Abduction (6 page)

“What makes you say that? The phone numbers?”

“Not only that… even if no one apart from your wife and mine knows my number. Actually, even you don't have it. Of course (he pulled a slightly piqued face), we've had no reason to call each other, eh? And my phone has always been set up to hide my number from the person I'm calling. But that's not what's bugging me.”

“What is then?”

“I don't know yet. Just a feeling. Go and get some rest; we'll talk about it again later.”

“Do you think we can rescue her?”

“Yes…” he said, looking away too quickly. “Look at your hands, though. You're no help to your daughter by skinning yourself.”

I almost asked him what right he thought he had to speak to me in that tone. He wasn't my father, as far as I was aware! Nevertheless, my eyes followed my father-in-law's gaze; red scratches crisscrossed the backs of my hands.

I opened my mouth wide to utter some stupid protest like
I didn't do that!
Mathieu didn't look round at me, probably out of charity.

I arranged my face into a neutral expression before facing the other panic – my wife's. I felt a dual sensation of shame and fear: was I so incapable of keeping my cool in a situation that required so much of it? Could my little girl rely on such a cowardly father to help her?

Maybe I slept for an hour or two? I don't remember having nightmares, but rather floating in a sort of treacle in which I seemed to be unconscious or rather dead to all sensation.

I half-opened one eyelid and half-saw my wife snuggled up tightly against me, something that hadn't happened for donkey's years. A hazy thought, soft and warm, spread through my body, a mixture of an admiring
How beautiful she is!
and a concupiscent
I would love to lick the insides of your thighs, fair lady…

I groaned when the dagger of Shehera's name appeared from nowhere and stabbed into my wildly imagining heart. I sat up, fizzing with such searing anxiety that it was as if I had just caught sight of a thousand-strong crowd chasing after me to tear me apart.

“My daughter…”

“Yes, Aziz?”

I'd been mistaken; Meriem wasn't asleep. She cradled my head in her hands.

“How is she, Aziz, can you tell me?”

Before I could answer, she reacted strangely: her hands caught my cheeks in a pincer grip. I didn't dare move.

“It's the first night she's spent away from us. And in the meantime, we're sleeping and… and…”

A dry retch, a grating at the back of her throat, prevented her from continuing. She pulled away from me abruptly. It must have been five o'clock in the morning going by the muezzin's loudspeaker calling the faithful to morning prayers.

“Do you hear him?”

She repeated, “Hey? Can you hear the keeper of dawn?”

Her voice had taken on a more pensive, more irascible tone. She cleared her throat, started to speak twice and ended up bent over double, coughing dryly. I thought, “She has no more tears to wet her throat.” She turned on the night-light. The faint beam of light emphasised the rings around her wide, staring eyes and the scratches at the base of her chin.

“Where are you going?”

“I don't know, but I can't sit idly by any longer, waiting for someone to rape her, kill her and then dump her in the street somewhere!”

Contemptuous of both herself and me, she hurled, “Get up. No parent can breathe easily while their fourteen-year-old daughter is being murdered.”

She got dressed calmly, too calmly, while I watched her, unable to raise a single objection to this fundamental truth. She was right. Anything that happens to a child is its parents' fault; for a child, God is above all mum and dad! I had been a child and I recalled my own unshakeable personal pantheon. Spitefully, I choked back a dry, convulsive sob.

Mathieu was already bustling around the living room. Latifa was on her knees, praying fervently. Meriem waited until the prayers were over to place a kiss on her mother's head.

With ecstasy in her eyes, Latifa cried, “I'm sure He doesn't know about this!”

“Who are you talking about mum?”

My mother-in-law clutched her daughter's arm.

“God, for heaven's sake! The Almighty doesn't know about this because, honestly, He'd never have let something this cruel happen!”

As I sniggered silently at the paradox (“If He doesn't know about this, then He isn't God, stupid!”), I could see that Meriem was wondering about her mother's mental state. She stroked the old woman's hand, but refused to show any more emotion than that.

