A Single Swallow (28 page)

The approach to Algiers is a little like the descent into Palermo: a city couched in a ring of mountains beside a wide bright sea. But where Palermo might have a ferry approaching and a few fishing boats
leaving its harbour, Algiers has dozens of tankers, container ships and gas carriers coming, going or standing off at anchor, attendant. You cannot miss Algeria's treasure. Even flying over at night, flares light the desert; you certainly cannot miss it coming in by day as the road from the airport takes you right past clusters of storage tanks like huge steel pucks: Algeria has oil.

The light was the first thing that struck me, but then I had been waiting for it. Like so many who are first taught to read French through the strong simplicity of Albert Camus, Algeria to me was Camus' country. Algeria's light, I expected, would be the pellucid, piercing, lethal light that burns everything else out of the brain of Meursault, the Outsider of Camus'
L'Etranger
, just before he murders a man, ‘the Arab', on a beach – and so it was.

We hummed along the motorway into thickening traffic and I strained to take in all the brightness of the day. Like Sicily, Algeria is a country in love with spring, and this bright blue day, spring had come. Police with slung machine-guns eyed us as we crawled through a checkpoint on the edge of the city.

‘It's normal,' said the young taxi driver, and we drove into Algiers, ‘
Alger la Blanche
', as the old postcards put it, as the French used to call it, when it was the greatest treasure in their empire: ‘Algiers the White'. To see it is to think you understand, in the same way one thinks one understands on first seeing Cape Town, why men kill in and die for and cling so ferociously to particular pieces of the world: Algiers is utterly beautiful.

It is built on the slopes of rumpled mountains where they tumble down to the sea. Many of its roads are contour paths which weave in and out of the ravines and re-entrants of these tumbledown hills; streets seem to float like scarves in mid-air, wound around pine trees, villas and apartment buildings, crossing bridges, narrowing and doubling back like mountain tracks. There are gardens of palms and sweet-scented plants whose names I did not know. There are Ottoman palaces with bougainvillea pouring over their walls like purple foam; lower, roads glide and swoop down boulevards, through terraced white Art Deco fronts to the port's arcaded waterfront where
grand banks and great palazzo-like office buildings, once the long arms of colonial administration and commerce, gaze north, across the sea towards Marseilles. The port and the harbours are vibrant, working places. Where once the corsairs auctioned European slaves, ships now manoeuvre, trains pull in and out of the station and I watched four cats confused over who had what right to which of five fish-heads.

Just to the west of the centre, climbing away from the sea up its own hill is the Kasbah, Turkish and pre-Turkish, an ancient, riddled and riddling world-heritage warren, perhaps best known to the world now as the battleground of the Battle of Algiers.

At the gateway to the hotel the taxi stopped while a man in uniform probed underneath it with a mirror, then poked around in the boot with a chemical bomb-sniffer. By the time I had reached my room, opened the windows and stepped on to the little balcony, into a view full of sea and white roofs and a blue sky spinning with swifts, I was smitten. I had only five days in Algeria. I would not spend them waiting for buses or watching the hundreds of miles of country pass by a window. The swallows would have to come to me; I resolved to give all the time to Algiers.

The commitment to smoking is remarkable: should you want to light up three times between the lift and the reception desk, or extinguish five cigarettes between the concierge and the main door, there was an ashtray on hand for every match and flick of ash. Algerians are champion smokers. Everyone over the age of seven has lived through worlds of death unimaginable to us. Their story renders ridiculous our world of nebulous health-scares.

‘This race, wholly cast into its present, lives without myths, without solace', Camus wrote. ‘Everything that is done here shows a horror of stability and a disregard for the future.'

