Sirocco Page 4

  Zizou appeared in the mirror behind me. “Let me have a look.” She inclined her head sideways and batted her eyelashes. “Turn around.”

  I slowly spun, holding my arms away from my body, and paused facing her, awaiting her verdict.

  “Nice sweater,” she chuckled.

  * * *

  Once at Jeanne D’Arc, I adjusted my rough suit with a scowl and ran with Zizou to join a game of volleyball in progress. While we played, two young French soldiers sat on the beach not too far from our tents and watched the game.

  When the ball dashed my way, I jumped to hit it back; it grazed my fingertips and bounced in the direction of the soldiers. I chased after it. As I picked the ball up, one of the young men said to the other, “Give her a couple of years and she’ll be a looker.”

  I straightened up, holding the ball against my chest, and looked around to have a peek at la belle du jour, but no one was there but me. I strolled back to the volleyball game in a daze. Could they possibly have been speaking about me? A future looker? In this … suit? Naw, not me. I sighed with regret and sent the ball to the players behind the net.

  The game over, I dropped beside Zizou on the band of cool, wet sand. She had not yet graduated from bottom-only swimsuits and studied mine and the way I scratched here and there. “You look like the monk in a horsehair shirt we saw in the movie at the parish cinema last Sunday. What horrible sins have you committed, Nanna?”

  “What d’you mean?” I side-glanced at the lounging soldiers and blushed.

  Zizou chuckled, for she knew I had all the confidence of an over-cooked noodle. “I mean that ever since you went after the ball, those guys over there,” she pointed her chin at them, “have been watching you.” She batted her lashes, vamp-like, and said, “Could it be that they like your winter swimsuit?”

  I felt hot, itchy, and bitchy. “Next summer, this suit will be too small for me.” I pointedly stared at her chest. “Looks like you will need it then. Might be a tad big, but you’ll grow into it.”

  Her grin vanished and she lifted protective hands to her nipples. Then she recovered and blustered, “Not me. Not this suit. No way.”

  She must have been clairvoyant, for the strangest thing happened sometime during the following fall, winter or perhaps, spring. When it came time to prepare for the beach again, the dark blue wool suit had new holes as big as my fist. Couldn’t have been moths. Must have been a lone rat that had bypassed the rattraps, poison, and other rat-nefarious ruses our grandfather was so good at setting.

  Must have been the most famished, intelligent, and lucky rat in all of Sidi Mabrouk.

  Later on that summer, while Maman and I made pizzas for the next day at the beach, she sighed, “Tomorrow is the anniversary of your uncle Pierro’s death.”

  I knew the story of Tonton Pierro’s death quite well.

  When their mother died, Maman was eleven, Tonton Pierro, nine, and Tonton Gilles, six. So Ma became a mother to her brothers.

  * * *

  In 1945, before going home for the summer, Pierro and four friends had spent the day at the beach to celebrate passing their exams at their engineering school in Algiers. While in the water, one of the young men was caught in a riptide. A second swam to his rescue, but the current took him. Each of the remaining boys went in to rescue the others until all five had drowned.

  Pierro was my uncle and my godfather. He was sixteen when he died and I was one year old. I cannot remember him, but Maman gave me the poems he wrote for me. I know he was a painter like Mémé Honninger and he loved to read. Like me.

  * * *

  The smell of garlic cloves Maman minced brought me back to our pizza making. I arranged slices of tomato on top of the Gruyère cheese lining the dough. “Ma, tell me again how I met Papa after Tonton Pierro died.”

  She spread the garlic on top of the tomatoes. “Pépé, you, and I took the train from Constantine to Algiers to claim your uncle Pierro’s body. I carried you down the hotel’s staircase to join Pépé Honninger in the lobby ….”

  Papa playing Le Chat Botté.

  The Day I Met Papa

  Hôtel d’Alger in Algiers, Summer, 1945

  I knew this story well also. Maman was minding her steps while descending the stairs of the Hôtel d’Alger in Algiers when an emaciated, unshaven, and ill-looking soldier, wearing a tattered military coat too large for him, barred her way. “Lili? What are you doing here?” he asked in a raspy voice.

