The Moment Before Drowning

by James Brydon

  Gallantin’s lawyer starts to say something about how there is no evidence of bodies being irregularly disposed of at al-Mazra’a, but the magistrate silences him.

  “What exactly did you wish to accomplish by taking the body to the police?” he asks me. “You must have been aware that this would only draw attention to you. If you could have disposed of the body discreetly, as you suggest, why did you not do so?”

  “I wanted the body to be examined.”

  “But the cause of death was clear and there has been no dispute about that from either side: Amira Khadra was killed by a gunshot wound to the head.” He casts an inquiring glance at Gallantin and the lawyer, who nods his head in confirmation.

  “It wasn’t the cause of death I wanted to have examined. It was the state of the body.”

  “And why was that?”

  I pull a creased A4 envelope out of the lining of my greatcoat, where it has been sitting for weeks now. “Maybe it would be useful just to read the pathologist’s report.”

  “Indeed?”

  I hand the envelope over to the magistrate and he pulls out three yellowing sheets of paper scrawled over with black ink. He mutters as his eyes trace the faded sentences across the paper. Single gunshot wound to the head . . . multiple cranial fractures . . . death certainly instantaneous . . .

  I point him down to the next part of the report, which he reads out slowly.

  “Aside from the fatal wound to the head, the body showed a large number of other nonfatal injuries of varying degrees of severity. These injuries had apparently been sustained over a period of several days prior to death. The soles of the feet, the abdomen, and the face all showed multiple contusions; flesh around the nipples was not only torn but singed, as if subjected to fire or to electric current; lesions around the vagina and anus indicated rape, possibly committed multiple times and by a variety of perpetrators.” The magistrate looks up at me. “The woman . . .”

  “Amira.”

  “Amira had been severely mistreated before her death. Is this especially significant to the matter we are here to investigate, which is how she died?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who did this to her, Capitaine le Garrec?”

  “Three privates in the French army. Privates Second-

  Class Guérin, Bernard, and Garnier, all acting under the command of Colonel Lambert.”

  Gallantin’s lawyer starts to speak but the magistrate cuts him off again.

  “I assure you, Maître Sablier, that you will have a chance to respond fully to the comments of M. le Garrec, but first of all I feel we should let him finish giving us his account of events so that you know exactly what it is you are trying to refute.” He looks back at me. “Please continue. Who are these privates that you mention?”

  “They’re conscripts, part of the detail at one of the camps close to al-Mazra’a. I don’t know exactly how they came to Lambert’s attention, but he’s always on the lookout for certain characteristics in soldiers. The ones who hate the bougnoules, drink too much, beat up Arabs on patrols, or burn down mechtas for no reason. Lambert likes to have some soldiers like that on The Farm. Sometimes he brings them in at night, perhaps when activity in the sector is low and soldiers find themselves with too much time on their hands. He uses them to work on the prisoners. They’re not like professional interrogators. They’re completely out of control. There’s no purpose or pattern to what they do.”

  “I see. Is there any evidence, capitaine, of such practices taking place in Algeria?”

  “If I might interject here,” the lawyer says. Once again, the magistrate cuts him off.

  “Capitaine?”

  “The state of the woman’s body is evidence of the treatment she received. That’s why I took her to the police station: to get an objective record of the condition of her body before she died.”

  “Now, Maître Sablier,” the magistrate says, “you may have your say.”

  “It should be noted that there is not a single testimony from any member of the service de renseignements or the army stationed at al-Mazra’a which corroborates the accusations made by M. le Garrec.” The lawyer’s voice is cold. “The three soldiers in question categorically deny having performed the acts they are alleged to have committed and they are upheld in their testimonies by their superior officers, including career soldiers with highly distinguished service records. There is no evidence at all in support of M. le Garrec’s claims that the suffering that this woman underwent was carried out by army personnel. The more likely explanation would be that these wounds were caused prior to her arrest by members of the FLN, whose brutality is notorious, as some sort of punishment.”

