Sirocco Page 14

  The soldier called another one over. “Keep her here.” He turned and walked to the café’s entrance.

  I wiped my runny nose with the back of my hand and rubbed it on the side of my dress. My eyes dried up. The rims of my eyelids burned and I needed to pee. I crossed my legs. The paimpon paimpon, of ambulances rushing through the streets grew louder. I watched, hypnotized, as soldiers tramped in and out of the café, their boots splattered with blood coating the terrace. But, unlike the long-ago sacrificed sheep across the street, this blood wasn’t alive. It didn’t flow, but lay in wait, thick and unmoving like swamp water. I slapped a hand to my mouth to keep from throwing up.

  “Are you all right, ma petite?”

  I felt as if I were waking from a deep sleep. I didn’t know which was true, the nightmare of my grandfather lying in a pool of blood, or the happy dream of his hand on my shoulder. Soldiers hurried about us. First responders loaded covered stretchers into parked ambulances.

  “Pépé!”

  Pépé lifted my chin. “Çà va, Nanna?”

  At his back, the blinding orb of the early afternoon sun melted into the white-hot August sky, and beyond the racket of voices, heavy boots, and departing ambulances, the cicadas rubbed their wings. I threw my arms around his neck. “I thought you were dead.” Then I got a hold of myself and stepped back.

  Pépé’s lips quivered, then he shook bits of plaster from his mussed hair and shoulders. “I was lucky.” His pale lips ebbed into the ashen hue of his face and a long red scratch scored his cheek. His dusty clothes looked as if he had rolled in a mound of dirt like a horse trying to shake pesky flies.

  Pépé chomped on his dentures to shove them back up his gums and turned to the soldier who had fetched him, “I’m taking my granddaughter home.” He pointed down the road. “To that house.”

  The soldier shook his head. “We need your statement.”

  Pépé grabbed my hand. “Don’t worry, young man; I’ll be right back to help clean up. I’ll talk to you then.”

  Pépé laid his arm across my shoulder and guided me home down the street.

  Zizou shook her head. “I tell you there was not so much blood as you say.”

  “There was too. I saw it. I saw the soldiers slosh in it. There was so much it reached over the soles of their boots.” I vividly recalled the scene, felt that it was an insult to the sacredness of life. The recollection of these stained boots sickened me. Their trampling of blood—the essence of life—engulfed me in an immeasurable feeling of loss.

  Zizou repeated, “Oui, there was blood on the terrace, but only from the soldiers tracking it from the café. Not the swamp you say it was.”

  “How would you know?”

  “Because I was there.”

  “No you weren’t. You were in Maman’s bedroom with the kids.”

  “I was, but when I heard Maman yell for you to come back I peeked into the corridor and saw you racing out, so I went after you.” Zizou left the room and came back with my shoes.

  I grabbed them. “Where were they?”

  “In the street. You lost them when you sprinted to La Guinguette.” She pointed at my battered feet. “Couldn’t you feel you were running barefoot on gravel and macadam hot enough to broil merguez?”

  I shook my head. “I didn’t feel anything.”

  She looked at me funny. “You really need to stay out of the sun, Nanna.”

  I sat in the kitchen darkened by drawn shutters, feet soaking in cold water and a dollop of vinegar. I reflected on the images my mind had created, so vivid that I believed them to be true. The intense red—ruby droplets—leaping off boots that cut across a crimson pool. A pool that grew darker and more viscous under the sun.

  That night, the owl woke me. I turned over and smirked at the empty warning. Papa said the night birds were portents of doom, but in spite of this afternoon’s attack on La Guinguette, Pépé Honninger lay secure in his bed, alive, and Pépé Vincent slept peacefully in the spare bed across from mine. Hoot yourself, crazy bird.

  * * *

  Since Pépé Vincent had moved in with us, whenever the owl hooted in the plane tree at the corner of the front yard, Papa gave it the finger and stole out in the dark, shotgun cocked. “Nobody in this house’s going to die,” he’d say.

  Inevitably, Maman warned, “Careful, chéri, not to hit the power line.” Inevitably, Papa shouldered his gun and shot at the tree, growling, “You think I’m an ass?” and inevitably, the hooting stopped.

