The Anklet of Tinhinan (ALGERIAN novel )

Thanks a lot, Londonhbb, for this book! Sure I am that it is more amazing than the first one!

Thank u very much

emm, London Im too late to download it can anyone provide a new link, please?

It's a great novel. This is a new link dear angeleyes http://ifile.it/wx8t17p/THE_ANKLET_OF_TINHINAN.pdf
Good luck

Thx a lot London and Sabine! I got it now!
Wolf, here is a new link, but not 4shared :
http://www.filefactory.com/file/cc99952/n/THE_ANKLET_OF_TINHINAN.pdf

Hi, dear readers!

Chill ran down my spine as I become aware that you're reading my second novel THE ANKLET OF TINHINAN. Actually, what you have in hands is the draft version. The polished off version you'll discover it once it comes out formally within few months. I let you know, my loyal readers, that I took almost two years to bag it! For the story is inspired from a real one, that is, a suicide of a blooming woman I knew back in August 2004. In the novel I named her Tinhinan, though her real name was Kahina! I felt for her; I was hurt weaving back the whole novel. I thought at first of a title as THE SHADOW OF THE HEART, but finally I bet on the title THE ANKLET OF TINHINAN. Even the French novel I referred to in my English novel (that is LE RIRE DE LAURA) was actually a book she read before she committed suicide by hanging herself in Algiers on damn August. I tried to depict along the chapters the craziness of suicide here and elsewhere!

I welcome your comments and critics.

Belkacem Meghzochene
The author of Sophia in the White City

Novel: THE ANKLET OF TINHINAN

Excerpts:

CHAPTER ONE

The shabbily starlit sky was of dark-blue attire. A cohort of illuminations made up, by proxy, for the somber celestial koubba
of the White City.

Fromthe fifth floor, thirty-five-year-old Maciva, who was still up in the dead of the night despite her tiredness, recorded passively the few uproars coming up from the nearby port. At her far right, the Memorial of Martyr, also feebly illumined for this March night, and at the top of which a red light served as a signal light for both boats and planes (who knows ?), seemed to guard the Algiers’s sleeping dwellers¾and squatters, for sure.


The Algiers Bay was alive of days’ churned-out froth. Below this French-style building, two tortuous queues of parked cars zipped up the already miniature street, waiting for the traffic bottlenecks of morn.


Maciva, her brown hair winnowing in the night breeze and bare slim arms resting on the aluminum sill of the wide sliding window, glanced down at a line of poor palm trees, overwhelmed by quotidian emitted car gazes.


The feminine voice of Al Jazeera’s newsreader, Algerian-born and trained Khadidja Benguenna, called on Maciva’s suddenly awakened mind. A Palestinian is slain every one hour…At the pace of slaughter, these marooned people of the Middle East’s most raped land, would one day go extinct like dinos. The shame would be tarbooshing the heads of docile onlookers of the Arab Umma. ‘From the Ocean to the Gulf,’ as unflagging, ageless Arab rulers would articulate, ‘the condemnation is
unanimous, stern and sustained!’ Certainly like their compelling golden thrones! Always athirst for extending their years of unduly caliphate, they make sure that the only interchangeable piece of furniture next to their rooted thrones is a wooden coffin! Still, they perhaps dream of an afterlife remake of their turbid life!


Maciva was so absorbed in hammering away at the Arabian rulers’ turpitudes, that she did not feel her barefoot son getting up from his bed and coming up to her so closely, just behind her waist. “Oh, my darling Yidir,” she said, as she turned back, crouching to hug him tightly.

“I’m thirsty, mama,” he whispered in her ears.

“Oh, my baby. Sorry.” She stood up and fetched a glass of water. She cupped the glass and helped him drink about two-thirds of it. She gulped down the last third.

“Mama, I want to pee.”

“Okay. Come with me.”

When she bedded him down back in his bed, five-year-old Yidir urged his mother to narrate him a story before sleeping back. It was true that Maciva had been getting him used to every fallen night. His fragile head posed on the Pokemon-patterned pillow and the other part of his body covered by a yellow-striped eiderdown. He looked up at Maciva, alacritous to be fed with a fable.


She reached out her palm in slow motion for cosseting his plump cheeks. “Which story would you like to hear my pet?”

“Belajut!” he muttered, innocence in shroud.

