The German Mujahid

MALRICH’S DIARY, 31 OCTOBER 1996

I don’t understand Rachel. He really pisses me off. He talks like papa was a murderer or something, he bangs on about it, it’s insane. So what if Papa was in the SS? So what if he was posted to extermination camps? There’s no proof that he actually killed anyone. He guarded prisoners, that’s all. Not even that, they had the Kapos to do that — German convicts and deserters, Rachel says himself they were dogs, they’re the ones who guarded the prisoners, who beat and robbed and raped them, forced them to work, clubbed them to death and dragged them feet first, tossing them into the furnaces. Papa was a chemical engineer, not an executioner. He worked in some laboratory way outside the camp, he oversaw the preparation of chemicals, that’s all. He didn’t know what people were planning to do with them, how could he know? The gas chambers were run by the Sonderkommando, the death squads, the Einsatzgruppen, not the laboratory. Papa’s responsibility ended at the point of delivery. The trucks showed up, picked up the canisters, the paperwork was signed and the drivers drove off to God knows where. How could Rachel, who was so impressed by the way the Germans organised things, possibly think that the Bonzen would have had a scientist like papa working as a common killer, stoking furnaces, fuelling gas chambers, locking doors, turning levers, watching dials? Rachel and me are Hälfte-Deutsch, he knew as well as I do Germans are sticklers for regulations.

That’s what Papa was like, you didn’t joke around with him except when it was time for joking around. Rachel lost it, he forgot everything we learned. He was angry and upset and he let his imagination run away with him. He was sick to his stomach like I am whenever I think about us, about the Islamists slitting our parents’ throats in their sleep, about our godforsaken rathole of an estate, the people living there constantly harangued by the imam, surrounded by jihadists in djellebas and black jackets, with Kapos snapping at them like pitbulls, when I think about uncle Ali wasting away like a prisoner in a concentration camp and aunt Sakina who just waits, never surprised at anything, when I think about poor Nadia burned to death by the Emir. I think about my father. How did you get mixed up in this shit, papa? Did you know what was happening? You had to know something. In the camp, everyone eats together, the officers all in the officers’ mess, you talk about work, about the things that go wrong, brag about the stuff you’ve got done. Then there’s the meetings, you listen to the Führer’s speeches, read the official communiqués from Himmler himself, you talk deadlines, figures, technical problems, you bawl out the slackers, praise the high achievers, get this week’s orders. And there are the loudspeakers, those awful megaphones hanging over the prisoners’ heads, tormenting them, driving them insane, the unemotional voice drowning out the howling wind, forever ordering them to assemble, to submit, to surrender, spelling out the horror line by line, verse by verse, transforming a monstrous crime into the simple implementation of a policy. And in the evenings, after dinner and the obligatory toast to the Führer, everyone sits around the stove, relaxing, listening to music, playing cards, drinking, daydreaming, thinking about their families, talking about hunting trips and fishing trips with friends, about the battles being fought elsewhere. Eventually, they get round to talking about the camp, the stories, the jokes, the racketeering, the gossip, the horrible diseases, the pitiful scams, the prisoners who arrived that morning welcomed with full military fanfare, still clinging to hope, to their dignity, to their battered suitcases, apprehensive but not scared, still believing in God, in reason, in the impossibility of the incredible. Everything is fine, they’re thinking, as they line up outside the camp. They cling to the idea — as old as the world — that submissiveness will save them, will make their masters think well of them; the Bonzen look so powerful, so impressive that it’s impossible to imagine they could lack nobility, compassion. The sight of the pristine camp, the disciplined Kapos running it, reassures them, persuades them that death is not the certainty some pessimists predicted during the long, agonising journey in the cattle trucks, it is merely a possibility that can be evaded with a little luck, a little cunning, if they swallow their pride. The worst is over, they have been quickly separated into groups: men, women and babies, children, the old and the crippled, the beautiful girls like Nadia. They will not hold out for long. In a little while or maybe tomorrow at dawn, after disinfection, the worthless, the Lebensunwertes Leben, will be sent to the gas chambers. The able-bodied will be assigned to the Arbeitkommandos and the Strafarbeitkommandos, the brothels for the Kapos and I don’t know what else. The camp is just like our estate — everyone knows what’s going on, what people are doing, what they’re thinking, what they’re hiding. People gossip, they watch each other, they get together for parties, funerals, marches on the town hall, campaigns to clean up the stairwells, patrol the car parks. We all know who the Islamists are and what they’re planning, and we know the people who aren’t and what they’re afraid of. We know everything there is to know about each other. And at the same time we don’t know anything, we’re strangers, we think we know each other but we’re all living inside our own heads, we know what we think, but other people’s thoughts are vague or hearsay. On the estate, just like in the camps, people speak fifteen different languages and at least as many dialects, we can’t possibly understand all of them. We fake it, we mumble. Besides, we’ve got nothing to talk about except the weather, we say the same things we said yesterday, the same shit we’ll say anther thirty times by the end of the month. The people who live on the estate know where Paris is and the people who live in Paris know that the estate is somewhere in the suburbs — but what do we really know about each other? Nothing. We’re just shadows and rumours. Between us there’s a wall, barbed wire, watchtowers and minefields, fundamental prejudices, unimaginable realities. In the end, papa knew and didn’t know, that’s the truth of it. Rachel was my brother but I knew nothing about him and his diary is like a shield that stops me seeing him. Poor Rachel, who are you? Who was papa? Who am I? I get so fucking angry I want to scream, to cry. I’m trapped, the whole world disgusts me, I disgust myself. I’m losing my mind just like Rachel did. I hardly set foot outside the house anymore, I spend all day reading and rereading his diary, his books, or slumped in front of the TV, I go round and round in circles, cramps in my stomach. At night I go out and I walk and walk as far as I can. Alone. More alone than anyone in the world. Like Rachel. Like poor Rachel.

