In his grandmother’s study, Jean-Claude stamps an envelope: it holds the letter he is about to send to René Coty, at the Elysée, imploring him to save his stepfather. Pictured on the blue stamp is a man he knows nothing about: mustache and kepi, eyes fixed on a distant point. Underneath it says: Marshal Franchet d’Espèrey, born May 25, 1856 in Mostaganem, Algeria. No doubt, thinks Jean-Claude, the president knows who this person is—and if he is on this stamp, it’s probably because he was a great man, which adds gravity to the request …
Zamoun arrived two weeks ago and has already been moved to another cell, promptly replaced by no. 400: Mohamed Ben Hamadi el Aziz—call me Abdelaziz, he tells his cellmates while firmly shaking their hands—an Iraqi who came to Algeria to fight with the Front. Captured after getting injured, a bullet to the groin. The military tribunal sentenced him to death. He imparts this lightly, almost serenely, in a low voice, almost suave. Abdelaziz, in addition to being a handsome man, is elegant. There is something of the prince about him, or a somber sire. The gaze is lively, two rings of black agate, convex eyelids as if drawn in charcoal. Short hair graying on a high forehead. The nose is long, hooked but harmonious, and the shapely beard chisels the already sharp outline of his features—it seems the man has self-esteem and cares about his appearance, though his situation is hardly conducive to grooming. His mouth (the lower lip distinctly more pronounced than the upper) purses sometimes, a kind of habit, when he finishes a sentence. He feels out the mattress. Takes his shoes off, straightens his back. Massages the back of his neck as if about to start warming up. Fernand observes him out of the corner of his eye—this man exudes something strange. It’s probably what the word “aura” is for: not likability, he certainly does not inspire liking; not fear, either, he would refuse it. Something much more disquieting since it eludes the obvious, it slips away like sawdust in one’s hand. The man is dashedly intelligent, his face corroborates it, but within his eyes and the set of his mouth, charm and harshness, sweetness and cruelty are at odds.
The wan blue of night. Not a cloud, not a star, not a ripple in sight—a motionless mass sprawled over the city. Abdelaziz, intrigued, asks Fernand—who is reading Les Misérables, a gift from the chaplain—if he too belongs to the Front in an official way. The three men are sat on their respective bunks. Fernand explains that he was originally an activist in the Algerian Communist Party and then joined its armed wing: the CDL, Combattants de la Libération. The FLN insurgency, at the end of ’54, caused mayhem within the Party: activists were divided and the cadres did not know what stance to take. Was it a genuine revolution or the doing of reckless agitators, whose excessive radicality played right into the hands of the colonial authorities? Fernand had gotten fed up with the endless debates and procrastinations: Algeria was at war, they had to open their eyes, face up to reality and stop being afraid of confrontation. But they were repeatedly told to wait and, above all, respect the legal framework. Abdelaziz listens, his eyes narrowed like the arrowslits of a fortress. Fernand explains that he wanted to act with his comrades, lend a hand to the independentists, but the Party leaders remained silent … And then I lost someone close to me, a brother, a Frenchman. He was a soldier who deserted to join the guerrillas, stealing materiel belonging to the French army. He was shot … This pushed me to get even more involved. The FLN called for a general strike, I took part, as a factory worker. But the Party didn’t budge from its position, it couldn’t decide what to do: it was for independence, but not for armed struggle. But how else could independence be won, in this context? A deal was finally sealed between the Party and the FLN: communist militants could join the FLN, and hence the struggle, but only in a personal, individual capacity. That’s what I did with my comrades. We had to prove ourselves before we could carry weapons and so, me and another guy (Fabien, but Fernand does not mention his name), we planned to set freight cars on fire in the harbor, after curfew. No one knows this, not even my wife, so I’m trusting you (Fernand feels that he can: Chikhi has a tongue between his teeth which he doesn’t know how to use, and Abdelaziz didn’t come from Iraq to rat on a cellmate): we had four bottles of gasoline, but when we got there, we saw armored cars … We weren’t about to attack them with what we had! We turned back. Though we didn’t agree with some of the FLN’s methods, we were now under their orders. We didn’t want to hurt civilians, that was out of the question. Killing is permissible during a war, but you kill soldiers or terrorists, not innocent bystanders. The next thing we did my wife doesn’t know either: we tracked a guy, a member of an armed colonialist organization, a nut, a real brute. I was okay with shooting him, if I had to, but the operation fell through in the end. A comrade took down a military officer instead, a paratrooper (it is Hachelaf’s name, this time, that Fernand withholds). I tell you all this, but at the same time I know where they come from, those bombs in cafés. I realize they don’t come out of the blue, just look at the massacres committed by the army. But still, we’re never going to find a solution by killing each other. Abdelaziz, who hadn’t said a word, objects that pilots who bomb villages don’t give a damn about the children cowering inside their homes—an eye for an eye, he concludes, his words as cutting as the blade he does not have on him, that’ll keep those sons of swine in their place.
