The Stone Face

by William Gardner Smith

  “She still didn’t talk. They gave her time to recover, to think about the pain and time to be able to feel pain again, and then they stripped her naked and beat her with clubs, concentrating on her breasts, elbows and knees. But they saved the best for last. Two soldiers held her arms and two others grabbed her by the ankles and pulled her legs wide open and a paratrooper lieutenant smiled and broke the neck of a champagne bottle and placed the jagged edge against her sex.” Simeon winced. “‘Talk,’ the lieutenant said. Latifa screamed and did not talk. He jammed the ragged-edged bottle into her sex and twisted it inside. She shrieked and fainted. When she came to, they threatened to repeat the whole thing all over again. She talked.”

  Simeon was trembling uncontrollably in horror. Ahmed spoke with cold fury, his eyes narrowed. “As for Djamila. Her torture was somewhat milder. She was tortured in front of her father and her fiancé, with electrodes. Electricity devices plugged in and applied to the breasts and the sex. Not pleasant, I can assure you. The father, who shut his eyes, could not look; the fiancé, the man now in prison, cried out to be tortured in her place. The torturer turned to the fiancé and smiled: ‘Don’t worry, bicot, your turn will come.’”

  Ahmed’s face was pale with rage, his lips trembled. Simeon stared at Ahmed, the inhuman images in his mind. Simeon put himself in the place of the women. He was himself in the bathtub, himself before the electrodes. He shut his eyes.

  The two women peeked into the room, then entered. Latifa’s face was still grave, but Djamila had shrugged off the mood. She let nothing interfere with her good humor. The room was filled with smoke, and she coughed and laughed and said, “Men! Always pipes and cigars and cigarettes.”

  But the others, including Simeon, could not smile. They sat smoking and staring at the cold coffee until finally Simeon got up to go.

  “I’ll wait a minute and escort the girls home, they live up the street,” Ahmed said.

  “Yes.” Simeon shook hands with Latifa and Djamila. “I hope we’ll see each other again,” he said warmly.

  “Yes. Ahmed will arrange it.”

  At the door, Simeon turned to Ahmed, “I don’t know what to say. Thank you for the lesson.”

  Ahmed smiled at him. “Don’t fall apart, mon frère.”

  “No.”

  “By the way, you won’t be seeing me out on the streets at night after next week. The government has just decreed a curfew for Algerians. We have to be off the streets by eight o’clock. All our cafés have to close at the same hour.”

  “It’s not possible!”

  “Don’t you read the newspapers?”

  “I . . . didn’t see that.”

  “That’s right. Mustn’t clutter up the streets, smell up the air for decent Frenchmen. Oh, it’s all right for me, with my apartment. But think of the men living four to a room in the slums!”

  Simeon looked down the hall. Several Algerians came out of a room and walked down the hall and knocked on another door.

  “Don’t worry,” Ahmed said. “We won’t take it lying down. We’ll react.”

  “How?”

  “We’ll defy them.”

  “The police will club you down.”

  “They’ll do worse than that. But we have to react.” He seemed so much older and more mature than Simeon.

  “Good night, Simeon.”

  “Good night, Ahmed. I’ll ring you or drop by your place.”

  VI

  1

  ON OCTOBER 1, 1961, the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) called on all Algerians living in Paris to go into the streets in the evening and hold a peaceful demonstration against the curfew imposed on them by the French Government. The FLN instructions were that all available men, women and even children were to take part; that they were to parade in orderly fashion, in groups headed by FLN militants; that no one was to carry a weapon, not even a stick or a pocket knife.

  It was a cold, damp day. The Paris police prefecture published a communiqué warning that all gatherings on the streets were banned, and that the police would break up any demonstrations that were held. But everyone knew that the Algerians would ignore this warning; everyone knew they would demonstrate anyway; everyone knew there would be fights, riots, and that at the end of the day a number of people would be dead. The faces of Algerians one passed on the street during the day were grim. Sometimes fear could be seen, but always determination. On the faces of the French and the foreigners was something else: varying degrees of guilt and apprehension.

