The Last Life (28 page)

"Leave that alone, hey? It's my dad's."

"Bang and Olufsen. Amazing." He ran a hand over one of the freestanding speakers. "These are incredible. The sound must be incredible. And so thin!"

"Leave it alone, Jacquot." Sami didn't turn around. He was squashed between the rose velvet love seat and the wall, in a little space that forced him to lean back, precariously, almost at the angle of the speakers. His attention was focussed on the watercolor of the Bay of Algiers, the one my father had salvaged from his grandmothers apartment.

The painting wasn't big, about thirty centimeters square, and it sat, in shadow, in its narrow dark blue frame. Surrounded on the wall by etchings and prints, overwhelmed by large, gold-framed oils—powerful abstracts, gaudy spurts of paint to which my father was partial—it waited, rarely noticed, like a half-closed eye. But Sami had been drawn to it at once, to its unobtrusive placement, and then, up close, to its apron of azure sea, erratically white-capped, broken by the sandstone finger of the port and three rollicking, ridged-hulled ships, tricolors aloft, at anchor. Behind the bay stretched the white rise of the city, a thousand precise terraces and roofs climbing into the sunlit sky, the European curlicues and the higgledy-piggledy casbah, all their outlines drawn as if with a single hair, interspersed with delicate little palms and cypresses and other trees of variegated greens, and with broad, brown avenues like branches. A statue on horseback could be made out near the sea, in a plaza lined by fig trees, to the right of the picture: the Due d'Or-léans in the Place du Gouvernement, facing, as French national pride demanded, the conquerable interior. Tiny people in djellabas and Victorian suits dotted the waterfront in groups and pairs, too small to have faces, too small to have hands, but joyful in their attitudes—they could not be otherwise, bathed in this cerulean paradise, from which a warm, salty breeze seemed to emanate, and on it, the imaginary drift of jasmine and bougainvillea.

"Your folks from there?"

"Huh." I felt embarrassed, as if I were confessing to a set of sins against Sami and his kin. "It was a long time ago."

"I thought you were American, really," Jacquot put in. "That's the word at school."

"Just my mom. My dad's family was from there." I gestured at the picture.

Sami extricated himself from the little space. "I never knew that." His features, hawkish, betrayed nothing.

"Guess you don't read the papers, then. It was all in the papers about my grandfather. With the trial, you know."

"So does your old man vote for the National Front?"

"What?"

"Does he vote for Le Pen?"

"Don't be ridiculous." I could feel my cheeks burning. My grandfather had said that he didn't, but he had said, too, that he understood it. He believed in the Algeria that had been—not in the one Camus yearned for, that Utopian, impossible City of Man; but in the earthly city that he had left behind, where people, and races, knew their place. Where, indeed, he saw the placid paradise of the watercolor before us: an Algeria that had no more existed than did the dream, the might-have-been, in my own imagination, where Sami and I might have strolled the African streets as friends. My grandmother said things like, "There are Arabs, and then there are Arabs." As I child I had wondered what she meant; standing then in my living room, I knew that she meant there were Zohra and Fadéla, and then there was Sami. She had also been known to say, "They didn't want us in their country, and we don't want them in ours." So much for Utopias. I was embarrassed, and afraid.

"It's not a ridiculous question," Sami said. "That bombing, in the summer, remember? It shows it's still important now. Everybody knows that it's people like your family who—"

"Not my family."

"People like your family, then, who—"

There was a noise, a cry, from upstairs.

"Hang on." I ran out into the hall. "Everything okay?"

Lahou was halfway down the stairs, naked but for the purple towel which made her skin shine like a queen's, or like that of the marble Venus. Her hair, wet at the ends, fell over her shoulders in loose springs. Her mouth was open. She clasped the towel at her bosom with one hand, while the other flailed in spoonlike gestures.

"There's a man. Upstairs, a man."

"Where?"

"In the hall—in the bathroom. He came in the bathroom."

"Sagesse?" It was my father. "Is that you, Sagesse?"

"Shit. Oh shit. My dad. Get in here." I opened the door to Etienne's elevator, and saw, to my surprise, Etienne inside. He appeared to have been sleeping, but his head snapped up and he made a happy burble at the sight of me. "Get in here."