I know, I know, Fernand says, chilled by his interlocutor’s impassive hatred, but that doesn’t mean we should respond the same way … So, I offered to place a bomb in the factory where I work. An FLN leader—Yacef, you probably know him?—immediately thought of blowing up the lot, a mini Hiroshima, but I said that I didn’t want to kill a single person, just make an impression on the colonialists, screw up some equipment. And now I’m here … Didn’t the bomb kill anyone? the Iraqi asks. It didn’t even explode. I was caught red-handed, so to speak. And you’ve been sentenced to death for that? Yes. Abdelaziz ponders at length before adding: you’re French, they’ll spare your life, don’t worry about it. No, Fernand interjects, I’m Algerian. And Chikhi adds: even more than you are, Abdelaziz.
Smadja and Laînné arrive. They came to tell their client that they are going back to Paris to meet with President Coty. Laînné is confident: there’s nothing about this case that would allow a pardon to be refused. Smadja does not contradict him, but Fernand senses that he’s wary and uncomfortable. Laînné turns his rhinoceros-like body toward his colleague, isn’t that right, Albert? Smadja nods. What about Nordmann, Fernand asks, will he be there with you? Yes, of course, there’ll be three of us in front of the president. How could he not listen to us, with all that! Smadja asks the inmates whether they’ve been following recent events; Abdelaziz answers for all of them, and in the negative. Well, the FLN has decreed a general strike throughout Algiers, to get the UN’s attention, put pressure on the next General Assembly. There’s cops and soldiers everywhere, red and green berets. The Casbah is deserted. If the Arabs refuse to open their shops, the paratroopers will smash everything up. They’re being forced to go back to work, corralled into stadiums, it’s hell.
Fabien has been transferred to Barberousse.
They crossed each other on the way to the visiting room. Take heart, Fernand mumbled as he passed. The two men thought the exact same thing: how much the other had changed since they’d last met. Ravaged faces, bodies shrunken inside their clothes, and those dark circles, those faded veils under their eyes. Two specters in the entrails of Barberousse. The Nation—a face crawling with fleas. Back in his cell, Fernand wonders: does Fabien resent him? He must know, obviously, that his comrade betrayed him under beatings and electric shocks. Was Fabien braver than him? Fernand hopes so, at least.
Hélène …
A name like an itch. A wound in the roof of his mouth that he cannot forget.
He thinks of her every day. He cannot keep from doing it. Cannot keep from picking up the scattered pieces of their story, as if he had to put them in order between these walls, give them a meaning in this gray shithole, bulb on the ceiling, bunk stained by former inmates, on
e toilet between three. Give them a direction, a solid outline, thick, drawn in chalk or charcoal. Three and a half years together: one with the other, one through and for the other. Fernand collects whatever pieces his memory more or less readily restores to him, to form a brick—a cinderblock of love alone capable, in the face of an uncertain future, to break the bones and jaws of his tormentors.
Hélène.
Her blonde hair, the wonder of the neighborhood when she first came (everybody swore, rightly, that the Algerian sun would soon darken it). Her feet, which she said she once used to like, but not so much anymore. Her buttocks outlined under blue underwear, promising folds. The way people took her for Jean-Claude’s older sister, since time washes over her without taking liberties (the very opposite of Fernand, who’s always looked older than his age). Their wedding: Tuesday July 25, 1955, Algiers city hall. Afterward they danced most of the night away, with Jean-Claude, in a club near the racetrack. Their “lovely Sunday outings” as Hélène liked to call their excursions to Cherchell, near Tipaza. The song “Le Temps perdu,” which Mathé Altéry had performed for France at Eurovision, a few months prior, in her high soprano, a song Hélène loved to play over and over …
For you, my love, he writes at the bottom of the letter he just finished.