“It’s a long story. Don’t you want to sleep, Yidir?” She bent her head a bit, their faces being just one inch from each other. “Once upon a time, lived a young man whose name was Belajut. He was orphan at the age of five. He had just a miserable red-tiled hut, passed on him by his defunct parents. In fact, his modest hut was divided into two parts. By the corner, a tiny part at the left of the wooden door provided an in-hut den for his only she-goat. Of course, piled-up ash logs made up a barrier from the other part of his hut, where he managed to make it a sound¾but not necessarily an inodorous¾living. His hut was situated at midway of the village he thought belonging to and the vale where a rivulet would just flow in winter and spring.” She paused to let it sink in for her unique child.

And Yidir to ask, somnolence being hard to overcome him, “Did he go to school?”

Maciva smiled at him warmly. “Not at all! He lived in a time when there existed neither school nor electricity. His village
was nested high in the green mountains. People lived on farming their lands and raising their tamed animals. Goat, sheep, hens, rabbits, cows and donkeys.
Belajut had his own small land at the border of the rivulet. The land was comprised of, to be exact, three fig trees, one plum tree, one walnut tree, two pomegranate trees, one medlar tree, and two red cherry trees.” She held his fingers in hers to count him that Belajut had had, in all, in his orchard ten fruit trees.

“He was surely happy to have ten trees, mama?”

“Yes, indeed. Besides, he cultivated vegetables. Then, he had goat milk, fruit and vegetables. For the time of his
living it was quite complacent a possession. What encouraged Belajut to love and plow his land, was the abhorrent attitude of the villagers toward him. Belajut did not know the reason, but he promised himself¾and his goat¾to dig up the truth, sooner or later. The few times he would show up in the overlooking village, he felt his wool-clad back bitten by strange and fiend eyes. And Belajut was so shy that he dared not clash with the villagers. He just made his visits to the village less
and less frequent. He only attended funerals. As to marriages, when the few people remembered to invite Belajut, he would always s excuse himself after congratulating the newly wed couple with a basketful of fruit and a jar of caprine milk.”

“Had he got some friends?”

She wetted her lips before saying, “Unfortunately, no. His only friends were his goat and the birds pecking at the fruit of his orchard.”

Yidir’s countenance felt for the poor Belajut. “If I were living in his time, I’d have been a faithful friend to Belajut, played with his goat, and helped him taking care of his ten trees.”


Pleased that her growing up child had such a sensitive heart, Maciva said, “I’m proud of you, Yidir. You’re the last hope I’m holding to in my life. May God protect you, my dear son.”


He straightened up to be folded by his mother’s arms. The hug was strong and warm. Maciva’s jet-black eyes started to well as some drops made their way down onto her cheeks, moistening slightly Yidir’s white-T-shirted left shoulder. He felt secure against the bosom of his mother, not knowing the upset noesis of hers when at this very strong moment dormant chagrins got up tormenting her mind unremittingly.


Yidir pulled back as he realized that something had gone wrong with his endeared mother. “Mama, why are you weeping?”
He extended his dwarf hand up under her eyelids, collecting with the tips of his cherubic fingers some drops of her tears.

“Am I crying, truely?” she just retorted, finding no other words to utter at his brusque question, ridden with sorriness.

“Someone hurt you, mama?”

“No. What are you talking about, sonny?”

“I’m a man now. I can combat anybody who dares harm you. Believe me.”

Her smile followed her tears, and if her smile were compared to the sun’s rays and her tears to the droplets of rain, Yidir could extraordinarily contemplate a facial rainbow of his mother!

“Now, you must sleep, sweet bunny. It’s late for a child of your age. Okay?”

“And Belajut?”

“It’s a long fable as I told you. I promise you every night I’ll narrate you a bit of it. I’m sorry, dear son. Tomorrow, I’ve a lot of work to do. And I’ve to wake up before seven.”

He resignedly accepted to turn in. Maciva kissed him on his forehead, checked he was well covered, then switched off the light.


Maciva stretched alone in her double-bed. The darkness of her room made her feel comfortable. She disliked the intense light, be it natural or man-made. The light shone just to let her see the harsh moments she had been hauling, living, shoeing, wearing, espousing, kissing and licking. For her, darkness had virtues: not to see, and not to be seen. She had
not studied philosophy at university, but she could easily make out the philosophy of her own life¾hard life. Wasn't it the bright daylight of August that brought her bad news of her sister, Tinhinan, who committed suicide without warning? Wasn't it, too, the moonlight of May that triggered off her abrupt divorce? ‘You’re divorced!’ he had sentenced. Thrice. Maciva,
found it funny¾and bitter¾that she had married him in May and got divorced from him five years later in the very same month. Fortunately, the irony of fate denied all-all accomplishment as the days mismatched. The two diametrically opposed days were nine days apart. In two months, it would have passed one year since her morale-defeating split. And nine months since her salt-rubbing wound of her sister’s unscheduled, irreversible departure. Twin misfortunes, Maciva thought.


