What can I tell you, Mr. Investigator, about a crime committed in a book? I don’t know what happened on that particular day, in that gruesome summer, between six o’clock in the morning and two in the afternoon, the hour of Musa’s death. And, in any case, after Musa was killed nobody came around to question us. There was no serious investigation. I have a hard time remembering what I myself did that day. In the morning, the usual neighborhood characters were awake and on the street. Down at one end, we had Tawi and his sons. Tawi was a heavyset fellow. Dragged his bad left leg, had a nagging cough, smoked a lot. And, early each morning, it was his habit to step outside and pee on a wall, as blithely as you please. Everybody knew him, because his ritual was so unvarying that he served as a clock; the broken cadence of his footsteps and his cough were the first signs that the new day had arrived on our street. Farther up on the right, there was El-Hadj, “the pilgrim”—which he was by genealogy, not because he’d made the trip to Mecca. El-Hadj was just his given name. He, too, was the silent type. His main occupations seemed to be striking his mother and eying his neighbors with a permanent air of defiance. On the near corner of the adjacent alley, a Moroccan had a café called El-Blidi. His sons were liars and petty thieves, capable of stealing all the fruit off every tree. They’d invented a game: they would throw matches into the sidewalk gutters, where the wastewater ran, and then follow the course of those matches. They never tired of doing that. I also remember an old woman, Taï bia, big, fat, childless, and very temperamental. There was something unsettling and even a little voracious in the way she looked at us—other women’s offspring—that made us giggle nervously. We were just a little collection of lice on the back of the huge geological animal that was the city, with its thousand alleys.

So, on that particular day, nothing unusual. Even Mama, who loved omens and was sensitive to spirits, failed to detect anything abnormal. A routine day, in short—women calling to one another, laundry hung out on the terraces, street venders. No one could have heard a gunshot from so far away, a shot fired downtown, on the beach. Not even at the devil’s hour, two o’clock on a summer afternoon—the siesta hour. So, I repeat, nothing unusual. Later, of course, I thought about it and, little by little, I concluded that there had to be—among the thousand versions Mama offered, among her memory fragments and her still vivid intuitions—there had to be one version that was truer than the others.

By telling me so many implausible tales and outright lies, Mama eventually aroused my suspicions and put my own intuitions in order. I reconstructed the whole thing. Musa’s frequent binges during that period, the scent floating in the air, his proud smile when he ran into his friends, their overserious, almost comical confabs, the way my brother had of playing with his knife and showing me his tattoos: Echedda fi Allah, “God is my support.” “March or die” on his right shoulder. “Be quiet” on his left forearm, under a drawing of a broken heart. This was the only book that Musa wrote. Shorter than a last sigh, just three sentences inscribed on the oldest paper in the world, his own skin. I remember his tattoos the way most people remember their first picture book. Other details? Oh, I don’t know, his overalls, his espadrilles, his prophet’s beard, his big hands, which tried to hold on to our father’s ghost, and his history with a nameless, honorless woman.

Ah! The mystery woman! Provided that she existed at all. I know only her first name; at least, I presume it was hers. My brother had spoken it in his sleep that night, the night before his death: Zubida. A sign? Maybe. In any case, the day Mama and I left the neighborhood forever—Mama had decided to get away from Algiers and the sea—I’m sure I saw a woman staring at us. A very intense stare. She was wearing a short skirt and tacky stockings, and she’d done her hair the way the movie stars did in those days: although she was quite obviously a brunette, her hair was dyed blond. “Zubida forever,” ha-ha! Perhaps my brother had those words tattooed somewhere on his body as well—I don’t know for sure. But I am sure that it was her that day.

It was early in the morning. We were setting out, Mama and I, leaving the house for good, and there she was, holding a little red purse, staring at us from some distance away. I can still see her lips and her huge eyes, which seemed to be asking us for something. I’m almost certain that it was her. At the time, I wanted it to be her, and I decided that it was, because that added something to the tale of my brother’s demise somehow. I needed Musa to have had an excuse, a reason. Without realizing it, I rejected the absurdity of his death; I needed a story to give him a shroud. Well, then. I pulled Mama by her haik, so that she wouldn’t see the woman. But she must have sensed something, because she made a horrible face and spat out a prodigiously vulgar insult. I turned around, but the woman had disappeared. And then we left.

I remember the road to our new home, in the village of Hadjout, the fields whose crops weren’t destined for us, the naked sun, the other travellers on the dusty bus. The oil fumes nauseated me, but I loved the virile, almost comforting roar of the engine, like a kind of father that was snatching us, my mother and me, out of an enormous labyrinth of buildings, downtrodden people, shantytowns, dirty urchins, aggressive cops, and beaches fatal to Arabs. For the two of us, the city would always be the scene of the crime, the place where something pure and ancient was lost. Yes, Algiers, in my memory, is a dirty, corrupt creature, a dark, treacherous man-stealer.

Let’s see, let me try to remember exactly. . . . How did we first learn of Musa’s death? I remember a kind of invisible cloud hovering over our street, and angry grownups talking loudly and gesticulating. At first, Mama told me that a gaouri had killed one of our neighbor’s sons while he was trying to defend an Arab woman and her honor. But, during the night, anxiety got inside our house, and I think Mama began to realize the truth. So did I, probably. And then, all of a sudden, I heard this long, low moan, swelling until it became immense, a huge mass of sound that destroyed our furniture and blew apart our walls and then the whole neighborhood and left me all alone. I remember starting to cry for no reason, just because everyone was looking at me. Mama had disappeared, and I was shoved outside, ejected by something more important than me, absorbed into some kind of collective disaster. Strange, don’t you think? I told myself, confusedly, that this probably had to do with my father, that he was definitely dead this time, which made me sob twice as hard. It was a long night; nobody slept. A constant stream of people came to offer their condolences. The grownups spoke to me solemnly. When I couldn’t understand what they were telling me, I contented myself with looking at their hard eyes, their shaking hands, and their shabby shoes. By the time dawn came, I was very hungry, and I fell asleep I don’t know where. No matter how much I dig around in my memory, I have no recollection at all of that day and the next, except of the smell of couscous. The days blurred into an interminable single day, like a broad, deep valley I meandered through. The last day of a man’s life doesn’t exist. Outside of storybooks, there’s no hope, nothing but soap bubbles bursting. That’s the best proof of our absurd existence, my dear friend: no one is granted a final day, only an accidental interruption of life.