  Simeon called at Ahmed’s apartment that afternoon, but his friend was not at home. He had half-expected this. It was clear that Ahmed, along with the entire FLN in Paris, was helping to organize the evening’s march. At the Tournon, at the Monaco, at the Danton, in all the cafés where members of the foreign colony met, the demonstration was the center of conversation throughout the day. Most of the English-speaking foreigners intended to go home early and stay indoors.

  “You know how them French cops is,” Babe said. “When they start swingin’ them clubs, they don’t see no difference between a demonstrator and a spectator.”

  “I’m going to take a look all the same,” Simeon said.

  Early that evening more than thirty thousand Algerians came out of their bidonvilles and tumbledown suburbs, out of their crowded hotel rooms and sad cafés, and, by foot, subway, train and bus converged on the centers of Paris. Shopkeepers and salesgirls going to the cinemas on the Grands Boulevards, well-dressed business and professional men and tourists sipping coffee at cafés on the Avenue de l’Opéra, well-fed lovers strolling along the Seine stared in surprise and indignation as the hordes of bicots spewed out of their ghettos and took possession of the streets of the capital.

  The mass of Algerians, in different groups, converged on key centers: the Grands Boulevards, the Avenue de l’Opéra, the rue du Bac, the Boulevard Saint-Michel, the quais along the Seine. Men in shabby clothes—their “Sunday best”—shuffled along beside women who were often accompanied by their children or held babies in their arms. The men and boys shouted nationalistic slogans: “Long Live the FLN,” “Long Live Free Algeria,” “Algeria to the Algerians.” The Algerian women and girls raised their voices in the chilling wail Simeon had heard from Latifa and Djamila.

  Traffic was forced to a standstill. Police rushing to the scenes struggled to make their way through flocks of honking automobiles. Bystanders fled into cafés or the courtyards of buildings, steel gates slammed down in front of shopwindows, wooden shutters closed over windows of apartments. Those who hated or disliked the Algerians, the majority, cursed them: those who sympathized prayed for the Algerians. The sirens sounded in the distance, the police were on their way.

  The confrontations occurred simultaneously in the various parts of the city where the Algerians were concentrated. The police, with long white clubs, converged from side streets and attacked. Theoretically, French police charges were aimed at splitting demonstrations into small pockets, and dispersing the demonstrators; but it was clear that tonight the police were out for blood. While “combat groups” charged, other ranks of police stood behind in each street, blocking escape routes, armed with clubs and submachine guns. The charges split the Algerians into small pockets; each pocket was then surrounded by police who methodically clubbed men, women and children. Simeon saw old men clubbed after they had fallen to the ground, sometimes by five or six policemen at a time, their bodies beaten after the men were dead. In scenes of terrible sadism, Simeon saw pregnant women clubbed in the abdomen, infants snatched from their mothers and hurled to the ground. Along the Seine, police lifted unconscious Algerians from the ground and tossed them into the river.

  2

  Meanwhile, most of the city slept or went its carefree way. Laughing women and men danced the touiste or the cha-cha-cha to candlelight in the Club Privé at Saint-Germain-des-Prés, danced at the Epi-Club, danced at Chez
Regine, danced in the ballrooms and cabarets. Old-timers, some of whom had lived through the nightmare of the wartime German Occupation, or even the concentration camps, played cards or dominos or quatre-cents vingt-et-un in the old cafés. Tourists were treated to the specially manufactured charms of “Paris by Night,” middle-aged businessmen sent flowers to the nudes of the Folies-Bergères or the Concert Mayol, Marie-Chantal went a-hunting for a prospective wealthy husband or prospective impresario at Le Nuage.

  Clyde drank at the Monoco to forget about Jinx, Jinx drank at the Select to forget about herself, Doug made love to his State Department girl, Babe belched after a gigantic meal and joked off a feeling of guilt, Benson lay drunk and bitter in bed with his mistress, and Ahmed lay dead, his head battered to a pulp by police clubs, on the corner of rue du Bac and the Boulevard Saint-Germain.

