by James Brydon
“Since there’s nothing to follow up from the discovery of the body, I’ll start tomorrow by going to Anne-Lise’s house and talking to her family. Lafourgue thinks it’s all a waste of time.”
“You don’t agree.”
“I don’t know. The way the body was left, and that peculiar wound in her side . . . It all feels so personal. There are so many layers of meaning. Symbols that need to be decoded. The question is whether Anne-Lise could have been anyone—a blank slate for a murderer’s pathology—or whether it had to be her body he did those things to. I’ll start with her. Who she was. What she might have been to someone else. That’s the only starting point I have.”
How else can I look at the case? After all this time, the only thing to go on is Anne-Lise herself. Who she was. Why someone would have wanted to hurt her. The wounds feel personal, but perhaps only because that is how I need to perceive them, otherwise I can never penetrate the mystery of what happened and Anne-Lise’s death will fade and be forgotten.
But already, I know I am not simply reading events but interpreting them too. Changing them. Making them into what I need them to be.
It’s like the service de renseignements. Algerians are brought in, terrorists, sympathizers, and bystanders all jumbled together, and we make them into the sources of our information. All of them. They all end up giving information: silence is as suspicious as speech. Whether they say anything or not doesn’t matter. Silence can be a proof of guilt just as much as admission. We don’t discover guilt; we invent it. We have the means to turn everything they do and everything they are into information. We find things that they might be saying, things that aren’t necessarily true or untrue. Things that don’t exist but which we make into realities, and which spread virally until the idea of truth is long forgotten and the methods of the service are all that remains.
Erwann stares at me sorrowfully. His green eyes dilate, like he’s trying to see into me.
“Whatever made you decide to go to Algeria? You must have known that it was a lost cause. You certainly never believed that we had any right to the land. Everything that we plundered needs, eventually, to be returned. However many French people were implanted there, they were only ever foreign bodies. Something toxic grafted on with violence. Infection. Sooner or later, the lymphocytes will come. Joining the police: that was something I could understand. You were a hero back in ’45, and what philosopher doesn’t secretly share Marx’s dream of changing the world? Yes, the police must have been exciting for you. But the Algérois? Whatever were you hoping to find there?”
“It was Lesage. You remember?”
He nods. René Lesage. He’d graduated from the École Polytechnique with one of the best scores of the past decade. When I met him he was only in his late twenties but already almost completely bald. His eyes were soft though his voice was hard and cold. He ran a cell of the maquis working throughout northern France. Arrested by the Germans in ’43, he’d spent four nights in the Nazi headquarters at the Hôtel Aurore. Whatever he lived through in those four days, he never told anyone, although he managed not to talk. When he was released, one of his eyes was so badly damaged that his world forever more looked drenched in fog and snow.
When I saw him again, in early ’57, he wore a patch over it, making him look sinister, like an incarnation of disease or suffering. His good eye still gazed softly but his skin seemed yellowed and liver spots ran prematurely across his hands and up his arms. He’d been in Algeria since the beginning, drafted there in ’45 after the repression in Sétif left dozens dead and injured. He contacted me and invited me to his office on the avenue Foch. By then, Algiers was in lockdown. Algerian women with homemade weapons under burkas or in bags were walking into European cafés and leaving behind bombs which detonated in hails of glass, plaster, and torn flesh. The French were combing the city block by block, pulling Arabs out of their homes, making seizures and arrests. It was a display of power. The more innocent people got hurt, the more effective the message. There were barricades and searches on the streets. Women waited in line for hours after buying groceries to be searched before they could go back home. Out in the countryside, French military personnel who had just returned from the humiliation of Indochina read a few pages of Mao, repeated obediently that the insurgent exists within his own community like a fish in water, then set about destroying the very fabric of that habitat.
