The Guillotine Choice
Page 38
Silence shouldered this voice aside as if it had never spoken. Although I appreciated the sentiment, we didn’t need anyone to spell out what had been lost.
Papa was lowered into the hole and covered with stones and soil.
Chins on chests, everyone prayed. While I searched for the words to say goodbye to my father, I tried to ignore the nagging feeling of guilt that prodded me like a finger between my ribs… I had not been by his side to witness his last painful breath. How could I call myself son to this man?
From somewhere a breeze cooled my exposed neck. I looked over at the branches of a tree. Nothing stirred and yet the breeze persisted.
Silence reclaimed us as we walked back down to the house, where my mum and sister waited.
Mum took me in her arms as if I was once again a child and all of the emotion that I had stored up behind my numb facade was released. As if she knew exactly what I needed, she guided me to a room where I could be alone with my grief.
On a bed, I curled into the shape of a foetus and allowed sorrow to take me. For hours I lay there while my pillow grew wet and salty with tears. How does one measure grief? Do you count the tears? Do you measure the energy that seeps from your bones, while you lie as limp as a shroud?
‘You pick the flowers as a reminder of the beauty in life and you mourn until the flowers wither and die,’ a voice sounded in my mind. ‘Then you go on with the act of living. There is no other choice.’
Had I heard my dad say this? It sounded like something he would have said. My mind was a melange of images past and present. My father alive. Then a jumble of the faces that lined the outside of the house, the garage, the garden and our neighbours’ land. How many had there been? Thousands? Is that how you measure grief?
I picked at the frame of my father’s memory. What do I remember of him? Memories bleed and snap into broken chunks of jigsaw. Here, a grin. There, a bark of warning. The constant plume of cigarette smoke. Teeth marks in thick butter spread on a baguette. The spread of the eagle tattoo across his chest.
So much and so little.
He left French Guiana in the 1940s and I wasn’t born until later in the next decade. What happened during those years? A jigsaw incomplete. What filled the gaps?
I imagine him on that last day in French Guiana and wonder at how he must have felt. The emotions that would have been rioting in his mind: anticipation, fear, apprehension, joy, self-doubt. He came home to a nation still struggling under the yoke of the French, a family desperate for a leader and a wife he didn’t know, who was no longer his.
Events once again forced him to leave Algeria and it was only when I was six that I was to meet him for the first time.
More gaps in my knowledge of the man. What happened to him then? Allah clearly didn’t believe this particular man had suffered enough and offered him more difficulties to learn from.
So many gaps.
I see him in his office behind his large oak desk. The desktop has neat piles of papers arranged at intervals. A stubby cup stained with coffee is within reach. A cigarette neatly balanced on the edge of an ashtray sends a thin ribbon of smoke towards the ceiling.
All of those people out there had come to see him. What would he have made of that? Doubtless he would have shrugged, drawn on a cigarette and exhaled a comment along with the smoke, thinking them mad.
He didn’t look for thanks or appreciation. If he could help, he did. If a few words could assist someone to make sense of their life, then what was the cost to him?
I hear him again.
‘Then you go on with the act of living. There is no other choice.’
Who among us, when faced with the events of his life, would have had the courage and determination to go on with the act of living?
I wonder at his life and his legacy. His name still carries a powerful charge in the Kabylie. People remember with awe that he kept silent rather than issue the words that would have his cousin sent to the guillotine. They remember that he endured years of hard labour without complaint. That he lived with deep respect towards his culture. That he considered all to be his children.
My mind strayed again and again to that last visit. We had a passage of the moon together. A month where he waited each morning for me to wake up, a strong coffee on the table in front of him and a smile on his weathered face. He was an early riser and when he tired of waiting for me he would walk up and down the main corridor of the house, knocking his stick off the walls and coughing.
‘What are we doing today, son?’ he would ask when I stumbled through to the kitchen, swabbing sleep from my eyes.
I sat beside him, my hand ready for the coffee that I knew my mum was bringing to me, and shrugged. ‘How about we go for a drive?’
‘A drive would be good,’ he nodded and smiled. ‘I must go and pay a visit to…’ A different name formed on his lips each day. We had a large extended family and, as an important man in the region, he had many, many friends. He also had many people calling on his time and wisdom.
