Then the cock crowed
This morning they dared to
They dared to murder you
In the fortress of our bodies
May our ideal live on
Mingled with your blood
So that tomorrow they won’t dare,
They won’t dare to murder us.
All of his torturers sound the same, Fernand can’t distinguish between their voices anymore: similar timbre, just a lot of noise, goddamn hertz. What Fernand does not know is that the general secretary of police in Algiers, Paul Teitgen, made it explicitly clear, two hours ago, that he forbade anyone from touching the suspect. Teitgen had been deported and tortured by the Germans during the war. He could not understand why the police, his police, that of the France for which he’d fought, the France of the Republic, Voltaire, Hugo, Clemenceau, the France of human rights, of Human Rights (he was never sure when to capitalize), this France, la France, would use torture as well. No one here had taken any notice: Teitgen was a gentle soul, a pencil pusher offloaded from the metropolis just three months ago. He had brought his dainty ways along in his little suitcase, you should’ve seen, duty, probity, righteousness, ethics even — ethics my ass, he knows nothing about this place, nothing at all, do what you have to do with Iveton and I’ll cover for you, or so the chief had decided without hesitation. You can’t fight a war with principles and boy-scout sermons.
Fernand Iveton, a pied-noir — of European descent — Algerian Communist, was sympathetic to the indigenous side in the Algerian Civil War: thinking of it as more of a class war than a true struggle for independence, it was because Iveton loved France, and its ideals of “liberté, égalité, fraternité”, that he joined the militant National Liberation Front in order to gain the attention of the ruling class. Not willing to actually hurt anyone, however, he did agree to plant a small bomb in an unused shed at the factory where he worked (set to go off after hours); but the authorities were watching the NLF and the bomb was recovered beforehand and Iveton was arrested, tortured, and charged with a capital offence.
The writing flits around between characters (note that the second passage I quoted moves between three different people in one paragraph), and chapters alternate between those detailing Iveton’s experience as an activist (from taking possession of the bomb onward through his imprisonment and trial) and chapters that depict his time in France (receiving treatment for TB) where he met the woman who would become his wife, Hélène. Andras contrasts harrowing accounts of electrocution and waterboarding with a truly sweet love story, and in either timeline, striking nature writing can occur at any time: The River Marne sticks out a green tongue to the sky’s peaceful blue…The moon yawns, its white breath a veil to the darkness. A star-formed meshwork — thousands of little keys opening the night…Green wavelets lapping on a mossy stone, the shapes of yellow snakes. Iveton does have several conversations that outline the class struggle that he believes he is participating in, and through incidental details (the lynching of any nearby “Arabs” whenever there’s an attack on a member of the ruling class, the fact that Iveton is given twice as many blankets and opportunities to wash as compared to his indigenous cellmates, etc), Andras clearly makes the anti-colonial case: Iveton seems to have been fighting on the right side of history.
He thinks of her every day. He cannot keep from doing it. Cannot keep from picking up the scattered pieces of their story, as if he had to put them in order between these walls, give them a meaning in this gray shithole, bulb on the ceiling, bunk stained by former inmates, one toilet between three. Give them a direction, a solid outline, thick, drawn in chalk or charcoal. Three and a half years together: one with the other, one through and for the other. Fernand collects whatever pieces his memory more or less readily restores to him, to form a brick — a cinderblock of love alone capable, in the face of an uncertain future, to break the bones and jaws of his tormentors.
Hélène.
The love story helps to make Iveton feel like a real and relatable person, and although from the beginning it’s clear that the authorities want to “make an example” of him, I did not previously know Iveton’s ultimate fate and there was much narrative tension as his case played out. Algeria would eventually gain its independence, Sartre and Camus would write about Iveton’s treatment in their day, an anonymous correspondent would pen the verses that inspired the title of this novel, and François Mitterrand — who had been Interior Minister during the conflict — would eventually attempt to atone for his draconian stance on Algerian freedom-fighters when he became President of France in 1981. In the face of “the silence of the State” over the years, Andras brings attention here to a voice that refuses to fade into oblivion and I am enlarged for having encountered both the author and his subject. Wonderful, if hard, read.
