“Sit down, it’s alright.”
His face is illuminated by the flame of a lighter. He hands him a packet of cigarettes.
“Can we smoke here?”
“It’s fine. We’re protected by the rocks. Anyway, you really think they’d send a sniper to hide out in the middle of the night, just to take out two guys having a smoke?”
Daniel picks out a cigarette. Castel lights it.
“So?” the sergent asks.
“You scared me.”
Daniel takes a drag. Virginia tobacco. Sweet.
“I didn’t scare you. I surprised you. It’s not the same thing. That’s not fear. You don’t know what fear is.”
Thick, drawling voice. Daniel can hear him blow smoke through his nostrils.
“How can you say that? You don’t know me.”
“Yes, I do. I know you better than you think. I’ve seen you suffering for three weeks now . . . I know things about you that you don’t know yourself.”
“What are you, a wizard or something? Can you read people’s minds?”
“No. Your faces. And your feet. The way you walk, the way you look around. The way you hold your weapons and the way you shoot. I’ve seen so many men die that I know how to look at those who are alive.”
“You must be a philosopher.”
Daniel feels Castel’s fingers tighten around his neck and his vision fills with red stars. This man is going to crush his throat.
“Don’t get smart with me. I can kill you just like that if I want.”
He forces Daniel to bend over then suddenly lets go of him. Daniel leaps backwards. All he can see of the man on the bench is a vague mass.
“Sit down, you dick. Of course I’m not going to kill you. There are fellouzes for that. And your own stupidity, when things start heating up.”
A brief, mirthless laugh.
“And no, I’m not a philosopher. Too much brawn and not enough brains, I guess . . . I’m just a soldier, the type of guy that always gets sent to be made into mincemeat so philosophers can continue pontificating without having to get off their fat asses. Just like in the Middle Ages—there are those who pray and those who fight.”
“Don’t you ever pray?”
“Pray to who? Do you know anyone?”
They can hear the sound of the wind in the small valley below them. Castel lights another cigarette. He scrapes his feet on the ground, as if annoyed.
“There’s nothing and there’s no-one, and that’s all there is to it. Life and death. Afterwards, we’re just carrion—like those two Arabs we found the other day. Remember how they stank, those two piles of shit? There’s that, and then there’s nothing. And we’re all the same. Vietnamese, French, fells . . . You swell up, you stink, you ooze, and that’s it.”
He stands up. The bench lists to the side. Daniel sees the sergent’s silhouette above him.
“Come on. I’m going to wash my face and crash out. Five, tomorrow morning. There’s going to be movement in the sector, and we have to find those sons of bitches. You’ll see what I meant about fear, cos it’s not going to be an easy ride like you’ve had up to now. We’re setting up an ambush. With a bit of luck, we’ll put them out of action completely. Shit, yeah. We’re going to hammer them.”
He walks away, dragging his feetthrough the pebbles, mumbling incoherently. Daniel wonders what time it is. Not ten yet, because the curfew bell hasn’t rung.
He thinks over what Castel said about fear. He thinks about how cold it was that day, and of the day that rose so slowly that he prayed to a god—any god—for a little sunlight to finally arrive. In the first rays of dawn he saw birds, all ruffled up, hopping about on the roof tiles close to him, watching this little giant through their minuscule eyes, and he smiled as he threw them a few crumbs of the bread that his mother had left him in a paper bag. He talked to them, and it seemed to him that they listened, that they left and then came back to see if he was still there. He had prayed to them, several times, asking them go and see where his mummy and daddy were and to bring them back to him, and to tell them that he was cold and needed to pee. He had muttered these silly requests to himself and waited for the genie to appear from the chimney. He had hoped his wishes would come true as soon as he had uttered his last words, as happened in the stories his mother told him at bedtimes. But nothing happened, of course. He remembers eating the bit of bread and the saucisson that his father had given him. He remembers the strong, thick taste of garlic. He has never been able to eat it again since.
