After Rachel came back to Paris in February 1996, he holed up in his house and never came out again. Two months later, on April 24, he killed himself in his garage. I found out he was back from Momo, who always knows everything. He said, “Hey, I saw your bro down at Prisunic. Jesus, the fucking state of him! Has he got AIDS or what?” “Leave it,” I said. “It’s just some middle-class bullshit, problems with his wife or his high-powered job.” At the time I didn’t suspect anything, but what Momo said got me thinking and I decided to go round there. I made out like I was just passing. It was pretty choked up. He looked like a walking corpse, he was all hunched and confused like an old man, and Rachel had always been sharp, well turned-out, always plugged-in, always had his shit together better than any CEO. He was wearing these creepy striped pyjamas I’d never seen before and he had his head shaved like some convict. The house was upside down, the whole place was filthy, it reeked, the blinds were closed. It was like a cell in solitary. He sat on the arm of the chair and he said in this little voice, “I was going to come and see you on the estate . . . I will come . . . I will, I’ll come . . . ” I asked him if everything was okay. He shrugged like it was nothing serious. “It’s fine.” We drank cold coffee in awkward silence. I kept looking at him out of the corner of my eye, he was staring at the floor, his hands on his knees. If I didn’t know him, I’d have thought he was some junkie who’d woken up in our place. He wasn’t there, he was off some place in his head, I could hear him thinking. It looked like he could feel everything he was thinking. He looked so frail, so alone. And so strange. I was moved. Then suddenly, doing his best to sound serious and persuasive, he started giving me one of his little lectures about reliability, honesty, decency, studying hard. I got up and said, “Okay, all right, I can see you’re fine, I’ll leave you to it.” He called me back! First time ever, he was never the kind to be pushy, to keep people hanging around if they wanted to head off. He said, “I wanted to say I’m sorry.” He hesitated and then he said, “I haven’t been a good brother to you, but never forget that I’m your big brother, and I love you more than anything in the world.” I guess I shrugged, I hate that sort of soppy shit, I found it really embarrassing. He said again, “Don’t forget that . . . whatever happens.” What he said had me so choked up, I got angry. I got up and stormed out and didn’t look back. I regret it now. I should have stayed, talked to him, asked him what was going on, taken him in hand, moved into the house so I could keep and eye on him. I could tell he was losing it, it was obvious. But back then, the way I looked at it, I had my shit and other people had theirs. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I didn’t go back there, I wouldn’t let myself, I was pissed at him for not keeping his word, he’d said he’d come and see me on the estate. I’d even told aunt Sakina, and she was so happy. And I’d told my mates so they could “accidentally” drop by while he was there, they’re pretty useful for filling up space and giving the impression that life’s spur of the moment and everything’s a party.
In his diary, there are three pages about his suicide. To Rachel, it wasn’t suicide. He never uses the word. He talks about retribution, about justice. He calls it an act of love for papa and for his victims. I don’t know if it’s just to try to link two things that can’t be linked, to make a single gesture for both victims and executioner. I don’t think I’ll ever really understand what was going on in his head. It’s probably the same with anyone who commits suicide. Faced with their lifeless bodies, we’re dumbstruck, asking questions to which there are no answers. Now I’ve read and reread his diary, I can understand the mental process that led him to kill himself, but the act itself is beyond all understanding. I can understand thinking about suicide, everyone does it, on the estate it’s like an epidemic. I can even accept that there might come a time when you do something, when you plan, when you decide how to do it, when you run through it in your head, when you play at being a desperate man putting a bullet through his brain, falling back, holding your breath to see what it feels like but it’s a long way from there to actually going through with it. That moment is beyond imagining. Even the person committing suicide can’t imagine it, at some point there’s a click and it’s all over. Rachel didn’t choose the easy option, didn’t put a bullet in his brain, swallow poison, jump off a bridge, throw himself under a train, he killed himself slowly. It was nothing to do with suicide, he wanted to atone, he wanted to be gassed to death like papa’s victims, like it was papa who was gassing him. He watched himself die and I think he probably tried to stay conscious right up to that last second. This was the price he wanted to pay in papa’s place for the victims of the camps and probably for me, to relieve me of the burden of our debt. Yeah. “Suicide” is not the word.
