WHEN I GOT HOME in the evening after a tiring day at the hospital, I had a shower, grabbed a beer and sat down to relax in the garden overlooking the bay of Algiers, whose beauty I never tired of admiring. Outside, the riots had reached their peak.
I had avoided walking along the seafront, my usual route home from work, where I had often strolled with Omar back when both of us were students. The seafront had become unrecognisable. Devastated.
Until the riots, this seafront had been one of the protected areas of the city that had been spared from the clutches of the nouveaux riches, who had disfigured Algiers through the anarchic construction of unbelievably ugly buildings. Exactly why this seafront had escaped their ferocity and voraciousness eluded me. Omar and I asked ourselves this question, but could not come up with any answers.
Situated in the heart of the city, the seafront had always aroused my senses and filled my head with images that Marquet – the French painter who had spent 20 years of his life in this city – had captured so well. This part of Algiers still had a remarkably authentic urban feel to it.
Back there, to the south: the heights of the city climbing up towards the sky. Ahead, to the north: the sea and the docks. On one side lay the neo-Moorish and neo-colonial buildings, visually striking as well as elegant and refined, which, as Omar never stopped repeating while we were at university, were the only wonderful legacy the French had left us! On the other side were the gigantic, inescapable docks, bedecked with complex, interlinked machines which increasingly invaded the urban fabric, devouring it and swallowing it up: they could be seen from all over town. Looming up everywhere. Just there!
When night fell, the seafront looked sublime, its opacity blurring shapes and painting them with a sort of chromatic glimmer, giving strollers the impression that everything was cloaked in exaggerated lethargy, especially the dozens of ships moored along the quay. The impression, that is, that the docks were taking over the city, pressing against it, spilling into it despite its perfectly straight streets, the interminable avenues, its sickly neon lights and the futuristic buildings that still had an air of subterfuge about them, like a film set.
After nightfall, the docks impregnated the city with their unwholesome stench, forcing life in the Kasbah uphill. Towards God, through the alleyways and embellished labyrinths, where unique miniature mosques were to be found scattered here and there!
In that peculiar month of October 1988, the birds had gathered on three or four trees in the garden, as if disdaining the other, less leafy trees. The mulberry tree stood out and the lushness of its layered, dark green obscurity created strangely frightening and funereal shapes. All the objects in the vicinity seemed like ghosts, one piled atop the other at quite close quarters, and tiredness made me feel they were surrounding me like the big, heavy, angry tanks that were roaming around the city. These tanks were settled in comfortably for the long haul, soiling everything with chaos, laying waste and challenging everything including the abnormal weather that was proving disorientating to the soldiers, the demonstrators, my cat Nana and Mozart, my music-loving hedgehog (I schlepped them along with me on my travels between Algiers and Constantine, which is why all my friends and colleagues thought me a little eccentric. Zygote, for his part, used to say that it was high time they locked me up in an asylum. Only Omar found my attitude towards my little menagerie charming and sweet.)
Once, on my way back from the hospital, I sensed the birds growing restless, or rather, jittery in a manner that was unusual for them. Unless these feelings were emanating from me, simply because I was both exhausted and overwhelmed with man’s capacity to show such cruelty (especially the manner in which they had castrated Ali, known as ‘Nightmare Face’, by sticking his penis into a desk drawer and then opening and shutting the drawer methodically, meticulously and bureaucratically, laughing amongst themselves, calling this technique ‘the art of tidying one’s stuff away properly...’).
Mozart the hedgehog was as sensitive as I was to all that muffled late-afternoon orchestration. Nana, on the other hand, was wholly indifferent to it. I was fascinated by this Siamese cat’s sense of propriety. At night she slept at the foot of my bed, but when I had a girlfriend stay over, she would spend the night outside! Out of modesty? Out of jealousy? My flights of fancy amused Omar, but as soon as I touched on the subject of our bachelorhood, our inability to get married and have children – in short to be like everyone else – he shut up.
Under my eyelids, which had grown heavy due to the lack of sleep, I felt colours change into their opposites, shifting and alternating. They formed a rectangle, a dark green window separated into two parts: a cherry-red rectangle – my swollen eyelids – and an olive-green rectangle – the lush mulberry tree. Suddenly, I pricked up my ears to their voices, fleeting to start with, but soon swelling. I had a hunch, though sleep had already begun to take a hold of my mind, that an imperceptible change had taken place; despite the fact that – when all was said and done – the air was still the same. It was just the transition from the end of the day to the beginning of night.
