by Alexis Jenni
He was released. Not everyone had been arrested. If they had been, who would guard the prison? He rejoined his battalion, now restructured and given a different name.
The opposing armies swelled. Soldiers like him were no longer the only ones to have guns. Young conscripts who had only just left their families had guns. Uniformed police officers had guns. The various police services had guns. Men in civilian clothes arriving from France had guns. The Europeans of Algiers, baffled and bellicose, had guns. The Arabs, radical and disciplined, had guns. There were sporadic bursts of gunfire every hour. Muffled explosions rattled shop windows. Ambulances careened through the streets of Algiers, taking the wounded to Hussein-Dey. People killed each other in their bedrooms. All operations were suspended. There were no more raids. The important thing was to stay alive. Others fought, set ambushes in cafés, blew up villas, tossed mangled corpses into the sea. Trambassac fretted in his office, his useful tool now useless.
They were sent home. They crossed the sea by boat. Salagnon was posted to Germany. He was back where he had started, he smiled, but what a detour! He was stationed at a base he shared with a tank regiment. The helicopters lined up on the pristine concrete never flew. The huge, brand new houses in Germany served only as places to live in; everything was functional; there was no life in the streets. The permanently overcast sky looked like a canopy of grey canvas swollen with an unbelievable quantity of water, constantly seeping, ready to spill.
When the war ended ‘over there’, he resigned his commission. There would not be another for a long time and he could not imagine blindly manoeuvring tanks against other tanks. He contacted Mariani. He had resigned his commission and did not know what to do. In July they took a flight to Algiers.
Since they looked like each other – the build, the close-cropped hair, the clear-cut gestures, the wary eyes, the garish shirts worn over their trousers – they looked like secret agents on a secret mission dressed up as secret agents on a secret mission.
On the plane, theirs were the only occupied seats. The stewardess came and chatted with them for a moment, then took off her shoes and lay down on a row of empty seats. No one went to Algiers any more, but the return flight would be jam-packed, people would fight to get aboard. From a distance, high above the sea, they saw the columns of black smoke. As the aeroplane banked to line up with the runway, through the window they watched smoke from the fires rising from the whitewashed streets they knew so well. They each had a small carry-on bag and, under their garish shirts, a pistol tucked into their belts. No one checked their passports; no one checked anything any more; since they looked like twins, with their build and their military bearing, and their rather suspicious little flight bags, everything seemed normal. They were ushered through; people stepped aside as they passed; some saluted – the soldiers, the police officers armed to the teeth, the civilian officers. The air terminals were crowded with families slumped over piles of suitcases. Small children, old men, everyone was there, everyone had too much luggage; the men paced up and down, sweating through white shirts that were stained at the armpits; a lot of the women were sobbing quietly. They were all Europeans. Arab staff moved through the crowd, cleaning, servicing, carrying luggage, doing their best not to bump into anyone, careful to watch where they stepped, constantly followed by hateful stares. The Europeans of Algiers were waiting for planes. The planes arrived empty and left almost immediately, ferrying them to France by the hundreds. No one was selling tickets any more. To board a plane required nerve, bribery and threats.
All over the city the walls were marked by gunfire, single bullet holes and huge clusters. The burned-out cafés were boarded up. Most of the shops had rolled down their metal shutters, but some of these had been ripped, twisted and pried open with crowbars. The streets were littered with objects of every kind. Piles of furniture – beds, tables, dressers – were blazing. They saw a man open the door of his car, set a canister of petrol on the front seat and torch it. He watched it burn, although bewildered passers-by, avoiding the debris from the houses, scarcely gave it a glance. A bed tumbled from a window and crashed on to the ground. Almost every scrap of bare wall was daubed with dribbling graffiti: OAS was everywhere. A woman dashed across the street pulling her haik tightly around her. A scooter carrying two young men came zigzagging down the road, swerving to avoid the broken glass and the bullet-riddled cars. It came up behind the woman, who, in her haste, was not looking around her; the pillion passenger took out a pistol and shot her twice in the head; she crumpled, her haik now soaked in blood, and the two boys carried on weaving down the street on their scooter. People stepped over the dead woman as though she were a piece of rubbish. They saw two other women in the same street, lying in their own blood. A whole family appeared from a building, weighed down with luggage; the short, overweight husband was dragging two suitcases; his wife had bags slung over her shoulders; the four children and the grandmother were carrying as much as they could. The sweating man yelled at them; they stumbled about fifty metres, only to be stopped by young men in white shirts, who gestured for them to go back. There followed an argument, voices were raised, there was much waving of hands; eventually the man picked up his suitcases again and took a step forwards. One of the young men whipped a gun from his belt and killed the little man with a single bullet. ‘No one is leaving!’ they shouted to any open windows and to the people leaning over balconies, as they walked away. ‘Everyone is staying!’ And everyone in the street nodded vaguely, bowed their heads and stepped away from the dead man. Mariani and Salagnon did not stop for anything. They drove to Bab El Oued to fetch Eurydice. Her little apartment was empty. They found her at her father’s house.
