What the day owes the nigth

1

MY FATHER was happy.

It had never occurred to me that he was capable of such an emotion.

Sometimes, the sight of his serene face disturbed me.

Hunkered on a pile of loose stones, knees clasped to his chin, he watched the breeze caress the slender stalks of wheat, breathe over them, scurry feverishly through them. The wheat fields billowed over the plains like the manes of thousands of horses galloping. It was like watching the sea as it rises and falls. And my father was smiling. I could not remember ever seeing him smile; it was not in his nature to show happiness – if he could be said to have ever felt such a thing. Moulded by adversity, his eyes usually bore a permanent look of desperation. His life had been an endless series of disappointments; he mistrusted the future, realising it to be traitorous and unknowable.

I had never known him to have friends.

We lived in isolation like ghosts on our patch of land, in the sidereal silence of those who have little to say to one another: my mother in the shadow of our shack, bent over her cooking pot, stirring a broth of root vegetables of questionable flavour; Zahra, my sister, three years my junior, crouched forgotten in some dark corner, so self-effacing that at times we did not even notice her; and me, a sickly, solitary boy, who had barely blossomed before I wilted, carrying my ten years like a burden.

This was not life; we merely existed.

The simple fact of waking in the morning was a miracle, and at night, as we readied ourselves for bed, we wondered whether it might not be better to close our eyes once and for all, convinced that we had seen all there was to see in life and that life itself did not warrant further examination. The days were desolate in their sameness; not a single one brought with it anything new, and each day died taking with it the few remaining illusions that dangled before us like the carrots used to urge on a donkey.

In the 1930s, poverty and disease swept the country, wiping out families and livestock with astonishing perversity, forcing those who survived into exile or vagrancy. We no longer received any news of those few relatives we had left. As for the ragged creatures we sometimes saw in the distance, we knew that they were merely passing through. The dirt track that led past our shack was gradually disappearing.

My father cared little.

He liked to be alone, hunched over his plough, lips flecked white with foam. Sometimes I saw in him some god, fashioning the world and would sit for hours watching him, fascinated by his strength, his determination.

When my mother asked me to take his meals out to him, I had to be prompt. My father ate punctually, frugally, eager to get back to work. I would have liked him to say a kind word, take some interest in me for a moment, but he had eyes only for his land. Only here, in the midst of this tawny universe, was he truly in his element. Nothing and no one, not even those dearest to him, could distract him from it.

In the evening, when we came back to our shack, the spark in his eyes would fade with the setting sun. He would become someone else, someone ordinary, someone dreary and uninteresting; I almost felt disappointed in him.

But for some weeks now, he had been unaccountably happy. The coming harvest promised to be glorious, exceeding his wildest expectations. Crippled with debts, he had mortgaged the lands that had belonged to his forefathers, and this harvest, he knew, was to be his last battle. He did the work of ten men, toiling relentlessly, a fire in his belly; a cloudless sky could terrify him, the smallest cloud electrify him. Never had I seen him pray and pour himself into his work as he did then. And when summer came, and the wheat scattered its glittering sequins across the plains, my father sat hunkered on a mound of loose stones, motionless. Hunched under his straw hat, he would spend most of the day staring at his crops, which, after years of thankless work, of lean cows, seemed finally to promise a sunny spell.

The harvest would come soon, and as the day drew closer my father became more excited. He could already see himself, arms outstretched, gathering in sheaves, trussing hundreds of bales, harvesting hopes so great he did not know what to do with them.

A week earlier, sitting me next to him on our little cart, we had gone to the village some miles beyond the hill. Usually he did not take me anywhere with him. Perhaps he thought that now that things were looking up, it was time to change, to learn new habits, new ways of thinking. On the way, he hummed a Bedouin tune. It was the first time in my life I had ever heard him sing. His voice dipped and soared, so out of tune it would scare the horses, but to me, no singer in the world could compare: it was glorious. Then he suddenly regained his composure, surprised to find he had been so carried away; embarrassed that he had shamed himself in front of his son.

The village was a depressing, godforsaken place, its cob walled huts cracking beneath the weight of misery, its narrow streets desperately twisting and turning, not knowing where to hide their squalor. A few skeletal trees, gnawed away by goats, stood withered and dying like gibbets. Crouched beneath the trees, the unemployed sat like ruined scarecrows waiting for a storm to come to carry them off.

My father stopped the cart in front of a squalid little shack surrounded by a group of barefoot boys with crudely patched tunics of jute sacking instead of gandurahs and shaven heads pocked with oozing sores that looked like some mark of damnation. They crowded round us, curious as a pack of fox cubs whose territory has been invaded. With a wave, my father sent them scurrying, then pushed me towards the grocer’s shop, where a man sat dozing amid the empty shelves. He did not bother to get to his feet to greet us.

‘I’m going to need men and tools for the harvest,’ my father said to him.

‘Is that all?’ said the grocer wearily. ‘I sell sugar and salt too, you know, oil, cornmeal.’

‘All that will come later. Can I depend on you?’

‘When do you want them, the men and the tools?’

‘Friday week?’

‘You’re the boss. You whistle, we’ll be there.’

‘Right, well let’s say Friday of next week.’

‘It’s a deal,’ groaned the grocer, pulling his turban down over his face. ‘Glad to hear you’ve saved the season.’

‘What I’ve saved is my soul,’ my father said as he turned to go.

‘To do that, my friend, you have to have a soul in the first place.’

Standing in the doorway, my father stopped and shuddered, detecting some slight in what the grocer had said. He scratched his head, climbed on to the cart and we headed home. The grocer had touched a raw nerve. My father’s face, so radiant when we first set out, was serious now. The grocer’s remark, he thought, was some dire omen. This was how my father was; at the slightest problem he immediately feared the worst. To boast about the harvest before it was gathered in was to tempt the evil eye. I knew he was bitterly regretting boasting of his success when not a grain had yet been harvested.

He drove home, his body coiled like a snake, flogging the mule with his whip, every lash bearing the mark of his fury.

As he waited for Friday, he dug out old billhooks and rusty sickles and set about cleaning and sharpening them. With my dog, I watched him from a distance, waiting for some word, some chance to make myself useful. But my father needed no help. He knew exactly what had to be done.

Then, without warning, disaster struck. I woke one night to hear the dog howling. When I looked out, I thought the sun had tumbled from the sky and landed in our fields. Though it was three a.m., it was so bright it seemed like noon. My mother stood wordlessly by the door, her head buried in her hands. The flickering light outside sent her several shadows scurrying along the walls behind me. My sister sat crouched in her corner, fingers stuffed into her mouth, eyes vacant.

I dashed outside and saw a sea of fire surging and rolling across the fields, the flames so high they seemed to light the heavens, from which not a single star looked down.

Dripping with sweat, his bare chest slashed with streaks of soot, my father had gone mad. Over and over he filled a tiny bucket from the trough and rushed towards the blaze, disappearing into the flames, then reappeared, filled his bucket again and stumbled back into the inferno. Though his efforts were absurd, he could not face the thought that there was nothing he could do, that no prayer, no miracle could prevent his dreams from going up in smoke. My mother, knowing all was lost, watched her husband tear around, terrified that there would come a moment when he did not re-emerge from the flames. My father was capable of trying to gather in sheaves of the blazing wheat and burning with them. For it was only among his crops that he truly felt at home.

At dawn, he was still trying to douse the wisps of smoke that rose from the charred stubble. Nothing remained of the crops and yet he refused to see it. Out of spite.

It was a terrible injustice.

Three days before harvest.

Two inches from salvation.

One breath from redemption.

Later that morning, my father was finally compelled to face facts. His bucket dangling from one hand, he looked up to survey the extent of the disaster. For a long time he stood, legs trembling, eyes bloodshot, face distorted; then he fell to his knees, collapsed on his belly, and before our incredulous eyes did something a man should never do in public – he wept . . . He wept until he had no tears left to cry.

It was then that I realised that our guardian angels had abandoned us, that we would be cursed until the day of judgement.

For us, time stood still. True, the day still bowed before the night, darkness still gave way to dawn, vultures still wheeled in the sky, but to us it was as though all things had ended. History had turned a page and we no longer figured in what happened next. For days my father paced his razed fields, wandering among the shadows and the stubble from sunrise to sundown like a ghost trapped among ruins. My mother watched him through the hole in the wall that served us as a window. Every time he slapped his thighs, his cheeks, she made a hurried sign, called out to every marabout – every holy man – in the region to intercede; she was convinced that her husband had lost his mind.

A week later, a man came to visit our shack. Wearing a ceremonial uniform, his beard carefully trimmed, chest bedecked with medals, he looked like a sultan. This was the kaid, escorted by his praetorian guard. Without troubling to get down from his barouche, he instructed my father to append his fingerprints to some documents that a Frenchman, pale, gaunt and dressed all in black, had pulled from his briefcase. My father did not protest. He rolled his fingertips on the ink-soaked sponge and pressed them to the papers. As soon as the documents were ‘signed’, the kaid drove off leaving my father standing in the yard, staring from his ink-stained fingers to the barouche as it moved away up the hill. Neither my mother nor I dared speak to him.

The next day, my mother gathered our few belongings into bundles and packed them into the cart.

It was over.

For the rest of my life I will remember that day, the day my father stepped through the looking glass. It was overcast, the sun hung crucified above the mountain, the horizon was a blur. Even at noon it felt as though we were enveloped in some endless, silent twilight, as though the universe itself had fled leaving us to our misery.

My father took the reins, his shoulders hunched, eyes fixed on the floor, and urged the mule on, taking us I knew not where. My mother huddled against the slatted sides of the cart, hidden behind her veil, barely distinguishable from the sacks and bundles. My little sister, her eyes vacant, kept her fingers pressed into her mouth. My parents had not noticed that their daughter had stopped eating, that something in her spirit had broken on that night when hell itself had rained down on our farm.

The dog followed the cart at a distance, careful not to be seen. From time to time it stopped on the brow of a hill and sat on its haunches as though determined to hold out until we disappeared from view, then leapt up and bounded after us, muzzle trailing along the ground, desperately trying to catch up. When it drew closer, it would slow and then wander off the road and sit, miserable, distraught. The dog knew that wherever we were headed, there was no place for it. My father had made this clear by hurling stones at it as the cart pulled away from the farm.

I loved my dog. He was my one friend, my only confidant. I wondered what would become of him, what would become of both of us now that our paths had parted.

We travelled for miles without encountering a solitary soul, as though fate had cleared the landscape of every other creature so it might have us to itself. The dirt road rushed along ahead of us, bare and mournful. It looked like our fortune.

Late in the afternoon, in the haze of the sweltering sun, a small black speck appeared in the distance. My father jerked the bridle of the mule towards this makeshift tent, a rickety construction of posts and hessian that stood in the deserted landscape as though it had appeared out of a dream. He instructed my mother to get down and wait beside a large boulder. In our world, when men meet, women are expected to withdraw; there is no greater sacrilege than to see one’s wife stared at by a stranger. My mother did as she was asked, taking Zahra in her arms, and went and crouched in the shadow of the rock.

The merchant was a small, wizened man with ferret-like eyes sunk in a face mottled with blackish pustules. He wore tattered Arab trousers over mouldering shoes with gaping holes through which poked his misshapen toes. His threadbare waistcoat did little to hide his scrawny chest. He peered at us from beneath his makeshift tent, one hand on his club. When he realised we were not thieves, he dropped the stick and stepped out into the sunlight.

‘People are wicked, Issa,’ he greeted my father. ‘It is in their nature. It is little use to hate them for it.’

My father drew to a halt. He knew all too well what the man was referring to, but he did not answer.

‘When I saw the fire in the distance that night,’ the man said, ‘I knew that some poor soul was heading straight for hell, but not for a moment did I think that it was you.’

‘It is the Lord’s will,’ my father said.

‘That is not true, and you know it. If men are evil, the Lord cannot be blamed. It is unjust to burden Him with crimes that we alone make possible. Issa, my friend, who could hate you so that they would burn your crops?’

‘It is God who decides our fate,’ said my father.

The merchant shrugged. ‘Men invented God to distract them from their demons.’

As my father stepped down from the cart, the tail of his gandurah snagged on the seat. This, he decided, was another evil omen. His face flushed with anger.

‘Are you going to Oran?’ the merchant asked.

‘Who told you that?’

‘When a man has lost everything, he goes to the city . . . Be careful, Issa. The city is no place for people like us. Oran is teeming with villains more deadly than cobras, more cunning than the Devil, who fear neither God nor man.’

‘Why do you talk such nonsense?’ said my father angrily.

‘Because you don’t know what you’re getting yourself into. The city is a wicked place. Barakah – the breath of life, the wisdom of our ancestors – has no power there. Those who go there never return.’

My father raised one hand, imploring him to keep his wild imaginings to himself.

‘I’ve come to sell you my cart. The wheels and the cart are solid and the mule is barely four years old. I’ll take whatever you can offer.’

‘I’m afraid I cannot offer much, Issa.’ The merchant looked at the mule and the trap. ‘Please do not think I would profit from your misfortune. Few travellers pass this way now and I am left with melons I cannot sell.’

‘Anything you can offer will be enough for me.’

‘To tell the truth, I have no need of a cart or a mule . . . But I have a little money, which I will happily share with you. You have helped me many times. As for the mule and cart, you can leave them here with me; I’ll find a buyer for you. You can come back and collect the money whenever you like. I won’t take a penny of it.’

My father did not hesitate; he had no choice. He held out his hand to shake on the deal.

‘You are a good man, Miloud. I know you would not cheat me.’

‘A man who cheats, cheats only himself.’

My father handed me two bundles, shouldered the others himself and, pocketing the few coins the merchant gave him, went to find my mother, never once looking back at what he was leaving behind.

We walked until we could no longer feel our legs. The sun was unbearable; its dazzling glare off the arid, desolate terrain stung our eyes. Swathed in her shroud, my mother stumbled like a ghost behind us, stopping only to shift my sister from one hip to the other. My father paid her no mind. He walked on, resolute, forcing us to run to keep up. There could be no question of us asking him to slow down. My heels were rubbed raw by my sandals, my throat burned, but I kept going. To stave off my hunger, my thirst, I focused on the steam rising from my father’s shoulders, on the way he carried his burden, his brutal, unvarying pace determined to trample any evil spirit in his path. Not once did he turn to see whether we were still following.

The sun was beginning to set by the time we reached the roumi track – by which he meant the tarmac road. My father chose a lone olive tree behind a small hill, safe from prying eyes, and began to lash the branches together to make a shelter for the night. Then, checking to ensure that he could still see the road, he told us we could set down our burdens. My mother laid the sleeping Zahra at the foot of the tree and covered her with a pagne, then took a crock pot and a wooden spoon from one of the bundles.

‘No fire,’ my father said, stopping her. ‘We can eat cured meat tonight.’

‘There is no meat. I have a few fresh eggs left.’

‘No fire, I said. I want no one to know that we are here. We will make do with tomatoes and onions.’

The oppressive heat died away and a cool breeze rustled the leaves and the branches of the olive tree. We could hear lizards darting through the dry grass. The sun spilled out across the horizon like a broken egg.

My father lay on his back in the shade of a boulder, one knee raised, his turban covering his face. He had eaten nothing. It was almost as though he was sulking.

Just before nightfall, a man appeared on a high ridge and waved at us. Out of modesty, he dared not come any closer while my mother was present. My father sent me to ask what he wanted. He was a shepherd, dressed in tattered rags, his face was wizened, his hands calloused. He offered us his shelter for the night. My father declined this hospitality. The shepherd insisted – his neighbours would not forgive him if he left a family to sleep outside when his little shack was nearby. My father categorically refused. ‘I will not be beholden to any man,’ he muttered to himself. The shepherd, annoyed, went back to his meagre flock of goats, grumbling and stamping his feet.

We spent the night beneath the stars. My mother and Zahra at the foot of the olive tree, me under my gandurah, my father sitting in the shadow of the rock, a cutlass between his feet, keeping watch.

When I woke in the morning, my father was a different man. He had shaved and washed his face in a nearby stream and put on clean clothes: a waistcoat over a faded shirt and a neatly pressed sarouel – a pair of loose-fitting trousers – I had never seen him wear before, and leather shoes, which, though shabby, had been freshly buffed.

The bus arrived just as the sun began to rise. My father packed our belongings on to the roof and sat us on a long bench at the back. This was the first time I had ever seen a bus. When it moved off, I clung to the seat, thrilled and terrified. The few other travellers dozed here and there, mostly roumis – Westerners – looking cramped in their shabby suits. I stared out of the windows at the landscape as it streamed past on either side. I was in awe of the bus driver. I could only see his back, which was broad as a rampart, and his broad, sinewy arms, which twisted the steering wheel with considerable authority. On my right sat a toothless old man with a tattered basket at his feet, who lurched from side to side with every hairpin bend. After each corner he would plunge his hand into the basket to make sure that everything was still as it should be.

The pungent petrol fumes and the closed windows finally got the better of me and, stomach churning, head feeling bloated as a rubber ball, I dozed off.

