The Angels Die

1

I owe my nickname to the shopkeeper in Graba.

The first time he saw me enter his lair, he looked me up and down, shocked by the state I was in and the way I smelt, and asked me if I came from the earth or the night. I was in bad shape, half dead from diarrhoea and exhaustion as a result of a long forced march across scrubland.

‘I’m from Turambo, sir.’

The shopkeeper smacked his lips, which were as thick as a buffalo frog’s. The name of my village meant nothing to him. ‘Turambo? Which side of hell is that on?’

‘I don’t know, sir. I need half a douro’s worth of yeast and I’m in a hurry.’

The shopkeeper turned to his half-empty shelves and, holding his chin between his thumb and index finger, repeated, ‘Turambo? Turambo? Never heard of it.’

From that day on, whenever I passed his shop, he’d cry out, ‘Hey, Turambo! Which side of hell is your village on?’ His voice carried such a long way that gradually everyone started calling me Turambo.

My village had been wiped off the map by a landslide a week earlier. It was like the end of the world. Wild lightning flashes streaked the darkness, and the thunder seemed to be trying to smash the mountains to pieces. You couldn’t tell men from animals any more; they were all tearing in every direction, screaming like creatures possessed. In a few hours, the torrents of rain had swept away our hovels, our goats and donkeys, our cries and prayers, and all our landmarks.

By morning, apart from the survivors shivering on the mud-covered rocks, nothing remained of the village. My father had vanished into thin air. We managed to dredge up a few bodies, but there was no trace of the broken face that had survived the deluge of fire and steel in the Great War. We followed the ravages of the flood as far as the plain, searched bushes and ravines, lifted the trunks of uprooted trees, but all in vain.

An old man prayed that the victims might be at rest, my mother shed a tear in memory of her husband, and that was it.

We considered putting everything back that had been scattered by the storm, but we didn’t have the means, or the strength to believe it was possible. Our animals were dead, our meagre crops were ruined, our zinc shelters and our zaribas were beyond repair. Where the village had been, there was nothing but a mudslide on the side of the mountain, like a huge stream of vomit.

After assessing the damage, my mother said to us, ‘Mortal man has only one fixed abode: the grave. As long as he lives, there’s nothing he can take for granted, neither home nor country.’

We bundled up the few things the disaster had deigned to leave us and set off for Graba, a ghetto area of Sidi Bel Abbès where wretches thrown off their lands by typhus or the greed of the powerful arrived by the score.

With my father gone, my young uncle Mekki, who wasn’t very far into his teens, declared himself the head of the family. He had a legitimate claim, being the eldest male.

There were five of us in a shack wedged between a military dumping ground and a scraggy orchard. There was my mother, a sturdy Berber with a tattooed forehead, not very beautiful but solid; my aunt Rokaya, whose pedlar husband had walked out on her over a decade earlier; her daughter Nora, who was more or less the same age as me; my fifteen-year-old uncle Mekki, and me, four years his junior.

Since we didn’t know anyone, we had only ourselves to rely on.

I missed my father.

Strangely, I don’t remember ever seeing him up close. Ever since he’d come back from the war, his face shattered by a piece of shrapnel, he’d kept his distance, sitting all day long in the shade of a solitary tree. When my cousin Nora took him his meals, she’d approach him on tiptoe, as if she was feeding a wild animal. I waited for him to return to earth, but he refused to come down from his cloud of depression. After a while, I ended up confusing him with someone I may once have seen and eventually ignored him completely. His disappearance merely confirmed his absence.

And yet in Graba, I couldn’t help thinking about him every day.

Mekki promised we wouldn’t stay long in this shanty town if we worked hard and made enough money to rebuild our lives somewhere else. My mother and my aunt decided to start making biscuits, which my uncle would sell to cheap restaurants. I wanted to lend a hand — kids a lot weaker than me were working as porters, donkey drivers and soup vendors, and doing well — but my uncle refused to hire me. I was bright, he had to admit that, I just wasn’t bright enough to handle rascals capable of beating the devil himself at his own game. He was particularly afraid I’d be skinned alive by the first little runt I came across.

And so I was left to my own devices.

In Turambo, my mother had told me about dubious shanty towns inhabited by creatures so monstrous I had bad dreams about them, but I’d never imagined I’d end up in one of them one day. And now here I was, slap bang in the middle of one, but this was no bedtime story. Graba was like an open-air asylum. It was as if a tidal wave had swept across the hinterland and tons of human flotsam and jetsam had somehow been tossed here. Labourers and beasts of burden jostled each other in the same narrow alleys. The rumbling of carts and the barking of dogs created a din that made your head spin. The place swarmed with crippled veterans and unemployed ex-convicts, and as for beggars, they could moan until their voices gave out, they’d never get a grain of corn to put in their mouths. The only thing people had to share was bad luck.

Everywhere amid the rickety shacks, where every alley was an ordeal to walk down, snotty-nosed kids engaged in fierce organised battles. Even though they barely came up to your knee, they already had to fend for themselves, and the future they could look forward to was no brighter than their early years. The birthright automatically went to the one who hit hardest, and devotion to your parents meant nothing once you’d given your allegiance to a gang leader.

I wasn’t scared of these street urchins; I was scared of becoming like them. In Turambo, nobody swore, nobody looked their elders directly in the face; people showed respect, and if ever a kid got a bit carried away, you just had to clear your throat and he’d behave himself. But in this hellhole that stank of piss, every laugh, every greeting, every sentence came wrapped in obscenity.

It was in Graba that I first heard adults speak crudely.

The shopkeeper was getting some air outside his shack, his belly hanging down over his knees. A carter said, ‘So, fatty, when’s the baby due?’

‘God knows.’

‘Boy or girl?’

‘A baby elephant,’ said the shopkeeper, putting his hand on his flies. ‘Want me to show you its trunk?’

I was shocked.

You couldn’t hear yourself breathe until the sun went down. Then the ghetto would wrap itself around its troubles and, soothed by the echoes of its foul acts, allow itself to fade into the darkness.

In Graba, night didn’t come, didn’t fall, but, rather, poured down as though from a huge cauldron of fresh tar; it cascaded from the sky, thick and elastic, engulfing hills and forests, pushing its blackness deep into our minds. For a few moments, like hikers caught unawares by an avalanche, people would fall abruptly silent. Not a sound, not a rustle in the bushes. Then, little by little, you would hear the crack of a strap, the clatter of a gate, the cry of a baby, kids squabbling. Life would slowly resume and, like termites nibbling at the shadows, the anxieties of the night would come to the surface. And just as you blew out the candle to go to sleep, you’d hear drunks yelling and screaming in the most terrifying way; anyone lingering on the streets had to hurry home if they didn’t want their bodies to be found lying in pools of blood early the following morning.

‘When are we going back to Turambo?’ I kept asking Mekki.

‘When the sea gives back to the land what it took away,’ he would answer with a sigh.

We had a neighbour in the shack opposite ours, a young widow of about thirty who would have been beautiful if only she’d taken a little care of herself. Always in an old dress, her hair in a mess, she’d sometimes buy bread from us on credit. She’d rush in, mutter an excuse, snatch her order from my mother’s hands and go back home as quickly as she’d come.

We thought she was strange; my aunt was sure the poor woman was possessed by a jinn.

This widow had a little boy who was also strange. In the morning, she’d take him outside and order him to sit at the foot of the wall and not move for any reason. The boy was obedient. He could stay in that blazing heat for hours, sweating and blinking his eyes, salivating over a crust of bread, with a vague smile on his face. Seeing him sitting in the same spot, nibbling at his mouldy piece of bread, made me so uneasy that I’d recite a verse to ward off the evil spirits that seemed to keep him company. Then, unexpectedly, he started following me from a distance. Whether I went to the scrub or the military dumping ground, every time I turned round I saw him right behind me, a walking scarecrow, his crust in his mouth. I’d try to chase him away, threatening him, even throwing stones at him, but he’d just retreat for a few moments then, at a bend in the path, reappear behind me, always keeping at a safe distance.

I went to see his mother and asked her to keep her kid tied up because I was tired of him always following me. She listened without interrupting, then told me he had lost his father and so he needed company. I told her I already found it hard to bear my own shadow. ‘It’s your choice,’ she sighed. I expected her to lose her temper like the other women in the neighbourhood whenever they disagreed with something, but she just went back to her chores as though nothing had happened. Her resignation made me feel sorry for her. I took the boy under my wing. He was older than me, but judging by the naive grin on his face, his brain must have been smaller than a pinhead. And he never spoke. I’d take him to the woods to pick jujubes or up the hill to look down at the railway tracks glittering among the stones. In the distance, you could see goatherds surrounded by their emaciated flocks and hear the little bells teasing the lethargic silence. Below the hill, there was a gypsy encampment, recognisable by its dilapidated caravans.

At night, the gypsies would light fires and pluck their guitars until dawn. Even though they mostly twiddled their thumbs the lids of their cooking pots were constantly clattering. I think their God must have been quite a good one. True, he didn’t exactly shower them with his benevolence, but at least he made sure they always had enough to eat.

We met Pedro the gypsy in the scrub. He was pretty much the same age as us and knew all the burrows where game went to hide. Once his basket was filled, he’d take out a sandwich and share it with us. We became friends. One day, he invited us to the camp. That’s how I learnt to take a close look at these tricksters whose food fell from the skies.

In spite of a quick temper, Pedro’s mother was basically good-natured. She was a fat redhead with a moustache, a lively temperament, and breasts so large you couldn’t tell where they stopped. She never wore anything under her dress, so when she sat on the ground you could see her pubic hair. Her husband was a broken-down septuagenarian who used an ear trumpet to hear and spent his time sucking at a pipe as old as the hills. He’d laugh whenever you looked at him, and open his mouth to reveal a single rotten tooth that made his gums look all the more repulsive. And yet in the evening, when the sun went down behind the mountains, the old man would wedge his violin under his chin and draw from the strings of his instrument laments that were the colour of the sunset and filled us with sweet melancholy. I’d never again hear anyone play the violin better than he did.

Pedro had lots of talents. He could wrap his feet round the back of his neck and stand on his hands, he could juggle with torches; his great ambition was to join a circus. He’d describe it to me: a big tent with corridors and a ring where people went to cheer wild animals that could do amazing things and acrobats who performed dangerous stunts ten metres above the ground. Pedro would gush, telling me how they would also exhibit human monsters, dwarfs, animals with two heads and women with bodies you could only dream about. ‘They’re like us,’ he’d say. ‘They’re always travelling, except that they have bears, lions and boa constrictors with them.’

I thought he was making it all up. I found it hard to picture a bear riding a bicycle, or men with painted faces and shoes half a metre long. But Pedro was good at presenting things, and even when the world he raved about was far beyond my understanding, I happily went along with his crazy stories. Besides, everybody in the camp let their imagination run riot. You’d think you were at an academy for the greatest storytellers on earth. There was old Gonsho, a little man with tattoos from his thighs up to his neck, who claimed he’d been killed in an ambush. ‘I was dead for a week,’ he’d say. ‘No angel came to play me a lullaby on his harp, and no demon stuck his pitchfork up my arse. All I did was drift from sky to sky. Believe it or not, I didn’t see any Garden of Eden or any Gehenna.’

‘That makes sense,’ said Pepe, the elder of the group, who was as ancient as a museum piece. ‘First, everybody in the world would have to be dead. Then there’ll be the Last Judgement, and only then will some be moved to heaven and others to hell.’

‘You’re not going to tell me that people who kicked the bucket thousands of years ago are going to have to wait for there to be nobody left on earth before they’re judged by the Lord?’

‘I’ve explained it to you before, Gonsho,’ Pepe replied condescendingly. ‘Forty days after they die, people become eligible for reincarnation. The Lord can’t judge us on one life alone. So he brings us back wealthy, then poor, then as kings, then as tramps, as believers, as brigands, and so on, to see how we behave. He isn’t going to create someone who’s in the shit and then condemn him without giving him a chance to redeem himself. In order to be fair, he makes us wear all kinds of hats, then he takes an overall look at all our different lives, so that he can decide on our fate.’

‘If what you say is true, why is it I’ve come back with the same face and in the same body?’

And Pepe, like an infinitely patient teacher, replied, ‘You were dead for only a week. It takes forty days to pass on. And besides, gypsies are the only ones who have the privilege to be reborn as gypsies. Because we have a mission. We’re constantly travelling in order to explore the paths of destiny. We’ve been given the task of seeking the Truth. That’s why since the dawn of time, we’ve never stayed in one place.’

Making a circular movement with his finger at his temple, Pepe encouraged Gonsho to think for a few moments about what he’d just told him.

The debate could have gone on indefinitely without either of them agreeing with the other. For gypsies, arguing wasn’t about what you believed, it was about being stubborn. When you had an opinion, you held on to it at all costs because the worst way to lose face was to abandon your point of view.

Gypsies were colourful, fascinating, crazy characters, and they all had a religious sense of responsibility towards their families. They could disagree, yell at one another, and even come to blows, but they all deferred to the Mama, who kept an eye on everything.

Ah, the Mama! She’d given me her blessing the moment she’d seen me. She was a kind of impoverished dowager, lounging on her embroidered cushions at the far end of her caravan, which was piled high with gifts and relics; the tribe worshipped her like a sacred cow. I’d have liked to throw myself into her arms and sink into her flesh.

I felt comfortable among the gypsies. My days were filled with fun and surprises. They gave me food and let me enjoy myself as I wished … Then, one morning, the caravans were gone. All that was left of the camp was a few traces of their stay: rutted tracks, a few shoes with holes in them, a shawl hanging from a bush, dog mess. Never had a place seemed to me as ruined as this patch abandoned by the gypsies and returned to its bleak former state. For weeks I went back, conjuring up memories in the hope of hearing an echo, a laugh, a voice, but there was no answer, not even the sound of a violin to act as an excuse for my sorrow. With the gypsies gone, I was back to a grim future, to dull, endless days that went round in circles like a wild animal in a cage.

The days passed but didn’t advance, monotonous, blind, empty; it was as if they were walking over my body.

At home, I was an extra burden. ‘Go back to the street; may the earth swallow you. Can’t you see we’re working?’

I was scared of the street.

You couldn’t go to the military dumping ground any more since the numbers of scavengers had increased, and woe betide anyone who dared fight them over a piece of rubbish.

I fell back on the railway and spent my time watching out for the train and picturing myself on it. I ended up jumping on. The local train had broken down and was stuck on the rails, like a huge caterpillar about to give up the ghost. Two mechanics were fussing around the locomotive. I approached the last carriage. The door was open. I hoisted myself on board with my partner in misfortune, sat down on an empty sack, and gazed up at the sky through the slits in the roof. I imagined myself travelling across green countryside, bridges and farms, fleeing the ghetto where nothing good ever happened. Suddenly, the carriage started moving. The boy staggered and clung to the wall. The locomotive whistle made me leap to my feet. Outside, the countryside began slowly rolling by. I jumped off first, almost breaking my ankle on the ballast. But the boy wouldn’t let go of the wall. Jump off, I’ll catch you, I shouted. He was paralysed and wouldn’t jump. The more the train gathered speed, the more I panicked. Jump, jump … I started running, the ballast cutting into my feet like broken bottles. The boy was crying. His moaning rose above the din of the livestock carriages. I realised he wasn’t going to jump. It was up to me to get him. As usual. I ran and ran, my chest burning, my feet bleeding. I was two fingers away from gaining a handhold, three fingers, four, ten, thirty … It wasn’t because I was slowing down; the iron monster was growing bolder as the locomotive increased its output of smoke. At the end of a frantic run, I stopped, my legs cut to pieces. All I could do was watch the train get further away until it vanished in the dust.

I followed the track for many miles, limping under a blazing sun … I caught sight of a figure and rushed towards it, thinking it was the boy. It wasn’t him.

The sun was starting to go down. I was already a long way from Graba. I had to get home before nightfall, or I might get lost too.

The widow was at our house, pale with worry. When she saw me on my own, she rushed out into the street and turned even paler than before.

‘What have you done with my baby?’ She shook me angrily. ‘Where’s my child? He was with you. You were supposed to look after him.’

‘The train —’

‘What train?’

I felt a tightness in my throat. I couldn’t swallow.

‘What about the train? Say something!’

‘It took him away.’

Silence.

The widow didn’t seem to understand. She furrowed her brow. I felt her fingers go limp on my shoulders. Against all expectations, she gave a little laugh and turned pensive. I thought she’d bounce back, sink her claws into me, break up our shack and us with it, but she leant against the wall and slid down to the ground. She stayed like that, with her elbows on her knees and her head in her hands, a dark look in her eyes. A tear ran down her cheek; she didn’t wipe it away. ‘Whatever God decides, we must accept,’ she sighed in a muted voice. ‘Everything that happens in this world happens according to His will.’

My mother tried to put a sympathetic hand on her shoulder. She shook it off with a gesture of disgust. ‘Don’t touch me. I don’t want your pity. Pity never fed anyone. I don’t need anybody any more. Now that my son’s gone, I can go too. I’ve been wanting to put an end to this lousy life for years. But my son wasn’t right in the head. I couldn’t see him surviving among people who are worse than wolves … I can’t wait to have a word with the One who created me just to make me suffer.’

‘Are you mad? What are you talking about? It’s a sin to kill yourself.’

‘I don’t think there could possibly be a hell worse than mine, either in the sky or anywhere else.’

She looked up at me and it was as if the distress of the whole of humanity was concentrated in her eyes.

‘Torn to pieces by a train! My God! How can I do away with a child like that after putting him through so much?’

I was speechless, upset by her ranting.

She pressed down on the palms of her hands and got unsteadily to her feet. ‘Show me where my baby is. Is there anything left of him for me to bury?’

‘He isn’t dead!’ I cried.

She shuddered. Her eyes struck me with the ferocity of lightning. ‘What? Did you leave my son bleeding on the railway tracks?’

‘He wasn’t run over by the train. We got on it, and when the train started, I jumped off and he stayed on. I shouted to him to jump but he didn’t dare. I ran after the train and walked along the rails, but he didn’t get off anywhere.’

The widow put her head in her hands. Once again, she didn’t seem to understand. Suddenly, she stiffened. I saw her facial expression go from confusion to relief, then from relief to panic, and then from panic to hysteria. ‘Oh, God! My son is lost! They’ll eat him alive. He doesn’t even know how to hold out his hand. Oh, my God! Where’s my baby?’

She took me by the throat and started to shake me, almost dislocating my neck. My mother and aunt tried to get me away from her; she pushed them back with a kick and, totally losing her mind, started screaming and spinning like a tornado, knocking down everything in her path. Suddenly, she howled and collapsed, her eyes rolled back, her body convulsed.

My mother got up. She had scratches all over. With amazing calm, she fetched a large jailer’s key and slipped it into the widow’s fist — a common practice with people who fainted from dizziness or shock.

Dumbfounded, my aunt ordered her daughter to go and fetch Mekki before the madwoman returned to her senses.

Mekki didn’t beat about the bush. Nora had told him everything. He was all fired up and didn’t want to hear any more. In our family, you hit first, and then you talked. You bastard, I’m going to kill you. He rushed at me and started beating me up. I thought he’d never stop.

My mother didn’t intervene.

It was men’s business.

Having beaten me thoroughly, my uncle ordered me to take him to the railway track and show him the direction the train had gone in. I could barely stand. The ballast had injured my feet, and the beating had finished me off.

‘How am I supposed to look for him in the dark?’ Mekki cursed, leaving the shack.

At dawn, Mekki wasn’t back. The widow came to ask for news every five minutes, in a state of mental collapse.

Three days passed and still there was nothing on the horizon. After a week, we began to fear the worst. My aunt was constantly on her knees, praying. My mother kept going round in circles in the one room that made up our house. ‘I suppose you’re proud of yourself,’ she grunted, resisting the impulse to hit me. ‘You see where your mischief has landed us? It’s all your fault. For all we know, the jackals have long since chewed your uncle’s bones. What will become of us without him?’

Just when we were beginning to lose hope, we heard the widow cry out. It was about four in the afternoon. We ran out of the shack. Mekki could barely stand up, his face was dark, and he was covered in dirt. The widow was hugging her child tightly to her, pulling up his gaiters to see if he was hurt, feeling his scalp for any bumps or injuries; the boy showed the effects of wandering and hunger, but was safe and sound. He was staring at me dull-eyed, and pointing his finger at me the way you point at a culprit.

2

Ogres are nothing but hallucinations born of our superstitions, and an excuse for them, which is why we are no better than they are, because, as both false witnesses and stern judges, we often condemn before deliberating.

The ogre known as Graba wasn’t as monstrous as all that.

From the hill that served as my vantage point, I had seen its people as plague victims and its slums as deadly traps. I was wrong. Seen from close up, the ghetto was simply living as best it could. It might have seemed like purgatory, but it wasn’t. In Graba, people weren’t paying for their crimes or their sins, they were just poor, that was all.

