The Attack

by Yasmina Khadra

  A light shiver grazes my back before extending its furtive crawl all the way into my chest.

  “Has the patient died?” I ask.

  Navid finally raises his eyes to me. I’ve seldom looked into unhappier ones.

  “There’s no patient, Amin.”

  “If that’s the case, and there’s no one to operate on, why have you dragged me out of bed at this hour?”

  Navid doesn’t appear to know where to start. His embarrassment infects Dr. Ros, who begins fidgeting in a most disagreeable way. I stare at the two of them, more and more irritated by the mystery they’re keeping up in spite of their obvious mounting discomfort.

  “Damn it, isn’t anyone going to tell me what’s going on?” I say.

  With a thrust of his hips, Dr. Ros detaches himself from the wall he’s been leaning against and returns to the reception desk, where two clearly desperate nurses pretend to stare at their computer screens.

  Navid gathers his courage and asks, “Is Sihem at home?”

  I feel my calves give way, but I recover quickly. “Why?”

  “Is she at home or not, Amin?”

  He’s trying to sound insistent, but his eyes are panicking already.

  An icy grip squeezes my guts. My Adam’s apple sticks in my throat, preventing me from swallowing. “She’s still at her grandmother’s,” I say. “In Kafr Kanna, near Nazareth. She went there to visit her family. . . . What are you getting at? What are you trying to tell me?”

  Navid takes a step forward. The odor of his perspiration muddles me, intensifying the confusion I’m already feeling. My friend doesn’t know whether he should take me by the shoulders or keep his hands to himself.

  “What the bloody hell is going on? Are you preparing me for the worst, or what? The bus Sihem was on . . . has there been an accident? Did the bus go off the road? Is that it? Is that what you’re telling me?”

  “It’s not about the bus, Amin.”

  “Then what?”

  “We’ve got a body on our hands and we’ve got to put a name on it,” says a thickset, brutish-looking man who suddenly appears behind me.

  I quickly turn back to Navid. “I think it’s your wife, Amin,” he concedes. “But to make a positive identification, we need you.”

  I feel myself disintegrating. . . .

  Someone grabs me by the elbow to stop me from collapsing. In a fraction of a second, all my reference points have vanished. I no longer know where I am, don’t even recognize the walls of the building where I’ve spent my whole professional career, all those years. . . . The hand at my elbow guides me into an evanescent corridor whose bright white lights slash my brain. I have a feeling that I’m walking on a cloud, that my feet are sinking into its surface. I step into the hospital morgue like a condemned man mounting the scaffold. A physician is standing at an altar. . . . The altar is covered with a bloodstained sheet. . . . Under the bloodstained sheet, obviously, there are human remains. . . .

  I’m suddenly afraid of all the eyes turned in my direction. My prayers resound inside me like a subterranean echo.

  The doctor gives me time to clear my head before reaching out a hand to the sheet. He keeps his eyes on the brute from a little while ago. At a signal from him, the doctor will pull back the sheet.

  The policeman shakes his chin.

  I cry out, “My God!”

  I’ve seen mutilated bodies in my life. I’ve patched up dozens of them. I’ve seen some so badly damaged it was impossible to identify them. But the shredded limbs on the table in front of me pass all understanding. This is horror in its most absolute ugliness. . . . Only Sihem’s head, strangely spared by the devastation that ravaged the rest of her body, emerges from the mass, the eyes closed, the mouth open a little, the features calm, as though liberated from their suffering. . . . I could think that she’s peacefully sleeping, that she’s going to open her eyes any minute and smile at me.

  This time, my legs buckle, and neither the unknown person’s hand nor Navid’s can catch me before I fall.

  3.

