The Moment Before Drowning

by James Brydon

  Again and again, my eyes dart toward the indistinct curves of the road. I can almost hear the rumble of a car driving back from Sainte-Élisabeth but it is only the blood rushing through my head. The bones of my face throb and twitch. I pull back the bolts. The metal groans and shrieks in the night. I grope for a way to open the doors.

  My hands fix on a metal ring.

  The wood creaks and the door swings back. A hole gapes in the earth. The air coming out of it is damp and heavy. I can smell the faintest hint of blood on it. A mere trace that reminds me of the odor of the warren. The past lingers in the air. The little particles of degradation that have been stored down here are now seeping out, leaching into the night, settling in my mouth and on my tongue, laying their toxicity upon me.

  My throat contracts violently. My breath burns in gasps. I crawl closer to the opening. I try to stare down into the blackness. Freezing air drifts upward, dusted with poison that floats around my face and settles on my skin. I move closer to the hole. I don’t know why I don’t stand up. I don’t know why I am still on my hands and knees in the sodden grass. My hands are clutching the edge of the hole, but instead of pulling myself forward, I realize I am just clinging on; my hands are strangling the wooden frame, and splinters are needling my flesh and nestling in my fingers and I grip harder and harder, however sharply the wood tears into my skin I keep on holding tighter and tighter because it is the only thing to do.

  It is the only way I can stop myself from falling.

  * * *

  The next thing I am aware of is sitting in my car, my head thrown back, gasping for air. Where am I? The woods and the somber outline of the château loom in the night. A wave of panic runs through me. It feels like a razor tearing at my gut. My skin prickles. There isn’t enough air in the whole world.

  Where am I?

  Snatches come back to me. The hole in the ground. The fetid air from within floating up toward me. Air that was heavy with the sweat and blood of Aïcha. Perhaps with the terror of Anne-Lise’s last hours too.

  I can’t remember anything else. How many minutes were swallowed by blackness? What happened? I need to go back to the château and go down into the dungeon and find out what is hidden there.

  My legs won’t move. They seem soft, as if the muscles are wasted and the bones are decaying and can no longer support the flesh.

  I realize that I cannot go back. Even to check whether or not I shut the wooden door. Nothing can make me step down into that lightless pit. My body simply will not let me.

  I try to catch my breath and to regain some control. The vision out of my left eye is streaked with flashes of white light. I don’t think I can move my fingers. I understand that this is the end. That I can go no further toward finding Anne-Lise’s killer. There is no salvaging of the past. I no longer have the strength to investigate this case or any other. Tomorrow I will come before the judge. The stains of the past are inexpungible. The rankness of my memory will seep out as I talk and its poison will lie over everything like the chemical residue of a bomb.

  I sit in the quiet for a time that seems endless. I focus on my own breathing. I gaze into the toneless immensity of the night. Feeling comes slowly back into my prickling fingers. I manage to turn the key in the ignition and pull the choke. The car rolls down toward the road. I hold my foot halfway down on the brake in case my muscles fail me again. I leave the headlights turned off. The car slinks silently past the château. I can feel the lacerations left by the wooden frame of the dungeon where my hands grip the cold steering wheel.

  There is nothing more I can do. Tomorrow, before I have to drive to Paris, I will tell Lafourgue where he can find the pictures and the dungeon. I will leave him to arrest de la Hallière and bring to Sarah whatever peace she can find in the closure of the case.

  My hands shake. I clutch the wheel. With the headlights off, the road in front of me is almost invisible.

  Day Seven

  I fall asleep when it’s nearly dawn and all my dreams are recollections of leaving for Algeria. It’s summer, 1957. The Battle of Algiers is ending. In France, people talk about small handfuls of rebels and the need to maintain order. No one wants to say the word war. Rachel has just left me and I can still taste her skin on my tongue. Its mineral freshness makes me think of the sea-soaked breezes of my childhood in Sainte-Élisabeth. I can still feel her body beneath my hands. At night, my dreams are full of her tanned skin glowing in the dim light. I can still see the heat of her eyes smoldering in the shadows. I can still feel her in the bed next to me and I reach out for her, and only when my fingers close on nothingness and my arms remain empty do I awake and find myself alone.

