by Alexis Jenni
Finally, night fell. The group gradually dispersed. The stench now came up to your knees. We could feel it as we hunkered down. There were only a few of us, hesitating. The smell did not dissolve in the cool of the night. We kicked dirt into the hole. ‘Come in and wash your hands, kids. That’s disgusting.’ The grown-up who had been watching, smiling, had stayed until the end. He came over, crouched down, watching us work without a word, still smiling. He did not speak until we were just about to leave. ‘Come on, I live just here, on the ground floor. You need to wash your hands, they’re disgusting.’ He had a permanent smile and a slightly high-pitched, childlike voice, which made him seem more like us, something we found a little worrying. He insisted. Three of us followed him. He lived on the ground floor, the first door as you entered the building. All the shutters were closed. Inside it did not smell very nice. He pushed the door, which closed with a metallic clatter. He talked on and on. ‘It’s a horrible smell. I recognize it. Anyone who has ever smelled it would recognize it. It’s the smell of a grave, a grave when it is re-opened. You need to wash your hands. Thoroughly. Right now. And even your faces. It’s absolutely disgusting, the putrid dirt, and the fragments, the bones; it can make you seriously ill.’
We tramped through a murky living room filled with objects that were difficult to identify, a glass display case glowed dimly, a rifle hung on one wall, a dagger in its scabbard hanging from a nail beneath a piece of leather preposterously pinned to the wallpaper.
The bathroom was tiny. The three of us squeezed together at the washbasin. The harsh light above the mirrors was frightening. We could see him smiling above our heads, see his lips contort as he spoke, revealing stained teeth we thought were horrible. In the tiny bathroom he brushed against us as he passed the soap, turned on the tap. We were suffocating. We washed quickly, eager to get out of there. ‘We need to go now, it’s dark,’ one of us finally dared to interrupt him. ‘Already? Well, if you like…’ We headed back through the dark living room, packed together as though beating a retreat. He took the rifle from the wall and held it out to me. ‘Want to hold it? It’s a real rifle. It was used in a real war.’ None of us reached out. We kept our hands pressed against our bodies, trying to make sure nothing stuck out. ‘My dad doesn’t like me to handle weapons,’ one of us said.
‘A pity. He’s wrong.’ He hung up the gun with a sigh. He stroked the square of leather pinned to the wall. He took down the dagger, withdrew it from its sheath, looked at the rusted blade and slid it home again. We headed for the door. He opened the glass display case and removed a dark object and held it out to us. ‘Here.’ He stepped closer. ‘Take it. Feel it in your hands. Tell me what it is.’ Without taking it, we could tell it was a bone. A large, broken thighbone, easily recognizable by the bulbous end still crusted with desiccated meat that looked charred. ‘Take it, take it.’ ‘What is it? Something off the barbecue? Did your dog not want it?’ His hand hung, suspended. He fell silent, staring at us intently. ‘Don’t you have a dog?’ ‘A dog? Oh, yes, I used to have a dog. But they killed him. They slit my dog’s throat.’ His voice changed and in the dark living room this scared us. The ridiculous piece of leather tacked to the wall reflected a horrid, pinkish glow. We turned on our heels and raced for the door. It was closed, but only latched. ‘Goodbye, monsieur! Thanks, monsieur!’ It was only a latch. We simply had to turn the knob and we were outside. The air was mauve, the street lamps were lit, the car park was empty and never more than in that moment did I have a sense of vast spaces, of freedom, of fresh air. Without looking at each other, we disbanded, each running back to the building where we lived. I hurtled down the dirt embankment that we had filled in and the ground crumbled beneath my feet, I felt myself sinking. We had dug it over, it was full of bones and teeth. I jumped on to the concrete wall, down on to the tarmac. I ran. I took the stairs three at a time, the most my little legs could manage. I raced home.
Never again did we dig as deeply. We kept to the surface, contented ourselves with minor roadworks alongside the little motorway. Our major excavations were carried out elsewhere, far away. I grew up over a secret graveyard; when you dug up the ground, it stank. It was confirmed to me later: we were living over an abandoned cemetery. Older residents still remembered it. It had been filled in and built over. All that remained was the tall cypress tree in the middle of the grass where we played, oblivious.
