The Mysteries of Algiers

by Robert Irwin

  ‘Only the show-offs and the immature get involved in politics. And make a lot of noise, but left-wing, rightwing, communist, fascist, how much difference is there between them really? Noisy egotists, they make a lot of noise about their theories and doctrines, but when they come to power, they all do the same things in the end.’

  Yvonne and Eugene are happy to consent to this comfortable rubbish and Eugene starts telling me how much more interesting bees are than politicians.

  After fruit, Yvonne takes the plates into the kitchen. She refuses my offer of assistance with the washing up. Eugene pours us two out some armagnac. It is plain that he wants us to have a heart to heart.

  ‘Don’t take offence now, Philippe, but (correct me if I am wrong) I sense in you an over-fastidious soul … I saw you looking at my wife … Yes, I saw that smile … Well, let me be frank. If one can’t fart in front of one’s wife, one is not really intimate with her. It does not seem to me that one is properly married …’

  He breaks off for Yvonne has come in to wish us goodnight. Eugene says that we will sit up a little longer and that he will see to my bedding. He listens to her going up the stairs, before speaking again.

  ‘She is a good sort that little wife of mine. We are content … or we were before this war started … Eh, they look down on us in France. I know or at least I can imagine. All right, I don’t read Camus or Robbe-Grillet and the wife can’t afford to dress from Vogue. I raise pigs and keep bees. Is that such a bad thing? Eh … Now how have I offended my fellow countrymen that I must lose my home, my garden, my pigsties, say goodbye to the church in which I worshipped and the school where I learned my letters and my daughters are learning theirs? What evil have we done that we must forfeit our livelihoods and our memories? We are to become the refugees and pensionaries of the very men who sold us out: That big man, the General, showing his medals to the cameras, talking about “Frenchmen”, he is not talking about us, but only about himself. It’s all mad.’

  Why is he telling me all this? Does he think that I have the ear of the General? He looks as though he is about to cry, but then he pulls himself together.

  ‘Eh well, time to look at that leg.’ He motions me to follow him and we go into what seems to be a small study. He wants me to take my trousers off, but I say, ‘The shot first.’

  I thrust my bared arm at him, a tangled mess of scratches and lumps. The needle is expertly inserted. This must be the end of the masquerade, but since the morphine is now slowly pumping through my veins, I am relaxed about it. I produce the pistol from my waistband. It is awkward stepping out of the trousers while covering the man with the gun, but I manage it.

  ‘I want a proper dressing on this.’

  From time to time as he works on the leg he looks up at me with dubious eyes, but he says nothing. Guessing doubtless how this must end, he takes his time and makes a good job of the new clean dressing. When he has finished, I shoot him in the skull. To see the side of a skull fly apart under the force of the bullet – or rather not see it, it is so fast – is something extraordinary. ‘Might is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one. It is in itself an economic power.’ Marx’s watchword is mine.

  Now I mount the stairs hoping to find the wife still in bed, but I meet her halfway down the stairs and I set about clubbing her down the steps, beating her about the head and not stopping until she lies lifeless in the hallway. I stand there a while catching my breath and listening to hear if the sound of the gun has attracted the attention of the neighbours. Once more I find myself wishing that my Tokarev had a silencer, but if it did then the muzzle velocity would be slower. In my experience, there is no such thing as the perfect weapon. Then I try to carry the woman back upstairs in my arms, but I cannot bear her weight so I drag her up in fits and jerks and heave her on to the bed. Then I pull her nightgown up and set to work with my tapes and detonation cords. When I have finished, I consider booby-trapping the husband’s corpse too, but one will be enough for the effect. Besides, the plastique is used up. I would not dare carry such unstable stuff around any longer. All I have is some chloride and that is not so easy to use in these booby-traps.

