The Heart’s Arrest
First1, there had been the questions — how to put it — normal in an interrogation of this kind: age and place of birth, the flight number of the plane that had brought him, the reasons for the journey. Had he come to France for tourism or for professional reasons? Research, or something else? Everything, in the inspector’s tone — a short, plump man who nonetheless did not seem to have reached thirty — had the placid, purring character of administrative discourse. Robert Hamdani answered calmly, with even a touch of affectation, of linguistic orthodoxy, a coquetry on which he generally prided himself before French people, going so far as to use slightly precious turns of phrase and displays of knowledge of French culture that were rarely called for in this sort of conversation.
“No, sir, I have not come to France to spend a week or two on holiday, however much I might wish to. You can well imagine that the present situation in my country does not incline me toward tourism. Whether in France, for that matter, or anywhere else… As for professional research, you know well that for a journalist there is no day without work. The street is our library, the spirit of the times a source of information, and the slightest event matter enough for an article or two. To observe, and to say what I have observed, that is the essence of my profession.”
As he spoke, he was aware of the vanity of things, of the words that said them. He had arrived in Paris three days earlier, in a kind of stupor. “What am I doing here, far from my own, far from my work?” The first time he had set foot in the French capital since the end of his studies. He counted in his head — let’s see, it was 1974, ah! yes, that made twenty-one years. He could have left, or rather fled, Algiers for London or for Rome. No, he had requested his visa for France. A country with which he had a bond, a relationship of another order. There are several ways of being abroad, he told himself, or rather, there are several “abroads.”
The inspector’s voice droned on. Noise, more noise. There was something indecent in these apparently banal questions, asked in a calm, even voice, while the war had just caught up with him there, where he had reckoned on having time to reflect, to take his distance. The war had caught up with him, that was all, with its vulgarity, its short-sightedness, its violence, and its absence of love. The rest — my God, all the rest — was nothing but the giving of form to the hours, gestures for the drinking and the eating, steps for work or for leisure.
“So you had no precise purpose in coming to France?”
Fatigue. A certain sense, too, of the appraisal of men. He looked at the little inspector as though through the convex glass of a television set. Not everyone, he told himself, is capable of listening to what stirs within me. My last book, for example — if this policeman knew… A book! not even. A simple manuscript, refused everywhere, even in France. Not enough of today’s images, not enough good folkloric blood, not enough women imprisoned behind the iron veil of the Law and of tradition!
Ah! he was not going to start telling all, the way one sits down to a meal — which is done, nonetheless, in such places. Not that he felt himself exceptional, but really, come now, to lay his heart bare in this police room where other inspectors, seated at other desks, interrogated with the same apparent lack of interest other defendants — no, that, never. For them, he was first of all a passport, and a passport makes no poetry.
The hotel, on the rue de Seine. Yes, it is indeed the hotel on the rue de Seine. And this is the third time I pass and repass before its slightly solemn door. It looks like a woman too well dressed for the hour of the day and for the neighborhood. Its corbelled pediment, with its little Napoleon III side, that manner of belated baroque, is out of tune in the heart of the Latin Quarter. And for the third time, I dare not go in, ask for a room, for one night, two, ten perhaps, for fear that… For fear of what? I am abroad, granted, but I am not entirely a foreigner. Although… Come now, I am not going to start playing those sterile little games of intellectuals short on inspiration. It is, after all, death that I wanted to escape by landing in France, and Fadila, she is still in danger… There, again that pinch, that icy wave in the heart. It is the same thing every time I think of Fadila. Decidedly, I am becoming a Pavlovian animal. But come, enough of these ravings, I am after all abroad. It is what is inscribed in my bearing, in that of the people around me, in the peaceful breathing of this street and in all its little shop windows peopled with today’s paintings, in the passport I have in my pocket, and in my plane ticket, which includes a return. It troubles me, all the same, to have said to myself: I am abroad. What does that mean? My name is what it is, and I have the face I have. Of course, it is the kind of face that immediately gives rise to stereotypes in people’s heads. It is true that, these days, an Arab mug like mine, especially on a body well dressed as an intellectual’s, can raise questions, breed unease. Stupidly, I wonder whether, in this hotel, they will remember my father when they read my name.
