The Last Life (19 page)

The Bellevue, of a sudden, and the certainty of my family's gaze, beckoned. Those last five nights, I dreamed repeatedly of home. It was perhaps inevitable—the rhythm of any such foray into freedom, its intensity and its falling away—but I was also washed in sadness to have lost, in coming there, my dream of America; to have lost virginity, if not of the technical kind, then of another. Did I know, then, that I would return, begin again, forge a self anew, as I have done? I do not think so. Then, a week was still long, a year unimaginable, the stretch of my future invisible. I did not know what I already carried with me, nor what I would have yet to bear.

Now, almost a decade later, with so many American years behind me, I still see this place like any immigrant: here in my tiny apartment on Riverside Drive, or in the library at my studies, or downtown in the cafés and nightclubs, I am invented and reinvented. I meet people who ask about my trace of an accent, or the way I halt, upon occasion, in my speech, and they are satisfied by my answer, whatever it is. I can appear foreign or native, exotic or invisible, depending on my whim. I am, to different friends, American or French, or a plausible mid-Atlantic hybrid, and for most of them my background conjures only their misty adolescent visits, with schoolteachers or parents, to the parapets of Notre Dame, or sweltering August afternoons in cars or minivans, touring the Loire Valley. There is nothing real about my history, and most of it I do not tell. Even the Robertsons lurk in shadow, an unknown corner of my life, to all but Chad Spong (his hair now groomed exactly like his father's), with whom I dine irregularly, lunch or supper in expensive linen and silver restaurants for which his discreet fortune foots the bill.

I still wake up at dawn, with the eastern shaft of light casting its momentary eye upon my studio floor (the rest of the day the room is dark, the seasons themselves obscured by the apartments opposite), and think eagerly of home, only to remember, as I blink into awareness, that like so many other homes, it exists, as it was then, only and unreachably to me.

My father loved his homeland. Of this I am certain. When, in those last, crazed weeks of June 1962, fuming buses and flatbed trucks poured into Algiers from the mountains and beyond, overflowing with white refugees and the tokens of generations, and juddered their honking, diesel-drenched way to the wild bazaar that the port had become, he stayed shuttered at home and pretended, for as long as he could, that all would be well. A boy of seventeen, he clung to his world: his parents had crossed the sea to France and a new beginning a year before, leaving their obstinate adolescent in the care of his grandmother. He had not wanted to leave; nor had she. They still did not want to.

Towards the end, young Alexandre scrabbled for any portents of stability, however fragile. Had de Gaulle not once promised, that famous day in Mostaganem, that Algeria was part of France and would forever remain so? And would the country's French inhabitants not hold him to that promise somehow, in spite of everything? Had the downstairs neighbors not, but eight months before, opened a restaurant in the Rue Bab Azoun, and did it not spill its dance of shadows and conversation nightly onto the plaza?

These, at least, were the phrases with which he soothed the old woman. She, bedridden and in the final stages of her cancer, insisted that the very breeze and the bougainvillea were French and would remain so, unable to concede that the deed was done and the country lost. He monitored the radio broadcasts and filtered out the reports of slaughter that punctuated the news. He played instead the swollen '78s of Debussy or Mendelssohn to which his grandmother was, even at the last, partial. The apartment was cloistered from the piercing sun, its heavy nineteenth-century furnishings (the shape of his own mother's girlhood) filmed with dust that last month when the
bonne,
Widad, no longer came, having excused herself tearfully after eight years of service on the grounds that it was, for her and her family, no longer safe: the bodies of too many Muslims lay fly-bitten in the streets.

An odd normality did persist: neatly suited, the doctor rapped on the door morning and night to check on his deteriorating patient, measuring blood pressure and dosing morphine. And a nurse, a quiet young nun in starchy white, padded about the apartment in the afternoons, leaving Alexandre free, when he chose, to go out. Twice a week, Sundays and Thursdays, his parents telephoned from their new home, their anxiety and the crackling line one and the same, blurring them. His mother offered to come, and wanted to (it was her mother, after all, who was dying), but Alexandre put her off, and off, with the hollow assurances he would use again later in life. She, afraid and wanting to believe him, believed.

