They take off their bags and drop them on the floor and lie on their beds, the sub-machine gun on their chest or the rifle by their pillow, and for a few moments the only sound is their breathing and their sighs, amid the buzzing of flies and the creaking of beds, in the darkness of the shelter where no-one thinks to close the door on the white light that has been burning their eyes and tanning their hide for the past three weeks.
Daniel, eyes closed, listens to this exhausted stirring. He lets his body grow heavy and the canvas of the bed becomes stretched almost to breaking point by the weight of all this fatigue. On his skin, he can feel the mixture of sweat and dust drying, turning his face into a marble mask, earth-colored, like the faces of the dead they found on their second patrol in the ruins of a tiny village, two peasants with their throats cut, on whom the killers had let loose a dog. All the newbies had puked and the others had had to breathe through their mouths, scarves covering their noses, so as not to retch at the stink, because whatever they might say, laughing with a beer the next evening, they fall asleep just as often to this vision of rotting corpses and black blood as they do in the company of the girl who writes to them from time to time. Daniel remembers how they’d all had to retreat because the wasps were attacking them after being disturbed in their feast by a caporal who’d been ordered to find papers on the bodies or any other clue that would enable them to be identified, and they had waved their hands around for a moment to get the wasps off them while the lieutenant called H.Q. to report the discovery of the bodies and find out what he was supposed to do.
He tries to rid his mind of this image of cadavers, but it surges back constantly to his memory like a rubber ball thrown against a wall that bounces crazily and returns, flashing bizarrely like those electric pool balls you see in cafés. He opens his eyes and stares at the whitewashed ceiling, a blind and silent screen. With his fingertips, he touches his rifle and the scope and keeps his hand on the warm metal as he watches the others lying on their beds like him, and his mind is empty. All he thinks about is the shower he’s going to take, the smell of the soap, the feel of a clean shirt on his shoulders. He thinks about these trivial things, these tiny details, these fleeting sensations, shutting himself away with them as if he were hiding in a secret, impregnable fortress.
He sees the sergent sitting immobile, body leaned forward, boonie hat in hand, shoulders lifted up by his slow, deep breathing. Occasionally he shakes his head. There are beads of sweat scattered over his shaved skull, running down the back of his neck, making it glisten, trickling down over his chin. Even he seems to be feeling it now, that battle-hardened bull, lean and tough, who tells everyone that he left behind his fat and his fatigue in Indochina, sucked out by the mosquitoes and the leeches, washed away by the monsoon and the buckets of lukewarm water that they would pour over their heads, night and day, over there, as if that shitty place might, by turning them to liquid, absorb them alive into the mud in which they sank sometimes up to their thighs, flooded by their own dysentery.
Even he was affected, this man who, after ten days of marching and shooting exercises, had wanted to punish the newbies by making them do night patrols followed by the search of a wadi, where all they managed to do was scare a flock of sheep whose shepherd was nowhere to be seen, disoriented and senseless, perhaps returned to the savage state of those sheep, like them too, pretty soon, dragging their feet and stumbling through gravel, who might become a sort of nomadic horde at the edge of exhaustion, looking to massacre something.
Even him, the sergent, who they had all wanted, at various times, to push into the ravine below the cliff edge that crumbled beneath their feet, the stones rattling endlessly into the precipice more than a hundred meters beneath them. They had advanced, almost crouching on the hillside, hanging on to tufts of vegetation that would tear out in their hands at the slightest misstep. He went first, practically running, and then, two hundred meters further on, on stable terrain, leaning on a rock, he had cocked his sub-machine gun and looked at the peak on the other side of the valley, repeating that no-one would go to search for any cretin who fell into the abyss because there was no point exhausting themselves dragging a pile of smashed-up bones back to the camp.
Daniel stares at him, that son of a bitch—Castel, he’s called—sitting at the foot of his bed, slouched forward, letting the sweat run off him without moving, as if he was praying . . . and who knows, maybe this man is one of those soldier monks, on a crusade in this land of infidels and unbelievers. Maybe, in the privacy of his digs, he beats himself with a belt to expiate some mortal sin . . . It was Giovanni who talked about that the other evening. Mortifications, they’re called. Loads of mystic loonies do it all over the world, sometimes in processions, to redeem men’s transgressions. So here, in the war—the supreme transgression—he can flay his skin to bits, this stupid sergent, all alone in his room, he can whip his back until the bones show, and he’s not there yet. And if that makes him pleased with himself, I can add some salt, rub it in his wounds, just to see him twist and scream and ask about his whore of a mother.
In the evenings, they go to the meeting hall to have a few beers, about thirty of them: all those who are not on duty or doing fatigue duties or ill or already too drunk. The radio plays songs—Charles Trenet or Gilbert Bécaud—that no-one really listens to because they’re drowned out by the yelling of the tarot card players when one of them succeeds in keeping le petit until the end or because someone else still had a trump that no-one had counted, so there’s lots of shouting over at the card table and a flat cloud of cigarette smoke that floats around the dented lampshades hanging from the ceiling. You could almost believe you were in a gambling den somewhere, were it not for the crêpe-paper garlands stretched across the room as if it were a youth club party. A capitaine who occupied this old abandoned farm for the first time after an attack in ’56 had managed to get tables and chairs, a bar and some lampshades from an officers’ mess in Oran. He had knocked out the briquette walls that divided the hutches where the farm workers used to sleep. And so, since then, there had been more than a hundred square meters of space that the men took turns cleaning, maintaining and supplying with various forms of fuel.
Daniel watched a game of volleyball for a minute, and then, when it began to grow dark—the mountainsides turning black under the golden sky—he got a beer and went to sit at a table where Giovanni and Jean-André, the platoon’s machine-gunner, are having an intense discussion in low voices. They sit across from each other, leaning forward, almost lying on the table, tense, fists balled around beer cans, hissing into each other’s faces.
“We’re not the criminals. It’s the fellouzes21. Didn’t you see what they did to some other bicots the other day? And all of our lot with their bollocks shoved in their mouths and their eyes gouged out? Why do they need to do that, eh? And we’re the criminals?”
“What about us French though? What good have we done since we got here? The colonists exploit them, and we come and make war on them because they’re rebelling. We set fire to villages, we torture them, we bomb them. We’re just as guilty of massacres as they are.”
“Oh, stop. You haven’t seen anything. I’ve been in this shit heap for a year now. The things I could tell you . . . You talk like a Commie, and you act like a know-it-all cos you went to college. So shut your fucking mouth. We’ll talk about it when you’ve seen a friend of yours die next to you. You piss me off.”
Jean-André gets up, knocking his chair over behind him. He stands there, covered in sweat, his crumpled shirt open over his skinny chest. He drinks a mouthful of beer and points at Giovanni, waving his can around.
“You know fuck-all, you stupid prick. It’s just theories, all that. You won’t be such a smart-ass one of these days.”
