This pulp was left in the open air, where it immediately took on colors of particularly frightening iridescence. During this time, one of the children would run to fill an old bottle with water. Now it was the turn of the cypress cones to be ground up. The children were sure of their malevolence for the unsure reason that the cypress is the cemetery tree. But the fruits were collected from the tree, not on the ground where drying out and hardening gave them a distressingly healthy appearance.e Next, the two mashes were mixed in an old bowl and diluted with water, then filtered through a dirty handkerchief. The children handled the liquid thus obtained, of an alarming green, with all the care one would exercise with a virulent poison.
They carefully decanted the liquid into aspirin tubes or pharmaceutical jars, which they restoppered while prudently avoiding touching the contents. They mixed what was left with various mashes of all the berries they could gather, so as to make a series of more and more intense poisons, carefully numbered and put away under the stone bench until the next week, so that fermentation would make them definitively deadly. When this sinister work was finished, J. and P. would gaze enraptured at their collection of terrifying flasks and sniff delightedly the sharp acid smell that rose from the stone stained with green mash. These poisons were not actually intended for anyone. The chemists calculated the number of people they could kill, sometimes optimistically stretching it to the point of supposing they had manufactured a quantity sufficient to depopulate the whole city. Yet they had never thought that these magical drugs might rid them of a classmate or teacher they detested. But to tell the truth, there was no one they hated, which would greatly hinder them when they were adults, in the world where they then had to live.
But the grandest days were those of the wind. A side of the building that faced the park ended in what had once been a terrace, with its stone railing now lying in the grass in front of the huge red-tiled cement footing. From the terrace, open on three sides, you looked out over the park and, beyond it, a ravine that separated the Kouba hill from one of the high plains of the Sahel. The terrace was so oriented that on days when the east wind rose, always violent in Algiers, it would whip straight across it.
On those days the children would dash to the closest palms, where long dried palm branches were always lying around. They scraped the ends to remove the thorns and so they could hold on with both hands. Then, dragging the branches behind them, they ran to the terrace; the wind blew furiously, whistling through the big eucalyptuses that were wildly waving their top branches, disheveling the palms, making a sound of paper crumpling as it shook the big shiny leaves of the rubber trees.
The idea was to climb up on the terrace, lift the palm branches and turn their backs to the wind. The children would get a good grip on the dry rustling branches, partly shielding them with their bodies, then would abruptly turn around. The branch would immediately be plastered against them, they would breathe its smell of dust and straw. The game was to advance into the wind while lifting the branch higher and higher.
The winner was the one who first reached the end of the terrace without letting the wind tear the branch from his hands, then he would stand erect holding the palm branch at arm’s length, one leg extended with all his weight on it, struggling victoriously for as long as possible against the raging force of the wind.
There, standing erect over the park and the plain seething with trees, under the sky crossed by huge clouds traveling at full speed, Jacques could feel the wind from the farthest ends of the country coursing down the length of the branch and down his arms to fill him with such a power and an exultation that he cried out endlessly, until his arms and shoulders gave way under the strain and he let go of the branch, which the storm instantly carried off along with his cries. And that night lying in bed, worn out, in the silence of the room where his mother was lightly sleeping, he could still hear the howling and the tumult of the wind that he would love for all his life.
Thursdayf was also the day Jacques and Pierre would go to the public library. Jacques had always devoured any books that came to hand, and he consumed them with the same appetite he felt for living, playing, or dreaming. But reading enabled him to escape into a world of innocence where wealth and poverty were equally interesting because both were utterly unreal.
L’Intrépide, that series of thick collections of illustrated stories that he and his friends passed around until the board binding was gray and rough and the pages dog-eared and torn, was the first to transport him to a world of comedy or heroism where his two basic appetites for joy and for courage were satisfied. The taste for heroism and panache was certainly strong in the two boys, judging by their incredible consumption of cloak-and-dagger novels, and by how easily they added the characters of Pardaillan to their everyday lives.
Indeed, their favorite writer was Michel Zevaco,g and the Renaissance, especially in Italy, with its atmosphere of stilettos and poisons, in settings of Roman or Florentine palaces and royal or papal pomp, was the favorite kingdom of these two aristocrats, who could sometimes be seen in the yellow dusty street where Pierre lived, hurling challenges at each other as they unsheathed their long varnished []2 rulers fighting impetuous duels among the garbage cans that would leave long-lasting marks on their fingers.h At the time, they could hardly find any other sort of books, for the reason that few people read in that neighborhood and all they could buy for themselves—and only rarely at that—were the cheap volumes lying around in the bookstores.
But about the same time they started at the lycée, a public library was opened in the area, halfway between the street where Jacques lived and the heights where the more refined districts began, with their villas surrounded by little gardens full of scented plants that thrived on the hot humid slopes of Algiers. These villas circled the grounds of Sainte-Odile, a religious boarding school that took only girls.
It was in this neighborhood, so near and yet so far from their own, that Jacques and Pierre experienced their deepest emotions (that it is not yet time to discuss, that will be discussed, etc.). The frontier between these two worlds (one dusty and treeless, where all the space was devoted to its residents and the stone that sheltered them, the other where flowers and trees supplied this world’s true luxury) was described by a rather wide boulevard with superb plane trees planted along its two sidewalks. Villas stretched along one bank of this frontier and low-cost buildings along the other. The public library was built on that border.
It was open three times a week, including Thursday, in the evening after work, and all morning Thursday. A quite unattractive-looking young teacher, who volunteered several hours a week at this library, would be sitting behind a rather large blond-wood table and was in charge of books for loan. The room was square, the walls entirely filled with blond wood bookcases and black clothbound books.
There was also a small table with a few chairs around it for those who wanted quickly to refer to a dictionary, for it was only a lending library, and an alphabetical card catalogue that neither Jacques nor Pierre ever looked into, their method consisting of wandering along the shelves, choosing a book by its title or, less often, by its author, then making note of its number and writing it on the blue slip that you used to request permission to borrow the work. To be entitled to borrow books, you just had to show a rent receipt and pay a minimal fee. Then you received a folding card where borrowed books were noted, as well as in the book kept by the young teacher.
Most of the books in the library were novels, but many were set aside and forbidden to those under fifteen. And the children’s strictly intuitive method made no real selection among the books that remained. But chance is not the worst method in matters of culture, and, devouring everything indiscriminately, the two gluttons swallowed the best at the same time as the worst, not caring in any event whether they remembered anything, and in fact retaining just about nothing, except a strange and powerful emotion that, over the
