The German Mujahid

MALRICH’S DIARY, NOVEMBER 1996

It was hard for me to read Rachel’s diary. His French isn’t like mine. The dictionary wasn’t much help, every time I looked something up it just referred me to something else. French is a real minefield, every word is a whole history linked to every other. How is anyone supposed to remember it all? I remembered something Monsieur Vincent used to say to me: “Education is like tightening a wheel nut, too much is too much and not enough is not enough.” But I learned a lot, and the more I learned, the more I wanted to know.

The whole thing started with the eight o’clock news on Monday, 25 April 1994. One tragedy leading to another leading to another, the third the worst tragedy of all time. Rachel wrote:

I’ve never felt any particular attachment to Algeria, but every night, at eight o’clock on the dot, I’d sit down in front of the television waiting for news from the bled. There’s a war on there. A faceless, pitiless, endless war. So much has been said about it, so many terrible things, that I came to believe that some day or other, no matter where we were, no matter what we did, this horror was bound to touch us. I feared as much for this distant country, for my parents living there, as I did for us, here, safe from it all.

In his letters, papa only ever talked about the village, his humdrum routine, as if the village were a bubble beyond time itself. Gradually, in my mind, the whole country became reduced to that village. That was how I saw it: an ancient village from some dimly remembered folk tale; the villagers have no names, no faces, they never speak, never go anywhere; I saw them standing, crouching, lying on mats or sitting on stools in front of closed doors, cracked whitewashed walls; they move slowly, with no particular goal; the streets are narrow, the roofs low, the minarets oblique, the fountains dry; the sand extends in vertiginous waves from one end of the horizon to the other; once a year clouds pass in the blue sky like hooded pilgrims mumbling to themselves, they never stop here but march on to sacrifice themselves to the sun or hurl themselves into the sea; sometimes they expiate their sins over the heads of the villagers, and then it’s like the biblical flood; here and there I hear dogs barking at nothing, the caravans are long gone but as everywhere in these forsaken countries, skeletal buses shudder along the rutted roads like demons belching smoke; I see naked children running — like shadows swathed in dust — too fast to know what game they are playing; pursued by some djinn; laughter and tears and screams following behind, fading to a vague hum in this air suffused with light and ash, merging with the echoes. And the more I told myself that all this was just some movie playing in my head, a ragbag of nostalgia, ignorance and clichés seen on the news, the more the scene seemed real. Papa and maman, on the other hand, I could still picture quite clearly, hear their voices, still smell them, and yet I knew that this too was false, that these were inventions of my mind, sacred relics from my childhood memory making them younger with each passing year. I reminded myself that life is hard in the old country, all the more so in a godforsaken village, and then this tranquil veil would tear and I would see an old man, half-paralysed, trying to stay standing to surprise me, and a hunchbacked old woman supporting herself against the flaking wall as she struggled to her feet to greet me, and I would think, this is papa, this is maman, this is what time and hard living have done to them.

Everything I know about Algeria, I know from the media, from books, from talking to friends. Back when I lived with uncle Ali on the estate, my impressions were too real to be true. On the estate, people played at being Algerian beyond what truth could bear. Nothing forced them to, but they conformed to tradition with consummate skill. Emigrants we are and emigrants we will be for all time. The country they spoke of with such emotion, such passion, doesn’t exist, the tradition that is the North Star of their memory still less so. It’s an idol with a stamp of tradition on its brow that reads “Made in Taiwan”; it’s phony, artificial and dangerous. Algeria was other, it had its own life, everyone knew its leaders had pillaged the country and were actively preparing for the end of days. The Algerians who still live there know all too well the difference between the real country and the one we live in. They know the alpha and the omega of the horror they are forced to live through. If it were left to them, the torturers would have been the only victims of their dirty deeds.

On 25 April 1994, the bled was the lead story on the eight o’clock news: “Fresh carnage in Algeria! Last night armed men stormed the little village of Aïn Deb and cut the throats of all of its inhabitants. According to Algerian television, this new massacre is the work of Islamic fundamentalists in the Armed Islamic Group. . ”

I jumped to my feet and screamed, “Oh God, this can’t be happening!” What I had most feared had happened, the horror had finally found us. I slumped back, shell-shocked, I was sweating, I felt cold, I was shivering. Ophélie rushed in from the kitchen shouting, “What is it? What’s the matter? Talk to me for Christ’s sake!” I pushed her away. I needed to be on my own, to take it in, to compose myself. But the truth was there before my eyes, in my heart, my parents, faces, immeasurably old, immeasurably scared, pleading with me to help them, stretching out their arms towards me as ancient shadows brutally dragged them back, threw them to the ground, shoved a knee into their frail chests and slit their throats. I could see their legs judder and twitch as terrified life fled their aged bodies.

