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  Zizou took a deep breath. “Do you think it was Papa Noël?”

  I shrugged. “Who else could it be? After that, I didn’t sleep a wink. I lay stiffer than Ma’s ironing board and, I can tell you, nobody left or entered the room until morning.”

  “So, it was Him!”

  “Et bien, you tell me.”

  Of course, I could not confess to my sister that, with each passing year since that night, I remembered piecemeal sounds of rustling paper and whispers. That I recalled shadows bumping into each other and a stifled giggle that sounded much like Yvette when she’s up to no good.

  However, proud of my white lie, I went to bed and tucked the blankets around my neck. “Go to sleep, Zizou. And remember; do not step into the kitchen tonight even if you’re dying for a glass of water. Somebody might break a leg.”

  * * *

  The day after Christmas, we learned that while we opened presents and basked in the comfort of our family holidays, other households grieved. News of the slain rolled off the daily’s pages like rosary beads coursing through penitents’ fingers.

  The explosions we’d heard during our quest for logs while Papa was still on the road were only two of four that rocked Constantine that day. Killing nine people. During December 24th and 25th, attacks in Constantine and across the region resulted in thirty-one people slain and countless wounded. And, adding insult to injury, splashed across Le Magrebien’s front page, French President René Coty grinned like he had just opened a wonderful Christmas present. The headline announced he had pardoned five Algerian terrorists on death row—Good will toward men. I gnashed my teeth. Who will pardon our slaughtered? Seal their slit throats? Restore their body parts? I wadded up the paper and threw it to the ground. Maman turned from the stove. “What is getting into you?”

  “I hate Coty. Pardoning terrorists! They don’t care who they kill. The things they do even to their own people.” I wiped off tears of rage. A nauseous heat wave rose to my throat as I realized that, while I laughed and stuffed my belly with goodies, other children’s guts blew apart. Still I shamelessly thanked God they belonged to other families. Not mine. Not this time. Then a certainty, hard and cold as an icy fist, punched me in the stomach.

  The certainty that, never again, would I believe a kiss could turn a frog into a prince charming or a miracle free Lazarus from his shroud. A certainty that left me disoriented as I often am when exiting the cinema’s snug hall—head full of images, sounds, and dreams, senses abruptly assaulted by the outside world. Transported from the safety of an artificial universe back to one where, for a split second, people and buildings, daylight and the air don an intangible, looming quality. A dissociation that makes my head swim and body seem to float like a kite in a sluggish wind.

  One constant, though, that kept that kite tethered was the holidays. They marked the passing of the seasons, nudging us toward the next cycle of our lives as individuals and as a family. The predictable customs comforted even if they couldn’t heal.

  Whether religious or secular, celebrations served as a balm. When our native joie de vivre threatened to die, the holidays rekindled it. Killing the bold spirit engrained in the Pied-Noir soul would not prove as easy as our enemies believed … not even after the FLN broadcast—“Hunt the infidels to take their land and their houses”—and its associated increase in terrorist attacks during the four months following Christmas.

  Two years later at Easter, 1959. House, front yard. Pépé Honninger, Mireille, Riri, Yves, Maman, Zizou, Nanna and two visiting friends.

  Dimanche des Rameaux

  Sidi Mabrouk, April, 1957

  When I woke up, vision blurry with sleep, on Palm Sunday, I caught the faint glint of the rameaux hanging from the ceiling light. They looked like midget trees with trunks and bare limbs wrapped in gold foil. Each upturned branch held dangling tinsels and chocolate bells, eggs, rabbits, and chickens. I sighed. This morning there were only three rameaux gleaming in the morning light. At ten and twelve, Zizou and I were past the age when children were allowed to hold up the glitzy trees to be blessed at the ten o’clock mass.

  Instead, we carried small olive branches Father Attar sprinkled with holy water. Later, we tucked them behind the cross above our parents’ bed. The leaves dried there for a year until, on Mercredi des Cendres—Ash Wednesday—le Père burned them and rubbed their ashes on our foreheads in the sign of the cross. “Poussière tu étais, poussière tu retourneras.”