  * * *

  I’ve lost patients while I was operating on them. You never emerge completely unscathed from a failure like that. But the ordeal didn’t stop there; I would then have to announce the terrible news to the relatives of the deceased, who were holding their breath in the waiting room. For as long as I live, I’ll remember the anguished look they turned on me when I appeared before them after the operation. It was a look that was simultaneously intense and distant, fraught with hope and fear, and always the same, immense and profound as the silence that accompanied it. At that precise moment, I would lose confidence in myself. I’d be afraid of my words, of the shock they were going to cause. I’d wonder how the relatives were going to take the blow and what their first thoughts were going to be after they realized that the longed-for miracle had not taken place.

  Today, it’s my turn to take the blow. I believed that the sky was falling in on me when the doctor pulled away the sheet to reveal what was left of Sihem. Paradoxically, however, my mind was blank.

  Now I’m slouched in a chair, and my mind is still blank. There’s a vacuum in my head. I don’t know if I’m in my office or someone else’s. I see the diplomas hanging on the wall, the window with its blinds drawn, the shadows coming and going in the corridor, but it’s as if all these things exist in a parallel world, into which I’ve been tossed without warning and without the least restraint.

  I feel sickly, hallucinatory, devitalized. I’m nothing but a great heap of grief huddled under a lead blanket, incapable of telling whether I’m simply conscious of the misfortune I’ve been struck by or whether it’s already annihilated me.

  A nurse brought me a glass of water and withdrew on tiptoe. Navid hadn’t stayed with me very long before his men came to fetch him. He followed them in silence, his chin buried in the hollow of his neck. Ilan Ros returned to his duties without once coming up to me and offering me his condolences. It was only much later that I realized I was alone in the office. Ezra Benhaim arrived ten minutes after my visit to the hospital morgue. He was on his last legs, visibly run-down and reeling from fatigue. He took me in his arms and held me very tightly. But there was an obstruction in his throat, and he could find no words to say to me. Then Ros came in and took him aside. I saw them conversing in the corridor. Ros kept whispering into his ear, and Ezra was having more and more trouble nodding his head. He had to lean against the wall in order to keep from falling down; I lost sight of him.

  I hear vehicles in the drive and car doors slamming. Immediately, the sounds of footsteps resound in the corridors, accompanied by babbling voices and the occasional grunt. Two nurses hurry past, pushing a spectral gurney ahead of them. The shuffling footsteps invade the floor I’m on, fill the corridor, and draw nearer; some stern-looking men come to a stop in front of me. One of them, the one with short legs and a receding hairline, steps away from the group. It’s the brute who complained about having a corpse on his hands and wanted me to help identify it.

  “I’m Captain Moshé.”

  Navid Ronnen is there, standing two steps behind the captain. He isn’t looking his best, my friend Navid. He seems overwhelmed, superseded. Despite his superior rank, he’s suddenly been relegated to a secondary role.

  The captain brandishes a document. “We have a search warrant, Dr. Jaafari.”

  “Search warrant?”

  “You heard me. Please come with us—we’re going to your house.”

  I try to read any possible glimmer in Navid’s eyes; my friend stares at the ground.

  I turn to the captain. “Why my house?”

  The captain folds the document twice and slips it into the inside pocket of his jacket. “Our preliminary investigations indicate that the massive injuries sustained by your wife are typical of those found on the bodies of fundamentalist suicide bombers.”

  I can clearly make out the captain’s words, but I can’t manage to attach any sense to them. Something seizes up in my mind,
like a mollusk that abruptly closes its shell when it senses a threat from outside.

  Navid offers an explanation: “It wasn’t a planted bomb; it was a suicide attack. Everything suggests that the person who blew herself up in that restaurant was your wife, Amin.”

  The earth moves away under my feet. I do not, however, crumble. Rage props me up. Or maybe I’m just withdrawing. I refuse to hear one word more. I no longer recognize the world I live in.

  * * *

  The early risers hurry to the train stations and the bus shelters. Tel Aviv wakes up to itself, more obstinate than ever. However great the damage may be, no cataclysm is going to keep the world from turning.