People at other tables turn towards them, but in the chaos of chattering voices and songs bellowed out by the radio, no-one bothers to find out what they are arguing about.
“What’s up with the wop? Shooting his mouth off, is he? Got his panties in a twist? Maybe his mama’s too busy whoring to cook him spaghetti?”
The man who yelled this is one of the card-players. He turns away from Giovanni and grins grotesquely at his pals, who burst out laughing. His name is Marius Declerck, he’s from Roubaix, and is generally considered a decent lad, a bit slow on the uptake, whom it’s not a good idea to tease after he’s downed seven or eight pints of lager in an evening, which happens pretty often.
Giovanni is on his feet. Daniel tells him, “Forget it, he’s a prick,” holding him back by his arm. The man’s shoulders are visibly shaking with laughter, but the conversations have gone quiet and the guys at his table suddenly stare at their cards with extreme concentration, as if they were playing high-stakes poker.
“Say that again?”
The man stands up too. Tall, broad-shouldered, with thick, short arms. He stares down at Giovanni, a nasty smile on his face, and in his hand an empty bottle.
Not that Giovanni cares. He’ll sink his teeth in the guy’s throat and not let go. He’s seen little mutts hanging like that from the necks of massive mastiffs, having to be knocked out before their fangs can be extracted from the big dog’s flesh.
“What I’m saying is that you’re hardly even French and you’re screwing up the morale of the boys. But that’s wops for you. They fuck everything up. Just look at the mess they’ve made of their own country—nothing works at all. Even the Krauts couldn’t count on them. So, I’m saying, you should go home to your spaghetti-eating pals and leave us French to do what needs to be done here.”
Giovanni walks up to him, grabbing a chair on his way. Around him, men silently get to their feet. Some of them leave their beer on the table, others take it with them, swallowing a mouthful on the fly as if to make the sensation more intense. Someone has turned off the radio.
“Stop it, lads. If an N.C.O. arrives, you’ll be for it.”
“Shut your face. Let them settle it like men.”
And with perfect timing, Vrignon, the lieutenant, makes his entrance with a caporal.
“I’d rather not know what you’re up to, but you’d better stop this shit now. Understood?”
Everyone sits down. Chairs scrape the floor. Radio switched back on. “J’attendrais toujours ton retour . . .”22 The vibrato is drowned out by static, but no-one cares: it soothes the tense atmosphere.
The giant has gone back to his card game. Giovanni is trembling. Daniel asks him if he’s alright, but he remains silent, his gaze sunk into the wood of the table like a knife. Then he stands up and walks over to Declerck. The other players stop what they’re doing, look up at Giovanni, wide-eyed. One of them pushes his chair back a little.
Giovanni is leaning in close, speaking almost into his ear. At the other end of the room, the lieutenant, leaning on the bar, cranes his neck towards them. Declerck remains immobile, eyes staring vacantly, cards in his hand.
“You’d better watch yourself, pal. I’ll get you, sooner or later. There have been plenty of others, ever since I was a kid, guys bigger and tougher than you, who’ve regretted spouting that kind of shit to me. Got it, Komrad? Maybe you find German easier to understand, eh?”
“Go fuck yourself,” says Hercules. “If you want to try it, you’d better make sure I’m asleep. Now piss off. You’re lucky the lieutenant’s here.”
Giovanni puts his hand on Declerck’s shoulder, and instantly feels a shudder of repulsion that runs through the man’s entire body.
“I love you too.”
He walks away and sits down next to Daniel. He’s smiling.
“What did you say to him?”
“Nothing.”
He’s still smiling—with his eyes as well as his mouth—and he gives Daniel a mysterious look. He picks up his bottle and lifts it towards him.
“Cheers, buddy. Vive la sociale.”23
They clink bottle and can together. The beer is already lukewarm, but they don’t care. Two other men walk up to them. Two Parisians. Olivier and Gérard. They join the toast.
“You’ve got balls, Zacco. He’d have snapped you in half. That Marius is a complete nutter when he’s pissed. They had to transfer him here cos he lost his temper in Kabylie and almost kicked a guy to death.”
“How do you know that?”
“From that caporal—the little one, you know? Carlin. He’s a good guy. We were on guard duty the other night, and he told me.”
“Well, nutcases always have a great time during wars,” says Giovanni. “Allowed to carry a gun and use it, allowed to kill . . . there are loads of guys who wallow in that like pigs in shit.”
“What can we do about it?” asks Gérard. “Maybe human beings are just bastards who don’t care about each other.”
“Not all of them though,” says Giovanni.
The four of them fall silent as if by tacit agreement and stare vacantly around this room where the soldiers kill time, necks shaved, clothes disheveled, sweating too much beer, with their faces like kids or halfwits.
“Yeah,” says Daniel. “Maybe not all of them, but quite a lot. Anyway, I’m going for a walk. I’ve had enough of all these jerk-offs.”
He stands up and walks out into the courtyard, bottle in hand, and as soon as the door to the meeting hall shuts behind him the roar of chatter and laughter is scattered by the cold wind that roams the mountain and snaps the flag high up on its pole. He walks past the watchtower, stuck in the middle of the camp, and gives the password just to annoy the man on duty, half-asleep on his machine gun, and who replies by telling him to fuck off, you stupid dick. Daniel moves away and the sentry continues reeling off his string of insults, voice muffled by the sandbag barrier. He’s a Breton who had to leave his father and his uncle on their boat in Audierne to come over here and ass around. Le Goff, he’s called—Yvon to his friends—and he says he misses everything, the sea, the wind, the rain, and tells anyone who’ll listen that one day soon he’s going to get the hell out of this dump, screw the F.L.N. and the katibas24 and the general staff, this place has fuck-all to do with him, let them all die here, all he wants is to be on the boat and to catch fish and to surf waves as big as houses and to dive into the hollows where it’s almost black as night and that’s all. He says all this during marches, when they’re having a rest, and the men around him stare tiredly at the sunbleached sky, the bare hills, the scrawny bushes, the paths traced by centuries of wear that they are now the only ones to use, their supplies clattering over the bumps, and they struggle to imagine that the sea can suddenly make night fall between two mountains of water under an overcast sky. Giovanni once started reciting a Victor Hugo poem.
“L’homme est en mer. Depuis l’enfance matelot,
Il livre au hasard sombre une rude bataille.
Pluie ou bourrasque, il faut qu’il sorte, il faut qu’il aille . . .”25
The men were astounded that anyone could know all those words by heart, and that anyone would think of saying them here, under a live oak, arms wrapped round knees, backs soaked with sweat under their bags. The Breton had listened silently, eyes lowered, then he had thanked Giovanni. He’d said, Fuck, that was good. Victor Hugo must have been through some serious storms to talk like that.”
Daniel dives into darkness, skirting the main farm building where the lieutenant and the N.C.O.s are quartered, and he walks through an abandoned garden where a few rosebushes are flowering, grown wild because no-one has the time to prune them. He can feel in his stiff muscles the ground slowly rising and he comes to a low wall topped with barbed wire that protects this spur of greenery perched high up, about thirty meters above a little canyon.
