by Norman Lewis
He handed the card back to me, and I was seized by a kind of panic when he addressed me as ‘Sir’. ‘Sir, do you wanna leave just now?’ It happened that there was a plane leaving for Algiers within the hour, and there would be no problem about an unscheduled landing at Philippeville to drop me off en route.
At Philippeville I went straight to Dr Kessous’ house to hear the details of the atrocity. A company of Senegalese, normally the most disciplined of troops, had broken out of barracks, found the armoury mysteriously unlocked, and gone on the rampage killing every Arab they could find.
What had happened to all our mutual friends — to Kobtan, Meksen and the rest? — was my first question.
‘Praise God,’ he said, they were all safe. Someone had mentioned that Kessous had started his life as an unbeliever, but religiosity had fed upon success, and now the name of Allah was rarely out of his mouth.
It soon became clear that the massacre had claimed its victims entirely among proletarians — perhaps by design, or perhaps because they had no stone-built houses or walls behind which to take refuge. Kessous said the official figure for those killed was thirty-seven, but he put the dead at several hundred, most of them vagrant workers or distant villagers who could conveniently disappear without trace to be buried secretly in unmarked graves.
Listening to him, to the flux of angry rhetoric alternating with the persuasive smiles, I formed the opinion that he had suffered no more than a political setback, to be offset against propaganda gains, leading in the end to a bloodily satisfactory retaliation. What in the end, he seemed to suggest after the emptying of the vials of his wrath, did the death of a few nameless peasants matter, if by their sacrifice the cause of the Algerian people (behind their leaders) could be advanced? He was resigned to the fact that I could do nothing to impede the recurrence of such atrocities, but urged me to do all I could to publicize what had happened.
Madame Hadef, the vivacious taxi-driver’s wife, had bad news. She spoke of her husband’s last moments, as described by a European friend who had seen what had happened, displaying in the telling of this the simple dry-eyed fortitude possessed equally by an Arab woman of her calibre and the small boys whose toes were crushed by the French police at the base depot.
Every Arab in Philippeville knew that something terrible was about to happen, she said, and all those who could afford to do so left their offices or places of work, went home and locked themselves in. Since the withdrawal of most of the Allied troops, fares were few and far between, and most of the Arab taxi-drivers stayed put until a European drove up to warn them that the Senegalese were shooting every Arab in sight in the town’s centre.
They decided to try to escape along the coast road to Jeanne d’Arc, but had only driven a few hundred yards before they found themselves cut off. They left their cabs and ran for it, but the Senegalese chased them to the top of a low cliff, bayoneted them, and threw them over the edge. The mass funeral, she said, had set off an extraordinary demonstration. All the French and Senegalese had been withdrawn from the town, and some irresistible impulse had sent the women out in their thousands into the streets. In defiance of custom among the Algerian Muslims, they followed the procession to the cemetery and held up their children-in-arms to see the coffins lowered into the graves, ‘so that they would remember’.
Afterwards the bayonet-rent cast-off blazers and morning coats were carefully cleansed of blood, repaired, and passed on as heirlooms to close relatives, or in extremity sold in the market.
I took a taxi out to Fortuna’s farm, passing several cars with MP stickers on them on the way. As soon as the taxi pulled up, Fortuna came out of the house, arms outstretched. The appalling fact was that he was unmistakably happy to see me — a man capable of lasting gratitude. He made a joke about pretending to assume that I had come to pick up ‘the Roman thing’, and said that I ought to have given him a few hours’ notice to be able to have it ready for me.
‘Were you mixed up in that Arab business?’ I asked him.
‘Not personally,’ he said, ‘but you know me — I can’t stand the sight of them.’
I told him that a friend of mine had been killed.
‘I’m sorry,’ he told me. ‘Maybe we could have fixed him up with a pass.’
For me this was a clear admission that the gangsters of the milice populaire had worked with the officers of the Senegalese.
This was the cloud, no bigger than a man’s hand in the sky, that presaged the end of French rule in Algeria. Ten years of terrorism and counter-terrorism followed until, on 20 August 1955, Philippeville was the scene of the most atrocious massacre of the post-war period, carried out in reprisal for attacks on settlers elsewhere. French paras flew in and, aided by bands of vigilantes, began the task of destroying the Arab population. Here is a description of the action by Pierre Leulliette, a para officer who took part in it: ‘We opened fire into the thick of them at random. Then … our company commanders finally gave us the order to shoot down every Arab we met. At midday, fresh orders, take prisoners. That complicated everything.’ The prisoners were rounded up and kept in the stadium, but next day it was decided to kill them all after all. ‘There were so many of them they had to be buried with bulldozers.’ The total Arab death-roll was 12,000, a high proportion of them women and children. In the words of the Governor-General Jacques Soustelle, ‘Between our two communities an abyss has been dug through which flows a river of blood.’
In this huge final tragedy our section in Philippeville, succouring through ignorance and gullibility such gangsters as Fortuna, played its tiny part.
