The Mysteries of Algiers (15 page)

‘You look rather old to be a conscript.’

‘Ah, but that was in ’55, madame, and much has happened to me since then. When I got my wound and was invalided out, I stayed on here. There was nothing for me to go back to in France.’

Eugene looks concerned.

‘We’ll talk about this later. But you must watch yourself. This morphine business can add years to your life – in your case I think it already has.’

‘Well anyway, I’m glad you came out as a conscript,’ says Yvonne. ‘That’s better than the Legion. The legionnaires round here are like gypsies, thieving and stealing … They treat this place like a foreign land under occupation.’

They talk about how the war has changed the place. Eugene remembers growing up in Laghouat, that was before even the Hôtel Transatlantique was built. In those days there was less of a racial feeling in the town and as a boy he used to play in the streets with the Arabs and Jews. You don’t see much of that these days. Yvonne’s upbringing was rather different. She was not born in Laghouat, but came here from the coast. She starts to reminisce about her girlhood and her first ball at the Governor’s Residence in Algiers. There is perhaps a hint of snobbery in these carefully hoarded memories, a yearning for something other than the provincial existence that she finally settled for. Still, Yvonne laughs unaffectedly at that young girl’s gaucheness and timidity and her dreams of being swept off her feet by an officer in the Spahis.

‘I thought it would go on forever, the dances and the afternoon calls …’

When I say that the wife is nice, and for that matter Eugene too, this does not mean that I like them. I do not like nice people. Nor does it necessarily mean that I will spare them. As I sit here chewing on the pork, I am wondering will it be desirable or necessary to kill this old couple?

The family photograph album comes out and is passed across the table. I love looking at old photos. Here is the youth, Eugene, playing cards with his father in a flowery garden and here is Yvonne picnicking with some officers on an outing to the Hoggar and there are lots of photos of the one year they took their daughters to mainland France to show them to their grandmother a little before she died. I am reminded of other photos – of the one taken of Chantal’s mother sitting with a spaniel on her lap and shading her eyes against the glare of the sun. That was only a few days before the Philippeville massacre. And the one of Mercier and Jomard standing arm in arm on the edge of the metal airstrip at Dien Bien Phu. Jomard did not survive the attempt to break out of Fortress Isabelle. In my eyes and in retrospect the people staring at the lens seem actually to be facing some sort of firing squad, and so they are for, in time, they will all be dead and when we open an album of photographs we are contemplating the dead – the buried dead and the walking dead.

I would like to pump them for news of Fort Tiberias. I should like to know if the incident in the fort is public knowledge in Laghouat, but this is risky. If there is a hunt on for a renegade legionnaire officer I do not want them to reconsider me in this light. Besides it rapidly becomes apparent that the couple have no great interest in political and military affairs.

‘Eh, how do we know what is going on, from reading the newspapers I ask you? Lies, censorship and simple misinformation. It is stupid to try and follow current affairs.’

‘Politics is very boring,’ Yvonne agrees with a sigh.

Eugene comes out with a cassoulet–rich fart.

Yvonne winces. I smile. Eugene catches my hastily vanishing smile.

‘Angels flying overhead,’ says Yvonne.

Why is it that all parties and all political thinkers despise the
petit bourgeois?
I share the common prejudice. However the conversation must be kept going, so I tell them how I, too, have never had any time for politics.

‘Only the show-offs and the immature get involved in politics. And make a lot of noise, but left-wing, right-wing, communist, fascist, how much difference is there between them really? Noisy egotists, they make a lot of noise about their theories and doctrines, but when they come to power, they all do the same things in the end.’

Yvonne and Eugene are happy to consent to this comfortable rubbish and Eugene starts telling me how much more interesting bees are than politicians.

After fruit, Yvonne takes the plates into the kitchen. She refuses my offer of assistance with the washing up. Eugene pours us two out some armagnac. It is plain that he wants us to have a heart to heart.

