‘Why have you brought me here?’
‘You just have to go inside and you’ll know.’
‘Do you think my father is buried with the Jews?’
‘No, he just keeps an eye on their dead.’
Mekki pushed me into the cemetery, looked around and finally pointed to a man sitting cross-legged on the threshold of a sentry box, stuffing a piece of bread with slices of onion and tomato. Just as he was about to bite into his sandwich, he noticed our presence. I recognised him immediately. It was my broken-faced father, thinner than a scarecrow and in mismatched clothes. My heart beat so strongly in my chest that I shook from head to foot. The earth and the sky merged into one around me and I had to clutch my uncle’s arm to remain upright, my Adam’s apple stuck in my throat like a stone.
‘He should have died in his trench,’ my uncle said. ‘At least we would have had a medal to add some kind of pride to our loss.’
The caretaker stared at us with his rodent-like eyes. When he in turn recognised us, he bent low over his food. As if nothing had happened. As if we weren’t there. As if he didn’t know us from Adam.
If the ground had given way beneath my feet at that moment, I would have gladly let it swallow me up.
‘I hope you won’t go on about your father any more,’ Mekki said. ‘He’s alive and well, as you can see. He’s just a pathetic character who prefers to weed graves rather than sweep his own doorway. He chose the Jewish cemetery so as not to be found. He must have thought no Muslim would ever see him here. Let alone the family he abandoned.’
He took me by the arm and pushed me towards the gate. I couldn’t take my eyes off the man who was eating on the threshold of the sentry box. An unfathomable feeling spread through me like molten lead. I had a mad desire to burst into tears but managed neither to cry out nor to moan. I simply looked at that man who had been my father and my idol and was now a complete stranger to me. He was still ignoring us, intent on his food. The only thing that seemed to matter to him was his piece of bread, which he was eating with gusto. I hadn’t spotted either surprise or the slightest trace of emotion on his face. After that fleeting glimmer of recognition, his whole face had closed like a pool over a paving stone. I felt really sorry for him, even though I was very aware that of all the children on earth, I was to be pitied the most.
‘Let’s go,’ Mekki said. ‘You’ve had enough for today.’
My strength had given way. My uncle was almost dragging me.
We left the cemetery and I saw my father close the gate behind us. Without a glance. Without a shred of embarrassment …
A world had just ended, though I didn’t know which.
I turned round several times in the hope of seeing the cemetery gate open and my father come running out after me.
The gate was still closed.
I realised I had to go, to get away, to disappear.
My uncle was speaking to me. His voce faded before it reached me. All I could hear was the blood throbbing in my temples. The houses went by on either side in a haze. It was daytime and yet it seemed dark. My feet sank into the soft ground. My stomach felt tight with nausea and I was shivering in the sun.
I walked straight ahead like a sleepwalker, carried along by my pain. My uncle fell silent, then faded into the background. I reached Boulevard National without realising it and came out on Place d’Armes. There were too many people in the square, too many carriages, too many shoeshine boys yelling, too many pick-up artists, too many women with their pushchairs; there was too much agitation and too much noise. I needed space and silence. I carried on towards the seafront. There was a party in full swing at the Military Club. I skirted Château-Neuf, where the Zouaves were confined, and went down an embankment to the promenade of Létang. Here, loving couples talked in low voices all along the avenues, holding hands like children, elegant women wandered peacefully, their heads full of dreams beneath their parasols, and children frolicked on the lawn. Where did I fit in to all that? I didn’t, I was irrelevant, out of the picture.
I climbed onto a promontory to gaze at the ships in the harbour. Four freighters were moored at the quays, filled to the brim with corn; their funnels, as red as a clown’s nose, belched clouds of black smoke into the air. A few months earlier, I had come to this place to gaze at the sea; I had found it as fascinating and mysterious as the sky and had wondered which took its inspiration from the other. I had stood on this same rocky outcrop, my eyes open wide, astonished at the blue plain stretching off into the distance. It was the first time I had seen the sea. A painter who was reproducing on his canvas the potbellied freighters and the little steamboats that seemed as tiny as fleas beside them had said to me: The sea is a font where all the prayers that don’t reach the Lord fall as tears, and have done for millions of years. Of course, that painter was trying to be witty. Yet this time, on the same promontory, where nobody had set up an easel, those words came back to me as I once again saw, going round and round in slow motion, the image of my father closing the cemetery gate behind me, and those stupid, beautiful words broke my heart.
I remained on the promontory until nightfall. I was overwhelmed by grief, and I was sinking into it. I didn’t want to go home. I couldn’t have stood the looks I’d get from my mother and uncle. I hated them. They had known and hadn’t said anything. The monsters! … I needed a culprit, and I wasn’t big enough for the role. I was the victim, more to be pitied than to be charged. I needed somebody to point a finger at. My father? He was the misdeed. Not the exhibit, but the act itself, the crime, the murder. I saw only my mother and Mekki in the dock. At last I understood why they had fallen silent that time when I had caught them talking about my father. They should have taken me into their confidence. I would have been able to bear the blow. They hadn’t done so. And now I held them responsible for all the misfortunes of the world.
That night, I didn’t go home.
I went and knocked on Gino’s door.
As soon as he saw the expression on my face, Gino guessed that if he didn’t let me in, I would throw myself into the abyss and never come back up again.
His mother was asleep with her mouth open.
He led me to the little courtyard, which was lit by a lantern. The sky was glittering with constellations. In the distance, you could hear people quarrelling. Gino took me by the wrist and I told him everything, all in one go, without pausing to catch my breath. He listened right to the end, without interrupting me and without letting go of my hand.
When I had finished, he said, ‘A lot of people came back from the war hardly knowing themselves any more, Turambo. They went off in one piece and returned having left a part of their souls in the trenches.’
‘It would have been better if the whole of him had stayed there.’
‘Don’t be hard on him. He’s still your father, and you don’t know what he suffered over there. I’m sure he’s suffering even now. You don’t flee your family when you survive the war.’
‘He did.’
‘That proves that he no longer knows where he is.’
‘I would have preferred him to be dead. What memory am I going to have of him now? A cemetery gate shutting in my face?’
His fingers closed a little more over mine. ‘I’d give anything to believe that my father was still alive somewhere,’ he said sadly. ‘A living man can always come home eventually, but not a dead man.’
Gino said other things too, but I’d stopped listening to him. Only the creaking of the gate continued to echo in my head. However much my father tried to retreat behind it, I could clearly distinguish him as if in a one-way mirror, ghostly, shabby and grotesque. He disgusted me. I would close my eyes and there he was; I would open them and he was still there, in his scarecrow’s suit, as inexpressive as a wooden skeleton. What had happened to him? Was it really him? What was war? An afterlife from which you returned deprived of your soul, your heart and your memory? These questions were eating me alive. I would have liked them to finish me off or else help me understand. But there was nothing. I endured them and that was all. I was sick of not finding a semblance of an answer to them, or any kind of meaning.