  Rachel. My work excited her, at first. Perhaps she thought it was a struggle against violence and degradation. She would sit up in the small hours, her eyes staring sleeplessly, wanting to hear about the cases I was working on. Over time, she began to realize that there are no boundaries. You don’t fight depravity. It becomes your world. It molds you. It lives and breathes beside you, walks with you every day. It diffuses throughout the air you inhale. In the endless hours of police work, it becomes all that you know.

  She started to go to bed earlier. She didn’t wait to hear about my work. She couldn’t listen to it anymore. She couldn’t breathe the air that I existed in.

  One day she was gone. There was just stillness in the apartment, empty drawers and cupboards where her things had been, and the faint trace of her perfume on the pillow where she had lain.

  After she left, I accepted Lesage’s invitation to talk to him about Algeria. I didn’t understand why he needed someone like me. He sat behind his desk, his one good eye glittering savagely and his face tensed in fury. He told me that more and more of the work carried out in Algeria was actually police work, not military work. The fundamental tasks in the process of pacification were making arrests, carrying out searches, cultivating informers, collecting and interpreting intelligence, and questioning suspects. He insisted that the conflict would never be won by military force. The rebels were everywhere within the local populations. Firepower couldn’t eradicate them. Only targeted arrests could diminish their number. The main task of the service de renseignements would be to locate and nullify the rebels with surgical precision. He told me that this was the only way the conflict could end.

  Even so, Kurmakin had insisted, you must have known.

  I remember that, as I listened to Lesage, I could feel something like the tickle of an insect’s feet running down the back of my neck. It was gentle but insistent, something fluttering in the back of my brain and casting a shadow across my thoughts.

  Lesage put it to me like this: Most of the troops who were out in Algeria were conscripts. Kids. Eighteen, nineteen, twenty years old. They were doing military service. They weren’t career soldiers. They were civilians who’d put their youth on hold for two years to serve under the flag. And every time they thought they were going to be liberated, their service was extended. Another two months. And two more. They were frustrated and scared. Many had seen their comrades wounded or killed by guerrilla rebels. And these were the people who were asked to deal with the indigenous population. To arrest and interrogate. Lesage kept saying that only professional police work carried out by the army in Algeria could reverse the escalation of the conflict that was ripping the country to pieces. He said that some aspects of the work would be abhorrent. He said that our sacrifice would save countless lives and prevent unimaginable suffering in the future.

  “Do you understand?” His face was screwed up with stress.

  Do I understand? On the eleventh of August, under a glittering azure sky, I board the boat for Algiers. It’s heaving with young conscripts who are shoved down into the hold. They cling to their chairs while the boat pitches and lurches as we leave Marseille behind. Nobody sleeps. Waves batter the sides. As the boat rolls and tosses, nausea spreads among the men. Wine is served freely. It raises spirits for a while. Some talk loudly of “smashing the fellagha.”
Then the nausea closes in again in great surges. The conscripts clutch their chairs. Their faces are totally white.

  A feeling of joy breaks out when we reach Algiers. As the boat draws near, the view takes my breath away. The bay sparkles, bobbing with ships. Wide roads lined with trees stretch out toward the heart of the city. Around the port, the buildings are elegant and European in style. The harbor is thronged with life. I see people in both djellabas and Western clothes dotted between the palm trees. Among the crowds, there are hugs and fond words. People are welcomed home. Despite the brightness of the sun, and the beauty of the white city, I shiver. I can’t imagine a war raging behind such a perfect scene. It seems absurd to think of streets overseen by a military police force, boulevards littered with torn flesh and broken glass, each face a blank screen of enmity, and every piece of clothing camouflage for a bomb.

