by Annie Hawes
Hamida and Mohammed will walk me to the bus-stop, they say, where I can catch a bus back to the centre. Her father’s bakery is right opposite: we can stop in and say hello. And tomorrow we must meet up in town, in her lunch hour, if I’d like to come and meet the girls she works with?
Her broken lift, she says as we wind our way around it on the long trek down the stairs, is a symbol of the new world order. Once there was space for a Third World country to manoeuvre: play off one superpower against another, survive in the interstices – even to have modern homes with working lifts. Not any more. The Soviet Union has died, the lift manufacturers exist no longer – asset-stripped, no doubt, by some Russian free-marketeer. No spare parts. There will be no working lift here again – until Algeria is back on her feet. If that ever happens. The jury is still out. Will the Islamists win, and send her country back to the dark ages? Will its present leaders succeed in selling it off piecemeal? Please God there is some chance of Algerians standing up to both, owning their own democratic country and running it for themselves, with full rights for all citizens – including women. And functioning lifts!
Before we leave the building, Hamida stops to tie one of those white beaky kerchiefs over the lovely smile. These days, she says, you’re not safe round here without it. I walk out onto the street with a new Hamida, one who has become invisible, just like all the other invisible women in this place.
How fortunate I am to come from a continent where beards are a matter of indifference! In Morocco, people who grow them come under attack. Here in Algeria, on the other hand, it is those who would remove them that get a hard time. Opposite the bus-stop, three workmen are fitting steel blinds to the window of the barber’s shop a few doors along from Hamida’s father’s bakery. The barber’s windows have already been broken three times, Mohammed tells me excitedly. The Islamists do not take kindly to a man making his living from the removal of facial hair.
Hamida’s father, Zayed, is busy indoors, wearing a white apron and an interesting hat made of folded newspaper, oddly similar to the paper boats I used to fold as a child. No idea whether this is an eccentricity of his own, or normal baker’s wear here in Algiers. He is supervising the making of tomorrow morning’s croissants, and his three floury young assistants stand rolling up the little triangles of dough, broad end first; a quick bend to give it the moon-shape – its name means ‘crescent moon’ – and set it on the tray. Now it can sit and rise till morning. Obvious though it is once you’ve seen it done, I had no idea till this moment that a croissant started life as a triangle.
Zayed, a vibrant bundle of grey-moustachioed energy, shoves a bun into his grandson’s hand and takes us all to sit outside the shop, chatting nineteen to the dozen. In the twenty minutes it takes for my bus to arrive, he manages to give me his opinion upon almost every topic under the sun – as well as acting out for my benefit the knockabout comedy version of his famous role in the Algerian Revolution: a tale in which he and his comrades thoroughly outsmarted the French army, who were recruiting what they believed was a fifth column of Algerians sympathetic to their cause – natives they would train up as commandos and use to infiltrate the enemy. So self-delusional were these French officers that they had no notion that almost every member of the group was in fact a supporter of National Liberation. And the few who weren’t, says Zayed, were merely ignorant. It didn’t take five minutes to show them that they had no possible interest in keeping Algeria French. So, after a period of intensive training, the entire commando absconded one fine night, well fed, well trained, twice as muscular as before, privy to the plans of the enemy, and bearing with them the precious weapons and ammunition, of which their own nationalist side was extremely short! Great days! he adds enthusiastically – to a reproving look from his daughter. No, well, terrible days really, of course . . . he says, toning it down for the sake of the children.
