by Amin Maalouf
“I don’t want to save my skin,” the hostage insists.
He tells his jailer to slip a hand into the inside pocket of his jacket, which contains his identity card, a “death notice” like the one he sent to me, and the most recent draft of his farewell letter, containing the passage: “By the time you find this message, I will already have done what I’ve decided to do … I don’t want any of you to feel responsible for my death, or for anyone to think that if they had done something earlier, they might have prevented it. I didn’t make this decision yesterday. It has been too late for far too long …”
The man takes the time to read and reread the letter, his lips moving from time to time. Then says, in disbelief:
“You were heading home … to kill yourself, is that it?”
Albert nods.
“And we came along and stopped you?”
Albert nods again.
A brief silence. Then the man starts to laugh uncontrollably, and after a few seconds the hostage, though still bound and blindfolded, throws his head back and laughs too.
It is the jailer who first manages to recover his composure and in a tone that is curious but not hostile asks:
“Why?”
This man who, a moment earlier, was threatening to kill the hostage without a second thought now seems shaken by the idea that this well-dressed young man who seems of sound mind was preparing to take his own life.
“Why?”
Albert was never one for confidences. And certainly not for confiding in a perfect stranger. But that day, perhaps because at the point when he was kidnapped he had been mulling over the text of his farewell letter; perhaps because, having made his preparations, set the scene, and set in motion an infallible mechanism, control of his destiny had suddenly been wrenched from him, and he felt unsettled; perhaps because the person asking the question was a despondent jailer, and it would be an epilogue appropriate to the absurdity of life here on earth—he began to talk.
Oh, it was not a torrent of words, nor a confession. Indeed, Albert was incapable of using words to illuminate the murky waves that had carried him to the brink of suicide; all he told his improbable confessor were the obvious things people say in such circumstances, that life had lost all meaning, that he felt cut off from the world, that he felt suffocated by the war raging all around … But the man would not give up. Adopting a stern voice and placing his hands on the shoulders of the hostage—though with no intention of untying his bonds or removing his blindfold—he began to lecture him, reeling off the hackneyed phrases of grief-stricken fathers.
“Think about your parents, they fed you, they watched you grow up, they dreamed of seeing you graduate, dreamed of seeing you married! Now here you are, a handsome young man, and instead of finding a pretty girlfriend, you’re thinking about ending it all? What a shame! What a waste! What an abomination! When you have your whole life ahead of you!”
“My whole life ahead of me, huh?”
Albert’s tone was only faintly ironic, but the theatrical flailing of his bound limbs and blindfolded head was enough for the two of them—first his kidnapper, then himself—to burst into hysterical laughter.
-
2
It was not uncommon at that time for the families of a kidnap victim to react by capturing one or more members assumed to belong to the opposing camp in order to use them as bargaining chips.
But this was not the most usual practice in the case of a kidnapping. Generally, if a man did not come home and it was believed that he had been kidnapped, his family would turn to some local dignitary who, in turn, would get in touch with a mediator. The mediator would seek to find out the identity of the kidnappers, their motives, their demands, and who was most likely to make them see reason; he would confirm that the hostage was alive and well treated, then set about negotiating his release. Such mediators, invariably voluntary, were generally impartial and were very effective, if not called upon too late.
From a distance, all the kidnappings could seem similar; on close inspection, to the trained eye, no two were identical. Sometimes—though this was rare—the motive was financial: a wealthy individual was abducted and the family was forced to pay a ransom. Financially motivated crimes were commonly called “sordid,” a somewhat perverse epithet since it seems to suggest that the other crimes had a certain nobility. So, the massacre of innocents for political or religious reasons would not be sordid since there was no attempt to extort money? So, kidnapping a man with the intention of torturing him, murdering him, and dumping his body in the street could not be considered sordid if the motivation was simply to intimidate or to escalate violence? Surely such tacit complicity is inexcusable and degrading? Any man who abducts, tortures, and humiliates another is scum, whether he is a common criminal, a militant, an officer of the law, or a political leader.
However, the abduction of our friend Albert was not motivated by political cynicism, it seemed, nor by fanaticism, nor by money.
The man holding Albert hostage in his workshop was not a conventional kidnapper. In peacetime, it was unlikely he would ever have committed a crime; in fact, he might have been a model citizen. He was a garage mechanic who had spent his life working all hours, happy to get his hands dirty, dreaming that one day his son might get a degree in engineering. A dream that had come true three years earlier. To celebrate his graduation, he had given his high-flying son a flashy brand-new car so he could drive it across the city and proudly park it outside the offices of the company that had recruited him; the only cars he had ever owned were those he had patched up himself.
The son’s beautiful car had been found abandoned one morning in December, on a street close to where Albert lived. Before the kidnappers could be identified, militiamen belonging to the mechanic’s extended family staged an abduction in the neighbourhood in question, grabbing the first pedestrian they found. According to the rules of this wretched game, Albert’s family and friends should have contacted a mediator to ensure that the incident ended with an exchange and both hostages could be returned to their families.
