A Tree on Fire (42 page)

He read the papers, eyes close in the dim light. In earlier campaigns Azrou had been burned, Nahra flattened, the people of Laghouat wiped out. Massacre and destruction had been poured onto them, oil into flames by the self-conscious madmen of Europe, gaolers and bullies and scum-soldiers who perpetrated atrocities they would never mention to their grandchildren who would sit on their knees when they became kindly old men. They indulged in frenetic cruelties of ‘pacification', they humiliated, exploited, butchered wherever they went. Behind them came the technicians and tillers of soil, roadmakers and administrators, idealists who did even dirtier work because they believed it was good, or were glad to have a career and servants they would never have achieved in their own country. But after a hundred and twenty years the Algerians had finally risen, and would not be put down. He found his friends proud and competent, dedicated and amiable, endlessly suffering and brave. ‘
Le Moudjahid!
he is the soldier of the FLN, the political militant, the contact-man, the shepherd, the herdsman, the schoolchildren who go on strike in Algiers and Oran, the man who fights by sabotage, the student who joins the men in the hills, the man or woman who hands out leaflets, the poorest peasant who, with his wife and family, can only suffer and hope. The
Moudjahid
is the combined effort of a whole people guided by the FLN and having but one idea: the independence of their country.

‘The
Moudjahid
is the one who cuts telegraph-wires, derails a train, burns down the house of the colonialist farmer. Every peaceful means to free ourselves from colonialism has been tried, and all that is left is to take up arms in order to recover liberty and independence. The
Moudjahid
is in the mountains and valleys; in every town and village he is the heroic soldier fighting against the mercenary and the legionnaire. Our wounded bleed to death or succumb under torture, perish by arbitrary justice, die protecting women and orphans. But the virtues and moral worth of the freedom-fighter are an indivisible part of the Algerian Revolution. Such qualities will lead us to victory, because true dignity and spiritual greatness are the first attributes of this fight without mercy, this fight to the death in which nevertheless we must not lose our sense of humanity, so that in the future we can remember our sufferings and in so doing recover our tenderness, affection and sensibility in order to build a free and democratic country for the people.

‘The occupying powers have tried to divide the Algerian people among themselves, separate brother from brother, but they can never succeed. The people are united and determined to triumph in this war of liberation. Our people will confound and defeat the enemy: they are the creative force, the inspiration and faith of our fight. The secret of our success resides in the support of the people. The
Moudjahid
is a citizen-soldier face to face with a conscript who does not wish to die for something in which he has no belief. The
Moudjahid
has a social duty, and a clean conscience, and though he is willing to die for these ideals, the fear and thought of death never for a moment enters into his soul.

‘Small groups yesterday have become a regular army today, developing a power of offensive, gathering their war material, and improving their tactical skill. Faced with an enemy bent on genocide the Algerian army has rapidly reorganised. The
Moudjahid
in uniform operates in the mountains and wilderness. The
Moussebelines
– those without uniform – operate in the towns and villages, accomplish their missions in the streets, in cafés, cinemas, on the roads, in public gardens. They hunt down informers and torturers. They destroy police stations and guard-posts. They transport guns and ammunition, hide and look after the wounded, act as guides and liaison runners, report on the movements of the enemy. They draw the enemy into ambushes, form scout guards around our halting-places. The enemy cannot sleep or rest. He can never remain calm, or forget that we are there. Faced with the young and old, people of the towns, peasants of the countryside, students and workmen, all those who make up the FLN the enemy has the whole country against him. The colonialist hordes continue their savage repressions against unarmed people, their extortions and pillage, and remain a devastating force. But they will be met by the serene courage of the Algerian
Moudjahid.
In combat he always stays within the limits of the laws of war. He must respect the human being, the plants and crops, animals of the field and all those works necessary to the wellbeing of the population. As well as fighting the enemy he must assist the people for whom he is fighting. He must help them in their misery and hunger, ignorance and illiteracy.'

