I WAS PERFECTLY AWARE that Uncle Kamal, Omar’s father, had never been a collaborator. Not really. Yet when I ventured to say so, his son, who was brimming with spite, asked, ‘What does that mean “not really”? Was he or wasn’t he? In these circumstances, there can be one answer. And one only!’ At which point I said, ‘He was tossed about by the winds of history. He should have taken a stronger stance, and turned down the Organisation when they asked him to remain in his post and provide them with intelligence, weapons and men. He should have resigned and gone into the opposition. Just like you did when you were assigned that assassination at the Stade de Colombes, when they gave you that funny alias ‘Joe’! Your father thought that being caught between two stools would be easier! And that’s where he made a mess of it... And on top of that, where did all that money come from that he spent freely on himself and on you and Nadia? It certainly didn’t come from your grandfather, did it? After all, he was despoiled and went bankrupt at the beginning of the war. He was a true rebel... Do you remember the wardrobes you flung open in front of our hungry eyes? We were all green with envy. I certainly was, having been deprived of pretty much everything by that immensely rich bastard father of mine, who refused to spend any money on me, not because he was a miser, but because he was cruel and mean-spirited. So try and get some closure and leave me in peace. Please keep quiet... Please.’
He fell silent.
I asked myself, ‘Why is he so tormented? What did his father’s own personal tragedy matter in comparison to the assassination of Abbane Ramdane by certain members of the Organisation, and to the murder of Ben Mhidi by the French army and that swine Bigeard? Or compared to the execution of Fernand Yveton, whose executioner – Fernand Meyssonnier, also known as ‘Mr Algiers’ – said after the deed, ‘He was exemplary as a condemned man. And I mean exemplary. Not like the others that shat themselves. Pathetic! My second customer, Ferradj Mohammed, had screamed and spat and put up a struggle at the guillotine. As for Fernand Yveton, now that was classy...’ Omar and I often thought about those other martyrs, who’d been overcome with fear when they’d come face to face with that horrible machine. We wanted to know who they were... We admired them more than the Zabanas, the Talebs, the Yvetons. Classy! What the...?
The Ferradj case was very unusual. He’d only joined the resistance after having been a harki, when he’d committed atrocities against the local population. One day, he killed a French soldier over a trifle. Afraid of the French army’s reprisals, he sought sanctuary with the resistance. Ferradj had no beliefs. That’s why he didn’t have the courage to face the guillotine. Omar and I didn’t like heroes all that much, which is why we had a soft spot for him. Why? Because fear is so human! And there you have it, this country’s painful history sticks in my throat – all thanks to Omar, his complaints, his unhappiness, his epic benders, those fucking teenage years when he and I had done something which we never mentioned ever again after he left to join the resistance. That incredible story of the twins... Nymphos? Maybe, but that’s precisely why we loved them, because they were free spirits.
It was true that Uncle Kamal had been unjustly branded a collaborator by one of his underlings! It was also true that Uncle Kamal had been very handsome.
1957, the year of that dramatic attack on the Stade de Colombes, had also witnessed the wholesale liquidation of communist elements within the Organisation, among them the group commanded by Master Amrani in the Aurès, which numbered over three hundred (Muslim, Jewish, Christian, atheist) communist fighters. Their throats were slit in the space of a single night. Among the fallen were Professor Cognot, a lung specialist at the hospital in Constantine, and Ahmed Inal, the first Algerian to qualify as a French teacher and also the national 800 metres champion. It’s also true that Salim, Omar’s younger brother, had enlisted with the OAS, not out of conviction, but so as to get invited to the Saturday night dances. To increase his chances of laying colonial girls. The cunt. In the end, he got what was coming to him. He had truly deserved his death. He had gone on Arab-killing sprees through the centre of Batna armed with a machine gun, parading his racism in full view. He thought he was a tough guy, with his cherub-like looks, the pied noir accent he had quickly learnt to parrot, his nice suits, his sports cars and the beautiful women driven wild by sex, champagne and blood. Blood!