No moon. Only a few stars shining and vanishing in the misty sky. Only the night so dark that you wonder how so much sunlight can beat down on this earth. Near him is an old wrought-iron garden bench that someone left here and that wobbles when you sit on it.
But nothing moves when he leans against the back.
“What are you doing here?”
He jumps to his feet and stumbles over a rock, and a hand grabs the shoulder of his shirt. It’s Castel, the sergent.
“Sit down, it’s alright.”
His face is illuminated by the flame of a lighter. He hands him a packet of cigarettes.
“Can we smoke here?”
“It’s fine. We’re protected by the rocks. Anyway, you really think they’d send a sniper to hide out in the middle of the night, just to take out two guys having a smoke?”
Daniel picks out a cigarette. Castel lights it.
“So?” the sergent asks.
“You scared me.”
Daniel takes a drag. Virginia tobacco. Sweet.
“I didn’t scare you. I surprised you. It’s not the same thing. That’s not fear. You don’t know what fear is.”
Thick, drawling voice. Daniel can hear him blow smoke through his nostrils.
“How can you say that? You don’t know me.”
“Yes, I do. I know you better than you think. I’ve seen you suffering for three weeks now . . . I know things about you that you don’t know yourself.”
“What are you, a wizard or something? Can you read people’s minds?”
“No. Your faces. And your feet. The way you walk, the way you look around. The way you hold your weapons and the way you shoot. I’ve seen so many men die that I know how to look at those who are alive.”
“You must be a philosopher.”
Daniel feels Castel’s fingers tighten around his neck and his vision fills with red stars. This man is going to crush his throat.
“Don’t get smart with me. I can kill you just like that if I want.”
He forces Daniel to bend over then suddenly lets go of him. Daniel leaps backwards. All he can see of the man on the bench is a vague mass.
“Sit down, you dick. Of course I’m not going to kill you. There are fellouzes for that. And your own stupidity, when things start heating up.”
A brief, mirthless laugh.
“And no, I’m not a philosopher. Too much brawn and not enough brains, I guess . . . I’m just a soldier, the type of guy that always gets sent to be made into mincemeat so philosophers can continue pontificating without having to get off their fat asses. Just like in the Middle Ages—there are those who pray and those who fight.”
“Don’t you ever pray?”
“Pray to who? Do you know anyone?”
They can hear the sound of the wind in the small valley below them. Castel lights another cigarette. He scrapes his feet on the ground, as if annoyed.
“There’s nothing and there’s no-one, and that’s all there is to it. Life and death. Afterwards, we’re just carrion—like those two Arabs we found the other day. Remember how they stank, those two piles of shit? There’s that, and then there’s nothing. And we’re all the same. Vietnamese, French, fells . . . You swell up, you stink, you ooze, and that’s it.”
He stands up. The bench lists to the side. Daniel sees the sergent’s silhouette above him.
“Come on. I’m going to wash my face and crash out. Five, tomorrow morning. There’s going to be movement in the sector, and we have to find those sons of bitches. You’ll see what I meant about fear, cos it’s not going to be an easy ride like you’ve had up to now. We’re setting up an ambush. With a bit of luck, we’ll put them out of action completely. Shit, yeah. We’re going to hammer them.”
He walks away, dragging his feetthrough the pebbles, mumbling incoherently. Daniel wonders what time it is. Not ten yet, because the curfew bell hasn’t rung.
He thinks over what Castel said about fear. He thinks about how cold it was that day, and of the day that rose so slowly that he prayed to a god—any god—for a little sunlight to finally arrive. In the first rays of dawn he saw birds, all ruffled up, hopping about on the roof tiles close to him, watching this little giant through their minuscule eyes, and he smiled as he threw them a few crumbs of the bread that his mother had left him in a paper bag. He talked to them, and it seemed to him that they listened, that they left and then came back to see if he was still there. He had prayed to them, several times, asking them go and see where his mummy and daddy were and to bring them back to him, and to tell them that he was cold and needed to pee. He had muttered these silly requests to himself and waited for the genie to appear from the chimney. He had hoped his wishes would come true as soon as he had uttered his last words, as happened in the stories his mother told him at bedtimes. But nothing happened, of course. He remembers eating the bit of bread and the saucisson that his father had given him. He remembers the strong, thick taste of garlic. He has never been able to eat it again since.
That evening, as night fell, the skylight had opened and he had seen the face of that man, a beret on his head, his features weirdly shadowed by the corridor light, as if he were wearing a scary mask. He had shivered and moaned at this apparition, before recognizing Maurice and climbing towards him, stunned by fear and numb with cold.
Fear. The fear that had gripped him when he heard those footsteps and yells on the staircase. His mother’s fear, when she began to moan and weep. She took him in her arms and held him tight against her and covered him with kisses, her black hair in his mouth and nose, her tears wetting his face. My sweet little boy. My love. The fear of the hammering on the door, so close to where he stood. “Police! Open up!”
We’ll come back. Wait for us. Stay close to the chimney. Be very careful. Be good. I love you. Mommy and I love you very much, O.K.? Be very careful. Wait like a good boy. His father closed the skylight. His father. Who had come back to the house a week earlier, after being gone for days, as he often was. He reappeared sometimes, his hands full of money and ration coupons. Smiling, joking. Singing all the time. And Mommy would start singing along. She was always waiting for him. He would see her staring through the window at the street.
He tries to remember his father’s face. He remembers his singing, the songs he bellowed at the top of his voice. But his face is a total blank.
Daddy had held him tight, kissed his hair, then closed the skylight.
Doors had banged shut in the street, people had yelled. Sometimes the cops blew whistles. After that, there had been an immense silence.
“Daniel?”
He shivers. For half a second he doesn’t know where—or when—that voice is coming from. So far from here. The memories cling to him. Unable to hold on, he had peed on the tiles. It had run down to the gutter.
“Yeah. I’m here.”
Giovanni. Walking carefully, breathing hard.
“Fuck, I think I’ve had too much to drink. The Parisians had a great time. They’re good guys.”
He sits down. The bench pitches slightly, then stabilizes. Daniel swallows his desire to weep.
“What are you doing here in the dark on your own?”
“Nothing. Just thinking.”
“Not a good idea.”
“I talked to Castel. He was drunk. He told me we’re going to ambush them tomorrow morning.”
Giovanni exhales.
“Well, it was bound to happen. Shit. We’re fucked now.”
“He says there have been fells spotted in the area.”
They fall silent. The night is turning cold. Daniel rubs his hands together. He asks Giovanni:
“Are you scared?”
“Yeah, I’m scared. All the time. I feel like everything’s threatening me. And I’m not just scared of dying here.”
“What else?”
Giovanni sighs. Shifts on the bench and makes it lean sideways again.
