The Mysteries of Algiers

by Robert Irwin

  His good humour abruptly vanishes.

  ‘I want an answer, Roussel. Give me an answer about the two carriage clocks, one of gold and one of zinc, and make it a good one or I will blow the fingers of your right hand off.’

  I groan.

  ‘I am not saying that the gold clock will sell for the same as a zinc clock. You can’t honestly think that Marxists believe that. Of course a gold clock will sell for more, but there we are talking about gold’s price, not its value …’

  ‘But this mystical “value” is like the madman’s invisible radio waves …’

  ‘No it is not. If the price of an object were the same as its value where would profit be? How can there be profits in the exchange of varying commodities – carriage clocks, penknives, saucepans and so on – unless they have something in common? What they have in common is value. There is nothing mystical or moral in this, it is common-sense economics. I am not a more moral man than you are –’

  Raoul laughs.

  ‘– and you will not become a more moral man by becoming a Marxist – any more than understanding that the world is round not flat makes one want to help old ladies across the street.’

  ‘I understand that, but you are telling me that it is man’s labour which gives an object value … Well, suppose Demeulze and Co. has an industrial robot which makes gold carriage clocks, what is the value of a gold carriage clock now?’

  Raoul brandishes the pistol as if it were a blackboard pointer in the classroom. Momentarily it occurs to me to wonder if the non-existent old man in the boulevard Gaspigny was so very mad after all.

  ‘Demeulze, forgive me, I need another shot, if we are to continue with this.’

  ‘Madame! Madame al-Hadi!’ he bellows. He hasn’t even troubled to learn her proper name which is Madame al-Shaykhoun. ‘Get me a drink and our friend needs some more treatment.’

  She nods but before she can leave the room, I call to her, ‘Believe me, Zora, I took no pleasure in killing your husband. It was a mercy killing. Even suppose it had been possible to arrange his escape, what would it have been who returned home to you? A man who has been systematically tortured for any length of time isn’t really a man at all. But he did die for a cause, and if you let men like this … this gentleman in the suit … do you think he has droit de seigneur? Your husband’s sacrifice will all have been in vain … So he forced you … There is no need to feel shame. It is one of their tricks to transfer shame, but the true shame is that of the imperialist and the rapist.’

  ‘We all have our own ideas about how the oppressed peoples of Africa can best be helped,’ says Raoul smiling.

  The slinky creature flashes a cheeky grin back at him and self-consciously waggles out of the room. Raoul continues to smile amiably at the closing door before he turns back to me.

  ‘Look at you, you are a mess. And I don’t just mean how you look at this moment. I mean look at your life. You are a born loser, someone who is bound to attach himself to lost causes. Your rotten destiny sent you to Dien Bien Phu. You have been severely tortured once in your life already. This afternoon when Chantal arrives you will be tortured again. You remember Lieutenant Schwab? I can see that you do. You worked with him on al-Hadi. Chantal has succeeded in recruiting him to our cause and they must both be on their way here by now. Think about it. You get yourself in these situations. Subconsciously you are a masochist – that’s what Marxism is for you, your own special brand of masochism.’

  Zora comes in with a lager in one hand and the needle in the other. The four-year-old comes after her trying to catch hold of the edge of her dress. She is waiting for Raoul to acknowledge her presence before giving him his beer. I make a final effort.

  ‘Listen, Demeulze. As it happens Marxist economic theory is right, but even if it were not … even if it were not, it would still be worth pretending that it was, just to do something about that bidonville outside Laghouat.’

  A look of faint concern crosses Raoul’s face.

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘You never will!’ And with that I heave myself out of bed and snatch up the four-year-old. I hold him up before me. I hold him by the throat.

  ‘Give me the gun, Raoul, or I will break this child’s neck.’

  ‘Ah no! Not little Rashid!’ cries Zora.

  Raoul has not shifted his position. He is perfectly relaxed, his head thrown back, his lidded eyes seem only mildly amused.

  ‘You are talking to the wrong man, Roussel. Kill the child and let’s get back to our argument.’

