by Simon Pare
I felt the screwdriver through my bag. This man was chatty, his head waggling from side to side in time with his words, not allowing me to gather my thoughts. Anyway, there was no chance of doing anything for the moment; there were too many people walking between the bus stop and the nearby buildings. A teenager walked up and asked for a packet of Marlboros.
“Real or fake?” the shopkeeper asked good-naturedly.
“The fake ones from Niger?”
“That’s right, my friend,” Moh agreed. “But take the real ones from Hong Kong. They’re a little more expensive, but worth it – they’re guaranteed against lung disease, friend. Those Chinese have invented machines that take out the cancer grains, one by one. The Niger cigarettes are made illegally by uneducated Blacks; they’re a total disaster.”
With a wink, Moh asked me to fetch a packet of cigarettes out of the cardboard box stashed under the table. I did as he said, regretting bitterly the trap of familiarity I had fallen into.
The radio was now playing the whining quavering of a Middle Eastern female singer about the joys of living by the Nile. When the teenager had gone, I said, as much to pad out the conversation as to contain the storm inside me, “Did you make that up, that stuff about fake and real cigarettes?”
“Yes, of course I did. Both of them have been smuggled in from some African country, but my customers feel better if they think they’ve chosen the right ones.
“That’s a…”
He chuckled. “Of course it’s a lie, but you’re not really going to demand honesty from me. For lack of arms and legs, I’ve had to develop my tongue. May God forgive me for exaggerating a little! On the other hand, He didn’t have to make me this way. Tell me…”
He hesitated, trying to make his cunning look seem complicit.
“Aren’t you working today or did you sneak out of the office?”
“What makes you think that?”
My tone was too snappy. He shook his head.
“Excuse me for saying so, but you look harassed. And… have you seen your jacket?… Next to the left pocket?”
A big greasy stain flecked my jacket where it had touched the bag. I was seized by sudden irritation at the handicapped man’s prying eyes. I bent my nose over my cup of coffee before mumbling, “My boss gave me the day off. He doesn’t think I look good either. A stomach bug probably.”
“My son’ll be round soon, after school. If you want, you can ask him to go and get you some medicine from the pharmacy. If you’re not in too much of a hurry, that is…”
“You have a son?”
He sniggered – but it was no longer the same cheerful laugh.
“You’re wondering how this sausage-man managed to find himself a son? And how low did a woman have to stoop to tie her life to his?”
“No, I…”
His wrinkled face with its thin crop of hair lit up.
“I’m not lying this time. Want me to tell you a secret?”
I didn’t answer. My face closed. There’s no way I’m listening to you, no way you’re going to save your skin and my daughter lose hers – I can see right through this sob story!
Moh sighed and the straw fell out of his mouth. I pretended I hadn’t seen anything. But the man obviously wanted to talk; he seized the opportunity – a rare one for him – of having a supposedly benevolent ear available.
“My son is the most wonderful thing that’s ever happened to me. He’s a little over 14 and he’s the one who takes care of me. Well, washing, brushing my teeth and… all the other stuff… I’d be unable to manage by myself… Think of the number of erm, personal things for which hands are essential. I don’t have to draw you a picture for you to understand, with all due respect of course… It’s a terrible chore and yet my young son carries it out morning and evening with no complaints and without showing any disgust. He even joked about the colour of my shit one day when I’d eaten too much beetroot!”
The man looked down.
“As for my wife, that’s something different. I should probably say my ex-wife. When I was younger, my father was a well-to-do shopkeeper, whereas my future wife’s family was poor and heavily in debt to him. It was a good deal for everyone when my in-laws gave us their daughter: for my old man, who’d been dreaming of getting rid of me since my birth; for the young woman’s parents, who wiped off their debts in one go and even received an allowance for looking after me; and for me, the nearly-nothing, the less-than-dwarf, who gained a nurse and a wife at the same time. Everyone was delighted, apart from the beautiful young girl whose opinion no one had asked. That wasn’t common practice in the country in my day! Since then, my father has gone bankrupt and had the unfortunate idea to kick the bucket as a result. I’ve even had time to have two children by my wife, a girl and a boy. But my wife couldn’t stand me any more. She insulted me, she kept saying…”
He went off on another round of giggles. (I thought cruelly that, if he’d had hands, he would have slapped his thighs.)
“She kept saying, with all due respect, that a cock stuck to a sub-monkey doesn’t make a husband. She isn’t wrong, I must confess. She wanted to remarry a man who was, let’s say, all there. My daughter very quickly took her mother’s side. At school she told them I was dead. My son, though, carried on loving me. I don’t know why, actually – I didn’t rock him, I didn’t play football with him, I didn’t help him with his homework, all those little things that fathers are supposed to do with their kids, not to mention spanking them when they get in trouble.”
He was interrupted by a brief sigh.
“My kid is a little drop of heavenly mint poured into my life potion at the very last moment, maybe a little sign of regret from the Almighty.”
He cleared his throat, overcome with emotion.
“The funny thing is that the new husband, a good lad, pulled some strings to get me this breezeblock box to sleep in and trade from.”
He motioned with his head towards the metal sheet that served as a roof.
