A Single Swallow

by Horatio Clare

  The people on the streets were a mixture of the secular, the religious and the westernised, at least by their dress. As many women wore jeans as headscarves. Most of the men seemed to wear leather jackets, which made them look like secret policemen. I attracted many stares, but nothing like hostility. In a bookshop, in a café, idling along above the harbour, I fell easily into half a dozen conversations: each time my interlocutor was anxious, almost desperate, to talk and be helpful. I caused a small pandemonium in the bookshop, expressing an interest in one volume which the assistant was sure he had in a better, unscuffed cover. His colleague was summoned, other customers joined in, books fell from shelves, voices were raised in exasperation: Algerians, I concluded, over the following days, give the impression of anxiety because they are perfectionists. If a man can see you doing something which he can also see could be done better he will not be able to resist telling you about it, and the longer you desist from following his advice, or the less perfectly you follow it, the louder he will inadvertently shout in attempting to assist you. The effect of this is that every now and then streets, cafés, corners or squares resound with raised voices, but what sounds like a widespread and angry dissent is in fact perfectly normal exchange.

  The sweep of Algiers leads you to the sea: the gradients flatten along the front and then, like the gentle swell of a wave, carry you up to the Kasbah. There is a small square just before the main road into it, where one swallow flew round and round a cluster of stalls in the middle. She was a female, alone, and there seemed something hectic, something lost about her, like a bat caught out by the daylight. I stopped for coffee. The stall was busy; two or three serving and an old man in charge. One imagined he had donned his old blue coat, such as grocers used to wear, every working day for years. His pate was dark brown and his eyes were black, with dark semicircles below them.

  ‘French?’ he demanded.

  ‘No – Gallois!’

  ‘Gallois . . . Tourist?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘Why have you come here?’

  ‘Just to see, to find out, I have read much about Algeria, and I have always wanted to see it.’

  ‘Ah, it’s good, it’s good. What would you like?’

  ‘Coffee, please.’

  ‘Give me a coffee here! So what do you think of Algiers?’

  ‘Formidable! It’s beautiful . . .’

  ‘Yes, yes, beautiful . . .’

  ‘Have you lived here long?’

  ‘All my life – ha! A long time.’

  ‘So you have seen a lot.’

  ‘Ha! A lot! Yes, everything. I live in the Kasbah. Have you seen the Kasbah?’

  ‘No, I am going there next. So – you remember the war?’

  ‘But of course. It was here. It was on this street. People died there, and there, shot down by the paratroopers. Did you see on the corner? There is a plaque. And another across the street. I remember the boys who died there.’

  ‘It must have been terrible . . .’

  ‘Terrible. They did us wrong.’

  ‘The soldiers?’

  ‘The French did us very wrong,’ he said, with a sorrow, not an anger, as though he was not describing an assault so much as a betrayal.

  ‘How did you – live?’

  ‘In the walls. We lived in the walls. Do you understand? We lived in the walls to survive.’

  He would not let me pay for the coffee and when we shook hands he held mine for a moment. ‘You must go into the Kasbah and see. It is good that you are here. Bon courage!’

  ‘Merci, monsieur. Et à vous aussi.’

  The war began in 1954. By 1962, when it ended, more than a million Algerians had died, six French governments had been brought down by it, de Gaulle had been returned to power to face it, and his solution to it, the eventual return of Algeria to the Algerians, had come extraordinarily – amazingly, it seems now – close to bringing a civil war to French soil, as entire regiments of the French army in Algeria mutinied against what they saw as a surrender which made meaningless all the terrible things they had done, and betrayed all those they had lost.

  The war in the Kasbah – called the Battle of Algiers – can be seen as the paradigmatic heart of the conflict. Up and down the tiny streets, which seem to wind, rise and fall in three dimensions through the packed, stacked, clay-coloured nest of this ancient town within a town, a maze of tiny doors, peeping windows and secret staircases, French paratroopers and the Front de Libération National engaged in a pitiless struggle. By all the rules of insurgency, in the midst of a hostile population, against an enemy that was born to the battlefield, the French, not long since defeated in Vietnam, should have lost the Battle of Algiers. But they did not, and this has come to be seen by the mighty but mired occupying armies of our own time as the terrible lesson of Algeria: the model of how guerrillas can be beaten on their own ground. The formula is as simple as the great negation of evil itself. You win by torture and summary execution.

  A paratrooper, Pierre Leuillette, recorded his experiences in an interrogation centre, in a disused sweet factory.

  All day, through the floorboards, we heard their hoarse cries, like those of animals being slowly put to death. Sometimes I think I still hear them . . . All these men disappeared . . .

  The numbers of the disappeared are still disputed. From the summer of 1956 when FLN fighters gunned down forty-nine civilians over three days in June, to the end of March 1957, around 3,000 men and women were seized and killed, many having first been tortured. Had the FLN won the battle it is likely the war would have ended that year: instead it continued for another five.

