The Moment Before Drowning

by James Brydon

She shrugs. “You look even worse than last time.” She tugs again at her hair. “Maybe I do too.”

  “I need to ask you about Lafourgue.”

  “Lafourgue?” Her voice hums gently. It seems almost tangible and, where it touches me, my skin prickles. I need her to talk to me. Her voice brushes up against me and melts against my skin. Her deep brown hair is thrown across her face and tumbles down her shoulders. She looks fragile.

  “Did Anne-Lise have any connection with him before the killing? Did she know him at all? Did he seem interested in her?”

  “Did he . . . ? Do you think he . . . ?” The words stick in her throat.

  I want to tell her how I sat in his basement with the chill of night all around. I want to tell her what I read: how he carried out his police work with a kind of implacable ruthlessness that made me think of Anne-Lise’s killer. I want to reach across to Mathilde and tell her that Lafourgue made no serious attempt to investigate Anne-Lise’s death, and that she was not even the first girl to have been killed and the case remain unsolved under his command here. I want to tell Mathilde that Lafourgue despised Anne-Lise because of her origins and that, while my house was being ransacked last night, he was the only person who could have known that I wouldn’t come back at any moment because I was in his basement. I want to say these things and to feel myself closer to Mathilde’s translucent skin. I want to share with her the events of this case which have become the horizons and valleys of my world. I feel only my tongue lying heavy in my mouth. My palate is dry. I wait in silence for her to speak.

  “I don’t think he knew Anne-Lise especially,” Mathilde says. “And I’m sure she had no interest in him at all. I do remember one time when he came into A l’abri des flots. His breath and clothes stank of alcohol but he seemed totally calm and controlled. He came over to where Anna and I were sitting. We were with some guys but I don’t remember who they were. Some local guys. With Anna, there were always guys around. I don’t know exactly what we were doing, nothing much, just talking, maybe sharing a cigarette. Then Lafourgue came over to the table. He didn’t even look at the guys, just at us. He told them to get lost. He stared at us the whole time but everyone knew he was talking to the guys. They didn’t bother to argue. They just got up and left. I think he just stood there for a while, not saying anything but not taking his eyes off Anna and me either. We could hear his breath going in and out and we just stared down at the table waiting for him to speak. Eventually he said something about . . . about dogs. How they give off a hormone that brings all the male dogs running. He said something about how we were like dogs, giving off some kind of . . . of smell . . . that would bring all the local boys running. Then he waited for ages again, not saying anything. I remember Anna’s face was pink, I don’t know if it was because she was furious or because she was ashamed. She was staring down at the table and her skin was burning. After a while he said something about how this was a Christian bar, not an Arab whorehouse. I think that was it. It’s the only time I remember him ever speaking to Anne-Lise.”

  Mathilde looks unbearably sad as she speaks. It feels as if she is weighing up all the individual pieces of Anne-Lise’s life and taking stock of their mediocrity: dreary conversations with local boys, the slow, repeated small-town evenings that she tolerated in the expectation of something better. Days that were supposed to be just a prelude, but that became all she would ever know.

  “I don’t think she ever spoke to him,” Mathilde says. “Is that what you wanted to hear?” She smiles weakly. “It seems so long ago but it’s not even a year.”

  Something glitters in the weird bareness of her room. On the floor at the bottom of the bed is a nine-branched candlestick. A menorah. The candles are blown out now but there are newly set beads of wax running down the sides. Nothing else in Mathilde’s room seems to be hers. I remember her drained, hungover face when we first met. This sign of devoutness seems out of place.

  “I didn’t know you were Jewish.”

  “Neither did I.”

  “But your parents . . .”

  Mathilde frowns in disappointment and I don’t need to finish the sentence.

  “They’re not, are they?” Once again, I see the Blanchards shuffling around downstairs, half-deaf, lost to the world.

  Mathilde shakes her head and the light glimmers on the loose filaments of her hair.

  “The war?”