The hotel, there it is before me, intact as in my memory — I mean as in the memory I have of my father’s accounts. I look at the windows, I note the drawn or undrawn curtains, I count the floors. Behind which of these windows did my father spend those nights, those days that were to be the last of his life? Behind which did he receive his friends, his companions in struggle; behind which did he perhaps, did he surely, love a woman? I catch myself counting on my fingers: ah! yes, in 1961 I was — what, barely twelve — and it had been five years since he had gone back to the country, five years without a woman. Of course, he could not have remained alone. He must have met people, talked, formed friendships. At the time, many Frenchwomen helped us in our struggle. He was handsome, cultivated, he must have… it is obvious…
And since that month of October 1961, thirty-four years have passed, flown away like dust in the wind, like light words, like the smoke of the thousands of cigarettes he burned and that burned him; thirty-four years since his body was thrown into the river, with its wounds to the head and the hands, with his lungs already so devoured by death that his murder thereby became useless; thirty-four years since that yellowed newspaper photo in which Professor Rachid Hamdani lies buried at the bottom of my wallet. And it is another war, today, that brings me back to the rue de Seine, in Paris.
“You say, then, that you came to France for a few days, and solely because of death threats, by letter and by telephone, of which you were the object? May I ask why you chose France? I know that we granted you a visa, but you will understand that, given the events of this morning… Do you have family here?
— Yes, sir, I have my father and my maternal grandparents.
— Ah! and what is their address?
— They are dead, sir. Of my father’s grave, I have only this newspaper photo, taken at the morgue of the police prefecture, I suppose. I never learned what became of his body afterward. It was in October 1961, the 17th of October exactly. But, given your age, you are probably not aware of it. You see, my father has been in France for 34 years — well, somewhere in the soil of France. As for my grandparents, they are French, they are buried at the Montparnasse cemetery. My mother, like them, is French.”
He observed a moment of silence that he himself analyzed poorly, before adding:
“She is French too.
— Oh! forgive me, I did not know. But am I to understand that your mother is in France?”
There are questions made of simple words, and which, nonetheless, become inexplicably crude and aggressive. He had no desire to explain himself, to put back into words the whistling of the bullets, ten days earlier on the sidewalk, in front of the lycée, the blood… It would have been to return to the country by means of words without thereby recovering the danger; it would have been like brusquely lifting the blanket beneath which a loved one slept, before a stranger. An indecency. He no longer had the desire. He could no longer. He contented himself with saying, in a neutral tone:
“No, sir, no, my mother is… is… well, she is in Algeria.”
The rue de Seine! To think that I forbade myself, throughout my years as an undergraduate, to come stroll in this street, out of who knows what modesty, what respect for that part of my father’s life in which he had married Algeria far more than he had married my mother.
The weather is magnificent, one of those spring days all woven of light, like those that bathed my country in sun when it was happy. And yet it is October. And yet it is France. Who was it who said that it was cold in France? My heart aches, I ache inside my heart. I am like a building site ravaged by a tornado. Materials, tools are strewn there, overturned here and there. They are vanished friends, women like heaps of rubble, children without childhood, jolting fears, panic-stricken birds. I ache for my city soiled with hatred, torn, divided; I ache at having had to leave it; I ache for Fadila, I ache for my street, I ache for the market of Belcourt where we no longer find the little suns that lit the table; I ache, I ache for Fadila. I ache for all my poetry.