Salomon, utterly frantic, no longer left his house. He had closed the shutters and now lived in semi-darkness; he had screwed metal plates to cover the bottom half of each window. Victorien tapped one with his finger, it rang hollowly.
‘Where did you get this, Salomon?’
‘They’re plates from the gas cooker.’
‘You think they’ll protect you?’
‘Victorien, they’re firing guns in the street. They’re shooting at people. You can get killed just walking past a window. They don’t even know who they’re killing. They fire based on what you look like, and round here we all look pretty much alike. I’m protecting myself. I don’t want to die by accident.’
‘Salomon, a bullet would go through a piece of metal like that and not even notice. You’re not protecting yourself, and you can’t see a damn thing. All you’re doing is putting nails in your own coffin. You have to leave. We’re taking you with us.’
As soon as the two men stepped into this murky apartment, which was beginning to smell like a cellar, with their broad shoulders, their precise movements, their wary eyes, a relieved Eurydice slipped into Salagnon’s arms.
‘I’ve come to get you,’ he whispered in her ear, suddenly overwhelmed by the scent of her hair.
He felt her chin dig into his shoulder as she nodded, but she said nothing: had she opened her mouth to speak, she would have sobbed. A bomb exploded close by, rattling the window panes. Eurydice flinched, but did not open her eyes. Salomon cowered a little more. He was standing in the middle of his home, his eyes closed, frozen.
‘Come on, Kaloyannis, let’s go,’ said Mariani.
‘Go where?’
‘To France.’
‘What do you expect me to do in France?’
‘It’s the name of the country on your passport. Given that you have to barricade your windows with sheets of metal here, I think it’s not your home any more.’
‘Let’s go, Papa,’ said Eurydice.
She went and fetched the suitcases she had already packed. There was a knock at the door. Mariani went to answer it. An excitable man burst into the living room, his white, unbuttoned shirt gleamed in the half-light. He stopped dead in front of Eurydice.
‘What are you doing with those suitcases?’
‘I’m leaving’
‘Who is this guy?’ said Mariani.
‘Her husband.’
‘So you’re the one taking her away, Salagnon?’ he roared.
He took a gun from his belt, waving it around as he spoke, his finger on the trigger.
‘There’s no way you’re leaving. You – you can go. Go back to France. You weren’t capable of killing the crouilles, so go home, let us deal with it. Eurydice is my wife. She’s staying here. Doctor Kaloyannis might be half-Yid and half-Greek, but this is his country. If he moves, I’ll put a bullet in him.’
He was very handsome, Eurydice’s husband. He spoke passionately, his thick black hair falling over his forehead, spittle frothing at the corners of his beautiful lips. He aimed his gun as he spoke. ‘Kaloyannis, touch that suitcase and I’ll shoot you. And you, Salagnon, you pitiful excuse for a paratrooper, you’re a traitor, a coward, so you can fuck off, you and the little queer in the flowery shirt, before I get angry. Let us handle this.’
The gun was pointing at Salagnon’s head, his finger quivered on the trigger. Mariani raised his hand as though this were target practice and shot him in the back of the skull. Blood sprayed over the steel plate screwed to the window frame and the man crumpled, lifeless.
‘You’re an idiot, Mariani. The slightest twitch and he would have put a bullet in me.’
‘You can’t have everything… but all’s well that ends well.’
Eurydice bit her lip and followed them. They took Salomon by the shoulder and he came meekly. A bomb shook the air; a plume of white dust rose from the far end of the street. Debris littered the pavement; a shop was ablaze; broken furniture lay waiting to be burned. Several cars, their doors open, their windscreens spidered with cracks, had been overturned; in one of them, the blood-spattered driver was slumped over the steering wheel. An elegantly dressed Arab man was inspecting the Citroën 2CV parked at the kerb.
‘Doctor Kaloyannis, so nice to see you.’
He straightened up. The butt of a revolver poked out of his belt. He smiled genially.
‘Just the man I’ve been looking for. I’ve just bought Ramirez’s shop. I didn’t pay much, but it was more than they would have got if it had been seized. I was also planning to buy your car.’
They put the suitcases in the boot.
‘I want to keep it.’
‘He’s not selling,’ growled Mariani.
‘I could simply take it, but I’m offering to pay,’ he smiled again.
The gunshots rang out quickly, but in the chaos of the street no one noticed. Mariani had aimed for the chest. The man staggered and fell, the hand emerging from his pocket clutching a few crumpled banknotes.
‘Mariani, you can’t go round killing everyone.’
‘I don’t give a shit. I’ve seen too many dead. Anyone who gets in my way had better get out of it, fast. Now let’s go.’
They drove through the crumbling ruins of Algiers, Salagnon at the wheel, Mariani with his elbow jutting out of the window, tapping the grip of his gun. In the back seat Eurydice was holding her father’s hand. On the road to the airport they had to stop at a barrier manned by Garde Mobile militiamen. The men’s hands never left the butts of the sub-machine guns slung across their chests; they were sweating under their black helmets. Off to one side, a group of Arabs in new uniforms were waiting, sitting on the bonnet of a jeep.
‘Who are they?’
