by Alexis Jenni
Every dead body was an outlaw. All of the dead had something to be ashamed of. Punishment was the mark of guilt.
They headed back to Algiers by truck, taking their time, the drivers for once respecting the speed limit, yielding right of way, trying not to jolt too much, to avoid the potholes, since they were transporting a cargo of men being sent back to rest. They drove slowly through the streets of Algiers, stopping at junctions and traffic lights. The girls of Algiers gave little waves, the kind of girl who has dark hair and deep, dusky eyes; the sort who has vivid red lips, who smiles a lot and chatters, who wears flower-print dresses that sway with her body, revealing her legs at every step. The other girls did not matter. Algiers has a population of one million, only half of whom can speak. The other half learn from childhood to be silent. They cannot speak, because they have not mastered the language that expresses thought, power, force. When they do succeed in learning it, determined to master the language of force at any cost, they are congratulated. And everything they say is scrutinized for the slightest inflection, the tiniest mistake, the smallest impropriety. And it will be found, since, to find fault, one has only to look; it might be simply an unusual modulation. And we smile. We praise them for their command of the language, but still they do not get to have a voice. They still fall short, that much is clear. The scrutiny is intensified; some fault will be found. In their bodies, in their souls, in their faces, in the timbre of their voices. We commend them on their fluency, but still they will not truly have a voice. It is never-ending. We need something we can be proud of having done together, Salagnon was thinking. Something good. These are childish words, but we only really respond to childish words.
We can be proud of refusing to bend. This is what we will tell, the reflex that allowed us to save face. Over everything else we will draw a veil. And that veil, the shroud thrown over the dead, through which we can still make out the mutilated bodies, will suffocate us. But right now the girls of Algiers, the ones who walk around with flowing hair, coppery legs and brazen eyes, are waving at us; at us, the soldiers in the truck coming back from the mountains, as lean and tanned as shepherds, covered in crystallizing sweat, stained with black blood, unshaven, giving off the smell of hunted animals, of fear endured and overcome, of powder, gun grease and diesel; they give us little waves to which we hardly respond. The others don’t count. The paratroopers doze on benches in the back of the truck, their heads lolling on their neighbour’s shoulders, their legs spread, their well-oiled weapons lying at their feet. They did not all come back. They are what they appear to be: boys of nineteen crowded together. One of them is driving. Salagnon, who has long since passed that age, is in the cab, giving directions. He tells them where to go. They blindly follow.
The big GMC trucks could not negotiate the narrow, stepped streets of the Casbah. If they could, they would have driven through the Arab quarter, engines roaring, spewing diesel fumes, since nowhere should be a no-go area: in this war such things had to be shown, these people had to be shown. But the wide-wheeled trucks could not drive through these steep streets, so they circumnavigated this neighbourhood of whitewashed houses teeming with men, swarming like an anthill, taking the rue Randon and the rue Marengo through Bab El Oued, before turning uphill.
The trucks slowed. Pedestrians were walking down the middle of the street. There were so many. It’s them! Salagnon said to himself. Snapping awake, he sat up in the passenger seat. Them! The idiocy of this exclamation appealed to him: it was that simple. The men in the back sat up, too, suddenly alert, like hounds scenting a trail. Them. The trucks slowed to a crawl in the crowded street, brushing against passers-by, who did not look at them, their eyes being level with the huge, dusty wheels of the GMCs, but scrabbled to make sure their feet were not run over. Them. There are so many, he thought. They are a river and we are the impermeable stones. They are so many they will engulf us.
Shattered after weeks of operations in the mountains, lulled for hours by the gently rumble of the convoy, as they came into Algiers Salagnon suffered an attack of demographic phobia. Brought on by the crowd, perhaps, the narrowness of the streets, by intoxication from the black fumes of the GMCs in such a confined space, perhaps. Demographic phobia manifested itself by a sudden revulsion at the numerical reality of fertility. To be repulsed by a number is a form of madness, but when it comes to race, everything is madness. Measurement is madness.
The Arabs did not look up, did not look away, did not look at them; they are rejecting us, thought Salagnon. They are simply waiting for us to leave. And we will have to leave or break them all, and that is something we cannot do. Eight to one, and so many children. A vast river in which we are a few large rocks. Water always gets its way. One day or another we will leave, because of their patience, their endurance.
Them and us; seeing us without looking. Them down there, us up here in the big trucks, never face to face, all of us looking at something else, and yet constantly in close contact. We are all the more us, all the more determinedly us, because they are them; and they are all the more them, because they reject us. I have not known a single one of them in the time I’ve been here, thought Salagnon. Not one have I spoken to without expecting the answer I wanted to hear; not one has spoken to me without trembling at what I might do. I have never spoken to one of them, and it is not an issue of language. I have used French to silence them. I ask the questions; their answers are constrained. Between us, language was barbed wire and, for dozens of years to come, when the words used then are said again, their very sound will be electrocuting. Uttering the words will send the jaw into a galvanic spasm; it will be impossible to speak.
