ALGERIA 1932
TWO DAYS AFTER MY father was shot on the beach, I had to work.
I’d been a waiter at Chez Anouilh since I’d left school the previous summer, bringing squat glasses of black coffee to the French expats who’d taken over the town. The cold Parisian owner insisted I come straight to my shift from my dad’s funeral, cheeks dry and salty, the scent of geraniums and wet earth following me around like a ghost.
The cafe was a few streets back from the beach, notched between a tobacconist’s and a bakery. It was a pretty boulevard, lined with fig trees and cars, the smell of fresh bread mingling with the tang of gasoline. When the locals sought shade inside during the peak of the afternoon, the pavements crawled with cats. Today, the tobacconist sat outside his shop in a folding deckchair, smoking and watching the world go by.
The sky overhead was black with clouds, and the humid air threatened rain.
I set an espresso down in front of Farid, a tall, scrawny gentleman who spent all day every day at the same outdoor table, reading newspapers from cover to cover while chain-smoking. We’d grown close over the last few months – a kind of uncle–nephew feel to the relationship – making jokes and exchanging stories. As I gave him his final coffee before he switched to a carafe of wine, my hands trembled so much that the sachet of brown sugar fell to the ground. I went to pick it up, but Farid beat me to it.
Straightening up and tearing the top of the sachet, he said, ‘I was so sorry to hear about your loss, habibi. Your father was a good man.’
‘Thank you.’ Tears stung fiercely at my eyes, and shame rose in me like a flame. Boys shouldn’t cry – at least not in public. I looked up at the charcoal sky to force the emotion back down.
‘Such a senseless tragedy.’ Farid shook his head as he stirred the sugar into the espresso. The whole table wobbled as he did, despite the ashtray wedged under its wonky leg. Dark-brown liquid sloshed on to the red oilcloth.
‘Yes.’ It was all I felt able to say.
‘He lives on in you. Remember that.’
I nodded, blinked, looked away.
A white French family with crisp accents arrived, twin boys in matching sailor suits – clearly pieds-noirs, though I didn’t harbour the same intrinsic loathing for them as other natives did. Arden and I had been French in our previous lives, dying for our country in the blood-soaked trenches of the Western Front. And now here I was on a shore that – justifiably – loathed the land I had sacrificed myself in the name of. Whatever divine hand was responsible for our reincarnations clearly had a sense of humour.
Just as I was about to take the French family’s order, a short, handsome and well-dressed boy around my age stopped outside the cafe.
He looked into my eyes with a familiar, heavy nod.
For the second time in as many lives, I felt not fear but relief.
A truck bumped along the uneven cobbles behind him, kicking up a cloud of dust. I offered him a weak smile, nodding towards the deserted interior of the cafe. He followed me wordlessly inside.
‘You found me, then.’ I laid down my tray and notepad on the counter and busied myself changing the coffee filter. Nerves jumped in my chest as I looked around the cafe, painted a muted, peeling red. ‘A better fate than the trenches, I’m sure you’ll agree.’
He surveyed some of the framed pictures on the walls. There were several illustrated proverbs that the owners had translated from Arabic to French. Badly.
Arden gestured to the watercolour brushwork of the phrase that should’ve been ‘inda al botoun da’at al ’okoul’. In the stomach, the mind is lost. Only, they’d mistranslated mind as ears .
‘That’s wrong,’ Arden muttered, visibly aghast. ‘It should be something like, “Dans les ventres, les espirits se perdent.” Or maybe a different tense? Perhaps –’
‘Such a pedant.’
‘Translation in a colonized state is an act of violence, and …’ He trailed off as his gaze finally pinned itself to me. ‘ Hi. ’
Strange, how much emotion could be carried in a single syllable.
I took in his new appearance. He had golden skin and a long nose with a boxer’s crook. His dark hair was slicked back and he wore a button-down shirt, a tight-fitting jacket and a red tie. Clearly he came from wealth. I felt grubby with my patchy facial hair and faded, stained apron, my burn-scarred hands fumbling with the tie at the back. Tugging at the knot, I only tightened it further, and the frustration finally let loose the grief in my chest.
Dropping my elbows on to the counter, I pressed the heels of my hands into my eye sockets and succumbed to the wracking sobs.
