I LOVE Río Salado – the place the Romans called Fulmen Salsum and one we now call El Malah. I have loved this town all my life; I cannot imagine growing old beneath any other sky, cannot imagine dying far from these ghosts. It was a beautiful colonial village with leafy streets lined with magnificent houses. The main square, where dances were held and famous musical troupes came to play, unfurled its flagstone carpet a stone’s throw from the steps of the town hall, flanked by tall palm trees strung together by garlands studded with Chinese lanterns. The great jazz musician Aimé Barelli performed here, and bandleader Xavier Cugat with his famous chihuahua, as well as Jacques Hélian and Pérez Prado. The town attracted artists and orchestras that even Oran, for all its charm and its standing as the capital of the West, could not afford. Río Salado liked to flaunt its wealth, to avenge itself on all those who for years had written it off. The ostentatious mansions that lined the main street were the town’s way of telling passers-by that ostentation was a virtue if it meant refuting others’ preconceptions, if it meant enduring every hardship in order to catch the moon. The land here had once been a stony wilderness left to lizards, the only human soul a shepherd passing, never to return; it was a landscape of scrubland and dry riverbeds, the domain of boars and hyenas – a land forgotten by men and angels. Those pilgrims who passed this way raced through like gusts of wind as though it were a cursed cemetery. Later, exiles and nomads, Spaniards mostly, laid claim to this desolate land, which mirrored their suffering. These men rolled up their sleeves and set about taming this savage landscape. They uprooted the mastic trees and replaced them with vineyards, ploughed and hoed the wasteland to create farms, and from their Herculean efforts Río Salado blossomed, as green shoots grew over mass graves.
Nestled amid hundreds of vineyards and wine cellars, Río Salado was a town to be savoured, like one of its own vintages. Though there were chill January days when the sky was streaked with snow, the town had an aura of perpetual summer about it. The contented inhabitants went joyfully about their business, coming together at sunset to share a drink or some piece of scandal or gossip. Their braying laughter or their righteous anger could be heard for miles around.
‘You’ll like it here,’ my uncle promised as he greeted Germaine and me on the steps of our new home.
The majority of the inhabitants of Río Salado were Spaniards and Jews, who were fiercely proud of having built their houses with their bare hands, of having snatched from this dry, pitted land sweet grapes that would have delighted even the gods of Olympus. They were friendly, impulsive people who would shout across the street to one other, hands cupped like megaphones. They knew each other so well that it was as if they had all been cast from the same mould. It was utterly unlike Oran, where to go from one neighbourhood to another was like moving between centuries, between different planets. Río Salado was easygoing and broad-minded; even the church, which stood next to the town hall, was set back from the square so as not to disturb revellers.
My uncle was right. Río Salado was the perfect place to start afresh. We lived on a hill to the east of the village in a large, bright, airy house set in magnificent gardens and with a small balcony that overlooked a sea of vineyards. The ground floor had been converted into a pharmacy, with a small back office lined with shelves and compartments. A spiral staircase led to the first-floor living room, off which were three large bedrooms and a tiled bathroom with an iron bathtub with claw feet in the shape of lion’s paws cast in bronze. I felt at home here from the moment I first stood on the sunlit balcony watching a partridge soar above the vineyards, and felt myself soar with it.
I was overjoyed. Having been born in the countryside, here in Río Salado I rediscovered the familiar sights and smells of my childhood, the smell of the newly ploughed earth, the silent hills. I was a farmer’s son again, happy to discover that the city clothes I had been forced to wear for so long had not warped my soul. The city was an illusion, the countryside a joy that was constantly renewed, a place where day breaks like the dawn of the world, where nightfall brings with it perfect peace. From the first, I loved Río Salado. It was a blessed place and I could easily imagine gods and titans finding rest here. It was a place of serenity, undisturbed by primordial demons. Even when the jackals came at night to prowl the sleeping town, I felt like going with them, following them into deep forest. Sometimes I would go out on to the balcony to watch them, sly shadows slinking through the vineyards; I could stand there for hours listening for every hushed sound, gazing at the moon, which dipped and seemed to brush my eyelashes.
And then there was Émilie.
The first time I saw her, she was sitting on the porch outside the pharmacy, toying with the laces of her boots. She was a pretty girl with timorous coal-black eyes. I could have mistaken her for an angel were it not that her face, so white it looked like marble, bore the unmistakable sign of some terrible illness.
‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Can I help you?’
‘I’m waiting for my father,’ she said, shifting to one side to let me pass.
‘You can wait inside. It’s freezing out here.’
She shook her head.
When I saw her some days later she was with her father, a hulking man who looked as though he had been carved from a menhir. He waited by the counter, silent and motionless, as Germaine led the girl into the back office. When they reappeared some minutes later, the man set some money on the counter, took his daughter by the hand and left.
‘What was she here for?’ I asked Germaine.
‘Her injection . . . I give it to her every Wednesday.’
‘Is it serious . . . what she’s got?’
‘Only God can know that.’
The following Wednesday, I hurried home from school so I could see her. She was sitting on a bench opposite the counter, leafing through a book.
‘What are you reading?’
‘It’s a book about Guadeloupe.’
‘What’s Guadeloupe?’
‘It’s a French island in the Caribbean.’
I tiptoed closer, afraid that I might startle her – she looked so fragile.
‘My name is Younes.’
‘Mine’s Émilie.’
‘I’ll be thirteen in three weeks.’
‘I was nine last November.’
‘Are you in a lot of pain?’
‘It’s not too bad.’
‘What’s wrong with you?’
‘I don’t know. The doctors at the hospital couldn’t work it out, and the medicine they’re giving me doesn’t seem to do any good.’
Germaine appeared and Émilie went with her, leaving the book on the bench. There was a rose bush in a pot on the sideboard. I picked a rose and slipped it between the pages of the book, then went up to my room.
When I came down again, Émilie was gone.
She did not come for her injection the following Wednesday, nor the Wednesday after that.
‘She must be in hospital,’ Germaine said.
After several weeks, I gave up all hope of seeing Émilie again.
Then I met Isabelle. She was the niece of Pépé Rucillio – the richest man in Río Salado. Isabelle was a pretty little girl with big periwinkle-blue eyes and long hair that cascaded down her back. She thought of herself as sophisticated. She looked down her nose at everything and everyone, but when she looked at me, she suddenly seemed thin and frail. Isabelle wanted me all to herself and woe betide anyone who came too close to me.
Isabelle’s parents – successful wine merchants – worked for Pépé Rucillio, the patriarch of the village. They lived in a huge villa on a street cascading with bougainvilleas near the Jewish cemetery.
Isabelle’s mother was a highly strung French woman whose family, people said, were penniless aristocrats (though she was quick to remind everyone that she had blue blood in her veins). Isabelle had inherited little from her mother except her obsession with order and discipline, but she owed much to her father, a handsome olive-skinned man from Catalonia. She had his face – the same high cheekbones, the chiselled mouth, the piercing eyes. Even at the tender age of thirteen, with her aristocratic nose and her regal manner, Isabelle knew what she wanted and how to get it. She was as careful about the company she kept and the image she projected of herself. In a previous life, she told me, she had been a chatelaine.
It was Isabelle who approached me. I was at some festival on the village square when she came over to me and asked: ‘Are you Monsieur Jonas?’ She addressed everyone, young and old, as monsieur or madame, and insisted they do the same to her. ‘Thursday is my birthday,’ she went on imperiously, not waiting for me to answer. ‘You are cordially invited to attend.’ I didn’t know whether this was an invitation or a command. When I arrived at her party on Thursday, feeling somewhat lost in the confusion of her cousins and her friends, she grabbed me and introduced me to everyone: ‘This is my best friend.’
My first kiss, I owe to Isabelle. We were in an alcove of the grand drawing room at her house. Isabelle, her back straight, her chin held high, was playing the piano. I was sitting next to her, watching her slender fingers flutter over the keys. Suddenly she stopped, closed the piano lid carefully and, after a moment’s hesitation – or a moment’s thought – turned to me, took my face in her hands and pressed her lips to mine, closing her eyes in mock passion.
The kiss seemed to go on for ever.
Isabelle opened her eyes again before she pulled away.
‘Did you feel anything, Monsieur Jonas?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Me neither. It’s strange, in the movies, it looks so sophisticated . . . Perhaps you have to be grown up to really feel these things.’
She looked deep into my eyes and announced: ‘Never mind. We’ll wait as long as it takes.’
Isabelle had the patience of those who believe that tomorrow belongs to them. I was the most handsome boy on earth, she told me, and in some previous life I must have been a prince. She informed me that she had chosen me to be her fiancé because I was ‘worth the candle.’
After that first attempt, we didn’t kiss, but we saw each other almost every day and dreamed up fantastical plans.
Then suddenly, abruptly, our ‘engagement’ came to an end. It was a Sunday morning. I had been skulking around the house – my uncle had shut himself in his room and Germaine had gone to church – half-heartedly trying to play or read. It was a glorious spring day; the swallows had come early, and Río Salado was scented with jasmine.
I went for a walk, my head in the clouds, and though I had not planned to do so, I found myself standing outside the Rucillios’ house. I called to Isabelle through the window. She did not come down to the door, but peered at me through the shutters for a moment before slamming them open and screaming:
‘Liar!’
From her tone and the incandescent fury of her stare, I knew she hated me – it was the tone, the look that she invariably used when she had decided to declare war. I had no idea of the charges levelled against me; I was completely unprepared for the attack. I stood there speechless.
‘I never want to see you again, Jonas!’ she declared, and I realised this was the first time I had ever heard her address anyone without using monsieur or madame.
‘Why did you lie to me?’ she screamed, infuriated that I simply stood there looking confused. ‘Why?’
‘I’ve never lied to you . . .’
‘Haven’t you? Your name is Younes, isn’t it? You-nes? So why do you go round calling yourself Jonas?’
‘Everyone calls me Jonas . . . What difference does it make?’
‘It makes all the difference!’ she shouted breathlessly, her face flushed as she spat scornfully. ‘It changes everything.’
‘We are from different worlds, Monsieur Younes,’ she said implacably when she had got her breath back. ‘And the fact that you have blue eyes is not enough.’ Then, before slamming the shutters closed, she spluttered contemptuously: ‘I am a Rucillio, or had you forgotten? You surely don’t think I could marry an Arab? I’d rather die!’
As a child, such a glimpse into the adult world can scar you for life. I was shell-shocked; I felt as though I had woken from a nightmare. I would never again look at things the same way. There are things that, though to a child’s eye they seem so trivial as to be inconsequential, come back to haunt you; even when you close your eyes, you feel them drag you down, tenacious and cruel as the pangs of remorse.
Isabelle had ripped me from my safe little world and tossed me into the gutter. Adam cast out of Eden could not have felt more wretched, and the lump in my throat was harder to swallow than his apple.
After what Isabelle said, I began to be more circumspect, more attentive. I noticed that no one in Río Salado wore a billowing haik, and that the dishevelled wretches in turbans who haunted the vineyards from dawn to dusk did not dare come into Río Salado itself, and that my uncle – whom most of the villagers assumed was a Turk from Tlemcen – was the only Arab to have succeeded in putting down roots in this fiercely colonial village.
What Isabelle had said had shocked me.
After that, whenever we met, she would stalk past, head high as a butcher’s hook, as though I had never existed. Nor did it stop there: she invariably imposed her prejudices on others. If she had decided to hate someone, she insisted all her friends do so too. I watched as a yawning gap opened up around me in the school playground, my classmates deliberately shunned me.
It was for Isabelle’s sake, too, that Jean-Christophe Lamy picked a fight with me at school and beat me to a bloody pulp. Though he was a year my senior, Jean-Christophe had little to boast about, since his father was the son of a caretaker. But Jean-Christophe was hopelessly in love with Pépé Rucillio’s indomitable niece, and he hoped by beating me up to show her how much he loved her, how far he was prepared to go.
Shocked by the sight of my injuries, the teacher called me up before the whole class and demanded that I name the ‘little savage’ who had done this. When I refused, the teacher ordered me to hold out my hands and thrashed me with a ruler, then made me stand in the corner for the rest of the day. After class, he had me stay behind, thinking he could coerce me into giving him the name of the culprit. Still I refused, and eventually he let me go.
When she saw the state of me, Germaine was livid. She demanded to know who had done this to me, but again I stubbornly refused to answer. She insisted on taking me back to the school so she could find out what had happened, but my uncle, who was slumped in a corner, dissuaded her. ‘You’re not taking him anywhere,’ he said. ‘It’s high time he learned to stand on his own two feet.’
