by Simon Pare
“Get up, mum,” she ordered. “Come and have a hot drink and afterwards you can have a rest.”
The old woman did as she was told, glad, in her disarray, to have someone to obey. She allowed herself to be led to her chair and she grasped the cup Meriem handed her. As she sipped her tea, she didn’t leave off studying her daughter’s and husband’s faces, afraid of discovering there a sign of some terrible piece of information that had been withheld from her. Her misty eyes blinked constantly, doubtless to strengthen the fragile dam holding back the tears that might burst forth at a single word or intuition.
Meriem bent over her mother. For a few seconds, I could see their two faces side by side, like for like, despite the difference in age, in their beauty and the expressiveness of their grief! Petty, ridiculous rancour welled up inside me at this old lady who was stealing a part of my wife from me by ‘daring’ to experience the same sorrow as she did.
Oh, how irritating the grief of people we don’t like can be! And how terribly, conversely, can our hearts be broken by the grief of those we love when we show ourselves incapable, even when we share it, of offering them the slightest succour!
Meriem accompanied her mother to Shehera’s bedroom. Mathieu and I watched each other, making no attempt to disguise the fact that we didn’t think much of each other, even if, deep down, we hadn’t the faintest idea of why this was. The embarrassed silence lasted for a few seconds before my father-in-law spoke. He looked pensive.
“The kidnapper knows I’m French. If it really is those GIA bastards…”
Meriem appeared in the corridor and interrupted him.
“I know what we have to do.”
She gave us a hostile stare. She never covered her head, but now she had wrapped herself in a broad scarf and an old coat. She had stuck one of her hands in a pocket.
“Where are you off to like that? It’s dark outside.”
My anxiety went up a notch when – as if this were sufficient explanation – she held up the thing she had stuffed into her pocket: a small, illuminated Koran.
“Where did you dig that out? I didn’t know we had one in the house.”
She shrugged her shoulders with a defiant expression containing not an ounce of love.
“You assume I’m going to just twiddle my thumbs until my daughter’s corpse turns up?”
Her near-exhausted tone contrasted with the sparks of anger glittering in her eyes. I no longer recognised the woman I had been living with for the last fifteen years; first the Koran and now this haunted look…
“I’m going to see the imam. He’ll be able to intercede. He’s almost one of them, remember?”
I jumped out of my chair.
“You’re mad! That’s the last thing we should do. He won’t lift a finger. Quite the opposite: he always said bad things about Shehera! His wife told you…”
Pushing me violently aside, she made for the front door. I yelled, “You’re out of your mind!”
“Don’t go, Meriem. Your husband’s right, it’s very dangerous,” Mathieu begged, advancing towards her. “The fact that they bothered to call us means that it could be a matter of negotiating. Stay here; we’ll find a solution, I swear! One life is already in danger. Don’t make things worse by adding yours.”
Momentarily taken aback, Meriem shook her head in revulsion.
“Don’t come on all fatherly towards me!” she chastised him from the doorway. “Marrying my mother by betraying my father doesn’t give you any rights over me! You’re the one who has to stick to his rightful place – that’s all we ask of you!”
She slammed the door. Mathieu shouted, “Stop her!” I hesitated for a couple of seconds – I was in my pyjama bottoms and vest – before rushing after her. The imam lived in the tower block on the southern edge of the estate. Although the gravel cut into my feet, I ran towards the building with mounting unease when I didn’t catch sight of Meriem. Assuming that she was running too, I should have caught up with her by now. Despite its gentle pinkness, the rising dawn over Algiers couldn’t manage to soften the landscape of urban ruins through which I ran like hell – some repair work on the gas pipes that had been dragging on for a year, piles of trash, some sprayed slogans to the glory of the FIS – the Islamic Salvation Front – and its leaders, graffiti calling on people to fuck a certain Hassan’s mother, a burnt-out car. As I panted along like a madman, a part of me, a tiny one admittedly but one that would retain, I suppose, its sense of sarcasm even if the devil was flipping me over and over like a cutlet in his pan, remarked: We were meant to be the descendants of the sublime Andalusians and Harun al-Rashid the Magnificent, and we have become the bastards of a trashcan country that aspires to disappear up the anus of al-Qaida!
