When the light comes on again, while the murmur of conversation rises around him, Daniel remains seated for a few seconds longer, watching the silent white screen. He blinks as if he were in the dust and blinding sunlight of Tombstone, and he clicks his tongue like Doc Holliday when he’s thirsty and he sees the street flooded with light bordered by wooden sidewalks where figures on rocking chairs sit motionless in the shadows. Inside his head, men are still running, leaping, falling during the gunfight, shots are still echoing, the cocking levers of Winchester rifles still snapping into place. The seats bang softly into seatbacks as people stand up and he feels these muffled thuds in his back, savouring this solitude in which he lets the film percolate through him, burning itself into his memory. His friends often ask him how he manages to remember so many details about the films he sees, the names of actors and directors, things they pay no attention to. He replies simply that he likes all that stuff and that, if he could, he’d go to the cinema every day and write books about it, write reviews in newspapers. The others think this is too much: write a book? Oh yeah, and what else? Him, the mechanic from rue Furtado, the kid who grew up here in Bacalan, this workers’ suburb on the edge of the city and the marshes?
He doesn’t dare tell them how he used a folding ruler to make a little rectangular frame that he keeps in a pocket and that he often looks between those right angles at people and things and that nothing then exists except what he sees there, a sharper, deeper image, something stronger and more singular. He doesn’t dare tell them—because they’d think he was crazy—that he frames women walking down the street and they are more beautiful that way, that the city itself, enclosed in this geometry, becomes a place of intrigue where anything might happen, mysteries appearing suddenly from the corner of that street, the middle of that square, behind that window, in that car driving past too fast . . .
He hears the lid of a lighter snap open somewhere above him, and immediately afterwards a cloud of smoke with the smell of Virginia tobacco pours down on him. Alain hands him a pack of Camels.
“So are you staying to bury the dead or are you coming with us?”
“Where are the others?”
“Outside, where do you think? It’s stuffy as hell in here.”
Daniel takes a cigarette from the pack and Alain lights it for him with his Zippo.
“Let me see,” says Daniel. “Where’d you get that?”
He weighs the lighter up in his hand, opening the lid with a flick of his thumb, turning the wheel. Smell of oil, good strong flame.
“From a sailor, on the docks. I worked there five days last week and got chatting with a wop. He told me he had loads of ’em. He’s from Naples, and down there they buy and sell anything American, he said. Apparently the Yank soldiers have these in their kitbags.
“You couldn’t get another one, could you?”
Alain shakes his head. Then throws Daniel the pack of Camels.
“Here. You can keep these. He gave me two cartons. His boat left yesterday and he won’t be back till February—they’re going to Senegal and then Tunisia. Next time he comes he might be selling bags of couscous or wooden statues.”
They leave the cinema laughing, arm in arm, and bump into an old granny who yells at them, waving the handle of her umbrella.
“Oh, don’t bother saying sorry! That’s young people for you these days! Just a bunch of hoodlums! I’d send the whole lot of ’em to Algeria . . .”
“My son is there at the moment,” says a woman behind her. “That’s young people for you these days, as you say. The things we do to them. Sending them off to war, as if the last one wasn’t bad enough. So let them have a bit of fun, and shut your face!”
The granny turns around but says nothing, dumbstruck, mouth gaping idiotically. She holds her handbag and her brolly tight to her side.
“I’m going there in February, if that makes you feel any better,” Daniel tells her. “I’m just waiting for my marching orders. So stick it up your ass.”
The woman goes purple-faced. A man appears from behind her and grabs the younger man by the arm.
“What did you say to my wife? Say it again.”
“Oh, that’s your wife, is it? Well, tell her from me that she can stick it up her ass, if she didn’t hear me the first time. And so can you, dickhead. How’s that for you?”
The people around them have stopped and are watching in silence. A dark little crowd, faces pale under the lobby’s bright lights. Who knows what they’re thinking. Maybe they’re expecting a scrap. Another duel, minus the sunlight, on this winter night whose cold air they can feel blowing through the open doors. The man grabs Daniel’s collar and shoves him, yelling “What? What?”, eyes bulging from their sockets, spit drooling from his lips. He’s shortish but well-built, fists as big as his thick-skulled head, and Daniel retreats, not knowing how he’s going to get rid of this moron because right now, pushed backwards, off-balance, he can’t even give him a good kick in the balls. Alain gets in between them. He grabs the man by his collar and blocks the way so he has to stand on tiptoes to face him down, like a cock on its spurs.
