The Mysteries of Algiers

by Robert Irwin

  Something simple. Wait till night. I know the routine of the guard on the walls. Wait till the guard has passed, then over the wall and drop on to the dark desert below. Ha! ha! Just having my little joke. It is a forty-foot drop from the walls. A lot of people, even some of the pieds noirs on the coast who should know better, think the Sahara is all softly rolling sand dunes. Well the Legion never builds a fort on a softly rolling sand dune. It’s scrub and hard stone for about half a mile around at least. I’d break my leg.

  Really bursting for that pee. Got it. Got it! I wait up here until the next trooper comes along. Then I urinate on his head. Then when they come for me I feign insanity. My God! By now, I’m not sure it would be entirely feigned. The objection is of course that they would sweat that nonsense out of me fast enough in a few sessions of rock ’n’ roll, breast stroke and sodium pentothal. I’m hungry. It would be pleasant to think about a hot meal, but I keep thinking that the next thing that is likely to enter my stomach will be a long rubber tube.

  Every solution I have come up with is ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous. Stuff from the adventures of the Three Musketeers or some other juvenile wet dream. But I am going to have to make a run for it soon and it will be by using one of these absolutely ridiculous schemes. The question is, which?

  Chapter Eight

  I come off my ledge. There’s an officer’s toilet at the top of the stairs. I have a pee. I am so nervous that some of it goes over my trousers. I count my ammunition.

  It’s evening when I come out on to the parade ground. A few men are standing around smoking. I try not to look at them. I lean against a shadowed doorway. I still don’t know what to do, but I am waiting for inspiration to come – or anything reasonably close to inspiration. I see Corporal Buchalik fiddling around with one of the jeeps. I put my hands in my pockets and stroll over. I adopt a faintly bullying voice.

  ‘Is everything all right with that jeep, Corporal?’

  ‘Just the clutch is a bit stiff. I thought I might – My God! Captain Roussel! I thought you were –’

  ‘No, I’m fine, as you can see. The security exercise is over now. Have you got the keys? I’m requisitioning this jeep.’

  ‘Yes, but –’

  ‘Hand them over, Corporal: I need the jeep now.’

  I get in without waiting. He passes me the keys but he is bursting with doubts and questions.

  ‘We were told you’d been shot – and the colonel. You’ll need to see the major before you take the jeep out. No one is going through the gates until further notice. Can you –’

  ‘The exercise is over, Corporal.’ I have the ignition on now. ‘You and your men will get your briefing on the whole operation tomorrow morning. I’m fine and the colonel’s fine.’

  ‘Here! Hold on a minute! I saw the colonel’s body, it was – Captain, wait.’

  That was a mistake that last touch. The jeep lurches across the courtyard with Corporal Buchalik running after it. At the gate, there is more argy-bargy.

  ‘Sergeant Hughes, something’s come up. I want the gate opened on the double. Once I’m through it, see that it stays closed and report to Major Levy for further orders.’

  The sergeant starts to unbar the gate, but he is dubious from the first. Then Buchalik comes running up. Buchalik is so vehement and excited that he starts by yelling at Hughes in Polish. Hughes is getting terribly confused. It is clear that he is having second thoughts. He is not going to swing the gates open for my jeep.

  ‘If we could just sort this out with Major Levy, sir. We seem to have got our wires crossed here.’

  Sighing heavily, I get out of the jeep and go over to Sergeant Hughes. I thrust a piece of paper into his hands – it is the agenda for the Security Panel meeting. Then, while he is puzzling over it, I shoot him. Buchalik is off like a hare in the direction of the guardroom. I don’t bother with him. But I pull one of the large gates open myself. It is ages since I have had to drive myself and the gears do not come easily to me. The thing lurches forward and lightly prangs the edge of the other gate. Then I’m back in the jeep and out into the desert.

