Abduction (28 page)

After a pause, he added, “If you're still alive, of course.”

He beat him all night, carefully seeking out the most tender areas, pulling down the prisoner's trousers to lash his buttocks, then his genitals. When Mathieu, unable to stand the pain any longer, started screaming in a voice that was so distorted it could have been a woman's, Tahar gagged him.

“Answer my question,” panted the Algerian with tear-soaked spite. “Is my beating worse than the ones you and those DOP fuckers of yours dealt me? If you don't tell me the exact truth, I promise that I will break open your skull here and now and piss on the brains spilling out of it! So answer by nodding your goddamn fucking head: Is this blow… (Mathieu had huddled up, but the branch caught him on the testicles)… Hurts, does it?… But do you think it hurts more than electrodes on your ears or having your nails ripped out with pliers? Don't be selfish. Don't just think about your own pain; think about what my pain was like when you really let yourselves go. If you're not truthful, that's too bad for you – I'll crush your head with a stone!”

A vile terror gripped Mathieu when he forced himself to nod his head in denial.

“I'll carry on then!”

Stifling his sobs, Tahar went back to his methodical work, letting out
Hah
! and
Heh!
noises like a lumberjack and moans of pain when too sudden a movement revived the injuries the DOP had inflicted on him.

Blows rained down on the prisoner, and Mathieu, haggard now and urinating under him without even noticing it, had the impression that an unbelievable multitude of creatures were screaming inside his head, each of them voicing a different version of his pain and his fear. The focus of this fear was the
fell
's sorrow, which seemed to worsen with every blow he administered. Between two grunts that drowned out his sobs, the maquisard hurled insults, most of them in Arabic, others probably in French but rendered unintelligible by rage.

An entreaty swept through Mathieu: “Dear God, I'm not a hero, prevent this murderer from killing me – I don't want to die like this! Console him; make him stop. I'm sorry, don't abandon me!”

The beating ceased at dawn. But Mathieu didn't know it. He had lost consciousness and only came to because something was tickling his face. The rodent that was sniffing at him – a kind of small field mouse – ran off at the sight of his furiously blinking eyes. Flies were buzzing around his lips, attracted by the clots of blood.

His guard had removed his gag.
I'm going to die in a stupid bid for freedom,
he thought.
Or maybe like some low-down, rabid dog instead. I'm already laid out like a corpse and no one will ever lift me up again. Or maybe I'm already dead and this is…

From the moisture on his cheeks he knew that it was raining. He took little superstitious sniffs to curb his own morbid prophecies: deciding that he was dead was likely to ‘tempt' reality. His eyes sought out the person who had reduced him to this state. His heart skipped a beat when he caught sight of the man's legs above his head.

“Now tell me why you made me escape.”

A slight breeze had got up. Leaning against a tree trunk, his voice hoarse with fatigue, the man spoke calmly.

“Are you going to finish me off?” the Frenchman asked resignedly.

“I don't know. You already stink like a corpse, but have I smashed your skull to a pulp? Have I driven a stake into your heart or up your arse? No… at least, not yet… So why are you in such a hurry to find out the future? Answer my question instead. And remember: I'm the one leading the interrogation this time, not you.”

M
athieu knows that time is growing short and that these details are of no use to Aziz. But he has an almost physiological need for these confessions – the first he's ever accorded to an Algerian, with the obvious exception of his friend Tahar. As great a need, he senses, as for the pills he's been taking against heart trouble for some years.

He told the man who had beaten him everything, and that ‘everything' could be summed up in one word:
shame
– irresistible, corrosive, poisonous shame.

“I realise that it's ridiculous, that it's hard to swallow, but that's how it is. Forgive me. I…”

He had stopped talking, unable to offer any reasons. A blush had come over his face, but luckily it was invisible in the darkness of the undergrowth. Tahar had listened to him in silence, with a thin, incredulous smile on his swollen face.

“So one day,” he sighed, scratching his nose, “there was a
knock! knock! knock!
on the door of that torturer's head of yours. You said:
Who's there!
and someone or something answered:
It's me – morality! Can I come into your life?”

He dissolved into a deeply insulting burst of laughter.

“You think a single good deed is enough to wipe out all the dirty things you did to those men who passed through your hands? Sounds like you know a thing or two about bookkeeping!”

