And suddenly, at a word from the dogcatcher, the old Arab would pull back on the reins and the cart would stop. The dogcatcher had spotted one of his wretched victims digging feverishly in a garbage can, glancing back frantically at regular intervals, or else trotting rapidly along a wall with the hurried and anxious look of an undernourished dog. Galoufa then seized from the top of the cart a leather rod with a chain that ran through a ring down the handle. He moved toward the animal at the supple, rapid, and silent pace of a trapper, and when he had caught up with the beast, if it was not wearing the collar that proves membership in a good family, he would run at it, in a sudden burst of astonishing speed, and put his weapon around the dog’s neck, so that it served as an iron and leather lasso. Suddenly strangled, the animal struggled wildly while making inarticulate groans.
But the man quickly dragged [it] to the cart, opened one of the cage doors, lifted the dog, strangling it more and more, and shoved it into the cage, making sure to put the handle of his lasso through the bars. Once the dog was captured, he loosened the iron chain and freed the neck of the now imprisoned animal. At least that is how things happened when the dog was not under the protection of the neighborhood children.
For they were all in league against Galoufa. They knew the captured dogs were taken to the municipal pound, kept for three days, after which, if no one claimed them, the animals were put to death. And if they had not known it, the pitiful spectacle of that death cart returning after a fruitful journey, loaded with wretched animals of all colors and sizes, terrified behind their bars and leaving behind the vehicle a trail of cries and mortal howls, would have been enough to rouse the children’s indignation. So, as soon as the prison van appeared in the area, the children would alert each other.
They would scatter throughout the streets of the neighborhood, they too hunting down the dogs, but in order to chase them off to other parts of the city, far from the terrible lasso. If despite these precautions the dogcatcher found a stray dog in their presence, as happened several times to Pierre and Jacques, their tactics were always the same. Before the dogcatcher could get close enough to his quarry, Jacques and Pierre would start screaming “Galoufa! Galoufa!” in voices so piercing and so terrifying that the dog would flee as fast as he could and would soon be out of reach. Now it was the children’s turn to prove their skill as sprinters, for the unfortunate Galoufa, who was paid a bounty for each dog he caught, was wild with anger, and he would chase them brandishing his leather rod.
The grown-ups usually helped them escape, either by hindering Galoufa or by stopping him outright and telling him to stick to his dogs. The workingmen of the neighborhood were all hunters and as a rule liked dogs; they had no respect for this strange occupation. As Uncle Ernest would say: “He loafer!” The old Arab who drove the cart presided silent and impassive over all the fuss, or, if the arguments stretched out, would calmly start rolling a cigarette. Whether they had captured cats or saved dogs, the children would then hasten—wearing short capes for the wind if it was winter, their leather sandals (known as “mevas”) flapping if it was summer—toward school and work.
While crossing the market, they would glance quickly at the displays of fruit, mountains of oranges and tangerines, of medlars, apricots, peaches, tangerines,4 melons, and watermelons rushing past them, of which they would get to taste only the least expensive, and that in small quantities; two or three turns at jousting on the broad shiny rim of the basin at the waterspout, and they would go alongside the warehouses on Boulevard Thiers, where they would be hit in the face with the smell of oranges coming from factories that peeled them to make liqueurs with their rinds; up a small street of gardens and villas, and they would come out finally on rue Aumerat into a swarm of children who, while chattering away at each other, were waiting for the doors to open.
Then came class. With M. Bernard, this class was always interesting for the simple reason that he loved his work with a passion. Outside, the sun might blare on the tawny walls while the heat crackled in the classroom itself, though it was shaded by awnings with big yellow and white stripes. Or the rain might fall, as it does in Algeria, in endless deluges, making a wet dark well of the street, but the class was hardly distracted. Only the flies during a storm could sometimes divert the children’s attention. They would be captured and grounded in the inkwells, where they suffered a hideous death, drowned in the purple ink that filled the little cone-shaped wells that were set in holes in the table.
But M. Bernard’s method, which consisted of strict control on behavior while at the same time making his teaching lively and entertaining, would win out over even the flies. He always knew the right moment to bring from his treasure chest the mineral collection, the herbarium, the mounted butterflies and insects, the maps or … to revive his pupils’ flagging interest. He was the only person in the school to have obtained a magic lantern, and twice a month he would do projections on some subject in natural history or geography.
In arithmetic, he instituted a contest in mental calculation that forced the students to think quickly. He would put forth a problem to the class, all sitting with their arms folded, in division, or multiplication, or sometimes a somewhat complex addition. How much is 1,267 + 691? The first one to give the correct answer was awarded a plus that counted toward the monthly ranking.
Besides, he used the textbooks with competence and accuracy … The texts were always those used in France. And these children, who knew only the sirocco, the dust, the short torrential cloudbursts, the sand of the beaches, and the sea in flames under the sun, would assiduously read—accenting the commas and periods—stories that to them were mythical, where children in hoods and mufflers, their feet in wooden shoes, would come home dragging bundles of sticks along snowy paths until they saw the snow-covered roof of the house where the smoking chimney told them the pea soup was cooking in the hearth. For Jacques, these stories were as exotic as they could possibly be.
He dreamed about them, filled his compositions with descriptions of a world he had never seen, and was forever questioning his grandmother about a snowfall lasting one hour that had taken place in the Algiers area twenty years earlier.
For him these stories were part of the powerful poetry of school, which was nourished also by the smell of varnished rulers and pen cases; the delicious taste of the strap on his satchel that he would chew on at length while laboring over his lessons; the sharp bitter smell of purple ink, especially when his turn came to fill the inkwells from a huge dark bottle with a cork through which a bent glass tube had been pushed, and Jacques would happily sniff the opening of the tube; the soft feel of the smooth glossy pages in certain books, which also gave off the good smell of print and glue; and, finally, on rainy days, the smell of wet wool that emanated from the wool coats at the back of the classroom and seemed to be a harbinger of that Garden of Eden where children in wooden shoes and woolen hoods ran through the snow to their warm homes.
Only school gave Jacques and Pierre these joys. And no doubt what they so passionately loved in school was that they were not at home, where want and ignorance made life harder and more bleak, as if closed in on itself; poverty is a fortress without drawbridges.
But it was not just that, for Jacques considered himself the most unfortunate of children when, to get rid of this tireless brat during vacations, his grandmother would send him to a holiday camp, with fifty or so other children and a handful of counselors, at Miliana in the Zaccar Mountains; there they lived in a school that had dormitories, ate and slept comfortably, played or wandered around all day long, watched over by some nice nurses, and despite all that, when evening came—when shadows rose so rapidly on the mountain slopes and from the neighboring barracks the bugle began to throw the melancholy notes of curfew into the enormous silence of this small town lost in the mountains, a hundred kilometers from any really traveled location—the child felt a limitless despair rising in him and in silence he cried for the destitute home of his entire childhood.c
No, school did not just provide them an escape from family life. At least in M. Bernard’s class, it fed a hunger in them more basic even to the child than to the man, and that is the hunger for discovery. No doubt they were taught many things in their other classes, but it was somewhat the way geese are stuffed: food was presented to them and they were asked to please swallow it. In M. Germain’s5 class, they felt for
