Abduction (33 page)

“Pass me your husband,” the awfully familiar voice resumes, adding, “please,
ma… madam
(he stumbles deliberately, with mocking disdain, over
madam
)… Is that you, Aziz?”

“No, it's still me, his wife. Please, I…”

“Come on, you slag!” the stranger yells. “Why don't you do as I tell you?”

She holds the mobile out to Aziz. Her face is so bloodless and so devoid of emotion that Aziz believes for an instant that she has just learnt of their daughter's death…

“You… you've…”

He gasps for the air he needs to release the cry that has already taken control of his brain.

“If you scream, I'll kill her. Right now.”

The part of Aziz's brain that is still functioning retains only one element of the kidnapper's threat:
If he's threatening to kill her, then he hasn't killed her!

Suppressing the mixture of relief and rage then and there throws Aziz into a state verging on nauseous dizziness.

“OK, I'll be quiet, I swear… (Then, to his wife.) She's alive… (To the stranger again.) I beseech you, let us speak to our daughter…”

“Don't give me orders, if you please.”

“No, no – never!”

Aziz has adopted the most servile tone possible.

“Well now, tell your wife everything. Or would you rather I did? Come on, put it on loudspeaker!”

“Right now?”

“Right now.”

Aziz does as he's told, focusing his gaze on the small buttons to avoid his wife's eyes.

“So, what are you waiting for?”

Panting with excitement, the kidnapper's voice is like a perverted little boy's as he awaits the outcome of some naughty prank.

“I…”

Aziz's lips are as swollen as if they had been plunged into crushed ice.

“Speak, you idiot, or it'll be your daughter yelling instead!”

“I… I murdered a man and…”

The final whispered words hiss out of him like a punctured tyre.

“…And Mathieu is going to kill himself before dawn…”

“Why are you telling me these fibs, Aziz?”

Meriem shakes her husband's arm in disbelief.

“Why?” she puffs out in a halting, almost inaudible breath.

“He's cut off three of Shehera's fingers. He threatened to cut off some more if we didn't obey him.”

Meriem half-closes her eyes and gropes around for help as if the floor had turned to quicksand. She is in terrible pain; a monstrous animal is sinking its claws and its fangs into her breast. She articulates painfully, carefully – she
has
to rescue her daughter – by clutching with all her might to the tiny shaft of intelligence she has left: “My daughter… Give me back my daughter… Take my life instead of hers… Right now, if you want… I'll leave the house at once… Look, I don't even need to put a coat on…”

She gulps in spite of the sickening bitterness of her saliva. The man takes his time.

“You're suffering, eh? It's tough, I know. I'm not guessing –
I know
. You tell yourself the pain can't get any bigger, that it's already bigger than the universe, and yet it carries on getting bigger… I won't say I pity you, but I understand you, you can be sure of that.”

The voice is not sarcastic and seems to show a genuine concern for his interlocutor's mental state. Then, as though the man had cast a glance at his watch:

“Here I am, nattering away! I have to go or else I won't have any minutes left for our conversation tomorrow morning.”

“My daughter… Just a little word with my daughter,” Meriem implores him. “I beg you… just one tiny second…”

A burst of laughter crackles over the loudspeaker. Then the man rebuffs Meriem with almost fatherly irritation.

“Now, now, my poor foolish woman, you'll have to do more than beg for your wishes to come true. Even if you behaved like an Inca priest and piled every living being in the world on top of each other for sacrifice, it would still be far from enough. That would be too easy, woman. Anyway, talk to you tomorrow… well, as long as your father-in-law doesn't shy away at the last minute… He's made one hell of a wager, your father-in-law: his life for his granddaughter's, who might already be dead. I can cheat too, sometimes…No, I'm kidding! Who knows…”

The kidnapper clicks his tongue against his palate in a sign of derision, before speaking again, with something like envy. “Does he really love you all this much, that fucking
gaouri
?”

The question catches the woman off-guard. She opens her mouth, but nothing comes out.

“You don't know? Well, you will tomorrow…”

“S
top blubbering!”

