by Mike Bond
Feeling an itch on his ankle, Cohen glanced down. A yellow-spined cockroach fat as his thumb ran under the baseboard. “Life's a punishment, then, visited on survivors?”
The colonel laughed lightly. He spoke in Arabic to the soldiers grouped behind him. Indifferently they moved away; four settled by the door, rifles at ease; the others clustered at the bar. The colonel faced Cohen. “Now, where do you come from?”
“Now? Why?”
“Few étrangers come to Algeria. Since the tragedy last year at Munich our borders are difficult to cross.” The colonel slipped his olive kepi back from his forehead, exposing inky curls. “Where did you cross?”
“I come from Morocco.”
“Ah, vraiment?” The colonel slid down a little in his chair. “A Fascist country. The King and a few who drive Mercedes. The hungry millions. Soon we'll be at war. Vraiment,” he sat up, “you come now from Maroc?”
“Vraiment. Why should that matter?” Cohen's stomach tensed round his meal; wine burned his throat.
“That border is closed. Normalement, it is impossible to cross.” The colonel's fingers flitted like spider legs over his glass. “So where did you cross?”
Cohen yawned, covering his mouth. “Don't remember. Some sleepy little town.”
“Ahh. We seem a nation of sleepy towns? It must have been either Taourirt, Nador, or Sidi bel Abbès?”
“Can't recall. Maybe Nador.”
“Ah, my friend.” The colonel's black eyes brightened beneath their hooded lashes. “Nador's a hundred kilometers inside Maroc, not on our border.”
“I must've come that way.”
“So – you come from the south? You don't look so tanned to have been in the Hamada – the desert.”
Cohen shrugged. It was twenty feet from the table to the soldiers leaning against the bar, another ten feet to the four waiting by the door. No back door, either. Can't run anyway. It's over, Paul. You're on your own.
“Did you like it in Nador, the desert?” The colonel's aristocratic features were equatorially bronzed, his nose narrow and pinched at the bridge, his slender mouth animated, almost friendly.
“Yes.”
Sadly, the colonel shook his head. “Nador's on the coast, mon ami, not far from the Spanish colony of Melilla. There's no crossing in the Hamada.” He sighed reluctantly. “Now I must see your passport.”
“Why?” Cohen shoved forward. “Why harass me – I'm a visitor to your country – don't read Arabic. Merde de Dieu – one name's the same as another!”
“On the visa in your passport will be the name of your sleepy village.”
“I got my visa in France!”
“Surely they stamped it at your sleepy town!”
“It's with my things – at the house of my friends. They brought me here, in a 403, from Maroc.”
The colonel raised his eyebrows, nodded as if in understanding. He drained his glass, stood. “Can I get you one? It's tea.”
Cohen shook his head, pushed aside his plate, tucked Noces into his shirt. The colonel halted to speak with the soldiers at the bar, returned with another glass. “We must talk.”
“I have to go.”
The colonel raised one finger. “I'll tell you an interesting story…” He dragged his chair closer to the table. “Nearly twenty years ago, when our revolution began, I was a student in Algiers, intending to learn many languages and cultures, for I knew all humanity was one. Our differences were only…misunderstandings.” He fingered his breast pocket for a cigarette. “I returned to Ghardaia for holiday. My family and their home were gone. Also the neighbors.” He glanced at the match in his fingers and dropped it to the floor, leaned forward to crush it with his boot. “French bombs. There was nothing to bury. I joined the maquis.” He waved away smoke. “I've been a warrior ever since.”
“So the killing of your family made you also a killer?”
“But never of women and children, of families. Only of other men, other killers with weapons.”
“Why tell me this?”
“Now another country, a so-called ‘great’ country, is bombing women and children in Asia, and they also hunt someone like you. They will not say why, so I am curious to know whether he is a warrior, too, in his way.”
Cohen laughed. “No one's hunting me, thank God. I'm a simple wanderer, hardly a warrior.”
“How good. How much safer.” The colonel wrinkled his aquiline nose. “Tell me, what could a young American do that his country would hunt him? With unusual ferocity – intensity.”
“Not being American I'd hardly know. He must've broken some law.”
