“Why did some people hate him?”
“I don’t know. Your Ali would have been able to tell you, but the poor man is not himself anymore. I do know that he hid your father for many months in our village in Kabylia. Later, after we left for France, your papa went into hiding in Aïn Deb with a friend from the maquis. Tahar, his name was, he was your uncle. Your father married his sister Aïcha. Tahar died long ago, before you and your brother were even born.”
“Why did papa never come to France?”
“I don’t know, oulidi. He had fought the French in the war back when he lived in Germany, and when he came to Algeria he was afraid he might be arrested.”
“But uncle Ali fought against the French, and he came to live here, and he never had any problems.”
“Well, I’m sure your father had his reasons, but I don’t know what they were.”
“Why did he send us here to live with you in France, why didn’t he want us to stay with him and maman? I mean, is that normal?”
“Don’t judge your father, oulidi, he was thinking of you, of your future, he wanted you to study, to be successful, to live in peace. Why are you asking me all these questions?”
“No reason, am’ti. . no reason.”
“You’re not well, oulidi, ever since your brother died, you haven’t been the same. You are not happy, you spend too much time thinking. But it will pass, you are young, Allah watches over you.”
That night I slept like a baby. It was the first time in a long time.
RACHEL’S DIARY, MARCH 1995
My life is a living hell. Everything is going wrong. Ophélie is always nagging me, she won’t give me a minute’s peace, she wants things to go back to the way they were, she wants me to be the man I was when we first met. I know now why women love soap operas — they tell the same stories over and over with the same dialogue, the same sets, actors who barely age a day in twenty years. The characters never change. Maybe this is their way of taking revenge on life. But I can understand Ophélie. Her whole world has been turned upside down, she’s living with a stranger, an intruder, an impostor, someone who is not interesting or exciting, some lunatic who is constantly brooding about horrors from another time, another world. This is not the man she married, this stranger has no business being in her life, in our soap-opera love story. I’ve tried to keep things to myself, but it’s getting harder and harder. I’ve tried hiding behind my work, I’ve made up emergencies, deals going south, I’ve blamed the recession the economists are always talking about, I’ve blamed tough negotiations, I’ve blamed the Chinese and the Indians and the Koreans for underbidding and stealing our market share, senior management for their obsession with endless meetings, flurries of last-minute orders, endless seminars and conferences, the unions terrified of losing their benefits just making things worse. I talk to her about these things the way you might explain a war film to a pacifist or a conscientious objector, I try to keep up the suspense, putting in just enough high-minded principles to justify the ruthlessness of our reactions. Our jobs are on the line, we’re fighting for our lives, for her. But she doesn’t care about any of this. In her eyes, none of these things can justify my silence, my constant absences, the bags under my eyes, my lack of interest in food, in sex, and nothing can justify my obsession with those books—those vile books, she calls them — about the war, the SS, the deportations, the extermination camps, the machinery of death, the post-war trials, the worldwide hunt for war criminals. In fact, she once threatened to throw them in the fire, but one look at me and she knew it wouldn’t be a good move. I moved the books out to the garage and put a lock on the tool cabinet. Sometimes she said things that were really hurtful, though I knew it wasn’t really her, it was her mother talking. One day she said to me, “You’re all the same, you half-breeds, it’s all six of one and half a dozen of the other, you have no idea what you want really.” I said, “You can tell your mother from me that six of one and half a dozen of the other are not the same thing, though that’s what the expression is supposed to mean.” Ophélie sulked for a whole week because I corrected her, and her mother phoned me and screamed that she wasn’t about to take French lessons from a foreigner. I didn’t know what she was talking about, but I said, “It’s all relative. A foreigner is only foreign to a foreigner. In the absolute he is just a person and there’s no law that says he can’t read Molière and Maupassant.” She slammed the phone down. One night, when I came home with a pile of new books under my arm, Ophélie, with an ingenuousness that scared me, said, “It’s not like we killed the Jews, I can’t see why you’re so obsessed with this whole thing.” This was the last straw. I answered with the same chilly detachment, “You’re right, it wasn’t us, but it could have been us!” I didn’t try to explain and she quickly changed the subject. “My mother’s coming over for dinner tonight, so do me a favour and snap out of this mood.”
My mother-in-law is really something. I don’t mind that she’s fat, ugly, eccentric and her taste in clothes might best be described as garish. It’s quite funny watching her play at being the diva. My problem is she has a poisonous tongue and a stare that could turn a nest of rattlesnakes to stone. When she’s around, I can’t breathe without her thinking the worst.
“I’m very disappointed in you, Rachel, you’ve really changed, you’ve completely let yourself go. In my house, we don’t. . ”
“Well, I’m delighted to say that you clearly haven’t changed at all. But may I remind you that we are not in your house, this is my house. . ”
With that, dinner came screeching to a halt. My mother-in-law stormed off spluttering, her daughter threw her napkin in my face and went after her. A minute later, the front door banged as though a hurricane had ripped it from its hinges, the whole house shook. I sat by myself, finishing my dinner, delighted at the thought that I had spared at least a few rattlesnakes.
The next morning, there was a shitstorm waiting for me at the office. Another one. When it rains it pours. I was summoned to see the boss and, from his secretary’s tone, I knew he was going to tear me off a strip. I’d been expecting it. It was all over the office, people had been talking behind my back for months. Whenever I walked into a room, everyone suddenly changed the subject. I was worried, but not too worried. My boss, Monsieur Candela, is a friend, he’s like a brother, he hired me, he showed me the ropes, and whenever this magnificent money-making machine kicked me in the balls, he was the one who helped me up again. We had two things in common: Nantes, where both of us had studied and where he had once taught fluid mechanics; and Algeria, his birthplace and that of all his tribe going back generations to some distant Basque forefather. The minute he saw my CV, he decided to hire me. He needed a fellow student, a fellow countryman to help him run his kingdom: the largest sales force in Europe and Africa. And he needed a talented engineer, something I believed I could become. I was twenty-four, I had a brand-new degree and a head full of new ideas. The job was a gift, I had made a good friend and had gained the prospect of travelling. Six months later, I moved into our dream house and — with her mother’s rose-tinted blessing — I married Ophélie, the only girl I’ve ever loved. They were good times, our feet only ever touched the ground when we needed to walk somewhere.
Monsieur Candela was sitting at his desk with the sullen, scornful glower of a manager expecting an underling who has suddenly fallen from grace. Playing bad cop doesn’t suit him, he has a sunny, cheerful Mediterranean disposition. I hadn’t even closed the door when he ripped into me. “Are you planning to keep up this shit?” This is how he always talks at work, very American, shooting from the hip, straight to the point, no pussyfooting. It makes sense, after all we are here to make money and the company article of faith can be summed up in three words: Time is money, our god is the Almighty Dollar. The company is 100 percent American, the only thing foreign about it is the market. And the staff — the pissant, prolix, profligate Frogs, though at least they get to pay us in French francs — they consider to be infidels.