Generosity

every night, in hushed voices over dinner. A century and a half of the colonized mind has spewed out tribalism with a vengeance, but without any noble cause this time. Dress, words, facial hair: every trait declares allegiance, intended or not. A generation into the country’s third major linguectomy, words are again a capital offense. When her father slips into French while lecturing to his university engineering students-et donc, voila-he’s publicly censured. Her mother, a document translator for the national oil company Sonatrach, gets hissed at one afternoon by a small chorus on a Bab el-Oued bus for her neckline and bare hair, and when she complains to a patrolling policeman, he fines her for rabble-rousing.

Yes, the girl has her music lessons, her family seaside picnics, even her horse riding on holidays with cousins in Little Kabylia. Some days, the city still rises up like a dream of jumbled white from the azure Mediterranean. But destiny runs mostly backward, in Algiers. Birth rates soar and housing collapses. Corruption outpaces every industry; just walking down the street requires a payoff. Education starts to gutter, and as the girl enters second grade, the entire cobbledup system reaches the brink. The Islamic Salvation Front threatens to sweep into power. Then the Pouvoir cancels all elections.

Real darkness settles in, a decade of it. Her mother instructs the girl and her brother never to sit next to each other on the bus or walk through the market together. Many of the nightly massacres occur in mountain villages, remote and unregistered. But murder-nameless, ecumenical-makes itself at home even in the capital, strolling downhill from the Casbah, spreading through the French quarter, wandering impudently all the way up to the grim joke of the Martyrs Monument.

The killers are many and generous. They massacre for any reason, even on one another’s behalf. The Islamic Salvation Front, the Islamic Salvation Army, the Armed Islamic Group, the Islamic Armed Movement, the National Democratic Rally, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat: new charters by the week. Devout versus secular, traditionalist versus Western, Arab versus Kabyle Whole villages disappear under cover of dark. Neighbors kill neighbors over old scores, then trick out the corpse to make it look political. A corpse can be ordered for a handful of dinars.

The elites flee the country for Casablanca, Tunis, or Marseilles. Thassa’s mother’s brother escapes to the vast minimum-security wastelands of the Parisian banlieue, where he finds a job with Public Assistance. He phones his Algiers kin with magical accounts of buying bread in a boulangerie without fear of retribution. The girl’s father’s sister gives up her prosperous dental clinic to become a groundskeeper in the Montreal botanical gardens. The girl’s own parents-the last cosmopolitan Algerians not on a boat somewhere-resolve to leave when the death toll reaches eighty thousand. Then they say ninety. Then one hundred. They’re still there when the deaths hit one thousand a week. They are the victims of congenital hope. They can’t break themselves of that old habit, faith. Not religious faith, which they long ago consigned to the realm of vicious myth. Faith in their friends and neighbors. Belief in the average human.

The girl enters secondary school. Her world shrinks down to her classroom and her home. But the world of books opens to her, without borders. She, her brother, and her mother travel together to Dib’s Tlemcen, Yacine’s Bone, even Duras’s Saigon. The three of them perform amateur re-creations for her father’s entertainment. The crudest imaginary venue is a respite from Algiers.

Her engineer father waits for humanity’s return to reason. He makes guarded, deniable appeals to his lecture classes, slipped in between load calculations and stress analysis. He cheers the amnesty programs and the gradual surrender of the guerrillas. He quietly champions the new elections. His innate optimism begins to pay off. He pictures the end of the endless war.

Then the Kabyle singer Lounes Matoub is killed. The country spirals into new violence, and Thassa’s father suffers a conversion.

He writes a letter to the editor of El Watan: real democracy demands official status for Berber. Tamazight must be taught in public schools. All the deaths of the last decade will mean nothing without a return of that first tongue.

His stand is moderate enough, given recent years. But two weeks after the letter appears in print, students find Thassa’s father at his university desk, facedown on a pile of fluid dynamics exams, two holes the size of finches’ eyes high up in the back of his skull.

