Harraga

Act I

Bonjour, Oiseau!

Even as my life was leaching away

As sand was slipping through my fingers

As silence numbed my soul

For always

A bird landed on my shoulder.

‘Cheep cheep, cheep cheep…!’

He chirruped in my ear

As he fluttered and frolicked.

I did not understand.

But when one is lonely

A single word brings joy

And so I threw away my rosary

And I danced.

A bird is a thing of beauty

But, alas, a bird has wings

Which, just as they serve to alight,

So too they serve to take flight.

That is the tragedy of birds.

My door is making a worrying sound. It doesn’t go knock knock, it goes bang bang. It’s reinforced steel, which I suppose might explain the racket, but with things the way they are these days, I can’t help but think of other reasons.

I open it, staying pressed against the doorjamb for protection. A reflex. ‘Chkoun? Who’s there?’ It’s not the patrol, nor some sermoniser nor the Defenders of Truth, it’s not my neighbour from the rue Marengo, a chubby-faced old gorgon of a woman who’s forever popping round for a gossip and believes in a hundred clichéd theories, none of which are desperately interesting. Thankfully it’s not old Moussa our postman, the fearless factotum of the Rampe Valée, an old warhorse who’s constantly banging on about something and who, day after day — excepting riots and strikes — leaves a paper trail of panic and contagion in his wake. No, it’s some funny-looking slip of a girl. ‘It’s me!’ she says. I’ve no idea who ‘me’ is. Skinny, dressed in a get-up cobbled together from shreds and patches that looks like something off X Factor. Whether it’s a fashion faux-pas or a flash of inspiration, all these flounces and frills make it look like a drag outfit for a family of screaming queens. She could probably pull it off, were it not for the clashing colours. Her hair is a mix-and-match of everything from historic styles to the latest fashions. Her face is plastered with make-up, her eyes — black, white and twinkling — are bobbing in a pool of eyeliner surrounded by a lush meadow of green eyeshadow. All she needs is a blade of wheat behind her ear to know she comes from the back end of nowhere. The acrid cloud of her perfume could rival the fallout from Chernobyl. She’s a walking scandal who has somehow inexplicably escaped the wrath of Allah. A battered holdall lies at her feet like a recently shed snakeskin, completing the ‘look’ of this sixteen- or seventeen-year-old globetrotter. Her full, perfect lips are set in a blood-red pout pitched somewhere between impatience and bewilderment. It’s clear that behind her regal smile, she’s got some nerve. To cap it all, she’s several months pregnant and her belly button is on display for all the world to see.

‘Tata Lamia?’ she says bravely, drawing herself up to her full five feet nothing.

‘Well… that depends.’

‘I’m Chérifa!’

‘Good for you… and?’

‘Sofiane sent me. I’ve come from Oran.’

‘What?!!’

‘He didn’t phone you?’

‘Er… no.’

‘Can I come in?’

‘Um… I suppose.’

‘Thanks.’

‘You’re welcome.’

‘It’s weird, your place.’

‘You said it.’

This is how a whirlwind sweeps into your life. Nothing, absolutely nothing in my past led me to suppose that one day I would open up my door, open up my life, to such mayhem. I opened the door because that’s what you do when someone knocks, you answer. You might worry that it will be some hoodlum — and Lord knows the neighbourhood has its fair share of thugs — or more likely a sermoniser, a rapist or the cops, and you’re thinking ‘these people, they’ve got no consideration, no manners’, but to set your mind at rest, and perhaps even in some surge of hope, you open the door anyway, thinking maybe this is the promised miracle, maybe this is fate bringing the good things we’re told come to those who wait, you think of all the happy things a gloomy life conjures in the mind.

There is also the premonition, the primal impulse, the subtle power of things unseen, the call of another world, the sudden longing to brave the mystery. All these things urge on more powerfully than fear holds back.

Truth be told, I just opened the door without thinking. What can I say? I’m an impulsive woman. Maybe not entirely without thinking: I have never given up hope that I might see my little brother again, might hear him knock at my door. Every sound rekindles that hope. It’s a constant torment. I know that Sofiane is gone, I know that he is never coming back.

A good upbringing is a terrible handicap. You end up being a well-bred little chick in a nest filled with cuckoos. One polite gesture led to another: I offered this interloper a glass of lemonade, then some supper — an egg and an orange — and stoically I listened, all ears, to her endless chatter. Could I refuse her a bed for the night? The duty of hospitality does not stop at the bedroom door. As it turned out, she didn’t wait to be asked; while I was clearing the table the cheeky little thing put on her nightie. What could I do? I gave her a pillow and some clean sheets, I favoured her with a sing-song ‘goodnight’, something she took as an invitation. She laughed so hard and talked so much about this and that, about everything and nothing, about Raï music and Les Chebs, about things that even Scheherazade, that incomparable insomniac, never told of in her tales. The moment she opened her mouth, I was completely lost.

In all honesty, I wasn’t really listening, though, out of politeness, I feigned interest. Her shrill falsetto irritated me. I thought about Louiza, my gentle, sweet Louiza. God, how I miss her. About what had become of all our promises.

Three am and night drags on. The old clock that stands sentry in the hall hasn’t chimed since its first owner died — something I can relate to — but it still clanks and grates at regular intervals out of habit. Three times, it struggled bravely to toll the passing hour. The endless witterings of the damsel grew fainter until it was just a vague cloud hovering above our heads, then it faded into the ether. In this silence, this true mineral silence, the house began to give voice to its aches and pains, to creaks and groans fit to rouse a poltergeist. We had reached that hour that does not truly belong to us, when only a silver thread connects soul to body. Finally, she fell asleep, sinking down into the sofa and the multicoloured cushions. She slumped back, her arms folded, her mouth wide open — to say nothing of her legs — leaving my head still spinning with her twaddle. Sprawled there as she was, she might have appeared indecent were she not so innocent. In sleep, she looked every bit as outlandish as she did awake and it was clear that inside her was a world very different from the one in which we live, a world of fairies and Prince Charmings in which everyone else — the supporting cast, the minor players, the evil witches and wicked stepmothers — exist only so they can be foiled by the good, by the dreamers.

I thought I knew all there was to know about long nights dedicated to silence and the endless game of introspection and now, suddenly, I no longer knew where I was, what I felt, I didn’t know what to think, what to do, I had lost the measured tempo of those who are solitary by nature. I felt flustered, my natural rhythms thrown out of kilter. I felt restive. By which I mean consumed by curiosity. Such a strange feeling! This is the danger that stalks the misanthrope: the world encroaching on one’s cocoon.

Never mind, I’ll read for a bit, or turn on the TV and channel surf, I’m sure I’ll find something to send me to sleep. At this hour, everything makes you want to kick the bucket. First thing tomorrow, as soon as she bounds out of bed, my little damsel will have to set me straight on three things:

First: Who is she?

Second: Where is she from?

Third: Where is she going?

I can’t think of anything else to say, that’s how it happened. To say more, to relate the details, the impressions, the misgivings, the repetitions, the hesitant silences, would add nothing. On the contrary, it would take away from the incident, which, in and of itself, was curiously moving: Sofiane has finally made contact and the means he has chosen is this strange little girl.

That day, a trite grey day like every other, a day of nagging doubts, I could not have guessed what upheavals lay in store for me. Worse still, I couldn’t think how to get rid of the silly little goose. Did I really want to be rid of her? It hardly matters, the presence of this giddy girl is the bombshell that will shake my defences to the core. Already I sensed this, I knew it was inevitable, another life had grafted itself on to mine and would consume it from within, engulf it, twist it off course.

To what extent, my God, are our lives really our own?

I spent a long time watching the intruder. She slept the sleep of the fairies. A fine-looking girl with the face of a spoiled child. The colours of the cushions, the soft light, the deep silence, the familiar rumblings from the depths, the delicacy of the sheen, all these add to the aura of enchantment. The image of happiness, that serene happiness that makes us beautiful and gentle. If angels slumber, this surely is how they look, like Chérifa adrift in her dreams. And if demons surrender to sleep, surely they too look like this. There is no reason to think that the good and the wicked do not take equal pleasure in their natural urges.

I don’t know how it happened. Hardly was she out of bed than my interloper had ploughed up the whole house and scattered her belongings like seeds. Some people don’t need to move in to feel at home. The bathroom, my bathroom, had suffered a complete makeover. ‘What’s all this mess?’ I shouted finally. Never in the depths of my depression had I wreaked such havoc on my old dwelling place. The silly goose never stopped but she started, I could see her slight frame rushing round, turning on lamps, torturing the radio, flicking through the television channels, rummaging through my chest of drawers, delving into nooks and crannies, then reappearing looking like a package tourist at the end of a tour realising they’ve missed out on everything. She batted it back to me when she said ‘What mess?’: I was a stranger in my own house. She was eyeing me up the way you might a greengrocer out of season. Following her lead, I ate a breakfast of biscuits standing up in front of the fridge and brushed crumbs from my clothes without worrying about ants coming in from the garden. Just yesterday, ants were my worst nightmare, I could keep them at bay on the other side of the kitchen door only by sheer force, cleanliness… and a healthy dose of pesticide. The ancient scents and smells so deeply rooted in my memory yielded before the radioactive perfume of this little strumpet and the irritating odour of youth metamorphosing uncontrollably. I was absolutely furious, disgusted by my own passivity and, unless I’m very much mistaken, thrilled by her presence. I felt like a big sister reprimanding her naughty little sibling.

Novelty has its charms, but it also shocks in that it forces us to change. I was alarmed and, at the same time, I was spellbound. Our beliefs, our habits, after all, are what they have always been: a stopgap. To suddenly discover that she is an old maid is a terrible thing for a woman. Chérifa terrorised me by her dissoluteness and charmed me by her untidiness.

But while there is a time to be soft-hearted, there are many more when it is best to be hard-bitten.

‘Listen, little girl, it’s all very well letting yourself go, but it helps to know where you’re headed! Who are you, where have you come from and where are you going in that condition? You can start by telling me how you know my idiot brother and what he has to do with that big belly of yours. And don’t think your little Lolita act will save you!’

‘But, Tata, why are you angry with me?’

‘What’s with this “Tata”? I’m not your auntie! And I’m not your mother!’

‘What can I call you, then?’

‘Well, really! You don’t call me anything, you address me as mademoiselle.’

‘Aren’t you a bit old to be a mademoiselle?’

‘Well, really!’

Anyway, I’m not about to give chapter and verse of such an inane conversation, especially one that hardly portrays me in a flattering light.

With simpletons, everything is simple, the trick is not to overcomplicate things. Seen in this light, the problem seems pitifully banal. Somehow, in Oran, Chérifa, one of so many lost girls, encountered my idiot brother who was also on the road to ruin. In their misery, they exchanged ideas, no doubt kisses, and all the calamities that this entails. The little damsel is not backward in coming forward, though she has clearly retained some sense of propriety, since she makes no mention of her belly. Did she conceive by the Holy Spirit? Well, all that matters is the result. At a guess, I’d say she’s five months gone. Beware, there’s trouble brewing, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this girl is the kind that attracts problems. Well, I’m telling you right now, she can go bake that bun in her oven somewhere else!

Knowing the silver tongue Sofiane has, and the gullibility of silly little geese, I assume that their goodbyes went something like this:

‘Chérifa, my destiny is not to stay here in Oran but to continue on my way. I must find freedom and fulfilment. Those who went before us swear by Allah that such things are only to be found over there in the West.’

‘All I want is to get as far as Algiers, the capital, a girl can live there like a queen. All my friends back in the village dream of going there. Look at my belly… I’m starting to show, aren’t I? If I go back to the douar with a baby in tow, they’ll cut my throat.’

‘Go to my sister Lamia. She has a big house, there’ll be a room for you and a cot for the baby. She’s a doctor, so you won’t lack for medicine. She’s old and she’s prickly as a cactus, but that will be good for the child, it will keep him on the straight and narrow. I’m off to Tangier to look for a ship.’

This is how they talk, the children who have strayed from the path.

But, humbled by age and by wisdom, how are we supposed to talk to them — especially when life has long since taught us to bite our tongues and pretend we still believe?

Unable to talk to her, I tormented her. My questions came so thick and fast that she was paralysed, she did not understand what they meant nor why they were so urgent. There I was expecting the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but she started blubbering and hiccuping like a barking seal. Her eyeliner trickled miserably down her face. Then, hup, she leapt to her feet and rushed out, slamming the door behind her. For minutes afterwards, the walls of the house shuddered from the bang. When it finally finished sundering, my heart was left in pieces and I cried my eyes out.

She came back at midnight, on the twelfth stroke. Or thereabouts. This was the time limit I had set before hanging myself. I was guilty. Past midnight, only corpses and their killers roam the streets of this city. I had allowed her to go out, alone, after dark, in a neighbourhood where even murderers are scared of their own shadows. I rushed to open the door, expecting to meet with a violent death. Whew! It was her, with her holdall and her regal airs. She went straight into the living room — her bedroom — without so much as looking at me. I fought the urge to bump her off myself, right there in the hall. Next time, I’ll kill her and I won’t lose any sleep. A woman has a right to a little respect in her own home. As I closed the door, I thought I saw among the shifting shadows of the poplar trees that guard the neighbourhood, the figure of a man disappearing into the darkness.

One more worry. And a major one.

Day, night,

Within, without,

The rough beast

Waits

With dagger drawn.

Against all faith

Against all laws

The rough beast

Strikes

With burning hook.

Beware, woman

Beware, child,

The rough beast

Runs

With tail erect.

Cowering

Contented

Man awaits

His beloved beast

HIS FEAR.

I’m not sure whether I miss my former solitude, those long, leisurely evenings, the weekends spent like a worker bee on strike, the wanton wildness and the associated absences, the curious habits of a confirmed spinster which, though unrewarding, are familiar, the delicious thrill of fear in the darkness and my heroic rebellions against the ghosts who share with me the mysteries of the past and the murmuring of walls steeped in forgotten stories. No, I have no regrets, only fond memories. I enjoyed my rootless solitude, enjoyed shutting myself away in this house which, for more than two centuries, has seen so many people come and go, taking on the wrinkles, the wilful habits and the curious odours of those who came before us, the janissaries, the hookah smokers, by their own intrigues or by some insidious illness; a high-ranking Turk — an officer in the Sultan’s guard — built this house as a weekend retreat; after him came a viscount, a blue-blooded Frenchman, part soldier, part naturalist, who, in time, put down roots in the medina, embracing Islam and one of its daughters; next came a Jew whose ancestors it seems arrived on the Barbary Coast before the upheavals began; he was followed by a succession of pieds-noirs who arrived in wretched hordes from Navarre and Galilee and are now exiled to the north pole; then, shortly after independence, it was my parents’ turn. They came down from the mountains of Greater Kabylia, and for a while they housed friends and allies and, during the ‘Years of Lead’ that followed when honour was at a low ebb, they took in furtive strangers who showed up with their secrets and left before we could discover what they were. How we tried to eavesdrop on those whispered conversations! But this house is big, we were small, inexperienced, and much went over our heads.

I enjoyed my forays into impenetrable silences, and all the questions that come to mind when time moves on without us; I would embellish them according to my whims, my moods. I would drift far away, reluctant to return. Reality is but a port of call on our journey, a succession of mindless chores, repetitive gestures, tedious stories, so we might as well be brief. And yet I enjoyed tackling domestic problems as antiquated as the house itself with cold determination and an almost perverse punctiliousness. In a way a simple life is very complicated. There are the unknowns and all the shifting imponderables in the background. The walls are crumbling, the pots are chipped, the iron cuts out during ironing, the pipes are leaking, everything creaks or groans and sometimes the house is plunged into darkness in broad daylight. Increasingly, it seems to me, whole sections are falling apart. Why, I don’t know; sometimes these cave-ins took place inside my head. I was surrounded by antiquated things which gave up the ghost faster than I could fix them. You deal with it or you don’t. Even the screws can come unscrewed, I thought, at the end of the day as I reached for a hammer. For a while, it was like a religion to me, a form of post-industrial asceticism made up of transcendental shrugs and sighs and bouts of blind rage, a type of OCD complete with the liberating rituals that entails. But at least it gave my arms some muscle tone and distracted my ears from the revolutionary claptrap fed like milk and honey to the masses. This was the era of diatribes and mass protests, of gobbledygook spouted all the working week and silent only on the Sabbath. There’s not a single gadget in this house I didn’t manage to dismantle only to have to replace it with a new, more complicated model which immediately sneered at me from its state-of-the-art technology. Not a single object was made within these walls, they all show up without warning, cash on delivery, and are promptly put in the right place, there to age safe from prying eyes. The real feat is not getting them to work — something that can be done with the press of a button — but in deciphering the instructions. It’s astonishing the sheaves of booklets that spew from the cardboard boxes, you can picture yourself dying, stupid and useless. Finding your own language in an instruction booklet is a riddle in itself, so I would read the first page that came to hand, Chinese, Korean, Hindu, Russian, Turkish, Greek. I would stare and stare at the text. It’s so complicated. It seems impossible that people can speak and understand these languages. I avoided the French booklets, churned out by polyglots who learn the language of Molière from fast-food menus. They infuriated me, I felt an irresistible urge to rewrite them before reading them point by point. I ignored the Arabic, which reminds me of the hateful slew of paperwork that our glorious government uses to manipulate us from January to December all the civic year. I shunned the manuals in English because, though I can muddle through, it gives me the creeps, it makes me feel ignorant and anxious. English is the language of those who travel, and I don’t travel. Who but me would confess to turning on machines without reading the instructions? The phase was short-lived, I didn’t have many gadgets, and since everything comes with time, it was something I was determined to work out for myself: technology is serious business, it’s man’s work, something women have no right to meddle with. I quickly worked out how best to proceed. Tonton Hocine, a friend of Papa’s who lives on the Impasse des Alouettes, a veteran of some war or other — independence probably — would come round with his box of tricks whenever I asked and, with the air of an indignant expert, make it clear what a terrible mess I had made of things. I had the poor man wrapped round my little finger. Once you got him going, he was a powerhouse, he would immediately set about finding the leak. I found it fascinating to watch him sweat blood, blowtorch in hand, trying heroically to fix the pipe. Aside from the tiny garden, now parched as the savannah, the house was suffering from nothing more serious than mild arthritis, something an old man could do nothing about. The wind whistling through cracks in the windows and the doorframes grated on my nerves, but there was no through breeze. To thank him, I found nothing better than to stroke his hair over a cup of strong coffee. Having often seen his breath flame in his unkempt thatch of beard, I knew that Tonton Hocine was fuelled by rotgut, but how could a woman buy wine and how could I offer him alcohol without shocking him and losing his respect? Besides, I had my scruples, his limbs were plagued with gout, and it was bad enough that he was using what little strength he had to help me out. So I stuck with serving coffee thick as tar, which I pressed until it yielded rubbing alcohol. I listened to him, blissful to the point of brainlessness, chin resting on his hand, as he refought his battles with pen-pushers, relived old quarrels with a certain Corporal Abou Hitler and, towards the end, when the important things remain to be said, he would rail about Arabs whom he claimed power made particularly cruel. Old men have their pet subjects, there’s nothing you can do to shut them up. Hocine was a sweet little man. He was a Kabyle and still very much a hill tribesman, a rough diamond with a bushy moustache that tickled his ears, a paunch that pulled him forward and down, rheumy eyes and a tuft of lank hair that fell over his warty nose making him look like an ageing walrus capable of hibernating for six months at a stretch. He talked the only way he knew how, in the Tamazight dialect of the distant, precipitous Djurdjura Mountains, so, for him, words probably exceeded the sheer, sad reality. These crafty old devils have a tendency to make categorical pronouncements, there’s never any debate. I thought no differently to him, but I wasn’t old enough to share my thoughts without consequences so I simply nodded meekly. All this was fascinating, but it was terribly expensive since the man could spend whole afternoons talking and tinkering and, being retired, I found it difficult to pay his hourly rate. Then one day, he dropped dead and I cried like a child.

I used to love saddling up some wild fantasy and slipping into the parallel lives that loomed out of the whispering darkness, away from the cold sheets of my bed, and see myself cantering off to that place where things end, where real life begins. At their most intense, these reveries could wake me with a savage jolt, like a demon dropped into a font of holy water, my throat choked with anguished cries. In our eagerness to dream, we living dead have a tendency to forget that a mere glimpse of life can be fatal to us. Afterwards, I tell myself that such affectations are unseemly, but then I remind myself that to dream only of the life we know is to darken our days. I was panting and dripping with sweat as I listened to the dying echo at the foot of the stairs as it descended into the cellar like a corpse suddenly conjured or ascended the attic to pass away in among things long forgotten and never to be exhumed. Then I would sink back into the silence, my ears still quivering, and fashion this spontaneous commotion into a skilfully orchestrated tragedy. Sometimes, when the silence was filled with strange noises, I was so terrified I would rush out of the house in my slippers. There, in the sullen shadows of the poplar trees, I would slowly get my bearing. I was alone, lost in the jungle with darkness my only guide. The aim was for my excitements to go hand in hand with reality, and so sometimes I would lay it on thick. I have some rather manly ways of exciting myself, not all of which succeed. A heroine in carpet slippers, a dressing gown and a headscarf is pathetic. I reminded myself of Miss Marple aggravating her arthritis running around spreading gossip. But pain has its own pathways, strange shortcuts that I discover from time to time when it pounces unexpectedly and makes me howl. Then there is the dread, the muffled dread that torments me the way needless fears torment a hypochondriac. Trapped within my hallucinations, I would curl up like an animal, everything inside me quivering and pulsing, and sometimes I could feel my eyes shine with the comforting resignation of death. My life is measured out in long prostrations on the terrace at the far end of my little garden, or in the bathroom where I would scrub myself like a dog to suppress the breathless panting of my soul. Eventually, overwhelmed by the absurd, I would wind up at the foot of my bed, at the end of the night with my dreams, my rebellions. Silence was my refuge and wandering my quest. My life was both rich and poor. And a little histrionic. I asked nothing of it, and it gave me nothing, it was a curious symbiosis, and it was enough. The days shambled past, I abandoned myself to abandonment, everything was fine. How reassuring a barren wilderness can be when the path is well trodden!

And yet it frightened me, that solitude. Jealous, vindictive, it wanted me all to itself, its walls closed in on me, scowling. Would it leave me an open window? I felt myself fade as the life-force guttered inside me. But still I longed to live, to live like a madwoman, to dance like a heretic, to scream exultantly, to get drunk on happiness, to embrace all the misfortunes, all the wild dreams in the world.

I was mad but did not realise it. Kind souls, in their own way, would tell me as much with a reticent look, a pitying smile on their lips like an offering. I would respond with a gale of laughter which merely paved the way for truly malicious gossip which would eventually get back to me, from other, more authoritative mouths, from great-aunts weighed down with victuals and wise maxims who were quick to show up with hot news and remonstrate, from visiting female cousins with hearts so placid I feared for their health, and even from perfect strangers who gaily appeared uninvited pretexting some family connection as tenuous as it was unverifiable, each of them blessed with husbands, legitimate progeny and the assurance that experience gives them the right to speak of good and evil. Behind their words was a vehement dislike, behind their eyes a warning. This was an Islamic country, not a holiday camp. I took it badly, censure calls down the Last Judgment. To be mad does not mean to be unnatural, to live alone is not a crime, it is not the indulgence of the depraved! Could Allah be afraid of a poor forsaken woman?