Driven by boredom and idleness, I started venturing further and further into the ghetto. I was just beginning to feel part of it when I had my baptism of fire. Which of course I’d been expecting.

A carter offered me a douro to help him load about a hundred bundles of wood onto his cart. Once the job was done, he paid me half the promised sum, swearing on his children’s heads that it was all he had on him. He seemed sincere. I was watching him walk away when a voice behind me cried out, ‘Are you trying to muscle in on my territory?’

It was the Daho brothers. They were barring my way.

I sensed things were about to go downhill. Peerless street fighters, they reigned supreme over the local kids. Whenever a boy came running through the crowd, his face reduced to a pulp, it meant the Dahos weren’t far away. They were only twelve or thirteen, but talked through the sides of their mouths like old lags. Behind them, their bodyguards rubbed their hands at the prospect of a thrashing. The Daho brothers couldn’t just go on their way. Wherever they stopped, blood had to flow. It was the rule. Kings hate truces, and the twins didn’t believe in taking a well-earned rest. Squat and faun-like, their faces so identical you felt you were seeing the same disaster twice, they were as fast as whips and just as sharp. Adults nicknamed them Gog and Magog, two irredeemable little pests bound to end up on the scaffold as surely as ageing virgins were destined to marry their halfwit cousins. There was no getting away from them and I was angry with myself for having crossed their path.

‘I don’t want to fight,’ I said.

This spontaneous surrender was greeted with sardonic laughter.

‘Hand over what you’ve got in your pocket.’

I took out the coin the carter had given me and held it out. My hand was steady. I wasn’t looking for trouble. I wanted to get home in one piece.

‘You have to be nuts to be content with this,’ Daho One said, weighing my earnings contemptuously in his hand. ‘You don’t move a cartload of stuff for half a douro, you little toerag. Any idiot would have asked for three times this much.’

‘I didn’t know,’ I said apologetically.

‘Turn out your pockets, now.’

‘I’ve already given you everything I have.’

‘Liar.’

I could see in their eyes that confiscating my pay was just the start and that what mattered was the thrashing. I immediately went on the defensive, determined to give as good as I got. The Daho brothers always hit first, without warning, hoping to take their victim by surprise. They would strike simultaneously, in a perfectly synchronised movement, with a headbutt to the nose and a kick between the legs to disconcert their prey. The rest was just a formality.

‘Aren’t you ashamed of yourselves?’ a providential voice rang out. ‘A whole bunch of you picking on a little kid?’

The voice belonged to a shopkeeper standing in the doorway of his establishment with his hands on his hips. His tarboosh was tilted at a rakish angle over one eye and his moustache was turned up at the ends. He moved his fat carcass to adjust his Turkish sirwal and, advancing into the sunlight, looked around at the gang before letting his keen eyes fall on the twins.

‘If you want to take him on, do it one at a time.’

I’d been expecting the shopkeeper to come to my rescue, but all he was doing was organising my beating in a more conventional way, which wasn’t exactly a lucky break for me.

Daho One accepted the challenge. Sneering, his eyes shining with wicked glee, he rolled up his sleeves.

‘Move back,’ the shopkeeper ordered the rest of the gang, ‘and don’t even think of joining in.’

A wave of anticipation went through the gang as they formed a circle around us. Daho One’s snarl increased as he looked me up and down. He feinted to the left and tried to punch me but only brushed my temple. He didn’t get a second chance because my fist shot out in retaliation and, much to my surprise, hit its target. The scourge of the local kids flopped like a puppet and collapsed in the dust, his arms outstretched. The gang gasped in outraged amazement. The other twin stood there stunned for a few moments, unable to understand or admit what his eyes were telling him, then, in a rage, he ordered his brother to get up. But his brother didn’t get up. He was sleeping the sleep of the just.

Sensing the turn things seemed to be taking, the shopkeeper came and stood beside me and we both looked at the gang picking up their martyr, who was deep in an impenetrable dream filled with bells and birdsong.

‘You didn’t play fair,’ cried a frizzy-haired little runt with legs like a wading bird. ‘You tricked him. You’ll pay for that.’

‘We’ll be back for you,’ Daho Two vowed, wiping his snotty nose with the back of his hand.

The shopkeeper was a little disappointed by my rapid victory. He had been hoping for a more substantial show, full of falls and suspense and dodges and devastating punches, thus getting a decent slice of entertainment for free. Reluctantly he admitted to me that, all things considered, he was delighted that someone had succeeded in soundly thrashing that lowlife, who blighted the ghetto and thought he could get away with anything because there was nobody to take him on.

‘You’re really quick,’ he said, flatteringly. ‘Where did you learn to hit like that?’

‘That’s the first time I was ever in a fight, sir.’

‘Wow, such promise! How would you like to work for me? It isn’t difficult. All you have to do is keep guard when I’m not there and handle a few little things.’

I took the bait without even asking about my wages, only too happy to be able to earn my crust and make a contribution to the family’s war chest.

‘When do I start, sir?’

‘Right away,’ he said, pointing reverently at his dilapidated shop.

I had no way of knowing that when charitable people intervene to save your skin, they don’t necessarily plan to leave any of it on your back.

The shopkeeper was called Zane, and it was he who taught me that the devil had a name.

What Zane referred to as little things were more like the labours of Hercules. No sooner had I finished one task than I was given another. I wasn’t allowed a lunch break or even a moment to catch my breath. I was told to tidy the shambles that was the premises (a veritable Ali Baba’s cave), stack the shelves, polish the bric-a-brac, dislodge the spiders, a bucket of water in one hand and a ceiling brush in the other, and deal with deliveries. Before giving me a trial, Zane subjected me to ‘loyalty’ tests, leaving money and other bait lying around to see how honest I was; I didn’t touch a thing.

Within a few months, I learnt more about human nature than an old soldier. Zane was like a first-class school, and the people he came into contact with provided wonderful lessons in life. The most curious characters would creep into his shop, some with suspect packages, others with futile projects. Zane — smuggler, blackmailer, fence, snitch and pimp — controlled his circle with an iron fist, and he had a finger in every pie; there wasn’t a single deal, even the most insignificant, carried out in Graba that he didn’t get a cut from. He would buy for next to nothing and sell at exorbitant prices, and wouldn’t take no for an answer. Everyone in Graba owed him something. People would go down on their knees to him, prepared to do any dirty work to merit his generosity. Zane had no qualms. For a can of food or a trifling bit of credit, he would ask for the moon. He shamelessly exploited every opportunity and took every advantage he could of people’s misfortunes. He was a pawnbroker too. When the item was something of value, a decent piece of jewellery for example, he would make the excuse that he didn’t have enough money available and ask the customer to come back the following day, which gave him time to arrange a trap. The next day, the customer would reappear, deposit his jewel, count his money and leave … only to come back ten minutes later, his face covered in blood and his clothes torn to shreds as if he’d just been in a fight with a bear. ‘I was attacked and robbed not far from here.’ To which Zane would reply imperturbably, ‘What’s that to me? Am I supposed to give my customers an escort to make sure they get home safely?’ And with this he would dismiss the poor devil. It was perfectly obvious that the ambush had been set up by my employer. He had henchmen who just waited for a sign from him to pounce. Zane wasn’t content with these practices, which weren’t all that unusual; he also boasted of having policemen under his thumb and claimed he could have anyone sent to jail just by clicking his fingers. He was widely feared and nobody haggled with him. Often, humble women draped from head to foot in filthy veils, with just a tiny opening at the front to see where they were going, would come into the shop. They were usually at the end of their tether and were prepared to make any sacrifice for a piece of sugar or a small coin. Zane would push them into the back room, pin them up against a big table cluttered with all kinds of implements, pull their dresses up over their naked buttocks and possess them unceremoniously. He loved humiliating them and making them suffer before throwing them out like dishcloths. I think he was mad. You had to be mad to put down roots in Graba when you could afford a house in the city; you had to be completely demented to flaunt your fortune in front of people so broke they’d think a bit of spittle was cash; and you had to be suicidal to rape mothers, sisters and aunts, one after the other, when you knew that in that deadly place no secret could be kept for very long, public condemnation was swift, and a knife was as sharp as it was accurate. Zane didn’t give a hoot, convinced he could cross a minefield with his eyes closed. He carried with him amulets stronger than spells and curses combined. He had been born under a cast-iron star and feared neither gods nor men.

According to a marabout, when Zane finally gave up the ghost, with his sins intact, he wouldn’t go to either heaven or hell because the good Lord would deny he’d ever created him.

For the first few weeks, the Daho brothers would come by and remind me that they had a debt to settle with me. They would stand at the corner of the alley to avoid confronting my formidable employer and yell challenges at me as if casting a spell. They would make obscene gestures and mime cutting my throat. I kept calm, sitting on the steps in front of the shop … In the evening, my uncle Mekki would come to fetch me, carrying a nail-studded club over his shoulder.

A jack of all trades gets to go everywhere. With all my deliveries and errands, I broadened my field of activities and before long made a number of new acquaintances. The first was Ramdane, a puny kid who was always in two places at once, having to provide for his large family because his father had lost both his legs. He had been thinking like a grown-up since he was barely out of his mother’s womb. I admired him, and even though I didn’t always share his opinions, I knew there was sense in them, and that quality — still there underneath it all, despite centuries of failure — which the old-timers called ‘dignity’. The boy had panache. Even though he was two years younger than me, I would have given anything to be his son. It was reassuring to know that he existed and that he brought a touch of loyalty to our collective defeat, which had reduced universal values to selfish needs and ancestral wisdom to an undignified survival strategy. Ramdane taught me how much more worthwhile it was to be useful than to be rich.

Next, I met Gomri, an apprentice blacksmith as squat and solid as a bollard, a touch ridiculous in his apron, which was far too big for him. With his curly red hair, pockmarked face, clear eyes and skin as white as an albino’s, he made me uncomfortable at first because of an old tribal belief that redheads have evil intentions, which seep out of their hair. I was wrong. Gomri didn’t have an evil thought in his head and never tried to trick anybody. In between shoeing horses, he would show up and offer Zane hammers, hoes and other implements he had made himself. As the smithy was not far from the shop, Zane ordered me to go there and check there wasn’t anything fishy going on, because, in his opinion, Gomri was too young to produce such skilled work. I would watch Gomri take a piece of scrap iron, plunge it into the fire until it was red-hot, then place it on the anvil and beat it, and I would see the common metal gradually transformed, as if by magic, into an almost perfect tool.

Ramdane introduced me to Sid Roho, a fifteen-year-old black boy nicknamed the Billy Goat ever since he had been caught behind a thicket with his trousers on the ground, abusing a hairless old nanny goat. According to malicious gossip, when the nanny goat had given birth, a delegation of jokers had gone to see him and asked him what name he planned to give his offspring. But Sid Roho never lost his temper over digs and jibes. He was funny and helpful and wouldn’t have hesitated to give the shirt off his back to someone in need, which didn’t stop him living off the proceeds of sin. He was an out-and-out thief. No matter how closely the merchants kept their eye on him, he always managed to filch what he wanted in a flash. He was a real magician. On several occasions, I saw him steal things from stalls, slip them into the hood of a passer-by and recover them on the way out of the market. I doubt there was ever anyone more light-fingered than him in the whole world.

Ramdane, Gomri, Sid Roho and I became friends without even realising it. We had no obvious affinities, but we got along well. After a day’s work, we would meet up in the evening near an abandoned orchard to swap jokes and laugh at our disappointments until night caught up with us.

At home, things seemed to be going well. My uncle had discovered that he had a gift for business and was managing quite nicely. He had made a cart from what was left of a wheelbarrow, stuck a cast-iron cooking pot on it and, from morning to evening, he would sell soup on the main square of Graba. My mother, my aunt and Nora all redoubled their efforts, supplying him as well as delivering fresh bread to cheap cafés. I didn’t feel inferior because of how hard they worked; as a result of my own job, I too was entitled to some respect and, before going to bed, to a prayer and a blessing. I felt grown up, almost as much of a man as my friend Ramdane, and could also afford to say, like the others and with some reason, that soon we would have colour in our cheeks and enough money to move to a real house with a door that locked and shutters on the windows, somewhere where the shops would be better stocked and there would be hammams on every street corner.

I was tidying the shelves when a shadowy figure slipped in behind me and headed for the back room. I only had time to glimpse a white veil disappearing through the curtain. A smile of satisfaction glimmered on Zane’s face. He first checked the contents of his drawer, then, smoothing his moustache, indicated the front door out of the corner of his eye, meaning that he wanted me to keep watch.

Zane had no more scruples than a hyena, but he dreaded the idea of his female conquests being followed by jealous husbands or family members with a keen sense of honour.

‘Don’t let anyone in, all right?’ he said. ‘Any beggars, just send them away. As for customers, ask them to come back later.’

I nodded.

Zane cleared his throat and joined his prey behind the curtain. I couldn’t see them, but I could hear them.

‘Well, well,’ he said in his overbearing voice. ‘You finally saw reason …’

‘My son and I have nothing left to eat,’ the woman said, stifling a sob.

‘Whose fault is that? I made you an offer and you rejected it.’

‘I’m a mother. I … I don’t sell myself to men.’

I was sure I knew that voice.

‘So what are you doing in my shop? I thought you’d changed your mind, that you’d realised we’re sometimes forced to make concessions to get what we can’t afford …’

Silence.

The woman was sobbing softly.

‘In this life, it’s tit for tat,’ Zane said. ‘Don’t think you can make me feel sorry for you, pretending butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth. Either you pull up your dress or you go back where you came from.’

Silence.

‘So, do you want my four soldi or not?’

‘My God, what will become of me afterwards?’

‘That’s your problem. Are you going to show me your pretty backside or not?’

Weeping.

‘That’s better. Now turn round, sweetheart.’

I heard Zane pin the woman up against the table. A terrible cry rang out, followed by loud, rapid creaking noises, covering the woman’s moans, until Zane’s triumphant groan put an end to the din.

‘You see?’ he said. ‘It wasn’t so difficult … Come back whenever you like. Now get out!’

‘You promised me four soldi.’

‘Yes, two today, the rest next time.’

‘But —’

‘Clear off, I said.’

The curtain was raised and Zane threw the woman out. She collapsed on the ground on all fours. Looking up, she saw me standing there and her red face turned as white as a shroud. Choking with embarrassment, she quickly gathered up her veil and ran out as if she had seen the devil himself.

It was our neighbour, the widow.

That evening, as I was on my way home, she intercepted me at the corner of the street. She had aged twenty years in a few hours. Hair dishevelled, wild-eyed, foaming at the mouth, she looked like a witch who had just emerged from a trance. She grabbed hold of my shoulders.

‘I beg you,’ she said, her toneless voice sounding like a dying breath, ‘don’t tell anyone what you saw.’

I felt embarrassed and sorry for her at the same time. Her fingers were crushing me. I had to remove them one by one to get her off me.

‘I didn’t see anything,’ I said.

‘Yes, earlier, in the shop.’

‘I don’t know what shop you’re talking about. Are you going to let me get home?’

‘I could kill myself, my child. You don’t know how much I regret giving in to hunger. I’m not a loose woman. I didn’t think it would ever happen to me. But it happened. Nobody’s safe. That’s not an excuse, it’s the facts. Nobody is to know, you understand? I would die on the spot.’

‘I tell you I didn’t see anything.’

She threw herself on me, kissed my head and my hands and got down on all fours to kiss my feet. I pushed her away and ran to our shack. As soon as I was far enough away, I turned and saw her huddled by a heap of scrap metal, weeping her eyes out.

The next day, she had vanished.

She had taken her son and nobody knew where she had gone.

I never saw her again.

I realised I had never even known her name, or her son’s.

3

The disappearance of the widow and her son had shocked me. I was angry with myself for having witnessed that willing rape that had plunged our neighbour into the depths of hopelessness. How could I rid myself of the memory of that desperate woman? Her voice continued to ring in my ears and my eyes were full of her distress. It made me feel disgusted with the whole human race.

I was furious with those people who drifted from day to day as if tomorrow had no more interest than yesterday. I saw them pass through the shop, sick with hunger and despair, ready to lick the counter if there was a little sugar on it. They didn’t care about their appearance or their pride; all that mattered to them was a wretched mouthful of food. I tried to make excuses for them, and for myself, but in vain. In Zane’s shadow, I wallowed in bitterness and anger all day long; my sleep was filled with beggars, louts, thieves, fallen women, wild-haired witches and beaming tyrants whose mouths spat swirling flames. I would wake up dripping with sweat and as sick as a dog, run outside and throw up. I felt hatred for Zane. Had he ever been a child? If so, would I be like him when I grew up? Or would I be like one of those confused spectres who dragged their damnation around with them like a ball and chain, the dirt so thick on their skin you could have stuck a knife into it without hurting them? No, I told myself, Zane was never a child. He was born like that, with his twirled moustache and his sewer-like mouth. He was corruption in human form and stank like carrion in the sun, except that, horror of horrors, he was alive and well.

Zane noticed how sad and distracted I was and threatened to fire me. I would have left of my own accord if he had paid me what he owed me.

Worried by my low spirits, my friends plied me with questions, but I kept my secret to myself. How could I tell them what went on in the back room of the shop without being complicit in it? How could I explain the widow’s disappearance without being guilty?

Zane fired me in the end and I felt a little better. He had been the cause of my depression. Nobody can live in close proximity to perversion without being soiled by it in one way or another. Zane’s actions hadn’t simply spattered me; I was infected by them.

Even now, my silences are disturbed by the creaking of the table in the back room and the weeping of the women he sodomised to his heart’s content. I have enough mouths to feed without burdening myself with bastards, the loathsome Zane would tell them.

My uncle almost fell over backwards when he heard I’d been dismissed. When he discovered that Zane hadn’t paid me a penny after months of slavery, he grabbed his nail-studded club and set off to have a word with him. He returned in a terrible state, lying on a cart, thoroughly beaten. This is your fault again! my mother yelled at me, sententiously.

Left to my own devices once again, I joined Gomri in his smithy. His boss chased me away after a few days, claiming that my presence slowed down production. Then Ramdane suggested I give him a hand in the market. We were prepared to take on any task without worrying about how much it brought in as long as we were hired again the next day. Ramdane had no concept of rest, or how to choose between horrible jobs. At the end of the month, I threw in the towel, much preferring to loaf around in the fields or go to the souk to see Sid Roho cleverly robbing his victims. Sid was a wizard. Once, he even stole Laweto’s marmoset under everyone’s nose. Laweto was a curious old fellow who sold miracle potions at the entrance to the market. Whenever customers he’d fleeced brought back his poison, calling him a quack, he would come back at them with, What do you have against quacks? They’ve made more discoveries in medicine than scientists have. To draw his audience in, he would get his monkey to perform obscene acrobatic tricks that made us double up with laughter. That day, as he was trumpeting the far-fetched qualities of a scorpion’s sting that he was passing off as the thorn of an aphrodisiac plant, he noticed that his marmoset was no longer on his shoulder. In an instant, the scene descended into chaos. Laweto screamed and ran into the crowd, knocking people over, looking into baskets, under stalls, behind shacks, shouting at suspects and tearing his hair out in handfuls. Such was his agitation that even the thieves and pickpockets rallied round, suspending their activities to lend us a hand. But there was no trace of the marmoset. Laweto was sick with worry. He confessed through hot tears that he wouldn’t survive without his monkey and that he would die if it wasn’t brought back to him before nightfall.

Night fell, and there was still no news of the marmoset.

‘Has anyone seen the Billy Goat?’ Gomri asked. As it happened, nobody had seen Sid Roho all day, either in the souk or during the search. Gomri was suspicious. He asked Ramdane and me to follow him, and we immediately set off for the Billy Goat’s place.

Gomri was right: there was Sid Roho lying on what was left of a stretcher picked up from a rubbish dump, his heel resting on his knee, chewing on a stick of liquorice, like a young dignitary taking a cure, and … tied to a beam, Laweto’s monkey, scared to death, wondering what it was doing there with a crazy boy it didn’t know from Adam.

‘I knew it was you,’ Gomri cried, beside himself. ‘I thought you had some respect for poor Laweto.’

‘It was just for a laugh,’ Sid Roho said, completely unaware of the panic his theft had caused in Graba.

‘Laweto is about to have a heart attack,’ Ramdane protested. ‘Give him back his monkey straight away, or I swear I won’t talk to you again as long as I live.’

The next day, with his marmoset on his shoulder, Laweto was roaming the streets like a sleepwalker, proclaiming a miracle and telling all and sundry that a winged angel had freed his monkey from a spell and brought it back in a dream.

