The French Art of War Page 3

  He took up his post and fulfilled his duties above and beyond what he could have imagined.

  In 1957 the paras had all the power. Bombs were going off in Algiers, several a day. The paratroopers had been ordered to make the bombings stop. They were given no rules of engagement. They had just come back from Indo-China, so they knew how to run in the woods, to hide, to fight, to kill in every way possible. They were asked to make the bombings stop. They were paraded through the streets of Algiers cheered on by crowds of Europeans.

  They began arresting people, almost all of them Arabs. Those arrested were asked whether they made bombs or whether they knew anyone who made bombs, or, failing that, anyone who knew anyone, and so on. If you ask enough people, use enough force, you eventually find what you are looking for. If you forcibly interrogate everyone, you eventually find the person making the bombs.

  To fulfil the order they had been given, they built a death machine, a slaughterhouse through which they dragged the Arabs of Algiers. They drew numbers on the houses, wrote up a file for every man, which they pinned to the wall; they pieced together the ‘hidden tree’ of the kasbah. They cross-referenced information. Whatever was left of the man afterwards, a crumpled, bloodstained husk, they made disappear. You don’t leave such things lying around.

  Paul Teitgen was the Sécretaire Général de la Police, working at the préfecture for the département of Algiers. He was the civilian assistant to the general commanding the paratroopers. He was a silent shadow, all that was asked of him was that he agree. Not even agree: nothing was asked of him.

  But he, on the other hand, did ask.

  Paul Teitgen succeeded – and for this he deserves a statue – in getting the paratroopers to sign an arrest warrant for each of the men they detained. He must have used up a lot of pens! He signed all the warrants given to him by the paratroopers, a thick sheaf of them each day; he signed every one of them, and every one represented someone imprisoned, someone interrogated, someone helping the army with their enquiries, always the same enquiries, asked with too much force for all these men to survive.

  He signed the warrants, he kept copies, each one carried a name. A colonel would come to do an audit. When he had tallied the number of those released, those incarcerated and those who had escaped, Paul Teitgen would point out the discrepancy between his figures and the list of names he used to cross-reference. ‘What about them?’ he would ask, and give a warrant number and a name; and every day the colonel, who didn’t like this, answered with a shrug: ‘Them? They disappeared. That’s all there is to it.’ And ended the meeting.

  Behind the scenes, Paul Teitgen kept a tally of the dead.

  In the end he knew how many. Out of all of those brutally snatched from their homes, stopped in the street, tossed into a jeep that suddenly appeared and immediately disappeared, or into a covered truck, destination unknown – though everyone knew the destination all too well – out of these men, who numbered 20,000 of the 150,000 Arabs of Algiers, of the 70,000 residents of the kasbah, 3,024 ‘disappeared’. It was claimed that they had fled to join their comrades in the mountains. Some were found on the beaches, thrown up by the tide, their bodies bloated and ravaged by the salt, bearing wounds that could be blamed on fish, on crabs, on prawns.

  For each of these men Paul Teitgen had a file with a name that he had personally signed. What does it matter? you might argue. What does it matter to those men who disappeared? What does it matter, this scrap of paper with their name, since they did not survive? What does it matter that below their name you can read the signature of the civilian assistant to the general of the paratroop regiment? What does it matter when it does not change their fate? Kaddish does not change the fate of the dead, either: they will not be coming back. But it is a prayer of such power that it confers honour on those who say it, and that honour goes with the departed, and the wound it leaves among the living will heal over, it will hurt less, for a shorter time.

  Paul Teitgen counted the dead. He signed brief, bureaucratic prayers so that the slaughter would not be indiscriminate, so that the number of the dead would be known, and their names.

