A Tree on Fire

Chapter Twenty-eight

The woman came in and set down his tray of chickpeas and mutton, dates and sheep’s milk. He was craven and blind with hunger, but would vomit if he touched it. The smell of real food tormented him. He scooped something from the first dish. The woman smiled, and shuffled out. Those who visited him did not wear veils. Being sick, he was inhuman, or a child. The elder woman had a sleek plump face, thick lips and brown eyes that looked with a smile at every dish to see if he had eaten. Ragged trousers showed under her skirts, drawn in tight to her brown calves. There were gold teeth in her mouth. She wore a kerchief on her head. He ignored her out of physical weakness. The fatigue of observing these small points forced his eyes to close. She had three daughters, one who was sixteen, slim, pallid and consumptive, the first one out as if her role of leading the other and the first shock of world air had been too much for her, wilting the forceful spirit and turning it in on its own weakness. She never smiled, but burned her way by him smelling of spice as she picked up his slops or the colourless camelhair blanket that had fallen on the floor. She was white and gaunt — finished. He’d known a girl once who worked in a tobacco factory and one day went to a sanatorium never to be seen again. She had the same impermanent, brittle, stern expression. Her breath went straight to heaven, they said. The mother bullied her, but only enough to prove to the girl that she wasn’t ill enough to die. To stop bullying would frighten her. The girl was taller than her mother by a foot.

He was a casualty, kaput, unable to stand or eat, suspended above every sensation he’d ever known, and wondering whether he’d been left here to die. The world was divided into those who lived with their mouths open, and those who went with them closed. You saw the latter all over the place, the permanent open-mouths who were naive and unselfquestioning, the gums of all countries, John and Audrey Gum hand-in-hand in a corner of the sunless snug with never a care in the world or a word between them. He’d known many, but never for more than a few minutes at a time. He closed his mouth.

His watch had gone, and he never felt anyone take it. It was an act of mercy to be relieved of time, hours of revolution, days of sickness, weeks of hope. In this house all comers offered a hand to be shaken, whether they knew you already or not, as if you had just met in the middle of a wilderness, even though you’d touched hands a dozen times before with a smile and only a shade of recognition. It needed many greetings to establish friendship. What use was a watch among such people? No acquaintance is ever finally made, no friendship killed unless you die of wounds or your liver dries up. They brought him lemon syrup every time he opened his eyes. The consumptive girl poured yellow thick fluid into a cup and filled it with water from a beige earthen jar. He gulped it half-way and she refilled it. Another great swallow and in poured more water until the syrup lost all taste. The well was deep, the water good, not even reminding him of the buckets that dragged it up. She belonged to people who lived before the invention of the smile. It never distorted her thin face and pale straight lips. She would not touch him or get too close, or let her gaudy cinnamon-smelling dress swing near. He smiled out of weakness because he could not talk, having come back along a tunnel towards daylight and now hanging onto the solid ledge at the entrance as if he were made of straw and had no strength, clinging till he became solid and his force returned so that he could crawl away over the level and open earth.

He was naked under the blankets, and as far as he knew owned nothing except twenty-four hours of half-sleep every day. He was a landed and spiritual proprietor of sleep, owning sleep, all of it, forests and gardens of sleep, and the will to occupy a million square miles of wilderness, to descend from the tree of fire to the nether zones of ice and guts, down into twisting tripes and corridors of graven dream. It was nothing but memory, pure vicious iridescent memory, the primal slime of the past and his parents’ past waiting to pull him in by neck and leg, hair and teeth, into the heat of midday and the sweat of the afternoon pall.

The hour before dawn was deceptively cool, when he felt he could stand up and walk out of the house, holding onto its outer wall perhaps, then by stick and guile make his way across the hills. He would be discovered and shot down, or the sun would shake him into leaf and powder. He lay like a hollow stone. Weakness made him panic, as if that were the permanent and final state of his life till death caught him secretly while fast asleep. The one escape seemed to get up and walk, crawl, either live or die, but not trough down into this panic wash of debility. For a time it made him loathe people, every fit person he saw coming into his room. But beneath his weakness he knew that this was wrong, that he should not run out and die alone, and that behind his tissue and spiritual inanition was a faint determination to survive. There was nothing to do but wait, drink the vile and bitter herbs, the dust-coated pills brought from God knew where and at what cost, and hope that the trick of life would work. He put his thumb on a large red ant to squash it, but it bit his flesh before he could find the force to press down. The earthen walls were bare, blemished in spite of the planing effect of use, breath and smoke. The smell of kerosene and burning oil came in at dusk from the next room, filtering around the edges of sacking hung in the archway. All he wanted was to drink and sleep, but no water would douse his fever, and no sleep refill his veins with desire and strength.

Pamphlets and papers in French were put beside him on the floor by these women who were fiercer at heart and even more revolutionary than the men. But he wasn’t bored at the endless days drifting by, not even by the thought that he might be a burden on those who looked after him. He seemed to be taking weeks of their priceless hospitality, but only ten days went by before he began to wake from his illness and notice his room and the people who cared for him.

One of the leaflets he picked up, yellow paper and large pockmarked print, described the big attack he had taken part in, telling how it came as an astonishing surprise to the enemy who, being so far south and in such open country, had always considered themselves safe. Frank could not understand how they had been taken unawares. Drawing towards the town on the previous days and nights all had seemed confused and obvious. Those who had taken part were referred to as ‘heroic soldiers’ — ‘Les heroïques soldats luttant contre le légionnaire et le mercenaire, les combattants loyaux luttant contre le napalm …’ — who had destroyed seven transport-planes and damaged ten others, and caused heavy losses to the enemy. The country was denuded, so no one had thought to suspect or look. The beige flat-topped hills towards the town and oasis had crawled with hundreds of men, brown and olive patches that from the air may have appeared like clumps of alfalfa grass or vegetation that a chance shower had drawn up from the baking flats. No plane had flown over low enough, and no binoculars from road or outposts had penetrated the sage-green and purple hills. They lay in their private ovens for the common good, the Algerian Moudjahid risking a daytime death-trap in order to spring down at dusk and do with rifles and grenades what should only in all sanity be attempted with mortars and artillery. The planes went up like jellyfish laden with gasoline, white lights bursting the crab-exterior of wings and wheels. The vague scuffling under a vast umbrella of stars and noise portrayed nothing glorious, but the leaflet turned it into an inspired strike for independence, and it needed no poet to put such phrases together, but only the experience of having been part of it for the fine words to dominate your fibres forever.

He could claim no share or glory, because he was exhausted and sick, and because he had so far survived. Dozens had been left behind, out of the oven and into death, and scores more had been killed in the organised rattisages of subsequent days. The hunt was always on, and any time the sackcloth might be pushed aside and show the automatic rifle of some para or legionnaire. He was old enough to know that he could worry about that when it happened. Eyes burned through an inch of grey stubble hiding his emaciation. A shirt of white and charcoal stripes had just been given him, loose and with long sleeves, and his khaki shirt and trousers lay newly-washed on the floor ready for when he was able to get up one night and walk away.

The air was close, and smells hung thick from his morning ablutions. A cock scraped out its cry beyond walls and doors where a blue-white sun smothered the hills. By thinking of it, he could feel it, and the fear of it no longer daunted or pushed him back into sleep as a defence against the recollection of something dangerous. He wanted to leave at no matter what risk. A scorpion lay flat and literate on the wall, an analphabetic insect shaping itself in the first clear letter of the world, grey lines with grey callipers and an aerial sting-tail which looked as if it came from a big family and was a long way from home. He reached for some paper and crushed it before it had time to kill itself. It was an easy enemy, that you could see. Its twin-brother had turned into a globe of sweat, and broke into a run down his face. The greatest heat, when you were lying in bed, came at five in the afternoon, with the sun on its first slow pull away from your part of the earth, collected humours of the day falling into its track, and an intense pitch of fiery dampness turning his shirt into a foul dishrag without one muscle moving.

He read the papers, eyes close in the dim light. In earlier campaigns Azrou had been burned, Nahra flattened, the people of Laghouat wiped out. Massacre and destruction had been poured onto them, oil into flames by the self-conscious madmen of Europe, gaolers and bullies and scum-soldiers who perpetrated atrocities they would never mention to their grandchildren who would sit on their knees when they became kindly old men. They indulged in frenetic cruelties of ‘pacification’, they humiliated, exploited, butchered wherever they went. Behind them came the technicians and tillers of soil, roadmakers and administrators, idealists who did even dirtier work because they believed it was good, or were glad to have a career and servants they would never have achieved in their own country. But after a hundred and twenty years the Algerians had finally risen, and would not be put down. He found his friends proud and competent, dedicated and amiable, endlessly suffering and brave. ‘Le Moudjahid! he is the soldier of the FLN, the political militant, the contact-man, the shepherd, the herdsman, the schoolchildren who go on strike in Algiers and Oran, the man who fights by sabotage, the student who joins the men in the hills, the man or woman who hands out leaflets, the poorest peasant who, with his wife and family, can only suffer and hope. The Moudjahid is the combined effort of a whole people guided by the FLN and having but one idea: the independence of their country.

‘The Moudjahid is the one who cuts telegraph-wires, derails a train, burns down the house of the colonialist farmer. Every peaceful means to free ourselves from colonialism has been tried, and all that is left is to take up arms in order to recover liberty and independence. The Moudjahid is in the mountains and valleys; in every town and village he is the heroic soldier fighting against the mercenary and the legionnaire. Our wounded bleed to death or succumb under torture, perish by arbitrary justice, die protecting women and orphans. But the virtues and moral worth of the freedom-fighter are an indivisible part of the Algerian Revolution. Such qualities will lead us to victory, because true dignity and spiritual greatness are the first attributes of this fight without mercy, this fight to the death in which nevertheless we must not lose our sense of humanity, so that in the future we can remember our sufferings and in so doing recover our tenderness, affection and sensibility in order to build a free and democratic country for the people.

‘The occupying powers have tried to divide the Algerian people among themselves, separate brother from brother, but they can never succeed. The people are united and determined to triumph in this war of liberation. Our people will confound and defeat the enemy: they are the creative force, the inspiration and faith of our fight. The secret of our success resides in the support of the people. The Moudjahid is a citizen-soldier face to face with a conscript who does not wish to die for something in which he has no belief. The Moudjahid has a social duty, and a clean conscience, and though he is willing to die for these ideals, the fear and thought of death never for a moment enters into his soul.

