The Mysteries of Algiers (11 page)

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.

‘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 …

When I come to again she is not in the bedroom. With some pain I can move my head to gaze at a wall tapestry on which stags in a forest are picked out in a rich mess of magentas, vermilions and yellowy browns. There are a few pieces of heavy European furniture. The large wardrobe is open, and I can see that al-Hadi possessed two Western-style suits, as well as an accumulation of Arab robes. On the chest of drawers there are a plastic jug and cups and a clutter of cosmetics, both Western and Eastern, lipstick, henna wash, powder puff, mastic paste and antimony. Apart from the tapestry of the stags, there is a tourist poster of Annecy pinned to the wall.

When she returns she has a child under her arm which she puts down to crawl on the floor, before busying herself with the needle.

‘What is in the syringe?’

‘Morphine. I have been giving you morphine to stop you screaming. The other guests must not know that you are here.’ I marvel at Zora’s hoarse throaty voice.

‘One of the Arabs shot at me.’

‘They found you in the desert. You were hit in the leg.’

‘They rescue me and then they try to kill me?’

‘It was an accident. Hamid is a simple desert Arab. He had never seen a pistol before.’

‘That’s absurd!’

‘No, he had never handled a gun before. He and his brothers smuggled you into Laghouat. They took great risks. You should be grateful to them.’

‘You know who I am?’

‘I know you. You are the soldier who worked with my man. You work with him for the
FLN
.’

‘Good. Now it is very important that I contact the
FLN
now and get a message to Tughril.’

‘Do not worry. Tughril will get the message. He has been sent for.’

‘When will Tughril come?’

Silence. Considering her reply.

‘Soon. I am pleased to have you here. It is not so good without a man in the house and you can tell me how my man died. He admired you very much.’

‘It is time for that shot.’

Catching the look of longing with which I regard the syringe, she smiles.

‘This morphine is difficult to get hold of. The chemists will not sell drugs they think may be used to treat the fellagha. It is good that I have friends. I do things for them and they do things for me. But we must be careful with our supply.’ After two failures to find a vein and a finally successful though bruising shot in the arm, for Zora is certainly no professional nurse, she pulls away.

‘Is that better for you? You like it better than me I think.’ It is a sneer not a complaint.

Standing beside the bed, she does a shimmying little wriggle to emphasize how awkwardly the pendulous breasts and buttocks are contained within the blue dress of cheap synthetic silk. Her step, as she marches out of the room, is unmistakably jaunty, taunting. I think she hates me. Objectively I approve of that. She, her late husband and I – and the Arabs in the desert and the oppressed women of Algeria – we are all on the same side. Even so, it is good for people like Zora to hate people like me. For though I am on her side, it is still good for her to hate the man, the European, the Saint-Cyr graduate, the colonialist officer. I approve of that hatred. Objectively it is a good thing. Class envy is one of the greatest forces for good in the world. Hatred is the engine of change. It is good to hate the rich, the powerful and the successful, and though I have thrown in my lot with the oppressed, still I am forever contaminated by my former association with the oppressing class. I accept that and I understand and approve of Zora’s ambivalent attitude towards me. At least I think I do.

The pain is not back, indeed the sensations conferred by the needle are so pleasant … I think back to Hanoi. Mercier and I had decided to visit an opium den – at least it was not a proper den, but just a parlour above a night-club casino where one could retire to smoke opium. I was a bit drunk and I found it difficult to focus on the heating of the pellets of opium over a flame and the ritual of the preparation of the pipes. Instead I struggled to read a page of
La Meilleur du Reader’s Digest
and found that difficult too. I would rather have been dancing downstairs. But we were young then and there was this feeling that we ought to have tried everything before we went into combat. It was before Dien Bien Phu. We drank green tea and waited for our ten-piastre pipes to take effect. I kept thinking of the Cochinois girl I should have been dancing with. I drifted in and out of darkness, but I had the impression that the opium was doing nothing. Still it would be something to tell one’s girl about when one got back to France. When my head cleared, Mercier seemed to have been talking for some time.

Mercier was reading Marx and Malraux that year. I smile to think of it now. That was Mercier’s intellectual dabbling. It went nowhere, except towards more books. You can’t understand Marxism by reading, you have to live it. Anyway at that time I had no interest in the stuff, but over our third pipe, Mercier took it upon himself to explain in a rather incoherent way what Marx meant by ‘religion is the opium of the people’.

‘What you have to realize,’ he said, ‘is that in the nineteenth century, opium was conceived of not as a soporific, but as a stimulant. The workers in the factories of Paris used to take it to get them through their working day. Closely read, Marx’s statement “Religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. Religion is the opium of the people …” should not be taken as an outright condemnation either of opium or of religion. It is certainly possible to be a good Catholic and a Marxist.’ The Chinaman at the door kept nodding his head all the time Mercier talked, but I don’t know if he knew French or not.

Then Mercier told me about the mist-soaked valley of Dien Bien Phu, the air drops and the heavy guns being gathered together on the hills above it. Then there was, I remember, a Eurasian who entered the parlour with a concertina. This character made a start at an orientalized rendering of ‘La Carmagnole’, before the Chinaman forced him to stop. But the Eurasian needed to raise a little more money for his pipe, so he crawled round the room, reading people’s fortunes in their palms. Looking at my palm and then up at my face he told me, ‘You have two months to live.’ Sod him. He obviously didn’t like my face. Mercier and I and some of the others took opium away with us that evening. We agreed that it might be useful if we went into battle. When Mercier had talked of that remote valley and the early morning mists, I could imagine it so perfectly in the opium parlour. A week later we were actually there and the mist rose from the valley floor and the enemy’s barrage began.

Zora is back again, making faces as she removes the bedpan.

‘I have to go out now. But do not worry. The dog will protect you.’

‘Where are you going?’ I am full of suspicion.

‘I am going to the hammam. It is the ladies’ afternoon in the hammam.’ She finds her purse and slips it in the handbag. ‘Ah, you would like it there. You cannot imagine how much a man would like it in the hammam. Soft bodies moving through the steam, we are so many women without men, we are waiting for them like houris in paradise. But the men do not come and we sigh and are lonely.’

There is no mistaking the way Zora is baiting me. She does a slinky wriggle to get the white gondourah wrapped over her blue dress. Then she slips out of the door. Why is this game of verbal seduction practised on a sick man? I am not interested in her, how could I be? All I want is for my body to stop aching. I do not really think that she desires me either. Beneath the sexual teasing, she is, I sense, frightened of me, and the way she thrusts that needle in suggests hatred rather than desire. So I am curious as to what her game is.