Harraga (24 page)

Scheherazade abruptly got to her feet. The night porter was about to begin his shift and would discover she was absent at roll-call. After six pm, the price of his silence is exorbitant.

She promised to come back and see me.

Algiers airport is unlike any in the world
. All the dangerous contraptions the commercial aviation industry has devised ever since Icarus first flew too close to the sun are to be found there. With all its junk and all its gaping wounds I can’t understand how it’s still standing. The building is all splints and plasters. It’s a miracle the planes still remember how to fly. I had a knot in my stomach as I stepped inside this beleaguered world that looks like a national disaster and where a sizeable subset of humanity rushes, shrieks, weeps, jostles and gesticulates. After several collisions and copious sweating, I found myself standing in front of a breeze-block barrier next to the public lavatories, a mouldering area where the ambient temperature was several hundred degrees. Above the low wall a cardboard sign suspended from the ceiling was emblazoned in red with the words
Bienvenu, Information
in twelve different languages (or simply repeated twelve times). I stepped forward. Behind the counter, a phalanx of bungling idiots were playing a game a little like ‘Battleships’. The aim is to destroy the maximum number of planes with the minimum number of bombs in the shortest possible time. Brazenly, I addressed them, but they spoke a language I could not quite place, something gruff, halting, punctuated by sprays of black spittle and accompanied by threatening gestures. Nearby, sitting cross-legged on blocks of wood, girls wearing
pagnes
and bonnets were shelling peas, grinding millet or knitting mittens. They were not happy, something is bothering them so they adopt the pose of scorned lovers. I often prefer to view things and people through a distorting prism, I find it makes them easier to understand, they prove to be different to how they appear. The leader of this tribe, easily identifiable by her headdress, her sceptre and a fine collection of pendants dangling from her neck, her ears, even her navel, looked daggers at me, but when I explained that I had not come to disturb their glorious rituals but to see my cousin Rachid, a pilot, about a family matter of the utmost importance, she flashed me a lewd smile. I was treated to a volley of crude sniggers and a barrage of innuendo. Rachid clearly has something of a reputation among his fellow pilots who envy him and covet his many ‘cousins’. I squeezed my eyes closed and imagined them all being strangled by King Kong and, emerging from this therapy, I found myself face to face with a man in his priestly garb, a sort of evangelical minister with a firm but gentle voice. He had appeared from a hut behind the stockade. Beneath his penetrating gaze, I felt childish and naive.

‘What do you want, woman?’

I was safe, this fellow spoke my dialect of Latin. I explained myself again, employing broken Arabic the better to flatter his eloquence and get the information I needed at a bargain price. The minister gazed at me for a long time, peered searchingly into my eyes until he could see the colour of my knickers, then he nodded, shrugged, bustled about behind his pulpit, scribed a few hieroglyphics with the aid of a golden flint, mumbled some incantations into a handset and in the time it takes to roast a lizard over a slow flame, a knight from an operetta appeared in full regalia whom I immediately recognised: fortysomething, pot-bellied, a cheery fellow, he went by the name of Rachid. When he saw me, impeccably dressed in my immaculate chasuble, he unsheathed the smile reserved for fine ladies, a solemn, sophisticated, nonchalant rictus that twitched at the corners of his mouth. Scheherazade was right, the handsome hunk was a miserable loser.

I needed to quickly befriend him if I was to achieve my goal: to find Chérifa safe and sound.

True to the dictates of his shallow, callous nature, he immediately attempted to seduce me. Usually, I am brutal with self-styled Lotharios who try to chat me up, but in this case I decided to be tactful:

‘I’m in a relationship with a sort of Bluebeard who’s planning to cut my throat, but if you want to try your luck in twenty or thirty years’ time, and assuming I’m still up to it, I’ll willingly give myself to you for free.’

The man’s a chancer. He said, ‘You’re on.’

Via a rickety metal fire escape, we headed down to the terrace café like a couple of travellers each with his own map. Panoramic views of the hinterland, lifeless suburbs sporting a shock of state-of-the-art satellite dishes, abandoned building sites with girders soaring into empty space and cranes slowly rusting, the motorway sweeping impetuously away with its miscellaneous cars and vehicles and, in the distant mountains, a raging forest fire. This is the ravaged, windswept landscape of Dinotopia, where bellowing pterodactyls take wing and tyrannosaurs breathe fire. The magic of the IMF has done its work here and we have been sent back to the Middle Ages filled with fearsome
djinns
and comical mendicants. Below us sprawled the airport, the hangars, the ramshackle planes lined up with their noses to the wind, the runway with its puddles, its potholes, its airstairs, its windsocks; the ballet of baggage handlers. I can’t begin to describe the strange things that were happening on the ground, light-fingers were fluttering and filching and in broad daylight. Oh, yes, and there were policemen, dozens of them everywhere.

