What the day owes the nigth Read online

  ‘No fire,’ my father said, stopping her. ‘We can eat cured meat tonight.’

  ‘There is no meat. I have a few fresh eggs left.’

  ‘No fire, I said. I want no one to know that we are here. We will make do with tomatoes and onions.’

  The oppressive heat died away and a cool breeze rustled the leaves and the branches of the olive tree. We could hear lizards darting through the dry grass. The sun spilled out across the horizon like a broken egg.

  My father lay on his back in the shade of a boulder, one knee raised, his turban covering his face. He had eaten nothing. It was almost as though he was sulking.

  Just before nightfall, a man appeared on a high ridge and waved at us. Out of modesty, he dared not come any closer while my mother was present. My father sent me to ask what he wanted. He was a shepherd, dressed in tattered rags, his face was wizened, his hands calloused. He offered us his shelter for the night. My father declined this hospitality. The shepherd insisted – his neighbours would not forgive him if he left a family to sleep outside when his little shack was nearby. My father categorically refused. ‘I will not be beholden to any man,’ he muttered to himself. The shepherd, annoyed, went back to his meagre flock of goats, grumbling and stamping his feet.

  We spent the night beneath the stars. My mother and Zahra at the foot of the olive tree, me under my gandurah, my father sitting in the shadow of the rock, a cutlass between his feet, keeping watch.

  When I woke in the morning, my father was a different man. He had shaved and washed his face in a nearby stream and put on clean clothes: a waistcoat over a faded shirt and a neatly pressed sarouel – a pair of loose-fitting trousers – I had never seen him wear before, and leather shoes, which, though shabby, had been freshly buffed.

  The bus arrived just as the sun began to rise. My father packed our belongings on to the roof and sat us on a long bench at the back. This was the first time I had ever seen a bus. When it moved off, I clung to the seat, thrilled and terrified. The few other travellers dozed here and there, mostly roumis – Westerners – looking cramped in their shabby suits. I stared out of the windows at the landscape as it streamed past on either side. I was in awe of the bus driver. I could only see his back, which was broad as a rampart, and his broad, sinewy arms, which twisted the steering wheel with considerable authority. On my right sat a toothless old man with a tattered basket at his feet, who lurched from side to side with every hairpin bend. After each corner he would plunge his hand into the basket to make sure that everything was still as it should be.

  The pungent petrol fumes and the closed windows finally got the better of me and, stomach churning, head feeling bloated as a rubber ball, I dozed off.

  The bus stopped on a little square flanked by trees opposite a vast red-brick building. The travellers rushed for their bags. In their haste, some of them trod on my feet; I didn’t even notice. I was so dumbstruck by what I saw that I forgot to help my father take down our bundles.

  The city.

  I had never imagined that such a sprawling place could exist. It was extraordinary. For a moment I wondered if the heat and fumes were playing tricks on me. On the far side of the square, rows and rows of houses stretched as far as the eye could see, with tall windows and balconies filled with flowers. The streets were paved and there were footpaths on either side. I couldn’t believe my eyes; I did not even have names for many of the things that flashed before them. Beautiful houses rose up on every side, elegant and impressive, set back behind high black railings. Families relaxed on verandas around white tables on which stood tall decanters of orangeade, while rosy children with hair of gold played in the gardens, their high-pitched laughter bursting through the greenery like jets of water. These privileged residences exuded a sense of tranquillity and wealth that I could hardly believe possible, so different were they from life out in the bled, where crops withered to dust, where stables and barns were less pathetic than the shack we had called home.

  This was a different planet.

  I shambled along behind my father, dazzled by the parks bounded by low stone walls or wrought-iron railings, by the broad, sunlit avenues with their street lamps, majestic and aloof, like glowing sentinels. And the cars . . . ! I had seen at least a dozen cars. They appeared out of nowhere, sputtering like shooting stars, only to disappear around a corner before I had time to make a wish.

  ‘What’s the name of this country?’ I asked my father.