This essay, ‘Summer in Algiers', was written in 1936. The race he refers to is his own: the mixture of French, Spanish and Italian ‘
colons
' or ‘
pieds noirs
' who had colonised the country since the French
conquest of 1830. That race has vanished now, scattered to disappearance. Though it refers to a lost world, ‘Summer in Algiers' is still full of contemporary truth: only the occasional line has been rendered anachronistic in the most terrible way, as if it took an apocalypse to eclipse Camus' observation. All its ten short pages are shot through with something dreadfully beyond irony: with prophesy.

The hotel gardens were full of exotic plants, and gardeners, and no guests. Just beyond the gates was a garage and beyond that a road leading up to the British Embassy. Though I called them, left messages and knocked on their door I never roused any response from that embassy: I had hoped someone there might give me a briefing on Algiers, perhaps furnish me with Algerian contacts. Two policemen on duty nearby said they saw very little of the diplomats. It was not surprising. In the autumn of 1993 war was declared on foreigners: by the summer of the following year over fifty had been killed and the French ambassador had ordered the last 2,000 French expatriates to leave. Every life is of equal value, and many of those killed died horribly, but still, since 1962, when the Algerian war of independence ended with the mass exodus of the
pieds noirs
, fifty foreign deaths are a tiny speck in the maelstrom of Algerian blood which engulfed the country before and since the French left.

The two police officers were dressed as if for a musical featuring Italian policemen of the 1920s, in bright sky-blue uniforms adorned with sparkling white cuffs, belts and straps, and large caps. They would have looked comical, toy-like, had it not been for their automatic weapons: every Algerian policeman seems to have a well-oiled assault rifle within easy reach. The guns were striking because they seemed so well looked after, their wooden stocks and grips smooth
and shiny with long use. But at least you can see their owners' faces. In 1993 the state created a force of 15,000 paramilitary police who came to be known as the Ninjas, because of their black balaclavas. Their job was to kill and torture: to kill the Islamist killers and torturers, who themselves killed indiscriminately, and to torture those suspected of harbouring or sympathising with the killers. Men like the Ninjas – who might have been Ninjas, how could one know? – faceless, unaccountable men also murdered civilians who might sympathise with the FIS, the Islamic party which won the 1992 elections, triggering an army
coup d'état
. By the late 1990s anyone could be killed, in fact: slaughter served to weaken the state the Islamists hated; slaughter also served to cull those who might vote for Islamic parties. The army, the terrorists, the intelligence services and the paramilitaries, all stoked the horror, and fed on it.

Death became the
raison d'être
of the GIA, an acronym initially deployed to describe a loose network of Islamist killers, but one which came to be questioned by investigative journalists: the massacres ascribed to the GIA often seemed to serve the interests of the army generals and the mafia of shadows who comprise ‘
le Pouvoir
' – ‘the Power' – the vague and loathsome force which has squatted on or near the levers of Algerian power since 1962: the men with secret bank accounts stuffed with the proceeds of Algerian oil.

Algiers was bright and beautiful, that first day, but unsmiling. The killing has abated: the country is led by President Bouteflika, a prized ally of the West since 2001 and the coming of ‘the War on Terror'. Occasional bomb attacks, roughly one spree a year, are now ascribed to ‘Al Quaeda in the Islamic Maghreb' but few trust this provenance. They keep the population docile, it is pointed out, and
le Pouvoir
is still in power; and behind Bouteflika, and who knows what else, is the DRS, the Département de Renseignement et de Sécurité, a secret service founded in 1990 principally to protect and serve the generals at the heart of the
Pouvoir
, which specialises in torture, assassination and kidnap. The lessons Algeria has to teach are almost too awful to study, which perhaps explains Europe's attitude towards it. We have heard and forgotten reports of coups, massacres, earthquake and
bombs – otherwise, apart from the oil workers, flown in and out of fortified camps in the desert, and the never-mentioned US base at Tamanrasset, the West has largely ignored it.

‘Don't you find it oppressive?' I had asked the young taxi driver. ‘There are so many policemen!'

‘No – why?' he said. ‘They are here for our security . . .'

Sometimes it seemed half the male population of Algiers was employed to keep an eye on the other half.

