The Influence Peddlers

by Hedi Kaddour

  There was something light-hearted in that “Internationale” with fifes and tambourines, a feeling of a country wedding, assorted people, the level-headed, the entertainers, the crazies. There are probably even foremen, Chemla said: When the little leaders are upset, it rocks the boat for the owners. Raouf had passed that on to Gabrielle. She thought Raouf was lacking animation when he spoke. He was very different from how he had been in Germany, less emotional. Look, said Raouf, pointing off the path, a man who was working a pendulum well: He’s doing the same thing that was done a thousand years ago, with the same tool, he’s drawing water with goat skins, he’s watching us and nothing bothers him . . . Gabrielle thought that Raouf would make a good journalist, he likes great writers and small details, I should talk to him about that one day.

  There were also peasants marching, agricultural workers, and even khammes, Raouf told Gabrielle, explaining that it was the first time he had seen such a thing, the khammes rising up. They must really be hurting to demonstrate like that, usually they are the most passive, the most resigned people. Yes, the one-fifth sharecroppers, that’s what they’re called in French. They work the land for only a fifth of what they produce, while reimbursing a usurer that they will never be able to reimburse. In the countryside they are in the majority. If the khammes really calculated they wouldn’t farm, and what is a man who makes them work like that worth? asked Raouf. And the one who lends to them at close to one hundred percent interest? And what about the third man, the one who tells the khammes every Friday that it is the will from On High, and that all would be better if people renounced corruption, that of the soul, of course? How would the life of a khammes be different if there weren’t any corruption? And what about another life, that of the day laborer, who picks olives while wondering if there would still be picking to do the next day, or ditches to dig? And all that for half a loaf of bread and three mint leaves? Destroy everything and start again, like the Bolshevists? Raouf knew that basically, for Chemla, one could not pull anything politically from the peasants. Only workers could make history, behind their advanced guard of professional revolutionaries. That sounded good, and the triumphant proletariat would then emancipate the khammes, said Chemla, adding, “after sending the social traitors to the garbage dump of history!”

  Raouf thought his friend was going a bit far. He didn’t understand why, for Chemla, the main enemies were now the socialists more than the owners. Socialism here, said Chemla, is the socialism of the little whites. Just when they’re about to take the plunge they back down and align themselves with the colonists. They don’t set the trap, but they direct the people right into it, and abandon them. They will never recognize nationalities, only Lenin was able . . .

  Raouf and David’s friends made fun of their discussions: You’re becoming heavier and heavier with what you say about the proletariat, almost as heavy as the devout who talk to us of prayers and good intentions. Your defect is that you don’t know how to drink. You don’t drink enough, never enough to reach the moment of truth!

  And on another occasion Ganthier had said to Raouf: The peasant, the khammes, he doesn’t reason as you do. You pass over the land, whereas he considers himself rooted, in a land that his ancestors owned, and if he is no longer the owner, it is not because other owners ruined him, it is because bad fortune struck him, it’s not the same. He wants to go back to the old order, his roots, and if you tell him he’s a victim of exploitation, that he must prepare a classless future—the land going to those who work it, bright tomorrows—the khammes will ask you how you know about tomorrow, and the peasant owners in the area will call you a diviner and an apostate. You’ll end up stoned by the guys you want to liberate. Will you allow me to prepare your eulogy? Things you’d like to see highlighted? “He liked Hallaj, La Rochefoucauld, Ibn Khaldun, Apollinaire, and Marx.” You like too many things, that will be your downfall. “He liked progress and morality, not too much religion” . . . No, I wouldn’t say that, I would make you a sincere believer . . . No need to be controversial at a graveside.

  Being cynical was Ganthier’s way of then placing an arm around Raouf’s shoulders, to beg pardon. He would never have dared to make that gesture as a sign of pure affection.

