The Moment Before Drowning

by James Brydon

  “I don’t think so. Can I talk to you about her?”

  “Are you investigating the murder?” His hand brushes his eyes.

  “I’m trying to piece together the last few weeks before she died. I’m sorry, but I need to ask you some things which you might find painful. Did you know Anne-Lise was pregnant?”

  “Pregnant? When she died?” His cheeks are suddenly flushed. He gasps slightly and his hands move to cover his face. The metal of the handcuffs clangs against the chair and his right hand falls back by his side.

  “No, not when she was killed. But she was pregnant the winter before. You must have noticed her mood at the time.”

  “Of course, but . . .” He can’t find an answer. He wasn’t prepared to answer these questions. He looks away wordlessly.

  “The reason for her depression last winter was that she was pregnant.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I have the name of the doctor who carried out the abortion. And she told her teacher, Dr. Ollivier. But no one else, or so it seems. She never told you?”

  Kurmakin shakes his head almost imperceptibly.

  “Was the child yours?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Could it have been?”

  He nods slowly.

  “Did you ever think that . . . that Anne-Lise might have had a relationship with someone else?”

  I can see fear shredding his gut now. “No.” It comes out as a strangled whisper. He says it again, trying this time to inject some conviction into the word: “No.”

  “Do you want to take a break for a while?”

  He inclines his head to say yes and the waves of his hair tumble down and obscure his face. I stand by the door, staring out into the gray corridors of the police station until Kurmakin’s voice brings me back to the present.

  “What did you hope to bring to Algeria? The values of capitalist democracy? Did you hope they might forget about their alienated and oppressed existence if they could afford a new refrigerator or a Western suit?”

  “I don’t think I thought enough about them at all. I was just looking for a way to sacrifice myself. Can you understand that? In the Resistance it was an idea we lived with every day. It can be hard to forget something like that and drift back into simple normality.”

  “Do you . . .” Kurmakin’s voice breaks off. “Do you think she was . . . ?”

  “Seeing someone else?”

  “Yes. You can be honest with me.”

  “I don’t know. There’s no evidence at all that she was.”

  Involuntarily, Kurmakin lets out a flood of air as his body relaxes. “She was my life,” he says quite calmly, as if he were stating his date of birth or the color of his jacket. “She was the one thing that shaped and lit up the time to come. Her face. Her hands. Her touch was gentle, like rain. I still can’t accept that I will never watch her get older. Never watch the years make her weary and wise. She is fixed forever now. A girl who never grew up. I feel like I forget her a little more every day. I try to hold on to her—her hair, its scent, something sweet like cinnamon—but I feel like I’m making her up, not remembering. I think I know what she was like, but it’s my rational mind telling me that, and so I invent scenes that correspond to what she should be. It’s like my memory’s degrading . . .”

  “It’s protecting you. There are some things you can’t live with. Memory is clever. It makes you let things go.”

  “Do you know why she died?”

  “Not yet. I have to ask you: did you ever have any idea why someone would have wanted to mutilate her?”

  He simply blinks, seeming to find no other response.

  “There was something ritual in the mutilation. Something that gave an enigmatic meaning to the act of killing. Did it make any sense to you?”

  He shakes his head and his skin seems paler than ever.

  “It must be something that explains the crime, but to whom? Perhaps not to those of us who simply look on, and for whom it seems grotesque and uncanny. Perhaps it explains the crime to the killer himself. Hours after Anne-Lise died, he marked her body to make sense of his own deed.”

  As Kurmakin tries to answer my questions, shaking his head, his skin sucked white as the blood rushes away from his face, he looks less and less like a militant and ever more like a teenager, drawn wide-eyed and trembling into an adult’s nightmare. Getting arrested didn’t faze him, but the memory of Anne-Lise is playing on his nerves and fraying his composure. Occasionally, without seeming to notice he is doing it, he tugs at the handcuffs binding him to the chair. Interrogation, for all its refinement and elaborate methods, is not a complex art. The mind becomes incapable of defending itself against perpetual attack. The body is transformed into a field of pain. Kurmakin bites his lip.