Zayed has also shared with his daughter and me the theory of a friend of his, first expounded to him last night, according to which today’s Islamism springs from the same sources as the right-wing Christian movements that overtook Italy and Spain in the 1930s. He races indoors to find the typed sheets the friend left for him, riffling through the chaos of papers around his ancient brass till, eventually returning triumphant. Here! Look, he says, brandishing the document at Hamida. See this bit: ‘. . . preoccupation with community decline, humiliation and victimhood . . . compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity . . .’ It fits, doesn’t it! And this bit about ‘pursuing with redemptive violence goals of internal cleansing’. Eh? He’s right, isn’t he? And look here: ‘abandoning democratic liberties, seeking charismatic leaders, strong men to lead the nation to its true destiny’! That’s like the Islamists wanting to bring back the djema’a – chosen by other wise men, supposed to heal the rifts in the nation! Do we not see it? It’s identical, says Zayed excitably. Both nations were only too aware of their former greatness – the mighty Spanish Empire, the glorious Republic of Rome – but reduced, like the Islamic world today, to humiliating poverty and backwardness, to licking the boots of the rich . . .
On the bus at last, riding back through the grey suburbs towards the brilliant white of the centre, I certainly have plenty to mull over: Franco, Mussolini, my old friend Salazar . . . It is true that their supporters were seeking a return to a fantasized world of moral order and social harmony. The modern evil of individualism, they believed, could be stamped out by eliminating democracy, exalting the family, and putting women back under male tutelage. Salazar’s new constitution of 1933, I recall, proclaimed everyone in Portugal equal before the law ‘except for women, due to their nature and for the good of the family’. Sections of the educated middle classes in Europe, as here in the Maghreb, sought to heal the social breakdown of the 1930s depression by imposing their notion of a contented past where everyone knew their place.
Does the parallel hold any further? Alas, I have little energy left for mulling purposes. I can’t decide. I am exhausted. So far, the day has been the exact opposite of the peaceful battery-charging one I had envisaged.
Back in the centre of town, at our pavement café, things start to look up. Guy has arrived before me, and is sitting quietly engrossed in a newspaper. I collapse onto the chair next to him and order a tea. Bad mistake: I should have said an Algerian tea. I have been taken for a Frenchwoman, and the waiter now delivers me a cup of lukewarm water wherein a weak teabag-on-a-string lies, floating limply. The ghastly French version of my – and, of course the Algerians’ – national beverage.
Guy has been back here for hours, he says. And he hasn’t managed to see the inside of his parents’ old home. He lost his nerve. He stood outside, walked past it, walked back the other way, stood outside again. He realized that part of him had never really believed it existed. He could hardly take on board how identical it was to the photos that have been hanging on his parents’ walls all his life, to the reels of old eight-mil film his father pulls out at Christmas for family get-togethers. It’s just a little apartment house with internal balconies round a courtyard in the centre, four flats around it. His grandparents lived in one of them, his parents in another, the third one had a dentist, Monsieur Gaillard, and the fourth, he can’t remember. They did the laundry outside in the courtyard. There’s a bit of film with them posing there, all laughing, the washing line behind them, and a huge banana palm in a pot. Today there seemed to be dozens of people going in and out – the housing crisis here must really be serious if that many people are living in one small building! He saw only women and children there, though, and he wasn’t sure about the protocol for approaching an unknown woman, who maybe didn’t speak French and wouldn’t know why he was accosting her. He might end up getting lynched, he thought. The banana tree was still there, and so big now that he could spot it down the hallway as people came and went. He wondered whether to ring a doorbell, but in the end he just went and sat in the café over the road – a café that used to be run by a certain Pierre le Moche, wh
o also stars in the family’s film archive, an inveterate card-player with huge moustache and jowls – and drank a beer and stared. Of course, there was no Pierre le Moche there either – he must have left along with everyone else. Maybe it’s a bad idea to go there, anyway? Does he really want to overlay his own phantom memories with some other family’s reality? Assuming they would let him in at all, that is. It seemed impossible that he should think it had anything to do with him, when all those people so obviously had their own busy lives going on in it. Then he started worrying how they might see him. They might think he’d come because he imagined he had some rights over the place. Anyway, it was all too much. He decided to come back here, have another beer while he thought it all over. Maybe he’ll try again tomorrow . . . ?
