NEEDLING

TWO WORLDS

Tonight, I went over T.'s immigration forms for the green card. I met him at the hotel / restaurant where he works. We’ve been over the forms several times. I think we got them this time. It’s been two months now since he’s received the application form. He should send it off in the next few days. So tonight, he invited me to diner at the hotel. We had some couscous and some red wine.

It’s so far removed, how could I even come close to describing our talk. He told me in his village in 1991 they didn’t have electricity. That he grew up doing his homework by candle light. That everyday they walked to the next village for work or for school or for whatever. For hundreds of years they’ve always walked. It’s about five kilometers away, so it’s about one hour’s walk. One day a few years ago, a man from one of the two villages bought a car and started offering for a small fee a shuttle service. At first they all thought he was crazy, why would anybody pay when we’ve always walked. He didn’t have any customers. But little by little, people started taking the car. Why walk? Why spend one hour walking when for a small fee I can be there in five minutes? Then T. went on about the man in the desert who on his camel takes two months to cross the part of the desert he’s been crossing his whole life. One day, an aviator stops by and asks him why he always takes the same route with his camel. I don’t understand, said the man of the desert. Well, the aviator said, what takes you two months by camel takes me two hours by plane. Why don’t you let me take you? And the man of the desert looked at the aviator and said, but if it only took me two hours, what would I do the rest of the time. And he took to his camel and once more for the umpteenth time, he started his two months trip.

But if you had exactly what you wanted, where would you go? Would you stay here in France, go to the States, or go back to Kabily?
To Kabily, of course.
Then why go through all this trouble to go to America?
I can’t stay here. I can’t continue living like this. It’s very hard getting papers here. If I could have a regular situation in America, why not.
You’ll have to learn to speak English.
I know, I’ve been trying but so far I haven’t been able to.
And you don’t to want to move back to your village?
There’s nothing there, you know. People don’t have anything.
So you came to France.
Sure… everybody in Algeria wants to come here. You know, there’s this Algerian comic he says all the Algerians they came over to France and the French they were getting crowded, so they went off on their boats and found this place on the other side of the Mediterranean sea and said to themselves, look here, there’s a nice empty place, why don’t we move in.
When did the French move in?
In 1830 around there. They didn’t make it to my country till 57. Twenty seven years later. But that’s because we live in the mountain, you know, and it’s harder to invade. All the invaders when they’ve come to Algeria, first they take the flat lands and then they take the mountains. Most never take the mountains. You know, in my country, every time there’s a problem, we just climb into the mountains and hide. Nobody can find us there. That’s how we’ve remained Kabyl throughout all these centuries.
Sure, that’s fine, but you know, first you had the Romans, they took the plains, you guys climbed up the mountains while they settled down, left you guys alone, integrated with the locals. Then came the Germanic tribes a few centuries later, they invaded the plains, and since you guys had integrated with the Romans and the Romans with you guys, you all climbed up the mountains together to get away from the Germanic hoards. The Germans settled down, integrated with the locals, got accustomed to the weather and all when the Arabs came in. By this time the Germans were also part of the crowd so they climbed up the mountains with you guys to hide from the Arabs... and the Turks came in at one point... and finally the French.
I never thought about it that way. We’re one big mess.
Like most everybody.
It’s true, we got all kinds of people living up in the mountains. Blacks, Arabs, Jews... and the French even, we got a few of them too. But most of them left after the French war. The Jews too, they all left with the French.

I don’t know how to write this conversation. I questioned him and he told me he had eight siblings, two of them have moved here with him to France, and it is the 45/50 or more hours of work a week they put in working for low wages undeclared, underpaid, doing the jobs that nobody else wants to do that they’ve put all their other siblings through school. At least T. is lucky, he works for a fair boss. Still, if you took all the hours he works and then took the pay he takes home every months and made an average, you’d come way under the legal minimum wage in this country. He and his brother share a hotel room downtown where they have no kitchen and cannot bring girls. His brother is a dishwasher all week, every morning and every evening getting only the afternoon off. On Sundays he works for his uncle in another restaurant.

These guys are good people, but I can’t even come close to understanding the world they come from. And trying to talk about it, I only manage to sound patronizing, possibly condescending, at the very least sympathetic to their situation which I can only understand maybe an inkling because I’ve grown up as an illegal alien. But not even then.

You’ve never lived without electricity?
Never.
Imagine, I never even knew electricity anywhere in my village before I was twenty.
I can’t imagine. I just can’t.

Then we talked about the power going out for a few hours throughout such a large part of New England. What if the power went out for good. Right here in Paris, throughout France... throughout Europe. What would we do? We cannot live without energy. We have created a world in which we are totally dependent on so much useless activity - brassage d'air - so much useless activity which requires us to work and make money just so we can continue with more newer and more efficient useless activities. We have got ourselves caught up in such a fragile contraception which could so easily tumble and break. Tomorrow, there is no more petrol, every gas station closes down, the electric plants shut down, the factories must close their doors. A few hours later after the shock and people realize their world has just turned around 380 degrees... it is complete chaos, anarchy... complete all out revolution, everybody on top of everybody, killing anything that gets in their way. First it starts with looting and stealing. Then it turns to killing to defend your property. Then killing just to defend yourself and your family. Then killing to survive and find food. Especially in the big cities which cannot live without energy. In a few days everything as we know it is destroyed.

How could we survive such a world?
I don’t know.
We’re so dependent on all these totally useless things. We don’t need phones, cars, trains, computers, electricity to fuck, eat, and drink. We were perfectly alright before. I mean, we weren’t any more or any less savage, intelligent, creative back then. It’s just now everything is faster.
We’d all have to move to the country.
Thank god we still have a few peasants who know what to do to make food, how to plant a few veggies or milk a goat for example. I certainly don’t know what the hell to do.
I know my way around a chicken barn. Me and my brother we raised chickens for a while, to sell them and make some money before moving here.

The French, they could never take the mountains. They killed most of our men, and the last one of us standing was a woman. She’s our Joan of Arc, you know, a real fighter. She led our people and it took the French three of their generals to capture that woman and to finally win against us. She was the bravest. And when they did catch her, those bastards, they decapitated her. Like Joan of Arc, they burnt her alive.

We ended our evening watching the English get beat by the Portuguese and getting eliminated from the European Soccer Championship. People were screaming at the tiny fifteen inch television screen in the bar in Kabyl and in French... there was even this English guy who came in to catch the last few seconds. The people in the bar of various backgrounds were cheering for one team or for the other indiscriminately. Some were for the Portuguese, some were for the English. People would come off the street to ask the score, automatically speaking with “TU” regardless of race, ethnic background, or social position. When the European soccer cup is in question, everybody’s a friend if they’ve got that little screen going.