Abduction

by Simon Pare

  The imam was surprised. “The old gaouri who went by the name of Ali? Whatever got into him? Had he been drinking?”

  A murmur ran through the small crowd. Aziz felt like laying his hand on his wife’s shoulder, but decided against it because the people were now examining them with an increasingly unfriendly interest.

  “Erm… No, he didn’t drink… He had heart trouble… Maybe a heart attack?”

  The man muttered dubiously, “Poor man… May God grant him His mercy… But why was he driving then? We’d just finished the main building work…”

  The imam gestured sorrowfully at the ruined wall. Aziz saw the moment coming when the man would start complaining about the cost of the damage. Someone groaned, “A mosque damaged by a Christian – that was all we needed in such miserable times! We’ll have to see if someone can pay for it…”

  Show some pity, Aziz almost screamed, we don’t even know if he’s actually dead yet! but some unrest in the crowd cut his anger short. He couldn’t make out what was happening in the half-light of dawn.

  When she suddenly appeared in her dressing gown, forcibly pushing aside the people blocking her path, Aziz thought to himself that her appearance was in the order of things: there was no reason that either their misfortune or the absurd play they were forced to act should cease when everything was going so well. Latifa, her hair unkempt, contemplated the scene of destruction with an incredulous look. Then an ululation formed in her throat. Stretching her arms out towards the crashed car, she keened, “My little one… My little one… My little one…”, then slumped to the ground.

  Terror-stricken, Meriem tried to pull her mother to her feet, but she shoved her away. On all fours, panting between sobs – “Oh, what are you going to do there without your dear wife… My liver is bleeding for you as if it was I who nursed you…” – she headed towards the car. As the mesmerised crowd watched the indecency of this old madwoman proclaiming her love for a foreigner in the midst of believers, she reached the car. With Meriem still in hot pursuit, she swept aside the brick and breezeblock rubble that was preventing her from reaching the door. One of the girders swayed. Latifa pulled on the handle to no avail. Bending down to the window and cupping her hands round her eyes, she surveyed the inside of the car.

  “There he is… There’s my husband… Oh, there you are, Mathieu… My whole life crushed in this rotten car… And I told him not to drive at night… Is he dead? Really dead?”

  “Yes, Mum.”

  “Why are you so sure? You’re like everyone else, you don’t like him, eh?”

  “I’m telling you he’s dead.”

  “We have to get him out of there, my girl. Iron defiles the body.”

  “It’s dangerous, Mum, the wall’s going to collapse! There’s petrol everywhere – look at the bottom of your gown!”

  “Well, let me burn! That’ll be the end of me too.”

  And, turning away from Meriem, she called out to the gathering: “You are not men… Not one of you is helping him… And yet he loved this country… You’re leaving him to die like vermin… You lie to God, you lie to one another…”

  A man shouted, “Someone shut this loony up! We nearly died too!”

  Followed by another protest: “She married a heathen and now she thinks she can lecture us about religion!”

  “You’re all cowards!”

  A murmur of anger rose up, punctuated by cries of “Frenchman’s trollop!” and “Shameless slut!” Trapping her mother with both arms, Meriem begged her to be quiet. As she struggled to escape from her daughter, Latifa eructated, “…A man is dying before your eyes and you don’t even lift a finger, you damn…”

  Meriem placed a hand over her mother’s mouth and called to Aziz to help bring her under control before her explosion of grief caused irreparable damage. Aziz reacted late. His empty head throbbed with just one ambition, as piercing as toothache: to lock himself away for a whole day and drink, drink, drink until he could no longer remember having ever been capable of a single rational thought, and thereby to escape from this mob of humans – of which he was such an intimate part – caught up in their wickedness, their repressed sorrows and their grotesque certainties.

  “Bloody believers my vagina! Satan will grind your bones!”

  Latifa was shouting herself hoarse with a vulgarity unimaginable of a stickler for proprieties.

  “Everyone’s screwing you – the GIA, the government, the cops, the army – and you take revenge on someone weaker than you: a dead man!”