My work takes up eight, ten, twelve hours a day. I don’t count, I work on cases triaged as urgent while other colleagues — guys with a string of high-flown titles after their name — lie around sunning themselves or stalk the hospital corridors. Sometimes, I feel like I’m a skivvy, it’s humiliating. I arrive first thing in the morning and get home last thing at night or vice versa, constantly rushing. I button and unbutton my white coat on the go. But then again I’m not paid to stand around and daydream. Paediatrics is sheer slavery, by far the most taxing branch of medicine. Children are charlatans; if they’re not crying out of pain, they cry out of sheer spite. And the Hôpital Parnet is hardly a shining example of medical care in Algiers. I spend half my time telling off snotty brats and the other half at loggerheads with the fools in administration. It wears you down. At thirty-five, I’ve got the wrinkles of a sixty-year-old. They call me ‘The Old Woman’, pretending it’s an affectionate nickname to sugar the pill. I don’t take it well. For a doctor, such signs of deterioration are the first steps on the road to ruin, and for a woman who is still young and beautiful it is like being thrown on the scrapheap.

My solitude consoles me for my spinsterhood, my premature wrinkles, my pernicious habits, it consoles me for the pervasive atmosphere of violence, the constant Algerian bilge, the national navel-gazing, the moronic male chauvinism that regulate society. But it cannot make up for the absence of my little brother which is as painful as on the day he disappeared. What has become of him, my God? He has been gone over a year. I haven’t dared contact the police who would only have been annoyed that I had bothered them, who would have invented some trumped-up charge and put us on a blacklist. Sofiane is eighteen, old enough they’d probably think, they would hunt him down to torture him. I’ve done my best to look for him without raising suspicion. Besides, my idiot brother left of his own free will. Legally, he can go anywhere he likes. Democracy has its good points, even in the eyes of the police. Truth be told, the more rights they have the less they worry about their responsibilities.

Bluebeard plays a role in my dreams and my nightmares. I don’t know whether he really exists. He is a shadowy figure behind the Venetian blinds of the house across the street, a ramshackle hovel splintered to the bone that has lain empty since the mysterious disappearance of its owner, a Frenchman — a real one, so I’m told — sometime back in the 1960s. There’s no way of knowing what happened to him. At that age, I did not notice neighbours, any more than in a corner of my childhood memory I registered the comings and goings of a shadow no different from that of any other man. The figure I see now could be the shadow from my childhood trying to resurface. How can I know? A lot of blood has flowed under the bridge since then, an ocean of bitterness through people’s hearts. The population of the neighbourhood has changed several times, it’s a wonder I can find myself. Change grew out of the barrel of a gun, the swift got out while they still could, the stragglers got it in the neck. There was no remission, no pity. The exodus from the land, which was the great success of the period, turned Algiers into a boundless sea of poverty, people come and go and are swallowed up by one of the many shantytowns whose numberless tentacles coil and uncoil from one horizon to the other. Wherever you go, you’re held within its grip. In a sickly city, a breath of rumour sets all tongues wagging. Stop one and ten more scuttle out of the shadows laying claim to some scrap of truth. People began to say my house was haunted. Children got goosebumps, old ladies shuddered, scurrying past as fast as their withered legs would carry them. The fear was such that the street became deserted. Shopkeepers packed up and moved on and their customers followed. Haunted, my eye! Everyone said there had been some funny business, some underhand ploy to divest the Frenchman of his property, but no one was prepared to be a witness to anything, certainly not to a crime so cunningly contrived. Where there was conspiracy, there were threats, and where there were threats, most people quietly assumed the government were involved. Personally, I used to believe it was haunted and I had nightmares about it. Doubt crept in. Ghosts are fun, they get a kick out of scaring people. But the ghost I saw was different; rather than flitting about going woooooo, it lay in wait, watching intently, which meant the shadow was something real, something flesh and blood with a head full of ideas that were reactionary if not dangerous. Which broadens the scope of possibilities. Is he an assassin lying in wait, some killer in a turban; is he a cornered, desperate fugitive, or a suicide-bomber determined to set the neighbourhood ablaze? In my more paranoid moments, that is how I imagined him. In cheerier moments, I gave my imagination free rein, I pictured him as a lover racked by remorse, a Quasimodo dying on a dusty bed, a mystic fascinated by his own navel, a kind-hearted Elephant Man, a cantankerous old grouch abandoned by his family, a wild-haired scientist involved in some astounding research. Does he ever leave that window? Never when I am at home. How does he occupy his time when I’m out? I could not help but wonder. For the most part, I simply glanced in his direction and casually turned away.

I dubbed him Bluebeard. A memory from the past, from a childhood spent reading, but also a stupid, cruel reference to the present in which les barbus — the bearded men — oppress this country and its banlieues beyond the seas, beyond religion, leaving nature but a straw through which to breathe.

I finally decided that my particular barbu is harmless, if a little mysterious. If he has a beard, it’s probably just because he doesn’t shave. I can’t believe that this ghost, this character out of Grimm’s fairytales, cultivates his facial hair as part of a fanatical ideology consumed with hatred. He probably loves his beard, and those who love, suffer. On the other hand, the real Bluebeard cut women’s throats, a fact that briefly gives me pause for thought. But there’s nothing to say that my Bluebeard even has a beard, that’s just how I picture him, what I named him, because these days the beard is the symbol of the evil that lurks all around, gnaws away at us, the evil that kills. In any case, whether or not he has a beard, Bluebeard is a part of my life. I share my solitude with him, as he perhaps shares his with me. There is no escape, we are caught in the same net, we breathe the same polluted air, separated only by a narrow street and two sets of shutters, mine and his, both crumbling with age. It’s not as though I could go over there, knock on the door and ask him to move out. What if he turned out to be a ghost?

This house has known happier times, when the whole family was in residence. Papa, Maman, my big brother Yacine and little Sofiane, who was growing like a little devil, not to mention the puppies in the courtyard and the kittens under our feet and — how could I forget? — a beautiful pair of short-lived lovebirds in an intricately carved cage that hung in our living room like a chandelier in a palace. Everywhere, there were lush, green plants, hanging from macramé potholders we made ourselves. Out in the garden, silent and invisible, a tortoise lived out its life at its own pace, nibbling everything in its path. Sometimes, we would accidentally step on it but nothing happened, these tender creatures are so well armoured they’ve never needed to learn to scream. And there was me, Lamia, a pretty, bubbly daughter of the house, born midway between the two boys. Maman’s women friends came and went as they pleased, they stayed, they talked, they helped themselves to endless cups of sugar, floor, couscous and so forth. One day, I’ll demand every cupful back and bankrupt them. I should think about them more often. Thanks to them, we knew every secret, no one was better at nosing out a dead body, we would have been lost without their skills. Our afternoons were enlivened as we listened to the sins of our neighbours. The worst thing that could happen was for us to fall asleep after lunch, so we did everything we possibly could to stay awake. It was not that I felt we were listening to some terrible tragedy, but I sensed that, being girls, we needed to find out what life held in store for us in the future. Since the house was as riddled with holes as Swiss cheese, every local breeze arranged to meet there. On every corner there was some girl or boy asking after one of my brothers. There was no reason to panic, but all this commotion was contagious. Doors slammed and the crash-bang-wallop scampered along the walls to join in the collective hysteria. Music blared at ear-splitting volume, yéyé and 1960s pop were all the rage: Johnny Hallyday, Eddy Mitchell, Les Chats Sauvages, Les Algers, these were our idols. We were young, we lacked gravitas. The truth is, we made more noise than an army barracks on R & R. During the War of Independence, Papa had fought with the maquis and so earned the coveted title of veteran moudjahid entitling him to a pension, which, after long years of repeated applications, finally arrived like manna from heaven. Nationalism is a terrible thing. Cholera is easier to survive. But Papa had the good grace to keep his sickness to himself and never imposed his ailments on us. ‘A country liberated by its own people, what could be more normal than that!’ he’d mutter every night, listening as the TV recounted the litany of the dead and the maimed as a miracle. His pension was not enough to provide food for the lovebirds, so he went to work in a state factory that made — what was it? — I can’t remember. Papa was constantly bending our ears, complaining about all the things that were wrong with the factory which, we were convinced, manufactured rusty widgets or churned out scraps and memos for the Head of State, known as the country’s foreman. The constant harping about ‘dead wood’, which peppered his laments, sounded to my young ears like ‘redwood’ and I imagined some miraculous tree had sprouted in the middle of the factory, something which conferred a mysterious significance on his pronouncement, though I never dared to ask the question. But at home things were fine. The comings and goings, the shouting and screaming, the clattering footsteps, the whispered secrets, the squabbles, the fights, all made for stormy days and leisurely evenings. There is nothing better than the calm that comes after war. The kittens purred in utter bliss. They had a way of curling up into a ball that commanded respect, they looked as though they would be ready even if the sky should fall. We were as hypnotised as they were comatose, and before long our snores and their purrs began to resonate and the house retreated into a cocoon of cotton wool. My happiness would have been complete and I would have thanked God unreservedly if only I had had a little sister. ‘You should thank Him anyway,’ Louiza would say, ‘having sisters is worse than having spots.’ Louiza, my best friend from school, was plagued with freckles and devastated that she did not have a little brother to look after. With her permanently stunned expression and her big buck teeth, she might have looked like she was crazy but she was sweet as could be and I thought she was cute. She had freckles like raisins and a shock of red hair; she looked good enough to eat. So we nicknamed her Carrot Cake. We’d cup our hands and yell, ‘Come here and give us a bite!’ This warhead detonated in three stages: first she would pull a face, then force a laugh, then — bam — she’d burst into tears. We would cover her in kisses to staunch the flow, petrified in case the cavalry showed up. Her mother was more terrifying than the whole Mexican army. I was often teased myself, given that I was a collection of… well, we don’t need to talk about that, it’s ancient history. ‘I wish I had a little brother,’ Louiza would wail. ‘I wish I had a little sister,’ I’d sigh. Hand in hand, we would walk to school and hand in hand we returned home. I think I remember us swearing on our mothers’ lives that nothing would ever part us. We couldn’t have been closer if we’d been monozygotic and all alone in the world. Her whole family was female with the exception of her father, a former member of the maquis and an honest-to-God invalid besides who, never knowing which way to turn, kept himself to himself. Apart from stroking his moustache, he had no other distinguishing tics. It was his way of dreaming about his beloved douar, because though you can take a farmer from the land, he will forever be a ragbag of preoccupations: digging, ploughing, hailstorms, cattle rustlers, foxes, tax collectors. His true home was the Moorish café down the hill where the rootless men of the district gathered, that was where his daughters went to tell him it was time for bed. Being a believer of the old school, of the time before the upheavals when Muslims devoted themselves to tilling the land, he felt that being part of an increasingly secular family living in the city was a terrible waste aside from being the anteroom to hell.

People assume that little girls spend their whole time talking about boyfriends when in fact they also dream of the brother they long for or the brother they would turn into a toad without a second thought. That was true of us. We had boyfriends and we did talk about them, but only to say they were dumb and boring. Little girls also think about the sister they desperately miss or the one they would happily see burn in hell, but rarely talk about them. This too was true of us: we avoided the subject since Louiza was determined that none of the little witches should be spared and I was furious at the idea she would consign her adorable little sister to the flames.

At sixteen, the beautiful Louiza was married off to a pauper from some distant, utterly benighted suburb. He gave her a string of daughters and not a single son. In genetics, it’s either one thing or the other. Poor darling Louiza always got the opposite of what she wished for. She was the youngest of the family and no one listened to her. The wedding was a leper’s funeral. Beneath the tattered rags of an inoffensive city tramp, her husband turned out to be a dangerous fanatic hostile to joy and to fantasy. His lips flecked with spittle, he harangued us with verses ripped from the Qur’an and baleful threats from the terrorists’ handbook. Since the situation called for spinelessness, the other men puffed out their chests and began spouting suras like suicide bombers. Ever since, I’ve been traumatised, I keep asking myself: does Islam produce true believers, craven cowards or just terrorists? There is no easy answer since all three are talented actors. And besides, it turns out that Islam these days is both a performance and a powerful weapon in the hands of grave-robbers. The girls suppressed their rebellious ways, gave up the fight and quietly stared at each other all night, huddled behind their grandmother’s skirts. It would have been good to cry, but the philistines had all but forbidden us from breathing. In the distance, as night enfolded the city like a shroud, we could hear bitter rumblings and shameful silences. I never saw my beloved Louiza again. What mortuary does she live in now? What little news I have of her seems to come from beyond the grave.

Time flew by and I found myself alone. As I stumbled on, I stockpiled sorrows: university, the dreariness of college work, the pettiness of fellow students, the endless betrayals and setbacks, the scrabble to find a job — any job — the self-seeking recommendations and those that led nowhere. All this takes time, takes years, and leaves its scars. Then, finally, a stroke of luck, a smile sent from heaven: I happened to be at the Parnet clinic when the consultant paediatrician tossed his white coat at the feet of the hospital administrator, a cousin of the Minister for Health and a nephew of the Pasha. He was exultant, brandishing a visa offering him refugee status in Canada; from seven thousand miles away Lady Luck had smiled on him. His luck was also mine. That same day, I donned my white coat. The hospital administrator thought it best to prove he was a man and act quickly before the rumour mill started. ‘Go to hell, you little queer,’ he spat, grabbing his crotch. ‘The next person I come across gets your job!’ I was there, I heard him. For better or worse, I signed up. The salary didn’t exactly break the bank, but it pays enough to eat and I’ve learned to make the best of leftovers, potluck stews and ratatouille. That day I learned all there was to know about the Arab-Islamic economy: at work just like at home, the men chat and the women toil and there’s no rest on Sunday for anyone. My married colleagues, mothers with children, daughters-in-law with mothers-in-law, work a forty-eight-hour day, with twelve hours in arrears that count double as soon as the grandchildren arrive, so I’ve got nothing to complain about, my time is my own. Allah’s sun shines on some and not on others. How to deflect its orbit is a prickly question, one I no longer think about.

Time and again death visited this house and with it came the cortèges, the mourners, the funeral vigils, the steady string of solicitors, offers on the house, tongue-tied acquaintances, marriage proposals from men clutching a measuring tape in one hand, and, always in full view, the imam in his slippers pontificating. On the fortieth day of my last period of mourning, I drew a line under things and I shut the windows and the doors. Emptiness closed over me like a tombstone over the dead, but it was my emptiness and I could fill it as I pleased. On the blessed day, I accorded myself the minor privilege of dying as I chose. Better to be a prisoner who is free inside her head, I thought, than a jailer who is a prisoner of his keys and besides, it is good and necessary that there should be a wall between freedom and imprisonment. In doing so, I joined the most reviled mob in the Islamic world, the company of free, independent women. In such circumstances, it is best to grow old quickly, hence my premature wrinkles. For a woman living beneath the green flag of Algeria, growing old brings not devastation, but salvation.

In a few short months I had faced a lifetime of mourning. Death dogged my family, determined to wipe out everyone. It ignored me, though I pleaded on bended knee. I am the last of the Mohicans, I wonder who will wear mourning weeds for me. Papa was the first to go, he died of heart failure; three months later, my mother died of a broken heart and not long afterwards my brother Yacine died at the wheel of his car — the one great love of his life — a Renault 5, periwinkle blue fitted with a radio and a steering lock, a bargain imported from Marseilles by ‘Scrap Iron Ali’, the local racketeer. Paid for out of family money, as we reminded him every Sunday when, pristine as a bar of soap, he prepared to take French leave. He looked like a ladykiller from the 1930s, ready to fall for the first femme fatale. We pretended to be watching over the crockpot while he hugged the walls, knowing that he had to find himself a wife. It was high time, he was almost thirty, he was beginning to stoop, to cough at the slightest gust of wind, to sit in his slippers and snore. He had got a job in the administration, he was inured to it now. We lured the prettiest flowers in the neighbourhood to our house, we scoured the city for miles around like guardians of a harem. We looked for true virgins, no counterfeits. The matchmakers quickly got involved and poor Maman suddenly found herself busy going to cemeteries and funeral vigils — the key places where marriages are arranged — and visiting the shrines of marabouts where unthinkable things are done and undone. I was left to search the usual haunts: secondary schools, dressmakers’ shops, weddings, hammams, bus stops. I brought home heaps of girls, beautiful and intelligent girls, fervent traditionalists and borderline crackpots, blondes, brunettes, eccentrics and teenagers, every one of them free, but every time the idiot turned up his nose, turned his back on the parade, he was determined to comb the streets like a big boy and find his own Mata Hari. The poor bastard thought he could outwit the wily matchmakers. He was driving his little car slowly past the government buildings towards the Club des Pins, when a sports car ploughed into him, we were told, it was more an insinuation than an explanation. Fed up seeing him spend half his life waxing the car and the other half watching it like a hawk in case a bird shat on the paintwork, we used to mock him: ‘Are you planning to marry that old wreck of yours?’ He took it badly. It had been our way of warning him, since there was something animal about his passion for his car, about his need to show off. Our mourning was tinged with bitter guilt, as our jokes and jibes came back to haunt us. I’ve never been able to shake off the thought that we brought him bad luck. To refer to his car as a ‘wreck’ was like sounding a death knell. Forgive me, Yacine, forgive me, my brother. Lastly there was Sofiane. With his first cigarette, he got it into his head that, come weal or woe, he would leave the country and get as far away as possible. ‘Better to die elsewhere than to live here!’ he would scream whenever I tried to reason with him. ‘If you can’t live at home, what’s the point of dying next door?’ I would shout back. This was my argument, the only one I could think of. What I was trying to say is that dying is not difficult; the trick is learning how to live, the locale is of secondary importance. But he could think of nothing else, could focus on nothing but finding an escape route, getting his papers, studying the stratagems of those who had made the great leap, poring over their glorious failures. He barely spoke, barely ate and came home only to brood over his rage. Then, one morning at dawn — bam! — he left. He headed west, taking the most dangerous route: to Oran and via the border to Morocco, Spain and from there to France, to England, to anywhere, that was his plan. I only found out later that day, after I had trawled the neighbourhood and finally flushed out one of his friends — another candidate for suicide — at a secret, mystical meeting. There was a crowd of them, a veritable congregation, drunk on their own tears, dreaming aloud, telling each other how the great wide world was waiting for them with flowers, and how fleeing this country would deal a fatal blow to the reign of the dictator. Long story short, they were all touched by the same fever. They gathered round me like a big sister ennobled by great sorrow and informed me that Sofiane had gone the way of the harragas — the ‘path-burners’. I was familiar with the expression, this was how everyone in the country referred to those who burned their bridges, who fled the country on makeshift rafts and destroyed their papers when caught. But this was the first time I had heard the word from the lips of a true zealot, and it sent a chill down my spine. He said it nonchalantly; to him, ‘burning a path’ was something only they knew how to do. I was lumbered with ‘honour’ and they with the responsibility of covering Sofiane’s still-warm tracks. What can you say about such morons? I stared at them the way you might at a lost prophet and shook their dust from my sandals. I would happily have denounced them to the police but for the fact that the police — who constantly interrogated them, frisked them, manipulated them, spat in their faces — were at the root of their delirium. On the road the harragas take there is no turning back, every fall leads to another, one harder and more painful, until the final, fatal plunge. We’ve all witnessed it: satellite TV beams back the pictures of corpses lying broken on the rocks, or tossed by the waves, frozen or suffocated in the cargo hold of a boat, a plane, in the back of a refrigerated van. As though we did not already have enough, the harragas have invented new ways of dying. Even those who succeeded in making the crossing lost their souls in the terrible kingdom of the undocumented immigrant. What kind of life is it, to be forever condemned to a clandestine existence?

And what kind of life is it that I am leading, entombed here in my ancient house?

I spent a whole month going round in circles, I shed every tear in my body. I scarcely looked up: Maman, my little brother is lost; Papa, my little brother is lost… I was racked with guilt at the thought of having let them down. I slept in Sofiane’s room so I would feel better.

Then one night he phoned. From Oran. From that godforsaken hole where nothing — not the language, nor the religion, not even the taste of the bread — is the same as it is in Algiers.

‘Where in Oran?’

‘At a friend’s place.’

‘Who are you trying to kid? Your friends are here, in their own homes or in conclave electing a new pope.’

‘Don’t worry about it.’

‘This has gone far enough, come home.’

‘Later.’

‘When?’

‘I dunno.’

‘Give me your address so I can send you some money.’

‘I ain’t got no address.’

‘This friend of yours, is he homeless?’

‘…’

‘Hello? Hello? Helloooo?’

The little shit had already picked up an Oran accent, he said yeah for yes, he even clicked his tongue. Otherwise he was just the same: impulsive, mule-headed, thick as two short planks… and sweet as an angel when it suited him. He never phoned again. Was it something I said? Maybe, but it doesn’t matter; they’re all the same: stupid, easily offended, quick to pick a fight. Even now the question haunts me. It’s hard to be the sister of a man who’s still a boy. How many men realise that?

Suddenly, the house seemed terrifying. The emptiness swelled, the silence became oppressive. I had no answers, I had no more questions. Nothing mattered any more, the daily tedium could come and sweep everything away. Dying did not seem like an agonising inevitability but a consummation devoutly to be wished. I won’t deny, there were times when I contemplated suicide. I even made my decision; all that remained was to work out when and how. I couldn’t make up my mind; premeditation made it difficult to think straight. After a while, I bounced back. That’s what I’m like, I lose hope and I bounce back.

And then Chérifa showed up. ‘Invaded’ might be a better word. What on earth am I going to do with her? She gets on my nerves, I can’t be dealing with her vanishing acts. Or her tantrums. Or her mess. Or her being here. And I can’t abide that high-pitched little-girl voice of hers. I need peace and quiet, I need things in my life to be straightforward. At any moment, I need to be able to tell myself: this is my freedom, that is my will.

Just how much, dear Lord, do our lives truly belong to us?

The first disappearing act came soon enough. It came the morning after her arrival. We were finishing our breakfast. To apologise for my torture session the night before, I brought out Maman’s best tablemats and the secret stash of Turkish delight I’d been hoarding since Eid al-Fitr. We were in slippers and dressing gowns, our eyes still thick with sleep. It was nice enough, pleasant, domestic, I still feel moved at the memory. She popped a sugar cube into her mouth and went upstairs to get dressed. What she said, what I said, I don’t remember. It was short-lived. And I was spiteful. To be completely frank, I gave the little madam her marching orders. I regretted it straightaway.

‘I’m just going out for a walk, Tata Lamia,’ she announced from the lofty height of her elephantine heels.

‘Go wherever you like, go with my blessing, but I don’t want to clap eyes on you again.’

‘Could you give me some money?’

‘You’ve got some nerve! You’ve had a good night’s sleep, you’ve had food, you’ve had a laugh… look, here’s 100 dinars… no need to thank me.’

‘A hundred dinars? Is that it? What am I supposed to do with that?’

‘It’s enough to phone your parents… Are you listening to me? What was I saying again? Look, I don’t know the first thing about you, I have my own life, and just because my idiot brother gave you my address doesn’t mean I have to take you in. All right, here’s another hundred… which, I’ll have you know, leaves me without a santeem. Salaries are paid once a month, not that you’d know…’

‘…’

While I was rambling on like a half-wit, she pocketed the money, grabbed her bundle, popped a piece of Turkish delight in her mouth, shrugged her shoulders and stormed out. If I was waiting for a goodbye or a thank you, I’d be waiting still.

Good riddance!

The return to the void was brutal. I hadn’t been expecting it, I’d assumed I would calmly go back to my solitary bliss. It was a wrenching pain, that emptiness that comes with separation. Then a sense of loss takes hold, saps the will. I had suffered it before, now here it was again. Shit! That crazy girl is no concern of mine. Only yesterday, I treated her like an extraterrestrial who had brazenly materialised in my garden and made itself at home. I wondered whether her swollen belly had something to do with Mars or Jupiter. The fact that she comes from Oran, a one-horse town in Algeria, and that my brother sent her doesn’t change a thing. What little I know about her — homeless, destitute and pregnant by person or persons unknown — is hardly likely to endear her to me. If everyone minded their own business, we’d all be better off. Now, suddenly all is silence and sorrow. Bluebeard’s shadow is still standing guard. Does the man never sleep? I don’t mind him being mysterious, but not all the time. A hieratic statue, he is watching me from above. Then, suddenly, the shadow turned and vanished. What the…? Are my eyes playing tricks? Did Bluebeard just turn his back on me contemptuously? Damn it, what the devil has any of this got to do with him?

