by Simon Pare
A guardian angel inside me knelt down and silently implored me: You cannot even consider killing a human being, Aziz! If you destroy a human being in cold blood, you leave the community of honourable men. Every stranger is like you: he has flesh as fragile as yours, an arsehole that hurts him when he is constipated and a woolly-minded head on his torso that’s as full of hopes and wild ideas as your own. No, you have no right to, Aziz…
Wait, listen to me, it insisted – and its supplications were now punctuated by tears – think of your wife… Meriem… could you look her in the eye when you’ve murdered some poor guy who’s as attached to his wretched life as you are to yours?
I stood rooted to the spot in the middle of the road, hardly breathing. The mention of Meriem was heartrending, but I did not react. Staring at a landscape whose every detail was indistinguishable to me, I ‘listened’ to myself. The terror-stricken voice tried a different tack.
What about Shehera… could you bear her to despise you…
“You’re wrong, you old fogey!” I replied, chilled by self-contempt. “That’s exactly the wrong argument. You say nothing about my child’s delicate body and her right to live longer than us, her parents. If I do not kill, Shehera will be killed. And what will I do with my daughter’s respect if some madman slices her up?”
I went back into the bushes, this time to urinate. My vanquished organism must have thought it was better to piss than to cry. While my kidneys emptied themselves of their impure water, my head filled with filth: I had just aged by several decades and the old man who had taken my place had decided to capitulate to the demon on the telephone.
But whom should I kill? And how should I kill?
I realised that the second question was the more difficult one in the short term. If all I’d had to do was press a button to eliminate an unknown person and recover my daughter, I don’t think I would have hesitated. But grappling with someone who would give me a first unsuspecting glance before screaming in fear when he discovered my true intentions; who would defend himself with every last drop of strength to stay alive, blood spreading, intestines perhaps voiding themselves of their shit – that was something else.
Of course I had seen a terrorist slit a man’s throat without it seeming to affect him in the slightest. That gesture to snatch life away had been so extraordinarily simple: a simple back-and-forth of the blade across a neck that didn’t expect it. But by his complete indifference the bearded killer’s had seemed to belong to a different species.
Feeling nauseous, I headed towards my car. I don’t know why, but I felt I had to make a detour via the bonobos’ shelter. Miraculously, there were no visitors hanging around nearby – and, most importantly, no little tie-wearing runts from the ministry. For the first time since the phone call, I thought back to the incident with my boss and his guests. It felt as if it had happened ever so long ago, back in prehistoric times, and that the foreseeable consequences (a reprimand, suspension, maybe even sacking) had nothing more to do with me, for I had left the human race.
Two males were fighting over a branch without any real conviction. A female was scratching her equally morose neighbour while chewing on a piece of fruit. The others were warming themselves in the weak morning sunlight. I looked in vain for Lucy and Lucette. I was almost overwhelmed by a sob when I realised that I was standing there in front of some monkeys, hoping – yes, indeed! – for one final sign of humanity before I plunged into ignominy.
I shrugged my shoulders. I guessed, however, that I would have given up everything – not least the ridiculous slop filling my skull – to change places not with the bonobos (they seemed to me to be too perspicacious to be still unaware of the wretchedness of their captivity), but with even the stupidest animal in all creation, the earthworm for example, and never have to worry again about trading one life for another.
From afar I saw Lounes, the vet, approaching – the mere sight of my friend in a previous life had become unbearable to me. Although he waved energetically at me, I drove off before he could reach me. I shot out onto the slip-road leading to the motorway.
It was only ten in the morning. It was already past ten in the morning.
The crowded and untidy stream of vehicles on the sloping carriageway looked like a horde of animals fleeing from a raging fire. I had never felt more alone or more desperate. I had never felt this abandoned, other than in a nightmare that had haunted me when the first wave of assassinations of intellectuals began; I writhed in slow and painful agony surrounded by smiling people who pretended not to hear my calls for help. But I quickly decided that this comparison was inappropriate; the terror then was as nothing compared to the merciless humiliation and the soiling of my deepest self and, by contagion, of the entire universe that I felt as my brain started to scratch around for a way to satisfy the abductor’s demands.
