by Simon Pare
“… Private,” he beseeched them with a wretched smile of complicity. “A small private company, not state-owned, guys. I hate the state as much as you do, I swear by love of the Prophet and his companions!”
Producing a long knife, one of the terrorists ordered the wretched man to kneel down. The man refused, sobbing and calling out to his mother for help. The beard with the knife muttered that neither his whore of a mother, nor that crony the President of the Republic would save the lives of renegades like him who tortured good Muslims in prison. He grabbed hold of the young man’s neck and tried to force it downwards. The prisoner bucked and managed to break free. Dazed, his face streaming with tears, he shouted, “Look, brother, look at my white trousers. I just bought them, they’re brand new – you can’t expect me to kneel down in the dirt!”
I thought I must have heard wrongly. I saw the eyes of the man with the knife widen in disbelief before creasing in a huge burst of laughter. Still snivelling, the traveller – who had barely turned twenty – had smiled beatifically, relieved to see a man who had almost murdered him suddenly turn cheerful. He called us to witness.
“See, this brother is a good man. He understands what life’s about, he does! I’m sure that…”
He didn’t have time to finish his sentence. The second maquisard grabbed him roughly by the hair and with a dagger that had, as if by magic, taken the place of the machine gun, he slit his throat from ear to ear, bellowing out a furious “Allah Akbar’ as he did so. Blood spurted out and spattered the other terrorist, who hadn’t had time to get out of the way.
“See,” the cutthroat cried, “you’re dead before your trousers could get dirty. Try using your pick-up act in hell, you son of a bitch!” he said, shoving the corpse aside with a kick in the backside.
Then, addressing us: “That’s what’ll happen to you if you lie to us. Look, he’s just shat his pants. So much for boring us about his new clothes! And if he thinks Satan is going to clean his arse for him…”
The young man’s bowels had emptied and a dark stain was seeping through the thin fabric of his trousers. The killer looked at his own hand in disgust. Muttering “God curse all heathen! What kind of gel did that bastard put in his hair!” he held his hand in the air, looking around for something to wipe it on.
His irritated ‘colleague’ shouted, “Stop complaining! My jacket’s fucked. You could have warned me you were going to cut his throat standing up!”
That was the only time in my life I have felt both a vile sense of debilitating pity and an uncontrollable desire to burst out laughing.
Just then, one of the terrorists yelled, “They’re coming! The soldiers!” The cutthroat shouted in our direction, “Your luck’s in, you bunch of ungodly fuckers!” before running off after his fellows and disappearing into the bushes along the verge.
The soldiers were furious at having missed the terrorists and they interrogated us forcefully. An officer dealt the driver an almighty slap around the face when he said he was worried about the delay with night falling. Confiscating his driving licence, the officer ordered him to come and pick it up the next day at their barracks. “He’s going to get one hell of a thrashing there, the poor sod…” someone behind me whispered prophetically. The same officer called us all cowards and terrorist cocksuckers who were guilty of allowing a young conscript to be killed who could have been our son. When the coach drove off again, I hazarded a glance at the curled-up body; his shirt and fine trousers had turned a hideous brown colour. As I fought back my nausea, I thought, “Sorry, my boy, I’m not laughing at you… Sorry…” and I guessed that had he been a ghost swirling around me, he would not have forgiven my disrespectfulness one jot. Another fit of laughter was not far off, and I had to breathe deeply and close my eyes for a good minute until I finally got myself back under control.
The journey continued in oppressive, distrustful silence as a passenger had suggested that one of us must have informed the terrorists of the traveller’s true identity. A small girl broke into irritating little sobs, joined almost immediately by her mother, and no one made any attempt to stop them. At Algiers bus station, as we were getting out of the vehicle with heavy hearts, the shady dealer, who had suddenly perked up and was now acting as if nothing had happened since we had all emerged unscathed, wanted to resume his conversation about dock-tailed sheep from New Zealand. I cut him short by asking him if his knob had been circumcised in accordance with Sharia law and, if so, suggesting that he write to the High Council to find out whether it would permit him to shag a non-Muslim female sheep from the other side of the planet. The old man looked me up and down as if I’d taken leave of my senses, then spluttered that my soul was drowning in a sea of spit and that the ‘brothers’ should have slit my throat, not that poor young man’s.
