What happens—first, how very fast the soldiers smash in the doors and charge into the houses with their guns in their hands, the houses so low, so dark it takes time for the eyes to get used to it and find only a few women and old men, sometimes children deep inside the rooms.
Not one able-bodied man.
The soldiers sweep through the village yelling as they run, they yell to buck themselves up, to frighten, like rattling groans, hard breathing, so the old women let go of the baskets they’re weaving and look at the young men, surprised that with guns in their hands they’re the ones who seem frightened. They’re angry, they yell,
Out!
Out!
And in the houses they grab people by the arms, pull on their clothing,
Get out! Get the fuck out!
And the women put down the baskets. They get up. They leave the looms, they walk out, the old men walk out, they don’t know why and their slow steps contradict their obedience, with their raised hands flat on their heads and the barrels of the automatic rifles pushing them towards the center of the village.
The children walk forward too, looking up at the soldiers, their faces are contorted, they’re holding back, fear keeps them from crying.
Children are screaming in front of the door of a house. They remain motionless, two little ones, just standing there, they scream until a woman comes to get them and brings them with her to sit in the town square, squeezed together, all of them, neighbors, friends, all the others, family, all of them, as long as they’re women, old people, children, all huddled together at the level of the soldiers’ legs, with the tips of the barrels dancing before their eyes and the stifling hot dust, thick, white, blurring eyes and smells, and leaving a dry floury taste in the mouth.
Hens cluck across the village square and scrabble around in the dust and dogs are barking, you can hear goats, and the doors being smashed in, women’s screams, a few women locked in or hidden, young women dressed in bright colors, red, blue, yellow, they resist, they have to be pushed, pushed at gun point and you have to yell,
Fuck, move it!
Then bring them back to the square,
Come on!
More violently than the old people because they know something, they know where the men are.
The men, where the hell are the men?
No one can find the men.
The old people don’t talk either, remain silent—only the toothless mouths vibrate and make a lapping sound and splutter, or quiver like the fingers hooked onto the canes that are holding them up. Aside from that the eyes say nothing, nothing, not even astonishment. Not even anger, nothing. Calm, resignation, nothing, patience, perhaps. Some of them saw the bodies after the napalm bombings—the little black heaps of charred bodies with their limbs intact, others had their penis split by electric shocks, they miraculously escaped death, they saw soldiers stone men to death and twelve-year-old girls give themselves to the soldiers without crying; so now they’re not afraid and they wait, patience is on their side.
The lieutenant is talking with Abdelmalik, one of the two harkis. Now he’s bawling at the top of his lungs at those bitches who don’t want to talk, we’ll make them talk, they’ll have to talk, them or the old guys,
Fuck it, they have to talk.
And while he’s yelling and spitting and wiping his forehead with the back of his sleeve, they keep searching the houses and forcing open the possible weapons caches, the doors, more doors, a few more, of the houses slightly set back from the street, and from the inside you can hear breaking, things being knocked down, hens run away, goats scatter, maybe there’ll be weapons in the big earthen jars they smash open and only find wheat that spreads over the floor like powder or sand in clouds of yellow dust between the fingers.
Février wants to go into one of the last houses and the door won’t open. It’s resisting. Three or four together, it’s got to give way. And inside there is a woman and a blind old man who jumps when the door gives way and floods the room with light and the soldiers figure right away the old man’s blind because he’s the only one who doesn’t turn his face to them.
But he’s not the one you walk up to. Nor to the woman, who might be the blind man’s daughter, but to the two children, almost not children anymore, a girl and a boy, fourteen or fifteen, not the age of a fellagha yet.
How we know he’s not a fell, how we know what he is, guys?
What are you?
Say it, say what you are.
We asked you a question.
You don’t speak French? No, you don’t understand?
The adolescent doesn’t say anything, he shrinks back slightly, hardly one step, and he looks at the soldiers one after the other. He makes a sign to say he doesn’t understand, he raises his arms and wants to put them on his head, then changes his mind, lowers them down to his body, then, in Arabic, he says words nobody understands. You can feel, you can guess what he means. He must be saying he doesn’t understand and doesn’t know what they’re asking, while his eyes are just saying he’s terrified—and he’s going to try to alleviate his fear by looking at his mother and sister, by looking at the old man. Nobody seems to understand what he’s saying.
Where you hiding weapons?
Where’re you hiding weapons, say it.
The first time they hit him he doesn’t flinch, he barely even starts, or blinks. His voice is shaking, that’s all, to say he doesn’t understand or he’s not hiding anything, or whatever, other words, impossible to make out.
The weapons?
Where are they, say it.
He looks at them and doesn’t answer.
The men, where’re they hiding?
No, he makes a sign to say no.
Where, you know where.
Say it.
He shakes his head to say no.
The fells, you don’t know anything?
There are two soldiers very close to him and they give him little slaps with their fingertips, on his skull, behind his head, on the nape of the neck.
The weapons, where are they?
He closes his eyes, his eyes blink. The sharp sound of slaps. The boy still stands straight. He holds his breath. The sounds of slaps get louder and louder, on the cheeks, on the eyes, on his forehead, he knits his brows, you can see his jaw muscles shuddering, he holds his breath, he makes a gesture of not knowing and he says no with a sharp, nervous movement, like a spasm. He steps back. He spreads out his hands and puts his arms up. They search him and find nothing under his clothing but the trembling of his whole body and the cold sweat on the back of his rigid neck, and as soon as the hitting stops he opens his eyes wide and his breath makes his chest rise and he breathes very loudly through his nose, with his mouth open.
Outside, the sound—they listen—of more doors being kicked in. You can hear the big clay jars thrown down, smashing apart on the ground. And children, babies crying. And dogs barking. Then a shot. They jump. Goats. A dog, someone killed a dog. And they search the adolescent. Then the others. Then someone gropes the girl’s djellaba. Then the girl looks at her mother as her hair escapes from the headscarf that the soldier slides off, and her hair comes undone, falls over her shoulders. Then she opens her mouth as if to express surprise. She clenches her fists. The soldier lingers, searching, groping her breasts for a long time. Mouret and Février watch without saying anything. Then Février walks up to the girl, the other soldier moves over, Février touches the djellaba and stops when the girl lets out a soft cry, almost nothing, and then takes refuge in silence. Her anger must be kept in the background—she knows, she repeats to herself that she can’t lose her head, above all she can’t get mad, she can’t scream, she absolutely can’t scream, can’t insult them, you have to wait, have to keep quiet.
Mouret looks at Février and motions him to drop it.
Février turns away and goes back to the boy,
You don’t want to say anything?
You don’t want to talk? We’ll make you talk, you know we can make you, you know that?
He walks over, he hesitates. He looks the boy in the eyes then spits right next to him. He looks at the boy again, as if he wanted to tell him something, or understand him, or probe into his silence, into his fear, and grab something, read a confession in it, secrets; and he looks at the old man and the woman, but now all he can see is wrinkled, furrowed skin and the man has eyes as dead as his youth.
Then Février gets almost scared and his eyes finally alight on the girl. She’s holding up the top of her djellaba with one hand and with the other she’s trying to hold back her hair. She does not focus on Février’s eyes, nor on the others’. They make the boy put his two hands flat on his skull. He’s crying, silently, the tears fog up his eyes, and flow down his cheeks. There is no revolt or anger in his expression. The blind man does not move at all and neither does the mother, she barely turns her face away, lowers her eyes a little. As for the boy, his wide-open eyes are on the men—eyes open and shining as if they were reflecting a hallucination.
And still from outside you can hear babies crying, another dog barking, women wailing, and then that burnt smell spreading out, and on the square, the cries of the women and the lamentations also floating in the acrid, bitter smell of the black smoke, the smell, the smoke filtering in and soon stinging nostrils and eyes.
The men are going to leave. They are going to go out. Février hesitates and looks at the girl, she can feel it, the others feel it too, the soldiers too. Mouret gives him a punch in the shoulder.
They walk out. They’re on the doorstep when Nivelle turns around with no warning, a sharp, mechanical movement without thinking it seems, he retraces his steps, a few strides, his body stiff; he walks a few meters and takes his gun out of his belt and without looking without thinking straight ahead walks up to the boy and puts a bullet in his head.
Outside, Février and the others discover the village in flames. The women and the old people are in the middle of the square, while from some burning houses comes the sound of moaning. And all the men and women are sitting next to each other, huddled one against the other, and the women are crying, not all of them, some of them turn around and look at the burning houses, and others are imploring; the men lower their eyes and wait, their hands flat on their heads, they wait and the crying of the women is even more unbearable than the smoke and the fire devastating the houses around them, more unbearable perhaps than the soldiers so close to them, aiming their machine guns at them, and the lieutenant shouting and circling around them, he kicks shoulders, backs, and he orders them to talk, to tell where the able-bodied men are, you know where, the husbands, sons, brothers, of course you know where, since they abandoned you here,
They’re dogs, the lieutenant repeats, dogs because they abandoned you, they knew we’d come and they abandoned you.
And he keeps circling the group of men and women and children, and then soldiers walk between them, step over the bodies, and kick them at random, hard boot-kicks, the women are howling and the children are crying in their arms. They yell they don’t know,
We don’t know anything, the men left so long ago, we don’t know, to the city, to Oran, for work, they left to look for work.
And the lieutenant does not believe them. The soldiers do not believe them. The lieutenant tears a baby from a woman’s arms—at first she resists, she holds the child back, her arms, her hands clinging to the body of the child and a soldier comes to help the lieutenant, pushing away the woman, hitting her on the arms and shoulders with his rifle butt, so she’ll let go, so she’ll give in, and finally she gives in and collapses and the lieutenant takes the baby, he picks it up by the neck with one hand, brandishes it in the air, the old men and the women sit up but the soldiers point their barrels and the lieutenant raises his arm higher still and they can see the baby and the tiny arms, tiny legs kicking around,
His father, where is he, where’s his father?
And the lieutenant keeps standing with his arm up and the child screams and struggles, he looks like he’s swimming, his mother screams, she implores them, she has crawled up to the lieutenant’s feet and wants to hang on to him but the soldier hits her again with his rifle butt, pushes her away, the lieutenant doesn’t see her, he looks at the others in the square, all the others, sitting there, terrified, not daring to move,
Where are they, where are your men?
And he doesn’t wait for an answer, it’s over, he takes out his gun and slaps the mouth of the barrel onto the baby’s temple and a pink mark shows on the temple, deep in it, and the baby screams, the lieutenant looks at the women, at the old men, they say nothing and he looks at the soldiers around him, frozen, very pale too,
No,
He hears a voice saying
No,
And he waits like that, and he lets the silence cover everything, then he wonders if it’s him, if he’s the one who has spoken and said,
He puts his gun back in the holster, and with an indifferent gesture, like a pit you spit out after rolling it around in your mouth for a long time, he throws the baby a few meters away from him; and soon you hear only tears and the endless wailing of the woman who throws herself on the child.
And then they’ll keep going, to the next village.
From one village to the next, still the smell of the smoke, not only on clothes but in the air, spreading out and coloring the sky. They go through the cool of an immensely wide stream for a while, but the water is only a very thin trickle winding along a bed of pebbles that have to be stepped over, like the loose stones and the tufts of thistles. The earth is moist, sandy, dotted with pickleweed. You can hear sheep and goats. There are traces of sandals and hiking boots. They walk fairly fast, in silence, with only the sound of water between the stones and the pebbles sliding underfoot, the voices, when they say shit, voices of men stumbling and the clink of metal junk in the loads the guys are carrying.
A stop to put your hands in the water, refresh yourself.
Nobody says anything. And when the lieutenant orders Poiret to go get the ones who’re lagging behind, he grumbles a little, not out of fear, but out of scorn for the ones lagging behind, or simply because he doesn’t want to walk more than he has to.
And of course Châtel’s the one he finds alone, last. When he sees him coming toward him his look is unmistakable,
Leave me alone.
Châtel would like to say,
Leave me alone.
But he doesn’t say it. Except through the whiteness, the paleness of his face, his cold look. Or, rather, angry look. Furious now. And then it doesn’t last long. The time for the others to turn around when they hear not voices, not the sound of hands but the gear of the two men falling into the water and the splashing of the bodies fighting and the pebbles rolling around in the water.
When they’re separated, Châtel is on the ground, the other is insulting him and keeps hitting, he hits hard, kicks. Châtel is in the water protecting his face, his body feels nothing, barely feels the pebbles under him rolling, sliding, striking his body, his back, buttocks and legs, not even Poiret’s kicks,
Come on, fight, you fucking piece of shit, fight!
And then the others hold Poiret back, they help Châtel get up and gather his things.
But roughly, without any friendship for him, just to go faster, because the lieutenant had given the order. And they don’t look at him. You wouldn’t be surprised if he started to cry. But he doesn’t cry. He walks along and mumbles something, his eyes fixed on the back of the ones walking in front of him, as if he couldn’t see anything anymore and the shade they’re enjoying for the moment would last forever.
But no. Soon you have to leave the wadi. You can see the roofs of the next village.
Châtel comes to a halt and starts throwing up.
That evening, he’s standing at the bar of the rec hall, and for a time that seems to last forever, he stays there without moving, his elbows on the bar, his eyes turned to the room.
Nivelle and Poiret are playing foosball there.
Châtel looks at them and can’t take his eyes off those two guys he doesn’t understand.
He looks at them, the way they both have of holding their arms in front of them and keeping their legs wide apart, their torsos and shoulders very mobile, the back of Nivelle’s neck, their skulls under the crew cut hair. He sees them turning the handles, he hears the clacking of the chromed bars and the clacks resound in the thick, heavy silence of this room which is suddenly too subdued, where the men are drinking their beer without talking—they don’t talk, they smoke, and they have in their voices, when they need to talk, a sort of slowness. Is it fatigue, is it fear, he doesn’t know. He can still hear and feel the water in the wadi and the stones rolling under his skin when the other guy was demanding that he fight, in that voice he hears yelling the same way at Nivelle now, exactly the same way, because he’s winning; and the noise of the ball when it seems to cut through the opponent’s goal, a quick sharp sound like the shot of a gun.
Châtel jumps.
Both of them are playing with such frenzy that sometimes the whole foosball table moves, and Châtel is almost frightened by that. And the looks of the other men around him, how they’re watching the two of them playing like maniacs, their resounding voices, the scraping of the frame over the floor, the white balls rolling and thrown with a sure hand into the middle of the playing field.
And later when Châtel walks into the barracks, when all the others are still hanging out a little longer in the rec hall before heading for dinner, he sees Bernard sitting on his bed, absorbed in his missal.
And if Bernard raises his head, it’s to plunge it back into his book and let his lips run from one psalm to another, holding his breath, completely concentrated. Châtel knows that he can talk to no one here, not even to Bernard, as he had first thought. It’s over, he knows it, Bernard is irritated by Châtel, everything in him annoys him, his strange thinness and pallor, his thin black mustache over his lips, a sort of very fine down, like a shadow, which he trims with scissors every day. Too sure of himself behind that fragile look that serves as a screen, as false modesty, and that look of a student he has, of an intellectual, his ugliness, too, which makes Bernard think that it’s probably because women don’t like him that Châtel can easily see himself as a servant of God.
Because Châtel is something of a pacifist, one of those people Bernard knows only because of a few words he heard somewhere, the kind of people nobody has ever known personally; Châtel is someone who thinks that one God doesn’t necessarily exclude another, that you can have other beliefs and yet the same rights, who sometimes even says,
The UN, you know what the UN is?
It’s impossible to talk to him, he and Bernard agree about nothing.
All the same, that evening, when both of them are called, among others, Bernard can guess how lonely Châtel’s going to feel, even more than the other men, and yet they’ll have to go, step into the night with all the others, then leave the base, walk a good thirty meters and spread out around it—they don’t like that, no one likes that, because you find yourself alone in the night and you have to stay awake and on the alert for hours, squatting or standing with your rifle in your hand.
They form a circle around the base, but the links of the chain are so spaced out that you know you’re alone, the space between two men is now so wide, so vast, you can’t talk to the others, at first you’d like to talk to someone but when you learn that talking makes you a target and smoking too, that you can be seen and heard, you give up very quickly and right away you feel more naked and vulnerable than inside the base, here nothing protects you—and for Bernard, as for the others, the only company is the horrible rumblings that tear his stomach apart, the urge to vomit and hunger too, because dinner is already well behind him, the food is so bad, well, no, not bad really, but it’s always so much the same thing. Because you’d like, the body would like to know something besides the corned beef or the cans of tuna in oil or the dried vegetables and rice again, always rice, or the boiled beef soup in which for days on end they find the same lousy, spoiled meat that passes for beef,
Come on, this is beef?
rages Février, who knows something about beef and can tell the taste of lamb or camel right away. But he doesn’t recognize the taste of the donkeys they occasionally kill by mistake here—corpses of animals whose only virtue is not to come from a can. So, meat. And wine. And going home. That’s what Février talks about to Bernard, in the evening, when he shows the pictures of his fiancée in his wallet. Because here, women are souvenirs tucked into wallets where the Saturday night dances, the fiancées they’ve held tight, light dresses and springtime warmth are stored, and then comes the throbbing pain of desire, a desire they drive away by joking around.
But Février shows a picture of Éliane at the beach, you see her standing, she’s smiling at the photographer and every time he shows it, he knows it may be to boast a little, to say yes, look at the girl who’s waiting for me, her legs and her pretty naked feet in the sand, the bikini and her hair in the wind and her hands on her hips and that smile on the beach of Tranche-sur-Mer, her breasts thrust out and the whole barracks whistles,
And Février shouts,
Home, for chrissake!
And they all laugh,
Home, for chrissake!
They try to rip the snapshot away from him, to pass it around, and comments fly between two laughs.
And now, in the night, the cold finally gets to you.
Bernard tries to shift position often, his limbs go numb and he tries to hear the men to his right and to his left, the ones who are shifting position like him and you can hear from far off.
You tell yourself it’s them, because even if your eyes get used to the night, what you’re on the lookout for, at first, what he, too, tries to hear rather than see, is all the sounds that don’t come from him, from his body whose breathing is so heavy that sometimes that’s what scares him, as if someone were breathing behind him, as if there were someone right next to him—and so hands and fingers grip the rifle very hard, eyes strain to spot a shadow in the darkness, a shape—but what emerges in the bluish gray is the outline of the landscape you’ve known for months but at night you’d rather see it from up there, when you’re a sentry, rather than out here at the outpost.
The difference is that up there you’re in a stone tower, solid, firm, made of gray stones that have no fear of bullets, and you climb up there through a staircase you access through a steel door, locked by the commanding officer. There’s nothing to be scared of up there; you tell yourself that if the base were attacked, it’s probably the only place where nothing could happen to you.
