“Tahar, ia Tahar!”
Another voice responds: “Tahar, ia Tahar! Allah irahmek!”
Another voice calls out in turn: “Allah irham ech-chuhada!”
“What are they saying?” Capitaine Degorce asks.
“They know about Hadj Nacer,” replies a harki. “They’re saying that his soul is with God.”
“How do they know?”
Moreau spreads his hands in a helpless gesture.
“Make them be quiet,” orders Capitaine Degorce. “I don’t want to hear them anymore.”
He steps aside to smoke a cigarette. First there is a clatter of doors opening, one after the other, then shouting and finally silence. There is no end to the afternoon. The wind drives a winter sky before it, laden with rain. The sun dries the wet pavements. And it is the same monotony, the same emptiness. The essential truth has been revealed and nothing new will happen. On all fours in his office he retrieves the torn fragments of the letter from Jeanne-Marie out of the depths of the wastepaper basket. Patiently he tries to piece it together and when he has finished dusk has fallen. He does not know if this was only a way of passing the time or if he is incapable of resigning himself to solitude. The words that bring him pain help him to feel alive.
“My child, my beloved, André, no news today. I don’t feel like talking to you about the children and the petty aspects of our life far away from you. It’s night and you’re so very far away. If I didn’t know you I could believe that you no longer love us. Your letters are so short and so cold. But I know you, I know the purity of your soul, your honesty, and I cannot believe it. So I know you are suffering and don’t want to talk about it.”
(But I no longer have a soul.)
A tear in the paper makes the start of the next sentence illegible.
“… for everything that torments you. And so I shall wait for the time it takes and you will share your pain with me. I’m almost an old woman, but there’s nothing I could not hear from you, that’s the advantage of being married to an older woman! If you want to continue carrying a burden that is too heavy for you all on your own, André, then do so if you must, but don’t forget that I’m here to carry my share of it and that you can speak to me whenever you want to. Distance makes everything more difficult, my child, but I’m certain that when you’re close to me it will be easy for you to talk and I know, too, that you’ll need to do so. In the meantime please at least tell me I’m not mistaken. I know I’m not mistaken, but I should like you to write and tell me this, without any specifics, if you like, but write and tell me, for I’m going through some difficult nights. Oh, I’m not reproaching you, André, I’m asking you a favour. And I’ll go on talking to you about peaches and the marvellous spring we’re having here, I’ll give you all the details, the scent of the maquis, now the flowers are out, the children’s games, their whims, when they’re being naughty little things, and their sweetness and our family outings. I shall go on so you may know we’re all here, and there’s a place for you forever in our hearts where nothing has changed. I shall ask nothing more of you and I’ll expect you will be ready to …”
“Mon capitaine, you must come at once.”
*
Robert Clément is lying on his side on the floor of his cell, the lower part of his naked body wrapped in a military blanket. His arms are pressed against his chest, black with dried blood. There is blood on the tiled floor, all around him a vast pool spreading towards the walls and disappearing beneath the straw mattress. One foot sticks out from the blanket and its milky whiteness is like a patch of light in the darkness. Adjudant-chef Moreau soaks a sponge in a bucket of water and gently wipes Clément’s arms, on which the furrows of deep, jagged cuts appear where the pallid skin is torn. Capitaine Degorce crouches beside Moreau and takes the sponge from him. He squeezes it to expel all the blood and rinses it until the water that trickles out of it is perfectly clear and pure. He turns Clément onto his back and delicately raises his head, which sticks to the floor because of the blood. He runs the sponge over the face, the hair, the open eyes that are reluctant to close. The acne spot is still there, beneath the ridiculous moustache. His tightly closed lips are almost blue.
“How did he do that?” asks Capitaine Degorce.
“I’ve no idea, mon capitaine,” Moreau says. “I don’t understand.”
Close to the body, stuck fast in the blood, a soldier finds a curved piece of plastic, about ten centimetres long and crudely sharpened, which he hands to Capitaine Degorce. Clément must have spent a long time rubbing it against the walls of his cell. In one sense his resolution had held firm. It had just been totally concentrated on a different objective.
“Where did he find that? What is it?”
“I’ve no idea, mon capitaine,” repeats Moreau.
“It looks like a bit of the seat from the shithouse, mon capitaine,” observes a soldier. “Do you want me to check?”
The capitaine silently shakes his head.
“I don’t know when we screwed up, mon capitaine,” says Moreau in a stricken voice.
“I don’t hold it against you, Moreau,” says the capitaine. “We’ve all screwed up, as you say, and I don’t think it’s important to know when.”
Capitaine Degorce makes another vain attempt to close Clément’s eyes. He straightens up slowly. He studies his bloodied shoes which make a sucking noise as he raises them from the floor.
“Clean the cell for me,” he says. “And finish washing the boy.”
He looks at Clément again, the milky whiteness of his skin, his open eyes that no longer see anything.
“Come with me, Moreau.”
In his office he places a file on top of the torn-up letter from Jeanne-Marie.