‘The army of the FLN. We’re leaving tonight. They’re taking over, and after that no one gets to leave. Actually no one really knows anything. No one cares. Let them sort it out themselves.’
Salomon opened the car door and got out.
‘Where are you going, Papa?’ Eurydice’s voice died in her throat.
‘France is too far,’ he muttered. ‘I want to stay here. I want to live in my own home. I’m going to talk to them.’
He walked over to the FLN officers, said something to them. They struck up a conversation. Salomon became animated. The Arabs grinned broadly. They laid a hand on his shoulder and had him get into the back seat of the jeep; one of them sat next to him. They went on talking, but from the 2CV it was impossible to make out what was said. Salomon looked worried. The Arabs went on smiling, keeping a hand on his shoulder.
‘Are you going?’ the officer of the Garde Mobile said irritably.
‘Eurydice?’ Salagnon said, his hands on the steering wheel. He did not turn. He did not look at her. He simply asked, preparing himself for anything.
‘Do what you like, Victorien.’
Without looking at her face in the rear-view mirror, trusting to the calmness of her voice, he started the car and drove through the barrier. Cars of all sorts lay abandoned by the side of the road.
The airport was heaving with crowds still pressing to get inside. A line of soldiers cordoned off access to the runway. The two men flanking Eurydice pushed their way through the crowd. People jostled, shouted, waved tickets. The soldiers stood, shoulder to shoulder, blocking their path. Planes took off, one after another. Victorien talked to the officer, whispered a few words in his ear. After a few minutes a jeep appeared. Trambassac got out. They walked through the cordon.
‘Not very nice, your last mission, Colonel.’
‘I do what I’m ordered, but I can’t imagine you painting it.’
‘No.’
Space was found for them in a small government aeroplane transporting senior civil servants from the Governor General’s office, who had left their office carrying briefcases bulging with documents; they were going home; they had no interest in the new arrivals.
The plane took off, banked over Algiers and headed north. She did not sob, the tears trickled silently down Eurydice’s face, as if draining out of her, so Victorien gathered her in his arms. They both closed their eyes and did not open them until they landed.
Mariani could not tear himself away from the window. He stared out at the ruins and the pall of black smoke for as long as he could, cursing the waste. When he could no longer see anything, when they were over the sea, a seething rage prevented him from closing his eyes; and, hovering always in front of him, he could see his fratricidal anger rebuking him. He did not know how to answer.
Commentaries VII
We watched, uncomprehending, the Paseo of the dead
WRITING IS NOT MY FORTE. I would have liked to show, to paint if necessary, and for that to be enough. But my mediocre artistic talents mean that I ended up a narrator. This will be of no interest to anyone, this account of trifling events, but I stubbornly insisted on retracing in French something of the life of those who speak it. I persisted in recounting the story of a community of people who can speak to one another because they share the same language, but who fail to speak to each other because they stumble over dead words. There are words that are no longer spoken, yet they remain, and we speak with gobbets of blood in our mouths that hinder the movement of our tongues; we feel we might choke and, in the end, we say nothing.
This is one of the banal consequences of violent periods of history: certain common words explode from within, gorged with curdled blood, victims of a thrombosis of meaning. These words that die from their use can no longer be uttered without staining our hands. But since they still exist, we avoid them, we go around them, pretend they aren’t there, but it’s obvious we’re avoiding them; we use circumlocutions and one day we stumble, because we forgot we could not say them. We use these words engorged with blood and they spurt out, spattering everything with the clots they contain, staining the shirts of those listening to us; they shout, they recoil, they protest, we apologize. We fail to understand each other. We have inadvertently used a dead word that was lying around. We could have avoided using it, but we said it. We want to use it, but we can no longer do so; it is burdened by history and history is blood. It lies there, this word, sick with clotting, sick with the perishing of that which moved within it; still it remains, dangerous, like the threat of a conversational thrombosis.
Writing is not my fort
e, but I write for him who can tell nothing to anyone, so that he can teach me to paint; and I write for her, too, to tell her what she is, and that what I am writing opens her arms to me.
Writing is not my forte, but, by virtue of necessity and a lack of other means, I force myself to do it when all I want is to paint, to silently point the finger and for that to be enough. It is not enough. I want to go on listening to people talk. I dread that my language will gutter out. I want to hear it. I want to restore my mutilated tongue. I want to find it whole among all those who live through it and make it live, for it is the only country.
Words are lost with the gradual unravelling of empire, and this amounts to losing some of the territories in which we live; it amounts to diminishing the extent of ‘us’. There is a decaying part in our language, a diseased tissue of necrotic words whose meaning has clotted. Language, like an apple, rots where it has been bruised. It dates back to the time when French, the language of empire, the language of the Mediterranean, the language of teeming cities, of deserts and jungles, the time when French, from one end of the world to the other, was the international language of interrogation.
I am trying to tell those things about him that he never said. I am trying to tell those things about her that she has never dared imagine. I would have preferred to show; I would have preferred to paint; but we are dealing with language, which courses through us, flows between us and threatens to coagulate, and language cannot be seen. So I narrate, to avoid the calamity that would leave us clotted, paralyzed, quickly putrefied, all of us, both of us, me.