At the Hôpital Parnet, I glared at my male co-workers as though each one harboured murderous thoughts. I looked again. But, no, they bore the usual scars, nothing more. God, they’re vile, and they dress like a symposium of scarecrows. I don’t like the way they puff out their chests, the way they cut a swathe through the air before them. I’d hear their delusional prating: ‘Hum, hum, we’re the friends of the Sultan, get out of our way.’ They come and they go with the same couldn’t-give-a-shit attitude that has not only destroyed this country but, by the miracle of globalisation, fobbed off any responsibility on others. They talk in loud, bellowing voices, leaving the rest of the populace half-deaf. Whether singing or whistling, moaning or snivelling, whether bickering, backslapping or brown-nosing, they do it with the same gusto; there’s never anything new or different. Their lives are pitted with a thousand and one crimes, routine mistakes, petty slip-ups, but they don’t care. I can’t help thinking that they smile too much. Can there be a reason — any reason — to rejoice in failure? Can there be any excuse — however slim — to justify why they strut about like peacocks when their work is only half done and that badly? I wonder what true crimes they have committed to have such an air of inane innocence.

Shame is a funny thing. The world seems to whirl endlessly, it makes me dizzy. I’m ashamed that other people are not as ashamed of their flaws as I am of mine. On their supercilious faces their faults stick out so much you could forget they had a nose. Maybe I should see a shrink and talk to him about it.

I can tell it’s going to be a long day. I’ll visit the children’s ward, kids understand comedy, to them it’s not a synonym for hypocrisy.

My head is spinning, I’m sweating; worse still I have the terrible feeling of something wriggling in my belly. Could I be pregnant? By what? By whom? The Holy Spirit? An extraterrestrial? A film noir is running through my head, I feel like I’m about to kill somebody.

I’m tense and overwrought.

Where can the little vixen have got to? She hasn’t the first idea what she’s letting herself in for. Algiers will sweep her up in its madness. This crumbling city is pitiless, constantly reviling and condemning girls, and every day the outcry grows a little louder. The first passing taxi will whisk her away to some seedy den of iniquity. The way the old rattletraps prowl the streets makes you sick. ‘Get in or I’ll run you over!’ She’s a child, a stranger, a tourist, she has no idea, she’s too trusting. What does a girl from Oran know about the pitfalls of Algiers? In Oran, they take their misery and turn it into mournful melodies they call Raï, here in Algiers we play double or quits. That way Chérifa struts about, that hair of hers, that smile like a precocious nymph, that perfume, that ridiculous scarf — are these the signs of a good Muslim? Damn it, you don’t go around playing the starlet during a religious epidemic!

I spent the day pretending to work, tormenting myself, fearing the worst — which is usually the most likely. I just hope I didn’t accidentally poison some child on my ward, they’re so distracted they’ll swallow anything you give them. I was beside myself, in my mind I was running through the streets of Algiers, trying to imagine where I would go if I was wearing the sort of grotesque Chérifa favours. It was useless thinking about the places that marked my childhood, they’re all ancient history. What attractions are there left? The area around La Grande Poste, with its feverish crowds and its cosy tearooms, is a trap for any girl. Then there’s Maqam Echahid — the Martyrs’ Memorial — with its fancy boutiques and its hanging gardens where gilded youth parade, trailing the wannabes and the work-shy from the suburbs in their wake. In such situations it’s the followers rather than the leaders who are the real problem. There’s the famous Club des Pins — formerly the hacienda of Lucien Borgeaud, the greatest colonist of all time — now a state residence where the overlords of the regime live corralled in close quarters guarded by four watchtowers. The stories you hear about the place would have police around the world on alert, but to giddy little girls, it’s like the Big Brother house, they flock there in droves. Disaster dogs their every step but all they can think of are the dances, the parties, the surprises. The grand hotels are run by pros, placed there by the Organisation, but with her supercilious air, Chérifa could pass for a first-class vestal virgin. The old men scouting for prey from their comfortable armchairs would pay a lot of money just to nibble her earlobe. The hypnotic way they smile at cute girls and pretty boys would put a rattlesnake to sleep. A childlike Lolita sets the old pigs grunting. I despise them.

‘Hey, Lamia! Hey, wait up!’

I recognise that voice. It’s Mourad, a colleague from the hospital, the crackpot on our wing. Working with cancer patients drove him round the bend. He’s probably the only man I know who doesn’t dream of emigrating. Not that he lacks the capability or the courage, he just hasn’t got the energy any more. I’m very fond of Mourad. There was a time when he would try to chat me up, but he’s come to terms with it now. His liver is shot, he’s overweight, he drinks like a fish — a real Romeo. But he’s a sensitive soul, he’s philosophical when he’s in his cups and he wouldn’t kill a fly. I’m guessing no woman has ever looked twice at the poor man and now his liver is about to explode. At first, I thought he drank to reinforce his air of blithe indifference. Time was, he constantly undermined the young interns and laughed at the brown-noses. But he has evolved, these days he subverts authority by encouraging the go-getting doctors to work like dogs. On the day the director hired me on a whim and set me to work, Mourad sidled up and, having looked me up and down and found my belly button, he said: ‘Listen, kid, you’re cute and all, but I’ll save that for later, right now I just want to let you know what you’re letting yourself in for. This place is like the maquis, there are mines and booby traps everywhere. If you need any advice, come find me, but be discreet. In the meantime, think about this: less diligence makes for fewer problems.’

And he sauntered off, his hands in his pockets. A comedian. Men are contemptible, they see a woman wanting to do things properly as a problem.

That day, I opened up to him, about Chérifa, her whims, her disappearing acts, my helplessness, my shame. He immediately understood. There are facts, which can be viewed as a logical progression, but there are also feelings and what lies, repressed, in the deepest depths of the human heart. To put it bluntly, I feared the worst. He spent a long moment biting his lip and then finally he said:

‘You’re obviously fond of the girl! Why on earth did you throw her out? Oh well, I suppose women are never straightforward, or if they are something is up. You’re not going to find her by searching around the Martyrs’ Memorial or the palaces or the Club des Pins, that’s where the high-class girls hang out, it requires special dispensation from the Organisation. I’m not sure about La Grande Poste, the girls there work for crooks and gangsters and the takings are pretty slim. But this girl is pregnant, and that’s bound to influence how she thinks. A fish swims towards the sea, not towards the gutter. You’d be better off checking the bus stations or the women’s halls of residence at the university. If she headed for a station, then she’s planning to move to another city, so you might as well give up hope because rural Algeria is the arse-end of the universe. If she went to the university, then obviously she’s looking for help, she’s assuming that in situations like hers women support each other… well, you know what I mean, she’ll be looking for a place to stay and a little female sympathy.’

‘I can easily do the bus stations, there aren’t many, but I don’t see how I can check the halls of residence. How many are there? I can hardly knock on the door of every room and say: is Chérifa here?’

‘You don’t need to, you just get a message to one girl and you wait. Talk to any of the female students and you’ll have your answer within twenty-four hours. At university, girls are cut off from the outside world, they’re a closed network. Surely you remember what it was like when you were at college — though in our day, the segregation was more of a revolutionary nature, you could hold your meeting, propose your motions. These days, that’s all over, everyone is insane and no one messes with religion. Try not to terrify the poor things, they all have something to hide, some idea, some dream, some secret crush, some little foible, sometimes even a plan to commit suicide…’

‘The easiest thing would be to wait. I’m sure she’ll come back, she’s got nowhere to go.’

‘That’s up to you, but you know as well as I do where hope leads around here.’

These words struck a chord. I don’t know a single Algerian who doesn’t blithely talk about hope a hundred times a day. Not a single one. I can’t help but wonder what the word means.

I stopped by Hussein-Dey station before I went home. Have to start somewhere, I thought, and at least it’s on the way. The place was teeming. The world and his wife were there. The suburban commuters, the season-ticket holders who travel in battalions, silent, grey-black, half-dead, rucksacks slung over their shoulders, staring at the ground. Every morning they are swallowed up by crumbling factories from the socialist era and every evening they are spewed out after eight hours of being pointlessly ground down. They look like they’ve wandered out of a gulag and are just waiting for the siren to call them back.

The whole thing is preposterous, the economic war is taking place elsewhere; it is waged by computers and satellites in utter silence. These people would be better off going home and comforting their families, it’s impossible to escape both poverty and the IMF. A mother would be hard pressed to spot her child in a crowd like this. And, even in high heels, Chérifa is knee high to a grasshopper; how would I spot her? While I was trying to work out how long it would take to search the premises, the train arrived, surging out of the mists of time. A thunderous rumble shook the ground and half the sky was blotted out with smoke. How had such a crowd managed to pile on to the train so quickly, cramming into carriages like sardines and perching on the running boards? Damned if I know. This whole scene, the calmness, the patience, the hands stuffed in pockets, the rucksacks on the ground, it was pure cinema. The poor — all paid-up members of the school of hard knocks — have an ability to pretend that beggars belief. They surged forward en masse and, in a split second, dozens of them manage to slip through a crack a gloved hand could barely squeeze into. In the time it took to catch my breath, I was standing on the platform alone, with the bitter feeling that I had missed the last train of the year. An old soldier in a peaked cap and with a wooden leg calmly walked over to me and said: ‘Don’t worry, madame, there’s another train at 6.37 pm, but you’ll have to elbow your way on, this is rush hour.’ He was the station master, I could take his word for it. Thank you. I rushed off. If Chérifa had gone to a station I would never see her again, she would move from one crowd to another.

What about university students? Girls at university were ferried between the halls of residence and lecture halls by bus. How many such buses weave through the streets of Algiers? I don’t know, in this ossified city things grow like mushrooms. They’re everywhere, those buses, each one full to bursting. What are they really ferrying around? I asked myself. Boys with beards and girls in chadors, the boys dare not talk, the girls dare not move and the drivers careen through the city as though obeying secret signals. There’s nothing very educational about it. In my young day, buses did not go unnoticed, or were clapped-out Russian wrecks, half-eaten with rust and smoky as a damp cigar. We would sing ‘Qassaman’, ‘The Internationale’, ‘Le Déserteur’, we would spit on the bourgeoisie and their lackeys, make drivers nearly crash by flashing them a glimpse of breast, or by pretending to take down their registration number so we could denounce them to the KGB. Times have changed.

The journey home was painful. I dragged my feet, my heart in my mouth. The neighbourhood seemed seedy and unpleasant and the house — my house — gave me a cold welcome. I needed that. And yet I loved this grey dusk, caught between sun and moon, between waning day and emerging night. Relief comes, hope is reborn, we dither on the doorstep, fumbling with keys, eager to cross the threshold. We are done with the world, we retreat to our refuge, we shed our coats. Somewhere deep within us, an internal clock or a guardian angel activates a switch and we settle down to dream like children. For the poor, this is the true meaning of happiness. We relax, we move to a gentler rhythm, we do housework and minor repairs, potter around brooding over our uncertainties, we take a bath if the water has been reconnected, make a call if the phone lines are working, settle in front of the TV if the power cut is over, laze around, read a book, do a little cooking, water the plants, sprinkle insecticide to keep ants at bay, do some knitting. Then there are the evenings when the only thing we can think to do is prop our elbows on our knees and bury our face in our hands. Life is blank, it is useless to fuss.

What was it Mourad said… a little female sympathy? How dare he say that to me! What am I, a bear, a rock, a machine? What does he really know about me? What does he really know about women? He’s a man, he knows nothing. He probably thinks there is such a thing as male sympathy. What a romantic.

Am I seeing things? There… hanging on a coat peg in the hall? It is! It’s a panther-pink pullover with flowers in blue fabric crudely sewn on the front. If it’s not mine — and I know it’s not — then it must belong to Chérifa. Snff… snff. The house smells of weapons-grade plutonium perfume. A quick tour reveals a G-string in the bath, a bead necklace on the cooker, a handkerchief under the phone, a powder compact next to the TV, a pencil in the vase, a pair of ballet pumps hanging from a nail in the corridor, a beanie hat dangling from the handle of a dresser. The girl strews her possessions in her wake, she’d have a job going undercover in a detective movie. Where can she be at this hour? If she doesn’t come back to collect her belongings, it means she’s lost. No, the little minx would do anything to reclaim her treasure, it’s all she has.

Later, under a sofa cushion, I found a little handbag, the kind of preposterous clutch bag a bride might carry, so tiny that just trying to get your keys inside could result in losing a finger. It reminded me of the story of a chimpanzee in a laboratory, putting his hand into a jar, grabbing a piece of fruit and discovering to his consternation that the narrow neck would not allow him to withdraw his fist. I’m not sure which is sadder, mocking the chimp or thinking that we’re smarter. I dared not open the clutch bag, but I opened it anyway; my house, my rules. Inventory: a pencil stub, a brush, a pin, a coin, another pin, a full-length photo of someone. Well, well, would you credit it…? A man. Thirty-five? He looks ordinary… or rather conventional, his every feature conforms to the new biology of exceptional Algerians: chubby-cheeked, pot-bellied, fat-arsed, he sports a hirsute adornment around his mouth which, depending on circumstances, is intended as a sign of moderate piety, an aid to seduction or a proof of intelligence, he is dressed like a mobster at a mafia cocktail party. It’s all so tacky, the minute these people have money in their pockets, they’re all over the place. There is a self-consciousness to the way he holds his head and a twitchy nervousness deep in his eyes. It’s an expression I know only too well, in every photo I look as though I’ve been startled by a one-eyed badger. He’s a little young to be her grandfather but too old to be a brother or a schoolfriend, although all families are dysfunctional. Obviously, the possibilities do not end there: an uncle, a cousin, a neighbour’s husband. Then again he could be a drug trafficker or a bar owner, professions that are all the rage in the new biometry. The Chérifas of this world are their preferred prey. Or he could be… as I racked my brain, I realised I knew this reprobate, I’d seen his ugly mug somewhere. A celebrity? Yes, that was it. What was he? A sportsman, a politician, a captain of industry, an artist with connections to the ministry? Whatever he was, he was some sort of bigwig.

What was the connection between the man in the photo and Chérifa’s swollen belly? It was a question I could not help but ask myself. And now I have.

It had been three days since I saw that old trout from the rue Marengo and now, bang on time — knock, knock — she shows up, all hot and flustered. And — unusually for her — she didn’t beat around the bush.

‘Oh, my dear, young people today, you simply can’t depend on them! They’re here one minute and gone the next! They’re only too happy to have us worrying and fretting over them, when all we want at our time of life is a little comfort, a little peace, but you might as well ask the town council for running water. How is it that I’ve never met this girl? The clothes she wears! What’s her name? Where’s her husband? What was she thinking, going out last night and coming home after midnight? Where did she go? And what was she doing, storming out again at dawn in such a terrible temper?’

‘Ah, Tante Zohra, what a coincidence! I was just going to pop round to see you. I hadn’t heard from you and I was starting to worry!’

I know how Tante Zohra’s mind works, I’ve heard it all before and I’ve learned the best thing to do is bombard her with information and bamboozle her.

‘Were you talking about Chérifa? Pretty little thing, don’t you think? She’s my cousin’s youngest, you know — the cousin who moved to Oran just after the War, back when the Americans were bombing the mountain villages because they thought we were hiding Nazis. Then, when they realised that we were only hiding ourselves, they came back and showered us with chocolate bars. The kids stuck to them like leeches, the Yanks adopted them as mascots and we never saw hide nor hair of them again. Up in Kabylia, we had nothing to eat but acorn flour, green olives and goat’s cheese. Oh, I nearly forgot, up in the mountains our favourite fruit was figs, we used to pick them off the trees. You can’t till the soil up in Kabylia, it’s all rocks. So, anyway, this cousin of mine is on his deathbed and, sensing that the end is near, he’s asked his youngest daughter to visit the family on his behalf. Our family is scattered to the four winds, Allah alone knows us by our lamentations. You know better than I how widely scattered the Kabyle people were, hounded from town to town when we weren’t hounded out of existence. Well, anyway, little Chérifa, she comes, she goes, and likely will for some time, because, like I said, there are cousins everywhere, furtive exiles weighed down by sorrow and homesickness. And being an insomniac, she keeps odd hours. But what’s to be done, Tante Zohra? C’est la vie!’

‘And how is Sofiane? Did he go to Oran, surely he must have gone to say his goodbyes to this cousin of yours?’

The way she just came out with it! She’s a cunning shrew, trying to trip me up.

‘No, no, my dear, you know Sofiane, he always did have his head in the clouds! Remember how whenever he passed your house he pretended not to see you?’

My little performance earned me a week of peace and happiness. The old bat didn’t believe a word of my rigmarole, but it hardly mattered since all she needs to do her scandalmongering is her tongue and a little spit.

That night, I didn’t sleep a wink. I scrubbed the house from top to bottom, I might even have cleaned it twice. While I was about it, I did the laundry, then I pottered around. I felt like I was in Kubrick’s The Shining just before all hell is unleashed. On my wanderings I discovered a makeshift corridor on the second floor running from the back of an old wardrobe to a sort of box-room — it was beyond me how I had never noticed it before. The door to the box-room creaked like it was a thousand years old. Slave quarters? A place to hide when things were tough? It was probably something constructed by the Turk, those people have a lot going on under their fezzes. Inside, I expected to find a skeleton or see a ghost surge forward and slip between my legs, but nothing. The room smelled of mildew. No gold doubloons, no pirate map, no clue what to do next. Some day I’ll leave a sheet of mysterious drawings here that will help my successor live, secure in the knowledge that his life will be rich and carefree. A pinch of gold dust, and the results would be better. This rickety old house evolved over time, there’s always something left to explore.

Then, suddenly, my knees gave out. I’d overexerted myself. I went back to the living room and lay down, I read a book. I went into the kitchen and made some herbal tea and sipped it as I watched the cockroaches gorging on scraps of food. It’s been a long time since I’ve waged war against them. The future belongs to cockroaches. In some old scientific magazine I read that the more you persecute them the stronger they get, so I leave them be in the hopes that indolence and overeating will kill them off. Then, sadly, I listened to the radio babble on about this and that, a phone-in for parish-pump problems from far-flung, probably fictional listeners convinced their nightly ramblings are advancing some great cause. Tonight’s topic: civic-mindedness and household refuse. To a man (and woman), they put the blame on everyone else, not one of them was prepared to take any responsibility. The pathetic fools. When you’re this deluded, better to keep your mouth shut and not spout such drivel! When you’ve made your bed, you have to lie in it.

Then I wept and wept and wept.

I can’t help but wonder what times they are I’m living through. Things fell apart so quickly. Was there ever a before? Did I ever really live? Did I ever have anything other than my beloved parents who died too soon, my idiot little brother who disappeared into himself or is in the process of doing so? And Yacine, my big brother, who died by the roadside having known no greater love than his rickety old banger. It is easy to be overwhelmed by such emptiness. What century is it out there? The din and the dust that reach me in brutal waves have nothing of interest to say to me. The world has taken a wrong turning, ominous Islam and garish consumerism are battling it out with mantras and slogans. Their conflicting cacophony makes my ears hurt. Here in Algeria, even time itself — humanity’s world heritage — is torn between rabid reactionism and a ghastly futurism; its energy, its drive, its clarity have all been sapped. To embrace such twisted logic is to embrace the void. To say one thing is also to believe the contrary, it is to plunge furiously, hobbled and blinkered, into the fray. Why the blindfold? I don’t know. Time to these mutants is what dark glasses are to the blind man, it speaks to their inability to see and their inability to do. Through their fault or Voltaire’s, my life has gradually shrunk to nothing, to less than nothing, to a series of fits and starts between waking and sleeping before it stops altogether just as the clock in the hall fell silent when its master died. Time, where I am concerned, is a hodgepodge, a thing of shreds and patches, it blends scraps of my — happy but unfinished — childhood, a little of what I read, a lot of what I watch on television, fragments of dreams, a goodly helping of what fury proclaims to the four winds and, on a day-by-day basis, dictates my course of action. I have fashioned a life for myself that does not depend on money or on incense, I have no truck with religion, with clutter or procrastination. Or perhaps this is simply the way things are when you retreat to a desert island, when you sit rusting in a traffic jam. You make do with what you have. To be perfectly honest, I’ve never understood where wishes come from nor how disappointments are made, all I know is that I don’t care a tinker’s curse for the rantings of the truth-mongers. Like Penelope, I am deaf to suitors, committed to my work. My loneliness is my shield.

In this life, you have to hold your own if you hope to emerge unscathed.

The house — my house — has left me no choice. There are mornings, those gloomy mornings that seem like a painful prolongation of the night, when I feel as though I am a prisoner, albeit a willing one since I have no place else to hide. The house is over two hundred years old, I keep a weather eye on it, but I know, I can sense, that one day it will crumble with me inside. The house dates back to the seventeenth century, to the Regency of Algiers. The rooms are poky, the windows Lilliputian, the doors low and the stairs, which are treacherous, were clearly made by carpenters who had one leg shorter than the other and very narrow minds. This perhaps explains — if explanation be needed — why everyone in my family grew up to have one calf muscle thicker than the other, a pronounced stoop, a waddle like a duck and very narrow minds. It has nothing to do with genetics; the house made us that way. Back then, the perpendicular was a mystery, since in this house lines never marry at right-angles, because they were never introduced by the mason’s trowel. It is a shock to the eyes. The nose, too, since a musty smell impregnates the walls. Sometimes I feel like an ant in a maze, sometimes like Alice in Wonderland.

The house was built by an officer of the Ottoman court — an Effendi — a certain Mustafa Al Malik, whose name and coat of arms can still be seen to the left of the entrance, carved into an ornate marble plaque worn away by the years. Which is why people in the neighbourhood refer to us as the House of Mustafa. It’s a little unfortunate, since the man had a terrible reputation for being a paedophile — though back in those days, such crimes were tolerated in polite society.

The house’s charm comes from the primitive mosaics, the nooks like the holes in Gruyère cheese into which are set old brasses, narrow corridors and the steep staircases which meander this way and that. Mystery pervades this house, around every corner is a ghost in a djellaba, a goateed genie rubbing his lamp, an overweight courtesan chained to a wizened old crone, a pot-bellied vizier plotting against the Caliph. Of course there is nothing really there, and yet you feel as though you might encounter anything.

I grew up shrouded in this atmosphere, so it is hardly surprising that it has distorted my sense of time. Things would be different if I had grown up in an overcrowded tower block in some blighted suburb, on a marshy plain buffeted by the fumes from factories. Here I have space to dream to my heart’s content, all I lack are the funds. My salary is more conducive to sleepless nights than idle days.