I wonder now whether there were murderers lined up on the shelves where we lived. I cannot say for certain, but statistically it seems likely. In the glory years of the radiant cité, all the men aged between twenty-five and thirty-five, all my parents friends, had had the opportunity to kill. All of them. The opportunity. Two and a half million former soldiers, two million expatriated Algerians, a million exiled pieds noirs, a tenth of the population of what is now France were directly branded with the stain of colonialism, and it is contagious, it can be transmitted by contact and by word. Among the fathers of my friends, among the friends of my parents, there must have been some who were tainted by it, and by the secret powers of language all were sullied. The word ‘Algerian’ was spoken only after the briefest of hesitations, but one that was audible, since the ear can distinguish the slightest modulation. We did not know what to call them, so we simpered and preferred to say nothing. We did not see them; we saw only ‘them’. There was no word that fitted them, so they were nameless; they haunted us, the right word on the tips of our tongues, our tongues searching to find it. Even ‘Algerian’, which seems neutral, referring as it does to citizens of the republic of Algeria, did not fit, since it referred to others. The French language is a spoil of war according to a writer who wrote in French, and he was absolutely right, but so too is the name ‘Algerian’, it is a piece of flayed skin, the blood still visible, the dried clots still clinging to the flesh; they inhabit a name as others inhabit the abandoned apartments in the centre of Algiers. We no longer know what to say. The word ‘Arab’ has been contaminated by those who use it. ‘Native’ now is a term only in ethnology. ‘Muslim’ reveals something that should be hidden. We used the whole panoply of insults imported from over there. We invented the term ‘grey’ to designate those we do not name. We proposed the term ‘Maghrébin’, which we used without conviction like the Latin names of flowers. Colonial rot was eating away at our language; the deeper we dug, the more it stank.
The windows of the ground-floor apartment remained closed as far as I remember, and I never again saw the man with the childlike voice; and I never discovered what beast he could turn into, since we fled. I left with my parents to go and live in the country, a patch of land surrounded by a hedge; alone. Perched on a hill, behind leafy walls, we could see for miles.
In that horrific military parade that lasted twenty years, twenty years of uninterrupted repetition, the aim of each war was to wipe the slate clean after the war that had preceded it. To clear the table after a banquet of blood everything must be wiped clean, so that the table can be set and we can eat together once again. Over the course of twenty years war followed war; each purged the one that came before, as the murderers from each war disappeared into the next. Because each of those wars made murderers of men who would not have beaten their dog or even dreamed of beating it, delivering bound and naked men into their hands, allowing them to rule over droves of people cheapened by colonialism, a herd of unknown numbers, part of which could be slaughtered in order to save the rest, as cattle are culled to ward off epizootic disease. Those who had got a taste for blood vanished into the next war. The vicious and the mad, those the war had enlisted, and more especially those whom that war created, all those men who would never have thought of hurting anyone and yet had bathed in blood, this huge reserve of fighting men was reallocated like army surplus, like an overstock of weapons, and they found themselves embroiled in grubby little wars, sordid terrorist attacks, fighting alongside thugs. But the rest? What became of the human surplus from the last of our wars?
Given my age, I may have encount
ered them as a child, in school, in the street, in the stairwells of the tower block. Grown-ups who were parents of my friends, friends of my parents, those wonderful people who had hugged me, lifted me into the air, dandled me on their knees, served me at dinner, might have used those selfsame hands to shoot, to stab, to drown, to activate electrodes that made men howl. Perhaps the ears that listened to our childish prattle had heard that unspeakable howl when a man’s scream sends him plummeting down the stages of evolution: the cry of a child, a dog, an ape, a reptile, the groan of a suffocating fish and finally the viscous burst of a trampled worm. Perhaps I lived through a nightmare in which only I was asleep. I lived among ghosts, I could not hear them, each immured in his pain. Where were they, the men who had been taught to do such things? When we finally ceased to fight, what did we do to re-absorb the murderers from the last of all our wars? We vaguely cleaned them up. We shipped them home. Violence is a biological function common to everyone, it is locked inside; but if given free rein, it spreads; if the jack-in-the-box is opened, it may be impossible to close again. What became of all those whose hands were stained with blood? They must have been all around me, silently lined up on the concrete shelves where I spent my childhood. Those marked by violence are a nuisance, because there are so many of them, and there was nowhere they could be absorbed except in embittered nationalist movements.