But Salagnon saw their faces as they brushed past the truck, moving at a snail’s pace; having painted so many, he knew how to read faces. They are rejecting us, he thought, I can see it, they are waiting for us to leave. They are proud to be rejecting us, together, resolutely. We will leave one day, because of what they suffer together and are proud to endure. We pretend not to understand what is happening. Were we to admit that we are like them, we would understand immediately. We share the same desires, even the values of the FLN are French and are expressed in French. The orders, the accounts, the reports, all the blood-soaked documents taken from dead officers are written in French. The Mediterranean gleaming in the sun is a mirror. On one side and the other, we are flickering reflections of each other, and separation is unbearably painful and bloody; like close-knit brothers, we kill one another over trivial squabbles. The most extreme violence is a reflexive action when faced with slightly distorted mirrors.
The truck at the head of the convoy stopped, the crowd was clotting in the street below the Arab quarter; it stopped moving. The engine growled; the deep powerful note of the horn rang out and slowly people stepped aside, slowly because they were shoulder to shoulder. They are so many they will engulf us, thought Salagnon, eight to one and so many children. The French government does not want to give them the right to vote, because it would mean a hundred députés being sent from here to the Assemblée Nationale. The Europeans here do not favour equality, because they would be overwhelmed. Eight against, and so many children.
We have the power. Give us a lever and a fulcrum and we will move the Earth. The fulcrum, in this case, is one little word: ‘them’. With ‘them’ we can use that force. Each in this looking-glass war, this war in a hall of mirrors; everyone is leaning on everyone else. ‘Us’ is defined by ‘them’; without them, we do not exist. ‘They’ are defined by us; without us, they would not exist. Everyone has a vested interest in our having nothing in common. They are different. Different how? In language, in religion? Language? The natural state of humanity is to speak at least two. Religion? Is it so important? For them, yes; according to us. The other is always irrational; a fanatics exists, it is always him.
Islam separates us. But who believes in it? Who believes in religion? It is like borders in the jungle that were set down on a map at some point and everyone agrees not to cha
nge, and eventually we come to think of them as natural boundaries. France considers Islam to be a species barrier, a natural barrier that divides citizens from subjects. There is nothing in the République that justifies citizens and subjects living in the same territory. Religion supplies the justification, as though it were an innate, infectious characteristic of certain individuals, which for ever renders them unfit for democratic citizenship.
The FLN considers Islam as an almost physical, hereditary characteristic, which renders France and the Colonial Subject incompatible, leaving only one possible future: the full independence of a new nation which is Islamic and speaks only Arabic.
What are we afraid of? Of the power of the other, of loss of control, of the battle of fecundities. We apply leverage to the little word ‘them’, one we cling to above all others. Islam occupies the whole landscape of a common accord. People who could not care less are compelled to think of nothing else; those who do not wish to think about it are eliminated. Everyone is told to choose a place on one side of the line, a line drawn on paper, which we now accept as a natural boundary. All one would need to do is take away the stone on which the lever is balanced, take away them and replace it with a larger us. As long as it is a question of us and them, they are right to want us to leave. For us to stay would mean trampling principles, which we invented and which are fundamental to who we are. It is in us that the tensions are greatest. It is we who are overwhelmed by contradictions. They are tearing us apart inside and we will leave before the pain we are inflicting on them forces them to let go. We will leave, because we carry on using this little word: them.
How long will this carry on?
A radiant Eurydice had rented a tiny apartment, a single, sixth-floor room with a balcony overlooking the street. Leaning on the black, wrought-iron railing, she was watching the bustle from above, from far above, a joyful smile playing on her lips. Victorien had just arrived; he was racing up the six flights of stairs and clasping her in his arms. Their pulsing hearts beat in time. He was panting for breath and this made him laugh, a laugh punctuated with wheezing breaths, despite the fact that he was accustomed to running, to marching through the mountains, despite his tireless legs and his stamina. When he had caught his breath sufficiently, so that his mouth was relieved of the task of breathing, they kissed for a long time. She was working as a nurse in Hussein-Dey, working shifts during the day and sometimes at night, when she would come home in the morning and fall asleep to the clamour from the street that crept up the sides of the buildings, slipped over the balcony, through the half-open shutters and lulled her in her bed. Without waking her, he would slip in beside her; as his arms enfolded her, she would open her eyes.
She spent long hours of her erratic schedule staring out the window or gazing at the ceiling above her bed, and finding in this unoccupied time the makings of a boundless happiness. She read Victorien’s letters, studied the sketches he sent her, searching in the lines, in the brushstrokes, in all the ink effects the slightest vestige of his slightest gesture. Now she wrote back. He visited irregularly when his armed gang came back to rest, to nurse their wounds, to fill in the gaps, a short spell in the city like a period in dry dock, when they could think of something else before being sent out again. They did not all come back. Salagnon would run up the stairs, sometimes in his neatly pressed leave uniform, clean, freshly shaved, and sometimes still steeped in sweat and dust, his jeep abandoned on the pavement, getting in the way, blocking the whole street, but his appearance and his well-worn uniform meant that, in Algiers, he could do whatever he liked. Sometimes people would even salute as they stepped off the pavement and walked around his jeep. He would have a shower and slip into bed next to her, his dick permanently hard.
