Khalil Read online

  Also by Yasmina Khadra

  Published in English

  In the Name of God

  Wolf Dreams

  The Swallows of Kabul

  The Attack

  The Sirens of Baghdad

  What the Day Owes the Night

  The Dictator’s Last Night

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Translation copyright © 2021 by John Cullen

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in France by Éditions Julliard, Paris, in 2018. Copyright © 2018 by Éditions Julliard, Paris, France.

  www.nanatalese.com

  Doubleday is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC. Nan A. Talese and the colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Cover photographs: Paris © Elenamiv/Shutterstock; lights © Julneighbour/Shutterstock; ISIS flag © railway fx/Shutterstock

  Cover design by Michael J. Windsor

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Khadra, Yasmina, author. | Cullen, John, [date] translator.

  Title: Khalil : a novel / Yasmina Khadra ; translated from the French by John Cullen.

  Other titles: Khalil. English

  Description: First American edition. | New York : Nan A. Talese ; Doubleday, [2021]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020008874 (print) | LCCN 2020008875 (ebook) | ISBN 9780385545914 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780385545921 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Terrorism—France—Paris—History—21st century—Fiction. | Terrorism—Religious aspects—Islam—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PQ3989.2.K386 K4313 2020 (print) | LCC PQ3989.2.K386 (ebook) | DDC 843/.92—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020008874

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020008875

  Ebook ISBN 9780385545921

  ep_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Yasmina Khadra

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Part I: The Ababil Birds

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part II: Concerto in C Minor for a Suicide Bomber

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  A Note About the Author

  To reach posterity, there’s no need to be a hero or a genius—all you have to do is plant a tree.

  I

  –

  The Ababil Birds

  Therefore will I discover thy skirts upon thy face, that thy shame may appear.

  —Jeremiah 13:26

  1

  Paris, City of Light.

  Should just one of its streetlamps go out, the whole world would find itself in the dark.

  There were four of us suicide bombers, with one mission: to turn the celebration at the Stade de France into global mourning.

  Crammed into the car conveying us down the freeway at top speed, we weren’t saying anything. There was Ali the driver, Driss, two “brothers” I didn’t know—one in the front with Ali, one on the backseat next to Driss—and me. The brother in front had inserted a CD into the car stereo, and ever since, we’d been doing nothing but listen to Sheikh Saad el-Ghamidi declaim the surahs in a voice as penetrating as a magic spell. I’ve never heard anyone recite the Quran better than that scholar of Islam. He didn’t have vocal cords in his throat, he had a singing rainbow. I think we were all moved to tears, except maybe Ali, who seemed nervous up there behind the wheel.

  I tried to distract myself by staring at the countryside, but Lyès’s voice sounded in my head, constantly calling me to order: “You want to end up like Moka?”

  In Molenbeek, Moka was something like the town idiot. Although sixty years old and counting, he remained the same working-class kid from the faubourgs, the suburbs, where night comes too soon. His leather jacket festooned with lapel pins, his jeans ripped at the knees, he was convinced that age had no hold on him. The objects of his passionate interest were the street kids he’d meet up with every day in the parc des Muses and regale with revised, racy, and oft-repeated tales of his wild youth, never even suspecting that his young listeners were there for the sole purpose of mocking him.

  Nobody wanted to end up like Moka, a broken-down drunk with bleary eyes and half a brain.

  “Look behind you and tell me what you see.” Lyès and I were in a kebab shop, eating sandwiches. I glanced back over my shoulder. “Idiot,” he’d hissed, his mouth dripping juice, “I point you to the moon and you look at my finger. It’s your past I want to talk about. What have you done with your bitch of a life? Not a damn thing. Behind you is nothing but wind. When you were five, you were already hanging out in the streets. Ten years later, you’re still trudging around those same streets. You’ve never risked a step outside square one…You know what happens to guys who wait for something they don’t dare go out and look for? They don’t live. They putrefy standing up.”

  At the time, Lyès had no god and no prophet. Religion was as foreign to him as those mathematical formulas that short-circuit your neurons before you finish copying them in your notebook. He was nothing but a moody seventeen-year-old who had no idea what to do with his ten fingers, unless you count slamming his fist into the face of a boy from the next housing project over or flipping off a too-inquisitive security guard.

  He resented us, the neighborhood misfits, because of our placid indifference to our tomorrows. He himself didn’t know what he expected of us, but seeing us swarm around that old jackass Moka all day long made him sick.

