by Jane Johnson
‘I just wish…’ Her face trembles. ‘I just wish I’d seen my baby, just held him once. Or her. They never even told me what sex my child was. I couldn’t even give it a name in my head. They just gave me a little bit of its hair, a strange, superstitious thing to do, but I kept it. I slipped it inside my locket. Just an old thing made out of Cornish pewter, not very valuable, not to anyone else, but it’s disappeared, and now I have nothing.’ She looks utterly stricken.
Rosie shuffles uncomfortably. She ducks her head and does something complicated with her scarf and jumper, then hands to Olivia a chunky oval pendant on a silver chain. ‘I suppose you better have this back then,’ she says gruffly. ‘But there’s nothing in it – it doesn’t open.’
Olivia grabs the object and fiddles with the pendant. Some hidden mechanism operates with an audible click and it flips open. I crane over her hands. Inside is a lock of fine dark hair, tied with a tiny white satin bow, and behind that what appears to be a tiny photograph. Olivia tenderly removes the hair and brushes it against her cheek, her gaze inward and private. And now I can see that it is not a photo but a miniature portrait executed with loving attention to detail. Black hair, brown skin, brown eyes curved in mischievous half moons, a long straight nose, full lips, sharp facial bones. The portrait is so vital that it seems to beam benevolence out into the world. My heart seizes, then beats very fast.
The doorbell rings, shocking me to my feet, and the two old ladies stare at one another. I run to the window, and there is Reda, as if he has somehow been summoned by the opening of the locket. But even by the time I have explained who the visitor is and have let him in, my brain has done the mathematics.
Reda follows me into the parlour and his gaze sweeps the room, settles on Rosie, slides back to me. I give him a tiny shake of the head.
‘I told my sister-in-law you were home,’ he says to Olivia, ‘and she made a gift for you!’
That same benevolence, that fierce love of life burning out of his eyes… but the set of his face is different, and the dates simply don’t work. I am a romantic idiot, leaping to absurdly wrong conclusions.
Olivia, meanwhile, perks right up, eyeing the box. ‘A gift?’
Reda winks at me. ‘Becky and I will make a fresh pot of tea, and then you will see.’
I follow him out into the hallway, shutting the door behind me. Out in the kitchen while we boil a kettle and assemble a tea tray I bring him up to speed.
‘A Nazi!’ he whistles. ‘What an amazing story. And an Algerian lover…’ He grins at me and I feel my knees go a bit weak.
Then he says, ‘Is it safe to leave Olivia and Rosie Sparrow together?’
‘Honestly? I have no idea.’
But when we have made tea and piled up the tray and come back to the parlour door, there they are, heads bent together over the locket, and Gabriel is up on the bookcase, preening an outstretched wing contentedly, as if the company of two bickering old women is exactly what he likes best.
Reda puts the tray down on the table and the two old ladies stare at him, then at one another. There is something going on here, but I don’t know quite what it is. Maybe it’s just the pleasant spell cast by the entrance of a handsome man into a room of women – certainly, Rosie shows no sign of the disgust she had expressed at the idea of Hamid’s darker skin.
I pour out cups of tea for everyone, then Reda whips away the cloth that he placed over the centrepiece, and reveals a plateful of exquisite pastries curved into crescent moons dusted with icing sugar. Each has a series of tiny marks pricked into it: little triangles and circles, lines and dots, just like the patterns on the sea gate.
Olivia picks one up and brings it close. ‘Oh!’ she exclaims. ‘Thank you so much.’
‘Je vous en prie, madame.’ He places a courtly hand over his heart.
‘Shokran bezef!’ Olivia declares, and they beam at one another, delighted by this cosmopolitan exchange. She takes a tiny bite, sits back with her eyes closed. At last she asks faintly, ‘Where did you say you got these?’
‘My brother’s wife, Amina, made them. She learned the recipe from our mother.’
‘Hamid used to make biscuits like this, though we couldn’t get hold of almonds during the war. We had to gather hazelnuts out of the hedges, roast and grind them: what a palaver! But I had ones just like this when I went to Morocco.’