Sometimes, when Bernard is on sentry duty with the night stretched out in front of him, the cold doesn’t keep him awake. It’s mild out, you could even fall asleep more easily than in the barracks, because here, at least, neither the snores nor the smells of sweat disturb your craving for sleep. The cicadas help move you toward sleep, that gentle floating, too, that you feel, of the wind in the trees and the brush, that numbness whose caress you get to like very quickly, telling yourself: this could be a lot worse.
You imagine what’s happening on the other side of the base, behind the big oil tanks. You imagine the sea and the ships whose sirens can sometimes be heard in the distance, and on the other side, behind the hills, you tell yourself that this country stretches out, a country you only know by name and the ideas people have about it, postcard clichés, the desert, the camels, one imagines turbaned horsemen galloping down the trails at top speed, the sand kicking up like a cloud around them and broad, supple movements when they twirl their huge, curved, sickle-shaped sabers high above their heads.
But for now you cling to your rifle and Bernard, like the others, is ruining his eyes looking for shapes moving in the night.
Wild dogs do come prowling around, he knows that very well, he can spot them sometimes from his sentry post in the tower—brown spots sticking out in the transparent blue, pinkish in some places—but from up there you’re not afraid of being attacked, not even by the dogs attracted by the smell of the garbage cans.
Whereas now, this very evening, you’ll hear a slight cracking sound first.
Like twigs cracking under footsteps.
For a few seconds Bernard holds his breath, he wants to hear. He wonders if it’s not just a buddy taking a leak further on—often, when he’s here, he’s so scared of being attacked precisely at the moment when he lets his guard down to take a piss that he holds it back as long as he can—you have so many stories in your head—so many guys like him found in the early morning with their throat slashed open and their member in their mouth. So he strains his ears even more, yes, a noise still pretty far away, like twigs being crushed, or is it the wind—he’s well aware it might be just about anything.
There are so many nights he can’t manage to sleep, even inside the base.
It’s because he’s still outraged by that business with the money and his mother: he knows he can’t do anything about it.
And it’s no use trying to drive fear away in the night by reciting psalms and stroking the metal or tapping the butt of his automatic rifle, he knows that for weeks, the first weeks at least, anger blinded him and how, thanks to it, or because of it, like an anesthetic, he hadn’t even realized until now that he had boarded that ship. Because for him there’s no way he’s going to go back to the fields, or sit for whole afternoons watching cows graze away his youth and his whole life slipping away from him in the rustling of the poplar leaves.
All that’s over and done with.
Now he dreams of having a trade, being a mechanic, working in a city and leaving the boredom and fatigue of the fields behind. He wants money. He imagines that with money everything will change. He’ll be able to leave for the city and find a job in a factory or even, why not, in a garage, like Nivelle, who’s a mechanic in a car dealership near Orléans. Or better still, ever since he met Mireille: have his own garage. That’s what he dreams about and sometimes talks about with other people, because some of them understand the idea of not going back to the farm, since the work is hard and doesn’t necessarily pay off.
And he thinks again of the money no sooner won than lost.
He can see himself demanding the money from his mother the day after he gets back, after he finally got some sleep and had some food to find the strength to oppose her and calmly claim his due. It can’t happen the day they pick him up at the station, when everybody will want to touch him, as if to make sure it’s really him standing there in front of them. He can see it all, he can even imagine the face of his mother who’ll be waiting for him at home, he won’t speak to her right away, but the day after he gets back, trembling, stiff, ready to give up because of the fear in his belly and yet determined not to give in and to demand that she give him back, coin after coin, the exact amount of which nothing will be left but two cows in a field and the brand new roof on the barn.
He thinks of all that, especially during the night.
And now he tells himself he won’t recover the money his mother took from him. He doesn’t need it anymore. He tells himself he’s damned if he’ll ever set foot in La Bassée again, still less in his parents’ house, because now he knows Mireille and he knows he’ll leave with her and open up his garage in Paris.
And this time, he’s almost sure of it, there’s something out there, far off, something moving.
Something coming toward him.
He squats down and waits. He wants to hear better, behind the sounds of the cicadas and the blowing of the wind, soft as it is and so warm, under a sky too clear for the fells to risk—what, we’d see them, we’d probably see them, the sky too pale, cloudless, the moon half full and the stars like millions of flashlights—yes, he looks ahead of him, he can see a little and even sees himself very well, his hands, arms, legs, body, the gray light reflected on the metal of his gun. It’s not a very dark night, so he tells himself they won’t dare. And besides, the only time they dared, he remembers, he was in the barracks and suddenly the night was cut sharply in two by a burst of machine gun fire, like a fruit sliced by the blade of a knife.
The eyes of all the men had opened wide as if they were the eyes of one single man.
Everybody waking up at once with a start, and silence, the time to sit up in bed, turn on the light and listen, shut up the men who were talking and worrying without even giving themselves time to understand.
Shut the fuck up!
They were watching each other, trying to hold their breath, already breathing heavily, loudly, almost panting.
Shut up!
And then the bursts of gunfire had resumed in the night. They had said: it’s the guy up there in the sentry box, it’s him firing, he’s just answering their fire.
For a few seconds they’d wondered if it was an attack, if they’d have to fight, or if.
Then nothing. Silence. Very long, very deep. As if the whole coast had silenced all life to let the bullets pierce the thickness of the dark and the coolness of the air; and then a jackal—unless it wasn’t a jackal but the rallying cry of the fells, they thought of that. And then nothing.
The next day, they’d found bootprints in the ground and a huge puddle of blood, black as oil, and then the lifeless body of a local guy in blue overalls they knew very well.
So he thinks of that night again and now he knows it’s a bad idea, he shouldn’t think about it, they won’t come. It’s too light out. The night is too bright. He does hear someone coughing further off, though, as if someone were talking behind him.
He turns around and behind him there is only the mass of the lookout tower and the gate of the base, and he pivots halfway round again, he knows you shouldn’t stay like that, with your back to the hills. He feels fear gaining on him, because he isn’t cold at all anymore, and it even seems a sticky sweat is spreading over his back, invading him almost completely.
He passes his hand over his neck and forehead, yes that’s it, a sticky liquid, no need to taste it, he knows its salty taste by heart.
There must be something you can do, like think about Mireille, that’s what you need, to hold out, not yield to fear and the urge to piss, he’ll have to give in to it pretty soon, but not yet. For the moment he can hold out and he’s going to stand there, cling to his rifle, pivot around a few times and not count the shadows or the shapes, the outlines, the angles, the trees, the movements of the branches or the number of hills or anything else, but think about Mireille and tell himself again he loves her and also that love is no big deal.
He doesn’t think about Mireille all the time. He doesn’t think she’s a very beautiful girl. No, love is not blind, not like they say.
He pictures himself in a garage, he’d be the boss and Mireille would keep the books, she’d know how to do that, for sure; he thinks back to their meeting in a bar with his cousin Rabut, how he’d forgotten his army cap and for that reason she’d written him, and also invited him to come over to her house and pick it up. And how impressed he had been by Mireille’s father when he and Février found themselves sitting on the chairs they had been offered, over a glass of orangeade (as if they were children and not men).
They couldn’t help thinking that not only had they never seen a peasant and winegrower like Mireille’s father, but they would even have doubted his existence, doubted the very possibility of his existence—a farmer with such delicate white hands—if they hadn’t been there, in front of him, sitting around a big table of shiny black wood, with him in a shirt and tie, his sleeves rolled high up on his forearms, with a rather relaxed look and yet a severe, almost austere face, with his hair combed back, his glasses emphasizing his bony but ordinary face, without anything that really distinguished him from the other French colonists here.
But all those paintings on the walls, the Arab woman who came to open the door. And the rugs. The patio with its fountain. The coolness. And the large pieces of furniture. The staircase. The whole house, so vast, he tells himself that all this is part of Mireille’s beauty. And then he hears Mireille tell him that she thinks he kind of looks, no, in fact he does look like an American actor whose name he can’t even remember. And he tells himself all this. Repeats it to himself. Tells himself that maybe Mireille is his chance to make it.
Yes, she really is his chance. He’s sure of it.
And when he prays, he doesn’t forget to thank God for having allowed him to meet Mireille and making him look like this American actor.
Also telling himself that now we write each other so often and we make plans, we say to each other, tomorrow, when it’s over, it’ll be over soon. All that, at night. And that movement he hears, on his right, as if someone had just moved forward, walked. And now the cracking sound isn’t coming from steps over branches or brush, no, what’s cracking is only his teeth grinding in his mouth, fear in his mouth and his jaws clenched so hard it might make his gums bleed or break his teeth when the burst of gunfire comes to pierce the night—not far on his right, a flash of light, white, bluish, its blinding intensity and the echo invading the whole space and suddenly he’s lying with his face on the ground and his hands ready to fire, his fingers tight on the trigger.
He’s shaking. He’s breathing hard. His whole body is shaking and the buzzing in his ears is so loud he can’t hear his breath, or the cicadas, or the shouts of the guys further on. He doesn’t know yet that the guy who fired only took fright at the shapes of three dogs bolting toward the base and prowling too near them; he doesn’t know that two of the dogs are dead and another took to the hills and has already disappeared—all he knows is his jaw hurts and he can’t stop his tears. There’s this cracking in his throat, a tightening, like a burn, a vise, and his pants are soaked, his bladder is completely emptied and something in his head is distorting every muscle in his face so much it hurts.
And yet, when the next day comes, it’ll be the same world, the same melody in the morning,
So-and-so! Java duty!
As if last night was nothing. They’ll pretend it was nothing at all.
It’ll be this one’s or that one’s turn to get up and bring the coffee from the kitchen. Sometimes it’s his turn, but most often not, and so he does like everybody else, he grumbles along with the whole platoon, all twenty-five men. Transistors crackle out the first news of the day, voices yell for them to turn it off, turn it down, and with eyes still half-shut all of them go take a leak against the little wall outside, a bit further off.
Today, he’ll write Solange. As he often does, to pass the time and ask how things are going, say he’s stuffing himself with sausage, coffee, and jam here.
He can write this: things are okay.
He can also ask how the family is, what’s happening to them—he doesn’t dare write “back home,” it’s too sentimental and hypocritical and he insists she give him news of this one and that one, he wants her to report details, conversations, but also stories about what’s going on in town and also news of other guys who left like him to defend peace with automatic rifles and boots and save the country. He hadn’t really understood the country was in danger, since nothing ever happens and you’re bored to death there.
And when he asks for news in his letters, it’s not really because he wants to know how the brothers and sisters are doing—they’re still sleeping in the bedrooms next to the parents’ room, four together across the width of the bed, yes, he knows it, and four others in the room at the back, that makes eight, plus a few others sleeping somewhere else, at their bosses’ place in the farmhouses around and also a few others lying in coffins for all eternity. And him here on an iron cot with an ash-gray blanket that serves as a bedspread, with cans filled with water under it so the vermin can drown in them.
At least he has his own bed. He’s lucky, they keep repeating to him. Because here, the barracks are made of cinderblocks, while others are tents and tents let the fells’ knife blades go through like butter they explain to him, and bullets still more easily.
Yes, it’s good here.
He can write Solange that the situation could have been worse for him. We’re not far from Oran, and he says he saw their cousin Rabut there and met Mireille with him and other people, too, Philibert, Gisèle, and Jacqueline.
He says they have assembly around eight and they stay at attention through the raising of the flag. That’s when they look at the flag in the blue sky, when they try to convince themselves they’re here for something like ideas, an ideal, some kind of higher goal, preserving civilization or something, like it said in one of the booklets he was given when he got here.
They give themselves missions, goals, and the base commander’s mood is the barometer of the day. Maintenance work, weapons and barracks inspection, and instruction for the new recruits, target practice. They’re stuck between the sea and the hills, they’re here to protect the big oil tanks. They also protect the director of the refinery and his family. At the beginning they were surprised to see that an Algerian was appointed to this position, if the tanks are so important and oil such a precious commodity, how come it’s an Algerian who’s in charge, they wonder; they don’t know there’s also an Arab bourgeoisie.
Besides, they almost never see the man, and his wife still less. She stays at home, which is inside the base but still far enough from the center for them to feel apart from it. When you’re on inspection or sentry duty you have to walk all the way behind the house, a stone house like in France, a simple cube with two floors, and go around it behind the little vegetable garden, up to the barbed wire. That makes the walk a lot longer, and they don’t particularly like going that way because the distance from the rest of the base is sometimes a little unsettling, especially at night. It’s a dark spot, you hold your rifle in your hands as you walk ahead and you lean forward to see better, on the alert.
Sometimes you can see the light through one of the windows.
He doesn’t tell Solange that some men claim they’ve seen the shape of the wife naked behind the curtain, or even naked at the window. Nobody believes that, but once or twice everybody stayed a little longer than necessary under the window of the only civilians in the base, just to see if ever.
Except that no, never.
On the other hand, he can say they see the husband crossing the yard very early in the morning and heading to his office on the other side of the base, in a prefabricated building where he works. No one really understands what he does there all day. They know he has visitors, and trucks come in regularly, accompanied by a platoon just for the trucks alone, so great is the fear of attacks. The trucks are filled up, then they leave again.
Sometimes one can see the couple’s little girl, too. She’s always dressed in dark clothes. Bernard walks by her often when he’s inspecting the base, with Février, Nivelle, Poiret, or someone else.
When you walk near their house, you can sometimes hear the cries of a newborn baby.
The little girl is shy, or she’s scared, they don’t know which. Whatever the reason, when they ask her name or how old she is, she lowers her eyes when she answers. Fatiha, that’s the name she whispers.
Fatiha is eight.
And then lunch and the afternoon nap. Strange, long days, like the ones he knows with the cows in the fields, when the only music you get is the buzzing of the flies and your own breath, heavy, panting, in the hollow of an afternoon nap.
But here, it’s different. He’s not the only one who’s alone, all of them are alone together.
This afternoon, he’s not the only one who doesn’t feel like talking.
They walk on without saying anything. They listen to the cicadas and the crunch of loose stones rolling under their feet, they just walk following the guy ahead, without knowing where they’re going, without waiting either. They listen to Nivelle talk about the peasants here, pitying them because with soil like that, nothing must grow, he says. And then Abdelmalik answers no, he remembers that here, before, there used to be wheat, they grew wheat but the peasants in the relocation centers can’t work the land anymore.
You call that land?
Yes. There used to be wheat, before.
And they also talk about the gigantic olive trees whose green color is almost gray, they’ve never seen that back home; everything is so white here, or milky, without shadow, without depth, even the hills melt into the sky, even the blue isn’t blue but seems diluted in a whitish mist where mountain and sky fuse together. That’s something you have time to see. Because you never come across anybody. You don’t see anybody. Only stones, dust, flies landing on the sweat of their faces and sticking to it; and their eyes already squinting to see what’s ahead, a hundred meters away, a pile of stones, constructions, the shapes of a small village.
From far off, yes, it looks like a village.
A few low walls and scattered, spindly tufts of yellow, stringy crabgrass where families and houses used to be. Bernard doesn’t understand why the people were sent away but gets the feeling it’s better not to ask. They walk silently through the little paths that used to be narrow streets, perhaps.
Sometimes you can see a whole set of furniture made of clay. Sometimes the things are sculpted and the set has been decorated, or only parts, big drawings, often of snakes.
They’re going to leave, they can’t stay here, as if it were a cemetery. Bernard thinks of what he’s been told about Oradour-sur-Glane, and that thought makes him thirsty for a few seconds, a strange kind of thirst that must be quenched right away, but the others have already started moving; for a few seconds he just stands there, lost in space, his eyes staring at a shattered earthenware jar in what might have been a kitchen.
Afterward, when they’re at the relocation center, they have to walk through the camp, inspect it, and today Bernard looks at the people and wonders what they would do, what we would do, in the hamlets of La Migne, if soldiers had come in and razed everything, broke everything, prevented us from farming, from working.
He imagines.
All those people out of work that soldiers would be herding into some relocation center. He imagines and wonders if they, too, would do what the men in the camp do, laying out plastic basins on the ground, turning themselves into grocers or hardware merchants just because they have two or three basins to sell, or drivers with a license in their pockets but no car, or, why not, carpenters with some old rusty nails in a chicory can, would that be enough to bear the humiliation of being out of work, could the men he knows bear being moved away from their crops and see barbed wire around their children?
You see men in woolen djellabas who sit there for hours on end without talking.
Like big bags.
You’d think they were bags of cement because they don’t move, waiting for what, Bernard doesn’t know; he just imagines what it would be like for the men back home to experience the same humiliation, for a farmer to be deprived of what gives him his reason for living. He imagines his brothers and the children playing the way he’s seen the children here, around the fountain, with toys made out of steel wire—wheels as thin as twigs, carts as fragile as paper, and the eyes of two sisters, one wearing braids and the other in a pink dress with light blue swallows on it and gold thread to emphasize the design.
They look at the people attentively. He’s not sure why he looks at the people the way he does, at their wretched poverty, as if he’d never seen that before, but he’s so tired, and angry too, what the hell are we doing here, he can see it’s ridiculous, being here makes no sense, let’s go home, let’s leave the faces you see here with what scares you in them, their silence, their seriousness, their shining eyes, is it fever, is it anger?
You don’t know.
And you don’t know why, but you know you’re scared. And in Bernard’s mouth there is the same taste as last night, but weaker, more persistent; the people look at the soldiers and they, the soldiers, walk between the shacks, slowly, very slowly, and he’s one of the soldiers, one of the young men, so young, walking along the paths.
He walks calmly and inside himself he finds this camp absurd, laid out in a straight line that way, with its town hall, its fountain and its wretched poverty, its undernourished children with dirty hair, the astonished eyes they have when you finally walk in and search their place without asking them anything, without them daring to do anything against us.
Because in the camp there’s always that same appearance of calm and resigned peace; the same violence in the bright eyes of the women, the babies with their eyes shut and their bellies swollen like balloons; and then the men who sit there without saying anything, waiting.
Tomorrow, some of the men will leave for Oran. Bernard isn’t one of them and will have to stay at the base.
He’ll have to stay there all day and wait for the others to return, spend his afternoon imagining the missed opportunity. He doesn’t feel like talking cars with Nivelle. It’s a very hot, very heavy day, but the presence of the sea promises some coolness. He takes a nap and walks around the base for part of the afternoon, partly out of boredom or to stretch his legs; that’s the day he comes upon little Fatiha sitting in the shade of an olive tree.
