Abduction

by Simon Pare

  When evening came and he had got rid of the kid by putting him back in sickbay, Mathieu had fallen back on his tried-and-tested method of getting completely plastered. He woke up the next morning with a migraine the size of Algeria but afflicted nonetheless by a new itch more unforgiving than the worst parasite: shame.

  Only once that day had he tried to defend himself. Come on, you’re exaggerating. I’m only torturing to get information; I’d never abuse anyone just for kicks. You know, I’ve never helped rip off a rebel’s ear, for example, to earn a round of pastis from a beaming barman! I’m a soldier; I’m fighting for my country and the free world…

  He heard his answer – and there was mocking pity in the retort from the scoundrel crouching somewhere deep inside his brain: And that’s your excuse for the kid?

  It was as if the entire moral circuit that he thought no longer existed inside him had suddenly been activated again, its needle stuck at maximum voltage, the tortured boy flicking a wall switch with a potential accomplice in the little sniffling Breton boy fighting not to spend eternity in hell. No matter how often Mathieu sniggered and repeated to himself, “Listen up, you three fucking policemen in my life – father, mother and You, you incomprehensible clown spying on me from up there in Your clouds! When I interrogate someone, I’m like a septic tank: I stink to high heaven, I disgust anyone who approaches me. But who’d dare claim that a septic tank isn’t useful?” that which he had almost instantly baptised the moral magneto had not loosened its grip.

  Hunched on the kitchen chair, Mathieu coughs. Half a century later, that damned shame is still alive and well, polluting his nightmares, clinging to what is left of his soul like incurable ringworm. He has never told anyone any of this in detail, not even the person he has loved – and loves – more than anything in the world: Latifa. No love could survive the proximity to such filth. So it is out of the question that Aziz here, whose sole attribute is to be Latifa’s daughter’s husband, should hear it from his lips.

  Time is short, so all he says to the father of his granddaughter is: We carried out a large-scale operation after a tip-off.

  However, the informer had been wrong on two counts. Firstly, about the basics: there was no meeting of high-ranking FLN officials, but rather a movement by six platoons of rebel troops preparing to carry out a huge wave of reprisals, ordered by local FLN chiefs and completely out of proportion to earlier operations, against villages in a region suspected of supporting a rival movement called the Algerian National Movement, the MNA. And, secondly, about the date: the event – the massacre – had taken place two days before the date the prisoner had given.

  The old soldier sighs; he is, as they say in this country, eaten away by sadness and regret. He shifts on his chair before relieving his aching stomach with a discreet fart.

  Mathieu looks at his watch – how fast time flies, as fast as the kidnapper’s knife on the girl’s fingers! – and whispers a silent entreaty: “Li’l Robert, my failed privateer who used to have so much tenderness to spare, if you’re going to stir up the muck in my heart some more, please help me to speak about Tahar in front of this Algerian bastard…”

  He brings his hands together and rubs his phalanges, all the while praying intensely: “… Without betraying my friend, please, without betraying him.”

  God must be hooked on luck, for Mathieu had only come across ‘his’ rebel by accident around the side of an earthen bank several hours’ march north of the huge peak. The exhausted patrol had given up the hunt and he was merely looking for a sheltered spot, firstly to relieve himself and then to take off his boots and rest his aching feet a bit.

  That day the new captain had decided that every available soldier, including the DOP staff and the pen-pushers, had to take part in the hunt. “We’ve got to take advantage of what’s happened in the villages in the Béni Ilemane area and then, I can assure you, the battle with those FLN criminals will be as good as won. Or at least the one we’re fighting to win over public opinion back home and around the world, which has been a fiasco until now. Those sand niggers have done us a real favour this time, gentlemen!”

  The officer’s eyes were shining with excitement and he pointed a threatening finger at the soldiers. “This place is going to be crawling with journalists in under twenty-four hours. So get out there and hunt, and make sure you bring me back some of those responsible for this slaughter alive – and I mean alive. If you catch one, take care not to rough him up too much. We need those vermin so we can show them off left, right and centre. It’ll be headline news around the world, I swear, and those rags back home that spit on our army will be forced to admit that they’ve been misled by these FLN murderers ever since this trouble began!”

