by Robert Irwin
‘Who has told you this?’
There is a secretive little smile, but no reply.
‘It is absurd!’
‘No, you killed him. I know this.’
I lie back thinking. Why should she or I be shielded from the truth?’
‘Yes. It was a necessary sacrifice for the revolution. He could not have escaped. He might have talked. I killed him as quickly as I could.’
‘Ah bad man, what if he had talked? What then? Tell me now, you made him give up his life to save yours. What makes your soul so much bigger than his? And you killed him for nothing anyway. They found you out. That clever woman found you out. And now you lie on our bed, where I and my man used to lie and you have been happy for me to be waiting on you and nursing you. I do not think you are a man at all. You are a djinn, a very evil djinn.
‘I am thinking that there is no more morphine for you any more. Imagine that. So now what are you going to tell me that is going to make me change my attitude? I cannot imagine. I am taking the morphine away from this room now. I think I shall go to my sister’s house for a while. When I come back I shall have you on your knees telling me about how my man died.’
Now I lie coldly sweating on to the already damp mattress. My whole body seems to crawl, as if thousands of tiny maggots were active under the skin. I suppose I will tell her whatever she wants to know. Nothing is worth this. If there is something, I can’t think too clearly about it. My head feels as though blunt pieces of wood are being slowly hammered up the nasal shafts into the porridgy brain. I throw myself on to the floor and … this is where Zora finds me screaming two hours later.
She looks perturbed to find me in such a state. She looks so distracted that I snatch at the opportunity. From the floor I lunge for the needle. The syringe drops to the ground and there is broken glass all around us. But I am on my feet and determined to make a break for it – or take control of the flat, or kill this Zora bitch. I don’t know what exactly. But the wounded leg can hardly bear any weight at all. And the alsatian comes out of its corner snarling and then barking furiously. I hold on to Zora and use her as a shield against the raging dog. Zora wriggles and in her struggles kicks over the child’s potty. The floor is slippery with shit and urine and brittle with broken glass and stained with blood from our bare feet. The dog keeps circling, trying to get at me behind Zora, barking all the time. Zora screams at me and the dog and it takes both my hands to keep her with me. So I wonder how I am going to get the door open and myself out of the bedroom without having the dog at my throat? I cannot stay upright much longer.
But now the door flies open and a black and brown shape hurls itself upon us. Zora and I crash to the ground and I find myself having to use the woman against two alsatians. And there is a second person in the room. It is one of the Ouled Nail dancers from downstairs, and Zora’s four-year-old follows in after her. It is the end. The two women get the alsatians off and me back into bed, but not before one of the dogs has got its teeth deep into my bad leg and the claws of the other have raked an arm that was already covered with needle scratches. I lie there trying to get them to find me another shot, but the two women cluck and squawk away at one another in harsh Arabic. They are arguing about whether it is time, whether ‘the gentleman’ should be fetched.
‘He is ready now.’
‘He is really desperate,’ the other woman agrees.
‘We will have to buy another needle.’
Chapter Eleven
About an hour later I get the shot that I need and I can drift off. When I come round again, there is Raoul seated in a chair some distance from the bed and resting a pistol on his knee. There is a smell of disinfectant in the room, but no sign of Zora. Raoul seems faintly amused by the whole situation. I marvel at his elegance, the lightweight cotton three-piece suit in white and, beside the chair, the panama straw hat.
‘I expect you are wondering what you are doing here?’
‘Yes.’
‘Wonder away.’
Then, about ten minutes later, he ventures, ‘I don’t think that we have decided what to do with you yet. Chantal and Schwab aren’t here yet. Not everyone finds it as easy to leave Fort Tiberias as you did, but I expect they will be here tomorrow. Meanwhile, it seems that Madame al-Hadi can’t cope any longer. So here I am to baby-sit for the lady.’ Then he yells to the next room, ‘Madame! Madame, get me a lager if you please.’
