E-Book, Englisch, 352 Seiten
Dalembert The Mediterranean Wall
1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-1-78227-710-1
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
E-Book, Englisch, 352 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-78227-710-1
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Louis-Philippe Dalembert is an award-winning Haitian poet and novelist, who writes in both French and Haitian Creole. His works have been translated into several languages. The Mediterranean Wall was longlisted for the Goncourt Prize and is the first of his novels to be translated into English. He now divides his home between Berlin, Paris and Port-au-Prince.
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night had just fallen on Sabratha when one of the jailers entered the warehouse. The sun had suddenly retreated, giving way to an ink-black sky in which a rather pale crescent moon and the first stars of the bordering desert were beginning to appear. The man was holding a flashlight, which he directed at the pile of bodies tangled in a heartrending mess right on the rough concrete floor or, for the luckiest among them, on some mattresses that lay scattered around. At the first sound of the key in the lock the girls had moved very close to each other, the scorching heat inside the building notwithstanding. As if to protect themselves from a danger that could only come from outside. The nauseating smell of the supervisor’s cologne came rushing in to mix with the musty odors inside. He inspected the faces contorted from daily bullying and deprivations before focusing the light on one of them, immobilizing it with terror. The building resonated with a ‘You. Out!’ accompanied by a commanding motion of his index finger. The girl he’d pointed to hurried to comply, gathering herself and the bag with her measly belongings together, as she’d been told to, at the risk of being forced to rise by boots kicking at her sides.
Normally the jailer, the same or a different one, would choose three or four, bringing them back a few hours later, or sometimes at the end of the day, shoving them like bags of shit amid the others lying huddled on the floor. Most of them would find refuge in a corner of the room, enclosed inside their pain or nestled in the arms of someone who still had a little compassion left to give. Some let out a stifled sob but not for long. Out of modesty or dignity. They all knew the hell the ‘returnees’ had been through from the moment they’d been dragged from the warehouse until they came back to the group. Even the most recent arrivals knew, since the older ones had clued them in. If need be, the state of their companions in misfortune, holding their underbelly with one hand, their buttocks with the other, their face sometimes swollen, was enough to give them a sense of what was awaiting them the next time the key turned in the lock.
That night, the prison guard pointed at many more than usual, shouting at them, manhandling them to get them up and out faster. ‘Move! Move! Bring your stuff. Go on, move your ass.’ God only knows what criteria they had for their selection, the evacuation happened in such a rush. As luck would have it Semhar and Shoshana were part of the group. The two had become inseparable except to go to the toilet, or on the day the captor decided to take away one and not the other. Were it not for the difference in physical appearance and origin—Semhar was a small sharp Eritrean while Shoshana was a stoutly built Nigerian—one would have said they were like a baby koala attached to its mother. They slept glued to each other, shared what little they were given to eat, exchanged words of solace and hope in English, in which Semhar was quite fluent although it wasn’t her mother tongue. They each prayed in a language unfamiliar to the other. And would hum songs the other didn’t know. ‘Whatever happens,’ Semhar thought, ‘at least we’ll be together.’
All in all, there were almost sixty of them, now outside, clustered together in the dark waiting for the Cerberus’s orders. They knew, whether from experience or from hearsay, that trying to flee would be of no use. And even if they’d manage to escape the vigilance of their tormentors, where would they go? The depot in which they were held was at some distance from the nearest town; a long walk on a clay road where it seemed only the prison guards’ 4 x 4’s and the pick-up trucks that had transported them to this wreckage of a building ventured, forgotten by heaven and men. These were the only engine sounds they’d heard until then. No chance of running into a charitable soul that might take the risk of helping them.
The most intrepid ones had paid a high price, perhaps even with their lives. No one had any further news of those daredevils. Unless they’d reached their goal at last. Who knows! God is great. Elohim HaGadol. Or maybe they’d reached their final destination and found a land where milk and honey flowed. After wandering for months, no years, on the roads of the continent. Braving wind and high water, forests, deserts, and a whole range of calamities. All of it to end up in this bloody land they hadn’t chosen, held hostage in this nameless penal colony subjected to all kinds of hard labor. Despite their own compliance in the ransom from their loved ones who’d stayed behind. As they waited for a crossing that depended solely on the whim of the smugglers.
