The German Mujahid

MALRICH’S DIARY, WEDNESDAY, 9 OCTOBER 1996

Momo and Raymond swung by the house and told me some horror story, the fuckers were talking like it was something they saw on TV. I nearly didn’t listen when, actually, it was a real tragedy. And I know all about tragedy, I’m up to my neck in it in Rachel’s diary. “And you only come and tell me now,” I yelled. “The moped was fucked,” Momo said, the liar. It was about Nadia, a sixteen-year-old Arab girl, worked as a trainee at Christelle’s salon by the RER station, The Golden Scissors. She’d disappeared. I’m sure I probably knew her, but all those girls look exactly the same, same hair and everything, I can never put a face to a name. They should be forced to wear something so you can tell them apart; because you never know, I mean this is the proof. “Who’s Nadia?” I said. “Just some girl,” Momo says, the fuckwit. “She lives in Block 22,” Raymond says. “Her old man’s Moussa, works in the steelworks, you know the guy who drives the green Ami 6.” The men all look the same to me too, Moussa, Abdallah, Arezki, Abdel-Ben-some-shit. Anyway, you never hardly see them, all they do is work and sleep, they’re up at the crack of dawn and working half the night — except Sundays, the Lord’s day, when they all hang out in lame cafés, eaten up by nostalgia and gambling on scratch tickets or the horses. Even when you do see them, they’re just crooked shadows appearing and disappearing into the darkness. Anyway, the whole estate was mobilised to look for Nadia — parents, kids, police, fire brigade — everyone running around. The women were out on the balconies wailing and praying and yelling at their husbands. At first everyone said she’d run away, then they were saying she’d been kidnapped, since yesterday they’re saying she was murdered. A bunch of TV crews showed up and set up their cameras in the skankiest part of the estate — the sort of no-go area even people on the estate never set foot in. Someone said they’d seen some girl getting beat up by some guy with a beard, a young guy from Block 11, some big shot always banging on about how he’s been to Kabul and London and Algiers, calls himself Allah’s Terminator. Apparently he didn’t like the way she dressed, didn’t like her day-glo hair or the fact she hung out with boys — and not just any boys—kaffirs—unbelievers. So he slapped her about, spat in her face, pulled her hair and yelled, “Last warning!” It all went down in the stairwell of Block 22, some kid coming downstairs saw it and he told his mates, they told their mates and so on until it got back to Moussa. Moussa didn’t stop to think, grabbed a knife and headed out looking for the guy with the beard. The neighbours grabbed him as he was leaving the block, took away the knife and marched him off to see Com’Dad. The two of them had a little chat round the back of the supermarket — no witnesses. The guy with the beard was busted and twenty-four hours later he was out again. No corpse, no crime; no crime, no perp. The Terminator’s lawyer — some guy with a beard and a three-piece suit — knew how to play the system, he got to faxing and phoning every association, every Islamic consulate, every brotherhood, every marabout and every sleeper network — even woke up the Minister for the Interior. The sky was black with fax toner and thundering with righteous anger. Com’Dad was purple with rage when he got a call politely suggesting he release the killer and reopen the mosque in Block 17. Don’t rock the boat — the whole city is happy to think she’s run away. The Terminator was giving it large about how he’d got his ticket to paradise—djina, they call it in Arabic — put one over on the cops and heroically confirmed his status as Emir of the estate. Then, this morning — shock, horror — they find poor Nadia in the basement of some shop that’s been boarded up for years, all naked and tied up with barbed wire, her face and body burnt to shit with a blowtorch. The parents identified her straight off. It was their little girl, they just knew it. They put the cuffs on the Emir as he was coming out of the mosque. Apparently he was spitting fire at Com’Dad: “Allahu Akbar, your day will come.” The Imam immediately announces there’s going to be a big service on the esplanade between the tower blocks to honour the hero, support his worthy parents and raise money for the cause. It’s going to be on Friday at 8:30 P.M. And he issued a fatwa saying anyone who doesn’t show is a sinner and Allah will not fail to punish them. To forsake a Brother in Islam when he’s attacked by kaffirs is among the greatest of sins. The place will be rammed. I’m planning on being there. It’s not some spur-of-the-moment decision, I swore to myself I’d cut the throat of that SS fucker who’s trying to turn this estate into an extermination camp, and now’s the time.

