by James Brydon
I followed Djamel hesitantly back down into the warren.
“Chef,” he said, “Lambert wants you to come back inside. He says the suspect is ready to talk now.”
Why not go back in? I couldn’t outrun the sound of that voice that burst through the warren. It was a whisper embedded in my brain the way a bullet lodges in flesh. I followed Djamel’s feet down into the dim corridors, through the glowing heat of the bulbs overhead. The door to Tarik’s cell was open. The corridor was eerily quiet. There was just a soft yet persistent sound of scraping, an intermittent swish, as if someone were sweeping the floor inside. Then I caught a burning odor wafting faintly on the air trapped in the basement.
“Come on, chef,” Djamel said. “Lambert won’t wait long.”
Tarik had been hung from the ceiling. His hands were tied behind his back, and the rope had been passed through a hook on the ceiling. The tendons running along his arms and shoulders bulged and strained, looking as if they might snap. His back arced, jerked desperately, trying to relieve the pressure his dangling body was exerting on his arms. That swishing, scrabbling noise was his feet. The tips of his toes, straining terrifically, could just make contact with the ground. Each time his nails managed to scrape the floor, the strain in his arms increased with the effort. It was tearing his muscles apart. But the urge was stronger than reason. Time and again he tensed his toes like an animal’s claws and reached over and over for the floor that was always just out of reach.
Apart from a few breathless groans as his feet scrabbled for the ground, Tarik was now totally silent. His eyes were wide open yet utterly blank, as if he had been given a narcotic. The flesh around his nipples was blackened and gummy with blood. It no longer looked like human flesh at all, more like the mineral residue of fire. The head of his penis was fissured down the middle. I could see the tissue of the glans hanging in rubbery, torn clumps . . .
Gallantin taps the paper with his pen. “You seem at great pains to detail cases of alleged brutality, and to show your own disgust at what was happening. And yet we have no other reports of any such actions taking place. What’s more, someone who spent as long as you did in the Resistance would have been used to such scenes. You lived with torture every day, even if only as an idea, a possibility. Why would these events have caused you such discomfort, even if they had taken place as you describe?”
Why? Perhaps because in the Resistance, we knew why people were suffering. It wasn’t suffering itself that chased me out of the warren at al-Mazra’a. It was feeling that the brutality was meaningless. We were accomplishing nothing. The guilt spread like a sickness.
“Fine,” Gallantin says, smiling wanly. “You don’t have to answer the question.” He gestures at my statement. “Finish reading it. You should think carefully about what you wish to present to the judge.”
Djamel went up to where Tarik’s body was dangling in the bulb’s glare. He spoke to him softly and insistently for about five minutes. At that time, I couldn’t understand much Arabic and I had to ask Djamel what he was saying. He looked subdued and he almost whispered.
“I told him: ‘You need to talk. Do you understand? You need to start talking. If you don’t talk, you’ll die. Do you understand?’”
“What did he say?”
“He said he can’t talk. He doesn’t know anything. I told him: ‘Listen, you have to find something to say. It’s the only way you can get out. Otherwise, this will carry on until it kills you. So think!’”
For a while, Djamel and Tarik whispered in Arabic. Or rather, Djamel whispered urgently, cajoling Tarik, and great streams of words rattled off his tongue. He grabbed Tarik’s sweat-soaked arm in a gesture of compassion. The Harkis came not like interrogators but like brothers.
Djamel appeared in the depths of Tarik’s pain and spoke to him gently, but it didn’t seem as if Tarik were paying any attention. His head lolled backward. His eyes were closed. His mouth twitched, although more in pain than from a desire to talk. Occasionally, whatever Djamel was saying penetrated the screen of his suffering and he jerked a little, his throat opened, and a few broken sounds were forced out.
Djamel eventually removed his hand from Tarik’s shoulder. For some reason, I couldn’t stop thinking that the flesh must be ice-cold in spite of the burning. Djamel nodded at me.