My young uncle was tired of seeing me come back in the evening without a penny. He found me a job as a moutcho in an ancient hammam in Kasdir, an old douar where night arrived faster than day. It was an Arab quarter grafted onto the southern part of Sidi Bel Abbès, with whitewashed houses and foul-smelling drains in the middle of the streets. The people were suspicious, mistrusting everything from Graba — child, animal, fruit or dust. I have no idea what Mekki did to persuade the owner to take me on. It was clean, honest work. I would carry the bathers’ towels, wring out their loincloths and scrub their children clean. As far as tips went, I could whistle for them, but I made seventeen douros a week, and that helped boost the family coffers. Everything went well until the evening a customer who was broke and couldn’t pay his bill accused me of robbing him.

I was dismissed immediately.

*

I didn’t think it was a good idea to tell my uncle that I’d lost my job. During the day, I would hide in the scrub to avoid running into him. When the sun went down, I’d join my gang in the orchard. My friends knew about my bad luck and they all had suggestions for me. Sid Roho proposed I steal for him. He needed an accomplice to expand his business. I declined the offer. Categorically.

‘I don’t want to end up in prison,’ I said.

‘Some people get away with it.’

‘Maybe, but it’s haram.’

‘Don’t talk rubbish, Turambo. It’s not having any money that’s haram. How do you think people survive around here? When you have nothing, it doesn’t matter what you turn your hand to.’

‘Nobody’s ever stolen anything in my family. My uncle would throw me out if he discovered I was stealing.’

Sid Roho tapped his temple with his finger, but didn’t insist.

Two days later, he came back to see me with a box slung over his shoulder.

‘So you want to earn your living by the honest sweat of your brow? All right. I’m going to teach you my old trade of shoeshine boy. There’s only money to be made from it in the city, in the European quarters. How would you like to come with me to Sidi Bel Abbès?’

‘Oh, no, not the city. We’d get lost.’

‘There’s no reason we should. I go there all the time.’

‘My uncle says people get run over by cars there every day.’

‘Your uncle knows nothing about the city. He’s never walked on a pavement in his life … Come on. Sidi Bel Abbès is quite something, you’ll see. It isn’t meant for the likes of us, but there’s nothing to say we can’t go there.’

‘No, those big places scare me.’

‘My grandfather used to say: a man born in hell doesn’t fear volcanoes. Trust me. I’ll show you things you could never imagine. You can speak a bit of French, can’t you?’

‘Of course. I grew up on a colonial farm. My father worked in the stables and my mother did the housework. Xavier let me play with his kids. I can do arithmetic too. Division’s difficult, but as far as addition and subtraction go, all I need is a blackboard and a piece of chalk.’

‘All right, all right, no need to go on about it,’ he cut in, sounding jealous. ‘Will you come with me to the city, yes or no?’

I still hesitated.

‘Learn to make up your own mind, Turambo,’ he went on. ‘Someone once said: if you want to get to the moon, start climbing now.’

Sid Roho managed to convince me and we ran off to wash our faces in a drinking trough where a mule was quenching its thirst. Then Sid Roho took me to his place to try on a shirt, a pair of trousers that reached down to my calves and sandals with hemp soles.

‘In your country clothes, they’d put you in the dog pound before you got to town.’

Sidi Bel Abbès was a real shock to me.

My universe had been limited to Turambo and the colonial estate. As far as I was concerned, the Xaviers’ farm had been the height of affluence, comfort and modernity. I’d never seen anything as opulent. I’d spend hours gazing at the big house with its tiled roof, its wide front steps bordered by balustrades, its big front door of carved wood opening onto a light-flooded reception room, its French windows painted green looking out on a vast flowery veranda where, on Sunday, the owner and his guests ate grilled meat and drank ice-cold orangeade. That, I had thought, was the pinnacle of fine living, the acme of success, a privilege so rare that only those blessed by the gods could enjoy it.

I had never set foot in a city before and had only a vague notion of Europeans, confusing them with sultans from the stories Aunt Rokaya told Nora and me when we were hungry or had a fever.

For a boy with limited horizons like me, there were only two, diametrically opposed worlds: the world of the colonial Xavier, a tall, strapping man who had orchards, a carriage drawn by a magnificent thoroughbred, and obsequious servants, and who ate méchoui on every public holiday; and the world of Turambo, where time seemed to have stood still, a sad, joyless, deadly place, without prospects, where people went to ground like moles.

And now here was Sidi Bel Abbès, which swept away my points of reference with a lordly hand by revealing a world I had never suspected, made up of paved streets, proper street lighting instead of the old-fashioned gas lamps we had, pavements lined with trees, shop windows displaying fine lingerie that would have frozen me with embarrassment just imagining it on Nora’s body, bistros with sun-drenched terraces and people in their best clothes puffing contentedly on their pipes.

I stood there open-mouthed for a long time, watching the carriages coming and going at a syncopated rhythm; the cars parked here and there when they weren’t backfiring along the boulevard; the women in colourful, figure-hugging dresses, some on the arms of distinguished gentlemen, others sheltering beneath pretty hats, all breathtakingly beautiful; the officers striding with a martial air in their freshly pressed uniforms, chests thrown out; and the children in short trousers running about like will-o’-the-wisps on the square which was bedecked with flags.

This discovery would remain engraved in my memory, like a prophetic revelation.

For me, Sidi Bel Abbès wasn’t so much a chance encounter as proof that a different life, poles apart from mine, was possible. I think it was that day that I started dreaming — I certainly couldn’t remember having done so before. I would even say that dreams, like hopes, were barely familiar to me, so convinced was I that everyone’s role was determined in advance, that there were those who had been born to strut in the limelight and those who were condemned to fade away in the wings until they disappeared. I was bewildered, charmed and frustrated all at once …

Sidi Bel Abbès awoke feelings in me I had never suspected. I was faced with a challenge. To be or not to be. To make a choice or give up. The city wasn’t rejecting me, it was opening my eyes, removing my blinkers, showing me new prospects; I already knew what I no longer wanted. Well before it was time to go back home, I was certain I couldn’t settle for Graba. I was determined to do anything, even commit a sin, in order to rebuild my life elsewhere, in a city where sounds had their own music and the people and the streets smelt of luck and hope.

While Sid Roho set to work shining shoes, I couldn’t help lingering over my discoveries, absorbing everything down to the smallest detail, like a dried-up sponge thrown suddenly into a stream. That neat church regally watching over the square, those shop windows reflecting back at me my own bad fortune, and those dazzling girls who seemed to dance as they walked, and those avenues so clean that no dirt dared land on them, and those grassy verges strewn with roses, and those children, the same age as me, who had everything they needed, in their sailor suits and caps, with socks up to their knees and their feet in soft shoes, and who passed me without seeing me, racing around like streaks of pure happiness! Watching those children moving about in such a carefree way, I told myself, without wishing to offend the saints, that their God was more considerate than ours and that, if paradise was indeed promised to us rather than to them, a semblance of decency in our lives wouldn’t have gone amiss.

‘Hey, don’t just stand there gawping, come back down to earth. This is real life, Turambo. Watch how I handle the brush if you want to learn the trade.’

Sid Roho was putting the finishing touches to a soldier’s leather boots. After polishing them, he went over them with a cloth, his wrists moving as fast as pistons. The soldier ignored us. With his hands in his pockets and a lopsided smile on his face, he was ogling two young girls on the opposite pavement.

‘There you are, Monsieur. Your boots are as good as new.’

The soldier dropped a coin on the ground and crossed the road, whistling.

‘Do you think I’ll ever live in a city like this?’ I asked, my eyes full of all the colourful details.

‘Who knows? My grandfather used to say that what’s difficult isn’t necessarily impossible.’

‘What did your grandfather do?’

‘He made children. One after the other … Well,’ he added, making a large circle with his arm, ‘do you believe me now? Sidi Bel Abbès is magical, isn’t it?’

‘I can’t believe there are so many wonderful houses in a single place.’

‘And you haven’t seen what they’re like inside. The people all have their own rooms, separated by corridors. Their lamps don’t use wicks. They have lots of mirrors, and prints in gold frames. And carpets on the floor so they don’t hurt their feet. And they have beds. Not straw mattresses, not mats, but iron beds with springs that cradle them to sleep. And sometimes pianos. These people don’t have to go to the well to fetch water. Water comes to them in pipes. They have it in the room where they cook and in the room where they relieve themselves. While we have to look in every direction before we pull our trousers down behind a bush, they just have to kick open the toilet door. And you know what? Apparently, they read the newspaper while they’re doing their important business.’

‘I saw some of these things on the Xaviers’ farm, except that for water they had a pump in the yard.’

‘Not the same thing at all. You’re in the city, my poor Turambo. Here, the streets and squares have names and the doors have numbers. In these houses, you don’t live, you take it easy. You’re the luckiest of lucky devils and the gods eat out of your hands. And that’s not all. Tomorrow is Sunday, when high society throngs the square after mass. Sometimes there are bands playing in the open air, and the women powder their noses to make themselves more beautiful than their daughters.’

‘Will we come back tomorrow?’

‘You can’t learn everything in a day.’

And he hurried off to offer his services to a fashionably dressed man.

By the time I got back to Graba, my head was filled with stars. I was so obsessed by Sidi Bel Abbès I didn’t sleep a wink. I recalled the extraordinary neighbourhoods and the refined people who walked in them as if they had nothing else to do. In the morning, I ran and woke Sid Roho, eager to go back to the city and draw from its sun the light that was lacking in my life. We found a few shoes to shine, then went to a park and watched the young lovers whispering sweet nothings to each other on the benches. We quite forgot that we were hungry.

Sid Roho taught me how to rub the shoes to get the dust off, then how to polish them without getting the laces dirty and, finally, how to go over them with a cloth to make the leather shine. At the end of the day, he entrusted two pairs of shoes to me that were difficult at first, but which I managed to clean acceptably. Then he went and sat on a low wall to rest for a while and left me to get on with it by myself.

‘Well?’ he asked when he returned.

‘I’ve no complaints.’

‘That’s you set up, then. Now give everything back to me,’ he said, seeing a policeman approach. ‘I need to make some real money today.’

The policeman immediately stuck out his foot, raising the hem of his trouser leg so as not to get it dirty. Sid Roho displayed his skills with unusual dexterity, as if the uniform inspired a particular enthusiasm in him. At the end, the policeman grunted with satisfaction and went on his way without putting his hand in his pocket.

‘He didn’t pay you.’

‘He doesn’t have to, I suppose,’ Sid Roho said, putting his equipment back in the box. ‘Only, he’s made a big mistake.’

When we were some distance away, he took a whistle from his pocket.

‘That copper thought he could get away with anything,’ he said, excited. ‘Well, so do I, my friend. I pinched that stingy bastard’s whistle.’

‘How did you do that?’

‘The ways of the Lord are unfathomable.’

He was really impressive.

That evening, we didn’t go straight back to Graba. Sid Roho was determined to show me the extent of his daring. When night had fallen on the city, he took me to a neighbourhood lit by gas lamps. No sooner did he start blowing the whistle than other whistles sounded in the surrounding area and we saw two policemen run past. Sid Roho was doubled up with laughter, his hand pressed to his mouth. ‘I’m going to drive them crazy all night long, those uniformed skinflints who won’t pay a penniless shoeshine boy.’ Thinking the alarm had been raised, the policemen inspected the area thoroughly before withdrawing. Sid Roho took me to another neighbourhood and repeated the performance. Again, other whistles answered him. Again, we had a good laugh and moved on to a different area. The poor cops sped past us, holding their kepis down with one hand while clutching their truncheons with the other, bumping into each other as they turned corners, yelling orders at each other, running back the way they had come, before finally, panting, driven to distraction by the fact that they couldn’t understand what was going on, they went morosely back to their station. Huddled in the shadows, Sid Roho and I laughed until we cried, our feet pedalling in the air, our throats tight with the effort to keep as quiet as possible. This practical joke of ours gave us goose pimples, it was so wonderful and at the same time so scary. A few streets further on, Sid Roho took out his whistle once more and started all over again. The poor policemen emerged from the darkness, looked around like disorientated spaniels, and set off again on their wild goose chase. One of them, out of breath, wheezing like a dying animal, came close to our hiding place and threw up. It was an amazing sight, which almost made me throw up too. I was laughing so much I could barely stay upright and had to beg Sid Roho to give it a rest. Towards midnight, absolutely delighted by our prank, we got back to Graba to enjoy a well-earned sleep.

In the morning, the ghetto was like a punch in the face.

Now that I had seen Sidi Bel Abbès, I didn’t want to see anything else.

In Graba, there were no shop windows, no bandstands, no esplanades lined with verdant hedges, no dance halls. There was only the stench that gnawed at our eyes and throat; the shacks blackened with use and overgrown with weeds; the dogs trailing their colonies of fleas from one end of the shanty town to the other, so skinny you could have played the zither on their ribs; the beggars huddled in their own shadows and the bare-bottomed brats running in all directions like mad things.

I could no longer bear this hell that fried our brains and dried our veins without leaving us a drop for our tears. One moonless night, I vowed, I would set fire to it and watch the flames destroy these dishevelled slums that wanted me to believe they were my graveyard and I was a ghost.

‘What’s the matter?’ Mekki asked, catching me talking to myself on the doorstep of our shack.

‘I want us to leave here.’

‘On what? A flying carpet? We can’t afford it. Why don’t you get back to the hammam instead of talking nonsense?’

‘The owner fired me.’

He almost choked. ‘When was this?’

‘A week ago.’

‘Why didn’t you say anything?’

‘You get angry about a lot less.’

‘What did you do this time?’

‘It wasn’t my fault.’

‘Whose was it — mine? If you can’t even hold down a job, how do you plan to leave here? You should follow Nora’s example. She works so hard, she’s almost worn her fingers to the bone. And she doesn’t complain. And what about your mother? And your aunt? As for me, I’ve forgotten what having a rest means, while you don’t seem to care that we have no money.’

‘I couldn’t force him to keep me.’

‘He’s a reasonable man. But you just do whatever comes into your head, if you still have one, that is. I’m fed up with you being under my feet.’

‘I’m going to work for myself.’

Mekki gave a brief, dry laugh, a kind of irritable hiccup. ‘For yourself? Are you planning to start a business? With what, may I ask? With your fingers up your nose?’

‘I’m going to be a shoeshine boy.’

Mekki staggered as if the sky had fallen on his head. He frowned to make sure he had heard correctly, then, his face ashen and his nostrils dilated with anger, he grabbed me by the throat and pushed me up against the wall with the clear intention of seeing me disappear through it.

‘A shoeshine boy? Nobody in our family has ever kissed the feet of a master. Our houses may be nothing but ruins, our fields may have been confiscated, but we still have our honour. When are you going to get that into your head, you mangy dog?’

I pushed him away angrily. ‘Don’t insult me.’

‘Is there a worse insult than lowering yourself to polish the shoes of your fellow men?’

‘It’s a living, like any other. And I don’t want you ever to raise your hand to me again. You’re not my father.’

‘I’d tear your heart out with my bare hands if I was your father. And since I’m the one who gives the orders here, I forbid you to dishonour the name of our family. A shoeshine boy! That’s all we need. What’ll you do when your brush is worn out — shine shoes with your tongue?’

I didn’t know any more whether to laugh or cry. Mekki dared to talk to me about honour and abstract, solemn duties while I sniffed shame with every breath of air. Was he blind or stupid? Didn’t he understand that I was as determined as he was to flee this backwater of canvas and zinc, where people kept their rotten luck like an ember still smouldering beneath the ashes and refusing to die? Didn’t he understand that I had just become aware of a reality other than the one I’d always thought was our lot, that at the very moment I was confronting him I was becoming someone else, that it was Sunday, a Sunday unlike any other, no longer just the day of the Lord and Roumis, but a crucial day that would stand out for me and that there are some dates that matter more than others, in which you are born again? I didn’t yet have the words to express these things, but I felt them deep inside. It was a strange feeling, nagging and confused, like the one you feel when you have a name on the tip of your tongue and you just can’t find it. And I was determined to find it.

Sid Roho advanced me the money to buy a box, brushes and polish, and I set off in search of shoes to shine. I soon realised that I wasn’t the only one who’d had that idea. I needed to negotiate according to the current rules, because competition was tough and supply was limited. The Arab kids who did the same job as me were quick with their fists and didn’t hold back once they’d got the intruder on the ground. But I held firm and defended my territory.

What mattered to me was to make as much money as possible to allow Mekki to find us a house in stone on a real street, in a real neighbourhood with street lighting that came on at night and shops with window displays. I wanted to see high society pass beneath my window, take a moment’s rest on a public bench and — why not? — believe that I was a man of my time, capable of making the most of it. To do that, I had to earn the right to dream and the right to hope. I didn’t deceive myself that I would ever achieve the same status as a Roumi: it wasn’t my territory; but it wasn’t unreasonable for a poor boy to find another way, another destiny, and, with a bit of luck, to escape once and for all those disaster areas where songs echoed like curses, and where tomorrows were inspired by yesterdays as dark as night. I had seen a few Arabs who’d apparently done well for themselves. They wore neat suits and there wasn’t the slightest stain on their fezzes. They walked among Roumis without tripping up and lived in whitewashed houses with doors that could be locked and shutters at the windows — the kind of houses I dreamt about. And that had given me confidence.

I’d get to the main square of Sidi Bel Abbès early in the morning, my box slung over my shoulder and my brush openly displayed, watching out for someone clicking his fingers or nodding his head, at which point I’d throw myself at their shoes and not let go of them until I could see my reflection in the leather. The kicks in the side that I received taught me the tricks of the trade; the customers’ anger made me more skilful; I took care not to go beyond the shoe itself, the one great sin of the profession, and when they threw me a coin, I’d catch it and pocket it, already imagining myself on my balcony waving to friends in the street.

Alas, there weren’t that many customers. There were days when I returned home empty-handed, with nothing in my belly. Not all Europeans were eager for my services: many wore shoes as worn-out as mine. That didn’t discourage me. I prowled endlessly around the cafés, the church, the town hall — and the brothel, because, according to Sid Roho, some boys about to lose their virginity were anxious to look presentable for their sexual baptism. My box seemed to grow heavier every day, but didn’t slow me down. Years later, I could still feel the straps of that box digging into the back of my neck and the slap an outraged client gave me. I clearly remember that particular man, who almost lynched me because of an unfortunate mark on his sock. Huge, his face crimson with sun, he wore a colonial helmet, a spotlessly white suit and a fob watch on his waistcoat. He was coming out of the barber’s when he hailed me. As I set to work putting a shine back in his shoes, he began ogling a girl who was hanging out washing on a balcony. I don’t know how my brush slipped. The man almost fainted when he saw his soiled sock. His big, bear-like hand came down on my cheek with such violence that I saw the night stars appear in broad daylight. It didn’t put me off. Blows were part of life; they were the price of perseverance, the price I had to pay in order to believe and to dream. And I believed and dreamt so much, my head was almost bursting. I told myself that what was allowed to some was allowed to all, and that although there might be people who gave up, there was no reason for me to do so. According to an old saying, the man who hopes is worth more than the man who waits, and the man who waits is less to be pitied than the man who gives up. My ambition was as great as my hunger and as raw as my nakedness. I wanted one day to wear nice clean clothes and braces over my shirt, to soap my body until it vanished beneath the suds, to comb my hair and live it up on the streets … Between customers, I would sit on the pavement and imagine myself coming out of a pastry shop arms laden with cakes, or leaving a butcher’s with thick slabs of meat in a nice parcel, or sitting on a bench, smoking my cigarette like that gentleman over there studying his newspaper. When a bus passed, I saw myself inside it, just behind the driver, watching his every move because — who knows? — I too might find myself behind a wheel one day. When a young couple came along arm in arm, I would feel a frail, tender hand taking me by the waist … I would hear Sid Roho’s grandfather whisper to me, ‘What’s difficult is not necessarily impossible … What’s difficult is not necessarily impossible … not necessarily impossible … possible, possible, possible,’ and I would nod with conviction as if the old man was right there in front of me.

4

Dreams are a poor man’s guardian, and his destruction. They take us by the hand, walk us through a thousand promises, then leave us whenever they want. Dreams are clever; dreams understand psychology: they accept our feelings just as we take an inveterate liar at his word, but when we entrust our hearts and minds to them, they give us the slip just when things are going badly, and we find ourselves with a void in our head and a hole in our chest — all we have left is eyes to weep.

What can I say of my own dream? Like all dreams, it was captivating. It cradled my soul with such tenderness that I would have preferred it to my mother with my eyes closed. And my eyes were indeed closed, because I saw things only through my dream. But a dream isn’t brave and doesn’t think things through. It runs away when the hour of reckoning arrives; its principles crumble, and we come back down to earth as stupid as we were before we flew up to the sky, with, in addition, the annoyance of returning to square one and finding it even more unbearable than before. All at once, dusk seems like the smothering of our illusions, and the colour of night recalls the ashes of our vain passions, because none of our so-called wishes have been granted.

