That’s why I’ve never talked much with them. I thought it would be easier for us to talk in France, but even around the dinner table I feel as if they’re elsewhere, already gone and merely showing up. Nothing happens. They chat among themselves about their friends, their plans. I don’t understand, and a few polite words are all we exchange. But I’m not the only one in this fix. Did my father talk to me? It’s true, he didn’t say a lot to me, but I knew what had to be done. No need for big speeches. He taught me the fundamentals of our religion: My son, Islam is simple: you alone are responsible for yourself before God, so if you are good you will find goodness in the afterlife, and if you are bad you’ll find that instead. There’s no mystery: everything depends on how you treat people, especially the weak, the poor, so Islam, that means you pray, you address the Creator and don’t do evil around you, don’t lie, don’t steal, don’t betray your wife or your country, don’t kill — but do I really need to remind you of this? My mother said nothing, rarely spoke. The day I told her I should get married, she replied, I’ve thought about that and found you the wife we need. She emphasised the “we.” As expected, I married my cousin — a distant cousin — and everything was fine. No trouble, never a harsh word, everything quiet; she has never opposed me, and I have never troubled her. My mother knew what I needed; I’ll be eternally grateful to her. Parents should always be trusted, for they know better than their children what’s best for them. That’s not always true, I know: times change, but I don’t. With my children, I couldn’t manage it. I don’t understand — I’m lost and don’t know what to do. I allowed things to happen and said nothing. That wasn’t a good solution. Children need to hear their parents, and there I think I made a mess of it. But that’s another story, between LaFrance and me.
I never dreamed about LaFrance. True, I heard about people who left to find work in LaFrance, but that’s all. When they came back they never talked about LaFrance, just the cold, the difficult language, the people who never smiled at you. They brought back money, though, and things we didn’t necessarily need. I remember my uncle who brought home an electric oven and an iron. He’d forgotten that we don’t have electricity and use candles and kerosene lamps, and butane gas bottles to run the TV. They used the oven for a pantry. It was so funny! My aunt took precious care of it, wrapped it in an embroidered shawl, and no one else could touch it. The iron was useful for flattening dough to make perfectly thin crêpes. A nephew brought back some underwear, silk bras, but his mother had never worn them and hung them on a nail, saving them for his future fiancée, except that no young woman wanted him because he stuttered, and children made fun of him. When he was angry his stuttering upset him even more, and everyone just laughed louder. He said that in France no one mocked him and the next time he’d go spend his vacation with some peasants in Brittany! He never came back to the village — we lost touch with him.
When I was little my dream was to learn the Koran inside out, to understand it completely, maybe even explain it to others. I recited whole suras yet could not completely grasp their meaning. Nobody in the village could interpret this flood of images. The recitation would excite me so much that I would stutter a little like my cousin, swallowing words so that some vanished down my throat; others left only fragments because they were too long to hold on to. I had other dreams but never dared speak of them. I didn’t want to be rich; I just wanted enough money to give presents. Whenever I gazed at the horizon, at that dry mass of red and grey rock, my dreams were too intimidated to show their faces; I feared they might become stuck in that barren landscape, so hard and hopeless. Everything was exaggerated in that place: cold and heat, light and storms, the stars that swarmed in infinite numbers on some nights, and the clouds that blanketed the sky without shedding the tiniest drop of rain. So the dreams stayed sleeping in a cave I never dared to explore. I was scared of what I might find. Dreams, they’re like memories: I don’t know where they go or where they hide. One of my children once asked me, Where does the light hole up during the day? I thought, That’s the sort of question I’d never have asked my father. It was my son who told me the answer: The earth turns, the light stays put, and us, we move with the earth. That was the time when my children asked me questions even if I didn’t answer. Now they barely look at me.
Neither Brahim (may God keep his soul in his mercy!) nor Lahcen nor Hamdouch nor Larej nor even Ahmed (who wanted to be called Tony) nor lots of others — none of us asked for citizenship, which we left to the young people, because us, we’ll never be one hundred per cent Frenchified. Let’s be honest, that’s not our thing. We’re Moroccans, Algerians, Tunisians, Libyans — we’re not going to pretend, just to get some documents, and it’s not good when guys who can’t even speak correctly call themselves French, putting on that TV-announcer accent.
All my children are French, on paper, which at first I had a hard time accepting. I had to sign documents; I hesitated, and we talked about it, my pals and I, but couldn’t agree among ourselves. Rabi’i even hit his two daughters with a belt after they filled out the citizenship forms, and they raised a huge stink: the police and press got involved and the girls weren’t minors anymore, so poor Rabi’i almost went to prison for assault, but to him their becoming French meant he was publicly admitting that his children didn’t belong to him anymore, that LaFrance had taken them under her wing and he had no more say in the matter. All fired up, a reporter stormed the projects with a camera, to hear what he had to say for himself, and ambushed the poor man in a café, where he didn’t know what to say or how to escape her trap: she bombarded him with questions without giving him time to think, accusing him of every evil plaguing immigrant society, and he was so miserable after this ordeal that he left for Algeria with the youngest of his children, enrolled him in an Algerian high school, and thought, At least they won’t get this one.
But things didn’t work out the way he’d planned. The kid ran away, back to Yvelines, where he fell in with a gang of young guys with beards, who were French but wanted to defend the honour of Islam on Christian soil. Even though they knew squat about the Koran, they observed rituals they didn’t much understand. The boy was troubled by his predicament: between this band of bearded youths trying to brainwash him and his family with their violent arguments, he no longer knew where he belonged. One day he couldn’t take it anymore and shouted, I don’t believe in God! The “brothers” started praying to drive Satan away from him, while he just sneered, provoking them with taunts: In the name of your god, they’re cutting the throats of little girls in Algeria! Then he bolted and took up with a bunch of petty thieves and drug dealers led by his cousin, known as One Eye. When the cousin died in a car accident, the boy took over for him and grew rich. He kept changing his name and address until he was forced to flee and wound up in Australia, where people say he opened a restaurant called the Couscous King. That’s the last we heard of him. His father was so shaken by despair that he stopped speaking and shut himself up in a long silence to wait for his deliverance in death.