Our Riches, page 11
“Hi, remember me? I’m Sarah. We met the other night, at Saïd’s place, with my friends.”
“Oh yes, and the blind man . . .”
“Youcef.”
“Youcef?”
“Youcef, not the blind man, jerk; call him by his name.”
“Yes, of course. You know, that reminds me, I’ve got a whole lot of books to give away. Do you want to come and take some?”
“I’ll come tomorrow and choose one or two: a bit of fun for Youcef.”
She sits down beside Ryad to follow the match, her thigh against his. He can smell her warmth, the scent of her hair and skin. He tries not to look at her long auburn hair. She is wearing close-fitting black trousers and a shirt that is tight across her breasts.
* * *
It’s halftime. Horns are honking, cars have filled the streets. Every now and then a human voice can be heard from one of the higher balconies. Ryad takes the opportunity to slip away. The gray car, he sees, is still there with the two men in it. Someone has taken the blue boxes but dumped their contents. The books are lying in the puddles, ruined for good. The smart aleck has even written THANK YOU on Ryad’s notice and taped it to the window of Les Vraies Richesses.
Paris, 1961
The rain falls. The sky is gray. By the Seine, the wind blows hard. Children’s hats, well-dressed girls, leather handbags, clean but mended clothes. Family groups and groups of friends. Some laughing, others serious. Together, we march to protest against the curfew arbitrarily imposed on Algerians in France.
Those Arabs. Those towelheads. Those rats. Those kebabs. Those turds. Those lice. Beat them. Slaughter them. Rub them out. Send them flying. Use batons. Use our police weapons. Use bricks. Kill as many as possible. Kill them by the dozen. Slaughter these people who have no right to be here in Paris, by the Seine, among our monuments, our trees, our women. Slaughter them. Beat them. Throw them in the river. See the Algerian bodies sinking into the muddy water. Far away now, the brown bodies. Make them disappear. Quickly. Brutal charges. Arab-hunting in Paris. Paris! Manned by Papon’s police, Paris kills. Savage. Chases in the streets of Paris. Don’t think twice: throw them over, into the Seine. Broken bodies. Beaten with rifle butts and batons. Bodies hung in the Bois de Vincennes. Seine full of corpses. Hate set free. Noise. Chaos. Baton blows raining on bodies lying flat, on bloodied skulls, on the unarmed. And the silence of the Parisians. Another charge. People on the ground. Blood everywhere. Ambulance sirens. More blows, and bodies in the Seine. A pogrom in 1961. Purify France of its Arabs. Disinfect the avenues. Slaughter the assassins. Repression. Tragic. Starting in the morning, Paris kills. The police, the riot squad, and the gendarmes are reinforced by the Auxiliary Police Force: brigades made up of Harkis, who fought with the French in Algeria. Zero tolerance. The arrests began even before the demonstration. Insults, blows, harassment. Made to swallow whole cigarettes. Water mixed with bleach. Brutal roundups. Blood on the Arab face. Broken legs. We hit, we unleash the dogs. We line the brownskins up against the walls. We pack them into police vans. We grab them in the street by their curly hair. We hunt the type. We throw stones. We drown them. For a whole month after, bodies will be pulled from the water. The killing will go on for days. Corpses in the Seine. Hands tied behind their backs. Strangled with their own belts. Bodies bound and flung into the water. When the families in Algeria are informed, they will not understand what has happened. Someone will bury the bodies somewhere. Paris!
Raided bars. Bludgeoning. Bullets in the head. Bodies piled into common graves. Bullets in the stomach. Bodies on the ground, hunched for protection. Iron bars and lead-tipped sticks. Paris! Systematic interrogation. Up against the wall. Faces drained of color. Pools of blood. Trembling hands. Wild eyes. The sound of the batons, the gun butts, the kicks. Arabs battered and hurled. Shot. Hundreds of men. In endless lines. Hands raised. Arrested. Beaten.
Night has fallen. Windows open. With heads full of rage and bodies spent, we let out heartrending ululations. A last salute to our dead.