“I don’t know yet. If we get out of here in one piece, I don’t know what kind of state we’ll be in. Have you seen the others? The ones who’ve been here for a few months? Have you heard them?”
“We’re going to war tomorrow, Zacco.”
“They’re going to war. I’m not going to shoot at Algerian Resistance fighters.”
“Oh, really? So you’re just going to walk towards them, smiling and holding up your Party membership card so they’ll shoot in the air cos you’re on the side of the goodies? Have you seen this place? As you said, have you seen the reaction of the others when you try to talk to them, when you try to make them understand? Did you hear that asshole earlier tonight insulting you? For fuck’s sake—they’re the people too, you know! They’re the ones we have to deal with. Anyway, how are we going to get out of this mess if we’re getting shot at, if the guys next to us are injured, or worse? Are we going to start yelling, ‘Ceasefire, comrades! Peace in Algeria!’?”
“So what will you do when you see someone’s face in close-up through your scope? You won’t be shooting a film, you know. You’re the best shot in the platoon, pal. You never miss at two hundred meters, but those are cardboard targets or tins of corned beef. When it’s a fell, a real man of flesh and blood, you’d better not miss then cos Castel and the lieutenant will know that you’ve done it on purpose.”
They fall silent again. As they can’t see each other, on this moonless night, and as the jebel is silent, they are only voices and breathing, motionless in the cold air that moves around them now, leaving its icy hands on their necks.
“Shit, I don’t know,” says Giovanni, after a while. “I’ve drunk too much. I’m not used to it. I feel lost.”
The wind makes the dry leaves tremble in the tree above them. They lift their eyes to this invisible shivering.
“C’était un temps déraisonnable
On avait mis les morts à table
On faisait des châteaux de sable
On prenait les loups pour des chiens
Tout changeait de pôle et d’épaule
La pièce était-elle ou non drôle
Moi si j’y tenais mal mon rôle
C’était de n’y comprendre rien.26
That’s Aragon. I don’t know what else to tell you.”
“I’m sick of your fucking poetry.”
“I know. But it’s the only way I know how to think.”
Giovanni gets up and sighs and stands for a moment, smoking. He blows smoke out softly after each drag. He swears very quietly then crushes his cigarette butt under his shoe.
“I’m going to try to get some sleep. See you tomorrow.”
Daniel listens as he walks away, stumbling over the stones. Poetry. As if this was the right time, the right place. He thinks about Irène and how she loved to recite it all the time too. They’d be a perfect pair, those two pinkos: they could recite poetry while selling L’Humanité.27 It would be cute as hell. Irène and Giovanni. What am I talking about? Irène. Irène.
He realizes he is saying her name out loud. And the wind brings him a scent of thyme and dust, and tickles his shoulders. He shakes out the shiver like a dog.
Night all around them. A deep, chasm-like silence surrounds the headlights of the GMC trucks, the roar of the engines and the noise of men’s voices, like the mouth of a monster hesitating to swallow a toxic prey. Not a star in the sky; nothing but the fathomless blackness of the universe high above the commotion of the platoon as it gets ready to set off. At ground level, the dust is already rising, visible in the vehicles’ luminous beams, drying their mouths already dehydrated from bad sleep and too much booze. Men help each other to climb aboard trucks and sit on benches that kill their backs, even though they haven’t started moving yet. They’re closely packed, so their rifles are held between their legs, loaded, safeties on. In front of each soldier is his bag, with his helmet on top. Bareheaded, they feel the cold only when they climb on board the trucks, so some of them rummage in their pockets to find their caps and warm their shaved scalps.
There are forty trucks on the road, doing maybe fifty kilometers per hour, and the men are shaken around, their spines rolling against the seat back, and they are thrown into each other as the trucks jolt and lurch over ruts and cracks in the ground. They all yell at the drivers to slow down, banging with their boots and their rifle butts, but nothing happens. They call them sons of bitches and the drivers tell them where they can stick it and after a few miles they simply curl up in the fetal position, arms crossed over their knees, asses crushed and backs singing with pain, the soldiers already ground down before the mission has even begun.
About ten kilometers from their quarters is a mountain pass where weapons are transported on the backs of men or mules, where groups of fellaghas come at night to seek provisions from the hamlets located on the edge of the forbidden zone. They will continue over the peaks to seize control of the north side. The south will be taken by Capitaine Laurent’s platoon.
Lieutenant Vrignon, looking wan in the feeble light of dawn, told them all this straight out, standing legs apart on the path they must take later, indifferent to the icy wind that sweeps the spur where the trucks stopped. The men stood leaning against the vehicles, seeking any protection they could find from the Algerian blizzard, and they all noticed Sergent Castel’s approving nod, his respectful mimicry when the lieutenant mentioned the name and rank of Capitaine Laurent.
Above them, the stars went out. While Vrignon continued his long-winded speech, not even flinching in the cold, they drew their heads into their shoulders, pulled their large cotton scarves even tighter over their chins, and their bodies trembled, the muscles petrified, as they stamped their feet.
When the sergent ordered them to start marching, Daniel felt almost happy, lifting the bag that must have weighed at least twenty kilos onto his back and helping Giovanni with his, because they had given him two satchels full of magazines for the machine gun. They walked quite quickly for an hour, the cold from the stones seeping up their legs, the sun rising behind them, pursuing their huge, deformed shadows.
There are about forty of them. They say nothing and most of the time they stare at the path they walk or at the feet of the man in front. Earlier, Daniel saw the cliffs where they are headed blaze brightly in the golden light of dawn. Picked out by the slanting light, even the stones were illuminated, like embers breathed on by the wind. Now, in a white dazzle, he can feel sweat seeping from every pore, streaming over his skin and then drying up like a wadi lost in the sand. He can taste its saltiness on his lips, can feel his eyes burning. He tries to soothe this by rubbing his eyelids with the back of his hand, the way children do when they are sleepy.
When the path descends into a wide basin where thick grass and a few green bushes shine in the sunlight, they take the chance to light cigarettes, pass each other packets of tobacco or lighters and talk among themselves for the first time in two hours, though what they say can be summarized in twenty words, including swear words, plus a few insults offered without conviction, without consequence. Their column of whispers and muffled laughs stretches over more than a hundred meters as they tread close-cut turf sprinkled with blue flowers. Then they all hear the same thing at the same moment: men speaking Arabic. And they all see, on the ridge line at the other side of the green crater, the silhouettes of two goats. In a single movement they crouch down, fingers tight to triggers. The sergent sends a caporal to scout the land to the left with ten light infantrymen who leave their bags in order to move more quickly. They run along the side of the basin, and the only sound is their footsteps, muffled by the firm green ground. Two scouts slip behind an embankment, while the rest continue their progress on the slope, all of them bent double.
The goats line up in growing numbers on the ridge. They do not move, slowly chewing as they stare at the soldiers. Daniel has often seen this sort of backlit line-up at the cinema, when Apache horsemen mass at the summit of a hill before attacking a procession of carriages or a platoon of cavalry. He takes his Garand28 rifle from its holster, pulls out the scope and puts his eye to it.
