by Alexis Jenni
He set off up the steep streets; in the gutters brown water flowed towards the sea; a reddish sludge coursed down from the Arab districts through the European city, cut a path through it and disappeared into the sea. He noticed this sludge was scattered with flecks of debris; some were clots of congealed blood of a purple so dark it was almost black. The clouds had dispersed; the white walls mirrored the light, they shimmered. He navigated by the blue-tiled signs on the street corners. French plaques inscribed in French, a fact he did not notice, since it seemed so unremarkable: the words that he could read were underscored by the jagged undulations of Arabic, which he could not read, so they formed a simple ornament. He walked on, with no detours, and found the house whose address he had copied out so often, where Salomon joyously welcomed him.
‘Come in, Victorien, come in! It is such a pleasure to see you!’
Salomon took his arm and led him into a grubby little kitchen with dishes piled up in the sink. He found a bottle and two glasses and set them on the oilcloth-covered table. He quickly wiped away the crumbs and the larger stains with a dubious-looking dishrag.
‘Sit down, Victorien! I’m so happy you’re here! Here, taste, it’s an anisette. It’s what we drink here.’
He filled the glasses, gestured for Victorien to sit, then sat down himself and looked his guest in the eye; but his red-rimmed eyes could not see straight.
‘Stay, Victorien, stay as long as you like. This is your home here. Your home.’
But after this fulsome welcome, he began to repeat himself, his voice a little softer each time until finally he fell silent. Salomon had aged. He no longer laughed. He talked loudly, tremulously served more anisette. His hands trembled and a few drops splattered next to the glasses. His hands trembled constantly, although it was hardly noticeable since, when not holding something, he hid them, slipping them under the table or stuffing them into his pockets. They exchanged snippets of news, talked about themselves.
‘Where’s Ahmed?’
‘Ahmed? Gone.’
Salomon sighed, drained his glass and refilled it. He did not laugh at all now; the network of laughter lines that criss-crossed his face seemed disused, while other wrinkles had appeared that made him look older.
‘You know about what happened here last year? Suddenly, the whole world was turned upside down, everything that had seemed so solid was reduced to cardboard and pfft it was ripped apart and blown away. And all it took was a flag and a single gunshot. A single gunshot, just as people were taking their aperitif, like in some pataouète tragedy.
‘The Arabs wanted to have a march to celebrate the victory when the Germans up there in the north decided to throw in the towel. The Arabs wanted to show how happy they were that we had won, but no one here agrees who we mean by “we”. They wanted to celebrate victory, to glory in having won, and also to say that now that we had won, nothing would be the same again. They wanted to stage an official parade, so they got out the Algerian flags; the problem is that the Algerian flag is banned. Personally, I think the Algerian flag is ridiculous; I don’t know what it’s supposed to be. But they got it out and the Muslim scouts were carrying it. Some guy was coming out of a café, a cop, and when he saw this group of Arabs marching with the flag, he thought he was hallucinating and he panicked. He’d been wearing his service revolver in the café, so he pulled it out and fired, and the little Muslim scout carrying the flag was killed. This dumb fucking cop goes for a drink wearing his gun and starts a riot. Things might have calmed down. I mean, it’s hardly the first time an Arab has been killed for no reason, just for looking at someone the wrong way; but there was a whole troop marching, carrying the banned Algerian flag and this was 8 May, Victory Day, the day of our victory, except no one here agrees on who we mean by “we”.
‘At that point, the rioters fell on passers-by; people killed each other for having the wrong type of face, slaughtered each other for a look or a scowl. Dozens of Europeans were gutted with all manner of weapons. I stitched many of their wounds, they were ugly and filthy. The wounded – those who managed to avoid being ripped apart – suffered agonies because their wounds became infected; but much worse was the terror they suffered, a terror far worse than any I saw during the war, when the disciplined Germans were firing on us. These wounded souls were living through a nightmare, because these people who lived among them, whom they rubbed shoulders with in the streets every day and passed without seeing, had suddenly turned on them with sharp tools and struck them. More terrible than the pain of the injuries was their disbelief, though the wounds were savage and deep, since they had been made with tools, gardening forks and butcher’s knives that sank deep into their vital organs; but their failure to understand went deeper still, it went to the very heart, to the core of these people. And because they could not understand, they died of fear: someone living alongside you has turned on you. As though, without warning, a faithful dog had turned and bitten them. Can you imagine? The faithful dog you feed and care for suddenly turns on you and mauls you.’
‘The Arabs are your dogs?’
‘Why do you say that, Victorien?’
‘You said it, not me.’
‘I didn’t say anything of the sort. I made a comparison so you would understand the surprise, the horror of a betrayal of trust. And what can a man trust if not his dog? In its mouth it has the means to kill you, but it does not. So when it does turn on you with those vicious teeth it has always possessed yet never used to bite you, then all trust is destroyed; as in a nightmare where things turn against you, where animals return to a nature long since tamed. It is beyond comprehension; or perhaps it is something you always knew, but never dared to say. In the case of dogs, we call it rabies, a virus that drives them insane, a virus they contract by being bitten that causes them to bite in turn, and that explains everything. With Arabs, no one knows.’