“So you’re too bloody scared to take me on your own, eh, you queer?”
Alain lets go of his collar, pushing him back slightly. The people around them are leaving now, perhaps disappointed by the punchup. The man gives up but remains standing in front of the two youngsters, his face white with rage, forehead shining with sweat.
“Fuck off then, you little fags! You won’t have to worry about the Algerians cutting your balls off!”
Daniel takes another step forward, but Alain drags him towards the exit. “Come on,” he says. “Just ignore those assholes.”
Their friends are waiting for them on the sidewalk, under the awning, although even here the cold drizzle reaches them, blown there by the wind. Irène and Sara, whispering to each other a little further off, and big Gilbert, who comes towards them.
“So? What’re you up to?”
His black moustache smiles, his eyes growing round under his mass of hair. Too tall and wide for his tight raincoat, his long legs poking out from his ill-fitting trousers. A thick blue scarf wrapped around his ears. He always says he doesn’t give a toss if he’s badly dressed when girls politely mention it to him. You could make an effort, they tell him. You’re a handsome bloke. Look at you. Like a bloody scarecrow. And he smiles, red-faced, clowning around because he’s the center of attention, all these girls crowding around him, pulling at the sleeves of his jacket or his turtleneck sweater. They all know he’s tight up though, with his half-mad mother and his three sisters to feed, even working overtime every day as a docker, and they know that his clothes are hand-me-downs from an uncle who’s not rich either but is a lot shorter and punier than Gilbert. It’s actually because of this unshakable poverty that he’s been spared Algeria. Family to support. He has broad shoulders and strong arms, but sometimes his burden gets too heavy and they can tell it’s hard for him.
Alain tells the story. Sara wants to go and explain things to the old lady, and she looks through the crowd to try and find her. She shakes her head and mutters to herself. Daniel shrugs.
“Shall we go?”
They start to walk, pressed close together, their shoulders bumping occasionally. Sara insinuates herself between Gilbert and Alain and hangs on to their arms, her legs suspended above the ground, betting them they can’t carry her all the way home like that, while Daniel and Irène walk just behind them, not saying a word.
“Can you believe it? Having a go at Daniel about that! If there’s anyone who actually wants to go to Algeria, it’s him! We should have beaten the shit out of that dick!”
Daniel walks over and stands in front of him.
“What did you say?”
“Nothing,” says Irène, taking his arm. “He didn’t say anything. And you—why don’t you give it a rest, eh? You really think this is the time?”
“I didn’t say I wanted to go, I just said I was going. That it doesn’t really bother me. At least I’ll get to see what it is.”
“We already know that,” says Sara. “It’s an imperialist war. You think they’re going to let Algeria go, after what happened in Indochina?”
“Your father was in a war, wasn’t he? You talk about it all the time!”
“Careful what you say about my father, Daniel. Yes, he went to war to fight the fascists. Yes, he died and I’m proud of that even if I’m sad that I never got to know him, that I don’t even remember his face. And Maurice and Roselyne fought the war too, in their own way, I have no problem with that. But Algeria . . . who are you fighting against?”
They have stopped in the middle of the street, gathered in a circle, and their breath and the words that they speak look like smoke in the cold air as if they were pouring in a blaze from their mouths. The street has gradually emptied. People pass them by, grumbling because they’re in the way.
“Yourself, that’s who you’ll be fighting against,” says Irène in an undertone, as if talking to herself.
Daniel seeks out her eyes in the shadows of her face.
“Why do you say that?”
“You know.”
“Stop trying to sound clever, with all your philosophy. Just cos you passed your exams.”
“She’s right,” Sara says. “Men often go to war to find themselves, to discover their limits. You see that in plenty of films—you should know, you love them so much. But this war you want to see is a real one. Errol Flynn won’t be there, just a bunch of morons and shit. What did they see in Palestro1, huh? Are any of them still around to tell people about their adventures?”
“So? What do you think I should do then, you and your big mouth? You think I should desert? Or jump on a boat like Alain wants to do? Anyway, it’s my life: I’ll do what I want with it.”