“Okay, he’s given me something. We can go.”
“Are you going to cut him down?”
Djamel grinned and a strange, sheepish expression came over his face. “No. Lambert is quite specific about it. Pain doesn’t stop just because someone talks. It’s always there.”
“You should pay special attention to the following statement,” Gallantin advises. “It will be contested vigorously and with abundant evidence.”
The words stand clearly before my eyes. For the first time in weeks, I read something that seems to make sense. Something in which I have captured the murmur of the past:
I discovered that Lambert had refined and developed the techniques and apparatuses of torture with an almost scientific rigor. He insisted on the generalized application of pain almost independent of the processes of information-gathering. He used torture as a perpetual, capricious instrument to disorient and break detainees. He subjected suspects to agony for hours or even days without any attempt, initially, to interrogate them. If pain were applied solely in order to obtain information, and then suspended when information had been received, this created an evident and intelligible pattern that allowed detainees a measure of control over their situations. Lambert wanted to create a self-contained universe for detainees in which feeding or being starved, sleep or sleeplessness, and the application of torture or relief from it should form a complete system which exceeded entirely and at all times the detainees’ ability to manipulate or master it. Suspects who could foresee when they would be tortured could make calculations about what information to give or to withhold, and when to do so, or about how long they could expect to keep particular secrets in exchange for other, less important details. Detainees were more inclined to resort to misinformation if they were kept in an environment that was amenable to logical analysis. At al-Mazra’a, Lambert had removed any sense of logic or control. It was almost literally a nightmare in which a profound, incomprehensible, and unending suffering held sway.
Lambert kept Tarik at al-Mazra’a for nine days. For much of that time he remained in the same position, his arms bound behind his back, hanging from the ceiling, just close enough to the floor to feel driven to reach out for it, but without being able to support his weight at all.
I tried to talk to Lambert about the information Tarik had given up. It seemed obvious that he had simply invented something in order to put an end to his torment and in the hope of saving his own life. Lambert barely listened. His eyes glimmered contempt. He continued to calibrate the maximum amount of suffering that he could inflict on Tarik, alternating periods of unendurable agony with respite so that physical inurement to pain and the psychological resistance that might emerge from too much unalleviated torture—the sense of having withstood the worst—could never be attained.
Lambert was not at all concerned with the idea that Tarik’s information could be false. He put unrelenting pressure upon all detainees, assuming that, as disorientation and weakness set in, misinformation would be contradicted and correct information would be corroborated by repetition. He created, in Tarik’s broken mind, a perpetual need to provide intelligence. Tarik talked more and more. He babbled and begged and shouted into the stone walls around him when there was no interrogator in his cell. He sought through ever more detailed information to put an end to the insanity that was al-Mazra’a. He talked and talked. Names. Locations. Leads. He kept on talking. I could not believe this was intelligence. It was the terrified, temporary madness of a man in intolerable agony, desperate to end it however he could.
Based on what he said, more suspects were brought into al-Mazra’a. The insanity spread from the detainees to the interrogators an
d out into the whole country.
Gallantin sits stiffly at the kitchen table. He shakes his head when I offer him coffee. He leans in toward me, and his eyes bore into mine.
“This, too,” he says, “is highly contentious and will be refuted by extensive testimony. Allow me to read back to you what you wrote: Truth didn’t matter. What mattered was the means to propagate war. The notion of information-gathering enabled the widening of repression regardless of how it was carried out: True intelligence closed the net around insurrectionary groups. False intelligence allowed the war to break out of its confines as a military operation and for military power to be used as a tool of repression, terror, and even extermination on the population as a whole. Again, I can only suggest that you consider the consequences of perjuring yourself before the tribunal.”
His voice hums between us sharply as he continues reading: “After nine days at al-Mazra’a, Tarik died of a heart attack. The last time I saw his body, it was lying beneath an unmarked sheet of tarpaulin in the grange. Other bundles were also there, wrapped tight to keep them from rotting in the heat. The next day, the body was gone.”
