“Recruitment is obviously booming.”
“And we’ve got this new one-eyed imam. They call him Cyclops. Aren’t one-eyed people bad luck?”
“No, fool, that’s hunchbacks you’re thinking of.”
“Bullshit, hunchbacks are supposed to bring good luck.”
“This just gets better and better, now we’ve got gimps casting spells. Anyone else?”
“These guys are no-bullshit, they’re from the AIG, they were sent in from Boufarik, that’s where they’ve got all the Taliban training camps. The day they showed up they issued a fatwa. First: anyone who’s not with them is against them. Second: girls aren’t allowed out on the street anymore. Third: we’re forbidden from talking to Jews, Christians, animists, communists, queers or journalists. Fourth: they’ve banned speed, blow, cigarettes, beer, pinball, sports, music, books, TV, movies. . I don’t remember the rest. . ”
“Wanking in public.”
“Wanking in private.”
“Farting in the direction of the mosque.”
“Shaving your d. . ”
“You fuckwits think this is funny?”
“Yeah. . no. . we’re just having a laugh!”
“What about the people on the estate, what are they doing about it?”
“Same old same old, they just play dead.”
“What about you guys?”
Silence. Whispering.
“What about you guys?” I repeated.
“What do you expect us to do?” Raymou was angry.
“Nothing. Same old same old.”
“You can talk, you the one who never leaves the house, what about you?”
It was my turn to tell them a few things. I told them what I’d been thinking. I couldn’t believe it, they actually listened from start to finish, except Momo who got up halfway through and said, “Hang on, I’ve got to piss, don’t say anything till I get back.”
He came running back, stuffing his water pistol back into his pants.
“Okay, you can go on now. . ”
I started with a question.
“How much do you guys know about Hitler?”
Silence. Looks. Whispers.
“Okay, none of you knows anything much, that simplifies things. .
“We weren’t born in Hitler’s time, most of our parents weren’t born, except my father, who was a fifteen-year-old sports freak when he came to power. Hitler was the German Führer, sort of like an all-powerful imam in a peaked cap and a black uniform. He had this thing called Nazism which was like a new religion. All the Germans wore swastikas round their necks, a swastika was a symbol that meant: I’m a Nazi, I believe in Hitler, I live through him and for him. He outlawed loads of things, just like the imam with this fatwa he’s issued, then when Hitler had the Germans well trained, when they were proper Nazis obsessed with this new religion, with their Führer, he declared that all Jews, foreigners, immigrants, cripples, people with one arm, like you, Manchot, brainiacs like Togo, prodigies like Cinq-Pouces, motormouths like Idir-Quoi, people who were a bit soft in the head like Raymou here, mixed-race kids like me and halal butchers’ sons like Momo should all be wiped out. He said they were impure, an inferior race, said they didn’t deserve to live, and he said the parents that had given birth to them were to die in the fire with them. Hitler ordered all the Jews in Europe, including the ones here in France, to wear a yellow star on their chest so it would be easier for the cops to haul them in. And he had millions of people burned in furnaces. Not little ones like the one near the old train station, vast incinerators, bigger than the ones they use to burn the rubbish on the estate, and much better organised. You get the picture? Millions of men, women and children snatched off the streets, dragged to some nearby stadium where they were branded with a red-hot iron, then packed into cattle trucks and shipped off to extermination camps where they wait around for days, weeks, even months, barefoot in the snow, for someone to come and burn them. Every day, the Nazis pick some random group, tie them up with barbed wire and dump them on a conveyor belt that went more or less right to the mouth of this huge furnace. The prisoners are so scared, they don’t even scream, and it doesn’t matter even if they do, because there’s no one to hear but themselves. And it’s not just Nazis who are in charge, some of the people doing the work are prisoners — mostly young, fit guys like us — called Kapos. While they’re waiting their turn, they work as guards, shovel coal into the furnaces, check the thermostat, keep track of the number of dead, rip out the prisoners’ hair, their teeth — and know what they do with the ashes? They make fucking soap and candles for the soldiers. And it goes on and on like this, day after day, for months, years. . ”
Whispers, the guys shift in their seats, cough, I’ve never seen them so quiet.
“What I’m telling you here is the bare truth, it’s all here in these books, I can show you the photos if you promise not to look at them for more than a second, because otherwise they’ll fuck you up for the rest of your life. You won’t be able to believe you’re really men, that your parents are really human, that your friends are really friends, good guys like you lot, like me. Rachel checked it all out, he did research, he went to Germany, to Poland, he saw the furnaces, saw them with his own fucking eyes.”
Idir-Quoi asked a question.
“What did he do it for, Rachel, I mean?”
“I’m getting to that. . ” I said.
“One day, the whole world got together and declared war on this madness and they killed the imam, the leader, the Führer and all his emirs and they took over Germany. That’s when they found the extermination camps. There were dozens of them and millions of dead and survivors that looked like so much like corpses that they didn’t know what to say to them. When my parents and everyone else in Aïn Deb were murdered by the Islamists, Rachel got to thinking. He figured that fundamentalist Islam and Nazism were kif-kif—same old same old. He wanted to find out what would happen if people did nothing, the way people did nothing in Germany back in the day, what would happen if nobody did anything in Kabul and Algeria where they’ve got I don’t know how many mass graves, or here in France where we’ve got all these Islamist Gestapo. In the end, the whole idea scared him so much he killed himself. He thought it was too late, he felt guilty, he said that by saying nothing it was like we were colluding, he said we’re all caught in this trap and if we go on doing nothing, go round pretending like we’re talking about things intelligently, we’ll wind up being Kapos without even realising, and we won’t even notice that everyone around us has turned into a Kapo already.
“That’s bullshit — we’re not Kapos!” Raymou yelled.
“Really? A while back we were all on their side and we didn’t even know, remember?”
I didn’t have to say any more, they remembered, they’d been up to their balls in it.
“So, what? You’re suggesting we all top ourselves like Rachel?” Raymou asked.
“No, we’re not going to die, we’re going to live, we’re going to fight.”
“How?”
“I don’t know, we’ll have to see. . ”
“Fuck’s sake, all this bullshit and now he says he doesn’t know!”
“Why don’t we set up an anti-Islamic league?” suggested Bidochon.
“Islamic or Islamist?” asked Raymou.
“Who cares? It’s the same difference.”
“Bullshit, it’s not the same at all, my parents are Muslims, Islam is the greatest religion in the world!” shouted Momo.
“My mother does the Salat, and she wouldn’t hurt a fly,” added Idir-Quoi.
“It’s Muslims that end up becoming Islamists, though, isn’t it?” said Manchot.
“No, there’s Christians too, like Raymou,” said Idir-Quoi.