The Mysteries of Algiers

by Robert Irwin

  When I come to again she is not in the bedroom. With some pain I can move my head to gaze at a wall tapestry on which stags in a forest are picked out in a rich mess of magentas, vermilions and yellowy browns. There are a few pieces of heavy European furniture. The large wardrobe is open, and I can see that al-Hadi possessed two Western-style suits, as well as an accumulation of Arab robes. On the chest of drawers there are a plastic jug and cups and a clutter of cosmetics, both Western and Eastern, lipstick, henna wash, powder puff, mastic paste and antimony. Apart from the tapestry of the stags, there is a tourist poster of Annecy pinned to the wall.

  When she returns she has a child under her arm which she puts down to crawl on the floor, before busying herself with the needle.

  ‘What is in the syringe?’

  ‘Morphine. I have been giving you morphine to stop you screaming. The other guests must not know that you are here.’ I marvel at Zora’s hoarse throaty voice.

  ‘One of the Arabs shot at me.’

  ‘They found you in the desert. You were hit in the leg.’

  ‘They rescue me and then they try to kill me?’

  ‘It was an accident. Hamid is a simple desert Arab. He had never seen a pistol before.’

  ‘That’s absurd!’

  ‘No, he had never handled a gun before. He and his brothers smuggled you into Laghouat. They took great risks. You should be grateful to them.’

  ‘You know who I am?’

  ‘I know you. You are the soldier who worked with my man. You work with him for the FLN.’

  ‘Good. Now it is very important that I contact the FLN now and get a message to Tughril.’

  ‘Do not worry. Tughril will get the message. He has been sent for.’

  ‘When will Tughril come?’

  Silence. Considering her reply.

  ‘Soon. I am pleased to have you here. It is not so good without a man in the house and you can tell me how my man died. He admired you very much.’

  ‘It is time for that shot.’

  Catching the look of longing with which I regard the syringe, she smiles.

  ‘This morphine is difficult to get hold of. The chemists will not sell drugs they think may be used to treat the fellagha. It is good that I have friends. I do things for them and they do things for me. But we must be careful with our supply.’ After two failures to find a vein and a finally successful though bruising shot in the arm, for Zora is certainly no professional nurse, she pulls away.

  ‘Is that better for you? You like it better than me I think.’ It is a sneer not a complaint.

  Standing beside the bed, she does a shimmying little wriggle to emphasize how awkwardly the pendulous breasts and buttocks are contained within the blue dress of cheap synthetic silk. Her step, as she marches out of the room, is unmistakably jaunty, taunting. I think she hates me. Objectively I approve of that. She, her late husband and I – and the Arabs in the desert and the oppressed women of Algeria – we are all on the same side. Even so, it is good for people like Zora to hate people like me. For though I am on her side, it is still good for her to hate the man, the European, the Saint-Cyr graduate, the colonialist officer. I approve of that hatred. Objectively it is a good thing. Class envy is one of the greatest forces for good in the world. Hatred is the engine of change. It is good to hate the rich, the powerful and the successful, and though I have thrown in my lot with the oppressed, still I am forever contaminated by my former association with the oppressing class. I accept that and I understand and approve of Zora’s ambivalent attitude towards me. At least I think I do.

  The pain is not back, indeed the sensations conferred by the needle are so pleasant … I think back to Hanoi. Mercier and I had decided to visit an opium den – at least it was not a proper den, but just a parlour above a night-club casino where one could retire to smoke opium. I was a bit drunk and I found it difficult to focus on the heating of the pellets of opium over a flame and the ritual of the preparation of the pipes. Instead I struggled to read a page of La Meilleur du Reader’s Digest and found that difficult too. I would rather have been dancing downstairs. But we were young then and there was this feeling that we ought to have tried everything before we went into combat. It was before Dien Bien Phu. We drank green tea and waited for our ten-piastre pipes to take effect. I kept thinking of the Cochinois girl I should have been dancing with. I drifted in and out of darkness, but I had the impression that the opium was doing nothing. Still it would be something to tell one’s girl about when one got back to France. When my head cleared, Mercier seemed to have been talking for some time.

