A Tree on Fire (44 page)

Go forward, go back, circle, stop, run. Sharp-angle retreat. Flank march. Attack. Wait. Scuffle. Retreat. Do nothing for three days. Go forward. You can always go back if that's where the advantage lies. Grave-stones bake, and bushes that can't get out of the sun wilt also in silent torment. Great mountain flanks rise across the valley, sheer walls of rusty stone in places, or ash-grey, or banked with olive-woods that seem, through the merging, enlarging, isolating power of the binoculars to be almost as dense and one shade lighter than jungle. Waiting, you isolate faces and scenery in the mind by the wielding of imaginary binoculars, superimposed over the real and dangerous detail that never escapes the eyes. The imaginary lens of discretion shifts at will across the legendary escarpments of memory, over the top, beyond further valleys and into other countries, where your own particular republic lies – height, distance and dense undergrowth removed from the common reality of the half-blind world but which, with one sudden pull of the will, floods in and becomes your real self staring you in the eyes. It is a dangerous exercise – at the moment – because it obliterates the valley and road you have been set there to watch. But he can't help thinking of his own children abandoned so blithely three years ago. If life becomes the progression of a more or less straight line you are poorer in spirit at the end than you were at the beginning when you first thought it easiest to live your life in that way. To turn back, zigzag, go in circles, demands courage but produces understanding.

From this spur of land both approaches to the village were controlled by heavy machine-guns, and was sealed off from the other world, first point of a star screening the battalion headquarters. If I were attacking I wouldn't come along the roads, neither from east nor west, the obvious ways which are easy to defend, but over the high mountains which shoot above it to north and south, and which nobody could be expected to climb. That's our obvious way of retreat. You're only on the side of history if you think of and do the impossible. If they come against us, we get more of them; if they send a patrol first to mask the main force, we get the patrol, if they send planes over they don't see us. They can send planes on random off-chance bombing but we've been through that before. You can't lose a war like this, you can only die, which is better than in previous wars when you did both.

The village is compact and crawls up a hill – like all important villages. Olive and fruit terraces fall away on three sides. People live here, but silently. The tin-rattle of goat and sheep bells still sound round about, but you hardly ever see them. The days are hot in the sun, bring flies and midges out, living off the smell of donkey-shit and steaming pungent straw in a stone shed nearby. It was a long way from the camels of the sand-dunes nine months ago, when the taut skin of the camels reminded him of the oldest preserved body in the world that he'd seen in the British Museum. The camels had died at the same time, great barrel-humps of bodies in a stonehenge circle, with no sign of what had happened to the people on them. He saw the first oasis after the sand, beige and blue houses on a hill surrounded by a deep-green palm-forest.

A rattling well-chain rapidly unfolds on its wheel, and the bucket smacks hard into water below, all sounds distant yet clear in this alpine silence. The bucket is hauled up twenty times a day, water in abundance, real life at last. He tasted it, cold and earth-fresh, and the stones round about smell of it in the sun for a few minutes.

The arrow is a liar, the straight line a lure and a trick. The lifeline on the palm of the hand may be straight and definite enough, forcefully curving through the landscape of cuts and callouses, scars and dust, but to circle and go back when necessary is still part of that life arrow, the straight line in the sky that you may look for but never see, but which is always over you. He wondered what geometry had to do with life, despicable shorthand that lopped it off and hemmed it in. See that road at which my optic sights are laid? A mortar-bomb would find its own trajectory, follow the setting it was on. The drifting and subtle decorations of arabesques are equally part of the true spirit. Days were meaningless, counted as units of time. Distances and directions were null and never to be considered.