  Stones hiss through the air, thrown up by the tyres. As I say for half a mile round the fort it is rutted gravel. We call this sort of gravelly stuff reg. The jeep jolts and thumps from rut to rut, and the teeth rattle in the head, but one can travel fast on this sort of ground. I am heading north, I think. I have left the jeep’s lights off. In a few minutes I am driving into something closer to most people’s conception of real desert. Hard-sand deep ruts radiate out from the fort crossing and criss-crossing – the tracks made by lorries. If possible in desert driving one tries to follow an older track, but if the ruts get too deep there is a risk of the central ridge damaging one’s sump. So a new track is created and then another. In the jeep’s mirror I can see arc lights switched on now on the walls of the fort, but they cannot reach so far and I continue to drive without lights. There seems to be no attempt at pursuit. I suppose that they will use spotter planes in the morning. There is no hurry for them. They will be radioing to Laghouat now. Corporal Buchalik seemed to think that I had been one of the victims in the Security Panel shootings. What the hell is going on back there?

  I am heading north, towards the Mediterranean. It is, of course, possible to navigate by the stars. Find the Big Dipper and use it to locate the Pole Star. It is possible, but travelling fast and turbulently all stars look alike to me. Every time I think I have a fix on the bloody thing, the jeep bucks and thuds over more ruts. So, I just rely on a general sense of direction. Going north, but what for? I am not deceiving myself. In the morning they will come after me and find me. I am as good as a dead man already. All that I have gained and what is left of my life is a night’s driving in the desert. Captain Philippe Roussel, he dead man, he zombie.

  All goes well for the next two hours. After an hour, the jeep runs out of petrol, but there is more in a jerry can in the back. Then the rutted ground begins to give way to something else – the feel of the ground tells me that I am entering the region of the sands – pushing in on the fringes of the Grande Erg Orientale.

  It is eerie driving in the pitch darkness, among the billowing, rising, undulating, twisting dunes, unable to see them, but knowing that they are there. Feeling the jeep lurch, tip and scurf along. I cling to the wheel and pray for the dawn, but we never reach it. Cresting what may be our four hundredth ridge, when the crest abruptly begins to crumble, I slam my foot hard on the accelerator, but it is too late. The wheels flail impotently in the sand. One shouldn’t of course, but after a few cautious attempts to ease the vehicle out of the accumulated drift, I abandon all attempts at caution and put my foot hard down on the accelerator, digging the wheels deeper and deeper into the sand. Then I rest my head against the wheel and wait for the dawn.

  When I awake, the sun is dancing fire on my face. It is almost at the zenith and I have lost the best time of the day for travelling. In circumstances like these, when one’s vehicle has conked out, one should in no circumstances abandon it, if one hopes to be rescued. I prepare to abandon the jeep. I unscrew the compass from the gearbox and squeeze the cumbersome thing into one of my pockets. Then I feel under the seat for water flasks. Sod Buchalik! There should be filled water flasks in all our vehicles at all times, but there aren’t in this one. However, there is still the water for refilling the radiator. I take a long drink from the jerry can. It tastes disgusting and I can feel the rust on my teeth, but the rust is reassuring. It means that I’m not drinking that poisonous anti-rust stuff. I get most of a litre inside me, but that’s it. I pour the rest of the water over my body.

  Standing on what is left of the crest of dune, I half-heartedly shovel sand on the jeep, but I soon give up and start walking away heading north. It will soon be winter, but at midday it is, I guess about 100 degrees Farenheit. I have no real aim, but to walk away from that jeep, what remains visible of it. I shall be the master of my death. Their chances of spotting me from the air are rather slight. E
ven for someone who wants to be rescued, it is difficult to attract the attention of a spotter plane. Those Piper Cubs only really have sideways visibility as far as the ground is concerned. And even if I were spotted, where could a plane land among these vast rolling dunes? Twice in the course of the day I hear a faint droning in the air, and I throw myself to the ground and cover myself in the scorching sand. Nothing happens. Sounds travel for miles in this region but the planes never become visible.

