The Mysteries of Algiers

by Robert Irwin

  I sometimes wonder about nomads, whether they can read minds, whether in this case they could read my contempt for their primitive way of life from small inflexions in my voice. Desert Arabs are supposed to be experts in detection. From a little heap of camel dung they can tell you the sex, age and state of health of the beast, which tribe it belonged to, when and on what pasture it last ate and which direction it was travelling in. Yes, it’s impressive but it is an anachronistic skill. They and their medieval crafts have been artificially preserved under the protection of the Legion and in the interests of capitalistic tourism. When we go, they go too. The irritating thing is I am pretty sure from my own dossiers that Hamid is a link man for the FLN with the tribes – and one of al-Hadi’s contacts, what’s more. It is unfortunate that I have never had any direct dealings with him. It’s bloody ironical.

  I find myself thinking again of that lush time in Normandy. It was nothing to do with me. It was experienced by another man, the one who occupied my body then. As for myself, I was born in Indochina. Perhaps I would like to be that other man safe in his walled garden. I should have got out of the army in ’53. There wouldn’t have been any problem for a Saint-Cyr graduate in getting a job. At the very least I could have got work as something like an international salesman for a Grenoble-based pharmaceuticals firm. The odd thing is that even now I still think (and I hope that I am thinking lucidly) that it would have taken more courage to become that salesman than to follow the course I have actually pursued. When I think of the difficulties and aggravations of business correspondence and meetings, of the concomitant responsibilities that come with the inevitable marriage and children and loans from the bank to buy a house, a pit of fear forms in my stomach, just from thinking about it. There is the courage one needs to bullshit and sell a new product one really knows nothing about, the courage needed to fire an incompetent subordinate, the courage needed to attend the deathbed of an aged parent and perhaps also the courage needed to watch one’s oldest son drifting into surly unemployment and then hopeless alcoholism. When I think of the immense courage needed to face the futility of a lifetime’s bourgeois domesticity. I quail. Army life on the other hand has a pleasing simplicity, and as for the risks taken by operating as a communist traitor within that army, well, they are only risks of a certain sort.

  There are many such thoughts as I continue to meander over the sands. The emptiness and abstraction of the desert encourages such generalizings and musings. As evening comes on, the featureless white sands of noonday are shaped in reds, purples and blues. I look out on it from what feels like a skull of caked salt. Yesterday it was difficult to see for the salt sweat streaming down into my eyes. Today there is less sweat and it is ominously pure. Tomorrow, I guess the cramps will set in. A lot of the time now my attention is devoted to simply moving my arms and legs in the right way, and negotiating my passage over the next small stretch of sand, but still odd thoughts and memories come unbidden.

  Those sodding Arabs – I should have started shooting them the moment they turned their backs on me. Have I been lying, killing and torturing so that men like that may be free? Sod them. Fuck them. Up the revolution, down with Arabs! One thing I do hope for his sake alone is that Saint-Exupéry’s goddamn Little Prince doesn’t turn up in my part of the desert. The way I feel now I would put a pistol shot through his brains as soon as look at the little fellow. What was it like to kill Joinville? Like nothing really. It’s like the torturing of al-Hadi, it’s so long since I killed my first man or tortured my first man, that I really can’t remember what it was like. One gets used to anything, and it’s no use the Little Prince turning up now and telling me in shocked tones that nothing can justify murder and torture. It just isn’t true. That’s just a pious catchphrase. For myself, I believe that one must live absolutely according to one’s beliefs and judge by one’s own values or else abandon them.

  Anyway did I really kill the colonel? My enemies hardly seem alive to me. The officers at Fort Tiberias are men who have been constructed according to the rules, doing what they have been told is their duty and looking down the line all the time to look and see if they all are doing their duty in the same way that their neighbours are. Chantal on the other hand is an evil woman, but she is at least alive. I remember when she first arrived at Fort Tiberias on a tour of duty, Joinville, who like most of his fellow officers is suspicious of pushy emancipated women, called her into his office to give her a lecture on how she should comport herself. Chantal listened to it all and gave him the sweetest of her smiles. She told him that she had no time for pushy emancipated women either.