I’m not trying to make excuses, but back then, life wasn’t exactly a bed of roses on the estate. Had it ever been? I think so, I remember a time when people were happy there. You came and went, you had no worries, no fears. And if you had, usually round end of the month, you got through it and if you couldn’t dodge the people you owed money to, you tightened your belt, lived on credit, the women would go to the pawn shop. Looking back, I think people were more relaxed, they struggled, but they didn’t think of their lives as a sort of hell they’d never get out of. You’d hear them say: “Tomorrow’s another day”; “Vive la République, vive la France”; “Where there’s life, there’s hope.” Or things like “He who sleeps forgets his hunger”; “We’ll eat better tomorrow”; “Suck your thumb if you still feel hungry”; “Pretend it’s Ramadan”; “Have a glass of water and get a good night’s sleep” and we’d laugh. If things were really bad, you made like a soldier from the First World War, talking to himself in the trenches: “We’ll just have to make the best of things,” or “You have to die of something,” or “There’s people worse off than us,” or “A man dies with his boots on . . . ” That’s what I always heard, you could compile a dictionary of sayings like that, most of them brought back from Africa by war veterans. We didn’t give up hope, when we were at our wits’ end, we’d get out our secret weapon: Allah, Jesus, Mary or the local griot. Back then, the estate was like a village that wasn’t on the map, it had its ups and downs, one day we’d be helping each other out, the next day we’d be at each other’s throats and the day after that we’d be sitting round the fire, all friends again. That was all we had to keep us going: arguments about fences, squabbles between neighbours, kids fighting and family histories that twisted and tangled all the way back to darkest Africa. Apart from the old women who pulled the strings and were constantly whining about something, no one had the patience to untangle them so everyone pretended that they knew, that gossiping and running people down was just another form of conversation. But maybe I only think that because I was young, we were always off somewhere getting up to some shit, we didn’t think about the big picture, who was stirring things, what was going on in people’s heads, we’d picked up on snatches of conversation that sounded mysterious and violent, that smacked of heroism and great rewards in heaven or on earth. When the first Islamists showed up, we were happy, they had faced up to the dictator and his men back at home, back in Algeria, Taghouts, they called them, big shots with big guns who were going round murdering and looting and it was all completely legal. I saw a thing or two back in Algeria, every step I took I thought I was about to be deported and exterminated like an Untermensch, an inferior person. They looked funny in their old-world suicide-bomber getups, with their martyrs’ belts, their scruffy beards, their battered faces, their staring eyes, their all-terrain sandals, we liked the way they talked, like Allah’s rap crew, the way they were always available, the way they were like superheroes fighting for the poor. There were only about a dozen of them, but there were hordes of us and we were all itching to be their right-hand men. We’d do anything, they only had to ask, they had Allah’s ear, he was on their side. We were all wet behind the ears but they had us all fired up, they taught us how exciting it was to have people to hate, people you wanted dead so much it kept you awake at night. We’d talk about this stuff at night in the cellars and the stairwells, muffled up in our Mujahideen-issue parkas while the poor souls who had only their poverty to worry about double-locked their doors to the truth of the Prophet and moral certainty and slept like happy morons. During our initiation, we despised abstract creatures, people without names, it was mystical enough to intoxicate a saint. The vague and the inexplicable were your basic ingredients if you wanted to become a fanatic, and we wanted it right then and there. These loathsome abstract creatures, we called the infidels, the Kaffirs, the tyrants, the Taghouts, you could imagine they were whatever you wanted, the cat, the dog, the kitchen sink. Once we were deemed worthy of jihad, the imam opened the big sack of Kaffirs and in a solemn, incontrovertible voice, gave each of them a name: this one is the Jew, Lihoudi, he is scum, the worst of all, this one is the Christian, massihi, the hypocrite, the accursed, this one is the communist, el chouyouï, the monster reviled by Allah, these are the secular Muslims, the westernised Arab, the liberated woman, dogs and bitches who deserve to die a cruel death, these ones are the queers, the junkies, the intellectuals who must be crushed by any means necessary. Most of them were people that we knew, our neighbours, friends from school, work colleagues, local shopkeepers, teachers, people on the TV. Suddenly we saw France in all its horror, rotten and corrupt to the core, a whole pack of Untermenschen, filthy poisonous bastards in league with Israel, America, and the vile Arabic dictatorships who exterminated their own people to prevent Islam from spreading. It was high time to exterminate. As the months went by, and we organised rescue operations, we all escaped as best we could, but there were a lot of people who were still in it up to their necks. People who don’t rise above fundamentalism are doomed for centuries to come.