I had thought I understood horror, we see it all over the world, we hear about it every night in the news, we know what motivates it, every day political analysts explain the terrifying logic, but the only person who truly understands horror is the victim. And now I was a victim, the victim, the son of victims, and the pain was real, deep, mysterious, unspeakable. Devastating. Pain came hand in hand with an aching doubt. First thing the next morning, I phoned the Algerian Embassy in Paris to find out if my parents had been among the victims. I was transferred from one office to another, put on hold, and I held, breathless, gasping, until finally a polite voice came on the line.

“What was the name again, monsieur?”

“Schiller. . S,C,H,I, double L, E, R. . Aícha and Hans Schiller.”

As I listened to the rustle of paper, I prayed to God to spare us. Then the polite voice came back and in a reassuring voice said: “Put your mind at rest, monsieur, they’re not on the list I have here. . Although. . ”

“Although what?”

“I do have an Aícha Majdali and a Hassan Hans, known as Sid Mourad. . Do those names mean anything to you?”

“That’s my mother. . and my father. . ” I said, holding back my tears.

“Please accept my condolences, monsieur.”

“Why aren’t they listed as Aícha and Hans Schiller?”

“That, I’m afraid, I couldn’t say, monsieur, the list was sent to us by the Ministry of the Interior in Algeria.”

Rachel had told me nothing. I never watch TV and my mates don’t even know it exists. We’d never dream about sitting in a dark room watching pictures and listening to people prattling on. If I did hear about the massacre it was only in passing, and I didn’t give a toss. Aïn Deb, Algeria, didn’t mean much to me. We knew there was a war on there, but it was far away, we talked about it the same way we talked about wars in Africa or the Middle East, in Kabul, in Bosnia. All my friends are from places where there’s a war or a famine, when we talk about that shit we never go into detail. Our life is here on the estate, the boredom, the neighbours screaming, the gang wars, the latest Islamist guerrilla action, the police raids, the busts, the dealers, the grief we get from our big brothers, the demonstrations, the funerals. There are family parties sometimes, they’re cool, but they’re really for the women. The men are always downstairs, standing outside the tower blocks counting the breezes. If you go at all, it’s only to say you went. The rest of the time we’re bored shitless, we just hang around on corners waiting for it to be over.

Sometimes, we’ll get a little visit from Com’Dad — that’s what we call Commissioner Lepère. He always pretends like he didn’t know we’d be there: “Hey guys, I didn’t see you there. . I was just passing. . ” Then he’ll come over, lean against the wall with us and chat like we’re old friends. Meanwhile we’re standing there wondering if he’s come to phish or philosophize. Both, my brothers, both. Sometimes we’ll feed him a scrap, some bit of bogus information, sometimes we’ll make out like we’re thinking aloud about careers in the service of humanity and the environment. We have a laugh and then say our goodbyes, American style, high fives all round. Com’Dad even buys us all tea at Da Hocine or a coffee at the station bar. Poor bastard thinks it’s a good way of getting in with us. It is so lame. But at the same time we pretend to our mates that we’ve got Com’Dad right where we want him, that we’re always feeding him false information and getting him to pull strings for illegals on the estate. As for Com’Dad, he’ll turn up uninvited at whatever’s going on, he’s there at every party, wedding, circumcision, excision, he pops round to celebrate when people get on a course, get out of prison, get their papers, and he never misses the slaughtering of the sheep at Eid. He always leads the procession at funerals. He’s part of the new school of policing: to know your enemy you have to live with him, live like him.

In Rachel’s garage I found newspaper reports of the Aïn Deb massacre, some from here, some from the bled, Le Monde, Libération, El Watan, Liberté. . There was a big pile of them. Rachel had highlighted the stuff about us. It ripped my heart out just reading it. There was something sick about it too, the journalists talking about genocide like it was just another story, but their tone was like: “We told you so, there’s something not right about this war.” What fucking war is right? This one’s just wronger than most. And you end up imagining all the horror, the shame piled up on the grief. I had a film of it playing in my head for days, it made me sick to my stomach. This sleepy old village in the middle of nowhere, a moonless sky, dogs starting to bark, mad staring eyes appearing out of the darkness, shadows darting here and there, listening at doors, shattering them with their boots, inhuman screams, orders barked in the night, terrified villagers dragged out into the village square, kids bawling, women screaming, girls scarred with fear clinging to their mothers, trying to hide their breasts, dazed old men praying to Allah, pleading with the killers, ashen-faced men parleying with the darkness. I see a towering bearded man with cartridge belts slung across his chest ranting at the crowd in the name of Allah, then cutting a man’s head off with a slash of his saber. After that, it’s chaos, carnage, crying and screaming, limbs thrashing, savage laughter. Then silence again. A few groans still, soft sounds dying away one after the other, and then a sort of heavy, viscous silence crashing down onto nothingness. The dogs aren’t barking now, they’re whimpering, heads between their paws. Night is closing in on itself, on its secret. Then the film starts up again, only more graphic this time, more screams, more silence, more darkness. The stench of death is choking me, the smell of blood as it mingles with the earth. And I throw up. Suddenly I realise I’m alone in Rachel’s house. It’s pitch black outside, the silence is crushing. Then I hear a dog bark. I imagine shadows slipping through the streets. I calm myself as best I can and I sleep like the dead.