Zora comes trotting in with a can of beer. There is no lager for me. Raoul tells Zora to take al-Hadi’s clothes out of the wardrobe and get rid of them. There is no reason why they should make escape easy for me. He has her find a key to the bedroom door too.
‘But somehow I think that a naked drug addict with a bad leg is not going to get far in a sober little town like Laghouat.’ Raoul reaches for his hat to fan himself.
‘Well, we haven’t decided what to do with you yet. But it is reasonable to suppose that, one way or another, you can be of use to us. (If you don’t respond this is going to be very dull for me.) Chantal believes that you work for the other side from conviction but also that you became a convinced Marxist in one of those detention centres in Indochina. As we see it, you were brainwashed. She says that if you could be brainwashed one way, you can be brainwashed the other. It is a possibility. We might try that.’
I say nothing, just stare up at the ceiling. Let him tire himself out with talking.
‘Christ Jesu! It’s going to be dull, if you are not even going to talk. Chantal is quite impressed with your performance, both before the committee meeting and afterwards. She respects that kind of derring-do and ruthlessness. Mind you, it won’t necessarily stop her castrating you with a blunt stone knife tomorrow.’ Raoul laughs easily. ‘And if we should decide to re-educate you, I should warn you it will not be a gentle process.
‘Oh for Christ’s sake you might say something! Look I have something to propose – a sort of wager. Let’s debate Marxism. If I can persuade you that Marxism is fundamentally mistaken and evil, and we are convinced of the genuineness of your conversion, then Chantal and I will be delighted to have you in the struggle fighting shoulder to shoulder with us.’
I snort but Raoul continues, ‘If on the other hand, you can persuade me that Marxism is right, I hand you the gun and you can walk free. Not only that but I will join the Party and follow you to the ends of the earth. Yes, that’s perfectly serious. I am rightwing, some would say an extreme rightwinger, but that does not make me a fool with a closed mind. I know that there are millions in the world who have gone over to communism, and without the brainwashing that you endured. There must be something in it. I should genuinely like to know what it is that they saw in it. I am curious. Educate me.’
‘Leave off, Demeulze. This is not serious.’
‘Oh but it is, life and death serious. An English bishop, I think it was, once said, “Things are as they are and the consequences of them will be what they will be. Why then should we wish to be deceived?” ’ Raoul throws the pistol up in the air and catches it, before continuing. ‘I am like that. If you are right and I am wrong, then I will throw up everything for communism. There is no point in living in bad faith.’
‘Piss off.’
‘Come on. It is worth making the effort. I may be a fascist – I am sure that you have me tagged as that, but I am not one of those blood and soil fascists (and between the two of us Chantal is a sweet thing, but her politics are a bit irrational). No, I believe in reason. Indeed I believe that it is precisely their power of reasoning that has given Europeans hegemony over most of the world.’
‘That’s naïve irrational rubbish. It is money that has given international capital hegemony over most of the world.’
‘Ah, so now we are talking! Go on. Go on, whether it is reason or money that has given France power over Algeria, why should I not support that French presence?’
‘Because it is going to lose. It is stupid to back losers. Colonialism is the last gasp of the crisis of capitalism.’
‘What crisis of capitalism? I see no crisis of capitalism. What’s wrong with capitalism?’ Raoul simulates a clownish bewilderment.
‘So far capitalism has been able to stave off the escalating crisis of boom and slump that Marx predicted for it by finding new cheap markets in the colonies, but when the capitalists cease to control those markets, then comes the crisis of the capitalists and the triumph of the proletariat. What is wrong with capitalism is that it is based on a value system that is both false and inequitable. Take any commodity, it is the labour not the capital that creates the value, so it should be the labourer not the capitalist that gets the reward.’
‘I don’t see the moral force in that – but anyway how do we know that it is labour that gives a commodity value? What about … what about demand? Supply? Investment? The value given to a commodity by utility or rarity? And surely the capitalist deserves some reward for his cleverness and the risks he has taken?’