A neighbour on his way back from some place or other called out to me with a mixture of amusement and reproach: “Hey, sports star, training for the Olympics in our bare feet and pyjamas now, are we?”
I had already made it to the second floor of the imam’s building when, like a wasp sting, I suddenly recalled the strange comment Meriem had made during the call to prayers: “Do you hear him?”
“Shit…”
‘He’ was obviously at the mosque! Quite logically, Meriem had decided to go to where the muezzin was leading the service. I ran back down the stairs four at a time and crossed the estate in the opposite direction until I reached the building site of the mosque – which had been deliberately left unfinished so that it didn’t come under the control of the Ministry of Religious Affairs. A few latecomers were hurrying towards the entrance. Breathless and streaming with sweat, I searched for Meriem’s face.
I felt like my chest had gone hollow when I caught sight of her half-hidden behind a digger, slight inside her coat and disfigured by the scarf covering her beautiful hair.
“Meriem, please, wait for me, I’m nothing without you…” I whispered to myself like a prayer.
I remembered how she would laugh in delight at the moment of orgasm and how, if I started holding forth in front of supposedly important guests, she was quite capable of sliding a mischievous hand under the table and guiding it towards my genitals…
My passionate, happy wife. My wife and mother of my child. My wife, broken by grief. And I couldn’t do a thing, neither for her, nor for my child.
“Meriem, listen to me…”
I was just behind her now. She carried on walking, not looking round and mumbling, “I’m going to do what I have to do.”
“And what do you have to do?”
She ignored my question. I grabbed her by the arm. She tried to break free. Her large pupils, faded from crying, stared at me as if I were a stranger.
“He knows some of the people who took my daughter.”
“How can you be sure?”
“After the elections were cancelled, the imam spent four months in jail. It’s common knowledge. They even say he was tortured. That’s some kind of proof, isn’t it?”
“He only did four months. Four short months. If he’d belonged…”
I lowered my voice because we were being closely watched from the mosque entrance.
“… to the GIA or that kind of group, do you think the police or the army would have let him off so lightly? They’d have found him tied up on the edge of the estate with a bullet in his head. If he can carry on waking us up every morning since he got out of jail with that bloody loudspeaker of his, it’s because the authorities back him.”
This argument hit home. Meriem’s eyes, which had been almost malicious up till now, reflected her bewilderment. I drove home my advantage, ready to damn a man whose son I sometimes gave a lift home to and whom I actually barely knew.
“Quid pro quo, I guess. In any case, that’s the rumour. If he doesn’t preach, the leader of the mosque is just one more unemployed in this shit-hole neighbourhood. They must have offered him a deal: his freedom and a chance to make a living selling sermons in return for some information about troublemakers on the estate. Maybe he even grasses on bo
th sides: one day to the cops, the next to their sworn enemies… Look at where it leaves us: if you talk to the imam, everyone will find out, the cops and the terrorists. That kidnapper swine insisted we…”
I didn’t continue. Meriem’s drawn face paled a little more.
“I wanted to suggest an exchange to the kidnapper – an adult for a child.”
“And then what?”
“I would’ve killed myself. I’ve brought along what I’d need.”
She half-opened her coat. The handle of a kitchen knife was poking out of the inside pocket. A chill wave swept through me. I tried to clear my throat, but nothing, not a sound, came out of my gullet.
Meriem hung her head, beaten once and for all. A little liquid ball, then another, rolled down her nose. I caught myself smiling stupidly as some snot flowed out of her nostrils and linked the two streams of tears. I felt like yelling: You locals, save us. You think we’re alive because we’re still standing and speaking, but we’re drowning before your very eyes!
