‘What’s she—’
‘Shh.’
Nicolette felt Rafiq’s hand tighten on her shoulder – a talisman against the malevolence that strolled before her. The soldiers were closer now, sauntering as if on a Sunday walk, the woman between them non-existent except for the firm grip each had on her arms. Nicolette saw a purple bruise on the woman’s jaw, and on one of her breasts scratch marks punctuated with flakes of dried blood. Her clean-plucked pubis was swollen and battered, dark crimson blood smeared across the yellow and purple of the flesh.
Rafiq closed his eyes and his fingers dug harder into Nicolette’s shoulder, hurting her. A small moan escaped her, and the woman opened her eyes. For an instant she looked directly at Nicolette, woman and child one. The trio passed by.
‘Bastards.’ Rafiq stood, looking at the backs of the soldiers now heading towards the square.
‘But what has she done?’
‘She killed one of them. Yesterday. He raped her so she picked up an axe and killed him. And now they’ve come for her and they’ve raped her again to teach her a lesson and now they’re going to kill her.’
‘What’s rape? She might just go to jail. The judge might—’
‘Oh grow up, Nicolette! She’s not French. Do you really think they’re going to bother with a judge? Go home. Go home to your nice safe house with your nice safe mother and your nice safe uncle. Ask your uncle what rape is – he’s a soldier, he’ll tell you. And ask him what happens to Berber women who kill French soldiers.’
Nicolette saw tears forming in his eyes and she raised her hand towards his face, but he pushed past her and ran. As he turned around the corner, a single shot resounded in the empty street.
She thought the soldiers had killed Rafiq, and she ran to the square half blinded by her tears. She found it empty except for the two soldiers walking away from the body of the woman, her head lying in a pool of blood.
Slowly doors and shutters opened. Hesitantly, people came into the square. Then she saw Rafiq. He noticed her and screamed across the body of the naked woman.
‘Go home, Nicolette. You don’t belong here. Go home!’
#
Days melted into weeks and weeks into months. Nicolette’s world now consisted of her grandfather’s apartment and school. She was never allowed to walk by herself as before. Her uncle was often at the apartment, and there was talk of passports and immigration papers and of asking a trusted Arab to pour concrete into the family crypt, so that the bodies wouldn’t be disturbed. Sometimes she went to school, more often than not she didn’t. She noticed that more and more seats in her class were empty and she knew, through some sixth sense that children possess in times of crisis, that these children would never return. Then one morning, Nicolette woke to find her mother packing.
‘We’re going on a holiday. Hurry up and get dressed – we’ll be leaving soon.’
Nicolette went to her grandfather’s room. He was sitting on the edge of his bed, a suitcase at his feet. Never had she seen him look so sad.
‘You’re coming with us too, aren’t you?’
He looked up and nodded, and Nicolette understood this was no holiday. She went back to the room she shared with her mother. Saw her dolls, her books, and Papouli, the teddy bear given to her the day she’d been born, all still unpacked.
‘What about my things?’
‘We can only take one suitcase. Don’t worry about your things, your uncle will take care of them.’
But Nicolette knew this was the last time she’d see these belongings. She grabbed Papouli, determined to fight her mother if need be – either Papouli went with them, or she wasn’t going anywhere.
She needn’t have worried. The doorbell rang. It was Francois and his family. He handed them passports, warned them to stick to the holiday explanation. They would go to Philipeville, where a fisherman had been paid to take them to Corsica where they would board the Neptunia. A quiet knock on the door – close friends come to say goodbye. And amidst the tears, the farewells and the urgency, no one noticed the tattered teddy bear clutched by a young girl.
23
In the early hours of the morning of Wednesday 27th of December, Nicolette woke to Steven hammering on her door.
‘Come on kiddo, wake up! Nicolette? You awake?’
‘What? What’s the matter?’
‘Boumedienne’s just died. Come on, throw some clothes on. I’ll meet you in the kitchen in five minutes tops.’