Rachel wrote:

I’ve decided, I’m going to Aïn Deb. It is something I have to do, something I need to do. The risks don’t matter, this is my road to Damascus.

It’s not going to be easy. When I went to the Algerian consulate in Nanterre, they treated me like I was a Soviet dissident. The official stared me in the eye until it hurt, then he flicked through my passport, flicked through it again, read and reread my visa application, then, eyes half-closed, he tilted his head back and stared at a spot on the ceiling until I thought he was in a coma. I don’t know if he heard me call him, whether he realised I was worried, but suddenly, out of the blue, he leaned over to me and, just between the two of us, he muttered between clenched teeth, “Schiller, what is that. . English. . Jewish?”

“I think you’ll find the passport is French, monsieur.”

“Why do you want to go to Algeria?”

“My mother and father were Algerian, monsieur, they lived in Aïn Deb until 24 April, when the whole village was wiped off the map by Islamic fundamentalists. I want to visit their graves, I want to mourn, surely you can understand that?”

“Oh, yes, Aïn Deb. . You should have said. . But I’m afraid it’s out of the question. The consulate doesn’t issue visas to foreign nationals. . ”

“Then who do you issue them to?”

“If you get killed out there, people blame us. More to the point, the French government prohibits you from travelling to Algeria. Maybe you didn’t know that, or maybe you’re just playing dumb?”

“So what do I do?”

“If your parents were Algerian, you can apply for an Algerian passport.”

“How do I go about that?”

“Ask at the passport office.”

After three months of running around, I finally got my hands on the precious documents I needed to apply. Getting Algerian papers is without doubt the most complicated mission in the world. Stealing the Eiffel Tower or kidnapping the queen of England is child’s play by comparison. Phone all you like, no one ever answers, paperwork gets lost somewhere over the Mediterranean or is intercepted by Big Brother to be filed away in a missile silo in the Sahara until the world crumbles. It took me five registered letters and two months of fretful waiting just to get a copy of papa’s certificate of nationality. When I finally got the papers, I felt like a hero, like I’d conquered Annapurna. I rushed back to the consulate. The passport officer proved to be every bit as intractable as his colleague at the visa desk, but, in the end, officiousness had to defer to the law. God it must be degrading and dangerous to be Algerian full time.

At the Air France office they looked at me as though I had shown up with a noose around my neck ready to hang myself in front of them. “Air France no longer flies to Algeria, monsieur,” the woman snapped, shooing me away from her desk. I went to Air Algérie, where the woman behind the desk could think of no reason to send me packing, but she tossed my brand new passport back at me and said, “The computers are down. You’ll have to come back another day. Or you could try somewhere else.”

Only when I finally got the whole trip sorted out did I tell Ophélie and, as I expected, she threw a fit.

“Are you crazy? What the hell do you want to go to Algeria for?”

“It’s business, the company is sending me to assess the market.”

“But there’s a war on!”

“Exactly. . ”

“And you said you’d go?”

“It’s my job. . ”

“Why are you only telling me this now?”

“It wasn’t definite until now, we needed to find someone well connected in the regime.”

“Go on then, get yourself killed, see if I care.”

If sulking was an Olympic sport, Ophélie would be a gold medalist. At dawn the next morning, while the dustmen were making their rounds, I crept out of the house like a burglar.

The journey itself proved to be much easier than the consulate, the airlines and Ophélie predicted. Getting to Algiers was as easy as sending a letter to Switzerland. Unsurprisingly, Algiers Airport was just as I left it in 1985 when I came to bring Malrich back home. It was exactly how I remembered it, the only difference was the atmosphere. In 1985, it was low-level distrust, now it is abject terror. People here are scared of their own shadows. There’s been a lot going on. The airport was bombed not long ago, there’s still a gaping hole in the arrivals hall, you can still see spatters of dried blood on the walls.

I found myself out on the street, in the milling crowds, under a pitiless sun. What was I supposed to do now, where was I supposed to go? From my clothes, it was obvious I was a foreigner, so I didn’t go unnoticed. I hardly had time to wonder when a whole crowd of guys started sidling past me, staring up at the sky, down at their feet, doing their best to look as though they weren’t talking to me: “Hé, m’sieur!. . taxi?. . pas cher. . very cheap. . ” they whispered without moving their lips. Clandestine ventriloquists. I adopted the same tactic.

“How much to Aïn Deb?”

“Where?”

“Near Sétif.”

A yawning gulf opened up around me. Too far. . too dangerous. Some of the drivers turned their backs without a word, others looked at me accusingly. It seemed as if my trip was to end here when a young, friendly guy came up to me. Covert whispers were exchanged. He was prepared for take me and quoted me a fare with a string of zeroes — for what he was asking, I could have traveled from Paris to New York in a Cadillac — but danger has a price, and I accepted. I winked discreetly to let him know I agreed. My new benefactor whispered for me to walk some way behind him so no one would realise we were together. The car was parked outside the airport. I stopped short and stared at this rust bucket that looked like it was on its last legs. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I keep it like this to ward off the evil eye.” The car started first time.

