I'VE NEVER LIKED HAPPY PEOPLE. Happiness has always bored me. Omar was miserable, and that’s why I loved him. I relied on his misery and the profound respect I secretly harboured for him. My dealings with him were nonetheless strange. It was not like me to benefit from the misfortunes of others, but I found the drama and confusion surrounding his destiny fascinating, because his experience encapsulated my country’s tragic history. It simply radiated out of Omar, his family, his refusal to negotiate the labyrinth of events with honesty and lucidity; a kind of x-ray from which one could read – albeit with difficulty – the collective history of Algeria, one that was both frightening and painful.
I felt saturated with Omar’s pain each time I saw him, catching fleeting hints of his mental torture. All those scars my cousin accumulated after those traumatic events were continually exacerbated by fresh additions, each with its own hidden meanings, which could only be distinguished by vague, subtle nuances. These scars were swelled by the effects of a memory that had become confused by dint of his constant brushes with death. Omar had gone from one peril to another, from one loss of consciousness to the next, until his memories had grown heavier and more inward-looking.
Omar had but a single aim in life – to try and escape from the confusion inflicted by that falsified reality, from a father who had collaborated with the French and a brother who worked for the OAS. A reality that had been distorted and disordered for reasons that yet eluded him. He’d been striving to shake off all these gnawing regrets not only since he had first understood his family history, but forever. A genuine symmetry had nonetheless always existed between the various diverging points of view within the family nucleus, which overflowed with emotions, betrayals, acts of cowardice and heroism – both Omar and his grandfather had been staunch nationalists at first and rebels afterwards; with closely related fantasies that were quite capable of suddenly vanishing, contradicting themselves, running up against stubborn fact, disobeying all the known rules of paramnesia, splitting themselves into two, shrinking away, and so on. My relationship with Omar was therefore taxing, but excitingly complex.
He didn’t remain in the bush for long. He was gravely wounded after a few months and evacuated to a hospital in Moscow.
Moscow. The hospital. The night scattered into the air where it dissolved. As soon as the first particles of light bombarded the atmosphere, Omar woke up, his limbs numb, debilitated by a psychological weariness whose origins he found difficult to discern. He remembered that the war was over for him and that his leg had been saved. But his first memory was reserved for his favourite filly, Fascination II, as she neighed and galloped at lightning speed, as resplendent as those cast-lead horse statuettes and Omar’s grandfather Si Mustafa’s beloved Barbary figs that featured on his stable’s coat-of-arms and sat on the shelves of Si Mustafa’s office alongside the trophies and ribbons he’d won in competitions the world over. Omar never stopped telling himself the war was over. He would then sink into that fluid, silky atmosphere full of his mother Nadia’s favourite signs and colours: wine-red, straw-yellow and plum. Nadia was exceptionally beautiful and exuded a bewildering sensuality and energy.
Nadia arranged to go and visit Omar in that distant city... But how had she known that he was in that Moscow hospital? Omar suspected the resistance’s efficient but disconcerting intelligence services of helping his mother, who was an informant in the city of Batna, where her husband was Police Commissioner. They had certainly provided her with a fake passport, allowing her to slip past the watchful eye of the French Secret Services in order to arrive, after several detours, in Moscow, the colonial authorities’ sworn enemy at the time.
Nadia was laden with gifts and recent photographs of the family and the stud farm’s horses, one of which of course was the ever-impressive Fascination II. Omar and I had once witnessed that stunning mare being mounted by a black stallion of exceptional pedigree. I still remember that scene – the violence had both flummoxed and terrified us. The two animals were locked in a savage struggle, egged on loudly by the grooms. Saliva was spraying everywhere. Everyone was excited. That bestial scene had shocked, disgusted and traumatised me.
Nadia came out of nowhere, bringing with her that inimitable mayhem and commotion, wearing an extravagant European- style outfit she had made herself, radiating her cryptic beauty, her sensual exuberance. Omar began asking her for explanations, while that Russian August heat continued to distort objects and the few pieces of furniture in the room, contorting them into curious shapes. All of a sudden, the different layers in the atmosphere grew dense, oscillating between half-darkness and blazing colours, between patches of heavy darkness and shimmering pools of raw light.
The overwhelming atmosphere in the hospital room had become misty and dense, moistening the surface of the mirror with coat after coat of condensation. Determined to show his mother his leg had healed, Omar feebly got out of bed, took a few steps, headed towards the washbasin and combed his hair while looking in the mirror. He gazed at his features, examined them, running his index finger over the skin of his cheeks, which over the past few days had grown rough with stubble. As soon as Omar realised the bristles had grown coarse, the room began to spin. He hung in there, narrowly avoiding falling down or fainting so as not to worry his mother.