My mother used to say that the gods are only great because we see them from below. That is true of dreams too. Lifting my head from the shoes I was polishing, I would realise how small I was. My brush wasn’t a magic lamp, and no genie would choose a worn shoe to hide in. After six months of hard graft, I still didn’t have enough to buy myself a pair of trousers; the stone-houses-with-numbers-on-streets-with-names were receding like ships leaving for the land of plenty, while I was falling to pieces on my desert island with nothing but sand filtering through my fingers. Even if my fingers were green, had anyone ever seen flowers grow on sand dunes?

All it took was a little boy pointing at me for my dream to burst like an abscess. I was getting ready to have a bite to eat under a tree, sitting on my box, when I heard, ‘That’s him, officer!’ He was a European kid, dressed like a prince, the summer in his hair and the sea in his eyes. I had never seen him before and didn’t know what he wanted with me. But misfortune can never rest. It waits for you — then, tired of hanging about, comes looking for you. The policeman didn’t waste any time. His truncheon came down instinctively on my head. An Arab is guilty by nature. If you don’t know what he’s actually guilty of, there’s no point asking him. I had no idea what the little Roumi was accusing me of. I don’t suppose there was any point asking him either. My piece of bread stuck in my throat; the blood that spurted in my mouth didn’t help it go down. The policeman hit me several times with his truncheon and kicked me in the side. ‘You vermin!’ he cried. ‘You lousy piece of filth! Get a move on! Go back to your kennel and stay there. If I catch you prowling around this area again, I’ll put you in a cell until the rats have finished gnawing your bones.’

Dazed, my legs like jelly and my face split open, I set off at a run and left the city, forgetting my shoeshine box, my stupid daydreams and a whole lot of other things that only a peasant my age would have been naive enough to think possible.

I never set foot in Sidi Bel Abbès again.

*

Our stay in Graba continued.

Two years had passed and we were still there. Mekki would take me to work with him in order to keep his eye on me. He had made a counter out of wooden boards and we would stand side by side, selling not only soup but also hard-boiled eggs and tomatoes with onion.

I was seeing less of my friends now. We would meet in the same place, the abandoned orchard, but we were seldom all there at the same time; we would each take turns at skipping our evenings together.

Ramdane had developed a nasty swelling in the middle of his stomach. The healer had assured him that it was because of the loads he was carrying all day long. Ramdane refused to take the healer’s recommendations seriously. He wrapped a bandage around his waist to contain his hernia and resumed work. He was wasting away before our eyes. As for Gomri, he had found himself a ‘fiancée’ and was starting to neglect us so that he could meet up with her behind the wooded hillocks. Sid Roho and I followed him one evening to see her for ourselves. The fiancée was a girl from Kasdir, either a runaway or an orphan, because in those days a girl had to be one or the other to be out at night and go around with boys. She had a long, thin face tightly wrapped in a scarf, narrow shoulders, a flat chest and disproportionately long and spindly legs. She looked like a grasshopper. She kept laughing for no reason. Gomri, his hands between his thighs as if struggling to hold back an urge to pee, couldn’t take his eyes off her, even for a moment. It has to be said, the girl was quite a tease, a hot flame straight from the fires of hell. She would squirm in simulated embarrassment, her fingers in her mouth, cooing, showing more and more of her undeveloped breasts and going so far as to pull her dress up above her thighs to get Gomri even more excited. Hidden in the bushes, we watched this little performance in perfect silence, Sid Roho massaging his rod and me thinking about Nora.

The winter of 1925 was terrible. It hadn’t been so cold in the region in living memory. After the torrential rains that flooded our shacks, the ground was covered in ice, turning Graba into a skating rink. It snowed three days running, without stopping. People were up to their waists in the snow, and children stayed at home. Many straw huts had collapsed beneath the rain and some had burnt down because of the logs lit inside. For two weeks, the stalls remained closed and the market empty. Dozens died of hunger, dozens more of cold. When the snow melted, the place turned into a mud bath, causing more deaths and the collapse of homes. When the first provisions reached us, people went mad; Ramdane’s crippled father was trampled in the stampede.

My family didn’t escape unscathed. Nora caught a bad cold and almost died. Then Mekki and my mother were sick for a whole week, throwing up even the rancid water they drank, which was the only thing we could put in our mouths anyway. As for me, I had a high fever and my body was covered in boils. At night, I had visions of cockroaches crawling around me. Then, one by one, we came back to life. All except Aunt Rokaya, whose knees had stiffened. She couldn’t bend her legs or sit properly. We thought she was going to die, and it was almost as if she had. Her lower limbs no longer responded. She lay on her mat, as stiff as a piece of wood. Seeing Nora and my mother drag her behind the thicket to help her relieve herself, I realised the full extent of human misery.

Many families had gathered their meagre belongings and set off to some new hell. They no longer had a roof over their heads and didn’t see any hope of rebuilding their lives in Graba. Ramdane was among those who left. He piled his mother and siblings onto a cart and went off to bury his father in his native douar. He would never return.

Sid Roho mourned the loss of both his parents, carried off by hunger and illness. He made sure he said goodbye to me before leaving.

‘Sorry about your parents,’ I said.

‘It’s the survivors you should feel sorry for, Turambo. My parents’ act has finished and the curtain has come down. I’m the one still up on stage like an idiot, not knowing what to do with my grief.’

‘It is written,’ I said, unable to think what else to say.

‘Yes, but who by? My grandfather used to say that fate only strikes those who’ve tried everything and failed. If you have a broken arm, nothing can help you accept that. I don’t think my parents ever tried anything. They died because all they did was endure what they should have fought against.’

‘And where do you plan to go?’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t care. When I’m tired of travelling, I’ll stop. The world is vast, and anyone who’s known Graba can go anywhere he wants, knowing the worst is always behind him.’

I walked with him to the ‘Arab’ road and watched him limp off in search of his destiny, a bundle on his head and his shoeshine box over his shoulder.

It was a dark, ugly morning and even the birds had stopped singing.

In turn, Mekki admitted that the time had come for us to reinvent ourselves elsewhere. He gathered us together in our shack, whose sheet-metal roof had been demolished by the snow.

‘I think we have enough money to try our luck far from here,’ he said, emptying our savings onto a scarf. ‘There’s nothing for us in this dump any more anyway.’

That was true. Half the ghetto had been devastated by the bad weather and the few vendors who had tried to cling on had given up one after the other, for lack of customers or supplies. The suppliers preferred to sell to Kasdir and run. The track leading to Graba was impassable and the paths were overrun by robbers. The most alarming thing of all was that epidemics were breaking out here and there. There was talk of typhoid and cholera. The deaths continued. The makeshift graveyard behind the military dumping ground bore witness to the extent of the disaster.

‘If you hadn’t already made up your mind, I’d have left of my own accord,’ my mother declared. ‘From the start, I’ve been telling myself you’d realise there was nothing for us here. But I suppose men are slower on the uptake than mules.’

My mother’s anger astonished us. She had always concealed her sorrows, like a hen sitting on her eggs, and now here she was expressing her discontent without pulling her punches. Her unexpected outburst was proof that we had reached rock bottom.

My mother shifted a pile of packages in a corner of the room, extracted a tightly bound cloth and untied it as we watched. A wonderfully carved solid gold kholkhal rolled across to our feet, with the head of a roaring lion at each end and calligraphic inscriptions of exceptional delicacy on the edges; a genuine work of art from a lost era when our women were all cherished sultanas.

‘Take it,’ she said to her brother.

Mekki shook his head. ‘I have no right to touch it. This jewel belonged to your great-grandmother.’

‘She doesn’t need it any more.’

‘It belongs to you now.’

‘I’m hungry, and I can’t eat it.’

‘No, I can’t … It’s all we have left of our history.’

‘Don’t be a fool. The only history is the present, and we’re dying. If it’s written that this jewel will stay in our family, it’ll come back to us … I’m sick of this shanty town. Find us somewhere to go where people are like people, so that we too can be what we were.’

She seized Mekki’s hand, put the impressive jewel in his palm and closed his fingers over it. With that, she left the room and got down to work putting some kind of order in her belongings.

I had often wondered what my mother really expected of life. I’m sure she expected nothing, any more than she expected something of death, except perhaps the relief at having finished with everything, absolutely everything, provided there was no heaven or hell afterwards.

Mekki set off the next day in search of somewhere to go. He hadn’t decided on anywhere, but was planning to ask the advice of people he met on the road. Ten days went by without any news of the head of our family. We couldn’t digest the crop we brought back from the scrub and we couldn’t sleep. Whenever a man passed our shack, we prayed it was Mekki. But it wasn’t. The waiting was even more agonising when the sun went down and we started to fear the worst.

One morning, Rokaya woke bathed in sweat, her eyes popping out of their sockets.

‘I had a bad dream, I shudder to think of it. I’m sure something has happened to Mekki.’

‘Since when have your dreams been premonitions?’ my mother said curtly.

‘What did you see?’ Nora asked Rokaya.

Rokaya shifted painfully on her mat. ‘Even if Mekki went to the ends of the earth, he’d have been back by now.’

‘He’ll be back,’ my mother cut in. ‘He promised us a quiet place, and quiet places aren’t so easy to find.’

‘I have a bad feeling about this, Taos. My heart has turned to jelly. You shouldn’t have given him your bracelet. With all those scoundrels on the roads —’

‘Shut up! You’ll bring him bad luck.’

‘It may already have happened. Mekki may be dead by now. Your jewel has caused his downfall, and ours.’

‘Shut your mouth, you witch. God can’t do that to us. He has no right.’

‘God has every right, Taos. Why are you blaspheming?’

My mother went out into the yard. She was furious and didn’t know what to reply.

I had never before heard her raise her voice or show a lack of respect to her elder sister.

Mekki did come back, exhausted but radiant. From a distance, I saw him waving to me enthusiastically and I realised our connection with Graba was coming to an end. We greeted Mekki like a gift from heaven. He begged us to let him eat first, then, having savoured our impatience, he announced that we were leaving for Oran. My mother remarked that Rokaya wouldn’t be able to stand such a journey in her state. Mekki reassured us: a haulier from Kasdir who had a delivery to make in Oran had agreed to take us on his lorry for a few francs.

We gathered together our knick-knacks and our utensils, our clothes and our prayers, and at dawn climbed into the back of the vehicle and closed our eyes in order not to see Graba recede into the distance; we were already elsewhere.

Mekki had found us a place to live on the north side of Medina Jedida — a Muslim quarter the city council called the ‘Village Nègre’ — a stone outhouse inside a courtyard, with a balcony and shutters on the windows, located on the corner of Rue du Général-Cérez and Boulevard Andrieu, opposite an artillery barracks.

The dwelling was spacious, consisting of two large connecting bedrooms, one of which looked out onto the street and the other onto a beaten-earth esplanade, and a narrow room for cooking; the toilets were in the courtyard, which we shared with the landlady, a Turkish widow, and a Kabyle family who ran a Moorish bath. We were very pleased with our new accommodation. Nora shed a few tears to bless the place.

It took me a while to familiarise myself with city life: the straight pavements, the roads that might prove fatal to the distracted, the panic instilled in me by the cars with their blaring horns. But I was in seventh heaven. Our house had a door with a lock and a number above it. As far as I was concerned, it was the best I could have hoped for.

My dreams were coming true.

The first few days, I enjoyed leaning with one foot against the wall and staying like that for hours so that the residents would know I lived in that beautiful residence with glass in the windows; that seemed to me as important as the fact that we were no longer obliged to fetch water from springs miles away but could draw it from the well in the courtyard. And at night, from my balcony, I would gaze out at the Moorish houses adorned with street lights, at their white slanting façades, the mashrabiyas behind which shadows moved in the light of gas lamps and, on the esplanade, quiet now, passers-by strolling here and there, carrying lanterns like giant fireflies borne on the wind. Spray from the sea, which I had never before seen in my life, was carried from the harbour and dampened my face with thousands of cooling droplets. I would breathe in the air until my lungs almost burst and catch myself humming unknown tunes, as if they had long been buried deep in my subconscious and now my joy had freed them all at once and launched them into the sky.

Disorientated by the forest of identical houses and the inextricable web of avenues, I undertook to walk up and down my street from end to end several times, in order to memorise the landmarks. When I had learnt how to find my door with my eyes closed, I extended my curiosity to the neighbouring streets, then to the surrounding boulevards, and within a week I knew Medina Jedida by heart.

My uncle went into partnership with a herbalist, a Mozabite, and set up shop in the Arab market. I would take him his meal at midday and the rest of the time I would wander.

Oran was a breathless adventure, a crossroads where every era came together, each in its own finery. Modernity offered up its lures, to which the old reflexes responded only reluctantly, as if tasting a suspicious fruit. The native population understood that a new era was under way and wondered what it had to offer them, and at what price. Frenzied and intimidating, the European city flaunted its ambitions, but something in its gorging didn’t tally with their own frugality, and they were too uncertain of their place to claim a slice of the cake. Things were not distributed equally, and chances did not come to everyone. The cards had been unfairly dealt. The gulf between the haves and have-nots was too wide to bridge; segregation, which reduced the unknown other to abstraction or cliché, kept the communities in a state of heightened mistrust. At that time, Oran was stewing in a mixture of doubt and confusion, fuelled by prejudice and insularity. You wouldn’t be mad enough to entrust your mother to your neighbour.

I walked for hours and hours without noticing, engrossed in the mysteries of the various neighbourhoods, which slowly revealed themselves. My search for work took me from one end to the other of the southern plateau of the city, which was strewn with the tents of nomads from the desert. Beyond the Jewish cemetery, in a kind of no man’s land trapped between Sananes and the parade ground, was a little patch of countryside disfigured by urban life, reducing its rustic charms to hollowed-out building sites; amid the skeletal orchards, a handful of houses still dripping with wattle and daub and covered in sheet metal laid the foundations for a soon-to-be village. A little further on was Lamur, a vast stretch of purple clay laid out in rudimentary courtyards. Muslim city dwellers did not look kindly on the shacks the peasants arriving from the hinterland erected around their territory in a hotchpotch of rotting tarpaulins and wooden beams; squabbles erupted daily between the locals and the newcomers, which forced the latter, who were becoming intrusive, to fall back on Jenane Jato, a dangerous area where you wouldn’t want to venture at night. To the west, the neighbourhood of Eckmühl descended as far as the ravine of Ras el-Aïn with its garland of market gardens, its tiered houses, its shaded alleys and its thrilling bullrings. The majority of the inhabitants were Spaniards, mostly humble people and settled gypsies who somehow eked out a living, always hoping for something like a miracle to get them through their rough patch. Their women, among them many fortune tellers, went from door to door selling faded lace or reading unlikely futures in the occupants’ palms. They had a gift for spotting a sucker from a long way away; when a customer hesitated, they would end up telling them all kinds of nonsense, but never letting go. Amazing, combative women, who didn’t take no for an answer and could smooth-talk even the devil. To the north-east of Medina Jedida, below Magenta, you came to the Derb, a Sephardic quarter where men in black skullcaps bustled about their shops, making sure their women were securely behind locked doors. Just like us. Apart from little girls with plaited hair playing jacks with little boys on the pavement, there were no young people to enliven the streets. It was a poor neighbourhood, although it refused to admit it. And in the evening, to prove that there was some joy, the cafés filled the streets with music in a fusion of styles which made the virgins sigh behind their shutters …

It was the same everywhere.

Each community had nothing but its own talent to survive the ups and downs of life. A matter of self-respect and survival. Music was a weapon, an absolute refusal to surrender. In Médioni and Delmonte and Saint-Eugène, from the pine grove of Les Planteurs to the heights of Santa Cruz, people sang in order not to disappear. The Bedouin flute gave the cue to the tambourine and, when the accordion breathed its last in some hidden courtyard, the gypsy guitar took over. It was important for the inhabitants never to stop hearing the sound of their own lives. In Oran, poverty was a state of mind, not a condition. I saw people bundled up in clothes that had been mended a hundred times, shuffling along in old shoes that gaped open, but walking with their heads held high. In Oran, you could tolerate being at the bottom of the ladder, but never at someone else’s feet. From Chollet to Ras el-Aïn, where I would watch the washerwomen wringing out their washing on the bank of the oued, from La Scalera, shared by Spaniards and Muslims worn out by three hundred years of wars and reprisals, to Victor-Hugo, where the inexorable spread of the shanty town was forcing the kitchen gardens to recede, each area had its own character, and each group jealously guarded its own honour. Of course, I would sometimes turn a corner and be waylaid by packs of kids anxious to defend their fiefdom and punish intruders, but there was invariably a grown-up around to bring them to heel.

Oran also had its seedy spots where it grew dark early, slums haunted by pimps and other shady characters, brothels that smelt of the clap and stairwells where people fornicated in a rush, standing up. The inhabitants of Oran denied any knowledge of these places of ill repute; everyone acted as if they didn’t exist. Anyone who had been spotted there once was shamed for life. The only people you saw there were strangers to the city, randy soldiers and boatmen from distant horizons.

Coming back up from the Casbah, you came out onto Place d’Armes, surrounded by centuries-old trees as big as baobabs: this was the exact spot where the different communities met without really meeting, tacitly divided by a virtual line of demarcation. It was a beautiful square radiant with sunlight, with its tram station, its cafés and terraces, its hurrying women and its pomaded pick-up artists, its flashy automobiles overtaking the carriages just to impress them, flanked to the south by the city hall with its two bronze lions guarding the entrance, to the west by the theatre and to the north by the Military Club. Then, all at once, looking down on the upper part of Boulevard Seguin, there was the plateau of Karguentah! Another world, stretching as far as Miramar, beautiful, sumptuous and self-centred. This was the other side of the mirror, where ethereal souls faded away of their own accord in order not to blight the scenery; the exclusive world of the rich, those who had the right to believe and to possess, to reign and to endure, for whom the sun rose purely to salute them and night only veiled its face to protect them from the evil eye: the famous European city with its pavements adorned with street lamps, its gleaming shop windows, its neon signs, its Haussmann-style apartment buildings bedecked with statues that seemed to rise from the walls, its verdant parks, its wrought-iron benches and its marbled lobbies where people in white suits and dark glasses resisted the good humour so dear to the southern districts and were deeply hostile to beggars and street vendors; taciturn, arrogant people, so sophisticated that they all reminded me of that fat pig who had beaten me in Sidi Bel Abbès over a tiny spot of polish on his sock.

For my part, I was only myself and proud to be so in Medina Jedida, my home port, my refuge, my country. I never tired of breathing it in, taking its pulse, being aware of its slightest spasm. Medina Jedida had an air of endurance and survival. The aroma of spices competed with incense and the stench of the tanneries, mingled with the smells of the bazaars, caught the fragrance of mint from the Moorish cafés and the scent of the kebabs being braised outside them, and all these odours merged in an alchemy that compacted the air and held the dust in suspense. The lights of the day bounced off the walls and the horse-drawn carriages in a succession of dazzling flashes, searing the eyes like razor blades. Rascally kids with their heads shaven Zouave-fashion, ran barefoot, overturning stalls in their flight, mimicking the vendors; it was pointless yelling at them — neither threats nor thrashings could calm them. The streets swarmed with a disparate and feverish collection of people, their heads covered with fezzes, chechias, turbans and sometimes even colonial helmets. The booming cries of the merchants were enough to give the crowds a splitting headache. With the garish colours and the deliciously absurd atmosphere, it was like being at a fair. I loved Medina Jedida from the moment I looked at its people — my people, but so different from those of Graba. In Medina Jedida, there was still poverty, but it had a certain reserve. Cripples didn’t cling to the coat-tails of passers-by and beggars restrained their whining. The natives, mostly Araberbers,1 burnouses over their shoulders and canes in their hands, were as dignified as in the days when their ancestors could look at the ground without lowering their heads. Here, there were no curses, no obscene remarks; politeness was all. Old men wore their white beards with nobility. They didn’t sit on the ground, but on padded stools or small wicker chairs or in groups on rattan benches, telling their prayer beads with translucent hands and offering the young their skulls to kiss. In the crowded cafés, where nasal phonographs endlessly played Egyptian music, the waiters in spotless aprons weaved in and out among the tables, bearing teapots on trays. It wasn’t unusual to see women turn up in their flouncy veils, and out of politeness the men would turn away as they passed. And in the evening, when the heat at last consented to die down, crowds would gather on the beaten-earth esplanade to be treated to all kinds of entertainments. The lalaoui dancers would take out their tambourines and sticks; snake charmers would lift the lids of their baskets and cast their lascivious vipers at the feet of horrified children; other men held the crowd spellbound with virtuoso displays of fighting with clubs. Further on, a troubadour enchanted the spectators with far-fetched stories interspersed with tear-jerking songs he seemed to have made up on the spot, while a monkey trainer clearly took himself for a magician. The folklore of Medina Jedida conjured all demons away.