The driver’s name was Omar. He pumped the accelerator, took off at a hundred miles an hour and, before I knew it, we’d left the city behind us. I decided to call him Schumacher. I told him that I was hoping to get to Sétif in one piece.

“Hé, m’sieur, we need to get to Sétif before dark — after dark is when they set up the fake roadblocks. Tonight, you sleep in a hotel, tomorrow you find a taxi to take you to your doaur. If I can find an honest Muslim, they will give me a bed for the night. . ”

“What do you mean I can get a taxi? I’ve already got a taxi right here, one I’m paying a small fortune for. . ”

“Hé, m’sieur, I cannot take you to some place I’ve never been to, a place where Islamists slit the throats of everyone in the village, you see what I’m saying?”

“Yeah, you’re saying you’ve ripped me off. But okay, I wouldn’t want your death on my conscience, my own will be more than enough, you can drop me in Sétif.”

Fear was hacking at my insides. The roads were so deserted it made my blood freeze. Not a soul, not a sound, nothing but the wind whistling around the car, the tires hissing softly like snakes. We passed military vehicles packed with young men armed to the teeth. Whenever Omar saw one, he would ease off the accelerator, look left, look right, look ahead, look behind, then, taking a deep breath and putting himself in God’s hands, he’d pull out into the other lane and go hell for leather until we passed them. “Don’t worry,” he smiled at me, “Those are real soldiers.” “What do we do if we run into fake ones?” I asked stupidly. “Nothing,” he smiled and flicked his thumb across his throat. We stopped once or twice for petrol, for coffee, for a piss. At the entrance to every village, there was a police roadblock. The routine ran like clockwork: first a machine-gun was trained on us and we were ordered to turn off the ignition, step out of the vehicle with our hands up, leave the doors open and walk to the blockhouse, keeping well apart. Next our papers were checked, then came the interrogation, the body search, the car search. Eventually we would be sent on our way with some helpful nuggets of advice about what awaited us down the road. “When you get to such-and-such a place, be careful. . If you see a child or a frightened woman hitchhiking, or if you see a man lying in the road pleading for help, put your foot down, it’s a trap.” Omar knew all about them, he told me stories as we drove. I have never been on such a terrifying journey, though the only people we met were genuine policemen and real soldiers — all of them as terrified as we were. We covered the three hundred kilometers from Algiers and Sétif in less than four hours, just like you would in France.

As we came into Sétif, the sun, now sinking in the west, still hammered down like a hydraulic press at noon. “You see, m’sieur,” Omar got out his best smile: “No problem.” “Yeah,” I said, “I’m wondering why it cost me so much money. For what I paid the least I’d expect is a couple of murders, a sunset doesn’t really cut it.”

This didn’t sound like the Rachel I knew. Round me, he always seemed so serious, so distant and withdrawn, and he was always acting the big brother — I hated that. Rachel never really fitted in on the estate, with his Swedish good looks and his la-di-dah politeness, his university degree, his big-shot job at a multinational corporation, his little house and his little garden in a posh neighbourhood. The estate doesn’t approve of individual success: it breeds jealousy, it rocks the boat, it stirs up a shitload of aggravation. To tell the truth, I was ashamed of him. Everyone on the estate assumed I was loaded. They were always saying, “Why don’t you go ask you brother?” He should have moved away, gone to live in Paris. I never understood why he stuck around. To make things worse, Ophélie was the sexiest thing on the estate. All the kids on the estate called her Bump — short for ‘speed bump’ because everyone slowed down when she walked past — that’s how hot she was. After she and Rachel got married, I put the word out: first person calls her Bump is a dead man. After that the guys on the estate called her Rachella. They’d grown up a bit by then, they knew the score, and there were plenty more fish in the sea.

In his diary, Rachel sounds cool, funny, he sounds human. I thought maybe misery made him humble, human, but now I’m not so sure. Everyone on the estate is miserable as sin, but they’re not humble and there aren’t many like uncle Ali and aunt Sakina who are genuine human beings. Maybe having to question everything is what did it, all the questions he asks himself in his diary. But I think there’s something else, I think deciding to go back to Aïn Deb, in spite of the risks and the consequences, was a weight off his shoulders. People say there’s a real satisfaction in doing your duty.

Rachel doesn’t say what he did in Sétif or how he got to Aïn Deb. I suppose he haggled with a local cab driver and got some all-inclusive deal that covered whatever danger there was out there in the bled. Rachel never was much of a talker, but he obviously found people to talk to in Algeria. My mate Momo — his parents are from the province of Kabylia too — says they’ve got pretty much everything in Sétif: houses and streets and cafés and garages and all that shit. And there’s this famous fountain in the middle on the Place de la Fontaine. Momo swears it’s the most beautiful place in the world. He says all the men in Sétif are truck drivers or taxi drivers, they’re like the cowboys you see in movies who never get off their horses, Momo says they’re proud of it, that being a driver is something passed down from father to son for generations, he says that, to them, dying behind the wheel is a glory they all dream about. I’m just telling it like I heard it. I suppose it takes all kinds.

