Khadra The Angels Die

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-80533-431-6
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 384 Seiten

'However successful you may become, you will always be just the little Arab from the souk.'?Even as a child living hand-to-mouth in a ghetto, Turambo dreamt of a better future. So when his family find a decent home in the city of Oran anything seems possible. But colonial Algeria is no place to be ambitious for those of Arab-Berber ethnicity. Through a succession of menial jobs, the constants for Turambo are his rage at the injustice surrounding him, and a reliable left hook. This last opens the door to a boxing apprenticeship, which will ultimately offer Turambo a choice: to take his chance at sporting greatness or choose a simpler life beside the woman he loves.Award-winning author Yasmina Khadra gives us a stunning panorama of life in Algeria between the two world wars, in this dramatic story of one man's rise from abject poverty to a life of wealth and adulation.

Yasmina Khadra is the pen name of award-winning Algerian author Mohammed Moulessehoul. His novels include The Swallows of Kabul, The Attack, and The Sirens of Baghdad. In 2011 Yasmina Khadra was awarded the prestigious Grand prix de la littérature Henri Gal by the Académie Française.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Khadra, Yasmina

Weitere Mitwirkende

Curtis, Howard

Leseproben

My name is Turambo and they’ll be coming to get me at dawn.

‘You won’t feel a thing,’ Chief Borselli reassures me.

How would he know anyway? His brain’s the size of a pea.

I feel like yelling at him to shut up, to forget about me for once, but I’m at the end of my tether. His nasal voice is as terrifying as the minutes eating away at what’s left of my life.

Chief Borselli is embarrassed. He can’t find the words to comfort me. His whole repertoire comes down to a few nasty set phrases that he punctuates with blows of his truncheon. I’m going to smash your face like a mirror, he likes to boast. That way, whenever you look at your own reflection, you’ll get seven years of bad luck … Pity there’s no mirror in my cell, and when you’re on death row a stay of execution isn’t calculated in years.

Tonight, Chief Borselli is forced to hold back his venom and that throws him off balance. He’s having to improvise some kind of friendly behaviour, instead of just being a brute, and it doesn’t suit him; in fact it distorts who he is. He comes across as pathetic, disappointing, as annoying as a bad cold. He’s not used to waiting hand and foot on a jailbird he’d rather be beating up so as not to lose his touch. Only two days ago, he stood me up against the wall and rammed my face into the stone – I still have the mark on my forehead. I’m going to tear your eyes out and stick them up your arse, he bellowed so that everyone could hear. That way you’ll have four balls and you’ll be able to look at me without winding me up … An idiot with a truncheon and permission to use it as he pleases. A cockerel made out of clay. Even if he rose to his full height, he wouldn’t come up to my waist, but I suppose you don’t need a stool when you’ve got a club in your hand to knock giants down to size.

Chief Borselli hasn’t been feeling well since he moved his chair to sit outside my cell. He keeps mopping himself with a little handkerchief and spouting theories that are beyond his mental powers. It’s obvious he’d rather be somewhere else: in the arms of a drunken whore, or maybe in a stadium, surrounded by a jubilant crowd screaming their heads off to keep the troubles of the world away, in fact anywhere that’s a million miles from this foul-smelling corridor, sitting opposite a poor devil who doesn’t know where to put his head until it’s time to return it to its rightful owner.

I think he feels sorry for me. After all, what is a prison guard but the man on the other side of the bars, one step away from remorse? Chief Borselli probably regrets his overly harsh treatment of me now that the scaffold is being erected in the deathly silence of the courtyard.

I don’t think I’ve hated him more than I should. The poor bastard’s only doing the lousy job he’s been given. Without his uniform, which makes him a bit more solid, he’d be eaten alive quicker than a monkey in a swamp filled with piranhas. But prison’s like a circus: on one side, there are the animals in their cages and, on the other, the tamers with their whips. The boundaries are clear, and anyone who ignores them has only himself to blame.

When I’d finished eating, I lay down on my mat. I looked at the ceiling, the walls defaced with obscene drawings, the rays of the setting sun fading on the bars, and got no answers to any of my questions. What answers? And what questions? There’s been nothing up for debate since the day the judge, in a booming voice, read out what my fate was to be. The flies, I remember, had broken off their dance in the gloomy room and all eyes turned to me, like so many shovelfuls of earth thrown on a corpse.

All I can do now is wait for the will of men to be done.

I try to recall my past, but all I can feel is my heart beating to the relentless rhythm of the passing, echoless moments that are taking me, step by step, to my executioner.

