I think it’s the place where a living person can get closest to the sun without leaving the earth. According to my childhood memories, at least. But these days I don’t like it anymore, that place, and I dread the day when I’ll be obliged to go back there to bury Mama — who doesn’t seem to want to die. At her age, passing away doesn’t make sense anymore. One day, I asked myself a question that you and your people have never asked yourselves, even though it’s the first clue to the puzzle. Your hero’s mother — where’s her grave? Yes, over in Hadjout, but where, exactly? Who’s ever visited it? Who’s ever located the old people’s home where she lived in the book? Who’s run his finger over the inscription on her gravestone? Nobody I know of. I myself have looked for that grave, but I’ve never found it. There were a bunch of people in the village with similar names, but the exact name of the murderer’s mother is still unknown. Yes, of course, there’s a possible explanation: Some of our people even decolonized the colonists’ cemeteries, and you’d often see street kids playing ball with disinterred skulls, I know. That’s practically become a tradition here when colonists run away. They often leave us three things: words, roads, and bones … Except that I’ve never found your hero’s mother’s grave. Did he lie about his origins? I believe so. That would explain his legendary indifference and his impossible chilliness in a country flooded with sunlight and covered with fig trees. Maybe his mother wasn’t what people think she was. I know I’m just blathering here, but my suspicion is well founded. Your hero talks about that funeral in such detail, he seems to want to produce a fable, not a report. It’s like a handmade reconstruction, not a private confidence. A too-perfect alibi, not a memory. Do you realize what it would mean if I could prove what I’m telling you, if I could prove your hero wasn’t even present at his mother’s funeral? Years later, I questioned some people from Hadjout, and guess what? Nobody remembers that name, nobody remembers a woman who died in an old folks’ home or a procession of Christians in the sun. The only mother who proves this story’s not an alibi is mine, and she’s still at home, sweeping the courtyard around our lemon tree.
Do you want me to reveal my secret — or rather our secret, Mama’s and mine? Here it is: One terrible night, over in Hadjout, the moon obliged me to finish the job your hero began in the sun. Anyone can blame his stars or his mother. That’s a ditch I dig all the time. My god, I’m really feeling bad! I look at you and I wonder how trustworthy you are. Will you believe another version of the facts, a version previously unknown? Ah, I’m hesitating, I’m not sure. No, look, not now, we’ll try another time, another day. Where to go, when you’re already dead? I’m rambling. I think you want facts, not parentheses, right?
After Musa’s murder, while we were still living in Algiers, my mother converted her anger into a long, spectacular mourning period that won her the sympathy of the neighbor women and a kind of legitimacy that allowed her to go out on the street, mingle with men, work in other people’s houses, sell spices, and do housework without running the risk of being judged. Her femininity had died, and with it men’s suspicions. I saw little of her during that time. I’d spend entire days waiting for her while she walked all over the city, conducting her investigation into Musa’s death, questioning people who knew him, recognized him, or crossed his path for the last time in the course of that year, 1942. Some neighbor ladies kept me fed, and the other children in the neighborhood showed me the respect you give seriously ill or broken people. I found my status — the “dead man’s brother” — almost agreeable; in fact, I didn’t begin to suffer from it until I was approaching adulthood, when I learned to read and realized what an unjust fate had befallen my brother, who died in a book.
After his passing, the way my time was structured changed. I lived my life in absolute freedom, which lasted exactly forty days. The funeral didn’t take place until then, you see. The neighborhood imam must have found the whole thing disturbing. Missing persons don’t have funerals very often … For Musa’s body was never found. As I gradually learned, my mother looked for my brother everywhere, in the morgue, at the police station in Belcourt, and she knocked on every door. To no avail. Musa had vanished, he was absolutely, perfectly, incomprehensibly dead. There had been two of them in that place of sand and salt, him and his killer, just those two. About the murderer we knew nothing. He was el-roumi, the foreigner, the stranger. People in the neighborhood showed my mother his picture in the newspaper, but for us he was the spitting image of all the colonists who’d grown fat on so many stolen harvests. There was nothing special about him, except for the cigarette stuck in the corner of his mouth, and his features were instantly forgettable, easy to confuse with those of all his kind. My mother visited lots of cemeteries, pestered my brother’s former comrades, and tried to speak to your hero, who no longer addressed himself to anything but a scrap of newspaper found under a mat in his cell. Her efforts were in vain, but they revealed her talent for idle chatter, and her mourning period evolved into a surprising comedy, a marvelous act she put on and refined until it became a masterpiece. Virtually widowed for the second time, she turned her personal drama into a kind of business that required all who came near her to make an effort of compassion. She invented a range of illnesses in order to gather the whole tribe of female neighbors around her whenever she had so much as a migraine headache. She often pointed a finger at me as if I was an orphan, and she withdrew her affection from me very quickly, replacing it with the narrowed eyes of suspicion and the hard gaze of admonition. Oddly enough, I was treated like the dead brother and Musa like the survivor whose coffee was hot and ready at the end of the day, whose bed was made, and whose footsteps were guessed at, even coming from very far away, from downtown Algiers and the neighborhoods that were closed to us at the time. I was condemned to a secondary role because I had nothing in particular to offer. I felt guilty for being alive but also responsible for a life that wasn’t my own! I was the guardian, the assas, like my father, watching over another body.
I also remember that weird funeral. Crowds of people; discussions lasting well into the night; us children, attracted by the lightbulbs and the many candles; and then an empty grave and a prayer for the departed. After the religious waiting period of forty days, Musa had been declared dead — swept away by the sea — and therefore the absurd service was performed, in accordance with Islam’s provisions for the drowned. Then everyone left, except for my mother and me.
It’s morning, I’m cold even under the blanket, I’m shivering. Musa’s been dead for weeks. I hear the outside sounds — a passing bicycle, old Tawi’s coughing, the squeaking of chairs, the raising of iron shutters. In my head, every voice corresponds to a woman, a time of life, a concern, a mood, or even the kind of wash that’s going to be hung out that day. There’s a knocking at our door. Some women have come to visit Mama. I know the script by heart: a silence, followed by sobs, then some hugs and kisses; still more tears; then one of the women lifts the curtain that divides the room in two, looks at me, smiles distractedly, and grabs the coffee jar or something else. The scene continues until sometime around noon. While it’s going on, I enjoy a great deal of freedom, but it’s also slightly annoying to be so invisible. Only in the afternoon, after the ritual of the scarf soaked in orange-flower water and wrapped around her head, after some interminable moaning and a long, very long silence, does Mama remember me and take me in her arms. But I know it’s Musa she wants to find there, not me. And I let her do it.