A coffee or two later, a flashy little car pulls up before us with a squeal of brakes, and who should step out of it but Gérard, looking very pleased with himself. The driver climbs out too: a young woman dressed in ultra-European style, skin-tight jeans with tons of make-up and even more tons of jewellery. From the back seat appears a slightly harassed-looking Frenchman – who must be the teacher, Jean-Pierre. They join us, and we are introduced. The young woman, Farida, is the daughter of the headmaster, and one of Jean-Pierre’s pupils at the lycée. She was coming to this very bar to meet some friends, so she insisted on dropping them off. Farida is quite alarmingly full-on; she is en cheveux with a vengeance, masses of curls flowing down her back, and an amount of cleavage on view that would be make her an object of some interest even in liberal Europe. Within minutes Farida has adopted us and is planning our evening’s itinerary. As soon as her friends arrive, we’ll go for a tour round the casbah. She’ll show us the palace where the dey of Algiers slapped the French ambassador with his fan, the famous Coup d’Eventail that gave France its excuse to invade in 1830, she says, with a twinkle at Gérard and Guy. Then we’ll have dinner at the pizzeria something-or-other. Then we’ll go to a club: she knows a place where they have live cha’abi music, the popular music of Algiers; of course we must go there! Before the intégristes close the place down! If there’s one thing they hate more than Rai, it’s cha’abi!
Our visit to the walled town is quite bizarre. We leave the car behind and set off on foot up the steep, narrow streets of the casbah, famous for its poverty, overcrowding and – naturally – fundamentalism. But Farida and her friends – another girl, Lamia, also a pupil of Jean-Pierre’s, and a young man, Kamal, who seems to be quite openly gay, dressed in a floppy floral shirt, gold medallion, and jeans – appear to have no fear whatsoever of the intégristes and their works. And with reason, it seems: the group of young barbus hanging out on the steps of a mosque at an alleyway crossroads, far from spitting at them as I’m expecting, or indeed expressing disapproval or outraged morality in any way, seem terrified of her and her two friends. They turn away, muttering amongst themselves, and make no comment. Everywhere jellaba’d men shrink back into doorways as we pass up the narrow streets in our loud, golden, perfect-French-speaking aura. And when Farida decides that we absolutely must stop at a sweet stall and buy some candy-floss, the salesman keeps his eyes on the floor, and answers her cheerful sallies with a nervous whisper. It is obvious to all and sundry, we gather, that Farida and Lamia are daughters of the Pouvoir class. Even without the car, their behaviour, their perfect, accentless French and their Western dress proclaim it from the rooftops. Farida has all the self-confidence, charm and lack of self-awareness of some spoilt American prom queen. My respect for the intégristes – in so far as I had any – has sunk well below zero after this experience. And I am certainly getting a clearer idea of where the common folks’ hatred of francisants may come from.
At the top of the casbah we pause as promised to investigate the palace of the dey – home to Barbarossa in the days of his splendour. Did he set out from this very spot to rescue his beleaguered fellow Muslims from the hostile shores of Spain, and torment the Genoese vassals of Diano Marina? Nowadays the palace is a series of crumbling buildings and courtyards showing hardly a sign of their former elegance: just a patch of blue-and-white tiles with Arabic calligraphy here and there, or a set of slim, elegant pillars with intricately carved capitals supporting a fragile balcony. The dey’s hammam is dilapidated, half in ruins, like the rest of the area, though people seem to be living here anyway. Washing hangs from windows, or is strung out across bits of flat roof. There is the sound of children everywhere. A door into one of the internal courtyards hangs off its hinges. We step inside to inspect what must be an empty ruin, only to find that we are being inspected ourselves. There are children crowding every one of the four storeys of unstable and chimney-like internal balconies; there are women cooking in the courtyard amongst the debris of fallen masonry. This has only happened in the last few months, says Jean-Pierre, since people began coming in from the Mitidja, fleeing the violence. The only empty space they can find is in buildings like this – places considered too dangerous to live in by everyone else.
