8

Pure Fate

ANXIETY IS A LETHAL POISON, and life is a sure recipe for torment. Ousmane La Gauche’s life had never been this bad before. He had to submit to the absurd calculations that life imposes. The world couldn’t stand on one leg. The left alone wasn’t enough. He accepted that. He had shat out all his old convictions and was content to live like a wolf. But now he was a poisoned victim, powerless and abhorrent. Damn all those who are unable to act, whatever the reasons might be. He stood there drunk, watching Zahiya. He didn’t know why he was following her or rubbing salt into his own wounds by watching her. The stationery shop was still closed and he had free time to monitor her activities. He saw Zahiya come out of her husband’s villa and drive off in a car worth at least ten times as much as he could afford. Her husband, the stupid old man, spent lavishly on her, and seemed happy with her. Maybe he thought his new wife was the ideal woman. Where did he first see her and how did she meet him, since she didn’t go out of the house? Did she bewitch him? He was worried she might notice his presence nearby. She had threatened him with the police when he approached her one time. She had given up her husband and children for the sake of her own pleasure. A loose woman, a cow—all the insults in the world wouldn’t allay his anger. He went home to drink, or to Mubarak’s café to ask dozens of questions without taking the trouble to seek the answer to any of them. Could that old man satisfy her hunger in a way that he couldn’t do himself? The man was older than him and further advanced along the road to decrepitude. Maybe he’d found some secret concoction or some amazingly effective pills. No. Only money performs miracles. She looked at Ousmane with contempt. He insisted on harassing her, and once he heard her say, “I’ll speak to you one day.” She wanted to fob him off. He didn’t get the message, so she threatened to file a complaint against him.

She told him in haste that she had never hated him, but she wanted to save herself and her children. His curse would have struck them all, so she had to act. Ousmane asked Kada to help and he made inquiries about her. Her new husband had set up a big garment workshop for her, arranged for twenty seamstresses to work there, and placed a large deposit in her bank account, and so she had become important, in a way. Zahiya had once told him she was thinking of applying for one of the microloans set aside for women who stay at home so that she could buy a sewing machine. He dragged his feet and snuffed out her enthusiasm for the idea. But she had finally found someone who appreciated her talent for sewing and would help her achieve her dream. Once Kada tried tempting Ousmane into blackmailing her but Ousmane said, “I would never accept a bribe. Unlike her, I’m not the kind that runs after money.” Zahiya was cured of poverty and had taken off like a rocket, while he just rolled around in the mud like a mangy dog. Ousmane’s son Oualid told him that Zahiya’s new husband did everything she asked of him and for her sake he had fallen out with all his own children. Ousmane burned with anger whenever Oualid told him some new detail of her new life. He seriously considered hitting Oualid when he saw the effect his rival’s generosity had on his son, but he backed off at the last moment and didn’t utter even one word of disapproval. But fatherhood is not a matter of words. The children loved only her and avoided visiting him. They had no need for a useless father like him, a failure and a drunk. The interloper took control of everything, while he lost his family because he was a man of principle and had bad luck. He called an old school friend, Ashour the postmaster, but Ashour didn’t reply. Ashour ignored him and avoided meeting him. Ousmane eventually asked Ashour to lend him some money and he gave a feeble excuse for refusing. He wasn’t a real friend, or else he would have helped him, at least to find a job. Ashour knew lots of people but his sympathy for Ousmane wasn’t sincere. Ousmane had given him so much help in exams. Ashour was a jackass and didn’t understand a thing. When they were at school together, Ashour would pay for cigarettes and sandwiches while Ousmane copied out the lessons, explained them to him, did the homework, and fed the answers to him during exams if the proctor was distracted. Ousmane danced at Ashour’s wedding and was very happy for him, but then Ashour insulted him in front of the guests. He made them laugh at Ousmane by saying he was slow-witted and idealistic. Ousmane kept his distance for a while but was soon appeased by a trivial apology. Ousmane had a long history of feeling inferior, though later he tried to make up for it a little. He restored some of the balance in his relationship with Ashour, and yet nothing lasts. Affection is too weak to withstand the tests of time and fates at cross purposes. Ashour left him in suspense for two days, then offered him a 1,000-dinar note and he had no choice but to accept it. Ousmane became very withdrawn. All the things he used to talk about endlessly no longer had any importance. Intellectuals were just plucked chickens drowning in their own shit. Only full pockets impose their logic. He no longer had access to supplies from the beer factory so, after selling booze without the government’s knowledge, he went bankrupt and could hardly afford his own daily bread. To make a living he put copies of the Quran back in his bookshop, along with books on fatwas and copies of Malik’s Muwatta’. His bookstore didn’t provide even a subsistence income and most of what he earned went to rent for the store. No one reads these days and ignorance is spreading like the plague. He owed the landlord three months’ rent on the store. The landlord was threatening to evict him and, as a last resort, had given him one week to pay up. His other business, selling alcohol, had covered his needs, but now he was completely destitute and his ex-wife added to his misery and wore him down. He thought she should pay the price, any price.