  Before she was killed in 2006 the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya wrote about what she called the Chechenisation of Russian society. The horrors Russia visited on the little republic have warped and perverted Russia’s own soul, she said: in killing and torturing, beyond any law or justification, Russia has carved a capacity for numbness at horror and debasement into its national psyche. Something similar seems to have begun to happen to France: the difference was that those who spoke and wrote about it did not themselves become state targets. French soldiers, writers and intellectuals drew parallels between French methods in Algeria and those of the Gestapo. Something in the heart of morale, any army’s ultimate weapon, died in the torture chambers, in the shallow graves, in the body-dumpings at sea, in ‘the work in the woods’, as the soldiers called the business of secret execution. In crushing the Kasbah, all sides later agreed, France won the Battle of Algiers and lost the war for Algeria.

  The songs of caged goldfinches trickle sweetly through the alleys of the Kasbah. Then the rain comes, hard cold curtains sweeping in from the west, and wind: climbing steep, cracked steps I turn around and the sea seems vertiginously close, as if a backward slip would tumble you to the streaming waves. A gas tanker rides the swells, no sign of life on her, as if the crew have deserted. I duck from shelter to shelter, hiding from the rain in cafés and, once, a workshop, where an old man fondles the ears of a tiny dog. In each place I meet the same questions, the same bemusement, which each time turns to something like friendship. In three stops in the Kasbah I am warned three times to be careful in the Kasbah, as if it is a den of thieves. I see no thieves. Veiled women hurrying out of the rain, children being called in, a shouting group of sixth formers coming home from school. I will not be here long enough to gain an invitation: I can only climb steps, wander alleys, stop, start and peer and try not to be seen to pry. I keep seeing the same wry smile on the faces of the men I speak to, but I cannot quite ascribe it. Am I the first tourist of the year, a premature sign – or am I an irony?

  In my new book, Ten Walks in Algiers, a French resident of the 1920s mentions swallows. ‘They love the old Turkish walls of the Kasbah’, he says. I climb up when the clouds begin to break, and a washed white sun shines on gutters running black, into a smell of pines, and suddenly a shadow flies across the street at my feet and I know before my gaze finds them that they are here.
Two, five, seven at least – and there are the old Turkish walls and there they are – and they still love the walls of the Kasbah! The light makes their breasts and backs shine brilliantly as they throw themselves up and over the street in that way they have, as if the downbeats of their wings render them weightless, to catch and redirect themselves forward on the upswing.

  In the next three days I come to know their habits. A small population of ‘our’ swallows, Barn Swallows, breed on the North African coast. Among those I watch in Algiers, some appear to be prospecting for nest sites: there is no other explanation for their attachment to certain parts of the city. In the coffee shop square the lone female now has companions; higher up three or four birds hunt a particular switchback street near the Kasbah walls, and then one morning in a sun bright as knives, which would have been hot were it not for the wind, I find others between the city and the shore. These do not seem to be prospecting. They are on their way north, I guess, and feeding up for the flight across the sea.

  The long white arcade pullulates with people and the traffic is thick on the road beside it, overlooking the port, and the square around the corner is packed. I am coming to terms with the city’s strange rhythm. Friday is mosque day so everyone is off, which means Thursday night is a bit like Friday night in the West. Saturday is off and the week starts again on Sunday, unless you are on a European time, which much of the city is, in which case you do not go to work until Monday. If I lived here, I daydream, I would only work Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday: the rest I would give to writing, reading, walking and making love.

  In Algiers whoever is young and alive finds sanctuary and occasion for triumphs everywhere: in the bay, the sun, the red and white games on the seaward terraces, the flowers and the sports stadiums, the cool-legged girls.

  The intense physical beauty of Algiers, which Camus caught perfectly, still sings through the movements of people: in the way they carry themselves, the way they look at you and each other – the moment-to-moment seems very vivid here; a migrant such as I can only speculate but it is as though years of unemployment and war and horror have culled people’s faith from the future and focused their concern on the present.

  Or perhaps it is only that this is such a sparkling late morning, and that coffee tastes particularly rich in the mouth and cigarette smoke particularly satisfying; that the ship docking at the quay is particularly huge and its manoeuvres particularly delicate. The rushes of sea wind seem to fan the sunlight and brighten the glare. And the swallows – were they human you would have said they were high on it all: dozens, darting in and out of the colonnades, flinging themselves into the traffic, dodging buses and scooters with equal unconcern, sling-shooting themselves in the strongest wind at the corner, whipping back 90 feet only to skew sideways and back under the arcade. All the thousands of miles they have flown seem to have distilled into confidence: there is an exultation in their speed and fitness, as though they are playing in the waves of the air, as though they have mastered all they have crossed: the savannahs and hills, the storms of the forests, the deserts, the mountains – as though they have conquered Africa. I stood at the corner grinning like a fool and watched them dive into the square. Suddenly they were down, no more than 3 feet from the floor, cutting through the crowd at leg-level. Either they played, flew for fun or were showing off to each other – this could be courtship or celebration. They do indeed find sanctuary and occasion for triumphs in every square inch of the air.