Lesage was furious, eaten up by a rage that simmered in every word he spoke. He saw Sétif as an idiotic blunder that had managed to turn a straightforward protest for independence into a massacre and thus into the spark for a war. He never once referred to the conflict as maintaining order: like Lambert, he called it a total war. No front. No designated battle zones or no-man’s-land. The war was everywhere. On every street corner. Every woman and child was a potential combatant. He told me that he needed information from people who knew how to gather it.
“If you don’t go,” he told me, “then there will be someone else in your place. Someone else whom I did not handpick for the assignment. Someone not ennobled by the long fight in the shadows that we undertook in the Resistance. This person will probably be someone more brutal than you, more unenlightened, more sadistic, someone aroused by the possibility of inflicting pain and abjection upon other human beings. I cannot sit here and lie to you, Jacques. What the service de renseignements does is ugly. But only from the inside can we prevent it from becoming an abomination. We can control that ugliness so that it is purposeful and necessary. It is a sacrifice . . .” His yellowed fingers reached out and gently tapped the black patch under which his damaged eye saw only static. “In the Resistance we sacrificed our bodies. Here, we are more likely to lose our souls. I wish it were otherwise, and that we could obtain information without becoming steeped in blood and torment. I need to find
men for whom the line between necessary force and hideous cruelty is absolute. This is what you can give to me.”
Erwann shakes his head in frustration. “You can’t possibly have believed that!”
“Why not? The idea of sacrifice made sense to me. I could remember what it was like to live under occupation, thinking that you had nothing left to lose. I imagined I could understand what the Algerians thought.”
“And when you were there? Did you still think so?”
“No. I felt like an alien. Or, perhaps, like exactly what I was: a colonialist. Even thinking the way I had been, like it was my responsibility to help those poor people whose land we were occupying, began to seem appalling. Because isn’t that exactly what a colonialist would think?”
Erwann walks over and stands next to me. The clock in the dining room sounds a solitary note. One o’clock. Somehow, at al-Mazra’a, there was always a glint of starlight to thin out the darkness. Here, the sky is forever drenched with rain; clouds block out the sidereal glow.
Erwann puts a hand upon my shoulder. “This isn’t your fault, you know: this horrible crime that you’ve been accused of. You mustn’t feel that you have to take the blame for it to atone for having been there. You must fight against the accusations and clear your name. It was a war, that’s what you said, and atrocities happen in wars. I imagine you did everything you could to stop such barbarism from taking place. Don’t allow the guilt that you feel about having served in Algeria to force you to take the blame for a crime of which I have no doubt you are innocent . . . I can see they polluted your mind with the violence of Algeria. But at least fight so that they don’t destroy your name as well.”
His hand lies softly on my shoulder. I cannot feel any conviction in the grip.
Day Three
I have already been awake for hours when the first glow of dawn begins to frost the blackness. It glimmers faintly, a ghostly sheen in the distance. I slept for a while. Then I was kneeling next to the body of a teenage Algerian girl. Blood was pooling around her. Filthy red-black blood. Gummy and insistent, it beat against my legs in waves. I wanted to stand up and get away but my muscles wouldn�
��t respond. My trousers were sodden with gore. I wanted to wipe them though I couldn’t bear to touch them.
I awoke, my lungs heaving, gasping for air.
Erwann didn’t leave last night. I find him asleep in an armchair, curled up to fend off the cold. Perhaps he couldn’t face the trek back across the lightless heath. Perhaps there is something intolerable in his isolation, something that gnaws at him in the long, empty hours and means that he would prefer to sleep here, knowing there is someone else present. Yet in sleep, the years seem to peel away from him. The lines wrinkling his eyes recede. I could envy him what looks like peace.
I close the door quietly behind me, leaving him to whatever dreams are flickering in his mind.
Dawn burns softly in the air. Standing on the grass in front of my house is a gray Citroën with a note from Lafourgue stuck under the windshield wipers. It reads: keys in glove compartment. I pull the choke and the car coughs to life. It hums along the corniche down toward the center of Sainte-Élisabeth. Mudflats stretch out for miles where the low tide has drawn the sea almost out of sight. It looks like a moonscape where the waters have been sucked away. Green streaks of algae run in oily shimmers across the uncovered seabed. Avocets strut across the mud, pecking at worm casts. Gulls circle against the leaden skies, filling the air with their chatter.
