When you grow up on the estate, you learn to improvise. Dragging my suitcase, I went and knocked on Mohamed’s door. He was the son of the local shoemaker, we were friends back when I was a kid. I remembered people used to call him Mimed and I don’t remember seeing him going barefoot back in the day. I figured this was the best thing to do — I didn’t want to panic the whole village. The memory of the massacre must still haunt them. As I crept through the village I prayed to God that Mimed was still alive. At this hour — it was after 8 P.M. — the good people would have recited Isha’a, the last prayer, and would be sleeping the sleep of the just.
I’ll spare you the details, but fuckwit that I am, I scratched at the door instead of knocking properly and that set off all kinds of furtive goings-on and terrified whispers inside, then I nearly sent them into a panic because, instead of introducing myself properly, I whispered: “Mimed, open up, it’s, Malrich. . ” Malrich is what they call me in France, it doesn’t mean anything to anyone here in the bled, they probably thought it was a secret password or something. But everything worked itself out in the end. I introduced myself properly: “It’s Malek, Hassan and Aïcha’s son, Rachel’s brother, open the door for God’s sake.” Mohamed didn’t recognise me, and I didn’t recognise him. It took some time and some memory jogging before we could say, “It’s you, Malek, Cheïkh Hassan’s son, I can’t believe it! It’s you, Mimed, Tayeb the shoemaker’s son, I can’t believe it!” He was expecting an old man and here I was, this young guy; I was expecting a young man and what I found was an old man with a swarm of kids bawling and clinging to his ankles. The poor things were pissing themselves they were so scared. He kissed me on both cheecks and brought me inside. The kids magically disappeared, I could hear them on the other side of the curtain. His wife, an old woman who was still young and healthy, gave me some leftover couscous, some dates and some milk, then she disappeared for a second and came back with a rug, a blanket and a pillow and made a bed up for me in front of the fire. I ate like an animal. Through a gap in the curtain, the kids were staring at me. Poor things never seen a stranger, they didn’t know such things existed. Mohamed threw a white burnous over my shoulders then stoked the fire. Gradually, I came back to life a bit. Since it was really late for them—9 o’clock — and since I was dead on my feet, they said good night and went back to their room. I blew out the oil lamp and got under the blanket which smelled wonderfully of mountain sheep and straw. The fire sputtered in the grate, throwing off sparks. It was beautiful. Beside the fireplace, in an old scorched basket by the fire was a cat with her litter. I think she smiled at me, her eyes shining in the darkness. It really was beautiful.
Outside, the wind howled as hard as it could, rain came in flurries and the village dogs, smelling an unfamiliar scent, my scent, were barking as loudly as they could. I knew, I remembered: if they were pups of the dogs we used to have, they wouldn’t stop until dawn, not until the goats were let out and bounded down into the valley, to the roaring torrent of the wadi. I felt suddenly happy. Everything seemed innocent, so incredibly permanent that you forget everything, forget your own troubles and the troubles of the world.
I slept like a baby that night. It had been a long time.
MALRICH’S DIARY, 16 DECEMBER 1996
It had been a terrible day. I’d done just what Rachel had done, gone from house to house, drunk coffee after coffee, babbled as best I could and in the end — partly because I felt shattered and needed to get the hell out and partly because mourning does not wait on twilight, Mimed took me to the cemetery. The sun, which had risen early was sinking now, framed by big black clouds but still visible, the wind had died away. The air stinging my lungs was bitterly cold.
This, then, was the martyrs’ section where my parents were buried. The grass had grown over it, the whitewash on the stones had faded and they were covered in mud. Now the martyrs were like the rest of the dead, there was nothing to distinguish them from the others, they had joined the rest of the cemetery where the people who died of natural causes were buried, or maybe, more rightly, those who’d died of natural causes had come to join the victims to shoulder some of their pain. Soon they would be united in the same dust. You couldn’t see the small monument erected by the authorities any more, all the dead were now subject to the same power, to time which obliterates everything.
Mimed stood off to one side and left me to myself. He bowed his head and prayed while standing in front of my parent’s grave. I tried to meditate, to remember happy times from my childhood with papa and maman. I couldn’t seem to do it, but figured I’d soon get the hang of this meditation thing, Rachel got so good at it he went round philosophising like a council of imams. Suddenly I felt a stabbing pain, a spasm ripping through my guts. What had been vague, something I’d known only secondhand from reading Rachel’s diary, something I’d kept private, suppressed, carefully contained, was now here before my eyes: my parents’ graves, the graves of papa, of maman, of our neighbours, the graves of childhood friends, of babies I had not seen born or grow up, all of them butchered like dogs by God knows who. My head exploded, I started to sob, to scream, I couldn’t think straight, I fell on my knees and started to beat my head against the ground. It was all so unfair, so strange, so many things had been hushed up, and everywhere I could smell the stink of injustice, twisting the knife in the wound. I didn’t know what to do. Then suddenly, a sort of madness took me, I wanted smash things, I was filled with hate — I hated myself, I hated the whole world, hated Rachel and this country and these people. I hated the way things were. I hated the people of Aïn Deb for living in silence, for tending that silence like a sacred flame, like a barrier protecting them from themselves. I despised them for treating truth, treating life as things that could be hidden, hushed up, for bringing children into a life of lies, of pretence, of ignorance and amnesia. I am paying the price. Papa never told us anything, and when his turn came, Rachel never told me anything, the authorities tell us nothing, they have broken our spirit. We are helpless, pitiful, weak, ready to make any concession, agree to any cover-up, collude in any cowardice. We’re dead men, we’re sheep, we’re concentration-camp prisoners. I hated my father for making us pariahs. I hated God through whose will things were this way, God who, almighty, invisible, serene, extends across the universe, who doesn’t hear our cries, doesn’t answer our prayers. Well, fuck Him, His truth is not our truth, and our truth is not His. He is not one of us. That’s why I want this diary to be read by people all over the world, people like me, like us. I’ve nothing to hide, I don’t want to hide anything, I want people to see me for what I am, to know who I am and where I come from.
I struggled to my feet, raied my arms and shouted: “My name is Malrich, I am the son of the SS officer Hans Schiller, a man guilty of genocide. I am carrying the weight of the greatest tragedy the world has ever known, I am its repository, and I’m ashamed, I’m afraid and I want to die! I’m begging for your help, because no one told me anything, all of this has been visited on me and I don’t know why. My brother killed himself, my parents and their neighbours were murdered and I don’t know why or by whom, I’m alone, more alone than anyone in the world.”
It was then that I felt rage, black rage, grip my insides, I had no right to feel sorry for myself, the only truth is Nakam—revenge. I hated the Islamists, those Nazi bastards, I wanted to kill every last one of them, to kill their wives, their children, their grandchildren, their parents, to bulldoze their houses, their mosques, their bunkers, break up their sleeper cells, hound them into the next world and crush them before God Himself, the same God they claim to represent. I wanted fireworks like on Bastille Day, to celebrate their deaths our rebirth. Why are they like this, God? Why have You made them like this? Who can save them? Who will save their wives, their children? Who will save us from them?