1

Evasion

I HAVE A KNIFE IN my kitchen. I’ve never been an aggressive person, but if this disgusting old man goes on jabbering away I’m seriously thinking of finding a new use for that knife. I’ll cut his tongue out, and some other organ if necessary. I’m out of cigarettes, the weather’s so miserable it makes you aggressive and, on top of all that, he’s giving me good reason to finish him off. Removing someone from the land of the living might be a reasonable solution, even for someone like me who has only trivial reasons for doing so. This Uncle Mubarak, as everyone calls him, is an uncle to everyone, not an uncle to anyone in particular. He’s public property, vulgar and delusional. He likes to hear people say things that suggest he’s respected, though he doesn’t deserve any respect. That’s what I learned in his café when I had the impression he deserved a certain respect in deference to his gray hair. It was my mistake from the beginning—when I opened the door and let him into this den of mine, and earlier when I let him break down the barrier I had set up between myself and others. Being alone is bad, but having to deal with other people is worse. I haven’t spoken to anyone for days. I’ve sold my phone. I don’t have anyone to call or anyone to call me. Throughout the past year, Mubarak is the only person I’ve spoken to for more than five minutes.

He’s still nattering away. I turn on the television, which has served no purpose since I came to live here. He’s trying to prove to me that somehow he understands everything that’s happening in the world. The Jews are the cause of all the misfortunes and intrigues that have befallen us, he told me. This is his second visit to me. It’s close to nine o’clock in the evening. I have a little balcony that looks out on a square that’s surrounded by buildings and frequented at night by lecherous dogs and cats. I often sit there and stay up till dawn. Silence is wisdom, he says in summation.

I’ll spit in his face or take my clothes off and sit down naked with him so that he goes off and leaves me. My suspicions tell me that that’s what he wants. He deprives me of my only outlet—sitting on the balcony and observing the banality of the world when it’s shrouded in darkness, or reading by a low light that doesn’t draw the attention of my neighbors. I do that after midnight and sometimes I even worry that the glow at the end of my cigarette might give me away. Living on the top floor is a special privilege. Mubarak doesn’t seem to have any family. He comes from far away and doesn’t tell anyone where. I’m sure that behind his forced smile this old man is hiding a dark history and even darker intentions. It’s clear from what he says that he loves money and nothing else.

Where are you from? he asks me. Why aren’t you married? What do you do? Where are your family?

I’ve become one of those people who doesn’t care about anything, however important, but Mubarak’s questions make me angry. I don’t understand why he’s so inanely inquisitive about me. I went out on the balcony and left him. He stared at the woman presenting the news, adjusting his glasses on his nose and sighing. Finally he shut up for a while and stopped talking bullshit to me.

Mubarak came up to me the first time I went into the café he owns. Welcome amongst us, he said, You’re like a son to me. He said that and other things that sounded like cheap attempts to ingratiate himself. We agreed I could order drinks on account and pay at the end of the month. After that there was nothing said between us. The only regulars at the café are some retirees and a few has-beens on whom life has turned its back. The café’s very close to the apartment so I’m not thinking of going to any other one. Sometimes I pick up a cup of coffee and bring it back to the apartment. He’s morbidly inquisitive and sticks his nose into the asses of those around him without good cause. I try to ignore the looks he gives me—he and the insolent people around him. I go in and pore over a newspaper, though I have no desire to read any of the stories. One day one of them followed me to the bus stop and I managed to shake him off. I gathered from their conversations that he was an informer or a lackey for some government agency. Mubarak is the only one who’s dared to knock on my door so far. How did he know which apartment it was? He said that, since I was alone and out of work, he was offering to let me be his partner in some project he didn’t disclose. If we succeed in it (he said “we,” plural), you’ll be a king, he said. As for himself, he claimed he had so little time left to live that he didn’t have any such aspirations. What he said didn’t make me curious to find out what it was he thought would make me a king. He’s a big talker, probably suspect, and I should be wary of him. A king? In practice that goes way beyond my aspirations, which are absurdly limited, for which I deserve a special dose of pity. Anyway, I’m a filthy slave that no one knows or cares for, and that suits me fine. That creature finally tired of me, turned off the television and left. He did say goodbye, but I didn’t respond. I saw him limp into the square. He stopped a while and then walked off, full of confidence. I didn’t ask him why he was limping, but I’m pretty sure that his glasses are just part of a disguise. Everything about him is suspicious, even his smile.