‘Don’t take offence now, Philippe, but (correct me if I am wrong) I sense in you an over-fastidious soul … I saw you looking at my wife … Yes, I saw that smile … Well, let me be frank. If one can’t fart in front of one’s wife, one is not really intimate with her. It does not seem to me that one is properly married …’

He breaks off for Yvonne has come in to wish us goodnight. Eugene says that we will sit up a little longer and that he will see to my bedding. He listens to her going up the stairs, before speaking again.

‘She is a good sort that little wife of mine. We are content … or we were before this war started … Eh, they look down on us in France. I know or at least I can imagine. All right, I don’t read Camus or Robbe-Grillet and the wife can’t afford to dress from
Vogue.
I raise pigs and keep bees. Is that such a bad thing? Eh … Now how have I offended my fellow countrymen that I must lose my home, my garden, my pigsties, say goodbye to the church in which I worshipped and the school where I learned my letters and my daughters are learning theirs? What evil have we done that we must forfeit our livelihoods and our memories? We are to become the refugees and pensionaries of the very men who sold us out: That big man, the General, showing his medals to the cameras, talking about “Frenchmen”, he is not talking about us, but only about himself. It’s all mad.’

Why is he telling me all this? Does he think that I have the ear of the General? He looks as though he is about to cry, but then he pulls himself together.

‘Eh well, time to look at that leg.’ He motions me to follow him and we go into what seems to be a small study. He wants me to take my trousers off, but I say, ‘The shot first.’

I thrust my bared arm at him, a tangled mess of scratches and lumps. The needle is expertly inserted. This must be the end of the masquerade, but since the morphine is now slowly pumping through my veins, I am relaxed about it. I produce the pistol from my waistband. It is awkward stepping out of the trousers while covering the man with the gun, but I manage it.

‘I want a proper dressing on this.’

From time to time as he works on the leg he looks up at me with dubious eyes, but he says nothing. Guessing doubtless how this must end, he takes his time and makes a good job of the new clean dressing. When he has finished, I shoot him in the skull. To see the side of a skull fly apart under the force of the bullet – or rather not see it, it is so fast – is something extraordinary. ‘Might is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one. It is in itself an economic power.’ Marx’s watchword is mine.

Now I mount the stairs hoping to find the wife still in bed, but I meet her halfway down the stairs and I set about clubbing her down the steps, beating her about the head and not stopping until she lies lifeless in the hallway. I stand there a while catching my breath and listening to hear if the sound of the gun has attracted the attention of the neighbours. Once more I find myself wishing that my Tokarev had a silencer, but if it did then the muzzle velocity would be slower. In my experience, there is no such thing as the perfect weapon. Then I try to carry the woman back upstairs in my arms, but I cannot bear her weight so I drag her up in fits and jerks and heave her on to the bed. Then I pull her nightgown up and set to work with my tapes and detonation cords. When I have finished, I consider booby-trapping the husband’s corpse too, but one will be enough for the effect. Besides, the plastique is used up. I would not dare carry such unstable stuff around any longer. All I have is some chloride and that is not so easy to use in these booby-traps.

I have often lectured on the subject but I haven’t actually handled explosives of any sort since training. I am pleased with myself. In itself nitroglycerine is no joke to handle and once the nitrocellulose is added it is even more dodgy, but it is precisely this instability, which sets the operator such problems, which also gives the stuff such a hair-fine response when the trap is actually triggered off. What I have set up is an adaptation of the wire-trip device, in which the cord tied to Yvonne’s legs pulls the firing pin which sets off the blasting cap and then the main charge. The
frisson
created by this sort of outrage, it’s so much more effective than an ordinary tactical strike against a railway siding or something. In the next few months a few more
pieds noirs
here in Laghouat will probably decide to pull up roots and migrate back to France. Why the death of this old couple should be so shocking, I don’t know. Oh yes, I do. They are Europeans. But if forty villagers in the highlands of the Kabyle are killed in a pacificatory bombing raid, that is different. That is done by people in uniform, it is backed by state structures and the people are Arabs, not fully people. It is all quite different. But I don’t have to justify myself to myself.