Giovanni puts a hand on his arm.
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing. Just looking.”
“And what do you see?”
“Those fucking goats.”
A metallic shudder runs through the column of men. Everyone on the alert. The inaudible jingling of slings as they shoulder their rifles. The intensified pressure around rifle butts, pistol grips, triggers.
Just ahead, two men are walking, hands on their heads, surrounded by the herd, which is beginning to descend towards the bottom of the basin. An old man and a tall, skinny kid, as far as Daniel can tell by looking at them through his rifle scope. Each carries a stick, and a satchel. The two scouts arrive behind them and smash them to the ground with the butts of their guns, holding them flat on the ground with a foot on their necks. They are surrounded. Their satchels are emptied out, the contents kicked away or crushed beneath a boot heel. The goats scatter, bleating, taking advantage of the situation to cavort in the grass and finding between the clumps of little bulrushes pockets of water lapping and hissing beneath their hoofs.
The lieutenant sends Daniel and Giovanni westward as lookouts. He yells at the rest to remain high up, except for three whom he tells to set up a machine gun at the top of the slope that the path follows. Next he sits on a rock and picks up the radio receiver, back turned to the troops in order to speak, as if he were making a private call.
Daniel and Giovanni climb up on top of a big rock that overlooks the green hollow. From here, they can see the entire valley that the platoon climbed through, a frozen swell of hills and ridges. The sky is slowly whitening and the light beats down on their eyelids as they scan the few bushes growing stubbornly and randomly in places. But the bushes are too far apart, too scattered to hide a group of fells or an imminent attack. Daniel enjoys imagining the figures of animals or men that he hunts down with his binoculars, evading the capricious traps of light and shadows. Behind him, he hears Castel interrogating the two shepherds in his hoarse drawl, so he turns around and sees the two poor devils on their knees, hands still on their heads. He looks up to see all those soldiers in a circle around them, guns vaguely aimed at them, or shouldered as they smoke cigarettes and drink water from their flasks. Then Castel starts screaming. He smacks the old man on the top of his head, not very hard, though Daniel hears the sharp sound it makes and the man curls into a ball, then kneels up again, protecting his face with his hands.
“When did they go past?” the sergent yells. “You must have seen them!”
The man shakes his head, waves his hands. He says he didn’t see anyone, that he went out this morning with his goats and his son. Have pity, he says, and other things in his language, in his choked voice. The boy asks the sergent to leave them in peace, but a kick sends him sprawling onto his side and he immediately gets back on his knees, swaying slightly and keeping his head lowered, his lips moving although nothing can be heard of the prayer—or curse—that he is uttering.
“Look!” Castel tells the old man. “Look at this, you scum!”
He takes out his pistol, releases the safety and presses the barrel to the boy’s temple.
Giovanni grabs Daniel’s sleeve.
“Talk, or I’ll blow his head off! Talk, you son of a bitch! It’ll be one less rebel anyway, cos they’ll come here to take your little bastard!”
The old man says again that he doesn’t know anything, hasn’t seen anything, that he only came here to feed and water his herd, please, please, leave us alone. The boy trembles and shakes and moans, his eyes crazed with terror.
Giovanni is on his feet. His fist tightens around the cocking lever of his rifle.
“Don’t say anything. Don’t move,” Daniel whispers. “Leave them. They’ll calm down.”
“They’re not going to kill that man—they can’t!” Giovanni chokes.
The sergent makes a sign to a soldier. The man primes his submachine gun and aims a burst of gunfire at the herd of goats. He does it gladly. Maybe half the magazine is used. The goats leap in all directions or collapse to the ground or limp away then roll down the slope, bleating like children, like old women, and to hear them, you’d think it was a group of people being massacred. Two drag their bodies around with their front legs, and three are lying on their sides, their bodies jerking. The others try to climb the sides of the grassy crater, but the men are kicking them back down, shouting and laughing, then the crippled goats crawl along the ground, braying, and the soldiers laugh even louder. Lieutenant Vrignon, who turned around when he heard the gunfire, watches without understanding. He hangs up his telephone, picks up his sub-machine gun and runs towards the sergent and the two Arabs, who are now holding their heads and crying, and his feet get stuck in ruts and he stumbles sometimes against large tufts of thick grass.
He squats next to the two men and forces them to look at him by lifting up their chins with the barrel of his gun, and he too barks into their faces and hits them with the back of his hand while Castel holds them by the hair.
The interrogation lasts another five minutes. Castel and two soldiers strip the boy naked and force him to stand up, hands on his head, and the two soldiers tease his penis with the points of their daggers, telling him even a bitch in heat wouldn’t want that soft piece of meat. They throw the old man by his hair at his goats and the soldier who did that rubs his hands, grimacing and whining with disgust because a lock of hair is stuck between his fingers, white and bushy and dry as tow, stuck there with sweat.
A few men laugh. Others pretend to look away.
Then the lieutenant whistles as if calling a dog and the men turn to look at him and respond to his signal by reforming the column on the path.
The two shepherds are sitting down, their faces in their hands. The boy has hastily dressed again, shivering as he pulls his old rags tight around him. The remaining goats have come back and are nibbling or sniffing or pushing at them with their muzzles, while bleating.
Daniel comes down from the spur where they had gone to keep a lookout, and behind him he hears Giovanni whispering insults and threats at the officers, the army, this whole fucking war.
“And we let them do it . . . Jesus, can you believe it? They could have killed those two men and what would we have said?”
Daniel does not reply. He doesn’t know what to say. He concentrates on putting his rifle back in its slipcover, then lights a cigarette and offers one to Giovanni.
“I don’t know what we could do. Maybe nothing. Because this is a war and we don’t have any freedom left. We’re not even ourselves anymore.”
“Of course we are! Shit, what do you think? Look around! We’re just the same as before, with the same ideas, the same reactions, aren’t we?”
Daniel meets his eyes: huge, shining and very dark. He would like to be able to think like Giovanni. He’d like to be able to think, full stop.
“I don’t know. Shit, I don’t know anything anymore.”
His friend tosses away his cigarette, loads up his bag, gets tangled up in the straps of his rifle. He looks as though he is about to throw everything to the ground, but Daniel helps him lift up his kit. Around them, the men are blowing and sighing as they hoist up their loads. None of them watches the old man and his son picking up the contents of their bags. A bit of bread, some dates, a few crumbs of cheese. In the transparent air, under a sky of a deep, dense blue, the light picks out each detail like the point of a scalpel. Perhaps no-one can look at that without pain.
They start walking again and the heat silences them and exhaustion rises through their legs, making their footsteps heavy and slow. The path climbs gently, incessantly, subjecting them inch by insidious inch to its rule.