In the building opposite me a teenage girl often looks out at me in my long night sessions. She looks at me, waves her hand, and holds up her phone, suggesting that I give her my number and that she’s alone and available. Sometimes I ignore her and sometimes I respond with a smile that goes to waste in the darkness. I couldn’t possibly make the foolish mistake of seducing an immature girl like her, but I’m reluctant to claim any virtue, even to myself. I want to live invisibly, unseeable even as a reflection. Her balcony is closed and I’m still waiting. I don’t know what draws me to her. I’m not so hungry that I’m going to break my long and voluntary abstinence from women with any old piece of meat that invites in anyone who comes up to her. Yet I do find myself inquisitive, even intrigued. Aren’t I cured of being interested in anything? I’ll get sick again. The balcony that I’ve been interested in recently seems dark and unpromising. Why the hell am I so stubborn? A few days ago she threw a piece of paper off her balcony. I interrupted my seclusion and slowly went down to pick it up. My heart was racing. It was a small piece of paper, folded and scented, and her phone number was written on it in pink ink. I took it home, even more interested in her balcony. When she watched me pick up the piece of paper, I didn’t sign to her that I didn’t have a phone. A phone’s a luxury I can do without and, besides, I can’t afford to buy another one just so that our heartbeats can meet halfway between one ring and another. I’m as broke as a gambler who’s lost his shirt. Is she in love with me? I avoid asking myself this question.

Tonight it was an ordeal breaking free from the old man. I sat on the balcony pretending to myself that I wasn’t looking forward to her looking out at me. The little tart teases me by going missing some nights. My book remained unopened on the small table in front of me. I felt as listless and apathetic as a castrated bull. I had a powerful expectation that she would do me harm in some way. I wouldn’t be her first victim, or her last. I would just be a male who marked his presence between her thighs, like many others before and after. She might be really passionate, frustrated and desirous, but who falls in love with a shadow and looks forward to meeting it? She had created an image of me in her imagination without even seeing my face in detail. I’m a night creature most of the time, and the night is a playground for desire, a fertile pasture for every hungry imagination. My own imagination is depleted and dried up. I don’t like to feel sorry for myself, and I’m no good at doing it in the first place. My history with women is embarrassing. I have no experience and the only thing in me that has changed since I was a teenager is that I’m now burned out, just ashes.

It’s three o’clock in the morning. The weather’s a little cold but I’m on fire watching for her silhouette to appear. I was about to have a shower to punish my body for disobeying me at a time when I needed it to be obedient, but at the last minute I was too lazy to bother. My weak will is my chronic defect. Inane rambling. I’ll close the balcony shutters and go to sleep. I haven’t gone down to the café for a week, but I might try to do so tomorrow if I can. I remember Mubarak. The fact that he came to see me was like advance notice of a night as ugly as his face. The light on the balcony opposite hasn’t come on for me and I haven’t read anything. No great loss as far as I’m concerned. What really worries me, though, is that I’m interested in her and I’m waiting for tomorrow. I slipped under the bedding to die a little death. My head’s heavy on the pillow, and I wish it had been cut off in that incident in the past. In that case I’d now be up above laughing at the fates that have deprived me of my fair share in life.

