The Mysteries of Algiers

by Robert Irwin

  At the gates of the Marengo Gardens I buy a copy of the Echo d’Alger. There is nothing about Fort Tiberias, but of course after all this time it would not still be news, even if the press had been allowed by the military to learn something about that affair. There is nothing either about ‘Atrocious Outrage at Laghouat’, but doubtless that will rate a substantial little column tomorrow.

  At length there is an enormous paw on my shoulder. Such a mass of flesh and bone I do not think I have seen before outside a butcher’s shop.

  Nounourse’s voice is a terrible growl.

  ‘Meet me again on the north side of the place du Lyre. Start walking now.’

  Nounourse never meets me in the place du Lyre, but a match seller gives me the message: ‘In fifteen minutes’ time leave the place du Lyre, go up rue Randon and enter the kasbah at the Médée checkpoint. Then left, then up Affreville to the Zawiya of Sidi M’Hamed Cherif, then up the Barberousse steps to rue Abdallah and over to rue Nfissah and into the impasse de Ramadan. Do not take any short cuts. I will look after your bag.’

  Of course, it is grief and anguish for me to surrender my bag. But I am schooled in discipline and the avoidance of needless risks. I surrender by bag to the comrade, only warning him not to let it be searched by the security forces. I can afford to be without my drug for a little while, for after all I hardly think that I am yet an addict.

  The kasbah comes cascading down the hillside in flights of steps and narrow streets. Streets, houses and courtyards coil around one another. The Battle of Algiers was won for the French almost two years back. Massu’s paras no longer guard the entrances to the kasbah. There are only bored gendarmes at the Médée checkpoint. There is no longer any curfew. Nevertheless, as the darkness comes on, I hurry and those few people I meet in the kasbah are hurrying too, as if flames of fear were licking round their ankles. Even before the outbreak of this war, which is not a war, the kasbah was not safe by night and the markets closed before the evening prayer. In this close warren of little alleyways and covered passages, whose walls are broken only by heavy painted and studded doors which open to release or admit veiled and hooded figures, a fanciful man might dream that he stood or walked in the Cairo of the Arabian Nights and revel in its mysteries. I have no time for such rubbish. What savour can there be in the stink of poverty? And certainly the kasbah stinks – some of the stink is shit and rotting vegetables, some of it is the disinfectant which trickles out of great drums which are rolled down the alley by boys in blue overalls watched by steel-helmeted soldiers. What sort of a literary turd can take pleasure in the kasbah, a racial ghetto and a cheap labour camp? This is the charmed world of Harun al-Rashid! And who is it who contemplates those thickly studded doors and windows covered with closely worked mashrabiyya and seriously thinks that some sort of enchantment lies beyond them? What lies beyond the door is a man with too little work and too many children and an ignorant, illiterate wife who fears the beating her husband will infallibly give her tonight, before he ploughs her like a tilled field, and the hungry children cower in the corners hearing and seeing it all. These picturesque houses are structures of oppression, prisons for women, and the kasbah a place of incarceration for the people of Algeria. The kasbah is a good home for criminals and rats, a breeding ground for mental illness.

  Close by the steps that go up to the Zawiya Ben M’Hamed, I am witness to a scene. An old woman, too old to need to veil her tattooed and warty face, is stopped by a gendarme. She is carrying a flaming torch and a bucket of water. Where is she going? What is she up to? She tried to push past, screeching in bad French, that she is in a hurry. The torch is for setting fire to Paradise and the water to extinguish the flames of hell, so that we should not live in expectation of one or fear of the other. The gendarme smiles and lets her by – and taps his head significantly. Then, catching sight of me, he shouts that I should hurry to get out of these parts and asks if I would like an escort. I shake my head vigorously and I too hurry on in the direction the old woman had taken, but she has vanished.

  I am now, I guess, about ten minutes from the impasse de Ramadan, but I never reach it. Just short of the impasse de Grenade (where two years back Ali la Pointe made his last stand against the paras), a man shoulders me through an open doorway. Two others, waiting in its shadows, bring me to the ground and after a brief struggle bind my hands. A huge hand comes over my mouth. For a long time then nothing happens, the men in the dark are audibly recovering their breath. The hand is still on my mouth and I know it is Nounourse’s. I fear I may suffocate.