Even worse, I later learnt that Salim had been a divisional head of the OAS! He was neither a fanatic nor politically motivated. He wanted women to like him, particularly settlers’ daughters. He didn’t need to slaughter dozens of Algerians to achieve that! He had his good looks and his father was a Police Commissioner. The European girls were already crazy about him. He’d overdone it. He was assassinated the day after Independence, amid all the celebrations. Where? How? By whom? No one ever knew. Omar spent long months making the necessary enquiries and had come to the conclusion that Salim had either been murdered out of jealousy or by accident. That he’d never belonged to the OAS. That he was innocent. He was distraught at being unable to mourn his brother properly because there was no corpse. He wove a web of paranoia and cocooned himself inside it. He of all people, an officer in the resistance, had failed miserably... Uncle Kamal didn’t deserve all the humiliation and dishonour and the widespread opprobrium that ultimately made him lose his mind, and wander, silent and dishevelled, around the very town where he had been the Police Commissioner only a few months earlier.
I was the only person who still listened to Omar. I helped him attain a certain level of clarity. I wanted to relieve him of the guilt he had been mired in since 1 November 1954, the day the war had begun. What a waste of time! It invariably wound up with him getting angry at me and not speaking to me for months, then coming back to apologise, crestfallen and unhappy, suffering from a profound sense of hurt, even though he was now aware of the truth. He was also conscious of how he was deceiving himself and would eventually get back in touch with me. There was a childhood complicity between us. We had spent fantastic summers together on his grandfather’s farms and on the beach. There had been the brothels of Constantine. There had been the twins. Above all the twins! Those girls had by now become an unspoken taboo between us, but I was determined sooner or later to break the silence. I bided my time. This trip between Algiers and Constantine would be decisive in that respect as well!
Those unspeakable summers on the Eastern Algerian plateaus, not far from Constantine, at harvest time, when horses were broken in and furious stallions made to copulate, when hectares of wheat fields were strewn with the stark red stains of Barbary figs. Those Barbary figs had been a staple part of our summer holidays, their different shades – ranging from green to brown and red – with that trademark stiffness that made them seem so much more violent to us, so much more real. A raw, rugged quality that brought to mind the paintings of Marcel Gromaire and Fernand Léger... To us, the Barbary figs were symbolic guardians that had always kept watch over our country. Despite all the disasters and the tragedies, despite the genocide!
It was because of this idyllic past – undoubtedly exaggerated by nostalgia and my imagination – that I had remained so jealously affectionate towards Omar, who was after all only a cousin by marriage. He was only a nephew of my aunt, who had married my uncle Hocine, a perverse, obese idiot, whom I hated for his cruelty. The real reason for my friendship with Omar, apart from his tragic destiny, was the fabulous wardrobe whose contents he proudly exhibited each summer. When we were teenagers, he would often lend me his suits so we could go to Azefoun – or Bougie or Bône or Philippeville or Djidjelli or Collo or La Calle – and flirt with the settlers’ daughters who organised dances on the beaches.
There were also the twins, and the mad orgies we had with them. And Mozart, my tame hedgehog, who I had taught to whistle Bach sonatas and had incomprehensibly turned into a music-lover. There was Nana, my cat. There were bottles of whisky and wine from Mascara. There were memorable pissups and memories of our talented classmates at secondary school. There was the bachelor lifestyle we’d chosen when we were teenagers and that continued to bind us. Why? It was all a pretext for Omar to come and visit me in that house of mine in Constantine, which he’d personally restored so beautifully.
There lay the Gordian knot of our complex, muddled, almost amorous relationship. It was certainly true that he’d gone into the bush and joined the resistance right after secondary school, going against his father’s wishes without a second thought. Two years older than me, Omar had become a hero in my eyes, and at the age of eighteen I followed in his footsteps and enlisted.