I realised that the word soul kept cropping up in my inner ramblings. What was the meaning of the word soul inside my skull that kept coming up with every thought of love, death and of the memories I would leave behind (I was going to say for my family, but I realised that what I really meant was for myself), even though I was fairly dubious about the notion of eternal life.
I honked my horn at a driver who had overtaken me on the hard shoulder. I then edged into the same lane, accelerating for no reason and twice changing lanes suddenly. This earned me a chorus of horns accompanied, I presume, by a stream of insults. One driver shook his fist at me.
I shouted, “Pull over, mate, if you dare and my soul will come and box yours until it’s out for the count for good!”
I spluttered angrily as the car disappeared in my rear-view mirror, “And I’ve got a right son of a bitch of a soul, just so you know what you’re up against, mate!”
I realised from the sound of the engine that I was still accelerating. For a few seconds, I felt the thrill of imminent deliverance. Boundless joy flooded through me. I sensed that such exultation was disgraceful, but it was so pleasant that I decided I would shut my eyes as soon as the pedal hit the floor.
A little more pressure on the accelerator (keeping it secret from the rest of me so as not to change my mind…) and everything would become as insignificant as the consequences of the disappearance of a tiny worm on the future orbit of the planets…
… Insignificant… Your daughter is insignificant?
I let out a shrill “Ah” as I braked a few inches from a huge articulated lorry loaded with sacks of cement. The car skidded; I braced myself, hoping for, and simultaneously dreading, the fatal impact with the car behind.
The miracle came to pass: no crash of crumpled metal, no lancing pain as the steel frame and the plastic of the dashboard pierced my flesh. Just a high-pitched screeching of brakes and horns trumpeting the panic of a herd of clockwork animals!
I sat up, my eyes bleary with sweat, both feet cramped up, one on the brake pedal, the other on the accelerator. I turned the engine off, laid both my hands flat on the dashboard and waited for my body to stop shaking and the scraps of thought surging and bursting through my head like angry bubbles to settle. My empty gaze wandered across the traffic and on to a sheet of newspaper caught on a bush on the central reservation. I bent down to read the headlines: ‘Boumerdes teacher told to wear hijab by pupils’ and, in bigger letters: ‘The president opens a…’ I wasn’t brave enough to get out of the vehicle to find out what it was the president had inaugurated – an automatic laundry, the civil war or a rest centre for amnestied terrorists.
The car still reeked of burnt rubber. I drummed my fingers on the dashboard. I realised that I loved my daughter and my wife with the weight of all the oceans on earth and that my only mission in this world was to protect them, whatever curses it might bring down upon me. One day, at the second coming of the messiah of one of our world’s many religions, a kindly angel would perhaps dare to forgive me or, at least, take account of mitigating circumstances.
Even before I had finished counting my fingers (five on the first hand and five on the
second), I had accepted my fate.
All I had to do now was to find the victim, the weapon and the moment to kill.
And almost immediately I sensed that I was well beyond that, that my reptilian brain, the archaic part of the nerve matter that is the source of our species’ survival instinct, had been much quicker and had already ensnared its prey.
Yes, I was a coward. Yes, I had spontaneously resorted to the most spineless kind of reasoning: if you kill for killing’s sake, you might as well kill the man with the least value in the eyes of the world, including his own. You might as well kill – and this argument complements the previous one – someone who has no means of defending himself…
The old prehistoric beast within me had at once identified the weakest animal in the flock: Moh, the armless, legless newspaper-seller.
