The Mysteries of Algiers (8 page)

Many a schoolboy would see nothing wrong in Chantal’s oath to carry the values of D’Artagnan on into the twentieth century – quite the contrary. But this requires a little thought. What are D’Artagnan’s values? He is a royalist. Chantal is a royalist. In Chantal’s eyes there has been no legitimate government in France since 21 October 1791. D’Artagnan is an old-fashioned Catholic. Chantal is an old-fashioned Catholic. He is a traditionalist. Chantal is a traditionalist. They are both fervent patriots. D’Artagnan believed in taking justice into his own hands, for did he not supervise the execution of Milady de Winter? Chantal and her friends see nothing wrong in that too. The sword, the axe and the horse are their symbols. Their blood and their faith have given them the right to rule over the Arabs.

In the dark shadow world of Chantal and D’Artagnan, we stand on the edge of a forest which seems to stretch into infinity and we are filled with unassuageable yearnings. Deep in the forest we dimly glimpse the candlelit windows of a chapel. Smoke from a peasant’s cottage straggles across the face of the moon. There is the premonitory sound of a huntsman’s horn, and then another and another, and we see the horsemen flickering between the trees on the fringes of the forest, cavaliers in scarlet capes fringed with gold. Steel helmets glint gold under the torchlight, silver under the moonshine. The white banner with the golden lilies of France has been unfurled. The oriflamme has been presented to the virginal bride who stands before the altar in the forest chapel. What are we yearning for? Sacred mysteries? Or old simplicities?

So Chantal, toiling over badly cyclostyled records in a jerry-built office block in dusty Algiers, dreams of a marriage of the blood and the soil. But for myself, I am for the sullen peasants who watch these cavaliers ride by. When surly Jacques stands his ground and refuses to doff his cap to the fine huntsmen, I am shoulder to shoulder with Jacques.

To get out of here, I might move to the edge of the ledge. Then, when one of the troopers comes down the corridor, I might drop on him, overpower him without a sound, drag him into the laundry room, put on his uniform. Then with the
képi
pulled deep over my face, I would march across the parade square and talk my way through the gate. That’s ludicrous. It is not so very easy to overpower a professional soldier without a sound and why should a trooper have his
képi
on at such an unmilitary angle and why on earth would he be going out for a walk in the desert? Everyone in the fort knows me. The gates are closed and I am not going to get through them that way.

I have no time for Mercier either and all that liberal values and slowly-slowly stuff. That cow de Beauvoir in her comfortable armchair in Paris going on and on about the cancer of torture in French Algeria … I don’t even respect that stuff in the way I do what the true enemy stands for. Objectively what liberals do is shore up the oppressing power, commit little kindnesses which only delay the necessary revolution, the salutary bloodletting. They are panders smearing cosmetics on the face of Moloch. Of course if one thinks about the Algerian tragedy objectively, there are two sides to it. I can see the other side’s case. Marxists are trained to think objectively. But seeing two sides is not the same as impotent dithering. I believe in action. Action to secure the rights of the oppressed!

I might drop lightly down, steal into the laundry room, wrap a sheet round myself, pretend I was an Arab … ludicrous, ludicrous. All these flights, deaths and concealments, this desperate pass that I am in, it seems so extraordinary that I could ever have reached it. It was not of my seeking. It was in the beginning a matter of cautious contacts made with people who knew people who knew
FLN
section heads, of anonymous meetings and then small testing assignments. There has been no dramatic moment, only a slow escalation of the risks involved, until this morning when I prepared to go to the security committee and I thought that nothing would happen, but at the same time I thought that I should take my gun to the committee.

I could wait up here until I saw the chance of taking a hostage. It would have to be Chantal. Then I could talk them into surrendering a jeep and opening the gates to me. That is of course totally preposterous. A film director can risk having a preposterous scene like that in his production, but I cannot risk the implausible, because in my case if things don’t work out I die. If Chantal with my pistol to her head says, ‘No, I’m not moving’ (and she is a woman of courage), what would I do then? Blow her brains out, or say, ‘Oh well forget it.’ Even if I did manage to propel her along in front of me, their marksmen would almost certainly take the risk of killing her to get at me. They just cannot let me escape. And how if we got a jeep am I going to drive holding a pistol to Chantal’s head? Well, I could force her to drive, I suppose. But the jeep is going to be spotted from the air pretty fast.