We spent many hours visiting his parcels of land just outside the town. There, we wandered through his olive groves and lines of orange trees, and he would pause occasionally to stroke a leaf or squeeze some low-hanging fruit. As we walked, his low voice filled my ears with words heavy with wisdom, much like the trees bursting with fruit.
We both knew that the visit to the friends was an excuse. Even if no one asked for his time, we would have gone to the car and driven; we simply wanted to spend as much time in each other’s company as was possible before the demands on my time forced me to leave. We had many years to make up for and although I didn’t know it at the time, we had little time remaining to us.
I can’t remember when I first learned that my father was sent to Devil’s Island in French Guiana for murder. However, knowledge and understanding are as wide apart as the ocean that separated my father from his family in Algeria for the long years of his incarceration.
This book is my attempt to bring understanding to that knowledge. It is my attempt to demonstrate the evils of colonialism, and it is a campaign bound in a novel to ask the French authorities for an apology for the treatment meted out to my dad.
Most important of all, it’s a son’s effort to really know his father.
Acknowledgements
MICHAEL J MALONE
I would like to thank Bashir Saoudi and the Saoudi family for granting me the privilege of writing their father’s amazing story.
Also, many thanks to Elizabeth Garrett for the gift of space and time in her writers’ retreat in Aberdeenshire, where much of this book was written.
BASHIR SAOUDI
First I would like to thank my mother for the persistence she maintained for many years until she persuaded my father to allow me to interview him. I thank her, too, for giving me an insight to his personality and helping me to get to know him better.
I would like to thank Nana Messaouda, who, despite her old age (98), remembered so many details from the day she married my father’s brother Amar. She was the source of all the missing information that my father did not share with me himself.
Also many thanks to my cousin Brahim, who introduced me to an old friend of my father’s during our time in Bezit. As it turned out, my father had left with this friend many secrets when they went out hunting together. Sharing these secrets filled in many missing pieces of this story.
I’d like to thank my brother Chérif in Paris, for all his support: for getting the taped interview written down, and for introducing me to his friends David Applefield and John Calder who believed in the story and encouraged us to publish it.
Thanks are also due to my elder brother, Tahar – the closest to our father – for his contributions in describing my father’s day-to-day habits and foibles and for sharing some of his thoughts.
I’m grateful to my ex-wife, Michelle Barnes, who lived with my father for a while, and who put up with my crazy ambition to bring this story into the world. I also thank her for giving me the deares
t three sons, Tamlan, Lias and Nathan, with whom I have discussed many aspects of this story on a regular basis.
I also would like to thank Dominique, a former French teacher in Algeria, with whom I worked on this project for two years until the complexity and depth of this story prohibited more. Her drive to help get my father’s story written was an inspiration to me.
Many thanks to my friend William McLymont for believing in the project and for encouraging me to find a way to communicate my father’s experiences to the world.
I would like to thank many friends at work in CSR for reading and commenting on the initial drafts, as well as my cousins Lamine, Djallel and Karima for helping to find so much information from different members of our family.
Finally my deepest thanks are due to Michael Malone, who has managed to make my dream of thirty years into a reality. His eye for detail, his patience and his storytelling ability have all helped to make this book everything we hoped for.
Bashir Saoudi with his mother; Kaci Mohand Saoudi.
About the Authors
Michael J Malone is a Scottish author and poet, born and brought up in the heart of Burns’ country, leading him into a career in the book world. He is the author of two crime novels and a non-fiction book, Carnegie’s Call, and has had more than 150 poems published in the UK literary press. He wrote this book in collaboration with Bashir Saoudi, a semiconductor engineer in Cambridge whose life’s dream is to see his father’s incredible story brought to a public audience before he retires to Algeria.
ALSO BY MICHAEL J. MALONE
FICTION
Blood Tears
A Taste for Malice
NON-FICTION
Carnegie’s Call
Copyright
Contraband is an imprint of Saraband
Published by Saraband
Suite 202, 98 Woodlands Road Glasgow
G3 6HB, Scotland
www.saraband.net
Copyright © Bashir Saoudi 2014
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without first obtaining the written permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN: 9781908643407
ebook: 9781908643445
Printed in the EU on sustainably sourced paper.
Editor: Craig Hillsley
Text design: Laura Jones
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