There was something else going on between us, a secret of sorts. Something that we had done together when we were teenagers, but never since brought up.
Something strange.
Inappropriate.
A few weeks after I joined the resistance, Omar had sent me a terse little note imbued with irony: ‘I hope you haven’t got too many blisters and that you’re getting on well with the crabs. Welcome to the Aurès.’ That was before he sent that photograph.
On the plane the mood was calm. Some people were queuing up for the toilets. I looked at my watch. We had been airborne for twenty minutes.
Omar looked at me distractedly. He was pretending to doze. I knew he was wide-awake. We were each carrying on our conversation deep down inside us. I adored this man, this cousin of mine, this communist, this piss-head, this architect who had once worked for Oscar Niemeyer, the great Brazilian architect and project manager, who was still alive at the age of 101, and whom Omar admired for his design of Constantine University, a work of genius. Omar went to Rio de Janeiro every year to pay his respects to his idol. He called it his ‘Brazilian pilgrimage’.
But I too had had my share of unhappiness. I lost my paternal grandfather when I was a child. He perished in a fire when his grocery store burnt down during the Mawlid festivities, a fire started by some kid who’d set off a firecracker for fun. My grandfather lost his life and I lost my child-like tenderness, since I had adored my grandfather and hated my father.
Mohammed, my grandfather, was tiny and light-skinned, with blue eyes and a bushy red moustache. He was incredibly frightened of his wife, who was rather ugly, nagging, malicious and obese, just like her son, Uncle Hocine, who was her favourite, and whom she daily force-fed a variety of snacks and desserts. She found her husband too soft-spoken and gentle, almost effeminate. ‘He’s fragile,’ she would say. This was neither praise nor criticism; it was much worse. It was mockery.
My grandfather bore a striking resemblance to Si Mustafa, Omar’s grandfather. They were the same height. Had the same complexion. The same eyes. The same moustache. And the same kindness that sprang from nowhere and which both men freely lavished on others. Despite the class differences between them, they spent a lot of time together, talking, discussing politics, lending each other books. But my grandfather was just a well-off merchant, whereas Omar’s grandfather was actually wealthy. He was the one who filled Omar’s wardrobes with such wonderful clothes, designer shirts and shoes that were certainly Italian and sometimes even handmade in Milan, Turin or Venice. I didn’t know about that until much later. That is to say until this decisive trip we were taking, during which time we were getting everything off our chests. All in the space of a single hour.
Despite their different backgrounds, the two men got on and respected one another. When my grandfather’s son, my uncle Hocine, married Ouarda, Si Mustafa’s daughter, there was no question of a dowry. Just a single, symbolic franc! This marriage strengthened their friendship and when my grandfather died in the fire, his friend never quite recovered from the loss. He subconsciously considered me an orphan from that point on, perhaps because he knew how unusually profound a love I had cherished for my grandfather, and Si Mustafa therefore treated me like one of his own grandchildren, a situation I accepted. Every summer, he would insist on inviting me to his stud farms and holiday homes, which were scattered all over eastern Algeria, between Azefoun and Djidjelli, by way of Bône, Bougie and Philippeville.
That was how I became Omar’s best friend, thanks to his grandfather.
It was the beginning of a great friendship, which had its fair share of difficulties, arguments, rows and reconciliations, and had a hand in shaping my own destiny, because I in truth modelled my own life on Omar’s and imitated each step I took in life on his. To this day I am convinced that I would never have joined the resistance in July 1959 had it not been for him. He’d enlisted two years earlier, leaving the Organisation in France to return to Algeria and become a resistance fighter in Chaabet Lakhra, one of the most remote parts of the Aurès mountains.
Before he left France, Omar was assigned a very difficult mission as a test. They had ordered him to kill a big-shot Algerian collaborator – the bashagha Ali Chekkal, a ruthless, crooked old man – during the French Cup final on 26 May 1957 in which FC Toulouse was playing Angers SCO at the Stade de Colombes. The bashagha was seated next to René Coty, the French President.