“Works for me,” says Alain. “We’ll enroll as novices on a passenger-cargo ship going to French West Africa and we’ll get to see theworld! And at least we won’t have our balls cut off by bicots.”2
“What? Shit, you can’t say stuff like that,” says Irène. “It’s a disgusting way to talk.”
Sara has walked ahead a few steps and now turns around.
“So we’ve got one who wants to go but doesn’t really know why and another who’s refusing to go but sounds like a stupid grunt. I’m sick of talking with you lot.”
“Alright, calm down,” says Alain. “I shouldn’t have said that. But everyone talks like that, so . . . You know me though! You know I’m not a racist!”
“What about you, Gilbert? Don’t you have an opinion?”
Irène has turned towards the beanpole, who shrugs.
“Me? Well, I’m just going to stay here, safe and sound, while the others go and get shot at, so . . . But I think our friends are both pretty brave, each in his own way. I don’t know . . .”
They are silent for a few seconds. The rain starts falling more heavily.
“Well, I’ve got some new Yank records,” says Alain. “We could listen to them while we have a beer. What do you think?”
Smiles all round. They rub their hands, pull their collars up and set off the other way, towards Alain’s house. But Daniel does not move. He is watching them walk away when Irène turns around.
“Aren’t you coming?”
“Nah. I’ve had enough of this crap. I’m going home to crash out.”
The others call out to him. Come on, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, how can you say no to that?
He says goodnight and turns around, ignoring their protestations. He hears them behind him, worrying about him. What’s up with him? Irène says something in reply then their voices vanish in the distance and the wind. Once he is around the street corner, all is silent again, except for the low insistent hiss of the rain in the gutters. He walks quickly, almost running, and the night protects him, deeper and darker here on this street bordered by rumbling factories that glimmer and smoke. He turns onto rue de New York, his fingers already clasping the set of keys in his pocket. Breathlessly he climbs the three steps, trembles as he searches for the lock and almost dives into the hallway, banging the door shut behind him. He stays like that in the blackness, leaning against the wall, the cold raindrops trickling down his neck, over his face.
He starts thinking about them. It comes over him sometimes. Especially his mother. She is merely a silhouette, a shadow, the timbre of a voice. A woman singing. What about him? He would come along sometimes, smiling, happy. He sniffed all the time. He can no longer remember his face. All that remains to him now is that photograph in which he can barely recognize the couple who stand hand in hand on the cours de l’Intendance in August 1936, the date marked in purple ink on the back. Here in this darkness he summons their faces, but his cinema does not respond and the screen remains dark, flickering only with a few stray images from the film. The Earp brothers and Doc Holliday walking down the street and the dust kicked up by their boots. The tormented look on Kirk Douglas’ face. Guns swaying against their thighs. They are walking towards him and maybe they are going to appear at the end of the hallway, the door swinging behind them for a long time, letting in waves of sweltering Arizona sunlight. Daniel is almost panting with the effort of trying to remember his parents’ faces and he can feel himself falling slowly to the bottom of a well, from where daylight, seen through the opening, will soon be no more than a quivering star. And he knows that the two of them, leaning on the rim, are staring down at him.
The kitchen door opens and Roselyne pokes out her head, wide-eyed. The pale light gives her a tired look, a grey face.
“Ah, I thought I heard the door. What are you doing in the dark?”
“Nothing. Just thinking.”
“Irène isn’t with you?”
“No, they went to drink coffee and listen to records at Alain’s place.”
She nods, smiling vaguely. She pulls the woollen shawl more tightly around her neck, then takes a handkerchief from the pocket of her dressing gown and rubs his hair with it.
“Look at you. You’re all wet. Was the film good?”
“Yeah, it was good. A Western.”
“Ugh, I hate those!”
He holds her shoulders and kisses her on the forehead. “I know . . . What about you? Why are you still up?”
“Couldn’t sleep, so I made myself a herbal tea. Maurice fell asleep on his book and started snoring. Do you want anything?”
Daniel does not reply. He holds his hands over the stove. Drops of water fall from his hair and crackle on the burning steel. He becomes more peaceful as the well disappears from his mind and he finds the open air again.
“I’m going to heat up some coffee.”
He pours a few drops into the saucepan then takes a cup and some sugar from the sideboard while it warms up. When he sits down, Roselyne stares at him.
