Time and again death visited this house and with it came the cortèges, the mourners, the funeral vigils, the steady string of solicitors, offers on the house, tongue-tied acquaintances, marriage proposals from men clutching a measuring tape in one hand, and, always in full view, the imam in his slippers pontificating. On the fortieth day of my last period of mourning, I drew a line under things and I shut the windows and the doors. Emptiness closed over me like a tombstone over the dead, but it was my emptiness and I could fill it as I pleased. On the blessed day, I accorded myself the minor privilege of dying as I chose. Better to be a prisoner who is free inside her head, I thought, than a jailer who is a prisoner of his keys and besides, it is good and necessary that there should be a wall between freedom and imprisonment. In doing so, I joined the most reviled mob in the Islamic world, the company of free, independent women. In such circumstances, it is best to grow old quickly, hence my premature wrinkles. For a woman living beneath the green flag of Algeria, growing old brings not devastation, but salvation.
In a few short months I had faced a lifetime of mourning. Death dogged my family, determined to wipe out everyone. It ignored me, though I pleaded on bended knee. I am the last of the Mohicans, I wonder who will wear mourning weeds for me. Papa was the first to go, he died of heart failure; three months later, my mother died of a broken heart and not long afterwards my brother Yacine died at the wheel of his car — the one great love of his life — a Renault 5, periwinkle blue fitted with a radio and a steering lock, a bargain imported from Marseilles by ‘Scrap Iron Ali’, the local racketeer. Paid for out of family money, as we reminded him every Sunday when, pristine as a bar of soap, he prepared to take French leave. He looked like a ladykiller from the 1930s, ready to fall for the first femme fatale. We pretended to be watching over the crockpot while he hugged the walls, knowing that he had to find himself a wife. It was high time, he was almost thirty, he was beginning to stoop, to cough at the slightest gust of wind, to sit in his slippers and snore. He had got a job in the administration, he was inured to it now. We lured the prettiest flowers in the neighbourhood to our house, we scoured the city for miles around like guardians of a harem. We looked for true virgins, no counterfeits. The matchmakers quickly got involved and poor Maman suddenly found herself busy going to cemeteries and funeral vigils — the key places where marriages are arranged — and visiting the shrines of marabouts where unthinkable things are done and undone. I was left to search the usual haunts: secondary schools, dressmakers’ shops, weddings, hammams, bus stops. I brought home heaps of girls, beautiful and intelligent girls, fervent traditionalists and borderline crackpots, blondes, brunettes, eccentrics and teenagers, every one of them free, but every time the idiot turned up his nose, turned his back on the parade, he was determined to comb the streets like a big boy and find his own Mata Hari. The poor bastard thought he could outwit the wily matchmakers. He was driving his little car slowly past the government buildings towards the Club des Pins, when a sports car ploughed into him, we were told, it was more an insinuation than an explanation. Fed up seeing him spend half his life waxing the car and the other half watching it like a hawk in case a bird shat on the paintwork, we used to mock him: ‘Are you planning to marry that old wreck of yours?’ He took it badly. It had been our way of warning him, since there was something animal about his passion for his car, about his need to show off. Our mourning was tinged with bitter guilt, as our jokes and jibes came back to haunt us. I’ve never been able to shake off the thought that we brought him bad luck. To refer to his car as a ‘wreck’ was like sounding a death knell. Forgive me, Yacine, forgive me, my brother. Lastly there was Sofiane. With his first cigarette, he got it into his head that, come weal or woe, he would leave the country and get as far away as possible. ‘Better to die elsewhere than to live here!’ he would scream whenever I tried to reason with him. ‘If you can’t live at home, what’s the point of dying next door?’ I would shout back. This was my argument, the only one I could think of. What I was trying to say is that dying is not difficult; the trick is learning how to live, the locale is of secondary importance. But he could think of nothing else, could focus on nothing but finding an escape route, getting his papers, studying the stratagems of those who had made the great leap, poring over their glorious failures. He barely spoke, barely ate and came home only to brood over his rage. Then, one morning at dawn — bam! — he left. He headed west, taking the most dangerous route: to Oran and via the border to Morocco, Spain and from there to France, to England, to anywhere, that was his plan. I only found out later that day, after I had trawled the neighbourhood and finally flushed out one of his friends — another candidate for suicide — at a secret, mystical meeting. There was a crowd of them, a veritable congregation, drunk on their own tears, dreaming aloud, telling each other how the great wide world was waiting for them with flowers, and how fleeing this country would deal a fatal blow to the reign of the dictator. Long story short, they were all touched by the same fever. They gathered round me like a big sister ennobled by great sorrow and informed me that Sofiane had gone the way of the harragas — the ‘path-burners’. I was familiar with the expression, this was how everyone in the country referred to those who burned their bridges, who fled the country on makeshift rafts and destroyed their papers when caught. But this was the first time I had heard the word from the lips of a true zealot, and it sent a chill down my spine. He said it nonchalantly; to him, ‘burning a path’ was something only they knew how to do. I was lumbered with ‘honour’ and they with the responsibility of covering Sofiane’s still-warm tracks. What can you say about such morons? I stared at them the way you might at a lost prophet and shook their dust from my sandals. I would happily have denounced them to the police but for the fact that the police — who constantly interrogated them, frisked them, manipulated them, spat in their faces — were at the root of their delirium. On the road the harragas take there is no turning back, every fall leads to another, one harder and more painful, until the final, fatal plunge. We’ve all witnessed it: satellite TV beams back the pictures of corpses lying broken on the rocks, or tossed by the waves, frozen or suffocated in the cargo hold of a boat, a plane, in the back of a refrigerated van. As though we did not already have enough, the harragas have invented new ways of dying. Even those who succeeded in making the crossing lost their souls in the terrible kingdom of the undocumented immigrant. What kind of life is it, to be forever condemned to a clandestine existence?
And what kind of life is it that I am leading, entombed here in my ancient house?
I spent a whole month going round in circles, I shed every tear in my body. I scarcely looked up: Maman, my little brother is lost; Papa, my little brother is lost… I was racked with guilt at the thought of having let them down. I slept in Sofiane’s room so I would feel better.