  Maman backed up two steps to get away from the filthy stranger. He put a hand on her arm to steady her. She looked around for help. “Don’t touch us.”

  “Lili, it’s me, Riri, your husband.”

  She searched the stranger’s eyes. They were the same green she remembered from not quite two years past, but now they looked older than those of a man of twenty-one years, tired, and glossed over with fever.

  While my father was at the war, Maman had pointed at his photo. “Papa,” she said enough times that eventually, when asked, “Where is Papa?” I pointed at the picture on the wall. This picture was a large framed affair showing my papa as a child-thespian, costumed for the leading role in Charles Perrault’s fairytale, Le Chat Botté. He wore a rapier, thigh-high turned-down boot-tops, and bouffant pants, a wide-sleeved shirt, and embroidered bolero. He had long black whiskers and pointed cat ears. So, when this bad-smelling, scratchy-faced stranger took me from my mother’s arms, saying, “Papa …. Papa …. Dis bonjour à Papa,” and kissed me, I shrieked, and squirmed, and turned away.

  The stranger slapped my face and shoved me into my mother’s arms. With a mean expression, he asked, “What are you doing here?” A man whose very young and beautiful wife has been husbandless for two years could come to no worse conclusion. He had seen it happen to other soldiers. “Have you been whoring in this hotel while I risked my life?”

  “She came here to collect her brother’s body and does not need any more grief. Not even from you.” Pépé Honninger had come in search of his daughter and heard his son-in-law’s accusation. Pépé took me from Ma’s arms and wiped the tears off my face. “And what are you doing here?” he asked Papa.

  “Just off the boat from France, waiting for my military discharge before going home.”

  “Then I suggest you clean yourself up and get a new attitude before I throw you down the stairs on your ass,” growled Pépé.

  This was Maman’s account of how my father and I first met. An episode I couldn’t recall, but which might account for the mixed feelings of awe and fear my pa inspired in me through the years.

  Nanna.

  Chapter Four

  After Papa came home from the war, the world settled like sand after a Sirocco storm. My family moved into a home, close to the cemetery where Papa worked. Even seven years after the move, at the age of twelve, I could still picture it as if it were projected on a movie screen.

  The house stood at the bottom of la Route du Cimetière. The road ran downhill to the outskirts of Constantine. It leveled out by our house and converged with another sloping road into the wide circular cemetery plaza, as if into a giant eddy. From there, the two roads merged into one, channeled by the walls of the Christian and Muslim cemeteries, then dissolved into the countryside.

  A curved stone bench lined each side of the twin portals of the walled Christian cemetery, where both Arabs and Europeans sat to wait for the electric tram back to the city.

  Past the portals, the cemetery’s main avenue darted downslope, just as a swift arrow mimics the earth’s curvature.

  On each side of the avenue, a row of cypresses, dark and streamlined, pointed to the sky like Roman legion lances. At their feet along the roadside, narrow troughs replenished a string of small in-ground tanks with running water used to fill pots of cut flowers and clean monuments.

  On its way down, the avenue bisected perpendicular roads, themselves intersected by paths, thus creating quadrilateral plots that emulated city blocks. However, while cities fragment their neighborhoods int
o rich versus poor, this city of the dead did not discriminate—haves and have-nots lay side-by-side.

  Nanna, age 6, at the cemetery.

  A Day with Pépé Vincent

  European Cemetery in Constantine, June, 1950

  Early in the morning of my sixth birthday, Papa had left me with my grandfather, Pépé Vincent, at the cemetery. There, father and son practiced their craft, building a metropolis where plain stone graves rubbed shoulders with granite or marble tombs, elegant crypts, ornate chapels, and flamboyant mausoleums.

  I loved to peer into the tanks’ water, at the rippling, upside-down world, tinged green by the slime-covered tank walls. I’d stare at my reflection, suspended between the seemingly bottomless water and the fathomless sky behind me, and observe what looked like my first grade teacher’s pictures of farm animals and people floating mid-air in hues of greens and smothered blues.

