The Moment Before Drowning

by James Brydon

  “You know, I don’t think most people understand why the police are there. Even some of the police don’t understand. They seem to think that police work is about solving crimes, or bringing criminals to justice, or protecting people. People say that a lot, even though no one really believes it’s true. Civilians can protect themselves and each other. And most criminals don’t need to be caught. They give themselves up or they give themselves away. We don’t need to do a lot. Some crimes don’t even get noticed or reported. Others, like Anne-Lise, give you nothing to go on. There’s no evidence and no traces. Sometimes we end up arresting the wrong person and we even know it, but we still need a conviction, so we get one. None of that has anything to do with justice or protection. So why are we here?”

  Lafourgue’s pupils are normally two tiny pinpricks, but in the dim glare of the bulb they have swollen. He looks different. More naive, perhaps. But crazier too. Like a sudden revelation has illuminated his mind.

  “We’re here to be the police. Not to perform the tasks that people think the police perform. Not the kind of tasks that can be summarized and assessed in terms of percentages and statistics. We’re here to provide a police presence. Searches, arrests, the suppression of disorder, interrogation—these are the ways we make ourselves known to the population. We need to be visible to all people, not just to criminals. We create fear and repression in their minds. They are constantly aware of power and of the force it exerts on them. It makes them timid, contemplative, and cowardly. You must have seen it in Algeria, le Garrec. I read a great deal about the police—or the service de renseignements—out there. All we got was the sanitized version in the morning papers. But I could read between the lines. I’m sure you performed the tasks that were supposed to be your mission. Uncovering and disrupting arms supplies, monitoring terrorist groups, etcetera. But all of those things served a wider purpose. They allowed you to scare people. Not terrorists, ordinary people. People going about their daily business who might otherwise have started to believe in independence. Your real job was to be the police. To create terror and repression by your presence alone.”

  Lafourgue walks over to the filing cabinet and leans against it. “That’s what the police really are. You see it clearly during an occupation. It’s a form of the army used against the population at large. It’s the tentacles of power made visible.”

  “If that’s the case in Algeria, then it isn’t working.”

  Lafourgue’s voice is a faint murmur through the darkness: “Why not?”

  “Repression didn’t deter anyone. It nurtured nationalism. The more we deployed violence, the more the nationalists turned that same violence back on us. Our repression was the FLN’s best recruiting tool.”

  “Then you didn’t go far enough. Terror wasn’t widespread enough.”

  “No. The army hasn’t managed to constrain the Algerians because all it has done is magnify the very nature of our colonial presence. It shows us for what we are: in schools where we force Algerians to learn French and despise Arabic, in hospitals where they rot and die while we get the best treatment, or in segregated towns where the sewage pipes and clean streets are confined to the French quarters. All we’ve managed to do is make clear to all Algerians the violence inherent in every aspect of our dealings with them. It has made them desperate and furious. They see how we’ve embedded our own pathology in them. They don’t know anymore what violence is theirs and what we have simply branded onto them and seared into their brains.”

  Lafourgue steps toward me and stares hard into my face. “Now isn’t the time to back down. You need to stand by what you did. It was real policing. That’s what I do here. That’s what my files record. Actual police work. Exercising power and spreading terror. I don’t know who killed Anne-Lise and I don’t really care. The girl was a whore, and it is sometimes the fate of whores to end up as she did. The child was an abomination, like her mother. But I have used the case to fight the Communists and the collaborators and the degenerates.”

  He lays a hand on my shoulder. “I can see that they want to crucify you. That’s politics. But what you did was right. Shall I drive you back to your car?”

  I get up slowly and climb the stairs. My muscles ache from sitting for so long in the frozen basement.

  I was told by Lambert that I was assigned to interrogate Amira. He informed me that she was an agent de liaison. I asked him how we knew.

  “She’s an Algerian. She’s either a current agent de liaison or a potential one. Either way, when you’ve finished interrogating her, she’ll be neither. Get it done.”