Hélène is not so much hugging as carrying Fernand in her arms, for her husband’s body has trouble holding itself up. He learned of Henri’s death in the press. Like everyone else. Like so many strangers to whom this first and last name, Henri Maillot, meant nothing. Just another casualty, a line immediately forgotten, a few printed characters, dust to dust. Those in the know are already hailing the death of this “traitor”—others try to “understand what could’ve happened,” of course, but “he was such a sweet man.” Hélène is more shaken by the reaction of the man she loves than by the demise of a man she hardly knew: it is the first time she’s seen Fernand like this, overcome by spasms, quivering with tears, incapable of finding the words to articulate what his eyes can only stutter. She says nothing but understands perfectly well what led Henri to act as he did. She herself had told Fernand, after discovering Algeria: when the French had had enough of the Germans, they took to the maquis, period. She agreed with him on this point enough to have allowed, last year, a few men to stay in their house—men of whom all she knew was that the police or the army was after them.
Hélène was struck, on meeting Henri for the first time, by the gulf which drew the two friends together: the energy of the one reaching out to the other’s calm, the spontaneity of the worker reaching out to the accountant’s reserve. Those who found him cold sensed nothing of his inner fire, his quiet, subterranean strength, sources made more formidable by his refusal to give outsiders a glimpse of them. Henri loved an Arab woman, Baya, who loved him back. She had been married against her will to a cousin, at the age of fourteen, and became a mother a year later: she managed to separate from her husband at the age of twenty and did as she pleased from then on, liberating herself from the veil and stuffing her head with communist texts. Henri worked for the daily Alger républicain, and Fernand knew that his comrades appreciated him for his seriousness and efficiency: the man always filed his stories before the deadline.
He shaved with care and cut his curly hair short over his big, rounded forehead. His gaze was subtle, almost feminine. His eyes were lively and intense; they fixed his interlocutor without ever betraying his thoughts. A long nose, sharp and protruding like the frame of his face. Henri attracted women without realizing it: his calm was not a form of stillness, but rather a purity, like that of high mountain lakes. His moderation was only apparent. His anger, which was rare, had more in common with fury—like the day he told Abdelhamid, a journalist friend, of how in Constantine a paratrooper captain had shoved his revolver, after wiping the barrel with a tissue, into the mouth of an Algerian baby and pulled the trigger. Henri had howled. He swore that it was necessary to kill every paratrooper, one by one. That they had to rip this whole system up—that he would never forget what he’d seen, those decomposing Arab bodies floating in the Oued Rhumel. Abdelhamid had listened in silence on that occasion.
Toward the end of 1955, he enlisted as a cadet in a battalion of the French army, and was tasked a few months later with transporting weapons from Miliana to Algiers: he pointed his own at the truck driver—they were ferrying 140 handguns, grenades, magazines, as well as 132 machine guns—and forced him into a forest of pine and eucalyptus trees where communist comrades, informed of the operation beforehand, were waiting. The driver was chloroformed; the whole cargo was stolen. Henri had kissed his sister before leaving, divulging nothing, of course, about his plans. His desertion shook Algeria as much as it did France, and he was sentenced to death. Meanwhile his group turned into a maquis or guerrilla unit, fighting the French army but without, at the same time, joining the ranks of the FLN. The independentists were soon attacked and Henri was captured alive by soldiers of the 504 BT: after beating him up, they told him he was free to go. He knew it wasn’t true and walked backwards, shouting “Long live the Algerian Communist Party!” until they shot him dead.
His body was driven into town on the hood of an armored vehicle, his hair dyed with henna, false papers in his pockets. A trophy for a great victory.
Civilization puffs its chest, brandishing rod and flag.
Marianne trades in her tricolor nights—swapping pennies for chimeras.
