The art of losing, p.7
The Art of Losing, page 7
Meanwhile, in the midst of this jubilant scene, where no one stops eating except to laugh, Ali’s joy is spoiled by a gnawing fear that half blocks his throat, preventing him from swallowing his food: the Amrouches are not here. They have not come to join in the meal. The antipathy between the two families is genuine, it is well-known, but it is on occasions such as this that the village rises above its divisions and shows that it can function as a whole. It is during such celebrations that one realizes that these rivalries are not an angry wound inflicted on the flesh but a simple line of honor traced between clans.
The Amrouches are not here. Ali cannot help but think that the arrival of the men from the FLN in the village is to blame for their absence. Ever since one of their family was appointed tax collector, the Amrouches have decided that they now belong to a new camp, one that does not live according to the precepts of the village. They have external imperatives. They have adopted the logic of war.
* * *
To a customer who notices the open article in Paris Match, Michelle smiles and whispers:
“I’ve known men who strike like thunderbolts. Honestly, it’s nothing to boast about.”
“I mean, really,” the customer says in the same mocking tone, “all these men falling from the skies, and so far not one has thought to land in my garden!”
* * *
The meats give way to pastries, and lips glossy with fat are now silken with powdered sugar and honey, with crisp golden crumbs.
The ritual plays out like a piece of theater, like an opera, with trapdoors from which a deus ex machina might suddenly appear. No sooner has the last cake been eaten than, from outside, come the high-pitched wails announcing the arrival of the hadjem, the circumciser. This is the signal for Messaoud, Yema’s brother, to go and fetch the child from the group of women. He gets to his feet as lightly as he can since the banquet has left his stomach heavy and his legs numb.
When she sees Messaoud, Yema hugs Hamid more tightly against her chest. She no longer knows whether she is playing the role allotted to her in the ceremony, or whether her refusal to let her son go is real. Hamid, confused, frightened by his mother’s wails, begins to sob, too. He loses the self-assurance of prince and king. He forgets the words his father recited to him yesterday. He forgets bravery, forgets decency, forgets strength. Messaoud grabs the little boy under the arms. Yema holds on to his feet, she pins to his costume a silver brooch, to protect him; she kisses him. With each of these gestures, she is following the ritual, and although she wishes it would stop, she sings, or, rather, sobs a melody:
Do your work, circumciser,
May God guide your hands,
Harm not my son,
Lest I should hate you,
Do your work …
Now that Messaoud has a firm grip on his nephew, Yema lets go. All around her, women take up the song:
Do your work, circumciser,
Let not the blade grow cold.
The hadjem is an old man from the ridge whose date of birth is lost in the mists of time. He is accustomed to the tears of the children and those of their mothers. In a corner of the room where the ceremony will take place, he calmly unties the bundle in which he keeps his materials: a piece of wood with a hole, a knife, a length of string with a wooden ball at each end, juniper berries. At this point, Ali leaves the room. When the knife cuts the flesh, neither parent may be present. Alone, or at least without their help, the boy must endure the first pains of manhood. Hamid is passed between his uncles: his mother’s brother, Messaoud, gives him to his father’s brother Hamza, who sits him on his knee. The hadjem spreads the boy’s legs, and on the ground he sets a plate filled with earth, which will collect the blood and the foreskin.
As the hadjem grips the tip of the foreskin, sliding in the juniper berry to protect the glans, Hamid starts to scream at the top of his lungs. He calls to his father and his mother for help. Suddenly it seems as though everything has been a trap: the beautiful clothes he is wearing, the food, the laughter, and the songs. All this was just a ruse to cut off his penis. Despite what he has been told, he now knows that it is the whole organ, slipped through the hole in the board, that is going to be cut off by the old man with the blade. (Twenty years later, Naïma will sob just as fiercely the first time her father tricks her into thinking he has stolen her nose, showing her the tip of the thumb he has slipped between his index and middle fingers. And seeing his daughter cry, Hamid will vaguely remember the anguish of his circumcision.)