‘I’m listening,’ I said, before he forgot himself.

Though I know it all too well, as I listened to him regale me with tales of his conquests, I was reminded how intelligent imbecility needs to sound if it is to prosper. I’ve never heard the like. He’d met Chérifa in the café next to Air Algérie downtown. His heart had skipped a beat, the sight of a Lolita in distress moved our gallant hero. He had qualms, but he did what he felt was his duty. He is prepared to try anything once, and he likes to show off his trophies. He felt particularly proud of this catch: a pregnant, abandoned girl – what better? Good lord, he paraded her around the Great South, flying her in his rusty crate to Tamanrasset, Djanet, Timimoun, Illizi, tourist destinations for those of us from the Great North, sand upon sand in millions of tonnes, heat capable of melting stones, clumps of palm trees here and there to indicate areas of human habitation surrounded by the vast immensity and by silver-tongued men with sombreros and Toyotas who pretend that they have a timetable to respect. That little wretch Chérifa manages to commandeer bus drivers, pilots and army officers, while I’m having trouble making ends meet! Chérifa, of course, was delighted; she laughed at everything, marvelled at everything, was thrilled to see the white-hot sky floating above the boundless, white-hot sands and, between the two, the Blue Men, those magnificent nomads, trailed by gentle, gallant dromedaries across the rolling dunes. Dear God, I picture her there and I feel distraught, how could she have thought life in the desert would be fun? Then, of course, she started having pains, vomiting, thrashing about.

‘I can guess what comes next! You tossed her aside in a region so vast that people get lost inside their own homes.’

‘How dare you suggest such a thing! She left of her own accord . . . I . . .’

‘She’s not even seventeen years old, she knows nothing about life, she still believes in fairies, she’ll swallow any nonsense, but even she realised that you were the biggest cretin of all time. I’m just dumbfounded that it took her a couple of days to tell it to you straight.’

‘I . . . I . . .’

‘Go to hell!’

Going to court is out of the question, Chérifa is known to the police as a prostitute and she would probably be blamed for the battle between press and police at the university halls of residence. As a woman, she has no rights, as a prostitute she has a lot of explaining to do, as an unmarried teenage mother, she deserves the death penalty. Godforsaken ignorant fucking
bled
! Besides, what judge would listen to me? I’m a woman, I’m a spinster, a troublemaker, I don’t wear the veil, I don’t own a burka, I walk with my head held high, I give as good as I get, and in the eyes of their infernal laws Chérifa is nothing to me. And I have no one to sign for me.

I crawled home. Emptiness, which after all is my universe, exploded inside my head; I couldn’t see, I couldn’t hear, I couldn’t breathe. I ceased to exist. Everything I loved, everything I had dreamed about with all my heart, everything I missed to the point that I turned myself into a nunlike automaton had miraculously come to life in the form of that uneducated, ungrateful, emotionally unstable girl. Life tore through me like a tornado through a cave. I gave her everything, she rejected everything and the breath of life that her presence inspired in me has leaked away like air from a burst tyre. I was angry with myself. I was angry with her, but I also saw a kind of fulfilment in that fundamental imbalance, I felt both uplifted and reduced to nothing, a nebulous middle ground between the happiness I had finally glimpsed and the perpetual, unending sadness of our life.

Where are you Chérifa? How far can your life take you when there is nothing to hold you back? Wherever you are, if you can read my thoughts, you should know that Rampe Valée, the haunted house and the heart of Lamia will always be open to you.

It’s time to go home and get ready to wait; eternity is a long time.

A bird is a thing of beauty

But, alas, a bird has wings

Which, just as they serve to alight

So too they serve to take flight.

That is the tragedy of birds.

I was inspired when I wrote those words.

Act III

To Live or to Die

All that is begun must end

This we have known since the dawn of time.

Already to speak is to be silent

And to be born is already to die.

What matters that God wills

And the Devil laughs?