‘What about your husband?’
‘He doesn’t care. He spends all his time with his friends. They meet up a lot. He had a screaming match with my father, because he thinks he’s spineless. I don’t think he even noticed me moving out. He and his friends talk big and play with guns. They garrisoned our apartment. There’s no place for me there any more. They want to turn Bab El Oued into a fortress, an impregnable Budapest no one can ever drive them out of. They want to kill the Arabs. As long as I’m not seen in public with you, he doesn’t care what I do; and if anyone taunts him, he’ll kill them.’
She said this with a strange smile and kissed him.
‘He doesn’t beat about the bush.’
‘Algeria is dying, Victorien. There are too many guns. Everyone wants one. Things people used to think only to themselves or say only in a whisper, they do these things now. You can’t imagine how happy I am at the hospital when I have to deal with a ruptured appendix or someone who’s fallen off a bicycle and broken their arm, the sort of things other hospitals get to deal with. Because day and night at our hospital we get people with bullet wounds, stab wounds, people suffering burns from explosions. There are armed police in the corridors, army units outside the wards to make sure that no one comes to finish the job, to shoot or kidnap or cut the throats of the patients. I dream of an ordinary epidemic, an outbreak of flu. I dream of being a nurse in peacetime, so I can heal children’s cuts and scrapes, comfort old people who are losing their marbles. Take me in your arms, Victorien. Kiss me. Come inside me.’
They clung together for a long time, breathless, drenched in sweat, their eyes closed. From time to time a breath of wind came from the sea, bringing with it the scent of flowers and of grilling meat. Through the half-open shutter they could hear the clamour of the street and sometimes an explosion stirred the muggy air. It did not make them flinch.
His uncle came to fetch him.
‘The time has come to decide what you want, Victorien. And what I want is to keep what we have won. We have saved our honour. We must defend it.’
They went to see Trambassac. Groups of armed men prowled the corridors wearing berets of different colours, and when two groups met, they stared hard at each other, not knowing quite what to do. They considered each other’s berets, weighed up the stripes and the badges and went on their way, casting suspicious looks over their shoulders, slipping their fingers into the trigger guard of their weapon. It was a generalized coup d’état; everyone was an independent putschist. Trambassac went on sitting behind his desk. He had filed away his reports, cleared out his belonging; all that remained were a few paintings on the walls; otherwise he was ready to move. He was waiting.
‘What are you going to do, Colonel?’
‘Obey the Government, messieurs.’
‘Which one?’
‘Whichever it may be. Change the Government and I will continue to comply with orders. But do not count on me to change it. I obey. I was asked to recapture territory for certain reasons; I recaptured. Now I have been asked to relinquish it for other reasons, or perhaps the same reasons, so I relinquish. Command and countermand, march and retreat, that’s military routine.’
‘We’re being asked to give up, Colonel, to give up everything we’ve won.’
‘The military mind does not dwell on details. We are men of action; we act. Undoing is a form of doing. Forward, march! Sound the retreat! I obey. My role is to protect all this.’ With a sweeping gesture he took in his uniform, his office and Salagnon’s framed portraits on the walls. ‘It doesn’t matter what I do. I must protect.’
The ink-wash paratroopers stared down like an imperturbable guard of honour; each had a name, several were dead; Trambassac carefully preserved them. ‘I protect all this. I’m proud of my men. I obey. Do as you must, messieurs.’
The uncle brusquely got to his feet and stormed out.
‘What about you? Victorien?’
‘I don’t want power.’
‘Neither do I. Just respect for what we have achieved. We will prevail. We must prevail. I will prevail. Otherwise I’ll never get over this humiliation, which has been going on now for twenty years. And all the dead I carry with me will have died for nothing.’
‘I carry my dead, too
. Sometimes I think that simply knowing me is fatal. It has gone too far. I have to stop. I should have stopped long ago.’
‘To stop now would mean losing everything. Losing everything that came before.’
‘It’s already lost.’
‘Are you with us?’
‘Count me out.’
Painting saved his life and his soul. He spent several days doing nothing else. Painting makes it possible to reach that glorious state where language disappears. In the silence of gestures, he was nothing more than what was there. He painted Eurydice. He painted Algiers. He slept in his quarters, so that everyone would know where he was. In the turmoil that followed the coup d’état, he was arrested. Four men in civilian clothes burst into his room, formed a circle around him, so as not to hinder each other and to cover all lines of fire, leaving no blind spots; in a calm but slightly worried voice, they told him to follow them. He got to his feet, making no sudden movements, ensuring his hands were clearly visible; he cleaned his brushes and went with them. His uncle had disappeared, to Spain, he had fled to Spain, he discovered. The men in civvies interrogated him at length, but did not touch him. He was put in solitary confinement. He was allowed to keep a sketchpad and a pencil. He could remain there for a long time, reduced to a blank page the size of a hand.