A Tree on Fire (25 page)

They climbed up another flank of a thousand metres. When the sky was blue but the sun had not yet risen, a great shadow lay to the north, as if from clouds when the sun was overhead. It was the sparsely-treed area covering the hills near Aflou which, in the dim light, seemed cooler and more thickly forested than it was, a good place of refuge.

‘I know what you're thinking,' Shelley said.

‘You're wrong. It's so ideal it's a death-trap.'

‘You say and do the right things. What does it feel like, coming from the purest bastard race on earth?'

‘It'll be light soon,' Frank said. ‘A big fat sun scorching our noses and elbows for the next fifteen hours.'

‘It's not that,' Shelley said, ‘but it's this pain I don't like. Thirty-six hours I've felt it, which feels like all my life. I reckon we're all full of pain ready to be tapped. Just needs a bullet or a knife to spark it off.'

Frank spat out a mouthful of goatwater. ‘What have you got against pure bastard races like the English? Sometimes, I think you're just one of those white Anglo-Saxon Protestant Americans fighting for the freedom of subject races – as long as they're reasonably pure. I don't understand it, you White Anglo-Saxon Freedom Fighter. You're a WASFF – a WASP with no roof to his mouth. I've read all that Jack London-Hemingway crap, and spewed over it.'

‘So have I. Leave me to it and let's get on.' He looked back at him, but could find no confirmation in Frank's straight-looking eyes that he was dying. Frank knew he couldn't, would not give him this leap of satisfaction, found it better to control the outward expressions of his heart when he did not want what his eyes saw to overwhelm it.

A track ran along the dry, flat bed of the valley. While holes were dug among the rocks on either side, the newspaper-seller pulled down a bush and smoothed all trace of them out of the dust, then put the finishing touches to their burials. They lay under the rocks, loopholes opening towards the track, sweating, choking, killing scorpions that came in dozens to disturb their agony. The youth found a hiding-place, and by full daylight this part of the valley seemed as deserted and empty as the rest.

His mind reached its limits. They had nailed up the coffin but he stayed alive. Childhood and adolescent horrors came back, as they should at a time like this, otherwise how could you trust them? And how could they be of any use to you? They can't all have been for nothing, meaningless, those parts you suffered and those you loved. Every man was a coffin until his rifle or machine-gun joined the chorus of others, the new gunchurch of the revolution spitting out their cleansing hymns. He counted six helicopters, man-made tin-plated dragonflies spluttering a hundred feet up, prayed for one to land before their guns so that they could kill the dozen troops on board before they began to disembark, run out like spiders and pull it to pieces. Mokhtar had drawn diagrams showing petrol-tanks and vital parts, and Frank was as familiar with ways of destroying helicopters as he had one time known how to preserve and lengthen the life of his own motor-car when he worked in the factory. He also found it necessary to believe and ponder on the fact that the art of camouflage meant not only to melt against the sheltering land, but equally to withdraw your consciousness out of the atmosphere. If an approaching patrol has no visual hope of seeing you, some member of it will, nevertheless, sense that you are there. Your psyche is as tangible as your body, your ego as plain as iron, and unless you can master these, then the most skilful disguise can betray you. Perfect camouflage is an exercise in self-negation, an utter wiping-out of yourself, a withdrawl into non-existence, so that you can't in any way be alive to others. The only light to be kept alert is that of the eyes, so that when the ring of your ambush is perfect, the united trigger can be drawn with unexpected and shattering effect. From a state of sublime withdrawal you must leap to a state of active egotism, which means death to all who face the ray of it. Thus the span of spiritual experience is in this way wider, before the final limit chops you off in death.

They waited five hours. Shelley did not know how long he was groaning. Frank was awake, staring at the road and willing a car, lorry, tank to come along, anything with engine and wheels on which they could take Shelley to a doctor. He'd seen it before, his grandfather die, and a man at work die after being struck by falling girders, remembered the look of utter and painful consciousness on both before the breathing diminished and stopped. He'd imagined that people died quickly, or went slowly but surely under the sleep of drugs, but this state of know-all consciousness both of the world they loved and the blackness they were going to was the most disturbing thing he'd seen, and signs of it were already in Shelley's eyes. Mokhtar knew it too, and for once the demands of war and survival coincided with the need for mercy towards one of their wounded. Frank had under-estimated Mokhtar, had kept his eyes open and gun ready in case he should think to make a quick finish of Shelley if he dragged too much on their progress. But Shelley had shown such great and undeniable courage by keeping up with their race, that the Lion of Judah had decided on the way of compassion.

