Then there’s 235, who shows up once a week with his bus. He comes to ask if there’s any news, with a bus full of pilgrims in tow, furious to find themselves in the back of beyond. He’s really sweet, but he tends to forget himself and his passengers end up hanging around in the midday sun while he’s sipping lemonade and telling me for the umpteenth time about his saintly mother. He’s a good boy.
My dear friends phone about once a year, always with the same cutting remark: ‘So, what are you up to these days?’ I always retort: ‘What about yourself?’ firmly believing ‘least said, soonest offended’. It’s always the women who don’t give a damn who come nosing around. ‘Hi, how are you?’ and they’re off badmouthing everyone in the neighbourhood. God, but the women in this country have got sharp tongues, I don’t know where they get it from. You could cut their throats and they’d still be gossiping.
Knock knock! Knock knock!
My heart was racing. I yanked the door open so fast I nearly dislocated my arm. It wasn’t Chérifa.
A young woman. Twenty-two, twenty-three maybe. Dark hair, a slightly ‘so what’ air, jeans that fit her like a glove, her chest sags a little, she needs to rethink her bra. Dark eyes, lots of eyeliner, eyebrows like circumflexes. She’s clearly a worrier, she overthinks before she speaks. Sniff sniff. She smells good. Like me, she has her perfume sent from Paris in the diplomatic bag.
‘If you’re looking for Lamia, you’ve found her. And you are?’
‘Um… Scheherazade.’
‘Please don’t tell me you’ve come from Oran or Tangiers on the advice of my idiot brother Sofiane because, I swear, I’ll kill myself.’
‘Um… I’m from Algiers.’
A beautiful voice, warm, a little husky. The name suits her to a T. She is the Orient that exists only in fairytales.
‘So?’
‘Um… I was looking for Chérifa…’
‘What? Chérifa? My Chérifa?’
‘Um… yes.’
‘Get in here right now and explain yourself.’
From the moment my little runaway from Oran showed up, I was destined to meet people. Missing Parts and 235 were at the top of the list. It was because of Chérifa that Bluebeard lost his sense of mystery; these days I just think of him as one more neighbour to distrust. Now here is the beautiful Scheherazade come to tell me extraordinary tales. I’m up to my eyes in myths and legends. Scheherazade is practically a colleague, she’s a fourth-year biology student. She hails from Constantine, a town that died with the Jewish exodus in 1962, all that remains is a pile of stones and a few old men who lean against the crumbling walls pretending to dream of the beauties of the Mesozoic era and to know all there is to know about the charms of Andalucía in their grandfathers’ day. An earthquake measuring 9 on the Richter scale could not have done a better job. The few remaining women wear black feathers, she tells me, people call them crows. While Scheherazade describes her curious hometown, in my mind I am flicking through Yasmina Khadra’s novel The Swallows of Kabul. Her grandfather works in the rag trade, he imports fabric from the Sentier district in Paris.
‘Would you credit it? And why not buy from Medina or from Islamabad, after all they are our brothers?’
‘They’re old boyhood friends.’
‘I understand.’
A wise man is a wise man, what can you say? Scheherazade lives in the halls of residence at Ben-Aknoun University, she has a tiny room on the top floor, building 12, stairwell B, which, over time, she has managed to make cosy. This is against regulations but the elderly janitor doesn’t know her or has forgotten her. She cooks, stays at home, listens to modern music and invites her girlfriends — some of whom even dare to smoke!
‘I know all about caretakers, my dear, I’ve hoodwinked my fair share in my time. The janitors at the Hôpital Parnet are ruthless, but they’ve never caught me out. I turn up on time, I leave on time, my white coat is clean and I always give them a cheery salaam alaykum.’
‘At university we have to bribe the porters, they insist on a tip at the end of the month…’
‘That’s new. In my day, it was more about the sensual. They’d beg us to show them our knickers. If you hiked your dress up to your thigh, they’d lick your hand, you could send them off to run errands, they would even lie on your behalf if need be. It sounds like they’ve aged. So, where is Chérifa?’
‘Well, that’s the thing — I’m looking for her.’
‘You mean she ran away?’
‘That’s the least of it…’
‘Tell me everything.’
‘…’
We talked. For hours. Everything I feared had happened and more besides. I blame myself: by imagining the worst, I brought it about. And that idiot Mourad played on my fears at every opportunity: ‘Women are all the same!’ he’d say every time I got discouraged and gave in to despair. In this beautiful city, there will never be a shortage of men willing to speak ill of women.
On the fateful day when she left here, Chérifa went into the town centre. This is where waifs and strays converge, the illegal immigrants, the unemployed, the tramps and all the little creatures that the economic reforms have forced to turn tricks for 300 dinars an hour on the byroads off the straight and narrow. Here in the heart of the city, abject poverty meets garish luxury beneath the all-seeing eye of God and his representatives. There’s nothing to be done about it, even Hercules would wear himself down trying to understand the topography. In fact the place reminds me of Rachid Boudjedra’s novel Ideal Topography for an Aggravated Assault, the story of a Kabyle who arrives in Paris from a rocky peak in the Djurdjura and goes round and round and round on the métro, astonished by everything he sees in this never-ending tunnel only to finally succeed in getting himself murdered. He never manages to see the sun shine in Paris or enjoy the peace of its streets. Which in turn reminds me of Camus’s L’Étranger, which has Meursault going round and round and round in the luminous meanders of Algiers until he finally meets an Arab by a sand dune, can’t understand him, and kills him stone dead. The same tragedy, the same unfathomable humanity.
A hundred metres uphill is the seat of government, though that’s not really what has people flocking here. A hundred metres downhill is the harbour, with its tubby boats and an army of freight agents afflicted by facial tics. A hundred metres to the left is the Commissariat of Police with its army of informants. A hundred metres to the right is the Kasbah with its inscrutable mysteries. In the shadow of La Grande Poste, in the middle of the square, is the one and only entrance to the famous Algiers métro which has been a boon and a nightmare for five successive presidents, twenty governments and two thousand utterly insignificant deputés. Ten times it has been inaugurated, and each time we believed this was the one. The entrance is a fantasia of pink marble and anodised bronze used to great effect. It is possible to go down into the station but the tunnel leads nowhere, it simply trails off into the muddy depths and the prehistoric magma. It sometimes seems as though from the bottomless ventilation shaft, you can hear people whispering in Chinese. As it waits for its trains and its satisfied commuters who, we are assured, will arrive within six months, the passageways serve as a shopping arcade for the local fauna. One person’s loss is another person’s gain. Here, luxury items are sold, dope, guns, forged identity papers, counterfeit money, merchandise which arrives via the port, the Commissariat, the Government Annexe, the Kasbah, the post office.