The Moment Before Drowning

by James Brydon

  Some of them were once in the Resistance & they risked their lives for France. Now they sit around in basements full of smoke & shouting or they sit in dank cellars & read tracts calling for violence & for the overthrow of the system we live in. They shout their hatred for Christianity & for capitalism & for any other system that bans their perversions & shows them for what they are. They are themselves perverters of history. In their tracts they call their work a continuation of the Resistance. They claim to be fighting a war in the shadows, only the enemy is not the Boche, it is the government & democracy & the church in France.

  They say that there is no authority & power is illegitimate. All methods to overthrow power are fair. I cannot see any action coming from them. It is just drinking & speeches & dreaming about a warped future that will never come. It is just depravity & nothing more. They are not even working class, they are the dregs of the degenerate bourgeoisie.

  Secondly, MDCO (le mouvement pour la dictature de la classe ouvrière). This is a workers’ movement but they are just would-be terrorists & ne’er-do-wells. They have also read some Lenin & Mao & the other poisons of the left & they are prepared to use violence. They roll up their shirtsleeves & wipe the grease off their hands & talk a lot about ends & means & how this makes killing acceptable.

  Last year they supported a strike in a textile factory in Brest. They helped the workers to make picket lines & they made signs saying, “A bas le patronat.” Then they made Molotov cocktails & they threw them at the cars of the bosses. One of the gas tanks caught fire & blew to high heaven. It was just a strike & they turned it into a war. One of the board members had his whole arm & back burned & had to have skin grafted on where his flesh had seared & died. The strikers were terrified & they turned on the MDCO & blamed them for the attacks. Finally they all lost their nerve & denounced each other & arrests were made & the factory hired new workers.

  Kurmakin’s exact ties are not known but he has been seen with members of both organizations. Written evidence is hard to find. Both Aube and the MDCO call for an end to Western Christian democracy & demand the use of violence. This is a cutting from a tract published by Jacques Labrie in Aube’s newsletter.

  A ripped, clumsily printed scrap of paper is clipped into the file:

  Violence is not a tool which enables revolution, but a necessary and indivisible aspect of the revolutionary process right from its initial phase as resistance to prevailing ideology. Only through an almost anarchic and indiscriminate violence can the entrenched positions of liberal capitalism be destroyed. The more absolute and radical the destruction, the greater the chance that the following reconstruction will wholly cast off the corruption of the past, thus preventing another bourgeois revolution from deceiving humanity.

  Lafourgue’s script continues underneath:

  Hypothesis: Kurmakin is mature, in control, independent. He would not kill Anne-Lise out of jealousy. It is more likely that a revolutionary group or leader said he must kill her & called it a sort of initiation rite. This is common & it is a characteristic of the degenerates of the left. They use violent crime as a way to debase & control the minds of converts. They call it discipline. They encourage such acts. It is a way to erase the ideas of God & of order which are naturally implanted in the human brain. Kurmakin may have been made to kill & then mutilate Anne-Lise. This would prove his commitment to the cause. It would also change him & twist him & he would learn the kind of brutality which is needed to throw bombs at civilians & call it justice. Or he may have been told to kill her to free himself from anything that might weaken him. Anne-Lise was always in his thoughts & he could not tear himself away from her. He could not drag himself away from Sainte-Élisabeth. She was diverting his strength away from the revolution. This would explain the two phases of the crime. Firstly the murder itself, which was carried out in fury & also in despair. Then the calm hours after & the controlled way the body was dealt with (cleaned & wiped & dumped). Kurmakin may have been helped with this part of the crime.

  27/02/59

  We picked Kurmakin up & took him in for questioning right after Anne-Lise’s funeral. Blanc & I waited in the churchyard in the rain. There were hordes there. It felt like the whole town had come. Most of them probably didn’t know Anne-Lise at all. But they heard how she got ripped & killed & they came to gawk & to get excited by it. Whenever there is horror there is also a crowd.