  ‘Shut up and walk,’ he snapped. ‘And keep your eyes on the road if you don’t want to fall into a hole.’

  This was Oran.

  My father walked straight ahead, sure-footed, undaunted by the grid of streets and their dizzying buildings that branched out all around us, each so like the others that it felt as though we were marking time. Curiously, I saw, the women in the city did not wear the veil. They walked around with their faces bare; the old women wore strange headgear, but the younger ones went bare-headed, their hair on show for all to see, seemingly unperturbed by the men all around them.

  As we walked farther, the hubbub died away and we wandered through peaceful, shady areas, the silence barely broken by a passing barouche or the clatter of a metal shutter. A few elderly European men with crimson faces lingered outside their front doors. They wore baggy shorts, shirts open to reveal their paunches, and broad-brimmed hats to protect their pale necks. Exhausted by the heat, they chatted over a glass of anisette set down on the pavement, distractedly waving fans to cool themselves. My father strode past without greeting them, without even looking at them, trying to act as though they were not even there, but his pace slackened now and lost something of its assurance.

  We emerged on to a broad avenue where pedestrians stood window-shopping. My father stopped to watch a tram pass before crossing the road. He signalled to my mother, indicating a spot where she should wait for him, then, leaving her to look after the baskets and bundles, he ordered me to follow him to a chemist’s shop at the far end of a lane. He glanced through the front window first to make sure this was the right address, then straightened his turban, smoothed down his waistcoat and stepped inside. A tall, thin man behind the counter was scribbling in a ledger. He was wearing a three-piece suit and a red fez over his blonde hair. He had blue eyes and a delicate face; a narrow strip of moustache accentuated the thin-lipped slit that served him as a mouth. When he saw my father come in, he frowned, then he lifted a section at the side of the counter and stepped from behind it to greet us.

  The two men threw their arms around each other. The embrace was brief but forceful.

  ‘Is this my nephew?’ asked the stranger, coming up to me.

  ‘Yes.’ My father nodded.

  ‘My God, he’s handsome!’

  This man was my uncle. I was not aware that I had an uncle. My father had never spoken to us about his family. Or about anyone. He barely spoke to us at all.

  My uncle crouched down and hugged me.

  ‘You have a fine young man there, Issa,’ he said.

  My father said nothing. I saw his lips move and knew he was silently reciting verses from the Qur’an to ward off the evil eye.

  The man got to his feet again and turned to my father. After a moment, he went back behind the counter but continued to stare at him.

  ‘You’re not an easy man to flush out, Issa. I have to assume that something serious has happened. It’s been years since you came to visit your big brother.’

  My father did not beat about the bush. In a single, breathless sentence he recounted what had happened out in the bled, how our crops had gone up in flames, about the visit of the kaid . . . My uncle listened carefully and did not interrupt. I watched as his hands alternately gripped the counter and balled into fists. When my father had finished, he pushed his fez back and dabbed at his brow with a handkerchief. He was devastated, but he held up as best he could.

  ‘You should have asked me for money, Issa, instead of mortgaging our lands. You know what happens with that kind of lo
an. You’ve seen many people take the bait, and you’ve seen what has happened to them. How could you let yourself be swindled too?’

  There was no reproach in my uncle’s tone, just an overwhelming disappointment.

  ‘What’s done is done,’ said my father, who could think of nothing else to say. ‘God has decided.’

  ‘The Lord did not command that your crops be burned . . . God cannot be blamed for the wickedness of man. Nor the Devil either.’

  My father raised his hand to stop the conversation.

  ‘I’ve come to settle in the city,’ he said. ‘My wife and my daughter are waiting for me on the corner.’

  ‘Let’s go back to my house first. You can stay there for a few days and I will see what I can do—’

  ‘No.’ My father cut him off. ‘If a man is to get back on his feet, he must do it straight away. I need a home of my own, and I need it today.’

  My uncle did not insist. He knew his brother’s stubbornness too well to contradict him. He took us to the far side of the city.

