The Mysteries of Algiers

by Robert Irwin

  ‘Faith of a child, hands of a warrior.’ I nod thoughtfully, but I am not thinking about that. I wonder if it can be possible that he does not know what I have become, what I have done? It is in fact now well advertised. There are fly-posters on buildings and lamp-posts everywhere and I find it hard to take a piss in a public urinoir without facing my image pasted on the wall in front of me. I appear in batches of nine or twelve photos of wanted men – the only European in the batch – every one a killer on the run. Families have been set alight in their farm houses, a priest has been executed by progressive mutilation, a pregnant woman has been eviscerated and the foetus ripped from her womb, and yet, eerily, almost every grainy snapshot shows a smiling face. But, of course, most of these photos date from the times when there was still hope for these men, before the oppressive structures of the colonialist apparatus had been fully exposed, before these men had to take to the cellars and the hills. Some of the photos show signs of retouching and were, I guess, made to be used by marriage brokers or given to fiancées. Mouloud Besmuti, the one who cut the woman open, has the biggest grin of all and it looks to me as though his snapshot may have been taken in one of those fairground booths. I am the only one in this gallery who is not smiling – a boot-face, crew-cut officer’s military passcard photo.

  Edmond has turned back to the machine.

  ‘I like pinball. It’s not a snob’s game. I’d really like to get some of these machines in our camp. They would love it, flashing lights, bright colours and all, but I doubt if the general would wear it.’

  ‘He’d be right too. Machines like this would encourage unhealthy expectations in our Arabs.’

  ‘What the hell do you mean, old fellow?’

  ‘Just look at it.’

  I point to the design on the backglass. On a podium there stands a blonde with cupid lips. She has been poured into a skimpy little black cocktail dress whose unrealistic curves are brought out by the glossy highlights and she is being serenaded by young men in white tuxedos with slicked back hair and knowing grins. The ambience is something between a high school prom and a brothel. Here is a scene from the dream life of capitalism. As Marx puts it in The German Ideology, ‘The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life processes, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises.’

  ‘That’s what the West is to the Arabs. They will think that everyone who steps off the boat at Marseilles is given a white tuxedo and …’

  ‘You are a devil for cynicism, my dear fellow!’

  ‘I’m not cynical. A cynic, looking at your képi-bleu type work, would say that by giving to the Arabs, you prevent them from taking and what the Arabs need to be taught is how to take. But you will never hear me say that.’

  ‘I have heard you say that.’

  A look of fixed dislike has settled on his face. It’s got a bit awkward for him now and he is wondering what to say next. Perhaps he will walk away and leave me in peace. Damn the man, let him leave in peace. But, no …

  ‘It’s not a matter of being lovey-dovey with the Arabs: it’s a matter of being able to heal wounds as well as inflict them. Simply, if we are not human –’ He breaks off. ‘You do think I have gone soft, don’t you?’ He rests his clenched fists on the machine. ‘You little arsehole! You don’t remember anything, do you? How about that time, in Hoa Binh, at the Bishop’s Palace in the Garden of Supplications after the chaplain and I found you with that little Chinese tart? I beat you to pulp. I could do it again now for old time’s sake.’

  I raise my hands deprecatingly.

  ‘Yes, yes, that was quite a thrashing, but it’s your go. Let me get the drinks this time.’

  I walk away, thinking, and I think that I have nothing to fear. Indochina was a long time ago and I was a different man before Dien Bien Phu. That’s true. But I’m not sure that I was ever in Hoa Binh. Certainly I never went to the Bishop’s Palace and I don’t think I can remember being in any fight over a Chinese tart. What the hell was or is the Garden of Supplications? Now that I think about our little chat as it has run so far – ‘old comrade in arms’, ‘old fellow’, ‘little arsehole’ – not once has he called me by my name. It is certainly quite likely that we met on one or other of the Red River operations, but I am pretty sure that he has got me mixed up with someone else. In which case, it is now time to throw him off the scent completely. The Kabyle’s glazed eyes follow me as I return with the mollifying glass of beer.

