All Men Want to Know Read online

  Nina Bouraoui

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  ALL MEN WANT TO KNOW

  Translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins

  Contents

  Prologue

  Becoming

  Remembering

  Becoming

  Remembering

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  Remembering

  Remembering

  Remembering

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  Knowing

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  Knowing

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  Knowing

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  Knowing

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  Knowing

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  Knowing

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  Knowing

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  Knowing

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  Knowing

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  Knowing

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  Becoming

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  Knowing

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  Becoming

  Remembering

  Becoming

  Knowing

  Being

  Being

  Remembering

  Being

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Nina Bouraoui was born in 1967 to a French mother and an Algerian father. She lived in Algiers until the age of fourteen before moving to France and becoming a writer. She is one of France’s most renowned living novelists, and has won several prestigious literary prizes, including the Prix Emmanuel Roblès, the Prix du Livre Inter and the Prix Renaudot, and she was awarded the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Her novels have been translated into over fifteen languages.

  For my parents

  ‘All men by nature want to know’ – Aristotle, Metaphysics

  I wonder who in this crowd is newly in love, who has just been left and who has walked out without a word, who is happy and who sad, who is fearful and who forging confidently ahead, who is hoping for a brighter future. I cross over the Seine, I walk beside nameless men and women, mirror images of me. Our hearts beat as one, we are one unit. We are alive.

  I’ve lived in France for longer than I did in Algeria. I left Algiers on 17 July 1981, before the Black Decade. I was fourteen years old. How many friends, neighbours, acquaintances have been killed since then? I came empty-handed to Rue Saint-Charles, my first address in Paris. I stand between my two lands, two continents on either side of the sea. I cling to the flowers and brambles of my memories, photographic images that restore colour and texture to bodies bathing in the sea at Cherchell. I close my eyes, I move through Oran, Annaba, Constantine. In my mind, nothing has changed, nothing will ever change.

  I could sketch the precise layout of the apartment in Algiers: the hallway and the bedrooms, the living room, the library, the streaks of light across the tiled floor I thought were messages from outer space, from other-worldly beings coming to spirit me away.

  I am both architect and archaeologist.

  I piece together everything I know about my family as if assembling the fragments of a shattered object. From this disorder emerges order. Silences, where echoes of the past converge. I want to know who I am, what I am made of, what I can hope for; I trace the thread of my past back as far as it will take me, making my way through the mysteries that haunt me, hoping to unravel them.

  I often ask myself about the person I might have become if I’d stayed in Algeria, if I were to choose to go back there. When I say the ‘person’, I’m thinking of who I am in matters of love.

  I search for evidence in my past, vestiges of my homosexuality, my childhood set on this path, like an asteroid circling the earth or a stream flowing down a mountain.

  Paris opens itself up to me. Rue du Vieux Colombier, the Katmandou, a women-only club in the 1980s, a theatre now. The scene of many tears and fights. Where I learned the lessons of violence and submission. I close my eyes and the landscape of those nights rises up before me. I reach out and take the hand of the woman I was then. My younger self, wellspring and herald of who I am, is not lost to me.

  Becoming

  At the Kat, I’m eighteen years old and I don’t look it. I live in Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, alone. My parents are stationed in one of the Emirates of the Persian Gulf. When I think of them, I see them through a veil of mist, busily going about their lives, a life that is no longer mine. I imagine them in their house, sand all around them, a long way from the centre of town, the desert encroaching on them. When the wind is high, my mother claims she can hear the helicopters and tanks from Kuwait City. I don’t know if she’s imagining it or alluding to a war as real as the one I’m waging against myself.

  My first time at the Kat, I’m asked to show ID, then I become one of the regulars. I go there on Fridays, Saturdays, Tuesdays and sometimes Thursdays. On weeknights, the emptiness of the place intensifies my loneliness. My fantasies are of murder and torture. The price I believe I must pay for being who I am.

  Tables in the golden square, nearest to the bar, are reserved for actresses and girls from the escort agency with the men they bring in. Men who observe from the sidelines, stealing glances at the slow-dancing women, keeping their distance, that’s the rule. I look around for a hand to lead me across the field of bodies, all of them unknown to me but sharing my desire: to be loved.

  The women at the Kat scare me, they’re different from me, from the women of my childhood; these women bury their softness beneath layers of anger so it won’t be expos
ed, vulnerable. The night is destructive – perhaps it will destroy me in turn.

