June 25th, 2025
Today, Granddad goes to the sea. Mom says he needs peace and quiet, that he needs time to recover, so we’re taking him to a rest home west of Algiers. There, so close to the Mediterranean, he can relax. Since Grandma died, he’s changed. He doesn’t really go out anymore, doesn’t talk much, hides behind doors, in corners, or under the bed. He’s dedicated, never does things halfway. He gives in to childish ways, rather than solitude. This is no game for him, far from it. There is a pronounced gravity to him, like the end is near. He told us that it was his final act, a rehearsal before the grand finale. People ask us why he acts like this, curious as to what he’s hoping to achieve. He simply says he no longer wants to be seen. That’s all. He wants to know what it’s like. I don’t think Granddad really wants to die, I think he just wants to disappear slowly, a little more each day, from view, and possibly from our hearts. If he really wanted to die, he would’ve left without a trace, without bonding with us. At his age, I know it tears him apart to see his loved ones go. He knows that pieces of himself leave with them. He lost a large chunk of himself when Grandma passed, as though it had been torn off, flung into oblivion. I sense that he feels more and more detached from us, and that’s why he hides: to adjust to dying, to learn how to do it. Mom says that the sea will be good for him, that he’ll be surrounded by people his own age, all there for the same reason: to cling to life, to get better, to slow the wear and tear of time. Maybe being so near the water makes old age easier to bear. He’ll have the vast blue expanse before him with nowhere to hide. Right now, we’re searching for him. It scares me that soon I won’t be able to tell the difference between make-believe and death. Granddad has always been a quick learner, he goes all-in on things, surrenders himself completely. He’s been told on numerous occasions that, in another life, he could’ve been an imam. Faith like his can’t be learned, it just waits to be realized.
Ah, I think I see him in the closet. Yeah, there he is. His hiding place was actually really good this time, only thing that gave him away was cracking the door to breathe. I’m sure he would’ve liked to stay tucked away in there, that would’ve been perfect.
The rest home is in Sidi Fredj, where so many turned up to plunder then never wanted to leave. It’s a large rectangular building, painted blue and white, with windows and balconies overlooking the sea. There’s a thalassotherapy center, a dining hall, and a garden in the back. Granddad doesn’t talk the whole way there. Mom and I have to carry the conversation. He listens to us in silence, watching the city stretch out, opening its veins. We arrive around 2 p.m., the tarmac sizzling under suntan lotion. Granddad is angry with Mom, we all know it. He doesn’t even look at her when she greets him. He feels nothing but disgust for her, for taking the easy way out, for putting her own father in this circus of casket-bound fogeys, sticking him in a drawer. All because she can’t bear the idea that he wants to burrow in like a mole, all to get accustomed to oblivion. For her, it’s a whim, regression, momentary mental fatigue. Granddad asks her why she doesn’t understand. For him, it’s not such a terrible thing to want to hide away for a couple hours, sometimes all day, or even all week, to practice dying. People used to say “playing dead,” so he doesn’t see a problem with wanting to do that, rather than taking a nap. It’s just another pastime for pensioners, no stranger than gardening or tai chi. Mom wavers; she lowers her eyes.
