The Mysteries of Algiers (21 page)

‘So, well, there is not much more to tell. On the day of the mission I put Nounourse in charge of the section of the platoon that was carrying the bomb. He would have broken my head like a coconut if I hadn’t, but in the same squad I put that modest young dyer who was not afraid to admit that he was afraid. When night fell the comrades went off down to the docks. I wept as I kissed them all goodbye. Everything went wrong. The details are of no interest. Down by the docks the comrades took a wrong turning on the way to the gasworks, and blundered into a cul-de-sac. They were spotted by a gendarme. Also perhaps there was a leak in our security, for that night the docks were crawling with regular troops as well as gendarmes. The comrades find themselves trapped in this little road without an exit. And what happens? Nounourse sets the bomb against the wall at the end of the road and starts its fuse, and they shoot away at the police and soldiers. The bomb goes off. A couple of the comrades are injured in the blast and one is killed. But those who can go through the wall, while Nounourse holds the troops off, making his Tarzan cry all the time. At the end he runs out of ammunition and has to bludgeon a soldier down with the butt of his gun. Then Nounourse makes off. It was amazing he escaped, for he was carrying another man, that young dyer who was too frightened to walk and the load was not very pleasant, for the dyer has shitted in his pants. Later that night we executed the dyer for cowardice in the field.’

Jalloud scrapes his chin and gives me a very direct look.

‘I tell you all this to show you that things are not always what they seem. Or rather they are precisely what they seem. That is the paradox.’

Again I am not sure whether I believe Jalloud, but there is no point in saying so.

‘I had better give you another shot before Nounourse comes back. He does not like to see drugs being taken in his flat.’

While Jalloud busies himself with the solution and the injection, he continues to talk.

‘Nounourse is OK. You will see. He obeys me. They all obey me. I bet anything that you think I am too young to be in charge of a whole wilaya. It is not so. Some months back this summer I and some of the comrades had to go to Arzew to meet a Bulgarian who was saying that maybe there might be arms from Russia for us, maybe not. You know Arzew? This meeting was on the cliffs by the sea where we could see that we were not being watched. We had look-outs in all directions. The Bulgarian was thinking maybe what you are thinking, that I was not really in charge of my men. So I told him to be a witness to what was going to happen and I made a signal to one of my watchers on the cliff and he threw himself off the cliff down on to the rocks below, dead, just like that, and the Bulgarian’s doubts were at an end. It is true. Nounourse was there.’

Jalloud sighs heavily.

‘So now, I and my men are at your disposal. You can snap your fingers at them, like me. What is your plan?’

It will not do to show any hesitation.

‘The demonstration and putsch are still more than a fortnight off. I have ideas about that, but first I propose that we put a spoke in their wheels by eliminating Chantal. That woman is dangerous.’

‘Murder Chantal? Why not?’ says Jalloud indifferently. It does indeed seem that he will go along with anything I say. ‘Why not? But how? and where?’

‘Just this morning I noticed that the opera house is mounting the
Ring
cycle. The first night of
Rheingold
is the day after tomorrow, and –’

‘And she will be there.’

‘All the old Pétainist scum will be there, come to celebrate the Aryan Artist as Superman. In any case, it is the event of the season. The de Serkissians will have a box for the first night. That is a certainty.’

‘The opera –’ Jalloud hesitates. ‘That will be difficult. To get in will be possible for you, perhaps for several of us. But what about weapons? Will we not be frisked and searched at the doors? Will it be the gun or the bomb? And how are we going to escape? None of us knows the opera house. Does it have to be the opera?’

‘The opera will be best. The de Serkissian villa and the
SDECE
building where she works are both heavily guarded. Besides, action like speech has its rhetoric. An outrage at the opera will have a definite effect – and it will prove to the world that there is nowhere that these people can be safe.’

Jalloud deliberates.

‘OK. I can see that, but the details will be difficult. We will need to know more about the layout of the place and the location of the de Serkissian box. That is important. We will need time maybe to “persuade” some of the stagehands or other backstage people to co-operate. It could be done perhaps … but we can’t just charge into it.’

‘True. I have thought about that.
Rheingold
is on Monday. Three days after that is the first night of
Die Walküre.
Later come
Siegfried
and
Götterdämmerung
. So I will go to the first night of
Rheingold,
reconnoitre and report back. Then later we make the attempt on one of the other first nights.’