But this time, the hostage had no family, and precious few friends. Nor did those friends have any reason to be aware of what was happening. Why would they suspect a kidnapping when they had written proof that Albert had decided to take his own life?
It was not until three weeks after the disappearance of their friend that Tania and Mourad, puzzled that no remains had yet been found, got in touch with a potential mediator—a former member of parliament. They provided the man with the name and a description of their friend, and the last date on which he had been seen.
Two days later, I picked up the phone in my Paris apartment and heard the words:
“He’s alive.”
Mourad said it without a glimmer of joy in his voice, not at all the way I might have expected to hear such astonishing news. I did not feel that I could show any sign of relief, and so, warily, hoping simply to trigger the next sentence, I said:
“But …?”
“But he’s being held captive by a garage mechanic whose son has been kidnapped.”
“For a hostage exchange?”
“That’s right. Except that his son is dead.”
“God in heaven!”
“Right now, the father still thinks his son might be alive. He’s still hoping for an exchange.”
A long silence on both ends of the line, and protracted sighs as Mourad and I imagined how the man would react if he were to learn the truth.
After a moment, I stated the obvious:
“We need our friend to be released before that.”
“Negotiations are under way. We just have to hope they’re concluded in time.”
Again, a vast expanse of silence.
“So, how come you and I know that the son is dead if his father doesn’t?”
“I assume he’s heard contradictor
y rumours in recent days,” Mourad said, “and he’s clinging to the idea that his son is alive and will come back to him. I hope the mediators know what they’re doing. If not, when he does find out the truth, he’ll go berserk and he’ll take it out on his hostage.”
“Poor Albert! He decides to kill himself, discreetly, cleanly, with no fuss and with as little pain as possible. Instead, he gets himself kidnapped and risks being tortured, mutilated, and having his body dumped on a rubbish tip. His own death has been stolen from him.”
A pause. Then I went on:
“When I think that, of all our old friends, Albert was the only one who never took an interest in this war.”
Mourad agreed:
“When I went into his apartment, I didn’t find a single newspaper, new or old. Nothing but science-fiction books, walls and walls of them, carefully arranged in alphabetical order. And display cabinets full of music boxes. Did you know he collected them?”
“Yes, he showed them to me one day. He used to buy them in junk shops, repaint them, and repair the mechanism. He only had to see one to know the period it was made and who had made it.”
“There are dozens of them. Some of them must be worth a fortune, if he wanted to sell them.”
“That was never his intention. Besides, who would he have sold them to? Who but him would have thought of buying music boxes in the middle of a war?”
We laughed. Then we stopped laughing. Mourad felt guilty.
“To think I threw him out of my house! I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s like I pushed him over the edge. I feel so angry with myself.”
“Me too, I’m angry with myself for leaving without worrying about the people who stayed behind,” I said in an attempt to temper his guilt.
“If he comes through this alive, I’m going to encourage him to leave too. He has no place in this country …”
“What about you, Mourad? Do you still think there’s really a place for you there?”
“There’s no place for me elsewhere,” he said in a tone that put an end to the conversation.
Another silence. Then he asked:
“Wasn’t it you who once said to me: ‘Even if you don’t take an interest in politics, politics takes an interest in you’?”
“It’s not my line, I must have read it somewhere. I don’t remember who wrote it …”
When it came to quotations, I had always taken provenance very seriously. My old friend knew this and would often amuse himself by tossing me a quote so I would chase after it, like a greyhound after a rabbit: “I don’t suppose you know who said …” In those days, there were no prodigious “search engines” that could give you the answer in the blink of an eye. I had no choice but to search and search, particularly in the countless dictionaries of quotations that occupied—and still occupy—several shelves in my bookcase. I would eventually find an answer, but it was rarely conclusive. As a general rule, very few famous quotes were said by the people to whom they’re attributed. Julius Caesar never said “Et tu, Brute?”; Henri IV never said “Paris is well worth a mass!”—though he obviously agreed with the sentiment; and his grandson Louis XIV never said “L’État, c’est moi!”
As to the quote Mourad had just mentioned, I quickly discovered that the original was phrased: “Be on your guard: if you do not take an interest in politics, politics takes an interest in you.” There was some dispute as to the source, and it was alternately attributed to Pierre Paul Royer-Collard and Abbé Sieyès, both writing during the French Revolution.
The original phrasing is more pertinent than the version Mourad remembered. It says, “If you do not take an interest in politics,” not “Even if …” In other words, it is not simply a banal observation that politics affects everyone, even those who take no interest in it; what the writer is saying is that political machinations particularly affect those who take no interest in them.
It’s absolutely true! Albert was not kidnapped despite the fact that he took no interest in this bloody war, but because he took no interest. A paradox? Only superficially.