So, wound ought to be different in size, deepness and acuteness. Maciva admitted to herself that her sister’s death was
bigger, deeper and sharper than her divorce. She knew well that there would be no cure to the stigmata left, even though unsolicited, by her big sis, Tinhinan. Actually, Tinhinan was two years older than Maciva. Instead of offering a nosegay of daisies in the upcoming May’s sixth anniversary of their wedding, and as the wind of divorce shifted the direction of pollen, Maciva would disconsolately lay a wreath for her dead sister on August. Mournful summer. She had been so shocked that she barely broke down. Buried beside her long-dead father, Tinhinan could find under what lacked her above: paternal tenderness. Maciva did not need to close her watery eyes to see back the gloomy miasma of that gloomier family day, come to delete a second member of her family nineteen years later. Why have you done this, Tinhinan? Did we need another monumental loss? Have you ever thought about our decades-long grieving mother? It was unfair from your side, dear Tinhinan. You were graduated in History, and now you constitute a harrowing History of our splayed, dismembered family.


Maciva could never recover from the unforeseen parting of Tinhinan on that broiling August. It was she who had discovered the inert body of black-robed Tinhinan; a lasso around her bluish neck, bulged eyes, bloodless face, sere and creviced lips, red-coral-embossed silver earrings, uncombed black hair, shoeless slender feet flailing half a meter above the wet floor of the bathroom. The scene of the horror had been unbearable, mind-paralyzing, and body-electrocuting, beyond screaming. Maciva’s first reaction when she had finally come to was to dash on toward the kitchen. She had been in a pother fishing for the damn knife. Climbing on the chair Tinhinan had used to stage suicide, Maciva cut like a mad, all sobbing, the damn beige rope which was hanging down from the ceiling. She had almost tumbled down from the chair as she held the relatively heavy cadaver of Tinhinan ¾do corpses gain weight? She loosened the loop, slammed Tinhinan’s cheeks for a desperate resuscitation, ear-probed her chest for a more desperate, beatless, shut-down cherished heart…


At this woeful sequence, Maciva stopped living back the familial calamity of that second Monday of damn August. She turned on her belly, slithering her right cheek from one extremity of the pillow to the other, always in the dimness. She would, since her sister’s great loss, experience nightmares before sealing off the eyelids. It was very difficult for Maciva to surmount two three-month interspaced mishaps. Destiny had not pampered her. Not at all. Work in Algiers compelled her to live away from her diabetic mother, shacking in the high mountains. Many times Maciva had tried to convince her mother to come stay with them (she and Tinhinan), then with her, a grass widow living in a heart-rending Algerian society, deeply metamorphosed by scuzzy terrorism and crawling pauperism, while the oil barrel had been crescendoing over one hundred wings.


Her ex-husband became, as the months crept by, sheer anathema to her the seldom moments he deigned popping up to see their child, Yidir. Hocine’s leman might be strict! His compendious verdict of that damn night of mid-May was still piercing her spirit like disintegrating nails of different sizes. How after five harmonious years of marital life he made up his mind parting with her? Though she recognized that her ex had been a good divorcer. In record time, he had left her this apartment situated in the heart of Algiers, paid the due divorce costs, then went his way, lithe that his pettifogger got him things done hastily, neatly and efficiently. His rank, Maciva full knew, alas, permitted him to act up so. Who can deter him not to ? Her
widowed mother? Her gone sister? If Maciva could just find out the reason of his bold decision. She would dedicate the remaining years of her lifespan to unearth the rationale, if any, of her divorce as well as of her sister’s sudden death. It would not be a walk in the park, she owned to herself, before she melted into a sound sleep in the dark.

Sorry, when pasted my text, things went wrong in terms of lines and blanks! I'm innocent!

Good afternoon Mr Meghzouchene I have arranged it somehow, I hope it looks to some extent like the original version now.
We are really honored to have you amongst us and privileged to read your excerpts indeed. This may initiate stimulating literary discussions I hope.

Hi, Sassy
Thanks a lot for your effort I do appreciate!

Enjoy !

Meghzouchene Belkacem