I ease myself up on one elbow and we smile at one another. We both know that I have very little chance of jumping him with his gun. It rests on his lap. I have to pray that I can get him so involved in the debate that the gun falls to the floor or something. And so the debate gets going. Sometimes Zora comes in with another lager for Raoul. I get water and a shot of morphine. It is over a grain a shot now.
At one point Raoul tries to draw Zora into the argument.
‘What gets me is the squalor and drabness of Marxism. It is ugly thinking and ugly looking. Look at him, madame, as he lies on your bed, with his straggly half-grown beard and his hard fanatical eyes, and think of his belief in the ends justifying the means so that it is all right for him to torture and then murder your husband. Madame, can you find it in your heart to find that sort of creature attractive?’ And Raoul makes a preposterous rhetorical flourish. A baiting gesture, I think. He intends to make me go for the gun.
Zora finds Raoul’s French hard to follow. She pauses a moment and looks down on me with brooding eyes. Then, without saying a word, she puts the tray down and scuttles out.
Back to the labour theory of value. Raoul continues, ‘No capitalist would deny that part of the cost of a finished commodity lies in the cost of labour and that the capitalist’s profits come at least in part from the difference between what he has to pay his labourers and what he has to sell his goods for. But why should this blinding insight make us all Marxists?’
I don’t believe that Raoul can be converted. It is only the irritability of the drugged that makes me argue. Raoul can’t afford to abandon his old ideas. We all have a vested interest in the ideas we have grown up with.
Lunch comes in on a tray. I drift in and out of the argument. It’s hard to listen to Raoul all the time when one is as heavily tanked up with morphine as I am. I guess that Raoul sees himself as some latter-day Socrates firing off his tricksy questions and me as some dimwit disciple stumbling after him round the Acropolis being led by the Socratic questions by the nose until the dumb pupil comes to the truth that the great philosopher was taking him to all the time. But Socrates didn’t carry a gun. And I, the disciple he has chosen, facing a MAS 35, lie naked on a filthy bed, naked except for an awkwardly lumpy bandage round one knee, and am further handicapped by what seems very close to an overdose of morphine. I am thirsty all the time – and painfully constipated.
‘And what is this abstract notion of value? Surely labour only has a price, the price an employer is prepared to pay for it?’ Raoul seems to be obsessed by hammering these silly arguments home. Perhaps I should try to jump him now? I must make the attempt some time. But Raoul continues, ‘I mean here I am arguing with you and pointing a gun at you.’ (Blast! He has picked the gun up again.) ‘It is labour – at least it feels like labour to me. Tell me what value my labour has and where it fits in with the Marxist scheme of things?’
Oh, it rambles on with both of us repeating ourselves and contradicting ourselves. We cover trade cycles and economic crisis, the role of the agrarian sector in a communist regime, the possibility that Marxist prophecies might be self-fulfilling, the arbitrariness or not of class-based analysis of society, the impossibility of gradualism and much else, but always we keep coming back to the goddamn labour theory of value.
‘Roussel, I hope you won’t take offence if I tell you that all I have heard from you seems to me … a little strange. Well, it is worse than that. It reminds me of a man I met on the boulevard Gaspigny a few weeks ago. He tried to sell me some drawings, diagrams really, lots of circles with faces and squiggles in them. He wore one of those broad-brimmed gypsyish hats and at first indeed I had the impression that I had been accosted by an artist, but when I looked into the shadow under the hat, I made another guess, a guess which was to be confirmed by what he went on to tell me. He told me that he had devised a system, based on mental hygienics, which allowed him to see into the future. Even as we talked, there were invisible forces moving down the boulevard Gaspigny. They were invisible to everyone except him. He knew what was happening because he could see the radio waves in the street. Everything that happened in the world was based on radio waves. Everything in the world could be explained by reference to these radio waves. But because of his special knowledge there were people after him. The Director of Renault Cars was trying to have him killed. You have the picture? He had presence that man, with his big hat and long white beard. His craziness carried a certain conviction. For about half an hour after our meeting, I found myself looking over my shoulder for invisible radio waves or the no less invisible agents of Renault Cars. Absurd. Later it came to me that Marxism is like that – a contagious form of mass insanity, all hidden forces and great conspiracies, immensely elaborate, everything explained within the system – it’s a total delusional system. Don’t take offence now.’
