What the day owes the nigth Read online

  What the day owes the nigth

  Translated from the French by Frank Wynne

  In Oran, as elsewhere, for lack of time and thinking, people are forced to love each other without realising it.

  Albert Camus, The Plague

  I love Algeria, because I have truly been affected by it.

  Gabriel Garcia Marquez

  1. Jenane Jato

  1

  MY FATHER was happy.

  It had never occurred to me that he was capable of such an emotion.

  Sometimes, the sight of his serene face disturbed me.

  Hunkered on a pile of loose stones, knees clasped to his chin, he watched the breeze caress the slender stalks of wheat, breathe over them, scurry feverishly through them. The wheat fields billowed over the plains like the manes of thousands of horses galloping. It was like watching the sea as it rises and falls. And my father was smiling. I could not remember ever seeing him smile; it was not in his nature to show happiness – if he could be said to have ever felt such a thing. Moulded by adversity, his eyes usually bore a permanent look of desperation. His life had been an endless series of disappointments; he mistrusted the future, realising it to be traitorous and unknowable.

  I had never known him to have friends.

  We lived in isolation like ghosts on our patch of land, in the sidereal silence of those who have little to say to one another: my mother in the shadow of our shack, bent over her cooking pot, stirring a broth of root vegetables of questionable flavour; Zahra, my sister, three years my junior, crouched forgotten in some dark corner, so self-effacing that at times we did not even notice her; and me, a sickly, solitary boy, who had barely blossomed before I wilted, carrying my ten years like a burden.

  This was not life; we merely existed.

  The simple fact of waking in the morning was a miracle, and at night, as we readied ourselves for bed, we wondered whether it might not be better to close our eyes once and for all, convinced that we had seen all there was to see in life and that life itself did not warrant further examination. The days were desolate in their sameness; not a single one brought with it anything new, and each day died taking with it the few remaining illusions that dangled before us like the carrots used to urge on a donkey.

  In the 1930s, poverty and disease swept the country, wiping out families and livestock with astonishing perversity, forcing those who survived into exile or vagrancy. We no longer received any news of those few relatives we had left. As for the ragged creatures we sometimes saw in the distance, we knew that they were merely passing through. The dirt track that led past our shack was gradually disappearing.

  My father cared little.

  He liked to be alone, hunched over his plough, lips flecked white with foam. Sometimes I saw in him some god, fashioning the world and would sit for hours watching him, fascinated by his strength, his determination.

  When my mother asked me to take his meals out to him, I had to be prompt. My father ate punctually, frugally, eager to get back to work. I would have liked him to say a kind word, take some interest in me for a moment, but he had eyes only for his land. Only here, in the midst of this tawny universe, was he truly in his element. Nothing and no one, not even those dearest to him, could distract him from it.

  In the evening, when we came back to our shack, the spark in his eyes would fade with the setting sun. He would become someone else, someone ordinary, someone dreary and uninteresting; I almost felt disappointed in him.

  But for some weeks now, he had been unaccountably happy. The coming harvest promised to be glorious, exceeding his wildest expectations. Crippled with debts, he had mortgaged the lands that had belonged to his forefathers, and this harvest, he knew, was to be his last battle. He did the work of ten men, toiling relentlessly, a fire in his belly; a cloudless sky could terrify him, the smallest cloud electrify him. Never had I seen him pray and pour himself into his work as he did then. And when summer came, and the wheat scattered its glittering sequins across the plains, my father sat hunkered on a mound of loose stones, motionless. Hunched under his straw hat, he would spend most of the day staring at his crops, which, after years of thankless work, of lean cows, seemed finally to promise a sunny spell.

  The harvest would come soon, and as the day drew closer my father became more excited. He could already see himself, arms outstretched, gathering in sheaves, trussing hundreds of bales, harvesting hopes so great he did not know what to do with them.