  There is nothing cruder than the inequalities of a city. Walk around a block and day becomes night, life becomes death. Even now, years later, I still shudder whenever I remember that devastating experience.

  The ‘suburb’ where we ended up broke the spell the city had cast only a few hours earlier. This was still Oran, but now we were behind the scenes, where the beautiful houses and the leafy avenues gave way to a sprawling chaos peppered with squalid shacks, disgusting shops, the tents nomads call kheimas, which are open to the four winds, and pens filled with livestock.

  ‘This is Jenane Jato,’ my uncle said. ‘Today is the day the souk, the market, is held. It’s usually quieter than this,’ he added, to reassure us.

  Jenane Jato: a slum of scrubland and shacks teeming with squeaking carts, beggars, hawkers, donkey-drivers struggling with their beasts, water-carriers, charlatans and ragged children; a stifling clay-red wasteland of dust and filth that clung to the walls of the city like a malignant tumour. The abject poverty was unbelievable, and the people – piteous wretches – dissolved into the shadows. It was as though the damned had been driven out of hell without judgement or warning and washed up here; they were the personification of life’s futility.

  My uncle introduced us to a puny little man with a short neck and shifty eyes. Bliss was a broker, a vulture waiting to grow rich on other people’s misery. At the time, with disease-ridden waves of migrants flooding into the city, such predators were unavoidable. Ours was no exception to the rule. Bliss knew that we were ruined, he knew we were at his mercy. I remember he had a goatee beard that made his chin seem abnormally long and wore a filthy fez perched on his huge, bald, misshapen head. I hated him the moment I set eyes on him, his snakelike smile, the way he rubbed his hands together as though about to eat us alive.

  He greeted my father with a nod and listened as my uncle explained our situation.

  ‘I think I may have something for your brother, Doctor,’ said the broker, who seemed to know my uncle well. ‘If it’s something temporary you’re looking for, you won’t find anything better. It’s not a palace, but it’s comfortable and the neighbours are honest.’

  He led us to a yard in front of what looked like a stable, near a stinking stream. He asked us to wait in the street, then cleared his throat loudly to let the women know to disappear – as was the custom if a man was about to walk into a room. When the coast was clear, he signalled for us to follow him.

  The house was built around a central courtyard flanked by rooms each crammed with families fleeing the famine and the typhus that raged in the countryside.

  ‘Here it is,’ the broker said, pulling aside a curtain to reveal an empty room. It smelled of piss and cats, of dead chickens and vomit. The walls, still standing through some miracle, were black and oozed damp; the floor was covered in a carpet of rats’ droppings. ‘You won’t find a more affordable rent,’ he assured us.

  My father stared at the cockroaches that teemed around a drain choked with filth, looked up at the cobwebs spotted with dead flies; the broker watched out of the corner of his eye, like a reptile eyeing its prey.

  ‘I’ll take it,’ my father said to the man’s relief.

  Immediately he began to pile our belongings into a corner of the room.

  ‘The communal toilets are at the other end of the courtyard,’ the broker said enthusiastically. ‘There’s a well, too, though it’s dry right now. You’ll need to watch that the kids don’t get too close to the edge. We lost a little girl last year when some fool forgot to put back the cover. Apart from that, there’s nothing else you need to know. The neighbours are good people. They’ve all come in from the bled to work, and they never complain. If you need anything at all, come and ask me,’ he insisted eagerly. ‘I know people, I can lay my hands on anything, day or night, if you’ve got the money. If you didn’t already know, I rent out mats, blankets, oil lamps and paraffin stoves. You only have to ask. I’ll bring you the moon itself if you’ve got the money.’

  My father wasn’t listening; he already despised the man. As he set about tidying our new home, I saw my uncle take the broker aside and slip something into his hand.

  ‘That should cover the rent for a while.’

  The broker held the banknote up against the sunlight and looked at my uncle with malicious joy. He pressed the money to his forehead, then to his lips and yelped.

  ‘Money might have no smell, but my God, it smells good to me.’

