Sarab

by Raja Alem

  Except for the moment when his heightened senses caught the sound of a twig breaking, a faint tick almost beyond hearing, and hope of survival re-awoke in Raphael. He wheeled around impatiently, only to find his body crushed onto a giant root that rose from the earth like a platform. He had been thrown so he was kneeling face downward, like a sacrificial offering to the demon now sucking his body, pinned down and open for desecration. His trousers were torn away, his guts congealed when claws scoured them, countless claws were plunging into his flesh; against all logic, he was certain they belonged to the demons of this forest, given physical form in order to punish him, and at the same time he heard wails breaking out all around like newborn babies. Faintly, a memory came back of their trainer telling them about Malagasy children born on inauspicious dates, who were left on anthills to be eaten alive. He could feel the soft flesh in his belly being gnawed by the fangs of a ruthless ant. However much he struggled, he couldn’t succeed in freeing his body. It was pinned down for what seemed like an eternity while dry stalks burrowed into his guts and lecherous spears tore his anus mercilessly, answering his deeply rooted need to destroy his being and self beyond hope of repair, until the pain brought him to a climax that burst his heart and soul like a blister.

  Afterward, he was left alone. A trail of blood trickled behind him as he walked, and not an insect, beast, or shadow dared to follow him. The entire forest was revolted by the rot of his bowels that had been infected by a demon’s sperm.

  The smell of semen guided him while he was at the summit of pain, beyond pain. He left his weapons behind, along with the state-of-the-art survival kit they had armed him with when they dropped him into this hell. Half-naked, he began to grope his way forward. He didn’t bother with concealment; his feverish wound gave him additional senses that helped him decipher the darkness.

  At some point, an enormous apparition appeared in front of him, layers of pitch-black wrinkles flowing over gleaming white bones. This skeleton was the first light to appear on his path; its burning eyes were like live coals, illuminating slack lips drawn like a short veil over long teeth.

  The vision beckoned to Raphael, but its feet gave Raphael cause for doubt; they pointed backward. Raphael wanted to turn and run away but the giant clothed with wrinkles wouldn’t let him retreat. It pointed, indicating that Raphael should cross the sea of crystal blades spreading out before him, sharp blades nature had formed so close together there was no way of passing between them and no way of walking over them. Raphael wanted to escape, but wherever he turned the wrinkled giant was there, guiding him deeper and deeper. Raphael followed, trampling the crystal knives in a state of numbness. He didn’t care whether the apparition was leading him to his destruction. He followed automatically, as if he were following an instinct, until the vision brought him to the entrance of a huge cavern, a pit of nothingness like the depths of his soul at that moment, and invited him to enter. At once he was swept away into its flooded and endless tunnels, and although he couldn’t see anything, he was sure that the walls of this cave were lined with corpses. A voice in his head affirmed that it was a mass grave left over from some colonial war or other, and he remembered his trainer’s warnings of the taboos of the Malagasy. He had said, “Never point your finger at a grave, or that finger will fall off.” It was a ridiculous superstition, but nevertheless Raphael was careful to keep his fist closed and avoided pointing at the graves arrayed close together around him. He wondered whether he had been forced into participating in famadihana, the ritual of bone-turning, when the Malagasy dug up the bodies of their dead relatives and wrapped them in new shrouds to keep them happy. He was lightheaded at this moment of nonexistence, and wondered whether he should re-shroud his father; his mother deserved no such satisfaction.

  Raphael realized he was surrounded by skeletons, white lined with black, crowned with skulls leaning at contemplative angles as they watched his passage and illuminated the cavern with their bones. As soon as Raphael exchanged a glance with them, their eye sockets began to resemble his father’s eyes, gouged out by humiliation, and they sucked him in.

  It was a moonlit night when he was launched back into life like a missile, and he found himself floating on the Indian Ocean. The night was calm and his feverish body, flayed and wounded, was gathered up by its cool touch. Tranquility eased his passage from the earth’s crushing bowels to its surface, made resplendent by the reflections of the stars. He abandoned his body to the salty waves and the wind, realizing that he had found his way out of the forest at last.