She’s playing and doesn’t see him right away. When she raises her eyes to him, he smiles at her and asks what she’s playing. He walks over and she—in a voice that’s not loud but sure of itself, like the voice of what a child of eight can imagine a grown-up’s voice should sound like—she spontaneously gives him a lesson, you take some olives, not ripe ones but not too hard either, and you throw them like this (at that moment she throws the two olives she’s holding in her hand), there, then you turn over your hand, they have to fall on the back of your hand, and if you miss your opponent hits the back of your hand with his fingers, like this, one hit for each olive you missed, see, I missed one, you have to hit me with your finger.
And so he kneels down with the child and both of them play for a few minutes, and soon both of them get caught up in the game. Bernard throws and can’t always catch the olives. He enjoys Fatiha’s seriousness as she puts her fingers together and hits the back of his hand, loudly counting the number of times she hits him.
He wants to suggest something too, he has an idea and he likes that idea so much that suddenly he smiles and asks if Fatiha would like to come along with him. She hesitates, thinks for a bit, then answers that her mother doesn’t really like her to talk to soldiers but okay, yes, a little secret, her mother won’t know.
When they get to the barracks, it’s not empty, three or four men are there, Poiret and Nivelle among them. Bernard and Fatiha go over to a box that has a turtle in it.
It’s our mascot. They’re the ones who found it.
A turtle, I didn’t know there were turtles.
No, we didn’t either.
And now Nivelle and Poiret also walk over to the box and look at the animal. Poiret picks it up carefully, you see that the turtle’s paws are like the limbs of a swimmer doing the breaststroke in slow motion and seen from underneath; Fatiha shrinks back for a second, the time to get scared, to scare herself, to laugh too, astonished, taken aback, and finally Poiret holds out the turtle to her, asking her to be careful, its teeth are sharp and the little nails on its paws are very sharp, too.
Fatiha asks if she can come back, the men say yes, whenever she wants.
When she leaves, Bernard walks her back. He’s walking next to her when she starts to run to get back to her scooter: she left it near the trucks, well before her house.
He’ll still have to wait. Wait for the others to return from Oran.
Bernard is disappointed not to have gone with them, because every time the city is like a breath of fresh air. Wait some more for the men who’ll have something to tell and bring back the mail they’re all hoping for.
He remembers the first time he went to Oran, the half-track in the lead and the jeep tracing the way, and also that nobody was thinking about the risk of an ambush but only of those few hours they would have given anything for, because after you got the supplies at the CP, you knew you’d be spending the afternoon in the streets, the cafés, you’d go listen to music, who knows, nothing seems impossible when for once you know you’ll be far from those big gray oil reservoirs that close off the horizon on one side and on the other, their counterpart, the hills.
There are several of them walking through the city together, looking at the shop windows, the palm trees—you have glimpses of the sea and you hear the noise of traffic, you don’t know yet how banal and clichéd the extraordinary images of the veiled women are. Women on scooters. That one, who drives by wrapped up in surprisingly white veils, they can see her eyes looking straight ahead of her and her brows furrowed, and this detail which amuses them: yellow plastic shoes with high heels.
It amuses them or it doesn’t. It stirs them too, surprises them. It brings their minds back to the idea of going to see women, and they know where to go.
As for him, he hadn’t followed the others, that, too, he remembers, he remembers his cousin Rabut; they had arranged to meet in the Choupot neighborhood, but first he remembers the walk through the city with Idir, surprised to walk through the city with an Algerian, in silence, one guiding the other without talking to him, without either of them even trying to say anything—it doesn’t occur to them to ask each other questions, they don’t think of it, each is going to do what he has to do. Bernard knows Idir’s going to meet his family, that’s enough for him. He doesn’t know that Idir enlisted in the army to defend France like his grandfather, the family hero, decorated, honored, with one of his arms left behind in the mud of Verdun.
Bernard doesn’t ask him anything, they simply walk and look at the city.
On some walls you can read,
Algeria will win. Free Algeria.
The graffiti have been scratched out, scraped, they’ve been vaguely painted over but along the shape of the letters, so they remain legible. They act as if they hadn’t seen them, but something of those graffiti remains in the sounds of the city and the silence between the two men, like a doubt, an uncertainty: for Bernard, a vague fear, a kind of premonition.
He thinks that among the men and women they pass on the street some of them want him dead, him and all the others wearing the uniform of the army.
But at the same time all of this seems fake to him because there’s the sun and the city, you hear conversations about nothing, laughter, life, the beat of a whole city, the noise of engines—cars and scooters—a man sitting in front of his little butcher shop watching children play soccer on a little square, barefoot, with a can rolling around with a frightful noise and sometimes stopping silently in the schoolbags and sweaters that serve as a net.
Is that what war is like?
Then he can see the afternoon with Rabut again, and how Rabut talks about taking lots of pictures—the army newspaper, Le Bled, you know, Le Bled, organized a contest, and he says he won a Kodak. Ever since, he’s been snapping the guys and the landscapes when they go out, and he takes pictures of veiled women and the people in the markets. But most often from behind, because they don’t really like you to take their picture.
He also recalls his first meeting with Mireille, the guys all very high on the way back, they’d had a few, they saw women and they make fun of him a little,
So, had a good time with your cousin?
And he looks at his buddies without laughing. He’s even shocked that Février went to the women, too. And in Bernard’s silence and unforgiving look, Février senses what he blames him for: Éliane.
Février shrugs to say that has nothing to do with it, he knows very well that has nothing to do with it. And besides he confides to Bernard that going with a prostitute isn’t really cheating and what he did is even less cheating; and almost whispering, getting slightly closer to his ear, he tells him he didn’t sleep with the girl, even if he went up to her room he didn’t sleep with her, he just unbuckled his belt, lowered his pants, and stayed there standing with his eyes shut, drawing the girl’s head to him and letting his hands slide in her hair to go along with her motion.
That’s all, it’s not really cheating.
When they return at the end of the afternoon, the men in the convoy bring back the mail. Février is not in a good mood at all, Bernard can tell right away; he can feel his friend’s animosity, his anger or disappointment: he didn’t get a letter, Éliane hasn’t written in two weeks.
What Bernard doesn’t know yet, at the time he gets a letter from Mireille, is that he soon will be bitterly disappointed too, almost furious. He doesn’t know this. Not yet. For the moment he’s holding the envelope in his hands, his fingers are shaking, his whole being is shaking and it seems to him that happiness is written all over his cheeks, his forehead, his eyes.
But that won’t last.
Not that Mireille’s telling him anything whose tone or feeling could give him something to worry about. On the contrary, the letter is very long, she talks about being eager to see him again and even suggests a few things they might do together. But what she says in passing, as if for him it wouldn’t be important at all and in any case it wasn’t for her, is that often, well no, let’s say not often, a few times, once in a café and two other times in a nightclub open in the afternoon, she’s seen his cousin Rabut.
She says he’s adorable; Bernard doesn’t yet know how much scorn and repugnance he feels for this word, because he doesn’t know, at this point, how a word can be contemptible and cowardly as much as a cousin, let’s say, that particular cousin—Rabut. And Bernard only has time to brood over his rage and, for the first time, to feel a kind of anger at Mireille, a kind of resentment at the naiveté of her words and the thoughtlessness of her conduct.
So, because the jealousy he feels is a shameful emotion, he doesn’t talk about it.
He spends part of the evening with the other men, playing cards in the rec hall before dinner. When he stops playing and joins Février at a table, he almost feels relieved; it’s as if he wasn’t thinking about anything.
But Février, on the other hand, is not thinking of nothing. He drinks his beer and asks Bernard if he doesn’t want to get out of here, too much noise. Outside they walk slowly, the time for Février to talk of his disappointment when he looked inside the mailbag and realized that this time, too, he wouldn’t have a letter, none, not even from his parents but okay, they can’t write, and his brothers and sisters could write too, but no, and Éliane.
Except she.
Like a stomach cramp, a heart cramp. It’s so unfair and still, again, the dumb hope you hang on to, whereas Février and Bernard both know what Éliane doesn’t want to say, and what she means by not sending any more letters.
And then, with a laugh, Février says that today again we went to see women, him and the guys. Not the same one he saw last time. He says,
Another one, prettier, a blonde with huge breasts, you should’ve seen her. This time I really felt like laying her down on the bed and touching her breasts, that really turns me on.
And he laughs. Bernard starts laughing too.
All’s fair in love and war, that’s what they say, right?
Well no.
I just did like the other time, I thought of Éliane and I told myself it couldn’t possibly be over, not like that, I don’t believe it, no, she can’t do that to me.
So?
So I dropped my pants and just stood there like I was at attention.
And they both laugh because of the absurd, incongruous image. Then they’re quiet, and Février doesn’t say how he feels like crying and the effort he’s making not to show it.
And then, there’s that doctor who came with them from Oran, and the medical examination where everyone goes on about how hungry and fed up they are, getting the same food all the time, not terrible, but so much always the same. He hears the same words everywhere, on all the bases, the doctor says, as if that should reassure or mollify them to learn that others share the same problems. The doctor says there’s nothing he can do, but they feel, through his perplexed look, that he understands them, yes, men so young should be eating more.
And on the way out from his checkup Bernard sees them. Idir and Châtel in the yard: Idir, furious, provoking Châtel and giving him little finger-slaps that turn into real slaps, always on the same spot, slaps which suddenly resound and punctuate the same words,
What is it, what d’you mean? What d’you want from me?
And at first Châtel smiles and doesn’t think the other guy is serious; then his smile freezes when he realizes Idir isn’t joking and he turns very pale, he doesn’t answer, or just vaguely, nothing, in a shaky voice almost as expressionless as his face, and the dust rises in the shuffle.
At first the others hesitate. Some of them think of separating them. Then others say,
No, let’s have some laughs.
They laugh all right, and they begin to make bets, two or three cigarettes, they form a circle in the yard, and the circle tightens around them, they yell and Idir’s getting increasingly furious because he can sense that Châtel is refusing to fight and he doesn’t want to hit him. Idir thinks it’s cowardice, Châtel is a coward, that’s all, and he starts to curse him out because a man who challenges another should be ready to fight, to defend himself, not like Châtel, who hints at things without taking responsibility for them.
Bernard walks over, asks Nivelle why they’re going to fight.
Because Châtel said that what they’re doing here is disgusting and the harkis are betraying the Algerians. The other guy didn’t like it. He said his family has to eat and the army is a job like any other job and he’s just as French as anybody else.
So they’re going to fight.
Except that Châtel doesn’t really understand what’s happening and he remains inert, hardly stirred by the punches in his shoulder, his body swaying with every punch, his hips, his legs, his feet going with the shock and pivoting slightly backward then coming back, straightening up and moving in an increasingly wide arc. The other men laugh at first, and then, as he doesn’t react, curse him out, call him a wimp, a faggot, come on, hit him one. And Châtel more and more livid looks around for someone in the crowd who could help him, save him, understand him, explain why he’s there, now, and why he’s going to get hit, why an Algerian’s going to hit him, since he’s always defending the Algerians. He doesn’t get it. To tell the truth, he’d like to just say he’s sorry, say he didn’t mean to be insulting. But the other men are pushing him to strike back. So he throws a few clumsy, soft punches, as if fatigue were preventing him from aiming, as if he had no strength in his arms.
The corporal has walked over and nobody pays any attention to him. He looks at the scene without saying anything. Idir throws a punch, one punch, one single punch and Châtel collapses, then tries to get up and falls down again under the shouts, the laughs, they’re having fun, he makes them laugh and instead of getting mad Châtel feels something collapsing in his chest and the words and laughs lacerate him as well as the punches, they tell him to get up, to fight, and he tries, he tries, he’d like to keep trying, but everything in him refuses, his body doesn’t want to, he knows it but he’d like to fight against himself, too.
The corporal walks into the circle and asks who started it. Idir defends himself, he says the other insulted him, he said that—
And then he falls silent, he refuses to speak.
Châtel gets up and looks by turns at the corporal, Idir, and the other guys around them. He says he’s sorry. He swears he didn’t mean to insult Idir, something Idir refuses to believe—but the corporal’s voice cuts in to interrupt everything, you’re even, that’s enough. All the men here are French and they’re all under his command.
The next day, the incident that overshadows the whole day isn’t Châtel’s fight or what each man has retained of the corporal’s words. As if suddenly all that belonged to another time, far away. Because the corporal’s voice won’t be that forceful when he gives them the news, in the yard where they’ve all been summoned, that the doctor was kidnapped on his way back to Oran. There’s talk of an ambush. There’s talk of shots and they are told that a car has fallen into the hands of the fells.
The car was found with two gendarmes in it. Their throats were cut. The doctor was not in the jeep.
And the feeling of helplessness gets even stronger when they learn it’s men from another platoon who will be interrogating the people in the camp, and also that men from the Foreign Legion will be searching the hills. You tell yourself you can’t do anything, for a moment you feel negligible and useless.
You don’t realize that this time around you’ve been spared a nasty job.
You feel angry, and in the evening, when it’s time to go to the rec hall, you can feel that anger in your pockets as you empty them a little more frantically than usual, to look for a cigarette but mostly for change to buy a beer. They crowd around the bar, this evening maybe more than any other. They’ll drink beer, nobody will play foosball. And even the card games will be played without a shout, without a laugh.
One more silence.
And when Février walks into the barracks with his beer in his hand, he stands there disconcerted for a moment: Bernard and Châtel are sitting next to each other, each with his hands clasped, their heads bowed, their eyes closed. They hardly move when he walks in. But he stays there, he doesn’t leave. He’s embarrassed, certainly, but he understands.
They’ll only talk about it afterward.
He says: Prayers won’t help the doc.
Maybe it can help us?
You believe that, Bernard? You really believe that?
I don’t know. I know it helps me.
Yeah, but how about the doc?
And when Châtel wants to speak, he doesn’t have the time to open his mouth or even move, Février doesn’t leave him the time,
Yeah, go say that to his wife, go tell her we’re a bunch of assholes, right, you go tell her. Go tell her that.
Châtel doesn’t answer.
He stays like that, frozen, his eyes fixed on Février, because it’s the first time he’s heard him talk in this tone, with such violence. Trembling slightly too, imperceptibly, it’s like a vibration, fear barely hidden by the movement of his hand raising the bottle to his mouth; and the sound of the beer when it reaches the neck of the bottle, then a mouthful of beer and for a second you hear him swallowing and the silence right after that, but fear is in the air, in the sudden way Février has of catching his breath, and it’s the same for Bernard and Châtel.
And then Février starts smiling again; he holds up the bottle,
Hey, guys, to each his own God, after all.
And now things are different. In the calm of the night, it’s not peace and soothing coolness you feel, it’s fear, fear creeps in, very slowly at first, because they’re thinking of the doctor, of the two gendarmes who were found slaughtered; and you try not to tell yourself it could have been you, you can see them leaving on the path in the afternoon and you know their vigilance and their weapons within arm’s reach were useless. It’s mostly at night that you think about it, but you don’t tell anyone. Because if you did, you’d have to say why you have diarrhea, why the stomach cramps and the loss of appetite, why you drink liters of water and you’re still thirsty.
A few days later there’s that body they find not far from the spot where that same day, just a few hours earlier, they discovered telephone poles which had been sawed down.
They tell themselves,
That’s why the fells cut down the telephone poles. Because they knew someone would come to repair them and would find the body before it was devoured by the animals, the jackals and stray dogs, before the sun wreaked havoc on it, burned it up, made it unrecognizable, so it would still be sufficiently intact, you could say legible, yes, so everybody could really understand what was said here, what is being said through it. That’s why the fells sawed down the poles. So someone would come back and they could leave a corpse there without running the risk of being found or located, with nobody around.
That’s what they think, anyway.
And they see the men who’ve come back to notify the base. The guys who went to repair the telephone poles and the guys who went with them for protection. They had radioed first. And the men pile into the medical half-track, Nivelle and Bernard among them, with their rifles on their shoulders, with no other news, without really knowing what they’ll find where they’re going. Even if they tell themselves. And imagine. Because the nurse is with them; they’re riding in the ambulance. And the dust on the trail. The wind clacking on the metal of the car and the canvas top with the red cross painted on it, the sand like iron filings, the bumpy trail, the coughing engine, its loud rumblings and vibrations under their feet through the floor, and the men holding their breath, already; they look straight ahead and also along the sides at the line of olive trees in the distance, they know the wadi’s there down below, that road they know now, and the fear they feel rising inside themselves, they already know it, too.
Then they get to the meeting point. Others come out to meet them, they see a jeep and the radio operator.
They hear the captain’s voice, he’s getting irritated and he’s hanging on to the handset of the transmitter,
And they don’t understand. There are men there smoking and looking at the ground a little further on, at first they don’t notice how pale they all are; with them there’s an Arab in a djellaba. With his handset still in his hand, the captain suddenly stops talking, then looks at them:
He’s yours.
He points to the mass whose shape they see at the foot of an embankment near one of the poles that was sawed off at the base and is leaning into the air, not down completely yet.
They already know it’s a body. And Bernard wonders, is he going to see a man with his throat cut? Bernard thinks again about all the stories you hear in France—stories he heard echoes of back home, at the market on Sundays—when they talk of terribly mutilated bodies, of that appalling sight you tried to imagine without ever really succeeding. And he looks a few meters further on over there, next to the embankment, at that shape. First he can’t make out the body but only the bare feet of the man, dirty feet whitened by the dust, like his pants. He tells himself the men who killed him kept his shoes.
They walk forward slowly. They start talking again, then they fall silent, they clear their throats and exchange glances, yes, we’re coming—the body is in a strange position they don’t understand right away, as if it were sideways, its right arm hidden and its head in profile, leaning back, as if the chin were completely thrust forward offering up its throat—but the throat is not sliced open, you can see the gaping mouth and the eyes very black already, sunk into the dark sockets, swollen, and the hair almost gray because of the dust, and all that sand in the hair, on the tight skin, that strange, almost broken color of the skin, too, not yet hardened, not yet totally burned because there is still, under the skin and the shape of the skull, a face, and features they can recognize, almost, hardly, it will soon be over but it’s still there, a human being, more or less, soon to give birth to a carcass, that’s what Bernard tells himself, thinks, imagines—that face in profile where the cheek, like a hole, could open a second mouth, and the shirt whose collar is buttoned up to the neck; the hand and the left arm thrust behind let a sheet of paper float on the chest in front, pinned on with a safety pin, the bottom of the paper moving slightly, yes, stirring, almost nothing, and then they look more closely at the pants covered with stains, the stench already atrocious, the stains, and you understand what must have happened. The nurse walks over to the body, walks around it and gets to the level of the torso. There, he leans over, then hesitates, and says,
No.
He repeats to himself, in a whisper,
No,
Straightens up, looks at the others and,
Oh God. God, Jesus,
His face suddenly livid, he turns to the corpse anyway and rips off the paper; he walks back to the others to show them.