That evening, as night fell, the skylight had opened and he had seen the face of that man, a beret on his head, his features weirdly shadowed by the corridor light, as if he were wearing a scary mask. He had shivered and moaned at this apparition, before recognizing Maurice and climbing towards him, stunned by fear and numb with cold.
Fear. The fear that had gripped him when he heard those footsteps and yells on the staircase. His mother’s fear, when she began to moan and weep. She took him in her arms and held him tight against her and covered him with kisses, her black hair in his mouth and nose, her tears wetting his face. My sweet little boy. My love. The fear of the hammering on the door, so close to where he stood. “Police! Open up!”
We’ll come back. Wait for us. Stay close to the chimney. Be very careful. Be good. I love you. Mommy and I love you very much, O.K.? Be very careful. Wait like a good boy. His father closed the skylight. His father. Who had come back to the house a week earlier, after being gone for days, as he often was. He reappeared sometimes, his hands full of money and ration coupons. Smiling, joking. Singing all the time. And Mommy would start singing along. She was always waiting for him. He would see her staring through the window at the street.
He tries to remember his father’s face. He remembers his singing, the songs he bellowed at the top of his voice. But his face is a total blank.
Daddy had held him tight, kissed his hair, then closed the skylight.
Doors had banged shut in the street, people had yelled. Sometimes the cops blew whistles. After that, there had been an immense silence.
“Daniel?”
He shivers. For half a second he doesn’t know where—or when—that voice is coming from. So far from here. The memories cling to him. Unable to hold on, he had peed on the tiles. It had run down to the gutter.
“Yeah. I’m here.”
Giovanni. Walking carefully, breathing hard.
“Fuck, I think I’ve had too much to drink. The Parisians had a great time. They’re good guys.”
He sits down. The bench pitches slightly, then stabilizes. Daniel swallows his desire to weep.
“What are you doing here in the dark on your own?”
“Nothing. Just thinking.”
“Not a good idea.”
“I talked to Castel. He was drunk. He told me we’re going to ambush them tomorrow morning.”
Giovanni exhales.
“Well, it was bound to happen. Shit. We’re fucked now.”
“He says there have been fells spotted in the area.”
They fall silent. The night is turning cold. Daniel rubs his hands together. He asks Giovanni:
“Are you scared?”
“Yeah, I’m scared. All the time. I feel like everything’s threatening me. And I’m not just scared of dying here.”
“What else?”
Giovanni sighs. Shifts on the bench and makes it lean sideways again.
“I don’t know yet. If we get out of here in one piece, I don’t know what kind of state we’ll be in. Have you seen the others? The ones who’ve been here for a few months? Have you heard them?”
“We’re going to war tomorrow, Zacco.”
“They’re going to war. I’m not going to shoot at Algerian Resistance fighters.”
“Oh, really? So you’re just going to walk towards them,
smiling and holding up your Party membership card so they’ll shoot in the air cos you’re on the side of the goodies? Have you seen this place? As you said, have you seen the reaction of the others when you try to talk to them, when you try to make them understand? Did you hear that asshole earlier tonight insulting you? For fuck’s sake—they’re the people too, you know! They’re the ones we have to deal with. Anyway, how are we going to get out of this mess if we’re getting shot at, if the guys next to us are injured, or worse? Are we going to start yelling, ‘Ceasefire, comrades! Peace in Algeria!’?”
“So what will you do when you see someone’s face in close-up through your scope? You won’t be shooting a film, you know. You’re the best shot in the platoon, pal. You never miss at two hundred meters, but those are cardboard targets or tins of corned beef. When it’s a fell, a real man of flesh and blood, you’d better not miss then cos Castel and the lieutenant will know that you’ve done it on purpose.”
They fall silent again. As they can’t see each other, on this moonless night, and as the jebel is silent, they are only voices and breathing, motionless in the cold air that moves around them now, leaving its icy hands on their necks.