  He looked back down at his desk and began to write. With a single wave of his hand he indicated that the discussion was over.

  Amira was down in the warren. She was probably shaking, chilled by icy sweats and rocked by sickness as she waited for the horror that was coming and that was me.

  * * *

  By the time I get back it is completely dark. Clouds and rain soak the atmosphere and make the blackness seem to float just overhead. There is no starlight, just the thick, waterlogged air.

  As I pull into the driveway I can see that something is wrong. The door of the house gapes open before a gust of wind roars past and slams it against the frame. I switch off the headlights and the darkness is almost impenetrable. My eyes itch as they strain into the night.

  For a while I stand by the door, listening into the house. I try to catch footsteps or rustling, any noise that would betray someone still inside. I can hear only silence above the distant whisper of the sea and the occasional crash of the door blown against the frame.

  Something in my gut, some pulse of terror or adrenaline, surges as I step silently inside. Then, in the chill of the hallway, it subsides. That tingling alertness provoked by danger washes out of me. My muscles go slack. Weariness burns behind my eyes. The tension that has run static through my body for months suddenly ebbs away. Exhaustion soaks through me. I sink into it. Let the darkness bring what it will, whatever dangers it enfolds. For so long, fear seems to be the only thing that has bound me to life. It is all I can remember. My body suddenly rejects it. In the night, I am free of the persistent animal need to exist, even if only as flesh and nerves jolted by hunger and terror. No. Let it end now, whimpering and senseless in the dark. As well here as somewhere else. As well now as later when the only thing that separates the two is an endless series of minutes which rub and gnaw at the soul.

  I go calmly to the light switch and turn it on. The glow is blinding. Books and papers are strewn on the floor. The table has been overturned. A smashed lamp rolls on the rug. Drawers and cupboards have been rifled through one by one, emptied, and their contents cast onto the ground.

  There is still no noise in the house apart from the rustle of the sea wearing down the rocks, shrinking the land.

  Who did this? Someone sent by the army, looking to remove any proof against Lambert which I might have hidden away? Or Anne-Lise’s killer, who had blended back into the silence after the investigation foundered, but now, hearing of my inquiries, is alarmed enough to break cover and come and hunt down his pursuer?

  I can feel the photograph of Anne-Lise pressed in my pocket. Would it matter if I discovered who killed her? She would still be just a corpse, putrefying matter in the cold ground, nothing more than cellular decomposition, a pure, organic thing dissolving, rotting, wasting back to the original nothingness.

  I have to try to hold on to her. She is the only thing that keeps me from dissolving. She gives me shape. Without her, there are only the endless identical minutes passing by me, falling around me like snow, burying me, lying over me like a pall until I too fade and am forgotten.

  There is still only silence in the rest of the house.

  I clear some space on the sofa, pushing papers and books with cracked spines onto the floor. It seemed strange to come back home, to this preserved relic of a past that had long ago died in my memory. This chaos makes sense. This destruction. This living darkness in which an
unknown person may remain, out in the distance, watching me, waiting for another opportunity to search for whatever he thought he could find here.

  I turn off the light and lie down on the sofa. I listen to the door lurching and banging in the fury of the wind that whistles and swirls in the hallway and sounds like a lullaby.

  Day Six

  I am fully awake by the time dawn breaks with wintry slowness, filtering through the mist and damp and streaking the air gray. The light seems to trickle through the sky, struggling to exist at all, diluted and absorbed by clouds distended with rain and by the persistent night. I slept in my army greatcoat, but the air coming through the open door is heavy with the ice and chill of the sea and my muscles are stiff and my skin, stained by two years in the North African sun, looks jaundiced and pale.