Some days later, as I was wandering through the vineyards, I saw Jean-Christophe Lamy and his two henchmen, Simon Benyamin and Fabrice Scamaroni, coming across the fields towards me. Though their manner was not hostile, I was terrified. They did not usually play around here; they hung around the town square or played football together on a patch of waste ground. The very fact that they were in my neighbourhood was not good news. I didn’t really know Fabrice. He was in the class above me: I often saw him reading comics in the playground. He seemed an unremarkable boy whose only talent was his ability to give Jean-Christophe an alibi when he needed it, but I suspected that he might wade into the fight if things turned nasty. Not that Jean-Christophe needed any help; he knew how to throw a punch. Simon was a different matter. I did not trust him at all – he was wildly unpredictable, capable of head-butting a friend just to put an end to a boring conversation. He was in the same year as me, and was the class clown. He always sat at the back and constantly persecuted the clever students. He was a dunce who would complain when the teacher gave him a bad grade, and he hated girls – especially the pretty, clever ones. Simon and I had met on my first day at the school. He and his gang had crowded around me and jeered at me, at the scabs on my knees, at my delicate features, ‘like a little girl’, at my new shoes, which they said made me look like a frog. When I did not react, Simon called me a sissy. After that, he ignored me.
Jean-Christophe was carrying something under his arm. I watched carefully, waiting for him to signal to his friends. Strangely, I saw no sign of the malicious grin, the tenseness in his movements he usually exhibited when about to beat somebody up.
‘We’re not here to hurt you,’ Fabrice said.
Jean-Christophe approached me warily, looking embarrassed, even apologetic. His shoulders sagged under the weight of some invisible burden.
He held out a package.
‘I came to say sorry,’ he said.
I did not take the package, suspecting some practical joke, so he placed it in my hands.
‘It’s a wooden horse. It means a lot to me, but I’d like you to have it. Take it, please, and forgive me.’
Fabrice stared at me, willing me to forgive him.
Once he felt that I had a grip on the package, Jean-Christophe took his hands away and whispered: ‘And thanks for not telling on me.’
In that moment, the friendship between the four of us, one that was to prove among the most important in my life, was sealed. Later, I discovered that Isabelle, furious at Jean-Christophe’s hapless attempt to impress her, had insisted he apologise to me in the presence of witnesses.
Our first summer in Río Salado began inauspiciously. On 3 July, Algeria was rocked by Operation Catapult, in which a British naval squadron bombed the French fleet at the Battle of Mers-el-Kébir. Three days later, before we had had time to weigh the extent of the disaster, His Majesty’s Air Force returned to finish the job.
One of Germaine’s nephews in Oran, a cook on the warship Dunkerque, was among the 1,297 sailors killed in the raid. My uncle, who was gradually, inexorably withdrawing into himself, refused to come to the funeral, so Germaine and I had to go without him.
The city of Oran was in a state of shock. The whole population had gathered on the docks and was staring aghast at the burning barracks. Many of the ships had been on fire since the first bombing raids, and thick clouds of black smoke now choked the city and veiled the mountains. What had happened was all the more shocking because the warships the British had bombed had been in the process of laying up, the French having signed an armistice with Germany two weeks earlier. This war that people had assumed posed no threat to this side of the Mediterranean was now on our doorstep. After the initial panic and confusion, there was mayhem. Half-truths and rumours were rife, and people seemed prepared to believe even the wildest and most terrifying stories. There was talk of a German invasion, of nightly parachute drops outside the city, of massive bombing raids targeting the civilian population and dragging Algeria into this savage war, which even now was returning all of Europe to the Stone Age.
I was desperate to get back to Río Salado.
After the funeral, Germaine gave me some money so that I could go to Jenane Jato, and asked her nephew Bertrand to go with me so he could bring me back safe and sound.
Jenane Jato looked different, larger. It sprawled now towards Petit Lac, towards the shanty towns and the camp grounds of the nomads. Scrubland was fast disappearing under the advancing concrete. Patches of waste ground and dark alleys were now building sites. The high walls of a barracks or a prison rose up where once the souk had been. Crowds milled outside employment ‘offices’ – most of which were no more than tables set up in front of vast mountains of scrap iron. Jenane Jato was different, yet poverty still clung tenaciously to the place, resistant to even the most fervent municipal projects. The same shambling shadows still hugged the walls, the same human wrecks still sprawled drunkenly in cardboard boxes; the destitute, faces ashen, shrouded like mummies in their burnous, still teemed around the filthy cafés, hoping to dip a dry crust into the smells of cooking. The poor, the drunken and the wretched stared at us as though we were time itself, as though we had appeared from some parallel universe. Whenever he heard some insult directed at us, or saw someone stare a little too long at our fine clothes, Bertrand, who had never seen a place like Jenane Jato, walked a little faster. There were roumis here and there, and some Muslims who wore European suits, fezzes perched at rakish angles, but in the air there was still the stifling smell of a storm about to break. As we walked, we happened on squabbles, some of which degenerated into brawls while others simply petered out into uneasy silence. The sense of dread was overpowering. Even the jingling dance of the water sellers, whose leather harnesses were studded with tiny bells, could not ward off the unwholesome effects.
There was far too much suffering.
Jenane Jato was crumbling beneath the weight of broken dreams. Abandoned children stumbled in their parents’ shadows, weak from starvation and sunstroke, fledgling tragedies set loose upon the world. Feral and brutish, they raced barefoot through the streets, hanging on to the backs of trucks, dashing between the carts, laughing, heedless, flirting with death. Gangs of boys fought, or played soccer with a ball of knotted rags. In their terrifying games, there was something exhilarating, something dizzyingly suicidal.
‘Makes a change from Río Salado, doesn’t it?’ Bertrand tried to smile, but he was sweating and pale with fear. I was scared too, but my terror vanished when I saw Peg-Leg standing outside his stall. The poor devil had lost a lot of weight. He looked ten years older. He gave me the same puzzled frown he had the last time he had seen me – half surprise, half delight.
‘Can you give me the address of your guardian angel, blue eyes?’ he shouted. ‘Because if there is a God, I want to know why he looks out for you and not for us lot here.’
‘That’s enough of your blasphemy,’ called the barber. ‘It’s probably your ugly mug that made God turn his back on us.’
The barber had not changed, though he now had the scar of a razor slash across his face. Jenane Jato was clearly on the move, but where it was headed I could not tell. The shacks behind the jujube hedges had been cleared away to leave a vast expanse of red clay surrounded by a wire fence into which had been dug the foundations for a bridge that was to span the railway line. Where the old barracks had stood rose the towers of a huge new factory.
Peg-Leg jerked a thumb at his jar of sweets.
‘You want one, kid?’
‘No thanks.’
Crouched beneath a rotting lamp post, a waffle-seller clicked a pair of metal castanets. He offered us waffles in paper cornets and the gleam in his eyes sent shivers down our backs. Bertrand urged me on, clearly not prepared to trust a face or a shadow in this place.
When we came to the courtyard, he said, ‘I’ll wait for you outside. Take all the time you need.’
Opposite, where Ouari’s chicken coop had once been, there was a new brick house with a low stone wall that ran along what had been the patch of waste ground where a gang of boys had once tried to lynch me. I thought about Ouari, remembered him teaching me to catch goldfinches; I wondered where he was now.
Badra peered at me when she saw me step into the courtyard. She was hanging out her washing, the hem of her dress tucked into the rainbow-coloured cord she used as a belt, revealing her bare legs. She stood, feet apart, hands on her broad hips, barring my way.
‘So it’s only now that you remember you have a family?’ Badra looked different. She had put on weight. Her strong face had slipped to join a double chin, her fearsome energy had waned and she now seemed flabby and listless.
I didn’t know whether she was teasing or scolding me.
‘Your mother and your sister are out.’ She nodded to our curtained room. ‘But they should be back soon.’
She pushed her laundry pail aside with her foot and shoved a stool towards me
‘Sit down,’ she said. ‘Kids! You’re all the same! You suckle till you’ve sucked us dry, and as soon as you learn to walk, you clear off and leave us to starve. You’re just like your fathers; you creep out and you don’t give a thought to what happens to us.’
She turned and went back to hanging out her laundry. I could see only her shoulders rising and falling. She stopped for a moment to wipe her nose or brush away a tear, shook her head then went back to hanging clothes on the old hemp washing line that bisected the courtyard.
‘Your mother’s not been well,’ she said. ‘Not well at all. I’m sure something terrible has happened to your father, but she won’t believe it. Lots of men walk out on their families, they go away and start again somewhere. But that’s not the only possibility . . . There’s a lot of violence these days. I’ve got a bad feeling about your father. I think he was murdered and dumped in a ditch. He was a good man, not the kind of man who walks out on his kids. I’m sure he’s dead. Like my poor husband. Cut down for three soldies – three lousy cents. In broad daylight they killed him – stabbed him in the middle of the street. A single stab and it was all over. How can it be so easy for a man to die when he has hungry mouths to feed? How could he let himself be stabbed in the back by a kid not much older than you are?’
Badra chattered on, never pausing for breath, as though someone had opened up a Pandora’s box inside her. It was as though this was all there was left for her: to talk about her tragedies, a casual gesture here, a sudden silence there. Above the clothes she was hanging out I could see her shoulders; beneath them, her bare legs, and sometimes, in the gap between the clothes, a glimpse of her plump hips. She told me that Bliss had evicted the beautiful Hadda, with her two kids trailing after her and nothing but a bundle of clothes. She told me that one night, when her drunken husband beat her yet again, poor Yezza had thrown herself into the well and killed herself. She told me how Batoul, the psychic, who had managed to extort a tidy sum from the poor wretches who came to consult her, finally amassed enough to buy a house and a Turkish hammam in the Village Nègre, and she told me about the new tenant who had shown up from God knew where and, in the afternoon, when all the shutters were closed, admitted every kind of deviant into her room. Badra told me that Bliss, now there were no men living in the courtyard, had become a pimp.
When she had finished hanging out her washing, she tipped the dirty water into the drain, untucked the hem of her skirt from her belt, and went back into her dingy rat hole, where she continued to rail and curse until my mother came back.
My mother did not seem surprised to see me sitting there on a stool in the courtyard. She barely seemed to recognise me. When I went over to kiss her, she took a step back. It was only when I pressed myself to her that her arms – hesitating for an instant – finally wrapped themselves around me.
‘Why did you come?’ she asked me over and over.
I proffered the money Germaine had given me. Hardly had I held it out than, like lightning, my mother had whipped the few grubby banknotes from my hand and conjured them away like a magician. She pushed me into the poky little room where we had lived, and as soon as we were safe, took the money out and counted it over and over to assure herself she wasn’t dreaming. I was ashamed by her greed, ashamed of the unkempt hair she had clearly not brushed for ages, ashamed of the tattered haik draped like an old curtain round her shoulders, ashamed of the hunger and the pain that distorted her face, this woman who, once, had been as beautiful as the dawn.
‘It’s a lot of money,’ she said. ‘Did your uncle tell you to give it to me?’
Fearing she might react the same way my father had, I lied:
‘I saved it up.’
‘Are you working?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’ve stopped going to school?’
‘I still go to school.’
‘I don’t want you to leave school. I want you to be educated and get a good job so you can live happily for the rest of your life. Do you understand? I don’t want your children to have to live like dogs.’
Her eyes burned as she grabbed me by the shoulders.
‘Promise me, Younes, promise me that you’ll go to university like your uncle, that you’ll have a proper house and a proper job . . .’
Her fingers dug into my shoulders until I thought they might break.
‘I promise . . . Where is Zahra?’
Warily she took a step back. Then, remembering that I was her son and not some envious evil neighbour, she whispered:
‘She is learning a trade . . . She is going to be a seam-stress. I got her a post as an apprentice in a dressmaker’s shop in the New Town. I want her to make something of herself . . .’
‘Is she better?’
‘She was never sick and she wasn’t mad; she’s simply deaf and dumb. But she understands people and the senior dressmaker told me she’s a quick learner. She’s a good woman, the dressmaker. I work for her three days a week. I do the cleaning. Here or there, what’s the difference? Besides, you do what you have to to survive.’
‘Why don’t you come and live with us in Río Salado?’