I stretched out my arms to embrace my wife.
“Hey, you two, aren’t you ashamed of yourselves, arguing in front of a mosque this early in the morning?”
The man guarding the entrance ran up to us. He was ‘Afghan’ in appearance, with his unkempt beard and the small dimple above his eyebrows typical of devotees reputed to pray so fervently that their mat leaves an imprint on their forehead.
“As for you, you ass, don’t you have an ounce of modesty, showing yourself in public in your pyjamas with a woman within the confines of God’s house? Get out of here before I call the faithful!”
“Come on,” I said simply, “let’s go home.”
We walked away in silence, infinitely sad, leaving the cleric to his imprecations. We were only a few yards from our building when Meriem murmured, “Your feet are covered in blood.”
Her voice was so gentle, so like how it used to be, that a breath of gratitude for the council workers’ negligence filled my lungs.
“It’s nothing… just the stones from the building work.”
We started with the police. Meriem wanted to come to the police station with me, but I insisted she wait for me in the car. A duty policeman blocked my path. I announced that I wanted to withdraw a complaint. With a cigarette dangling from his mouth and his cap pushed back, the man joked, “Good idea! At last someone sensible, who doesn’t come and heap us with every misfortune that has afflicted him since birth!”
I grimaced.
“One can get carried away sometimes. Then, after a good night’s sleep…”
Inside, the man at the desk asked me to wait, muttering that there was no panic and that he had an urgent report to fill in for his boss. I waited a good twenty minutes for the officer to return. People came in and sat down tamely next to me on the bench. A man and his son were arguing fiercely about the burglary they had suffered the night before. The father accused the son of not having checked the padlocks on the grocer’s shop; the son defended himself by claiming that it was the father who had done the checks. The two individuals looked strikingly like each other: the same thick, short-sighted glasses, paunchy and bald apart from a tuft around the edge. I mused bitterly: “How about your respective harpies? Are their arses as big as yours?” Their argument was welcome: I focused on the two of them chatting away to try and calm my shaking. Sensing my gaze on him, the father greeted me, then commented, with friendly concern, “You ought to wrap up warm. Your teeth are chattering.”
“I don’t know where my mind was this morning.”
“Nothing serious, I hope?”
I saw in his eyes that he thought that he was due the story of my trials since he had entertained me with his own. The officer’s return created a diversion. I stood up, dizzy to the point of collapse. I wiped my moist hands on my jacket, silently cursing myself: “Hey, yellow-belly, now’s not the time to have a heart attack!”The policeman was putting on the arrogant airs of someone who’s just been torn off a strip by a superior and is bent on taking it out on everyone under him.
“Officer…”
He gave a groan and continued to pay no attention to me. I had prepared a little speech with Meriem that we felt was more or less convincing. I had polished it while I was waiting. And then just as my hand gripped the desk, I suddenly felt like throwing myself at the guy’s feet, yelling that a murderer and rapist had abducted my daughter and calling on every last cop in the world to help me bring my child back safe and sound. Otherwise my wife would die of sorrow and, without my little girl and my wife, I was fit for the asylum…
A telephone rang. It took me a couple of seconds to realise that it was my own. I got it out of my pocket under the policeman’s irritated gaze. The screen read ‘Caller unknown’. I knew straightaway that it was him.
“Where are you? Have you finished at the police station?”
The voice was more guttural than the day before. I shuddered with horror.
“I…”
A few scattered neurones did actually send the order to my tongue to articulate the words “I’m still at the police station…” But nothing happened. I stood there dumb, caught between two opposing urges to obey and to disobey the man who was planning to wreck my life. The officer leaned forward to pick up a few snatches of our conversation.