Everyone who heard about that incident told me later that I was nearly killed. I have a different perspective on it now, and time has a tendency to correct what people say. I won another chance at life but I wouldn’t say I’ve made good use of it. It was a chance that others, the people consumed by that vicious war, would have made better use of. Those people were offered as sacrifices to the gods. In that decade of fire and tears, each faction killed the guilty and the innocent without distinction as a way to win the favor of their bloody gods, whether they were rebel commanders in the mountains with their morbid beliefs or government soldiers who wanted to win promotion by trampling on the bodies of the dead. O the religion of God! God alone knows how many sacrificial victims disappeared or were killed and never heard of again, or which god devoured them. Some other teenagers and I were abducted from the corner of the main street in our village, there in Serdj El Ghoul north of Sétif. It was devastating for my family. Time would heal that, as it always does, but I came closer to death than at any other time in my life. A man who was working with the death squads didn’t know that and he saved me from them when he recognized me, but that just put me on track for another kind of death. Many years later I was sitting in a pizzeria on Rue Hassiba in Algiers when I saw my savior come in. His body had plumped out and his jowls had drooped. My appearance had changed too and he didn’t remember me. It’s enough that he recognized me in that forest when everything was hazy. Throughout my only night as an abductee I was tied up and blindfolded. I pissed in my pants from the fear and the cold, constantly muttering all the short Quranic verses I could remember. Until dawn I prayed to God to save me and I stopped praying only when I heard the metal door open. I concluded that those people were stronger than anyone and that God had abandoned me. On the edge of the valley, in the forest of death, they took off my blindfold. The man was from our village. He shouted in their faces. He’s a secondary school kid and had nothing to do with anything, he said. In the pizzeria I stood up and embraced the middle-aged man he had become. I reminded him of the incident. It was the first time I had hugged anyone with such affection and felt such gratitude toward someone. After everything I went through after my “escape” from death, I now wonder which of us is indebted to the other. He paid for my sandwich, gave me some spending money, and left. I was in a really pitiable state, although the most difficult part was yet to come. My aunt had died a few days earlier. After the condolence rituals were done, I didn’t wait for her children to tell me I was now surplus to needs. I forgive them. I too feel I’m superfluous wherever I go. She put up with me in her house for many years when I came to her fleeing from death and I decided not to go on taking advantage of her, whether she was alive or dead. I passed my baccalaureate exams and went to university thanks to her. Death puts an end to everything. I saw her as a substitute for my mother. She was strict with her children but she always treated me differently.

My memories of my mother are distant and hazy. I feel no emotional attachment to her. Sometimes I think I was born without a mother, that I was born instead from my father’s back when he was watering the fields. It wasn’t long before my father joined her. He loved me with a love that had no equal, but it was clear that he loved her more than he loved me, because he followed her and abandoned me and my brother Ammar. My aunt hadn’t had any sons and saw me as her opportunity to have one. She pampered me to an extraordinary extent and I didn’t disappoint her. I played my role in a way that would have suited an only son. Her daughters were envious of me and sometimes they would hit me. They were much older than me. I often snooped on them when they were washing or changing their clothes. I lived out roles that were not mine, standing in for people who were dead or missing, or had never been born. I was an interloper, living an incidental life. Then my aunt died. The doctor’s report said it was a heart attack but I knew I had killed her off with the curse that I carry with me. I’m good at killing off the people that love me. Loving me is a sure recipe for a quick death. Where’s the love I carried in my heart for all those who gave me their unlimited love? I stopped visiting the grave of my maternal aunt and before that my father’s grave and that of my paternal aunt, although I was like her substitute son. How’s my brother Ammar? We saw each other a few years ago at the funeral of my maternal aunt. He said he missed me and I should go back to Serdj El Ghoul. I miss him terribly now. I know he loves me and I haven’t done right by him. But I’ve lost contact with him in his own interest because his life is more important to me than my own life, and I don’t want him to try his luck with that curse that I carry.

Is it as crowded and annoying up above as it is for us here? I imagine that up above there’s a hall where they display all the inevitabilities that shaped our lives and the possible and probable destinies of all those who have lived on earth.

