Yasmina Khadra: The Angels Die

Almighty God, You who are said to be merciful, make the blade jam. I wouldn’t like to die as brainless as I’ve lived.

The car drove around Place d’Armes, and I bade farewell to everything that had mattered to me. The two lions guarding the entrance to the town hall struck me as bigger than usual; stiff in their bronze costumes, they looked down on their world. And they were right. Only creatures of flesh and blood end up rotting in the sun.

Even today, plugged into machines in my hospital room, as the erosion of the years slows my pulse, I watch the dusk steal the last light of day and I remember. All I can do is remember. I have the feeling that we never die completely until we have consumed all our memories, that death is the ultimate forgetting.

I’m already confusing names and faces. But other snapshots remain, as sharp as scratches.

Each man retains within him an indelible imprint of a sin that has marked him more than any other. He needs it. It is his way of balancing his being, of putting a little water in his Grail, without which he would take himself for a deity and no praise would satisfy his arrogance. Animals too remember their first prey. It is through it that they realise their instinct for survival. But unlike animals, it is through their first misdeed that men grasp their own insignificance. To raise themselves up a notch, they will look for excuses or attenuating circumstances and persist in trying to prove that they were right.

That’s how men are; God may have created them in His image, but didn’t specify which one.

On my bedside table lies the book by Edmond Bourg.

I found it in a flea market, among old things and knick-knacks no longer in use. Since then, it has become a sort of prayer book. It revealed many shadowy areas to me, illuminated them with a holy light, but didn’t succeed in making me keep the vows I made on that white morning as the police car took me to prison. I didn’t become an imam or a just man. I continued living without really being useful to others. Rather like my father when he came back from the war. Maybe The Miracle Man wasn’t written for me. Out of some morbid need or other, I had looked for a message in it, a sign, a way. After much dissecting of the sentences and brooding between the lines, I ended up seeing it simply as the story of a man who was a murderer, then a priest, a man I never managed to grasp fully. In Diar Rahma, where old men rejected by their offspring or consigned to the scrapheap waited for the end of their downward spiral, reading helped me to swallow my medicines and my tasteless soup without complaint. With time, prophecies become tiresome and you no longer have a desire for anything so troublesome. Oh, time — that lazy fugitive who runs after us like a stray dog which, just when you think you’ve tamed it, abandons us, depriving us of our bearings. Forgiveness, remorse and sin barely matter compared with a tooth falling out, and faith becomes as uncertain as a trembling hand. Sin is not merely a wrong, it is the proof that evil is inside us, that it’s organic, as necessary as anxiety or fever, since our worries are born out of what we lack, and our joys can only be evaluated in relation to our sorrows.

I closed the book, but didn’t get rid of it. I waited to disappear in my turn, like Sid Roho and all those I had lost touch with.

Then two miracles happened.

First the letter from Gino I received in prison a few weeks before my trial. Recognising his handwriting on the envelope, I felt faint. I pinched myself to make sure I wasn’t delirious. For some nights after that, I couldn’t sleep a wink, haunted by ghosts … Gino hadn’t written to me from the afterlife. He had survived the stabbing. I clasped the letter to me as if it were a talisman. Of course, I didn’t open it. I was illiterate and I had no desire for anyone else to read it for me. Later, much later, I learnt to read in prison. Once I could make out the meaning of the sentences without stumbling too much over the words, I took the letter out again and, although it was short, took ages to get through it: Gino forgave me; he apologised for having objected to Irène and held himself responsible for the mess that had ensued. He came to visit me several times in prison. I didn’t dare go to see him in the visiting room. I was afraid of disappointing him, fearful that I would have no response to his smile but a repentant expression, and no answer to his words but a helpless silence. But his letter never left me. I wrapped it in a piece of plastic and sewed it into the lining of my convict’s jacket. Today, it is tucked in the middle of my bedside book, The Miracle Man.

Then, on the day of my execution, my heart gave out, and they couldn’t revive me. The imam apparently said that they couldn’t execute a dead man. The warden didn’t know whether or not to cut the head off a condemned man who was in a coma … I came to in the military hospital, after weeks of blackness. My heart attack had caused considerable damage. For months, I was nothing but a vegetable. I had lost the use of my lower limbs and my left arm, that left arm whose hook had moved mountains; half my face no longer worked; I was incontinent — a noise, a cry, and my belly evacuated everything, wherever I was. I spent more than a year in hospital, in a wheelchair. In a state of shock. Locked into my lethargy. I was fed with a spoon, washed down with a hose, and was sometimes put in a straitjacket and isolated because of my anxiety attacks. At night, when the nurse lowered the sash window, I would raise my good hand to my neck and scream until they came and sedated me. I only vaguely remember those ‘parallel’ months, but from them I still keep a strange smell that clings to my nostrils like an animal breath; at moments, nightmarish images go through my mind and I catch myself shaking from head to foot. A photograph of the time shows me in my decrepit state: I look like a broken puppet on a pallet, saliva drooling from my mouth, my features melted, my eyes askew, an idiotic expression on my face. They tried experimental treatments on me, potions concocted by mad scientists; I would emerge from one delirium only to plunge back into another. A doctor declared me insane, unfit to be executed. That may have been what saved me — according to some sources, the Duke may have had something to do with it …

I wasn’t pardoned. I was sentenced to hard labour for life. No sooner was I back on my feet than I was sent back to prison. The guards were convinced I was faking it. They would set traps to catch me, harass me constantly, get other convicts to make my life impossible. Whenever one of my attacks came on, they would put me in solitary.

The months, the years finally returned me to the inexorable march of fate. I had again become a full-time convict. A filthy animal in a zoo of horrors. I found myself sparing the cockroaches after being accustomed to squashing them beneath my shoe; they had one advantage I didn’t have: they could go where they wanted without asking permission. The rats struck me as less repulsive than the smiles of the military police. Whenever a bird came and landed in the courtyard, I envied it with all my might, and I was jealous of the grain of sand that joined the storm and went travelling around while I remained stuck in my cage, rotting like carrion. At night, whenever some poor bastard howled in his sleep, you pitied him because he would be even less happy when he woke up. In that grim exile, the days wore mourning; no light reached us. In prison, you had no more respect for yourself than you had pity for the condemned man being dragged to the scaffold.

I extorted money from queers, beat up loudmouths, pledged allegiance to gang bosses and gave up my rations to those who were stronger than me.

There was no place for God in prison. Every reprieve had to be negotiated on the scales of survival. A misplaced look, a superfluous word, a moan louder than the others, and you were automatically buried, without distinction of colour or religion. You had to keep alert; the slightest careless mistake was paid for. I learnt to scheme, to betray, to stab in the back, not to look away when a cellmate was being raped and to look elsewhere when he was being bled dry. I wasn’t proud of myself and it didn’t matter. I told myself my turn would come, so there was no point in feeling sorry for the first served. I sometimes slept standing up to make the bastards think I was waiting for them, and when they came to rouse me with the tip of their boots, I played dead.