Khalil

by Yasmina Khadra

  * * *

  —

  Rayan, Driss, and I were all born between March and July 1992. In the same apartment building on rue Melpomène in Molenbeek. Rayan on the fourth floor, me on the second floor, and Driss on the ground floor. Rayan’s mother managed a ready-to-wear shop; Driss’s was a cashier in a supermarket; mine babysat the neighbors’ kids in exchange for a few banknotes at the end of the month. My father had no objection. In fact, he was delighted that my mother took care of her personal financial needs without requiring contributions from him. He called himself poor; in reality, he was a tightwad. I don’t remember ever seeing him slip a coin to anyone at all.

  Rayan, Driss, and I learned to stand on our own two feet under the same roof and busted our faces on the same tiled floor. My mother raised us as though we were triplets. When Rayan was three, he got sent to a day nursery; Driss and I stayed with my mother. Eventually, school reunited the three of us. We weren’t in the same classroom, but the schoolyard was ours. In the evenings, we’d be together again at one or the other’s apartment. Rayan was a brilliant student, which naturally made him a target of the class dummies, who nicknamed him “Baby Bottle” because, they said, his beautiful, slender mother had nursed him on powdered milk so as not to spoil her breasts. This wasn’t true, of course. Rayan’s mother was a Berber born and bred, and she didn’t stray from her ancestral traditions. After her husband died in a car accident, she raised their only child with complete selflessness. Rayan didn’t want for anything. The first time I pedaled a bicycle, it was his; the first time I maneuvered the joystick on a video game console, we were in his room. I confess that I was a little jealous of him. He was always neat and tidy, well combed, well brushed, well dressed, as polished as a pebble. While Driss and I were laughing our heads off in the middle of Moka’s entourage, listening to the old owl tell us of his trials and tribulations as a man inured to every danger, Rayan was going over his lessons and not turning in for the night until he’d shown his mother his duly completed homework.

  My father had never so much as glanced at my report cards, which were, it’s true, marked with some disastrous grades. He preferred getting sloshed and losing his shirt at the racetrack. As for our mother, she was illiterate and incapable of telling the difference between a bill and a summons. In fact, nobody in my house gave a damn about school. I skipped classes as often as I wanted—nobody even noticed.

  In middle school, things didn’t get much better. Driss and I spent our time clowning around in the back of the classroom; Rayan collected congratulations. The work our diligent fellow student turned in was always showered with praise; Driss and I sometimes submitted blank pages, just to impress our classmates. Detentions and warnings from the teacher pumped us up; we were proud, not shamed, to be singled out.

  Rayan pursued his studies in a private high school carefully chosen by his mother. Driss dropped out of the public high school after the second year began; one month later, I burned my schoolbag and my notebooks and hastened to join him in the carpenter’s shop where he worked off the books.

  A computer whiz, Rayan had no trouble getting himself recruited by a well-established management firm. Driss excelled in carpentry, a trade that had already cost him two or three fingers. Me, I got by on part-time jobs and fresh air and didn’t worry too much about tomorrow.

  Each of us ran his own ship with the means at hand, but we remained the best of friends in the world, all three of us. We got together often, went to movies as a group, and regularly talked on the phone, even though Rayan seemed less available after Driss and I began to get involved with projects sponsored by the Fraternal Solidarity Association.

  5

  Around ten o’clock the next morning, I went to see Dominique, aka Buffa, an old acquaintance who lived in my former neighborhood in Molenbeek. He had a shop where he repaired and rented motorbikes. When we were ten, Buffa and I had been sworn enemies. Every time our paths crossed, he called me a “fucking Arab” and a “snake charmer” and showed me his crotch. He was dying to give me a serious ass-whipping. I was too fainthearted to take up the challenge. One evening, as I was coming back from the parc des Muses, where Moka had established his headquarters, Buffa caught me in a deserted alley. A fight was inevitable, and I had to defend myself. I did better than that; Buffa went home with a bloody face. Afterward, we made peace and became pals.

  Buffa wasn’t educated. Cutting class was his preferred school activity, and he negotiated puberty in turmoil. In time, he got on the right side of things. Married since he was nineteen and father of a kid, he took care of his little family and seemed satisfied with what each day brought him. He was sensible, nothing more. He had no ideals. For Imam Sadek, a good citizen was not necessarily a good believer, but since Buffa was a Christian, he was excusable. The Bible is a human work and therefore imperfect, which made the exercise of their faith less essential to the subjects of Issa the Christ. Buffa frankly admitted as much. He recognized that there was something miraculous in Islam, and he found our way of practicing our religion much more sincere than the equivalent in his community. If I had continued to see him (Imam Sadek recommended that we break off any relations with non-Muslims), it was for precisely this reason: Buffa was neither a racist nor an Islamophobe.

  “I need a bike for an emergency.”

  Buffa opened his arms wide and said, “Take your pick.”

  “I’ll have it back before noon.”

  “No problem. Just try not to bang up this one like you did the last one.”

  “I promise.”