  But if Raoul is untroubled, this is not true of Zora. She plunges the hypodermic into Raoul’s ear to the full length of the needle. As he sits there making the most extraordinary gargling noises I throw the child away from me and snatch the gun from his shaking hand.

  Chapter Twelve

  ‘What happened to the clothes Raoul told you to get rid of?’

  ‘I gave them to Selima to sell.’ Selima is the Ouled Nail dancer who rents a room downstairs.

  ‘Go and see if she still has them. I will look after your children while you are gone.’

  She exchanges a panicky look with Rashid before hurrying off. While she is gone I prise the tiles off part of the living-room wall and take out the package of explosive compounds that al-Hadi had stored there. The blasting caps are stored separately further along the wall.

  I have left Raoul sitting screaming with the needle in his ear. I do not imagine that he will live. In Tonkin I heard of a man who died from a hat-pin thrust through the ear, but I’m not interested in what happens to Raoul. It was always certain that I would outwit him. I did not survive the death march from Dien Bien Phu to Lang Trang only to fall victim to a piece of shit like that, for I carry an unfinished story within me, my destiny. No man has to drift impotently in the face of his future. Every man has within him the capacity to imitate, on an individual basis, the success of Stalin’s Five Year Plans.

  Zora comes back with a large bundle of al-Hadi’s clothes. I put on an ill-fitting suit. Al-Hadi was a thinner man than me. I have a job jamming the pistol into the waistband under the jacket. Then I go into the bedroom and kneel over Raoul to rifle his pockets. I find his wallet. Then I go back out to Zora.

  ‘Morphine?’

  She shows me what she has. A tiny packet, one shot’s worth, two at most.

  ‘Syringe?’

  She shakes her head and points to the needle in Raoul’s ear. In his writhings Raoul has snapped off the needle from the rest of the hypodermic.

  ‘You don’t have another needle?’

  She shakes her head. I feel scratchy, very tight. If I start feeling worse, I won’t be able to think clearly enough to think what to do. Using the pistol I usher Zora into the bedroom where Raoul lies moaning and I lock the door. Then, bag of explosives in hand, I issue out into the streets of Laghouat. It is the end of the day. It takes me a while to find from memory the town’s only pharmacy, in the shadow of the Cathedral of the Bishop of the Sahara. When I get there, I see that the man is shutting up shop. I shout and try to run across the square. I do not care to think what this is doing to my leg. He pauses reluctantly at his operations with the shutters.

  ‘Sir, I need some morphine.’

  ‘Do you indeed? Didn’t those fools at the hospital tell you when I close?’

  I stare at him silently.

  ‘Oh, very well. Where’s your prescription?’

  I continue to stare at him silently. I think that I am standing stock still, until I see that he is staring at my hands which are shaking horrifically and the shakes go up to the shoulders. My whole body is riven by shudders.

  ‘Oh I see one of those … Ah, the pity … Eh, well I can’t do anything … You are a veteran, I guess?’

  His eyes are indeed filled with pity. A short man, he is even shorter than me. He has rheumy eyes and a nose like a distended raspberry.

  ‘A veteran, yes,’ I mutter.

  Yes that is what I am.

  ‘And
when you were hospitalized with that leg …’ He has his keys out, but he is not doing anything with them.

  I pick up the cue he has supplied me with.

  ‘Yes, yes … We were on ops in the Kabyle.’

  I talk very fast and it seems to me that I am talking as fast as my hands are shaking.

  ‘Our officers were wonderful fellows, but the op went wrong … I don’t know … A bunch of fellagha had been spotted trying to leave over some high ground. We were dropped by helicopter, but things started to go wrong when my section was landed on the wrong hill and we couldn’t find the rest of the platoon. I was sent off up the hill to see if I could see any sign of them over the crest, but I ran into a bunch of fellagha instead and bought it in the leg. That was it for me. I just lay there in the dark watching my blood oozing through the bit of shirt I’d tied round the wound, and feeling colder and colder as the blood oozed out, like it was being forced out of my body by a slow pump. I didn’t dare shout for fear of bringing the guns of the fellagha on to me again – or worse the fellagha themselves. That happened to three of my mates the previous summer in the Aures. I can tell you about that. For some reason they had wandered off from the platoon’s line of march. By the time we found them again they had all had their eyes gouged out. Two of them were dead from shock, the third was still breathing and they’d all had their severed cocks stuffed into their mouths. Our lieutenant shot the third man.’

