by Simon Pare
“Did he write the text?”
“Who else do you think it could be?”
Mathieu handed the phone back to his son-in-law. His tic had returned and was more febrile than ever. He pushed the unruly eyelid down hard.
“Have you done anything for his guy, Aziz?”
The grief-stricken father appeared to hesitate before protesting.
“No, of course not. What do you think he’d ask me to do for him?”
“That’s for you to tell me.”
“Go to hell! Firstly, I don’t owe you any explanations. And secondly, I haven’t done anything for him, all right? Where did you get that idea? Did he ask you to do something perhaps?”
“Why me?”
They looked each other up and down for a few seconds, resentfully mingling their silent lies. Mathieu was just opening his mouth when Latifa appeared, terrified.
“The phone rang, didn’t it?”
She stared at her son-in-law as if she held him responsible in advance for any coming disaster.
“Yes,” her husband replied in his son-in-law’s stead, “but it was a wrong number.”
The old man stood up and put his arms very tenderly around his wife’s shoulders.
“Go on, I’ll be with you in a few minutes.”
She groaned.
“Oh, this is all so awful, Mathieu.”
“Yes,” he replied simply, struggling not to cry.
He whispered a couple of words in his wife’s ear before closing the door behind her. He poured himself a glass of water while Aziz tapped away on the buttons of his mobile, probably setting it to vibrate.
The man who had once been a soldier sat down on his chair again. With the exhausted acquiescence of his companion in misfortune, he resumed the pathetic process of dissimulation from which he hoped at least some truth would emerge.
Otherwise, all he had to do was to kill his son-in-law. Pointless – but did he have a choice? – other than to earn a little more time for Shehera, a few bubbles of oxygen before she drowned.
It was that night, the night when he broke Tahar’s nose – although he didn’t know his first name yet – that his ‘conversion’ began.
Even now, as he sat opposite Shehera’s father beating about the bush, dreading having to announce to him that he has probably found out who the kidnapper is, he can think of no other word than the ridiculous ‘conversion’.
He hadn’t fallen suddenly to his knees with imploring words to a new God. No, he hadn’t needed to address any novel prayers to some brand new avatar of Yahwe or Allah, like the slippery formulas whispered by a child’s toy.
Yet overnight Mathieu had become incapable of torturing.
Later, when he rediscovered a little of his irony to fight off his despair at having betrayed his country, he distinguished two stages in this transmutation, which he described – to himself, of course, for he didn’t breathe a word of this to anyone else – using the Sunday school images of his childhood.
Instead of the Angel Gabriel, he received a visit from a weak-bladdered little boy who warned him, just by his screams, that he would soon be carrying a shame that would grow endlessly inside him like some ravenous embryo he would never be able to get rid of.
As for the bearer of these ‘good tidings’, it was no longer a bearded Jesus dying on the cross to save the human rabble but Tahar, tortured in a stinking room belonging to the DOP, a criminal among criminals who was trying, despite his terror, to kill himself in atonement for sins greater than his own life.
Mathieu became utterly disgusted with himself in the space of twenty-four hours. Years later, as he emerged noisily from a cheap restaurant, he found an amusing explanation for this complete turnaround. He’d been very hungry that day and the dish the waiter had brought him looked absolutely perfect in every respect: appearance, aroma, quantity… Anyway, he was getting ready to stuff his face when a tiny bit of snot dripped off the waiter’s nose and immediately sank into the delicious sauce that filled his plate. This was all it took for the meal to become instantly vile to Mathieu and impossible to swallow without throwing up.
That summed up his life in his own caricature of it until that fateful morning. At some stage in his childhood, some damned angel that was dying of boredom on the plains of paradise had squirted a long flow of snot into the pot where what should have been a fairly honourable future had been simmering for the little Breton lad. The contrast between the absolute innocence of the one and the limitless guilt of the other – the child and the fell – had, to his misfortune, allowed him to smell the ‘revolting dish’ he’d become. Since then, Mathieu, the wringer of bodies who had been indifferent to such considerations up to this point, could no longer stand himself. Worse: he disgusted himself.