Omar – who had been saddled with the alias of ‘Joe’ by the resistance – accepted the mission, but the orders were countermanded at the last minute, by which point the Organisation had already discussed the plan with him and even given him a ticket for the VIP stand. So he didn’t go through with it. They had only wanted to put him to the test; to size up his determination and resolve. He felt terribly let down and it had haunted him ever since. He kept up with the news about the executioner after the latter’s arrest. The little plumber. He knew everything about him. When Independence came, Omar was finally able to meet him, and he introduced me to him. After he had killed the bashagha and been arrested, this militant, whose name was Mohammed Ben Sadok, had commanded the French policemen’s respect.
He had satisfied his pride. His path and destiny resembled that of Fernand Yveton – the difference of course being that Yveton was executed and Mohammed Ben Sadok was pardoned, thanks to the efforts of a committee of French intellectuals, as well as a series of public demonstrations of support. Caught red-handed, Ben Sadok had decided that he wouldn’t allow his torturers to get away with all their condescending and racist abuse. (At the time, ‘fig tree’ was the racist slur for Algerians, though for us, Barbary figs were a symbol of resistance.) He needed to be calmer than them. Look them in the eye. Pride is a shield. He had history on his side. The Police Commissioner in Colombes wasn’t really up to the task, and after numerous failed attempts at prosecution, he progressively lost his arrogance, his cheeky humour and even his broken, suburban French. The plumber had mounted quite a simple defence: he refused to concede even a single inch.
In the disorganised, dusty police station, the balance of power was decidedly uneven, since the terrorist’s calm demeanour was clearly nerve-shattering for everyone around him, save for the Commissioner. He was lolling in his worn imitationleather armchair, his face made even paler by the insufficient light cast by the room’s single light bulb. There was also a typist on the other side of the room, who was tasked with writing up the report; he felt every click of the keys shiver down his back as he tried to picture the outdated typewriter which – due to the metallic sound the carriage made each time a letter was printed and the interference the keyboard produced like a stifled cough – just had to be an old Remington.
Behind him stood the policemen, their arms crossed against their Judoka chests, stuck in their usual routine of petty thefts, ridiculous murders, car accidents, handbag thefts, acts of vandalism and all manner of other offences – and here they were, confronted with a headline-grabbing assassination that had shaken the whole of France and demonstrated the Organisation’s power. The policemen kept silent when faced with the terrorist’s reasoned argument, which he had outlined both calmly and concisely when they asked him to explain his actions. Arguments he repeated monotonously throughout the night without once missing a beat, impressing the policemen to the point where no one dared talk down to him, and making the Commissioner wary of meeting the man’s steady, almost contemptuous gaze.
The prisoner was more than ready to sketch out all the steps that had led him to his act in big dark red strokes, painting them a picture of the disaster that involved the execution of a traitor (the reason he had been specifically targeted), and a reconstruction of the whole trajectory that took many secondary details into account: the whole gamut and constellation of gestures and movements and the layout of the public places he had walked through, where he had left fingerprints and the weapon he had used, as well as a whole arsenal of minute details which he did not really care to remember, but outlined regardless.
The policemen stood still, their eyelids already blue with rising tension and astonishment they were trying to rein in – to say nothing of the panic that was throbbing in their nerves and temples. They could not believe their eyes: they were faced with a real political bombshell. They were frightened by the culprit’s audacity and the calm with which he had fired his bullet, without even taking the gun out of his pocket, without even taking his aim, almost randomly, because the bashagha had walked straight into him as he was being escorted out of the stadium for security reasons, well before the end of the match.
FC TOULOUSE: 6
SCO ANGERS: 3
He had fired his miniature revolver almost casually through the cloth of his China-blue jacket and hit the bull’s eye from a distance of thirteen yards. The policemen were suddenly thrust onto the stage of history when they had just been getting ready to go home and have a quiet dinner with the family and settle down to watch the latest detective thriller on television. Stunned by the magnitude of the event that had just occurred, they had lost all concept of time, forgetting to call their wives and girlfriends to warn them that they wouldn’t be coming home that night.
