Kenza Rachid died in the Concorde crash, but few know her name. She hadn't bought a ticket. She wasn't on the plane. And she was Algerian. It was only her first day at work. When Air France flight 4590 crashed into the roadside Hotelissimo near Roissy airport on July 25th, it killed 109 passengers and crew and four hotel chambermaids. The women - among them Kenza - were due to leave work at 5 p.m., a quarter of an hour after the catastrophe. In the wrong place at the wrong time, these forgotten victims of the Concorde could never have paid the 50,000 French francs fare for a ticket to New York.
Rajeenee Chundunsing (41), from Mauritius, was raising two children alone and had worked at the Hotelissimo for a year. Ewa Lipinska (18) and Paulina Cypko (19) came from a small industrial town near the Czech border in Poland. The fourth, 19-year-old Kenza, had dual French and Algerian nationality and was the hope of an immigrant family from nearby GargeslesGonesse. She'd been hired the day before.
For three million Algerians living in France, the death of Kenza Rachid has special resonance, because her family's experience so closely resembles their own. The youngest child of a retired petrol station attendant and a cleaning lady living on welfare payments, Kenza was the only child of the Rachid family to obtain her baccalaureat in French. She received her results - 15 out of 20 - just a couple of days before she was killed, but never had a chance to tell her parents, who were on holiday in Algeria. Although Kenza's death passed almost unnoticed in the French press, it was widely covered in Algerian newspapers, and large crowds are expected for her burial in the family plot in her parents' home town of Bejaia, on the coast 160km east of Algiers. "This is a national tragedy," Abdelghani Amara, Algeria's consul in Pontoise, told me. "She was a wonderful girl, the pride of the family, the only one who'd succeeded."
Like most of the families of Concorde victims, the Rachids have not seen their daughter's body and do not know when it will be given to them. And they don't know how they will survive without her. Kenza's parents cannot read or write, and her older brothers are rarely home. "Kenza organised all her sick mother's medicine," Dalila Driss, a family friend and neighbour explains. "She did the insurance papers, everything administrative - she was the pillar of the family."
The Rachids are from the Berber Kabyle minority, many of whom are Paris taxi drivers and cafe owners. For three generations they've clung to their identity, returning home to Bejaia every summer. Kenza's grandfather left his wife and children behind in Kabylie when he came to work in the canteen of the Simca car factory at Poissy in the 1940s. Her father, Madjid, now 61, came to join his father in France in 1957. Madjid's family later found a bride for him back in Bejaia; she was Tassadit, 12 years his junior. He brought her to Paris where she became a concierge near the Porte de Clignancourt and Madjid pumped petrol across the street. The family moved to the flat where they still live in GargeslesGonesse when Kenza was three. Almost by miracle, they were unscathed by the 1954-62 war of independence and by the violence that has wracked Algeria since 1992.
Garges is an immigrant dormitory town between Paris and Roissy airport. Abdelkader Zaoui, the local imam, says half of its 40,000 residents are Muslims. As you drive down the main boulevard, you could easily think you were in Algiers; almost all of the faces at the open air market beside the train station are Arab and African. The 1970s low-income apartment blocks are truffled with satellite dishes. The walls of a disused shopping centre and municipal auditorium seem to ooze rust and damp.
Shoes are lined up on the landing of the Rachids' fourth floor walk-up, a Muslim custom intended to keep street dirt out of the home. Madjid and Tassadit wander around the apartment as they have every day since their daughter's death, dazed by the catastrophe that has befallen them, unable to resume any semblance of normal life. Their silent younger son Kamel lumbers in and out. He wears gold jewellery and unlike his parents and neighbours does not remove his shoes when he enters the apartment. Questions about the other, absent son Hafid are evaded.
Tassadit is dressed in Kabyle fashion, with a scarf tied turban-like on her head, and a long, brightly coloured dress. Madjid is a slight man with fine black hair and thick eye-glasses, more reserved in his grief than his wife. The attention of family, friends and doctors has focused on Tassadit, who
has had breast cancer and suffers from high blood pressure and fainting spells. "It hurts me like it hurts her mother," Madjid tells me, as if asserting his own right to grieve. "She was my daughter too."
Tassadit sits behind a low table, staring into space as she clutches a page from the morning's Le Parisien tabloid. Her fingers are black with the newspaper ink, and from time to time she shifts her stare to the blurry little medallion photo of her dead daughter, in the corner of a larger picture of Tassadit collapsing at the Church of the Madeleine memorial ceremony. The original - of Kenza in a gondola on a school trip to Venice - sits before her on the table, but Tassadit seems interested only in the newspaper medallion; it is the first public recognition of her daughter's death, more than a week after the Concorde crash.
