The Mysteries of Algiers Read online

  When Maurice’s response came, it was more melancholy than angry.

  ‘Everything sexual these days. The young are supposed to live for nothing else. It’s fashionable now, I know, to badmouth Pétain, and certainly there were excesses and terrible mistakes were made, but I can’t help feeling that something really rather fine perished with Vichy. And what have we now? That scruffy Johnny Halliday and this beastly rock ’n’ roll one hears everywhere these days, in bars, on the beaches …’

  ‘Even in the barracks,’ Raoul interrupted.

  I could see from the glint in Raoul’s eyes that he knew what rock ’n’ roll was likely to mean to me, and that he was going to make me sweat for it this evening, if he could.

  ‘Oddly enough,’ he continued, ‘one of the commonest complaints we lawyers hear from Arabs who have been lucky enough to be released from military detention is about the incessant rock ’n’ roll in the barracks! Would you believe it!’

  He looks at me. I shake my head.

  ‘I mean you would think that they had other things to complain about. But they were absolutely vehement about its horrors, though a bit confused. They said para and legionnaire officers were especially keen on rock ’n’ roll. Well, Philippe, can you answer for your fellow officers?’

  ‘We are,’ I said, ‘a rather unmusical lot at Fort Tiberias.’

  Lagaillarde was enjoying the joke. Maurice looked bored and mystified. (The platoon I am addressing look miserable.) Raoul pressed on.

  ‘Let us take our average Arab – let us call him Mustafa – someone whom we are trying to persuade of the glories of Algérie française and the grandeur of French culture, but then Mustafa says, “This French culture you tell me that I should be so grateful for … Is it such a great thing? I walk past the barracks of the soldiers and I listen and what do I hear but the sounds of rock ’n’ roll. All shrieking and writhing. It all sounds very decadent to me. What I ask myself is this rock ’n’ roll? Is this part of the great French culture?” ’

  But before Raoul can take his prosecution any further, Maurice cuts in.

  ‘The army has gone soft and that is a fact.’

  I have heard it all before from Maurice and his grand colon friends. Jews and Masons in the army. The army failed France in 1940. Then we sold out in Indochina and now we are preparing to sell out to the FLN. De Gaulle was the man who betrayed France in 1940, set a bad precedent according to Maurice. Gave other soldiers the impression that rebellion and indiscipline can pay off. Since then every soldier carries a draft of his inaugural speech as president in his knapsack. The army has degenerated into a gang of politicians and képi-bleu social workers, doing more to help the Arabs than to protect people’s farms. Why aren’t the de Serkissian estates being given a proper guard? If you won’t defend us, you might at least give us the weapons to do it ourselves. The officers, Jews and bumboys to a man – if men is what they are – have lost their nerve …’ and so on and so on.

  (It is pretty certain that in the year that is to come some members of the platoon I am talking to now will die, in effect defending this fat cat and the profitability of his estates. I do not point this out to the men. Corporal Buchalik sits in the front row. I can see his eyes lit up with hatred. Whether it is for me, or for my hosts of last week, I do not know.)

  As Maurice’s tirade began to run down, Raoul actually dared to interrupt.

  ‘Hand on your heart, Philippe, can you swear that you are prepared to die to defend all this?’

  Raoul’s arm sweeps out to encompass the gleaming white tablecloth, the candelabra, Maurice’s guests and servants.

  (In the lecture room now my arm does the same, summoning up the invisible table, guests and servants to appear before the bored old lags of Fort Tiberias.

  ‘Can you see it, men? Do you see it clearly? It is for Maurice de Serkissian and his pals that we fight and die in the desert. I shall tell you how I replied …’)

  ‘Sir,’ I said, addressing Maurice but hoping that Chantal will hear me, ‘I am prepared to kill for it and that is what counts. As I see it, the army is the last bastion against decadence in the West – even against de Gaulle and the clever intellectuals and lawyers around him. The army is doing its duty. It is the intellectuals, the word players, who are selling us out. We are doing our job, I swear …’

  Raoul was charming.

