by Alexis Jenni
‘Hence the armour-plating?’
‘I would have put more on, but I need to be able to see the road. But to hit me now they’ll need a high-quality rifle and a sniper with good aim. I’m not such an easy target. I’m not a sitting duck. They’ll try and shoot the driver of some other truck. On paper, I survive.’
‘You’re very meticulous.’
‘And a coppersmith. Take a look, it’s all hand-made. Ten-gauge galvanized steel fitted together like paper cut-outs. It’s a fine piece of work, Capitaine.’
They passed Chambol, standing on the bonnet of his parked jeep. He was holding on to the windscreen, gazing at the village down the hill. The slanted afternoon light sculpted his face, carving it into a mask like a military statue. He stood stock-still.
‘What the hell is that idiot doing there?’
Salagnon gave a curt, two-finger salute and the colonel responded with an imperceptible chin jut. Two half-tracks blocked the road and the entrance to the village. A few young soldiers stood around, steel helmets lopsided, holding their rifles like brooms, childlike in their overlarge uniforms. The sun grazed the horizon; the dust that hung in the air caught coppery reflections; the youthful faces of the soldiers radiated confusion. They stood where they were planted; they didn’t know what to do. Salagnon climbed down from the truck. The viscid evening air warmed by a low sun made him blink; he heard flies. They droned in the thick amber in which they were all stuck; the soldiers clumsily clutching their rifles, standing rigid and silent. The gunners on the half-tracks had their fingers on the stocks of the machine guns; they were staring straight ahead of them and did not move. He heard a scream; a scream in a French that stretched the vocal cords to braking point. He could not make out the words. Several bodies lay on the scree between the houses. It was from here the drone of flies was coming. The mud wall above them was peppered with random holes; the machine-gun bullets passed straight through with no problem, gouging out lumps of mud. A sergeant was screaming at an Arab lying on the ground, an old man paralysed with fear, mumbling through his toothless gums. Several soldiers stood, watching the scene, like spectators; some had their hands in their pockets; not one said a word or dared to make a move. The sergeant kicked wildly at the old man, shrieking louder than his vocal cords could manage. Eventually, Salagnon understood what he was saying.
‘Where is he? Where is he?’
‘Sergent, are you looking for something?’
The sergeant stood up, his eyes glittering, the corners of his mouth flecked with foam from screaming without stopping to catch his breath.
‘I’m looking for the bastard who gave us the false information. I lost four of my men in that ambush, four kids, and I want to find that bastard.’
‘Does he know anything?’
‘They all know. But they won’t say. They shield each other. But I’ll find him. He’ll tell me. That bastard will pay. If I have to burn down the whole village to make him pay, I’ll do it. They have to be taught. We can’t let anything slide.’
‘Leave the old man. He doesn’t know anything. He doesn’t even understand your questions.’
‘He doesn’t know anything? In that case, you’re right, let’s stop this right now.’
He took his regulation-issue pistol from its holster and, with a single movement, aimed it at the old man and fired. Blood from his shattered skull spattered the shoes of the soldier standing closest, who recoiled, eyes wide, and the fingers gripping his rifle tightened; a gunshot rang out, the bullet boring into the dirt, raising a cloud of dust, rattling him, and he blushed as though caught out and muttered an apology. Salagnon took a step forwards. The sergeant watched him approach. He reeked of alcohol. Salagnon punched him under the chin. The sergeant crumpled to the ground and stopped moving.
‘Clear the road. Roll these gun trucks on to the verge.’
The half-tracks complied in a haze of diesel smoke. The soldiers stepped aside. Salagnon climbed back into his truck. They drove slowly through the village, avoiding the potholes and the large stones scattered across the road. The constant whine of the flies joined the whine of their engines. The sergeant was still lying on the ground. The bewildered rookies stood, frozen, rifles pointing at the earth, blinking into the late afternoon sun. The corpses sank into the shadows.
‘Just a bit of tidying up to do,’ muttered Salagnon. ‘They’ll be fine without us.’
‘They don’t seem too smart,’ said the driver.
‘They’re asked to do appalling things. They’re trained by arseholes, led by a colonel from a third-rate comedy, and all for nothing in particular. They’ll hate us for this. They’ll hate us for a long time.’
