Harraga (12 page)

‘I'm not looking for advice on how to behave,' I snapped back, ‘I want you to tell me what you plan to do to find my idiot brother!'

‘We have our ways,' she whispered as though discussing assembling a neutron bomb in front of an audience of illiterates.

How dare she! I swear, I'll rip the bitch's heart out!

‘And what precisely are these “ways”?'

She glibly began to reel off the protocol, stabbing the air with her finger.

‘We draw up missing persons' files . . . we liaise with the authorities who in turn liaise with the relevant overseas organisations . . . um . . . we regularly chase up queries . . . we have meetings . . . we draw up a confidential annual report which we submit to the government . . .'

‘Why the secrecy? A missing person is a missing person, everyone knows that.'

‘Um . . . actually I said confidential, there's a difference.'

‘I realise that, but that doesn't change the fact that a missing person is a missing person.'

‘We . . . um . . . we are planning to set up a newsletter to be sent out to family members.'

‘Now that's a stroke of genius. A newsletter is a brilliant way of keeping patients warm.'

‘I suppose you can think of something better?' she snapped back, lips pursed.

‘I can actually. Toss a message in a bottle into the sea and go home to bed.'

 

This outburst calmed me a little. Maybe I should have told her that the only way to truly extricate this country from hell itself would be to toss the government into the sea and the wagging tail of the civil service with it. Then young people wouldn't dream of taking to the sea any more for fear of meeting them bobbing on the waves. But that's politics and politics is dangerous, I'm rather attached to my life and to my little job at the Hôpital Parnet. You have to understand that in this Mickey Mouse country, people have every right to complain, but they have no right to complain to the pen-pushers who work for the government. They're understandably nervous, given that they are constantly plagued by international organisations who want to know why they are cruel, scheming parasites and how so many poor wretches manage to disappear right under the noses of their families, their friends and the powers that be. It's a valid question, but it's not the only one that deserves an answer. No one can convince me that the Association aren't complicit in the whole thing. They act as a screen, they exist so that the administration can sidestep the issue. Who better than a delegation of shrewd women to blindside the bigwigs at the international organisations and force them to admit they were mistaken? These women have a trick or two up their sleeves, they can explain away anything – right down to a concierge's lumbago – and lay the blame on colonialism, imperialism, Zionism, the IMF and the machinations of
You Know Who
. What they can't tell you is how to comfort a decent, upstanding woman.

‘If you take into account the fact that those who resort to clandestine emigration do so in secret via underground networks often linked to multinational terrorist groups – which, by the way, are not necessarily the groups our friends in the West are quick to blame – and furthermore that as often as not they die in secret, then perhaps you might begin to understand just how difficult our work here is,' she said, suddenly pedantic.

I don't know whether she's planning to bore me for the whole evening or masturbate in front of me until cock crow. I need to wake her up.

‘What I understand is that young people are leaving because everything in this country, right down to the taps, is closed to them. Do you know many young people who enjoy captivity? And another thing, why do you refer to it as “clandestine emigration”, when a better phrase might be “mass exodus” . . . though “collective suicide” also has a ring to it.'

‘And what about you?' she squawks, twin harpoons darting from the eyes of this foul-mouthed goose. ‘What did you ever do to stop your brother from leaving the country?'

‘So you're saying that it's up to us, the prisoners, to free the young, to provide schools to emancipate them, work to give them some self-esteem, some goal in life beyond reciting poems for the hard of hearing, some hobbies other than the vicious, bloody pastime of enlisting with the army, the Islamic Salvation Front or – God forbid! – the Defenders of Truth?'

‘What are . . . you're talking gibberish!'

‘Well, I know what I mean.'

‘. . .'

This, then, was my first visit to the Association. Later visits were not what you might call a success. Whenever they saw me coming, they all ran away screaming, they all suddenly remembered some urgent meeting. My attitude was absurd, it was counterproductive. These minions don't need much excuse to bury a case file and yet there I was naively thinking that I simply had to motivate them efficiently. I took a different tack. To best a hypocrite, become a hypocrite. I tried to reinvent myself as the arch-defender of dignity and responsibility, as a woman proud of her new-found friends.

But to no avail: my mind refuses to play along, I still can't stand the sight of them. I thought about Chérifa. It drives me insane to think that she too might end up abandoned in this accursed country or wandering the streets of some port out in the wide world. The mere sight of these stout matrons sitting on their arses, these government lackeys licking their lips in the sunshine, this bloody farce plain for all to see, has me choking with rage. All in all, this was likely to be a grim encounter. I arrived with a solemn smile on my face and Chérifa on my arm looking every inch a queen.

‘So nice to see you again, my dears. How are you all? I feel confident that today you will be able to reassure me, to finally give me some news of my idiot brother.'

‘Sadly not, my dear friend.'

‘Excuse me?'

‘We have been a little behind schedule lately, you understand . . . We're expecting a delegation from the European Union . . . We're counting on their financial support . . . we're working on the files . . .'

‘What files?'

‘You know, the budget, the development plan, the meeting schedule, the press releases . . .'

‘And where does Sofiane come into all this?'

‘Set your mind at rest, he's in the database.'

‘The database?'

‘Yes, the database.'

‘The database. Well, you learn something new every day.'

‘Absolutely, the database of our dear disappeared. We will give a copy to the EU delegation who will integrate it into their own database. It's networking . . . you understand?'

‘Absolutely, people can disappear with a clear conscience as long as they are entered into the Great Database.'