  ‘Oh, but so brutally, so clumsily. We have deprived the Arab of his dignity, and of the most fundamental aspect of that dignity, his right to choose. How can one possibly defend the methods the army are using to suppress these freedoms?’

  Raoul smiled at us. He knew that we knew that he had defended the army’s methods many times in the courts and in the press. But it was one of Raoul’s specialities, one of his daring little outrages, to pick up the case for the Arab, and play with it for an hour to pass the time and to hone up his debating skills. And now he will defend the FLN and their bomb outrages, smirking cockily at the social risk he is taking. I had argued with Raoul before. He put on opinions like a lady trying on a frock. The one thing he didn’t want to do was to be caught out wearing the same frock as any of the other ladies. He fascinated me. I had to admire him. It was impossible to win against a man like that. At best when I thought I had him cornered, Raoul would throw up his hands.

  ‘But of course, I agree with you. I was just playing devil’s advocate for a moment.’

  And there would be the unspoken implication in his voice: ‘That was the conclusion I was leading you on to all the time with my sophisticated debater’s skills.’ Just when one thought one had victory in one’s grasp, one found oneself with one’s nose in his hands, more profoundly humiliated than ever. (I try to explain this to my men, but they look hurt and ashamed. It seems I have failed them and, at the dinner table, became a lost leader.)

  That night Raoul defended the logic of the FLN’S tactics, and sneered at the heavy-handedness of our army.

  ‘The true battle of Algiers is not going to be won by charging around the kasbah letting off rounds of small-arms fire – refreshing though it is to see such energy, such rude high spirits in our young troops. No, the true battle is going to be won in the mind of the Algerian and it’s wise words not bullets that we need. Now our Algerian, let’s call him Mustafa, I can imagine him saying, “That’s all very fine. You say you offer me a chance to become a Frenchman, etc., the next thing I know the paras are upon me, tearing down the walls of my shanty hut, feeling up my women …” ’

  I interrupted.

  ‘As for complaints about the way the security forces treat the fatmas, the army could not treat those women worse than their own fathers and husbands treat them …’

  My remark started Mercier off on how all women are oppressed. Even Frenchwomen are subtly oppressed. Eventually the boredom of it drove Chantal away from the table and into the swimming pool …

  I use my hands to give my men some impression of what Chantal looked like in a swimsuit, but I do not trouble to relay Mercier’s account of de Beauvoir’s limp liberal ideas about womanhood to the men. It would not interest them. It does not interest me. I shall stop with Raoul’s attack on our operations in the kasbah. Raoul’s rhetoric fascinates my poor soldiers. Their brows are furrowed in concentration. They cannot realize, as everyone at the table at the time realized – even Maurice who was somewhat slow in such matters – that Raoul was only playing with words and ideas, and I lack the skill to make my men really understand the situation.

  As I finish, I note with satisfaction how the overheated lecture hall seems to throb with a concentrated hatred, but I see also no hatred on the faces of a few of the men, but only a dream of longing and envy.

  ‘Platoon dismissed!’

  Chapter Five

  I hurry back to the intelligence office and immerse myself in my beloved files. Many of the files are routine reports, mostly compiled by my predecessor about purely Saharan matters. They deal with the seasonal movements of the tribes and local tribal rivalries.
They are really of more value to the anthropologist than they are to counter-intelligence. The greater part of the more recent files, however, are my work and they are highly classified. They deal with disaffection among the tribesmen, with pro-colonial informers and collaborators, with FLN fund-raisers and propaganda officers, with FLN routes for the transmission of men, weapons and information from Tunisia into the Algerian Sahara, with the FLN regiments mustered on the other side of the Morice Line. Above all they purport to trace the chains of communication between the bedouin and the fellagha in the desert and the commanding FLN wilayas in the big cities of the coast.