After the death of the Turk, the house embarked upon a new career. Whether by a twist of fate, or because it was built on the highest point of what would later be called the Rampe Valée — named after the Maréchal de France and Governor-General of Algeria whose contemporaries said he ruled with an iron fist in a velvet glove — but whatever the reason, the Turkish officer was succeeded by a French officer, a certain Colonel Louis-Joseph de la Buissière, who was a viscount besides. His name and coat of arms are carved on the right-hand side of the pediment on a garlanded marble plaque eaten away by time. Nothing is known about his military career. I assume he earned his rank by proving himself on the battlefield, unless it was his by virtue of his ancestry. The fall of Charles X in 1830 brought about his own fall since, being a legitimist and a romantic, the colonel refused to allow the tricolour to replace the white cockade on his regimental pennant. He resigned his commission before he could be dismissed by Republican arrivistes and melted into the crowd of nobodies in Algiers. He was also a respected naturalist whose name features in the prestigious gazettes that paper the attic. He criss-crossed the wilds of Algeria on foot, by caleche, under the blazing sun, pencil in hand, making notes and sketches of everything the desert could offer up to his insatiable curiosity. He filled several volumes with extraordinarily meticulous drawings. It’s funny how beautiful a bitter, stunted, sprig of goat’s-foot can become beneath the scientist’s pencil. But little minds have little respect so the gazettes ended up in the attic where they have fed generations of mice hungry for knowledge. The world is as it is, made up of scholars and simpletons; what the former create the latter destroy. Somewhat belatedly, in the grip of who knows what passion, the colonel embraced Islam and married one of its daughters, a certain Mériem, the youngest child of a respectable apothecary in the Kasbah and took the name Youssef, which is simply the Arabic spelling of Joseph, favoured son of Jacob and Rachel. It was generally accepted that the colonel was a devout believer and he is often cited whenever someone feels the need to demonstrate how Islam is superior to all other religions. It has to be said that when famous Christians convert, it’s a bonus, which is why there’s so much media hype about Western celebrities who suddenly go over to Islam. I don’t really understand why these people embrace Islam with the sort of bluster usually reserved for defecting to the enemy. There’s a lot of nah, nah, nah-nah, nah! in their neurons. Now, a Muslim who converted to Christianity wouldn’t admit to it under torture, he wouldn’t tell his confessor, he would continue showing up to the mosque, fervent and fearless as a Taliban. It doesn’t matter, let people believe whatever they want as long as they don’t use it as an excuse to go around bumping people off. As it says in the Book: ‘I have sent to you the Qur’an and Muhammad to close the prophetic cycle of revelations.’ Thus it is permitted to grow and to improve, which is precisely what the viscount serenely did. The good Youssef died in the odour of sanctity at the ripe old age of ninety-something, he passed away in bed surrounded by relatives and friends, but there were those in Paris who were puzzled by his curious end. Being so far from civilisation, they expected him to die a violent death, to kick the bucket in some unseemly fashion, or at the very least to expire from some fever obscure enough to be considered exotic. And perhaps in the end he did, though in those days people were more likely to die of old age, starvation, an excess of sun or a kick from a horse though I’ll admit one could also die of a malaria epidemic, a plague of locusts or a dagger between the shoulder blades. The colonel left an estate that was enough to tempt the most disinterested observer, since he had substantial properties in Barbary as in his native Sologne. There ensued a confabulation between solicitors and much coming and going between Algiers and Paris. With consummate skill, the shysters quickly scoured the law books to see what portion they could reserve for the rich and what pittance might be left to the poor and order was thereby restored. They evicted old Madame Mériem with only her memories while the French branch of the de la Buissière family succeeded in clinging to their inheritance.

The house was entrusted to a certain Daoud Ben Chekroun, a Jew from Bab Azoun who made a living brokering property deals between the retreating Turks and the advancing French and would end his life as rich as Croesus. At least that’s what it says on the daguerreotype we have which depicts him hunkered, leaning against a tumbledown hovel, one hand flicking a bull’s tail flyswatter, as hairy and dishevelled as an old gorilla. But I suppose it’s possible for a man to be rich and underhand. And we can’t rule out the possibility that he hoodwinked the photographer who in all good faith immortalised him in his poverty. The local elders of Rampe Valée, who convene their meetings in a café maure at the bottom of the valley, could think of no better names for the Turk’s citadel than the Frenchman’s palace, the Convert’s fortress, the Jew’s lair, the crow’s nest, the fox’s den. The names stuck and did us considerable harm. Applied to us, devout Muslims since birth, in a free, independent, overzealous country imbued with Arabo-Islamic contempt, ‘convert’ meant ‘kafir’, ‘Frenchman’ was synonymous with harki — the name given to the traitorous Algerians who fought with the French during the War of Independence — and what could the word ‘Jew’ mean but ‘thief’? The fact that we earned our living as indefatigable shopkeepers only served to fuel the rumours.

It is to Monsieur Louis-Joseph that we owe the magnificent fireplace in the parlour, the passageway that leads into the garden, the conversion of the hammam into a bathroom and of the baker’s oven into a modern kitchen. He cleverly solved the water problem by sinking a well in the garden and installing a labyrinthine network of pipes. Being warm-hearted and compassionate, he erected a public drinking fountain on the street which, in the short term, bankrupted the local trader who peddled this precious commodity and in the long term sparked a bitter war between those who voted to keep the fountain and the free water, and those who maintained the water was poisoned and brought forward as many snivelling witnesses as there were beggars in the medina. While he was about it, Monsieur Louis-Joseph installed a splendid grandfather clock in the hall whose golden pendulum was later substituted for a lead weight by some light-fingered person. Ever since, weighed down with lead, it has groaned as though being tortured. Having converted to become Youssef, he had his study-cum-oratory decorated with beautiful tiles bearing suras from the Qur’an calligraphed by great poets, he divided the ground-floor living room in two, placing a stunning mashrabiya down the middle to create one side for the men, the other for women. On the first floor, he had a gynaeceum — a harem — built, sealed on four sides, and fitted with all the modern conveniences so beloved of subjugated females: a coal-fired stove, a pitcher and a washbowl. He raised the walls surrounding the house and topped them with shards of glass to reinforce the prison atmosphere I find so painful now that there is fighting in the streets, now that I have reinforced the doors and windows and no longer go out. Finally, he installed a charming ablutions area where the faithful could perform wudu.

After Ben Chekroun had finished his labours, the house fell into the hands of an immigrant newly arrived from far-off Transylvania. We never quite knew what that meant, but we suspected that he was Romanian by day, Hungarian by night and a ferryman in times of trouble. It was as he took his last step down the steamship’s gangplank that the rogue and the stranger met by sheer chance. It is possible that, as has been attested, the deal was struck quickly and quietly in the best interests of all concerned. But that is simply legalistic jargon, a magical incantation; I am more inclined to believe that two deaf-mutes could not have made more noise in trying to make themselves heard. Ben Chekroun was, after all, a man of some importance and the newcomer was not just anyone. He is remembered as a character who might have stepped straight out of the silver screen. Perhaps it is possible to be born in the Carpathians and retain one’s humanity, but our character believed only in the supernatural. Vampires were his friends, he spoke of them as of some eternal truth. When he arrived, he bore the unpronounceable name Tartem-something-or-other; his first name, a real tongue-twister, was Crzhyk-I-forget-what. A simple greeting was a real mouthful. Back in the snow-capped mountains of Transylvania, he had served a Voivode — a warlord — descended from the race of Phanariotes about whom the literature of the region has nothing good to say. In short, he had learned from a master the gentle art of treachery. I suspect the negotiations were dramatic and long-drawn-out and attracted a vast crowd. A quick trip to the town hall and suddenly our friend Tartem-thingumabob declares himself ready to die for the country of Rousseau. Immediately, the insults hurled at him by first-generation immigrants ceased. Overnight, he became just another pied noir like everyone else. Back then, integration simply meant shucking your shoes and donning a beret. Once you’d done that, you could run around proclaiming that you had truly arrived. ‘Ze suis frantuzeasca?!’ he roared, as the Negroes on the docks waiting for corvettes might have yelled ‘Bwana, bwana!’ I assume people said such things, it was in the spirit of the times, part of the local colour of the period, like gas streetlamps. From that day forth, he styled himself François Carpatus. He cannily established a reputation as an excellent repairman, which brought customers to his ironmongery-cum-seed-merchants-cum-grocery-cum-haberdashery-cum-gunsmiths-cum-perfumery, a chaotic Aladdin’s cave of the kind that existed long ago. A terror of vampires, hitherto unknown in our part of the world, mysteriously spread through the medina and with it the remedies to be rid of it, from garlic braids to consecrated wooden stakes. It was François Carpatus who converted our barn into a shop, something that proved extremely profitable for those who came after him — all except for Doctor Montaldo, the last occupant of the house before we arrived. Nor was it particularly profitable for us, since by then the Algerian government had decided to adopt the Soviet model of feeding a starving populace, and we were not granted a licence to run a shop (Papa dreamed of owning a delicatessen stocked with everything that anyone could want).

Towards the end of his life, at the turn of the twentieth century, M. Carpatus suffered a mysterious ailment, a sort of delirium tremens brought on by an overdose of garlic. After a number of fruitless treatments, he emigrated to the United States and was never heard of again. American vampires clearly did not recognise him as one of their own.

It’s difficult to know exactly what happened next, the machinations and the manoeuvres, the whole business was shrouded in secrecy, but the house was bought by… a certain Daoud Ben Chekroun! By this time, Carpatus was no longer in his right mind and may rashly have sold his assets at a knock-down price; then again, pretending to be mad can be a great advantage in negotiations.

All sorts of ridiculous rumours have been circulated by wagging tongues about the aforementioned Mustafa, Louis-Joseph-Youssef, Ben Chekroun, Carpatus. A crooked Turk, a Frenchman who stumbled into the melting pot of Islam, a wandering Jew, an abominable snowman from the Carpathians, a Doctor Schweitzer who died on the job. What better tales to inspire a wandering storyteller? As children we lapped it up, we delighted in these far-fetched stories which also enhanced the prestige of our house. Genies, vampires, hidden treasures, apparitions by prophets, paranormal phenomena, Jewish fables, we had stories enough to while away many a pleasant evening. Other people might have envied us.

These tales still run through my head, they fuse, they feed on one another, speaking in their different tongues, garbed in their different costumes. I shift from one century to another, one foot here and my head on some distant continent. This explains why I seem to be from everywhere and nowhere, a stranger in this country and yet firmly entrenched within these walls. Nothing is more relative than the origin of things.

Fantasies have always been the means of killing time in Rampe Valée. People who live by old stories do not notice the passing of time, if I can put it like that.

Throughout the first half of the twentieth century — a dismal period — the house was occupied by various nonentities, pen-pushers, newcomers, large families. They all knew Daoud Ben Chekroun through his kids, Jacob, Zadok, Elijah and his great-nephews Ephraim and Mordecai (though they knew them by their Muslim names). Sceptics might suspect some posthumous ploy on the part of the old curmudgeon, but in fact the subterfuge was dictated by events. The turbulent period was marked by successive waves of Jewish immigrants to Algeria which, with a contemptuous click of their tongue, people back then brazenly referred to as the Yid Invasions. Such prejudices were fuelled by the Socialist anti-Jewish leagues, the Crémieux Decree, the Dreyfus Affair and Musette’s tales of the vagabond Cagayous. This is history, it is convoluted and calamitous. The newcomers, as I said, stayed just long enough to put together a case file and lodge it with the town hall. Meanwhile, an ideal habitat for the Town Mouse had just been devised: the tower block. As wealth trickled down to the colonies, tower blocks sprang up in Algiers and its suburbs. A vast procession of people cheerfully rushed to live there, transporting their belongings in vans, in handcarts, on pack mules, in convoys led by children singing at the tops of their voices as little old ladies trailed behind devoutly muttering suras. No sooner had they climbed the stairs and set up camp than pennants — and laundry — were hoisted on the balconies. The war between neighbours could now begin. As I set down the story of my misfortunes, that war is beginning to seem like a massacre, one covertly fuelled by those who work as government officials by day and estate agents by night. At the foot of the stairwells, the children finish off the wounded and race to see the imam for their reward. All these fleeting comings and goings did much damage to the house. The series of ‘renovations’ proved in time to be mutilations: veneer, formica, linoleum and leatherette gradually invaded the venerable old house driving out the terracotta floor-tiles, the stucco, the mosaics and the coppers, even the lingering smell of old leather. It was a terrible shame.

The neighbourhood changed radically. It became a warren. Buildings sprang up here and there, this way and that, aslant and askew, seedy hovels and lavish residences, a maze of narrow streets and blind alleys appeared out of nowhere and with them crooked flights of steps, rubbish tips, open sewers, filthy gutters, cowsheds, cheap restaurants, a synagogue, seven mosques, some sort of temple that vanished into the crowd, three cemeteries, cramped shops, brothels, overflow pipes, smithies and, later, two or three schools built of corrugated iron on the children’s playgrounds and a complaints office that was burned to the ground on the precise day and time it was inaugurated by the mayor and his entourage of estate agents. Out of the misery of the mid-twentieth century, a favela was born, one that may endure for centuries.

And yet, for the longest time I found it impossibly romantic to be living here in Rampe Valée, this tangled world where mystery and misery battled it out in a hell of noise and dust and mud. It was a particular phase in my life when I subscribed to a certain idea of utopia, I was discovering Gandhi and Mother Teresa, Rimbaud and his cohorts, I felt a kinship with Calcutta, with Mogadishu, with the ghettos of Pretoria and the favelas of Bahia. I was electrified by tragedies in far-flung places. These days I’ve had enough, now I dream only of palaces, of carriages, of high society, of passionate fleeting affairs.

Opposite our lavish mansion was a drab little house, a sandcastle crowned with a peaked cap built by a man about whom we never really knew anything. Some said he worked on the streetcars, others that he worked for the National Tobacco and Safety Match Corporation, that he was a fitter for the gas company, a sales rep for Orangina, a tax inspector, a cement packer with Lafarge, a teacher of some unknown subject, and various other things. Too much information is no information. In short, everyone had their own view of him. During the war he was rarely spotted. After Independence, he disappeared or at least he kept a low profile. Some insisted that he was a traitor who had secretly supported French rule as an active member of the OAS and that sinister meetings had taken place within these walls, while others maintained it had been used as a safe house by one of the leaders of the FLN during the Battle of Algiers. Gradually, people began to forget, they left behind those stories of good guys and bad guys. Life after Independence was no bed of roses, the good ship Algeria was being skippered by incompetents and crooks, everyone aboard was panicking. With time memories fade, but they emerge again and so the thread of history remains unbroken. We told each other strange stories, about how our enigmatic neighbour had abandoned the house across the road because it was hunted — I mean haunted. It was a sorry sight, shrouded in cobwebs, creepers and weeds and encased like an ancient mummy in desiccated bird droppings. Only a single pair of shuttered windows is still visible; the windows that face my house. A ghost was the only logical explanation for such a baleful building and so that was what we decided, and ever afterwards we called it the ghost’s house. This is the ghost I now call Bluebeard. The neighbours give him other names, each related to their deepest fears: Bouloulou, Barbapoux, Azrael, Frankenstein, Dracula, Fantômas.

Only the old-timers still remember the period the good Doctor Montaldo spent living here. They refer to it as the poor man’s house, as though God himself had sojourned here and they resent me for not carrying on the tradition. I pull a few strings for them at the hospital when I have a chance, it’s my way of applying a little arnica to their memory, of earning their respect. The good doctor spent too much of his time tending to the poor and needy, he gave little thought to repairs, to comfort, to cosiness. His legacy includes a basin and a tap in the room he once used as his surgery, a collection of surgical instruments and medical books — which proved very useful to me in my studies. It’s astonishing how, in the past half a century, medical knowledge has changed without really changing. There is some indefinable difference between the textbooks of then and now, but I’m too dim to spot it. I would say it was context, but where does that get us? Mourad talks about governance, in fact it’s all he talks about, but I don’t know what the word means. I’m not ashamed to admit that medicine is just a job to me, there is nothing profound or poetic about it. How the hell can anyone practise genuine, sincere, caring, holistic medicine when everything — people, ethics, cities, hospitals — is going to hell in a handcart? If proof were needed, the good doctor died penniless and exhausted while many of his patients ended up rich and powerful. Many went on to rule us with an iron hand and their successors — military and religious — still do so today.

The memory of Doctor Montaldo brings a human face to my relationship with time even though I disapprove of treating villains as effectively as honest folk. In choosing paediatrics, I opted for the innocent; with children there can be no qualms of conscience, nice or not you treat them just the same and — hup! — off to bed.

Finally my family arrived here on a September day in the year of our Lord 1962. It was a Sunday, the sun was at its height, we stepped into the house as into a temple, heads bowed, awe-stricken. At least that’s how I imagine the scene, since I came into the world somewhat later. We had come from Kabylia — from the mountains, the poverty, the cold — and we were little more than troglodytes, stubborn to the marrow and in permanent revolt against the Caïd and the capital. Now we found ourselves perched high above the capital, living in this magnificent mansion — vast, labyrinthine, mysterious, Olympian. And antiquated, with deep wrinkles and a look about it as though it had forgotten how to weather time. How Papa came to own this house I have no idea; he had his secrets and he took them to his grave. I was born ten years after my older brother Yacine on an October day in 1966. For seven long years, war had kept my parents apart, and it took them three more years to learn to rekindle the passion of lovebirds. Papa needed to forget the harsh realities of the maquis while Maman needed to remember what, over time, she had forgotten. We were the first native-born Algerians to own this extraordinary house. We felt as though, since the dawn of time, it had been waiting for us to arrive when in fact we hadn’t had the first idea where we were going. Uprooted from our mountain lair, we looked out at the sky as though it were boundless. The house had known so many people, had travelled far and wide. It taught us much about ourselves and about its former occupants. Scarcely credible stories of lives as hazy as mirages, true tales filled with spice and suspense. The lightest ones always float to the surface, but vast, unfathomed depths lie beneath, throbbing like a pulsar. How would we ever have known of the existence of vampires if the mysterious Carpatus had stayed in his native Transylvania? The djinns that populated our oldest memories suddenly seemed less powerful, but they were more sympathetic since they fed, not on hot blood sucked from the carotid artery of another human being, but upon the same misery we did. Would I have chosen to study medicine had I not stumbled upon Doctor Montaldo’s textbooks as a girl? Where else would we have come upon the stories, the sayings, the jokes from distant lands that enlivened our evenings? Not to mention the humdrum things we gradually discovered about life, the world, the customs and habits of different peoples, the way their stories intertwined with ours, and the interminable questions that clutter the mind from dawn till dusk — the why of one thing, the how of another — and all that this entails, the obsessive fears, the wounded silences, the constant migraines. An ancient house is a succession of stories laid down in strata, thick or thin, with evil sprites flitting along seams and veins. And this is how we experienced it — in exaltation, striving and doubt.

Everything about this place speaks of ancient mysteries.

This house, my house, has also taught me sorrow, fear and loneliness.

That is the story of my family. The house is the centre, time is Ariadne’s thread which must be uncoiled without being broken. I am the last to live here. When I am gone, it will crumble and the story will be over.

While brooding about all this and cursing Sofiane’s recklessness, I had a sort of epiphany: yesterday, today and doubtless tomorrow and on until the end of time, more people have fled this country than have arrived. There is no logic to it, it is not in the nature of the earth to bring forth a vacuum, no mother dreams of driving her children away and no man has the right to uproot another from his birthplace. It is a curse that has survived from century to century from Roman times when we were wild-eyed Circumcellions razing farms all the way to the present day when, since we cannot all burn our bridges and flee, we live with our bags permanently packed. This is a huge country, vast enough to accommodate whole peoples; if necessary we could have taken more from our neighbours who don’t need so much space, but no, at some point or other the curse returns and the vacuum brutally swells. Since the beginning of time we have always been harragas, those who burn a path, such is the course of our history.

Could it be that my time to leave was coming?

Algiers never ceases to amaze. Though it is a master of the low blow, it knows how to take care of its own and, when one of them is in the depths of despair, it never fails to throw her a lifeline. Today was one of those auspicious days for which Algiers is famous. The heatwave unexpectedly abated, the southerly wind shifted and now blew from the north, singing through the leaves. The air was filled with the whispers of the Mediterranean, its subtle scents, its piquant charms, its musky pleasures, its sun-dappled dreams. And the natives of Algiers, the worst city dwellers of the century, suddenly, eagerly, surrender to peace. They are amazed, they look at each other in shock, but still they forge ahead, curious to discover the extent of this illusion. One thing leads to another, there is a surge of optimism, a ripple of friendliness and before they know it people begin to think that this, too, is life. Suddenly, there is an outpouring of joy and a glorious torrent of heedless happiness sweeps across the city like a wadi bursting its banks. Hearts stirring, the women feel themselves come alive, they dare to raise their heads, to steal a glance through their hijabs. It is perfect bliss to see them taking part in life, to witness their strange and fascinating radiance dispel the darkness and the pain. God Himself is moved by such a sight, you can see it in the faces of the children which glow with good intentions. People dazzle so brightly it puts their drab Islamic rags to shame and they risk being publicly excommunicated. This just goes to prove that people should never give up their instinctive irreverence; some day the Islamists will dig their own graves and people will mock their shrivelled poisonous humps. On a day like today the Islamists feel ill at ease, swept up by the tide of joy, hemmed in on all sides, they scrabble away desperately, run to their caves there to dream of the glorious crimes against humanity yet to be committed. The exultant atmosphere of celebration begins to course through the streets, to scale the buildings, to flash from one person to the next. This is a critical moment: the devil himself, tail whipping high above his horns, might suddenly appear and ruin everything. When Algiers is beautiful, it happens of a sudden. She wrong-foots her citizens. It is love at first sight. We think of her as a wizened old crone who died in misery and is buried beneath the dust, but still sometimes she steps into the light, she dazzles, bewitches, steals, ravishes, enchants. After a little prenuptial perplexity, the city grows more civilised in leaps and bounds, great discoveries are anticipated. We would dearly love to make the most of our good fortune, to pause this moment, to bask in this hopefulness, build castles in the air; but we know Algiers all too well, she is a pantomime villain, playing the innocent is her favourite trick. Because we know this, whenever she strikes a pose we simply shrug. We simply dare to wish that a crowd of tourists would arrive in one of these magical moments so that we might surprise them, might strip away the preconceptions they have about our nonsensical stories, our dirty wars, our conspiracies against reason, our crimes against the heart, our medieval customs, our insufferable weather, our tortuous geography. Algiers is a trollop who gives of herself the better to take. Her going rate is five minutes of pleasure for one month of bitterness.

A straw mattress in the hand is worth a four-poster glimpsed on the silver screen. Maman had her little maxims, she served them up for dinner with endless split-pea soup: If you don’t eat it, you’ll be sorry in an hour. Now, I mutter them to myself to help me endure the grinding poverty, but I don’t make a business of it like the people who run around with their hands out, going from pillar to post, from bank to bank, shamelessly pleading and prattling. In Algeria, the poor — like the rich — are ruthless, they’re constantly running, tackling, dribbling, scheming, gradually gaining ground. Nowhere in the world have people better mastered the trick of distracting someone’s attention in order to steal their place in a queue. But what is wealth when people don’t know the value of things? And what is poverty when people scorn knowledge? Those who would overcome misery must first accept it! It’s time for the poor to decide whether they want to stay in a hole or climb out, and for the rich to learn how to behave. The way they behave drives me mad.

All this to say that Algiers is no picnic.

There I was, slowly trudging home, dog-tired but deliriously happy to be leaving the hospital, looking left and right, thinking to myself how wonderful life would be if everyone would stop lying. I made the usual detours to avoid the women who lurk on their doorsteps, waiting for news. For as long as I can remember they have stood there, waiting, in fruitless, uncertain expectation. They no longer remember why they’re waiting; time has forgotten them, only the ritual remains, carved into their daily routine. Each woman brings a personal touch to her vigil: tears, prayers, tremulous dirges, pitiful pleas to the men who stop and stare, and crude obscenities at those who pompously look straight ahead. I always pretend to be preoccupied with things I need to buy on the way home — milk, bread, water, vegetables, candles, salt, insecticide — so that I can give the impression of an absent-minded woman innocently remembering something she has forgotten. It’s best to pretend to be deaf to the calls from behind you. I’m tired of having to bring news of the outside world to these women who have cut themselves off. In fact, they are the crux of the problem, I can understand that they need to know their fate, but for pity’s sake, why can’t they just read the State newspapers!