‘You have visited my country!’ Reda sounds delighted: the two of them have mapped out a small, shared magical space.
She smiles, remembering. ‘It was such a long time ago. Hamid sent me a letter, but it took such a long time to arrive. The day I received it I sent him a telegram and we arranged to meet in Casablanca. That trip was a marvel. He took me everywhere – to his sisters in Oujda, south into the mountains, way down into the desert. I rode a camel in the Sahara – can you imagine? We lay together under a canopy of stars, so many stars, and I wished that time would never end. But of course it was over far too soon and I was on a boat back to England. I cried all the way home.’
‘Couldn’t you have stayed?’ I ask. ‘Couldn’t you have married him and stayed in North Africa, made a life together there?’ I am disappointed that she came home: surely love would conquer everything?
‘Hamid said it wasn’t safe for me, especially in Algeria. There was unrest everywhere. The French authorities had cracked down, so there was a lot of ill feeling towards Europeans. It was before the war for independence officially broke out, but he knew it was coming. I tried to persuade him to come back to Cornwall with me, but he said he couldn’t leave his family to fend for themselves.
‘Then he sent me this.’
She digs in her handbag, brings out an envelope and takes from it a piece of folded paper marked with an official stamp in red ink and the letters ‘ICRC’ upon it.
29
Hamid
Arzew, Algeria, 1958
‘IF YOU WRITE A LETTER I PROMISE WE WILL DO OUR VERY best to ensure it reaches the recipient.’
The visitor from the International Red Cross gazed at the prisoner before her, taking in his general thinness and fragility, the soiled bandages on his feet, the crooked set of his hands, the marks on his face and the scabs on his shaven scalp, and a tremor of pity ran through her.
‘I’m sorry. It’s all we can do. I wish we could do more for you…’ She looked down, gathering herself, then lifted her chin and met his eyes. ‘I’m afraid they will read whatever you write and if it is at all… problematic, I fear it will be censored or possibly even destroyed.’ Her French was perfect, very precise.
The prisoner – Hamid Medjani – nodded once. ‘I understand.’
She passed him the single sheet of paper, a pen, and ink. ‘And they will be watching,’ she indicated the guards lounging in the doorway, ‘as they are listening now.’
He gave her a lopsided smile, the scar across his face distorting briefly. Then he took the writing materials from her and with great concentration placed the fountain pen between right thumb and a forefinger that would not bend. It took him a little while to find a position that would work, then he bent his head over the desk and started slowly to form the words that crowded his mind.
How are you, my dearest Olivia? I am well, or at least I am better than I was. My right hand has healed sufficiently for me to write to you now, and this is a boon. I must write quickly, for I have only a short time, so forgive me if my letter is inadequate and expresses only a little of what my heart holds. God grant me the chance to write to you at greater length and under other circumstances one day.
He paused, touching the pen to his lips, readjusted his position on the uncomfortable chair and reapplied himself to his task.
As you will no doubt see from the provenance of this letter when, insha’allah, it reaches you, I am held in the prison at Arzew in my own country. I cannot tell you anything of how I came to be here, so I will not waste words on that. Just know that I live, and that while I live I think of you.
The days pass s
lowly here and I have a lot of time to think and to dream. And when I do, I dream of Cornwall – of my blue-grey country – in contrast to this, my red country – red for the soil, red for the sun, red for the blood that has been shed here for so long. I hope they will not censor that – all countries’ histories are bloody, are they not?
I remember how you tried to teach me to swim in the cove beneath the house, how we sat in the sun on the steps below the sea gate, out of sight of the rest of the world, looking down on a gull sliding through the air, paired with its sand-borne shadow on the beach below us. Do you remember that little bit of magic that we shared? The bird existing in two different elements at once – in the air; on the land.
So am I now: I exist most of all in my head, in my dreams. I skim through the Cornish skies even though my earthly body is trapped here. I am with you, my love, in the wild blue expanses of my mind: they can never take that away from me.