  Now, as on many previous occasions, I lose myself in rapt contemplation of my work – the cross-referenced files and the charts which map out the chains of command in the FLN and counter-intelligence. The FLN wilaya divides into sectors, the sectors into subsectors, subsectors into districts, districts into subdistricts, subdistricts into groups, groups into cells. Or one can look at it another way; a cell – three men form a cell – once formed recruits new members. It may expand to twice its size before it splits. When it splits, two cells are formed and the combination of these two cells in turn creates a group. A sufficient accumulation of groups in turn will create a subdistrict. There is a beautiful organic geometry about the revolutionary cell system. It generates the FLN structure of command which is pyramidal in shape and this FLN pyramid is matched and mirrored by the French pyramid of surveillance and counter-intelligence. Pyramids, lattice grids and cells, but there is nothing frozen about this geometry. It is ceaselessly in movement, generating new structures and sloughing off old ones. The twin geometries of revolution and counter-revolution generate discipline and violence. And these two pyramids twist in upon one another, as informers and double agents bind the two systems together and as the two systems seek to mirror each other’s techniques and advantages.

  I see it all in my mind’s eye. However, it must now be confessed that the delineation of the FLN chain of command as I have created it on paper here in the intelligence office in Fort Tiberias is far from perfect. My FLN pyramid lacks its apex; everywhere in the structure there are crucial steps that are missing and pathways which seem to lead upwards but actually go nowhere. I have FLN agents listed as double agents for the French and pro-French double agents queried as FLN triple agents. Every intelligence profile is docketed, but almost half the cross-references on the dockets refer to files that seem to have been mislaid. Here confusion has made his unobtrusive masterpiece. Over the past four years I have rendered the revolution many services, but I am certain that this botched and bungled intelligence compilation is my greatest contribution.

  At regular intervals I send my materials and accompanying analysis to the main archives of the Deuxième Bureau in Algiers, Oran and Paris and they have been unquestioningly fed into the system. Until recently that is. Of late there have been queries and criticisms of my results. I have had some successes of course. My masters have been careful to provide some successes to sustain my position, but not enough. Many men have been tortured and died under torture to sustain my imposture, but not enough. Still the drift of my critics, and they are still few, seems to be that I am an incompetent plodder. I cannot detect any hint of the suspicion of treason. But how much longer will this last?

  Chantal is one of those who look down on me as a failure at my job. It is implicit in her patronizing flirtation with me. In the meetings of the security committee she is in fact my sternest critic. In bed, I fancy that it is not the intelligence officer she spreads her legs for, but the legionnaire. Even when I stand before Chantal stark naked, she sees an irregular-shaped aura around me. This aura consists of a white képi, a blue cloak and red epaulettes. I am sure it is so. And I am perhaps not so very different. This afternoon it was not the body of Chantal that I made love to, but the class enemy that I raped. As I rape Chantal, I sodomize her landowning father and put my prick up the arse of capitalist bourgeois society. I find deceit to have aphrodisiac effects and betrayal to be the greatest of the sexual perversions.

  The incident with the gun this afternoon was alarming. No – there was a moment of stark terror. In an instant I might have given myself away, but that instant was long enough to persuade me that no one planning to arrest a senior agent of the FLN would do so dressed only in silk underwear and stockings. Another futile game of the bored silly idle rich girl. Silks, perfumes, perversions – one can read about the worthlessness of capitalist society – it is another matter to have direct experience of such things in bed. Action is the thing. As Marx says, ‘Philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point however is to change it.’ That is right. You don’t understand anything by reading about it. The only way to understand the world is to make it yours by acting upon it, changing it, handling it. I have handled Chantal enough and I understand her pretty well. ‘Know the mind of the enemy.’

