by Jane Johnson
‘ “Have you ever seen the sea?” I asked him. All I had seen were black-and-white photos in a French textbook. La mer, la Méditerranée. It looked like a wide mountain meadow dotted with sheep; except that the sheep were boats.
‘“Once,” he said. He stirred more sugar into the pot. “Just the once. I wept: it was too big.” That frightened me, that anything should overawe my rough, tough father so; a man who was used to the wild vastnesses of mountain and sky. “It was beautiful,” he said wistfully. “The most beautiful thing I ever saw.” He paused. “Apart from your mother on our wedding night.” It was hard for me to think my mother beautiful: she was as thin and dark as the mountain earth, her hair fell in ringlets like the wool on the biggest ram, and her eyes were like a buzzard’s.
‘It took me four days to reach the coast, and another half day to come to the outskirts of Oran. I sat on a hill overlooking the city when I came down out of the forest, where a local farmer told me the last two Barbary lions in Africa had been killed, and marvelled at it. The sight of it took all my words from me. All white it was, the houses and the roads, and the sea was so blue, bluer than the sky, bluer than new lavender, bluer than gentians, and touched with green, as if it hid secret underwater meadows. It was huge. There were perhaps thirty houses in our village, and they were all made of pisé – of mud and straw – and roofed with baked earth; they were of the ground on which they stood, a part of the unchanging landscape. But Oran shone grey and white and full of glass, and the streets were full of cars. I had never seen a car: where I lived if you needed to travel to the moussem or the market you saddled up a donkey.
‘I had set out wearing my best djellaba, which was foolish. After four nights of sleeping in it, of tearing it free from thornbushes and prickly pears, it was dusty and tattered and creased. How was I to get a job in such a shining city dressed like a poor peasant? So at first I stayed on the edge of town and worked in the souk there, running errands, helping stallholders – for a loaf of bread here, an apple or an orange there, or the share of a tajine – for all the men working there cooked for themselves. I learned all manner of things from the people in this market, for many of them travelled from one quarter of the city to another. There was the strawberry man and the lemon seller, the herb man and the perfume seller; and the man who repaired and sold old clothes. It was he who procured for me a shirt and trousers like those my teacher wore, though re-hemmed, with mismatched buttons and a little patched. I put this new costume on at once and thought I looked like a foreign prince. The herb man laughed and clapped me on the shoulder. “One of my best customers, the wife of a French administrator, lives in a great house in the Nouvelle Ville,” he said. “Come with me when I deliver her next order. Be respectful and polite and show a little of your learning and maybe she will know someone who has a job, in the douane, the customs, maybe, at the port.”
‘The man on the next stall overheard this and spat loudly into the dust. “Stay here among good Algerians, that’s what I advise. You don’t want to get involved with those—” and here he used a foul word I cannot repeat, but he meant the French. “They treat us all like slaves, as if we come from the jungles. I’ve heard them call us black with my own ears, and laugh about our language and our habits. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking they’re special or better than us; for all their fancy ways they are no better than savages themselves.”
‘The herb man rolled his eyes as if he had heard this many times before. “Leave the lad alone; all he wants is to make some money for his family.”
‘It was not all I wanted, but I nodded to that.
‘The next week I found myself in the Nouvelle Ville, inside a great white house with shining marble floors and light everywhere. I could hardly believe my eyes. It was more richly furnished than our local mosque, with all its fretted wooden screens, its great china vases and silver goblets. All the paintings and mirrors were framed with intricately carved wood, acanthus leaves twining around and around, as if the wood was still alive. I liked to whittle while I sat by the campfire telling stories to my brothers at night in the mountains, keeping watch for jackals and foxes – but all I ever made were dollies for my sisters, or crude pots for my mother. Now, I wished fervently that I could use a knife more delicately and learn to make such art. I was so mesmerized that I found myself drawn to the largest mirror to lay my fingers to its frame.
‘“Please don’t touch!” The woman’s voice was shrill and angry and I stepped back, feeling like a bad little boy.