  Mercier was reading Marx and Malraux that year. I smile to think of it now. That was Mercier’s intellectual dabbling. It went nowhere, except towards more books. You can’t understand Marxism by reading, you have to live it. Anyway at that time I had no interest in the stuff, but over our third pipe, Mercier took it upon himself to explain in a rather incoherent way what Marx meant by ‘religion is the opium of the people’.

  ‘What you have to realize,’ he said, ‘is that in the nineteenth century, opium was conceived of not as a soporific, but as a stimulant. The workers in the factories of Paris used to take it to get them through their working day. Closely read, Marx’s statement “Religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. Religion is the opium of the people …” should not be taken as an outright condemnation either of opium or of religion. It is certainly possible to be a good Catholic and a Marxist.’ The Chinaman at the door kept nodding his head all the time Mercier talked, but I don’t know if he knew French or not.

  Then Mercier told me about the mist-soaked valley of Dien Bien Phu, the air drops and the heavy guns being gathered together on the hills above it. Then there was, I remember, a Eurasian who entered the parlour with a concertina. This character made a start at an orientalized rendering of ‘La Carmagnole’, before the Chinaman forced him to stop. But the Eurasian needed to raise a little more money for his pipe, so he crawled round the room, reading people’s fortunes in their palms. Looking at my palm and then up at my face he told me, ‘You have two months to live.’ Sod him. He obviously didn’t like my face. Mercier and I and some of the others took opium away with us that evening. We agreed that it might be useful if we went into battle. When Mercier had talked of that remote valley and the early morning mists, I could imagine it so perfectly in the opium parlour. A week later we were actually there and the mist rose from the valley floor and the enemy’s barrage began.

  Zora is back again, making faces as she removes the bedpan.

  ‘I have to go out now. But do not worry. The dog will protect you.’

  ‘Where are you going?’ I am full of suspicion.

  ‘I am going to the hammam. It is the ladies’ afternoon in the hammam.’ She finds her purse and slips it in the handbag. ‘Ah, you would like it there. You cannot imagine how much a man would like it in the hammam. Soft bodies moving through the steam, we are so many women without men, we are waiting for them like houris in paradise. But the men do not come and we sigh and are lonely.’

  There is no mistaking the way Zora is baiting me. She does a slinky wriggle to get the white gondourah wrapped over her blue dress. Then she slips out of the door. Why is this game of verbal seduction practised on a sick man? I am not interested in her, how could I be? All I want is for my body to stop aching. I do not really think that she desires me either. Beneath the sexual teasing, she is, I sense, frightened of me, and the way she thrusts that needle in suggests hatred rather than desire. So I am curious as to what her game is.

  I lie here looking at the high window, calculating what I would see if I could make my way to it. I remember al-Hadi’s house as being in the southern part, the native quarter of Laghouat. If the bedroom faces in the direction I think it does, then if I were at the window, I would look north towards the mili
tary hospital and the public gardens on three sides and the tennis courts. Laghouat is on the edge of the Sahara, an oasis town being eaten up by military installations. In my mind I drift down its white streets and the hours pass. Flies buzz over what I guess to be a turd in the child’s potty. From time to time the alsatian pads from end to end of the room. Zora has been gone a long time.

  But I do not think that she has gone to the hammam. I imagine that I hear her pacing on the roof above me, her anklets clinking. I think that she is pacing round and round. I think that she is plotting something. I turn on the bed, thinking how I might seduce this woman or be seduced by her, but it is an abstract desire for seduction, for the drug makes me impotent. It is only in the head. There is such a thing as the physiognomy of the oppressed. I have only to compare Zora’s skinny pock-marked body with my memories of Chantal. Zora inhabits a world of secret shames. Women scuttle out of the women’s quarters and mutter their mysteries to one another holding the edge of their gondourahs over their mouths, conferring anxiously over their laundry at the public fountain.