Our reason for being

Our incessant lunacy

Is doggedly to believe

In the impossible.

That which is finished is invited

To begin again

And thus

Living is possible.

In my stupor
I see everything in shades of grey, a shabby, squalid grey. The world seems a thousand leagues away, or somewhere off to one side, I’m not sure. I pass my days without seeing it. I remember that the world existed once, that as the result of some accident, some curse, some wasting disease, I have been exiled from it. I allow myself to drift, it is futile to cling to anything in a world that is crumbling. I lash out between the falls, I rant and rave between convulsions, I pull myself together but it doesn’t last and the pain after the calm is more intense.

I watch television the way you might leaf through a book in the dark, I listen to the radio, but all it does is buzz in my ear and when I retreat into silence a terrible roaring fills my head and turmoil crushes my heart. At the hospital, I manhandle the kids as though they were my own brats and their mothers tear them from my arms. They are suspicious of me, there are rumours of children being stolen, clapped in irons and sold at auction, rented out to beggar women, shipped off to war zones. Some are found alive, others dead, but most of them are never seen again. And once more I am faced with the Dantesque vision of a ­starless sky, a planet with no children, and – on the small scale that is my world in the arse-end of Rampe Valée – a house with no Lolita.

How did I ever manage to live without my Louiza, my sister, when the absence of Chérifa is killing me? In me, the same causes do not produce the same effects, each time the result is worse. Either I’m starting to show my age or I’m sick and tired of watching my life draining away in torrents, Papa, Maman, Yacine, Sofiane, Chérifa and everything else that’s ebbed and gone: people, little pleasures, daydreams in the moonlight, even the kittens that purred on the sofa have grown into fat alley cats that keep us awake at night. Dear God, how painful this life is!

I hate what I’ve become, I’m emotional, hysterical, quick to confuse things, too unbalanced to keep on an even keel, I’ve tipped into catatonia. I tell myself that reason is the antidote to these bouts of madness but even as I think this, it occurs to me that healing simply clears the ground for new contagion. God forbid I should have come to the point of finding my pleasure in pain, my freedom in captivity, my clarity in chaos, my tranquillity in turmoil. It’s a terrifying thought.

I began to search again, I’m not one to sit around doing nothing. Scheherazade visited less and less so I went and surprised her at the university at Ben–Aknoun. After all she might have heard something. Monsieur 235 went with me at a moment’s notice, his rustbucket of a bus spitting fumes and flames. I thought it might be a good idea for him to visit the halls of residence so he could keep his mother supplied with lady’s companions and – who knows? – might even find a lady for himself – or two, or three, or why not four, after all he is a Muslim, a religion that favours one-sided polygamy. Scheherazade’s rabbit hutch was minuscule, but absolutely charming; it would make a lovely cupboard in someone’s mansion. She was wearing slippers and a night cap, her eyes were red and her eyelids twitched. I was worried I had tired her out with all my questions, but no, she had been cramming, burning the candle at both ends, exams were looming and rumours were rife that quotas had been imposed by people in high places. She was a nervous wreck. I tried to reassure her: there have been all sorts of rumours since the programme of reform proposed by the
marabouts
that would spell triumph for cretinism, militant fundamentalism and galloping racism. I know all about these reforms, I was a nervous wreck myself. The ministry wants no more nurses, no more doctors, and certainly no more lab assistants and absolutely no . . . what else . . . oh, that’s right, no more people who can read and write! Apparently there are so many we don’t know what to do with them, but then suddenly we find out that actually we don’t have nearly enough and have to start churning them out again. Still the ministry ploughs ahead, slashing funding, turning a blind eye to negative results, opening new hospitals wherever it can find four walls, operating on the basis that hiring thirteen numskulls to the dozen is the perfect solution to rampant unemployment. Development has become a co-ordinated series of imbalances, or at least that’s what I heard on some deathly dull TV talk show. This makes sense if you already know how to walk, otherwise it might be best to stay sitting down – something armchair pundits are experts at. The real problem is that the restricted intake into the medical profession is based on the size of the population and not, as it should be, on the number of people who are actually ill; while the former is dwindling dangerously, the latter is growing exponentially. In such circumstances, it seems obvious that the way to calculate is not simply by adding zeroes, but the ministry refuses to acknowledge this, preferring to cling to the old methods that worked well back when the dead did not talk.