  I have often lectured on the subject but I haven’t actually handled explosives of any sort since training. I am pleased with myself. In itself nitroglycerine is no joke to handle and once the nitrocellulose is added it is even more dodgy, but it is precisely this instability, which sets the operator such problems, which also gives the stuff such a hair-fine response when the trap is actually triggered off. What I have set up is an adaptation of the wire-trip device, in which the cord tied to Yvonne’s legs pulls the firing pin which sets off the blasting cap and then the main charge. The frisson created by this sort of outrage, it’s so much more effective than an ordinary tactical strike against a railway siding or something. In the next few months a few more pieds noirs here in Laghouat will probably decide to pull up roots and migrate back to France. Why the death of this old couple should be so shocking, I don’t know. Oh yes, I do. They are Europeans. But if forty villagers in the highlands of the Kabyle are killed in a pacificatory bombing raid, that is different. That is done by people in uniform, it is backed by state structures and the people are Arabs, not fully people. It is all quite different. But I don’t have to justify myself to myself.

  I can do nothing more tonight. At night the roadblocks and patrols are pretty intense – not to mention the ironic risk of being ambushed by the FLN. Part of the effect I shall be creating comes from the supposition that I have killed innocent people. Of course they weren’t innocent. Of course not. Their style of life battens on the poor and feeds off the Arabs. It would cost an Arab a year’s work to buy some of Eugene’s medicines. He gave me dinner, yes and thanks for that I suppose, but he wouldn’t have given an Arab or a Berber dinner. And he has a standard of living forty times higher than the natives. And when I was torturing Arabs on behalf of Algérie francaise, did this man try to stop me? Did he as much as write a letter to the newspapers? He knew perfectly well what I and others were doing. The cells in our barracks came to resemble abattoirs. We slopped around in Arab blood, all so that the ‘innocent’ pharmacist might keep his beehives and pigsties. In the context of a country in revolution, this innocence is a form of evil.

  By now Chantal and that lieutenant must have arrived at Laghouat. Will Raoul still be alive to speak to them? Will Zora stay there to risk Chantal’s rage? What will Chantal’s next move be? Ah, but it is hopeless guessing. And it is no use being idle. Now I have got my breath back, I start to search the living room. It does not take me long to find what I am looking for – a camera and a box of flash bulbs kept in the corner cupboard. Then I go upstairs and take pictures of Yvonne’s body displayed on the bed with her legs drawn up at an awkward angle and her head propped up on the bloody pillow. Then I go down to find Eugene and arrange his body in all sorts of grotesque angles for my pictures. Technically this is interesting work – aesthetically too, for photography furnishes atrocity with its aesthetics. This war of ours in Algeria has been fought in black and white and when I dream of this war it is always in grainy black and white images. There is no brilliant blue sky, no yellow sand, no multi-coloured Arab robes, only the two-colour chiaroscuro of the soldiers, politicians and journalists.

  Photography produces quirky and visually enhancing effects. When some little bourgeois in Grenoble opens his newspaper over the coffee and croissants and finds my snap of Yvonne with her head clubbed in, he will not see what I have seen; in some respects it will be more horrible. I have noticed before that blood in the camera’s register does not look like blood and the blood on the pillow behind Yvonne’s head will probably more closely resemble shit spattered round a lavatory bowl and, though civilians in France are rarely allowed to see these photographs (it would be bad for their morale), a head that has been clubbed in does not seem to contain brains, but rather some strange black fibrous matter. So anyway this good citizen at his breakfast table will contemp
late my picture of Yvonne. He will be revolted, yes, but he will also feel guilty that he is impotent to do anything about it and, thoroughly demoralized, in time he will harden his heart to the plight of the pieds noirs in Algeria. He has already hardened his heart to the plight of the millions who starve in Africa and Asia. When the flash bulbs are used up, I fire off the rest of the film into the darkness. Then I put the roll of film in my bag.

