‘You need to give him a smack in the mouth, Jonas.’
‘What for?’ I asked wearily.
‘For what he says about Arabs. What he said was outrageous, I expected you to put him in his place.’
‘This is his place, Fabrice . . . I’m the one who doesn’t know my place.’
With that I grabbed my towel and headed back towards the road to hitchhike back to Río Salado. Fabrice came after me, tried to persuade me not to go home so early, but I felt sick at heart and the beach now seemed as bleak as a desert island. It was at that moment that a four-engine plane shattered the silence, appearing over the headland trailing a ribbon of smoke.
‘It’s on fire,’ José shouted, shocked. ‘It’s going to crash.’
The crippled plane disappeared beyond the ridge. Everyone on the beach was on their feet now, shading their eyes with their hands, waiting for an explosion or a cloud of smoke marking out the crash site. Nothing. The plane continued to coast, its engines stalled, but to the relief of everyone it did not crash.
Was this some terrible omen?
Some months later, on 7 November, as night fell over the deserted beach, monstrous shadows appeared on the horizon. The landings on the coast of Oran had begun.
‘Three shots fired,’ roared Pépé Rucillio. The man who rarely showed himself in public was standing on the village square. ‘Where is our valiant army?’
In Río Salado, news of the landings had been greeted like hail at harvest time. The men of the town had convened a meeting on the steps of the town hall. Some glowered with fury and disbelief while others, panic-stricken, had slumped and were sitting on the pavement, drumming their fingers on their knees. The mayor had rushed back to his office, where, according to those close to him, he was in constant contact with the military authorities at the barracks in Oran.
‘The Americans tricked us,’ roared Pépé, the richest man in the district. ‘While our soldiers were stationed in their bunkers, the enemy ships skirted the Montagne des Lions, bypassing our defences, and landed at Arzew without firing a shot. From there, they marched all the way to Tlélat without meeting a living soul, then advanced on Oran by the back door . . . While our troops were still keeping lookout on the clifftops, there were Americans strolling down the Boulevard Mascara. I’m telling you, there wasn’t so much as a skirmish! The enemy marched into Oran and made themselves right at home. What’s going to happen now?’
The day passed in a dizzying whirl of half-truths and wild rumours. Night fell, but no one seemed to notice – in fact most of the villagers did not go home until dawn. By now, they were disoriented. Some swore they could hear tanks roaring through the vineyards.
‘What kept you out so late?’ Germaine demanded, opening the door. ‘You’ve had me worried sick. Where have you been? The whole country is at war and you’re out wandering the streets . . .’
My uncle had emerged from his room. He was slumped in an armchair in the living room, unable to keep his hands still.
‘Is it true the Germans have landed?’ he asked me.
‘Not the Germans, the Americans.’
‘The Americans?’ He looked puzzled. ‘What the hell would the Americans be doing here?’
He jumped to his feet, looked about him contemptuously and announced: ‘I’m going to my room. When they get here, tell them I don’t have time to see them, tell them they can torch the house.’
No one came to torch our house, no air raid troubled the quiet of our fields. A couple of motorcyclists were spotted near Bouhadjar, the neighbouring village, but they turned out to be lost. They drove around for a while, then headed back the way they had come. Some said they were German soldiers, others said it was an American reconnaissance mission, but since no one had ever seen either army up close, we drew a line under the matter and went about our business.
André Sosa was the first of us to go to Oran.
He came back completely confused.
‘The Americans are buying up everything,’ he told us. ‘War or no war, they’re behaving like tourists. They’re all over Oran – in the bars, in the whorehouses, in the Jewish Quarter, they’ve even gone into the Village Nègre, against the express orders of their commander. They want everything: carpets, rugs, fezzes, burnous, tapestries. And they don’t even haggle! I saw one of them give a Moroccan veteran a wad of cash for just some rusty old bayonet from the Great War.’
He pulled a banknote from his back pocket and laid it on the table as though this were proof of what he had said.
‘Just look at what they do with their money . . . This is a hundred-dollar bill. Have you ever seen a French banknote scribbled over like this? They’re autographs. It’s stupid, but it’s the Yanks’ favourite game. They call it ‘Short Snorter’. You can do it with other notes too. Some of them have rolls of bills all like this. They’re not trying to get rich, they’re just collecting them. See those two autographs there, that’s Laurel and Hardy, I swear it is. That one there is Errol Flynn, you know, the guy who plays Zorro . . . Joe gave it to me for a crate of wine . . .’
He picked up the note, stuffed it back in his pocket and, rubbing his hands together, told us he’d be going back to Oran within the week to do some deals with the GIs.
As the fear subsided and people realised the Americans had not come as conquerors but as saviours, others from Río Salado headed for Oran to see what was going on. Little by little, the last pockets of suspicion died away and people stopped posting guards over the farms and the houses.
André was keyed up. Every day, he jumped in his car and headed for Oran to barter, and after each sortie he would come back and try to impress us with his treasures. We had to go to Oran for ourselves to corroborate the wild stories circulating about the Yanks. Jean-Christophe pestered Fabrice, who pestered his mother to drive us there. Madame Scamaroni was reluctant, but eventually she relented.
We left at dawn. The sun had barely risen above the horizon when we reached Misserghin. Jeeps droned back and forth across the roads and the fields. In the streams, GIs, stripped to the waist, washed themselves, singing loudly. There were broken-down trucks along the verge, their hoods up, surrounded by listless mechanics. By the gates of the city, whole convoys waited. Oran had changed. The GIs teeming through the streets gave the place a carnival air. André had not been exaggerating – there were Americans everywhere: on the boulevards and the building sites, driving their half-tracks through the chaos of camels and tipcarts, dispatching units to the nomads’ douars, filling the air with dust and noise. Officers in civvies honked their horns to cut a path through the mayhem. Others, dressed up to the nines, lounged on the terraces of cafés with lady friends while a gramophone played Dinah Shore. Oran was operating on American time. It was not only Uncle Sam’s troops that had landed, they had brought his culture with them: their ration boxes were crammed with condensed milk, chocolate bars, corned beef, chewing gum, Coca-Cola, Twinkies, processed cheese, American cigarettes and white bread. Local bars were playing American music, and the yaouleds – the shoeshine boys – who had suddenly meta-morphosed into newspaper sellers, dashed from the squares to the tram stops howling ‘The Stars and Stripes’ in some incomprehensible pidgin English. From the pavements came the rustle of magazines ruffled by the breeze: Esquire, The New Yorker, Life. Fans of Hollywood began to adopt the traits of their favourite actors: they swaggered as they walked and curled their lips into a sneer even as the merchants in the souks effortlessly learned to lie and haggle in English.
Río Salado suddenly seemed like a backwater. Oran had taken possession of our souls, its clamour pulsed through our veins, its audacity cheered us. We felt drunk, caught up in the commotion of gleaming avenues and teeming bars, made dizzy by the constant weaving of the carts, the cars, the trams, while the girls, insolent but not flighty, their hips swaying seductively, whirled around us like houris.