‘Small groups yesterday have become a regular army today, developing a power of offensive, gathering their war material, and improving their tactical skill. Faced with an enemy bent on genocide the Algerian army has rapidly reorganised. The Moudjahid in uniform operates in the mountains and wilderness. The Moussebelines — those without uniform — operate in the towns and villages, accomplish their missions in the streets, in cafés, cinemas, on the roads, in public gardens. They hunt down informers and torturers. They destroy police stations and guard-posts. They transport guns and ammunition, hide and look after the wounded, act as guides and liaison runners, report on the movements of the enemy. They draw the enemy into ambushes, form scout guards around our halting-places. The enemy cannot sleep or rest. He can never remain calm, or forget that we are there. Faced with the young and old, people of the towns, peasants of the countryside, students and workmen, all those who make up the FLN the enemy has the whole country against him. The colonialist hordes continue their savage repressions against unarmed people, their extortions and pillage, and remain a devastating force. But they will be met by the serene courage of the Algerian Moudjahid. In combat he always stays within the limits of the laws of war. He must respect the human being, the plants and crops, animals of the field and all those works necessary to the wellbeing of the population. As well as fighting the enemy he must assist the people for whom he is fighting. He must help them in their misery and hunger, ignorance and illiteracy.’

Daylight was hot, darkness was hot. He could move, read, think. When the girl came in, he asked for water: ‘Fish ’andukum môya?’

‘Aho el-môya’ — giving him a cupsized earthbowl of warm liquid. He spread it over his face. Using the lid of a small tin for a mirror he pulled his razor painfully up and down the long bristles. She watched from the doorway, arms folded at waist level. The face in the tin was distant and indistinct, as if behind a waterfall, but the image gave him the assurance to shave by touch and not butcher himself. The more he scraped the more polished seemed the tin. With the bristles off, matted over the surface of the water like iron filings, his face was smaller but not so bony as he’d thought it would be. He expected her to smile but she didn’t, so his ego was satisfied by not being pandered to. Her feet made no noise, and only her clothes moved when she took up the water and went. Love came with two faces, usually that of the great destroyer, rage and maggot-fire hiding behind the smile of the all-embracing womb of sweetness that tried to get you. Love destroyed your will, the soft evil old-fashioned swooning love that one had read and been told about, that froze the bowels and cooked the heart, the two-way facing foxy tearabout let loose in you by some far back ancestral parcel of yourself trying to do you in at the crucial moment or turning-point of your life. It was a sort of love you had to say goodbye to, drop dead to, get off my back love to, without losing your decency and self-respect, and your responsibility to others. Sweat poured out of you like thought; thought was salt and sweat in contradistinction to snot and shit. Blood wasn’t thought, but disaster, and he’d seen enough spilled and splashed, grey and yellow flesh flashing maggoty under the sun and inking the rocks, death-pits and treegallows, scorched teeth and blancoed bone to last forever. The love all knew about was zither strings on which your enemies played, the love of evil that they got you to stave off by the way you spent your money, the whole sticktwisted righthanded idealism of love me and nothing more, love your father, mother, sweetheart, wife, children, country, king and soil, the sky turned blind when it laughed behind your back, a black patch over the H-bomb mushroom exploding while you groped in the dark and called it love, romantic semantic schizoid psychic platonic tectonic bucolic rancid fervid fetid bubonic love, the love that locks you deep in the dungeon of your putrescent silted soul. Swim up like a fish to the red-hot sands of the desert, and set off through your own death towards life. It’s a gamble in which no one wins but which those who take may win through, though at the moment he didn’t see how he’d ever get beyond this cellar under the sky.

If he asked himself what was to be done, the only answer that came without thought and therefore truly was to stand up, to walk, to leave the tunnel of malaise and fight to the pinhead spotlight of sickness, resume his trek over rubble and sand and get to the mountains and maybe catch another glimpse of the sea before he croaked. If the dead love, the rotten love, the western love pulled out of you there was nothing left, except to lie for weeks in a hole in the ground hugging the bit of life still somehow tucked under your skin. What you had left, at this low pitch, was the will to get on your legs and move your arms to fight or build, walk, march, kill if anybody tried to stop you doing these things. When the foul and useless love you had been conditioned to accept by a finished and rotten society dead in its tracks had died, and you knew that to love only one person out of all others in the world, and be yourself loved by someone else out of all the others in the world was wrong in every sense, then you began to experience a new warmth of life, a responsible manifold feeling towards all others and not just one. The love of one was the love of death and of the devil. The love of all was a respect for creation. You could not love only one person in the desert, because if you did you and everyone would perish. There was a love in which the phallus dominated all else, the boss and operating member tyrannising over everything you did or wanted to do. The other love was controlled by the hands that helped, taught, built and if necessary fought. The phallus could not be ignored, but neither could it be allowed to dominate, for such a dominion was destruction leading you to the sinkpots and gutters of the earth, dropping you and everyone through to the cloacae of oblivion. You came a long way to find simple truths, too far on foot over the earth, too far into the labyrinthine depths of your own flesh and blood, and yet never far enough, never to the extreme limits that the spirit can endure. No one else can live for you, neither the servants nor the telly nor books, nor any yarnspinner back and blighted from the fantastic pot-zones of heaven and earth. You had to go yourself, right in, right down, through the eye of a needle and into many mansions, queer street and rotton row, shit creek and blind alley. No one could go for you or do for you. The light burned in your forehead and shone right in front, and if the earth and coal fell it fell on you, with no one to blame but yourself and nothing to lose but yourself. Only your own skull was crushed, your own light stamped out, and since you didn’t know anything about it nothing would hereafter matter.

The silent cinnamon glow of this tall young woman walking in and out day after day put her softly withdrawing life into him, a spirit and blood transfusion taking place with neither of them knowing it until it was too late. Towards the end, after Mokhtar had spoken about arrangements to get him to the base zones of the Kabylie Mountains, and when he was walking round the room ten and fifty times a day to build the fibres back into his legs, he sensed the decline of her strength, though she did not walk more slowly or breathe heavily and with pain. She lived on by gentleness and will, but her eyes grew lighter, burned intensely when they were turned away from his, and when he looked at them before she realised he had seen her. They were grey-green, small and almost closed, as if to see better in the dim light and save what life remained in them.

He stamped on his love for her. He held her hand a moment on the night he went away. Her fingers were thin and cold, and she muttered something in Arabic in reply to his few words of French. He felt that neither had understood the other’s speech, and did not need to.

Chapter Twenty-nine

Sand blew against the back of his head, hot grains stinging through his hair. Hat in hand, he walked along, for the moment unarmed, feet scuffling away the last two hundred miles to mountains and sea. Thin, grit-choked alfalfa grass stretched all around and up to the heights which now had trees on them. He was glad that the hot wind was coming from behind. Walking into it, the black mood would have sent him mad. They had been three days on the march, a guide in front and a Moudjahid soldier behind so that he began to feel like a prisoner. ‘You are going away,’ Mokhtar said. ‘Snow for the winter, perhaps a sea-cruise to Egypt. Everything is arranged along the route. No more fighting.’

‘Let the desert bloom,’ he said, pissing on the sand, ‘and lizards drown in it.’ The heat of life was diminishing as they sat down to eat, three points of a well-spaced triangle, mobile rag-bundles resting before dusk and a few more miles into darkness. The triangle was deformed by surrounding huge rocks, and when the thin plane whistle was heard they hugged the ground and spread grey cloaks over themselves to become part of the outcrop and invisible. His moving shadow marked out the land, patterning much of it, robbing the sun as he walked of direct touches of the earth. He took his shadow with him, he in a straight line as it slowly shifted round all points of the compass. At night as he lay it was held down firmly so that it wouldn’t walk away unawares and leave him naked and incomplete. He was no longer on the run, out to escape from others and himself. Yet he felt particularly insignificant under the great sky.

Another ten days and, if he didn’t perish from bullets or napalm, he would be in the mountains. He was feeling his way towards some new phase at last, but could not fix clearly in his mind what it was because he felt no guarantee of getting there. He went on without hope, but with strength and intent matching together. Thought played no great part in his plan. The only way he could prove to himself that he was alive was to become dead. They moved, met nomads at dawn, ate beans and mutton, chickpeas and crackling bread, figs and dates. They drank tea. Dawn was like dusk: rose, rose, O Rose thou art sick. He watched it settling on the next range of flowing green-armed hills. Which Rose was that? Poor Rose. What disease did she have, this female day you walked across. Who could tell, till the sun came up? If she was sick, she was sick, and that was that. She’d either get better or get dead. He’d been dead, and proved he was alive — to himself. Each day began this way, the day that might on a whim change back into dusk and die like the night. A breath of wind came, rose turning to sunflower-yellow, warming a little out of the sun’s nostrils. Far off on his left-hand was the way they were going, and it seemed no great pull to him. He picked up a stone, weighed it and let it drop. He spat on it, the smell of his night-sweat wafting around him. The guide blew his snot, and knelt on the ground in the same direction. Yet he wanted to go on, to reach the bitter fighting of the north. He had not quite died. He felt cheated. The world owed him a death, hadn’t yet paid its debt to him. He was clear, free, easier than he’d ever been, but wasn’t there another land still to be crossed? He was a believer as only an unbeliever could be, a believer in the materialist future who found his life hard after a mere few days out of the soft, warm acid-bath of death. The sun was shining and the wind was light, walking was effortless, but the familiar weight had not returned to his heart. Belief in the future one-way track of the world was not heavy enough. He did not feel serious or grim, and the great horizon made fun of his new uneasiness concerning it.

They hid among the rocks while a man on a donkey went by wearing a ragged striped shirt and baggy pantaloons. No one was trusted, not even friends. When face and limbs were pressed on to the earth, he felt more responsibility to the ideas he was trekking and fighting for. Pepperdust, crushed insects, salt stone and grass-juice were eating his own spit and sweat. The soldier passed him a half-smoked cigarette, and after a few draws he slid it back. A large white bird with black wingtips and yellow beak flew low, perched on a rock for a closer look, then lifted vertically as if yanked on an invisible wire. He did not like such birds, buzzards who were slaves to rotting flesh, chained to the dying, and the wounded who staggered along. They were part of the earth yet not of it, preying on it and waiting to taste flesh spiced by the spirit that had seasoned it. They reminded him of people who fed gluttonously off the meat and salt of the earth, who breathed in death as their spiritual seasoning and indulged in glamourised flights to heaven that made them feel superior and safe, and were set apart from struggle and a real knowledge of machinery and bread. From above they saw a pall of smoke drifting beautifully, but from below a tree was on fire with tortured trunk and writhing leaves, cellophane flames spreading and bursting towards cooler air. On the ground you walk away to get out of range, not fly towards it for a better view. Smoke blinds, but flame burns off a layer of your flesh, frightens you into awe when its blackened ruin smoulders and the mooncircle of ash is all that’s left. Buzzards fly towards free meat and dreams, romance unstriven for and found in far off paradisal places — not crawled towards with sweat and effort, bloody feet, scabs, burning eyes, black nostrils.