She is berating him violently. She doesn't want to sit down for fear that her body might not obey her now. Moreover, she feels like her brain is only working in fits and starts: one moment, extremely sharp; the next, incapable of understanding what had appeared obvious.

“Tell me everything,” she ordered before interrupting him: “This stuff about Mathieu committing suicide before dawn, is it true?”

Aziz nods, ashen-faced.

“Yes. Otherwise Shehera will have her throat slit.”

The words have lost all their modesty. The beast whines and sinks its teeth into another part of his belly.

“Will he do it?”

“Do you mean Mathieu or the…”

“Mathieu.”

Her heart is cold. She speaks in a low voice to avoid her mother eavesdropping on their conversation. She'll have all the time she needs, later, to share his grief. She can think only of her daughter; she'd be prepared to sacrifice the whole world to save her child.

“You never really liked your father-in-law, did you?”

Her husband studies her in fearful astonishment.

“And you're not going to ask me about the guy I killed?”

Yes, how come she hasn't questioned him about…
Oh, my God! The pieces of news slam into each other so hard that some, even the most appalling, temporarily disappear beneath the horizon of her understanding. Aziz tries to give her a hug; she pushes him away. If she lets herself dissolve into tears, Shehera will die of abandonment. Right now, she feels something close to revulsion at Aziz's betrayal. How could he have kept such alarming information about her daughter secret from her?

She digs deep into her lungs to bring a breath of calm to her voice.

“Tell me everything. And please don't leave anything out.”

She learns successively of their neighbour's murder, her father's past, her father-in-law's too, his planned suicide at dawn, and the likely reason for her daughter's kidnapping.

If she has understood correctly, her daughter is going to die because of a massacre during the Algerian war. One of her hands is shaking.

“No, she's not going to die, I promise you that. He wants revenge? Well, he can have revenge! He'll take Mathieu's life and I'll offer him mine if he so desires, but he won't kill Shehera.”

She notices that he is searching for reassurance in her eyes. She refuses him any such aid; the kidnapper had no second thoughts about cutting off her daughter's fingers. This man's thirst for vengeance is impossible to satisfy. In his mathematics about an exchange of corpses – those of his family in return for Shehera's – he still comes out a heavy loser.

She knows that Aziz is ready to throw down his life at the kidnapper's feet like a mere potato peeling. He had the courage to commit a murder, he who had never been in a fight in his life. He tried to kill his father-in-law. She feels her chest tighten with love for this indecisive man who gave her so much joy in the early days of their marriage, and more and more regrets in recent years. She recalls the happiness that had washed over them when the little one came into the world and they began, despite the bombings and the butchery, to hatch marvellous plans for the future of their little family: leave this squalid place, buy a small flat, have some ‘normal' neighbours, go to the cinema and the theatre, no longer fear the hate-filled looks due to uncovered hair or too short a dress…

She decides to twist the cruel tap of memories tight shut because otherwise a chasm of despair will open beneath her feet. To quell her trembling she goes off the kitchen to make herself a coffee. She tries to think of a possible way out –
necessarily
possible. She catches herself murmuring a snatch of a prayer, before a sniggering thought stings her mind:
“Even Eve, close as she was to God, lost her son. So you, my girl…”
With tears in her eyes, she tastes the scalding liquid and suddenly recalls the cursed day her father died.

…She is coming home happily from the university. Her linguistics test went well, she enjoys her studies, even if she knows in advance that they won't be worth a great deal when the time comes to transform this knowledge into a job. She knocks on the door of her family's flat. She left home early that morning because of the erratic timetable of the bus that takes her to the university. She didn't kiss either her father or her mother as they were both still asleep.

Her mum opens the door immediately, as if she were on the lookout for her return and tells her bluntly, her face impenetrable: “Your father is dead.”

She breaks down in tears and stammers, “Ho… how… come? He… he was fine yesterday.”

Her mother stares at her. In her eyes she can read grief and anger in equal measure, both of them vast.

“Your father committed suicide.”

“What?”

“Sleeping tablets.”

