Tuareg

He found what he was looking for behind the façade of an old Rumi temple. They were curious churches that the French had built throughout the country, even though they must have known that they never had a hope in hell of converting one single Muslim into a Christian.

It had been built on the edge of what had been on the brink of becoming one of the capital’s smarter neighbourhoods, by a luxury development on the edge of the beach, next to a stretch of high cliffs. But it was one of the first things to go when the revolution got underway. One night the building burst into flames and continued to burn until dawn, with no-one, not even the neighbours or the fire brigade, daring to put it out. Everyone knew that in the mists of the neighbouring woods, the nationalist marksmen were waiting to shoot, by the light of the flames, at anyone imprudent enough to go near it.

Over time it had crumbled into a blackened and dusty skeleton, home only to rats and lizards and a place that even the tramps avoided out of superstition, after one of them turned up dead on the night, coincidentally, of the tenth anniversary of its destruction.

The central grand nave had lost its roof and the damp wind that came in off of the sea made it an unpleasant place to be in. Right at the end, however, behind what must have the main alter, there was a door that opened into some small, sheltered rooms, two of which, still had most of the glass intact in their windows.

It was a peaceful and solitary place and what Gazel needed after the nerve wracking few days he had just had. He was confused and sickened by this deafening city and its crowds of people, all of which felt like an assault to his senses and his eardrums, having always been accustomed to peace and silence.

Exhausted, he stretched out his blanket in one corner and slept, clutching his weapons and consumed by hideous dreams where trains, buses and roaring crowds all seemed to be rushing towards him, bearing down on him until he became nothing more than a bloody and shapeless mass.

He awoke at dawn, shivering with cold but sweating profusely. He struggled to get enough air inside of him and felt as if a giant hand was bearing down on him and trying to suffocate him. For the first time in his life he had slept underneath a concrete roof and in between four walls.

He went outside. One hundred metres away the sea was blue and calm, quite different to the foamy, daring, monster it had been the day before with its silvery reflections dancing up and down under a brilliant sun.

Very carefully, almost ceremoniously, he opened up the packet that he had bought in a shop in the kasbah and emptied its contents out onto the blanket. He propped up a small mirror and gave himself a dry shave, as he had done so since he was old enough to think, using the sharp blade of his dagger. Then he took the scissors and cut his short, black, thick, hair until he no longer recognised himself. Later he went out to the sea and bathed, using a perfumed bar of soap to wash himself with, surprised by the bitter tasting water, how little foam it produced and the salt traces that it left on his skin.

Once he was back his hideaway he put on some blue, fitted trousers and a white shirt and felt ridiculous.

He looked sadly at his djellabas, his turban and his veil and was tempted to put them all back on again, but he knew that he could not since his normal clothes were attracting too much attention, even in the kasbah.

He had issued a threat to the most powerful man in the country and on that basis the police and the army would all be looking for a Targui, dressed in a litham that only revealed his eyes. He had to take advantage of the fact that nobody knew, not even remotely, what he really looked like and he realised that with his new appearance, not even Laila would be able to recognise him.

He hated the idea that complete strangers would now be able to see his face and he felt embarrassed, as if he was walking out onto the street and into the crowds naked. One day many years ago, when he was no longer a child, his mother had given him his first djellabah and later when he became a warrior, he was given the litham, for having completed the tasks that made him eligible for one. To get rid of both items of clothing was like becoming a child again, or like going back in time, to an era when he had walked around without them and felt no shame or offended anyone.

He walked through the room and into the wide nave, trying to get used to his new clothes. But his trousers pinched him with each long step and made it impossible for him to squat, a position that he found comfortable and liked to assume, sometimes for hours on end. The shirt rubbed him annoyingly and his skin itched, whether from the fabric or the sea, he was not sure.

Finally he got undressed again, wrapped himself up in the blanket and spent the rest of the day huddled up in a corner, lost in his thoughts.

He closed his eyes as soon as the room became dark and opened them with the first light. He got dressed, overcoming the revulsion he felt for his new clothes and found himself standing before the grey ministry building, just as the city was starting to wake up.

Nobody took any notice of him or looked at him as if he were naked, but he did notice some policemen armed with machine guns who seemed to be positioned at strategic points. The fat man in uniform was in his usual spot, waving his arms around, maybe a little bit more frantically than normal and making regular and furtive glances around him.

‘They’re looking for me,’ he said. ‘But they’ll never recognise me in these clothes.’

A little later, at eight o’clock on the dot, with chronometric precision, the ministry’s committee appeared at the end of the passage and Gazel watched as Ali Madani walked quickly down the staircase and into the building, not stopping to greet anyone this time round.

He sat down on one of the banks in the boulevard, like any other of the city’s unemployed men, hoping that at any moment Laila and his children would appear from the same door. But he knew, deep down, that he was wasting his time.

At midday, Madani left the building again, accompanied by his fleet of motorbikes and did not return. As afternoon fell Gazel knew that the minister had probably never had the slightest intention of returning his family to him. So he left the bench and headed off, having reached the painful conclusion, that there, in the midst of all that confusion, in that enormous city, the chances of him being reunited with the people that he loved most, were very remote.

His threat to the President had fallen on deaf ears and he wondered what on earth they were doing with them anyway, if Abdul-el-Kebir was free and in Paris. They must have been carrying out some kind of stupid and cowardly revenge, because surely they could not take any pleasure in hurting such defenceless beings, who had not done anything wrong in the first place.

‘Maybe they didn’t believe me,’ he reasoned. ‘Maybe they thought I was just a poor ignorant Targui that would never dare to go near the President.’

And maybe they were right because in just a few days, Gazel had realised how little his own knowledge, experience and judgement were worth in the complex world of a capital city and how small he felt in its midst.

It was a forest of buildings that backed onto an enormous, salty sea; where sweet water gushed forth from every street corner, producing more drinking water in a day than a Bedouin would drink in a lifetime; built on a stony ground that at dawn was inhabited by thousands of rats. It had to be said that even the most cunning, brave, noble and intelligent Imohag of the blessed Kel-Talgimus people, would be as powerless as a humble akli slave in the face of all that chaos.

‘Could you tell me the way to the President’s palace?’

He had to ask five times and then listen very carefully to each answer because the labyrinth of streets all looked the same to him and he was unable to tell one from the other. Finally, after much persistence and just as night was falling, he arrived at a big park and there, surrounded by high railings on all four sides, stood the grandest building he had ever seen.

A guard of honour in a red tunic and an elaborate feathery helmet was marching up and down, obediently obeying his orders. He was later replaced by some proud sentinels, who stood on each corner rigidly, looking more like statues than men of flesh and blood.

He studied the majestic park carefully and his gaze fell on a group of tall date palms that rose up and over the main entrance, taking up an area of about two hundred meters.

In the far away desert, Gazel had once hidden for days in the cups of those palm trees, tied to one of their thick leaves as he had laid in wait for a herd of onix, which, had he been hiding anywhere else, would have immediately smelled his human presence.

He checked the distance between the railings and the date palms and estimated that if, during the night, he was able to get into one of the trees without being seen, then he had a good chance of being able to shoot the President on his way in or out of the building.

It was just a question of patience and patience was something a Targui always had plenty of.