by Simon Pare
I knew, since I had already been so myself, that he would be impressed by the sight: the second floor was made up of a single large room and in the place where the window must originally have been, an entire wall was missing!
“Did those sons of bitches really make off with a wall? But why take one from the second floor?”
I held out the torch, which he was requesting with impatient gestures. Approaching the drop with careful steps, he shone the light on the wall that used to form an angle with the one that had disappeared. Abdou gave a short chuckle of admiration.
“Seems like those rogues cut through the concrete like butter. The man who pulled this off deserves the Nobel Prize for plunder!”
He turned to face me, shining the beam of light into my face. I blinked, dazzled.
“You’re scared of heights by the look of it. Come on, come over here, there’s nothing to fear. Look, hold on to me and show me this great building plot of yours that is going to make us rich!
He pointed the torch out at the black horizon. My hand plunged into the inside pocket of my jacket. My heart was beating so fast that I felt quite dizzy, as if too much blood were suddenly rushing to my head. Misreading my hesitation, the man came over to me and put a protective arm around my shoulders.
“Come on,” he said, “there’s really nothing to fear. After all, it isn’t the edge of the Grand Canyon!”
My hand was pinned in my inside pocket by his arm. As I tried to free the knife, I actually made a movement that span me so that my back was pressed against the informer’s stomach. He stiffened with surprise, waiting for my reaction. I didn’t dare pull away immediately for fear that he would discover the knife before I could get into position to stab him with it. My neighbour misunderstood the reason behind my docility. He moved his pubis closer to my backside and, his voice suddenly shrill, mumbled, “I think you and I will get along just wonderfully. I know how to go about it, I’ll do you nothing but good…”
I felt his erect penis rubbing against my behind. Taken aback, I burst out laughing. The man pressed himself further against me, in doing so bringing us closer to the drop. He pulled out his penis with the hand holding the torch while frantically searching for my belt buckle with the other.
“Laughing, eh… You’ve got a nice backside… Prepare for paradise to enter into you…”
I laughed even harder until tears started to blur my vision. All of a sudden, I pulled away. He didn’t spot the knife immediately. I was still laughing.
“So while I’m planning to kill you, all you can think of is screwing me?”
“What? A knife? So you don’t like…? What the hell’s going on?”
I ripped the torch out of his hand. Making the most of his astonishment, I drove him back with the point of my weapon to within a few inches of the edge. Eyes bulging and penis dangling, the man glanced behind him.
“Hey, stop mucking around, I thought you wanted to… You were the one leading me on, for fuck’s sake! Watch out – I’m going to fall off!”
He sized up with his eyes whether he could make it past me. I shook my head, waving the knife about. He scolded me, more in amazement than fear.
“What are you, a terrorist or a queer? Or both at once? Do you realise who I am?”
He continued, his voice grating, his certainty fast evaporating.
“You don’t look like a terrorist. You made up all that stuff about the building plot, right? What do you want from me? I’m your neighbour, and neighbours are sacred to us!”
I remained silent. Behind him was the vast darkness of the Algerian night, full of terror and murder, studded with the odd star and, in the distance, the lights of the airport. My stomach was in such knots that I could feel an acidic liquid mounting into my mouth.
“Is that how you went about it with the kids during the riots in October ’88?” I whispered. “You tortured them first and then raped them, or was it the other way round?”
Choking, the man barked out, “You’re spouting complete rubbish! ’88 is ages ago, prehistoric! With everything else that’s happened since then, you still have time to think about ancient history like that? It’s not true anyway – I never took part in any torture. I’m just an ordinary official in the security services… Hey, don’t push me, please, or I’ll go crashing to the ground…”
“Don’t lie. Tell me the truth!”
“Who the hell are you to judge me, you shitty intellectual! What did you ever do to protect your country?”
I couldn’t think of any riposte to my neighbour’s ironic grimace. So, taking a quick breath, I stabbed him for the first time, in the shoulder, saving my strength though. Like a child, he yelled out a pointless, high-pitched “You hurt me, you fucker!”