The birds began to answer each other hesitantly and intermittently at a barely-audible frequency, as though they were having second thoughts and stuttering, then swiftly taking heart until their perfectly pitched songs rose up from deep inside the mulberry tree and then from every tree in the garden. But the clearest harmonies of all came from the giant mulberry tree, whose branches continued to claw at my bedroom windows. The melody’s crescendo was soft and sweet and silky, and was promptly followed by a genuine, swelling concerto full of improvisation. The initial concerto gradually turned into a symphony, sometimes dissonant, sometimes harmonious, occasionally extremely precise.
Then the musical and spatial arrangements began to change – drastically – at extraordinary speed. In one direction the horizon was stained by a greenish streak, and in the other the musical tumult reached its deafening climax. It was as if the old world, struggling and unravelling in its slow, difficult march, acquired a new lease of life, reinvigorated by this symphony of birds that sounded as if it were being performed on old instruments grown rusty with the evening dew. When I raised my eyes – by which time night had been scattered over the garden – I saw groups of birds on the lookout from the roof corners, facing east, their bodies casting blurry, slightly faded little shadows above the uncertain rim of the sky that hadn’t yet reverted to its usual shade of blue-black, but was hanging on to wan, faded colours.
Like the sky I’d glimpsed in the badly-reproduced photographs in my jealously hoarded newspapers with their accounts of the terrible earthquake of 1953 (which, in retrospect, seemed like a prelude to the real earthquake that was to come a year later on 1 November 1954, the date that signalled the beginning of the war) that contrasted with the thousands of dappled grey feathers here and there, the millions of round, green leaves looming large, hanging over almost the entire roof of the house and some of the neighbouring houses’ roofs, not to mention a good portion of the rest of the sky. I realised then that some residual darkness that had been left hanging during the sunset now seemed to be dripping down with the slowness of stretching quicksilver, or like the dregs of flowing wine.
This in turn drained the habitual greyness from the feathers of the birds lined up along the roof of the house and on the branches of the trees and in the depths of the mulberry tree. Perched on their little legs, the birds had now fallen silent, while slight vibrations occasionally ruffled their puffed-out plumage; the sort of quick vibration that was barely perceptible to the naked eye, matching every trill and every cry, in perfect harmony with this rhythmic music and its ascending, progressively swelling tones, escalating to the point where it became ear-splittingly shrill. It was at this moment that the birds’ eyes, though small, seemed clear and gleaming in contrast to their slightly orangey, rosy beaks.
This spectacle, helped by the breeze, gave me some respite. I felt better rested. Little by little, the tiredness I had accumulated during those long days at the hospital began to recede. A sort of serenity took hold of my mind and body, even though I was fully aware that the riots outside were rising towards their inevitable climax.
I was alone, drinking a beer in my garden in Algiers, pricking my ears up at the intermittent sound of explosions going off in the distance. I wondered why I needed such solitude. Why I desired and accepted this bachelorhood, which surprised even me some days.
And why was Omar also a bachelor?
The birds lingered, staring into space with their melancholy eyes, as if they carried in their pupils all the tears of the world, including my mother’s; especially the tears she’d held back since 1946, since the day my father married Kamar, the young teenage girl from Bône who hailed from an aristocratic Ottoman family, and who was capable of tracing – and flaunting – her family tree back to a Turkish corsair ancestor. Kamar, the owner and beneficiary of those 19 pure platinum Sicilian clocks nobody had ever laid eyes on.
As it happened, Kamar took her cue from Nadia, who was her aunt as well as Omar’s mother and the one who had made up that story about the corsair ancestor and his 19 clocks. She was fascinated by her. Kamar imitated Nadia in every respect. The women were first cousins.
The birds carried in their eyes the tears which my mother had held back when she’d been sitting on top of one of her suitcases late at night in the icy cold, total darkness of Khroub railway station. When I – or my older brother, or my younger brother Zygote – stood by her side, observing her despite the veil that hid her entire face apart from her eyes, stealing glances while listening out for the sounds of the approaching train that suddenly made its deafening entry into the station, spouting jets of smoke, piercing the silence and shrouding the small station’s platforms in thick fog.