  The stone just missed Aziz and crashed down on the bonnet of the car. The next ones hit their target: Latifa. Hiding her head in her hands, she muttered a final insult before dropping at her daughter’s feet.

  Spotting the blood that was already stickying her mother’s temple, Meriem yelped at the top of her voice: “Help me, neighbours. They’re killing my mother… Help!” Meriem was shouting in the same angry and simultaneously shrill tone as her mother. Aziz focused for a second on this strange observation, gaining a moment’s respite from the horror of the scene around him. From a window a man cried, “What’s going on? Can’t we sleep in peace?”

  Frightened by the course events were taking, the imam interposed himself between the crowd and the two women.

  “Brothers, curse the Devil. She has lost her mind, the old woman is not responsible for what she’s saying. For the love of the Beloved, listen to me! Regain your calm, I be…”

  A last stone hit his shoulder. A voice apologised: “Excuse us, imam, that wasn’t meant for you!” The cleric called to Aziz in a brusque tone: “Neighbour, take your women away. There’s already one dead and one wounded; that’s enough for today!”

  The man who held forth five times a day on the grandeur of Creation and the ultimate purposes of existence was spluttering with fear and impatience at his interlocutor’s slowness.

  “Have you been drinking too, or don’t you understand Arabic anymore? A fire might break out at any moment. By the face of the Prophet, go. Take your old woman to casualty. Don’t wait for the ambulance, it’ll take an hour to get here. I’ll take care of the dead man and the cops. Come back and see me when everything’s calmed down. I don’t want any trouble, not with the locals nor with the authorities!”

  The husband whispered, “Meriem, wait here for me. I’ll get my car.”

  Curling her lip, Meriem avoided looking at him. Turning on his heel, he noticed the reflection of the streetlight in a puddle of petrol that had leaked out of the tank. He spared a final thought for the corpse with the staved-in chest: You dirty bastard, you made one hell of an exit! and a wave of hideous love for Mathieu swept through him.

  Admission to the casualty department went as messily as usual at the Mustapha Pacha Hospital. The duty house doctor palpated the half-unconscious old woman in a slovenly manner in the main waiting room, as visitors and inquisitive people looked on. Other patients waited resignedly for someone to come and take care of them. A chap with an arm immobilised in a bloody scarf was openly smoking.

  Meriem was entitled only to some indistinct grumblings from the house doctor as a response to her questions.

  “Your mother’s head has suffered a serious injury. It’s the end of my call and you can discuss everything in a little while with the doctor who takes over from me. In the meantime, a nurse will clean her head, but she’ll have to be hospitalised.”

  Upon which he turned on his heel.

  “Aziz, we can’t sit on our hands waiting for a doctor. Do something,” Meriem begged tearfully. “It’s my mother, after all! This can’t be happening, so many disasters all at once!”

  A middle-aged woman wearing a haik came up to the couple.

  “Don’t cry, my girl. But don’t trust these shit doctors; they have no heart and no conscience! Don’t leave your mother without anyone to look after her. My husband was unlucky – he didn’t know anyone here.”

  Without waiting for an answer, the stranger began telling them, with a kind of angry eage
rness, about her husband’s misadventures since his hospitalisation.

  “The sheets – can you imagine, we had to bribe the nurse to get some clean ones! If you can’t pull any strings here, you’re done for. Anyone God loves never goes near an Algerian hospital! Even the bread they give the patients is stale in this rotten hospital! Little one, what does your mother have on her temple? You should wash your hands: you’ve got blood all over you and that won’t do. The blood of others, even a close relative’s, is poison, believe me.”

  Aziz left Meriem to deal with the gossip and her clingy concern. “If you do have to leave her here, make sure you buy her a private toiletries kit as soon as possible, with all due respect, something for when she has to…” was the last sentence he heard before he found himself out in the open air again.

  During the drive to the hospital, with him at the wheel, and Meriem and her mother in the back seat, they hadn’t exchanged a single word about the stepfather’s death. When the traffic conditions happened to bring their eyes into contact – but only in the rear-view mirror – they saw that their relationship had withered, perhaps irretrievably, through their all too easy consent to this proxy murder.