He had dreamed so much, my father, imagined so much a country recovered, a country renommé (renamed/renowned). I still hear him explaining that the word “renommé,” in French, could mean as well “to name anew” as “famous” or “illustrious.” He dreamed aloud, in the evening near my bed. I was too young, he thought I did not hear, that I would not retain, that I would not understand; he spoke of the enemy who was not only the enemy of his country, but also of the France he loved, that he taught. He spoke of books, of ideas; he told of Voltaire and Averroes, Hugo and Si Mohand. He dreamed, my father, of that language with two voices, of that way with two languages, which might have been a new road for all, for the greatest number. And since he knew the semantic importance of spelling, he had even written out his dream so that one could understand the two meanings of the sound “voi” — one with an “x” (voix, voice), the other with an “e” (voie, way). But History…
My heart aches. I am in the country whose language I use in my books, in my poems, in my articles, whose language I use like a lamp against the darkness; I am in the country my father fought, but whose culture, whose richness, he also offered me. And yet I am abroad.
Fadila’s telephone call, last night, her voice chopped, held back, the code words clumsily inserted into the conversation, and the minutes that cost so dear. Fadila. She must have been in a phone booth, of course. Rule number one, do not call from home, nor from the home of a friend or a relative. Rule number two, cite no surname, no first name. And it makes for a blank language, empty and bare, without the wool or the silk in which I have always clothed my words with the woman I love, with the woman I have left behind me on account of an assassination attempt. Because I had first needed that, that horror of seeing my mother’s body — French and a moudjahida2 of the first hour — riddled with bullets. They killed her, deliberately, filthily, thirty-four years after other enemies — and yet the same — had thrown my father’s body into the Seine. They killed my mother…”
For us, the defenders of God, they said in the bloodstained letter they left beside her body, a moudjahida cannot be a Frenchwoman. “A Frenchwoman! she whose couscous filled me at once with calories and with culture, she whose Arabic, learned at the lycée, was often more careful and more correct than that of my father, whose mother tongue was Berber! They tried with me too, three days later. It had taken this new assassination attempt for me to set off, alone, without my wife, without the little ones. I see her again, Fadila, in the great noisy hall of the airport, clasping the hands of our two children in hers; I carry in my skin, in my heart, the uncomprehending looks of Jamel and of Sakina, planted in me like daggers. Fadila. I see her again, standing, mute enough to scream, frozen behind the great panes, while I moved off toward the doors of the departure lounge. I still hear her last words, just before the barrier of the departure lounge, her last recommendations: ‘Think of your heart, Robert, think of your heart, try to use the trip to give up cigarettes!’”
The hotel on the rue de Seine. I finally made up my mind, I finally conquered myself.
“Good day, Madame. I would like a room for three or four nights, I don’t know exactly yet.
— Yes, sir. Under what name?”
The young woman is about forty. She is dressed with that strict elegance of receptionists in well-kept hotels: a navy-blue suit, hair pulled back, fine glasses. She is nonetheless pretty, like someone who seeks to mask her charm for reasons of professional seriousness. I note that out of habit; it is an old reflex acquired in my trade.
I slowly took out my green passport and laid it on the gleaming wood of the desk. I wait. I am abroad and I am not abroad. Good God, the French language is so — how to put it — consubstantial with me that sometimes… “In a strange country within my own country.” The line stirred in me almost without my knowing. It is my tic, my own breathing; it does not belong to my father. I always lug around in my head little scraps of Aragon, of Rimbaud, or of Saint-John Perse, which help me cross the ford. Stanzas of Neruda too, of Ritsos, and of others still. I need many boats to cross my contrary waters. And then, that’s how it is, I have an international love. I thought, pell-mell, Aragon, Neruda, Ritsos, Perse, Rimbaud, and I told myself at once that Ritsos and Neruda, they did not write in French, did not write in my language. “In my language” — yes, I have just had the silent courage to say that to myself, while the neat and careful young woman before me deciphers my passport. My heart is beating. I watch her dutifully copy out my first name and surname into her great register. Robert Hamdani. Robert, that is because of my mother, it is the first name of my maternal grandfather. My father knew how to show his respect within his love. Or perhaps it is the reverse one ought to say. Yes, “In a strange country…”
“There you are, Monsieur Hamdani, you have room 37. It’s on the third floor, you won’t have too much noise. For your suitcase, would you like that…?