It seems an eternity since I last saw these things. Dried stalks of barley in winter. Rows of hawthorn. Crests of sand grass pricking the tops of the dunes.
Home.
Erwann called it camouflage; a murderer lurks behind it and waits.
I need to find out who Anne-Lise was. To pull her out of the void into which death has cast her. I want her to live again, faintly, just for a few days, beneath my gaze.
Her mother lives on the rue de la Grande Baie at the northern edge of town where the road curls between the laurel trees and down toward the shore. The house is neat; unremarkable; whitewashed. Blue shutters pulled to. A gray slate roof blending into the greater gray all around.
The tongue of the bell clacks gratingly in the early-morning quiet. There is silence inside, then a shuffling and scrabbling that seems to last for long minutes. A woman in her midforties answers the door. Her eyes are blurry, her hair faded blond, graying at the edges. Her skin is creased around the eyes, stamped with the faint scars of her past. She shudders as the wind off the sea lashes her flesh and she hugs her dressing gown tighter around her sides. She looks puzzled, like she’s groping for an answer, and I realize that we have met before.
“Sarah? I’m Capitaine le Garrec. I came into your bar yesterday with Lafourgue. You served us. I don’t know if Lafourgue told you, but I would like to investigate Anne-Lise’s death. I know that the police didn’t find much last time, but I want to try again. I know that it could be painful for you, to rake over the past, but—”
She cuts me off. “Come in. It’s a mess. Will that bother you?” She fumbles inside, trying to clear some space on the sofa. Flushed, she gathers three empty wine bottles, a jumble of bills and scrap envelopes, and a functional plain white bra. She mumbles something about not having guests often. She doesn’t sit down herself, but stands over by the window, still hugging her sides, gazing out into the mist shrouding the sea.
“May I ask you about the day Anne-Lise disappeared?”
She nods. “Anne-Lise. Yes. Okay.” Her voice sounds far away. “Would it . . . Would it be too early to offer you a little drink? It is quite early, isn’t it, but . . . perhaps you’ll take a little cognac?” Her hand shakes slightly where it holds the folds of her dressing gown together.
“By all means.”
“Thank you,” she says quietly. She returns with two large half-filled glasses and places one in front of me. The sweet disinfectant odor wafting from it makes me nauseous. Sarah gulps hers and pinkness floods her cheeks. Her eyes widen and glitter. Her hands lie still.
“What would you like to know?”
“The day Anne-Lise went missing, it was the sixteenth of February, a Monday, I think. Tell me what you can remember about that day.”
“I couldn’t forget any of it. I don’t know how much it will help you, though. She had gone to school, as usual, to Saint-Malo. You know that she went to the lycée Jacques Cartier there? She wanted to do the classes prépa, you know, for the École normale. She was always a clever girl. Afterward, people kept saying how she’d had a bright future ahead of her . . .” Her eyes seem drawn to the mist that is now rising, floating over the fence, crawling through the garden. With a start, she lifts her empty glass.
“Where are my manners? It must be time for a refill. Would you . . . ?” Seeing the full glass in front of me, she doesn’t even bother to finish the question. As she wanders back into the lounge, she totters a little.
“It seems pointless now to go back over it. Nothing happened that day. She went to school on the bus, like she always did. I didn’t see her. She left in the dark. She never came home.”
“When did you report her missing?”
“That evening. About ten o’clock. She never would have stayed out that late. Sometimes she stayed with a friend. But I always knew where. She told me she’d be away for a day or two. This time, nobody knew where she was. I knew that something was wrong. But I didn’t think that . . . you know.”
“Did she seem to be in any kind of trouble? Was she anxious? Scared?”
“Not then. A few weeks before, she’d been crying her eyes out over something. That wasn’t like her. She’d never done that before.”
