Fernand makes a point of controlling his diction, not to sound like a North African hick. She insists on knowing more. Her blue eyes grow warmer, sapphire bubbles, bouquets of sky come down from God knows where. Very well. Fernand deliberately takes his time, passes a finger over his mustache, throws back his head a little, and talks about his father, since she was reminiscing about hers. Pascal, a foster child, raised in public care. His last name, Iveton—spelled with an “I,” mind you, not a “Y,” he adds immediately—comes from them, from the French state. And your mother? From Spain. She had me when she was seventeen, the same year AC Fiorentina was founded. You don’t know them? Their shirts have a big red fleur-de-lys on them, still doesn’t ring a bell? So it’s true about women and soccer … I’m teasing you. An Italian club from Florence. In short, I admit there are better ways to make an entrance. My mother’s first name was Encarnación, no need to translate, a lovely name, isn’t it? Yes, perhaps, in any case it was my mother’s. She died when I was two and my father remarried a woman with two kids, sorry, children, from a previous union, as they say. There, we’re even, Hélène. We can really kick off now, if you’ll allow the expression—was that alright, did you get it this time? She laughs and calls him a hooligan. You’ll have to see about that with my mom, maybe hold her to account, he rejoins with a serious face. Hélène freezes, petrified to think she might have blundered; he bursts out laughing, I’m teasing again, sorry, but the face you just made, he chuckles again, then, seeing the waitress, asks if she’d like some coffee.
A week has passed since Fernand was arrested.
He is told, in his cell, that he will be tried in a military court. The trial is in four days. Attempt to destroy, with an explosive substance, a building that is inhabited or used for habitation. The officer reads out the charges without looking up. He has fat cheeks and bad skin. Fernand is sitting on an iron bench, his feet still in chains. Articles 434 and 435 of the Penal Code. Risk of incurring maximum penalty. In other words—he specifies, as if it needed to be any clearer—death. Fernand is surprised not to find himself blinking at the sound of the word. Torture must’ve fried my brain, he thinks. Since yesterday, a nerve has been throbbing continually near the bicep in his right arm. The communist leadership, the other continues, refuses to get involved: the Party hasn’t sent a lawyer. They are wary of that troublemaker Iveton: isn’t he an anarchist, anyway? Smells like sulfur, like bombs rolled under Tsarist carriages, explosives chucked in parliament or at a barracks, the pennants black and proud, Auguste Vaillant and all the rest of it … The officer carefully folds the paper in four before tucking it inside his back pocket. A soldier next to him tells Fernand that out there, every European in Algeria wants him skinned alive. There are pictures of your mug all over Algiers. A traitor, a felon, a white man sold to the fucking arabs.
Hélène looks her boss in the eyes, down to the bottom of his pupils, to the blackest black. She stares him down for so long and so well that he ends up lowering his eyes to his desk, his boss’s desk. He raises his head again and adds that he has nothing else to say to her, she can do as she pleases with her afternoon and they’ll send her pay for November (or for the days worked, at least, since he doesn’t want her to finish the month) as soon as possible. She does not respond and makes a curt exit, taking care, of course, to slam the door. Management, he let her know, does not mean to keep her on as a waitress, given recent events. She passes the Mustapha Hospital but ignores her usual trolleybus stop—she prefers to walk home, to calm down. The bastards, she thinks, what a bunch of bastards. She’ll have to find another job fast, or else, with Fernand in prison, she won’t be able to pay the landlord … Hélène will wait for the trial to take place, and then comb through the classifieds. She worked as a maid when she first arrived in Algiers, at an engineer’s, whose pastime of choice was playing tennis with his wife. Friendly people. Might they take her on again? You never know.
Fernand is transferred to Barberousse prison in Algiers. French settlers built it some twenty years after their army invaded the country. A handsome building, really, with its uncluttered façades and pointy dome, the sea behind in the distance, cutting the sky with a determined gesture. He is stripped. Fingerprint on the entry register. Cell number assigned, written on a piece of gray cloth—6101. The trial is in two days and Fernand still does not know who will defend him.