Gallantin sighs. “When this comes to the tribunal, do you really want such highly problematic, patently untruthful assertions to be considered? Every piece of documentary evidence that exists will contradict your statements. You will not find a single soldier who served at al-Mazra’a who will corroborate your account of what happened there. You will therefore, if you persist in your story, appear not only as a delusional and dangerous traitor to your country, you will also be prosecuted for perjury and libel. It is my duty today to remind you that it is still not too late to retract the remarks you have made. I believe that this will allow the judge to look more clearly, and more sympathetically, at the circumstances surrounding the death of Amira Khadra. However she died—”
“She was shot in the head. No one denies that.”
“Indeed.” Impatience flickers in Gallantin’s eyes. “But how she came to be shot, and under what circumstances, these are the true facts of the case and they remain to be established. She may well have been attempting to escape, for example, or resisting officers during detainment procedures. The judge will be acutely aware of how difficult life is for soldiers who bear the burden of the sacred mission to defend the nation. Do you not think that these are matters which the judge should consider in your case, rather than being required to work through your rather confusing account of the army’s activities in Algeria?”
My silence floats between us. Suddenly, there is an urgency to Gallantin’s tone.
“The girl was shot, as you say. And at the time she was shot, you alone were responsible for her. There is no way you can hope to escape prosecution for her death, if you insist upon bringing it before the court. All the testimony is unambiguous: she was with you when she died.”
“I don’t dispute it.”
“What’s more, your allegations have already been proven false. Here, for example,” he turns to another page of the deposition, “you claim that Lambert’s room was covered with pictures of detainees which he had either taken himself or had had taken. In one that I remember vividly, an Algerian woman is standing between two French soldiers. A cord is passed around her neck like a leash put on a dog and one of the soldiers holds the other end. In the sepia tones of the photograph, the woman’s naked body merges into the bronze hues of the dustlands behind her. Offset against the tawny expanse of desert and skin is the black triangle of her pubic hair. The woman and both soldiers all stare straight ahead into the camera, their faces rigid, blank, inscrutable. You go on to describe other pictures of women stripped, tied up, forced into unseemly positions. Yet the military police have performed a thorough search of Lambert’s quarters at al-Mazra’a and no such material was found. It has therefore been proven beyond doubt that your allegations are unfounded and, should you choose to pursue them before the judge on Friday, I am duty-bound to inform you that they will be interpreted as a deliberate attack upon the honor of the army and an attempt to subvert the mission to maintain order in Algeria. You will then be subject to the harshest prosecutions that can be brought against you and no mitigating circumstances or clemency can be considered. Do you understand?”
I nod slowly. These same words, or variations upon them, have been thrumming in my ears for weeks.
Once Gallantin has left, I wash some of the sleep out of my eyes. After being submerged again in the basements of al-Mazra’a, the shock of cold water feels pleasant. It jolts me, shaking off the tiredness and washing away the dead layers of the past.
I take Anne-Lise’s photo out of my pocket. I return to that. Her gently condescending gaze. A girl living in a future that would exist only in her own mind.
Anne-Lise keeps me in the present. In three days’ time, I will have to stand before the judge and sink back into the quicksand of memory. There are three days to find whoever killed her and left her body on the heather.
Three days to live with Anne-Lise, not with Amira.
I fix upon Anne-Lise’s cool, untroubled eyes gazing out upon eternity.
* * *
The rue du Grand Champ is just another quiet Breton street: stone houses, blue shutters, the brown stalks of dead geraniums curled in window boxes, gray slate roofs. The Blanchards live in an old house with moss creeping across the facade. The stones of the building are huge, irregular masses somehow made to tessellate. Grass grows wild in the garden, great drooping clumps of it swelling out of the earth. Weeds sprout profusely between the flagstones of the path: dandelions, catnip, clover.