‘“I am sorry, it is just so beautiful, like a mirror out of the old stories. I think a djinn might try to bewitch me through it, or an ensorcelled princess might appear to beg for her release.”
‘The woman laughed and turned to the herb man. “I see what you mean, Omar – he really is quite charming, and his French is excellent.” She looked back at me. “Can you read and write?”
‘I told her I could, and started to list my accomplishments. She held up a hand. “And work with figures?”
‘“My teacher has praised my understanding of arithmetic, though I have to admit I have only just begun to understand algebra. Did you know that was an Arabic word – algebra? It comes from the Arabic al-jabr and it means the reunion of broken parts. I like that, ‘the reunion of broken parts’: it’s poetic, don’t you think? I like mending things, and my teacher said algebra was the unifying thread of mathematics, so I intend to devote time to studying it more closely.”
‘“I don’t think an advanced understanding of algebra will be entirely necessary to what I have in mind,” the woman said drily.
‘They left me then and after a while the woman returned alone. “Where is Sidi Omar?” I asked. She did not reply to that question. Instead, she took me to another part of the house and showed me a small room.
‘“My husband works away a lot, but he will be back in due course and I think you will be useful to him. This will be your room and you can help me till he returns. My name is Madame Duchamps. I allow my special friends to call me Marguerite. Maybe one day I will let you call me that.”
‘I was very confused by this, but I set myself to working hard at every task she set me. I went to the market for her, I tended the garden, and that day I was cleaning out the bowl of the courtyard fountain and repairing the mechanism that was clogged with silt so that it spouted joyfully again. I had taken off my shirt so as not to spoil it with dirt, and sang while I worked, the songs I sang for the goats in the mountains, when I had the feeling of eyes upon me, and when I turned Madam Duchamps was watching me. I felt like a mountain hare under the eyes of a jackal. I stopped what I was doing.
‘“Come with me, Hamid,” she said, and put out her hand.
‘She led me not to the kitchen for tea, nor to the servants’ quarters, but up the stairs.’ He looked at Olivia under his lashes. ‘But I think that is a story for another time, and you would not like to hear it.’
Olivia, who had sat rapt throughout, lulled by the cadence of his lovely French and the gently unrolling story, said at once, ‘Oh, I would!’ and he laughed.
‘Well, I will keep that one to myself, for now, I think. We must all have our little secrets. It seemed that Madame and Monsieur Duchamps had many secrets from one another, for I heard from Mariam, who did the cooking and the laundry for them, that monsieur would often return from his working trips with smudges of cosmetics and unusual scents upon his clothes. She had been snappy with me at first, Mariam, and said, “Oh, another one, how she runs through them,” which at the time made me try harder to please, since I thought it was because previous employees had not worked hard enough. I was, how you say, naïf. I had noticed for myself that when Monsieur Duchamps returned he and his wife were extremely polite together, like people who do not like one another much but have made some sort of arrangement to share the same space. My mother could be like that with my father’s mother, who lived in our house and was always criticizing, even though she did not do any work herself.