The bus stopped on a little square flanked by trees opposite a vast red-brick building. The travellers rushed for their bags. In their haste, some of them trod on my feet; I didn’t even notice. I was so dumbstruck by what I saw that I forgot to help my father take down our bundles.

The city.

I had never imagined that such a sprawling place could exist. It was extraordinary. For a moment I wondered if the heat and fumes were playing tricks on me. On the far side of the square, rows and rows of houses stretched as far as the eye could see, with tall windows and balconies filled with flowers. The streets were paved and there were footpaths on either side. I couldn’t believe my eyes; I did not even have names for many of the things that flashed before them. Beautiful houses rose up on every side, elegant and impressive, set back behind high black railings. Families relaxed on verandas around white tables on which stood tall decanters of orangeade, while rosy children with hair of gold played in the gardens, their high-pitched laughter bursting through the greenery like jets of water. These privileged residences exuded a sense of tranquillity and wealth that I could hardly believe possible, so different were they from life out in the bled, where crops withered to dust, where stables and barns were less pathetic than the shack we had called home.

This was a different planet.

I shambled along behind my father, dazzled by the parks bounded by low stone walls or wrought-iron railings, by the broad, sunlit avenues with their street lamps, majestic and aloof, like glowing sentinels. And the cars . . . ! I had seen at least a dozen cars. They appeared out of nowhere, sputtering like shooting stars, only to disappear around a corner before I had time to make a wish.

‘What’s the name of this country?’ I asked my father.

‘Shut up and walk,’ he snapped. ‘And keep your eyes on the road if you don’t want to fall into a hole.’

This was Oran.

My father walked straight ahead, sure-footed, undaunted by the grid of streets and their dizzying buildings that branched out all around us, each so like the others that it felt as though we were marking time. Curiously, I saw, the women in the city did not wear the veil. They walked around with their faces bare; the old women wore strange headgear, but the younger ones went bare-headed, their hair on show for all to see, seemingly unperturbed by the men all around them.

As we walked farther, the hubbub died away and we wandered through peaceful, shady areas, the silence barely broken by a passing barouche or the clatter of a metal shutter. A few elderly European men with crimson faces lingered outside their front doors. They wore baggy shorts, shirts open to reveal their paunches, and broad-brimmed hats to protect their pale necks. Exhausted by the heat, they chatted over a glass of anisette set down on the pavement, distractedly waving fans to cool themselves. My father strode past without greeting them, without even looking at them, trying to act as though they were not even there, but his pace slackened now and lost something of its assurance.

We emerged on to a broad avenue where pedestrians stood window-shopping. My father stopped to watch a tram pass before crossing the road. He signalled to my mother, indicating a spot where she should wait for him, then, leaving her to look after the baskets and bundles, he ordered me to follow him to a chemist’s shop at the far end of a lane. He glanced through the front window first to make sure this was the right address, then straightened his turban, smoothed down his waistcoat and stepped inside. A tall, thin man behind the counter was scribbling in a ledger. He was wearing a three-piece suit and a red fez over his blonde hair. He had blue eyes and a delicate face; a narrow strip of moustache accentuated the thin-lipped slit that served him as a mouth. When he saw my father come in, he frowned, then he lifted a section at the side of the counter and stepped from behind it to greet us.

The two men threw their arms around each other. The embrace was brief but forceful.

‘Is this my nephew?’ asked the stranger, coming up to me.

‘Yes.’ My father nodded.

‘My God, he’s handsome!’

This man was my uncle. I was not aware that I had an uncle. My father had never spoken to us about his family. Or about anyone. He barely spoke to us at all.

My uncle crouched down and hugged me.

‘You have a fine young man there, Issa,’ he said.

My father said nothing. I saw his lips move and knew he was silently reciting verses from the Qur’an to ward off the evil eye.

The man got to his feet again and turned to my father. After a moment, he went back behind the counter but continued to stare at him.

‘You’re not an easy man to flush out, Issa. I have to assume that something serious has happened. It’s been years since you came to visit your big brother.’

My father did not beat about the bush. In a single, breathless sentence he recounted what had happened out in the bled, how our crops had gone up in flames, about the visit of the kaid . . . My uncle listened carefully and did not interrupt. I watched as his hands alternately gripped the counter and balled into fists. When my father had finished, he pushed his fez back and dabbed at his brow with a handkerchief. He was devastated, but he held up as best he could.

‘You should have asked me for money, Issa, instead of mortgaging our lands. You know what happens with that kind of loan. You’ve seen many people take the bait, and you’ve seen what has happened to them. How could you let yourself be swindled too?’

There was no reproach in my uncle’s tone, just an overwhelming disappointment.

‘What’s done is done,’ said my father, who could think of nothing else to say. ‘God has decided.’

‘The Lord did not command that your crops be burned . . . God cannot be blamed for the wickedness of man. Nor the Devil either.’

My father raised his hand to stop the conversation.

‘I’ve come to settle in the city,’ he said. ‘My wife and my daughter are waiting for me on the corner.’

‘Let’s go back to my house first. You can stay there for a few days and I will see what I can do—’

‘No.’ My father cut him off. ‘If a man is to get back on his feet, he must do it straight away. I need a home of my own, and I need it today.’

My uncle did not insist. He knew his brother’s stubbornness too well to contradict him. He took us to the far side of the city.

There is nothing cruder than the inequalities of a city. Walk around a block and day becomes night, life becomes death. Even now, years later, I still shudder whenever I remember that devastating experience.

The ‘suburb’ where we ended up broke the spell the city had cast only a few hours earlier. This was still Oran, but now we were behind the scenes, where the beautiful houses and the leafy avenues gave way to a sprawling chaos peppered with squalid shacks, disgusting shops, the tents nomads call kheimas, which are open to the four winds, and pens filled with livestock.

‘This is Jenane Jato,’ my uncle said. ‘Today is the day the souk, the market, is held. It’s usually quieter than this,’ he added, to reassure us.

Jenane Jato: a slum of scrubland and shacks teeming with squeaking carts, beggars, hawkers, donkey-drivers struggling with their beasts, water-carriers, charlatans and ragged children; a stifling clay-red wasteland of dust and filth that clung to the walls of the city like a malignant tumour. The abject poverty was unbelievable, and the people – piteous wretches – dissolved into the shadows. It was as though the damned had been driven out of hell without judgement or warning and washed up here; they were the personification of life’s futility.

My uncle introduced us to a puny little man with a short neck and shifty eyes. Bliss was a broker, a vulture waiting to grow rich on other people’s misery. At the time, with disease-ridden waves of migrants flooding into the city, such predators were unavoidable. Ours was no exception to the rule. Bliss knew that we were ruined, he knew we were at his mercy. I remember he had a goatee beard that made his chin seem abnormally long and wore a filthy fez perched on his huge, bald, misshapen head. I hated him the moment I set eyes on him, his snakelike smile, the way he rubbed his hands together as though about to eat us alive.

He greeted my father with a nod and listened as my uncle explained our situation.

‘I think I may have something for your brother, Doctor,’ said the broker, who seemed to know my uncle well. ‘If it’s something temporary you’re looking for, you won’t find anything better. It’s not a palace, but it’s comfortable and the neighbours are honest.’

He led us to a yard in front of what looked like a stable, near a stinking stream. He asked us to wait in the street, then cleared his throat loudly to let the women know to disappear – as was the custom if a man was about to walk into a room. When the coast was clear, he signalled for us to follow him.

The house was built around a central courtyard flanked by rooms each crammed with families fleeing the famine and the typhus that raged in the countryside.

‘Here it is,’ the broker said, pulling aside a curtain to reveal an empty room. It smelled of piss and cats, of dead chickens and vomit. The walls, still standing through some miracle, were black and oozed damp; the floor was covered in a carpet of rats’ droppings. ‘You won’t find a more affordable rent,’ he assured us.

My father stared at the cockroaches that teemed around a drain choked with filth, looked up at the cobwebs spotted with dead flies; the broker watched out of the corner of his eye, like a reptile eyeing its prey.

‘I’ll take it,’ my father said to the man’s relief.

Immediately he began to pile our belongings into a corner of the room.

‘The communal toilets are at the other end of the courtyard,’ the broker said enthusiastically. ‘There’s a well, too, though it’s dry right now. You’ll need to watch that the kids don’t get too close to the edge. We lost a little girl last year when some fool forgot to put back the cover. Apart from that, there’s nothing else you need to know. The neighbours are good people. They’ve all come in from the bled to work, and they never complain. If you need anything at all, come and ask me,’ he insisted eagerly. ‘I know people, I can lay my hands on anything, day or night, if you’ve got the money. If you didn’t already know, I rent out mats, blankets, oil lamps and paraffin stoves. You only have to ask. I’ll bring you the moon itself if you’ve got the money.’

My father wasn’t listening; he already despised the man. As he set about tidying our new home, I saw my uncle take the broker aside and slip something into his hand.

‘That should cover the rent for a while.’

The broker held the banknote up against the sunlight and looked at my uncle with malicious joy. He pressed the money to his forehead, then to his lips and yelped.

‘Money might have no smell, but my God, it smells good to me.’

2

MY FATHER wasted no time. He was determined to get back on his feet as soon as possible. At dawn next day, he took me with him and we went looking for any work that might bring in a few pennies. Unfortunately, he knew nothing about the city and didn’t know where to start. At nightfall we came back empty-handed and exhausted. Meanwhile, my mother had cleaned our hovel and organised our things. We ate like animals and fell asleep immediately.

The following day, before daybreak, my father and I set out again to look for work. We had been walking for hours when we saw a crowd of men milling around a truck.

‘What’s going on?’ my father asked a beggar in tattered rags.

‘They’re looking for labourers to unload cargo on the port.’

Convinced this was his lucky break, my father told me to wait on the terrace of an ancient ramshackle café and piled into the crowd. I watched him elbow his way through and disappear into the throng. When the truck pulled away, there was no sign of him; he had obviously managed to get aboard.

I waited for him for hours under the blazing sun. All around me, people in rags and tatters clustered around shacks, squatting on their haunches, perfectly motionless in the shade of their makeshift shelters. Every one of them had vacant eyes and something of the night in their faces. They seemed to be waiting, with unfathomable patience, for something that would never happen. In the evening, weary of waiting, they drifted away in silence, leaving only a few tramps, two or three gibbering madmen and sinister men with reptilian eyes. Suddenly I heard someone shout, ‘Stop, thief!’ and it was as though Pandora’s box had been opened. Heads jerked, bodies uncoiled like springs and I watched a handful of hirsute men swoop on a young lad in rags trying to escape. This was the thief. In the blink of an eye, they had lynched him. His screams would haunt my sleep for weeks to come. When they had finished, all that remained was the broken body of a teenage boy lying in a pool of blood. I was so shocked that when a man leaned down to speak to me, I almost jumped out of my skin.

‘I didn’t mean to scare you, lad,’ the man said, holding his hands up to reassure me, ‘but you’ve been here since morning. You need to be heading home now. This is no place for the likes of you.’

‘I’m waiting for my father,’ I said. ‘He went on the truck.’

‘Where is he then, this fool of a father of yours? What is he thinking, leaving a little lad like you in a place like this? Do you live far?’

‘I don’t know.’

The man seemed embarrassed. He was big, strapping, with hairy arms, a face weathered by the sun and one black eye. He glanced around him, then, reluctantly, he pushed a seat towards me and invited me to sit with him at his table, which was black with dirt.

‘It’ll be dark soon, and I have to close up. You can’t hang around here, got it? It’s not safe. The place is crawling with lunatics . . . Have you eaten?’

I shook my head.

‘I didn’t think so.’

He stepped inside his café and brought out a tin plate with some cold congealed soup at the bottom.

‘I’ve no bread left . . .’

He sat down next to me and watched as I lapped at the plate like a dog with his bowl.

‘Your father is a fool,’ he sighed.

It grew dark. The café owner closed up but he didn’t leave. He hung a lantern from a beam and, scowling, kept me company. Shadows flitted here and there across the murky square. A throng of homeless people gradually took over the area; some clustered around a wood fire, others simply stretched out on the ground and slept. Hours went by, the sounds faded; my father had still not returned. As time passed, the café owner’s fury mounted. He wanted to head home but was convinced that if he left me, even for a moment, I would be dead. When my father finally appeared, ashen with worry, the café owner laid into him in no uncertain terms.

‘Where the hell do you think you are? Mecca? What on earth possessed you to leave your kid in a place like this? Even criminals aren’t safe around here.’

My father was so relieved to find me safe that he drank down the café owner’s rebuke like a blessed elixir. He realised that he had made a grave mistake and that had the café owner left me to my fate, he might not have found me at all.

‘I went in the truck,’ he stammered, distraught. ‘I thought they were going to bring us back here, but I was wrong. I’m not from the city and the port is farther than I thought. I didn’t know where I was or how to get back here. I’ve been going round and round in circles for hours.’

‘You’re not right in the head is what it is,’ roared the café owner, unhooking the lantern. ‘If you’re out looking for work, you leave your kid at home . . . Now follow me, the pair of you. We’re about to cross the most vicious viper pit the good Lord ever put on this earth.’

‘Thank you, my brother,’ said my father.

‘Nothing to thank me for. I just don’t like to see a kid hurt is all. I’d have stayed here with him till morning if I had to or he’d never have made it out of this hole alive, and I wouldn’t have that on my conscience.’

He led us through the cut-throat alleys without a hitch, explaining as we walked how to avoid the worst areas and make it home in one piece, then disappeared into the shadows.

My father followed the café owner’s advice to the letter. After that day, he was gone by the time I woke up every morning, and I was asleep before he got home at night.

I no longer saw him.

I missed him.

There was nothing for me to do in Jenane Jato. I was bored. Having been brought up a solitary boy with only an old dog for company, I did not know how to join in the games of the horde of children who constantly squabbled in the courtyard. They were like poltergeists. They were younger than I was – some barely came up to my knees – yet they made more noise than a pack of demons. Sitting on the step of our room, I would watch them, keeping a safe distance from their savage games that invariably ended with a head split open or a knee grazed.

We shared our courtyard with five other families, all of whom had come from the hinterland: bankrupt landowners or khammès – tenant farmers – who had defaulted on their lease. The men would leave at daybreak to find work and the women, indifferent to their children’s vicious brawls, would spend their days attempting to make a filthy hovel into a home. They seemed to believe this was a lesson in the nasty, brutish ways of life, one their children should learn as soon as possible. They seemed almost happy to watch as, again and again, the children lashed out at one another, then, after a good cry, made up again only to hurl themselves back into the fray with astonishing ferocity. The women stuck together, they supported each another: if one was ill, the others would make sure there was food in her pot, look after her baby, take turns sitting by her bedside. From time to time they would share something sweet, and with touching simplicity, they seemed inured to their hardship. For this, I admired them.

There was Badra, a hefty, strapping woman who loved to tell dirty stories. She was a breath of fresh air. Her crude language made my mother uncomfortable, but the other women loved it. Badra was mother to five little brats and two awkward teenagers. She had been married, to a shepherd thick as two short planks, who, she liked to say, had a dick like a donkey and no idea how to use it . . . There was Batoul, slight and skinny with hair as black as cloves, who, barely forty, seemed like an old woman; she would squirm with laughter before Badra even opened her mouth. As a girl, Batoul had been forced to marry a man old enough to be her grandfather. She claimed to have supernatural powers – she would read palms and interpret dreams. The women in the neighbourhood regularly came to her for advice. For a handful of potatoes, a franc or a sliver of soap, she would tell their future. For the people who lived around the courtyard, she did it for free . . . There was Yezza, a plump, red-haired woman with a magnificent bosom whose alcoholic husband regularly hit her. Her ruined face bore the marks of his constant beatings and she had barely a tooth left in her head. Her ‘crime’ was her failure to bear him children, something that made him particularly loathsome . . . There was Mama, who, though she had enough to worry about with her brood of children, had the energy of a dozen men and was prepared to do anything to keep a roof over their heads . . . And then there was Hadda, beautiful as a houri, who already had two children, though she was barely in her teens. Her husband had set off to look for work one morning and never come back. Left to herself, with no means of support, she owed her continued survival to the solidarity of the women who shared the courtyard.

Every day these women would gather around the well and spend most of their time turning over the past as you might turn a knife in an old wound. They talked about the orange groves that had been repossessed, of blue hills lost for ever, of kinfolk left behind, of a land of misfortune that they might never see again. And as they talked, their faces sagged with heartache, their voices cracked, but just when sorrow seemed about to overwhelm them, Badra would interrupt with some new outrageous tale of her first husband’s sexual disasters and, like a magic potion, the painful memories would loosen their grip, the women would fall about with laughter and the courtyard regained a small part of its soul.