We headed out and did the tour of the estate, rounding up the posse — Cinq-Pouces, Garcon-de-Café (we call him Bidochon) Togo-au-Lait, Manchot, who’s only got one arm, and Idir-Quoi, who can barely get a sentence out he stutters so badly — then we all went up to offer our condolences to Moussa’s family. There were crowds milling outside Block 22 and all the way up the stairs. We waited our turn. Fuck sake, it was tough. . You had to feel for Nadia’s mother, she just sat there, saying nothing, staring down at her hands clasped in her lap, whimpering like a cat that’s been run over, Moussa just stared at us and nodded, and we stared back at them, holding our breath. After that we went over to Christelle’s salon, where Nadia worked. The minute she saw us at the window, Christelle flinched and reached for the phone. Since I’m the only one with blonde hair, I went in on my own and told her why we were there. She came out and listened to us blethering on about how sorry we were. We didn’t know what to say. Besides, she was crying so hard she couldn’t hear a word anyway. It’s weird, offering condolences to people you don’t even know. When we saw her crying, we started crying, we looked like fucking idiots standing there trembling in the wind. Eventually we stopped crying and headed off to the cafeteria in the train station and held a meeting in the upstairs room. We had to do something, we had to show we had balls, we had to save the estate. The cute couple making out by the window left as soon as we piled in — there were eight of us and we did look pretty dodgy. The owner came over with his big backstabbing smile, brought us our drinks then went back and stood next to his panic button. Pretty quickly we all got angry. A bunch of the guys, that gimp Momo was one of them, reckoned there was nothing we could do, then there was Raymond (we call him Sting-Ray when he gets riled), who suggested we start a counter-jihad. One extreme to the other, same old, same old. I said, “We have to cut off the head, and the head, that’s the imam.”

Silence. Whispers. The imam, fuck, that’s heavy. .

“What the hell is with you guys? They’ve fucked every single one of us over — they fucked me up, and you Momo, and you Raymond, going around calling yourself Ibn Abû-some-shit, all ready to fly off and gun down a bunch of Afghans. And what about you, Cinq-Pouces, down at that mosque from four in the morning until midnight bowing and scraping. . ”

“I. . I. . I. . I think we sh. . sh. . should t. . t. . talk to our pa. . parents.”

“Idir, if you can’t think of anything sensible to say, then don’t say anything. Our parents will say we should talk to the police, the police will say we should talk to the judge, the judge will say we should talk to the government, the government will say that it has to be referred back to the mayors and you know what the mayors will say: fuck off!”

“So it all comes down to us?”

“Too right it does, Bidochon. . and the first thing is, nobody says anything to anyone about what we’re planning.”

“But what can we do? The jihadists are all over the estate — they’re the ones with the money, the lawyers, the connections, they’re the ones with friends in high places, all those ambassadors and shit. . ”

“Counter-jihad, it’s the only way. We give them a taste of their own medicine — set up our own cells, infiltrate the. . ”

“Yeah sure, all eight of us! And this counter-jihad, what religion were you planning to fight in the name of?”

“Hey Manchot! Are you with us here or are you dreaming about that missing arm again?”

I’ll stop there, I just wanted to give you an idea of the discussion. By the time we finished, we’d come up with three mutually exclusive angles: “We’re fucked and whatever we do we’re still fucked,” (Momo and his lot); “The only way to fight jihad is counter-jihad” (Raymond and his lot) and “We need to waste the imam” (me and my lot). The last one is what I planned to put into action.

After the meeting, we headed back to my house and picked up a couple of six-packs at the supermarket along the way. The eve of battle was going to be a long night.