At first, what they see is a picture. They get the fells’ idea. They’re going to post it everywhere, they’ll use it for propaganda.
French soldiers, your families are thinking of you, go home.
Bernard doesn’t look at the picture, he walks toward the body, he wants to see, now, he wants to know and the first thing he wants to see is if the body has been mutilated at the throat. The throat is intact. You can see the bristles of a few days without shaving, the glottis and the very tight skin.
Bernard stays like that for a moment, he’s surprised there’s no blood on the throat. He refuses to see what will stare him in the face later on, because he hadn’t been told that this, too, was possible.
On the way back, they cannot yet accept what they saw. And it’s not the sand, not the desolation, not even the relative coolness of the morning and the nauseous heaves they’re all going to have, one after the other, never at the same time, as if the time to react was different for each of them—none of this will change something of, how to call it, they don’t know what to call what they see when they finally make up their minds to move the body and turn it on its back.
And afterward, at the base, for those who haven’t seen, they’ll just talk about the dust and the silence, about the flies already attacking the body and they’ll pile up details, all the details they can think of to dress up the story in order to delay the moment they’ll have to show and tell. The others, in the mess hall, will be very quick to understand that something’s being kept from them, the truth, not the death of the doctor exactly, not even that his death is recent, yesterday probably, or this morning, but then how to tell guys who’re waiting, incredulous but not yet mad just curious, with that slight fear or apprehension that keeps them alert and tense in their curiosity, not yet shaken and revolted as they’ll become, afterward, when they find out.
To tell them: he was alive when they did that to him.
They did that to a living man, they cut through the flesh, the muscles. Everything, down to the bone. They scraped from the wrist all the way up to the shoulder. And you tell yourself that the man saw the skeleton of his arm. Scraped off. Ripped off. He fainted every time, the pain, you know, and those men, the ones who did that, with what, knives, knives that scrape, and him screaming and them, always waking him up, patiently, relentlessly, without pity, each time, until he understands that not only will they chop up his arm but they will rip out the muscles, and the flesh, down to the skeleton.
And why that precision, stopping at the wrist and the same precision at the level of the shoulder.
Death came but only at the last minute, on the road perhaps, very close to the spot where the corpse was found.
In the photograph you see him alive, his arm already half ripped apart, streaming blood, in the picture you can easily recognize the doctor despite the pain, with his eyes turned up, his mouth open, standing up, hanging by ropes under his armpits. And these words in big letters under the picture, words that will always come back to them:
French soldiers, your families are thinking of you, go home.
And then the way everything speeds up, the way something is happening very quickly because they set up a funerary chapel in the infirmary, and how all the men want to see because they refuse to tell themselves that such a thing is possible. And how that same evening in the rec hall, they all crowd around the bar—Bernard, like the others, searches his pockets for change to buy a beer and more cigarettes. With Nivelle, who hasn’t said a word all day. And others, too. Châtel hasn’t left the barracks, he’s praying. Maybe he’s crying and he’s just afraid of meeting the others, all the others, who won’t fail to ask him what he thinks now about the war of liberation. And he doesn’t want to go back on what he said. He doesn’t want to run into Février or speak to him, him or anyone else, it doesn’t matter who, because he’s not sure he thinks anything at all anymore.
He wonders if a cause can be just and its means, unjust. How is it possible to think that terror will lead to more good. He wonders if the good.
He doesn’t want to go out and prefers to stay there alone and pray. He’s surprised that Bernard doesn’t want to pray with him. Bernard will only pray later, alone, when night has come, when in the silence of the barracks he will try to forget what he saw. He’ll try. Just as in the rec hall, he tries not to interpret an exchange of looks he catches between Idir and Abdelmalik, apparently the conclusion of an argument which had been going on for some time, and even some kind of provocation directed at Idir, coming from Abdelmalik. Because both of them must tighten their jaws and keep quiet when they hear the guys talking about the Arabs, saying dogs, all of them are dogs, nothing but dogs all of them—and they’re not talking about the fells when they use those words, no, they’re talking about Arabs, as if all Arabs, as if.
And the two harkis say nothing. They wait. They watch.
As if they were the only ones who hadn’t forgotten where they were born.
Early next morning there’s total pandemonium. It’s the first time Bernard has seen so many people at the base.
Reinforcements got there early, at dawn. Among them, Bernard recognizes Rabut and some other guys stationed in Oran. There are several platoons. They’re going to comb the sector, they stay like that in the morning for almost an hour, it’s not clear yet what kind of action will be taken, if any. For the first time at the base there’s something different from the usual slowness, something other than the boredom that has been weighing on you for weeks on end, on your morale, your intelligence, your body, as if every day you’ve been getting number and number while others, out there in the hills, cut your friends’ throats and dismember them.
So this time, from the way they’re preparing, he can feel a kind of energy and anger at the base; it even seems to him that this morning none of them watched the flag go up in the same way they do every day—this time in the blue sky there’s something like an urge to go out and run, yell, say they want to get it over with and some of them think that once they’re in the hills, once they’ve been in combat they’ll be soldiers, too, soldiers who’ve been under fire and they can go home and take up their normal lives again in the fields and factories. And not be afraid anymore. Not have stomachaches, not be hungry, hungry so often, not so often feel the urge to leave those stinking latrines behind, and that rancid odor of sweat in the barracks. And Châtel with his prayers and clasped hands, Bernard with his missal, his postcard of the phosphorescent Virgin over his bed, and the others, each one with his own quirks, his stories, and all the cockroaches and vermin that circulate among us, the fleas, the bedbugs, no matter how hard you scrub yourself, and the same endless days, we tell ourselves,
This time we’ll finish tearing up our last pairs of socks, already so worn out in the boots with our toes bleeding inside them even when we’re not marching, our feet will bleed on the stony trails once and for all and afterward, after that, maybe it’ll be all over and instead of a four-day furlough for the fourteenth of July they’ll tell us,
It’s over, you can go home and thank you very much peace has returned to Algeria,
Just because some old rifles from the First World War were dug out of holes and they found some guys as skinny as death hiding in improbable caves, with feverish eyes shining like Christmas candles.
And it’ll be over.
That’s what they tell themselves, what they’re waiting for. It’ll be over. That’s how they set out, all of them, and they end up hoping for the horrible march with swollen toes, cracked heels or the skin bursting like a translucent bubble, bubbles, blisters and oozing pus, blackened nails ready to fall off, with blood underneath. They want to go for it. Even if they know it’s going to be hot and they’ll be walking single file carrying a whole hardware supply of explosive and smoke grenades—and woe to whoever hangs back, the stragglers stumbling along, the soles of their feet rolling over the stones, under the weight of their bags, their cartridge belts, their rifles, and there won’t be a single one of them thinking of going home but all of them will find the energy to march in the sun and tell themselves,
It’s the humiliation, that’s right,
You can’t do this you can’t do that my ass: punishments rain down on us like the plague of frogs in the bible, the stupid chores, the bullying, the endless pushups, the constant orders and laps around the yard with your rifle over your head and the bolt between your teeth, and the huge, gluey garbage cans without handles from the mess hall, the garbage, our shit, our rubbish, the meals, swill, dried-out meat, leather soles, moldy bread and all the maggots, cans, mush, and the potatoes and the beans, the whole load of it oozing out of obese garbage cans, and dragging them, sliding them along slowly without throwing up because of the stench, without knocking them down, rolling them up to the truck—you might find some compassionate soul, a seminarian, a greenhorn, a student, a city guy, all those white hands to get rid of that shit without having to negotiate, that crap or some other, our ass out in the djebels looking for an enemy and finally finding one, anyone, deserters, fells, bandits, men, women, shadows, a jackal or a horse or just something moving in the brush, something with a little more consistency than a nightmare under the shrubs and the crawling vegetation,
That’s what we want, let’s get it all over with.
The decision has been made to leave the jeeps and half-tracks near the wadi. They’ll keep going on foot. Some of them will stay here, and Bernard and Idir are among the few guys who’ll wait for the two platoons to return.
They watch the others leave between the rocks. Bernard won’t know what’s going to happen, or he’ll picture the bayonets opening the crumbly earth to find the entrances to arms caches, the men looking at the ground, probing the earth and the clumps of shrubs for hours. And since they don’t find anything they walk deeper into the rocks, already frustrated, humiliated at the prospect of returning empty-handed from a hunt in which they don’t even know what they’re hunting.
You have to go far to find more than razed villages deserted by their inhabitants in order to come upon signs of human presence that are not cans of mackerel in white wine sauce in the dust and the stones. So you have to keep walking and sometimes you hear the buzzing of a Piper Cub high above you, no bigger than a toy, and its shadow is like the shadow of a stubborn, rigid bird that keeps coming back to guide us, to help us, over the same pieces of blackened branches, already burning hot. But there’s nothing but thirsty clumps of plants looking for water just as we’re looking for the fells, the rifles, the caches, and so we readjust the blue scarf that identifies us on our left shoulder, because we’re pretty sure the only people we’re likely to run into are our own people, but you never know, we don’t want to fire at each other.
And in the distance you look for something that will make you think it’s worth keeping on, bearing the heat and the buzzing plane and the big circles it sometimes traces over your head when it stays up there too long—and that exasperation, too, when you’re faced with always the same palm trees and their green head of hair, and the very tall, scaly trunks of the date trees, the oleanders everywhere, indestructible, that crap you thought was so beautiful at the beginning, and that very blue sky, the blue of the infinite monotony of postcards, the bees too, sometimes, and the flies, always.
And when they finally reach a village, they deploy so as to encircle it, and hearts are beating this time because here the village is not deserted: they have walked so far that the forbidden, uninhabitable zone has been left behind a long time ago.
And then, when they see us, the inhabitants must hesitate, incredulous before the men who come running up to their houses with guns in their hands—a woman remains there in the middle, in front of them, with wicker branches on her head that she’s maintaining with one hand, and she stands there dumfounded, it takes some time before she understands, before she realizes, and then she turns around as if nothing were happening.
Soon she disappears behind a door.
And Bernard and Idir are sitting next to each other in the shade of the jeeps. At first they don’t talk. Then Bernard says he shouldn’t take it personally, what the guys are saying about the Arabs, it’s because they’re scared and angry.
Idir can understand that, he doesn’t bear a grudge against anybody. He says,
You think Kabyles are Arabs. For you, all Algerians are the same. I’m not an Arab, I’m a Berber.
Bernard doesn’t know what to answer, after all he can’t even recognize an accent from Marseilles. He’d like to say that to defend himself, but he just nods. He’d like to talk about Abdelmalik, who’s with the others, but he doesn’t dare.
Idir’s the one who speaks.
Abdelmalik, it really bugs him when they talk like that about Arabs, he says we’ll never be French. Whatever we do. He says the people here, we’re fighting them, it’s war and we call it peace.
He doesn’t look at Bernard when he speaks. He shakes a stick around in front of him and draws incomprehensible figures in the sand.
And then the others will be back and they’ll start marching again.
They’ll march for hours, without daring to ask what happened in the village—they have a pretty good idea, they heard shooting, and black smoke went through the sky with the smell of burning straw. Nivelle has no qualms telling how where he was stationed before, with other guys, in the South,
Oh man, we really showed ’em.
And he remembers a guy who’d cut off the fells’ ears and gave them to the woman who sold him cigarettes at the tobacco shop—
Nivelle, shut the fuck up, that’s enough.
They set up camp.
And if you’re afraid of sleeping in canvas tents, you’re even more afraid of being ordered to guard the improvised camp.
What they don’t know yet is how, when they fall asleep almost despite themselves, they’ll wake up with a start because they hear artillery firing in the night. They look at each other, first they’re not sure and they realize only at the second round that it’s going to last for hours, the bombardment will last a long time, a very long time, and they understand why camp was set up here, so near a village, to shell it, that’s right, and sleep won’t come, you won’t get used to it, your body will jump with every blast and your ears are ringing already.
They look at each other. They get out of the tents to see. It’s night and sometimes you see bursts of light, the earth rumbles, it reverberates under your feet: a vibration that gets into your bones and ears.
There are fells over there.
Someone’s yelling, repeating,
There are fells.
The guy next to Bernard says there must be fells, otherwise they wouldn’t fire, there are fells and that way there won’t be hand-to-hand combat and that’s a good thing, that’s what he says, what he’s repeating, and Bernard hears the guy’s voice, his shaky voice that doesn’t believe what it’s saying, his eyes shining in the night.
And the next morning they get up with aching bodies, stiff muscles, it’s dawn, very early. Everywhere there is the smell of gunpowder in the air and that silence when they have to walk through the grayness of dawn, all the way over there, to that village you can’t see for the moment except for a dark shape diluted in the black smoke—the smell already, even from far off, the smell of ashes, they don’t dare tell themselves yet but they think of burned flesh, of smells they do not yet know.
The next day is a day of great fatigue and silence at the base.
A day when Rabut is there among the reinforcements. He has to leave the same evening, he and the others. In a few hours the base will return to what it was before. Then it will be the fourteenth of July, and some guys will get a furlough in Oran for three or four days.
But meanwhile they stay there, it lasts for a few strange hours, very long, interminable. They wait for all the platoons to meet there so they can all go back together. Bernard pretends he doesn’t know what Mireille confided to him in her letters, that she saw Rabut at least two or three times, and danced with him twice, in the afternoon, in a club. He wonders what Rabut’s doing here, he can’t wait for him to leave with his whole company. He can’t wait to get back to the calm and even the boredom and lethargy, to the way it was before. He’d like to doze away and wait, calmly, quietly, for the time of his leave in Oran.
He already wrote Mireille to tell her he’d be there for four days.
Soon the base fills up with all the platoons. They had never seen that many men there before, especially in the rec hall. No weapons had been found. No fellaghas either.
And yet they have the feeling they’ve been in combat, they’ve experienced something that feels like war, but above all they feel great fatigue, the urge to take off their boots, to take care of their feet that hurt horribly, have a beer, sleep. They’ll play cards and try to think of something else; because they’re also eager to hear that the doctor’s body is far away from them.
They’d like it all to be over.
As always, Bernard and Rabut stay together, sitting beside each other on the steps of the rec hall. They don’t talk about anything. Bernard doesn’t say anything. Nothing about the hours he spent chewing over his anger and reading the words over and over where Mireille talks about the nightclub with that unbearable word for Rabut: adorable. He doesn’t say any of that and doesn’t ask his cousin anything either, if he’s still engaged to Nicole, if he has news of the family.
And he could even ask about Mireille. But no, he doesn’t do it; he thinks it’s better not to show he’s thinking about that.
The two cousins walk around the base for a few hours during the afternoon; they talk with the mechanics about the engines of the jeeps and about the trucks they’ll have to check out soon. They also look at the helicopter in front of the entrance to the base. Rabut disappears for a few minutes, and when he comes back he has his camera in his hands. He can’t take many pictures because he has almost no film left. But a few nonetheless, here, at the base. He says he’ll send them to Solange and the family,
I’m sure nobody has a picture of you, back home.
Bernard doesn’t answer, he’s thinking of the bodies in the village they shelled all night—women and children, dogs too, a donkey and a few goats. He can hear the captain’s voice yelling in the morning for them to find the weapons and the fells, and all of them work away furiously, lifting up stones, ashes, dust. There’s nothing but death—and the stupid face of the captain spitting and not understanding and yelling like a madman for them to find those fucking fellaghas.
When they run into Fatiha, she’s in the shade of a tree playing the olive game, but she stops right away when she sees Bernard. She runs up to him and asks if she can go see the turtle. Bernard says yes. So she gets her scooter that’s against the wall of the house and comes back. Rabut asks her to stop for a minute. She’s there, facing him, and behind you can see the house and its peeling façade.
He snaps the picture.
When she comes back to them, Rabut remains slightly behind them and looks at his cousin and the little girl, the two of them acting as if they were alone, there’s no talking, it’s very quiet, you just hear the voices of the other men further off, maybe a car engine. But that’s all. On the sand you can see Rabut’s shadow like a crawling animal, and when he looks into the viewfinder, Bernard is slightly leaning over the little girl, helping her by holding her up with one hand, she’s very attentive to the way she’s moving forward, very serious, almost grave.
Rabut wonders if she’s wearing black because of the death of the doctor, he doesn’t know that no one has ever seen her wearing light colors. In back, there is a building made of cinderblocks with a very low roof, and still further back, the hill and the sky of the end of the afternoon, almost ochre,
He presses the shutter.
And then soon all the platoons are in the yard, grouped under the flag. They walk back to the vehicles, already the engines are revving up, and in a few minutes the base looks the way it did before. Except there are tire marks and the dust raised by the trucks and jeeps seems to hang in the air, and all of them are thinking about the doctor, or rather, all of them are thinking that they’ve taken away his remains—that terrible word to talk about bodies, to talk about a man, like what remains of a skinned rabbit, of an animal skinned to be eaten, and they’re all left with the weight of that absence, with the evening coming in, the dust falling slowly back down, so slowly you’d think it was floating, and then nothing, no sounds, just the men in the base and the routine to go back to, except that now everybody knows that what has been routine is no longer routine.
Because all of them already know that something has changed. They don’t know what. Nothing’s going to change. And yet, everything. They know mornings will have the same corporal’s voice and the same old tune,
So-and-so! Java duty!
Transistors will be crackling out the first news of the day, voices will yell for them to turn it off, turn it down, and with eyes still half shut all of them will go take a leak against the little wall outside, a bit further off.
And yet, like all the others, without talking to anyone, Bernard immediately knows how it’s not exactly the same as before that thing with the doctor; he knows the atmosphere will get bad and tense at the base, the others will no longer laugh at bedtime when there’s only the little yellow lightbulb over them in the middle of the room, they won’t laugh either when Février yells and keeps yelling,
Send us home, for chrissake!
Because each of them will think he heard his buddy’s voice shake, something it didn’t do before.
And the truth is that the guys can’t find sleep, or that sleep comes very late in the night.
And when you hear how some men are tossing in their beds, turning, turning over again, you don’t tell dirty jokes anymore, you don’t talk about women; you only hear the silence and sometimes the exasperated, angry voice of this one or that one yelling for them to stop tossing around, cut it out,
Stop it for godsake!
And then the bodies will stiffen in the night, each man in his bed, and you know that for many of them it’s almost impossible to breathe and hearts are near breaking, you can almost hear the urge to scream that’s smothering them.
So under these conditions, more than ever you’re overcome by nostalgia, by homesickness. And the days grow heavy even when the heat is not that stifling, even when you only have target practice. Because for the officers, too, something has changed.