  The next morning, we’d find broken twigs and fallen leaves at the base of the old tree, but no dead owl. Not even a feather.

  Jovial neighbors asked, “Did you get it this time?”

  Papa peered into the tree; hands on hips, feet apart, head thrown back. “I know I got it. Must be stuck up there.”

  A few nights later, the hooting resumed, belying Papa’s reputation as a fine shot, wounding his pride. Worrying him. “Keep away from my house,” he’d curse.

  But the bird always came back. And ten days after the attack on La Guinguette, the owl hooted. This time, I didn’t smirk.

  The Wake

  “Nanna, wake up.”

  “Pa?” Waking out of a restless sleep, I read the news in his red-rimmed eyes. “Is he dead?”

  My father sat on the side of the bed. I had slept in my parents’ bedroom while they spent the night in mine. The doctor warned that Pépé Vincent wouldn’t last the night and they wished to be at his side when he died. Zizou and our three younger siblings were sent away to Yvette and Gilles’ in Constantine.

  “He died early this morning.” Waxen under the tan, Pa’s features were taut like a celluloid mask. I timidly touched his hand. He retrieved it and stood, searching his breast pocket for his cigarettes. “Your mother wants you to get dressed.”

  I got up and followed him into my room. Even though a glorious sun brightened the morning, the closed shutters swathed the bedroom in semi-darkness. Candles flickered on either side of my bed, where Pépé now lay. He wore his Sunday suit and tie. A white sheet covered his legs up to his knees. His hands rested folded at his waist, fingers entwined in a mother of pearl rosary. Two gleaming coins weighed down his eyelids. A length of white cloth passing under his chin was tied into a knot on top of his skull, giving his head the look of a beribboned Easter egg. The effect was comical. The indignity, heartbreaking.

  I knew the cloth prevented his mouth from falling open until rigor mortis set in. “Can’t we take this off, Papa?”

  My father flinched. “Later.”

  I sat down on the side of the bed. The bedsprings shifted, buckling the mattress at its center, pushing Pépé’s body upward. In the lurching candlelight, he seemed to levitate—straight and rigid like a wooden plank.

  I nearly bolted, but Pa’s gaze burning a hole on the back of my neck kept me rooted, eyes fastened to the body like flies on sticky paper.

  Pépé’s skin glowed, translucent like candle wax. A morbid curiosity moved my hand to his hands, clasped together in death. They felt neither cold nor warm, the flesh firm and smooth, powdery like driftwood—soulless.

  An intense longing wrung my heart. A thirst to turn back the clock to that evening, long ago, when I gazed up into his face towering above me as he pushed my pram up the Route du Cimetière. Cocooned in blankets, I drank in the rugged smile that framed his strong teeth and the tiny blue dot on the side of his nose. He wore the full moon on the side of his head like a cockeyed beret, and the rest of him faded into the dark blue night. He made me feel warm all over. He created the word “Love” just for me. And now ….

  Now he was a stranger who frightened me. A carcass that meant nothing.

  Burning with revulsion and anger, I stood and walked around the bed to my wardrobe. The muscles of my buttocks cramped as I tried not to run, tried to hide my terror from Papa. To spare his feelings. I jerked open the wardrobe curtain, almost tearing it off the clinking rings, gathered clothes and shoes at random and speed-walked out of the room, fle
eing from the deathbed in fear and from my father, in shame of that fear.

  Over the next twenty-four hours, time passed—a sluggish, out-of-focus, motion picture in sepia. Strangers embraced and kissed us. Whispering friends gathered in an arc of chairs around the dead man’s bed. Comings and goings caused the yellow candle flames to vacillate, sputter, and release sinuous threads of charcoal fumes.

  Evening brought little relief from the August heat seeping through the shutters’ slats. Minutes stretched like thick treacle. The smell of hot candles, food, and coffee, even that of disinfectant used to wash the floor, no longer masked the cloying stench of decay stemming from the bed.

  By mid-morning, the body was transferred to a coffin resting on wooden trestles. The time had come to say good-bye. I stood at Pa’s side. The mixed smells of rotting flesh and room disinfectant nauseated me, but to please my father, I followed his example and bent over Pépé for a last kiss. Almost brutally, Papa grabbed my arm and walked me to the other side of the casket. I looked up at him, fearful I had done something wrong. He pointed his chin at the trickle of black blood oozing at the corner of Pépé’s mouth.