He sat down with Mubarak, the person closest to him in recent times, and spoke to him at length in a low voice. This time Mubarak didn’t grumble about hearing the story repeated. In the story of his friend’s misfortune he found some consolation for what he was going through himself, even if what he faced wasn’t quite so tragic. The previous evening had been a turning point: he had faced the difficult test and emerged triumphant. The rain had stopped and after midnight he was coming out of the apartment of the dead man’s son and going down the stairs in the building in a state of elation. He wasn’t completely unlucky, his fears had abated, and he still had hope. If it turned out that Ousmane had asked him about his sexual capabilities only to embarrass him and to prove to himself that he wasn’t the only impotent man around, he could boast that he had successfully passed the test and proven he still had some virility left. His heart was no longer young and taking those pills all the time would tire him out. He needed two years at the most to see the baby boy in front of him, then he could say goodbye to the world with his mind at rest. The young woman had tired him out. He would never find out that she had kept the blue shirt as a special token since he didn’t intend to repeat the experience. He had decided to embark on what was useful. His face looked tired but he looked satisfied with himself in a way, and angry with himself in that he had allowed his late wife to ruin his health. Even after her death he had hesitated to seek another wife for a long time and his courage and his principles let him down several times. Hellfire would inevitably consume him, but that was something for the future. On the Day of Judgment he would find out how God would respond, to hold him to account for fornicating at such an advanced age. He had never been promiscuous but circumstances had imposed it on him. And what now? He repeated the question to himself, and Ousmane left him to his silence. Let the daughters go to hell, they’re nasty and they inherited envy and greed from their mother. He would die with his reputation intact to spite them all. Only the woman who produced a baby boy for him would deserve all the wealth he had accumulated over his lifetime. He went and asked Cheikh Hassan about it. He did the kind of thorough ablution necessary after committing a serious sin and performed the dawn prayers, then he sat with the sheikh in his section of the mosque. The sheikh met his question with a smile and then clasped Mubarak’s hand and encouraged him. “Make a vow to trust in the Lord,” he told him. When you’re trying to save what can be saved, you mustn’t take sacrifices into account or make petty calculations. He didn’t regret the amount he had paid to Kada and his friend Djelal the bleary-eyed cemetery janitor for arranging the woman and the place. Because of the partial success he had achieved, he wouldn’t consider the money he had paid to be a serious loss. Kada had opened up Mourad’s apartment for him and brought the woman so that he could see if he was up to it. He hadn’t done that for years—he had wasted his life but it wasn’t the right time to lament or recover the fitness that had been destroyed by inactivity and old age. He would renovate the house and order his daughters to help him and they would obey. Fear and greed would motivate them and they wouldn’t rebel against him. He had seen that poor woman in her forties and his heart went out to her. She left the courtroom with her father and he followed them and took her father’s phone number. Then he made an appointment with him and visited them at home. She had one five-year-old daughter, who could stay with her grandmother. He understood that the man was chronically poor and it was a foregone conclusion that he would agree to let him marry his daughter. He had made up his mind not to die without a male heir, after living his life without a son to help him, and whatever he left would rightfully belong to the woman who achieved his lifelong wish, and he wouldn’t begrudge anything to a child he had long awaited. Ousmane stood up but Mubarak didn’t even notice. He dismissed all Ousmane’s warnings out of hand. She was a good woman and she wouldn’t wrong him or disgrace his bed. All he had to do was pray to God to make sure he lived a little longer and that his heart held out so that the baby boy would come. He would be delighted to see him and then he could die without any regrets and as content as if he had obtained everything he wished for in this world.