Swinging down a long sloping street towards the centre of town, marvelling at swooning-sweet gardens and tall palms below the road, I happened to glance up at a passing bus. Every single passenger on it was staring at me. I raised this with a friend I made at an internet café.

‘Am I the only European in the whole city?'

‘No,' he said, ‘I saw another one yesterday.'

‘Don't Europeans come here, then?'

‘Oh yes – Italians, and the French, in the summer. You are a little early, that is all.
Bon courage!
'

At the bottom of the road, where the streets opened into squares and the boulevards descended to the sea, a fight broke out. My only other experience of the testosterone overspill of young North African men being in Morocco, I was shocked by the speed and fury with which this battle ignited. Moroccans seem to love the idea of fighting but they do not actually fight much – two youths dancing around each other making a lot of noise and show is not an uncommon sight, nor particularly disturbing. But these two Algerians were trying to kill each other. A group of men formed a ring around them but made no effort to separate them. Then police arrived, in force. It was strange to see such rage and hatred in the middle of a sunny spring afternoon. Immediately, up and down the street, older men went into gossip huddles.

When they were young these men were known as
hittistes
, from the Arabic
heta
, meaning wall, a reference to where they spent their lives, hanging about on corners, leaning on the walls of their neighbourhoods. Many have spent the greater part of their lives out of work. After independence, following a coup in which Houari Boumédienne deposed Ahmed Ben Bella, figurehead of the liberation struggle, a
flush of rising oil prices buoyed Algeria through Soviet-inspired industrial and agrarian semi-revolutions, into an urbanised modernity. In time this period, the 1970s, would come to be seen as a proud time, even something of a golden age. But by the mid-1980s, with Boumédienne dead and his successor, Chadli Bendjedid, ineffective in the face of corruption, a permanent gap opened between the rulers and the ruled. The population doubled to 23 million as oil prices fell. Along with mass unemployment, food queues and water shortages came to Algiers. Exit visas were abolished. The
hittistes
fulminated against the
chi-chis
: those connected to the elite. Hatred of bureaucrats, capitalists and politicians became street currency, expressed in bitter jokes and salved with zombretto, a cocktail of industrial alcohol and lemonade.

The people on the streets were a mixture of the secular, the religious and the westernised, at least by their dress. As many women wore jeans as headscarves. Most of the men seemed to wear leather jackets, which made them look like secret policemen. I attracted many stares, but nothing like hostility. In a bookshop, in a café, idling along above the harbour, I fell easily into half a dozen conversations: each time my interlocutor was anxious, almost desperate, to talk and be helpful. I caused a small pandemonium in the bookshop, expressing an interest in one volume which the assistant was sure he had in a better, unscuffed cover. His colleague was summoned, other customers joined in, books fell from shelves, voices were raised in exasperation: Algerians, I concluded, over the following days, give the impression of anxiety because they are perfectionists. If a man can see you doing something which he can also see could be done better he will not be able to resist telling you about it, and the longer you desist from following his advice, or the less perfectly you follow it, the louder he will inadvertently shout in attempting to assist you. The effect of this is that every now and then streets, cafés, corners or squares resound with raised voices, but what sounds like a widespread and angry dissent is in fact perfectly normal exchange.

The sweep of Algiers leads you to the sea: the gradients flatten along the front and then, like the gentle swell of a wave, carry you up to the Kasbah. There is a small square just before the main road into it, where one swallow flew round and round a cluster of stalls in the middle. She was a female, alone, and there seemed something hectic, something lost about her, like a bat caught out by the daylight. I stopped for coffee. The stall was busy; two or three serving and an old man in charge. One imagined he had donned his old blue coat, such as grocers used to wear, every working day for years. His pate was dark brown and his eyes were black, with dark semicircles below them.

‘French?' he demanded.

‘No –
Gallois!
'

‘
Gallois
. . . Tourist?'

‘Yes!'