“Where you from?” the caporal asks.
“Bordeaux.”
“I’ve got an uncle in Bordeaux. He works in the shipyards, at the Chantiers de la Gironde. He’s a boilermaker.”
Daniel looks away. His eyes search for Giovanni and find him giving a cigarette and a light to a chasseur alpin19, who protects the flame with his huge beret.
“I joined as an N.C.O., cos you get paid more. It’s for my mother, who’s alone with my little sister. To help them. I’m not like some of those bastards though. You don’t have to call me ‘sir’.”
Daniel stares at him. He looks normal, likeable, blinking and shivering in the wind, digging his hands into his pockets and looking sheepish like any old G.I.
“What about you? Where are you from?”
“Limoges. Well, near there. My parents are farmers. My mother’s on her own though, she has to do everything. There’s a neighbor who helps her out sometimes, but he’s getting old.”
“Didn’t you try to get an exemption?”
“What do you think? They need fresh blood. They couldn’t give a toss about my mother.”
“I’ve got a friend who—”
“Good for him. I hope he makes the most of it. His family are probably even deeper in the shit than us. I reckon in the army they think that if you’ve got a bit of land and a few cows, you must be fine. They’ve got no fucking idea what farming is, those lazy bastards.”
Whistles and shouts. Men moving, gathering. The caporal shakes his hand, crushing Daniel’s fingers in a vice-like grip hardened by calluses.
“I’ve got to go and pick up my men. One thing’s for sure—it’s not going to be a fucking picnic, wherever they put you. Apart from a few pen-pushers in signals or equipment, and even then it can get rough, from what I’ve heard. Watch yourselves, you and your buddy.”
He walks away into the jostling khaki crowd, reaching on tiptoes to see where he’s going.
The day has lightened, the clouds scattering to reveal a wide pale sky where seagulls hover and caw, their cries audible even over the hubbub of men’s voices all piled up on the bridge, pressing against the handrails to stare at the flat, dark sea. The city rises up slowly in front of them, white, absorbing all the light and all their gazes, and Algeria begins for the men with this dazzling chaos under an unbearably blue sky.
Off the boat, the docks still seem to move under their feet and some of them get seasick again. They wait outside a warehouse, beneath a creaking crane whose movements they eye anxiously as it lifts half-tracks and armored cars and jeeps off a cargo ship guarded by gendarmes. There are maybe two hundred of them, vaguely bunched into platoons, sitting on crates or lying on the concrete, smoking and talking in whispers because of the N.C.O.s prowling around them like glaring, barking dogs. But above all because the tumult of the sea and the other men is no longer there to cover their voices, so all the bravado and the jokes and the macho poses, all that bullshit they shared on board the ship like some final fuck-you to the army and its discipline, all that ceased as soon as the first men began walking down the gangway, awaited on the docks by stony-faced officers in sunglasses, pistols at the waist, and by a line of canvas-topped G.M.C. trucks, the drivers sitting with their feet on the dashboards, smoking or asleep.
“Well, this is it now,” says a tall, lanky blond lad with milk-white skin.
Daniel looks up and sees him standing, hands on hips, in full sunlight, nodding sorrowfully. He said the words to himself and he is looking around him at the activity of the port, the passing trucks, the Arab dockers slaving away under the hot sun, some of them in turbans, and yelling in their language and laughing as they rotate a cargo of crates at the end of a chain so it can be unloaded properly. Their skin is almost black. Their faded shirts are haloed with sweat. Daniel too watches the men working, his mind empty, because there is nothing else to do. He lights an American cigarette and tastes the copper flavor in his mouth as he takes his first drag. He has smoked so much that he feels as if he is constantly chewing cardboard. The lukewarm water in his flask, which he drank a little earlier, changed nothing. The taste of aluminium replaced the taste of copper for a moment as he swallowed, and that was all. He smokes and looks at his watch. That’s all he does. Three hours have passed since they got off the ship. In that time, they’ve seen convoys leave and waited for the dozen or so trucks that will take them to a barracks where they’ll be given their combat equipment and their weapons. A capitaine goes to find out what’s happening. They see him drive away on a jeep, and some of them moan a bit, so the sergents bark at them to shut their gobs and wait, and they do, all of them, reduced to this exhausted obedience.
