Abduction (30 page)

Another moment of unspeakable fear was when an aircraft flew over the area. More than bombs, it was napalm the prisoners were most afraid of. It found its way into the deepest cracks and, if it didn't kill you on the spot, burnt your skin beyond healing. Ignoring the rule of silence, a French conscript said that he had seen, in the middle of a
mechta
gutted by incendiary bombs dropped by a plane that was combing the area, a child whose face was intact but whose body was burnt all over; the child was in such pain that even its eyes could shed no tears.

By some freak occurrence that he could never fully explain to himself, Mathieu very soon felt a compulsive need to tell his life story to his former victim. Although he couldn't see Tahar in the darkness of the cave, he knew he was listening closely by his astonished or even shocked ‘huhs' when too crude a secret offended his peasant's conservative sensibilities. “Stop talking like that – it defiles my ears to hear such rubbish!” he murmured in exasperation. These monologues imposed by life at such close quarters (“Confessions to a kind of Muslim ‘priest', from whom I unconsciously expected some kind of absolution,” he later admitted to Tahar) became as essential to him as the very occasional cigarettes their jailers allowed those inmates who smoked. Repelled by the strange familiarity between tortured and torturer that prison dictated, Tahar pondered his profound confusion in silence, only accidentally giving in to the bitter consolation of pouring his heart out. “You have no shame, Frenchman. You're lucky to be so naïve!” he grumbled when the ex-DOP serviceman's awkward and intrusive camaraderie became too brazen for him to bear.

Mathieu succeeded in cheering the maquisard up only once when a tick had burrowed deep into one of the other man's testicles. Tahar was in such searing pain that he resigned himself to asking his annoying neighbour for help. Due to his introverted character, the teacher had not managed to strike up any kind of relations with the Arab or Kabyle prisoners and had convinced himself, as a last resort, that there was no cause for prudery with this accursed Christian because the man had already been in the position of ‘handling' him stark naked… Using a tin can, some oil skimmed off the soup and a strip of blanket, Mathieu managed to build a rudimentary lamp to shine on his fellow inmate's scrotum and then, with much patience and little bits of matches, to remove the clawed parasite. The operation was painful, but after a great many more or less blasphemous swearwords Tahar burst out laughing: “You mongrel son of a hyena and I don't know what, you used to try to bust my balls – now you fondle them!”

After days of prevarication, the local FLN leaders decided to accept the two men's version of events. People explained to Tahar later that the carnage at Mechta Kasbah had shaken many combatants, who protested vehemently that they had taken to the
jebel
to free Algeria, not to reproduce the large-scale massacres committed by French settlers in May 1945. Luckily for Tahar, the camp commander was one such protester. It was therefore decided, although he hadn't argued his case very persuasively, that Tahar would not be accused of deserting his detachment. They preferred the story of the fighter who had got lost and was captured and then tortured by the enemy. It was even decided that he had never been involved in the massacres at Mechta Kasbah, since the official party line now was that they should be attributed to French troops.

“The brothers are so ashamed of what happened in Mechta Kasbah that they're trying to make themselves believe in their own yarns! We're not even independent yet, but history is already being blighted by lies!” Tahar sighed as he told Mathieu about his conversation with the political commissar. As for the Frenchman, his decision to come over to the Algerian side was greeted with something like resignation. “Couldn't you have deserted in a town? What are we going to do with you now?” the irritated camp commander said reproachfully, but nevertheless thanked him for having risked his life to help a
mujahid
escape.

“So you're going back?” Mathieu asked Tahar when, barely recovered, the latter was preparing to set off with a group of
djounoud
for another rebel area.

“Of course. What else am I supposed to do?”

“
In spite of
…”

“In spite of.”

A stern expression was written on his face.

“Doesn't what brought me here (he pointed to the mountains, his boots and his cobbled-together uniform) mean anything anymore? Am I… am I no longer a wog to your compatriots and now they'll call me
Monsieur
? Will my brother's murderers be brought to trial again? You can be sure of one thing: I still want independence. Maybe more than ever, precisely
because
of…”

He stroked his moustache nervously.