In fact, Granddad doesn’t realize that Mom is also locked in a prison, one of scrutiny and shame; that she, too, has her monsters, for whom she harbors fears like a loyal hound. She pretends not to understand and leaves, heading to the reception desk with a confident step. We go in and find no one there; it’s empty, like a shell without a mollusk. A few minutes later, a staff member arrives and apologizes, it’s nap time and the residents get to choose between sleeping alone in their rooms or in groups under staff supervision in what he calls the nap room. Mom is very happy she has chosen such a modern place. He leads us to Granddad’s room. It is small, painted white, has a strong smell of salt, and is sparsely decorated, evoking tidy misery: there’s an empty vase on a bedside table, a bed, that’s all. The only thing that distinguishes it from a monk’s cell is the large window that cuts a square from the aqueous world, letting it pour in. Granddad will finally have his ascetic life. On our way out, he ignores Mom and only responds to my goodbye. She cries. He sits on the edge of the bed, his back to the door, looking out, totally defeated, clinging to nothing, abandoning all attempts at his game. There are creases on the back of his shirt resembling slashes. There’s no television in his room; there are no more corners to hide in. I wonder what he’ll do at night …
July 5th, 2025
It’s been several days since we were together, so I’m writing. I remember fragments of my childhood, and he was ever-present: we would walk everywhere, and he would hold my hand as we crossed the street, sometimes letting go and telling me “Run! Don’t be scared!” It drove Mom crazy, but she smiled and laughed. She was proud of us, of our relationship. It’s been a long time. He wanted me to be brave when facing the world. He told me he was preparing me for life, and that was why he’d let me run into traffic, into markets, into maze-like souks with their stalls of spices, vegetables and fruit. I ran like I was being chased discovering the world for myself, but under his eye: he’d always find me. That’s why I tell myself that now it’s up to me to find him when he hides from us, from me. He told me stories too, slightly fantastical stories, which were often quite scary. More than once, he told me they were to prepare me for the life of the heart, a life we can feel but not see. He wanted me to understand pain, regret, oblivion, and death before they came my way.
Granddad had always admired the intensity and bluntness of Nordic people, so would often tell me the story of these trolls who were all named Solness, who built enormous structures: cathedrals, mosques, and nearly infinite towers. He told me they had a reason, because there’s a reason for absolutely everything we do, even if it’s twisted or deviant. The trolls would spend years and years building, oblivious to the passing seasons, obsessed with height, wanting to reach the heavens. They did all this so they could end their lives flamboyantly, so they could leave their mark. Yes, he told me that after laying the final stone, a troll would come down, look at the giant edifice, smile a little—then begin to climb, patiently, with unfailing concentration, forgetting the world, because this was already the afterlife. Once Solness reached the final stone, he would look around, let out a cry of extreme pain, and, finally, simply, he would jump. He would crash to the ground with a huge crunch of broken bones, Granddad said. And every year, a new troll would do the same: build a monstrous structure, then throw himself off. I didn’t quite get this story, but Granddad told it with such love for the trolls who would throw themselves from their high perches. His admiration had me transfixed, brought to tears by the words coming from his mouth. I later realized that Granddad wanted to be like them. He wanted to die like them, for his blood to splatter onto the world and leave a permanent mark. He wanted more than just being here with us, he wanted to remain in this world as a vestige. He didn’t have much time left to build his own tower, he knew that, and it terrified him. It broke him.
He was never really very far from death, if you think about it. It’s just that before, he had only brushed against it, flirted with it. Now he was seeking a true embrace: that of a lover for whom being one among several isn’t enough; a lover who seeks possession and total abandonment. He often mentioned knots, large or small, tight or loose, alpine or marine. It’s one of those memories that come back to haunt you when you least expect it, unannounced, like a knife in the dark of a back alley, the passing of time lowering your defenses. The type of moment when you realize that life is nothing but interpretation and that we have no frame of reference that would let us see the morbidity, the deadly nature, the funereal baggage of such an innocent obsession.