‘No,’ she shrieked as though I had uttered some obscenity. ‘I can’t leave this place until your father comes back. Imagine if he came back and we weren’t here? How would he find us? We have no family, no friends in this terrible city. And besides, where is Río Salado? It would never occur to your father that we might leave Oran. No, I am staying right here until he comes.
‘But what if he’s dead?’
She grabbed me by the throat and slammed my head against the wall.
‘You little fool! How dare you! Batoul the clairvoyant told me. She saw it in my palm and she saw signs on the water. Your father is safe and well. He’s making his fortune; when he is rich, he will come home. We will all live in a beautiful house with a veranda and a vegetable garden, and there will be a garage for our new car, and all the troubles of the past will be forgotten. Who knows, maybe we might go back and buy back the lands we were forced to sell.’
All this she said quickly, very quickly, with a quaver in her voice and a curious gleam in her eye, as her hands sketched her impossible dreams on the air. Had I known that this was the last time we would ever speak, I might have believed her fantasies; might have stayed with her. But how could I have known?
Once again it was she who urged me to leave; to go back to my adoptive parents.
THEY CALLED us ‘the pitchfork’. We were as inseparable as the tines of a fork.
There was Jean-Christophe Lamy, a hulking giant at the age of sixteen. As the eldest of the group, he was the leader. His hair as blonde as a hayrick, he had a permanent smile. Every girl in Río Salado swooned over him, but ever since Isabelle Rucillio had provisionally agreed to make him her ‘fiancé’, he watched his step.
Then there was Fabrice Scamaroni, two months younger than me, a boy who had his heart on his sleeve and his head in the clouds. His sole ambition was to be a writer. His mother, a young widow who was a little crazy, owned businesses in Río Salado and Oran. She lived by her own rules and was the only woman in the whole district to drive a car. The wagging tongues in Río Salado constantly gossiped about her, but Madame Scamaroni didn’t care. She was beautiful, rich, independent. What more was there?
In the summer, we would pile into the back seat of her sturdy six-cylinder truck and she would drive us to the beach at Terga. After a swim, she would throw together a barbecue, stuffing us with black olives, lamb kebabs and sardines grilled over charcoal.
Then there was Simon Benyamin. Simon, like me, was fifteen. He was a short, fat Jewish boy who loved tricks and practical jokes. He was jolly, a little cynical because he had been unlucky in love, but he could be endearing when he wanted to. He dreamed of working in the theatre or the movies. His family was not exactly popular in Río Salado. His father trailed bad luck in his wake. Every time he set up a business it went bust, which meant that he owed money to everyone, even the seasonal workers.
Of the gang, Simon and I were closest. We lived a stone’s throw from each other, and every day he called for me and we would go and meet Jean-Christophe on the hill. The hilltop was our fort. We would meet under an ancient olive tree and look down at Río Salado shimmering at our feet. Fabrice was always last to show up, and always with a basket full of kosher sausage sandwiches, pickled peppers and fresh fruit. Together we would hang out there until late into the night, dreaming up improbable schemes and listening to Jean-Christophe talking about the tribulations he suffered at the hands of Isabelle Rucillio. Fabrice, for his part, drove us insane reciting poems and dysenteric prose strung together with words he had found in the dictionary.
Sometimes we allowed other boys to join us. More often than not this meant the Sosa cousins: José, who shared a tiny garret with his mother and ate gazpacho for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and André – we called him Dédé – who was every inch the son of his father, the stern Jaime Jiménez Sosa, who owed one of the largest farms in the area. André was sometimes a bully, he could be brutal with the hired help but he was kind to his friends. Spoiled and precocious, he was capable of saying outrageous things, seemingly indifferent to who he hurt, but I could never stay angry with him for long. Despite the cruel, casual remarks he made about the Arabs, he was always considerate to me. He did not discriminate; I was invited to his house just as often as his other friends. Yet even in my presence he was capable of disparaging Muslims, as though this was simply how things were. His father ruled his estate like a feudal lord, keeping the countless Muslim families who worked for him packed in like cattle. Wearing a pith helmet and slapping at his boots with a riding crop, Jaime Jiménez Sosa IV was always up at first light and always last to bed. He worked his ‘galley slaves’ until they dropped, and God help the malingerers. He worshipped his vineyards, and any incursion on to his land he regarded as sacrilege. People said that he once killed a goat who dared to nibble on a vine leaf and shot at the flabbergasted shepherd for trying to save the animal.
These were strange times.
As for me, time marched on – I was becoming a man. I had grown almost twelve inches, and when I licked my lips, I could feel a little downy moustache.
It was the summer of 1942, and we were on the beach, sunning ourselves. The sea was crystalline and the horizon so clear that you could see all the way to the Habibas Islands. Fabrice and I were lounging under a sunshade while Simon, wearing a pair of revolting shorts, was entertaining the crowd doing ridiculous dives, hoping his antics might impress some girl, but his Apache war cries simply terrified the children and irritated the old ladies slumped in their deckchairs. Jean-Christophe was posing, holding his stomach in, hands on his hips, showing off the perfect V of his torso. Nearby, the Sosa boys had set up a tent. André loved to put on airs. Whereas other people brought deckchairs to the beach, he brought a tent; if they showed up with a tent, he would turn up with a whole caravanserai. At the age of eighteen, he already owned two cars, including a convertible. This he would drive lazily through the streets of Oran, except when it was time for siesta, when he would tear through Río Salado with an ear-splitting roar. Today, he could think of nothing better to do than mistreat his manservant Jelloul. He had already sent him back to the village three times in the blazing sun, the first time to get cigarettes, the second to get matches, and the third because Monsieur André had asked for Bastos cigarettes, not something that ‘a navvy might smoke’. The village was a fair distance and poor Jelloul was melting like an ice cube.
Fabrice and I had watched the scene play out from the beginning. André knew that the way he treated his manservant annoyed us and took malicious pleasure in winding us up. As soon as Jelloul got back, he sent him off a fourth time to get a tin-opener. The servant, a timid boy, turned on his heel stoically and headed back up the embankment in the sweltering afternoon heat.
‘Give him a break, Dédé,’ José said.
‘It’s the only way to keep him on his toes,’ said André, clasping his hands behind his neck. ‘Give him a break, and next minute he’ll be snoring.’
‘It’s a hundred degrees out there,’ pleaded Fabrice. ‘The poor guy is only flesh and blood, he’ll get sunstroke.’
José got to his feet to call Jelloul back. André grabbed his wrist and forced him to sit down again.
‘Leave it, José. You don’t have servants, you don’t know what it’s like . . . Arabs are like dogs, you have to beat them to get them to behave.’ Then, remembering that I was there, he corrected himself: ‘Well, some Arabs . . .’
Suddenly realising just how offensive his remark had been, he leapt to his feet and raced down to the sea. We watched him dive in, throwing up great sheets of spray. There was an uncomfortable silence in the tent. José clenched his jaw, finding it difficult to contain himself. Fabrice closed the book he had been reading and glared at me.
‘You need to give him a smack in the mouth, Jonas.’
‘What for?’ I asked wearily.
‘For what he says about Arabs. What he said was outrageous, I expected you to put him in his place.’
‘This is his place, Fabrice . . . I’m the one who doesn’t know my place.’
With that I grabbed my towel and headed back towards the road to hitchhike back to Río Salado. Fabrice came after me, tried to persuade me not to go home so early, but I felt sick at heart and the beach now seemed as bleak as a desert island. It was at that moment that a four-engine plane shattered the silence, appearing over the headland trailing a ribbon of smoke.
‘It’s on fire,’ José shouted, shocked. ‘It’s going to crash.’
The crippled plane disappeared beyond the ridge. Everyone on the beach was on their feet now, shading their eyes with their hands, waiting for an explosion or a cloud of smoke marking out the crash site. Nothing. The plane continued to coast, its engines stalled, but to the relief of everyone it did not crash.
Was this some terrible omen?
Some months later, on 7 November, as night fell over the deserted beach, monstrous shadows appeared on the horizon. The landings on the coast of Oran had begun.
‘Three shots fired,’ roared Pépé Rucillio. The man who rarely showed himself in public was standing on the village square. ‘Where is our valiant army?’
In Río Salado, news of the landings had been greeted like hail at harvest time. The men of the town had convened a meeting on the steps of the town hall. Some glowered with fury and disbelief while others, panic-stricken, had slumped and were sitting on the pavement, drumming their fingers on their knees. The mayor had rushed back to his office, where, according to those close to him, he was in constant contact with the military authorities at the barracks in Oran.
‘The Americans tricked us,’ roared Pépé, the richest man in the district. ‘While our soldiers were stationed in their bunkers, the enemy ships skirted the Montagne des Lions, bypassing our defences, and landed at Arzew without firing a shot. From there, they marched all the way to Tlélat without meeting a living soul, then advanced on Oran by the back door . . . While our troops were still keeping lookout on the clifftops, there were Americans strolling down the Boulevard Mascara. I’m telling you, there wasn’t so much as a skirmish! The enemy marched into Oran and made themselves right at home. What’s going to happen now?’
The day passed in a dizzying whirl of half-truths and wild rumours. Night fell, but no one seemed to notice – in fact most of the villagers did not go home until dawn. By now, they were disoriented. Some swore they could hear tanks roaring through the vineyards.
‘What kept you out so late?’ Germaine demanded, opening the door. ‘You’ve had me worried sick. Where have you been? The whole country is at war and you’re out wandering the streets . . .’
My uncle had emerged from his room. He was slumped in an armchair in the living room, unable to keep his hands still.
‘Is it true the Germans have landed?’ he asked me.
‘Not the Germans, the Americans.’
‘The Americans?’ He looked puzzled. ‘What the hell would the Americans be doing here?’
He jumped to his feet, looked about him contemptuously and announced: ‘I’m going to my room. When they get here, tell them I don’t have time to see them, tell them they can torch the house.’
No one came to torch our house, no air raid troubled the quiet of our fields. A couple of motorcyclists were spotted near Bouhadjar, the neighbouring village, but they turned out to be lost. They drove around for a while, then headed back the way they had come. Some said they were German soldiers, others said it was an American reconnaissance mission, but since no one had ever seen either army up close, we drew a line under the matter and went about our business.
André Sosa was the first of us to go to Oran.
He came back completely confused.
‘The Americans are buying up everything,’ he told us. ‘War or no war, they’re behaving like tourists. They’re all over Oran – in the bars, in the whorehouses, in the Jewish Quarter, they’ve even gone into the Village Nègre, against the express orders of their commander. They want everything: carpets, rugs, fezzes, burnous, tapestries. And they don’t even haggle! I saw one of them give a Moroccan veteran a wad of cash for just some rusty old bayonet from the Great War.’
He pulled a banknote from his back pocket and laid it on the table as though this were proof of what he had said.
‘Just look at what they do with their money . . . This is a hundred-dollar bill. Have you ever seen a French banknote scribbled over like this? They’re autographs. It’s stupid, but it’s the Yanks’ favourite game. They call it ‘Short Snorter’. You can do it with other notes too. Some of them have rolls of bills all like this. They’re not trying to get rich, they’re just collecting them. See those two autographs there, that’s Laurel and Hardy, I swear it is. That one there is Errol Flynn, you know, the guy who plays Zorro . . . Joe gave it to me for a crate of wine . . .’
He picked up the note, stuffed it back in his pocket and, rubbing his hands together, told us he’d be going back to Oran within the week to do some deals with the GIs.
As the fear subsided and people realised the Americans had not come as conquerors but as saviours, others from Río Salado headed for Oran to see what was going on. Little by little, the last pockets of suspicion died away and people stopped posting guards over the farms and the houses.
André was keyed up. Every day, he jumped in his car and headed for Oran to barter, and after each sortie he would come back and try to impress us with his treasures. We had to go to Oran for ourselves to corroborate the wild stories circulating about the Yanks. Jean-Christophe pestered Fabrice, who pestered his mother to drive us there. Madame Scamaroni was reluctant, but eventually she relented.