  But in fact I know this woman Zora very well. When I was interrogating al-Hadi and there were others in the interrogation chamber, then the electrodes had to be switched on. But I did not wish al-Hadi to give more away of fellagha operations than was strictly necessary. On the other hand at the same time I had to keep my fellow torturer, Lieutenant Schwab, amused. So the trick of it was to probe into al-Hadi’s sex life. Al-Hadi didn’t like it but I think that he understood what I was doing. It was really rather eerie listening to the man describe his greatest sexual joys, screaming and sobbing as he spoke. So it was that we discovered every detail of this woman Zora’s performance in bed. We investigated everything from the first bloody penetration of the frightened child bride and the cries of joy which greeted the display of bloody sheets, on through the years of systematic abuse of that skinny work-worn body. I explained to the lieutenant that it was the ultimate betrayal. Once an Arab’s honour has been broken, like an egg it can never be put together again.

  Where are my clothes? Perhaps they do not matter. There is something very comforting in lying here, though there are odd aches and pains, blisters and scabs, quite apart from the bullet in the leg and what I guess to be a fractured fibula. There is something very comforting in being invalided out of the struggle. The wound is my ticket out of it. But hours pass and my impatience grows waiting for the return of Zora and the morphine. At times I could swear I hear Zora’s voice in the next room.

  She comes in smiling as though someone has just told her a joke.

  ‘When will Tughril come?’

  ‘Ah it may be several days yet … It is not yet safe for him to come. Tell me again how my husband died … or … or you may not get your shot, bad man.’ She smiles to show she does not mean it, but I think she does.

  ‘I admired your husband very much. His death was a tragic loss to the cause, but there is no nobler way to die than as a martyr for revolutionary socialism.’

  ‘What went wrong?’

  ‘He took too many risks.’

  ‘Bad man, you could have secured his release, now don’t say no.’

  ‘Zora, it wasn’t as simple as that.’

  ‘Or protected him?’

  ‘He wasn’t my responsibility.’

  She comes to lie on the bed beside me the needle poised over my shoulder like a talon. The thoughtful melancholy eyes are concentrated on my face.

  ‘Don’t be so vague. You can tell me. How did he die? Was it a bullet or did they strangle him?’

  ‘I can’t say. I wasn’t there when they killed him.’

  ‘But you should have been there. He was your man. You should have protected him.’ Now at last she gives me my shot. Then she moves away towards the clutter on the chest of drawers and she cleans her teeth. This she does by rubbing them with soot. Then, pulling up her skirt, she sits cross-legged on a tartan rug spread out on the floor beside the bed and combs her hair. Then she curls up fully dressed and goes to sleep.

  The following morning I raise a niggling suspicion that has been at the back of my mind for some time.

  ‘There is someone beyond the door. There may be someone in the next room spying on us.’

  ‘There is no one in the next room. Perhaps it is the children. You mean my little babies.’

  I would like to investigate. Indeed I would like to get up and see if it is possible to stand on my good leg, but she presses herself against me, forcing me back against the pillow. Then she disengages herself.

  Later Zora brings one of her children in, the four-year-old.

  ‘Good child, this is a great friend of your father’s.’

  ‘When will Daddy be back?’

  It seemed to me almost as though the child’s pathetic question had been rehearsed.

  ‘It is hard managing without him. You must look after your poor mother.’ Then Zora sends him toddling out. She smiles. It is that secretive smile that irritates me.

  ‘Keep those bloody children out. I want some more morphine. I need it.’

  She is grinning madly as she swishes out the syringe and fills it with morphine solution. With my eyes I follow the needle circling over me, then it jabs down. Zora’s ministrations are not kind and both my arms are now covered with scratches and bruises.