  48

  A COMPLEX OPERATION

  Caps, fanfare, slogans, and more or less organized rows, several hundred people, two banners: on one, “Equal Pay for Equal Work!” and on the other, “A Forty-Five-Hour Workweek Now!”

  Insanity, said Pagnon at the Cercle des Prépondérants, foreign competition would kill us. Then Pagnon calmed down. It was only a march. They were going to wind around, two, three hours. They like that, winding around, do arabesques in the countryside, in the native style. The oriental soul likes arabesques. And there won’t be a forty-five-hour workweek.

  Everything could have ended peacefully if there hadn’t been the other march. In fact it wasn’t a real march, rather a sort of shapeless mass. It wasn’t immediately understood what it was, a large and murmuring mass, and it didn’t even have to be kept out of the city: that’s what had been surprising. A few dozen men had started to move around in the old city and instead of regrouping in the center, they went to the poorest and most populated zone in the outskirts, the place where people lived between boards, under tarps, with walls made of clay and pieces of wavy sheet metal, a place without water or name, and even if a name had been written on a sign, no one in that place would have been able to read it. And those men from the old city had gathered twenty, thirty times more people when they passed through than they had in the beginning, a mass of beggars coming out of their shacks, walking where grass, cardoons, nettles, and stones still had the right to exist, and there were even yellow flowers, on a land that no one cultivated because they knew that houses would come, and the road would also come, or the railroad, or workshops, or it would become a quarter of villas for the rich. Until then they called these empty spaces, the shapeless mass moving over that land, and farther there was the countryside, the real one, with its olive trees or its wheat or esparto grass fields, and even farther there were dunes, not the real desert, rather sand that had come from the sea, but if one took care not to show the sea one could give the impression that it was the desert—that’s what the Americans did for their film—the mass advancing through the vacant spaces, then the countryside, and the French officers quickly gave orders to the cavalry to watch that mass, the horses of the Spahis and the gendarmes galloping amid poppies, it seems that makes good harvests, and there were a lot more locusts than usual—it had been almost twenty-five years since they had seen so many locusts, no time to think about that. When the mass saw the riders, it accelerated; there were shouts, invocations to God, sometimes sickles raised high.

  At one point those in the disorganized mass saw the marching strikers in the distance. They started to go faster. It was clear they wanted to join them, in the middle of the countryside, and a few snitches were finally able to give some information to the officers. The people in the mass wanted to go to the Americans’ film set, in the dunes. It wasn’t clear why, but it was troubling. It was surprising that Laganier and his men hadn’t known anything about it up to then, and now that mass was turning and running toward the marching workers.

  And that was out of the question, Colonel Audibert said, such a mixture would be explosive. Another piece of information arrived. All those beggars wanted to get their children. What children? Those on the film set, the extras that the star, Cavarro, as a noble sheikh, was supposed to have saved from the evil Turkish robbers . . . A rumor in the morning, they hadn’t paid attention, but now things were heating up. The people were saying that the Americans were going to convert the children, with the help of the French, and would take them to their Christian land, thousands of people whipped into a frenzy who could finally vent their fury, not furious about their miserable salaries—they didn’t have salaries—or against poverty—most accepted poverty as the order of the world—but at the ones stealing their child
ren, that was legitimate fury: the American Christians were going to convert the little shoeshine boys and little maids they had rented from the families where they worked!