  I’m afraid I’ll run into one of them as I walk along Boulevard Saint-Germain and down Rue de Rennes, as I approach the door of this place that’s drawing me in, the place I leave in the small hours to walk home, skirting the boundary fence of the Jardin du Luxembourg.

  I pray to the trees, the statues, the fountains, put my faith in the power of all this beauty watching over me. I’m leading a double life, following a path that’s strewn with thorns and nettles. I don’t know where it will lead me.

  Remembering

  In Algiers, all that separates the gardens of our building from the eucalyptus forest are strips of barbed wire; it’s easy to prise them apart and slip into the forest.

  The trees thrust like swords towards the sun. Night falls on my skin; I feel the earth beating under my hand, beneath my belly as I lie down. I smell its perfume of amber and resin. The earth is a body, a maze of nerves and blood vessels.

  They say that men come here to lie together in the fallen leaves. Men from the city, from the docks usually. They make their way one by one, strangers who meet and embrace, safe from watching eyes. People say they leave a part of themselves in this earth, that the soil has become more fertile. These men seem to me to exist on a higher plane. In my dreams I become them, I cast aside the feminine part of my being, the part that doesn’t chime with my desires, with the paths I take. I cleave to their hands, their breath. I am no longer a daughter. I will never be a wife. I am the child of these men who lie in the forest.

  Becoming

  At first, I go alone to the Kat. I don’t have any lesbian friends, I don’t want any. I avoid all connections beyond the club itself. I don’t give out my phone number, I go by a false name, create an identity for myself, a hologram that fades away as quickly as it comes together; I’d wipe away my fingerprints if I could.

  I become paranoid, I have a recurring dream of a voice calling me on the phone and saying: ‘I know who you are, I know who you are.’ I’m terrified at the thought of being unmasked, of being found deserving of punishment.

  I pay cash to get in, buy my drinks with cash, don’t use my credit card or my chequebook, and when I run out of money I go out to the cash machine and come straight back.

  I don’t carry a handbag, I keep everything in my jacket pocket. I wear a jacket even when it’s not cold and I never leave it in the cloakroom, that way I can make a quick getaway if there’s a fight or if the police are called.

  Remembering

  I haven’t forgotten my roots: the cliffs of the corniche, the palm grove of Bou Saada, the walking trails of Chréa, the reeds along the seashore, the medlar trees I used to climb, hauling myself up above the world, my teeth tearing into the fruit hanging from the branches, flooding me with a pleasure I never tired of seeking.

  I remember the road from the Place d’Hydra to our apartment block built by Shell in the 1950s for the French oil workers of Total.

  I remember the houses, the steep streets, the bends in the roads, the widest one in front of the French Embassy, the guard’s sentry box, the concrete blocks of the car parks, the lift cabin gliding over a dark-green wall as it rises, the fake marble staircase, the wrought-iron balustrade, the tiled floor with carpets laid over it, the curving lines of the buildings set out in rows in order of size in the manner of Le Corbusier.

  I can no longer recall the names of the streets, French names Arabized in the 1980s, nor the names of our neighbours or of the families that lived close by. But the shapes, colours, textures, all the details of the decor are still with me; a stage empty of actors, a city of ghosts.

  In Algiers, my family seems to me to be one living being, whole and unique. We have no need of others, we are enough as we are, my sister in her bedroom, my mother on the balcony, the cat at her feet, my father filing his papers. Everything is in its place: furniture, objects, the people who use them.

  I move through the apartment as if gazing out from within a painting on the wall, from the tapestry that hangs in the living room, images of voluptuous women on a riverbank, cherubs beside them, ferns, poplars.

  I feel the happiness in my body, waves of happiness, a sensation I can pinpoint; it comes when we are all together.

  It cannot be real, such happiness, it cannot endure. There will be a price to pay for it.

  Becoming

  I begin to write when I first start going to the Kat.

  My night-time outings are inner dramas. I go out alone, as a man would, believing myself to be free. But this is no freedom: no one’s waiting for me, no one’s hoping I’ll be there. I’m nothing. I know it and I’m ashamed.

  Sitting at the bar, I wait. It’s sad but I accept it – I don’t like it here but this place has something I’m searching for. Every night the same songs, nothing changes from one evening to the next; it reminds me of death. I watch the women dancing together and the only thing that shocks me is how alone I am.