Through my teeth I said, “Shut up or I’ll stick this through your eye!”
In a defensive reflex, he put his hands in front of his face as he carried on moaning that he was an honest man and a patriot. But the pain in his shoulder must have been too much for him, for he lowered his arms.
I wasn’t scared anymore and a muted anger took hold of me. If this man wasn’t guilty, then I was all the more so!
“Tell me the truth now or I’ll bleed you dry. If you don’t lie to me, then maybe I’ll let you live. Did you or did you not rape teenagers in October ’88?”
“What’s it got to do with you? They were a bunch of young louts! They wanted to set the whole country ablaze. We couldn’t let them get away with it. Your wife and you could sleep safely because we did all the dirty work. We just… we just taught those faggots a bit of a lesson!”
His voice petered out.
“Hey, it wasn’t just me doing it; I was just an underling! Why don’t you go after the ones who gave the orders? Anyway, that mob of rioters deserved everything they got! You’ve seen how they’ve ruined the country since ’88, with their damn democracy, the bombings and the fucking GIA. You’re from a good family – don’t tell me you didn’t want the best for your country! When all’s said and done, I was just doing my duty!”
Abdou tried to put his penis away. Waving my knife, I ordered, “Leave your thing out so it can cool down a bit. And please don’t tell me you’re shy! You were talking about faggots…”
“Yes, faggots! Real faggots who’d have joined the Islamist resistance, I swear by the face of God!”
His sly manner suggested there was some kind of complicity between us.
“The ones who were scared of the bath or the cloth or electricity presented their arses…”
“You’re sure they were the ones wanting it…”
“Why would I lie? You know I fear God and his prophets. They were pissing themselves with fear. A bunch of yellow-bellied thieves and vandals. In any case, they didn’t have a choice. It was either that or be forced to sit on the neck of a lemonade bottle. We were just following orders. Don’t act as if you didn’t know! You know it’s always been that way in Algeria!”
“How many of them did you fuck?”
“How many?”
The question appeared to shock him. A malicious smile flickered at the corners of his mouth.
“Why are you asking me? You’re not allowed to ask things like that!”
“Answer me. How many did you fuck?”
“I can’t remember. Four, five. Some just…” (He pointed to his penis.)
“Did you enjoy it?”
Abdou cleared his throat with an unconvincing little cough that was both embarrassed and thoughtful.
“Looking for a reason to kill me, neighbour? I’ve got three sons and a wife, don’t forget.”
“Answer. Did you enjoy it?”
Squinting down at his groin again, he noticed that his penis was still grotesquely tumescent. We both smiled in an unusual moment of male solidarity. For the first time he was scared of me. His voice wavered.
“Forgive me, brother, I am only a man. With a man’s weaknesses…”
“So am I, brother. I’m only a man, with a man’s weaknesses.
I’m not really any better than you, but unfortunately for you I love my daughter…”
“Your daughter? What’s she got to do with it?”
And with the point of the knife and with no further explanation, I pushed him over the edge as he shouted, “You promised you’d spare me! We were under orders. You know that… I had to obey!” He tried to grab hold of the sleeve of my raincoat. For a split second, his hand slid along, but couldn’t hold on to, the blade of the knife.
There was a dull thud. I had the feeling that it echoed around the valley. I felt a new surge of fear, followed – to my surprise and disgust – by an erection that horrified me almost as much as the sound of the fall. For a second, I spread my arms wide as if to show potential spectators that I wasn’t responsible for my member’s reaction. A comical piece of self-justification, which I stifled at the very last moment, died on my lips. No, this isn’t me, this filthy pig who’s got a hard-on from killing. I do know myself! I feverishly put the knife away in my raincoat before realising that I shouldn’t have done – there was bound to be some blood on the knife that would stain the fabric. I managed to stifle a sob of pity for the man I had just murdered with such ease. He didn’t deserve it, even if he did deserve it.
