Generosity: An Enhancement (6 page)

All eight of them grow an inch more alert. John stumbles through another half a sentence then backs off, claiming the rest of the entry is too rough to share. “Roughness is the only thing
worth
sharing,” Russell claims. The others flip through their pages, eyes down, stripped of their art-student élan.

No volunteers. Maybe it’s suburban diffidence, the Islands of the Blessed deferring to the edge of the scorched Sahara. Or maybe they’re just soaking in the glow of this woman, her eerie contentment. They shuffle their journals, glancing sidelong, checking to see if they’ve made her up.

“We’re reading out loud?” Thassa asks. Her glee confers with everyone. “May I go next?”

Before Stone can wonder how she learned her modal verbs better than the native speakers, she starts her entry. Her voice is one of those mountain flutes, somehow able to weave a second melody around the one it plays. Russell misses the gist of the words, he’s so wrapped up in the cadence of the sentences. It’s something out of the dawn of myth, set in a Chicago all but animist. One thing worth telling a total stranger, and the thing is this: an ancient woman, hoisting her aluminum walker up the Grand Staircase of the Cultural Center at the rate of one step a minute.

The ascent is glacial, the staircase infinite, the climber a Wednesday-afternoon Sisyphus mounting toward the world’s largest Tiffany dome. The worn marble steps droop like cloth under the feet of a century of ghosts. But every word of Thassa’s description lifts the climber toward the light. By the third step, Russell realizes he’s never looked hard at anyone. By the top of the stairs, a sharp blue filament of need makes him want to see what will happen to the species, long after he’s dead.

“Shit,” Sue Weston says, when Thassa is done. “Girlfriend? You expect me to read mine, after that?”

They all laugh, and laughing, Russell remembers to breathe. Roberto Muñoz shudders in his loose flak jacket, rubs his shaved, plum-colored head with one cupped palm. “Thank you for that,” he murmurs. “Serious thanks. Makes me look forward to getting decrepit.” He shoots Thassa a look. “How old are you, anyway?”

She’s twenty-three, it turns out, give or take an era.

The others read, while the air is still jazzed with the colors of that ascent. They compete for approval, each of them fueled by Thassa’s encouraging nods. Affection threatens to replace all other texts. Algeria is nowhere, and Chicago a place just now become visible.

The night ends before they get a chance to take a look at the assignment from
Make Your Writing Come Alive
. Russell scrambles to summarize Frederick P. Harmon’s thesis:

Unless you care for the people in your story the way you want your reader to, all the description in the world will arrive stillborn.

Nobody cares. They’re all too busy grooming and teasing one another. As the group packs up, Mason assigns them all nicknames. Kiyoshi becomes Invisiboy. There’s Artgrrl Weston and Princess Heavy Hullinger. John Thornell makes a born Spock. Adam becomes the Joker and Roberto, the Thief. Mason christens himself Counterstrike and declares that Russell Stone will hereafter be known as Teacherman. Only Thassadit gives him pause. He studies her, timid in her amused return gaze. “Hello,
Dalai
!” Then he corrects himself: “No, no. I know who you are. Miss Generosity.”

Teacherman has to wave the grade book to get their attention.
“Remember to e-mail your new pieces by midnight tomorrow.” The Joker and Artgrrl moan like cartoon characters caught in an ambush. Russell assigns the next topic as if he hasn’t been thinking about it for the last twenty-four hours, arranging and rearranging the words like a carpet of forest leaves hiding a pit trap.
Convince someone that they wouldn’t want to grow up in your hometown.

Des Plaines, Terre Haute, Buffalo Grove: the perils of home are many, and the rewards slim. Stone reads all about the top hazards, tedium chief among them. “If Wheaton were a reality show,” says Mason’s piece, “the sponsors would have crashed it halfway through the pilot.” Close behind come isolation, bigotry, aimlessness, crushing homogeny, commercial blight, crimes against every known aesthetic, and the terminal malaise of abundance. Charlotte Hullinger writes, “I spent my childhood simmering in a satellite dish.” You know the place. A hometown now opening in a development near you.

Now come by train, a five-year-old from Sétif, into the swarming Agha Station, Algiers. Grow up in a sprawling suburban maze uphill from the port, in the sun-disintegrating, low-bid, postwar high-rises of that repeatedly despoiled recumbent odalisque,
Alger la blanche
. Postwar? Prewar. Midwar, now and always. Holy war.
La sale guerre
. Half a century of war that has emptied the country of a third of its people. The zeal of recent independence has turned on itself, and the state manufactures new enemies everywhere. The Islamic backlash against kleptocrat tyrants escalates into a mass movement. The separatist Berber Spring comes and goes, not so much suppressed as deferred into a simmering Berber Summer.
Reculer pour mieux sauter
 . . .

The world’s most promising new state has gone stillborn. The girl knows the problem. Her parents map it out, every night, in hushed voices over dinner. A century and a half of the colonized mind has spewed out tribalism with a vengeance, but without any noble cause this time. Dress, words, facial hair: every trait declares allegiance, intended or not. A generation into the country’s third major linguectomy, words are again a capital offense. When her father slips into French while lecturing to his university engineering students—
et donc, voilà
—he’s publicly censured. Her mother, a document translator for the national oil company Sonatrach, gets hissed at one afternoon
by a small chorus on a Bab el-Oued bus for her neckline and bare hair, and when she complains to a patrolling policeman, he fines her for rabble-rousing.