Jalloud thinks hard. Then he seems to see a possibility.

‘Yes. Good. It would be best if we murdered that woman during
Götterdämmerung.
That is
Twilight of the Gods,
is it not? It will have a good effect, as you say.’

He stands up and walks about, waving the now empty syringe in an excited fashion.

‘But I am coming to the opera too! I have never been to an opera before! Let us take a box, if we can … We will need proper dress, but I can fix that. Our expenses can all come out of the
FLN
funds.’ He giggles a little hysterically. ‘But what Nounourse will make of it, I do not know.’

At that moment the door opens.

‘Ah, there you are, Nounourse! We were just talking about you.’

Jalloud looks elegant and excited. From time to time he self-consciously runs his fingers down his jacket. He has provided me not only with a dinner-jacket, but also a hat, white scarf and gloves and a gardenia in my button-hole – and dark glasses. I am to wear the hat tipped over my eyes and the scarf wrapped round my mouth, for fear lest any of my former comrades-in-arms recognize me. I look like Rudolph, Prince of Geroldstein – as impersonated by a grocer in a small-town amateur dramatics society. I am only thankful that Jalloud’s mates in the kasbah have failed to produce the sash of the Légion d’honneur. When Nounourse sees me, he roars with delight and throws a punch at my stomach. It is true that I have a paunch, but it is a muscular paunch. It can take the kick of a mule. I don’t even grunt. Nounourse gives me a funny look.

Jalloud is frantically hunting for his binoculars and he asks me if we should take money for ice-creams. Saphia in her chair gets irritated by Jalloud’s jokes and nervous gestures. I am irritable and I sweat profusely, for, over the last two days, Jalloud has been watering down the doses of morphine.

In the foyer, I thrust past the fat white women with gold on their bosoms and the men with shiny faces. The men bow to hear their partners’ words, then bob away as I thrust past. Ah, the charm of the upper classes! Well, I am determined not to be charmed by them. These people have come together in the evening’s stifling heat in a sort of demonstration to the world outside. For, after all, in one thousand three hundred years of history, the Arabs have produced nothing that remotely compares with Wagner’s
Ring
cycle. Squeezing their bums into their seats is, then, a political act for these idlers. Certainly I hate opera. What is remarkable is that they do too and that they are so bad at disguising it. They will talk about anything except the music that they are here for and they will shift restlessly on their seats. Even so, it is a price they are ready to pay, if only to have something to talk about at the dinner parties which form the life-in-death of the dull winter season in Algiers. If a socialist revolution in Algeria succeeded only in closing the opera house and putting an end to those dinner parties, it would already be something. Personally, I used to enjoy the dirty stuff we sang in the barracks on Camerone Night. I am also fond of the songs of Edith Piaf. She sings for the little people.

The audience is stacked and raked in the confined space, like so many birds of prey nesting on a cliff face, squawking and extending their jewelled talons. We have a box. Jalloud’s French army issue binoculars sweep the balcony, the grand tier, the circle and the stalls. There is no sign of Chantal or of her family. General Challe is here though. Jalloud has spotted him in a front stalls seat. If only we had managed to smuggle weapons in tonight … I, too, scan the house obsessively. Since I have returned to Algiers, I have been conscious of Chantal as an unseen presence. Wherever I go, she walks with me, a ghost who walks hip to hip with me and who matches her steps precisely to mine and at night I have lain awake wondering if my ghost also walks with her and when she lies with another man is my ghost also present as the third one in the bed, unconsenting but repeatedly violated? I find the strength of this romantic and certainly neurotic fantasy somewhat eerie and Marx’s guidance on these matters is enigmatic. What he says in
The German Ideology
is that ‘The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-processes, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises.’

Chantal must be here tonight. Certainly, there is a lot at stake. If Chantal fails to appear, then my stock with Jalloud and the comrades will fall. The opera house is, I suppose, small by comparison with those to be found in the cities of mainland France, but it makes an attempt at grandeur in miniature. The gold and red striped wallpaper, the red velvet coverings on the balconies, the cream-coloured imperial eagles in stucco alternating with bizarre human-headed, butterfly-winged caryatids – it seems that operatic culture came to an end in the Napoleonic era. With so much cream and gold, the general effect is of sitting inside a rather sickly multi-tiered wedding cake.

