Abduction (29 page)

He nibbled at his lip.

“I realise now that I wasn't very smart. Not a doubt crossed my mind when the commander recruited back-up troops in rival villages: the FLN officers must know what they're doing! The area around Melouza is a patchwork of Kabyle and Arab
douars
, and the two populations have never got on. I didn't like the look of these civilians armed with knives and axes one bit, but we were assured that their presence would inspire even greater awe in the refractory villages.”

Mathieu saw him dig around in one of his pockets with the reflex of a smoker searching for a packet of cigarettes that wasn't there. A wrinkle creased his brow. An additional concern knotted the Frenchman's stomach:
Why was the
fell
telling him all this now, and in such detail, when he hadn't admitted it under torture? Did he already regard him as a simple pair of quivering ears on top of a ‘nice ripe corpse', as their platoon referred to suspects due for elimination?

“After the first night and a skirmish with an armed group from the MNA, we headed for a
douar
a few miles from Melouza. We surrounded the rebellious
douar
of Béni Ilemane. I was just a novice
mujahid
in the midst of hardened fighters and I didn't feel I had any right to comment on my leaders' orders. So when, early on, I saw houses on fire I didn't like it, but I didn't say anything. That was maybe when the village constable and his family were slaughtered. I didn't know anything about it at the time. Our troops were spread around the five
mechtas
and each of us had only a very partial view of events. Basically I felt that the brutality was inevitable; we had just been involved in a bloody skirmish, the region was turning out to be very hostile to the FLN and, naturally enough, the French army was playing on that to pursue and kill our men. The local people had made the wrong choice and they had to be taught a lesson to remember… Next, our leaders ordered us to take all the men over fifteen up onto the rocky peak above Mechta Kasbah. The local dignitaries had been gathered in a mosque with the aim of forcing them to rally to our cause. The discussions had dragged on all through the night. At dawn, despite the threats, the village leaders still refused to disown their old messiah Messali and his damn MNA. That was the moment the order was given to massacre all the men and teenagers assembled on the peak.”

Tahar clutched one hand with the other and a look of extreme bewilderment came over his battered face.

“I couldn't believe what I was hearing… I asked the man next to me, ‘What? What did the lieutenant and the captain say? For God's sake, it can't be true! We're not going to kill them all? They're just like us – I don't believe this!' And I added the following stupid question: ‘Brother, what will they say about me back in my village?'”

The horrified man ran the back of his hand over his chin.

“Yes… what will she say about me?”

Intrigued, Mathieu muttered, “Who are you talking about? Your mother?”

The Algerian flew into a fit of anger.

“No. I'm talking about a different woman… The woman I love… That I want to marry… I… I… And the devil take you!”

The Algerian's clay-coloured cheeks had turned scarlet. Despite the gravity of the moment, Mathieu suppressed a smile.

“And shit too!”

His eyes were riveted to the ground; the man seemed to be reliving a scene he couldn't tear himself away from.

“I think I killed two people up on that peak… The first was a peasant, whom I shot in panic because my platoon commander was furious at my hesitation and thumped me on the shoulder with an order to fire into the crowd. All I could see of that poor civilian was his
chèche
. I was taken aback by the bland, warm smell of the blood running past our feet, the axes, the flames from the burning shacks, the screams of pain, the cries for mercy from women lacerating their faces, the insults from officers as they yelled in our ears that traitors were worse than the French soldiers. It was horrible; I noticed how incredibly enthusiastic some of my companions were…”

He pinched his bottom lip between two fingers for a long time, as if punishing it for the horrors he was uttering.

