Next!
Daoud the Sephardi, whom I bumped into in a secret hiding place, listened to me at length, his face lined with grave concern, then, out of the blue, he suggests an amazing business deaclass="underline" sell the house for ten times what it’s worth and buy it back a week later for next to nothing. I’m on board.
‘Interest. Quick, tell me how to go about swindling the sucker, I could do with some money!’
‘…………………….!…?’
‘Well, how do you like that!’
‘………’
‘It gets better and better.’
‘……!’
‘Let me see if I’ve got this straight: I spread a rumour that King Solomon’s treasure is hidden in the house, then, after I sell it, you haunt the new owner, terrify him so much he comes back and begs me to take it off his hands for peanuts?’
‘…………!’
‘Yes, yes, a lot of gold. And diamonds, too, we could say it was loot belonging to Mustafa’s cousin Barbarossa.’
‘…’
Carpatus, who was standing by the wall listening, understood the colonel’s pain. It was no accident that the real-estate market was bullish on the day he first set foot in Algiers. This was going to be a bumpy night. Let’s say no more about him.
In what once was the doctor’s surgery, I ran into the ghost of Doctor Montaldo busy treating an invisible patient. Still working his fingers to the bone, the good doctor, clearly his vocation did not end with death. Hardly had he spotted me than he said:
‘You’re clearly not a well woman! Just look at the bags under your eyes.’
These were the magic words, immediately I felt weak, exhausted, shattered. I tried to downplay things.
‘No, I’m fine… Just a little low…’
‘…?’
‘Sleep? Well I manage to get some sleep but…’
‘…?’
‘Actually, my tongue is a little furred.’
‘…?’
‘I brood, I blame myself… Chérifa…’
‘…’
‘I don’t think I could stomach any more herbal tea.’
‘…’
‘And where exactly am I supposed to find fresh air?’
‘…’
‘Really? That far?’
‘…’
‘Thank you, doctor. How much do I owe you?’
‘…’
‘That doesn’t matter, treatment is treatment even if it’s virtual.’
What can you expect of the dead? Vague advice, antiquated observations, a new hash of old broken dreams, pointless suggestions, out-of-date medications. I can’t help but be sceptical of such spirits.
I’m very fond of my ghosts, but only when everything’s fine. Right now, I find them tiresome. And upsetting. Not one of them asked about Chérifa, or barely. She is a stranger to this house, she has no roots within these walls, they cannot feel her presence and so on and so forth. Forty-two days she spent here, that’s two days more than the official period of mourning. One of these days I’ll call in the undertakers and good riddance to them all — bone idle, the lot of them. And chauvinist to boot! Where are their wives, their children, their sisters, their mistresses, the maids? Don’t they have the right to come back and haunt me too?
I rushed to Papa, to Maman, to Yacine. I opened up to them. Were they sympathetic? No, they blamed me for letting Sofiane leave and for taking in some girl off the streets. Papa doesn’t like the way I look at things, he’s a true Kabyle, meaning he’s obtuse. All Maman ever does is sigh, Papa speaks for both of them. And Yacine doesn’t give a damn, just like when he was alive. I reminded them how Maman used to take in stray cats, and always the ones with mange or consumption, how Papa was constantly searching for the comrades he’d lost during the war and afterwards, poring tearfully over the newspaper, how Yacine’s only love was a clapped-out old banger… It was a waste of breath, a streetwalker is a streetwalker.
I am alone; truly, horribly alone.
Dear God, what has become of Chérifa’s father? I suppose his witch of a wife has finally got him under her thumb, or turned him into a filthy Islamist. He probably doesn’t think any more. Poor man, he has lost his daughter, lost his dignity.
What was it that I said, what terrible name did I call her? I’m sorry, Chérifa… I love you… where are you?
I kept wondering whether our lives truly belong to us or whether they belong to others, to those who gave us life and those who have taken it from us. I don’t know, but I have a sort of answer: when we alone are truly masters of our lives, then we are truly alone. Or we are dead.
Three months passed like this in a kind of madness. I didn’t see it coming. Because I’m level-headed, or at least I was, I took on the world, I emancipated myself. It was as I thought I was exalted by suffering that I sank into delirium. Is solitude playing tricks on me? Perhaps nothing is happening but for the days passing and me muttering to the empty air.
You quickly fall apart when you lose the thread of time. Living is such a dangerous occupation.
Let not sorrow distract you.
Let not emptiness dazzle you.
It is always by some oversight
That we lose life.
To think that I wrote those lines!
I’m not a believer but I can’t help wondering what God is waiting for before coming to my aid.
The day was not like any other
The ground gaped
Or the sky blazed
The world turned upside down
The Hominids fled to improbable shelters
Followed by animals consumed by the flames.
And someone said:
‘God, what is all this?’
Thirty million years later,
We echo that mysterious cry
Each time the sky falls on us
Each time the ground gapes beneath our feet.
The only piece of news: God finally exists.
He has colonised the earth
The heavens have long since been his demesne.
And every day, he rips open our houses
Or has roofs collapse on our heads
For the pleasure of watching us beseech
As we flee for the shelters
And so, God: I BESEECH THEE!
Serendipity has now arrived, come to twist the knife in the wound. It appeared via Arte, a humanitarian television channel if ever there was one. Ever since Chérifa’s disappearance, I’d forgotten about my faithful friend the television which had become shrouded in dust, but on that particular evening our friendship was accidentally rekindled. A gust of wind and the television suddenly came on by itself, or as though it had something to tell me. From the very first image, I could see that the programme was about us, the landless, the harragas, the path-burners. As part of a series about Great World Suffering, Arte took us from an African village somewhere in the deserts of the Ténéré, across the sweeping plains of the Sahel all the way to Tamanrasset where the camera allowed itself a brief pause to flick through the criminal record of the Algerian government, a crucial link in the people-smuggling networks of Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa; from Tamanrasset, it zigzagged through the no-man’s-land of Algeria and Morocco, travelling by night, far from paved roads, heading steadily north-west until it arrived, scorched and weary, in Tarifa, Spain, a few kilometres from Gibraltar — which once was ‘Jabal Tāriq’ in another story — where the epilogue to this odyssey was played out. In Gibraltar we watched the policemen with their funny helmets fishing bodies out of the sea while, high up on the cliffs, a priest who supported the rights of the harragas, surrounded by tearful militants, prays with all his might to a God who refuses to listen to the poor. It is a magnificent scene. It reminded me of Roland Joffé’s film The Mission, with Robert De Niro as mercenary Rodrigo Mendoza who, after some terrible event, becomes a Jesuit. But rather than honouring God and conforming to the strict discipline of the order, Mendoza rebels and fights for the indigenous Guaraní doomed to annihilation because of some distant, nebulous issue between the Roman Catholic Church and the kings of Spain and Portugal. In the end, he is shot and killed and with him every last Guaraní tribesman while a sanctimonious new order is established all across South America. A harrowing tale filmed in majestic locations. And I thought of The Name of the Rose which depicts grim, boorish monks who go to insane lengths to orchestrate bizarre crimes in a monastery constructed like a pagan labyrinth. Do we really kill people simply because they have discovered that laughter exists? It’s appalling.