  The chemist has turned away, revolted by my words, but I clamp my hand to his shoulder.

  ‘So, to go back to me in the Kabylie, you can imagine the sorts of things that I was thinking. It was hours before the captain found me. He was a terrific guy. Stayed by me till dawn. I couldn’t be lifted off the plateau until then. The pain was pretty awful and the ride in the chopper was none too smooth. They gave me morphine for it in hospital. They did it for the best, but I find that I have grown to like the taste. The leg’s never healed properly, as you can see, sir, and when they discovered that I had become addicted they tried to sweat it out of me a couple of times, before giving up. I was invalided out. I have nothing to go back to France for. I can pay you for the morphine, sir. To tell you the truth, I can’t do without it.’

  ‘Come inside.’

  While he fishes about among his powders he tells me not to keep calling him sir. His name is Eugene. He hunts around for a new box of hypodermics and I chatter madly. I tell him how I envy him his shop and his work and what a fascinating study pharmacy must be. Slowly a thought strikes him. One can see the presence of it spreading over his face.

  ‘I’ll give you a shot now. But of course you will soon be needing another. Why don’t you come to my house and I’ll give you another later in the evening and we can discuss what can be done for you. There are treatments, not here in Laghouat, but …’

  (I wonder if he is queer, but he goes on …)

  ‘Oh and of course there will be dinner. My wife serves excellent food, though maybe not as excellent as the armagnac.’

  ‘That will be fine. You are very kind. Thank you … er, Eugene.’

  ‘And that leg of yours looks as though it needs attention, I’ll look at it of course, but we could drive in to the military hospital tomorrow. It will be no trouble. I have to go there anyway.’

  We set off in his 2 CV. The house is on the fringe of town and backs on to the oasis groves. Incongruously there are a couple of pigs lying in the rapidly lengthening shade of the palm trees. They are the chemist’s pigs. He also keeps bees. It is a while yet before the sun sets, but already his wife is busying herself putting the makeshift shutters up – a night-time precaution against prowling FLN snipers, although it is a couple of years since there has been any of that sort of thing in Laghouat. Still the fear lingers on. The wife turns to regard the 2CV crunching over the gravel. In the dying light of the sun her face is like a yellow skull.

  As the wife comes to shake my hand and be introduced, the chemist (I must learn to call him Eugene) explains somewhat apologetically. ‘It is all right for the soldiers – forgive me – they sometimes get leave. But we civilians, we are constantly on duty. We always have to be on guard. Over there, look. Our neighbours are putting up their shutters too.’

  Eugene waves to the neighbours, but I am keen not to be seen by them and make haste to follow his wife, Yvonne, into the house.

  ‘We are very modest here, you see.’

  I ease myself into a chair with some difficulty.

  ‘Leg troubling you? You must let me look at it – after dinner, when you will be wanting another shot anyway.’

  Eugene’s wife has a long death-white bony face. There are liver spots on her pale hands. But she has a sunnier disposition than was first suggested by that skull-like face and as she bustles about the table she teases out of Eugene Laghouat’s pitiful modicum of gossip. At last we are all ready and seated.

  ‘The Arabs have a proverb, “A stranger is the friend of every other stranger.” Eat your fill, my strange friend,’ says Eugene.

  It’s cassoulet. Their daughters are away staying with an aunt in Constantine. As I say, the wife is nicer than she looks and we are relaxed and merry at table. Once more I set to, telling Eugene how much I envy him his shop, and then I go on to explain how I had a job all set up as a pharmaceuticals salesman in Grenoble. But then my call-up papers came, the job was given to someone else and by the time my battalion was ready to be shipped out to Oran, my fiancée had written to me telling me that she was going to marry that someone else.