A discreet cough interrupts his reverie. ‘Monsieur Medjani? I am sorry, you must finish now.’ She indicated the guards, who had now stepped into the room. ‘They must take you back into the cells, and I must leave.’
Hamid grimaced. Writing quickly, he added, ‘Je t’aimerai toujours…’
I will love you for ever.
Then he blew on the paper, imbuing the drying ink with his prayers, folded it and handed it to the Red Cross woman.
‘I greatly appreciate all you are trying to do for us,’ he said. ‘But I fear we are damned souls.’
He watched as her dark eyes swam and she blinked rapidly. ‘God bless you,’ she said, getting to her feet. Then she turned away and walked rapidly out of the room and the guards came to pick him up and carry him back to hell.
30
Becky
REDA READS THE LETTER FIRST IN HIS PERFECT FRENCH, and I see that his hand – usually so sure and steady in all that he does – is shaking. He reaches the end and his voice catches. Then he translates it into English for us.
At the end of his recitation a solemn silence falls, broken only by Olivia blowing her nose loudly into a tissue.
‘That was the last time I ever heard from him,’ she says at last. ‘Hamid was held by the French authorities in the prison camp at Arzew, outside Oran. The International Red Cross sent the letter to me after they had managed to force through an official visit, but after that I never heard from him again.’ She sniffs and gazes into the flames of the fire. ‘I think he must have died. But now I will never know.’
‘Oh, Olivia.’ What pain to have carried through all these decades. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I say. ‘It’s a very beautiful letter.’
Reda folds the piece of paper reverentially and returns it to Olivia, who pats and strokes it, then slips it back into her handbag.
‘I know the rest of the story,’ he says quietly.
Olivia becomes very still. ‘How do you know? How can you?’
Reda looks away, his gaze distant. ‘In our family Hamid is a hero.’
We all stare at him.
‘In your family?’ I ask, feeling my skin prickle.
He meets my eye, his expression somehow managing to be both defiant and sorrowful. ‘I must admit now that I am not here purely by coincidence.’ Then he announces to the room, ‘Hamid Medjani was my great-uncle: my grandfather’s brother.’
Olivia gives an audible gasp. Reda takes her hand and enfolds it in his. He rubs his thumb across her papery old skin as caressingly as she touched the letter.
‘I am sorry, dear lady. I do not know whether you will want to hear the rest of the tale. It does not have a happy ending.’
‘I must.’ Her voice is raw with emotion. ‘You must tell me.’
‘You are sure?’
Olivia nods once. As she juts her chin you can see the ghostly profile of the girl she once was, fierce and capable, full of life.
Reda takes a deep breath, then begins. ‘My grandfather was Omar Medjani, Hamid’s second youngest brother. They both fought for the FLN – the Front de Libération Nationale – for the independence of Algeria. I don’t know how much you understand of the politics of North Africa, but the French were not just colonialists in Algeria, but oppressive masters. They ruled with an iron fist. In our history there were many atrocities, many massacres. A lot of bad blood. The war for independence was brutal. Hamid returned from Europe after the Second World War hoping for peace and a way to reclaim his life, but what he found horrified him. His father and brother Nazim were killed by the French in retaliation for attacks on Europeans in Setif, in Oran. It did not matter that they had taken no part in the unrest: they were caught by a French patrol out in the hills with their herd and executed for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Their bodies were hung in the local village square, for the flies. They would not even let the family give them a decent Islamic burial.
‘And this was what Hamid went back to. He joined the Resistance and worked his way up through the organization in no time: he was brave and resourceful. He ran a guerrilla unit out of Oran, and they carried out many audacious raids, but eventually he was betrayed and captured and imprisoned – in the camp at Arzew, from where he wrote that letter.’ Now he takes a deep breath. ‘Perhaps it is not wise to dwell on the details of what happened next.’