There’s all that Camus crap. If I was a hero in one of those existentialist novels, I would be thinking now about blowing my brains out. Dinner-table stuff for the intellectuals. Not for me. People just go on about how they are thinking of committing suicide to make themselves seem interesting. It doesn’t to me. Willy-wet-legs. Suicide is one of the curious indulgences of the bourgeois.

I should have tried to get out earlier. Talked the gates open before anyone had quite realized what was happening. Damn, damn, damn. If only it was yesterday and I knew then what I know now.

Maybe, if I did try to make a run for it, they would make it easy for me to get away? In the hope of seeing where I led them? Well I certainly wouldn’t count on that. Besides, I don’t want to lead them to my comrades.

Cautiously and quietly I keep shifting my position on the ledge. I am uncomfortably aware of my body. It is I suppose the last time that I shall contemplate my body whole, all my fingernails there, all my teeth, still perfect hearing for a few more minutes or hours. I am still in my right mind and still potent. I notice that my hands are clutched over my balls as if in self-protection. It is a little bizarre, but perhaps I should masturbate now? It will surely be my last orgasm. No, my bladder is full and, though the rest of my body is hot and stiff, my penis is limp and cold. Fear takes away desire, makes a man impotent. Now I can consider Chantal without the coloration of sexual desire. Look at her objectively, and I wonder how anyone so beautiful can be committed to a cause that is so evil? It is hard to get away from the notion that a beautiful face is the outward expression of a beautiful soul, a healthy body the appropriate sheath for a healthy mind. It is hard to get away from that idea, but I should. In any moment in history the oppressing class has most of the beautiful women. I wonder what Chantal thinks of me now? Strange for a professional hunter, now to be the hunted. I really ought to know all the tricks. But the right one for the present moment does not occur to me.

I might get down from here. Go along to the barrack room of third platoon. Address the men. Appeal to the old Spanish Civil War lags. Organize a mutiny and a mass desertion. Claim that we are acting to support de Gaulle and the civil authority against a projected colonels’ putsch in Algiers. My men will follow me anywhere. Bunk. They won’t. They hardly know me. I have hardly interested myself in their welfare. I leave all that to the
NCOS
. They don’t particularly like me. I am the officer that busies himself with all that dirty work down in cell 2. It is hard for me to contemplate with detachment what my men would do to the officer who has been betraying their comrades to the
FLN
.

I fired four shots at the security meeting. It is an eight-round magazine. Of course if it comes to it, I might have to blow my brains out. But there are a lot of other people’s brains I’d like to blow out first. If I do shoot myself, there will be nothing grand about it. I don’t want to be on the end of a rock ’n’ roll session in cell 2. And it is crucial that what I know about the command structure of the
FLN
should not pass into the hands of the enemy. Death then would be necessary to preserve the revolution’s secrets. Indeed it is objectively necessary that I get out of here and get what I know to the comrades in Algiers. First, the stuff about barricades week;
FLN
bomb squads can make good use of that. Second, the date of Operation Sunshade and details about its preliminaries. So far I have not even managed to get to my masters the information that Sunshade (code for the testing of the first French H-bomb in the desert) will take place at the beginning of next year. That is why the tribes are being cleared around Reganne. Third, Tughril in Algiers must be told how I have been blown and persuaded to do something about Chantal.

Could the
FLN
organize a rescue operation to get me out? Not on. They don’t know what is going on and I have no way of contacting them.

I detest and adore the woman, that body, those hips like a cavalry officer’s and that mind like a sewer. Simultaneously angel and pig, she rises before my vision as the flying pig: She is committed to
Action Française
of course. Daddy’s estates are in hock to the Jews and the Masons. De Gaulle is a crypto-communist preparing to sell us out. In her bedroom in Algiers she has a lithograph of Marshal Pétain standing on a storm-tossed hillside. The military cape on his shoulders and the tricolor above him billow in the wind of history. Chantal said that we should couple beneath him to get his blessings on our union. In her next breath, she said Pétain was the only man to have offered France a chance of moral regeneration in this century.