“Can you guess what my beautiful store used to be?”
“Er, no.”
“Take a closer look. Forget the paint and the little sign, take the roof off and cover the lot with some dirty thatch… Never seen one before? Maybe even at the foot of your block of flats?”
Irritated, I almost replied that I hated riddles before I started in embarrassment, gripped by a nervous desire to laugh.
“You’ve really squatted a rubbish tip? And no one objected?”
“A rubbish tip, spring-cleaned and with added roof and door. My ex-wife’s new husband wanted to get rid of me as fast as he could. All the same, I think he felt a bit ashamed about kicking out someone like me. In return for a few banknotes, he persuaded the council worker to ‘forget’ this rubbish tip. Anything goes in this crazy country, you know that, as long as you pay the right price.”
Moh turned his head to the right and, using it like an index finger, pointed with his tongue.
“You see those bin bags over there by the car park? They’re piled up around a construction just like mine. It’s the new tip but, as you can see, it’s not really any use. People prefer to chuck their rubbish any old place; it’s as if having cleaner surroundings would annoy them! At least I use mine as a villa. All right, it’s true there aren’t any windows, nothing but a badly made door, but I only shut myself in at night. I don’t take up much room, as you can see; I can live in next to nothing.”
His head was still nodding furiously (Ha ha ha, don’t forget he’s a Mediterranean, he gesticulates with his head for want of hands.) Once more his mouth produced a shrill laugh, too cheerful by half.
“When I say I come in… what I mean is that my son puts me inside in the evening and shuts the door until the next day, except for Friday when it’s the people from the mosque who take care of me, pamper me and feed me before they help me pray. The imam has threatened any locals who try to steal from me or do me any harm with reprisals. He dreamed that I was sent by heaven to test the be
lievers in the neighbourhood. According to him, I am of indubitable social and religious usefulness.”
His eyes shone with mocking pride.
“What time does your son come?”
“He always comes in the morning to open the door, wash me and help me set out my goods. In the evening, he’s here around 7 o’clock to count the till and feed me. When he hasn’t got school, he sometimes drops in at lunchtime.”
“And you sleep alone?”
“Yes, until (as he laughed, he clicked his tongue against his palate) the imam or some accommodating Muslim comes up with a new wife for me.”
“How old are you, Moh?”
“Forty-four and a few months. Do you want my star sign too?”
Something evil had moved within me, like a venomous snake raising its head to put an end to this idiotic dialogue with its prey. Time you shut up, you dwarf. Your smile is forced, you feign cheerfulness because you’re scared that people will be put off by your appearance and shrink from talking to you. But I’m sure you spend your nights weeping over the injustice of your fate. This evening I will come and put an end to your mother’s blunder and we won’t even need to bury you in the rubbish because you’ll already be there.
I felt a kind of dizziness at such a hideous emotion. I blinked with the violence of this discovery: a part of me about the size of a hazelnut had just murmured gleefully at the thought of taking another person’s life.
The handicapped man had fixed me with eyes brimming with anxiety.
“Ah, I’m boring you with my chatter…”
And as if he were afraid that I might flee, he hurriedly added, completely out of context with what had gone before, “Please wait. I have to tell you what my son’s called.”
He contemplated me with a disturbingly fierce glint of defiance.
“My son’s called Yacine. When I gave him that name, I didn’t know that he would deserve it far more than I bargained for. You know the Surah Ya-sin from the holy Koran, which is called that because it begins with two separate letters – the letters Ya and Sin. No one knows why God chose to put them all on their own. We will find out, it seems, at the end of time when we are born again to be judged. Long time to wait, don’t you think?”
The limbless man was interrupted by a long and whistling cough. He smiled awkwardly by way of apology. Some saliva dribbled from the corners of his mouth. For a second, I thought about getting up and wiping it away.
“You see, doctor, my son is a real mystery. How, at his age, can he be so considerate towards his runt of a father and never lose patience? Everything has a heart, and it is claimed that the heart of the Koran is this mysterious Surah Yasin. As you can imagine, I am too ignorant to dare to express an opinion about God’s plans…”
The cigarette seller had tears in his eyes. The trap had just sprung shut on me: I had let him talk too long about his cursed offspring.
“…But it’s simple as far as I’m concerned – my boy Yacine is my heart of hearts!”
I stood up, overcome with anger at my clear defeat. I would never have the courage to seize this man by the throat, plunge the point of my screwdriver into it and hold it there until the death rattle came. I hated the miraculous teenager whose mere existence had just saved his father’s life.
My hands were itching. With shame, with despair.
So you don’t want to do away with an innocent person? A big word that! Look at them, all these people around you, so profoundly, so spectacularly innocent, as if by vocation; examine their innocent gestures, listen to their innocent conversations and their innocent arguments! You’d think that no one had ever killed anyone in Algeria in all these long years, that no one had denounced a neighbour who talked too much, that no one was getting ready to kill people in an attack or a fake roadblock tomorrow! And see how, still armoured with the same innocence, they throw themselves at today’s amnestied prisoners and yesterday’s mass murderers, how seductive they find them with their hennaed beards, their big, melancholy eyes and their rhetoric about the Eden of promiscuity that awaits the Obedient!
