by Simon Pare
He stood up, defeated. The kidnapper had lied to him. His daughter was probably already dead. A dark shroud replaced the daylight. He opened his eyes wide, at the same time emptying his chest: in front of him, less than ten yards away, yawned the void.
The void, with its promise of permanent peace, stripped of remorse.
Still clutching the pistol, he took a step towards deliverance.
See, it isn’t hard, chuntered a corner of his brain.
The telephone rang. He didn’t recognise the ringtone. He shuddered and looked around him before realising that the device was stowed in his pocket. He flicked it open. Displayed on the screen were two letters, initials perhaps.
“Is it you?” enquired a voice when he pushed the call button. “Do we do as planned? First, though, I’m going to have a bit of fun…”
The voice let out a coarse guffaw.
“It’s halal because it’s war booty…And I’ll get rid of the body at the dump tonight. No one will be any the wiser. Hey, old man, have you lost your tongue or something? Hang on… It is you? Where are you?”
The line went dead. A few seconds later, the same ringtone went off again. Once more, Aziz took the call in a daze.
“What the hell’s going on? I can hear your ringtone… You’re out on the terrace, right? You’re not the old man, eh? How did you make it up here? Hey, butt-face, I’m talking to you!”
The inside door of the laundry room had opened. From behind the wire mesh of the second door, an unshaven man in his early thirties armed with a sawn-off shotgun was shouting at him.
“What’s that in your hand? Answer me or I’ll blow your balls off!”
“Nothing – just a telephone.”
“Are you taking the mickey? I’m talking about the other hand. It’s the old man’s gun, isn’t it?”
The accomplice pointed his gun at him.
“What old man?”
Just then, a voice called out from inside.
“Is that you, Dad? Dad, he wants to kill me!”
The fellow turned round and yelled, “Shut up, tart! I’d have been better off fucking you, with a rag in your gob!”
The thug went down in two movements, initially sprawling down the side of the wire mesh door with the first shot to the stomach, then onto his back after the second bullet, fired point-blank into the mouth that had insulted the girl. A spurt of blood and some pieces of flesh soiled the father’s fist, but he didn’t even notice.
“Help, Dad!”
He thought that the key would refuse to open the wire mesh door. It didn’t. The oxygen that his lungs were forcing themselves to gulp down had congealed to a thick substance.
Stepping over the body, Aziz saw nothing of the first room, apart from a camp bed and a chair. The air smelled foul, musty with mould and excrement. The door to the second room was open.
His daughter let out a high-pitched whine. He caught her just as the stack of tins collapsed. He almost passed out; he didn’t remember his child’s body being so heavy. The teenager choked on her tears. As nothing else came to mind, Aziz whispered, “Daddy’s here, Daddy’s here…”
“He wanted to… then kill me… there’s an old man as well… he’s cruel… he’s going to come… Kill them, Dad, kill them…”
He hugged her tightly to him with her feet a good foot off the ground, lifting her up to leave some slack in the rope encircling her neck. Shehera’s arms were tied behind her back, but he spotted the bloody bandage wrapped around her left hand.
“Try not to move – I’ll take the rope off first.”
His daughter carried on sobbing, haemorrhaging fat tears, and he had no tourniquet to stem them. Despite the surrounding stench, he smelt Shehera’s heartrending child’s scent through her sweater and he struggled to stop himself weeping too. “She hasn’t got a lisp anymore, my princess! As soon as possible, I’ll take her to the zoo to see Lucette. Will she remember Lucette, though?” he forced himself to think, horrified by the absurdity of the dykes his mind was erecting against the infinite sorrow that threatened to swamp him. Moving his foot forward to shift his daughter’s weight onto his right arm, the father began, with his left hand, to loosen the knot in the rope. A new fit of panic gripped him at the sound of breathing. The revolver was lying on the floor and he was defenceless! It took him one more breath to realise that it was his own breathing.