Giovanni and Daniel can’t think of anything else to say to each other. They’re in a daze, one sitting, the other stretched out, his back propped up against their bags, crammed into any scrap of shade they can find with all the others. The sun slowly hunts them down, its harsh unyielding glare and steady progress across the sky the sole proof that time has not stopped. They wipe their foreheads, their necks with a large perfumed handkerchief that a woman’s hand slipped inside their suitcase so long ago, or so it seems. They roll up their sleeves. Flasks are passed around. A siren howls in the distance. Daniel notices only the silence seeping through amid the agitation of the port. The dockers have disappeared and he can no longer see any of the gendarmes who had been supervising the unloading of the armored cars. The cranes are immobile. Even the seabirds have shut their beaks. There are three of them sitting on the roof of the warehouse, smoothing their wing feathers. How many hours have passed? He feels as if he has woken from a nap that’s destroyed his perception of time. He begins to understand what their first enemies will be: sunlight and time. And this is only March. He tries to imagine what it will be like in summer, under the real heatwave.
The capitaine will return on his jeep at the head of a convoy of trucks. They will have to climb on board, with N.C.O.s ranting at them, yelling insults. Suddenly, it will be the most urgent thing in the world to get this bunch of lily-livered pansies, these queers, these fairies to leave this dock where finally a bit of shade is starting to spread beneath the warehouse.
All they will see of Algiers is roads vanishing from the back of the truck, glimpsed cafés with packed terraces, and every one of them will be filled with the same desire for a glass of anything as long as it’s cold, with ice cubes floating in it. They will leave behind them this life full of colors and noise and dust and crowds and cars and kids and carts pulled by bald donkeys led by men frowning in the too-bright sunlight. Daniel will lean out to get a better view, like they all will, curious, and too tired to be worried, and from the overheated shade of the covered truck where they will all be sitting, it will seem to him that this country consists only of light and that it can only be seen through a dazzling glare.
They will enter a camp, surrounded by a cloud of dust and exhaust fumes, and they’ll jump from the trucks in the orange rays of sunset and be led towards a sort of bunker where they will have to wait again for a supplies officer who will get his underlings to distribute uniforms that stink of mothballs, telling them, yes, for fuck’s sake, of course it’s the right size, I’ve done this before you know. Not that it’ll make any fucking difference when you’re long-marching through the desert or you’ve got fells20 on your ass, it’s not a fucking fashion parade you know, they shoot you no matter how elegant you look, these men couldn’t care less if they put holes in a perfectly fitting uniform or a potato sack cos they know there’s meat inside either way. So the supply officer’s underlings shove piles of khaki clothes at the queuing newbies, go on, you’re done, don’t piss around, get out of here, there’s people waiting you know. On the other hand, the adjutant is more careful about the shoes he gives them, saying yes it matters cos your feet’ll swell up if they don’t fit, here you either walk properly or you die, got it, you bunch of pricks? And get your asses in gear cos w
e’ve got to have our soup tonight, fucksake, and now follow the sergent to the armory to get the rest of your stuff.
Rifles shouldered, carrying their kit, helmets hanging from their wrists like women’s handbags, they will hold their uniform rolled up under their arms and will drag themselves over to a huge tent and drop their equipment on a camp bed before escaping to the shelter used as a canteen, hurry up, chop-chop, curfew at twenty-one hours, we leave tomorrow at six, so go to sleep and no wanking, you can think about your girlfriends another time.
Around midnight, they will be torn from a fragile sleep by gunfire, shouts, orders, and through gaps in the canvas tent they will glimpse the cold gleam of flares. The sergent will tell them to stay in bed while he walks to the doorway of the tent, sub-machine gun in hand, to see what’s going on. They will hear brief bursts of fire, closer, more muffled, it’s the watchtower machine guns firing back, the sarge will say, returning to his bed.
