Sirocco Page 5

  Maman said, “Ma grande, please, take the little ones to play in the garden.” She always called me “my grown-up girl” when there was a chore to be done. But, being eleven and the eldest, I guess I was considered more mature than my siblings. I picked up Yves and grudgingly nudged Mireille and Riri out the front door.

  “You too, Zizou,” Papa said.

  At dinnertime, Maman called us back inside to join the grown-ups at the table. Over deviled eggs, pork roast, potato Elise, and Yvette’s yummy peach tart, the conversation—to Zizou’s consternation and mine—turned to mundane matters. After coffee and Eau de Poire for the adults, our guests were ready to leave. Papa sent me to fetch their purses and jackets.

  The last in the pile on my parents’ bed was Monsieur Martinez’s jacket. I picked it up by a sleeve and a jagged-edged photo slipped out, landing face down at my feet. I draped the coat on my left arm and picked up the picture. A penciled note read, “Les Blanches Colombes du FLN.” I turned the photo over to have a look at “The White Doves of the FLN.”

  Five small children—out of what seemed a long line of bodies—lay side by side on the open ground. Ribbons, like tattered butterflies, were plastered in the clotted, curly hair of one little girl. The pillows under their heads suggested they might be asleep, but twisted limbs, heads at odd angles and rumpled clothing said otherwise.

  I realized with a chill of horror that, had the pictures been in color rather than black and white, the smudges coating bodies and clothing would have been blood-red rather than mud-black.

  I had barely taken in the gaping throats and mangled bodies when Zizou entered the room. “Mr. Martinez is waiting for his jacket.” She looked from my face to my hand. “What’s that?”

  I whipped the picture behind my back. “Rien.”

  She circled me. “It’s not nothing. Show me.”

  I shoved the photo into the jacket pocket and pushed past my nine-year old sister. “Here is your jacket, Mr. Martinez.”

  Once everyone was gone, the dishes washed and dried and we lay in bed, Zizou snuggled up to me and whispered, “What was in the photo?”

  “Nothing. Just dirty pictures.”

  “Like the ones they sell in the streets?”

  “Oui.”

  She turned over and went to sleep while, in the darkness, I stared at images of little Yves, Riri, and Mireille’s faces floating mid-air. Will they also be Blanches Colombes one day? And Zizou, and Papa, and Maman, and Pépé, and Tonton, and Yvette, and everyone I know. Will they all die like this—ducks flapping upon the parched earth, heads chopped off with axes or blunt knives, blood drying in puddles to feed swarms of flies?

  Will there be anyone left to bury us all?

  The next day, I learned there would always be someone around to bury the dead. The front page of Le Magrebien showed a pressing crowd of men and women in their Sunday clothes, framing a line of flower-smothered coffins cropped by the picture frame. The headline read, “Unbearable, Barbaric Atrocities. What was the culpability of the El-Halia’s children?”

  While I skimmed down the page, the veins in my temples throbbed like a pigeon’s throat pinched between finger and thumb. My God! The sixty coffins captured in the newsprint contained thirty-four El-Halia victims; fourteen from Philippeville—whole families wiped out—and twelve soldiers who had fought the assailants in the streets.

  I realized I had blanked out when I felt Zizou pull my arm. “Are you all right, Nanna?” She tried to grab the newspaper out of my hands, but I shoved her and her shoulder hit the wall. “Leave me alone.”

  Though a thousand prickles stung the lining of my eyelids, I reread the article’s closing paragraph. The same French government officials who had refused to let the El-Halia mine workers arm themselves drove from Constantine to Philippeville to assist at the burials. But they did not stay long. They wisely fled for their own safety when the mourners turned violent against them.

  I wiped off tears of rage. “I wish they had beaten up les salauds.” Reading over my shoulder, Zizou echoed, “These sons of bitches.”

  In a sidebar, Le Magrebien reported that the military secret services had known about an imminent attack on Philippeville and nearby villages but failed to share the information with the civilian population. My rage against the irreversible loss and our leaders’ irresponsibility knew no bounds. “Salauds, les salauds!” I hit the wall with my fist. “SALAUDS. I hope the same horror happens to them.”

