The Mysteries of Algiers (19 page)

‘But that one over there will interest you, I think.’

The man whom Jalloud surreptitiously points to is at the end of the ward. He is a European and we do not approach him, for fear of being overheard by the nun.

‘The case is a little obscure. I believe that he nailed a dog to some sort of electric wheel and got the wheel to spin so fast that the brains flew out of the dog. There were fears for the safety of his family … He had good prospects too … He was a gendarme assigned to traffic control, but his superiors thought so highly of him that they assigned him to interrogation duties.’

An unfortunate European victim of this terrible war, but really the French should build bigger hospitals and put all the Arabs in them, for, from the perspective of the colonist, what is revolution but a criminal psychopathic reaction against a stable and ordered society? The psychotic, the amnesiac, the lethargic, the insomniac, the abouliac, the paranoid, the deviant and the paraesthetic drift in and out of the wards and down the corridors. It is not so very different from the streets of Algiers – only the pretence has been removed. We are drifting with them. We pass a fat man sitting up in bed in a private room chanting happily to himself.

‘Kill. Kill. Kill the blacks. Kill. Kill the Arabs. Kill the Jews. Kill. Kill the
pieds-noirs.
Kill. Kill the flics. Kill – Good morning, doctor,’ he shouts cheerily as we pass, and as we move on we can hear him continuing to chant, ‘Kill the doctors. Kill. Kill the sisters …’

Jalloud and I dart into another of the hospital’s glory holes. This one is locked, but Jalloud has the key. He produces two Monoprix carrier bags from his case and takes a few handfuls of stuff from the shelves – morphine and other drugs – and puts them in one of the bags.

‘The comrades in the
bled
need these things very badly. Maybe they need the morphine even more than you do. What do you think? You can take it out for us. They will not search you with your lovely white skin. Right now, you stay here. I will lock you in. I am just going to see if your patient is ready for you.’

I stand in the dark and wait and I wonder if he is really going to come back or whether this is not some grotesque practical joke. It is possible that Jalloud will come back with the security guards. It is possible that he will not come back at all. It seems a very long time, waiting. Thinking about the gendarme, here is evidence, if evidence were needed, that it is hard to be a torturer. It takes skill, intelligence and often considerable physical strength to achieve successful results. And, naturally, the greatest challenge is to stay human at the end of it all without degenerating into a psychopath.

But Jalloud comes back in a state of high excitement.

‘It is all ready. The patient is under heavy sedation and the apparatus is lined up right along beside the bed. Perhaps I should tell you about this patient too. You will be interested in him. He is an officer in the Territorial Reserve. He had the misfortune to be captured by the fellagha in the Aures mountains. I fear that he suffered many hardships at their hands before making his escape. Now he is prone to paroxysmal tachycardia, but there are psychosomatic complications. He told me that every night he dreams that pale fellagha in white robes congregate around his bed to drink from his wounds. Well this morning we – no, you – are going to make his nightmare come true.’

‘What!’

‘You are going to drain his blood. The comrades in the
bled
have need of blood too. I have shown you how to do it. There should be no problem. You have enough sacs for maybe three litres of blood. That should finish him off. But if you think you cannot get it all in the carrier bags maybe a little less will do. You can find your own way out of the hospital, I think. You should not be stopped getting out, as I say. I can meet you and collect the stuff by the obelisk in the parc Jaubert at twelve thirty.’

‘What about you now? Why do I have to do this on my own?’

‘Oh, I am going on a ward round with the consultant. It will be my alibi.’

Before we exit from the cupboard, Jalloud gives me a shot of morphine to set me up. Then we march smartly down the corridor. Jalloud points me to my patient who lies, apparently asleep, in a private room. Jalloud gives me an encouraging squeeze on the shoulder and then hurries off for his ward round. In my time I have done parachute drops, flown a helicopter, blown up bridges, repaired the sump of a lorry, cooked soup made of snake’s flesh, cut off the gangrenous leg of a wounded man and put another out of his misery. I am hardly going to flinch from this. The needle goes into the jugular. Though one of the rubber tubes is badly frayed and some blood goes over the sheets, in fact I am rather pleased with myself. Perhaps I should have been a doctor? But then, in a sense, I rather fancy that I am a doctor of sorts – diagnosing the sickness of society and then to work cutting out the cancerous growths at the heart of that society. My ‘brother’ officer in this bed is one of those cancers. At one point the patient opens his eyes and rather feebly tries to say something. I pay no attention. Three litres will kill him of course. I can imagine that one day there might be another better world in which one would have the right to say that what I am doing is ‘atrocious, disgusting’. But that world has not been achieved yet and it will be achieved only by continuous struggle. In that struggle there can be no half-measures. There is no nice way of accomplishing a revolution – or of resisting one.