  It is all amazing drivel. Now that I have this picture of me as a pharmaceuticals salesman in Grenoble clearer in my mind, I know for sure what drivel this daily beauty of the humdrum is. If I had become a pharmaceuticals salesman in Grenoble … I find it hard to imagine quite how evil I would have become, the million little evils and petty lies of my everyday bourgeois existence, all contributing to the single great evil of capitalism. Thinking of myself with neat little moustache and suitcase full of pharmaceutical samples, I have difficulty in choking back my laughter. Yvonne looks at me curiously.

  ‘You look rather old to be a conscript.’

  ‘Ah, but that was in ’55, madame, and much has happened to me since then. When I got my wound and was invalided out, I stayed on here. There was nothing for me to go back to in France.’

  Eugene looks concerned.

  ‘We’ll talk about this later. But you must watch yourself. This morphine business can add years to your life – in your case I think it already has.’

  ‘Well anyway, I’m glad you came out as a conscript,’ says Yvonne. ‘That’s better than the Legion. The legionnaires round here are like gypsies, thieving and stealing … They treat this place like a foreign land under occupation.’

  They talk about how the war has changed the place. Eugene remembers growing up in Laghouat, that was before even the Hôtel Transatlantique was built. In those days there was less of a racial feeling in the town and as a boy he used to play in the streets with the Arabs and Jews. You don’t see much of that these days. Yvonne’s upbringing was rather different. She was not born in Laghouat, but came here from the coast. She starts to reminisce about her girlhood and her first ball at the Governor’s Residence in Algiers. There is perhaps a hint of snobbery in these carefully hoarded memories, a yearning for something other than the provincial existence that she finally settled for. Still, Yvonne laughs unaffectedly at that young girl’s gaucheness and timidity and her dreams of being swept off her feet by an officer in the Spahis.

  ‘I thought it would go on forever, the dances and the afternoon calls …’

  When I say that the wife is nice, and for that matter Eugene too, this does not mean that I like them. I do not like nice people. Nor does it necessarily mean that I will spare them. As I sit here chewing on the pork, I am wondering will it be desirable or necessary to kill this old couple?

  The family photograph album comes out and is passed across the table. I love looking at old photos. Here is the youth, Euge
ne, playing cards with his father in a flowery garden and here is Yvonne picnicking with some officers on an outing to the Hoggar and there are lots of photos of the one year they took their daughters to mainland France to show them to their grandmother a little before she died. I am reminded of other photos – of the one taken of Chantal’s mother sitting with a spaniel on her lap and shading her eyes against the glare of the sun. That was only a few days before the Philippeville massacre. And the one of Mercier and Jomard standing arm in arm on the edge of the metal airstrip at Dien Bien Phu. Jomard did not survive the attempt to break out of Fortress Isabelle. In my eyes and in retrospect the people staring at the lens seem actually to be facing some sort of firing squad, and so they are for, in time, they will all be dead and when we open an album of photographs we are contemplating the dead – the buried dead and the walking dead.

  I would like to pump them for news of Fort Tiberias. I should like to know if the incident in the fort is public knowledge in Laghouat, but this is risky. If there is a hunt on for a renegade legionnaire officer I do not want them to reconsider me in this light. Besides it rapidly becomes apparent that the couple have no great interest in political and military affairs.

  ‘Eh, how do we know what is going on, from reading the newspapers I ask you? Lies, censorship and simple misinformation. It is stupid to try and follow current affairs.’

  ‘Politics is very boring,’ Yvonne agrees with a sigh.

  Eugene comes out with a cassoulet–rich fart.

  Yvonne winces. I smile. Eugene catches my hastily vanishing smile.

  ‘Angels flying overhead,’ says Yvonne.

  Why is it that all parties and all political thinkers despise the petit bourgeois? I share the common prejudice. However the conversation must be kept going, so I tell them how I, too, have never had any time for politics.