I got talking to Slim, the guy huddled next to me in this hell, he was a university student home to the bled to spend the Christmas holidays with his family. I asked if he knew what was going on, but he had no idea. He said he flew Paris to Algiers all the time, but this was the first time they’d pulled him out of the line-up. ‘Maybe I’m starting to look like a terrorist,’ he laughed. He was an optimist. We talked about this and that. He was studying computer science at Jussieu and lived in some posh house in the sixteenth arrondissement with his uncle who’s a professor at Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital. Poor little rich kid. But Slim told me it wasn’t like that at all, he said he had to live off some measly grant, he said all he got from his uncle was room and board, his travel card and a bit of pocket money. Oh, and on weekends his uncle would lend him his Mercedes 300 convertible with a full tank of petrol and enough money to cover his expenses. Slim bitched that he’d even had to work as a management trainee in a merchant bank run by some friend of his uncle to pay for his skiing holiday in Switzerland. Then he bitched about France, the cold, the discrimination, the crime rate, the cost of living, the filthy streets, the pig-headed police and the civil servants and on and on, the préfecture refusing to give him a ten-year resident’s permit for no good reason. Slim was a pain in the arse. He told me as soon as he finished his degree he was going to move to London and set up a department of international studies with his cousins so they could make some money out of Africa. I listened, I nodded, I understood, but I can’t help it, I’ve never been able to stomach spoiled brats. I said to him what Aunt Sakina was always saying to me: ‘Don’t be so ungrateful’. But Slim said it’s not him, it’s France that’s ungrateful. Slim is a royal pain in the arse. ‘There goes someone who thinks his shit doesn’t stink,’ as Monsieur Vincent used to say whenever some guy showed up with a Ferrari, tossed the keys at him, stared at the ceiling and said, ‘Check her over for me!’ With guys like that, small-time crooks bigging it up like gangsters, we’d push the car into a corner of the workshop and take our own sweet time racking up a bill fit for a king. Slim and I talked about this and that, talked about meeting up again in Algiers and in Paris. Neither of us figured we were going to be shut up in this hangar forever. When you don’t know what’s going on, it’s best to be optimistic.