From "An Algerian Childhood"

. . . Even as a small child, however, I was shocked by one custom. Every day, at certain times, some of the farm workers, after having laid out with their gaze an imaginary mat, would kneel between the rows of vines or on the dusty road for a solitary ritual prayer. What shocked me was not the custom of praying out in the landscape. To the contrary, I liked this way, so different from ours, of fusing the prayer words with the space of the vineyards, the trees, and the sky. And, as children will do when they imitate adults in order the better to know and to understand, I would sometimes do like those who prayed and prostrate myself as they did, with the same swaying, no doubt hoping miraculously to discover, in this imitation, the purpose of a gesture that escaped me.
        What shocked me was how he who prayed sometimes placed himself at an angle in relation to the axis of the road and the rows of vines. Why this orientation, an orientation that went against the beautiful geometry of the roads, the vineyards, and the tree-lined allees? Why did they line up this way athwart the fundamental lines of this place? It was my father who one day gave me the explanation for this mystery. By means of a a drawing in the form of a rosette, which he drew with his index finger in the dust of the road, he explained that when Muslims pray, they turn towards a stone, a holy stone. This other, invisible geometry made a great impression on me. And I can still picture his finger tracing in the dusty road that mysterious rosette, that immense flower covering the various lands of the universe and whose heart was a stone. I think this was my first metaphysical emotion.
        And so, just as there were two geographies in nature and several languages, there were two geometries as well: the one manifest and the other invisible. And space was not neutral. It was predicated on an axis. Oriented towards a center. By virtue of a book and a prayer.
        This idea, which remained imprecise during my childhood, would be urgently resurrected later. During the composition of Le maboul and because its main character is a Muslim. Once again, the source of inspiration is childhood. And ever since then, I have found it difficult to describe a landscape devoid of lines and centers. That is no doubt why most of my books deal with Algeria. It is only there that I rediscover my fixes, my routes, my orientations. Far from her I feel disoriented. As though I had lost both my center and my compass.
        Often in the evening, after dinner, I went outside. There, plunged in darkness, I would join the familiar trees, the earth still warm with the day's heat, and the night odors. And, of course, the farm's night watchman: a nocturnal person--and thus different from the others--who in the darkness roamed the property and the paths, and who at sun-up would come to awaken my father by knocking on the shutters and calling him by his first name. It was he who, in his raucous voice and in Arabic, taught me the names of the stars and the constellations, pointing them out with his finger or by tracing with his stick their strange and interlinked figures. Before knowing its name in French, I learned from him that the Little Bear was called Sidi Okba's Cart; and that, near the second star of the cart's shaft, there glimmered a tiny star named Alcor (or Alcoran) which he claimed one could only distinguish--and then only if one had good eyesight--on condition that the weather be clear and the star gazer be looking for God.
        As a result of these things, I felt that I had two lives, which I was living in two countries: one that was solar and European, with its agronomy, its vineyards, and its orange trees, in which I recognized the mark my father had made on the land; and the other one that was nocturnal and Arab, with the song of the grape pickers near the cellar, and with all those names traced out around a crescent moon in a deep and infinite sky. Such that even today, in Paris, when I happen to look at the stars and the constellations, I catch myself not only trying to recall their original names, their Arabic names, but also trying to distinguish--in front of Sidi Okba's Cart--that tiny mysterious star that is only visible to the believer.

Translated from the French
by Eric Sellin