‘You’re talking about people as if they are dogs.’
‘Spare me the lecture on which words are acceptable. You’re not from here, Victorien, you know nothing. What we have experienced is so terrifying that we are not about to mince words to spare prissy, French sensibilities. We have to face facts, Victorien. We have to tell the truth. And the truth hurts.’
‘Whether it is the truth is another matter.’
‘I wanted to talk about trust, so I talked about dogs. To explain the sudden rage dogs sometimes suffer, we say they have rabies; we accept that as a natural explanation and we have them put down. With the Arabs, I don’t know. I’ve never believed in all this business about race, but now I can see no way to explain it except that it’s in the blood. Violence is in the blood. Treachery is in the blood. Can you give me another explanation?’
He said nothing for a moment. He poured himself another glass, spilling a little, and forgetting to pour one for Salagnon.
‘Ahmed has disappeared. When all this started, he helped me. The wounded were sent for me to treat and he worked alongside me. But when the patients saw him bending over them, with his hook nose and his moustache and his swarthy skin, they whimpered in a weak voice and asked me to stay. They begged me not to go away, not to leave them alone with him, and at night they wanted me to watch over them, not him.
‘Now it occurs to me that I forgot to ask Ahmed what he thought, but I found it funny. I’d pat Ahmed on the shoulder and say: “Go on, leave me to it, they’re not well, they’re allergic to moustaches,” like it was a joke. But it was no joke; men who have been ripped open with gardening tools don’t joke.
‘And then, late one night, while we were cleaning and sterilizing the instruments we had used during the day – because there was so much work, we had to do everything, but it wasn’t very different to the years we had spent at war together – so, there we were, the two of us, standing in front of the sterilizer and he told me that I was his friend. At first, it made me happy. I thought that exhaustion and the late hour and everything we had been through together over the years had suddenly made him talkative. I nodd
ed and I was about to say that I felt the same, but he carried on. He told me that soon the Arabs would murder all the French. And that since I was his friend, when that day came he would kill me himself, quickly, so I did not suffer.
‘He spoke without raising his voice, without looking at me; he carried on working, a blood-spattered apron around his waist, his hands covered in soap suds in the middle of the night, when, but for a few patients who couldn’t sleep, we were the only ones awake, the only ones standing, the only healthy, rational men. He reassured me that he would not let just anyone do it any old how, and he said it as he cleaned the bloodstains from the razor-sharp blades; he said it standing in front of a shelf full of scalpels, of pincers and needles that would have terrified a butcher. I had the presence of mind to laugh it off and thank him, and he smiled too. When everything had been tidied away, we went to bed. I found the key to my bedroom. It was a tiny, flimsy key that slotted into a tiny, flimsy lock, but it was all I had, and, besides, this had to be a nightmare, and I locked my door. Rituals are enough to ward off nightmares. In the morning, even I was shocked to find that I had secured the door with such a little lock. Ahmed was gone. Men from the neighbourhood armed with rifles and pistols, men dressed in short-sleeved shirts – I knew every one of them – they came to my house and asked me where he was. But I didn’t know. They wanted to take him away and give him a beating. I was relieved that he had left. These armed men told me that there were murderers gathering in the mountains. Ahmed, they said, had probably gone to join them. But there were so many hunts, so many executions, so many mass burials that he may very well have disappeared; actually disappeared without a trace. No one knows how many have died. No one keeps count. All the wounded I treated were Europeans. Because during those weeks no Arabs were wounded. The Arabs were killed.
‘You know what they mean by a hunt? You comb the countryside and flush out your quarry. For weeks, they hunted those responsible for the dreadful acts of 8 May. Not one could be allowed to escape. Everyone was involved: the police, obviously, but they were not up to the task, so they were joined by the army, but they failed too, and so the country folk, who know the terrain, and the people from the city, who got to know it, and even the navy, who bomb the villages along the coast, and the air force, who had been bombing the remote villages. They all took up arms and all the Arabs suspected of having some role, however small, in the tragedy, were caught and eliminated.’
‘How many in all?’
‘A thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand, how would I know? If necessary, a million; all of them. Treachery is in the blood. There is no other explanation, because otherwise why should they turn on us when we lived side by side? All of them, if need be. All of them. We’ll have peace now for ten years.’
‘How were they recognized?’
‘Who? The Arabs? Surely you’re joking, Victorien?’
‘The guilty men.’
‘The guilty men were Arabs. And this was no time to let one of them escape. If others got caught up in it, too bad. It was crucial to eradicate, to cauterize as quickly as possible, for that to be the end of the matter. Most Arabs are guilty of something or other. You just have to look at the way they walk, the way they look at us. They’re all in this together. They have huge families, you know. Like tribes. They all know each other, they support each other. So they are all guilty men. They’re not difficult to recognize.’
‘You didn’t talk this way in 1944. You talked about equality.’
‘I don’t give a shit about equality. I was young. I was in France. I was winning the war. Now I’m home and I’m scared. Can you believe that? This is my home and I’m scared shitless.’
His hands were shaking, his eyes red-rimmed, his shoulders sagged as though he were about to curl up into a ball and go to sleep. He poured himself another glass and stared at it in silence.