A few hours later, they have a break in the shade of a copse of live oaks and eat their corned beef from the tin, and slices of saucisson with rubbery bread. They drink sparingly from their flasks of water and click their tongues, perhaps to rid their mouths of the briny or metallic taste. The sergent is the only one who remains on his feet, the sling of his sub-machine gun across his chest, the weapon behind his back. He says sitting down makes you weak, and he goes from group to group asking everyone if they are alright, advising them to save their water because there’s none around in this country of sand and dust; it’s like a precious metal, hidden in the depths of the earth. Not like in Indo, he adds, where two days in the humidity made you mouldy like an old bit of bread and where you could fill your flask just by holding it to the end of a giant leaf for five minutes.
Men offer him slices of saucisson and squares of chocolate and he refuses scornfully, content to pick and swallow handfuls of nuts and grains from his pocket. It’s said that no-one has ever seen him eat anything more substantial than that during any march or patrol. That he’s never thirsty; that a single gulp of water is enough for him, where a grunt will down his entire flask; that he runs smoothly on very little because all he carries around with him is the bare minimum: muscles and nerves, basic weaponry, plus a grenade that he keeps on him so that, if the fells ever get him, he will blow himself up—him and the idiot who walks over in triumph, thinking he’s caught a prisoner. It’s also said that he brings in bottles of gin by military courier and that he cuts it with lemonade to give it some flavor and that he gets drunk alone in his hovel, a former pigsty whose first human occupants, in ’56, cleaned it with a flame-thrower before whitewashing it. Those who have been inside talk about a canvas bed, a table and chair, a washbowl perched on a three-legged stool in front of a mirror and a single wooden shelf. Weapons hung on hooks on the wall. And nothing else. Oh . . . yes. Photos of Chinks with those fucking gently sloping hats. And landscapes with yet more Chinks or Gooks, who can tell, slaving away, bent double over the waters of a paddy field.
That is what they say about Sergent Castel. Behind his back, and at quite a distance.
No-one really hears the clicks that echo above them. Castel drops to the ground, the lieutenant yells, “Down! Down!” and Daniel sees Declerck, thrown forward as if kicked, fall head first in the dust then twist his torso, holding his throat to stop the blood from pissing everywhere, but it pours between his writhing fingers, and the giant of the north struggles, groaning, kicking out and rolling over, as if trying to fight off an invisible enemy. Giovanni crawls over to him and uses his dirty scarf to compress his ripped throat, telling him it’ll be alright, don’t worry, we just need to press down on this to make it stop.
Above them, there is a buzzing and the leaves of the trees are torn off and rain down on the men like confetti. The trees wail as their branches are eaten away. Daniel looks around him at the men pinned to the ground, on the verge of burying themselves like insects in the sand in order to avoid the bullets that seek them out but ricochet from rocks or land in the soil, creating little clouds of dust. Giovanni is still lying next to Declerck, one hand pressed to his neck, the blood-soaked scarf in his hand, but the wounded man no longer moves, lying on his back with his eyes and mouth wide open, his fingers tensed and buried in the earth.
The gunfire ceases suddenly. Heads are lifted. Vrignon, the lieutenant, adjusts his hat and goes over to Castel. The two of them gather up the men, tacking quickly, backs bent, between the abandoned bags and guns. A few look away from the sight of Declerck’s corpse, while others can’t stop staring at it. Stupefied. All that blood. They’ve probably never seen so much. A piglet can be bled, squealing, into a bucket, but a man’s blood pours out like red water from a burst pipe, spreading over the dry earth, already absorbed into it, now nothing more than a dark stain. They are pale, jaws slack or tensed, faces shining with a sweat that has not been caused only by the heat.
The lieutenant crouches down, and those who were still standing imitate him, gripping their weapons with sweat-slick fingers. He stares at them without a word, meeting every gaze, wide-eyed or defeated. He is probably waiting for his breathing to slow before he can speak.
Castel is lying on his belly in the undergrowth, looking through binoculars at the side of the hill.
“They’ve got a machine gun,” says the lieutenant. “They’re containing us here, waiting for us to leave; that’s why they’re aiming high and shooting in short bursts. It’s possible they’ve got another position a bit further on so they can catch us from both sides. Evidently they don’t have a mortar, otherwise we’d all be dead, and we’re not going to wait till one arrives, if it happens to be on its way. Alright, so we’ve lost one. They got him by pure chance. It could have been any of us, O.K.? I don’t want to lose anyone else. What I want is for us to get out of here without any injuries. And we’re not going to let those sons of bitches get away with it—we’re going to kill a few of them, so at least Declerck won’t have died for nothing. Understood? So stop crawling around like cockroaches and start acting like soldiers again.”
The men mutter and nod, slowly getting up. Giovanni puts his blood-covered hands in the dust and wipes them on his trousers. Daniel meets his vacant gaze that then looks away, eyes lost in the deathly pallor of his face.
The sergent gets to his feet. They all stare at him in terror, instinctively cringing.
“Lieutenant, let me reconnoitre. We should be able to find that machine gun. I think I know where they were shooting from.”
Vrignon looks up at him, glances around at the men sitting in the shade and shakes his head. Aggrieved or resigned.
“O.K. I’ll call the battalion to let them know.”
“Two men with me to see where they are,” says Castel. “You can cover us from here. Short bursts—save the ammunition. We don’t know how long we’ll have to stay here. Pauly and Normand. Delbos, you take your Garand. Those guys up there are not made of cardboard—you need a bull’s-eye. Got it? Leave your bags. Just take your gun and some grenades. Come on, let’s get moving!”
When he hears his name, Daniel shivers and stands up at the same time as the other two, slowly, then removes the rifle from its slipcover and takes three magazines. As soon as he leaves the shade, the sun beats down on his shoulders, trying to force him to the ground. Daniel follows Castel, who climbs up through the thicket of trees, emerging from their cover to throw himself behind a rock. The four of them find themselves on their knees and the covering fire starts up. The hillside shakes, with clouds of dust, shards of rock, fragments of branches and leaves sent flying by the impact of the bullets.
They start climbing again on all fours, hidden by the thick, dry underbrush that rustles as they move through it and scratches at their faces and arms. Daniel is just behind Castel, who goes quickly, but he finds himself sliding over the stones as they roll beneath his shoes, as if he was running on a carpet of marbles. He’s short of breath and the burning he can feel in his legs seems to be radiating from his very bones, cooking his muscles from inside. He can hear the two others, Pauly and Normand, panting behind him. They too skid and slip, and swear in whispers.
The gunshots come more sporadically. The platoon’s machine gun must have been placed in a good position, because they can hear it more loudly now. Above them, the fells fire at random but they seem invisible. Nothing moves apart from the scraps of foliage torn from the trees by bullets and the puffs of dust raised by their impact. It looks as if the hill itself is answering back to the shots. A volley of bullets hisses past over their heads and Daniel hears Pauly yell and fall heavily and groan, “I’m hit! Shit, boys, they got me, those fuckers!,” so he goes back and crouches next to the wounded man while Normand fires his sub-machine gun in every direction, staring at the bead, as if the fellaghas might appear from anywhere to finish them off.