  2

  MY FATHER wasted no time. He was determined to get back on his feet as soon as possible. At dawn next day, he took me with him and we went looking for any work that might bring in a few pennies. Unfortunately, he knew nothing about the city and didn’t know where to start. At nightfall we came back empty-handed and exhausted. Meanwhile, my mother had cleaned our hovel and organised our things. We ate like animals and fell asleep immediately.

  The following day, before daybreak, my father and I set out again to look for work. We had been walking for hours when we saw a crowd of men milling around a truck.

  ‘What’s going on?’ my father asked a beggar in tattered rags.

  ‘They’re looking for labourers to unload cargo on the port.’

  Convinced this was his lucky break, my father told me to wait on the terrace of an ancient ramshackle café and piled into the crowd. I watched him elbow his way through and disappear into the throng. When the truck pulled away, there was no sign of him; he had obviously managed to get aboard.

  I waited for him for hours under the blazing sun. All around me, people in rags and tatters clustered around shacks, squatting on their haunches, perfectly motionless in the shade of their makeshift shelters. Every one of them had vacant eyes and something of the night in their faces. They seemed to be waiting, with unfathomable patience, for something that would never happen. In the evening, weary of waiting, they drifted away in silence, leaving only a few tramps, two or three gibbering madmen and sinister men with reptilian eyes. Suddenly I heard someone shout, ‘Stop, thief!’ and it was as though Pandora’s box had been opened. Heads jerked, bodies uncoiled like springs and I watched a handful of hirsute men swoop on a young lad in rags trying to escape. This was the thief. In the blink of an eye, they had lynched him. His screams would haunt my sleep for weeks to come. When they had finished, all that remained was the broken body of a teenage boy lying in a pool of blood. I was so shocked that when a man leaned down to speak to me, I almost jumped out of my skin.

  ‘I didn’t mean to scare you, lad,’ the man said, holding his hands up to reassure me, ‘but you’ve been here since morning. You need to be heading home now. This is no place for the likes of you.’

  ‘I’m waiting for my father,’ I said. ‘He went on the truck.’

  ‘Where is he then, this fool of a father of yours? What is he thinking, leaving a little lad like you in a place like this? Do you live far?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  The man seem
ed embarrassed. He was big, strapping, with hairy arms, a face weathered by the sun and one black eye. He glanced around him, then, reluctantly, he pushed a seat towards me and invited me to sit with him at his table, which was black with dirt.

  ‘It’ll be dark soon, and I have to close up. You can’t hang around here, got it? It’s not safe. The place is crawling with lunatics . . . Have you eaten?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘I didn’t think so.’

  He stepped inside his café and brought out a tin plate with some cold congealed soup at the bottom.

  ‘I’ve no bread left . . .’

  He sat down next to me and watched as I lapped at the plate like a dog with his bowl.

  ‘Your father is a fool,’ he sighed.

  It grew dark. The café owner closed up but he didn’t leave. He hung a lantern from a beam and, scowling, kept me company. Shadows flitted here and there across the murky square. A throng of homeless people gradually took over the area; some clustered around a wood fire, others simply stretched out on the ground and slept. Hours went by, the sounds faded; my father had still not returned. As time passed, the café owner’s fury mounted. He wanted to head home but was convinced that if he left me, even for a moment, I would be dead. When my father finally appeared, ashen with worry, the café owner laid into him in no uncertain terms.

  ‘Where the hell do you think you are? Mecca? What on earth possessed you to leave your kid in a place like this? Even criminals aren’t safe around here.’

  My father was so relieved to find me safe that he drank down the café owner’s rebuke like a blessed elixir. He realised that he had made a grave mistake and that had the café owner left me to my fate, he might not have found me at all.

  ‘I went in the truck,’ he stammered, distraught. ‘I thought they were going to bring us back here, but I was wrong. I’m not from the city and the port is farther than I thought. I didn’t know where I was or how to get back here. I’ve been going round and round in circles for hours.’