I need to know, I need to understand. Rachel made a mistake, he got caught up in his grief and it destroyed him, just like his boss Monsieur Candela told him it would. You have to try and put things in context, like Com’Dad said to me, “First you have to understand.” Com’Dad thinks Rachel understood, but he’s wrong, Rachel wanted to understand to take away the grief — or maybe so he could finally grieve. He became obsessed with evil and he turned it on himself. He got so caught up in it that he tried to take papa’s guilt upon himself. He even imagined he’d lived in the camps, imagined himself as an SS officer’s son playing with other kids, beating and killing poor little bastards who never did anything to him. The most dangerous traps are the ones we set for ourselves. Rachel even imagined putting on his black suit and going before a judge to confess to every crime committed in the Third Reich. I think what really finished him off was that poem by Primo Levi that starts off blaming the readers: “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. .” It was like the poem was describing Rachel’s life, he’s trundling along with no real worries, and then he suddenly finds out about the massacre in Aïn Deb, finds out our parents have been murdered, then he discovers papa was an SS officer who worked in the death camps for the Third Reich. When it came to me, I got straight to the point. I asked myself, what has papa’s past got to do with us? That was his life, this is ours. How can we be blamed for that war, that tragedy, the Holocaust, what they call the Shoah? Ophélie was right: “It’s not like we killed the Jews, I can’t see why you’re so obsessed with this whole thing.” History is like that, it’s a steamroller crushing everyone in its path, it’s horrible, it tragic, but what can we do about it? Like Monsieur Candela said to Rachel, “Your grieving for your parents and feeling sorry for yourself isn’t going to bring them back.” I can’t rewrite history, and feeling sorry for myself won’t bring anyone back — not my parents, not Rachel, not poor Nadia, not the millions of people I didn’t know who died in the gas chambers. I need to do something. To act. But do what? “Read if you want, campaign if you want, make a difference however you can. Anything else you do is the devil’s work.” That’s what Monsieur Candela said, and he’d seen enough of life to have more faith in the devil than he had in God. And I remembered something Monsieur Vincent used to say when he’d see us scratching our heads over some clapped-out old banger: “If you stop thinking so hard, you might see things better.” And a lot of the time he was right: we’d push start the old rust bucket and it would be fine. People are always making problems for themselves and then wondering why they end up with a headache.