  ‘I too believe that women are inherently inferior to men, Colonel. It is just that I haven’t found a man to be inferior to yet.’

  She made the colonel very nervous. When I think of her account of that meeting I sit down and start laughing. I spread myself out on the sands and laugh like anything.

  Chapter Nine

  This morning – is it the second or third? I forget – I find it difficult to stand at all. But I do and recommence shuffling. The heat drops a little. There is an unpleasant vitality in the air. My skin starts to prickle and I look down and see that beads of sweat have begun to pop out of the pores of my body. I am astonished. I could not have guessed that I had any moisture left inside me. The brilliant white of noonday has mysteriously dulled to yellow. Wraith-like coils of sand begin to whip around my ankles. There is a rumbling and a crackling at my back. Although I know what it is that is coming up behind me, nevertheless I turn to face it. Thick billowing brown clouds of sand are rolling towards me and, at the heart of the dust storm, electric rods of lightning intermittently travel between heaven and earth. I turn away and keep walking. The sand begins to sting at my face. It is not at all pleasant. One might be flayed alive in such a sand storm. Once I saw all the paint on a jeep stripped off in a storm like this. I tie the greasy mechanic’s rag round my eyes and keep on walking.

  A blind man walking among the columns of fire in the desert, surely I am the seal of prophecy, the culmination of both Marx and Muhammad? Though I hear the lightning crackle to the left and right of me, I have no fear, for, in all respects that matter, I am a dead man already. A spectre is haunting the Algerian desert. It is the spectre of communism. I am carrying the contagion of revolution towards the Mediterranean. At the salons, at the race meetings, at the opera, I shall be there with my parcel of bombs, the vengeance of the poor.

  ‘Life is a desert and woman is the camel that helps us cross it,’ as the bedouin proverb has it. On reflection, now, I should like to live a little longer and be revenged. That flush of triumph on Chantal’s face as she rose to denounce me. The grand coup, the surprise gesture in the middle of the committee meeting, wonderfully vulgar like all her acts and beliefs. Vulgarity is the hallmark of all fascists – think of the fat little men covered in medals, orating from overblown pseudo-classical rostra, raving on about blood and fire. Fascism is not a political doctrine in the way that anarchism is, nor a scientific perception of the world which is Marxism. Fascism is a style and a vulgar one to boot. Gleaming jackboots covered in the saliva of alsatians. The curves of a black-leather boot covered in spittle, that is very much to Chantal’s taste. The curve of the whip, the curl of the lip, the moistly gleaming eye, the moistly gleaming boot.

  Surely I shall live to be revenged, for, as Marx says, ‘Mankind only sets itself such tasks as it can solve.’ I should not like to die without taking Chantal with me. Marx also says, ‘If you have loved without evoking love in return, then your love is impotent and a misfortune.’ Not that I have loved of course. I shall return from the desert, sun-scorched and sandblasted, to lie with her once more, a final time. She will be gloating about my presumed slow death in the desert when I step out from behind the door … Of course, there will be nothing personal in my revenge. It will be like putting down a rabid dog. The white foam runs down her jaws on to her gleaming black boots. Chantal’s vulgarity is contagious, communicated in embr
aces and easily caught in crowds. I shall make her regret what she has done to me. I will have her kneeling with tears in her eyes, confessing her errors before I send her to the People’s Justice.

  I can walk on forever. I have undertaken the thousand-year march of history. The further I walk the better. This is a demonstration of the labour theory of value. The more labour I put into this stumbling trek across the desert, the more valuable it becomes. Only Marxism gives man his full value. With part of my mind, I know that I am delirious. The other half however does not. It is an infernal dialectic. The contradictions do not trouble me, for they are fruitful contradictions. I am the master of the sands. The winds are directed according to my will. The man who recognizes the world he has made is free. The man who has understood the laws of history is God, the only God there is. The revolution in the kasbah awaits my coming, me, the star-crossed navigator on the tides of history, the furnaceman of revolution. History moves too slowly. I shall give it a push.

