Abduction (3 page)

These bloody primates were too like real people. And had I, the failed biologist, really dreamed of following in the great Pasteur's footsteps throughout my adolescence only to resign myself to ending up a mere prison guard for near-humans? I sighed, unhappy that I could find nothing to laugh at in my exaggeration.

“Sorry, Lucy. If it were in my power, I would open every cage in this miserable zoo. But, well, firstly I'd be out of a job and, secondly, what good would it do you to escape in this crazy country? You'd either get raped to death in the bowels of some police station or one of those fanatics of religious beheadings would tear you apart alive!”

I tapped on my notebook. The female ape looked up as if she were listening to me.

“You're right not to believe me, my dear: human beings spend a lot of their time lying. It's true – I was laughing at you, and that's not good.”

The word ‘lying' reminded me of what Meriem had said about our daughter. I had a premonition that our discussion was going to be difficult because my sweet, stubborn daughter would probably tie herself up in knots of denial, and Meriem, then I, would get angry, first of all with Shehera and then with each other.

I was overcome with a faint sense of nostalgia for the time not so long ago when, as young parents, and close to tears, we had bent over the small creature we'd just brought back from the clinic. Curfew, bombings and massacres might well be the only tangible reality in Algeria, but in our little abode, Meriem, our still-wrinkled baby and I formed the happiest family in the world.

Even then, of course, I had a big hole in my soul – what Meriem called my almost biological cynicism – as well as the touch of craftiness needed to get by in Algiers somehow. In my defence, there was also the blissful love I felt for my wife. The moment I saw her, everything alive within me – my heart, my balls, my brain, my guts – was shaken to the core. I think that Meriem felt the same wonderful pain. In her more sarcastic moments, she would go on about our first meeting: “An unexpected shock in this land of bombings – what could be more normal?”

We sometimes forced a chuckle at how the history of our relationship seemed to mirror the ‘political' almanac of Algeria. We first caught sight of each other during the great riots of October 1988; we fucked for the first time the night of the coup after the Islamists had won the December 1991 elections; and six months later we decided on a rushed wedding following the announcement of President Boudiaf's assassination after his return from Moroccan exile to play the role of puppet for a bunch of potbellied generals. Maybe we were scared of having our throats slit or being blown up before either of us could do something with our lives.

We indeed took full advantage of those early years. Our discussions were fierce, but our tenderness turned out to be boundless, and our desire was often fuelled by the ludicrous places and times we endeavoured to satisfy it in. One evening, for example, we were on our way back from a dinner on the outskirts of Algiers. There was very little traffic because the curfew had been only partially lifted. It was raining and the journey was dreary. We couldn't stand it anymore, so we turned off the road and drove down a dirt track along the side of a wheat field. Meriem had already stripped off on the back seat and I was doing likewise when an old 404 with its headlights on full appeared on the track, which the downpour had turned to mud. A whole family was squashed inside, probably local farmers on their way home. Seeing us in the nude, the patriarch in his
chèche
turban, his wife wrapped in her
haik
and their swarm of children were initially stunned, but this quickly changed to indignation.

“How dare you? You're on my land, you dogs!”

The driver had got out of his car brandishing a club. Panicking, I started the engine while I fumbled with my trousers with my free hand. For a few terrifying seconds, the wheels span in the mud. The 404's driver was banging on the boot of our car like a lunatic while simultaneously damning us, and any swine that might result from our depravity, to drown in the flaming faeces of hell. Meriem, paralysed with fear, made no move to get dressed. Eventually, with a screech of its battered gearbox, the car leapt forwards and we found ourselves driving like lunatics towards Algiers, squawking with laughter and relief, me with my dick out and her stark naked. “Oh, Meriem…”

Even as I noted down the alterations that needed to be made to the bonobos' shelter, I could feel the questions “
Were we still just as much in love or was our love getting bogged down in a pitiful mire of disenchantment?”
sticking in my throat like fishbones.

Before… Now…

“Hey Lucy, could you weave me a magic carpet to take me back to those wonderful times before our doubts?”

Lucy turned her back on me.

