Abduction (10 page)

Shehera… My little Shehera…

I shut my eyelids, then opened them again immediately: I still had the
impossible
image of that bit of finger lying in a pool of blood on the floor in my mind's unseeing eye.

In an additional blow to my reason, I remembered the delight that had filled my soul when, so few years ago, I would bend over my daughter's cot and play with her little fingers in mine.

Once more, I felt my fear spreading like an awful disease through every organ in my body.

“H
ow do Arabs kill?”

The words had slipped out, but I could hardly believe they were mine. I put my hand to my mouth as if the words might have left a wound. I didn't move, unable to tear myself away from the flimsy cover of the bushes. An insect dropped off a branch above me onto my jacket. It immediately took to crawling laboriously up the sleeve. I contemplated its uncomfortable progress across the checked fabric in a sort of waking unconsciousness.

“You are going to kill someone.”

My mouth had once more pronounced these words without asking my leave. I moaned in the horrified certainty that the kidnapper had just cast me into hell. I dreamed: “And this time, it's
real
hell, not an image or a turn of phrase.”

In stupefied admiration, I also noted: God really is economical in his means. No need for any ridiculous special effects or afterlife to create a place for destroying souls at a knockdown price.

I wanted to call for help. And did nothing –
Shehera's little fingers.

“Meriem, yes, phone Meriem…”

“Then what? What are you going to tell her?”

That the madman has cut off one of our daughter's fingers and that I have to murder someone before dawn?

I pulled a handkerchief out of my pocket and wiped my face; there was a little blood on the material from the scratches. I emerged from the bushes, scaring a passer-by. The person looked at me with accusing eyes before walking on. I made for the car park. The man thought I was following him and speeded up. A thought crossed my mind, sharp as an arrow:
If I killed you, someone I don't know, perhaps my daughter's suffering would be over, all it would take…

“…would be for me to… what – strangle you, stab you, drown you?… And where would I throw your corpse, you bastard?”

The man had disappeared out of sight. Maybe he'd started running just around the corner? I laughed. And I shuddered because I'd laughed.

I flexed the muscles of my soul – because soon I would have to make a decision.

And I realised that I loved my daughter too much to refuse the awful proposition.

A guardian angel inside me knelt down and silently implored me:
You cannot even consider killing a human being, Aziz! If you destroy a human being in cold blood, you leave the community of honourable men. Every stranger is like you: he has flesh as fragile as yours, an arsehole that hurts him when he is constipated and a woolly-minded head on his torso that's as full of hopes and wild ideas as your own. No, you have no right to, Aziz…

Wait, listen to me
, it insisted – and its supplications were now punctuated by tears –
think of your wife… Meriem… could you look her in the eye when you've murdered some poor guy who's as attached to his wretched life as you are to yours?

I stood rooted to the spot in the middle of the road, hardly breathing. The mention of Meriem was heartrending, but I did not react. Staring at a landscape whose every detail was indistinguishable to me, I ‘listened' to myself. The terror-stricken voice tried a different tack.

What about Shehera… could you bear her to despise you…

“You're wrong, you old fogey!” I replied, chilled by self-contempt. “That's exactly the wrong argument. You say nothing about my child's delicate body and her right to live longer than us, her parents. If I do not kill, Shehera will be killed. And what will I do with my daughter's respect if some madman slices her up?”

I went back into the bushes, this time to urinate. My vanquished organism must have thought it was better to piss than to cry. While my kidneys emptied themselves of their impure water, my head filled with filth: I had just aged by several decades and the old man who had taken my place had decided to capitulate to the demon on the telephone.

But
whom
should I kill? And
how
should I kill?

I realised that the second question was the more difficult one in the short term. If all I'd had to do was press a button to eliminate an unknown person and recover my daughter, I don't think I would have hesitated. But grappling with someone who would give me a first unsuspecting glance before screaming in fear when he discovered my true intentions; who would defend himself with every last drop of strength to stay alive, blood spreading, intestines perhaps voiding themselves of their shit – that was something else.

Of course I had seen a terrorist slit a man's throat without it seeming to affect him in the slightest. That gesture to snatch life away had been so extraordinarily simple: a simple back-and-forth of the blade across a neck that didn't expect it. But by his complete indifference the bearded killer's had seemed to belong to a different species.

Feeling nauseous, I headed towards my car. I don't know why, but I felt I had to make a detour via the bonobos' shelter. Miraculously, there were no visitors hanging around nearby – and, most importantly, no little tie-wearing runts from the ministry. For the first time since the phone call, I thought back to the incident with my boss and his guests. It felt as if it had happened ever so long ago, back in prehistoric times, and that the foreseeable consequences (a reprimand, suspension, maybe even sacking) had nothing more to do with me, for I had left the human race.

Two males were fighting over a branch without any real conviction. A female was scratching her equally morose neighbour while chewing on a piece of fruit. The others were warming themselves in the weak morning sunlight. I looked in vain for Lucy and Lucette. I was almost overwhelmed by a sob when I realised that I was standing there in front of some monkeys, hoping – yes, indeed! – for one final sign of humanity before I plunged into ignominy.

I shrugged my shoulders. I guessed, however, that I would have given up everything – not least the ridiculous slop filling my skull – to change places not with the bonobos (they seemed to me to be too perspicacious to be still unaware of the wretchedness of their captivity), but with even the stupidest animal in all creation, the earthworm for example, and never have to worry again about trading one life for another.

From afar I saw Lounes, the vet, approaching – the mere sight of my friend in a previous life had become unbearable to me. Although he waved energetically at me, I drove off before he could reach me. I shot out onto the slip-road leading to the motorway.

It was only ten in the morning. It was already past ten in the morning.