In 1958 The Novelist once again became head of state. He was an écrivain militaire, of the sort that might have existed during the Empire or the Grand Siècle; the sort to scrawl great battle lines in red pencil on a map, to juggle mistresses in every barracks town, to get to know his army on campaign as he might a pack of hounds; the sort who is ostensibly obedient to his prince, yet in the field heeds no opinion but his own; the sort who writes brilliant letters on the eve of battle and heavy tomes of memoirs late in life. But the man who returned as head of state never presided over a war, never flaunted a mistress and never found a prince he could obey.
In 1958 the army placed The Novelist at the apex of the state, where there is room for only one man. It is strange to think that in a position designed for a prince, they placed a soldier. It is strange that they were devoted to a soldier who did not fight, whose only extravagance was verbal, who relentlessly created himself through an extraordinary literary brilliance. His towering oeuvre is not entirely contained within his books; it is most marked in his orations, like so many dramatic monologues; in speeches like prophecies and in epigrams cited in a welter of anecdotes, most of them apocryphal, since he would not have had time to say them all, but which nonetheless form part of the oeuvre. He had spirit, this great general with no troops who marshalled only words; he had a romantic spirit, one he breathed into his books and into the minds of those who read them. The spirit of the French people was The Novelist’s masterpiece: he rewrote them; the French people were his great novel. It is still read to this day. He had spirit, which is the French manner of using language, with him, and against him.
The military men, ill at ease with the pen, made him head of state; he was entrusted with writing History. He had already written the first volume: he was asked to write the sequel. In this novel featuring fifty million characters he was to be the omniscient narrator. Reality would be entirely composed of what he said; what he left unsaid would not exist; what he slyly hinted at would come to pass. People ascribed to him the omnipotence of the creating Word. With him they had the little-known relationship that the characters in a novel have with their author. Most of the time they are silent, they are merely the words of the other, they have no autonomy. The narrator alone is entrusted with the word. He tells the truth. He dictates the criteria for truth. He gives the impression of truth and everything else, everything that resides outside the categories of his narration is nothing but noises, moans, eructations and rumblings destined to go unheard. The characters are haunted with pain at amounting to so little that they die noisily, torn apart.
From the helicopter they could see the Commandos de Chasse scouring the countryside. He watched them march in long lines through the wastes of the forbidden zone. Atop the pale rocks he saw the dotted line of dark figures, weighed down by heavy kitbags, canteens of water, guns slung over their shoulders. They criss-crossed the zone, letting nothing through, tracking the remnants of the beaten katibas, searching out and killing small groups of starving men with Czech rifles who marched through the night and spent their days in caves. The Commandos de Chasse marched a lot and much of the time they found nothing, but their muscles became thick cables, their skin became bronzed, their souls became impervious to blood, their minds could identity the enemy by his face, his name, the timbre of his voice. Salagnon fle
w over the area in a helicopter. He set down at just the right point when a sledgehammer blow was needed to break down the barriers. With his men of noble presence they formed a mighty force. They stormed caves and intercepted a powerful unit led by officers trained in Eastern Europe. ‘We’re the shock troops,’ Trambassac would say to the other officers, whom he treated like old fogeys. ‘We take the fight to them. We take it to them and we win.’ They moved out in fleets of helicopters. They were victorious, always victorious; they came back in trucks. And nothing changed. They decimated the countryside; a good part of the population was rounded up into camps; after every operation they publicly displayed the corpses of the slaughtered rebels; they kept a count, and nothing changed. In Algiers, a general hostility sapped the strength of French Algeria. Tactical terror spread fear as a fine powder that blanched everything, a lingering smell it was impossible to escape, like industrial waste, like pollution, like the oily smoke belched by factories, so pervasive it impregnated the sky, the earth, the bodies. Salagnon and his men continued to strike hard, here and there. Nothing changed. Fear pervaded the very stones they walked on, the air they breathed, leaving a dusty film over skin and soul, thickening the blood, obstructing the heart. They died of congestion, of hypercoagulation, of general circulatory failure.