Nicolette joined him in under four minutes. He pushed a mug of coffee into her hands. ‘Here, it’s not too hot. Drink it quickly and we’ll go. Amoud’ll be here in a minute.’
‘How did you find out? What’s the time anyway?’
‘Got a call. He died a little while ago – 3.55, officially. They haven’t announced it yet, so we might be the first there.’ A car horn honked outside. ‘Come on, that’s Amoud.’
#
They weren’t the first at the Mustapha Hospital. Half a dozen other journalists and photographers were already there, and if Steven had hoped to sneak into the hospital for a scoop, the fully-armed police at the entrance convinced him otherwise.
‘What now?’
‘Now, we wait. Damn! I was hoping no one else had gotten here before us.’
Nicolette rubbed her arms against the cold and stamped her feet. She got a camera out of her bag, took a couple of films out of their canister and put them in her pocket in readiness. ‘Great,’ she complained. ‘You get me out of bed at some ungodly hour, and now we just wait.’
‘It’ll get busy soon enough. If I were you, I’d find a good vantage point.’
She found a stone garden wall about a metre tall, and climbed on to it. From there, she had a good view of the hospital and area around it. She swung her camera bag onto her back, took a couple of preliminary shots of the front of the hospital, then zoomed in on one of the policemen looking bored.
Slowly, the sky lightened. A fine drizzle fell for about an hour, then stopped – just enough to dampen everyone’s clothes. More journalists arrived, as well as a couple of television crews. A few early risers noticed the journalists and TV crews, and guessing their reason for being there, stood respectfully before the hospital. Someone turned on a radio, and she heard the tail end of the news. She yawned, fighting sleep. Then, as soon as the news finished, a very brief repeated bulletin announcing the death of President Boumedienne. Nicolette sat up straight and looked around. Was that it? Just that? She’d expected something more dramatic. She signalled to Steven, who was chatting with one of the television crew.
‘That was an anti-climax.’
‘What d’you expect?’
‘I don’t know. Something more than just a news flash.’
‘Give it time. You’ll have plenty to shoot soon.’
#
Steven was right. Within minutes people from houses close by began making their way to stand before the hospital. Men in office clothes, women in the white haik typical of Algiers, with their faces covered. She heard the roar of motorbikes and stood to better see an extra half-a-dozen police make their way through the crowd. They too lined up in front of the doors of the hospital. The crowd grew, until by ten o’clock about a thousand people had gathered. On the radio verses from the Qu’ran were being read, and some of the crowd swayed in rhythm. But the crowd stayed orderly, and Nicolette just took a few character shots.
Then, at 11 am, a simple grey coffin was brought out of the hospital and placed into the back of a van, to be transferred to what had once been the Summer Palace – now the People’s Palace – only a few hundred metres away. Immediately police on motorbikes surrounded the van. As it began to move away the atmosphere of the crowd changed. Women ululated and moaned, pushing their way into the path of the motorbikes. Nicolette jumped from the wall and followed, the motordrive of her camera whirling. Tensions rose. One woman tore off her veil and scratched her face in grief, until blood mingled with her tears. Others did the same and the hysteria spr
ead. A woman fainted. Nicolette pushed her way further into the crowd and someone bumped into her, her camera hitting her face, so that for a moment she thought her nose would bleed. Then, as quickly as it had begun, the hysteria eased.
Nicolette looked around, disorientated. They had reached the People’s Palace and the coffin had been taken inside. She looked for Steven. He was standing inside a television van, away from the crowd. She felt the area around her eye where the camera had hit hardest. It was tender. She pushed her way through the crowd and joined Steven in the van.
They were listening to the end of the broadcast from the General Popular Assembly. Interim President Rabah Bitat has taken office. The President of the Judicial Assembly, Metatlah, read Article 117 of the constitution, which outlined the duties of the Interim President. Forty days of mourning was announced – the same number of days that the President had been in a coma. The assembly was asking the people to show respect, discipline and patriotism. Then, almost as quickly as the morning announcement of Boumedienne’s death, the Assembly broadcast was over.