  Someone objected that the fells had a day’s march on them. The officer barked at him that he didn’t need reminding of that and that he was counting on them to pull off a miracle. “You DOP blokes have got a free rein! Interrogate anyone you want – Kabyles, Arabs, their donkeys, their dogs. There’s been so much bad blood between Kabyle and Arab douars around here for so long, there’s a good chance some bloke’ll cough up some useful information!”

  Curled up tight, his boots brown with coagulated blood and his old English .303 rifle thrown down at his feet, the fighter in ALN fatigues hadn’t lifted a finger in self-defence when the Frenchman pointed his weapon at him.

  Something was wrong; the catch had been too easy! The man shouldn’t have been there, he’d had all the time in the world to melt away into the jumble of ridges, passes and thick undergrowth. There was no reason for fortune to smile on Mathieu and his fellow soldiers like this, but it had: the Breton, short of breath, was immediately convinced that the guy in his sights had taken part in the massacre.

  The man, as though oblivious to everything around him, still didn’t react to the shouted order to stand up and put his hands in the air. It was only after he’d received several furious kicks in the back and sides that he obeyed with some short whimpers that sounded more like mechanical reflexes from his body than real complaints. His face, half hidden behind several days’ stubble, was drawn and his wide-open eyes appeared not to take in any of the landscape of stunted olive trees. After retrieving his prisoner’s rifle with the usual precautions, Mathieu had yelled, in a voice filled with a strangely revengeful joy that he could only explain to himself much later, “Come on, you bastard. Walk ahead of me – it’ll be dark soon! One move and I’ll kill you, and you can ask at that Allah of yours’ reception desk which basement of hell he plans to send you to!”

  The man seemed to rouse from his torpor as if pricked by a needle. His pupils were bright with hope.

  “You’ll shoot me if I try to run away?”

  The stranger had spoken with a harsh accent, rolling his ‘r’s, but his French sounded decent. Mathieu had knitted his brow in satisfaction: his catch was all the more special because the resistance fighter was probably an ‘intellectual’, a cadre, not just some illiterate peasant. He had responded with a chuckle.

  “You bet – and twice rather than once. Bastards like you deserve to be shot without warning and then thrown to the jackals as an appetizer!”

  “Kill me then. I’m going to try and run away…”

  He had then repeated the words in a strange tone of voice – a beseeching tone – but his whole body was trembling with fear. (“So why didn’t you make a run for it earlier, you fucker?” Mathieu thought, taken aback.)

  “Please kill me.”

  Then, pointing to a sort of hole on the side of the bank: “Over there in the thistles… end of story. I deserve no better.”

  Mathieu was speechless. The man was addressing him as though he were begging him for a favour! The French soldier had been overcome with anger. He had hit the fell on the temple with the barrel first, then pushed him to the ground and then smashed him repeatedly with the butt, avoiding the head this time so as not to disobey the captain’s orders.

  “Huh? You think… hem… you can get out o
f it like that, do you? After everything you and your mates did up there… A bullet… um… in the head and it’s all over? A little patience, mate… um… you’ll see, we’ll take care of you back at the barracks all right…”

  They brought the prisoner back in an army lorry trussed up by his ankles and wrists like a sheep, having first notified their superiors by field telephone. The soldiers took it in turns to smack the fell on the backside while shouting at the top of their voices “A mile on foot wears out your boots, a mile in a Jeep wears out your arse…” but, heeding their officer’s warnings, they didn’t hit him very hard. Worn out from the hours spent trekking in the sun, some of them were annoyed that they couldn’t take it out more on the Arab at their feet and from time to time a sly boot would come down on his coccyx. A beaming Mathieu protested but watched the rebel’s face eagerly for a sign of supplication – which still didn’t come, even though the corner of the man’s mouth was twisted with terror.

  Mathieu had started the day in the horrifying lanes of Mechta Kasbah and had ended it here in this lorry, his heart flooded with a feeling of relief, as if God himself, by allowing him to arrest a murderer like this, had decided to wipe away the shame that had ruined his life since they had tortured the little Arab boy.