  A week earlier, sitting me next to him on our little cart, we had gone to the village some miles beyond the hill. Usually he did not take me anywhere with him. Perhaps he thought that now that things were looking up, it was time to change, to learn new habits, new ways of thinking. On the way, he hummed a Bedouin tune. It was the first time in my life I had ever heard him sing. His voice dipped and soared, so out of tune it would scare the horses, but to me, no singer in the world could compare: it was glorious. Then he suddenly regained his composure, surprised to find he had been so carried away; embarrassed that he had shamed himself in front of his son.

  The village was a depressing, godforsaken place, its cob walled huts cracking beneath the weight of misery, its narrow streets desperately twisting and turning, not knowing where to hide their squalor. A few skeletal trees, gnawed away by goats, stood withered and dying like gibbets. Crouched beneath the trees, the unemployed sat like ruined scarecrows waiting for a storm to come to carry them off.

  My father stopped the cart in front of a squalid little shack surrounded by a group of barefoot boys with crudely patched tunics of jute sacking instead of gandurahs and shaven heads pocked with oozing sores that looked like some mark of damnation. They crowded round us, curious as a pack of fox cubs whose territory has been invaded. With a wave, my father sent them scurrying, then pushed me towards the grocer’s shop, where a man sat dozing amid the empty shelves. He did not bother to get to his feet to greet us.

  ‘I’m going to need men and tools for the harvest,’ my father said to him.

  ‘Is that all?’ said the grocer wearily. ‘I sell sugar and salt too, you know, oil, cornmeal.’

  ‘All that will come later. Can I depend on you?’

  ‘When do you want them, the men and the tools?’

  ‘Friday week?’

  ‘You’re the boss. You whistle, we’ll be there.’

  ‘Right, well let’s say Friday of next week.’

  ‘It’s a deal,’ groaned the grocer, pulling his turban down over his face. ‘Glad to hear you’ve saved the season.’

  ‘What I’ve saved is my soul,’ my father said as he turned to go.

  ‘To do that, my friend, you have to have a soul in the first place.’

  Standing in the doorway, my father stopped and shuddered, detecting some slight in what the grocer had said. He scratched his head, climbed on to the cart and we headed home. The grocer had touched a raw nerve. My father’s face, so radiant when we first set out, was serious now. The grocer’s remark, he thought, was some dire omen. This was how my father was; at the slightest problem he immediately feared the worst. To boast about the harvest before it was gathered in was to tempt the evil eye. I knew he was bitterly regretting boasting of his success when not a grain had yet been harvested.

  He drove home, his body coiled like a snake, flogging the mule with his whip, every lash bearing the mark of his fury.

  As he waited for Friday, he dug out old billhooks and rusty sickles and set about cleaning and sharpening them. With my dog, I watched him from a distance, waiting for some word, some chance to make myself useful. But my father needed no help. He knew exactly what had to be done.

  Then, without warning, disaster struck. I woke one night to hear the dog
howling. When I looked out, I thought the sun had tumbled from the sky and landed in our fields. Though it was three a.m., it was so bright it seemed like noon. My mother stood wordlessly by the door, her head buried in her hands. The flickering light outside sent her several shadows scurrying along the walls behind me. My sister sat crouched in her corner, fingers stuffed into her mouth, eyes vacant.

  I dashed outside and saw a sea of fire surging and rolling across the fields, the flames so high they seemed to light the heavens, from which not a single star looked down.

  Dripping with sweat, his bare chest slashed with streaks of soot, my father had gone mad. Over and over he filled a tiny bucket from the trough and rushed towards the blaze, disappearing into the flames, then reappeared, filled his bucket again and stumbled back into the inferno. Though his efforts were absurd, he could not face the thought that there was nothing he could do, that no prayer, no miracle could prevent his dreams from going up in smoke. My mother, knowing all was lost, watched her husband tear around, terrified that there would come a moment when he did not re-emerge from the flames. My father was capable of trying to gather in sheaves of the blazing wheat and burning with them. For it was only among his crops that he truly felt at home.