  We are transported by train from Algiers. The conscripts are bundled into cattle trucks without seats or even straw to lie on. I am invited to sit in a passenger carriage at the front of the train. I had imagined Algeria as arid, with dusty tracts of desert stretching into the infinite distance. Instead, what I see is what we have come to defend: vast machine-driven acres of fertile cropland, the earth overflowing with fecundity, divided up into enormous sectors of capital and parceled out among the colonists. Tobacco leaves sway gently in the warm breeze. The wind brushes the train and its touch is hot, dry, and bitter. A half-track with a machine gun mounted on it runs along the railway in front of the locomotive to protect the convoy.

  As the sun begins to fall from its zenith, toppling slowly toward the horizon and ushering in the chill of evening, I see a figure on horseback standing immobile amid the tobacco fields. Tall, sunburned, and corpulent, he holds a riding crop in his left hand, and his right rests next to a pistol holstered in his belt. A colonist. He nods as the train passes by, much as a medieval king might deign to acknowledge the troops he sent to battle or to slaughter for the glory of his empire. From out of one of the conscript trucks, someone shouts, “Salaud de colon!”

  The officer sitting next to me grins. “Sometimes the recruits turn up with Socialist convictions,” he says. “But as soon as the fels launch an ambush, they’ll be ready to massacre them sure enough. You’re going to The Farm, aren’t you?”

  “The Farm?”

  “Al-Mazra’a. That’s what it means in Arabic: The Farm. That’s what it was originally. And, in a sense, that’s what it has remained.”

  I nod.

  “It’s good work that you people do up there. War isn’t just about the front line. What you do saves lives.”

  I awake with these scenes running through my mind. I can almost taste the rough breeze wafting off the plantations, heavy with dust and pollen, burning my throat.

  My watch says six thirty. I need to be in Paris this afternoon for the hearing but I have enough time to find Lafourgue before I leave.

  I drink coffee and try to shave carefully, though my hand shakes as I clutch the razor. My skin looks dried-out and gray in the mirror. Purple lines ring my eyes. I look like a killer. Like that dead-eyed soldier in the local paper.

  I finish shaving. The coffee gives a jolt of color to my cheeks as it hits my veins. I stare for a second into the pits of my own eyes. They are blank and impenetrable. Nothing is reflected there. Those are the eyes I will bring before the magistrate. Dull. Drained.

  Too late.

  * * *

  Just before seven o’clock I am knocking on Lafourgue’s door, banging the wood insistently for several minutes before he finally appears in a frayed dressing gown, gray stubble bristling on his cheeks, his eyes glowering furiously. He stares at me, looking nonplussed as I try to tell him about my visit to the Château de la Hallière. I explain about the photographs of Aïcha and where they can be found. There is something rapacious in his stare.

  “It’s not just the evidence of violence. It’s also the setting. Inside. Hidden. The perfect place to keep someone a prisoner and then to deal with the body.”

  “Possibly.”

  “It’s more than possible. I found it. De la Hallière’s dungeon. The entrance is on the west side of the château hidden under grass and weeds. That’s where he took the pictures of Aïcha and I’m sure it’s where he kept Anne-Lise too.”

  I expect Lafourgue to look excited but he simply purses his lips. “It could be. What did you find inside? Was there anything that would connect Anne-Lise with de la Hallière?”

  “I didn’t have time to go in. I heard someone coming up the road. I had to leave. But you can go there today. Take a team to do a search and proper forensics. You’ll find something that places Anne-Lise there, I’m sure of it.”

  He looks at me with that same mixture of uncertainty and rapacity. Something tempts him, and he knows that something isn’t quite right. “Okay,” he says. “I’ll have a look. We’ll see what we can turn up. Do you want to come?”

  “I can’t.” It sounds like my voice is quavering but it might just be the throbbing pain in my head which, since yesterday, will not subside. “I have to drive to Paris today for the preliminary hearing.”

  Lafourgue smiles coldly. “Let’s hope they make the right decision.”

  As I drive away I see his curious, predatory gaze following the car out of the gates and onto the icy road.