I have to admit I can be a hateful bitch sometimes.

Parked outside my door I discovered a sinister contraption like a bus that had been spared the wrecking yard, a heap of twisted metal designed to ferry the dead. I’ve never seen anything like it in the neighbourhood. The streets here are so narrow that cars scrape their bodywork as they pass. A stone’s throw away, in the Kasbah, it’s like driving through the eye of a needle. The streets of the Kasbah are so narrow that when two pedestrians try to pass each other, one has to reverse or abandon her family. After a flicker of hesitation born of fear — hup! — I dashed inside my house and double-locked the door behind me. I just had time to see a figure in the bus waving and gesticulating.

Routine makes us deaf and blind. I never notice buses in the city, never hear their horns honking. There are so many and they make such an infernal racket, they’re like bulls in a corrida, hooves thundering across the sand, herding together at bus stops, muzzles steaming, bellowing like rutting bulls, jostling each other for space, only to belch black smoke then roar away in a cloud of dust. Want to know what a bullfight at a feria sounds like? There’s one outside my house right now, plain as the nose on my face, covered with a moth-eaten caparison, bellowing fit to burst. Then bang, bang, someone pounds on my door. Of course, I brush aside my fears, I open the door and who is standing there, looking more like Lolita than ever… Chérifa! And, as always, at her feet is her magic holdall.

My heart soared heavenwards.

And my eyes rolled heavenwards. Behind the shutters, Bluebeard’s shadow shifted this way and that like a hunchback dancing a jig. I remembered an image from Perrault’s fairytale, a devoted sister watching from the battlements, hoping for deliverance. Oh, Bluebeard, Sister Anne was right, Chérifa has come home to us!

Behind her comes the bus driver, teeth clenched into a smile like a boy scout who’s done the good deed of the century. Did I invite this guy?

The rules of hospitality are what they are, but I really feel they could do with a little clarification. The matter of preconditions isn’t addressed, for example, or the problem of consequences. Before offering hospitality, it would be nice to know whether it’s compulsory, what the conditions are and whether — when it’s over and done with — you’ll have the strength to stomach the sense of indignation. We wouldn’t find ourselves so frequently put upon, upset, humiliated and disgraced if we took the necessary measures and sent people packing.

In this case, the bus driver — whose name, like the number on his vehicle — was 235, proved to be a crude but charming individual. I have fond memories of him.

This, then, was how things had played out, not in the way Mourad had suggested. Mourad obviously doesn’t understand the first thing about girls. No bus stations, no university halls of residence.

Whenever I come through a crisis, I tend to become a little crazy. I threw myself at Chérifa, prepared to tear her to pieces on the spot.

‘You could at least have let me know you were alive…’ I spat in her face. ‘You had me worried half to death!’

‘But, Tata, you said not to come back!’

‘I said, I said… that doesn’t mean you had to believe me!’

‘Well, as it happens, I didn’t believe you… that’s why I’m back.’

‘That’s still no reason!’

The bus driver was staring at us, his headlights on full. The day men finally learn to listen to women without standing around looking pathetic is still a long way off.

‘So tell me, my dear Monsieur 235, what were you doing when you crossed paths with Chérifa and what exactly have you done to her since?’

The guy was obviously not one of nature’s storytellers. He seemed to think that our actions are entirely decided by mektoub — fate. Which didn’t get me very far. A storyteller who doesn’t give his characters room to develop has no business in a souk. The whole reason people tell stories is because they’re sick to the back teeth of mektoub, we want our characters to act, to take decisions, hatch plots, screw up, land on their feet like a cat, win the game, make the sultan look ridiculous, we don’t want pathetic creatures like ourselves who wait pointlessly for heaven to send us a sign.

‘What could I do, sister? Three days ago, this girl got on my bus first thing in the morning while the engine was still cold and coughing like it had tuberculosis, I couldn’t even change gears. I’ve told the supervisor a thousand times that imported engine oil is better than domestic, but he’d rather foul up the engines — it makes no sense, I mean, we’re talking thoroughbred Magirus Deutz motors, they only speak German!’

‘Why can’t they be converted into Arabic?’

‘You’re not allowed, it invalidates the warranty. Anyway, like I was saying, I work route 12, from Chevalley to La Grande Poste via Rampe Valée. That’s a lot of steep hills, as you know yourself. So anyway, she takes a ticket and she sits behind me. Even looking at her in the rear-view mirror I could tell she was… well… a lost soul. Her mektoub…’

‘Yes, let’s leave her mektoub out of this…’

‘She spent the whole day sitting in the same seat, shuttling back and forth from Chevalley to La Poste, La Poste to Chevalley. Well in the end she fell asleep, as you can imagine…’

‘I can easily imagine, I feel myself nodding off right now, but I’d like to hear the end of the story… So, where were we?’

‘What’s the matter, Tata? He’s telling it just like it happened, I swear.’

‘I’ll believe you, I’ll believe anything, I realise disbelief is not an option… So, monsieur, you were saying?’

‘At 8 pm, when I finished my shift, I said to her, I said: Last stop! All change, please!”

‘And did she change?’

‘No, she asked if she could sleep on the bus. I’ve never heard the like. I told her it was impossible, that it was against regulations, I have to take the bus back to the garage and you’re not allowed in there.’

‘The plot thickens.’

‘Absolutely not, we’re devout Muslims, we know all about hospitality. I said to her if you’ve nowhere to sleep, you can come back to our house, my mother would be happy to have the company. The poor thing, she…’

‘OK, so you get to the house and…?’

‘My mother looked after her like she was her own daughter. You have to understand, I’m an only child, and I’m a man and amah needs someone she can talk to about cooking and cleaning, someone who’ll listen to her problems…’

‘I can well understand her. And then what?’

‘So, anyway, three days later, this morning to be precise, the girl says to me, I’m coming with you.’

‘Would you credit it! And?’

‘So she came with me. And after a little while, when I was inspecting the bus before taking it back to the garage in case anyone had left their papers or their lunchbox under a seat, she says to me: I’m going back to Tata Lamia.’

‘That’s me!’

‘So, well, anyway, I brought her back to you. Now, I must dash, the depot closes at 8.30 pm sharp.’

‘Not before you have a glass of lemonade, dear Monsieur 235. I know a little about hospitality myself, and it doesn’t only work one way; besides, the garage is hardly likely to vanish because it’s missing a bus.’

‘A minute late is a minute too late!’

‘Only in Switzerland, my friend, only in Switzerland. Here in Algeria, it’s more like: where there’s life there’s leeway. We’ll tell the depot that the bus broke down, it probably happens six times a week and if they can put up with six, they’ll put up with seven.’

And then the gallant bus driver told me his life story. This is it in a nutshell: at the age of sixteen, he was hired by the Greater Algiers Urban Transport Authority — GAUTA — where, by dint of perseverance and engine oil, he worked his way from cleaner to grease monkey to bus conductor right up to the dizzy heights of bus driver in less than twenty years. And from here? Ticket inspector, if God wills it. And why should God not will it, isn’t it what He has always wanted, to punish fare-dodgers and nit-pickers? Maybe, but his bosses operate on a different policy: they give jobs to their friends. Things had taken a philosophical turn, so I put on the brakes. Was there life after work? Truth to tell, he had never had time to dawdle, he spent his leisure hours looking after his saintly mother and his great dream was for her to make the pilgrimage to Mecca. Married? No, unfortunately, mektoub had dictated otherwise. His problem is he’s an awkward so-and-so who wants everything to be perfect for him and his elderly mother. Any sporting activities? Pétanque with his co-workers sometimes during lunch break, but otherwise… Hey, wait a minute, do you shoot or do you point, I’ve heard that in pétanque it makes all the difference? Um… it depends. So, what else? Fishing, during holidays. And? Dominoes with friends in the neighbourhood and um… going to the mosque on Fridays. And I’ll bet you watch TV? Oh yes, every night.

Good old 235 clearly lived a life almost as thrilling and hectic as my own, all that was missing was the essential, those little extras that make the heart skip a beat. I was sad to see him drive away in his thirteen-wheeled, four-eyed dragon.

The Greater Algiers Urban Transport Authority is very fortunate to have a man of such calibre. As is his sainted mother. There aren’t many like him these days. Though she might loosen the aprons strings a bit, the poor guy needs to let his hair down.

Chérifa left me in a foul mood and has returned to find me in a foul mood. The little baggage is completely brazen, she sulks, she does a bunk, she shows up whenever it suits her, she brings bus drivers to my door. People behave better in hotels — you let the hotel know when you’ll be arriving, when you’ll be leaving, you leave your taxi driver at the door, you’re polite to the staff, you put your things away, you flush the toilet and turn off the tap when the water is running low. A few rules and a little common decency are essential in any family. She should tell me everything, whether there are people looking for her, whether she’s in danger, whether… Well, the possibilities are endless.

‘Now listen to me, mademoiselle, since my idiot brother has cleverly finagled things, I’m prepared to put you up, but let me tell you right now that my home is not a hotel, and it’s not a crèche where you can drop off your little problems. Now it’s not an army barracks, either, but I do expect a little discipline — assuming you know what the word means — and you’ll need a permit if you’re going out!’

‘But, Tata, I can’t stay cooped up in here!’

‘You go out when I go out… is that clear?’

‘Hmm.’

‘I said is that clear?’

‘Hmmmm!’

‘Now, here’s the deal. Tomorrow, I’ll take you for a check-up, we need to know what’s in that belly of yours. Then we’re going to get rid of these frills and fripperies you’re wearing and get you a wardrobe more appropriate for an expectant mother. And we need to think about the baby too, whether it’s a boy or a girl, it’s going to need a cot and some baby clothes.’

‘And a bottle, a bonnet, nappies, a rattle, some…’

‘We’ll make a list. Thirdly, and this will be the hard part, you’ll have to lead a healthy lifestyle: wholesome food, lots of exercise, lots of rest. And a little reliability.’

Over dinner, we drew up a list of baby things. The longer we sat at the table, the longer the list grew. We talked about colours. Unable to choose between pink and blue, we decided white would fit the bill. Before it’s even born, this baby is costing the earth and creating problems. But, well, you treat people according to their merits and this child had already tugged at my purse strings and my heart strings, there was no going back now. Never forget that children are the oldest and most expensive joy in the world.

Today was truly one of those auspicious days for which Algiers is famous.

What a wonderful moment, I could already see myself going gaga!

Suddenly I felt a flash of pain. An association of ideas, a call to order, a warning to be cautious? I was besieged by memories of Louiza, my foster sister, my beloved little Carrot. What morgue does she live in now?

We were no older than our dolls

We dreamed our dreams of wonders

Eternity cupped us in its hands

In a world filled with enchantment

Little noticing

Little realising

We died

Walled up alive

Such is the law

Allah be praised

And may they rot in hell

The Defenders of Truth!

I scrawled this in my splenetic notebook, one day when loneliness had the acrid taste of poison.

That night we laughed until we cried. I was liberal with the jokes, with the Turkish delight, thinking this was a good way to coax the little runaway’s secrets from her. By midnight, she was doubled up in stitches, her cheeks streaked with tears she was too tired to wipe away. Mustafa, Louis-Joseph-Youssef, Carpatus, Daoud Ben Chekroun excelled themselves — I could see them sniggering in their graves. I tore Mourad off a strip, the silly man, him and his tales of proletarian bus stations and university halls of residence. Ending with a flourish, I put Bluebeard in the dock and accused him of comical crimes of my own invention.

All that remained was to steer the conversation to get her to open up. The trick is to begin with ‘I’ve never told anyone this, but…’ to bait the hook and then pass the baton, ‘What about you, what did you do and with whom?’ It’s essential to recognise the perfect moment, to create an expansive mood, nurture the urge to talk freely — that is the real trick.

Being a well-brought-up woman of a certain age, I had little to confess beyond a small scar and a bruise that had long since healed. I was evasive, I was not about to invent trials and tribulations simply to cajole her, after all I’m not the one who’s pregnant and isolated from everyone I know. I told her about the secret boyfriend I had back when I was eight and Papa had already begun to stand guard at the school gates. An only daughter is a father’s worst nightmare.

As it turned out, I was right: the man in the photograph was indeed the culprit responsible for her swollen belly. There was a moment when I both feared and hoped that it might turn out to be that idiot Sofiane. If my horoscope decreed I was to raise a child, I thought, it might as well be my own flesh and blood.

The man’s name, she told me, was Hachemi and he was thirty-eight. In the photo, he could pass for ten years younger. It was this discrepancy that had dazzled the little ninny. ‘He’s so handsome,’ she told me, squirming in her seat, ‘he’s so intelligent, and kind, and strong…’ I cut short her litany, this man was not the good Lord, he was a swine, he was a complete and utter bastard. You can find a baker’s dozen of them in the nearest alleyway.

‘Where and how did you meet him?’

‘In Oran. I was walking along the Corniche with my new best friends, Lila and Biba…’

‘Lila and Biba, did you ever hear of such a thing!? So then what happened?’

‘He came up to us and said: I’d like to buy you girls some ice cream.’

‘So you went with him.’

‘Yeah. Afterwards, he took me for a drive in his car.’

‘Don’t tell me, I can guess what happens next. He offered to show you his etchings, or his collection of human scalps.’

‘Huh?’

‘Never mind. What were you doing in Oran, I mean it’s not your douar, is it?’

‘I ran away, I couldn’t stand it. My parents were getting on my nerves, they wanted me to stay at home, to wear the hijab, to hide away. There were Emirs prowling around slitting young girls’ throats. The imam said the girls deserved it, but he’s a moron. He expects us to be Muslims 24/7, that’s no life for anyone.’

‘That’s obvious — calm down.’

‘Oran is cool, we spent all day hanging out.’

‘I never had the chance. Algiers is not like Oran, the government doesn’t tolerate joyous outbursts, it’s best you know that right now. So, you fell head over heels and before you knew it you were pregnant. So what did he do then, your brave and gallant friend Hachemi?’

‘He went back to Algiers. He’s a big shot, a manager or something. He promised he’d come back for me.’

‘Don’t tell me, let me guess: it slipped his mind.’

‘No, he used to visit two or three times a month, he brought me presents, clothes, jewellery…’

‘The get-up you’re wearing now?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I see…’

‘What?’

‘Never mind. What else did he give you?’

‘Money, and he took me to cafés and to restaurants.’

‘Well, well, so you were a kept woman?’

‘I already told you he was generous.’

‘But then, one morning, he was struck by amnesia.’

‘Struck by what?’

‘By some pressing business.’

‘How did you know? Biba came by and showed me a photograph of him in the paper, he’d just been appointed Minister or Wazīr or something like that. I don’t know how to read, but she told me what it said, only I don’t remember.’

‘OK, I’m with you now, I knew I’d seen his ugly mug somewhere. Now I remember! I saw him on the television once, he was so wooden you could have sawn him in half.’

‘What are you talking about? He’s not a magician!’

‘On that point we agree. Does he know about the baby?’

‘I told him.’

‘And that’s when he forgot all about you.’

‘He promised…’

‘You silly girl, a government minister can’t afford for people to find out he’s got fleas.’

‘Why are you talking like that? He’s very clean!’

‘Did you come down with the last shower? People like that are dangerous lunatics.’

‘But he wasn’t a minister when I told him.’

‘You told him before the amnesia, that’s good, and then the baby was thrown out with the bathwater.’

‘What?’

‘Never mind. So, given your choices were coming to Algiers to beard him in his ministerial den, committing suicide or going back to your douar where your father would likely cut your throat, what did you decide?’

‘To go to Morocco, to Spain.’

‘And that’s how you met my idiot brother, there you both were down on the shore looking for a likely boat. And viva España!’

‘Now where am I supposed to give birth? I don’t have anyone to sign for me.’

‘Sign what?’

‘Everything… the paperwork… and what about money?’

‘And you think that in Europe no one has to sign anything?’

‘Sofiane said it was dangerous to be a harraga in my condition. At the Moroccan border, they shoot at people and you have to dive into the ditch. He told me to come to you.’

‘And now that you’re here, we’ll make the best of a bad job.’

‘…’

It’s three o’clock in the morning and still the night drags on. Three times the hall clock has tried to make its presence felt but these are troubled waters, even a ghost would struggle to make itself heard. This is no country for rational people. Not that I have been rational recently, things have been moving too fast.

Chérifa passed out, arms folded, mouth agape, legs likewise, drunk on laughter and Turkish delight. I know, it’s her way of dealing with things and now that I know her secret I find her a lot less indecent.

Secret is a bit of an overstatement… the whole story is a cliché! Older man seduces girl, refashions her to his taste, keeps her as a little indulgence for his business outings, then tosses her overboard with a bun in the oven. A well-worn tale that just keeps repeating itself.

It’s a cliché I experienced myself — minus the bun in the oven — so I can hardly cast the first stone. I was the same age she is now, I’d just arrived at university, my hair still in schoolgirl pigtails. Like her, I was swept off my feet, like her I got to go to the ball, like her I waited patiently for my Prince Charming to call and like her I was tossed aside once I’d been used. I had my studies to take my mind off things, all she has is her carefree madness to keep her sane. Later, just as the brainwashing sessions were beginning, I found out that my Romeo was the Party bigwig assigned to keep the university under surveillance. This was his hunting ground, his personal fiefdom, the university chancellor licked his boots, the professors kissed his hand, those students who already had one foot on the Party ladder organised a guard of honour for him. He was handsome, his patter was slick, he only had to click his fingers and they would have hurled themselves from the highest tower. I felt privileged, all my girlfriends were infatuated. He and I talked of a bright future together, promised to help each other out, to marry our fortunes. Then, when the new academic year began, my mentor took his pick of the new students. It was his routine, he was exercising his droit du seigneur. This was the year of the blonde. The lucky girl had a shock of flaxen hair and about as much common sense as I had had in the year of the redhead.

Thinking about it nearly twenty years later, it sounds stupid, but at the time, it felt like the end of the world. At seventeen, coming straight from the bosom of a family, you never do anything by halves; you fall head over heels and it feels like dying.

It was not so much this incident that led me to this solitary life. There are the things that, day by day, slowly blacken and decay, sucking us into their quagmire logic, turning our stomachs and our hearts. The things that howl, that violate and slaughter. The things that smack of duplicity, the stifling atmosphere, the maddening charade. And above all, there are the unshakeable truths, the fearsome certainties, those dank prisons that engulf, demean, stultify, annihilate and vomit up fanatical mobs bent on nightmare. Then there is everything else, everything that is lacking, disappearing, crumbling, futile, mind-numbing. The monstrous showdown between those who exploit with a jerk of the chin and those who suffer with heads bowed.

Why would I want to be on such a ship? I am better off on my raft, I drink water, I watch the sky, I listen to the wind — everything is perfect. If sometimes I gnash my teeth, and if sometimes my flesh grates on my bones, it is simply a reminder of my failings.

The clock has just whirred four times. How time flies.

At this point, I am tormented by indecision, not knowing whether to sleep or wake.

Dear God, what a week! Like a marathon crossed with an assault course. The maternity clinic, the blood tests, the chemist and then straight on to the shops, the flea markets, the bazaars, the souks. The usual unpleasant encounters. Everywhere and elsewhere, restless hordes thronged the streets while droves of snorting old bangers charged the crowds and mounted the pavements. We were caught up in an end-of-the-world scare which turned out to be a dummy run organised by people with too much time on their hands. It’s enough to give anyone a migraine. A race against the clock in the morning, a race against the clock at night. Taxis, buses, stairs, more taxis, more buses, more stairs. And in between, the endless standing around in the sweltering heat. We were offered free travel and personalised stops on the route 12 bus, which was a relief. Intimately acquainted with every nook and cranny of Algiers, our friend from GAUTA, the master of the good deed, supplied us with useful addresses and even went so far as to drive us everywhere. There was panic aboard the 235, people accusing him of hijacking, of blue murder, of favouritism, but the passengers all heartily approved when the gallant admiral, hand on his heart, explained his plan: ‘Hey, they’re my family, I’m taking them home, are you people Muslims or what?’ A quick stop at midday to grab a bite, delicious morsels dripping with grease, coated in sugar, teeming with bacteria. Algiers seems to have one food stall for every inhabitant, but no one to sweep the streets. Dying of starvation here would take some doing, but it’s not enough to eat, people need dignity. It’s beyond me: the more dire the poverty, the more cheap eateries there are, and the more people snack! The haggling alone is enough to make you abandon all hope. This, I realised, was the much-trumpeted free-market economy in action. All the albatrosses, the white elephants, the turkeys and the shiny gadgets manufactured around the world are offloaded here where people scrabble to buy them, despite the fact that the people here have no jobs and don’t know where their next pay packet is coming from. I wish some armchair economist would leave his comfortable sitting room and explain it to me. And spare me the nonsense about oil revenues and all that malarkey! The prices here read like science fiction. The swindlers make them up as they go along. And, God, their beady eyes! They specialise in exploiting people who are down on their luck, so my well-groomed appearance didn’t help. Stallholders quoted us the sort of prices they reserve for the wealthy and the well-heeled. We moved on to the next stall double-quick only to be greeted by the same nightmare. It was Catch-22. Chérifa is impulsive, she wants everything and she wants it now! If I hesitate, she sulks and stamps her feet. She doesn’t care about my purse or my health.

And, dear God, her taste! The colours, the patterns, the fabrics, it’s enough to make you throw up. The girl is a disgrace. And she has a terrible temper. Even though she’s an expectant mother, she’s still determined to be quirky. Luckily for me, I have an old feudal law to deal with such eventualities: she who pays, decides.

But the evenings, what bliss: hot baths, fresh scents, beds so soft you dream of dying in your sleep! Not to mention the pleasures of tearing wrapping paper, opening buttons, trying clothes on, taking a step back, a step forward, twirling in high heels, laughing all the while. What can I say? Pretending to be a fashion model is the greatest pastime in the world. How glorious it feels to play at being middle class when you’re penniless. And how dangerous. Chérifa is no princess, and everything I inherited, I got from my old prole of a father. I couldn’t help thinking that for poor anaemic creatures like us, doomed to fretfulness and mumbling, every step forward brings fresh pain. When faced with such ethical dilemmas, we are tempted to retreat into our shell and watch the economy die on its feet, because we know only too well that, for the poor, the worst is always yet to come. OK, you killjoys, get out of my dreams, it’ll be time enough to weep on Sunday. There is no abyss deep enough to wake the blissful dreamer.

In the end, I acquitted myself pretty well, I bought practically everything for next to nothing. Whenever my smile didn’t work, I bared my teeth and went for the conman’s jugular. Scam artists don’t know how to deal with outraged women, panic sets in and suddenly they find their shop flooded by people attracted by the scent of blood and ransacked by every urchin off the streets. That’s life, we all have our problems. Chérifa and her kid are now ready for the battle to come. I even got each of them a piece of jewellery worth a small fortune. We’ll go on a diet to replenish the coffers.

