by Karine Tuil
* * *
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 week
s, 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.”
Djamal arrives at a remote camp divided into several sectors, where Lashkar’s leaders live. He is given a military uniform: combat pants, a khaki shirt, and a sort of beret. Here, he meets two men: Abdel, known as Abdel of Mecca, and Mohammed, a member of the mobile Pakistani army who liaises between this camp and Afghanistan and reports on the situation there. He is in charge of recruiting foreigners, irrespective of their nationality.
Djamal stays in this camp for a few weeks, then is sent to another camp, concealed in the mountains of the Punjab. The units are mobile in order to avoid discovery. A day in the camp follows an unchanging ritual: the trainees are woken at three in the morning; they pray together and listen to speeches about the importance of the jihad and the holy war. As in Fontainebleau, they are shown images of war, mutilations and acts of violence committed against Muslims. Along with other men from all over the world, Djamal undergoes a military training that takes the form of long walks during the day and, at night, in the mountains; shooting practice; and the assembly and disassembly of firearms. He is taught techniques for ambushes, camouflage, the use of weapons (grenades, Kalashnikovs, sniper rifles, mortars), and the manufacture and installation of explosives and detonators. The trainees follow orders, they run and crawl, climb, roll through sand, jump into trenches, carry weights, attack a military convoy. It is cold and Djamal is hungry. Exhaustion begins to overcome him. Here too, the weakest are removed, sent back to wherever they came from. Djamal lives here, surrounded by two or three thousand Mujahideen. He swaggers around, defying the enemy, his brain afire. They are guided by a military sheikh, who reports to Abdel, picking out the best men for him: those steel-hard recruits who will have the glory of dying as martyrs. Here, with them, Djamal has a goal—he exists, he is important—whereas back home in Sevran, in peacetime, he is nothing.
Sometimes, in the middle of the night, the men are rudely awoken, mobilized into groups, and evacuated from the camp, their weapons well hidden. They disappear into the mountains. The Pakistani army and some American officers are about to arrive, so it’s said. They flee without fear, informed in advance of every move by members of the Pakistani army itself. It’s a well-oiled machine. In a secluded area, Djamal devotes himself to cleaning the camp. He does it quickly and efficiently, picking up the spent shells and collecting them in a large metal box. This process takes a few hours, sometimes a few days, and after that it’s fine. They return as soon as the Pakistanis and Americans have left, empty-handed, those pathetic losers—we will destroy them all, the Western dogs! In the evening, around the campfire, they recite verses from the Koran predicting the coming victory, and our enemies shall perish beneath our sword, we shall invade their lands, we shall kill them all unto the last!
They sleep on the ground, rolled up in blankets that smell of sweat and dust, defying the cold and the heat, the wind and the fear, and dream of women whose marble-like bodies they uncover from beneath the thickest chadors, pure virgins who do not cry out during lovemaking, who offer themselves without resistance, open and close their thighs upon command, oh, it’s so good, they think, like the celestial paradise, those hairless, unblemished bodies waiting to be deflowered. They dream so intensely that they do not hear the American soldiers who have them in their rifle sights, ready to blow their heads off. They are woken roughly, with iron bars, meekly releasing the grenades from their hands, which they hold during sleep in case of a surprise attack, and as Djamal opens his eyes he screams that he is French—I’m French!—that he hasn’t done anything—I’m French! I haven’t done anything! I’m innocent!—but one of the soldiers smashes him in the face with the butt of his rifle, almost gouging out his right eye, and Djamal collapses in a cloud of ash and dust.
But . . . I’ . . . Fren . . .
* * *
1. Latifa Oualil, sixteen. Has no idea what she wants to do with her life.
11
“So Sami is in jail because of this brother, who he never even mentioned to me,” Berman tells Nina. “After being arrested on the Afghan border by American soldiers, his brother was taken to the United States and then incarcerated in Guantánamo. But apparently no one understands what role Sam played in this exactly, or how deeply he was involved in it. It’s still a mystery.” Nina has listened to Berman without interrupting, feeling as if he were talking about a stranger. Could Samir have deceived her so thoroughly about this? Is it possible for a man to have not two but five or six faces? Who was Samir, really? A cruel hoaxer? A lovable schizophrenic? A perverted polymorph? Was he the victim of some dreadful conspiracy or was he part of that conspiracy? An activist of some sort? Surely not a terrorist. Not an Islamist or a fundamentalist either. He loved alcohol and sex, loved provocation and transgression. And he loved her. Didn’t he? In her mind, everything had become vague and murky: she was no longer capable of separating reality from fantasy, fact from gossip, truth from falsehood. She felt nauseous—felt the bile rise like some deadly lava inside her—and if Berman hadn’t ended his monologue there, she would have fainted in this café where the voices of other people buzzed and roared like an engine . . . she would have fainted and perhaps even died. Because, for her, what other way out was there from this? She possessed absolutely nothing. During all these months in New York, she had let herself be carried on his shoulders, like a child, and how light she had felt! Cleaning the house, paying her bills, working for a living—all those shackles imposed by society, she had been free of them all.
“You can’t stay in New York,” Berman tells her. “They’ll interrogate you. And your presence here might damage him even more. They’re going to freeze his bank accounts. Believe me, the best thing you can do is return to France as quickly as possible.” Nina does not reply. She feels sure that Berman does not know the truth about Samir’s identity because he keeps repeating that he doesn’t believe this story: “Why would a Jew be on the side of radical Islamists?” She decides it is better to remain silent. “What do you think?” She says she would like to see Sami, speak to him, but Berman dissuades her:
“I’m afraid that’s impossible. He’s kept in total isolation. They regard him as a danger to society, you see? No one is allowed to go near him. Even for his lawyers, there’s a whole routine they have to go through each time. What they’re trying to do, by keeping him away from people in this way, is to make him weak, make him crack, make him believe that everyone on the outside has abandoned him; it’s a fairly standard torture technique.”
“In that case, I’ll write to him.”
“I don’t think that would be a good idea. Do you really think they’ll just let your letter through to him unopened? Every letter he receives will be censored. Each one will be read very carefully, and if by any chance it is handed on to him, most of your sentences will be blacked out anyway. Don’t look so shocked—when it comes to anti-terrorism, there are no rules anymore. They can do anything they want. So imagine what they would find out from your letters . . . The judges
would learn that he was leading a double life. You’d risk damning him even more. It would help them build up a picture of a man who was two-faced, secretive, and in many ways manipulative. That’s all it would take for them to keep him in prison for months to come . . .”
“Whatever, I have to see him and—”
“What do you mean, whatever? What kind of world are you living in? This isn’t a romantic comedy, Nina.”
She is revolted by the machismo of his speech. But she says nothing and, as he lectures her, listens to him obediently like a six-year-old girl.
“Listen, Nina, what do you expect from him? He’ll probably be in prison for a long time. For now, you can’t help him at all. All you can do is make things more difficult for him. The only people he needs in his life right now are his lawyers.”
“I’ll wait.”
“Wait? Where? His bank accounts will be blocked. The owner of the apartment he rents for you will kick you out . . . And anyway, why would you do that for him? He put you in danger, didn’t he?”
“I’m going to stay. He’ll need me eventually. Because we’re together.”
In an infuriated voice, Berman finally tells her: “You are not together! Sami is married. He has a wife, a family, and the only person he will need by his side is Ruth Berg. With her money, with her influence, she’s in a position to help him. You can’t even imagine the lawyers’ fees for a case like this. Without his wife, I’m not sure he’d even be able to afford it.”