  And then I casually try it out.

  ‘I shouldn’t like us to quarrel and, by the way, Edmond, I think that you have forgotten my name. It’s Antoine – Antoine Galland.’

  ‘Antoine! That’s fine! Let’s shake on –’ But his hand never reaches mine. He wrinkles his nose.

  ‘No, wait a minute, surely … have I been muddling you? … Surely … Philippe. Sorry. I thought you were Philippe Roussel. Surely, you were one of Joinville’s team …’

  It is very quiet between us. Then he tries a short laugh.

  ‘No. It’s Antoine. That’s right. I had forgotten …’

  ‘No, Edmond. Now, you remember. Yes, it’s Philippe Roussel. Keep that hand away from your holster. I have killed and I will kill again.’

  And I ease the handle of my Tokarev out from my pocket far enough for him to see it.

  ‘I want you to go and sit over there. I want you to sit on your hands.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sit on your hands. You liberal colonialists have had plenty of practice at that.’

  He shakes his head, but he does as I tell him. I give him a fraternal hug round the shoulder, leaning low over him to prevent others in the bar from seeing what I am doing, and I get the gun from his holster and slip it inside my jacket. It is time for another gamble. I speak very low and he has to incline his head to hear it all.

  ‘Now, don’t turn round straight away, but there is a man sitting behind us, the one in the postman’s uniform with the gauntlets. You must have noticed him. He’s been keeping you under observation all the time we talked. He’s one of my men. In a minute I am going to walk out of this place. OK, you can turn your head now and look at him.’

  The Kabyle’s regard which had dropped for a moment is fixed on us. It’s an unnervingly impassive stare.

  ‘What I want, Edmond, is for you to just sit and reflect for a while. You are going to stay here, until ten minutes after my man has left. Then, of course, you can raise the alarm, but on the whole I think it would be better if you managed to forget we have ever met. Don’t you? We have our men in your filthy regroupment camp at Blida. They can take your head off your shoulders any time. It’s been nice talking to you, Edmond. I only wish I could remember you as well as you remember me.’

  Once more, I stroll over to the bar. It is important that I do not look back. I buy a beer. Then I walk over to the postman and hand him the beer.

  ‘It’s a grand job you postmen are doing in these dangerous times. This beer comes with the compliments of that officer over there.’

  Close up, it is clear that I have guessed right. The postman is almost completely blotto. He has difficulty in raising the glass in his gauntleted hands, but he raises it in a sort of half-toast to Edmond and looks at him in bleary puzzlement. I slip Edmond’s gun on to his lap. The postman is so past it that he does not seem to register this.

  Then I walk out. Never run. It is for my enemies to run. But I admit I am somewhat shaken. I have been walking around this city in a sort of fantasy, for it is as if I imagined that I were Fantômas, the master criminal whose disguise the police and the authorities are incapable of penetrating. Yet twice in one day I have been recognized. These are risks which are not worth running. It is quiet in the foggy street outside. Then I hear the matchstick crackle of gunfire. It is impossible to tell in which direction. Hardly an hour passes in this city without the sound of shooting. I do not think that Nounourse and I can exist in that confined room for much longer without trying to kil
l each other. I am getting out of control and dangerous to myself. It is plain that our final strike in Algiers must be soon.

  Chapter Twenty

  The barricades are going up. On the Saturday the shopkeepers and workers come out with picks and shovels and start hacking at the surfaces of the roads and levering great lumps up to form barriers across those roads. These new walls are crowned by wood and barbed wire. The militias are out in the streets too, sporting their arms and standing guard rather self-consciously over the barricades that are going up. Occasionally a police officer or a para will stroll up and they and the militia men and shopkeepers chat casually. But most of the time the police are happy to keep to themselves, playing cards in the shade of their armoured black marias. The leaders of the demonstration and the strike walk about having oblique conversations and shifting their gaze to see what their comrades are doing. People everywhere are waiting for people somewhere else to do something. As I do the shopping, I hear the phrases which are the small change in this season’s currency of conversation. ‘The suitcase or the coffin’, ‘It’s now or never’, ‘We are at the last quarter-hour’, ‘The days of hope, like Hungary in ’56.’

