by Annie Hawes
I don’t like to seem selfish, I say, but is there any chance that these armed Islamists will have it in for European travellers like ourselves?
Ali laughs at the very idea. Of course not. This is between Algerians, he says, echoing Samir back in Italy. Nothing to do with foreign tourists.
Soon, true to his word, Ali drops us off, with much well-wishing, at a crossroads bus stop twenty or thirty miles down the road.
Baraka Allahu fik, we say, in correct Moroccan-Maghreb style. Will it be the right thing to say here, too? Yes: a triumph. Ali, naturally enough, answers with yet another unfamiliar expression, but at least he doesn’t laugh.
Here at the crossroads, exactly the same thing happens as at our last bus stop. We enjoy the spring greenery, the almond trees to one side of us, the olive groves to the other, the warm sunshine, and the company of plenty of nice people who wish they had enough room to give us a lift and have no idea when the next bus is coming. I’m hardly bothered anyway. I’ve found a rather comfortable rock to sit on, next to a clover patch with a lot of bees buzzing around it, and asked to borrow Gérard’s new Little Cunning One for my entertainment and enlightenment, causing controversy to break out between him and Guy. Gérard is now scowling at me as if it was my fault. Surely he didn’t seriously intend to try and conceal his sins right the way through Algeria? Once we reach Algiers and turn south, he and Guy still have another 2,000 kilometres of Algeria to cross before they reach the Malian frontier and throw it away. I know this for a fact, because it says so, under ‘Géographie’, right here at the front of the book.
After a while, I find that the bees have begun to focus their attentions less on the clover than on my T-shirt. It is, indeed, a sort of cloverish pink but, I would imagine, a lot less nutritious than the plant itself. Still, man does not live by bread alone – and I daresay something similar applies to bees.
Our bucolic how-do-you-do-to-every-passer-by scenario reaches a climax of oddity when a small, wiry-looking man on a motorbike pulls in beside us. The fact that he is riding the bike in a jellaba, with an orange chèche wound doughnut-style round his head in place of a helmet, does not decrease the oddness quotient. We chat for some minutes of this and that, thoroughly covering the classical topics: our provenance, our destination, the weather conditions, along with a new addition – the unfortunate laws of physics that prevent four people and three bags fitting onto a motorbike. Now, friendship having developed thus far, our interlocutor decides that obviously we need to come and see his home before we travel any further.
Do we?
Yes, we certainly do. We are here to see Algeria, are we not? His is an historic house. He will go back there now and get his cousin Hamid, who has a car. Hamid will bring us to the house; we will all have some coffee; and then he will take us back onto the bus route, but several kilometres further on. Yes? D’accord?
Yes indeed! It seems possible that the Algerians may even outdo the Moroccans for hospitality. And we haven’t had any coffee for days.
The man on the motorbike shakes all of our hands with a grip of steel, announcing that his name is Khaled, before taking off in style, chèche-tail and jellaba flying in the slipstream, to fetch the cousin. Within five minutes, our friend is back, riding in cavalcade with the cousin behind him in an old black Citroën, the fish-faced kind of Citroën that hisses and rises up alarmingly by several inches when you turn on the ignition.
Hamid is altogether a much larger and more expansive man than his cousin, with an impressively curling moustache. Flanked by our motorbike outrider, we set off down a long, straight tree-lined side-road. Soon we are driving through another perfect vineyard, heading for a stand of taller trees. Rounding the trees, we come face to face with the house, and stand amazed. We are in the gravel forecourt of a massive French-colonial villa, all plaster curlicues and colonnaded front doors, high windows with intricate mouldings and green-slatted shutters, narrow pagoda-roofed verandas. No wonder they want to show the place off to every passer-by they come across! Major surprise, all the more so since neither of the cousins gives the impression of being especially well-heeled.
