A Tree on Fire (20 page)

Shelley's pipe rattled against the stones. Being an expensive one, it didn't break. Frank's fist drew back from a real blow. By the time Mokhtar opened his eyes, Shelley had re-lit his pipe, stood up and walked into the darkness. He didn't go far. ‘I was seeing how you'd react to the arguments I try to beat down my own spirit with. One hears often that no man is an island, and does not live by bread alone, and all that crap, but if that's true, what the hell is there? All my life I've been trying to prove that I can live alone, without man and without God, and to make it easier for me I've dedicated myself to the cause of helping people towards the togetherness of socialism.'

Frank laughed. ‘Still, what you're trying to do is the main thing. What makes you do it shouldn't be much worry. There's no world happening outside of this one. This is the world, the only one and I'm glad it is. I wouldn't like another one moaning around, because this bugger we're on takes all I've got.'

‘An individual can only exist if he's lonely,' Shelley said. ‘In a socialist society, with so much social activity, you can really be lonely. You can then become more completely an individual than ever.'

‘It only sounds convincing in the dark dust-storm of the night,' Frank said. The raw cold and his own exhaustion fixed him tight so that he leaned back, using his arm for a pillow, his last sight that of Shelley's thin light moving across a small area of the map, backwards and forwards over the route they were to take, before he split his consciousness between day and night and lost touch with the world he lived in.

Chapter Fifteen

The dome-shaped mud roofs were hard to pick out from more than a few hundred yards away. A grove of sickly palm-trees surrounding a mud-banked pond of clear water showed its existence to Frank's binoculars. Veiled women looked at them as they entered, black hoods, black veils, eyes so black and rounded with expression that he saw brief pictures of the nearby bleak landscape in them. Hard earth divided the houses, blank walls whose livelier backs faced the water, and children played on those that had weakened and fallen in like eggshells. They seemed built to hide people rather than shelter them, and it seemed a strange way of living after so long from such inventions when the only shelter had been cave, or rock, or the occasional nomad's tent.

He felt unsure of his legs on flat solid soil stamped down by the village. The remaining grey ash of the desert ate more fiercely into his sandals, scraping his feet as if there was sandpaper even inside the eyeholes of each buckle, down through the cloth to his skin which seemed suddenly weaker near to earth so free of gravel. Flies were bigger and fiercer, flew at his face and settled as if he didn't have the habit of bashing them off. He did, they came back only to drop dead when he caught them, one so full that he had blood on his face for the first time, which he wiped away with a rag. These people, living in such poverty and dirt with no will nor ability nor hope, were enough to make him believe it was impossible to do anything about it, that it wasn't worth fighting for, but he knew that what despair there was inside was only a wastepipe through which any uselessness that besets the mind is emptied. You can always crawl into your self-contained and tastefully furnished hole, he thought, and say what's the use as you tuck into a big dinner. All we can do is fight to get the war over, and then see what can be done for this country and these people. Children stared at their single file of ragbags and scarecrows. The men of the village had clean robes on, patched but complete, not lousy and tattered as their clothes were. After weeks of cliffs and mountains, the solidity of terrain that took all strength before allowing you to pass through it, he felt he could push even the most solid houses down with one good shove. Sunlight lifted its guillotine blade of midday as they bent low and entered the poorest house of the village. The room was empty but for a blanket which Mokhtar, standing in the middle, was already peeling back and pointing to a hole they were to climb down. Frank followed in his turn, descended a swaying rope-ladder that he thought would unhinge and slither him into a fall of countless feet, though the rope might be attached to the supports of the house itself. His feet touched bottom, and once his eyes fully opened in the paraffin lamps he saw they were in a large hewn-out room, walls as smooth as the baked mud of the houses above. It was cool but airless, and he wanted to climb the ladder and get in the sun again. His clothes turned heavy, a layer of paste on his body. A faint song of morse came from the other end of the room, and was drowned now and again by a wind that moaned from ventilation chimneys. There were other people in the room, and Mokhtar was talking to a new voice nearby, a man who wore khaki trousers and a newly-washed shirt, had a broad forehead, short black hair, a prominent nose and a thick-lipped smile, smoked a cigarette, and wore a ring on his left hand with a large opal stone in the middle. There was a trestle-table but no chairs. Some men slept by another exit, leaning against piles of ammunition-boxes and a rack of machineguns. The table was thick with maps, and piled with sheets of yellow paper. He felt easy now that he could see. The youth working at the radio sat crosslegged on the floor, earphones on his knee, as if waiting for someone to replace them by a plate of food. Being in a human room and surrounded by houses made his stomach constrict as if he hadn't eaten for days, but he fought it down, for to take in details of the room seemed more important than a passing hunger, as if to notice everything was to take possession of it. He did not know how long they would stay, and his interest was increased by a contempt for this comfortable secret headquarters which controlled – most of the time at least – thousands of square miles of mute and void land, the unalloyed mercury of the sun's strength and a few scoops of muddy water never easy to find.