  La belle France, whole and indivisible from Dunkirk to Tamanrasset. France is a country whose two halves are joined by the Mediterranean. It is truly wonderful to me as I walk over and round these rolling and curving dunes, bleached of all colour by the noonday sun, that I am taking a walk in Metropolitan France. Over there to the left, one might see the mairie, a tabac, some cafés and a few old men playing pétanque during the lunch hour – only there is a very large sand dune in the way. And just ahead where I am walking now there is doubtless a vineyard, and a team of labourers clearing out a ditch. Oh! But there is an only slightly smaller sand dune in the way! Everywhere I look, everywhere I turn, there is glorious, beautiful, prosperous, bustling France. One cannot see it, because of all the sand that is in the way, but it is there. Our legislators and map drawers tell us it is there, so it must be so. I should get a grip on myself.

  No, really the dunes are very beautiful. One has to climb to the ridge of one of the larger ones really to appreciate their beauty. That means climbing a hundred metres or more, before one can have any true notion of the scale of their beauty. I am in the region of the barchan dunes. The barchan dunes are crescent-shaped, curving away from the wind. They stretch in every direction as far as the eye can see, rippling and overlapping. A fanciful person might see patterns, even things and faces, in the chance arrangements of the sands, but I am not that sort of person. No, the devil of it is that I am trying to follow the compass needle due north, but the gentle pressure of the dunes, the gradual curving first one way and then another makes this impossible. One can’t keep cresting dune after dune cutting a direct way north. The windward side of a barchan dune is not too bad. It is a gradual slope of fairly tight-packed sand, but to go north, I first have to climb the leeward side and that is steep, and gives with every footstep. Worse, the leeward slope is liable to sudden slippage. One might be buried alive in these boiling sands. But to follow the dunes around the foot of their slopes is also tedious and one can walk for half a kilometre east or west, finding one barchan linked to another and no easy way through, and the unverifiable suspicion grows that one has been driven by insensible curves actually southwards.

  Ah, but then what does it matter? I have to keep reminding myself that I am a dead man already. Every step I take is pure gain. Without water, I guess that I have an absolute maximum of four days to live, and I should bear in mind the fact that towards the end I will be so delirious that I won’t know whether I am alive or dead. But there is the possibility of death by heat exhaustion, particularly if I keep walking in the sun. It could come suddenly, perhaps tomorrow. This heat I am used to. It is tiring to walk in, but otherwise it does not bother me. I revel in the austere purity of my world. Austere, limitless, infinite. I am exactly the man I wish to be in exactly the place I wish to be. I shall certainly die, but it is no less certain that my cause will triumph. It is only a matter of understanding the laws of history, for it is certain there are such laws. Of course the Marxist laws of historical development cannot predict the behaviour of an individual from moment to moment, no more than a geologist can determine the movement of an individual grain of sand, but the pattern of these dunes, the overall movement of the individual grains of sand in their near infinite numbers is predictable given a knowledge of the prevailing direction of the winds. It is like that with history – the direction is determinable, once one has understood the labour theory of value. And having understood what direction it is that history is travelling irr, one would be a fool not to travel in it oneself. It is not because the proletariat is the suffering class that we fight for it, but because it is ultimately the triumphant class. Who knowingly would enroll as a sucker on the losing side, that of the bourgeoisie? So even now I am not dismayed. I may be on the run, but that is at the level of the individual grain of sand. On the grander scale it is international capitalism that is on the run.

  Towards evening, the winds begin to rise. It gets cool. The sun sets in the south. I stare at my compass unbelievingly. Then as I slowly work out what has happened I start growling at the thing. Those jeeps have a lot of steel in their bodywork and have quite a substantial magnetic field. This compass was adjusted for that jeep’s magnetic field. The bloody thing really is of no use at all. Now I think about it more clearly, I realize that it never has been. It is just a useless weight to carry about. I smash its glass face, cutting myself in the process. I drink my blood. Then I drink the diminutive amount of spirit on which the compass needle floated, and I throw the bloody thing away. The winds die away and it becomes hot and humid again for an hour so, but at least the sand is now cool enough to stretch out on. I do so and fall almost instantly into a dream-laden doze. My dreams are racked by the body’s pains. And sleep becomes shallower and shallower as the temperature begins to fall again. In the end I am lying there, my eyes closed, but fully awake, shaking with cold. I stagger up and urinate into my cupped hands. Not much there, but I drink it. It doesn’t do any good, I know, but it moistens the mouth, and it brings back memories of my time in the detention camp on the Gulf of Tonkin. Then I start walking in the pre-dawn. My face is blistered, but my teeth are chattering. At least in the early morning the sand is cold and hard to walk on. It will take two or three hours to warm up.