“Where does it hurt? Fuck, I can’t see anything!”
Pauly pants and moans. His eyes roll back in terror.
“My back,” he manages to say. “At the top.”
Daniel pulls him towards him so he can turn him onto his side, and that is when he sees the slash in the battledress jacket and beneath that the bloodstained undershirt and beneath that a smear of blood, like a sort of burn. He touches the skin around it, feeling only the bulge of a rib.
“It’s nothing. Just a scratch. It’s bleeding a bit, but that’s all.”
“Bollocks to that! I get hit by a bullet and you give me that shit!”
Daniel feels himself pushed aside and falls on his ass. Castel is already leaning over Pauly.
“Show me. What have you got?”
He makes him lie face down and examines the wound.
“This is nothing, you prick. Another centimeter and it would have hit your spine, but you’ve got nothing worse than a cracked rib, so stop fucking whining. Stay here and don’t move. We’ll pick you up on our way back. And shut your mouth, you understand? Normand, take his magazines and let’s go. Their machine gun’s over there, in that thicket. We’re going to take it out.”
He leaves, with Daniel and Normand following. Bent double, noses to the ground, sucking up dust. The sergent lies down behind a mound of earth. He passes Daniel his binoculars.
“Look over there. That pointed tree higher up. Below that. You see the barrel sticking out? The leaves move sometimes too. Wait until they fire again.”
Not two hundred meters away. Dense undergrowth below live oaks and junipers. Daniel can see nothing but the leaves shining brightly in the sun, motionless. Nothing moves or even shivers.
“You don’t see anything?”
The sergent is whispering into his ear. Daniel props himself up on his elbows, holds his breath. He sees the smoke before he hears the crackle of gunfire.
Now he can make out a few centimeters of the barrel and part of the tripod. He wonders how he didn’t notice it earlier. He doesn’t have enough saliva to speak: his dry mouth, lined with dust, emits only a sort of choking noise. He thinks about his two flasks of water, waiting for him down below, in the shade. Looking for the shooter, he notices the slightest tremble in the rough, stiff foliage that rarely moves in the breeze. His forearms tremble. His back and his shoulders are burning, and the collar of his jacket scratches the back of his neck, which is covered in sweat. He searches the depths of the thicket for a lighter mark, a bit of skin, a circle of light sliding over a face.
Suddenly he distinguishes the shape of a face, unmoving, above the firing axis of the machine gun.
Rifle. Adjust the scope. He’s lost his target: his field of vision is trembling too much.
“Here. Take a drink, and afterwards blow his head off.”
He does not remember ever having swallowed anything better than this lukewarm, dirty water. He manages to say thanks and returns to a firing position, moves slightly to the side, finds a better support.
The man is still there, in the shadow of the undergrowth, immobile at his machine gun. He can see him better now. Face leaning forward, eyes lowered perhaps, as if he’s praying. He is surprised by the power of this image. This profile framed by an emerald and black blur, sparkling in the sunlight. Depth and contrast.
Daniel centers him in the eyepiece, lifts it a little to compensate for the fall of the trajectory and holds his breath again. For ten or fifteen seconds he can feel nothing but a drop of sweat tickling his skin as it runs from his temple down to his cheek. And in the scope he sees the man lying flat and with his other eye the dark green thicket where he lies shining in the blazing sun.
Deafened by the detonation. His shoulder absorbs the shock. In the scope he can no longer see anything, then he finds the mouth of the machine gun again, searches for the figure of the gunner.
Castel scans the bushes with his binoculars.
“I saw something move. You got him.”
He picks up the walkie-talkie and speaks to the lieutenant.
“We got him. Move now before they replace him. I’m going to check it out.”
Daniel continues staring at the undergrowth. He cannot take his eyes off the place where he saw that immobile face. Perhaps he was already dead, he thinks, and at the same time he half expects him to reappear. The sergent tugs at his sleeve.
“Come on, let’s go. Stay three meters below me.” Then, to Normand, he orders: “You—find some shelter for Pauly.”
“You’re not going to wait for the others?”
“What others? They’re coming, the others. Don’t worry. Our orders are to comb the ground. There are choppers coming.”
They run in zigzags through a dense thicket of low bushes that cling to the canvas of their trousers as they go, hundreds of skeletal fingers trying to hold them back. The sun is ahead of them, laying a burning hand on their chests, licking their faces like a furnace. Lower down, the platoon has split into three groups and is climbing towards them. Daniel is distracted by the clinking of his straps as he runs. He does not feel anything, neither fatigue nor fear. He has probably just killed a man and he is running towards his corpse without thinking about anything. Least of all death.
“Look up there!” the sergent shouts. “Look at those cunts running away!”
Daniel notices bushes shaking in all directions near the ridge line. Castel empties a magazine at this movement while yelling insults at the retreating rebels. He kneels down to reload his submachine gun.
“Come over here,” he says. “Let’s see what you got.”
They enter the undergrowth, training their guns all around in the hot darkness that surrounds them and Daniel sees the man’s body, lying on its side. The top of his jacket is soaked with blood. Daniel slowly approaches to see where he hit him. He has no cheek or jaw left. Something twisted and bloody is hanging from his face.
“Watch it,” Castel whispers. “They might have booby-trapped it.”
Daniel turns towards him, incredulous.
“With a grenade underneath. Pin out, just the lever supported. You move the body and it blows your head off. I’ll go. Follow me.”
Castel straddles the man, crouching down and slowly passing his hand under his legs, under his torso. Just as he stands up to say something, the gunner makes a rattling noise and his legs move. Castel jumps backwards, catching hold of a branch and swearing.
“Fuck, he’s not dead!”
Daniel starts to tremble. He points his gun at the wounded man’s head, but he feels as if his arms are incapable of any movement except for this trembling that runs from his shoulders to his hands.
The sergent grabs the man’s shirt and lifts him up, leaning his back against a tree trunk. The man half opens his eyes, moves his head slightly. The torn-away part of his face drips blood. He groans, tries to speak.
Daniel moves closer.
“Will he make it?”
Castel looks up at him, surprised, then shrugs.
“No. Impossible. Have you seen him? It took off half his face.”
“You can repair that kind of thing though, can’t you?”
“Yeah, right. I’ll call the surgeon and we’ll book him a nice room in a hospital, with a pretty nurse to jerk him off. Give me a fucking break! He’s going to die, simple as. One of our men got killed back there, for fuck’s sake. What more do you need? What if it turns out this guy shot him? You’re not going to pin a medal to his rotting corpse, are you? This is war, lad, you don’t seem to have figured that out yet. We didn’t do all this just so he could pull through. He doesn’t even know he’s dead already. He’s trying to speak. Maybe cos he can’t shut his mouth anymore.”