A gasp of indignation shook Mathieu – and for a brief moment a mixture of anger and scorn overcame his fear.

“And you really think you're in a position to give me lessons on morals, do you, fucker? That fake informer's little girl – what was her name again?”

The man started. His face tensed instantly, as though he'd been slapped. He staggered to his feet, looked around for the pistol that had fallen from his lap, seized it and levelled it at the prisoner.

“You… you…”

His eyes raging, Tahar cocked the gun, bent a finger around the trigger and… burst out crying.

Mathieu lay there stunned. The fellow who, one minute earlier, had been prepared to shoot him without any ceremony had brought his hands up to his face to hide the tears that were streaming down his drawn cheeks.

“Hey, what's got into you?”

Tahar dried his eyes with the sleeve of what remained of his shirt, muttering something that sounded like “Leave me alone, you idiot!”

“I ne… never… wan… ted to kill anyone… I… Never… I'm not a… a…”

Mathieu felt a strange sensation – a wish to console him? – spread insidiously through him at the sight of this man who had withstood so much torture and was falling to pieces now that he seemed to be in control of the situation. He left him to cry ugly great adult tears – and realised that his own eyes were growing moist.

“That girl… I never laid eyes on her… I didn't kill any children… That's not what I joined the rebels for…”

He wiped his nose on the back of his hand. He had hung his head, keeping his finger on the trigger of the pistol.

“So who killed everyone in that
mechta
then?” muttered the Frenchman, choosing to ignore the pistol.

“That wasn't how it was supposed to turn out.”

He gazed at his gun with an expression of such hatred, at once stubborn and lost, that Mathieu thought he was actually going to use it.

“The villagers were pro-MNA. Some of them refused to feed FLN fighters or wouldn't pay their dues. Others were informing the French army of our whereabouts; that kind of thing. We only meant to teach them a lesson… not kill them! That's what our leaders had assured us – that we were only going to cure them of their taste for treachery, and give them a good thrashing if need be…”

He picked up a stone and flung it at a tree.

“In any case, that's what I thought when we arrived in the
douar
.”

The scene, as the old man would remember several decades later, was pretty unreal; tragic, because a human being was speaking about his part in a massacre; ridiculous, for the man who was greedily soaking up the other's confidences was lying at his feet trussed up like a sausage. Lost in the middle of a forest of cork oaks, the two associates didn't look good. One of them had tortured the other; the other had taken his revenge by beating him to a pulp all through the night. If some divine director exists, he must take great pleasure in such an unlikely reversal.

“I was a novice teacher in a hamlet on the High Plateaux. I'd been lucky for an Arab growing up in the countryside; I'd been able to go to school and then study with the white priests. I was hoping that fortune would continue to smile on me, that I could cobble together a nice future for myself, a nice house, a nice wife. The schools inspector despised Arabs and didn't have much time for me – nor I for him for that matter. I didn't show it, of course; I satisfied myself with liking my pupils and my job.”

Tahar gave a sad smile.

“You see, it wasn't much. But for me, coming from where I came from, it was enormous.”

He sighed, as if apologising.

“My parents' village was about sixty miles from my school. Everything was wretched there. I hated its degrading misery and even if I loved my family, I only went back to my
douar
for special occasions. That particular time, it was for my nephew's circumcision, my elder brother's first son. The day after the festivities, a group of soldiers led by a captain entered the village. They were chasing some maquisards and claimed we had sheltered them. They questioned us one by one. As we all kept silent, they undressed several men and beat them with sticks and wet rope. Then they forced them to drink salted water. The captain ordered his men to hang up the man he thought was the village chief from a beam by his foot and wrist.”

Gently he stroked the bruise turning blue on his cheek.

“That chief was my father. For the first time in my life I saw this austere, white-haired, intransigent man weeping with pain and humiliation like a kid. The soldiers were laughing and I didn't have the courage to take a strong stand against it. As for my elder brother, he leapt at the captain, but a soldier stopped him in his tracks with a bullet in the thigh. The officer, mad with rage, had my brother dragged off to a rocky outcrop and pushed him over the edge.”

Again his voice broke. He looked coyly in the direction of his prisoner.

“Do you have any brothers?”

“No.”