In the wilderness you threw stones at such birds — and never hit them. Eyes looked, and their beaks cremated you. When you died they devoured your dead meat, divided it among a tribe, flew off with you in their several bellies towards the sun. It seemed like a bad wish fulfilled, going away from the earth. Maybe the bird would fall dead over the sea and your flesh sink back to the fishes. Perhaps a soldier shot them through the belly and so you were killed twice in the same way — the worms getting you in the end. Your flesh was at many mercies, but perhaps it was immortal after it was dead.

A village was clear of the French, and they entered in the afternoon. Small brown donkeys stood in the shadows of crumbling houses. He walked slowly. A middle-aged man in flowing white, with a thin face and sardonic mouth led them through a flock of long-haired black and white goats. Sheep and mules were mixing freely by a well. They could not stay. A French column was coming from the east, and woman and children were walking mutely to the hills they had just left. After eating, Frank strolled among the houses. He was offered tea, which he accepted. A twelve-year-old girl with no hands waved her stumps and asked for money. He laid a coin on the red withered skin of her wrist. She smiled from a long, rather fleshy face that seemed to have no settled features, as if she had just come out of a bitter snowstorm and was still cold from it.

They hadn’t slept for two days, treading over miles of ground where the land was comparatively quiet. A Peugeot station-wagon took them a pre-arranged fifty kilometres along a straight narrow road. The land was dead flat, scrub, stones, half sand and barren. They ran quickly when the Peugeot stopped, hid in a water-course while a convoy went by. The Frenchman who had driven the car and whose white face had not spoken one word talked to military police. Frank watched through binoculars, saw him resume his journey in safety.

The mountains were close, foothills of thirst and sun lifting to a purple Crestline of five thousand feet. The girl’s face haunted him. Her stumps fitted into the sockets of his eyes and blocked out the stars. His face streamed salt as he crouched low in the blinding heat. He craved the mountains. Food and comfort had no meaning, but he wanted to climb vast slopes and crawl through woods, get nearer to the cooling sky. The last scorching will of the desert was on him, a final flash so intense it made him wonder how he could ever have walked into it. But he considered that a man has to go into a place where the sun burns and wind chastens, where no other lives can feed off your own and where you reach the desert of your soul, of yourself, where the wind and sand can smother the immediate emotions and unsolvable chaos living with you and that you live with, and where the wind can reveal areas of yourself that had laid dormant. To survive it means that you want to live, which hadn’t been so certain before. Solitude sings to you, real truths, real lies, and real songs of which there are few because they are real and not false. Having the largeness of spirit to try and change the pattern of your suffering you grow in the desert, for when suffering increases you understand the causes better. The immense space against which you pit yourself intimidates you yet increases vision. By showing such great areas of land and spirit you see that this vast emptiness will soon be filled with more than the turmoiled minor emptinesses of before. The stumps of the girl’s arms tormented him, the flesh still hot and burning under his eyes. He hoped she had been born that way, so that he could blame nature and not man, and laugh at his misspent tears. If God existed, you could curse until your lungs burst, but you couldn’t weep at what He did.

The last of the desert was burning under his feet. They weaved among upcrops of grey rock, stepped between fields of flint-teeth that looked as if they had been dropped by great metallic dragons that had turned vegetarian at the sight of green and distant mountains. A range of glistening salt-hills intervened, silver humps and hollows baking in their own utter barrenness. The pack burned scabs into his sweating spine where flesh had healed to tenderness during the long sickness and rest. Pain could be cut off, ignored by all senses, subdued and separated by the incessant walk that numbed everything but his private theatre of recollection, giving continual performance against colourful and fabulous backdrops of imperishable outdated scenery that he couldn’t help noticing because it changed so slowly. The saline undulations they walked over for days would have been insupportable if the high ranges of the Tell Atlas had not pushed their shadows closer every time he woke up.

Pine-cones cracked in unendurable heat. They went for miles on knees and belly. He wanted to think of Myra, but could not keep her image in focus. It was almost as if he never expected to see her again. She and the child lived in a far-off other world, and at the moment he could make no bridges to connect the two. They had taken ten days to get over the first range of mountains — up six thousand feet, and twenty miles on. They joined a column which travelled by day and night, or tried to. This was a base area, a safe zone, but there were more bombs and rockets than ever before. Planes were always overhead, blasting the hillsides with noise on one run, scourging it with flame and smoke on the quick return, like two strokes of a painter’s brush, said Djemal, a sixteen-year-old youth walking behind who had run away from the Lycée in Constantine a year ago to join the Moudjahid. He sang songs about the people of Algeria marching to victory against their colonialist oppressors, whistled the Marsellaise softly before curling himself in the foetal position and going to sleep at whatever time they stopped. On waking he looked like a baby in the womb of leaves and bushes, about to be born complete with uniform and rifle, razor-knife and bombs. It was as if the older men who were more silent had given him what remained of their ardent spirit for safekeeping till the perils were over. Frank was cleaning his new Czech rifle, and Djemal wanted to know why he had come to Algeria, a question he forced himself to ask in order to make sure he had guessed the right answer.

For a while Frank had nothing to say. It was hard. It seemed as if he had been born in Algeria, and that the question was irrelevant. When they stopped in villages the people now automatically spoke to him in Arabic, as if he could be no other than one of them. But he now felt himself a middle-aged man looked up to by a youth, and he must provide an answer. ‘I came to help people who needed help,’ he said, ‘and to help myself. When you help others, you also do good to yourself. It began when I drove a lorry-load of guns over the Moroccan border, and stayed to take part in the struggle.’

Djemal laughed. ‘It’s strange, nevertheless. You must be a communist.’

‘I might be,’ Frank said. ‘But the one certain thing is that I belong to the FLN, because I have an identity-card in my pocket to say so.’

‘I’m a communist,’ said Djemal. ‘After the war we are going to build a new Algeria — right from the bottom, because the country is ruined except for airfields and roads. There’ll be so much work that no one will be idle. We’ll build houses and factories and hospitals, schools, and places where our workers can take holidays. We shall construct a great African country.’

A tremor passed under the ground. They were near once more to civilisation, with its sensations of fear and the desire to run from the danger of exploding chemicals. They lay all day watching a sparsely wooded hillside burn across the valley. No one was hiding there. It was meant for them, hidden by smoke from their own trap, a screen no helicopter could penetrate. It blocked out the sun and they choked through handkerchiefs and rag saturated by precious water. You didn’t think of the future for fear something in the present took away your capability of ever thinking back on it from a future beyond that. Another rippling explosion gave him a gothic gut-ache. A dead and withered branch fell among them, scattering cedar-cones. Would they now turn to this hill? They were forty in all, caught on the periphery of the base zone and brushing the outskirts of a French brigade. Without reason the beast could send up a ten-man claw in their direction, then call in the planes when it came back mangled.

They took advantage of the smoke and moved on, their formations the shape of eight-pointed Moslem stars drifting between the trees, until precision was lost and they merely followed the vanguards, though still widely spread. They crossed a track and began to climb. Looking from higher up, the smoke became a shifting bank of dull green, a new forest grown and suspended above the one burned out. The setting sun tinted it purple at the diffusing borders. Staves of flame showed beneath, spiked up by new explosions. They had moved out before the trap closed. An hour later they would have fried and died under it. ‘How did they know?’

‘Some French soldier passed on the news,’ said Djemal. ‘It often happens. A lot have come over to our side, even officers. They see we are winning, or that we cannot lose.’ He remembered the man who had ridden them along a dangerous road in his Peugeot, his white fearful face and small grey eyes not turned to them during the whole length of it, as if he didn’t want even friends to recognise him. Meeting him on the street he might seem a typical reactionary colon: presumably the military police took him for such when they stopped him, setting his fear down to the fact that he had come over perilous ground where he might have been sniped at from one of the riverbeds flanking the road. ‘Sometimes we are caught in their traps, and the Gardens of Paradise become pits and sheets of fire. We turn into hares — but spread in the right direction. You must always know which way to run, how to pull out in swift order.’

They were doing so now. There were cedar-forests on the mountainside, and it was cool and windy among them, refreshing after the sun and sand-ovens of the south. They crossed a track at five thousand feet, then lay down for a rest between bomb-smoke and darkness. A few lights cringed on the foothills, almost red. The evening was clear, strange, neither cloud nor smoke anywhere. There would be no tea for them, either. The sky was purple, hills iron-rust, totally silent. His eyes still ran from the smoke. Immediately after wiping them he could see. Then they were filled again. He ached, even in his blood, though his bones did not feel the roots and rocks under him. The great Djurdjura mountains across the flatlands turned dark like a wall, white sparks above fixed in the ice age of the sky. Beyond would be the sea, white foam and blue waves, ships and a different freedom from the one he had now, a picture that he did not want to imagine until he could taste the salt air that leapt from it.

Out of one’s confusion comes the greatest strength, if you give in with patience to that confusion and know that some day you will find more meaning in it than you could ever get out of order. No one could see them. Not aeroplanes, nor even helicopters ten feet above the ground. The mats were the same colour as the earth, and they were lying in graves among bones and dust, fighting for life from oddments of the long (and not so long) dead. He spied out the track, too absorbed to notice the sun burning his hair. Like Switzerland, they said the French had continually said, these great inaccessible mountains, craggy and wooded, soon to be snowed up for the winter. But it was like Algeria, because it was like Algeria, and in Algeria, and in no other country on earth, Djemal said before he died. The ambush had taken place far over the valley by a white-walled red-roofed farm. An old man sat outside, a statue of rags with nothing good about him except his hearing, which was phenomenal. He detected a convoy coming along the road, and warned everyone. They took up rifles and revolvers, and spread over the countryside. There were eucalyptus trees at the back of the farm, and olives dotted down the hill. The convoy stopped, and a gun was unlimbered. They fired. A tree before the farm burst into flames. Then the house went up and the old man vanished in smoke and ruin. They re-limbered and went on. Arbitrary law was the rule — which was called war. A boulder blocked their way. The officer got down from the lorry and was shot dead, a bullet out of cedar trees. Only one shot, though two dozen laid the ambush. The soldiers fired, at nothing. They spread out. They came back. They went on, taking the dead officer with them. A few minutes later planes flew over, and Djemal was the only casualty.