‘Victorien, go and see Eurydice. I’m tired now. She’s down at the beach with some friends. She’ll be happy to see you.’
‘At the beach, in October?’
‘What do you think, boy, you think they dismantle the beach in August when the French go home after your holidays? The beach is still there. Go on, go. Eurydice will be glad to see you.’
On the beach in Algiers there is no need to bathe. The coast plunges steeply into the sea, the strip of sand is narrow, small waves slap against the rocks that appear out of the water with brusque impatience. The sand dries quickly beneath the blazing sun; the sky is a spotless, pale blue; a neat line of clouds floats above the horizon to the north, over Spain and France.
Young people wearing open shirts over their swimming costumes come and sit on this beach ringed with rocks. They bring a towel, a beach bag; they sit on the sand or at makeshift refreshment stalls: little more than a concrete windbreak, a bar and a few stools. Here people live outdoors, they scarcely dress; they nibble spicy snacks and sip their drinks and they talk, they talk interminably as they sit together on the sand.
On her white beach towel Eurydice sat at the centre of a group of lithe, tanned young men, who were talking and laughing. Seeing Victorien appear, she got to her feet and ran towards him a little cautiously over the uneven sand; she ran to him as fast as she could and threw her bronzed arms around his neck. Then she led him back to the group and introduced him to the others, who greeted him with unexpected enthusiasm. They bombarded him with questions, told him jokes, touched his arm or his shoulder when they spoke to him as though they had known him for ever. They laughed loudly, they talked quickly, they got worked up over nothing and then laughed again. Salagnon was left behind. He quickly proved disappointing; he lacked a quick wit; he did not measure up.
Eurydice laughed with her friends, who pretended to flirt with her. When the sun grew brighter she put on sunglasses, which blotted out her eyes so that she was simply a pair of mischievous lips. She turned from one to the other; her hair, falling over her shoulders, followed her every movement after a flicker of hesitation; every time she laughed she was the queen of a troop of monkeys. Salagnon scowled resentfully. He did not take part. He watched from a distance and thought that he would rather paint the undulating line of clouds floating over the horizon to his right. His talent was rekindled, a tingling in his hands; he sat in silence. Suddenly he despised Algiers, he who had loved the garrulous affability of Salomon Kaloyannis; despised Algiers and the French Algerians who talk too quickly in a language that is no longer his, an informal language, one that he cannot follow, cannot join in. They pranced around him, mocking, cruel, as they dug an impassable moat around Eurydice.
Eventually, they went back up to the city by a flight of concrete steps between the rocks. The young men took their leave, kissing Eurydice, shaking Victorien’s hand with an enthusiasm that seemed to him different, more ironic than it had been at first. The two of them walked home together, shoulder to shoulder. From time to time they glanced at each other a little awkwardly, but mostly they stared straight ahead. They made banal small talk along the way. The walk seemed endless; the bustling crowds slowed their progress.
The evening meal with Salomon was ponderously polite. Eurydice was tired and went to bed early.
‘What do you plan to do now, Victorien?’
‘Go back, I think. Maybe re-enlist in the army.’
‘The war is over, Victorien. Life has resumed. Why would we need musketeers now? Make a life for yourself, do something important. The last thing Eurydice needs is a sabre-rattler; their time has passed. When you’ve made a life for yourself, come back. The young men here are all talk, but you, you’re nothing. Live a little, then come back to us.’
The following morning he took the ferry for Marseille. On the afterdeck he began a letter to Eurydice. The Algerian coast began to shrink: he sketched it. The harsh sun picked out the shadows, made the kasbah bristle with teeth. He drew the small boat of the ferry: the funnel, the gunwales, the passengers leaning against the sides, looking out to sea. He sketched in ink on small white cards. From Mars
eille he sent her some as postcards. He sent them often. On the back he wrote a few brief lines about what he was doing. She never replied.
He met his uncle, who was back from Indochine. He spent several weeks in a room without even unpacking his bags; he was waiting to put out again. There was nothing for him here in France, his uncle said. ‘These days, I live in a trunk.’ He would say it without a smile, staring into the eyes of his interlocutor, who would inevitably look away, because it made him think of a pine coffin and he did not know whether to smile or shudder. He was talking about a metal trunk painted green, not particularly large, that held all his belongings and followed him wherever he went. He had dragged it through Germany, through Africa, both North and Equatorial, and now through Indochine. The paint was flaking, the sides were dented. When he tapped it affectionately, it boomed hollowly.
‘This is my real home, because it contains everything I own. We all end up in a trunk in the end, but I’m already living in one. I’m ahead of the game. They say that to study philosophy is to learn how to die. I haven’t read the books that explain the idea, but it’s a philosophy I understand in practice. It saves a lot of time, and that is one thing I run short of: given the life I lead, I’m likely to go before most people.’
His uncle did not laugh. Victorien knew that there was no humour in what he said: he simply said what he had to say, but he did it so bluntly that it sometimes sounded like a joke. He just told it like it was.
‘Why don’t you give it up?’ Victorien asked all the same. ‘Why don’t you come back now?’