Abduction

by Simon Pare

  Mathieu had bet a quarter of his wages that he would leave the army if it came up heads and that he would then choose, well, a career as a… or, even better, a… but, sitting in this kitchen in Algiers opposite a son-in-law who is staring at him with a mixture of animosity and fear, he can no longer remember the professions that had seemed so attractive at the time.

  He lost his bet of course and without any regrets signed up for five more years, this time to serve the strange tribe of the Algerian French. It should be said that in the meantime his love for the council employee – and, indeed, for any other subject – had withered like a cut flower in the Mitidja sun. He’d had flings with a few French women. On evenings when his depression was darkest, he satisfied himself by giving an Arab prostitute a good seeing-to in a squalid room in a seedy hotel in Bab-el Oued, before drinking himself senseless in one of the bars along the coast as part of what he called his ‘minimum political programme for friendship between peoples’: French cock in a fatma’s pussy, washed down with a few patriotic pastis.

  It was incidentally during one of these single-man’s pub-crawls, as he was coming out of a little restaurant, that he came across a customer who was drunker than he was, a noisy pimp who’d been thrown out by the owner and lay face down on the ground. Moved by the drunkard’s instinctive compassion for his fellows, Mathieu, who was none too steady on his feet himself, pulled the stranger onto the pavement just before a goods lorry sped past, thus saving his life. Between two fits of vomiting, the man – an Arab of around fifty in a magnificent suit – insisted on seeing him again to express his thanks. The man’s conception of gratitude was fairly unusual because the next day, after a few drinks, he provided him with no more, no less, than the name and address of the head of an FLN cell in the Casbah. “If it weren’t for you, brother, I’d be in the morgue, so we’re friends for life now! This free piece of information is my gift to you. It’ll give your captain a massive hard-on, just you wait and see! Maybe with time you’ll make it to general, who knows? To make sure you get even more credit, don’t say it was me who gave you the information but that you just kept your ears pricked while you were chatting to people here and there, if you see what I mean?”

  Of course, Mathieu didn’t tell Aziz all of this and especially not in this fashion. He just said: I served in the French army and I was sent to an army base in eastern Algeria.

  He didn’t specify that his superiors had appreciated enormously the surprise tip-off about the head of one of the nationalist cells in the Casbah and had credited the Breton with it. “How did you pull it off? You don’t even speak Arabic. Hmm, you sure have a way with the natives!” an officer exclaimed by way of congratulations. Following the arrest of the minor rebel leader, an officer had ordered Mathieu to take part in the interrogation, reasoning that his knowledge of Arab psychology might be invaluable to help break the prisoner and maybe even to get him to change sides. Mathieu almost retorted that he knew almost as much about the psychology of Tasmanian aborigines, and that the pimp informer (about whom he hadn’t breathed a word) was in fact the first native he’d talked to since he’d been sent to bloody Algeria – apart, of course, from Arab hookers. Noting his NCO’s reticence, the officer cajoled him, “Don’t be modest. It’s obvious you’ve got a knack for this kind of thing and the army needs people of your calibre!”

  And thus everything – everything! – had been triggered by a stupid misunderstanding: his supposed knowledge of the workings of the Arab soul (often Kabyle, actually) compounded by the crude flattery of an officer short of personnel. Less than twenty months later – and with unexpected zeal on his side – Mathieu was posted to a French army base not far from Sétif, officially at first as an ordinary secretary but in a very particular unit – a DOP, one of the eighteen formidable and deliberately innocuous-sounding Operational Protection Units stationed throughout Algeria whose existence the military authorities would stubbornly deny for years.

  Mathieu can’t remember which clever thinker it was who asserted that history was an abattoir in which individuals and whole peoples were sacrificed. In his case, he knows it was his soul (he sniggers at the solemn word his memory has had the nerve to use) that he deliberately murdered while serving in that damn DOP. When his feet first trod Algerian soil, he was nothing more than a poorly rated, lazy and boozy soldier. His dishonour was not yet sealed. A part of him hoped that some day, for no particular reason, the beautiful butterfly within him would extricate itself and fly away fast from the disgusting caterpillar he’d resigned himself to being up to that point.