The crowded and untidy stream of vehicles on the sloping carriageway looked like a horde of animals fleeing from a raging fire. I had never felt more alone or more desperate. I had never felt this abandoned, other than in a nightmare that had haunted me when the first wave of assassinations of intellectuals began; I writhed in slow and painful agony surrounded by smiling people who pretended not to hear my calls for help. But I quickly decided that this comparison was inappropriate; the terror then was as nothing compared to the merciless humiliation and the soiling of my deepest self and, by contagion, of the entire universe that I felt as my brain started to scratch around for a way to satisfy the abductor's demands.

I realised that the word
soul
kept cropping up in my inner ramblings. What was the meaning of the word
soul
inside my skull that kept coming up with every thought of love, death and of the memories I would leave behind (I was going to say
for my family
, but I realised that what I really meant was
for myself
), even though I was fairly dubious about the notion of eternal life.

I honked my horn at a driver who had overtaken me on the hard shoulder. I then edged into the same lane, accelerating for no reason and twice changing lanes suddenly. This earned me a chorus of horns accompanied, I presume, by a stream of insults. One driver shook his fist at me.

I shouted, “Pull over, mate, if you dare and my soul will come and box yours until it's out for the count for good!”

I spluttered angrily as the car disappeared in my rear-view mirror, “And I've got a right son of a bitch of a soul, just so you know what you're up against, mate!”

I realised from the sound of the engine that I was still accelerating. For a few seconds, I felt the thrill of imminent deliverance. Boundless joy flooded through me. I sensed that such exultation was disgraceful, but it was so pleasant that I decided I would shut my eyes as soon as the pedal hit the floor.

A little more pressure on the accelerator (keeping it
secret
from the rest of me so as not to change my mind…) and everything would become as insignificant as the consequences of the disappearance of a tiny worm on the future orbit of the planets…

… Insignificant… Your daughter is insignificant?

I let out a shrill “Ah” as I braked a few inches from a huge articulated lorry loaded with sacks of cement. The car skidded; I braced myself, hoping for, and simultaneously dreading, the fatal impact with the car behind.

The miracle came to pass: no crash of crumpled metal, no lancing pain as the steel frame and the plastic of the dashboard pierced my flesh. Just a high-pitched screeching of brakes and horns trumpeting the panic of a herd of clockwork animals!

I sat up, my eyes bleary with sweat, both feet cramped up, one on the brake pedal, the other on the accelerator. I turned the engine off, laid both my hands flat on the dashboard and waited for my body to stop shaking and the scraps of thought surging and bursting through my head like angry bubbles to settle. My empty gaze wandered across the traffic and on to a sheet of newspaper caught on a bush on the central reservation. I bent down to read the headlines: ‘
Boumerdes teacher told to wear hijab by pupils'
and, in bigger letters: ‘
The president opens a…'
I wasn't brave enough to get out of the vehicle to find out what it was the president had inaugurated – an automatic laundry, the civil war or a rest centre for amnestied terrorists.

The car still reeked of burnt rubber. I drummed my fingers on the dashboard. I realised that I loved my daughter and my wife with the weight of all the oceans on earth and that my only mission in this world was to protect them, whatever curses it might bring down upon me. One day, at the second coming of the messiah of one of our world's many religions, a kindly angel would perhaps dare to forgive me or, at least, take account of mitigating circumstances.

Even before I had finished counting my fingers (five on the first hand and five on the second), I had accepted my fate.

All I had to do now was to find the victim, the weapon and the moment to kill.

And almost immediately I sensed that I was well beyond that, that my reptilian brain, the archaic part of the nerve matter that is the source of our species' survival instinct, had been much quicker and had already ensnared its prey.

Yes, I was a coward. Yes, I had spontaneously resorted to the most spineless kind of reasoning: if you kill for killing's sake, you might as well kill the man with the least value in the eyes of the world, including his own. You might as well kill – and this argument complements the previous one – someone who has no means of defending himself…

The old prehistoric beast within me had at once identified the weakest animal in the flock: Moh, the armless, legless newspaper-seller.

I mused: “If you had also been mute and blind, my friend Moh, you'd have served my purpose well…” I gave a surprised gasp at my ‘pragmatic' reaction, a little bile rising deep in my throat. I shivered at the thought of this ‘new' side to a subject I was supposed to know more intimately than anyone else alive: myself. I felt a mixture of disgust and a strange feeling that I dared not identify as a sort of dismayed fascination: was the real
me
so different from the basically normal
me
I had been presenting in total ignorance since my birth? Might this everyday identity have been merely the handmaiden of another less unsavoury identity waiting patiently to surface?

“Oh shit!”

I forbade myself to go any further with this introspection, suspecting that it would destroy what little willpower I had been able to summon up. I had opened the boot to rummage through the toolbox I always carried with me to deal with my car's frequent breakdowns. I hesitated between a monkey wrench and a hammer I had already used once to beat a bit of metal back into shape after a crash at a red light.

The wrench was too light and the hammer too bulky. But out of the mess of washers and bolts emerged a long, sharp, flat-ended screwdriver.

“Need some help?”

Holding my breath, I turned towards the van driver who was beaming at me out of his open window.

“What?” I stammered, imagining for a horrible instant that he could read my murderous plans on my face.

“Broken down, have you? Because I know a thing or two about cars.”

I forced myself to smile back at him as I hurriedly tossed the tools back into the boot.

“No… thanks… Erm… I was just checking something.”

“Sure you don't need any help? I can tow you. I've got a towbar in the back and I know a garage nearby.”

“No,” I interrupted him brusquely, “I haven't broken down.”

The man in the van's friendly expression had vanished.

“Hey, calm down, cousin, calm down! I just wanted to give you a hand. Strange times when you offer your neighbour some help and he throws it back in your face!”