‘Where was he?’ his aunt demanded, in a raised whisper. Aunt Isabelle was all dolled up for town, her lips as vermilion as rhubarb stalks, white cotton gloves, a short-sleeved sundress and crocheted bolero. Her short dark curly hair was pushed back off her face with a thick white Alice band.
‘Over by the trees. You know where. Let’s go.’
From that moment on, the cause of his father’s departure, ‘the accident’, was deemed taboo.
Amid the chatter and agitation, Luc was installed in the rear of the beetle-black, long-nosed Citroën, with its burgundy leather upholstery, next to the silent figure of his grandfather, who, staring directly in front of him, was cradling a rifle. His mother and aunt had stipulated that the windows were to be kept tightly shut in spite of the heat for fear of attacks by bloodthirsty natives. Nose pressed against the glass, Luc stared out. He felt a deep knot of misery in his stomach. His mother was at the wheel in her sleeveless leaf-print sundress and awkward sandals, now speckled with earth, as they descended the long, winding driveway, rolling slowly along the dappled avenue, flanked by bluish-green cedars and pencil-thin Italian cypresses, to the property’s imposing black iron gates. In the distance, beyond the white city of Bône, the sun shimmered and glowed on the Mediterranean.
Although Luc loved the sea, always excitedly anticipating his Sunday fishing adventures with his grandfather, today the boy paid the view little attention. He was craning his head backwards, twisting his torso to catch for the last time, to store in his memory, the image of the shadowed mound of earth that represented his last impression of his father. On either side, beyond the procession of conifers, the clouds of dust and tiny pebbles thrown up by the tyres, the acres and acres of Cambon vineyards were heavy with ripening grapes. Who was left to harvest them? No one. On the car radio, the songwriter-singer Gilbert Bécaud’s darkly brooding ‘Et Maintenant’.
Yes, what now?’
Across the street, as the Citroën exited through the open gates, a young Algerian woman in cerulean blue, wearing a haphazard mix of Western and traditional dress, barefoot, hennaed hands wringing, eyes as round as hazelnuts, marked their departure. She hurled herself towards their car. Her arms, numerous silver bracelets jangling, were lifted heavenwards; her fists were clenched as though preparing to beat against their windscreen, to arrest their departure. She was screaming in Arabic, ‘Murderers! Murderers!’
Clarisse spotted her. ‘Merde!’ she spat, and before the girl could even cross the lane, she gunned the accelerator and the Cambon automobile swung sharply left, the gates closing behind them.
‘Granddad, should we shoot her? Granddad!’
‘Hush, now, boy,’ commanded his grandmother.
No one said another word. Luc concentrated on the young woman’s receding figure, fearing she might pull a gun and fire at them through the rear windscreen.
He held his breath as they proceeded along the lane beside the barbed-wire perimeter fence that protected the lower vineyards of their plantation while the Arab girl shrivelled to a speck that eventually disappeared from sight.
Five minutes later, two other cars joined them. Both had been waiting at the extreme point beyond the estate’s furthest security post, which was no longer manned due to the abdication of all staff. The labour force had returned to their villages to fight with their own. Both of the newly arrived vehicles were transporting French families and their worldly goods, colonials from neighbouring farms more modest than the Cambons’ own rolling hills, both situated a few kilometres west of the village of Mondovi, not far from St Joseph. Now they were a cortège in flight. Strength in numbers, each carrying loaded rifles. At the crossroads, they turned right. From there, the three packed automobiles dipped at a pace towards the sea. A dog barked frenziedly, then gave up, having worn itself out or lost interest.
Luc knew the way to the coast by heart. It was the same route he and his grandfather took when they went to Plage Toche to snorkel, first through the lovely port city of Bône, then habitually to the beach from which their dinghy was launched. Today, exceptionally, they were driving along the city’s principal boulevard, Le Cours, descending directly to the water’s edge, to the commercial port, the third largest in Algeria.