“What were you thinking about, all alone in the dark?”
He stirs the sugar into his coffee, fully absorbed by what he’s doing so he doesn’t have to look at her. The clink of the spoon against the cup. Occasional murmurs of wind in the chimney.
“You don’t want to tell me?”
“What am I supposed to say? It’s always the same thing. When it comes over me, there’s nothing else I can think about.”
She tries to take his hand, sliding hers onto the oilcloth, but he gently shrinks away.
“Have you talked to your sister about it?”
He shakes his head.
Silence falls between them. They sip their too-hot drinks. Roselyne watches Daniel, a mocking smile in her eyes. He does not look at anything. Maybe the sideboard, standing in front of him, and the frosted glass doors, their panes decorated with floral swirls. He feels either sad or bitter, he’s not sure which.
“Anyway, she’s not really my sister.”
“She’s just like your sister. We raised you together. She was only two when you arrived.”
Roselyne suddenly stops talking, and a smile spreads across her face.
“That is one of my happiest memories, you know: seeing the two of you there with me. Your parents had been arrested but, back then, we didn’t know where they were being taken, although there were rumors, of course. Germany, Poland . . . People talked about prison camps, but everyone thought they were like the P.O.W. camps where soldiers were kept. But anyway, we had to face up to the truth. It was hard; we forgot what normal life was like. Irène called you Dada straight away, remember? That went on for years. She used to follow you around all the time to start with; she didn’t understand why you couldn’t go out like her. Once, I remember, we were in the butcher’s—this was in January ’44—and she started yapping away about Dada. That butcher was a nasty piece of work: he used to sell meat on the black market to the Krauts. I didn’t know how to stop her talking. She was going on about how she talked with Dada all the time, how she played cards and Ludo with him because he got bored in his room that he could never leave, how he spent too long in the toilets . . . just a whole load of stuff, and I could imagine her spilling the beans completely at any moment and I had no idea how to stop her. And that bastard started questioning her, casually, you know, like ‘And what’s he like, this Dada? Is he nice? Why doesn’t he go out? Is he ill? What sort of stories does he tell? What’s his real name?’ He knew there must be something fishy going on and he wanted to figure out what it was, like a dog sniffing around a bush. She was only three or four at the time, and you remember what a chatterbox she was—she used to drive us all crazy! And then suddenly she stopped talking and she looked at that bastard and giggled and she said: ‘He’s silly, that man, he’s getting it all mixed up. A teddy bear can’t go out in the street or he’ll get wet, and he can’t tell stories, I just said that so he would sleep in my bed. Dada is for Danilou. That’s what they call him in the forest.’ You should have seen the guy’s face, and him holding a packet of meat in the air. All the people in the queue were laughing at this little girl and the way she talked, addressing everyone in the shop, her eyes wide as saucers. As a recompense, he gave us an extra fifty grams of beef trimmings. When we got out of the shop she held my hand and said, ‘Did you see how I got out of that? It was good, wasn’t it? He wanted me to tell him about Daniel, did you see?’ She’d understood completely. War makes children grow up faster but it doesn’t necessarily make them more intelligent; otherwise human beings would all be geniuses. But that kid: she knew exactly how much danger you were in, she knew that there were bastards all over the place with big open smiles like gas chambers. She never asked many questions about the Germans, or what was happening in the news, but she listened to everything, and observed, she watched us talking with Maurice at the dinner table with that serious look on her face and sometimes I’d catch her looking at me with those huge eyes as if she wanted to swallow me whole. I was so afraid for those eyes and I wondered what world they would see later. Anyway . . . She started hopping about on the sidewalk again and I was worried like always that she’d trip over a cobblestone, but I felt happier then than I’d felt in a long time.”
“I used to listen to you too. I stayed in my little room but I heard everything. And I used to listen out for any noises on the stairs. I thought they’d come back and we’d all go home and life would go on like before. Or I’d look through the window. I used to stand on a chair and pull back the curtain to see as far as I could. And sometimes my heart would leap because I thought I’d seen Mom crossing the street. I wonder if Irène understood the situation better than I did. She knew they weren’t coming back, that it was all over. That was why she used to hug me sometimes without saying anything and I’d let her even though it annoyed me.”
Daniel lights a cigarette and gets up to fetch a clean ashtray from the sink.
