Boualem Sansal - The German Mujahid

In his diary, Rachel says that he came back from Algeria a different man. He mentions taking me to lunch in some posh, boring restaurant. I don’t remember. He says that was when he decided not to tell me about the massacre, about our parents, about his trip to Algeria and all the secrets he dragged back with him, the whole tragedy going on in his head. He probably thought I was too dumb, too insensitive, that’s what he usually thought about me. Or maybe he was worried the whole thing would send me further off the rails. He wrote some nice things about me, the sort of things you say to people who aren’t nice because you know they’ll never really understand.

Poor Malrich. Life hasn’t been easy on you. I feel like I’m to blame, I’ve never really made the effort to get to know you. I’m not trying to make excuses, I’m not saying it was because of school, or my exams, or the four years I spent in Nantes, or working 24/7 for a multinational that only cares about the bottom line, or even life with Ophélie — though you know better than anyone how difficult she can be — or the responsibilities society imposes on everyone. I’ve used every possible excuse I could think of to justify my indifference to you, to poor uncle Ali who opened his home and his heart to us, to his sons whom life chewed up and spat out before they had a chance to find out what any of it meant, to our parents whom I put out of my mind and never gave a second thought. Now I realise that what I thought was intelligent conversation was just pompous preaching, that even as I claimed I was doing things for your own good I was putting you down. The worst thing is, I know you don’t hate me for it. You think I’m a good person, you defend me with the same excuses I used to use: he’s the serious type, he’s studying for his finals, he’s looking for a job, he’s travelling for work, Ophélie is giving him grief, he’s part of a world with its own rules. What’s done is done and there’s no way now to make amends. If I were brave enough, I would go and tell you that I love you, that I’m proud of you. After we left the restaurant, I felt so ashamed, for saying nothing, for being a coward. I’m not looking for another excuse, but I was honestly trying to spare you the pain. Our parents died in terrible circumstances and what I know now, this thing that’s eating away inside me, would have hurt you, in time it would have destroyed you. I decided the best thing was to keep you at arm’s length. Some day, you’ll read this diary and you’ll understand and I know that you’ll forgive me. Time will have done its work.

Things with Ophélie got worse. Rachel wasn’t the same any more, he spent all his time brooding, he was reading way too much and travelling all the time, running around all over the place, and every time he came back he was worse. Ophélie has always been controlling. Her life has to be perfect — she can’t stand anything getting in the way of her happiness, anything that throws sand in her perfect routine, anything that sends clouds over her perfect little garden. She got her idea of life from playing with Barbie. And she’s always been a bit of a snob. Poor Rachel, she nagged him and pestered him, she’d pick fights, make snide comments, throw tantrums, she’d sulk and slam doors, and she’d leave him, regular as clockwork. She always was high-strung. She’d usually go round and stay at her mother’s and it would take a UN peacekeeping force to get her back. Love is stupid and dangerous. Ophélie’s mother completely spoiled her, she never really had a chance to grow up, become a woman, accept the fact that problems and worries and trouble are just part of life. But I do feel kind of sorry for her, Rachel never talked to her, just like he never talked to me, he kept everything bottled up. Nobody likes being treated like they don’t exist. Especially not Ophélie. When I think that he never told me about our parents being murdered, I could kill him. I would have given anything to go to Aïn Deb with him, visit their graves. We might finally have gotten to know each other.

So, anyway, that’s the first part of our diary. Rachel came back from Algeria completely changed. He was physically different. I didn’t see much of him back then, he was always travelling and, anyway, I had my own shit to deal with — I’d been hauled up before the courts again and this time it was serious — but even I noticed he’d changed. I saw him a couple of times at the supermarket, trailing around behind Ophélie, who was as excited as a bee who could smell flowers a wing-flick away. I always make a quick getaway. I hate talking to people in supermarkets. Just watching them pushing their shopping trolleys around like rats in some air-conditioned maze, talking about property prices and home improvement, makes me want to throw up. My attitude to supermarkets is to get in and out as fast as possible — I take what I want and use the emergency exit checkout. Supermarkets are so fucking hideous, I think it’s completely reasonable to steal from them. I remember laughing to myself and thinking, God, Rachel’s looking old, that multinational of his is obviously getting its money’s worth. This was the beginning of the end. The reason for the change was in the little battered suitcase Rachel brought back from Aïn Deb, the suitcase that contained all papa’s files. His past. The rest of it, Rachel found out from books and from his trips to Germany, Poland, Austria, Turkey, Egypt and all over France.