Thassa’s mother collapses. She’s two months recovering. When she can function again, Zamra Amzwar packs and takes her two teenage children to her brother’s in Paris. She finds work in a community health clinic: light clerical. Just until. She’s still working there over a year later, when the gendarmes near Tizi Ouzou, back home, kill a nineteen-year-old named Guermouh Massinissa. During the ten days of riots that follow, mother and children tune in nightly to accounts relayed from Radio Algerienne as scores of protesting Kabyle teens are gunned down.

Four months later, a doctor at the clinic notices Zamra Amzwar’s jaundice and discovers her distended gallbladder. A six-centimeter pancreatic tumor has already spread cells through every system in Thassa’s mother’s body. Seventeen weeks later she dies, listening to her daughter read aloud the news from Algiers.

The Berber student fits all this into three pages of eerily idiomatic English. Her second journal assignment: why you might not want to grow up in my hometown. But still, she writes, it is so beautiful there. I wish you could see it, up close, from the harbor. It would fill your heart. So crazy with life, chez nous.

True, then: both of Thassa Amzwar’s parents are dead. Dead of identity and too much hope. And the daughter is either on newly discovered antidepressants or so permanently traumatized she’s giddy. Her writing has that open confidence of a child who might still become an astronaut when she grows up. All her sounds ring, all colors shine. Crippling colonial inheritance, religious psychosis, nighttime raids: she’s swept along by the stream, marveling. Her words are naked. Her clauses sprout whatever comes just before wings.

Stone’s hands shake as he inks up her assignment. He uses a green marker to highlight great phrases. (Never red, the pedagogical texts insist.) By the end, her paper is streaked over in ghostly emerald. Even my photocopy looks like a kelp farm.

When he finishes, he tries to return to his delinquent work on Becoming You. These last two years he’s become an editing machine-tea in, grammar out. But now he can’t concentrate for more than a paragraph, he’s so keyed up about that evening’s class. After his fourth evasive visit in forty minutes to the Algerian Crisis Explained website, he decides that a walk might do him a world of good.

The walk from Logan Square to the South Loop takes hours. He’s healthy, and the hike should be effortless. But he’s winded by Bucktown. On foot, Milwaukee Avenue is another country. He knows nothing about the place where he lives. By Wicker Park, he’s overheard six languages. And all the more recent ethnic groups supposedly live on the other side of town.

Frederick P. Harmon devotes a whole chapter of Make Your Writing Come Alive to place. Stone has the topic on his syllabus, for mid-October. Place, Harmon says, is as much a protagonist as any character. But place is in danger, Harmon claims. Our sense of here is rapidly disappearing in the globalizing, virtual onslaught.

By Greek Town, Russell decides that Frederick P. needs to get out more often.

Stone has a mental map of the city’s neighborhoods, color-coded: do not enter unaccompanied, or after dark, or ever. He’s never come close to those spots of true underbelly, the pockets of no-man’s-land that even the police refuse to visit. He’s seen the projects from the expressway, high-rise concentrations of pain on par with any of the earth’s doomed places. But Chicago’s grimmest threats seem laughable, after Algiers.

He’s never once feared for his life here. He’s always felt safe, that lazy delusion. Now, walking down Milwaukee, he sees armed youths waving their Scorpios from town-house windows. FIS and GIA spotters signal from the street corners. A rebel pipe bomb blows out the picture window of a used-record shop. The street fills with oily smoke. Black-hooded paramilitary ninjas on motorcycles sweep up and down Division Street, commandos working for God knows whom, pulling random people out of cars and beating them senseless in hidden warehouse interrogation chambers on the edge of Oak Park.

By the time Russell reaches the Mesquakie lobby, he’s quivering. All the bitchy, nail-biting, tattooed, fashionably depressive art students that so terrified him last week now seem like guardian angels. He wants to hug these harmless ingenues, gods of health and childlike benevolence. Meeting his group again is like the summer’s last poolside party.