Farida leads us on into one of the main palace courtyards to see the plaque put up by the French, to commemorate the famous fan-slapping moment of 1827, and gives us the story of the Coup d’Eventail. The French government, she says, owed a huge debt to two Jewish merchants of Algiers, men of Moorish extraction. The Jews had loaned the French government the money to buy grain and save its skin, when the French nation was on the very brink of revolt – in 1799, wasn’t it? And the debt had still not been repaid. The French ambassador at the time was a disreputable little businessman who, when the dey mentioned this matter on behalf of his citizen subjects, showed no intention whatsoever of paying up. The dey slapped him in the face, naturally enough, and then the French demanded he apologize. He refused. And so, the French had found their excuse to invade!
Is that not right, Monsieur le Professeur? she says, turning to Jean-Pierre, who gulps and agrees that indeed it was something like that, though there are various accounts of how the situation actually developed . . .
And here you still are among us, after all this time! she interrupts gaily, opening her arms wide to encompass the French contingent.
16
The golden youth of Algiers goes everywhere by car, even if it’s only a couple of streets away. Farida seems to love nothing more than roaring at top speed through the traffic of the city centre, racing Kamal in his equally nippy little number. Perhaps that explains her lack of fear of intégristes. Hard to intimidate a woman when she’s inside a speeding metal box.
They drive us out to see the beach now, where they inveigh against the hypocrisy of the Islamists: we can’t even imagine how many dirty little barbus come to the beach all holy in their white jellabas, and minutes later there they are in a pair of floral Bermudas, ogling every bikini for miles! Then, when they come here with their children and their wives, it’s comical, they make them wear that great white haik even when they get in the water! And of course it’s ridiculous, you should see how a wet haik clings to a woman’s body, nothing at all is left to the imagination, Farida can promise us that!
In the pizzeria – jam-packed with other members of this privileged tribe – Western music is playing in the background. Prince, by the sound of it. There is not a hint of khimar or jellaba – much less of a veil. It’s hard to believe we’re in North Africa at all. Except for the conversation of Farida and friends. Kamal is now telling us the tale of a road-block he was stopped at the other day, along with his mother. The military police only got as far as her handbag, which contained a packet of cigarettes. And that was enough for them: they just waved the car on – no checking the boot for explosives or weapons as they should have done. To their minds, a woman who smoked – or at any rate, owned a packet of cigarettes – could not be an Islamist. The Algerian military is supposedly trained according to superior French techniques, he says, with a sly glance at the French guests. But obviously the French have a much less subtle grasp of bluff and double-bluff than one might have imagined.
Back i
nto the cars again, and off to the cha’abi night. A crowded upstairs bar, lots of young people, plenty of alcohol on view. Farida and Lamia seem to know everybody in here, and while they do the rounds, we get to talk to Jean-Pierre at last. He has been working in Algeria for well over a decade, he tells us, and first came here with the co-opérant movement: once the Algerians got their independence, many thousands of French students committed their first three post-degree years to helping them rebuild their country. It seemed only fair: French public opinion was reeling at the revelations coming out of Algeria. The military had made the bad mistake of torturing a Frenchman to death – a young university professor sympathetic to the Algerian cause. And the worse mistake of letting another French victim survive to tell of their systematic torture of ordinary Algerians – a tale soon corroborated by hundreds of young conscript soldiers from the small towns of France, who, lacking the racist training of the standing army in Algeria, were horrified by what they saw.
Nowadays, though, far from helping the poor, he says ruefully, he is reduced to teaching the privileged! Once the Arabization policy started, the services of French teachers were hardly in demand – unless they could teach their subject in Arabic. Jean-Pierre went off to work in Mali for a bit; but alas, he had left his heart here in Algiers. The country may be a mess, he says, but its people are the salt of the earth.