  El-Halia

  A few days later, I knocked on the bathroom door. “Zizou are you finished? You’ve been there for hours. I can’t wait anymore.”

  I heard the toilet flush, a rustle, and Zizou opened the door. The front of her dress looked padded from underneath. “What were you doing?”

  She crossed her arms across her belly. “Rien.”

  “What do you mean ‘nothing’? What did you do?”

  She looked around and, pulling me by the arm, stepped into the bathroom and locked the door behind us.

  “What’s going on, Zizou?”

  She put a finger to her puckered lips and blew a sour breath. “Shush.” Then she bent down and, raising the hem of her dress all the way to her waist, revealed what looked like a small newspaper tucked between her stomach and underwear.

  “What’s this?”

  She tugged the paper out and smoothed it against her chest. It was la Gazette du Littoral.

  “Where did you get this?”

  “My friend, Viviane, found it on top of a newspaper pile. She let me have it.” Zizou thrust the paper forward as if challenging me to read it. “Here.”

  Under the headline banner, “I was in El-Halia,” the Gazette ran the photograph of two women who looked like life-size rag dolls thrown helter-skelter. They lay in a small, spartan bedroom in pools of what must be blood. The woman on the floor had lost a shoe, and the other lay on her stomach atop a simple metal bed set in the corner of two spattered walls. Under the picture, the caption read, “Two Victims of El-Halia.” Beneath, a subtitle read, “A young El-Halia woman’s tale of horrors.”

  Zizou squeezed my arm. “Read.”

  I read.

  My name is Marie-Jeanne Pusceddu, I am a Pied-Noir, born in Philippeville in 1938 from French parents of Italian descent.

  My parents were blue-collar workers, all my family, brothers, uncles, cousins, worked at the El-Halia mine, near Philippeville.

  This small village of El-Halia was only a village of mineworkers, artisans who worked hard at the iron mine.

  There were also Arab workers with whom we shared, during our respective holidays, our pastries and friendship. They had their customs, different from ours. We respected each other. We were happy.

  Les Événementsd’Algerie started in 1954. But, for us, life was the same. We were not wary of our Arab friends.

  I was married the 13th of August, 1955. We had a beautiful party and all our friends were here, notably C---, the Arab taxi cab driver whom we knew well. With my husband we went to our honeymoon.

  On the 19th of August 1955, with my husband André Brandy (Engineer of mines at the Bureau de la Recherche Minière d'Algérie,) we took C---’s taxi to go back to El-Halia.

  On the way, C--- told us: “Tomorrow, there will be a big celebration with lots of meat.”

  I told him, “What celebration? There is no celebration.” I thought he was kidding—”

  “Mon Dieu,” I whispered, guessing what would come next.

  Zizou urged, “Go on. Read.”

  I read on, a knot in my throat.

  The next day, August 20th, all the men were at work at the mine, but for my husband. It was noon, we were at the table, when suddenly, we were surprised by strident screams, the ululations of Moorish women, and gunshots.

  At the same time, my sister-in-law, Rose, holding her last born, Bernadette (three months old,) in her arms, arrived, panic-stricken, followed by her children, Genevieve 8, Jean-Paul 5, Nicole 14, Anne-Marie, 4. Her eldest Roger, 17 years old was a
t the mine with his father.

  With my mother, my brother Roland 8, Suzanne my sister 10, my other sister Olga 14, and my husband, we understood something very grave was happening. The screams were horrible. They screamed: “We want the men.” I say to my husband: “Quick, hide in the laundry room!”

  We locked ourselves in the house, but the fellaghas barged in by breaking the door down with an axe. To our great amazement, it was C---, the taxi driver, the “friend” who had been a guest at our wedding. I still see him as if it were yesterday. He ran after us to the dining room, then the kitchen; we were trapped. C---, with his hunting gun, threatened us—

  “I knew that was going to happen,” I cried out. I closed my burning eyelids. Zizou nudged me and I picked up the story’s thread, hoping against hope that I was wrong. That C--- would spare them.