  Wedged between two brutes on the backseat of the police car, I look at the buildings filing past on one side and the other, and at the lighted windows where, for a few fleeting moments, figures appear like shadow puppets. The roar of a truck echoes down the street like the cry of a monster whose sleep has been disturbed; then the dazed silence of weekday mornings returns again. A drunk is flailing about in the middle of a square, probably trying to dislodge the lice that are eating him alive. At a red light, two law-enforcement officers are on the lookout, one eye in front, one eye behind, like chameleons.

  Inside the car, everybody keeps quiet. The driver is at one with his steering wheel. He’s got broad shoulders and a neck so short, it looks as though it’s been pounded into his body. Just once, our eyes meet in the rearview mirror, and a chill runs down my spine. “Our preliminary investigations indicate that the massive injuries sustained by your wife are typical of those found on the bodies of fundamentalist suicide bombers.” I have the feeling that these revelations will haunt me for the rest of my days. They alternate in my mind, slowly at first, and then, as if nourished by their excess, they grow bolder and besiege me on all sides. The captain’s voice continues its hammering, clear and haughty, fully cognizant of the extreme gravity of its declarations: “The woman who blew herself up . . . the suicide bomber . . . it was your wife. . . .” It swells, that loathsome voice; it surges up like a dark wave, submerging my thoughts and shattering my incredulity before it suddenly withdraws, taking with it entire sections of my being. I barely have time to see my grief clearly before the groundswell rises again, throbbing, foaming, breaking over me as if driven raving mad by my perplexity and determined to dismantle me, fiber by fiber, until I fall apart. . . .

  The cop on my right lowers the window. A stream of fresh air lashes my face. The fetid smell of the sea reminds me of rotten eggs.

  Night is preparing to strike camp as the dawn grows impatient at the gates of the city. Through the spaces between buildings, you can see the purulent stripes methodically fissuring the eastern horizon. It’s a stricken night, deceived, stunned, beating a retreat, encumbered with uncertainties and dead dreams. No trace of romance remains in the sky; no cloud proposes to temper the fiery zeal of the newborn sun. Even if its light were supposed to be Revelation itself, it would not warm my soul.

  My neighborhood receives me coldly. A police patrol wagon is parked in front of my house. Police officers are standing on either side of my front gate. Another vehicle has been left half on the sidewalk with its red and blue lights still pirouetting. A few cigarettes glow in the blackness like an eruption of pimples.

  They let me out of the car.

  I push the gate, cross my yard, walk up the front steps, and open the door of my house. I’m clearheaded, but at the same time, I’m waiting to wake up.

  The policemen know exactly what they have to do. They plunge through the foyer and hurry to the various rooms to begin their search.

  Captain Moshé shows me to a sofa in the living room. “Can we have a little private talk, you and I?”

  He guides me to my seat courteously but firmly. He applies himself to being worthy of his prerogatives; he cares a great deal about his status as a police officer, but his obsequiousness lacks credibility. He’s nothing but a predator, sure of his tactics now that his prey is isolated. A bit like a cat playing with a mouse, he draws out his pleasure before devouring his meal.

  “Please have a seat,” he says.

  He extracts a cigarette from a case, taps it against his thumbnail, and screws it into the corner of his mouth. After applying a lighter to the cigarette, he blows the smoke in my direction. “I hope you don’t mind if I smoke?”

  He takes two or three more puffs, following the curls of smoke until they reach the ceiling and disperse.

  “She really amazed you, didn’t she?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “I’m sorry, I think you may still be in shock.”

  His eyes pass over the pictures hanging on the wall, inspect the corner shelves, slide across the imposing curtains, and make a few more stops here and there before turning their force back on me.

  “How can a person give up such luxury?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “I’m thinking out loud,” he says, shaking his cigarette in a sign of apology. “I’m trying to understand, but there are some things I’ll never understand. It’s so absurd, so stupid. . . . In your opinion, was there a chance of dissuading her? You surely knew all about her little project, didn’t you?”

  “What are you saying to me?”

  “I believe I’m being quite clear. Don’t look at me like that. You’re not going to try to make me believe you didn’t know anything, are you?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “About your wife, Doctor. About the crime she committed yesterday afternoon.”