Once inside the city limits, no one within the car spoke. They were silenced by the chaos that surrounded them in the war-torn urban streets: the stop-start of traffic jamming the road; crippled soldiers begging; bedraggled revolutionaries caked in dried blood; the burned-out carcasses of French-licensed vehicles. The dregs of a traumatic war, a victory for the Algerians but far from concluded. Burned-out buildings to left and right. The heartrending cries of women mourning the thousands of bodies still to bury. Lines of military trucks transporting the wounded with their moaning, hollow-eyed faces, while the unclaimed corpses of men, women and children – Europeans, Arabs and Berbers alike – lay strewn about the pavements where no one paid them any attention. Atrocities perpetrated. Those who survived were sick to their teeth with the war, with the rotting bodies and the bloodshed.
Images engraved for ever on the boy Luc’s consciousness.
‘There’s no law and order left in Algeria. Everyone running amok. They’ll be thieving and pillaging soon, whatever they can lay their hands on,’ muttered his aunt Isabelle, in the front passenger seat, beside his mother at the wheel. ‘We should have boarded up the house.’
‘You think it would make any difference? If they want to rob the place, they’ll get in.’
‘And God knows when, if ever, we’ll be back. They’ve won the war. We Cambons will be outcasts.’
In contrast, at the port, all was eerily deserted. The tall palms shivered from time to time, as though in shock, in the non-existent wind. It was a threatening stillness, presaging a desert storm soon to blow up from the Sahara. Not a soul walked the quay. There was little activity on the water, which slicked and sucked and shifted against the land’s man-made boundaries. Neither military nor commercial ships, the majestic liners the French called paquebots, were in dock to offer passage to the fleeing Pieds-Noirs. The President of the Fifth Republic, Charles de Gaulle, perceived as a traitor by many colonial landowners and agriculturalists, had given the order: ‘No transport assistance is to be offered to the fleeing Pieds-Noirs.’ The Pieds-Noirs, the black feet, were the hundreds of thousands of French citizens, French passport holders, white Europeans, born on Algerian soil, who had been the ruling majority in this French colonial state for over a hundred and fifty years but whose power was now at an end. Who found themselves little better than refugees.
‘What now?’
Clarisse drew the Citroën to a halt in the shade of a towering palm, shoved the manual gearstick into neutral, but left the motor running. ‘For God’s sake,’ she yelled, beating her fist against the wheel, causing the horn to sound. ‘Why doesn’t any bloody thing go our way? We have to get away.’
‘Calm yourself, Clarisse,’ hummed Luc’s grandmother, squeezed up against the rear door directly behind her. ‘Don’t make matters worse.’
Isabelle ran a finger down her sister-in-law’s neck but the younger woman shrugged it off. ‘Come on,’ she spat. ‘Let’s make a decision.’
The adults, save for Luc’s grandfather, who stayed put, shoved at the doors and emerged from the confinement of the car to join their neighbours, clustering in a circle, a pow-wow in animated debate. The women’s full summer skirts, bold flower prints against neutral backgrounds, moved gently in the early-morning air as though on springs. His mother’s hourglass figure was cinched in at the waist by a thick patent red belt. The car’s wireless was still on, muted, barely audible. Petula Clark was singing in French, ‘Romeo’, an unlikely hit in continental as well as colonial France at the beginning of that year.
‘Will we go home now, Granddad?’
Luc’s grandfather gave a half-hearted shrug.
Bruno Fabius, a russet-haired date farmer from the upper valley behind Mondovi, a neighbour who had regularly gone hunti
ng with Adrien, Luc’s father, broke from the group, strode towards the Cambon car and stuck his head through the automobile’s open front window, filling the frame. He reeked of pastis, and his eyes were as baggy as knotted handkerchiefs. To Luc, he resembled a semi-shaved coconut.
‘Sorry about your son, sir. Murderous bastards, these Muslims.’
Luc’s grandfather shot a glance towards Clarisse, then lowered his gaze without a word.
Fabius waited awkwardly, the whites of his eyes marbled red, still with his head through the open window. ‘The port’s been taken and closed off,’ he announced, as though to give purpose to his presence at the window. ‘There’ll be no passage for any of us from out of here. All colonials attempting to board ships along this east-coast outlet will be massacred. I’ve told Clarisse. We heard it on the radio on the way down here.’
Massacred?
