The women especially. They were fearsome, like the Gaulish women Caesar tells of, they got the men fired up with songs deriding cowards.
But after Chefchaouen they began to calm down, it was high time they did, the cataclysm was fast approaching, at headquarters there was talk of abandoning Fez, the trough of a wave, or rather a snowball, a Mediterranean country with lots of snowballs will … snowball, the parts merge, overnight thousands of men lining up behind Abd el-Krim, an impetus that carries all before it, an avalanche, a rolling snowball army, he even tried to create a state, a snowball state, he had begun as a good and faithful servant, an adviser to the Spanish governor, a journalist on the Telegrama del Rif, they were later dubbed the ‘Beni-oui-oui’, he could have taken a well-earned retirement, after thirty years of publishing jackal-bites-man stories in Spanish newspapers, he had no choice but to rebel, found himself between a country bent on destroying itself with vendettas and not overly civilised civilisers who let you see their motor cars and their aeroplanes and remind you at every turn that you, Abd el-Krim el-Khattabi, are still an ignorant savage; you end up thinking that this is the only reason they are there, to remind you.
And the French talk about the Spaniards the way the Spaniards talk about you, Abd el-Krim, trash, they also talk about you the way they talk about the Spaniards, but not Lyautey, and in France there are French people who actually sing your praises, you are a small liberty-loving people which would like to live in the twentieth century but without having settlers landed on you, the Riff Republic, Spanish officers sometimes talked about their own men, their Basques, their Catalans, their Andalusians from Jaén the way they talked about the natives, each level borrowing its contempt from the level above it.
Abd el-Krim probably didn’t know exactly what he’d got into, he was a snowball too, chérif zaïm, fqih, raïs, amir, khalifat, mawlana, sidna, ghazi, he’d picked up every title as he went along, even sultan.
Sometimes a strict old-style Muslim, no tobacco, no marabout, no dancing on hot coals, the right hand of thieves, the five prayers.
At other times he looks across at Turkey, Mustafa Kemal’s fresh start, it’s the religion of our fathers that has landed us in this mess, in four centuries we have not even been able to nail a long handle on to a brush and turn it into a broom, true, but at least Abd el-Krim didn’t force that business with the cap on his Riffians, outside villages in certain parts of Turkey there was a gallows, with a real rope and a pile of caps; when they came to the village the peasants had to exchange their turbans for caps, there was a choice of caps.
Very complicated all these roles, but Abd el-Krim doesn’t reject any of them, khalifat is virtually a successor to the Prophet, as sultan he replaces the Sultan of Morocco who is not best pleased, rid me of this rebel he is supposed to have said to Pétain, ghazi just means conqueror, a fqih is a holy man, amir is the director of the faithful but raïs is a secular chief, a sort of president.
Zaïm is what the English call a leader, sidna and mawlana are very traditional, somewhere between yer lordship and Our Lord, Abd el-Krim makes the most of them all, a mythical city, and he doesn’t take anything for granted, swings of a pendulum, the Spaniards invade us, the tribes rise up, I use the insurrection to show the Spaniards that I’m indispensable, I demonstrate to the French that they need my support, I convince the Spaniards that they must negotiate, I mix holy war and Turkish-style revolution, the Europeans don’t get the idea for five years, inconceivable that these people can fight to become something different from what we want them to become, Moscow’s hand is behind it all, London’s gold, and the voice of Berlin, a voice you could hear in beleaguered French outposts, came from the rebel lines, spoken in German by deserters from the Legion, ‘come on you Riffians, by God, you got no balls!’
The Germans are prevented from crossing the Rhine, so they come to the Riff to stab the French in the back.
That said, they also helped the Spaniards: a purpose-built turnkey plant at Melilla for making Yperite and tabun, around ten thousand gas-bombs dropped in three years, Abd el-Krim believes France is incapable of undertaking a war, he gathers many men to him, those who come, those who don’t come and are compelled to come, those he bribes — who sometimes prove more loyal than those who came in the flush of enthusiasm and will run away at the first setback — he also has hostages, as we do, a real snowball, but the snowball will come to a stop when it gets to the bottom of the hill, when it reaches the plain, where the great cities are which he does not dare to capture, woe to those who have forsaken their fields for the town, Goffard knew all that, they called him The African, and thirty years later he was also one of the first to get his hands on a copy of the Khrushchev report, it was his big scoop, it suited the interests of far too many people.
‘The CIA and the KGB,’ continues Malraux, ‘are hand in hand, the Atlanticists and the Soviets, talking of Adanticists, Baron, your friend Kappler, still as close to the Americans, is he?’
Max, face white, Malraux goes on:
‘Kappler, difficult man, but instead of sticking to being difficult with women he had to poke his nose into politics, and now no one ever knows where he is, a friendly visit to the Russian zone in ’47, neither here nor there, but he couldn’t not return to the East in ’56, did you discuss it? Which of you showed the other the Khrushchev report? Kappler going to live in the East after fighting the communists by the side of the CIA.’
‘Along with you, Master,’ said Max.
‘True,’ says Malraux, ‘that business with Preuves, I wrote for Preuves, with Sperber, in about ’52, ’53, and with Kappler too, a great review, on the side of freedom.’
‘Which had some very unusual financial backing.’
Malraux, without picking up on this remark:
‘But Kappler certainly pulled the wool over our eyes, going off to live in the East in ’56, after Budapest!’
‘He only stayed three years,’ says Max.
‘He left for Switzerland in ’59,’ adds Malraux, ‘and today his name crops up in CIA reviews, the reviews which publish him are subsidised by the Americans, a man for all seasons.’
‘It’s because he is a man of sincerity,’ says Max.
‘A man of every sincerity going,’ says Malraux.
‘He was incapable of telling the necessary lie.’ Max has stopped clowning. ‘But we’re getting away from the subject, Master: Peking, the Great Helmsman and the little Lolitas.’
The two people around this table who have known each other longest are Goffard and Malraux, almost half a century of friendship, and they are now about to quarrel terminally, when Malraux said ‘cliché’ and ‘tittle-tattle’, he lowered his eyes, not wanting to see the man who had taken him in hand in the twenties, and Max too has had enough of his author, whole decades start falling under the hammer, an orgy of destruction, each man destroying what he had once meant to the other, I leave you my old clothes, enjoy, Lolitas, tittle-tattle, it’s all meaningless, because it was him, tearing each other apart for the same absence of reason, because it was like this, because it was like that, or because they’d got too carried away, or because they’d never really been friends, or because one day the powers-that-be decide they don’t like the edge one of you has over the other, or because what they had originally destroyed in order to become friends has reared its head again, what exactly is it that’s been kept hidden for so long?