“Is it often like this?” a voice will ask in the blackness.
The men will all be wide awake, eyes bulging in the dark, and they will all shrink into the canvas of their beds, as if to avoid the trajectory of a stray bullet, already crushed, already pinned down by what they do not yet dare call fear. They will see the incandescent end of the sergent’s cigarette glow and the smell of Virginia tobacco will spread through the air above them and he will cough before saying in a hoarse voice:
“Every time a new load of grunts arrives. The only people who say there’s no war here are those fucking politicians. Welcome to Algeria, lads. Sleep well.”
He will end this speech with a little rattling laugh and they will hear him take two or three more drags on his cigarette then, almost immediately, start snoring, like a peaceful beast.
17The first line of Baudelaire’s poem “Recueillement.” Translated into English as “Meditation” by Robert Lowell, this first line reads: “Calm down, my Sorrow, we must move with care.”
18Trou de balle can mean both “bullet hole” and “asshole.”
19The chasseurs alpins are the elite mountain infantry of the French army.
20Slang term for Algerian armed rebels.
14
Two weeks. Two weeks, ten hours a day, they’ve been working on this, him and his men. Couchot’s customers, acquaintances, relatives, friends and enemies have been interrogated, hassled, searched. Nothing. Watertight alibis, non-existent motives, rock-solid integrity. Innocent angels stunned by the questions the nasty cops ask them, gobsmacked imbeciles who barely even understand what they’re being asked and above all why they are being bothered about all this. At worst, law-abiding bastards completely unconnected with this case.
Like that Robert, that little pimp, a complete unknown until now, who put the kid to work in an attic with various pedos before selling her to the Crabos. Upon enquiry, it turned out his real name was Gaston Daumas, a crook from the Porte de Pantin who took refuge in Bordeaux after a settling of scores—three men dead on the carpet, and he was very nearly the fourth. Their colleagues over there seemed pretty pleased to know that he was far away, saying they hoped the warm, humid south-western climate might soften him up and do him good. They were reassured to know where he was, just in case, but they had nothing to hang on him, no really awkward questions to put to him.
He coughed up the truth about little Arlette without any difficulty. Yes, he put her to work at the Crabos’ request, because he owed him a few favors. No, he didn’t know where she was, but he knew which gang had picked her up, and old Crabos had sent him word from Spain not to move, to keep a low profile because this whole thing had nothing to do with him. This must be someone settling old scores, lancing old boils, burning the contents of skips where unburied corpses lay rotting.
Darlac slapped him around a bit, but soon gave up: this queer could take a beating, and he was obviously scared to death. He must have double-crossed a big shot in Pigalle to have hitmen after him like that. One day they would find him filled with bullets from a .45 and they wouldn’t put much into effort into identifying the killer: the Paris boys would pick up the cold meat. The world was so much more peaceful when everyone just minded their own business.
They didn’t even get anything from little Arlette’s parents. They’d had to wait for the father to sober up a bit before they could interrogate him, waiting in that filthy kitchen of his, between a table still covered with plates where last night’s dinner had gone cold and a sink filled with dirty crockery; they’d had to wait for him to drink a bottle of water and make himself puke in the scullery that they probably used as a toilet, before he stated, sitting ramrod straight in his chair so he wouldn’t fall off, his skin greyish-green, that he didn’t even remember when his daughter—a nice kid who was always very kind to everyone, and who had done well at school—had left the family home. When he was asked why he hadn’t told the police about her running away, he had mumbled that he’d expected her to come home of her own accord, seeing as she was better off here than outside. The two detectives grew weary of listening to his stammered drunkard’s answers and watching his shifty eyes. They stood up suddenly from their rickety chairs so they wouldn’t start beating him up and warned him that it would be better for his personal safety if he didn’t tell porkies or forget anything.