— No, no, thank you, Madame, it’s light luggage, I’ll see to it myself.”
My suitcase, indeed, does not weigh much. My real baggage is elsewhere. Untransportable, undeclarable at customs. My name provoked no reaction in her. My father is dead, my father is truly dead. And then I realize that my reflection concerning my name is stupid. This young woman, in 1961, could only have been five or six years old.
Disdaining the elevator, I climb the staircase covered with a red carpet, the staircase Rachid Hamdani — professor of letters and network leader for the France Federation of the FLN from 1959 until his death in October 1961 — must have taken many a time.
“These death threats of which you say you were the object — in what forms did they reach you?”
He was still there, the little inspector, alive and well, he was. What could he know of death threats, he who probably overindulged in sweets? What did he know of the awakenings in the middle of the night, in the stridency of the telephone, of the panicked hand groping over the sheet to reassure Fadila, jolted awake?
Robert Hamdani lit his twentieth cigarette of the day. A young woman in uniform crossed the vast office in which the interrogation was unfolding. He followed her with his eyes, pensive, a little nostalgic, thinking of his student escapades. But everything, in the face of the essential, had become soap bubbles. The only things that counted were his flesh, his thought: Fadila the unbreakable, Jamel the Lion, and Sakina, whom he nicknamed Little Hazelnut — Sakina, whose eyes ate up her face. All of them were far from him today.
He saw again his walk, begun in the late morning, that respectful stroll, that debt he was repaying as much to himself as to his father. The Sorbonne, the wooden staircases, badly lit, the great Richelieu amphitheater, as majestic as it was touching in its permanence. And the great wall frescoes were still there, figures of History frozen in their little story more than in the varnish of the paintings. A motionless majesty he found intact, and which curiously gave him the sense of the immense time elapsed. Ah! the years too know how to die with indifference. He had then walked from the little place de la Sorbonne, in a kind of trance. Despite the new paving stones that seemed to enlarge the pedestrian zone, despite the sellers of naïve portraits or uncertain watercolors, the little square had not changed; it still opened onto the boulevard Saint-Michel with that confidence and that abandon it had had during his studies. It had also kept that perfume, that lightness that float in places where the average age of the strollers does not exceed twenty. One difference, however. The bistro, right by the great P.U.F. bookshop, had risen in rank, had become a brasserie, with tables and chairs on the sidewalk, parasols even, under this incredible October sun, mild and caressing.
“So you took these threats seriously enough to… leave your family?”
The young inspector, he was sure, had nearly said: to abandon your family.
“Yes, sir, there comes a moment in existence when there is more honor in staying alive far from the field of battle than in dying at the front.
— The problem, Monsieur Hamdani, is that the front has a curious tendency to shift, these days. As if… as if… someone wanted to make us understand that it is the same war on both sides of the Mediterranean.
— You are in a sense right, except that I, I would say that it is above all the same enemy.
— Perhaps, perhaps, all the more since we learned a few moments ago that on a market near Algiers, and almost at the same hour as here, a bomb also exploded, causing, unfortunately, Monsieur Hamdani, five victims. I even seem to have heard the name of the neighborhood pronounced — Belcourt, yes, that’s it, they said Belcourt.”
A bomb. What market? I do not want to know. I heard nothing — neither the place, nor the number of the dead, nor the name of the city, nor the hour. I heard nothing. I am in Paris, capital of France. There has been here an incident of no gravity. I am being questioned as a matter of routine. I am going to leave, resume my walk. In the evening, Fadila is going to call, tell me about Jamel, about Sakina. Tell me what they did at school, tell me in the blank voice. This gentleman, it is his job, questions me. Since he has noticed that I am an intellectual, he lays it on a bit, he analyzes, he allows himself a little geopolitics. But I heard nothing. Nothing happened at an uncertain hour, on a market I know nothing of, in an unknown city, on the other side of the world, on the other side of the night. I am in October, in Paris which I love.