  For this he deserves our thanks. Helpless, horrified, he survived a reign of terror by counting and naming the dead. During a reign of terror, when a man could disappear in a jet of flame, when a man’s fate was etched on his face, when he might never come back from a ride in a jeep, when trucks transported mangled, still-breathing bodies to be killed, when whimpering bodies on a street corner in Zéralda were finished off with a knife, when men were tossed into the sea like so much garbage, he did the only thing he could do, having decided not to leave on that first day. In this maelstrom of fire, of jagged splinters, of stabbings, blows, water torture, electric shocks, he did the only human thing: one by one, he made a census of the dead, he safeguarded their names. He registered their absence and, when the colonel made his daily audit, he asked questions. And the colonel, embarrassed, annoyed, replied that they had disappeared. OK, fine, they’ve disappeared, Teitgen would say, noting down the warrant number and their name.

  What we are clinging to is all too slight, but inside the death machine that was the Battle of Algiers, those men who believed that people were people, that they had a number and a name, those men saved their owns souls, the souls of those who understood, and the souls of those over whose fate they agonized. Long after their mangled, broken bodies had disappeared, their souls remained, they did not become ghosts.

  Now I understand the importance of that act, although I didn’t back when I was watching TV footage of Desert Storm. I understand now because I learned it from a film; and also because I met Victorien Salagnon. From this man, who was my teacher, I learned that the dead who are named and counted are not lost.

  Victorien Salagnon lit the path for me, meeting him at a point when I had hit rock bottom guided me. It was he who forced me to see that symbol that runs like a thread through history, that obscure yet obvious mathematical symbol that pervades all things, it is a ratio, a fraction, and it can be expressed as 10:1. This ratio is the clandestine symbol of colonial massacre.

  On my return to Lyon I settled into humble digs. I filled the furnished room with the meagre contents of my boxes. I was alone and that did not bother me. I was not thinking of meeting someone, as single people often are: I was not looking for a soulmate. I didn’t care, since my soul has no mate, no sisters, no brothers; it has always been an only child, and no relationship will ever coax it from its isolation. Besides, I liked the single women of my age who lived alone in cramped flats and who, when I came round, would light candles and curl up on the sofa, hugging their knees. They were hoping for an escape, they were waiting for me to disentangle their arms, so that they could hug something other than their knees, but living with them would have destroyed the quivering magic of flickering flame that illuminated these single women, the magic of those folded arms opening to me; and so, once their arms were opened, I was disinclined to stay.

  Thankfully, I wanted for nothing. The tortuous workings of the Human Resources department in my former company, coupled with the first-rate social welfare in this country – no matter what people may say, no matter what they may have become – afforded me a year of peace and quiet. I had a year. A year in which to do so many things. I did one thing. I prevaricated.

  When my income began to dwindle I became a distributor of free newspapers. I would set out in the morning with a cap on my head to push freesheets through letterboxes. I wore woollen mittens that looked a little shabby but were perfectly suited to the task of ringing doorbells and grabbing paper. I dragged along a shopping trolley laden with the newspapers I had to give out; it was very heavy because paper is heavy, and I had to force myself to push just one copy through each letterbox. After a hundred metres, the temptation would take hold to dump the whole lot in one batch rather than distribute them. I was tempted to fill the rubbish bins, stuff discarded boxes, to accidentally-on-purpose shove two, five, ten through a letterbox ra
ther than one in each; but there would have been complaints, a supervisor followed my route, and I would have lost a job that earned one centime for every paper, 40 centimes per kilogram of paper lugged, this job that kept me busy in the mornings. From daybreak I roamed the city, preceded by the white mist of my breath, hauling an obscenely heavy old lady’s trolley. I tramped the streets, humbly greeting the upstanding citizens I passed, well-dressed and groomed, on their way to work, careful not to stare. With a keen eye versed in class warfare they sized me up – my anorak, my cap, my gloves – decided to say nothing, walked past and let me go on my way; moving quickly, shoulders hunched, almost invisible, I stuffed one copy into each letterbox and moved on. I covered my area systematically, painstakingly blanketing it in a pollution of publicity that would end up in the bin the next day; and at the end of my route I always stopped at the café on the boulevard separating Lyon from Voracieux-les-Bredins, where I would drink a small glass of white wine around noon. At one o’clock I headed off to load up again. The papers for the following day were delivered at fixed times. I had to be there, I couldn’t hang about.