I ran down the stairs. I swept the floor with the torch beam, searching for the body. At last I found it, but not where it ought to have been. Abdou had dragged himself a dozen yards towards the skeleton of a machine. I heard moans mingled with calls for help and snatches of the Shahada, the Muslim profession of faith. I knew then that all my resolve would desert me if the dying man looked me in the eye and begged me to spare him. The man exuded a smell of excrement. Grabbing the hammer, I dealt him a first blow, then a second, to the back of the skull.
An age-old thought (reaching back to the time before I became a killer) tried to surface, but I throttled it in irritation. I wanted whatever the cost to remain in the state of heightened emotions, broken only by the reaction of my member which, like some refractory animal, had stayed as stiff as a minaret. I turned the body over and wedged the head between two stones. I took some photos of the corpse with my mobile by the sulphur-yellow light of the torch. With his hair dishevelled from the fall and the hammer blows, the dead man looked up at me with a shocked expression, as if to exclaim: Come on, is this some kind of joke?
I was almost sick when I spotted the traces of blood on my raincoat, some of them dark, others lighter-coloured and fatty-looking. Brain maybe. Don’t be sick here – that’d be another DNA sample you leave behind! I returned to my car, crumpled my raincoat into a ball and stuffed it into a plastic bag. I had a strange sensation as I put the key in the ignition. I didn’t stop to analyse it, but I was struck by a feeling that it was something absolutely crucial. I made it to the motorway in a kind of daze. I drove for a good twenty minutes before I reached the capital’s main rubbish tip.
When I left it again, I was coughing so hard my lungs felt as if they were going to burst and my eyes were weeping tears that were sticky with all the dirt in Algiers, but I had got rid of the knife and hammer, and the bloody raincoat was already being reduced to ashes.
I stopped again a little further on. After soaking a piece of shammy leather in detergent from a bottle in my boot, I set about vigorously rubbing the door handles, the dashboard and anything else the rapist might have touched. When I’d taken the wheel again, my phone rang. It was Mathieu asking me curtly to come home as quickly as possible because Meriem was feeling ill. I stammered something before hanging up on him in mid-sentence.
When I reached the foot of our block of flats, a strange shudder ran through me, as if, quite unconsciously, my body was trying vainly to rearrange the load of grief weighing down on its shoulders. My sacrilegious penis participated in its own way in the burial of my soul by curling up between my testicles. The murderer I had become climbed the stairs with a heavy tread, counting them off in a sort of funeral prayer. On the first landing, the idea that had been threatening for a while to clear its way through the sludge in my brain finally showed its snout: You’re horrified because you’ve discovered you enjoy killing, right?
The novice murderer didn’t attempt to defend himself; that was pointless. The last thing that occurred to him before he opened the door and found the woman he loved again was that he had kept his part of the bargain. A life for a life (no, two lives for a life, he corrected himself, his own, which was now worthless, and Abdou’s, in exchange for his daughter’s). It remained to be seen whether the kidnapper would cheat or not.
The latter hadn’t rung yet. In the distance, as wistful as the lost happiness of childhood, rose the call to evening prayers, the last of the day. The longer innocent man hung his head, overwhelmed.
“Dear God, whoever You may be, You put my daughter in the hands of this sadist and therefore I beseech You to force Your Satan to keep his word.”
When I put my hand on Meriem’s shoulder, she mumbled that I ought to have been at her side, that she could feel herself dying and that this was proof to her that her little girl was being harmed. I couldn’t come up with any response to this.
Mathieu and his wife were in the kitchen. When she saw me, the latter got up and left the room without a word, too demoralised to show me again how little esteem she held me in. My father-in-law offered me a sandwich. I started nibbling at it with the impression that I was chewing soil.
I said, “I’ve made some tea. Do you want some?”
Mathieu nodded his head ponderously. He waited for me to serve him some tea before asking me, as if by chance, “Aziz, have you done something for… for him?”
“Sorry?”
