The Mysteries of Algiers (16 page)

I was sitting beside an autumn bonfire when I saw a woman dressed as Harlequin pacing about on the opposite side of the fire. She walked with a mannish stride, but despite the mask, I was certain that she was a woman. She was offering everyone fruit. In the orange sunset light, I at first mistook the apples for oranges. Later she sat down beside me and introduced me to her younger sister. That was the
fete de village
when I was ten, I think. That would be in 1935? I don’t know why this picture should suddenly have come unbidden to me.

There is leisure for thinking on the bus, too much for my tastes. I should prefer to be moving and acting … Still, it is desirable that I should satisfy myself that there was nothing personal or pathological in my killing of Yvonne and Eugene. I apply the discipline of self-criticism and examine my motives. At length I am satisfied. It is true that I have a generalized hatred of old people, but this is the product of what I consider to be a political perception. Yes, old people shamble about in front of me in the street getting in my way – and there across the aisle in the bus at this very moment there is an aged Berber who has been irritating me immensely by smiling at nothing whatsoever and by grunting at irregular but frequent intervals. He is old, impoverished and a member of an oppressed nation; in those circumstances his smile is peculiarly fatuous. But no, there is nothing personal in my detestation of the old. The mutual hatred of young and old is half of politics. Simply, old people are an obstacle to revolutionary change, a dead weight on the future.

I am not a fool. Of course I shall be old myself one day. I hope that I shall have the courage to hate myself then. As long as we have not learned to hate old age, poverty and sickness, the world will never change. Revolution works towards Harlequin and the apples which glow like little suns.

But I am not going to spend four or five hours just thinking about old people. At the same time, my mind is active on other matters. Suppose this bus is being followed? I can see no consistent tail but that proves nothing. Suppose there is a tail, a shadow on the bus itself? It could be that daft old Berber. Suppose Chantal, or for that matter the
SDECE
, if they still believe I am alive deduce my destination and the means available to me to reach it? So that when the bus pulls up at the terminus, there is a reception committee waiting, waiting and patiently slapping their cudgels lightly against their palms? Suppose that when I do alight at Algiers and start to try to make contact I find that the cell I need to make contact with has been broken up? Or suppose that when I do make contact with Tughril, I discover that he has been turned by the
SDECE
, or worse I never discover that he has?

It is good to be properly cautious, and in my trade it is desirable to examine all possible eventualities, but I do not intend to go potty doing so. I am careful also to have more positive thoughts, so I think to myself how good it is that I who have worked as a loner for so long will be now able to jettison solitude and deception and walk shoulder to shoulder with my comrades. How bad it has been, these years of playing soldier and spy. It is not good for a man to be alienated from the product of his labour, nor is it healthy to be an individualist. Men should work together, to spur each other on by example and to offer each other solidarity. I am tired of playing my hand against every other man’s. I want to come in. It is time for some human warmth.

Algiers the white!

The coach terminus is in Mustapha Inférieure, not far from the place Raymond Poincaré. The first need is to find a
pissoir
where I can shoot up some more morphine – a tricky business if I am to do it fast and not to drop the bag or the needle. Posted on the side of the
pissoir
is the latest round-up of faces of wanted men. My face is not yet among them. Now, how many years have I spent in this country? Nearly eight I think and never before have I had to take public transport. It takes me some time before I can work out which tram it is I need to cross town by. Waiting at a tram stop is something new for me. I am conscious of myself standing here as shabby, limping, down at heel. The once close-cropped hair now sticks out like the spines of a sea urchin, and I have a straggly beard. Well, I rejoice that I am not such a dull dog as I seem, with my little bags of morphine and chloride explosive.

There is a man at the table of the café opposite who seems to be watching me. It takes me time to assure myself that this is in fact not so. He is admiring the red-haired Jewess who stands beside me in the queue. I should say that his gaze was concentrated on the seams of her stockings. It is the hour of the anisette and the tables in front of the café opposite are almost full. Happy hour, as the disgusting Americans call it, but few of these citizens look happy. They sit there saying little, but watching each other. There is an old white-bearded man moving among the tables trying to sell the clients what may be drawings. His chosen victims look up at the old man, while clients at tables further away watch their predicament with amusement and these clients are in turn being watched by a couple of women leaning over a balcony on the opposite side of the street. And down in the street a gaggle of veiled fatmas stare up at the balcony with eyes that glitter with envy or with malice. Eye crosses eye. Suddenly and incongruously I find myself thinking of Yvonne and Eugene and Eugene’s fart.