  At a younger age, the notion of “ashes to ashes” inspired me to stir the the cold cinders in our woodstoves, looking for signs of budding life—perhaps a baby. Finding none, I gratefully returned to the notion of cabbage patches and storks dropping babies down chimneys.

  In later years, I found the prospect of turning to ashes after I died perplexing—what happened to Redemption and the promise to the righteous that they’d sit at the right hand of Our Father?

  Better yet, how could God tell a pile of virtuous dust from a pile of bad dust? And, if saints and sinners ended up in an identical state, what was the point of being good?

  After countless years of weekly Thursday afternoon catechism and Sunday morning ten o’clock masses, I made up my mind: I was born from nothing and would end up as nothing.

  So … what does that make me now?

  I didn’t even want to broach the subject with Zizou. She’d press her index finger against her temple and move it back and forth to imply I was crazy. I also knew better than to share my newly acquired conclusion that bringing a bunch of candies to be blessed at mass wasn’t all that different from worshipping Aaron’s golden calf. At the end of Palm Sunday mass, le Père appeared to agree with my reasoning. “Starting next Rameaux,” he said, “I will bless only olive branches, as has been the Roman Catholic custom of this region.”

  Disgruntled exclamations rising from many of the assembled children and a few parents died away under the Father’s withering glare. His strong voice rose into the restored silence. “This means that idolatry, in the guise of tinseled rameaux’s blessings,” he repeatedly struck the pulpit with a hard index finger for emphasis, “will no longer be perpetuated in the church of Notre Dame.”

  Though I still harbored some resentment at le Père’s banishment of First Communion frou-frous, and though it was painful to argue against chocolate—especially blessed chocolate—I felt le Père and I had become soul mates.

  However, I dearly hoped he approved of Easter Sunday egg hunts as much as I did.

  Each Dimanche de Pâques, my siblings and I galloped down the stairs to search for the eggs the stork had concealed throughout the garden. The grand black and white birds with long orange beaks and legs arrived in Constantine around springtime. They built bushy nests on top of the Kasbah’s dwellings that threatened to spill over the edge of the Rhumel cliffs.

  Of course, in addition to announcing spring and bringing chocolate eggs at Easter, the storks also brought good luck and babies. For years, Zizou and I wondered how babies found their way home after the storks moved away in the fall.

  “Bien sûr,” I had pondered, “cabbages must take over during the winter months.”

  “Unless it’s real cold. Bad for the babies,” Zizou mused.

  “Then what?” I asked.

  “I don’t know!” she said.

  By the age of thirteen, I knew how babies were born and that Papa was not only Santa, but also the stork. I imagined him—a basketful of chocolate eggs swinging from the crook of his arm—as he tiptoed through flowerbeds like a mischievous djinn.

  The image made me giggle. But what prompted him to give up his warm bed, early Easter Sundays, and steal into the cool outdoors? A flutter of guilt tickled my stomach. Papa was such an overwhelming force in our lives that I’d never realized how much he provided for his family, beyond the essentials. The realization of his secret caring washed over me, relieving the anguish that was kept alive by the constant outside threats. His love was more vital to me than food on our table, a roof over
our heads, or even a gun in our hands.

  If only Pa’s caring could make the daily violence—the other constant in our lives—disappear. But that violence seemed to increase by the day, bleeding vitality from our communities like an ever hungry leech.

  Chapter Twelve

  Yves and Riri at Jeanne d’Arc beach, 1961.

  Life Goes On

  Spring, 1957

  The blood-letting splashed across the country’s newspapers, echoed in the disembodied voices of radio broadcasters, the mouth-to-ear drone of le Téléphone Arabe, and the heartrending sobs of the victims’ families.

  I read the paper and listened to what I heard said around me and on the radio. The news buzzed inside my head like a swarm of killer bees, bringing visions of massacred European farmers and Arab peasants who had done nothing to deserve their death sentences. They toiled, day-in day-out, to scratch a living from the dry land and only wished to be left alone.

