Abduction

by Simon Pare

  “Even so, Aziz, I’m still shuddering with fright at the thought of…”

  He ended with a quick side-step: “…of cleansing my soul after all the crimes I’ve committed, huh, isn’t that what I’m supposed to say?”

  I heard a slow exhalation, a kind of Pffeuh! followed by a barely audible “My God, I’m talking such bollocks!” Then nothing more, apart from the sound of my own blood pounding in my temples.

  I choked back a swelling of pity. Of course you’re scared witless, Mathieu, you’re not some heroic Indian chief. You’re just a fallen Frenchman – and a failed Algerian to boot. And to cap it all, you ran into me, a man with all the balls of a rabbit!

  I kept the phone pressed to my ear for a couple of needless seconds, then put it away with a lingering look out of the gaping window – which supposedly led to my daughter’s prison – and then at Meriem. The woman who had long ago taken possession of my soul looked as if she wanted to annihilate me with a single question: Had I really done everything a father is duty bound to do to save the flesh of his flesh?

  I had failed from start to finish. I had killed a man for nothing, Mathieu had pipped me at the post by electing to die in my stead, and my daughter was still a lunatic’s plaything.

  It was a perfect trap: if we alerted the police, the girl was lost; if we didn’t, the result would be the same. With one small difference: in the first scenario, the killer alone decided on her passing; in the second, it was we who decided on the timing of Shehera’s execution.

  When I was younger, I had been unlucky enough to witness a man commit suicide by throwing himself off the suspension bridge in Constantine. The man had bumped into me by accident just before he climbed up the bridge and had been polite enough to turn round and apologise. It took several seconds for him to hit the bottom of the canyon. Throughout his entire fall, he let out a bloodcurdling scream. For several nights afterwards I kept waking up with a start, imagining the terror of the man as he saw the ground approaching at breakneck speed. For him, that fear had come to a swift end. I had no such luck. Ever since Shehera’s kidnapping, I felt myself falling at an ever more breathtaking velocity down the sides of a canyon infinitely deeper than the one in Constantine.

  I suddenly realised that the bulge of the pistol in my pocket was far too visible. I evaded Meriem’s accusing gaze. Once again I wondered whether I had been wrong to lie to her. The mere thought of the words I might use to tell the truth caused my tongue to sag down against the bottom of my mouth.

  When he lowers his eyes, Meriem thinks with bitter surprise that she would have laid down her life for this man who ‘stole her soul’, as the old cassette they played over and over again in Aziz’s car in the early days of their relationship proclaimed so prettily. The song swore that “I won’t stop loving you until the Good Lord starts to grow old.” The tune had been playing by chance on the radio the first time they made love in the car. Over the years the little ditty had become a sort of anthem celebrating this event.

  How long should you love? the wife ponders, stirring the broth of grief that is poisoning her heart and mind. Before, this gently blasphemous chorus had had a joyous meaning without any ambiguity.

  God had all at once grown old and that had made our daughter’s death possible. Shall I continue to cherish this dillydallying husband, who buzzes around, goes out and comes back in like a fly, but doesn’t bring our little girl home in his arms?

  The broken woman supporting another grief-stricken woman guesses – knows – that she is being unfair. She senses that the love she still feels for this man is beginning to be contaminated by something resembling, yes, contempt; a real father has a duty to protect his family, whereas this one has got bogged down in lamentations with his doddering old father-in-law…

  You imbecile, a voice rebuffs her, it isn’t your husband’s fault if a maniac has kidnapped your daughter. For God’s sake, don’t act like some silly little Arab goose who’s always blaming someone for her misfortunes!

  Deep down, Meriem agrees, but at the mention of her daughter’s disappearance and the glacial desert she will have to face for the rest of her life, she clings to this resentment for her companion in life.

  Dad, why did you have to die so young? she thinks in a rage. She observes her mother with suppressed anger. A strange jealousy grips her heart: her mother is no longer grieving only for her kidnapped granddaughter, but also for her… her… Meriem can’t bring herself to speak the usurper’s name in her mind.