At night, in the cavernous darkness, he lay awake, awaiting only death and departure, both of which seemed so impossible that they shaped themselves instead as fear. He listened until the street noises started up again near dawn, jolted from near-sleep by the rumble of vehicles in the small hours, or the irregular spatter of footsteps on the pavement outside. He envisioned attack and pillage, flashing knives and walls of flame, mental pyrotechnics all the more extreme for the dulled quiet in which he and his husk of an ancestor spent their hours.

He read to her and cooked for her, although she consumed little more than clear broth and the occasional mouthful of bread. Alexandre sipped his morning coffee alone, cross-legged on the terrace, watching the movements of the city, its jerky rushes to departure, its veneer of familiar calm. Daily, Algiers held fewer friends to reassure him that life would go on, and although they drifted to France, these people were, to his purposes, as good as dead. Walking the streets, he could hardly believe that just that spring he had strolled those same paths with his comrades, that they had batted at each other with their briefcases; that in spite of the
plastiquages
and the ubiquitous smell of burning he had been preoccupied, above all, with playing off one pretty girl against another, with going as far, sexually speaking, as was feasible without courting disaster. Everyone had been aware of what would have to be (the peace accords with the FLN had been signed in March, and that after so many long years of battle), but they had thought—no, more than thought, insisted—that they could continue in the familiar round of their days.

Granted, that familiar round differed for some. My father had a cousin who had joined the OAS, a boy of twenty-one, his childhood playmate, now a terrorist flickering on the fringes, in order, as Alexandre and his friends saw it, to whip up hysteria and make matters worse. The OAS was responsible for the corpses, brown and white, or for most of them. Many secretly supported them, blasting the tattoo of "
Al-gé-ne fran-çaise
" on their car horns, or on their pots and pans; but in the flesh, their members were oudlaws, and unwelcome.

As late as early June, this cousin, Jean, had appeared at the apartment unannounced, after dark. His knock alarmed my father, convinced that Arab murderers were beating at last upon the door, but the sight of Jean was hardly preferable. Ostensibly, the young man came to pay his respects to the dying, but in the kitchen, in a whispered hiss, he exhorted my father once more to join him, to fight to the last man, with the last bomb.

"And
Grand'-mère?
" asked Alexandre. "How could I leave her?"

"And her grave?" countered his cousin. "Will you just leave that, and this—" he gestured "—your life, as if it were nothing? Come on, man, look at the choices."

Failing there, Jean tried another tack: "And the
métropole
? You think they want us there, any more than you want to go?"

Alexandre hesitated. But he said no a final time, and, after allowing the young man to kiss his slumbering grandmother, hurried him out the door and back to his desperate cell.

Inevitably, change bore down upon my father. His suspended quiet—the life of a man in his third age, not his first—crumbled. The university library burned to the ground, and with it his final hopes. Then, the following Monday, his grandmother forsook consciousness, a development that prompted young Alexandre to the highly unusual step of calling his parents. His mother sobbed into the ocean of air between them, while his father suggested the names of friends who might help—all of them, Alexandre knew, already gone.

That evening, on his round, the doctor drew my father aside. "It's a matter of days," he told him. "Two, maybe three. I'll try to come by, when I can. But my wife and children are leaving on Wednesday, and I myself am due to fly out before the weekend. I've got a lot to see to before then. I can't do anything now but bear witness, and that is as well done, or better done, by the sister. She'll get the priest. You need to be making your own plans. There isn't much time left."

"I can't leave her."

"Do you plan to bury her here, or take her to France with you?"

The choice had not struck my father clearly before that moment: he was young, unaccustomed to the rituals of death. He had forgotten there would be a body. But the answer seemed evident: "She'll come with me, of course. For my mother, for the funeral."

The doctor clicked his pen several times. "Are you sure that's what you want?"

"Absolutely." It occurred to my father that his grandmother, having made Algeria her home, would be loath to leave it even in a coffin; but he knew, too, that she was French above all, and that an Algeria no longer French, no longer Catholic, was no resting place for her.

