Where I Left My Soul

by Jérôme Ferrari, Geoffrey Strachan

Genres: General Fiction; Literary Fiction; War & Military

Synopsis

He was interned at Buchenwald during the German occupation and imprisoned by the Vietnamese when France's armies in the Far East collapsed. Now Capitaine Degorce is an interrogator himself, and the only peace he can find is in the presence of Tahar, a captive commander in the very organization he is charged with eliminating. But his confessor is no saint: Tahar stands accused of indiscriminate murder. Lieutenant Andreani - who served with Degorce in Vietnam and revels in his new role as executioner - is determined to see a noose around his neck. This is Algeria, 1957. Blood, sand, dust, heat - perhaps the bitterest colonial conflict of the last century. Degorce will learn that in times of war, no matter what a man has suffered in his past, there is no limit to the cruelty he is capable of.

Release date: September 27, 2012

Publisher: MacLehose Press

Print pages: 115

Sample

A number of people and organizations referred to in the original French text of Jérôme Ferrari’s novel relate to the period of rebellion and war in French Algeria between 1954 and 1962 which led to Algerian independence. The F.L.N. (Front de Libération Nationale) was the independence movement and the A.L.N. (Armée de Libération Nationale) was its military wing. The revolutionary committee divided the country into six autonomous zones or Wilayas. Kabylia is the region of Algeria on whose coastline Algiers is situated: it has a distinct landscape and culture, the Kabylian Berber people have lived there over many centuries. The French settlers in Algeria (who left for metropolitan France after independence) were known as pieds noirs. The harkis were Algerian Muslims fighting on the French side. Général Raoul Salan was Commander-in-Chief of the French army in Algeria from 1956 until he retired in 1960. An opponent of Algerian independence, Salan was one of the generals who led an attempted coup against the French government in 1961 and launched the O.A.S. (Organisation Armée Secrète), using underground techniques of terrorism. Général Jacques de Bollardière, who had fought at El Alamein and in the maquis, and who was sent to Algeria in 1956, was shocked by the attitudes of the French army and requested posting back to France. In March 1957, a letter from him was published in L’Express voicing his criticisms and he was sentenced to sixty days of “fortress arrest” for this breach of discipline.

The military ranks of caporal, sergent, adjudant-chef, sous-lieutenant, lieutenant, capitaine, commandant, lieutenant-colonel, colonel and général, which I have left in French in the text, are approximately equivalent to the British military ranks of corporal, sergeant, warrant officer, second lieutenant, lieutenant, captain, major, lieutenant colonel, colonel and general.

I am indebted to a number of people, including the author, for assistance and advice in the preparation of this translation. My thanks are due, in particular, to June Elks, Ben Faccini, Scott Grant, Don Hill, Russell Ingham, Pierre Sciama, Simon Strachan and Susan Strachan, as well as Christopher MacLehose, who commissioned it.

G.S.

“He is saying that there is no peace for him by moonlight and that his duty is a hard one. He says it always, whether he is asleep or awake, and he always sees the same thing: a path of moonlight. He longs to walk along it and talk to his prisoner, Ha-Notsri, because he claims he had more to say to him on that distant fourteenth day of Nisan. But he never succeeds in reaching that path and no-one ever comes near him.”

Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and MargaritaTranslated by Michael Glenny

 