They have a hard time keeping the men busy, making them believe what they do is important, useful, they know the men have lost their motivation; and now conversations are no longer so funny or lively, the days stretch out and the men seem to find sleep more at nap time than at night. You spend your time cleaning the barracks. Maybe you write even more than usual. You end up playing cards without even paying attention to the game. All you talk about is going home. They know that some of them will be eligible, others will have to settle for three or four days in Oran, and still others will have to wait.
They all pray, secretly, not to be one of those.
The ones who managed to get a week and will be leaving for France know that when they get back they’ll have to report everything and tell a story that lives up to the expectations of those who have stayed behind. They don’t know yet that they’ll have to tell the story of a long, unpleasant trip, dismal barracks, hours of waiting for nothing, all that time lost, all that freedom wasted, the transit center and a night in the guardroom of the port, the night crossing, stretched out on the floor without seeing anything of the steel-gray water, and dreamless sleep.
They’ll speak and the others will listen in total silence. They’ll talk about the kisses and hugs, and that’s it. They will say nothing more. The rest is for them. Friends, family, fiancée. And then sometimes no more fiancée, but news about her from other people, yes, she’s with so-and-so’s son. And they’ll pretend not to hold it against her, and above all they won’t try to see her again to demand an explanation, scream their disappointment and their feeling of injustice and abandonment.
They will know how to keep quiet, how not to tell the episode of the doctor, the villages. Perhaps talk only about the boredom and the routine. Better still: keep quiet and ignore.
A few days later, in Oran, it’s someone you don’t know who presses the shutter—and in the pictures there’s a whole bunch of us, the tallest kneeling in front of the others, most wearing sunglasses, and most with a broad smile.
And then, among the pictures, there’s the one Rabut will come upon in the middle of all the ones he took, without knowing how it got there. A shot he’ll have seen at Bernard’s place too, and he won’t know who took it. It’s Bernard with Idir, and both of them are laughing, squinting in the sun, you can see their teeth and prominent cheekbones, it’s as if they were making faces at the sun, which is dazzling them. Bernard has put his arm on Idir’s shoulder and behind them you see the war memorial, white as a cuttlebone and over it little French flags floating like a colony of insects, butterflies or bees, you can’t tell in the blue air, it’s July and the national holiday, carefully surrounded and watched over by the military. The parade, the French flags decorating the balconies.
It’s a celebration, but it’s also and above all a show of force.
But for them it will be something else: they’re on leave.
And so you’ll only think of the sun, you’ll want to walk around, have fun, be your real age, something you occasionally have the impression of forgetting in the barracks or at the base. And so you’ll have images, smells, and thoughts that will be etched into your memories as deeply as the knives of the fells into the flesh of their victims.
That will last all our lives, it will be as important as the rest and yet we won’t realize how much it matters, because we don’t think every day about the things that cover the walls of our lives; children with colorful paper cones full of chickpeas or salted pumpkin seeds, we’ll remember them like we’ll remember the smells of sardines or merguez so intensely they become nauseating, nightmarish. But for the moment, it’s the wind on the waterfront and the light of Oran, the women with hennaed hair and scarves tied around it, the little photographer’s shops, the rounded, worn-out cobblestones, the cars—Simca Aronde, Peugeot 203—the sun, of course, and the cicadas like static on the radio, the trams, Philibert, Gisèle, Jacqueline, and Mireille’s hand when he touches her palm and fingers for the first time, at the Mogador cinema in the afternoon, hesitantly at first, not daring to look at her, but she turns frankly toward him and looks at him, smiling, happy, not red and shy like he is but frank and simple, as if the gesture had been the obvious thing to do from the start.
Like the others, he took a little room in a hotel near the station. A cot that squeaks at the slightest movement, a sink with cold water, a mirror cracked from top to bottom that splits his face in two the way he splits the oranges he eats in the morning on his bed.
It’s the first time he’s had a room to himself in a long time (he could say, since he was born); so what if the wallpaper has a pattern of horrible flowers and the cockroaches have taken possession of the sink and the mold makes the paper peel and draws halos over the window and the sink. So what if the neighbors fight for a good part of the night. He’s alone in the room and that’s what counts, and from the window he can lean out and look at the city, at the green and yellow trams.
And in the morning he walks around, he looks at the window of the Grand Café Riche, at the Boulevard Charlemagne and the little Rue de l’Hôtel de Ville. He pictures himself living here, not even looking at the oval end of the building and the Café Brésil anymore, which he knows so well by now. He tells himself there’ll be peace, he could live here and be happy. He likes the atmosphere of the city. When he gets back to the base he’ll write Solange and tell her everything you miss out on when you live in the country, like seeing all the young Arabs suddenly coming out of a back street in the afternoon with newspapers under their arms selling L’Echo d’Oran.
He has time to think, too, not just about the last events, about the corpse of the doctor and Châtel who’s getting more and more sullen and doesn’t speak to anyone anymore. He thinks about the Algerians; he tells himself that since he’s been here the only one he knows is little Fatiha, and not even her parents, that the population is for him and the other men a kind of mystery that grows deeper from week to week, and he tells himself that without knowing why, he’s afraid and doesn’t know what he’s afraid of.
He doesn’t know anything, and as he walks through Oran very early in the morning, that thought makes him ashamed.
The more time passes, the more he repeats to himself and the more he can’t help thinking that if he were Algerian he’d probably be a fellagha. He doesn’t know why he has that idea and he wants to get rid of it very quickly, as soon as he thinks of the doctor’s body in the dust. What kind of men can do that. The people who do that are not men. And yet. They are men. He tells himself sometimes that he’d be a fellagha. Because the peasants can’t work their land. Because of the poverty here. Even if we’re told we’re here for them. We’ve come to bring them peace and civilization. Right. But he thinks of his mother and the cows in their fields, he thinks of the thick heavy clouds whose shadows fall on the animals’ backs in the stream and on the poplars. He thinks of his father and mother, who had to put their hands over their babies’ mouths—they told that story to him and his brothers and sisters many times—when the whole village left their farms to hide in the holes made by the shells and they could hear the steps of the Germans right near them. He thinks of what he was told about the Occupation, try as he might he can’t help thinking of it, he can’t help saying to himself that here we’re like the Germans back home, we’re no better than them.
He also thinks he could be a harki like Idir, because whatever you may say, France is not bad really, and then also because this is France too, here, it’s been France for such a long time. And the army’s a job like any other, Idir’s right about that, being a harki means making a living for your family or else they’d die of hunger.
But he also thinks maybe all that isn’t true. You can’t believe anybody. They lie everywhere. He thinks he’s been lied to forever. Something, lies. Everywhere. To the point of making him feel nauseous and overthrowing everything that makes up the world before him. He almost feels like crying. He doesn’t know why. Why does he feel all blue and melancholy. When today. Four days. And Mireille as the sole horizon of these four days.
The sky is beautiful, so is the city, definitely, he has such a strong impression of the city, and the feeling that you can’t live outside of a city. He’s so dazzled by it that the speeches of the parish priest come back to him only as a new lie he hadn’t suspected before, but now it’s blatant: no, the city is not hell or temptation or superficiality, nor anything like that, and suddenly the priest seems ugly and bitter to him and for the first time Bernard won’t open his missal for days.
He wonders if Châtel’s way of thinking about God isn’t closer to the truth than his. Then he stops wondering altogether.
Idir has asked him to come for tea at his parents’ house. Bernard accepted, a little surprised at first. He doesn’t have the impression that he’s really close to Idir, but certainly more than he is to Abdelmalik, that’s for sure, but that’s pretty easy because it’s also true that Abdelmalik doesn’t talk a whole lot, not to him or to anyone. So, being close to Idir is the least you could expect.
When they greet him and offer him tea, Bernard is very impressed. And not just because he’s in an Arab family, given the fact that he doesn’t have a clue about the folklore and how they do things, but also because they go out of their way to entertain him, as if he were an important man, yes, that’s what he feels and he’s embarrassed a little because it’s all too much, all the consideration, the friendship, the ceremony around the tea the mother is going to pour—and the grandfather who insists on showing him his veteran’s medals, and his arm lost at Verdun that he talks about while he touches the emptiness in his jacket sleeve like a trophy, the sleeve folded back and stapled at the elbow; and the embarrassment, almost, which rises and suffocates Bernard as he faces Idir and his family, like suddenly the hint of a guilty conscience. He wonders why he should have a guilty conscience, about what, about whom, and he thinks again of Abdelmalik and what he had said to Idir,
We can do whatever we like, we’ll never be French.
And he tells himself that this time he’s dealing with things a peasant like him can’t understand or can only have incorrect ideas about, he would have had to go to high school at least, gotten an education, experienced more things, met more people.
So he gets all flustered when the moment comes to say good-bye to Idir’s family and thank them for their hospitality. He thanks them profusely, he stammers, he doesn’t know why, he obscurely knows he won’t tell anyone he’s been here. And that thought bothers him. He wonders why he should be ashamed of coming here and yet he feels uncomfortable, as if he were betraying his own, but no, Idir is one of us, or maybe because he was especially embarrassed by the fact that they felt honored by his presence, he who made fun of bicots and négros back in the village, without ever having come across a single one except in the stories the grandfathers told about the Senegalese riflemen—giants they put in the front lines to scare the Krauts.
But ideas and questions evaporate the moment he meets the little group chaperoning Mireille. They give him a tour of the city, they explain the old prefecture on Place Kléber but the new one, no, you won’t see it, it’s hideous. Then the lions guarding the entrance to City Hall. And after that it’ll be the Choupot neighborhood, and they’ll stay in that neighborhood, with its ficus trees of the same green as the green benches where you wait for the trolley; and on the way back, Mireille points out the Météore on the right—we’ll go there, that’s where we go dancing, you’ll see, it’s fantastic, she says.
There’s a record store. When Mireille points to one of the record jackets in the window, Bernard doesn’t look at it and at first pretends he didn’t hear. He wonders if he’s the only boy his age who’s never had records at home. Well no, he knows he’s not the only one. He knows Mireille is pretty much alone in the opposite direction. He wonders why she can be interested in him, someone who doesn’t know anything. He’s willing to learn, but for that you’ll have to admit you don’t know anything, and this is something he absolutely won’t do.
When she points to another record jacket, he doesn’t answer, he walks ahead, he says anyway, for him, music . . . But Mireille then says she likes music enough for the two of them, she plays the piano a little but Chopin’s really boring, but what can you do, it’s my father. She’d rather play modern stuff, things you can dance to.
And speaking of dancing they’ll go to Mirailles’ across from the bakery, and at the bar they’ll eat kémias and listen to the jukebox turned up to the max.
That’s what they do. Mireille takes off her big green sunglasses that she leaves next to her like a little pet. The music covers up the conversations—Philibert invites Bernard to go snorkeling with him. He tells him he owns a little cabin out there on the beach; between Cape Falcon and Saint-Roch, when you leave the mountain there’s a beach and the cabins are right up against the rocks, and Philibert says he spends lots of time there with his pals Lopez and Segura when they’re not at work, and pointing to Mireille with a wink, he says to Bernard, it’s a great spot to take a girl.
Later in the afternoon, Mireille has to go home. Guests are coming over, her parents insist that she get back early. Gisèle and Jacqueline are there to chaperone her, but they agree not to walk back with her and let Bernard take her to her door alone. He doesn’t see the city, he would probably be unable to go back the way he came, and in fact he does get lost on the way back and if he hadn’t bumped into Philibert, he might not have found his way back to the hotel.
It’s because Mireille’s voice is echoing in his head, like all promises made softly, calmly, as if you were just talking about the fine weather and cooing away to make yourself lovable and charming. But no, that’s already done, they’re already beyond that. With Mireille you talk about going to live in Paris, and even, without exactly saying it, getting married. Because even if the word is never said, you talk about the future and say: after the army. You say: what we’ll do after the army, and not what he, Bernard, will do. But that we is dropped casually, in passing, and they both pretend not to notice it, as if the two of them were already married. And the parents don’t matter. For him it’s easy, he says he doesn’t want to go back home.
He says: I’d like to open a garage.
That sentence dropping just like that. It’s as if now he was suddenly so bold, as if with Mireille nothing was impossible. He will leave home, he will change his life, that’s for sure, this time he knows it, there was a miracle and the miracle is her, right here, who came to him, he wonders what she can possibly see in him that’s so . . . so . . . well, so, he doesn’t get it, he can’t see it, but okay, great, that’s great.
He knows that sometimes the question becomes a source of worry, and the worry becomes pure anxiety. He’s afraid that suddenly the miracle will stop just as it began, and he’ll get a letter like so many buddies have already, a letter, a few words: I don’t love you anymore.
He sleeps poorly, and the next morning he feels slightly nauseous. Février knocks on his door, they’re going to spend the day together because tonight, already, they’re going back. They have to be in the Oran barracks at five-thirty to be at the base early in the evening. They would rather have gone back the next morning, but that won’t be possible. Nothing you can do about it, they know everybody has to converge on the barracks (and they all have to resign themselves, at least in spirit, almost despite themselves, whether they’re in the city or further out on a beach, everyone already on his way in his mind, presenting himself at the barracks, telling the buddies two or three not so good jokes; and then, immediately, without thinking, making sure you’re ready, joining the others, preparing the convoy, hitting the road and going back to the old routine).
The idea of going back to the base is terrible; Février and Bernard are struck with such fatigue that they don’t even need to talk about it, because that’s all they see, as each is a reflection of the other.
So: they’ll talk only about the last three days.
Talk of what they’ll have done. What it was like to find yourself for the first time without your buddies, alone at last, for once, a moment when you even felt somewhat abandoned at first, in a vacuum, instead of the pleasure you were expecting. And simply taking it easy, going to the movies, having a Pernod or a beer or an anisette and looking at the shop windows. Wasting time at the sidewalk cafés watching people on the street going about their business. And also, the buddies you ran into by chance and you spent the afternoon with them, and the evening, and then the next day too, and finally your whole time.
One part of the afternoon is spent at the Météore—the bar as you come in, the dance floor on the side. Everybody’s breath has a little scent of anisette and couscous, and, for the women, the slightly heavy, flowery fragrance of lipstick and makeup.
Février and Bernard are excited, and at the same time tense; they watch the girls dance with other soldiers or men in civilian clothes, all in suits, with neatly combed hair.
They stand there for a moment without moving, they listen to songs, and despite themselves, they almost feel like dancing. Especially Février. And he doesn’t hold back for long—why should he anyway, that’s why we’re here, to have fun, we’ve still got a few hours ahead of us and very soon he finds girls eager for a hand to invite them. They’re sitting there looking around the room for a dance partner. Some of them are alone, and the idea that no one came with them goes to Février’s head, and he doesn’t wait for long to make up his mind.
Bernard is surprised not to see Mireille, nor even Gisèle, Jacqueline, or Philibert and his friends Lopez and Segura.
They’d made a date to meet here. And suddenly he gets worried. What if nobody came? If he had to go back to the barracks without having seen Mireille again? The idea seems unthinkable to him. So he stays like that, standing there. He hesitates to go back to the bar then says to himself the bar, yeah, why not, maybe, from there he’d see who comes in, rather than waiting here doing nothing and watching the others have fun. So he lights up a cigarette and, a bit reluctantly, looks around again one last time to see if he can’t find the face of a friend in the crowd, aside from Février.
A friend, no. But a face he knows, yes, very quickly. Because as he walks over to the bar, among the soldiers he recognizes Rabut in the entrance, who hesitates for a moment then comes over and waves when he sees him.
I didn’t recognize you, he says to Bernard.
And that’s about it. They don’t talk much. They stay next to each other, they tell each other that anyway they’ll leave together for the barracks, yes, what time, five, if we want to be there at half past. They don’t tell each other they could leave on their own, they don’t like each other much and at the same time they stick together as soon as they see each other, that’s the way it’s always been, and it’s even more true here, something from home that connects people without their really knowing why, through what old habit, so old they don’t even think of questioning it.
Rabut orders a beer. He asks Bernard if he wants one and he shakes his head. He looks at the door, the people coming in, still nobody, none of the faces of the people he’s waiting for.
And disappointment settles in.
The two cousins hesitate to go into the part of the club where people are dancing. Rabut glances in and Bernard doesn’t say anything when he sees that look, he thinks maybe Rabut is waiting for Mireille, too.
Of course not.
He tells himself he’s making up stories, it’s not because Rabut and Mireille danced together once or twice that you necessarily have to imagine that they.
Then he wants to reassure himself by repeating that in love, trust is important, trust is everything, he has to trust Mireille, that’s what Solange would explain to him, and Solange always gives good advice.
Trust her, yes.
Even if, of course, it’s mostly Rabut he doesn’t trust.
Finally, they go back to where people are dancing, they do it without talking to one another, just a nod, it’s better than standing there glued to the bar. But Bernard looks at the entrance to the bar one last time and unfortunately no one’s coming—that idea that nobody will come, he looks at his watch, will no one really come? He wonders if he’d have the time to go all the way to Mireille’s house, it’s not so far to walk, he thinks he could find the way again, even if he’s not too sure.
He imagines himself ringing and knocking at the door. He imagines the face of the Arab woman opening up for him, letting him into the corridor; but perhaps they wouldn’t open or from the entrance he’d be surprised to see a whole company of people at the dinner table in the living room or the dining room—or sitting in armchairs, uncles, aunts, all in fine, dark, strict suits and women in gowns in unfamiliar shapes and colors, and he’d be standing there under their half-amused, half-scornful eyes, with his cap in his hands and his thick smile, his thick face, the way he looks with his pleated pants, he tells himself that with his silly soldier’s pride he’d just look ridiculous and grotesque.
So no, he won’t move. They said the date was here. I’m not going to budge. If she ever arrived at the moment he was leaving for her house, it would really be too dumb. For him to get to her house and they’d tell him,
You must have passed her on the way, she left a good half hour ago with her friend Gisèle.
He’s not going to budge. He’s going to wait.
And so they don’t talk, they just look at Février who’s dancing and changing partners every time, trying his luck, sweet-talking into ears with earrings sparkling under the lights of the nightclub.
Then Bernard walks back to the bar and sits down. He has a beer and turns around as soon as people come in and he hears voices and women laughing. He remains alone for a moment, meets guys from his platoon who come in and go out very quickly saying see you later. He answers halfheartedly and suddenly surprises himself counting the bubbles in his beer as they rise and disappear, like the voices behind him. And then he tries to smoke again, he still has some cigarettes, a few, the soft pack in his pocket, and matches, then his hands shaking a little and suddenly he straightens up, is he going to wait like that? Is it possible to wait and tell yourself that you’re going to stay alone at the bar when you’ve already been waiting for an hour and ten minutes, soon an hour and fifteen?