Omar then allowed the memories of days past and their distended hours to come flooding back, opening up a horizon of small joys and ordinary sorrows, despite the piling up of uncertainties regarding his mixed Berber, Arab and Turkish origins, and, for the past couple of years – since going into the bush to fight in the resistance – his strange relationship with his father, which had grown complicated in ways he could not have foreseen. Some days he suspected him of collaborating with the colonial authorities, and on others thought him entirely innocent, since he was only following the Organisation’s orders advising him to remain in his post as Police Commissioner in Batna to play the part of a double agent. To top it off, ever since his mother had arrived in Moscow, Omar hadn’t ceased wondering what role she played in the Organisation.
He often lost himself in a labyrinth of speculation, blood and betrayal, unable to remember who or where he was, despite the presence of his mother, who had a way of sweeping his apprehensions aside with a casual, comical wave of her hand; whose pathetic movements he observed relentlessly through a kind of bottled-up despair. Like those 19 Sicilian clocks Nadia had brought with her from the city of her birth when she got married, which broke space down into the essential components of time with sumptuous calculation and measured sloth. As if the 19 clocks, which he often thought about but had neither seen nor heard chime, pushed him to the end of his tether and threw him off-kilter, casting him loose in the vast geography of words where he sought refuge in the warm embraces of logic. Yet he remained doubtful. Nadia said: ‘But your father has been forced to serve the resistance in an unofficial capacity. He’s following the Organisation’s orders. What exactly are you getting at? Come on Omar, aren’t you ashamed of harbouring suspicions about your father? And Salim – Salim has never dabbled in politics! He just wants to have a bit of fun like any other boy his age. Did you know your brother’s a marvellous dancer? And what about me? What do you think about me?’
The new photographs his mother had brought him depicted not only family members, but also the beautiful mosques, churches and synagogues of various capitals around the world that his grandfather had visited during Omar’s absence. They also portrayed the enormous dockyards chock-full of interwoven structures and slumbering ships of various shapes and sizes. Photos of Geneva, Barcelona and Marseille (where, during the 130-year-long colonial era, they had made soap from the bodies of Algerians stolen from cemeteries), where Mr Baltayan, an Armenian living in exile in France, an inseparable friend and steadfast business partner of Si Mustafa’s, continued to manage the buying, selling and grooming of racehorses in Europe. Nadia hadn’t stopped telling Omar all the latest news ever since she’d burst into that hospital room in Moscow: Si Mustafa, her father-in-law, was as usual roaming the world like the ancient explorers and seafarers he never stopped reading about and admiring, always on the lookout for new mares and stallions to breed with his own. Si Mustafa had stubbornly resisted selling Fascination II, who had attracted the attention of numerous buyers who perhaps thought that, as Omar had left for the war, he would certainly die or quickly be captured by the French, quickly tortured, quickly sentenced to death and quickly guillotined, and that Fascination II’s owner would die of grief. ‘You know he’s still involved in politics at his age! Can you believe it? That’s the sort of man your grandfather is!’ Nadia concluded.
Nadia’s peculiar behaviour aroused Omar’s curiosity. He knew full well she was playing the role of Mother Hen and steadfast wife, but he suspected her... Omar conjured up images of searing blizzards, sand-storms, Arctic glaciers, frozen deserts, slimy swamps, exotic foliage, Andalusian plains where splendid horses galloped, dilapidated African villages, Chinese workers smiling on their bicycles, young African girls, Algerian, Moroccan and Vietnamese prostitutes and so forth. Far away as he was, it helped him visualise the teeming world that entered the family home through Si Mustafa’s famous photos, which frightened his wife, daughter-in-law and all the other women of the family, who were shocked by the outlandishness or erotic indecency of certain pictures Omar’s grandfather was naïve enough to purchase without much discernment or attentiveness.
Si Mustafa was fond of scribbling messages on the back of these famous postcards that were of astonishing warmth for a man of his generation, who had been born into such a backward, puritanical and hypocritical society. Si Mustafa – who was the complete opposite of my own father, a feudalistic, polygamous and paedophilic bastard – often mailed photographs of the stallions and mares he’d bought, giving plenty of details, such as the date and place the transaction was made. To avoid any problems with the colonial censors, he wrote his notes in French, since writing in Arabic was deemed a subversive act; despite the fact that the numbers in the date – the day, month and year – were actually Arabic!
So this paradoxical, often obscene world entered that large ancestral abode, an estate Nadia continued to manage despite her son’s departure into the bush to fight in the resistance and his being wounded eight months later. She bore this burden despite the rumours surrounding her husband Kamal and the malicious gossip about Salim, her younger son, who was criticised for attending too many Saturday-night dances hosted by French colonists. Despite the suspicions that Omar harboured about her.
The plane was now climbing.