“Get up, mum,” she ordered. “Come and have a hot drink and afterwards you can have a rest.”

The old woman did as she was told, glad, in her disarray, to have someone to obey. She allowed herself to be led to her chair and she grasped the cup Meriem handed her. As she sipped her tea, she didn't leave off studying her daughter's and husband's faces, afraid of discovering there a sign of some terrible piece of information that had been withheld from her. Her misty eyes blinked constantly, doubtless to strengthen the fragile dam holding back the tears that might burst forth at a single word or intuition.

Meriem bent over her mother. For a few seconds, I could see their two faces side by side, like for like, despite the difference in age, in their beauty and the expressiveness of their grief! Petty, ridiculous rancour welled up inside me at this old lady who was stealing a part of my wife from me by ‘daring' to experience the same sorrow as she did.

Oh, how irritating the grief of people we don't like can be! And how terribly, conversely, can our hearts be broken by the grief of those we love when we show ourselves incapable, even when we share it, of offering them the slightest succour!

Meriem accompanied her mother to Shehera's bedroom. Mathieu and I watched each other, making no attempt to disguise the fact that we didn't think much of each other, even if, deep down, we hadn't the faintest idea of why this was. The embarrassed silence lasted for a few seconds before my father-in-law spoke. He looked pensive.

“The kidnapper knows I'm French. If it really is those GIA bastards…”

Meriem appeared in the corridor and interrupted him.

“I know what we have to do.”

She gave us a hostile stare. She never covered her head, but now she had wrapped herself in a broad scarf and an old coat. She had stuck one of her hands in a pocket.

“Where are you off to like that? It's dark outside.”

My anxiety went up a notch when – as if this were sufficient explanation – she held up the thing she had stuffed into her pocket: a small, illuminated Koran.

“Where did you dig that out? I didn't know we had one in the house.”

She shrugged her shoulders with a defiant expression containing not an ounce of love.

“You assume I'm going to just twiddle my thumbs until my daughter's corpse turns up?”

Her near-exhausted tone contrasted with the sparks of anger glittering in her eyes. I no longer recognised the woman I had been living with for the last fifteen years; first the Koran and now this haunted look…

“I'm going to see the imam. He'll be able to intercede. He's almost one of them, remember?”

I jumped out of my chair.

“You're mad! That's the last thing we should do. He won't lift a finger. Quite the opposite: he always said bad things about Shehera! His wife told you…”

Pushing me violently aside, she made for the front door. I yelled, “You're out of your mind!”

“Don't go, Meriem. Your husband's right, it's very dangerous,” Mathieu begged, advancing towards her. “The fact that they bothered to call us means that it could be a matter of negotiating. Stay here; we'll find a solution, I swear! One life is already in danger. Don't make things worse by adding yours.”

Momentarily taken aback, Meriem shook her head in revulsion.

“Don't come on all fatherly towards me!” she chastised him from the doorway. “Marrying my mother by betraying my father doesn't give you any rights over me! You're the one who has to stick to his rightful place – that's all we ask of you!”

She slammed the door. Mathieu shouted, “Stop her!” I hesitated for a couple of seconds – I was in my pyjama bottoms and vest – before rushing after her. The imam lived in the tower block on the southern edge of the estate. Although the gravel cut into my feet, I ran towards the building with mounting unease when I didn't catch sight of Meriem. Assuming that she was running too, I should have caught up with her by now. Despite its gentle pinkness, the rising dawn over Algiers couldn't manage to soften the landscape of urban ruins through which I ran like hell – some repair work on the gas pipes that had been dragging on for a year, piles of trash, some sprayed slogans to the glory of the FIS – the Islamic Salvation Front – and its leaders, graffiti calling on people to fuck a certain Hassan's mother, a burnt-out car. As I panted along like a madman, a part of me, a tiny one admittedly but one that would retain, I suppose, its sense of sarcasm even if the devil was flipping me over and over like a cutlet in his pan, remarked:
We were meant to be the descendants of the sublime Andalusians and Harun al-Rashid the Magnificent, and we have become the bastards of a trashcan country that aspires to disappear up the anus of al-Qaida!