This was my world finding its bearings again, my people as they were before misfortune threw them off track. After so many exiles, so many shipwrecks, I was back in my element.

I was moved, reinvigorated and relieved, convinced that I could now grow up normally, safe from the Zanes and the perversity of the shanty towns, even though I was still hungry and had no nice clothes to wear.

1 Word coined by the author to indicate the unity of the Arab and Berber peoples.

5

In spite of Mekki’s disapproval, my mother had found a job. She had seen how the flats of the old Turkish woman and the Kabyle family were furnished and she too wanted mattresses, low tables for eating on, tableware, woollen blankets, eiderdowns, even a sideboard with a huge mirror in the middle. My uncle earned just enough to provide food and pay the rent. My mother was ambitious. She wanted a decent house where she could receive her neighbours without making them feel uncomfortable, a bed for her elder sister, whose health was deteriorating, and nice dresses for Nora, who was growing up. Yes, Nora had grown quickly, her features had become more defined and she was blossoming as her big black eyes opened to the world. I didn’t have the courage to admit it, but Nora had been occupying my thoughts a lot since I had caught her washing herself. Her adolescent body was starting to take shape and her white breasts adorned her chest like two twin suns. I had certainly seen her naked before, without it having much effect on me, but, since this last time, she’d just had to look at me to arouse me, and I was always the one who turned my head away first.

My mother did the cleaning and other housework for a widow who lived on Boulevard Mascara, not far from our house. I had to walk her there in the morning and bring her back in the evening because she got the houses and streets muddled up and was incapable of finding her way back once she had crossed the road. I would lead her to the door in question, knock and leave when the door was opened. Towards the end of the afternoon, I would pick her up from the same place. The day she got her wages, we would do the rounds of the bazaars and return home laden with iron buckets, funnels, samovars, braziers with bellows and all kinds of other items, sometimes of little use.

I was waiting for her on Boulevard Mascara when a fair-haired boy my age, neat and tidy without being dapper, stopped in front of me.

‘Can I help you?’ he asked me in Arabic.

There was no aggressiveness in his blue eyes. He seemed friendly, but the only memory I had of young Roumis was of that boy who had burst my dream like an abscess by pointing me out to the policeman in Sidi Bel Abbès. Instinctively, I checked to see if there was any uniform in the vicinity.

‘I didn’t ask you for anything,’ I grunted.

‘You’re sitting in our doorway,’ he said calmly.

‘I’m waiting for my mother. She’s cleaning in there.’

‘Do you want me to go up and see how far she’s got?’

His kindness made me uncomfortable. Was he softening me up before kicking me in the face?

‘I’d like that,’ I said cautiously. ‘I’m starting to get a headache because of the sun.’

The boy stepped over me, ran up a staircase and returned after a few minutes.

‘She’ll be another hour or so.’

‘What’s she doing in there? Redecorating the house or what?’

‘My name’s Gino, Gino Ramoun,’ he said, holding out his hand. ‘My mother has a lot of good things to say about yours. It’s the first time she’s got along with a cleaner. We’ve had lots. Some cheated us and others stole things, not just food.’

‘We’re respectable people. Just because my mother works for yours doesn’t mean —’

‘No, no, I wasn’t implying anything like that. We’re not rich. My mother’s disabled. She never leaves her bed. She needs help, that’s all.’

I waved away his apologies.

He sat down next to me on the doorstep. I could see he was trying to redeem himself, but I didn’t encourage him. I’d had enough of polishing my backside on the step and watching others go about their business.

‘I’m a bit peckish,’ the Roumi said. ‘How about going for a bite to eat?’

I didn’t reply. I was broke.

‘It’s on me,’ he insisted. ‘Come on. If your mother can be friends with mine, why can’t we?’

I don’t know if it was out of boredom or hunger, but I accepted the invitation.

‘Do you like boiled chickpeas with cumin?’

‘Anything’s fine when you’re hungry.’

‘Well, then, what are we waiting for?’

Gino was a straightforward, uncomplicated, guileless boy. He seemed awkward and my company was a comfort to him. He didn’t mix with the other boys in the neighbourhood; they scared him. I got used to him, and within a few weeks we were as thick as thieves. There was something reassuring about him. His voice was soft and his eyes clear and wholesome. He worked in a garage on Place Sébastopol. We would meet up in the evenings on Boulevard Mascara. Sometimes, he’d walk with us to our house and, after dropping my mother off, we’d go and eat doughnuts in the Arab market or test our teeth on the torraicos that the Spaniards sold us in paper cones.

One day, he invited me to his home. He was determined to give me something. Gino’s flat was above a haberdasher’s. You reached it by a steep staircase that went straight up to the first floor. We climbed the stairs to a short L-shaped corridor that led to two large rooms on the right and a courtyard on the left. As we reached the hall, a voice cried out, ‘Open the windows. I’m melting.’

The voice had come in a weary breath from the bedroom. I looked in, but couldn’t see anything. Then something moved on the bed. Squinting, I made out a red-faced mass beneath a white sheet transparent with sweat. Actually, it wasn’t a sheet, but a huge blouse designed to look smart in spite of its size, with embroidery along the bottom and flowered braid on the collar. There was a blonde head on the pillow with a beautiful face trapped in a crimson mass of flesh too large to be considered a neck, above a body made up of disjointed slabs furrowed with deep, winding folds. The sight took my breath away. It took me a while to distinguish breasts of supernatural volume from arms so heavy they could barely move. Her stomach undulated with rolls of fat cascading onto her sides, and her elephantine legs rested on cushions like two marble columns. Never in my wildest dreams had I imagined that human bodies of that size could exist. It wasn’t so much a woman’s body as a phenomenal heap of flesh that covered almost the entire mattress, a mass of flabbiness scarlet with the heat, threatening to spread through the room in a gelatinous stream.

This was Gino’s mother, so monumentally obese, so suffocated by her own weight that she had difficulty breathing.

‘Sei Gino?’

‘Yes, Mother.’

‘Dove eri finito, angelo mio?’

‘You know perfectly well, Mother. I was at the garage.’

‘Hai mangiato?’

‘Yes, Mother, I’ve eaten.’

A silence, then his mother’s voice returned, calm now. ‘Chi è il ragazzo con te?’

‘This is Turambo, the son of Taos … of Madame Taos.’

She tried to turn towards us, but succeeded only in setting in motion an avalanche of shudders that went through her body like wavelets on the surface of a pond.

‘Digli di avvicinarsi, così posso vederlo più da vicino.’

Gino pushed me towards the bed.

His mother stared at me with her blue eyes. She had lovely dimples on her cheeks, and her smile was touchingly gentle. ‘Come a little closer.’

Embarrassed, I did as she said.

She tried to raise her hand to my face, but her arm remained stuck in the mass of flesh. ‘You look like a good boy, Turambo.’

I said nothing. I was still in a state of shock.

‘Your mother takes care of me like a sister … Gino has told me a lot about you. I think the two of you are going to get along well. Come closer still, right next to me.’

Gino noticed my growing unease and came to my rescue, grabbing me by the wrist. ‘I’m taking him to my room, Mother. I have things to show him.’

‘Povero figlio, ha solo stracci addosso. Devi sicuramente avere degli abiti che non indossi più, Gino. Daglieli.’

‘That’s what I was planning to do, Mother.’

Gino led me to his room. There was a bed that could be taken apart, a table with a chair in a corner, a little wardrobe that was falling to pieces, and that was all. The walls were peeling and there were greenish stains on the cracked ceiling crossed by beams. It was a sad room, with a broken window looking out onto the façade of a repulsively ugly building.

‘What language does your mother speak?’ I asked Gino.

‘Italian.’

‘Is that a Berber language?’

‘No. Italy’s a country on the other side of the sea, not far from France.’

‘Aren’t you Algerian?’

‘Oh, yes. My father was born here. So were his parents. His ancestors had been here for centuries. My mother’s from Florence. She met my father on a liner. They got married and my mother followed him here. She speaks Arabic and French, but when she and I are together we speak Italian. So that I don’t lose the language of my uncles, you know? Italians are very proud of their origins. They’re quite temperamental.’

What he was trying to explain was beyond me. All I knew of the world was what everyday life and its vileness showed me. When I was small, standing on a rock in the hills above Turambo, I’d thought the horizon was a precipice, that the earth stopped at its feet, and that there was nothing beyond it.

Gino opened the wardrobe and took a packet of photographs from a drawer. He selected one to show me. The photograph, taken on a terrace overlooking the sea, showed a woman laughing, her siren-like body held snugly in a pretty bathing suit. She was as beautiful as the actresses you saw on posters outside cinemas.

‘Who is she?’

Gino gave a sullen pout. His eyes glistened as he pointed over his shoulder with his thumb. ‘The lady rising like dough in the next room.’

‘I don’t believe it.’

‘I swear to you it’s my mother in the photograph. She used to turn heads in the street. She was offered a part in a film, but my father didn’t want an actress in his house. He said you never know when an actress is being sincere and when she’s acting. A real macho man, my father, from what I’ve been told. He left us to fight in the war in Europe. I don’t remember him very well. He died in the trenches, gassed. My mother went mad when she found out. She even had to be committed. When she recovered her senses, she started putting on weight. She hasn’t stopped since. She’s been prescribed all kinds of treatments, but neither the hospital doctors nor the Arab healers have been able to control her obesity.’

I took the photograph from his hands to get a better look at it. ‘How beautiful she was!’

‘She still is. Did you see her face? It’s like an angel’s. It’s the only part of her body that’s been spared. As if to save her soul.’

‘To save her soul?’

‘I’m sorry, I don’t know why I’m talking this way. When I see what’s become of her, I say all sorts of nonsense. She can’t even sit up any more. She weighs as much as a cow on the scales. And a cow doesn’t need anybody to help it relieve itself.’

‘Don’t talk like that about your mother.’

‘I don’t blame her. But I can’t help it, it makes me bitter. My mother’s a generous woman. She’s never harmed anybody. She gives her money away and expects nothing in return. People have often robbed her, but not once has she held it against them. She’s even turned a blind eye when she’s caught them red-handed. It isn’t fair, that’s all. I don’t think she deserves to end up like this.’

He took the photograph from me and put it away in a cardboard box.

He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand and looked at me warily. Then he cleared his throat to summon up courage and said, ‘I have a few shirts, one or two sweaters, and a pair of trousers I don’t wear any more. Would you be offended if I gave them to you? I’d be very happy to. I don’t want you to take it badly. I’d really like it if you said yes.’

There was a mixture of sadness and fear in his eyes. He was awaiting my reaction as if it were a verdict.

‘My bottom is almost showing through the seat of my trousers,’ I said.

He gave a little laugh and, relieved, started rummaging through the shelves, throwing me a quick glance to make sure I wasn’t offended.

Later, several years later, I asked him why he’d been so defensive when he was only trying to help a friend. Gino replied that it was because Arabs were sensitive and had a sense of honour so excessive they would be suspicious even of a good deed.

Returning home that day, proud of my bundle of almost new clothes, I surprised Mekki and my mother talking about my father. They fell silent when they saw me come in. Their faces were twisted with anger. My mother seemed on the point of imploding. Her face was trembling with indignation and there were tears in her eyes. I asked what was going on. Mekki told me it was none of my business and shut the door of his room in my face. I listened carefully, hoping to catch a few scraps of their conversation, but neither my uncle nor my mother carried on speaking. I shrugged my shoulders and went to the other room to try on the clothes Gino had given me.

Mekki joined me a few moments later, his cheek twitching.

‘Has my father been found dead?’ I asked.

‘After all these years?’ he retorted, annoyed at my naivety, then changed the subject. ‘You have to find a job. Rokaya’s sick. She needs care. Your mother and I don’t earn enough.’

‘I look for one every day.’

‘But you don’t knock on the right doors. I don’t want to see you hanging around the streets any more.’

*

I set off again in search of a livelihood, but didn’t change my habits; I didn’t know where the right doors were. In any case, whether I turned up before or after they had employed someone, it was always the same old story: either the job was already taken or I didn’t look suitable.

I was sitting on a low wall, longing for a piece of the goat’s cheese wrapped in vine leaves that a child was trying to sell to passers-by, when a boy approached me. He must have been about fifteen or sixteen. He was tall for his age and quite thin; his glasses made him look like one of those educated boys who were good at picking up girls outside school. He was wearing a check shirt and smart, neatly ironed trousers. His brown hair was cut short at the sides and his hands were spotlessly clean.

‘Don’t you live opposite the artillery barracks?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘I live quite near to you. My name’s Pierre.’ He didn’t hold out his hand. ‘I heard you asking about a job at the warehouse earlier. I can arrange it. I have contacts. Neighbours should stick together, don’t you think?’

‘Sure.’

‘It isn’t easy to sway an employer these days. You don’t have any experience and of course you don’t have any education. If you let me recommend you for jobs, you can start earning your living tomorrow.’

‘All right then.’

‘What about this then: I find you work and whatever you make we split fifty-fifty. How does that sound?’

‘It sounds fine.’

‘You do understand the deal, don’t you? What you make we share fifty-fifty. I don’t want you to try and short-change me later. Is that understood? Fifty-fifty on what you make?’

‘Yes, I got that.’

He held out his hand. ‘Let’s shake on it. Giving your word of honour is better than any contract.’

I shook his hand enthusiastically. ‘When do I start?’

‘You do live in the house with the balcony over the esplanade, the one with the door opposite the barracks?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Wait for me outside your house at five tomorrow morning. But let’s get this straight once again, it’ll be fifty-fifty. And don’t try to double-cross me, because I’m the one who’s going to negotiate your wages.’

‘I’m not a cheat.’

He looked at me thoughtfully, then relaxed. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Turambo.’

‘Well, Turambo, God has put me in your path. If you do exactly what I ask and you’re as honest as you claim to be, in less than a year we’ll be doing a lot of business together.’

Pierre kept his word. At dawn the next day, he came for me and took me to a huge depot where I had to carry crates of fruit and vegetables. I thought I was going to drop dead with all the kicks I got from a fat lump who kept yelling at me. In the evening, Pierre was waiting for me at the corner of Rue du Général-Cérez. He counted out my money, pocketed half and handed me the rest. It was the same ritual each time. He didn’t find me work every day, but whenever a job fell vacant, it was mine. Pierre was the son of a court clerk who spent his money on prostitutes. He pointed him out to me one night, coming out of a brothel. He was a smart-looking man in a good suit, his hat pulled down over his face in order to remain incognito in such a seedy place. Pierre didn’t mince his words when he talked about him. He told me that arguments were common at home. His mother knew what kept her husband out so late at night and that made her hysterical because, in addition to his shameful sexual relations, his father had no qualms about drawing on the family savings. The reason Pierre, who was still at school, skipped classes was to help his mother make ends meet. And he was counting on me to save his family from bankruptcy. In a way, I was his golden goose. I didn’t see any disadvantage in that. As long as I didn’t return home empty-handed, I was prepared to do anything he suggested. Although the work tired me out, I wasn’t discouraged. But Pierre wanted me for himself. He kept an eye on me, noted who I mixed with, ordered me to go to bed early, in order to save my energy for work; in short, he ruled me with a rod of iron. He was particularly unhappy if I hung around with Gino in the evenings and made it quite clear what he thought about it.

‘Get rid of that fellow, Turambo. He’s not good for you. Plus, he’s a Yid.’

‘What’s a Yid?’

‘A Jew. Come on, what planet are you from?’

‘How do you know that Gino’s a Jew?’

‘I saw him having a pee.’ Pierre grabbed me by the shoulders and looked me in the eye. ‘Haven’t I been straight with you? We’ve always split things fifty-fifty. If you want to carry on as my partner, keep away from that queer. The two of us are going to make a ton of money, and in a few years, we’ll start a business and drive around in a car like nabobs. Have you seen how well connected I am? I can get you as many jobs as you like. Well? Do you trust me?’

‘Gino’s my friend.’

‘No sentiment in business, Turambo. That’s for little girls and mummy’s boys. When you were going round in circles, starving hungry, did anybody care? Yes, I did. Without you asking me. Because I have your best interests at heart. Forget that camp idiot. He’s earning his own living. Nice and safe there in his garage, polishing rich people’s cars. Did he ever suggest you work with him? Did he ever talk to his boss about you?’

He fell silent, waiting for a sign from me that didn’t come. He puffed out his cheeks and let his arms drop to his sides.

‘Well,’ he went on, irritably, ‘it’s up to you. If you think that mariquita matters more than your career, that’s up to you. Just don’t come and tell me I didn’t warn you.’

I didn’t know what was so wrong with being a Jew or what I risked by associating with one. But Pierre’s warning and his covert blackmail threw me. When I next saw Gino, as we were sitting on the pavement watching two carters having an argument, I asked him if he was a Jew. Gino frowned oddly; I realised that my question wasn’t so much a surprise as a shock. He stared at me as if he couldn’t place me. His lips were quivering. He took a deep breath, then sighed sadly and said, ‘Would that change anything between us?’

I told him it wouldn’t.

‘Then why did you ask me such a stupid question?’ He stood up, leaving me sitting there, and went back home.

He was very angry.

Over the next few days, he avoided me, and I realised how tactless I’d been.

Pierre had got his gold mine back and he was delighted that I was now his, and his alone. ‘You see?’ he said. ‘As soon as you pointed out his little secret, he dropped you. He’s not honest, your Gino.’

I tried to make it up with Gino, but in vain; he was giving me the cold shoulder. I realised how much I’d hurt him, however inadvertently. I hated seeing him angry with me, and doubly so because I’d never meant to cause him any pain. As far as I was concerned, it had been just a casual question. I didn’t care if he was black or white, a believer or an atheist. He was my friend, and his company mattered to me. He’d often taken me to his home, where we would spend hours chatting away in his room. He was a devoted, obedient son. He read to his mother every evening. He would sit down next to her, on the edge of the bed, open a book, and the silence of the house would be filled with magical characters and stories of adventure. Gino’s mother couldn’t get to sleep without this little excursion into the world of books. She would ask her son to continue with such and such a chapter, or reread such and such a poem, and Gino would go back over the pages with an enthusiasm that gave me food for thought. I couldn’t read, but I loved to sit on a stool and listen to him. He had a soft, spellbinding voice which would transport me from one setting to another.

There was a book that his mother loved more than any other. It was called The Miracle Man, written by a parish priest named Edmond Bourg. At first, I thought it was a prayer book. It was all about forgiveness, charity and solidarity, and Gino’s mother would cry over certain passages. It was so moving, my heart contracted like a fist as I listened. I wanted to find out more about the author: was he a prophet or a saint? Gino told me the story of Edmond Bourg, who had apparently hit the headlines in the previous century. Before becoming a priest, Edmond Bourg had been a railway engineer. He was an ordinary man, a bit of a lone wolf, but amiable and considerate. One evening, he caught his wife having torrid sex with one of his colleagues in his own bed. He killed both of them and cut them up into little pieces. The police found the pieces scattered in the woods. Every day, the newspapers would announce the discovery of a piece of flesh or an organ, as if the killer was deliberately trying to traumatise everyone. This macabre story fascinated and horrified the public to such an extent that the trial had to be adjourned several times because of the crowds wanting to attend. Edmond Bourg’s lawyers pleaded that he was insane when he committed the crime. The people demanded blood, and the court sentenced the murderer to death. But on the day of the execution, the blade of the guillotine jammed. As the penal code demanded that the operation continue until the head was separated from the body, the executioner pulled the lever again, without success. Curiously, when the condemned man was removed from the block, the mechanism worked, and when his head was once more placed on the blosk, the blade again refused to fall. The chaplain claimed it was a sign from heaven; Edmond Bourg’s sentence was commuted to hard labour for life. He was sent to Devil’s Island, a penal colony not far from Cayenne, in Guyana, where he was a model prisoner. Some twenty years after he was sentenced, a famous journalist revived the story of Edmond Bourg, and a national debate ensued, with articles and petitions, which resulted in his being pardoned. Edmond Bourg became a priest and spent the rest of his life doing good, spreading the word and helping people come to terms with their own demons. His book was a huge success when it came out in 1903. Souls in torment drew a great deal of comfort from it, and Gino’s mother always kept it on her bedside table, next to the Bible.

The story of Bourg had impressed me so much that I had asked Gino to teach me to read and write, just as Rémi and Lucette, Xavier’s children, had once taught me arithmetic … And then there had been that one mistake and everything had come crashing down. Since my stupid question, I didn’t know what to do with my evenings. Sometimes, without realising it, I caught myself walking up and down Boulevard Mascara. I would see the light on in Gino’s room and wonder if he too was thinking of me, if he missed me as much as I missed him. Sometimes, driven by an irresistible urge, I would stop outside the door of his house, on the verge of knocking on it, but didn’t dare go further. I was afraid he would close his heart to me once and for all.