  And yet she used to like him, this ‘uncle’ who spent all his evenings at their house when her father was still alive! Spoiling her silly, bringing her countless toys at first, then books, telling her interminable and wonderful stories about his native Brittany.

  She had never understood the origins of the friendship that bound her father so strongly to this Frenchman who’d appeared from nowhere and of whom she knew only that he had ‘helped the Revolution’ and that he wouldn’t allow himself, despite the nostalgia gnawing away at him, to go back to France. He had always managed to find work not far from them. That wasn’t very hard with his job as a post office counter clerk. There were post offices in even the remotest parts of the country! Every time Tahar was posted somewhere, Mathieu managed to follow him, sometimes needing a year or two before he obtained a transfer. Not really understanding the reasons for these constant changes, his superiors at the post office grudgingly satisfied what they viewed as a gaouri’s whims and finally buckled in the face of their strange compatriot’s obstinacy.

  Mathieu had Algerian identity papers, but he didn’t seem to hold his adoptive country in great esteem. Meriem had often caught him grumbling about these Arab layabouts who spent their time complaining about the entire world while they shamelessly frittered away the fabulous riches that nature had bestowed on them. Meriem was shocked to hear these criticisms verging on racism coming from the mouth of a European, but she was forced to acknowledge that all he was doing was repeating, sometimes word for word, the diatribes of her own widely admired father.

  They were living at the time in a small town in the east of the country, where her father exercised the post of headmaster. When she mentioned the rumours about his heroism, the former mujahid curled his lips in disgust: “What do those meatheads know about courage and the evil of war? The only thing they’re interested in is whether I’ll agree to be their candidate for mayor to cover up for their dodgy real estate schemes and their swindling with my heroism!” He had always refused to tell her about the deeds that had earned him his reputation as a rebel, once objecting scathingly when she pressed him: “Everyone always lies when they talk about the war. So don’t ever force me to lie to you!”

  Dad, you would have known how to bring back our little girl… Whereas this useless twit doesn’t even know how to look after the monkeys entrusted to him!

  She takes her mother by the arm and pulls her into Shehera’s bedroom.

  “Have a rest, Mum. Mathieu will be home soon.”

  “You think so? I know him like the back of my hand, my Mathieu. His voice was odd, as if he were afraid…”

  After tucking her mother in like a child, Meriem goes back into the living room. All she can see of Aziz is an exhausted profile so ravaged by despair that it makes her heart melt with both grief and anger. She puts both hands on her man’s shoulders, finding nothing to say to him. He grasps them. He too remains silent. He is afraid of starting to speak, afraid that he won’t be able to stop.

  The ringtone kills off the sigh rising in Meriem’s lungs. It is her mobile that is tinkling with those ghastly cheerful musical chimes her daughter installed for her because she thought the old ringtone was too bland.

  “So then, has he confessed everything to you, your nice little husband?”

  She feels a shooting pain. She raises her hand to her breast, but manages to stammer: “What was he meant to confess?”

  “Oh, always keeping secrets! That’s no good… You should tell the woman of your life
everything! Tut, tut, that’s not the behaviour of a faithful husband…”

  “Which secrets do you mean?”

  The man doesn’t answer right away. Meriem feels a new pang biting into a different corner of her heart. What if the kidnapper hangs up? Without giving any news of her daughter? Plunging them once more into the horror of ignorance?

  “Pass me your husband,” the awfully familiar voice resumes, adding, “please, ma… madam (he stumbles deliberately, with mocking disdain, over madam)… Is that you, Aziz?”

  “No, it’s still me, his wife. Please, I…”

  “Come on, you slag!” the stranger yells. “Why don’t you do as I tell you?”

  She holds the mobile out to Aziz. Her face is so bloodless and so devoid of emotion that Aziz believes for an instant that she has just learnt of their daughter’s death…

  “You… you’ve…”

  He gasps for the air he needs to release the cry that has already taken control of his brain.

