At twenty-five, Rachel got French citizenship. He threw this big fuck-off party. Ophélie and her mother — a hard-core cheerleader for the National Front — had no reason now to put off the wedding. Algerian and German, maybe, but he’s French now and an engineer to boot, they told anyone who asked. Another party. Has to be said, Rachel and Ophélie had been together since they were kids and her mother Wenda had run Rachel out of the house plenty of times; but she saw him grow up to be serious and well-mannered. Besides, she couldn’t really complain, Rachel had blue eyes and blonde hair, Ophélie was the one with dark hair and brown eyes. Rachel had inherited papa’s German genes and Ophélie’s Russian blood did the rest. Their life was like some cheesy music box, all you had to do was wind it up and it played. Half the time I was jealous of them, the other half I wanted to kill them just to put them out of their misery. To keep on good terms, I steered clear. Any time I went round their house, they’d flap around like there was a storm threatening the nest. Ophélie was always two steps ahead of me and she’d go round afterwards to make sure nothing was missing.
After he got his citizenship, Rachel said, “I’m going to sort out your papers too, you can’t go on like this, like a free electron.” I shrugged: “Whatever, do what you like.” So he did. One day he shows up on the estate and gets me to sign some papers and a year later he shows up again and says, “Congratulations, you’re one of us now, your papers have come through.” He said his boss pulled a few strings. He took me to dinner in some big fancy restaurant in Paris near Nation. It wasn’t to celebrate me getting my papers, it was to give me a lecture about all the responsibilities that went with it. So, as soon as I’d had dessert, I was like, “Later,” and I was out of there.
Monsieur Vincent sorted things out for me, he gave me a month’s paid leave. It was pretty good of him really, I’d only ever worked two days here, three days there, and there was a clapped out old wreck I hadn’t even finished working on. He sorted things out with social services too, since they were forking out for the apprenticeship.
I needed to hole up, to be on my own. I’d got to the point where the only way to deal with the world is to go off and hide and wallow in your pain. I read Rachel’s diary over and over. This shit was so huge, so dark, I couldn’t see any way out. Then suddenly, I started writing like a lunatic, me who’s always hated writing. Then I started running round like a headless chicken. What I went through I wouldn’t wish on anyone.
MALRICH’S DIARY, NOVEMBER 1996
It was hard for me to read Rachel’s diary. His French isn’t like mine. The dictionary wasn’t much help, every time I looked something up it just referred me to something else. French is a real minefield, every word is a whole history linked to every other. How is anyone supposed to remember it all? I remembered something Monsieur Vincent used to say to me: “Education is like tightening a wheel nut, too much is too much and not enough is not enough.” But I learned a lot, and the more I learned, the more I wanted to know.
The whole thing started with the eight o’clock news on Monday, 25 April 1994. One tragedy leading to another leading to another, the third the worst tragedy of all time. Rachel wrote:
I’ve never felt any particular attachment to Algeria, but every night, at eight o’clock on the dot, I’d sit down in front of the television waiting for news from the bled. There’s a war on there. A faceless, pitiless, endless war. So much has been said about it, so many terrible things, that I came to believe that some day or other, no matter where we were, no matter what we did, this horror was bound to touch us. I feared as much for this distant country, for my parents living there, as I did for us, here, safe from it all.
In his letters, papa only ever talked about the village, his humdrum routine, as if the village were a bubble beyond time itself. Gradually, in my mind, the whole country became reduced to that village. That was how I saw it: an ancient village from some dimly remembered folk tale; the villagers have no names, no faces, they never speak, never go anywhere; I saw them standing, crouching, lying on mats or sitting on stools in front of closed doors, cracked whitewashed walls; they move slowly, with no particular goal; the streets are narrow, the roofs low, the minarets oblique, the fountains dry; the sand extends in vertiginous waves from one end of the horizon to the other; once a year clouds pass in the blue sky like hooded pilgrims mumbling to themselves, they never stop here but march on to sacrifice themselves to the sun or hurl themselves into the sea; sometimes they expiate their sins over the heads of the villagers, and then it’s like the biblical flood; here and there I hear dogs barking at nothing, the caravans are long gone but as everywhere in these forsaken countries, skeletal buses shudder along the rutted roads like demons belching smoke; I see naked children running — like shadows swathed in dust — too fast to know what game they are playing; pursued by some djinn; laughter and tears and screams following behind, fading to a vague hum in this air suffused with light and ash, merging with the echoes. And the more I told myself that all this was just some movie playing in my head, a ragbag of nostalgia, ignorance and clichés seen on the news, the more the scene seemed real. Papa and maman, on the other hand, I could still picture quite clearly, hear their voices, still smell them, and yet I knew that this too was false, that these were inventions of my mind, sacred relics from my childhood memory making them younger with each passing year. I reminded myself that life is hard in the old country, all the more so in a godforsaken village, and then this tranquil veil would tear and I would see an old man, half-paralysed, trying to stay standing to surprise me, and a hunchbacked old woman supporting herself against the flaking wall as she struggled to her feet to greet me, and I would think, this is papa, this is maman, this is what time and hard living have done to them.