He is five years old, and he is convinced that he is going to die horribly mutilated. He needs to get out of here. He struggles on the lap of Hamza, who cannot keep him still, and, in a clumsy attempt to calm the boy, whispers:
“If you wriggle too much, he’ll cut off the wrong part.”
This serves only to make Hamid sob more loudly. Outside, Yema is tempted to rush into the house to save her son. The other women hold her back. Don’t you want your son to become a man? Not yet, Yema wants to say, not yet. He has his whole life to do that. I just want them to stop making him cry. Can’t you hear that he is terrified? That he still needs his mother?
Indoors, the old hadjem looks into Hamid’s eyes with patient gentleness.
“I’m only going to take a tiny piece,” he explains. “It is stopping your penis from growing. Once I remove it, you’ll be able to grow into a man.”
Hamid, his face smeared with snot and tears, becomes a little calmer.
“Snip,” says the hadjem with a smile, as though it is a joke.
He matches the word to the action. The earth in the dish immediately absorbs the blood that spurts, and the flap of foreskin lies on the dark surface, like a piece of food dropped during the feast.
Hamid’s reaction is twofold: At first, he is relieved to realize that most of his penis is still attached to his body. A moment later, pain hits like the lash of a whip. He wants to howl again, but already his uncles are congratulating him: You were very brave. You’re a brave little man. We’re all proud of you. And Hamid does not want to make liars of them. Before the circumcision, he could still allow himself to cry, but now? On this day, without knowing it, he sets out on a life of clenched teeth and fists, a life without tears, his life as a man. (Later, by a kind of cultural reflex, he will sometimes say, “I was moved to tears,” to indicate that he feels overcome, but in truth his eyes ran dry when he was five years old.)
The old man carefully cleans his hands, then prepares a poultice of pine resin and butter, which he applies to the boy’s glans. Hamid bites his lower lip to stifle a whimper. Lastly, with the deft movements of a magician, the hadjem pierces a hole in the shell of a raw egg and inserts the child’s penis. All of the men get to their feet and, one by one, drop banknotes into the hands of the freshly circumcised boy. Outside, the voices of the women and the music of flutes and drums start up again. Hamid has become a man.
* * *
“‘From Flanders to the Congo,’” Annie diligently recites to her father over dinner, “‘there is but one law, and that law is the law of France.’”
“What did you say, darling?”
“It’s a poem by François Mitterrand.”
* * *
When, finally, they lie down next to each other after three days of celebrations, Ali pretends not to hear Yema’s sobs. Her head buried under the blankets, she weeps for a long time, unable to sleep. The little dove-like coos she makes as she tries to choke back tears are filled with such youth, such innocence, that Ali, too, abandons sleep, and takes her in his arms and listens as she whispers, “My little boy, my little boy … I’ve lost him.”
“Nothing is going to change,” Ali reassures her. “Everything will be fine.”
He, too, wishes that arms bigger and stronger than his own—the arms of God? of History?—would enfold him and lull him to sleep, would make him forget the dreadful worry that the absence of the Amrouche family has planted in his heart.
The rock face of the gorge rises vertically and cascades down as scree, punctured here and there with limestone tracery, widening to accommodate a river that summer drinks and dries up. But when the river flows, the gorge is softened by waterfalls, by rivulets, by little waves. It is verdant with festoons of greenery and mossy cushions. Delicate early poppies spatter the slopes blood-red with their petals. Fishes and eels glide, flashing silver in the current. Over two miles of rocky gorges border the meanders of the River Isser and the narrow road that runs between the water and the sheer rock face. In the early twentieth century, the gorges to the north of Palestro attracted many tourists and contributed to the development of the town: inns and cafés flourished, catering to hikers who wore soft leather boots and pastel hats. The gorges of Palestro are among the wonders of nature few would think to visit these days, now that Palestro is no longer called Palestro and foreign tourists have fled Algeria after the Black Decade.