‘Evelyn,’ said Arden roughly. ‘What’s wrong?’ He didn’t reach out to touch me this time, and my traitorous heart wished he would.
‘My dad d-died. He was killed, actually.’ Starbursts danced behind my eyes as I pressed harder against my palms. ‘A random act of evil. No motive, no nothing. I can’t make sense of it. And I don’t want to live without him. So just do it. Now. Please.’
I reached under the counter where dishes were drying on a rack and handed him the knife I used to slice baguettes. Its edge was serrated. It would hurt like hell, but no worse than the feeling of losing my father. His big soft belly and his warm hugs, his love for birdwatching, his sage advice on becoming a man as we took evening strolls along the docks.
Never again.
How could anyone bear the weight of never ?
I supposed most nevers were not as long as mine.
Arden looked down at the knife and then back up at me. ‘Evelyn …’
‘I know it’s still a year until I’m eighteen, but this is too much to bear.’ The tears had stopped flowing, and my tone had taken on a coarse, gravelled quality. ‘You’ll be doing me a favour.’
He shook his head slowly. ‘That’s not who you are. You don’t hide from this.’
I wiped my sodden cheeks with the bottom of the floury apron. ‘What?’
‘The Evelyn I know … they love over and over and over again, even though it can only ever end in tragedy. Even though they’ve lost everyone they’ve ever loved, and they miss them in the next life, and the next, and the next. Never have they developed hard edges, like I have. Never have they tried to protect themselves from that pain. They love softly, and fiercely, and openly, and it’s the bravest thing I know. The most human thing I know.’
He’d expressed a similar sentiment on the Western Front, but it felt different hearing it seventeen years later, between the quiet red walls of the cafe.
My father had felt like the final straw, his death scrubbing my heart raw. Trying to keep the people I loved alive was like trying to cup the rain in my palms, every drop so precious and fragile and important, only to watch them seep, inevitably, back into the earth. I clung to what Anais Lamunière had told me twenty years ago, tried to imagine what my father had been to me in my past, tried to imagine what I would be to him in the future, tried to imagine the new love that would bloom from our ashes.
‘We’re all born that way.’ Arden gripped my hand so tightly it almost hurt. ‘All little children are like that. They’re not afraid to feel, to love. Life hardens most of them, but you … you’ve lived for nearly a thousand years and still –’
‘Please,’ I whispered. ‘I’m begging you. Kill me.’
‘I’ve never met anyone as ruthful as you,’ Arden went on, as though he hadn’t heard me.
I frowned. ‘Do you mean ruthless?’
He shook his head vehemently. ‘Ruthful, the original. From the thirteenth century, or round about then. How can you have forgotten? It means endless compassion, a deep empathy for others.’ His jaw was taut and his gaze was urgent. ‘I hope you never lose that bottomless capacity for love. I hope you hold on to what makes you human.’
I met his intense stare, feeling, like I had a thousand times before, that those eyes could swallow me whole.
Voice a mere whisper, I said, ‘This time it hurts too much.’
I craved the cotton-wool baby years of my next life, before my mind developed enough to remember everything that had happened to me. Everything – and everyone – I’d lost.
Shifting on aching feet, my elbow jostled a half-empty carafe from the edge of the counter, and it went careening to the tiled floor, shattering into smithereens.
‘Aaaaaaaaarghhh!’ I yelled, so loudly and suddenly that Arden recoiled.
Something hideous and agonizing shaken loose in me, I grabbed another carafe and hurled it at the back wall. It crashed into a framed newspaper clipping of a famous visitor, sending both to the tiles with a smash.
I threw another, and another, and another, panting with the exertion, my eyes blurred with tears, until finally I slumped raggedly to the counter, sobbing into my forearm.
For a moment, there was silence – then a voice so soft and tender it threatened to unravel me all over again.
‘Come here, habibi,’ Arden whispered.
I looked up. Several faces were peering into the window of the cafe, but none had come inside to check on the furore.
Arden walked around the side of the counter, bumping his hip on the sharp corner without a wince, and lifted my chin with a gentle thumb. Once I was upright, he wrapped his arms round me. The sensation of his body against mine after seventeen long years brought a familiar yearning, an insistent tug behind my ribs and below my belly. I sniffed into the hollow of his shoulder, letting the warmth of his chest and the steady thump of his heart moor me once more.