We left at dawn. The sun had barely risen above the horizon when we reached Misserghin. Jeeps droned back and forth across the roads and the fields. In the streams, GIs, stripped to the waist, washed themselves, singing loudly. There were broken-down trucks along the verge, their hoods up, surrounded by listless mechanics. By the gates of the city, whole convoys waited. Oran had changed. The GIs teeming through the streets gave the place a carnival air. André had not been exaggerating – there were Americans everywhere: on the boulevards and the building sites, driving their half-tracks through the chaos of camels and tipcarts, dispatching units to the nomads’ douars, filling the air with dust and noise. Officers in civvies honked their horns to cut a path through the mayhem. Others, dressed up to the nines, lounged on the terraces of cafés with lady friends while a gramophone played Dinah Shore. Oran was operating on American time. It was not only Uncle Sam’s troops that had landed, they had brought his culture with them: their ration boxes were crammed with condensed milk, chocolate bars, corned beef, chewing gum, Coca-Cola, Twinkies, processed cheese, American cigarettes and white bread. Local bars were playing American music, and the yaouleds – the shoeshine boys – who had suddenly meta-morphosed into newspaper sellers, dashed from the squares to the tram stops howling ‘The Stars and Stripes’ in some incomprehensible pidgin English. From the pavements came the rustle of magazines ruffled by the breeze: Esquire, The New Yorker, Life. Fans of Hollywood began to adopt the traits of their favourite actors: they swaggered as they walked and curled their lips into a sneer even as the merchants in the souks effortlessly learned to lie and haggle in English.
Río Salado suddenly seemed like a backwater. Oran had taken possession of our souls, its clamour pulsed through our veins, its audacity cheered us. We felt drunk, caught up in the commotion of gleaming avenues and teeming bars, made dizzy by the constant weaving of the carts, the cars, the trams, while the girls, insolent but not flighty, their hips swaying seductively, whirled around us like houris.
There could be no question of going back to Río Salado. Madame Scamaroni headed back alone, leaving us in a room over one of her shops on the Boulevard des Chasseurs and making us promise not to do anything foolish in her absence. Hardly had her car turned the corner than we began our invasion of the city. Oran was ours: the Place des Armes, with its rococo theatre; the town hall, flanked by its colossal bronze lions; the Promenade de l’Étang, the Place de la Bastille, the Passage Clauzel, where lovers met; the ice-cream stands that served the finest lemonade on earth, the lavish cinemas and Darmon’s department stores . . . In its charm and its daring, Oran lacked nothing, every spark became a firework, every joke an uproar, every drink a celebration. Ever generous and impulsive, the city was determined to share every pleasure and despised anything it did not find entertaining. A sullen face could ruin its equanimity, a killjoy sour its mood; it could not bear to see the cloud darken its silver lining. Every street corner was a party, every square a carnival, and everywhere its voice proclaimed a hymn to life itself. In Oran, pleasure was not simply a state of mind; it was a cardinal rule: without it, the whole world was a mess. Beautiful, alluring and well aware of the spell she cast over strangers, Oran was bourgeois in an understated fashion. She needed no fanfare and was convinced that no storm – not even the war – could curb her flight. Oran was a city of airs and graces, people referred to her as la ville américaine, and every fantasy in the world was becoming real. Perched on a clifftop, she gazed out to sea, pretending to languish, a captive maiden watching from a tower for Prince Charming to arrive. She was pleasure itself, and everything suited her.
We were caught up in her spell.
‘Hey, rednecks!’ André Sosa yelled to us.
He was sitting on the terrace of an ice-cream parlour with an American soldier. From the way he waved, it was obvious he was trying to impress. He looked dashing: his hair was scraped back and plastered down with brilliantine, his shoes freshly polished, and his sunglasses hid half his face.
‘Hey, come join us,’ he called, getting up to fetch more chairs. ‘They do the best double-chocolate malt here, and the best snails piquant.’
The soldier shifted over to make room, and watched confidently as we surrounded him.
‘This is my friend Joe,’ said André, delighted to be able to introduce the Yank he had been boasting about. ‘Our American cousin. He comes from a godforsaken hole just like ours. He’s from Salt Lake City and we’re from Río Salado, which means Salt River.’
He threw his head back and gave a forced laugh, delighted by this notion.
‘Does he speak French?’ Jean-Christophe asked.
‘Kind of. Joe says his great-grandmother was French, from Haut-Savoie, but he never really learned the language, he picked it up while he was stationed here in North Africa. Joe’s a corporal. He fought on all the fronts.’
Joe punctuated André’s comments by nodding vigorously, clearly amused to see us all raise our eyebrows in admiration. He shook hands with the four of us and André introduced us as his best friends and the finest stallions in Salt River. Although he was thirty and had been in the wars, Joe still had a boyish face, thin-lipped, with high cheekbones that seemed too delicate for a guy of his build. His keen eye lacked any real acuity and made him look a little simple when he grinned from ear to ear; and he grinned whenever anyone so much as looked at him.
‘Joe’s got a problem,’ André told us.
‘Is he a deserter?’ asked Fabrice.
‘No, Joe’s no coward – he lives for fighting. The problem is, he hasn’t had it off for six months and his balls are so full of spunk he can’t put one foot in front of the other.’
‘Why?’ asked Simon. ‘Don’t they issue hand towels with the rations?’
‘It’s not that.’ André patted the corporal’s hand gently. ‘Joe wants a real bed with red lampshades on the nightstands and a real flesh-and-blood woman who can whisper dirty things to him.’
We all burst out laughing and Joe joined us, nodding his head, his smile splitting his face.
‘Anyway, I’ve decided to take him to a whorehouse,’ André announced, throwing his arms wide to indicate the extent of his generosity.
‘They won’t let you in,’ said Jean-Christophe.
‘They wouldn’t dare refuse André Jiménez Sosa . . . They’re more likely to roll out the red carpet for me. The madame at Camélia is a friend – I’ve put so much money her way, she melts like butter as soon as she sees me. So, anyway, I’m going to take my friend Joe over there and we’re going to fuck their brains out, aren’t we, Joe?’
‘Oh, yeah.’ Joe twisted his hat nervously in his hands.
‘I wouldn’t mind going with you,’ Jean-Christophe ventured. ‘I’ve never done anything serious with a woman. You think you could arrange it?’
‘Are you crazy?’ said Simon. ‘You’re not seriously thinking of going into a dive like that with all the diseases the whores have got?’
‘I’m with Simon,’ said Fabrice. ‘I don’t think we should go. Besides, we told my mother we’d behave ourselves.’
Jean-Christophe shrugged, leaned over to André and whispered something in his ear. André gave him a superior look and said, ‘I can get you into Hell itself if you want.’
Relieved and excited, Jean-Christophe turned to me.
‘What about you, Jonas, are you coming?’
‘Absolutely . . .’
I was more shocked than anyone to hear myself say this.
The red-light district In Oran was behind the theatre on the Rue de l’Aqueduc, a squalid alleyway with stairs at either end that reeked of piss and teemed with drunks. Hardly had we set foot in the alley than I felt horribly uncomfortable, and it took every ounce of energy not to turn tail and run. Joe and André raced ahead, eager to get inside. Jean-Christophe followed close behind. He was clearly intimidated and his attempt at seeming offhand was unconvincing. He turned round from time to time and winked at me, to which I responded with a nervous smile, but the moment we passed anyone shifty we swerved out of the way and made as if to leave. The brothels were all lined up on the same part of the alley, their front doors painted in garish colours. The Rue de l’Aqueduc was heaving; there were soldiers, sailors, furtive Arab men terrified of being spotted by a neighbour, barefoot boys running errands, Senegalese pimps with flick knives tucked into their belts watching over their livestock, ‘native’ soldiers wearing tall red fezzes – a feverish yet somehow muted tumult.
The madame at the Camélia was a giant of a woman with a voice that could make the earth quake. She ruled her demesne with a rod of iron and was bawling out an ill-mannered customer on the steps as we arrived.
‘You fucked up again, Gégé, and that’s not good. You want to come back here and see my girls? Well, it’s down to you. If you keep acting like a thug, you’ll never set foot in my house again. You know me, Gégé, when I put that little red cross next to someone’s name, I might just as well be digging his grave. You understand what I’m saying, or do I need to draw you a picture?’
‘Don’t act like you’re doing me some big favour,’ Gégé protested. ‘I come here with my cash, all I’m asking is that your whore does what she’s told.’
‘You can stick your money up your arse, Gégé. This is a brothel, not a torture chamber. If you don’t like the service, you can take your custom elsewhere. Because if you try something like that again, I’ll rip your heart out with my bare hands.’
Gégé, who was almost a dwarf, rose up on the tips of his shoes and glared at the madame, purple with rage. Then he rocked back on to his heels and, livid at having been publicly ticked off by a woman, elbowed his way past us and disappeared into the crowd.
‘Serves him right,’ yelled a soldier. ‘If he doesn’t like it, he can take his business elsewhere.’
‘That goes for you too, Sergeant,’ the madame said. ‘You’re no saint yourself.’
The soldier shrank back. The madame was clearly in a bad mood, and André realised that things might not go his way. He managed to persuade her to let Jean-Christophe in, given his height, but could do nothing for me.
‘He’s just a kid, Dédé,’ she said. ‘He still smells of mother’s milk. I can turn a blind eye to your blonde friend here, but this little cherub with his blue eyes, there’s no way. He’d be raped in the corridor before he even got to a room.’
André made no attempt to insist. The madame was not the sort to go back on a decision. She told me I could wait for my friends behind the counter, instructing me not to touch anything or speak to anyone. I felt relieved. Now that I had seen the brothel, I didn’t want to go any farther; the place turned my stomach.
In the waiting room, veiled by curtains of smoke, the hunters, looking shrunken and dazed, eyed their prey. Some of the men were drunk and they grumbled and jostled. The prostitutes were displayed on a long upholstered bench in an alcove carved into the wall of the corridor that led to the bedrooms. They sat facing the customers, some of them barely dressed, others squeezed into see-through corselets. It looked like a painting of ruined concubines by a despondent Delacroix. There were big girls rippling with rolls of fat, breasts stuffed into bras the size of hammocks; scrawny women with dark sunken eyes who looked as though they had been dragged from their deathbeds; brunettes in cheap blonde wigs; blondes wearing so much make-up they looked like clowns, one breast casually exposed. The women sat in silence, patiently scratching their crotches, smoking, eyeing the cattle opposite.
Sitting behind the counter, I contemplated this world and regretted ever having ventured inside. It smelled of adulterated wine and the stench of rutting flesh. A terrible tension hung in the room like some noxious gas. One spark, one misjudged comment, one wrong look and the whole place could go up . . . The decor, although contrived and naïve, did its best to be cheery: delicate wall hangings framed with velvet, gilded mirrors, cheap paintings of nymphs dressed as Eve, matching lamps and mosaic walls, empty love seats in the alcoves. But the customers seemed oblivious to all this; they could see only the half-naked girls on the long bench. Veins throbbing in their necks, all but pawing the ground, they were eager to get started.
I was beginning to get bored. Jean-Christophe disappeared with some fat old woman, followed by Joe leading two girls caked in make-up. André had vanished.
The owner offered me a bowl of toasted almonds and promised that when I came of age I could have her prettiest girl.
‘No hard feelings, kid?’
‘No hard feelings, Madame.’
‘You’re sweet . . . and for God’s sake don’t call me Madame, it gives me constipation.’
Calmer now, the woman was trying to make peace. I was terrified she might do me a ‘favour’ and allow me to choose from the sweaty flesh laid out on the bench.
‘Sure you’re not angry with me?’
‘I’m not, honestly,’ I yelped, now convinced she would overlook my age and pick out a girl for me. ‘Actually,’ I said quickly, to cover every eventuality, ‘I didn’t want to come in the first place. I’m not ready.’
‘You’re right, kid. When it comes to dealing with women, you’re never ready . . . There’s lemonade behind you if you’re thirsty. It’s on the house.’
She left me and disappeared into the corridor to make sure everything was okay.
It was then that I saw her. She had just finished with a client and gone back to sit with her co-workers on the bench. Her arrival created a ripple in the waiting room. One burly soldier loudly announced that he was first in the queue, causing a storm of protests. I paid no attention. Suddenly the noise in the room seemed to die away; even the room had vanished. There was only her. It was as if a shooting star had come from nowhere and traced a halo of light around her. I recognised her at once, though this was the last place I would have expected to see her. She did not seem to have aged at all. Her body, in a tight-fitting, lowcut dress, was still that of an adolescent girl, her hair spilled over her shoulders just as I remembered it, her cheekbones were as perfectly chiselled as ever. It was Hadda . . . Hadda the beautiful, the woman I had secretly loved, the object of my first boyish fantasies. How could Hadda, who simply by stepping into the courtyard of our house lit it up like the sun, have wound up in this seedy dive?
I was shocked, frozen with disbelief.