  Somebody on the roof whistles. A light across the courtyard comes on and Nounourse drags me into the now lit-up reception room. I am flung on to the sofa, the only bit of furniture in the room. Nounourse lowers himself carefully down beside me. I can smell the swimming pool’s chlorine on his breath. Three other men come into the room. Two of them come up close and examine my face. At length one of them says, ‘All right, it is him, with a beard. This is comrade “Yves”, or rather since his cover has been blown, it can be Captain Philippe Roussel.’

  I let out an enormous sigh of relief.

  A second man smiling puts my bag on the floor.

  ‘And this, comrade, is your bag?’

  I am almost weeping with relief, but I nod.

  ‘Thank God!’ I say. ‘Now you must arrange a meeting with Tughril for me. I have information from Fort Tiberias for him.’

  ‘In time, comrade. That can be arranged perhaps. First there is something which should concern you more directly.’

  The bag is opened for me and the chloride carefully placed to one side. A man takes a step towards the sofa with the sachets of morphine. Another has moved close to me, on the other side from Nounourse. He is fiddling with the button of my cuff.

  ‘This is yours, comrade Captain?’

  ‘Yes. That is – I stole it. I –’

  ‘Is it for your own use? What do you want this stuff for?’

  Before I can answer, Nounourse booms, ‘Comrade Captain. By article five of the Tribune of the Federation for National Liberation, the following crimes against morality when discovered to have been committed by Party members or by soldiers serving in the Army of National Liberation are punishable by death – pederasty, the consumption of alcohol and the use of drugs. This article specifically was reaffirmed at the Summit of the Wilayas at Sounnam in 1956.’

  ‘All right, but wait till I –’

  ‘There can be no extenuating circumstances.’

  The man in front of me has started to juggle with the sachets of morphine. I wonder why he is doing this, until I deduce from the direction of his eyes that he is trying to distract me from something. I twist my head to the left, but it is too late to prevent the descent of the hands of Nounourse and the wrapping of the cord around my neck.

  Chapter Fourteen

  ‘Do you like stamps, Captain?’

  Chantal looked incongruously provocative as she leaned over the table and I presumed that ‘stamps’ was code for something else. That proved not to be the case.

  ‘Postage stamps, I mean. Have you ever collected stamps?’

  I shook my head and wondered as I did so, why Maurice at the head of the table was looking so apprehensive, but she went on excitedly, ‘I have a magnificent stamp collection. Come upstairs and let me show you my stamp collection.’

  What should I say about those wretched stamps? They were nicely set out on loose leaves of cartridge paper and written up in a copperplate hand. Chantal turned the pages – stodgy French dignitaries in miniature and uninspired allegories of France and her provinces were flipped over. Chantal paused for a moment over a mint set showing military scenes – vignettes of ‘the grandeur and servitude of military life’. For example, the one franc stamp showed Napoleon’s bear-skinned Imperial Guard trudging through the snow, while behind and to the right of them, youths in uniform gave the Sieg Heil salute. Each stamp had an heraldic label attached to it – a complex monogram dominated by a sword an
d a great V and crowned by a steel helmet. I leaned over to read the writing on the stamps, ‘La Légion des Volontaires Français contre le Bolchévisme’, and as I did so Chantal rested her hand on my shoulder.

  ‘Fieldpost stamps from the Russian Front. Uncle Melikian was with the French Legion when von Paulus surrendered at Stalingrad. He vanished after that. But come and look at this album –’

  She sat cross-legged on the floor. Her long gown accommodated this unsuitable posture with extreme strain. I joined her there and, together on the floor, we looked at her collection of German stamps. I did not know Chantal then, and at that time this eminently innocent half-hour had the quality of a nightmare, where at any moment something just as strange, but much nastier might happen.

  ‘A different style, you see.’

  Race horses, opera houses, airships – what was I supposed to be looking at or for? Chantal watched my face anxiously and then as if she were engaged in trying to prompt, began to speak very slowly.