He, on the other hand, gathered his thoughts and set about eliminating this sterile profusion of details and incidents that seemed to fascinate the policemen so much. He was staring so fixedly at the space in front of him that he felt dizzy. He wasn’t thinking about anything, not even of Messaouda, his mother, who would certainly refuse to attend the trial. He was relieved that so many of the streets, cities and continents he had travelled through would now be devoted to the Organisation, thanks in part to the success of his mission. He was amazingly steadfast in refusing to be misled by the policemen’s ambiguous questions: What does this postcard mean with the picture of an Etruscan statuette on it, this champions’ trophy with winged feet, these blueprints of refineries in Rouen, Le Havre and Mourepiane (later the targets of dramatic attacks)?
He limited himself to repeating the same, clear arguments, telling them that they were wasting their time, that they had only to open his wallet and pull out that cherished blue postcard, whose gelatinous film was likely to flake off in the policemen’s big hairy hands, almost angry at the attention they paid to the card and their attempts to establish some link with the blueprint of the refinery in Rouen. ‘They’re so dim-witted and clumsy’, he thought to himself, laughing at how they held the postcard and examined it as if it concealed some indecipherable hieroglyphs, all the more so since – as he would later find out – the Etruscans had a written language that hadn’t yet been decoded, as if it were booby-trapped, as if it were magical.
He had an irrepressible desire to sleep and gather his thoughts, leaving the policemen to their far-fetched assumptions, their illogical reasoning, their idle chatter, their futile arguments and the limits of their little brains, which had grown used to their petty routine, their small-time delinquents and all the small, trivial affairs of a suburban police station.
As it happens, the police chief never stopped phoning his officers up to remind them that he wanted to know all the details, ramifications, names of accomplices, the plans, the sort of organisation, its command structure, its support mechanisms, the places of rendezvous, the names of the big leaders as well as those of simple underlings, the weapons caches, the contacts, their supply sources, the location of clandestine printing presses and of hide-outs, and information on some of their French accomplices and the Organisation’s sympathisers, who were considered a bunch of criminals. He demanded to know their names, their addresses, and the secret codes the members of this network used to communicate with one another. He wanted the man who had murdered the bashagha to furnish them with all imaginable, possible details, but he didn’t want them to lay a finger on him, let alone torture or humiliate him. He demanded a full and detailed report, complete with forecast statistics, homothetic curves, probability studies, solid hypotheses and robust conclusions.
The Police Commissioner was shouting down the telephone, saying he didn’t want to hear of any blunders, excessive zeal or errors, because, he yelled, the whole world would hear about it – as would journalists from every country, because this business was serious enough as it was and he didn’t want it to blow up in his face, because, you never know, with these abrupt sea-changes in politics – all the more so since there was a ministerial crisis going on at the moment – he didn’t want someone to make him take the fall. ‘After all, I am the one who has to deal with all the hearings, the rogatory commissions, the loud-mouth newspapers, the solidarity meetings, the motions signed by those bloody intellectuals, the popular demonstrations, the hunger strikes, all the jeering at the UN, the interventions by the International Red Cross and Red Crescent committees, and so on.’
A FRIEND OF FRANCE, THE
BASHAGHA ALI CHEKKAL, KILLED
AT THE STADE DE COLOMBES DURING
THE FRENCH CUP FINAL
FC TOULOUSE: 6
SCO ANGERS: 3
‘I know the score, boys,’ said the old Commissioner. ‘You’re going to do a good job for me within the seven days of custody. A week flies by. You better believe it! After that the prisoner will be transferred to the custody of the prosecutor and we can’t rely on the judge assigned to the case, because a whole plethora of lawyers have offered their services to the man. So get a move on! But restrain yourselves. I want him in one piece. A word of advice: pay close attention to the subway map, the blueprints of the refinery in Rouen, the reproduction of the Etruscan or Thracian or Byzantine or whatever fucking civilization that statuette belongs to... And find me that ‘Joe’ who was in touch with him...’
