“What year was he born?”
“I don’t know. I was four years older.”
“And you, what year were you born?”
“I don’t know. Look in the family book.”
Jacques went into the bedroom and opened the wardrobe. Among the towels, on the top shelf, were the family record book, a pension book, and some old documents in Spanish. He came back with the papers.
“He was born in 1885 and you in 1882. You were three years older.”
“Ah! I thought it was four. It was a long time ago.”
“You told me he lost his father and mother when he was very young, and his brothers put him in an orphanage.”
“Yes. His sister too.”
“His parents had a farm?”
“Yes. They were Alsatians.”
“At Ouled-Fayet.”
“Yes. And we were at Chéragas. It’s right nearby.”
“How old was he when he lost his parents?”
“I don’t know. Oh, he was young. His sister left him. That wasn’t right. He didn’t want to see them anymore.”
“How old was his sister?”
“I don’t know.”
“And his brothers? Was he the youngest?”
“No. He was the second one.”
“But then his brothers were too young to look after him.”
“Yes, that’s it.”
“Then it wasn’t their fault.”
“No, he held it against them. After the orphanage, when he was sixteen, he went to his sister’s farm. They made him work too much. It was too much.”
“He came to Chéragas.”
“Yes, to our place.”
“That’s where you met him?”
“Yes.” Again she turned her head away, toward the street, and he felt himself unable to continue along that line. But she herself went in another direction. “You have to understand, he didn’t know how to read. They didn’t learn anything in the orphanage.”
“But you showed me postcards he sent you from the war.”
“Yes, he learned from M. Classiault.”
“At Ricome.”
“Yes. M. Classiault was the boss. He taught him to read and write.”
“How old was he?”
“Twenty, I think. I don’t know. All that was long ago. But when we were married, he had learned about wines and he could work anywhere. He had a good head on his shoulders.” She looked at him. “Like you.”
“And then?”
“And then? Your brother came. Your father was working for Ricome, and Ricome sent him to his farm at Saint-Lapôtre.”
“Saint-Apôtre?”
“Yes. And then there was the war. He died. They sent me the shell splinter.”
The shell fragment that had split his father’s skull was in a little biscuit can behind those same towels in that same wardrobe, with the dry and terse cards written from the front that he could recite by heart. “My dear Lucie. I’m well. We’re changing quarters tomorrow. Take good care of the children. I kiss you. Your husband.”
Yes, in the depths of the night when he was born during their move, an emigrant, child of emigrants, Europe was already tuning its cannons that would go off in unison several months later, chasing the Cormerys from Saint-Apôtre, he to his army corps in Algiers, she to her mother’s little apartment in that wretched neighborhood, carrying in her arms the baby swollen with mosquito bites from the Seybouse. “Don’t trouble yourself, Mother. We’ll leave when Henri comes back.”
And the grandmother, erect, white hair pulled back, her eyes bright and hard: “Daughter, you’ll have to go to work.”
“He was in the Zouaves.”
“Yes. He was in the war in Morocco.”
It was true. He had forgotten. In 1905 his father was twenty years old. He had been on active duty, as they say, against the Moroccans.e Jacques recalled what M. Levesque, the principal of his school, had told him when he ran into him on the streets of Algiers several years earlier. M. Levesque had been called up at the same time as his father. But they spent only a month in the same unit. According to him, he did not know Cormery well, for the latter had little to say. Hardened to fatigue, closemouthed, but easygoing and fair-minded. On just one occasion, Cormery had seemed beside himself. It was at night, after a scorching day, someplace out in the Atlas Mountains where the detail had made camp at the top of a hill protected by a rocky pass. Cormery and Levesque were supposed to relieve the sentinel at the bottom of the pass. No one answered their call. And, at the foot of a hedge of prickly pears, they found their comrade with his head back, bizarrely facing toward the moon. And at first they did not recognize his head because of its strange shape. But it was very simple. His throat had been cut and that ghastly swelling in his mouth was his entire sexual organ. That was when they saw the body, with the legs spread wide, the Zouave’s pantaloons slashed, and, in the middle of the gap, that swampy puddle, which they could see by the now indirect light of the moon.f A hundred meters farther on, this time behind a large rock, the second sentinel was displayed in the same position. The alarm was sounded, the number of sentries doubled. At dawn, when they had gone back up to the camp, Cormery said their enemies were not men. Levesque, who was thinking about it, answered that for them that was how men should act, that we were in their country, that they fought by any and all means.
Cormery’s face was dead set. “Maybe. But they’re wrong. A man doesn’t do that.”
Levesque said that according to the other side, there were certain circumstances in which a man was supposed to do anything and [destroy everything].
But Cormery had shouted as if crazed with anger: “No, a man doesn’t let himself do that kind of thing! That’s what makes a man, or otherwise …” Then he calmed down. “As for me,” he said in a low voice, “I’m poor, I came from an orphanage, they put me in this uniform, they dragged me into the war, but I wouldn’t let myself do that.”
“There are Frenchmen who do do it,” [said] Levesque.
“Then they too, they aren’t men.” And suddenly he cried out: “A filthy race! What a race! All of them, all of them …” And, white as a sheet, he went into his tent.
When he thought about it, Jacques realized that the most he had learned about his father was from this old teacher, of whom he had now lost track. But it was no more, except in the details, than what he had been able to surmise from his mother’s silences. A hard man and a bitter one, who had worked all his life, had killed on command, had submitted to everything that could not be avoided, but had preserved some part of himself where he allowed no one to trespass. A poor man, after all.
For poverty is not a choice one makes, but a poor person can protect himself. And Jacques tried, with the little he knew from his mother, to picture the same man nine years later, married, father of two, who had achieved a somewhat better position in life and then was summoned back to Algiers to be mobilized,g the long journey by night with the patient wife and the unbearable children, the parting at the station and then, three days later, at the little apartment in Belcourt, his sudden appearance in the Zouave regiment’s handsome red-and-blue uniform with its baggy pantaloons, sweating under the thick wool in the July* heat, a straw hat in his hand because he had neither tarboosh nor helmet, after he had sneaked out of the depot under the arches of the docks and run to kiss his wife and children before shipping out that night for the France he had never seen,h on the sea that had never before carried him; and he embraced them, strongly and quickly, and he left at the same pace, and the woman on the little balcony waved to him and he responded on the run, turning to wave the straw hat, before once more racing down the street that was gray with dust and heat, and then he disappeared in front of the movie theatre, farther on, into the radiant light of the morning from which he would never return.
Jacques would have to imagine the rest. Not through what could be told to him by his mother, who had no idea what history and geography might be, who knew only that she lived on land near the sea, that France was on the other side of that sea which she too had never traveled, France in any case being an obscure place lost in a dim night which one reached through a port named Marseilles, which she pictured like the port of Algiers, where there was a shining city they said was very beautiful and that was called Paris, where there was also a region named Alsace that her husband’s family came from—it was a long time ago, they were fleeing enemies called Germans to settle in Algeria, and now that same region had to be taken back from those same enemies who were always evil and cruel, especially with the French, and for no reason at all. The French were always obliged to defend themselves against these quarrelsome, implacable men.
It was there, along with Spain, which she could not locate but in any case it was not far away, from where her own family, natives of Mahon, had emigrated as long ago as her husband’s family to come to Algeria, because they were dying of hunger in Mahon, and she did not even know that it was on an island, not knowing anyway what an island was, for she had never seen one. About other countries, she might sometimes be struck by
