Yasmina Khadra - The Angels Die

‘I tell you I didn’t see anything.’

She threw herself on me, kissed my head and my hands and got down on all fours to kiss my feet. I pushed her away and ran to our shack. As soon as I was far enough away, I turned and saw her huddled by a heap of scrap metal, weeping her eyes out.

The next day, she had vanished.

She had taken her son and nobody knew where she had gone.

I never saw her again.

I realised I had never even known her name, or her son’s.

The disappearance of the widow and her son had shocked me. I was angry with myself for having witnessed that willing rape that had plunged our neighbour into the depths of hopelessness. How could I rid myself of the memory of that desperate woman? Her voice continued to ring in my ears and my eyes were full of her distress. It made me feel disgusted with the whole human race.

I was furious with those people who drifted from day to day as if tomorrow had no more interest than yesterday. I saw them pass through the shop, sick with hunger and despair, ready to lick the counter if there was a little sugar on it. They didn’t care about their appearance or their pride; all that mattered to them was a wretched mouthful of food. I tried to make excuses for them, and for myself, but in vain. In Zane’s shadow, I wallowed in bitterness and anger all day long; my sleep was filled with beggars, louts, thieves, fallen women, wild-haired witches and beaming tyrants whose mouths spat swirling flames. I would wake up dripping with sweat and as sick as a dog, run outside and throw up. I felt hatred for Zane. Had he ever been a child? If so, would I be like him when I grew up? Or would I be like one of those confused spectres who dragged their damnation around with them like a ball and chain, the dirt so thick on their skin you could have stuck a knife into it without hurting them? No, I told myself, Zane was never a child. He was born like that, with his twirled moustache and his sewer-like mouth. He was corruption in human form and stank like carrion in the sun, except that, horror of horrors, he was alive and well.

Zane noticed how sad and distracted I was and threatened to fire me. I would have left of my own accord if he had paid me what he owed me.

Worried by my low spirits, my friends plied me with questions, but I kept my secret to myself. How could I tell them what went on in the back room of the shop without being complicit in it? How could I explain the widow’s disappearance without being guilty?

Zane fired me in the end and I felt a little better. He had been the cause of my depression. Nobody can live in close proximity to perversion without being soiled by it in one way or another. Zane’s actions hadn’t simply spattered me; I was infected by them.

Even now, my silences are disturbed by the creaking of the table in the back room and the weeping of the women he sodomised to his heart’s content. I have enough mouths to feed without burdening myself with bastards , the loathsome Zane would tell them.

My uncle almost fell over backwards when he heard I’d been dismissed. When he discovered that Zane hadn’t paid me a penny after months of slavery, he grabbed his nail-studded club and set off to have a word with him. He returned in a terrible state, lying on a cart, thoroughly beaten. This is your fault again! my mother yelled at me, sententiously.

Left to my own devices once again, I joined Gomri in his smithy. His boss chased me away after a few days, claiming that my presence slowed down production. Then Ramdane suggested I give him a hand in the market. We were prepared to take on any task without worrying about how much it brought in as long as we were hired again the next day. Ramdane had no concept of rest, or how to choose between horrible jobs. At the end of the month, I threw in the towel, much preferring to loaf around in the fields or go to the souk to see Sid Roho cleverly robbing his victims. Sid was a wizard. Once, he even stole Laweto’s marmoset under everyone’s nose. Laweto was a curious old fellow who sold miracle potions at the entrance to the market. Whenever customers he’d fleeced brought back his poison, calling him a quack, he would come back at them with, What do you have against quacks? They’ve made more discoveries in medicine than scientists have . To draw his audience in, he would get his monkey to perform obscene acrobatic tricks that made us double up with laughter. That day, as he was trumpeting the far-fetched qualities of a scorpion’s sting that he was passing off as the thorn of an aphrodisiac plant, he noticed that his marmoset was no longer on his shoulder. In an instant, the scene descended into chaos. Laweto screamed and ran into the crowd, knocking people over, looking into baskets, under stalls, behind shacks, shouting at suspects and tearing his hair out in handfuls. Such was his agitation that even the thieves and pickpockets rallied round, suspending their activities to lend us a hand. But there was no trace of the marmoset. Laweto was sick with worry. He confessed through hot tears that he wouldn’t survive without his monkey and that he would die if it wasn’t brought back to him before nightfall.

Night fell, and there was still no news of the marmoset.

‘Has anyone seen the Billy Goat?’ Gomri asked. As it happened, nobody had seen Sid Roho all day, either in the souk or during the search. Gomri was suspicious. He asked Ramdane and me to follow him, and we immediately set off for the Billy Goat’s place.

Gomri was right: there was Sid Roho lying on what was left of a stretcher picked up from a rubbish dump, his heel resting on his knee, chewing on a stick of liquorice, like a young dignitary taking a cure, and … tied to a beam, Laweto’s monkey, scared to death, wondering what it was doing there with a crazy boy it didn’t know from Adam.

‘I knew it was you,’ Gomri cried, beside himself. ‘I thought you had some respect for poor Laweto.’

‘It was just for a laugh,’ Sid Roho said, completely unaware of the panic his theft had caused in Graba.

‘Laweto is about to have a heart attack,’ Ramdane protested. ‘Give him back his monkey straight away, or I swear I won’t talk to you again as long as I live.’

The next day, with his marmoset on his shoulder, Laweto was roaming the streets like a sleepwalker, proclaiming a miracle and telling all and sundry that a winged angel had freed his monkey from a spell and brought it back in a dream.

My young uncle was tired of seeing me come back in the evening without a penny. He found me a job as a moutcho in an ancient hammam in Kasdir, an old douar where night arrived faster than day. It was an Arab quarter grafted onto the southern part of Sidi Bel Abbès, with whitewashed houses and foul-smelling drains in the middle of the streets. The people were suspicious, mistrusting everything from Graba — child, animal, fruit or dust. I have no idea what Mekki did to persuade the owner to take me on. It was clean, honest work. I would carry the bathers’ towels, wring out their loincloths and scrub their children clean. As far as tips went, I could whistle for them, but I made seventeen douros a week, and that helped boost the family coffers. Everything went well until the evening a customer who was broke and couldn’t pay his bill accused me of robbing him.

I was dismissed immediately.

*

I didn’t think it was a good idea to tell my uncle that I’d lost my job. During the day, I would hide in the scrub to avoid running into him. When the sun went down, I’d join my gang in the orchard. My friends knew about my bad luck and they all had suggestions for me. Sid Roho proposed I steal for him. He needed an accomplice to expand his business. I declined the offer. Categorically.