I understood that Granddad saw knots as an attempt at reconciliation, a pressure against the throat that, depending on its intensity and size, could elicit fainting or deep nothingness, suffocation as a gateway letting death trespass among the living, a near-perfect preparation for the afterlife: the possibility of wearing suicide around the neck. So many of the things that we would glimpse only briefly, now take on prophetic dimensions and reveal truths as old as the world itself: how his big eyes would get misty, say, when he stared at a face, as though he were already watching worms gnawing at its cheeks. Or how he’d devote a particular interest to the details and circumstances leading to a death. Or how he was indifferent to marriages and births, whereas his excitement at the announcement of a funeral was palpable. No one else noticed these things but me. The whole family said he was a man of duty, someone who understood the importance of being present for mourning. What no one realized, however, was that he was the one who needed comfort, that he had such a heavy, persistent fear of death that he could find no other solution than to expose himself to the phenomenon at every chance he got. That, perhaps, explains his long and arduous architectural studies, the data he collected for his building, the plans he drew up in his head, his sketches, the models he made. Come to think of it, the hiding places after Grandma died were just the umpteenth example of a lifelong pursuit, another attempt. Granddad was never crazy about life, but death …
July 27th, 2025
I went to see him a few weeks later. On my way to the nursing home, I realized that these were the true outskirts, not just in a geographic sense, but also in that it was cut off from the major arteries of life itself, hidden away on a tiny peninsula, absent from view and memory, close only to an indifferent sea which cared nothing for the land and its people. This was where we put people we wanted to forget, in places beyond time, beyond space; places where the senses were suspended, that rested on the periphery, the margins. These were places like prisons and hospitals, cemeteries and dungeons, where we piled up the dead, the deviants, and those whose slow decline we do not wish to confront. It was the land of erasure, a non-place, far from sight and mind, the world’s attic. And Mom buried Granddad in a place like that; I watched her do it, and I let her. I was as guilty as she was, despite my high morals. I was a witness to all of it, always silent, never speaking up, an accomplice to the catastrophe: a scourge, basically an instigator, complicit to a murder within my own family. These questions tortured me the whole way there. After I parked my car, I went and threw up in a bush.
I found him sitting alone on a white stone bench, staring at nothing, inert, lifeless, just there. He was happy to see me, genuinely so, and asked me questions about Mom, who hadn’t come. He wasn’t surprised. We sat there in silence, which shame moved me to break. I started asking him questions about his new life, what he did with his days, if he had made any friends, about the residents, the staff, the food, anything to cure me of the silence that choked me like laryngitis. Granddad considered my questions, then started to speak. As he did, I lowered my eyes. The more he spoke, the more I wanted to sink into the ground, to melt into the earth, to become, if I could, a living fissure. Shame gnawed at me, growing bigger and bigger, voracious, becoming Leviathan, devouring me wholly, without so much as a moment’s respite. He kept speaking; I felt small, shrinking as he grew overbearingly enormous. I could no longer move. My panic mounted. I felt regret. I was so sorry. If only he knew. Granddad told me about Mom, who he considered a treacherous hyena; he told me about the morgue-like food they gave him, it was the only way he could describe the paradoxically sticky and sandy mush. At the hospital, at least they tried to keep people alive. Here, it was slow death. He fell silent for a few seconds. I saw a tear make its way down the dry channeled wrinkles of his face. I looked away.
I didn’t know how to respond; I was captivated by his words. He had exhausted me with his righteousness and rage. The things he said made me reel. My hands trembled. The pain in my chest grew. It felt like a shroud, a blanket that enveloped me completely. He described his emetic neighbors who clung to life like condemned men to their nooses. He told me about the staff who infantilized the centenarians like schoolchildren, about the wars he had known—those he had seen on television, those that raged in his head—and again about my mother, the hyena, who he … who he should have stabbed in the heart. He told me how the sky and the sea were merging into one, how the blue tried to claim everything, bruising the heart and mind; how the sea assaulted the eye, the nostril, the eardrum. The sea tried to sneak in everywhere, to flood his veins, to freeze them. This great blue lava became his daily hell, his liquid Gehenna. Then he circled back to the daughter who now lorded over his home, how she had forgotten her own father, giving him up to the sea crows and human seals, had abandoned him to the painful lives of old men who feed on illusions, which allow them to cling to a world that is casting them out.
