Free Horses of God by Mahi Binebine Page A

between the shop, the garage, and home, where he only came to eat. Gone, too, was the gaiety he usually spread around the table, theridiculous stories that had Yemma in stitches. He could even extract a smile from my father’s mummified face. He’d jeer at my brothers and no one would be able to get a word in edgeways, he was always so talkative, so funny. All that was gone. He managed to spin a kind of austere web that gradually entangled us all. We couldn’t watch TV in peace because he’d be doing our heads in with his diatribes about the American-Zionist conspiracy that was brainwashing us all, corrupting our morals and insidiously infecting each one of us. Yemma didn’t understand a word he was saying, but depriving her of her Egyptian and Brazilian soaps was out of the question. So, just to irritate us, he’d start noisily reciting the Koran in the room next door.
    As time passed, Hamid would come home less and less. Eventually he set himself up in a shack near the garage, lent to him by Abu Zoubeir. That hurt a lot, because he left a gaping hole at home. I went on loving him in spite of it all. He was still my idol, on a par with Yachine, my soccer hero. I’d get up at dawn to go and meet him before he left for work. He’d take me to Belkabir’s, a stallholder who made doughnuts that were second to none. Sitting behind a vast frying pan, the man with the spreading paunch would fling rounds of sticky dough into boiling oil. They’d instantly swell as they floated, giving off an exquisite smell. We’d buy a big crisp ring of them and take itto the café, order mint tea and happily munch away. Hamid said I ought to find myself a job so I’d be able to feed myself properly. He’d have a word with Abu Zoubeir, who had friends everywhere. I agreed, because I adored doughnuts. Sometimes he’d put me off my food by talking about hell so early in the morning. He’d insist that on the day of the Last Judgment the infidels would be thrown into vats of boiling oil, that their skin would keep growing back so they’d carry on frying and the suffering would be atrocious. That gave me goose bumps. I told him I believed in God and I’d never get fried like a doughnut. That’s how I became an apprentice mechanic with Ba Moussa. A grubby job, but one I was conscientious about. And since Nabil was bored and kept hanging around the bikes I was fixing, he was taken on too. Together, we made a great team. So much so that Ba Moussa, who was an inveterate kif smoker, came to rely on us and we became professionals .
    The shop consisted of two connecting rooms. The one at the back, which was tiny, dark, and airless, was where the boss lived. It had a bed and a table, on top of which, in pride of place, was a transistor radio, which blared from morning till night, and a suitcase for his clothes. A bare bulb, emitting a faint glow, hung from the low ceiling. We were always knocking our heads on it. The other room was our workshop: there was a crate full of tools,some old tires, nuts and bolts, screws, and a mountain of ill-assorted scrap metal that could be reused. But in fact, except when it rained, we always worked outside. The bicycle held no mysteries for us anymore. And then we progressed to the next stage: mopeds. That was a whole different story, but we knuckled down. Moussa would give us easy jobs to start with, and more complicated ones as we went on. And if, when we made a mistake, he took the liberty of giving us a beating, it was for our own good. We knew that. You have to be tough on apprentices at times, even if Ba Moussa, when he was annoyed, could deliver a real drubbing. I learned to keep out of the way, but Nabil had a knack for being in range. He bore the brunt of it. But hey, that was the deal.
    It took us a few months to get the hang of the work. We learned to strip an engine in next to no time, lubricate it, replace the faulty parts, and reassemble it.