At the rival café, a few buildings along, the attention of the drinkers is rather focused on the passers-by and some men watch the women clicking by on their high heels, but other men are watching the eyes of their fellows to see what women their eyes are following. A waiter stands by alert for further orders, but I do not think that his eyes are only for the customers, for at frequent intervals his eyes sweep over the floor of the café and the pavement outside, looking for suspicious and abandoned packages. By now, this is such a conditioned part of his life that he is probably not even aware that he is doing it. A man walks by in too much of a hurry, even at this distance he is visibly sweating. All eyes turn to watch him instead. Idleness, sexual desire and now fear direct the eyes of this city. A city in fear, I like it, for fear is my element, I have lived with fear, inside fear, ever since the morning of 11 March 1954 when the guns opened fire on Fortress Gabrielle in the valley of Dien Bien Phu. To see the rest of these shits living in fear, why it makes my heart beat a little faster!

The tram takes me almost to the door of the Hydra Sports Club on the edge of the Marengo Gardens. I purchase a temporary membership ticket, but, no, I do not want to swim. Make contact with Tughril, report to Tughril, yes that will be the end of my mission, but this is not a simple matter. Even I do not know who Tughril is or how to contact him directly. ‘Tughril’ is certainly not the real name of this cell leader. However, one possible contact may be here at the club working as a lifeguard. I know the man was used by al-Hadi as a channel for getting messages to Tughril, but even this man who works here as a lifeguard, I do not know his real name only his nickname, so I will have to ask one of the boys for ‘Nounourse’. I pause watching the dance of the lights, threads of gold on the water before calling a boy over. It takes a sort of courage for a man to ask for a ‘Teddybear’, but fortunately there is no smile. The boy realizes who it is I want.

The boy walks to the side of the pool. It is as if he is summoning a monster up from its depths. The vast shape breaks from the water and heaves itself up on to the tiles and advances with deliberate tread towards me. Nounourse is almost a giant, heavily muscled, bearded and smiling with the genial ferocity of a Barbary pirate. The genial smile however vanishes when he realizes that I am not a customer who has to be smiled at, but a comrade. I mutter an identification code and ask to be put in touch with Tughril. We arrange to meet in the Marengo Gardens in half an hour’s time when he can get off work. Then with the grin sliced like a wound on his face once more he goes back to teaching the white children how to swim. That grin reminds me of the famous Kabyle smile. Indeed the Kabyle smile stretches from ear to ear, but it runs across the throat and it is made with a knife.

At the gates of the Marengo Gardens I buy a copy of the
Echo d’Alger.
There is nothing about Fort Tiberias, but of course after all this time it would not still be news, even if the press had been allowed by the military to learn something about that affair. There is nothing either about ‘Atrocious Outrage at Laghouat’, but doubtless that will rate a substantial little column tomorrow.

At length there is an enormous paw on my shoulder. Such a mass of flesh and bone I do not think I have seen before outside a butcher’s shop.

Nounourse’s voice is a terrible growl.

‘Meet me again on the north side of the place du Lyre. Start walking now.’

Nounourse never meets me in the place du Lyre, but a match seller gives me the message: ‘In fifteen minutes’ time leave the place du Lyre, go up rue Randon and enter the kasbah at the Médée checkpoint. Then left, then up Affreville to the Zawiya of Sidi M’Hamed Cherif, then up the Barberousse steps to rue Abdallah and over to rue Nfissah and into the impasse de Ramadan. Do not take any short cuts. I will look after your bag.’

Of course, it is grief and anguish for me to surrender my bag. But I am schooled in discipline and the avoidance of needless risks. I surrender by bag to the comrade, only warning him not to let it be searched by the security forces. I can afford to be without my drug for a little while, for after all I hardly think that I am yet an addict.