‘Are you mocking me?'

‘I'll go one better, if someone doesn't stop me, I'll slap you.'

‘. . .'

I was beside myself. I honestly believe that some crimes are to be encouraged. If every petty king and princeling in this country was broken on the wheel together with all their miserable jesters, our young people might finally see the light. This is what I was thinking as I stomped back, eager to get home and smash some crockery. Crowds parted as I passed, frightened or shocked. Wimps and weaklings who feel women have no right to be angry, to be out of control, pitiful excuses for men. I tugged Chérifa by the sleeve, jostling her along. The poor thing's whimpers were heartbreaking.

 

I've decided that I'm done with the Association. I'll do my own search. I don't know how but I'll find a way. I'll hire some neighbourhood kid, some other harraga, encourage him to ‘burn a path' and find that idiot Sofiane and then . . . no, that's a stupid idea, I might as well pay for his trip, maybe he'll send me a postcard from Tangiers, from Marbella, from the great beyond. No, there's a better solution, I'll hire a retired cop, they're wily as foxes and some of them are honest. Late in life, they tend to recover some scraps of their lost humanity. I'd need to find one with a son who disappeared on the
harragas
' road, that way we can make common cause. I'll talk to Mourad, see if he knows anyone who might fit the bill. I . . . No, forget that, Mourad is no help, he gets me all muddled, with him it's always one dead end to another. I'm not about to forget that thing about bus stations in a hurry. I could put a classified ad in various newspapers, here, in Morocco, in Spain, wherever. ‘Missing Persons', I wonder whether the category still exists? I remember Papa used to read it avidly, he had a lot of old friends he hadn't heard from in ages. It's strange how, even in more peaceful times, people could easily disappear. Back then, it was a routine matter: Missing Persons were classified as casualties of colonialism,
harkis
who died in an ambush somewhere, case closed. What was even stranger was that some reappeared, alive, roaming the streets, badly injured and unable to explain why, only to find themselves arrested for petit-bourgeois vagrancy, thrown into the back of a truck and tossed out again three villages farther down the road. These days, you have to work hard just to keep track of your own whereabouts. And missing relatives are a dangerous business; you find yourself being interrogated about the shady dealings they were involved in, who was financing it, who was pulling strings, whether the International Organisations are aware of it. It turns into a huge rigmarole. You go to the police station to complain about the police or another branch of the civil service and come away charged with some cold case pulled at random from the Criminal Records Office.

‘You see what will happen if you don't keep a careful eye on the company your baby keeps?' I said, twisting Chérifa's arm.

‘Ow! Why would you wish something like that on us?'

‘What about you? You abandoned your parents, just like that idiot Sofiane, like all those morons who disappear, who run away instead of . . . of . . .'

Damn it! Suddenly I'm blubbing like a baby.

‘Instead of what?' asked Chérifa, overcome.

‘Instead of dying here, at home, with their families!'

‘Why do you always refer to him as “that idiot Sofiane”?'

‘Because to die far from your grave is pathetic, you stupid girl!'

 

The cold closed around me like the grave around a dead man. There is nothing to be said, nothing to be done, nothing to hope for. Evil goes about its business. In a hundred years, a thousand years, ten thousand years, when we are all dead and forgotten, life will reassert itself. Inexorably. Women and children will have their part. Right now, there are too many sermonisers, as many more Defenders of Truth, and so many cowards we haven't room enough to put them. Why do they have beards and warts on their heads when their heads serve no purpose? The question haunts me.

Chérifa and I huddled in a corner and wept buckets.

And then she told me everything. She was four years old when her mother died. She has no memory of her mother and doesn't know what she died of. I know how she feels, we get a lot of women at the Hôpital Parnet so damaged that it's pointless to try and work out what they are suffering from, we make a wild guess and we get it wrong. We write
Generalised Infirmity
and close the file. Chérifa's eight brothers, all older than her, worked in nearby farms and mills which meant she never saw more than three or four of them at a time. The road was their home. Then, one morning, the father married a she-devil sent back from hell who bore him a litter of sons and daughters. ‘How many of each?' ‘A bunch, I don't know, their mother spent all day coddling them and Papa left her to it.' He was obviously scared of her. When the Islamists showed up and started cutting the throats of local girls, the she-devil fawned on them, made couscous for them, tattled to them about the sins of others hoping to deflect their wrath from her own house. Chérifa posed a problem – being wayward, independent, a moaner, a truant and devilishly pretty, she was an irresistible delicacy for the bearded fundamentalists. One morning, she packed a bag and got the hell out. It is a story that is played out a hundred times, a thousand times all over the country and before long over the world. The green plague of Islamofascism knows no borders. One day, girls will be burned in towns across California, I can just see it, and it won't be the work of the Ku Klux Klan.

‘. . . my stepmother hated me, I swear, it's like I was trying to replace her! I loathe her, she's ugly, she's evil, she's a thief. She called me the devil's daughter, she'd claim she'd seen me when I hadn't even done anything.'

‘Seen you where . . . doing what?'

‘With boys!'

‘I suspected as much.'

‘Papa is a coward, whenever he got me on my own, he'd plead with me, beg me to hide myself behind the
hijab
to avoid the wrath of his bloodsucking wife and the cut-throat religious bastards. So I packed a bag and left. It serves them right!'

‘Now listen to me, around here I don't want you saying you're not religious. I swear, you're soft in the head. This is Islam we're talking about, they'll burn you alive and me with you!'