They felt a signal, and heard the engine. The young man would make no sign if more than one vehicle appeared, for they could not take on a convoy. Handbills still flapping from his pocket, he ran into the middle of the track, waving his arms. It was a desert jeep, with three soldiers in it. The driver dropped gear, its noise change roaring along the flanks of the valley, shouting at him to get out of the way. He stood firm, flapping his papers with an idiot grin of welcome. The driver braked and skidded, and the man was knocked slightly as he stepped aside and fell flat into the dust to save his life, which was immediately extinguished by the only burst of bullets that one soldier of the jeep had time and inclination to fire. Mokhtar, Idris, Mohamed and Frank, two on either side, pressed their triggers at the same time.

They dragged the bodies behind the rocks, and swept dust over the tracks and pools of blood. Frank put on a soldier's jacket and cap, and did the same for Shelley. He turned from the dead young men, his heart bursting. He was familiar with the dead, but the more he saw, the more depressed he was. He supposed the war would go on until one side or another lost heart, felt the shadow only of so much useless death, instead of pure energy-giving rage at the stony manifestation of another row of corpses. Slogans, ideals and beliefs weakened when you pulled the warm bodies towards the holes you had lain in while waiting to kill them, with their tortured human faces and limbs still jumping. He took all field-dressings from their packs before heaping on the stones.

They squeezed in, and Frank turned the jeep around and drove back the way it had come. The guide directed him towards a gap between two mountains. A plane flew high over the loose stones, a bird with an engine stuck in its craw that would not molest them because they were no longer bandits on the run from the great clean-up, but part of it, as the pennant flapping on the car plainly showed. This was treachery, if you like, though Frank could not revel in the moral satisfaction he would have got from it because of Shelley's ash-coloured face in the mirror.

‘We'll be out of it tonight,' he called.

‘Out of what?' Shelley's lips moved, his eyes shone, but from a face immobilised in every pore by the unyielding grip of pain. Frank smiled as if they were on an excursion looking for a beach or oasis pool where they might drink cool beer and swim.

‘If I sleep more than eight hours,' – Shelley's thin face magically threw off all sign of the blackening blood beating like a drum in his mangled hand – ‘my stomach begins to ache.'

They laughed. Unreality. ‘That's hunger,' Frank said.

‘Or conscience. I don't think I was born to sleep.' On second thoughts, he added: ‘Not yet, anyway,' – which saved Frank the hypocrisy of deciding not to contradict him.

Chapter Eighteen

They went forward all day, met the sun head-on in the morning, had it pushing them from behind in the afternoon towards another great door of darkness. Ahmed had been killed, the newspaper-seller had died, and the guide had returned to his village because he was no longer familiar with the territory they were in. They were five: Mokhtar, Frank, Mohamed, Idris and Shelley, and it did not occur to Frank how lucky they had so far been in escaping all interception.

The hills covered with scrub and trees, marked as forest on the map, closed over them at the end of the day. A thicker patch concealed them, and they laid branches over the truck. A stream had water running along its bed, and he could not believe it, until the taste went down his throat. Some rations had been taken from the truck, tins of paté, sardines and chocolate. Shelley could not eat. After a mouthful, he vomited. They hoped to find morphine in the cab, but there was none. He was unrecognisable, mouth black and torn from the grind of teeth, eyes unable to open. He felt them to be a great distance from him, a horseshoe of shadows, each a thousand needle-points trying to force his eyes open and prick them, collectively to push him so that he lost balance and sat down.

Frank lifted him. He was saturated, as if he'd been taken from a bath of scalding water. Shelley roared. There was more pain in his legs than the injured arm.

‘Put him down,' Mokhtar said.