Thursday, 10 October

We spent the day just hanging out. The whole estate was in mourning. The men were hanging around outside, propping up the tower blocks. Little groups united in their grief and their passivity. What were they talking about? What were they thinking about? About Nadia? About what might happen to them? They probably weren’t thinking about anything. They looked like concentration camp prisoners waiting for time to pass, for something to turn up, waiting for the ground to open up and swallow them, for someone to come tell them to get home now because their favourite soap was starting. They looked so crushed, so sheepish, it disgusted me. The jihadists were down in their mosque making plans, their Kapos out patrolling the camp, looking at people like they were worthless prisoners. There was a fleet of cars parked outside Block 17, all brand new, all clean and polished, so they obviously didn’t belong to anyone on the estate. We were just about to head off when — surprise, surprise — Com’Dad comes out of the basement with a bunch of people, some guys from the city council, some from local organisations and some people I didn’t recognise. That evil fucking imam had his arm round Com’Dad’s shoulder, like they were best mates and he was just giving him a few gentle reminders. Fucking fuck. The French authorities in talks with the SS, and in their own bunker too — that takes balls! Because we know what Com’Dad is like, he’s new-school police, you make friends with enemies and you all play nice together. Fuck the rest of us, we’re dead, France is marching backwards with a truncheon up its arse.

Friday, 11 October

7 A.M. I’ve never seen anything like it. The whole estate is deserted: the esplanade, the alleys, the balconies, the car parks. Not a soul. Not so much as a shadow. Not even the old African guys in their Turkish slippers who sit out sunning themselves even when it’s pissing rain. If you wanted to make a movie about the end of the world, this would be the perfect film set. I never realised the estate was so ugly, so depressingly cold, so completely fucked up. Before all this happened, it all looked normal, everyone kind of liked the estate, we all came and went, we never noticed anything. Whenever I heard people complaining about the noise and the dirt, I felt like thumping them, it was like they were dissing us.

So there we were, the eight of us, looking like a right bunch of fucktards. We’d come to fight a war and the other side hadn’t even shown up. We’d been so sure how things would go down. The jihadists are pros, when they organise something, they’re up and out at dawn, straight after the first prayer—Fajr, they call it — they’ve got their Kapos running round from shop to shop, from block to block, dragging people away from whatever they’re doing and bringing them along in their wake. An hour later, everyone’s been rounded up, herded onto the esplanade, packed in like sardines, and after a few cries of Allahu Akbar over the speaker system, they’ve got them all fired up. By the time they turn them loose, there’s no stopping them.

8 A.M. Sick of waiting, we headed over to the mosque. It was closed. We were pissed off the jihadists had backed down. Were they the ones running scared now? Did they back down because of the support for Nadia and her parents? They’re better informed than the CIA, maybe they figured out people wouldn’t stand for it. Honouring a murderer, celebrating his crime and praising Allah in the same breath was going too far — the estate wouldn’t stand for it. It was a matter of decency.

But then I realised there was another reason the jihadists hadn’t shown: riot police. There were CRS crawling all over the place and we hadn’t even noticed. They were waiting in their unmarked SUVs all over the estate. The bastards had screwed up our revenge, this was supposed to be between us and the jihadists and from the silence all over the estate it was clear that we were winning. Now the jihadists could claim they were men of peace and had only called off their demonstration so as not to give thugs and troublemakers and Islamophobes the opportunity to hijack their ceremony to honour the victims. Islamists are expert spin doctors, they could make a crocodile blush.

I was just about to track down the imam and carve a swastika into his forehead when I heard someone calling me: “Malrich!. . Malrich!. . C’mere a minute. . Get over here now!” It was Com’Dad. He was stepping out of an unmarked car. I wandered over, hands in my pockets.

“Come here!” he said, dragging me by the arm, then he had me spread my arms and frisked me to see if I was carrying a knife or a rocket launcher or something. He gave my mates a look that told them to stay where they were.

“Don’t even think about bullshitting me, I know what you and your bunch of Looney Tunes are planning.”

“We weren’t planning anything. . We were just heading over to see if—”

“Shut the fuck up!”