“Robert Clément was released this morning after being questioned,” he says to Moreau, carefully articulating each word. “Tonight you will take his body and make it disappear, I don’t want to know how. I just want to be certain it will never be found. Understood?”
“Yes, mon capitaine,” Moreau agrees. “But you know,” he says after a while. “No-one will ever believe he was released and vanished like that into thin air.”
The capitaine shrugs.
“What does it matter, Moreau, what people believe or not? What does it matter?”
Capitaine Degorce lowers his head and massages his brow with his fingertips. “And now leave me alone, please.”
*
Within every man the memory of all humanity is perpetuated. And as for the immensity of all that there is to know, each one of us knows it already. That is why there will be no forgiveness. Capitaine Degorce has gone to find the Bible in his bedroom. He strokes its worn cover. There is a terrible sentence somewhere in the Gospel of St John that he needs to read and he reads: “But Jesus did not commit himself unto them because he knew all men, and needed not that any should testify of man: for he knew what was in man.” He takes a sheet of paper and stares at the blank page without writing anything.
(A voice has returned to me, Jeanne-Marie, but what can I do with it? For a long time I’ve been a prey to lies. I know what there is in man, I’ve seen it so many times and have never spoken of it. That’s how I have gone on living. All I ever wrote to the families of all my comrades who died at my side in the prison camp was a web of lies. I spoke of courage, of sacrifice, of pride. I should have told them: your husband died because of me, your brother died because of me, or your son. I couldn’t save them. I didn’t want to. They died because they saw men accepting to live like insects, men like me. They died because they couldn’t bring themselves to do this and because, when they looked at us, myself and my fellow men, they asked themselves, what’s the point of living? Where we were, Jeanne-Marie, no-one could ask such a question and survive. Of course, there’s someone who has a place in your loving heart, Jeanne-Marie, and also the hearts of the children, but it is not me. As for me I have no dwelling, not even in hell. As they reach out to you my arms ought to disintegrate into ashes. The p
ages of the holy Book ought to burn my eyes. If you could see what I am you would shield your face and Claudie would turn away from me in horror. That’s how it is. Something wells up in man, something hideous, which is not human, and yet it is the essence of man, his profound truth. All the rest is merely lies. Spring is a lie, Jeanne-Marie, the sky is not blue and this very day I have killed a child and killed my brother. Undeserved love burdens us with a deadly weight. How could I tell you these things? A voice has returned to me for silence and for the night. A voice has returned to me for the dead who can no longer hear it.)
“Mon capitaine, Andreani’s men are here.”
“Tell Moreau to take charge of handing over the prisoners. I’m busy. Give him the list.”
Through the window he looks at the crescent of the moon, shining in a sky filled with stars. He feels as if he were performing an ageless ritual. In Jerusalem the storm of the crucifixion has passed and on the terrace of his palace the Procurator of Judaea raises his eyes clouded with longing towards the same moon. The heavy stone of the tomb has closed on the bodies of the execution victims and the silence of the night no longer makes them afraid.
(How many faces does He have, Jeanne-Marie? Does He take pleasure in not being recognized so that we should go astray and turn away from Him while believing we are seeking Him? Is He evil? Does He rejoice to see us fall? Is it thus that He repays us for our weakness and our love? His body is ugly. No majesty emanates from it. He does not shine. His wounds are appalling and do not inspire compassion. He looks like a criminal broken by justice. No-one weeps over Him. Those who cannot hold back their tears on seeing Him are saved, but no-one weeps. You can see, I am not weeping. Implacable logic strengthens my mind and logic is useless to me, it turns inside out like a glove and all the countless reasons that caused me to accept His being tortured and to raise my hand against Him are as insubstantial as mist. And I raised my hand against Him, Jeanne-Marie, several times, and I did not recognize Him, power and logic armed my hand, gave it its strength, but this hand has fallen back, powerless and dead and I cannot now cause it never to have been raised. But He, Jeanne-Marie, He who can do everything. Could not He cause it never to have been raised? Could not He cause me to have repudiated my mind’s logic and not Him? For now I have learned and I know. If it were given to me to encounter Him again I should recognize Him, whatever His face were like, I should recognize Him and I should know what to do. For I have also learned that evil is not the opposite of good: the frontiers between good and evil are confused, they blend into one another and become impossible to tell apart in the bleak grey light that covers everything and that is what evil is. And I have learned that the mind’s desiccated logic can achieve nothing without the help of the soul, it can only stray endlessly in the grey fog, lost between good and evil, and I, Jeanne-Marie, have left my soul somewhere behind me, I can remember neither where nor when. And what would be the point of my knowing if He does not allow me to retrace my steps? And what is there for me to do other than continue pressing on along the road that leads me ever further from Him and you? I should like Him to take me back to the dawn of that day that is erased from my memory, one that only He knows. The truth is that if anger could still mean something to me I should be so angry with Him. Why did He let me squander all the love I carried within me? Why did He let me make myself unworthy of you? But He does not even grant me the grace of His anger, Jeanne-Marie, I’m a whimpering animal, so cold I no longer even feel the pain that makes me whimper, and although I know that I lost the right to pray a long time ago, I pray all the same. All I wish is that He would let me return, if only for a moment, to where I left my soul.)