Over and over I ask myself the same question: where in all of this is papa — the man I knew, the man who married maman, the Cheïkh of Aïn Deb, the man everyone loved and respected, uncle Ali’s oldest, closest friend? Because he did exist, the father we spent all those years missing, he had two healthy sons, Rachel the brainy one and me who was never much good at anything, but I’m smart enough to know right from wrong. Am I supposed to believe the man I called papa and the SS officer are really the same person? How is it possible to blame one and honour the other, to hate the killer he was — a man I never knew — and love the father, the victim he is now, a victim of the same terrorists who are gunning for us? Did my father pay for his crimes? What about us, are we paying because we are his sons? Is this fate, mektoub, is it a curse? “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.” That’s what Primo Levi says: the children are doomed from the start because parents never tell their children about their crimes, if parents told their children everything it would be like killing them in the womb. This Primo Levi guy is crazy. I refuse to believe that God is more evil than man, that children are doomed to their fate.

Some of my mates come by the house from time to time, they say they do it just to annoy me, but actually they’re shit scared that I’m losing it. They come right out and say it too, but when they see how I react, they start joking around, grabbing each other by the sleeve, by the neck, by the dick, calling each other wacko. The crazier you are, the more you laugh, they say, laughing like lunatics. You can’t choose your friends. I play along just to get it over with. After they’ve trashed the place, we collapse on the sofa and talk. We talk for hours. It’s always the same conversation. It starts with me. Why don’t I go out any more? Why am I always going round with a face like an undertaker? Why am I always reading? And what the fuck am I writing in this notebook? Then they start with their stupid questions: Am I eating properly? Who washes my clothes? Who does the cleaning? Who takes out the rubbish? Who’s paying the electric? I don’t bother to try and explain, they’ve all got mothers and sisters who do everything for them. I can’t imagine Bidochon — who’s done, like, three days of work in his whole life — or Momo, who lives off the halal meat from his father’s butcher’s shop, know what a direct debit is, or how to wash a pair of boxers, make an omelette, cut a slice of bread, clean up after themselves, flush the toilet. All they’ve ever done is sit back and wait for everything to be done for them. The only one who can actually think is Idir-Quoi, but he can’t tell you what he thinks because the minute he opens his mouth he starts stammering. There’s no point even talking about Togo-au-Lait, he’s black as the ace of spades, he’s got his hair in cornrows like some gangsta and he thinks he’s clever as a monkey. When you see the way he rolls his eyes as soon as he sees a question mark, you realise he doesn’t know anything about monkeys — a lot of them are incredibly stupid. Raymou’s got two brains that don’t connect, a brain full of working-class common sense he inherited from his dad, and his own brain, which chews up common sense and spits it out. How much sense you get out of Raymou depends on whether you’re talking to the father or the son. Or the Holy Ghost. At the end of the day, Cinq-Pouces is the only one of the lot of them with a clue, his nickname means he’s all thumbs, but he’s a hard worker. He’s the only one of them who’s ever held down a job. He used to work with his father and he can turn his hand to pretty much anything. The things at the end of his arms aren’t hands, they’re Swiss army knives. Like I said, you can’t choose your friends. But I love them the way they are, crazy, dumb, ungrateful, awkward, useless, infuriating, and all out of benefits, even the benefit of the doubt. They’re prisoners. Yeah, I love them.