I’ve tried to think what must have been going through his mind when he first opened the suitcase in our old house in that douar in the middle of nowhere. The way I imagine it, it’s dark, sleep has abandoned him somewhere along the way so he gets up, makes a cup of tea and sits drinking it, thinking about papa and maman, about what happened on 24 April, or maybe he’s thinking about Ophélie waiting for him back at home, and suddenly the business about the names on the Ministry of the Interior’s list starts bugging him. He’s thought about it before, asked at the embassy. I’ve thought about it myself. Why do papa and maman appear on the list under different names — the names are real enough — Majdali was my mother’s maiden name and Hassan was the name papa took when he converted to Islam. But why list him by his first name rather than his surname? And why does the name Schiller not appear on the list at all? The names on the gravestones were the same, but who decided what to write? Was it some bureaucratic fuckup? A political decision — I know that’s what Rachel thought — was the government worried that a foreign name on the list of victims would set off a diplomatic incident? If the European press, the German newspapers in particular, got hold of the story, questions might have been asked of the Algerian government, and their reputation isn’t exactly squeaky clean, given that they’ve been accused of genocide, crimes against humanity, torture, systematic looting and I don’t know what else. Anyway, this whole business is bugging him so he gets up and wanders around the house and ends up in our parents’ bedroom, he’s looking for something though he doesn’t know what, then he finds this suitcase on top of the wardrobe or under the bed. An alarm goes off in his head. I heard it myself the first time I picked up the suitcase. Rachel hid it in the tool cabinet in the garage, the one place in the house he knew Ophélie would never look. And I did what he had done two years before.

When you’re faced with an box you know is full of secrets, you feel scared. It was easier for Rachel, he wasn’t expecting to find anything out of the ordinary in this suitcase. Every family has a shoebox, a folder, a suitcase like this full of papers and photographs, letters, bits of jewelery, charms and talismans. Uncle Ali has one — one of those huge trunks you take when you’re emigrating, tied up with ropes and big knots, in it there are hundreds of certificates, all the paperwork from a lifetime spent slaving at temporary jobs, there are a couple of talismans he brought back from the bled and a huge collection of gris-gris he bought from the Senegalese griot in Block 14. But from reading Rachel’s diary, I already knew what was in this suitcase, what horror was waiting for me. There were papers, photos, letters, newspaper cuttings, a magazine. Yellowed, tattered, stained. There was a stainless steel watch from the last century which had stopped at 6:22. Three medals. Rachel had looked them up, the first one had the symbol of the Hitlerjugends , the Hitler Youth, the second was a medal from the Wehrmacht for bravery in combat, the third had the insignia of the Waffen SS. There’s a piece of tissue paper with a skull and crossbones, the Totenkopf , the emblem of the SS. The photos were taken in Europe, Germany probably, papa is wearing his uniform, there are photos of him on his own and some group shots. In some of the photographs he’s very young and he and his mates are built like athletes, proud of their uniforms, happy to be alive. In others, he’s older-looking, very serious, wearing a black SS uniform. He’s leaning against a tank or posing in a huge courtyard, or sitting on the steps of some house. In one of the photos he’s wearing civilian clothes, he looks handsome and elegant, all dressed in white with a big moustache, it was taken somewhere in Egypt, he’s posing beside the great pyramid, smiling at a couple of elderly English ladies who are smiling back. There are more recent photos of him from when he was in the maquis in Algeria, wearing fatigues and a safari hat. He’s put on a bit of weight and he’s really tanned, which suits him. In one of them, he’s standing in a forest with two young guerrillas who are sitting on the ground, there are guns spread out on a blanket. He’s doing weapons training. There’s an Algerian flag on a makeshift flagpole. In another photo, he’s standing next to some tall, bony guy with a haunted look wearing battle dress, smiling like his teeth hurt. Rachel figured out who the other guy was, he calls him Boumédienne, he was the leader of the maquis . There are newspaper clippings in English, French, Italian. The French article is from some magazine called Historia . I read it. It was about the Nuremberg Trials of the Nazi leaders: Bormann, Göring, von Ribbentrop, Dönitz, Hess, von Schirach, and that lot. It talks about the ones they captured later — Adolf Eichmann, Franz Stangl, Gustav Wagner, Klaus Barbie. . It goes on about the ones who are scattered across the world to countries in South America, the Arab world, in Africa. It mentions Brazil, Argentina, Columbia, Bolivia, Paraguay, Egypt, Turkey, Syria, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Rhodesia and a couple of others. There are lots of letters in German, one in French, signed Jean 92, dated 11 November 1962. You need to know code to work out what it says, because it sounds like a letter from a burglar to a fence. It reads like it’s nothing important — this Jean 92 mentions a number of valuable items recently recovered, some other items that have been traced and are likely to be recovered soon, then says that no one knows where the rest of the loot is hidden, so it must be in a safe place. He mentions a high-powered investigator called SW, some group known by the initials BJ and another one he calls N which seems to be linked to an incredibly dangerous organisation he calls M. He mentions some woman called Odessa who’s looking after the objects and having them transferred to a safe place. Rachel worked it all out, he did a lot of research. The mysterious Jean 92 signs off: HH, your star of better days . I think this is the letter that sent Rachel racing around Europe, and from there to Egypt. He talks about it a lot in his diary. But he doesn’t explain everything, or maybe you need to know other stuff, stuff I don’t know yet, before you can understand.