The jokes and stories would go on until nightfall. Sometimes, emboldened by the absence of the men, Bliss, the broker, would come and strut about. As soon as they heard him loudly clear his throat, the women would disappear, then he would stride into the courtyard, shout at the children, look for any rubbish and call us vermin if he found the slightest scratch on the walls. He would stand in the middle of the courtyard staring pointedly at the room where the beautiful Hadda lived and, loathsome as a one-eyed flea, threaten to turn us all out on to the street. After he had gone, the women would reappear, giggling, more amused than intimidated by the man’s bluster. And Bliss could certainly brag, though he was not up to his boasts. He would not have dared show his face in the courtyard if there were a man present – even if it were only a man on his deathbed. Badra was convinced that Bliss had designs on Hadda. Destitute and vulnerable, the girl would be easy prey, her position made more precarious by the fact that she was in arrears on her rent. Bliss constantly bullied her hoping she would break.

To protect me from Badra’s vulgar tongue, my mother allowed me to go out and play in the street – if it could be called a street. It was a dirt road lined on either side with hovels made of corrugated iron and squalid little shacks. There were only two houses built of bricks and mortar: the courtyard house where we lived, and a sort of stable where a number of families lived cramped together. On the corner of the street was a barber, a small man of indeterminate age, barely taller than a stick of asparagus and so timorous that some refused to pay for their haircuts. Inside his tiny roofless cabin were a munitions case salvaged from a military dump, a sliver of mirror rescued from a wardrobe and a rickety counter on which sat a large jug, a tattered shaving brush, a bent pair of scissors and an assortment of blunt razor blades. When he was not shaving old men, he squatted on the ground outside his shack and sang. His voice was hoarse and gravelly, he could barely remember the words to the songs, yet there was something thrilling in the way he poured out his pain. I never tired of listening to him.

Next to the barber’s was a ramshackle lean-to that served as a grocer’s shop. The shopkeeper was known as Peg-Leg – a Moroccan veteran who had lost his leg in a minefield. This was the first time I had ever seen a wooden leg. It made a strange impression on me. The ex-soldier seemed proud of it; he would pull it off and brandish it like a weapon at any boy he found trying to pilfer from his jars.

Peg-Leg was not happy in his little shop. He missed the reek of battle and the noise of the barracks. He dreamed of re-enlisting, of going into battle again and tearing the enemy to shreds. As he waited for his mutilated leg to grow back, he ran a thriving black market in jam, sugar loaves and rancid cooking oil. In his spare time he was a back-street dentist; many times I watched him pull rotten, bloody stumps from children’s mouths with a pair of rusty pliers; it was as though he was ripping their hearts out.

Beyond Peg-Leg’s shack was a patch of waste ground that opened on to scrubland. I wandered out there one morning and witnessed a battle between two rival armies of children, one led by Daho – a savage child, his head shaven but for a lock of hair that fell over his forehead – the other by a young man who seemed to be mentally retarded and thought he was a warrior king. It was as if the earth had opened up beneath my feet. In a split second I was seized by a forest of arms, and before I knew what was happening they had stripped me of my shoes, my gandurah and my fez. They even tried to drag me into the bushes and dishonour me. Shocked and traumatised, I’m not sure how I escaped the pack, but I never set foot in the waste ground again.

My father spent every hour of the day looking for a job, but still the situation was bleak. Every day at dawn, thousands of men went out looking for work. As wretches lay dying on the rubbish tips, their bellies so emaciated you could almost see their spines, the living seemed only too ready to tear each other to pieces over a stale crust of bread. Times were hard. The dreams the city seemed to promise from afar had proved illusory. My father was lucky if he managed to get one day’s labour in every ten, and the money he earned was barely enough to buy the sliver of soap to wash himself with. Some nights he would stagger home, his face haggard, his back stooped from a day spent loading and unloading, in so much pain that he had to sleep on his stomach. He was exhausted, but most of all he was desperate. His resolve began to crack under the weight of his doubts.

Weeks passed. My father was visibly losing weight. He was increasingly short-tempered and at the slightest excuse would take out his frustration on my mother. He never hit her, but he would scream at her and she would guiltily bow her head and say nothing. The days slipped away from us, the nights loomed large. My father no longer slept. He spent his nights sighing, clapping his hands, I would hear him pacing the room in the dark; sometimes he would go out into the courtyard and sit, chin on his knees, arms clasped around his legs, and wait for sun-up.

One morning he told me to put on my best gandurah and together we walked to his brother’s chemist’s shop, where we found my uncle setting out his boxes and vials on the shelves.

My father hesitated before stepping into the shop. Proud and tongue-tied, he dithered for a long time before admitting why we had come. He needed money. My uncle, as though he had been expecting this, immediately opened the cash register and took out a large banknote. My father stared at the money in anguish. Realising he would not take the money, my uncle stepped from behind the counter and slipped it into his pocket. My father stood, frozen, hanging his head, and his voice when he finally spoke was faint, muffled, barely audible: ‘Thank you.’

My uncle went back behind his counter. It was obvious that there was something he wanted to say, but he dared not burst the blister. His eyes flickered from my father’s face to his own scrubbed white fingers drumming on the countertop. Having weighed the situation with infinite care, he took his courage in both hands and said:

‘I know it’s hard, Issa, but you’ll get through this. If you’d only let me help you a little.’

‘I’ll pay you back every last penny,’ my father promised.

‘I’m not worried about the money, Issa, pay me back whenever you can. As far as I am concerned, you don’t need to pay me back at all. I can give you more. It’s no problem. I’m your brother, and I’m here for you, whenever you need me. I don’t know how to say this to you . . .’ He cleared his throat. ‘I’ve always found it difficult to talk to you. I’m afraid I will offend you, though all I want to do is be a brother to you. But it’s time you learned to listen, Issa. There’s nothing wrong in listening. Life is a constant learning process: the more you think you know, the less you actually know; things change so quickly, attitudes change . . .’

‘I’ll get by.’

‘I don’t doubt it, Issa, not for a second. But good intentions require means. No matter how hard you believe, belief isn’t enough.’

‘What are you insinuating, Mahi?’

My uncle wrung his hands nervously, searching for words, turning them over in his mind, then he took a deep breath and said:

‘You have a wife and two children. It’s a heavy burden for a man with no work. It ties your hands, it clips your wings . . .’

‘They’re my family.’

‘I am your family too.’

‘It’s not the same thing.’

‘It is the same thing, Issa. Your son is my nephew, flesh of my flesh. Leave him with me. What can he do if he follows in your footsteps? What were you hoping he might be – a labourer, a shoeshine boy, a donkey driver? You need to face facts. If he stays with you he will never amount to much. The boy needs to go to school, to learn to read and write, to grow up properly. I know – Arab boys aren’t supposed to go to school, they’re supposed to work in the fields, look after the livestock. But I can send him to school, I can turn him into an educated man . . . Please, don’t take this the wrong way. Think for a minute. The boy has no future with you.’

My father thought for a long while about what his brother had said, eyes down, teeth clenched. When at last he looked up, his own face had disappeared, replaced by a mask of ashen impassiveness, and with a heavy heart he said:

‘Clearly, you will never understand anything, my brother.’

‘Don’t take it like that, Issa.’

‘Shut up. Don’t say another word. Perhaps I am not educated like you, but if being educated means belittling others, I want nothing to do with it.’

My uncle tried to say something; my father stopped him with a wave. He took the banknote from his pocket and set it on the counter.

‘And I want nothing to do with your money, either.’

With that, he grabbed me by the arm so roughly that he almost tore it from its socket, and pushed me out into the street. My uncle wanted to come after us, but didn’t dare. He stood outside his shop, knowing this mistake would never be forgiven.

My father did not walk, he thundered down the hill like a boulder. I had never seen him so angry. He seemed about to implode. His lips quivered, his eyes stared fiercely at the world as though wishing the ground would open up and swallow everything. He said nothing, but his seething silence made me fear the worst.

When we had gone some distance, he grabbed me and slammed me against a wall, staring hard into my terrified eyes; a blast of buckshot could not have terrified me more.

‘Do you think I’m a failure?’ he asked, choking out the words. ‘Do you think I brought a child into the world to watch him die slowly? Well, you’re wrong, and your sneering uncle is wrong, and destiny itself is wrong if it thinks I will allow myself be humiliated. Do you know why? Because though I was forced to abandon my lands, I still have my soul. I’m still alive, I’m strong, I’ve got my health. I have the power enough to move mountains. Because I have pride.’

His fingers digging into my shoulders were hurting me. He didn’t realise it. His eyes rolled in his head like white-hot ball bearings.

‘I wasn’t able to save our land, I know that, but I got it to produce a harvest, don’t forget that . . . What happened afterwards was not my fault. Sometime hard work and prayer come to grief in the face of man’s greed. I was naïve. I’m not naïve now. I won’t be stabbed in the back again . . . I may be starting from scratch, but I’m starting off a wiser man. I’ll work harder than any man has ever worked, I’ll face down the evil eye and I’ll prove to you that your father is a worthy man. I’ll drag us out of this pit that’s swallowed us up, I swear it. You do believe me, son, don’t you?’

‘Yes, Papa.’

‘Look me in the eye and tell me you believe me.’

He had no eyes now, only two gaping chasms of tears and blood that threatened to engulf us both.

‘Look at me!’

He grabbed my chin and jerked my head up.

‘You don’t believe me, do you?’

I felt a lump in my throat. I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t meet his eyes. The hand gripping my chin was the only thing that held me up.

Suddenly I felt his other hand lash my cheek.

‘You think I’m crazy, that’s why you won’t say anything. You little shit. What right have you to doubt me? No one has the right to doubt me. If that bastard of an uncle of yours thinks I’m washed up, then he’s no better.’

This was the first time my father had ever raised his hand to me. I didn’t understand what was going on, what I had done wrong, why he was so angry with me. I felt ashamed that I had made him angry, terrified that he might disown me, this man who mattered more to me than anything in the world.

My father raised his hand again and it hovered in the air, fingers trembling. His face was swollen and distorted. Then he howled like a wounded animal and hugged me to his chest, sobbing, crushing me against him so hard, for so long, I thought I might die.

3

THE WOMEN were sitting around a low table in a corner of the courtyard, drinking tea and basking in the sun. My mother, sitting with them, slightly aloof, held Zahra in her arms. She had finally joined the group but she took no part in their conversations. She was shy, and often, when Badra started in on one of her dirty stories, she would flush and choke on her tea with embarrassment. As usual, the conversation shifted from one subject to another, anything to take their minds off the stifling heat of the courtyard. Yezza, the redhead, had a black eye; her husband had come home drunk again the night before. Out of a sense of propriety, the other women pretended not to notice. Yezza was proud of her black eye; she endured her husband’s cowardly attacks with dignity.

‘The past few nights, I’ve had a strange dream,’ Mama said to Batoul, the clairvoyant. ‘It’s always the same: it’s dark, I’m lying on my belly and someone sticks a knife in my back.’

The women all turned towards Batoul, waiting for her interpretation. The psychic looked hesitant and scratched her head; she had no vision.

‘It’s always the same?’

‘Exactly the same.’

‘You’re lying on your belly in the dark and someone stabs you in the back?’ asked Badra.

‘Exactly.’

‘Are you sure it’s a knife?’ Badra quipped, rolling her eyes lewdly.

It took the women a moment to realise what she was hinting at, then they burst out laughing. Mama clearly had no idea what the joke was, so Badra nudged her. ‘You should tell your husband to be more gentle!’

‘Badra! Don’t you ever think about anything else?’ Mama was angry, ‘Can’t you see I’m being serious?’

‘Well, so am I . . .’

The women fell about, mouths hanging open as they brayed with laughter. Mama sat sullenly for a minute, shocked by their lack of restraint, but then she too began to smile and then to giggle.

Only Hadda did not join in the laughter. Her small, slender frame was drawn up. She was extraordinarily beautiful, with high cheekbones and great dark eyes, but she looked distraught. She had not said a word since she sat down. Suddenly she reached across the table and offered her palm for Batoul to read.

‘Tell me what you can see . . .’

Batoul hesitated, but seeing the distress in the girl’s face, she gently took the small hand in her own, her fingernail tracing the lines that criss-crossed the palm.

‘You have the hands of a princess, Hadda.’

‘Tell me what you see, Batoul. I need to know. I can’t go on like this.’

Batoul studied the girl’s palm in silence for a long time.

‘Can you see my husband?’ Hadda asked anxiously. ‘Where is he? What is he doing? Has he taken another wife? Is he dead? I’m begging you, Batoul, tell me. I need to know the truth, no matter what it is.’

Batoul sighed, her shoulders slumped.

‘I do not see your husband, my poor Hadda. Nowhere. I sense no presence, not the least trace of him. Either he has gone far away, so far that he has forgotten you, or he is no longer of this world. One thing is certain, he will not return.’

Hadda swallowed hard, but she carried on, her eyes boring into the psychic’s face. ‘Tell, me, Batoul, what does my future hold? What will become of me? I am a single woman with two small children, I have no family, no husband . . .’

‘We will not abandon you,’ Badra promised.

‘If my husband has abandoned me, there are no shoulders broad enough to hold me up,’ said Hadda. ‘Tell me, Batoul, what is to become of me? I need to know. When you are prepared for the worst, it is easier to bear.’

Batoul pored over her neighbour’s palm, tracing and retracing the lines with her fingernail.

‘I see you surrounded by many men, Hadda, but I see little happiness. You were not made for happiness. I can see brief moments of joy swallowed up by years of bitterness, years of shadows and sorrow, yet you never surrender.’

‘Many men? Am I to be widowed, or will my husbands constantly abandon me?’

‘The image is unclear. There are too many people around you, too much noise. It seems like a dream, but it is not a dream. It is . . . it is very strange. Perhaps I am getting old . . . I feel tired today. Excuse me . . .’

Batoul got to her feet and stumbled back to her room.

My mother made the most of the clairvoyant’s departure to slip away herself.

‘Aren’t you ashamed of yourself, coming and sitting with the women?’ she scolded me in a low voice behind the curtain that screened our room. ‘How many times have I told you that a boy has no business listening to women’s chatter? Go and play in the street, and try not to go too far.’

‘There’s nothing for me to do in the street.’

‘There’s nothing for you to do in here with grown women either.’

‘The other boys pick on me.’

‘You need to learn to stand up for yourself. You’re not a girl. Sooner or later you have to learn to get by on your own, and you won’t do that sitting around listening to women gossip!’

I didn’t like leaving the courtyard. What had happened to me on the scrubland had made me fearful. I did not set foot outside the house without carefully scanning the streets and alleys all around, constantly alert for anything suspicious. I was terrified of the local thugs, of Daho in particular, a squat, stocky lad who was ugly and evil as a djinn. He terrified me. Whenever I saw him, I felt myself crumble into a thousand pieces; I would have walked through walls to get away from him. He was a surly boy, as impulsive as a lightning bolt. He prowled the streets with a gang of young hyenas as vicious and cruel as himself. No one knew where he came from, who his parents were, but everyone knew he would wind up dangling on the end of a rope or with his head on a spike.

And then there was the Moor – El Moro – an ex-con who had spent seventeen years in prison. He was a giant of a man, broad and strapping, with arms like Hercules, tattoos all over his body and a leather eye patch that covered a gaping socket. The gash of a scar cut across his face from eyebrow to chin, slashing his mouth into a harelip. His very name spelled terror. Whenever he appeared, everyone suddenly fell silent and quietly slipped away, hugging the walls. Only once had I seen him close up. There were a gang of us clustered around Peg-Leg’s stall. The ex-soldier was telling us about his exploits in the Rif Valley in Morocco – he had fought with the French against the Berber rebel Abd el-Krim. We were hanging on his every word, then suddenly our hero turned deathly pale. We thought he was having a heart attack. But he wasn’t: El Moro was standing behind us, his legs like tree trunks, hands on his hips. He looked the grocer up and down with a sneer.

‘You want to send these lads off to get slaughtered, bone-head? Is that why you’re always filling their heads with your tall tales? Why don’t you tell them how, after years of loyal service, the same officers threw you to the dogs when you had one paw missing?’

Peg-Leg had suddenly lost the power of speech, his lips moving silently like a fish out of water.

El Moro went on, his fury mounting.

‘You smoke out villages, slaughter the livestock, shoot poor unarmed souls, then come and lay out your trophies on the public square. You call that war? You want to know what I think? You’re a coward; you disgust me. I’d like to take that wooden club you use for a leg and skewer you with it until your eyes pop out of your ears . . . “Heroes” like you don’t deserve a monument; they don’t deserve so much as a headstone over the mass grave they should be buried in. You’re scum, you’re a mercenary traitor trying to hide his crimes by blowing his nose in the flag.’

Peg-Leg was green now, and shaking, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat. Suddenly there was a terrible smell – Peg-Leg had soiled himself.

But there were others in Jenane Jato besides street urchins and loud-mouthed thugs. Most of those who lived there were good people. Poverty had not eaten away their souls, misery had not dampened their kindness. They knew they had little chance in life, but still they waited for manna from Heaven, still they convinced themselves that the misfortune that dogged them would run its term and hope rise again from the ashes. They were decent people, some of them were charming or funny, and all of them kept the faith and, with extraordinary patience, carried on.

