I got talking to Slim, the guy huddled next to me in this hell, he was a university student home to spend Christmas holidays in the bled with his family. I asked if he knew what was going on, but he had no idea. He said he flew Paris to Algiers all the time, but this was the first time they’d pulled him out of the line up. “Maybe I’m starting to look like a terrorist,” he laughed. He was an optimist. We talked about this and that. He was studying computer science at Jussieu and lived in some posh house in the sixteenth arrondissement with his uncle who’s a professor at Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital. Poor little rich kid. But Slim said it wasn’t like that at all, he said he had to live off some measly grant, he said all he got from his uncle was room and board, his travel card and a bit of pocket money. Oh, and on weekends his uncle would lend him his Mercedes 300 convertible with a full tank of petrol and enough money to cover his expenses. Slim bitched that he’d even had to work as a management trainee in a merchant bank run by some friend of his uncle to pay for his skiing holiday in Switzerland. Then he bitched about France, the cold, the discrimination, the crime rate, the cost of living, the filthy streets, the pig-headed police, the civil servants and on and on, the préfecture refusing to give him a ten-year resident permit for no good reason. Slim was a pain in the arse. He told me as soon as he finished his degree he was going to move to London and set up a department of international studies with his cousins so they could make some money out of Africa. I listened, I nodded, I understood, but I can’t help it, I’ve never been able to stomach spoiled brats. I said to him aunt Sakina was always saying to me: “Don’t be so ungrateful.” But Slim said it’s not him, it’s France that’s ungrateful. Slim is a royal pain in the arse. “There goes someone who thinks his shit doesn’t stink,” as Monsieur Vincent used to say whenever some guy showed up with a Ferrari, tossed the keys at him, stared at the ceiling and said, “Check her over for me!” With guys like that, small-time crooks bigging it up like gangsters, we’d push the car into a corner of the workshop and take our own sweet time racking up a bill fit for a king. Slim and I talked about this and that, talked about meeting up again in Algiers and in Paris. Neither of us figured we were going to be shut up in this hangar forever. When you don’t know what’s going on, it’s best to be optimistic.
An hour later, the special agents came back. They lined us all up in front and the head guy asked each of us a series of questions. When it came to my turn, he asked if my name was really Malek Ulrich Schiller, if I’d got my passport through the legal channels, if I really was going to Aïn Deb to see my family, if I was planning anything illegal and if I harboured any ill intentions. He was a bit thrown by my name, he said, “Your father is German, but you’re Algerian?” I explained that my father was a scientist, a Muslim, a hero, a veteran Mujahid, a respected cheïkh and a chahid. He pointed to his left and said, “Go stand over there.” A minute later my new best friend Slim joined me. An hour later, there were two groups, one on the right, one on the left. We eyed each other tearfully, resentfully, everyone thinking, it’s their fault we’re in this mess. The selection process finished, the group on the right were loaded back onto the truck and driven off. Where to, I don’t know. A cop came over to our group and said, “Follow me.” We trailed after him like sheep. He led us to the building marked Arrivals Hall, Welcome to Algeria. He said, “Now fuck off.” We didn’t need to be told twice. Still shaking, we went through the necessary formalities: immigration, customs, baggage check, body search, brief routine interrogation, sundry declarations, compulsory foreign exchange, payment of taxes and found ourselves outside, half dead from exhaustion, hunger, thirst, cold, humiliation, soaked to the skin but free and ecstatic to be free. I felt like I’d just done a thirty-year stretch. The sunlight hurt my eyes and aunt Sakina’s suitcase was ripping my arm out of its socket. For a long time I wondered what had happened to the other group. I can’t bring myself to believe that the cops tortured them, killed them, deported them. I’d rather believe they just locked them up and that their parents aren’t worried. Some day, when the war is over, when the camps are liberated, we’ll find out.