Harraga (15 page)

I had discovered this ballad among Sofiane’s belongings, it was just one of the curiosities he liked to collect. The young are only superficially modern, the slightest thing drags them back into the shadows of the past. And then I realised that the ballad was a bastardised version of the famous ‘Ode to Hiziya’, which brought our grandmothers to tears. At the first note, Chérifa fell into a trance, I mean a dance, listening to this cyclical rise and fall like a sultry summer that refuses to end, this violent, shuddering telluric rite from before the Gospels that abruptly segues into a bourrée of roughneck soldiers returning from war. I joined in as best I could, writhing wantonly, then passionately, in my chair, I even ventured one or two wails which went down like a lead balloon. Chérifa looked at me scornfully, I was ruining her rapturous trance. She looked at me the way someone might look at a Scandinavian tourist in Papua New Guinea who gets up in the middle of a ritual to ask the witch doctor how he does his tricks. ‘You don’t get it!’ she said disdainfully. That irritated me, so I put on music from my region, Kabylie music and rock from the mountains, and showed her how we shake our hips down Fort National way. Music so powerful, a person would have to be born deaf, mute, blind and cold to resist it. The battle had begun, between the old country and the majestic mountains, provincial honour was at stake and Chérifa and I both gave as good as we got. The finale was pitiful, we collapsed, exhausted, just before daybreak.

I don’t know where I slept or by what miracle I came to wake up in my own bed. I thought I knew all the ghosts in this house, but this one had clearly been a stretcher-bearer in life, he had done his duty and immediately set off for other theatres of war. I shall call him Mabrouk. I saw myself somewhere, I don’t know where, in a dream, in some distant land, an island fringed with palm trees, washed up after some devastating shipwreck. With me were Chérifa, Louiza, Sofiane, Yacine and other beautiful, youthful innocents. There were recent friends, the flautist and his virginal maid, the girls from the university halls of residence, and there were others, acquaintances made long ago upon the journey of life. We were all naked as the day we were born or wearing fig leaves. We were dancing around a huge bonfire. Sweating blood and water, Tonton Hocine stoked the flames, operating a huge bellows with both hands while Monsieur 235 wielded a poker as long as the propeller shaft of an ocean liner. In the distance, a volcano was playing the tuba and smoking cheerfully. The earth was trembling just enough to heighten the rumba. Joyous minstrels perched high in the mangrove trees were strumming mandolins as though we were kings of the carnival. In the vast bonfire, people and strange beasts were burning. Whenever one of them tried to escape, we kicked it back into the blaze. I recognised the President and her sea lion, two or three skewers of gibbons wearing helmets, goats in
djellabas
, a single moray eel, the
Wazier
of who knows where, the evil madam, the infamous
caïd
and others, the mute parrots who roll their eyes at parades when they see the Supreme Leader of all Tribes strut past in his billowing
bubu
or talk about his days spent dealing with obsequious plenipotentiaries who come to show him some new model of tea glass. From a tumbril, the fire was fuelled with preachers and Defenders of Truth, bound and gagged. The inferno gave off a terrible stench which we breathed in in deep lungfuls, delirious with joy.

It was a glorious celebration. That night I slept the sleep of a queen, though tinged with panic as I waited for the sky to fall, or for the ground to open up beneath my feet.

The Moonlight Soliloquy

When images of children came to haunt my nights

It was always with two great silent eyes

In an unflinching forehead

And in those eyes that gaze upon the mischief of the world

The mayhem of its godless revelries

And the cold tremors of its mass graves

I saw their souls floating high above the maelstrom.

And their faces, radiant with a lingering light

Announced the Divine Judgment.

And always, in my darkest nights, those wide eyes

That dauntless silence

That deep-rooted pain

Spoke to me of life

Of its miracles, its mercies, endlessly reiterated

Its unquenchable euphoria and the promises

It makes in spite of all

Our rancour and our wild excess

Our hopelessness, our suffering

Our heartless crimes, our treacheries

Our baseness and our cowardice

And the impossible loftiness of man
.

And, knowing that our punishment

Is not grim death but dearth of life,

I dared to dream I might embrace

The universe within my gaze.