  She nods. “I have no idea what happened to them. Deported, I guess. They”—she tilts her head to indicate downstairs where the Blanchards are probably bustling around in the kitchen—“were just acquaintances of acquaintances of acquaintances. Something like that. They don’t really know where I came from.”

  “It was brave of them to take you in.”

  “Brave?” She is clearly surprised to hear the word spoken in connection with the scuttling, half-senile presences downstairs. “I guess so. I didn’t really think about it.”

  “Did you ever search for your real parents?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Do you know that they’re . . . that they didn’t survive the war?”

  “You mean that they’re dead. I don’t know. But I know that dozens and dozens of thousands of them went on trains to the East and that only a handful ever came back.”

  There is silence. Tarik’s inhuman voice is whispering into my ear. I can feel the gentle tide of Amira’s blood beating against my knees.

  “Sasha told me that seventy-five thousand were taken and that two thousand returned,” Mathilde says. “He knows all about what happened in the war. Anyway, if my parents were alive and they wanted to find me—if they were in a state to want to find me—then I don’t suppose it would be too hard for them.”

  “Don’t you even want to know who they were?”

  She pauses. “Would it make any difference? Maybe there’s a fortune with my name on it in the vault of the Rothschild Bank. Maybe I’m next in line for the title of some Eastern European nobility that the Communists abolished long ago. Probably my parents were just petty, frightened clerks who got crushed in the machinery when the Nazis came. I don’t think it matters either way.”

  She stands up lazily and walks to the window where the sky shines palely above the pulsing band of the ocean. “However it was before, this is my world now. Sainte-Élisabeth. This naked room in a house with two strangers. The church in the center of town. A l’abri des flots in the evenings. Fishermen who can’t quite get the stink of guts off their fingers. Rain.”

  “You could leave.”

  “And go where? I’m not as clever as Anne-Lise. I can’t go off and read philosophy in Paris. I could just take my chances and be one more wandering, homeless Jew.”

  The struggling light in the sky glints on Mathilde’s skin, draining it of blood and emphasizing its pallor and its sheen. She clutches her cardigan around her skinny sides.

  “And the menorah?”

  She laughs faintly. “I bought it in a secondhand shop. I guess there were quite a few menorahs without owners after the war. I don’t even know what to do with it. I just know that it’s for the festival of light, in winter. I light the candles each evening and watch the flames dance and the wax melt. It’s pretty. I wish I could say more about it, like what it’s supposed to mean.”

  “You don’t ever go to a synagogue, or see other Jews?”

  “In Sainte-Élisabeth? And what do I have to worship? I didn’t even know until I was fifteen what I was. I mean, what my parents were. I don’t know if they worshipped or if they were just Jews by race. I think I always knew, though, that they”—another nod downstairs—“weren’t my parents.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know . . . You just know. Maybe lots of kids think that and it doesn’t mean anything. I knew it was true. They always denied it when I asked but then one evening a couple of years ago—I can’t even remember what we were arguing about—they gave in and told me that they’d agreed to take me in. They said it like it was a great revelation. I
think they wanted me to be grateful or something.”

  “Were you?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Although Mathilde answers my questions, she doesn’t turn her gaze away from the window. She seems almost to be talking to herself.

  “It was strange. I mean, when I found out. At first it was a relief. Like I’d been freed from a destiny that was choking me. I’d lived my whole life feeling I was someone else, or that I should be somewhere else, and then I found out that it was all true. Only . . .” She is silent for a long time and the quiet rolls around in this small, empty room. “Only what I found out is that whatever I am is completely lost. No parents. No stories. No people. A black hole.”

  “You could search—”

  “Don’t you understand? You can’t just search out the past. Do you know what we’re actually talking about here? The deportations. The death camps. It’s the obliteration of an entire people. No records. No survivors. Nothing. It was supposed to be complete annihilation. There’s nothing left for me to find. Maybe a couple of names on an official register somewhere. Dates and places. Pithiviers. Beaune-la-Rolande. Drancy. Auschwitz. None of that adds up to a past. That’s why I bought the menorah. Not to try to rediscover some Jewish tradition that was never mine. To remind me of all the things I’ll never know. I’m not trying to worship with it. I just keep it as a light in the night.”