When his Alsatian unit commander saw the prisoner’s broken nose, he tore a strip off him. Mathieu got out of it somewhat by stating that he had had a long and extremely informative conversation with the rebel.
“Your method works, sir. People tell their torturers all kinds of things when they start mollycoddling them!”
His superior’s blotchy jowls had twitched. The officer loosened the collar of his shirt by running a finger around his neck. He must have shaved a bit too close, Mathieu noticed, because there were some raw patches on the skin on his throat.
“What did he tell you?”
“Nothing particularly useful for the moment. Some vague stories about his childhood, the Koranic school he went to, his mother – that sort of thing. But give me one more night and I’ll winkle some information about his katiba out of him…”
“Why would he grass on his mates? Does he fancy you that much, sergeant?”
Mathieu had shrugged his shoulders, as if to say slyly: “I couldn’t give a damn – you’re the boss! There’s a real chance of extracting the information the colonel’s been longing for and it’ll be your fault if we fail…” The suspicious Alsatian had come round to his subordinate’s suggestion, but only reluctantly.
“Type me up a complete report of everything he told you last night, especially any details that could help us locate his home douar. If that helps us track down one of his relatives, who knows, maybe there’ll be some way of putting pressure on the bloke. We’ve got copies of the survivors’ statements. They all claim they don’t know who attacked them. Have a look through the papers again, just to check we haven’t missed anything important by mistake. The rest of the team and I’ll work hard on the guy and if we haven’t made any progress by this evening, you can take over for another night. Hey, don’t go falling in love with him though!” the Alsatian said in an attempt at a ribald joke. “There are more than enough women in Constantine or Sétif, not to mention all the fatmas around, if you’re into that kind of creature.”
“Witty one, sir!” Mathieu hissed as he turned on his heel, his stomach churning with fear at the decision he had just taken in the depths of his soul. A minute earlier it would have seemed not only insane, but also contrary to any moral sense he had left.
“One last thing!” the officer shouted. “Make him understand that our patience has just about run out. If he persists, explain to him that soon, as if by chance, he’ll try and escape and, obedient soldiers that we are, we will be forced, as the law provides, to shoot him dead after the customary warnings! The colonel gave us a week to get as much out of this zouave as we can, and we’ve wasted five days already.”
He guffawed, but his eyes, which had an unfamiliar glitter of distrust in them, did not join in with his mirth.
“Oh and by the way, you’re going to be on ‘fire’ duty. Some time since you last did it, eh? You’ve already broken your mate’s nose so you might as well finish the job.”
Mathieu saluted without bothering to point out the contradiction in threatening with death a man whose sole wish was to die.
The morning passed in a kind of terror that he had never experienced before. While he laboured over a report describing an imaginary conversation, he could hear Tahar’s scream
s through the breezeblock walls. In this army post in the open countryside, there was no record player to cover the prisoners’ howls of pain.
He sighed, bursting with anger at himself. The gods were real gamblers: they weren’t satisfied with his self-contempt; now he was turning all queer, no longer able to stand the screams that had until now formed the background noise to life in the DOP! He was tormented for much of the morning by the urge to have a stiff drink, but he resisted it, unwilling to face his superior’s bad mood.
Mathieu recognised every note of what was known as the ‘scale’ of screams. The most harrowing screams weren’t necessarily caused by the most extreme pain. On the contrary; suspects yelled more at the beginning of their interrogation, when they not only still had the strength but were expressing above all their terror at the suffering to come. He could recall a prisoner who had squealed like a pig having its throat slit when he received the first blows and kicks, but who a few days later could only wail imperceptibly when they held a soldering iron to the soles of his feet. A good interrogator had to have a keen ear to pick up quickly the kind of pain that his suspect could endure before talking. That particular fell, who’d spilled the beans after having both feet burnt with a soldering iron, had withstood the field magneto turned up to maximum voltage without flinching.