Hélène bought the day’s papers on her way home. Still walking in, she goes through the articles on the incident and finds a line, one simple line, which instantly arouses her fury: Fernand was apparently wearing dirty blue overalls and a shirt of questionable whiteness. There it is in black and white, in today’s rag. She places her keys on top of the dresser (or throws them, rather), then tears that page off of the periodical. She’s always insisted on her husband being clean and tidy, the crease in his pants neat, the collar straight and not yellowed near the neck. She made a fuss whenever he forgot to adjust his belt so the buckle covered the button of his pants (something he had a nasty habit of not doing), and now this journalist has the gall to humiliate them this way, shamelessly, to paint Fernand as unkempt, a slob. No doubt he thinks himself entitled to disparage workers, to jeer at them from the comfort of his chair, that failure, that hack! … Hélène is unable to compose herself. She lights a cigarette and takes two drags. A long breath out. Their cat, Titi, is sleeping, a circle of dark fur against the back of a chair, his left paw over his eyes against the light.
Fernand lies on a bunk in his cell, which he shares with two other inmates, both Arabs. He does not know their names (one of them has been keeping up a rhythmic snoring since Fernand arrived, the other is at the infirmary). Even here, the system is colonial: Europeans are given two blankets while natives get one; the former are permitted two showers and as many shaves per week, while the latter are allowed one of each. The door opens. A man enters, preceded by a guard. He introduces himself to Fernand: Albert Smadja, lawyer. The two shake hands and the guard leaves. There’s nowhere for you to sit, the inmate apologizes. Smadja has brown hair and coarse skin reminiscent of wet sand; his eyes are half-hidden under their lids. He is communist and Jewish. Perrin, the chairman of the Bar, has charged him with Fernand’s defense as the court’s appointment. Fernand listens. He knows nothing, or almost nothing, of what happens behind the scenes. Smadja prefers to be straight with him: he disapproves of his actions but will, naturally, do all he can to plead his case, even if he is only a young lawyer, just starting out. Miming a chop to his neck with his right hand, Fernand inquires: my head? The chairman of the Bar, answers the lawyer, thinks you’ll get a prison sentence because you can’t be executed when you haven’t killed anyone. And you, what do you think? Smadja pauses, visibly embarrassed. His silence rolls into a ball deep inside his throat. To be perfectly frank with you, Fernand, I was reluctant to work on this case, I’m only a third-year trainee, I doubt I have the stature for it … The atmosphere is dreadful in Algiers just now, you know. They all want, precisely, your head. I spoke with the chairman and this very morning he asked Charles Laînné to join your team as well. Don’t know if you’ve heard of him, he’s a very good lawyer, sixtyish, a member of Catholic Relief’s Social Secretariat. That’s just to say that he is always keen to defend, let’s say, good causes … Fernand asks what Laînné thinks of his case. Smadja finishes wiping the right lens of his glasses with a handkerchief drawn from his breast pocket, and continues: he, too, doubts whether they could take your life for what you’ve done. We’ve had a think together about our line for your defense tomorrow—I know, yes, the time frame is awful, people are after your blood, so the authorities don’t want to drag things out, I suppose. The member of parliament Soustelle even claimed that you were planning to blow up the whole city … Yes, yes, I’m telling you. Smadja rubs the bridge of his nose with his middle finger. Then, looking at Fernand—sat at the edge of his bunk, eyes focused on the floor and shoulders curved slightly inward—he asks him to describe with the utmost precision the abuses
committed against him. Fernand raises his face. His eyes are hollow and purplish, his face gaunt, his beard thick. Then he stands up and, without a word, takes off his shirt. Smadja raises his eyebrows. Bruises, scabs, welts. Everywhere.