Seeing her, I was suddenly transported back to a morning several years before. I was sitting in the courtyard outside our tiny room in Jenane Jato, listening to the laughter and the chatter of our neighbours, the squealing of their children. Hadda was not laughing. She was sad. I remembered watching her place her hand on the low table, palm upwards, and say: ‘Tell me what you see, Batoul, I need to know. I can’t go on like this,’ and Batoul saying, ‘I see you surrounded by many men, Hadda. But there is little happiness . . . It looks like a dream, yet it is not a dream.’
Batoul had been right. Hadda was surrounded by many men, but there was little joy. This place where she had washed up, with its sequins and spangles, its subdued lighting and extravagant decor, was dream-like, yet it was not a dream. I stood behind the counter, open-mouthed, unable to give voice to the terrible feeling that crept over me like a fog and made me feel as though I might go mad.
The burly soldier with the shaven head grabbed two men and smashed their heads against the wall. After that, things calmed down somewhat. He glared around him, nostrils flaring, and when he realised that no one else was prepared to take him on, let go of the two men and strode over to Hadda, grabbed her by the elbow and pulled her to her feet. In the silence as they walked down the corridor, you could cut the atmosphere with a knife.
I rushed out into the street, choking for breath.
André, Jean-Christophe and Joe found me sitting, dumbstruck, on a step, and assuming it was because the madame had refused to let me in, they asked no questions. Jean-Christophe was crimson with embarrassment. Things, apparently, had not gone well. André had eyes only for his Yank, and seemed prepared to grant his every wish. He suggested to Jean-Christophe and me that we go and find Simon and Fabrice and meet up later at the Majestic, one of the most fashionable brasseries in the new town.
The six of us spent the rest of the evening in a high-class restaurant at André’s expense. Joe could not hold his wine. After we had eaten, he started acting up. It started with him pestering a journalist who was quietly trying to put the finishing touches to a story. Joe wandered over to tell the man about his exploits – how he had fought at the front, how many times he had risked his life. The journalist, a patient, polite man, heard him out, clearly eager to get back to his work, irritated but too shy to say anything. He was visibly relieved when André went to collect his soldier friend. Joe came back and joined us, but he was restless and volatile. From time to time he turned back to the journalist and bellowed across the tables: ‘I want a big headline, John, I want to see my face on the front page. You need a photo, it’s no problem, okay, John? I’m counting on you.’ Realising he had no hope of finishing his story with this lunatic nearby, the journalist picked up his rough draft, dropped some money on the table and left.
‘You know who that is?’ Joe said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. ‘That’s John Steinbeck. He’s a writer, a war correspondent with the Herald Tribune. He wrote a piece about my regiment.’
After the journalist had left, Joe looked for other prey. He went up to the bar and asked them to play some Glenn Miller. Then he climbed on to his chair, stood at attention, and sang ‘Home on the Range’. Later, egged on by a bunch of Americans having dinner on the terrace, he forced one of the waiters to repeat after him the lyrics to ‘You’d Be So Nice To Come Home To’. Gradually, the laughter faded to smiles and the smiles to frowns and people began to ask André to take his Yank elsewhere. Joe was no longer the biddable young man he had been during the day. He was drunk now. His eyes bloodshot, his lips flecked with spittle, he clambered up on the table and began to tap-dance, sending cutlery and crockery flying and glasses and bottles crashing to the floor. The manager came over and politely asked him to stop, but Joe, who did not take kindly to the request, punched the man in the face. Two waiters rushed to help their boss and were immediately sent flying. Women started crying. André grabbed his protégé, begging him to calm down, but Joe was no longer listening. He lashed out in all directions and the brawl spread to other customers, then the soldiers on the terrace waded in and chairs started flying. It was chaos.
It took a number of officers from the military police to overpower Joe, and the restaurant did not begin to relax until the MP’s jeep disappeared into the night with Joe inside.
Back in our room on the Boulevard des Chasseurs, I couldn’t get to sleep. All night I tossed and turned, unable to get the image of Hadda the prostitute out of my mind. Batoul’s voice echoed in my head, stirring up old fears, unearthing silences buried deep within me. It was as though I had seen a glimpse of some terrible catastrophe that would befall me. I buried my head under the pillow, trying to suffocate myself with it, but it was useless: the image of Hadda sitting half naked in that brothel turned and turned in my head like a dancer on a music box to the voice of Batoul the clairvoyant.
The following morning, I asked Fabrice to lend me some money, and I headed off on my own to Jenane Jato. This was the other side of Oran; no uniformed soldiers strutted about the streets here, and the air was filled with the stench of rotting prayers and hopes. I needed to see my mother and my sister, wanted to touch them with my own hands, hoping I might shake off the terrible sense of foreboding that had hounded me all night, that clung to me still . . .
But my terrible fears were proved right. Jenane Jato had changed since my last visit. The courtyard where we had lived stood empty; it looked as though a tornado had swept through and carried everyone off. There was barbed wire across the doorway, but someone had made a hole in it large enough for me to crawl through. The courtyard was filled with blackened rubble, rats’ dropping and cat shit. The metal cover of the well was warped and twisted. The doors and windows were all gone. Fire had gutted the left-hand side of the building; the walls had collapsed. A few charred beams still hung from the roof. Above them there was only the pitiless blue of the sky. Our tiny room lay in ruins, and here and there amid the rubble were broken kitchen implements and half-charred bundles of clothes.
‘There’s no one there.’ A voice rang out behind me.
It was Peg-Leg, propped against the doorway, wearing a gandurah that was too short for him. His face was gaunt, his toothless mouth gaped, a terrible maw his grey beard did little to hide. His arm was trembling and he was having trouble standing on his one good leg, which was pale now and covered with brownish pustules.
‘What happened here?’ I asked him.
‘Terrible things . . .’
He hobbled over to me, picking up a can as he passed. He turned it over to see if there might be anything inside worth salvaging, then threw it over his shoulder.
‘Look at this mess.’ He flung his arm wide. ‘It’s a terrible shame.’
Seeing me standing there, waiting, he went on:
‘I warned Bliss about it. This is a respectable house, I told him, you’ve no business putting that whore in with decent women; it’ll end in tears. But he wouldn’t listen to me. One night, a couple of drunks came round looking for her, but she already had a customer, so they tried their luck with Badra. You can imagine – they never knew what hit them. The widow’s two sons butchered them. After that, it was the whore’s turn. She defended herself better than her clients, but there were two of them. At some point, someone knocked over the oil lamp and the fire spread like lightning. It’s lucky it didn’t reach the other houses. The police arrested Badra and her sons and boarded up the house; it’s been like this for two years now. Some people say it’s haunted.’
‘What happened my mother?’
‘I’ve no idea. I do know that she survived the fire; I saw her with your little sister the next day on the corner of the street. They weren’t injured.’
‘What about Bliss?’
‘He disappeared.’
‘What about the other tenants? Maybe they know something . . .’
‘I don’t know where they went, sorry.’
I made my way back to the Boulevard des Chasseurs with a heavy heart. My friends pestered me to know where I’d been, but their questions simply infuriated me and I went out again and wandered the streets for hours. Again and again I found myself standing in the middle of a street, my head in my hands, trying to compose myself. My mother and my sister were safe, I told myself, and probably better off now than they had been. Batoul the psychic was never wrong – after all, she had predicted Hadda’s fate. My father would come back – it was written on the ripples of the water. My mother would not have to worry any more.
This was what I was thinking when suddenly I saw him . . .
My father!
I was sure it was him – I could have recognised his shadow in the darkness among ten thousand, among a hundred thousand men. It was my father. He had come back. Bent beneath the weight of a thick green coat he was wearing in spite of the heat, he was crossing a crowded square in the Village Nègre. I rushed to catch up with him, pushing through the crowded square, but it seemed that for every step forward, I was pushed two steps back. Not for a moment did I take my eyes off the figure of my father as he shambled away, limping slightly, bowed beneath the weight of his green jacket. I was terrified that if I lost sight of him, I might never find him again. But by the time I finally struggled free of the crowd and made it to the far side of the square, he had vanished.
I looked for him in the local cafés, in the bars, in the hammams . . . but he was gone.
I never saw my mother or my sister again. I do not know what became of them, whether they are alive still or dust mingled with the dust of ages. My father I saw several times. About once every ten years I would spot him in a crowded souk or on a building site; sometimes standing alone on his own, or in the doorway of an abandoned warehouse. I never managed to speak to him. Once, I followed him into a blind alley, certain that at last I had tracked him down, and was shocked to discover that the alley was deserted, there was no one waiting at the foot of the crumbling wall. Only when I realised that he always wore the same green jacket, which seemed to be untouched by time and weather, did I finally understand that the man I saw was not flesh and blood.
Even now, in my declining years, I still see him in the distance sometimes, bowed beneath the weight of his old green jacket, limping slowly towards his doom.
THE SEA looked smooth enough to walk on; not a wave lapped at the beach, not a ripple disturbed the glassy surface. It was a weekday and the beach belonged to us. Next to me, Fabrice lay on his back dozing, a book open over his face. Jean-Christophe was strutting along the water’s edge, showing off as always. The Sosa cousins, André and José, had set up a tent and a barbecue a hundred metres away and were waiting for the girls from Lourmel. Here and there a few families lay sunning themselves along the shore. Were it not for Simon’s antics, we might have been on a desert island.
The sun poured down like molten lead, and seagulls darted across the flawless sky, drunk on space and freedom. From time to time they skimmed the waves, like planes chasing each other and hedge-hopping, only to soar again to melt into the blue. In the distance, a trawler heading for port trailed a cloud of birds in its wake; it had been a good day’s fishing.
The weather was beautiful.
Sitting beneath a parasol, a woman gazed out at the horizon. She wore a broad-brimmed hat with a red ribbon, dark glasses and a white swimsuit that clung to her tanned body like a second skin.
And there would be no more to tell had it not been for a gust of wind.
Had I known that a gust of wind can change the course of a life, I might have been more wary, but at the age of seventeen, we all believe we are invulnerable . . .
The midday breeze had come up and the fateful gust of wind, waiting in ambush, raced along the beach stirring up eddies of sand, whipping the parasol into the air as the lady clutched her hat to stop it from flying away. The parasol pirouetted through the air, sailed along the sand, turned somersaults. Jean-Christophe tried but failed to catch it. If he had, my life would have gone on as before, but fate decreed otherwise. The parasol landed at my feet. I simply reached out and picked it up.
Smiling, the lady watched me as I made my way towards her with the parasol tucked under one arm. She got to her feet.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
‘Don’t mention it, madame.’
I knelt down beside her and began scooping out sand, making the hole where the parasol had been deeper and wider. Then I replanted the parasol, and trampled the sand to make sure it did not fly off again.
‘You are very kind, Monsieur Jonas,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry . . .’ she added quickly. ‘I heard your friends call you that.’
She took off her dark glasses.
‘Are you from Terga?’
‘From Río Salado, madame.’
Her piercing eyes unsettled me. In the distance I could see my friends giggling and laughing at me. I quickly took my leave of the woman and went back to join them.
‘You’re red as a beetroot,’ Jean-Christophe teased me.
‘Leave me alone,’ I said.
Simon, who had just come back from a swim, was rubbing himself vigorously with a towel, a mischievous smile on his lips. He dropped into my chair and said:
‘So what did Madame Cazenave want with you?’
‘You know her?’
‘Of course I know her. Her husband was governor of a penal colony in Guyana. They say he disappeared in the jungle tracking a couple of escaped prisoners. When he didn’t show up, she decided to come home. She’s a good friend of my aunt. My aunt says she thinks Madame Cazenave’s husband succumbed to the charms of some big-bottomed Amazonian beauty and ran off with her.’
‘I’m glad your aunt’s no friend of mine!’
Simon burst out laughing and threw the towel at my face, beat his chest like a gorilla and, with a shrill war cry, raced back down to the sea.
‘Completely mad,’ sighed Fabrice, propping himself up on one elbow to watch Simon perform some ridiculous dive.
The girls André had been waiting for arrived on the stroke of ten. The youngest was at least four or five years older than André and José. The girls kissed the Sosa cousins on both cheeks and settled themselves in canvas chairs. André’s manservant, Jelloul, busied himself at the barbecue, fanning the coals and sending clouds of white smoke across the surrounding dunes. José pulled a hamper from under the piles of bags around the centre pole of the tent, took out a couple of strings of spicy merguez sausages and laid them on the grill. The smell of burning fat began to drift along the beach.