Finding a room that was to her taste and decorating it the way she wanted took time — God, but that girl is a handful! My house has eight bedrooms, three reception rooms, four box-rooms, twenty alcoves and three terraces, one with a sea view, a vast cellar riddled with unexplored passageways that is a world unto itself and feels like a medieval crypt, an attic with three separate levels, hundreds of metres of winding corridors and tortuous stairways, and still Chérifa turned her nose up at everything. In the end, she settled on a room no more spacious than the others. It is right next to mine, and the rooms are connected by a grand, vaulted vestibule; it was the acoustics that decided her. ‘We can chat all night without having to get out of bed or even raise our voices,’ she decided. A pity Uncle Hocine is no longer with us, he would have made the room into a cosy little nest. I’m not sure how happy he would have been to do so for my little Lolita, he held attitudes from a bygone age when girls were girls to be seen and not heard — exactly the opposite of our Chérifa. But between the two of us, we did what we could. We managed to cover up the worst and refurbish the remainder. When I dimmed the glare from the bedside lamp by covering it with a veil of rarest crimson, we thought we were in paradise. Chérifa had tears in her eyes, and for the first time, I took her in my arms and kissed her ear. I felt an electric jolt of happiness. Dear God, she’s all skin and bone, I thought, and suddenly I felt a pang of guilt. My poor Louiza was another one who didn’t have much flesh on her bones, but there was something plump about the way she moved, it was a joy to behold. I miss her so much. And I worry about my little refugee.

I immediately put Chérifa on the UNICEF African baby diet: all the sugar, fat and carbohydrates she could eat. I gave her vitamins, too, I measured every spoonful. After a week on this diet, she was a little heavier and my conscience a little lighter. She had some colour in her cheeks and her new clothes made her look almost human. The baby began to kick and squirm. We joyfully followed its progress. At six months, the little tadpole was beating all records. All was for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

We argued over baby names and colours. Chérifa is a pain in the neck, she’s so stubborn I have to scream to make myself heard. I realise that this is her baby, but this is my house so I’m entitled to my say. If I couldn’t persuade her to choose a beautiful Amazigh or Phoenician name, at least I might dissuade her from plumbing the depths of Oran where they give kids names that make me wonder what planet they’re from. She had two names in mind, the first would have made a dead man’s skin crawl, the second would have had him biting a dog.

‘Are you completely out of your mind? What on earth is Seif El Islam — a declaration of war? Believe me, giving your child a name that translates as “The Sword of Islam” would make him a sitting target for terrorism, not to mention counter-terrorism. Is that really what you want for your son?’

‘In Oran, people think it’s cool.’

‘Well, it’s not, it’s repellent! And what was the other one again?’

‘Benchiha… you know, like Cheb Benchiha, the Raï singer from Canastel.’

‘You really are out of your mind! What on earth is Benchiha, an order to kill? Believe me, a singer called Benchiha has a one in a million chance of ever making the Top 40. Is that really what you want for your son?’

‘In Oran, people think it’s cool.’

‘Well, it’s not, it’s hideous! When it comes to names, you have to think about things carefully. You can’t imagine the handicap a name can be. You need to choose something short, musical…’

‘And besides, it’s going to be a girl, and I’ll call her… um…’

‘You see. Now you’re thinking. If it’s a girl, we’ll call her Louiza, it’s beautiful, it’s charming, it’s elegant.’

‘Hmm.’

‘OK, that’s settled. And if it’s a boy, you’ll call him… um…’

‘Hachemi?’

‘Don’t even think about it!’

‘Sofiane?’

‘Oh, no! One harraga in the family is more than enough! Now Yacine is a fine name, a very fine name. It’s all the rage in Algiers.’

‘Hmm.’

So, that’s one thing settled. Now I need to come up with a system for tackling the rest. Teaching her to read is the most pressing problem, I can’t possibly live with an illiterate under my roof, I’d end up killing her. Once I’ve taught her to cook, to sew, to mend, at least she can make herself useful. But first I need to get the golden rule for living in Algiers through her thick skull: be suspicious of everyone: passers-by, neighbours, sermonisers, hooligans, policemen, judges, and especially well-dressed men who use their refined manners to seduce young girls.

Then there are the basic virtues she needs to get into her head once and for all: order, discipline, kindness, cleanliness and whatnot. I set great store by the inspirational properties of self-control, cleanliness and a dulcet speaking voice. She’ll feel my fists before long, believe me.

Good God, you can’t help but wonder sometimes what it is that parents teach their children.

My first plan of action is to re-read Robinson Crusoe which is full of pointers on how to teach savages. I feel a certain affinity with the congenial castaway. I already have my desert island, my house is out of time and far from any thoroughfare, and if memory serves, my own little savage showed up on a Friday or some other day. As for me, even in these straitened times, I have no shortage of pugnacity and good manners. All of which is good news for her. Providence has brought the sickness to the cure. And another thing, I’m beginning to enjoy my role as the kind-hearted lady of the manor. All I need is a sedan chair or a Rolls-Royce to bear my solitude, I already have a pallid complexion, a deportment that is aloof without being excessive while the house itself is pervaded by an end-of-era atmosphere, while outside, in Algeria, life is strange: the proletariat are disoriented, the patricians exhausted by their vices, the Emirs sated on blood and the poor President has no opponents left to assassinate. What news of the outside world trickles through to us arrives centuries late, drowned out by the whine of machines and the sighs of the mourners. All of which seamlessly becomes my image as the benevolent lady of the manor holed up in the ancestral home.

Chérifa falls asleep earlier and earlier. By midnight, she has drifted far away. She’s sleeping for two. I’ve started giving her herbal tea enriched with baby sedative. I continue on my own, as I’ve always done. I potter around the house, tidy up, have a nibble, I read, I think and when my legs or my eyes start to tingle, I curl up in a corner and doze off. I listen to the silent darkness, to the creaking of the house and, high above it all, the ineffable pulse of time. It is a beautiful music, it enfolds me, seeps into my skin, into every molecule, every atom and deep inside me it blossoms as a giant corolla. It comes from so far, and extends so far, that everything becomes hazy, everything stops, and little by little the moment becomes eternity. I don’t move, I don’t breathe, a gentle, preternatural warmth radiates through me. I feel at peace with everything. I am about to sink… I am sinking…

As I teeter on the brink of sleep, a cry goes through my head: I have to contact Chérifa’s parents, to let them know she is all right. How could I not have thought of it before? I spent more than a year with no news of Sofiane and all the while every fibre of my being was waiting: I know their pain, I can feel it. I’ll talk to Chérifa, we’ll do what we have to do.

Another thought occurs to me: we should contact the man in the photo, the minister-for-whatever, make him face up to his responsibilities. I immediately dismiss this thought, the bastard has power, he could have us thrown in jail, have the baby adopted by a tattooed harpy like some chador-wearing Madame Thénardier who would force the child to fetch and carry water and later introduce her to a life of crime. He could have the child taken from its mother, taken from me, he could set the State against us. Dear God, he could mould the babe in his own likeness to become a wheeler-dealer, a crook, a profiteer! There’s no point even considering it, the man doesn’t deserve to live.

And while I’m thinking about such weighty matters, tomorrow afternoon I’ll go and find out what’s happening down at the Association. It’s been a while, maybe they will have news for me.

I don’t hold out much hope, but still I go. When your whole life is measured out by nagging heartache and the same haunting questions, you need some sort of ritual. Where are you, Sofiane? What has become of you? When are you coming home?

The Association offices occupy the ground floor of a city-centre building that in some former life must have been palatial. Half ruined, it still has a certain magnificence, surrounded as it is by buildings wholly ruined. The plaque next to the entrance is inscribed with a name as long as a gibbon’s splayed arm: ‘Algerian Family Crisis Centre for the Location and Rehabilitation of Youth Missing as a result of Clandestine Emigration’ — the AFCCLRYMCE. There is a lot to be said about this splayed gibbon and his murderous missions but I prefer to keep things short and simple: I call it the Disappeared Association. At the bottom of the plaque on the aforementioned sanctuary, it stipulates that the Association is authorised by the Ministry of the Interior. I don’t know whether this stipulation is a requirement or whether in this case it expresses a sort of voluntary allegiance. I’m not about to cast stones, I know that in a criminal State such things are easily confused and if you don’t like it, well, too bad. I found out about the Association through Mourad, who gave me the address. The man’s brain is cluttered with information. I wonder about him sometimes — does he come to the hospital out of the goodness of his heart, or is he working there as a sort of unpaid spy? I can’t help but admire my colleagues, they know everything, always, before anyone else. I don’t know one of them who retreats in the face of complexity. Not a single one. Where do they get such self-confidence? Sometimes I feel like killing one of them, putting a bullet through his forehead just to see that flicker of disbelief, that glint of fear as he faces the unknown; to hear him fall silent as he confronts something beyond his comprehension. Mourad is one of those people who knows everything, I thanked him profusely, I hope he remembers that.

The first time I met the President of the Association, she informed me I was asking all the wrong questions. I was helpless, I was desperate for information, I was bombarding her with queries. What she meant, she explained, was that wittering and whining were useless, I needed to stay calm, to let the experts do their job. As she said this she flashed me the sort of smile reserved for polite little girls and cheerfully strode off, briefcase in hand, phone pressed to her ear, with a sardonic swagger. A modern superwoman in pursuit of glory — even TV commercials don’t feature such airheads any more. I never saw her again, thank God. She’s a show-off, a charlatan, the sort of person who frequents salons, fraternises with the lumpenproletariat who monopolise the upper echelons of government and chairs pointless meetings. Her assistant, a sea lion wallowing in an ocean of files, simultaneously advised me not to give up hope and to prepare myself for the worst. This, she took great pleasure in emphasising, showed dignity and responsibility. She showered me with statistics, with grisly photos and press clippings, she bamboozled me with statements intended to reflect the seriousness of the tragedy. The country is being drained of its young and no one is doing anything about it — this was the gist of what she managed to say.

‘I’m not looking for advice on how to behave,’ I snapped back, ‘I want you to tell me what you plan to do to find my idiot brother!’

‘We have our ways,’ she whispered as though discussing assembling a neutron bomb in front of an audience of illiterates.

How dare she! I swear, I’ll rip the bitch’s heart out!

‘And what precisely are these “ways”?’

She glibly began to reel off the protocol, stabbing the air with her finger.

‘We draw up missing persons’ files… we liaise with the authorities who in turn liaise with the relevant overseas organisations… um… we regularly chase up queries… we have meetings… we draw up a confidential annual report which we submit to the government…’

‘Why the secrecy? A missing person is a missing person, everyone knows that.’

‘Um… actually I said confidential, there’s a difference.’

‘I realise that, but that doesn’t change the fact that a missing person is a missing person.’

‘We… um… we are planning to set up a newsletter to be sent out to family members.’

‘Now that’s a stroke of genius. A newsletter is a brilliant way of keeping patients warm.’

‘I suppose you can think of something better?’ she snapped back, lips pursed.

‘I can actually. Toss a message in a bottle into the sea and go home to bed.’

This outburst calmed me a little. Maybe I should have told her that the only way to truly extricate this country from hell itself would be to toss the government into the sea and the wagging tail of the civil service with it. Then young people wouldn’t dream of taking to the sea any more for fear of meeting them bobbing on the waves. But that’s politics and politics is dangerous, I’m rather attached to my life and to my little job at the Hôpital Parnet. You have to understand that in this Mickey Mouse country, people have every right to complain, but they have no right to complain to the pen-pushers who work for the government. They’re understandably nervous, given that they are constantly plagued by international organisations who want to know why they are cruel, scheming parasites and how so many poor wretches manage to disappear right under the noses of their families, their friends and the powers that be. It’s a valid question, but it’s not the only one that deserves an answer. No one can convince me that the Association aren’t complicit in the whole thing. They act as a screen, they exist so that the administration can sidestep the issue. Who better than a delegation of shrewd women to blindside the bigwigs at the international organisations and force them to admit they were mistaken? These women have a trick or two up their sleeves, they can explain away anything — right down to a concierge’s lumbago — and lay the blame on colonialism, imperialism, Zionism, the IMF and the machinations of You Know Who. What they can’t tell you is how to comfort a decent, upstanding woman.

‘If you take into account the fact that those who resort to clandestine emigration do so in secret via underground networks often linked to multinational terrorist groups — which, by the way, are not necessarily the groups our friends in the West are quick to blame — and furthermore that as often as not they die in secret, then perhaps you might begin to understand just how difficult our work here is,’ she said, suddenly pedantic.

I don’t know whether she’s planning to bore me for the whole evening or masturbate in front of me until cock crow. I need to wake her up.

‘What I understand is that young people are leaving because everything in this country, right down to the taps, is closed to them. Do you know many young people who enjoy captivity? And another thing, why do you refer to it as “clandestine emigration”, when a better phrase might be “mass exodus”… though “collective suicide” also has a ring to it.’

‘And what about you?’ she squawks, twin harpoons darting from the eyes of this foul-mouthed goose. ‘What did you ever do to stop your brother from leaving the country?’

‘So you’re saying that it’s up to us, the prisoners, to free the young, to provide schools to emancipate them, work to give them some self-esteem, some goal in life beyond reciting poems for the hard of hearing, some hobbies other than the vicious, bloody pastime of enlisting with the army, the Islamic Salvation Front or — God forbid! — the Defenders of Truth?’

‘What are… you’re talking gibberish!’

‘Well, I know what I mean.’

‘…’

This, then, was my first visit to the Association. Later visits were not what you might call a success. Whenever they saw me coming, they all ran away screaming, they all suddenly remembered some urgent meeting. My attitude was absurd, it was counterproductive. These minions don’t need much excuse to bury a case file and yet there I was naively thinking that I simply had to motivate them efficiently. I took a different tack. To best a hypocrite, become a hypocrite. I tried to reinvent myself as the arch-defender of dignity and responsibility, as a woman proud of her new-found friends.

But to no avail: my mind refuses to play along, I still can’t stand the sight of them. I thought about Chérifa. It drives me insane to think that she too might end up abandoned in this accursed country or wandering the streets of some port out in the wide world. The mere sight of these stout matrons sitting on their arses, these government lackeys licking their lips in the sunshine, this bloody farce plain for all to see, has me choking with rage. All in all, this was likely to be a grim encounter. I arrived with a solemn smile on my face and Chérifa on my arm looking every inch a queen.

‘So nice to see you again, my dears. How are you all? I feel confident that today you will be able to reassure me, to finally give me some news of my idiot brother.’

‘Sadly not, my dear friend.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘We have been a little behind schedule lately, you understand… We’re expecting a delegation from the European Union… We’re counting on their financial support… we’re working on the files…’

‘What files?’

‘You know, the budget, the development plan, the meeting schedule, the press releases…’

‘And where does Sofiane come into all this?’

‘Set your mind at rest, he’s in the database.’

‘The database?’

‘Yes, the database.’

‘The database. Well, you learn something new every day.’

‘Absolutely, the database of our dear disappeared. We will give a copy to the EU delegation who will integrate it into their own database. It’s networking… you understand?’

‘Absolutely, people can disappear with a clear conscience as long as they are entered into the Great Database.’

‘Are you mocking me?’

‘I’ll go one better, if someone doesn’t stop me, I’ll slap you.’

‘…’

I was beside myself. I honestly believe that some crimes are to be encouraged. If every petty king and princeling in this country was broken on the wheel together with all their miserable jesters, our young people might finally see the light. This is what I was thinking as I stomped back, eager to get home and smash some crockery. Crowds parted as I passed, frightened or shocked. Wimps and weaklings who feel women have no right to be angry, to be out of control, pitiful excuses for men. I tugged Chérifa by the sleeve, jostling her along. The poor thing’s whimpers were heartbreaking.

I’ve decided that I’m done with the Association. I’ll do my own search. I don’t know how but I’ll find a way. I’ll hire some neighbourhood kid, some other harraga, encourage him to ‘burn a path’ and find that idiot Sofiane and then… no, that’s a stupid idea, I might as well pay for his trip, maybe he’ll send me a postcard from Tangiers, from Marbella, from the great beyond. No, there’s a better solution, I’ll hire a retired cop, they’re wily as foxes and some of them are honest. Late in life, they tend to recover some scraps of their lost humanity. I’d need to find one with a son who disappeared on the harragas’ road, that way we can make common cause. I’ll talk to Mourad, see if he knows anyone who might fit the bill. I… No, forget that, Mourad is no help, he gets me all muddled, with him it’s always one dead end to another. I’m not about to forget that thing about bus stations in a hurry. I could put a classified ad in various newspapers, here, in Morocco, in Spain, wherever. ‘Missing Persons’, I wonder whether the category still exists? I remember Papa used to read it avidly, he had a lot of old friends he hadn’t heard from in ages. It’s strange how, even in more peaceful times, people could easily disappear. Back then, it was a routine matter: Missing Persons were classified as casualties of colonialism, harkis who died in an ambush somewhere, case closed. What was even stranger was that some reappeared, alive, roaming the streets, badly injured and unable to explain why, only to find themselves arrested for petit-bourgeois vagrancy, thrown into the back of a truck and tossed out again three villages farther down the road. These days, you have to work hard just to keep track of your own whereabouts. And missing relatives are a dangerous business; you find yourself being interrogated about the shady dealings they were involved in, who was financing it, who was pulling strings, whether the International Organisations are aware of it. It turns into a huge rigmarole. You go to the police station to complain about the police or another branch of the civil service and come away charged with some cold case pulled at random from the Criminal Records Office.

‘You see what will happen if you don’t keep a careful eye on the company your baby keeps?’ I said, twisting Chérifa’s arm.

‘Ow! Why would you wish something like that on us?’

‘What about you? You abandoned your parents, just like that idiot Sofiane, like all those morons who disappear, who run away instead of… of…’

Damn it! Suddenly I’m blubbing like a baby.

‘Instead of what?’ asked Chérifa, overcome.

‘Instead of dying here, at home, with their families!’

‘Why do you always refer to him as “that idiot Sofiane”?’

‘Because to die far from your grave is pathetic, you stupid girl!’

The cold closed around me like the grave around a dead man. There is nothing to be said, nothing to be done, nothing to hope for. Evil goes about its business. In a hundred years, a thousand years, ten thousand years, when we are all dead and forgotten, life will reassert itself. Inexorably. Women and children will have their part. Right now, there are too many sermonisers, as many more Defenders of Truth, and so many cowards we haven’t room enough to put them. Why do they have beards and warts on their heads when their heads serve no purpose? The question haunts me.

Chérifa and I huddled in a corner and wept buckets.

And then she told me everything. She was four years old when her mother died. She has no memory of her mother and doesn’t know what she died of. I know how she feels, we get a lot of women at the Hôpital Parnet so damaged that it’s pointless to try and work out what they are suffering from, we make a wild guess and we get it wrong. We write Generalised Infirmity and close the file. Chérifa’s eight brothers, all older than her, worked in nearby farms and mills which meant she never saw more than three or four of them at a time. The road was their home. Then, one morning, the father married a she-devil sent back from hell who bore him a litter of sons and daughters. ‘How many of each?’ ‘A bunch, I don’t know, their mother spent all day coddling them and Papa left her to it.’ He was obviously scared of her. When the Islamists showed up and started cutting the throats of local girls, the she-devil fawned on them, made couscous for them, tattled to them about the sins of others hoping to deflect their wrath from her own house. Chérifa posed a problem — being wayward, independent, a moaner, a truant and devilishly pretty, she was an irresistible delicacy for the bearded fundamentalists. One morning, she packed a bag and got the hell out. It is a story that is played out a hundred times, a thousand times all over the country and before long over the world. The green plague of Islamofascism knows no borders. One day, girls will be burned in towns across California, I can just see it, and it won’t be the work of the Ku Klux Klan.

‘… my stepmother hated me, I swear, it’s like I was trying to replace her! I loathe her, she’s ugly, she’s evil, she’s a thief. She called me the devil’s daughter, she’d claim she’d seen me when I hadn’t even done anything.’

‘Seen you where… doing what?’

‘With boys!’

‘I suspected as much.’

‘Papa is a coward, whenever he got me on my own, he’d plead with me, beg me to hide myself behind the hijab to avoid the wrath of his bloodsucking wife and the cut-throat religious bastards. So I packed a bag and left. It serves them right!’

‘Now listen to me, around here I don’t want you saying you’re not religious. I swear, you’re soft in the head. This is Islam we’re talking about, they’ll burn you alive and me with you!’

‘I don’t care.’

‘Oh, but you do care! You’ve got a baby on the way, and I don’t fancy being burned at the stake.’

‘Then I’ll go away and you won’t have to worry.’

‘Go where? These people are out there, it’s like The X Files. And don’t say you’ll go to Europe, because let me tell you they’ve got their feet under the table there too, and things are getting to be pretty tough for girls!’

‘Then I’ll go somewhere else.’

‘You little fool. It’s the same everywhere.’

‘I’ll… um…’

‘You see? You can learn when you make an effort.’

‘Um…’

‘But you’re right — why should we give a damn about religion? Why should we go around weeping and wailing? If Allah doesn’t love us, too bad! We’ll go with Satan. Come on, let’s go into town, we’ll show them, we’ll have a ball, we’ll eat ice cream, we’ll have a laugh, we’ll walk in the sunshine, we’ll squander my money on fripperies and while we’re at it, we’ll buy some shameless clothes! And if they burn us, so what? We’ll shoot straight to hell like dazzling fireworks!’

Dear God, the tailspin! When your heart is in it, it’s hard not to love Algiers. It was a revelation, the city opened wide its slick arms to welcome us. The shops, the bazaars, the salons de thé, we were all smiles as we strolled along the boulevards and stopped off in the parks. Chérifa swayed her belly and her hips as to the manner born while I — not having the figure of a skinny nymphet — was humble and unassuming. Hard on our heels, moving to the same rhythm, the freaks and fanatics followed behind, waiting for any excuse to pounce. Just before the trouble broke out, I turned into a scandalous woman and suddenly they scuttled into the alleyways like cockroaches. More cowards working towards their shame. To our delight, we did not see it coming. We did not even realise night had drawn in until we saw people heading home, heads bowed, walking quickly. Decent folk ran for cover. It was a stampede. Let them run, the cowards! The curfew in Algiers was lifted donkey’s years ago, someday the siege will be over, the torture centres will disappear; these days the TV broadcasts nothing but popular music and idle chatter, the newspapers are full of tittle-tattle, the President spends his time taking pleasure cruises, life is perfect, but the old reflexes remain, the people of Algiers still live in fear. Lies terrify them as much as truth. Cars raced along suddenly deserted streets. Silence and the stench of death descended upon Algiers, rolling out towards the city ramparts.

We got back to the neighbourhood at about nine o’clock. There was no reason in the world that could justify two women being out on the street at such an hour. Rampe Valée is the middle of nowhere, a steep hill that scrabbles past the Kasbah to vanish into the suburbs, it is the far side of the moon. There were no taxis, no buses, and not a single streetlamp to light our way. It’s stupid, this habit we have of seeking out the light, it would simply make us visible to men waiting in the shadows. It reminds me of the parable of the streetlamp… the man who loses his wallet in the middle of a dark street but searches for it in the nearest pool of light. This is the absurdity of treating everything as black and white, you stop just where the sequel starts. Where did we come by the idea that light is always a blessing? Chérifa and I took our courage in both hands and plunged into the darkness of the labyrinth. I walked ahead, guided by memory. Everything is mapped out in my head, distances, bends, potholes, hillocks, walls. We were scared witless. There was not a cat, not a dog, not a rat to be seen, nothing was stirring, the neighbourhood looked as though it had been playing dead for centuries. Aside from our breathless panting, the click-clack of our heels and, always, ceaseless and mysterious, the hushed, distant pulse of the heavens, there was nothing: silence, stillness, emptiness.

Dear God, is every night like this in our blessed city?

Chérifa was no longer strutting brazenly, she was clinging to my arm with both hands, trembling from head to foot. Our little escapade had served its purpose. Rather than using words to persuade, it’s better to demonstrate and devastate. Robinson Crusoe would have been hard pressed to come up with a better solution.

As I was closing the door, I saw among the wavering shadows of the poplar trees the figure of a man disappearing into the darkness. Could it be the same man I thought I saw when Chérifa first vanished? What can it mean other than that we are being watched? By whom? And why?

Nonchalance has its flipside, things are beginning to look grim.

