Dear Malrich,
I hope you and your family are well. I’ve decided to stay here in Canada and I’ve asked maman to put the house up for sale. Thanks for looking after it for me all this time. I hope you weren’t too bored living there, and that you weren’t too scared sleeping there at night. And I hope you remembered to water the plants! I’m sending you $1,000 for your trouble. By my reckoning, you should get 5,162 francs for them at a bureau de change. If they offer you less, take it to a bank, their rates are usually better. You’ll need some form of ID, so don’t forget to bring your identity card. If you want anything from the house, the TV or Rachel’s clothes, feel free, I’ve told maman to let you take whatever you want.
I send you my love. Be good. Find a nice girlfriend and be happy.
Ophélie
P.S.: I’d rather you heard this from me: I’ve met someone else, we’re getting married.
I thought about Racheclass="underline" Poor bastard, must be turning in his grave.
MALRICH’S DIARY, DECEMBER 1996
This sudden downpour of dollars is a blessing — now I can finally go to Aïn Deb. Like Rachel, I’m going back to the source, back to my childhood, to our house, our parents. Back to my father. To say a prayer at my parents’ grave. I’m scared to death but I’m happy. I feel it’s a journey that I need to make, one I would have had to make sooner or later. I need to feel Algerian soil beneath my feet, feel it hold me up like an insignificant insect. Not because I used to live there as a kid, not because my mother and my grandparents were born there or because my father spent most of his life there. None of these things are as important as the fact that my parents are buried there. I don’t know how to explain it, I’ve always had trouble putting things into words, I can’t do it, so I just write down the facts, but that doesn’t explain what I feel. I never was very good at school. What I’m trying to say is that death expresses truth better than life. I think nothing connects a man to the earth more than the graves of his parents and his grandparents. That’s only just occurred to me, I’ll have to think about it, because it sounds strange to say death binds us to life when we know that death is the end of everything. Rachel used to say home is where you live, which is true — but he was talking about the emigrants who stubbornly go on living as emigrants and who end up not living in their own country or their adopted one. Rachel was right, it’s psychology. They’re just thinking about themselves, about their deaths, about the grave waiting for them back in the old country, they’re not thinking about the children they’re leaving dangling over the abyss. It’s hardly surprising that when they fall, they break their necks. Imagine if Togo-au-Lait’s parents had raised him to be like his great-grandfather, he’d have eaten the lot of us and he wouldn’t even feel sorry. But I also think that home is the country where your parents are buried, that’s why I felt I needed to go and see that land, walk on it, soak up some part of the mystery fed by generations of souls. “A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,” to quote Churchill, who Rachel thought was the greatest hero of the war against the Nazis. That’s what a country should be, a mystery. But still I wonder why I’ve never been interested in Germany. My father was born there, my grandparents are buried there, so some part of my soul must be over there in what Rachel called the mystery of deepest, darkest Germany. Is it because of the war? Because of Papa’s past? Is it because I’ve never been there? Rachel says it’s beautiful, incredibly well organised, he says the people are really helpful. I’ll go there some day.
From what Rachel says in his diary, the officials at the Algerian consulate in Nanterre aren’t likely to be much help. I can’t trust them, I’ll have to see if I can find someone on the estate who’s got some scam going with the passport officer, it will save a lot of time and a lot of money.
In the end, it was easy. Momo steered me in the right direction, his father had been involved in some dodgy stuff back in the day, back when Algeria was just coming out of the socialist terror and everyone thought they’d be able to come and go whenever they wanted. Passports were selling like hotcakes, you’d hand over your cash in the morning and you’d get your Ausweis delivered to you at Café Da Hocine the same night. But it only lasted a couple of months before the doors slammed shut again, the socialist dictatorship in Algeria came back with a vengeance and this time got into bed with two other dictators — corruption and religion — and Momo’s dad had to stop trafficking in passports because he was no match for the new regime, so he took all the cash he’d made and set up as a halal butcher and pretty quickly he got the reputation of being the best halal butcher for quality, value and strict adherence to Qur’anic law. He does a lot of his business at Eid, he goes all round the estate slitting sheep’s throats, for a whole month he’s up to his elbows in sheep’s blood. So I got myself a brand new green Algerian passport, same day service, and all it cost me was five kilos of prime fillet steak. Poor Rachel had to slog his guts out to get his. It was weird, having the passport made me feel like an illegal immigrant. That’s the thing about being mixed-race, you’re not one thing or another. What I need is a French-Algerian-German passport. But you have to make do with what you get in this life, as Monsieur Vincent used to say when he’d see us drooling over a brochure for some shiny high-tech equipment.
This was the first time in my life I ever saw aunt Sakina surprised by anything. When I told her I was going back to the bled, she looked at me like she didn’t understand what I’d just said. “Where did you say you were going?” she said, her voice cracking. I kept right on, pretending I hadn’t noticed how worried she was. “To Aïn Deb, just for a week or so, I want to go and see papa and maman’s graves, catch up with some friends from when I was a kid.” She thought for a moment, then she said, “I’ve got a little money put by, I’ll buy some things for you to take to the children there, I’m sure there’s a lot of things they need.”
She packed a suitcase for me, the biggest one she could find, the suitcase of an emigrant coming home, a poor man’s Santa Claus.
When I told my mates I was going back to the bled, as we stood freezing our balls off in a stairwell in one of the tower blocks, they didn’t pull punches.
“What are you, sick in the head? You’ll get your throat cut.”
“Have you forgotten what they did to your parents?”
“Fuck sake, don’t be stupid, stay here with us.”
“You don’t speak Arabic, you don’t speak Berber, how are you supposed to talk to people?”
“Pretend you’re deaf and dumb. . ”
“Dress like a Taliban, that way no one will notice you.”
“Steer clear of the red-light districts.”
“Steer clear of the banlieues.”
“Watch out for the cops, everyone says they’re like the mafia.”
“Keep away from the jihadists.”
“They’ll roast you like a Jew.”
“There’s no way they’re going to let you come back.”
“They’ll arrest you, they don’t like the French over there.”
“They’ll never let you in, they fucking hate French Arabs.”
. .
I waited till they were done, then I said, “Thanks for the support, guys, but I’m going anyway. I’ll be back in a week. Meet me from the plane at Orly.”
The night before I left was a long one. Aunt Sakina kept coming and going, she’d check to make sure the suitcase was properly closed, then she’d open it and put something else in, close it again, zip it up tight, go back to the living room, then come back to check it again. Uncle Ali was in his bed, staring at the ceiling, off somewhere in his head.