  It was doubtless because Driss and I wanted to keep Lyès off our backs that we stopped hanging out with the old owl in the leather jacket. That was a way for us to prove to each other that we’d grown up. As for Moka, he remained the same kid he’d always been, and other idle brats took our places. Despite our well-meaning efforts, however, Lyès wouldn’t calm down. He acted like a scowling big brother, always ready with reproaches he couldn’t wait to shoot at us like so many arrows. There was something wrong with him. On several occasions, his father had considered having him institutionalized.

  But that was all past and gone. With his long kamis shirt and his henna-reddened beard, Lyès had found his way and risen to the rank of emir, a valiant war leader. He’d learned to talk sense skillfully and to demand from others no more than he was capable of undertaking himself, and on the occasions when he raised his voice, I would drink in every word that came from his lips. He awakened me to the indescribable beauties within and made an enlightened creature of me. I wrapped my bitch of a life in a rag and flung it into the gutter. What I left behind didn’t count. The best of me was at the end of the road I was on, a straight road as euphoric as a flying carpet.

  * * *

  —

  Ali was driving with his eyes cl
osed. No map, no GPS. In a former life, he’d been a taxi driver.

  Ali was a master of anticipation who never risked so much as a step without first making sure there was no mine under the pavement. To give himself cover, he’d posted a ride-sharing offer online and waited until four potential carpoolers had called him before shutting down his phone. In case of trouble, his voicemail messages would prove to any eventual investigators that our transporter often resorted to ride-sharing in order to cut down on gas expenses, and that he wasn’t authorized to go through his passengers’ bags.

  Ali wasn’t a friend. I’d gone on three “errands” with him. He was a taciturn guy, so I didn’t know where he lived or what his real name was. I knew only—thanks to Ramdan’s indiscretions—that ever since Ali lost his taxi license, he’d worked off the books, and that sometimes, on behalf of the war effort, he’d do a Brussels-Alicante-Brussels turnaround with a few kilos of cannabis hidden in his spare tire. Lyès would occasionally call upon Ali and entrust him with one or two brothers who were leaving for the jihad or commission him to pick up fighters who had returned from Syria and were holed up in this or that godforsaken backwater in France or Holland.

  Ali didn’t exactly give his all for the Cause. He charged for his services. If it was up to me, I’d spit seven times on the back of my left hand so that I wouldn’t have to use the same sidewalk as he did, except that the bastard offered one major advantage: secretive, methodical, and efficient, he had no police record of any kind.

  * * *

  —

  I’d never been to Paris. My maternal aunt lived there, however. We weren’t very close, her family and ours. Sometimes in the summer, while visiting our village in the old country, we might happen to run into one another, but nothing more. My mother thought her sister considered us mud-stained provincials; in reality, she was jealous of my aunt, who’d arranged her life very well. She lived in a nice neighborhood, in a place overlooking the Seine, and in spite of her premature widowhood, she’d made a physician and an architect out of her two daughters and a banker out of her son, whereas my twin sister, Zahra, had been married for hardly more than a few months before her husband unceremoniously repudiated her, my older sister, Yezza, was slaving away in a sweatshop seventy kilometers from her home, and as for me, the boy, the male, the one who ought to have been his father’s pride and joy—I hadn’t managed to complete even two years of high school.

  That Friday—November 13, 2015—was the first time in my life that I’d ever set foot on French soil. School excursions had taken me to Rotterdam and Seville eight or nine years ago, but otherwise, the only place I’d ever left my poor suburban Brussels neighborhood for was a douar, a little village in the Rif region of northern Morocco; my parents were from the Kebdana Mountains, east of the city of Nador. We’d go there every other summer, when my father succeeded in putting aside a little money for the trip. In Belgium, I knew Liège (where I’d done a nine-month internship two years before), Charleroi, Antwerp, Mons (where my big sister was ruining her eyes and her hands on sewing machines), and a few isolated farms on the country’s eastern border (where I’d gone on behalf of the Association).

  So it gave me a strange sensation to be leaving Belgium, knowing my journey had nothing to do with a school excursion or a rural holiday. The feeling I had was hard to pin down, a vague dizziness somewhere between intoxication and sunstroke.

  I remember an old friend of my father’s who sometimes came to dinner at our place. He was a childless widower. When he was tipsy, he’d assure us that the soul is immortal and usurps our flesh unjustly, like a foreign occupier, which is the reason why our organism, determined to reject the invader, develops an addiction to everything that would destroy it.

  He wasn’t completely wrong, my father’s friend.

  As I headed for my destiny, I had the feeling that my body and my soul were on bad terms with each other.

  * * *

  —

  Ali turned in to the first rest area to take off his down jacket. He was sweating too much, or at least that was his excuse.

  The two strangers ignored us.

  Driss kept on smiling. When Driss smiled for no reason, that meant that he’d placed his mind elsewhere.