  ‘Shshsh now. Go to sleep. You are safe here. You will wake the children.’

  I drift off thinking about Zora’s children. There should be medals for mothers of the revolution. The determinants of the mode of production apply as much to human beings as to factory commodities. The Arab prick is a powerful revolutionary tool. Four million Arabs at the beginning of the century. Almost 10 million now, and, from now on, the population will double every twenty years. The white man in Africa is being fucked out of existence …

  In the morning when I wake up anxious for the needle, I find her as usual lying on the floor beside me. Looking round the room and at its French furniture and tapestry, I cannot approve. Some of my fellow officers would sneer at its bad taste for snobbish reasons. It’s not that, but what I see in this ill-conceived clutter is clear evidence of al-Hadi’s and Zora’s determination to belong to the bourgeoisie. After all that this woman has gone through and all that the revolution should have taught her, all she wants to be is a big bourgeoise and hoard expensive furniture and clothes.

  ‘Zora! Zora! Wake up, please! I need another shot.’

  She is slow to stir and lies on the floor looking lazily up at me. There is a faint sleepy smile.

  ‘Zora! The needle, I need the needle. I am beginning to hurt again.’

  The four-year-old has come stumbling into the room, rubbing his eyes sleepily, woken by continued shouts. ‘Zora! The morphine! Zora, it is time!’ The alsatian in the corner is up and growling, but Zora just lies there smiling to herself.

  Now I find that when the shots wear off, everything aches. My whole body is a cold grey ache. But yet it can be easily solved with the needle. Still she is not moving. Christ! I can get it myself though. Surely I can get across to the chest of drawers over there? I have been in bed long enough. I roll myself over to the edge of the mattress and painfully get my legs to hang over the edge. Now at last, when she sees what I am trying to do, she does stir herself. She is up on her feet and pushing me back on to the mattress. She is desperate to keep me in the bed. She is a skinny, slender little creature, but I am very weak and our struggle is prolonged.

  As she presses herself against me, it comes into her mind to try to hold me back with something else. All the while pushing against me, with considerable difficulty she manages to get herself out of that hideous blue dress.

  ‘Stay in bed, you bad man.’

  She comes down upon me and her long tongue like a lizard’s explores my mouth.

  ‘Come on now, you darling. Why won’t you tell me how my husband died?’

  The child and the dog look on as we attempt love. Morphine is strange stuff. It brings on lust, but it all t
urns out to be in the head. And when the drug has worn off as now, I find I have the shakes. She lies on top of me and I catch a pleased, almost admiring expression in her eyes, but I sense that what she is admiring is not me but the shakes and the cold sweat that I have. After a while we cease to struggle and with a sigh she gives up.

  ‘All right I get you the needle. Have another needle now, darling bad man.’

  As the needle goes in the relief is tremendous. I can lie back and think coherently once more. I wish I knew why I am here, what part Zora has for me in her world of mysteries, but with the good stuff coursing through my veins once more, I can relax about it a bit. Faintly smiling, Zora comes back to lie on the bed beside me. She whistles the dog over to her and lies back contentedly allowing the dog to tongue-wash her toes.

  The next time, a few hours later, it is not so easy.

  ‘Bad man, you must beg for your shot.’

  I can’t allow myself to remain at the mercy of this woman much longer. That is clear.

  ‘When is Tughril coming?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘Who is Tughril? I know no Tughril. He is not coming.’ She slips away from the the bed, before I can grab her by the throat.

  ‘What is your game, Zora?’

  ‘I know of no games. I am not having any games.’

  ‘I warn you, you are making a big mistake treating me like this. Give me my shot and stop playing all these silly games. Then I’ll tell you how to get in touch with the nearest fellagha command cell. Now the needle, please.’

  ‘Captain Roussel, you are not just a bad man, you are full of folly. They told me you killed my man. Now you tell me how you killed my man and you get your shot.’