The kasbah comes cascading down the hillside in flights of steps and narrow streets. Streets, houses and courtyards coil around one another. The Battle of Algiers was won for the French almost two years back. Massu’s paras no longer guard the entrances to the kasbah. There are only bored gendarmes at the Médée checkpoint. There is no longer any curfew. Nevertheless, as the darkness comes on, I hurry and those few people I meet in the kasbah are hurrying too, as if flames of fear were licking round their ankles. Even before the outbreak of this war, which is not a war, the kasbah was not safe by night and the markets closed before the evening prayer. In this close warren of little alleyways and covered passages, whose walls are broken only by heavy painted and studded doors which open to release or admit veiled and hooded figures, a fanciful man might dream that he stood or walked in the Cairo of the
Arabian Nights
and revel in its mysteries. I have no time for such rubbish. What savour can there be in the stink of poverty? And certainly the kasbah stinks – some of the stink is shit and rotting vegetables, some of it is the disinfectant which trickles out of great drums which are rolled down the alley by boys in blue overalls watched by steel-helmeted soldiers. What sort of a literary turd can take pleasure in the kasbah, a racial ghetto and a cheap labour camp? This is the charmed world of Harun al-Rashid! And who is it who contemplates those thickly studded doors and windows covered with closely worked mashrabiyya and seriously thinks that some sort of enchantment lies beyond them? What lies beyond the door is a man with too little work and too many children and an ignorant, illiterate wife who fears the beating her husband will infallibly give her tonight, before he ploughs her like a tilled field, and the hungry children cower in the corners hearing and seeing it all. These picturesque houses are structures of oppression, prisons for women, and the kasbah a place of incarceration for the people of Algeria. The kasbah is a good home for criminals and rats, a breeding ground for mental illness.

Close by the steps that go up to the Zawiya Ben M’Hamed, I am witness to a scene. An old woman, too old to need to veil her tattooed and warty face, is stopped by a gendarme. She is carrying a flaming torch and a bucket of water. Where is she going? What is she up to? She tried to push past, screeching in bad French, that she is in a hurry. The torch is for setting fire to Paradise and the water to extinguish the flames of hell, so that we should not live in expectation of one or fear of the other. The gendarme smiles and lets her by – and taps his head significantly. Then, catching sight of me, he shouts that I should hurry to get out of these parts and asks if I would like an escort. I shake my head vigorously and I too hurry on in the direction the old woman had taken, but she has vanished.

I am now, I guess, about ten minutes from the impasse de Ramadan, but I never reach it. Just short of the impasse de Grenade (where two years back Ali la Pointe made his last stand against the paras), a man shoulders me through an open doorway. Two others, waiting in its shadows, bring me to the ground and after a brief struggle bind my hands. A huge hand comes over my mouth. For a long time then nothing happens, the men in the dark are audibly recovering their breath. The hand is still on my mouth and I know it is Nounourse’s. I fear I may suffocate.

Somebody on the roof whistles. A light across the courtyard comes on and Nounourse drags me into the now lit-up reception room. I am flung on to the sofa, the only bit of furniture in the room. Nounourse lowers himself carefully down beside me. I can smell the swimming pool’s chlorine on his breath. Three other men come into the room. Two of them come up close and examine my face. At length one of them says, ‘All right, it is him, with a beard. This is comrade “Yves”, or rather since his cover has been blown, it can be Captain Philippe Roussel.’

I let out an enormous sigh of relief.

A second man smiling puts my bag on the floor.

‘And this, comrade, is your bag?’

I am almost weeping with relief, but I nod.

‘Thank God!’ I say. ‘Now you must arrange a meeting with Tughril for me. I have information from Fort Tiberias for him.’

‘In time, comrade. That can be arranged perhaps. First there is something which should concern you more directly.’

The bag is opened for me and the chloride carefully placed to one side. A man takes a step towards the sofa with the sachets of morphine. Another has moved close to me, on the other side from Nounourse. He is fiddling with the button of my cuff.