“Then you certainly won't understand. That brother had protected me throughout my childhood; he turned himself in instead of me whenever I did something stupid because my father ruled us with an iron hand. How many thrashings did my brother get because of me! It was simple: I revered him; he made the sun rise for me. Up until that damned morning I was sure that I would lay down my life for him.”

A cuckoo made its characteristic
coo-coo
call. The dawn had long since melted into morning.

“What did the soldiers do next?”

“Nothing, apart from dealing out a few punches and disappearing as quickly as they had appeared with threats of the same treatment the next time they patrolled.”

“And you weren't maltreated by the soldiers?”

“No, probably because I was the only one in the
douar
who spoke French. Maybe, to their minds, a native schoolteacher who spoke their language was necessarily on the side of the French army…”

Tahar broke off a blade of grass and stuck it in his mouth.

“We made a formal complaint. Well… I complained, because no one in the
douar
trusted in French justice. I quickly realised that people were whispering behind my back that I was turning to the courts to make people forget my cowardliness. Hadn't they stripped and flogged my father, then killed my brother before my eyes without any sign of revolt from me? My poor mother didn't accuse me of anything, but I saw that she more or less shared their opinion. She still loved me – I had been her favourite… – but she also began to despise me a little.”

Pulling the blade of grass out of his mouth, he crushed it between his fingers and then threw it away.

“Actually, they weren't wrong. I'd been paralysed with fear in front of those soldiers. And also I didn't want to lose everything – my brother, my teaching job and the minute ambitions I had devised for myself – in one go. A few months later, notwithstanding our statements and the lawyer who had relieved us of all our savings, the judges acquitted the soldiers and their captain. The worst thing was that they finally confessed, but the court didn't take that into account. According to the judges, the accused had been doing their duty.”

The Algerian turned to the soldier, a bitter grimace twisting the corners of his mouth.

“That doesn't really come as a surprise to you, does it, such indulgence towards your mates?

Mathieu forced himself to keep a neutral expression. The rebel shrugged his shoulders.

“After the acquittal, I took to the
jebel
. I didn't have any choice.”

His voice was full of resentment.

“Yes… neither the village nor the French left me any choice. It wasn't that I couldn't care less about liberating Algeria back then, but, well, the humiliation had been going on for over a century and independence could wait a few more years, just long enough for me to feather my little nest! Until you captured me, I'd been wading around in mud for six months, dying of hunger, cold and fear, scared the whole time that a plane might bomb us or, worse still, burn us to a crisp with napalm. Looking back, I feel like eternity itself would have trouble matching those six fucking months for length!”

The pistol span one way on his finger, then the other.

“You see, at the end of the day, it's not very difficult to become what you call a terrorist. How would you have reacted in my shoes?”

And realising the absurdity of his question the man fell silent for several minutes. Mathieu thought the other man would never speak again. He started to shift his legs into a less painful position but gave up, called to order by the pins and needles numbing his limbs.

“Then came the events in Melouza.”

“At the camp, I didn't understand or get involved in any political discussions. I was too busy with my own rancour and remorse at having done nothing for my father and my brother while there was still time. Oh, such remorse! It was like a poisoned fruit that I just kept peeling. The more bitter it tasted, the harder I chewed. The leaders had decided to put several
mechtas
in the Melouza area that were casting sidelong glances at Messali Hadj and the MNA back on the right track. It was true that the war veteran had fought all his life for Algeria, but they kept telling us that he was past it, that his inflated personal ambition was harming the common cause and that his MNA, the
Mouvement National Algérien
, was gradually turning into a pack of traitors in the pay of the French army. The political commissars hammered it into us: if you want to fight for Algerian independence, there is only one party capable of this historic enterprise, the FLN and its military wing, the ALN, the
Armée de Libération Nationale;
everyone else are just fledgling renegades and
harkis
. For my comrades and me, that had become an article of faith as incontrovertible as the Koran! I had no reason to doubt my leaders' word, all of them tough, courageous men who were always in the front line risking their lives when we clashed with enemy soldiers. One night we set out with six platoons totalling several hundred
djounoud
. Our commander had told us that the aim was to put the local MNA out of action and punish the recalcitrant
douars
. According to them our mission was simple: a show of strength, arrest some traitors, stiff fines and assorted threats for the future should the villages not come over to our side.”