The Meursault Investigation (3 page)

What can I tell you, Mr. Investigator, about a crime committed in a book? I don’t know what happened on that particular day, in that gruesome summer, between six o’clock in the morning and two in the afternoon, the hour of Musa’s death. There we are! Besides, after Musa was killed, nobody came around to question us. There was no serious investigation. I have a hard time remembering what I myself did that day. In the morning, the same neighborhood characters were awake and on the street. Down at one end, we had Tawi and his sons. Tawi was a heavyset fellow. Dragged his bad left leg, had a nagging cough, smoked a lot. And early each morning, it was his habit to step outside and pee on a wall, as blithely as you please. Everybody knew him, because his ritual was so unvarying that he served as a clock; the broken cadence of his footsteps and his cough were the first signs that the new day had arrived in our street. Farther up on the right, there was El-Hajj, alias the pilgrim — which he was by genealogy, not because he’d made the trip to Mecca; El-Hajj was just his real given name. He too was the silent type. His main occupations seemed to be striking his mother and eyeing his neighbors with a permanent air of defiance. On the near corner of the adjacent alley, the Moroccan had a café called El-Blidi. His sons were liars and petty thieves, capable of stealing all the fruit off every possible tree. They’d invented a game: They would throw matches into the sidewalk gutters where the wastewater ran and then follow the course of those matches. They never tired of doing that. I also remember an old woman, Taïbia, big, fat, childless, and very temperamental. Something unsettling and even a little
voracious in the way she looked at us — us, other women’s offspring — made us giggle nervously. The city, with its thousand alleys, was like a huge geological animal, and we were a little collection of lice on its back.

So on that particular day, nothing unusual. Even Mama, who loved omens and was sensitive to spirits, failed to detect anything abnormal. A routine day, in short — women calling to one another, laundry hung out on the terraces, street vendors. No one could have heard a gunshot from so far away, a shot fired way downtown, on the beach. Not even at the devil’s hour, two o’clock on a summer afternoon — the siesta hour. So, Mr. Investigator, I repeat, nothing unusual. Later, of course, I thought about it, and little by little, I concluded that there must be — among the thousand versions Mama offered, among her memory fragments and her still-vivid intuitions — there must be one version truer than the others. In our house in those days, there was something I’m not sure about, something I might call the smell of female rivalry floating in the air, rivalry between Mama and another woman. I never saw her, but Musa carried a trace of her in his voice, in his eyes, and in the way he had of violently rejecting Mama’s insinuations. So there was this harem tension, if I can call it that. Like a mute struggle between an exotic perfume and an overly familiar kitchen smell. In our neighborhood, all the women were “sisters.” A code of respect prevented the more interesting sorts of romance and reduced the game of seduction to wedding parties or mere glances exchanged while the women hung out the wash on the terraces. For young men of Musa’s age, I imagine the neighborhood “sisters”
offered the prospect of practically incestuous and not particularly passionate marriages. Now there
were
a few skirt-wearing, firm-breasted Algerian women who shuttled between our world and the world of the
roumis
, down in the French neighborhoods. We brats used to call them whores and stone them with our eyes. They were fascinating targets, because they could promise the pleasures of love without the inevitably of marriage. Those women often inspired violent passions and hateful rivalries, the sort of thing your writer alludes to a few times in his book. However, his version is unfair, because the unseen woman he mentions wasn’t Musa’s sister. One of his girlfriends, maybe. And there, I’ve always thought, is where the misunderstanding came from; what in fact was never anything other than a banal score-settling that got out of hand was elevated to a philosophical crime. Musa wanted to save the girl’s honor by teaching your hero a lesson, and he protected himself by shooting my brother down in cold blood on a beach. Men in the working-class neighborhoods of Algiers actually did have an exaggerated, grotesque sense of honor. Defend our women and their thighs! I tell myself that after losing their land, their wells, and their livestock, women were all our guys had left. This rather feudal explanation makes me smile too, but do me a favor and think about it. It’s not completely crazy. The story in that book of yours comes down to a sudden slipup caused by two great vices: women and laziness. So — and I really think this sometimes — there were indeed some traces of a woman, a scent of jealousy, in Musa’s last days. Mama never spoke about it, but in our neighborhood, after the crime, I was often greeted as the
heir of some recovered honor, though I could never figure out the reasons why, child that I was. Nevertheless, I knew it! I could feel it. By telling me so many implausible tales and outright lies, Mama eventually aroused my suspicions and put my intuitions in order. I reconstructed the whole thing. Musa’s frequent binges in that last period, the scent floating in the air, his proud smile when he ran into his friends, their overly serious, almost comical confabs, the way my brother had of playing with his knife and showing me his tattoos.
Echedda fi Allah
, “God is my support.” “March or die” on his right shoulder. “Be quiet” on his left forearm, under a drawing of a broken heart. That was the only book Musa wrote. Shorter than a last sigh, consisting of three sentences on the oldest paper in the world, his own skin. I remember his tattoos the way other people remember their first picture book. Other details? Oh, I don’t know, his overalls, his espadrilles, his prophet’s beard, and his big hands, which tried to hold on to our father’s ghost, and his involvement with a nameless, honorless woman. I’m not sure, Mr. Student Detective.