  Words are the balm for my nights spent in search of something that eludes me, in search of love, of beauty remembered – women reclining on the rocks, my mother’s and sister’s voices calling me from the sixth floor of the apartment block in Algiers, a lightness sometimes: the days we spent away from the city and its web of fears, playing in the creeks, on the rocks.

  When I begin to write, my first creation is a woman, alone and abused. I don’t realize I’m sketching a portrait of my mother.

  Remembering

  My mother comes into our apartment in Algiers, her dress torn, drops of spit in her hair, her skin streaked with grime, clutching her hands to her breasts as if to hide them. She doesn’t cry, she makes her way to the bathroom, asks us not to follow her. I pick up her shoes and bag thrown down in the hallway. I go to my room and wait for her, my sister comes to join me; I make a paper aeroplane, launch it at the wall.

  We carry on as if nothing has happened. My mother washes herself, she takes her time, she scrubs her body to rub away the imprints of the fingers that have touched her. Then she says: ‘I was attacked by a madman. I managed to get away. I took cover in a shop. I think he tried to strangle a child too, although I’m not absolutely sure.’

  I open all the windows in the apartment, fear flies out, the beauty of nature flows in and wraps itself around us: treetops, sun shining through the clouds. I pray to heaven to mend this image; this ‘dirty image’ I call it, because of the thoughts it gives rise to. I imagine a creature, half man, half beast, pinning my mother to the ground, devouring her. This is the dark place I come from.

  Later, I will make it my duty to protect other women from danger, even when there is none.

  Remembering

  In Paris, our building is number 118 on Rue Saint-Charles. It’s a modern five-storey building with latticework balconies. My mother chose it because of its proximity to the Boucicaut Hospital, which she finds reassuring. It has a living room with large sliding-glass windows and one bedroom with a trestle table set up as my desk.

  I sleep with my mother, my bed pushed right up against hers. At night, I listen to Boulevard de l’étrange on the radio. My new situation in Paris seems just as weird to me as the ghost stories I’m listening to.

  When we were living in Algiers, while my father was away on diplomatic missions to Washington, we used to watch an English television series called Thriller. We’d sleep together afterwards, all three of us, my sister, my mother and I in one bed. My mother was afraid ‘they’ would come after us ‘with knives’.

  Remembering

  The Algerian terror begins for me with the death of a psychiatrist in the 1990s.

  Because I know him. Because he was murdered in his consulting room in Mustapha Pasha Hospital.

  His skin, his red hair, his laugh are familiar to me, his voice calling to us in the lemon grove, ‘Lunch is ready, children,’ as we play our game of ‘chuck the ball at the wall, the ball goes over the wall, a passer-by picks it up, pockets it and walks on’. His gentleness t
he day I told him I’d dreamed of a wall that suddenly sprang up in front of me and came crashing down on my head.

  Because I was his son’s protector in the Hydra School playground.

  Because his French wife wore pleated skirts and blouses of material so fine you could see her freckled skin beneath; every freckle the imprint of a kiss – a kiss from Doctor G.

  Becoming

  At the Kat, I experience a form of social unease, a class anxiety that fills me with shame. I’m mixing with women outside my social circle, factory workers, former prisoners, prostitutes. We are thrown together by fate, driven together by the one thing we share: our sexual orientation.

  I’m a victim of my own homophobia. I despise myself for sneering at the embracing couples on the benches, the girls locked in one another’s arms on the dance floor, the courageous couples in the street. I resent them for flaunting themselves in this way. I could be compromised if I were seen with them.

  I envy their freedom. I stay locked into my fear. When someone offers me a lift out of concern for my safety, I refuse; they might remember my address, come to my door the next day, I could be outed to my fellow students at the university who know nothing of my ‘tendencies’, my ‘invert’ nature; I use these outmoded expressions to taunt myself and because the Kat exists outside of time, cut off from the 1980s I’m living through. I’d rather walk home, be followed; it’s the price I pay for calling into existence what I call my ‘nature’.

  I’m not breaking any laws but I’m flirting with decadence; I must be, I spend so much time at the Kat.

  Only writing is innocent. I write in complete freedom: I have no timetable, no obligations; words, phrases well up, abrupt, sudden, intrusive, only to disappear as soon as I go back out into the night.