Chaos of the Senses (11 page)

What is freedom, in the end, but your right to be different?

Another thing I couldn't see any justification for was the fact that I had to wait so long in that little office. It was as though I was of no concern to anyone, or as though everyone was too busy with more important matters to concern themselves with my case.

From time to time I'd hear a young man screaming. I concluded that they must be interrogating him in their own way, which made me feel all the more pained and helpless.

For a moment it occurred to me that they might have caught the murderer, although I didn't think it likely, since they'd never caught a murderer that fast before.

Suddenly a policeman came in and asked me to follow him.

This time I was ushered into an office whose furnishings were nicer, in keeping with the rank of the officer who
occupied it. Above his desk hung a picture of President Chadli Bendjedid. When I came in, the officer stood up to shake my hand and invited me to sit down.

‘Have you found the murderer?' I asked him.

‘No,' he replied as he arranged some of his papers. ‘We're counting on your testimony to help us do that.'

I gulped.

‘All the details are important to us,' he went on, ‘so try to remember everything you can.'

‘I'll try,' I said.

He took out a piece of paper in preparation to write down my answers.

‘First,' he said, ‘did you see the murderer?'

‘I was looking towards the bridge when I heard gun shots. When I turned around, I saw a young man running and disappearing down a side street.'

‘Do you think he was alone, or that someone was with him?'

I answered, ‘I only saw one man running. I don't know whether there were others with him, or waiting for him somewhere.'

‘Approximately how old would you say he was?'

‘Somewhere between twenty and twenty-five, maybe.'

‘Could you describe him for me?'

‘I don't know how to describe him, actually. I only glimpsed him from the back.'

‘While you and the driver were on your way to the bridge, did you notice a motorcycle or car following you?'

‘I don't know. I was looking ahead. All I know is that while we were standing on the bridge, there was heavy traffic. There were a lot of people around us and, as you might expect in that sort of
situation, some of them turned and stared at us out of curiosity.'

‘Did you stand there for very long?'

‘I don't think so. Not more than around ten minutes. I remember the driver saying all of a sudden, “Come on, let's go,” as if he'd noticed something. Then he headed for the car. I'd just started towards the car after him when he was shot.'

‘Do you go there regularly?'

‘No, not at all.'

‘Did you inform anyone in advance that you would be going there?'

‘No.'

‘The maid, for example. Didn't you tell her where you were going?'

‘No. As I always do, I told her I was going out, and that's all.'

He paused briefly, fiddling with a small piece of paper in front of him. Then he asked me, ‘And your brother? Is he aware of your comings and goings?'

‘My brother?' I asked, surprised. ‘He doesn't live with me.'

‘I know,' he said.

Then he continued, ‘Had you noticed any change in the driver's behaviour of late? Any visible nervousness or anxiety?'

‘No. He was a calm, peaceable sort of person, and during that last outing of ours, he was his usual talkative, jovial self.'

After jotting down some comments, he got up, shook my hand again, and said, ‘We may be in touch with you again if we need to investigate any of these details further.'

Then he added, ‘I've learned that your husband is on a mission in the capital at the moment. I'll send him word of the incident through the Ministry. Then I'll give him a report.'

He walked with me to the door, asking a soldier to escort me home, and we shook hands again. In a voice that wasn't mine any more, I said, ‘Thank you.' Then I left the world of iron for the world of bewilderment and grief.

* * *

Writing is always scary, because it makes an appointment for us with all the things we're afraid to face or understand too deeply.

The day I began writing in that notebook, I hadn't intended to invest things around me with some profound philosophical significance. Yet now I'd discovered that this man's death was bigger than me. It transcended the limits of my understanding. It transcended my logic, because it had happened outside of my notebook. Or, rather, it had happened on the margin of the page, along that fine red line that separates life from words.

The freakish, painful thing about his death was that he'd died because of a fictitious character, a creature of ink. Never before had death been this accessible to either words or imagination!

This man who hated bridges, who hated questions, it was his love that had brought me up against questions that had no answers.

And Uncle Ahmad, why had he died? Why today? Why now? Why in that particular place? Why him, and not somebody else?

I'd worked to get him to choose an address for my fate, and he'd chosen one for his own.

I'd told him to take me to the place he loved most in this city, but death had abducted my question and escorted it to its final answer.

Which of us was the prime suspect in a crime like this? Was it Fate, to which I'd turned over the wheel and with which I'd concluded a pact of trust, only to have it betray me? Was it I, who'd gone running after a fictitious man beyond paper's borders only to find that I'd turned the game of writing into a game of death? Or was it that fictitious man, who'd persuaded me to put my trust in Fate, then abandoned me so as to teach me a lesson in story writing?

It all boiled down now to two questions: Had this man's death been a crime of Fate, or of literature? And to what extent had I been responsible for it?

For my husband, who rushed back the following morning, things couldn't possibly be viewed from such a simplistic perspective, not only because he wasn't aware of the story I'd been writing and living and that had caused me to end up on that bridge but, in addition, because he was, first and foremost, a military man for whom what mattered were purely factual questions that left no room for Fate or literary creations. And this was the type of question that, like the ones I'd answered the day before, would rain down on me again, only this time in an irritable tone and with certain additions.

‘Why did you go there? Have you lost your mind? Why on earth would you have a government car pull up along the side of the road, get out to look at a bridge and then, as if that weren't enough, carry on a conversation with the driver where everyone could see you?'

‘I just wanted to see the bridge up close, that's all. I always see it in the painting in the reception room, the one Khaled Ben Toubal gave us on our wedding day. We happened to be passing that way, and since we were taking a tour and had the time, I thought: Why not get out and look at the bridge?'