  What now? was the only question that floated between them at present, harshly filling in the hollows and little by little sucking away the oxygen of love that had nourished their relationship for so many years.

  “Do you think he’ll let her go?” she had asked all of a sudden, in a voice that she had forced herself to keep under control, but shot through with a plea that he answer as she wished. Her mother’s head, wrapped in a bandage, was resting on her lap. From time to time, the still-unconscious, injured woman would emit a garbled sound, and Meriem patted her reassuringly on the shoulder.

  “He’s got what he wanted, hasn’t he? Now he just has to let our Shehera go.”

  Then she had uttered some fairly crazed words, doubtless forgetting her mother’s presence: “That’s what I’d do if I were him; he didn’t get my father, the chief instigator, but he got the stepfather, his accomplice in a sense. Throw in the man you… that ought to be enough, hey, Aziz? Two souls for crimes committed over fifty years ago, plus three of our daughter’s fingers, that should make up for it now.”

  Aziz hadn’t opened his mouth out of superstition. But he couldn’t help but think: “If we’re talking about the number of deaths, you’re forgetting the woman lying on your lap. And then, you see, the bloke is an ogre, his sorrow is insatiable, and none of your sums will satisfy him!”

  Perhaps Meriem had suspected the significance of his silence, for she added, still just as feverishly, “What do you think he’s done with our daughter’s fingers? Has he thrown them away? Has he kept them?”

  Faced with his speechlessness, she had cast him another glance in the rear-view mirror that was full of fear and hatred. He felt as if he had taken an axe blow to the heart. His legs started trembling; the engine had stalled on a hill and, once again, an urge to vomit out of terror for his daughter had tortured his guts.

  His passenger had bent over her mother, whispering in near hysteria, “Mum, I haven’t got time to look after you right now. Don’t die, please… Put it off till later if you like, but first we have to find your granddaughter!”

  He recalled that at that moment, in a final defensive reflex, a phrase had sparkled like a neon sign in the night of his soul: I love you, Shehera, tell your mother that I’ll love her too; I love you, Shehera, tell…

  He rings his friend the vet from the hospital courtyard. The man grumbles at first – “Hey, do you know what time it is? I hope your question’s a lot more urgent than the re-election of our dear life president now you’ve dragged me out of bed this early. Unless, that is, our most handsome male bonobo has run away with the chief’s wife, or that little monkey Lucy has suddenly converted to Islam and volunteered for a suicide attack on the Ministry of Agriculture!” – before giving up this exuberant demonstration of bad-temperedness on hearing his friend’s distraught voice.

  “Are you all right, Aziz?”

  “I need you, Lounes. Do you know a doctor in a good position at the Mustapha Pacha Hospital? My mother-in-law has had an accident.”

  “Is it serious?”

  “Maybe.”

  The vet hesitated momentarily.

  “I’ll see what I can do. I’ve got a relative who’s a consultant at Mustapha Pacha. Where are you?”

  “At the casualty department.”

  “We’ll meet there. Hey, don’t hang up! A man phoned the zoo administration yesterday. He said that you wouldn’t be coming in all week. Urgent family matters to see to, he said. The bloke didn’t seem all that trustworthy. According to the receptionist, he was much too cheerful, and he repeated that you were thinking about changing jobs. He presented himself as a close relative of yours. You can imagine that the director didn’t appreciate the fact that you got a stranger to announce you’d be off. He’s furious with you and he’s talking about sacking you, especially as you made him lose face in front of the delegation from the ministry. Hey man, what’s going on? You disappear overnight, you skive off work… Got a problem?”

  Aziz gulped, barely withstanding the temptation to confide everything to his friend.

  “No… Well, not really. I’ll explain. Please come as fast as you can.”

  He went back into the waiting room. A nurse with her hackles up was explaining sourly to Meriem that it wasn’t her fault if the doctors were late every morning. Voices began to be raised. Aziz laid a hand on his wife’s arm to calm her down. Just then a telephone ringtone went off. His.

  “Is it him?” whispered Meriem.

  “Yes… I think so… Hidden number… I’m going outside to speak to him. Lounes will be here any minute. He knows a well-placed guy at the hospital.”