  We’d known each other since our earliest childhood, Driss and I. We lived in the same apartment building on rue Melpomène in Molenbeek, we’d gone to the same school and sat side by side at the back of the classroom, happy to be wise guys during our classes and proud to be called into Madame Perrix’s office when our mischief became too much for our teacher to take. Driss wasn’t the kind of guy who bullied the conscientious students or harassed the girls. As far as he was concerned, studies were a waste of time; he wanted to grow up fast so he could help his mother, a cashier in a supermarket, to make ends meet. One day during recess, I was waylaid by Bruno Lesten, a twelve-year-old terror who reigned supreme over the fourth grade, going through our pockets as he passed and beating on heads he didn’t like. I don’t remember how I let Bruno corner me, since I was so afraid of him I generally went out of my way to avoid him. When he grabbed me by the neck and squashed me against the wall, I nearly passed out. Driss, who up until then had never gotten into a fight with another student, initially tried to reason with the big guy. Things went downhill quickly, triggering one of the most spectacular brawls the school had ever seen. And my friend Driss became my hero from that day on. I could no longer imagine my existence without him. When my family moved to rue Herkoliers in Koekelberg in order to get my sisters away from the bearded fundamentalists of Molenbeek, who called girls whores and threatened to disfigure them with acid if they weren’t wearing scarves, I went back to my old neighborhood each evening and every weekend to pal around with Driss, and so, when my hero dropped out of high school, I did the same, as naturally as could be.

  I was happy to die at his side.

  * * *

  —

  “Don’t mind us,” the brother in front grumbled in Arabic, glaring at Ali as he drove. “If you’d like to stop for a jog or a little nap, go right ahead. We’re not in any hurry.”

  “We’ll be on time,” said Ali, trying to reassure him.

  “Who are you to know what the next hour will hold? Get back on the road, and be quick about it. And don’t stop again until we reach the end.”

  Ali didn’t protest. He put his puffy jacket in the trunk, jumped into the car, and zoomed back onto the highway. He gripped the steering wheel forcefully to hide the trembling of his hands, but in vain; his clenched jaw betrayed the anger welling up inside him.

  After passing a line of tractor trailers, we had an unobstructed view of the countryside. A few cows were grazing in the middle of a big green field. Farther on, a village was trying to escape from the haze, its church steeple like a greasy pole in disgrace.

  I tried to think of nothing. But how could I empty my head of thought when all it contained were clips from old, unrestored films? My twin sister running barefoot through the orchards of Kebdana; Yezza building up a grudge against the whole world; my pathetic father in his greengrocer’s apron; my mother, a silhouette on a gray screen…Will they miss me? My twin sister will, for sure. Maybe my mother. Not Yezza. Not my father. We hardly knew each other, my father and I…My family was my buddies; my house was the street; my private club, the mosque. My mother would shed a few tears during the first days, my father would tell the neighbors and anyone else who’d deign to listen to him that I wasn’t his son, and then their life would resume its course, and there wouldn’t be anything left of me but a few old photographs with curling corners at the bottom of a drawer.

  What purpose did they serve, my family? What had they done with their lives? They were a little like Moka, surviving as resistant parasites, making the world less and less attractive.

  I don’t remember ever seeing my mother risk a step outside square one. Bogged down in routine, she didn�
��t expect much from any tomorrow. She remained as I had known her when I was three years old, the same mass of misfortune and submission, programmed like a machine, her hands red and chapped by laundry soap, hollering at her children and flattening herself like a cowpat before her husband. My mother was frozen in time, without age and without her bearings, a Berber living in the West and pining for the Rif, like a sense of remorse that looks for guilt as justification but discovers that the penalties are doubled when you’re guilty of being a victim.

  As for my sire, he’d offered me the same spectacle ever since I’d opened my eyes: a man who had come to the end of his rope but who was taking a long time to hang himself. I’d often wondered why he’d left Morocco for exile in a Belgian grocery store when he could have sold his fruits and vegetables in Nador without changing any of his habits as a low-rent high roller. He came home plastered every night, in a foul mood, with neither a kiss for his wife nor a tender word for his children.

  “They’ll rot like wild grass, pitiful and useless,” proclaimed a preacher who had come from London to give our existence meaning.

  * * *

  —

  “Shall I switch over to the radio to see what’s going on at the Stade de France?” Ali suggested, probably tired of listening to the sheikh’s nonstop recitation of Holy Writ.

  “The match isn’t scheduled to start yet,” Driss pointed out.

  “Right, but they must be putting some kind of special measures in place. The German team had to evacuate their hotel yesterday because of a bomb threat. The security services aren’t going to act as though nothing’s up.”