  It is midwinter, but the temperature is spring-like and the girls who bring picnic baskets to the men on the barricades are in their summer dresses. The young men slick back their hair and joke with the girls. In the evenings, in place of the traditional paseo up the boulevard Guillemin and round to Trois Horloges, there are street parties where the young dance the rumba and the cha-cha-cha and the old look on, for once, indulgently. Where cars can still drive, convoys of cars drive around aimlessly sounding their horns to the rhythm of Al–gér–ie fran–çaise.

  The last time they played this game, the pieds noirs took Government House and brought Generals Salan and Massu to the balcony. They put an end to concessions to the Arabs, forced the fall of the government in France and brought de Gaulle to power. This time it is again no concessions to the Arabs and they plan to remove de Gaulle from power. There is a lot of swagger and hard talk in the streets, but Marx’s phrase keeps running in my head, ‘the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce’. The putschists will form a Committee of Public Safety and will demand that Jacques Massu, the torturer of the kasbah, be brought back to Algiers. They are reckoning without Captain Philippe Roussel.

  The day of the strike comes, 24 January, 1960. In the heart of the city and in the white suburbs the shutters come down. The clusters of men on street corners are getting larger. Every cluster has its transistor radio blaring. They talk casually and eye other groups up and down the road as they talk. At last, from the higher reaches of the city, small bands begin to move off down the ravine roads and flights of steps in rivulets, then in great streams of humanity, heading towards Government Square. The strategy worked out by the Children of Vercingetorix and other ultra groups is that their militias and the vast mass of the white population of Algiers will descend on Government House in such numbers that the gendarmes guarding the place will be forced to withdraw and the commissioner of police will call in the paras and the Foreign Legion. Key officers in these regiments will then declare themselves in sympathy with the aims of the demonstrators and from that moment on the coup will be properly launched. In order for the army to declare itself in this way, it is crucial that the gendarmes are forced out of the way as peacefully as possible, so, although the militias march under their banners with their antiquated Lebel rifles sloped over their shoulders, the rifles are for show, not use.

  Everything is ready for the demonstrators in Government Square. A triple line of steel-helmeted and gauntleted gendarmes is drawn up in front of the floral clock. They have their truncheons out and look tough, but they must know that they will have to withdraw in the face of a demonstration of this size. Behind the floral clock, the French and foreign camera crews have got their cameras up on platforms. Nounourse and I lie pressed very low on the roof of one of the administrative buildings on the side of the square.

  The crowd floods across the square. A man in the striped uniform of a former Belsen inmate, flanked by two veterans of the First World War, leads its advance under a banner which bears the motto ‘ALGERIA IS OUR MOTHER. ONE DOES NOT ABANDON ONE’S MOTHER’.

  They carry wreaths for the French Algerians who died for France in two world wars. Prominent behind them is Lagaillarde, the ex-para whom they are calling ‘the D’Artagnan of the barricades’. The leaders are all trying to smile for the cameramen. In twenty years’ time, or sooner I estimate, those anxious smiles will come to resemble deathmasks. The crowd’s shouts come up to us on the roof like the sound of the sea drawing back on gravel. We look down on a thousand snaking lines of tricolours, placards, képis, headscarves, berets and steel helmets and on the clenched fists which dance up and down above the heads. What a tremendous sight! Just the sort of mass demonstration of spurious comradeship and high-minded emotion to give Chantal one of her shivers up the spine.