Her mother claps her palms together. For one ridiculous second, Meriem thinks she's applauding. In reality, her mother is doing her best to keep her hands busy and stop them from scratching at her cheeks until the blood comes, as the ancient Arab mourning custom requires.

“Yes, he's done this to us… I loved him though… Oh Tahar…”

She eyes her up and down brusquely, almost accusingly.

“You loved him too, didn't you?”

“Of course I loved him, Mum.”

And again Meriem collapses, overwhelmed this time, in addition to her sorrow, by an unbearable sense of guilt.

She gasps, “Why did he do it, Mum? He hasn't been in a good mood recently, but to go and… He was fine…”

“No,” she said pointing to her temple, “your father was never well.”

“Why, Mum?”

Large tears well up in the corners of her mother's eyes, without any change in her facial expression.

“The past, my girl, the damned past drove a rusty nail into his soul that was impossible to pull out again.”

She doesn't say another word. Meriem rushes into the bedroom where her father is resting. Her mother has lovingly combed his hair and dressed him in a suit. He appears to be sleeping, a vague pout of protest pulling his lips downwards, like some tearaway who has sunk into sleep leaving some quarrel unresolved. He is the first dead person she has ever seen close up. She feels like touching him to check that her mother isn't mistaken. Maybe he's just fainted? People don't commit suicide for no reason, even at her father's age. A squall of tears, dark with rancour, beats down inside her head. The preposterous thought occurs to her to tickle her father like when she was small: he used to scream with laughter when she slid her hand under his armpit. It was so good to hear him laugh, this father with his black moods! If you help a dead man to laugh at the state he's in, perhaps he will eventually agree to wake up?

Mathieu comes into the room just as, despite being eighteen years old, the young girl is shaking her father by the shoulder to attempt the impossible. Her old ‘uncle', whom she now calls by his first name, is distraught, his eyes red from crying. He holds her tight, asks her not to be angry with her father and, in the same breath, makes her swear on the soul of the man lying in front of her that she won't breathe a word about his suicide. Cornered, she promises. Some day, he insists, she will understand. He asks her to leave the room and bustles about on his own for a while before calling her mother. Although she is grateful for his support, she is shocked at how he has taken control of
her
family's affairs. She stays by the door. She hears snatches of conversation: “…Cleaned everything… taken all the boxes… A doctor… a friend of mine… He owes me one… Don't worry about it, Latifa… No one will know…”

An hour later the doctor Mathieu has fetched solemnly confirms death by sudden cardiac arrest after a speedy examination and issues the burial certificate…

…Fairly soon she began to detest him. He came round to their house too often. She would have liked to do her mourning face to face with her mother, to savour alone with her the bitterness of recounting the little, insignificant facts that make up the heartbreaking memories one has of a loved one after his death. Like, for example, the comedy surrounding the sugar lump for his coffee, which he wheedled out of her unbeknownst to her mother. Something to do with a high diabetes level, if she remembers rightly.

Or another day when he had tucked into some asparagus, which had then triggered a spectacular allergic reaction on his face. Her horrified mother had cried, “Tahar, you've got great big spots on your face!”

“Really? This asparagus is delicious, though!”

He got up from the table and went off to gaze at himself in the mirror in the corridor. Without turning round, he called out phlegmatically to his wife: “I can't really say I'm better-looking than King Kong! You, however, are still a thousand times prettier than the blonde in the film!”

She had seen her mother blush with pleasure at this unexpected compliment. For a long time afterwards, Meriem teased them with the joint nickname of ‘Beauty and the Gorilla'.

Mathieu was very fond of Meriem, but the opposite was no longer true because it had become all too apparent that he had begun to fall in love with his friend's wife. Sacrilegious love according to Meriem, a betrayal of the friendship that bound him to her deceased father. For her part, her mother had been devastated by her husband's suicide, which she initially felt as a defilement of their love. For several months she refused to pronounce his name. By a strange paradox, the attentive presence of her late husband's friend eventually restored, little by little, her ability to talk lovingly about the man whose life she had shared.