“I asked God for help, but around me some were shouting
‘Allah, save us!'
and others
‘Allah, help us kill them!'
My prayer was grotesque; God seemed to me like a spectator who wouldn't dream of helping anyone. I fell silent and carried on shaking. My second victim was an old man my father's age. One of our back-up men chased after a young boy and sent him sprawling with a kick in the backside. Lying on the ground, the teenager started to yell in terror at the sight of the pickaxe raised above him. His father, the old man, had managed to escape from the main group of prisoners. Amid the hail of bullets and the unbearable moans of men having their throats slit he was yelping, ‘Don't kill my son, he's too young, he knows nothing about politics. Oh mercy – God will reward you!' The guy with the pickaxe hadn't heard or seen him approaching. The old man was getting ready to batter him to death with an iron bar. I reacted without thinking: I fired a shot, killing the old man instantly. Our man turned round, scared out of his wits. He was a kid of about twenty whose good humour and helpfulness had caught my attention. Throughout the negotiations with the dignitaries from the mosque, he hadn't stopped serving tea and biscuits to our group of
djounoud
. The bloke caught sight of the body stretched out behind him first, then me with my rifle still pointing at the dead man. A broad relieved smile spread across his face. A second later, just as cheerfully, he stove in the kid's skull with a single blow of his pickaxe. A mixture of blood and brain spurted as far as my boots.”

Tahar hunched up, as though this memory had struck him dumb.

“That pickaxe blew the boy's head apart and shattered my heart into a thousand pieces. I wanted independence – but not at that price. Since then I've been like a dead man. I didn't join the rebels to kill a father defending his son… My brother had been killed for trying to protect an old man. So I disobeyed and ran away. I roamed like a madman, but I knew I never wanted to go back to the mujahideen. I thought of suicide, but I wasn't brave enough.”

He cackled with a kind of wicked delight.

“I let myself be captured by the French military because I was convinced you would execute me on the spot. It would have all been over in one go: my cowardice, my stain, this war I no longer understand… Seems I was wrong. I hadn't reckoned with people like you…”

“J
ust to get this straight,” Aziz interrupted him with a contemptuous gesture, “you became friends because you were like each other: one tortured rebels, the other killed civilians.”

“No, please don't say that about Tahar!” Mathieu protested in a cracked voice. “I'm a real bastard, but he was just a killer. Or, in any case, a reluctant killer… Listen to me, Aziz…”

“No, you listen to me, Mathieu. And you'd better open your ears wide.”

Mathieu thought that Aziz would have less trouble agreeing to the kidnapper's demands after hearing these revelations.

“I couldn't give a damn how you justify your vile stories from half a century ago. All I can think of is my daughter being cut up into bits. Tell me one thing: what did the man who swore to take revenge on Tahar look like? Can you describe him? His face? Anything particular that might help us recognise him?”

Mathieu shrugged. A far-off commentator at the back of his mind replied exasperatedly: “How's a muttonhead like me supposed to remember an Arab I glimpsed for a few minutes over fifty years ago? You all looked the same to me back then…”

“No, nothing specific,” the old man finally sighed, “…except that he was a redhead… So damn red it was a shock and you forgot his face.”

“Great clue, that! The nutter must be so old now that his hair's had all the time in the world to go white. Look at yours. Who knows, he might even be bald!”

His voice grew evermore high-pitched, both beseeching and menacing at the same time.

“Nothing else comes to mind? What language did he speak in, Arabic or Kabyle? Think harder: some detail… a scar… I don't know… a name? Something that slipped out during his confrontation with Tahar?”

The old man gazed at the utterly distraught individual as he searched vainly for some meaning in the disaster engulfing him.
How alike all sufferers look!
he thought. He recalled the frantic pupils of Tahar's eyes, the same futile revolt.

He moved his hand and placed it over Aziz's. The father was startled by this unexpected familiarity – and then his body froze, suddenly alert.

“You remember something?”

“The first name, Aziz.”

“His first name…
his
?” the Algerian managed, his voice quivering with hope, however tiny.

“No. Not
his
.”

Mathieu felt like an icy stone was swelling up in his stomach. And that soon, by some terrible miracle, it would crush his exhausted heart.

“I never agreed with Tahar on this. I begged him not to do it. But he was as stubborn as a mule when he decided to be.”