“Camels, huh? Let me have one.”
“Do you smoke? Alain got them from a guy on the docks.”
She lights her cigarette and closes her eyes as she takes a drag.
“It’s going to make my head spin, but it’s really nice!”
They smoke in silence, smiling occasionally, each in their own thoughts. Daniel feels good here, with this woman who raised him and who has blown away the dark night that was closing around him like a toxic cloud. This is his home, these people his family. With eighteen-year-old Irène and her green eyes that sometimes don’t dare meet his, that turn away and hide themselves the way a woman might cover up a suddenly bared shoulder.
“I miss them too, you know, even after all this time. Your mother was like a sister to me. See, we can’t get away from the subject of brothers and sisters, can we? Anyway, I sometimes imagine that she’s going to come home too, that she’s standing outside the door at that very moment, so I wait a few minutes to see what happens. It’s a strange sensation: it seems so definite, I’m sure that she’s going to walk in. There’s a knock at the door and I open it and there she is, smiling at me but looking so terribly tired after all they put her through, after all she must have seen . . . So we fall into each other’s arms and we start crying and laughing at the same time and then we talk for hours . . . How many times have I stopped what I was doing in the hope that my daydream was about to come true!”
“What about my father?”
“We’ve already talked about this . . . When he was there, with the two of you, he was an extraordinary man. Always so cheerful, and gentle. He’d come back with presents, toys, sometimes money. And Olga, your mother, would welcome him back the way people greet a cat who’s spent three days outside in the rain and who’s been fighting with other toms. She would dote on him and he’d promise that he wasn’t going to do it again, that he was going to stay with you at home, that all his stupid behaviour was a thing of the past. For a long time she believed what he told her. I think she wanted to believe him. She must have liked the lies somehow. Maybe she loved men who were like tomcats, I don’t know . . . She suspected there were other women, of course, beautiful women, unclean women . . . Maurice and me, we knew what was going on, but we never dared talk to her about it. But we should have, me especially . . . Then again, would it really have changed anything? Anyway, one day, in place Pey-Berland, she saw him in the arms of another girl, saw him kiss her and laugh with her. I remember the day she came here in tears, with you in your pushchair, just a baby.”
Roselyne suddenly stops talking and looks up at Daniel, as if surprised to see him there, across the table, as if just emerging from a daydream.
“Why am I telling you all this? You know it already.”
Daniel had let his cigarette burn down to his fingers while he was listening, and the burn of it on his skin wakes him from the trance in which he was floating. He stubs out the butt in the ashtray and the smoke drifts away like the transparent images that came to his mind before, leaving only the smell of tobacco, already overpowering. He seeks out the woman’s hand and she moves it towards his and they touch their fingertips together without looking at each other, without speaking.
“It helps me,” he says quietly. “Like this, they still exist a little bit.”
Roselyne smiles sadly at him.
“We should go to bed, don’t you think?” she asks.
They overcome their tiredness at the same time, pushing themselves up from the table. Roselyne goes into the hallway before Daniel, then turns around and strokes his cheek.
“Sleep well.”
“Goodnight.”
He hears the door creak softly behind him and Maurice’s muffled snoring. Then he switches off the light before entering his room. The window looks out over the little garden where a faint light, falling from the low sky and worn away by the wind, attaches itself to the pane along with the rain. He takes off his damp jacket and his shoes and lies on the bed in his clothes. His mind is a confused place, full of strange entanglements. Brambles, ivy, suffocating flowers. He stares up at the invisible ceiling and that is, perhaps, how he falls asleep, listening to the distant sound of a badly closed shutter rattling somewhere in the winter night.
1 The Palestro gorge: located 50 miles south-east of Algiers; this is where a French army patrol was caught in an ambush by the resistance fighters of the Algerian A.L.N. (National Liberation Army) on May 18, 1956. Twenty-one soldiers died in the attack, and their bodies were found horribly mutilated. The attack caused outrage in France, and the Palestro Ambush, although far from the only such attack, became the symbol of this war’s cruelty, and crucially gave credence to the image of the insurgents in French public opinion as “barbarians” fighting against the “pacifying” efforts of the French Army (c.f. L’Embuscade de Palestro by Raphaelle Branche, Armand Colin, 2010).
2 Racist slang term for North Africans.