“He took the tape off my mouth… He said he wanted to hear my fear… that it gave him pleasure… Daddy, oh Daddy, if you knew how much they hurt me… The knife…”
Then, suddenly, before he had been able to take her down, the teenage girl asked, “Daddy, where’s Mummy? I want Mummy… Daddy, I want to show Mummy my hand! Mummy…”
Epilogue
“Dad! A stork!”
Shehera points to the beautiful, slender bird flying off towards the Ouanougha mountains across the Hodna plain. This June is already hot and the summer promises to be like a furnace. I had pulled the old car up in a wooded grove, its engine grumbling after a good half-an-hour’s climb. I smile at my daughter.
“They say storks bring good luck.”
“Yes,” she replies, slightly surprised. “We could certainly do with some,” she adds after a pause.
I try to think up a suitable riposte, but I lack inspiration. I look away. I’ve felt that strangling feeling in my throat. Maybe Shehera has noticed this because she opens the door.
“I’m going to stretch my legs a bit.”
My daughter gets out of the car. She takes a few steps before freezing and contemplating the barren countryside that has witnessed so many crimes. I join her. She has taken off the glove she usually puts on to hide her stumps and massages her fingers distractedly.
My daughter’s face is so hard it pains my heart. She looks up at the summit before sighing, “I thought I could do it, but I think I was wrong, Dad. Everything’s too real here! I feel like I’m about to meet some almost living ghosts. What should I say to them?”
“We’ll be in Béni Ilemane in quarter of an hour. But no one’s forcing you to, my girl. We’ll go back to M’sila if you want.”
A faint, apologetic look comes over Shehera’s face. Without answering, she returns to the car and comes back with the bouquet of flowers we bought in M’sila.
Her chin is quivering. I’ve known this symptom of imminent tears since she was very small. I’d like to put a hand on her shoulder, but I don’t dare.
She walks over to the side of the road. She doesn’t seem to know what to do with the bouquet to begin with, but then she starts pulling out the flowers one by one and throwing them out into the void. Once she is halfway through, she gives up and, with an enraged gesture, chucks the remaining flowers away.
“There’s no point in remembering. This is stupid!”
I put my arms round my teenage daughter. She rests her head on my chest and thinks about rebelling before being racked by sobs.
“Dad, I miss Mum… Mummy…”
“Me too, sweetheart. You can’t imagine how much…”
And as I had feared, I too begin to cry.
Today’s newspaper is lying on the back seat of my car. The photograph of the woman and the child is there in the births column accompanied by the two words Happy Birthday, without any surnames or first names. The employee at the newspaper’s advertising department had been surprised by this when I placed my order. I had said it was for discretion’s sake, but the man had commented: “If you’re trying to be discreet then you shouldn’t publish the photo! And anyway, whose birthday is it, the woman’s or the girl’s?” I had muttered that it was both of theirs. As he filled out the form, the employee said in delight, “The mother and the daughter were born on the same day? A happy coincidence like that will bring you luck, mate – there’s an old proverb says so!” I stood there speechless, offering only a stupid grin by way of thanks.
I do actually think that a good part of my intelligence abandoned me the day Meriem died. I use what little I have left to l
ook after Shehera. Whenever I think of my wife, memories float up to the surface like water-swollen corpses. I am torn apart by sadness as well as anger – because Meriem deserved better than these grim memories. None of her beauty and none of what we once were have survived in my memory. I see only the two days following my daughter’s kidnapping. I keep going over and over those final hours leading up to Meriem’s death, asking myself with an awful sense of guilt at what moment I might have changed the course of events. Deep down inside me remains the confused but extremely powerful intuition that there was some such moment, and that I was unable to grasp it.
At the funeral someone said to me (and I don’t know how he dared) that no one should boast of having been lucky enough not to have lived. I did hear some words of condolence after that, but that little phrase about the misfortune of existing is the only one that has stuck in my mind from that sunny morning when I lowered my wife into the ground. Up till now, all it takes is to close my eyes to prove him right and then open them again – to the sight of my poor daughter… – to prove him partly wrong.
Shehera is here next to me, lost in her own thoughts. A muscle twitches by her cheekbone. She has become almost totally speechless, my little queen. Yet she was the one who insisted on conducting this short ceremony at Béni Ilemane. Less than ten days ago, she stated that she wanted to lay a bouquet of flowers on the spot where the people from the douar had been gathered to be tortured. That was when she told me that, during her imprisonment, the kidnapper’s recriminations and threats revolved around the family he had lost at Béni Ilemane. And above all around the tiny girl who bore the same name she did.
“That man is the person I hate most in the whole world. I cannot possibly imagine hating another human being more than him. And yet when he talked about his love for the child that had been cut to bits, I sometimes felt pity for him. And for her. Even after he…”
She went pale, as if to apologise for her compassion for her torturer and her mother’s murderer.
“…you know, cut my fingers off. And then my grandfather’s also partly to blame for all of that. I can’t pretend he isn’t. Do you understand?”
I said, “Yes, I understand’ although I didn’t.
For over two months she refused to say anything about her imprisonment. The first time I tried to press her clumsily into confiding in me, she flung in my face, almost bristling with hate, that three fingers was nothing compared to her mother’s murder and that she would be ashamed to complain after all her mother had gone through.
That was on the day after the particularly painful operation she had had to undergo. The surgeons had cut back her stumps due to the first signs of gangrene, warning me that she would suffer from her missing fingers for a long time to come.
I had almost turned down my daughter’s strange request to go and commemorate the victims of Melouza with the objection that I had inherited the old madman’s grief, not she, her sole task being to repair her soul and forget her appalling ordeal. She suffers from long periods of insomnia and when she does manage to fall asleep, she frequently wakes up with a start in the middle of nightmares of which she reveals nothing to me. Her marks at school are disastrous and I was called in by the headteacher because she had behaved unusually insolently towards one of her teachers.
I had resigned myself to this trip, hoping that it might give my daughter and me an opportunity to share our burdensome secrets. I had taken only one precaution, that of phoning the town hall beforehand pretending to be a journalist preparing an article about the area. I had been swiftly passed to the deputy mayor, since I was supposedly the special correspondent of one of the country’s most influential newspapers. The voluble man had expressed how pleased he was to see the capital’s press finally showing an interest in small municipalities like his. To gain his trust I had let him chatter on about the ostracism he felt Béni Ilemane suffered from, the lack of interest shown by the prefecture in his municipality’s basic needs, the drinking water that only flowed from the taps once every month and a half, about unemployment, stillborn social housing projects, etc. I had finally got a word in edgeways to say that my planned article was more wide-ranging, since I wanted to look at the part history played in his municipality’s current difficulties.
“The part what plays?” he had asked, suddenly on the alert.
“The… the events… you know, Melouza… Are people still suffering from it? Have they forgiven?”
“Oh, is that the main focus of your article? I should have guessed. The anniversary is in less than a week.”
His tone had hardened.
“Yes,” I agreed a little too quickly. “I’d like to visit the spot where the victims were buried.”
“Is that all you’re interested in,” he complained. “Stirring up muck from the past. What good will it do to re-open the scars of the war? It’s so long ago, all of that! And isn’t the main thing that we’re independent now? Independence is essential, right, unless you have a slave in your mind?”
Interrupting my laborious attempt to argue for the importance of the past in order to construct the future, my interlocutor jeered, “Admit that it’s because a nice smutty article about these harkis-who-weren’t-harkis will sell a lot of papers! You couldn’t care less about us really. You think of us as peasants still, even if we have been to school!”
The council official spoke with a bitterness that no longer had anything administrative about it.
“Everyone is connected to everyone else here. Everyone has a relative who was somehow involved in that disaster. My grandfather had a brother who was much younger than him. Before they killed the brother that night, they first cut off his legs.”
“What about your grandfather?”