He dug both elbows into the stones and pulled himself from the grave. Numerous insects clipped and hustled about the grey light. He staggered as if to fall, the air not weight enough to hold him, leaned against a rock which still had the warmth of day in it and let his piss stream down. It grew chilly, and he searched for the bush where he'd left his blanket. The sky was so white it needed a long stare before making out the lacy network of stars. The sudden pale flush of them sweeping above the blue-ashy precipices of the Djurdjura swung him somehow back to his Lincolnshire night-wanderings when living there with Pat, the pale expanding autumn sky above the wolds met with on his long solitary walks. He smelled the grass and hedges, wavering leaf-smoke and the farm-mould at the end of a lane. He stood still from his walk in order to recall it more clearly, not so much in a mood of loving recollection but out of curiosity to see whether it would come back totally. It did not, almost faded, until he thought of Handley and his brood who, he didn't doubt, still lived in the rambling and rickety house he'd once visited. He remembered an exquisite encounter with his fair plump daughter, and the odd meeting at revolver-point with someone called John, a mad pensioned-off brother who dreamed of controlling God and the world by radio. He thought of them as if they were part of his own family, and had such a forceful strange desire to be among them again that he seemed to be out of Algeria and danger and almost on his way there. He was disappointed, when his vision dropped, to find it was neither true nor possible. He wanted to see everyone – Nancy and the children, Myra and his child, the Handleys, even Pat who had gone back to her husband. After being so long in the desert he felt he could live at ease with them all as one big tribe.

He speculated on it, traipsing the valley five miles to get food and a space to sleep in. The wind buffeted between great pinnacles to the north. It was cold and damp, altering the spirit of the seasons, an equinox breaking towards winter, rough seas and snow. But it was still light and comforting under the common moon, and his regular footsteps were strong even to himself, in spite of hunger chewing around the hollows of his stomach. He thought of Handley scoffing food in the Greek Street restaurant, as he had with himself and Teddy Greensleaves the last time he saw them both. Maybe Handley lived in a flat now on Park Lane, and his kids instead of poaching went out at night emptying parking-meters. He suddenly felt human at recalling something he had never given up, the life you could not step out of because it stalked you as a shadow even along this Algerian upland valley with the moon on its trees and the path he walked.

A rabbit with upstuck ears flopped out of his track, startled him by the feverish zigzag of its grip on survival. It didn't even have to know when to run, but shot away from its own ripe ruin when the mood of the earth shook it, all nerves and no reason, all fear and no civilised lunacy to stand and fight or find out what the tremors signified. As for them, they starfished at the threat of bombs, but never ran as bleak engines overhead shed noise and planed the hair's-breadth off their backs.

The thought of it stirred him to walk more quickly and his shadow caught up with a voice he recognised. He offered Makhlouf a cigarette, who shivered when he stopped to take a light also. ‘There'll be frost and snow soon,' Frank said.

Makhlouf held his hand, smiled over the lighter flame. ‘Every autumn I think we'll be in Algiers before the snow comes, with cigarettes and coffee, bread and newspapers.'

They walked on. ‘It's warmer on the coast.'

‘But I don't think so this year. We'll stay in the hills. Frostbite and pneumonia.'

‘It's my first time in this
wilayet,
' Frank told him.

‘They say you're going out.'

‘You have enough men, I suppose,' Frank said. ‘It's only guns you want. I can understand it.'

‘You brought us guns. But we need men as well – everyone.' Makhlouf had received a terrible mouth wound, though his lips had grown back into a not altogether unhandsome shape. But his sentences of French came strangely out, sounds not tallying with the movement of his lips, like a speaker in some badly dubbed film. His wound had healed, but he nearly died from pleurisy, and he now roamed the hills like a spectre, thin and active with whatever company would have him. He rattled, rather than breathed, and the shape of his mouth was solidified in the form of an ironic, almost cynical grin – as if put on to apologise for the noise his breathing made. Whoever slept near him and woke in the night, which happened often when broken by exhaustion, heard the weird hollow rhythm of it. Makhlouf knew of this and slept apart, the grin still with him and varying with the intensity of his noise. He was tenacious, quick-witted, and strong, and used these virtues to defeat a concerted move to keep him in some safe rest area. He was a survivor of the Battle of Algiers, and had been a casual labourer on the docks most of his life. Under the red beret of a French paratrooper he'd killed in the Aurès Mountains, his head was completely shaved, a faint grey covering to his skullskin. ‘They'll get you out,' he said. ‘I heard them talking about it down at the post.'

He kicked a stone as he walked. ‘They don't trust me,' Frank said, ‘after so long.'

Makhlouf laughed. ‘You've done enough. They want you to go overseas, and tell people about our struggle.'

‘No one would listen to me.'

