I took refuge in the garden. It had been snowing all week long. A thick layer of powdery snow covered the trees, the lawn, the swimming pool. A pale shroud. The branches of the fir trees bent to the weight of the ice crystals. I buried my head in the pine branches. Rubbed my face. I stripped off my clothes and with my bare hands I attacked the sheet of ice which covered the swimming pool. I pounded it with my fists. With the flat of my hands. With my elbows. I pounded until I could scarcely breathe. The surface began to crack, then gave way, streaked with the blood flowing down my fingers. I pretended to ignore my reddened hands. They made me think of the Sardive brothers’ hands. I had to wash. To purify myself. To disappear. To see your gaze no longer. Your eyes black with disdain. Your scornful grimaces. I had to get away from your voice calling me a murderer. I plunged into the icy water. It took my breath away. I was gasping for air. I was chilled to the bone. Sinking. And yet the weather was fine. The sun was at its zenith. There were colorful figures all around the swimming pool. I recognized the doctor, his wife and son. They were laughing hysterically. I called out to them: Help, I’m drowning. They didn’t see me. Or maybe they were pretending, ignoring the intruder that I was. The despoiler. The doctor’s wife, a tall, elegant, beautiful woman, her arms bare in her chiffon dress, was pointing at something. The servant came out with a tray of refreshments. The doctor put his arm around a little brunette with mischievous eyes. He introduced her as his future daughter-in-law. The guests came closer, surrounding them. Moths drawn to a candle flame. I went deeper, paralyzed. I could hear joyful cries, congratulating the fiancés. That’s what it was, an engagement party. For the eldest son. Now I remembered. It was the last party held in the garden. I was witnessing the last moments of happiness for the famous surgeon’s family. Two days after the party the fiancé was arrested. Parents, friends, and neighbors were completely taken aback. Why? The boy had never been in trouble. He was handsome. Gentle. An angel. A young man who despised violence. He didn’t get involved in politics. No one knew of any suspicious activities. He had no police record, anywhere. Not a single file that might look bad. The brilliant boy was studying architecture, he was a citizen above all suspicion. Why? Why had he been arrested? This was Year One of the Theological Republic, established in the name of God. Peaceful gatherings were forbidden, in the name of God. Protesters were immediately viewed as traitors, Judases in the pay of the aggressor. The witch-hunt against counterrevolutionaries had begun, upon the orders of the Commander and by the will of God. The country would be purged of refractory elements of every stripe, thanks to the help of God. Any individual manifesting suspicious behavior in a time of war was punishable by execution upon the very place of arrest, without any other form of trial, and with the consent of God. Since the ultimate judge could only be God. Amen. The staff announced the Commander’s edict at the front. I admired the wisdom of our leader, the head of our armies. As did all the volunteers in the militia. We were prepared, as one man, to take any high-ranking army officer educated under the former regime who did not share our point of view and kill him on the spot. This law, promulgated in record time like all the others, was necessary to save the Fatherland.
We were just poor, foolish adolescents, easy to manipulate. We were just poor ignorant peasants whom an old man with a hard heart had turned into fools, without even having to give it much thought. We made good cannon fodder. The doctor’s son, like thousands of others, was ripe for hanging. The clerics in charge had set up the altar where they would sacrifice the country’s youth. In the name of God and by the will of the Commander. After six months of desperate searching, the doctor found out his son had been killed. Shot in someone else’s place. I knew all this when I agreed to move in to the villa. You are right, Vima, I’m a murderer, I’m no better than they are. You are right, Vima, it’s not enough not to have used your own hands to kill, that does not absolve you. You are right, Vima, I am their accomplice . . .
I can hear the echo of your screaming again. You went crazy. Get out. Get out of there, right now. You threw the garden hose at me. I still don’t know how with your weak arms you pulled me out. I woke up at around noon. In a sweat. A cold sweat. With a terrible headache. You left me some medicine, a thermos of tea, and a note on the night table: “You have to leave. Get the hell out. You have to leave those monsters and this country. Otherwise, I’m the one who will leave you. I’ll come back tomorrow morning so we can talk about it.”
Now here I am all alone in the world in a sordid room in a center for homeless refugees. For five years I’ve been trying to hang on. In vain. I don’t lie anymore. I don’t get my hands dirty. I denounce our tyrants. For five years I’ve been telling them I’m ready to speak openly to the cameras. In public. To journalists from all around the world. If they extend their human rights to me, and valid documents. The truth doesn’t pay. No more here than it does there, my Vima. Yuri is one of those guys with a library for a brain, and he has sworn to me that the democrats here are all hand in glove with the tyrants there and everywhere else. They have breakfast with Putin. They have lunch with emissaries from the Supreme Commander. Dinner with Kim Jong-Il. They smoke their cigars with Castro and fuck the young whores—blondes, brunettes, blacks—they are offered wherever they go. Could be. Yuri knows what he’s talking about.