He sat on the floor with the others, regretted not having pushed a book into his pocket on leaving Tangier. So far he hadn't felt this lack, because there'd been nothing to wait for, only to walk towards, and then the immediate descent into sleep at night straight after food. He walked to the table. The man in khaki was writing. ‘He wants us to stay a few days on his turf,' Shelley said. ‘We're close to the N1 road, all pretty and paved down to Ghardaia, and he thinks we might pull off a lorry. Won't say what's in it – if anything. Just to show our strength.'

‘As long as he's not throwing us away, and I don't suppose he is.'

‘It's not that kind of war.'

Frank laughed. ‘Every war is that kind of war.'

‘We've got no say in this one,' Shelley said. ‘But it's organised, the old one-two: uproar in the east, strike in the west. Pull out of the west and get chased. Then the grand slam in the north. They're so subtle it makes my nose itch.'

‘Are we the ones to get chased?'

‘We're not, but get your mummy rags on: we're going to be buried for two days. We're the uproar in the east. But don't get worried.'

‘I won't. I just like to know.' He didn't know anything yet. It was impossible to know, because it might never take place, and plans could be changed to some different work. You could think, but need never worry, and all that your face might show was the accumulated bile of not taking part in anything that made sense until you became too numbed and exhausted to care. ‘You'd better let the others know.'

‘Mokhtar's doing it.' The wireless-operator disconnected batteries and aerial. Frank had seen him before, or a similar shadow far back in Lincolnshire, the visage of Handley's mad brother who sprang up and levelled a sweating gun at him. The figure of this man he'd never really known blocked out the present cellar he'd dropped into, took on uncanny featureless power as it played his memory and suddenly overwhelmed him. The face smiled, huge and important, though not so close as to be intimidating, not so distinct as to be told off as either good or evil, but a peculiar memory to roll over the earth at such a time. Or had it only come to him because he was underground? ‘Don't talk for a while,' Shelley said. ‘The cats are upstairs.'

A scout car stopped in the village. Frank's hunger came back. He disliked this tomb that was too deep to leap from and slip away unseen. Twenty people in it were petrified, as if ready for an archaeologist to break in with pick and flashlight and claim a great find. The FLN officer had given Shelley a tin of English tobacco, and he pressed in the steel tooth to cut away the foil covering. A pudding-sweet smell hissed out, and for some minutes he didn't know why it stirred him so pleasantly. It touched off a memory of freedom and happiness, being more than ten years ago when he was full of youth and living a life forgotten but now recreated in every sense by this smell of newly-opened tobacco. He was puzzled, had a great yearning to be in that life, reverse the sun and moon, and live as part of it again. Yet he couldn't remember when he'd ever been happy. With half-closed eyes he counted back ten years, to a time as he had considered it then of extreme discontent working as an advertising copywriter on Madison Avenue at a job he hated because it fed the very roots of evil in a society he now wanted to destroy.

It irritated him that this unexpected whiff of desire for something lost should turn out to have been tutelage and desperation. Do you have to die before finding out what is real and what is not? he wondered, putting the cap back on the tin.

The truck left, and he woke Frank. ‘They'll be feeding us soon.' Mokhtar talked French so that both understood: ‘There's a system in this area. If the troops in the scout car throw any weight or hurt people to get information, we send a signal, and in the ambush try to kill everyone on it. If it causes no damage, it runs unharmed through the ambush, which it cannot see. No one suffers. It's an unwritten treaty we have with the French, because conscripts don't want to die for what they don't believe in. It's a safe zone and we're supposed to leave the road in peace, though our side will end that policy soon, because though it may be locally agreeable to the French, it's not ruthless enough for us. We already have a new headquarters.' They would open up the area to flame and spoil, sending a wave through all contiguous
wilayets.
Maybe the base zones in the Kabylie were crumbling, though the French would find it more expensive to move around this territory in force.

