December 1996
This sudden downpour of dollars is a blessing – now I can finally go to Aïn Deb. Like Rachel, I’m going back to the source, back to my childhood, to our house, our parents. Back to my father. To say a prayer at their grave. I’m scared to death but I’m happy. I feel it’s a journey that I need to make, one I would have had to make sooner or later. I need to feel Algerian soil beneath my feet, feel it hold me up like an insignificant insect. Not because I used to live there as a kid, not because my mother and my grandparents were born there or because my father spent most of his life there. None of these things are as important as the fact that my parents are buried there. I don’t know how to explain it, I’ve always had trouble putting things into words, I can’t do it, so I just write down the facts, but that doesn’t explain what I feel. I never was very good at school. What I’m trying to say is that death expresses truth better than life. I think nothing connects a man to the earth more than the graves of his parents and his grandparents. That’s only just occurred to me, I’ll have to think about it, because it sounds strange to say death binds us to life when we know that death is the end of everything. Rachel used to say home is where you live, which is true – but he was talking about the emigrants who stubbornly go on living as emigrants and who end up not living in their own country or their adopted one. Rachel was right, its psychology. They’re just thinking about themselves, about their deaths, about the grave waiting for them back in the old country, they’re not thinking about the children they’re leaving dangling over the abyss. It’s hardly surprising that when they fall, they break their necks. Imagine if Togo-au-Lait’s parents had raised him to be like his great-grandfather, he’d have eaten the lot of us and he wouldn’t even feel sorry. But I also think that home is the country where your parents are buried, that’s why I felt I needed to go and see that land, walk on it, soak up some part of the mystery fed by generations of souls. ‘A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,’ to quote Churchill, who Rachel thought was the greatest hero of the war against the Nazis. That’s what a country should be, a mystery. But still I wonder why I’ve never been interested in Germany. My father was born there, my grandparents are buried there, so some part of my soul must be over there in what Rachel called the mystery of deepest, darkest Germany. Is it because of the war? Because of Papa’s past? Is it because I’ve never been there? Rachel says it’s beautiful, incredibly well organised, he says the people are really helpful. I’ll go there some day.
From what Rachel says in his diary the officials at the Algerian Consulate in Nanterre aren’t likely to be much help. I can’t trust them, I’ll have to see if I can find someone on the estate who’s got some scam going with the passport officer, it will save a lot of time and a lot of money.
In the end, it was easy. Momo steered me in the right direction, his father had been involved in some dodgy stuff back in the day, back when Algeria was just coming out of the socialist terror and everyone thought they’d be able to come and go whenever they wanted. Passports were selling like hot cakes, you’d hand over your cash in the morning and you’d get your Ausweis delivered to you at Café Da Hocine the same night. But it only lasted a couple of months before the doors slammed shut again, the socialist dictatorship in Algeria came back with a vengeance and this time got into bed with two other dictatorships – corruption and religion – and Momo’s dad had to stop trafficking in passports because he was no match for the new regime, so he took all the cash he’d made and set up as a halal butcher and pretty quickly he got the reputation of being the best halal butcher for quality, value and strict adherence to Qur’anic law. He does a lot of his business at Eid, he goes all round the estate slitting sheep’s throats, for a whole month he’s up to his elbows in sheep’s blood. So I got myself a brand-new green Algerian passport, same-day service, and all it cost me was five kilos of prime fillet steak. Poor Rachel had to slog his guts out to get his. It was weird, having the passport made me feel like an illegal immigrant. That’s the thing about being mixed-race, you’re not one thing or another. What I need is a French–Algerian–German passport. But you have to make do with what you get in this life, as Monsieur Vincent used to say when he’d see us drooling over a brochure for some shiny high-tech equipment.
This was the first time in my life I ever saw Aunt Sakina surprised by anything. When I told her I was going back to the bled, she looked at me like she didn’t understand what I’d just said. ‘Where did you say you were going?’ she said, her voice cracking. I kept right on, pretending I hadn’t noticed how worried she was. ‘To Aïn Deb, just for a week or so, I want to go and see Papa and Maman’s graves, catch up with some friends from when I was a kid.’ She thought for a moment, then she said, ‘I’ve got a little money put by, I’ll buy some things for you to take to the children there, I’m sure there’s a lot of things they need.’
She packed a suitcase for me, the biggest one she could find, the suitcase of an emigrant coming home, a poor man’s Santa Claus.
When I told my mates I was going back to the bled, as we stood freezing our balls off in a stairwell in one of the tower blocks, they didn’t pull their punches.
‘What are you, sick in the head? You’ll get your throat cut.’
‘Have you forgotten what they did to your parents?’
‘Fuck sake, don’t be stupid, stay here with us.’
‘You don’t speak Arabic, you don’t speak Berber, how are you supposed to talk to people?’
‘Pretend you’re deaf and dumb . . .’
‘Dress like a Taliban, that way no one will notice you.’