“My head is full of pitch-black birds. Sometime I feel as if a dead man is crawling around in my brain ordering me to join him, but I resist because I have unfinished business. Don't be mistaken, Mathieu. I'm not fighting for the FLN; I'm fighting for my brother and my father…”

The maquisard added, after a pause: “…And also for those two blokes in the
mechta
who'd done me no harm and whom I shot like dogs.”

The top corner of his lip twitched.

“Aren't you afraid… of being caught by the army… and finding yourself back in the hands of theDOP?”

A smile softened his face, still marked by pain.

“You know me, Mathieu. I'm a chicken, but I'll cope. Maybe there'll be another remorse-ridden bastard like you to lend me a hand… after using me as a punch bag first, of course.”

Mathieu tried to smile too, in vain.

“Will you forgive me some day?”

“Me?”

“Yes, you.”

The Arab threw him a surprised and disapproving sideways glance.

“That doesn't matter anymore. I was incredibly lucky to get to repay you a tiny fraction of what you inflicted on me. Ask those people you didn't free for forgiveness instead. Because they…”

He blushed at his show of emotion and tried to work himself up into a rage.

“That's enough useless chat! My brothers are waiting for me! So long and look after yourself, Mathieu.”

The Frenchman and the Algerian parted without much fuss, unaware that they would soon be following the same route. The Frenchman was first packed off by the FLN to Bône and then to Tunis with false papers, whereas the Algerian, most likely in a disguised disciplinary measure, was sent in one of the convoys that crossed the Tunisian border to bring back weapons and ALN soldiers from the so-called ‘exterior'. Work was only just starting on the electric barrier, but the crossing still had a dangerous reputation – and this would only increase when the Morice Line was reinforced with two huge electrified barbed-wire fences, separated by a no man's land several miles wide in places that was liberally sprinkled with mines and patrolled day and night by armoured vehicles to do any ‘mopping up'.

It was during one of these crossings, less than a year from the end of the war, that Tahar suffered a serious leg wound and was taken to hospital in Tunisia by the FLN. And it was the week after his hospitalization, in an unprepossessing building in the suburbs of Tunis, that chance – which sometimes arranges human destinies while bursting its sides with laughter – brought the men face to face once more.

Imagine my astonishment, Aziz. I'd been hanging around in the Tunisian capital for months, making a living from lousy jobs and poring over the wreckage of my life again and again in my mind. Everything in me stank of mediocrity and even the remorse I occasionally felt never got the upper hand over my boredom! One desperate day, after a huge drinking binge, I had a car accident. Some Algerian exiles remembered that I'd helped one of their own out of a sticky situation, so they sent me for treatment at a clinic directed by a sympathizer. There were about twenty rooms and it just so happened that I ended up in Tahar's.

It was a miracle! You'd have thought that the idiotic, blind, deaf and dumb deity that elaborates the poisonous concoctions of our lives had picked up the wrong test-tube and dripped a droplet of luck on my head.

I wormed my way in there, clung on like a leech; I swallowed my pride, I persisted. You cannot imagine how happy I was to meet up with this filthy-tempered Arab again, so shy that he came across as having no manners, impatient and awkward towards the admiring nurses who'd been told that he had fought heroically, that he had never known fear in the face of the enemy, crap like that. I prayed that his convalescence might last as long as possible. You didn't have to be a strategic genius to work out that hostilities would soon come to an end and on no account did I want the man I already considered my friend to be pointlessly killed by the final bullet of the final machine-gun burst of this bitch of a war.

If he died, who would
vindicate
me? By the very fact of Tahar's death, I would slip back into my cesspit, into my private desert.

My friend, my best friend… Well, when I say
best
… talk about boasting! In truth, the
only
friend fate ever gave me.

Eventually, he no longer turned me away. I told him about my childhood, my parents and, thanks to him – to his silence above all – I managed to more or less make my peace with them.