I remember you, mon capitaine, I remember you clearly, and I can still picture distinctly the dark confusion and despair that filled your eyes when I told you he had hanged himself. It was a cold spring morning, mon capitaine, it was so long ago and yet for a brief moment, there in front of me I caught a glimpse of the old man you have finally become. You asked me how we could possibly have left such an important prisoner as Tahar unguarded, several times you repeated, how could you possibly? as if it were essential for you to grasp the inconceivable negligence we had been guilty of – but what answer could I give? So I remained silent, I smiled at you and at length you understood and I saw the night fall upon you, you crumpled behind your desk, all the years you had left to live coursed through your veins, they streamed from your heart and submerged you and suddenly in front of me there was an old man on the brink of death, or perhaps a little child, an orphan, abandoned beside a long desert road. You levelled your eyes filled with darkness upon me and I felt the chill breath of your impotent hatred, mon capitaine, you made no reproach, your lips tightened to hold in check the caustic torrent of words you had no right to utter and your body trembled because none of the surges of outrage that shook it could be allowed to run its course, naivety and hope are no excuse, mon capitaine, and you knew very well that you could no more be absolved of his death than I could. You lowered your eyes, I clearly remember, and muttered, you took him from me, Andreani, you took him from me, in a broken voice, and I was ashamed for you, no longer strong enough to conceal the obscenity of your distress. When you had got a grip on yourself you made a gesture without looking at me, the gesture that is used to dismiss servants and dogs, and you lost patience because I took the time to salute you, you said, just fuck off, lieutenant! but I completed my salute and punctiliously performed a regulation right turn before leaving because some things are more important than your qualms. I was glad to get out into the street, I must admit, mon capitaine, and to escape from the repellent spectacle of your agonizing and all your hopeless wrestling with yourself. I inhaled a breath of fresh air and thought perhaps I should recommend the general staff to relieve you of your duties, that I had an obligation to do so, but I quickly abandoned this idea, mon capitaine, for loyalty is the only virtue. And yet I had been so happy to meet up with you again, you know, and I still hope that you, too, at least for a while, had been happy to do so. We had lived through so many difficult times together. But no-one knows what secret law governs our souls and it quickly became clear that you had grown apart from me and we could no longer understand one another. When I agreed to take command of that special section and installed myself with my men in the villa at Saint-Eugène you became openly hostile, I remember it clearly. I could not understand it and was hurt by it, I can tell you now, our missions were not so different that you were entitled to heap your hatred and scorn upon me, we were soldiers, mon capitaine, and it was not for us to choose how to fight, I, too, should have preferred to do it differently, you know, I too, should have preferred the bloody turmoil of battle to the appalling monotony of this hunt for intelligence, but we were not given any choice. Still today I ask myself by what aberration you could have convinced yourself that your actions were better than mine. You, too, sought and obtained intelligence and there was only ever one method for obtaining this, mon capitaine, you know very well, only one, and the hideous simplicity of this method could not in any way be compensated for by your scruples, your ludicrous posturings, your sanctimoniousness and remorse, which achieved nothing, except to make a laughing stock of you and all of us along with you. When I was ordered to come and take charge of Tahar at your command post at El-Biar, I cherished a moment of hope that your delight at having captured one of the leaders of the A.L.N. might perhaps have made you more friendly, but you did not speak to me, you had Tahar taken from his cell and gave him the full military compliments, he was led to me past a file of French soldiers who presented arms to him, him, that terrorist, that son of a whore, on your orders, while I had to submit to this shame without saying a word. Oh, mon capitaine, what was the point of such a masquerade, and what were you hoping for? Was it the gratitude of this man with whom you had become infatuated to the extent of breaking down at the news of his death? But he never spoke of you, you know, not a word; he never said, Capitaine Degorce is an admirable man, or anything of the kind and I am certain that at no time, at no time, do you understand, mon capitaine, did you occupy the smallest place in his thoughts. Tahar was a hard man who was not given to your type of sentimentality, I regret having to tell you this, and, unlike you, he knew very well that he was going to die, he had no expectation of some happy outcome along the lines of those you must surely have been dreaming of in your puerile overexcitement and blindness, puerile and inexcusable, mon capitaine, you could not be unaware of what the villa at Saint-Eugène was, you could not be unaware that no-one left it alive, for it was not a villa, it was a door open onto the abyss, a gash in the canvas of the world through which people toppled into nothingness – I have seen so many men die, mon capitaine, and they all knew they would never be seen again, no-one would kiss them on the brow while reciting the Shahadah, no loving hand would piously wash their bodies or bless them before consigning them to the earth, all they had was me, and at that moment I was closer to them than their own mothers, yes, I was their mother and their guide and I escorted them into the limbo of oblivion, to the shores of a nameless river, to a silence so complete that prayers and promises of salvation could not disturb it. In one sense Tahar was lucky that you had shown him to the press, we had to hand over his body, but if it had been up to me, mon capitaine, I should have dissolved him in quicklime too, I should have buried him in the depths of the bay, I should have scattered him to the desert winds, I should have erased him from people’s memories. I should have caused him never to have existed. Tahar knew it, he knew what it is to have an enemy. But you never grasped any of this, mon capitaine, we do justice to our enemy not with our compassion or our respect, for which he has no use, but with our hatred, our cruelty – and our joy. You may perhaps remember that little student from a seminary, a conscript some stupid pen-pusher who knew nothing about our mission had assigned to me as assistant, a religious zealot, like you, afflicted with a sensitive soul, but a genuinely sensitive one, very much more innocent and honest than yours. When he arrived he was relieved because he thought he would not have to dirty his hands and he was, in a manner of speaking, safe from sin. He reported to me and I almost dismissed him. He gazed out of the windows of the villa at the sea and the laurels in the garden and could not help smiling, I think he had never seen so much light and space, he felt more alive than he had ever been, liberated from damp dawns on his knees on the chilly stone floor of some murky chapel, liberated from shameful whisperings in the dim light of a musty confessional, and I kept him on, after all it was not my place to make decisions about which lesson each of us was to take, whatever the cost, nor who was to be excused, mon capitaine, for when it comes down to it every one of us has had to pay attention, right to the end, to the same timeless and brutal lesson and nobody asked us whether we were willing to hear it, so I told the little seminarist that he would have to take notes when suspects were being interrogated, I dictated a few sentences to him, his handwriting was neat, energetic and elegant and I let him find a billet. He came back to see me, he was shattered, he said to me, please sir, it’s impossible, the walls in the barrack room are covered in pornographic photographs and he asked me to have them taken down, he was s. . .