Castel laughs silently at his own witticism. Then he says nothing and stares at the man, who is breathing feebly, head leaning to the side, eyes half closed. They hear the tramping of the patrol moving closer and the voice of the lieutenant asking: “So? Where are we?”
The sergent loads his sub-machine gun and fires three bullets into the man on the ground. His body jumps at each impact and rolls over onto its side. Daniel would like to scream in this racket and then in the silence that follows, but his throat remains knotted, rough as rope.
“Any other stupid ideas you want to share? You started the work, I finished it. Don’t tell me you only shot at him earlier to scare him off, right? Don’t tell me you practice shooting every day to impress the birds at the fair when you’ve gone back to your miserable hometown. No-one forced you to do that. You were really happy when the lieutenant gave you the Garand, and you looked after it the way you look after your own balls. So? I’m not interested in your fucking moods. You understand?”
A caporal arrives, along with a dozen men, all out of breath, while the others continue climbing the slope. He glances casually at the corpse then leans over the machine gun to examine it.
“Russki-made,” says the sergent. “Serious shit. This thing never jams and it’s accurate. The Vietnamese nailed us easily with those. But they knew how to fight, not like these fellouze bastards.”
The men push the corpse with their feet or with the barrels of their guns like a bunch of monkeys who don’t understand what death is. Some of them hiss insults then stand around, without moving, perhaps taking advantage of the shade.
“It was Delbos who got him,” says the sergent. “He’ll pay for his round when we get back.”
The others congratulate him. Pat him on the back, tell him well done for avenging Declerck.
“You see? In war we’re all the same, when it comes down to it . . . Yesterday you almost got into a scrap with him, and today you shoot the son of a bitch who killed him.”
The man who says this, his face close to Daniel’s, eyes staring into his eyes, is called Dumas, or Duprat—Daniel can’t remember. He stinks of sweat and rotten teeth, and his eyes appear by turns battered and wide open, which Daniel thinks gives him the twisted, unpredictable look of a dangerous madman, so he wrestles free from his grip and promises everyone a drink, and the mere idea that cold liquid might fill his mouth and flow down his throat suddenly feels like a daydream, confusing his mind so completely that he has to walk out into the sunlight to rid himself of it. He wipes the sweat and dust from his face and looks up at the summit of the hill, where the men are traipsing, and above it the sky is so blue it looks hard, like the bottom of a plate that has just come out of a kiln.
He joins the others as they travel across the ridge line, looking out for Giovanni without finding him. One of the Parisians, Gérard, tells him that the lieutenant ordered Giovanni and another soldier to stay behind with Declerck’s body, and to look after the bags too, because they were just carrying out a quick reconnaissance mission before going back. The ambush mission was cancelled. Choppers cancelled too, so no combing of the area. Apparently there was going to be a big operation in the coming days.
“So I heard you got the shooter?”
“Yeah, I got him. I didn’t kill him, but I got him.”
The Parisian doesn’t understand.
“He was still alive when we got there. A bit of a mess, but alive. It was Castel who finished him off.”
“He did that?”
“I started, he finished.”
“Fuck. But all the same . . .”
Daniel stops to light a cigarette, letting the column leave him behind, and as he starts walking again he tries to put his mind back in working order. Eyes to the ground, he does not notice the red-soiled valley that stretches out below him to the east, studded with rocky outcrops like teeth in the mouth of a monster. He tries to recollect the face of the man he shot, but the memory fades as soon as the image forms in his mind and he is left with only the vision of the corpse on the ground and the men prodding it with their boots.
For two hours they patrol the other side of the hill and find nothing, vainly scanning the horizon from various high points and searching bushes, but all that ever emerges is the odd snake, which they crush with the butt of a rifle. And when the lieutenant yells at them to be quiet, the silence covers them like a veil, heavy and oppressive, and they find themselves alone, guns hanging from their hands in this empty land where even the southerly wind seems to have fled.
In the trucks, on the way back to their quarters, they say nothing, worn out, heat-dazed, suffocated by the exhaust fumes from the vehicle jolting along in front of them, black smoke pouring from its asshole in an endless flood of diarrhea, wheels raising tons of dust. They protect themselves by wrapping their large scarves around their faces, which makes them look like Tuaregs or the Mujahideen, as if this war were forcing them to resemble their enemy.
Night falls almost as soon as they enter the command post. They jump heavily from the trucks, then drag themselves over to their quarters, shaking the dust from their clothes with exaggerated exclamations.
Daniel looks everywhere for Giovanni, finally finding him in the shack that serves as an infirmary, helping to wash Declerck’s barechested corpse, which lies, imposingly, on a trestle table. It seems to Daniel that, at this moment, the dead man occupies all the space in the room, making it hard for anyone to move around him. The corpse is supposed to be taken to town by jeep tomorrow morning. It will need an escort—half-track and all that crap—because the thirty-kilometer trip there is infamously hairy. The nurse speaks to him without looking up from what he’s doing, softly wiping the ragged edges of the bullet’s exit wound with a cloth.
“Before he starts stinking,” the man explains. “In this heat.”
Daniel seeks out Giovanni’s eyes, but his friend remains focused on his task, holding a bowl full of brownish, muddy water with blood clots floating in it. So he watches Giovanni taking care of the corpse, the same man he wanted to kill just yesterday, removing his dirty shirt, delicately cleaning his white, marbled skin with a flannel, smoothing back his dust-grey hair. He watches this dead man, whose ignorant hatred had seemed to drive him through life, this brute whose family could say, as they mourned, that he was shot in the back by those Arab dogs when he wasn’t hurting anyone. His view of this pale, muscular body is strangely superimposed on the image of the scrawny, copper-skinned machine-gunner he shot that afternoon, and he feels as if he has walked on one of those landmines they’re always warning you about, that explodes only when you remove your foot from it to take the next step. And he thinks the only way of escaping it is to jump as far ahead as possible. To end up in pieces rather than dying on the spot.
21 Slang term for fellaghas, another word for the armed Algerian nationalists.
22 “J’attendrai” was a popular French song recorded by Rina Ketty in 1938. The quoted lyric means “I will always wait for your return.”
23 A toast to the 1905 French law separating church and state.
24 The F.L.N. is the Algerian National Liberation Front. Katiba is the Arab word for a battalion or company of rebel soldiers.
25 “Man is at sea. A sailor since childhood, / He’s been battling hard against dark chance. / In rain or squalls he must go out, he must leave . . .”
26 From Louis Aragon’s poem, “Est-ce ainsi que les hommes vivent?” (“Is This How Men Live?”). These lines can be translated as: “It was an unreasonable time / We had put the dead on the table / We saw wolves as dogs / Everything changed pole and shoulder / Was the play funny or not? / If I didn’t play my role well / That’s because I didn’t understand it at all.”
27 The Communist Party newspaper in France, at the time.
28 American-made rifle, equipped with a scope, sometimes used by snipers during the Algerian war.