Daylight was hot, darkness was hot. He could move, read, think. When the girl came in, he asked for water: ‘
Fish 'andukum môya?
'

‘
Aho el-môya
' – giving him a cupsized earthbowl of warm liquid. He spread it over his face. Using the lid of a small tin for a mirror he pulled his razor painfully up and down the long bristles. She watched from the doorway, arms folded at waist level. The face in the tin was distant and indistinct, as if behind a waterfall, but the image gave him the assurance to shave by touch and not butcher himself. The more he scraped the more polished seemed the tin. With the bristles off, matted over the surface of the water like iron filings, his face was smaller but not so bony as he'd thought it would be. He expected her to smile but she didn't, so his ego was satisfied by not being pandered to. Her feet made no noise, and only her clothes moved when she took up the water and went. Love came with two faces, usually that of the great destroyer, rage and maggot-fire hiding behind the smile of the all-embracing womb of sweetness that tried to get you. Love destroyed your will, the soft evil old-fashioned swooning love that one had read and been told about, that froze the bowels and cooked the heart, the two-way facing foxy tearabout let loose in you by some far back ancestral parcel of yourself trying to do you in at the crucial moment or turning-point of your life. It was a sort of love you had to say goodbye to, drop dead to, get off my back love to, without losing your decency and self-respect, and your responsibility to others. Sweat poured out of you like thought; thought was salt and sweat in contradistinction to snot and shit. Blood wasn't thought, but disaster, and he'd seen enough spilled and splashed, grey and yellow flesh flashing maggoty under the sun and inking the rocks, death-pits and treegallows, scorched teeth and blancoed bone to last forever. The love all knew about was zither strings on which your enemies played, the love of evil that they got you to stave off by the way you spent your money, the whole sticktwisted righthanded idealism of love me and nothing more, love your father, mother, sweetheart, wife, children, country, king and soil, the sky turned blind when it laughed behind your back, a black patch over the H-bomb mushroom exploding while you groped in the dark and called it love, romantic semantic schizoid psychic platonic tectonic bucolic rancid fervid fetid bubonic love, the love that locks you deep in the dungeon of your putrescent silted soul. Swim up like a fish to the red-hot sands of the desert, and set off through your own death towards life. It's a gamble in which no one wins but which those who take may win through, though at the moment he didn't see how he'd ever get beyond this cellar under the sky.

If he asked himself what was to be done, the only answer that came without thought and therefore truly was to stand up, to walk, to leave the tunnel of malaise and fight to the pinhead spotlight of sickness, resume his trek over rubble and sand and get to the mountains and maybe catch another glimpse of the sea before he croaked. If the dead love, the rotten love, the western love pulled out of you there was nothing left, except to lie for weeks in a hole in the ground hugging the bit of life still somehow tucked under your skin. What you had left, at this low pitch, was the will to get on your legs and move your arms to fight or build, walk, march, kill if anybody tried to stop you doing these things. When the foul and useless love you had been conditioned to accept by a finished and rotten society dead in its tracks had died, and you knew that to love only one person out of all others in the world, and be yourself loved by someone else out of all the others in the world was wrong in every sense, then you began to experience a new warmth of life, a responsible manifold feeling towards all others and not just one. The love of one was the love of death and of the devil. The love of all was a respect for creation. You could not love only one person in the desert, because if you did you and everyone would perish. There was a love in which the phallus dominated all else, the boss and operating member tyrannising over everything you did or wanted to do. The other love was controlled by the hands that helped, taught, built and if necessary fought. The phallus could not be ignored, but neither could it be allowed to dominate, for such a dominion was destruction leading you to the sinkpots and gutters of the earth, dropping you and everyone through to the cloacae of oblivion. You came a long way to find simple truths, too far on foot over the earth, too far into the labyrinthine depths of your own flesh and blood, and yet never far enough, never to the extreme limits that the spirit can endure. No one else can live for you, neither the servants nor the telly nor books, nor any yarnspinner back and blighted from the fantastic pot-zones of heaven and earth. You had to go yourself, right in, right down, through the eye of a needle and into many mansions, queer street and rotton row, shit creek and blind alley. No one could go for you or do for you. The light burned in your forehead and shone right in front, and if the earth and coal fell it fell on you, with no one to blame but yourself and nothing to lose but yourself. Only your own skull was crushed, your own light stamped out, and since you didn't know anything about it nothing would hereafter matter.