The day of the souk in Jenane Jato was like carnival, and everyone did what they could to maintain the illusion. Soup vendors set up stalls and, wielding their ladles like cudgels to beat off the beggars, sold bowls of broth made of chickpeas, water and cumin for half a doro. There were several cafés where groups of starving wretches stood outside simply to inhale the smell of cooking. On market day, con artists were out in force – they would come from the four corners of the city hoping for some blunder, some misunderstanding they could turn to their advantage, but the people of Jenane Jato ignored them: they knew these twisted souls could not be healed. Instead they listened to the travel ling musicians and thrilled at the acrobats. The biggest draws at the souk were the gouals. Hundreds of people would crowd around them to listen. It was difficult to take in everything they said – their stories were as threadbare as their clothes – but they had the gift of bluffing their audience, of keeping them breathless from start to finish. The gouals were a beggar’s opera of sorts, a form of open-air theatre. It was from them, for example, that I learned that once the sea had been fresh water, until the tears of sailors’ widows turned it to salt . . .

After the gouals came the snake charmers. They would try to scare us, tossing snakes at our feet. I watched charmers half swallow quivering vipers only to conjure them away into the sleeves of their gandurahs – a sight so thrilling yet so revolting, I had nightmares about it. The cleverest of all were the charlatans, who stood babbling and gesticulating next to stalls filled with phials and potions, gris-gris, amulets, and the dried corpses of animals famous for their aphrodisiacal powers. They claimed they could cure deafness, toothache, gout, paralysis, terror, barrenness, ringworm, insomnia, evil spells and frigidity, and the credulous crowds fell for it. Some would swallow one of these potions, and three seconds later would be rolling in the dirt, claiming to have been miraculously cured. It was astounding.

There were prophets who came to harangue the crowd. Their gestures solemn, their voices sepulchral, they would stand on their makeshift platforms and hold forth, denouncing the corruption of the spirit, heralding the coming of the Judgement Day. They ranted about the Apocalypse, about the rage of men, the fate reserved for impure women; they foamed at the mouth, railing at innocent passers-by, or launched into esoteric ideas that were seemingly unending. ‘How many slaves have risen up against empires only to die on a cross?’ one of them thundered, shaking his shaggy beard. ‘How many kings have thought they could change history only to end up rotting in a dungeon? How many prophets have sought to expand our minds only to leave us more deluded than before?’ ‘How many times have we told you you’re boring?’ someone in the crowd roared back. ‘Why don’t you put a hood over that ugly mug of yours and show us some belly-dancing and stop this lunatic raving?’

Slimane was among the sideshows. With a barrel organ slung across his chest and his marmoset perched on his shoulder, he strutted around the market cranking the handle while the monkey held out a peaked cap to anyone who came near. Whenever someone tossed a coin in, the monkey would pull faces for them. Away from the main attractions were the livestock enclosures and the donkey sellers, wily horse-traders so persuasive they could pass off a mule as a pureblood stallion. I loved to listen to them sing the praises of their animals; being hoodwinked by them was almost a pleasure, since they treated you with the courtesy and deference reserved for an aga.

Sometimes, into this mayhem, the Karcabo would arrive – a troop of black men bedecked with amulets, who danced like demons, rolling their milk-white eyes. We would hear them coming from the devilish racket of their metal castanets, the roll of their drums. The Karcabo came only for the feast day of the marabout Sidi Blal, their patron. They would come into town leading a sacrificial bull calf draped in the colours of the brotherhood and go from door to door to collect money for the sacrifice. In Jenane Jato, women would rush to the doors to watch – even though it was forbidden – children would pop up out of nowhere like gerbils, eager to join the throng, and as the procession moved on, the noise and the clamour grew.

Of all of the extraordinary sites at the festival, Slimane took the prize. His music was sweet and sad as water flowing, and the marmoset was charmingly mischievous. People said Slimane had been born a Christian to a wealthy, educated French family but fell in love with a Bedouin girl and converted to Islam. He could have lived like a king, they said, since his family had never disowned him, but instead he chose to stay with his adoptive people and share their joys and their pains. We all thought this was touching. No one, Arab or Berber, even the most hard-hearted, had anything but respect for him, and no one would raise a hand against him. I was very fond of Slimane. As far back as I can remember, deep in my heart – the heart of the old man I am now – no one that I ever met better embodied what I believe to be the greatest of virtues: discernment, a quality that is all but lost today, but one which did much for the reputation of my people at a time when few had any respect for us.

Meanwhile, I had befriended Ouari, a boy a few years older than me, who was thin, almost emaciated, with reddish-blonde hair, bushy eyebrows and a hook nose like a sickle. He was not really a friend, but he didn’t seem to mind me hanging around, and since I needed him, I did everything I could to win his friendship. Ouari was probably an orphan – or a runaway; I never once saw him go in or come out of a house. He spent his time behind a vast pile of scrap metal in something that looked like a henhouse carpeted with dung, and spent his time hunting goldfinches so he could sell them at market.

Ouari never spoke. I would talk to him for hours; he paid me no mind. He was a mysterious, solitary boy, the only one in the neighbourhood who wore trousers and a beret. All the other boys wore long gandurahs and a fez. In the evenings he made traps with olive branches dipped in birdlime. In the mornings I would follow him into the scrubland and help him set the traps. When a bird landed on one of the traps and began to flap its wings frantically, we’d rush over and put it in a cage while we waited to catch some more. In the afternoon we would stroll through the streets offering our hunting trophies to novice bird-catchers.

The first few pennies I ever earned, I made with Ouari. Ouari never cheated me. At the end of our first hunting expedition – which lasted several days – he asked me to follow him to a quiet corner, where he spilled the contents of the game bag he used as a purse. He divided up the coins, one penny for him, one for me, and so on until there were none left. He walked me home, then he vanished. The next morning I went looking for him at the chicken coop. I don’t think he would ever have come looking for me. He seemed perfectly capable of getting by without my help or anyone else’s.

I felt good being around Ouari, confident and relaxed. Even the little savage Daho left us in peace. Ouari had a dark, steely, mysterious look about him that kept people at bay. He didn’t say much, but he had only to scowl and the street kids disappeared so fast it took their shadows a moment to catch up. I think I was happy around Ouari. I got a taste for hunting goldfinches and learned a lot about traps and camouflage.

Then, one evening, hoping to make my father proud of me, it all collapsed. I waited until after supper before taking my purse from its hiding place. Hands trembling with excitement, I held out the fruits of my labours.

‘What’s this?’ my father asked suspiciously.

‘I don’t know how much is there, I don’t know how to count . . . but it’s the money I made selling birds.’

‘What birds?’

‘Goldfinches. You catch them with twigs dipped in birdlime—’

My father grabbed my hand. His eyes were like white-hot ball bearings, and his voice shook as he said:

‘Listen carefully, son, I don’t need your money, and I don’t need an imam nipping at my heels.’

As my face distorted with pain, his grip tightened.

‘I know I’m hurting you, son, I can feel your pain like it was my own. I’m not trying to break your hand, I’m trying to get it into that thick skull of yours that I’m not a ghost. I’m flesh and blood and I’m very much alive.’

I felt my fingers crushed by his fist, hot tears blurred my vision. I was choking with the pain, but there could be no question of whingeing or crying. Everything was a matter of honour between my father and me; and honour was measured by our ability to endure pain.

‘What can you see right there in front of you?’ He nodded to the low table, the leftover food.

‘Supper, Papa.’

‘I’m not saying it’s a feast, but you get enough to eat, don’t you?’

‘Yes, Papa.’

‘Have you ever gone to bed hungry since we came to the city?’

‘No, Papa.’

‘And that table there, the one you’re eating off, did we have it when we got here?’

‘No, Papa.’

‘What about the paraffin stove? Did someone give it to us? Did we find it in the street?’

‘You bought it, Papa.’

‘When we got here, the only light we had was a marepoza – a miserable bit of wick floating in a puddle of oil, remember? What have we got now?’

‘An oil lamp.’

‘What about the sleeping mats, the blankets, the pillows, the buckets, the broom?’

‘You bought them, Papa.’

‘Then why can’t you get it into your head, son? I told you the other day, I might have lost my lands, but I haven’t lost my soul. I couldn’t save the damned farm, and I’m sorry. You can’t imagine how sorry I am. There’s not a minute of the day I don’t think about it. But I’m not about to give up. I work every hour God sends, I break my back to get us back on our feet. And it’s up to me – and only me – to make that happen. Do you understand, son? I don’t want you feeling guilty about what happened. It’s not your fault. You don’t have to give me money. I wouldn’t send you out to work to make ends meet, I wouldn’t stoop to that. If I fall, I pick myself up again; that’s the price I have to pay and I don’t blame anyone. And I will do it, I swear to you. Like I told you, I have the power to move mountains. So in the name of our dead and those of us still living, if you want to make my life easier, just promise me you’ll never again do what you’ve just done to me, because every penny you bring into this house just makes my shame worse.’

He opened his fist. My hand and my purse felt as though they were welded together. I couldn’t move my fingers; my arm was numb up to the elbow.

The following morning, I gave Ouari the money back.

Ouari frowned slightly as he saw me slip my purse into his game bag, but his surprise faded immediately and he went back to his traps as though it had never happened.

My father’s reaction unsettled me. How could he have so misinterpreted my modest contribution? I was his son, flesh of his flesh. By what twisted logic could my well-meant gesture be taken as an insult? I would have been so proud for him to accept my money, but instead, I had hurt him.

This was the night, I think, when I first began to doubt the soundness of my good intentions, a doubt that would plague my every thought.

I no longer understood anything.

I was no longer certain of anything.

My father was determined to get back on his feet, determined to prove to me that my uncle had been wrong. He worked tirelessly, worked every hour of the day, and now made no attempt to hide how hard he worked. My father, who until now had always kept his plans to himself so as not to tempt the evil eye, now told my mother every detail of his plans to find more work, earn more money – ensuring his voice was loud enough so that I would overhear. He promised us the moon. Every night when he came home, a twinkle in his eye, jingling the change in his pocket, he would talk about the house we were going to live in – a proper house with shutters on the windows, a front door of solid wood, maybe even a little vegetable garden where he could plant coriander and mint, tomatoes and vegetables that would melt in our mouths. My mother listened, happy to see her husband planning and dreaming again. Though she did not entirely have faith in these plans, she pretended to believe him, and when he held her hand – something he had never done before – she positively glowed.

My father worked morning, noon and night, taking any job he could find, determined to be back on his feet as soon as possible. He spent his mornings helping out a herbalist, in the afternoons he did a shift for a ambulant greengrocer and in the evenings he worked as a masseur in a Turkish bath. He was even planning to start his own business.

As for me, I wandered the streets, alone and worried.

One morning, while I was far from home, Daho crept up on me. He had an ugly green snake wrapped round his arm. He backed me into a corner, rolling his eyes, waving the reptile’s gaping maw in my face. I had always hated snakes; they scared me to death. Daho taunted me, laughing at my panic, calling me a sissy . . . I was about to pass out when suddenly Ouari appeared from nowhere. Daho immediately stopped and stood, ready to run if my friend came to help me. But Ouari did not come to my rescue. He stared at us for a moment, and then walked on as though he hadn’t seen anything. Daho breathed a sigh of relief and, laughing maniacally, went back to torturing me with the snake. But it didn’t matter now, he could laugh all he wanted. I didn’t care. Sadness had driven out fear: I no longer had a friend.

4

PEG-LEG was dozing behind his counter, his turban pushed down over his face, his makeshift limb in easy reach lest he need it to fend off some light-fingered child who came too close to his sweets. His humiliation at the hands of El Moro was a distant memory. His time in the army had taught him forbearance. After years of suffering brutal NCOs with obtuse submissiveness, I suppose he considered the fleeting outbursts of Jenane Jato’s thugs just another abuse of power. Peg-Leg knew that life was a series of ups and downs, moments of bravery and moments of cowardice. What mattered was to pick yourself up when you fell, keep your dignity when you had been beaten. The fact that no one in Jenane Jato made fun of him after El Moro’s ‘humiliation’ was proof that no one could have stood up to the man. El Moro was no ordinary adversary; he was death incarnate, he was a firing squad. To face him head on and escape with only cuts and bruises was a triumph; to come through unscathed but for a pair of soiled pants was a miracle.

Next door, the barber was shaving the head of a bald man who sat on the ground like a fakir, his open mouth revealing a single stump of tooth. The rasp of the razor on the strop seemed to give the old man great pleasure. The barber told him all his troubles, but the old man paid him no heed; he simply sat, eyes closed, enjoying the feel of the razor as it scraped across his head, which was as bald as a polished marble.

‘There you go!’ the barber said as he finished. ‘That head of yours is so clear now a man could read your mind.’

‘I’m sure you missed a bit,’ the old man said. ‘I can feel a five o’clock shadow clouding my thoughts.’

‘What thoughts, you old fool? Don’t tell me that that brain of yours still works . . .’

‘I might be old, but I’m not senile. Look again. I’m sure you missed a hair or two.’

‘There’s nothing, I promise you. It’s smooth as an egg.’

‘Please,’ the old man insisted, ‘look again.’

The barber was no fool; he knew the old man was simply enjoying the shave. He considered his work, meticulously checking that he had not missed a single hair on the old man’s wizened neck, then he set down his razor and indicated to his customer that his siesta was over.

‘Come on, Uncle Jabori, time to get back to your goats.’

‘Please . . .’

‘Enough is enough, I said. I’ve better things to do with my time.’

The old man grudgingly got to his feet, peered at himself in the sliver of mirror, then pretended to rummage through his pockets.

‘I think I must have left my money at home,’ he said, trying to sound exasperated.

The barber smiled; he had seen this coming.

‘Don’t worry about it, Uncle Jabori.’

‘I was sure I’d put it in my pocket this morning, I swear to you. Maybe I lost it on the way here.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ the barber said wearily. ‘God will repay me.’

‘I won’t hear of it!’ said the old man politely. ‘I’ll go and get it right this minute.’

‘That’s very touching. Just try not to get lost on the way.’

The old man twisted his turban round his head and hurried off. The barber watched him go, then squatted on his munitions box.

‘It’s always the same – do people think I do this for fun?’ he muttered. ‘This is my living, for God’s sake! How am I supposed to eat tonight?’

He ranted on, trying to get Peg-Leg to respond.

Peg-Leg ignored him.

The barber went on for several minutes, and when the ex-soldier still did not react, he took a deep breath and, staring up into the sky, started to sing:

I miss your eyes

And I go blind

Every time you look away

I die a little every day

Searching for you

In vain among the living

What does it mean to live this love

When all the world proclaims

That you are gone?

What will I do now with my hands

Now your body is not here . . .

‘Use them to wipe your arse!’ yelled Peg-Leg.

It was as if someone had thrown a bucket of cold water over the barber. He was sickened by the vulgar way the grocer had broken the spell, the beauty of his song. Looking on, I felt sad, as though I had been woken from a dream.

The barber tried to ignore Peg-Leg; he shook his head sadly, cleared his throat and tried to begin again, but there was a lump in his throat and his heart was not in it any more.

‘You can be such a pain in the arse!’

‘What about you, forever wailing those pathetic songs of yours?’ Peg-Leg shifted lazily on his box.

‘What if I am?’ the barber said. ‘Look around. There’s no one here, there’s nothing to do. The whole place is dying and there’s not a soul around can even raise a smile. If a man can’t sing, what’s left?’

Peg-Leg jerked his thumb at the coils of rope on the hook above his head.

‘There’s always that. Take your pick, tie one end to the branch of a tree, wrap the other end around your neck, then bend your knees and you’ll have peace; that’s a sleep no one can disturb.’

‘Why don’t you go first? You’re the one who hates life.’

‘How am I supposed to go first? I’ve got a wooden leg – I can’t bend my knees.’

Resigned, the barber sat back on his munitions box and put his head in his hands – probably so he could go on humming to himself. He knew there was no one to listen to his song. His only muse was one he conjured out of whispers and sighs, and he knew he would never be worthy of her. The sliver of mirror reflected the disparity between his lowly body and his grand desires: he was short, scrawny, and so stooped he was almost a hunch back, as ugly and as poor as Job himself; he had no house, no family and no prospect of making his pitiful life any better. And so he contented himself with living in a dream, an unattainable dream, a dream he could not admit to in public without seeming a fool, a dream that in private he gnawed on like a juicy bone.

It broke my heart.

‘Come here, lad,’ shouted Peg-Leg, unscrewing the top of the jar of sweets. He handed me a sweet, gestured for me to sit next to him. He stared at me for a long moment.

‘Let me look at your face, son,’ he said, lifting my chin with his finger. ‘Well, now . . . The good Lord was particularly inspired when he made you, wasn’t he. A face takes talent. How come you have blue eyes? Is your mother French?’

‘No.’

‘Your grandmother, then?’

‘No.’

He tousled my hair with his calloused hand, then slowly stroked my cheek.

‘You have the face of an angel, lad.’

‘Leave the kid alone,’ hissed Bliss the broker, appearing suddenly around the corner.

Peg-Leg jerked his hand away quickly.

‘I didn’t do nothing,’ he whined.

‘Don’t give me that,’ said Bliss. ‘I’m warning you, the boy’s father is a brute – he’ll rip your other leg off as soon as look at you, and I won’t have a legless cripple on my street. They bring bad luck.’