“A boy?”
“I don’t think so. She didn’t really need to care about boys. They came running after her all the time, even if she paid them no attention. I don’t know what made her cry like that. For a while she couldn’t even concentrate at school. I don’t think she’d ever got lower than 17 for any work she did, and all of a sudden she was lucky to be getting 11 or 12. But with time, she seemed to snap out of it.”
“When was that?”
“Just after Christmas. Though everything seemed fine again. Until . . .” She stops her mouth with another slug of cognac.
“Would you mind if I asked you for two things? Firstly, I’d like to look at any of her possessions that you still have. I want to see if there’s anything among her belongings that can help me to reconstruct the last weeks of her life.”
“Why not? Look around her room, if you like. I haven’t touched it since then. I kept meaning to, but . . .” She gestures around at the dirty glasses, the strewn papers, then the clothes lying around the living room. “There’s always something else to do, or not do, instead.”
“Thank you. Secondly, do you think you could give me a picture of Anne-Lise? Something that reminds you of her as she seemed to you? I’ll return it to you when I’ve finished my investigations.”
For a second, I catch a flash of mistrust in Sarah’s eyes. Then she nods slowly. “I suppose so. Will it help?”
“I want to see her as she was. To have a sense of her identity and how other people saw her.” Not just as a corpse laid out upon the gorse in some hideous staged gesture, her hands clutching at herself and at the frozen earth.
I hear Sarah’s hands rifle among piles of paper, then she returns with a creased little sepia-tinted square.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I should have taken better care of it. It was shot at the start of the school year. I noted that on the back.” In careful script, it reads: septembre cinquante-huit. “I just threw it in a drawer somewhere and forgot about it. How was I supposed to know that there wouldn’t be others?”
She closes her eyes and her body shivers, her scrawny hip bones jutting against the thinness of her dressing gown. It feels indecent to see her like this, so I look at the photograph instead. Anne-Lise stares coolly past my shoulder. Her hair tumbles in light waves. Even the crinkled sepia can’t take away the glow of her skin. Her mouth is pursed a little. I glimpse boredom in the glassy depths of her eyes. She looks like a girl waiting for a better future to
come and efface the present. She, too, couldn’t know that this image would fix her forever, and that all she was in the flash of the photographer’s bulb is all she would ever be.
“May I take it?” I press it into the warmth of my pocket. It sits there like a relic, a charm: a tiny piece of the past in which I will try to lose myself. I will reconstruct memories of Anne-Lise to fight against my own memories of al-Mazra’a. Perhaps this dead girl left to freeze on the Breton heathland can shield me from the other dead girl, down in the basement of the service de renseignements, her blood pooling around my knees.
“Anne-Lise’s room is just at the top of the stairs,” Sarah says. Her fingers clutch the empty glass tightly, her bones visible beneath the skin. “Everything is just as she left it. Take as much time as you want.”
* * *
The bed in Anne-Lise’s room is unmade, piles of books lie on the desk, and drawers hang half-open. There are houses like this in Algeria: chairs left askew or toppled around tables set for dinner, clothes laid out ready to be worn. The sudden suspension of life is uncanny. Absence shrieks out in rooms that anticipate their inhabitants’ return.
As I search her things, running through those habitual actions brings back the time when I was a policeman. I cover her room quickly but methodically, and my hands move skilfully. For a moment I am back in the brigade criminelle, a detective, and Algeria is just a blank space on a map. I check Anne-Lise’s wardrobe, searching for a hint of something unusual in her life: rips, stains, anything hidden in pockets or linings, clothes that don’t look like hers or look as if they may have been a gift. Then I turn to her desk, where scrawled notes for a school assignment still lie, alongside books left open on pages she was reading. The title remains, in blue ink faded by months of sunlight streaming across her desk, for an essay to remain unwritten: Is it possible to speak of a philosophical treatment of love in the work of Baudelaire? These words, from the poet’s notebooks, were in her head as she walked through her last days:
