I’m not trying to make excuses, but back then, life wasn’t exactly a picnic on the estate. Had it ever been? I think so, I remember a time when people were happy there. You came and went, you had no worries, no fears. And if you had, usually round end of the month, you got through it and if you couldn’t dodge the people you owed money to, you tightened your belt, lived on credit, the women would go to the pawn shop. Looking back, I think people were more relaxed, they struggled, but they didn’t think of their lives as a sort of hell they’d never get out of. You’d hear them say, ‘Tomorrow’s another day,’ ‘Vive la République, vive la France,’ ‘While there’s life, there’s hope.’ Or things like, ‘He who sleeps forgets his hunger,’ ‘We’ll eat better tomorrow,’ ‘Suck your thumb if you still feel hungry,’ ‘Pretend it’s Ramadan,’ ‘Have a glass of water and get a good night’s sleep,’ and we’d laugh. If things were really bad, you made like a soldier from the First World War, talking to himself in the trenches: ‘We’ll just have to make the best of things,’ or ‘You have to die of something,’ or ‘There’s people worse off than us,’ or ‘A man dies with his boots on . . .’ That’s what I always heard, you could compile a dictionary of sayings like that, most of them brought back from Africa by war veterans. We didn’t give up hope, when we were at our wits’ end, we’d get out our secret weapon: Allah, Jesus, Mary or the local griot. Back then, the estate was like a village that wasn’t on the map, it had its ups and downs, one day we’d be helping each other out, the next day we’d be at each other’s throats and the day after that we’d be sitting round the fire, all friends again. That was all we had to keep us going: arguments about fences, squabbles between neighbours, kids fighting and family histories that twisted and tangled all the way back to darkest Africa. Apart from the old women who pulled the strings and were constantly whining about something, no one had the patience to untangle them so everyone pretended that they knew, that way gossiping and running people down was just another form of conversation. But maybe I only think that because I was young, we were always off somewhere getting up to some shit, we didn’t think about the big picture, who was stirring things, what was going on in people’s heads, we’d pick up on snatches of conversation that sounded mysterious and violent, that smacked of heroism and great rewards in heaven or on earth. When the first Islamists showed up, we were happy, they had faced up to the dictator and his men back at home, back in Algeria. Taghouts, they called them, big shots with big guns who were going round murdering and looting and it was all completely legal. I saw a thing or two back in Algeria, every step I took I thought I was about to be deported and exterminated like an Untermensch, an inferior person. They looked funny in their old-world suicide-bomber getups, with their martyrs’ belts, their scruffy beards, their battered faces, their staring eyes, their all-terrain sandals, we liked the way they talked, like Allah’s rap crew, the way they were always available, the way they were like superheroes fighting for the poor. There were only about a dozen of them, but there were hordes of us and we were all itching to be their right-hand men. We’d do anything, they only had to ask, they had Allah’s ear, he was on their side. We were all wet behind the ears but they had us all fired up, they taught us how exciting it was to have people to hate, to want them dead so much it kept you awake at night. We’d talk about this stuff at night in the cellars and the stairwells, muffled up in our Mujahideen-issue parkas while the poor souls who had only their poverty to worry about double-locked their doors to the truth of the Prophet and moral certainty and slept like happy morons. During our initiation, we despised abstract creatures, people without names, it was mystical enough to intoxicate a saint. The vague and the inexplicable were your basic ingredients if you wanted to become a fanatic, and we wanted it right then and there. These loathsome abstract creatures, we called the infidels, the Kafirs, the tyrants, the Taghouts, you could imagine they were whatever you wanted, the cat, the dog, the kitchen sink. Once we were deemed worthy of jihad, the imam opened the big sack of Kafirs and in a solemn, incontrovertible voice, gave each of them a name: this one is the Jew, Lihoudi, he is scum, the worst of all, this one is the Christian, massihi, the hypocrite, the accursed, this one is the communist, el chouyouï, the monster reviled by Allah, these are the secular Muslims, the westernised Arab, the liberated woman, dogs and bitches who deserve to die a cruel death, these ones are the queers, the junkies, the intellectuals who must be crushed by any means necessary. Most of them were people that we knew, our neighbours, friends from school, work colleagues, local shopkeepers, teachers, people on the TV. Suddenly we saw France in all its horror, rotten and corrupt to the core, a whole pack of Untermenschen, filthy poisonous bastards in league with Israel, America, and the vile Arabic dictatorships who exterminated their own people to prevent Islam from spreading. It was high time to exterminate. As the months went by, and we organised rescue operations, we all escaped as best we could, but there were a lot of people who were still in it up to their necks. People who don’t get over fundamentalism are doomed for centuries to come.