“He’s a friend. He was born here.”
“Come in,” said Tamzal. “You will drink tea.”
Tamzal did not remember anything. Yes, perhaps. He had heard one of his uncles talk about a manager who had stayed a few months, it was after the war.
“Before,” said Jacques.
Or before, that was possible, he was very young at the time, and what became of his father? He was killed in the war. “Mektoub,”2 said Tamzal. “But war is bad.”
“There’s always been war,” said Veillard. “But people quickly get accustomed to peace. So they think it’s normal. No, war is what’s normal.”b
“Men are crazy in wartime,” said Tamzal as he went to take a platter of tea from the hands of a woman in the next room, who had turned her head away. They drank the scorching tea, thanked him, and went back along the stifling hot path through the vineyards.
“I’m going back to Solférino with my taxi,” said Jacques. “The doctor invited me for lunch.”
“I’m inviting myself along. Wait a moment. I’ll get some food.”
Later, on the plane taking him back to Algiers, Jacques was trying to sort out the information he had collected. Actually he had only gotten a little, and nothing that directly concerned his father. The night seemed strangely to rise from the earth at an almost measurable speed until at last it swallowed the plane that was pushing straight ahead, steadily, like a screw driven into the thickness of the night. But the night added to Jacques’s discomfort, for he felt himself doubly confined, by the plane and by the dark, and he was breathing with difficulty. Again he saw the register of births and the names of the two witnesses, real French names like those [you] see on signs in Paris, and the old doctor, after telling him the story of his father’s arrival and his own birth, had said the witnesses were local shopkeepers, the first to happen by, who agreed to do his father a favor; they had names from the outskirts of Paris, yes, but that was no surprise, since Solférino was founded by “forty-eighters.”1
“Oh yes,” Veillard had said, “my great-grandparents were among them. That’s why my old man had revolution in his genes.” He went on to say that the first of his great-grandparents to come were a carpenter from Faubourg Saint-Denis and a fine-linen laundress. There was a lot of unemployment in Paris, there was unrest, and the Constituent Assembly had voted fifty million francs to send a colony of settlers.c They promised everyone a house and 2 to 10 hectares. “You can imagine how they applied. More than a thousand. And all of them dreaming of the Promised Land. Especially the men. The women, they were afraid of the unknown. Not the men! They hadn’t made the revolution for nothing. They were the kind who believe in Santa Claus. And their Santa Claus wore a burnoose. Well, they got some kind of Santa Claus. They left in ’49, and the first house was built in the summer of ’54. Meanwhile …”
Jacques was breathing more easily now. The first darkness had finished flowing; it had ebbed like a tide, leaving behind it a cloud of stars, and now the sky was filled with stars. Now only the deafening sound of the motors was oppressing him. He tried to summon the face of the old dealer in carob and fodder who had known his father, who vaguely remembered him, and kept repeating: “No talker, he was no talker.”
But he was stupefied by the noise, it plunged him into a nasty sort of torpor where he tried in vain to evoke his father, to imagine him, but he disappeared behind this immense and hostile land, he melted into the anonymous history of the village and the plain. Details from their conversation at the doctor’s came back to him on the same wave as those barges that, according to the doctor, had brought the Parisian settlers to Solférino. On the same wave, and there was no train at the time, no, no—yes, but it only went to Lyon.
Then, six barges hauled by draft horses, with the “Marseillaise” and the “Chant du Départ,” of course, played by the city’s brass band, and the benediction by the clergy on the banks of the Seine with a flag on which was embroidered the name of the village that did not yet exist but which the passengers would create by magic. The barge was already under way, Paris was slipping away, becoming fluid, was going to disappear—may God bless your undertaking—and even the strongest of spirits, the tough ones from the barricades, they fell silent, sick at heart, their frightened wives clinging to their strength, and in the hold they had to sleep on rustling straw with the dirty water at eye level, but first the women undressed behind bedsheets that they held up in turn.
Where was his father in all this? Nowhere, and yet those barges hauled a hundred years ago along the canals at the end of autumn, drifting for a month on streams and rivers covered with the last dead leaves, escorted by hazel trees and willows, bare under the gray sky, greeted in the towns by official fanfare and sent on their way with a cargo of new vagrants toward a strange country—they taught him more about the young dead man of Saint-Brieuc than the [senile] and disordered recollections that he had gone to seek.
The motors now changed speed. Those dark masses, those sharp-edged dislocated chunks of the night, that was Kabylia, the wild and bloody part of the country—it had long been wild and bloody; that was where they were headed a hundred years ago, the workers of ’48 piled up in a paddlewheeler. “The Labrador,” said the old doctor, “that was its name; can you imagine that, the Labrador to go to the mosquitoes and the sun?”
Anyway, the Labrador with all its blades paddling, churning the icy water that the mistral was whipping up in a storm, its decks swept for five days and five nights by a polar wind, and the conquerors at the bottom of the hold, deathly ill, vomiting on each other and wanting to die, until they arrived at the port of Bône, with the whole population on the docks to greet the greenish adventurers with music; they had come so far, having left the capital of Europe with their wives and children and possessions to stagger ashore, after five weeks of wandering, on this land with its distant bluish background, where they encountered uneasily its strange odor compounded of fertilizer, spices, and [].1
Jacques turned in his seat; he was half asleep. He saw his father, whom he had never seen, whose very height he did not know, he saw him on the dock at Bône among the emigrants, while the pulleys hoisted off the poor possessions that had survived the voyage and disputes broke out about those that were lost. He was there, resolute, somber, teeth clenched, and, after all, was this not the same road he had taken from Bône to Solférino, almost forty years earlier, on the wagon, under the same autumn sky?
But the road did not exist for the migrants: the women and children piled onto the army’s gun carriages, the men on foot, cutting by guesswork across the swampy plain or the spiny brush, under the hostile eyes of occasional groups of Arabs watching them from a distance, accompanied almost constantly by a howling pack of Kabyle dogs, until at the end of the day they reached the same country his father had forty years earlier—flat, surrounded by distant heights, without a dwelling, without a single plot of cultivated land, only a handful of earth-colored military tents on it, nothing but bare empty space; to them it was the end of the world, between the deserted sky and the dangerous land,* and then the women cried into the night, from exhaustion, and fear, and disappointment.
The same arrival by night in a wretched hostile place, the same men, and then, and then … Oh! Jacques did not know about his father, but for the rest, that was how it was, they had to pull themselves together in front of the laughing soldiers and settle into their tents. The houses would come later, they would be built and the land would be portioned out, and work, blessed work, would save them all. “But they couldn’t have it right away, that work …” said Veillard. The rain, the Algerian rain, enormous, brutal, unending, had fallen for eight days; the Seybouse had overflowed. The water came up to the tents, and they could not go out, brother-enemies in the filthy promiscuity of the great tents resonating under the interminable downpour, and to escape the stench they cut pieces of hollow reed so they could urinate from the inside out, and as soon as the rain stopped, they at last went to work building flimsy huts under the orders of the carpenter.
“Ah! Those good people,” said Veillard, laughing. “They finished their little shacks in the spring, and then they were entitled to cholera. If I can believe my old man, that’s how our ancestor the carpenter lost his daughter and his wife—they were right to be reluctant about the journey.”
“Well yes,” said the old doctor, striding up and down, still erect and proud in his leggings; he could not sit still. “They died ten a day. The hot season came early, they were roasting in the huts. And as for hygiene
