What Isabelle had said had shocked me.
After that, whenever we met, she would stalk past, head high as a butcher’s hook, as though I had never existed. Nor did it stop there: she invariably imposed her prejudices on others. If she had decided to hate someone, she insisted all her friends do so too. I watched as a yawning gap opened up around me in the school playground, my classmates deliberately shunned me.
It was for Isabelle’s sake, too, that Jean-Christophe Lamy picked a fight with me at school and beat me to a bloody pulp. Though he was a year my senior, Jean-Christophe had little to boast about, since his father was the son of a caretaker. But Jean-Christophe was hopelessly in love with Pépé Rucillio’s indomitable niece, and he hoped by beating me up to show her how much he loved her, how far he was prepared to go.
Shocked by the sight of my injuries, the teacher called me up before the whole class and demanded that I name the ‘little savage’ who had done this. When I refused, the teacher ordered me to hold out my hands and thrashed me with a ruler, then made me stand in the corner for the rest of the day. After class, he had me stay behind, thinking he could coerce me into giving him the name of the culprit. Still I refused, and eventually he let me go.
When she saw the state of me, Germaine was livid. She demanded to know who had done this to me, but again I stubbornly refused to answer. She insisted on taking me back to the school so she could find out what had happened, but my uncle, who was slumped in a corner, dissuaded her. ‘You’re not taking him anywhere,’ he said. ‘It’s high time he learned to stand on his own two feet.’
Some days later, as I was wandering through the vineyards, I saw Jean-Christophe Lamy and his two henchmen, Simon Benyamin and Fabrice Scamaroni, coming across the fields towards me. Though their manner was not hostile, I was terrified. They did not usually play around here; they hung around the town square or played football together on a patch of waste ground. The very fact that they were in my neighbourhood was not good news. I didn’t really know Fabrice. He was in the class above me: I often saw him reading comics in the playground. He seemed an unremarkable boy whose only talent was his ability to give Jean-Christophe an alibi when he needed it, but I suspected that he might wade into the fight if things turned nasty. Not that Jean-Christophe needed any help; he knew how to throw a punch. Simon was a different matter. I did not trust him at all – he was wildly unpredictable, capable of head-butting a friend just to put an end to a boring conversation. He was in the same year as me, and was the class clown. He always sat at the back and constantly persecuted the clever students. He was a dunce who would complain when the teacher gave him a bad grade, and he hated girls – especially the pretty, clever ones. Simon and I had met on my first day at the school. He and his gang had crowded around me and jeered at me, at the scabs on my knees, at my delicate features, ‘like a little girl’, at my new shoes, which they said made me look like a frog. When I did not react, Simon called me a sissy. After that, he ignored me.
Jean-Christophe was carrying something under his arm. I watched carefully, waiting for him to signal to his friends. Strangely, I saw no sign of the malicious grin, the tenseness in his movements he usually exhibited when about to beat somebody up.
‘We’re not here to hurt you,’ Fabrice said.
Jean-Christophe approached me warily, looking embarrassed, even apologetic. His shoulders sagged under the weight of some invisible burden.
He held out a package.
‘I came to say sorry,’ he said.
I did not take the package, suspecting some practical joke, so he placed it in my hands.
‘It’s a wooden horse. It means a lot to me, but I’d like you to have it. Take it, please, and forgive me.’
Fabrice stared at me, willing me to forgive him.
Once he felt that I had a grip on the package, Jean-Christophe took his hands away and whispered: ‘And thanks for not telling on me.’
In that moment, the friendship between the four of us, one that was to prove among the most important in my life, was sealed. Later, I discovered that Isabelle, furious at Jean-Christophe’s hapless attempt to impress her, had insisted he apologise to me in the presence of witnesses.
Our first summer in Río Salado began inauspiciously. On 3 July, Algeria was rocked by Operation Catapult, in which a British naval squadron bombed the French fleet at the Battle of Mers-el-Kébir. Three days later, before we had had time to weigh the extent of the disaster, His Majesty’s Air Force returned to finish the job.
One of Germaine’s nephews in Oran, a cook on the warship Dunkerque, was among the 1,297 sailors killed in the raid. My uncle, who was gradually, inexorably withdrawing into himself, refused to come to the funeral, so Germaine and I had to go without him.
The city of Oran was in a state of shock. The whole population had gathered on the docks and was staring aghast at the burning barracks. Many of the ships had been on fire since the first bombing raids, and thick clouds of black smoke now choked the city and veiled the mountains. What had happened was all the more shocking because the warships the British had bombed had been in the process of laying up, the French having signed an armistice with Germany two weeks earlier. This war that people had assumed posed no threat to this side of the Mediterranean was now on our doorstep. After the initial panic and confusion, there was mayhem. Half-truths and rumours were rife, and people seemed prepared to believe even the wildest and most terrifying stories. There was talk of a German invasion, of nightly parachute drops outside the city, of massive bombing raids targeting the civilian population and dragging Algeria into this savage war, which even now was returning all of Europe to the Stone Age.
I was desperate to get back to Río Salado.
After the funeral, Germaine gave me some money so that I could go to Jenane Jato, and asked her nephew Bertrand to go with me so he could bring me back safe and sound.
Jenane Jato looked different, larger. It sprawled now towards Petit Lac, towards the shanty towns and the camp grounds of the nomads. Scrubland was fast disappearing under the advancing concrete. Patches of waste ground and dark alleys were now building sites. The high walls of a barracks or a prison rose up where once the souk had been. Crowds milled outside employment ‘offices’ – most of which were no more than tables set up in front of vast mountains of scrap iron. Jenane Jato was different, yet poverty still clung tenaciously to the place, resistant to even the most fervent municipal projects. The same shambling shadows still hugged the walls, the same human wrecks still sprawled drunkenly in cardboard boxes; the destitute, faces ashen, shrouded like mummies in their burnous, still teemed around the filthy cafés, hoping to dip a dry crust into the smells of cooking. The poor, the drunken and the wretched stared at us as though we were time itself, as though we had appeared from some parallel universe. Whenever he heard some insult directed at us, or saw someone stare a little too long at our fine clothes, Bertrand, who had never seen a place like Jenane Jato, walked a little faster. There were roumis here and there, and some Muslims who wore European suits, fezzes perched at rakish angles, but in the air there was still the stifling smell of a storm about to break. As we walked, we happened on squabbles, some of which degenerated into brawls while others simply petered out into uneasy silence. The sense of dread was overpowering. Even the jingling dance of the water sellers, whose leather harnesses were studded with tiny bells, could not ward off the unwholesome effects.
There was far too much suffering.
Jenane Jato was crumbling beneath the weight of broken dreams. Abandoned children stumbled in their parents’ shadows, weak from starvation and sunstroke, fledgling tragedies set loose upon the world. Feral and brutish, they raced barefoot through the streets, hanging on to the backs of trucks, dashing between the carts, laughing, heedless, flirting with death. Gangs of boys fought, or played soccer with a ball of knotted rags. In their terrifying games, there was something exhilarating, something dizzyingly suicidal.