  “Capitaine?” The magistrate peers back at me.

  “Look at the timescale indicated on the pathologist’s report.” I point and the magistrate reads out loud.

  “All of the wounds which the body has sustained were caused within two to three days of death, judging by their condition.”

  I take out a second envelope from my greatcoat in which there is a single photograph. “This is a picture of the record of detentions at al-Mazra’a, showing who was brought in and when. Here you can see the entry for Amira Khadra, dated September 10. She died on September 13, having suffered three days’ worth of torture. For the entirety of that time, as the detention log proves, she was imprisoned by the service de renseignements. For the three days in which she was brutalized, she was at the mercy of the French army, not the FLN. In her final hours, she was just another one of the animals kept on The Farm.”

  “That certainly doesn’t prove that these three men are guilty of the offenses,” says Sablier. “Nor, even if they were, that they were acting on the orders of anyone else, least of all Colonel Lambert. You yourself were at al-Mazra’a during those three days, and you were principally responsible for the detention of Amira Khadra. These injuries could very well have been caused by you. That would certainly explain your determination to smear the army of the Republic in this respect.”

  “That, maître,” the magistrate says firmly, “is quite enough speculation. Save your hypotheses and your oratory for when you have a jury that might prove susceptible to them. Nevertheless,” and here his hooded, intense eyes are trained upon me again, “we certainly do need to establish, and in a manner founded upon clear evidence, what happened to this young woman during her detention. Perhaps, capitaine, you can explain to me in your own words what you remember happening at al-Mazra’a.”

  The first time I go to see Amira she has been put in room 15. The bulb buzzes and blinks overhead. Nauseating shadows are flung across the chipped plaster of the walls and the stained concrete floor. Amira is dressed like a European. She’s wearing khaki trousers and a gray shirt unbuttoned at the neck. Her dark hair hangs in rigid, polished curls around her face. Her skin glistens, burnished by a sheen of sweat. Beneath one eye is a bright, glowing welt. Her cheek is beginning to swell and force her right eye into a slit. She sees my eyes drawn to the wound and seems to shrug, as if it’s nothing. She must already be preparing herself for what’s to come, knowing it will be unimaginably worse than a simple blow to the face.

  In the Resistance, I spent a long time thinking about this moment, trying to prepare myself to deal with it. Lesage managed it. He didn’t talk even when they gouged out his eye. I was never in this position. I never found out if I could be silent or not.

  I see Amira preparing herself. She must have been trained to do that. She has thought about this moment before. That means she is involved. She hasn’t been brought here by mistake.

  She is guilty, according to what the French colonists call law. And now she is going to confront the darkness that she has pictured many times in her own mind. She is going to find out whether she can be silent.

  I ask her in Arabic how she is and she laughs and replies in perfect French.

  “Is concern for my well-being really why you’re here?”

  “I’m here to find out what you know. What you
can tell me.”

  “And if I don’t feel very talkative?”

  She tries to make it sound nonchalant but I can hear the tremor in her throat. Her skin is smooth and unlined. It glows with life. She must be about nineteen or twenty. I sit down beside her and offer her water to drink.

  “Officer,” she says, and I realize she is afraid of the quiet, as if she can feel it thrumming emptily in her head, waiting to be filled with her nightmares, “why are you doing this?”

  “Doing what?”

  She sips at the water and I can see her hand shake.

  “Killing people to protect your colonial empire. Do you know what they teach us in school? That France is the mother of civilization. She brought technology and medicine to Algeria to save us. Does it look like that to you?”

  I shake my head. She looks surprised, as if she’d expected an argument or an outburst of fury. She looks like a bright student preparing for a debate. This is probably the world she has always known: classrooms, libraries, lecture halls—implicit monuments to the ideals of progress and reason. Now there is only The Farm. She will find out here exactly what her education and its Enlightenment values amount to, living in a world without logic or reason, buried in the silence of the earth.