I wanted him to stop; I didn’t want him to tell me all that. Not like this. I pleaded with him as though he were all the gods combined into an old, hunched figure, a spectral sculpture to whom I could pray. He recounted his youth, his dreams like shipwrecks that would remain forever on the surface of his stormy sea, abusive as a stepmother. He recalled Grandma, young and beautiful, old and faithful until the very end, his first love, the one who had taught him everything, with the same beauty spot from childhood to death. He confessed the pain of both their broken dreams, of their shattered ambitions, of their muzzled freedom, snatched right from their hands by an enemy who debarked here, in this place where he was sent to die; the pain he felt for his brothers and sisters who had vanished; and for those killed, shot; others slaughtered, women veiled and violated, raped and murdered, whatever the massacre dictates, what the killers dictate, as history dictates, as history demands repeated, cyclical, forever.
I wanted to die. I fled.
August 15th, 2025
Like so many snakes shedding their skins at dawn, the days passed and became new: changing their shape and color, density and length. The last visit hollowed me out. I was feverish. Granddad’s words were like a chisel, suddenly shaping a world that had been latent until then, brought forth by his doubts and beliefs. I began to mistrust Mom. She took on the shape of a wild animal in my head, her heart turning to solid stone, ready to sacrifice everything for herself, an evil woman. Thanks to what he said, I understood the recurrent abandonments I had suffered and inflicted; my shame; my fragility; my wavering faith in life, in the world, in gods and demons; the disappearance of my father—which suddenly seemed like a voluntary departure, a choice rather than something I had suffered—and my first loves. All those little flights of fancy I had believed back then for no reason became calculated, fated plans, conditioned by inherited features, eyes that had traveled through time, reminders from the past to emulate the lost innocence of childhood. I felt thrown into a new cosmogony, made up of thousand-year-old ghosts and traitors who crowded the streets; those who first sold their bodies, then their hearts, then their lands and their mothers too. I thought of Sidi Fredj and her flat sea, conquered by the bay, compressed by a century of shame, castrated and excised, emptied of ardor; her tempests, her longstanding personality, revived for a few years and then bankrupt again, plundered again, used but never loved, deeply loved, never totally liberated nor unchained. And saddest of all, never respected, never lifted from gutter princess to admired queen. She had always been muzzled, oppressed, hated, transformed into a barroom wench, a broken bitch, later finished off, eaten by her own young.
Granddad taught me the song of the world, gave me the key. His rage-filled words infected and possessed me; they were not meant to oppress me, bring me down, or diminish me among the crowd. I understood that he wanted to raise me up, that his words were meant to shock me. It was part of my education, probably one of my final lessons. Contaminated with his rage, invigorated, it gave meaning to my life. He wanted to bequeath me a history, to transfer hopes that outlived the yoke, the tyranny, the attempted murders, the throat-slittings and the bombings, imposed silences and censorship, pervasive, violent, and abusive ideologies, monolithic and supreme, the mysteries and secrets of clans and cabals; discord, fictitious unity, erased, modified, and altered history; misplaced and distorted love that should, first and foremost, be for the earth and only then for those who inhabit it, for only the earth, not men, can claim eternity. Since childhood, he had wanted to give me the weight of time, to prepare me as his heir. His words were a desperate attempt, I realized, they could just as easily have ricocheted as hit the mark. He took his shot because he didn’t have much time left: the knot was tightening, every moment bringing him closer to evanescence.