  In the military lorry taking them and the bound prisoner back to HQ, he had been very careful not to dwell too long on why he was so excited. Was he not, he thought, trying to sum things up for himself, responsible for an arrest that would probably earn him the captain’s congratulations and maybe a promotion to Constantine, whose brothel, just behind the municipal theatre, was famed throughout Algeria?

  Even as he was yelling with his comrades, he had tried to re-establish contact with ‘Li’l Robert’. But the boy had refused to answer and the man had been scared that he might have fallen silent for good since that bloody carry-on with the kid.

  That morning, long before he had captured the fell, when Mathieu had seen the dozens of mutilated corpses piled up like rotting meat in the town square, their throats slit, battered to death with axes and picks or shot, he had felt sullied by having witnessed such a spectacle…

  …and at the same time secretly delighted that he’d been given this chance to assure himself that there were “of course” people far worse than him in the rebels’ ranks “and (he added, aware of how important this observation might prove on those depressing evenings) by a long way, mate, by a long way!”

  A few feet from the corpses, he caught himself mumbling the opening words of his defence speech in front of judge ‘Li’l Robert’. You see, you idiot, we were right to torture that fell shit and his brat! Maybe we could have saved these fucking fells that bring tears to your eyes if we’d got down to it earlier? Answer me – these lazy good-for-nothings are bigger savages than us, eh?

  ‘Li’l Robert’ hadn’t reacted. Suffocating with the almost liquid smell of putrefaction, Mathieu had covered his nostrils with one hand and beaten away the thick clouds of flies swirling around the dead with the other. He had wandered around the wretched stone huts where women were scratching at their faces and wailing in grief while their terrified children clung to their multicoloured dresses and soldiers were busy either dragging together corpses or nosing around for clues. Scattered objects – cooking pots, kanouns, shoes, burnous – obstructed the steep lanes, which were slippery with trails of blood. A spade or a fork here and a hammer or kitchen utensil there had spots of a greasy, whitey-grey substance on them, and Mathieu did not immediately realise that it was human brains. When the crows grew bolder and picked at an obscenely undressed body, he kicked out angrily at them and, a couple of times, hit the birds, weighed down by their revolting feast, in the head. Several Sikorsky helicopters landed, each disgorging a bunch of top brass and feverish officers flanked by their bodyguards.

  A young soldier, who had been given the task of counting the victims and had reached the figure of three hundred, started shouting, “What the fuck are we doing in this country? This is a slaughterhouse… Let’s just kill them, kill all these Arabs! This can’t be real…” before receiving a resounding slap from a sergeant and breaking out in sobs.

  “Shit, it’s lucky they’re not French!” a journalist cried out after slipping over in a pool of blood. Having clambered to his feet again, the potbellied maniac examined his stained raincoat with disgust. Then, a cigarette dangling from his lips, he resumed his casual stroll around a group of teenagers who had had their throats slit and their penises and scrotums cut off. Their faces were frozen in their final horror-filled expression. Only the youngest among them, twelve or thirteen years old, his head nestling in the arms of some other poor devil, seemed asleep. It looked as if all it would take was a gentle tap on the shoulder to startle him awake.

  There was something strangely beautiful about his sulky expression. Suddenly captivated, the photographer snapped several shots of him. The scar on his throat was barely visible, as if his murderer had been affected in spite of himself and couldn’t bring himself to disfigure the fine-featured boy’s face. Trying not to look at him too much, Mathieu was nonetheless struck by his vague resemblance to the boy they had tortured. He shrugged his shoulders, deciding with a confused sense of panic that this was no surprise given that Arabs, like Blacks, all looked pretty much the same.

  He almost broke into a run when a dishevelled old woman, her face scarred with wrinkles and traditional tattoos, suddenly walked up to the heap and, her shoulders convulsed with sobs, attempted to move aside one body after another, slowly at first, then forcibly. Mathieu only looked round when he was already fifty yards down the road; the woman, her arms and dress red with blood, seemed to have finally found what she was looking for. Sitting on her backside, she had grabbed the hand of a corpse and, letting out a series of unbearably sorrowful guttural moans, she showered it with kisses.