  “Let me be absolutely clear,” the magistrate says. “Did you yourself have any role in, or did you personally witness, the bodily harm that was done to Amira Khadra?”

  “No.”

  “Then how can you be sure that the incidents took place as you describe, and that the parties whom you allege to be the perpetrators are, in fact, guilty?”

  I talk to Amira for about two hours on that first day. I don’t find out any precise information about her work as an agent de liaison. I can’t bring myself to ask her. I have known from the first minutes I spent with her that she is involved with the nationalist cause. She follows it because it chimes with the ideas of freedom and human dignity that France is supposed to embody. I find out that she grew up in Algiers and that she used to watch the European ladies in the streets when she was a little girl and it made her feel dirty. I find out that the FLN scares her because of their radical beliefs. I imagine that if she supports them it is because she sees it as the only way that the colonists will be forced off Algerian soil, and she wants to live in a country where girls don’t grow up hating the color of their own skin or the sound of their own language.

  I leave her in the early evening and write up a report for Lambert saying that she has some very minimal knowledge of fellagha activity through anecdotal means, but that she plays no role herself within the organization of the FLN. It is the best I can do. Lambert will be more inclined to interrogate her himself if I deny all possible links with the rebels. My report is intended to play for time.

  “What did you imagine would be the consequence of this initial interrogation?” The magistrate’s face is hawk-like and he looks intent on ripping the truth out of me.

  “I thought it would get Amira a few days of peace. I asked to be able to check out some details of her story.”

  “And that was the tenth?”

  “Yes.”

  “When did you next see her?”

  “The next time I saw her was the afternoon of the twelfth. I’d cross-checked intelligence about some of her supposed associates, and I wanted to go over the facts with her. I was dragging the investigation out, thinking that it could go on for several days as long as it looked like there was some progress.”

  In the warren there are no times of day. Outside, the afternoon heat is starting to gutter in the fading daylight. In Amira’s cell there is just the bulb’s eternal glare. Her face is badly swollen. I step back in shock when I see her. I struggle to pick out the features that had been so clear two days ago. She can’t move her jaw to speak. Something is flickering in her eyes. I stare into them. The flickering is nothing rational. It’s like a spasm, a madness playing on her nerves and eating away at her control. Her gaze darts past me and through me.

  I hold her head very gently. I feel her rock in my arms. I keep talking to her, murmuring softly and insistently, as if I too have become afraid of silence. Eventually she stops twitching. Her jaw moves very slowly. Her face distorts in pain with the effort.

  “Did you . . . come . . . to see?”

  “No. I didn’t know . . . I didn’t know . . .”

  She closes her eyes. It doesn’t matter to her. It only matters to me. She doesn’t need to hear one more colonist trying to keep his conscience clean. Her hair is matted with sweat and blood. The waves have become clumps. Thick, shapeless tangles.

  “None of this provides us with an answer to the question,” the magistrate says. “How do you know the names of the men who did that to her?”

  I want to ask her what happened but the question is absurd. The answer is written into her fissured, discolored skin. Al-Mazra’a is brutal, but there is something sadistic in the way she has been attacked. Something deviant. As if this is a personal message from Lambert.

  I don’t know what to say to her so I ask her if she knows who came.

  She nods. She tried not to look at their faces. It was too much to meet their eyes looking into hers. She couldn’t watch them watching her, remembering her pain, carrying those moments out of the warren and back into the world in their memories. She stared away. She stared down at their sweat-stained green shirts. She stared at the tags where their names and ranks were written. She looked at the letters and the numbers and that was all she saw.

  “M. le juge,” Gallantin interjects, “the capitaine’s remarks cannot but place in doubt his allegiance to France. He appears to be almost admitting to collusion with the enemy.”

  The magistrate nods, noting the objection without passing any judgment upon it, and gestures toward me.

  Amira seems to grow tired. Her head nods on her breast as if sleep is washing over her. Then she starts awake and her eyes roll in fear. She whispers, “Can you . . . get . . . me out?”