“… all the more since we learned that, almost at the same hour, on a market in Algiers…”
Robert Hamdani lit another cigarette. His hand trembled. Empty his thought. He had learned to do that too. The voice must remain calm, even, as for information at a post-office window.
“Perhaps you could tell me, sir? Well, I would like to know what I have been doing here for more than an hour now…”
The question was simple, direct. He suddenly wanted to cross swords, an eagerness to have done with the bubbles, the useless words, a need to get out, to run in the French light, reach a telephone booth, and… No! no! he had decided to make a void. So, no telephone for now, no telephone.
“All right, Monsieur Hamdani, all right, you want to know. Then tell me first why you were on that market on the boulevard Richard-Lenoir this late morning.”
To tell! To tell something concrete to this functionary seated in his certainties and the well-traced furrows of his regulations! If he had to tell, he might as well imagine that he had a tape recorder in front of him, he told himself, instead of a fussy functionary. There, he was going to speak to a tape recorder, that is to say to the most faithful, the most respectful ear there is.
After his visit to the Sorbonne, he had paced the boulevard Saint-Michel, with no preconceived idea, letting himself slide toward the fountain at the bottom, a little lost, a little disoriented. He could not find his bearings again.
The seventies, his student years, were far off, seemed to belong to another universe. He had decided to do an undergraduate degree in letters a little in memory of his father, and much out of love for French culture. But after a year or two, the teaching had quickly seemed to him dreary and repetitive. He had felt the need for those paper combats, as he said at twenty; he needed to take life full-on, body to body. And courageously, he had launched into a first novel, while doing freelance pieces, here and there, on cinema or literature. Little by little, journalism had become his livelihood, especially insofar as it did not prevent him from carrying through his work of writing. Even after a dozen years and some six or seven books, he preferred to speak, in his own case, of writing rather than of being a writer. He kept a real repulsion for those discussions of old with other students around the smoke-filled tables of the Odéon, for those radio debates where one heard some affirm that the French language was the body, while for others it was only the garment. An old war between the statue and the tool that created it. Sometimes a journalist, stricken with the great malady of ethnology, would set about dissecting the magnificent explosive prose of Kateb Yacine or the telluric poetry of Aimé Césaire. And each would then embark on those stories of mother tongue or acquired tongue, of familial or social soil, and other nonsense. Come now! all that was nothing but vain talk of literary chapels! He saw himself again speaking Arabic with Ma Khadidja, his old paternal grandmother, during his returns to Algiers. For him, she agreed to abandon the Berber he did not know, for that Arabic of the streets, singing and all marbled with French. He found again the sweetness of the phrases, the words that came back often: “r’sal tchari, y’a b’ni, guol li y’a guelbi, enta lé tékteb hadel sdador ? o ma tehrafch ?3” Never, in the course of these conversations, while they drank little black coffees, seated facing one another, had he felt the slightest guilt at writing in French books his grandmother would not be able to read. His books spoke his soul, that of his country and of its torments, described the gaudy dress the women wore at festivals or weddings, the silver jewelry, the sweetness of the honey cakes — but they said all that with a deliberately chosen tool, a style that was his own and personal. The music, it remained the one Ma Khadidja understood, the one that made her dance. Hence the particular character recognized in his style: his French was a language, it was not the language of France. Men, in the world, speak or write the language of the country that made them, whose History as much as Geography they share. He, he spoke his love, his sorrows, his projects, with the language of a country whose road had crossed that of Algeria for nearly a century and a half, and it was a country that had another history, another breathing, another ethics even. But, during those dazzling moments of communion, of confluence, of promiscuity and of war, France had deposited in him the magic instrument of the language.
