Trafika Europe 6 - Arabesque

men don’t cry

hens, washing the laundry in the oued and fetching drinking water from the well!” “That’s enough of your stupid ideas! You know perfectly well they don’t live like that any more. They’re doing better than we are. The Algerians are the Americans of North Africa. D’you want to know what I think? If you hadn’t brought me here, I’d see my family every day, and in my garden I’d have planted lemon trees and almond trees instead of watching Stop signs and rusty washing machines sprouting.” I was just a kid busy playing at the Trojan War in the garden, but I can remember clearly that when my sister distanced herself something snapped in our family. I loved Dounia, because she askedmy opinion about a heap of things and also because she

different Dounia. The summer she turned twenty, she announced that she would no longer be joining us for our traditional family holidays back in the bled . This decision marked a breaking point for my parents. Up until then, they had both lived in the hope that it was all a passing phase. “It ’s what ’s cal led an adolescent crisis. ” “What ’s that? A virus? A disease?” “It’s the kind of disease you can only catch in Europe! If you hadn’t brought me here – and we’d raised them in Algeria instead – Dounia would never have caught this adolescent crisis!” “Yes, but if I hadn’t brought you here, then right now you’d be milking a cow, feeding the

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