Pierre could see how unhappy I was. To keep my mind off Gino, he undertook to wear me out with jobs as exhausting as they were badly paid. In the next few months, he made me do all kinds of things. I was in turn a shop assistant, a stable boy, an upholsterer, a wafer seller, a delivery boy and a coalman. I never did the same job two weeks in a row. Pierre would negotiate my wages without any concern for the trials he was inflicting on me. He would pick me up from my home, leave me at work, pick me up at the end of the day and relieve me of half my pay. When he had nothing for me, he would abandon me. I could knock at his door but he wouldn’t open. If I insisted, he would come out onto the balcony and yell at me. After quarrelling with Gino, I hated him for treating me like that. My pride was hurt, and I decided I wouldn’t take the bait any more. After a few instances of ‘insubordination’, he was the one who started running after me. Now I didn’t open my door to him. I’d look at him from the balcony and ignore his efforts to tempt me. He’d scratch his head, pretending to think, then offer me all kinds of benefits. He’d promise me the moon, but I’d just shake my head.

‘Be reasonable, Turambo. I’m your lucky star. Without me, you won’t go far. I know it’s hard, but we have to stick together. One day, thanks to me, you’ll stand on your own two feet.’

‘I can already stand, thank you.’

‘No, really, what is it you want from me?’

‘A real job. I don’t care what it is as long as it’s steady,’ I said in a firm tone. ‘I’m tired of going all over town for peanuts.’

He shook his head, unable to think of any more interesting propositions. ‘Can we still share everything fifty-fifty?’

‘That depends.’

*

Pierre introduced me to Toto La Goinche, who owned a shabby café nestling at the foot of Santa Cruz, below an old Spanish fortification. Toto was an unassuming man in his forties. When we arrived, he was carving up a pig in the courtyard of his establishment, a butcher’s apron over his naked chest. He asked me if I knew how to keep a register and I told him I didn’t. He asked me if I could hold my tongue and I told him I could. Those were the right answers.

He agreed to give me a week’s trial, without pay.

Then a second week to make sure he hadn’t backed the wrong horse; still without pay.

At last, he welcomed me into his fraternity.

In truth, the café wasn’t really a café, the kind you found dozens of on the outskirts of the city, but a clandestine brothel, a seedy inn stinking of adulterated hooch where elephantine whores lured sailors with strange accents and skilfully fleeced them after a botched attempt at lovemaking.

The first few days, the place gave me the shivers. It was in a dead-end alley overflowing with rubbish where, miraculously, cats and dogs amicably shared the contents of the dustbins and drunks got into fights over nothing. The owner, who believed in a certain decorum, wouldn’t stand for arguments under his roof, but was happy for disputes to be settled behind the courtyard, on a strip of earth leading to a precipice. Whenever things looked like ending in bloodshed, Toto would call on the services of Babaye, a huge ex-convict from the Sahara, a man so black you could barely make out the tattoos on his body. Babaye didn’t have an ounce of patience and didn’t bother to reason with the warring parties, who’d be yelling at each other and brandishing their knives; he would grab them both by the scruff of the neck, knock their heads together and dump them on the ground, certain they wouldn’t be heard from again before daybreak.

It wasn’t the fights that bothered me — I’d seen enough of them in Graba. The urban animals I feared were the women who worked there, like crocodiles in troubled waters; they were terrifying with their hair in curlers, their faces marked by degradation, dripping with cheap make-up, their eyes black with bad kohl and their mouths so red they might have been dipped in a bowl of fresh blood. They were strange, disturbing, syphilitic creatures, with their bare breasts and their hemstitched basques pulled up over their buttocks; they smoked like chimneys and belched and farted constantly; they were fierce and vulgar, misshapen by the age of thirty but still reigning supreme over the bestial desires of men. They smelt of rancid butter by day and cold sweat as soon as night fell. When they weren’t pleased, they would hit out at random, even throwing their clients out of the window and then drawing the curtains without a second thought.

I was determined not to go anywhere near them.

I slogged away in the basement while they were hard at work upstairs, and that was fine by me.

My work consisted of clearing the tables, emptying the chamber pots, washing the dishes, taking out the dustbins and holding my tongue — because strange things went on in that place. It wasn’t just girls in distress who were picked up in doorways, dying of hunger, and brought to the brothel: there were boys too.

At first, I didn’t pay any attention to what went on in slow motion in the damp and the dark. While the staff were busy assessing the vulnerability of the fools they were about to fleece, I would shut myself away in the basement among the bowls and the wine racks to avoid seeing anything. I was isolated and ignored, and I was starting to get bored repeating the same actions and tramping the same stretch of floor. Even Babaye only appeared occasionally. He must have hidden in a cupboard like a jinn, only emerging when his master blew the whistle. Then, little by little, I started to realise just how far into the mire Pierre had got me. That café wasn’t for me. I wanted only one thing: to take my wages, get out of that part of the city as quickly as possible and never see it again. Toto pointed out that a contract was a contract, even if nothing had been signed; I would only get what was due to me at the end of the month. So, in addition to the two weeks’ trial, I had to endure four more weeks, holding my breath, rinsing the glasses and turning a blind eye to the horrors around me.

One night, a dishevelled sailor came down to my hideout. He was holding a bottle of red wine in his hand and swaying all over the place. He was in tears. ‘I could walk on water and no priest would notice,’ he moaned to himself. ‘I could spend my life doing good and nobody would take me seriously. Because nobody ever takes me seriously. “If you went to sea, you’d find it had run dry” — that was what my saintly mother, who I loved so much, said to me once.’ When he saw me bent over the glasses in a corner, he tumbled down the few steps that separated us and, still swaying, took a wad of banknotes from his pocket and stuffed them under my sweater. ‘Fat Bertha, who claims the wart under her nose is a beauty spot, turned it down. She told me she didn’t want my money, I might as well wipe my arse with it … Can you imagine? Even when you earn money by the sweat of your brow, you can’t get laid these days … Do you want it? Well, I’m giving it to you. Gladly. I don’t want it any more. I have bundles of it at home. I make mattresses with it. You need it. It’s written all over your face. You must have a sick relative. Think of my money as a gift from heaven. I’m a good Christian, I am. I may not be taken seriously, but I’m a generous person.’ He fiddled with his flies and tried to stroke my cheek …

Miraculously, Babaye emerged from his cupboard and threw the drunk out.

6

Mekki looked reluctantly at the money the sailor at the café had given me. He wouldn’t even touch it. We were in his room. He had just finished his prayers when I held out the banknotes.

‘Where did you get this?’ he said, refraining from holding his nose.

‘I earned it.’

‘You mean you won it gambling?’

‘I worked for it.’

‘Even a bellboy at the Bastrana Casino wouldn’t earn as much as this.’

‘Do I ask you how you make your money?’

‘You’re perfectly entitled to know. The Mozabite keeps our accounts and you can check them. Not a penny that’s haram comes into this house. And now you hand me a wad of paper money from somewhere or other and ask me to believe you have a rich man’s salary. I won’t take your money. It doesn’t smell right.’

Disappointed, I grudgingly put the notes back in my pocket.

I was about to go to my mat to sleep when Mekki said, ‘Not so fast. You’re not sleeping here until you tell me what trouble you’re in.’

‘I wash dishes in a café.’

‘Not a luxury hotel? That’s the only place you can make that kind of money, and even then it’s not the right season.’

I shrugged my shoulders and walked out.

Mekki followed me out into the street and ordered me to explain myself. I hurried on, deaf to his summons, then, relieved I could no longer hear him grunting behind me, I slowed down. I was furious. I was working hard and I would have liked a little respect. It wasn’t fair.

After wandering around the alleys, cursing everything and kicking stones, I slept in the open air, on a bench in a park, the haunt of tramps risking the uncertainties of the night. It struck me that they and I were all practising the same self-denial.

It didn’t take Mekki long to solve the mystery. He must have followed me. A week later, I got home to find the family council on a war footing. There was Rokaya, confined to her bed, Nora, sitting apart but in agreement, and my mother and Mekki glaring at me. They were waiting stiffly for me in the main room, nostrils trembling with indignation.

‘You bring shame on our family, both the living and the dead,’ Mekki decreed, his switch firmly clasped in his hand. ‘First you choose to polish boots and, now, you wash dishes in a brothel. Well, if you have so little self-respect, I’m going to treat you like a dog until you learn to honour our absent ones.’

He raised his switch and brought it down on my shoulder. The pain made me see red. I didn’t care if he was the head of the family, I grabbed my uncle by the throat and pushed him up against the wall, while my mother looked on aghast.

‘You dare to raise your hand to me?’ my uncle thundered, stunned by this sacrilege.

‘I’m not a dog and you’re not my father.’

‘Your father? You talk to me about your father? He’s the one feeding you, is he? He’s the one sweating blood for this family? That wretch, your father? All right, let’s talk about your father while we’re about it!’

‘Mekki!’ my mother implored him.

‘He has to know,’ he retorted, his mouth glistening with flecks of foam. ‘Come on, you little brat, come with me. I’m going to show you what filth your pride is based on, my poor, vain, idiot nephew.’

He seized me by the neck and pushed me outside.

I followed him, curious to discover what lay behind his insinuations. The streets were baking in the sun. The air smelt of drains and overheated asphalt. Mekki kept walking straight ahead, bad-temperedly. He was inwardly seething with rage. I hurried behind him. We crossed Medina Jedida in the crushing heat, pushed our way through the crowds in the market, which no weather, however unbearable, ever seemed to discourage, came out on the avenue that led to Porte de Valmy and the grazing park before stopping outside the Jewish cemetery.

Mekki gave me a spiteful grin, pointed to the open gate leading to the rows of graves and motioned me with his head to precede him. ‘After you, as the Roumis say,’ he said with a cruel gleam in his eyes.

I had never seen my uncle, that twenty-year-old sage who had always been so pious, in such a state of contempt or so pleased at the harm he was about to inflict on me — I’d guessed that he hadn’t brought me here to remind me of my duties, but to punish me in such a way that the consequences would stay with me until the end of my days.

‘Why have you brought me here?’

‘You just have to go inside and you’ll know.’

‘Do you think my father is buried with the Jews?’

‘No, he just keeps an eye on their dead.’

Mekki pushed me into the cemetery, looked around and finally pointed to a man sitting cross-legged on the threshold of a sentry box, stuffing a piece of bread with slices of onion and tomato. Just as he was about to bite into his sandwich, he noticed our presence. I recognised him immediately. It was my broken-faced father, thinner than a scarecrow and in mismatched clothes. My heart beat so strongly in my chest that I shook from head to foot. The earth and the sky merged into one around me and I had to clutch my uncle’s arm to remain upright, my Adam’s apple stuck in my throat like a stone.

‘He should have died in his trench,’ my uncle said. ‘At least we would have had a medal to add some kind of pride to our loss.’

The caretaker stared at us with his rodent-like eyes. When he in turn recognised us, he bent low over his food. As if nothing had happened. As if we weren’t there. As if he didn’t know us from Adam.

If the ground had given way beneath my feet at that moment, I would have gladly let it swallow me up.

‘I hope you won’t go on about your father any more,’ Mekki said. ‘He’s alive and well, as you can see. He’s just a pathetic character who prefers to weed graves rather than sweep his own doorway. He chose the Jewish cemetery so as not to be found. He must have thought no Muslim would ever see him here. Let alone the family he abandoned.’

He took me by the arm and pushed me towards the gate. I couldn’t take my eyes off the man who was eating on the threshold of the sentry box. An unfathomable feeling spread through me like molten lead. I had a mad desire to burst into tears but managed neither to cry out nor to moan. I simply looked at that man who had been my father and my idol and was now a complete stranger to me. He was still ignoring us, intent on his food. The only thing that seemed to matter to him was his piece of bread, which he was eating with gusto. I hadn’t spotted either surprise or the slightest trace of emotion on his face. After that fleeting glimmer of recognition, his whole face had closed like a pool over a paving stone. I felt really sorry for him, even though I was very aware that of all the children on earth, I was to be pitied the most.

‘Let’s go,’ Mekki said. ‘You’ve had enough for today.’

My strength had given way. My uncle was almost dragging me.

We left the cemetery and I saw my father close the gate behind us. Without a glance. Without a shred of embarrassment …

A world had just ended, though I didn’t know which.

I turned round several times in the hope of seeing the cemetery gate open and my father come running out after me.

The gate was still closed.

I realised I had to go, to get away, to disappear.

My uncle was speaking to me. His voce faded before it reached me. All I could hear was the blood throbbing in my temples. The houses went by on either side in a haze. It was daytime and yet it seemed dark. My feet sank into the soft ground. My stomach felt tight with nausea and I was shivering in the sun.

I walked straight ahead like a sleepwalker, carried along by my pain. My uncle fell silent, then faded into the background. I reached Boulevard National without realising it and came out on Place d’Armes. There were too many people in the square, too many carriages, too many shoeshine boys yelling, too many pick-up artists, too many women with their pushchairs; there was too much agitation and too much noise. I needed space and silence. I carried on towards the seafront. There was a party in full swing at the Military Club. I skirted Château-Neuf, where the Zouaves were confined, and went down an embankment to the promenade of Létang. Here, loving couples talked in low voices all along the avenues, holding hands like children, elegant women wandered peacefully, their heads full of dreams beneath their parasols, and children frolicked on the lawn. Where did I fit in to all that? I didn’t, I was irrelevant, out of the picture.

I climbed onto a promontory to gaze at the ships in the harbour. Four freighters were moored at the quays, filled to the brim with corn; their funnels, as red as a clown’s nose, belched clouds of black smoke into the air. A few months earlier, I had come to this place to gaze at the sea; I had found it as fascinating and mysterious as the sky and had wondered which took its inspiration from the other. I had stood on this same rocky outcrop, my eyes open wide, astonished at the blue plain stretching off into the distance. It was the first time I had seen the sea. A painter who was reproducing on his canvas the potbellied freighters and the little steamboats that seemed as tiny as fleas beside them had said to me: The sea is a font where all the prayers that don’t reach the Lord fall as tears, and have done for millions of years. Of course, that painter was trying to be witty. Yet this time, on the same promontory, where nobody had set up an easel, those words came back to me as I once again saw, going round and round in slow motion, the image of my father closing the cemetery gate behind me, and those stupid, beautiful words broke my heart.

I remained on the promontory until nightfall. I was overwhelmed by grief, and I was sinking into it. I didn’t want to go home. I couldn’t have stood the looks I’d get from my mother and uncle. I hated them. They had known and hadn’t said anything. The monsters! … I needed a culprit, and I wasn’t big enough for the role. I was the victim, more to be pitied than to be charged. I needed somebody to point a finger at. My father? He was the misdeed. Not the exhibit, but the act itself, the crime, the murder. I saw only my mother and Mekki in the dock. At last I understood why they had fallen silent that time when I had caught them talking about my father. They should have taken me into their confidence. I would have been able to bear the blow. They hadn’t done so. And now I held them responsible for all the misfortunes of the world.

That night, I didn’t go home.

I went and knocked on Gino’s door.

As soon as he saw the expression on my face, Gino guessed that if he didn’t let me in, I would throw myself into the abyss and never come back up again.

His mother was asleep with her mouth open.

He led me to the little courtyard, which was lit by a lantern. The sky was glittering with constellations. In the distance, you could hear people quarrelling. Gino took me by the wrist and I told him everything, all in one go, without pausing to catch my breath. He listened right to the end, without interrupting me and without letting go of my hand.

When I had finished, he said, ‘A lot of people came back from the war hardly knowing themselves any more, Turambo. They went off in one piece and returned having left a part of their souls in the trenches.’

‘It would have been better if the whole of him had stayed there.’

‘Don’t be hard on him. He’s still your father, and you don’t know what he suffered over there. I’m sure he’s suffering even now. You don’t flee your family when you survive the war.’

‘He did.’

‘That proves that he no longer knows where he is.’

‘I would have preferred him to be dead. What memory am I going to have of him now? A cemetery gate shutting in my face?’

His fingers closed a little more over mine. ‘I’d give anything to believe that my father was still alive somewhere,’ he said sadly. ‘A living man can always come home eventually, but not a dead man.’

Gino said other things too, but I’d stopped listening to him. Only the creaking of the gate continued to echo in my head. However much my father tried to retreat behind it, I could clearly distinguish him as if in a one-way mirror, ghostly, shabby and grotesque. He disgusted me. I would close my eyes and there he was; I would open them and he was still there, in his scarecrow’s suit, as inexpressive as a wooden skeleton. What had happened to him? Was it really him? What was war? An afterlife from which you returned deprived of your soul, your heart and your memory? These questions were eating me alive. I would have liked them to finish me off or else help me understand. But there was nothing. I endured them and that was all. I was sick of not finding a semblance of an answer to them, or any kind of meaning.

Gino suggested I sleep in his room. I told him I wouldn’t be able to breathe, that I preferred the courtyard. He brought me an esparto mat and a blanket and lay down next to me on a piece of carpet. We stared up at the sky and listened out for the noises of the city. When the streets grew quiet, Gino started snoring. I waited to doze off in my turn, but anger caught up with me and I didn’t sleep a wink.

Gino got up early. He made coffee for his mother, made sure she had everything she needed and told me I could stay in the apartment if I wanted. I declined the offer because I had no desire to meet my mother, who would be arriving soon. She came at seven every day to do the housework for the Ramouns. Gino didn’t have any other suggestion to make. He had to go to work. I walked with him to Place Sébastopol. He promised to see me at the end of the day and took his leave. I stood there on the pavement, not knowing what to do with myself. I felt ill at ease and ached all over. The thought of going home repelled me.

I went up onto the heights of Létang to look at the sea. It was as wild as the din in my head. Then I went to Boulevard Marceau to watch the trams with their passengers clinging to the guardrails like strings of garlic. At the station, I listened to the trains arriving in a screech of whistles and pouring their contingents of travellers out onto the platforms. From time to time, an idea would cross my mind and I would imagine myself getting on a train and going somewhere, anywhere, far from this feeling of disgust I was dragging around like a ball and chain. I wanted to hit everything that moved. If anybody looked at me, I was ready to charge.

I only felt a little calmer when Gino returned.

Gino was my stability, my crutch. Every evening, he would take me to the cinema to see Max Linder, Charlie Chaplin, The Three Musketeers, Tarzan of the Apes, King Kong and horror films. Then we would go to a cabaret in Rue d’Austerlitz in the Derb to hear Messaoud Médioni sing. I would then start to feel a little better. But in the morning, when Gino went to work, my unease would return and I would try and shake it off in the bustle of the streets.

Pierre came looking for me. I told him it was all over between us. He called me an idiot and told me that the ‘Yid’ was brainwashing me. I couldn’t control what my fist did next. I felt my ‘pimp’s’ nose give at the end of my arm. Surprised by my action, Pierre fell backwards, half stunned. He lifted his hand to his face and looked incredulously at his bloodstained fingers. ‘I should have expected that,’ he grunted in a voice shaking with bile. ‘I try to help you and this is how you thank me. Well, what can you expect of an Arab? No loyalty or gratitude.’

He stood up, gave me a black eye and finally left me alone.

7

We were supposed to be going to Ras el-Aïn for a walk, but Gino suddenly changed his mind. ‘I have things to sort out at home,’ he said by way of excuse. I walked home with him. And my mother was there, on Boulevard Mascara, a glove in one hand and a bowl of water beside her; she was just finishing washing my friend’s mother. What was the meaning of this strange coincidence? I asked Gino. He replied that I was wrong to avoid my family. I hadn’t set foot in Rue du Général-Cérez for nine months, not since the incident in the Jewish cemetery. I asked Gino if this was a roundabout way of getting rid of me. He told me his home was mine and that I could stay there as long as I wanted, but that my family needed me, and that it wasn’t a good idea to fall out with them.

I was getting ready to leave when my mother grabbed me by the wrist. ‘I have to talk to you,’ she said. She put on her veil and motioned me to follow her. We did not exchange a word in the street. She walked ahead and I trailed behind, wondering what new revelation awaited me round the corner.

When we got home, my mother said, ‘We’re not hard on you, it’s life that’s hard on all of us.’ I asked her why she hadn’t told me the truth about my father, and she replied that there was nothing to say about him. And that was all. My mother went into the kitchen to make dinner.

Nora joined me in the next room. She was even more beautiful than before and her big eyes threw me into disarray.

‘We missed you,’ she admitted, turning away in embarrassment.

She’s growing up too fast, I thought. She was almost a woman now. Her body had blossomed; it demanded celebration.

‘I’m back, that’s all that matters,’ I said.

Nora smelt good, like a meadow in spring. Her black hair fell over her round shoulders and her chest carried the promise of maturity.

We could think of nothing further to say.

Our silence spoke for us.