I told Meriem about the trousers and the slicked-back hair and then, unable to control myself any longer, I burst out laughing while she stared at me in disbelief. I uttered some scurrilous and stupid remark, then went off to throw up my fear and shame.
Even then, our relationship had already taken a turn for a worse. That night I dreamed a lot of the young soldier: his body had been transformed into an overflowing garbage bag that was slit down the middle with a knife.
Having finished my tour of the cages and enclosures, I now headed for the office. There were quite a few details to sort out if we wanted to elicit a favourable response from the ministerial committee. Our annual budget was at stake, as were two jobs – including my own, as I was only a contract worker. So we had to ‘nurse’ the inspection visit, both in the field (although here the result could only be mediocre) and at lunch in the zoo’s upmarket restaurant. Following the orders from my puritanical but crafty acting Director, I discussed the menu at length with the restaurant manager (foie gras – oh yes… – game, of both fur and feather, a range of sweets) without being able to resolve the tricky issue of alcoholic drinks; thirsty officials plied with fine wines and top-quality whisky always show more indulgence when it comes to writing their final report. On the other hand, if we were unlucky enough to come across some teetotallers or, worse, one of the Islamist hardliners currently teeming at every level of the administration, the consequences could be disastrous. Hajji Sadok and I had already checked: of the three committee members, two were not averse to a little tipple and the older man was even said to be a boozer; the last one had only just been promoted to the ministry and we hadn’t been able to find anything out about him.
I left my office late in the evening, well after my colleagues, with my head still full of existential doubts – ‘Soft drinks or alcohol?” – and promising myself that I would find some way to sound out the new inspector. Despite my tiredness, I couldn’t resist the urge to have another look at our new guests. The monkeys had gone back inside their shelters at nightfall. There was a magnificent starry sky; the silence that had enveloped the huge leisure complex, of which the zoo was only one small part, was occasionally broken by the braying of camels, the muffled roars of lions and the cackling of sacred ibises. I’d forgotten that I didn’t have the car today. The thought of the climb from the zoo to the park’s main entrance turned my legs to jelly.
“Hey, my African glamour girls!” I chuckled. “Your Algerian guard’s dropped by to wish you nightie-night!”
My mobile phone rang. “This old thing still works?” I commented not unhappily. It had fallen on the floor of the bus the day before and the battery had come out of its case. I read Meriem’s name on the screen. I took the call and got ready to stammer the customary excuses for my unusual lateness. I anticipated her recriminations. She would no doubt accuse me of coming home at some ungodly hour to avoid the discussion with our daughter.
“Where are you?” she asked brusquely. And without waiting for an answer, she whispered in a strangled voice, “Our daughter hasn’t come home from school.”
“What? I can’t hear you, the reception’s really bad here. You know the zoo’s in a bowl.”
&n
bsp; She repeated, in something between a scream and a groan, “Our daughter’s hasn’t come home. And… it’s… it’s dark now. Shehera’s so young…”
Then, losing all control of herself, she whined (and then, because I had never heard her lamenting so horribly, I felt my bones freeze inside me, along with the flesh that covered them), “Bring back our baby, Aziz… This isn’t just her being late… Mathieu and my mother are here with me… Bring her back, I beg you… Mum received a strange phone call quarter of an hour ago… Someone was laughing…”
“That’s it?”
“Yes, that’s it. They laughed. And then they hung up.”
There was a silence, then quite an animated but unintelligible conversation followed by another silence.
“Aziz?”
It was Mathieu’s voice – muffled, as though he was making sure that the two women couldn’t hear him.
“I think…”
He swallowed.
“I think… it’s a kidnapping.”