On May 18, 1956, a section commanded by Hervé Artur sets out on a reconnaissance mission. It is principally made up of young soldiers who have just arrived in Algeria. So far, they have barely had time to settle into the section house, to marvel at the sweltering heat, and to take a few meals together, sitting at the long tables in the refectory, shoulder to shoulder, chewing in unison. They have strung up a net to play volleyball. In the magnificent surroundings, they forget their uniforms and offer their pale skin to the sun, already imagining heading home, tanned and muscular, and swaggering through the streets of their villages. They strike up those instant friendships that make it possible to share every moment of the day. They take photographs for those not fortunate enough to glimpse this dazzling landscape. “It would be lovely to come here on vacation!” one of the boys writes to his parents. But on May 18, as they are moving through the Palestro gorges toward Ouled Djerrah, the sheer rock face closes in and crushes them. Artur’s section has walked into an ambush set by the FLN. The young soldiers, their corporals, and their officer cadet—caught in the sights of the combatants perched high on the slopes—fall one after another. From the rocky overhangs, it is almost too easy to pick them off, trapped as they are in the narrow gorge. The reconnaissance mission ends barely hours after it began.
Is it because they are young that the army forgets that its mission, like that of the FLN, is to fight, to kill, perhaps to die? Is it because in metropolitan France people still refuse to use the word “war”? Is it because the ambush lasted less than twenty minutes, a skirmish so brief it was an insult? Is it because the bodies were found with their throats cut, riddled with stab wounds, their eyes gouged out? Whatever the reason, in France this day in May will be spoken of as a massacre that no one could have expected. The newspapers will report that the men of the Artur section had their guts ripped out and their bodies filled with stones. The press will say that their genitals were cut off and stuffed into their mouths. It will emphasize sickeningly sophisticated barbarism. It will show readers in France that in Algeria people die and, at the same time, imply that they die more when they die young, and even more when they are mutilated.
The soldiers who remained behind in the section house, like many of those posted in the region of Kabylia, are driven mad with grief and rage when they discover the fate of the Artur section. The news bulletins—whether true or false—sting them like hornets. Tiny blood vessels in their eyes burst. They scream.
In May 1956, the French army begins a series of reprisals that radiate from Palestro; columns of soldiers launch assaults on the mountains. To take revenge. To kill. They have been told by the authorities that they have complete freedom. Some of the reprisal squads take the path that seems right, or, if not right, a path that seems justified: they march on Ouled Djerrah, they head into the gorges to wound shoot kill, they overrun Toulmout and El Guerrah. Other units are happy to simply kill beat slash, whoever, wherever. There is no logic to it. They advance on Bouderbala, almost reach Zbarbar.
The columns setting off to seek revenge encounter columns of villagers simply leaving, fleeing, with no goal, no purpose beyond sheer panic. From a vantage point high above the peaks, the slopes appear crisscrossed in every direction, moving lines, an anthill run amok.
* * *
In 2010, Naïma spends a night drinking beer in the deserted gallery of an Irish artist who is exhibiting photographs of a devastated Dublin. Warning her that it is a mediocre film, he insists on showing her a scene from Michael Collins, saying:
“This is what a war of independence looks like.”
On the small computer screen, the armored cars, angular as praying mantises, bristling with machine guns, enter Croke Park stadium during a Gaelic football match. The crowd watching the match are families, all wearing green and white, smiling and cheering. It is obviously a Sunday. She watches as the tanks roll onto the pitch. They stop. One of the players completes a play beneath the turrets of these strange beasts. The crowd cheers. The British open fire, randomly shooting into the fifteen thousand spectators.
This is what a war of independence looks like: in response to the violence committed by a handful of freedom fighters who, for the most part, were trained in a cellar, a cave, in some dark corner of a forest, a professional army, shimmering with cannons, marches out to crush civilians going about their business.
* * *
For the first time, Ali’s village is visited by a convoy of jeeps filled with French soldiers, their faces masks of fury. With kicks and blows from rifle butts, they force the villagers from their homes and order them to lie facedown, hands on their heads. They search the houses, turning everything upside down, smashing earthenware jars, ripping apart beds. Their brutality is so random it is clear they do not know what they are looking for.
