OMAR HAD READ SOMEWHERE that a language reveals the ambiguities of its history. He thought this might also be applicable to a country – his country in particular. And he grew more disconcerted when he remembered that his father, the Police Commissioner, had imposed the use of French upon his entire family, despite the fierce disapproval voiced by his grandfather, the horse-breeder. This bothered him because he knew that his father was not and had never been a collaborator during the war. He knew it was more ambiguous and more complex than that, but his father’s insistence on speaking refined French had always worried him, arousing his suspicions. All the more so since his father’s physique was startlingly Aryan. Omar’s fairly aristocratic family with its Turkish origins was not the only one to be visited by such doubts after the end of the colonial period. Its patriarch, Si Mustafa, was a wealthy landholder who owned a stud farm that was famed throughout the region – and beyond – for the quality of its Arab thoroughbreds, which routinely snapped up prizes at racecourses around the world. Thanks to his trade, which required him to accompany his horses or track down other rare breeds, Si Mustafa was a polyglot; but he only used French when speaking with the French, never with members of his own family, especially since his wife only spoke Berber and Arabic.
It was this linguistic and patriotic uncertainty that planted the seeds of doubt in Omar’s mind about his father’s role during the war, when he was Police Commissioner in Batna, the capital of the Aurès region and epicentre of the 1954 rebellion against French occupation. Omar had mulled over that idea about the ambiguities of language, constantly churning it around in his head, right up to this day at Algiers airport when we were boarding the flight to Constantine and I decided to put an end once and for all to his qualms over his past and relieve his guilty conscience. The flight lasted exactly an hour, during which time I would need to clear up all the confusion that had been eating away at him for the past thirty years.
Once we had sat down, he repeated, mechanically, almost casually, ‘A language is nothing but the sum of the ambiguities that its history has allowed to persist.’ It was like a recitative. A requiem. By dint of repeating it to himself, he had almost started to sing it.
‘I’ve never found out who said that. It’s genius!’ he said.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I replied, ‘but it’s so lucid and accurate.’
‘It’s incredible,’ he went on. ‘It’s true of all of us, our history, our country – which has often been colonised, duped, betrayed, brushed aside, invaded... It also neatly sums up my father. Watch your tongue though! He was never a collaborator, believe you me! You do believe me, don’t you? I know you loved him... He was a classy guy...’
‘It’s true,’ I said.
‘What’s true?’ he asked. ‘That history’s ambiguous or that you loved my father?’
‘History’s ambiguities, above all...’ I replied. ‘Proof of it lies in your unending suffering, the hard times you went through... You haven’t stopped ranting or beating yourself up about it since you got back from the bush... One might even go so far as to say that you take great pleasure in stirring up all that blood, all that mud, all that muck... Ambiguity! We’re all caught up in ambiguities, your father too! After all, the war is over now, Omar. It’s been over for a long time. And after it was over we messed everything up. We became just like the rest of them. All revolutions end in failure, but one still has to go through with them.’
The plane went through a patch of turbulence. It pitched to and fro, making Omar’s body and face seem like they too were tossing and turning. His face, already pale, grew even whiter. It wasn’t that he was afraid, but he had been thrown by what I had said to him in the heat of the moment: Your father too!
Omar fell silent. I felt relieved. We were silent for a long while. I felt the aircraft cut through the clouds, diving, then climbing back up, only to dip once again. It reminded me of the French army’s small reconnaissance jets during the resistance, which we called ‘Hornets’ because they were invariably yellow. Invariably deafening. The war was horrible.
The plane continued to nose up through the clouds.
Throughout this war, we had climbed the mountains of the Aurès region, amazed by how quickly we had gone from being model students at an elite secondary school, where we were among the few Algerians, to being soldiers of the resistance, just like that – an amazement we put down to fear or bewilderment. It was as if some days these mountains would burst out from under our feet, appearing round a corner, suddenly becoming visible through winter clouds or summer mists – which were much denser and disorienting – leaving us stunned and dumbfounded. The trees began to spin around us as we walked, climbed the rocks and crawled on the muddy, slippery ground until we were exhausted, and then went beyond exhaustion into total breakdown. We were so tired and frightened that we had the feeling we were walking beside our bone-weary bodies, as if our stiff limbs were flailing disjointedly around us.