I can hear the old man shouting, talking to people only he can see. He scolds them for dying too soon, argues with old neighbors, and tells his late wife he has to get up early to do something, something different every time. The poor man is senile and has started to have dementia. I’ll never forget what his son Mourad did for me, yet I still think he’s a bastard. He paid a woman to look after his father, then went off and left him alone. I’ve lived without a father for years. I go to the old man’s apartment and he disgusts me with his slobber, he says the most unexpected things and makes up strange sentences that I don’t understand. I think they stem from a mixture of imagination and reality, the past that he wanted but that never came about and the bleak present that he never expected. I feel sorry for him. Sometimes he calls me Mourad and in return I try to repay the debt. His son gave me the apartment to live in without me having to pay him a penny. The old man fought in the War of Independence, but I don’t know how he obtained two flats in the same building. They’re part of a project into which the government shoves all the rats and their families and gives them ownership. This country is a big trick. I can’t sleep when I hear him shouting. This miserable old man deserves a merciful death, and a week ago I seriously thought of slipping something into his food, but then I backed off. I was too hard-hearted to inflict such mercy on a weak man like him. Mourad deserves to be executed at the stake. He didn’t appreciate the blessing of having a father in his life and he went off to Germany. It’s been more than a year since he’s seen him. He used to call me once a month to check up on his father. He’s a terrible actor and his voice gives him away. I suspect he wanted to hear that his father had died. He stopped asking after him completely six months ago.

I know the old man’s life history. In my presence he brings up his distant, jumbled memories of poverty, his harsh childhood, and the Algerian war for independence. Sometimes he loses all his memory and he can’t even remember his name, but he never forgets to pray. He’s conscientious about that. Often he forgets that he’s prayed, so he prays two or three times. He might miss one prostration or do one extra by mistake, and he usually does it without bothering to wash. I brought him an ablution stone that he can use as a substitute for abluting with water. A few days later I heard him speaking to Mourad on the phone at the top of his voice. He was angry and sad and he threw the stone at the television screen. I ran to him and hugged him. He was gasping like a child. I felt rather sorry for him and cursed my luck. But for some reason I didn’t fully sympathize with him. I thought he’d been cruel and unfair in his life and deserved this end. Those were just ideas that I immediately forgot. I bought him another television that was bigger and more expensive and threw the ablution stone in the trash bin. As long as his heart’s pure, he’s in a fit state to pray, I thought. I leave him constantly watching the Quran channel. He likes the voice of Abdel Basit Abdel Samad more than anyone else’s and his face beams when he hears him reciting. He’s deeply religious, or he’s trying to make up for the past. He reminds me of the Quran teacher in our village—similar features and the same dignity of old age. I remember rubbing clay on the wooden writing tablets to clean them, the inkwells, the reed pens, and the ink we made from burned wool. I expect that teacher’s probably dead by now. I wasn’t as mischievous as the other kids. I was slow-witted and apathetic and that annoyed him, and I don’t think he liked me much. That was his good luck or else he would have died earlier, since anyone who likes me soon meets their demise. I forgive him all the beatings, which left the soles of my feet swollen, because God’s word doesn’t come free of charge. What has God’s attitude toward me been recently?

