At the corner of the rue Prévost-Paradol,l 3a group of men were shouting.
“That filthy race,” a short worker in an undershirt said, looking in the direction of an Arab standing as if glued in a gateway near the café.
“I didn’t do anything,” the Arab said.
“You’re all in it together, all you fucking sons of bitches,” and he started toward him. The other men held him back. Jacques said to the Arab: “Come with me,” and he took him into the café, which was now run by Jean, his childhood friend, the son of the barber. Jean was there, still the same, but wrinkled, short and thin, his face sly and alert.
“He didn’t do anything,” said Jacques. “Take him into your home.”
Jean looked the Arab over while he wiped off the counter. “Come,” he said, and they disappeared out the back.
Jacques went outside, and the worker scowled at him.
“He hasn’t done anything,” Jacques said.
“We should kill them all.”
“That’s what you say when you’re angry. Think it over.”
The worker shrugged. “Go over there and see what you say after you’ve seen the mess.”
Ambulance sirens were rising, rapid, urgent. Jacques ran to the trolley stop. The bomb had exploded by the line pole close to the stop. A lot of people, all in their Sunday dress, had been waiting for the trolley. The little café nearby was full of cries of anger or suffering, you could not tell which.
He went back to his mother. She was standing erect now and very pale. “Sit down,” and he led her to the chair close to the table. He sat by her and took her hands.
“Twice this week,” she said. “I’m afraid to go out.”
“It’s nothing,” Jacques said. “It’ll stop.”
“Yes,” she said. She looked at him with an odd air of indecision, as if she were divided between her faith in her son’s intelligence and her conviction that life in its entirety was a misfortune you could not struggle against but could only endure.
“You see,” she said, “I’m old. I can’t run anymore.”
Now the blood was returning to her cheeks. In the distance could be heard the sirens of the ambulances, urgent, rapid. But she did not hear them. She breathed deeply, calmed herself a little more, and smiled at her son with her beautiful brave smile. Like all her people, she had grown up with danger, and danger might wring her heart but she would endure it as she did everything else. It was he who could not bear that pinched look of a dying person he had suddenly seen on her face.
“Come with me to France,” he said to her, but she shook her head with resolute sorrow: “Oh no, it’s cold over there. I’m too old now. I want to stay home.”
a. Sunday.
- Later called Ernest.
b. transition. - Two illegible marks.
c. the bony polished brow where the dark and feverish eye was shining.
d. The father—interrogation—war of 14—Attack.
e. 14
f. Croak with it or without it, you’re still dead, the sergeant said.
g. 1814 newspapers in Algiers. [Sic—Ed.]
- August.
h. He had never seen France. He saw it and was killed.
i. to develop
j. she thinks shells explode by their own volition.
k. changes in the apartment
l. —He saw it before coming to see his mother?
—Rework the Kessous bombing in the third part, and in that case only mention it here.
—Farther along.
- This entire section up to “you could not tell which” is circled with a question mark.
6 : The Family
“Ah!” his mother said to him, “I’m glad when you’re here.a But come in the evening, I’ll be less bored. It’s the evenings especially, in winter it gets dark early. If only I knew how to read. I can’t knit either in this light, my eyes hurt. So when Etienne’s not here, I lie down and wait till it’s time to eat. It’s a long time, two hours like that. If I had the little girls with me, I’d talk with them. But they come and they go away. I’m too old. Maybe I smell bad. So it’s like that, and all alone …”
She spoke all at once, in short simple sentences that followed each other as if she were emptying herself of thoughts that till then had been silent. And then, her thoughts run dry, she was again silent, her lips tight, her look gentle and dejected, gazing through the closed dining-room shutters at the suffocating light coming up from the street, still at her same place on the same uncomfortable chair and her son going around the table in the middle of the room as he used to do.b
She watched him as once more he circled the table.c
“Solférino, it’s pretty?”
“Yes, it’s spotless. But it must have changed since the last time you saw it.”
“Yes, things change.”
“The doctor sends you his greetings. You remember him?”
“No. It was long ago.”
“No one remembers Papa.”
“We didn’t stay long. And besides, he didn’t say much.”
“Maman?” She looked at him, unsmiling, with a mild and vacant expression. “I thought you and Papa never lived together in Algiers.”
“No, no.”
“Did you understand me?” She had not understood; he could guess as much from her slightly frightened manner, as if she were apologizing, and he articulated the words as he repeated the question: “You never lived together in Algiers?”
“No,” she said.
“But how about the time Papa went to see them cut off Pirette’s head?”
He hit his neck with the side of his hand to make himself understood. But she answered immediately: “Yes, he got up at three o’clock to go to Barberousse.”
“So you were in Algiers?”
“Yes.”
“But when was it?”
“I don’t know. He was working for Ricome.”
“Before you went to Solférino?”
“Yes.”
She said yes, maybe it was no; she had to reach back in time through a clouded memory, nothing was certain. To begin with, poor people’s memory is less nourished than that of the rich; it has fewer landmarks in space because they seldom leave the place where they live, and fewer reference points in time throughout lives that are gray and featureless. Of course there is the memory of the heart that they say is the surest kind, but the heart wears out with sorrow and labor, it forgets sooner under the weight of fatigue. Remembrance of things past is just for the rich.
For the poor it only marks the faint traces on the path to death. And besides, in order to bear up well one must not remember too much, but rather stick close to the passing day, hour by hour, as his mother did, somewhat by necessity no doubt, since that childhood illness (by the way, according to his grandmother, it was typhoid. But typhoid does not have such aftereffects.
Typhus perhaps. Or else? Here again, all was darkness) since that childhood illness had left her deaf and speaking with difficulty, then prevented her from learning what is taught to even the most wretched, so her mute resignation was forced on her, but it was also the only way she had found to face up to her life, and what else could she have done, who in her place could have found another way? He wanted her to be fascinated by describing for him a man who had died forty years earlier and whose life she had shared (and had she really shared it?) for five years. She could not do that; he did not even know if she had passionately loved that man, and in any case he could not ask it of her, for in her presence he too was in his own way mute and crippled; at heart he did not even want to know what there had been between them, and so he had to give up on learning anything from her.
Even the one circumstance that had made such an impression on him as a child, had pursued him throughout his life and even into his dreams, his father getting up at three o’clock to attend the execution of a notorious criminal—even that he had learned from his grandmother. Pirette was an agricultural laborer on a farm in the Sahel, quite close to Algiers. He had killed his employers and the three children in the house with a hammer. “To rob them?” Jacques asked as a child.
“Yes,” said Uncle Étienne. “No,” said his grandmother, but without any further explanation. They found the disfigured corpses, the house splattered with blood right up to the ceiling, and, under one of the beds, the youngest child still breathing; he died also, but he had found the strength to write on the whitewashed wall with his blood-soaked finger: “It’s Pirette.” They searched for the murderer and found him, dazed, out in the countryside. Horrified public opinion demanded the death penalty; it was readily granted, and the execution took place before Barberousse prison in the presence of a considerable number of spectators. Jacques’s father had gotten up in the night and gone to attend the exemplary punishment of a