Go forward, go back, circle, stop, run. Sharp-angle retreat. Flank march. Attack. Wait. Scuffle. Retreat. Do nothing for three days. Go forward. You can always go back if that’s where the advantage lies. Grave-stones bake, and bushes that can’t get out of the sun wilt also in silent torment. Great mountain flanks rise across the valley, sheer walls of rusty stone in places, or ash-grey, or banked with olive-woods that seem, through the merging, enlarging, isolating power of the binoculars to be almost as dense and one shade lighter than jungle. Waiting, you isolate faces and scenery in the mind by the wielding of imaginary binoculars, superimposed over the real and dangerous detail that never escapes the eyes. The imaginary lens of discretion shifts at will across the legendary escarpments of memory, over the top, beyond further valleys and into other countries, where your own particular republic lies — height, distance and dense undergrowth removed from the common reality of the half-blind world but which, with one sudden pull of the will, floods in and becomes your real self staring you in the eyes. It is a dangerous exercise — at the moment — because it obliterates the valley and road you have been set there to watch. But he can’t help thinking of his own children abandoned so blithely three years ago. If life becomes the progression of a more or less straight line you are poorer in spirit at the end than you were at the beginning when you first thought it easiest to live your life in that way. To turn back, zigzag, go in circles, demands courage but produces understanding.

From this spur of land both approaches to the village were controlled by heavy machine-guns, and was sealed off from the other world, first point of a star screening the battalion headquarters. If I were attacking I wouldn’t come along the roads, neither from east nor west, the obvious ways which are easy to defend, but over the high mountains which shoot above it to north and south, and which nobody could be expected to climb. That’s our obvious way of retreat. You’re only on the side of history if you think of and do the impossible. If they come against us, we get more of them; if they send a patrol first to mask the main force, we get the patrol, if they send planes over they don’t see us. They can send planes on random off-chance bombing but we’ve been through that before. You can’t lose a war like this, you can only die, which is better than in previous wars when you did both.

The village is compact and crawls up a hill — like all important villages. Olive and fruit terraces fall away on three sides. People live here, but silently. The tin-rattle of goat and sheep bells still sound round about, but you hardly ever see them. The days are hot in the sun, bring flies and midges out, living off the smell of donkey-shit and steaming pungent straw in a stone shed nearby. It was a long way from the camels of the sand-dunes nine months ago, when the taut skin of the camels reminded him of the oldest preserved body in the world that he’d seen in the British Museum. The camels had died at the same time, great barrel-humps of bodies in a stonehenge circle, with no sign of what had happened to the people on them. He saw the first oasis after the sand, beige and blue houses on a hill surrounded by a deep-green palm-forest.

A rattling well-chain rapidly unfolds on its wheel, and the bucket smacks hard into water below, all sounds distant yet clear in this alpine silence. The bucket is hauled up twenty times a day, water in abundance, real life at last. He tasted it, cold and earth-fresh, and the stones round about smell of it in the sun for a few minutes.

The arrow is a liar, the straight line a lure and a trick. The lifeline on the palm of the hand may be straight and definite enough, forcefully curving through the landscape of cuts and callouses, scars and dust, but to circle and go back when necessary is still part of that life arrow, the straight line in the sky that you may look for but never see, but which is always over you. He wondered what geometry had to do with life, despicable shorthand that lopped it off and hemmed it in. See that road at which my optic sights are laid? A mortar-bomb would find its own trajectory, follow the setting it was on. The drifting and subtle decorations of arabesques are equally part of the true spirit. Days were meaningless, counted as units of time. Distances and directions were null and never to be considered.

He dug both elbows into the stones and pulled himself from the grave. Numerous insects clipped and hustled about the grey light. He staggered as if to fall, the air not weight enough to hold him, leaned against a rock which still had the warmth of day in it and let his piss stream down. It grew chilly, and he searched for the bush where he’d left his blanket. The sky was so white it needed a long stare before making out the lacy network of stars. The sudden pale flush of them sweeping above the blue-ashy precipices of the Djurdjura swung him somehow back to his Lincolnshire night-wanderings when living there with Pat, the pale expanding autumn sky above the wolds met with on his long solitary walks. He smelled the grass and hedges, wavering leaf-smoke and the farm-mould at the end of a lane. He stood still from his walk in order to recall it more clearly, not so much in a mood of loving recollection but out of curiosity to see whether it would come back totally. It did not, almost faded, until he thought of Handley and his brood who, he didn’t doubt, still lived in the rambling and rickety house he’d once visited. He remembered an exquisite encounter with his fair plump daughter, and the odd meeting at revolver-point with someone called John, a mad pensioned-off brother who dreamed of controlling God and the world by radio. He thought of them as if they were part of his own family, and had such a forceful strange desire to be among them again that he seemed to be out of Algeria and danger and almost on his way there. He was disappointed, when his vision dropped, to find it was neither true nor possible. He wanted to see everyone — Nancy and the children, Myra and his child, the Handleys, even Pat who had gone back to her husband. After being so long in the desert he felt he could live at ease with them all as one big tribe.

He speculated on it, traipsing the valley five miles to get food and a space to sleep in. The wind buffeted between great pinnacles to the north. It was cold and damp, altering the spirit of the seasons, an equinox breaking towards winter, rough seas and snow. But it was still light and comforting under the common moon, and his regular footsteps were strong even to himself, in spite of hunger chewing around the hollows of his stomach. He thought of Handley scoffing food in the Greek Street restaurant, as he had with himself and Teddy Greensleaves the last time he saw them both. Maybe Handley lived in a flat now on Park Lane, and his kids instead of poaching went out at night emptying parking-meters. He suddenly felt human at recalling something he had never given up, the life you could not step out of because it stalked you as a shadow even along this Algerian upland valley with the moon on its trees and the path he walked.

A rabbit with upstuck ears flopped out of his track, startled him by the feverish zigzag of its grip on survival. It didn’t even have to know when to run, but shot away from its own ripe ruin when the mood of the earth shook it, all nerves and no reason, all fear and no civilised lunacy to stand and fight or find out what the tremors signified. As for them, they starfished at the threat of bombs, but never ran as bleak engines overhead shed noise and planed the hair’s-breadth off their backs.

The thought of it stirred him to walk more quickly and his shadow caught up with a voice he recognised. He offered Makhlouf a cigarette, who shivered when he stopped to take a light also. ‘There’ll be frost and snow soon,’ Frank said.

Makhlouf held his hand, smiled over the lighter flame. ‘Every autumn I think we’ll be in Algiers before the snow comes, with cigarettes and coffee, bread and newspapers.’

They walked on. ‘It’s warmer on the coast.’

‘But I don’t think so this year. We’ll stay in the hills. Frostbite and pneumonia.’

‘It’s my first time in this wilayet,’ Frank told him.

‘They say you’re going out.’

‘You have enough men, I suppose,’ Frank said. ‘It’s only guns you want. I can understand it.’

‘You brought us guns. But we need men as well — everyone.’ Makhlouf had received a terrible mouth wound, though his lips had grown back into a not altogether unhandsome shape. But his sentences of French came strangely out, sounds not tallying with the movement of his lips, like a speaker in some badly dubbed film. His wound had healed, but he nearly died from pleurisy, and he now roamed the hills like a spectre, thin and active with whatever company would have him. He rattled, rather than breathed, and the shape of his mouth was solidified in the form of an ironic, almost cynical grin — as if put on to apologise for the noise his breathing made. Whoever slept near him and woke in the night, which happened often when broken by exhaustion, heard the weird hollow rhythm of it. Makhlouf knew of this and slept apart, the grin still with him and varying with the intensity of his noise. He was tenacious, quick-witted, and strong, and used these virtues to defeat a concerted move to keep him in some safe rest area. He was a survivor of the Battle of Algiers, and had been a casual labourer on the docks most of his life. Under the red beret of a French paratrooper he’d killed in the Aurès Mountains, his head was completely shaved, a faint grey covering to his skullskin. ‘They’ll get you out,’ he said. ‘I heard them talking about it down at the post.’

He kicked a stone as he walked. ‘They don’t trust me,’ Frank said, ‘after so long.’

Makhlouf laughed. ‘You’ve done enough. They want you to go overseas, and tell people about our struggle.’

‘No one would listen to me.’

‘They don’t trust anyone,’ Makhlouf said. ‘Why should they? They don’t need to. If anything goes wrong, a bullet is the only answer. A quick one. Life is simple.’

It was, until you thought about it. Then it became a derangement of the senses. It was all right as you waited, hidden, ready to kill, kept your mind drilled on war and politics, but even this was working less and less, the derangement staying uppermost as if he were losing his nerve. They were right to boot him out, no matter what reason was put on it.

It was cold, and twenty slept huddled in one small room. Even Makhlouf’s rattle of life was welcome since it helped to keep them united, like the low purr of a worn-out fan evenly dispersing the spice and sweatfumes of suffocation. Walls shook with thunder, sounding far beyond the outside, yet sharp enough to penetrate his sleep. It made him uneasy, would stop him remembering his dreams. Orange flashes bumped against his eyelids, turning the blue walls grey. He rolled over and straightened his legs, pushing the bottom of another’s feet. The small space held them in two rows, and Frank, now awake, noted how close he was to the black and red Kabylie blanket drawn half across the door. The spout of a Bren-gun pushed it to the wall, and a guard filled the space with his body and shouts.

Frank knocked a stump of candle down, pushed from behind by others struggling to get free. A giant handful of earth hit him in the face, and a body fell on to him, rolled sideways and stood up. He staggered and ran to the trees. Blazing branches fell across the house. The inside chains of himself pulled and strained, but he gripped a sharp stone in the palm of his hand as he lay on the ground to stop the chain snapping and leaving him to finally disintegrate. ‘Paratroops have landed where we were yesterday,’ Makhlouf said. ‘Artillery, planes — everything.’ The light in his eyes seemed to be choking him. A green flare shaped out the grove and all their faces, a circle looking in on itself. The bank of a gully descended, and he wondered whether they would stay on the hill-top, or pull out. A radio-telephone sparked. This was one attack they didn’t get word of. He fought his way from sleep, not entirely wanting to wake up and face the reality of something that did not seem quite real any more.

A cold grey light was let into the valley, streaks of violet beyond veils of dust and smoke. He slithered, hanging to bushes to break a direct fall. The hill-top flamed outwards, shaking gusts of soil and air on to them. A man rolled free, stricken by shrapnel, going down in a ball so quickly that one of his boots flew off. The grey tooth-like crags beyond spewed mist. ‘Bouclage,’ Makhlouf shouted, ‘ou rattisage?’ They seemed to be part of the crumbling cliff. Thorns ripped into his clothes. The tail of a chameleon flickered down among the rubble. LMGs opened up on the hill-top. They reached the oued bottom and found markers to guide them along its course, a climbing flank march to the spur they had just left. Frank heard the noise of the Sikorsky helicopter and flattened with the others. Three passed over, slicing smoke and air to drop another platoon on the hill. The FLN had set fire to the trees with kerosene so that the helicopters hovered helplessly above unable to put down reinforcements the paras had called for. Dull thumping of grenades spanned the distance, but nothing could be seen except black and yellow smoke. White phosphorous spewed out of the pudding. A straggle of mortar-bombs fell across their retreat, bending and fusing the cedar-trees on fire. Helicopters had dropped grenades into the smoke and came clacking back over them. They lay in a forced rest for ten minutes. Any lifting head would have been blasted by their own guns if it gave the company away. Discipline was strict and not without rage. His face was in the soil, and the taste on his parched mouth forced him back to the past as hunger pulls a pig to its empty trough. But the trough seemed to have filled up, and his recollection was so sharp that it stung him to pain and happiness, so that he thought he had stopped living. Any future misfortune must stem from such periods when you did not know what was happening in the present — unless you jerked out of it to smash back the dragons of memory that only emerged from their lair to destroy you.