  I worked mornings, because after that everything closed. No one comes to lock up: the doors themselves decide when to open and close. The keypads have timers that tick off the time required for the postman, the cleaners, the delivery men, and at noon they close; after that, only someone with a key or an entry code can get in.

  So I spent the mornings plying my parasitical trade, cap on my head, lugging a trolley weighed down with paper, inveigling myself into people’s nests to lay my promotional egg before the doors closed. It’s creepy, when you think about it, that objects can decide something as important as when to open and close; but no one thinks about it, we prefer to assign difficult tasks to machines, whether their difficulty is physical or moral. Advertising is a form of parasite; I wormed my way into people’s nests, deposited my sheaves of garishly coloured, unmissable offers as quickly as possible, then went next door to deposit some more. All the while the doors silently counted off the minutes. At noon the mechanism was activated. I was locked out. There was nothing I could do. So I went to celebrate the end of my day, my short, irregular working day, with a few glasses of white wine at the nearest bar.

  On Saturdays I walked faster. By distributing my papers at a jogging pace and dumping the remainder into the recycling bins, I gained a good hour, which I spent at the same bistro at the end of my route. Some of the other customers there, like me, worked insecure jobs or lived off their pensions. We gathered in this bistro at the frontier between Lyon and Voracieux-les-Bredins, all of us finished or nearing the finish line, and on Saturdays there were three times as many of us as on other days. I drank with the regulars and on Saturday I could stay a bit longer. Soon I was part of the furniture. I was younger than they were. I couldn’t hold my drink, and that made them laugh.

  I first saw Victorien Salagnon in that bistro, one Saturday, saw him through the thick yellow coke-bottle glasses of my midday wine, which made reality more fuzzy but much closer, more fluid and impossible to grasp, which in those days suited me well.

  He was sitting on his own at the sort of sticky old wooden table you seldom see in Lyon now. He was drinking alone, a half-bottle of white that he made last, and reading the local paper which he spread over the table. The local paper was a broadsheet; unfolded, it took up four places, so no one came to sit with him. Towards noon, in the packed café, he casually presided over the only free table in the bistro, while others stood huddled at the bar, but no one bothered him, they were used to him, and he went on reading the trivial titbits of local news without raising his head.

  Someone told me something that helped explain this one day. The man standing next to me at the bar leaned over, pointed to Salagnon, and whispered in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear: ‘See the guy with the paper taking up all the space? A veteran of the Indo-China War, he is. And I tell you, the stuff he got up to over there…’

  He gave a knowing wink to indicate he knew much more and that it explained a lot. He straightened himself and drained his glass of wine.

  Indo-China! There was a word you never heard any more, except as a term of abuse for veterans, l’Indochine as a region no longer exists; the name has been mothballed, put in a glass case, even to utter it is bad luck. In the vocabulary I had learned from my left-wing parents, on the rare occasions the word was spoken it was uttered with the same hint of disgust or contempt used for anything colonial. It was unsurprising for it to pop up in a crumbling bar, among men in whom liver failure and cancer were running a race; I had to come here, to the arse-end of the world, down in its basement, among the dregs, to hear the word spoken again as it must once have sounded.

  This was said in a stage whisper; I had to reply in the same tone. ‘Oh, Indo-China!’ I said. ‘A bit like Vietnam, wasn’t it? Well, a French-style Vietnam, meaning cobbled together with no equipment! Since we had no helicopters, the soldiers jumped out of planes and, assuming their parachutes actually opened, they carried on on foot.’