The coconut, having delivered the bad news, returned to his car.
If they drove home, which was what Luc was hoping with all his heart, their throats would be slashed while they slept. Or so his aunt, the Cassandra of the household, forewarned as she settled back into her seat, lighting a Camel, slinging the match onto the pavement and inhaling deeply.
‘There’ll be no escape from this port. We have to keep going,’ was his mother’s determined decision. ‘Fuck de Gaulle,’ she yelled. Pulling out a pack of Peter Stuyvesant, she lit one with the car lighter. She dragged hard, leaving the smoking cigarette hanging from her lips, then threw herself back into her seat, pressed her sandalled foot on the accelerator and reversed at breakneck speed, almost dismantling a letterbox. ‘Somehow or other,’ she said, as though threatening her loved ones, ‘even if I have to kill for it, we will find a passage out of here.’
‘There’ll be ships sailing from Algiers.’
‘Let’s go.’
The roads were hot, dusty and congested. All day and into the night, they kept advancing, moving west, passing through shelled, smoking villages, bodies ditched for carrion. The two younger women took turns at the wheel while the grandparents and Luc sat bunched together in the rear, crowded by the weight of possessions piled about them. It was a distance of four hundred and twenty kilometres – not a taxing journey from point A to point B, but they were forced to slow, to stop, to wait when they encountered military and FLN guerrilla roadblocks. In other areas, stretches of road had been blown up by the rebel forces, making it necessary to zigzag, to take improvised detours inland, where their lives were at greater risk on lonely rubble roads, and where finding petrol became a challenge, then a concern. When they eventually discovered a broken-down pump, manned by a dark-eyed Berber swathed in scarves, the replenishment cost them a substantial wad of their stashed-away francs.
Dusk, followed by fast-falling night, stole the landscape from the boy’s sight. Luc stared sullenly ahead into the beam of the headlights. Flying insects slapped against the windows, splotching them. A sandstorm was gaining momentum, as though they were driving directly into a swirling blanket of weather. Beaten-up vans and trucks were transporting agricultural goods, cord-secured crops of hay, tomatoes, aubergines, hillocks of food spilling into their vision, disappearing into the night.
Luc listened to his grandfather snoring gently at his side, a comforting sound, and the more alarming whispered exchanges of the two women in the front seats. He wanted them to stop: he needed to wee. He wanted to go home. He feared they might journey on for ever in the rocking vehicle.
By the time they reached the capital, the sun was rising. In spite of fatigue and hunger, they beat a path directly to the harbour, but the roads there were also clogged. The queues filed back a kilometre from the port, Algiers, where the hot desert wind was blowing grains of sand in angry whorls and closing out the daylight. It chafed their flesh, like rope burns, and stung their eyes. It lodged in their mouths and between their teeth. Three massive steamers, les paquebots, hugged the quay. Each was prepared, for a hefty sum, to transport the local French passport-holders who were not resident in mainland France.
‘We’ll find a passage here,’ said Clarisse, but the boats were already spilling over with bodies, shapeless distraught masses wedged tightly together, frantic travellers, European refugees. The Cambons were too late for those sailings. No tickets available at any price. The first was preparing its departure. Low belching horns. Queues and queues of colonials were ahead of them. All fearing for their lives, waiting to escape. Luc’s family joined the line. They hung on, sleeping in the Citroën, buying water, snacks at street stalls, from Berber vendors. They dared not leave the car: it would be stolen, torched, their possessions thieved. But the queues never seemed to lessen.
They lost sight of their neighbours in the other two cars. Their last link to Bône. Havoc ruled. They lacked sleep and washing facilities, and their spirits were sinking. After two days they had obtained no passage and their lives were in danger. In the eyes of the new Algerian power, the FLN, Adrien Cambon was a war criminal. A wanted man. No one knew he was a dead one.
‘Enough!’ yelled Clarisse, tossing the remains of a baguette and a cigarette stub to the ground, both instantly gobbled up by two squabbling black-backed gulls. ‘Let’s go!’
Luc closed his eyes and prayed with all his solemn might that they would return to their house, to the vineyards and his father.