Hélène places the sweater, jacket, shirt and pants inside a cardboard box. Fernand must look presentable tomorrow at his trial. It is out of the question to give those scribblers another chance to describe him as a scruffy pig. After picking up the scraps of newspaper from the tiled floor, she takes the keys on the dresser and boards the trolleybus to the center of town. She goes to the prison’s front desk and demands, by virtue of her status as spouse, to have this package given at once to prisoner Fernand Iveton, cell number 6101. The officer refuses, on the grounds that she hasn’t followed the normal procedure and that it’s impossible to deliver items to inmates without previously filling out such and such a form, etc. Hélène announces that she will not move an inch until Fernand has received the package in person; the officer is adamant, too, behind his little red mustache. In that case, call the director, I demand to speak to him. The officer hesitates. Hélène stares him down, like she had earlier glared at Monsieur Trémand, her boss, she glares at him until he yields, which he does because he takes the receiver and asks to speak to the prison director. Two CRS men see her to his office. She takes his proffered hand, briskly. The director smiles and bids her sit on one of the three chairs. He is touched by her tenacity, he admits without divesting himself of his smile. I’m not mocking you, I assure you, I’m certain many prisoners would like to know a woman like you. I’ve been informed of all your calls and letters over the last two days: what tenacity, what stubbornness! Hélène is somewhat baffled by her interlocutor’s tone. She sets down the package in front of her and explains that she absolutely (emphasizing each syllable) insists her husband wear clean clothes during his trial. It’s the least one could do, the director answers as he takes it. We’ll inspect the contents, naturally, as you would expect, but I give you my word that we’ll get them to him if they’re found in accordance with the regulations. Hélène thanks him. Then senses, once outside, the presence of plainclothes policemen, or perhaps members of the intelligence services, whichever. She glances back, scrutinizing the passersby, convinced that more than one are following her. Is she losing her mind? No, no. She walks on, turns around. A man stops to ask a street vendor for a cigarette: he stopped at the very moment she turned around. She’s not dreaming, no, she’s not crazy. Hélène yells at him to get lost.
Good night, yes, and above all be strong, Fernand, says Smadja, patting his shoulder awkwardly. The lawyer knocks on the cell door. Three knocks. The guard opens and Fernand nods for the second time at the courtappointed attorney.
The X-ray shows an opaque stain on a lobe of the right lung. Fernand has no precise idea of what this means, beyond the fact that the statement’s length invites the interpretation that what he took for a common cold, caught after a soccer match in Algeria, may be a more serious illness. Very probably tuberculosis. The hospital in Lagny strongly recommended he go to Paris as soon as possible to visit another doctor for further examination. Yet Fernand is not particularly worried. By nature he is accustomed, at the great table of existence, to pour his glasses half-full. Happiness for him is tied to the ordinary. He does not claim to be more capable than he is, and displays himself in the evident modesty of crumpled clothes: without noise, without clashes, only with a sort of well-being of which he has no need to be proud.
Hélène has just finished her shift. Her calves are slightly sore after so much walking (there were more customers than usual tonight, for no apparent reason). Fernand is in his room on the Café Bleu’s second floor, lying on the counterpane in his underpants, reading France Football. Lille OSC has just won the French Cup against FC Nancy. Two goals to one. Fernand knows one of the goalscorers, Jean Vincent—or at least knows of him through the press, and through having watched a few of his matches. He has a likeable mug, that Vincent: high forehead, Sioux nose. Scored in the seventeenth minute. A knock on the door. He gets up, surprised. Who could it be—he looks at his watch—at 10:40 p.m.? He opens, it’s Hélène. I hope I’m not disturbing you? Her presence, more than the question it suggests, grips him to the bone: here he is, as if naked, in a stupor. No, no, of course not … Come in, please.
She’s been on her feet all day, she says, she wanted to sit down a minute before walking home. Fernand can hardly believe his ears. She’s not shy, this one, coming up here at such an unreasonable hour: she could have passed any of the people living on this floor, and they would’ve had a field day just talking about it … What are you reading? Ah, soccer again! Fernand demurs: there’s L’Humanité right there, at the foot of the bed. I don’t know if that’s much better. She laughs. Then Fernand asks himself if he prefers her laughing, like this, head thrown back to leave her throat exposed, yet not offering it, either: a playful swan, a fair ribbon of spring, with those small white stubs beating their wings and that high-pitched trill, thin and frail (Fernand is getting lost). Or perhaps he prefers her serious, severe, as she often is, the wrinkle between her two eyebrows more pronounced, a delicate furrow, and that tragic look, a Slavic stare straight out of Dostoevsky (or at least that’s the image that comes to his mind, again; he gave up on Crime and Punishment after the third chapter. He only remembers one sentence, very beautiful really, he had thought to himself: the hero’s mother, the one whose name is impossible to remember, had written her son a letter that ended with I kiss you with a thousand thousand kisses, yours until the grave—that’s lovely, that is, he told himself). Dumb question. There is no need to choose, he loves her both cheerful and serious: two colors of the same future.
