In his latest novel, Always Beware of Dogs, Algerian author Samir Kacimi reflects on Algeria’s current landscape, where voices have been stymied following the country’s visibly peaceful movements. By creatively blending elements of fantasy, Kacimi offers readers a fresh lens through which to view contemporary Algerian life.
Samir Kacimi
Translated by Rana Asfour
Until the moment they bit off his tongue, Abdel Moumen Hallofa could never have conceived that the last memory he would take with him into the next world would be of Nesrin Nait Khodja, whispering in his ear to always watch out for dogs.
It had happened years ago, on the dawn of that morning, when he was leaving her apartment on rue Lyon Bourgeois in Marseille after an intense night of conversation that lasted nine hours. He intended to transcribe their discussion during his boat ride back to Algeria, but instead found himself completely engrossed in listening to the recording. As he did so, he remained uncertain whether it was mere chance or his relentless efforts that had brought them together. Either way, he knew this meeting was going to kickstart his career. It was sheer luck that he stumbled upon her name in the 1956 French police inquiries register, which he followed by insisting to speak with her one-on-one — an audacious move that no one had ever attempted before. He was sure that, without a string of peculiar coincidences that fell perfectly into place, his insistence would have ultimately been futile. Had the meeting unfolded differently, Nesrin might have dismissed him as a harasser, finding countless ways to avoid him. After all, it was difficult to imagine that a man could consistently reach out to a woman he didn’t know twice a day for weeks without her feeling uneasy or threatened. Yet, due to the turbulent events she was experiencing then, each conversation sparked a glimmer of hope in him that she might just give in to his request.
It took nine weeks of relentless phone calls to set up the meeting, and he began to worry that it wouldn’t be long before he had to start borrowing money just to cover the costs of the international calls he was racking up. This was all thanks to Nesrin’s stubborn refusal to embrace modern conveniences like the internet or mobile phones, making it nearly impossible to track her down. Even after a year of searching for her, it was still possible that he might never have uncovered any trace of her if it weren’t for a mix of fortunate leads and his questionable morals. After finally tracking down the notary’s office that had handled her last real estate transactions, he managed to build a rapport with one of the staff members. This connection gave him access to Nesrin’s phone number and address. By that time, she was 92 years old, an age he believed might have diminished her cognitive abilities significantly. But as fate would have it, their extended phone conversations revealed she had managed to keep her sanity, while he went to great lengths to steer clear of any reminders about the passing of time. It seemed, perhaps out of fear, that Nesrin had paused time, freezing it to the year she first stepped on those opposite shores. After selling her apartment and the house she inherited from her grandmother, she appointed a notary to finalize an inheritance from her father — one she had chosen not to accept for decades. She had always felt a deep apprehension about returning to the home where she was born, a place forever tainted by the loss of her parents.
Abdel Moumen’s look into Algiers’ civil records revealed a surprising truth: Nesrin wasn’t born in the Upper Kasbah in 1931, as her documents stated. Instead, she came into the world a few years earlier in a stone house in the remote village of Maghnin. Nesrin was candid about her past and often reflected on her grandmother’s advice about time. Ironically, it would eventually be time itself that felt threatened by her granddaughter. “Always keep an eye out for the dogs,” she would say.
Just as curiosity had driven Abdel Moumen to uncover these details, it also led him to the house in the Kasbah of Algiers. It sat on a slope leading up to Bab Djedid, a place that had long been known as Dar Al-Baraniya until people suddenly stopped calling it that. Remarkably, just a year after Nesrin’s departure to Marseille, the name resurfaced in people’s memories. It was then engraved on a marble stone at the entrance of the newly named Dar.
In 1956, news spread among the Kasbah residents that the Algerian revolutionaries had issued a military order prohibiting any dealings with the inhabitants or visitors of Dar Al-Baraniya and that punishment would ensue for anyone who mentioned its name. Although no one had actually seen the order or read the order, it was widely rumored that the commander of the region himself was its signatory. A speculation that stemmed from the known history between him and Nesrin’s father, dating back to their days of service during WWI. They had fought together in the French Fifth Corps regiment, alongside Captain De Velcoeur.
Abdel Moumen uncovered a surprising truth that contradicted the circulating rumors: the ban had not been imposed by any official body representing the Algerian revolutionaries. Instead, it stemmed from a man named “Belkacem Belhocine,” whose comments somehow gained momentum and turned into a widely accepted reality. Despite all of Abdel Moumen’s efforts to uncover the man’s identity, he found no trace of him, except for a personal letter from the mayor of the capital at that time, Jacques Chevalier, advising a police investigator not to give in to Belkacem’s order.
