Boualem Sansal - The German Mujahid

The old man looked at me for a long time, then shrugged in what might have been a yes or a no. I whispered, “Were you one of them?”

Silence.

“Was that part of your duty?”

Silence.

“Please.”

Silence. A shrug of exasperation.

I don’t know why I did it, but I took papa’s military record out of my pocket and gave it to him. He didn’t know what to make of the gesture. He hesitated for a moment, then took it, turning it over and over in his hands, then he set it down on his lap, put on his glasses and leafed through it infinitely slowly. His hands were shaking, his lips quivering. I knew it had been a mistake, I knew that he wouldn’t say any more now.

I said again, “Please.”

Silence.

“You were talking about duty. . ”

“Duty. . duty is something that must be done, there’s nothing else.”

“Whatever the circumstances?”

He got up from the table, muttering to himself.

“It’s time I was going home.”

He looked out at the blue sky, out towards Germania as though looking for some answer, then he looked me in the eye again and said, “Your father was a soldier, that’s all there is to say. Never forget that, Jugend .”

And he left, shuffling away like an old man scared of his own shadow. I pitied him, picturing him going home, climbing into his lonely bed and dying of a sudden fever in the night. What had he meant when he invoked duty as the sole justification for the workings of the world? Was he talking about papa? About himself? Was he talking about me? The word “duty” can be made to hide a multitude of sins, whole peoples can be dragged into it and hurled into the abyss. That’s all there is to it.

I went down to the toilets and took a leak and washed my hands slowly. “You were right,” I said to my reflection in the mirror, “What you’ve been thinking since Aïn Deb, papa was just obeying orders, he was doing his duty.” To the bitter end. “ Meine Ehre heißt Treue ”—”My Honour is called Loyalty.” I felt like throwing up.

You who live secure

In your warm houses

Who return at evening to find

Hot food and friendly faces:

Consider whether this is a man,

Who labours in the mud

Who knows no peace

Who fights for a crust of bread

Who dies at a yes or a no.

Consider whether this is a woman,

Without hair or name

With no more strength to remember

Eyes empty and womb cold

As a frog in winter.

Consider that this has been:

I commend these words to you.

Engrave them on your hearts

When you are in your house, when you walk on your way,

When you go to bed, when you rise.

Repeat them to your children.

Or may your house crumble,

Disease render you powerless,

Your offspring avert their faces from you.

Primo Levi

To this poem, Rachel had added the verse:

Your offspring do not know;

They live, they play, they love.

And when what was appears to them;

The tragedies bequeathed by their parents;

They are faced with strange questions,

Glacial silences,

Nameless shadows.

My house has crumbled, grief has made me powerless;

And I do not know why.

My father never told me.

Momo and Raymond swung by the house and told me some horror story, the fuckers were talking like it was something they saw on TV. I nearly didn’t listen when, actually, it was a real tragedy. And I know all about tragedy, I’m up to my neck in it in Rachel’s diary. “And you only come and tell me now,” I yelled. “The moped was fucked,” Momo said, the liar. It was about Nadia, a sixteen-year-old Arab girl, worked as a trainee at Christelle’s salon by the RER station, The Golden Scissors. She’d disappeared. I’m sure I probably knew her, but all those girls look exactly the same, same hair and everything, I can never put a face to a name. They should be forced to wear something so you can tell them apart; because you never know, I mean this is the proof. “Who’s Nadia?” I said. “Just some girl,” Momo says, the fuckwit. “She lives in Block 22,” Raymond says. “Her old man’s Moussa, works in the steelworks, you know the guy who drives the green Ami 6.” The men all look the same to me too, Moussa, Abdallah, Arezki, Abdel-Ben-some-shit. Anyway, you never hardly see them, all they do is work and sleep, they’re up at the crack of dawn and working half the night — except Sundays, the Lord’s day, when they all hang out in lame cafés, eaten up by nostalgia and gambling on scratch tickets or the horses. Even when you do see them, they’re just crooked shadows appearing and disappearing into the darkness. Anyway, the whole estate was mobilised to look for Nadia — parents, kids, police, fire brigade — everyone running around. The women were out on the balconies wailing and praying and yelling at their husbands. At first everyone said she’d run away, then they were saying she’d been kidnapped, since yesterday they’re saying she was murdered. A bunch of TV crews showed up and set up their cameras in the skankiest part of the estate — the sort of no-go area even people on the estate never set foot in. Someone said they’d seen some girl getting beat up by some guy with a beard, a young guy from Block 11, some big shot always banging on about how he’s been to Kabul and London and Algiers, calls himself Allah’s Terminator. Apparently he didn’t like the way she dressed, didn’t like her day-glo hair or the fact she hung out with boys — and not just any boys— kaffirs —unbelievers. So he slapped her about, spat in her face, pulled her hair and yelled, “Last warning!” It all went down in the stairwell of Block 22, some kid coming downstairs saw it and he told his mates, they told their mates and so on until it got back to Moussa. Moussa didn’t stop to think, grabbed a knife and headed out looking for the guy with the beard. The neighbours grabbed him as he was leaving the block, took away the knife and marched him off to see Com’Dad. The two of them had a little chat round the back of the supermarket — no witnesses. The guy with the beard was busted and twenty-four hours later he was out again. No corpse, no crime; no crime, no perp. The Terminator’s lawyer — some guy with a beard and a three-piece suit — knew how to play the system, he got to faxing and phoning every association, every Islamic consulate, every brotherhood, every marabout and every sleeper network — even woke up the Minister for the Interior. The sky was black with fax toner and thundering with righteous anger. Com’Dad was purple with rage when he got a call politely suggesting he release the killer and reopen the mosque in Block 17. Don’t rock the boat — the whole city is happy to think she’s run away. The Terminator was giving it large about how he’d got his ticket to paradise— djina , they call it in Arabic — put one over on the cops and heroically confirmed his status as Emir of the estate. Then, this morning — shock, horror — they find poor Nadia in the basement of some shop that’s been boarded up for years, all naked and tied up with barbed wire, her face and body burnt to shit with a blowtorch. The parents identified her straight off. It was their little girl, they just knew it. They put the cuffs on the Emir as he was coming out of the mosque. Apparently he was spitting fire at Com’Dad: “Allahu Akbar, your day will come.” The Imam immediately announces there’s going to be a big service on the esplanade between the tower blocks to honour the hero, support his worthy parents and raise money for the cause. It’s going to be on Friday at 8:30 P.M. And he issued a fatwa saying anyone who doesn’t show is a sinner and Allah will not fail to punish them. To forsake a Brother in Islam when he’s attacked by kaffirs is among the greatest of sins. The place will be rammed. I’m planning on being there. It’s not some spur-of-the-moment decision, I swore to myself I’d cut the throat of that SS fucker who’s trying to turn this estate into an extermination camp, and now’s the time.