Horses of God Read Free

other bad weather.
    Nabil would dream. He used to say that the day I felt the need to stand on my own two feet, I could come and live with him. We’d have a brazier and a big pot for cooking up succulent tagines. It was only a question of time. If we worked hard and persevered, we’d get there. That was when I started to feel cramped at home. We slept six to a room no bigger than a cellar. I couldn’t stand the snoring, or the mixture of barely identifiable odors: the stink of shoes, sweat, pants, the DDT powder that Yemma did her best to spread under the raffia sleeping mats every night. Yes, I too began to dream of a room of my own. Of a real bed with a box spring that no scorpion could scale, nor any other creature, except maybe ticks, which never really bothered me. In anycase, I much preferred them to the suffocating smell of insecticide. There wouldn’t be mothballs in my room either. I don’t know why Yemma was so concerned about moths; we had so little wool, so few clothes, that our hovel would have been the last place they’d go to feast. But Yemma was like that. The cleanest, shrewdest woman I ever had the good fortune to meet. Early each morning she’d begin by waking one of us to go and fetch water from the pump, though she’d spare the little ones. It took several trips to fill the big earthenware jar. She’d splash water over the yard in a kind of daily war against dust. Next she’d water the pots of basil that stood at the entrance to the bedrooms, to keep out mosquitoes. Finally, she’d fill the kettle to boil water for us to wash with, and set about preparing the breakfast we’d all have together. She loved watching us eat. She’d fuss over each of us like a mother hen. We were her men. Nine strong lads and a father who’d decided to be old before his time, crouched in his corner, endlessly fingering his amber prayer beads. He prayed sitting down because he claimed he no longer had the strength to stand. He, the former quarry worker, had become so thin, so desiccated, just like the wasteland that had once been the industrial district, where he’d always lived. Yemma would serve him his soup and plump up the cushions behind his back without a word. Then she’d look over our clothes like a corporalinspecting his squad: a button missing from a shirt, a sock or jumper with holes in it would trigger an avalanche of reproach: “What! Are you trying to make me a laughingstock?” Or “Come on! You take that off immediately, I’m not dead yet!” And she’d grab the sewing basket. “Yachine,” she’d call out, “come over and thread this needle for me, you’re the one with the best eyes.” I was so happy to have something that was better than the others. I’d moisten the thread between my lips and slip it through the eye first time. Yemma smiled at me. I loved seeing her smile.
    Some days, Nabil would turn up on our doorstep at dawn. As soon as Yemma heard his whistle (that was his way of calling me), she’d dunk a crust of hot bread in the plate of olive oil and say: “Here, give this to your friend.” Looking hungry, his smile as wide as his ears, Nabil took it gratefully. He’d ask me for a glass of water to rinse out his mouth because in Sidi Moumen our teeth grated continuously, due to the dust that got everywhere. Then he’d wolf down the hunk of bread before he went to work. Nabil was no poorer than us, far from it. It was just that his bohemian mother was in the habit of sleeping in. She worked so late that getting up early was out of the question. To avoid waking her, he’d sneak out like a thief, on tiptoe. I have no idea how anyone could sleep with the garbage trucks’ morning racket anyway. But around there, everyone got used to everything—to thestench of rotting and death, for instance, which became so familiar and clung to our skin. We couldn’t smell it