The Age of Reinvention (34 page)

He is woken in the middle of the night by a warden who prods him with a stick as if he were a venomous snake, yelling: “Get up! Slowly!” Djamal is led to a room lit only by a dim bulb, a sort of damp basement room without windows. The interrogation begins again: Who are you? Why did you come here? What are your links with the dean of the university? Etc. Djamal demands a lawyer and his questioner laughs: “Where the hell do you think you are? This isn't France!” He is beaten and threatened, but does not give in. Finally, after asking repeatedly, he is put in touch with the French Consulate. This is his get-out-of-jail-free card. Never has he felt such desire before to assert the fact that he is French. To the man from the consulate he tirelessly repeats what he has already told his jailers: “I came here to study Islam and learn Arabic, and that's all.”

He does not ask his mother or Hamid for help: he wants to get out of this situation himself. And he succeeds, because after three weeks he is released. The man he's been staying with is waiting for him outside the prison gates. Together they walk back to the apartment and eat dinner, lit by candle flames that flicker in the breaths from raised voices and bursts of laughter: they are celebrating Djamal's return. At the evening's end, two men dressed in black enter the apartment through the back door. They greet Djamal warmly and hand him a return flight ticket to France. Who are these men? When did he ask for their help? The reply is vague. When he gets home, he tells his wife that he still had some money left, but she doesn't believe him—and for the first time she suspects that he has been aided financially by the men he calls “my brothers.”

Upon his return, Nora no longer recognizes him. He has become radicalized, mistrustful, paranoiac, suspicious, obsessive. And, most of all, he has become anti-Semitic. He sees Jews everywhere and squanders the money that Samir continues to send him on the publication and distribution of anti-Semitic tracts. He and his wife have terrible rows. Djamal gets back in touch with Hamid, who no longer doubts him. In the housing estate, he goes regularly to a small mosque located in a former gymnasium and becomes friendly with other “brothers.” He does not talk about his experience in Yemen: for him, it represents a failure. One morning, one of the worshippers at the mosque advises him to train as a halal butcher. “Halal is the future,” he says, backing up his case with figures that show the size of the market and the importance of this activity for the rebirth of a pure Islam: if Muslims have the choice, they will eat halal meat—
You'd even be able to open your own butcher's shop one day, Insha'Allah
. With Samir's money, that will actually be possible, Djamal thinks; he enrolls in a training program, enjoys it, and receives his diploma. Two months later, he gets a job in a slaughterhouse. He has to caress the animals to calm them down, then lead them to a rotating trap where they are killed while facing Mecca. The bovine's head is held still, the neck lengthened. Djamal triggers the rotation of the trap along a horizontal axis—a sort of aerial rail—so that the beast is suspended upside down with its hooves in the air. The bovine starts bellowing now, so Djamal has to act quickly: he places the knife under the glottis and cuts its throat. He does this without fear, without emotion, and in one rapid motion, so that the animal doesn't suffer. Blood spurts out, splashing into the trough, but Djamal continues undaunted: this is a sacred act and he is proud to have been chosen to perform it. When the animal has stopped breathing, he skins it, eviscerates it, splits open the carcass, then trims and weighs the meat before refrigerating it. After that, he only has to perform his ablutions, and everything is ready. Not only does Djamal like his work, but he takes it very seriously. He is the one who slits the sheep's throat for Eid; he does it cleanly, in the abattoir. He takes the orders, organizes the deliveries. He hates finding sheep's heads, their disemboweled carcasses, their stinking entrails, tossed into his building's garbage chute, as often happens. In fact, it disgusts him, and soon he is also taking charge of the slaughter of his neighbors' animals. One evening, coming home from prayer, he sees, out in the wasteland near his apartment block, a sheep hanging from a rope tied between two trees. Facing the sheep are two children, age ten or eleven, armed with a huge knife. The first one skewers the animal, while the second prepares to cut it up. Djamal runs up to them and starts yelling at them so angrily that they are dumbfounded, too frightened to say a word. Their hands are covered in blood and the sheep's head is hanging. But the animal is still alive, making pitiful moaning noises. Djamal grabs the knife from the boy's hands, raises it above his head, and, with a single stroke, puts the beast out of its misery. Only then does he look the children in the eyes and threaten them: if he ever finds them doing this again, they'll be the ones to feel the sharpness of his knife's blade. The words come out without him thinking, and afterward he feels slightly ashamed of what he's said, but he loves animals. In Yemen, where dogs and cats roam freely in search of leftovers, he had found a skinny, starving kitten in a garbage can and fallen in love with it. He took it home, looked after it until it was no longer skinny or starving, and then set it free again—nobody wanted it.