Rabut and Février join him at the bar, they joke around, laugh, they’re talking loudly. Their laughter suddenly irritates Bernard, but he moves over so they can sit down at the bar with him.
They order two more beers.
Soon the pack of cigarettes is completely empty. Bernard crushes it slowly, very seriously, very, very slowly and carefully, until it turns into a compact ball, very tight, as concentrated perhaps as the ball of rage and anger he feels rising up inside him with great force—something of that furor he absolutely doesn’t want today, a black knot forming now and he wonders what’s happening, if he didn’t make a mistake about where to meet, if he understood the time and place correctly, or something may have happened to Mireille and Gisèle, or to someone else, and then in that case why, why didn’t any of the others come and warn him, tell him there’s no point waiting for Mireille and hoping to see her today?
But nothing. No one comes. The music is unbearable. The perfume of the girls and the smell of beer. The men in suits, all of them dressed up, ugly, like everything is suddenly ugly, hurtful, loud colors, screaming music; and the air is suddenly as gray and full of smoke as his thoughts growing somber and dark, and he can feel the irritation and the perfume smelling too strong and making him dizzy.
He closes his eyes before ordering another beer; he tells himself he drank too much. He never drinks, or very little, and now his head is spinning. And yet he didn’t drink much. But there’s the sun, too, that heat he can’t really get used to. The frustration. The tension. The fatigue from his bad night. That sudden fear, so strong, of telling himself that Mireille won’t come back to him. That it’s over. That she doesn’t want to see him anymore. She’s realized he’s a simple peasant, a peasant’s son, she realized that the other day, because of the shop window with the records and now she must think he’s a moron and an ignoramus, she’s laughing at him with the others, in another bar, and maybe she’s even dancing with other men and his name is already like the name of a song that was a hit last summer and then,
Ciao, bello.
But no, that’s stupid, it can’t possibly be like that. He blames himself for always imagining things the same way, situations where he’s always humiliated, brought down lower than the ground, as if he always had to end up that way, like a wimp, like a nothing, a less than nothing; and this time he doesn’t want to. In fact, no, he never wanted to.
And he won’t let them push him around.
He looks at the time. It’s not time to go yet. But it’s getting later, the clock is ticking, it’s ticking so fast that soon he’ll have to make up his mind and give up waiting here; he twists his neck around as soon as he hears new voices, bursts of laughter; he would recognize Mireille’s laugh anywhere any time, so the idea of telling himself he’ll have to leave before hearing her again, and seeing her—that idea seems almost terrifying all of a sudden, it’s as if he felt himself losing his footing. Without being able to be more rational. Without knowing why, inside of him, the feeling is so oppressive, so disturbing.
And so he says yes without thinking, without knowing what they’re saying to him.
Someone suggests another drink and he says yes without thinking or listening, even though now he has a stomachache and the smoke and the mix of odors are making him nauseous. And the other two with him insist on laughing and telling jokes, their voices so loud and their laughs so heavy, he hears that, picks up his glass and looks at the entrance one last time. He says he’s going to leave. He’s not staying here. The heavy laughs and the jokes Rabut and Février have told a thousand times are becoming unbearable, especially because he sees the jokes only as a way of provoking him, that’s right, they’re just taunting him, they’ve been teasing him for the last ten minutes at least, a sneaky way of looking for a fight, of annoying him still more, of laughing at him—and besides he thought he saw a gesture, for sure he saw it, Rabut nudging Février with his elbow.
He doesn’t want to lose his temper.
He runs his fingers over his lips; they’re dry, his mouth feels all furry. So, he swallows what’s in his glass in two big gulps, very fast, and when he puts it back down with a sharp, brusque gesture, stronger than what he was expecting, the noise on the counter surprises him and he stares at Rabut and Février: in a curt, biting voice, not looking at Février but only at Rabut he throws out,
Hey, what’s the matter, what does he want from me, the graduate’s got a problem?
And a few hours later, some can say they saw Bernard and Février, and Rabut too, in a nightclub. Can say,
We saw them we said hi and we said see you later.
Very quickly, the word goes round in the barracks: some soldiers, draftees. Hey guys, some draftees are missing.
It’s not quite what they think, not quite yet what the soldiers think but what they already fear when they contact the base back there—assassination, kidnapping, anything’s possible, they know that, they don’t trust this place, they pretend they’re not thinking about it but they’re always afraid something like that might happen, anytime and anyplace, so they reassure themselves by saying,
Nothing’s for sure, maybe they only went to sober up someplace and that’ll be it, they wouldn’t be the first.
The two jeeps and the half-track are waiting under the sun in plain sight, in the yard. From the base, the corporal wanted to talk to one of his men: it was Nivelle. He ordered him to go look for Février and Bernard, and not come back without them.
Take Idir, he knows the city, and find those two assholes for me.
That’s what he says before hanging up with a bang, very angry. And an hour later, Nivelle and Idir and two other men come back at the double, alone.
They say they didn’t find anyone.
Yes, people saw them, some people saw them, a whole bunch of people saw them and when things went bad they disappeared and then nobody.
And in the barracks the men who know them are surprised and try to picture Rabut and Bernard under the sun, those two country boys, more country than ever, with Février around them doing his best to calm them down and failing, and they wonder how something between the two cousins exploded because Rabut must have drunk too much, too fast, that’s what they’ll be saying,
Rabut likes to raise his elbow in the rec hall but they know that the other guy, the cousin, no, he’s kind of religious, a beer from time to time that’s all, and he likes to play cards and maybe have a smoke with his buddies and kid around, but he’s not the talkative type, quiet guy, a little gloomy, a worrier, and often his missal in his hands and prayers on his lips, that’s what they know about him.
What they think they know, and nothing more.
You really wonder what could have happened and then very soon you don’t even try to find out why, at the bar, Rabut suddenly looked at his cousin with that serious expression just because the guy had said something silly, not really mean. And yet Rabut had that cold, hard way of looking at him before answering, leaving his glass on the bar and straightening up just a little, giving him a kind of—how to say it, what can you call that—a shifty look and also that smirk, that determination not to pay attention to what the other guy had said,
What does he want from me, the graduate’s got a problem?
Rabut not really flinching and holding himself back, and even ignoring (pretending to ignore) what he’d heard, as if he were just distracted by the bar, by the people too, and the music, nothing, a little mocking smile, not even a nasty look, for hardly a second and yet he couldn’t let that go.
Hey, cousin! Drop it, don’t start up with that again.
How then there was that ripple of motion, no one could tell how, how between them things went over the edge and the two bodies were carried away, first into the entrance, both of them, the two cousins, their bodies and shapes roughly the same size forming one single black and gray shape, with the shapes of their hands not yet clearly visible in the doorframe and the outside like a photograph or a painting or something too garish, the white light, blinding, and the ficus, the color green, motion too, and then just Février and voices around them talking, laughing, having fun with it, those voices getting much louder, not shouts yet between the two men, not their hands yet but already their red faces and their eyes open very wide like the eyes of corpses and owls in the night, they know all that by heart, but not yet what’s coming, what they’re going through now, what holds them and everything that was said at the entrance to the bar before someone decides they were becoming violent and they—so, to say how it all started, not just what led to the fight, but,
The graduate,
That word caught by Rabut, drunk enough that afternoon not to take it. That smile with that look. That smirk. How both of them rushed, not at each other, but to face each other, planted there, already set to fight,
Why do you have to fuck with me here, too?
Both of them tensed up in the doorway, not seeing anyone else coming in anymore or even hearing the voices and laughs at first, Février’s voice, the voices of a few soldiers at the bar; and then a fist very tightly clenched, as tightly perhaps as a pack of cigarettes rolled into a ball and left there on the counter, and then, like a hand, a flower, opening on the bar, blossoming, going slack as it smooth’s out slowly, like a small animal moving, a crab, sideways; and of course, at first no one thought they’d hit. You hear voices. Music. Life in the street.
And the doctor, when you found the doctor were you cleaning your nails so as not to look at him, did you call the doctor a slut too, when he died?
And Bernard, his mouth hanging open and the saliva shining, didn’t answer right away; then his fists clenched,
You’re a total asshole, Rabut, you always were an asshole.
Neither of them talking about Mireille while Mireille was the only thing on Bernard’s mind.
He said to himself: Mireille.
Her name like a dream to hang onto. When his heart suddenly jumped, that’s right, jumped in his chest and he straightened up because the other guy had straightened up and suddenly no peace is possible between them, no peace anymore because Rabut has pushed Bernard away and he has tears in his eyes when he whispers and spits in disgust—Bernard thought he heard it, he did, that name and that image, he’s sure of it, from Rabut, the words in Rabut’s mouth.
I felt like saying that to you for years, nobody ever had the guts to tell you,
Rabut with tears, no, eyes swollen, his voice shaky,
She was your sister and you called Reine a slut, that’s what you were saying—slut,
And Bernard not listening, frowning, had started to spit,
What’re you talking about, you don’t know a thing, nothing at all, nobody knows anything, just shut the fuck up, Rabut.
And then the bodies and the shouts, not their shouts but the shouts of the others, all the others around them who didn’t see or believe that it could start so fast, so hard, the sound of punches, the shock of punches to the jaw, the one who started punching the other, the bodies grabbing each other, fists clenched, necks tensed, chests thrust forward and the shouts, the threats, both of them out of breath, blindly pushing off everybody opposing them, interposing, and both of them together, united, in agreement on this at least, to clear space around them and struggle to get free so they could run at each other, straight ahead, spitting, the shouts are so loud and finally they’re pushed outside, both of them thrown out and even kicked despite Février, despite other soldiers, with some people trying, with gestures, words,
Calm them down,
No,
Impossible with words they can’t hear, gestures they can’t see, hands they push away, impossible to do anything and certainly to calm them down, neither of them, together in it, impossible to shut them up.
Stop,
They saw nothing of the laughs or the bets already shouted out, and around them the mass of people and the hands imitating punches,
Go, go!
Hit him!
Hit him!
The hands like a hedge making a fence around them and the mouths of children full of watermelon, a few thin wisps of white clouds above them, the kids yelling and laughing and the women, worried, calling out to each other, looking for support, calling out under the oh’s of stupefaction and the encouragements, some of them looking around and insisting, they have to be separated, who’s going to separate them, nobody, their chests thrust forward, their hands clenched into fists, fake boxers, a cockfight, and others on the contrary yelling call the police, somebody, their voices drowned in the dust and under the blows, sharp, short, the fists, the breaths and then the shouts and the laughs.
And while they’re hitting, neither of them can imagine or think of anything. And yet their hearts are emptying out, they don’t know of what, either of them.
But they empty out.
And all around them the sun, the shouts and the people are like spots of color and remote, incomprehensible sounds, more remote than even the place where that need to hit is coming from. As if Bernard were hitting his mother. As if he could finally hit his mother as if she were a man and yell and howl out his hatred at last; like bursting a blister full of pus and vomiting out the image of the doctor’s body—both of them have the impression that they’re crying as they hit and by hitting the other it is themselves they are hurting.
And at that moment, Bernard cannot imagine that forty years later—let’s say, almost forty, yes, almost forty years, so many years, all those years, he can’t imagine that leap in time and, through the thickness of the years, see or even perceive that winter night when Rabut wakes up again with a start because in the course of the day someone will have said the name Algeria.
While he’s fighting, Bernard doesn’t imagine anything.
Not his voice, of course, nor the face he’ll have forty years later. Not the day of Solange’s birthday, nor the little deep blue jewel box he will have bought for her and certainly not Chefraoui nor the night that will follow, nor Rabut, fat, heavy, a little clumsy, waking up with a start at three in the morning as he does every time he has insomnia.
And this time like all the others, Rabut wakes up with his eyes wide open: that is, when he realizes he’s awake, it’s as if his eyes were already wide open, his hand groping in space trying to find the switch of the bed lamp. He’s a little shaky, breathing hard. He wakes up in his bed next to his wife, Nicole, who has her back turned and hears nothing. He has the face and body of a man of sixty-two and he’s tired, he feels so heavy, exhausted, there’s drool on his mouth and he may wipe his fingers on it a few times to dry it, as he also does on his face as if to unwrinkle it, to retrieve his face from before, a smoother face so as to understand better, but no.
First he has to raise his body a little, and it’s complicated, the pillow behind him slides down, flattens out, he has to turn a little to raise it and sit up but he’s like a drowned man, he is a drowned man, he’s drowning—and while he’s trying to grab the switch of the bed lamp next to him, he still sees those images passing in front of his eyes, he still has to bear them and hear that old fight again, a fight that could have been stopped if only, instead of opening his big mouth—as he will blame himself so often for doing ever since—instead of opening his mouth and stirring up the man facing him who would pay so dearly for that fight, if he had only known, if he could have known, no, he wouldn’t have stirred up Bernard’s anger and then.
But then—
Bernard would be—he saved his life, too. Because of that fight, it’s thanks to that fight that they didn’t go back to the base that evening and were compelled to stay in the city barracks.
Yes. Except that if they’d gone back to the base nothing would have happened like,
like,
like that.
And Rabut may well find himself sitting in his bed, worn, his body turned flabby from the years and the family, from all those weddings, births, communions, and the banquets with the North Africa Veterans, their méchouis, the nostalgia for something lost over there, maybe your youth, because maybe you end up embellishing even the memories you’d rather forget but can’t get rid of, never completely. So you transform them, you tell each other stories, even if it’s good to know you’re not the only one who went there, and from time to time, have a laugh with the others, when at night you’ll be all alone to face the ghosts and feel your hands sweat.
And let yourself be taken over by the young man Rabut once was, punching away without stopping, without realizing he’s taking punches too, how he’s hurting and almost losing heart, when they start rolling on the ground under the shouting, and Bernard—Rabut doesn’t remember that—Bernard grabbing his face with his fingers squeezing, scratching him, tackling him onto the ground, hitting him some more, faster and faster, hard, fists like a cleaver, a chisel, like stones, punches—but not the worst yet—he’ll be in pain for weeks—still more pain for months—his head against the asphalt—the other hitting—fingers clinging, almost trying to rip his ears off—and the fists hitting the eyes—the body giving way—eyes closing—skin cracking—the other guy’s on top of him—he’s being crushed and soon feels only a huge fatigue and a great abandonment of his whole body—it’s cracking, dislocating and the silence in his head, the blood in his mouth—a bloodbath in his mouth—the smell—his nose is bleeding, too—he’s not breathing anymore and already words do not reach him.
And now Rabut can’t really see the face of the man they take him to right after that, the man who saw the fight from his window and ran over with his doctor’s bag and behind him his wife begging him not to get involved. But the man didn’t listen to her.
He came there, sweating already, breathing heavily, in a short-sleeved shirt, with a handkerchief to wipe off his forehead, his face, and then words to separate the two men, to get help separating them. He wanted us to go to his house, even demanded that we come, that we be treated before we went back to the barracks or wherever you want to go, to hell if you like, but stop that and stop it right away, just stop it, he demanded. And now Rabut drags himself along, supported by him and Février, while Bernard lags a few meters back, walking reluctantly in their wake. Because yes, Bernard is there. He comes along without thinking, because ever since childhood he never has learned that he could let Rabut leave, go his own way; so he follows him without even thinking. Even if he doesn’t help carry his cousin who’s a lot more banged up than he is, all he can think of is following as he staggers along, puffing and panting with his head down, looking at the pavement and in the dust for a few minutes as if he’d lost his glasses or something, maybe his watch, and then giving up, resigned.
The doctor rolls up his sleeves and for nearly two hours lectures each of the two cousins alternately, seriously, diligently, calling Février to witness, who nods, yet glances at the clock he can see out there in the library. The doctor talks as he takes care of them, he talks and lectures them like a good father as he gives out compresses, with precise, supple gestures, so gently it’s almost a caress, all the while repeating with consternation, as if we didn’t have enough violence, guys, you shouldn’t fight, you shouldn’t get yourself all worked up like that, and so on, while behind him his wife silently serves them tea and cookies to cheer everybody up.
And during all this time Bernard says nothing. He answers yes or no, and that’s it. He waits. He looks at the doctor from behind, at Rabut’s legs and arms hanging over either side of the examining table. Bernard stays like that. From time to time he gets up, stands there for a few minutes without really knowing where to go, then walks over to them, comes back, sits down again. Then gets up again, this time very quickly. And he walks around, very straight, stiffly, then goes over to the window as if this time he knew why he was getting up, leans out and looks into the street, where they had their fight.
Everything else happens for them as if in a kind of fever. Like in a dream, or as if a part of that time—of their life anyway—had been erased. Their arrival at the Oran barracks means only prison doors shutting on the three of them, the time to sober up, despite Février’s shouts of protest, the time, they are told, to think things over. And no matter how loud Février yells he has nothing to do with it, the only thing he can hear echoing through his head all night is,
You’ll explain yourself tomorrow.
And what he sees: the door shutting on him, a tiny white rectangle where dilated pupils look at him for a long time, then disappear into the dark.
And the night. Three silences and shining eyes. Three solitudes.
Nothing else.
Very early the next morning they’re allowed to go join the others. Février doesn’t talk to Bernard, because it’s his fault he spent his night in the brig. He’s cold, he’s dirty, exhausted, and he didn’t sleep; he knows he, too, will be tried along with the others for being late and for the fight too, and now that’s driving him up the wall.
But all that was nothing, nothing at all, he’ll later say to Rabut at the end of the sixties, when he came to tell him about Éliane and him, and the farm, and that he’d seen Mireille and Bernard with their first child: she was pregnant and sad, not old yet but about to fall into a state sadder and darker than old age, while he, Bernard, so different from the one who—
So no.
No, finding himself there in the convoy that was bringing us back to the base, so sad and angry, dirty too—that was nothing and I even have to try hard to remember that day, he would tell Rabut later, seven or eight years after all that, so amusing during the meal, talking about everything, very funny, really, and Nicole remembering him for a long time as a big oaf talking only about his own part of the country.