The mother, disheveled, her eyes red and swollen, stared in terror at the policemen, leaving most of the talking to her husband who could answer their questions better because he knew more about that kind of thing. Her daughter used to help her a lot around the house, cleaning and looking after the little ones. A real little woman, she was, serious and all that, could easily have been a schoolteacher. And she moaned because now she had to bring up the four that were left on her own, one of them a little nipper only a year old who screamed like a stuck piglet in a cot at the foot of his parents’ bed. “We do sometimes wonder if it’s normal that he bawls like that all the time. My husband says maybe he needs some injections to calm him down.” They couldn’t get any more out of this defeated woman who mourned her eldest daughter, burned alive, between whining about the poverty that oozed from the walls, soiling everything in this hovel and making the children sick and mean.
Faced with such misery, the cops retreated and informed the social workers because of that nipper in his cot, with his bulging eyes and his skinny limbs shaking, and because of a little girl they saw hiding behind a door, wearing nothing but a pair of shorts and an undershirt in this icy hellhole, her arms covered with nasty bruises, an imbecilic smile on her cracked lips.
So this is what is running through Commissaire Darlac’s sorrowful mind as he walks towards the church of Saint-Pierre under a grey sky, through the damp air that sticks to the city between rainstorms. For a few days now he’s been imagining himself as a policeman in Nice or Marseille. He’d be like a fox in a henhouse there, without having to be a two-faced bastard and salute commissaire divisionnaires and kowtow to capitaines, in those cities where the sky is blue and the air so corrupt that no-one even thinks of holding their nose. But he would have to make new connections, new contacts, prove himself all over again, and that would require too much effort and, above all, too much time. And as now he’s at an age when time seems to speed by, this thought calms his Mediterranean fever and he glares up at the threatening sky and draws his head in, dreading the coming rainstorm more than some divine judgement that he doesn’t give a shit about.
Here in Bordeaux, he knows everyone. In a way, he’s one of the princes of this little kingdom that appears so peaceful. As if to prove this idea, he pushes open the glass door of one of his baronies, “chez pierrot,” and breathes a sigh of relief as he spies Francis at the back of the bar, sitting at a table in front of a cast-iron stew pot, digging out spoonfuls of meat and sauce. There are about ten customers in there eating lunch. Local shopkeepers, traveling salesmen, greysuited pen-pushers. Some of them are alone, others talk very quietly. Whispered conversati
ons and the clink of cutlery and crockery.
Sitting at the table with Francis is a young blonde woman who the commissaire would think pretty were it not for the make-up plastered all over her face and the false lashes that make her blue eyes look devoid of all expression. She wipes up the sauce from the bottom of her plate with a hunk of bread and finishes her glass of water. The two men nod at each other, and the cop sits down with a sigh, taking off his raincoat and unbuttoning his jacket. The girl does not react at all, does not even look up at the man who’s just sat down. A waiter brings her a large cup of coffee in which she drops three lumps of sugar and begins to stir slowly, eyes lowered, apparently absorbed by what she is doing.
“Have you eaten?”
Darlac shakes his head.
“Roger! Bring a plate for my friend! We’ll share it. Nothing fancy!”
Darlac watches as a glass of wine is poured for him, then drinks it in big gulps as if it were water. He turns around to look at the entrance.
“You expecting someone?”
“No. It’s just that these days I don’t like having my back to the door.”
Francis clicks his fingers under the girl’s nose. She bats her long eyelashes, holding her cup pressed to her lips.
“Didn’t you hear what he said?”
The girl looks blank, then turns to Darlac as if she has only just noticed him.
“Go and drink your coffee somewhere else and leave us alone. We’ve got stuff to talk about. Afterwards, go to my flat and wait for me, and don’t move. Understood?”
The girl gets up without a word, eyes lowered, taking her coffee with her, and sways over to the bar where she hops onto a stool. Darlac sits in the still-warm chair she has just vacated and watches her go, sizing up the flawless body perched on high heels.
After the War Page 20