From now on, his life is the abattoir and the friends he has made there. He spends his evenings in the mosque with his work colleagues. They discuss a passage from the Koran or talk politics; he still dreams of going off to fight. He enjoys their company, but when he goes home, late at night, still smelling of dead animals—viscera, skin, blood—his wife pushes him away. He disgusts her. He scares her. She no longer wants to make love with him, and one evening when he kisses her, she says: “I don't feel anything for you.” She sees his face tense up and becomes frightened. In spite of this, though, she stands up to him and she is the first to utter the word “divorce.” When does he become violent? When she pronounces that word or, a little later, when she begins hitting him as hard as she can because he tried to kiss her, holding her face securely in his blood-stinking hands? He launches himself at her, pins her to the wall, removes his belt, pulls down his pants, and rapes her brutally, yelling insults at her—
Filthy whore
—and repeating that, if she ever leaves him, he will kill her. Finally, after a few minutes of this, he lets go of her and gets dressed. Nora is in tears, one hand covering her breasts. She shouts at him that she will call the police.
Go ahead, call them. And I'll throw you out the fucking window!
He can't stand being dominated by women anymore—first it was his mother, now it's his wife. He dreams of a society where everyone will know their place: men out in town, women at home. While he's thinking about this, not paying attention, Nora escapes, holding her torn blouse, leaving behind all her belongings, and takes refuge with her parents. He will never see her again. But she doesn't press charges, terrified by the threats he makes to her the next day.

Djamal no longer wants to live in this apartment, which reminds him of the shame his wife brought down on him by asking for a divorce. He divides his time between his mother's apartment and the home of two brothers—activists he met during a dinner at Hamid's house. That summer, he decides to go to Morocco to find a wife: one of the brothers has told him about a sixteen-year-old girl from a good family whose parents want to marry her off. Three weeks before his departure, he burns his passport and declares it lost so he can obtain a new one, without any foreign stamps in it.

In Morocco, he meets his future wife,
¹
a young girl who is rather plump but has very pure, innocent eyes. He has a discussion with the father, where they negotiate the dowry sum, then marries the girl a few days later. On their wedding night, he makes love to her on a small mattress that his parents-in-law have put on the floor in one of the rooms in their house. When it's over, he gives the family the bloodstained sheet. He hears ululations through the dividing wall. He feels happy.

On returning to France, he moves with his new wife to a one-bedroom apartment that he sublets and starts back to work at the slaughterhouse. He still sees Hamid, but his friend seems worried, and Djamal wonders why. Then, one day, Hamid takes him into his confidence: he is going to fight alongside his oppressed brothers. He can't bear staying here and doing nothing in this country where “nobody likes us.”

In the nights that follow Hamid's revelation, Djamal sleeps badly. He dreams that he too is going away, carrying a gun, a hero. With Hamid acting as an intermediary, he gets in touch with the men whose job it is to recruit Westerners. Djamal has references and a spotless résumé. Best of all, he looks completely European: the enemy is less likely to suspect him. The men ask him to shave his beard and to swap his traditional clothes for a shirt and jeans: “You must blend in with the crowd.” He goes to see them again, transformed by these changes, and they laugh: “You'd get in the Ku Klux Klan looking like that!” That very day, they give him a false passport and a telephone number that he must call when he arrives at the train station in London. He must recite a sentence in code, then take the Tube to Finsbury Park Station. At the exit, a bearded man in a blue scarf will be waiting for him. The problem, it turns out, is that most of the men there are bearded and wear dark-colored scarfs. He waits for forty-five minutes before a man matching the description he's been given approaches him and mutters a few words. He follows the man. They walk for a long time—maybe an hour—before arriving at a small white-brick building. The man motions him to enter. Inside, men are coming and going in all directions. The place looks like the headquarters of some sort of research firm. Djamal feels lost and unsure, so he asks the man where they are and who brought him here. But the man responds only with a frown and a finger pressed to his lips. Djamal realizes that he must not ask questions. He does not feel very reassured by this. The man barely speaks a word, but takes him to a room and tells him he should wait there until he returns. He waits for maybe four or five hours in that cramped room, the air smelling of urine and sweat, without seeing anyone. Then the man returns with an aluminum box, a bottle of water, and a plastic spoon. He tells Djamal that he will stay here this evening, then leave in the night to catch a 6:50 a.m. airplane to Islamabad. The meal inside the box is cold, probably because it has just been thawed. It's a lamb stew with potatoes, but the meat is fatty and gelatinous and gives off a sickening odor, as if the animal were cooked in its own viscera. Djamal decides not to eat and takes a copy of Sun Tzu's
The Art of War
from his bag. At two in the morning, he is woken by the sound of a man's voice and the harsh brightness of a flashlight aimed at his face. Still sleepy, he struggles to his feet, listens to his final instructions, and then—holding his flight ticket and the bus ticket to the airport—he exits the building and disappears into the night.