The silent cinnamon glow of this tall young woman walking in and out day after day put her softly withdrawing life into him, a spirit and blood transfusion taking place with neither of them knowing it until it was too late. Towards the end, after Mokhtar had spoken about arrangements to get him to the base zones of the Kabylie Mountains, and when he was walking round the room ten and fifty times a day to build the fibres back into his legs, he sensed the decline of her strength, though she did not walk more slowly or breathe heavily and with pain. She lived on by gentleness and will, but her eyes grew lighter, burned intensely when they were turned away from his, and when he looked at them before she realised he had seen her. They were grey-green, small and almost closed, as if to see better in the dim light and save what life remained in them.

He stamped on his love for her. He held her hand a moment on the night he went away. Her fingers were thin and cold, and she muttered something in Arabic in reply to his few words of French. He felt that neither had understood the other's speech, and did not need to.

Chapter Twenty-nine

Sand blew against the back of his head, hot grains stinging through his hair. Hat in hand, he walked along, for the moment unarmed, feet scuffling away the last two hundred miles to mountains and sea. Thin, grit-choked alfalfa grass stretched all around and up to the heights which now had trees on them. He was glad that the hot wind was coming from behind. Walking into it, the black mood would have sent him mad. They had been three days on the march, a guide in front and a
Moudjahid
soldier behind so that he began to feel like a prisoner. ‘You are going away,' Mokhtar said. ‘Snow for the winter, perhaps a sea-cruise to Egypt. Everything is arranged along the route. No more fighting.'

‘Let the desert bloom,' he said, pissing on the sand, ‘and lizards drown in it.' The heat of life was diminishing as they sat down to eat, three points of a well-spaced triangle, mobile rag-bundles resting before dusk and a few more miles into darkness. The triangle was deformed by surrounding huge rocks, and when the thin plane whistle was heard they hugged the ground and spread grey cloaks over themselves to become part of the outcrop and invisible. His moving shadow marked out the land, patterning much of it, robbing the sun as he walked of direct touches of the earth. He took his shadow with him, he in a straight line as it slowly shifted round all points of the compass. At night as he lay it was held down firmly so that it wouldn't walk away unawares and leave him naked and incomplete. He was no longer on the run, out to escape from others and himself. Yet he felt particularly insignificant under the great sky.

Another ten days and, if he didn't perish from bullets or napalm, he would be in the mountains. He was feeling his way towards some new phase at last, but could not fix clearly in his mind what it was because he felt no guarantee of getting there. He went on without hope, but with strength and intent matching together. Thought played no great part in his plan. The only way he could prove to himself that he was alive was to become dead. They moved, met nomads at dawn, ate beans and mutton, chickpeas and crackling bread, figs and dates. They drank tea. Dawn was like dusk: rose, rose, O Rose thou art sick. He watched it settling on the next range of flowing green-armed hills. Which Rose was that? Poor Rose. What disease did she have, this female day you walked across. Who could tell, till the sun came up? If she was sick, she was sick, and that was that. She'd either get better or get dead. He'd been dead, and proved he was alive – to himself. Each day began this way, the day that might on a whim change back into dusk and die like the night. A breath of wind came, rose turning to sunflower-yellow, warming a little out of the sun's nostrils. Far off on his left-hand was the way they were going, and it seemed no great pull to him. He picked up a stone, weighed it and let it drop. He spat on it, the smell of his night-sweat wafting around him. The guide blew his snot, and knelt on the ground in the same direction. Yet he wanted to go on, to reach the bitter fighting of the north. He had not quite died. He felt cheated. The world owed him a death, hadn't yet paid its debt to him. He was clear, free, easier than he'd ever been, but wasn't there another land still to be crossed? He was a believer as only an unbeliever could be, a believer in the materialist future who found his life hard after a mere few days out of the soft, warm acid-bath of death. The sun was shining and the wind was light, walking was effortless, but the familiar weight had not returned to his heart. Belief in the future one-way track of the world was not heavy enough. He did not feel serious or grim, and the great horizon made fun of his new uneasiness concerning it.