I can do nothing more tonight. At night the roadblocks and patrols are pretty intense – not to mention the ironic risk of being ambushed by the
FLN
. Part of the effect I shall be creating comes from the supposition that I have killed innocent people. Of course they weren’t innocent. Of course not. Their style of life battens on the poor and feeds off the Arabs. It would cost an Arab a year’s work to buy some of Eugene’s medicines. He gave me dinner, yes and thanks for that I suppose, but he wouldn’t have given an Arab or a Berber dinner. And he has a standard of living forty times higher than the natives. And when I was torturing Arabs on behalf of
Algérie francaise,
did this man try to stop me? Did he as much as write a letter to the newspapers? He knew perfectly well what I and others were doing. The cells in our barracks came to resemble abattoirs. We slopped around in Arab blood, all so that the ‘innocent’ pharmacist might keep his beehives and pig-sties. In the context of a country in revolution, this innocence is a form of evil.

By now Chantal and that lieutenant must have arrived at Laghouat. Will Raoul still be alive to speak to them? Will Zora stay there to risk Chantal’s rage? What will Chantal’s next move be? Ah, but it is hopeless guessing. And it is no use being idle. Now I have got my breath back, I start to search the living room. It does not take me long to find what I am looking for – a camera and a box of flash bulbs kept in the corner cupboard. Then I go upstairs and take pictures of Yvonne’s body displayed on the bed with her legs drawn up at an awkward angle and her head propped up on the bloody pillow. Then I go down to find Eugene and arrange his body in all sorts of grotesque angles for my pictures. Technically this is interesting work – aesthetically too, for photography furnishes atrocity with its aesthetics. This war of ours in Algeria has been fought in black and white and when I dream of this war it is always in grainy black and white images. There is no brilliant blue sky, no yellow sand, no multi-coloured Arab robes, only the two-colour chiaroscuro of the soldiers, politicians and journalists.

Photography produces quirky and visually enhancing effects. When some little bourgeois in Grenoble opens his newspaper over the coffee and croissants and finds my snap of Yvonne with her head clubbed in, he will not see what I have seen; in some respects it will be more horrible. I have noticed before that blood in the camera’s register does not look like blood and the blood on the pillow behind Yvonne’s head will probably more closely resemble shit spattered round a lavatory bowl and, though civilians in France are rarely allowed to see these photographs (it would be bad for their morale), a head that has been clubbed in does not seem to contain brains, but rather some strange black fibrous matter. So anyway this good citizen at his breakfast table will contemplate my picture of Yvonne. He will be revolted, yes, but he will also feel guilty that he is impotent to do anything about it and, thoroughly demoralized, in time he will harden his heart to the plight of the
pieds noirs
in Algeria. He has already hardened his heart to the plight of the millions who starve in Africa and Asia. When the flash bulbs are used up, I fire off the rest of the film into the darkness. Then I put the roll of film in my bag.

I lie on the sofa downstairs, thinking, plotting and dozing, until just before dawn. Then I don one of the chemist’s suits and bury al-Hadi’s blood-bespattered suit outside the back door. I drive the 2
CV
into Laghouat and use the dead man’s keys to open his shop. I take what looks like a year’s supply of morphine and some needles, also the small change from the till. Then I drive north. Half a mile outside Bou Hara I abandon the car in a grove of cork trees and walk into town. At the bus station I find a bus that is leaving for Algiers in half an hour. There are a couple of poor whites on the bus and me. Otherwise the bus is filled with Arabs and there are even children standing in the aisles. Jasmine water is sprinkled on the passengers by the driver just before we leave. It will be a five-hour journey. Two hours into the journey there is an inspection of papers. A conscript and his officer move slowly up the aisle carefully examining papers and irritably crushing the children against the seats. As they come close, I brandish Raoul’s
carte d’identité.
Even this gesture was unnecessary. They are not interested in the Europeans, only in the Arabs. I relax back into my seat and contemplate the gentle melancholy of the Algerians. They look like sheep preparing to be slaughtered. Not that sheep do, of course. I admire the view and think. These dopey passive Arabs content to be on their way to market … Actually I believe that stupidity is also a form of evil … a culpable refusal to see the truth.

To see so many stupid people around me, it is depressing perhaps. But I am on the loose once more and free to act. They will never be able to keep up with me. I have scarcely begun.