  He immediately shot my poor mother, right in the chest. She was trying to protect my little brother Roland. She died on the spot with Roland in her arms, he also was severely injured. My sister-in-law Rose was killed by a shot in the back. She held her baby against the wall, my younger sister Olga threw herself, hysterical, upon the gun, he shot her point blank, badly. He taunted us with his gun. Bravely and panic stricken, I told him: “Go on! Shoot! I am the only one left—”

  I was so charged with anger that I hit the wall with my hand. “That’s my girl. Good for you.” And screamed, “Tell him off. Tell le salaud off. Show him what you are made of—”

  Zizou put a finger to her lips. “Shush. Pépé’s going to hear you.”

  I bit my lip and returned to Marie-Jeanne’s story.

  He shot me, a bullet hit me at hip level, I did not even realize it and he left—

  The scene unrolled inside my head like a silent movie. Even my sobs were soundless. I sat on the tile floor, back pressed against the wall, to ensure I’d face any danger that might come at me. Zizou sat close and cupped her hand over my shoulder. “Nanna, you don’t have to read on. Let go.”

  “Non. I want to know.” Filled with bottomless pity for the victims and rage and hatred for the murdering animals, I read on.

  I took the children, hid them under the bed with me, but I was in great pain and wanted to know if my husband was still alive. I went to the laundry room and hid with him behind the aviary. The fellaghas, C---’s sons came back. Hearing noise, they walked in our direction, but one of them said in Arabic: “It’s nothing, it’s the birds.” And we remained, frightened, lost, not moving until five in the afternoon. The screams, the strident ululations, the smoke …. What a nightmare!

  A private airplane flew above the village and sounded the alarm.

  The army arrived at seventeen hundred hours. And then, we entered the house to discover the horror. My little brother Roland was still breathing; he was in a coma for five days and recovered. Unhappily, my sister Olga had been raped and murdered. My sister Suzanne, had a head wound, which still shows.

  Then the army gathered us.

  Ma famille Azei, all slaughtered with knives, my mother’s sister, her husband, her two daughters, one paralyzed, one of the daughters who was on holiday with her baby was, also, murdered with knives (It was the fiancée of her brother, who was hidden who saw it all and told us.) The baby had been shattered against the wall—

  I grabbed Zizou’s hand and pressed it hard to my lips to stifle a moan. She leaned against my arm. “Come, Nanna, let’s forget it,” she whispered, wiping tears off her face.

  “Non!” I said, hitting the floor with my fist.

  Then my cousin was killed with pitchforks at the mine restaurant, my mother’s brother, Pierrot Scarfoto, was also massacred with knives as he tried to save his children. His private parts stuffed in his mouth. The same happened to my nephew Roger, who was 17.

  My father, deaf at birth, wounded with knives, took refuge in an abandoned gallery. He did not hear the army, he was found fifteen days later dead from his wounds. He must have been in agony. My young brother Julien was slaughtered as well.

  Thirteen members of my family were thus tortured, massacred by the FLN.

  My whole body quivered, and I skipped the reporter’s closing paragraph to read a short article farther down the page.

  It relayed an interview with Doctor Baldino, a pediatrician enlisted to help at the understaffed Philippeville hospital:

  The first wounded was a Muslim pastry cook working at a European shop. A fellow Muslim had come into the pastry shop shooting him several times in the chest ….

  The interview stated that two hundred victims had been severely wounded. Some by high-caliber homemade bullets stuffed with hair and rusted metal that inflicted injuries practically impossible to repair. Others, pregnant women for instance, were eviscerated—mutilated by sharp instruments such as daggers, cutlasses, and axes. Doctor Baldino compared the slaughter to “the traditional ritual sacrifice of the sheep.”

  The image of Abraham preparing to sacrifice his son flashed through my mind, and I bitterly reflected that, this time, God had not intervened. He didn’t substitute His El-Halia children with sacrificial lambs. WHERE WAS HE?

  I scrambled to the toilet bowl and threw up.

  “I vomited, too,” Zizou said, handing me a piece of toilet paper.