  I welcome the opportunity to experience the hunger and hardship of the oppressed. Hunger and hardship of the oppressed. Hunger and hardship of the oppressed. I throw myself down to kiss the scorching sands. There is a black fist in my brain.

  As the black fist withdraws I return to consciousness and heave sickly on an empty stomach. I am blind. Blind! Then after a while I remember the rag tied round my eyes and remove it. I lie where I am looking at the dune that towers before me. There is no possibility of climbing it. It is better now just to lie here and think about things. Though the sun is only a glowing brown in the dust-laden sky, the sand storm has passed, the atmosphere is less heavy and it is possible to be lucid once more.

  I have been in a delirium, that is clear to me now. It is disturbing to find out just how much too little water and too much sun can alter a man’s thoughts. It takes very little to bring a psychotic delirium to the top. The matter is all the more complicated for me in that desire for revenge, death, murder, torture and the arbitrary act – yes, even delusions of grandeur – may be necessary to the revolutionary. Looking at the matter dispassionately, I am pleased to acknowledge that only his objective role in the historical process distinguishes the acts of a revolutionary from those of the psychopath. Nevertheless, the distinction is there and it is crucial.

  After an hour an Arab appears over the crest of the dune. Then, after some minutes, other Arabs appear beside him. I lie there at the foot of the dune wondering what they are doing at the top of it. Then they start to step and slip sideways down the ridge, approaching me warily like crabs. Only when he is directly above me do I identify their leader as Hamid.

  He speaks.

  ‘Peace. We have been to Fort Tiberias. What we found there, we did not like. Shall I tell you what we found there? We found the body of al-Hadi with no shroud, buried like garbage in an unmarked pit outside the fort. Why did you not say that you were a friend of al-Hadis?’

  I just lie there looking up at him. There is something about this that makes no sense. Yes, surely they cannot have been to Fort Tiberias and back in this time? Or have I been walking in the desert for longer than I think? Or have I been walking in circles? Who has told them that I was al-Hadi’s friend? In any case I can say nothing. It just is not possible for me to speak.

  ‘We will take you to the fellagha and you will help us be revenged against the killers of al-Hadi. But it will be dangerous. Do you have a weapon?’

  It is unnecessary for me to answer as Hamid kneels over me to take the Tokarev from its holster. He examines the weapon from all angles, seeming to marvel at its craftsmanship. Then, apparently satisfied, he points the pistol at my legs and there is an explosion.

  Chapter Ten

  ‘Quiet now. You will wake the children.’ In my agony I hear or dream I hear a voice saying this. Then the pain is gone.

  When I open my eyes, all I can see is the white ceiling, but most of the time, I keep them clenched tight shut, for as the stuff in the needle wears off, the pain gathers in intensity. But then the needle allows me to drift again and I can look back calmly on the pain when the bloody trouser leg was being cut away from the flesh and that is like a meditation on my own crucifixion. Out of the corner of an eye I glimpse small hands like black butterflies resting on my arm and trying to shift it ever so slightly, so that a new vein can be found for the needle.

  The next time I open my eyes I find myself looking up at a face. It is a fascinating face, fascinating because it is so familiar. I close my eyes and try to remember but I keep drifting. God, my puerile ravings in the desert. Of course, I was delirious even at the times when I thought I was lucid. But I am alarmed to find such juvenile fantasies of omnipotence lurking about in the shallows of the mind. I must have been babbling for days. I imagine that I am in a military hospital. Suppose when I am seen to be recovering consciousness, the nurse hands me over to the torturers? It is better to keep the eyes shut. Still I squint up through slitted lids.

  The ministering angel hovers above me once more armed with the blessed needle. She is dark complexioned, with big brown eyes and brilliant teeth. Then it comes to me easily where I have seen that face before. It was five weeks ago. It was my last meeting with al-Hadi, before his final mission to Algiers and arrest. I warned al-Hadi that they were on to him. I did not tell him that it was I who had put them on to him. It was my decision to throw this fish to French Military Intelligence, but it was with the approval of Tughril, who monitors my operations on behalf of the command cell of the Algiers FLN. The message came back, ‘The revolutionary troika can carry no passengers.’ I think Tughril liked sacrifices for their own sake. As far as I was concerned, I needed a small coup to keep my employers in Military Intelligence happy. The sacrifice of al-Hadi was objectively necessary.

