Gino suggested I sleep in his room. I told him I wouldn’t be able to breathe, that I preferred the courtyard. He brought me an esparto mat and a blanket and lay down next to me on a piece of carpet. We stared up at the sky and listened out for the noises of the city. When the streets grew quiet, Gino started snoring. I waited to doze off in my turn, but anger caught up with me and I didn’t sleep a wink.
Gino got up early. He made coffee for his mother, made sure she had everything she needed and told me I could stay in the apartment if I wanted. I declined the offer because I had no desire to meet my mother, who would be arriving soon. She came at seven every day to do the housework for the Ramouns. Gino didn’t have any other suggestion to make. He had to go to work. I walked with him to Place Sébastopol. He promised to see me at the end of the day and took his leave. I stood there on the pavement, not knowing what to do with myself. I felt ill at ease and ached all over. The thought of going home repelled me.
I went up onto the heights of Létang to look at the sea. It was as wild as the din in my head. Then I went to Boulevard Marceau to watch the trams with their passengers clinging to the guardrails like strings of garlic. At the station, I listened to the trains arriving in a screech of whistles and pouring their contingents of travellers out onto the platforms. From time to time, an idea would cross my mind and I would imagine myself getting on a train and going somewhere, anywhere, far from this feeling of disgust I was dragging around like a ball and chain. I wanted to hit everything that moved. If anybody looked at me, I was ready to charge.
I only felt a little calmer when Gino returned.
Gino was my stability, my crutch. Every evening, he would take me to the cinema to see Max Linder, Charlie Chaplin, The Three Musketeers, Tarzan of the Apes, King Kong and horror films. Then we would go to a cabaret in Rue d’Austerlitz in the Derb to hear Messaoud Médioni sing. I would then start to feel a little better. But in the morning, when Gino went to work, my unease would return and I would try and shake it off in the bustle of the streets.
Pierre came looking for me. I told him it was all over between us. He called me an idiot and told me that the ‘Yid’ was brainwashing me. I couldn’t control what my fist did next. I felt my ‘pimp’s’ nose give at the end of my arm. Surprised by my action, Pierre fell backwards, half stunned. He lifted his hand to his face and looked incredulously at his bloodstained fingers. ‘I should have expected that,’ he grunted in a voice shaking with bile. ‘I try to help you and this is how you thank me. Well, what can you expect of an Arab? No loyalty or gratitude.’
He stood up, gave me a black eye and finally left me alone.
7
We were supposed to be going to Ras el-Aïn for a walk, but Gino suddenly changed his mind. ‘I have things to sort out at home,’ he said by way of excuse. I walked home with him. And my mother was there, on Boulevard Mascara, a glove in one hand and a bowl of water beside her; she was just finishing washing my friend’s mother. What was the meaning of this strange coincidence? I asked Gino. He replied that I was wrong to avoid my family. I hadn’t set foot in Rue du Général-Cérez for nine months, not since the incident in the Jewish cemetery. I asked Gino if this was a roundabout way of getting rid of me. He told me his home was mine and that I could stay there as long as I wanted, but that my family needed me, and that it wasn’t a good idea to fall out with them.
I was getting ready to leave when my mother grabbed me by the wrist. ‘I have to talk to you,’ she said. She put on her veil and motioned me to follow her. We did not exchange a word in the street. She walked ahead and I trailed behind, wondering what new revelation awaited me round the corner.
When we got home, my mother said, ‘We’re not hard on you, it’s life that’s hard on all of us.’ I asked her why she hadn’t told me the truth about my father, and she replied that there was nothing to say about him. And that was all. My mother went into the kitchen to make dinner.
Nora joined me in the next room. She was even more beautiful than before and her big eyes threw me into disarray.
‘We missed you,’ she admitted, turning away in embarrassment.
She’s growing up too fast, I thought. She was almost a woman now. Her body had blossomed; it demanded celebration.
‘I’m back, that’s all that matters,’ I said.
Nora smelt good, like a meadow in spring. Her black hair fell over her round shoulders and her chest carried the promise of maturity.
We could think of nothing further to say.
Our silence spoke for us.
I was in love with her …
Aunt Rokaya opened her emaciated arms to me. ‘Silly fool!’ she scolded me affectionately. ‘You should never be angry with your family. How could you live with your friend so close to here and ignore us?’ She undid a scarf hanging from her blouse and handed me the silver ring that was in it. ‘This belonged to your grandfather. The day he died, he took it off his finger and made me promise to give it to my son. I never had a son of my own. And you’re more than a nephew to me.’
Aunt Rokaya had grown thinner. In addition to the paralysis of the lower limbs that confined her to her straw mattress, she complained of whistling in her ears and terrible headaches. The amulets the quacks prescribed for her had no effect. She was nothing now but a ghost with blurred features, her skin grey, her eyes full of stoic suffering.
Rokaya had the sickness of masterless people. She had contracted it in Turambo, when her home was a patched-up tent. At that time, the cauldron on the wooden fire only gurgled to stave off hunger. The flavourless crops grew once a year; the rest of the time we lived on roots and bitter acorns. By the age of five, Rokaya was looking after her grandfather’s one goat. One night, the goat’s throat had been torn out by a jackal because the pen hadn’t been properly closed. She had felt guilty about that all her life. Whenever misfortune struck us, she would say it was her fault — it was pointless to tell her that she was not to blame. At the age of fourteen, she was married off to a club-footed shepherd who beat her to make her submit to him. He knew he was the lowest of the low and had married her to make himself feel important. So when she so much as looked at him, he considered it an outrage. He died, killed by a bolt of lightning, and the villagers saw the hand of God in that thunderbolt from heaven. A widow at nineteen, she was remarried to another peasant who was just as bad. Her body would forever bear the marks of the mistreatment meted out to her during her second marriage. Rejected at the age of twenty-six, she was handed over for the third time to a pedlar who set off one morning to sell samovars and never came back, leaving his wife eight months pregnant. Rokaya gave birth to Nora in a barn, pushing with all her might, a cloth in her mouth to stifle her screams. At the age of forty-five, she was at the end of her tether. She looked twice her age. Her sickness had eaten her up inside with all the methodical greed of a colony of termites. I had always felt sorry for her. Her face bore the traces of an old sorrow that refused to vanish. It was through Rokaya that I had thought I understood that there are tragedies that obstinately remain on the surface, like ugly scars, in order not to fall into oblivion and thus be absolved of the harm they have caused … Because the damage returns as soon as it is forgiven, convinced it has been rehabilitated, and then it can no longer stop. Rokaya kept her wounds as open as her eyes, in order not to lose sight of even the slightest pain she had suffered for fear of not recognising it if it had the nerve to knock at her door again. Her face, in a sense, was a mirror where every ordeal displayed its duly paid bills. And the ordeals strove to make an inextricable parchment of her facial lines, all of which led back to the same original crime, that of a child of five who had neglected to close the pen where her family’s one goat was kept.