As you’ve seen in the previous chapters, things have got a whole lot worse these past few months. Ever since Nadia was torched by the emir on the orders of the imam, and Cyclops and Flicha showed up with their new Kapos, this isn’t my estate anymore. They’ve already turned it into a concentration camp, we’re dying slowly but surely, we lock ourselves in, they keep files on us, watch our every move, we’re constantly harangued about the rules of the Lager, what we should wear, how long our hair should be, how we should behave, the things we shouldn’t do, there are daily rallies, a general mobilisation on Fridays, the harrying sermons, the trials, the punishments, and in the end you’re signed up to the death Kommandos and shipped of to the camps in Afghanistan. All we need now are some gas chambers and a few Kremas and we can start the mass extermination. And no sign of a Righteous Person on the horizon. Rachel doesn’t explain it, but I’ve found out that Righteous Persons were non-Jews who risked their lives hiding Jews from the Gestapo and the police. He had a file about them and another one about Righteous Persons who were German, who were at the heart of the Machine and used their money, their intelligence and their courage to save thousands of innocent people. Some of them are famous and respected: Oskar Schindler, Albert Battel and others. Why couldn’t you have done that, papa? Rachel would still be alive and we would be the sons of a Righteous Man. Rachel says that the Holocaust is a historical aberration, that humanity would never allow such a thing to happen again. Rachel was educated, he was knowledgeable, he knew what he was talking about, but I think he forgot that people only realise what’s going on after the event. One minute before his death, he’s alive, but a second later, there are shocked people grieving for him. Aunt Sakina liked to say, “The difference between yesterday and tomorrow is today, because we don’t know how it will end.” And Monsieur Vincent, who’s a real stickler for tightening wheel nuts, used to look over our shoulders, cross his fingers and say: “So good so far, if the wheel nut shears, we’ll all know about it.” And Rachel also forgot that humanity is always failing, it never learns, it’s too much hassle. Everyone on the estate knows that it’s too late. The Islamists are already here, they’re settled and here we are, bound hand and foot, caught in the trap. If they don’t exterminate us, they’ll stop us from living. Worse still, they’ll turn us into our own guards, deferential to the emir, merciless to each other. We’ll be Kapos.
How things change. In a few months, the estate has become unrecognisable. What was a Sensitive Urban Area, Category 1 has become a concentration camp. In a few short minutes, the time it took to flick through a military record that should never have been there, Rachel fell into history’s black hole. In two years, he lost his health, his mind, his job, his friends, his Ophélie: the girl he’d loved his whole life. And me, in ten months I’ve gone from dumb apathy to a state of permanent panic somewhere between madness, anger and the urge to rush halfway across the world and drown myself. I don’t know what to do or what will be done tomorrow. I feel terribly alone. More alone that anyone in the world. My parents are dead, Rachel is dead, uncle Ali is not much longer for this world and I have no idea what will happen to aunt Sakina. Life is unutterably sad.
Me and my mates have been saying that maybe it’s time to get the fuck out, to go die somewhere else. Then again we’ve been talking about hanging in there and fighting. One day, we’ll swear it’s all worth it and the next day we’re saying it’s not worth shit. We can’t see what kind of miracle could set it off.