I was in love with her …

Aunt Rokaya opened her emaciated arms to me. ‘Silly fool!’ she scolded me affectionately. ‘You should never be angry with your family. How could you live with your friend so close to here and ignore us?’ She undid a scarf hanging from her blouse and handed me the silver ring that was in it. ‘This belonged to your grandfather. The day he died, he took it off his finger and made me promise to give it to my son. I never had a son of my own. And you’re more than a nephew to me.’

Aunt Rokaya had grown thinner. In addition to the paralysis of the lower limbs that confined her to her straw mattress, she complained of whistling in her ears and terrible headaches. The amulets the quacks prescribed for her had no effect. She was nothing now but a ghost with blurred features, her skin grey, her eyes full of stoic suffering.

Rokaya had the sickness of masterless people. She had contracted it in Turambo, when her home was a patched-up tent. At that time, the cauldron on the wooden fire only gurgled to stave off hunger. The flavourless crops grew once a year; the rest of the time we lived on roots and bitter acorns. By the age of five, Rokaya was looking after her grandfather’s one goat. One night, the goat’s throat had been torn out by a jackal because the pen hadn’t been properly closed. She had felt guilty about that all her life. Whenever misfortune struck us, she would say it was her fault — it was pointless to tell her that she was not to blame. At the age of fourteen, she was married off to a club-footed shepherd who beat her to make her submit to him. He knew he was the lowest of the low and had married her to make himself feel important. So when she so much as looked at him, he considered it an outrage. He died, killed by a bolt of lightning, and the villagers saw the hand of God in that thunderbolt from heaven. A widow at nineteen, she was remarried to another peasant who was just as bad. Her body would forever bear the marks of the mistreatment meted out to her during her second marriage. Rejected at the age of twenty-six, she was handed over for the third time to a pedlar who set off one morning to sell samovars and never came back, leaving his wife eight months pregnant. Rokaya gave birth to Nora in a barn, pushing with all her might, a cloth in her mouth to stifle her screams. At the age of forty-five, she was at the end of her tether. She looked twice her age. Her sickness had eaten her up inside with all the methodical greed of a colony of termites. I had always felt sorry for her. Her face bore the traces of an old sorrow that refused to vanish. It was through Rokaya that I had thought I understood that there are tragedies that obstinately remain on the surface, like ugly scars, in order not to fall into oblivion and thus be absolved of the harm they have caused … Because the damage returns as soon as it is forgiven, convinced it has been rehabilitated, and then it can no longer stop. Rokaya kept her wounds as open as her eyes, in order not to lose sight of even the slightest pain she had suffered for fear of not recognising it if it had the nerve to knock at her door again. Her face, in a sense, was a mirror where every ordeal displayed its duly paid bills. And the ordeals strove to make an inextricable parchment of her facial lines, all of which led back to the same original crime, that of a child of five who had neglected to close the pen where her family’s one goat was kept.

We had dinner in the main room, all four of us gathered round a low table, Rokaya lying a little further away in a corner. Mekki had merely given a little smile when he came home. He didn’t say a word to me. His status as head of the family spared him certain obligations. But he was pleased with my return to the fold. Nora had difficulty swallowing her spoonfuls of soup. My presence disturbed her. Or rather my gaze. I couldn’t stop glancing at her out of the corner of my eye, seeing nothing but her full mouth, which strove to silence what her eyes demanded. I too had grown up. I was nearly seventeen and well built, and whenever I smiled at my reflection in the mirror, my face displayed a kind of fleeting charm. Nora harboured feelings for me that went beyond pure innocence. Those nine months of separation had revealed us to ourselves. Our silence betrayed an inner feverishness that was too much for us. In our traditions, we didn’t know how to deal with those kinds of feeling. We let them simmer in secret and sometimes completely stifled them. They were feelings which were hard to bear and too dangerous to be brought out into the open. Words, in that platonic but intense debate, would have seemed indecently crude, since with us the senses were expressed in darkness. In that place, touch was more eloquent than poetry.

After dinner, Mekki claimed to have an appointment with his Mozabite partner and left; my mother cleared the table. Rokaya was already asleep. And it was that evening, taking advantage of a moment’s inattention, that I put my hand on Nora’s breasts. For the first time in my life, I touched the pulse of a fraction of eternity. Never would my fingers know a stronger sensation. Nora leapt back, startled by my gesture, but I could see in her wide eyes that she was flattered. She hastened to join my mother, while I retreated to the balcony, my heart racing, with the feeling that I held at the tips of my bold fingers, still heavy with Nora’s flesh, all the euphoria of the world.

In the morning, I had the impression that Medina Jedida was celebrating something. Faces were radiant and the sun-drenched streets seemed to have awoken to better days. In reality, it was I who was exultant. I had dreamt about Nora, and in my dream I had kissed her on the lips; as far as I was concerned, I had really kissed her. My mouth was anointed with an exquisite nectar. My chest was filled with joy, and my heart soared. Drained of all my venom, I had forgiven everything’. I even went to my uncle’s shop to show him I bore him no grudge. His partner, a Mozabite short in stature but enormously erudite, invited me to a café and we drank two pots of tea without realising it. He knew all the herbs and their qualities. I would listen to him for a few seconds then, between the names of flowers or aphrodisiac plants, the quivering image of Nora would catapult me through a thousand potential acts of daring.

It was after midday when the Mozabite took his leave of me.

I went back to Rue du Général-Cérez.

My mother was at the Ramouns’. Rokaya was dozing on her straw mattress. Nora was in the kitchen watching the cooking pot. I looked in all directions to make sure there was nobody else in the house. My cousin guessed what was going on in my head. She immediately became defensive. I approached her, my eyes riveted on her lips. She brandished her spatula. Her eyes did not reject mine, but it was a question of integrity. With us, love wasn’t paramount; it was subject to all kinds of proprieties and thus became almost a trial of strength. Nevertheless, I felt capable of climbing the sacred mountains and walking all over them, twisting the neck of convention, mocking the devil in his den. My body was in a frenzy. Nora backed into the wall, her spatula raised in front of her like a shield. I could see neither the barriers nor the wrong of it; I saw only her, and nothing else around us mattered. My face was an inch from hers, my mouth offering itself to her. I prayed with all my might that Nora would do the same and I waited for her lips to meet mine. Her breath mingled with mine but Nora did not yield. A tear rolled down her cheek and abruptly quenched the fire devouring me. ‘If you have any consideration for me, don’t do that,’ Nora said … I became aware of the extent of my selfishness. You don’t stamp on the sacred mountains. With my finger, I wiped the tears from my cousin’s cheek. ‘I think I came back earlier than expected,’ I said to save face. She looked down and nodded. I ran to rejoin the bustle of the streets. I was happy, and proud of my cousin. Her attitude had made her grow a hundredfold in my heart and in my mind.

I don’t know where I went that day, or how I managed to stay upright until Gino returned.

‘I’m seriously in love,’ I confided in him while he was changing in his room.

‘Nothing is serious about love,’ Madame Ramoun said from her bed.

Gino frowned. He gestured to me to lower my voice. We both laughed up our sleeves like two impudent children caught in the act. I glanced over my shoulder. Madame Ramoun had a broad smile on her sweat-streaked face.

‘I need a job,’ I said to Gino. ‘To become a man.’

‘Is that the condition your lady love has set you?’ he teased me, laughing.

‘It’s my condition for being worthy of her. I want to have a life, don’t you understand? Up until now all I’ve done is drift.’

‘I can see you’ve got it bad.’

‘I have! I don’t even know where I am any more.’

‘You lucky dog.’

‘Couldn’t you have a word with your boss?’

‘You don’t know anything about motor mechanics, and old Bébert is a bit of a stickler about things like that.’

‘I’ll learn.’

Gino pursed his lips in embarrassment, but promised to see what he could do.

He managed to persuade his boss to take me on as an apprentice.

Old Bébert told me straight away that I was to watch the others at work and not touch anything. He first asked me a lot of questions about the jobs I had done, about my family, whether I was ill and whether I had a criminal record. Next, he showed me the barrels for storing used oil, the broom cupboard and the cleaning materials and immediately put me to the test. As Gino was busy working on the innards of a large car, half buried under the bonnet, I had to get on with it by myself and familiarise myself as quickly as possible with the different sections of the garage. Old Bébert watched me from his booth, one eye on his registers, the other on what I was doing.

At about one o’clock, Gino took me to a kiosk where you could sit at a table and order sandwiches. I wasn’t hungry; instead I was wondering if the stale air of the garage suited me. I felt a bit out of my depth among those stubborn mechanics. Gino sensed I was disorientated and talked about all kinds of things just to lighten the atmosphere.

Three young Roumis were lounging on the terrace. The fair-haired one stopped stirring his coffee when he saw us take our seats at the next table.

‘Arabs aren’t allowed here,’ he said.

‘He’s with me,’ Gino said.

‘And who are you?’

‘We’re not looking for trouble. We just want a bite to eat.’

His two companions looked us up and down. They didn’t seem inclined to leave us alone.

‘They should put a sign up over the door,’ the youngest of the three said. ‘Dogs and Arabs not allowed.’

‘What’d be the point? They can’t read.’

‘In that case, why don’t they stay in their own pen?’

‘They can’t keep still either. God created Arabs to piss everyone off.’

Gino hailed the waiter, a dark-skinned adolescent, and gave him our order.

The fair-haired Roumi was looking at my clothes and sniggering. ‘What’s the difference between an Arab and a potato?’ he said. After looking around the table with an affected air, he cried, ‘A potato can be cultivated.’

His two companions laughed sardonically.

‘I didn’t quite get that,’ I said to the fair-haired one, ignoring Gino’s hand under the table trying to restrain me.

‘There’s no point even trying. You’ve been playing with yourself so much, you’ve addled your brains.’

‘Are you insulting me?’

‘Let it go,’ Gino said.

‘He’s not showing respect.’

‘No kidding!’ the fair-haired one retorted, leaving his table. He towered over me. ‘Do you even know what respect is?’

‘Let’s get out of here,’ Gino begged me, already on his feet.

I heaved a sigh and was getting ready to leave when the Roumi caught hold of the collar of my shirt. ‘Where do you think you’re going, you Arab scum? I haven’t finished with you yet.’

‘Listen,’ Gino said, trying to reason with him, ‘we don’t want any trouble.’

‘I’m not talking to you. Watch your step, okay?’ He turned back to me. ‘Well, Arab, cat got your tongue? Apart from playing with yourself, what else can you do with your hands, you little —?’

He didn’t finish his sentence. My fist catapulted him over the table. He span round amid the cups and bottles and collapsed to the ground in a clatter of breaking glass and crockery, his nose smashed and his arms outstretched.

‘I can punch,’ I said in reply to his last question.

The other two clowns raised their hands in surrender. Gino pulled me firmly by the wrist and we walked back up the boulevard to the garage.

Gino was angry with me. ‘Bébert doesn’t want any trouble in the neighbourhood. I moved heaven and earth to get him to agree to try you out.’

‘What did you want me to do? Let that idiot wipe the floor with me?’

‘He was just a layabout. I admit he was asking for it, but it wasn’t necessary. You have to learn when it’s best just to leave it, Turambo. If you start dwelling on the things that make you angry, you won’t get far. You have a trade to learn, with a possible job at the end of it. So be patient and, above all, be reasonable. There are pests like that on every street corner. You could spend your life knocking them out, but they’d only keep coming. They annoy me too; I may not make a big deal out of it, but it’s not for lack of self-respect.’

Old Bébert virtually worshipped his customers’ cars. He handled them as if they were made of nitroglycerine or porcelain. He even sometimes polished them in places with the end of his apron. His customers came from the city’s nouveaux riches, people who cared about appearances and displayed their social status like war veterans displaying their medals, proud of the struggle that had led them from the gutter to the heights when nobody would have given them much chance of survival.

You had to see these toffs leaving their cars with us. So many detailed instructions, insistent recommendations, adamant warnings. They wouldn’t leave the garage until they had made sure that their ‘gem’ was in good hands, promising large tips to the deserving and a thunderbolt from heaven for the slightest scratch on the bodywork.

Bébert kept an eye on things. He had surrounded himself with a team of four hand-picked specialist mechanics whom he ruled with a rod of iron and pushed hard. He had given me simple jobs to do: changing the wheels, cleaning the seats and the floors, polishing the bodywork and other safe little things, which didn’t stop me watching the others working because I wanted to learn the trade.

The team ended up adopting me. There were two old mechanics who had worked in factories, a young Corsican named Filippi who knew engines like the back of his hand, and Gino. The atmosphere was good and we worked relentlessly, telling each other a load of gossip about such and such a nabob and jokes that kept us human among the scrap iron and the smells of fuel.

After a few months, Bébert put me together with Gino. At last I had the right to touch the innards beneath the bonnets. I could connect a hose, replace a coil, clean a carburettor, adjust a headlight.

I was earning decent money, and not once had I been lectured by the boss.

But this respite was not to last.

It was about four in the afternoon. We were on schedule to deliver a superb vehicle which a customer had entrusted to us for a complete overhaul, a Citroën B14 touring car that looked as if it had come straight off the assembly line. Its owner, a red-headed muscle man with a broken nose, was crazy about it. He couldn’t stop running his finger over the bonnet to wipe away imperceptible specks of dust. When he came back for it and saw it waiting for him, all shiny and new, in the middle of the garage, he put his hands on his hips and stood there gazing at it for a while, then turned to his companion to see if he was as impressed as he was. ‘Lovely, isn’t she, my old crock? Girls won’t be able to resist me.’ Then he opened the door and his face suddenly turned dark red. ‘What’s this shit?’ he roared, pointing to a grease stain on the white leather seat. Gino came running to have a look. The customer took him by the throat and lifted him off the floor. ‘Do you know how much my old crock cost? You could spend your whole life forging banknotes and you wouldn’t be able to afford her, you slob.’ I grabbed a cloth and rushed over to wipe the seat, but all that did was to spread the grease further on the leather. Horrified by my clumsiness, the customer uttered a fierce curse and, letting go of Gino, gave me a slap that made me spin round. Gino didn’t have time to grab me round the waist. My arm threw a lightning hook and the customer collapsed like a house of cards. He writhed weakly on the floor, shuddered two or three times and went stiff. His companion stood there petrified, leaning back as if about to retreat. The mechanics stopped what they were doing and looked at us open-mouthed. Gino lifted his hands to his temples, devastated; I guessed that I had just committed a capital crime. Old Bébert burst out of his booth, white-faced with panic. He pushed me aside and bent over the customer. In the icy silence of the garage, all that could be heard was the heavy breathing of old Bébert, who didn’t know which to tear out: his hair or my eyes. ‘Have you gone mad?’ he screamed at me, rising again to his full height, shaking from head to foot. ‘You dare raise your hand to a customer, you toerag, you maggot? Is that how you repay me? I give you a job and you attack my customers? I don’t want to see you again. Get out of here. Go back to your cave until the police come for you. Because, trust me, you’re going to pay for this.’ I threw the cloth on the ground and went to get changed. Bébert ran after me, continuing to insult me while I took off my overalls and put my street clothes back on. His salivating mouth sprayed me with spittle and his eyes had a murderous look in them. He went back and helped the customer to his feet. The man was still dazed and couldn’t stand up straight. They put him in his car as best they could and his companion immediately started the engine. When the car left the garage, Bébert laid into Gino. He blamed him for my behaviour, held him responsible for the consequences of my attack and told him that he too was fired.

We trudged back to Boulevard Mascara. Gino walked silently, stricken, his head down. I was devastated, but I couldn’t find the words to apologise for the wrong I had done him. When we got to his place, he asked me to leave him, which I did.

Sitting on the doorstep of our courtyard, I was waiting for the promised Black Maria. I imagined myself at the police station, subject to the wrath of the cops. I had hit a European, they weren’t going to treat me with kid gloves. I knew Arabs who had found themselves in jail on a hunch, sometimes simply to be made an example of. And the fellow I had knocked out couldn’t have been just anybody, judging by his big car and Bébert’s panic.

The sun was starting to go down, but there was still no sign of the police. Were they waiting for nightfall to surprise me in my bed? I was sick to my stomach. I didn’t know what to do with my hands, which were sticky with tension. I remembered all the horrible stories I’d been told about prisons and the inhuman treatment meted out to prisoners. I panicked every time I heard a screech of tyres …

Instead of the police, it was three Europeans who came to see me: a stocky old man with a paunch, a straw boater pulled down over his head, and two other men, one stocky and bald, the other tall and thin — I’d seen this one at the local cinema, where he worked as a pianist, accompanying silent films.

‘Are you Turambo?’ the old man asked me.

‘Why do you want to know?’

‘You work at Bébert’s garage?’

‘Yes.’

He held out his hand, but I didn’t take it, afraid he would hit me with the other hand.

‘My name’s De Stefano. The fellow with glasses is Francis, and this is Salvo. I run a gym in Rue Wagram, just opposite the Porte du Ravin. Everyone’s talking about you, son. Filippi, who works with you, told me you knocked out Left-Hand with a single blow. I can’t get over it. Actually, nobody can get over it.’

‘Do you know who Left-Hand is?’ the bald man asked me.

‘No.’

‘He’s the only boxer in the Oran region to have stood up to Georges Carpentier. Three fights, and he never went down. You do know who Georges Carpentier is?’

‘No.’

‘He’s North African champion and world champion. He beat Battling Levinsky. Do you know who Battling Levinsky is?’

‘Stop,’ the pianist said. ‘You’re confusing him with your “Do you know who this man is?” and “Do you know who that man is?” He probably doesn’t even know who his own father is.’

The old man told his companions to keep quiet, then said to me, ‘Listen, son. What would you say to joining my gym?’

‘The police will be coming for me.’

‘They won’t. A boxer doesn’t lodge a complaint when he gets beaten outside the ring. It’s a matter of honour. Either he demands a return match or he throws in the towel. Left-Hand won’t be going to any police station to report you, I guarantee it. You have nothing to fear from that quarter … So, will you accept my offer? Who knows? You may be a champion and you don’t even know it. We’re one big happy family in Rue Wagram. We know how to make a top boxer, all we need is the boy. According to Filippi, you like to use your fists, and that’s already the mark of a champion.’

‘I don’t like fighting. I just defend myself.’

‘You don’t seem in a fit state to think clearly right now,’ the pianist said, wiping his dark glasses on his sweater. ‘We don’t want to force your hand. These things are too serious to be taken lightly. We’ll come back tomorrow and talk it over with a clear head. Is that all right with you?’

‘Or you could come and see us at the gym,’ the old man suggested. ‘Then you’ll be able to see for yourself what it’s all about. Allow me to insist on this, my boy. You really look like a champion. You’re well built and you look people straight in the eye. I’ve been in this business for twenty years and I’ve learnt to recognise a rare bird when I see one. We’ll wait for you tomorrow morning. If you don’t show up, we’ll come back here and find you. Will you promise to wait for us, just in case?’

‘I don’t know, Monsieur.’

The old man nodded. He pushed his hat back on the top of his head without taking his eyes off me. Again, he held out his hand, and this time I took it.

‘So, Turambo, can I count on you?’

‘I’m not that keen on fighting, Monsieur.’

‘We’re not talking about a street brawl, son. Boxing is a skill. It’ll open lots of doors for you. You can earn a heap of money and privileges, and everyone’s respect. Respect is important for someone from the gutter. In fact it’s one of the few opportunities an Arab gets to rise in the world and he shouldn’t miss it. I don’t know why, but something tells me you won’t miss your opportunity. Think about it tonight. Tomorrow we’ll talk.’

All three of them said goodbye and left.

They came back the next day, and the days after that. Sometimes together, sometimes separately. The old man promised me the earth. He told me his intuition had never let him down and that I was a real centaur. It was as if his future depended on my decision. He was so friendly I was afraid to disappoint him. I promised him I’d think about it. He told me that was the one thing I’d been doing for two weeks now, and that it all boiled down to one question: should I become a boxer or continue to roast in the sun?

Gino found the offer interesting. ‘All you ever do is fight,’ he remarked in a slightly reproachful tone. ‘Boxing is a job like any other. The guy you knocked out in the garage was nothing but a roughneck before he got in the ring. You saw the car he drove, the clothes he wore. If you learn quickly, you can climb the ladder and be rich and famous.’

Encouraged by Gino, I asked my uncle for advice. Mekki utterly disapproved of my wish to join the gym in Rue Wagram. ‘It’s a sin,’ he decreed. ‘You don’t dip your bread in other people’s blood. If you want to bless your food, water it with the sweat of your brow. Any profession that throws two people into a ring like animals isn’t a profession, it’s a perversion. I forbid you to raise your hand to your fellow man to earn a crust. We’re believers, and no faith condones violence.’