  His body was one of many, dead and wounded which lay sprawled on the street. Curled up like a child on his side, face twisted in a grimace, arms still raised protectively over his head, he looked even more youthful than in life. The police did not know he was dead, and tossed his body, along with the others, into a van. The corpses of more than two hundred Algerians, Ahmed’s among them, were to be fished out of the Seine the next day and for days afterward.

  3

  On a quai near the Pont Neuf, Simeon leaned against the fender of a parked automobile. He did not know what his friends were doing or what had happened to Ahmed or what was happening in the rest of the city. The air here as elsewhere in the city was filled with the screams of women and children. People ran madly, in zigzags and circles, but there was no escape. Suddenly Simeon saw something more brutal than anything he had ever seen before in his life. A few dozen yards away from him a policeman was swinging his club over a woman who was holding a baby. She fell to her knees, bent forward to protect the infant, and the police club kept flying up and down, up and down. Simeon stared, realizing that he was weeping, feeling those blows against his own body. Then suddenly he saw the policeman’s face.

  He saw it as clearly as though it were only inches from him—that face he knew so well, the face in America he had tried to escape—it was Chris, Mike, their face. The policeman’s face was distorted and twisted with the joy of destruction, his eyes narrowed, red dots of excitement on his deathly pale skin.

  The face exploded in front of Simeon; and he felt a shrieking dagger of pain in the socket of his missing eye. Simeon did not think, but stumbled forward, almost fainting from the pain in the socket, weaved between the parked cars, and swung his fist into that hated face, with all his strength. Bone rang on bone; he saw the nose flatten and the blood spurt; and then he felt an excruciating pain inside his head and the world blacked out.

  He woke to find himself suffocating under a hot crushing mass, with a terrible ache in his head and in the socket of his eye. He became conscious of movement, and gradually he realized that he was in a vehicle, a police van. When he pushed his arms forward to try to open a path to air he realized that he was wedged into a pile of bodies, some squirming and some inert. The air was thick with stale sweat and breath, and everyone seemed to be coughing.

  The van halted and the bodies were dragged out: bodies of men and women, some dead, but most wounded and alive. When Simeon’s feet touched ground he found himself in a clearing outside a gigantic sports stadium. The police were pulling men out of many other vans while files of CRS riot police stood on the edges of the clearing and near the vans with submachine guns. Simeon’s head throbbed; when he touched it, clotted blood came off onto his hand. He adjusted the patch which had nearly come off his head, then was pushed roughly into the long line of Algerians being herded into the stadium. “Get a move on, get a move on!” police shouted between curses and insults. Simeon stumbled through the entrance and gasped at what he saw inside: literally thousands of Algerians sat or sprawled on the floor of the huge stadium, most of them bleeding from head wounds. He saw no other recognizable non-Arabs. Simeon and the other newcomers were shoved out onto the floor where they sat down or lay on their backs with the others. Most of the Algerians paid no particular attention to Simeon, but two or three glanced at him and smiled faintly, without surprise, “Salud, frère,” a man said. Frère: brother. Simeon smiled. “Salud, mon frère.”

  The stadium was humid and cold, the air foul. Women and children lay among the ever-increasing bodies, and their mounting you-you cry echoed from the high-domed ceiling of the room. Those of the men who were not wounded sat cross-legged, staring straight ahead of them. Hundreds of police were everywhere in the room, pointing their guns menacingly. The moans of the wounded mingled with the general murmur of voices. There was a stutter of static and then a hollow voice blared from loudspeakers and the Algerians quieted down to listen. The voice said the Algerians would remain in the stadium until room had been found for them in prisons, hospitals or camps in France; it added that the agitators among them would be sent back to their “douars of origin”—to the concentration camps of the Algerian regions in which they had been born.

  Simeon lay on his back and closed his eye tight against the pain. What would happen to him? He did not care. For the first time in a long while he felt reasonably at peace with his conscience. Had his attack on the policeman been a deliberate act of courage, or the result of momentary fury and hallucination. That didn’t matter; what mattered was that he had struck at the face.