‘Tell me,’ Olivia says fiercely. ‘I want to know everything, no matter how harrowing. I spent years trying to trace him. I got in touch with the Red Cross and they tried to find him, but he had disappeared…’
Reda lets his breath out slowly: a man preparing to lift a heavy weight. ‘My grandfather Omar and our cousins launched a daring raid on the prison camp. They got Hamid out! They carried him – he could not walk. They had broken his feet, just as before they had broken his hands… if that is too much detail, I am sorry. He was treated very badly by the French, and he was too weak. They laid him in the shade of a cedar tree on the top of a hill overlooking the sea, gazing out into the blue. According to my grandfather he kept saying a word over and over: Olivia. They thought he was speaking French, that he wanted olives, so they brought him olives. And then – this has gone down in family legend – he said, “I am going back to my little paradise, to Chynalls.” And then he died. I am sad to say this, it breaks my heart to tell you.’
Tears are leaking out of Olivia’s eyes, and when I raise my hand to my face my own cheek is wet.
‘He had told Omar about his time in Cornwall. He called it the most beautiful place in the world. He said he had fallen in love there but he never spoke the young woman’s name, for the good of her reputation, not until he died,’ Reda continues. ‘Just as in the letter, he speaks decorously of birds, of magic: never of anything explicit. Omar told the story to my father, and my father told it to me. My parents’ generation, they did not travel – but for our generation, for my brother Mohamed and me, it’s different. As soon as we made some money we went to France and worked till we got passports – ironic, no, the country that oppressed our ancestors? And then we came to look for Cornwall. We looked for a place called Chynalls, but no one knew a Chynalls – we found Chyenhal, and it was pretty enough, but we couldn’t see the sea from there, and there was no sea gate down to a secret cove. But we loved the region: it was wild and beautiful. And Mo, he met Amina in Penzance and married her – imagine that: crossing continents to find the love of your life, a Moroccan girl raised in Cornwall! It really did seem we were brought here by fate.
‘And then Becky called our number, out of the blue.’
He turns his gaze upon me but I cannot get the words past the lump in my throat. With her free hand Olivia is holding a tissue to her eyes; even Rosie looks overcome. ‘Rebecca,’ my cousin says quietly. ‘Upstairs there’s a cardboard box under the bed in the front bedroom. You’ll find a photo album in there. Would you bring it to me?’
I cannot admit that I am already familiar with this box and its contents. Up I go, drag the box out, unearth the album and fetch it down, lay it in Olivia’s lap. She flicks through it, sometimes smiling
sadly, sometimes laughing to herself. She shows Rosie the photos of her and Jem. Rosie squints at them as if she can hardly believe her own image could have been captured and hidden away in the album for over half a century. ‘Our wedding day,’ she says at last. ‘We were no more than children.’
Olivia is turning pages faster and faster now. Venice and Paris flit by; Rome and Florence. When she comes to the desert photos, she tarries. Reda, too fascinated to keep a polite distance, cranes his neck. When she turns another leaf he puts his hand on the page. ‘Can I see?’
She angles the album towards him. The photo that has caught his attention is of a family group, all in native dress – kaftans and headwraps. There are four men, three women and several children, some babes in arms. They are all grinning widely, eyes narrowed against the sun: the photographer has been merciless in her quest for a sharp image. All except for the man on the end, who gives us only his profile, but I recognize him at once as the man in the miniature.
‘When was this taken?’ Reda asks.
Olivia thinks for a moment. ‘That would have been in the summer of 1954. My goodness, it was hot. And I was wearing tweed!’ She fiddles the photo off its adhesive hinges and turns it over. Written in the bottom right-hand corner in pencil is ‘Oujda, Aug 1954’.
It could have been 1854, I think, the image is so timeless. ‘That’s just three months before the war broke out,’ Reda says, scrutinizing the faces. ‘There is Hamid,’ he indicates the man with the striking profile, ‘and next to him my grandfather, the tallest of them all. The woman beside him is my grandmother Habiba, and the baby in her arms is my father! And this…’ he points to a solemn girl with watchful eyes standing in front of a small dark woman on the edge of the group, the woman’s hands resting protectively – possessively? – on the child’s shoulders. ‘I believe this is your daughter, yours and Hamid’s.’
