Visions of Isabelle (32 page)

"A Russian eccentric," she hears one of them reply, and then, sotto voce, "Her morals are widely impugned."

They stare at her with even greater interest, and pretending at first to be oblivious she finally responds to their attentions with a devastating smile.

The dinner, marked by empty speeches and numerous obsequious toasts, makes her feel strange.

"What am I doing here, dining at the table of my enemies?" she asks Barrucand.

"Not an unpleasant sensation," he replies.

She grins and nods. Then, after the president has left, several of the Parisian reporters come over and beg to be introduced.

In front of the hotel she holds an impromptu press conference, fielding questions with a combination of disdain and charm.

"Is it true you're anti-French?"

"Nothing could be more ridiculous. I'm a French citizen. The interests of France are always uppermost in my mind."

"But you have spoken out often against the colonial regime."

"Of course. The regime is sick. Victor Barrucand and I are in favor of a more benign colonialism under which my Arab brothers will be equal and not oppressed."

"What did you think of the president?"

"Unfortunately we were not introduced. But I received a favorable impression. Perhaps this trip will open the eyes of many people in France who think of Algeria as a barbarous land. It's up to you to make them see us Moslems as we are–a great brotherhood of civilized men whose sensibilities can no longer be ignored."

She and Barrucand finally escape, ride back to Villa Bellevue where they throw themselves on lounges on the terrace, open a bottle of whiskey and laugh.

"How do you feel?" he asks her.

"Delighted. What's scandalous in Algeria, in Paris can earn a great name."

Barrucand sips his drink carefully.

"I have a mission for you, Si Mahmoud–something worthy of your talents."

"What is it?" she asks with a smile. "Tell me at once and save my wasted life."

"In a moment, my dear, but first you must do me a favor."

"Name it! Perhaps you'd like to sleep with me. Everyone else has. Come–we can see to that at once..."

"No, no," he laughs, "but something personal nevertheless. What are your intentions vis-a-vis Slimen?"

"Ah," she murmurs, "poor Slimen. When I made him into what I thought I wanted, I looked at him closely and found I was filled with disgust."

"And now–?"

"Now it's over. I suppose there's a part of me that will always love him, but after what we went through in Ténès..." She shrugs.

"Then you're free?"

"Yes."

"Good–that's all I need to know." He takes another careful sip. "You know why Loubet is here. It's much more than a ceremonial visit. The stage is being set. France is going to gobble up Morocco."

Isabelle sits straight. She is intrigued, has caught a whiff of what her adventure might be.

"There's trouble in the Western Sahara." Barrucand speaks with the precision of a man who spends his life analyzing affairs of state. "The rebel Bou-Amama is wreaking havoc, and now French troops are massing, and a certain Colonel Lyautey has been called in to clean things up. He's no fool. Jonnart requested him because he's the kind of soldier who knows how to play at politics as well as war. Very soon we're going to hear of 'incidents.' Contrived or actual, there will be provocations, and then a rearrangement of the forts on the Moroccan frontier. Some territory will change hands, which will inevitably cause more 'incidents,' which in turn will provoke still more, and then–conquest!"

He snaps his fingers.

Isabelle is excited.

"What do you want me to do?"

"Go to Aïn Sefra. You'll be the correspondent for
Ahkbar
, accredited to the French army. You speak the language, so you'll be able to uncover the truth. This is a fabulous opportunity for a journalist. History is going to be made. If you go, I can guarantee you'll be famous within a year."

"And what is your profit in all of this?"

Barrucand laughs.

"I will sell newspapers. With exclusive dispatches from the front written by a personality who is–shall we say?–a cause célèbre all by herself,
Ahkbar
will make money and I will gain influence in Algiers."

He looks at her carefully.

"Will you go?"

"The desert! The south! A war! Of course I'll go!"

She stands up and twirls with her arms outstretched. "Oh, I'm happy," she cries. "And now we must both get drunk!"

S
he prepares carefully, studies the customs of the tribes and the political sequence that has led to the latest crisis in the Sud-Oranais. The idea of a French Morocco has its thrill–even to one, like herself, who has seen the costs of colonialism upon the Arab soul.

Suddenly, at the end of the summer, after the rebel Bou-Amama's devastating attack against a French convoy at El-Mounghar, she sheds the sadness that has consumed her life for the past two years and strikes out with a boldness she has not felt since the early days in El Oued.

T
he military train from Oran is filled with legionnaires. She is struck by their faces–haunted eyes, lean cheeks. They have the look of men striving to forget their pasts by losing themselves in anonymous ranks.

All night she presses her face against the rumbling glass, watching the towns and villages rush by. At midnight the train stops while an extra engine is attached. Then it seems to pant as it climbs the tortuous route of tracks to the High Plateau.

She is excited by the presence of the troops, the smoke of their black tobacco that swirls around her, envelops her in clouds, as they sing and chatter through the night.

She dozes for a while, then listens to their talk–of the enemy warlord, Bou-Amama, the trickery of his attacks, the way he appears with a hundred men at night, lays siege to a lonely fort, massacres everybody, then retreats back to the mountains before the dawn.

"He slips across the frontier," someone says, "and then he's safe."

"Damn the politicians! We should hunt him like a dog."

"And take Morocco while we're at it," mutters an old sergeant beneath his breath.

The train rolls and shakes as they talk on, of how it's better to fight to the death than allow oneself to be taken alive. Horrendous tortures are described. A young blond recruit, obviously a German, shudders as the sergeant tells of finding a decimated patrol, chopped up bodies strewn about on the sand, blood baked black by the sun.

