A Fire in the Sun

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My grandfather, George Conrad Effinger, whom I never knew, was a police officer in the city of Cleveland during the Depression. He was killed in the line of duty. This book is dedicated to his memory, growing fainter now each year in the minds of those people who did know him, except for his policeman’s shield, Badge #374, hung with pride in a station house in Cleveland.

We’d ridden for many days out the coast highway toward Mauretania, the part of Algeria where I’d been born. In that time, even at its lethargic pace, the broken-down old bus had carried us from the city to some town forsaken by Allah before it even learned what its name was. Centuries come, centuries go: In the Arab world they arrive and depart loaded on the roofs of shuddering, rattling buses that are more trouble to keep in service than the long parades of camels used to be. I remembered what those bus rides were like from when I was a kid, sitting or standing in the aisle with fifty other boys and men and maybe another two dozen clinging up on the roof. The buses passed by my home then. I saw turbaned heads, heads wearing fezes or knit caps, heads in white or checked keffiyas. All men. That was something I planned to ask my father about, if I ever met him. “O my father,” I would say, “tell me why everyone on the bus is a man. Where are their women?”

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