  He had once been a child himself and so excitable in his admiration for the great privateers of Saint-Malo that he had secretly nicknamed himself ‘Li’l Robert’ after the illustrious Robert Surcouf. This little Breton would revisit him, ticking him off in his sleep, utterly exasperated but not yet despairing: Hey, arsehole, drunkard, you shitty little wino, when are you going to really look out for me? Mathieu sometimes dreamt that he shouted back across time at his alter ego for using such totally inappropriate language for his age, only to wake up on the verge of tears and realise that it was actually him who was the embodiment of obscenity compared to the innocence of the boy he’d once been.

  In that god-awful DOP, the poisonous miracle of abjection that lies in wait for all men had taken hold of him; if opportunity makes the thief, it also produces swine by the cartload. Mathieu had become an efficient and reasonably respected NCO, whose drunken weekend binges were forgiven because he achieved his objectives of making the captured fells talk at any cost, combining persuasion, insults and, naturally, torture with the single-minded goal of filling in the local rebel organisation’s chain of command. The screams – every one atrociously individual – of each broken man (another ‘box’ ticked…) could only be forgotten by substituting them with others, like glasses of alcohol replaced by new glasses of alcohol.

  How had he come to this? He’d never totally understood, and even today, years later, he wouldn’t have known how to explain, not to this Algerian, crushed by grief, – it was impossible, he would rather tell him barefaced lies – but at least to himself (dear God, to himself!) how he had graduated so quickly – in two or three weeks – from insults and punches in the back to his first real beating, then kicks in the stomach, water-boarding and electric shocks. He couldn’t even cite greed as an excuse – the wages were terrible; nor conviction – like a pied noir, for example, losing control at the thought that these subhuman Arab rats who were so dirty, so ignorant and until now so submissive should have the cheek to contest the ownership of this land that his parents and grandparents had seized in fierce fighting in 1830 and brought to fruition ever since.

  Sometimes, after work, in a moment of alcoholic abandon, he would catch a glimpse in the eyes of his colleagues, even the worst ones, those who abused female prisoners before torturing them, of a similar stunned question: Hey, my Man, ruling everything from Your immaculate paradise, is this all I was born for? To be worth less than a mangy dog’s turd? When exactly did I become ‘unhinged’?

  No one would have put it that baldly: he would have been called a sentimental chicken happy to offer up his Vaseline-free anus to a Muslim prick or, worse, sent to a different unit for defeatism and aiding the enemy through such Communist propaganda. Of course, most of the time they were only too happy to cling to the general clamour surrounding the ‘question’: patriotic oompah-pah about defending France and Christendom, fighting Bolshevism and Nasserism, the barbarity of their rat-like adversary who massacred one hostile village after another without a second thought, drawing ear-to-ear ‘Kabyle smiles’ as a matter of course or chopping off French squaddies’ dicks and stuffing them in their mouths… When they felt like it, they believed so firmly in these self-protecting justifications that they would enjoy the sleep of the just for weeks until the yelps of pain of a new suspect – even if this one wasn’t tortured much more than his brothers before him – pierced the bottom of the raft that kept them from sin
king into their own filth.

  Sergeant Mathieu had fought off drowning by repeating that there would be an end to all this – either the end of the war against the fells or at least the end of his contract with the army. He could imagine returning to his native Brittany and getting absolutely blind-drunk for a week, no, more like a month or, better still, taking a year’s sabbatical dedicated exclusively to getting plastered in settlement of Algeria, before making a fresh start, memory purged and mind purified, to take care of that damn kid, the admirer of privateers who once dreamed of glory and honour.

  The second decisive words he spoke to Aziz were these: Then I met Tahar.