On the 17th of October in the middle of the night, Claude Bourdet and Gilles Martinet, founders of L’Observateur, receive an unexpected visit from policemen who want to publish an anonymous tract. It will appear on the 31st of October: four pages signed by “a group of Republican police officers” who state: What was done on the 17th of October 1961 and the following days to peaceful demonstrators, on whom no arms were found, obliges us to give our testimony and alert the public [. . .] All the Algerians caught in this huge trap were battered to death and thrown systematically into the Seine.
Many years later, our grandparents will see us leaving the country to cross the sea, and they will tell us to be careful: “The French are hard.” And we will not understand because we will have forgotten.
Edmond Charlot’s Notebook
Algiers 1961
April 29, 1961
Unveiling of a stela in honor of Camus, designed by the brilliant Louis Bénisti and set among the ruins of Tipaza. They couldn’t have put it anywhere else. Bénisti chose a sentence from Nuptials to be carved into the stone: Here I understand what glory means: the right to love without measure.
Deeply moved.
July 3, 1961
News of Amrouche. I’m told he’s spreading malicious rumors about me, talking about embezzlement, telling Paulhan that I was “dishonest.” When the gossipmongers start up, I try to make it clear that I’m not interested. Amrouche was a friend. Nothing else matters. We were all friends and that’s what it was, Éditions Charlot.
September 5, 1961
Attack on my store in the Rue Michelet, attributed to the OAS. We think they were after someone else and got the wrong address. We’re all right, but I lost about 20 percent of my stock.
September 7, 1961
I’ve started the repairs and the tidying up. Still in shock.
September 10, 1961
New door, fixed the shelving. Sent the family to France.
SEPTEMBER 15, 1961.
SECOND BOMBING
OF MY RIVAGES STORE.
THEY TOTALLY DESTROYED IT,
THE SWINE.
September 16, 1961
My store has been completely ruined. I’ve lost everything, absolutely everything: Camus’s reader’s reports, my correspondence with Gide, Amrouche, and the others. Thousands of books, documents, photographs, and manuscripts: all up in smoke. My precious archives gone! The second floor was blown away. All I have left are a few books and this journal. A whole life reduced to rubble. I’m reeling. What’s the message? What was their target? Who were they after? The young man who published Revolt in Asturias, who wasn’t even twenty at the time? The publisher of Vercors? Or of Algeria Will Be French and Happy? Was it the Resistance publisher, or the man who recently said in a café for all to hear that he was opposed to the bomb attacks that were killing Arabs every day? A friend to Momo and others? And Momo . . . the bard of the Casbah, my faithful friend, who came to see me there, in the ruins, and slipped a roll of bills into my pocket: all his savings.
September 17, 1961
Storefront blown out, glass on the pavement. Grille ripped apart. Rubble and confetti.
I’ll never have the strength to start all over again.
September 18, 1961
They’ve dug out about twenty tons of rubble and shredded paper. Camus’s manuscripts, Giono’s letters, the artwork for the magazines, all the books I’ve published since 1936, the books my grandfather left me . . . rubble and confetti.
September 24, 1961
Not a cent left. Alone in Algiers with my rubble.
October 5, 1961
My family keeps writing from France: they want me to leave Algiers, but I can’t. All this will pass.
October 12, 1961
Georges Drouet, director of the radio station France 5 Algiers, has come to my aid. He’s employed me as manager of the news programs and artistic advisor.
October 19, 1961
A journalist who is preparing yet another article on Camus asked me if I had ever encouraged anyone to write. Plenty of people. I told him my method:
Buy a desk, the plainest one you can find, as long as it has a drawer that locks.
Lock the drawer and throw away the key.
Every day, write whatever you like, enough to cover three pages.
Slip the pages in through the gap at the top of the drawer. Without rereading them, obviously. At the end of the year, you’ll have about 900 handwritten pages. Then the ball’s in your court.
7
In the morning, Ryad counts the books left in the store: sixty. All the others are soaked. He puts the picture books aside.
That damned gray Renault is still there in the street. As he walks past, he thinks he sees a blue shape on the back seat. He threads his way through the alleys and finally reaches the elementary school where the little girl next door goes. He tells the guard that he would like to give the children some books. The guard scratches the top of his head, looks him up and down, and asks him to wait outside the gate. Ryad can see the yard through the grille. It’s charming, with its vegetable bed and its soccer field traced out in chalk. Children are sitting on wooden benches sharing a secret, a piece of chocolate, or their dreams. A dark little boy in a striped T-shirt and overalls is trying to climb a pole. He keeps slipping down and landing on his bottom. But he tries again, undaunted.