  While I was starting the motorbike, Buffa wiped his oil-stained hands on a rag and walked over to me: “Do you know where Driss is?”

  “I haven’t seen him for a week. Why?”

  Buffa looked around first and then proceeded to alarm me: “It seems the police paid a visit to his home. They took his mother to the station.”

  My stomach contracted violently.

  “Do you think he’s gone off to Syria for the jihad?”

  “How should I know? That’s the kind of thing you don’t reveal to anybody.”

  “He’s your close friend. He really didn’t say anything to you?”

  “No. I have no idea where he is.”

  I jumped on the motorbike and got away from the garage as fast as I could.

  I couldn’t steer the thing very well. I had the impression that my arms and legs were going numb. I turned off the road and onto an esplanade, took out my telephone, and called my twin sister to ask her if anyone had stopped by to pick up my stuff, as arranged.

  “The friend in question has not materialized,” Zahra assured me. “You told me you didn’t need extra clothes anymore. You were coming home soon, you said.”

  “My internship in Antwerp is getting complicated. I haven’t received any mail?”

  “No.”

  “And you’re sure nobody’s come to the house looking for me?”

  “I’m sure. Nobody at all.”

  It took me a good ten minutes to decompress before I got back on the bike.

  * * *

  —

  The bomb maker lived on an isolated farm about twenty kilometers west of Brussels, off the road to Ninove. The lane to his house ran through fallow fields. There was no other building for miles around. I followed a stony path lined with sad trees, and then, a little lower down toward a stream, I took a goat trail to the ramshackle farm, where our handyman lived alone, with no wife or children, raising chickens and making “packages” for certain emirs in the region. I’d come to that strictly confidential address twice with Ali to pick up some special orders for Lyès.

  I found the bomb maker in a dingy cabin behind the shed, which was teeming with poultry. He was busy fixing a wheelbarrow wheel. Alerted by the throbbing sound of my motorbike, he pushed apart the two panels of the double door to see who was invading his privacy.
/>
  Having identified me, he went back to soldering the front part of his wheelbarrow.

  He wasn’t glad to see me. “Nobody told me I’d be getting a visitor today,” he grumbled, without stopping his work.

  “It’s not a courtesy visit, either,” I said.

  He stared daggers at me. “You have no right to turn up at my place of your own accord. You’re violating your instructions.”

  “It’s important to me.”

  “Does Lyès know you’re here?”

  “I had to see you first.”

  He laid his blowtorch on a big oak table, wiped his hands on his overalls, and planted his feet so he could look me over. “What have you got in that thick head of yours?” he asked. “Mud? I’m telling you, you have no business being here. You can’t just breeze on in like I’m having open house. Are you trying to fuck up everything in the whole sector? No one’s entitled to visit me without an authorization from his emir. Do you realize the problems you’re going to have with yours?”

  I slammed the suspect cell phone down on the table and said, “It was fried!”

  The bomb maker frowned and silently considered the telephone. He didn’t see what it had to do with anything.

  “Your little gadget doesn’t work.”

  “What is this crazy talk?”

  “I’m not a coward. You’re the one who screwed up. And you’re the one who’s going to explain to Lyès why I’m still alive. Your fucked-up telephone is out of commission. You should have checked it before you put it inside my belt.”

  He suddenly grew pale. He’d just grasped the meaning of my words and the reason for my visit. He took a step backward, the flat of one hand pressed against his forehead, and stayed like that for a minute, his breath ragged; then, having recovered a modicum of lucidity, he raised his two arms to keep me at a distance.

  “Listen close, you. I haven’t heard anything. You’re going to get on out of here, right away.”

  “I need to prove to Lyès that if I failed in my mission, it wasn’t because I didn’t try. I was given a button for form’s sake, but the phone that was supposed to blow me up by remote control was useless.”

  “I always check my devices.”

  “The repair guy said that the model’s outdated and the thing itself is completely fried.”

  “What repair guy, damn it? Do you realize what you’ve done?”

  “There’s no risk. It was in a phone shop.”

  “You dumb bastard.”

  “I wanted to know why it didn’t work.”

  “Maybe you fooled with it.”

  “I didn’t even know it existed. It wasn’t until I checked the condition of my belt that I found the phone, connected to the detonator. The wires leading from the firing button were just wrapped around a stick of explosive.”

  “I don’t need to explain myself to you. My mission consists of preparing packages. I have no right to know who they’re meant for or how they’re going to be used.”

  “Who authorized you to tamper with the firing button and plant that cell phone on me?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m not in the loop, I have nothing to do with developing projects. I’m not supposed to know who wears the belts I put together. And I don’t do after-sale service, you understand me? Now get out of here and don’t ever come back again. If you have any complaints, file them with your emir.”

  “You have to admit it was your fault that I didn’t carry out my mission.”

  The bomb maker viciously swept the blowtorch off the table, rushed over to the double door, and grabbed an axe that was hanging on one of the panels.

