The Moment Before Drowning

by James Brydon

  I kept talking but all I could think was that there was nowhere for Amira. Not this European abomination in which she was merely a sideshow absurdity, a Hellenized native. But nor could she exist in the world that was coming to Algeria when the colonists had been driven out and the FLN took power.

  My voice dried up. I couldn’t say anything to her. I just let her head roll between my hands, and her skin seemed both chilled and feverish to the touch, as if the dead air in the basements of al-Mazra’a had sucked all the heat out of it, but underneath a devouring, quenchless fire was raging.

  The magistrate’s voice seems to travel across a great distance to reach me: “Assuming, capitaine, that your version of events is accurate—and we shall let M. Gallantin have his say in this matter in good time—could you perhaps explain to me how you were able to stay with the girl for so long?”

  “I tried to tend to her. I gave instructions that I should be left alone with her for the time being so that I could get her in a suitable state for further interrogation. I remember screaming at Djamel and some of the French soldiers. I don’t know what the words were. They didn’t even matter. It was the noise and the fury that mattered. I think I was trying to say that Amira was an important source of information and now she was in no state to be able to answer my questions. All I remember is the expressions on their faces. There were little twitches of shock. Djamel’s eyes were wide and a tic fluttered in his cheek. I don’t know if they were scared of me or for me. I must have seemed frantic.”

  I shut myself back in with Amira and I tried to find the words again that were like a lullaby, a spell to stave off the dark. I said that the war would end. That peace comes when war ends, not just another different, unending war. My throat was raw where I had been shouting and the air was dry and thick with dust and I could barely breathe.

  Once again I was alone with Amira and I just sat cradling her head, trying to bring her back from wherever she had escaped to, sunken in herself and far from The Farm. I had no sense of time. I couldn’t move and the light was unchanging. Lambert annihilated time in the warren. It seemed never to pass at all. Then came the stifling fear that days, even months, were slipping away while you rotted down here in the dark. I felt my fingers lock and go numb. My joints began to ache but I didn’t dare to move away from Amira. I didn’t dare to let her go.

  I think hours must have passed. Outside it would have been deep in the middle of the night. In the basement of the warren the night didn’t end. I saw Amira’s eyelids flutter and she coughed. Slowly and painfully, she blinked. Something glowed briefly in her eyes.

  I pulled my coat tight around her shoulders. I tried to take her hand but she flinched and started as if I had attached another electrode to her skin. Her teeth clacked together. She stared up foggily and her eyes swam in the murk. She seemed to strain to make them fix on me. When she spoke it was in Arabic so broken and faint that I could hardly hear, and her voice seemed to drown in her throat.

  “End it now.”

  Those were the three words she said to me. I heard them clearly even though I could barely make out her voice. I tried to keep talking to her. I touched her cheek and forced words out of myself, trying to reach whatever fragment of her conscious mind had surfaced long enough to whisper that one sentence to me. It didn’t matter what I said. Amira wasn’t listening. She just jerked her head slightly, almost mechanically, as if shaking off a twinge of pain, and then she said it again.

  “End it now.”

  I kept hold of her head. I was too scared to move. I could hardly even breathe. I don’t know how long I remained frozen like that, pretending that if I remained perfectly still I wouldn’t have to listen to the words Amira had spoken and the one lucid, earnest wish she had dragged out of the blackness. I listened to the throbbing of footsteps in the corridors and the hum of the lightbulb above us. I felt Amira’s head jerk and twitch between my hands. I couldn’t tell whether she was shaking from the pain in her body or the shock of memory now that the mist in her consciousness was dissipating and she was returning to The Farm.

  My fingers were totally numb by the time she opened her eyelids again. Her eyes were burning. She stared up at me and seemed almost to nod her head. Her mouth was swollen and she struggled to form the words with her half-paralyzed jaw.

  “Why are you waiting . . . ?”

  “I can’t,” I tried to tell her. “I can’t.” She didn’t seem to be listening but I felt her head twitch again. I could sense that it was already over. After three days in al-Mazra’a, she would never again be whatever she had been before. They had made her into something else. Amira was gone.

  I unclipped my gun and pressed it into her hands. Her skin was rubbery where the circulation had been cut off for hours. I tried to close her fingers around the butt but she couldn’t grip it. Her hand lay limply in mine and I stared down at the weird bluish skin that looked as if the whole hand were bruised. Her fingers were lifeless. Her voice was soft and still and it floated on the rattle of her breath.

  “You . . .” Then, after a long pause, she found one single word, the last one she ever spoke. “Please.”

  Her head fell back. Her hair was stuck to her face in grimy, bloody streaks. That was all there was. The Farm took her out of the world and enclosed her within its walls. Her universe became the disintegration of her own body and the limits of its pain.

  I held her. The minutes drained into hours and the sounds in the corridors stilled and eventually I felt that, somewhere above ground, the sun must be coming up, glinting red on the vast horizon.

  I saw Amira’s cracked nail polish for the last time. I took my hands away from her face and found that her blood had tattooed my fingers. I picked up the gun that she wasn’t able to hold and placed it against her temple where the pulse of life still beat faintly within her, inside her head where her memories and her self abided too, as frail and indomitable as that pulse, and I shot her.