We always had the feeling that everything was stirring, closing in and moving in a halo in that scorching heat, deadly for those of us who were unaccustomed to its intensity, as was this mayhem of raging elements that were in actual fact perfectly immobile and static. This pandemonium of rocks and vegetation helped us pass by undetected, allowing us to be in two places at once and watch our shadows crumble under the effects of the heat or the cold. Those were long and tedious marches, where we walked, dazed and bruised, between the prickly pears, the jujube trees, the olive trees, the Barbary figs, the charred remains of Jeeps, disembowelled tanks, the fragments of shrapnel and the mines buried just under the scree that was sullied for miles on end with napalm and the blood of dead, crushed and stunned-looking villagers. The remains of B52 bombers dotted our path as if they had always been a part of the landscape, part of the necessary conflagration typical of this sort of calamitous war... But above all, we were frightened of those yellow Hornets, whose unexpected appearance scared us half to death when they flew so close to the ground that we felt as if they might land right on our heads.
We carried our ancient, outdated rifles over our shoulders and, despite the crushing pain in our chests, we tried to exorcise that cloying fear, to speed up our victory – inevitable on some days and impossible on others. Our hope had grown contorted with waiting, tiredness and the weight of our oldfashioned rifles.
We certainly felt next to no euphoria at taking part in this war, since we had very quickly stopped believing all the nonsense with which our heads were crammed. We were afraid. Afraid of everything. Of our ruthless adversary. Of our equally ruthless leaders. Of the natural elements, hostile and deadly. Of the heat and the sun. Of the snow and the cold. Of lice and crabs. Of this war of blitzkriegs, traps and ambushes, tears and all sorts of bodily secretions. Guts trailing from the puny, flycovered bodies of our comrades and of French soldiers. Entrails vomited from mouths. Innards pouring out of the usual confines of the human body, teaching all of us who had not yet died where our limits were. Living in expectation of death.
War: that scurrilous feeling snaking through our nervous system – already on edge – oozing through our spinal cord, through tightening vessels, through the bones and vertebrae of our valiant comrades and our ruthless adversaries, stained with the ochre dust of a land that was both hospitable and unforgiving. Bits of brain splattering all around us, which we perceived through our tears and our streams of sweat, despite being blinded by these horrible calamities, by the excessively raging sun, the excessively blue sky, the excessively white snow, the excessively crystal-clear waters of the lakes, the excessive rain, the excessive heat waves and the excessive ice. Our list of grievances was interminable. Scraps of metal and bits of pointed lead hailed down on us like the rainstorms of our childhood. We were too young and when night fell some of us cried out for our mothers or vainly pleaded with our unyielding commanders. When the sun rose, so did our pride, and we became once more hungry for violence, for acts of military prowess, feats of arms, for giddying exploits of bravery and heroism. And always the feeling that the mountains were marching towards us! The exhilaration of vengeance? The cruelty of the slave that has rid himself of his bonds after a century and a half of silence, fear and servile compliance? Perhaps. But what of our old weapons? We had precious few of them, though when Henri Maillot, a communist pied noir, hijacked a vast cargo of sophisticated weaponry belonging to the French army and handed it over to a resistance unit, the Organisation’s worries were alleviated for a while.