‘Honestly, I don’t know what you’re talking about, Monsieur Bliss.’

‘You know and everyone else round here knows what I’m talking about. If you’re so keen on war, why don’t you fuck off to Spain instead of hanging around here drooling over little boys? They’re always fighting some war in Spain, they need cannon fodder.’

‘How can he?’ the barber interrupted. ‘He’s got a wooden leg that doesn’t bend at the knee.’

‘Shut up, you cockroach,’ Peg-Leg roared, trying to save face, ‘or I’ll make you swallow your rusty razor blades one by one.’

‘You’d have to catch me first.’

Bliss waved for me to clear off.

As I scrambled away, my father appeared from a narrow alleyway and I ran to meet him. He was home earlier than usual and I could tell from the parcel under his arm that he was in a good mood. He asked where I’d got the sweet I was eating, then marched over to Peg-Leg and tried to pay for it. At first the grocer refused to take the money – it was only a sweet, he said – but my father would have none of it and insisted he take it.

Then we went home.

My father unwrapped the brown paper package and gave each of us a present: there was a scarf for my mother, a dress for my little sister and a pair of brand-new rubber boots for me.

‘You’re mad,’ my mother said.

‘Why?’

‘It’s a lot of money, and you need the money, don’t you?’

‘This is just the start,’ my father said, getting carried away. ‘Soon, we’ll have a new house, I promise. I’m working hard and I’m doing well. Things are looking up, so why not make the most of it? I have a meeting with a well-established merchant on Thursday, a serious businessman. He’s going to take me on as his partner.’

‘Please, Issa, don’t say another word. You’ve never had much luck. Don’t talk about your plans if you want them to come true.’

‘Don’t worry, I wasn’t going to tell you the details, just that this man said that to make me a partner in his business, I would have to invest a certain sum of money. And . . . I’ve got the money!’

‘Please, don’t say any more,’ my mother begged, spitting on the ground to ward off the evil eye. ‘Say nothing, and let things take their course. The evil eye has no pity for blowhards.’

My father did not say any more, but his eyes shone with a joy I had never seen in him before. That night, he was determined to celebrate his reconciliation with Lady Luck. He had been to the butcher’s, wrung the neck of a capon, plucked and cleaned it and brought it home – hidden at the bottom of a straw basket out of respect for our neighbours, who rarely had much to eat.

My father was suddenly happier than a gang of boys let loose at a carnival. He was counting off the days until he would be a partner in his own business. Five days, four, three . . .

He worked as hard as he ever had, but now he invariably came home earlier so he could have the pleasure of seeing me run to meet him. He needed me to be awake when he got home to reassure me that his luck had changed, that there were clear skies ahead, that he, my father, was strong as an oak, capable of moving mountains with his bare hands . . .

Then came the long-awaited Thursday.

There are some days the seasons shun, days that fate and demons spurn, days when our guardian angels desert us, when a man is left to his fate and is forever lost. That Thursday was such a day. My father realised it as soon as he woke; I could see it in his face. To the end of my days I will remember that day – an ugly, miserable, brutal day of torrential rain and thunderclaps that rang out like a curse. The sky brooded, the coppery clouds lowered.

‘Surely you’re not going out in weather like this?’ my mother said.

My father was standing on the threshold of our room, staring at the dark, bruised sky as at some evil omen. He considered postponing his meeting, but fortune does not favour those who hesitate. He knew this and dismissed his feeling of foreboding as the Devil attempting to disconcert him. At the last minute, he turned and asked me to go with him. Maybe he thought that if he brought me along, fate might relent, might spare him any low blows.

I slipped on my hooded gandurah, my rubber boots, and hurried after him.

We were soaked to the skin by the time we arrived at the meeting place. My feet squelched in the rain-filled boots, the sodden hood of my gandurah weighed on my shoulders like a yoke. The street was deserted, except for an overturned cart; there was no one to be seen . . . or almost no one. Because El Moro was lying in wait, like a bird of prey perched over the fate of man. When he saw us arrive, he stepped from his hiding place, his eyes like the barrels of a gun, dark sockets in which death seemed to smoulder. My father was taken aback. Before he could react, El Moro lashed out with his head, his foot, his fist. My father fought back as best he could, determined not to give in, but El Moro was quick; he ducked and weaved and in the end this thug got the better of my father, who, though brave, was a quiet, unassuming farmer unaccustomed to fighting. El Moro tripped him, and as he fell, he pinned him to the ground and began pounding him, clearly intent on killing him. I was petrified. It was like a nightmare. I tried to scream, to rush to my father’s aid, but not a nerve or a muscle in my body would respond. Blood and rainwater coursed into the gutter, yet still El Moro did not give up: he knew exactly what he was looking for. When at last my father stopped fighting back, the animal crouched over his prey and pushed up my father’s gandurah. His face lit up like a lightning flash in the darkness when he saw the purse strapped beneath my father’s armpit. He slashed the straps with a knife, smiled as he felt the weight of the purse, then disappeared without so much as a glance at me.

His face a bloody mess, his gandurah hiked up exposing his belly, my father lay where he had fallen. I could do nothing to help him. I was in some other world. I don’t remember how we got home.

‘I was sold out,’ my father cursed. ‘That thug was lying in wait for me. He knew I was carrying that money. He knew it . . . This was no stroke of bad luck, that bastard was waiting for me.’

Then he said nothing.

For days and days he did not say another word.

I have watched huge cacti split in a rainstorm, seen cliffs crumble; watching my father in the weeks and months after the attack was no different. He was slowly coming apart, unravelling thread by thread. He crouched in a corner, refusing to eat or drink, his head buried in his lap, his hands clasped behind his neck, silently brooding on his hatred, his fury.

He knew now that no matter what he did, what he said, he was doomed to disaster, and no oaths sworn on mountaintops, no holy vows could change the course of his fate.

One night we heard the voice of the local drunk howling and raging along the street, his filthy tirade echoing across the courtyard like a baleful wind whistling through a tomb. It was a rasping voice, filled with bile and scorn, that called all men dogs, all women pigs, that predicted dark days for the wretched and the cowardly; a voice that dripped with self-righteous scorn, with bloated pride; a voice the people of Jenane Jato had learned to recognise amid the thousand apocalyptic rumblings – the voice of El Moro.

When he heard it, my father looked up so quickly he slammed his head against the wall. For a moment he stayed crouched in the corner, petrified. Then, like a ghost emerging from the gloom, he got to his feet, lit the oil lamp, rummaged through a pile of clothes, pulled out a battered leather case and opened it. His eyes shone in the lamplight. He held his breath, hesitated a moment, then plunged his hand into the bag and the blade of a butcher’s knife flashed in his fist. He put on his gandurah, slipped the knife into the sleeve. I saw my mother stir. She knew what her husband was thinking, knew the madness of it, but she dared not say anything: this was not a woman’s business.

My father stepped into the shadows and I heard his footsteps in the courtyard dying away like prayers carried on the wind. The door to the street creaked as it swung shut, then there was silence . . . a roaring silence that kept me awake, watching for my father until morning.

He crept back furtively at dawn, took off his gandurah and threw it on the floor, slipped the knife back into its case. Then he went back to the murky corner where he had been brooding since that fateful Thursday, curled up and did not move again.

The news spread like wildfire through Jenane Jato. Bliss, the broker, was overjoyed. He went from door to door shouting, ‘El Moro is dead! He will never terrorise any of us again! Someone stabbed him through the heart!’

Two days later, my father took me to my uncle’s pharmacy. His eyes were bloodshot, his beard dishevelled and he was trembling as though he had a fever.

My uncle did not come out from behind the counter, suspicious that we had shown up unexpectedly at a time when most shopkeepers were only rolling up their shutters. He assumed my father had come to take revenge for the insult some days earlier. When at last my father spoke, my uncle was visibly relieved.

‘You were right, Mahi. My son has no future with me.’

My uncle stared at him open-mouthed.

My father crouched down beside me, digging his fingers into my shoulders so hard that it hurt. He looked me in the eye and said:

‘It’s for the best, son. I am not abandoning you, I am not disowning you; I simply want you to have a chance in life.’

He kissed me on the forehead – a gesture usually reserved for venerable elders. He tried to smile, and finding that he could not, he quickly got up and almost ran out of the shop to hide his tears.

5

MY UNCLE lived in the European part of the city, in a quiet cul-de-sac lined with neat brick houses with wrought-iron railings and shutters on the windows. It was a beautiful neighbourhood. The streets were bordered by neatly trimmed ficus trees; there were benches where old men could sit and watch the world go by and leafy squares where children could play. These children were not dressed in rags like the children in Jenane Jato, their rosy faces were not pitted with the marks of damnation; they took in life in great lungfuls and seemed to genuinely enjoy it. The neigh-bourhood seemed impossibly hushed, the only sounds the burbling of babies and the chirp of birdsong.

My uncle had a two-storey house with a small front garden and a lane running down the side. Bougainvillea spilled over the fence, its purple flowers tumbling into space, and a grapevine grew in a dense tangle over the veranda.

‘In summer, there are grapes everywhere,’ my uncle told me as he opened the gate. ‘If you stand on tiptoe, you’ll be able to pick them.’

His eyes were shining. He was in seventh heaven.

‘You’ll like it here, boy.’

The door was opened by a red-haired woman of about forty. She was beautiful, with an oval face and huge aqueous green eyes. Seeing me standing on the step, she clasped her hands to her heart and stood for a moment, speechless, then glanced at my uncle, who nodded.

‘He’s so handsome!’ she cried, crouching down to study me more carefully.

She threw her arms around me so suddenly that I almost fell over backwards. She was a powerful woman, with quick, brusque, almost masculine gestures. She hugged me to her, and I could feel her heart beating. She smelled as wonderful as a field of lavender, and the welling tears simply accentuated the green of her eyes.

‘Germaine, darling,’ my uncle said, his voice tremulous, ‘this is Younes. Yesterday he was my nephew, today he is our son.’

I felt the woman’s body tremble, saw a glittering tear quiver on her lashes then roll down her cheek.

‘Jonas,’ she said, choking back a sob, ‘Jonas, if you knew how happy this makes me.’

‘You have to speak to him in Arabic, he’s never been to school.’

‘It doesn’t matter, we’ll soon fix that.’

Still trembling, she got to her feet, took me by the hand and led me into a room full of grand furniture that to my eyes looked bigger than a cowshed. Daylight streamed through the French windows that led on to the veranda, where two rocking chairs stood either side of a table.

‘This is your new home, Jonas,’ Germaine said to me.

My uncle followed, a parcel under one arm, smiling from ear to ear.

‘I bought him some clothes. You can buy him some more tomorrow.’

‘That’s fine, I’ll look after him. You’d better go back, your customers will be getting impatient.’

‘Well, well . . . so you want him all to yourself?’

Germaine crouched down again and looked at me.

‘I think we’re going to get along just fine, aren’t we, Jonas?’ she said to me in Arabic.

My uncle put the parcel of clothes on a sideboard and settled himself on the sofa, hands in his lap, his fez pushed back from his forehead.

‘You’re not going to hang around here spying on us, are you?’ said Germaine.

‘Absolutely. Today is a holiday, my darling. I’ve just become a father.’

‘You’re not serious.’

‘I’ve never been more serious in my life.’

‘Very well then,’ Germaine conceded. ‘Jonas and I are going to take a nice bath.’

‘My name is Younes,’ I reminded her.

She gave me a tender smile, stroked my cheek and whispered:

‘Not any more, my darling . . .’

Then, turning to my uncle:

‘Since you’re here, make yourself useful and go and heat some water.’

She led me into a little room where there was a sort of large cast-iron cauldron, turned on a tap and began to undress me.

‘Let’s get rid of these old rags, shall we, Jonas?’

I didn’t know what to say. I watched her pale hands working, removing my fez, my gandurah, my threadbare vest, my rubber boots. I felt like a bird plucked of its feathers.

My uncle came back with a bucket of scalding water. Out of decency, he stayed in the hall. Germaine helped me into the tub, soaped me from head to foot, rinsed me over and over then rubbed me energetically with some perfumed lotion and wrapped me in a huge towel while she went to get my new clothes. When I was dressed again, she stood me in front of a large mirror. I was a different person. I was wearing a sailor’s pea jacket with a high collar and four brass buttons down the front, a pair of short trousers with pockets, and a beret like the one Ouari wore.

When I reappeared in the living room, my uncle got to his feet to greet me. He looked so happy it almost scared me.

‘My little barefoot prince,’ he said. ‘Isn’t he handsome?’

‘Stop that, you’ll draw the evil eye on him . . . And speaking of bare feet, you forgot to buy shoes.’

My uncle clapped his hand to his forehead. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘Where was my head?’

‘In the clouds, probably.’

My uncle immediately went out again and a little later reappeared with three pairs of shoes of different sizes. The smallest pair – black leather lace-up shoes that scraped my heels – fitted me perfectly. He didn’t take the other pairs back; he was keeping them, he said, for me to grow into.

Like two moths flickering around a flame, Germaine and my uncle flitted around me constantly. They took me on a tour of the house, any one of whose vast high-ceilinged rooms was large enough to accommodate all of Bliss’s tenants. Each spotless window was adorned with heavy drapes and framed by green shutters. It was a beautiful, sunny house, though a little disorienting, with its hidden doors, its spiral staircases and the built-in wardrobes that at first I mistook for rooms. I thought about my father, about our shack and the farm we had lost, about our filthy hovel in Jenane Jato; the difference was so great that I felt dizzy.

Every time I looked up, I saw Germaine looking down. She was determined to spoil me. My uncle did not quite know how to behave, but he did not leave my side. They tried to explain everything at once, burst out laughing for no reason at all, or simply stood, holding hands, staring at me with tears in their eyes. Meanwhile, wide-eyed, I discovered the wonders of the modern world.

That evening, we ate in the living room and I discovered something else strange: my uncle had no need of an oil lamp, he simply pressed a button on the wall and a host of lights in the ceiling lit up. I felt terribly awkward at dinner. At home I had been used to eating from the same plate as my family. Now that I had a plate all to myself, I didn’t know what to do. Ill at ease with the eyes watching my every move, the hands constantly stroking my hair, pinching my cheeks, I barely ate a thing.

‘Don’t rush him,’ Germaine kept saying to my uncle. ‘Give him some time to get used to things.’

My uncle would curb his excitement for a minute, only to get carried away again a moment later.

After dinner, they led me upstairs.

‘This is your room, Jonas,’ Germaine announced.

‘My room’ was twice as big as the room my family shared in Jenane Jato. In the middle was a huge bed flanked by two night tables. On the walls were paintings, some dreamlike landscapes, others of people praying, their hands clasped under their chins, heads ringed with golden haloes. On the mantelpiece was a statue of a little boy with wings and above it was a crucifix. In one corner was a small writing desk and an overstuffed chair. The room was pervaded by a strange perfume, sweet and ephemeral. Through the window I could see trees and the roofs of the houses opposite.

‘Do you like it?’

I didn’t answer. The lavishness of my surroundings frightened me. Everything seemed to be perfectly, precariously balanced; I was terrified that with one false move I would bring it all crashing down.

Germaine asked my uncle to leave the two of us alone. She waited until he had left and then undressed me and put me into bed, as though I would be incapable of doing so myself. My head sank into the mountain of pillows.

‘Sweet dreams, my son.’

She drew up the blankets, kissed my forehead, turned out the bedside lamp, then crept out on tiptoe, carefully closing the door behind her.

As a rule I was not scared of the dark – a solitary boy with little imagination, I usually found it easy to get to sleep – but now, in this opulent room, I felt strangely uneasy. I missed my parents. But this was not the reason I felt fearful. There was something ominous about the room, something I could sense but could not put my finger on. Was it the smell of the blankets, or the scent that hung in the air that made me feel light-headed? Was it the sound like breathing that echoed in the room and wailed in the chimney? I was convinced that I was not alone, that there was something crouched in the shadows watching me. The hair on the back of my neck stood up; I gasped for breath. I felt an icy hand over my face. Outside, the full moon lit the street. The wind whistled through the railings and whipped the trees. I forced myself to close my eyes, clutching the sheets. I could still feel the cold hand on my face, and the impression that there was something else here with me became unbearable. I could sense it standing by the end of the bed, ready to leap on me. The air felt thin, my heart felt as though it would explode. I opened my eyes again and saw the statue of the winged boy on the mantelpiece turn slowly and stare at me through vacant eyes, its mouth fixed in a sad smile.

Terrified, I leapt out of bed and crouched behind the headboard. The winged boy turned again to stare at me, its monstrous shadow splayed across the wall. I scuttled under the bed, dragging a blanket with me, curled up as small as I could and closed my eyes tight, convinced that if I opened them, I would find the statue on all fours, peering in at me.

I was so petrified, I’m not sure if I finally fell asleep or simply passed out.

‘Mahi!’

The scream woke me with such a start, I hit my head against the slats of the bed frame.

‘Jonas isn’t in his room,’ Germaine shouted.

‘What do you mean, he isn’t in his room?’