Records also revealed that the house was currently owned by a man who had bought it on the very same day that Nesrin had left her homeland. He also owned her four-room apartment in Bash Jarrah, located in the 17th building at the entrance of the eighth gate, right beside the municipal mosque.
Although Abdel Moumen hadn’t looked into what Nesrin had inherited from her father in the village of Magnine, near Bouira, a reassuring thought began to take hold in his mind. He found himself imagining that the new possessor of this inheritance would be none other than the individual who had bought the Kasbah house along with its apartment. This prompted him to consider the possibility of a connection between the man and Nesrin, suggesting that they might have shared an old relationship, especially given their similar ages, with him likely being a few years older. He found it inconceivable that mere coincidence —regardless of how well-meaning it might be—could account for the vast deal between them. An affirmation of his suspicions hit him the moment he glanced at the daily report from the French police, signed by Salah Berdjil—the very person to whom all of Nesrin’s property had ultimately been transferred. He suspected that such a move could only be driven by someone fueled by personal ambition and a thirst for power in a state that seemed to have risen only after the collapse of another— a collapse in which he had played a crucial role. It felt as though he was the one constant in a world that found its balance only through continuous upheaval.
The report made it clear to Abdel Moumen that Nesrin had been forced to play two opposing roles, effectively turning her into a double agent. On one side, she supported the revolution by providing the revolutionaries with valuable intel about the French police. Conversely, she was also feeding information to the enemy about the revolutionaries themselves. From what Abdel Moumen could gather from the report, Berdjil was the only officer who recognized the importance of this information, and he alone knew the truth about Nesrin.
The moment he had come across her name in the retrieved Algerian Archives from France, he couldn’t shake the strong feeling that there was far more to her story than what had been recounted time and time again. Her name marked the start of a story that no one wanted to touch—except for him. Like a dog with a bone, he held onto the hope that she would one day agree to meet him. After nine weeks of his persistent persuasion and her gracious refusals, she finally gave in. With a charming metropolitan accent, she caught him off guard with a remark that hinted at her possible acceptance: “I may not know the exact name of the person who wrote my life story, but it’s clear he’s a total failure.”
As soon as she spoke those words, a wave of astonishment washed over her as she questioned whether the sentence had truly come from her. Almost immediately after it slipped from her lips, an urgent urge took hold of her to delve into her thoughts, eager to discover if the phrase was inherently hers or something she had encountered before, perhaps in conversation or within the pages of a book. Battling the distractions that her advanced age had introduced to her thoughts, her confusion faded away just as quickly as it had arisen, leaving her devoid of her astonishment and the pressing desire to grasp the origin of the sentence. Moreover, in a distant time and place, Fate played its hand as the same words rolled off the tongue of another elderly, fondly known as “Old Timothy,” a nickname that stood as a testament to her long life and captured the tenacity with which it held her.
Abdel Moumen was the youngest of seven brothers. For many years, his father held the position of governor for the ruling party before he retired. As a young woman, his mother worked as a French language teacher but gave it all up to stay at home after the birth of her fifth son. Although she eventually lived and passed away in Djelfa, a village famed for its borrowed beauty, his mother originally came from the capital, where she was born and spent her childhood before her family moved to Blida. It was in Blida that Abdel Moumen’s father first met her. Without her father’s blessing, he took her away to Ben Yaqoub in Djelfa as his second wife.
Perhaps his mother’s tales of growing up in the capital and Blida inspired Abdel Moumen to leave his rural village and move to Algiers after graduating from university, where he would ultimately meet the woman he would marry. A woman he was neither drawn to out of love nor lust for a beautiful woman—after all, his wife was hardly a beauty. Instead, he chose her for the wealth she inherited, the ancient lineage she hailed from, and the revolutionary past of her family—qualities he valued most and sought. He felt that by aligning himself with a family like hers, he could attain what fate had denied him—or at least recover what he felt had been unjustly taken away from him after his father’s tragic suicide a few years into his retirement, driven into the act by the overwhelming shame of facing charges that ranged from forgery to the heinous crime of murder.
As it happened, a woman who had spent the majority of her life across the sea was now confronted with her own mortality. She yearned to return to her homeland for the remainder of her days and hoped to reconnect with the last remaining member of her family—a brother she had left behind when she and her husband had moved to Montpellier for work. At first, she had little news about her brother because she was focused on adjusting to her new life. However, all communication came to a halt when the revolution broke out in 1954. It wasn’t until 1960 that she was finally able to get in touch with him again, after his arrest for allegedly funding the revolutionaries. He spent six long months behind bars in Sarkaji prison before he was released. Unfortunately, after that, they lost contact once more.