THE COMMUNIST TRAITOR
HENRI MAILLOT HAS SEIZED
A CARGO OF WEAPONS
AND DELIVERED IT TO THE FELLAGHA
We were overwhelmed by these things. We retreated into the safety of blasphemy and defiance, always careful to forget all the redundant hyperbole forced down our throats during the daily raising of the flag designed to turn us into blithe, callous jingoists. What idiots! At night, we even lost faith in our compasses, whose needles were agitated by the magnetism of our flustered bodies. (Who knows? Perhaps Omar’s mother had a point after all when she deliberately set the wrong time on those fabled 19 Sicilian clocks – that had once allegedly belonged to her ancestor, a pirate – so as to then spend her time fixing them and thereby stave off boredom. No one had ever laid eyes on those clocks, since Nadia claimed she had hidden them in a safe-box underneath the foundations of the ancestral home.) The constant hail of lead and the intoxicating smell of gunpowder made us complacent, and we banished even the notion of danger.
We had meanwhile become adept at determining our grid coordinates on our maps using the compasses hanging from our necks while lying flat on the ground. We were our own guides and knew our terrain inch by inch, furrow by furrow, gorge by gorge. Our nostrils turned into sensitive seismographs that flew into a panic at the approach of the enemy. We were wretched, indecisive heroes. We watched the riverbeds run dry after bombing raids and olive trees spin root over branch. Barbary figs exploded in our faces, their colourful thorns slashing our cheeks. Our patience was otherworldly. The wait was long. Our bodies were starved; our pride wounded. We had had our fill of famines, fumigations and immurations.
In a letter to his brother, General Saint-Arnaud, who took Constantine in 1836, wrote: ‘When the Arabs held out against us, we fumigated and immured them in their caves like foxes...’ A trail of epidemics, looting, torture and rape. All this colonial gesturing had to stop. The war had made the unruly mountains inch towards us, as if drawn by our rancour and rage. The caves, which we surveyed until dizzy with vertigo, had been transformed into a vast underground network whose offshoots spread through the whole country. On some days, we were so exhausted and panic-stricken that we even began to believe that our hiking boots were marching alongside us. We then came to understand what a state of constant dread the French soldiers must have been in, inspiring in us alternate feelings of hatred and pity.
We had entered the war in the same manner that one enters a steamy hammam when it’s chilly outside. At night, during the few hours of rushed, intermittent sleep, I dreamt of the purplish breasts of sweaty women sliding between my legs; of Kamar, my young stepmother, barely a woman, and the debauched, incestuous, overexcited and utterly shameless twins that Omar and I had met some time before joining the resistance.
We had poisoned over-zealous guard dogs, cut the throats of caïds, shot some corrupt imams, iced some harkis who wavered between fear and arrogance. We had cried at the time of their execution, because we understood how hunger had clouded the judgement of these poor, destitute villagers, whose loyalties had been purchased by the French army. Having thus become bloody-minded harkis, they had failed to make any sense of the war, this sudden whirlwind heading towards them. Nor did they have any grasp of history.
We had crossed out the meaningless words, the speeches and demagogic rants with the tips of our bayonets. We were then taken to our leaders, who angered us with their smooth-talk, their unbelievably cruel punishments, their pointless chores, their attempted rapes, their little side-businesses, their conspiracies and the horrible way in which they settled their scores. We already knew that Abane had been murdered in a sordid manner by Boussouf on the orders, and in the presence, of Krim Belkacem. We knew who had massacred the 300 villagers at Mellouza. We knew about all the revolting atrocities that had been committed against the communist rebels at the behest of the Organisation and with its blessing... We quickly learnt that war was an inferno traversed by rivers of blood and vomit. Our entrails exploded in our hands, turned blue by the stings of mischievous flies.
Yet all these resistance fighters who carried out atrocities had the right to be wrong, to make mistakes and to commit crimes, because this Algerian war had subjugated them, driven them stark raving mad – to the point where they had given themselves over entirely to this revolution without heed to either thought or reflection. They had sacrificed themselves, were ready to die; abandoning their wives and children and throwing themselves into this hellish fire that was the war – that ferocious war that France waged in such a merciless, inhumane and pernicious way.