“Honest to God, officer—”

“Listen up, I’m not going to say this twice, the imam is our problem, not yours. If you so much as say hello to him, I’ll have you hauled in for attempted murder. And I don’t want to see you and your idiot friends hanging round the mosque like you were yesterday, get it?”

“No, I don’t get it. . So people aren’t even allowed to walk around the estate now?”

He grabbed my elbow again and slammed me against the car.

“Listen, Malrich, I know where all this is coming from. It’s your brother’s diary. But you don’t understand, he didn’t go killing people just because other people did. . He tried to understand. . ”

“Yeah. . and he died trying.”

“Go on, fuck off home, and take your gangsta mates with you. I want you in my office at 6 P.M. . and take your hands out of your pockets.”

We headed into Paris, we were sick of hanging round the estate. We wandered round Châtelet, then down to Beaubourg, we traipsed halfway up the Boulevard Sebastopol to one of Togo-au-Lait’s cousins who does hairpieces and makes carcinogenic beauty products. It’s the family business. Then we went down to the river for something to eat. After that we headed up to the Champs-Élysées. It’s like a different world, makes you wonder if you’re still in France. Finally, we went back down to the Tuileries and sat in the gardens to talk. I had a question I needed to ask.

“Obviously someone here is a snitch and I want to know who it is. Momo? Or maybe you, Togo? I mean you voted with him, you were all up for wimping out and doing nothing.”

After an hour of everyone throwing accusations around, I realised any one of them could be the snitch, or it could be some friend they’d mentioned our plans to, or even the guy at the station cafeteria, he’d been listening in. It was even possible that that Com’Dad just guessed what we were planning when he saw us outside the mosque at 7 A.M. We’re nocturnal creatures, everyone knows that.

“Well, I’m heading back, I’m freezing my balls off here and Monsieur le Commissaire is expecting me for tea.”

6 P.M. The police station is a fortress of breeze blocks and bulletproof glass planted right outside the estate, one side overlooking the estate, the other overlooking the neighbourhood where Rachel lived. All the cops know me. Babar, the desk sergeant, jerked his thumb towards the hall. “Yeah, yeah, I know — chief’s office is down the end of the hall. The one with the padded door.” Com’Dad has been around for, like, ten years. He and I showed up about the same time, me from Algeria, him from some sink estate up north. He’s an expert in Sensitive Urban Areas. I don’t know if he’s made any difference to ours. I don’t think so. It’s the same as it ever was except the kids have grown to be gangsters, the gangsters have grown old and fat, and the old guys walk round flashing their battle scars like they’re vets back from the war. Everyone else — the families, the ordinary people — just get on with life same as they always did. Some of them have jobs, some are on welfare, some are on disability. The kids are either with social services or at school or somewhere in between. The only thing that changed was when the jihadists started showing up. It’s something to do with the war in Algeria, apparently, or the war in Kabul or the Middle East or I don’t know where. They use France as a safe haven, as a base for operations. Whatever the reason they’re here, they’ve fucked everything up for everyone, that’s why we’re wandering around till we can’t take it any more. Before anyone knew what was happening, these death-dealing fuckers had taken over. If you blinked, you’d have missed it: everything changed, the clothes and everything. After that, the estate started to empty. The local economy packed up and moved out, the shops, the offices, the cash-in-hand work that keeps the jobless afloat. That’s their strategy: block the escape routes, make lots of noise, keep people poor — that way they’re one step closer to paradise. They treat people like sheep. And we fell for it, me, Momo, Raymond, all of us — mostly because we believed the Führer’s spiel: “Join the Brotherhood, you can have everything, you can have money and djina,” partly because they were constantly tugging at our djellabas, we couldn’t set foot outside without one of them jogging over and reciting the ten commandments of the suicide bomber. The Brotherhood and their fucking djina got us in big trouble, we were in and out of the police station, dragged up before the courts, forced to do community service. The only thing left for us was jail. We were branded for life. We had Com’Dad on our backs 24/7. But later, when he saw we were getting out of all this fanatical end-of-the-world bullshit, he put in a good word for us with the authorities, had us sent on training courses, got us apprenticeships. We were even taken on tours of parliament and got to meet our Député. It wasn’t going to change anything, but it was something to do.