“Yes – you're Irish! Right?” Squinting against the smoke, the colonel finished his cigarette and dropped it with a hiss into the dregs of his tea. “Kennedy was Irish, too. He's still loved in Algeria.” He put on his kepi. “When we Algerians began winning our revolution, the French screamed to the Americans for help. Terrible days those were! True, we were winning, but everybody was dying. Everyone who did not die lost a brother, a sister. More than a million young people died; vraiment, we could not have fought much longer. Then Kennedy told the French no – that Algeria should be free! How often I've wondered…Eh, mon ami?”
“Wondered what?”
“Who they are, and why they killed him.”
“I still wonder.”
“I thought so. In many countries, Europe, Latin America, Africa, it is said by those in the intelligence services that your CIA killed him.”
“Ireland has no CIA.”
“True. But then, it is that same CIA that now hunts one Samuel Cohen – a half-Jew born in Ireland – stating that he last was seen near Tipasa, having arrived by ship in Algiers.”
Cohen suppressed another yawn. “Very interesting, but I must go.”
“Wait, there's more. I'll get another.” The colonel took his glass to the bar, smiling and jostling with his men, Cohen suddenly aware of their jibing laughter, the nasal yowl of Arabic music from the juke box, the pinging of pinballs. Why play with me? Get it over with. You waiting for me to break, run? So your men can shoot me?
“Why all this talk?” Cohen said when the colonel returned.
“Que c'est compliquée, la vie! So few things what they appear. Kennedy's death, and then his brother's, seem to have passed into history. But they are enduring tragedies for the people of the world. Since then your country has descended into the abyss, become the enemy of peace and fairness, the enemy of liberty and evolution. Evolution, mon ami, is life!”
The colonel lit another cigarette. “How many children did America kill in Vietnam? Hundreds of thousands? A million? In our own revolution so many little ones killed by the French, or from our own doing…Do you know, my friend, children die better than men?”
Ashes fell from his cigarette; with the side of one hand he wiped them off the table edge into the other palm and dropped them in the ashtray. “It's why I don't believe in a God – no God could allow what I've seen.”
In the lateness of the evening the bar had quieted; beyond its steamy windows, wraiths of mist converged and melted in the street. “How much better,” the colonel said, “if just one more child had lived and I had died. After our victory I found I'd lost everything. Since then I've never wanted children, not in this war – not waiting for the bombs to fall.”
“Bombs?”
“You Americans. The great big ones. The last bomb, the last laugh. Do you realize, mon vieux, there will be a last bomb, a very last one? Will it be, I wonder, Russian or yours?”
“I am Irish.”
“Yes, I forget; my mind wanders. I say those years are gone, then I sit alone and they all come back. Sometimes I return to Ghardaia – it's always a mistake but I do it – and I see those years haven't passed at all. They're still here. Right now inside me! Ah!” He crushed out his cigarette. “Mon ami, time's a fiction.” He sat forward, grinning. “So why does America hunt you?”
Cohen looked round the Les Champs Elysées. All in a moment
he felt homeless, not solely in this sleazy foreign waterfront bar with its jagged Arabic accents, its wailing music, its strange odors of khaki, mint, kefta, sweat, and seafoggy dirt, its truculent soldiers and the insidiously friendly colonel. Homeless not only in Oran, city of The Plague, or in Algeria, where the Christians had persecuted then fled the Moslems, and now the Moslems persecuted each other, not only on this arid edge of Africa lured by the sea and tortured by the desert, not only far from the country he had once loved and that now hunted him. No, he realized, I am a homeless in the race of man – a stranger there, alone.
He smiled at the colonel. “It's kind of you to worry for me. If I were this person, I'd imagine they hunted me because I'd interfered, perhaps by accident, with a secret operation hostile to another nation, and that my friends have all been killed. But I'm a tourist, a wanderer, an étranger, and I wish only to pass peacefully through your country.”
“Ah, mon ami, as an étranger you stand out here. Why not travel to another place where you speak the language, where you fit in?”
“I'd imagine they'd be hunting for me there too, with greater intensity.”