I mused: “If you had also been mute and blind, my friend Moh, you’d have served my purpose well…” I gave a surprised gasp at my ‘pragmatic’ reaction, a little bile rising deep in my throat. I shivered at the thought of this ‘new’ side to a subject I was supposed to know more intimately than anyone else alive: myself. I felt a mixture of disgust and a strange feeling that I dared not identify as a sort of dismayed fascination: was the real me so different from the basically normal me I had been presenting in total ignorance since my birth? Might this everyday identity have been merely the handmaiden of another less unsavoury identity waiting patiently to surface?
“Oh shit!”
I forbade myself to go any further with this introspection, suspecting that it would destroy what little willpower I had been able to summon up. I had opened the boot to rummage through the toolbox I always carried with me to deal with my car’s frequent breakdowns. I hesitated between a monkey wrench and a hammer I had already used once to beat a bit of metal back into shape after a crash at a red light.
The wrench was too light and the hammer too bulky. But out of the mess of washers and bolts emerged a long, sharp, flat-ended screwdriver.
“Need some help?”
Holding my breath, I turned towards the van driver who was beaming at me out of his open window.
“What?” I stammered, imagining for a horrible instant that he could read my murderous plans on my face.
“Broken down, have you? Because I know a thing or two about cars.”
I forced myself to smile back at him as I hurriedly tossed the tools back into the boot.
“No… thanks… Erm… I was just checking something.”
“Sure you don’t need any help? I can tow you. I’ve got a towbar in the back and I know a garage nearby.”
“No,” I interrupted him brusquely, “I haven’t broken down.”
The man in the van’s friendly expression had vanished.
“Hey, calm down, cousin, calm down! I just wanted to give you a hand. Strange times when you offer your neighbour some help and he throws it back in your face!”
Then, seeking to have the final word in revenge for my rudeness, he said mockingly, “Anyway, you won’t get far in that heap of junk. And then you’ll be left high and dry, with that useless hammer and poofy monkey wrench of yours!”
A gust of wind blew the smoke from the exhaust pipe into my nostrils as the van sped off towards the Kouba hills. I followed the vehicle with my eyes, overcome by a new fear – of being arrested for the crime I was condemned to commit.
You’d better not get caught by the police, think of your daughter was, in substance, the kidnapper’s warning.
“Meriem…”
I wanted to take refuge in her arms, put my head between her breasts, tell her everything, share the tragedy of the ignominious deed I was about to perpetrate.
I moaned, suffocated by the coming solitude.
I got into the car and huddled up on my seat. A good quarter of an hour passed. All that time I had the impression that a huge foot was pressing down on me and crushing me under its weight.
At last I started the engine and checked that there weren’t any policemen around. I drove about a dozen yards, then suddenly cut across the yellow line and took the motorway in the opposite direction, towards the park.
I stuffed the screwdriver and then, after a moment’s thought, the hammer into an old bag that was lying around in the car. With a pang of anguish, I crossed the road that separated me from the limbless man’s shop before I suddenly felt all my determination leave me.
I must have staggered because a passer-by muttered reproachfully, “Well well, getting in a state like that so early in the day… May God curse Satan and his scheming mind!” I rushed into a little café. The waiter served me coffee in a dirty-looking cup. I drank it down in one and ordered another. The waiter laughed.
“A nice cup of coffee tastes good even if you’re carrying all of Algeria’s problems on your shoulders. Don’t forget to sweeten it with lots of sugar if you’re in a bitter frame of mind! If I were president, I’d put a spoonful of sugar in every Algerian’s head!”
I responded to the waiter’s cheerful chatter with a mutter that discouraged all further conversation. All the same, I followed his advice. I forced myself to sip the thick, sugary liquid. The feeling of having had my legs amputated gradually faded. The telephone rang. The icon announcing a text message blinked on the screen.
I opened the message. I stared at the two lines on the tiny screen, first in incomprehension, then in horror:
10 – 1 = 9
9 – 1 = ?
I sat up with a start, knocking my cup over. I paid the waiter, who was now grumbling, “I told you not to overdo it with the coffee. Everyone’s so highly strung in this country – no one listens to anyone!”
