The day after the deaths of Mohamed, Yousuf, and Ahmed Saidi, Amin and his mother had barely moved from the apartment. They had hardly eaten. Yet, people had come to offer their condolences and bring some food.
Amin and Fatima thanked each visitor and ensured none stayed too long so they could grieve their lost loved ones without constraints.
Grief had struck more than one family, yet nothing seemed to have changed. On the contrary, the divisions between communities appeared to have strengthened. All were buried, without coffins or tombstones, in Albert Schweitzer Square. It was just a patch of greenery bordered by trees. Since the lawn was no longer mowed, this tiny park had taken on the appearance of a prairie. The tallest grass was well over knee height.
Despite the hatred burning in his heart, Amin gave up seeking justice. The Council wouldn't allow it anyway after so much chaos.
He had gone to see his mother, and together they had a real discussion, perhaps for the first time in his memory. He was able to hear his usually reserved mother's opinion.
Her words profoundly impacted the young man, who seemed to be discovering his mother for the first time. They were wise and well thought out: it was time for them to leave and never return to Paris. Their goal was the French countryside, as there was no hope for them in their country of origin, according to her.
Before the blackout, they had a rather unique relationship with Algeria and their family who remained there. Amin had only been there twice and had seen the difference. People there were certainly more respectful, more orderly, but the social climate was far from as favorable as in France.
Like all Algerians living abroad, he loved his country of origin, but staying there for more than a week was complicated for him. He even doubted that Africa wanted them. Cynics would say that governments, not just the Algerian one, were only interested in the money they could send.
According to Fatima Saidi, everything had changed with the blackout. Expatriates had to seek to cross the Mediterranean en masse in search of a better life, an insurmountable challenge for the locals, but it was also possible that Algeria had been hit by the power outage. If so, it must have been chaos.
The difference, therefore, was in the nature of the country, its setting, its inhabitants. In France, they could be considered French if they behaved well and conformed, but over there, in the Maghreb, would they be considered foreigners?
And if another reason was needed, it was the climate. In North Africa, natural resources like water and food were much less abundant than in France. Here, there were fields as far as the eye could see, no deserts, but forests and long rivers where one could fish. In their country, if they went there to rebuild their lives as many others had decided to do, they would end up in the streets of ruined cities or in a plantation where they would toil like slaves. Eventually, they might get killed trying to cross the Mediterranean or even before reaching it.
So, they left Paris with a few belongings. Their neighbors saw them leave but did nothing to stop them. They knew what trials they had gone through and knew they too might have to leave soon if things didn't change.
The Council wanted to limit this phenomenon as much as possible, but they couldn't stop people from leaving if that was their will. Paris wasn't a prison and definitely not built to force people to stay.
They headed north without any specific goal. Unsurprisingly, it didn't take long for them to be noticed and robbed by other groups. They didn't resist, which was probably the only reason they were still alive. Fortunately, they didn't find the gun Amin had hidden on him. However, he decided not to use it for fear of triggering a chain reaction leading to a tragedy like the one that had already struck his family.
Eventually, they reached the city limits. The first fields were in sight. A small group was working under a scorching sun on a plot where cereals and vegetables were growing, using only their hands like in the Middle Ages.
This strange sight stunned the two travelers and prompted them to approach.
Fatima, dressed in a long dark veil, introduced herself to a man in a sweat-soaked t-shirt covered in dirt.
"Um, hello?" she said uncertainly, her son slightly behind, observing the workers with curiosity.
"Ah, hello!" the man said, straightening up with difficulty. "Can I help you?"
Fatima expected to be rejected immediately, but surprisingly, this man seemed friendly.
"We... We come from Paris and... we need food and water. We were robbed on the way."
The man scratched his cheek, leaving brown traces.
"Oh, I see. Well, we don't have much, but we can give you some potatoes. Water is no problem either. We can give you a bottle. It's not supermarket water, but it's better than nothing."
"Thank you! Thank you very much, sir!"
"You're welcome, ma'am. We must stick together, as they say. Especially when everything is falling apart."
Neither Fatima nor Amin expected to receive so much from a stranger. In the reverse situation, the young man wasn't sure he would have done the same. Resources had become too scarce and precious to be given away so freely.
Unable to contain his curiosity any longer, Amin asked the question that had been burning in his mind since he saw these people working. Having never lived in the countryside, he was practically discovering a new world.
"Excuse me, but what are you doing?"
"Well," replied the farmer, "we are harvesting the wheat sown last year. It has reached maturity, so we have to take care of it before it dies on the spot. We've made good progress."
"And you do all this by hand?" the young boy asked, astonished.
"Do we have a choice? Normally, I would use a combine harvester, but without my machines, we have to do everything by hand. We don't really know how to do it, so we manage as best we can. The important thing is to take care of it. Fortunately, I'm no longer alone to take care of my fields."
"You were all alone before?!"
Amin could see part of the fields, and it didn't take a genius to see that it represented a lot of work. As if reading his thoughts, the man responded with a mix of pride and sadness.
"Yes. It was a lot of work, but thanks to the machines, it was possible. I could even take a few days off each year."
This man named Mathieu immediately impressed Amin. Not because he was physically strong, not because he had extraordinary charisma, but because he had incredible willpower. While in Paris he had only seen people panic, think of themselves and their families, and end up tearing each other apart like ferocious wolves, here, Mathieu had continued to work the land because he refused to let his work go to waste.
He briefly told the two travelers how he had taken in strangers who agreed to work all day, from sunrise to sunset, without any guarantee of survival. They dirtied their hands to produce food while others still sought to steal what little was left in the city.
Mathieu gave them, as promised, some potatoes carefully placed in a plastic bag and a bottle of water without even asking who they were, where they came from exactly, what they had done all this time, or where they were going. He asked for nothing in return.