I don’t remember why I decided to head over to André’s tent. Perhaps I was deliberately trying to attract the attention of Madame Cazenave so that I could get another glimpse of her magnificent eyes. If so, she was reading my mind, because as I passed her, she took off her sunglasses, and as she did, I suddenly felt as though I was wading through quicksand.
I saw her again some days later on the main street in Río Salado. She was coming out of a shop, a white hat perched like a crown over her perfect face. People turned to look at her but she did not even notice. She had an aristocratic bearing and did not walk but strode along the avenue to the rhythm of time itself. She reminded me of the enigmatic heroines of the silver screen, who seemed so real that next to them our reality paled into insignificance.
She glided past as I sat with Simon Benyamin on the terrace of a café on the square. She did not even see me. My only consolation was the cloud of perfume that trailed in her wake.
‘Easy does it,’ whispered Simon.
‘What?’
‘Take a look in the mirror! You’re red as a beetroot! Don’t tell me you’re in love with a respectable housewife and mother?’
‘What are you saying?’
‘I’m saying you look like you’re about to have a heart attack.’
Simon was joking. What I felt for Madame Cazenave wasn’t love but a profound admiration. My feelings towards her were entirely honourable.
At the end of the week, she came into the pharmacy. I was behind the counter helping Germaine fill a pile of prescriptions that had come in as the result of an epidemic of gastritis. When I looked up and saw her, I almost fainted.
I expected her to take off her sunglasses, but she kept them perched on her pretty nose, and I could not tell if she was staring at me or ignoring me.
She handed Germaine a prescription, proffering her hand as though to be kissed.
‘It might take a little while . . .’ Germaine said, struggling to decipher the doctor’s scrawl. ‘I’m a little busy at the moment.’ She nodded to the packages on the counter.
‘When do you think it might be ready?’
‘This afternoon, hopefully, but it won’t be before three.’
‘That’s all right . . . but I won’t be able to come back to pick it up. I’ve been out of town for a while and my house needs some serious spring cleaning. Would you mind having a messenger bring it round? I’ll happily pay.’
‘It’s not a question of money, Madame . . . ?’
‘Cazenave, Madame Cazenave.’
‘Pleased to meet you. Do you live far?’
‘Just behind the Jewish cemetery. The house is set back from the marabout road.’
‘Oh, I know where you mean . . . It’s no problem, Madame Cazenave, I’ll have the prescription delivered to you this afternoon sometime between three and four.’
‘Perfect!’
As she left, she gave me an almost imperceptible nod.
I could barely sit still as I watched Germaine struggle to fill the orders in the back office. The hands of the clock hardly seemed to move; it felt as though night would come before the delivery was ready. At last came my hour of deliverance, like a great lungful of air after too long underwater. At exactly three p.m., Germaine emerged from the back office with a vial wrapped in brown paper. I did not even wait for her to give me directions, but tore it from her hands and leapt on my bicycle.
Gripping the handlebars, my shirt billowing in the wind, I was not pedalling, I was flying. I cycled around the Jewish cemetery, took a short cut through the fields and, weaving between the potholes, raced along the marabout road.
The Cazenaves lived in an imposing mansion perched on a hill some distance outside the village. It was a large whitewashed house that faced southward, overlooking the plains. There were stables, now derelict, but the house was still magnificent. A steep, narrow driveway lined with dwarf palms led up from the road. Wrought-iron gates leading to a courtyard hung from a low wall of finely chiselled stone on which a climbing vine vainly tried to get purchase. The pediment, supported by two marble columns, had the letter ‘C’ carved into the stone, and underneath, as though supporting the initial, was the date 1912, the year in which the house had been built.
I ditched my bicycle by the gates, which creaked loudly as I pushed them open, and stepped into the small courtyard with its fountain; there was no one there. The gardens had fallen into decline.
‘Madame Cazenave?’ I called out.
The shutters on the windows were closed; the wooden door leading inside was locked. I stood by the fountain in the shade of a stucco statue of Diana the Huntress, clutching the bottle of medicine. There was not a living soul in sight. I could hear the breeze rustle through the vine.
After having waited for a while, I decided to knock on the door. My knocking echoed through the house; it was clear there was no one home, but I refused to accept that fact.
I went back and sat on the edge of the fountain, listening for the rasp of footsteps on the gravel, eager to see her appear. Just as I was about to give up, I was startled to hear her cry, ‘Bonjour!’
She was standing behind me wearing a white dress, her broad-brimmed hat with the red ribbon pushed back over the delicate nape of her neck.
‘I was down in the orange grove. I like to walk there; it’s so quiet, so peaceful . . . Have you been waiting long?’
‘No,’ I lied. ‘I just got here.’
‘I didn’t see you as I was coming up the drive.’
‘I’ve brought your medication, madame,’ I said, handing her the package.
She hesitated before taking it, as though she had forgotten her visit to the pharmacy, then, gracefully, she slipped the bottle out of its wrapping paper, unscrewed the lid and delicately inhaled what appeared to be some cosmetic preparation.
‘It smells wonderful, the salve. I just hope it eases my stiff joints. The house was in such a state when I got here that I’ve been spending all day every day trying to get it back to how it used to be.’
‘If there’s anything you need carried or repaired, I’d be happy to do it for you.’
‘You’re very sweet, Monsieur Jonas.’
She nodded to the wicker chair by the table on the veranda, waited for me to sit down, then took the seat facing me.
‘I expect you’re thirsty, with all this heat,’ she said, proffering a jug of lemonade. She poured a large glass and pushed it across the table towards me. The movement clearly hurt her, and she winced and bit her lower lip with exquisite grace.
‘Are you in pain, madame?’
‘I must have pulled a muscle lifting something.’
She took off her sunglasses, and I felt my insides turn to jelly.
‘How old are you, Monsieur Jonas?’ she asked, gazing deep into my very soul.
‘I’m seventeen, madame.’
‘I expect you’re already engaged.’
‘No, madame.’
‘What do you mean, “No, madame”? With a pretty face like yours, and those eyes, I refuse to believe you don’t have a whole harem of girls pining after you.’
Her perfume intoxicated me.
Once again she bit her lip, bringing a hand up to her neck.
‘Is it very painful, madame?’
‘It is painful.’
She took my hand in hers.
‘You have beautiful hands.’
I was embarrassed that she might see the effect she was having on me.
‘What do you plan to be when you grow up, Monsieur Jonas?’
‘A chemist.’
She considered this for a moment, then nodded.
‘It is a noble profession.’
A third twinge in her neck almost bent her double with pain.
‘I think I need to try the balm right away.’ With great dignity, she got to her feet.
‘If you like madame, I can . . . I can massage your shoulder for you . . .’
‘I’m counting on it, Monsieur Jonas.’
I don’t know why, but for an instant, something broke the solemnity of this place. It lasted only a fraction of a second, for when she looked at me again, everything returned to how it had been.
My heart was beating so hard that I wondered whether she could hear it. She took off her hat and her hair tumbled on to her shoulders, and I was all but rooted to the spot.
‘Follow me, young man.’
She pushed open the door and gestured for me to follow her inside. The hall was lit by a faint glow, and I had a sudden sense of déjà vu. I felt certain I had seen the corridor ahead somewhere before, or was I imagining things? Madame Cazenave walked on ahead of me. For one searing instant, I mistook her for my destiny.
We climbed the stairs, my feet stumbling on each step. I held on to the banister, seeing only her body swaying before me, magnificent, bewitching, almost dreamlike in its gracefulness. As we came to the landing, she stopped in the dazzling radiance of a skylight, and it was as though her dress disintegrated and I could see every detail of her perfect figure.
She turned suddenly and found me in a state of shock. She quickly realised that I was incapable of following her much farther, that my legs were about to give out under me, that I was like goldfinch in a trap. Her smile was the coup de grâce. She came back towards me, her step light, floating, and said something I did not hear. Blood was pulsing in my temples, making it impossible for me to think. What’s the matter, Monsieur Jonas? She placed her hand on my chin and lifted my head. Are you all right? The whisper of her voice was lost in the throbbing uproar of my temples. Is it me that has you in this state? Perhaps she was not saying these things, perhaps it was me, though it did not sound like my voice. Her fingers moved over my face, I felt the wall at my back like a barricade obstructing any attempt at retreat. Monsieur Jonas? Her gaze swept over me, conjuring me away as if by magic. I was dissolving in her eyes, her breath fluttered about my breathless panting. When her lips brushed against mine, I thought I would shatter into a thousand pieces; it was as though she had obliterated me, only to refashion me with her fingers. It was not a kiss, but a glancing, hesitant touch – was she testing the waters? She took a step back, and it felt like a wave rolling away, revealing my nakedness, my confusion. Her lips returned, more confident now, more assertive; a mountain stream could not have slaked my thirst as she did. My lips surrendered to hers, melted into hers to become a flowing stream, and Madame Cazenave drank me down to the last drop in a single, endless draught. My head was in the clouds, my feet on a magic carpet. Frightened by the intensity of this pleasure, I must have tried to draw away, because I felt her hand hold me hard. I let her pull me to her, offering no resistance, feverish, willing, astounded by my own surrender, my body joined to hers by her invading tongue. With infinite tenderness, she unbuttoned my shirt and let it fall to the floor. My every breath now was her breath, my heartbeat was her pulse. I had the vague sensation of being undressed, being led into a bedroom, of being laid on a bed deep as a river. A thousand fingers exploded against my skin like fireworks; I was light and joy, I was pleasure at its most intoxicated; I felt myself dying even as I was reborn.
‘Could you come back down to earth a bit?’ Germaine scolded me. ‘You’ve broken half the crockery in the house in the past two days.’
I realised that the plate I had been rinsing had slipped from my hands and shattered at my feet.
‘Your mind is elsewhere . . .’
‘I’m sorry . . .’
Germaine looked at me curiously, wiped her hands on her apron and put them on my shoulders.
‘What’s the matter, Jonas?’
‘Nothing, the plate just slipped.’
‘I know . . . the problem is, it’s not the first one.’
‘Germaine!’ My uncle called her from his room at the far end of the corridor.
I hardly recognised myself. Since my encounter with Madame Cazenave, my mind was elsewhere; it was sounding the depths of a euphoria that seemed endless and eternal. This was my first experience of being a man, my first taste of sexual discovery, and I was intoxicated by it. My body was tight as a bow; I could still feel Madame Cazenave’s fingers moving over my skin, her caresses like a thousand tiny cuts gnawing at the fibre of my being, trilling through my body, becoming the blood pulsing in my temples. When I closed my eyes, I could still feel her breathless gasps, and my whole being was flooded with her intoxicating breath. At night, I did not sleep a wink; the memory of our lovemaking kept me restless until dawn.
Simon found my change of mood infuriating, but though Jean-Christophe and Fabrice fell about laughing at his jokes, his jibes could not touch me. I was like marble. I watched them laugh, unable to understand what was funny. How many times did Simon wave a hand in front of my face to see if I was awake? At moments like this I would come alive for a moment, only to sink back into a sort of trance, the sounds of the world outside suddenly dying away.
On the hill, in the shade of the olive tree or on the beach, I was now an absence among my friends.
I waited for two weeks before summoning the courage to go back to the big white mansion on the road to the marabout’s house. It was late; the light was failing. I left my bicycle by the gates and stepped into the courtyard . . . and there she was, crouched beneath a shrub with a pair of secateurs, tending to her garden.
‘Monsieur Jonas,’ she said, getting to her feet.
She set the secateurs down on a mound of pebbles and wiped the dust from her hands. She was wearing the same hat with the red ribbon, the same white dress, which, in the light of the setting sun, faithfully described the charming contours of her body.
We stared at each other, neither of us saying a word.
I found the silence oppressive; the drone of the cicadas seemed loud enough to split my eardrums.
‘Bonjour, madame.’
She smiled, her eyes wider than the span of the horizon.
‘What can I do for you, Monsieur Jonas?’
Something in her voice made me fear the worst.
‘I was just passing,’ I lied, ‘so I came up to say hello.’
‘How very sweet.’
Her brusqueness left me speechless. She stared at me as though waiting for me to justify my presence; she did not seem to appreciate my intrusion. It was as though I was disturbing her.
‘You don’t need to . . . I just thought . . . I mean, if you needed help with carrying things?’
‘I have servants to do that.’
Having run out of excuses, I felt foolish, felt that I had ruined everything.
‘Monsieur Jonas, you shouldn’t turn up at someone’s house unannounced.’
‘I just thought—’
She brought a finger to my lips, interrupting me.
‘You shouldn’t think.’
