It was then that I came face to face with war . . . with the terrible reality of war, the succubus of Death, the fertile concubine of Disaster, this truth I had not wanted to face. I had read the newspaper reports of bombings in towns and villages, of police raids on douars suspected of harbouring FLN supporters, of the thousands of people displaced, the deadly clashes, the manhunts, the massacres, but to me it had been like a fiction that never seemed to end. Then, one day, as I was sitting on the seafront sipping an orange juice, a large black car pulled up, machine guns bristling from the windows. The gunfire lasted only a few seconds before it was drowned out by the squeal of tyres, but the shots kept ringing in my head for a long time. Bodies lay sprawled on the pavement opposite, while onlookers ran for safety. The silence was so total that the cries of the seagulls drilled into my temples. It was like I was dreaming. I stared at the broken bodies and I started to tremble. My hand juddered like a shutter in the wind, splashing me with orange juice; the glass fell and shattered at my feet and someone at the next table screamed. People stumbled from shops and offices, from their cars, shocked and dazed. A woman fainted in her friend’s arms. I didn’t dare to move. I sat, open-mouthed, heart hammering in my chest, frozen in my chair. The police arrived in a blast of whistles. Soon, a crowd had gathered around the victims: three people were dead – among them a young girl – and five more gravely wounded.
I went back to Río Salado, locked myself in my room and did not come out for two days.
For months, I couldn’t sleep. From the moment I got into bed, I felt a terrible dread pulling me under, it was like tumbling into an abyss. I dared not let myself fall asleep: my dreams were grotesque and bloody nightmares. When I could no longer bear to stare at the ceiling, I sat up, put my head in my hands and stared at the floor. My feet left bloody prints, gunshots ricocheted through my head – it was useless to stop my ears, because I could still hear them, deadly, deafening, my body jolting with each shot. I left my bedside light on until morning to try to keep these ghosts at bay. The slightest rustle, the smallest sound, every creak of the woodwork, seemed loud enough to split my skull.
‘You’re in shock,’ the doctor told me. This was something I already knew. What I needed to know was how to get over it, but he had no magic cure to offer. He prescribed tranquillisers and sleeping pills, but they did not help. I was depressed. I knew I was lost, but I had no idea how to find myself again. It was as though I was a different person, an infuriating, disappointing yet indispensable person whose body was my only home.
I constantly felt claustrophobic and would go out and stand on the balcony. Sometimes Germaine would come and keep me company. She tried to talk to me but I didn’t listen. Listening to her exhausted me and aggravated my anxiety. I needed to be alone. So I went out – night after night, week after week. The silence in the village did me good. I liked to stroll through the deserted square, wander up and down the main street, sit on a bench and think about nothing.
One moonless night as I stood thinking on the pavement, I saw a bicycle lamp weaving in the distance, the rattle of the bicycle chain echoing from the walls in a thousand high-pitched whimpers. It was Madame Cazenave’s gardener. When he saw me, he braked hard, almost sending himself over the handlebars. Pale and dishevelled, he kept pointing back the way he had come, unable to speak. Then he climbed back on to his bike and, in his hurry to ride off, hit the kerb and fell backwards.
‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’
Shaking, he got to his feet, climbed back on his bicycle and managed to stammer:
‘I’m going to the police . . . something terrible has happened at the Cazenave house.’
It was then that I noticed the huge reddish glow behind the Jewish cemetery. ‘Oh my God,’ I screamed, and started to run.
The house was on fire, great flames lighting up the surrounding orchards. I cut through the cemetery, and as I came closer to the house, I realised the scale of the catastrophe. Fire was raging though the ground floor and was already threatening the first floor. Simon’s car stood burning in the driveway, but I could see no sign of him or of Émilie. The gates were open. The climbing vine on the trellis crackled and blazed. I had to shield my face to breach the wall of fire and get to the fountain. In the courtyard, two dogs lay dead. It was impossible to reach the house, which was now an inferno. Flames licked the walls, shooting out like tentacles. I tried to call to Simon, but no sound came from my parched throat. A woman sat huddled under a tree. It was the gardener’s wife. Hands clapped to her face, she stared trancelike at the house as it burned.
‘Where’s Simon?’
She turned and pointed up the hill to the old stables. I plunged into the blaze, deafened by the crack of burning wood and shattering windows. The hill was cloaked in thick, acrid smoke; the old stables were shrouded in a silence even more terrifying than the cataclysm behind me. In the distance I saw a body lying face down on the grass, arms crossed, illuminated by the distant flickering flames. My knees locked. I realised I was utterly alone, and I did not feel I could face this thing without someone to help me. I waited, hoping the gardener’s wife would follow me, but she did not move. I could hear only the roar of the fire, see only the body lying before me. Motionless and naked but for a pair of underpants, it lay in a pool of blood so black it looked like pitch. I recognised the bald head: it was Simon! This surely was some nightmare; I was at home, asleep . . . But a graze on my arm throbbed, reminding me that I was awake. The body gleamed in the glow of the fire. The face looked as though it had been carved from a block of chalk; there was no light in the eyes. Simon was dead.
I crouched down next to the body of my friend. I was in a daze. I no longer knew what I was doing, what I was thinking. Automatically, I reached out to the body as if to wake him.
‘Don’t touch him!’ a voice screamed out of the darkness.
Émilie was crouched by a corner of the stable. Her face was so pale it seemed luminous. Her eyes burned with a fire as vast as the flames behind me. Her hair spilled down her back. She was barefoot and wearing only a silk night-dress, which somehow made her seem more naked. Her son Michel huddled against her.
‘I forbid you to touch him,’ she shouted in an unearthly voice.
A man appeared behind her holding a rifle: it was Krimo, Simon’s chauffeur. Krimo was an Arab from Oran who had worked in a restaurant on the corniche until Simon hired him just before he got married. He stepped away from the wall and moved cautiously towards me.
‘I’ve already shot one of them,’ he yelled.
‘Who did this?’
‘Fellagas. They slit Simon’s throat and torched the place. By the time I got here, they’d gone – I saw them running through the valley and I fired. The cowards didn’t even fire back, but I heard one of them scream.’
He stood in front of me, the glow from the flames accentuating the contempt on his face.
‘Why Simon?’ he asked me. ‘What did he ever do to them?’
‘Go away,’ Émilie screamed. ‘Go away and leave us in peace. Make him go away, Krimo!’
‘You heard her.’ Krimo raised his rifle. ‘Fuck off out of here.’
I nodded and turned away. It felt as though my feet did not touch the ground, as though I were gliding through a void. I went back past the burning house, cut through the orange groves and headed back to the village. Headlights swept around the cemetery and headed up the marabout road. Behind the cars, I could see the shadows of people running. Their breathless voices came to me in snatches, but their shouting was drowned out by Émilie’s words, a maelstrom that was swallowing me up.