A Tree on Fire (43 page)

They hid among the rocks while a man on a donkey went by wearing a ragged striped shirt and baggy pantaloons. No one was trusted, not even friends. When face and limbs were pressed on to the earth, he felt more responsibility to the ideas he was trekking and fighting for. Pepperdust, crushed insects, salt stone and grass-juice were eating his own spit and sweat. The soldier passed him a half-smoked cigarette, and after a few draws he slid it back. A large white bird with black wingtips and yellow beak flew low, perched on a rock for a closer look, then lifted vertically as if yanked on an invisible wire. He did not like such birds, buzzards who were slaves to rotting flesh, chained to the dying, and the wounded who staggered along. They were part of the earth yet not of it, preying on it and waiting to taste flesh spiced by the spirit that had seasoned it. They reminded him of people who fed gluttonously off the meat and salt of the earth, who breathed in death as their spiritual seasoning and indulged in glamourised flights to heaven that made them feel superior and safe, and were set apart from struggle and a real knowledge of machinery and bread. From above they saw a pall of smoke drifting beautifully, but from below a tree was on fire with tortured trunk and writhing leaves, cellophane flames spreading and bursting towards cooler air. On the ground you walk away to get out of range, not fly towards it for a better view. Smoke blinds, but flame burns off a layer of your flesh, frightens you into awe when its blackened ruin smoulders and the mooncircle of ash is all that's left. Buzzards fly towards free meat and dreams, romance unstriven for and found in far off paradisal places – not crawled towards with sweat and effort, bloody feet, scabs, burning eyes, black nostrils.

In the wilderness you threw stones at such birds – and never hit them. Eyes looked, and their beaks cremated you. When you died they devoured your dead meat, divided it among a tribe, flew off with you in their several bellies towards the sun. It seemed like a bad wish fulfilled, going away from the earth. Maybe the bird would fall dead over the sea and your flesh sink back to the fishes. Perhaps a soldier shot them through the belly and so you were killed twice in the same way – the worms getting you in the end. Your flesh was at many mercies, but perhaps it was immortal after it was dead.

A village was clear of the French, and they entered in the afternoon. Small brown donkeys stood in the shadows of crumbling houses. He walked slowly. A middle-aged man in flowing white, with a thin face and sardonic mouth led them through a flock of long-haired black and white goats. Sheep and mules were mixing freely by a well. They could not stay. A French column was coming from the east, and woman and children were walking mutely to the hills they had just left. After eating, Frank strolled among the houses. He was offered tea, which he accepted. A twelve-year-old girl with no hands waved her stumps and asked for money. He laid a coin on the red withered skin of her wrist. She smiled from a long, rather fleshy face that seemed to have no settled features, as if she had just come out of a bitter snowstorm and was still cold from it.

They hadn't slept for two days, treading over miles of ground where the land was comparatively quiet. A Peugeot station-wagon took them a pre-arranged fifty kilometres along a straight narrow road. The land was dead flat, scrub, stones, half sand and barren. They ran quickly when the Peugeot stopped, hid in a water-course while a convoy went by. The Frenchman who had driven the car and whose white face had not spoken one word talked to military police. Frank watched through binoculars, saw him resume his journey in safety.

The mountains were close, foothills of thirst and sun lifting to a purple Crestline of five thousand feet. The girl's face haunted him. Her stumps fitted into the sockets of his eyes and blocked out the stars. His face streamed salt as he crouched low in the blinding heat. He craved the mountains. Food and comfort had no meaning, but he wanted to climb vast slopes and crawl through woods, get nearer to the cooling sky. The last scorching will of the desert was on him, a final flash so intense it made him wonder how he could ever have walked into it. But he considered that a man has to go into a place where the sun burns and wind chastens, where no other lives can feed off your own and where you reach the desert of your soul, of yourself, where the wind and sand can smother the immediate emotions and unsolvable chaos living with you and that you live with, and where the wind can reveal areas of yourself that had laid dormant. To survive it means that you want to live, which hadn't been so certain before. Solitude sings to you, real truths, real lies, and real songs of which there are few because they are real and not false. Having the largeness of spirit to try and change the pattern of your suffering you grow in the desert, for when suffering increases you understand the causes better. The immense space against which you pit yourself intimidates you yet increases vision. By showing such great areas of land and spirit you see that this vast emptiness will soon be filled with more than the turmoiled minor emptinesses of before. The stumps of the girl's arms tormented him, the flesh still hot and burning under his eyes. He hoped she had been born that way, so that he could blame nature and not man, and laugh at his misspent tears. If God existed, you could curse until your lungs burst, but you couldn't weep at what He did.