“You understood the question.”
“Nothing, nothing at all. What a strange thought!”
Carefully I set the kettle down. Despite my fears, my hands didn’t give me away. I avoided Mathieu’s eyes. The old man sat there, concentrating on stirring his tea. From where I was standing, I could see the top of his head with its fine hair like a baby’s.
“Yes, it is a strange thought, isn’t it,” he repeated in the same weary voice. “Unfortunately, it’s not mine.”
“Oh yes?”
I suddenly felt both cold and headachy at once. Mathieu/Ali was now talking to me in Arabic, as if attempting to force me into confiding in him in my mother tongue.
“Believe it or not, he rang me as well. And he told me he’d… asked you – these were his exact words – to do him a little favour. He didn’t tell me what kind. What ‘favour’ was it, Aziz?”
I held his gaze.
“Nothing. I haven’t done anything for that guy. Who do you really believe in all of this – me or the kidnapper?”
“Aren’t you waiting for his call right now?”
“No… Yes, of course I am! I’m waiting for his call, like you, like Meriem…”
I tried to alter my tone of voice, but it had escaped my control, gone all high-pitched and even more false-sounding.
“All of us just sitting here waiting for that damn phone to ring! Why on earth would you think such crazy things?”
Mathieu didn’t react to my protests. He carried on stirring his tea nervously as if the sugar wouldn’t dissolve.
“In passing, he told me that tomorrow it would be my turn to be invited, to use his expression, to ‘please’ him.”
I gave a start because the man had stifled a retch. He had gone pale and his liver spots stood out more clearly against his pallid skin. My anger dissipated all of a sudden.
“Did he explain what he wanted you… you to do, Mathieu?”
“No.”
We were silent for a while, crushed by our misfortune. When I got up from my chair, he called to me in his new voice – broken, older than ever.
“Wipe your feet, Aziz. You’ve brought… too much mud into the house. Some good detergent will get it off.”
My eyes veered down to the floor. My ribcage felt as if it had been seized in an iron grip – my shoes had a generous spattering of mud on
them and the right-hand one also had reddish rings on it.
I found the strength to say, “Thanks. I’ll go and clean them.”
“Hold on, I need to talk to you. Shut the kitchen door and sit down.”
“But… what if the phone in the… rings?”
“Don’t worry. I’d hear it ring even if I were buried under several layers of concrete. Shut the door and come back over here.”
I did as he said with the docility of a child. My father-in-law had at last stopped torturing his spoon.
“I think I know who he is. And then…”
He raised his light-grey eyes clouded with tears to my face.
“…I also have to tell you something about your wife.”
Part II
From the way Aziz is looking at me, I can tell that he’d prefer to think of me as a doddering old fool. My son-in-law’s aged ten years in less than twenty-four hours. I think I like him, for he’s not too stupid (nor too intelligent, mind you) and he looks after his family just about adequately. But there’s no doubting that he’s not overly fond of me. Sometimes I can read the question clearly in his eyes: who exactly are you and why did you settle in this weird country of mine?
I don’t have the time to feel sorry for him anymore. My tired heart feels too constricted for that. It’s already bursting with the incredible grief I have felt ever since my granddaughter was kidnapped. Bursting: I use the word quite literally, since my chest is relentlessly assaulted by a pain like the onset of a heart attack.
I try to breathe more gently, but it’s no use. I just feel all the more keenly the painful fragility, close to breaking point, of the pump that stubbornly continues to supply the oxygen to my bloodstream.
I mustn’t die. No: I forbid myself to die as long as Shehera is in the hands of that madman.
And after that? After that, I think I’d agree to leave this world with all the gratitude of someone in the last throes of cancer for his final dose of morphine.
After all I’ve been through, I didn’t think that I was capable of feeling anything with such overwhelming intensity anymore. I have already experienced the enormity of other emotions, especially love – or, when I was younger, hate. But nothing comes close to how I have felt since yesterday, particularly since that last phone call.
