Our Riches, page 7
Beside the door, a woman with a horsey face is sitting on a three-legged wooden stool. She has laid out bottles of fake perfume on a small red carpet. Only the finest brands: Dior, Saint Laurent, Chanel, Hermès . . . She greets Ryad cheerfully, pointing at her merchandise:
“Perfume for men. The best in the city, you won’t find another range like this. Take one, I’ll give you a discount: three hundred dinars, reduced from three fifty. A special deal for a neighbor.”
“Er . . . No thanks.”
“Go on, get one for your princess, then.”
“I don’t have a princess.”
“A handsome boy like you? How is that possible?”
“. . .”
“Ah! So get one for your prince.”
“No, it’s not that, I just don’t need any perfume.”
“Yes you do, you smell bad. Here, I’ll give you a little squirt for free. Come on, come here. It’s hard for me to get up because of my sciatica.”
“No, really, I just wanted to step out for . . .”
“Come on, come here, don’t be shy.”
Ffsscchhtt, ffsscchhtt. Citrus on his neck, hair, and torso. On the opposite sidewalk, Abdallah is smiling, propped on his stick. Ryad goes over and asks:
“Shall we get a coffee?”
“Yes.”
“You do smell bad, you know.”
“I know, I know . . .”
The old man leads him through a labyrinth of streets. In spite of his age and his stick, he walks quickly. The storekeepers greet him as he goes by, with a gesture, a Saha, or a Bonjour.
They come to a plain little café. Three portraits of ex-presidents hang on the wall: Ahmed Ben Bella, Houari Boumediene, and Mohamed Boudiaf. The radio is on, but turned down very low: a quiet buzz. The light is harsh and white. You can see into the kitchen at the back, where women with headscarves are calmly at work, yawning. One, young and pretty, in a tight blouse, squeezes her breasts in front of another, who nods in approval.
A man with a trouble-ravaged face is sitting at the counter, crying quietly. Beside him is a woman with a guitar, who plays a few notes and quietly hums. She greets Abdallah with a little nod.
Ryad and Abdallah sit down at a table with a blue Formica top. Abdallah is out of breath. What is it? Ryad wonders: a blocked artery, the beginning of a heart attack, panic, or just sadness? His noisy, rhythmic breathing makes a sound like breaking waves. Ryad remembers the vacation in Provence, with Claire. She wore a sky-blue bikini, the same color as her eyes. The same sky blue as the sweater that Abdallah is wearing now as he stares across the table.
“Not many people have eyes as dark as yours, do they? I mean, they’re so dark, you can’t even tell the iris from the pupil; it’s kind of scary.”
“You’re not scared just because I have dark eyes.”
“No, no . . .”
“What are you going to do today?”
“Clean up.”
“Clean up? You mean clean out.”
“Up, out, whatever.”
“What’s left?”
“The top shelves.”
“Where the Pléaide editions are.”
“You seem to know the store well.”
“I’ve spent a lot of time there.”
“Do you like reading?”
“I used to work there. I filled in the subscription forms, kept them in order.”
“Subscription forms?”
“Yes. It was a bookstore until the 1990s; then it was turned into a lending library. Are you sleeping on the mezzanine?”
“Yes . . . And did many people use it?”
“No . . . Five borrowers a month, at the most.”
“Oh well, that’s all right then.”
“All right? You think it’s all right to close it down because there weren’t many borrowers?”
“Well . . . yes.”
“You’re a fool. What are you going to do with the books?”
“The owner wants me to throw them out.”
“Throw them out? You’re not going to throw them out. Books? Do you realize what you’re saying?”
“What else can I do?”
“Give them away, keep them, anything, but don’t put books in the trash.”
“Do you like reading?”
“No.”
“So why are you worried about these books?”
“They’re important to me.”
“You can buy them on the internet, now, you know. You can get any book delivered anywhere. You can even read them online or on a tablet.”
“Tsss, tssss!”
Abdallah drinks the last drops of his coffee and gets up. Ryad reaches into his pocket but the waiter stops him with a quick gesture.
“For you, it’s free.”
Ryad mumbles a hurried thank you and goes out after Abdallah, who is already heading back to the bookstore. When they get there, the woman with the horsey face is negotiating with two teenage girls.
“I’ll give you a Dior J’adore and a Pure Poison for five hundred dinars. As a favor.”
“But I’m telling you, we’ve only got four hundred. Give us a discount.”
“You’re ruining me, you know that? You realize I have five children to feed? My husband couldn’t keep it in his pants, he ran off with a man, a little gigolo.”
“I’m telling you, it’s all we’ve got.”
“All right, all right. Take them, take them, but come back and see me again!”
In a cabinet, Ryad finds a series of books printed on fine, almost transparent bible paper. He ventures to open one but closes it immediately, repelled by the tiny letters. He lights a cigarette and smokes it in the doorway. The rain begins again. Big, heavy drops falling almost lazily. Abdallah waves from the opposite sidewalk. The two men stand there, facing each other in silence.