Rachel arrived in Aïn Deb at about 3 P.M. He wrote:

My God, to think I was born here, miles from anything! You won’t find Aïn Deb—“The Donkey’s Well”—on any map, you’re not even likely to stumble on it by accident. There’s no reason in the world for anyone to come here. Even someone lost, someone on the run, wouldn’t stay here, having more reason than most to keep moving, they’d be out of here as fast as they could. You turn off the tarmac road a couple of miles outside Sétif and drive along dirt tracks through a bare, rugged, silent wasteland ringed by infinite horizons. You immediately start to feel uneasy, you feel small, forlorn, damned. Much of the time, there is no line dividing earth and sky and everywhere you look is empty, ochre. We drive on towards an infinite, shifting wall of sand, and I feel obsessed by the idea that the map is closing up behind us. In mathematical terms, I’d say that by some quantum shift we seem to have entered non-Euclidean space; there are no signs, no landmarks here that a human being can relate to, there is no sense of time, no possible human compassion, nothing but an insistent drone like the echo of some cataclysm from before the flood. Exhausted from the heat, I start to wonder what terrible danger early man must have been running from to hole up in a place like this. Why did succeeding generations stay here? What enchantment kept them fettered to this place? It seems appalling, but for a minute it even occurred to me that the massacre of April 24 was simply in the nature of things. This landscape is meant be barren, it tolerates man only until it can find some way of being rid of him. But this is where I was born, where I grew up. I played here as a child. I must have loved this place, at that age you’re curious about everything, or at least you turn boredom into dreams and take your pleasure in them. If I left, it was because papa decided I should, thereby preempting the judgment of the earth and of Allah’s madmen who, in the wasteland of their minds, would come up with the idea of obliterating every trace of life twenty-five years later.

Aïn Deb is wedged at the bottom of a steep valley between four desolate hills. The people who first settled here were clearly trying to hide from the world. Maybe it goes back to ancient times, to tribes exhausted by blood feuds when the weakest hid away, settled out of sight to avoid the constant raids. Or maybe this place was once lush and verdant, capable of sustaining life, perhaps this barren wasteland came later, the result of some great catastrophe, some curse, some strange disease, some nameless mystery. Maybe drought followed hard on its heels like a tornado whipping away the last illusions of those who lived here. Their children would have left for other lands, other skies, taking with them a cruel, bitter memory which, like a self-fulfilling prophecy, doomed them to search in vain to know why they were cursed, while exhaustion, fear and the need to atone ensured they would never feel at peace in their new life. To those who run away, even the idea of a safe haven is dangerous, they see it as a trap where they will be forced to stop running. By some miracle Aïn Deb survived, it had a wellspring and it refused to give up life. And wherever a miracle is born, there is always some fearless donkey to bear witness. It’s astonishing how little people know about the history of their country. I wonder how many people in the world are capable of recounting the history of their village, their neighbourhood, even their house without slipping into some convenient fantasy. Fewer still know the history of their own family. And though I didn’t know it yet, the mad, nightmarish history of my family was about to blow up in my face and kill me.

I stopped on the crest of a hill. I didn’t have the strength to go any further, I felt sick, my eyes were stinging, sweat ripped at my back. Death hung in the air, I could smell it. And yet I could sense some residual force that spoke of life and of eternity. My heart was beating fit to burst, beating out a rhythm to a lament that sprang from the depths of the earth, from the pulsing sun, from the anguished cries of a memory imprisoned in stone. Here, amid this savage beauty, this agony of stone, this harsh light, life and death merged. The question whether to live or to die was superfluous; here opposites converged, here time was as it always was: an infinite silence, a crippling stillness, light rose and fell, the seasons chased each other like brothers and sisters, speaking to nothing but the immutable phases of the solar cycle. I sat on a rock, mopping my face with a handkerchief, and like an old man returning to a forgotten country, memories stirred, images appeared. They were quickly whipped away by what I saw. My memories did not tally with the reality. I dimly remembered a large, immaculate, contented village perched on a hill, and greedy tentacles spilling down, eating into the hillside; what I saw, devastating in its truth, was a pitifully small village which looked as though it vainly struggled to set its roots into the upper slopes. Everything here was hemmed in by steep hills. Two or three houses, rising up to defy the heavens, stood, unfinished, left to wrack and ruin. There was water in the wadi, and warty toads, the sort we used to torment during the mating season when we were kids, now there was also a small pool on a bed of powdery rock ringed by deadwood polished by time. In my mind, I remembered a breathtaking forest, but what I saw before me was a dying copse. In my mind, the streets hummed with life, and now, shielding my eyes to look down, all I could see were deserted laneways, cracked, crumbling walls, a flea-bitten mongrel wandering, a lone chicken scavenging, a donkey staring out and. . there, yes. . there in the courtyard, on the terrace, in the shadow of the mosque, people, women, children! I leapt to my feet and bounded down the hill like a mountain goat.