  There is a strange silence in the magistrate’s office. Then the voice of Maître Sablier starts up again, saying something about how I have even confessed to giving a weapon to a detainee, an act close to treason. My court-appointed lawyer now breaks his own silence, his querulous voice cutting across Sablier’s outrage and asking for time to consult with me before the hearing goes any further.

  The magistrate simply lifts his hand to call for silence. “I think that Capitaine le Garrec has been admirably lucid,” he remarks. “I can see no reason for us to start bandying about absurdities such as treason or asking him to reconsider his testimony. I should like to ask you a question, however, capitaine. Do you feel that the circumstances you describe, and the conditions in al-Mazra’a, mitigate or justify the shooting of the girl, to which you have in fact confessed?”

  “No.”

  “And yet you have described those things in great detail. You have wanted us to hear about them.”

  “Not to exonerate myself, M. le juge. I am guilty of her death. Amira was right. I couldn’t avoid it. Whatever I did, I was always guilty. That was in the nature of things in Algeria.”

  “But you could have tried to help the girl recover.”

  “For what? The rest of her life was just however long she could stand being tortured in al-Mazra’a. There was no other way out. She made a decision. She told me what she wanted.”

  “You could have disagreed.”

  “Like a proper colonist. Isn’t that our pathology? We build a hell for the natives and then think we know better than them how to exist in it. She knew what she was saying. She chose how things would end.”

  “But she was barely conscious, her mind addled by pain. She had no idea what she was saying.”

  “She knew how it ended. Under a tarpaulin in the grange. One way or another. This was the way she chose.”

  “And yet you still consider yourself guilty of her murder.”

  My lawyer starts to tell me that I should on no account answer the question before we have consulted.

 
; “I can’t answer the question. I don’t know anymore what words like guilty and murder mean. Not the way they’re being used in this room, or anywhere in this Palais de Justice. In any case, I didn’t come here today to ask for mercy. I came so that people could hear the truth. I wanted the truth to be written down somewhere official, where it might remain. That is all.”

  The magistrate nods. “Nevertheless, the decision about whether or not a crime has been committed—and who may or may not be guilty—remains one which I must take. And we shall now see what the capitaine and the eager Maître Sablier have to say from their side. They have certainly been anxious enough to advance their version of events, and now they shall have the chance . . .”

  I don’t take in a single word that is spoken after I finish giving my own testimony. I sit through the rest of the hearing in a kind of daze. At times, the magistrate asks me whether I want to counter anything Gallantin or Sablier has said but I just shake my head. I feel a sort of light-headed relief, like after vomiting. The discussions must take hours but I can only remember a few minutes of them by the time I get out of the Palais de Justice. I stand on the stone steps facing the city, rocked by the wind, and my senses seem sharper than they have for days. My vision is clearer. The tiredness that has clogged my brain and my retinas for as long as I can remember seems to ebb away. I gulp in the gray city air and let the cold pinch me back to wakefulness. My red-faced lawyer stands behind me, squinting youthfully at me and weighing up his words as he shakes his head.

  “Why did you tell the magistrate that you shot the girl? Isn’t it going to be very easy to condemn you now?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Is that what you want?”

  “I don’t care too much either way. Something that I think is true has been committed to the records today. And now, if the judge decides that there’s a case against me, he knows what will come out. It won’t be easy for the army, even if a lot of people will refute what I say. There’s enough evidence to make things complicated, and to attract attention.”

  “It won’t be easy for you either.”

  I leave him standing on the stairway with his brow knotted in confusion. He stares after me with something like despair in his eyes.

  * * *

  By the time I am approaching Sainte-Élisabeth it has begun to snow again. The air is aflutter with white. The flakes smother the earth, settling in sheets and veiling the ground beneath. The clouds are a violent gray, presaging a storm drifting in from the sea.

  Images flash in front of my eyes so vividly that I lose sight of the road winding past the cliffs and into town: fields alive with corn; green stalks of maize towering above me; the hum of insects on the pollen-thick air. The colors of childhood float eerily against the desolate winter air.

  Each step back toward the past only makes it recede further and augments its strangeness.

  Snow continues to fall in the quiet afternoon and lies voicelessly upon the ground.

  Once again, I think of Rachel. Four a.m. in our Paris apartment. Her sleepless eyes are glazed and bloodshot. She stares at me as I come through the door but she is too tired or too numb to find any words.

  “I thought you would have gone to bed,” I say.

  Her bloodless lips are tight with anger. “What was it this time?” she asks.

  What was it? It was what it always is. Nothing. Everything. Life.

  I’d had Babette sitting in my office, her body shaken by sobs and welts and cuts running down her back. She was a prostitute in her late thirties and nearing the end of the line. She was never an informant but she’d sometimes share information with me that she’d picked up on the streets. Jean-Jacques, her pimp, had beaten her with his belt for refusing to turn a trick with a client who’d wanted to tie her up. She didn’t know why she’d refused. She just panicked and so Jean-Jacques taught her a lesson. One minute she told me she hated him and the next she said she deserved it and he’d done the right thing.