  For a moment I can see Mathilde in her bare, dark room, listening to the clattering downstairs where two strangers bustle around in confusion. Outside, she hears the far-off roar of the sea, a whisper of infinity. At times, she must also hear the church bells tolling out the dull hours. By the window, gleaming frailly against the blackness, her menorah burns and glows, abiding in the gloom while she stares into the absolute darkness of her own past. Then another vision comes, eerily present for a moment: Anne-Lise’s body lying across the heathland in the police photographs. The precise, almost ritual nature of the mutilation in her flank leers like a black hole in the fuzzy, blizzard-flecked tones of the picture. The flesh excised after death. The body laid on display like criminals on medieval gallows.

  “Mathilde, how did it make you feel toward Anne-Lise when you learned that your parents were Jewish?”

  “Anne-Lise?”

  “With her being the child of a German.”

  “What difference would it make? She was who she was. Whoever her parents were couldn’t change that.”

  “But some people did resent her. They saw in her the shadow of the occupier. You didn’t?”

  “She was my best friend. She was the only person I loved. I didn’t ever even think about her being German. She was the same as me. She didn’t know where she came from either. There were always people ready to accuse her because of it, but she didn’t care. I don’t think she even really noticed. Mostly people just let it drop because it had no effect on her. Sometimes it just made them furious, though.”

  “They resented her.”

  “I guess.”

  “Enough to hurt her?”

  Mathilde’s eyes are totally focused now, and utterly cold. She stares hard at me and her gaze yields nothing. “What are you saying?”

  “Have you ever read The Merchant of Venice?”

  She shakes her head slowly. “Why?”

  “It’s about Shylock, a Jewish usurer who lends money to Antonio, a Christian. When a tempest wrecks Antonio’s ships and ruins him, he can’t pay his debt back to Shylock. So the usurer demands to cut a pound of flesh out of Antonio in return. It’s not so much compensation for the money Shylock has lost. It’s an act of revenge upon a society which treats him like an outcast, a subspecies. I suppose you know that some hours after she was killed, Anne-Lise’s murderer cut a piece of flesh out of her side . . .”

  Mathilde closes her eyes. I see her shiver.

  “By now, almost all of the evidence from the killing has gone. There was perhaps nothing even at the beginning. But there is still that one strange mutilation which may be the last, or the only, clear sign which explains why Anne-Lise was killed. I wonder if it might be a mark of revenge by someone persecuted during the war, or even after, who wanted to take a pound of flesh from Anne-Lise as a means of demanding atonement.”

  Mathilde sits completely still. She looks frozen. Her cheeks are sunken. “Are you saying that I—”

  “I’m not talking about you. I just want you to understand that the meaning of the wound in Anne-Lise’s side may perhaps be the only route that still leads back to whoever killed her.”

  She turns to the window and stares blindly into the great gray mass of clouds hanging above Sainte-Élisabeth.

  “Mathilde, listen. Have you ever heard anything about someone looking for revenge for the occupation? For the deportations? Anyone for whom Anne-Lise wasn’t just a seventeen-year-old girl, but a symbol of evil?”

  She still doesn’t move. She gapes unblinkingly out into the swollen banks of storm clouds louring above the coast.

  “Mathilde?”

  She shakes her head. “I don’t think so. I mean, I don’t know. I never heard anything like that before. It sounds . . . horrible.” Her voice is barely a whisper before it fades and dies.

  The image won’t leave my mind: persecuted Shylock ripping the satisfaction for his debt out of Antonio’s living flank. Maybe Anne-Lise wasn’t displayed as a piece of art, but as edification for the public. Was it a warning, like the hanged men dotting the boundaries of medieval towns, their flesh blackening in the sun, their eyes carrion for birds?

  I leave Mathilde in her empty room, where only the menorah’s gleam exists to remind her of the failure of memory. She is still standing by the window, her skin brushed by the sheen of light radiating faintly through the clouds, staring into the leaden sky that marks the boundary of her world, as another flurry of snow begins to drift gently down in white sheets.