He passes through customs without difficulty and falls asleep as soon as he is seated in the airplane. When he wakes up, the flight attendant informs him that the plane will be landing in Islamabad in a few minutes.

When he emerges from the plane, what first hits him is the suffocating heaviness of the air, even more unbearable than it had been in Yemen. The second thing is the bright clusters of dust that seem to swarm from all directions, forming a yellowish paste that sticks to his eyelids, gets everywhere. Djamal takes off his jacket and holds it tight to him. He is startled by the throngs of men in turbans, all with jet-black eyes, who swarm through the neighborhood around the airport. Half-starved animals wander between abandoned cars, pursued by hordes of fat flies and mosquitoes whose buzzing seems to echo the agitation of the men. Street hawkers run around, carrying their shabby merchandise, attempting to escape the eyes of the uniformed police who prowl, weapons at the ready, faces shining with sweat. After an hour of searching, he finally finds a public phone from which he can call his contact. He is told to stay where he is, with nothing to eat or drink, his face exposed to the burning sunlight. For the first time, Djamal wishes he were François again, wishes he could go home. This killing heat, this foreign speech, this poverty—it all serves to distance him from his strongest desire. He says nothing, however, and when, two hours later, a man arrives and asks him to follow, Djamal obeys without question. The man is huge, with a boxer's face and hands, and his body smells of engine oil. He gets into the man's rickety white van. Inside, the heat is unbreathable, the air like an oven. Through the window, Djamal watches the landscape speed past: cerulean with green dots and slashes. The mountains vanish into the distance. Women imprisoned in chadors carry children with sun-weathered faces. Herds of goats walk through clouds of dust, haloed with buzzing flies. The trip lasts forever: the road is full of rocks and holes, and the van jumps up and down as if its wheels were on springs. Djamal throws up several times. Finally, they arrive in front of a large jihadist mosque, a “center of preaching and good conduct.” A few yards away, a scrawny man, holding a comb and a pair of scissors, cuts the hair of a younger man who kneels before him in the middle of the street. Locks of black hair fall to the ground. Farther on, a man leans over a huge cast-iron dish, searing pieces of bloody meat. Djamal follows his guides, who disappear inside the mosque. He is greeted by a man in white who gives him a new name and tells him a room has been reserved for him in a neighboring hotel. He will stay there for two weeks, while his background is investigated. Is he a spy? A journalist? With his European appearance, Djamal is an obvious target for suspicion. In his hotel room, he begins to wonder what he's doing here. The peacock-blue carpet is covered with blackish stains. The paint on the walls is peeling in places and he can see roaches through the cracks. But he spends most of his time in the mosque, where a succession of prayers, discussions, and meals follow an unchanging rhythm, and finally—at the end of the two weeks—he is told that all is well and he can now go to Afghanistan. They explain what will happen there. Djamal is calm. The man responsible for conveying foreign volunteers to the training camps—a man in his early thirties, dressed like a soldier—will accompany him, helping him to pass through the Pakistani police's checkpoints without any problems. Djamal reaches the training camps belonging to Lashkar-e-Taiba—a movement created in the late 1980s to take part in the jihad against Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan, and which, following this, joined the Islamic Front carrying out a broader war against “the Jews and the Crusaders.”