Yasmina Khadra - The Angels Die

Prison was like a recurring nightmare. The hell of the sky trembled before the hell of men, and horned devils licked the boots of the guards, because nowhere on earth, neither on the battlefields nor in the arenas, did life and death know such contempt as the one in which they merged within the walls of a prison.

I was released in 1962, at a time when the jails were full to bursting with political prisoners. I was fifty-two years old.

When I came out of prison, I didn’t recognise my towns or my villages; no faces looked familiar. Alarcon Ventabren had given up the ghost, his farm had fallen into disrepair, and the path that led to it had disappeared beneath the wild grass. All that remained of the Duke was a rambling fable that young gangsters spiced up to make themselves seem important. Oran was nothing like any of my memories. Rue du Général-Cérez had forgotten me. The old men shielded their eyes with their hands and looked me up and down. ‘It’s me, Turambo,’ I would say to them, shadow-boxing. They would step out of my way, wondering if I was in my right mind.

Strangers were living in my parents’ house. They informed me that after my father died, my mother had followed Mekki, who had chosen to settle near Ghardaïa where his in-laws lived. My search led me to a rudimentary graveyard. On a grave, a name half erased by sandstorms: Khammar Taos, died 13 April 1949. Judging by the state of the grave and the ugly, scrawny bush that had grown over it, nobody had visited the place in a long time.

I looked for my uncle but couldn’t find any trace of him.

It was as if the earth had swallowed him up.

Back to Oran. On Boulevard Mascara, the haberdasher’s was now a shop selling television sets and radios. Above the door was a sign saying Radiola. Upstairs, an Arab family were living in the Ramouns’ flat. Gino had left the country without leaving a forwarding address. During my imprisonment, he had married Louise, the Duke’s daughter, and run a large company making domestic appliances before a bomb attack reduced it to rubble. I never heard from him again. I myself had no fixed abode where I could be contacted. I wandered where the seasons took me, like a lost, faded, stunned spectre, incapable of situating myself in relation to people and things. There was fury in the gloom, and the burning sun couldn’t supplant the inferno of my country at war. Worn down to nothing, I hated myself for being no more than my misfortunes. The world that welcomed me was totally alien to me.

The history of a nation coming to painful birth was being written, putting mine aside. A history in which the miracles had nothing to do with me.

I had left my life behind me in prison; I was reborn to something I couldn’t care less about, too old to start again from scratch. With no bearings or convictions, I wasn’t capable of beginning all over again. I no longer had the strength. I had survived only to learn, to my cost, that a ruined life cannot be put right.

I didn’t find love again either. Did I look for it? I’m not sure. It wasn’t a man who had left prison after a quarter of a century of self-denial, it was a ghost; my heart only beat to give rhythm to its fears. At first, back in the world of the living, I would be reminded of Irène’s perfume by the smell of the woods. I would embrace a tree trunk and stand there in silence. In the world of the living, the dead are only entitled to prayers and silence. I didn’t dare dream of another woman after Irène. Nor did any woman want to stay with a wild-eyed convict who smelt of tragedy from miles away. My face told a story of expiation; my words reassured nobody; there was nothing in my gaze but the blackness of the dungeons and I could no longer smile without giving the impression that I wanted to bite … Yes, my brother, you who give no credit to anything but redemption, who question the facts and curse genius, who jeer at the virtuous and praise imposters, you who disfigure beauty so that horror might exult, who reduce your happiness to a vulgar need to cause harm and who spit on the light so that the world may return to darkness, yes, you, my twin in the shadows, do you know why we no longer embody anything but our old demons? It is because the angels have died of our wounds.

I looked for work in order not to die of starvation; I was a ragman, a nightwatchman, a caretaker of vacant property, an exorcist without a flock and without magic. I stole fruit from the markets and chickens from remote farms; I begged for charity and the leftovers of revellers, escaping the snares of the days as best I could. My fists, which had once deposed champions, were no longer much use for anything; I had cut off three fingers to make my jailers feel sorry for me — in prison, people thought of all kinds of nonsense that might give them back their freedom. What freedom? I had clamoured for mine, but, once released, I didn’t know what to do with it. I roamed from town to douar, sleeping under bridges. Strangely, I missed my cell; my fellow convicts seemed dearer to me than my lost family. The country had changed. My era was long gone.

I was arrested on military sites and subjected to brutal interrogations, was interned in a refuge for vagrants, then went back to being a tramp. A ragged drunk, I reeled through dubious neighbourhoods, yelling at the top of my voice, dribble on my chin and my eyes rolled upwards, and I fled blindly from boys who stoned me like a mangy old dog.

I learnt to live without the people I loved, roaming from waste grounds to town squares for decades, and when my legs could no longer carry me, when my eyes started confusing shapes and colours, when the slightest cold turned my eyes to winter, I gave up my bundle and the open road and, surrounded by my absent ones, let myself be tossed from one nursing home to another like a piece of flotsam blown about by contrary winds. In time, my absent ones left, one after the other. All that remained were a few vague memories to stave off my loneliness.

In my hospital room, night is getting ready to put my memory to sleep. It’s dark and the nurse forgets to switch on the light; I can’t get out of bed to put it on because of the tubes that hold me captive. In the next bed, a patient who’s nothing but skin and bone fiddles with his tape player. It’s a ritual with him. At the same hour, every day since his admission, he listens to the singing of Lounis Aït Menguellet, whose repertoire he knows by heart. The warm voice of the Kabyle singer takes me far back into the past to a time when Gino and I used to go to cafés-concerts in working-class areas.

I never went back to the streets of my youth; I never again approached a stadium; I didn’t see myself in any celebration and no victory made my soul quiver. Sometimes, passing a poster, I would stand there dreamily without knowing why, as if I could place the face, then I would go on my way, which never led to the same place; for me, the world was populated by strangers.

I was looking at a mirror and couldn’t see myself in it.

If we look closely at our lives, we realise that we are not the heroes of our own stories. However much we feel sorry for ourselves or enjoy a fame based on fleeting talent, there will always be someone better or worse off than us. Oh, if only we could put everything into perspective — affectation, honour, sensitivity, faith and self-denial, falsehood as well as truth — we would doubtless find satisfaction even in frugality and realise very soon to what extent humility preserves us from insanity; there is no worse madness than thinking the world revolves around us. Every failure proves to us that we don’t amount to much, but who wants to admit that? We take our dreams for challenges when they are nothing but chimeras, otherwise how to explain that in death as in birth we are poor and naked? According to logic, all that counts is what remains, but we are all destined to die one day, and what trace of us will survive in the dust of ages? The image we give of ourselves doesn’t make us genuine artists but genuine fakers. We think we know where we are going, what we want, what’s good for us and what isn’t, and we do what we can to ensure that what doesn’t work out isn’t our fault. Our feeble excuses become irrefutable arguments for hiding our faces, and we elevate our hypothetical certainties to absolute truths in order to carry on speculating, even though we’ve got it all wrong. Isn’t that the way we walk over our own bodies to coexist with what is beyond us? In the long run, what have we pursued our whole life through unsuccessfully, but ourselves?