“Shit, I don’t know,” says Giovanni, after a while. “I’ve drunk too much. I’m not used to it. I feel lost.”
The wind makes the dry leaves tremble in the tree above them. They lift their eyes to this invisible shivering.
“C’était un temps déraisonnable
On avait mis les morts à table
On faisait des châteaux de sable
On prenait les loups pour des chiens
Tout changeait de pôle et d’épaule
La pièce était-elle ou non drôle
Moi si j’y tenais mal mon rôle
C’était de n’y comprendre rien.26
That’s Aragon. I don’t know what else to tell you.”
“I’m sick of your fucking poetry.”
“I know. But it’s the only way I know how to think.”
Giovanni gets up and sighs and stands for a moment, smoking. He blows smoke out softly after each drag. He swears very quietly then crushes his cigarette butt under his shoe.
“I’m going to try to get some sleep. See you tomorrow.”
Daniel listens as he walks away, stumbling over the stones. Poetry. As if this was the right time, the right place. He thinks about Irène and how she loved to recite it all the time too. They’d be a perfect pair, those two pinkos: they could recite poetry while selling L’Humanité.27 It would be cute as hell. Irène and Giovanni. What am I talking about? Irène. Irène.
He realizes he is saying her name out loud. And the wind brings him a scent of thyme and dust, and tickles his shoulders. He shakes out the shiver like a dog.
Night all around them. A deep, chasm-like silence surrounds the headlights of the GMC trucks, the roar of the engines and the noise of men’s voices, like the mouth of a monster hesitating to swallow a toxic prey. Not a star in the sky; nothing but the fathomless blackness of the universe high above the commotion of the platoon as it gets ready to set off. At ground level, the dust is already rising, visible in the vehicles’ luminous beams, drying their mouths already dehydrated from bad sleep and too much booze. Men help each other to climb aboard trucks and sit on benches that kill their backs, even though they haven’t started moving yet. They’re closely packed, so their rifles are held between their legs, loaded, safeties on. In front of each soldier is his bag, with his helmet on top. Bareheaded, they feel the cold only when they climb on board the trucks, so some of them rummage in their pockets to find their caps and warm their shaved scalps.
There are forty trucks on the road, doing maybe fifty kilometers per hour, and the men are shaken around, their spines rolling against the seat back, and they are thrown into each other as the trucks jolt and lurch over ruts and cracks in the ground. They all yell at the drivers to slow down, banging with their boots and their rifle butts, but nothing happens. They call them sons of bitches and the drivers tell them where they can stick it and after a few miles they simply curl up in the fetal position, arms crossed over their knees, asses crushed and backs singing with pain, the soldiers already ground down before the mission has even begun.
About ten kilometers from their quarters is a mountain pass where weapons are transported on the backs of men or mules, where groups of fellaghas come at night to seek provisions from the hamlets located on the edge of the forbidden zone. They will continue over the peaks to seize control of the north side. The south will be taken by Capitaine Laurent’s platoon.
Lieutenant Vrignon, looking wan in the feeble light of dawn, told them all this straight out, standing legs apart on the path they must take later, indifferent to the icy wind that sweeps the spur where the trucks stopped. The men stood leaning against the vehicles, seeking any protection they could find from the Algerian blizzard, and they all noticed Sergent Castel’s approving nod, his respectful mimicry when the lieutenant mentioned the name and rank of Capitaine Laurent.
Above them, the stars went out. While Vrignon continued his long-winded speech, not even flinching in the cold, they drew their heads into their shoulders, pulled their large cotton scarves even tighter over their chins, and their bodies trembled, the muscles petrified, as they stamped their feet.
When the sergent ordered them to start marching, Daniel felt almost happy, lifting the bag that must have weighed at least twenty kilos onto his back and helping Giovanni with his, because they had given him two satchels full of magazines for the machine gun. They walked quite quickly for an hour, the cold from the stones seeping up their legs, the sun rising behind them, pursuing their huge, deformed shadows.