  As we followed close behind the coffin being borne out of the room, Papa whispered, “Did you hear?”

  “Hear what, Pa?”

  “Didn’t you hear Pépé say, ‘Thank you Nanna’?”

  I stared at my father. His pasty skin and red-rimmed eyes broke my heart. I wanted to say yes, to make him feel better, but I couldn’t lie about something this important. I shook my head. “No, Papa, I didn’t.” Guilt and anguish pinched my throat. What would Pépé thank me for, when I’ve been so spooked and rushed out of the room in disgust? I wished with all my might he had spoken to me. Told me he forgave me. That he still loved me. But I hadn’t heard him.

  As the bearers maneuvered the coffin feet first around the front door jamb, a silly thought distracted me. So, that’s what “going feet first” means. I wonder why not head first?

  To my surprise, the bright sun flooding through the doorway made breathing easy again. I realized Maman was not with us and looked around for her. She stood at the kitchen door, shrunken in her mourning clothes, a dishtowel to her eyes. I stopped following the coffin to wait for her, but Papa eased me along. “Come. Your mother will prepare lunch while we are at the cemetery.”

  I followed him down the stairs, into a limousine. “Is she going to be alone?”

  “No, Tata Yvette’s helping her prepare lunch for after the funeral.”

  It seemed that lunch would last forever. That people would never stop hugging us, saying how sorry they were. That Pépé’s dying was “for the best.” It seemed they’d never leave. But when they did, they left behind a vacuum. As if the house had ballooned from the inside out with us, minute specks, in the center—particles of cosmic dust trapped within an extraterrestrial bubble.

  We sat, eyeing each other. Unable to stitch two words together. Strangers sharing a train compartment.

  Finally, Pépé Honninger slapped his knees and pushed himself up from his chair. “Well, I don’t know about you. But I’m going to La Guinguette. Anyone want to come?”

  The room smoothly deflated, returning to its usual dimensions. I blasted out, “Can I come?”

  Papa got up. “We’ll all go.”

  Maman stood. “We’ll be ready in a minute. Come, Nanna.”

  In her bedroom, she smoothed and pinned her hair on each side of her face with combs, applied powder on her cheeks and nose and a touch of color on the curves of her shapely lips.

  I combed my hair while she held the black headband I had worn all day. Yesterday Ma had said to Papa, “We should buy a black dress for Nanna, but I don’t want her to look like an orphan.”

  I envisioned Maman as an eleven-year-old girl in a black dress, mourning her mother. I could tell she still felt that loss and, for her sake, I would not have minded wearing a black dress. It would have been like holding that grieving girl in my arms, telling her, “It’s okay, I’m here.”

  Papa said, “I don’t want her in black either. Have her wear a small piece of something black.”

  Ma gave me a couple of francs and sent me to Guenassia’s novelty store to buy a length of black grosgrain I sewed into a headband.

  I put it on, and we joined Papa and Pépé Honninger waiting outside the front door. Pépé locked the door and handed the heavy key to Ma; then we all started for La Guinguette.

  The Clock

  At the café, I gulped the cold glass of sirop d’orgeat, the barley water Pépé ordered for me, and scanned the plates of kémia that Mr. Cavalier, the owner, spread along the bar. Today, the appetizers were green olives in olive oil and garlic, curried fava beans, and peanuts in the shell. I didn’t see my favorite—sardines en escabèche, the raw sardines marinated in spiced olive oil and wine vinegar. I picked up a few peanuts and crushed the shells while I studied the other patrons.

  Two men leaned on the brass rail at the bar, revisiting with Monsieur Cavalier the grenade explosion of two days before. Four other neighbors played poker at a wood table still embedded with debris from the blast. Between hands they sipped Pastis—the anise-flavored alcohol that turns cloudy as water is poured—now and then cutting into the conversation at the bar. Monsieur Michelet called out, “Dis-moi, Cavalier, what did the doctor say about your foot?”