When there was a settling of scores between two militias, two districts, two communities, militants on all sides went to ground. Those who had taken part in battles or massacres rarely ventured outside “their” zone unless there was a chance that it might be invaded, when they fled and hid out elsewhere.
Who did not feel the need to run away or to hide? Who went on crossing the demarcation lines between the zones? Who refused to leave neighbourhoods or villages when there was an invasion of “others”? Only those who had nothing to reproach themselves for, those who had taken part in no battles, no kidnapping, no massacre. And it was these innocents who ended up bearing the brunt.
Yes, it was from among the vast flock of apolitical sheep that the Minotaurs of the civil war chose their prey. The abduction of Albert was not the result of an unfortunate combination of circumstances, it was the tragicomic demonstration of a recognized paradox.
There followed painful weeks of negotiations. Thanks to Mourad’s daily briefings, I managed to follow the discussion closely.
“We’ve reached an impasse,” he told me one day. “I don’t dare go any farther for fear of triggering a disaster.”
Then he explained his dilemma:
“The kidnapper now knows for certain that his son is not coming back. He is still saying that he intends to execute our friend, but he hasn’t done so, and I feel that the more time passes, the more difficult he will find it to kill him in cold blood. He keeps him tied up, but he hasn’t tortured him and he’s not starving him. Some people have suggested that I offer to pay a ransom. I haven’t done it. It’s possible I might at some point, but right now I don’t think it’s the right solution. I’m afraid the kidnapper might react badly. The mediator gave me a phone number for the poor man. I call him every two or three days and get him talking, I listen patiently, I offer sympathy and consideration. I’ve established a relationship of trust, one that I don’t want to ruin with some blunder. But we can’t take the risk of just leaving Albert indefinitely at the mercy of this man and his family. I feel as though I’m trapped between two cliffs: I can’t go forward, I can’t go back. How much longer can this carry on? I have no idea.”
While I am racking my brain for a solution, Mourad highlights a second problem, even thornier than the first.
“And to be completely honest, there’s something else that’s been bothering me. I can talk to you about it because you must feel the same way. This whole kidnapping thing hasn’t made me forget the attempted suicide. Given the way he is, I feel Albert’s life will be at greater risk if he’s released than if he stays in captivity.
“If this were anyone else, my only thought would be to get them released and bring them safely home. With Albert, I’m not so sure. I can’t stop thinking about the logical consequence: we bring him home and the following day he is found dead in his bed with a new farewell letter on the table.”
Exhausted by this effort of memory, Adam felt the need for a break. To rest his head and his eyes, and to marshal his thoughts.
He had been working without interruption since morning and was no longer in any fit state to write. But he was so engulfed in his memories that he was incapable of stopping. Eventually, he went and lay on the bed, promising himself he would get up in five minutes.
The sun was low, but since his room faced the sea and therefore the sunset, it was still bathed in a rosy glow that was soft yet intense. He felt the desire to let sleep creep over him, and he no longer had the strength to resist.
He was woken several hours later by a friendly hand laid gently on his shoulder, his face, his forehead. When he opened his eyes, he noticed it was night.
“Pure spirit, I am your mortal conscience,” said the cheerful voice of Sémiramis.
He smiled and closed his eyes again.
“Dinner is ready,” she
said.
“No, thanks, I’m too tired; I think I’ll just go back to sleep.”
But the visitor was not moved to pity.
“No, Adam. You didn’t have lunch, you’ve spent the whole day writing; I’m not having you get sick under my roof. You’re already dressed, so just get up, give yourself a quick wash, and come downstairs.”
There was clearly no point in arguing.
“Very well, my chatelaine, I shall be right there. Give me ten minutes.”
If the title her dozing friend had just conferred upon her made her smile, it did nothing to lessen her determination. She went out and closed the door, but not before turning on all the lights.
-
3
The table had already been laid, and the dishes covered with upturned plates to stop them from getting cold.
Still not entirely awake, Adam ate little and talked even less. After several long minutes, he felt obliged to say:
“I’ve never been very talkative, but tonight it verges on rudeness … I’m sorry. My only excuse is that the surroundings in which I’ve found myself these past two days are conducive to concentration. Even when I stop writing on the page, I’m still writing in my head.”
“The silence, the mountain, the light, the sea on the horizon, the air purified by umbrella pines …”
“… and the feeling of being the prisoner of some benevolent deity.”
She laid her hand on his.
“You can’t imagine how happy it makes me to hear you say that.”
“That I feel like a prisoner?”
“Even that! I’ve done everything I can to make this an oasis of serenity and cool waters, and you’ve just told me I succeeded.”
“Except that instead of cool water, we have champagne.”
“Champagne is my idea of cool water.”
The raised their glasses, touched the rims, and drained them. No sooner had they set them down than the waiter came and refilled them. Sémiramis glanced at her watch.