‘That’s going to look good,’ Steven said, indicating Nicolette’s eye.‘Reckon you’ll get a shiner out of it.’
‘Terrific – just what I need.’
‘Well, jumping into a mob isn’t such a bright idea.’
‘You can’t expect to get good shots from the other side of the square. You know what Capa said – If your photographs aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.’
‘If you say so. It’s your face…’
More people were gathering outside the Palace, but nothing was happening. The radio was announcing that Algerian personalities would view the coffin that afternoon, and foreign dignitaries would do the same on Thursday morning. Thursday afternoon would be for the people of Algeria to come pay homage to their president. It advised everyone to go home, promising that everything would be televised. From around the Palace, police was also urging everyone to go home. The crowd began to disperse.
‘Come on,’ Steven said, ‘let’s go file this. This is only the beginning.’
#
Early next morning it was Nicolette who knocked on Steven’s door.
‘Come on in.’ He was sitting on his bed, his little folding Remington on his lap, madly typing away with two fingers.
‘We’re going?’ she asked.
He finished what he was writing and pulled the page out. ‘You’re up early. There’s no need to hurry today, we know the program now.’ He looked up and grinned. ‘Told you you’d get a black eye.’ He folded the keys of the typewriter back onto the machine and pushed it under the bed. ‘Come on then, if you’re so eager.’
From all the corners of the city small groups were making their way to the People’s Palace. They were quiet little groups, grave and dignified in their grief. Some held bunches of flowers, others placards on which the portrait of the President had been cut that morning from the front page of the newspaper El Moudjahid and quickly pasted onto a board. Many were crying quietly. For two hours they gathered around the Palace, first in their hundreds, then thousands – an ever widening perimeter of grief.
Then, like a cauldron left unattended which can suddenly boil over, the atmosphere changed. An old woman tried to climb the two-metre-high wall surrounding the gardens of the Palace. The police pulled her down and she screamed. Others took her place. The crowd pushed against the police cordon, which broke and was reformed again and again. Children ducked between the legs of the soldiers by the gate and were bludgeoned. The crowd pressed harder, a mad passionate siege squashing the cordon of police against the metal grille of the massive gates, never backing a centimetre even under the blows of truncheons. Nicolette’s motor drive whirled as she dodged her way around the crowd. She found an olive tree not already packed with mourners and climbed it to get a better view, the camera bag on her back catching in the branches. Security services bellowed through megaphones, asking the public to back away from the gates, to keep calm, but their requests were drowned out by the wailing of the Red Crescent ambulances.
And still the people came, united yet isolated in their grief. The hysteria rose. A woman climbed the tree Nicolette was in and tried to climb above her. Nicolette elbowed her back down, but the woman grabbed a handful of Nicolette’s hair and pulled herself higher. Nicolette yelled and lost her balance and she crashed to the ground, falling on those below her who yelled and swore at her. The corner of the camera around her neck crashed into her chest and she felt as if she’d been stabbed. A foot kicked her belly, and she panicked in that forest of legs. Someone walked over her, their shoe grinding the bone of her hip. She grabbed a haik to pull herself up but the woman screamed at her and slapped her around the head. Panic overtook her and she curled into a ball, her arms protecting her head.
‘Fuck off, you bastards! Get off her! Go on, fuck off!’ Women screamed as Steven pushed his way towards her, pulling people out of his way. ‘Get off her, you bitches, or I’ll kick your head in.’
The gates opened and the people moved forward, pushing Steven back. The crowd around her thinned and Nicolette struggled to her feet. Even before Steven could reach her she turned away from the gates, and hugging her sore chest, her head bent tight over her body, she pushed her way in the opposite direction to the crowd’s. Saw a pissoir and went into it, not caring whether there were men urinating there or not.
