The Attack

by Yasmina Khadra

  I tremble on my threshold for a while before I cross it.

  The housekeeper still hasn’t been here. I try to reach her by telephone a few times, but I keep getting her answering machine. I decide to take matters into my own hands. The house is as Captain Moshé’s men left it: rooms turned upside down, drawers spilled onto the floor and their contents scattered, wardrobes emptied out, bookcases capsized, furniture moved about and sometimes overturned. Since I’ve been here, dust and dead leaves have invaded the place, thanks to the broken panes of glass and the windows I forgot to close. The yard is disgraceful—it’s covered with beer cans, newspapers, and various other objects that my assailants from the other day left behind. I call up a glazier I know; he tells me he’s on a job at the moment but promises to pass by before nightfall. I start putting the rooms back into some semblance of order: I pick up what’s on the floor, replace the bookshelves and the drawers, separate damaged items from undamaged ones. When the glazier arrives, I’m just finishing with the sweeping. He helps me carry out the garbage bags and then goes to have a look at my windows while I withdraw to the kitchen for a smoke and a cup of coffee. He appears again with a notepad on which he’s written down the various repair operations he’ll have to carry out.

  “Hurricane or vandalism?” he asks me.

  I offer him a cup of coffee, which he gladly accepts. He’s a fat redhead with freckles all over his face, which is dominated by his large mouth; he’s got round, flabby shoulders and short legs ending in a pair of scuffed and slashed military boots. I’ve known him for years, and I’ve operated on his father twice.

  “There’s a lot of work to do,” he informs me. “Twenty-three panes have to be replaced. You should also call a carpenter—you’ve got broken wood on two windows and several shutters that need repair.”

  “You know a good carpenter?”

  He squints as he considers this question. “There’s one who’s not bad, but I’ll have to find out if he’s available on short notice. As for me, I’ll start tomorrow. I worked hard all day today, and I’m wasted, so I’m just going to give you an estimate this evening. Is that okay?”

  I look at my watch. “All right,” I say. “Tomorrow it is.”

  The glazier finishes his coffee with one gulp, stuffs his notepad into a leather briefcase with worn-out straps, and leaves. Since he seemed to know who trashed the house, I was afraid he was going to bring up the attack, but he did nothing of the kind. He noted down what he had to do and that was all. I find him admirable.

  After he drives off, I take a shower and go down to the city. First a taxi drops me off at the garage where I parked my car before I left for Jerusalem, and then I plant myself behind my steering wheel and head for the seafront. The frantic traffic forces me to turn into a parking area facing the Mediterranean. Couples and families are tranquilly strolling along the esplanades. I have dinner in a discreet little restaurant, drink a couple of beers in a bar at the other end of the street, and then I go and loiter on the beach until the small hours of the night. The sound of the waves fills me with a kind of bliss. I return home a bit tipsy, but I’ve cleared my mind of a whole lot of dross.

  I fall asleep in the armchair, fully dressed, my shoes still on my feet—sleep snatches me away between two puffs on a cigarette. The banging of a window awakens me with a start. I’m drenched with sweat. I think I must have had a bad dream, but it’s impossible for me to remember just what it was about. I stand up, tottering. My heart leaps into my throat; shivers course up and down my back. I hear myself cry out, “Who’s there?” I turn on the lights in the front hall, in the kitchen, in the bedrooms, ears cocked for a suspicious noise. “Who’s there?” There’s a French window open upstairs; its curtain billows in the wind. There’s nobody on the balcony. I close the shutters and go back into the living room. But the presence remains, vague and near at the same time. My shivering intensifies. No doubt it’s Sihem come back, or her ghost, or maybe even both of them. . . . Sihem . . . Gradually, she fills the space around me. By the end of a few palpitations, the whole place is replete with her, as full as an egg, leaving me only a tiny pocket of air so I won’t suffocate. The mistress of the house pervades it again, all of it: the chandeliers, the chests of drawers, the curtains, the consoles, the colors. She’s the one who chose the pictures, and she’s the one who hung them on the walls. I can still see her backing up a few steps, a finger to her chin, leaning her head left and right to be sure the frame is straight. Sihem had a keen eye for detail. She left nothing to chance and could spend hours deliberating with herself about the placement of a painting or the fold of a curtain. I move from one part of the house to another, from the living room to the kitchen, and I feel as though I’m following her trail. My memories give way to scenes that are practically real. Sihem relaxes on the leather sofa, applying thin layers of pink polish to her fingernails. Every corner retains a piece of her shadow; every mirror reflects a bright fragment of her image; every rustling sound speaks of her. All I have to do is reach out my hand to gather up a laugh, a sigh, a waft of her perfume. “I want you to give me a daughter,” I told her in the early days of our love. “Blond or brunette?” she replied, blushing. “I want her to be healthy and beautiful. I don’t care much about the color of her hair or her eyes. I’d like her to have your features and your dimples, so that when she smiles, she’ll be the spitting image of you.”