  At first the Americans had used children from better circumstances, but they behaved too well. Neil Daintree had protested, “It should be a group of orphans, not some kids who have been taught to wipe their noses.” He had assigned Wayne the task of finding some, and Wayne had found some, by spending a morning on avenue Jules-Ferry just when the review of the little shoeshine boys was taking place. They were seated side by side on the edge of the sidewalk, their boxes sitting in front of them, looking respectfully at the captain of the French army, who was inspecting them as he would have inspected true soldiers, or only seeming to look at him like that, because some of them must have been saying to themselves: What an idiotic son of a bitch with his switch like a dog’s tail that he puts under his arm instead of up his ass, the kids smiling with what the officer called “the atavistic devotion of the young native.” Wayne had negotiated with the captain, and the captain had put some twenty kids at his disposal by promising them—no, not promising, I’m not going to make promises to these scum—the captain told them that they would obey Wayne without causing problems and that they could leave the set and return to the city every day after five in the evening—that was when they would have the most customers—and no one would replace them in the meantime, and if one of them decided to desert the set he would immediately have his box and badge taken away. Yes, a captain of the greatest army in the world, a bachelor, was officially in charge of the little shoeshine boys in the European city. As for the little maids, the Americans could take their pick. They were all true actresses. They just had to be prevented from dancing all the time in front of the cameras.

  The mass was almost running now, true believers who were going to liberate their children, believers inspired by emotion. In the morning, Belkhodja and a few others had passed around a photo Laganier had provided, smiling children in front of a building, and the few people who had seen the photo had told the others, swearing on the heads of their own children, that it was true, since the cross was on the photo it was true, and everything they had endured suddenly became unendurable. Anything but the children. They could endure blows, confiscated land, forbidden land, obligatory work, taxes, fees, and forced labor when they couldn’t pay the taxes and fees, going through the city with chains on their legs, six months breaking stone before finding themselves without land, scavenging in the big piles of garbage outside the city. All of that was mektub, but suddenly there was something stronger, and which could not be mektub, and which was made much worse by all that they had been able to endure without complaining, and later the officers’ report would say that the people had transformed into furies. They had seen hands stick stones into the open stomach of a soldier’s body, hundreds and hundreds of men running in the countryside, slowing to regroup, making a bloc, allahu akbar, running again to wrench the children out of the hands of the Christians, a rush now through the fields, not winding on a path like the people with caps, but a true wave, no singing, but a permanent hum allahu akbar. The officer who was riding at the head of the cavalry had already heard that, more than ten years ago, a bad moment.

  And the marching workers saw the others. There was some wavering; that hadn’t been expected. Two militants sent out to scout said that they were mainly people from the slums. Another militant spoke of “Lumpen.” No one understood. Lumpenproletariat, said Mokhtar, it’s the proletariat in rags. So not the proletariat, said another voice. They were wary, and the two processions were not far from each other.

  We can’t let them converge, said Colonel Audibert, his voice emotional. He was going to be able to indulge in the joys of a complex operation to prevent the convergence. It would remain in the annals of the empire. We’ll do as Napoleon did; we’ll charge in between: the company of Senegalese will get out of the trucks and slip immediately between the two groups, and the gendarmes will cover the CGT, as a screen, and the Spahis will cover the rabble, with some of them facing them. The others will surround them on the wings, with the Legion in reserve! However, Audibert hadn’t been to the war in Europe. At fifty-three he was only a colonel, but he wasn’t going to let himself be outdone by a mix of fanatics and Moscowphiles; penetrate into the center, a double surrounding from the wings, they’ll talk about it for a long time, as far as Saint-Cyr! The colonel got out of his car. The two army photographers were there. He adjusted his uniform. He was happy; he embodied the pure concept of a uniform in the land of Saint Louis. A man in a great uniform, “with a capital ‘U,’” as they say, embodies the idea of order, fighting against all that is flabby and anarchic in life; and the uniform on a human body, when it is squeezed to the last inch of the neck by all those fasteners, buttons, and straps, becomes an impeccable sheath, without a single fold that isn’t desired; even the back is straight and without a wrinkle. One forgets one’s perspiration, one’s odors; the body becomes the instrument of values, not that of their loss. We will confront the enemy to the sound of our own heels, and a glorious death is a death in full uniform! The colonel wasn’t going to die, but he would have his glory.

