Love All in Colonial Algeria[1]
‘Infandum,
regina, iubes me renovare dolorem.’ (Virgil, Aeneid)[2]
‘Tout va sous
terre et rentre dans le jeu.’ (Valery, Le Cimetière Marini)[3]
Years
ago, when the moon rose like a huge grapefruit
Over
Ain el Nur, and the cicada orchestra
Was
playing fortissimo to bored prickly
pears,
I
sprawled among black pine trees as the sea
Toujours recommencée,[4]
Sullenly
repeated its French lessons,
To
the nearby cemetery.
Nestled
beside me, Rachel, in whispers,
Spoke
of a Nazi finishing-school
Specializing
in final solutions
For
problems her smart, Jewish family
Had
once dismissed as Nietzschean insanity,
Stage
thunder from Bayreuth,[5]
Till
the mad painter turned engraver,
Cracked
architect of ruin,
Leapt
out of drunken Munich
To
cavort among corpses.
She
alone had made it to Spain;
Franco
proved friendlier than her Gauleiter.[6]
The
thud of tennis balls, my liege,[7]
Drifted
from the moonlit court
Where
Negus[8],
our black prince,
Was
smashing his partner, like Othello,
With
Moorish efficiency.
‘Love
all,’ someone kept calling through the dark.
Love
all? Had we heard aright?
Night
and mist[9]
had surely distorted the message.
That
score was impossible, I told her firmly,
It
had been tried and failed,
It
meant nothing more than Zero,
Le Néant of
Sartre,
As
she, of all people, should know.
I
was right, of course,
Learning
later, to my cost,
Right
or wrong have nothing to do with love.
Life
was wide-eyed and childish there,
Sea
and sun marked our unsullied days.
Rachel
was wiser than I that night,
Rabbinically,
as stars wheeled down to dawn,
For
she smelt blood, where I smelt only pine-sap;
Smoke,
where I drank the fragrance of her hair;
And
the sighing of wind in the pines above us
Was
the dead whispering Kaddish[10]
for each other
Among
Polish ash-heaps.
Yet
she still believed ‘Love all’ was possible,
(Your
neighbour, God, creation, death itself).
My
Anglo-Saxon attitudes eluded her,
Bizarre
as cricket, puzzling as Eton fives,
As
her Sephardic love eluded me[11].
The
Hebrew prophetess
Had
spoken true.
Ten
murderous years later,
The
lycee[12]
was the haunt of owls and rats,
And
civil war, uncivil, broke the state.
Pierre,
whose Being combated the Void,
Michelle,
whose wild hair never could be tamed,
Sultry
Simone, renowned for hot embraces,
Marie-Rose,
longing for Alpine snows,
Dainty
Azizah, afraid of losing her looks,
(The
thoughtful paras[13]
set her mind at rest),
Rachel,
enraptured under the soughing pines,
Even
Monsieur le Proviseur,[14]
Our
scholarly headmaster,
With
his Legion d’Honneur and Resistance medals,
And
the rest of them, Arabs, French alike,
Were
raped, mutilated, tortured,
Wounded,
blown to pieces,
Dead,
bad, mad,
Or
dangerous to know.[15]
Negus,
died in a cellar in Algiers,
Among
rats and fetters, game to the every end,
Though
the paras smashed him repeatedly
Without
once mentioning Love,
Before
he slipped away
From
their nets to another court
In
a sudden, sharp volley.
Cut
down like summer grass by sharpened scythe,
Rachel
is lost among the black-beaked pines.
Blind
larva creep where tears used to form.[16]
Shema Yisra’el.[17]
Gull-winged,
I fled the coming storm.
Lolling
sybaritically on esparto-grass,
On
an Estonian tramp-steamer
Anchored
off Gibraltar at night,
With
the scent of orange-blossom drifting across the waters,
Evoking
Molly Bloom’s young love,[18]
While
the first mate told me how the Russians had violated his sisters,
And
the captain told me how the SS had shot his brothers,
Mother,
wife, grandparents and cousins,
Nailing
his father to the barn door
And
hurling the children into the burning house,
I
smelt the blood on Europe’s parapets.[19]
I
recalled goats grazing on Punic ruins,[20]
From
which even the sea had fled in disgust,
And
how Scipio’s Delenda est Carthago![21]
(The
victors ploughed up the site with salt)
Was
becoming an inspirational slogan
Now
wars of liberation were in fashion.
A
rabbinical voice warned me Rachel was right;
That
the stench of blood would vanquish the fragrant pines,
And
the wine-dark, many-voiced, unwearied sea,
Casting
on its sands a plethora of corpses,
Was
an unwinking, Cyclopean eye,
Watching
a game which had nothing to do with Love.
[1] In November 1945, the Arabs rose up against the
French colonists who had occupied the country since 1830. The struggle lasted
until March 1962, which was fought with the utmost ruthlessness on both sides. Algeria
is still torn by civil war.
[2] Spoken by Aeneas, in flight from Troy,
to Dido, queen of Carthage,
in Virgil’s Aeneid: ‘Dreadful, O
queen, are the sorrows you order me to renew.’
[3] ‘Everything goes beneath the earth and returns to
the game.’
[4] P. Valéry, Le
Cimetière Martin. ‘La mer, la mer, toujours recommence.’ The poem is a
long, philosophical meditation on death, in a cemetery by the sea.
[5] The German city noted for its annual performance
of Wagner’s operas. Wagner, who was intensely anti-Semitic, was adulated by the
Nazis.
[6] A local Nazi official.
[7] Henry V,
1.I.ii. 258. The Dauphin’s contemptuous gift of tennis balls provoked Henry
into declaring war on France.
[8] Negus, his personal name, means ‘prince’ (Amharic,
negus).
[9] ‘Nacht und
Nebel’ and ‘Final Solution’ were the Nazi code names for extermination
measures taken against the Jews.
[10] A Hebrew prayer for the dead, normally recited by
orphan mourners.
[11] The Jews of North Africa were Sephardic.
[12] A French high school maintained by the state.
[13] The French paratroops were notorious for their
brutality, as were their opponents.
[14] Title given to the headmaster of a lycee.
[15] Lady Canning said that Lord Byron, who fought with
the Greek revolutionaries against the Turks, was ‘mad, bad, and dangerous to
know’.
[16] Le Cimetière
Marin, ‘Le larve file ou se formaient les pleurs.’
[17] ‘Hear, O Israel…’ The Jewish prayer
stressing exclusive fidelity to God and God’s unity. It is traditionally said
to the dying.
[18] See the final section of Ulysees, where Molly Bloom recalls her youthful love-making in Gibraltar.
[19] Arthur Rimbaud,
‘Je regrette l’Europe aux anciens parapets’
[20] The ruins of Carthaginean cities.
[21] ‘Carthage
must be wiped out!’ A slogan voiced by the general who eventually destroyed Carthage, Rome’s
greatest rival, in 146 BCE.
