“The bay is there, majestic, bathed in a dazzling light. The white City clings to the mountain slope that seems to float on a vast carpet of blue marble….”
Akram Belkaid – Return to Algeria
Algiers. Photo by Karen Rose.
Trembling, I stood there at the top of the plane stairs, shading my eyes and squinting in the bright sunshine. When the aircraft door had been opened a few moments before, the warm air had hit me like a blast from a hairdryer, blowing dust into my eyes and whipping my long hair into tangles across my face. My mouth felt dry and my stomach tight with apprehension as I followed the other passengers across the tarmac to the airport building.
I heaved a sigh of relief on seeing T waiting impatiently for me on the other side of immigration control and, after a perfunctory and unsatisfactory kiss, more reserved than usual because people were eyeing us with curiosity, he grabbed my suitcase and threw it into the boot of the company car that had been assigned to him. As we drove out of the car park on to a road that looked unfinished in comparison with British roads, I could see, planted in the middle of an otherwise empty bit of waste ground, a large plywood hoarding. On it was written in giant letters: ICI LA TERRE DU SOCIALISME.
Good start. It looked like something out of Orwell.
Because his permanent accommodation had still not been sorted out, T was living in the centre of Oran, at the Hôtel Martinez, an old fashioned hotel with creaky lifts straight out of an Agatha Christie novel. He was also recovering from double pneumonia, brought on by standing in the pouring rain one day waiting for the company bus driver to open the doors of his bus.
Alone in his hotel room, he had been hallucinating as his temperature spiked. He had finally gone to see a doctor, who confirmed that he had a shadow on both lungs. Convinced that this was the end, he was already making plans in his head to return to Britain to die. On telling the doctor his intentions, the latter had just laughed, patted him on the shoulder and given him the medication he needed, together with strict instructions not to fast, as it was Ramadan.
He told me, with a wry smile, that the hotel waitress had practically thrown his breakfast at him every morning because he was not fasting. My first introduction to social and religious pressure à l’algérienne. It also meant that, as he was on sick leave, we could set off immediately for Algiers to meet his family – the next morning in fact.
The next day, on drawing back the dusty curtains of my hotel room, my mouth dropped open in surprise. The sunlight poured in through the window like molten lava and a brilliantly blue sky arched above me. Looking down, I saw real palm trees lining the street below, something I’d only ever seen on television or at the cinema. What a contrast to Liverpool, where, three days before, it had been snowing and was still dark outside at nine in the morning as I was calling my class register through lips that were sore and chapped from the cold.
Driving in the direction of Algiers along the old colonial roads bordered with plane trees, we went through a great number of villages and small towns all built, it seemed, along the same lines. Two or three beautiful stucco villas would be situated at each end of the village. A main street would run through it, on each side of which rows of townhouses stood, shutters closed, festooned with curly wrought iron grilles and crumbling stone balconies.
The town hall would be proudly displaying the Algerian flag – although the words Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité or République Française could often still be faintly seen on its frontage – and there would be a small park with yellowing grass and a ramshackle bandstand. Although the sunlight was blinding and the colours seemed to be in Technicolour – the blue of the sky, the whitewashed buildings and the deep green of the orange groves where the fruit hung like great, golden globes from the branches – everything looked slightly frayed around the edges.
When we finally arrived in Algiers late that afternoon, T stopped the car at the top of one wide boulevard, which, fringed with palm trees and white-stuccoed buildings, swept down to the sea. The harbour sparkled in the winter sunshine, boats rocking at anchor, and a large white ferry churned its way slowly towards the ruler line of the horizon where the two blues met. The air was clamorous with the sound of gulls, the sky patterned with their great gliding wings.
It was breathtaking. My first unforgettable view of Alger la Blanche – Algiers, The White Lady.
Algiers is indeed a lady — one of the grand old ladies of the Mediterranean. A legendary seaport on a par with Naples or Marseilles, Alexandria or Tangiers, it is shaped like a natural amphitheatre, with its white-colonnaded buildings sloping down to the sea. Further up on one side, the jumbled panorama of the Casbah, the old part of the city, with its terraces, faded tiles and whitewashed walls tumbles, without pattern or order, down the hill. Here a blue door, there a yellow window, here a windowsill bright with geraniums, there a line of washing as colourful as flags.
On a rocky outcrop of its own stands the neo-Byzantine pile of the cathedral of Notre Dame d’Afrique, keeping watch over the city. Its curves are echoed far below in the snow-white domes of the seventeenth-century Djama’a Al-Djedid, also known as la Mosquée de la Pêcherie, or the Fishery Mosque, because of its location on the waterfront.
As is the way of all elegant old ladies, The White Lady exudes a faded grandeur. You can see traces of her past beauty, but, in spite of the makeup and the perfume, there is no disguising the odour of ageing flesh. She is a capital frozen in time — the Miss Havisham of the Mediterranean world.
Yet, for me, everything was new and exciting. Delicious smells floated on the warm breeze— coffee, roast spices, grilled lamb, garlic and mimosa. Through the cacophony of car horns, the air was sweet with the song of goldfinches, fluttering their wings against the bars of the wooden or basketwork cages hung outside every shop and on every tiny, cluttered balcony.
T’s family home was situated in the residential area of Bellevue on the eastern outskirts of Algiers, in a suburb called, at the time, Maison Carrée. A “maison carrée” in French means a prison or fortress and sure enough, there was a large prison in the vicinity. After independence, its name was changed to El Harrach, after the the small river that ran through it and notorious for its ripe, noxious stink caused by the waste pumped into its waters by the paper mill built by the French on its banks. It had transformed the pure, clear stream, in which T had swum and fished when he was younger, into a toxic sludge.
After his father’s death in 1957, T and his family had stayed on in Reghaia, but, walking around Maison Carrée one day in 1962, he had met up with a French army captain, who was looking to rent out his house before joining the general exodus of pieds noirs, frightened by the OAS campaign, back to France. T hesitated because the FLN had given orders that anyone renting a house from a pied noir would be killed immediately. Obviously, they looked on these properties as war booty, to be shared amongst them once the war was over.
His father’s younger brother who had been “taking care of” the family’s affairs since T’s father’s death, as T was still a minor in the eyes of the law, told his nephew to go ahead and sign the rental agreement. He assured T that, should he have the misfortune to have his throat slit, his mother and siblings would be “looked after.”
We now had, however, to get down to the business ahead. It was time to meet the family.
An Englishwoman in Algeria 