  And he fell silent again, not knowing how to continue, despite his son-in-law’s obvious impatience. How was he supposed to confess that, a few days before meeting Tahar, he had been involved in some ‘work’ on a particularly tough fell who had been captured in a remote douar in the Constantine area after being denounced. Rumours from informers suggested that preparations were underway for a meeting of resistance leaders in the east of Algeria, and the local DOP staff hoped that the prisoner would eventually reveal the date and the place. Overexcited at this prospect, the chiefs of staff in Algiers had ordered them to extract the precious information from the man as fast as possible, since it would naturally only be of any use if the meeting had not already taken place. The forty-year-old man, a certain Hassan, had been tortured at length. His face swollen, his body reduced to one large bleeding wound, shitting himself with fear every time the soldiers fetched him from his cell, he hadn’t give a single scrap of useful information, persisting in playing the fool and swearing by Allah and His Prophet that he loved France and the three colours on its flag and that, if the lieutenant so wished, he would be delighted to spit on the FLN and its leaders, including Amirouche and his stooges, as many times as they wanted him to.

  “We can’t even find out if he’s a big fish, some kind of political commissar,” complained a colleague, chain-smoking to drive away the smell of shit. “If we can’t find out, then he must be one!” the lieutenant had decided.

  Mathieu had water-boarded the prisoner himself, before sending electricity through the rebel. The glans of his penis, black from electric burns, had been almost completely severed. Several times the Arab had passed out. Once they thought he was dead and the lieutenant panicked, having received clear orders not to kill him without having first extracted the information the top brass in Algiers were waiting for. The team in charge of dealing with him had hardly ever seen anyone resist for so long and their uneasy admiration for the fell was tinged with rage as time ticked remorselessly away.

  “He’s going to die without talking, the bastard. And we’ll get shat on from so fucking high we’ll be up to our eyeballs in it. They’ll accuse us of being a bunch of useless wets!” the intelligence officer had groaned, summing up the general feeling of frustration. It was Mathieu who had come up with the miracle solution. He had asked if the man was married; the colleague who updated the files on the people they arrested had confirmed that, according to his sources, his wife had been killed in a coach accident three years previously. It wouldn’t be possible, he remarked with a rueful expression, to use the fatma as a means of pressurising the man into giving in. “How about children? The bloke must have some. All wogs have kids, they love it…” Mathieu insisted. His colleague had shrugged and conceded that he didn’t have a clue; the suspect’s house had been empty when the soldiers searched it. As he nibbled away at a bar of chocolate as usual, the lieutenant gave Mathieu a strange look. “You’ve got something in mind, haven’t you…”

  A faint voice in his mind called out: No, Mathieu, leave children out of this, leave them out of this shit – it’s too despicable even for someone like you. Think of your mother – she loved you so much when you were a boy! “Tough luck, schmuck!” Mathieu had retorted in his mind, “my bitch of a mother didn’t love me and the feeling was mutual.”

  Then as if in thrall to his own ignominy, he explained that if the prisoner had any kids, they must have been taken in by their uncles and aunts. All they had to do was to pay a visit to their relatives, round up all the kids and threaten them with the worst kind of torture if they didn’t immediately point out which of them was Hassan’s son or daughter. “At least one of them will crack, I promise you. It’s as old as time: force someone to choose between their own children and their nieces and nephews, and they’ll always choose their children!” he concluded with great solemnity.

  Everything happened exactly as Mathieu had predicted. The panic-stricken parents handed over the fell’s son almost straight away, a small eight-year-old boy half-dead with fear, who stammered amid much sobbing that he had lost both his father and his mother and then, as soon as he caught sight of the man naked and trussed up on the table, ran towards him whimpering in Arabic, “Daddy, Daddy, what did they do to you?”

  As his son tried to kiss him, the father, his face blank, looked away and muttered something. The intelligence officer made a sign to the harki who served them as interpreter and on occasions as a zealous helper during interrogations. “He’s angry. He’s telling him that he’s not his father and ordering him to get away from him,” said the auxiliary soldier, “but I think the prisoner really is this little bastard’s father!”