We don’t go in through the main door, though, but round the side of the building, passing through a beautifully kept kitchen garden between the main building and a row of outhouses, and in through a smaller, side door. Do our hosts just work here, maybe? Along a low corridor with lots of doorways in it now. These must be the servants’ quarters, where the kitchens and suchlike will be – but no, we are ushered straight on, to stop at a pair of gleaming brass-handled mahogany double doors. Hamid opens them with a flourish, and we step into so much light and space that I can hardly make sense of it at all. An absolutely enormous room with a high ornate ceiling from which four great glass chandeliers hang, the sunlight sparkling off them, while four massive French windows give onto a terrace with a broad and beautiful view across vineyards, fruit trees, rolling fields, cypress trees, and yet more vineyards stretching right off into the distance. The floor in here is of polished wooden parquet; the glass in the French windows is bevelled; the walls are mirrored and intricately moulded-and-corniced. Surely this must once have been a ballroom?
The furnishing somewhat confuses the issue, though. In each corner there are two or three sofas, set at right angles to one another and dwarfed by their majestic surroundings. In the huge space in the centre, half a dozen small children are playing, while two slightly older ones race around them, skidding across the parquet on a sheepskin.
We all take our seats on the brown velour suite in the nearest corner. The one opposite us, fifteen yards away, is a peculiarly vibrant shade of purple. There is a rather antique-looking TV set beside us, a long, low coffee table and – naturally – a brazier to one side, where the water already simmers for our coffee. From here, we can see two youths out on the terrace, tools spread around them, fixing a Vélosolex bike under the shade of a vine-leaf pergola. It gives me a momentary pang of homesickness.
What do we think of the house, then? ask the cousins gleefully, though certainly they have already seen that we’re gratifyingly gobsmacked.
This ballroom, they explain, is now a living room, or rather, four living rooms – a corner each for four families, hence the many three-piece suites. Each corner has its own TV, too, I now see, and its own brazier. The room is so enormous I don’t suppose they ever get annoyed by one another’s choice of TV programme. There is still ample space in the centre for the communal nursery area, where another four children have now joined the others to sit observing, wide-eyed, the fascinating foreigners.
The place is amazing, we all agree. Incroyable! What luxury! And do the fields and the vineyards go with the house?
They certainly do, and the flour-mill and winery round at the side, too. We’ll go and inspect the premises after our coffee. Khaled’s and Hamid’s families moved in here once the French owners had run off. No point leaving it lying empty, was there? Six families live in here now, where once there was only one. Two more in the outbuildings we passed on the way in, since the next generation has started to grow up and marry. All of them, all the estate’s employees, used to live in the cottages to the side of the mansion, but this is much better! A beautiful place, isn’t it?
It certainly is. And it’s touching to see how pleased and proud the new proprietors still are, thirty years after the French exodus. I can’t help but wonder what the old owners of the estate would make of their ballroom being put to such a use, though. Imagine if they could see it now, full of farmers in jellabas, tangles of playing children and smoking charcoal braziers. Not to mention a bunch of scruffy European travellers. I’d love to be a fly on the wall.
12
Hamid’s and Khaled’s families had worked on the vineyards, they tell us, for four whole generations – and the other two families who ran the flour-mill as well. So when the patrons vanished, and the manager too – just upped and left without so much as a goodbye and farewell to the Algerian staff they had lived amongst
all their lives – the families took the estate over themselves. And believe it or not, no Frenchman has ever set foot in here since then – until today!
This last remark has, to my mind, rather worrying undertones of Chefchaouen and its Christian visitors. I fear that the first Frenchmen to view these premises since independence aren’t necessarily going to have an easy ride of it. But Gérard and Guy, apparently unperturbed, politely thank our hosts for the honour that has been accorded them. And Guy says, very formally, that he hopes to behave better than the last members of his nation to occupy this room.
Well, as long as you say goodbye when you’re leaving, says Hamid jovially, and don’t sneak out as if you thought we were planning to cut your throats!
Ouch!