My embarrassment turned to a sort of dull rage. Why was she treating me like this? How could she behave as though nothing had happened? Surely she knew why I had come to see her.
As though reading my mind, she said:
‘If I need you, I will let you know. You must learn to let things happen, you understand. To rush things is to ruin them.’
Her finger gently traced the line of my lips, then parted them and slipped into my mouth, lingering for a moment on the tip of my tongue before returning to rest on my lips once more.
‘There is something you need to understand, Jonas: with women, these things are all in the mind. They are only ready when their thoughts are in order. They control their emotions.’
Not for a moment did she take her resolute, regal eyes from mine. I felt as though I was a product of her imagination, a plaything in her hands, a puppy she might order to roll over so she could tickle its tummy. I had no intention of rushing things, of ruining any chance I might have. When she took her hand away, I realised it was time for me to leave . . . and to wait for a sign from her.
She did not walk me back to the gates.
I waited for weeks. The summer of 1944 was drawing to a close. Madame Cazenave no longer came down to the village. When Jean-Christophe called us all together and Fabrice read his poems, all I could do was stare out towards the white mansion on the hill. Sometimes I thought I could see her working in the courtyard, could make out her white dress through the heat haze on the plains. At night I would go out on to the balcony and listen to the howl of the jackals, hoping it might fill the yawning silence of her words.
Madame Scamaroni regularly took us to the apartment on the Boulevard des Chasseurs in Oran, but I have no memory of the movies we saw or the girls we met. Simon was getting tired of my distracted state. One day, on the beach, he tipped a bucket of water over me to get my attention. If Jean-Christophe had not been there, the joke would have turned into a brawl.
Worried by my sudden change of mood, Fabrice came to my house to ask me what was wrong. He got no answer.
Finally, tormented by the waiting, I jumped on my bicycle one Sunday at midday and raced down to the white house. Madame Cazenave had hired an old gardener and a housekeeper, and I found them having lunch together in the shade of a carob tree. I waited in the courtyard, clutching my bicycle, trembling from head to foot. Madame Cazenave gave an imperceptible start when she saw me standing by the fountain. She glanced around for the servants, saw that they were at the far end of the garden, turned back to me. She stared at me in silence; behind her smile, I could tell she was furious.
‘I couldn’t wait,’ I said.
She came down the small flight of steps and walked towards me.
‘But you have to,’ she said firmly.
She beckoned me to follow her back to the gates, and there, without worrying whether it was indiscreet, as though we were the only two people in the world, she slipped her arms around my neck and kissed me hard. The passion of her kiss was such that I knew that this was the end, that this was goodbye.
‘You were dreaming, Jonas,’ she said. ‘It was just a young man’s dream.’
She took her arms from round my neck and stepped back.
‘Nothing ever happened between us, not even this kiss.’
Her eyes forced me to retreat.
‘Do you understand?’
‘Yes, madame,’ I heard myself mumble.
‘Good.’
She patted my cheek, a brisk, maternal gesture.
‘I knew you were a sensible boy.’
I had to wait until it was dark before I went home.
I HOPED for a miracle; it never came.
Autumn arrived, stripping the trees of their leaves, and I realised I had to face facts. It had all been a dream. Nothing ever happened between Madame Cazenave and me.
I went back to my old life, to my friends, to Simon’s antics and Fabrice’s feverish idealism. Jean-Christophe had found a way of dealing with the demanding Isabelle Rucillio. With any compromise, he would say, the important thing was to make sure you got something out of it. Life was a long-term investment, he insisted, and fortune smiled on those who played the long game. He seemed to know what he wanted, and if his theories came unburdened with any actual proof, we were more than happy to take him at his word.
With 1945 came a stream of contradictory stories and rumours. Gossiping over a glass of anisette was the favoured pastime in Río Salado. The smallest rumour would be wildly exaggerated, embellished with daring feats attributed to people who for the most part had nothing to do with it. Everyone on the café terraces had a theory about the war. The names Stalin, Roosevelt, Churchill rang out like trumpets announcing the final assault. One joker, noting that General de Gaulle looked undernourished, suggested sending him a fine Algerian couscous to fatten him up, thereby making it easier for us to trust him, since Algerians invariably associate power with a pot belly. Everyone laughed and drank, then went on drinking until every passing donkey looked like a unicorn. The mood was optimistic. Jewish families who had left the town when news came of the mass deportations in France began to return home. Slowly, surely, things were getting back to normal. The grape harvest had been exceptional and the end-of-season ball was glorious. Pépé Rucillio married off his youngest son, and for seven days and seven nights the whole district rang to the sound of the guitars and castanets of a famous troupe of troubadours shipped in from Seville. We were even treated to an extravagant display in which the finest horsemen in the region were pitted against the greatest warriors of the Ouled N’har.
In Europe, the Third Reich was crumbling. Newsreels predicted that the war would soon be over, even as the bombing intensified: whole cities vanished in flames and ashes, the sky was black with the smoke of aerial battles, trenches collapsed beneath the caterpillar treads of advancing tanks. The cinema in Río Salado was constantly full of people who only came to watch the Pathé News they showed before the main feature. Allied troops had liberated great swaths of occupied territories and were now marching relentlessly on Germany. Italy was a shadow of its former self. The Resistance and the partisans were inflicting heavy losses on Nazi troops caught in a vice between the Red Army and the advancing American forces.
My uncle, wearing the thick jumper that hid his increasingly emaciated frame, sat glued to the wireless, never moving from his chair. From morning to night he sat turning the dial of the radio, trying to tune to some station without interference. Over the whine and static of the airwaves, the house hummed with news and speculation. Germaine had given up on her husband, allowing him to do exactly as he pleased. My uncle insisted on having his dinner served in the living room by the wireless, so that he didn’t miss a scrap of news.
As 8 May 1945 dawned, and the whole world celebrated the end of their nightmare, in Algeria a new nightmare appeared, devastating as a plague, monstrous as the Apocalypse itself. Popular celebrations turned to tragedy. In Aïn Temouchent, near Río Salado, marches for Algerian independence were brutally suppressed by the police. In Mostaganem, riots spread to the surrounding villages. But the horror reached its height in the Aurès and in the Constantine province, where the police, aided and abetted by former colonists turned militiamen, massacred thousands of Muslims.
‘I can’t believe it.’ My uncle’s voice quavered as he sat trembling in his pyjamas. ‘How could they? How could they murder people who are still mourning children who died fighting for the freedom of France? Why should we be slaughtered like cattle simply for demanding our own freedom?’ Pale, distraught and haggard, he shambled up and down the living room in his slippers.
The Arabic radio station reported the bloody suppression of Muslims in Guelma, Kherrata and Sétif, the mass graves where thousands of corpses lay rotting, the Arabs hunted by packs of dogs through vineyards and orange groves, the lynchings in the village squares. What was happening was so horrific that my uncle and I did not even dare to join the peaceful demonstration down the main avenue of Río Salado.
This savage, bloody cataclysm left the Muslim population of Algeria in mourning and almost killed my uncle. One night as he listened, he suddenly brought his hand up, clutched at his chest and collapsed. Madame Scamaroni drove us to the hospital, where we left him in the care of a doctor he knew and trusted. Germaine was distraught, and Madame Scamaroni offered to stay with her. Jean-Christophe and Fabrice came round and waited with us late into the night. Simon borrowed his neighbour’s motorbike so he could come too.
‘Your husband has had a heart attack, madame,’ the doctor explained to Germaine. ‘He’s still unconscious.’
‘Is he going to pull through?’
‘We’ve done everything we can; the rest is down to him.’
Germaine did not know what to say. She had barely uttered a word since we arrived at the hospital. Her face was pale, her eyes haunted; she clasped her hands and bowed her head in prayer.
At dawn the next day, my uncle regained consciousness, asked for a drink of water, and demanded he be discharged immediately, but the doctor insisted on keeping him under observation overnight. Madame Scamaroni offered to pay for a nurse so that my uncle would have full-time care, but Germaine politely declined. She thanked Madame Scamaroni for everything she had done, but insisted that she would look after her husband herself.
Two days later, as I sat by my uncle’s bed, I heard a voice outside, calling me. I went to the window and saw a figure crouching in the shadows. It was Jelloul, André’s manservant. I went outside, and as I crossed the path separ ating the house from the vineyard, Jelloul came out from his hiding place.
‘My God!’ I said.
Jelloul was limping. His face was swollen, his lip split; he had a black eye and his shirt was lashed with red stripes, clearly whip marks.
‘Who did this to you?’
Jelloul glanced around, as though afraid someone would hear, then said:
‘André.’
‘Why? What did you do wrong?’
He smiled at what was clearly a preposterous question.
‘I don’t need to do anything wrong. André always finds some excuse. This time it was the Muslim unrest in the Aurès. André doesn’t trust Arabs any more. When he got back from town drunk last night, he laid into me.’
He lifted his shirt and showed me the welts on his back. André had not pulled his punches. Jelloul turned back to face me, pushing his shirt tails back into his dusty trousers. He sniffed loudly and then said:
‘He told me it was a warning, that he didn’t want me getting any ideas. Said I needed to get it into my head that he was the boss, and he wasn’t going to tolerate insubordination from the hired help.’
Jelloul was clearly waiting for something, but I did not know what. He took off his fez and began twisting it in his grubby hands.
‘Jonas, I didn’t come here to tell you my life story. André threw me out without a penny. I can’t go back to my family with no money. If I don’t earn, my family will starve.’
‘How much do you need?’
‘Just enough to feed us for a couple of days.’
‘Give me two minutes.’
I went up to my room and came back with two fifty-franc notes. Jelloul reluctantly took them, turning them over in his hands.
‘It’s too much . . . I could never pay you back.’
‘You don’t need to pay me back.’
He looked at me and shook his head, thinking. Then, flushed and embarrassed, he said:
‘In that case, fifty francs is enough.’
‘Take the hundred francs, please,’ I said. ‘I’m only too happy to give it.’
‘I believe you, but it’s not necessary.’
‘Have you got work lined up?’
‘No.’ Jelloul suddenly gave a mysterious smile. ‘But André can’t survive without me. He’ll send for me before the end of the week. He won’t find a better dog than me.’
‘Why do you call yourself a dog?’
‘You wouldn’t understand . . . You’re one of us, but you live like one of them. When your whole family depends on you for money, when you have to support a half-crazed mother, a father who had both arms amputated, six brothers and sisters, a grandmother, two aunts disowned by their families and a sickly uncle, you are no longer a human being. You are a dog or a jackal, and every dog seeks out a master.’
Jelloul’s words unsettled me, and I realised that though he was not yet twenty, he had an inner strength, a maturity. The young man who stood before me that morning was not the lackey we had long thought him. He even looked different: he had a quiet dignity I had not noticed, a handsome face, high cheekbones, and eyes that were perceptive and unnerving.
‘Thank you, Jonas,’ he said. ‘I’ll make it up to you some day.’
He turned and began to hobble away.
‘Wait,’ I called after him. ‘You’re not going to get far on that foot.’
‘I got this far, didn’t I?’
‘Maybe, but you’re only going to make it worse . . . Where do you live?’
‘It’s not far, honestly. It’s just the other side of the marabout’s hill. I’ll manage.’
‘I won’t hear of it. Wait there, I’ll get my bicycle and drop you off.’
‘No, Jonas, it’s all right. You have better things to do.’
‘I insist.’
I thought that I had seen poverty in Jenane Jato; I was wrong. The shanty town where Jelloul and his family lived was beyond anything I had ever imagined. The douar was made up of a dozen squalid hovels on the banks of a dried-up riverbed. A few scrawny goats ambled around. The place smelled so foul I found it difficult to imagine how anyone could spend two days here. When the path petered out, I left the bike on the slopes and helped Jelloul down the hill. The marabout’s hill was only a few kilometres from Río Salado, but I could not remember ever having passed this way. People shunned the place, as though it were cursed. Suddenly the simple fact that I was on the far side of the hill terrified me. I was scared something might happen to me, and I knew that if anything did, no one would think to come looking for me here. It was ridiculous, but the fear was all too real. I felt a mortal dread at being in this douar of ramshackle huts pervaded by the stench of rotting flesh.
‘Come,’ Jelloul said. ‘Come in and meet my father.’
‘No,’ I almost screamed, petrified. ‘I have to get back to my uncle. He’s very ill.’