  When he was reunited with his division, he resisted all attempts to submit him to treatment. In silence, he endured fever, bowel rot, and the suspicion that it was his comrades who had raped him. They had overpowered him and bullied him since he joined the forces, seeing something twisted in him: the fragility created by his mother. It was a half-invitation to violation, and they had responded to that invitation, making sure to cure him of that fragility by their actions. But Raphael, newly formed by Madagascar, had severed every link with his past and his human weakness, aware that wherever he went, those forests and its demons would be carried living in his belly.

  Afterward, he never allowed a single ray of sunlight to pierce the rot inside him and heal it.

  Fury, inconducive to healing, caused him to excel at his training in extermination and turned him into something exceptional. One look at him no longer revealed a mortal man, but death itself.

  Now this young, graceful rebel was praying and kneeling in front of him. It was his own past, violated body made manifest, and yet, like a mirror, it reflected his confusion about his true sexuality and the mask of brutality that protected his fragility. The mask had fallen now, that mask of a GIGN killing machine, and out of the deeps, like a radiant bubble of humanity, the delicate adolescent he had buried in the caverns of Madagascar had emerged. He didn’t know why, but he found himself ensnared in feelings of tenderness toward Sayfullah; or rather, he had fallen victim to the need to protect him.

  Suddenly, Raphael was struck by the insight that he had once again succumbed to the idea of destroying himself. He realized that in surrendering to captivity without seriously attempting to escape, in allowing this rebel to bewitch him, he had betrayed the military training that had turned him into a machine driven by commands without reference to his own logic. He wondered whether, by disobeying commands, he had committed the suicide he had postponed for so long.

  He sat there, observing the transformation he had submitted to. It was not merely a psychological transformation; even his muscles seemed to be contracting in his body’s attempt to regain the grace he had lost when he joined the army. Was this the effect of the gas? Or had the jinn in this rebel’s body cast their nets over him and put a spell on him?

  Sayfullah remained still for a long time, his forehead touching the ground, his heart burning to repeat his prayer, while he trembled from the unbearable coldness in his soul.

  “O Guide, O Path, guide me with a miracle, or help me to kill this infidel and surrender myself to the fire of my pursuers with a heart of stone.”

  Finally Sayfullah finished his prayers. He turned to the rearrangement of the room. Frozen in flight on the walls, the little girl watched him while he began to clear the empty biscuit boxes and line them up neatly against the wall. As an ominous darkness fell on the room, Sayfullah seemed hypnotized, staring blankly ahead while his hand twisted a napkin. He began to gather up the dolls, trying not to touch them with his bare hands or look directly into their bright blue eyes. A gasp ran around the walls when he cut off the first head and threw it into the nearest box. A second head followed, and a third, and for a long while he was absorbed in decapitating the hypnotic dolls. He filled three boxes to the brim with heads, but the imprisoned blue eyes bored through the boxes to witness the rest of the slaughter. When he had finished, Sayfullah piled the headless bodies in a corner and covered them with a red blanket. Then, full of revulsion, he began to rip the cotton dolls apart, one
after another, emptying their cotton stuffing and filling the place with white dust as he threw their empty fabric skins and withered faces into the bin.

  The girl on the walls quivered when he turned to face her. He took up a knife and began to scrape her off the walls; his violent blows left deep wounds on her joyfully flying feet, but he only succeeded in scraping the surface layer of color off her neck and face, which were too high for him to reach. A long way from the knife, the girl closest to the ceiling watched the disfigurement befalling her feet and her reflections nearer the ground in terror. But however much he scraped and stabbed, specters of the girl remained, perfectly whole and engrossed in the ecstasy of her unrestrained flight over the wall; she was wounded but still sparkling with joy, and free.

  Raphael felt his demons reflected in these slaughtered dolls, but he resisted the temptation to fuel his disgust at the rebel who had been occupied with breathing life into the powerless dolls and turning them into an enemy army.

  Mocking Sayfullah was Raphael’s only way of reclaiming what he was: an officer of exceptional ability, master of the destinies of individuals and countries, capable of exterminating every living thing on the face of the earth.