He smiled at the thought of the astonishment his thoughts would have aroused in the inspector, had he been able to read within him.
“You asked me what I was doing on that boulevard Richard-Lenoir? To answer you, I warn you, I am going to have to redo in my mind my whole unpremeditated walk. You see, I said premeditated — I too know how to use police terms.”
Good tape recorder, you are going to have to open your inner ear, try to follow my steps from the rue de Seine!
Yes, the seventies were far off. The fast-food joints, the shops of jeans and American surplus, had more or less devoured the little bookshops and the elegant clothing stores, which were nonetheless within reach of modest purses. The snack bars, decorated comic-strip style, with Formica and plastic, had replaced the cafés filled with cigarette smoke and the murmur of passionate political discussions. The Sorbonne itself was today called Paris V or VI — he no longer knew quite which — a number as for the queens of France.
To speak of that bitterness that had settled in him, that curious feeling of double nostalgia that had invaded him, for his own world as much as for that, more mythical, of his father? Why not? After all, one can say anything to a tape recorder. A pilgrimage by interposed person — that, in fact, was what he had insisted on doing from his first days in Paris, a pilgrimage in his father’s stead, a salute more than a farewell. Yes, to say everything rather than to have heard what he had not heard ten minutes earlier. A bomb had… this morning… But no, he had heard nothing; good tape recorders, they listen, they do not speak. And the news, for heaven’s sake! it was not made for the dogs. He would listen to the news, later, this evening, another day…
He had thus crossed the Seine without noticing it, and as twenty years earlier, he had not even raised his eyes to the gilding of the Sainte-Chapelle, which he had always detested. By contrast, the pepper-pot turret of the Conciergerie, at the corner of the quay, set off in him the little emotion that was customary before the stone images of History, that same little pinch of the heart he felt before the ruins of Tipasa or the Tomb of the Christian Woman, near Algiers. Once again, he felt happy to be the repository of two riches, of two cultures, even if one of them prevailed over the other, and of course Camus’s famous sentence about his mother and the homeland fluttered for an instant through his memory. But no, it was about Justice in that sentence… He no longer knew… Fatigue…
He skirted the Châtelet, turned into the rue de Rivoli, then into the rue Saint-Antoine where he had lodged during his very first undergraduate year. He had the impression of following an itinerary as though dictated in advance. He was setting wounded steps again on familiar yet slightly different paths, sniffing the fresh air of this late morning, savoring the spectacle of a city at last peaceful. The Bastille, above all, had changed. The strange bulk of the opera house jarred him. It was a big incongruous cake, of which he wondered what on earth it could be doing there, set down in the middle of his old images, a fortress of smooth electronics, as if varnished, almost in the place of the stone one that an angry people had set ablaze. He turned away, ill at ease, in search of a quarter more in accord with his memories. And so he had turned into the boulevard Richard-Lenoir.
With some immodesty, he mingled the subtle meanderings of his thought, his associations of ideas, with the geography of the city. One can say anything to a tape recorder, he repeated to himself. For example, that his father’s first name was Rachid, that he had been one of the first “native” professors of French, as you used to say, Monsieur Tape Recorder. Before — that is to say, in another life. Yes, an excellent professor of French, since he was also my professor of culture. And yet, he fought the bad France, and the bad France killed him. But I have no hatred, Monsieur Tape Recorder, because hatred is not natural. He could still say many other things to the tape recorder in the gray jacket, things of his own skin, of his memory and his blood. For example, that Little Hazelnut loved only white dresses with little lace ruffles at the wrists; for example, that Jamel was about to be a brown belt in judo; for example, that Fadila had an incisor that delicately overlapped its neighbor, and that her lips… for example that Fadila… for example that Fadila… for example that Fadila… No, forbidden shore for now. Return to what really happened, and preferably long ago. For example, the reasons that had led him to choose Paris to do his studies there.