  When we arrived they were all standing around not knowing what to do. There was a sea of people. They were all voyeurs in their decent Sunday suits & the women in their fine hats. Blanc said, “Look, it’s a pack of vampires wanting to feast on Anne-Lise’s blood. For a while it makes them feel like they are alive again.”

  Overhead it was dark. The mourners & the voyeurs kept looking up to the sky & prayed that the rain would hold off until she was in the ground. Then the clouds burst & the sky spat all over the hypocrites. Rain wet their suits & the brims of their hats sagged over their eyes. The women were shrieking & flapping to find their umbrellas. Some of them turned to go & their heels sank into the mud but they couldn’t leave. There would never be another moment like this. They had to stay & see her body put in the grave.

  Then the coffin came out of the church & it was cheap, simple wood. The gawkers were silent & there was something like embarrassment that she should lie for eternity in such a poor abode. The rain still came down & the sky spat on everyone there & on that Boche whore too & the people sighed as they put her carcass in the earth. Blanc & I shook our heads as we listened to Père Clavel’s sermon. He stooped down by the grave & bent his head & tried to be solemn. He said that Anne-Lise had been blessed & luminous & chosen. He said that she had been too perfect for this earth & that she was with God. The drumming of the rain drowned out his words & all the time the derision of God poured upon him. Great rivulets of it flowed down. It plastered his gray hair onto his head & flooded his glasses. It poured down like an everlasting stream on the handful of mourners & the hordes of onlookers who were only there because it excited them to think of Anne-Lise screaming & cut.

  We smiled at the words the father uttered & the gloss he tried to smear onto the life of a wayward slut. We watched the mourners crawl up in the half-night. The collaborator mother tried to pretend it was the muddy ground that made her slip & stumble & not the liters of wine she’d heaved into her gut. A hysterical little crowd of simultaneously menstruating would-be nymphets stood by the grave. They had trashy eyeliner on & powder that was dissolving into streaks on their puppy-fat faces. They stood there with their mouths open & their new black clothes sodden & clinging to them.

  Then there was the revolutionary. He stood apart as if he was too grand to participate in it. After all, it was just small-town curiosity & grief. He was wearing a leather jacket & denim trousers out of contempt for the church. He stared with sadness at the cheap coffin & the cheap life within it that was an insult to the consecrated ground it was laid in. He stared around & tried to look pale & noble & the heavens spat their contempt down upon him.

  The sorry parade straggled past the coffin. The mother reeled & swayed & the hips of the nymphets bounced. Each of them clutched at earth to throw on the coffin. The rain fell harder & harder & the sky rumbled at the blasphemy below. The earth that their fingers clasped was wet through & turned to mud & so what they threw down onto the coffin wasn’t the sacred churchyard earth at all. It was the stinking mud that the German deserved to lie under until Judgment Day.

  Blanc & I grabbed Kurmakin just as he was leaving the churchyard. Blanc twisted his arms behind his back & we knocked him down so he could taste the dirt that would be his lover’s shroud for eternity.

  When we arrived at the police station the mud had dried on him & he was caked in filth. He took a few knocks getting into & out of the car but he didn’t whine. He muttered his dogma about repression & injustice & he took a few more knocks getting inside the station. Blanc said to him, “We can’t put you in the cells covered in shit right up to your slanty
eyes now, can we? Strip.”

  Of course the Communist refused & now it suited him to believe he had democratic rights. I left him with Blanc for a while and stood in the fresh air smoking a cigarette to clear the stench of decay from my nostrils. When I came back inside Kurmakin was curled up like a child on the cold floor. He was gasping for air. Blanc grinned at me. Kurmakin didn’t look grand now. He was balled up like a whipped animal & the air was rasping in his lungs & it sounded like each breath hurt him.

  “Is he ready to strip?” I asked Blanc.

  He said, “When he’s ready, he’s ready. There’s no rush.”

  I don’t remember if it was the second or the third time I came back but there was Kurmakin & his hands were shaking like a homosexual I arrested once with a prostitute & who begged & begged, “I have children, I have children, don’t tell my wife.” He unzipped that James Dean jacket he’d put on to shame the church. When he was naked I could see the red welts where Blanc’s fists had put color into his skin. He looked down the whole time. He tried to stand up & the muscles in his stomach heaved. Blanc smoked a cigarette.