  I enter the upstairs sitting room, with its dark red velvet drapery, its milky white curtains on the windows, and its two imposing armchairs standing in the middle of a handsome Persian rug and facing a glass and chrome coffee table. One wall of the room is taken up from one end to the other by a huge cherrywood bookcase, filled with carefully ordered books and various ornaments brought home from distant lands. This room was our ivory tower, Sihem’s and mine. No one else was ever admitted here. It was our intimate corner, our golden refuge. Sometimes we’d come here to commune with our silence and reactivate our senses, dulled and blunted by the noises of every day. We’d bring a book or put on some music, and then we were off. We read Kafka as well as Kahlil Gibran, and listened to Oum Kalthoum and Pavarotti with the same gratitude. . . . All at once, the hairs on my body bristle from head to feet. I feel her breath in the hollow of my neck, heavy, warm, panting. I know that all I have to do is turn around slightly and I’ll be face-to-face with her. I’ll stand in the wild dance of the waves emanating from her; I’ll see her radiance, her immense eyes, more beautiful than in my maddest dreams. . . .

  I don’t turn around.

  I back out of the sitting room until a draft of air dissipates her breath. In the bedroom, I switch on all the lamps and all the ceiling lights to banish any trace of shadow. I undress, smoke a last cigarette, swallow two tranquilizers, and slip into bed.

  Without turning off the lights.

  * * *

  The following morning, I’m surprised to find myself in the upstairs sitting room with my face pressed to the window, watching the sun come up. How did I make my way back to this haunted spot? Of my own free will, or sleepwalking? I have no idea.

  The sky over Tel Aviv outdoes itself; there’s not a hint of cloud in sight. The moon has been reduced to a faint sliver. The night’s last stars fade out slowly in the opalescence of the rising sun. On the other side of the gate, my neighbor from across the street is cleaning the windshield of his car. He’s always the first one up in the neighborhood. As the manager of one of the most elegant restaurants in town, he insists on arriving at the big wholesale market before his competitors. Sometimes we’ve exchanged standard greetings in the darkness, when he was getting ready to go to the market and I was coming home from the hospital. Since the attack, he acts as though I don’t exist.

  Around nine o’clock, the glazier arrives in a sun-bleached van. Assisted by two pimply boys, he unloads his equipment and his sheets of glass with the meticulous care of a craftsman. He informs me that the carpenter will be here soon. And indeed, this latter individual shows up a few mome
nts later, driving a pickup truck covered with a tarpaulin. He’s a tall, withered fellow stuffed into threadbare overalls, his face deeply lined and his eyes deadly serious. He asks to see the damaged windows, and the glazier takes charge of showing him what has to be done. I stay on the bottom floor, sitting in an armchair, smoking and drinking coffee. For a moment, I think about stretching my legs and relaxing my mind in a little park not far from my house. It’s a fine day—the sun is gilding the trees all around—but the risk that disagreeable encounters on the street may ruin my day dissuades me.

  It’s nearly eleven o’clock when Navid Ronnen calls me on the telephone. By this point, the carpenter has carried off the broken windows, which he has to repair in his shop. As for the glazier, he and his two assistants are still working upstairs, so silently that you’d think they were hiding.