A neighbour on his way back from some place or other called out to me with a mixture of amusement and reproach: “Hey, sports star, training for the Olympics in our bare feet and pyjamas now, are we?”

I had already made it to the second floor of the imam's building when, like a wasp sting, I suddenly recalled the strange comment Meriem had made during the call to prayers: “Do you hear him?”

“Shit…”

‘He' was obviously at the mosque! Quite logically, Meriem had decided to go to where the muezzin was leading the service. I ran back down the stairs four at a time and crossed the estate in the opposite direction until I reached the building site of the mosque – which had been deliberately left unfinished so that it didn't come under the control of the Ministry of Religious Affairs. A few latecomers were hurrying towards the entrance. Breathless and streaming with sweat, I searched for Meriem's face.

I felt like my chest had gone hollow when I caught sight of her half-hidden behind a digger, slight inside her coat and disfigured by the scarf covering her beautiful hair.

“Meriem, please, wait for me, I'm nothing without you…” I whispered to myself like a prayer.

I remembered how she would laugh in delight at the moment of orgasm and how, if I started holding forth in front of supposedly important guests, she was quite capable of sliding a mischievous hand under the table and guiding it towards my genitals…

My passionate, happy wife. My wife and mother of my child. My wife, broken by grief.
And I couldn't do a thing, neither for her, nor for my child.

“Meriem, listen to me…”

I was just behind her now. She carried on walking, not looking round and mumbling, “I'm going to do what I have to do.”

“And what do you have to do?”

She ignored my question. I grabbed her by the arm. She tried to break free. Her large pupils, faded from crying, stared at me as if I were a stranger.

“He knows some of the people who took my daughter.”

“How can you be sure?”

“After the elections were cancelled, the imam spent four months in jail. It's common knowledge. They even say he was tortured. That's some kind of proof, isn't it?”

“He
only
did four months. Four short months. If he'd belonged…”

I lowered my voice because we were being closely watched from the mosque entrance.

“… to the GIA or that kind of group, do you think the police or the army would have let him off so lightly? They'd have found him tied up on the edge of the estate with a bullet in his head. If he can carry on waking us up every morning since he got out of jail with that bloody loudspeaker of his, it's because the authorities back him.”

This argument hit home. Meriem's eyes, which had been almost malicious up till now, reflected her bewilderment. I drove home my advantage, ready to damn a man whose son I sometimes gave a lift home to and whom I actually barely knew.

“Quid pro quo, I guess. In any case, that's the rumour. If he doesn't preach, the leader of the mosque is just one more unemployed in this shit-hole neighbourhood. They must have offered him a deal: his freedom and a chance to make a living selling sermons in return for some information about troublemakers on the estate. Maybe he even grasses on both sides: one day to the cops, the next to their sworn enemies… Look at where it leaves us: if you talk to the imam, everyone will find out, the cops and the terrorists. That kidnapper swine insisted we…”

I didn't continue. Meriem's drawn face paled a little more.

“I wanted to suggest an exchange to the kidnapper – an adult for a child.”

“And then what?”

“I would've killed myself. I've brought along what I'd need.”

She half-opened her coat. The handle of a kitchen knife was poking out of the inside pocket. A chill wave swept through me. I tried to clear my throat, but nothing, not a sound, came out of my gullet.

Meriem hung her head, beaten once and for all. A little liquid ball, then another, rolled down her nose. I caught myself smiling stupidly as some snot flowed out of her nostrils and linked the two streams of tears. I felt like yelling:
You locals, save us. You think we're alive because we're still standing and speaking, but we're drowning before your very eyes!

I stretched out my arms to embrace my wife.

“Hey, you two, aren't you ashamed of yourselves, arguing in front of a mosque this early in the morning?”

The man guarding the entrance ran up to us. He was ‘Afghan' in appearance, with his unkempt beard and the small dimple above his eyebrows typical of devotees reputed to pray so fervently that their mat leaves an imprint on their forehead.