  Learning the fate of seventeen kidnapped Arab families, I imagined terrified children crying out for their parents, the desperate wailing of their mothers and the swallowed moans of powerless fathers, husbands, and brothers. I couldn’t understand their merciless mutilation at the hands of fellow Muslims.

  Filled with unbounded pity for the victims and anger toward the terrorists, I reflected that, unlike the lambs sacrificed to the glory of Allah, the terrorists sacrificed to the glory of their cause the very brothers whose interests they claimed to serve.

  I understood better, now, Papa’s earlier explanation of terrorism: “Terrorists have a cause. They sacrifice everything, everyone—even their own lives in the service of that cause. They’ll use whatever ploy necessary for that cause to succeed ….”

  Thus, a year earlier, three FLN women had placed bombs in our capital city, igniting a campaign aimed mostly at the French urban population. These bombings launched, the news had said, a blitz of eight hundred bombings and shootings a month that targeted cafés, cinemas, sports stadiums, buses, markets, and various other public places as well as increased attacks on farms. Even then, either out of habit, need, or defiance, the European civil population continued to patronize café terraces, sit in sports stadiums, ride buses, and shop at open markets as we used to before Les Événements started. Ultimately, the blitz resulted in what the newspapers dubbed, “La Bataille d’Alger,” during which French paratroopers hunted down the FLN cells entrenched in the city’s Casbah.

  Nevertheless, fellagha ambushes on country and mountain roads increased, forcing Papa to downsize his out-of-town business, restricting him to Constantine and its immediate surroundings. To make ends meet, Maman was soon forced to get a job as bookkeeper downtown.

  After that, when I came home from school and opened the door, my house felt desolate and cold, as if I’d opened the door of a fireless woodstove in the middle of winter. Most of all, and even though I was thirteen, I missed my afternoon café au lait and tartines with Ma. My home felt like it had lost its soul.

  As Maman pitched in to keep the pot boiling, Zizou and I picked up the slack at home. By the time our parents drove back late in the evening, we had fed the kids and put them to bed. These meals without our parents, and Pépé Honninger, when he was away, left a void inside me as empty as their vacant seats. I pined for Saturdays and Sundays when our home would be restored to its normal lunacy.

  La Vie en Rose

  One such Sunday evening, Zizou and I were drying the dinner dishes, singing “La Vie en Rose” along with Edith Piaf. Everyone else lounged near the radio, waiting for “La Nuit du Mystère,” our prized Sunday mystery program, to begin. Maman knitted a sweater for Yves. Papa read one of his “Le Saint” mysteries. Pépé played “Family” cards with Mireille and the boys.

  A radio announcement cut off Edith, leaving Zizou’s and my mouths open in mid-song. A deep voice announced, “We interrupt this program for a newsflash.” After a short silence, the voice trailed the sound of shuffled paper. “The FLN called for a general strike by Muslims to begin January 28 of the new year and made the following pledge: ‘Moslem brothers, the partisans of the FLN will destroy and exterminate all Europeans, including their children.’ ”

  All eyes zeroed in on Papa, who raised a hand to command silence while the deep voice continued. “Let’s ask our station’s political analyst what, in his opinion, prompted such declaration by the FLN.”

  A softer, more composed voice answered. “This is a new FLN terror campaign that is politically motivated.”

  “How so?” asked the deep voice.

  “The FLN seeks to garner the attention of the Metropolitan French and the international community to their cause.”

  “Don’t forget to mention the unconditional support of the FLN-ass-kissing communists,” Papa muttered.

  The radio host prompted his guest. “Can you expand on your allegation?”

  “The FLN trusts the commission of atrocities will force the French military into harsh reprisals and torture to extract vital information from the terrorists, thereby fostering an international outcry substantiated by worldwide political and financial support to the benefit of its cause …”

  I shut my ears to the ongoing dialogue. The evening glow was gone, “La vie” no longer “en rose.”