Aziz didn't give him time to explain why he loved Tahar more than the brother he never had. There is too little time left until the fateful dawn. Will no one ever know? Mathieu entwines and untwines his fingers again and again, as if picking apart the strands of the tragedy. For the first time in a very long while, he asks for help from ‘L'il Robert'. A tiny part of his soul manages a smile.
That pigheaded Tahar loved you, maybe not as much as the brother he lost, but for you it was something at least! And then, don't forget, he saved you; not your life – yours wasn't worth a curse – but something more precious than that…

When the mujahideen appeared in the clearing at the end of that morning, they found the two men sitting facing each other in silence, Mathieu still shocked at his release. A moment earlier, Tahar had climbed a tree after a bird alerted them by suddenly taking flight. He had come back down looking tense and unsure of what action to take. Then, aiming one last passing kick at his prisoner, he set him free.

“Put your belt on and your laces back in. Tell them you're a deserter who's been tortured by your own side because they suspected you of treachery. They're distrustful and they'll give you a hard time, so make sure your story's credible. They'll kill you if they think you might have belonged to the DOP. Pray that none of them passed through your hands.”

He concluded with a snigger: “You can add that you helped me to escape. With a little luck, the maquisards will soon think you're a hero.”

“Why are you saving my life?”

“You saved mine, didn't you?”

“Yes, but first I…”

“Tortured me, you mean?”

He made only a vague gesture by way of reply.

Mathieu insisted. “Why?”

“Do you really want to know?”

“Yes.”

The Arab bent down to him, his eyes narrowing with grim anger.

“Because I'm a bastard and because you're a bastard, both of us of the very worst kind. We're pretty much as bad as each other, you and me. One shit lending another shit a hand – that's the secret of our association. God has gone off on a trip to see some happier people and he's taken all His morals with Him, so we make do with what we've got. There's nothing attractive about it – pure filth.”

The sorrowing figure stood up straight again.

“If the mujahideen don't believe us, well, at the very worst they'll put a bullet in our brains and then throw us to the jackals. But I was hoping for something better from life…”

He didn't complete his sentence, but his hand kept beating the air like some large, indignant butterfly. Mathieu sat there aghast; his fellow fugitive was saving him for the same dodgy reasons that had made him desert. Furious at the large lump in his throat, he lowered his eyelids and tried to concentrate on knotting his shoelaces.

The maquisards were indeed more than a little distrustful. They took them to the FLN's regional HQ, where they were initially treated as suspects. Not as declared enemies, obviously, for if that had been the case, Tahar would not have lived a day longer; as for Mathieu, he would have been used as a bargaining chip with the French military, or killed in response to the guillotining of pro-independence activists at Barberousse prison in Algiers. The heads of the region imprisoned the two men after interrogations that left them sceptical. They shared the cave that served as a cell with other Algerians and some French soldiers. Some of the Algerians, most of whom were
harkis
or alleged traitors, were in just as bad a state as Tahar having quite obviously been beaten up by their jailers.

One reached the cells, which were plunged in constant darkness, via a maze hewn out of the solid rock. Mathieu would long remember, with a sense of affectionate disgust, the crunch of sun-dried grasshoppers between the teeth of their jailers who were as famished as they were and sometimes added these ‘Saharan shrimps' to their one daily meal. During the three weeks they spent in captivity, they shared the same obsessions as their companions in misfortune: hunger, thirst and, above all, keeping their cell clean to avoid rats appearing. It was claimed that these filthy animals anaesthetised their victims' muscles with their urine, enabling them to devour them without waking them up. A
harki
prisoner swore that one of his cattle had been found one morning with half of its lower leg shredded by rodents!

A tacit rule, and a result of their mutual suspicion, forbade anyone from bringing up the subject of the war or the circumstances that might have led to them all rotting several yards underground deep in the Algerian
jebel
as they awaited for an arbitrary verdict that, for reasons of secrecy, could only be one of two extreme outcomes: release, or death. What they talked about, when their mood did not lapse either into despair or racism, were their fond memories of the time before the troubles or, preferably, the gastronomic and sexual excesses they promised themselves once released. This did not prevent nightmares and fits of terror from striking the youngest inmates, who were unable to cope with the uncertain nature of their sentence in this eternal night, broken only by latrine duty.