  ‘There are no stamps like this any more … Quite a different style from today’s stamps … It is a world we have lost … Look!’ (A close-cropped youth sounding a herald’s trumpet.) ‘That boy has no doubts … And that stamp there!’ (A modern building in Breslau in a series commemorating the games there in 1938.) ‘The sweep of that line shows no doubts either … And that one.’ (In the same set, an old building in Breslau.) ‘Do you see? It is different and yet similar. Then, before the war, they built in a European tradition. Europe was not a colony of America … Isn’t he lovely?’ (A horse, the winner of the Vienna Cup in 1943.) ‘Isn’t he magnificent? We have had thoroughbred horses since the days of Charlemagne and his chivalry, now why not thoroughbred people? … See!’ (Siegfried kneels over a steel-corseted Valkyrie.) ‘Like Wagner himself, this stamp shows us that it is possible to be strong yet beautiful.’

  I found it uncomfortable on the floor and stood up. Chantal fished about for her cigarette holder and then her cigarettes. I found her the ashtray.

  ‘In France now, our France of the dirty rats, Mendès-France, Blum, Mitterrand, since the war, it is fashionable to mock “Strength through Joy”. But, Captain – I’m sorry, Philippe – Philippe, do you think we shall find joy in those incomprehensible Left Bank films, the drugs and cocktails from America, the Negro music, and the lies put out by the RTF? Philippe, believe me, I speak from my own experience. It is possible even for a woman to know the joy that comes from strength – and the strength from joy.’

  She flushed. Then she stretched out her hand and pulled me down to my knees on the floor once more. The cigarette was stubbed out. Doubtless the Legion and the officers’ mess had coarsened my emotional reflexes but I was thinking, ‘Is this my opportunity? Is this the moment to which “Come up and see my stamp collection” was leading?’ In fact, no. The affair of the bed of gardenias was to take place a few days later in my flat. But on this first evening, Chantal composed herself to kneel facing the window and I knelt and listened in discomfort while she prayed.

  ‘Oh God, almighty and eternal, who has established the Empire of the Franks to be the Instrument of Thy Holy Will in this world, fill with Thy celestial light always and everywhere the Sons of France, that they may know what they must do to extend Thy Kingdom.’ The end of the prayer was marked with a clap of the hands and she was up and striding over to her jewellery box on the dresser. She wanted to show me a signet ring – a vast crude thing too large for her fingers. The signet was the complex monogram I had already seen, with its great sword and V.

  All the Children of Vercingetorix possess such a ring. In 1948 a few of the surviving veterans of the Légion Française contre le Bolchévisme came together to form what was originally a social club and mutual aid group. But its membership was disappointingly small and gradually the membership was broadened to include all those who looked back with nostalgia to Fortress Europe holding out against the menace of Asiatic Zionist Bolshevism – elderly survivors of the pre-war Came-lots du Roi and Action Française, some Belgian Rexists, disgraced Vichy functionaries and the like. After 1954 and the Philippeville massacre there was a small influx of Algerian pieds noirs. Bitter officers returning from defeat in Indochina added fresh blood and expertise to the group. The veterans’ club reconstituted itself as a semi-secret elite dedicated to making a stand against the conspiracy by Jewry’s Bolshevik International and its Anglo-American and Negro allies to overthrow civilization in Africa. The new league was known as the Children of Vercingetorix. The de Serkissians joined of course. The stamps were rubbish, but I had found Chantal at prayer very attractive. A glib intellectual might comment that this was an attraction of opposites, but I doubt if things were so simple.

  Alas, it is of course impossible to explain the aesthetics of fascist philately to my captors. They are hardly the types to collect stamps – and, as for neo-Nazism, a common opinion among the Arabs in Algeria now is that Hitler’s chief crime was that he concentrated on the Jews rather than the French. I am reminded of the frustrations I so regularly experienced lecturing on counter-insurgency to those dumb platoons of legionnaires in Fort Tiberias.. I even have great difficulty in explaining to the men in the room why the Children of Vercingetorix pose such a danger to the liberation struggle in Algeria. Over the last year I have sent Tughril many reports on the subject of the Children of Vercingetorix and it is to him I should be talking now – not this gang of amateurs.