The old man who opens the door gapes at me. His eyes swim behind thick glasses. Wispy tufts of white hair are dotted across his scalp. I need to repeat to him several times that I would like to talk to Mathilde. Eventually he nods.
“Marthe, there’s a man here from the police. He wants to talk to Mathilde. She’s done one of her stupid things again.”
An old woman shuffles to the door, wiping her fingers on a filthy apron and shaking her head. Her tiny eyes strain to focus on me. “What’s she done this time? Is it serious?”
“Madame Blanchard, she hasn’t done anything. Please don’t be anxious. She isn’t in any trouble. I want to talk to her about Anne-Lise. Do you remember? She was Mathilde’s friend. She died about a year ago.”
“Well, well,” Madame Blanchard mutters, “if she’s done another one of her stupid things then I suppose you’d better speak to her. She’s up in her room. Just go in. She won’t answer if you knock anyway . . .”
She stumbles back into the kitchen emitting a chorus of lamentation while M. Blanchard points me in the direction of the stairs. I knock softly at the bedroom door and enter without waiting for an answer. Mathilde is fast asleep on the bed, her hair thrown around her head in a sprawling halo. One leg is bent beneath her. The other stretches out longingly. In spite of the darkness of her hair, her skin is pale. An infinitely fine dusting of dark hairs, running along her arms, trembles in the draft from the open door. Her skirt has ridden up to the top of her thighs, revealing smooth legs, finely muscled, tickled by goose bumps.
She screws her eyes tight shut, then squints up at me. She raises herself on all fours, rocking gently. Slowly, very slowly, she pulls her skirt back down and, tucking her legs under her, sits up on the bed and gazes vacantly at me.
“Who are you?”
“Le Garrec.”
“Are you a cop?”
“No.”
“Didn’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“Why not?” She seems to drift off into a daze. “Because you look scared. The cops never look scared.”
The skin beneath her eyes is so purple it looks bruised. She sweeps her hair back from her face wearily and tries to focus again.
“So if you’re not a cop, then what do you want?”
“I want to talk to you about Anne-Lise. I’m investigating her death.”
She blinks. Once. Twice. Then two round tears w
ell up in her eyes. She lets her head drop, as if it had been an unbearable effort to hold it up all this time. For a few minutes she sobs in complete silence, almost shivering, her face shaken by waves of sorrow. Her arms tremble and her stomach heaves. She struggles for breath. Sadness doesn’t seem to be something that rises up inside of her; instead it breaks over her in great surges. It chokes her. Paralyzes her. Leaves her fighting for air and for control.
Slowly, the shaking stops. She wipes her eyes and takes a deep breath.
“Yeah,” she says. “You can ask me about Anne-Lise. Whatever you want.” She cradles her head in her hands and she looks suddenly younger, childlike. “Are you going to get him, whoever did that to her?”
“I don’t know. I wish I could promise you that I will. It depends. The more you can tell me about her, though, the more likely it is that I can find her killer.”
If there’s anything there. If any connection exists or remains between her life and her death. Sometimes there is nothing. The vacuum of the past. All you can see are some distorted reflections on the surface. Any links remain drowned and out of sight.
Mathilde nods. “Just give me some time to get ready. I was out late last night. I need to . . .” Again, it is as if something in her brain cuts out for a moment. “I just need to wake up.”
She wanders out, her bare feet padding softly on the wooden floor. Downstairs, I can hear the Blanchards clattering around in a chaos of dirty crockery and pans. In the bathroom the taps start to run. Looking around Mathilde’s room, I am struck by an overpowering feeling of absence. There is nothing on the table or the walls: no pictures, no possessions. And what is here—some heavy brown curtains, nondescript pine furniture, a jarring floral bedspread—all seems so utterly alien to Mathilde, to her tired, soulful eyes, as if this cannot really be her room. She is a stranger here, just passing through. No sooner has she left than her presence is gone entirely from the room.