‘Me?’ Victorien Salagnon told me. ‘I paint, for Eurydice. That’s what keeps me from being bitter.’
And he was teaching me to paint. I went to visit him. He was teaching me the art of the brush, an art that had come to him naturally and whose vast potential he had glimpsed when studying with a master. In his little house with its hideous decor, he taught me the subtlest of arts, an art so subtle it scarcely requires a medium, a breath is enough.
I went to Voracieux by metro, by bus. I travelled to the end of the line. It was far. I had all the time in the world. I watched the urban landscape flash past, the cités and the tower blocks, the crumbling houses, the tall trees left standing by accident, the saplings planted in rows, the windowless warehouses that are the modern versions of factories, and the out-of-town shopping centres ringed by car parks so vast it is hardly possible to make out people passing on the other side. In silence, face pressed against the window of the bus, I travelled so I could learn to paint. The landscape shifted. The suburbs are continually being rebuilt. Nothing there is preserved except through inadvertence. I daydreamed. I thought about the art of painting. I watched the forms flittering across the windows of the bus. Then I spotted a number of strapping municipal police officers, their belts strung with incapacitating weapons. They moved in groups along the broad avenues, clustered around a rapid response vehicle fitted with a blue stripe and a flashing light. They were on guard duty, arms folded, arms dangling, outside the shopping centres. This shocked me; from this single image I understood: violence spreads, but it preserves the same form. Whether small scale or large scale, it is still the art of war.
There was a time when we entrusted our violence entirely to the State and laughed at municipal police. They were like rural policemen with smaller moustaches and no drums. For a long time the municipal police were men on scooters who would angrily pull up and tell you, no, you cannot park there; then they would zoom off again, helmets perched too high on their heads, belching an oily cloud of the two-stroke fuel mix that powered the scooters. They were also middle-aged women, who tramped the streets in unflattering uniforms hunting out illegally parked cars; in summer they read the riot act to the teenagers who dived into the Seine, warning that they would not be the ones to fish them out, and they bickered with shopkeepers over the cleanliness of pavements, over leaving piles of sweepings or sluicing bucketfuls of water with too much force. Then, like everything else, they were enhanced. A different type of man was drafted in. There were lots of them. They were not issued with guns, but with ‘compliance weapons’ that they were trained to use. They were heavily built, they looked like soldiers.
After the elections I saw them appear; they moved around Voracieux in groups. They had the same build, the same haircuts as the National Police. On their belts they carried side-handle batons. They were an imposing presence. I saw them from the window of the bus. I had never seen so many. Over and above the state police, I wondered how many municipal officers, prison warders and security guards there were in France, all kitted out in ankle boots, slim-fit trousers and pale blue shirts. The streets were becoming militarized, just as they were over there.
This new type of police officer first appeared in Voracieux because it is our future. City centres are conservation areas; it is in the outlying suburbs that one can see what has happened since. I saw the muscular sergeants through the windows of the bus taking me to my painting lesson. Driving past the tower blocks I saw municipal officers screwing a plaque to a wall. The high-vis plaque was white emblazoned in black with a letter, followed by a dot and a number in smaller type. They were boring into the thick concrete next to the entrance using a large power drill whose whine I could hear despite the distance, despite the window, despite the racket on the overcrowded bus, where, for some reason, the radio was always blaring. I saw other plaques just like it on all the tower blocks in the area, each marked with a different letter, a large black letter visible at a distance. Others had been affixed to the signposts at crossroads or on street corners. I wondered why the municipal police were carrying out public works. But I did not think too much of it.
