On the same side of the street there was also a little shop selling Arab fritters; it was really a nook that would hardly hold three men. A fireplace had been dug out at one side of this nook. Its sides were lined with blue-and-white earthenware, and a huge basin of boiling oil was bubbling on its surface. A strange person sat cross-legged in front of the fireplace. He wore Arab pantaloons, his chest was half naked during the summer and in the heat of the day; on other days he wore a European jacket closed at the top of the lapel with a safety pin; and with his shaved head, thin face, and toothless mouth he looked like a Gandhi without glasses.
With a red enamel skimmer in his hand, he watched over the cooking of the fritters browning in the oil. When a fritter was ready—that is, when the outside was golden while the very fine dough inside had become both translucent and crisp (like a transparent fried potato)—he would carefully reach under the fritter with his ladle and lift it deftly out of the oil, drain it over the basin by shaking the ladle three or four times, then put it in front of him in a glassed-in stand with several perforated shelves on which already prepared fritters were lined up, on one side the long honey fritters, on the other, flat and round, the plain fritters.i Pierre and Jacques were mad about these pastries, and on those rare occasions when one or the other had a bit of money, they took a moment to stop and get a plain fritter on a piece of paper immediately made transparent by the oil, or the long fritter that the seller before giving it to them had dipped in a nearby jar, alongside the stove, full of dark honey speckled with fritter crumbs. The children would take these splendid things and bite into them as they ran to the lycée, head and shoulders bent over to avoid dirtying their clothes.
The departure of the swallows took place each year, soon after the opening of school, in front of the church of Sainte-Victoire. Electrical wires and even high-power lines, used at one time to drive the trolleys, now abandoned but never taken down, stretched over the street where it had been widened. The swallowsj usually flew over the waterfront boulevards, on the square in front of the lycée, or in the sky over the poor neighborhoods, sometimes picking with piercing cries at a ficus fruit, some floating garbage, or fresh manure; but at the first cold weather—only relatively cold since there was never a frost; still you could feel it after the enormous weight of the hot months—the swallows would appear one by one in the corridor of rue Bab-Azoun, flying low toward a trolley, then abruptly veering up to disappear in the sky over the houses.
Suddenly one morning they appeared by the thousands on all the lines over the little square at Sainte-Victoire, on top of the houses, squeezed in next to each other, nodding their heads over their little black-and-white necks, shaking their tails and moving their feet a bit to make room for a newcomer, covering the sidewalk with their tiny ashlike droppings, all together making what was a single constant chirp, punctuated with brief cackles, a continuing confidential dialogue that had been going on above the street all morning, and would get gradually louder and become almost deafening by evening, when the children were running to the homeward-bound trolleys; then the chirp would stop suddenly, on an invisible command, and thousands of sleeping birds would bow their little heads and their black-and-white tails.
For two or three days, coming from every corner of the Sahel, and sometimes even farther, they would arrive in feathery little bands, trying to find room between the first arrivals, and, little by little, they would settle on all the cornices along the street on both sides of the main place of assembly, the sound of their wings beating and their chirping over the passersby growing louder and louder until it became deafening. And then one morning, just as abruptly, the street was empty. In the night, just before dawn, the birds had left all together for the South. For the children that was when winter began, well before its date, since they had never known a summer without the shriek of the swallows in the still warm sky of evening.
The rue Bab-Azoun ended at a big square where the lycée, on the left, faced the barracks on the right. The steep damp streets of the Arab city began their uphill climb behind the lycée. The barracks faced away from the sea.
Beyond the lycée was the Marengo gardens; beyond the barracks, the poor, half-Spanish Bab-el-Oued district. A few minutes past quarter after seven, Pierre and Jacques, having climbed the stairs at full speed, would enter with a flood of children through the concierge’s small entrance next to the monumental door. They started up the main stairs, with the honor rolls posted on either side, still running at top speed, and arrived at the main floor, where the stairs to the upper floors began on the left; it was separated from the main courtyard by a glassed-in arcade. There, behind one of the main floor columns, they spotted the Rhinoceros watching for latecomers. (The Rhinoceros was a chief supervisor, a small nervous Corsican who owed his nickname to his curled moustache.) Another life began.
Pierre and Jacques had received scholarships that included half-board because of their “family situation.” So they spent all day at the lycée and had their lunch in the dining hall. Classes began at eight or nine o’clock, according to the day, but breakfast for the boarding students was served at 7:15, and the half-boarders were entitled to it. The families of the two children could not imagine that anyone would give up anything to which he was entitled, they who were entitled to so little; thus Jacques and Pierre were among the few half-boarders to arrive at 7:15 in the big white circular dining hall, where sleepy boarding students were already seating themselves at long zinc-covered tables, before big bowls and huge baskets with thick slices of dry bread, while the waiters swaddled in long aprons made of crude canvas, most of whom were Arab, went along the rows carrying big coffeepots with curved spouts that had once been shiny, and poured into the bowls a boiling liquid that contained more chicory than coffee. Having used their prerogative, the children could go a quarter of an hour later to the study hall, where, presided over by a monitor who was himself a boarding student, they could review their homework before classes began.
The great difference here from the neighborhood school was the number of teachers. M. Bernard knew everything and taught everything he knew in the same way. At the lycée, the teacher changed with the subject, and the method changed with the man.k Now you could compare; you had to choose, that is, between those you liked and those you did not. From this point of view a teacher in the school is more like a father: he takes over his role almost entirely; he is as inevitable and he is part of what is necessary in your life. So the question of loving or not loving him does not really arise. Usually you love him because you are absolutely dependent on him. But if it happens that the child likes him little or not at all, dependence and necessity remain, and that is not far from resembling love. At the lycée, on the other hand, the teachers were like those uncles you are entitled to choose among.
That is, you could dislike them, and so there was a certain physics teacher, who was very elegant in his attire, authoritarian and crude in his speech, whom neither Jacques nor Pierre could stomach, though they had him two or three times over the years. The literature teacher, whom the children saw more often than the others, was the one they would have been most likely to love, and in fact Jacques and Pierre clung to him in almost all those classesl without however being able to depend on him, since he knew nothing about them and since, once class was over, he went off to a different life and so did they, leaving for that distant neighborhood where there was no possibility a lycée teacher would settle, so different that they never met anyone, neither teachers nor students, on their trolley line—only red cars served the lower districts (the C.F.R.A.), while the upper sections, reputed to be more elegant, were served by a line with green cars, the T.A. Furthermore, the T.A. went right to the lycée, whereas the C.F.R.A. line ended at the place du Gouvernement, you []1 the lycée from below.
So it was that when their day was over, the children felt their separateness at the very door to the lycée, or
