“. . you need to know, your brother was a good man, a very good man. Given all the stuff you know now. . about your father, Rachel did the only decent thing a man can do, he tried to understand. Doesn’t matter if you’re dealing with a crime committed yesterday or crimes committed years ago, that’s where you have to start: the first thing you have to do is understand” (he said it slowly, dragging out every word), “you can’t just rush in and judge things. When you were running around in you djelleba with that ratty little goatee beard, I could easily have thought: he’s a fundamentalist, a terrorist, I’m taking him down. But I didn’t, I tried to understand, to get to know you, and I decided that you weren’t one of them, you were Malrich, you were a good guy just trying to live your life like everyone else. Nothing is ever simple. Your brother’s suicide proves that. He tried to understand, but sadly he gradually started to believe that he was guilty, he felt he was to blame for what the Nazis — what your father — did to the Jews during the war. He hated your father but that still didn’t change the fact that he was your father, and like everyone, Rachel wanted a father he could look up to, a father he could be proud of. And it was worse for him, because you guys didn’t live with your parents, because you missed him, because of the terrible way your father died — his throat cut by Islamic fundamentalists with your mother and all those poor souls with only the sun to light the day. But the more research he did, the more he learned, the more he suffered. Something inside him snapped, he turned everything on its head and started to hate himself. Rachel couldn’t help but think of your father as a war criminal, but mostly he thought of him as his father, someone who had fought for Algerian independence, someone loved and respected by the people of his village; Rachel saw your father as a victim of the Islamic fundamentalists and of the Algerian political system that fosters these monsters. It was too much for him, he started to feel guilty, he was ashamed of his success, of what he saw as his selfishness towards you and the rest of your family, of his affluent lifestyle. That was when he started to cut himself off from everyone — from you, from his wife, from his adoptive parents. It was his way of trying to protect you. In the end, he took it all on himself, he passed judgement on himself in his father’s place. Suicide was his last resort, the only way he could reconcile the irreconcilable, do you understand?”
I don’t know what I said. Nothing, probably. I was tumbling into a black hole. I could see shadows. . my father, my mother, Rachel spiralling into madness, poor Nadia screaming as she died, the emir burning her with a blowtorch, the shadow of the imam looming over the estate; I thought about the massacre in Aïn Deb, about. . I don’t remember. I remember yelling, “What are you telling me all this for? What’s it got to do with me?”
He leaned over and said, “It’s got everything to do with you. I know what’s going on in that head of yours. You’re confusing the past and the present, you’re comparing yourself and Rachel, your father and the imam, you’re thinking about the Nazis who stole your father from you and used him as a tool in their genocide, you’re thinking about the Islamic fundamentalists who murdered your parents, who murdered poor Nadia, you want revenge, you want to take down the imam because he’s the leader, the Führer, because you used to belong to his Brotherhood of pathetic losers busy trying to wipe out humanity and you think this gives you a way to redeem yourself, to see your father differently, to forgive him. Do you understand?”
“This is bullshit. Can I go now?”
“Sure, you can go. But read your brother’s diary again, maybe you’ll realise something that even Rachel didn’t realise, though it was staring him in the face: you can’t get justice for a crime by committing another crime, or by committing suicide. We have laws to do that. For the rest, we have to rely on memory and wisdom. But the most important thing you need to learn is this: we are not responsible for the crimes of our parents.”
“Can I go now?”
“My door is always open, come back if you feel like it.”
I went up to see uncle Ali and aunt Sakina. I was planning to sleep at their place that night, I felt terrible, I hadn’t seen them in over a month. Actually, I was scared to be alone in Rachel’s house, I didn’t know what I might do. But there was another reason: there was something I wanted to ask aunt Sakina, something that hadn’t occurred to me before, or to Rachel — at least there was nothing in his diary about it: how did papa and uncle Ali meet? It’s weird the stuff you don’t know, that you don’t even think about. Ten years I’d been living with uncle Ali and aunt Sakina and I didn’t know anything about them, I didn’t know how they knew papa.
Uncle Ali and aunt Sakina are exactly like you’d imagine, they’re immigrants who’ve stayed immigrants. Their life in France is the same as if they still lived in Algeria, it would be exactly the same if they lived on another planet. “Allah decides all things,” they say, and that’s all there is to it. They’re good people, they don’t ask for much out of life: enough to eat, somewhere to sleep, a little peace, and now and then some news from the bled. They love getting letters. I used to have to read the letters to them and write the letters back. Back then I thought it was a pain, but now I look back on it fondly. Papa used to send them standard-issue letters: Dear Ali, just a few lines to let you know that I and the family are well. I hope that you, your wife and your children are well. We send you our love. Then he’d write a bit about life in the village, about the weather. Uncle Ali would write back: Dear Hassan, thank you for you letter which we received. We are happy to know that you are well. Allah be praised. Everything here is fine, the children send their love. Please write again soon. The peace of Allah be with you. I have sent the medicines you asked for, I hope they will arrive safely. If you need anything else, let me know. Then he’d write a bit about life on the estate, about the weather. I wrote dozens and dozens of letters, every one of them exactly the same — the only thing different was the date, the weather and the names of the medicines.
Now that I finally wanted to talk to them, I realised I didn’t know how to begin. We’d only ever talked in set phrases. Me saying, Hi uncle Ali, Hi aunt Sakina, I’m hungry, I’m going out, and them saying, Hello, Hello, Are you hungry? Can I get you some coffee? Put a coat on, you’ll get cold, God go with you. The rest was silence, politeness, the routine clichés of family life.
“Am’ti, how did papa and uncle Ali meet?”
I have never seen my aunt Sakina look surprised by anything. She answered perfectly calmly.
“They were in the maquis together during the War of Independence, they became great friends, they were like brothers.”
“Is that it? What about afterwards?”
“When independence came, times were hard, everyone was poor, people were sleeping in the streets while our leaders were feasting in the palaces left by the colonists and killing each other over who should take power. Your father and uncle Ali were disgusted by what was happening. Ali came to France, he couldn’t bear it. As soon as he found a job, he went back and asked for my hand, and I came back to France with him. Allah has watched over us, we have never wanted for anything.”
“What about papa?”
“He had problems with the new leaders, I know that. There were people who wanted him to leave Algeria — they threatened to kill him. But there were many people who wanted him to stay so he could go on training army officers.”