  Sayfullah felt Raphael’s eyes on him. He stopped abruptly and turned a sullen face toward the officer. “Get ready to join them in Hell.”

  “You’re hunting a girl on a wall? God, you’re a nothing.” He wanted that word to strike like a lightning bolt and reduce his enemy to ash. “Nothing.”

  But when no lightning bolt hit the room and his enemy was still standing, Raphael couldn’t bring himself to continue the abuse.

  “You’re nothing but a hostage to demons of your own invention, and the weapon you hold is tempting you to play God.”

  Sayfullah closed his ears in the face of this blasphemy, murmuring, “Astaghfir Allah, astaghfir Allah, may God forgive me . . .”

  Day Four

  The sound that flared up in the silence caused Sayfullah to rush out of the bathroom, only to be blinded by the television screen. Having profited from his deep sleep, Raphael had succeeded in reaching a foot to the television and switching it on.

  “This group, composed of the enemies of God and the corrupt of the earth, are sentenced to . . .”

  The voice of the broadcaster quavered, heralding doom. Sayfullah found himself suddenly facing a huge screen filled with the faces of his comrades. He stood there, paralyzed by the shock of seeing the people with whom he had lived for over a year, with whom he had shared food and fear during the siege. Surely every country from east to west was frozen in front of their television screens, following the investigation? The television continued to show and reshow lengthy clips of the surrendered rebels as they confessed their crimes and claimed the ultimate punishment as their due. Their eyes were vacant, staring directly into the next world, and the death sentence hovered over their matted heads as they confessed in the hope of avoiding further torture. Even their faith in Paradise had been shaken, but as they had no choice but to cling to that promise, they were keen to leave this life. Hours of interrogation and torture had wrung their bodies and souls dry, and words like justice, equality, and faith had turned to ashes in dry throats clogged with blood. To onlookers, they seemed to have fallen into a trap, having utterly lost faith in everything.

  Sayfullah trembled, wresting himself away from the horror of this shock. He smashed the television screen with his rifle. “Satan’s eye! It’s cursed Satan’s eye!” he spat, aiming a blow of the rifle butt at Raphael’s head. Blood poured from the wound in the GIGN officer’s temple, and he released a string of curses.

  “You idiot, they’re hunting you down while you hide here like a blind bat pretending that the siege has ended and you’re a heroic survivor.” Drained, Sayfullah dragged himself to the darkest corner of the room, and a wary silence settled over the two men. Time passed slowly while Sayfullah remained in his place, barely breathing, looking at nothing. His face was a dead man’s, mirroring the devastation on the faces that had appeared on the television screen. He didn’t know whether he fell asleep or whether time simply dropped him and he sank beneath the city’s notice, but when he got up, the blood on Raphael’s temple had congealed and turned black. Mechanically, Sayfullah moved to the kitchen and began to prepare porridge, mixed with the bodies of his comrades. A thought stuck to his skull: they had all gone to Heaven and left the flimsiness of the body to worms like him. He kept stirring and swallowing feverishly, as if the scene on the television were just a nightmare that had now vanished from his mind.

  “Listen, we can’t keep torturing each other like this,” Raphael said. “We’re at a dead end, and we should find a way of settling this situation. I have a deal for you . . . Face facts: you’re a captive here just like me . . .” Sayfullah’s twitching jaw indicated to Raphael that he was suffering from overstrained nerves, and he went on: “Believe me, we can leave this house, and each of us can go our own way. We don’t have to meet the same fate your friends did; no one has any way of knowing your role there, or even that you exist. I promise you, I’ll forget I ever met you.”

  Sayfullah broke into laughter, which infuriated Raphael. “You laugh like a woman,” he exclaimed in amazement, staring hungrily at the slender figure in front of him, its slim hips threatening to shatter under the pressure of that appetizingly round backside. Something in the air around them shifted at that moment, a tacit but dangerous change. Sayfullah blushed, and he moved outside the range of Raphael’s disconcerting stare.

  “Wait! Think about it. I can guarantee your safety . . .”