Three months later, Latifa, the woman who was to become his wife, turned up.

The next day Tahar, still limping slightly, asked me as an aside during a conversation about a book (we seldom talked about the war, of course), with his usual up-tight sense of humour, if I would do him the honour of being his witness.

I bawled my eyes out, of course, because it took me completely by surprise. Not in front of him, but I spent a good while sniffling gratefully in the clinic's stinking toilets.

“W
hat's all this about a name for God's sake?”

“When his daughter was born he wanted to give her that first name, but I was against it. I was terrified. I had no right to beseech him, but I did. I loved them so much, that guy and his wife, that I thought of their daughter a little as my own. He had no right to burden a baby, even symbolically, with a crime for which it wasn't responsible. He shouted out that I had a nerve to meddle in the choice of the first name for the fruit of his balls; I had tortured them enough. His private parts had ached for ages and he was convinced, until the birth of his daughter, that we had made him sterile. Tahar and I had almost fallen out for good. Latifa wasn't aware of our argument, but I imagine that she too would have been dead against her husband's choice with all her heart.”

Aziz tries to interrupt him.

“Let me go on… He backed down and they called their daughter Meriem. The years kept passing; their child grew up and became a woman. I had no idea, I swear, that Tahar hadn't given up on his idea and that he had made Meriem promise to name the daughter she bore Sheherazade. It was your wife herself who told me; she was convinced that the name belonged to your father's beloved grandmother. She didn't have any problem with it, especially since she liked the name, even if it did sound ‘archaic' and a little conceited. Moreover, Tahar was very ill at the time and you don't refuse a dying father anything. He had taken some medicine by mistake and it hadn't done him a lot of good.”

Mathieu observes Aziz's face. The man is obviously sifting through his memories, wondering whether he ever discussed the name with Meriem.

“It wasn't you who chose it, was it?”

“No,” the son-in-law says shaking his head, taut as a steel wire. “I had no reason to oppose my wife's wish. I didn't know it was a promise she'd made to her father, but what does it matter? At any rate, I wouldn't have been against it. Malika was my first choice, but either way,” he adds with an emotion that made his voice go hoarse, “I already thought of my daughter as a little princess who was destined to grow up to be a legendary queen.”

Mathieu sees his own hands begin to shake – and he is angry with himself for being so worn-out and so incapable of controlling his own body.

“Tahar never forgot what had happened at Mechta Kasbah. The more years passed, the guiltier he felt. He said that he should have rebelled and cried out to stop the butchery. ‘Don't be stupid, it wouldn't have been any use,' I retorted, ‘you'd have been shot right there. They cut off your nose for a cigarette, so for mutiny…!' ‘Maybe that would have been the way out?' he returned; he hadn't been born to swell the murderers' ranks. ‘And, Mathieu,' he insisted, ‘look how generously fate dispenses luck to those who don't need it: after we split up, I volunteered for the most dangerous missions, the ones from which no
djoundi
came back alive. I was scared to death each time, but actual death always carefully evaded me, the bitch!'”

A long sigh wrings the distraught man's chest.

“Oh how he suffered! He was the taciturn type. Latifa never knew. Sometimes he opened up to me – I had followed the couple to Algeria after independence. He said that that night in Mechta Kasbah, a monster had closed its hands around his throat and it had not stopped strangling him since. ‘I can't breathe, Mathieu,' he complained, ‘even when I'm making love to my wife.”'

The old Frenchman feels the red flush of shame flooding his crumpled cheeks. He shrugs his shoulders to avoid thinking about the rogue sob galloping in his throat.

“Do you remember the village constable's little daughter?”

“Where are you going with this, Mathieu? Which little girl?”

“And the redhead who claimed he could identify Tahar to get close to him at the DOP? Is it coming back to you? Well… He had a three-year-old daughter. She was with her grandfather when the whole family was killed. Can you guess what the unfortunate kid's name was now?”