I asked for a cigarette and Chief Borselli was eager to oblige. He’d have handed me the moon on a platter. Could it be that human beings simply adjust to circumstances, with the wolf and the lamb taking it in turns to ensure balance?

I smoked until I burnt my fingers, then watched the cigarette end cast out its final demons in tiny grey curls of smoke. Just like my life. Soon, night will fall in my head, but I’m not thinking of going to sleep. I’ll hold on to every second as stubbornly as a castaway clinging to wreckage.

I keep telling myself that there’ll be a sudden turnaround and I’ll get out of here. As if that’s going to happen! The die is well and truly cast, there’s not much hope left. Hope? That’s one big swindle! There are two kinds of hope. The hope that comes from ambition and the hope that makes us expect a miracle. The first can always keep going and the second can always wait: neither of them is an end in itself, only death is that.

And Chief Borselli is still talking nonsense! What’s he hoping for? My forgiveness? I don’t hold a grudge against anyone. So, for God’s sake, shut up, Chief Borselli, and leave me to my silences. I’m just an empty shell, and my mind is a vacuum.

I pretend to take an interest in the bugs running around the cell, in the scratches on the rough floor, in anything that can get me away from my guard’s babble. But it’s no use.

When I woke up this morning, I found an albino cockroach under my shirt, the first I’d ever seen. It was as smooth and shiny as a jewel, and I told myself it was probably a good omen. In the afternoon, I heard the truck sputter into the courtyard, and Chief Borselli, who knew, gave me a furtive glance. I climbed onto my bed and hauled myself up to the skylight, but all I could see was a disused wing of the prison and two guards twiddling their thumbs. I can’t imagine a more deafening silence. Most of the time, there have been jailbirds yelling and knocking their plates against the bars, when they weren’t being beaten up by the military police. This afternoon, not a single sound disturbed my anxious thoughts. The guards have disappeared. You don’t hear their grunting or their footsteps in the corridors. It’s as though the prison has lost its soul. I’m alone, face to face with my ghost, and I find it hard to figure out which of us is flesh and which smoke.

In the courtyard, they tested the blade. Three times. Thud! … Thud! … Thud! … Each time, my heart leapt in my chest like a frightened jerboa.

My fingers linger over the purple bruise on my forehead. Chief Borselli shifts on his chair. I’m not a bad man in civilian life, he says, referring to my bump. I’m only doing my job. I mean, I’ve got kids, d’you see? He’s not telling me anything new. I don’t like to see people die, he goes on. It puts me off life. I’m going to be ill all week and for weeks to come … I wish he’d keep quiet. His words are worse than the blows from his truncheon.

I try and think of something. My mind is a blank. I’m only twenty-seven, and this month, June 1937, with the midsummer heat giving me a taste of the hell that’s waiting for me, I feel as old as a ruin. I’d like to be afraid, to shake like a leaf, to dread the minutes ticking away one by one into the abyss, in other words to prove to myself that I’m not yet ready for the gravedigger – but there’s nothing, not a flicker of emotion. My body is like wood, my breathing a diversion. I scour my memory in the hope of getting something out of it: a figure, a face, a voice to keep me company. It’s pointless. My past has shrunk away, my career has cast me adrift, my history has disowned me.

Chief Borselli is now silent.

The silence is holding the prison in suspense. I know nobody’s asleep in the cells, that the guards are close by, that my hour is stamping with impatience at the end of the corridor …

Suddenly, a door squeaks in the hushed tranquillity of the stones and muffled footsteps move along the floor.

Chief Borselli almost knocks his chair over as he stands to attention. In the anaemic light of the corridor, shadows ooze onto the floor like trails of ink.

Far, far away, as if from a confused dream, the call of the muezzin echoes.

‘Rabbi m’âak,’ cries one of the inmates.

My guts are in a tangle, like snakes writhing inside a pot. Something takes hold of me that I can’t explain. The hour has come. Nobody can escape his destiny. Destiny? Only exceptional people have one. Common mortals just have fate … The muezzin’s call sweeps over me like a gust of wind, shattering my senses in a swirl of panic. As my fear reaches its height, I dream about walking through the wall and running out into the open without turning back. To escape what? To go where? I’m trapped like a rat. Even if my legs won’t carry me, the guards will make sure they hand me over in due form to the executioner.

The clenching of my bowels threatens my underpants. My mouth fills with the stench of soil; in it, I detect a foretaste of the grave that’s getting ready to digest me until I turn to dust … It’s stupid to end up like this at the age of twenty-seven. Did I even have time to live? And what kind of life? … You’re going to make a mess of things again, and I don’t feel like cleaning up after you any more, Gino used to warn me …...