When they came by today they said they had news — some good, most bad. The good news is that the imam from Block 17 was arrested as an accessory in Nadia’s murder. “That calls for a beer,” I said. “The thing is,” they said, “now the whole estate has gone to shit, we couldn’t stand it anymore, we had to get out.” This was why they had come round, they couldn’t breathe there. On the one hand, you’ve got the people living on the estate playing dead, waiting to see what happens before they make a move, on the other hand you’ve got people running round all over the place: the imam’s suicide bombers, his sleeper cells, Com’Dad’s informants, the cops, the CRS, people from all kinds of organisations, reporters, academics, rubberneckers, counsellors from City Hall, representatives from Sensitive Urban Areas all over France and one or two from Belgium. We’re all over the news. When the sink estates in Paris catch a cold, the whole of France ends up spitting blood. Everywhere you go on the estate you get ambushed. On their way here Momo and the guys were stopped and full-body searched thirty times, questioned fifteen times, interviewed seven times, called in as backup three times, and once they managed to slip through the cordon. They came up with a brilliant way of getting rid of the TV reporters: whenever a journalist tried to talk to them they shoved Idir-Quoi to the front, stood well back and pissed themselves laughing.

“When was the imam arrested?” I shouted.

“Yesterday,” someone, I think it was Momo, said. “Some crack squad from the Rapid Response Unit they sent in from Paris pulled him in.”

“They’ve got him bang to rights, he’ll go down for at least ten, that’s what Babar down the police station said to Rabah — you know, the guy who works in the supermarket.”

“Yeah sure, dickhead!” said Raymou. “My dad says that politicians are bound to get involved, I wouldn’t be surprised if he wound up getting a medal.”

“One of Togo-au-Lait’s cousins who works as a cleaner for some government minister said they’re planning to release him. Apparently banging up an imam is like setting some pedo loose in a primary school, it’s just asking for trouble. Locking them up apparently just turns out more suicide bombers, meanwhile the imam’s inside phoning round every sleeper cell in France and getting them out on the streets, that’s right isn’t it Togo?” said Manchot.

“Yeah, swear to God, my cousin heard the minister talking on the phone to some guy and pleading with him to make a conciliatory gesture.”

“What does that mean?” asked Momo.

“It means what it means,” said Manchot.

“They should just kill the fucker,” concluded Momo.

“I agree, Momo, you’re a butcher like your father, I’ve no bone to pick with you.”

“They j. . ju. . just going to c. . c. . cover up the in. . in. . ”

“Cover up the incident?”

“Y. . yeah.”

“We’ll make them fucking sit up and take notice if they try. They’ve got him, they can keep him.”

“They could send him back where he came from with only one eye.”

“Or one arm, like Manchot here.”

“Well, if that’s the good news, the bad news must be a world fucking war. Spill. . ” I said.

“The first thing is there’s a new emir on the estate, a guy called Flicha.”

“Recruitment is obviously booming.”

“And we’ve got this new one-eyed imam. They call him Cyclops. Aren’t one-eyed people bad luck?”

“No, fool, that’s hunchbacks you’re thinking of.”

“Bullshit, hunchbacks are supposed to bring good luck.”

“This just gets better and better, now we’ve got gimps casting spells. Anyone else?”

“These guys are no-bullshit, they’re from the AIG, they were sent in from Boufarik, that’s where they’ve got all the Taliban training camps. The day they showed up they issued a fatwa. First: anyone who’s not with them is against them. Second: girls aren’t allowed out on the street anymore. Third: we’re forbidden from talking to Jews, Christians, animists, communists, queers or journalists. Fourth: they’ve banned speed, blow, cigarettes, beer, pinball, sports, music, books, TV, movies. . I don’t remember the rest. . ”

“Wanking in public.”

“Wanking in private.”

“Farting in the direction of the mosque.”

“Shaving your d. . ”

“You fuckwits think this is funny?”

“Yeah. . no. . we’re just having a laugh!”

“What about the people on the estate, what are they doing about it?”

“Same old same old, they just play dead.”

“What about you guys?”

Silence. Whispering.

“What about you guys?” I repeated.

“What do you expect us to do?” Raymou was angry.

“Nothing. Same old same old.”

“You can talk, you the one who never leaves the house, what about you?”

It was my turn to tell them a few things. I told them what I’d been thinking. I couldn’t believe it, they actually listened from start to finish, except Momo who got up halfway through and said, “Hang on, I’ve got to piss, don’t say anything till I get back.”