There are about forty of them. They say nothing and most of the time they stare at the path they walk or at the feet of the man in front. Earlier, Daniel saw the cliffs where they are headed blaze brightly in the golden light of dawn. Picked out by the slanting light, even the stones were illuminated, like embers breathed on by the wind. Now, in a white dazzle, he can feel sweat seeping from every pore, streaming over his skin and then drying up like a wadi lost in the sand. He can taste its saltiness on his lips, can feel his eyes burning. He tries to soothe this by rubbing his eyelids with the back of his hand, the way children do when they are sleepy.
When the path descends into a wide basin where thick grass and a few green bushes shine in the sunlight, they take the chance to light cigarettes, pass each other packets of tobacco or lighters and talk among themselves for the first time in two hours, though what they say can be summarized in twenty words, including swear words, plus a few insults offered without conviction, without consequence. Their column of whispers and muffled laughs stretches over more than a hundred meters as they tread close-cut turf sprinkled with blue flowers. Then they all hear the same thing at the same moment: men speaking Arabic. And they all see, on the ridge line at the other side of the green crater, the silhouettes of two goats. In a single movement they crouch down, fingers tight to triggers. The sergent sends a caporal to scout the land to the left with ten light infantrymen who leave their bags in order to move more quickly. They run along the side of the basin, and the only sound is their footsteps, muffled by the firm green ground. Two scouts slip behind an embankment, while the rest continue their progress on the slope, all of them bent double.
The goats line up in growing numbers on the ridge. They do not move, slowly chewing as they stare at the soldiers. Daniel has often seen this sort of backlit line-up at the cinema, when Apache horsemen mass at the summit of a hill before attacking a procession of carriages or a platoon of cavalry. He takes his Garand28 rifle from its holster, pulls out the scope and puts his eye to it.
Giovanni puts a hand on his arm.
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing. Just looking.”
“And what do you see?”
“Those fucking goats.”
A metallic shudder runs through the column of men. Everyone on the alert. The inaudible jingling of slings as they shoulder their rifles. The intensified pressure around rifle butts, pistol grips, triggers.
Just ahead, two men are walking, hands on their heads, surrounded by the herd, which is beginning to descend towards the bottom of the basin. An old man and a tall, skinny kid, as far as Daniel can tell by looking at them through his rifle scope. Each carries a stick, and a satchel. The two scouts arrive behind them and smash them to the ground with the butts of their guns, holding them flat on the ground with a foot on their necks. They are surrounded. Their satchels are emptied out, the contents kicked away or crushed beneath a boot heel. The goats scatter, bleating, taking advantage of the situation to cavort in the grass and finding between the clumps of little bulrushes pockets of water lapping and hissing beneath their hoofs.
The lieutenant sends Daniel and Giovanni westward as lookouts. He yells at the rest to remain high up, except for three whom he tells to set up a machine gun at the top of the slope that the path follows. Next he sits on a rock and picks up the radio receiver, back turned to the troops in order to speak, as if he were making a private call.
Daniel and Giovanni climb up on top of a big rock that overlooks the green hollow. From here, they can see the entire valley that the platoon climbed through, a frozen swell of hills and ridges. The sky is slowly whitening and the light beats down on their eyelids as they scan the few bushes growing stubbornly and randomly in places. But the bushes are too far apart, too scattered to hide a group of fells or an imminent attack. Daniel enjoys imagining the figures of animals or men that he hunts down with his binoculars, evading the capricious traps of light and shadows. Behind him, he hears Castel interrogating the two shepherds in his hoarse drawl, so he turns around and sees the two poor devils on their knees, hands still on their heads. He looks up to see all those soldiers in a circle around them, guns vaguely aimed at them, or shouldered as they smoke cigarettes and drink water from their flasks. Then Castel starts screaming. He smacks the old man on the top of his head, not very hard, though Daniel hears the sharp sound it makes and the man curls into a ball, then kneels up again, protecting his face with his hands.
After the War Page 23