By arranging Mubarak’s encounter Kada had carried out another mission with success and he could relax for a whole day. On the next day he went to the café and found it shut. Mubarak’s phone didn’t answer. Ousmane didn’t want to keep him as a permanent customer. Mubarak’s heart was weak and some woman might kill him and Kada could get caught up in it. His major prize was somewhere else. He waited for him outside his house for an hour, but to no avail, and his suspicion became a certainty. Every week Mubarak went away for a day or two and then reappeared. This time might be decisive. He hoped his calculations weren’t mistaken. If luck was on his side and his plan succeeded, it would be the greatest thing that could happen to him, and he would be cured of his misery for the rest of his days. It wasn’t so much that he wasn’t resourceful, more that his luck worked against him. He had stayed up the night before with Djelal in the cemetery, just the two of them, far from the domino-playing rabble. They smoked two joints and got talking. Djelal ended up proving a truth that was blatantly obvious to him in his reduced state of consciousness. His eyes stuck out and he looked as if he were going to tell Kada some deep secret: “Kada, you’re common. If God really loved me, he would have provided me with a better friend.” The other man replied in cold blood: “We’re all riffraff, my friend. I’m corrupt by nature while you’re a chancer and one of the most despicable people in the world. You sell the bones of the dead and support your mother and your brothers on the proceeds from their remains.” Djelal nodded in agreement, then added by way of clarification: “They stole our lives and our souls while we were still alive. I think it’s very fair that I should take revenge on them when they’re dead.” Their cigarettes were about to burn out and they fell silent, and everything they had said, like the smoke, blew away in the wind. They were like two mirrors, two bare images, two men reconciled to their truths forever. The dead at rest nearby weren’t upset by their chitchat or their vulgar language. The dead have nerves of steel and are more patient than any of the living. The old madame, the mistress of the profession, as Kada called her, the woman with the blue nightshirt, the new den of iniquity . . . The two of them stayed up chatting by the light of a lantern, like bugs at night drawn to a faint light. Kada visited Djelal whenever something new came up. This time he came out of Djelal’s place after asking him to be on standby. This time we might need a new grave or we might open a forgotten grave that no one has visited, he said. Djelal, who was lying on his side, stood up when he heard that. “Why? Are you planning to hide someone’s body?” he asked. Kada didn’t reply. Djelal was silent for a while then he continued: “Didn’t you ask me that before and you promised me lots of money, and then nothing happened?” Kada tried to reassure him as he walked off: “Don’t worry. This time luck will be on my side.” And then, with great confidence: “You’ll get your share. It will be the deal of your life, you grave robber.”