  At dawn, he was still trying to douse the wisps of smoke that rose from the charred stubble. Nothing remained of the crops and yet he refused to see it. Out of spite.

  It was a terrible injustice.

  Three days before harvest.

  Two inches from salvation.

  One breath from redemption.

  Later that morning, my father was finally compelled to face facts. His bucket dangling from one hand, he looked up to survey the extent of the disaster. For a long time he stood, legs trembling, eyes bloodshot, face distorted; then he fell to his knees, collapsed on his belly, and before our incredulous eyes did something a man should never do in public – he wept . . . He wept until he had no tears left to cry.

  It was then that I realised that our guardian angels had abandoned us, that we would be cursed until the day of judgement.

  For us, time stood still. True, the day still bowed before the night, darkness still gave way to dawn, vultures still wheeled in the sky, but to us it was as though all things had ended. History had turned a page and we no longer figured in what happened next. For days my father paced his razed fields, wandering among the shadows and the stubble from sunrise to sundown like a ghost trapped among ruins. My mother watched him through the hole in the wall that served us as a window. Every time he slapped his thighs, his cheeks, she made a hurried sign, called out to every marabout – every holy man – in the region to intercede; she was convinced that her husband had lost his mind.

  A week later, a man came to visit our shack. Wearing a ceremonial uniform, his beard carefully trimmed, chest bedecked with medals, he looked like a sultan. This was the kaid, escorted by his praetorian guard. Without troubling to get down from his barouche, he instructed my father to append his fingerprints to some documents that a Frenchman, pale, gaunt and dressed all in black, had pulled from his briefcase. My father did not protest. He rolled his fingertips on the ink-soaked sponge and pressed them to the papers. As soon as the documents were ‘signed’, the kaid drove off leaving my father standing in the yard, staring from his ink-stained fingers to the barouche as it moved away up the hill. Neither my mother nor I dared speak to him.

  The next day, my mother gathered our few belongings into bundles and packed them into the cart.

  It was over.

  For the rest of my life I will remember that day, the day my father stepped through the looking glass. It was overcast, the sun hung crucified above the mountain, the horizon was a blur. Even at noon it felt as though we were enveloped in some endless, silent twilight, as though the universe itself had fled leaving us to our misery.

  My father took the reins, his shoulders hunched, eyes fixed on the floor, and urged the mule on, taking us I knew not where. My mother huddled against the slatted sides of the cart, hidden behind her veil, barely distinguishable from the sacks and bundles. My little sister, her eyes vacant, kept her fingers pressed into her mouth. My parents had not noticed that their daughter had stopped eating, that something in her spirit had broken on that night when hell itself had rained down on our farm.

  The dog followed the cart at a distance, careful not to be seen. From time to time it stopped on the brow of a hill and sat on its haunches as though determined to hold out until we disappeared from view, then leapt up and bounded after us, muzzle trailing along the ground, desperately trying to catch up. When it drew closer, it would slow and then wander off the road and sit, miserable, distraught. The dog knew that wherever we were headed, there was no place for it. My father had made this clear by hurling stones at it as the cart pulled away from the farm.

  I loved my dog. He was my one friend, my only confidant. I wondered what would become of him, what would become of both of us now that our paths had parted.

  We travelled for miles without encountering a solitary soul, as though fate had cleared the landscape of every other creature so it might have us to itself. The dirt road rushed along ahead of us, bare and mournful. It looked like our fortune.

  Late in the afternoon, in the haze of the sweltering sun, a small black speck appeared in the distance. My father jerked the bridle of the mule towards this makeshift tent, a rickety construction of posts and hessian that stood in the deserted landscape as though it had appeared out of a dream. He instructed my mother to get down and wait beside a large boulder. In our world, when men meet, women are expected to withdraw; there is no greater sacrilege than to see one’s wife stared at by a stranger. My mother did as she was asked, taking Zahra in her arms, and went and crouched in the shadow of the rock.