He came running back, stuffing his water pistol back into his pants.

“Okay, you can go on now. . ”

I started with a question.

“How much do you guys know about Hitler?”

Silence. Looks. Whispers.

“Okay, none of you knows anything much, that simplifies things. .

“We weren’t born in Hitler’s time, most of our parents weren’t born, except my father, who was a fifteen-year-old sports freak when he came to power. Hitler was the German Führer, sort of like an all-powerful imam in a peaked cap and a black uniform. He had this thing called Nazism which was like a new religion. All the Germans wore swastikas round their necks, a swastika was a symbol that meant: I’m a Nazi, I believe in Hitler, I live through him and for him. He outlawed loads of things, just like the imam with this fatwa he’s issued, then when Hitler had the Germans well trained, when they were proper Nazis obsessed with this new religion, with their Führer, he declared that all Jews, foreigners, immigrants, cripples, people with one arm, like you, Manchot, brainiacs like Togo, prodigies like Cinq-Pouces, motormouths like Idir-Quoi, people who were a bit soft in the head like Raymou here, mixed-race kids like me and halal butchers’ sons like Momo should all be wiped out. He said they were impure, an inferior race, said they didn’t deserve to live, and he said the parents that had given birth to them were to die in the fire with them. Hitler ordered all the Jews in Europe, including the ones here in France, to wear a yellow star on their chest so it would be easier for the cops to haul them in. And he had millions of people burned in furnaces. Not little ones like the one near the old train station, vast incinerators, bigger than the ones they use to burn the rubbish on the estate, and much better organised. You get the picture? Millions of men, women and children snatched off the streets, dragged to some nearby stadium where they were branded with a red-hot iron, then packed into cattle trucks and shipped off to extermination camps where they wait around for days, weeks, even months, barefoot in the snow, for someone to come and burn them. Every day, the Nazis pick some random group, tie them up with barbed wire and dump them on a conveyor belt that went more or less right to the mouth of this huge furnace. The prisoners are so scared, they don’t even scream, and it doesn’t matter even if they do, because there’s no one to hear but themselves. And it’s not just Nazis who are in charge, some of the people doing the work are prisoners — mostly young, fit guys like us — called Kapos. While they’re waiting their turn, they work as guards, shovel coal into the furnaces, check the thermostat, keep track of the number of dead, rip out the prisoners’ hair, their teeth — and know what they do with the ashes? They make fucking soap and candles for the soldiers. And it goes on and on like this, day after day, for months, years. . ”

Whispers, the guys shift in their seats, cough, I’ve never seen them so quiet.

“What I’m telling you here is the bare truth, it’s all here in these books, I can show you the photos if you promise not to look at them for more than a second, because otherwise they’ll fuck you up for the rest of your life. You won’t be able to believe you’re really men, that your parents are really human, that your friends are really friends, good guys like you lot, like me. Rachel checked it all out, he did research, he went to Germany, to Poland, he saw the furnaces, saw them with his own fucking eyes.”

Idir-Quoi asked a question.

“What did he do it for, Rachel, I mean?”

“I’m getting to that. . ” I said.

“One day, the whole world got together and declared war on this madness and they killed the imam, the leader, the Führer and all his emirs and they took over Germany. That’s when they found the extermination camps. There were dozens of them and millions of dead and survivors that looked like so much like corpses that they didn’t know what to say to them. When my parents and everyone else in Aïn Deb were murdered by the Islamists, Rachel got to thinking. He figured that fundamentalist Islam and Nazism were kif-kif—same old same old. He wanted to find out what would happen if people did nothing, the way people did nothing in Germany back in the day, what would happen if nobody did anything in Kabul and Algeria where they’ve got I don’t know how many mass graves, or here in France where we’ve got all these Islamist Gestapo. In the end, the whole idea scared him so much he killed himself. He thought it was too late, he felt guilty, he said that by saying nothing it was like we were colluding, he said we’re all caught in this trap and if we go on doing nothing, go round pretending like we’re talking about things intelligently, we’ll wind up being Kapos without even realising, and we won’t even notice that everyone around us has turned into a Kapo already.

