‘You see what will happen if you don’t keep a careful eye on the company your baby keeps?’ I said, twisting Chérifa’s arm.
‘Ow! Why would you wish something like that on us?’
‘What about you? You abandoned your parents, just like that idiot Sofiane, like all those morons who disappear, who run away instead of… of…’
Damn it! Suddenly I’m blubbing like a baby.
‘Instead of what?’ asked Chérifa, overcome.
‘Instead of dying here, at home, with their families!’
‘Why do you always refer to him as “that idiot Sofiane”?’
‘Because to die far from your grave is pathetic, you stupid girl!’
The cold closed around me like the grave around a dead man. There is nothing to be said, nothing to be done, nothing to hope for. Evil goes about its business. In a hundred years, a thousand years, ten thousand years, when we are all dead and forgotten, life will reassert itself. Inexorably. Women and children will have their part. Right now, there are too many sermonisers, as many more Defenders of Truth, and so many cowards we haven’t room enough to put them. Why do they have beards and warts on their heads when their heads serve no purpose? The question haunts me.
Chérifa and I huddled in a corner and wept buckets.
And then she told me everything. She was four years old when her mother died. She has no memory of her mother and doesn’t know what she died of. I know how she feels, we get a lot of women at the Hôpital Parnet so damaged that it’s pointless to try and work out what they are suffering from, we make a wild guess and we get it wrong. We write Generalised Infirmity and close the file. Chérifa’s eight brothers, all older than her, worked in nearby farms and mills which meant she never saw more than three or four of them at a time. The road was their home. Then, one morning, the father married a she-devil sent back from hell who bore him a litter of sons and daughters. ‘How many of each?’ ‘A bunch, I don’t know, their mother spent all day coddling them and Papa left her to it.’ He was obviously scared of her. When the Islamists showed up and started cutting the throats of local girls, the she-devil fawned on them, made couscous for them, tattled to them about the sins of others hoping to deflect their wrath from her own house. Chérifa posed a problem — being wayward, independent, a moaner, a truant and devilishly pretty, she was an irresistible delicacy for the bearded fundamentalists. One morning, she packed a bag and got the hell out. It is a story that is played out a hundred times, a thousand times all over the country and before long over the world. The green plague of Islamofascism knows no borders. One day, girls will be burned in towns across California, I can just see it, and it won’t be the work of the Ku Klux Klan.
‘… my stepmother hated me, I swear, it’s like I was trying to replace her! I loathe her, she’s ugly, she’s evil, she’s a thief. She called me the devil’s daughter, she’d claim she’d seen me when I hadn’t even done anything.’
‘Seen you where… doing what?’
‘With boys!’
‘I suspected as much.’
‘Papa is a coward, whenever he got me on my own, he’d plead with me, beg me to hide myself behind the hijab to avoid the wrath of his bloodsucking wife and the cut-throat religious bastards. So I packed a bag and left. It serves them right!’
‘Now listen to me, around here I don’t want you saying you’re not religious. I swear, you’re soft in the head. This is Islam we’re talking about, they’ll burn you alive and me with you!’
‘I don’t care.’
‘Oh, but you do care! You’ve got a baby on the way, and I don’t fancy being burned at the stake.’
‘Then I’ll go away and you won’t have to worry.’
‘Go where? These people are out there, it’s like The X Files. And don’t say you’ll go to Europe, because let me tell you they’ve got their feet under the table there too, and things are getting to be pretty tough for girls!’
‘Then I’ll go somewhere else.’
‘You little fool. It’s the same everywhere.’
‘I’ll… um…’
‘You see? You can learn when you make an effort.’
‘Um…’
‘But you’re right — why should we give a damn about religion? Why should we go around weeping and wailing? If Allah doesn’t love us, too bad! We’ll go with Satan. Come on, let’s go into town, we’ll show them, we’ll have a ball, we’ll eat ice cream, we’ll have a laugh, we’ll walk in the sunshine, we’ll squander my money on fripperies and while we’re at it, we’ll buy some shameless clothes! And if they burn us, so what? We’ll shoot straight to hell like dazzling fireworks!’
Dear God, the tailspin! When your heart is in it, it’s hard not to love Algiers. It was a revelation, the city opened wide its slick arms to welcome us. The shops, the bazaars, the salons de thé, we were all smiles as we strolled along the boulevards and stopped off in the parks. Chérifa swayed her belly and her hips as to the manner born while I — not having the figure of a skinny nymphet — was humble and unassuming. Hard on our heels, moving to the same rhythm, the freaks and fanatics followed behind, waiting for any excuse to pounce. Just before the trouble broke out, I turned into a scandalous woman and suddenly they scuttled into the alleyways like cockroaches. More cowards working towards their shame. To our delight, we did not see it coming. We did not even realise night had drawn in until we saw people heading home, heads bowed, walking quickly. Decent folk ran for cover. It was a stampede. Let them run, the cowards! The curfew in Algiers was lifted donkey’s years ago, someday the siege will be over, the torture centres will disappear; these days the TV broadcasts nothing but popular music and idle chatter, the newspapers are full of tittle-tattle, the President spends his time taking pleasure cruises, life is perfect, but the old reflexes remain, the people of Algiers still live in fear. Lies terrify them as much as truth. Cars raced along suddenly deserted streets. Silence and the stench of death descended upon Algiers, rolling out towards the city ramparts.