As if in a nightmare, I reached the booth, a garishly painted breezeblock cube with a corrugated iron roof. The limbless man was resting in an old wickerwork armchair like some enormous cucumber wrapped in a sleeveless coat. The crate on wheels was standing by one of the walls. He was listening to the radio with his head hanging to one side. I vaguely heard that the management of Al-Jazeera had just removed the results of a poll of thirty thousand Arab Internet users from its website. “Fifty-five per cent of them,” the journalist exclaimed, “support the recent kamikaze attacks in Algeria!”
The handicapped man was surprised to see me, but he greeted me with his unfailing smile.
“Did you hear that, doctor? No one wants to see Arabs die more than other Arabs, it seems! Nice timing – I’m dying for a drop of coffee after all that twaddle! Would you mind pouring me some?”
He gestured with his eyes towards the Thermos under his table decorated with their ‘anti-theft’ Koranic verses.
“Go on, have a cup with me, doctor.”
“I’m not…”
“…not a doctor, I know, doctor. But you deserve to be,” he added with a guffaw. “You know, you work too hard for a civil servant. You’ve gone all pale and you’re sweating even though it’s cool. You should go and see…”
“A real doctor, right?”
“I don’t have to spell things out to you!”
I had trouble swallowing. No, dear old Moh, if the brain in that elongated head of yours could only fathom one-thousandth of my intentions towards you, legs would sprout miraculously from your backside and you would scarper as fast as your legs could carry you away from this screwdriver-carrying doctor. Without further thought, without being able to utter the slightest riposte, I held out the cup to him. My task now is to manage to hate you so much in the next few seconds that I can then slit your throat.
I didn’t understand what caused his smile, at once patient and sarcastic.
“I… Sorry… sorry… I’m an idiot, I forgot your… I mean…”
Even my ears must have gone red, for I was holding out a cup to a man with no arms. Moh’s eyes twinkled as if he’d just watched a comedy sketch.
“Got you there, doctor! You’re not the only one, though. If you only knew the number of people who try to shake my hand or hand me a banknote before they realise that they have
to look after the till themselves. Anyway, for the cup, look down here to my right, there’s something my son made for me… There, that’s it.”
He had a son. A lump of icy dirt had formed in my stomach. And I, bastard son of a bastard, have a daughter. And she’s worth more than anything you could possibly raise in your defence!
The device was made out of bits and bobs, a metal bar with a board on the end with two holes in it, one bigger than the other.
“It’s not complicated. You fit the cup into the first one; the other’s for a bowl. Hold the thingummy-gob – that’s what my son calls it – up to me, then stick the straw between my lips.”
He sucked in the coffee with visible relish. I poured myself a cup too. I grimaced as I swallowed the bitter brew. My grimace didn’t escape the cigarette-seller’s beady eye.
“I can’t offer you any sugar because of diabetes.”
The straw in his mouth made him mash his words.
“Because you’ve got…”
“No, no! When you’re in my situation, it’s better to know when to stop! But who knows – maybe I’ll get that diabetes thing one day or another! I’m scared of God when He tries to show a bit of humour. So let’s pray He keeps his sense of moderation.”
“Do you think Allah has shown moderation towards you?”
“Yes, because I could’ve been blind, dumb and deaf as well. I can find any number of creatures whose fate is far uglier than mine. From that point of view, I’m privileged. And maybe, in return for my submissiveness, Allah is planning to offer me a prime position next to His throne with all the conveniences you can imagine: as many houris as I can handle, milk, honey, wine and all the rest… Unless…”
He dropped his straw. After wiping it with his paper tissue, he put it back in his mouth. I thought: “What if I smothered you? You couldn’t even put up a fight…”
“Thank you…”
“You were saying, a prime position?”
“Unless he forgets me, like a craftsman chucking a reject part on the scrapheap. The only thing I ask myself about what will happen to me after death, is this: will I have a full set of legs and arms? Let’s change the subject, brother, because we are flirting dangerously with blasphemy. I don’t want to risk losing my heavenly couch because of a word out of place!”