‘There is no way for this to end. There are no Arabs left for me to interrogate,’ he would say. ‘They’re dead, on the run, or they say nothing and disapprove and they look at me with fear. They don’t answer when I speak. They shun me. Walking down the street, I feel like a stone in the middle of a river. The water avoids me, washes around me, it scarcely dampens me, it goes on flowing without me, and the stone that I am is dying for want of being saturated, dying because it is impermeable, because it can see the water flowing all around, paying it no heed. I’m nothing but a stone, Victorien, I am as wretched as a stone.’
‘He says he knows you,’ said Mariani.
He recognized Brioude, despite the black eye, his swollen face, the dishevelled clothes that were stained down the front, the ripped collar with one button dangling from a thread about to fall; he recognized him, Brioude, sitting on the ground, leaning against the wall, a little slumped, his hands tied behind his back. A young Arab next to him, in exactly the same state, curiously had a small silver cross pinned to the lapel of his frayed jacket.
‘Father Brioude,’ Mariani went on, ‘a Catholic priest, that much is definite, and a war veteran, or so he claims. The other guy calls himself Sébastien Bouali and says he’s a seminarian.’
‘Lebanese?’
‘Algerian Muslim. Converted. It’s a bit too pat.’
When Mariani sent for him, Salagnon went down to the ‘fridge’, the stark cellar in the basement of the Moorish villa where prisoners were kept waiting. Sometimes a few hours in the ‘fridge’ was all it took, since they could hear the screams through the walls, could smell the stagnant, musty stench; they could see the heavyset men stride past, their shirts unbuttoned, but could never manage to catch their eyes, sunken deeply in their sockets like wells in the dim light. Putting them in the fridge was sometimes enough to reduce them to a terrified jelly; and sometimes not. In which case they were taken to one of the other cellars in the basement of the Moorish villa, one where they would be bombarded with questions until they talked or until they died.
‘What the hell are you doing here?’
‘Helping, my friend, I’m helping.’
‘Do you even know who you’re helping, Father?’ asked Mariani curtly.
‘Of course, my son,’ he said, a sardonic smile tugging at his thin lips.
‘You’re helping cut-throats, terrorists who set bombs off in the street to kill at random. You know who the FLN are?’
‘I know.’
‘So how can a Frenchman like you support them? And even sympathize with them? If you were a Communist, I might understand, but a priest!’
‘I know who they are. A monstrous hotchpotch that we ourselves created. But whoever they are, the Algerians are right to want to throw us out of their country.’
‘The Algerians are French, and this is part of France.’
Salagnon straightened up.
‘What did he do?’
‘I don’t know yet. He’s suspected of being a liaison officer for the FLN.’
‘Let it go.’
‘Are you joking? We’ve got him. We’re not going to let him go. He can give us a lot of information.’
‘Forget it. Send him and whatever he knows back to France, unharmed. I’m sure it’s not much. He’s been rattled enough as it is. He fought with me during the war. Let’s not tear each other apart.’
Brioude was helped to his feet, the handcuffs were removed and he rubbed his swollen wrists.
‘What about him?’
The three men standing glanced at the young Arab leaning against the wall, who looked up at them in silence.
‘The Christian name and the little crucifix, is it a front?’
‘He is genuinely Catholic. He was baptized. He chose this name when he was christened, because he was originally named after the Prophet and wanted to keep Him out of this. He converted in order to become a priest. He wants to know God and he found Islamic studies mindless. Forty boys sitting around reciting the Koran without understanding a word, in front of some fanatic who whacks them with a stick at the slightest mistake; it only leads to submission, but submission to the stick, not to God. He decided that Love and Incarnation were closer to what he felt. He is not a Muslim any more, he is a Catholic. I’ll vouch for him. You can untie him and send him back to France with me.’
‘He’ll stay here with us.’
‘He doesn’t know anything.’
‘We’ll find that out for ourselves.’
‘I’ve told you, he’s not Muslim! There’s nothing now standing in the way of him being a Frenchman like you and me.’
‘You don’t really understand Algeria, Father. He will always be a Muslim, and a French subject, not a citizen. Arab, native, if you prefer.’
‘He has converted.’
‘You do not stop being a Muslim by converting. Let him be Catholic if he wants, that’s his business, but he’s still a Muslim. It’s not an adjective. People cannot change their nature.’