Whereas he also talks, especially when night has fallen and the wife and kids have gone to sleep, he talked that evening, talked so much even, about the events, years later, about their events, when they talked, finally, sitting there alone and already slightly drunk, about how they’d had such a hard time living since then, the sleepless nights, how they’d also given up believing that Algeria was war, because you fight a war against guys on the opposite side, except that for us, and also because in a war you’re supposed to win, but there, and also because war’s always bad guys against good guys and there weren’t any good guys, just men, and also because the old folks used to say yeah well it wasn’t Verdun, man did they ever break our balls with Verdun, that crap about Verdun, how long are they going to repeat that, and the others after that who saved our honor and all that crap but we, because as far as I’m concerned, Février had said, you see, I didn’t even try to talk about it because when I got back nothing was there for me, work on the farm, animals to feed, and then watching the little car on the farm across from us that Éliane got out of every Sunday around five when she came back from her in-laws. Because when I got back, telling myself she was married, yeah, that was really rough. And to a neighbor, a loser I never had any respect for because I knew his whole family were collaborators in 1940, they changed sides at the last minute, all those bastards driving out the last Germans with shovels, that’s what I was told, my father told me, nobody’s more enraged than the Johnny-come-latelies, something to prove, to make up for, show they’re on the right side, all that misery and all they cared about was being on the right side, to really be on the right side, I know, they told me about that twenty-year-old guy they finished off with their shovels and so to tell myself she married a guy from that family, because the son of a bitch got a medical exemption and had money, when I came back I didn’t leave the farm for months, I even worked on it like never before, I fixed the fences, I walked through the country for hours and at the time I never thought mud was better than the stones back there, believe me, no, and the mud, the boots, the humidity, and the heaviness of the earth, how you sink into it, well, the only one I could talk to without screaming was my dog, when I’d walk in the woods for hours on end, and even at night he was the only one I could talk to.
Hey, it’s still like that. There were guys like me in town. We never talked about Algeria. Except we all knew what we were thinking when we’d say yeah, we’re just like the other guys, and animals are better than we are because they don’t give a damn about the right side.
And when Février had said all that, it was also to speak about the silence of the next day when they left for the base, and how mad he was at Bernard for getting him mixed up in family quarrels, like it’s so interesting, right.
And for years, Rabut was to repeat to himself, I don’t know why I can’t sleep at night anymore, I don’t know if Algeria’s the reason really, or if it’s only because of Février coming here years later and telling me how it went when they got to the base out there, he and Bernard, and saw the big oil tanks like giants in armor to welcome them, and the wind. That morning there was wind, he said the wind was important because everybody’s face was slapped by the sand and in your eyes the grains were burning, and on your cheeks the skin was red like it is from the alcohol you put on after shaving, he said.
And now, for years now, Rabut has been hearing Février’s voice, and he can see him telling how the road was that morning, and Rabut, ever since, often wakes up as if he himself had seen that, as if he himself had been there but he hadn’t, since he’d stayed at the barracks in Oran, it’s just Février’s voice that comes back to him.
And maybe also something of Février’s terror and the terror of the other men.
All the others with him, in the jeeps, in the half-tracks, their bodies shaken by the road, the stones, the potholes, the road back, with the wind and the sand both hitting them at once and giving that taste of dust to the blue of the sky all the way down to the bottom of your throat; you can cough or drink all you like, nothing helps. Your hand in front of your mouth doesn’t protect you, nor your closed lips, already dry from the start of the morning, even if it’s early and the sun is not yet high in the sky, not completely blue yet but pale, hesitant. But there’s nothing hesitant about the sand and the wind, which bother them like gnats in front of their eyes or lash at them like little lead pellets. And the almost light brown sky on the horizon and an endless expanse broken by—nothing, no, nothing breaks the horizon this time, nothing, not one of those vertical bars that should be telegraph poles, and no wires stretched between them either—because this time it isn’t just one or two poles the guys have sawed down. They’ve done it on the whole length of the road. Some of the poles fell on the side of the ditches but others—maybe they did all they could, probably they did all they could to make them fall on that side—others fell onto the road, in a straight line from one side to the other, with the wires all tangled up and dragging through the sand like dead snakes, forcing the convoy to stop often, dozens of times, along the whole length of the road.
And then you realize it’s like that as far the eye can see, soon you see that it’s along the whole trail because further on there’s a turn and the road goes down to the sea, so your eyes can take in the whole landscape far into the distance and from that far this time you understand that there’s almost nothing else to see.
And that, Février had said, that got even me out of my bad mood and my anger at Bernard. As if suddenly you remember there are more important things—the things happening now, and the buddies, we look at each other, we exchange the same fear, the same questions, so what happened between us the day before or even two hours before doesn’t exist anymore; we’re welded together by the same fear, at that moment we share everything, the same looks. And the need to talk to each other, because now—with the convoy stopped at the side of the road, the guys speechless for a minute, then jumping out of the jeeps one after the other—it’s as if the fells had done it calmly, without being afraid of anybody, that’s what you feel at that moment, and all of us have the same thought: it’s as if this time they’re the masters here.
At first we tell ourselves it’s like always and we’ll leave it at that. Then we get going and very soon, all of us, we’re there kicking at the ground to send the poles into the ditch; after that we get organized, one car drives ahead, stops at the first obstacle, three guys jump out running and pick up the pole, move it, and during that time the rest of the convoy moves forward, then stops and other guys do the same thing further on, while the first jeep passes them and so on. Like that the whole way, without talking. Except that as we go, we get increasingly irritated, and soon we’re angry, all of us, not only because we’re thirsty and already sweating and can’t see the end of it. But we feel it’s a provocation and we don’t know how to respond, we’re being trapped, we imagine the fells lying in ambush somewhere, laughing at us, we imagine them—we always imagine them since we can never see them, and anger can’t do anything, just give us the additional energy to get it over with faster and clear off the road very quickly while keeping inside ourselves the urge to scream at this whole country, at the stony trails, the brush, and the olive trees, at the wind, and the sea, at everything, the sky, the brambles, the tufts of grass, as if everything were looking at us and laughing along with the fells,
Come on, come out and fight if you’re men, show yourselves if you’re men—rather than this solitude, this dejection setting in already, and that discouragement coming over you when you hear the brakes of the jeep stopping a dozen meters further on.
Then the jeeps finally crawled into the base, and now we’re all extremely irritated. We don’t talk, we just look around, quick glances that don’t really focus on anything, on anything in particular, quick glances, that’s all, to fill up that huge silence, that space too huge as well, yet so familiar, but we look at it as if for the first time, as if it were a cave, a forest, with fear in our guts, our rifles at the ready, our hands sweaty and shaking. We don’t look for long, though, because very soon the quick glances are for each other.
And it’s not to look for an answer to something we don’t understand, it’s to give ourselves the strength, the courage to go forward, not to understand.
Because that, no, no, we can’t understand that, there’s nothing to understand.
Why suddenly we are so afraid of that silence and still more of what it might mean. We’re scared and suddenly it’s not for us that we’re scared, not for us, but for them, inside, inside the base—and those engines idling, even the road seems flatter than usual because when you drive less quickly you don’t feel the potholes so much and that reassures no one, just as none of us are reassured by the silence. And not one of us says anything. We can’t. Silence. We wait. We’re driving very slowly and we can hear the gravel and the pebbles crunching under the tires. Our hands on our rifles, our hands too cumbersome almost, that sudden tingling in our hands all the way down to the tips of our fingers. And then the hills. The brush. A few trees by the side of the road and the sea down below and the big oil tanks, still untouched by the sun that hasn’t yet sent its blinding flashes off the oil tanks like it sometimes does in the afternoon.
The moment of getting to the base and already discovering that weird picture: who says it first, who dares to say it, give it a name and say,
Jesus, did you see—no, I don’t know who says it.
Only, something travels very fast from one pair of eyes to another. And you try to understand. Or rather, try not to be overwhelmed by what you’re thinking, by what your eyes have seen. So you say to yourself, where’s the sarge, someone has to decide what to do because all of a sudden we don’t know what we should do, or think, we stay there and suddenly the vehicles instead of moving forward and starting the drive downhill after the last turn, slow down and brake. You hear the emergency brakes, the grinding of the axles, and the whole convoy comes to a halt.
And we wait.
We see this from above, from the road: in the yard of the base the flag has not been raised. The mast stands there, empty, the flag is not flying. Nobody says it yet, they just point it out to the others with a move of the chin.
Then someone says it.
The flag’s not up, they didn’t raise the flag.
We don’t know what to think. Or do we already know? Maybe we do. Yes, already. We know. Do we know? It’s only later that we tell ourselves we already knew, at that moment, and we just didn’t dare say it to ourselves,
Yes, that’s it.
We stay there for a few minutes, and a few minutes seem like a very long time, with the engines idling and rattling the metal of the vehicles, and us inside, until we hear the voice and the names, five names dropped from the voice in the first jeep, and it’s those men who have to open the march and jump out of the jeeps, on the ready.
And of course the first names are ours. Bernard’s and mine. We’re the first names, followed by three others.
But us two first, because. Because. Soon they’ll be saying all of this happened because we weren’t there when the time came to leave the Oran barracks, and in a way we’d done the fells’ work for them.
Yes, some said that.
Like we needed to hear that. As if the two of us, Bernard and me, hadn’t already thought of that; if the convoy had left on time, then yes, it was hard to imagine what would have happened and to tell ourselves, yes, because of us. Maybe because of us. And how many times did I tell myself, I should have shaken Bernard and his cousin harder and dragged both of them, well, just Bernard, because after all, what did I care if Rabut got back to his barracks or not, what did I care when for me the only one who mattered there was Bernard, and I could never tell myself it’s because of that fight and because we got there too late, they waited for us, it was the lieutenant’s orders, his or the corporal’s, or some sergeant, or somebody at the base, and really we couldn’t do anything about it, they’re the ones who made the decision to stay, and not leave without us, to wait for us, to delay the convoy’s departure, it’s not we who decided that everybody had to wait just because two guys weren’t there on time.
Not sure it would’ve changed anything. Not certain. As if that would have changed anything. I didn’t tell Bernard at that moment and he didn’t tell me either, but of course we knew it would have changed things if the convoy had left, instead of waiting for us, the fells attacked because they learned we weren’t leaving—they were informed, almost half a garrison less, that means something, they knew it, otherwise they never would have dared and that’s a fact.
And nobody needed to tell us that it was because of us.
No.
It’s your fuckup, your fuckup—and so they all were careful not to talk to us, to turn away from us, to lower their eyes before us, change the subject, walk past us, look down on us. How I had to live through that with Bernard, too. Thinking back to certain images was maybe the worst: our beds untouched, neat and clean. The brown blanket carefully folded over the bed. And the snapshots near the pillow, tacked to the wall, smiling at us. For me it was Éliane’s picture and for Bernard the postcard of the glowing Blessed Virgin with her hands folded and her tearful ecstatic look, while all around there was that silence and carnage with only that goddamn turtle raising its black wrinkled head, swaying a little, its little black eyes blinking, shining like a cat’s eyes at night or the chrome on a car, the innocence of a little old lady crossing a minefield without anything ever blowing up in her face.
So afterward you can always say that it was Bernard’s fault, my fault, Rabut’s fault, whoever you want to blame.
It’s mainly the fault of the ones who did it.
And then, Février had said, I don’t know how you could describe the fear, when you’re moving forward in silence with your body at an angle, your legs bent, your rifle in your hands, almost squatting—I mean, at the moment we were opening the road to the base, the few meters like that, all five of us, me in front, followed by Bernard, and the three other guys behind us—so scared that for awhile you end up not thinking about your fear at all, or about anything. You don’t even know why you’re moving forward. So you cling to your weapon and you run. You run head down, you advance in that silly posture, like a crab or whatever, to make yourself small and unobtrusive. And the hardest is not to scream.
You’d like to scream and you know you should think about all the hours you spent learning what you have to do, how you have to do it, things a soldier has to know, as if now we were in a war, and yes, we are in a war and we are soldiers. Men, like our parents and grandfathers, especially the grandfathers, dreamed we’d be, and later we will wonder,
Were they scared shitless like that at Verdun or in 1940? Is it the same fear in every war?
And really, I don’t know anybody, absolutely nobody, who could fucking tell me that. And I say yes, it was a war, a form of war. We don’t know what war is, but it sure does feel like war. I just know your breath is so loud you have the feeling the whole countryside can hear us breathe.
And I do remember how it feels, the pressure of the wire fence under my fingers, and the gate as if already opened, nobody’s there, no patrol, no one, not one of our buddies. We look at each other. We hesitate to call out. Bernard signals better not to. Then we had to give it a little push with our hands, just a little, no need to make a big effort. A sharp push and the gate swings open.
It’s not locked. It should’ve been. It should have been, of course it should have been locked, but it wasn’t and so when it opens you should hear it creak but all I can hear is my breathing, so hard my chest could burst, and the sudden weight of the clothes on my skin and my neck so stiff it’s hard to turn around and look at Bernard. Who is looking at me. We don’t understand. We don’t want to understand. What we can tell ourselves at that moment, the gate opening and not resisting as it should, the mast standing straight like that, with no flag, nothing, and nobody, still nobody, we tell ourselves it’s impossible, the word is rolling in our mouths,
It’s impossible, impossible,
And the word crumbles and falls away and is nothing but that soft paste dying in your throat, because fear, anger, fear again, so much fear, and you don’t think it’s real what you’re going through, what’s happening, and the idea you’re making it up, forming in your mind, is so ridiculous, when we look at each other a few times to say,
Come on, move, I’ll cover you,
And that ridiculous idea of covering each other too, of telling each other seriously that they simply forgot to wake up in there.
When we know how outrageous it is to think that.
But it’s also a way of not screaming, of not screaming out the names of our buddies, we’d like to see them appear suddenly, right there. But, no. Silence. So we cover each other as best we can. We say let’s cover each other because behind you, in your back, there is somebody shaking, ready to fire all around if anyone kills you. If anyone fires. If anyone moves. We cover each other. It’s something to do. Like run and let an idea go by in your head, then another, then none, nothing, and signal behind you to move forward.
Then another guy comes. Bernard is right behind me. Then another. There are three of us. Then four. Then five. And then all the others, watching and waiting. And then the steel door, the one to access the lookout tower; we find it open, when it’s supposed to protect the guy up there in the sentry box. It shouldn’t be open either, we know that but we don’t say anything. We don’t say yet that they needed a key, we just say we have to go up there.
And we do.
With three of us staying down below and the other two taking the stairs. And then, right away, as we go up, we know we’d like to walk more slowly, we’re ready to fire, we know we can fire but our fingers are hard now, stiff, and yet they’re trembling, everything’s trembling except the concrete steps under our feet and Poiret up there, his body tipped backward bathed in his own blood and his eyes wide open looking at nowhere.
The questions didn’t come right away but very soon, Février had said, yes, very soon, because we find the door to the tower open too, not broken or anything, not a scratch, just open. They must have had a key. That’s what we tell ourselves—but before that, Février had continued, there’s this disgust and how I ran back down and almost fell, my scream running down the steps, shoving Bernard on the way down, Bernard’s the one who told me, my scream, and also how I threw up but I think I don’t remember that at all, and yet I can still see myself standing there, with my legs shaking and my anger even, a terrible feeling of revolt; it was a huge, I don’t know what kind of fury it is when you see all your buddies one after the other with their throats slashed open, as if they didn’t have the time to get out of bed, I don’t know, you can say what you like, what you can, you can try to tell it, to describe it, you can imagine, try to imagine but in fact you can’t imagine the silence you discover when you enter the room, that silence is so heavy it weighs down on your ribcage and it’s as if you were at high altitude, like feeling the air pressure, and you’re suffocating, first because the light’s on in the middle of the room, that one bulb with its yellow light vibrating and you know that vibration well, you’ve been complaining along with the other guys from the start, you’ve been complaining about it with them and about everything, and some of your friends are here, they’re dead and you see that, you see it, how they struggled, you know that, they’re here, some of them are dressed, they had the time to get dressed, some of them, and to fight, not all of them, some are in their beds and the blanket’s even on them as if they didn’t see anything coming. But others, no. And on those guys, there are marks of blows, they smashed their heads in with rifle butts, that’s how Châtel died, from rifle butts, the front of his skull smashed in, and the time it took to slaughter them, all of them, the Kabyle smile, the thickness of the skin and the strange expression it gives to the face, like a mask put over the head, but the head is nothing, nothing, another mask and underneath there’s nothing, the thickness of the skin, the blood, opaque and brown, and the stench heavy and rancid already, revolting, we don’t stay long, it’s impossible to stay there and see that, guys you know, all of them, and also the place, the room, and also how they took the weapons from the little armory where they were stored.
We don’t think of Abdelmalik, not yet, but very soon we will, and it’s not as if we just had doubts about him, but this proof, his absence, he disappeared, he ran away, and somebody opened the gates—who besides him—someone killed the two guys on duty in the night—who besides him—the night patrol, and killed them from the inside, no one knows how he managed to kill both of them, all alone, how he did it, or maybe he killed Poiret first, up there in the tower, then opened the gate and they came in one after the other, and he had the keys. And to think how Abdelmalik could have done it, and watch the others do it, killing just like that the guys he’d lived with for months, telling yourself, is that possible, not to betray or change sides, but to slaughter guys you joked around with and you knew that for them, the war, the independence and the liberation of a country—they were more or less okay with it, but basically what they wanted mostly and above all was just to get it over with and go home.
How he could do that, I’ll never understand how it’s possible.
And how is it possible to do what we discovered later, me and Bernard, the two of us, again the two of us, when we had to open up the house and discover Fatiha’s body and Fatiha’s parents and the little baby, all dead, dead, so, how
how people can do that.
Because, it’s, to do what they did, I don’t think you can say it, I don’t think you can even imagine saying it, it’s so far from anything, to do that, and yet they did that, men, men did that, without pity, without anything human, men took an ax to kill, they mutilated the father, the arms, they ripped off his arms, and they opened the mother’s belly and—
No.
You can’t.
And I can’t get that out of my head and it’s no use gulping down all those pills the doctors give me, Février had said, I can take thousands of pills, and work my ass off on the farm for days on end and even think every evening about facing the night again, no, I keep turning it over and over in my head and I still can’t understand.
And I can’t understand either how they could try us later, Bernard and me. And how we had to hear not that maybe our being late had saved the life of everybody in the convoy and ours too, but how it was because of us that the fells had been able to operate. And out of all of us, Idir’s the one they got after the most, so he’d tell what he knew. He was suspected of knowing, and he said sometimes he suspected that Abdelmalik might betray us but he didn’t think he’d do it. He didn’t think so and yet Abdelmalik betrayed all of us, and he betrayed Idir as well, because twenty-three thousand francs a month, that’s not enough after awhile, it wasn’t enough to justify what he thought was treason to his people, and Idir, who had almost seen it coming, had refused, just as he refused, he said, to believe Abdelmalik was speaking seriously when he started saying that anyway whatever he did, he or someone else, they’d never accept him as a real Frenchman, that a real Frenchman couldn’t be a man like him, like them, not a dirty Arab, since basically Abdelmalik ended up thinking all of us were racists and it would never change; he ended up turning against us but Idir didn’t want to believe it, he didn’t want to believe what he could actually see, every day on the base, getting more and more true, because when they asked him if he, Idir, had doubts too, about himself, did he understand that, he hesitated before answering: he said that he was French and as long as he was French he had no reason to betray his own flag.