A veiled woman came with a large round tray, and he was given food in an earthenware dish, beans, mutton, mint tea and bread. The radio was tuned in again to the French Army. Apparently, the scout car had gone its way in peace.
Salaam aleikum!
He wanted to get out of this hole, but he ate slowly, chewing the stringy tasteless mutton and sipping tea through his bread. ‘What's the possibility of sending an airmail letter to England,' he asked Mokhtar, ‘or a postcard?'

He went to find out. Frank wanted Myra to hear that he was alive, though she might not be interested in knowing it. He remembered the promise in Tangier to come back in ten days, wait with her for the baby to be born and settle down in the never-never-land of love and loyalty with the undamped fire burning the marrow of his backbone to bitter ash. And to suffer so meant dragging the other in for company, the laws of love and disappointment meshing into a poisonous stranglehold. Myra hadn't come with him, so she had nothing to reproach him for, and he could not reproach her, either, if he went back and found her ensconced in her English dream-house with two more kids and some other man.

He had come here to escape, he had come here to find, to escape what he had come to find, to find what he had come to escape, to do it unquestioningly, to move, shoot, blow the guts from his fellow-men, shift, make the break and mend the rift that had been in him from birth. Godless and beleaguered in a brown land that only lit up and changed colour according to the motion of sun and moon, he above all wanted to live at peace, but desired it so strongly that he could only achieve it on his own terms. To settle for less would be the game of half a man, a twisted fly-blown nothing-soul that was on the world only to one day die. It might be different if you believed in heaven, but there were no dreams in heaven and therefore no point in seeking it.

To kill meant to empty yourself of all that was good; to go into the desert meant emptying oneself of all that was bad in order that what should have been there in the first place could then enter. Life had so far trained him to deal with the world in simple and mechanical terms, as if his thought were based on a philosophical system thousands of years dead but that had entered into common use again at the time of his birth. Desert trek and loneliness brought reflection: all things to all men, it fitted tightly into aphorisms, often platitudes, wasn't the reasoned essays of someone who had been used all his life to logical pondering before committing himself only to rational courses of action. And if the psychic shuffledown after such travelling left him in the same state as before he started then so much the better, because he hadn't been after all evil, for if he had it would have been impossible to begin a search in the first place.

He was given a dish of dates and raisins, a smile under the veil as he thanked her in Arabic. When plagued by a question he could not answer, such as what was he doing in a cellar under a house in the middle of the wilderness, he could only reply that it was his fate or destiny. So much was unanswerable because one didn't at the moment understand one's purpose in life. Having entered into it in response to an ideal of helping oppressed people (which seemed now to have meant walking into the unknown), he had at the same time become far too complex to accept that as a satisfactory answer to his question. Three months ago it might have appeared convincing enough for the question to leave him alone, but now his total preoccupation with it caused it, by fading into the background, to take him over completely.

Mokhtar returned: ‘They'll try and get your letter off in a week by courier over the Tunisian border, but at the moment our postal arrangements are erratic!' He added that they were to leave at darkness on the first twenty miles north, towards a five-day rendezvous ending in the south-east. They bedded down to snatch a few hours oblivion beforehand. At five o'clock, a plane flew low and dropped all its bombs. Half fell on the village. Still asleep, the earth was pulled from under him like a blanket, and he jumped up, head into clouds of fire. Flame shook its blue and yellow wings, bloody and shot through with dust. Two paraffin lamps had spread over the ammunition boxes, and they were trying to drag them out of the flame. Rubble was pouring from a crack in the wall and a wooden support had split. He cursed at the bad dream, hoping to fall back into peaceful sleep. Paraffin smells choked him. The room felt as if it were sinking deeper into the earth, gently and hardly noticed, as if like a crippled submarine they would never be able to surface from it. It was this feeling that stopped him rushing in panic towards the ladder on a desperate scramble to find air and daylight. The ice of hopelessness made him look around to see what he could do. A chain was formed to get the wireless operator and his equipment through the debris.