  “Oh my God, rescue her…” she groaned as she put her hands together, in a wounded tone that caused the exasperated nurse to spin round. The latter furrowed her brow at a demonstration of such trivial despair in this place, before walking off dragging her feet.

  Aziz slipped out of the building like a thief. A guard watched him suspiciously as he passed. He took refuge behind a wall. With the phone pressed to his ear, he tried to form a “Hello’, but no sound crossed his lips.

  “Let’s talk about your mother-in-law. Has she died?”

  “No…”

  “But she’s going to, isn’t she?”

  The voice was hopeful. Aziz’s armpits were suddenly moist. He sensed that it was dangerous to annoy the kidnapper.

  “Probably. Her head injuries seem to be serious. She’s in a coma. The doctor was very doubtful about her chances of coming through.”

  “Guess I’m a good shot: the old man crashed and the old woman made sure she followed him! But I’ve still got a few balls to pot. And I’m ahead, right?”

  Aziz was dumbstruck, overcome by an irrepressible urge to kill. He leaned against a wall, sucking in a great gulp of air to bring himself under control. The effort brought tears to his eyes.

  “Don’t have any comment?”

  “You’re going to kill my whole family, right?”

  A long silence. Then the sounds of a chair moving.

  “No more cheating: your aim is to kill us one by one, whatever we do. Am I wrong?”

  “I haven’t killed anyone, my boy. That is the plain truth.”

  “Stop all this play-acting. According to Mathieu, you’ve kidnapped my daughter because of Melouza. Why would my daughter be responsible for the crimes of her grandfather or Mathieu? How would her death console you for your daughter’s death?”

  Then, in a sudden burst of fury: “She was called Sheherazade, right?”

  More chilled than if the polar icecaps had lodged inside him, Aziz waited for the reaction from his daughter’s executioner with the curiosity of the condemned man waiting for the blade to come down on his neck. Maybe the maniac was going to slit Shehera’s throat the next moment? If so, the father decided with a realisation
that his action would be but a minor blip in the man’s plan, he would immediately bring his own existence to an end, without even taking the trouble to warn Meriem.

  “Do not vainly desecrate the past, Aziz. It bears enough grudges against you already; you couldn’t imagine how many.”

  There wasn’t the feared explosion of anger.

  Aziz took up his futile pleading again.

  “Listen… Today’s children are not guilty of crimes of the previous generation… I beg you…”

  “No, the past does not turn into the past without a helping hand. With goodwill, with tenderness, with the respect due to those who have suffered. As far as I’m concerned, the past is a gigantic bone stuck in my throat. In Algeria, you have spat on it, you keep on spitting on it and you will continue to spit on it… No, no, my past is far from passing, there is a price to pay for that… I shall be in touch in an hour’s time to set a meeting place. It’s in your bird’s and your interest to come running when I signal. Your daughter has lost a lot of blood, so no dawdling. Rejoice, partners, your impatience will soon be at an end.”

  “What? She’s losing a lot of blood? I beseech you, let her go – we have to look after her, she’s innocent!” Aziz begged, panic-stricken at not finding the magic words that would breach his interlocutor’s monstrous logic. “Are you really the man Mathieu talked about? Please answer me… Is my daughter on the estate? Have mercy… Why us? No, don’t hang up! For the love of…”

  White-faced, the father put the telephone away in his pocket before walking stiffly back towards the waiting room. From time to time, he pressed on his chest, for he was having trouble breathing. Ten yards or so away, the hospital security guard was picking his nose and following the man with his eyes who had spent over ten minutes on the other side of the wall shouting into his mobile. “Must be some dirty story turned sour. Half the people in this country are looking for a shag and the other half are barricading their arses!” he ventured and decided not to call the guardroom.

  The little boy was making a lot of noise in the waiting room. His worn-out mother gave him a clip around the ear. The child burst into tears. Overcome with remorse, the woman in the haik gave him a hug before plastering his nose with kisses. Smiling again while still snivelling, the child snuggled his head into his mother’s lap and pretended to doze off.