Around midnight, Ryad is still among the books. He feels neither hunger nor fatigue. Eventually he climbs up to the mezzanine and stretches out in the darkness with his hands under his head. He hears car horns and the screeching of tires on asphalt. From time to time, headlights shine in through the front window of Les Vraies Richesses, like suns that are born and die within the space of a few seconds.
A sad-sounding woman’s voice rises from the street. Ryad tries to hear the words of the song over the noise of the wind and the rain lashing at the store window. Something about an impossible love, a man who has gone far away. The voice gathers strength, trying to hold on to the man. You must prepare to forget the images of the past, the unmistakable signs, prepare to lose yourself in sadness. I don’t believe in separations, thinks Ryad, pulling the blanket up over his face, tears welling up in him suddenly. He imagines Claire beside him, lying on her back, her stomach rising and falling gently as she breathes. He makes an imaginary space for her on the mattress and tries not to move, to keep her there a little longer. The voice outside launches into a new song, accompanied by a guitar. Another story about a woman with a broken heart. This time, the man loves someone else. Claire, the mattress, the bookstore, Ryad, eyes shut. The song. The guitar. The rain on the glass. There’s a knock at the door.
It’s Abdallah.
Ryad hurries to let him in.
“Is everything all right?”
The old man nods. His black eyes are moist. Ryad leads him to the chair and makes him sit down.
“I don’t want to bother you.”
“I wasn’t doing anything special.”
There he is, Abdallah, back inside 2b, with the white sheet around his shoulders. He looks like a magus, a strange apparition. This is his place: he scans the room, searching for memories. At the sight of the books on the floor, he turns pale. Ryad builds himself a pile to sit on. From outside comes the sound of two drivers arguing, and others honking angrily, held up by the drawn-out dispute.
From his pocket, Abdallah takes some old photos, folded into four. He passes them to Ryad, who handles them carefully. The first shows Abdallah, much younger, beside a woman holding a baby. They are in a living room; white cloths embroidered with flowers and fruit cover the furniture.
The second photo shows a little girl, sitting on the ground, intently reading an old book: The Child and the River by Henri Bosco, Éditions Charlot. In the third photo, Ryad sees a young woman in a wedding dress, arm in arm with a stern-looking man.
“The first photo, that’s my wife holding my daughter when she was a few months old. In this one, she’s reading one of her favorite books, here in the store. And the last one is her wedding day.”
“She’s very pretty.”
The old man nods, and a proud smile flickers across his face. Ryad asks:
“Did you like working here?”
Abdallah thinks.
“Yes. These books kept me company every day for years. At first, I spent the evenings sorting them, putting on the call numbers, entering all the information in a register. For each one, I had to write down the name of the author, the title, the ISBN number, the key words. I would read a few pages so I could write the summary and answer questions from borrowers . . . It’s hard to explain what this place means to me. I haven’t told many people this, but I didn’t enjoy reading then, and I’m not sure I do now either; still, I like to be surrounded by books, although I came to reading late. Back in the days of the colony, the schools were for the French; there was nothing for us. I learned Arabic at the zawiya. And French, that was only after independence, thanks to my wife: she taught me. She never made fun of my ignorance. She was very patient; she took the time to get me started. But for years it was hard for me not to feel intimidated by the printed word. Maybe reading isn’t natural for people like me. A book is something you touch and feel. You should be able to turn down the corner of a page, or put a book aside and pick it up again, or hide it under your pillow . . . But I can’t do that. Even now, whenever I see a book, I want to put it on a shelf.”
He leans forward:
“I’ve read this one though, over and over. This is Les Vraies Richesses by Monsieur Giono. I wanted to understand why the store was named after this book. Listen, this is my favorite part: ‘They were used to waiting for orders and being told how to live. Now they decided to live as they pleased, simply, not listening to anyone, and everything was lit up, truly, as when we find the match and the lamp, and the house is illuminated, and we know at last where to reach for what we need, as when the dawn lights up a larger dwelling, and a part of the world that had been smothered by night’s mud, with its valleys, rivers, hills, and forests, is revealed in all its living joy.’ That’s what I felt when I came to work in this bookstore.”
The guitar has stopped playing. The singer is silent.
Sétif, May 1945
On the day of victory, the Mother Country will not forget all that she owes to her children in North Africa. Facing enemy fire, under bombardment, we defended France against the enemy. We were there at the battle of Monte Cassino and the liberation of the southern cities; we fought in Italy, where hundreds of our brothers fell, and we had to abandon their bodies; we freed Alsace and marched on into Nazi Germany. The bombs and bullets did not distinguish between French and Arab.
Ben Bella, who will be the first president of Algeria, is decorated by de Gaulle in Italy, where Mohamed Boudiaf fought as well, and Krim Belkacem, and Larbi Ben M’hidi: the future heroes of the Algerian revolution. Our courage is universally applauded.
In Algeria, people are preparing to celebrate the Liberation. We want to take part in the great outpouring of joy, but also to remind the French of the promises made during the war.
