Constantine, Algeria, October 1954
A tremor shook the soaring rock and its crowning city. A shudder as familiar to Constantine and its dwellers as the searing Sirocco wind that, in season, blew howling sand from the Sahara desert, hundreds of miles south.
Then, as abruptly as it started, the quake rumbled away and the city settled in its limestone bed as if nothing had happened. Fooling no one.
Everyone knew—the Berber boy herding his goats in the searing North African sun, the Muezzin in the Kasbah, calling the day’s prayers, the Synagogue’s Cantor striking his mournful chants and, certainly, ten-year-old Nanna riding in the back seat of the family car—everyone knew that “événements” had been set in motion.
Events that would revive Constantine’s eons-old tradition of seesawing between peace and war, abundance and devastation.
Numidians. Carthaginians. Romans. Vandals. Arab and Berber dynasties. All had ruled her. But she endured and, one hundred and sixteen years after the French wrestled her from the Turks, Constantine still commanded the vast western plain, the chasm of the Rhumel River, and the four eastern bridges that anchored her to the land across the gorges.
The charcoal-gray Citroen crossed the Sidi Rached Bridge, driving Nanna and her family from their home in Sidi Mabrouk into the city.
“Son of a bitch.” Nanna’s frustrated father slowed the car to match the pace of a caravan of donkeys carrying bundles of hides to leather artisans in the Kasbah’s souks. These Algerian beasts, the size of large dogs, plodded under the relentless sun. They dotted their passage with pungent dung—heedless of the insistent buzzing of flies and blasts of klaxons from the vehicles behind.
The blaring horns and raucous braying of a reluctant ass filled the shimmering air, spilled into the gorges below, and bounced in rich echoes against their opposite walls, dislodging flocks of crows from the crags and grottos pocking the gray cliffs. The black birds swooped in muddled formations up and down the chasm—churning omens of doom that raised prickles of dread on Nanna’s forearms.
Ever since Algeria had become the French province Nanna’s French forefathers had helped settle, propelling it into the twentieth century, restiveness on the part of some native Muslims seeking independence from France had become a ripening abscess. In fact, on the very day the French toasted the end of World War II on Constantine’s café terraces and danced in her streets, Muslims massacred European settlers in Sétif, fifty miles east of the rock and its city. As expected, the French army quelled the rebellion, but the unrest continued to flare on and off.
Now, on the eve of All Saints Day, 1954, the abscess was ready to burst.