August 22nd, 2025
It couldn’t end like this, not with us on opposite sides of the chasm. We had to jump together, become one. I owed him so much, the whole world. I had to see him again, thank him for enlightening me, for taking me to the other side, behind the tomb of history; for having shared such nuance with me, for bringing me into the crypt. I left on a Friday morning, at first light. I hadn’t slept a wink. When I told Mom, she looked at me sadly, with a slight, pained smile, because I was still clinging to the past instead of letting go. I was holding onto to a story that, for her, was over. She had done what she had had to do. He had food and shelter. She was a good daughter. She had a life of her own to live as well. Just for a moment, she lost composure; her face betrayed her. She was hurting. Regret, love, and shame pierced her suddenly like spears; her whole crystalline world of illusions shattered. Mom wasn’t the monster Granddad saw. She was floored by life, which she had only seen briefly in passing, through the gaze and words of others, so persistent here. Whether from hesitation or cowardice, I don’t know, I left her there to pick up the pieces of herself and walked out. The fever he provoked in me had dissipated. I felt like a virgin—like a being from before the fall. The sun was a soft yellow, like a newly-hatched chick, tender and fragile, moving. Leaving the comatose city, I slowly headed for his resting place. I was in no rush. I had the impression that it had been waiting for me my whole life. The unease from before had disappeared; there was nothing left to vomit out. Back inside, the receptionist smiled at me. I smiled back a genuine smile. Understanding others felt so easy now. We all need reassurance, that’s all. She told me that he was also up early, and that he was waiting for me on the veranda. I knew he wasn’t sleeping anymore.
He was easy to find now that he had stopped hiding. There he was, sitting quietly at a table, alone as usual, his battle grandiose, his coffee on the table, a tiny white dot drowned in a wash of blue. I approached him. I had brought him a gift, a small radio, a bit old but easy to use, with controls he surely knew. I sat down next to him. He turned his head and looked at me with very clear, peaceful eyes, which no longer looked sternly into the distance but saw only what was near—gazing with the innocence of someone waking up next to you for the first time. He told me that he had been waiting for me, that he had known I would be there soon, that this was how it had to be. I told him I was sorry for leaving the way I had last time. My shame was crushing me. He told me it didn’t matter, that he had waited for me a long time, and that I had come for so many before him. He had started to worry. He was exhausted. Now, he told me, we could leave peacefully and never return. I didn’t quite understand. Granddad wasn’t allowed to leave the home. Mom hadn’t said anything. I didn’t answer. I didn’t want to disappoint him.
We stood there for a long time, the sea before us, fatal in its attire, timeless, ageless in its beauty. We watched it undulate slowly, whispering little sonorous ricochets into the ears of its lovers, which, in the end, is what we were. Granddad started talking to me about angels, how he had never believed he would see one here. He told me that he thought all the angels had left this world, that it was no longer worth their while. But today I had come just to see him, and he felt lucky. He said he had always thought that those who lived on earth had been angels before, but now that I was there, he realized he had been wrong. He whispered to me that embryos were not of this world, that such innocence had no other earthly destiny other than to be trampled. I didn’t know what to say. I was lost. I let him go on. I owed it to him. He told me he was ready, that he had done his best, that he had put all his energy into building his tower, that he had no strength left. He wanted to rest, to find them, right where they were, in the great calm that follows noise and fury. Night fell. He asked me to walk him back to his room, saying he couldn’t see anyone else but me. Here and there, the moonlight made him shine in the pitch dark. He lay on the bed and looked at me for a long time. He saw that I was crying and told me that he was very lucky to have someone cry for him like that. He said that angels also cried, just like humans. He thanked me when I started sobbing and repeated how happy he was to see me, that he had been waiting for me for so long. Then he gently pushed me toward the door with just the tips of his fingers. He told me he’d come to see me very soon, that he’d come alone, at his own pace. He told me to wait for him. He’d be there. After leaving, I put my ear to the door to listen to his footsteps in the room, the creaking of his bed, his breathing. All I heard was the whistling of the wind coming to collapse the silence.
August 23rd, 2025
As of yesterday, Granddad is gone. We may never find his body. He hid too well this time, deep in the ocean. It doesn’t matter anymore anyway. He finished what he started. He built me. Today, there is only me. And the blue.
Read the original French text here.
Djamel Bouchenaki lives in Algeria, he sometimes teaches, reads, and writes a little. This is the first of his texts to be released into the wild.
Jordan Barger is a translator. Publications can be found in Poetry Magazine, FENCE, Circumference, Firmament, The Poetry Review UK, Caesura, Action Books’ blog and more.
minor literature[s] 