Go forward, go back, circle, stop, run. Sharp-angle retreat. Flank march. Attack. Wait. Scuffle. Retreat. Do nothing for three days. Go forward. You can always go back if that’s where the advantage lies. Grave-stones bake, and bushes that can’t get out of the sun wilt also in silent torment. Great mountain flanks rise across the valley, sheer walls of rusty stone in places, or ash-grey, or banked with olive-woods that seem, through the merging, enlarging, isolating power of the binoculars to be almost as dense and one shade lighter than jungle. Waiting, you isolate faces and scenery in the mind by the wielding of imaginary binoculars, superimposed over the real and dangerous detail that never escapes the eyes. The imaginary lens of discretion shifts at will across the legendary escarpments of memory, over the top, beyond further valleys and into other countries, where your own particular republic lies — height, distance and dense undergrowth removed from the common reality of the half-blind world but which, with one sudden pull of the will, floods in and becomes your real self staring you in the eyes. It is a dangerous exercise — at the moment — because it obliterates the valley and road you have been set there to watch. But he can’t help thinking of his own children abandoned so blithely three years ago. If life becomes the progression of a more or less straight line you are poorer in spirit at the end than you were at the beginning when you first thought it easiest to live your life in that way. To turn back, zigzag, go in circles, demands courage but produces understanding.
From this spur of land both approaches to the village were controlled by heavy machine-guns, and was sealed off from the other world, first point of a star screening the battalion headquarters. If I were attacking I wouldn’t come along the roads, neither from east nor west, the obvious ways which are easy to defend, but over the high mountains which shoot above it to north and south, and which nobody could be expected to climb. That’s our obvious way of retreat. You’re only on the side of history if you think of and do the impossible. If they come against us, we get more of them; if they send a patrol first to mask the main force, we get the patrol, if they send planes over they don’t see us. They can send planes on random off-chance bombing but we’ve been through that before. You can’t lose a war like this, you can only die, which is better than in previous wars when you did both.
The village is compact and crawls up a hill — like all important villages. Olive and fruit terraces fall away on three sides. People live here, but silently. The tin-rattle of goat and sheep bells still sound round about, but you hardly ever see them. The days are hot in the sun, bring flies and midges out, living off the smell of donkey-shit and steaming pungent straw in a stone shed nearby. It was a long way from the camels of the sand-dunes nine months ago, when the taut skin of the camels reminded him of the oldest preserved body in the world that he’d seen in the British Museum. The camels had died at the same time, great barrel-humps of bodies in a stonehenge circle, with no sign of what had happened to the people on them. He saw the first oasis after the sand, beige and blue houses on a hill surrounded by a deep-green palm-forest.
A rattling well-chain rapidly unfolds on its wheel, and the bucket smacks hard into water below, all sounds distant yet clear in this alpine silence. The bucket is hauled up twenty times a day, water in abundance, real life at last. He tasted it, cold and earth-fresh, and the stones round about smell of it in the sun for a few minutes.
The arrow is a liar, the straight line a lure and a trick. The lifeline on the palm of the hand may be straight and definite enough, forcefully curving through the landscape of cuts and callouses, scars and dust, but to circle and go back when necessary is still part of that life arrow, the straight line in the sky that you may look for but never see, but which is always over you. He wondered what geometry had to do with life, despicable shorthand that lopped it off and hemmed it in. See that road at which my optic sights are laid? A mortar-bomb would find its own trajectory, follow the setting it was on. The drifting and subtle decorations of arabesques are equally part of the true spirit. Days were meaningless, counted as units of time. Distances and directions were null and never to be considered.
He dug both elbows into the stones and pulled himself from the grave. Numerous insects clipped and hustled about the grey light. He staggered as if to fall, the air not weight enough to hold him, leaned against a rock which still had the warmth of day in it and let his piss stream down. It grew chilly, and he searched for the bush where he’d left his blanket. The sky was so white it needed a long stare before making out the lacy network of stars. The sudden pale flush of them sweeping above the blue-ashy precipices of the Djurdjura swung him somehow back to his Lincolnshire night-wanderings when living there with Pat, the pale expanding autumn sky above the wolds met with on his long solitary walks. He smelled the grass and hedges, wavering leaf-smoke and the farm-mould at the end of a lane. He stood still from his walk in order to recall it more clearly, not so much in a mood of loving recollection but out of curiosity to see whether it would come back totally. It did not, almost faded, until he thought of Handley and his brood who, he didn’t doubt, still lived in the rambling and rickety house he’d once visited. He remembered an exquisite encounter with his fair plump daughter, and the odd meeting at revolver-point with someone called John, a mad pensioned-off brother who dreamed of controlling God and the world by radio. He thought of them as if they were part of his own family, and had such a forceful strange desire to be among them again that he seemed to be out of Algeria and danger and almost on his way there. He was disappointed, when his vision dropped, to find it was neither true nor possible. He wanted to see everyone — Nancy and the children, Myra and his child, the Handleys, even Pat who had gone back to her husband. After being so long in the desert he felt he could live at ease with them all as one big tribe.
He speculated on it, traipsing the valley five miles to get food and a space to sleep in. The wind buffeted between great pinnacles to the north. It was cold and damp, altering the spirit of the seasons, an equinox breaking towards winter, rough seas and snow. But it was still light and comforting under the common moon, and his regular footsteps were strong even to himself, in spite of hunger chewing around the hollows of his stomach. He thought of Handley scoffing food in the Greek Street restaurant, as he had with himself and Teddy Greensleaves the last time he saw them both. Maybe Handley lived in a flat now on Park Lane, and his kids instead of poaching went out at night emptying parking-meters. He suddenly felt human at recalling something he had never given up, the life you could not step out of because it stalked you as a shadow even along this Algerian upland valley with the moon on its trees and the path he walked.