Harraga Read Free Page A

within these walls, they all show up without warning, cash on delivery, and are promptly put in the right place, there to age safe from prying eyes. The real feat is not getting them to work – something that can be done with the press of a button – but in deciphering the instructions. It’s astonishing the sheaves of booklets that spew from the cardboard boxes, you can picture yourself dying, stupid and useless. Finding your own language in an instruction booklet is a riddle in itself, so I would read the first page that came to hand, Chinese, Korean, Hindu, Russian, Turkish, Greek. I would stare and stare at the text. It’s so complicated. It seems impossible that people can speak and understand these languages. I avoided the French booklets, churned out by polyglots who learn the language of Molière from fast-food menus. They infuriated me, I felt an irresistible urge to rewrite them before reading them point by point. I ignored the Arabic, which reminds me of the hateful slew of paperwork that our glorious government uses to manipulate us from January to December all the civic year. I shunned the manuals in English because, though I can muddle through, it gives me the creeps, it makes me feel ignorant and anxious. English is the language of those who travel, and I don’t travel. Who but me would confess to turning on machines without reading the instructions? The phase was short-lived, I didn’t have many gadgets, and since everything comes with time, it was something I was determined to work out for myself: technology is serious business, it’s man’s work, something women have no right to meddle with. I quickly worked out how best to proceed. Tonton Hocine, a friend of Papa’s who lives on the Impasse des Alouettes, a veteran of some war or other – independence probably – would come round with his box of tricks whenever I asked and, with the air of an indignant expert, make it clear what a terrible mess I had made of things. I had the poor man wrapped round my little finger. Once you got him going, he was a powerhouse, he would immediately set about finding the leak. I found it fascinating to watch him sweat blood, blowtorch in hand, trying heroically to fix the pipe. Aside from the tiny garden, now parched as the savannah, the house was suffering from nothing more serious than mild arthritis, something an old man could do nothing about. The wind whistling through cracks in the windows and the doorframes grated on my nerves, but there was no through breeze. To thank him, I found nothing better than to stroke his hair over a cup of strong coffee. Having often seen his breath flame in his unkempt thatch of beard, I knew that Tonton Hocine was fuelled by rotgut, but how could a woman buy wine and how could I offer him alcohol without shocking him and losing his respect? Besides, I had my scruples, his limbs were plagued with gout, and it was bad enough that he was using what little strength he had to help me out. So I stuck with serving coffee thick as tar, which I pressed until it yielded rubbing alcohol. I listened to him, blissful to the point of brainlessness, chin resting on his hand, as he refought his battles with pen-pushers, relived old quarrels with a certain Corporal Abou Hitler and, towards the end, when the important things remain to be said, he would rail about Arabs whom he claimed power made particularly cruel. Old men have their pet subjects, there’s nothing you can do to shut them up. Hocine was a sweet little man. He was a Kabyle and still very much a hill tribesman, a rough diamond with a bushy moustache that tickled his ears, a paunch that pulled him forward and down, rheumy eyes and a tuft of lank hair that fell over his warty nose making him look like an ageing walrus capable of hibernating for six months at a stretch. He talked the only way he knew how, in the Tamazight dialect of the distant, precipitous Djurdjura Mountains, so, for him, words