Lahou, cringing and atremble, goose bumps rising on her velvety arms, scuttled into the tiny box.

"You guys," I hissed into the living room, "go in the garden or something. Hide. It's my dad."

"Why would he mind?" asked Sami.

"Just do it. Please?" I ran for the stairs. "Papa? Is that you? Papa?"

My father loomed, bullish, in the hallway. His hair was matted on one side of his head and his eyes bulged in their sockets. The pulse at his neck ticked furiously. His shirt sagged, half unbuttoned, and the curls of his chest glistened. He was barefoot, and his feet, covered with black hairs, were very white. His belt was unbuckled.

"What are you doing here?" he asked, the sound from his throat tight, as if the air were being squeezed out. "And who was that little Arab girl?"

"A friend. Just a friend." A shaft of light caught my eye from behind my father's creased shoulder. A door was open in the hallway. It was the door to the spare room I had offered to Lahou, the room where my grandfather had slept.

"You should be at school."

"It's out early."

"No it's not. Take that girl and go back to school."

"Papa, why is Etienne in the elevator?"

My father took a very deep breath. He was holding himself in. He looked the way I looked when I knew I was in trouble: not guilty, exactly; more defiant.

"Just get out of here. Just take that girl and go."

"She'll have to get dressed first."

My father slapped at the air and made a
pfft
sound. I darted into the bathroom to retrieve Lahou's clothes. The T-shirt gave off her cheap, sweet scent. My father did not move when I passed him. As I walked down, step by resounding step, I could hear him cracking his knuckles on both hands.

Lahou dressed in the elevator, in front of Etienne, while I held the door partway open for light. She had to twist away to keep his fingers from her stomach. Etienne loved skin, and Lahou's was particularly enticing. She tried not to grimace, but he and I both saw her, and she, afraid and embarrassed as I myself had been minutes before, knew it.

I thought of wheeling my brother out into the living room before we left, but didn't know how he had come to be in the elevator. I didn't want to get into any more trouble. So I shut the door and left him. All afternoon I kept picturing my brother boxed in, in the unbroken blackness. Was he afraid? Maybe he liked it. He hadn't made a sound.

The boys had hopped the garden wall early on; we ran into them at the bus stop.

"I'm sorry," I said. "That was really weird."

None of them said anything. They didn't brood on the incident, or refer to it. I had the impression that such unforeseen and surreal moments were not uncommon in their lives, and that they tolerated them without ever realizing that they were doing so. Sami was far more interested in the revelation of my
pied-noir
background, and I thought that might prove the day's most damaging event.

In the short term I was right. Sami and, at his behest, Jacquot, cooled towards me. Sami, at least, had revolutionary aspirations, and if I was not prepared more loudly to repudiate my heritage and its implications, I had no place alongside him. Not that I was an outright foe; I was too evidently ashamed for that. I simply could not be a friend. It was like failing to get security clearance for a government post. Lahou was more forgiving: she saw our bond as a matter of feminine trust, on which the broader world's politics had no bearing; and she had seen and been repelled by my brother, and felt guilty for her repulsion in a manner manifested, endearingly, as loyalty, one-on-one. Even so, she saw me less and less with her male retinue in tow, which meant less and less altogether.

Frédénc didn't care. He had known all along of what stripe the LaBasse family was, culturally if not politically. Ours were comparable societies. But he was a young man much concerned with appearances, and he played to both sides—Sami's and mine—while giving in to neither. In my way, even I was useful to Fred in some of his various guises; it was just that I no longer stood any chance of being truly cool, in his particular set, once I had been dismissed, thumbs down, by Sami.

These repercussions from the afternoon's events at least made sense to me, in the ever-shifting tectonics of the schoolyard. I could bend to them, behave accordingly, because their rules, although arcane and unwritten, had been instilled in me over many years in the company of my peers. Besides which, in the wake of the Marie-Jo cataclysm, this falling away seemed gentle, almost fond: these were my pretend-friends; now we would pretend less energetically; in time we might simply cease to pretend at all, without rancor. It would be fine.