  * * *

  Through the thick, reinforced glass window in the door to an interrogation room, I can see Sasha Kurmakin’s silhouette. His right wrist is handcuffed to a metal chair and his left hand is sunk deep in his pocket. He leans back, appearing entirely relaxed, his deep blue eyes gazing into the middle distance. His hair falls gently around his face, a jet-black, liquid cascade.

  “Told you we’d get him for you.” Lafourgue’s hand is like a rock on my shoulder. “We picked him up last night along with a few other unkempt revolutionaries. Take your time with him. We’ll probably hold him for a few days anyway. There’s enough evidence to drag out a possible conspiracy charge.”

  “Should I record the interview for you?”

  “It never even took place. He resisted arrest too, so a few extra bumps and bruises aren’t going to lead to any questions we don’t know how to answer.”

  Inside, the room seems tiny. The windowless walls are oppressively near. Kurmakin doesn’t even look up. Some of the Algerians were the same, trying to discipline their minds to disconnect from their surroundings. Others couldn’t help themselves. They tried to stare down but their eyes turned toward whoever came in, and in those eyes was a look of mute, pleading terror. Kurmakin doesn’t look scared at all. He must have passed through many police cells and interrogation rooms in the last months. He stares over at the far wall, his dreamy gaze floating freely. He’s pale and looks weary. His eyes are gently bruised with tiredness and his skin is wan.

  I offer him a cigarette and let him smoke for a while. His fingers tap the ash off with measured, refined gestures. He looks dreamily at the plumes of smoke wreathing in front of his face.

  “Sasha, I’m Capitaine le Garrec. I’m the one who wanted to speak to you. I asked Lafourgue to bring you in.”

  “Le Garrec?” He rolls the words around softly in his mouth. “I know the name. It was in the papers. The soldier who got carried away and murdered an Arab girl he was only supposed to torture.”

  I hadn’t intended to move, but suddenly my hand is around Kurmakin’s face. My fingers are digging into his flesh. His bones
and teeth feel like they are about to splinter in my hand. I want to feel the crack of the jaw in my grip. I force his head upward to look at me.

  “How many people do you think they murder in Algeria every day?” I keep hold of his face. The flesh warps and pales where my fingers bite into it. My voice is flat, or so it sounds to me. “Why do you think they would prosecute someone for doing exactly what the army does day in, day out? Are you really that stupid?”

  I slowly let go of Kurmakin’s jaw. I unclench my fingers. They feel alien, as if they’d been grafted on after an amputation. Kurmakin’s cheeks are bloodless where my hand crushed his flesh. He looks up at me and there is something uncertain in his stare.

  “That may be true.” His left hand reaches up and gently massages the skin of his cheeks. “So why are they prosecuting you?”

  “There’ll be a hearing tomorrow. I’ll try to explain it then. I can’t say anything now.”

  He nods. “You never know who might be listening. The article said that you were in the Resistance. That before you became a Fascist yourself, you tried to fight fascism. Is that true?”

  “Yes. At the time, I didn’t see it as becoming a Fascist. I thought that somebody had to be there. The situation already existed, so someone had to act in it. Better me than someone who actually wanted to fight the war.”

  “And now?” He sounds a little incredulous.

  “Now I think that the situation itself was just violence: colonialism, the nationalist rebellion, repression. That was the nature of it: pure violence; violence in its unreconstructed form. In that kind of situation, whatever you did, there was only ever going to be one outcome. I could have stayed in France and pretended it wasn’t happening, but I don’t think my hands would have been clean that way either.”

  For a while there is silence between us. Tobacco crackles and burns as Kurmakin pulls on another cigarette. Finally, he breaks the silence.

  “So why did you want to talk to me?”

  “It’s about Anne-Lise.”

  He frowns slightly. Her name catches him off guard. Something trembles in his gut and that carefully cultivated blank mask he had presented for interrogation begins to crack. He blinks once, twice. “Isn’t it too late now, for Anne-Lise?”