  “I know. I smelled it on your breath,” I said, and stuffed half of the Gazette into Zizou’s hands. “We need to get rid of this.” I tore my half into small pieces. “We cannot let Mimi and Riri see it. If Papa knew we’d read it, he would kill us.”

  We pulled the chain repeatedly to flush the pieces a few at a time until Pépé Honninger called through the door, “What’s going on in there?”

  Zizou shook her hand up and down, meaning, “What do we do now?” but said, “It’s the water tank, Pépé, it keeps on flushing.” She stifled a nervous snicker, pinching me in her excitement. “My behind is getting all wet.”

  “All right. I’ll see what’s wrong when you get out.

  After reading the Gazette, Zizou and I wondered about the Arabs who lived at the edge of our daily lives. “I bet you, this one could cut our heads off,” she’d whisper about a whiskered man walking down the street or a beardless youngster glancing at us. She slashed the tip of her thumb across her throat. “Just like that.”

  I could not bring myself to agree with her, “He does have small eyes, but we have known him all our lives.”

  “It won’t make a difference,” she said. “Remember, the victims of El-Halia and Philippeville? They trusted their Arab friends and neighbors too.”

  Chapter Six

  Bedtime Story

  That night, Papa came back late from La Guinguette. Frustrated with his missing dinnertime again, Maman hadn’t stayed up to serve him. I sat in bed, reading, listening for his tread on the stairs. When it came, I jumped out of bed and ran to open the door for him.

  I kissed his cheek. “Bonsoir Papa.”

  “Is your mother up?”

  “She went to bed, Pa.”

  He marched down the corridor and checked on her. “Lili, are you asleep?”

  She did not answer. Her eyes were closed, but I knew she was faking. Pleased to be alone with him, I trailed my father to the kitchen and heated up his dinner. I pounced on these evenings when it was just him and me, like a cat on a mouse. On these evenings, when he had only me to speak to, I felt important. Special.

  I served Pa’s food, placed the comic book he had been reading next to his plate, poured wine into his glass, and sat, arms folded on top of the table, studying his face. “It’s not too hot, Pa?” He threw a tantrum when the food was too hot.

  He shook his head. “I can live with it.”

  I already knew that—I had tested it with my little finger.

  To stop him from becoming absorbed in his magazine, I jumped in with the questions that had been on my mind. “Papa, why did the fellagha kill all these poor people in Philippeville?”

  Papa swallowed his mouthful of food and took a sip of wine. “I really don’t want to talk about this.
Besides, you’re too young to understand.”

  “I’m eleven, Pa,” I reminded him, trying to hide my hurt feelings. “I can understand if you explain it to me.”

  He sighed and pushed his plate and comic book aside.

  “Very simple: realizing that most Arabs don’t support its cause, the FLN slaughtered innocent Europeans. This forced the French government to strike back at the FLN, inevitably killing innocent Arabs in what is known as ‘collateral damage.’ ”

  Though knowing better, I interrupted him. “But, Papa, we don’t want to kill the good Arabs. Do we?”

  “Of course not. But if the terrorists hide among the general Arab population, how can we tell who’s who?”

  “But can’t the good Arabs tell us who the bad Arabs are? Then they won’t be punished for something they didn’t do.”

  “It’s not that simple. Let’s say I am a terrorist, and me and my acolytes come to your neighborhood or village and tell the community leader, ‘You will feed us. You will hide us. You will give us your money and, if one of you reports us, we will come back, torture and kill all of you—your children and wives first.’ ” Papa paused and raised his eyebrows. “What would you do?”

  My finger traced a yellow flower on the shiny oilcloth. “It would be hard, but I’m pretty sure I would not tell on them.”

  “Et voilà,” Papa said with a flourish of his hand.

  “But, how can the FLN let their own people pay for their crimes?”

  “Ah. That is the question. Terrorists don’t have ‘their own people.’ Terrorists have a cause. They sacrifice everything, everyone—even their own lives, in the service of that cause. This is why they are called ‘extremists.’ They’ll do whatever’s necessary for their principles to succeed.”