This sudden downpour of dollars is a blessing – now I can finally go to Aïn Deb. Like Rachel, I’m going back to the source, back to my childhood, to our house, our parents. Back to my father. To say a prayer at their grave. I’m scared to death but I’m happy. I feel it’s a journey that I need to make, one I would have had to make sooner or later. I need to feel Algerian soil beneath my feet, feel it hold me up like an insignificant insect. Not because I used to live there as a kid, not because my mother and my grandparents were born there or because my father spent most of his life there. None of these things are as important as the fact that my parents are buried there. I don’t know how to explain it, I’ve always had trouble putting things into words, I can’t do it, so I just write down the facts, but that doesn’t explain what I feel. I never was very good at school. What I’m trying to say is that death expresses truth better than life. I think nothing connects a man to the earth more than the graves of his parents and his grandparents. That’s only just occurred to me, I’ll have to think about it, because it sounds strange to say death binds us to life when we know that death is the end of everything. Rachel used to say home is where you live, which is true – but he was talking about the emigrants who stubbornly go on living as emigrants and who end up not living in their own country or their adopted one. Rachel was right, its psychology. They’re just thinking about themselves, about their deaths, about the grave waiting for them back in the old country, they’re not thinking about the children they’re leaving dangling over the abyss. It’s hardly surprising that when they fall, they break their necks. Imagine if Togo-au-Lait’s parents had raised him to be like his great-grandfather, he’d have eaten the lot of us and he wouldn’t even feel sorry. But I also think that home is the country where your parents are buried, that’s why I felt I needed to go and see that land, walk on it, soak up some part of the mystery fed by generations of souls. ‘A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,’ to quote Churchill, who Rachel thought was the greatest hero of the war against the Nazis. That’s what a country should be, a mystery. But still I wonder why I’ve never been interested in Germany. My father was born there, my grandparents are buried there, so some part of my soul must be over there in what Rachel called the mystery of deepest, darkest Germany. Is it because of the war? Because of Papa’s past? Is it because I’ve never been there? Rachel says it’s beautiful, incredibly well organised, he says the people are really helpful. I’ll go there some day.