At the end of the war, Omar and I asked ourselves just how it was that the same Organisation that had brought the French army to its knees, and had had the audacity and the means to take the war home to the French, could then go on to commit such terrible crimes. The three hundred villagers slaughtered at Mellouza. And the murder of Abbane Ramdane, who had been strangled by one of the most respected leaders of the resistance with the complicity of Krim Belkacem, who had hidden in the adjacent room during the deed like a coward. Belkacem was no doubt convinced he was doing the right thing. Saving the revolution. But the irony of history is that he himself was later strangled in a hotel room in Frankfurt a few years after Independence! Because history never forgets. It only seems to. Then there was the murder of Master Amrani’s Muslim, Christian and Jewish communist group in the Aurès (two or three hundred of them) – formidable fighters who had had their throats slit in a single night with the Organisation’s tacit approval. And many more... There had been so many fratricidal wars, so much frightening settling of scores. How had that come to pass? Why? This war: this cancer!
The Algerian terrorist continued to maintain that he’d had no contact with the Organisation, that he was altogether incapable of taking part in a group or movement since he was – as he mischievously admitted – too much of an individualist. He didn’t want to get Messaouda, his mother, mixed up in this business, which was why he hadn’t thought it worthwhile to tell them about the postcard, even though he had bought it with the intention of sending it to her to mark this important day; he had later changed his mind on the off-chance the athlete’s penis might have offended his mother’s sensibilities.
Moreover, hadn’t Pleimelding, despite being Toulouse Football Club’s centre-back and captain, told journalists and the radio before the match in the changing rooms filled with the musky sweat of the athletes’ bodies – already overheated by the cries of the roaring crowd as well as the stage fright they felt due to the importance of this final of the French Cup – hadn’t Pleimelding spontaneously announced that he would do everything he could to win the Cup so he could present it to his mother – who had stayed behind in her village in Alsace – as a Mother’s Day gift on the 31st, a few days after the match?
Omar was already in the bush by then and was able to follow all the events as they unfolded on his transistor radio: the trial, the death sentence and the pardon he received thanks to the help of the watchful guardians of France’s real conscience at the time, led by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.
Omar knew that the Organisation had decided around the same time to evacuate every professional Algerian footballer to Tunisia, where they then grew into the formidable team that would wreak havoc in stadiums all over the world and bring untold prestige to the resistance. Omar often spoke to me about the assassination attempt he was due to carry out... It haunted him. So did the Algerian footballers’ escape.
The escape of the 32 footballers, including several members of the French national team such as Zitouni, Mekhloufi and Brahimi, had only been made possible by the assistance of those French men and women who were opposed to this dirty war. And there were many of them. They never stopped organising demonstrations in favour of Algerian Independence. They often lay down in the path of trains transporting conscripts to Algeria. There had been the Charonne station massacre of January 1962, whose victims had been French communists opposed to the war in Algeria.
There had been the horrifying racist attacks on Algerians on 17 October 1961 in Paris. We talked about them all the time and thought about our hero and teacher, Mr Baudier. When James Dean died, he had told us to our saddened faces, ‘He has bought himself a luxury death in a car that cost more than the average American worker earns in a lifetime! There you go boys... Now stop whining!’ When we chanced upon some isolated French soldiers in the bush, we left them alone, telling ourselves that at least a few of them must sympathise with our cause and must have been drafted against their will. We therefore avoided catching them in our ambushes and hid this from our unrelenting commanders.
Later, after Independence, when we were at university, Omar much admired the Colombes terrorist, Mohammed Ben Sadok. He had become friends with him. I was both exasperated and jealous.
The plane continued on its way.