Salvation lies in education
. I have no intention of replicating the Algerian régime in my house and keeping this girl ignorant and dependent. In the long run, I would be tempted to shamelessly take advantage of her or I worry I might end up killing her. Teach her to read, open her eyes to the four great windows on to the world: science, history, art and philosophy – that’s my plan.

My first task is to get her to accept this as a starting point. It’s not easy, the uneducated are self-satisfied, ­thin-skinned and terribly suspicious. And Chérifa is contemptuous to boot. She needs to recognise the extent of her ignorance, needs to be scared by it if she is to decide to learn, for her own good and that of others. This is what I need to do.

I spent all week thinking about the problem, made some notes and came to the conclusion that it’s best to be thrown in at the deep end in order to learn to swim. I mean to teach. Dynamics will do the rest. Probably best to start with a guided tour of the capital. Algiers is not exactly a treasure trove of culture, but, well, Rome wasn’t built in a day. And it’s often an encounter with a monument, a painting, a curious object, a sudden insight, a system of signs that triggers the desire to learn. I thought back to the scene in
2001: A Space Odyssey
where an ape suddenly discovers all the possible uses of a mammoth’s jawbone and his descendant, six hundred million years later, discovers space travel. I thought about Newton’s apple and all the other hackneyed tales we tell schoolkids to awaken their sense of curiosity. My awakening was something similar: it was discovering Doctor Montaldo’s medical books and his strange surgical instruments that first gave me a taste for medicine and for repairs; why should Chérifa be any different? Something will take her fancy and begin the incredible process that is the getting of wisdom.

The various outings I’ve planned will require about a week. I’ll arrange to take some of the leave I’m owed, I’ll get Mourad involved – we’ll need his car. The presence of a casually cultivated man like Mourad will add just the right touch of jaded sophistication to my plan. Studying is a pleasure only for those who are truly initiates, I won’t be expecting great things of Chérifa on our first day of lessons. More haste, less speed.

And so it came to pass. Unfortunately for me, and even more so for the little airhead, the result was the opposite of what I had intended. If there was a
click
, it was the sound of a door closing. Chérifa is totally, utterly resistant to all things intellectual. The magic of knowledge does not stir her in the least. My explanations, Mourad’s comments rolled off her like water off a duck’s back without eliciting so much as a shiver. She was more bored than ever. And this was only day one . . .

Dear God, what did they do to her at school?

I had decided it was best to start at the famous Jardin d’Essai. A lot of people don’t realise it, but the botanical gardens there are as much a symbol of Algiers as the Bois de Boulogne is of Paris or Hyde Park of London. Algiers spends so much time bragging about its glories that these days no one visits the gardens any more. Jingoistic as they are, the citizens of Algiers don’t like it when their leaders gild the lily. Television fills in the blanks in our collective unconscious with archive footage, something that is obvious to anyone watching since the visitors to the gardens are too obviously wearing their Sunday best for this to be a Friday. The footage comes from the Algiers section of the archives of the long since defunct
Office de radiodiffusion-télévision française.
The gentlemen in these film clips all wear bell-bottoms and have a cigarette dangling from the corner of their mouths
à la
Humphrey Bogart, while the ladies in their crinoline wear their handbags dangling from the crooks of their elbows mimicking starlets they’ve seen in the movies. And the poor children look so well-behaved in their smart berets your heart goes out to them. This, then, was why I put the Jardin d’Essai at the top of my list – we would be the only ones there to admire this ancient wonder.