It is astonishing how life endures. Many villagers had survived the carnage by disappearing into the thick night, hiding as best they could, others played dead, while others still did not know by what miracle they survived. They recognised me as soon as they saw me. “It’s Rachid,” they cried, “Cheïkh Hassan’s son!” They rushed over and crowded around me, the children going through my pockets as though I was some wealthy uncle coming home. I couldn’t shake off my stilted politeness, I stood stiffly, head high, glancing around me, stammering words that sounded strange and grating to my ear. I listened as I idiotically babbled “Salam, salam!” I was welcomed, fussed over, thanked, congratulated. Normal roles had been reversed, the poor were comforting the privileged. For my part, I was shell shocked. I barely recognized my childhood friends, they looked so old, so pitiful it was unbearable, they looked almost like bedridden invalids you take outside in the morning so they can sit in the sun, and bring in again when night falls. The sight of them, with stumps for teeth, grey hair, deep wrinkles, hunched backs, made me feel guilty. Their hands looked thick and arthritic, the story of their short lives could be read in the ridges and their calluses. Those who had been old when I had first known them looked exactly as they always had, though maybe more alive than their children. When death comes knocking, life suddenly revives. We talked and talked some more, we talked for three whole days. The little Arabic I learned on the estate in Paris was useless. I babbled away in a mixture of French, English, German and what crumbs of Arabic and Berber I remembered, and we quickly bonded. We understood each other perfectly. To tell the truth, there wasn’t much to say: a smile, a few gestures, a few bows said all that needed to be said. Conversation is all in the mind, you carry on a conversation with yourself, answer your own questions, while a look, a gesture, is enough to sum it up to others. When it came down to it, all I was trying to say was, “I’m very well, thank you, Allahu Akbar.” Then I moved on to the next person, said the same things, drank some more coffee. I went from house to house, rediscovering the places, the smells, the mystery of a childhood suddenly rekindled. I wanted to run, to nose about, to steal, to plot, to invent great new secrets I would never tell to a living soul. We talked about that terrible night. They had all lost someone close to them — a relative, a friend, a neighbour. It had happened much as I had imagined it. Crime is not difficult to understand, it is something we know intimately, something we can easily imagine, something we see, we hear about, we read about all the time. Crime is our totem pole, planted in the earth, visible from the moon. It is the history of the world. And Algeria had written a special chapter for Aïn Deb and those who lived there.

Everyone in the village came to visit me in our family home which was now filled with emptiness, with memories of which I knew only the smallest part. But childhood memories are extraordinarily powerful. The people of Aïn Deb fed me, went without so that I could eat, worried about me, watched over me in the heavy afternoon hours as I slept, and when night began to weigh on me, the last of them would quietly creep away carrying their sleeping children in their arms. I was pleased to find that my father had been respected here and my mother thought of as blessed. I felt flattered. They say that the reputation the dead leave behind is ruthlessly judged by those who survive them. My parents had had their quietus.

The victims of the massacre had been buried in a section of the cemetery marked out with whitewashed stones, elevating them to the status of martyrs for God and the Republic. A marble slab set into concrete inscribed in Arabic says as much. I counted thirty-eight graves in neat rows. To a small village, this brutal loss had been devastating. Carved into the gravestones were the names of those who had died, a verse from the Qur’an and a little flag. The regional administration had planned and funded the memorial. The inauguration ceremony attracted officials from civil, military and religious authorities and a national TV crew. They arrived in a cortege, and left trailing a glorious cloud of dust, leaving behind the village which had served them as a film set and the villagers whose walk-on parts they had momentarily upstaged. I had been worried that my father, a Christian, would be buried elsewhere, something that would have upset me, but his grave was next to my mother’s in the martyrs’ section. On their headstones were the names Aïcha Majdali and Hassan Hans known as “Si Mourad.” This strange anomaly again. It was only now that I found out that papa had converted to Islam in 1963. After Independence, he decided to settle here in Aïn Deb. At first, the villagers found it strange, even inappropriate for a German, a Christian, to decide to live among them, but since papa had fought in the War of Independence and earned the title Mujahid, and since he was an Algerian national, they felt honoured. Three months later, charmed by the young and beautiful Aïcha, the daughter of the village cheïkh, papa converted to Islam in order to marry her and took the name Hassan. He was forty-five, she was eighteen. When the old cheïkh died, the villagers conferred the title on papa. It was a formality, really, since everyone already referred to him as Cheïkh Hassan. They came to consult him, to listen to him, he had a solution for everything, they were amazed by the changes he made to the village. Strangers passing through — admittedly, as infrequent as the rain — used to go away astonished, half-believing Aïn Deb was not in the same country. Papa’s wisdom, his experience, his flair for organisation and natural authority had argued in his favour without any need to plead his case. This was something else I didn’t know. Though, as I child, I heard people call him Si Hassan, I thought it was just a nickname. They called him Si Mourad too, the name he used in the maquis during the War of Independence, later they called him Cheïkh Hassan, but I just assumed it was a mark of respect for his age.