"It might be easier, given the circumstances—"

"It is my family's wish."

"Have you been to the port? Have you seen?"

Alexandre waved his hands in dismissal.

"Have you booked passage on a ship?"

"I'll take care of it. I will."

"Is there nobody to help you?"

"I'll manage."

The doctor shrugged. "I'D try to come by. I'll see what I can do."

That night, the nurse stayed. She sat beside the old woman's bed in the puddle of light cast by the lamp, knitting, her prayer book open upon her lap. Alexandre perched opposite, in shadow. He held his grandmother's hand, running his fingertips back and forth over her ridged nails: two months before, those stubby digits had peeled potatoes and tousled his hair, had written out shopping lists in the crabbed remnants of a once-elegant hand. Eventually my father slept, in his hard-backed chair, soothed by the nun's clacking needles and the knowledge that the wait was almost over. He slept better than he had in weeks. His grandmother, too, seemed more peaceful, her breath a shallow snore.

In the morning, instead of the doctor the priest came by, a tall man with the mournful face of an El Greco portrait. He delivered the last rites. All bone, his hairy toes unseemly in sandals, he embraced Alexandre, then spoke in hushed tones to the nurse, and departed.

The nun stayed on, and by this Alexandre knew his grandmother might die at any time. The younger woman rested for an hour on the sofa in the sitting room, her shoes neatly paired beneath her, and when she awoke, unwrinkled, she deftly plumped the cushions as though she had never lain there. Alexandre brought her coffee.

"Do you have somewhere else to be?" he asked.

"No."

"And no plans? Aren't you planning, like the doctor, to go?"

"God doesn't care who governs this country," she said. "I'm not going anywhere. But you need to get home now, to your family in France. Go this morning, and arrange for it."

"This is home," said my father.

The nun shook her head, with a small smile.

Alexandre set off for the port. As he drew nearer, the streets grew crammed with traffic. The paved expanse by the water, inside the gates, was thick with people, milling and shouting among their packages and the abandoned furniture of the already departed. He passed beside a refrigerator, a stack of studded trunks, a battered armoire. Some families had clearly been there for days, their shirts and blouses grimed, the men's chins whiskery, the women's hair greasy and unkempt. They gave off the sour stench of travel, in heat, which mingled everywhere with the fetid drift of sewage. Others, newer to the vigil, arranged their belongings into tidy pyramids and fed their children cold sausages and bread from string bags. One young mother suckled her baby, her mottled breast burst from her modest sprigged shirtwaist. A few feet away a fat man swayed uneasily, fanning himself with a newspaper, a limp handkerchief on his naked crown, sleeves rolled up to reveal his butcher's forearms an angry crimson from the sun. The elderly sat blank and tearstained upon their cases, clutching at incongruous objects: a frying pan, a mantel clock. An abandoned canary twittered in its ornate cage, alone on a bollard. The children, to whom the scene was an adventure, marauded in small packs, taunting the infants and bullying the leashed dogs, so that mingled with the calls and cries of people came the variegated, desperate barks of canines big and small.

Several red-faced sailors, sloppily uniformed, pushed through the fray, their destination an office on one side of a pier. Alexandre pushed behind them, sliding in their wake. He envied them their size and their nonchalance. From the mainland, they had no attachment to the crowd. Their task was to man the ship that would ferry the refugees away; then, perhaps, they would stay in Marseilles, perhaps return for more, again and again until all the white flotsam along the shores of Algeria had been cleared. It might as well have been cattle they were transporting. They did not, as did Alexandre, see toil and marriage and death in the fraying sacks and rope-bound boxes, or in the creviced features of the peasants and housewives; they saw only cargo. And they knew, unlike the haranguing, paper-waving mob that clustered around the harbormaster's office, that when the ship pulled out of port, they would be on it.

They strode easily into the office, but at the restraining hand of a sailor more gross even than they, the door was barred to all others, my father among them. Jostled, he stood incredulous.