The colonial newspapers kept printing bloody headlines, as if to reassure the public of their successes:
200 FELLAGHA NEUTRALISED
IN THE AURÈS MOUNTAINS
Decked out in all their ribbons and medals, the French army commanders refused to come to terms with reality. We felt the phosphorescence as our bones de-calcified under our skin and we became impregnated with the pungent smell of gunpowder, the nauseous stench of napalm, the fumes of incendiary bombs and the stink of rancid wool. Those who had dismissed our uprising at the start began to have second thoughts: they began to pass edicts about anything that came to their minds: establishing military tribunals, sending reinforcements of men and weapons, handing out death sentences to the likes of Fernand Yveton, Ahmed Zabana and Mohammed Ferradj (fifty rebel fighters were guillotined during the seven-year conflict). Their murderous ‘Operations’ bore the names of precious stones – Topaz, Amber, Opal, Ruby, Sapphire, Emerald – or of chesty actresses – Brigitte Bardot, Gina Lollobrigida. They had all lost their minds.
I was so utterly horrified that I no longer had any erotic dreams. Kamar, my young stepmother, as well as the twins, Mounia and Dounia, were henceforth cast from my mind because they loved no one. As soon as I joined the resistance in my own right, one of the twins – how could you tell them apart when they were so frustratingly identical? – managed to send me a letter in which she declared her affections for me. I was taken aback, but I replied. A more-or-less regular correspondence was thus established between us. Dounia – or was it Mounia? – began to receive a flood of my clumsy letters. Letters I wrote to mitigate the effects of the frightening days and the terrifying nights. Letters I wrote to forget the incest I had committed with Kamar, my stepmother.
I took the opportunity to tell her about the bush, describing it as a wonderful place, in order to avoid saying that the real situation was anything but rosy. I was afraid of disappointing her, of dragging her into those boring, ignoble days that might impede her from living out her real life with a sense of adventure and spontaneity.
To make her think I was a hero, I therefore subjected her to an endless stream of my illegible, naïve letters, sending them whenever we came to a halt in our marches. I avoided talking about Omar purely out of jealousy, however much I tried to forget my own wounded pride. I never stopped rearranging the events I had lived through, bringing a tight, bolstered and unusual order to my experiences, welding one detail to another so as to leave no room for doubt. Above all, I was wary of falling into complacency, which would have spoilt my cool, detached way of calling things into question: all out of fear that she – Dounia or Mounia? – might discover that her lover had committed incest and had further compromised himself by his idiotic heroism.
Her replies were always concise, as if her brevity and restraint were her way of reproaching my incontinent rambling, which in actual fact I used to piece together the fragments of my past, as well as that of Omar – whom I idolised – carefully handling the fragile elements of memory in order to give myself, above all, a bit of courage. I nevertheless continued sending her these overexcited missives, despite her reticence, which I surmised through the casual, negligent tone of her replies. She only ever reminisced about the debauched times we’d had together in the company of her identical twin and Omar, who never found out about our secret little correspondence. (She only ever talked about sex, or desire, as well as the plans we could put into practice after the end of the war – ‘Do you promise?’) I’d never had the courage to tell Omar the truth about this secret correspondence right up to the moment we had boarded this latest flight together from Algiers to Constantine.
Between letters to Mounia – or Dounia – we continued to charge through the Barbary figs, strawberry trees and prickly cactuses set aflame by napalm, the sun and the splatter of fresh blood that coagulated in the blink of an eye. We held our breath so as to trap the ghosts of our ancestors that had crumbled into dust after turning to stone in the quagmire of the war. Another matter I kept from Dounia – or Mounia – in those letters was the inevitable settling of scores caused by the pride of some of our commanders. They were so thirsty for power and riches that they often naïvely fell foul of traps laid by the French. The Great Kabylia bush witnessed the murder of a great number of intellectuals as well as the massacre of hundreds of villagers suspected of collaborating with the enemy, actions carried out by Colonel Amirouche, a skilful military strategist, whose tenacity and courage were exemplary, but who fell victim to the psychological tactics employed by the French army’s secret services, who called this conspiracy the ‘Bleuite’. It was this very same Amirouche who had sent dozens of intellectuals and women towards the border with Tunisia in order to spare them, once the French bombing campaigns became unbearable!