Tahar, to whom Mathieu had listened attentively during their ‘work’ on him, had reached the stage of whining punctuated by barks, panting and wheezing – signs of atrocious pain, which, apart from a miracle, still wouldn’t break him if his behaviour during the previous sessions was anything to go by. He must gradually be losing control of his sphincters; by now, he had probably, if not defecated, then at least urinated on himself.
Towards eleven o’clock the Alsatian came in to have a look at Mathieu’s report.
“You’re losing your touch, sergeant! This is bullshit – there’s nothing concrete in here!” he said after flicking through the two-page summary of Tahar’s supposed confidences. “That son of a bitch has been having you on. Apparently our mate lives in a little village surrounded by mountains, his mother loves her only son, and the head of the Koranic school was terribly strict… Well I never! Are you taking the piss, sergeant? Think there’s a shortage of mountain villages in Algeria, do you?”
However, all of a sudden, the officer’s anger subsided. Dropping the sheets of paper on the desk, he pulled a strange face.
“An Arab came by this morning and swore to the sentry that he was pretty sure he could identify our prisoner. Rumours spread fast around here and he thinks he knows who our captive is. Come with me – this could be our lucky day, who knows?”
In the room adjoining the interrogation room, which was nicknamed the ‘golden cage’, Mathieu caught sight of a white-faced young man, and it was clear from his frantically bobbing Adam’s apple that he was in a state of extreme agitation. The paleness of his features was accentuated by frizzy hair of the brightest ginger that Mathieu had ever seen. A soldier whispered in his ear, “Living proof that the Vikings squeezed a few cuddles out of the local women…” Mathieu thought bad-temperedly: There weren’t any Vikings in Algeria, you stupid prick – those were Vandals!
“Bring me a hood for the witness!” the officer ordered.
“There aren’t any, sir! We left them at headquarters.”
“Well, fix one up quick,” he spewed.
A few minutes later a soldier came back with a cement bag he’d just emptied of its contents. He cut two rough parallel holes in it with scissors and a third one for the mouth a little lower down.
“Come on, walk ahead of me,” the lieutenant ordered the man whose head had been covered with the dusty bag. “Don’t speak to the prisoner, say the bare minimum, and preferably answer yes or no when I ask you a question. If you’ve got any comments, wait until we’re out of the fell’s sight. I don’t want any stories or tricks, is that clear? You don’t need an interpreter, right?”
“No…” the redhead said, suddenly doubling over with coughing.
“Are you OK in there?” the Alsatian enquired almost kindly, patting the civilian on the back, but the muscles standing out on his neck showed how tense the soldier was.
“It’s nothing, it’s nothing, major,” the other man continued, “just some cement dust.”
The lieutenant smiled at his ‘promotion’, delighted by the witness’s servility. Ill at ease but curious, Mathieu followed the procession formed by the officer, the witness and two privates as reinforcements in case anything unforeseen happened.
“Yes, that’s him,” the Alsatian said in response to the man in the makeshift hood’s questioning gesture. “But you said you knew him?”
The man said nothing. He walked towards the naked prisoner trussed up on the plank. Mathieu hadn’t been wrong: the near-unconscious rebel stank of shit and urine. He wrinkled his nose in disgust as he remembered a military intelligence officer’s motto that had made him laugh the first time: “The shit of the prisoners we interrogate is like the smell of fresh bread to a baker – proof of a job well done. Can you imagine a baker feeling sick at the smell of his own bread?”
“Hey, hands off, you peasant!”
The witness had put his hand on the prisoner’s chin and was trying to wake him up. When the man didn’t obey, the furious lieutenant punched the witness in the back. The rebel opened his blurred eyes, uttering some indistinct ‘Yemma yemmas’. Drops of blood were trickling from his penis and there were some fresh purple belt marks on his chest. The team had worked long and hard on him by the look of it.