  “What kind of relationship did Anne-Lise have with Erwann Ollivier?”

  “He gave her lots of books to read. I think it was useful for getting into the École normale, but it was just the Western bourgeois canon. Individualist philosophy, Romantic poetry, the whole apparatus of psychology and emotion through which middle-class man creates his own self.”

  “Did the relationship go beyond that?”

  He shakes his head.

  “What about Christian de la Hallière? How close was Anne-Lise to him?”

  “Close? I don’t think they were close at all. She wanted to try to track down her father and she thought he could help. She was disgusted by the man himself.”

  “Did you ever get the impression that he might have misinterpreted Anne-Lise’s motives and begun to form an attachment to her?”

  “I don’t know, but . . .” For a second, his eyes glaze over and he struggles to rip the words out of his throat. “There was one time, after she went to see him . . . after she came back . . . It was the only time I ever saw Anne-Lise scared.”

  “Do you remember when?”

  “January, I think. About a month before she . . .”

  “What happened? Did he threaten her?”

  “I don’t know what it was. All I know is that one day, after school, she went out to the château to meet him. I think she said he had some news about where Otto went after he left France. Anne-Lise and I had arranged to meet later, only when she got there, her eyes were . . . frantic. She kept looking around as if she thought she was being hunted. It was strange because Anne-Lise was never scared of anything. She grew up in a house choking on fear and it seemed to inure her to it. But that night she seemed scared.”

  “He terrified her?”

  “She wouldn’t talk about it. But it was strange, because the one thing that she did say is that he wasn’t there.”

  “De la Hallière wasn’t there?”

  He nods.

  “Do you think she was lying?”

  “Anne-Lise didn’t lie—” He breaks off, perhaps thinking of the pregnancy. “Maybe she didn’t always tell me everything, but she wouldn’t lie.”

  “So something else scared her, not de la Hallière?”

  “I think so. Something at the château, but not him.”

  The strain of remembering is etched in the tense lines of his face. I’m not surprised he left Sainte-Élisabeth, where everything conjured Anne-Lise’s shadow and forced him, through the long minutes of each day, to excavate his memories of her.

  He blinks and shakes the tangled mass of his hair out of his face. His eyes are purple-rimmed but they burn tirelessly, sleeplessly. Something is driving all repose from him. Grief? Guilt?

  Lafourgue peers approvingly through the glass at Kurmakin’s crumpled silhouette as I leave the interrogation room.

  “We’ll probably hang on to him for a couple more days,” he says.

  * * *

  As evening sets in, I drive out to the Château de la Hallière with tiredness inflaming my eyes and the road seeming to dip and sway in front of me. My head throbs where Kerbac caught me with the metal bar and sharp waves of pain pulse through my skull.

  What was Anne-Lise a
fraid of, she who was never afraid?

  My hands start to slip on the steering wheel. It feels as if my fingers have been wasted by dystrophy. Tomorrow, I shall sit before the judge and talk about Amira. Tonight, there is this one remaining thread running back into the past and connecting me to Anne-Lise. What scared her? Is Kurmakin even telling the truth? The ground seems to shake beneath me. The road floats hazily ahead, vaporized in the mirage of sleeplessness. I try to recollect the events of al-Mazra’a in preparation for the hearing but the words running through my mind dissolve into meaninglessness.

  I park the car about two hundred meters away from the château, switch off the headlights, and wait. Dustings of snow caress the windshield, seeming not so much to fall as to condense in the frozen air. One light blazes in a downstairs window, but apart from that the building looks deserted, its gray mass hulking and rotting in the dusk.

  After about twenty minutes the window goes dark and I see Aïcha’s silhouette step out into the frozen air. Her skin glows against the charcoal tones of the landscape. Shivering a little, wrapped in a black shawl, she walks down the road toward Sainte-Élisabeth.