When I arrived at Salagnon’s place, Mariani was there, wearing a hideous green checked shirt and the same semi-transparent glasses that blurred his eyes. He was overexcited, talking nineteen to the dozen and laughing between sentences.
‘Listen to this, lad, you’re the one interested in things, though you wouldn’t dare get your hands dirty. We’ve taken a step towards resolving our problems. Well, at least we’ve got someone to listen. The new mayor agreed to meet me and a couple of my lads, the ones with a bit of education. That said, I’m the one who always does the talking and I’m the one people talk to. Anyway, we met him like he promised before he got elected; he didn’t want it to get out, because he knows people don’t like us. People resent us for speaking the truth, for shouting from the rooftops something they’d rather keep secret, by which I mean our national humiliation. People prefer to keep their heads down, make their money, wait for the problem to go away, or else they fuck off as soon as they’ve made their fortune. So when we try and force them to lift them up – their heads, I mean – it hurts, because they’ve been bowed so long they’re stuck that way, so they blame us. But the mayor understands where we’re coming from. He has to be discreet, because there are people who don’t like us; he’s discreet, but he understands us.’
‘He understands you?’
‘That’s what he said. He invited us into his office, me and the boys, shook everyone’s hand, had us sit down, and we were sitting right opposite him, like it was a work meeting. And that’s when he said to us: “I have understood you! I know what has happened here.”’
‘Really?’
‘Really. Word for word. And he went on in the same tone: “I see what you have been trying to achieve. And there are many things I want to change here.”’
‘I wonder where he comes up with this stuff?’ chuckled Salagnon.
‘Who knows? He must be a big reader. Or maybe, when he met us, he had a flash of inspiration, he had a vision of his place in history, and the Ancients spoke through him.’
‘Or he’s taking the piss.’
‘No. He’s too ambitious; everything is on the level. He asked our advice about how to hold Voracieux, how best to deploy the police to control the population. He appointed me as a security advisor.’
‘You?’
‘You might not think it, but I’ve got references. But it’s a phantom post. People don’t like us. They despise us, even though we’re expressing the dream of lots of people. I’ll be advising the municipal police force, and
let me tell you my advice won’t fall on deaf ears. We’ll put our ideas into practice.’
‘So you’re behind all this, the new cops, the patrols, the plaques on the tower blocks?’
‘That’s me. Surveillance, control, intelligence, action. We plan to take back the no-go areas and subdue them. Just like we did over there. We have the power.’
His voice quavered a little, with age and with joy, but I had no doubt that people would listen. The History that had stopped would pick up again exactly where we left off. We were inspired by phantoms: we tried to conflate our problems with those of the past, to solve them as we had failed to solve the problems of the past. We are so in thrall to power ever since we lost it. A little more power and we will be saved, we believe, just a little more power than we have now. And we will fail again.
Since we no longer know who we are, we will rid ourselves of those who are not like us. Then we will know who we are, because we will all be surrounded by those like us. We will be we. The ‘we’ who remains will be those who have cast off those who are unlike them. We will be bound by blood. Blood always binds, it sticks; blood that is spilled unites, blood we have spilled together, the blood of others that we have spilled together; we will congeal into a vast, united clot.
Power and resemblance are two stupid ideas that are incredibly persistent; it is impossible to be rid of them. They are twin beliefs in the physical nature of our world, two ideas of such simplicity that a child can understand them; and when a man who has power is driven by a child’s ideas, he can wreak terrible destruction. Resemblance and power are the most elemental ideas imaginable. They are so self-evident that each of us invents them without having to be taught. On these foundations it is possible to build an intellectual monument, an ideological movement, an imposing governmental project, one that stands or falls on its own merits (the expression itself is an omen), yet one so absurd and so false that the moment it is raised it begins to crumble, claiming thousands of victims as it collapses. And yet no lessons will be learned, power and resemblance will never evolve. When the project fails, as they count the dead, people will think that if only they had had just a little more power, if only they had more precisely calculated the degrees of resemblance. Stupid ideas are immortal, because we hold them in our hearts. They are childish ideas: children constantly dream of having more power, constantly seek out those who resemble them.