22ND JUNE
Back in Tunis, where the shadows have lengthened, to find Leopold on firm regimental ground again, but — as was to be expected with his recovery — Merrylees once again fading fast. Merrylees sets his absurd tasks and Leopold, tongue in cheek, sees to it that they are carried out. The FSO has been taken with a sudden mania for numbers. Having counted all the cars, I am told to count the houses in Carthage, La Marsa, Le Kram and La Goulette. This I set about doing, handing in daily totals to Leopold, who nods gravely, and sets the information aside for incorporation in the weekly report. This, according to the section member who types the final result, is an extravagant absurdity. He is bound to secrecy, but goes so far as to admit that the last report was unintelligible to him, although several Latin tags included were familiar. In his effort to keep us, as he puts it, on our toes the FSO has decided that we should arrange to lecture the neighbouring units. We take this to be on topics such as security of access and the disposal of classified material, but this proves far from the case. What Merrylees has in mind is morale-boosting get-togethers with veterans who have spent three years in the Western Desert, and are now reported as being, perhaps in consequence, somewhat cast down in spirit. He proposes we should remedy the state of affairs by readings of selected passages from the sagas, and by an account of the doings of Eric the Red, equally calculated in his opinion to have a tonic effect.
We all agree that one way out of this increasingly impossible situation would be for Leopold to ask to see the G2 at GHQ and tell him what is happening, but this he resolutely refuses to do, knowing only too well how the Army is accustomed to deal with bringers of bad news.
This sense of being confined in an open prison is heightened by the sudden dearth of letters from home from which we all suffer. Due to some breakdown in the Army postal service there has been no mail for weeks, but apart from this sudden stoppage, I am not the only one to notice that the bundles of letters collected for the section seem to be getting smaller. This is a situation calculated to turn men who hardly ever set pen to paper into excellent correspondents, and one section member — whether or not he has been able to post it — has written a letter to his wife every day he has been overseas. He is now tremendously depressed because it is two months since he has heard from her. It is five months since I have had news of Ernestina.
Today a letter arrived. I tore open the envelope a
nd a half-dozen tatters of paper fell out, on which I recognized my own handwriting. Accompanying these fragments was the long awaited letter from Guatemala.
The enclosed gives you some idea of what’s left when the censors have done their work. Once again, not a single comprehensible sentence. I know you’re out there somewhere, that’s all. The rest is silence.
It seems a long time since Cuba, doesn’t it? I wonder how the years have treated you. They’ve had their effect on me, but it’s happened so slowly that it’s only when I look back I say to myself, my God, can I really have changed so much? Nobody should really stay too long in a place like this. People don’t think here; first of all because they don’t need to think, and then because they’ve forgotten how to. I read Time because there’s nothing else to read, and that marks me down as an intellectual.
I’m afraid it has to be faced. I’ve given in. This is like a bullfight. I’m there for no other reason than that the others are, half-asleep, up in the tendidos. We go to the fiestas and throw confetti at each other, and the men get on their horses and pull cockerels’ heads off. Remember when I told you about the first one I went to. You were disgusted, and so was I. Now I’m beginning to stop thinking, nothing has much effect. Last week they tied some Indian bandits up in chairs and shot them in the plaza, and the whole town turned out including every single member, male and female, of our legation — and guess who else? I’ve used up my protest, and that’s what Guatemala does to anybody in the end, unless they’re strong — which I’m not. Perhaps I see myself for the first time, and realize I’m a very ordinary sort of person. Just like a lizard, lying in the sun.
Chapter Twenty-One
FEW PEOPLE FREQUENTED THE Chat Qui Rit, as the café-bar at the port of La Goulette was called, and those who did were from the depressed classes: fishermen who took their evil-looking fish there to be cooked, a man who watched over the plumbing of the local pissoirs, and a carpet-seller who admitted he was lucky to sell a carpet once a month.
One morning we had a customer of a different kind. He was intelligent-looking and a little sombre, and dressed in a dark, well-fitting suit that could have been made in Paris. Taking a seat, he sat bolt upright, thus — by comparison with the slouching regulars — giving an impression of alertness. When he beckoned in the direction of one of the Jewish girls, he expected and got service. In the matter of race he struck me as one of those borderline cases, either Arab or Jew — a man of the kind who had been in contact with power, which always seemed to me to have a deracializing effect, and provided its own international face. He ordered tea, and was served the usual stew-up of old leaves to which a sprinkling of new ones had been added. He took a sip, left it, paid, then stuck a tip under the saucer. I got the impression that the very special flies of La Goulette were bothering him. After a while he got up, came over and greeted me in Arabic, salaam aleikum. I acknowledged the greeting in the usual way, and he dropped into a chair at the next table so that we were seated side by side.
‘So you speak Arabic?’ he said in English.
‘A few words,’ I told him, and hoped it would be left at that. One was always running into people wanting to talk to strangers, because they were lonely or curious, or had something to sell, or were just compulsive talkers, and without being rude I got rid of them as soon as I could. He paid me a routine insincere compliment on my pronunciation, and it was clear that this man would not be easily put off.
