Chérifa imposed herself on Scheherazade, a seven-month swollen belly commands respect. But Chérifa did not change her ways. A few days later, she showed up with a clueless journalist who had a pen tucked behind his ear and a newspaper tucked under his arm. Scheherazade, who has a mouthful of peculiar expressions from her part of the country, dispatched him quickly: ‘A skinny little runt who wouldn’t need to catch a sheep to play knucklebones.’ The handover between policeman and journalist did not go well, there was a punch-up and the newshound found himself in hospital with cuts and contusions. The following day, the front-page story in his newspaper read: Our star reporter K.M. suffered a savage beating from police officers as a result of his hard-hitting investigation into the misconduct of Inspector H.B., who has been implicated in a major arms-dealing racket with the Islamist maquis. Scheherazade showed me a press clipping. What a story!
The authorities’ response came the following day via the pages of the government daily El Moudjahid (The Holy Warrior), from which Truth spills out over the country. Under the banner headline there is journalism and then there is journalism, it reads: It has been discovered that Monsieur K.M., a disgrace to a profession that has done so much for democracy, is involved in drug trafficking on a vast scale in collaboration with a certain sister country whose hatred for our homeland is matched only by its vicious oppression of the heroic Saharan people engaged in a legitimate struggle for independence recognised by the international community, and with certain groups in Algiers known for their pathological greed and their contempt for the extraordinarily progressive policy initiated by the President of the Republic. When challenged by the heroic Inspector H.B., the suspect attempted to corrupt the officer, offering him the services of a prostitute known to the police, a certain C.D., however the gallant officer, a man of irreproachable morals, flatly refused. Concerned by the seriousness of the facts alleged, and alarmed at the effects on law and order, the Public Prosecutor immediately issued a warrant for the arrest of Monsieur K.M. and ordered a search of the newspaper’s offices. The case continues.
What has Morocco got to do with any of this? And what, precisely, has the President’s policy achieved? God, how these people love things to be complicated!
The university campus witnessed a brief war of attrition between the press and the police, and then everything went back to normal, the journalist vanished without trace, the newspaper was shut down, the offices auctioned off and the editor got two years’ hard labour. While they were about it, the police interrogated and tortured a few other journalists as a precaution. The inspector was not forgotten in all this chaos: he received a promotion.
Chérifa, having brought disgrace on the university halls of residence, was formally requested to leave the premises. There was nothing else the girls could do, their exams were looming, their parents were panicking and visiting more often. This was no time for jokes.
Chérifa wandered the city for a while before hooking up with the pilot in a café next door to the offices of Air Algérie. Scheherazade caught a glimpse of him behind the wheel of his magnificent car when the runaway returned to campus to collect her belongings. Fortysomething and with a little paunch, the pilot looked quite dapper and seemed to be a cheerful character. Scheherazade thought she heard the shameless hussy refer to him as ‘Rachid’.
Their goodbyes were minimal, since the little madam is incapable of saying good morning or goodnight.
Since then, there had been no news. Had she taken the train? Had she gone back to Oran? Is she somewhere else and, if so, where?
Curtain. End of drama. Now, I could let myself weep.
Who would have believed that I, Lamia, a paediatrician, a strong-minded, intelligent woman, oblivious to everyday contingencies and immune to sentimentality, would be turning my life upside down for the sake of a little country girl who’s become a scarlet woman! I was filled with a curious feeling. Guilt? That’s certainly part of it, I smothered her and she ran away. Telling her she needed to be educated was another mistake, it made her feel a fool, cut off from the world. Anger, the resentment that comes from failure, from…? Not just that, rage, a desire to… It’s envy, pure mother-daughter envy! Yes, I suppose. Chérifa is happy to give her all to the first man who comes along, and yet I love her, I offered her my life, my home, and she refuses even to grace me with her presence. Not a single visit, not a phone call, not even a message. It’s stupid, it’s pathetic to get involved in such idiotic relationships.
What was it that I called her, what was the word I spat in her face when all she wanted was a smile, a glance, a hug?
I give up. I’ve already given her everything I had to give!
Louiza and Sofiane left me with deep scars, Chérifa ripped my heart out. It’s not fair. I’m done with it, I need to move on. I am not going to let this haunt me to my dying day.
‘So, tell me, my dear Scheherazade, do you really miss that lunatic so much that you’ve come all the way to Rampe Valée? Isn’t that a little like something out of a fairytale?’
‘We’re very fond of her… um… we…’
‘Go on.’
‘Well, um…’
‘I get it.’
We’re all in the same boat; like me, the girls at the university are filling an emptiness in their lives. Apart from their textbooks and their notebooks, they have nothing that makes them feel human. Their lives at the university felt hollow, formless, a prelude to their lives as women, a shadowgraph, a mere outline; they were hardworking, diligent, dutiful, submissive, slaves to timetables and rituals, and Chérifa, naive and happy-go-lucky, came along and challenged everything. In discovering our innermost dreams, we do not emerge unscathed. And, being women, we have too many dreams.
Scheherazade abruptly got to her feet. The night porter was about to begin his shift and would discover she was absent at roll-call. After six pm, the price of his silence is exorbitant.
She promised to come back and see me.
Algiers airport is unlike any in the world. All the dangerous contraptions the commercial aviation industry has devised ever since Icarus first flew too close to the sun are to be found there. With all its junk and all its gaping wounds I can’t understand how it’s still standing. The building is all splints and plasters. It’s a miracle the planes still remember how to fly. I had a knot in my stomach as I stepped inside this beleaguered world that looks like a national disaster and where a sizeable subset of humanity rushes, shrieks, weeps, jostles and gesticulates. After several collisions and copious sweating, I found myself standing in front of a breeze-block barrier next to the public lavatories, a mouldering area where the ambient temperature was several hundred degrees. Above the low wall a cardboard sign suspended from the ceiling was emblazoned in red with the words Bienvenu, Information in twelve different languages (or simply repeated twelve times). I stepped forward. Behind the counter, a phalanx of bungling idiots were playing a game a little like ‘Battleships’. The aim is to destroy the maximum number of planes with the minimum number of bombs in the shortest possible time. Brazenly, I addressed them, but they spoke a language I could not quite place, something gruff, halting, punctuated by sprays of black spittle and accompanied by threatening gestures. Nearby, sitting cross-legged on blocks of wood, girls wearing pagnes and bonnets were shelling peas, grinding millet or knitting mittens. They were not happy, something is bothering them so they adopt the pose of scorned lovers. I often prefer to view things and people through a distorting prism, I find it makes them easier to understand, they prove to be different to how they appear. The leader of this tribe, easily identifiable by her headdress, her sceptre and a fine collection of pendants dangling from her neck, her ears, even her navel, looked daggers at me, but when I explained that I had not come to disturb their glorious rituals but to see my cousin Rachid, a pilot, about a family matter of the utmost importance, she flashed me a lewd smile. I was treated to a volley of crude sniggers and a barrage of innuendo. Rachid clearly has something of a reputation among his fellow pilots who envy him and covet his many ‘cousins’. I squeezed my eyes closed and imagined them all being strangled by King Kong and, emerging from this therapy, I found myself face to face with a man in his priestly garb, a sort of evangelical minister with a firm but gentle voice. He had appeared from a hut behind the stockade. Beneath his penetrating gaze, I felt childish and naive.