  We met at Laghouat. Al-Hadi ben Shaykhoun was, in his very small way, as diversified in his enterprises as Maurice de Serkissian. We met at his ‘hotel’. It was actually a lodging house, almost a brothel, patronized by the dancing girls of the Ouled Nail when rooms elsewhere were full. The Ouled Nail women came from the south to towns like Bou Saada and Laghouat. They came to earn their dowries by dancing in public and engaging in prostitution. Then they went back to their tribes again, their dowries carried as jewellery and pierced coins about their bodies.

  The manner of my meeting with al-Hadi had been carefully arranged beforehand. I went first not to al-Hadi’s hotel but to a neighbouring house of ill fame where Shirina was performing. She stood and swayed in a long flounced dress. With every movement the coined turban and belt jingled. Then two women seated in the corner struck up on their tambourines and Shirina began the Dance of the Daggers. She sidled round the room, turning all the time to face the audience seated against the walls. There were a couple of Kabyles who dribbled tobacco on to the floor and half a dozen legionnaires, one of whom I recognized as McKellar from my own company. With every step she took she slapped the ground with her bare feet and thrust her hips out. Her arms snaked this way and that, before returning to her breasts to thrust them out at her audience, but the fiercely spiked bracelets warned the men to attempt nothing. Her eyes, brilliant in the midst of the dark kohl, invited the men to delight, but the haughty set of her barbarous face refused them. In short it was the usual tatty bogus oriental stuff the Ouled Nail offered to sex-starved soldiers and tired commercial travellers. She ended up rocking on her heels squeezing her breasts and thrusting them at me. I indicated that I was interested and, as had been previously arranged, we left the room together and she took me across the street and handed me over to al-Hadi. There were other Ouled Nail women leaning over the stairwell, but still there was a domestic atmosphere to the place conferred by some respectable long-term lodgers, and still more by al-Hadi’s children. He had three children, the oldest of them was four and one of the dancers had a child too.

  Al-Hadi and I ate and talked in the living room – in unpleasant proximity to a child’s plastic potty. One of al-Hadi’s alsatians padded in and slavered lovingly on his
master’s knee. Al-Hadi was very Western in his tastes and proud of them. Few Arabs cared to keep dogs in their houses. Al-Hadi was a hard drinker but a good Moslem in his own eyes at least. ‘God pardons the man who performs even one-hundredth of his obligations to Him,’ and ‘The man who has given as much as a quarter dirhem to the poor will never face the fires of Hell.’ I doubted whether al-Hadi had given much more, but such pious consolations were often on al-Hadi’s lips. His wife, Zora, brought us lagers. When she had also brought us couscous and hot peppers, he bawled her out of the room. We let the plates go cold, while al-Hadi proudly showed me how he kept his explosives hidden behind a stretch of tiling that ran round the wall.

  ‘What do you think, Sidi?’ he asked anxiously. All that was in my head was the question, what had possessed him to put a floral frieze of bathroom tiling in the living room? But I kept that to myself.

  ‘Very good, al-Hadi,’ I said.

  When Zora returned a little later, I think to see if we needed more lagers, he just shouted at her, ‘Go away, cow! Cow! Cow!’ and she stood for a while regarding him with tender brown eyes, before retreating into the kitchen.

  And now …

  And now I am sure that it is Zora who is shooting my veins with the analgesic stuff. Her face is bent close over me and its coarse pock-marked skin, presumably the legacy of childhood smallpox, occupies most of my field of vision and the ends of her long oily black hair rest on my chest. There is something reptilian in her face, not unattractive, but suggesting some sort of ancient pre-human wisdom and a resignation to the ways of the world, yet Zora is still young, at least ten years younger than her husband had been. So Zora is my nurse. I close my eyes again and wait for the pain-killing drug to circulate. It is unlikely that I am in a hospital. This must be their bedroom. I should guess that I am in the bed of the late al-Hadi. I should like to drift off for a while … for a minute … or a day …