The woman devoted herself to searching for her brother, reaching out to every organization and agency she thought might assist her until an unexpected turn of events occurred. She received a letter from the Ministry of the Interior, revealing that her brother had been located—he was a well-known Mujahid. For many years, he had served in the party’s secretariat in the city of Djelfa before retiring. He was living in Ben Yaqoub village with his two wives and children.
After that, all the woman needed was a ticket to Algiers and a taxi ride to Ben Yaqoub, where she would finally come face to face with the man she had spent her entire life searching for. Yet, the instant their eyes met, she revealed a shocking truth that would spur months of investigation and a mountain of paperwork to prove her startling first words to Abdel Moumen’s father: “You are not my brother… you’re a fraud.”
The investigation eventually revealed that Abdel Moumen’s father had taken the life of a young man before the country gained independence and then assumed that man’s identity. This allowed him to obtain false documents that claimed he fought in the revolution for Algeria’s independence. Even after the investigation wrapped up, no one ever discovered his true identity, leaving Abdel Moumen to live with a name given to him by a nameless man.
Abdel Moumen’s tragedies could have ended there, if only he hadn’t gone digging in his father’s file in an effort to clear his name. Instead, he uncovered his mother’s tales of her childhood—stories that revealed her youth in Blida and the capital as little more than a rosy illusion of fabricated memories painted around a home made of sand. Whether to escape the harsh truth or out of fear of it, he chose not to share his discovery with his mother or siblings. Instead, he distanced himself from his troubled and tumultuous family, setting out to build a new life for himself—a family of his own that would help him forget the past he was leaving behind. However, in a twist of fate that defied logic, his life turned out to be no different than theirs. However, unlike his parents’ story, his deceit began to unravel within just two years. His in-laws quickly saw through his façade and uncovered the truth about his family background. By the time he was thirty, he was divorced and barred from seeing his only son after agreeing to a deal that relieved him of financial obligations in exchange for giving up his visitation rights.
Between his divorce and accidentally discovering Nesrin’s name, Abdel Moumen had spent most of his life navigating a series of menial jobs that required no qualifications. It wasn’t until he was fifty that he came across Al-Sawt, a little-known newspaper that managed to stay afloat thanks to the benevolence of a kind-hearted employee at a public advertising agency. In exchange for a quarter page of advertising each day, the employee insisted that the newspaper toe the government line. As the state tightened its grip on public advertising, the print industry and most media outlets were stifled, making it increasingly rare for any newspaper to uphold an independent perspective for more than a year. As a result, many journalists—individually and collectively—began to compromise the very principles of freedom that had initially driven their passion for this profession.
In a world devoid of logic, Abdel Moumen was consumed by an unquenchable thirst for revenge against an authority he blamed for shattering his dreams, even though it was only holding up a mirror to the harsh reality of his situation. He expressed his disdain for the system not through his own experiences but by highlighting the stark realities faced by those who had been crushed by reason. This reality robbed them of clarity, leaving them unable to see the truth. These individuals found themselves at odds with everyone—not out of a desire to instigate conflict, but because they clung to the belief that pure reason could ultimately save them. Their steadfast convictions brought them nothing but the contempt of every authority figure. They embraced their reality in a way that brought them comfort, understanding that illusions could neither ensnare them nor bind them as captives. They understood that power—regardless of its form—is much like wine; while politics may squeeze it tightly, religion genuinely grants it a timeless richness.
Abdel Moumen’s heart was never truly at peace; he always yearned for power, even amid his complacency. His weaknesses weighed on him, making him question whether he truly deserved the paradise he dreamed of—unless he could exact his revenge—though he would never openly admit to that desire. Unlike those with nothing to lose, he lived in constant fear of losing what little he had. Yet, what he possessed was nothing more than an illusion. He clung to the hope that his circumstances would change one day, even though the only thing that shifted were the deceptive images he held onto. He should have come to terms with this truth as he navigated life with two fathers wrapped into one: the first, a revolutionary mujahid, and the second, a deceitful and ruthless fraudster. These contrasting experiences highlighted the stark differences in his reality.
His meeting with Nesrin Nait Khodja lasted hours, which he meticulously recorded in audio and video. As hours of unexpected revelations continued to unfold, he became increasingly convinced that his long-suppressed desire for revenge—held back for years by his own limitations—was finally within his reach. With her testimony secured, he knew it would take only two days to transfer everything he had recorded onto paper. After that, he could walk away, relishing the sight of flames consuming a State he pictured as nothing more than a construct of paper. However, instead of going ahead with publishing his interview as he originally intended, an unexpected idea hit him at the last moment—an idea that would go on to change his life dramatically within just a few months, making him the wealthiest man in the entire country. Instead of burning bridges with the paper State, as he had initially thought, he unknowingly set the stage for its dogs to bite his tongue out years later.