  Now the château is dark. The snow-sodden, unmown grass soaks my ankles as I walk around the back looking for a way in. The wood of the window frames is disintegrating, falling away in damp splinters. I can see that one of the latches is unattached and, by digging my nails into the crack, I am able to pull the window open. The gap is just large enough to crawl through and I find myself in a dark hallway, breathing in the murky air of the château. The carpet underfoot is worn. An enormous painting hangs on the wall. In the half-light, I can just make out the ancestral design of knights charging at hordes of scimitar-waving Moors, bringing enlightenment to the infidel lands in great tides of blood.

  The size of the château makes it almost impossible to search thoroughly. Where would Anne-Lise possibly have been? I go through the cupboards one by one in the grand reception room where de la Hallière sat, his chin flecked with spittle as he exhumed and embellished his memories of the Ostfront and the Division Charlemagne. There are boxes of cigars. Bottles of whiskey, Calvados, and rum coated in thick layers of dust. Old daguerreotypes of girls standing around in knickerbockers. In one, a girl is standing behind a shelf of apples, her breasts interposed between the fruit.

  I try to move silently and quickly, constantly listening out for the rumble of a car engine, the whisper of voices, or the sound of footsteps. The dark makes the search difficult and slow. My hands are shaking slightly and I keep fumbling with the objects I find as I go through the rooms. I try to breathe slowly and run through in my head the phrases I will need for tomorrow’s inquiry. The more I try to construct sentences which express the reality of those final weeks at al-Mazra’a, the more the words seem incoherent and their meaning eroded and absurd. My head throbs heavily and my hands tremble and seem unresponsive to my will, as if paralysis is setting in.

  The reception room reveals nothing. I try to return each object to where I found it but my unsteady fingers bump into things and knock them out of place. Where else could Anne-Lise have been? The bedroom? I guess it must be on the first floor, at the top of the wide wooden staircase with its sculptured columns and flourishes and heavy oak banisters. As night closes in outside, I can see less and less. The gloom blurs the château’s bric-a-brac into indistinct shapes. The stairs creak beneath my feet. The wood sinks and groans. Up on the landing, doors lead off in all directions. Most of them open into rooms clearly not used for years, even decades. Tarpaulins, canvases, and sheets are draped over the bulky forms of rotting pieces of furniture. Cobwebs hang down from the ceiling like great folds of white muslin. Black mold bespatters walls rotten with damp. The air is so thick with dust that it clogs my throat. I feel like I’m underwater. Like I’m drowning. I see Tarik’s head forced down into the gluey depths of the tub. His muscles tense and knot frantically. His breath roars in his throat when Lambert pulls him out, as if his lungs are on fire.

  I can feel my airway contract. Panic shakes my limbs. I try to listen out for footsteps, an engine, voices. Still my hands shake. They rattle against the porcelain door handles as I enter each new room. It feels as if the wooden floorboards are sagging and swaying beneath my feet.

  Finally, in the easternmost part of the château, I find an inhabitable room with an old four-poster bed at its center. I try to move quickly. The familiar routine of searching a room should be an activity that my body remembers and can perform competently. My fingers are leaden. I work my way through cupboards, drawers, and bookcases. Everything moves agonizingly slowly. It is so dark that I need to peer closely at each object I find in order to examine it. I run through clothes, pockets, books. De la Hallière has an extensive collection of pornographic writing, from the Marquis de Sade to low-quality fantasies of rape and violence.

  As I drag my fingers along the shelves, I feel something sticking out of a copy of Justine. In the failing light, I can see merely that it is a bundle of photographs. The images are hidden by the dark, except for what looks like a naked body in a posture of crucifixion. I stumble to the window, my legs clumsy and numb. I try to pick out more details by starlight. The air in my lungs burns and dwindles. The pale glint from the sky outside shows me more: a woman, stripped, her arms outstretched and chained to a stone wall. Her hair falls in great luxurious waves around her shoulders. The skin around her flanks and stomach is torn. It looks as if she has been beaten with a whip or a cane. Something that would lacerate the flesh. Her skin glows, faintly radiant like the dying warmth of sunset. Her eyes are closed as if to blot out the stare of the photographer capturing her pain and humiliation.

  Aïcha.