“That’s bullshit — we’re not Kapos!” Raymou yelled.

“Really? A while back we were all on their side and we didn’t even know, remember?”

I didn’t have to say any more, they remembered, they’d been up to their balls in it.

“So, what? You’re suggesting we all top ourselves like Rachel?” Raymou asked.

“No, we’re not going to die, we’re going to live, we’re going to fight.”

“How?”

“I don’t know, we’ll have to see. . ”

“Fuck’s sake, all this bullshit and now he says he doesn’t know!”

“Why don’t we set up an anti-Islamic league?” suggested Bidochon.

“Islamic or Islamist?” asked Raymou.

“Who cares? It’s the same difference.”

“Bullshit, it’s not the same at all, my parents are Muslims, Islam is the greatest religion in the world!” shouted Momo.

“My mother does the Salat, and she wouldn’t hurt a fly,” added Idir-Quoi.

“It’s Muslims that end up becoming Islamists, though, isn’t it?” said Manchot.

“No, there’s Christians too, like Raymou,” said Idir-Quoi.

“Okay, Momo, look it up in the dictionary, tell us the difference.”

“There’s no difference if you ask me,” said Bidochon.

“Just look it up, Momo. . under I, no that’s J. . it’s comes before that. . Idir-Quoi, you look it up.”

Idir-Quoi might have trouble saying words, but when they’re on a page he’s a genius. It took him two minutes to find the definition but it took him ten minutes to read it out, so I’ll skip the stammering.

“Islamic: of, or relating to, Islam, and Islamist means. . um. . I can’t find it. It’s not in here, it doesn’t exist. . what the fuck?”

“That’s an old dictionary, they didn’t have Islamists back then.”

“No, it was published in 1990, we had jihadists back then.”

“Yeah but dictionaries are serious, they don’t just put every single word in there.”

“Okay, let’s say anti-Islamist.”

“And what exactly is it supposed to do, this league of yours?”

“Take down the Islamists.”

“How?”

“We’ll run them off the estate!”

“How?”

“. . ”

An hour later we still hadn’t got anywhere. The conversation went off in all directions, but every time we hit a brick wall. We knew what the problem was, we just didn’t have the solution. Stopping Islamism is like trying to catch the wind, you need a bit more than a sieve or a bunch of muppets like us. It wasn’t enough to know. It wasn’t enough to understand. It wasn’t enough to want it. What we didn’t have the Islamists had in spades: determination. We’re like the concentration camp prisoners, caught up in the Machine, paralysed by fear, fascinated by evil, clinging to the secret hope that passivity will save us.

I didn’t tell them about papa, about his past. They’re my friends, I didn’t want them spooked, didn’t want them running out on me. And besides, they are what they are, they’re harmless enough but they get wound up easily. They might start thinking their fathers were hiding some terrible secret in their past. I didn’t want Togo suddenly remembering his great-grandfather was a cannibal and that the only way they cured his father was by feeding him raw steak from the day he was born — it would kill him. My father never told me anything, Rachel said. It’s true, fathers never have anything to say.

Momo, who’s always been too curious for his own good, gave me this weird look. “Your father was German, wasn’t he. . was he a Nazi?” I said, “Don’t be so fucking stupid, he emigrated to Algeria, he was fighting with the maquis for your country’s independence. . and he died a martyr.”

It was midnight by the time they left. I could tell just by looking at them that this whole conversation had scared them, they didn’t say anything, they were shuffling along, not looking at each other. They pulled their jackets tight around them and disappeared into the freezing shadows. I felt sorry for them, they looked like prisoners dragged back to camp after a botched escape attempt. Tonight, they would come to know the nightmare that has haunted me since Rachel’s death. In a couple of months I’ve aged a hundred years. I wouldn’t wish on them what the camp prisoners had to live through every moment of their short, endless lives. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone except the imam from Block 17 and his emir.