Ah! The mystery woman! Provided that she existed at all. I know only her first name; at least, I presume it was hers. My brother had spoken it in his sleep that night, the night before his death. Zubida. A sign? Maybe. In any case, the day Mama and I left the neighborhood forever — Mama had decided to get away from Algiers and the sea — I’m sure I saw a woman staring at us. A very intense stare. She was wearing a short skirt and tacky stockings, and it seems to me she’d done her hair like the movie stars in those days: Although she was quite
obviously a brunette, her hair was dyed blond. “Zubida forever,” ha, ha! Maybe my brother had those words tattooed somewhere on his body as well, I don’t know for sure. But I
am
sure it was her that day. It was early in the morning. We were setting out, Mama and I, leaving the house for good, and there she was, holding a little red purse, staring at us from some distance away. I can still see her lips and her huge eyes, which seemed to be asking us for something. I’m almost certain it was her. At the time, I wanted it to be her and I decided it was, because that enhanced my brother’s demise somehow. I needed Musa to have had an excuse and a reason. Without realizing it, and years before I learned to read, I rejected the absurdity of his death, and I needed a story to give him a shroud. Well, then. I pulled Mama by her haik, so she didn’t see her. But she must surely have sensed something, because she made a horrible face and spat out a prodigiously vulgar insult. I turned around, but the woman had disappeared. And then we left. I remember the road to Hadjout, lined with fields whose crops weren’t destined for us, and the naked sun, and the other travelers on the dusty bus. The oil fumes nauseated me, but I loved the virile, almost comforting roar of the engine, like a kind of father that was snatching us, my mother and me, out of an immense labyrinth made up of buildings, downtrodden people, shantytowns, dirty urchins, aggressive cops, and beaches fatal to Arabs. For the two of us, the city would always be the scene of the crime, or the place where something pure and ancient was lost. Yes, Algiers, in my memory, is a dirty, corrupt creature, a dark, treacherous man-stealer.

So how come I’ve wound up in a city once again, Oran this time? Good question. Maybe it’s self-punishment. Look around a little, here in Oran or elsewhere. It’s as though people have a grudge against the city and they’ve come here to trash it and plunder it, like a kind of foreign country. People treat the city like an old harlot, they insult it, they abuse it, they fling garbage in its face, they never stop comparing it to the pure, wholesome little town it used to be in the old days, but they can’t leave it, because it’s the only possible escape to the sea and the farthest you can get from the desert. Make a note of that, it’s quite good, I think, ha, ha! An old song, a local favorite, has a line that goes, “Beer is Arab and whiskey’s Western.” Which is wrong, of course. I often amend it when I’m alone: The song is Oranian, the beer’s Arab, the whiskey’s European, the bartenders are Kabyles, the streets are French, the old porticos are Spanish … and I could go on. I’ve lived here for several decades now, and I like it fine. The sea’s down there, far away, crushed underfoot by the harbor. It won’t take anyone away from me and can never reach me.