‘Steer clear of the red-light districts.’
‘Steer clear of the banlieues.’
‘Watch out for the cops, everyone says they’re like the mafia.’
‘Keep away from the jihadists.’
‘They’ll roast you like a Jew.’
‘There’s no way they’re going to let you come back.’
‘They’ll arrest you, they don’t like the French over there.’
‘They’ll never let you in, they fucking hate French Arabs.’
. . .
I waited till they were done, then I said, ‘Thanks for the support, guys, but I’m going anyway. I’ll be back in a week. Meet me from the plane at Orly.’
The night before I left was a long one. Aunt Sakina kept coming and going, she’d check to make sure the suitcase was properly closed, then she’d open it and put something else in, close it again, zip it up tight, go back to the living room, then come back to check it again. Uncle Ali was in his bed, staring at the ceiling, off somewhere in his head.
In my room, I read and reread the part of Rachel’s diary about going back to the bled, the airport, the security guards staring at everyone, snapping their fingers and dragging anyone suspicious out of the line, the atmosphere in the streets of Algiers like a concentration camp, the undercover taxi drivers who dump you in the middle of nowhere, the fake roadblocks, the guards holed up in their blockhouses, the desolate, dying landscape. It was weird but the black picture he painted of it encouraged rather than discouraged me. I’d never thought that going back to the root of things would be easy. Everything has a price, and I was prepared to pay. Rachel says something about the road to Damascus, I don’t know what it means but I’m guessing that’s what the road to Algiers must be like.
Aunt Sakina didn’t get a wink of sleep that night. She didn’t move from the living room. She was turning things over in her mind. I’m the only child she’s got now, when Uncle Ali is gone, she’ll only have me. I have to come back.
I didn’t sleep either. I read for a bit, then I turned off the light and stared at the ceiling, trying to think. I had all this stuff going round and round in my mind. I’d tried to deal with each worry as it popped into my head, but the more I tried, the more there were. There were so many, I couldn’t think, and in the end I dozed off. Suddenly I saw myself in a long, dark hallway, terrified as a prisoner on death row, I was struggling against something, I don’t know what, something pushing me into the darkness, then suddenly these two guys in balaclavas jumped out of the darkness, grabbed me by the arms and dragged me off, panting for breath. My legs were kicking into thin air. They threw me into this huge stadium where the terraces were already teeming with prisoners who looked weird, haggard and silent. Just as I was about to get to my feet and run away, these terrifying men appeared out of a tunnel and surrounded me, chanting my name in hoarse, frenzied, voices: Schiller! . . . Schiller! . . . Schiller! . . . They stretched their arms out towards me: Sieg Heil! . . . Sieg Heil! . . . Sieg Heil! . . . The silence on the terraces was more intense and I was crying in pain. I woke up with a start, turned on the light. Maman, where am I? I put my head in my hands. I looked down at the suitcase on the floor. I didn’t remember leaving it there. It was a stupid place to leave it, anyone might trip over it, I would have pushed it against the wall or under the bed, or put it on a chair. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. It fascinated and terrified me, then I smiled to myself, it’s just a thing, a box, a suitcase that needs to be strapped up so it doesn’t burst and spill everything everywhere. It seemed strange, taking clothes when you’re going nowhere, when you’re going to spend a week with friends in your other home . . . But caught up in Rachel’s stories of the Holocaust, the suitcase reminded me of the concentration camps, of the life we leave behind.
This is no time to get spooked, I thought, in a couple of hours I’m flying off to a country where there’s a real war on, where no one can be sure they’ll make it through the day alive. Fuck sake, I grew up on the H24 estate, I’ve seen enough to take on the Devil himself! But every time I managed to calm myself down, it started all over again. I’d read a bit, turn off the light, stare at the ceiling, determined not to think about anything. I’d try to think of the best way of not thinking about things and suddenly all the same thoughts would come flooding back. Suddenly I’m drugged and thrown into that stadium with the same zombies still chanting my name. It’s a vicious circle. In the end, I got up, pushed the suitcase under the bed, sat on the floor next to the window with my back to the wall and kept watch until morning. I didn’t feel safe until I heard the usual racket of the town blocks. It was four in the morning, the old African men in their Turkish slippers were getting ready for their daily migration across the savannah, the faithful were feverishly performing Wudu – their ritual ablutions – and every kid on the state, ripped suddenly from their nightmares, was screaming loud enough to burst a deaf man’s eardrum. Then all the TVs and the radios came on at once. By this time, Aunt Sakina had already settled Uncle Ali in his chair by the window, cleaned the apartment and made breakfast. I checked my papers five times and drank endless cups of coffee while I waited. I was shaking. This would be the first time I’d been on a plane since I’d left Algeria, the first time I’d left France since then, the first time I’d faced the unknown, the first time I’d ever felt death at my elbow. And it was the first time in my life I would ever carry a suitcase. I was scared shitless.