Authors: Simon Pare
Abduction
Copyright © Anouar Benmalek 2011
First Published in France as
Le Rapte
by Editions Fayard
Copyright © Editions Fayard 2009
First published in Great Britain in 2011 by
Arabia Books, 70 Cadogan Place, London SW1X 9AH
Ouvrage publié avec le soutien du Centre national du livre.
Published with the support of the Centre National du Livre.
English translation copyright © Simon Pare 2011
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
eISBN 978-1-907822-45-2
Typeset in Minion by MacGuru Ltd
[email protected]
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This novel was inspired by actual events.
I condemn no one, I absolve no one.
Chekhov
Why did things happen thus and not otherwise?
Because they did so happen.
Tolstoy
“I
t's far too fine for a winter morning. God keeps His books in good order and He never does anything without reason; if it carries on like this, we can expect one hell of a drought this summer. Bloody global warming!” he whispered, his face pale.
I burst out laughing at this non sequitur and the acting Zoo Director's offended tone. He seethed through clenched teeth, probably some insult about people who'd be better off with their balls grafted onto their brains rather than dangling uselessly between their legs. That was his favourite insult, but he only used it when he was in a
good
bad mood, as he put it. Unless, that is, disgusted by the two males coupling in front of us, he had shouted, “May Satan burn your arseholes until the end of time, you damned replicas of the sons of Adam!”
I thought, “You old relic, just admit that you'd love to swap places with these two monkeys! Butt-hole bliss at least once in your life, eh?” The prudish administrator gave me a nasty look as if he'd read my thoughts. I tried to arrange my face into a more serious expression, and we continued our tour of inspection.
I was carrying a spiral-bound notebook and conscientiously writing down my boss's comments (he was acting Director because the incumbent had just been hospitalized with an upset prostate due to the Algerian sun), unaware that by the end of the day I would be in a state worse than death. Or, more precisely, that my agony would commence only a few hours later â a little bit around 9 p.m. and a lot more towards 10 p.m. After that⦠well, I would envy the imperturbable serenity of those lucky enough to be safely dead and buried.
The day had started well enough, even if, from time to time, an unpleasant pinching in my stomach reminded me that Meriem, the woman I had loved for the last fifteen years, had mentioned divorce for the first time the week before. I had made the mistake of reacting to her recriminations with a joke. And that had really got her angry. She'd slammed our bedroom door and slept on the couch. The next morning we hadn't mentioned our argument, but that day and the following ones she refused to let me give her my usual quick kiss before we parted for the day, me heading off to my bread-and-butter job as a biologist at Algiers Zoo, and she to her foreign language institute. I had left earlier than her this particular morning; we had only one car, which we used alternately, and it was my turn to take the bus.
She had caught me on the doorstep â after once more rejecting my kiss â and told me in a concerned tone of voice, “Our girl's having trouble at school. I've looked through her exercise books â they're a right mess. We're going to have to crack down on her.”
“Can you really see me lecturing her on her birthday?”
“Her birthday's no excuse.”
She gave me what I call her âresponsible mother' look (which meant: look out, you little pervert, this has got nothing to do with any of our kiss-and-make-up stuff or our more and more frequent arguments. It's about something more serious, sacred even â
the-fate-of-our-daughter
!)
“I think she's got a boyfriend⦔
I didn't like the way those three suspension points had virtually materialised in the air between us. I grumbled, pretending that I didn't understand.
“She's got several boyfriends, and some girlfriends too, hasn't she?”
“Don't act the fool, Aziz! You know what I'm talking about. I found a note from some little shit in with her things. He arranged to meet her at the cinema in the Ryadh el-Feth shopping centre. And guess how he signed it?”
She threw her arms up.
“â
I luv you, darlin'
, with âlove' spelt wrong and no âg' on the end of âdarling'. The kid's an ignoramus too.”
A look of dumb protest must have appeared on my face, something like:
Come on, she's too young for stuff like that!
I went bright red. I must have blushed (to judge by my wife's mocking expression) as badly as when she had told me six months earlier in a normal, chatty tone of voice that our daughter â whom I still called
my baby
far too often â had had her first period.
“At the cinema? The day before yesterday? But she was at school⦔
The same suspension points, but this time it was I who had uttered them.
“Yes, she skived off. Your beloved daughter is a liar. Girls often lie at her age, and later on too. Didn't you know that?” she added with that little condescending laugh that really got under my skin.