I heard running in the corridor, doors slamming, footsteps on the stairs. He can’t have left the house . . . The door is double-locked. My uncle’s voice. The veranda door is locked too . . . Did you look in the toilet? I just checked – he’s not in there. Germaine was panicking. Are you sure he’s not in his room? . . .

I told you, his bed is empty . . . They searched downstairs, moving furniture, then came back upstairs and into my room.

‘My God, Jonas,’ Germaine cried when she saw me sitting on the edge of the bed, ‘where did you get to?’

My right side was stiff and my joints hurt. My uncle examined the lump on my forehead.

‘Did you fall out of bed?’

I pointed stiffly at the statue: ‘It kept moving all night.’

Germaine put her arms around me.

‘Jonas, my poor little Jonas, why didn’t you wake us? You’re so pale, I feel terrible.’

The following night, the statue of the winged boy was gone, and with it the crucifix and the holy pictures. Germaine sat beside my bed telling me stories in a jumble of Arabic and French, stroking my hair until I fell asleep.

As the weeks went by, I missed my parents terribly, though Germaine did everything she could to make my life happy. In the morning, when she went shopping, she would take me with her, and I never came home without a new toy or some sweets. The afternoons she spent teaching me to read and write. She was eager to enrol me in a school, but my uncle was determined not to rush things. Sometimes he let me come to work at the chemist shop with him, and sitting me at a little desk in the back office while he served customers, he had me copy out the alphabet in an exercise book. I was a fast learner, Germaine thought, and she didn’t understand why my uncle was so hesitant to send me to school. After two months, I could read whole words without stumbling over the syllables, but still my uncle would not hear of sending me to school until he was sure my father would not change his mind and come looking for me.

One evening, as I was wandering around aimlessly upstairs, he called me into his office. It was a dark room, lit only by a small skylight. There were books everywhere. Every inch of wall was lined with bookcases and there were piles of books on the sideboard and on his desk. His glasses balanced on the bridge of his nose, my uncle looked up from the book he had been reading. He perched me on his lap and pointed to the portrait of a woman on the wall.

‘You need to know something, my boy. You haven’t fallen from a tree into a ditch . . . You see that woman in the picture there? Her name is Lalla Fatna. She was a woman of money and status, and as domineering as she was rich – one general used to call her Jeanne d’Arch. She owned land enough for a small country, with meadows teeming with livestock. Eminent people came for miles to visit her and she had them eating out of her hand. Even officers of the French army courted her. They say that if the emir Abd al-Qadir had met her, it would have changed the course of history. Look closely at her, boy, because this woman, this legendary figure, was your great-grandmother.’

The woman in the portrait was beautiful. She lay back against plush cushions, neck straight, head held high, wearing a kaftan embroidered with gold and precious stones. She looked as though she might rule over men and over their dreams.

My uncle pointed to another photograph, one of three men in opulent burnouses with carefully trimmed beards and eyes so piercing they all but leapt from the frame.

‘The man in the middle is my father, your grandfather. The others are his brothers. Sidi Abbas, on the right, went to Syria and never came back. Abdelmoumène, on the left, was a brilliant student. A man so wise he might have been a scholar – one of the great ulemas – but as a young man, he gave in to temptation. He spent too much time with the European bourgeoisie; he neglected his lands and his livestock and squandered his money in brothels. He was found dead in an alley with a knife in his back.’

He turned and pointed to a third portrait, bigger than the other two.

‘The man in the middle, that’s your grandfather, with his five sons. He had three daughters by his first marriage but he never talked about them. On his right is Kaddour, the eldest of the brothers. He and his father did not get on well, and your grandfather disinherited him when he moved to the city to become a politician. On the left is Hassan, who liked to live like a lord. He kept company with women of easy virtue, showering them with jewels, while in secret he was brokering deals that would result in the family losing vast swaths of our lands and a large share in our stud. Your grandfather did not even realise how much damage he’d done until he was dragged before the courts. Your grandfather never really recovered. Next to Hassan is Abdessamad. He was a hard worker, but he left the family because your grandfather would not consent to him marrying a cousin whose family had sided with the French. Abdessamad died somewhere in Europe fighting in the Great War. And the two little boys sitting at your grandfather’s feet, that’s your father, Issa, the youngest, and me, I was two years older. As children we were very close, but then I got sick, very sick . . . I was about your age at the time. The doctors and the healers couldn’t cure me. My father – your grandfather – was desperate, and someone suggested he take me to the Catholic nuns. At first he refused, but I got worse and worse, I was wasting away, and one morning your grandfather found himself knocking on the door of the convent . . .’

He showed me a photograph of a group of nuns.

‘The nuns saved my life. It took years and years. By the time I was well again, I had already passed my baccalauréat. Although he was crippled with debts by then, your grandfather agreed to pay for me to study chemistry. Maybe he realised that I had a better chance of making a future with my books than with his creditors. Germaine and I met when we were at university. I was studying chemistry, she was studying biology. And even though your grandfather had probably planned for me to marry a cousin or one of his friends’ daughters, he didn’t oppose our marriage. When I graduated, he asked me what I planned to do with my life, and I told him I wanted to set up a chemist’s shop in the city. He agreed. He made no conditions. That’s how I came to buy my house here, and the shop . . . Your grandfather never came to the city – not even for our wedding – not because he disowned me, but because he wanted to give me a chance in life. Like your father did when he brought you here to live with me . . . Your father is a brave, honest, hardworking man. He did his best to save the family’s lands, but he was the only one left. It wasn’t his fault. He was simply the last wheel on a cart that was already falling apart. Your father still believes that if I had helped him, if there had been two of us, we might have saved the farm, but fate decided otherwise.’

He took my chin between finger and thumb and looked into my eyes.

‘I’m sure you’re wondering why I’m telling you all this, boy . . . I’m doing it so that you know who your family are. Lalla Fatna’s blood flows in your veins. Where your father failed, you can succeed, and climb back to the lofty place from where you came.’

He kissed me on the forehead.

‘Now, go and find Germaine. I’m sure she’s missing you.’

I slipped off his lap and ran to the door.

When he saw me stop and turn, he raised his eyebrows.

‘What is it, boy?’

In turn, I stared into his eyes and asked: ‘When will you take me to see my little sister?’

He smiled.

‘The day after tomorrow. I promise.’

My uncle came home early. Germaine and I were outside. She was sitting reading a book in the rocking chair on the veranda. I was looking for a tortoise I had seen in the garden the night before. Germaine set her book down on the table and frowned. My uncle went into the house without coming over to kiss her as he did every day. She waited for a moment, but when he did not come out, she went inside to find him.

My uncle was sitting on a chair in the kitchen, elbows propped on the table, his face buried in his hands. Germaine knew something terrible had happened. I watched as she sat opposite him and took his wrist.

‘Problems with a customer?’

‘Why would I have problems with my customers?’ My uncle was angry. ‘I’m not the one who prescribes their medicine.’

‘You’re upset . . .’

‘That’s hardly surprising. I’ve just come back from Jenane Jato.’

Germaine started slightly.

‘I thought you were taking the boy there tomorrow?’

‘I wanted to get the lie of the land first.’

Germaine fetched a jug of water and poured a glass for her husband, who drank it, then, seeing me standing in the living room, she gestured upstairs.

‘Wait for me up in your room, Jonas. We’ll go over your lessons in a little while.’

I pretended to do as she asked. I waited on the landing for a minute, then crept down a few steps so I could listen. The mention of Jenane Jato had intrigued me. I wanted to know why my uncle suddenly looked so old. Had something happened to my parents? Had my father been arrested for murdering El Moro?

‘So?’ Germaine whispered.

‘So, what?’ my uncle said wearily.

‘Did you see your brother?’

‘He looks terrible, I mean really terrible.’

‘Did you give him money?’

‘You must be joking. The minute I reached for my pocket, he went rigid, like I was going to pull out a gun. “I didn’t sell you my son” is what he said to me. “I left him in your care.” I was really shaken, I can’t tell you. Issa is going downhill, honestly. I’m starting to fear the worst.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s obvious – if you saw his eyes. He looks like a zombie.’

‘What about Jonas? Are you going to take him to see his mother tomorrow?’

‘No.’

‘But you promised.’

‘I’ve changed my mind. He’s barely crawled out of the gutter; I’m not about to push him back into it.’

‘Mahi . . .’

‘Don’t go on about it. I know what I’m doing. Our son has to look to the future. There’s nothing back there but misery.’

I heard Germaine shift nervously in her chair.

‘You can’t give up so easily, Mahi. Your brother needs you.’

‘Don’t you think I’ve tried to help him? Issa is like a ticking time bomb – touch him and he’s liable to explode. He won’t give me a chance. If I offered him a hand, he’d cut my arm off. As far as he’s concerned, anything he gets from other people is charity.’

‘But you’re not other people, you’re his brother.’

‘You think he doesn’t know that? To him, it’s all the same. His problem is that he won’t admit how bad things are. He’s a shadow of the man he was. Besides, he resents me. You can’t imagine how much he resents me. He thinks that if I had stayed with him, we could have saved the farm, the family lands. He’s convinced of it, now more than ever. He’s obsessed with the idea, I know he is.’

‘You’re the one who blames himself . . .’

‘Maybe, but he’s obsessed. I know him. He’s never said anything, but he nurses his anger. He hates me, he thinks I sold out, turned my back on my family, married a heathen. As far as he’s concerned, I sold my birthright for a house in the city, traded my gandurah for a European suit, and even though I wear the fez, he hates me for giving up the turban. We’ll never get along.’

‘You should have given the money to his wife.’

‘She wouldn’t take it. She knows Issa would kill her.’

I rushed upstairs and locked myself in my room.

The following day at noon, my uncle shut up the shop and came to fetch me. Having slept on it, he had changed his mind, or perhaps Germaine had persuaded him; whatever the reason, he was determined to set things straight. He was tired of living in fear. Tired of watching as my father became more and more withdrawn. Tired of worrying that my father might show up unannounced and take me away without so much as an explanation.

My uncle brought me back to Jenane Jato, and the place seemed more terrible than it ever had. Here, time stood still; nothing ever happened; the same weather-beaten faces stared into the sun, the same shadows melted into the darkness. When he saw me, Peg-Leg doffed his turban and the barber almost cut off the ear of the old man he was shaving. The street urchins stopped dead, then lined up to stare at us as we passed, their tattered rags hanging from their scrawny bodies.

My uncle did his best to ignore the abject poverty, walking straight ahead, head held high, his face expressionless. He did not come into the courtyard with me, but waited outside.

‘Take all the time you need, son.’

I dashed inside. Two of Badra’s kids were fighting near the edge of the well; the smaller boy seemed to be trying to dislocate his brother’s elbow. In a corner, near the toilets, Hadda was bending over a pail doing her laundry. Her skirt, hiked up to her thighs, exposed her bare legs to the gentle sun. She had her back to me and didn’t seem to notice the vicious brawl her neighbour’s sons were having.

I lifted the curtain to our tiny room and it took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. I saw my mother lying on a pallet, blanket thrown over her, her face wrapped in a shawl.

‘Is that you, Younes?’ she whimpered.

I ran over and threw myself at her. She wrapped her arms around me and hugged me close. Her arms felt weak. She was burning with a fever.

Feebly she pushed me away; my weight was making it difficult for her to breathe.

‘Why did you come back?’ she asked.

My sister was sitting by the low table, so silent and meek that I hadn’t noticed her at first. Her big vacant eyes were staring at me, wondering where they had seen me before. I had barely been gone two months and already she hardly remembered me. My sister had not yet started to talk. She was not like other children her age; she seemed determined not to grow up.

From my bag I took out the toy I had bought for her and put it on the table. My sister didn’t take it; she simply glanced at it and then went back to staring at me. I picked up the toy – it was a little rag doll – and put it in her hands. She did not even notice.

‘How did you manage to find the house?’ my mother asked.

‘My uncle is waiting outside.’

My mother gave a little cry as she sat up, then threw her arms around me again and hugged me.

‘I’m so happy to see you again. What is it like in your uncle’s house?’

‘Germaine is very nice. She baths me every day and buys me anything I want. I’ve got lots of toys and shoes and I can have jam whenever I want . . . It’s a big house, Maman, there’s lots of rooms for everyone. Why don’t you come and live with us?’

My mother smiled, and all the pain that lined her face disappeared as if by magic. She was beautiful, my mother, with long dark hair that fell to her hips, and eyes as big as saucers. Sometimes, back when we lived on the farm, and I saw her standing on a hill looking out over the fields, I thought she looked like a sultana. She was beautiful, graceful, and when she raced back down the little hill, the misfortune snapping at the hem of her dress could not catch up.

‘It’s true,’ I insisted. ‘Why don’t you come and live with us in my uncle’s house?’

‘That’s not how things work with grown-ups, son,’ she said, wiping something from my cheek. ‘Besides, your father would never agree to live in someone else’s house. He wants to get back on his feet by himself, he doesn’t want to be in anyone’s debt . . . You’re looking well,’ she said. ‘I think you’ve put on weight. And you’re so handsome in your new clothes! You look like a little roumi.’

‘Germaine calls me Jonas.’

‘Who is Germaine?’

‘My uncle’s wife.’

‘It doesn’t matter. The French don’t know how to pronounce our names. They don’t do it to be hurtful.’

‘I’ve learned how to read and write.’

She ruffled my hair.

‘That’s good. Your father would never have let your uncle take care of you if he didn’t know that your uncle could give you things he cannot.’

‘Where is he?’

‘He’s at work. He’s always working . . . You’ll see, one day he’ll come and take you to the house of his dreams. Did you know you were born in a beautiful mansion? The shack you grew up in used to belong to one of the tenant farmers who worked for your father. When your father and I got married, he was rich. The whole village came to celebrate our wedding. We had a proper house with big gardens. Your three elder brothers were born like princes. They didn’t survive. When you were little, you used to run around the gardens until you were exhausted. Then God decided that spring should turn to winter and the gardens died. Such is life, my son. It gives with one hand and takes with the other. But there is no reason why one day we might not get it back. And you – you will be a success. I asked Batoul, and she read it in the ripples of the water. She said you will be a great man. That’s why, whenever I miss you, I know I’m being selfish and I say to myself, he’s better off where he is. He’s safe.’

6

I DID not stay long with my mother, or perhaps I stayed for an eternity, I couldn’t tell. Time did not matter; there was something else, something more dense, more fundamental. Like prison visiting rooms, what matters is what you remember of the moment shared with the person you have missed so much. I was young, I had no idea of the pain my leaving had caused, of the wound I had become. When I left, my mother did not shed a single tear. She would find time to cry later. She took my hand, she talked to me and smiled. Her smile was like a benediction.

We said what we had to say to each other, which was not very much – nothing we did not already know.

‘It’s not good for you to be here,’ she announced.

At the time, I did not understand what she was saying. I was a child; to me, words were simply sounds you made with your lips. Did I take them in, did I think about them? Besides, what difference did it make? I was already elsewhere.

It was my mother who reminded me that my uncle was waiting outside, that it was time for me to go, and the eternity we had shared winked out so quickly – like a light bulb when you flick the switch – that it caught me unawares.

Beyond the curtain, the courtyard was silent. There was no fighting, no screaming – had they been eavesdropping on our conversation? As I stepped out I saw most of our neighbours gathered around the edge of the well: Badra, Yezza, Batoul the clairvoyant, the beautiful Hadda, Mama and her children. They stood, staring at me from a safe distance, as though terrified that I would break if they came closer. Badra’s boys hardly dared to breathe – these two little savages stood with their arms stiffly by their sides. All it had taken to confuse them was a change of clothes. Even now, I wonder if the world is nothing but appearances. A man with a face as grey as papier mâché wearing a crude jute tunic over his empty belly is a pauper, but wash his face, comb his hair, give him a pair of clean trousers and he is a different man. Everything is in the details. At the age of eleven, these are the things that puzzle you, and since you can find no answers, you settle on answers that are convenient. Poverty, I decided, had nothing to do with fate; it was simply a state of mind. We accept the world as we see it; we believe it to be immutable. But if we look away from the misery even for a moment, another path appears, bright as a new penny, and so mysterious that we begin to dream . . . The people of Jenane Jato did not dream; they had decided that their fate was sealed, that there was no way up, no way out. Years of poverty had left them blinkered.

My uncle held out his hand. I grabbed it. The moment his fingers closed around my wrist, I stopped looking behind me.

I was already elsewhere.

* * *

The first year I lived with my adoptive parents passed without incident. Relieved, my uncle enrolled me in a school two blocks from our house. It was an unremarkable building with bare corridors and tall plane trees in the playground. It seemed perpetually dark, as though the sunlight barely reached the roof of the building. Unlike the stern, austere man who taught us French (in a thick Auvergne accent some of the pupils could imitate perfectly), the other teacher was gentle and patient. A plump woman who always wore the same drab pinafore, she would walk up and down between the desks trailing a cloud of perfume behind her like a shadow.

The only two other Arab boys in my class, Abdelkader and Brahim, were both sons of diplomats and had servants who came and picked them up after school.