And afterward, for months, when you’re back home, Février had said, you find it bizarre that nobody asks you anything.
And me, like everybody else I read the paper and I saw in the paper that it was all over, Algeria wasn’t French anymore, the war was lost, but nobody in the café ever mentioned it. There are the old folks playing cards. There’s the warmth and the question of whether there’ll be enough animal feed this summer.
When I go to the café, people who haven’t seen me for a long time look at me and tell me I got thinner and I look like a man now.
Yeah, that’s right, I am a man.
They ask what Algeria was like, and sometimes, the ones who are interested say it’s a shame, all that for nothing. But still they’re glad it’s over and then. And then they go on to something else.
How are your parents and two more arms to take in the hay, that’ll be good for them.
And at that moment I would really like to see the faces of those old folks in the café, the old men over their cards and all the others behind the bar, if instead of answering with a smile and with yes, if I told them what we saw, what we did, how long it would be before the owner said,
Shut up, that’s enough.
How much would I have to tell them about the guys we let go and then shot in the head and kicked into the ravines to be eaten by the jackals and the dogs?
And finally, you tell yourself it’s as if you never left. As if Algeria never existed. I remember going through a few weeks like that, when I began to eat well again and work and even make plans, turn the page, everything’s the way it was before, Février had said, because old lady Fontenelle looked out from behind her curtain, because the hens kept pecking around on the path without paying attention to us, because of the smell of cow dung, the puddles of water, the plastic boots, the mud in the same old spots, and you hear yourself thinking that you’ll have to lay down some cement in front of the entrance to the goddamn barn one of these days, as if you’d never left.
And mostly, I did all I could not to think.
But the truth is, the main thing on my mind was Éliane and I did everything I could to avoid her.
And in the evenings—I mean, at night—when sleep fell on me, inevitably I lowered my guard, and then it would come back, I would tell myself,
Thursday, next Thursday I’ll go to the market,
Where I knew she sold eggs and vegetables, but not to tell her how she had hurt me.
I would wake up and that urge would be burning in me, the urge to plunk myself down in front of her and say,
What the hell do you think we did over there, what d’you think, tell me, while you were running away with, while you, with the other guy, you don’t know, I, meanwhile I saw guys of twenty or twenty-five and even once I think he must have been seventeen but a fellagha, whatever his age was, I remember his screams and how he was struggling when we put him on the helicopter and the racket the blades were making over the sea and he was screaming, he was begging, and I saw the terror in his eyes—you know what that’s like, do you? Did you already see that at your market, did you see terror in someone’s eyes? You have no idea, Éliane, you have no idea about anything, we put his feet in a block of cement and let it take, and when the cement was hard we brought him into the helicopter and I swear he would’ve sold out the whole world, he would have informed on the whole world and if you were in his shoes you would’ve informed on the whole world too, except he had courage, he’d resisted being beaten with a cane, you should have seen his back, so black, so black—
While she—if I’d told her that—she would’ve drawn herself up scandalized, she would have said to me,
But it’s over between us, it’s over, I’m married, get the hell out of here, leave me alone, you’re driving away customers with your stories,
And at the market the old women would have looked at me thinking who’s that nut,
What’s that nut talking about?
And Éliane would have looked everywhere, frightened, ashamed, for her husband, a relative, someone to come save her and free her from me, but I’d keep going,
If anyone resisted we threw him naked into the wash water of the trough, in the courtyard, and his body under the sun, and still more beatings with a cane, you don’t want to hear that, she’d lower her eyes and say,
Shut up, shut up, stop it, shut up,
And the old women would say,
That’s enough,
And the old guys would say,
That’s enough,
And then I would say he had stood up under all of that, but when we plunged his legs into the cement he realized right away and he would have given everybody’s name so as not to hear the blades of the helicopter and he did betray everybody—the cave where he and the others had been hiding, the materiel, the network, the recruiters, the escorts, the accomplices—and his hands and fingers hanging on so hard we had to cut them bloody and then hit, hit, and even then it seemed he couldn’t let go; but his body did let go and his scream disappeared into the blue air of the Mediterranean under the noise of the blades and the indifference of the sea.
And the afternoon hours, smoking while I watched the cows and the river, listening to the poplars rustling in the wind, waiting for what.
How many times did I nearly get up at night and go wake my parents, force them to listen to me, imagine them sitting up in their bed with a start, all frightened to see me suddenly appear in their room at any hour of the night.
And smile to them, lean over toward their deaf ears, and them half frightened to see me so close to them, in my pajamas, my eyes shining as if from fever, as if I were drunk, with the ticking of the clock to accompany me and them not quite out of their old peoples’ sleep, still half snoring, their eyes swollen with sleep, their bodies still slow and their blood so cold in their veins it prevents them from reacting, I imagined them, how many times did I nearly jump from my bed in the middle of the night to run into their room at the other end of the hall and storm in with gunfire in my voice to say that I had seen—me, their son—I had seen guys from here, local boys, white boys, do some funny things, and not just the wackos who’d fought in Indochina, while you thought I was preserving peace, well, me and my buddies on weekends we’d go out into the desert in jeeps and had races and sometimes, often, we’d hunt gazelles, and I would picture my parents’ faces when they heard me say we rode after gazelles in the desert and we’d yell, bare-chested, standing in the vehicles, and my urge to force them to hear, to listen to the very end, to this, the gazelles running up into the hills to escape, and running into the sun to blind us—we could see their silhouettes, the little clouds of dust and their tawny white coats, and their sharp horns and then.
And then. Then nothing.
Nothing.
I remember all of it, Février had said.
That was on the evening he’d come to Rabut’s place to spit it all out, because, even if he laughed while he said it, even if he told things in an almost casual tone, he’d finally confessed that his desire to see his buddies again was mostly his need to say everything that had been festering inside him and was becoming unbearable, too present, and he’d told himself that by talking with people like him he could, as he had said, root it out of himself.
But no.
He’d seen them all, one after the other.
The truth is that you don’t talk about the past, you have to keep going, start over, move forward, not stir things up. But Février had remained alone, hearing them repeat, again and again, like an incantation or a prayer, this little phrase,
Start over.
And in the end, no one had wanted to let him talk. So he went to Rabut’s, the one he knew the least, but the last one he’d been in close contact with.
For years Rabut’s been sleeping badly, he looks for answers and trembles when he imagines he’s found some.
With his buddies from the North Africa vets group they get together on Saturdays for banquets and they have fun. They think about their buddies, about the Algerians too, how it could all have happened, how sorry they are about all that.
That’s what he tells himself.
And tonight again he’ll wake up and remember and wonder if it’s because of the cold that he’s shaking, that his body is shaking, or if it’s because there’s this voice inside him that can’t keep quiet and whispers memories as if in a minefield or a field of ruins, words, questions, images—a compact, vague mass and all he can get out of it is fear and a stomachache.
He’s going to get up and take a pill because he’ll say he has heartburn. Or his throat’s too dry. Maybe a headache. And maybe make himself a glass of warm milk, with honey, to relax.
No.
Because the images from those old days keep coming in despite himself. And Rabut gets up as he has on so many nights, around three, sometimes four. And then he’ll remember Février telling him,
We were caught in a sort of funnel, spiraling downward so fast, so violently, that’s when we stopped calling them fells, that’s when we started saying fucking Arabs or sand niggers all the time, because by that time, as far as we were concerned, we had decided they weren’t men.
And like every time he’ll have to say to himself,
Wake up, Rabut, get up.
He’ll tell himself, better get up and be totally awake instead of lying in bed in this state, half asleep.
And that night, thinking about Bernard and Chefraoui, about Solange, and the stupidity of the past day, of that day.
Will I go over there tomorrow, to Bernard’s place, with the gendarmes?
Will I have the strength?
Will I—
I got up and took my bathrobe, Nicole was sleeping, I was careful not to wake her—but she’s used to hearing me shuffle along to the bathroom to relieve myself before sitting down in the kitchen and waiting for the hours to go by, over a cup of herb tea or something, anything to fill up the time—and that night, well, that was like the worst times, when even if I wake up and get out of bed, neither the anxiety nor the images go away.
And days like today. Bernard’s face and Chefraoui’s frightened look.
And then it all comes back.
And me, like a jerk, at sixty-two I got scared of the dark like a little kid, I had to turn on the light, straighten up, get up and walk out of the bedroom, splash some water on my face to refresh myself, yes, and refresh my memory, too, whereas all you want is for your memory to leave you the hell alone, finally, and let you sleep.
I thought about all that again, and I was saying to myself,
What has escaped me? What is it I didn’t understand? Something must have gone right by me, something I saw or lived through, I don’t know, something I didn’t understand.
That’s why instead of going into the kitchen and sitting down to stare into space or wait for the milk or the water to finally heat up in the little saucepan, I walked over to the front door, because there’s a closet in the hall.
There’s a whole bunch of things in there, odds and ends, that’s where we put cans and bottles of water and milk. But you have to climb a little, that’s what I did, I put my foot on the edge of the bottom shelf, grabbed the upper shelf and that way I could hoist myself up, stay standing and see all the way up, what was there in front of me, a pile of more or less useless stuff, all the way up, board games and checkers, old mismatched buttons in a plastic box, and at the back that shoebox and with it, still further behind it, almost inaccessible, the old Kodak in its case.
I grabbed the shoebox and walked to the living room. I put the box on the coffee table and turned on the lamp. I stayed like that for a while, hesitating before opening the box.
There’s no need for a bright light. The little lamp and its emerald green halo, too weak to light up the whole room, is enough.
Why am I doing this, what am I looking for?
And I also wondered how many years it had been since I looked at these old snapshots, years so far back I had trouble counting them.
And I was saying to myself,
Rabut, you’re sitting here over a shoebox, and you’re going to take those pictures out, why will you do that? To look for what? There’s nothing inside, no answer, I know every one of those pictures, I already know what I’m going to find.
I opened the box anyway, and in the Kraft envelopes I could feel the thickness of the stack of pictures, a particular set in each envelope, a format, dates written in pencil or ink on the back and sometimes names of towns that meant almost nothing to me anymore. I told myself that soon the dates and towns wouldn’t mean anything to anyone, nobody would know the stories behind those pictures or even what the names and places on the back meant.
And I had to smile: I was so naïve I even kept trolley tickets.
I opened the envelopes and all the photos fell onto the coffee table like playing cards, and for a second I couldn’t tell which ones I wanted to see or what I expected from them—because I’d given up trying to understand the words I’d heard from Février a long time ago.
I picked up the first pictures I had in front of me.
I leaned over the photos and looked at them one after the other. Slowly at first. Then faster and faster. Pausing over some of them and on the contrary passing quickly over the others, sometimes coming back to them, because of a detail, a question, a face. And of course I recognized people and places, streets, public squares, barracks, the base where I’d taken Bernard’s picture and little Fatiha on her scooter.
I looked a long time at the photo where she’s facing the camera and behind her you see the façade of her house. I looked at her face for a long time, her serious, almost grave look. And then, too, the fact that she’s dressed in black.
I remembered why for years I hadn’t been able to look at that face, its toughness, and also what I’d already told myself at the time: right away, very quickly, it had become almost, how can I put it—unbearable. Because all of a sudden her eyes were like an accusation. As if she were holding us responsible for her death, for everything, for the war. As if the fact she was dressed in those dark colors meant she was already dressed in mourning for the slaughter to come, as if she were in mourning for herself, in mourning for her own death.
I remember. Like a promise of suffering, whereas you’d like to see, in childhood, a promise of—it’s a dumb word, really—of happiness.
I also remember when Bernard had written me.
He’d been sent out there to the far end of the Aurès Mountains or into Greater Kabylia, that, too, I don’t know anymore, not too far from the desert, and I had spent a little time in jail because of that fight and I got that letter from him—I could have looked for it, it must have been there, somewhere, in an envelope. I didn’t look for it. I didn’t want to look for it. I hesitated, but then, no, what for? Why read the same words and see that blue ink from his Bic on a page from a school notebook again, where he was asking me to send him the pictures I’d taken of Fatiha?
I can still see myself reading that letter the first time, and how stupefied I was to find only that request about the pictures and nothing, not a word about himself, about that damned fight, nor about afterward, everything that happened afterward and that day after which we hadn’t spoken to each other again. The coldness, the detachment of his letter. As if we hardly knew each other. Just asking me for the pictures, and without saying anything about anything, his new posting, how he was, how I might be after all that, and say, I don’t know, something about what had happened.
No. Nothing. Just a polite request and his address.
I remember standing there stupefied because of the way he was acting; and that anger at him rising inside me. Then, after a few days of hesitation (because at first I was even determined not to send him the pictures at all, I’d written that to Nicole, not to ask her opinion but only to tell her mine, and then I had some doubts), I ended up giving in, finally I gave in and I can still see myself preparing the snapshots, sealing the envelope, I remember sending him copies of the prints, I’d just written a little note on a card hoping he got them, nothing more. I would have liked that indifference to be natural in me, too. But no. I had to force myself. Because I could have talked to him about everything, and at that moment I even would have felt like it. I could have told him about how afterward I hesitated to apologize to him, because I had said Reine’s name and I shouldn’t have. Because in fact the silence between us was precious, and should have been left unbroken.
I could also have told him about the tribunal.
We’d seen each other there once, very briefly, we just glanced at each other without saying anything, like ghosts, strangers passing each other, thinking they’ve seen that face somewhere before, when we were tried for our lateness, to determine how much was due to negligence, if complicity was involved, and so on.
He and Février wanting to be punished. They’d asked to be punished and came up with nothing better than to be sent off where they could really fight.
And the army was only too glad to comply: volunteers were rare.
I looked at the photos with their scalloped edges, and I ran the fleshy part of my fingers along the white frames that are slightly raised to emphasize the border of the picture, and at that moment I thought that in Algeria I had put the camera in front of my eyes only to prevent myself from seeing, or only to tell myself I was doing something—let’s say, useful. Maybe.
Afterward, I never took pictures again.
I stayed like that and didn’t really see the minutes passing, and soon more than an hour had gone by without my noticing it, because I’d been sitting there in front of the photos. And contrary to what I had thought when I told myself what’s the point of looking at them, what for, I know them all, I know that none of them will give me any answers, I know there is no answer, but. What if.
They said things.
They say things. What things. Behind the faces, first. Yes, you can see them well, those faces of young guys of twenty. All those guys I knew, today their names are fading away faster and faster and I mix them up, I take one for another.
The dates, behind the pictures, like codes that have become useless, all those dates diligently written with a pen, in a fine, elegant hand, as if I weren’t the one who’d written them but someone else, Nicole maybe when I got back, she’s the one who wanted to sort them, name them, I don’t know. Only, there were young men in the pictures and me, at three in the morning, I saw them smiling at me and joking, too, playing cards, posing bare-chested in their shorts, their sunglasses, I remember what we used to wear, actually I remember everything pretty well, us, what we used to say. And yet it’s something else, it’s smiles, kids playing, they’re there in front of me, and I find them so skinny, so delicate and carefree, and the friendship between them, too, they’re posing with their arms around each other’s necks, they’re laughing, clowning around, you’d think it was the schoolyard at recess.
The fear in your belly. But where is that fear? Not in the photos.
None of them show that.
So what is it, what is it that remains, exactly?
I was saying to myself, I’m sixty-two years old and here in this living room, at almost four in the morning, I’m looking at photos and my eyes, the tears, the lump in my throat, I’m holding on so I won’t collapse, as if the smiles and the youth of the guys in the pictures were like stabs of a knife, who knows who we were, what we did, you don’t know, I don’t know anymore. No matter how much I look at the pictures and see us again, the guys, photographed in Oran in nightclubs, at the Météore or elsewhere, in a bathing suit by the water, and me, with a kind of cape we’d made out of I don’t know what material; I’m carrying a kind of little wooden stretcher and on the other side another guy is holding it, in the middle, on the board, there’s a box no bigger than a shoebox, but I think it’s made of wood, and on it there’s that cross painted in black.
I stayed like that looking at the picture for a long time. Is that what death was? A box. Was that our game? Did we invent that? I recalled Father One Hundred, when we had that little ritual to celebrate the idea and the beginning of the countdown.
In one hundred days we leave.
In one hundred days we’re going home, it’s over, it was over, and the other pictures too, that slightly blurred picture of us in the open truck and under the hats and the sun and the sunglasses there are laughs, one of the guys is holding up a slate, with something written on it in chalk, Class of 1962, another’s wearing a sign saying “Going Home!” around his neck, hanging from a string; and I remember that my hands were shaking and why suddenly I needed to look at the photos faster and faster, as if I were short of breath, couldn’t breathe, and I looked at all of them once, then twice, then I wanted to see some of them one more time, but nothing, still nothing. I was filled with a great emptiness, a sensation of great emptiness, a great hollow. And yet I was trying to remember. And yet there were smells of burning straw and screams in my ear, the smell of dust in my nose, and trails in front of me, frightened looks but where was that, which photos, none of them, the photos were too intent on removing me from everything, like the things we brought back, those gypsum flowers so ridiculous when I think back, but we kept them and they’re here, somewhere, in the dining-room cabinet, next to the souvenirs from our vacations in Spain and the Balearic Islands.
And I remember the shame I felt when I came back from over there, when we had returned, one after the other, except for Bernard—at least he spared himself the humiliation of coming back here and doing what we did: keep quiet, show photos, yes, sun, beautiful landscapes, the sea, the traditional costumes, and vacation landscapes to keep a bit of sun in one’s head, but the war, no, no war, there wasn’t any war; and there’s no use looking at those photos again and looking for at least one, just one that could have told me,
Yes, that’s war, that’s what war looks like, like the pictures you see on TV or in the papers, not like those summer camps, or those people filling the streets of Oran either, and the stores open, the city traffic, and then, how come on the walls I photographed I didn’t find one single graffiti saying Algeria will win, not one wall painted, scraped, sandpapered, repainted, not one graffiti, not one weapon, nothing, nothing but that emptiness, and the sun, the blue sky, and the monstrosity of that beautiful weather.
The pictures of the sea.
All the guys on the deck smoking and looking at the horizon, hazy, distant—or on the contrary, in the night, the roaring of the engines and the wind, and how astonishing it is for a peasant to discover that a propeller can be out of the water, as if the ship were going to fly away and the crash it makes when it falls back, the ground so unstable and constantly shifting.
In some pictures there’s just a blur in the distance, so you can’t guess if it’s arrival or departure. The only thing I remember is that the first time I saw the sea it was in Marseilles, the weather was cold and gray, and I was about to board a ship for Algeria.