Amin and his mother did not leave. Here was everything they needed. The only problem was that Paris was very close, which was not reassuring. They both knew that to survive, the people there raided neighboring districts and communes. They were very vulnerable.
Thus, Mathieu's farm gained two new inhabitants. The house surrounded by fields was starting to feel cramped.
A week passed in the blink of an eye, and the harvest was done. Unfortunately, despite everyone's efforts, a significant part of the harvest was lost. Wheat doesn't like moisture. For good preservation, it needs to be dry at harvest. Otherwise, it can rot quickly.
Storing this wheat with the rest risked ruining everything, so they decided to abandon the remaining wheat.
They had cut the wheat ears with a knife as it had been a long time since a scythe was used on this small farm. It took them several days of hard labor to harvest the wheat on a single hectare (2.47 acres).
Harvesting the wheat ears was just one step. There was still a lot to do to make bread. What interested the farmers was the grain at the end of the ear. Each ear held about forty grains. On one hectare, according to Mathieu, up to six and a half tons of wheat could be harvested. They could produce a vast amount of flour and thus bread. Of course, the yield could vary from one region to another. Luckily, the land here was very fertile.
However, this would certainly be the last year with such a yield.
As for the rest of the ears, they would become straw, which they could eventually sell to a livestock farmer for the animals.
Wheat grain is not consumed as is: only the inner part of the grain is good. The rest can be given to animals. The problem, as they were starting to understand, was that when they broke the grain, a large part went with the husk. In the past, the grain was taken to the miller who made flour by crushing the grain between heavy stones. It was then sifted to separate the flour from the husk. But there were almost no mills left in France, just as there were very few farmers.
And as one problem never comes alone, a single sifting couldn't recover all the flour from the grain! They didn't know it, of course, but a miller would sift up to seven times! You had to extract the maximum amount of flour from each grain, because anything that wasn't sifted would end up in the stomach of a cow or a horse, for example.
It went without saying that Mathieu's farm was not equipped to do all these things. At best, they could separate the grain from the ear, but even in the Middle Ages, they had more equipment.
They had spread a sheet on the floor of the warehouse and had started to manually separate the grain from the ears, which was long and mortally boring. Everyone was sitting around a table that had been brought there along with chairs, and they were filling small baskets or bowls.
Amin found himself facing Stéphanie, a pretty girl but closed off, just like her sister. From what he could understand, there was a three-year gap between them, just like between him and Yousuf. Amin was almost the same age as Stéphanie, yet he felt like there was a solid wall between them.
He had noticed that it was more than shyness since the two sisters did not talk to him even though they had no problem talking with the other members of the community and even his mother. He had tried to get an explanation, but he had not received any satisfactory answer. Worse, he had even received hostility from the girl with the faded blue hair.
That evening, while he was taking a break, he ran into Mathieu, who had left the room a little earlier after feeling the call of nature.
"Mathieu, um, can I ask you something? Do you know why Stéphanie and Marie are so distant with me? I... I feel like it's just me they have an issue with."
"Ah..."
The farmer did not seem very surprised but rather embarrassed. His evasive look encouraged Amin.
"Did they say something to you? Did I say something wrong, or... I don't know. I know there's something, but I don't think I did anything bad."
Mathieu looked attentively at the young man in front of him. In one week, he looked a bit better, but his way of speaking still left something to be desired. Yet he could see that he was trying to make an effort to better integrate into the group.
"Give them some time, kid. They'll open up to you when they think it's the right time."
"But it's been over a week now!" exclaimed the young man, looking straight into the eyes of the property owner.
The expression on Mathieu's face became more complicated when he saw that this young man was suffering from the situation. He wanted to help him, but could he explain the problem without hurting him more?
"Just know that you didn't do anything wrong. They just need time."
"Do you know what it is? Why do they barely talk to me?"
Mathieu remained silent, showing an increasingly complicated look. Inside, a fierce battle was raging. This hesitation did not escape the young man who could not stand being rejected like this.
"It's... It's not up to me to tell you," he finally said. "It's their life."
"What happened? Tell me!" insisted Amin, fearing he had done something wrong.
The farmer pinched his lips and scratched his chin covered by a dirty beard.
"Very well," he finally conceded. "But I forbid you to talk about it in front of them. Is that clear?"
"Y-yes!" swallowed Amin with a hint of apprehension.
There was a short silence as Mathieu thought about how to formulate his thoughts.
"It happened a few days after the power outage. Marie, Stéphanie, and their parents had decided to leave the city to settle in the countryside. They lived in Saint-Denis. But that night, monsters broke into their house while they were sleeping. Their father went downstairs, and they killed him."
"Oh fuck!"
Shit! That's horrible! So they also lost their father?
"They then went upstairs and found them and their mother. They... they hurt them a lot, and their mother was killed."
There was a long silence. Amin, shocked, waited for Mathieu to continue his story.
"They suddenly found themselves all alone and had to bury their parents in the garden."
"T-that's disgusting! I mean, it's really sad! But I don't get what it has to do with me. Is it because I'm a guy?"
Mathieu shook his head and finally admitted painfully the cause of this distance.
"They were foreigners, Amin. Even though they know you had nothing to do with it, inside, they are scared, or at least they are wary. Don't look at me like that, and especially don't look at them like that. You can't blame them. That's why I tell you to give them time. They will see that you are a good person."
I am a good person? No. No. That's false. I know I'm not a good person. I've also done horrible things. They must feel it. That's how it is.
"Don't take things to heart, kid. What happened to them is not your fault, you have nothing to reproach yourself for. Just be attentive, give them time and space. They will open up more easily. You are doing good work, you don't need to change anything. Understood?"
"Yeah, I get it."
"Good, then I'll go back. And don't worry about these stories. Everyone has their own."