“You couldn't give a damn about your guards' worries. You've got a tragedy of your own to deal with, haven't you? So who am I supposed to turn to for advice? The only person I've got in Algiers is…”

I stood there stupefied for a few seconds, realising that my intonation had changed and that I was
actually
pleading with an animal for pity.

“Maybe I'll soon be reduced to asking you to read my cards for me, you pancake-faced witch?”

I felt a stab of anguish. Without Meriem and my daughter I was nothing, just one more idiot in a cruel city that was already crawling with them. When I was a kid, I had dreamed of being a knight in shining armour. All I had become, though, was an individual with no particular qualities, a waverer and a fair coward all in all, whose sole success – which was probably undeserved compared to its importance – was to have met Meriem.

I don't know why I started thinking about my wife's family, a strange couple made up of her mother, Latifa, and her stepfather Mathieu, a Frenchman as thin as a prickly pear spine who had lived in Algeria for so long that he spoke Arabic like a native, yet never mentioned the period before independence. He had remained in the country even when the wave of assassinations of foreigners was at its peak, taking only two ridiculous precautions that probably fooled no one: firstly, he put on a farmer's hat every time he went out so as to look as un-European as possible; and secondly he demanded that everyone call him by his chosen Arabic first name, Ali. Once, I thought I could discern the bulge of a pistol beneath his jacket. I had told Meriem, who had muttered that it was just some old handgun with a rusty mechanism and that I shouldn't tell anyone about it. Possessing none of the habitual expansiveness of the European
pied noir
settlers, this man made you ill at ease with his silences and his shy, thin-lipped smiles with their occasional, fleeting flicker of sarcasm. Meriem didn't seem overly keen on her stepfather either and spoke to him in curt, clipped sentences.

I had a burnt taste in my mouth; after several years of marriage, Meriem still held some secrets for me. Everything about her family was obscure to me. It was by a slip of her mother's tongue that I had learned that Meriem's deceased father was a revolutionary hero. He had a street in a town in the Aurès mountains named after him.

I had tried to find out more about the exploits that had earned him this honour. Meriem had quashed my curiosity: “My father died fifteen years ago and it was not easy for any of us, so let's just let him and old stories about the war of independence lie.”

I had been stupid enough to push her, asking, “What did your father die of?” Avoiding my gaze, she had sidestepped the issue with a catch-all expression: “A death willed by God.” I had been taken aback by this somewhat religious turn of phrase that was so unlike Meriem. After this strange exchange, I had given up all hope of her ever revealing how this Mathieu bloke, having appeared from nowhere, had ended up marrying her mother.

The argument awaiting me at home seemed so inevitable that I felt overwhelmed with sudden hostility towards myself. As I dragged myself off to the Addax antelopes' enclosure, I gave a nervous laugh, trying to fend off the sort of bad mood that I had learned to hide so skilfully from those around me. I was thought of as a constant livewire who even joked the evening he almost died in an ambush dressed up as a checkpoint. The coach bringing us back from Blida had been stopped about twenty miles from Algiers by men in army uniforms. We had immediately realised from the worn-out shoes some of them were wearing and the hairy beards of others, though, that we were dealing with terrorists.

It was in the middle of the electoral campaign for a referendum to decide on an agreement establishing an amnesty for all the acts of violence committed over the previous decade; “a sponge to wipe away the blood of all the atrocities by people wearing beards and kepis' was how the public summed it up, with resigned dark humour. However, it was acknowledged that many Islamist fighters were refusing to hand in their weapons and were bent on seeking to demonstrate this in the bloodiest way possible. That particular day they lined us up along a ditch and told us to give our papers to the ‘brothers' for checking. My identity card showed that I worked at the zoo – and therefore for the government the bearded men held in such contempt. Of course, this wasn't my first ‘fake checkpoint', but my stomach was in knots. My neighbour's teeth were chattering. The podgy old man had been rambling on about importing sheep from New Zealand for half the journey. He bitterly deplored the fact that, despite being cheap, these animals had been declared non-halal by extreme religious groups because their tails had been docked level with their hindquarters; and yet, he recounted indignantly as we crossed the Mitidja plain, nothing in the Koran or the Sunnah outlawed the sacrifice of animals with shortened tails. He was even thinking of writing a petition to the president of the Algerian High Islamic Council with a request for this disastrous misunderstanding to be officially cleared up.