I am not Muslim, Henri had written shortly before, but I am a European Algerian. I consider Algeria to be my country. I must fulfill toward it the same duties as all of its sons. As soon as the Algerian people rose up to free their land from under the colonial yoke, I knew my place was alongside those engaged in the fight for liberation. The colonial press shouts treason, while at the same time it publishes and endorses the separatist calls of Boyer and Banse. It also cried treason when, under Vichy, French officers joined the Resistance, while it was serving Hitler and fascism. In truth, the traitors to France are those who, to serve their own selfish interests, pervert in the eyes of Algerians the true face of France and of its people, whose traditions are generous, revolutionary, and anticolonial. What’s more, every progressive man in France and in the world recognizes the legitimacy and justice of our national claims. The Algerian people, long thwarted and humiliated, have taken their resolute place in the great historic movement of colonial liberation, a movement which has set Africa and Asia ablaze. Its victory is certain. And this is not, as the biggest owners of wealth in this country would have us believe, a racial conflict, but a struggle of the oppressed, without distinction of origins, against the oppressors and their valets, without distinction of race. This is not a movement aimed against France and the French, or against workers of French or Israelite origin. These have their place in this country. We do not confuse them with our people’s oppressors. In my actions, in giving to Algerian fighters the weapons they need for their liberation, weapons which will be used exclusively against military and police forces, as well as against collaborators, I am conscious of having served my country and my people, including those European workers who were momentarily deceived.
Fernand catches his breath.
Hélène wipes one of his cheeks with the palm of her hand. She could have licked his face until the tears stopped falling, this beautiful puppet, its strings cut by distress.
We have to act, he finally whispers. Do something. So he won’t have died for nothing.
René Coty wears a dark pinstriped suit. He has flat hair combed to the left, protruding ears and a nose like a lump of bread. Nordmann, Smadja and Laînné are sat on the three chairs positioned in front of his desk in the Elysée. The president of the Republic appears smiling and gracious. Benevolent, even. After listening to the three lawyers recapitulate the grave failings they wish to stress (the climate of collective hysteria in Algeria, the impossibility of prior investigation and preparation by the defense, the torture undergone by their client, the impartial brutality of the
press), Coty assures them that he is familiar with the case, and that he too considers the sentence out of proportion to the allegations. He even discerns a dash of nobility there—or at least he can, while disapproving of Iveton’s action, recognize the courage of his intentions and the element of charity in his motives. But all this reminds me of another story, he continues. In 1917, when I was a young officer, thirty-five years old, something like that, I witnessed with my own eyes the execution of two young French soldiers. As one of them was being taken to the wall, the general said to him, I remember it perfectly: you too, my son, you die for France. He pauses after these words. Smadja hears what he did not say, or thinks he does, interpreting as follows: Coty, in mentioning this unfortunate soldier, is contemplating Fernand Iveton: he too, then, is about to die for France. Coty resumes, explaining that the appeals for a pardon he has received from Algeria are significantly outnumbered by the calls for the sentence to be carried out. And there is the matter of public order, he adds. Nordmann cuts in: with all due respect, monsieur le président, this argument doesn’t hold water. To guillotine Iveton would certainly satisfy the spirit of blind retaliation, but believe me, believe us, it will not in the least intimidate the Arab population. They will keep fighting with whatever means at their disposal, do not doubt it, monsieur. Nordmann pushes on in a firm, fluent voice, without bother: when I was cabinet director at the Justice Ministry during the liberation of Paris, I myself wrote and put up posters calling on the population to abstain from summary executions. Blind violence solves nothing, nothing at all. Coty listens attentively, a little leather notebook in front of him. He makes occasional jottings in it. Allow me to tell you an anecdote: when one of the prison guards insulted our client, do you know how he reacted? “You fool, I’m in here for your sake!” Yes, take note of that, monsieur le président. Our client is conscious of fighting for more than himself. He’s fighting for his country, which he wants to see free and happy, a country which guarantees to each and every one of its citizens, Muslim or European, freedom of thought and equality. Our client wants nothing else. Smadja takes a letter out of his bag, signed by Hélène and addressed to René Coty. The president takes it, promises to read it without delay and puts it down to his right, on top of a thick folder labeled “Fernand Iveton.” And Laînné insists: our client must be heard as a witness, especially with regard to the torture he suffered. The president concurs—it is indeed unworthy of the police or army of the Republic to have behaved in such a fashion, should the alleged acts be confirmed. The interview has lasted an hour and a half. The four men give each other their regards. Coty sees them to his office door.
Tomorrow They Won't Dare to Murder Us Page 9