I’m doing fine, see? It’s been years since I’ve seriously spoken my brother’s name, except in my head and in this bar. My countrymen have a habit of calling anybody they don’t know “Mohammed,” but the name I give everyone is “Musa.” That’s also our barman’s name, you can call him that, it’ll make him smile. It’s as important to give a dead man a name as it is to name a newborn infant. Yes, it’s very important. My brother’s name was Musa. On the last day of his life, I was seven years old, and so I don’t know any more about him than what I’ve told you.
I can’t quite recall the name of our street in Algiers. All I remember is that Bab-el-Oued was the name of the neighborhood, and the market, and the cemetery. The rest has disappeared from my memory. Algiers still scares me, though. It has nothing to say to me and remembers neither me nor my family. And picture this: One summer, it was 1963, I think, right after Independence, I went back to Algiers, determined to conduct my own investigation. But I barely got out of the train station before I lost my resolve and turned back. It was hot, I felt ridiculous in the suit I was wearing, and everything was going so fast it made me dizzy, too fast for a villager used to the slow cycles of harvests and trees. I immediately turned back. My reason? It’s obvious, my young friend. I told myself that if I found our old house again, death would end up finding us, Mama and me. And so would the sea, and injustice. That’s pompous, and it sounds like a line that’s been rehearsed for a long time, but it’s also the truth.

Let’s see, let me try to remember exactly … How did we learn of Musa’s death? I remember a kind of invisible cloud hovering over our street and angry grown-ups talking loud and gesticulating. At first, Mama told me that a
gaouri
had killed one of the neighbor’s sons while he was trying to defend an Arab woman and her honor. Then, during the night, anxiety got inside our house, and I think Mama gradually began to realize the truth. So did I, probably. And then, all of a sudden, I heard this long, low moan, swelling until it became immense, a huge mass of sound that destroyed our furniture and blew our walls apart and then blew up the whole neighborhood and left me all alone.

I remember starting to cry for no reason, just because everyone was looking at me. Mama had disappeared, and I got shoved outside, rejected by something more important than me, absorbed into some kind of collective disaster. Strange, don’t you think? I told myself, confusedly, that this might be about my father, that he was definitely dead this time, which made me sob twice as hard. It was a long night; nobody slept. A constant stream of people came in to offer their condolences. The grown-ups spoke to me solemnly. When I couldn’t understand what they were telling me, I contented myself with looking at their hard eyes, their shaking hands, and their shabby shoes. When the dawn came, I felt very hungry, and I wound up falling asleep I don’t know where. No matter how much I dig around in my memory, I have no recollection at all of that day and the next, except I recall the smell of couscous. The days blurred into a sort of immensely long single day, tall and broad like a deep valley, where I meandered with other solemn kids who were showing me the respect due to my new status as “the hero’s brother.” That’s all I remember. The last day of a man’s life doesn’t exist. Outside of storybooks, there’s no hope, nothing but soap bubbles bursting. That’s the best proof of our absurd existence, my dear friend: Nobody’s granted a final day, just an accidental interruption in his life.

I’m going home. How about you?

Yes, the barman’s name is Musa — in my head, at any rate. And the other one, the one over there, in the back? I’ve christened him Musa too. But he’s got a whole different
story, that one. He’s older and surely half widowed, or half married. Notice his skin, it’s like parchment. He’s a former inspector of education in the teaching of the French language. I know him. I don’t like to look him in the eye because he’s liable to seize the opportunity to get inside my head, make himself comfortable, and tell me the story of his life, jabbering away in my place. I keep my distance from sad people. The two other guys behind me? Same profile. The bars still open in this country are aquariums containing mostly bottom-feeders, weighed down and scraping along. You come here when you want to escape your age, your god, or your wife, I believe, but in any case haphazardly. Well, all right, I suppose you know a bit about this kind of place. Except that recently they’ve been closing all the bars in the country, and all the customers are like trapped rats, jumping from one sinking boat to another. And when we get down to the last bar, there will be a lot of us, old boy, we’ll have to use our elbows. That moment will be the real Last Judgment. I invite you to attend, it’s coming soon. You know what the regulars call this place? The Titanic. But if you look at the sign, you see the name of a mountain: Djebel Zendel. Go figure.