I yelped, “What? Are you crazy?”
He cleared his throat. Then his voice quavered, almost breaking into a sob – as if he too were giving in to the horror of what he had just uttered: “I got the same phone call as your mother-in-law.”
I was standing under a street lamp. I had a horrible feeling that my testicles were shrivelling and being sucked up into my stomach. I glanced at my watch without thinking. It was eight twenty-three p.m. and eleven… twelve… thirteen… seconds. I tried to catch my breath and for one moment, for one very long moment in this shitty country of mine, I thought I wouldn’t be able to.
There it was. My agony had begun.
From the zoo I made it to the motorway slip-road before I found a taxi that would agree to take me for twice the normal price. The cab driver defended this by saying that it was late and that I lived in a ‘dodgy’ part of town. I got into the passenger seat, as is usual in Algiers. Even though my brain was gradually coagulating with fear, I remembered another taxi driver’s strange, offended comment when he saw me getting into the back of his vehicle: “Get in the front, mate. Who do you think I am – your private chauffeur?” As the old banger stinking of tobacco drove me off towards what might well be total disaster, I thought that only a few minutes earlier the mere thought of the driver’s hurt expression would have made be burst out laughing.
I now found myself in almost the same position as someone with both arms amputated looking at a photograph of himself before his mutilation. I bit my lip in a reflex of fearful superstition, thinking about an event as tragic as amputation at a time like this could only call down the worst kind of trouble on my daughter’s head.
Even in the dark, the man noticed that my hand was trembling. He mocked me. “Been overdoing it on the drink a bit, have we, brother?” I made no reply for fear that my voice might betray my anxiety. The man muttered something about courtesy being a dying habit, even when you showed weakness and did someone a favour. He lit a cigarette and defiantly turned the music up to full volume.
Throughout that entire drive across the city by way of the Kouba neighbourhood, I clutched my mobile phone so tightly as to break it. I couldn’t believe that the damn device could have whispered in my ear such a vile word as ‘kidnapping’ in connection with my daughter. With all its might, a part of me tried to convince myself that all of this was down to a mother and two senile old people panicking. As for the phone call, well, there were legions of frustrated men in Algiers who dialled numbers at random until they happened upon a female voice with whom they could strike up a flirtatious conversation. That other part of me listened docilely to these arguments, only to discover to its horror that it was more ‘convinced’ by the quavering fearfulness of old Mathieu, who was usually so reserved. An atrociously mocking thought flashed through my mind: So, my boy, you really thought you could escape unscathed from the disasters that have plagued this bloody country for so long, did you? Why should everyone else be affected by the murders, the kidnappings and all the other things you no longer dare name and not your own precious little family, eh?
I paid the taxi driver, adding, after a momentary hesitation, a generous tip – perhaps to earn a friendly comment before I faced the worst. He didn’t thank me. Opening the door, I grovelled and begged him, “Hey, wish me luck, brother!”
With immediate repartee he said, “You think your sort really deserves it? Ask God, His hearing’s better than mine!”
I was hardly able to stay on my feet after the taxi drove off. The towers on the estate, with their peeling facades and the slashed garbage bags scattered around them, had never looked so sinister. The few street lamps whose bulbs hadn’t been smashed lit up ugly buildings studded with satellite dishes, half of which were turned – with the country’s customary schizophrenia – towards Europe and half towards the Middle East. Young people hung around the bottom of the staircases in small groups trying to keep boredom at bay. I felt a sudden pang when I caught sight of Meriem on our balcony. She shouted, “Aziz! Aziz! Hurry up!” in such a heartbreaking voice that a teenager sprawling on the stairs looked up at me and said, “Got a problem, mister? Need a hand?”
The local imam’s son’s eyes contained lazy curiosity, a mixture of distrust and goodwill.
“Nothing thanks, Rachid. Say hello to your dad,” I replied in a strangled voice.
Meriem rushed up to me, her face smudged with tears. She was trembling. Scared stiff, like me. I held her tight, patting her softly on the back.