Ah, says the quiet Khaled, the patrons, the owners, were good enough people at heart, which is more than can be said for the estate manager. But a lot of water has passed under the bridge since then. Nowadays, instead of just supporting four families, one of them in luxury, the estate supports ten families sharing equally – and they still live better than ever they did in the old days!
It took their parents months to even think of moving in here after the patrons had gone, Khaled tells us, passing us our glasses of coffee. Their mothers and sisters went on respectfully cleaning the place from top to bottom every week. For the benefit of nobody. It was Khaled and Hamid, just teenagers at the time, who suggested it. Their fathers were still in shock for the whole first year, it was all so sudden. Even though they were running the business themselves now, they still couldn’t believe they had a right actually to use the bosses’ old homes!
It’s true, says Hamid. Almost a year to learn that we truly were our own masters. But we’ve become a lot quicker-witted since then!
I take a sip of my coffee now, and it’s extraordinary. It tastes absolutely nothing like the coffee I’ve been expecting, and looking forward to immensely, after the last few tea-loaded days, but even so, I love it. Which is a serious accolade. It’s perfumed and spicy, with a flavour that is strangely familiar, although I can’t pin it down.
Delicious, I say, taking another large swig. What is the extra ingredient?
A kind of seed-pod, ground up – but Khaled only knows the name in Arabic. He passes me a little wooden container, beautifully carved, to sniff at.
Cardamom! That’s what it is. I’ve never heard of mixing cardamom in coffee, but it is an inspiration. Another recipe to remember. Wonder how it would go down with the fried-egg brik? A whole breakfast menu to take home with me already!
Two women have followed the last wave of children into the room, one of them veiled with one of those little white triangles, the other with a khimar draped to hide most of her face. They don’t say hello, but go and sit in the farthest corner of the room, calling the children over to them. Aren’t we going to be introduced? Nobody’s taking any notice of them at all. Is this Islamic good manners? Or is it just the etiquette of a multiple living room: you pretend you can’t see one another? Dare I ask who the ladies are? Best not. For all I know, since you aren’t allowed to ask how people’s wives are, there may be some other unimaginable rule where you have to pretend they are invisible if you haven’t been introduced.
Still, they must have put the veils on because of us lot. People don’t go around veiled in their own homes, do they? This is terrible – we’re inconveniencing them in their own living room, and ignoring them into the bargain. But then, maybe it’s normal to them? What a ridiculous amount of thinking you have to do, in a culture where you have hardly any bearings at all.
Khaled is pouring out our second glass of coffee now – do coffees come in threes as well? – while Hamid tells us the tale of the vanishing French owners. Nobody knew what was meant to happen next, he says. Then, just as their fathers were wondering how on earth they were supposed to pay the extra hands they would need for the ven dange, or whether they would have to leave the grapes to rot on the vines, word finally came through from the new Algerian government, the Front for National Liberation, that all property abandoned by French proprietors now belonged to the state. And that all Algerian patriots should do their best to keep the ex-French businesses running if they possibly could, to keep their new nation functioning and solvent.
So here they were, employees in a state collective all of a sudden, and this house a state building too, running the whole show themselves, without a single Frenchman to order them about!
Joy and exhilaration at first, says Khaled, and then the nightmare began! Because it was not just their own patrons here that had left, it was all of them. Every last Frenchman was off: 800,000 of them. All the management of every business in Algeria! And most of the technicians, too. There was nobody there any more. All gone.
And, says Hamid the ebullient, his and Khaled’s families could keep the fields and vineyards going, no problem, but they knew nothing about what happened to the produce they grew. Their fathers could hardly read and write, never mind their mothers. And when they finally realized they’d better break into the office to get some information – dared smash a window to get into the house of Masselier, the estate manager – he turned out to have burnt all the books! Orders, receipts, accounts, everything – nothing left to work from but a pile of ashes in the fireplace.