&nbs
p; ‘Monsieur Duchamps took me with him to his office in the business district of Oran. He worked in procurement, supplying French ships with all they required when they put into port. Before the war these had all been merchant vessels, but things were different now and he was much busier: he had a whole battalion of young Algerians running here, there and everywhere between La Blanca and the Nouvelle Ville to get the best price on everything from vegetables and cigarettes to pomegranates and girls. Me, I specialized in the paperwork – I’d be the go-between for the vendors and Monsieur Duchamps’ office staff, but sometimes when we were really busy I’d help with deliveries to the ships. And that was how, on the afternoon of the third of July 1940, I found myself on board a French warship named the Strasbourg, which had put into Oran’s port – Mers el-Kebir – along with a number of other battleships in the marine nationale, delivering crates of oranges and lemons, and some brandy for the captain. We were in his cabin, haggling over the final payment for this latter item (my master always overcharged outrageously and left it to me to calm the buyer down), when there was a lot of noise outside, and he swore and shoved the full sum of money at me and ran up on deck. I ran after him, because he was severely overpaying and that seemed wrong to me, but when I got outside I could not believe what I saw! The sky was full of planes. I know now that they were British aircraft, but at the time I was entirely uninformed. The war was something that was happening in other places, not close to my home. I knew that France had surrendered to a country called Germany and was now run from a government in somewhere called Vichy, but I could not even point to any of these places on a map. I had only ever seen one map and that had been pinned to the blackboard at school, and it made no sense to me at all that the whole world could be represented like that, for the world as I knew it was rough and steep and full of mountains and the valleys were deep and verdant – and how could you show all that on a flat sheet of paper? I could not understand how Algeria could be all around us, yet be a small shape drawn at the top of a continent called Africa, or that it could contain a thousand colours within the vista I could see out of the window, but be rendered in a single shade of blue alongside all of France’s other “colonies”. There were a great many colonies in Africa, though I could not understand how a country could “own” another country.
‘I must apologize to you, Miss Olivia, but I didn’t even know the words England or Great Britain, let alone have the first idea of where they might be. When they told me I was in Cornwall when they took me prisoner, they might as well have said the moon. But I am getting ahead of myself… And perhaps you would like a break?’
‘Not at all,’ said Olivia briskly. ‘I want to know what happened.’
Hamid dipped his head in assent. ‘So there I was out on deck with sailors running all around me, and these British planes strafing us and dropping mines and bombs and the ships’ anti-aircraft crews firing back. It was deafening. That makes it sound as if I knew what was happening but to be honest it was chaos: I did not even know whose planes they were. All I wanted was to get off that ship and back onto dry land as fast as I could, but the boat I had come out to the ship on was gone, and I did not know how to swim.’ He saw Olivia’s expression. ‘Where I come from water is scarce – it’s not a skill we learn. I can run down a scree slope or climb a cliff – I’ve had to do both to rescue stray sheep – not the goats, though: they are the most surefooted of all creatures. I’ve seen them scale sheer rock faces no man could ever climb.
‘I gazed down into the dark water, wondering how hard swimming could be, when there was an almighty explosion. I turned to see a great tower of smoke and flame, and water as solid as a wall rising from where the ship nearest to us had been. Even the sea was burning, and so were the men who had been thrown off its decks into the water.’ He dropped his gaze. ‘I will never forget their screams.’
Olivia was horrified, picturing the poor sailors on fire in the oil-slicked waters with warplanes screaming overhead. He had painted a less-than-heroic picture and suddenly she found herself wondering how and where her father had met his end. Against her will she started to cry, then began to sob uncontrollably.
Hamid was alarmed. ‘I apologize most sincerely, I did not mean to upset you with my story. I am an idiot. I should not have elaborated with such grim details.’
Olivia raised swollen eyes to him and sucked in a breath. ‘It’s not that. It’s… everything. It’s all come together – my father’s death, Mummy not coming home, having to deal with Mary, and all the bills, the trouble at the farm, Mamie, and what h-happened last night…’ Some of this came out in English, some in broken French. She sniffed hard, but failed to stop the tears and at last sank her head in her hands and let them come.
For long moments Hamid sat there, not knowing what to say or do, then he reached out a bandaged hand and gently laid it on her shoulder. ‘I did not know about your father,’ he said. ‘I am so sorry. And you’re so young: it’s all too much. You shouldn’t have to deal with so much.’
Olivia blew her nose into the dust one nostril at a time. Mummy would be horrified, she thought, blowing her nose on her sleeve. But Mummy wasn’t there, so what Mummy thought didn’t count. Her chin came up. ‘I’m sixteen,’ she said in English, ‘and we are at war, so I’ve just got to buck up.’ And then had to explain that supremely British concept to him. ‘Please carry on with your story.’