Makhlouf pulled his arm. They moved away from the oued and went up between the thickening trees, scouts ahead and behind. They pass through a former village, a collection of charred places, bits of rag and paper, where the paras had been three weeks ago. The men had fled, but all women and children were caught in their net. They walked quickly in silence, one village out of thousands. What did memories matter when something like this blotted them clean away and sent in its place a catastrophe that would be remembered forever? Everything living had been shot down.

Smoke to the south-east rose up slantwise as if to avoid the sun. Shame at this picture of massacre made him want to die, to never get out, to kill his uttermost and perish here. Those who saw it were robbed of their manhood, never able, to face women and children again without remembering what they had been powerless to prevent. Did it shrivel the souls of those men who acted in this way? He didn’t think so. German Nazis from the Foreign Legion had set up torture-houses in Algiers, trained others in the same game. Yet thousands of Germans had also deserted. The Algerians didn’t like them, but took them carefully to the frontiers on an arduous trek of repatriation. The Germans handed over weapons and ammunition as the price of their ticket to friendly soil. Tell the world about our struggle when you get out, the FLN officers said, and some Germans organised arms traffic, sent money to collecting-points in Paris. A few of the deserting legionnaires — Italians, Germans, Yugoslavs — changed their minds in Tunis and Rabat, and came back over great and perilous wasteland routes to rejoin the FLN.

They lay on a hill-top, hidden among stones and gorse, a ferka of thirty men with twenty rifles, three LMGs and a mortar. Warmth spread through cloud and sweated them like a Turkish bath, became a knife-edged autumn sun. There’d been no water for a day, and then only a few hand-cups of green slime that he’d preferred not to look at. He could only croak, impossible to converse with Makhlouf, so looked with care and interest between the bushes and across open ground of the uplands. It was hot and silent, a smell of stones and sweat, and of cedar bark rising out of thick forest. Faint notes of a cowbell came from a far-off meadow. They expected nothing, yet had never waited when nothing came.

Helicopters, ‘those putrid horseflies of pacification with ten maggot-murderers in each body’ — to quote a leaflet he had just read — passed over now and again, and they collectively willed one to descend on impulse. It was a good landing-ground, uneven but tenable, as perfect as one could allow if they weren’t to suspect a trick.

Flies and midges hounded them, touched eyes, walked up nostrils, bit lips, but such torments were set apart from his patience. Five hours passed, and at times he almost slept. It was an inviting hilltop to occupy, pacify, fortify, employ as watchpost or base from which to send out patrols. Lost and isolated, it looked as if no soldier’s boot had ever stepped on it. To sleep meant chaos and death, sudden fire and nightmare, so his eyes stayed open, unseen slits between flesh-puffed bites he’d thought himself immune to after a year in Africa. In the Kabylie mountains they bred more fiercely than in the south, venom his blood could not yet absorb without pain.

They were ordered by radio to keep their position all night, sweat out dreams on to thorn and gravel. Biting mist hurt into his marrow. The greatest fight during the crossings of successive wildernesses had not been with the French, but to keep up with the physical tenacity of people around him who had come to the FLN because they could no longer bear to be treated like dogs, who had lost friends and families in endless and unendurable massacres, and who had reasoned that the only place for them was under the green and white flag. Bitterness and idealism toughened them even more than the previous hard life.

A green light near the coast lost itself in cloud, finding the one free hole to heaven, and good luck to it. Man-arsed sparks would disintegrate, unseen cold dust falling back to earth after they had lit up some poor bastards for a hail of bullets and phosphorous. Springs in his eyes snapped open when he tried with great effort to sleep.

Insects flung their last bites before being banked down by snow. He could smell it. Over six thousand feet up, it was ready to float on to them, hail in by crosswinds. What if some bullbrain mulling over a map in Legion headquarters should spot the subtly formed contours of their hill and decide to pacify it in the morning, to attack from landward on all sides and destroy their fondest hope of a godsent ambush. It was a game of psychic hide-and-seek, of pulverising the rectitude of Lambert gridlines on the map one by one. An attack would chase them down from the hills like frightened stallions into the flaring waves of the sea.

He sweated, began to see more in the world than the next tree, the oncoming rock, the ragcap in front. Gates of fire and chaos fell on him. Unable to sleep, he wanted to get up and make for the nearest barrage or deathpost, through darkness into the blackest night of all. He gripped hard so as not to let go, a sharp stone and the magazine of his rifle, the pack of bombs and ammunition between bare feet. Chafing fleas were armed with minute hooks, power and virulence that for months his flesh had resisted or brushed off as too unimportant to kick against. Another rash of lights went up, green lace flickering along the pale-blue undergut of cloud. A low rumble of guns or thunder followed. An attack at night was rare. After the vicious scrambles of the day you either slept at the backend of exhaustion or, more often, moved elsewhere in an endless game of musical chairs that, going on long enough, was designed to paralyse the less arabesque mind of the adversary. He imagined it would be difficult for a man who had commanded or been involved in this kind of revolutionary war to take over in peacetime, to set a raw and idealistic country along the line of material progress and development, especially one just out of complete and utter ruin. Maybe a man stored up the sort of energy and talent that would let him make a good job of it.

Moonlight flaked on surrounding pinnacles, tall fingers, rockhands, light-grey fists and knucklebones, a frightening sight, blue flames and limbs of panic ready to rush down from the highest peaks like overpowering ghosts and finish off all contenders whether they were guilty or innocent. The machine and metal of his gun squashed such terror, pushed fear into locked cupboards from which it would not emerge until or unless the age of machinery was destroyed. A gun saved him from the despair of not being able to distinguish good from bad, ghost from reality, day from night. In normal life maybe he would not need it, but now he did, in this eternal insanity of move and countermove. Its clean hard metal and machine-shaped wood set him apart from trees and rocks, and told him on which side of them he stood, even though other machines and metal were trying to destroy him unless he could take cover and sufficiently hide among those same trees and rocks.

Metal and living wood fused in him as he fell asleep.

When madness ended, sanity began. Thirst, fleas, hunger and midges pulled away with the magic scene of a helicopter gliding towards them up the valley.

It hovered over clear but bumpy land, looking for the softest point to set down its wheels. Cloud had lifted, woods and lesser hills below had lost their smoky purple of the morning, lay flat and green, hillocks and ridges waving away to the next upshoot of high peaks. LMGs were sighted on the door, rifles and the mortar set for intervening space. The expected monster looked fragile and vulnerable. His vacillation and fear had vanished in an hour’s sleep.

The pilot took care but suspected nothing. Guns swept the ground but they lay with iron control, hidden. The first soldiers came out skilfully, throwing themselves to the ground at great speed. He would have heard the thumps they made, but four were caught in mid-flight by the first bursts, and fell dead or wounded. Six others fired from under the helicopter’s belly, then moved forward. Frank lined his sights at the petrol-tank, sent his magazine into it.

Shouts and gunfire shut off engine-noise. His second magazine went for the cockpit, calmly manipulating trigger and bolt as if on piecework at his old job in the engineering factory, but still as always keeping up the quality of articles sent out. Nightmare had gone, and a workshop of calmness and order closed around him. Mortar smoke flashed along open ground. He fired on fixed sights, unmoving elbow dug painfully in.

The helicopter sagged. A whistle blew and he wanted to laugh at the out-of-place half-time sound of it. His mouth was full of coffee-grounds, accumulated bile-dust of day after day passed in the unnatural forced drive of exhaustion; He existed for a moment in emptiness, a human spent cartridge suddenly without senses. He shook it off, recalling his love of life and power of endurance. Two men nearby slumped over their benches as if they had worked too hard, or as if bent in shock at some mistake in their pay-packets. Another screamed in rage and pain because the machine seemed to have packed up on him.

Noise died as smoke cleared. He reloaded, senses sharp, danger always in silence and emptiness. A paratrooper stood up and rushed forward, arm swinging back, a brave fellow with nothing to live for. Frank fired three times, and as the man folded the missile curved towards them, slow, gentle and sure. Bullets cracked through the explosion. Warm dust and flesh threw him sideways. The aarif stood and shouted orders, and Frank unhooked his granades. The engine roared back into dominance, and the machine tried to lift, blades driving smoke in a large circle.

The aarif knelt, and two men near him went down. An LMG trained on the cockpit spat whole magazines away. Frank ran and hurled three bombs. None reached the machine, hid it from view of every gunner. He swore, and hugged the ground, disappointed at not hearing the final rending smash-up. Someone ran over him thinking he was dead, and leapt across open ground in front. He clipped on his last magazine, and followed.

A fist of light threw him back, hot smoke boiling in as the helicopter exploded. He crawled away, a terrible ache in his shoulder.

They withdrew from blackening fire and carnage, a beacon-signal for French reinforcements. Nothing remained that needed assistance, but it would draw them nevertheless, and they had to move speedily down, after fighting into the flames to collect arms and ammunition.

In the forest they were five men less, but they had rifles and machine-guns for another dozen. In such an army there were always more men than guns. Frank could barely carry his own. The fight had taken twenty minutes of their lives, and he felt the accumulation of twenty days travail tearing him apart. He kept up with their running, Makhlouf at his side wherever possible on the narrow track.

Feet shook as he followed the rough steep steps of a cliff face, fifty metres’ drop over the tops of cedars, corpse-grey backbones and poisonous dark-green cauliflowers and a midday pullulating heat pulling him dizzily down towards them. A continuous high-pitched note humming through the back of his head made it difficult to keep his eyes open. He saw Makhlouf in front, in startling three-dimension, swaying along under a load of guns and pouches, and a spare beret like a red ear hanging from his pocket. The soft clarity of his movement was like an exceptionally marvellous painting come to life. Beyond him were others, blurred in dull brown going down through the trees. Only the nearest man was in focus, and he had no voice, no sounds penetrating his ears as roundedly as Makhlouf did his eyesight. He was black from the fire, sooted and corked, and all were unrecognisable one from another by face or race, united in moving quickly along a rocky valley, a track devoid of trees.