  I’d asked around and had a tip-off that Jean-Jacques had been spotted in a bar in Pigalle. We scoured the area until nearly midnight. At about one, we picked him up in a back room playing cards. We took him to the police station and questioned him for two hours about a stabbing in Belleville from a week before. He was drunk and tired. We told him there were witnesses who put him at the scene of the crime. He got so agitated about fighting the murder charge that he admitted to having beaten Babette.

  I just remember Rachel’s tired brown eyes like two deep pools swallowing all the light. “That’s it? That’s why you’re home at four in the morning? Because a whore got beaten? That’s all?” Her voice cracks and fades away.

  She left soon after. I came home late and now there was only silence and shadow in the apartment. The rooms were empty and cold. For a while, I even missed the noise and the blame. Then the quiet became all I knew, all I could remember.

  * * *

  At the police station I find Lafourgue in a noncommittal mood. De la Hallière has been brought in and is sitting calmly behind a table in one of the interview rooms. His long fingers stroke the end of a cigarette and he stares at a wall. A faint smirk of satisfaction plays across his face.

  Lafourgue looks at me intently and shakes his head. “I think you’d better come out to the château with me. I want to show you what we found out there. You can tell me what you make of it.”

  He is silent in the car as we drive. I wonder if he has found anything to prove that de la Hallière kept Anne-Lise there. He shows me up to the bedroom I searched last night and asks me if this is the room I meant.

  I nod.

  He walks over to the bookshelves and pulls out the copy of Justine. He leafs through the pages and lets the pictures fall into his hands.

  “Here you are. Are these the ones you were talking about?”

  I look down. In my hand are some old photographs of a naked Arab woman standing in front of a wall. She peers vacantly in front of her. She looks a little embarrassed. She doesn’t look scared. She stretches out her arms but they aren’t bound. Her skin isn’t torn.

  She isn’t Aïcha.

  I start to shake my head. My fingers rifle through the little pile of pictures. They all show the same woman. In some she is naked. In others she wears frills or furs. She often looks blank. In one picture, dressed as a maid, she tries to pout as she pretends to reach up to do some dusting and her lacy skirt rides up to show her buttocks.

  Aïcha isn’t anywhere in the whole set of images. It’s barely even pornography.

  I start to shake my head again and I look up at Lafourgue, who just shrugs.

  “Let’s go and look at the dungeon,” he offers.

  In the daylight, I can see a simple wooden door and steps leading down.

  “After you,” Lafourgue gestures.

  I walk down the stairs. There is just a faint smell of damp. The wood creaks a little beneath my feet. The floor at the bottom is earth. I step slowly into the darkness. I reach out my hands. I touch wood. A great wooden rack.

  I squint into the dark. My hands rub up against smooth, glassy curves. Nestled between the wooden slats are rows and rows of bottles.

  Lafourgue is suddenly right beside me. “It’s just a wine cellar,” he says. “Nothing that looks like a dungeon at all. Was this all you found or was there something else?”

  I can’t find any words. I can hear Lafourgue’s voice buzzing and echoing in my ears.

  “I don’t know . . . I thought that . . .”

  He rests a hand on my shoulder. “Look, you were under real strain with the hearing today. Sometimes this job gets to you at the best of times. It isn’t hard to start seeing ghosts. But they’re not there. Anyway, if this is all we’ve got, there’s nothing we can hold de la Hallière with. I’ll have to let him go.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I don’t know why I thought . . . I’m not sure what happened.” I walk back up the wooden staircase and out into the daylight. It seems immense, blinding. I try to think back
to last night. What I sensed in the musty air rising from the cellar was the faint odor of my own past. The underground cells of al-Mazra’a. A dead girl, her blood leaching out into the dark. For a moment, it was enough to make me almost mad.

  The road home winds in front of me, a white streak in the white immensity of the snow. It glows on the ground and irradiates the night. Now that my head has cleared, I can see how little I have really discovered about Anne-Lise. The fragments of her past have led nowhere. I have stumbled through the investigation, constantly confusing Anne-Lise and Amira in my mind, worming ever deeper into the endless well of my own guilt.

  And all the while, Anne-Lise slipped away.

  Day Eight

  I watch through the window as the first light of dawn begins to diffuse through the night. My mind is endued with the same clarity as yesterday after the hearing. My thoughts are restless, grasping for something I can’t quite find. The unease it provokes drives me out of the house and sets me pacing the coastal paths between expanses of heather shrouded in snow while the pale sunrise flickers fitfully on the horizon. In the damp breath of the mist, I am the only thing living.

  For the first time in weeks, I can see clearly, without my eyelids feeling leaden and the world swimming queasily in front of me. The single thing about Anne-Lise’s death which could still lead back to her killer is the mutilation. Why hack the flesh out of her side? Perhaps it is now too late to find the answer. Time has cast its shadow on the past, effacing it from memory and then from existence, just as the bed of heather on which Anne-Lise’s corpse lay has been erased by the glowing silence of the snow. Whatever my mind is groping for can no longer be found. There is nothing more to do here.

  I touch Anne-Lise’s picture in my pocket and determine to return it to her mother.