  “One more word and I’ll split your skull. After that, I’ll throw you in a hole and cover your carcass with chicken droppings. The best tracking dog around will find no trace of you. Now clear out. You’ve been dead to me for so long I can’t remember you anymore.”

  His mouth frothing, his eyes bulging, he was waiting for me to make just one false move so he could bash my head in. It wasn’t a human being I had in front of me, it was a wolf prepared to eat me alive.

  I got on my motorbike and returned to Brussels. My heart was squashed like a lemon.

  * * *

  —

  There were people in Buffa’s garage. I recognized Jérôme, an occasional subject of detention warrants. He lived in Molenbeek, where he passed for the reincarnation of Arsène Lupin, with a specialty in burglaries carried out in swanky neighborhoods. He must have been thirty years old and looked twice that. Next to him was Ėric, Buffa’s older brother, who had an automobile repair shop in rue Korenbeek. He was married with three kids. Sitting on the seat of a dismantled motorbike, Fred the Lefty was eating a snack of hard-boiled eggs. Fred was also a mechanic. He’d been in the army before getting kicked out for stealing spare parts.

  Every member of this fine company fell silent while I parked my bike.

  “Am I disturbing you guys?” I asked touchily.

  Buffa motioned me to step over his office threshold. “Feels like I’m interrupting a family council,” I said.

  “You haven’t heard?” Ėric said to me, looking uncommonly fidgety.

  “That depends.”

  “It’s about your friend Driss.”

  “I don’t know where he is. Our heads aren’t under the same hat.”

  “I’m afraid he won’t be able to find a size that fits his head anymore,” said Fred, his mouth overflowing with bits of egg yolk. “Your pal has been identified. He made it into the top story on the television news this morning. He was one of the suicide bombers at the Stade de France.”

  I feigned astonishment. Buffa rushed over to stop me from falling.

  “We’re all stunned,” he told me. “Molenbeek’s in shock. Nobody imagined Driss would be capable of doing such a thing.”

  “Me, I just can’t believe it,” Jérôme added, visibly upset. “Driss was always a good kid. He never gave the impression he was thinking such savage thoughts. Really, this news has just about knocked me on my ass. I liked him a lot, I always did.”

  Buffa pushed a chair toward me. “Sit down. I’m going to get you a glass of water.”

  I pretended to collapse onto the chair and then hid my face in my hands, because I couldn’t display any genuine emotion.

  Jérôme tapped me on the shoulder. “You didn’t suspect anything?”

  “How was he supposed to suspect anything?” Fred asked. “These fanatics don’t even talk to their sweeties. Shit! To blow yourself up, to blow yourself up voluntarily? It’s beyond my understanding. I couldn’t even pull out one of my own teeth. How can they just go to their deaths like that, like going to a parade?”

  Buffa returned with a glass of water. I drank it all in one gulp, managing my anger. Fred’s words were like stab wounds; I struggled to keep myself from jumping at his throat.

  “Besides, he was a jackass,” Fred went on. “His only victim was himself.”

  “Maybe they shot him before he activated his belt.”

  “If that’s the case, serves him fucking right.”

  I couldn’t take any more.

  I got up and left the garage. Buffa walked me to the street, holding me by the arm.

  “Will you be all right?”

  “Yeah, you can let me go.”

  “It’s terrible, though, isn’t it? Driss, a suicide bomber? What kind of fucked-up world is this?”

  “Driss died a martyr, Buffa.”

  He frowned and stopped short. “He was your friend, and so you support what he did.”

  “I don’t judge anyone. Not me.”

  I crossed the road and turned down the first street I saw, without looking back.

  * * *

  —

  I wandered around for hours before taking refuge in a pu
blic park. It wasn’t a possible visit to my house from the police that I was worried about. When you’ve chosen to sacrifice yourself for a cause, everything that has to do with life loses its importance. What concerned me was what I should say to Rayan. Like everybody else, he must certainly know about Driss, and he was probably at this very moment asking himself a bunch of questions about my presence in Paris on the night of the attacks. Of course he would want to understand. I’d need to keep a straight head on my shoulders and come up with some good answers for him.

  Around four o’clock in the afternoon, I gathered up my courage and went to rue des Bogards. Rayan’s car was there, which wasn’t at all a good sign. Rayan hardly ever came home in the middle of a working day. I rang his doorbell, but he didn’t answer, so I made use of the key he’d left for me. Except for water running in the bathroom, the apartment was sunk in a morgue-like silence. I called Rayan; he didn’t respond. Pushing the shower curtain aside, I found him sitting on the floor, fully dressed, while the water rained down on him. He was ashy pale, and his features were all blurred together; he was crying.

  He raised his devastated eyes to me. “You knew, didn’t you?”

  His voice seemed to come out of a well.

  “Yes.”

  He nodded, sniffed, feebly passed the back of his hand over his nose.

  “You weren’t in Paris to see your aunt?”

  “No.”

  He nodded again, full of consternation.

  “I kind of suspected as much.”

  “But it’s not what you think, Rayan.”

  “Oh, no?”

  “I was in Paris to talk him out of going through with it.”