Helicopter-engines muttered, homing onto the smoking chaos they had fled from. They ate half-cooked beans, and supped from a few tins of condensed milk, which gave energy but choked him with thirst. His shoulder burned, but there was no blood. To touch it would be putting a hand into the fire. Both hand and fire lodged in his one body, but longed to stay apart, to widen the gap until it disintegrated out of pain and life.

Chapter Thirty

John Handley boarded the steamship El Djezair at Palma, carrying his own luggage, and dressed in a pale grey suit. It was the end of September. The sky was hazy along the line of Majorcan mountains, but clear blue over the pinnacles and buttresses of the cathedral. The boat funnel was already churning, and a tree of smoke shadowed the baking sunclean quay. ‘Yes sir, she’s my baby’ pounded from the bar radio, and a group of people were handclapping its rhythm as a steward showed him to a plastic deckchair along the port side of the boat. Smells of food and fuel oil permeated everywhere.

He stood at the bar with a bottle of lager, toasting himself in his brother’s style: ‘Here’s the sky on your head!’ After backpedalling from the quay, the ship steamed slowly into the widening bay. In ten hours he would land in Algeria, but his purpose was muted after many delays in Paris, time spent establishing FLN contacts whose addresses had been given him by Richard. At last he had been accepted by them, and received a laissez-passer from the FLN Provisional Government.

Tunes being played were composed at the time the ship was built, he thought, the jogtrot of the French colons from the twenties and thirties. Studying their faces, he saw that it was all finished for them, that the dance of gaiety covered brave despair which their flushed and half-cheerful faces would not admit to. A Frenchman danced with his wife, half young and half carefree, dark and good-looking, but her expression was growing towards that of raddled anxiety, of the soon to be dispossessed. He did not imagine it. The boat reeked of racial venom that the blue sea could not wash away. The Algerians of tourist class kept apart, less noisy at their separate tables. John had read and heard enough in Paris to know why. It was a boat whose passengers showed neither joy nor anticipation for the end of their journey, as if they would not stay long in the place they were going to.

In the dining-room an elaborate and stultifying four-course meal was served, and John saw how scrupulously and tactfully the stewards had assigned places at table so that no Moslem sat with Europeans. Facing him was a Spaniard with a business in Algiers, who wanted to know why an Englishman should visit Algeria at this stage of its history. He would do much better to come in a couple of years when the rebels had been finished off. He scoffed at the idea of John being a tourist. What was there to see, in any case? He’d lived there forty years, and there was nothing, nothing now but filth and laziness, barren mountains and sand, and a handful of rebels causing trouble, Algerian riff-raff who had undone all the good of civilisation. ‘And as for the people, they’ll cut your throat if you go beyond the suburbs of Algiers.’

‘I won’t let that worry me,’ said John, standing up to go back on deck. His ineffable middle-aged gentleness worried the Spaniard, who stood by him later at the rail. John would have preferred an overnight journey, for there was nothing to see except the occasional steamer passing from east to west. The bar was closed after coffee, and people wandered up and down, or dozed on deckchairs as the boat rattled its way across the sea he had last sailed on coming from Singapore in 1945.

‘You mustn’t go beyond Algiers,’ the Spaniard repeated.

‘I thought a million French troops had made the country safe at last?’ John said, wanting to get rid of him and study his maps in peace. Richard had procured a thick packet of large-scale survey maps for him, of areas where fighting was heaviest, and of zones said to be already liberated by the FLN.

‘It will never be safe for us, not with ten million troops.’

John pitied him, yet wished he did not exist. The man was frightened, and because John was not, saw a danger of losing the protection that his fear gave him. If everyone were afraid they could at least learn how to feel safe. Those who were not tainted with fear were traitors, saboteurs, or innocent foreigners who did not realise what was at stake. They weren’t pulling their weight, and detracted from the collective fear needed to give vital energy for the defence. And because John was an outsider the Spanish — Algerine felt as if the finger of the world were pointing at his insecurity and guilt. John asked what business he had in Algeria, and he replied that he owned a farm near Algiers, and a block of flats in the town. He was sixty-five, and if he lost both, he would starve. ‘So you see, we can’t leave.’

‘To lose all,’ John said, turning from water racing by to set his grey eyes fully on the man, ‘is to become free. When you own nothing then you can live. Your eyes only open when you have nothing. Your spirit will flower. Ever after, you can share the fulness of your heart with others. If ever you lose everything’ — he took a small card from his wallet, his name and the address of Albert’s non-existent Lincolnshire house written on it — ‘come to me here, so that I can willingly share all I have with you’ — he grasped the shocked man’s lapel with a gaze that burned into his eyes and in some way frightened him. ‘There’ll be a camp-bed in my room, and food on my tray.’ The Spaniard sweated, thanked him, and went quickly to his deckchair where he tried to sleep for the rest of the journey and keep out of this madman’s way.

John stood alone and during his musing remembered the fire he had started in the kitchen on the night of his departure, and smiled in the hope that it had succeeded in consuming the destructive pride of the family. If not, he would try again when he got back. If so, they would live in tents and caravans, and prosper under the hardship, pride gone, comrades once more.

Approaching Algiers the air was sultry, yet on top deck, exposed to the wind, it became damp and penetrating. Sailors were hoisting signal-flags, which shot out on the lap of the wind when the string was pulled. The coast to the east merged with heavy air and cloud that no stiff breeze could shift. An oil-tanker was waiting to enter the roads. Trying to penetrate the bad visibility with field glasses he half discerned distant peaks of the Kabylie Mountains.

After a fortnight in the sombre humidity of downtown Algiers John gave a taxi-driver twenty-five English pounds and was driven to the nearest FLN roadblock in the Kabylie Mountains. After many detours he arrived there at five in the afternoon, having taken all day to do the hundred miles, and been shot at several times by Algerian militiamen. His papers were checked at the roadblock, and the major said they had organised a tour for him, to see a hospital, schools and training camps, and that it might also be possible for him to interview prisoners.

John nodded, wise and of few words. ‘Are there any Englishmen fighting for your cause?’

The major did not know. ‘Some English deserters came over to us from the Foreign Legion, but I believe they were repatriated through Tunisia. All deserters can choose repatriation, and most of them do.’

Two orderlies struggled up the hillside with his suitcase, camera, field-glasses and haversack. For a fortnight he was guided about the hills, seeing the black and blighted circle of one doomed village after another, the marks of massacre, endless graves. He was shown an improvised arms factory, and caves in which grenades were made out of milk-tins. He watched a napalm attack by French planes on Algerian Nationalist positions, a distant upsurge of boiling nightmarish colour that brought the spread of childhood horrors bursting out of his mind. He lost balance, held a tree branch to stop the sight of collapsing trees spinning him to the ground. Even when the earth had settled down to the steady work of burning itself to death, he heard from within it the thump and scatternoise of fighting, and remembered his own short-lived term as a soldier. He calmly scanned the hills and boulders while the major pointed to landmarks of the trap now drawing in more French forces. He took John’s hand. The vantage-point was no longer safe, and they had to run.

He saw the prisoners next day, young men of twenty in their camouflaged commando suits. They were ragged, weary, hungry, though not particularly disgruntled, and stood in line between the trees. John chose the man who looked most dispirited and asked why he had been taking part in this war. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’m a conscript.’

‘Did you like fighting?’

‘No,’ He was tall, sandy-haired, and had a raw unhealed scar down his left cheek.

‘Where do you come from?’

‘Auxerre.’

‘What do you want to do now?’

‘Nothing. Go home.’

‘If you get home,’ John said, ‘will you tell others about what’s happening here?’

‘Perhaps. It’s terrible. I don’t know.’ John reflected that it was beyond the resources of the Algerian Nationalists to indoctrinate each of the million Frenchmen set against them in this way, should they be sent in the tracks of those already captured.

He saw children gathered outside a hut and being taught to read by a young man from the city. The remnants of a European suit showed how recently a change of heart had sent him to this bleak wilderness. John had often come across groups of such dispossessed infants, grazing between trees like flocks of half-starved goats yet guarded by an adult who negotiated food for them and tried to see that none actually died. They were fed on a priority scale, which sometimes meant as much nutriment as in normal conditions. As far as possible they were kept under the green umbrella of wooded areas, for in the open any flicker of movement would be blasted from the air. Cut off from house, parents or village they ran and fought in the sunlight, rolled in autumn leaves, slept in outside djellabas. ‘The children are cared for as much as our soldiers,’ his guide told him. ‘They are the future citizens of Algeria.’ He had learned good English at the Lycée in Constantine, had not in fact wanted to take to the hills, because he had enough pro-French middle-class ambition to get control one day of his father’s transport agency. But his brother was arrested — by mistake as far as he knew — and died while in the hands of the paras. There was no decision to make. Life became simple. At the first attack he was wounded in the leg and permanently lamed, and so he became a teacher and shepherd of orphan children, spent his night whenever there was a lamp or candle reading the French text of Kapital. He was well read in all matter concerning revolution, including the phase of government when the war was over. John made him a present of his fountain-pen, and a street-map of London.

‘Here,’ said the major, ‘is our hospital.’ Nets and camouflage-cloths were spread high and flapping between the trees. Huge poles had been rigged where trunks were sparse. John looked for huts or tents, motor-cars perhaps. ‘It was,’ said the major, ‘one of the best hospitals in the wilayet. Before moving it here we used to put out red cross signs but they were machine-gunned. Now our wounded can be looked after in secret. We occasionally spread red crosses where nothing exists just to test their panache, and we are never disappointed to see bombs and napalm raining down.’

They entered between two bushes. John thought the path would lead to an encampment, but steps descended under his feet and feeble lamps flickered along the narrow tunnel. Fumes mixed with damp earth, caused him to cough and wonder what it was like being carried down with shrapnel or a bullet in the lungs, and the thought brought tears to his eyes. The mutual cruelties of the world mauled his senses, and at such times the justness of the cause being fought for did not help his manhood to face these realities. It was easy and comforting and necessary to believe certain things and fight for them, but to see what suffering took place during the transformation of the social order (or one part of it) was enough to break the heart.

The tunnel turned at right-angles, and then again sharply, for soldiers had been known to advance into such places preceded by flamethrowers, and such an intricate entrance was better for picking off the machinist before he came into the central ward, gave time for the lightly wounded to escape by an emergency exit.

He stood ten minutes in the dark. Wounded men were lying on the floor wrapped in greatcoats and ragged blankets. Damp petrol fumes made even John join in the coughing, and as he walked between them the disinfectant stench brought him close to retching. He could see clearly, and those sitting up showed gaunt faces, olive-wax features wondering who this man was from another world, who found it so warm that he paused to force out the peg-buttons of his sheepskin coat. The major explained that a doctor and three nurses looked after the hospital. Once the wounded reached it there were few deaths, but fatalities were common between battleground and casualty station. They had still not solved this kind of problem. The rules of Red Cross protection were hardly refined enough to help in such a struggle, but perhaps they would be so when this type of war became more general. John wanted him to finish before asking the question he made at each stop, but at the end of the row, following his own intense scrutiny of every face and revealed feature, he saw Frank Dawley resting with his back against the rocky wall. His eyes opened, and were set in a dull stare.