  The man at the table heard me. He looked up and made an attempt to smile. He stared at me with icy-blue eyes whose expression I couldn’t make out, but maybe he was just staring at me. ‘I suppose you’ve got a point. Well, about the lack of resources, anyway,’ then he went back to reading his outspread newspaper, turning the huge pages, never missing one, until he came to the end. The conversation moved on to something else; standing at the bar is no place for serious conversation. That’s the whole point of the aperitif: the rapidity, the lack of gravity, the lack of inertia, the fact that everyone assumes physical characteristics that do not belong to the real world, the one that burdens us, bogs us down. Through wine-tinted spectacles the world we saw was smaller and better suited to our half-hearted ambitions. When the time came I headed off with my empty trolley and went back to my room for a nap to sleep off what I had drunk that morning. This job was threatening to give me cirrhosis and, as I drifted off, I kept promising myself I would find something else soon, but I always fell asleep before I worked out what.

  The old man’s stare lingered with me. The colour of a glacier, with no emotion, no depth. Yet it radiated a calm, an attentiveness that took in everything around him. His gaze fostered a sort of intimacy, there seemed to be no barriers that prevented you from being seen or distorted how you were seen. Maybe I was just imagining things, deceived by the curious colour of his eyes, that emptiness like an ice floe on black water; but this look that I had seen for a fleeting second stayed with me, and for the whole week I dreamed of Indo-China, and the dream I woke from each morning haunted me all day. I had never thought about it before, about Indo-China, now I dreamed about it in images that were precise but totally imaginary.

  I dreamed of a vast house. We were inside; we did not know how big it was or what was outside; I did not even know who ‘we’ were. We climbed a large, creaking wooden staircase that rose in a languid spiral to each landing, from which corridors lined with doors branched off. We moved in single file, marching slowly, lugging heavy backpacks. I don’t remember any weapons, only the old-fashioned khaki canvas backpacks with their metal frames and straps padded with felt. We were in uniform, climbing this endless staircase, moving in silence, single file, down long corridors. The lighting was dim, the panelling absorbed all the light; there were no windows or the inside shutters were closed.

  Behind half-open doors we saw people sitting, eating in silence or asleep, sprawled on huge beds, flanked by thick cushions, lying on chequered bedspreads. We climbed for a long time and, reaching a landing, we piled our rucksacks in a heap. The officer in charge showed us where to take up our positions. We slumped, exhausted, behind the rucksacks, he alone stayed standing. Scrawny, legs apart, arms akimbo, he kept his sleeves rolled up, and his cool demeanour ensured our safety. We barricaded the staircases, made a barrier with our rucksacks, but the enemy was in the walls. I knew this because on several occasions I found myself looking through their eye
s, staring down at us from above, through cracks in the ceiling. I never named this enemy, because I never saw it. I simply saw through its eyes. I knew from the start that this close combat was the Indochine War. We were attacked, we were constantly under attack. The enemy ripped the wallpaper, surged from the walls, fell from the ceiling. I don’t remember any guns, any explosions, just that ripping sound, that surging, that danger that streamed from the walls and the ceilings that enclosed us. We were outnumbered, we were heroic, we retreated to a narrow strip of landing behind our rucksacks, while our officer, fists on his hips, stood, implacable, jerking his chin to let us know where we should be positioned during the various phases of the attack.

  I thrashed about during this dream and woke bathed in a sweat that stank of wine. All the next day I could not shake off the overpowering image of that house, the walls closing in, and the self-assured swagger of that scrawny officer standing over us, reassuring us.

  After the violence of the dream had dissolved, all that remained was the ‘we’. A nebulous ‘we’ ran through this dream, ran through my account of it, one that, for want of a better one, described the non-specific viewpoint through which I lived this dream. Because we live our dreams. The point of view through which I lived it had been undefined. I was one or other of the marching soldiers shouldering a rucksack. I was one of the soldiers huddled behind a rucksack, trying to defend himself, forced to retreat again, but I was also a part of the surreptitious gaze that watched them from the walls. I was part of the collective breath that made it possible to tell this story. The only person I was not, the only one who was not part of this ‘we’ and who kept his ‘he’, was the skinny officer, unarmed and standing to attention, whose keen eye saw everything and whose self-control saved us. Saved us.