“For tonight, then, where do you stay?”
“A hotel.”
The colonel noted his watch. “It approaches midnight. The hotels are closed.” He removed his kepi, fingered the rim. “You are the guest of my country, welcome at the home of my uncle.”
“You are kind, but no.”
“Vraiment, it might be safer. Wandering the streets you might be taken for that American. Your CIA works closely with our criminal element – drug smugglers, prostitution, the like – they call it ‘liaison with private enterprise,’ I believe.” The colonel clunked down his glass. “Since you resemble this…this Sam Cohen, you'd be wise to avoid them.”
He stood. “The Irish are great soldiers. The Wild Geese, were you not called? It will be my uncle's honor for you to stay in his home.”
Cohen stood also, pain shooting through his knee. “Thank you. I'm happy to sleep on your floor.”
The colonel scoffed. “We are now a Moslem country. And in a Moslem country one does not treat a guest so.” He paused for a moment with the soldiers, then held open the door. A smile glinted at them from the cluster at the bar.
THEY CLIMBED THROUGH twisted, wet streets into the city's core. There were no cars, few faces. The colonel's boots crunched on the paving stones. “When I walk these streets at night I live it again: the sirens, bullets, plastiques. Corpses, bloody holes in the walls. Here,” he swung his hand at a street corner where the cobblestones shone dark with mist and thick in their seams with ordure, black rotted banana peels, goat manure, the wind-borne plastic and sand of the city, “here died my closest friend. At twenty-two he spoke five languages, an economist. He was crippled – couldn't walk without crutches. A week before the end, the French propped him up against this wall and shot him. At the end they were shooting everyone, everyone. So many times I've passed this corner, looking for him, wondering why, why, why? Do you know why?”
It was a place where men and dogs urinated, a whitewashed wall pockmarked as lava. In its center, at chest height, the concrete looked like bread gnawed by a rat. “Thousands of bullets it took, that wall. Where's the blood of all the young people who died against it? What's it nourished, their blood?”
“You don't speak like a revolutionary.”
“I was never a revolutionary. In this war I have seen French kill Arab, Arab kill French, Arab kill Arab, so I have learned that political causes are created solely so we humans can kill each other. But I believe in revolution.”
“So do I.”
“Ah.” The colonel leaned back. “Why?”
“Because the world's divided into a few who eat and many who are hungry, because the few won't turn from their pursuits to share equally with the hungry. Because democratic governments, in that they're manipulated by money, become little more than devices to protect the rich from the poor.”
“You speak of America?”
“Particularly, yes. But other places as well. No doubt Russia, too.”
“Surely.” The colonel turned and continued the climb.
“How war simplifies! Live or die.” He breathed heavily. “Later, it's easy to miss that simplicity. Words lose their meanings.”
“I do not believe in words.”
They entered a dark, unpaved alley, at its end a dimly lit doorway, and above it a tall concrete silhouette. The elevator entry was open and smelt of urine. “My uncle,” the colonel said, “is away in Constantine.”
THE APARTMENT WAS large and well-furnished in French colonial style. There was an odor of incense and a vague reminder of broken sewer pipes. The city glimmered through fog-stippled windows.
“I do not know your name,” the colonel said.
“Joe.”
“Come, Joe, have a glass of wine with me.” He grasped Cohen's wrist as they sat at the flecked formica table in the compressed kitchen. “I would do anything for peace.”
Under the flyspecked kitchen bulb Cohen could not ignore the blearied eyes, the black stubble, the sour breath, the sallow undershirt with coiled hairs peeping from its neckband. “It's just a word, peace,” he said. “It doesn't mean anything.”
The colonel lit another cigarette, pinched a fleck of tobacco from his lip. “One night, when I was a boy, I was studying French, lying before the fire in the room where my mother was weaving and my father mending a donkey saddle, my three little brothers playing beside me – and I was caught suddenly by a page of vocabulary. There were words for different things, like spoon or mirror or tree, and in the midst of them was mort, as if death were only a thing like a mirror or a spoon, of no greater significance.” He blew smoke upward, away from Cohen's face. “Right then I realized only two words count, in any language: life and death.” He rinsed the glasses in the sink, put away the wine, showed Cohen to a plushly curtained room with a velvet comforter on a double bed, and clumped away down the hall.