A worry line quickly creased her brow.
“Remember the kind of neighbourhood we live in. The woman next-door whispered to me that the imam's wife is spreading nasty gossip about our daughter.”
“Well, you know where those yokels the imam and his wife can stick their gossip?”
“Gossiping yokels wearing hijabs and beards can be dangerous in this crazy country!” she hissed. “Half of our neighbours in the City of Joy would sell their souls if the Islamists told them to, remember?”
Bloody City of Joy! Of course I remembered, just as I remembered the overjoyed looks on the faces of some of our neighbours the day after the first attacks on intellectuals and journalists thought to be anti-Islamists. After the sordid murder of a writer in front of his wife and daughter, even the pretty young widow on the sixth floor who made ends meet by trading on her charms had felt obliged to tell me that a new era of justice, free of heathens and heathenism, was nigh.
This bloody City of Joy and bloody us too! We had been forced to hide our worry and feign a neutrality that could be taken for approval. Meriem was careful about her appearance now, and we were both sick of the duplicity we imposed on ourselves. We had realised though that this excitability was not just some burst of political hotheadedness and that it might pose a threat to our physical safety. We had never entirely thrown off that tension, that vital obligation to weigh what we said, since. We weren't the only ones, far from it, who drew a veil if not over our bodies, then at least over our words. Many Algerians, maybe even most â who could know with such a silent people! â waited in spineless anxiety to see which way the wind would blow. While fate dithered over whom to make the country's new rulers, it was better not to get one's feet wet. “If you are killed in this godforsaken, lawless country, only your mother will mourn you for more than a day; everyone else, starting with your closest friends, will hasten to dry their tears for fear that their grief will identify them to your enemies!” were the words of wisdom doing the rounds in Algiers.
As for me, after a few years of this exhausting ordeal, I had become a master of the art of charting a course between completely opposing opinions and leaving my interlocutor from the City of Joy â no matter whether he was an Islamist, a policeman or just an âordinary' neighbour! â convinced, through a series of knowing expressions and smiles, that I wholeheartedly agreed with him. With one exception: the overly friendly ground-floor tenant, always dressed in the same dark jacket, who said he was a simple postal worker and whom I suspected of being an army or police informer, albeit a lowly one, since he lived in the same trashy block of flats I did.
Fifty-odd and balding, he had an unpleasant way of pressing your fingers while asking his harmless questions. I felt both sullied by the touch of his hand and vaguely uneasy at the feeling of guilt he inspired in me, even when he was asking me what I thought of the weather. “Rat-man!” I had once insulted him under my breath and I had thought, later, that this name suited him well. Rumour had it that he had been involved in the riots of October '88 while officiating in a different part of the Algiers area, and that he had taken advantage of this to rape some teenagers who had been arrested during the troubles. These events had taken place in a police station according to some, and in a paratroopers' barracks according to others. The man didn't seem to have got wind of these grave accusations â or else he couldn't care less â because he didn't think twice about going to the mosque every Friday dressed in a magnificent white burnous.
I had inherited this miserable dwelling after my father died in an accident; my mother had been divorced since I was a teenager and had opted to go and live out her days with my older sister in the village of her birth. Mine and Meriem's salaries didn't allow us to rent a flat in a less seedy area. I had resigned myself to living in this hole infested with bearded men for a few more years while we saved up a few hypothetical wads of dinars.
“OK, OK,” I had granted Meriem in my cowardice, “we'll talk about it with Shehera this evening if I don't get home too late. You better believe it; it's going to be a real family council with lots of arguing. And some beatings, if you insist! By then I'll have grown a moustache so that I'm up to the task! And I'll buy a burqa too, just to be on the safe side.”
“You never take anything seriously, do you? You always find a way to wriggle out of it,” she'd muttered, but broke off because our daughter, barefoot and in her pyjamas, had joined us by the front door. Although her eyes were still sleepy, she already had one Walkman earphone in her right ear, which she claimed was the more âmusical'.
“Hi Mum, hi Dad,” she'd called with a lisp that an expensive speech therapist was battling to correct â but which still made me melt with selfish affection.
“You're late getting up, Sheherazade.”
I always used the full version of her first name when I was about to tell her off. She didn't like her first name â the cliché of the tacky Oriental princess â and in any case, she said firmly, no man, not even a king, would keep her nattering away for a thousand and one nights.