  Like a whirlwind, Sayfullah hurtled back into the room, grabbed Raphael’s throat, and began to squeeze. He hissed, “Infidel, you and your like worship the vain life of this earth, because it’s your only chance. You will all fall into Hell as soon as you die as a punishment for the sin of worshiping life.”

  Raphael was shocked to find himself aroused by Sayfullah’s hands around his throat; despite the pain, he felt a pleasurable numbness trickling down his spine, and he was blinded by an inexplicable sadistic thrill at this violent connection with his enemy.

  Sayfullah leaped away from the muscled neck, stung by the perfection of that naked body. He moved away, disconcerted and self-conscious, rebuking himself for having undressed the man. But there was no longer any way of covering up the enemy, neither this Frenchman nor the enemy inside himself.

  “Someone like you can’t guarantee anything to someone like me. I am a jihadi—we left our homes and our families and promised to meet them again only in Paradise. There is no life for us on your vain earth.”

  Raphael resisted the desire to laugh out loud at this idiot who was determined to ignore the struggle inside him and like a tape player kept repeating that Paradise was reserved for him and his comrades. The sardonic smile on his face provoked Sayfullah, and he snarled, “Until now, I haven’t done anything to fulfill the pledge of eternal life in Heaven, but you were sent to me as a miracle. Either I use you as a hostage to negotiate for the release of my comrades in prison or, if that fails . . .” His voice betrayed him. His confused mind struggled to know what to do with his hostage. “If I kill an enemy like you, God will give me a palace in Heaven.”

  “Fine. Let’s get it over with. Shoot me and get your throne in Heaven. Because I won’t help you get what you want on earth. You can’t exchange me for anything. And soon you’ll be facing some very angry people all by yourself. As you saw on the television, there won’t be an easy death in store for you at their hands. You’ll endure horrific torture.”

  Somehow his words succeeded in shaking Sayfullah’s mask.

  “Whoever fights in the path of God will never be alone. God is with me. As for what you think, I’m not so naive that I’ll end your torment so easily. You have no hope of reaching Heaven—not in this life, and not in the next.”

  “Ah, so now you’re Heaven’s doorman, and my word, what an egotistical doorman you are! Tell me: who are the lucky o
nes on your list worthy of Heaven?” Raphael greatly enjoyed quarreling with Sayfullah. “Look out, boy; maybe I deserve to be in Heaven more than any of you. Consider that I’ve converted to Islam, and pronounced the Shahada—‘I testify that there is no God but God and Muhammad is His prophet’—and I was allowed to enter the Grand Mosque. You, on the other hand, had to skulk inside with your insurgent friends.” Raphael was maneuvering to crumple Sayfullah’s mask; he considered this as important as killing him.

  “Speaking Arabic and pronouncing the Shahada don’t make you a real Muslim. My ancestors are the Ikhwan. They helped found this country, and didn’t hesitate to go to war with it when it established diplomatic relations with the foreigners and allowed them to come to our country.” Sayfullah was shocked to hear himself automatically repeating Mujan’s sermons, which had bored into his memory.

  “What does a boy like you know about international politics? Your ruler was building a state while Mujan was brainwashing ignorant boys like you in that godforsaken desert camp.” Sayfullah was mortified and Raphael pressed on: “What’s so shameful in dealing with other nations? To my knowledge, the Prophet said, ‘Seek knowledge, even in China.’ He didn’t say, ‘Boycott the Chinese and kill them.’”

  Sayfullah closed his ears against this logic, which threatened to disrupt the beliefs he had been living out for months. But the discussion forged a new, human space between the two men; it seemed to have stripped them of their mechanical impulse to kill and left them as mere humans, faced with each other and their own weakness and limitations before all else.

  “You think you are the authority that can grant a certificate of faith? Who decides who is the believer and who the infidel?” Raphael exploited Sayfullah’s silence and went on: “Look, I spent time in North Africa on a mission for the forces. I learned Arabic and the fundamentals of Islam, and the most important thing I learned was that faith is in the heart, and only God knows the truth of it. What makes you think you know what’s in my heart? But still you put me on trial and pass a death sentence on me?”