Read Online The Meursault Investigation by Kamel Daoud - Free Book Online Page B

that. And so nobody responded to them, people clammed up in their presence, leaned on the wall, and waited. Your writer-murderer was wrong, my brother and his friend had no intention whatsoever of killing them, him and his pimp friend. They were just waiting for them to leave, all of them, your hero, the pimp, and the thousands and thousands of others. We all knew it, we knew it from early childhood, we didn’t even need to talk about it: We knew one day they’d eventually leave. When we happened to pass through a European neighborhood, we used to amuse ourselves by pointing at the houses and divvying them up like spoils of war. One of us would say, “This one’s mine, I touched it first!” and set off a frenzy of claims and counterclaims. We were five years old when we started doing that, can you imagine?As if our intuition was telling us what would happen when Independence came, but leaving out the weapons.
    And so my brother had to be seen through your hero’s eyes in order to become an “Arab” and consequently die. On that miserable morning in the summer of 1942 — as I’ve already mentioned several times — Musa had announced that he’d be home earlier than usual. Which annoyed me a little, because it meant I’d have less time for playing in the street. Musa was wearing his blue overalls and his espadrilles. He drank his café au lait, looked at the walls the way people today browse through their phones, and then suddenly stood up, maybe after coming to a definitive decision about his schedule and the hour of his rendezvous with some friends. Every day, or almost, went the same way: a foray in the morning, followed — if there was no work at the port or in the market — by long hours of idleness. Musa slammed the door behind him, leaving my mother’s question unanswered: “Will you bring home some bread?”
    One point in particular keeps nagging at me: How did my brother end up on that beach? We’ll never know. That detail’s an immeasurable mystery. You can get dizzy thinking about it and then wondering how a man could lose his name, plus his life, plus his own corpse, all in a single day. Yes, that’s it, basically. This story — I’m going to allow myself to get a little bombastic here — it’s everybody’s story these days. He was Musa to us, his family, his neighbors, but it was enough for him to venture a few meters into the French part of the city, a single glance from one of them was enough, to make him lose everything, starting with his name, which went floatingoff into some blind spot in the landscape. In fact, Musa didn’t do anything that day but get too close to the sun, in a way. He was supposed to meet one of his friends, a certain Larbi, who as I recall played the flute. Incidentally, he’s never been found, this Larbi guy. He vanished from the neighborhood to avoid my mother, the police, the whole story, and even the story in your book. All that’s left of him is his first name, which makes an odd echo: Larbi l’Arabe, Larbi the Arab. But he’s a false twin, he couldn’t be more anonymous … Oh, right, there’s still the prostitute! I never talk about her, because her part is truly insulting. It’s a tall tale invented by your hero. Did he have to make up such an improbable story, a working whore whose brother wanted to avenge her? I acknowledge that your hero had the talent to create a tragedy out of a newspaper clipping and bring a mad emperor to life out of a fire, but I confess, he disappointed me there. Why a whore? To insult Musa’s memory, to smear him and thus diminish the gravity of the author’s own misdeed? I’ve come to doubt that. I think rather that his twisted mind conceived some abstract characters. This country, our land, in the form of two imaginary women: the famous Marie, brought up in a greenhouse of impossible innocence, and the alleged sister of Musa alias Zujj, a distant symbol of our land, plowed by customers and passersby, reduced to