  “I warned you to stay away from those tanks.” Pépé’s rebuke broke the spell.

  “I’m careful, Pépé. See?” I held on to the tubular fence surrounding the water and gave him my most beguiling smile.

  The stern expression shadowing his usually kind face told me that, at the moment, my charm was not working on him.

  Abashed, I sat on the low wall of a nearby mausoleum—knocking the heels of my swinging feet against the gleaming, beige granite—and watched him work.

  Pépé sat on a low wooden stool, knees apart, chiseling a family name on a slab of gray-veined marble. The hammer in his right hand clinked-clinked, clinked-clinked in a familiar cadence against the flat head of the burin’s dark steel, causing sparkling chips of marble to arch about him like falling stars.

  Amid the soothing quiet of the tombs, the clear metal sounds harmonized with the chirping of sauntering sparrows and cries of diving swallows. These emerged from the tall, dark green cypresses, as if from church spires and—curved carbon blades—dive-bombed toward the ground until, almost on the verge of crashing, they arced back up to the sky with jubilant shrieks.

  With no set direction, a Tiger butterfly fluttered from one flowered grave to another.

  “Please, Pépé, can I go and catch the butterfly?”

  “You may.” He closed his eyes and blew mica dust off his work. “But stay where I can see you.”

  “Oui, Pépé.”

  While I slithered down my perch, the butterfly had veered and flickered across the avenue. I followed and stalked it to a single bloom. But, no sooner had my hand’s shadow darkened its brilliant wings, it took off and disappeared into the folds of a pointed-tipped cypress—a slow metronome swaying in the breeze.

  At times, instead of real flowers decorating the graves, wreaths and bouquets of tiny glass beads shimmered in colors of rainbows. I spent many hours stringing these beads into rings, necklaces, bracelets, and earrings, but Pépé said I should not do this.

  “Why not, Pépé? They are so pretty.”

  “One does not steal from the dead.”

  “But Pépé, if they are dead, they don’t need it.”

  “It is not they who need it; it is the others, the people who are alive who do.”

  “How’s that, Pépé?”

  “Well, it’s like this. Being dead means you are not alive anymore. But the family and friends of a dead person can keep this person alive in their thoughts and hearts. And as long as they do so, the dead person is dead in body, but not in spirit.”

  “But what about the bead flowers, Pépé?”

  “Well, one of the many ways to keep the spirit of the dead alive and help their families and friends miss them less is to bring flowers, fresh or beaded, to their dead. If someone steals the flowers, it’s as if they stole the love of the living for the dead and that makes them dead forever and the living very sad.

  I looked at him. “But Pépé, a lot of graves don’t have flowers. Does that mean their spirits are dead?”

  “Non. There are reasons why some people cannot come to the cemetery—they live far away or are too busy, but their dead still live in their hearts. That is why we celebrate la Toussaint. Once a year, on All Saints Day, people do not work and come to the cemetery to bring chrysanthemums and visit with their dear departed. That makes these people feel good—”

  “Oh, you mean, it feels like when I come to see you, even though you are not dead, Pépé?”

  He grabbed and squeezed me hard against his chest. “And like when I go to see you.”

  His clothes smelled of cement dust, cigarette smoke, and bay rum. I hugged him back and peered into his craggy face. Right above the wing of his left nostril, there was this familiar little dot, blue like a tattoo. “But, it is all right to play with the bead flowers that fell on the ground, the ones that are not on a grave?”

  After a second’s hesitation, he said, “These, you may play with.”

  He tapped me on the derriere. “Let me do some work now and remember, don’t go far.”

  I skipped away. “Non, Pépé. I won’t.”

  I moseyed from graves that barely rose above ground, to sober tombs, to imposing chapels, and towering mausoleums. I peeked through condensation holes and slits at the back of monuments. The dank, musty darkness inside barely revealed the faint glint of coffins perched on trestles.