  Anne-Lise. Each time I sleep, the pieces of her begin to fragment. She seems farther away than ever when I awake. I spend my days reconstructing her last weeks and hours—the relationships that bound her, the infinitesimal details of her everyday world—only for it all to unravel in the indefinition of each new dawn. I try to gather up the shards of her life—her books, her friendships, her hopes—and piece them back into a whole. I try to remember how to look at them like a detective, how to analyze them, how to sift through them until, with the right turn of the kaleidoscope, something new, some luminous pattern, suddenly emerges from all the dashed and shattered parts. What have I missed? What meaning is imprinted on the most banal things that I have already seen or heard but let slip innocuously by?

  This is how I want to think of Anne-Lise: In the faint traces of the past, she can be saved. Her death can be understood and stamped with justice.

  But each morning, in the gummy no-man’s-land between sleep and wakefulness, Anne-Lise slips away. Her past is distant and dead, and I feel only the uselessness of my desire to recover it. The only way back to Anne-Lise is the memory of those who knew her—and memory, with all its deviousness and its intelligence to protect us from what we know, is a deceitful guide. My own memory is devious. How can I stop myself from seeing in Anne-Lise another Amira, a victim who, this time perhaps, I can save?

  * * *

  The church at Sainte-Élisabeth stands at the hub of the town. All roads lead up to its brown stone walls and its spire dwarfs the houses around it and stretches up toward the platinum sheen of the sky. The early-morning light is murky and the church is almost dark inside, save for the flickering points of candlelight. The air is heavy. From my childhood, I can dimly remember ranks of old oak pews, the wood polished smooth over generations. They were plundered by the Nazis sometime during the war and now there are crudely carpentered boards nailed up in their place. I walk to the front bench and sit down on the rough wood. There is a tranquility here in the leaden air, something calm that tends toward the peaceful cessation of thought. I lean back and close my eyes. I want to force them open but exhaustion pulls on my muscles like lead weights. I can barely lift my head. I feel like I am tied to the bench as paralysis spreads through my nerves.

  Then something jolts me awake. Out of the corner of my eye, as it flickers half-open, I see the body of Christ bound to the cross hanging above the altar. For a second, it is Anne-Lise’s pale flesh I see nailed to the wood, the torment of the body flaunted as an obscure yet majestic symbol. And whoever came to church and sat in the congregation and stared out at the martyred body of the Son of God could understand that gesture by which flesh became transubstantiated into art. In the mind of her killer, was Anne-Lise’s torment also an apotheosis, a mark of love?

  A gentle cough echoes behind me and Père Clavel appears in a woolen jumper, his eyes magnified behind the watery thickness of his glasses. He sits beside me on the front pew and lays one almost weightless hand on my arm.

  “It’s been a long time,” he says. “I didn’t think we would see you again. And if we did, I would have hoped for it to be in better circumstances.”

  “You remember me, then?”

  “I remember that you weren’t one for churches. Did Algeria make you change your mind?”

  I shake my head. “I wanted to talk to you about Anne-Lise Aurigny. And about another girl, Julie Bergeret, who was killed in the winter of ’47. Do you remember her too?”

  “I have made it my business to know the people around here for forty years. I don’t think I have forgotten any of them.”

  “Tell me about Anne-Lise. Was she someone you knew?”

  “Only when she was younger. Sarah used to bring her to church when she was five or six. She didn’t dare to go in herself but she’d leave Anne-Lise with me. She didn’t want her daughter to grow up with a stigma upon her. She wanted Anne-Lise to learn about God and to be cleansed.”

  “How did Anne-Lise behave?”

  “She wasn’t the least bit interested. She was a remarkably stubborn, precociously self-assured little girl. She had an ability to totally ignore everything that she didn’t agree with. She just used to sit down and gaze at the stained glass or through the open door. I soon gave up trying to teach her about the Bible.”

  “So you never got close to her.”