As I always say: bring on the fear.

The days passed, we went out only to do the shopping. One morning, I took Chérifa to the Hôpital Parnet for a routine check-up and, ten days later, we dashed to the post office to queue for something or other, to fill out answers to questions I didn’t understand. I don’t remember which particular law required that I present myself at Counter No. 6 to deal with some legal dispute. What legal dispute? Where? When? As it turned out, the writ was intended for a third party, some oddball who had dared to complain to the management about the service at the aforementioned Counter No. 6 and had been summoned to suffer the consequences. By some unfortunate twist of fate, the summons had ended up in my letterbox. Legal documents will be the death of me, try as I might, I can never cure myself. They seem to be drawn up in Cyrillic from the time of the pharaohs or the Arabic of the international Islamist. I don’t even take the time to check, I head for the hills. It’s hard to believe, but legal documents throw me into such a panic I don’t even recognise my own name. This is not the first time that Moussa, postman and general factotum of Rampe Valée, has made a mistake. There are days when he delivers his letters more or less at random. Now, I know precisely what his problem is, but he could make a little effort! Moussa was a postman of the old school, he used the Latin alphabet, he was proud of his peaked cap and his cape, he loved his thick clodhopping boots. As children, Louiza and I were in awe of him because he was always wrapped up warm and invariably punctual regardless of the state of the weather. I seem to remember that one bitterly cold day, we dreamed that someday we might marry him. He did well for himself, he got Christmas bonuses, his little calendars sold like hot cakes, and when he showed up we’d call ‘Hi, Moussa!’ and ‘Bravo, la poste!’ as he left. Then, when the seismic shift came in 1976, when every street sign, every road sign was replaced in the space of a single night, he did his best to Arabise in the few short hours allotted, but the edict caught him off guard, as it did all of us. Here I’m prepared to reveal a secret jealously guarded by the administration: he lied to his boss, who was also of the old school; between the two of them they could barely decipher half the new Arabic script; Moussa admitted as much one day when I caught him red-handed pleading with some scruffy schoolboy to translate an address for him. In the course of a single night, the streets had changed their names, their language, their alphabet. It cannot be easy, and sometimes he is overcome by blind panic, he feels as though he is in some foreign land, his guardian angel replaced by a fearsome djinn, and, terrified of being hunted down for treason, he pushes envelopes into the nearest letterboxes, all the while doing his best to look like he knows what he’s doing. He explained his dilemma to me one day when, finding him in a terrible state, I gave him a full jug of coffee to buck him up. I hope that the old codger will escape the hornets’ nest alive, I feel an intimate connection with the insane.

This was the only kind of outing I could come up with so that Chérifa could stretch her legs and get a breath of fresh air.

The third time I mentioned it, she shrugged and went back to painting her toenails. I had suggested she come with me to the town hall where I needed to pick up some form or other that my bosses at the hospital urgently required. At the time, I was annoyed, but when I got back I congratulated her, having just extricated myself, dazed and exhausted, from another preposterous situation.

Solitude can be brutal to those not armed against it. I have learned to make the best of it, I know how to fill my days with nothing, with silence, dreams, trips into the fourth dimension, empty soliloquys, outlandish outbursts and painstaking household tasks. I have active and passive moods and switch between the two as the whim takes me. I have my work, my books, my records, my TV, my illicit satellite dish, my little forays into the hustle and bustle of the capital, and my house which still holds its secrets. I have a window on to time, I know how to navigate its most secret places and drop anchor by its uncertain shores.

Chérifa has nothing; to her, solitude is an emptiness, it is suffering, pain, an incomprehensible abandonment.

What can I do?

She scarcely thanks me when I pamper her, barely notices when I devote my time to her, as far as she is concerned it is completely normal that I should drop everything to attend to her every infantile desire. She is so self-centred!

What to do? I talk to her as much as I can, tell her about my day at the hospital, enliven things with the sort of juicy gossip beloved of housewives. I watch the Egyptian soap operas through her eyes at the risk of my own sanity. I’m attentive to her needs, I allow her to interrupt me, to change the subject — something I loathe — I hang on her every word, I always maintain eye contact. Every time she sulks or throws a tantrum, I offer abject apologies that whittle away at my self-esteem. But still she sees nothing, she’s blind, I am no more than a shadow on the wall, something so familiar it goes unnoticed, a big sister who’s not much to look at, an aunt who’s a little soft in the head, a mother who is a bit embarrassing. I don’t know, perhaps I mean nothing to her, perhaps I’m just an overbearing landlady, an infuriating neighbour. The way she cuts me dead sometimes, the way she says ‘Get off my back!’ would drive even a clapped-out old car round the bend.

When she starts a conversation, I’m so desperately eager to play along it puts her off. Too much fawning unsettles her. She gets angry. I try to patch things up. It ends in tears. Example:

‘It’s raining,’ she says out of the blue.

‘Is it?’

‘Can’t you see it is?’ She’s angry now.

‘I was just wondering if you had noticed.’

‘I’m not blind!’ she screams.

‘Sometimes people don’t really pay attention, we listen without hearing.’

‘I’m not deaf!’

‘I was just saying.’

At this point, she throws whatever she’s holding on the floor and stomps out of the room.

Does she even realise that I love her?

How do you raise a child? The question popped into my head as I was going through a bunch of old recipes I’d collected here and there. Papa and Maman left me a basketful and I accumulated quite a few while I was growing up. Evolution being what it is, and the Muslim world being what it is, I had struggled to understand why girls were put upon while boys were fawned upon and wondered whether the hand of God or the hand of the Devil was at work. I quickly realised that our society does not have ears capable of hearing girls.

What about me, how will I bring up this child? This girl!

With other people’s children, it’s simple: we ignore them, give them a clip round the ear or smile at them as if to say: ‘Carry on like that and you’ll turn out just like your ignoramus of a father or your cack-handed mother.’ Or we find them unbearably cute and let them get away with murder. With other people’s children, we don’t have to worry about feeding them, clothing them, knocking some sense into them. They can be offhandedly loved, affectionately castigated, shamelessly forgotten.

The problem is that Chérifa is neither a child nor a woman. Between the two, it’s difficult to know how to behave — we casually refer to girls of that age as Lolitas, but it brings us no closer to understanding them. Nature is fairly straightforward in its workings, it transforms us from larva to adult after briefly keeping us in a pupa stage there to eliminate our childhood dreams and fashion new ones. Sometimes, the machine unspooling time grinds to a halt and we hesitate as we wait for it to start up again; but I’ve noticed that some people, the foolish ones, cling to old dreams like rotten acorns, while others, the more enlightened, determinedly follow their star even in the blinding glare of noon.

I know I didn’t much enjoy leaving childhood behind, nor do I much like what I see looming on the horizon. The future looks to me too much like ancient history, while the childhood innocence I trail behind me is a terrible handicap in this jungle. In the end, the problem is to decide whether it is better to die at our appointed hour or to live on through our ancestors. At first glance there would seem to be no connection, but I can imagine an explorer finding himself face to face with a sign reading: turn right and you will be eaten alive, turn left and you will be roasted on a spit, straight ahead a boiling cauldron awaits you. Turn back and you will die of starvation.

Enough of these riddles, I have a practical problem I need to resolve. I need to make Chérifa love me, I need to make her understand that I love her, as my own daughter, with all my strength, with all my weakness.

Where is the path?

From one door to the next

Hushed is the silence

The wind has nothing worthwhile to report

The crowd is running on empty

The nightmare draws out its shadow

My heart aches.

To say I love you to the walls

And hearken for an answer

Beggars reason.

Where can it be, the path

Which from the unknown

Will fashion my native soil

My love, my life

And my death?

Suddenly, I have begun to dread coming back to this house. This is new only yesterday I would be halfway home before I’d even left the Hôpital Parnet. In my haste, I would rip my white coat. This house is my haven, my personal history, my life. One question nags at me, unsettles me, slows my pace. It worries me. The answer, I know, will be there when I get home, Chérifa will be slumped in front of the TV, flicking through the channels or counting her toes, or she’ll have taken off without so much as a note — she can’t write, cannot even formulate thought, so alien is writing to her — and yet still I come back here, one moment fretting and fearing the worst and the next hoping for the best, I cling to that thought though it does not seem to put an end to the agonising uncertainty. At times, I walk more slowly, at times more quickly, and here and there in the twisting alleyways that irrigate this city I allow myself to be buttonholed by the women who wait on their doorsteps, I stop and take the time to give them the latest news about their case. They listen to me, beating their breasts or covering their faces with their hands, stammering oh and ah. There are times when I find this gesture infuriating, when I see it as an abdication of responsibility, a thoroughly masculine cowardice; sometimes I browbeat them to the point where I fear for their lives and sometimes my heart bleeds and so I give them news that will have them singing and dancing all night. Dear God, how tenuous their life is, it hangs by a thread, a word, a glimmer, a law. And how absurd my own life.

Chérifa is bored. I’ve noticed that she’s become less voluble, less frivolous; she is brooding, preoccupied, serious. I scarcely recognise her. She is like a caged bird that has forgotten how to sing, to splash in its bath, to hop and skip for joy — a joy it can scarcely remember, one too distant and too fleeting to gladden the heart. Chérifa is like a living doll, in her glassy eyes there is a faraway look; are they staring at the bars or past them to a distant something that glimmers in the sky, rustles in the wind, sings in the trees? I’m reminded of the story of the man who was born blind and who, one day, for a fraction of a second, recovers his sight — a miracle — and in that second he sees a sleek, handsome rat scurry along the wall. And ever after, when something is being described to him, he asks, awestruck and anxious: ‘Does it look like the rat?’

The honeymoon period is over: our chats, our games, our rambles through the winding passageways of the house in search of some forgotten ghost no longer leave Chérifa spellbound, open-mouthed, eyes shining. I’m almost tempted to tell her the story of M. Seguin’s goat being eaten by the big bad wolf, but that might reawaken the nomad in her and if I opened the door, would she even be able to resist the call of the sea long enough to say goodbye? The thing is, I’ve grown attached to her; the only solitude I can imagine now is in her company. Dear Lord, how much do our lives truly belong to us?

Something has changed in her, I can feel it, I can sense it. What did I do? What has happened to her?

Pregnancy — of course! — and all the upheaval that entails. The swollen body, the leaden legs, the hot flushes, the swirl of hormones, the mood swings, the sudden cravings that affect the very core of one’s being. I’ve seen some odd cases at the Hôpital Parnet, women who chew their fingers, gnawing the bone down to the marrow, others who tear their hair, there are even women who stare at the ceiling like saints, oblivious to the hustle and bustle, to the midwives, to the cheeping of the chicks and the silences of the angels; there are the women who hit out at the nurses, lash out at their husbands, their brothers. There are the stately, old-fashioned princesses who come to us by chance or out of the goodness of their hearts; we crowd around to admire them, cajole and flatter them, but there is nothing to be done about their delusions, they are not of this world; with an imperious wave they brush us away like insignificant germs. They are difficult to deal with, the very fact that they are carrying the family heir means they are constantly in a state. There are the mother hens, feathery as eiderdowns, who amble between the cubicles pecking at each other; life does not bother them, they love the chaos, they love the crowing, they are always in good spirits. No sooner have they laid this baby in a manger than they are back to bustling about the house, clucking all the while. Every woman who comes to us has her own story, none of them banal. Then there are other problems, and God knows Chérifa has her share: youth, inexperience, vain hopes, bad dreams and I don’t know what else, her mood swings, her wilfulness, those things she has inherited. She is volatile, fierce and aggressive one minute, dazed and sullen the next. Love and sex and all the bother and the upset that goes with them, they destroy, they damage, they scar. Chérifa is young, she’s wild, she can’t resist the lure of the sensual. I have long since left behind the agonies of desire but there was a time when I too rolled around on the floor like an addict in withdrawal.

What can I do?

It’s a fact, I take her out less and less. Not at all, if truth be told. Where can we go? Algiers is no place for a quiet stroll, it’s exhausting; women find themselves constantly followed, pointed at, harassed. The old men spout shrill scathing proverbs, the old crones make disparaging remarks as we pass, the cops wolf-whistle and stroke their truncheons suggestively. The little boys are the worst. They shout, they make obscene gestures, they walk behind us, egging on the crowds. It says a lot about their upbringing that hardly are they out of the womb than they’re waging war on womankind. The more I think about them, the more they remind me of the film Gremlins. What a story: in the dim recesses of ancient China (an antique shop somewhere in the heart of Chinatown run by a venerable old man more ancient than his antiques), an American explorer — half crackpot, half bumbling inventor but wholly charming — discovers a curious creature, a strange furry animal with eyes like a lemur and ears like a panda, a creature so adorable anyone would want to take it home. The man offers to buy it: it would make an ideal birthday present for his son. The ancient Chinaman demurs. The American lays down another $100 bill. Still the old man refuses: With Mogwai, comes much responsibility. I cannot sell him at any price. But the old man’s grandson rushes after the American and secretly agrees to sell the creature, warning the man: keep him out of the light, especially sunlight, it’ll kill him. Second, don’t give him any water, not even to drink. But the most important rule, the rule you can never forget, no matter how much he cries, no matter how much he begs, never feed him after midnight. These are the three commandments for anyone who would have a Mogwai under their roof. Our explorer agrees to these conditions and returns to present-day America — about three blocks away. Everything happens as it was foretold. The man’s son is delighted, as is his mother since she doesn’t need to feed or wash the new pet. And then one night, the boy feeds the creature after midnight, then spills a glass of water on his head in broad daylight. What follows is horrendous: the adorable Mogwai spawns a vicious creature, a Gremlin, which immediately begins to multiply. By the end of the film, America the indomitable is on its knees, besieged by these mischievous scamps who scream and laugh and pillage, eating and multiplying until they can overrun the planet and destroy it. This is a long-winded way of saying that I, too, felt under siege. It’s impossible to face down everyone and so you bow your head, you cross the street, you put a compress on the wound. Typically, the few decent men, the genuine believers, the humble fathers — those lifeless men — express their compassion by not lifting a finger, by giving the impression that there is much they would say if only life were not so short. Afterwards, they resent us, they are embarrassed by our misfortune which serves only to emphasise their own. This country may lack many things, but we have no shortage of would-be sermonisers, of lazy bastards happy to leave you to sweat, of pathetic cowards quick to fade into the background. What with me trying to look like a fashionable mother and Chérifa’s hip and glamorous clothes, we were an affront to the prevailing air of sanctity. We reeked of brimstone, of bitches on heat, of shameless heresy, our insolence knew no bounds. ‘Like mother, like daughter’ people whispered as we passed, squinting at us, pursing their lips. One day, I’ll tell them exactly what I think of their ‘absolute perfection’. Because they think they believe in Allah, they think that means they can do what they please, throw bombs and worse, sermonise from dawn to dusk, Monday to Friday. Is it my fault that Chérifa has the beauty of a fallen angel and I look like a Madonna? The streets of Algiers are dismal, dirty, choked with seething crowds, what is there to do but stare longingly through grimy shop windows and fend off rogues? It’s true I scold Chérifa more than I realise. She’s petulant by nature and I’m turning into a cantankerous old crone, I’m starting to lose the plot, I’m sick to the back teeth of the bled, I’m eaten up by worry, I’m missing Sofiane, I’m worn out working at the hospital. The compromises and cuddles of traditional family life are not Chérifa’s thing. And the best that can be said about housework is that she loathes it.

If only she could read! My library is filled with treasures, the viscount and the saintly doctor left behind books enough to last us till the end of time. The others also left books by the basketful, but they’re potboilers, I keep them out of pity. Aside from a respect for the old, Papa instilled in us a love of the printed word that I have never outgrown. Everything else, I could live without. Over time, I’ve made my own additions, a handful of pearls and dozens of third-rate novels bought by the kilo and mottled with aphids and fly specks. I had to buy them in order to ride out my grief, to survive my time in the wilderness. I think I’ve probably read more books than a monkey eats peanuts in its life. The whole house is stuffed with them and I could get more if she needed them. But Chérifa doesn’t realise what she’s missing. For every single person on this planet, there is a book that speaks directly to them, that is a revelation, that tells them everything they need to know. To read that book — your book — without being forever changed is impossible. The problem with people who know nothing is that you have to explain everything, and the more you explain, the more they shut themselves off. They cling to their ignorance, it keeps them warm.

I decided it was time for a spring-clean. It was all I could come up with to keep us busy. Chérifa shrugged. I was about to suggest a tactical retreat but it was too late, the young hate it when their elders go back on their word. We put on our battle dress, tucked our skirts into our knickers, tied our hair back with bandanas and then set off, full steam ahead. This was spring-cleaning Algerian style — slopping water everywhere until it seeps under the rugs, making a racket loud enough to wake the dead, whipping up such a commotion a person could lose her marbles. It is a continuation of domestic housework by military means, a complete clear-out; it is the tradition of the harem.

This is how I learned to do it, this is how I do it, full stop!

By eight o’clock that night, we had made little progress and the house was a disaster area. We laughed, we larked, we vied to see who was faster, we set each other challenges, we slogged heroically, we mopped, we swabbed, we dusted, but it was joyless and half-hearted. In the thick of spring-cleaning, it occurred to me that playing the skivvy in order to ward off disaster was the worst thing to inflict upon a girl in love. I imagined how terrified Chérifa must feel, now that she glimpsed the yawning chasm between the dreams she had cherished and the reality I was offering. But when you have nothing, what can you offer? Sadness leached into our deepest thoughts and by a process of cross-contamination we polluted the atmosphere. Our laughter was too loud, too forced, our conversation filled with too many things unsaid.

Sometimes the defeat precedes the attempt, as it did in this case. When you’re waiting for the end of the world, all bets are off.

The evening was pleasant, but it left a bitter aftertaste. It started out well enough, we were intoxicated by the whiff of disinfectant mingling with the soothing aromas of tea and Turkish delight. Lolling in our slippers, we began to drift off, exhausted from the big clear-out. I acted just in time, I put on a CD of Rachmaninov in his heyday to open our hearts, awaken us to the beauties of the world. A vast, sweeping, subtle music echoed through the house, happiness, rapture, golden dreams and carefully crafted mysteries. In this old place which broods upon its secrets, beauty produces ghostly harmonics. When I opened my eyes again, I saw Chérifa’s face, she was deathly pale, she was about to throw up on the rug. Great music is not really her thing, she didn’t know it existed, that it existed long before she was born. I put on some classic Aznavour, then Paradès singing fado that could level a granite mountain, then something by Malek, the Franco-Moroccan singer, then Idir, the Franco-Algerian singer, and seeing that even this was new to her ears, I slipped an old, scratched vinyl disc on to my battered old record player. Something recorded during Am Charr, the Year of the Great Famine, in 1929 or 1936. On the record sleeve, an old, tattooed woman sits cross-legged at the door of her tent staring out at the desert and written on the luminescent sky in a florid, cursive font is the title of a spaghetti western: The Whore and the Flautist. From the speakers came a threnody channelled from the bowels of the earth, one that would have put a herd of elephants to flight. The old woman, a famous cheikha from before the war with a rasping drawl, was lamenting the misfortunes of a young girl of noble birth abducted by slave traders and sold for thirty douros to an evil madam who immediately put her to work on her back. Straightaway we are plunged into pathos and misery. The girl’s apprenticeship was swift and brutal; the once beautiful, joyous maiden sank into a deep depression. Then the harvest ended and so began the orgiastic season for the peasants. Amid the fantasies and feasts, libations and copulations, black magic and honour killings and heaven knows what. The summer sun is sweltering. As news of the girl’s beauty and her doe eyes reached even the blind and the deaf in the desert, men came from fields in far-flung places to straddle the newest arrival. A brave troubadour who visited the bordello between society balls fell madly in love with her the moment he slipped into her bed. It is at this point in the story that the words of the chorus become clear: ‘Enter my friend, enter, higher still you’ll find my heart, it belongs to he who claims it!’ Thirty times the cheikha sings the words, heartrending whimpers from the depths of her being. She would not be more convincing if she were in the throes of death. The minstrel carried off the girl on a thoroughbred stolen from the village cheikh and so our lovebirds are caught up in a gruelling adventure, pursued by the guards of the monstrous madam and the henchmen of the notorious caïd. The tale might have ended there on a hopeful note, since to flee is in a sense a synonym for salvation, but no, the poet decided to follow heartbreak to its logical conclusion: the couple are caught, the flautist’s throat is cut and his body dismembered on the public square while his young lover is shackled and dragged back to the hovel where she will live out her days in untold pain. Since the dawn of time, the struggle to be free has led to tragedy.

I had discovered this ballad among Sofiane’s belongings, it was just one of the curiosities he liked to collect. The young are only superficially modern, the slightest thing drags them back into the shadows of the past. And then I realised that the ballad was a bastardised version of the famous ‘Ode to Hiziya’, which brought our grandmothers to tears. At the first note, Chérifa fell into a trance, I mean a dance, listening to this cyclical rise and fall like a sultry summer that refuses to end, this violent, shuddering telluric rite from before the Gospels that abruptly segues into a bourrée of roughneck soldiers returning from war. I joined in as best I could, writhing wantonly, then passionately, in my chair, I even ventured one or two wails which went down like a lead balloon. Chérifa looked at me scornfully, I was ruining her rapturous trance. She looked at me the way someone might look at a Scandinavian tourist in Papua New Guinea who gets up in the middle of a ritual to ask the witch doctor how he does his tricks. ‘You don’t get it!’ she said disdainfully. That irritated me, so I put on music from my region, Kabylie music and rock from the mountains, and showed her how we shake our hips down Fort National way. Music so powerful, a person would have to be born deaf, mute, blind and cold to resist it. The battle had begun, between the old country and the majestic mountains, provincial honour was at stake and Chérifa and I both gave as good as we got. The finale was pitiful, we collapsed, exhausted, just before daybreak.

I don’t know where I slept or by what miracle I came to wake up in my own bed. I thought I knew all the ghosts in this house, but this one had clearly been a stretcher-bearer in life, he had done his duty and immediately set off for other theatres of war. I shall call him Mabrouk. I saw myself somewhere, I don’t know where, in a dream, in some distant land, an island fringed with palm trees, washed up after some devastating shipwreck. With me were Chérifa, Louiza, Sofiane, Yacine and other beautiful, youthful innocents. There were recent friends, the flautist and his virginal maid, the girls from the university halls of residence, and there were others, acquaintances made long ago upon the journey of life. We were all naked as the day we were born or wearing fig leaves. We were dancing around a huge bonfire. Sweating blood and water, Tonton Hocine stoked the flames, operating a huge bellows with both hands while Monsieur 235 wielded a poker as long as the propeller shaft of an ocean liner. In the distance, a volcano was playing the tuba and smoking cheerfully. The earth was trembling just enough to heighten the rumba. Joyous minstrels perched high in the mangrove trees were strumming mandolins as though we were kings of the carnival. In the vast bonfire, people and strange beasts were burning. Whenever one of them tried to escape, we kicked it back into the blaze. I recognised the President and her sea lion, two or three skewers of gibbons wearing helmets, goats in djellabas, a single moray eel, the Wazier of who knows where, the evil madam, the infamous caïd and others, the mute parrots who roll their eyes at parades when they see the Supreme Leader of all Tribes strut past in his billowing bubu or talk about his days spent dealing with obsequious plenipotentiaries who come to show him some new model of tea glass. From a tumbril, the fire was fuelled with preachers and Defenders of Truth, bound and gagged. The inferno gave off a terrible stench which we breathed in in deep lungfuls, delirious with joy.

It was a glorious celebration. That night I slept the sleep of a queen, though tinged with panic as I waited for the sky to fall, or for the ground to open up beneath my feet.

The Moonlight Soliloquy

When images of children came to haunt my nights

It was always with two great silent eyes

In an unflinching forehead

And in those eyes that gaze upon the mischief of the world

The mayhem of its godless revelries

And the cold tremors of its mass graves

I saw their souls floating high above the maelstrom.

And their faces, radiant with a lingering light

Announced the Divine Judgment.

And always, in my darkest nights, those wide eyes

That dauntless silence

That deep-rooted pain

Spoke to me of life

Of its miracles, its mercies, endlessly reiterated

Its unquenchable euphoria and the promises

It makes in spite of all

Our rancour and our wild excess

Our hopelessness, our suffering

Our heartless crimes, our treacheries

Our baseness and our cowardice

And the impossible loftiness of man.

And, knowing that our punishment

Is not grim death but dearth of life,

I dared to dream I might embrace

The universe within my gaze.

Salvation lies in education. I have no intention of replicating the Algerian régime in my house and keeping this girl ignorant and dependent. In the long run, I would be tempted to shamelessly take advantage of her or I worry I might end up killing her. Teach her to read, open her eyes to the four great windows on to the world: science, history, art and philosophy — that’s my plan.

My first task is to get her to accept this as a starting point. It’s not easy, the uneducated are self-satisfied, thin-skinned and terribly suspicious. And Chérifa is contemptuous to boot. She needs to recognise the extent of her ignorance, needs to be scared by it if she is to decide to learn, for her own good and that of others. This is what I need to do.

I spent all week thinking about the problem, made some notes and came to the conclusion that it’s best to be thrown in at the deep end in order to learn to swim. I mean to teach. Dynamics will do the rest. Probably best to start with a guided tour of the capital. Algiers is not exactly a treasure trove of culture, but, well, Rome wasn’t built in a day. And it’s often an encounter with a monument, a painting, a curious object, a sudden insight, a system of signs that triggers the desire to learn. I thought back to the scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey where an ape suddenly discovers all the possible uses of a mammoth’s jawbone and his descendant, six hundred million years later, discovers space travel. I thought about Newton’s apple and all the other hackneyed tales we tell schoolkids to awaken their sense of curiosity. My awakening was something similar: it was discovering Doctor Montaldo’s medical books and his strange surgical instruments that first gave me a taste for medicine and for repairs; why should Chérifa be any different? Something will take her fancy and begin the incredible process that is the getting of wisdom.

The various outings I’ve planned will require about a week. I’ll arrange to take some of the leave I’m owed, I’ll get Mourad involved — we’ll need his car. The presence of a casually cultivated man like Mourad will add just the right touch of jaded sophistication to my plan. Studying is a pleasure only for those who are truly initiates, I won’t be expecting great things of Chérifa on our first day of lessons. More haste, less speed.

And so it came to pass. Unfortunately for me, and even more so for the little airhead, the result was the opposite of what I had intended. If there was a click, it was the sound of a door closing. Chérifa is totally, utterly resistant to all things intellectual. The magic of knowledge does not stir her in the least. My explanations, Mourad’s comments rolled off her like water off a duck’s back without eliciting so much as a shiver. She was more bored than ever. And this was only day one…

Dear God, what did they do to her at school?

I had decided it was best to start at the famous Jardin d’Essai. A lot of people don’t realise it, but the botanical gardens there are as much a symbol of Algiers as the Bois de Boulogne is of Paris or Hyde Park of London. Algiers spends so much time bragging about its glories that these days no one visits the gardens any more. Jingoistic as they are, the citizens of Algiers don’t like it when their leaders gild the lily. Television fills in the blanks in our collective unconscious with archive footage, something that is obvious to anyone watching since the visitors to the gardens are too obviously wearing their Sunday best for this to be a Friday. The footage comes from the Algiers section of the archives of the long since defunct Office de radiodiffusion-télévision française. The gentlemen in these film clips all wear bell-bottoms and have a cigarette dangling from the corner of their mouths à la Humphrey Bogart, while the ladies in their crinoline wear their handbags dangling from the crooks of their elbows mimicking starlets they’ve seen in the movies. And the poor children look so well-behaved in their smart berets your heart goes out to them. This, then, was why I put the Jardin d’Essai at the top of my list — we would be the only ones there to admire this ancient wonder.

It was a mistake, a fiasco; this little corner of paradise, like all the others, has been spoiled. Chérifa was not likely to catch the botany bug here. Papa used to take us to the gardens when I was a little girl. It was a ritual: the Algerian families at the time, fresh from the war of liberation, still clung to this colonial tradition of a Sunday in the park. Louiza and I would come back, our brains teeming with extraordinary images, magical perfumes, with burgeoning dreams, and immediately set to work on whatever composition we had to write for school. ‘This is all very well, Lamia,’ the teacher said when we had taught her everything there was to know about the gardens, ‘it’s all very poetic and so forth, but you are allowed to write about something else. And that goes for you, too, Louiza.’ On our first visit, we felt dwarfed by the majesty of the place which conveyed such a powerful sense of abundance, of wonderment, of uniqueness, of strangeness, of otherworldly purity that it blew our minds, our eyes darted around like malfunctioning lasers. My God, how could anyone read, let alone remember, all the names attached to the trees, the shrubs, the flowers? Back in Rampe Valée, this glut of information left our heads spinning for a week. Our euphoria attained frenzied proportions when we visited the little zoo nestled in the heart of the gardens. Oh, the shock, the indescribable sense of discovery! Oh, those roars, the growls, the trumpets, the cackles, the howls, the strange rustlings that seemed both distant and so close, the barbaric chants, the harrowing cries, the endless echoes rippling out, jarring, merging, overlapping, falling eerily silent only to suddenly erupt again in a different register. And that feverishness, those piercing eyes, the colours and the smells that made up the wild savage harmonies of the world, a melody unchanged since the dawn of time when we first filled it with our fears. I remember feeling my hair stand on end. All this was very different from the cats and dogs, the canaries and the other pets we were accustomed to. To my dying day, I will remember the magnificent lion from the Atlas Mountains who lay dozing in his cage like a king in his palace. Immediately we were reminded of biblical tales so dear to Maman: I thought about Samson, the great strangler of lions, about Delilah, the repentant sinner — who, before she repented, had been an incomparable sinner. Watching the lion yawn, I could easily imagine that Louiza and I would fit inside that huge, gaping maw, even standing up with arms outstretched. I remembered us faithfully swearing not to leave each other’s side. A brass plaque informed us: A gift from His Royal Highness Muhammad V, Sultan of Morocco and Commander of the Faithful, to his brother Ahmed Ben Bella, on the occasion of his triumphant election to the highest office of the People’s Democratic Republic of Algeria.

The inscription infuriated Papa. ‘An ass is an ass, even if he is a distant cousin of the king of the jungle!’ he said. He was thinking about politics. Papa liked to make vague pronouncements: ‘The worm is already in the apple,’ he would mutter sententiously when Maman reminded him that the ‘ass’ had been toppled years before and the man who toppled him was no more likely to prevail in heaven. Louiza and I were young at the time, we found adult conversations boring, at that age other people don’t matter. The only yoke we knew was that of our parents, the only ingratitude that of the neighbourhood trollops.

No one visits the gardens, I said, but we arrived to find milling crowds on every path and trail and even the once sacrosanct parterres and conservatories were swarming with hordes of people so anonymous we passed without registering them, terrified pensioners plodding along in faltering groups, children and beggars dashing past, legions of wily street hawkers selling snacks, single cigarettes, digital watches, Islamic textbooks, aromatic incense (and other types of resin), posters of Bin Laden, Bouteflika, Zarqawi, Saddam, the Terminator, Zinedine Zidane, John Wayne, Madonna, Lara Croft, Mickey Mouse, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Bruce Lee, Benflis, Umm Kulthum and I don’t know who all, it was a souk, there was something for everyone. The trees in the garden are afflicted by leprosy or maybe just by old age. The same goes for the shrubs and the crumbling arbours. Perhaps it’s the drought, Algiers is in the anhydrous phase of its climatic cycles, there is no water, the air is fetid. One by one the zoo animals died off. Some burrowed deep trying to find water, the carnivores devoured each other before they expired, those few that remain are afflicted by the blind staggers. I remembered a newspaper publishing a letter from a man so outraged by the park authorities’ neglect he had taken to watering the poor dying creatures himself. The joker called it a crime against humanity. It’s not exactly how I would have put it, since there is a danger of contamination between that idea and an underlying one. Every morning, he would make his rounds with his jerry can, going from cage to cage, giving water to each according to its needs. Exhausted by the task, the man appealed to people through the pages of his favourite newspaper. I don’t know how many responded to his plea, but chronic neglect has certainly contributed to the carnage: the place has an air of decline that is noxious to sensitive souls. Nothing saddens the eye like rust and decay and I have to admit the garden bears its mark, as does Algeria, a Third World country chasing its tail: these are the signs, the half-finished, the moribund, the half-forgotten, the endless restrictions, the sporadic bouts of madness. On this path, time collapses into nothing, space contracts and life is a self-evident abdication. Thankfully, great suffering carries within it its own antidote: fatalism — which offers many reasons to die in the shadows, with no regrets, without demanding justice.

How have we managed to live surrounded by so little grandeur, so little clarity? I wonder.

I gave the order to retreat. To stay too long here would finish us off. Under the arch of the monumental gates, Chérifa threw a tantrum that knocked me for six: ‘Why did we come here?’ ‘We’re just taking a stroll,’ I replied, fingers crossed. ‘Just over there is the Museum of Antiquities and Fine Art, you’ll see it’s educa—… it’s fun.’ Seen from without, the building is as chipped and peeling as a leper colony, but to hell with outward appearance, the interior might well be magnificent.

As indeed it was. Though to realise that, you had to have eyes to see, something Chérifa, from the outset, stubbornly refused to do. Four thousand years of beauty, of unfathomable mysteries harmoniously cohabiting beneath dizzyingly high ceilings. They seemed to eye us scornfully as if to say ‘What’s that doing here?’ We felt insignificant, ugly, obtuse, in a word humiliated by the outmoded and inefficient ideas swirling in our heads. I saw Chérifa become rigid. At least she felt intimidated; that was a start. The vast entrance hall of stone and marble in the flamboyant Louis-Philippe style cannot but seem overwhelming to people like us who live in dark, sweltering anthills. Then, suddenly, in her eyes I saw the question that would cut my legs from under me and force me to abandon my tutoring: ‘So what did we come in here for?’

The spell was broken.

Heads bowed, we traipsed morosely through centuries and civilisations and nothing jumped out, nothing forced us to ask the crucial question: ‘What is that doing here?’ The galleries were deserted, they told of superannuated futility, of soullessness, of banishment. The paintings, the statues, the objets d’art, the gemstones, the engravings looked like antiquated curios arranged by pen-pushers exhausted by routine. The beautiful is beautiful only when one knows. We walked past without noticing and found ourselves outside in the sunshine, depressed, dazzled, tired, disappointed.

All this is another world to Chérifa, a bizarre, artificial world assembled from the flea market of past centuries, past millennia. She stared at everything wide-eyed as an owl woken by a sudden commotion. I wanted her to understand that we had not magically appeared from an Aladdin’s lamp or some sleight-of-hand in a laboratory, that we were the product of these things that surrounded us, but no words can pierce a mental block. Chérifa has much to see if she is to make headway and I cannot do it for her. It is for her to decide.

A hasty change of plan — we weave our way through the streets according to the code, prevaricating with the imponderable. Everything else — the Bardo Museum, the great mosques, the Ketchaoua mosque and the Jewish one, the Cathédrale du Sacré-Coeur, the basilica of Notre Dame d’Afrique, the citadel, the Palace of the Raïs, the Villa du Centenaire, the Cemetery of the Two Princesses, the Tomb of the Christian, the Roman ruins of Tipaza and the rest — will have to wait for another time, if one day the wind should change.

We wolfed down pizza in a ramshackle hovel no worse than the next, swigged lemonade from the bottle and headed home by bus having abandoned Mourad — who thought he spotted some old comrades in arms — in a bar that seemed somewhat mysterious through the thick pall of smoke.

I felt Chérifa draw away. She looked at me as though I were a stranger or a relative in whom she’d just discovered some bizarre vice. It was at that moment that I truly understood the meaning of despair.

Education may well be salvation, but it is also the thing that most clearly divides people.

Had it happened, this thing that was inevitable? This is what I asked myself as I turned the key in the door. Was this merely foreboding? No, there was a clear sign: a thick, heavy silence. That was unlike Chérifa, who surrounds herself with noise, all day long she has the TV, the radio, the record player or the CD player turned up so loud the walls are queasy and my poor ears are assailed. Ever since she showed up, I’ve forgotten the meaning of silence. The silence that greeted me now was heavy and impenetrable, but it was also unusual, deafening, glacial. I ran inside, I shouted, I screamed. I stopped and then I ran again, I ran faster, screaming fit to burst my lungs: ‘Chérifaaaaa… Chérifaaaa… Chérifaa… Chérifa… Chéri…!’ Then I fell to my knees… I don’t remember where. I don’t know how, but I found myself on the sofa, head in my hands, trembling and feverish. I felt a terrible pain as, on the horizon, I saw a whole tsunami of pain bearing down on me.

Papa, Maman and Yacine are long gone, God called them to Himself, then that idiot Sofiane let himself be caught up in his own delusions, now it is Chérifa’s turn. She is nothing to me, just a stray chick who turned up uninvited, but the love I feel for her has made her my little sister, my daughter, my baby. What have I done to deserve this?

Then suddenly I noticed that her clothes were still strewn about the place, under my feet, draped over the TV, the table, the dresser, the chairs. Where our clothes are, we are. Or not far off. I’m impulsive by nature, I always overreact, I’m my own worst enemy, I act first and think later.

It was a terrible week, twice the little hussy ran away — brief flits of a few hours, but so nerve-racking they have left me wiped out. These are obviously portents.

Like the fledgling that flaps its wings on a branch, is she preparing to take flight?

Day by day I am discovering that our lives only partly belong to us. And there is no guarantee that the part we can control is more crucial than that part we cannot.

She is utterly astounding, that girl. I would never have imagined that the dusty old douars of Algeria were capable of producing such a character. In the godforsaken places stuck out in the back of beyond, you come to expect anything — lunatics, neurotics, egotists, runaways, snobs — anything but this. These are city problems, for crying out loud.

What’s worse is that I’ve got used to her little disappearing acts. The time will come when I don’t even notice her disappear and reappear, it’s like having a cat, you only notice it’s missing when you try to feed it: ‘Here, puss-puss-puss, where are you, you little pest?’, and when it finally shows up wanting food, it plants itself in front of the fridge like a carrion eater and yowls, ‘Miaow, miaow, open this thing for me!’ You end up wondering who is dependent on whom. It’s blackmail and I won’t stand for it.

The way Chérifa talks about her comings and goings drives me mad. You’d think she was going to the bakery or coming back from the dairy: ‘Hello, a pitcher of milk, please, thanks, bye.’ I’m the one who is polite and apologetic, she is the one who gets angry, jabs her finger. Besides, there is no dairy around here any more, no milk churns, no cows, no goats, nothing, we buy our milk from the local shop like everything else, it comes in plastic cartons full of botulism. And the bread they sell tastes like soap.

Getting information out of Chérifa is like pulling teeth.

The comparison to a cat suits her, she disappeared last night just because she saw some guy tom-catting under the balcony — the same guy I saw slipping between the poplar trees after midnight the day after she first showed up. It’s reassuring to know we weren’t under surveillance, we were just being stalked! Phew! Well, that’s one mystery solved. This tom-cat lives in a nameless shantytown near Bab el-Oued between Rampe Valée and Climat-de-France, the neighbouring ghetto. He’d been hanging around when he spotted Chérifa looking for my place. I don’t know whether he suddenly fell head over heels in love or whether he took a moment to think about things, but one way or another, he clearly decided he had a good reason for hanging around the neighbourhood and loitering under my window. Ever since, this guy has been tracking us, slipping in the shadows, waiting for mektoub to tell him when to go for broke. Last night, he finally did.

‘So what happened?’ I asked.

‘Nothing. We talked for a bit outside.’

‘What else?’

‘We went for a walk around the block, not that it’s any of your business! He wanted to show me some of the damage from the flooding in Bab el-Oued last year.’

‘I suppose it was exciting. A thousand people drowned, as many more disappeared and God knows how many houses were swept away. So, what else?’

‘The poor guy, he lost his father and his brothers and most of his friends in the flood.’

‘That’s very sad… and?’

‘We went down as far as Sostara to look at the little restaurant where he threw himself on a home-made bomb. He used to work as a labourer down on the docks and he was on his lunch break. He lost one arm, one leg, one ear, one eye, his nose, a…’

‘The poor guy, unemployed and disabled, he’s really not had much luck, but there are worse things, believe me… what else?’

‘Around his way, people call him “Missing Parts”.’

‘Charming. But he didn’t drag you into some tramp’s hovel to watch television, that’s the main thing.’

‘We did go to his place in Climat-de-France, he wanted to introduce me to his mother.’

‘He’s got some ulterior motive.’

‘What?’

‘Never mind. So how is she, his mother?’

‘She was hit in the head by a stray bullet during the attack at the Marché de la Lyre where she sells pancakes. She doesn’t get out any more, poor thing.’

‘So, after all that, did he tell you what it was he wanted?’

‘Just to talk. The poor guy is lonely, he lost half his friends in disasters and the other half in terrorist attacks. He says girls make better friends because they’re more likely to survive.’

‘If he comes prowling around here again, tell him that girl friends eventually end up getting married at which point “just talking” is almost as dangerous as sticking your nose in a grinder.’

Chérifa wasn’t listening, and then stupidly she said, ‘I prefer guys, girls can be really bitchy, they steal your stuff and they’re always jealous.’

‘I agree, but that’s not the point. So where exactly were you all day today?’

‘Dunno.’

‘Don’t come the innocent with me, young lady, I want you to tell me right now. If you’re going to get yourself killed or kidnapped, I need to know how and by whom.’

‘I swear, you’re crazy. People go for a walk all the time.’

‘True, but you don’t know what else people get up to!’

Dear God, why is everything so difficult with some people? This crazy girl is calling me crazy, what is this country coming to? Eventually I got it out of her, but by then I was beside myself.

‘I just wandered around the neighbourhood,’ she said.

‘Did you indeed? And what’s new since the last century?’

‘I had a chat with Tante Zohra.’

‘Did you tell her the truth? I hope you didn’t, because she’ll use it against you, she’s never happier than when she’s meddling in my business.’

‘We just talked.’

‘And then?’

‘I went into the old house.’

‘You did what? Say that again!’

‘Over there… the house across the road.’

‘What?? Say that again!’

‘The old house. The man waved at me from his window… so I went upstairs…’

‘Bluebeard?!’

‘He’s a sweet little old man.’

‘What?? Say that again!’

‘The old guy across the road! Are you deaf or what??’

‘Has he got a beard? Is it blue?’

‘No, he’s got a head of white hair and thick glasses perched on his nose.’

‘But he’s a human being? A real live person?’

‘He speaks some language I don’t understand… D’you think it might be French?’

‘How should I know?’

‘He talks the way you talk when you’re angry with me.’

‘Well then, it’s French, I only speak it when I’m angry.’

‘He speaks Algerian too, but with an accent.’

‘That’s the pied-noir accent, you’d never mistake it for an English accent. So what did he say, this man?’

‘He told me that I was pretty and charming,’ she simpers.

‘Well, well, Bluebeard was trying to chat you up! I’ve always known how things were going to turn out, I’ve known since I was a little girl.’

‘He asked me if you had news from Sofiane, he said he hopes to see him again soon.’

‘It’s a good chat-up line, I’ll give him that. What else? I want to know everything.’

‘Nothing. He made us some hot chocolate. He’s got loads of stuff in his house, it’s lovely, he’s got furniture and things, paintings, souvenirs, he’s got cats…’

‘So, apart from the chocolate and the cats, did he give you a tour of the rest of the museum? Or have you forgotten? And how is it that I’ve never seen this old friend of yours?’

‘His door doesn’t open on to our street, it opens on to the hill on the other side. Anyway, he never goes out.’

‘Oh, so there’s a secret passageway. That’s another mystery solved. It’s amazing how many mysteries get cleared up when you’re around. Before long, we’ll know too much, and that’s dangerous. So, what happened next?’

‘He gave me this necklace — look… It belonged to his daughter, she died a long time ago.’

‘That’s what he said, he could just as easily have cut her throat like he did his six wives.’

‘What are you on about? She was an only child, she was ten years old.’

‘I know what I’m talking about.’

‘…’

This snot-nosed little girl has made herself at home in the neighbourhood a lot faster than I did; after thirty-five years of exhausting comings and goings, I still haven’t really settled. It’s intolerable, she’s going to ruin my retirement. She’ll turn my house into the Cotton Club, people will come and unravel my secrets, torment my ghosts, annoy my aliens.

No, no, no — I won’t stand for it.

While I was about it, I bawled her out good and proper: don’t go out, don’t talk to strangers, look after yourself, be suspicious of everything and everyone, it’s not rocket science, for crying out loud! Then I calmly explained the situation, the strange things that go on in other people’s heads, the deaths by the dozen, by the hundreds, the thousands, the tens of thousands, the hundreds of…

‘You’re completely off your head!’

‘And you’re a gullible little fool! The people who died, they weren’t suspicious either. Don’t you know where you live? There’s a war on and it didn’t start this morning! People here have all but forgotten that it’s possible to die a natural death, but mademoiselle here goes out for a little walk, she chats to people… she drinks hot chocolate!’

Thinking about it, I didn’t use her pregnancy against her, that might have made her toe the line. I could have scared her with talk of complications, acute septicaemia, ovarian cancer, the foetus turning into a crocodile and I don’t know what else. With three months to go before you’re due, you don’t take risks, you put on the brakes, you look after your health, you get ready for when the baby arrives. You talk, you plan, you prepare, you organise. And mostly you worry; for a child, the future is a big deal.

But all Chérifa thinks about is herself, about living in the moment. The girl is so self-centred.

I don’t know what I said to her, I wasn’t thinking straight, I carried on yelling at her, repeating myself, probably. That’s me — a sour-faced, cantankerous bitch; when I get angry, I don’t know when to stop… I… Was it something I said? I think… I’m sure… I don’t know, at some point she froze, her eyes almost popped out of her head, then she turned her back on me and disappeared into the labyrinth. It haunts me still — what was it that I said? What was it that I called her? Knowing me, whatever it was, I probably laced it with my bitterest venom.

The following day, coming home from the Hôpital Parnet after an arduous shift, I knew the house was empty before I even heard the booming silence. I didn’t try to talk myself out of it, I couldn’t bring myself to, I was petrified. Chérifa is gone. A dead voice whispered the words into my ear, whispered them over and over. I didn’t understand, I stared into space, I couldn’t make sense of anything. Then something inside my head exploded, a terrible howl that chilled my blood, and I threw down my bag and I ran. Her bedroom was neat and tidy, but this was no miracle, it was proof: her clothes had disappeared and the baby’s clothes too. And of that scent of troubled little girl, all that remained was the vaguest whiff of inert gas. It was then I truly felt that death was busy digging my grave.

I curled up in a corner and I waited. What else could I do? Like the film The Langoliers, with its plot about how ‘time rips’ affect humans, I watched, dazed and helpless, as piece by piece the world disappeared before my eyes in an apocalyptic silence. Then I reacted. I have this thing I do, something I made up for Louiza when, as girls, we were faced by the unfathomable violence of the world: whenever you’re afraid of something, you squeeze your eyes tight shut and think of the opposite and everything balances out. Chérifa will come back, I know she will. She’ll come back soon. I could cling to life.

I’m fickle, that’s just how I am!