by Robert Irwin
I stand in the dark and wait and I wonder if he is really going to come back or whether this is not some grotesque practical joke. It is possible that Jalloud will come back with the security guards. It is possible that he will not come back at all. It seems a very long time, waiting. Thinking about the gendarme, here is evidence, if evidence were needed, that it is hard to be a torturer. It takes skill, intelligence and often considerable physical strength to achieve successful results. And, naturally, the greatest challenge is to stay human at the end of it all without degenerating into a psychopath.
But Jalloud comes back in a state of high excitement.
‘It is all ready. The patient is under heavy sedation and the apparatus is lined up right along beside the bed. Perhaps I should tell you about this patient too. You will be interested in him. He is an officer in the Territorial Reserve. He had the misfortune to be captured by the fellagha in the Aures mountains. I fear that he suffered many hardships at their hands before making his escape. Now he is prone to paroxysmal tachycardia, but there are psychosomatic complications. He told me that every night he dreams that pale fellagha in white robes congregate around his bed to drink from his wounds. Well this morning we – no, you – are going to make his nightmare come true.’
‘What!’
‘You are going to drain his blood. The comrades in the bled have need of blood too. I have shown you how to do it. There should be no problem. You have enough sacs for maybe three litres of blood. That should finish him off. But if you think you cannot get it all in the carrier bags maybe a little less will do. You can find your own way out of the hospital, I think. You should not be stopped getting out, as I say. I can meet you and collect the stuff by the obelisk in the parc Jaubert at twelve thirty.’
‘What about you now? Why do I have to do this on my own?’
‘Oh, I am going on a ward round with the consultant. It will be my alibi.’
Before we exit from the cupboard, Jalloud gives me a shot of morphine to set me up. Then we march smartly down the corridor. Jalloud points me to my patient who lies, apparently asleep, in a private room. Jalloud gives me an encouraging squeeze on the shoulder and then hurries off for his ward round. In my time I have done parachute drops, flown a helicopter, blown up bridges, repaired the sump of a lorry, cooked soup made of snake’s flesh, cut off the gangrenous leg of a wounded man and put another out of his misery. I am hardly going to flinch from this. The needle goes into the jugular. Though one of the rubber tubes is badly frayed and some blood goes over the sheets, in fact I am rather pleased with myself. Perhaps I should have been a doctor? But then, in a sense, I rather fancy that I am a doctor of sorts – diagnosing the sickness of society and then to work cutting out the cancerous growths at the heart of that society. My ‘brother’ officer in this bed is one of those cancers. At one point the patient opens his eyes and rather feebly tries to say something. I pay no attention. Three litres will kill him of course. I can imagine that one day there might be another better world in which one would have the right to say that what I am doing is ‘atrocious, disgusting’. But that world has not been achieved yet and it will be achieved only by continuous struggle. In that struggle there can be no half-measures. There is no nice way of accomplishing a revolution – or of resisting one.
With the blood in the bag, I walk out of the hospital. It is very simple. I have some hours to kill and I stroll over to the place du Lyre. I note that the opera house, in an unusual gesture of extravagant confidence, will shortly be presenting all four parts of the Ring cycle. Its more usual fare I believe is operetta – or at its most ambitious Gounod. The beginnings of an idea form in my mind. Then I buy a paper and take it with me to the parc Jaubert. Yes, my little horror is in on the second page. ‘Ghastly Crime at Laghouat’. I bless the Echo d’Alger, and the RTF, and Time magazine and the BBC World Service. Without them it would not have been worth my while stuffing plastic explosive up that woman’s skirt. But as it is, I can imagine that this evening or some time soon in London on the BBC Radio there may be a discussion programme about politics, and there may be some discussion of FLN atrocities and everyone will agree that atrocities are atrocious, but then some liberal intellectual – and England is full of such people – will come on and say, ‘While in no way condoning such atrocities, nevertheless they have to be understood in the context of the continuing oppression which is a feature of …’ and so and so and so on. It is for that beautiful liberal intellectual, and so that everyone may hear what he has to say about the injustices of French colonialism, that I killed Eugene and Yvonne – and, of course, I shall kill again.