“Come in. Take a seat. Do you want a cup of tea?”

“No.”

We talked: he did most of the talking, pacing round the office, and I was only half listening. As usual, he started out with all the stuff he cares about — the estate, the future, the Republic, the straight and narrow — then he got to talking about me, like he was a mate who was only looking out for me.

“. . you need to know, your brother was a good man, a very good man. Given all the stuff you know now. . about your father, Rachel did the only decent thing a man can do, he tried to understand. Doesn’t matter if you’re dealing with a crime committed yesterday or crimes committed years ago, that’s where you have to start: the first thing you have to do is understand” (he said it slowly, dragging out every word), “you can’t just rush in and judge things. When you were running around in you djelleba with that ratty little goatee beard, I could easily have thought: he’s a fundamentalist, a terrorist, I’m taking him down. But I didn’t, I tried to understand, to get to know you, and I decided that you weren’t one of them, you were Malrich, you were a good guy just trying to live your life like everyone else. Nothing is ever simple. Your brother’s suicide proves that. He tried to understand, but sadly he gradually started to believe that he was guilty, he felt he was to blame for what the Nazis — what your father — did to the Jews during the war. He hated your father but that still didn’t change the fact that he was your father, and like everyone, Rachel wanted a father he could look up to, a father he could be proud of. And it was worse for him, because you guys didn’t live with your parents, because you missed him, because of the terrible way your father died — his throat cut by Islamic fundamentalists with your mother and all those poor souls with only the sun to light the day. But the more research he did, the more he learned, the more he suffered. Something inside him snapped, he turned everything on its head and started to hate himself. Rachel couldn’t help but think of your father as a war criminal, but mostly he thought of him as his father, someone who had fought for Algerian independence, someone loved and respected by the people of his village; Rachel saw your father as a victim of the Islamic fundamentalists and of the Algerian political system that fosters these monsters. It was too much for him, he started to feel guilty, he was ashamed of his success, of what he saw as his selfishness towards you and the rest of your family, of his affluent lifestyle. That was when he started to cut himself off from everyone — from you, from his wife, from his adoptive parents. It was his way of trying to protect you. In the end, he took it all on himself, he passed judgement on himself in his father’s place. Suicide was his last resort, the only way he could reconcile the irreconcilable, do you understand?”

I don’t know what I said. Nothing, probably. I was tumbling into a black hole. I could see shadows. . my father, my mother, Rachel spiralling into madness, poor Nadia screaming as she died, the emir burning her with a blowtorch, the shadow of the imam looming over the estate; I thought about the massacre in Aïn Deb, about. . I don’t remember. I remember yelling, “What are you telling me all this for? What’s it got to do with me?”

He leaned over and said, “It’s got everything to do with you. I know what’s going on in that head of yours. You’re confusing the past and the present, you’re comparing yourself and Rachel, your father and the imam, you’re thinking about the Nazis who stole your father from you and used him as a tool in their genocide, you’re thinking about the Islamic fundamentalists who murdered your parents, who murdered poor Nadia, you want revenge, you want to take down the imam because he’s the leader, the Führer, because you used to belong to his Brotherhood of pathetic losers busy trying to wipe out humanity and you think this gives you a way to redeem yourself, to see your father differently, to forgive him. Do you understand?”

“This is bullshit. Can I go now?”

“Sure, you can go. But read your brother’s diary again, maybe you’ll realise something that even Rachel didn’t realise, though it was staring him in the face: you can’t get justice for a crime by committing another crime, or by committing suicide. We have laws to do that. For the rest, we have to rely on memory and wisdom. But the most important thing you need to learn is this: we are not responsible for the crimes of our parents.”

“Can I go now?”

“My door is always open, come back if you feel like it.”