  I lie on the sofa downstairs, thinking, plotting and dozing, until just before dawn. Then I don one of the chemist’s suits and bury al-Hadi’s blood-bespattered suit outside the back door. I drive the 2CV into Laghouat and use the dead man’s keys to open his shop. I take what looks like a year’s supply of morphine and some needles, also the small change from the till. Then I drive north. Half a mile outside Bou Hara I abandon the car in a grove of cork trees and walk into town. At the bus station I find a bus that is leaving for Algiers in half an hour. There are a couple of poor whites on the bus and me. Otherwise the bus is filled with Arabs and there are even children standing in the aisles. Jasmine water is sprinkled on the passengers by the driver just before we leave. It will be a five-hour journey. Two hours into the journey there is an inspection of papers. A conscript and his officer move slowly up the aisle carefully examining papers and irritably crushing the children against the seats. As they come close, I brandish Raoul’s carte d’identité. Even this gesture was unnecessary. They are not interested in the Europeans, only in the Arabs. I relax back into my seat and contemplate the gentle melancholy of the Algerians. They look like sheep preparing to be slaughtered. Not that sheep do, of course. I admire the view and think. These dopey passive Arabs content to be on their way to market … Actually I believe that stupidity is also a form of evil … a culpable refusal to see the truth.

  To see so many stupid people around me, it is depressing perhaps. But I am on the loose once more and free to act. They will never be able to keep up with me. I have scarcely begun.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I was sitting beside an autumn bonfire when I saw a woman dressed as Harlequin pacing about on the opposite side of the fire. She walked with a mannish stride, but despite the mask, I was certain that she was a woman. She was offering everyone fruit. In the orange sunset light, I at first mistook the apples for oranges. Later she sat down beside me and introduced me to her younger sister. That was the fete de village when I was ten, I think. That would be in 1935? I don’t know why this picture should suddenly have come unbidden to me.

  There is leisure for thinking on the bus, too much for my tastes. I should prefer to be moving and acting … Still, it is desirable that I should satisfy myself that there was nothing personal or pathological in my killing of Yvonne and Eugene. I apply the discipline of self-criticism and examine my motives. At length I am satisfied. It is true that I have a generalized hatred of old people, but this is the product of what I consider to be a political perception. Yes, old people shamble about in front of me in the street getting in my way – and there across the aisle in the bus at this very moment there is an aged Berber who has been irritating me immensely by smiling at nothing whatsoever and by grunting at irregular but frequent intervals. He is old, impoverished and a member of an oppressed nation; in those circumstances his smile is peculiarly fatuous. But no, there is nothing personal in my detestation of the old. The mutual hatred of young and old is half of politics. Simply, old people are an obstacle to revolutionary change, a dead weight on the future.

  I am not a fool. Of course I shall be old myself one day. I hope that I shall have the courage to hate myself then. As long as we have not learned to hate old age, poverty and sickness, the world will never change. Revolution works towards Harlequin and the apples which glow like little suns.

  But I am not going to spend four or five hours just thinking about old people. At the same time, my mind is active on other matters. Suppose this bus is being followed? I can see no consistent tail but that proves nothing. Suppose there is a tail, a shadow on the bus itself? It could be that daft old Berber. Suppose Chantal, or for that matter the SDECE, if they still believe I am alive deduce my destination and the means available to me to reach it? So that when the bus pulls up at the terminus, there is a reception committee waiting, waiting and patiently slapping their cudgels lightly against their palms? Suppose that when I do alight at Algiers and start to try to make contact I find that the cell I need to make contact with has been broken up? Or suppose that when I do make contact with Tughril, I discover that he has been turned by the SDECE, or worse I never discover that he has?

  It is good to be properly cautious, and in my trade it is desirable to examine all possible eventualities, but I do not intend to go potty doing so. I am careful also to have more positive thoughts, so I think to myself how good it is that I who have worked as a loner for so long will be now able to jettison solitude and deception and walk shoulder to shoulder with my comrades. How bad it has been, these years of playing soldier and spy. It is not good for a man to be alienated from the product of his labour, nor is it healthy to be an individualist. Men should work together, to spur each other on by example and to offer each other solidarity. I am tired of playing my hand against every other man’s. I want to come in. It is time for some human warmth.

  Algiers the white!