  “Not at first, but we were quite close for years. She didn’t want to learn about the Bible but nor did her mother want to take her away from the church. Sarah wanted Anne-Lise to seem godly. She wanted her to be blessed, to protect her from the evil eyes that were all around. I think she also wanted some time for herself, in which she could drink quietly and without worrying about how to hide it from those inquisitive eyes that seemed to see everything and to see straight through it all at the same time. So Anne-Lise and I played chess. She was as interested in those sixty-four black and white squares as she was utterly uninterested in the Scriptures. Sometimes we played games, and at other times we recreated great matches from the past. She used to stare at the board as I moved the pieces around to show her strategies. She soon played much better than me. I suppose she lost interest in me. I was, at best, a mediocre player.”

  “Why do you think she was killed?”

  “I have no idea. There was certainly malice directed at the family, but I can’t see any connection between banal, small-town spite and the pathological violence of her death. I can make no sense of it at all. It is pure bestiality. Evil unchained.”

  “Someone told me that Anne-Lise may have been killed out of love. Could you believe that?”

  He shakes his head. “No love could encompass such wickedness.”

  I point to the fallen head of the Christ, the torn flank, the nails hammered through the hands and feet. “What about love like that?”

  “That was the most incomprehensible sacrifice.”

  “Perhaps Anne-Lise’s killer thought the same.”

  Clavel shakes his head. “I don’t believe such acts can ever be explained.”

  “What about Julie Bergeret? Do you think there could be any connection between the two killings?”

  “They are a long time apart. What about all the years between?”

  “I don’t know. Did you think that Julien Kerbac killed Julie?”

  “I’m not even sure whether Julien knows the answer to that question. As for myself, I have no idea. By now, I’m not sure anyone will ever know. Not in this world.”

  “What was Julie like?”

  Clavel shakes his head gently. “It’s going back a long way.”

  “Try. I need her to live again, just a little.”

  “I suppose, in many ways, she was quite nondescript. Soft-spoken, quiet brown eyes, and brown hair. She didn’t want attention or say a great deal, she didn’t stand out at school. She was the sort of girl you could easily overlook. And yet there was something about her that struck me when I was with her—you should remember that she went to church at le Quéduc, not here—and that was an almost radiant quality of goodness. It seemed to simply shine out of her: patience, tolerance, gentleness. She cared for Julien, sheltered him from the harshness of a world he could never fathom. She let him breathe and
be himself. When she died, nothing could hold him together anymore.”

  I leave Père Clavel enhaloed in candlelight and make two trips before heading off to find Lafourgue and, through him, Sasha Kurmakin. First I drive back to the lycée Cartier and, in their records, search for the year Erwann began to teach at the school. On a meticulously indexed card I find the date September 1948: the summer after Julie’s death. Next I obtain from police records the date of de la Hallière’s return to France. According to the files, he was back from North Africa in October ’47, the last autumn when Julie was still alive: a quiet, virtuous, inconspicuous girl just months away from a nightmare that no one can now recall or understand.

  * * *

  When I arrive at the police station I am informed that Kurmakin has not yet been brought in. I decide to speak to Mathilde again. Something about her haunts me. I don’t know if it’s her hurt, dark eyes or her empty room. This morning I find her awake. Her skin is almost translucent and shot through with the blue marbling of her veins. She peers up at me dully but, unlike last time, she’s not hungover. She just looks exhausted. Her soft brown eyes are red-rimmed and her hair is tangled and knotted. She runs her hands through it almost mechanically to smooth out kinks but she seems only to make the knots worse. She is dressed, but appears as if she hasn’t been to bed at all. Her eyes stare at me, liquid, the pupils dilated and depthless.

  “I guess you didn’t get anywhere,” she says. “Is that why you’re back? To apologize to me and to say that you tried but you couldn’t find out who killed Anne-Lise?”

  “Can I sit down?”

  She nods toward the foot of the bed. “Please.” Her voice is husky, far away.

  “I don’t yet know if I’ve gotten anywhere or not. I found things out, but I don’t know whether they’ll lead anywhere until they do. Or they don’t.”