  The crowd advances to within a few feet of the first line of gendarmes and stops. It shuffles and looks at itself and its front line ripples uncertainly. There is a lot of taunting, as each man dares his neighbour to go a little further than he has done and to risk coming within range of a truncheon. Of course people further back in the crowd are impatient and trying to push ahead, but still the mood on both sides is fairly good-humoured, taunting rather than genuinely threatening. There are a few flurries and flailing blows. Rather than really lash out and provoke serious trouble, the police keep taking steps backwards. I am reminded of a comic newsreel being run in reverse. Even now as the police keep withdrawing in good order, both sides take care not to trample over the floral clock – the famous floral clock in Government Square which has marked the hour for so many demonstrations. But the hands on this clock show that we are indeed at the last quarter-hour.

  It is time for the Bad Fairy Carabosse to put an end to the mob’s honeymoon. The distance is formidable. Nounourse and I have only our pistols, but the lines of gendarmes are closely packed, and we do not even have to hit them. We only have to make them realize that they are being fired upon. We take aim and fire. One of the gendarmes does indeed fall. A couple of police officers fire over the heads of the crowd. The militia men at the front kneel to return their fire, but the militia fire into the ranks of the police. Nounourse and I fire again. More gendarmes fall. This was not expected and it seems that, apart from the officers, the police were not issued with ammunition.

  The crowd in movement has its choreography. It splits apart like an exploding star. It shoots flares of humanity up the streets that lead out of the square. I note with interest that though almost everyone is running, no one is running very fast. I come to the conclusion that there are two reasons for this. Firstly, the crowd in flight runs with its head hunched low in expectation of a bullet in the back and it is difficult to run fast in that position. Second, the crowd cannot run fast for fear of trampling over itself. The mob in flight travels at a half-trot.

  Within a few minutes the square that was packed is almost empty. There are militia men firing from the stairs and from behind the camera platforms. The police have got tear-gas grenades out and are lobbing them into the centre of the square. Already I can see a dozen of their number lying motionless, pressed to the ground as if they were seeking warmth from its flagstones. The square is littered with abandoned placards, picnic food for the outing and high-heeled shoes. A pair of deserted children look on bewildered with their thumbs in their mouths. Ever since the firing started, there have been cries from both sides of ‘Cease firing!’, ‘Cease your fire!’, but sporadic firing continues. There is not a soldier in sight.

  I find the whole business utterly fascinating and for a long time I lie there peering over the edge of the roof. It is the living and dying proof of what I have always known, that one can understand violent revolutionary change only by actually participating in it. The right man at the right time, I have put history in motion. Pointing to the blo
ody city below us, I quote Lenin to Nounourse, ‘And when, on an earth which has finally been subdued and purged of enemies, the final iniquity shall have been drowned in the blood of the just and the unjust, then the State which has reached the limit of all power, a monstrous idol covering the entire earth will be discreetly absorbed into the silent city of Justice.’ Eventually, when it is clear that the action has moved away from Government Square, I roll over and bask in this beautiful Algerian sun of ours. Nounourse and I chat idly. I find his company more tiresome than ever. This simple soul thinks that I support the Arabs. He is, of course, in error. What is going on in Algiers and throughout the world is not a football match, where everyone, playing or watching, is either for the French or for the Arabs and one cheers and waves the rattle without thinking. History is not a football match and it is history alone that I support. However, Nounourse and I agree that it has been a very good morning’s piece of work, and already I am thinking about how to deal with Chantal and the brood of Vercingetorix.

  It is dusk before we come off the roof. It is ‘like Hungary in ’56’, but, like Hungary in ’56 it is moving into a darker phase. Barricades of tyres are being set alight, sending filthy black smoke up into the ink-blue sky. Grim-looking shopkeepers are assembling collections of bottles filled with petrol behind the barricades. There is still no sign of the army. On the one hand, too many French policemen have been killed for the paras to declare themselves to be on the side of the rioters. On the other hand, there are too many rioters about for the troops to attempt to regain control of the city yet. No one knows what will happen next. The Great Fear has come upon the people.