  Even with her face half-hidden and her features only feebly picked out by the dead light of the stars, there is no doubting that it is her. Other pictures show her in similar poses: her arms tied to two thick metal rings, her skin martyrized before the photos immortalized these moments of her suffering. The surfaces of the pictures are dark; the images are drowned in shadows.

  The blood pumps in my head. The gash on my cheek feels like a metal blade lodged in my face. My fingers tingle and are losing all sensation. My left arm is quivering slightly and an iciness runs along it from the shoulder to the fingertips.

  The photos were taken inside. In a room with metal restraints. A dungeon. Somewhere hidden in the earth, where the screams would stay muffled. A place where someone could be kept for hours, even days. Anne-Lise. Perhaps she found the photographs showing the torture of Aïcha. It terrified her. If de la Hallière found out, it could have been reason enough to kill her. He took her down to the same chamber where Aïcha had been terrorized. In the last hours of her life, her world was nothing more than those four stone walls, the dirt floor, and the hopeless attempt to blot out pain.

  Tomorrow I will return to al-Mazra’a. The basement warrens. The detainees living in those labyrinthine corridors and small cells and clinging to fragile memories. The bare bulbs gleaming overhead.

  They stripped Amira too. When I went in to interrogate her, her hands were tied behind her back and her hair fell in great luxurious waves around her shoulders and tumbled jet-black over her breasts and her belly was stained with sweat and pumping hard, the muscles bunched and frantic, contracting and releasing, and her skin glowed in the nauseating light of the bulb faintly radiant with the dying warmth of a sunset. Her eyes were downcast; she couldn’t look up and she had closed her eyes as if she wanted to blot out my stare capturing her pain and humiliation.

  I push the photographs back into the book and try to restore everything in the bedroom to its original state. My memory seems to be blanking out. There are great voids in my perception. I can’t remember where any of the things I moved came from. I arrange the books, clothes, and papers I have disturbed into some semblance of order and pull the door shut behind me.

  The corridors are almost completely dark by now. My feet feel out the way in front of me. The creaking of the wood resou
nds like gunshots in the quiet and makes my heart lurch in my chest. I manage to stumble down the stairs, my feet slipping on the threadbare carpet, all my senses straining into the blackness and the silence to pick up any indication that de la Hallière may be home.

  Reaching the hall, my steps turn in the direction of the window and escape. But I can’t go yet. I need to find de la Hallière’s dungeon, whatever dark pit he kept Aïcha in, tearing her flesh and turning her pain into the polished surfaces of his photographs. I move through the ground floor of the château room by room, not daring to use a flashlight, feeling out the ground with my feet, stamping, hoping for a hollow echo to answer my search.

  Ten minutes elapse in the darkness. Twenty. The night is absolute. There is barely even the faintest glimmer of moonlight creeping through the windows. Thirty minutes. As the time ticks past, my eyes are drawn ever more anxiously to the windows. I stare down the road to Sainte-Élisabeth, waiting for de la Hallière or Aïcha to return.

  Forty minutes.

  Nothing. No hollowness underfoot. No entrances that I can see. In my pocket is the crumpled photo of Anne-Lise. I try to remember her face. Kurmakin thought he forgot her more every day. His brain invented things to make up for the loss of the past. Aïcha’s body, stripped, the skin broken, her eyes closed in terror, glimmers in my mind’s eye.

  Fifty minutes. Even the tiniest capillaries in my chest seem to have swollen. The air is being squeezed out of me. My lungs are distended. I can’t get air into them.

  Nothing.

  Something that feels like tears is trying to well up behind my eyes but my whole body is desiccated. There is no liquid to expel.

  There are no more rooms to search. I climb back through the window, and as I jump down, the wet grass caresses my ankles. I brush up against the château’s walls as I stumble back around to the road in the dark.

  Then my feet strike wood. I can feel something like a large board underneath the grass. I drop to my knees and scrabble with my hands. Wooden planks are set in the earth. The wood is thick, damp. Metal bars run across from end to end. Cold, eternal iron. On the right-hand side, my fingers pull at a catch. The metal bars are bolts.