Having made my pilgrimage, and having been so warmly welcomed, I soon felt at peace again. My breathing slowed, each breath now filled with courage, each sigh with noble self-denial. Everyone I met offered me words of comfort that harked back to that ageless, tragic condition of man, the essential humanity without which he would be nothing more than an automaton wandering in the desert, rusting without knowing it: “To God we belong and to Him we return. . We are but dust in the wind. . No one can knows what lies beyond death. . Believe in God, he is the resurrection and the life. . Allah never forsakes his own. .” Here in this sacred atmosphere, in this place where death had passed like a blast of the apocalypse, these phrases resonated oddly with me. Being so far from everything in this devastating but exhilirating emptiness, borne up by this sense of time passing unhurriedly, by these infallible memories, by words which have crossed the centuries, questioning and humanizing the unknowable, fosters a sense of infinite and unshakeable patience, of transcendence. You do not see yourself moving towards this blessed state, but suddenly you are someone else, someone who observes the world serenely, asks no questions, feels no fear. It is wonderful and terrifying at the same time. You spurn life, rise above it, look on it as inconsequential, ephemeral, illusory, even as life — indefatigable, magnificent, eternal — crushes us like grains of sand and sweeps us under the carpet.

I was worried when I read this part of Rachel’s diary. I’ve cut out a lot of stuff and kept the best bits, the rest is the sort of bullshit you hear in the mosque. I’ve had my fill of sermons like that. Back in the day, I was a regular in the basement of Block 17, where the jihadists had a mosque for anyone who wanted to come. You’re hooked before you know it — it only takes three sessions, and there are five prayers a day and you don’t get any days off. This is the sort of stuff they talk about all the time there: “real” life, paradise, djina, they call it, the houris, the Companions of the Prophet, the saints of the Golden Age, God’s perfect system, Brotherhood, then everyone smiles that merciful smile and hugs like veterans of some holy war, thinking hard about Jerusalem—El Qods, they call it. At first, it was cool — me and my mates went because we enjoyed going. Then a bunch of other people showed up with this new imam who was a leader in the AIG — the Armed Islamic Group — and the whole laid-back vibe turned into this terrifying madness and we were all caught in the headlights. Suddenly the only thing anybody talked about was jihad and the martyrs of Islam, about kaffirs and hell and death, about bombs and rivers of blood, about the end of the world, and noble sacrifice, about exterminating the other. Even outside, after we’d been to the mosque, we talked about it all the time. Then, the next time we heard the muezzin, we’d head back down to the basement wearing a black band round our foreheads, bloodthirsty and ready for action. When I got expelled from school, the new imam was delighted. According to him, school was a crime perpetrated by Christian dogs, the mosque was the future. I’d never really had much time for school, but I’d never thought about it like that. The imam said, “I will teach you what Allah expects of you, I will open the gates of paradise for you.” I made my excuses, said I had some training course to do and got the hell out of there. Momo kept going, he was really into all that shit, but when he got to Taliban level, he found out the meaning of pain. When you get to be a Taliban — a student of Islam — leaving is considered desertion. The jihadists caught up with him and beat him to a bloody pulp. He would have died if we hadn’t got him to hospital. We told the doctors he’d been run over by a truck. Momo spent two weeks in there being spoiled by the nurses. The jihadists were planning to finish him off in hospital but they didn’t get round to it and then they ran out of time. It was round about then that Raymond, who’d been going round calling himself Ibn Abou Mossab, asked his father to help get him out of there. Raymond was in deep shit by then, he already had his plane ticket to Afghanistan and the manual for the training camps in Kabul. He was only seventeen, but on his fake papers they’d added ten years and a big beard. After he got his son out, Monsieur Vincent set up a neighbourhood watch committee and that’s when all hell broke loose. They managed to get the mosque in Block 17 closed down for health and safety reasons, but the jihadists just set up again straight away in the back of a Moroccan grocery shop. Com’Dad is in there all the time, he’s big friends with the owner.

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are two Algerian documents. The first one, dated 17 June 1957 and signed by Colonel Boumédienne, Chief of Staff of the Armée des frontières, reads:

This is to attest that Si Mourad has been appointed to the training corps of the EMG as an advisor on logistics and weaponry.

CC: BE, SBLA, head of the CFEMG, heads of the technical and operational units of Wilayah 8 (communications, transport, engineering. .).

The second, dated 8 January 1963, is signed by the General Secretary of the Officer Training Academy in Cherchell:

1) This is to confirm the appointment of the aforementioned Mourad Hans, a temporary civil instructor.

2) The chief of service of personnel shall be responsible for implementing this decision.

CC: personnel department of the Ministry of Defense.

For information only: Office of Military Security, district of Algiers.