Only one bed in the room, not even a stool or a trunk, nothing. Hélène remains standing and Fernand can guess at her embarrassment. Here, he says immediately, to push it away, I didn’t tell you: I got a letter from the hospital around noon. They’ve diagnosed a bit of something inside, a lung playing up. An opaque stain on a lobe’s what it is—Fernand corrects himself—is what they say. Funny way to put it, an opaque stain on a lobe, don’t you think? Hélène thinks that he should take it more seriously. Trouble is, I’d have to go to Paris. Trouble? exclaims Hélène, it’s only thirty kilometers away, that’s nothing! You know I’m not from around here, thirty kilometers is a long way away on the back of a camel. Hélène giggles, you’re silly. Fernand begins: I don’t want to inconvenience you, Hélène (he likes to utter her first name in front of her, looking straight into her eyes without blinking and with the impression, as foolish as it is fleeting, that he already has her, if only a little …), but would you mind if. Hélène cuts in again: don’t bother being so polite, stop fussing, I’ll drive you there if it helps. Fernand thanks her. Followed by silence. A passing angel, armed to the teeth. It’s late, I’ve got to go. See you soon, I expect. Fernand nods, he hopes so. And anyway Clara needs help downstairs, we’ll cross paths again for sure. He stands up to see her to the door. Cover your neck outside, Hélène, wouldn’t want to catch an opaque stain, now would you …
Paris crumbles under a thick drapery of sky.
The sun shines in little scales, white spittle. Hélène is wearing heels and a striped scarf; her legs are crossed under a round table, outside a café. On the sidewalk, a woman holds a wallet and a baguette in the same hand, a couple hail a taxi (he, a tall twig, sports a blue shirt rolled up to the elbows; she has on beige gloves and a yellowpatterned orange skirt), a man in a raincoat runs across the street without stopping, the policewoman on the square shakes her baton, the metro station on the corner breathes passersby in, out with the same continuous movement … Hélène tells Fernand about the war, hers anyway, in which part of her family in Poland was massacred by the Germans. One of her uncles, Sławomir, was tortured for a whole night by a Nazi officer before they finished him off with a saber. Her parents—her father, she specifies, was still in France, he only returned in ’48—hid Jews during the Occupation,
and she herself fed a friend’s brother, a young Resistance fighter in hiding, a member of a network whose name she doesn’t know. She never ascertained how it happened, but she was eventually found out: the Vichy authorities wrote to summon her to a police station in Chartres. I think it was a Tuesday, she remembers. She thought it inadvisable to attend, and fled. She was still a Swiss national, thanks to her husband, even though she’d left him before the war, and she took refuge in Lausanne until it was over. The café owner puts a Mouloudji record on the turntable. I’ve the ills of the night / Of the night in Paris / When the girls come and go / And at this hour, I just linger … Hélène suddenly stops talking and listens. She really likes this song, she says; Fernand pretends to know it and agrees, a catchy number, yes, I like the chorus, makes me want to dance …
He pays the bill and they walk toward Saint-Michel. Fernand spent three days in Paris when he first arrived; he stayed in Pigalle at his grandfather’s, a concierge who works in the Grandes-Carrières district, in the 17th arrondissement, and sells France-Soir once his day is done, to make a little extra (or bring a bit more bacon home, as he says, though he happens not to like it very much). He had offered to put Fernand up to help him save on hotels. You’ll see tonight, the guy’s a sweetie, continues Fernand, and I think he’s going to like you a lot! The Seine greens to their right, coloring the clouds in one long stroke. They walk by a movie theater and look at the posters: The Return of Don Camillo, Newlyweds, Circle of Danger, I Confess—a Hitchcock. Fernand never goes to the movies, practically speaking, but Hélène treats herself sometimes, once a year, when there’s a little money left over. The war, you were saying? Yes, her brother, she resumes, enlisted in the Foreign Legion when Germany invaded Poland. Their shadows touch on the asphalt.
Tomorrow They Won't Dare to Murder Us Page 4