We were on the edge, marching on while dwelling on our anger. We came out of nowhere, showering strangers with buckshot and explosive or hollow-point bullets before disappearing once again, leaving the enemy stunned and dazed. We pushed past our limits, crawling on the ground without any respite until the horizon began to buckle and turn into a web of mirages, which we would one day have the time to decipher. We clambered up mountain ridges to the rhythm of the swarms of the cactus flies buzzing around between us and the graves of those we had murdered.
The enemy soldiers spared from our spiteful vengeance gave us nightmares. We often dozed in mountain huts. We would wake with a start to find ourselves splashing about in the blood of our comrades, whom we buried with little ceremony before the vultures could get to them, so that their wounds would not fill with grass and soil teeming with worms. Afterwards, there was little we could do except play childish pranks on one another, affording us some relief from the usual pattern of violence, acrimony, resentment and deception. Sometimes, a furious blue flash whirled mercilessly through our minds. Doubt gnawed away at us. We felt weighed down by the empathy we felt for one another, as well as for our enemies. Omar’s photo from the bush never left my side. Even though its quality was rather mediocre, it was my amulet, my lucky charm. My burden too!
And so we kept running and sliding down the slopes, while our dying comrades inhaled their last puffs of kif hashish, sucking it in until their final breath, before we buried them in miserable shrouds and scattered some quicklime over them. The days began to melt into one another and the nights overlapped, until we could no longer tell the difference between sunrise and flaming dusk, between sunset and the swell of emotions that unleashed our excitability and arrogance, enabling us to avoid the easy path cut by our ancestors at the beginning of time, when they too had taken up arms against their foreign aggressors and lost their wars...
90 FELLAGHA KILLED
IN THE GREAT KABYLIA
DURING
OPERATION GINA LOLLOBRIGIDA
...and who one after the other, distraught in the face of their defeats, had cornered themselves into dissatisfaction, into petty feuds, into compromises and betrayals, leaving the triumphant outsiders to wield the rights of death and citizenship over them, thereby clearing a path punctuated by fumigations and immurations, tactics employed to wipe out entire tribes. Omar was obsessed with General Saint-Arnaud’s letters, which narrated all the genocides he had committed in such a cool, detached manner, all the while displaying such sentimentality when it came to the education of Adolph, his little brother, or to the death of Delphine, his little niece. Those letters were a chronicle of bloodbaths, massacres, burnt crops and confiscated farms.
The only thing left to us was to play tricks on reality, to outwit the enemy’s maps, since we had inherited nothing from our ancestors: no tactics, no eye-witness accounts, no military stratagems; nothing at all that might have helped us bring their dreams of vengeance to fruition. Were we ungrateful towards these ancestors? No doubt. We were too intransigent, too clearsighted about the situation we’d found ourselves in. We were all too aware of past uprisings, rebellions and insubordinations, all of which had been etched on our memories thanks to Mr Baudier, who taught us French, Latin and Greek, as well as to Mr Ben Ashour, who taught us Arabic poetry; all of this didn’t satisfy us. We were saddened by how many times our ancestors had been beaten. Were we certain of our destiny? Not really. We were so often betrayed by our compasses, our unspeakable fear and the palpitations of our hearts, which were gripped by uncertainty – why had the resistance slaughtered Mellouza’s 300 inhabitants in May 1957? Why had Colonel Amirouche executed so many illustrious intellectuals? Why had Boussouf, the head of the Organisation’s secret services, in cahoots with Krim Belkacem, had his brother-in-arms Abbane strangled? Why? ‘Because it was the revolution,’ Omar would tell himself over and over during the war. I, on the other hand, would say, ‘Because they were misled by the conspiracies hatched by the French army’s intelligence services.’ But that wasn’t the whole story! I know... I know!
Omar, meanwhile, was talking about his father and his younger brother, insisting on their complete and total innocence, but I wasn’t listening to him. I was lost in the memories of that shameful, scabrous war.
The plane had now reached its cruising speed.