The man had taken off his bag and was screaming something at the prone man.
“What’s he jabbering on about? Is the fucker speaking in Arabic or Kabyle?” the lieutenant roared. “Get the interpreter in here right now. And keep him away from the prisoner!”
The ‘witness’ was shouting angrily and from time to time his voice broke down into splutters. His cheeks were grey with cement, which his tears turned black in places. The two privates stepped in between the two men, while Mathieu, overwhelmed by the newcomer’s grief, rushed outside to fetch the harki who usually served as their interpreter.
“He’s telling the prisoner that he’s seen his face now and one day he’ll kill him; one way or another he’ll pay for the others. He swears this by…”
The back-up soldier, a middle-aged man in fatigues wearing a traditional chèche rather than an army helmet, was fiddling with one end of his moustache to hide his emotion. This chap was no softie. He regularly attended suspects’ interrogations as an interpreter and wasn’t averse to lending a hand if permitted. Even though the lieutenant didn’t respect him (a harki was, according to him, disloyal by nature as he had betrayed once and was therefore likely to betray again), he appreciated his clear translations and his willing explanations that helped to disentangle the customs of the region.
“Sir, he also says that his father and mother, his brother, his wife and his three-year-old girl were all killed by this bloke and his fellagha accomplices. He says his father was the village constable… He says they had their throats slit like… burned like… This guy’s face, he’ll never… He says… he’ll never forget it… He says that… his daughter was called… I can’t understand everything he’s saying, sir…”
“So,” the Alsatian growled, “he didn’t know our fell at all before he saw him here?”
In the face of the lieutenant’s anger, the interpreter stammered, as if he’d been caught out: “Well… I don’t think so, sir…”
“So he was just having us on with that pack of lies that he knows something about this bloke here? What are you waiting for? Ask him.”
The disconcerted harki nibbled at his lower lip, as if he were caught in the crossfire between his superior’s rage, whose consequences were unpredictable, and this other, near-sacred rage of a human being deprived in one fell swoop of both his families, the family that had seen him being born and the other he had founded himself.
“Hey,
I’m talking to you, you lousy interpreter! Are you going to translate?”
“He’s talking about his daughter again… She was three years old, she was called…”
He pronounced the first name, commenting to himself emotionally, “It’s a beautiful name.”
“What’s all this crap about a name? I can’t understand what you’re muttering…”
The interpreter repeated the dead girl’s name, making sure he articulated it more carefully, like a schoolboy. Chilled by the strange scene taking place before his eyes, Mathieu rubbed his temple nervously. He recognised in his unsettled stomach the signs of the nauseating pity that sometimes overcame him by surprise, like an enemy waiting in ambush, when he was tormenting a suspect, so that he had to slink pathetically out of the interrogation room at the first excuse. He would have liked to have been brave enough to step forward, in a selfish, protective reaction, and put his arms around the shoulders of the man who was raging and lamenting the loss of his two families. Maybe – the idea seemed obscene at first because this man was an Arab, and then not so obscene after all – maybe if he shared the man’s mourning for his family, he might mourn his own family that he had loved so little, to the point of cutting his mother to the quick and falling out with his father for good… For the first time in a long while he felt an intense pain in his chest and a nostalgia for the world before he went into the army, before the torture and its base works, before this system of military obedience that was so handy for escaping individual infamy.
“Come on, you idiot, I couldn’t care less what the girl’s name is! Ask this arsehole,” the head of the unit screamed, “why he’s come and stuck his oar in if he hasn’t got any information for us!”
In his rage, the lieutenant had forgotten that the visitor could speak French. No longer able to keep quiet, Mathieu whispered as neutrally as he could: “Sir, the witness isn’t a witness. He’s made up a story just so he could get close enough to identify one of his family’s murderers.”
The officer’s small, blue eyes looked daggers at him, as if to say: “What’s this got to do with you?” before, wide with frustration, they turned to the so-called informer.