My uncle took a keen interest in my studies; I was the apple of his eye. His joy gave me confidence. From time to time he would invite me into his study and tell me stories whose meaning and import I did not understand.

Oran was a beautiful city. There was something unique about the place, a charm that was more than simply Mediterranean exuberance. It was brash and vital and alive. When evening came, the city was magical. The air was cool after the sweltering heat of the day, and people would set chairs out on the pavement and spend long hours chatting over a glass of anisette. From our veranda we could see the glow of their cigarettes, overhear their conversations; their scandalous stories streaked across the darkness like shooting stars, their throaty laughter crashed at our feet like waves on a beach.

Germaine was happy. Every time she looked at me she offered up a prayer of thanks. I could see how happy I made her and her husband, and I felt flattered.

Sometimes my uncle entertained guests from out of town, Arabs and Berbers, some in European suits, others in traditional dress. They were distinguished, eminent people who talked about some country called Algeria. This was not the same country they taught us about at school, nor the one people talked about in the posh neighbourhoods, but a country that had been ravaged, conquered, silenced; a country that gnawed on its anger like rotting meat. These men talked about the Algeria of Jenane Jato, about the yawning gulf between rich and poor, about whipping boys and scapegoats . . . they talked about a country that was yet to be redefined, a country in which every paradox seemed to live a life of ease.

I think I was happy at my uncle’s house. I did not miss Jenane Jato. I had a friend who lived across the road. Her name was Lucette. We were in the same class and her father allowed her to play with me. She was nine; she was not pretty, but she was sweet and generous and I loved being with her.

At school, things settled down in my second year. I managed to blend in with everyone else. I still found roumi children to be strange creatures – they could be all smiles one minute and snub you the next. In the playground they would sometimes fall out with each other, declare themselves sworn enemies, but the moment an interloper appeared – usually an Arab or a ‘poor relation’ from their own community – they joined forces against him. They would ignore him, mock him, bully him. At first, they sent Maurice, a stupid, brutish boy, to bully me. Once they realised I was a ‘sissy’ who would not fight back and would not tell tales, they left me alone. They moved on, found another scapegoat, and now they would tolerate me on the periphery of their group. But I was not really one of them – a fact they were quick to remind me of. Strangely, my chief weapon if I wanted them to be my friends was my lunchbox. The moment I opened it, they would crowd round and treat me with disarming respect. But as soon as I had shared out my food and the last crumb had been eaten, they turned their backs so fast it made my head spin.

One afternoon, I arrived home from school in a rage, fuming at Maurice, at my teacher, at the whole class. I needed answers and I needed them now. Something had happened to undermine my self-assurance; for the first time I realised that my self-respect did not depend solely on those close to me, but on people whom I did not even know. It had happened during class. We had all handed in our homework, all except Abdelkader, who was embarrassed because he had forgotten to do it. The teacher dragged him to the front of the class by the ear and said: ‘Would you like to tell us why, unlike your friends, you have no homework to give me, Monsieur Abdelkader?’ The boy kept his head down, flushed with humiliation. ‘Why, Monsieur Abdelkader? Why have you failed to do your homework?’ When he got no response, the teacher turned to the rest of us. ‘Can anyone in the class enlighten me as to why Monsieur Abdelkader did not do his homework?’ Without bothering to put his hand up, Maurice yelled: ‘Because Arabs are lazy and shiftless, sir.’ The whole class had erupted with laughter and this had set me brooding.

As soon as I got home, I went and found my uncle in his study.

‘Is it true that Arabs are lazy and shiftless?’

My uncle was surprised by the anger in my voice. He set down the book he had been reading and turned to me. What he saw on my face moved him to pity.

‘Come here a minute, son,’ he said, opening his arms.

‘No . . . I want to know if it’s true. Are Arabs lazy?’

My uncle took his chin between thumb and forefinger and looked at me. He realised that I was serious, that he owed me an explanation.

He thought for a moment, then sat opposite me and said:

‘No, Arabs are not lazy, but we take the time to live life to the full; it is something Europeans don’t understand. To them, time is money. To us, time has no price. We can be happy simply taking the time to share a glass of mint tea, whereas nothing in the world is enough to make them happy. That is the difference between us, son.’

I never spoke to Maurice again, and I no longer feared him.

Then came a day when one of my dreams – for I was learning to dream now – was shattered.

I had walked Lucette to her aunt’s house in Choupot, some distance north of where we lived, and was heading home. It was an October morning. The sun hung in the sky as big as a pumpkin, autumn was plucking the last tatters from the trees, while the wind whipped armfuls of the dead leaves into eddies. On a wide boulevard where Lucette and I liked to stare in the shop windows, there was a bar. I don’t remember the sign that hung over the door, but I still remember the drunks who frequented the place – angry, foul-mouthed men given to brawling. The police often had to restore the peace with truncheons. That afternoon as I was walking past, a fight broke out. I heard shouting and swearing and tables crashing, then I watched as a furious barman grabbed a beggar by the collar and the seat of his pants and threw him down the steps. The poor fellow landed at my feet like a bale of hay. He was dead drunk.

‘Don’t let me see your face round here again, you lousy bastard,’ the barman threatened from the top of the steps. ‘We don’t want the likes of you here.’

He stepped inside and reappeared with a pair of old slippers.

‘Here! Take your slippers. You’ll need to run if I set eyes on you again.’

The tramp tried to duck, but a slipper hit him on the head. He lay in front of me, splayed across the pavement, and not knowing whether to walk round him or cross the road, I stood rooted to the spot.

Face down on the ground, his turban unravelled, the tramp panted and gasped as he tried to get to his feet, but he was too drunk. After a couple of attempts he managed to sit up. He groped around for his slippers, put them on, then picked up his turban and would it crudely round his head.

The stench from him was terrible; I think he had wet himself.

Swaying as he sat, one hand pressed against the ground to steady himself, he looked round for his walking stick. Seeing it lying in the gutter, he crawled over to get it. Suddenly he became aware of my presence and froze. As he looked up at me, his face contorted.

It was my father.

My father . . . a man who had the power to move mountains with his bare hands, who could conquer all uncertainties, who could wring the neck of fate itself . . . was lying at my feet, dressed in filthy, stinking rags, his face swollen, his lips flecked with spittle, his blue eyes as pained as the bruises on his face. A wreck, a ruin, a tragedy.

He looked at me as though I had returned from the dead. His puffy eyes misted over and his face crumpled like old paper.

‘Younes?’ he said.

It was not a cry, but something between an exclamation and a sob.

I was dumbstruck.

Still staring at me, the strain showing in his face, he struggled to get to his feet. Leaning on his walking stick, he managed to haul himself upright, careful not to let out a groan, but his knees buckled and he fell back into the gutter. And as he fell, it was as though all the promises he had ever made, all my dreams and aspirations, were whipped away by a harsh gust of the sirocco. I was shocked. I wanted to lean down, to put my arm around his shoulders and help him to his feet. I wanted him to take my hand, to allow me to support him. I wanted so many things, but still my eyes refused to believe what they saw and my limbs refused to obey my commands. I loved my father too much to see him like this, sprawled at my feet in rags and tatters, his finger-nails black, his nostrils flaring . . .

In a last spasm of pride, my father took a deep breath and, leaning on his walking stick and drawing on his last reserves of dignity, hauled himself upright again. He swayed, stumbled backwards and collided with a wall. Though his legs threatened to give out under him, he marshalled every ounce of strength in his struggle to stay standing. He looked like an old nag ready for the knacker’s yard. Then, carefully putting one foot before the other, shoulder still pressed to the wall, he stumbled away. As he went, he tried to step away from the wall, to show me he could walk unaided. In his piteous battle with himself I saw everything that was brave and grotesque about suffering. He was too drunk to walk far, and after a short distance he stopped, gasping for breath. He turned to see if I had gone, but I was still standing where he had left me, as helpless as he was. At that moment he gave me a look that was to haunt me for the rest of my life – a look of such despair that it choked the life out of a noble father’s promises to his son. It was a look such as a man can give only once in his lifetime, since after it there is nothing. Seeing it, I realised that those eyes, which had fascinated and terrified me, which had watched over me, warned me, loved and pitied me, would never look upon me again.

‘How long has he been like this?’ the doctor asked, slipping his stethoscope back into his case.

‘He seemed fine when he came home at lunchtime,’ Germaine said. ‘Then when we sat down to eat, he took a few bites then ran to the bathroom to be sick.’

The doctor was a strapping, big-boned man with a pale, thin face. The coal-black suit he wore made him look like a marabout. He fastened the straps of his briefcase as he stared at me.

‘I don’t know what’s wrong with him,’ he confessed. ‘He has no fever, he’s not sweating and he doesn’t seem to be cold.’

My uncle, who was standing next to Germaine at the foot of my bed, said nothing. He had followed the examination carefully, glancing worriedly at the doctor from time to time. The doctor had looked in my mouth, shone a small torch in my eyes, run his fingers over my ears, listened to my breathing. As he straightened up, he looked circumspect.

‘I’ll give him something for the nausea,’ he said. ‘You need to keep him in bed for the rest of the day. These things usually settle down by themselves – it’s probably something he ate. If he’s not better by tomorrow, give me a call.’

After the doctor left, Germaine stayed with me. She was worried.

‘Did you eat something while you were out?’

‘No.’

‘Have you got a pain in your stomach?’

‘No.’

‘What’s the matter, then?’

I didn’t know what the matter was. I felt as though I was falling apart. Whenever I lifted my head I felt dizzy, my insides felt twisted and tangled, my soul felt numb . . .

When I woke up, it was dark and there was no sound from the street outside. My room was lit by the glow of the full moon and a gentle breeze tugged at the trees. I knew it had to be late, since usually the neighbours did not go to bed until they’d counted every star. I had a bitter taste in my mouth, and my throat was burning. I pushed off the blankets and got up. My legs were shaking. I went over to the window and stood, my nose pressed to the glass, watching every shadow, hoping that in each of them I might see my father.

Germaine found me standing there, freezing cold, the window misted with my breath. She put me back to bed and whispered to me, but I could not understand what she was saying. Her face would melt to become my mother’s face and then my father’s, then my stomach would clench and I would feel sick.

I don’t know how many days I spent in this state, but when at last I was well enough to go back to school, Lucette told me I had changed. She said I was not the same person. Something inside me had broken.

Bliss the broker came to see my uncle at the pharmacy. I realised who it was as soon as I heard him clear his throat. I was in the back office doing my homework when he arrived. I peered through a gap in the curtain that separated the office from the shop. Bliss was soaked to the skin, wearing a second-hand burnous that was much too big for him, a mud-spattered baggy sarouel and rubber sandals that tracked dirt all over the floor.

My uncle looked up from his ledger, clearly none too pleased to see the broker. Bliss rarely ventured into the European part of town. From the look on the man’s face, my uncle could tell that whatever had brought him here was not good news.

‘Yes . . . ?’

Bliss pushed his fez back off his face and scratched his head furiously, obviously embarrassed.

‘It’s about your brother, Doctor,’ he said.

My uncle slammed the cash register shut. Realising I had been watching, he came out from behind the counter, took Bliss by the elbow and led him to a corner of the shop. I climbed down off my stool and crept to the curtain to listen.

‘What about my brother?’

‘He’s disappeared.’

‘What? What do you mean, he’s disappeared?’

‘He hasn’t been home . . .’

‘Since when?’

‘It’s been three weeks now.’

‘Three weeks? And you’re only coming to tell me this now?’

‘It’s his wife’s fault. You know what women are like when their husbands run off. They’d let their house catch fire rather than ask for help. I only found out this morning when Batoul the clairvoyant said that your brother’s wife came to her last night and asked her to read her palm and tell her where her husband was. That was the first Batoul knew that the woman hadn’t seen her husband for three weeks.’

‘My God!’

I dashed back to my desk.

My uncle pulled back the curtain and found me poring over my poetry book.

‘Go get Germaine and tell her to look after the shop. I have some urgent business I need to deal with.’

I picked up my book and left the shop. As I passed, I tried to see what Bliss was thinking, but he turned away. I tore through the streets like a child possessed.

Germaine couldn’t sit still. As soon as she’d served each customer, she would come into the back office to check on me, worried by how calm I seemed. From time to time, unable to stop herself, she would tiptoe up behind me and lean over my shoulder as I learned my recitation pieces by heart. She stroked my hair, then let her hand slide down to my forehead to take my temperature.

‘Are you sure you feel all right?’

I said nothing.

That last look on my father’s face as he stood, reeling from drink and shame, gnawed at my insides again like a tapeworm.

Night had fallen hours ago and still my uncle was not back. Outside, in the driving rain, a horse had collapsed in the street, upending the cart it had been pulling and spilling a load of coal across the road. The driver, cursing his horse and the weather, tried in vain to get the animal to its feet.

Germaine and I watched from the window as the horse lay in the street, its neck twisted, its mane rising and falling on the rising river of rainwater.

The carter went to fetch help, and found a group of men prepared to brave the storm. One of them crouched next to the horse.

‘The old nag is dead,’ he said in Arabic.

‘He can’t be, he just slipped.’

‘I’m telling you, he’s stone dead.’

The carter refused to believe the man and crouched down next to the animal, though he did not dare touch it.

‘I can’t believe it, he was fine earlier.’

‘Animals can’t tell you when they’re sick,’ said the first man. ‘You’ve probably been driving the horse too hard.’

Germaine took the crank handle to lower the security grille, handed me her umbrella, turned out the lights then urged me outside. She put the padlock on the shutter, took the umbrella from me and hugged me close to her as we dashed home.

My uncle did not arrive back until late that night. He was dripping wet. Germaine took his coat and his shoes in the hall.

‘Why isn’t he in bed?’ he said, jerking his chin at me.

Germaine shrugged as she climbed the stairs to the first floor. My uncle looked at me carefully, his wet hair glistening in the light but his expression solemn.

‘You should be in bed, you’ve got school tomorrow.’

Germaine reappeared with a dressing gown. My uncle put it on, slipped his feet into his slippers and came over to me.

‘Go on, son, go up to your room . . . for me.’

‘He knows about his father,’ Germaine said.

‘He knew before you did, but that’s no reason.’

‘He won’t get a wink of sleep until you tell him what you found out. This is about his father.’

Germaine’s remark irritated my uncle and he glared at her, but she did not turn away. She knew I was worried and felt that it was unfair to keep the truth from me.

My uncle put his hands on my shoulders.

‘We looked everywhere,’ he said. ‘We checked all the places he usually goes, but no one has seen him for a long time. Your mother doesn’t know where he is, she can’t understand why he would leave . . . We’ll keep looking for him. I’ve told Bliss to find three men I can trust to scour the city for him.’

‘I know where he is,’ I said. ‘He’s gone to make his fortune. He’ll come back in a shiny new car.’

My uncle glanced anxiously at Germaine, clearly afraid I was delirious, but she shook her head.

Up in my bedroom, I stared at the white expanse of ceiling, imagining it was a cinema screen, and pictured my father somewhere making his fortune, like in the movies Lucette’s father sometimes took us to see on Sunday afternoons. Germaine came up more than once to check on me and I pretended to be asleep. She came over to the bed, felt my forehead, adjusted my pillows, pulled the blankets up, then tiptoed out. The moment I heard the door shut, I threw off the covers and went back to staring at the ceiling. Spellbound as a little boy, I watched my father’s adventures.

The men my uncle sent out to find my father came back empty-handed. They checked the police stations, the hospitals, the brothels; they checked the rubbish tips and the souks; they questioned gravediggers and gangsters, drunks and horse traders. There was no word of my father.

Several weeks after his disappearance, I went to Jenane Jato without telling anyone. I knew my way around the city by now, and I wanted to go and see my sister without having to ask Germaine’s permission, without having my uncle take me there. When she saw me, my mother was angry. What I had done was stupid, she said, making me promise never to do it again. Jenane Jato was crawling with criminals. It was no place for a well-dressed boy; I might end up in a dark alley with my throat cut. I said I’d come to see if my father had come home. My mother told me I didn’t need to worry about my father any more, that Batoul had told her he was fine and well on his way to making a fortune. ‘When he comes back, he’ll stop off and pick you up from your uncle’s house and then come and collect your sister and me, and we’ll all drive off to a big house with gardens and fruit trees.’

Then she sent Badra’s eldest son to fetch Bliss so that he could walk me back to my uncle’s house.

This brusque dismissal by my mother troubled me for a long time. I felt as though I were to blame for all the misfortunes on earth.

7

FOR A whole month, I couldn’t fall asleep until I had watched my father’s adventures play out on the bedroom ceiling. I lay on my back, propped up on my pillows, and watched as a disjointed movie unfolded above my head. I imagined my father as a sultan surrounded by courtesans, as an outlaw plundering far-off lands, as a prospector discovering the biggest gold nugget of the century or a gangster in a three-piece suit, a cigar in the corner of his mouth.

Some nights, seized by a nameless fear, I imagined him drunk and unkempt, wandering through some squalid neighbourhood pursued by a pack of street urchins. When the fear took hold of me, it was as though my wrists were trapped in a vice, a vice exactly like the one that had almost forced my coins into my flesh the night I tried to make my father proud of me by giving him the money I had made selling goldfinches.

