In front of the window of a washing machine, Kahina and her husband draw plans of the comet. What if the water from washing clothes was actually the wave of a distant sea whose foamy foam would make everything new? “Elli eddah lebhar tjibou elmouja, what the sea carries away is brought back by the wave,” says a proverb. What if the clothes washed up behind the glass drew the contours of a new world, more beautiful and clean, as if reinvented? It is with this complicit and dreaming couple that we begin Things That Happen, the second collection of short stories by Salah Badis, a 29-year-old Algerian writer, poet and journalist.
Kahina, a public service doctor, has been on strike for several weeks to obtain better working conditions and pay. When she finds her trainer husband back from a trip, she informs him of a new challenge for their already financially weakened couple: finding a new home in less than a week, because the owner of theirs is taking back her property. How will the spouses get by in a city, Algiers, where it is so difficult to find housing? Perhaps they will follow this “genius idea” – the title of the short story – of going off on a tangent by opening a laundromat…
Salah Badis’ collection brings together nine texts and as many daily anecdotes told from micro-events and down-to-earth problems. A young photographer and musician seeks to make himself known and make a living from his art. A teenager would like to free himself from maternal guardianship and finally experience love. An administration employee tries to escape the hum of his existence by republishing old scholarly books. Young people want to party until they get drunk. The owner of a hair salon struggles to resolve a plumbing problem. A young woman dreams of buying an improbable apartment with a view…
A few lines each time are enough for the reader to embark on these different parts of life, narrated with an apparent simplicity of tone but an art of subtle and poetic detail. Thus of this man who wishes to sell his old Peugeot but who cannot help but tell his buyer: “He feels that the story is starting to bore the young man, it always happens like this when he launches into explanations on words or events, he loses the thread, it creates holes in his stories and memories begin to flow from these holes, compact and dense memories, which carry an overflow of things, like the water of gutters, then he drowns between memory and story. »
Maintain the thrill of life
We also let ourselves be charmed by the refinement of the translation, signed by the poet Lofti Nia, which preserves extracts in Arabic, as beautiful to look at for those who do not decipher the language as to “listen to”, because it is often verses from ancient songs: “Let the sea take me but not you… consume me again/Ripe apples, I was told they were green…/Burn me again. »
Like so many pieces of a puzzle, all these life journeys also make up a wide shot image: that of Algiers. Far from the old clichés of an immaculate capital proudly facing the sea, the city of Salah Badis is presented rather from the angle of its current, technical, logistical and social problems: from the narrowness of the real estate stock to the lack of maintenance of public space, from lifeless dormitory suburbs to the cramped conditions of city center housing, from transport problems to hindered romantic encounters, from the desire to party to the prohibition of alcohol, including a sexuality conditioned by marriage…
Salah Badis’ characters get by as best they can, slaloming from one place to another, abstracting themselves as much as possible from reality, trying to forget political authoritarianism as well as the traumatic memory of the years of lead or earthquakes that have shaken the city in the past. Fragility is there, everywhere, for all beings aware of their smallness, in a world that is as padlocked as it is impermanent. But it’s about maintaining the thrill of life despite everything. As Selma, protagonist of the short story titled Desperately Seeking Balcony, says: “You want me to tell you what I do best? Support nothingness. This is my talent. »