The last of the desert was burning under his feet. They weaved among upcrops of grey rock, stepped between fields of flint-teeth that looked as if they had been dropped by great metallic dragons that had turned vegetarian at the sight of green and distant mountains. A range of glistening salt-hills intervened, silver humps and hollows baking in their own utter barrenness. The pack burned scabs into his sweating spine where flesh had healed to tenderness during the long sickness and rest. Pain could be cut off, ignored by all senses, subdued and separated by the incessant walk that numbed everything but his private theatre of recollection, giving continual performance against colourful and fabulous backdrops of imperishable outdated scenery that he couldn't help noticing because it changed so slowly. The saline undulations they walked over for days would have been insupportable if the high ranges of the Tell Atlas had not pushed their shadows closer every time he woke up.

Pine-cones cracked in unendurable heat. They went for miles on knees and belly. He wanted to think of Myra, but could not keep her image in focus. It was almost as if he never expected to see her again. She and the child lived in a far-off other world, and at the moment he could make no bridges to connect the two. They had taken ten days to get over the first range of mountains – up six thousand feet, and twenty miles on. They joined a column which travelled by day and night, or tried to. This was a base area, a safe zone, but there were more bombs and rockets than ever before. Planes were always overhead, blasting the hillsides with noise on one run, scourging it with flame and smoke on the quick return, like two strokes of a painter's brush, said Djemal, a sixteen-year-old youth walking behind who had run away from the Lycée in Constantine a year ago to join the
Moudjahid.
He sang songs about the people of Algeria marching to victory against their colonialist oppressors, whistled the Marsellaise softly before curling himself in the foetal position and going to sleep at whatever time they stopped. On waking he looked like a baby in the womb of leaves and bushes, about to be born complete with uniform and rifle, razor-knife and bombs. It was as if the older men who were more silent had given him what remained of their ardent spirit for safekeeping till the perils were over. Frank was cleaning his new Czech rifle, and Djemal wanted to know why he had come to Algeria, a question he forced himself to ask in order to make sure he had guessed the right answer.

For a while Frank had nothing to say. It was hard. It seemed as if he had been born in Algeria, and that the question was irrelevant. When they stopped in villages the people now automatically spoke to him in Arabic, as if he could be no other than one of them. But he now felt himself a middle-aged man looked up to by a youth, and he must provide an answer. ‘I came to help people who needed help,' he said, ‘and to help myself. When you help others, you also do good to yourself. It began when I drove a lorry-load of guns over the Moroccan border, and stayed to take part in the struggle.'

Djemal laughed. ‘It's strange, nevertheless. You must be a communist.'

‘I might be,' Frank said. ‘But the one certain thing is that I belong to the FLN, because I have an identity-card in my pocket to say so.'

‘I'm a communist,' said Djemal. ‘After the war we are going to build a new Algeria – right from the bottom, because the country is ruined except for airfields and roads. There'll be so much work that no one will be idle. We'll build houses and factories and hospitals, schools, and places where our workers can take holidays. We shall construct a great African country.'

