Free The Meursault Investigation by Kamel Daoud Page A

new generations, in ever-increasing numbers, as they push the old ones toward the edge of the cliff. It’s shameful, but I feel hatred when I see them. They’re stealing something from me. I slept very badly last night.
    My neighbor’s an invisible man who takes it upon himself, every weekend, to read the Koran at the top of his voice all night long. Nobody dares tell him to stop, because it’s God who’s making him shout. I myself don’t dare, I’m marginal enough in this city as it is. His voice is nasal, plaintive, and obsequious. It sounds as if he’s alternating roles, from torturer to victim and back. I always react that way when I hear someone recite the Koran. I get the feeling it’s not a book, it’s a dispute between a heaven and a creature! As far as I’m concerned, religion is public transportation I never use. This God — I liketraveling in his direction, on foot if necessary, but I don’t want to take an organized trip. I’ve loathed Fridays ever since Independence, I think. Am I a believer? I’ve dealt with the heaven question by recognizing the obvious: I realized very young that among all those who nattered on about my condition, whether angels, gods, devils, or books, I was the only one who knew the sorrow and obligation of death, work, and sickness. I alone pay the electric bill, I alone will be eaten by worms in the end. So get lost! And therefore I detest religions and submission. Who wants to run panting after a father who has never set foot on earth, has never had to know hunger or work for a living?
    My father? Oh, I’ve told you everything I know about him. I learned to write his name in my school notebooks, the way you write an address. A family name and nothing else. There’s no other trace of him; I don’t even have an old jacket or a photograph. Mama always refused to describe his looks or his character, to give him a body or share the smallest memory with me. And I had no paternal uncles and no tribe to help reestablish his outline. Nothing. And so, when I was a little boy, I imagined him as rather like Musa, but bigger. Immense, gigantic, capable of fits of cosmic anger, sitting at the world’s border, doing his night watchman’s job. My theory is, it was either weariness or cowardice that caused him to leave. You know, maybe I’ve taken after him. I left my own family before I had one, for I’ve never been married. Sure, I’ve known the love of lots of women, but it never untied the heavy, suffocating knot of secrets that bound me to my mother. After all these years of bachelorhood, here’smy conclusion: I have always nurtured a mighty distrust of women. Basically, I’ve never believed them.
    Mother, death, love — everyone shares, unequally, those three poles of fascination. The truth is that women have never been able to free me from my own mother, from the smoldering anger I felt toward her, or to protect me from her eyes, which followed me everywhere for a long time. In silence. As if they were asking me why I hadn’t found Musa’s body or why I’d survived instead of him or why I’d come into the world. And then you have to consider the modesty that was obligatory in those days. Accessible women were rare, and in a village like Hadjout, you couldn’t come across a woman with her face uncovered, much less talk to one. I didn’t have any female cousin anywhere around. The only part of my life that was anything like a love story was what I had with Meriem. She’s the only woman who found the patience to love me and lead me back to life. It wasn’t quite summer yet when I met her, in 1963. Everyone was riding the wave of post-Independence enthusiasm, and I can still remember her wild hair and her passionate eyes, which come and visit me sometimes in insistent dreams. After my relationship with Meriem, I became aware that women would get themselves out of my way, they’d make, so to speak, a detour, as if they could instinctively tell I was another woman’s