Kada went back home and lay on his bed in an apartment with one bedroom, a kitchen, and a bathroom. The municipality had given him the place on the recommendation of a security agency, in return for his services. Productive work as an informer. He was bored of all that. His eyes were still wide open, staring at the ceiling, a little tired from staying up late the day before, and looking forward to his next opportunity. He had received a reasonable amount of money from Mubarak, at a serious cost to his own dignity, and he had to put an end to this degradation. People are bastards and the ones who win are the biggest bastards of all. Who would have expected he would end up where he was? At the July 5 Stadium, back in the 1990s, he had chanted with the crowds. He was one of those who had shouted at the top of their voices. “Islamic! Islamic!” and “By the profession of faith we live, by it we die, and by it we meet God,” they had said. That was when he was a young man starting out in life. God had a place in his heart. He had been detained with all the others and the tyrants had triumphed in their war against the Islamic awakening. God had let them down, abandoned them as easy prey for the military. There were plenty of hypocrites and God has no obligation to help everyone and his uncle just because they have spoken out in public in the name of Islam. The times changed and people forgot them. Inside Berrouaghia prison he saw hell with his own two eyes. He was tortured and abused and he had wanted to die, and yet he continued to believe in the Islamic Salvation Front. Some of its leaders were imprisoned and others escaped and were pursued. Some of them turned out to be frauds and took the side of the tyrant regime. In spite of everything, he had suffered and endured. One cold night they had huddled together to keep warm. The cell was freezing and smelled moldy. They were held separately until the prison authorities put some highly dangerous common criminals in among them. They had some difficult times with them. He heard that in other cells criminals of this kind were trying to spread their deviant practices to the other inmates. They groped each other’s asses and whispered to each other. Someone who didn’t seem to care would suddenly break down in tears. Someone else would piss in his pants. Their hearts grew insensitive or they were afraid of something he didn’t know about. They had banal conversations, they reconsidered their beliefs and remembered their children, then cried bitterly. Was it psychological warfare on the part of the prison administration or was it for real? He didn’t reach any conclusive answer. His resistance broke down. Endless humiliation. He was shocked by what he heard. Wasn’t it for the sake of these people that he had raised the banner of God, to save them from the plague of atheism and despotism? It was called the Islamic Salvation Front, but to save who and at what cost? One officer spoke to him and he listened with his head bowed in shame, when once he would bow only to his Lord. Something inside him was broken and after that he couldn’t lift up his head. He was of a delicate constitution and couldn’t bear to be subjected to any humiliation for too long. He showed he was prepared for anything and from that day on the word “no” disappeared from his lexicon forever.

He came out of prison and made more and more concessions till there was nothing left to concede. After all those years, who could he possibly choose as a target for vengeance? He was a loathsome man, willing to commit any outrage in return for money, and in his absence they called him an informer. Brother Kada Bensafia came to be called Kada the Informer. He ignored that. He knew he was hated like a pig with no pride, but there was no way he could change his image. Several times he tried to make a new start, in another city with different people. The remains of his dignity stirred, then died down again. He was stuck in a hole that was hard to get out of. People aren’t completely innocent or necessarily more honorable than him. They are varied and wear a thousand masks. They are opportunists like him, maybe more so. What distinguished him from them is that he showed his true face, didn’t beat about the bush, serving his own interests and not claiming to be moral. He didn’t grow a beard, stand in the front line in the mosque, lie to God, or keep anything to himself. He lied to unfortunate people and took advantage of their situation. He sent loose women to those who asked for them and received payment from both parties. He was a thief and a wanderer, a liar and a tattletale, a walking ragbag of evils, but no one ever accused him of hypocrisy. One ordeal would be enough to turn him back into a freak. If he had been a true believer, he would have waited patiently and wouldn’t have ended up the way he was. He heard them whispering about him to each other in the neighborhood and laughing. A police dog, a quisling who informs on his neighbors and the local people, probably without payment or in exchange for a pittance. If only he could tear up his CV and start again from scratch. He tossed and turned and tried to sleep, but the noise and the light at the end of day wouldn’t let him doze at all. He started thinking about a new adventure, the chance of his lifetime if he made good use of it. The darkness started to descend and he decided to sleep early that night. He ate two eggs and some chicken breast left over from the previous day’s meal. He went back to bed and threw himself down without changing his clothes. A few minutes later Rafik Nassiri called him on his phone.