A group of naked children were playing in the dust, their bellies swollen, flies crawling on their faces. Then I realised that it was not simply the stench; it was the drone of the flies, incessant, voracious, filling the foul air like some baleful supplication, like the breath of some demon that lowered over human misery, a sound as old as time itself. At the foot of a low toube wall, a group of old men lay dozing, mouths open, huddled beside a sleeping donkey. A madman, arms raised to the heavens, stood babbling wildly beneath a marabout tree from which hung talismans, coloured ribbons and candle wax. There was no one else: it was as though the douar had been abandoned to feral children and dying men.
A pack of dogs ran towards me, growling. Jelloul picked up a stone and drove them off. There was silence again. He turned and gave me a strange smile.
‘This is how our people live, Jonas; my people and your people too. Here, nothing ever changes, while you go on living like a prince . . . What’s the matter? Why don’t you say something? You’re shocked; you can’t believe it, can you? Maybe now you know why I call myself a dog. Even a dog would not live like this.’
I stood, speechless; the stench and filth turned my stomach, the piercing drone of the flies drilled into my brain. I wanted to vomit, but I was afraid that Jelloul would get the wrong impression.
He sniggered, amused by my awkwardness, then showed me around the douar.
‘Look at this godforsaken slum. This is our place in this country, the country of our ancestors. Take a good look, Jonas. God himself would not set foot here.’
‘Why are you saying these terrible things?’
‘Because I believe them. Because they’re true.’
Suddenly, I felt more afraid, but now it was Jelloul, his furious stare, his sardonic smile, that terrified me.
‘That’s right, Younes. Turn your back on the truth, on your people, run back to your friends . . . Younes . . . You do still remember your name? Hey, Younes . . . Thanks for the money. I’ll pay you back some day soon, I promise. The world is changing, or hadn’t you noticed?’
I rode away, pedalling like a madman, Jelloul’s catcalls like rifle shots whistling past my ears.
Jelloul was right. Things were changing, but to me it was as though these changes were happening in some parallel world. I sat on the fence, torn between loyalty to my friends and solidarity with my people. After the massacre in the Constantine province, the dawning awareness of the Muslim majority, I knew that I had to choose, but still I refused to take sides. In the end, events would make my decision for me.
There was a fierce rage in the air; it bubbled up from the maquis in the scrubland where militants met in secret, it spilled into the streets, seeped into the poor neighbourhoods, trickled out into the villages nègres and isolated douars.
The four of us who made up Jean-Christophe’s gang turned a blind eye to what was happening in these demonstrations. We were young men now, and if the down on our upper lips was not yet thick enough to qualify as a moustache, it emphasised our desire to be men, to be masters of our fate. The four of us, inseparable as the tines of a pitchfork, lived for ourselves; we were our own little world.
Fabrice was awarded the National Poetry Prize, and Madame Scamaroni drove all of us to Algiers for the ceremony. Fabrice was overjoyed. Aside from the prestige, the winning collection of poems was to be published by Edmond Charlot, an important Algerian publisher. Madame Scamaroni put us up in a charming little hotel not far from the Rue d’Isly. After the ceremony, at which Fabrice received his award from the great poet Max-Pol Fouchet, the prizewinner’s mother treated us to a lavish seafood dinner at a magnificent restaurant in La Madrague. The next day, eager to get back to Río Salado, where the mayor had organised a lunch to honour the town’s prodigy, we set off early, stopping at Orléansville for a snack and at Perrigault to stock up on the finest oranges in the world.
Some months later, Fabrice invited us to a bookshop in Lourmel, a small colonial town near Río Salado. His mother was there, looking stunning in a burgundy trouser suit and wearing a broad-brimmed feathered hat. Smiling benevolently, the bookseller and a number of local dignitaries stood around a large ebony table on which sat piles of books fresh out of their boxes. On the cover, beneath the title, was the name ‘Fabrice Scamaroni’.
‘Holy shit!’ sputtered Simon, who could always be counted on to undermine any solemn occasion.
The moment the speeches were over, Simon, Jean-Christophe and I pounced on the books. We leafed through the pages, turning the books over in our hands, so reverential that Madame Scamaroni was surprised to find a tear that trickled mascara down her cheek.
‘I read your work with great pleasure, Monsieur Scamaroni,’ a man of about sixty said to Fabrice. ‘You have considerable talent and, I think, every chance of reviving the noble art of poetry, which has always been the soul of Algeria.’
The bookseller handed Fabrice a letter of congratulations from Gabriel Audisio, founder of the magazine Rivages, in which the editor suggested that they might collaborate.
Back in Río Salado, the mayor promised to open a library on the main street, and Pépé Rucillio bought a hundred copies of Fabrice’s poems to send to his acquaintances in Oran – who, he suspected, called him an upstart peasant behind his back – to prove to them that there was more to Río Salado than idiots, wine growers and drunks.
Winter tiptoed away one night, and by morning, swallows dotted the telegraph lines like ink blots and the streets of Río Salado were awash with the scents of spring. My uncle was slowly returning to life. He had recovered his health, his old habits, his passion for books; he devoured them, closing a novel only to open an essay. He read in both French and Arabic, moving from El Akkad to Flaubert. Though he still did not venture out of the house, he had begun to shave and dress every day. He now ate with us in the dining room and occasionally exchanged pleasantries with Germaine. As regular as clockwork, he would get up at dawn, perform his morning prayers and appear at the table for breakfast at seven o’clock sharp. After breakfast, he would retire to his study to wait for the newspaper to be delivered, and when he had read the paper, he would open his spiral notepad, dip his pen into the inkwell and write until noon. At one p.m. he would take a short nap, and then pick up a book and lose himself in its pages until sundown.
One day, he came to my bedroom.
‘You need to read this. It was written by Malek Bennabi. The man himself seems a little suspicious, but he is a clear thinker.’
He set the book down on my night table and waited for me to pick it up. It was a slim volume, barely a hundred pages, entitled The Conditions of the Algerian Renaissance.
As he left the room, he said:
‘Never forget what it says in the Qur’an: Whosoever killeth a man, it shall be as if he had killed all mankind.’
He never asked me whether I had read Malek Bennabi’s book, still less what I thought of it. At dinner he only ever spoke to Germaine.
Our lives had recovered some semblance of stability. Things were far from being back to normal, but just seeing my uncle standing in front of the wardrobe mirror knotting his tie was wonderful. Germaine and I waited anxiously for him to cross the threshold, to step outside and rejoin the world of the living. Germaine would throw the French windows open so he could adjust to the sounds of the street again. She dreamed of seeing her husband adjust his fez, smooth his jacket, glance at his fob watch and hurry out to visit a café, to sit on a park bench, to be with friends. But my uncle dreaded the outside world, he had a morbid fear of crowds, he panicked if someone crossed his path. Only at home did he truly feel safe.
Germaine believed that her husband was capable of the superhuman effort it would take to rebuild his life.
Then, one Sunday as we were finishing lunch, my uncle suddenly banged his fists on the table, sending plates and glasses crashing to the floor. We thought it might be another heart attack, but it was not. He leapt to his feet, knocking over his chair, then shrank back to the wall, pointing at us, and thundered:
‘You have no right to judge me!’
Germaine stared at me in astonishment.
‘What did you say to him?’
‘Nothing . . .’
She looked at her husband as though he were a stranger.
‘No one is judging you, Mahi.’
But my uncle was not talking to us. Though he was staring straight at us, he could not see us. He frowned as though shaking off a bad dream, then he picked up his chair, sat down again, took his head in his hands and did not move.
That night, at about three a.m., Germaine and I were woken by the sound of raised voices. My uncle had locked himself in his study, where he was arguing violently with someone. I dashed downstairs to see if the front door was open, but it was locked and bolted. I went back upstairs. Germaine tried peering through the keyhole to see what was going on, but the key was in the lock.
‘I am not a coward,’ my uncle screamed hysterically. ‘I didn’t betray anyone, do you hear? Don’t look at me like that. How dare you sneer at me. I never informed on anyone . . .’
Then the study door flew open and my uncle emerged, raging, his lips flecked with foam, and pushed past without even seeing us.
Germaine was first to go into the study; I followed her. There was no one there.
Early in the autumn, I saw Madame Cazenave again. It was raining hard, Río Salado was gloomy and dismal, the café terraces were deserted. Seeing her come towards me, I realised that she still had the same ethereal beauty, but my heart did not leap in my chest. Did the rain temper my passion, the dreary weather blunt my memories? I did not care to wonder. I crossed the road to avoid her.
In Río Salado, which drew its vital force from the sun, autumn was always a dead season. In autumn, the masks that people wore in summer fell away like the leaves from the trees and, as Jean-Christophe Lamy discovered, deathless loves took on a sudden brittleness. One evening Jean-Christophe arrived at Fabrice’s house, where we were waiting for Simon to come back from Oran. He did not say a word; he simply sat on the veranda and brooded.
Simon Benyamin had gone to Oran to try his luck as a comedian. He had seen an ad in the paper looking for talented young comedians and thought this was his chance. Stuffing the ad in his pocket, he hopped on the first bus, bound for glory. From his expression when he arrived back, it was clear things had not gone as he had hoped.
‘So?’ Fabrice asked.
Simon slumped into a wicker chair and folded his arms, clearly in a foul mood.
‘What happened?’
‘Nothing.’ Simon cut him off. ‘Nothing happened. The bastards didn’t even give me a chance . . . I knew straight off that this wasn’t going to be my day. I hung around backstage for hours before I got to go on. The theatre was completely empty; there was nobody there except an old guy in the front row and some dried-up old witch next to him with round glasses that made her look like a barn owl. They had a big spotlight pointed right on me. It was like I was being interrogated. Then the old guy says, “You may begin, Monsieur Benyamin.” I swear it was like my great-grandfather’s voice from beyond the grave. I couldn’t make the guy out. He looked like he could watch a church burn down and not bat an eyelid. I’ve only just started when he interrupts me. “Do you know the difference between a clown and a fool, Monsieur Benyamin?” He’s spitting the words. “No? Well let me enlighten you: a clown makes people laugh because he is both funny and sad; a fool makes people laugh because he is ridiculous.” Then he waved me offstage and shouted, “Next!”’
Fabrice doubled up with laughter.
‘I sat in the dressing room for two hours trying to calm down. If the guy had come in to apologise, I’d have eaten him alive. You should have seen the two of them, sitting in the empty theatre; they looked like a couple of undertakers.’
Seeing us all laughing, Jean-Christophe fumed silently.
‘What’s the matter?’ asked Fabrice.
Jean-Christophe bowed his head and sighed.
‘Isabelle is starting to get on my nerves.’
‘Only starting?’ said Simon. ‘I told you at the beginning she wasn’t right for you.’
‘Love is blind,’ Fabrice said philosophically.
‘Love makes you blind,’ Simon corrected him.
‘Is it serious?’ I asked Jean-Christophe.
‘Why? Are you still interested in her?’ He shot me a curious look, then added: ‘You never did get over her, did you, Jonas? Well, I’ve had it with her, she’s all yours.’
‘Why would I be interested in her?’
‘Because you’re the one she’s in love with,’ he yelled, banging the table.
There was an uncomfortable silence. Fabrice and Simon looked from me to Jean-Christophe. He clearly hated me.
‘What are you telling me?’ I said.
‘I’m telling you the truth. Whenever she knows you’re around, she’s impossible, she’s always sneaking looks at you. If you’d seen her at the last dance, there she was on my arm and then you show up and she starts fooling around just to get your attention. I nearly slapped her.’
‘Love might be blind, Chris, but I think jealousy has got you seeing things.’
‘I am jealous, you’re right. But I’m not seeing things.’
‘Hang on a minute,’ Fabrice interrupted, sensing there was trouble brewing. ‘Isabelle manipulates people, Chris, it’s what she always does. She’s just testing you. If she didn’t love you, she would have dumped you long ago.’
‘It doesn’t matter, I’ve had enough. If the girl I love spends her time looking over my shoulder, then maybe it’s better if I walk away. To be honest, I don’t know if I was ever really serious about her.’
I felt uncomfortable. This was the first time anything had upset the friendship between the four of us. Then, to my relief, Jean-Christophe turned and pointed at me. ‘Ha! Fooled you, didn’t I? You fell for it hook, line and sinker!’
No one laughed. We all still believed Jean-Christophe had been serious.
The next day, as I wandered to the village square with Simon, we saw Isabelle and Jean-Christophe arm in arm, headed for the cinema. I don’t know why, but I ducked into a doorway so they wouldn’t see me. Simon was surprised by my reaction, but he understood.