‘La Goulette,’ he said, ‘is not very interesting.’ I agreed with him, and this gave him the opportunity to ask what I was doing there, in reply to which I said the first thing that came into my head.
Next, as a matter of routine, it was the British royal family, always dragged in at such random encounters to keep up the conversation. ‘You English are royalists, and we are royalists, too. All of us. You have a King and we have a Bey. This is the best system for us all.’
I said something non-committal.
He wagged a warning finger under my nose, and the sharp intelligent eyes mirrored mistrust. ‘The French are no good,’ he said.
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Because they are finished. Defeated.’ He made a finicky gesture of distaste as if rejecting unsatisfactory food. Arabs frequently sought to curry favour with us by remarks of this kind, as if purporting to be aware of hidden tensions in the relationship between the two nations. I made no comment.
It was past midday and I was due back at our office in Le Kram. I made to get up, and he laid a hand on my sleeve. ‘I will speak with you about a confidential matter. It is our wish for you to see the brother of our Bey.’
‘Excuse me, but what on earth for?’
‘It would be interesting for us. Also I think for you.’
‘For me personally?’
‘No, I think for your country it would be interesting.’
Mysterious approaches of this kind happened from time to time, and at Philippeville we had soon learned that they were rarely to be taken seriously. There was one chance in ten that there was something at the back of this to be investigated. I offered to pass the man on to Leopold and make an appointment for him, but he would have none of this. The meeting at the Bey’s palace was to be with me, and questioning him as to why this should be, he became vague and evasive. I asked him who had directed him to me, and why, and he fenced me off with his secret smile. ‘We know of you,’ he said. ‘That is why I have come to talk to you in this way.’ He handed a splendidly engraved card. ‘Jean-Claude Mélia, Conseiller à la Cour de Sa Majesté le Bey.’ I began to be impressed, and to argue with myself that there was nothing to be lost in such a meeting, which might at least prove to be a memorable adventure. It was agreed that we should meet later that day, when I would give him my answer.
Leopold wanted to know what exactly was a bey, and I explained that he was the ruler of the country under the French. In this case some confusion arose because there were two beys, one the royal figurehead and the second, Sidi Lamine Bey, the ‘Bey du Camp’, the power behind the throne and Commander of the Palace Guard. It was the Bey du Camp with whom the meeting would be arranged.
‘And who’s this man you’ve been talking to?’
‘Mélia. Jean-Claude Mélia. He’s some sort of adviser.’
‘He’s not in the book,’ Leopold said. He was referring to the book in which names of several hundred suspects were listed, and the fact that he could make such a positive announcement off the cuff suddenly made me suspicious. Could Leopold be in some way mixed up with this? I tested him with a pretence of lack of interest. ‘Do you want to bother with this?’ I asked.
‘Go along with him,’ Leopold said. ‘I don’t have to tell you what to do. You might get the section an invitation to the palace. Do us all a bit of good. Might even be a bit of harem going spare.’ This enthusiasm only strengthened my suspicion.
I asked him if he wanted a report at this stage, and he said, ‘No, why? There’s nothing to report about.’
Next day Mélia drove me to the Bey’s palace at Kassar Said, among the orange orchards five miles out of Tunis. He handed me over to a palace official who led the way into a garden and left me in a rose arbour, with an entrance guarded by an enormous negro in an old-style Turkish uniform, holding a drawn scimitar. Shortly the Bey came floating into sight in a cloud of billowing lawn. He was carrying a white cat with long silky fur which he handed over to an accompanying servant, before greeting me. He said ‘Ahlan wa sahlan’ (‘Welcome’) three times, and asked with extreme politeness in a slightly disembodied voice after my health and that of the members of my family, before we settled facing each other at a little table covered with ceramic tiles, upon which another servant placed two glasses of mint tea.
The Bey du Camp, a man in early middle age, was saturated with patrician Arab restraint. All his movements were delicate and controlled, and through — as I imagined — a lifelong avoidance of displayed emotion, his face was strangely devoid of lines, and had about it someth
ing of a Madame Tussaud’s model. Even the small, glittering eyes in their setting of white, unwrinkled skin, seemed never to move. ‘Welcome,’ he said once again, before we raised the glasses of tea to our lips.
Arabic, using a modest vocabulary, stripped of provincial barbarism, and the verbs confined to their simple form, is the easiest of languages, made all the more so by the emphatic pronunciation of its consonants. The Bey employed the language in the pellucid form of the Koran, minus its archaism. He spoke slowly as if to a young child and was miraculously understandable. Delivering his message, he came straight to the point. Tunisia, he said, was about to sever its links with France which, legally, had no longer any claim upon a protectorate which it had failed to protect. The choice that faced it was between a royalist or republican form of government, and the Bey clearly favoured the first alternative, mentioning that the republican Destour movement, if allowed to take power, would introduce socialism into a strategically placed Mediterranean country, which clearly nobody wanted.