It’s been a rotten day, my Vima. I’ll go and see him to get my mind on other things. If he’s in a bad mood, we’ll brood together. Yuri does nothing but read. He’s been vegetating here for over a year. He tells me I’m the only one who can get him away from his books. It’s because I enjoy listening to him. And he likes to talk as much as he likes to read. He’s a born storyteller. He has a ton of stories in his head. When he’s fed up with me, he starts drinking. In the beginning, I would watch while he polished off one bottle after another, going deeper and deeper. But we haven’t gotten drunk together in ages. That’s what we’ll do tonight. Get wasted and talk about Achilles the invincible. That’s one of his best stories. Achilles’ heel, according to Yuri, is the symbol of a person’s fragility in the world. To think I have spent most of my life without ever drinking a drop of alcohol. What a jerk. I would never have made it in this fucking icicle of a country without Yuri’s vodka. He tells me, Better late than never, dumbass; bottoms up.
I leave the office. In a hurry. With only one thing on my mind, to climb into bed with a book. To forget this entire day. And yet my legs, these bloody legs that don’t always obey me, are leading me elsewhere. Dragging me into the center of town where the shrink’s office is. That’s where I am now. In a sweat. Out of breath. I’m going up the stairs four at a time. I don’t have an appointment. Never mind. Here I am. I have my reasons. It’s obvious. I’ve just confronted my past. The shrink will be proud of me. I have to tell him the good news. It’s only normal. He’ll approve. I ring the bell. The secretary says, but you don’t have an appointment! I know. It’s urgent. I’ll wait. Until the last hour if need be. It’s important. It’s absolutely vital. I must look weird. She doesn’t answer. She stares at me. Doesn’t smile. I leave her where she is standing in the entrance hall. I go and collapse on the sofa next to the door to the consulting room. That way he can’t miss me. He always sees his patients to the door. The last one leaves at 7:45 P.M. Two hours and then some, and the whole time I sit mentally revising everything I have to tell him. Here he is at last. I stand up. He doesn’t have much time for me. I bark that it’s all right, and I thank him, and I think that not much time will be more than enough to tell him about this incredible encounter. Five minutes will be enough. Now I’m lying down. Five minutes go by before I can say a single word. Then I speak and hear myself all at the same time. I can hear my voice getting ahead of my thoughts. My voice spilling out secrets I didn’t mean to reveal. There’s nothing for it. On it goes. Not a word about my day. Or the Office. Or the Colonel. The past I have just confronted rises up before me. But the way it wants to. There is no one else in the background, only him. Del. My love. My
wound. My failure to understand. Del who disappeared. The silence that kills. My refusal to live. Overwhelmed by grief, by absence. Where are you, my beloved?
The voice in me talks to the shrink as if to a friend. Calls him by his first name, to my great surprise. I never told you how I got out of the country. I have very confused memories of the final moments of my imprisonment. And there are black holes regarding what came next. It all happened so very quickly. I can’t remember a thing about how I left the country. How I ended up here, in your country. A place I knew nothing about. I’m a child of the sun, the desert, and now here I am in this glacis of fjords. Snatches of events without any apparent link coalesce in my mind then disappear. I clutch at a series of images. And the sensory markers which connect them. More precisely, there are two negatives, as if from a film. As if they were imprinted on my flesh. The first is that of my body covered in blood and curled up in a corner on my cell. And in the second, I have been propelled onto the back seat of a Patrol. The link between the two is the invisible man who sprang me from prison with a snap of his fingers. As simple as that. Just a few snaps of the fingers. I am trying to reconstruct it all, as if with computer-generated images. My eyes are like the computer screen where I have sketched the identikit of my savior thanks to my corporeal memory. Hearing replaces eyesight. I imagine him to be tall and thin, even bony, with square hands and protruding eyes. Features inspired by the abrupt, rhythmic clicking of his fingers. Features that would suit an unremarkable sort of man. Which doesn’t necessarily justify the protruding eyes. And then I see myself, a dark tangled mass wedged in a fetal position onto the back seat of the powerful car. When the joy ride began, I disconnected, I was tossed about, filled with vague sensations, my psyche cut in two. Fear in my belly and a desire to