It was a mistake, a fiasco; this little corner of paradise, like all the others, has been spoiled. Chérifa was not likely to catch the botany bug here. Papa used to take us to the gardens when I was a little girl. It was a ritual: the Algerian families at the time, fresh from the war of liberation, still clung to this colonial tradition of a Sunday in the park. Louiza and I would come back, our brains teeming with extraordinary images, magical perfumes, with burgeoning dreams, and immediately set to work on whatever composition we had to write for school. ‘This is all very well, Lamia,’ the teacher said when we had taught her everything there was to know about the gardens, ‘it’s all very poetic and so forth, but you are allowed to write about something else. And that goes for you, too, Louiza.’ On our first visit, we felt dwarfed by the majesty of the place which conveyed such a powerful sense of abundance, of wonderment, of uniqueness, of strangeness, of otherworldly purity that it blew our minds, our eyes darted around like malfunctioning lasers. My God, how could anyone read, let alone remember, all the names attached to the trees, the shrubs, the flowers? Back in Rampe Valée, this glut of information left our heads spinning for a week. Our euphoria attained frenzied proportions when we visited the little zoo nestled in the heart of the gardens. Oh, the shock, the indescribable sense of discovery! Oh, those roars, the growls, the trumpets, the cackles, the howls, the strange rustlings that seemed both distant and so close, the barbaric chants, the harrowing cries, the endless echoes rippling out, jarring, merging, overlapping, falling eerily silent only to suddenly erupt again in a different register. And that feverishness, those piercing eyes, the colours and the smells that made up the wild savage harmonies of the world, a melody unchanged since the dawn of time when we first filled it with our fears. I remember feeling my hair stand on end. All this was very different from the cats and dogs, the canaries and the other pets we were accustomed to. To my dying day, I will remember the magnificent lion from the Atlas Mountains who lay dozing in his cage like a king in his palace. Immediately we were reminded of biblical tales so dear to Maman: I thought about Samson, the great strangler of lions, about Delilah, the repentant sinner – who, before she repented, had been an incomparable sinner. Watching the lion yawn, I could easily imagine that Louiza and I would fit inside that huge, gaping maw, even standing up with arms outstretched. I remembered us faithfully swearing not to leave each other’s side. A brass plaque informed us:
A gift from His Royal Highness Muhammad V, Sultan of Morocco and Commander of the Faithful, to his brother Ahmed Ben Bella, on the occasion of his triumphant election to the highest office of the People’s Democratic Republic of Algeria.

The inscription infuriated Papa. ‘An ass is an ass, even if he is a distant cousin of the king of the jungle!’ he said. He was thinking about politics. Papa liked to make vague pronouncements: ‘The worm is already in the apple,’ he would mutter sententiously when Maman reminded him that the ‘ass’ had been toppled years before and the man who toppled him was no more likely to prevail in heaven. Louiza and I were young at the time, we found adult conversations boring, at that age other people don’t matter. The only yoke we knew was that of our parents, the only ingratitude that of the neighbourhood trollops.

No one visits the gardens, I said, but we arrived to find milling crowds on every path and trail and even the once sacrosanct parterres and conservatories were swarming with hordes of people so anonymous we passed without registering them, terrified pensioners plodding along in faltering groups, children and beggars dashing past, legions of wily street hawkers selling snacks, single cigarettes, digital watches, Islamic textbooks, aromatic incense (and other types of resin), posters of Bin Laden, Bouteflika, Zarqawi, Saddam, the Terminator, Zinedine Zidane, John Wayne, Madonna, Lara Croft, Mickey Mouse, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Bruce Lee, Benflis, Umm Kulthum and I don’t know who all, it was a
souk
, there was something for everyone. The trees in the garden are afflicted by leprosy or maybe just by old age. The same goes for the shrubs and the crumbling arbours. Perhaps it’s the drought, Algiers is in the anhydrous phase of its climatic cycles, there is no water, the air is fetid. One by one the zoo animals died off. Some burrowed deep trying to find water, the carnivores devoured each other before they expired, those few that remain are afflicted by the blind staggers. I remembered a newspaper publishing a letter from a man so outraged by the park authorities’ neglect he had taken to watering the poor dying creatures himself. The joker called it a crime against humanity. It’s not exactly how I would have put it, since there is a danger of contamination between that idea and an underlying one. Every morning, he would make his rounds with his jerry can, going from cage to cage, giving water to each according to its needs. Exhausted by the task, the man appealed to people through the pages of his favourite newspaper. I don’t know how many responded to his plea, but chronic neglect has certainly contributed to the carnage: the place has an air of decline that is noxious to sensitive souls. Nothing saddens the eye like rust and decay and I have to admit the garden bears its mark, as does Algeria, a Third World country chasing its tail: these are the signs, the half-finished, the moribund, the half-forgotten, the endless restrictions, the sporadic bouts of madness. On this path, time collapses into nothing, space contracts and life is a self-evident abdication. Thankfully, great suffering carries within it its own antidote: fatalism – which offers many reasons to die in the shadows, with no regrets, without demanding justice.