Finally, the guard comes running back, accompanied by a man with a potbelly.
“Hello, hello. Yes, I hear you would like to donate some books.”
“Yes, I’m clearing out a bookstore and I have some children’s books.”
“Ah, that’s wonderful, really wonderful. I wish there were more people like you; your parents should be proud of you, you’re wonderful.”
“Thank you . . . Really, it’s nothing . . . So I have about twenty books; I can bring them today.”
“Look, I would really like to take them, but I’m afraid it won’t be possible.”
“Why not?”
“We’re not allowed to accept personal gifts, you see?”
“Even books?”
“Yes, you never know.”
“What don’t you know?”
“So many things, oh, so many things! Who wrote the books, who published them, who printed them, who sold them, who brought them, who will read them . . . No, no, it’s really not possible.”
“But I can’t just throw them out. You can use them . . .”
“Listen, write a letter to the inspector at the Ministry of Education. Wait for an answer; it might take a while, because it has to go to the committee. You have to be patient. Then you’ll be able to bring the books.”
“But . . .”
“You go and do that. Good day to you, my son, and thank you again, the children will be glad to hear about what you tried to do for them.”
The guard slams the door shut in Ryad’s face. Now he is back in Rue Hamani. We see him walk past the damned gray Renault. He ignores the men who are spying on him night and day. He’s not afraid of them and he’s right: they won’t do him any harm. They are only there to remind us that they exist and that we are all under surveillance.
Almost as soon as Ryad steps into the store, somebody knocks at the door. It’s Sarah, radiant in denim overalls, with her auburn hair loose on her shoulders.
“Well, it’s empty here.”
“Yes.”
“Do you know what they’re going to do with it?”
“Yes, the owner is going to sell beignets.”
“Beignets? Uhuh . . . So I’m guessing these books on the floor are the ones you’re giving away?”
“Yes.”
“OK, I’ll take the Jules Roy and this one by Mohammed Dib. Pass me the Houhou and maybe a Camus as well. I hope that’s some help.”
“You can’t take anymore?”
“No, no, this is already too many. But listen, if you really want to get rid of them, take them to the underground lookout.”
“The underground lookout?”
“It’s in the old Rue Élisée-Reclus. Jean Sénac died there. You don’t know who he was, do you? I can tell by your face. Sénac: a poet, a member of the FLN, a homosexual with a big beard. No, doesn’t ring a bell? Kids get together there to write poetry and smoke and read. They’d be happy to have some books. I can take you, if you like.”
Ryad fills his suitcase with books and follows the young woman. They walk along avenues, across squares, and finally end up in some kind of dirty alleyway. Sarah leads him toward a building with a skull tag on the wall:
“Go on, it’s downstairs, I have to go, see you round.”
Stepping into the entrance hall, Ryad pinches his nose shut. He doesn’t dare switch on the light; he doesn’t want to touch anything. He pushes the door open with his shoulder, heaves his suitcase, and enters the underground lookout. There are plates, bottles, glasses, notepads, books. The walls are covered with photos and drawings, illuminated by bare bulbs.
The place stinks of beer.
“Come in, come in. Make yourself at home.”
The young man has a book in his hand. He is very fat, with a pudding-bowl haircut, and round, wire-framed spectacles.
“I’m a writer and a poet.”
He looks up at Ryad with a blend of false humility and pride.
“Do you write? No, you don’t, I can see that, what a pity,” he sighs, before yelling out: “Ladies!”
Ryad starts. Three women turn toward him.
“Greet the gentleman who has come to visit us.”
Intimidated, Ryad opens his suitcase without saying a word.
“Fantastic!”
They fall on the books, open them, stroke the covers, smell the paper. They have forgotten about Ryad, who takes this opportunity to slip away. As soon as he is in the street, torrential rain comes down. He runs to take shelter in Les Vraies Richesses. Because of the rain, he can’t bring himself to throw out the shelving, because of the rain and Abdallah, who is still keeping watch, he knows, although today, again, he hasn’t been there in the street. Ryad ends up going to bed without having dared to put the shelves and furniture out on the sidewalk.