  “What’s going on with you, old pal?” Navid asks, pleased that he’s finally got me on the other end of the line. “Are you an amnesia victim? Or just absentminded? You go away, you come back, you appear and reappear, and not once do you think about calling your good friend and giving him your address and phone number.”

  “Which ones? You yourself have just declared that I can’t stay in one place.”

  He laughs.

  “That’s not an impediment. I’m pretty restless myself, but my wife knows exactly how to reach me when she wants to score a point. Did everything go all right in Jerusalem?”

  “How do you know I was in Jerusalem?”

  “I’m a cop,” he says. Then, after a little laugh: “I called Kim, and Benjamin answered. He told me where you two had gone.”

  “Who told you I was back?”

  “I called Benjamin, and Kim answered. How’s that? Good enough? I’m calling because Margaret really wants you to come over for dinner. It’s been forever since she’s seen you.”

  “Not this evening, Navid. I’ve got some work to do on the house. There’s a team of glaziers over here right now. The carpenter came this morning.”

  “So we’ll make it tomorrow.”

  “I don’t know if I’ll be finished here by then.”

  Navid clears his throat, thinks a bit, and then makes an offer: “If your house needs a lot of work, I can send someone to help you.”

  “No, they’re all small repair jobs. I’ve got enough people over here already.”

  Navid clears his throat again. This is a tic that manifests itself whenever he’s embarrassed. “But surely they’re not going to spend the night there?”

  “No, but it seems like it. Thanks for the call, and love to Margaret.”

  Since it’s noon and Kim has given no sign of herself, I believe she must have gone to Navid and asked him to call and determine whether or not I was still among the living.

  The carpenter brings back my windows, installs them by himself, and checks to see that they’re functioning properly as I look on. He has me sign an invoice, puts my money in his pocket, and withdraws, an extinguished cigarette butt stuck in the corner of his mouth. The glazier and his assistants have been gone for a good while. I’ve got my house back again; I recognize its calmness—the peace of the convalescent—and its mysterious shadows. I go upstairs to the sitting room to tempt my ghosts. Nothing’s moving in the corners. I sink into a large chair facing a newly repaired window and watch night come down over the city like a cleaver, bloodying the horizon.

  Sihem smiles from a framed photograph on top of the stereo system. One eye looks larger than the other, probably because of her forced smile. You always smile for the photographer when he’s persuasive enough, even if your heart’s not in it. This is an old photograph, one of the very first ones taken after we got married. I remember that it was for her passport. Sihem didn’t really have her heart set on taking a honeymoon trip. She knew my resources were limited and preferred investing in a less dreary apartment than the one we had in the suburbs.

  I get up and take a closer look at the photograph. To my left, on a shelf otherwise loaded with compact discs, there’s a leather-bound photo album. Almost mechanically, I pick it up, go back to my chair, and start leafing through the album. I don’t feel any particular emotion. It’s as though I were flipping through a magazine while waiting my turn in a dentist’s office. The photographs pass in review, captives of the instant in which they were taken, cold as the glazed paper on which they reveal themselves, stripped of any affective charge capable of moving me: Sihem under a beach umbrella, her face masked by an enormous pair of sunglasses, at Sharm-el-Sheikh; Sihem on the Champs-Elysées in Paris; the two of us posing alongside one of Her Britannic Majesty’s guards; in the yard with my nephew Adel; at a party; at a reception in my honor; with her grandmother on the farm in Kafr Kanna; her uncle Abbas, with rubber boots and muddy knees; Sihem in front of the mosque in the Nazareth neighborhood where she was born. . . . I keep browsing, passing over memories without lingering on them very much. It’s as if I were turning the pages of a former life, of a closed case. Then one of the snapshots captures my attention. It shows my nephew Adel laughing, hands on his hips, in front of a mosque in Nazareth. I go back to the photo of Sihem posing before her childhood mosque. I know it’s a recent photograph, less than a year old, because Sihem’s got the purse I bought for her birthday last January. On the right, you can see the hood of a red car and a kid bending down to a dog. I go back to the photo of Adel. The red car’s in this one, too, and so are the kid and the dog. So these two pictures were taken at the same time; the two subjects probably took turns with the camera. It takes me a little time to admit it. Sihem used to go to Nazareth regularly to spend time with her grandmother. She loved her native town. But Adel? I don’t remember ever having seen him up there. That wasn’t his environment. He often came to see us in Tel Aviv when his business affairs took him away from Bethlehem, but Nazareth? Did he range that far? I feel a constriction around my heart. A vague unease comes over me. I’m frightened by these two photographs. I try to imagine an excuse for them, a reason, a hypothesis—in vain. My wife never went out with a relative of ours without my knowing about it. She always told me where she’d been, whom she’d met, who had called her on the telephone. It’s true that she appreciated Adel’s humor and spontaneity, but the idea that she would meet him somewhere other than the house, somewhere other than Tel Aviv, without mentioning it to me—she just wasn’t like that.