die. Animal instinct and human thought are rarely compatible when one is aware of impending death. Except when a vital need for rest overpowers everything else. Eradicates fear. Lulled by the purr of the engine and the thought of this salutary death, I passed out. I came to in a bed. A clean bed. Sheets that smelled of my grandmother. I wasn’t at home. Or at my mother’s place. But in a hospital, or a clinic. The light was gentle, dim. A greenish light. It hardly lit up the room, I had needles in my veins, and tubes hooked up to transfusion devices next to the bed. I had trouble keeping my eyes open. There were shadows and silhouettes, smiles and moving lips. They faded, then were interspersed with each opening of my eyelids. Hands busy with me. Examining me. Blood pressure. Pulse. Injection. Then they tucked me in. Gone the torturers and the rapists. Farewell, solitary confinement. White coats, taking care of me. But not speaking to me. Whispering among themselves, smiling, writing who knows what onto papers removed from one file and put back in another. Where am I? Who are you? No answer. Just lips palpitating in the doorway. I had difficulty reading them. Were they addressing me or someone else? A multitude of hidden, invisible people? Yes, I could hear a voice repeating the same sentence at regular intervals. You are here to rest. You are extremely weak. Like a soundtrack. A recording. As if they were making fun of me. As if it were all an act. Were there any other patients in this hospital? Any other broken bodies? People wrenched from that dump, Ravine, like me? Did the white coats know where I’d come from? Were they the healers of the tortured women of Ravine, escaped from hell? Or were they angels? Was I dead? No. I knew I wasn’t. But I didn’t know whether I was right in my head. I asked them. Once again their closed mouths were suggestions and smiles. When I pressed them, one of them gave me an injection. Another one stroked my cheek with all the tenderness in the world. I could hear a man’s voice. He said, Put plasters on the soles of her feet. He must have been the doctor. My feet were in shreds, torn to bits, I knew that. The Sardive brothers were experts at flagellation, and they used only electric cables to whip us. They had a preference for the palms of the hands and the soles of the feet, starting with the fingertips. The doctor said, Change her bandages every hour, and leave her feet to air for ten minutes. Someone whispered, she has such little feet. That’s what he used to say. Del would say, You have the prettiest little feet in the world. Another injection. More caresses. And I dozed off, and on my feet I was wearing the red sandals he had given me on one of our sun-filled trips. I fell asleep. I slept with my little feet bound in red sandals. Lulled by the scattered words of my love, “an apple . . . an orange . . . I cannot . . . your feet . . . stamping the floor . . . ” It was gentle. So gentle when he spoke to me. It was perfect. Out of paradise.
I awoke—after I don’t know how many hours or days—and my mother was by my side. How could this be? Prisoner number 455 from Section 209 of Ravine Prison was entitled to a visit from her mother! Was I at the prison infirmary? Was I about to go back to the men who raped me, their spit, their inflamed members? No. I was not in the kennel for battered dogs which they wrongly called an infirmary. But in a clinic worthy of the name. Who had informed my mother? Who had told her where I was? Who had allowed her to come and visit me? What had I done to earn the right to such privileges? It was the sort of favor that stank of collaboration. Had I sold our friends for the sake of my grandmother’s clean sheets? My mother swore to me that I hadn’t, and she never lies. Her ravaged face came close to mine. Her breath, stinging me. I heard her praying. She spoke to me of a miracle. A providential man. A savior. She blessed him. Her prayers would go with him all her life. I was stunned. Exhausted. Drugged. I left my other questions for later. Shortly afterwards, I found myself in another bed. Another room with a high, gleaming ceiling. No more white coats. No more needles in my veins. No more drips. My mother was still there with me. She was washing me while she spoke. She said, We’ll leave as soon as you’re on your feet. In a week or ten days at the most. We’re going to leave the country. You will be free at last, and safe. I gathered all my strength. All my strength to say no. A clear, short, irreversible no. That famous no, the envy of all my companions in misfortune. Those two letters which elevated me to the status of the heroine of Ravine. No, I won’t go anywhere without him. I will never leave the country, never abandon him to the vultures. My mother said, He’ll get out. The man promised. Del will join you. I swear. He told me he would.