The black earth stank, the reek of months or years, of petrol and wound odours, palliasses soaking in urine and excrement. His hopes, when he’d imagined it would end like this, had been nightmares, sweat-rivers and black seas desolate under the light of a slaughter-moon, a sickle-back sweeping along the rim of the earth. Any man who came down to this must count it as a certain end in his life, the point at which only death or resurrection could occur. The major talked on, and it seemed to John that the top of the ladder in guerrilla warfare was the gift of an easy and authoritative tongue, with little way to go before it led to a government post.

His eyes closed for a moment. They were hemmed in by grey bristles that spread over the pallow-eyed face. John took out his wallet, and gave him the letter from Myra which contained a photo of her and the child. ‘This is the man you were looking for?’ the major said.

‘Who are you?’ Frank asked, taking the envelope.

The doctor was a young man of twenty-five who had not finished medical school. ‘He was brought in a fortnight ago, and is ready to be discharged. His papers are in order for repatriation — out by the coast.’

‘When?’

He laughed. ‘We don’t know.’

‘My name is John Handley,’ he said. ‘I’m Albert’s brother. I’ve been sent here to look for you.’

Those who could walk were allowed into the fresh air, stood at the entrance waiting for eyes to focus on humps of rock and twisted tree-pillars. ‘I made up my mind to come and find you,’ he said, hand on his arm. ‘It was so easy that I still can’t believe I’ve done it. A month ago I was in Lincolnshire with Albert and Myra, and all the brood.’

Frank smoked one of his smooth well-packed steel-tasting cigarettes. ‘You may not find it so easy to get back.’

‘Has this life made you pessimistic?’

‘Not at all. But I know what is involved. The Yugoslav ships don’t have a regular schedule, and often they can’t get in at all. French warships go up and down playing guns and searchlights on the coast. We may wait months.’ He wondered whether anyone but John could have discovered him in this way, and at the same time talk so blithely about getting out. He’d only seen him for thirty seconds two years ago, at Albert’s house in Lincolnshire when he’d inadvertently strayed into his room while looking for the lavatory. John, sending morse at his radio-set, had picked up a huge revolver and threatened to blow his brains into the wall if he didn’t clear out. ‘I left my passport at the last place in Morocco,’ Frank said, ‘but it followed me by FLN courier. There’s more organisation here than you imagine. I suppose it looks like one big slice of chaos with everything so worn-down and shabby, but it works better than any so-called civilised town.’

John was amused by his defensiveness. They walked some way from the hospital, sat on a spur of land looking into a valley. ‘Did you bring any books with you?’ Frank was eager to set his eyes again on print that could be immediately understood, wanted for a while to restrict his world to clear shapes and lines of letters that would liberate his mind into the sort of pictures he chose to make from them. ‘My luggage should catch me up tomorrow,’ John said. ‘There are one or two things you might like.’

‘The fact is,’ Dawley said, ‘I feel at home here. I’m a part of this country. I’ve learned to exist in it. I don’t know that I want to leave just yet.’

‘You don’t have much choice. They’re sending you away.’

‘That’s true. I’ll have to go. I wouldn’t want to hinder them. They’re all right, in spite of what they’ve had to do at times.’

‘And you helped them, I think.’

‘I wanted to. What else could I do? A friend of mine died, an American. When I get out I must write to his father, even though they loathed each other. I must write to his girl-friend as well.’

‘Did you want to die?’

Frank laughed. ‘You’re bringing the wrong values in. That was always an irrelevant question.’

‘Still, I’m asking it.’

The sight of John, his clothes, speech, manner, face and body with the air of externalised living still on them made him hungry. The sparse diet he had grown used to seemed not enough at the apparition of this man newly-arrived from the outside world. He had a wild craving for food, for pork, cheese, sugar, cake. The desire went through his whole body and he laughed aloud at this strongest material sensation he’d had for months. He mentioned it to John.

‘I suppose that answers my question. It’s a good sign.’

‘I don’t believe in signs. It’ll pass, this unnatural unnecessary hunger. I’d like to stay here with these people, right to the end. I believe in their cause. I’ve been with them so long that it’s mine as well. There’s nothing false about it any more.’

‘It’s also mine,’ said John, ‘though I needn’t say it. But I came here to find you, and to see that you got safely back to England. Myra wants to see you. She’s never known in the last year whether you were dead or not. She’s grieving for you.’

‘I tried to send a letter,’ said Frank. ‘I thought she might have stopped caring. Yet I never did, really. You can never be sure of these things. The morning I left her in Tangier was a dream I was always trying to get back to. I managed it only when I was most desolate and disembodied. I must see her soon, or I will die completely. It’s funny, but I was strong before you came, but now I feel as if I’m caving in. I’m human again, weak. No, it’s all right, John. Don’t despair! I always was, but I kept it down. It was always a fight, for me. I’ve never been half so strong as I think I am. But I feel strong in realising that. I want to go away for a while, because I know that a rest from this will never weaken me towards it.’

He lit another cigarette. ‘Myra wants to see you. We all do.’

‘I’m busy here. I love Myra, but I believe in what we are trying to do in this country. How can a person be in love, and fight, and still be sane? Don’t you have to give up one or the other? Can any dedicated man, even a poet, say, claim to be in love with someone while he is writing his verses? Still, maybe you don’t have to believe that love is dead to draw enough strength to fight for a cause you believe in. Otherwise you’re not a whole man. I can get out of here for a while to see Myra, and then come back quite easily if I want to, or go to another war like this. There’ll be plenty in my lifetime.’

‘You seem determined.’

‘But this one will soon be finished. France can’t go on. I can’t understand why you came out to look for me, John.’

‘I wanted to see what kind of a man you were. The glimpse I had of you when you came into my room by mistake wasn’t enough. I frightened you off with a gun then. I don’t think I could do the same now.’

‘So you won’t tell me?’

Both were silent. Explosions vibrated through the cold black night. ‘You know,’ John said at last, ‘we don’t want you to perish out here.’

‘Perish! What language. It’s good to be talking English again. But how can one perish? You mean die. What does dying mean? I once knew a man who had cancer six times but didn’t die. Each time he went right to the point of death, and then became completely cured — by the guiding hand of his own spirit, as far as anybody knew. He went down from fifteen stones to five. Worked in our shop at the factory, and we got fed up visiting him and having collections for a wreath. He developed anti-bodies when close to pegging out, then his weight shot up to normal for another few years. Nothing could get him, but everything had a try. He even had TB as a young man. Then syphilis between two bouts of cancer. Lost the use of his kidneys once. In the end, when he was nearly sixty, he got run over by a loaded furniture-van. I don’t suppose he could stand old age. So don’t talk to me about perishing or death. Why should I worry about that when I’m not yet thirty?’

Chapter Thirty-one

Half-a-dozen grey-haired donkeys as small as dogs were strung along the footpath laden heavily with baskets of mortar-shells, cartridge-belts, food and oil. A roll of cloud that hid the great drop below looked firm and solid, as if any legs that lost foothold or balance would not be let down by it. They ascended towards more wet cloud, then crossed a plateau so deep in snow that the donkeys, led by an old man, were barely visible.

‘It seems we forgot our skis,’ John said, hurrying after them. ‘But never mind. Perhaps we’ll come back one day for winter sports.’ Frank had made an overcoat from his only blanket, cut arm-gaps and head-hole and drawn it around him with a length of rope. John had at first insisted he take his sheepskin coat.

‘You need it more than me,’ Frank said.

‘I’d be honoured if you take it, though.’ There was a glint of compassion and self-sacrifice in John’s eyes that irritated him, a blackmailing mothering solicitousness that smouldered like a lamp about to tip over and ignite. It was an English attempt at dominance that he had not met from anyone in Algeria, a final feeble wish to make contact with another human being by the only means left to him, which in this case would mean John sickening from exposure. He felt sorry for him, but would not give in. ‘I’m warm enough, thanks. I’ve toughened up a bit this last year.’

‘Really,’ said John, hurriedly taking it off. ‘I shan’t need it.’ His sharp face was thinned by the fires that burned in him, giving the temporary impression that he could cross Siberia naked and survive.

‘If I faint from hunger,’ Frank said, ‘I might ask you for a loan of it, but not now.’ He swung his own blanket-overcoat around himself and drew in the rope. John had thrown away his suitcase and fitted the remains of his belongings into a copious but lightweight pack in which he still carried his loaded service revolver. He levelled this at Frank: ‘Take my coat,’ he cried. ‘Take my coat. You need it more than I do.’ His hand shook, and he rubbed sweat from his face.

Frank snatched the gun. ‘You should give this to somebody who has better use for it.’ But he laughed at the argument and gave it him back, and John put it into the pocket. ‘You wear it the first week,’ Frank said, ‘and I’ll wear it the second — if you still want us to share it.’

‘We’ll be on the ship in three days.’

‘That’s what they say. It’ll be more like three or four weeks.’

Saturated by snow up to the waist they followed the track of the donkeys. John had learned enough to know that Frank was looked on with special favour by the FLN. He was not one of the thousands of Germans who deserted in such numbers from the Foreign Legion merely to be repatriated back to the cushier life of the economic miracle in the hope that their war crimes had been forgotten. Dawley had actually driven a huge cargo of arms from Morocco south of the Monice Line, and stayed on to fight with them.

‘You can stuff personal comfort,’ Frank said at that night’s resting-place, ‘as far as I’m concerned. Black bread or white bread, it makes no difference to me, as long as I can think on it and move on it.’

The northern slopes of the Grande Kabylie, well-covered with cork and olive-trees, ran sharply down towards the sea. Frank and John Handley shared a cave with other soldiers. They entered through a maze of thorn-bushes — though the area was completely free of the enemy — into a space large enough to stand up in, a hideout running twenty feet back into the hillside. A further compartment which burrowed out at an angle was used as a storeroom for food, arms and ammunition. They walked down towards the sea, but were turned back by Sten-armed FLN pickets.