Cohen tucked aside a curtain and looked down on the quiet city. A shabby man descended through a dim arc of streetlight, a burlap sack over one shoulder. A rat scampered along the curb behind him and into a gutter drain. A distant ship hooted.
The door swung open and the colonel entered in yellowed long underwear. He crossed to climb into bed. Opposite him, Cohen edged toward the door. “I'm not to sleep here?” he said.
“I also. You're afraid?”
“It's not my style.” Cohen felt his face flush with anger. The small, tanned face beamed up at him from a flounced scarlet pillow. “In truth, it's normal,” the colonel said.
“Not for me.” Pulling on his shirt, Cohen stepped into the darkened hallway, bumping a plant stand that fell with a crash.
“Stay here.” The colonel leaped from the bed. “I shall sleep elsewhere.”
A voice yelled angrily from the floor below. Cohen bent to retrieve the plant; his glasses slipped from his pocket and clattered on the floor. He fumbled for them, fingers sticky with loam.
“It's useless. There are no hotels.” The colonel flicked on a light and followed him into the living room, shrugging on a purple robe. “You'll be caught, mon ami. That'll be the end.”
Cohen reached the door. The colonel came up behind him. “I have this.”
Hand on the knob, Cohen turned. The pistol in the man's hand was small, nickel-plated. Cohen let out a suppressed, irritated breath, gauging the distance between them.
“Don't be foolish. I have killed so many men I do not even know the number you would be.”
“You would kill someone who won't go to bed with you?”
“Perhaps we might sit.” The colonel tipped the barrel toward the kitchen. “I'll put this away.” He flicked on the kitchen light. “There's something I would learn.” He padded barefoot to the sink, retrieved their wine glasses and set them with the bottle on the table.
“What do you want?” Cohen fingered his glasses furiously. One lens was cracked acro
ss the middle, the fissure dark with loam.
“To hear your story. My uncle, who owns this place, once was saved by the briefest of warnings. He was an engineer in the public works, under the French; when the war was dying down and the French were pulling out they called together all the Algerian personnel, supposedly to discuss the transfer to Algerian management. It was a big room – every Arab who'd ever worked for the public works was there, everyone who'd know where the pipes and cables were laid. A French friend yelled a warning to my uncle and he dove under the table as French soldiers ran in spraying everyone with machine guns…My uncle lay under that table for five hours, shielded by the bodies of his coworkers, then crawled through a window and found his way home past French patrols shooting everyone on the streets. So his wife got two horrible shocks – first she was told he was dead, then she opened the door to find him standing there covered in the blood and brains of his coworkers.” The colonel laughed. “They burned all the plans and blueprints, too, the French. For months nothing in Oran worked and no one alive could fix it.” He tilted his chair forward. “Perhaps you have a warning, too?”
“Who'd listen?”
“A few. What if you die before it's told?”
“I'll tell a friend first. He'll speak for me.” Cohen stood. “May I go?”
“A moment.” He left the kitchen and returned with a white silk shirt. “A gift?”
Cohen glanced at the colonel's threaded bathrobe, the undershirt grimy between its lapels. “No.”
“Go, then.”
He descended the stairs rapidly, listening for the elevator's hum or steps behind him. In the alley the air sang with hyacinth, lemon, and sea fragrance cut with whiffs of fresh sewage. Twelve days, Paul. I'm still with you.
The sidewalks rang out his steps. The lights of the port wavered behind curtains of mist. As he crossed the seaside boulevard the still-bright windows of Les Champs Elysées called out. He turned his back and climbed a cyclone fence guarding a long dock. Between two warehouses stood a pile of bald truck tires, one in the center large enough to stretch out on. “It is in giving that we receive.” Saint Francis said that. Perhaps, then, in receiving we give. And I am becoming one who does not exist except for himself, who lives on the leavings, the unreal, who wants nothing more. With Noces as a pillow, and breathing shallowly against the worn rubber, rat shit, and oily dirt smells, he fell asleep.