In Sétif, the authorities allow us to celebrate the victory, as long as we don’t mix with the Europeans. And as long as our assembly is not political. The bells ring out. Thousands of us gather in the streets. Joyously, our march sets off. We are joined by people from all the surrounding countryside. For the first time, in the middle of the crowd, the green-and-white flag with its red symbols appears. We raise banners demanding equality with the French, the release of our political prisoners, and the independence of Algeria. We encounter a policeman, who is swept up by the crowd. He draws his gun and fires. A young Arab scout carrying an Algerian flag falls to the ground. We cry out in panic. This is the beginning of the massacres. The socialist mayor of Sétif, a good man, tries to intervene, to stop the shooting. He is gunned down. Who fired? We will never know. All day and all night they shoot at us. And the following morning, the killing continues. For two weeks, violence rages. French people out on their own are shot. The army arrests and executes thousands of Arabs. Arms are distributed to French civilians, who search and destroy whole villages. Pavements run with blood. Corpses are dumped in wells. At Heliopolis, they fire up the lime kilns to dispose of the troublesome bodies.
The young Kateb Yacine is a student at the lycée in Sétif. The future author of Nedjma is just fifteen years old. When he hears about the massacres, he goes to join the demonstrators, in spite of his mother’s protests. He is soon arrested and thrown into prison, where he will spend three months, fearing every day that he will be taken out and shot. His mother is told that he is dead. Here she is wandering the streets, searching for his body. She cries, she begs, she prays herself crazy. Her family is obliged to have her interned in a mental asylum. She will never be herself again.
Throughout the province of Constantine, the army organizes humiliating rituals: we are forced to kneel before the French flag and shout that we are dogs.
Finally, they are back in Algeria, the Arab soldiers, lauded and triumphant. They are proud: France’s victory is theirs as well. They were feted in Europe along with their French comrades, and they have returned with the list of their friends who died in combat, with their stories about life in the regiment and card games by the fire. They arrive in their uniforms, medals pinned to their chests, full of hope for the future. We welcome them in our ruined villages and tell them about the massacres.
General de Gaulle sends Paul Tubert to investigate. He studied law and political science; he has served in Tunisia, Madagascar, Morocco, Albania, and Algeria. He arrives in Algiers on the nineteenth of May. He is kept there for a week. Visiting the province of Constantine is out of the question. He makes the best of the delay, meeting with various figures from both sides of the administration, French and Arab. People open up. They begin to tell him about the horrors. Finally, on the twenty-fifth of May, he reaches Sétif, but on that day a telegram from the Governor General’s office in Algiers orders him to return to Paris. On the tenth of July 1945, he warns the National Assembly. The situation is critical. We must react very quickly, he says. Time is short. The National Assembly is ill at ease. No official action is taken.
The Second World War has just finished. We know that we will soon have to take arms, and that France cannot stay in Algeria. The future president Boumediene, who is thirteen years old, has witnessed the massacres. Later, he will say: “That day I grew old before my time. The adolescent I was became a man. That day everything changed. Our ancestors turned in their graves. And their children understood that they would have to arm themselves and fight in order to be free. No one can forget that day.”
The man in charge of the repression, General Duval, declares: “I have given you peace for ten years. If France does nothing, it will start again, and worse, and there will probably be no stopping it.” The man is clear-sighted.
The organization of the revolt by men and women all over the country will take nine years. Nine years of meeting in secret, forming networks, recruiting a tiny army. They will be joined by French supporters of the Algerian cause: the mathematician Maurice Audin, the worker Fernand Iveton, the poet Jean Sénac, the officer cadet Henri Maillot, the doctor Pierre Chaulet . . . They will be hunted down, tortured, condemned to death. Many of them will die before the proclamation of independence.
We don’t know it yet, but soon the insurrection will begin in Algeria.
For now, our front doors are closed. Each family mourns its dead and disappeared.
Edmond Charlot’s Notebook
Paris, 1945–1949
January 2, 1945
The army has assigned me to the Office of Information, where I report to Major Albert de Bailliencourt, a graduate of the École Polytechnique. Office on the Champs-Élysées. There’s a table, a chair, and work for one person. The problem is, there are three of us! I have to do something to fill in the morning. If they have nothing to give me, I’m free to go out for a walk. So I’m visiting Paris, time on my hands, while my wife, my brother and my friends are looking after Les Vraies Richesses back in Algiers. Amrouche is here with me, working tirelessly to build up the circulation of L’Arche.
On the advice of Camus, I’ve taken a room at the Hôtel de la Minerve on the Rue de la Chaise, in the seventh. A pretty blonde, who looks like the actress Yvette Lebon, rings a great big cowbell whenever a visitor comes to see one of the residents. A terrible racket! That’s Paris for you . . .
January 12, 1945
Recruited a secretary: Madeleine Hidalgo. She’s perfectly trilingual and extremely efficient. We’re working in the hotel dining room, without heating. Madeleine keeps sneezing. Her hands are red; she can barely grip the pen.
January 21, 1945
I’m spending my days searching for a place within my (modest) means but big enough to house Éditions Charlot.
January 31, 1945
Camus introduced me to the book designer Pierre Faucheux. An interesting man. I invited him to think about some new covers for my collections.