  After a while, to my relief and that of my brothers and sisters, the regular programming resumed just in time for La Nuit du Mystère. We settled around the radio like chickens ruffling their feathers in preparation for a cozy night in the closeness of their coop.

  We experienced this same closeness along with many others in our community when, at the end of the next Sunday mass, le Père Attar raised his hands aloft and preached, “Let us pray for the eternal salvation of the terrorists who burned the church in Vauban and those who bombed the church of Nedroma, killing ten of our brothers in Christ. Let us pray for the eternal peace of Dr. Brechet, indefatigable friend of the Muslim community, murdered in Bougie. Finally, let us pray for the souls of the slain Pères de Saint-Aimé and Bougie and for the grand Rabbi of Médea—that they may find their just reward seated at the right hand of our Lord.”

  The worshippers kneeled in a brouhaha of closing prayer books, displaced air, and creaking benches. Bathed in the sanctifying smell of burning candles and incense, we knotted our hands and bent our heads.

  At the end of the Pater Noster, Père Attar raised his head. “And now, let us pray for our Muslim brothers slaughtered by their own brothers in Allah across our wonderful land, and for this month’s latest victims in our beloved city of Constantine. Our sixty Christian and Muslim brothers who fell victim to terrorism earlier this week at the Négrier market. Finally,” he added, opening his eyes, “let us pray for all grieving families that Notre Seigneur, in His great mercy, may bring them comfort in the prayer of our Lord. Amen.”

  Le Père dismissed mass and the congregation filed out in a quiet shuffling of feet. Outside, we took leave of each other in small, sober groups, our usual joviality muted in homage to the dead and polished Sunday shoes raising tiny puffs of dust.

  My brothers, sisters, and I walked home, our stomachs growling from the morning fast in wait for the Holy Ghost, eager to shed the binding Sunday garb and dig into the dominical fare waiting on our kitchen table.

  Changing into my housedress, I wondered once again how the prospect of a simple Sunday meal in the company of my family or even the worries I had about school could dim the suffering taking place every minute beyond the walls of my home. How could my life go on as if nothing was deadly wrong in our world?

  Où il y a de la vie, il y a de l’espoir, People often said to soothe their worries. Oui, I gratefully concluded, where there is life, there is hope. It was no capital sin to allow life to go on by shoving aside other people’s pain, at least for the space of a Sunday meal and—with luck and the help of neighbors like Monsieur Cavalier and his cinema—a little while longer.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Le Cinema de La Guinguette

  Summer, 1957
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  One summer evening following that Palm Sunday, Papa, Maman, and Pépé Honninger sat on chairs on the perron. The rest of us occupied the staircase like spectators on bleachers, waiting for La Guinguette’s movie screen to light up and eating ice cream—a rare treat for us, even though we now had a Frigidaire.

  Two months earlier, Monsieur Cavalier had opened an outdoor movie theater. He set up rows of folding chairs on his side lot. A tool shack served as projection room.

  At first we joined the festive bazaar atmosphere in the company of people we’d known all our lives. Shared the comfortable cocoon of common experiences. We all wore our Sunday suits and were on our best behavior. Double-cheek-kissed close friends. Acknowledged acquaintances with a gracious incline of the head or doffing of the hat. Very proper. Very civilized.

  Monsieur Cavalier sold tickets and candies from a round metal café table until the time came for him to start the show. No newsreels. Only the Saturday movie.

  While black numbers and squiggles flashed on the screen, the spectators settled down in a rustle of shoes shuffling the gravel and throat-clearing coughs blurring the whisper of eucalypti and chirps of crickets.

  I’d let out a sigh of contentment at the clack, clack, clack of the revolving reel and the dust-motted beam of the projector. Nothing can make you feel like one of the crowd the way sharing laughter during funny scenes does or holding your breath during dramatic moments. This laughter and breathlessness was shared by the Arab kids, who watched from the street side of the split bamboo screen in which they had cut viewing slits.