Yes, the girl has her music lessons, her family seaside picnics, even her horse riding on holidays with cousins in Little Kabylia. Some days, the city still rises up like a dream of jumbled white from the azure Mediterranean. But destiny runs mostly backward, in Algiers. Birth rates soar and housing collapses. Corruption outpaces every industry; just walking down the street requires a payoff. Education starts to gutter, and as the girl enters second grade, the entire cobbledup system reaches the brink. The Islamic Salvation Front threatens to sweep into power. Then the
Pouvoir
cancels all elections.

Real darkness settles in, a decade of it. Her mother instructs the girl and her brother never to sit next to each other on the bus or walk through the market together. Many of the nightly massacres occur in mountain villages, remote and unregistered. But murder—nameless, ecumenical—makes itself at home even in the capital, strolling downhill from the Casbah, spreading through the French quarter, wandering impudently all the way up to the grim joke of the Martyrs Monument.

The killers are many and generous. They massacre for any reason, even on one another’s behalf. The Islamic Salvation Front, the Islamic Salvation Army, the Armed Islamic Group, the Islamic Armed Movement, the National Democratic Rally, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat: new charters by the week. Devout versus secular, traditionalist versus Western, Arab versus Kabyle . . . Whole villages disappear under cover of dark. Neighbors kill neighbors over old scores, then trick out the corpse to make it look political. A corpse can be ordered for a handful of dinars.

The elites flee the country for Casablanca, Tunis, or Marseilles. Thassa’s mother’s brother escapes to the vast minimum-security wastelands of the Parisian banlieue, where he finds a job with Public Assistance. He phones his Algiers kin with magical accounts of buying bread in a boulangerie without fear of retribution. The girl’s father’s sister gives up her prosperous dental clinic to become a groundskeeper in the Montreal botanical gardens. The girl’s own parents—the last cosmopolitan Algerians not on a boat somewhere—resolve to leave when the death toll reaches eighty thousand. Then they say
ninety. Then one hundred. They’re still there when the deaths hit one thousand a week. They are the victims of congenital hope. They can’t break themselves of that old habit, faith. Not religious faith, which they long ago consigned to the realm of vicious myth. Faith in their friends and neighbors. Belief in the average human.

The girl enters secondary school. Her world shrinks down to her classroom and her home. But the world of books opens to her, without borders. She, her brother, and her mother travel together to Dib’s Tlemcen, Yacine’s Bône, even Duras’s Saigon. The three of them perform amateur re-creations for her father’s entertainment. The crudest imaginary venue is a respite from Algiers.

Her engineer father waits for humanity’s return to reason. He makes guarded, deniable appeals to his lecture classes, slipped in between load calculations and stress analysis. He cheers the amnesty programs and the gradual surrender of the guerrillas. He quietly champions the new elections. His innate optimism begins to pay off. He pictures the end of the endless war.

Then the Kabyle singer Lounès Matoub is killed. The country spirals into new violence, and Thassa’s father suffers a conversion.

He writes a letter to the editor of
El Watan
: real democracy demands official status for Berber. Tamazight must be taught in public schools. All the deaths of the last decade will mean nothing without a return of that first tongue.

His stand is moderate enough, given recent years. But two weeks after the letter appears in print, students find Thassa’s father at his university desk, facedown on a pile of fluid dynamics exams, two holes the size of finches’ eyes high up in the back of his skull.

Thassa’s mother collapses. She’s two months recovering. When she can function again, Zamra Amzwar packs and takes her two teenage children to her brother’s in Paris. She finds work in a community health clinic: light clerical. Just until. She’s still working there over a year later, when the gendarmes near Tizi Ouzou, back home, kill a nineteen-year-old named Guermouh Massinissa. During the ten days of riots that follow, mother and children tune in nightly to accounts relayed from Radio Algerienne as scores of protesting Kabyle teens are gunned down.

Four months later, a doctor at the clinic notices Zamra Amzwar’s jaundice and discovers her distended gallbladder. A six-centimeter
pancreatic tumor has already spread cells through every system in Thassa’s mother’s body. Seventeen weeks later she dies, listening to her daughter read aloud the news from Algiers.

The Berber student fits all this into three pages of eerily idiomatic English. Her second journal assignment: why you might not want to grow up in my hometown.
But still,
she writes,
it is so beautiful there. I wish you could see it, up close, from the harbor. It would fill your heart. So crazy with life,
chez nous.

True, then: both of Thassa Amzwar’s parents are dead. Dead of identity and too much hope. And the daughter is either on newly discovered antidepressants or so permanently traumatized she’s giddy. Her writing has that open confidence of a child who might still become an astronaut when she grows up. All her sounds ring, all colors shine. Crippling colonial inheritance, religious psychosis, nighttime raids: she’s swept along by the stream, marveling. Her words are naked. Her clauses sprout whatever comes just before wings.

Stone’s hands shake as he inks up her assignment. He uses a green marker to highlight great phrases. (
Never red
, the pedagogical texts insist.) By the end, her paper is streaked over in ghostly emerald. Even my photocopy looks like a kelp farm.