It does not surprise me that Jalloud never turns up. That would not be this cell’s style of operation. Instead a boy comes up and tugs at my sleeve and tries to take the bags away from me. He points to the park gates where Nounourse is standing and Nounourse indicates that I should give the bags to the boy. The boy darts off with the bags, and then Nounourse gestures that I am to follow him, Nounourse. We set off at a smart pace. It is fifteen minutes before he allows me to catch him up.
‘So there you are, Captain Addict!’
‘Where are we going?’
‘You are coming to stay with me. My home shall be your home.’
I have never heard the traditional Arab formula of hospitality pronounced in such a surly voice. Nounourse goes on.
‘You did what Jalloud said? And everything that we need is in those bags?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. But remember, Captain Addict, I am always watching you and I do not like you.’
‘I don’t care who likes me.’
‘Did you kill a French officer in the hospital?’
‘Yes. That was a test, wasn’t it?’
‘The comrades in the field really needed the blood.’
Nounourse’s flat is in the Bab el-Oued. The Bab el-Oued is a mixed quarter of poor whites and Arabs, living shoulder by shoulder and competing with one another for the same miserable jobs and services. Much of the area is occupied by large modern apartment blocks and Nounourse’s flat is in one of these blocks. As we go up the stairs, his neighbours call out salutations to him and ask after his day. In every sense Nounourse is a big man in this neighbourhood.
I am formally and surlily presented to Nounourse’s wife, Saphia. Saphia wears traditional Arab dress, but no veil. She receives my respects without rising from her chair and when she does get up and moves to the kitchen, the exertion makes her pant. I imagine that I can hear the insides of her thighs rubbing together as she walks. Saphia is very plump. She cannot weigh so very much less than Nounourse, but she has the eyes of a doe set in a moistly lustrous moon face. Having fetched some Cokes from the kitchen, she sits listening to what goes on, expressionless, with her eyes never leaving my face. It would be unwise for me to return her gaze. Nounourse asks about cakes and she lazily tells him that food will have to be later. I expect Nounourse to start shouting, but nothing happens.
‘My wife is a great trial to me,’ Nounourse says. ‘She has been sent from heaven as a trial for me.’
Saphia continues to look on placidly. Nounourse sets to, opening the Coca-Cola bottles. He has his own technique. He just squeezes the glass and the top pops off. Catching my expression, he tells me, ‘I used to be a great sportsman – not just the swimming, but also the wrestling and the boxing. I was Algiers boxing champion. Watch this!’
He gets up from his chair and hoists it up and puts one of the chair legs in his teeth. Then he walks round the small room holding the chair up by his clenched teeth, looking a little like a performing seal. Then he puts the chair down and thrusts his fists in my face. He lowers down at me.
‘With this fists, I can smash a man’s head like a coconut. So watch it, Captain Addict!’
Sitting down and now in a sudden good humour, he tells me, ‘Also I used to be the biggest bandit in all Algiers! I used to be chief bouncer at the Dolly Nightclub. All the other bandits walked in fear of me. You know the Dolly Nig
htclub? I used to protect the drug sellers and the tarts. I made lots of money, and I killed men who did not respect my boss.’
So ho! It is much the sort of background that I should have guessed. Nounourse is one of ‘the dangerous class’, the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown out by the lowest layers of an old society. He belongs to the class that Marx calls ‘the lumpenproletariat’. As Marx describes it in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte, the lumpenproletariat consists of ‘vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged gaolbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaus, brothel-keepers, porters, literate organ grinders, rag-pickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars’, a ‘whole indefinite disintegrated mass’. According to Marx this lumpenproletariat has very little revolutionary potential and the criminal as revolutionary hero is a romantic aberration of little significance.
This is not quite Nounourse’s view of the matter.