‘They don't trust anyone,' Makhlouf said. ‘Why should they? They don't need to. If anything goes wrong, a bullet is the only answer. A quick one. Life is simple.'

It was, until you thought about it. Then it became a derangement of the senses. It was all right as you waited, hidden, ready to kill, kept your mind drilled on war and politics, but even this was working less and less, the derangement staying uppermost as if he were losing his nerve. They were right to boot him out, no matter what reason was put on it.

It was cold, and twenty slept huddled in one small room. Even Makhlouf's rattle of life was welcome since it helped to keep them united, like the low purr of a worn-out fan evenly dispersing the spice and sweatfumes of suffocation. Walls shook with thunder, sounding far beyond the outside, yet sharp enough to penetrate his sleep. It made him uneasy, would stop him remembering his dreams. Orange flashes bumped against his eyelids, turning the blue walls grey. He rolled over and straightened his legs, pushing the bottom of another's feet. The small space held them in two rows, and Frank, now awake, noted how close he was to the black and red Kabylie blanket drawn half across the door. The spout of a Bren-gun pushed it to the wall, and a guard filled the space with his body and shouts.

Frank knocked a stump of candle down, pushed from behind by others struggling to get free. A giant handful of earth hit him in the face, and a body fell on to him, rolled sideways and stood up. He staggered and ran to the trees. Blazing branches fell across the house. The inside chains of himself pulled and strained, but he gripped a sharp stone in the palm of his hand as he lay on the ground to stop the chain snapping and leaving him to finally disintegrate. ‘Paratroops have landed where we were yesterday,' Makhlouf said. ‘Artillery, planes – everything.' The light in his eyes seemed to be choking him. A green flare shaped out the grove and all their faces, a circle looking in on itself. The bank of a gully descended, and he wondered whether they would stay on the hill-top, or pull out. A radio-telephone sparked. This was one attack they didn't get word of. He fought his way from sleep, not entirely wanting to wake up and face the reality of something that did not seem quite real any more.

A cold grey light was let into the valley, streaks of violet beyond veils of dust and smoke. He slithered, hanging to bushes to break a direct fall. The hill-top flamed outwards, shaking gusts of soil and air on to them. A man rolled free, stricken by shrapnel, going down in a ball so quickly that one of his boots flew off. The grey tooth-like crags beyond spewed mist. ‘
Bouclage
,' Makhlouf shouted, ‘
ou rattisage?
' They seemed to be part of the crumbling cliff. Thorns ripped into his clothes. The tail of a chameleon flickered down among the rubble. LMGs opened up on the hill-top. They reached the
oued
bottom and found markers to guide them along its course, a climbing flank march to the spur they had just left. Frank heard the noise of the Sikorsky helicopter and flattened with the others. Three passed over, slicing smoke and air to drop another platoon on the hill. The FLN had set fire to the trees with kerosene so that the helicopters hovered helplessly above unable to put down reinforcements the paras had called for. Dull thumping of grenades spanned the distance, but nothing could be seen except black and yellow smoke. White phosphorous spewed out of the pudding. A straggle of mortar-bombs fell across their retreat, bending and fusing the cedar-trees on fire. Helicopters had dropped grenades into the smoke and came clacking back over them. They lay in a forced rest for ten minutes. Any lifting head would have been blasted by their own guns if it gave the company away. Discipline was strict and not without rage. His face was in the soil, and the taste on his parched mouth forced him back to the past as hunger pulls a pig to its empty trough. But the trough seemed to have filled up, and his recollection was so sharp that it stung him to pain and happiness, so that he thought he had stopped living. Any future misfortune must stem from such periods when you did not know what was happening in the present – unless you jerked out of it to smash back the dragons of memory that only emerged from their lair to destroy you.

Makhlouf pulled his arm. They moved away from the
oued
and went up between the thickening trees, scouts ahead and behind. They pass through a former village, a collection of charred places, bits of rag and paper, where the paras had been three weeks ago. The men had fled, but all women and children were caught in their net. They walked quickly in silence, one village out of thousands. What did memories matter when something like this blotted them clean away and sent in its place a catastrophe that would be remembered forever? Everything living had been shot down.