I went back to work in the pharmacy. I was a little different, but I tried to remain clear-headed. At times I lost my patience trying to decipher some doctor’s scrawled prescription, or snapped at Germaine, who constantly fussed and worried over me, but then I would sigh, pull myself together and apologise. In the evenings, after we closed up, I would go out for a walk. I would go to the village square and watch Bruno, the young policeman, strutting about, twirling his police whistle round his finger. I liked his calm enthusiasm, the way he wore his kepi at a rakish angle, the exaggerated politeness he lavished on the pretty girls. I would sit on the terrace of a café, sipping my lemonade, and wait until it was dark before heading home. Sometimes I would lose myself, rambling through the orange groves. I was not lonely, but I missed having company. André had come back from America and business at the diner had picked up, but I was bored of playing pool, and José always beat me. Germaine thought about marrying me off. She invited a number of nieces to Río Salado in the hope that I might fall for one of them; I barely even noticed when they left.
I saw Simon from time to time; we would say hello or wave to each other. Sometimes we’d sit together for a few minutes in a café and make small talk. At first he ticked me off for ‘skipping’ his wedding like some boring class at school, but he forgave me. I suppose he had more important things to think about. He was living at Émilie’s place, in the big house on the marabout road. Madame Cazenave had been insistent. Besides, there were no houses available in the village, and the Benyamins’ family home was small and unattractive.
Fabrice had a second child and everyone got together to celebrate – everyone except Jean-Christophe, of whom we had had no news since his letter to Simon – in a beautiful villa on the cliff road outside Oran. It was here that André introduced us to his cousin, now his wife, a strapping Andalusian girl from Granada, tall and broad-shouldered with a powerful face and extraordinary green eyes. She was funny, but strict when it came to her husband’s manners. It was during the celebrations that I noticed that Émilie, too, was expecting a child.
Some months later, Madame Cazenave went to French Guyana. The body of her husband, who had been prison governor at Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni and had disappeared in the jungle during a manhunt, had been discovered by smugglers and identified from his personal effects. She never returned to Río Salado, not even to celebrate the birth of her grandson, Michel.
In the summer of 1953, I met Jamila, the daughter of a Muslim lawyer my uncle had known since university. We met by accident in a restaurant in Nemours. Jamila was not particularly beautiful, but she reminded me of Lucette; I loved her serene face, the pale, delicate hands that cradled everything they touched – a napkin, a spoon, a bag, an apple – as delicately as though they were sacred relics. She had dark, intelligent eyes, a small round mouth and a seriousness that betrayed a strict but modern education that had prepared her for life and its challenges. Jamila was studying law, and hoped to be a barrister like her father. She wrote to me first, a few anodyne lines on the back of a postcard depicting the oasis at Bou Saada, where her father worked. It was some months before I wrote back. We exchanged letters and cards for many years, neither of us straying beyond polite formalities; both of us too shy and too reserved to make any declarations.
On the first spring morning in 1954, my uncle asked me to take the car out of the garage. He was wearing the green suit he had not put on since the dinner in honour of Messali Hadj in Oran thirteen years earlier, a white shirt with a bow tie, a gold fob watch in the pocket of his waistcoat, black dress shoes and a fez he had bought recently in an old Turkish shop in Tlemcen.
‘I want to go and visit the grave of the patriarch,’ he informed me.
Since I did not know where the tomb of the patriarch was, my uncle had to direct me through the villages and the hamlets. We drove all morning without stopping for lunch or even to rest. Germaine, who could not stand the smell of petrol, felt ill, and the road, twisting steeply up and down, almost finished her off. In the late afternoon we came to the summit of a rocky peak. Below, on the plains, a patchwork of olive groves struggled to maintain their lushness. Here and there the ground was cracked and eroded and the scrubland turned to desert. A few small reservoirs tried to keep up appearances, but it was clear that before long the drought would drain them dry. Several flocks of sheep grazed at the foot of the hills, as far from each other as the dusty hamlets. My uncle brought a hand up to shield his eyes and looked out towards the horizon. Apparently he could not see what he had come to find. He climbed a steep stony path to a copse, in the midst of which stood a crumbling ruin. It was the remains of a marabout, a shrine to a Muslim holy man, or a sepulchre from another age that harsh winters and sweltering summers had worn away to rubble. In the shade of a low wall, half-buried beneath a pile of stones, was a faded, broken headstone. This was the tomb of the patriarch. My uncle was heartbroken to find it in such a state. He picked up a beam, leaned it against the dirt wall and considered it sadly, then he reverently opened a worm-eaten door and stepped inside the crypt. Germaine and I waited in silence in the small courtyard overgrown with thick brambles. My uncle stayed in the tomb of the patriarch for a long time. Germaine went and sat on a rock and held her head in her hands. She had not said a word since we left Río Salado. When she was silent like this, I always feared the worst.
My uncle rejoined us just as the sun was setting. The shadow of the sepulchre was now long and misshapen, and a cool breeze began to whistle through the brambles.
‘Let’s go home,’ he said, heading towards the car.
I waited for him to talk to me about the patriarch, about our clan, about Lalla Fatna, about what had suddenly brought him here to this rocky peak fashioned by the wind; he said nothing. He sat next to me and did not take his eyes off the road even for a moment. We drove late into the night. Germaine fell asleep on the back seat. My uncle did not complain; he was lost in his thoughts. We had not eaten since morning, but he did not seem to notice. Looking at him, I saw his face was pale, his cheeks sunken; the look in his eyes reminded me of the look he used to have before he slipped into the nether world that had been his prison and his refuge for many years.
‘I’m worried about your uncle,’ Germaine told me some weeks later. I too was worried, though my uncle showed no real signs of having relapsed. He continued to read and write, to eat with us, to go out every morning and stroll through the vineyards; but he no longer spoke to us. He would nod, sometimes he would smile at Germaine to thank her when she brought him tea or smoothed his jacket, but he did not utter a word. Sometimes he would sit in the rocking chair on the balcony, staring out at the hills, then, when it grew dark, he would go back to his room, put on his slippers, and lock himself in his study.
One night, he took to his bed and asked for me. His pallor was worse now and his hand, as he gripped my wrist, was cold, almost icy.
‘I would have liked to have lived to see your children, Jonas. I know they would have gladdened my heart. I’ve never bounced a baby on my knee.’
His eyes glistened with tears.
‘Take a wife, Younes. Only love can make good the misfortunes and the evils of this world. And remember this: if a woman loves you, no star is beyond your grasp, no god can touch you.’
I felt the cold coursing through him begin to flood through me with every shudder of his hand on my arm, seeping into my very being. My uncle went on talking to me for a long time; with every phrase he withdrew a little further from this world. He was slipping away. Germaine was weeping, slumped at the foot of the bed. Her sobs drowned out my uncle’s words. It was a strange night, profound and yet unreal. Outside, a jackal howled as I had never heard a beast howl. My uncle’s fingers, tight as a tourniquet, cut off the circulation to my fingers, leaving a purple bruise; my arm went numb. It was only when I saw Germaine cross herself and close her husband’s eyes that I accepted that someone I loved had the right to depart this life like the sun at dusk, like a candle with a breath of wind, and that the pain we suffered at his passing was simply a part of life.