‘I was the biggest bandit in Algiers, but the comrades showed me the error of my ways. They came to me and said, “Listen, Nounourse, can’t you see how bad it is what you are doing? You are serving up whores to the filthy French and you are killing your Arab brothers with those dirty drugs.” That was in 1954. And I said to myself, “Nounourse, you could smash their heads like coconuts. You can get a lot of respect for that, but first you should think about what these good men have to say.” So I reflected a little and I looked at the whores in the streets and the houses – not all the whores are in brothels – you understand me? – and I looked at the lipstick on their mouths like red wounds and the short skirts inviting a man’s hand to be stuck up inside them, and I saw the men being sick in the streets from too much alcohol. And I thought to myself, “It is true what they say. We are being used. But you, Nounourse, can change things.” So I killed my boss. He was a dirty Spaniard, and now I who used to be the biggest bandit in all Algiers have my own revolutionary cell. We cleared the pimps and drug pedlars off the streets and dropped them in the sea. Now everyone fears me and I can respect myself. And I am in charge of my own cell and I run it very well!’
Saphia sighs heavily.
The afternoon goes by slowly. Nounourse has taken the afternoon off from the Hydra Sports Club and Saphia has nothing to do. We share silences and desultory conversations. Nounourse wants to know about my experience of life in the Foreign Legion. The Legion fascinates him. He really admires the Legion.
‘They are really tough men. They are the professionals in this business. Not like us. Of course they have all the right equipment.’
I describe my experiences in the hospital and Nounourse says, ‘Jalloud is a good man. Even his professor thinks well of him.’
On the walls of the flat there are Sellotaped pictures of Elizabeth II and of Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan. Saphia likes Johnny Weissmuller. Saphia is proud to have this acknowledged. Elizabeth is Nounourse’s enthusiasm.
‘If the French had a queen like that, we should not be having this war. I would die for that woman!’
Nounourse is a mine of inaccurate information on Her Majesty and her unhappy life and the wicked doings of the Queen’s relatives, all of this he has culled from French scandal sheets. I gather from Nounourse that the House of Windsor is the number one bandit family in England. The Royal Family is fair, but tough when it comes to managing their multifarious rackets.
‘I am like the English. This I can respect.’
And it is not just the Royal Family that Nounourse is keen on. The English are the number one footballers. Everyone knows that. Nounourse’s strength lies in his simple beliefs. In that alone he resembles a member of the true proletariat. He is sturdy in his simple beliefs. I find Nounourse’s Anglophilia refreshing. It is not shared by the French in Algeria. Many of the pieds noirs believe that the English are working to destabilize the French in Algeria and that the English secret service is supplying arms to the FLN. Listening to the World Service is like listening to the Voice of Cairo. Chantal’s hatred of the English takes an extreme form. To tease Nounourse, I give him a dose of Chantal’s opinions. ‘England is the headquarters of the Masons and the refuge of the Jews. It is the centre of a network of plots. The senior Masons in the English army, the banks and the Church meet to plot the seduction of children, the corruption of the family and the creation of a socialistic society modelled on the anthill. British secret-service men kiss each others’ arses. It is part of their initiation ritual. There is no cruelty of which the English are not capable. Homosexuals and sadists to a man – if you can call them men.
‘Ah no, these are not my opinions.’ (For Nounourse has risen wrathfully to his feet and I instinctively put my hands up before my face.) ‘I am just telling you what this woman Chantal goes about saying. According to her, the English invented the concentration camp during the Boer War. According to her, they also invented terrorism. Before the Second World War, terrorism was only a matter of deranged individuals, like the anarchists with their infernal machines. But the English taught the world how to organize terrorism. They sent their secret-service men to murder Heydrich in Czechoslovakia. She believes it was they who murdered Darlan, Pétain’s governor here in Algiers, and it was certainly they who paid the communists in the French Resistance to murder Germans and commit random outrages in the streets of France. And Malaya, Cyprus, Kenya, Egypt – there is hardly one of their colonies where they have not practised torture, not because they needed to, but really to satisfy their perverted lusts.’
Nounourse sighs heavily.
‘This woman should surely die,’ he says.
But the atmosphere remains uneasy. It is as if he still suspects me of sharing Chantal’s opinions. But Nounourse is very naïve and it is boring talking to a man with whom I have so little in common. It is boring just sitting here, chatting away, just killing time. I long to be up and out of this pokey little flat and involved in some action.
