Budayeen Nights: Stories

because some people got their pleasure centers wired and spent the remainder of their short lives amp-addicted. Even if, as in my case, the pleasure center is left alone, the use of a moddy submerges your own personality, and that is interpreted as insobriety. Needless to say, while I have nothing but the warmest affection for Allah and His Messenger, I stop short of being a fanatic about it. I’m with that twentieth century King Saud who demanded that the Islamic leaders of his country stop dragging their feet when it came to technological progress. I don’t see any essential conflict between modern science and a thoughtful approach to religion.

“So,” said Chiri, trying to make conversation, “how did your trip turn out? Did you find whatever you were looking for?”

I looked at her, but didn’t say anything. I wondered if I had found it. When I saw my mother again in Algiers, her appearance had shocked me. In my imagination, I’d pictured her as a respectable, moderately well-to-do matron living in a comfortable neighborhood. I hadn’t seen or spoken to her in years, but I just figured she’d managed to lift herself out of the poverty and degradation. Now I thought maybe she was happy as she was, a haggard, strident old whore. I spent an hour with her, hoping to hear what I’d come to learn, trying to decide how to behave toward her, and being embarrassed by her in front of the Half-Hajj. She didn’t want to be troubled by her past. She didn’t like me dropping back into her life after all those years.

“Believe me,” I told her, “I didn’t like hunting you up either. I only did it because I have to.”

“Why do you have to?” she wanted to know. She reclined on a musty smelling, torn, old sofa that was covered with cat hair. She’d made herself another drink, but had neglected to offer me or Saied anything.

“It’s important to me,” I said. I told her about my life in the faraway city, how I’d lived as a subsonic hustler until Friedlander Bey had chosen me as the instrument of his will.

“You live in the city now?” She said that with a nostalgic longing. I never knew she’d been to the city.

“I lived in the Budayeen,” I said, “but Friedlander Bey moved me into his palace.”

“You work for him?”

“I had no choice.” I shrugged. She nodded. It surprised me that she knew who Papa was, too.

“So what did you come for?”

That was going to be hard to explain. “I wanted to find out everything I could about my father.”

She looked at me over the rim of her whiskey glass. “You already heard everything,” she said.

“I don’t think so. How sure are you that this French sailor was my dad?”

She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “His name was Bernard Audran. We met in a coffee shop. I was living in Sidi Bel Abbes then. He took me to dinner, we liked each other. I moved in with him. We came to live in Algiers after that, and we were together for a year and a half. Then after you was born, one day he just left. I never heard from him again. I don’t know where he went.”

“I do. Into the ground, that’s where. Took me a long time, but I traced Algerian computer records back far enough. There was a Bernard Audran in the navy of Provence, and he was in Mauretania when the French Confederate Union tried to regain control over us. The problem is that his brains were bashed out by some unidentified noraf more than a year before I was born. Maybe you could think back and see if you can get a clearer picture of those events.”

That made her furious. She jumped up and flung her half-full glass of liquor at me. It smashed into the already stained and streaked wall to my right. I could smell the pungent, undiluted sharpness of the Irish whiskey. I heard Saied murmuring something beside me, maybe a prayer. My mother took a couple of steps toward me, her face ugly with rage. “You calling me a liar?” she shrieked.

Well, I was. “I’m just telling you that the official records say something different.”

“Fuck the official records!”

“The records also say that you were married seven times in two years. No mention of any divorces.”

My mother’s anger faltered a bit. “How did that get in the computers? I never got officially married, not with no license or nothing.”

“I think you underestimate the government’s talent for keeping track of people. It’s all there for anybody to see.”

Now she looked frightened. “What else’d you find out?”

I let her off her own hook. “Nothing else. There wasn’t anything more. You want something else to stay buried, you don’t have to worry.” That was a He; I had learned plenty more about my mom.

“Good,” she said, relieved. “I don’t like you prying into what I done. It don’t show respect.”

I had an answer to that, but I didn’t use it. “What started all this nostalgic research,” I said in a quiet voice, “was some business I was taking care of for Papa.” Everybody in the Budayeen calls Friedlander Bey “Papa.” It’s an affectionate token of terror. “This police lieutenant who handled matters in the Budayeen died, so Papa decided that we needed a kind of public affairs officer, somebody to keep communications open between him and the police department. He asked me to take the job.”

Her mouth twisted. “Oh yeah? You got a gun now? You got a badge?” It was from my mother that I learned my dislike for cops.

“Yeah,” I said, “I got a gun and a badge.”

“Your badge ain’t any good in Algiers, salaud.”

“They give me professional courtesy wherever I go.” I didn’t even know if that was true here. “The point is, while I was deep in the cop comp, I took the opportunity to read my own file, and a few others. The funny thing was, my name and Friedlander Bey’s kept popping up together. And not just in the records of the last few years. I counted at least eight entries — hints, you understand, but nothing definite — that suggested the two of us were blood kin.” That got a loud reaction from the Half-Hajj; maybe I should have told him about all this before.

“So?” said my mother.

“The hell kind of answer is that? So what does it mean? You ever jam Friedlander Bey, back in your golden youth?”

She looked raving mad again. “Hell, I jammed lots of guys. You expect me to remember all of them? I didn’t even remember what they looked like while I was jamming them.”

“You didn’t want to get involved, right? You just wanted to be good friends. Were you ever friends enough to give credit? Or did you always ask for the cash up front?”

“Maghrebi,” cried Saied, “this is your mother!” I didn’t think it was possible to shock him.

“Yeah, it’s my mother. Look at her.”

She crossed the room in three steps, reached back, and gave me a hard slap across the face. It made me fall back a step. “Get the fuck out of here!” she yelled.

I put my hand to my cheek and glared at her. “You answer one thing first: Could Friedlander Bey be my real father?”

Her hand was poised to deliver another clout. “Yeah, he could be, the way practically any man could be. Go back to the city and climb up on his knee, sonny boy. I don’t ever want to see you around here again.”

She could rest easy on that score. I turned my back on her and left that repulsive hole in the wall. I didn’t bother to shut the door on the way out. The Half-Hajj did, and then he hurried to catch up with me. I was storming down the stairs. “Listen, Marid,” he said. Until he spoke, I didn’t realize how wild I was. “I guess all this is a big surprise to you — “

“You do? You’re very perceptive today, Saied.”

“ — but you can’t act that way toward your mother. Remember what it says — “

“In the Qur’an? Yeah, I know. Well, what does the Straight Path have to say about prostitution? What does it have to say about the kind of degenerate my holy mother has turned into?”

“You’ve got a lot of room to talk. If there was a cheaper hustler in the Budayeen, I never met him.”

I smiled coldly. “Thanks a lot, Saied, but I don’t live in the Budayeen anymore. You forget? And I don’t hustle anybody or anything. I got a steady job.”

He spat at my feet. “You used to do nearly anything to make a few kiam.”

“Anyway, just because I used to be the scum of the earth, it doesn’t make it all right for my mother to be scum, too.”

“Why don’t you just shut up about her? I don’t want to hear about it.”

“Your empathy just grows and grows, Saied,” I said. “You don’t know everything I know. My alma mater