Winter mist that spread along the coast gave Frank sore guts and rheumatism. White chops foamed on the sea, and passing ships were invisible though their hooters sounded — lost, melancholy, but determined at any cost to make tracks away from this inhospitable and stricken coast. He didn’t blame them, wishing he could also leave it, in his present mood. ‘I’d like to live on a ship, John, be the only passenger on a large cargo-boat that goes around the world, on every route and eventually to all parts of it. I’d have a cabin and part of the deck to myself, and would see all regions of the earth from the ship: Spitzbergen, Macassar, Valparaiso, Odessa, Yokohama, New York, Socotra, Buenos Aires, Singapore, Sydney, Archangel, Java. I’d never go ashore again, but I would see people. That ship would be a bit of everything, monastery, brothel, zoo, office, hotel, floating beer-hall, workshop. Lots of people would pass through it. Yet no, as soon as people start coming into it the idea loses its attraction. I’d like to be a hermit-figure on that ship. In the end I’d want to die at sea, dropped into the warm tropical tin-opened ocean. How’s that for the end of the world, John? You never expected me to say such things, and I suppose it all comes from the miserable moth-eaten all-consuming past, and meeting someone like yourself who has just come out of it, and is trying to show me my place in it again. Such pipe-dreams have to be put in their place, pulled and stamped on if you can’t burn them while they’re still inside. And if you want to fight against the extinction of your better self you’ve got to scorch out the sort of past that can only give you such paltry and hollow pipe-dreams when you’re at the end of your tether for a day or two. Plough the past under the rubble, and sow the best sea-salt in it — that’s the only thing to do.’

They waited for the ship to come. Myra’s letter had dropped to pieces, soaked and creased to extinction, and he left the remains of it in the hollow bole of an olive-tree. It was a simple letter, giving news of Mark, wanting him to come back, and hoping he was alive and well. But it was warmly written, and he longed to see her and his son. He also wanted to visit Nottingham to find Nancy and his two other children. The only thing out of your past that was ineradicable was children. After three years he had a blind and painful yearning to see them again and help them, somehow wanted to live where they could all be close to him, an insane proposition that haunted him on this wild, saturating and hungry coast while he waited for some boat to take him off it.

On waking in the morning he climbed to a lookout rock and scanned the sea with John’s binoculars hoping for some spectacular scene to fill his eyes — other than the usual files of men and donkeys. Perhaps one dawn I’ll see a huge P & O liner stranded on the rocks below. Or maybe I’d wake in the night, startled by the grinding noise of its collision, then by hordes of destitute Algerians streaming by the cave intent on loot, and materials for the army. And I would go out and join them, walk down to the great liner and help them strip it of its luxury for their subsistence against the all-beating elements.

During the long days of waiting they talked little, considering how much each had to say, as if saving the flood of it for the safety of Lincolnshire. He hoped the storm would let go its fury, for he wanted to cross on a leaden calm. The prospect of gliding along over a great watery placidity attracted him after the torment and turbulence of the last year. Or perhaps it’s my only hope of a rest, he thought, before the greater confusion to come. What right had anybody got to a peaceful life?

‘Does Albert know you’ve come out here?’ he asked, on a walk they took together through the drizzling mist.

‘The less I talk, the more I do. I only discuss what I’m not going to do. But on this occasion we were all having dinner, including Myra, and I did tell them I was coming here.’

‘What did he say?’

‘That I was a fool. But I felt sufficiently in control of myself to agree with them, and still set off.’

‘Don’t you think you were lucky to find me?’

‘I believe in fate. I was fated to.’

‘You just happened to meet me.’

‘Fate.’ John snapped out the word, like a saw going through wood.

‘Suit yourself.’

‘Albert will judge when we get back.’

He smiled, careful to make it compassionate should John take it into his occasionally muddled and paranoid head to snatch at the revolver bulging under his torn and stained coat. ‘I might be more inclined to talk about it in Lincolnshire,’ Frank said. ‘Let’s hope we get through that black sea. We might be in for months of gales. Makhlouf told me it was sometimes like this all winter.’

After dark he couldn’t sleep. It was still raining, a night laden with blackness. John slept in the shelter wrapped in coat and blanket, oblivious to the chill, stretched out straight and peaceful as if still in his army bed in England. It seemed that nothing could trouble his sleep, and Frank envied such animal-like capacity for indulging in it. He himself had lost it, being on his way out, while John took to slumber as if he might be here for good, which made Frank superstitiously wonder whether or not he’d ever feel the deck of a good steamer under his feet.

The sea was boiling up, as if the devil would make tea with it. Stretch out your arm with a kettle on the end and it would get snapped off. The wind was a mad steamroller, could push down trees, throw a helicopter against a cliff-face like so much spit. It roared along the coast and over the sea out of control, dangerous because of the night, crushing stars and pine-cones — though ships were moving through it. The roar was so great he expected boulders to be thrown up into the forest. The ship must attack the storm if it is not to be smashed itself. It sets out on an offensive against nature in which survival is a great victory. From a fish in water he would become a ship if and when he left Algeria, set out on his fight against the all-conditioning soul-moulding world. To fight was the only way to combat extinction, to mount the totality of his mind and body against annihilation by the sedate and backward sliding world. Yet he felt, in his agony of suspense, and the infinite postponement of getting away, in the tormented state of mind at being forced to leave and yet not wanting to, that for him complete victory was impossible because he had not been tempered in the true steel of the materialist world. In fact just plain victory was out of the question. You can conceivably break through the enemy lines, but you die on the barbed wire. Or, at most, you cut out your enclave in no-man’s-land, and hold off all comers, friend and enemy alike, until you have dug galleries and catacombs in which to work out your ideas to the bitter end. The conception of wide-open spaces beyond the bloody lines of battle and death is only a dream, valuable only for drawing you into the conflict in the first place. But it is a conflict in which neither armistice nor surrender is ever possible to contemplate.

The storm lessened, and one night a boat waited offshore in the mist. Men were grunting by with loads on their backs. The moist hills rolled behind them. He stood outside and an FLN officer shone a torch in his face. ‘You go down in an hour, at two o’clock.’

Back in the cave he took papers from a briefcase. ‘Both of you.’ They crouched. He counted ten one-thousand-franc notes. ‘This is your pay, a thousand francs a month. Please sign here.’

Seven pounds ten for a year. He’d expected nothing, but that was what the ordinary FLN soldier received. Then he gave it back. ‘Keep it, for the cause.’

They embraced. ‘We won’t forget what you’ve done for us,’ the officer said. ‘Tell everyone how we fight for our liberty. A guide is waiting for you outside. Here is your laissez-passer. You have plenty of time to get down.’

It was six hundred feet and three kilometres to the sea. Baked within and sweating outside, he hauled up his pack, and they set off for the rocks. He felt lean and nimble, not turning to see whether John was lagging behind. His arms were bars of steel, currents of energy running in to keep them working. Young lambs bleated from under carob-trees. How had they survived? It’s a wonder God didn’t turn in his grave at what was perpetrated in this war. He could no longer think of it. Such things would come to him later. They trotted the brown wet soil, filtering between trees, the last bouts of wind knocking into them, thorns ripping at his ragged slacks as if to send him out naked. The full moon was half-hidden, clear, then obscured, and plain again.

John fell, and he turned to help. ‘Keep it up. We’ll soon be on the boat.’

He was gasping as if his chest-wall would splinter. ‘Leave me if I can’t keep on. Leave me alone.’

Frank could not believe that the boat and a certain sort of liberation was so close. Their party descended steeply, no path to be seen, an occasional smoothness under the feet if they didn’t look down too often or anxiously. ‘I won’t leave you,’ Frank said, ‘not even if you throw an epileptic fit. Come on, get up.’ He took his belongings, heard him panting behind, and followed the vague shadow of the guide waiting below.

The sea made no recognisable noise, and the wind had become part of their breath with its soft hissing. The raingrit lifted but showed nothing, then came down again. He felt himself going quickly to the edge, towards some endless sudden drop of the land. On waking as a child he stood on the bed, still in his dream, and walked to the edge, fell off into his world of wakefulness — and a broken ankle. You stopped falling, and there was no broken drop that the body could not take nor the soul catch up with though badly jarred. When they rested he felt the power of John’s set eyes wildly against him. ‘Let’s smoke,’ he said. ‘Shield everything.’

‘The sky won’t see it,’ John smiled. ‘Its black eyes are shut tight tonight.’

‘They’d better be. Your fags will just about last till we hit Gibraltar — or wherever it is we’re dropped. I’ll take you out to a meal — by way of thanks and gratitude for you having come all this way to get me back safe and sound.’ It was impossible that they’d ever reach anywhere, except the stony ground of this bleak coast, in a thousand gobbet-pieces after the French warships blasted.

John threw down his unlit cigarette, stood and looked around as if the bars of the world were shutting in on him. He ran back up the hill, springing and zigzagging like a mad goat, stones and soil scuffing from under his feet, scattering at Frank who chased him. He ran to the left, a shallow outflanking move that soon set him in front. He leapt from a treebase and brought him down. John foamed and kicked, but Frank fixed his limbs and bones tight. A rattle shook his throat: ‘Let me go! Let me go!’

‘Where?’ cried Frank. ‘Where? Where do you want to go?’ Did he want to crawl back into the desert like Jesus Christ? He was too old. He’d die, and it couldn’t be allowed, for Albert’s sake, for everybody’s sake. A black chilling emptiness spread through Frank at this unexpected bar to their departure, shrivelling his will, denuding every field in his world of hope and desire. He neither wanted to get on the ship nor go back to the war. His spirit sank into a pit of emptiness. Despair tightened his stomach as if it would never let go. Yet somehow he kept his hard physical controlling grip on John as if he were some animal he had to vanquish. He felt the revolver under his hand and took it from him, feeling an impulse not to use it on John, but to kill himself.

‘Where do you want to go?’ he asked again. ‘Tell me, you madman. Maybe I’ll learn something.’

‘Leave me. I want to stand up. I won’t run.’

‘Stop struggling, then.’ But he heaved and pushed, and Frank’s strength was breaking under it. ‘Do you hear?’ He took the revolver away from his own mouth. It was something he could not do. If he wanted to die, and at that moment he had suffered enough to find it possible, then he would go on living and kill himself that way. The gun was pressed against the wild beast that lay under John’s heart. ‘If you try to run again,’ Frank said, ‘I’ll shoot you, and get rid of you for good and all. One false move and you’ve got all that you ever wished for all rolled up into one big wish. Do you understand?’

He nodded.

‘Go in front of me. We’re almost at the beach. If I kill you no questions will be asked. Stand up and walk.’

Head down, John staggered towards the shore. For some reason Frank exulted, thought of his entry into Algeria when he had driven Shelley Jones forward at the point of a Sten-gun. Foam splashed onto the black rocks, sent curving lines up the gravel.

There was a cat on the beach, a small cat sitting by the rocks, hard to see because of its grey and white stripes. He had never seen a cat on a beach before. He found a stone shaped exactly like an egg and threw it at the sea. He imagined throwing real eggs into the sea, a black insult, like pelting life with life, a holy pagan waste, a madman’s defiance, potlash, eggs into the salt sea, a negative backward turning motion that you could not do.

They climbed on board the motor-launch, subdued and quiet, and set off through thickening mist towards the ship.