Frank wanted to drive full pelt to the nearest town, find an army doctor, any doctor, even if it meant getting captured, then shot or twenty years in prison. ‘Give me some help with him.'

Shelley didn't want to go, and staggered to his feet. ‘Leave me alone.'

Frank held him nevertheless, knowing he'd no right to make such decisions of life and death for him. If he wanted to die rather than become a prisoner, then he must be respected. Fortunately, it was easy to know what his true wish was.

‘When we left Ahmed,' Mokhtar said, ‘he was wounded, not dead. I could have saved him, but I had to save all of us. I saw him badly wounded, but not dead. If we get a doctor for Shelley, we are all caught.'

‘Isn't there an FLN doctor?'

‘Not near. We can reach one tomorrow, beyond the road, if we travel all night.' It meant the big risk of headlights until they ran out of petrol. Frank broke up French cigarettes and packed the tobacco into Shelley's pipe, but he couldn't hold it in his teeth. He drove, not yet in the darkest stomach of the night, straight as he could in a north-easterly direction between the trees, torment for Shelley who cried out continually for them to stop. He drove quickly along a smooth track for ten kilometres before turning off, then went back to lights in crossing rocky, thinly-forested country.

When the moon came up, they travelled by it, eyes aching at the shapes they tried to see, at the boulders missed and flanking by. Part of the forest had been hit by bombs. This war was vicious to trees and men. It was like a ruined tree-city in the moonlight, blasted by lightning and as if already blackened by time, the arboreal remains of a vanished civilisation whose houses had been in the trees. Thinning trunks had been weighed and broken by the heavy fire of their top branches which had laid a thin waste of grey moonshone ash over the ground between. Maybe it was a gallows city blasted by the righteous sun. A soft wind blew ash towards him. It eddied and circled. It was warm, and when he walked a few steps, it burned his feet. Not all the trees had been destroyed. Brown and green streaks still patched some of the black boles. At one a red eye of fire smouldered. It took weeks for flame to retreat from a tree, yet it never totally destroyed it, either. Such wilderness trees always grew again, unless their roots had been absolutely blasted from the earth. It was weird, this scorched wood, reminded him of a ruined city that the inhabitants would one day come back to. Where the moon shone, the birds would return. Its leaves would grow greener than before, trunks less beautiful, but branches stronger.

He climbed back, and drove on. Why had the wood been napalmed? Perhaps if he had looked closer he would have seen blackened corpses, the flesh still red within, but undeniably dead forever. He had, as they say, blood on his own hands, but he didn't wish it away, though it seemed to widen the haunting nightmare moonshot visage of the wood he was not glad to have left behind. He couldn't regret what had taken so many years to bring about. He disliked the idea of destiny yet sometimes found it a useful word. There were too many burning trees for it not to lift up from the pool of his mind. Why was he in Algeria? Was it not destiny, that he had rationalised and decided on before taking the deliberate step? What had come first: a desire to help Algeria, or a desire to liberate himself? He could no longer blame these questions on a false sensibility whose only purpose was to break his resolution. Since they came, they were real. He asked so few questions that he was bound to respect them. He was almost grateful to them, though saw the danger of them becoming ends in themselves, questions that needed no answering, as if they were friends whose presence alone was comforting enough. His love for people was causing the death of people, but he could not look on himself as a murderer, because he was no pacifist. As soon as he stepped into Algeria, it was a matter of kill or be killed, and he could not stand idly by. He had been offered money for bringing in the guns and ammunition, but had not taken it. He had wanted to fight so that those considered the exploited and downtrodden could stand up to the so-called master races of Europe. But now it had become a fight for survival – such was their feeling as they ran from trap to trap, killing nevertheless, but fleeing undeniably. He had imagined something more deadly, more numerous, more dangerous, yet he wasn't a man to let his imagination hold him up to the ransom of disappointment. That would have been a blow at his pride, and foolish anyway. Perhaps a dozen groups such as theirs had caused the three brigades to be launched into these mountains, and so were drawn from the Kabylie where the main front was said to be in danger. The French had half a million men deployed in Algeria, which was one good reason for him to be here.