Life doesn’t accept the logic of substitute players, but that’s how I am now as far as Mourad is concerned. He provides the lodging and I spend time with his father, as a guard, as a companion, as a substitute for Mourad. The old man comes to his senses sometimes and is fully aware that his son has abandoned him and that I’m not Mourad. I suspect he deliberately calls me by his son’s name even when he’s in his right mind and his memory’s working. He understood the deal, and maybe he’s come to terms with the new situation. I have also realized that his son treated me despicably, for which I’m very grateful to him. I lock the old man in so that he doesn’t go out and lose his way in the streets. I protect him from any intruders, pay the water and electricity bills, supervise the woman who looks after the house, and pay her salary every month. There’s less than one month left of the year we agreed. I’m grateful to my friend in a way. He took me on as a guard dog without telling me in advance and without me having any prior qualifications. My sense of smell is weak but my hearing’s very sharp. My money’s run out and I’ve been through some hard times in this house. In fact I sometimes found nothing to eat and I couldn’t afford soap to wash with. Because of my conscience I did face one stupid moral dilemma. I’m not a thief, but some problems call for urgent solutions of one kind or another. I once called a taxi and dragged the old man to the nearest post office to withdraw his pension as a fighter in the War of Independence. His balance had accumulated. Mourad was the only other person who had the authority to withdraw the money and I discovered it was a fortune compared with my own means. I bought him some sheep’s liver and cooked it and we ate together. He looked as happy as a child, and I celebrated my victory over my conscience with some bottles of beer. A dirty insect fell inside one of them. I got rid of it, then poured what was left in the bottle down my throat as if nothing had happened. I found I had to sell my books to the booksellers at the square near the central post office in order to make ends meet. I had spent the last dinar of the money I had raised by selling my laptop earlier. I didn’t have anything else I could sell without embarrassment. I decided to take a share of the old man’s pension. Free lodging isn’t fair compensation for spending so much time with him. Mourad tricked me and I should have changed the agreement to make it fairer. Besides, dogs don’t make good guards when they’re hungry.

Who am I to judge others? Mourad was rash and reckless, yet I still see him as good, in a way. But if one had to look at it from another angle and describe him properly, he’s a womanizer. I don’t doubt that the bed I sleep in has been visited by a host of passing women. Underneath it I found a bra and in my second month here the doorbell rang and I opened it to find an ugly woman in her forties asking after him. He didn’t spare any female and his taste is disgusting. A case of aesthetic blindness. He spent most of his father’s pension on them and when he’d gone as far as he could with them here he moved on to abroad. He’ll probably die between a woman’s legs. I now live as a monk in what used to be a den of debauchery. He sold his car and paid a large bribe to someone in the German embassy to get him a visa. Later he told me he was very happy: he could sleep with countless women with blue eyes and smooth white legs, none of them with armpits that smell bad. He avoids any accusation that he has been negligent toward his father, though that’s a well-established fact. He cried a lot in our last phone conversation and said he wasn’t going to have any children so that he wouldn’t impose on anyone the burden of looking after him when he grows old. I think he’s made a final decision and he won’t be father or son to anyone other than himself. He pissed on the past and everything about it and left. I found the apartment was a shambles—dust, leftover food, empty beer cans, and rat shit. I’m not easily disgusted. Once I spent several nights in a shack right next to a dumpster full of trash. I spoke to him and he told me he no longer felt attached to the place and I had to deal with it. He came back that night, kissed his father on the forehead, and asked him to forgive him. That was when I knew for certain he would never come back. His last week here he was off with a woman, telling her that of all the women he knew she was the closest to his heart. They went to Oran and he promised he would help arrange for her to join him in Germany. As we stood talking at the door, she asked me if Mourad had asked me to tell her anything, and I said no. She called him a bastard and left.

The old man calmed down at dawn and stopped shouting. The cleaning woman would come again in the morning. I had received her wages for a whole year from Mourad. I don’t like to add to the sacrifices of others. She’s a hard-working woman who works like a robot without making a noise. She greets me sullenly and is almost mute in my presence, but I sometimes hear her exchanging words with the old man. She cleans his apartment daily, and my apartment whenever I ask her to, and I rely on her to buy everything we need. I’ve become a substitute for Mourad and so she has to obey me. For my part I don’t overwork her and I think she’s accepted the situation. She’s a pleasant creature but there’s something slavish in her nature. I doubled her wages and she didn’t seem especially grateful. It’s expensive to live in isolation but I don’t pay her from my own pocket. She lives near to this neighborhood and her presence is vital for me and for him. She’s honest and she’s bringing up her children alone. Women like her will be extinct in a few years’ time. My drowsiness disappeared and I went off to the balcony again. Further evidence of how attached I am to that bitch. Day broke: that meant I wouldn’t be seeing a faint light on her balcony, though even that might not have sent anything more than a misleading signal. I’ll have to wait for tonight. Damn waiting!