A tremor passed under the ground. They were near once more to civilisation, with its sensations of fear and the desire to run from the danger of exploding chemicals. They lay all day watching a sparsely wooded hillside burn across the valley. No one was hiding there. It was meant for them, hidden by smoke from their own trap, a screen no helicopter could penetrate. It blocked out the sun and they choked through handkerchiefs and rag saturated by precious water. You didn't think of the future for fear something in the present took away your capability of ever thinking back on it from a future beyond that. Another rippling explosion gave him a gothic gut-ache. A dead and withered branch fell among them, scattering cedar-cones. Would they now turn to this hill? They were forty in all, caught on the periphery of the base zone and brushing the outskirts of a French brigade. Without reason the beast could send up a ten-man claw in their direction, then call in the planes when it came back mangled.

They took advantage of the smoke and moved on, their formations the shape of eight-pointed Moslem stars drifting between the trees, until precision was lost and they merely followed the vanguards, though still widely spread. They crossed a track and began to climb. Looking from higher up, the smoke became a shifting bank of dull green, a new forest grown and suspended above the one burned out. The setting sun tinted it purple at the diffusing borders. Staves of flame showed beneath, spiked up by new explosions. They had moved out before the trap closed. An hour later they would have fried and died under it. ‘How did they know?'

‘Some French soldier passed on the news,' said Djemal. ‘It often happens. A lot have come over to our side, even officers. They see we are winning, or that we cannot lose.' He remembered the man who had ridden them along a dangerous road in his Peugeot, his white fearful face and small grey eyes not turned to them during the whole length of it, as if he didn't want even friends to recognise him. Meeting him on the street he might seem a typical reactionary
colon
: presumably the military police took him for such when they stopped him, setting his fear down to the fact that he had come over perilous ground where he might have been sniped at from one of the riverbeds flanking the road. ‘Sometimes we are caught in
their
traps, and the Gardens of Paradise become pits and sheets of fire. We turn into hares – but spread in the right direction. You must always know which way to run, how to pull out in swift order.'

They were doing so now. There were cedar-forests on the mountainside, and it was cool and windy among them, refreshing after the sun and sand-ovens of the south. They crossed a track at five thousand feet, then lay down for a rest between bomb-smoke and darkness. A few lights cringed on the foothills, almost red. The evening was clear, strange, neither cloud nor smoke anywhere. There would be no tea for them, either. The sky was purple, hills iron-rust, totally silent. His eyes still ran from the smoke. Immediately after wiping them he could see. Then they were filled again. He ached, even in his blood, though his bones did not feel the roots and rocks under him. The great Djurdjura mountains across the flatlands turned dark like a wall, white sparks above fixed in the ice age of the sky. Beyond would be the sea, white foam and blue waves, ships and a different freedom from the one he had now, a picture that he did not want to imagine until he could taste the salt air that leapt from it.

Out of one's confusion comes the greatest strength, if you give in with patience to that confusion and know that some day you will find more meaning in it than you could ever get out of order. No one could see them. Not aeroplanes, nor even helicopters ten feet above the ground. The mats were the same colour as the earth, and they were lying in graves among bones and dust, fighting for life from oddments of the long (and not so long) dead. He spied out the track, too absorbed to notice the sun burning his hair. Like Switzerland, they said the French had continually said, these great inaccessible mountains, craggy and wooded, soon to be snowed up for the winter. But it was like Algeria, because it was like Algeria, and in Algeria, and in no other country on earth, Djemal said before he died. The ambush had taken place far over the valley by a white-walled red-roofed farm. An old man sat outside, a statue of rags with nothing good about him except his hearing, which was phenomenal. He detected a convoy coming along the road, and warned everyone. They took up rifles and revolvers, and spread over the countryside. There were eucalyptus trees at the back of the farm, and olives dotted down the hill. The convoy stopped, and a gun was unlimbered. They fired. A tree before the farm burst into flames. Then the house went up and the old man vanished in smoke and ruin. They re-limbered and went on. Arbitrary law was the rule – which was called war. A boulder blocked their way. The officer got down from the lorry and was shot dead, a bullet out of cedar trees. Only one shot, though two dozen laid the ambush. The soldiers fired, at nothing. They spread out. They came back. They went on, taking the dead officer with them. A few minutes later planes flew over, and Djemal was the only casualty.