Yes, I can picture the old man – one of Algiers’s dispossessed, part of the drifting lumpenproletariat of poor whites – and I can imagine Raoul with his head cocked attentively, but smiling a smile that is almost a sneer.
‘Did you buy the old man’s drawings?’
Raoul impatiently waves the question away.
‘Well, we’ll call it a day, but I am enjoying our chats. You are the first real communist I have found to talk to. True I have met a few young ones in Paris, where a sort of Marxism is fashionable, but it seemed to me that for a certain type of young man it was something to talk about at parties and a way of getting up girls’ skirts.’ Raoul smiles as he polishes his glasses. ‘But, for you and me, it is life and death serious.’
Then he stands up and makes for the door, but I still want the answer to my question.
‘Did you buy the old man’s drawings?’
Raoul laughs delightedly.
‘No. Of course not. I made the old man up for the sake of the argument. You are so näive, Philippe.’
He waves his hat at me at he leaves. Then bursting with an afterthought he sticks his head round the door again.
‘I think that your commitment to communism is beginning to crumble. I have lit a long fuse, but, in the long run, you will come over to us.’
Then he is gone and the key turns in the lock. I am shaking with exhaustion and I ache all over. It’s hard for me to focus properly on all that labour theory of value stuff, not because it is difficult – Raoul is just wilfully making difficulties – but because it is so boring. I have always preferred praxis and action. All that crap I was thinking in the desert about how it takes more courage to commit yourself to a dull but useful job and share your life with a wife and children, well I do think that at times, but I also think that it is crap. No pharmaceutical salesman from Grenoble could have put himself through what I have been through for the sake of the cause. To end up wounded, drugged and threatened by a young fascist maniac with a gun. I could make it to the window, but I know there is nothing to see, so I just lie here.
As I lie here, I hear a muffled cry from the next room. For a moment it crosses my mind that somehow Tughril has found out my whereab
outs and the comrades have come to liberate me. Then I hear a rhythmic panting and I realize that Raoul has taken Zora and that he is probably having her on the living-room floor. Looking at it objectively I can see that I lost most of the arguments today. That doesn’t necessarily mean that Raoul is right. Clever people can always twist things to suit themselves. Raoul is cleverer than me, OK, but so what? There are cleverer people yet on my side. People who could carve Raoul’s arguments into little bits and have them for breakfast. It is my misfortune that none of these people are in this room at this moment. Still, no matter how clever, logical and well informed Raoul may be, he is not going to win me over. The moaning in the other room has stopped at last.
In the morning our investigations into the labour theory of value start all over again.
‘The running dog of the fascist warmongers and captains of industry is back again,’ says Raoul as he settles back into the chair. ‘I wish, I really wish you could convert me. I love the language of communism. I love its running dogs and paper tigers and kulaks, captains of industry and imperialist lackeys. But now tell me again what you think the labour theory of value is and make it concise and clear this time. Chantal will be here by lunchtime and we shall have to bring our little disputation to a hasty and possibly brutal close.’
Wearily I go over some of yesterday’s ground again, but Raoul says, ‘I have thought of further objections to this labour value. Suppose an employer hires two men to make carriage clocks. They both spend the same amount of labour, that is time, making their carriage clocks, but one makes his of gold while the other makes his of zinc. Are you going to tell me that the two clocks are or should be of equal value?’
‘Piss off, Demeulze. The truth is you are not worth converting. The cause does not need you. You nickety-pick at these intellectual problems and … and your intellectual niggles will, if you are lucky, save you from having to confront the bidonville that has grown up on the outskirts of Laghouat and on the outskirts of every town in Algeria. Your cleverness preserves you from seeing this shanty town where the dispossessed huddle in shacks of cardboard and corrugated iron and collect their water from gutters which run with faeces. People like you are not worth arguing with.’