‘Taking a tour, you say? Is this a tourist city? And is this a time for sightseeing? This entire country is in a state of open siege, and you're out taking a tour? Don't you read the newspapers? Don't you talk to people? Every day they lead policemen away, slaughter them like sheep, and throw their bodies off bridges!'

‘But I don't understand what Uncle Ahmad had to do with any of that. What had he done to deserve such a fate?'

‘He was driving a military vehicle, which made him a military official!'

‘But he wasn't in uniform.'

‘That makes no difference. He was in the service of the state, and that was enough to make him suspect in some people's eyes. Unless, of course, they thought he was me, in which case they would have had more than one reason to kill him.'

He fell silent for a while. Then he asked the most important question of all: ‘Where were you sitting?'

‘In the front seat,' I mumbled, ‘the way I sometimes do.' (The fact is, I
always
sat in the front seat.)

We sank together into an awkward silence as his thoughts and mine went to the same place. In the beginning my husband had objected to my sitting next to the driver. But with Uncle Ahmad in particular, I couldn't bring myself to sit in the back seat. He'd been like a member of the family. Besides, there was something so loyal and kind-hearted about him that, especially given the fact that he had once served in
the military, I would have been ashamed to demote him to the status of a mere chauffeur or porter when we were away from home.

I respected the patriotic service he'd performed in years past. I respected his seasoned hands. I respected his hoary head. It didn't matter to me that his towering height made him look younger than he was or the fact that sometimes he even looked as though he might be my husband. Nor did I care about the looks of shocked amazement that I got from other officers' wives when they happened to see me sitting next to him.

In fact, my quarrel with my husband might be summed up in this one issue. His ambition was to sit behind a chauffeur in a government car, whereas mine was simply to sit next to a man in a car, any car.

His dreams and mine had been separated by nothing but the distance between one car seat and another. Even so, it was a distance that turned out to be greater than I'd thought. I'd never realized that our decision to sit in one seat rather than another could expose something as deep as our convictions and aspirations in life. Nor had I realized that such a decision might cause the death of an innocent man because, without changing his place, it had changed the way he was perceived.

So here I was, confronted with another possible explanation for Uncle Ahmad's death, and it didn't relieve me of responsibility any more than the other one had. By sitting beside him I'd transformed him in others' eyes from a mere driver into a military officer and, as such, into an ideal target for their bullets.

How amazing, I thought suddenly, that Fate had done such a superb job of writing an end to this man's life. After living his
life as a simple soldier, he'd died at the age of fifty under the guise of a high-ranking officer.

He'd died under suspicion of being what he'd always dreamed of being, and he may well have been pleased by such a suspicion because, if only at the last moment of his life, his dreams were realized. Hadn't he died as a high-ranking officer on one of the bridges of Constantine that he'd loved so much?

The bridge on which he died was the very place where, in all likelihood, he'd fought and risked his life repeatedly thirty years earlier. However, death hadn't taken him then. It hadn't wanted him as a soldier disguised in the hooded cloak of a freedom fighter, nor as a martyr in a commando operation. That would have been too ordinary.

Rather, death chose to take him thirty years later: a soldier sitting in the seat of an Algerian officer who would die by Algerian bullets.

Only a death like this would be truly extraordinary!

My thoughts carried me far away, somewhere between irony and pain, as I travelled from one way station of regret to another.

I'd killed this man, not only with my insanity, but with my kind-heartedness, with an overdone humility that had prompted me to sit next to him in order to give him an illusory sense of being my equal.

Actually, the word ‘humble' doesn't quite fit me. As I understand it, ‘humility' means believing you're important for some reason, then relinquishing your status and making yourself other people's equal for a period of time, yet without entirely forgetting that you're more important than they are.

I've never felt more important than anybody else. I've always been so unpretentious that all the simple folks and nobodies around me thought I was one of them. And there's no hope of my changing – I've looked at things this way for as long as I can remember. I love these people. I learn more from them than I do from anyone else, and I'm more comfortable with them than I am with anybody else. Relationships with folks like these are easy and straightforward. In fact, they're downright wonderful, whereas relationships with important people – or people who appear to be important, at least – are tedious and complicated. In other words, they're pointless!

So, I'd had a relationship with this man, and only after he was gone did I see how beautiful it had been in its spontaneity.

* * *

Uncle Ahmad's death turned our lives upside down.

Given his certainty that he'd been the assassin's intended target, my husband took new security measures. The first of these was to give up his government vehicle and begin using an ordinary car, which he replaced from time to time. The second was to hire a new driver who would accompany me only when necessary, and to insist that I sit in the back seat and not engage him in any conversation.

My comings and goings were to be restricted that week to a visit to Uncle Ahmad's house to offer condolences to his family. My husband sent them a sheep and, I believe, also went to visit them one morning.

My only other outing of the week would be to visit my mother to see her off on the pilgrimage to Mecca. It was her third
pilgrimage, or maybe her fourth. I don't remember exactly. Nobody around here knows any more how many times anybody else has gone on the pilgrimage, since it's become the fashion to try to outbid others when it comes to pious appearances.

I was so stressed that week, I nearly had a nervous breakdown. I made my way from a dismal household which, after losing the sole provider for a family of seven, was filled with the sound of the chanting of the Qur'an and the wailing of women clad in black, to a house where I found my mother flitting about in a white robe and white shawl and surrounded by women of all ages. After putting on all the jewellery and fashionwear they could find in their wardrobes, the women had come to see her off for the umpteenth time or, rather, to convince her for the umpteenth time that they were no less well-off than she was and that, like her, they had the wherewithal to go on the pilgrimage as many times as they wanted to.