Slim phoned his parents and got them to come and pick him up. “They were convinced I’d been turned back at the border or murdered or something — it was complete panic, the old man was already on the phone to Paris,” he said, laughing. Slim is a spoiled royal pain in the arse. While we waited, we watched the comings and goings in the airport. The whole place was deathly silent. The people looked normal but maybe they were being extra careful. At one point we saw some cop dragging away a gang of young guys handcuffed together in pairs. They’d obviously thought they could just up and leave the country. They’ve had it now. Trying to leave is an insult. They’re bound to be gassed. We were trying to get into the country and we’d been given the third degree. Later, I saw the special agents, who’d been sitting in the cafeteria, suddenly get to their feet, button their raincoats, slip on their dark glasses and march off quickly. They walked straight past us, but we ducked out of sight just in time. Compared to Algiers airport, our estate is like an old-folks home, everyone hanging out, bored senseless. Or it used to be — because since the new imam and his emir showed up, the Fourth Reich is well under way. By the time I left for Algeria, it was all set, the propaganda machine was up and running, strict security was being enforced and you could smell Blitzkrieg in the air. I wonder what it will be like by the time I get back, whether my family, my neighbours, my mates will still be there. I miss them already. I can’t imagine a future without my mates, without Momo, Raymou, Togo-au-Lait, Idir-Quoi, Cinq-Pouces, Manchot and Bidochon, the coffee jockey who can’t even make a decent cup of coffee, all sons of dirt-poor, honest working men. Slim, the royal pain in the arse, told me about his life in Paris, his mates, his girlfriends, and he told me about what he did in Algeria during the holidays, days spent playing video games, big family meals, little parties at the house, his sisters inviting their friends over pretending they needed to revise. I didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about. I told him about life on the estate and he looked at me like I was from another planet. Just then, his father showed up, frantic but happy, he’s some important professor at Algiers hospital, he used to work in some hospital in Paris. They gave me a lift, dropped me at the bus station. Slim, the royal pain in the arse, winked at me and said, “Come by the house when you get back from that godforsaken hole you’re going to, we can do some revision.”
Rachel was a bit of spoiled pain in the arse himself. I mean, he didn’t have to spend a fortune taking a taxi to Aïn Deb. They have got buses in Algeria and for a couple of dinar they’ll drive you, your family and all your belongings to the ends of the earth and back. Outside the bus station — a patch of waste ground with barbed wire fences where a hundred rusty ramshackle buses waged all out war to get in, fight over passengers and get the fuck out — was a guy like a scarecrow whose job was to give directions. I told him my story. For fifty dinar he told me what I needed to do, all the while giving directions to a bunch of other lost souls, “Yeah, yeah, that’s right, take bus number 12 to Sétif. . You, you need to take the number 8 to Oran. . and you. . uh. . 36, that’ll take you to Sidi-Bel-Abbes. . What? Oh yeah, so when you get to Sétif, take the bus for Bordj Kédir. . and you. . give me a minute. . you can take the bus to Tiaret or the one to Mascara, doesn’t matter. . You need to take the Ouargla bus and from there you take the caravan that goes to El Goléa. . and you. . you need to hitchhike the rest of the way to — where was it again?” I repeated the name pronouncing it carefully. “Aïn what. .?” He said as he hurried over to pick a fight with another scarecrow who was cutting in on his turf. “Aïn Deb? Yeah, yeah. . it’s like I said.” And he left me standing there in the mud and the chaos.
It was all exactly the way Rachel had described it in his diary. The military convoys, the roadblocks, the police, the deserted roads, the stupefying silence, the bus driver, foot to the floor, not looking left or right, the passengers so scared they were throwing up. The only difference was that it was bucketing down and wind whipped at us on the near side. At every bend, the wheels of the bus hung over the cliff. If the terrorists don’t kill us, the bus will. Or the cold. We stopped in a tiny village that looked like it had died out with the last dinosaur. Not a man or a ghost, nothing but shapeless figures muffled up so you could hardly see their faces. The guy in the café served us scalding hot coffee, took our money and disappeared. I had to change busses in Sétif, but things there were more efficient than they’d been in Algiers. In Sétif, the self-appointed guide only charged me five dinar to tell me, “all the blue mini-busses go to Bordj Kédir, you can’t miss it.” In Bordj Kédir I managed to find a taxi driver who was prepared to take me closer to Aïn Deb for a reasonable price. His Peugeot 403 looked like nothing I’d ever seen. “There’s something strange going on out in Aïn Deb,” he told me, “people coming and going all the time. . it’s weird.” “What people?” I asked, “What are they looking for?” He stared at me but said nothing. Maybe he didn’t trust me, maybe he didn’t understand me, I was talking to him in my best pidgin French with a thick sink-estate Arabic accent. I have to say I didn’t really understand him. I assumed that he was talking about terrorists, because he was looking around him all the time like he was expecting an ambush. He dropped me off at a crossroads of two flooded dirt tracks you could barely see in the darkness. To the left, the path climbed steeply, to the right, it ran downhill. “It’s that way. . about three kilometres.” He said, at least that’s what I understood from him pointing to the left and waving three fingers in my face. “Kilometre” is international, it didn’t need translating. He disappeared back into the darkness, his headlights turned off. I took a deep breath and slogged uphill through the driving rain, but at the least the wind was now whipping at my arse.
Anyway, long story short, I arrived in Aïn Deb half dead from exhaustion, hunger, and thirst, soaked to the skin, both arms pulled from their sockets by aunt Sakina’s suitcase. And to top it all I’d caught a dose of flu. If it was like this in the camps, I’d volunteer to be gassed straight off, I thought, as the night got blacker and up there, on the hill, where Rachel had once stood, lost, the wind blew harder. It nearly sent me toppling into the abyss, but, with my big emigrant’s suitcase to weigh me down, I only flailed a bit.
Then, suddenly, I wondered what kind of welcome I would get. I hadn’t written, I hadn’t phoned. I hadn’t even thought about it, the trip was spur of the moment, because of the money Ophélie had sent me. Who cares, I thought, now that papa and maman and Rachel were all dead, I had no ties to Aïn Deb. I was a stranger turning up unexpectedly. But I was also a son of the village, following in my brother’s footsteps, in search of my father, my mother, our truth.
You could barely see the village from the hill. I waited for the next flash of lightning to get my bearings. I bounded down the hill like a sky-diver. At some point, as a flash of lightning lit up the sky, I spotted smoke rising from chimneys. I had finally arrived.