I stopped on the crest of a hill. I didn’t have the strength to go any further, I felt sick, my eyes were stinging, sweat ripped at my back. Death hung in the air, I could smell it. And yet I could sense some residual force that spoke of life and of eternity. My heart was beating fit to burst, beating out a rhythm to a lament that sprang from the depths of the earth, from the pulsing sun, from the anguished cries of a memory imprisoned in stone. Here, amid this savage beauty, this agony of stone, this harsh light, life and death merged. The question whether to live or to die was superfluous; here opposites converged, here time was as it always was: an infinite silence, a crippling stillness, light rose and fell, the seasons chased each other like brothers and sisters, speaking to nothing but the immutable phases of the solar cycle. I sat on a rock, mopping my face with a handkerchief, and like an old man returning to a forgotten country, memories stirred, images appeared. They were quickly whipped away by what I saw. My memories did not tally with the reality. I dimly remembered a large, immaculate, contented village perched on a hill, and greedy tentacles spilling down, eating into the hillside; what I saw, devastating in its truth, was a pitifully small village which looked as though it vainly struggled to set its roots into the upper slopes. Everything here was hemmed in by steep hills. Two or three houses, rising up to defy the heavens, stood, unfinished, left to wrack and ruin. There was water in the wadi, and warty toads, the sort we used to torment during the mating season when we were kids, now there was also a small pool on a bed of powdery rock ringed by deadwood polished by time. In my mind, I remembered a breathtaking forest, but what I saw before me was a dying copse. In my mind, the streets hummed with life, and now, shielding my eyes to look down, all I could see were deserted laneways, cracked, crumbling walls, a flea-bitten mongrel wandering, a lone chicken scavenging, a donkey staring out and. . there, yes. . there in the courtyard, on the terrace, in the shadow of the mosque, people, women, children! I leapt to my feet and bounded down the hill like a mountain goat.
It is astonishing how life endures. Many villagers had survived the carnage by disappearing into the thick night, hiding as best they could, others played dead, while others still did not know by what miracle they survived. They recognised me as soon as they saw me. “It’s Rachid,” they cried, “Cheïkh Hassan’s son!” They rushed over and crowded around me, the children going through my pockets as though I was some wealthy uncle coming home. I couldn’t shake off my stilted politeness, I stood stiffly, head high, glancing around me, stammering words that sounded strange and grating to my ear. I listened as I idiotically babbled “Salam, salam!” I was welcomed, fussed over, thanked, congratulated. Normal roles had been reversed, the poor were comforting the privileged. For my part, I was shell shocked. I barely recognized my childhood friends, they looked so old, so pitiful it was unbearable, they looked almost like bedridden invalids you take outside in the morning so they can sit in the sun, and bring in again when night falls. The sight of them, with stumps for teeth, grey hair, deep wrinkles, hunched backs, made me feel guilty. Their hands looked thick and arthritic, the story of their short lives could be read in the ridges and their calluses. Those who had been old when I had first known them looked exactly as they always had, though maybe more alive than their children. When death comes knocking, life suddenly revives. We talked and talked some more, we talked for three whole days. The little Arabic I learned on the estate in Paris was useless. I babbled away in a mixture of French, English, German and what crumbs of Arabic and Berber I remembered, and we quickly bonded. We understood each other perfectly. To tell the truth, there wasn’t much to say: a smile, a few gestures, a few bows said all that needed to be said. Conversation is all in the mind, you carry on a conversation with yourself, answer your own questions, while a look, a gesture, is enough to sum it up to others. When it came down to it, all I was trying to say was, “I’m very well, thank you, Allahu Akbar.” Then I moved on to the next person, said the same things, drank some more coffee. I went from house to house, rediscovering the places, the smells, the mystery of a childhood suddenly rekindled. I wanted to run, to nose about, to steal, to plot, to invent great new secrets I would never tell to a living soul. We talked about that terrible night. They had all lost someone close to them — a relative, a friend, a neighbour. It had happened much as I had imagined it. Crime is not difficult to understand, it is something we know intimately, something we can easily imagine, something we see, we hear about, we read about all the time. Crime is our totem pole, planted in the earth, visible from the moon. It is the history of the world. And Algeria had written a special chapter for Aïn Deb and those who lived there.
Everyone in the village came to visit me in our family home which was now filled with emptiness, with memories of which I knew only the smallest part. But childhood memories are extraordinarily powerful. The people of Aïn Deb fed me, went without so that I could eat, worried about me, watched over me in the heavy afternoon hours as I slept, and when night began to weigh on me, the last of them would quietly creep away carrying their sleeping children in their arms. I was pleased to find that my father had been respected here and my mother thought of as blessed. I felt flattered. They say that the reputation the dead leave behind is ruthlessly judged by those who survive them. My parents had had their quietus.
The victims of the massacre had been buried in a section of the cemetery marked out with whitewashed stones, elevating them to the status of martyrs for God and the Republic. A marble slab set into concrete inscribed in Arabic says as much. I counted thirty-eight graves in neat rows. To a small village, this brutal loss had been devastating. Carved into the gravestones were the names of those who had died, a verse from the Qur’an and a little flag. The regional administration had planned and funded the memorial. The inauguration ceremony attracted officials from civil, military and religious authorities and a national TV crew. They arrived in a cortege, and left trailing a glorious cloud of dust, leaving behind the village which had served them as a film set and the villagers whose walk-on parts they had momentarily upstaged. I had been worried that my father, a Christian, would be buried elsewhere, something that would have upset me, but his grave was next to my mother’s in the martyrs’ section. On their headstones were the names Aïcha Majdali and Hassan Hans known as “Si Mourad.” This strange anomaly again. It was only now that I found out that papa had converted to Islam in 1963. After Independence, he decided to settle here in Aïn Deb. At first, the villagers found it strange, even inappropriate for a German, a Christian, to decide to live among them, but since papa had fought in the War of Independence and earned the title Mujahid, and since he was an Algerian national, they felt honoured. Three months later, charmed by the young and beautiful Aïcha, the daughter of the village cheïkh, papa converted to Islam in order to marry her and took the name Hassan. He was forty-five, she was eighteen. When the old cheïkh died, the villagers conferred the title on papa. It was a formality, really, since everyone already referred to him as Cheïkh Hassan. They came to consult him, to listen to him, he had a solution for everything, they were amazed by the changes he made to the village. Strangers passing through — admittedly, as infrequent as the rain — used to go away astonished, half-believing Aïn Deb was not in the same country. Papa’s wisdom, his experience, his flair for organisation and natural authority had argued in his favour without any need to plead his case. This was something else I didn’t know. Though, as I child, I heard people call him Si Hassan, I thought it was just a nickname. They called him Si Mourad too, the name he used in the maquis during the War of Independence, later they called him Cheïkh Hassan, but I just assumed it was a mark of respect for his age.