  Halfway through the day, a meaningless and unbidden memory comes to me. It is the summer of ‘53 and I am sprawled in a cane chair on the back lawn of the family farmhouse in Normandy. The evening dew falls early in those parts. The sun is going and the air seems to be turning green as I stare at the ivy-covered wall beyond the vegetable garden and the orchards beyond the wall. I can smell the glass of Pernod in my hand. It is all there. I know exactly what the sounds are that I was listening to then – wood pigeons in the orchards, a barking dog further up the road and the rattle of crockery in the kitchen behind me. That was the summer of ‘53. A week later I took ship for Indochina and Dien Bien Phu. Then the memory in all its unbidden vividness is gone, and I find myself slithering down another sand dune with only the memory of a memory in my head. I continue walking, though I perceive that the walk is really more of a stagger.. The mind drifts from one thing to another. As one crests a great dune one can see for miles, but then as one descends again one can see very little. Up or down there is really very little to see. It is really rather dull dying, when one has to walk so slowly towards it.

  Towards the end of the day I see people, Arabs with their camels, strung out along the ridge of a sand dune. It is an amazing chance. Why should anyone be travelling in the Grande Erg Orientale? As soon as I see them I sit down. Why should I tire myself out walking over to them? Curiosity will surely bring them to me. And it does. There are four men, two boys and ten camels.

  When they are close to me, I produce noises which I hope sound like ‘Please help me.’ It is difficult to speak, for not only are my lips cracked and bleeding, but my tongue seems to have swollen to fill up all my mouth, but I continue.

  ‘I am a deserter from the Legion. Take me to the fellagha. I wish to join the FLN. I will see that you are paid.’

  They are perplexed and suspicious. These desert Arabs are a primitive lot with a primitive attitude to the land they occupy. As Marx says, ‘Among nomadic pastoral tribes the earth, like all other conditions of nature, appears in its elementary boundlessness.’ They belong to a pre-feudal mode of production. When the revolution comes these nomadic anachronisms will be swept away. Their lawlessness purged, they will be forced to settle. I have no sentiment to spare for the noble bedouin.

  For a while they argue no
isily among themselves. Since I spoke to them in French, they assume I know no Arabic. I pick up bits of it. They might be intercepted by Legion helicopters before reaching the fellagha … I might be an infiltrator … someone put out on the sands to trap them … In any case the fellagha are not in the direction they are going. They turn back to me.

  ‘We are peaceful bedu. We want no trouble. French a good thing. The Legion a good thing. We are loyal citizens of General de Ghool –’

  ‘We do not know you, we have not seen you,’ one of them cuts in.

  ‘Yes, you can see me,’ I protest.

  ‘We have not seen you.’

  ‘Some water please.’ I point at the flask hanging on the edge of Hamid’s camel. The flask is thrown at my feet.

  ‘You take the water. We do not give it you.’ (I understand that this means that they will not take me under their protection.)

  They return to talking among themselves. There is a rather silly argument about whether I am likely to be carrying sugar or cigarettes on my person. One of them, a real idiot, seems to believe that I am a rich American tourist who has somehow got lost in the desert. The fucking idiot! There haven’t been any tourists down here since the war started. Hamid, their leader, vetoes a proposal to slit my throat and see what I am carrying on me. I learn with a sinking heart that they are on their way to Fort Tiberias, where they hope to persuade the képis bleus to sell them some kerosene and some, medicines. Hamid offers to load me on to a camel and save my life by taking me back to Fort Tiberias. I produce my gun and point it at them. I would like them to come my way. North. It is no use. They just edge away. And with no formal farewells they ride off in what must be the direction of Fort Tiberias. I watch them flicker away in the haze on the horizon.