Above all, they want to make it clear they have understood: The mountains mean death. The natives mean death. This is not a summer vacation anymore. This is war, no matter what those back in France say.
Ali immediately lies down, and his brothers do likewise. Lying there, side by side, the three giants of the mountain look like sea creatures washed up on a beach. Old mother Tassadit, a woman so ancient she is almost a living mummy, a widow who can eat only because of Ali’s generosity, does not react when she is ordered from her house. The soldiers drag her from her home, spewing insults. They interpret her confused gestures as provocation.
“She’s deaf!” Ali says, half sitting up.
He puts his hands to his ears, miming the inability to hear.
“She’s deaf! You understand?”
“Shut the fuck up,” one of the soldiers roars, and kicks him in the stomach.
Ali falls back heavily, his jaw slamming against a stone. He feels a wave of heat, tastes the blood in his mouth. Having dragged her from her house, the soldiers snatch away old mother Tassadit’s walking stick, and one of them—the youngest, hardly more than a boy—beats her with it. Sitting on the step of his jeep, the sergeant does not intervene. As the motionless villagers watch, the old woman’s skin turns red, then blue, then black. Only when the cane snaps in his hand does the soldier finally stop.
“Shit!” he yells.
“You okay?” another soldier asks with a concern that, in these circumstances, has a surreal ring.
Ali’s eyes are at a level with the boots, the well-oiled gun barrels, the whirling dust, the inert bodies. He hears a volley of gunshots and forces himself to believe that they are being fired into the air. He dares to lift his head a few centimeters, hoping he will see the wolf-lieutenant from the FLN appear from nowhere. If he genuinely has lookouts in every mechta, he will have been informed of the column of jeeps before the villagers even heard the engines … And if he should suddenly show up now, Ali vows that he will never leave the man’s side, that he will follow him like a shadow, kill for him if necessary. Another volley rings out and is followed by whimpers and prayers muttered between clenched teeth. Ali closes his eyes and he waits.
As he lies motionless, his body racked with cramps, he thinks: It’s amazing that not moving can be so painful. He lies there for so long that time ceases to elapse. Up in the sky, the sun has halted its sweltering, oppressive course, the hours do not pass. Ali is frozen, time itself is frozen and it is agonizing.
“Let’s go, we’re done here!” the sergeant suddenly barks.
The soldiers gather around the jeeps. They are about to climb in when, at the last moment, two of the soldiers have a whispered discussion with their commander. Ali cannot hear what they are saying, but by painfully contorting himself, he can see the three soldiers nod their heads before turning back to the villagers still sprawled on the ground. They take a few quick steps, grab the two men nearest to the jeeps. The soldier who kicked Ali earlier is now staring in his direction, he glances at him briefly, then at those around him. Ali knows that the solider is looking for him—Where’s the brave bougnoule who saw fit to open his mouth?—but he does not recognize him. To him, the villagers all look the same. The Frenchman takes a few steps toward Ali, hesitates, then grabs Hamza. Ali moves to stand up.
“Stop, you idiot,” Djamel hisses, grabbing his belt, “or we’re all dead.”
Ali wavers, he does not know whom to protect. His little brother is being hauled away by the Frenchman. But this is also his little brother lying next to him, pleading with him to do nothing. Later, outside the house, Yema, Rachida, and Fatima are three pairs of wide eyes, three ragged breaths tremulous with tears. Yema is lying on her side, her huge belly so round that it no longer seems part of her, but looks like something that has been placed next to her. This time, his sisters-in-law have assured Ali that it will be a son. Ali slumps to the ground with all his weight, wishing that the earth would take him, would embrace him.
Hamza is too tall and too fat to be dragged to the jeep single-handed. The soldier can only push him, jabbing him in the back with his rifle. Ashamed that he cannot make a show of force, he takes his revenge by raining insults on Hamza. “Son of a bitch,” he shouts. “Filthy bougnoule. Raghead bastard. Goat-fucker. Your mother is a goat.” The jeeps drive off, raising a cloud of dust that settles over the faces of the prostrate villagers. It tastes of chalk and gas fumes.