  It was the first time Mathieu had seen so many massacred civilians in one place. Of course, he had taken part in some skirmishes that had ended in losses, sometimes considerable ones, on both sides. But he had seen little of the real war on the ground, even if he had his fair share of stories, from hearsay or the files that passed through his hands, of Arab villages razed to the ground by mortar shelling or burnt down with napalm (the pilots called them halal meat barbecues!), of suspects tortured by amateurs and then strung up on trees in retaliation for FLN operations during which French soldiers had had their throats slit and been castrated. Up until that point, his work in Algeria had involved being cooped up in a room or cellar with prisoners his superiors had labelled dangerous outlaws. It was his duty to break them quickly so that their even more harmful associates could be neutralised.

  Little by little, Mathieu had reached the conclusion that it was down to their own (incidentally stupid) stubbornness that certain suspects died after an overly intensive interrogation session, since everyone eventually spilt the beans. Wherever they now found themselves, roasting in the flames of hell or polishing their cocks between a houri’s thighs, those fanatical mujahideen only had their own lack of judgment to blame. “If, once we’ve started tearing out your nails, you think you can still resist us, you’re wrong, mate, you’re wrong…” he would sing to the tune of Saint-Germain-des-Près, with a certain soft spot for the most unyielding – who all gave in, the poor fools, when he got started on the second hand. He was against pointless violence and could not remember having tortured anyone more than he needed to. That was maybe why he had a reputation for reliability among his superiors.

  Basically he didn’t have anything to reproach himself for as he had always been just a humble and le-gi-ti-mate helper (he had begun to love the latter adjective passionately) in a large-scale law and order operation that was beyond him. All the rest – the fate of Algeria’s Europeans, the future of the country’s institutions, the patriotism on both sides, the atrocious situation of the natives, the discussions with an alleged ‘third force’, autonomy or independence, etc. – left him utterly cold. In any case, he hadn�
��t read a newspaper for ages. One of his colleagues from the DOP, a hard case from Alsace with a Resistance medal, theorised about their attitude, stating that when you were up to your neck in crap, you weren’t going to start devouring the tabloids that told you what the shit was made of! “Nothing but short-sighted policies for a land full of Arabs. Ever since cherries had stems, we soldiers have had to obey. In other words: we’re there to wipe the Republic’s arse when it’s shat its laws and decrees. Full stop! So, gentlemen, we’ll just get on with our work and all those lying politician clowns in Paris can go fuck themselves, as can all these pieds noirs who pretend not to notice that they’re only in charge in Algeria and their Oh-what-a-lovely-French-cottage-I-have-in-Africa attitude can only last because of the work we do on their behalf in stinking cellars!”

  As he left the village, the Breton had started walking faster to escape for a moment from the horror behind him. At the end of a long path stood a house that was a little less crude than the others, its front still smoking. A group of soldiers were poking around inside. One of them told him that an entire family had been massacred there – the village constable, a teenage boy, two women and a girl about three years old. “It’s the only house where they killed a child this small. They must have had quite a grudge against the policeman. They tortured him for a long time. Maybe they thought he was an informer… Want to go inside? It’s not a pretty sight…” Mathieu excused himself saying he had orders and beat a swift retreat.

  He stopped halfway between the douar and the policeman’s house. The scenery was magnificent and kindly; on one side was a eucalyptus wood hemmed in by two hills and, on the other, plots of land dotted with a delicate mix of daisies and poppies. The hedges of prickly pears indicated that there were native douars close by. As always, the spectator noticed, nature could not give a damn about clashes between humans; in less than twenty-four hours most of the bodies would have already been buried under the ground, the smell of sun-scorched grass would have replaced that of decaying carcasses, and a single rain shower would suffice to wash away the last spots of blood and brain. A wave of resentment rose up inside him: why couldn’t these people have been decimated while he was on leave last month? Why did they think they were allowed to lodge themselves, uninvited, among his jumbled thoughts with their hideous faces craving explanations?