“Let’s say that he was a bit luckier – he was guillotined later by the French. He’d shot one of their soldiers.”
The deputy mayor breathed in.
“So, do you think my father knows how to go about mourning for his own father and his beloved uncle?”
I heard another sigh. Then the man exclaimed, “But why I am telling you all this? To hell with your article!” and hung up.
We returned to Algiers the same day. We now live in my mother-in-law’s flat, as the mere thought of setting foot in the City of Joy again made our hair stand on end. Latifa has spent most of the time since emerging from her coma at a clinic specialised in brain injuries. I often go to visit her, firstly because Mathieu made me promise that I would and maybe also because, deep down, I see something of Meriem in this patient whose gaze wanders unfathomable depths of panic.
My mother-in-law occasionally recognises me and recovers the darkly ironic tone of our conversations from before the disaster. More often, when she has all her wits about her, she is overcome with despair. Since she cannot stand the thought that her daughter and her husband are dead, her mind eventually turns to pulp. She will ask me all of a sudden if I’m a new doctor. Not convinced by my answer, she begs me bitterly to phone her daughter and ask her to visit her. “You only have one mother on this earth and you don’t just drop her like a dirty dishcloth. I didn’t bring her up to behave this selfishly!” she laments. “And Mathieu went out to get some bread and he isn’t back yet! What’s he hanging about outside for? I hope he’s remembered that Tahar’s eating with us this evening. Oh my God, how are we going to organise things? Where’s he going to sleep? My telephone – where’s my telephone? Did someone really come and ask for Meriem’s hand even though nothing’s ready? What’s going on in this house?” she cries out in an anguished voice until a nurse, infuriated by the din, orders her to swallow a sedative. I take my leave of Latifa with a kiss, before hastily closing the door behind me to escape from the half-embarrassed, half-frightened reproach of an old lady worried that a perfect stranger – what’s more claiming to be her son-in-law – is treating her with such familiarity. When she is in this state, Latifa only ever mentions Shehera as a baby tucked up in her pregnant mother’s tummy, as if by not letting h
er be born yet, she were trying to bring back her dear granddaughter’s luck (and all her fingers).
A fresh police summons awaits me in the letterbox. They don’t scare me anymore… Well, not much anyway. At first, the detectives had shown a great deal of mistrust. I hadn’t reported the matter to the police until well after I’d taken Shehera to the hospital. I had gone back into the kidnapper’s flat to look for the recording of the murder plans that he had forced me to make at the zoo. Apart from the phone I already had in my possession, I had found three other mobiles and about ten chips hidden under a wardrobe, some of them still in their packaging. One of the devices did indeed contain the photo of the informer I had pushed over the edge, but no trace of the compromising recording.
That was the moment in my life when I felt the most disgusted with myself. I rummaged through the various rooms like a maniac for a few minutes, returned to the living room to place kisses all over Meriem’s face, one of whose cheeks little more than a mass of coagulated blood by now, and resumed my fruitless search. From time to time, I aimed a furious kick at the corpse of the kidnapper, whose paradoxical name I would only find out later: Zahi, the Joyous One.
Weary of the struggle, I armed myself with a hammer and smashed the chips and the mobiles into tiny pieces – apart from the one I had used to communicate with the accomplice – before throwing the whole lot in the toilet. I urinated for a long time, in fear, grief and rage.
Next I phoned the police. Having identified myself, I briefly explained that three dead bodies were waiting for them at such-and-such an address and that I would be at their disposal at the emergency department of Mustapha Pacha Hospital as my daughter had suffered mutilations after being abducted. I hung up when the policeman spluttered that he wanted more details. During the subsequent questioning, I was ‘pressurised’ but I stuck as closely as possible to the truth, leaving out only the murder of the informer. One of the detectives kept coming back to the time I had taken to alert the police after I first got back from the hospital. The excuse of complete confusion didn’t seem to wash with them entirely. I spent three long days in prison (like a terrorist suspect!) before being released, as Shehera’s statement was difficult to impugn.