  Not alive. Lambert will never let me leave with her.

  “Maybe. I don’t know.” It was all I could say.

  I glance around at the people in the magistrate’s office. My red-faced lawyer is adhering to his promise of silence as long as what I say doesn’t harm my defense. Gallantin’s predatory stare challenges mine. The magistrate’s eyes are keen and calm.

  “I didn’t think about allegiance. With hindsight, I don’t think that France would be well served by”—suddenly my voice seems to echo around the empty corners of the room—“by torturing a girl barely past school age.”

  “That,” Gallantin’s lawyer replies, “is an allegation which you have made, but which remains without the least substantiating evidence.”

  The magistrate sighs. “Maître, we are aware of that. There is no need to repeat it each time Capitaine le Garrec speaks.”

  I only vaguely hear what they are saying. My voice continues. It sounds hollow as I talk over the top of them. The mechanical buzz of it is directed at no one in particular.

  “When I look at those days in September, or even my whole time in Algeria, I think I have become a coward. I don’t know how or when, but it must have happened. I could see how much pain and danger Amira was in. I could see that moment in her eyes when choking fear rotted the rational brain within her. The world made no sense to her. She had lost her grip. Yet I did nothing. I wrote reports. I tried to see Lambert again. I even sent a dispatch to Lesage asking for more authority to control the interrogation of suspects. Useless, time-wasting activity. The actions of a desperate, beaten, bureaucratic man. And all that time I left Amira alone. And so I can say that whatever else I was during my time in Algeria, more than anything else I was a fool and a coward . . .”

  Gallantin nods and starts to open his mouth to speak, but the magistrate cuts him off abruptly.

  “Capitaine, in the darkest hours of France’s recent history, you exposed yourself to great danger to protect her honor. No one in this room who did not heed that c
all, as you did, to struggle for liberation, has the right to call your courage into question. We shall not do so. When did you next see Amira Khadra?”

  “When I next saw her, I knew it was over.”

  She was slumped on the chair she had been tied to. She had been stripped and her skin looked wan in the glare of the bulb overhead. Her hands and feet were swollen. They were so purple that the color of the fingers seemed to blend in with the crimson nail polish she was wearing. There was piss and shit and blood on the chair and the floor beneath her. It had stained her skin and the wood she sat on. I thought I should look away. I shouldn’t see her, because even just looking was violating her. I covered her with a coat. As I put it around her shoulders, I felt the glacial, sweat-soaked expanse of her skin. My fingers trembled.

  Her eyes were glazed. She didn’t know that I was there. She had fled from her pain into some internal realm and she couldn’t get back. I had to try to find her again. I spoke to her softly. I can’t remember a single one of the words. It was just noise. My mouth was parched and I could barely tear my tongue from my palate. I stared into her glazed eyes and hoped to see something stir in their depths. There was nothing: only the tiny, distorted shadows I cast with my hands as I moved to touch her. I sat with her for a while and tried to keep talking. I held her head in my hands. I have no idea how much time passed, but after a while the weight of her head made my fingers feel leaden.

  In the isolation of her cell, my voice was the only thing living. I told her that she was fighting for the freedom of her country. I said that her struggle was meaningful and that the lives destroyed by it were not lost in vain. I wanted her to hear that there was a purpose to what was happening to her. I wanted to piece back together the ties that bound her to the world beyond the walls of the warren.

  She couldn’t hear anything I said. She had retreated from a world that had hurt her in ways she couldn’t understand. I had to keep speaking. It had become an incantation. It dulled my own thinking and feeling. I insisted that she had served her cause with courage and would continue to do so. I stared down and saw the cracked nail polish on her bluish fingers and heard, reverberating in my memory, her bright, educated words. My mind was suddenly full of images of the women of the fellagha, robed all in black, hunched over their cooking pots and washboards and surrounded by the uncannily quiet children of the poor and hungry.