There is a battered little booklet: papa’s military record. The writing on the front is in this really impressive German gothic type. The first page lists his personal details: Hans Schiller, born 5 June 1918 in Uelzen, son of Erich Schiller and Magda Taunbach. Address: 12B Millenstraße, Landorf, Uelzen. Education: Chemical engineering, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main. His regimental number is stamped in a little box, and at the bottom of the page is the signature and the stamp of the recruiting officer: Obersturmbannführer Martin Alfons Kratz. The rest is a complicated list of the postings, transfers, ranks, promotions, citations, medals and injuries he received during his career. The pages are peppered with stamps. Papa reached the rank of Captain, he was a big shot. And he was a hero too. He was wounded a bunch of times and he was mentioned in dispatches and decorated over and over! He was posted to Germany, Austria, France, Poland and other places which would have meant nothing to me without Rachel’s notes: Frankfurt, Linz, Grossrosen, Salzburg, Dachau, Mauthausen, Rocroi, Drancy, Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Ghent, Hartheim, Lublin-Majdanek. Some of the places were extermination camps. These were top-secret places where the Nazis exterminated the Jews and other undesirables. Rachel says hundreds of people died and the article in Historia says millions. Fucking hell, I thought.

I had already read Rachel’s diary over and over and I had found out a lot of stuff, but holding papa’s medals, his military records in my own hands, seeing the names, the documents, the stamps on them with my own eyes really fucked me up. I felt sick. This meant papa was a Nazi war criminal, he would have been hanged if they’d ever caught up with him, but at the same time it didn’t mean anything. I refused to believe it, I clung to something else, something truer, fairer, he was our father, we are his sons, we bear his name. He was a good man, devoted to his village, loved and respected by everyone, he fought for the independence of his country, for the liberation of a people. He was a soldier, I thought, he was just obeying orders, orders he probably didn’t understand, orders he didn’t agree with. The leaders were the guilty ones, they knew how to manipulate people, get them to do things without understanding what they were doing, without thinking. Besides, I thought, why stir up all this shit now? Papa dead, his throat cut like a sheep at Aïd, murdered along with maman and all their neighbours by real criminals, by the most brutal bastards the earth has ever produced, criminals who are supported, cheered on, even helped by people, in Algeria and all over the world. These criminals speak at the UN, they have ads on TV, they insult whoever they like, whenever they like, like the imam in the mosque in Block 17, always jabbing his finger to heaven trying to scare people, to stop them thinking for themselves. I can understand Rachel’s pain, his whole world falling apart, I can understand why he felt guilty, tainted, why he felt that somehow, somewhere, someone had to atone. Rachel was the one to atone, though he had never hurt anyone in his life.

I know it sounds incredible, but I didn’t know anything about the war, the extermination. I’d heard bits and pieces, things the imam said about the Jews and other stuff I’d picked up here and there. I always thought it was like a legend, something that happened hundreds of years ago. But the honest truth is I didn’t think about it much, I didn’t care, me and my mates, we were young, we were broke, all we cared about were our own lives. Rachel wrote terrible things. Everything was boiling over in his mind — words and phrases I’d never heard before cropped up again and again: the final solution, gas chambers, Kremas, Sonderkommandos, concentration camps, the Shoah, the Holocaust. There was a phrase in German, I didn’t know what it meant and Rachel didn’t translate it but it sounded like a curse: Vernichtung Lebensunwerten Lebens. And another one that I recognised straight off: Befehl ist Befehl. That means “orders are orders.” When we were little, living back in the bled, papa used to say it under his breath sometimes if we argued back. Then, in French, or in Berber, he’d say, “We’re not at the circus!” It’s like what Monsieur Vincent used to say when we tried to get round him: “Just do what I told you to do, if there’s time later, we’ll talk about your ideas.”

I guess after he read all this stuff, Rachel sat up all night. Reading what he wrote about it did my head in. Rachel was clever, he could always see the big picture, he understood things. I’m not like that, I need explanations, I need time to get things straight in my head. If I’d been Rachel, the stuff in the suitcase would have meant nothing to me, all I would have thought was: my parents have been murdered and I’ll never see them again. I’d have thought: papa was a soldier back in Germany, then he came here to train the maquis, end of story. The only thing that seemed weird to me was that with all the experience he had, papa ended up in a godforsaken hole like Aïn Deb. I’d have been off to California, I’d have been a stuntman in Hollywood or a bodyguard to some rich heiress. But that was papa, he was a bit of a poet, a bit like those weirdos who get up one morning, sell their big city apartments and head off to the mountains to raise sheep that wolves will end up eating before they do. Papa went a lot farther, he went to Aïn Deb. It was the perfect place, really — even Algerians have never heard of it. Or at least they hadn’t until 25 April 1994.

I’m going to finish with something Rachel wrote, I think about it all the time: “Here I am, faced with a question as old as time: are we answerable for the crimes of our fathers, of our brothers, of our children? Our tragedy is that we form a direct line, there is no way out without breaking the chain and vanishing completely.” There’s one more thing. I’ve made a resolution: someone needs to put a stop to the imam from Block 17 before it’s too late.