  “If you scream, I’ll kill her. Right now.”

  The part of Aziz’s brain that is still functioning retains only one element of the kidnapper’s threat: If he’s threatening to kill her, then he hasn’t killed her!

  Suppressing the mixture of relief and rage then and there throws Aziz into a state verging on nauseous dizziness.

  “OK, I’ll be quiet, I swear… (Then, to his wife.) She’s alive… (To the stranger again.) I beseech you, let us speak to our daughter…”

  “Don’t give me orders, if you please.”

  “No, no – never!”

  Aziz has adopted the most servile tone possible.

  “Well now, tell your wife everything. Or would you rather I did? Come on, put it on loudspeaker!”

  “Right now?”

  “Right now.”

  Aziz does as he’s told, focusing his gaze on the small buttons to avoid his wife’s eyes.

  “So, what are you waiting for?”

  Panting with excitement, the kidnapper’s voice is like a perverted little boy’s as he awaits the outcome of some naughty prank.

  “I…”

  Aziz’s lips are as swollen as if they had been plunged into crushed ice.

  “Speak, you idiot, or it’ll be your daughter yelling instead!”

  “I… I murdered a man and…”

  The final whispered words hiss out of him like a punctured tyre.

  “…And Mathieu is going to kill himself before dawn…”

  “Why are you telling me these fibs, Aziz?”

  Meriem shakes her husband’s arm in disbelief.

  “Why?” she puffs out in a halting, almost inaudible breath.

  “He’s cut off three of Shehera’s fingers. He threatened to cut off some more if we didn’t obey him.”

  Meriem half-closes her eyes and gropes around for help as if the floor had turned to quicksand. She is in terrible pain; a monstrous animal is sinking its claws and its fangs into her breast. She articulates painfully, carefully – she has to rescue her daughter – by clutching with all her might to the tiny shaft of intelligence she has left: “My daughter… Give me back my daughter… Take my life instead of hers… Right now, if you want… I’ll leave the house at once… Look, I don’t even need to put a coat on…”

  She gulps in spite of the sickening bitterness of her saliva. The man takes his time.

  “You’re suffering, eh? It’s tough, I know. I’m not guessing – I know. You tell yourself the pain can’t get any bigger, that it’s already bigger than the universe, and yet it carries on getting bigger… I won’t say I pity you, but I understand you, you can be sure of that.”

  The voice is not sarcastic and seems to show a genuine concern for his interlocutor’s mental state. Then, as though the man had cast a glance at his watch:

  “Here I am, nattering away! I have to go or else I won’t have any minutes left for our conversation tomorrow morning.”

  “My daughter… Just a little word with my daughter,” Meriem implores him. “I beg you… just one tiny second…”

  A burst of laughter crackles over the loudspeaker. Then the man rebuffs Meriem with almost fatherly irritation.

  “Now, now, my poor foolish woman, you’ll have to do more than beg for your wishes to come true. Even if you behaved like an Inca priest and piled every living being in the world on top of each other for sacrifice, it would still be far from enough. That would be too easy, woman. Anyway, talk to you tomorrow… well, as long as your father-in-law doesn’t shy away at the last minute… He’s made one hell of a wager, your father-in-law: his life for his granddaughter’s, who might already be dead. I can cheat too, sometimes…No, I’m kidding! Who knows…”

  The kidnapper clicks his tongue against his palate in a sign of derision, before speaking again, with something like envy. “Does he really love you all this much, that fucking gaouri?”

  The question catches the woman off-guard. She opens her mouth, but nothing comes out.

  “You don’t know? Well, you will tomorrow…”

  “Stop blubbering!”

  She is berating him violently. She doesn’t want to sit down for fear that her body might not obey her now. Moreover, she feels like her brain is only working in fits and starts: one moment, extremely sharp; the next, incapable of understanding what had appeared obvious.

  “Tell me everything,” she ordered before interrupting him: “This stuff about Mathieu committing suicide before dawn, is it true?”

  Aziz nods, ashen-faced.