The women remained quiet, grouped together, barely daring to breathe until other flashlights cut through the darkness, showing three armed men surrounding them. A few more minutes of waiting and then from the mouth of the overseer came the order to advance:
‘Move!’ Still in that English as sharp as a cudgel on the back of a slave, followed by a command shouted in Arabic: ‘Yallah! Yallah!’ A hundred yards further on they were ordered to get into the back of one of two pick-up trucks. The rear panel already open to expedite boarding. Despite the mad scramble, Shoshana and Semhar managed to get into the same vehicle. They hadn’t even settled down when a loud explosion paralyzed the group, making them think an escapee had been fired on. Actually, one of the smugglers had only shut the tailgate behind them with a loud crash. Once the women were loaded onto the truck, crammed so tightly they could barely move a muscle, the jailer sat down in front next to the turbaned driver and an armed man, while the other two traffickers slipped into the second pick-up. Signaling departure, he moved his hand across the window and hit the side of the truck. Flooring it, headlights off, they drove for half an hour before reaching the sea, whose presence Semhar and Shoshana guessed at first from the smell, then from the rolling sound of the surf. They had no concept of time or day.
Earlier that day, in the old Italian quarter of Tripoli about sixty kilometers away, air-conditioned minibuses, with about twenty seats each, were waiting in front of the entrance to a three-star hotel, watched over by a charming porter in uniform. Loud voices preceded the arrival of a group of whirling children mocking each other in an Arabic dialect quite unlike that of Libya. Elegantly dressed adults followed closely behind them. They were pulling suitcases on wheels that they left close to the vehicle to which they were assigned so the porter could put them in the trunk. The men led the way, iPhones stuck to their ear. The women flaunted brand-name handbags, taking out a small mirror to replace a lock of hair or a lipstick, unless they were busy on their phones, tapping them with carefully manicured hands. Every now and then they’d take out a piece of candy or a cookie, handing it to a child who’d rushed over for a snack, before they were called to board one of the tinted-window minibuses.
Dima, her husband Hakim, and their two daughters were among the first to get settled in the bus. Their contact had alerted them the previous evening that the grand departure would happen the next day. ‘Are you sure this time? Not another lie?’ Dima had asked. ‘On the Koran of Mecca,’ the guy had answered confidently. It was 16 July 2014. They’d been waiting for a month. The girls wouldn’t stop asking her when they were leaving for Europe, but Dima was no longer able to give them a convincing response. She’d used up every credible answer to the point of returning to basic formulas like: ‘In two days, Inshallah, rouhi,’ in the hope that they’d forget by then. One day her older one, a furious Hana, told her that Allah obviously wanted the family to stay confined to the hotel, all four sleeping in the same room; she, without any of her friends, having to share a bed with her younger sister Shayma while at home they each had their own room. ‘Stop blaspheming!’ Dima had yelled. ‘Don’t let me hear you like that again, or else watch your backside.’ And added: ‘The ways of Allah are unfathomable. Only He knows what it is He wants for us mortals.’ She was aware that she’d masked her own helplessness with anger. What choice did she have? Besides, when the guy had come to tell them they should be ready because they were leaving the next day, she was unable to hide her joy or to hold back her tears when he left.
She couldn’t bear hiding any longer in this single room, just eighteen square meters. After the first week she was fed up playing at being a tourist in Tripoli and its surroundings. It was not the reason for her presence in the Libyan capital. Sick of the Saint-Gilles Citadel, the Clock Tower, the Al-Harajb souk, the Ezzedine Hammam, the city’s thousand and one mosques (may Allah forgive her). She was sick of forcing pretend smiles, of spending time with people whom she wouldn’t even have greeted in Aleppo, of having tea or dinner with them. ‘We’re all in the same boat, aren’t we?’ Hakim would say to ease the pain. ‘And besides, they are our compatriots.’...