  * * *

  The roads are quiet. The whole world seems sunken in the lull of winter. The tires slip and screech on the frozen tarmac. I arrive at the Palais de Justice early and sit in the car, watching people strolling past, cocooned in their everyday activities. I listen to the sound of my own breath. I watch it tracing lacy whorls in the air until it is time to go in.

  I haven’t arranged for legal representation and so I am assigned a duty lawyer, a palpably nervous redhead who escorts me to the examining magistrate’s office. The magistrate is seated behind a broad mahogany desk strewn with files. His hair falls in a thin veil over his forehead and his eyes focus intently on me. His face is pinched, the jut of the chin and hooked nose all sharp angles. There’s something scrupulous yet unforgiving in his stare.

  “Good afternoon, Capitaine le Garrec,” he says by way of welcome. “Do please come in and sit down.”

  Gallantin, dressed in full military regalia, is already seated next to me along with a lawyer looking somber in black robes.

  “I feel that it would be useful to have this confrontation,” the magistrate says, “while we are trying to establish what, indeed, are the key facts of this case. I understand from Capitaine Gallantin that he believes the death of Amira Khadra may simply be an unfortunate but unavoidable consequence of the pacification operation carried out by the army in Algeria. I shall attempt to ascertain whether or not this hypothesis holds water. Let us begin with the established facts of the matter. On the morning of September 13, 1959, you brought Amira’s body to a local police station, wrapped in tarpaulins . . .”

  The blood creeps toward my knees. I don’t look at Amira at all. I just see the swelling red stain spreading toward me. The filthiness of it is sickening. It crawls into my nostrils and seeps into my throat. I can’t move. There is nowhere to go. I just watch the stain extending outward, easing toward me, until it bathes my knees. I can feel the warmth of it soaking my trousers, staining my skin, but I can’t move.

  I can’t look up either. I can sense the monumental stillness of Amira’s body but I dare not look at her. I don’t know how much time passes before I slowly raise my eyes. The coat I wrapped her in is sodden with blood. Her neck is streaked. Gummy, spattered patterns run up her cheeks. Her eyes are open but are completely empty, just holes punched in her face. Another hole is punched in her temple. I try not to look at the place where the bullet has ripped away bone and brain and left her sprawled lifelessly on the ground. I reach out blindly and grope for her eyes. Her face is still warm beneath my fingers. I close her eyelids to wipe that terrible stare off her face forever, and her blood stains my skin and the heat of it burns
its way into my body.

  Eventually I manage to stand up. I pick Amira up in my arms and carry her to the hangar. Nobody stops me. Nobody says anything. She is obviously dead so there are no questions to be answered about where we are going. It isn’t strange to see someone carrying a body out of the warren at The Farm. I lay her down on the concrete floor of the old grain store and try to look at her face once more, not because I want to, not because I think I can bear to, but because it will be the last time when someone who knows her will ever look at her. After this, she will be evidence at best; at worst, she will be just one more dead Arab. Through her closed eyes and her blood-spattered skin and her shattered skull, I try to find the traces of who she was. I search out the determined line of her jaw, the eloquence of her mouth, the fine, high lines of her cheekbones, the dark pools of her eyes. I pull her onto a tarpaulin and the coat I covered her with sticks to her flesh and her skin still glows warm as if the life has not yet entirely evaporated from her and I close the tarpaulin around her body and she is gone forever and I pick up the bundle that was Amira and take it outside to one of the jeeps standing in the dust and the sun.

  “I’m just taking this one out to the sands,” I say to the orderly, and I try to grin at him although it feels as if my face has been anesthetized.

  “Bury it good and deep, sir. You don’t want to find dogs gnawing at the legs tomorrow.”

  I drive down the long alley out of al-Mazra’a and the sun beats down on the jeep and I realize that Amira is already decomposing. The warmth is beginning to rot her flesh, making it disintegrate, turning her into pure, decaying organic matter, wasting her back to the original nothingness. I press harder on the accelerator and the jeep bounces and jolts along the dry road.