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faith
    Against all laws
    The rough beast
    Strikes
    With burning hook.
    Â 
    Beware, woman
    Beware, child,
    The rough beast
    Runs
    With tail erect.
    Â 
    Cowering
    Contented
    Man awaits
    His beloved beast
    HIS FEAR.

I’m not sure whether I miss my former solitude, those long, leisurely evenings, the weekends spent like a worker bee on strike, the wanton wildness and the associated absences, the curious habits of a confirmed spinster which, though unrewarding, are familiar, the delicious thrill of fear in the darkness and my heroic rebellions against the ghosts who share with me the mysteries of the past and the murmuring of walls steeped in forgotten stories. No, I have no regrets, only fond memories. I enjoyed my rootless solitude, enjoyed shutting myself away in this house which, for more than two centuries, has seen so many people come and go, taking on the wrinkles, the wilful habits and the curious odours of those who came before us, the janissaries, the hookah smokers, by their own intrigues or by some insidious illness; a high-ranking Turk – an officer in the Sultan’s guard – built this house as a weekend retreat; after him came a viscount, a blue-blooded Frenchman, part soldier, part naturalist, who, in time, put down roots in the medina , embracing Islam and one of its daughters; next came a Jew whose ancestors it seems arrived on the Barbary Coast before the upheavals began; he was followed by a succession of pieds-noirs who arrived in wretched hordes from Navarre and Galilee and are now exiled to the north pole; then, shortly after independence, it was my parents’ turn. They came down from the mountains of Greater Kabylia, and for a while they housed friends and allies and, during the ‘Years of Lead’ that followed when honour was at a low ebb, they took in furtive strangers who showed up with their secrets and left before we could discover what they were. How we tried to eavesdrop on those whispered conversations! But this house is big, we were small, inexperienced, and much went over our heads.
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    I enjoyed my forays into impenetrable silences, and all the questions that come to mind when time moves on without us; I would embellish them according to my whims, my moods. I would drift far away, reluctant to return. Reality is but a port of call on our journey, a succession of mindless chores, repetitive gestures, tedious stories, so we might as well be brief. And yet I enjoyed tackling domestic problems as antiquated as the house itself with cold determination and an almost perverse punctiliousness. In a way a simple life is very complicated. There are the unknowns and all the shifting imponderables in the background. The walls are crumbling, the pots are chipped, the iron cuts out during ironing, the pipes are leaking, everything creaks or groans and sometimes the house is plunged into darkness in broad daylight. Increasingly, it seems to me, whole sections are falling apart. Why, I don’t know; sometimes these cave-ins took place inside my head. I was surrounded by antiquated things which gave up the ghost faster than I could fix them. You deal with it or you don’t. Even the screws can come unscrewed, I thought, at the end of the day as I reached for a hammer. For a while, it was like a religion to me, a form of post-industrial asceticism made up of transcendental shrugs and sighs and bouts of blind rage, a type of OCD complete with the liberating rituals that entails. But at least it gave my arms some muscle tone and distracted my ears from the revolutionary claptrap fed like milk and honey to the masses. This was the era of diatribes and mass protests, of gobbledygook spouted all the working week and silent only on the Sabbath. There’s not a single gadget in this house I didn’t manage to dismantle only to have to replace it with a new, more complicated model which immediately sneered at me from its state-of-the-art technology. Not a single object was made