With the blood in the bag, I walk out of the hospital. It is very simple. I have some hours to kill and I stroll over to the place du Lyre. I note that the opera house, in an unusual gesture of extravagant confidence, will shortly be presenting all four parts of the
Ring
cycle. Its more usual fare I believe is operetta – or at its most ambitious Gounod. The beginnings of an idea form in my mind. Then I buy a paper and take it with me to the parc Jaubert. Yes, my little horror is in on the second page. ‘Ghastly Crime at Laghouat’. I bless the
Echo d’Alger
, and the
RTF
, and
Time
magazine and the
BBC
World Service. Without them it would not have been worth my while stuffing plastic explosive up that woman’s skirt. But as it is, I can imagine that this evening or some time soon in London on the
BBC
Radio there may be a discussion programme about politics, and there may be some discussion of
FLN
atrocities and everyone will agree that atrocities are atrocious, but then some liberal intellectual – and England is full of such people – will come on and say, ‘While in no way condoning such atrocities, nevertheless they have to be understood in the context of the continuing oppression which is a feature of …’ and so and so and so on. It is for that beautiful liberal intellectual, and so that everyone may hear what he has to say about the injustices of French colonialism, that I killed Eugene and Yvonne – and, of course, I shall kill again.

It does not surprise me that Jalloud never turns up. That would not be this cell’s style of operation. Instead a boy comes up and tugs at my sleeve and tries to take the bags away from me. He points to the park gates where Nounourse is standing and Nounourse indicates that I should give the bags to the boy. The boy darts off with the bags, and then Nounourse gestures that I am to follow him, Nounourse. We set off at a smart pace. It is fifteen minutes before he allows me to catch him up.

‘So there you are, Captain Addict!’

‘Where are we going?’

‘You are coming to stay with me. My home shall be your home.’

I have never heard the traditional Arab formula of hospitality pronounced in such a surly voice. Nounourse goes on.

‘You did what Jalloud said? And everything that we need is in those bags?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good. But remember, Captain Addict, I am always watching you and I do not like you.’

‘I don’t care who likes me.’

‘Did you kill a French officer in the hospital?’

‘Yes. That was a test, wasn’t it?’

‘The comrades in the field really needed the blood.’

Nounourse’s flat is in the Bab el-Oued. The Bab el-Oued is a mixed quarter of poor whites and Arabs, living shoulder by shoulder and competing with one another for the same miserable jobs and services. Much of the area is occupied by large modern apartment blocks and Nounourse’s flat is in one of these blocks. As we go up the stairs, his neighbours call out salutations to him and ask after his day. In every sense Nounourse is a big man in this neighbourhood.

I am formally and surlily presented to Nounourse’s wife, Saphia. Saphia wears traditional Arab dress, but no veil. She receives my respects without rising from her chair and when she does get up and moves to the kitchen, the exertion makes her pant. I imagine that I can hear the insides of her thighs rubbing together as she walks. Saphia is very plump. She cannot weigh so very much less than Nounourse, but she has the eyes of a doe set in a moistly lustrous moon face. Having fetched some Cokes from the kitchen, she sits listening to what goes on, expressionless, with her eyes never leaving my face. It would be unwise for me to return her gaze. Nounourse asks about cakes and she lazily tells him that food will have to be later. I expect Nounourse to start shouting, but nothing happens.

‘My wife is a great trial to me,’ Nounourse says. ‘She has been sent from heaven as a trial for me.’

Saphia continues to look on placidly. Nounourse sets to, opening the Coca-Cola bottles. He has his own technique. He just squeezes the glass and the top pops off. Catching my expression, he tells me, ‘I used to be a great sportsman – not just the swimming, but also the wrestling and the boxing. I was Algiers boxing champion. Watch this!’

He gets up from his chair and hoists it up and puts one of the chair legs in his teeth. Then he walks round the small room holding the chair up by his clenched teeth, looking a little like a performing seal. Then he puts the chair down and thrusts his fists in my face. He lowers down at me.