"My captain looked around," he says, "and he gave us the word right there. 'No more prisoners!' I bet I've killed as many Arab fiends as there are men on this train!"

Fascinated by the old soldier's tales, she presses her face back against the window and dreams of war. But when they start to speak of Taghit, and of De Susbielle's stand, her ears prick up again.

"Are you speaking of Captain Édouard De Susbielle?" she asks.

"The same," says the old sergeant bundling his neck in the collar of his legion greatcoat. "They attacked his fort for hours, thousands of them, screaming maniacs, wave after wave. They kept coming out of the night, but Susbielle held on, rallied his men till they were fighting them off with bayonets at the gate. His stand at Taghit will be remembered for as long as the legion lasts."

She sits back then and lights a cigarette, incredulous that her loathsome little captain is now a hero of France.

The train rushes on. An occasional settlement blurs by, and at dawn the distant mountains become distinct. The men who've been talking fall off to sleep, but she cannot keep her eyes off the blue ranges of the Atlas that have begun to loom. Morocco, so forbidding, so mysterious, so full of violent passion and feudal power, is but a few miles to the west.

The train hurls through a region of fantastic red and golden dunes. Then she sees forts with notched towers on the heights. It is Aïn Sefra, headquarters of the expeditionary force. She dismounts amid dust and wind and looks around.

Horses and men march back and forth–companies of Arab scouts on strong lean ponies, men of the camel corps in black burnooses with cartridge belts crossed upon their chests. She sees infantrymen in blue, Spahis in red cloaks, and finally the legionnaires–tall, blond, Nordic, their faces bronzed by the sun in colonies far away. She hears shrill commands, curses in German, Danish, Dutch, smells manure and sweat and the oil used to grease guns.

She pushes her way through a throng of milling Arab irregulars to a row of military canteens crowded in the dry riverbed below the forts. Here, amidst card-sharks, pick-pockets and spies, she drinks an absinthe, eats a piece of bread and watches mules climbing the sides of the ravine carrying trunks and whores.

She wanders out again and explores. The whole place seems full of adventure, tensed for alarm. In a square in the African village she finds a great black market of military goods spread out in the sun. Soldiers bargain over Berber jewelry while behind, in stalls, workmen pound out additional "antiques."

She makes her way, finally, to a tent set up for the convenience of the visiting press. Inside she finds a middle-aged Frenchman repairing a camera spread out in pieces on a Berber rug. Another man, young and bearded, is frantically arguing with a lieutenant who sits passively behind a desk.

"What can I do for
you
?" The lieutenant and the bearded man give her ironic looks.

She hands over her papers.

"Ah, a new correspondent. Mademoiselle Eberhardt representing
Ahkbar
in Algiers. This is Jules Bresson of
Le Matin
."

Bresson shakes her hand.

"Bresson, here, is a complainer," says the lieutenant. "We've only one telegraph, and of course he wants full use of it even if that means throwing the colonel off the line."

"I know for a fact, Mademoiselle, that the Foreign Legion here is being torn to bits. This little lieutenant is trying to black out the news."

The man working on the camera curses under his breath. Isabelle stands awhile, listening to the argument, then, ignored, she slips out of the tent.

She deposits her bag with the proprietor of a café, goes to the military hospital atop the ravine. She passes through its crenellated walls of red mud into a courtyard where wounded men rest in the warm shade of the arcades. These are the survivors of El-Mounghar, and she spends the afternoon with them, listening to stories of the ambush, and the brave deeds of the ones who've died.

Beyond tales of Arab savagery, and the horrible pain of their wounds, it is the blazing desert sun they most vividly describe. One survivor can speak of nothing else.

"It's the worst, most devilish sun I've ever seen, and I was in Indochina for ten years. You broil by day and freeze all night, and the thirst can kill you faster than a stomach wound. In the morning when it rises, you think you'll be glad for the warmth, but as it clears the horizon you feel it burning out your eyes."

That night the entire town goes on alert. She makes her way back to her café where Arab irregulars huddle in the shuttered darkness speaking of the weakness of the garrison, Bou-Amama's hordes and the consequences if the rail and telegraph lines are cut.

The night is full of unexpected dramas. A woman delivers a baby in the open air out back, her screams giving way after many hours to the cries of an infant child. At midnight a courier rushes in, gulps down a whiskey and asks all to pray for him since he must carry a message to a distant isolated fort.

Resting on the mats, with her pipe full of kif, she is intoxicated by her impressions and writes her first dispatch. But still she cannot sleep. She is too thrilled at being in a place where she can test herself anew, lose herself in the silence of the desert, seek oblivion in its pain.

S
he buys herself a horse. It is a magnificent animal, a thoroughbred Arabian stallion, the best and most expensive she can find. Caressing its flanks, admiring the muscles rippling beneath its pure white flesh, she names him "Karim," then realizes she's spent every cent of Barrucand's advance. But she doesn't care. Her horse will be her single luxury, and upon it she will go to war.

Equipped, then, with a huge black revolver and a flask for anisette that dangles from her belt, she rides with the troops, sleeps on verminous mattresses in cafés, writes her articles and files them with exotic datelines to Algiers.

Deciding she must experience for herself the dangers of the men, she encamps with four teenage Arab soldiers who occupy the blockhouse above the rail line at the pass at Hadjerat-M'Guil. Mustapha, Mohammed, Ahmed and Ahkmed are their names, and on the first night they seem to her a sorry lot, standing with their rifles at their notches, trembling with fear.

"Why are you frightened?" she asks them.

"We are here to protect the tracks."

"Yes, yes," she says, "but why–why do you fight with the French if you're afraid?"