I went up to see uncle Ali and aunt Sakina. I was planning to sleep at their place that night, I felt terrible, I hadn’t seen them in over a month. Actually, I was scared to be alone in Rachel’s house, I didn’t know what I might do. But there was another reason: there was something I wanted to ask aunt Sakina, something that hadn’t occurred to me before, or to Rachel — at least there was nothing in his diary about it: how did papa and uncle Ali meet? It’s weird the stuff you don’t know, that you don’t even think about. Ten years I’d been living with uncle Ali and aunt Sakina and I didn’t know anything about them, I didn’t know how they knew papa.

Uncle Ali and aunt Sakina are exactly like you’d imagine, they’re immigrants who’ve stayed immigrants. Their life in France is the same as if they still lived in Algeria, it would be exactly the same if they lived on another planet. “Allah decides all things,” they say, and that’s all there is to it. They’re good people, they don’t ask for much out of life: enough to eat, somewhere to sleep, a little peace, and now and then some news from the bled. They love getting letters. I used to have to read the letters to them and write the letters back. Back then I thought it was a pain, but now I look back on it fondly. Papa used to send them standard-issue letters: Dear Ali, just a few lines to let you know that I and the family are well. I hope that you, your wife and your children are well. We send you our love. Then he’d write a bit about life in the village, about the weather. Uncle Ali would write back: Dear Hassan, thank you for you letter which we received. We are happy to know that you are well. Allah be praised. Everything here is fine, the children send their love. Please write again soon. The peace of Allah be with you. I have sent the medicines you asked for, I hope they will arrive safely. If you need anything else, let me know. Then he’d write a bit about life on the estate, about the weather. I wrote dozens and dozens of letters, every one of them exactly the same — the only thing different was the date, the weather and the names of the medicines.

Now that I finally wanted to talk to them, I realised I didn’t know how to begin. We’d only ever talked in set phrases. Me saying, Hi uncle Ali, Hi aunt Sakina, I’m hungry, I’m going out, and them saying, Hello, Hello, Are you hungry? Can I get you some coffee? Put a coat on, you’ll get cold, God go with you. The rest was silence, politeness, the routine clichés of family life.

“Am’ti, how did papa and uncle Ali meet?”

I have never seen my aunt Sakina look surprised by anything. She answered perfectly calmly.

“They were in the maquis together during the War of Independence, they became great friends, they were like brothers.”

“Is that it? What about afterwards?”

“When independence came, times were hard, everyone was poor, people were sleeping in the streets while our leaders were feasting in the palaces left by the colonists and killing each other over who should take power. Your father and uncle Ali were disgusted by what was happening. Ali came to France, he couldn’t bear it. As soon as he found a job, he went back and asked for my hand, and I came back to France with him. Allah has watched over us, we have never wanted for anything.”

“What about papa?”

“He had problems with the new leaders, I know that. There were people who wanted him to leave Algeria — they threatened to kill him. But there were many people who wanted him to stay so he could go on training army officers.”

“Why did some people hate him?”

“I don’t know. Your Ali would have been able to tell you, but the poor man is not himself anymore. I do know that he hid your father for many months in our village in Kabylia. Later, after we left for France, your papa went into hiding in Aïn Deb with a friend from the maquis. Tahar, his name was, he was your uncle. Your father married his sister Aïcha. Tahar died long ago, before you and your brother were even born.”

“Why did papa never come to France?”

“I don’t know, oulidi. He had fought the French in the war back when he lived in Germany, and when he came to Algeria he was afraid he might be arrested.”

“But uncle Ali fought against the French, and he came to live here, and he never had any problems.”

“Well, I’m sure your father had his reasons, but I don’t know what they were.”

“Why did he send us here to live with you in France, why didn’t he want us to stay with him and maman? I mean, is that normal?”

“Don’t judge your father, oulidi, he was thinking of you, of your future, he wanted you to study, to be successful, to live in peace. Why are you asking me all these questions?”

“No reason, am’ti. . no reason.”

“You’re not well, oulidi, ever since your brother died, you haven’t been the same. You are not happy, you spend too much time thinking. But it will pass, you are young, Allah watches over you.”

That night I slept like a baby. It was the first time in a long time.