It was empty. She leant against the wall, suddenly frozen to the spot, unable to move, afraid that if she did she would end once more beneath a sea of legs. It wasn’t a matter of whether she should go back and follow the crowd – she knew she couldn’t. She felt an asphyxiating sense of doom. She was sure that if she did go back, she’d end up dead. Bludgeoned to death, suffocated, it didn’t matter how. If she followed, she would die. She pushed away from the wall and hurried back to Madame Lesage’s.
#
‘Nicolette? Are you there? Nicky, answer me!’
Steven burst into her room and found her curled up on her bed, still in the clothes she’d worn that morning, bruised and dirty.
‘Christ, woman. You scared me half to death. Sit up,’ he said, slapping her backside.
‘Go away.’
‘No, I won’t go away. Sit up.’
‘Piss off, will you! I don’t want to talk to you.’
‘I see. You’d rather just lie here, feeling sorry for yourself. Fine. I’ll just go to the press office first thing tomorrow morning, and tell Mike you turned out to be a gutless little Prima Donna who was only playing at being a photojournalist, and who—’
Nicolette turned suddenly and hit out at him, but Steven had anticipated her move.
‘—who totally loses it as soon as the pressure’s on,’ he finished.
‘Arsehole,’ she said, sitting up. ‘You know that’s not true. I photographed the café bombing. And the farm in Constantine. You know that. When have I ever been a Prima Donna?’
‘So what happened out there?’
Nicolette shrugged and pulled her knees to her chest. She winced, and Steven noticed but didn’t comment. He waited for her to speak.
‘Well?’ he said at last, when it looked like she might start crying. ‘What was it, if not losing it?’
Nicolette took a deep breath, wincing again. He could almost see her thoughts, her pride fighting her fears.
‘Okay,’ she said at last in a small voice. ‘I did panic. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I shouldn’t be here.’
‘Good, admitting you panicked’s what’s important here. I’m going to let you in on a little secret here. We all panic. Me, DJ, Jean-Paul. Every one of us. Sooner or later we freeze – or run – depending.’
She looked at him, disbelieving. ‘I can’t imagine you ever panicking.’
‘Well, you’re wrong. With me it was a train derailment in India. I was pretty new at this, thinking I was this crash-hot journalist. Then this cop yelled at me to help him carry a body out, and I just froze. That body – it just didn’t look human anymor
e…’
‘What happened?’
‘Not much. He just called me every name under the sun, then got someone else to help. I threw up and went home with my tail between my legs. The point is, Nicky, you’ve got to get tough. You can’t go letting what’s going on around you get to you, or leaving a little piece of you in every shot you take, because if you do, soon you’ll be a total wreck and there’ll be nothing left.’
Nicolette nodded. ‘It’s not that easy.’
‘No-one said anything about easy. But for your own sake, you have to learn to turn your feelings off when you’re out there. All your feeling, including the fear. Capisce?’
‘Capisce.’
‘Okay, now let’s see where you’re hurt.’
Nicolette lifted her jumper and lowered her jeans a little. She had an angry bruise around a couple of ribs, a lesser one on her hip.
‘Does it hurt to breath?’
‘A little.’
‘Have a shower and see how it feels then. If you want, I can bandage it up firm for tomorrow.’
‘Hm. Tomorrow…’
‘Yes, tomorrow. You’re a tough photojournalist, remember? You can handle it.’
Nicolette nodded.
‘Have that shower and come have some food. You’ll feel better.’
‘Steven?’
‘Yeah?’
‘When do you stop being scared?’
‘Shit, kid, never. That’s half the fun.’
#
All of the next morning the radio and television continued to urge people to stay in their homes, assuring them that the funeral would be televised in complete detail. In a thirty-kilometre circle around the city the army set up barrages across all roads, to stop people from neighbouring towns and villages coming into Algiers. Fifteen thousand men from the police, army, and gendarmerie formed a double line on both sides of the route that the funeral procession was to take.
That Devil's Madness Page 23