My father’s desertion stuck in my throat; I could neither swallow it nor spit it out. I felt I was to blame. My father would never have abandoned my mother and my sister if he hadn’t run into me that night. He would have gone home, slept it off and none of the neighbours would have suspected a thing. My father was a man of principles. He used to tell me that if a man should lose his money, his land, his friends, his fortune, even his bearings, there was always a possibility, however small, for him to get back on his feet again, but that if a man lost face, then all the rest was futile.

My father had lost face. Because I had seen him that night, seen him at his lowest ebb. This was what he could not bear. He had been determined to prove to me that he would not allow misfortune to break him. But the look I had seen on his face as he struggled to stand outside the bar in Choupot told me something different. There is a despair from which there is no way back; that was what I had seen in my father’s face.

I blamed myself for taking that particular street, for passing at precisely the moment when the barman tossed my father into the gutter and my world with him; I blamed myself for leaving Lucette so quickly, for spending too much time staring in shop windows . . .

At night, in the darkness, I brooded on my sadness, searching for something that might absolve me. I was so miserable that one night I went into the box room to look for the statue of the winged boy that had terrified me on my first night in my uncle’s house. I found it at the bottom of a musty crate full of bric-a-brac, dusted it off and set it on the mantelpiece opposite my bed. I stared at it intently, convinced that I would see its wings flap, its head turn towards me . . . Nothing. The winged boy stood on its pedestal, mute, unknowable, and just before dawn I put it back in its crate.

* * *

‘God is cruel!’

‘It has nothing to do with God, son,’ my uncle said. ‘Your father decided to leave, that’s all there is to it. The Devil didn’t push him nor the Angel Gabriel lead him by the hand. Your father did everything he could, but after a while, he couldn’t take it any more. It’s as simple as that. Life is ups and downs – there is no middle ground. The important thing to remember is that you don’t have to go through it alone. Misfortune is like lightning, it doesn’t decide when or where to strike; it doesn’t realise, doesn’t suspect what tragedy it brings. If you want to cry, then cry; if you want to hope, then hope, pray, but there is no sense looking for something or someone to blame.’

And so I cried and I prayed, and as the months passed, the ceiling above my bed slowly went back to being just a ceiling. Taking Lucette by the hand, I went back to school. There were hundreds of other children like me, children who had done nothing wrong and who, like me, had suffered some tragedy and were patiently serving out their time, coping as best they could. If they did not ask questions it was because they knew they would not like the answers.

Mysterious guests continued to show up at my uncle’s house in the dead of night. They would arrive one by one and sit for hours with my uncle in the living room, smoking like chimneys – the whole house reeked of cigarette smoke. Their meetings always followed the same course: at first their discussion was calm and full of thoughtful silences, then it would become loud and impassioned, threatening to wake the neighbours. My uncle would take advantage of his position as master of the house to pour oil on troubled waters. If they could not agree, they would go out to the garden for some air and I would watch the tips of their cigarettes glowing in the darkness. When the meeting was over, they would tiptoe out, one by one, carefully checking to make sure no one was watching, then disappear into the night.

The morning after these meetings, I would invariably find my uncle in his study, jotting notes in a large hardback notebook.

One night, my uncle asked me to come and join his guests in the living room. He proudly introduced me to them. I recognised some of the faces. The meeting that night was different, less strained, almost solemn. Only one man spoke, the others hanging on his words. He was a man of great charisma, and clearly an honoured guest; my uncle was obviously in awe of him. Only much later did I put a name to his face: it was Messali Hadj, the guiding light of the movement for Algerian independence.

In Europe, war exploded like a blister.

Poland fell to the Nazi jackboots with terrifying ease. Where everyone had predicted fierce resistance there were only a few pitiful skirmishes, quickly crushed by the advancing Panzer divisions. The stunning success of the Nazi forces provoked terror and fascination. People began to turn their attention northward and watch as events on the far side of the Mediterranean played out. The news was not good; the spectre of an all-consuming conflagration haunted them. On café terraces men sat poring over their fears in the newspapers. People stopped each other in the street, they argued, they gathered in bars or in parks and talked in hushed whispers about how Europe was on the road to ruin. At school, our teachers no longer paid us any attention. They would arrive every morning with more news, more questions, and leave every evening with the same fears, the same anxieties. The headmaster had gone so far as to install a wireless in his office, where he spent most of the day listening to the news, indifferent to the thugs and bullies who now ran amok in the playground.

Germaine no longer took me out on Sundays after mass, instead she disappeared, shutting herself away in her room, kneeling in front of the cross, intoning interminable litanies. She had no family in Europe, but still she prayed that reason would triumph over madness.

Since my uncle also began to disappear more and more often, going out with a briefcase full of tracts and pamphlets under his coat, I relied more and more on Lucette for company. We would lose ourselves in our games until we heard a voice telling us it was time for dinner or time to go to bed.

Lucette’s father, Jérôme, was an engineer in a factory close to where we lived. At home, he spent much of his time with his nose in an engineering book or lying on the sofa listening to Schubert on the gramophone, and so no longer bothered to check to see what we were up to. Jérôme was tall and thin, his face half hidden behind thick round glasses, and he seemed to live in his own little world, careful to keep his distance from everyone and everything, including this war that seemed about to consume the whole planet. Summer and winter he wore the same khaki shirt with its breast pocket stuffed full of pens. He only ever spoke if we asked him a question, and even then he answered as though we were interrupting him. His wife had left him some years after Lucette was born and he had never quite got over it. Though he could not refuse Lucette anything, I never saw him hug her. At the cinema, where he always took us to see silent serials, I would have sworn that as soon as the lights went out, he disappeared. At times he frightened me, especially when he casually told my uncle he was an atheist. I had not realised before that moment that atheists existed. I was surrounded by believers: my uncle was Muslim, Germaine was Catholic, all our other neighbours were Jewish or Christian. At school and in the street, everyone talked about God, believed in God – I was shocked to discover Jérôme getting by without Him. Once, I overheard him tell an evangelist who called to his house: ‘Every man is his own god. In choosing to follow another god he denies himself and in doing so becomes blind and unjust.’ The evangelist looked at Jérôme as though he were the Devil incarnate.

On the Feast of the Ascension, Jérôme took Lucette and me to the top of Djebel Murdjadjo to see the city. We visited the medieval fortress on the mountaintop before joining the crowds of pilgrims flocking to the basilica of Our Lady of Santa Cruz. There were hundreds of them: women, old men and children, all milling around the base of the statue of the Virgin Mary. Some had come up the mountain barefoot, clutching at the broom and the bushes for support; others had climbed up on their knees, which were now scratched and bleeding. The pilgrims stood under the blazing sun as though in a trance, their eyes rolled back in their heads, their faces pale, imploring their guardian angels, beseeching the Almighty himself to spare their miserable lives. They were Spaniards, Lucette explained, and they made the pilgrimage every year to give thanks to the Virgin Mary for sparing Oran from the cholera epidemic of 1849 that had wiped out thousands of families.

‘But look at them,’ I said, shocked by the extent of their self-inflicted injuries.

‘They do it for God,’ Lucette said fervently. ‘God never asked them to do this,’ Jérôme interrupted, and his voice, like a whip crack, put paid to my curiosity. I no longer saw these people as pilgrims, but as cursed souls. If truth be told, Hell never seemed closer than it did to me on holy days. All my life I had been warned of the evils of blasphemy. Nor did you to have to utter a blasphemy to be damned; simply to overhear it was a sin. Lucette sensed that I was upset. I could see that she was angry with her father, but I couldn’t bring myself to respond to her embarrassed smile. I wanted to go home.

We took the bus back to the city, but the twisting cliff roads to Vieil Oran simply made me feel worse. At every bend in the road I thought I might be sick. Whereas usually when we were in the old town, Lucette and I liked to wander around La Scalera, eat paella or a caldero in a cheap Spanish café or buy trinkets from the Sephardic craftsmen in the old Jewish quarter, that day my heart wasn’t in it. What Jérôme had said had cast a pall over the day. I feared his blasphemy would bring about some catastrophe.

We took the tram back to the European sector of the city and then walked home. The weather was magnificent, and yet the sunlit streets felt strange and dreamlike. Lucette squeezed my hand, but I could not seem to wake up.

And then the catastrophe I had feared hit me like a thunderbolt. Our street was teeming with crowds of people; all the neighbours had come out and were standing around, arms folded across their chests. Jérôme gave a puzzled look to a man in shorts standing at his gate, who had clearly been watering his garden. The man turned off the hose and set it down, wiped his hands on his shirt, then spread them wide to indicate his bafflement.

‘There must be some mistake. The police have arrested Monsieur Mahi, the chemist. They’ve just taken him away in a police van. The cops didn’t look too happy.’

My uncle spent a week in custody. When he was finally released, he waited until dark before he dared to come back to the house. His face was gaunt, his eyes lifeless, the few short days he had spent in jail had changed him completely. He was barely recognisable. An unkempt beard emphasised his pallor, making him look like a ghost. He looked as though he had not eaten or slept in prison.

Germaine’s relief at her husband’s return was short-lived when she realised that he had not been returned to her whole. My uncle seemed to be in a constant daze. He found it difficult to understand what was said to him; he jumped if Germaine asked whether she could get him; anything. At night I heard him pacing up and down, mumbling and cursing. Sometimes, when I looked up from the garden, I would see him standing at the window, framed behind the curtains, constantly scanning the street as though expecting the Devil himself to arrive.

Forced to take over the running of the business, Germaine now had little time to spend on me. She was terrified – her husband was having a breakdown and refused to see a doctor. Sometimes she would stand, sobbing, in the middle of the living room.

Jérôme took over responsibility for taking me to school. Every morning, smiling and cheery, her hair in ribbons, Lucette would call for me. She would take my hand and we would run to catch up with her father at the end of the street.

I assumed that after a few weeks my uncle would be back to his old self. Instead, he got worse. He began to lock himself away in his study and would refuse to open the door when we knocked. It was as though there was an evil spirit in the house. Germaine was frantic. I was mystified. Why had my uncle been arrested? What had happened at the police station? Why would he not talk about what had happened in custody, even to Germaine? The secrets a house is desperate to conceal will, sooner or later, be shouted from the rooftops. A cultured, well-read man, aware of the upheavals in the Arab world, my uncle had been a supporter on an intellectual level of the nationalist cause spreading through educated Muslim circles. He had learned the speeches of Shakaib Arslan by heart, cut militant articles out of the newspapers that he catalogued, annotated and wrote dissertations on. Obsessed with the theoretical aspects of political upheaval, he had not realised the risks of his actions. All that he knew about political activism were his flights of rhetoric, the secret contributions he made to fund workshops, the clandestine night-time meetings at our house. Though committed to the cause of Algerian nationalism, he was drawn to the principle rather than to the radical activism espoused by members of the Parti du Peuple Algérien. It would never have occurred to him that he would ever set foot inside a police station, let alone spend the night in a stinking cell with rats and thugs for company. My uncle was a pacifist, a hypothetical democrat, an intellectual who put his faith in words, in demonstrations, in slogans, with a visceral hatred of violence. He was a law-abiding citizen, keenly aware of the social standing conferred on him by his university education and his profession as a chemist. He could never have imagined that the police would come for him one night while he was sitting in his armchair, feet up on an ottoman, reading El Ouma, the party newsletter.

The gossips said that before the police even put him in the van my uncle was a broken man, that he had confessed everything he knew as soon as he was questioned. They said that it was only because he had been so co operative that the police released him without charge – an allegation he would deny to his dying day. Unable to bear the gossip and the slander, he suffered several breakdowns.

When he recovered some measure of sanity, he told Germaine what he had planned: there could be no question of us going on living in Oran. We had to move.

‘The police are trying to turn me against my own people,’ he confided wearily. ‘Can you imagine? How could they think that they could ever get me to do that? Do I look like a traitor, Germaine? For the love of heaven, how could I possibly inform on my friends, my colleagues . . . ?’

From now on, he told her, he would be under constant surveillance, something which in itself would put his friends in danger.

‘Do you at least have somewhere in mind?’ Germaine asked, clearly devastated at the idea of having to leave her home town.

‘We’ll move to Río Salado.’

‘Why Río Salado?’

‘It’s a quiet little town. I went there the other day to look into the possibility of opening a pharmacy. I found a place – the ground floor of a large house . . .’

‘You want us to sell everything here in Oran: the shop, the house, everything?’

‘We have no choice.’

‘But if we do, then we can never come back, where we dreamed—’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘What if things don’t work out in Río Salado?’

‘Then we’ll move to Tlemcen, or to Sidi Bel Abbès, or out into the Sahara. God’s earth is vast, Germaine, or have you forgotten?’

Somewhere it was written that I was born to leave my home, to constantly leave, each time leaving a part of me behind.

Lucette stood in the doorway of her house, hands behind her back, leaning against the wall. She refused to believe me when I told her we were moving away. Now, seeing the truck arrive, she was upset with me. I couldn’t bring myself to cross the street and tell her that I was upset too. I simply stood and watched the movers load our furniture and our trunks into the truck. It was as though they were taking my whole world to pieces.

Germaine helped me up into the cab. The truck roared. I leaned out to look back at Lucette, hoping she might wave; she kept her hands behind her back. It was as though she didn’t believe I was really leaving, or perhaps she simply refused to accept it.

As the truck pulled away, the driver blocked my view of Lucette, so I craned my neck in the hope of taking with me the glimmer of a smile, some sign that she realised that this was not my fault, that I was as devastated as she was. But nothing . . . The street flashed by in a roar of metal and then disappeared.

Goodbye, Lucette.

For a long time I thought it had been her eyes that filled my soul with a gentle peace. Now I know that it was not simply her eyes, it was the way she looked at me – the gentle, caring, maternal expression of a girl not yet a woman . . .

Río Salado was only sixty kilometres west of Oran, but this journey was the longest I have ever known. The truck coughed and spluttered like a camel on its last legs, the engine stalling every time the driver changed gears. He wore trousers spattered with oil and grease, and his shirt had seen better days. He was a short, stocky man with broad shoulders and a face like a veteran boxer. He drove in silence, his hairy hands like tarantulas gripping the steering wheel. Her face pressed to the window, Germaine said nothing, but stared out at the orange groves that lined the road. Her hands were clasped, half hidden in her lap; I realised that she was praying.

We had to slow to a crawl as we drove through the village of Misserghin. It was market day and the road was lined with carts and stalls; housewives bustled about, and here and there were Bedouins – recognisable from their turbans – offering their services as porters. A policeman strutted around the town square, twirling his truncheon lazily. His kepi pulled down over his eyes, he greeted the women respectfully as he passed, turning back afterwards to catch a glimpse of their behinds.

‘My names is Costa.’ The driver spoke suddenly. ‘Coco to my friends.’

He shot Germaine a glance and, seeing her smile politely, went on:

‘I’m Greek.’

He shifted in his seat.

‘I own a half-share in this truck. I might not look like a rich man, but it’s true. Soon I’ll be my own boss and I will never have to leave my office. The men in the back, they are Italian. They can unload a steamship in half a day. They have been hauliers since they were in their mother’s womb.’

His big eyes, set in rolls of fat, twinkled now.

‘You know, madame, you look just like my cousin Mélina. When we arrived this morning, I thought I was seeing things. It’s incredible how much you look like her. You have the same hair, the same eyes, you are the same height. I don’t suppose you’re Greek, madame?

‘No, monsieur.’

‘Where are you from?’

‘From Oran. Fourth generation.’

‘Really? Perhaps one of your ancestors crossed swords with the patron saint of Arabs. Me, I have only been in Algeria fifteen years. I was a sailor, we put into port here, and it was here I met Berthe in a funduq. The moment I set eyes on her, I thought, this is where I will stay. I married Berthe and we settled in La Scalera. Oran is a beautiful city.’

‘It is,’ Germaine said sadly. ‘A very beautiful city.’

The driver swerved to avoid two donkeys standing in the middle of the road. The furniture in the back of the truck groaned and the Italian movers swore loudly in their own language.

The driver straightened up the truck and accelerated hard enough to blow a gasket.

‘Cut your chatter and keep your eyes on the road, Coco,’ one of the Italians yelled.

The driver nodded and fell silent.

A lush landscape flashed past, orange groves and vineyards jostling for space across the plains and the hills. Here and there, on rocky outcrops overlooking the scrubland, were beautiful farmhouses, ringed by majestic trees and lavish gardens, the driveways leading to them lined with olive trees and willowy palms. Every now and then we would see a colonial farmer walking his fields, or on horseback, galloping flat out towards some unseen joy. Then, without warning, like a pockmark in this fairytale landscape, we would see some squalid shack, crushed by the weight of poverty and the evil eye. Some of these shacks, out of a sense of decency, were hidden behind screens of tall cacti – all we could see was the ramshackle roof, which looked about to collapse on the people below; others clung to the rocky hillsides, their doorways ugly as a toothless smile, their cob walls pale and pitted as a death mask.

The driver turned to Germaine again and said:

‘It’s incredible how much you look like my cousin Mélina.’