  What followed was a scene during which nothing could prevent the butt of a rifle from finding a spine or a liver, butts also coming down on a hand protecting a jaw, shoving the hand into the jaw, the violence of the butt canceling out the protection of the phalanxes, breaking the phalanxes and shattering the teeth that fall out in a flow of blood, into the eyes, blinding, and the body on the ground under the stomping of laced boots, arms raised up to protect the head, providing large openings to the stomach or the sides, and sometimes the crunch of a heel on a spine. That one won’t be throwing stones anymore, said the soldier who needed a reason for what he was doing. The others were content to blindly knock heads, and at one point two Spahis found themselves alone, pitchforks lunging, bayonets parrying and responding, stabbing, a bayonet stuck in the bone of an enraged combatant. No way to get it out, yes, a method learned over there, in the great school of death on the Somme. Don’t try to pull the rifle out, that won’t work, the body will come with it. You just have to pull the trigger, bam! And it’s freed! Another soldier went too far ahead. He found himself surrounded by the enemy, knives, and could hardly feel the slight burning on his neck. He brought his hand up, avoided the next blow too late, and retaliated for having been struck. One can’t pardon a knife in the stomach. He aimed, fired, and saw a body fall. His vision was failing. He was struck by a sickle in his side. The steel blade continued its movement in the arc of a circle, cut through a kidney, came back out. The soldier fell, shrieking, on the body of a demonstrator whose carotid was still pouring blood onto the ground. A Spahi officer ordered the soldiers to open fire. The crowd retreated. The forces of order had brought back order.

  There were a half dozen bodies on the ground. Farther away, a young man in a dark gray suit, lying on his back, was no longer breathing. And a French woman, kneeling next to him, was weeping.

  In the evening a militia of colonists scoured the countryside, and for the first time there were a lot of Italians and Spanish among them. They opened fire on figures in the fields and even inspected the large farms. “Get out!” Ganthier, in tears, shouted at them. He had just learned of Raouf’s death. He was on horseback, standing on the stirrups, forbidding the militia access to his land or that of Rania. He shouted as if he thought his shouts would keep him alive: “You want to act like the French and kill Arabs, but only France has the right to kill Arabs! Do you hear? Only France!”

  49

  BEASTS FROM HELL

  And the next day it was learned that another mass was descending on the city and the surrounding region. It came from the south. Everyone knew it would eventually arrive. It had been more than twenty-five years since they had seen the insects, and these days attention had been so focused on what was going on with humans that they didn’t notice the exhausted locusts that were dragging th
emselves through the streets of the city . . . They had been seen in the countryside, too, but no one really talked about them, as if silence could prevent the unthinkable from happening. They put their trust in time, in destiny, in the Master of the two worlds. It couldn’t happen so it wouldn’t happen. Then it became hard to ignore, and everything began to move fast.

  The French were the ones who ultimately said the word: an invasion. They saw them from their airplanes, military planes that returned after flying very high, and the pilots spoke of a single, huge cloud under their wings, a greenish gray carpet. It covered the horizon, it had crossed the desert, it was above the steppe. Even the pilots who had been in the Great War, their voices trembled: they’ll be here tomorrow, or the day after. Ganthier, his face waxen, recalled the Revelation of John, “And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth: and unto them was given power, as the scorpions of the earth have power . . .” There were enough of them to destroy anything that resembled a plant within a radius of sixty miles, and many people calmed down. Rather, the anger of the demonstrations was replaced with fear, with the promise of a catastrophe affecting everyone that would be much worse than the misfortune of some. A ton of locusts can in one day eat as much food as twenty thousand people, and some remembered the famines of the past, when one’s skin was like folds, drooping like wax on candles. In the city there were now so many insects that it didn’t do any good to sweep them up, and they were just the advance guard. People waited for word from the authorities, which didn’t come, no orders for mobilization, or of requisition. Yet it was essential to react immediately, but it was as if they wanted to allow panic to overcome the people, make them experience it, and after they had tried to confront it, they would need a strong power, one that coordinates, organizes, decides, one that fights plagues. That’s also what a state is for, said Marfaing.