  The pain in his eye had diminished somewhat, and before dropping off to sleep he thought: the face of the French cop, the face of Chris, of Mike, of the sailor, the face of the Nazi torturer at Buchenwald and Dachau, the face of the hystercal mob at Little Rock, the face of the Afrikaner bigot and the Portuguese butcher in Angola, and, yes, the black faces of Lumumba’s murderers—they were all the same face. Wherever this face was found, it was his enemy; and whoever feared, or suffered from, or fought against this face was his brother.

  4

  Simeon woke in the early morning, stiff, aching and cold, his head throbbing. An old Algerian with a beard waved to him and he waved back. Most of the Algerians were already awake and talking in Arabic among themselves. Police with guns slung over their shoulders passed among them, serving a watery black liquid and chunks of dry bread.

  The loudspeaker blared: “Stand up.” They divided the men into small groups which they placed in designated parts of the stadium and began calling them individually into rooms or to desks that had been lined up along the walls. Simeon was in a group of some two hundred men and women who were seated in a corner of the room. A man next to Simeon smiled and spoke to him in Arabic. Simeon said in French, “I don’t speak Arabic.”

  “Are you African?”

  “No. American.”

  The man pursed his lips and arched his brows in surprise. For a moment, he seemed skeptical. Then he said, “Good.”

  They sat for hours on the damp cold floor, changing positions frequently to relieve their aching muscles. From time to time the women raised their voices in the shrill you-you wail again. Simeon thought of what Ahmed had told him, of how he had never felt as happy as when he found himself with a guerrilla unit fighting against parachutists. Simeon understood now what Ahmed meant.

  At around one o’clock police came to them with pots of stiff, lukewarm mashed potatoes with ground meat mixed in it which served as lunch. There were no plates or forks and each man was served in his cupped hands. They all ate hungrily.

  A man in civilian clothes wove in and out among the prisoners, looking at the faces. He paused and frowned when he saw Simeon. He walked over to him.

  “Are you an Arab?” he asked.

  Simeon shook his head. The Algerians looked at him.

  “What are you? African?”

  Simeon hesitated a moment, then said, “American.”

  Still frowning, the man turned and walked away. The Algerians looked at Simeon and smiled. No one said anything. About half an hour later, the civilia
n returned and said to Simeon, “Come with me.”

  Simeon made a V-for-victory sign with his fingers to the Algerians of his group, and followed the man across the stadium to the door of a small office. “Wait here a minute.” Through the door, Simeon saw a short, stout man, also in civilian clothes, sitting behind a desk questioning three Algerians who were standing. Dried blood was caked in the hair of the Algerians. At another table in the room sat a policeman who was typing notes.

  When the Algerians left the room, the civilian said to Simeon, “All right, go in.” The stout man looked at Simeon quizzically and said, “Ah, yes.” He beckoned him to a chair in front of the desk.

  “Your papers.”

  Simeon handed him his passport and resident’s card.

  “You’re an American. What were you doing in a political demonstration in France?”

  “I wasn’t in it, I was passing by.”

  “Why were you arrested?”

  “I tried to help a woman with a baby who was being clubbed by a policeman. I got hit on the head from behind, and woke up in a police van on its way here.”

  The man studied Simeon. His round face was not unpleasant. “You could be expelled from France, you know. You’re here as a guest, you have no right to interfere in our politics.”

  Simeon said nothing. The man looked at his papers again, noting Simeon’s name and other details. He looked up at Simeon.

  “Promise me you won’t interfere in any other demonstrations.”

  “I should hope there won’t have to be any other demonstrations like that.”

  The man flushed. Realizing that Simeon had avoided making the promise, he said:

  “You understand, I know something about your problems. I’ve been reading in the newspapers about the troubles in the schools. You understand, we like Negroes here, we don’t practice racism in France, it’s not like the United States. We can understand why you prefer to live here. We wouldn’t like to have to expel you.”