“Inspector, I must tell you that I did my studies here, at the Sorbonne, between 1969 and 1974. Out of love for the French language and culture. Out of respect for my father, a professor of letters as I have already told you, and who himself took his degree here. My studies were very well-behaved; I even had the luck to avoid May ’68, as you can see. So, what I was doing on the boulevard Richard-Lenoir, I’m going to tell you — I have no idea… I haven’t the faintest idea. I like to walk, and, as I have just told you, perhaps in too much detail, I walked a great deal this morning.
— Ah! really? you were strolling, in a way…
— That’s it, I was strolling. You know, it’s a luxury I had not allowed myself for a long time in my own city.”
He saw clearly that his too-correct French, as well as his total absence of accent, disconcerted the inspector, insofar as it transgressed the habitual imagery in which his physique confined him. It was not, however, the effect Robert Hamdani sought. Simply, he noticed with some astonishment that he took real pleasure in using the French language without the fear of seeming a snob or a blasphemer — the two pitfalls one always had to avoid when using French in the Algiers microcosm.
“Witnesses have assured us that, at the moment of the explosion, they saw you hurriedly put something back into your pocket as you fled.”
The explosion. Why did this jacket-and-tie use such murderous words? It was, moreover, a word from another country. Had he dreamed the three days that had just elapsed — the journey, the arrival at Orly, the hotel on the rue de Seine, the Sorbonne? The explosion. Yes, it had all been a dream. After all, perhaps he had not left Algiers?
He shook himself, set himself literally back on the boulevard in the minutes that had preceded the attack. The slow and attentive ambling of the housewives, the bustle of the Richard-Lenoir market, the presence of numerous fruit and vegetable sellers, Algerian or Moroccan, had unconsciously brought him back to that shopping street, at the entrance to the Belcourt quarter, where he would willingly go to do a few hasty errands to relieve Fadila, to protect her above all. It was even because of that impression, he remembered now, that he had taken from his wallet this photo of Fadila and the children, taken during a picnic three years earlier, in a forest to the west of Algiers. A need that had seized him. To see, to touch his own. This photo, he had always kept on him, because of a detail few people noticed at first glance: Fadila, smiling, was leaning there against a superb tree, probably a chestnut. She held Sakina, still a baby, in her arms, and Jamel, standing beside her, puffed out an already muscled chest. But on a branch, several meters above the group, a bird had remained perched. This photo, he cherished it, for that insolent little animal that had intruded by its own authority into his family, and for a certain something that introduced poetry into his life. He saw again his instinctive gesture, when he had stuffed the photo into his jacket as he fled, as though he had wanted to protect his family from possible shrapnel. He plunged his hand into his pocket and drew out the slightly crumpled print.
“Here, inspector, here is the weapon I hid as I fled, as you put it. But I was not fleeing, I simply wanted to save myself — you understand the nuance? — to save my life, that’s all… like everyone around me.”
The inspector turned the photo over and over between his fingers, manifestly incredulous. A photo, I ask you, to look at a photo while strolling through a market. Robert Hamdani felt something like a profanation at seeing that foreign hand caress the image of his wife and his children, brush against the tree, the bird…
“Rest assured, Monsieur Hamdani, I know well that you had no weapon on you, the search proved it, but you will understand that… I must tell you that the law obliges me to…”
Fog. Fog of words, of places, of instants… What am I doing speaking politely to a stranger when I ought to be running to the telephone. To know. No, to wait. To wait a little longer. Please, Madame Lightning, one instant, one instant more.
“One day all the same, a day will come, the color of orange,
A day like a bird, on the highest branch.”