I lean over to Jalloud and whisper, ‘One day, my colonel, all this will be yours.’

He laughs but I continue.

‘No, I am serious. Shall I tell you when I was last in an opera house?’

‘Yes. Tell me when you were last in an opera house,’ says Jalloud indifferently. He continues to look around him.

‘It was in Hanoi in 1955. We were all brought together in the Hanoi opera house. I was among the last batch of those to be repatriated – the survivors of Dien Bien Phu and the death march into captivity. There were some hundreds of us brought in from Lang Trang. What strikes me now is that the Hanoi opera house had the same tatty colonial pretensions as this place. Its balconies were decorated with stucco and gold palmettes, fringed by swords, lances and tropical foliage. The stalls seats had all been ripped out and those of us who could still walk milled about in that area. On the stage the little yellow men in black cotton uniforms yelled out orders and tried to organize us into proper groups. (But that is how I might have described it before Dien Bien Phu. Since Lang Trang I had learned to see them as us and us as them.) There was no usherette, but a man from the Red Cross walked around distributing cigarettes. That was the first as well as the last time I ever set foot in an opera house and it was a terrible moment for me. For the first time in many months I was re-encountering the men I had learned to hate and now, they told me, I was about to be shipped back to the country that had betrayed me.’

‘It must have been awful.’

‘You musn’t be impressed by all this.’

But Jalloud is not really responding. I wonder if it is conceivable that I am becoming a veteran revolutionary bore? I begin to study the programme notes and, despite myself, I become interested. I hate opera. Opera is reactionary, of course. It shows a flattering mirror to the upper classes. The message is that, whether exchanged as babies by gypsies, disguised as troubadours or on the tumbril to the scaffold, true nobility will out and the assembled spear-carriers in the end have nothing to do but acknowledge that nobility. But, now as I begin to study the programme notes, I begin to sense that Wagner’s
Ring
may be different. My only previous acquaintance with this man’s music I owe to Chantal. The vilest night we spent together was the night she put a record on the gramophone and challenged me to make love to her in time to the rhythms of the
Liebestod
from
Tristan und Isolde.
No two orgasms are ever the same. Every orgasm is a new discovery, but something that was so slow and as painful as the
Liebestod
orgasm was an unwelcome discovery.

Jalloud is a bright student. He has his ‘bac’ and he knows the plot of
Carmen,
but, as far as opera goes, that is it. I have a lot of problems explaining the plot of
Rheingold
to him. But in a box I have the luxury of continuing to whisper once the performance has started. The brooding notes of the ‘ring’ motif inaugurate the primal fantasy, that is the awakening of consciousness, which spirals and rises through the murky waters – yes, I should say it is even the awakening of class consciousness in a world of primitive communism, before man learned to value gold more than love.

Ideology is the key which unlocks all art, so, while Chantal may listen to the horns give voice to a hopeless yearning for the lost citadels of Europe, I hear something different, a lament for the way in which human beings have been sacrificed for gold. Alberic cheats the Rhinemaidens. He is robbed by Wotan who in turn cheats the giants. Fasolt kills Fafner. They all want that ring of power which is profit, this golden ring which turns the wheels of the dynamos and sends the dwarfish proletariat underground to work for their subsistence … There is a price for everything. That is Wagner’s message. And the gods are doomed. The fortifications of Valhalla are no stronger than those of Sidi Bel Abbès. That is why Wagner is great. He has got the enemy’s number.

Act One ends. Freia (Christa Mannerling) is cheered to the rafters. Her presence on the stage reassures the matrons in the stalls. It is possible to be very fat with streaky mascara and still be a goddess. There is no interval but Jalloud, bored, goes for a walk round the balcony corridor. I stay in the box. It is not safe for me to leave the box. When he returns, he tells me to relax (but it is he who is so nervous!). He has spotted a group of people who are obviously the de Serkissians. They are on the same side of the house, two boxes away from us. He says that Chantal looks very pretty. He is even more flushed and excited than before. And I too feel something of his excitement. Revenge! Soon, I shall be revenged! Already to be in the same building as her and she not knowing that I am here, and for me to be closing in for the kill, there is something sexual in this.