The next morning, he opens the door and feels snowflakes melting on his open palm, flakes delicately falling on the silver, sparkling sea, on the wire fence of the elementary school, the tables outside Chez Saïd, and the trash bins in front of the underground lookout.
Ryad is tired of waiting. Winter will never end. It will swallow Algiers whole.
The shelves, the mattress, the desk, the chair, the fan, the rusty old sign, the photos, the fridge, the hot plate, and the big portrait of Charlot are all outside now. Standing on the opposite sidewalk with a look of desolation on his face and the white sheet wrapped around his shoulders, Abdallah watches his universe sinking. Ryad goes to join him.
“A few years ago. A woman came here. A little woman with blonde hair. She told me that Charlot had died, in Pézenas. It was a shock. In the old house where he spent his last days, he had gone almost blind, which made him terribly sad, because he could no longer read or write letters to his friends. He was cremated and his ashes were scattered over the Mediterranean, his ‘home.’ The lady also told me that he had been very happy to hear that this bookstore had been preserved.”
The raindrops strike at the books with a sharp, military sound. People don’t really live in places, Abdallah thinks, it’s places that live in people. Ryad looks at the big sign, dripping with rain: “The young, by the young, for the young.” He doesn’t feel young anymore. His head is full of Abdallah’s stories: those heavy stories that go to make up History with a capital H, but he doesn’t know what to make of them. He feels that somehow he has failed to carry out his task. The portrait of Charlot is drowning in the waters of Algiers.
Watching Abdallah and Ryad through the foggy windshield of their gray Renault, the two men take notes.
Algiers, 2017
You’ll go to Les Vraies Richesses, won’t you? You’ll walk up and down the steep alleyways. The sun will beat down; you’ll stay in the shade. You’ll avoid the hectic Rue Didouche Mourad — so many alleyways off to each side, like hundreds of intersecting stories — until you come out a few steps from a bridge that is favored by suicides and lovers alike.
You will stop at the terrace of a café and, without hesitating, take a seat and strike up conversations with the other customers. For us, here, there is no difference between the people we already know and the people we have just met. We will listen to you attentively and accompany you on your walks. You will not be alone anymore. You will climb the streets, push open heavy wooden doors, imagine the men and the women who tried to create or destroy this land. You will feel overwhelmed. And the blue overhead will make you dizzy. You will hurry, heart thumping, to Rue Charras, which now has a different name, and look for 2b. You will ignore the gray Renault parked on the pavement. The men in the car have no power. You will find yourself in front of the former bookstore Les Vraies Richesses; I imagined its closure but it’s still there. You will try to open the glass door. The neighbor, who runs the adjoining restaurant, will tell you: “He’s gone to lunch. He has to eat, too! But don’t go, wait a bit, he’ll be back. Here, have a lemonade.”
You will sit on the doorstep, beside the plant, waiting for the attendant. He will hurry when he sees you. Finally, you will enter that little store, where so many stories began. You will look up to see the big portrait of Charlot, in his dark glasses, smiling. Not a broad smile, but it’s like an invitation, as if he were saying: “Welcome, come in, take what you like.” You will remember what Jules Roy wrote: “For me, what remains of that adventure, though we didn’t perceive it as such at the time, is a sort of mirage. It was as if Charlot had created us all, or at least presided over our births. He was the one who invented us (perhaps even Camus); he brought us into the world, shaped us, coaxed us, told us off sometimes, always encouraged us, praised us beyond our merits, brought us together, smoothed us, polished us, set us right, fed us often, raised us, inspired us . . . Never once did he say a word to suggest that our talent represented anything less than the future of Algerian and French and indeed of world literature. We were the finest poets, the brightest rising stars; we were marching toward a legendary future; we would bring glory on the land of our birth . . . We were his dream. And then fate played a cruel trick on him, like a storm brewing over a calm sea. For as long as he could, he held out against the gale. I never heard him complain about his misfortunes or the injustice of his lot. Sometimes I wonder if we were really worthy of him.”