‘With this fists, I can smash a man’s head like a coconut. So watch it, Captain Addict!’

Sitting down and now in a sudden good humour, he tells me, ‘Also I used to be the biggest bandit in all Algiers! I used to be chief bouncer at the Dolly Night-club. All the other bandits walked in fear of me. You know the Dolly Nightclub? I used to protect the drug sellers and the tarts. I made lots of money, and I killed men who did not respect my boss.’

So ho! It is much the sort of background that I should have guessed. Nounourse is one of ‘the dangerous class’, the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown out by the lowest layers of an old society. He belongs to the class that Marx calls ‘the lumpenproletariat’. As Marx describes it in
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte,
the lumpenproletariat consists of ‘vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged gaolbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaus, brothel-keepers, porters, literate organ grinders, rag-pickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars’, a ‘whole indefinite disintegrated mass’. According to Marx this lumpenproletariat has very little revolutionary potential and the criminal as revolutionary hero is a romantic aberration of little significance.

This is not quite Nounourse’s view of the matter.

‘I was the biggest bandit in Algiers, but the comrades showed me the error of my ways. They came to me and said, “Listen, Nounourse, can’t you see how bad it is what you are doing? You are serving up whores to the filthy French and you are killing your Arab brothers with those dirty drugs.” That was in 1954. And I said to myself, “Nounourse, you could smash their heads like coconuts. You can get a lot of respect for that, but first you should think about what these good men have to say.” So I reflected a little and I looked at the whores in the streets and the houses – not all the whores are in brothels – you understand me? – and I looked at the lipstick on their mouths like red wounds and the short skirts inviting a man’s hand to be stuck up inside them, and I saw the men being sick in the streets from too much alcohol. And I thought to myself, “It is true what they say. We are being used. But you, Nounourse, can change things.” So I killed my boss. He was a dirty Spaniard, and now I who used to be the biggest bandit in all Algiers have my own revolutionary cell. We cleared the pimps and drug pedlars off the streets and dropped them in the sea. Now everyone fears me and I can respect myself. And I am in charge of my own cell and I run it very well!’

Saphia sighs heavily.

The afternoon goes by slowly. Nounourse has taken the afternoon off from the Hydra Sports Club and Saphia has nothing to do. We share silences and desultory conversations. Nounourse wants to know about my experience of life in the Foreign Legion. The Legion fascinates him. He really admires the Legion.

‘They are really tough men. They are the professionals in this business. Not like us. Of course they have all the right equipment.’

I describe my experiences in the hospital and Nounourse says, ‘Jalloud is a good man. Even his professor thinks well of him.’

On the walls of the flat there are Sellotaped pictures of Elizabeth II and of Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan. Saphia likes Johnny Weissmuller. Saphia is proud to have this acknowledged. Elizabeth is Nounourse’s enthusiasm.

‘If the French had a queen like that, we should not be having this war. I would die for that woman!’

Nounourse is a mine of inaccurate information on Her Majesty and her unhappy life and the wicked doings of the Queen’s relatives, all of this he has culled from French scandal sheets. I gather from Nounourse that the House of Windsor is the number one bandit family in England. The Royal Family is fair, but tough when it comes to managing their multifarious rackets.

‘I am like the English. This I can respect.’

And it is not just the Royal Family that Nounourse is keen on. The English are the number one footballers. Everyone knows that. Nounourse’s strength lies in his simple beliefs. In that alone he resembles a member of the true proletariat. He is sturdy in his simple beliefs. I find Nounourse’s Anglophilia refreshing. It is not shared by the French in Algeria. Many of the
pieds noirs
believe that the English are working to destabilize the French in Algeria and that the English secret service is supplying arms to the
FLN
. Listening to the World Service is like listening to the Voice of Cairo. Chantal’s hatred of the English takes an extreme form. To tease Nounourse, I give him a dose of Chantal’s opinions. ‘England is the headquarters of the Masons and the refuge of the Jews. It is the centre of a network of plots. The senior Masons in the English army, the banks and the Church meet to plot the seduction of children, the corruption of the family and the creation of a socialistic society modelled on the anthill. British secret-service men kiss each others’ arses. It is part of their initiation ritual. There is no cruelty of which the English are not capable. Homosexuals and sadists to a man – if you can call them men.