Boualem Sansal - The German Mujahid

But then I realised there was another reason the jihadists hadn’t shown: riot police. There were CRS crawling all over the place and we hadn’t even noticed. They were waiting in their unmarked SUVs all over the estate. The bastards had screwed up our revenge, this was supposed to be between us and the jihadists and from the silence all over the estate it was clear that we were winning. Now the jihadists could claim they were men of peace and had only called off their demonstration so as not to give thugs and troublemakers and Islamophobes the opportunity to hijack their ceremony to honour the victims. Islamists are expert spin doctors, they could make a crocodile blush.

I was just about to track down the imam and carve a swastika into his forehead when I heard someone calling me: “Malrich!. . Malrich!. . C’mere a minute. . Get over here now!” It was Com’Dad. He was stepping out of an unmarked car. I wandered over, hands in my pockets.

“Come here!” he said, dragging me by the arm, then he had me spread my arms and frisked me to see if I was carrying a knife or a rocket launcher or something. He gave my mates a look that told them to stay where they were.

“Don’t even think about bullshitting me, I know what you and your bunch of Looney Tunes are planning.”

“We weren’t planning anything. . We were just heading over to see if—”

“Shut the fuck up!”

“Honest to God, officer—”

“Listen up, I’m not going to say this twice, the imam is our problem, not yours. If you so much as say hello to him, I’ll have you hauled in for attempted murder. And I don’t want to see you and your idiot friends hanging round the mosque like you were yesterday, get it?”

“No, I don’t get it. . So people aren’t even allowed to walk around the estate now?”

He grabbed my elbow again and slammed me against the car.

“Listen, Malrich, I know where all this is coming from. It’s your brother’s diary. But you don’t understand, he didn’t go killing people just because other people did. . He tried to understand. . ”

“Yeah. . and he died trying.”

“Go on, fuck off home, and take your gangsta mates with you. I want you in my office at 6 P.M. . and take your hands out of your pockets.”

We headed into Paris, we were sick of hanging round the estate. We wandered round Châtelet, then down to Beaubourg, we traipsed halfway up the Boulevard Sebastopol to one of Togo-au-Lait’s cousins who does hairpieces and makes carcinogenic beauty products. It’s the family business. Then we went down to the river for something to eat. After that we headed up to the Champs-Élysées. It’s like a different world, makes you wonder if you’re still in France. Finally, we went back down to the Tuileries and sat in the gardens to talk. I had a question I needed to ask.

“Obviously someone here is a snitch and I want to know who it is. Momo? Or maybe you, Togo? I mean you voted with him, you were all up for wimping out and doing nothing.”

After an hour of everyone throwing accusations around, I realised any one of them could be the snitch, or it could be some friend they’d mentioned our plans to, or even the guy at the station cafeteria, he’d been listening in. It was even possible that that Com’Dad just guessed what we were planning when he saw us outside the mosque at 7 A.M. We’re nocturnal creatures, everyone knows that.

“Well, I’m heading back, I’m freezing my balls off here and Monsieur le Commissaire is expecting me for tea.”

6 P.M. The police station is a fortress of breeze blocks and bulletproof glass planted right outside the estate, one side overlooking the estate, the other overlooking the neighbourhood where Rachel lived. All the cops know me. Babar, the desk sergeant, jerked his thumb towards the hall. “Yeah, yeah, I know — chief’s office is down the end of the hall. The one with the padded door.” Com’Dad has been around for, like, ten years. He and I showed up about the same time, me from Algeria, him from some sink estate up north. He’s an expert in Sensitive Urban Areas. I don’t know if he’s made any difference to ours. I don’t think so. It’s the same as it ever was except the kids have grown to be gangsters, the gangsters have grown old and fat, and the old guys walk round flashing their battle scars like they’re vets back from the war. Everyone else — the families, the ordinary people — just get on with life same as they always did. Some of them have jobs, some are on welfare, some are on disability. The kids are either with social services or at school or somewhere in between. The only thing that changed was when the jihadists started showing up. It’s something to do with the war in Algeria, apparently, or the war in Kabul or the Middle East or I don’t know where. They use France as a safe haven, as a base for operations. Whatever the reason they’re here, they’ve fucked everything up for everyone, that’s why we’re wandering around till we can’t take it any more. Before anyone knew what was happening, these death-dealing fuckers had taken over. If you blinked, you’d have missed it: everything changed, the clothes and everything. After that, the estate started to empty. The local economy packed up and moved out, the shops, the offices, the cash-in-hand work that keeps the jobless afloat. That’s their strategy: block the escape routes, make lots of noise, keep people poor — that way they’re one step closer to paradise. They treat people like sheep. And we fell for it, me, Momo, Raymond, all of us — mostly because we believed the Führer’s spiel: “Join the Brotherhood, you can have everything, you can have money and djina ,” partly because they were constantly tugging at our djellabas , we couldn’t set foot outside without one of them jogging over and reciting the ten commandments of the suicide bomber. The Brotherhood and their fucking djina got us in big trouble, we were in and out of the police station, dragged up before the courts, forced to do community service. The only thing left for us was jail. We were branded for life. We had Com’Dad on our backs 24/7. But later, when he saw we were getting out of all this fanatical end-of-the-world bullshit, he put in a good word for us with the authorities, had us sent on training courses, got us apprenticeships. We were even taken on tours of parliament and got to meet our Député . It wasn’t going to change anything, but it was something to do.

“Come in. Take a seat. Do you want a cup of tea?”

“No.”

We talked: he did most of the talking, pacing round the office, and I was only half listening. As usual, he started out with all the stuff he cares about — the estate, the future, the Republic, the straight and narrow — then he got to talking about me, like he was a mate who was only looking out for me.

“. . you need to know, your brother was a good man, a very good man. Given all the stuff you know now. . about your father, Rachel did the only decent thing a man can do, he tried to understand. Doesn’t matter if you’re dealing with a crime committed yesterday or crimes committed years ago, that’s where you have to start: the first thing you have to do is understand ” (he said it slowly, dragging out every word), “you can’t just rush in and judge things. When you were running around in you djelleba with that ratty little goatee beard, I could easily have thought: he’s a fundamentalist, a terrorist, I’m taking him down. But I didn’t, I tried to understand, to get to know you, and I decided that you weren’t one of them, you were Malrich, you were a good guy just trying to live your life like everyone else. Nothing is ever simple. Your brother’s suicide proves that. He tried to understand, but sadly he gradually started to believe that he was guilty, he felt he was to blame for what the Nazis — what your father — did to the Jews during the war. He hated your father but that still didn’t change the fact that he was your father, and like everyone, Rachel wanted a father he could look up to, a father he could be proud of. And it was worse for him, because you guys didn’t live with your parents, because you missed him, because of the terrible way your father died — his throat cut by Islamic fundamentalists with your mother and all those poor souls with only the sun to light the day. But the more research he did, the more he learned, the more he suffered. Something inside him snapped, he turned everything on its head and started to hate himself. Rachel couldn’t help but think of your father as a war criminal, but mostly he thought of him as his father, someone who had fought for Algerian independence, someone loved and respected by the people of his village; Rachel saw your father as a victim of the Islamic fundamentalists and of the Algerian political system that fosters these monsters. It was too much for him, he started to feel guilty, he was ashamed of his success, of what he saw as his selfishness towards you and the rest of your family, of his affluent lifestyle. That was when he started to cut himself off from everyone — from you, from his wife, from his adoptive parents. It was his way of trying to protect you. In the end, he took it all on himself, he passed judgement on himself in his father’s place. Suicide was his last resort, the only way he could reconcile the irreconcilable, do you understand?”