by Robert Irwin
‘Shut up, Raoul. Never mind all that. Tell me what you are doing here.’
Now Nounourse, who has been paying no attention to us but has been standing over the bed, looking down saucer-eyed at Chantal, raises his head, curious to see how this madman will explain himself. Raoul smiles at Nounourse and me, seeming to wish to offer us some faint reassurance.
‘You are right, of course. However, the point is that everything follows from the labour theory of value. It is the lynchpin of Marxist theory. Everything follows from that, as in a very beautifully constructed piece of –’
‘Enough of that, Raoul.’
‘I am simply trying to tell you that I am on your side. “Things are as they are and their consequences will be what they will be. Why then should we wish to be deceived?” Marxism is true and, as you should know, for me, if a thing is true, it is true to the limit. I now saw that forgiveness for Chantal was out of the question. She is the enemy and I also realized that I wanted to make contact with you again. There was only one place I could be sure that I would find you at. So I came here at the beginning of the evening and I brought a gun and a cut-throat razor with me. I have not killed her, for I thought we might need her to get out of this place. So here I have been these last three hours. We have been arguing, but I always had the gun on her. A bit like Laghouat really, but different.’
He laughs reminiscently.
‘Occasionally I have had a little chat with Maurice and his men. As I say, I told him to expect you and let you through.’
Here Nounourse interrupts. Nounourse is having difficulty with all this.
‘You have cut out her tongue?’
Raoul is looking at me for approval.
‘She was talking that old fascist propaganda. She will never change. So just now I cut it out. I find that I no longer have my old nose for political debate. The tongue is a slippery thing to get hold of and it was a messier business than I expected. As you see, there is a lot of blood, but she is in no danger of dying. Anyway. I didn’t want to hear more of her. I have long thought that there is such a thing as repressive tolerance and, as I see it now, freedom for her and her father and her father’s friends to talk is freedom to talk their way into doing other people down. I don’t want to hear any of the old siren songs. Imperialist and racist ideas do not deserve a voice. The time for debate is over. It is time to act!’
Nounourse’s face lights up and, catching Nounourse’s expression of approval, Raoul gestures grandly with the razor.
‘Now, shall we make Cleopatra’s nose shorter and change the face of the world?’
Nounourse has never heard of Cleopatra. As for me, I am not sure that I do approve. The ruthlessness, yes. But this melodramatic private vengeance, this posturing and all this over-excitement on the part of a new convert … His nervy jokes … I am not sure. But it hardly matters now. Raoul is right when he says that it is time to act.
‘Forget it. How do we get out of here?’
‘My car is outside. We walk out with Chantal. Very difficult for them with all these people around. I told Maurice not to cancel his little soirée. They will not dare touch us as long as we have her. We drive around until we have shaken any tail they put on us. After that I am not sure.’
‘So let’s get moving then.’
Raoul and I help Chantal get dressed, while Nounourse prudishly turns his back to us. She is shivering, very cold, but with a high feverish pulse. I kiss her firmly compressed lips. Raoul looks at me strangely, but there is nothing sexual in this kiss. I was never really in love with Chantal. That was not possible for me. Engels was right when he said, ‘Sexual love in a man’s relation to woman becomes and can become the rule among the oppressed class alone, among the proletarians.’ I work for the love of the proletariat, but I know that I shall never experience that love myself. I see things as they are. I kiss with my eyes open. I am kissing not a woman, but a mutilated figure, the embodiment of all the casualties that have happened and that will happen in this war in Algeria. Her eyes are wonderful nightmare eyes.
Raoul gets a cigarette out and alight in his lips. Nounourse is as amazed as I was by the effect of the smoke issuing out of Raoul’s face. Then we hoist Chantal up. She will have to be helped to walk. Raoul and I each take an arm and, as we come out into the corridor, Nounourse brings up the rear, covering us with his gun. The Corsicans lay down their rifles and watch us walk by. One of them looks as though he is about to be sick. Down below I can hear someone playing ‘The Cake Walk’ on the piano. Normally, Maurice would not tolerate that ‘black boogy-woogy, jigger-jigger music’ in his house, but obviously he has other things on his mind now. I think that we shall go to the Congo. This moment has the quality of a dark dream, but I recognize our behaviour, the behaviour of all of us in this house, as a manifestation, one manifestation among many, of the bizarre and decadent features of the capitalist world in its dying throes. Surely Marx was right when he wrote that capitalism ‘can just as easily turn the real, natural and essential powers of man into abstract ideas, as it can turn real imperfections and phantoms of the mind into essential powers and capacities’? As we descend the staircase the music stops.
About the Author
Robert Irwin was born in 1946. He read Modern History at Oxford and taught Medieval History at the University of St Andrews. He also lectured on Arabic and Middle Eastern History at the universities of London, Cambridge and Oxford. He is the commissioning editor for the TLS for The Middle East and writes for a number of newspapers and journals in the UK and the USA.
He is a fellow of The Royal Society of Literature.
He has published six novels: The Arabian Nightmare (1983), The Limits of Vision (1986), The Mysteries of Algiers (1988), Exquisite Corpse (1995), Prayer-Cushions of the Flesh (1997) and Satan Wants Me (1999).
He is the author of ten works of non-fiction: The Middle East in the Middle Ages (1984), The Arabian Nights: A Companion (1994), Islamic Art (1997), Night and Horses and the Desert: The Penguin Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature (1999), Alhambra (2004), For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies (2006), Camel (2010), Mamluks and Crusaders (2010), Visions of the Jinn; Illustrators of the Arabian Nights (2010), and Memoirs of a Dervish (2011).
He is also the editor of The New Cambridge History of Islam Vol. 4: Islamic Cultures and Societies to the End of the Eighteenth Century (2010)
Copyright
Published in the UK by Dedalus Limited,
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ISBN printed book 978 1 873982 60 0
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Publishing History
First published by Viking in 1988
first published by Penguin in 1988
First published by Dedalus in 1993
First ebook edition in 2012
Copyright © Robert Irwin1988
The right of Robert Irwin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
Printed in Finland by Bookwell
Typeset by RefineCatch Ltd
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A C.I.P. Listing for this book is available on request.
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Robert Irwin, The Mysteries of Algiers