At last, some time after the desultory conversation has declined to dismal silence, Jalloud comes in. He is in a high good humour and immediately Nounourse and he start horsing about around the room. Jalloud puts up the ludicrous pretence that he too is a boxing champ, and they move about parrying, lunging and whooping. Saphia hardly bothers to open her eyes and I am also bored by this childishness. I no longer have a sense of humour. It is something that I have put behind me. Who can laugh in this land of death and torture? Eventually Jalloud comes staggering up to me, gasping for breath and makes an attempt to slap me on the back which goes rather wide of its mark.
‘Hey! Hey! So this morning, you murdered a fellow officer! Bravo! You should chalk your murder score up on a wall somewhere.’
‘That was not murder,’ I tell him. ‘That was the necessary elimination of an enemy of the people.’
‘Oh, tra–la! What nonsense! The man was lying peacefully in his bed and you killed him. The nurses are running about screaming and the whole hospital is in a total rumpus. That has to be a murder.’
‘Murder is not the word for it. You are a bright student, Jalloud. You should be able to understand what I am about to tell you. Listen to me, will you? For us the difficulty is to find a language whose vocabulary and indeed whose very grammatical structure has not been appropriated by the oppressive power. We need a language in which the words are not inevitably channelled towards the conclusions of the imperialists and the liberals. For this reason, we have given new meanings to such words as “Democracy”, “Peace”, “Violence” and “A Necessary Execution of the People’s Will”. These words do not belong to the pieds noirs, or de Gaulle, or the United States or the Zionists. They belong to the people. Today in the hospital I have executed the will of the people. I murdered no one.’
‘Doubtless you have given new meanings to “Lies” and “Stupidity” as well.’
But Jalloud giggles nervously. He really does not want to quarrel with me. Jalloud is a bright young man – perhaps an intellectual even – but, as with Raoul, I am not impress
ed. I am not an intellectual, but I am a Marxist and Marxism is a powerful engine for the production of thought. On a very wide range of issues it does my thinking for me, so that I can talk with a Jalloud or a Raoul on more or less the same level, confident that my ideology has the answers.
‘Killing that officer was a test that I am who I say I am?’ I venture.
‘Of course, but we really needed the blood, and they are not going to give it to us. We have to take it.’ Then Jalloud continues, ‘Well, now it is time for us to decide what we are going to do about you and this young lady of yours.’
Chapter Sixteen
I pace around the room taking nervous drags through my preposterous cigarette holder. I have been kneeling at prayer, seeking guidance from the God of the Franks, but no guidance has come. I am filled with excitement and apprehension. Something terrible is brewing. If only I could lay my hands on Philippe, many of my fears would be laid to rest. I know, having beaten it out of Zora, that Philippe must have made contact with Tughril now. Unfortunately it is not possible to guess from Philippe’s skilfully botched intelligence records who Tughril is. When I catch up with Philippe, I will make him pay for the dance he has led us across Algeria. I shall make him kneel before me and beg for mercy. When I think how I deceived him in bed, I laugh ruthlessly.
Ah, it is no good. It has turned into unintentional parody. My attempts to enter the mind of Chantal strike me as pitiful, childlike fantasy, and, as Lenin says, ‘You must dream, but only on condition that it is permitted to you to believe in your dreams.’ ‘Know the mind of the enemy’ has always been my watchword, but I have no idea at all what goes on in the mind of Chantal, and, as is plain from the Security Panel incident, I never have had. Part of my trouble is that I have never been up against a woman before. From Saint-Cyr to Indochina to Algeria, I have lived in a world of men. It is not just Chantal, but all women. I have no idea how their minds work. It would be hard enough for me to enter the mind of any woman, but there are additional problems. Chantal is not of my class. The de Serkissians are haute bourgeoisie, plutocrats even I suppose. It is never really possible to transcend the bound of class consciousness. Saint-Cyr graduate I may be, but this does not furnish a simple laissez-passer to the upper-class mentality. Not only is she not of my sex or class (and she is younger than me too), but she is a fascist. How does a fascist think?