  This coincidence exercises me. It overtakes me in the restaurant and spoils my dinner. It intercepts me when I’m back home. It keeps me awake, in spite of two sleeping pills. . . . Adel, Sihem . . . Sihem, Adel . . . the Tel Aviv–Nazareth bus. . . . She claimed it was an emergency and got off the bus and then climbed into a car that had been following the bus . . . an old cream-colored Mercedes. Just like the one I caught a glimpse of in the abandoned warehouse in Bethlehem. “That belongs to Adel,” Yasser told me proudly. . . . Sihem was in Bethlehem, her last stop before the attack. . . . Too many coincidences.

  I push off the covers. The alarm clock tells me it’s five o’clock in the morning. I get dressed, jump into my car, and head for Kafr Kanna.

  There’s no one at the farm. A neighbor tells me that Sihem’s grandmother was taken to the hospital in Nazareth and that her nephew Abbas was with her. At the hospital, I’m not allowed to see the patient, who’s undergoing an emergency operation. Cerebral hemorrhage, a nurse tells me. Abbas is half-asleep on a bench in the waiting room. When he sees me, he doesn’t even get up. That’s his character; he’s as stiff as the trigger on an old carbine. A fifty-five-year-old bachelor who’s never left the farm, he’s wary of women and city dwellers, whom he avoids like the plague. He’d rather work himself to death day after day than be under the obligation to sit down for a meal with someone who doesn’t smell of plowed furrows and sweat. He’s a peasant with a body carved out of oak, thin, sharp lips, and a cement head. He’s wearing his mud-stained boots, his shirt with the sweat stains around the armpits, and a pair of rough, horrible pants that look as though they’ve been cut fro
m a tarpaulin. He gives me a succinct account: He found Grandmother lying on the floor with her mouth open, he’s been at the hospital for hours, and he neglected to untie the dogs. Grandmother’s condition is more of a bother to him than a cause for sadness.

  We wait in the room until a doctor comes and tells us the operation is over. Grandmother’s condition is stable, but her chances of pulling through are minimal. Abbas asks to be allowed to return to the farm. “I’ve got to feed the chickens,” he grumbles, not really interested in the doctor’s report.

  He jumps into his rusty pickup truck and dashes off in the direction of Kafr Kanna. I follow him in my car. Only when he’s finished with his various farm chores—that is, at the end of the day—does he notice that I’m still here.

  He admits that he often saw Sihem in the company of the boy in the photograph. The first time was when he, Abbas, went back to the hairdresser’s to give Sihem her purse, which she’d left on the seat of his truck. When he got there, he found Sihem and the boy in conversation. In the beginning, Abbas didn’t think anything about it. But later, after he’d come across them together in several different places, he began to suspect something unseemly. But it was only when the boy in the photo dared to show up at the farm that Abbas threatened to split his skull with a pickax. This incident had very much offended Sihem. Afterward, Abbas says, she never set foot in Kafr Kanna again.

  “That can’t be true,” I tell him. “Sihem spent the last two Eids with her grandmother.”

  “I’m telling you, she never came back after I told off that punk she was with.”

  Then, gathering my courage, I ask him what the nature of the relationship between my wife and the boy in the photograph was. At first, he’s astonished by the naïveté of my question; he looks me up and down with a frozen grin of disappointment and irritation. “Do I have to draw you a picture, or what?”