  “It wasn’t her. It couldn’t have been her.”

  “And why not? Why not her?”

  I don’t answer him; I limit myself to taking my head in my hands in an attempt to recover my wits. He stops me. With his free hand, he lifts my chin until he’s staring straight into my eyes. “Are you a practicing Muslim, Dr. Jaafari?”

  “No.”

  “And your wife?”

  “No.”

  He furrows his brow. “No?”

  “She didn’t say her prayers, if that’s what you mean by ‘practicing.’ ”

  “Strange . . .”

  He rests one of his buttocks on the arm of the chair opposite me, crosses his legs, buries his elbow in his thigh, and grasps his chin delicately between his thumb and his index finger, squinting because of the smoke.

  His murky gaze braces itself against mine.

  “She didn’t say her prayers?”

  “No.”

  “Did she observe Ramadan?”

  “Yes.”

  “Aha!”

  He rubs the bridge of his nose without taking his eyes off me.

  “A recalcitrant believer, in short—the image she needed so she could cover her tracks and work for the cause undisturbed. She was surely involved with a charitable organization or some such scam as that. They provide excellent cover, very easy to crawl under in case of problems. But behind all the volunteer work, there’s always some high-profit business going on. The clever ones make some dough; the simpletons get promised a little corner in Paradise. I know a bit about all this—it’s my job. I thought I’d seen the very depths of human stupidity, but I was kidding myself. I realize now that all I was doing was circling around the perimeter. . . .”

  He blows some smoke in my face.

  “She was friendly with the al-Aqsa Brigades, am I right? No, not al-Aqsa. We’re told they don’t give priority to suicide attacks. See, as far as I’m concerned, all these assholes are the same. Whether they’re Islamic Jihad or Hamas, they’re all part of the same pack of degenerates, ready to do anything to get a little publicity.”

  “My wife had nothing to do with those people. It’s all a terrible misunderstanding.”

  “Well, here’s a strange thing, Doctor. When we go and talk to the relatives of these nutcases after an attack, what they tell us is exactly what you just said. They give us the same stupefied look as the one on your face right now; events have taken them utterly by surprise. Is ther
e a sort of general instruction to act like that in order to gain time? Or is it just a cheeky way of putting people on?”

  “You’re making a mistake, Captain.”

  He calms me with a gesture before returning to the charge.

  “How did she seem yesterday morning when you left to go to work?”

  “My wife went to visit her grandmother in Kafr Kanna three days ago.”

  “So you haven’t seen her for the past three days?”

  “No.”

  “But you’ve spoken on the telephone.”

  “No. She forgot her mobile phone at home, and there’s no telephone at her grandmother’s.”

  “Has she got a name, this grandmother?” he asked, taking out a little notebook from his inside pocket.

  “Hanane Sheddad.”

  The captain writes it down.

  “Did you drive her to Kafr Kanna?”

  “No, she went by herself. I dropped her off at the bus terminal Wednesday morning. She took the eight-fifteen for Nazareth.”

  “You saw her leave?”

  “Yes. I left the station at the same time her bus did.”

  Two policemen come back from my study carrying cardboard folders. A third is right behind them with my computer in his arms.

  “They’re taking away my files.”

  “We’ll return them to you after we have a look at them.”

  “Those are confidential documents. They contain information about my patients.”

  “I’m very sorry, but we’ll have to verify that for ourselves.”

  I hear a sequence of crashes and squeals in my house: doors slamming, drawers and furniture creaking.

  “Let’s go back to your wife for a moment, Dr. Jaafari.”

  “You’re making a mistake, Captain. My wife has nothing to do with what you’re accusing her of. She was in that restaurant exactly like any other customer. Sihem doesn’t like to cook right after she comes back from a trip. She went there to have a bite to eat. It’s as simple as that. I’ve shared her life and her secrets for fifteen years. I’ve learned to know her very well. If she was hiding something from me, I would have figured it out before long.”