  The coach terminus is in Mustapha Inférieure, not far from the place Raymond Poincaré. The first need is to find a pissoir where I can shoot up some more morphine – a tricky business if I am to do it fast and not to drop the bag or the needle. Posted on the side of the pissoir is the latest roundup of faces of wanted men. My face is not yet among them. Now, how many years have I spent in this country? Nearly eight I think and never before have I had to take public transport. It takes me some time before I can work out which tram it is I need to cross town by. Waiting at a tram stop is something new for me. I am conscious of myself standing here as shabby, limping, down at heel. The once close-cropped hair now sticks out like the spines of a sea urchin, and I have a straggly beard. Well, I rejoice that I am not such a dull dog as I seem, with my little bags of morphine and chloride explosive.

  There is a man at the table of the café opposite who seems to be watching me. It takes me time to assure myself that this is in fact not so. He is admiring the red-haired Jewess who stands beside me in the queue. I should say that his gaze was concentrated on the seams of her stockings. It is the hour of the anisette and the tables in front of the café opposite are almost full. Happy hour, as the disgusting Americans call it, but few of these citizens look happy. They sit there saying little, but watching each other. There is an old white-bearded man moving among the tables trying to sell the clients what may be drawings. His chosen victims look up at the old man, while clients at tables further away watch their predicament with amusement and these clients are in turn being watched by a couple of women leaning over a balcony on the opposite side of the street. And down in the street a gaggle of veiled fatmas stare up at the balcony with eyes that glitter with envy or with malice. Eye crosses eye. Suddenly and incongruously I find myself thinking of Yvonne and Eugene and Eugene’s fart.

  At the rival café, a few buildings along, the attention of the drinkers is rather focused on the passers-by and some men watch the women clicking by on their high heels, but other men are watching the eyes of their fellows to see what women their eyes are following. A waiter stands by alert for further orders, but I do not think that his eyes are only for the customers, for at frequent intervals his eyes sweep over the floor of the café and the pavement outside, looking for suspicious and abandoned packages. By now, this is such a conditioned part of his life that he is probably not even aware that he is doing it. A man walks by in too much of a hurry, even at this distance he is visibly sweating. All eyes turn to watch him instead. Idleness, sexual desire and now fear direct the eyes of this city. A city in fear, I like it, for fear is my element, I have lived with fear, inside fear, ever since the morning of 11 March 1954 when the guns opened fire on Fo
rtress Gabrielle in the valley of Dien Bien Phu. To see the rest of these shits living in fear, why it makes my heart beat a little faster!

  The tram takes me almost to the door of the Hydra Sports Club on the edge of the Marengo Gardens. I purchase a temporary membership ticket, but, no, I do not want to swim. Make contact with Tughril, report to Tughril, yes that will be the end of my mission, but this is not a simple matter. Even I do not know who Tughril is or how to contact him directly. ‘Tughril’ is certainly not the real name of this cell leader. However, one possible contact may be here at the club working as a lifeguard. I know the man was used by al-Hadi as a channel for getting messages to Tughril, but even this man who works here as a lifeguard, I do not know his real name only his nickname, so I will have to ask one of the boys for ‘Nounourse’. I pause watching the dance of the lights, threads of gold on the water before calling a boy over. It takes a sort of courage for a man to ask for a ‘Teddybear’, but fortunately there is no smile. The boy realizes who it is I want.

  The boy walks to the side of the pool. It is as if he is summoning a monster up from its depths. The vast shape breaks from the water and heaves itself up on to the tiles and advances with deliberate tread towards me. Nounourse is almost a giant, heavily muscled, bearded and smiling with the genial ferocity of a Barbary pirate. The genial smile however vanishes when he realizes that I am not a customer who has to be smiled at, but a comrade. I mutter an identification code and ask to be put in touch with Tughril. We arrange to meet in the Marengo Gardens in half an hour’s time when he can get off work. Then with the grin sliced like a wound on his face once more he goes back to teaching the white children how to swim. That grin reminds me of the famous Kabyle smile. Indeed the Kabyle smile stretches from ear to ear, but it runs across the throat and it is made with a knife.