Harraga by Boualem Sansal Page B

reactionism and a ghastly futurism; its energy, its drive, its clarity have all been sapped. To embrace such twisted logic is to embrace the void. To say one thing is also to believe the contrary, it is to plunge furiously, hobbled and blinkered, into the fray. Why the blindfold? I don’t know. Time to these mutants is what dark glasses are to the blind man, it speaks to their inability to see and their inability to do. Through their fault or Voltaire’s, my life has gradually shrunk to nothing, to less than nothing, to a series of fits and starts between waking and sleeping before it stops altogether just as the clock in the hall fell silent when its master died. Time, where I am concerned, is a hodgepodge, a thing of shreds and patches, it blends scraps of my – happy but unfinished – childhood, a little of what I read, a lot of what I watch on television, fragments of dreams, a goodly helping of what fury proclaims to the four winds and, on a day-by-day basis, dictates my course of action. I have fashioned a life for myself that does not depend on money or on incense, I have no truck with religion, with clutter or procrastination. Or perhaps this is simply the way things are when you retreat to a desert island, when you sit rusting in a traffic jam. You make do with what you have. To be perfectly honest, I’ve never understood where wishes come from nor how disappointments are made, all I know is that I don’t care a tinker’s curse for the rantings of the truth-mongers. Like Penelope, I am deaf to suitors, committed to my work. My loneliness is my shield.
    In this life, you have to hold your own if you hope to emerge unscathed.
    The house – my house – has left me no choice. There are mornings, those gloomy mornings that seem like a painful prolongation of the night, when I feel as though I am a prisoner, albeit a willing one since I have no place else to hide. The house is over two hundred years old, I keep a weather eye on it, but I know, I can sense, that one day it will crumble with me inside. The house dates back to the seventeenth century, to the Regency of Algiers. The rooms are poky, the windows Lilliputian, the doors low and the stairs, which are treacherous, were clearly made by carpenters who had one leg shorter than the other and very narrow minds. This perhaps explains – if explanation be needed – why everyone in my family grew up to have one calf muscle thicker than the other, a pronounced stoop, a waddle like a duck and very narrow minds. It has nothing to do with genetics; the house made us that way. Back then, the perpendicular was a mystery, since in this house lines never marry at right-angles, because they were never introduced by the mason’s trowel. It is a shock to the eyes. The nose, too, since a musty smell impregnates the walls. Sometimes I feel like an ant in a maze, sometimes like Alice in Wonderland.
    The house was built by an officer of the Ottoman court – an Effendi – a certain Mustafa Al Malik, whose name and coat of arms can still be seen to the left of the entrance, carved into an ornate marble plaque worn away by the years. Which is why people in the neighbourhood refer to us as the House of Mustafa. It’s a little unfortunate, since the man had a terrible reputation for being a paedophile – though back in those days, such crimes were tolerated in polite society.
    The house’s charm comes from the primitive mosaics, the nooks like the holes in Gruyère cheese into which are set old brasses, narrow corridors and the steep staircases which meander this way and that. Mystery pervades this house, around every corner is a ghost in a djellaba , a goateed genie rubbing his lamp, an overweight courtesan chained to a wizened old crone, a pot-bellied vizier plotting against the Caliph. Of course there is nothing really there, and yet you feel as though you might encounter anything.
    I grew up shrouded in this atmosphere,