Bypassing Oran, Luc’s mother and aunt – both young females without men – took turns at the wheel. Foot hard against the accelerator, they traced the coastal highway into Morocco. Roads designed and engineered by the French, built with the sweat of local labour. Eight hundred kilometres to Tangier, where they were eventually herded aboard an overcrowded steamer bound for Algeciras in southern Spain. They had been on the run for six days – or was it seven? – but they were on their way out of Africa. Almost.
Au revoir to the country that had been the only homeland they had ever known.
Au revoir to the grandparents, who had decided they wouldn’t be taking the boat. ‘We’re staying,’ they announced. ‘We’re going back.’
‘No!’ wailed Luc.
‘Are you crazy?’ snapped Clarisse. ‘They’ll put you in a firing line, if they find you. No questions asked.’
‘It’s what we know,’ confirmed Luc’s grandmother.
‘Take me with you,’ cried Luc, arms wrapped about his grandfather’s legs.
Clarisse grabbed him and wrenched him free. She embraced her in-laws, then stepped aside to give Isabelle a final moment with her parents.
‘I’m further away from home than I’ve ever been,’ wept the child Luc, still picturing his father, the risen mound in the garden, now contemplating his unexpected abandonment by his beloved grandparents.
Aboard the boat, on the slopping murky water, waiting to depart, Luc grew nauseous and fretful: the long drive, the stink of diesel and sea salt, his filthy clothes, his sadness. His mother, eyes red-rimmed, was doling out baguette sandwiches stuffed with thin strips of a bright-yellow rubbery fromage she had bought on the quay, but he wasn’t hungry. He longed for his father. He ached for home with an unquantifiable sorrow. La tristesse. He rarely cried but he felt a thickening in his throat, a tightening in his chest that threatened to swamp him. Seagulls were screeching overhead. His mother was drinking gin from a bottle and appeared to be crying or snivelling, rubbing her nose as though it was itching. ‘I had no choice,’ she wailed. ‘All our lives were in danger. I did it for Luc.’
Luc yearned to lie beside that mound of earth in the shade of the jujube trees and talk to his father. He could not grasp what was happening to him, to his life, his family, his insane mother. What lay ahead? Where were they going? Behind him, beyond the decks of the mighty ship, was land, his past, Africa, where people were milling about everywhere. Street vendors, ticket touts waving the promise of a black-market passage, food shacks, water-sellers. Arabs, Berbers, French, Christians, Muslims.
Morocco, a liberated state for the last six years.
Ahead, his futur
e, nothing but a vast, empty sea. Beyond which, unseen, another continent: Europe. Spain and then France. The mother country, where neither he nor any other member of his family had ever set foot. The steamer’s horn boomed and the giant boat began to shift, slowly tearing itself away from the quay. The eddying water looked as though it went on for ever and was hungry to suck him under.
Three hours later, along with hundreds of other refugees, Luc, his mother and aunt were disembarking, files of cars spilling out of the belly of the ship. After queuing to retrieve their now filthy Citroën, the Cambons sped north.
Blasting from the car radio, as they drove through Spain, Anglo-Saxon popular music. Dion’s ‘The Wanderer’. Ray Charles, Elvis Presley. Popular tunes Clarisse and Isabelle had danced to by the pool at their settler parties, their own drunken soirées. Like so many others of their kind, they had partied on, ignoring the war, ignoring the impending imposed dismantling of their colonial lives. They had concentrated on the good life they had always known and pretended the rest of it was not happening. The only adjustments they had allowed were weapons. They had slept with guns under their pillows. They had walked the streets armed, and if a Muslim, male or female, was following them, they stepped aside to allow the unknown silhouette to pass, fearing the stranger shadowing them, imagining that they would be gunned down or stabbed silently in the back.
‘As of tomorrow, no one’s going to leave us for dead on the pavement. Tomorrow we’ll have reached France. Now, let’s sing,’ commanded his mother, crazed by exhaustion and loss. ‘Sing as loud as you can. We must keep our spirits up. Come on people.’ Clarisse began to croak, huskily and off-key, attempting to harmonize with the lyrics on the radio. Dion’s ‘The Wanderer’.
The Forgotten Summer Page 37