‘Religion is not a “nature”!’
‘It is in Algeria. And nature confers rights and reserves them.’
The young man hunkered against the wall did not move, did not protest. He followed the conversation with a sad, dejected air. Terror would come later.
‘Come on, Father, they know what they’re doing. What they say may be absurd, but in this case, they’re right.’
* * *
‘This is a war of capitaines,’ the uncle whispered to him.
The brushwood tossed on to the fire quickly blazed, illuminating them all. He no longer even noticed the uniform; his life was spent with people in uniform. He saw only the faces and the hands of his companions, the faces bare and shorn of hair, the hands and the forearms bare, since they all rolled up their sleeves. The tall flames from the brushwood cast dancing shadows on the faces of the young men around him. He thought about ink. The flames died down. The thick branches and solid roots they had piled up underneath produced a measured, enduring blaze. He could see the stars once more. Wisps of distant breeze brought the scents of aromatic plants and cooling rocks. The air smelled of wide open spaces; they were spending the night in the mountains.
‘These are our men. They follow us. We go where we please. We are the capitaines. We are the masters of our lives, our deaths. Isn’t that what you wanted?’
‘Yes.’
The circle of embers warmed their faces. Small blue flames danced over the black branches. The thick wood burned slowly, producing a heat that radiated into the darkness.
‘Are you with us, Victorien?’
‘With you in what sense?’
‘Seizing power, killing de Gaulle if necessary, keeping those French territories
we have now, preserving what we have fought for. Winning.’
‘It’s too late. There have been so many deaths. All those we could have questioned are dead.’
‘The FLN is not the people. They exist only through terror. We cannot let anything pass. We have to draw them out slowly.’
‘I’m tired of all the deaths, and all those still to come.’
‘You can’t stop now. Not now.’
‘They’re not wrong to want rid of us.’
‘Why should we have to leave? We made Algiers what it is.’
‘Yes. But in doing so we created an open wound within ourselves. The colonies are a worm eating away at the République. The work is eating us on this side of the sea and when we go back, when all those who have seen what happened here go back, the colonial rot will cross the sea with us. It needs to be amputated. De Gaulle wants to amputate.’
‘To go now, to leave everyone to fend for themselves would be cowardice, Victorien. De Gaulle is nothing more than a living pun. He is France only in the sense of a play on words, an example of French wit. He has decided to break us just when we were about to recover ourselves. Come with us, Victorien, in the name of everything you wanted to be.’
‘I don’t think this is what I wanted.’
‘Do it for Eurydice. If we leave, she will be nothing.’
‘I will protect her. By myself.’
The uncle sighed and for a long time he said nothing. ‘Have it your way, Victorien.’ One by one the men settled down in their military sleeping bags around the glowing embers and fell asleep. Lying on the rocks above, sentries watched over them.
Operations continued for several weeks, then they returned to Algiers. They kept a careful count of the passing days, so as not to become confused, a precise count of the weeks of sunshine like a scalding liquid, scree that smelled of lime kilns, gun battles in the dust, ambushes in the scrubland, restless nights beneath a pitch-black sky with the cold stars all present and correct, gulps of tepid water that tasted of metal and sardines eaten straight from the tin. They went back to Algiers by truck. The men dozed in the back, crammed on to wooden benches. Salagnon sat in the passenger seat, his head lolling against the window. Not all of them were going back; they knew precisely how many of them were missing. They knew how many kilometres they had covered on foot and how many by helicopter; they knew the number of bullets they had fired, the supply corps kept a detailed record. They did not know the precise number of outlaws they had killed. They had killed a lot of men, but they did not quite know who. Rebels, rebel sympathizers, protesters who dared not take up arms and innocent passers-by, they all looked alike. They were all dead. But could those who believed themselves innocent truly be innocent, when they were all alike? If colonialism breeds violence, then they are all colonials by blood. They did not know who they had killed: combatants, certainly, villagers from time to time, shepherds on the roads; they had counted the number of bodies left behind on the scree, in the scrubland, in the villages; to this figure they added the numbers of those they had seen fall, those who had disappeared or been taken away, and that gave the total that they noted down.