“Listen to me,” the stranger continued, “I’m going to kill your daughter right now, but not before I’ve fucked her. You hear me? And I’ll give everyone here a turn… It won’t be a vagina she’s got – it’ll be a pipeline! And I won’t mention her arsehole. So stop trying to be clever and answer me now!”
My tongue forgot all rebellion, as if it had been whipped. Gathering the little will I had left to offer the irked policeman a contrite smile, I stammered, “Everything’s fine, don’t worry… Really… But I can’t talk to you right now. I’m with them… Call me back in ten minutes… But please don’t do anything…”
I hung up. I must have been white as a sheet. I prayed that my hands wouldn’t shake.
“That was… that was my mother. You know what mothers are like…”
I gave a little cough to regain my composure. The monster’s words were still ringing in my head.
“So… I want to cancel a complaint (I’m going to kill her right now)… My wife was here yesterday (fucked… You hear me?) to report that my daughter hadn’t come home. In fact, my daughter (I’ll give everyone here a turn) was at her aunt’s, but she hadn’t told us…”
“You think it’s our job to sort out problems with your children’s upbringing?”
The officer looked me up and down with the stony and slightly threatening haughtiness Algerian policeman adopt when they intend to remind you that you are in enemy territory in a police station and, as such, are potentially guilty of any crime they might care to accuse you of. The subliminal message emitted by this den, painted ‘administrative green’, is extremely clear: you who enter here, do not imagine that we are here to serve you; should you persist in this delusion, remember that only a dozen steps separate the grotty normality of our offices from the sordid jails in the cellar below!
As a teenager in Constantine, I had been introduced to this cast-iron truth after making a salacious jibe about a traffic policeman. Unfortunately, I hadn’t noticed one of his colleagues on duty a few yards away. The two cops had handcuffed me and led me down into the basement, where the offended man had pulled out an erect penis and threatened to sodomize me unless I made up by giving him a blowjob. I think he would have raped me if my screams hadn’t put the wind up his colleague. The policeman then tucked his dick away and proceeded to beat me with his truncheon. That evening my father was summoned and informed by the officer on watch that I was liable to imprisonment for having insulted a policeman in the discharge of his duties. However, he added, if my father promised to punish me severely for my misdemeanours, the police would forget all about it. My poor old man thanked them profusely and gave me a second volley of blows at home. Naturally, I didn’t dar
e tell him about the rape I had almost suffered. Furthermore, having first choked on his indignation, he might actually have given me my third thrashing of the day and called me a queer incapable of defending his honour…
A servile chuckle escaped me at this memory.
“My wife panics easily. You know, with everything that’s going on. It’s in a woman’s nature to be more anxious than a rabbit. As for my daughter, don’t you worry, I… (I brandished an imaginary stick) as she deserved. I hope we didn’t bother you too much with these stupid matters.”
The man made a strangled sound that could just as well have been a life-saving yes or a fatal no. I felt a pain in my belly: This twat doesn’t believe you… Try something else, quick! Your daughter… your daughter!
I mustered all my remaining strength to assume the attitude of a citizen worried about the detrimental consequences for the police of a blunder he has made.
“It would really cap it off if you’ve already started investigations just because of some silly woman! Might we have to pay a fine?”
My heart was beating so fast that my thoughts suddenly became confused. To regain my footing, I sucked in the sickly, contaminated air of the police station hard. I tried another smile but just stopped myself in time, as this last masquerade threatened to turn into a fiasco.
The cop was busy trying to extract a scrap of food that was stuck in his teeth with his tongue and didn’t bother reacting to my tone of complicity. He was probably wondering which mental drawer to file me away in. I reckoned from the face he pulled that he’d opted for the category ‘standard bootlicker who blubs at the thought of losing some dosh’. Grabbing a register, he asked me for my name and telephone number before scribbling ‘Cancelled’ opposite some writing I couldn’t decipher. Then he went back to reading some of the documents lying around on his desk.
I ran back to the car. Meriem opened the door for me. She had been crying.