  I begin to walk along the sea front, determined to follow it westwards until my legs give out. Many men, women and children appear to have had the same idea, or, at least, to have been drawn to the sea. Perhaps it is the weather. Couples sit on benches, not quite canoodling. Families straggle, women lean on balustrades, men fish: it is as though in crossing the road between the city and the sea one steps into a municipal holiday. I walk into one of the many bands of boys playing football on one of the terraces.

  ‘Hey!’ one of them says.

  ‘Hey yourself!’ I return, and am instantly surrounded by children.

  ‘Who are you?’

  I tell them my name.

  ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘Wales.’

  ‘What is Wales? Where is it?’

  I explain. They look dubious. Then one boy brightens suddenly, with an excited smile and a cry: ‘Manchester United – Ryan Giggs!’

  ‘Yes!’ I say, equally thrilled. ‘Ryan Giggs!’

  It is not the first time someone has made this connection between the strange and the celebrated, the obscure and the familiar. It has been first a curiosity to me, then a suspicion, then a certainty that throughout Africa it is an absolute fact that the Land of Song, the armoury and workshop of the Industrial Revolution, the country of Snowdon, Gareth Edwards, the Arms Park (as was), the Great Thomases – R. S. and Dylan – the Dragon and Charlotte Church exists only in answer to a question about English football. This is: if England are so rubbish at football, especially compared to the wonders of its Premier League, why on earth do they not put Ryan Giggs on the left wing?

  Ah – some Man. U. fanatic must have answered a thousand times, in a thousand football conversations, in a thousand distant villages and towns – because Ryan Giggs is . . .

  ‘Do you play football?’ another boy demands.

  ‘Ah. Not really, I’m afraid – I’m a bit rubbish. I play rugby though – do you like rugby? It’s the national sport of Wales.’

  They were not in the least interested in this.

  ‘Oh, come on! Play with us!’

  I do my best but become rapidly frustrated at being effortlessly dispossessed by Algerian nine-year-olds, laughing cynically as they do so and calling me ‘Reean Geeggs’. In the end I pick up the ball and charge an imaginary try-line.

  They let me go after that, to walk on and ponder that if the homeland you love has to exist merely as a trivia point subordinate to a sportsman it is a great and fitting consolation that he should be the Zidane of the touchline, the Cantona of the cross-in, that human burst of speed and grace – Giggsy.

  Next I meet the friendliest secret policeman in Algeria. I am sceptical at first. He hails me from the other side of the road. I greet him in return but he shouts again, dodges through the traffic and accosts me by the sea wall. He wears jeans and a pale jacket, a wide smile on his thin face.

  ‘Don’t worry!’ he cries. ‘It is OK, I am a security man – I am here for your security.’

  This phrase is beginning to irk me.

  ‘My security is fine, thank you,’ I say, and make as if to move off.

  ‘Do you know people used to live down there?’ He points to a cluster of shacks and houses built below the wall, just above the sea, on collapsing pillars.

  ‘And there are some still there, but there used to be lots – fishermen – do you see?’

  ‘I do, yes,’ I say, and surrender, gracelessly, to a conversation he seems over-keen to have.

  ‘You are not the only tourist, no, no!’ he says, when I ask him if I am some sort of rarity. ‘They come in the summer, now, Italians and French.’

  ‘The French? Isn’t it strange for them?’

  ‘Strange, no – why?’

  ‘Because of the war.’

  ‘No, no. This is all in the past! We do not live there now. Every nation does bad things, doesn’t it? Every people in history, but we have to forgive. We do not hold anything against the French. I like the French! Do you know, there were French people here during the war who were kind to us, who helped us? Who hid people the soldiers were looking for? Well, there were. There is an old French couple who are my friends who have always lived here. They love it here, they say they never want to leave. And they know they are welcome here – and you are welcome here! We are very happy to see you in Algiers.’

  In the hotel that night I ask a man in a big leather jacket for a light. Ali is smoking a cigar. We talk, and he looks distressed that anyone should contemplate eating in the dining room when
there are better places in town. We are soon in a taxi, whose driver Ali knows, and then in a dark street near the port where Ali rings a bell. A door opens, cautiously at first, then is flung wide when he is recognised. Inside, we pass through light and warmth and a press of men drinking beer to a staircase which leads up to a room in which men and women crowd around a U-shaped counter, which surrounds a smoking grill. We eat succulent lamb chops and drink lager as Ali talks of the wonders of Algeria I will not have time to see. The Kabyle, he says, in the north-west, is like Paradise. Fruit trees, orchards, valleys of flowers, sharp-crested mountains, virgin coves fringing a crystalline sea: ‘You must go to the Kabyle!’ he cries. ‘But you must go with me or someone who knows it, a good driver, because there is still trouble there. They hate the Pouvoir.’

  And Oran, he said, you must go to Oran, and beyond, round and down into the desert, where his family lived, I would always be welcome there. Ali was a businessman; I was never quite clear what his business was, exactly, except that it took him to France, to Lyons, often, and to Marseilles, which he loved because it was like Algiers, and to our hotel, where he stayed when he was in town.