But everything fades away so quickly, Tahar’s face, smiling beneath the soft breeze that stirs the black curls of his hair, at Taghit or Timimoun, and the echoes of Claudie’s laughter on the beach at Piana. Capitaine André Degorce goes back to sit at his desk. He writes a single long sentence, an illegible scribble, into which he puts all his love.
Oh no, mon capitaine, I shall not forget you and nor will you be able to forget me, I know that, for I have a very clear memory of reading somewhere that we must forever share the fate of those who have loved us, and the love I bore you is perhaps more pure and true than the love you were surrounded with by your parents, your wife and your children and all those who believed they loved you. Your contempt does not matter any more than mine, mon capitaine, it is powerless against the force of this love I have never managed to eradicate from my heart, for it has been rooted there like a weed, full of vitality, and I know now that nothing will eradicate it. You cannot imagine how much easier it would be for me simply to be your enemy, rather than submitting to the tyranny of the love that binds me to you. I understand that you may want no part in it, that it may fill you with horror, but remember that it was not my choice either, and if you are still capable of being honest you must admit that, apart from me, no-one has loved the man you really are, for, in truth, no-one apart from me has known you. You are well aware of this, neither your wife, nor the boy you have brought up, nor the daughter you so inconsiderately begot know you and I am certain you must often have wondered what would survive of their love, could they but glimpse, if only for a second, the man you really are, the one you have striven to conceal from them for all these years, while constantly dreading that they would nevertheless discover him, and I would swear, mon capitaine, that you have chosen to live in fear and silence rather than risk confronting the fragility of their love. But I know you, I know what an incredible coward you are, I know the taste of the resentments that burn your mouth, and your erring ways, your lies, I know the immensity of your weakness, your unquenchable thirst for punishment, I know your tormented conscience because I am your brother, remember we were sired by the same battle, under the monsoon rains, and I have never ceased to love you like a brother. Oh, I know your secret dreams, mon capitaine, I know them so well that on some nights I feel as if you are dreaming within me, or else it is me slipping in beside you in the dream in which we have been transported very far away from the pitiless country of my birth, that country which is no longer mine and has never been yours, and the two of us are walking along a desert road between Taghit and Béchar, by the light of a very yellow crescent moon, which hangs like a street lamp in a sky without stars, we are walking amid objects half covered in sand, scattered over the ground as far as the eye can see, court shoes with broken heels, torn dresses whose colours have been erased by the desert wind that has stripped out all the embroidery with golden threads, a collapsed darbouka drum, an oud with no strings, blackened clusters of jewels, little boxes of henna and kohl, satin trousers and fragments of china, good luck charms, a whole trousseau that has slowly petrified in my memory since the one who assembled it has decayed into dust, an eternity ago, mon capitaine, and now these bone-dry remains are not even stirred by the wind that blows so strongly. You look about you, but none of the ones you seek are there, no little girl playing in the sand, no little boy, your wife is not waiting for you anywhere and the man you have been hoping all your life to see again will not come back to you and you try to call out his name in the darkness, but you have no voice and no-one can hear you. There is only me, mon capitaine, and very close to us, at the foot of a dune, a little dromedary crying out for its mother over and over again, stretching out its neck beneath the moon, but it cannot see us for a compassionate hand has blinded it, so that our wolf eyes, gleaming in the darkness, should never terrify anyone again. You are trying to escape from me, mon capitaine, but the undying power of my love shackles me to you and you cannot contrive to do so, all your futile running has never got you anywhere, and however breathlessly you run, I am still there, every tattered dress, the dromedary and the darbouka, each blade of grass, each fragment of coral and silver is like one of the infinite centres of the unimaginable circle round whose circumference you persist in running for no reason, mon capitaine, since however long you went on running for, you will never reach Taghit, you w
ill never know if someone is waiting for you in the cool of the palm grove, at the foot of the earth walls, to speak to you at last the words I did not allow him to utter in the darkness of a cellar during a night in spring, an eternity ago, and when you have understood this, you fall to your knees in the dust of the long desert road and you look up at the moon imploringly. In this dream, which is also your own, mon capitaine, the time has come when I go up to you to clasp you close to my heart like a brother. You do not push me away, you let yourself come to me, shaking with silent sobs, and I am so happy, mon capitaine, because I have understood that our dream will never set us free. We shall not leave one another. And the time has come when I lean gently towards you to whisper in your ear that we have arrived in hell, mon capitaine – and that your prayers have been answered.
JÉRÔME FERRARI was born in Paris in 1968. He worked as a professor of philosophy at the international lyée in Algiers for four years before moving to Corsica, where he now teaches. He has published three previous novels.
GEOFFREY STRACHAN is the award-winning translator of Andreï Makine.
Where I Left My Soul Page 11