  Kurmakin was silent. He kept trying to stand up. Maybe he thought he could save some pride by refusing to stay down. Maybe he read somewhere that it’s better to die on your feet than on your knees. Blanc knew better. A couple more blows to the ribs put him on the floor for good.

  “Do you want to question him?” he asked.

  I shook my head and said, “Put him in a cell.”

  Blanc took hold of Kurmakin’s hair & started to walk. I saw his head jerk back & his feet scrabble on the ground as he tried to keep up. I heard him go banging & sighing down the corridor. I went out for a smoke.

  Lafourgue’s notes on Kurmakin stop here. If he questioned him, there is no record of it in the file. I turn to the next page and find a picture of Sarah. Her eyes are dead from exhaustion but there is a tiny, imploring flicker of terror in the taut lines of her face. Lafourgue’s impeccable script continues as follows:

  04/03/59

  It is time to consider the idea that the drink-addled mother may even have been the one who choked her own progeny to death. This is a woman who prostituted herself to the Nazi plague-bringers in return for bread & liquor. She fornicated & funneled German goods into her mouth while the country starved. She would be capable of any monstrosity.

  Blanc & I decided to hit her bar around midafternoon. The tables were full of fishermen celebrating the end of their work & having survived another day on the high seas. We waited for the number of drinkers to reach a peak so there would be a good audience. For a long time the collaborator has hidden in our midst & tried to pretend she is one of us. Today we overturned her rock & watched her squirm in the light.

  She couldn’t even keep her hands still as she poured me a drink. Her fingers shook & the bottle trembled & clinked against the glass. She dribbled spirits all over the bar. She mumbled something about being sorry. She mumbled something about how she couldn’t get used to knowing that her daughter had been put in the earth.

  Blanc came up next to me & tapped the bar. The collaborator fumbled for another glass & tried to pretend it was grief that made her hands shake & her words slur. She stammered at us, “Have you . . . ? Have you found . . . ?”

  “We need to talk to you,” Blanc said.

  She mumbled, “I already . . . I already told you . . .”

  Blanc said, “Maybe, but maybe not. So we’re going to talk to you again. Properly this time. Move.”

  It was funny watching her try to understand what was happening. She blushed & stammered a few syllables but she couldn’t find any real words.

  “Are you too drunk already to even understand French?” I asked. I said it loud & there was suddenly silence in the bar. “We’re going to take you with us. So move.”

  I reached over & grabbed the top of her arm where the skin was all soft & trembling & pulled her around the bar. I grabbed her arm tighter. It disgusted me. It was sinewy & wasted. I could feel the muscles twitching beneath my fingers. I gripped even harder. There was no noise in the bar. Everyone had turned around to watch what was happening.

  Blanc grinned and said, “Sorry. We’re going to have to take her away. She has some questions to answer in a murder case.”

  Sarah jerked & twisted herself free of my hand. She walked back over to the bar & took the two shots she’d poured for me & Blanc & downed them both. She smoothed the hair out of her face.

  She said, “Fine, let’s go. But get your goddamn hands off me. I’ll walk myself.”

  “Be my guest,” I said.

  She marched out in front of us to the car & her feet slipped & shook & her drunken hips swayed this way & that.

  05/03/59

  We have watched the collaborator purge her toxic system for a full day & it has been instructive & satisfying. She has been quaking & shivering as the alcohol drains out of her blood. In her pain she has had to confront her own degeneracy. The sickness she feels is the one inside of her. She tried to sit calmly in her cell & leaned back against the stone wall. She looked like she was going to meditate.

  It took just hours before she was curled on the floor & her sick & skeletal fingers clawed at her belly & her throat was bloated & throbbing & she retched & choked. She rocked & shook & fought herself in order not to cry out.

  Weakness cannot be hidden. Sickness comes to the surface. She pretended to be strong for a few hours. Waves & waves of pain racked her corroded gut & her cries came wailing out of her cell. Her voice was all broken. She was calling for a drink.