  Once Nounourse had the garrotte round my neck, he had paused, enabling me to bark out in my best Saint-Cyr parade-ground voice, ‘Stop this nonsense. I am a major in Wilaya Four of the Army of National Liberation. I was given this rank by the Command Council of the Army of Liberation in Tunis. I demand to be heard and tried by officers of my own rank or above. Where is Colonel Tughril? It is he who must decide whether I can best serve the revolution by living or dying.’

  Nounourse listened, growled and then tightened the garrotte, so that I should never have managed another sentence. But a young man sitting on my other side, half shaven with steel-rimmed glasses, looks up appealingly at Nounourse.

  ‘He should at least have the right to make a confession before we kill him.’

  ‘What is there to confess?’ growls Nounourse. ‘I don’t tolerate addicts, winos or pimps in my cell. Oh, all right then, examine him, doctor, and tell us whether he is an addict or not.’

  ‘I am not really a doctor, you know – just a student,’ he tells me with a shy smile. He has the sleeve of my shirt up. He clicks his tongue.

  ‘He is addict all right.’

  ‘So I kill him,’ growls Nounourse.

  ‘The confession first,’ says the ‘doctor’ and the others agree.

  ‘It will be better that way.’

  By now I am perfectly relaxed. The charade with the cord around my throat has only been staged to impress or to panic me. It has succeeded in neither. I make my report, somewhat edited, for I judge that some of the material is for Colonel Tughril’s ears only. I wind up proposing that firm action be taken against the Children of Vercingetorix. I particularly urge that a squad be detailed to murder Chantal. Because of her position in both that neo-fascist league and in military intelligence, she poses a unique threat to the operations of the FLN in Algiers and the Sahara. Whether it is because of the compression of my narrative (which still takes over an hour) or because of my holding back some things which I judge to be for Tughril’s ears only, I don’t know, but the comrades are not happy with my report.

  The ‘doctor’ starts. Having first saved me from Nounourse’s noose, he now seems determined to play prosecuting council.

  ‘So you shot your way out of a military security meeting?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And then you shot your way out of Fort Tiberias?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well done,’ but the doctor clicks his tongue.

  Then Nounourse booms in my other ear. ‘Did you kill this clever fellow, this … Raoul?’

  ‘Yes, I think so … Yes
– er that is I left him for dead.’

  ‘You should be sure. Always finish them off.’ And Nounourse takes his hands off the cords to make an interesting wrenching gesture.

  ‘And Zora, you killed her?’

  ‘Zora? Oh yes, I killed her.’

  Why do I lie? I am far from sure that Raoul was dying when I left al-Hadi’s flat, and, as for Zora, I certainly did not kill her. I remember thanking her for the clothes – an unnecessary piece of politeness – and I left her comforting her frightened infant. Come to that, why didn’t I finish Raoul and Zora off? There is something about an interrogation … I have noticed it before, when I went through the charade of interrogating the fellagha at Fort Tiberias, something that makes the interrogatee want to rush into a panicky lying, pointless lies that will not cover his tracks or convince his captors … But why should I be lying? Perhaps it is that I do not think that my audience deserves the truth?

  The inquisition goes on.

  The doctor wants to know, ‘And these people, this Eugene and Yvonne Dutoit, you killed them too?’

  ‘Oh yes, I’m sure that will be in tomorrow’s papers.’

  There is a growl of satisfaction from Nounourse, but my difficulties continue. The other two in the room carry on the questioning. They are, I should judge, simple labourers, perhaps not even that, perhaps members of Algiers’s vast legion of unemployed. Maybe they are simply trying to get the story straight in their heads. Nevertheless, they seem to intend some sort of threat with every question.

  ‘You killed comrade al-Hadi?’

  ‘Yes. I had no choice. It was necessary to preserve my cover.’

  ‘And yet you also tell us that within twenty-four hours of this necessary killing, your cover was in fact blown?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You agree that that was most unfortunate?’

  ‘Of course.’