Life stories: 1961

 Out of the frying pan into the fire Map [Previous ¦ Next]

Dad worked as a geologist for the international team of French national oil company Elf-Aquitaine, and the north African Sahara region was just yielding its riches to seismic and drilling investigation. We thus went to Algiers, but unfortunately landed amidst a revolution, when local chiefly Muslim Arabic people were pushing the colonial French into the sea - we moved seven times in the six months we spent there, and I clearly remember tying my shoelaces the first time outside in the driveway to the boom of distance howitzers. A pump jockey was shot dead for serving gasoline to my Dad's French car - I sat across the window glass when the sharp pop was followed by the thud of a body, the roar of the engine and squealing of tires as my Dad sped off.

In stark contrast I was introduced to the vast expanse and unending light in the Sahara. L'ombre du désert (desert shadow in the sky) as the setting sun cast earth's shadow above the eastern horizon in dusty air. Silent hommes bleus du désert (blue men of the desert) appearing as if by magic on their solemn dromedaries (single-humped camels), then disappearing on their quiet footfalls in the soft sand: tuaregs robed in blue from head to toe, sun-tanned skin stained with blue dye pounded into the fabric with no benefit of water; bright eyes and teeth flash briefly as they turn away with the grace and supreme confidence of desert masters. Bright light and knifing shadows in villages, houses close together to keep out the sun and the heat, awnings bridging buildings and trapping air into suffocating dark corridors infested with flies, cries, kids both children and goats. Men running with a litière, improvised stretcher to rush a body to be buried before sunset per Muslim rule. Women in black chadors and men in white jelebayas, counterpointing the stark sunlight and deep shadows.

Dull winter days in cinder-black houses with tile floors and no heating to cut the chill. Curfews and bodies shrouded in brown paper, which we learned to step over all too casually. War is random: all quiet in one street, the muffled report of a bomb exploding around the corner, crowds rushing to the scene and taking us with them, my parents attempting to turn me away from an empty blood-stained pram akimbo in the rubble. I was young, but my parents had lived through this during World War II then the uprising in Budapest, and their parents before that during World War I, and theirs yet before in the Prussian wars of late 1800s. When would it ever end? When would I stop jumping every time something popped, the exhaust in an old car or gunfire in movies? When would I quit being fascinated by things military? My parents refused to talk let alone cry, a total blackout on anything before my birth. I learned by age four that they might provide for me materially but not emotionally.