  Blanc went down with a bottle of Armagnac & downed a few swigs in front of her. He breathed heavily & smiled & let a look of bliss come across his face. He let the smell of the Armagnac float across into Sarah’s cell. She was like a lab animal that starts salivating on cue. She rose up on her haunches & stared at the bottle held out in front of her. She stuck her claws out of her cage & her fingers grasped at the air. She begged.

  Blanc took another swig and said, “Take something off. If you do, I’ll let you have the rest of this.”

  She shook her head. She tried to say no. But already another wave of sickness hit her & it was her own moral sickness that was only now made clear to her. She didn’t even seem to notice what she was doing. Her fingers were pulling at the buttons of her blouse. Blanc shook his head in disgust. She was so distracted she didn’t even notice.

  Blanc said, “Not that bit. No one wants to see your withered, bitten dugs. The skirt. Lose it.”

  She said no but her hands were already fumbling at the zipper & then there she was in her petticoat. She was shaking & humming & holding her arms out in front of her. Her legs were skinny & pale.

  Blanc pulled hard on the bottle and said, “Jesus, didn’t you learn your lesson after the war? Once a whore, always a whore, I guess. Hey, Lafourgue, do you want to see what she has rotting under that petticoat?”

  I shook my head.

  Blanc said, “Me neither.” He walked off & Sarah just stood there. Her arms were still held out in front of her & her skirt was in a crumpled heap by her feet.

  Lafourgue records any actual questioning only sketchily. He tries to ascertain whether there’d been any particular rancor or unhappiness between Sarah and Anne-Lise in the weeks leading up to the murder. Sarah confesses to anxieties about Anne-Lise’s depression and says that she felt excluded from her daughter’s life. Lafourgue doesn’t note when Sarah was finally released.

  As I leaf through the rest of the file I can see that Kerbac has also been detained, terrified, and taunted about the loss of Julie. In the quiet of Lafourgue’s basement, the darkness suddenly seems immense. The bulb on the ceiling glows faintly. I think back to all the other files Lafourgue flicked past until he stopped on this one. How many more are simply records of bullying, humiliation, and violence? And yet, despite the venom, the entire procedure is implacable, ordered, carried out, and set down in a spirit of clear-eyed and unhurried calm.

  I walk
over to the filing cabinet. There must be hundreds of files in there. The light from the bulb seems to be growing watery. A damp chill floats on the air.

  Amira was brought in by two French soldiers in sweat-stained uniforms. Her hands were tied behind her back and her face was smudged with dirt. I wondered if they had pressed her face down into the earth when they bound her hands or whether she had just been crying. The two soldiers didn’t look at her. They dragged her down the west drive of al-Mazra’a beneath the radiance of the sunlight, which seemed to distend and swell the air. She let her feet dangle, making the soldiers work harder to drag her along. Her hair was uncovered—deep black, wavy, glistening in the midday heat. Her face was slender, curving gently around the cheekbones. Her eyes were almond-shaped. They stared outward but were somehow lifeless, empty behind the glittering deep-brown surface. The skin under her eyes was a tender purple like the skin of a baby.

  Cold seems to be seeping in from the frozen ground. The filing cabinet is locked and Lafourgue has the keys with him. I shut the file on Anne-Lise. There is nothing useful in it. I sit with it on the table in front of me in the crackling glow of the bulb, waiting for Lafourgue to come back.

  * * *

  It must be late by the time he returns. Somehow, the twilight outside can be sensed. Lafourgue’s boots squeak on the stairs and his voice thrums gently in the quiet.

  “You’ll get Kurmakin tomorrow. We’ll pick him up and bring him in to the station. Take your time with him. Interrogate him how you like. You’re a professional, so I don’t need to tell you what to do.”

  “Thanks for letting me read the file.” My throat feels tight. Desiccated.

  “No problem.” He gathers up the folder and looks through it carefully, perhaps to check that nothing is missing. He locks it away once again in the filing cabinet, then places the key back in his pocket.