  A flying piece of metal had hit Monsieur Cavalier’s foot, and his usually sanguine complexion was now wan from pain and loss of blood. He leaned his forearms on top of the bar. “He said because of my diabetes I might lose it.”

  “I’m sorry, my friend. You tell us when you need help, d’accord?”

  “D’accord.”

  Monsieur Cavalier was a nice man who had lost his wife way back when I was little. He didn’t have children but was kind to the neighborhood kids. I always thought how lonely he must be, living all by himself in the upstairs apartment. Now he was lonely, injured, and his café was in ruins. I watched him survey the damage and felt sorry for him.

  The grenade had left a shallow crater in the grainy black-and-white tile floor and the concrete underneath. The bar mirror and most of the bottles were gone. Patches of missing plaster—some tiny as my thumbnail, others as big as my fist—pocked the walls down to the brickwork. It felt like I must be on the set of a Hollywood war movie, but here, the smell of old dust shaken off the building two days ago still hovered.

  The clock that used to hang on the wall before the explosion had left behind the grimy, fly-speckled silhouette of its ogival-shaped case and a preserved swatch of the paper’s original colors.

  I’d loved watching the clock’s round brass pendulum swing in the tempo of a slow heartbeat. Now the clock was gone. Just like Pépé Vincent. I was beginning to feel sorry for myself when I saw it—the clock—propped against the wall at the far end of the bar, glass shattered, face marred, big hand missing, small hand pointing to two o’clock. The time of the explosion.

  “Papa,” I touched his arm.

  He shook my hand away. “I told you I don’t like to be touched.”

  I stepped back. “What time is it, Papa?”

  “Why?”

  “What time is it?”

  “Son of a bitch, these bastard kids won’t leave me in peace—”

  Maman whispered, “chéri, please.”

  He rotated his wrist and glanced at the watch. “Six o’clock.”

  I walked to the end of the bar and pointed the clock’s small hand to the missing number six and asked, “Can you rewind the clock, Monsieur Cavalier?”

  “It’s broken, honey.”

  “Maybe it’s not dead?”

  “The pendulum is gone.”

  “Please?”

  Mr. Cavalier opened the till drawer, took out the rewind key, and limped the length of the bar. He introduced the key into the clock’s rewind hole, turned it a half turn at a time until it would go no farther and looked at me round-eyed. His pallid jowls quivered like gelatin as he said, “It
works.”

  I put my ear to the clock and laughed at the halting tick-tock, tack-tuck—happy, for no reason.

  Monsieur Voisin folded his hand of fanned cards. “At least this is one less casualty.” He threw the cards to the green felt mat. “It’s too bad about Hakim.”

  Although Hakim was Muslim, he drank alcohol and was a regular patron of La Guinguette. He worked at a government office in town and wore impeccably cut Western suits—looking more dapper any single day of the week than any of the European patrons on Sundays. His shirts and ties were immaculate, his shoes spit-shined. His smile—after he won at poker, or his snarl when, as a passionate FLN supporter, he engaged in heated political arguments with Papa—showed off a sparkling gold tooth.

  Papa, took a sip of his pastis. “Et oui!” he sighed. “Even though we often disagreed, I’m going to miss the son of a bitch.”

  The other men nodded.

  I recalled Pépé Honninger relating the details of the bombing. Monsieur Cavalier, Hakim, and two others were playing cards. Pépé was pouring a round of drinks behind the bar when three terrorists booted open the café’s doors.

  Two kept the five men in check with machine guns while the third pulled the pin off a grenade and lobbed it into the middle of the room. Then they ran out, pulling the doors closed behind them.

  A split second before the explosion, Pépé dove from behind the bar into the back room. Two card players scrambled behind the bar, suffering only superficial cuts from the shattering bottles. Slower to react, Mr. Cavalier was wounded in the foot, while a projectile penetrated the underside of Hakim’s chair seat, mortally wounding him.

  Papa shook his head. “Fucking luck,” he said. Then he picked up a garlic-coated olive and popped it in his mouth.

  Silent up to now, Monsieur Nicholas left the card table, holding his empty glass, and walked to the bar for a refill. He put a hand on Papa’s shoulder. “Sorry about your father, Richard. I hope he didn’t suffer too much at the end?”