“Stop crying, Meriem, everything’ll be OK. Shehera will come home, it’s nothing, just a…”
“Don’t give me that,” she exploded. “She’s never stayed out this late, she wouldn’t dare. She’s scared of the dark, you know that! He… he… How could he? She’s only a little girl… I…”
Her whole body was shaking and rebelling. Stiffer than ever, Mathieu whispered, “Aziz, your wife has just had a phone call from the… laughing man.”
“The laughing man… Coming on all literary now, are you, you old fool?” I was stupid enough to remark to myself despite the terror-stricken atmosphere. Mathieu, whom I had never seen smoking, was holding a cigarette the old-fashioned way, between his forefinger and thumb, with the red-hot end facing in towards his palm. A saucer doubling as an ashtray showed that this was not his first cigarette. His eyelids were twitching, a sign of his extreme effort to remain impassive.
Meriem gasped, “He has… called… every… one. But… but how did he get hold of our mobile phone numbers?”
“How about you, Aziz, did this… this thug phone you?”
My mother-in-law was slumped on the couch, her face puffy from crying, and her tone was resentful, accusing even. It was as if Latifa was criticising me for being the only one not to have been subjected to the mysterious stranger’s jeering.
“No… I…” I hesitated, but then anger overcame me when I noticed that I was trying to justify myself. “That’s normal,” I almost spat out, “I changed network a month ago and no one’s got my new number!”
Mathieu gave me a blank stare I’d never seen before. He too was petrified. I was surprised by the intensity of his reaction. “Really,” I thought maliciously, “why bother pretending you’re worried? You’re only Meriem’s stepfather and not my daughter’s real grandfather!”
I felt like rebuffing them in the crudest terms. Wake up, you bunch of idiots – we don’t know anything for certain yet! What makes you think a family like ours would get caught up in this? The girl’s probably hanging around somewhere with her crazy boyfriend. Just wait and see the telling-off I’ll give her when she gets back! But I kept quiet, incapable of warding off my own distress. I embraced my wife, sinking my nose into her hair, before I stammered in a falsetto voice, “We’ll… we’ll report it to the police…”
My mother-in-law eyed me disdainfully.
“We didn’t wait for you to give us the go-ahead. We phoned all your daughter’s friends before going to the local police station. They say
it’s too early to start a search. According to the sergeant, she might just have run away because of some bad marks at school. If not, it’s a matter for police headquarters, he said, not the local station. He more or less chased us out of there. We had to stand our ground until the duty policeman took down our telephone number. The bastard was implying that we should keep a better eye on our daughter. Bloody cops,” she concluded, “you’d have thought we were there to report the neighbours for making a racket.”
She shrugged her shoulders.
“Anyway, in matters like this the Algerian police… Well, what has she ever done to…”
Latifa huddled up against the cushions of the couch and, sobbing violently, buried her face in her hands. I hated her for saying out loud what I was trying not to think in secret. Whether carried out by criminals or terrorists, abductions were not uncommon in Algeria. Most of the time, the police didn’t manage to prevent a tragic outcome.
My mother-in-law was referring – all of us knew – to a recent kidnapping that had made the front pages of the Algerian press, perhaps because of the child’s angelic looks. The police had undertaken no serious investigations, only bothering to visit the parents three days after the five-year-old’s disappearance. Her father and mother had taken things into their own hands, putting up posters of their son all around Algiers. Angry at the police’s laziness, some neighbours had eventually decided to call in a dog handler. In two hours, the dog had found the corpse, less than a mile from where the kidnapping had taken place. The child had first been raped, then killed and thrown down a well. Of course the kidnapper had had all the time in the world to disappear. There were furious editorials suggesting that the police’s inertia was due to the victim’s parents’ low social status. The little boy was ‘worth nothing’ was one columnist’s cruel take on the affair.
“What should we do, Aziz?”
“First of all, Meriem, we shouldn’t imagine the worst… Maybe…”