Home was another matter. When I returned home that evening, after sunset, Magda was feeding Etienne in the kitchen, and my mother, in an apron, was talking on the telephone while stirring some winy stew on the stove. My father was not in, and for the first time in a long while, he did not surface for supper. Somebody had put away the glasses and the unopened Coke bottles, and had stowed the tray.

When we sat down, my mother's bright—too bright—and hungry chatter filled the dining room: "And your grandfather has asked us to get him the works of Balzac—he's always loved Balzac, and wants to read them all over again. And it turns out he can receive magazines, so we thought we'd get some subscriptions..."

Odder still, later, while we were stacking the dishes in the dishwasher, my father's humor, easy, bluff, rolled into our evening like a soothing breeze. I waited for the awkwardness, the acknowledgment, however slight: a glance held, a forced joke, the sharp smell of fear or of anger. I tried to insinuate ("How was your day, Papa?"), but wide-eyed and cheerful, fine actor that he was, my father gave away nothing.

My grandfather and my father both looked my secrets in the face when I was fourteen, and kept them hidden. How adult I felt, to be entered into the family's rolling conspiracy of silence: who could be sure what anyone else knew or did not know? But whereas in my heart I believed, if perhaps incorrectly, that I had recognized my grandfather, and our bond, in the courtroom's lonely figure, I knew that in seeing my father that afternoon, as if for the first time, I did not know what I had seen. Too many shards rattled spiny and unconnected: the man's disarray; the strangled tones; the light behind him on the carpet; and my brother, resting in the corner of his cold, infinitely dark, purpose-built cage.

A single shard more might have organized the rest for me, and did, later, so that now I remember the incident as if I had seen her. It may well have been Magda herself, with her lush Slavic lips and almond eyes; she didn't last long with Etienne afterwards. Or my father may simply have dispatched Magda to the cinema or the department store and smuggled in a woman, a girl, anyone, anyone's. It could even have been Marie-Jo. I never saw her, but in my memory now I walk past my father to the bar of sunlight and trace, with my tender eye, which might be his, the alabaster rise of her shoulder and the outline of her buttocks under the sheet. She, of herself—her features or the quality of her soul—matters not at all; she merely orders the narrative, and so can't be left out.

Far more important to my understanding of my father, or to its failure, are Etienne and his hours in the elevator. How many hours? How many times? But this must of necessity be overlooked, because there is no one to tell it and nothing to say. And to my understanding of myself, the fact that I left Etienne there, and shut the door again upon him.

The Algerians, of all eras and all hues, might be presumed to love life. A third-century Roman inscription at Timgad, in the south, exhorts: "The hunt, the baths, play and laughter: that's the life for me!" It is certainly a myth among the
pieds-noirs,
that the culture, sun-drenched and sparkling, dwelt in joy. But across the centuries, their voices—those resonating voices of Augustine and Camus—tell a different truth.

Both men asked, one before God and the other a man alone on his darkling plain, whether life was worth living; and both answered "yes" with a desperation and a defiance that can have been born only of "no." Catholicism's strict prohibition of suicide is, in fact, Augustine's. It was he who first threatened that eternal reward would be denied those dead by their own hands: "Christians have no authority to commit suicide in any circumstance." But his logic, so carefully worked, a subtle synthesis of commandments about self and neighbor, could only have been necessary if he saw the temptation. He, whose early laughter and revelry led, on his return to Algeria from Milan, to years of loss and tumult, who learned how much of earthly life was sheer endurance, wrote, in old age, that "from the evidence of this life itself, a life so full of so many and such various evils that it can hardly be called living, we must conclude that the whole human race is being punished." Hence his belief in Original Sin: we must be punished, at least, for a cause. Life, that punishment, must be suffered to its natural end for only one reason: for God.

To Camus, whose footsteps followed so belatedly along Africa's northern coast, Augustine's evils became absurdity; the teetering flail of the void gaped where God's safe shore had loomed. Alongside the futile Sisyphean trials of his fellow men, the song of suicide could only beckon. But again, he said no. Not for God, but for man. He preached revolt, and passion, over the soothing melody of escape.