Free The Mysteries of Algiers by Robert Irwin Page A

easy to overpower a professional soldier without a sound and why should a trooper have his képi on at such an unmilitary angle and why on earth would he be going out for a walk in the desert? Everyone in the fort knows me. The gates are closed and I am not going to get through them that way.
    I have no time for Mercier either and all that liberal values and slowly-slowly stuff. That cow de Beauvoir in her comfortable armchair in Paris going on and on about the cancer of torture in French Algeria … I don’t even respect that stuff in the way I do what the true enemy stands for. Objectively what liberals do is shore up the oppressing power, commit little kindnesses which only delay the necessary revolution, the salutary bloodletting. They are panders smearing cosmetics on the face of Moloch. Of course if one thinks about the Algerian tragedy objectively, there are two sides to it. I can see the other side’s case. Marxists are trained to think objectively. But seeing two sides is not the same as impotent dithering. I believe in action. Action to secure the rights of the oppressed!
    I might drop lightly down, steal into the laundry room, wrap a sheet round myself, pretend I was an Arab … ludicrous, ludicrous. All these flights, deaths and concealments, this desperate pass that I am in, it seems so extraordinary that I could ever have reached it. It was not of my seeking. It was in the beginning a matter of cautious contacts made with people who knew people who knew FLN section heads, of anonymous meetings and then small testing assignments. There has been no dramatic moment, only a slow escalation of the risks involved, until this morning when I prepared to go to the security committee and I thought that nothing would happen, but at the same time I thought that I should take my gun to the committee.
    I could wait up here until I saw the chance of taking a hostage. It would have to be Chantal. Then I could talk them into surrendering a jeep and opening the gates to me. That is of course totally preposterous. A film director can risk having a preposterous scene like that in his production, but I cannot risk the implausible, because in my case if things don’t work out I die. If Chantal with my pistol to her head says, ‘No, I’m not moving’ (and she is a woman of courage), what would I do then? Blow her brains out, or say, ‘Oh well forget it.’ Even if I did manage to propel her along in front of me, their marksmen would almost certainly take the risk of killing her to get at me. They just cannot let me escape. And how if we got a jeep am I going to drive holding a pistol to Chantal’s head? Well, I could force her to drive, I suppose. But the jeep is going to be spotted from the air pretty fast.
    There’s all that Camus crap. If I was a hero in one of those existentialist novels, I would be thinking now about blowing my brains out. Dinner-table stuff for the intellectuals. Not for me. People just go on about how they are thinking of committing suicide to make themselves seem interesting. It doesn’t to me. Willy-wet-legs. Suicide is one of the curious indulgences of the bourgeois.
    I should have tried to get out earlier. Talked the gates open before anyone had quite realized what was happening. Damn, damn, damn. If only it was yesterday and I knew then what I know now.
    Maybe, if I did try to make a run for it, they would make it easy for me to get away? In the hope of seeing where I led them? Well I certainly wouldn’t count on that. Besides, I don’t want to lead them to my comrades.
    Cautiously and quietly I keep shifting my position on the ledge. I am uncomfortably aware of my body. It is I suppose the last time that I shall contemplate my body whole, all my fingernails there, all my teeth, still perfect hearing for a few more minutes or hours. I am still in my right mind and still potent. I notice that my hands are clutched over my balls as if in self-protection. It is a little bizarre, but perhaps I