When De Stefano came back the next time, I informed him that the family council had made its decision and that I wouldn’t be a boxer. He was so upset, he didn’t know what to say. He took off his hat, wiped his head with a handkerchief and stared at the toes of his shoes for five or six minutes before withdrawing with a heavy heart.

Back to square one.

A wholesale merchant hired me for his ironmonger’s in Rue d’Arzew. From morning to evening, I pushed a cart laden with all kinds of tools which I had to deliver to the different shops in the neighbourhood. My employer, an old Maltese riddled with rheumatism, was kind, but his customers would always find something to blame me for and would yell at me for any fault in the merchandise as if I was the one who had made it. I was ill at ease in those well-to-do neighbourhoods where the rattle of trams and the shrill blare of car horns drowned out the murmur of simple things. I held out for a few months, but after a while I’d had enough.

I was no longer the hungry kid ready to take on any cheap task, and employers were suspicious of hardened labourers. The foremen on building sites would shake their heads at me from a distance. The warehouse owners would pretend to look elsewhere. I was firmly rejected everywhere. In the harbour, there were lots of people willing to work for peanuts. The fights that broke out among the men jostling for work quickly sorted the wheat from the chaff. When the gate closed behind the lucky ones, the rejects immediately looked for scapegoats to take it out on. Poverty had reduced the unemployed to a state lower than that of wolves, and woe betide the man who succumbed. On one occasion, I almost didn’t escape with my life either. A big brute had caught his hand between the two halves of the gate. The recruiter ordered him to move away. The brute couldn’t obey because of his trapped hand. The recruiter started beating him with his club until the poor fellow’s face was streaming with blood. I threw myself at the recruiter and his big arms descended on me like vultures. Nobody came to my rescue. Not even the brute himself, who, in order to be noticed by the recruiter and show him how loyal he was in spite of the attack, took the liberty of finishing off the job after the thugs had left. He kicked me in the back, yelling that nobody raised his hand to Monsieur Créon. He yelled louder and louder so that the recruiter could still hear him as he walked away. The brute didn’t get hired that day, but he was convinced he had scored a point. After he’d finished with me, he knelt down next to me and said, ‘I’m sorry. I have twelve mouths to feed and no other way out. I’d sell my soul to the devil for peanuts …’

Gino had found a job at a printing works in Rue de Tlemcen. He no longer bore me a grudge for the incident at the garage. ‘I wasn’t planning to work there for the rest of my life anyway,’ he admitted. On the evenings when a neighbour volunteered to keep his mother company, Gino took me to cafés-concerts to hear musicians and singers. My uncle’s partner the Mozabite, who was a lyric writer in his spare time, used to say: Music is the proof that we are capable of continuing to love despite everything, of sharing the same emotion, of being ourselves a wonderful, healthy emotion, as beautiful as a dream emerging in the dead of night … What is an angel without his harp but a sad, naked demon, and what would paradise be for him but an exile full of boredom? Gino was absolutely of the same opinion. He loved music. Unlike me. I only liked the Kabyle songs my mother hummed while going about her household chores, but, going around with Gino, I was starting to discover new worlds. Before him, I didn’t know anything about films or different kinds of music. Gradually, my senses had opened to other people’s joys, and I wanted more.

A good-natured rivalry forced the musicians to excel. From Medina Jedida to the Casbah by way of the Derb, the singers warded off ill fortune just by clearing their throats. For my part, I started showing Gino what my own people could do. I took him to a Moorish café down a dead-end street in Sidi Blel, frequented by those in the know. There was a highly experienced violinist, a lute player, a derbouka, and a singer with vocal cords as solid as ropes. Gino fell in love with the group. He promised me that one day he would write a book about the music of the different neighbourhoods of Oran.

Times were hard, especially for the people of my community. My people could still cling to the flotsam, but they weren’t allowed on board the ship. The greater the poverty, though, the less the people of Oran gave in to it. Anger and humiliation might have been rife in the streets, but the wounds healed by themselves whenever the sound of the mandolin replaced the cacophony of men. In any case, we had no choice: either we listened to music or we gave in to our frustrations. These cafés were warm, welcoming places where the poor could find some respite and even, for a few hours, imagine that they were privileged. They sat on rickety chairs, their fezzes or tarbooshes tilted ostentatiously over their temples, some in suits, others in fine traditional robes. The better off among them smoked nargileh and sipped mint tea while on a makeshift stage legendary tenors took turns, men nourished by their native soil. By taking refuge in the music, I was leaving my furies behind. It was my way of hearing the sound of another bell, of feeling lucky for as long as the singing lasted, of drowning my sorrows in the sorrows of the lyric writers. It was only a brief reprieve, but for a lost soul like me it was almost a moment of grace.

Whenever Gino took his leave of me, I didn’t dare go back home immediately. I would continue to wander the dark alleys until morning, the songs still echoing in my head. In order to be left in peace, I told my family that I was a nightwatchman.

It was a Friday.

My mother had come home later than usual, tottering with exhaustion. I asked her what was wrong.

‘She made me brush her hair three times in a row,’ she sighed, throwing her veil into a corner. ‘I think she’s losing her mind.’

My mother was talking about Madame Ramoun.

‘She’s been raving since midday,’ she went on once she had quenched her thirst. ‘I didn’t know if I should listen to her or finish the housework. The poor woman’s not acting normally. She kept reciting something in a language which wasn’t Spanish, French, Arabic or Kabyle. I think she’s possessed.’

‘It must have been Italian,’ I said. ‘Did she fire you?’

My mother told me to let her catch her breath. She lay down on a sheepskin rug and slid her arm under her head as a pillow. ‘She’s asking for you, my son. She wants to see you. She won’t take no for an answer.’

I went to get a box of Pernot biscuits, which Gino’s mother was particularly fond of, and proceeded to Boulevard Mascara.

The door wasn’t locked.

I called to my friend and he came out onto the balcony and signalled to me to come up. I didn’t like the darkness on the stairs. A vague sense of foreboding clutched at my heart.

Gino was sitting on his mother’s bed with a defeated look on his face. Madame Ramoun lay spread over the mattress, gasping for air, a Bible on her chest. She slowly turned her head towards me. Her eyes lit up when she recognised me. She gave me a sad smile and motioned to me to come closer. Gino gave up his seat for me and stood by his mother’s bedside. I sat down on the edge of the bed, with a pang in my heart.

‘I was waiting just for you, Turambo. I can’t move my arm. Put your hand on mine, please. I have to talk to you.’

Whenever I saw her, I felt just as sorry for her. To have to lie down day and night, every day and every night, year in, year out, to depend on other people even for your most private needs: nobody deserved such indignity. Madame Ramoun was nothing but a crucified soul beneath a heap of wild flesh, like an unhappy saint trapped in her own contrition, and I could see no rhyme or reason to her suffering.

‘I love you like my son, Turambo. You’re more than a friend to Gino, more than a brother. From the first time I saw you, I knew you were the twin my son never had. Gino is a good person. He never harms anyone, and we live in unforgiving times. You’re younger than him, but I see you as older. And that reassures me. I want you to take care of Gino.’

‘Mother, please,’ Gino said.

‘Why do you say that, Madame Ramoun?’

‘Because I’m going. And I want to go in peace. I have nothing on my conscience, but I’m leaving an orphan behind me. I want to be sure he’ll be in good hands.’

‘Is she sick?’ I asked Gino.

‘She’s rambling. She’s been like this since midday. I called the doctor; he said there’s nothing wrong. I don’t understand why she thinks she’s dying. I’ve been trying to reason with her, but she won’t listen to me.’

‘There are things a doctor doesn’t see,’ his mother said. ‘Things only those who are going feel. My feet are freezing and the cold is spreading to the rest of my body.’

‘No, Mother, you’re imagining things.’

‘Put your hand on mine again, Turambo, and swear to me that you’ll take care of my son.’

Gino signalled to me to agree.

I swallowed, my throat tight with emotion.

‘Will you take care of him as you take care of yourself?’

‘Yes, Madame Ramoun.’

‘I don’t want anything to come between you, not money, not women, not your careers, not temptation.’

‘Nothing will come between us.’

‘I’ll be looking down on you, Turambo.’

‘I’ll look after Gino and won’t let any serpents come between us.’

‘Do you promise?’

‘I swear.’

She turned to Gino and said to him in Italian, ‘Fetch me your father.’

‘Mother …’

‘Please, Gino.’

Gino went to his room and came back with a framed photograph of a turbaned infantryman smiling at the camera and puffing at a cigarette. He was young, handsome, fine-featured and dark-skinned. The photograph had turned yellow in places and had scratches which, fortunately, had spared the soldier’s face.

‘Was he an Arab?’ I asked Gino.

‘He was my father, that’s all,’ he replied, irritated by my stupid question.

He placed the photograph on the chair next to the bedside table, so that his mother had it facing her. Madame Ramoun gazed for a long time at her husband’s picture. She smiled, sighed, smiled again, and raised her eyebrows in an expression of tenderness while a thousand memories flashed before her eyes. Everything in her was asking for forgiveness. She’d had enough of being confined to her sarcophagus of flesh. Without her faith, she would doubtless have put an end to her life ages ago, but there was that fear of the Last Judgement, that horrible deadline that raises its finger to warn you against yourself, that keeps you in purgatory while promising you hell if you try to get out of it. I had often asked myself what I would do in her position; not once had I come up with an answer. I had simply watched the poor woman sink into the quicksand of her body, like someone watching the misery of the world making a spectacle of itself on every street corner. There was nothing else to do.

‘And now, read to me a little, Gino … No, not the Bible,’ she said, clasping the holy book tighter to her chest. ‘I prefer Edmond Bourg. Reread Chapter thirteen to me, the passage where he talks about his wife …’

Madame Ramoun closed her eyes and let her son’s penetrating voice lull her. Gino read Chapter thirteen to her. As his mother didn’t react, he went on to the next chapter. Madame Ramoun shifted in her sleep and moved her finger, begging her son to go back and reread, over and over, the same chapter that the author devotes to his wife. It was a moving passage in which Edmond Bourg asked his wife for forgiveness.

Madame Ramoun died a few hours later, the Bible over her heart and her eyes filled with a serene light. First, she heaved a sigh, opened her eyes to take one last look at her son and smiled at him, then, happy, freed from the chains of her body, as light as the first thrill of her romance, she turned to the photograph propped up on the chair and said, ‘You took your time coming for me, my love.’

Gino and I looked for a carpenter to make us a coffin; those offered by the undertakers were no match for the dead woman’s size. It was hot and we had to be quick about it to avoid the corpse decomposing.

Gino’s worst fears were realised. More than the mourning itself, it was the removal of the body that was a particularly gruelling ordeal for my friend. It was impossible to get the corpse out through the main door. She was too obese, and too heavy for the bearers.

Volunteers from the neighbourhood came to help. There was such a crowd that the tram couldn’t get through. What’s going on? the passengers asked, leaning over the guardrail. Apparently a woman died … Did the building collapse on her? No, they’re knocking down the wall to get her out … Are you joking? Everyone stared at the men making a big hole in the wall around the window of the dead woman’s room.

Gino was devastated at the spectacle afforded by his mother’s funeral. He always preferred to be discreet and now he was on display to all and sundry like some kind of circus freak.

After knocking down the front of the house, the volunteers started erecting scaffolding with the help of ropes, pulleys and beams. A stonemason with a stitched forehead cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted instructions. The coffin, as big as a Norman dresser, was tied firmly and, to cries of Now hoist! some dozen men starting pulling on the ropes while others, on the balcony, guided the load to avoid it crashing into the wall.

The chaos that day was unbelievable.

When the coffin emerged through the hole in the wall and swayed over everyone’s heads, the crowd held their breath. In the general silence, the only sound was the creaking of the pulleys. The coffin was lowered with extreme caution and laid on a cart. The funeral cortège set off immediately, drawing dozens of onlookers in its wake.

In the streets, people stopped as the hearse went by; some took off their hats, others, sitting at café tables, rose obsequiously to their feet. Boys emerged from the thickets and trees where they were playing hide and seek, stopped their games of pignols or put off till later the errands they had been given and came to swell the cortège, suddenly silent and solemn, while housewives jostled one another on the balconies and rooftops, their children clinging to their skirts. An old madman who looked like Rasputin came and placed himself at the front of the cortège, foaming at the mouth, eyes popping out of their sockets. He pointed at the hearse, then at the sky, and shook his unruly hair from side to side, crying, ‘This is a warning. We’ll all die one day. What we think we possess is only an illusion. We’re merely the fleeting links in a chain dragged by a ghost named Time heading straight for nothingness.’ He was in a trance. Policemen had to step in and get him out of the way.

Gino kept his head down.

I took his hand; he pulled it away quickly and hurried on, wanting to be alone.

We buried Madame Ramoun in the Christian cemetery.

It was a terribly sad day.

Misfortunes never come singly. When one rears its head, a whole tribe appears in its wake, and the descent into hell begins in earnest.

It was a religious holiday and I was just getting ready to go with Gino to the beach at Kristel, where my friend had got into the habit of taking refuge since his mother’s death, when a gleaming car, driven by an Arab driver, stopped outside our house in Rue du Général-Cérez. In no time at all, kids appeared from the nearby alleys and started swarming around that gem on four wheels, fascinated by so much technology and refinement.

Who was that fat lady who looked like a sultana, being helped out of the car by two servants? Who were those women glittering with jewels and silk, and where were they taking those trays loaded with gifts and beribboned cakes? What was the meaning of those loud ululations, the excitement that had gripped our courtyard?

Nobody had told me, and I hadn’t seen it coming.

It was like a guillotine blade falling without any warning.

Nora’s a wonderful girl, my mother would tell me. She deserves all the happiness in the world, and you don’t have much to give her, my son. You have to face facts. Nora will be pampered. She’ll live in a big house and eat her fill every day. Don’t be selfish. Leave her to her destiny, and try to find one for yourself …

My cousin Nora, the love I had thought was mine for sure, my reason for living, had been handed over to a rich landowner from Frenda.

How had a country bumpkin who lived hundreds of miles from Oran heard about her? Nora almost never left the house, never saw anybody.

‘The matchmakers!’ the Mozabite enlightened me. ‘They’re professionals who frequent the hammam. And there’s no more propitious place to evaluate the merchandise than a hammam. The matchmakers know their business. They come and take a bath, settle in the hot room and choose from among the naked virgins those who have high breasts, shapely thighs, full hips, nice round buttocks, slender necks and pretty faces. After setting their sights on the one they prefer, they follow her from a distance, find out where she lives and gather as much information about her as they can from the neighbours. Once they’re sure they’ve got their hands on the right girl, they inform the family that hired them and, within a week, ladies loaded with gifts appear as if out of the blue to make their offer to the beauty’s parents … It’s an old practice. How else can you explain, when a virgin has been confined within four walls, that someone always comes to ask for her hand? The matchmakers are the best detectives in the country, and probably the best paid. They’d track down the Queen of Sheba without any problem.’

I was devastated.

I didn’t go to Kristel that day.

No sea would have been big enough to drown my sorrows in.

No sooner requested than wrapped and delivered. Within three weeks, everything was arranged and the marriage procession was begun. I didn’t have time to feel sorry for myself. My blue-bird had gone to her cage and her chirping was drowned out by the noises of the city.

In Oran, winter arrives like a thief and leaves the same way. What does it take with it in its shameful retreat? Everything the inhabitants hate — greyness, cold, short days, bad moods — in other words, what they gladly give up to it.

That winter was the worst of all winters; it had stolen the sun from me. When spring returned with its lights and its joys, it merely made my nights all the colder and sadder. With Nora gone, my people and my streets were unfamiliar to me. I had been betrayed. My aunt was not unaware of the feelings I had for her daughter. How could she have trampled on them? And why hadn’t my mother tried to dissuade her? I hated the whole earth, the angels and the demons, and every star in the sky. I had the feeling I had lost sight of the one point of reference that mattered to me. Suddenly, I didn’t know where I was. Deprived of my certainties and a little of my soul, I began cursing everything in my path.

My mother tried to reason with me. Love is the privilege of the rich, she said. The poor don’t have access to it. Their world is too wretched to accommodate a dream; their romance is a sham.

I didn’t agree. I refused to admit that everything could be bought and sold, including one’s own offspring. As far as I was concerned, Nora had been sold. To an old country bumpkin from Frenda, rich enough to afford a houri, but too miserly and obtuse to offer her paradise. Nora would be nothing but a kind of odalisque trapped in a hostile harem. The others would resent her for being the youngest, the most idolised by the master, and they would plot against her until she ended up as less than a shadow. Then the master would find himself a new virgin, and Nora would be relegated to the rank of occasional concubine …

At night, I would lie on the balcony, unable to get to sleep. On my back, my hands behind my neck, I would look up at the sky as if it were some undesirable I was looking up and down. I would imagine Nora in the arms of her repulsive ogre, who probably smelt of mouldy hay beneath his satin robe; it was as if a machine had got out of control and was crushing me. It was no longer Nora suffering the advances of her lover, but me. I clearly felt that bastard’s sticky hands soil my flesh, his rutting animal breath on my face, and my lungs filled with his fetid exhalations.

Never had fate seemed so unjust as it did on those nights.

I had loved in silence a cousin of my own rank and blood, and an ageing stranger had appeared from nowhere to steal her from me like a big arm taking from a child the only dream that would console him for everything he would never possess!

‘Can I ask you a question?’ I said to Gino.

‘Of course.’

‘And will you answer me honestly?’

‘I’ll try.’

‘Am I cursed?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Then why do bad things always happen to me?’

‘What’s happening to you, Turambo, is something everyone goes through. You’re no more to be pitied than a workman who falls off a ladder. That’s what happens in life. With a bit of patience, this bad patch will be nothing but a vague memory.’

‘You think so?’

‘Don’t you?’

I waited for the bad patch to turn into a vague memory, but every morning, when I awoke, there it was, omnipresent, stinking up the air I breathed and contaminating my thoughts.

I could no longer sleep.

By day, I would keep close to the walls like a crab. Oran had become a circus of horrors. I was a curious beast on display for the neighbours to mock. None of them had ever dared look up at Nora when she hung the washing out on the balcony. They knew she was mine, and they were jealous. Some were delighted at my disappointment now and made little attempt to hide it. Others had no qualms about making hurtful insinuations. Even when I responded with my fists, they continued to make fun of me … To escape these unpleasant remarks, which often led to nasty fights, I would retreat to the Cueva del Agua, a cliff to the east of the city, far from the bustle and the misunderstandings. It was a sinister spot where a few ragged fishermen would pretend to be watching their lines while getting blind drunk and having arguments. Looking at them, I felt like getting drunk too, as if there was no tomorrow, so drunk I would take a wave for a flood. I felt like proclaiming my sorrow in order to drown out the noise of the waves, insulting all the patron saints of the city one by one, cursing the rich and the poor until I’d got rid of all of them.

What difference would it have made?

I contented myself with gazing at the sea. I would sit down on a big rock, put my chin on my knees, wrap my arms round my legs to warm them and stare at the horizon. The ships in the harbour proved to me that there were other places to go, other shores, where you could have fabulous chance encounters, meet people who spoke strange languages. I dreamt of jumping on a boat and setting sail for some mirage. With Nora gone, I had lost my moorings. I was unhappy every time a voice, a figure, a rustle brought her memory back to me. Leave her to her destiny, my mother had said, and try to find one for yourself … How could I imagine a whole destiny when a mere blow of fate was enough to disqualify me?

I spent hours questioning the sea, feeling the breeze swell my shirt without soothing my soul. I longed to become a bubble of air, to fly above the storms and the malice of men, to put myself out of reach of my grief. I felt confined in my body, disorientated in my own mind, as empty of interest as of meaning.

I saw Nora again six months after she got married. She had come back to see her mother.

I returned one day from my wanderings and there she was, in shimmering silk, like a young princess, more beautiful than ever. The sight took my breath away. But she wasn’t alone. Two sisters-in-law and a reptilian maid watched over her; she was the apple of their eye and they wouldn’t let her out of their sight. As soon as they heard my footsteps in the corridor leading to the inner courtyard, they hurriedly lowered the curtain in the doorway to shelter their protégée. For three days, I tried to approach Nora, but in vain. I kept clearing my throat and coughing into my fist to let her know that I was in the next room, waiting for her, but Nora didn’t appear. On the fourth day, I managed to outwit her guards. Nora almost fainted when she saw me looming over her. She wouldn’t have been so scared if she’d seen a ghost. Are you mad? she choked, turning pale. What is it you want? To ruin me? I’m married now. Please go.

She pushed me unceremoniously out of the room, out of her sight, out of her life …

I meant nothing to her any more, except perhaps a potential source of scandal.

That was when I remembered De Stefano’s offer, and I found myself knocking at the door of his gym in Rue Wagram.

If you wanted to beat yourself up, there was no better place to do it than in a boxing ring.