For a long time my mother’s tears had no longer been salt but bitter. Like bitter almonds. No, concentrated opium. An acrid, viscous taste, which stung my palate. I’ll never get rid of the taste. I know that. I already told you, doctor. From the first bite my food takes on the taste of her tears. Moldy, with an aftertaste of bile, just so I don’t forget. Never forget anything. How much longer did I go on sleeping in that spacious room with its large picture window, overlooking a garden? All that remains of the den of my last, clandestine days in my forbidden country are the pearly ceiling and my mother’s tears, overflowing, submerging me. I see her again, waving a piece of paper in front of my face and saying, You didn’t want to trust your poor mother. Look. Open your eyes, wide. You recognize Del’s handwriting, don’t you? Read it. Read what he says. I looked away. My mother’s frozen expression and her conniving smile exasperated me. It was a theatrical mask, lifeless. Writing is falsification. Starting with the holy scriptures. The dictatorship of God teaches us this, at our expense. No. I do not trust writing or signatures. Any more than I trust voices. I have held in my hands dozens of pages of confessions supposedly signed by friends or by Del. Certified by God! I did not trust them at all. In those latitudes, everything is faked. Everything is lies . . . They would say, You can see it’s your terrorist husband’s handwriting. You see, he has confessed to his crimes. Don’t tell me you’re blind, you scumbag. Not yet anyway. You can see his signature at the bottom of the page. Go on pretending you’re blind and I will personally gouge out your eyes, you whore. Sign at the bottom of the page and you will be free. To my mother I said, I don’t want your paper. I don’t trust signatures. She begged me, Read the message and then decide. It’s the man who saved you who brought it to me. My tears flowed in spite of myself. Del, my love, my man, my husband in chains. I trembled. I
grabbed the paper from her hands. Skimmed it, just to put my mind at rest: “Get out as soon as you can. Go away. Leave the country. I will join you. Djadjal.” My eyes opened wide. Djadjal was a password that only he and I knew. Had there not been this secret code, the stamp of love, I would have gone on saying no until I was blue in the face. I would have shouted it so loudly that he would have heard. But this note really was from Del. He was the one who was ordering me to leave, who was promising to come and find me. I looked at my mother and said, All right, we’ll leave. She burst into tears. Did not even try to hide them. They were tears of joy but tears all the same. Get some rest now, she said. You have to be in shape for the departure. Where? How? Who with? Don’t worry about a thing. He will bring us some fake ID papers that will open the way to freedom. He? She didn’t know anything more than that. It was better not to know. To respect the golden rule of safety through anonymity. Until further notice. When Del came to find me, he would explain the miracle.
Between my leaving the clinic, the days I spent in my savior’s hiding place, and my presence in this new country where the days seem long, seem endless, there are only black holes. Absences. Forgetting. And abscesses of violence. My mother went home after several months had gone by. She would have liked to stay a bit longer to take care of me. But they wouldn’t renew her tourist visa. As for me, I put on the garments of the stateless refugee, for I had no other choice. Exile is a dizzying ordeal. And if you are far from your beloved, it is bound to be agony. Since I arrived here I have been shoring up my life, Doctor. Del’s absence grew longer. Week after week. Month after month. A year went by. My mother kept me waiting as best she could. With her weekly phone calls. Her empty promises. Apparently there were complications. His escape would be soon. He was going to come. Be patient, she said. Don’t lose hope . . . A year and five months. I couldn’t stand it anymore. I called her in the middle of the night. I’m coming home, Mama. I don’t want this freedom if he’s not part of it. Unless he’s dead. Tell me, I beg you, if they have executed him. He’s dead and you don’t dare tell me? Disorientated, up against the wall, at last she confessed the truth. Del is alive. But he won’t be coming, my dear. He won’t come. He was released a while ago. No one knows exactly when. Neither his parents nor your savior. The man just told me that after his release he disappeared. He’s in the country. But no one knows where he lives. My mother had lied to me out of love. To protect me. The way I’ve been lying to you for three years, Doctor. I was lying to you when I said they executed him. I too was lying to you, out of love for him. I was hoping to protect him, to keep him intact. The way it was, when we were happy. I stopped tormenting my poor old mother with my questions. She still doesn’t know where he is. I took the time I needed to find out what I could, even if I still don’t know exactly where he is living. I contacted former comrades through secret channels. Took every precaution. And I learned what I would rather never have known, my whole life long. My husband was no longer in chains even when I still was. He was released before the providential man saved me. My Del. My tall, strong man. My idol. My life. My reason for living. He knew all about my ordeal. He could not help but know what I was going through. And yet he deserted me. Abandoned me. When he knew everything. He condemned me to exile. A double exile, and he was the cause of it. Why, Doctor? Why? I’m trying to understand. I have to understand. Or maybe I’m actually refusing to understand. I’m afraid of the truth. This tenuous link between Del and the finger snapping man terrifies me. Was Del a stool pigeon, in the service of my mother’s providential man? If so, did he betray others to save me? . . . Impossible. Since he was released before I was. I cannot . . . I cannot believe they made him into their flunkey. I was crushed. I wept, Doctor. I wept. I thought there were no more tears in me. I will never get over this. I have been mortified for life. I’m so afraid. You can see for yourself, I’m still crying. I’m calling him Doctor now, no more first names. The shrink says, We’ll stop there. What you have just told me is of prime importance. And moreover, you master the language perfectly. I will see you tomorrow. We have to go deep into the heart of your trauma.
The Man Who Snapped His Fingers Page 5