Most of the Rachids' images of Kenza's 19 years are small ID photos taken in photo booths. There is a little girl of 10 with bright eyes wearing hoop earrings and a Batman T-shirt; Kenza's Algerian identity card dated 1996; Kenza with her favourite cousin Wahiba in Algiers against a Manhattan mural back-drop; Kenza with Wahiba wearing sunglasses, their legs sunburned from the beach. She is especially proud of a framed photo of Kenza as bridesmaid at the wedding of the daughter of Tassadit's best friend, Djida Driss (54), from across the street in Garges. "Her hair was a metre long. One of the boys told me she was the prettiest girl in Garges," she murmurs.
Tassadit desperately wanted a daughter. After her arranged marriage to Madjid, her first baby, a boy, was stillborn. She had Hafid and Kamel. Then the doctor told her that her health was too poor to keep having children. "I said I wouldn't stop until I had a girl. The day the sonogram showed me a girl, I was so happy I couldn't believe it. I called her Kenza because it means `little treasure'."
"They did everything together," says Djida Driss. "Shopping, cooking. Kenza used to say she didn't miss not having a sister because she had her mother."
Djida and Tassadit met in France, but their families are from the same area of Kabylie and are distantly related through marriage. The day after the Concorde crash, when Djida learned that Kenza had been killed, she telephoned her husband Ahcene, who was staying near Bejaia. He went to the Rachids' Algerian home, which has no telephone. "He was only supposed to ask them to phone me, but as soon as she saw his face, Tassadit begged him to tell her. Then she fainted. On the way to the hospital she tried to throw herself out of the car - she wanted to die too."
Djida's daughter, Dalila, was the last of Kenza's loved ones to see her alive. A few nights before the Concorde crash, the 34-year-old nurse's aide had picked Kenza up at the Pizza Hut in Drancy where Kenza worked as a waitress. "She finished late - after 11 - and she was afraid to take the train home. In the car, she told me she was quitting the pizzeria to go back to the hotel where she'd worked the summer before. She didn't like cleaning rooms, but at least she would finish early. They kept phoning her, begging her to come back. She was taking driving lessons, and she wanted to buy a car, to be more independent. She said after a few weeks we'd go to Algeria for a holiday. We talked about visiting Turkey next year. She was happy." In Garges's immigrant ghettos, where so many young people fall into drugs and crime, it was Kenza's motivation, her ambition of becoming a medical secretary or an elementary school teacher - and her determination to work, save money, pass exams - that made her different.
A week after Kenza was killed, a man and woman from Air France came to the Rachids' small apartment to talk about compensation money. The family sent them away, saying they wanted to consult a lawyer. "I don't want money, I want my daughter," Tassadit says hopelessly. The sum alluded to by insurance experts - as high as a million dollars - could drastically change the life of this broken family. In air crashes, compensation is usually a function of the victim's age, nationality and salary, but Abdelghani Amara, the Algerian consul, is determined that Kenza's relatives should be treated like those of the richest German who died on the Concorde. "Air France told me they would give everyone the same amount," he says, recalling that Kenza also had a French passport. "For insurance purposes, she is a European."
Imam Zaoui stops by to see the family. Madjid and Tassadit do not understand the Koranic verses which he cites as proof that Kenza has gone to heaven - Kabyle, not Arabic, is their first language. But they seem comforted when he tells them that their daughter is a martyr. "The Prophet Muhammad told his followers that the woman who dies in childbirth, people who die under rubble - like our dear sister Kenza - are martyrs," he explains, as tears stream down Tassadit's face. "In the Prophet's time there were only camels, no means of mass transportation. But wise men have interpreted his words to apply to catastrophes such as the Concorde one. When normal people die, God asks them, `what have you done with your life?' But children, very old people and martyrs are exonerated from judgment."
Yet faith is little comfort to Tassadit. Djida Driss stays with her friend at night. "She doesn't sleep or eat. She feels guilty; she says, `I killed her'. She could have made Kenza go with them to Algeria, but she didn't," Djida explains. "She walks in circles or stands on the balcony, watching the path Kenza used to come home. She won't take anti-depressants; she wants to be conscious."
Tassadit takes me into Kenza's bedroom, with the mauve flowered wallpaper the dead girl had chosen the year before. "She loved clothes - brand names," she says, pulling trousers and jumpers from the imitation pine cupboard. The labels are from Etam and La City, inexpensive French women's shops. Half-price tickets from the summer sales hang from several. "I couldn't refuse her anything. Whatever she wanted she bought," Tassadit says. And I imagine her mopping floors in the school down the road to pay for Kenza's clothes. The balcony door is open. "I would stand here and wave and say, `Kenza, Kenza' and she'd say, 'Don't shout Mom!' I was always in such a hurry for her to come home." As she speaks, Tassadit holds a trembling hand out, as if gesturing to her dead daughter. There are clouds in the sky beyond. And planes taking off from Roissy.