  I gave the lieutenant a hard time this morning. The truth is that I disapproved of what we were doing even more than he did. Para torture techniques are brutal and degrading – take that Boupasha woman who had a broken bottle thrust up her cunt, the one that the middle-class intellectual, de Beauvoir, is making such a fuss about. All that revolting stuff done to extract particular points of information, often misleading information at that. No, I cannot approve of such things. No, torture can be justifiable only when it is used to bring about personal and moral changes in the individual being interrogated. Torture is an instrument in the re-education of mankind. Take my own case. I might have read books and gone on specialist courses, but I would never have understood the essential truth of Marxism without passing through the fires of torture. My enlightenment was born in pain and hardship. I guess that Chantal thinks her boyfriend is some good-looking ox graduated out of Saint-Cyr, but the truth is that she is being violated by a Vietcong peasant, for my spiritual rebirth, the birth of the me that I am, was in the re-education centre in the little village of Lang Trang on the Gulf of Tonkin, forty miles from Hanoi.

  Looking out of the window now, a Hungarian doing la pelote under the supervision of Schwab provides a centre of interest. Schwab is making him run and crawl round the armoured cars with a sack of stones on his back. They are watched by a queue that is forming outside the dispensary. Delavigne is supervising the putting out of the screen and chairs for the evening’s film show. I can’t see round the corner, but I know that McKellar will be watering the colonel’s garden. A sentry with a sten marches back and forth in front of the steel gates. Two more pace the walls above, watching and waiting for the cloud of dust on the horizon, waiting for the wild screams and popping guns of the nomad horde. The nomads will never come. We are fifty years too late for all that. The only men outside the walls are the sharp-shooter team on the range and I can hear that the command to fire at will has been given, so, soon, they will be coming in again. Captain Delavigne will do the evening kit inspection and then there will be la soupe. I think that I can see the boredom rising in shimmering hot waves from the courtyard. Without moving from my place in this room, I can list what everyone in the fort is doing now and will be doing in an hour’s time and will be doing this time tomorrow, moving at the direction of the rosters, to the sound of bugles. I can count it all off on my fingers like a rosary. I was young when I elected to take my commission in the Legion. I thought that I was opting for endless movement and adventure. I did not anticipate the deep monastic peace of the military life. This fort is like a beautifully functioning timepiece. Only there is this dirt – this traitor – in the works …

  I am intrigued by Chantal’s revelation that she is confident she knows who the traitor is. I wonder which poor bastard she is going to put the finger on. I don’t think she can be on to me yet. If she is, I think I can talk my way out of it, for a time at least. She is widely regarded as a society girl who rather fancied being something to do with spies and intelligence, so daddy wangled her a job. It’s not true, but I can use it. She will be certain that I am not the type to be t
he traitor. She likes my uniform, my tales of bedouin life, my romantic nonsense with the gardenias. But I don’t think she thinks I am bright enough or tough enough for the sort of operation I have in fact been running. Raoul has a mind she can respect, she once told me. The clear implication was that she didn’t respect mine. I am looking forward to tomorrow’s meeting. I would like to know who the three civilians are and what the para colonel is doing with them. If I do make a run for it, I don’t want to go to my masters empty-handed. But I shouldn’t like al-Hadi to be interrogated by anyone but me. We have not needed to speak. He knows that I have been handling the interrogation as gently as I can. At times, I think, he has even managed to exaggerate the agony for Schwab’s benefit. He has courage, but that courage cannot be sustained forever.

  It is time to tie up this loose end.

  Al-Hadi strains eagerly under his bonds.

  ‘You are getting me out?’

  ‘I am getting you out, sidi.’

  ‘Alhamdulillah.’

  I fix the electrodes to his skull, bring the magneto up to maximum voltage and keep it there an instant. Then I hastily disconnect the beastly thing and hurry up into the sunlight. It is hard. Of course it is hard. At least there was a reason for al-Hadi to die. Too many people have died in this war for no reason. I might try ‘heart failure while under questioning’ at the security panel meeting tomorrow. It will probably go down on the registers as ‘killed while attempting to escape’.