It may be hard to imagine, says Khaled, but none of their parents had ever touched a telephone in their lives. He and Hamid, a pair of teenagers, had to pick up the phones – not that they’d ever used one before, either, but they had the courage of youth on their side! – and try to find out about wine wholesalers, transport, shipping. Whereupon they discovered that, all over Algeria, there was hardly anybody left trying to keep everything going, but other ignoramuses like themselves.
We had office workers, porters, cleaners even, says Khaled, trying to keep whole businesses running – people with no training, and hardly any education. The management everywhere had been French alone, for over a hundred years! Nobody knew if they were coming or going, or had any more experience of running their companies than Khaled’s and Hamid’s families did. Worse still, a lot of the patrons had destroyed whatever they could as they left, just to make the job harder. Like the estate manager here, an evil man.
The pieds-noirs didn’t just wreck their own businesses, either, but schools, libraries, hospitals, all over the country. Their parting shot. In spite of the fact that their own General de Gaulle had agreed that everything would be left in good order. France had admitted that the situation was her own fault, anyway, and agreed to help the country rebuild. What was the point in making it harder for Algeria to get back on its feet?
But the pieds-noirs hated their own government almost as much as they hated the Algerians, says Hamid. Maybe more. They wanted their army to stay here and go on fighting till every last one of us was destroyed. Who knows who they thought was going to do the dirty work in this country if they succeeded! Anyhow, if this estate hadn’t had the flour-mill to keep it going that first autumn – because at least everybody needs bread and couscous, and a sack of flour is easy to sell! – they and their families would all have gone very hungry indeed.
Something tells me that Guy is not going to bother mentioning his family’s Algerian connections just now. I certainly wouldn’t, in his place. I wonder, did his relations go around vandalizing as they left? Would they have told Guy if they had?
As Khaled passes us our third coffee, the two women in the corner get up, calling a selection of children to them, and head for the door. Still no salutations as they pass us on their way out – not even to Khaled and Hamid – though several of the children, trailing behind, come and hide behind the sofa to get a better look at us, and one daring little boy jumps onto Hamid’s lap.
Khaled gives us a conspiratorial grin as the women leave. Those are his and Hamid’s mothers, he says. They were too shy to say hello – they hardly speak any French – but they certainly got a good long look, didn’t they?
They certainly did. Evident
ly there is more than one use to a veil.
Now, the two grandmothers having left, Khaled’s wife comes into the room in their place. A childcare shift system? Or just curiosity? This time we are introduced. The wife, not veiled, shakes all our hands, but no names are exchanged. And now, disappointingly, she goes off to sit alone in the far corner, like the grannies did. If this is proper Maghreb social etiquette, I can certainly see why my bearded enemy back in Oujda was so exercised about his womenfolk’s free and easy behaviour. They were breaking every rule in the book.
But then, if women don’t mix socially with men here, what does that make me, sitting here among them? Do I not count as a woman? Would I be allowed to go over and sit with Khaled’s wife instead, maybe? But no; she might be horrified. Embarrassed. And not speak French anyway. Best stay put.
Another two children have come to clamber on Hamid. It’s certainly starting to get overcrowded in here these days, he says, ruffling the hair of one, while the other whacks at him with a vine-twig. Who knows where all these grandchildren will fit in, once they start growing up?
Your ballrooms, says Gérard, are overflowing! Is this what people mean when they talk about the housing crisis in Algeria?
Khaled laughs, as he is meant to, but Hamid doesn’t think it’s funny. We should wait till we see the big cities here, bidonvilles sprouting up everywhere, people sleeping in shifts because there’s nowhere for them to go – and the government cutting back on its building programme, too – before we make such jokes, he says, disapprovingly. Obviously there isn’t enough work here on the estate for all the next generation – and what will happen then?
We head off to check out the vineyards now the coffee drinking’s over. Nobody acknowledges Khaled’s wife as we leave. I try giving her a friendly wave as I go. She looks positively alarmed, and makes no response at all. Oh well.
Out of the side door again, and in among the vines. The motorbike-repairing boys have vanished from the terrace, though we can hear roaring engine-noises somewhere among the vegetation.