  I cupped my hands around my mouth and, as one drops stones to test a hollow’s depth, blew into the holes, “Who, who.”

  “Whoo, whoo,” came back the echo, an old dog’s breath.

  At the side of a grave with a leaning cross and moss-covered stone, I found scattered lengths of tiny beads still strung on their metal thread. I gathered them and sat on the grave’s hot stone. I twisted two strips together, shaped them into a circle I slipped around my wrist, “Là,” I sighed and, contented, surveyed my surroundings.

  Under the relentless sun, the blinding whiteness of life-size statues reflected into the buffed planes of marble and granite monuments—standing angels with open palms and serene smiles consoled the grief-stricken with promises of redemption. Cherubs proffered stone garlands of everlasting roses, and genuflecting monks, faces in hands under cowls, shared in the distress of the bereaved.

  On headstones, words of love, grief, or hope carved in gold letters testified as to who lay there—a little boy, a grandmother, a friend, a soldier, members of generations of the same family.

  Freshly cut flowers, scented messages from this world to the next, trembled in the breeze until, in time, as happens with all living things, they withered and died. They left long stems and leaves decaying in stagnant water. The odor reminded me of the times at school when we spat on our own arms, rubbed the spittle hard into the skin, and gave each other the smell test. “Yeak, you smell like a dead corpse.”

  A woman sobbed. I followed the sound to a white tomb where a pretty lady knelt. Underneath the black lace veil her pale face shined like a moonbeam. She reached out with trembling fingers to the picture of a girl’s face. It was trapped within the glazed depths of a sepia photograph set under glass, on the page of an open book carved in marble. The girl’s mischievous eyes belied the serious set of her mouth. The incised gilded message on the book read,

  To my Emilie,

  Gem of my life.

  Your sweet, smiling eyes

  Will forever

  Shine in my heart.

  Your Mummy

  Always.

  Behind the convex oval glass, the girl in sepia met my eyes. Her lips, blurred by the sky’s reflection, at this moment seemed to smile.

  I waited behind a nearby cross until the sad lady wiped her eyes and walked away, round-shouldered, as if bearing a boulder.

  I climbed and stood on tiptoe atop the marble bench at the side of the tomb, stretched until I could just stroke Emilie’s cheeks. It felt as if I caressed my own image—the same fringed, bobbed, sandy hair, clear, smiling eyes, and solemn mouth. It felt as if I were back at the water tank, peering down at my reflection as it meshed with the upside-down sky, and I smiled back.

  “Nanna, Whe
re are you?”

  I hastily slid the bead bracelet off my wrist, hooked it around the marble book’s corner, and jumped off the bench.

  “Here Pépé, I am here.”

  He came and took my hand. “Your Maman is bringing lunch. Let’s go and wash our hands.”

  Ma arrived with a basket of food, four-year-old Zizou holding on to her skirt. Mireille, still learning to walk, hung on to the basket. My heart overflowing with a love bigger than the sky, I watched Papa stroll down the road, hands shoved in his pockets and whistling to himself.

  I remembered loving this place so much then and Pépé, and Pa and Ma, and my little sisters, I could hardly breathe as I sat down for my birthday picnic party among the graves.

  Little did I know that, five years later, the year I turned eleven, my tranquil city of the dead and others like it would be the resting place for victims of unspeakable deaths like the ones in El-Halia.

  Chapter Five

  Sidi Mabrouk, August, 1955

  Tonton Gilles, his wife, Yvette, and a couple of my parents’ friends had dinner at our house. The adults’ sober conversation covered recent events in Philippeville and the nearby villages of El-Halia and Filfila. Their covert words and the careful looks they cast toward my brothers, sisters, and me alerted us that something worse than usual had happened. A somber Monsieur Martinez retrieved square, glossy black-and-white photos from his coat pocket. “It would not be a good idea for the children to see these,” he hinted.

  Leaning against my arm, Zizou whispered, “It’s like in the movies; each time they are going to kiss, the actors pull a curtain or close a door in our faces so we can’t see anything.”