  “Yes. Otherwise Shehera will have her throat slit.”

  The words have lost all their modesty. The beast whines and sinks its teeth into another part of his belly.

  “Will he do it?”

  “Do you mean Mathieu or the…”

  “Mathieu.”

  Her heart is cold. She speaks in a low voice to avoid her mother eavesdropping on their conversation. She’ll have all the time she needs, later, to share his grief. She can think only of her daughter; she’d be prepared to sacrifice the whole world to save her child.

  “You never really liked your father-in-law, did you?”

  Her husband studies her in fearful astonishment.

  “And you’re not going to ask me about the guy I killed?”

  Yes, how come she hasn’t questioned him about… Oh, my God! The pieces of news slam into each other so hard that some, even the most appalling, temporarily disappear beneath the horizon of her understanding. Aziz tries to give her a hug; she pushes him away. If she lets herself dissolve into tears, Shehera will die of abandonment. Right now, she feels something close to revulsion at Aziz’s betrayal. How could he have kept such alarming information about her daughter secret from her?

  She digs deep into her lungs to bring a breath of calm to her voice.

  “Tell me everything. And please don’t leave anything out.”

  She learns successively of their neighbour’s murder, her father’s past, her father-in-law’s too, his planned suicide at dawn, and the likely reason for her daughter’s kidnapping.

  If she has understood correctly, her daughter is going to die because of a massacre during the Algerian war. One of her hands is shaking.

  “No, she’s not going to die, I promise you that. He wants revenge? Well, he can have revenge! He’ll take Mathieu’s life and I’ll offer him mine if he so desires, but he won’t kill Shehera.”

  She notices that he is searching for reassurance in her eyes. She refuses him any such aid; the kidnapper had no second thoughts about cutting off her daughter’s fingers. This man’s thirst for vengeance is impossible to satisfy. In his mathematics about an exchange of corpses – those of his family in return for Shehera’s – he still comes out a heavy loser.

  She knows that Aziz is ready to throw down his life at the kidnapper’s feet like a mere potato peeling. He had the courage to commit a murder, he who had never been in a fight in his life. He tried to kill his father-in-law. She feels her chest tighten with love for this inde
cisive man who gave her so much joy in the early days of their marriage, and more and more regrets in recent years. She recalls the happiness that had washed over them when the little one came into the world and they began, despite the bombings and the butchery, to hatch marvellous plans for the future of their little family: leave this squalid place, buy a small flat, have some ‘normal’ neighbours, go to the cinema and the theatre, no longer fear the hate-filled looks due to uncovered hair or too short a dress…

  She decides to twist the cruel tap of memories tight shut because otherwise a chasm of despair will open beneath her feet. To quell her trembling she goes off the kitchen to make herself a coffee. She tries to think of a possible way out – necessarily possible. She catches herself murmuring a snatch of a prayer, before a sniggering thought stings her mind: “Even Eve, close as she was to God, lost her son. So you, my girl…” With tears in her eyes, she tastes the scalding liquid and suddenly recalls the cursed day her father died.

  …She is coming home happily from the university. Her linguistics test went well, she enjoys her studies, even if she knows in advance that they won’t be worth a great deal when the time comes to transform this knowledge into a job. She knocks on the door of her family’s flat. She left home early that morning because of the erratic timetable of the bus that takes her to the university. She didn’t kiss either her father or her mother as they were both still asleep.

  Her mum opens the door immediately, as if she were on the lookout for her return and tells her bluntly, her face impenetrable: “Your father is dead.”

  She breaks down in tears and stammers, “Ho… how… come? He… he was fine yesterday.”

  Her mother stares at her. In her eyes she can read grief and anger in equal measure, both of them vast.

  “Your father committed suicide.”

  “What?”

  “Sleeping tablets.”

  Her mother claps her palms together. For one ridiculous second, Meriem thinks she’s applauding. In reality, her mother is doing her best to keep her hands busy and stop them from scratching at her cheeks until the blood comes, as the ancient Arab mourning custom requires.