My God! How had I not thought of it sooner? It is those lines that already passed through Fadila’s smile and her eyes, through the folded wings of the bird. It is those lines that made me unconsciously keep that photo rather than another. The war has caught up with me, the war the huntress. And this gentleman, facing me, no longer knows quite what to think; too many elements collide: my face does not go with my first name, my speech, my accent, do not go with my surname; my words, however, do have the color of my country; and my father, in all that, adds to the confusion — a professor of letters inscribed in this confused image of the fellagha, an empty, meaningless stereotype today for many French people. This policeman suspects me of who knows what horror, without suspecting that Aragon’s lines (whose very name he perhaps does not know) jostle in my head. Our common enemy has, somewhere, brought off his stroke, since he separates us, since he sets up again between us the wall of doubt, if not of anger. Who knows how many dead the same bomb would have caused on a market in Algiers whose name I do not know? I said “would have caused”? Of course, the conditional. No one spoke to me in the indicative just now. No one pronounced the name of Belcourt. No one indicated the number of dead. And besides, how can there be dead from a bomb that does not yet exist. That has not yet exploded, to my knowledge. Not yet exploded in my life.
I must master the trembling of my hand, stop lighting cigarettes, as Fadila recommended, always anxious about my heart. This kind policeman might think it is for my life, for my freedom that I fear…
“You… … that the law… since… … month… permits… to extend the … extension of police custody to more than…”
I hear nothing now but scraps of words, little pieces of the phrases pronounced by this tape recorder. O my father! Had they taken these same careful pains with you? Had they taken these oratorical precautions, enunciating the letter of the law, before the last blow of the truncheon, before your body pushed into the cold water of the Seine?
I cannot bring myself to hatred. I do not know what it is. A foreign feeling, outside my carcass. Anger, contempt, I know; fear too. Love. But hatred is to me like one of those virtual objects they manufacture today with images, figures, electronic chips. A virtual object — two words coupled to make the most perfect antinomy one can encounter in a language. When I think that my last article, the one that earned me the assassination attempt, spoke of the notion of the couple. The couple under all its forms: man and woman, father and child, democracy and citizen, thought and freedom, the Poet and creation. Ah, my old Rousseau! how to believe in the original goodness of man?
“I was telling you, Monsieur Hamdani, that the law… Monsieur Hamdani, are you listening to me? I was telling you that the law, voted a few months ago, allows us to extend your police custody for another thirty-six hours, and that, by this fact…
— But I must telephone, I absolutely must telephone.
— No, sir, I am sorry. You may not have contact with the outside during this period.
— Don’t you understand, then? I must telephone, I must know the names of the victims…
— No, sir, once again, I am sorry.
— But this bomb… perhaps my wife…”
And Robert Hamdani toppled from his chair.
The evening press of that 8th of October 1995, the radios, the television news, spoke with a certain awkwardness and a very diplomatic reserve of the death, occurring during his police custody, of an Algerian journalist recently arrived on French territory because of the threats of which he had been the object in his country. This journalist, Robert Hamdani, had been transported, unconscious, to the emergency department of the Saint-Antoine hospital, where the doctor on duty had been unable to revive him. The diagnosis was: a fulminant myocardial infarction.
Associations were formed. There was talk, of course, of police blunder, of abuses, of racism. France is a country of law, for heaven’s sake! An inquiry was opened, the autopsy did indeed demonstrate the presence of a clot that had necrotized an entire vital zone of the cardiovascular tissue; the proofs were produced of an old cardiopathy that had affected the subject for a long time… All that was true, no doubt. But no policeman, no doctor knew, nor could detect, the truth, because there are truths that do not fall under the diagrams of physics, nor under the reagents of chemistry. The journalist’s heart had ceased to beat, on its own authority. A decision it had taken by itself, the heart, like a big boy who wants to demonstrate that he is not merely a stupid and repetitive muscle. It was a decision as arbitrary as it was immoral, full of compassion and at the same time of injustice, since Robert Hamdani never knew what a telephone call would have allowed him to learn: namely, that none of the victims of the attack that occurred two thousand kilometers from Paris, that day, in Algiers, bore his name.
None.
[Image: A black and white illustration showing three figures standing against a wall with destruction in the background]
Belgium, 1943, Tony Simon-Wolfskehl: “Ghetto, 1943”