Rafik wanted to meet up with him and had called to arrange it. Kada didn’t reply and wasn’t curious to know what Rafik was calling about. Rafik didn’t know that such a meeting would never take place, even if he was certain from the start that nothing important would come of it. He had come back from Serdj El Ghoul disappointed. He had gone there without telling anybody, except for one colleague from his intake year in the police who worked there and promised to meet him when he arrived and to help him. Rafik was like a lost man, looking for something he had lost. He did obtain some real information about the missing man for the first time, but it was very much too late. It was true that as an adolescent there was nothing to distinguish the missing man from his peers. He was shy and too reserved for his age at the time. He lost his mother and then his father, and then his uncle and aunt looked after him. He was kidnapped at random in revenge for the murder of a soldier close to Serdj El Ghoul. He miraculously survived, and some people still talked about what happened to him. Rafik spoke to many people, and no one mentioned that they had seen him after the incident, so did he really survive, Rafik wondered, after hearing two people say that he had died and that the rumor of his survival was spread by a man known for his bloodthirstiness at the time, in order to claim a heroism he didn’t deserve. Uncle Saleh, as they called him, the man who was said to have saved him, later became the head of the town council. He had passed away, but his son told the two of them that his father had told him that on one of his visits to the capital he had met, by chance in a pizzeria, a young man he had saved him from certain death during the civil war. The missing man’s brother, Ammar, had left Serdj El Ghoul some years earlier. Rafik got hold of his number and with difficulty he managed to speak to him. Ammar said he hadn’t seen his brother since their aunt died in the capital.

Rafik’s car broke down on the road and he wasted a day. When he arrived he stayed in the Hotel Frantz Fanon in the center of Sétif. He took a short walk, went into the shopping mall, and early in the morning he went to Serdj El Ghoul to ask after the missing man. On his way back to the capital his mind couldn’t make anything out of all the elements he had gathered. The family house, a property that was unregistered, had been bought by a teacher, a newcomer to the area who had now retired and didn’t know anything about the people who had been living there before him. Some of the neighbors he asked told him that Ammar was Ibrahim’s only child. If there was another child, no one had seen him and maybe he didn’t exist in the first place. Some people have to lie to hide the fact that they know nothing about what they’re being asked. The saddle-shaped mountain that overlooks the small town and gave the town its name—“The Ghoul’s Saddle”—invites everyone who looks at it “to mount the horse of the impossible” from time to time, or to disappear until they are nobodies. Rafik sat with his old colleague in a café, preparing to leave and filled with despair about the futile search. An elderly taxi driver came in and sat smoking a cigarette. He looked exhausted. He ordered a coffee and seemed unconcerned about anything. Rafik’s colleague invited him to sit with them and asked him questions without expecting any special information. The man spoke at length about Ibrahim, who had been his dearest friend, and about his sister who had married her cousin and left, and about their brother. Rafik listened to him, gave him his full attention. I may be old but I have a good memory, the taxi driver told them. Once he had driven a man and his wife to the capital, to the Drid Hocine Hospital to be precise, and there he had seen a young man who looked exactly like Ibrahim. “You’re the son of Ibrahim from Serdj El Ghoul,” he had said to him, to check that his hunch was well founded. The man didn’t reply. He seemed to be in a daze, speaking in whispers to a fat nurse and looking around in every direction as if he were frightened of something. He later went back to the hospital with Ammar and they asked after Ammar’s brother, but the hospital management said he had recovered and the doctor had given him a discharge permit. They offered a bribe to the guard, and his tongue wagged. The man you’re looking for had been accused of a crime. His name had come up in the case by mistake. Probably it was a groundless charge or someone had maliciously denounced him. Then the matter was sorted out. It was mistaken identity or maybe he really was a criminal, but no one could get any sense out of him. He escaped from the hospital on the night the doctor had agreed to discharge him, for fear of imprisonment or for some other reason that no one knew. The guard ended his story as if he had memorized it specifically to repeat to Ammar and the taxi driver. The nurses at the hospital didn’t tell them anything about a fat colleague of theirs who had been sent for questioning, and whose address the hospital management had refused to reveal. But they did smile knowingly at each other when they were asked about her.