The mastiff careering around in my mind interjected: Aziz, you are a downright chicken. Where are you going to find someone this easy to eliminate now? You want to stay clean? Well, stay clean, but it’s your daughter who’ll be sullied! First blood, then sperm, and finally decapitation…
Without another glance at Moh, I looked at my watch. I had wasted half an hour of the scarce time the kidnapper had granted me. Hastily I walked off, my jaws clenched, incapable of responding to the shopkeeper’s invitation to have another cup of coffee, this time with some extra-special cardamom someone had brought him back from Morocco.
I mumbled, “Sip your shitty coffee with some poison instead!”
I immediately felt like gulping down a few swigs of that merciful drink and dying right there, on this spit-spattered pavement – because I couldn’t see how I might save my child.
I got back in my car and put my useless bag down beside me. I looked at it in amazement. And, having not once invoked the heavens since my childhood, I started praying, like a coward, like a villain. “Dear God, forgive me, free my daughter, but do not ask me to kill an innocent. I do not have Abraham’s mad obedience; I am only the basest kind of man. Have mercy, have mercy!”
This prayer did nothing to diminish my terror. Worse: I felt as ridiculous as a chicken destined for the dinner table begging the farmer to spare it.
I took out my phone. I realised that the back cover had moved slightly and that the battery had come out of its housing. The telephone had therefore been off, probably ever since I’d put it back in my pocket. I pushed the battery back inside in a panic, cursing my negligence; I should have either changed phone or put a strip of sticky tape on the lid to stop it slipping.
The screen showed some waiting messages. I checked my voicemail. The first was from Meriem. In a strangled voice, she asked me whether the… (she didn’t dare name him) had rung and if I had any news about Shehera. The second was also from my wife. “Why aren’t you answering, Aziz? Call me… I’m dying of fright… Call me, please…”
Her voice was exasperated and at the same time on the verge of tears.
My soul melted with shame. I almost interrupted the succession of messages.
“…So you think not answering your dearest friend on earth is funny, eh? Why are you doing this? …”
I stiffened when I heard the third message.
“…I am extremely disappointed in you, Aziz, extremely disappointed. I shall call again in nine minutes. If you do not pick up in nine minutes’ time, then nine will only be eight, and eight will only be seven… Speak to you soon. Hey, my boy, don’t try and be clever, and most importantly don’t tell you-know-who about our plans.”
The menu came up again. I looked at my watch in horror. I was shaking so hard I couldn’t work out how to get back to find out when the message had been recorded.
“Aziz… (Meriem was sobbing) What have you done? … The man rang me… He said that you had disappointed him a lot… that his disappointment always has a price… What does he mean? … Aziz, I called your office… Your colleague said you’d left the zoo (A hiccup interrupted her moaning)… Come home… My daughter, I want my daughter…”
I hung up again. I stood there, not moving, taking short gulps of air, refusing to grasp what my ears had heard. Nine minutes, one finger; eight minutes, another finger… How many minutes would it take until she lost all her fingers? It was like the relentless teacher during my childhood dictating a mathematical problem about taps that kept on running, trying desperately to fill up bathtubs riddled with holes. But in this case the water was replaced by my daughter’s blood. I shook my head to break off this obscene calculation, but to no avail.
The telephone rang. I held my mobile up to my ear, my senses all at sea. The man tutted a dissatisfied no no no.
“Why did you turn your phone off?”
“I had a problem with the battery,” I stammered. “Pl
ease…”
“You understood my warning? The stuff about deadlines? It’s very annoying, to tell you the truth. Deep down, I don’t wish you any harm.”
His tone was so normal that I misunderstood him. I let out a sigh of relief. I heard an irritated snigger.
“Hey, don’t get ahead of yourself! I told you I found it annoying, but not enough to forget my promises. Exactly fifteen minutes have elapsed since my warning. A first period of nine minutes and a second of eight. You’ve studied, so go ahead and calculate, given that the second period doesn’t merit any punishment because it hasn’t finished yet and because you’re chatting away with me right now.”
I didn’t react, my horrified mind refusing to bend to the madman’s reasoning.
“Anyway, Aziz, it’s not so bad! I’ve only removed one more finger, her left ring finger. Come on, no need to make a diplomatic incident of it! It’d be better if you kept your mind on our agreement if you want her to keep the most important part.”
His tone of voice was that of a doctor explaining learnedly to his patient that he has had to proceed with two or three unavoidable operations that were apparently unpleasant but had benign consequences.
My mouth uttered some garbled words.
“Pass… Pass me my daughter…”
“Why? Don’t you believe me? And you’re giving me orders now?”
His tone was puzzled, with just a hint of amusement – the cat taken aback by a rebellious mouse.
“No… no. Please let me talk to my daughter.”
“And will you do as you promised?”
I answered “Yes, yes!” and every nook of my soul was sincere.
“I’ll see what I can do. Don’t cut us off,” he said, then burst out laughing at his pun.
I was left standing there with my ear glued to the phone for a good minute. Then I picked up some moans that appalled me more than any scream.