After I reached fifty, I started spending time in Constantine on a more regular basis. I spent whole evenings with Omar. And when the bottles of whisky and wine from Mascara and Médéa had taken their effect, everything started to flow back into my memory, which was cluttered with Omar’s family history and my own. I had bought the old family home and would often come to stay for long periods of time. As I got older, I needed that house, the Constantine weather and Omar’s company. We dwelled on our memories like the pair of old bachelors that we were. When very young, we had struck a pact and decided that we would never get married! Never have children! Why? I’ve never fully understood. We often spoke about Mr Baudier and that passage by Victor Hugo which he had told us to read and re-read. It bothered us. We nursed such a profound love for Victor Hugo! But these words of praise for the guillotine that had arrived at the docks in Algiers to ‘civilise’ the Algerians...
My memories waylaid me, and I began to remember standing there while the train gradually came to a stop; my mother rushing to get her luggage so that I wouldn’t see the tears running down her cheeks as the conductor blew his whistle with all his might. My mother was pretending to hurry, holding her suitcase in one hand and dragging me along by the other, running towards the first-class carriage, without a word, silent, calm, as if she were dead – or rather, as if her body were now devoid of life – with the white, raw silk inside her veil. It was as if she was being swallowed up by the earth she was trampling, vanishing, leaving no trace of her existence, because nothing mattered any more, apart from her suitcase and my hand, which she clutched so hard it started to hurt. I only had eyes for her veiled face, trying to read the magnitude of the sadness that had struck her in it, without any tangible results.
I couldn’t help staring at her as the train sped towards the village she had left many years earlier with my father and my elder brother, Zahir, who had taken me to football matches and boxing bouts, introduced me to pornography and to books by a certain André Gide. And who, much to my distress, all too soon left me behind to deal with that infernal monozygotic twin brother of mine (even my mother had started calling him by his nickname, Zygote).
Suddenly, I stopped looking at her and found myself surrounded by noises, voices and by a sort of restlessness that quickly gave way to a fascination with the bustle, the panting of the steam engine, the sound of the wheels on the tracks, and the screeching of the carts that the station porter was pulling towards the tiny station’s concourse. Then that horrible silence descended over the compartment once more and we sat down in our berths; my mother switched off the lights and we thundered into the world, into a frightening nothingness.
I very quickly fell in love with my young stepmother, who never stopped flirting with me, arousing my desires, and whose hairy pubis I could make out at the point where her thighs converged through her light, crumpled, silken nightgown. When she woke up, her eyes were sallow, her body on fire, her gait unsteady, and she always seemed – at least as far as I was concerned – enshrouded in mystery, to the point where I never stopped asking myself whether she had ever really loved my father, or if she were secretly in love with Zahir, my older brother.
My father’s store was spacious. The midday sun was at its strongest and the heat had reached its peak. There was a strong smell of cinnamon everywhere. The account books were stacked so high that they were waging war on the ceiling. The invoices were also piled up higgledy-piggledy. Inks. Fabrics. Wood carvings. The antique inkwell that father had purchased at the bazaar in Tehran. The sharp pincers of boredom: the impression that a plant was sprouting its shoots through my spinal cord. I fuck a whore who sometimes drops in to see me at the store. She takes my hand and pushes it into her sex. Sticky fluid oozes from the longitudinal wound, washing out all the humus, all the grass and all the plasma she conceals within her.
Disgust. Nausea. The rotund curve of her belly. Frozen fingertips. Vibrating air that warps in places. The anarchy and chaos of sex. The clitoris like a metal tube, while the vagina keeps spewing out congealed sticky liquid. Betrayal by the senses: I watch the distorted, wizened, shrunken passers-by through the frosted glass. Confused senses! Where is the hole, the orifice, the crack? I vomit and weep. Unhappiness is saffron-yellow and anxiety is green. Maybe it’s me Kamar loves. I was afraid then of falling into the trap of arrogance and complacency, all the more so since my pride knew no bounds.
The plane, like an arrow soaring towards its target. Unflinching. Like Zeno’s arrow. Moving. Unmoving. Moving...