  The merchant was a small, wizened man with ferret-like eyes sunk in a face mottled with blackish pustules. He wore tattered Arab trousers over mouldering shoes with gaping holes through which poked his misshapen toes. His threadbare waistcoat did little to hide his scrawny chest. He peered at us from beneath his makeshift tent, one hand on his club. When he realised we were not thieves, he dropped the stick and stepped out into the sunlight.

  ‘People are wicked, Issa,’ he greeted my father. ‘It is in their nature. It is little use to hate them for it.’

  My father drew to a halt. He knew all too well what the man was referring to, but he did not answer.

  ‘When I saw the fire in the distance that night,’ the man said, ‘I knew that some poor soul was heading straight for hell, but not for a moment did I think that it was you.’

  ‘It is the Lord’s will,’ my father said.

  ‘That is not true, and you know it. If men are evil, the Lord cannot be blamed. It is unjust to burden Him with crimes that we alone make possible. Issa, my friend, who could hate you so that they would burn your crops?’

  ‘It is God who decides our fate,’ said my father.

  The merchant shrugged. ‘Men invented God to distract them from their demons.’

  As my father stepped down from the cart, the tail of his gandurah snagged on the seat. This, he decided, was another evil omen. His face flushed with anger.

  ‘Are you going to Oran?’ the merchant asked.

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘When a man has lost everything, he goes to the city . . . Be careful, Issa. The city is no place for people like us. Oran is teeming with villains more deadly than cobras, more cunning than the Devil, who fear neither God nor man.’

  ‘Why do you talk such nonsense?’ said my father angrily.

  ‘Because you don’t know what you’re getting yourself into. The city is a wicked place. Barakah – the breath of life, the wisdom of our ancestors – has no power there. Those who go there never return.’

  My father raised one hand, imploring him to keep his wild imaginings to himself.

  ‘I’ve come to sell you my cart. The wheels and the cart are solid and the mule is barely four years old. I’ll take whateve
r you can offer.’

  ‘I’m afraid I cannot offer much, Issa.’ The merchant looked at the mule and the trap. ‘Please do not think I would profit from your misfortune. Few travellers pass this way now and I am left with melons I cannot sell.’

  ‘Anything you can offer will be enough for me.’

  ‘To tell the truth, I have no need of a cart or a mule . . . But I have a little money, which I will happily share with you. You have helped me many times. As for the mule and cart, you can leave them here with me; I’ll find a buyer for you. You can come back and collect the money whenever you like. I won’t take a penny of it.’

  My father did not hesitate; he had no choice. He held out his hand to shake on the deal.

  ‘You are a good man, Miloud. I know you would not cheat me.’

  ‘A man who cheats, cheats only himself.’

  My father handed me two bundles, shouldered the others himself and, pocketing the few coins the merchant gave him, went to find my mother, never once looking back at what he was leaving behind.

  We walked until we could no longer feel our legs. The sun was unbearable; its dazzling glare off the arid, desolate terrain stung our eyes. Swathed in her shroud, my mother stumbled like a ghost behind us, stopping only to shift my sister from one hip to the other. My father paid her no mind. He walked on, resolute, forcing us to run to keep up. There could be no question of us asking him to slow down. My heels were rubbed raw by my sandals, my throat burned, but I kept going. To stave off my hunger, my thirst, I focused on the steam rising from my father’s shoulders, on the way he carried his burden, his brutal, unvarying pace determined to trample any evil spirit in his path. Not once did he turn to see whether we were still following.

  The sun was beginning to set by the time we reached the roumi track – by which he meant the tarmac road. My father chose a lone olive tree behind a small hill, safe from prying eyes, and began to lash the branches together to make a shelter for the night. Then, checking to ensure that he could still see the road, he told us we could set down our burdens. My mother laid the sleeping Zahra at the foot of the tree and covered her with a pagne, then took a crock pot and a wooden spoon from one of the bundles.