  “We’ve got the fell faggot now!” the lieutenant smiled triumphantly. “Tie the kid up next to his father. We’ll give him some volts straight off – there’s no time to fuss about! We’ll see if this guy loves his son more than his bosses in the FLN.”

  Mathieu thinks of Shehera being tortured by her kidnapper. He is no better than the madman who has kidnapped the teenage girl. He has known that ever since that day when, at his suggestion, a child was tortured to extract secrets from his father that the end of war a few years later would render so horribly meaningless. As soon as the electrodes were placed on his ears, the child urinated on the floor below him in terror; and the father started to shake. His eyes, swollen from the blows he’d received, stared incredulously at the soldier about to crank up the magneto. At the little prisoner’s first scream, the fell struggled violently as if he thought he could break his bonds, but his lips stayed tightly shut. When the second came, the man shut his eyes as the child choked and spluttered out a growling noise, which the harki said meant something like “Daddy, help me… hurts, it hurts, they’re hurting me…”

  He caved in at the kid’s third high-pitched yelp. Then, in one breath, without looking at his son, the cause of his weakness, he gave the names, the place and the date of the meeting. The lieutenant was so happy he gave Mathieu a slap on the back. “Well, well, you really got us out of a hole there! I owe you one, my friend. The colonel’ll come as if he was fucking his wife for the very first time. We’ve killed two birds with one stone – getting the tip-off and recruiting an influential rebel. This fell has become a traitor to his FLN mates, so he and his son don’t have a choice anymore; they’re going to have to work for us now. If he doesn’t agree, we’ll do the son trick again. By the way, go and see the cook in a moment and bring back something nice for the kid; the lad’s earned it, after all! Before that, wipe his face and get him some clean clothes. And don’t forget: no one’s to know about this…”

  The lieutenant had a knowing look on his face. Still tied up, the kid followed the soldiers’ movements with his eyes. His face was stained with tears and snot; drops of blood were forming on one of his ears. Mathieu saw from his terrified look that he expected to be murdered at any moment.

  It was then that the man who was to be Aziz’s father-in-law heard, very distinctly, the soft, fluty voice of the boy who loved Robert Surcouf and Jean Bart beating on the walls of his skull. You can give him all the sweets you want, you’re still going to hell, Mathieu. You’ve tortured a kid… but you’re going to fry all alone like a rancid sausage. The voice was weeping uncontrollably and repeating over and over again: I haven’t said anything up till now, but you’ve gone too far… I don’t want t
o go to hell with you, I haven’t committed any atrocities, I’m not guilty of anything, I don’t want…

  Never before had it criticised him for torturing people and belonging – without so much as a grumble – to an army that carried out large-scale operations in which they combed and bombed villages under suspicion, napalmed fields and forests, displaced the population and worse still. It criticised him – incessantly, it’s true – for his lack of ambition and the sickening sordidness of his life. Mathieu knew he was despicable, but he couldn’t work out why he had become like this and especially why he had grown accustomed to it so easily. However, to his amazement, that hadn’t stopped him from drinking, fucking, joking and even – albeit infrequently – trekking heroically around the jebel when his superiors ordered him to.

  At the end of the day, he had decided, he didn’t owe anyone any explanations since he despised himself. What’s more, all that stuff about heaven and hell bored him to tears. He thought he’d sorted out the ‘problem’ by deciding that he was both the one who vomited and the vomit itself: when he found a part of himself unbearable, he would quite literally expel it by drinking continuously until every nook and cranny of his stomach rebelled. Without a hint of irony, he deduced from this that his failing organism would one day have nothing more to regurgitate and that the unfathomable metaphysical mystery of his potential guilt would thus be resolved, like some conjuring trick, by the prosaic capitulation of his liver to a good old cirrhosis.

  He spent the rest of that cursed day looking after the child, taking him first to the shower and then to the sickbay, clothing him from head to toe and later stuffing him with the best things he could dig up in the canteen. But the kid obviously couldn’t understand this change in treatment, and a shiver of fear ran through him every time Mathieu came too close. From time to time, he moaned in Arabic: “My ears hurt… I want to see my father!”