‘So that was what happened to the warship Bretagne, nearly a thousand crew dead or dying, just like that. I sat down on the deck, I was so shocked, and the ship I was on, the Strasbourg, started its engines and powered her way out of the narrow harbour. How we did not hit any of the mines the British planes had dropped I do not know, but God must have been smiling on us.’
‘But I don’t understand,’ Olivia said quietly. ‘Why would the British bomb these ships? The French are our allies.’
‘I understand no more than you; it seemed as if the whole world had gone mad. But as we left Oran and Algeria behind us – my country, just a shadow on the horizon, then vanishing from view – I heard from the sailors around me that the British must have taken the decision to bomb the French fleet rather than let it fall into enemy hands – the Germans’, I suppose. Because the French government had capitulated and the new government in Vichy was cooperating with the invasion force, and if the new government had ordered the admiral to surrender the fleet, he would have been obliged to do so. It all seems very complicated to me.
‘The next day we sailed for Toulon, and as we came in to the immensely busy port a man came to stand by me and spoke in my native language, though some of the words and inflections were slightly different. We exchanged names and greetings and he told me he lived in Marseille, but that his family came from a town on the coast of Morocco called Salé, near Rabat. “My family have been sailors ever since the seventeenth century,” he told me. “Some called us pirates then, more politely corsairs. The sea is in my blood and I have no loyalty to any but my family and my people, and I believe you’re Amazigh, like me. But, my friend, you have no papers, I think?”
‘I didn’t know what he meant by this, so he explained at length. “But won’t they just let me go home to Algeria?”
‘He barked out a laugh. “I think not, my friend. They’ll throw you in a prison camp. Or more likely just shoot you: feeding prisoners is an expensive business.”
I must have looked utterly despondent, for he put an arm around me. “Don’t despair. I know people. Don’t disembark with the rest. I will show you where to hide and I’ll come back and find you as soon as I have seen them. Do you have any money?”
Ah, so now we came to it. I had the captain’s brandy-money tucked away, but I am not a complete fool, so I said nothing, waiting to see what else he would say.
In the end, he shrugged. “Well, no matter. If you can’t trust another Berber, who can you trust?” He showed me to a cupboard – it was barely more than that – and told me to stay there and not to open the door for anyone unless I
heard the word baraka. That made me smile: it is our word for blessing, for good luck. I stayed there, in the dark, for the rest of the day and through the night – so you see, I am used to these conditions…’ He grinned, his teeth bright in the gloom, and waved a hand to indicate the confines of the cellar.
‘I was ready to give up on my new friend coming back for me, and was starting to curse my bad luck when I heard someone outside in the companionway. There was a long silence. I held my breath and then someone said “Baraka”. It was not my friend outside, but another, older, man who also spoke my language.
‘“Salaam aleikum,” he said, and handed me a flask of black coffee as thick as oil, and a still-warm almond pastry wrapped in newspaper. I ate and drank like a starving man as he talked. He could not, he said, find me passage back to Algeria, or even Morocco: there was too much “activity”, as he termed it, in the Mediterranean. So, he had brought me papers in the name of his dead cousin, a fisherman on a boat that worked out of Toulon.
‘“I’m no fisherman,” I told him. “I’m a shepherd.”
‘He just shrugged. “I was no smuggler till this war broke out. I ran a little hotel. But that was requisitioned by the bastard Germans, so what can you do? You’ve got to make a living, got to take care of your family, don’t you?”
‘“That’s what I was trying to do in Oran,” I said woefully. “But I’m so far away from them now I wonder if I will ever see them again.”
‘The older man laughed. “Of course you will. We’ll take care of you. Play your cards right and you’ll make far more than what you are getting doing whatever you are doing now.”
‘“It sounds dangerous.”
‘The man made a face. “Danger, it’s everywhere now. But better the sort of danger you choose than getting sent to your death by some bastard officer who hasn’t a clue what he’s doing.”
‘“What do I have to do?”
‘“You crew on one of my boats,” the man said. “I’m the admiral of my own little fleet. We run up and down the coast, buying and selling, if you take my meaning.”