Despite his fear, the shady sheep-dealer tried to reassure himself by muttering that he knew the local Islamists and that these particular ‘brothers' didn't take it out on civilians. “It's just a routine check, and maybe a small tax while they're at it,” he said with a grimace. He had been interrupted by screams – an armed man was viciously laying into a young man, calling him a liar, a heathen and a hellhound. With regard to his papers, he was accusing the smartly dressed lad with his pomaded hair and his impeccably pressed white trousers of being in the army or the police. Another beard had come over to them and put his machine gun to the young man's temple. The latter was protesting that he was an accountant for a private construction company.

“… Private,” he beseeched them with a wretched smile of complicity. “A small private company, not state-owned, guys. I hate the state as much as you do, I swear by love of the Prophet and his companions!”

Producing a long knife, one of the terrorists ordered the wretched man to kneel down. The man refused, sobbing and calling out to his mother for help. The beard with the knife muttered that neither his whore of a mother, nor that crony the President of the Republic would save the lives of renegades like him who tortured good Muslims in prison. He grabbed hold of the young man's neck and tried to force it downwards. The prisoner bucked and managed to break free. Dazed, his face streaming with tears, he shouted, “Look, brother, look at my white trousers. I just bought them, they're brand new – you can't expect me to kneel down in the dirt!”

I thought I must have heard wrongly. I saw the eyes of the man with the knife widen in disbelief before creasing in a huge burst of laughter. Still snivelling, the traveller – who had barely turned twenty – had smiled beatifically, relieved to see a man who had almost murdered him suddenly turn cheerful. He called us to witness.

“See, this brother is a good man. He understands what life's about, he does! I'm sure that…”

He didn't have time to finish his sentence. The second maquisard grabbed him roughly by the hair and with a dagger that had, as if by magic, taken the place of the machine gun, he slit his throat from ear to ear, bellowing out a furious “Allah Akbar' as he did so. Blood spurted out and spattered the other terrorist, who hadn't had time to get out of the way.

“See,” the cutthroat cried, “you're dead before your trousers could get dirty. Try using your pick-up act in hell, you son of a bitch!” he said, shoving the corpse aside with a kick in the backside.

Then, addressing us: “That's what'll happen to you if you lie to us. Look, he's just shat his pants. So much for boring us about his new clothes! And if he thinks Satan is going to clean his arse for him…”

The young man's bowels had emptied and a dark stain was seeping through the thin fabric of his trousers. The killer looked at his own hand in disgust. Muttering “God curse all heathen! What kind of gel did that bastard put in his hair!” he held his hand in the air, looking around for something to wipe it on.

His irritated ‘colleague' shouted, “Stop complaining! My jacket's fucked. You could have warned me you were going to cut his throat standing up!”

That was the only time in my life I have felt both a vile sense of debilitating pity and an uncontrollable desire to burst out laughing.

Just then, one of the terrorists yelled, “They're coming! The soldiers!” The cutthroat shouted in our direction, “Your luck's in, you bunch of ungodly fuckers!” before running off after his fellows and disappearing into the bushes along the verge.

The soldiers were furious at having missed the terrorists and they interrogated us forcefully. An officer dealt the driver an almighty slap around the face when he said he was worried about the delay with night falling. Confiscating his driving licence, the officer ordered him to come and pick it up the next day at their barracks. “He's going to get one hell of a thrashing there, the poor sod…” someone behind me whispered prophetically. The same officer called us all cowards and terrorist cocksuckers who were guilty of allowing a young conscript to be killed who could have been our son. When the coach drove off again, I hazarded a glance at the curled-up body; his shirt and fine trousers had turned a hideous brown colour. As I fought back my nausea, I thought, “Sorry, my boy, I'm not laughing at you… Sorry…” and I guessed that had he been a ghost swirling around me, he would not have forgiven my disrespectfulness one jot. Another fit of laughter was not far off, and I had to breathe deeply and close my eyes for a good minute until I finally got myself back under control.