And now that Pétain is dead? Order, discipline, purity, Chantal and her friends estimate that the old values can be restored, but a few heads will have to be broken first. The old values, the simple values, as little words who can quarrel with them? Chantal worships health, strength and beauty. We all worship them, don’t we? Chantal will never sleep with a man who wears a surgical truss. A man who wears a surgical truss, though he may have many admirable qualities and go on to do great things in life, will never sleep with Chantal. Neither will a Jew, an Arab nor any of those made joylessly ugly by poverty and disease. Reflecting back on yesterday afternoon, I see now that she must have known already who I was and that at the same time she made love to the soldier’s healthy body she was sizing up the atheist Marxist for his coffin. The business with the gun was a test and warning, a life-or-death tease. I thought I was playing with her. Now that I find that she has been playing with me, I know … What do I know? I don’t know anything.

Maybe I should hole up here for a couple of days, three even, until they assume I must have got away somehow, so the heat is off. Then make a run for it? That is not on. I can’t stay up here that long. I should be weak from hunger when I finally sprinted out into the desert. Besides I am bursting to pee now. It is fear which fills my bladder and stops me from sleeping. I could really use a sleep. An effect of shock I suppose.

This constant pressure in my bladder, it was like that at the political education centre Lang Trang. Everything they gave me to drink just went straight through me. Horrible sores developed on my legs. The sores attracted bugs. If I had my hands free I used to try and catch the bugs and eat them. They never allowed me to sleep. Lights shone day and night and my eyelids were peeled back and clipped so that they never closed. They made me beg to be given permission to drink urine. I thought myself particularly lucky if it was my own that I was allowed to drink. A small thing, but in such circumstances a small boon can give great happiness. It was a brief happiness, for the urine was too salty to satisfy thirst. I have described to Rocroy and to Mercier the things I went through at that camp. What I never told them is how I feel about it. I look back on Lang Trang with nostalgia and on my educators with respect. Of course they showed me the truths of Marxism. But it is not just that. The generals and politicians who sent us to Dien Bien Phu in such a hurry, once Dien Bien Phu was lost and that strategy seen to be not so smart, what hurry did they take to get us captives out of the hands of the Viet Minh? They didn’t really care. We were inconvenient bargaining counters in the hands of the enemy. Objectively viewed, my interrogators and teachers at Lang Trang were all cruel men, but they did care intensely about me and, in their rough way, they looked after all of us when we had been abandoned by our own generals.

Something simple. Wait till night. I know the routine of the guard on the walls. Wait till the guard has passed, then over the wall and drop on to the dark desert below. Ha! ha! Just having my little joke. It is a forty-foot drop from the walls. A lot of people, even some of the
pieds noirs
on the coast who should know better, think the Sahara is all softly rolling sand dunes. Well the Legion never builds a fort on a softly rolling sand dune. It’s scrub and hard stone for about half a mile around at least. I’d break my leg.

Really bursting for that pee. Got it. Got it! I wait up here until the next trooper comes along. Then I urinate on his head. Then when they come for me I feign insanity. My God! By now, I’m not sure it would be entirely feigned. The objection is of course that they would sweat that nonsense out of me fast enough in a few sessions of rock ’n’ roll, breast stroke and sodium pentothal. I’m hungry. It would be pleasant to think about a hot meal, but I keep thinking that the next thing that is likely to enter my stomach will be a long rubber tube.

Every solution I have come up with is ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous. Stuff from the adventures of the Three Musketeers or some other juvenile wet dream. But I am going to have to make a run for it soon and it will be by using one of these absolutely ridiculous schemes. The question is, which?

I come off my ledge. There’s an officer’s toilet at the top of the stairs. I have a pee. I am so nervous that some of it goes over my trousers. I count my ammunition.

It’s evening when I come out on to the parade ground. A few men are standing around smoking. I try not to look at them. I lean against a shadowed doorway. I still don’t know what to do, but I am waiting for inspiration to come – or anything reasonably close to inspiration. I see Corporal Buchalik fiddling around with one of the jeeps. I put my hands in my pockets and stroll over. I adopt a faintly bullying voice.