Abduction Read online

  Abduction

  Copyright © Anouar Benmalek 2011

  First Published in France as Le Rapte by Editions Fayard

  Copyright © Editions Fayard 2009

  First published in Great Britain in 2011 by

  Arabia Books, 70 Cadogan Place, London SW1X 9AH

  Ouvrage publié avec le soutien du Centre national du livre.

  Published with the support of the Centre National du Livre.

  English translation copyright © Simon Pare 2011

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  eISBN 978-1-907822-45-2

  Typeset in Minion by MacGuru Ltd

  [email protected]

  CONDITIONS OF SALE

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  This novel was inspired by actual events.

  I condemn no one, I absolve no one.

  Chekhov

  Why did things happen thus and not otherwise?

  Because they did so happen.

  Tolstoy

  Contents

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Part II

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Part III

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Epilogue

  Part I

  “It’s far too fine for a winter morning. God keeps His books in good order and He never does anything without reason; if it carries on like this, we can expect one hell of a drought this summer. Bloody global warming!” he whispered, his face pale.

  I burst out laughing at this non sequitur and the acting Zoo Director’s offended tone. He seethed through clenched teeth, probably some insult about people who’d be better off with their balls grafted onto their brains rather than dangling uselessly between their legs. That was his favourite insult, but he only used it when he was in a good bad mood, as he put it. Unless, that is, disgusted by the two males coupling in front of us, he had shouted, “May Satan burn your arseholes until the end of time, you damned replicas of the sons of Adam!”

  I thought, “You old relic, just admit that you’d love to swap places with these two monkeys! Butt-hole bliss at least once in your life, eh?” The prudish administrator gave me a nasty look as if he’d read my thoughts. I tried to arrange my face into a more serious expression, and we continued our tour of inspection.

  I was carrying a spiral-bound notebook and conscientiously writing down my boss’s comments (he was acting Director because the incumbent had just been hospitalized with an upset prostate due to the Algerian sun), unaware that by the end of the day I would be in a state worse than death. Or, more precisely, that my agony would commence only a few hours later – a little bit around 9 p.m. and a lot more towards 10 p.m. After that… well, I would envy the imperturbable serenity of those lucky enough to be safely dead and buried.

  The day had started well enough, even if, from time to time, an unpleasant pinching in my stomach reminded me that Meriem, the woman I had loved for the last fifteen years, had mentioned divorce for the first time the week before. I had made the mistake of reacting to her recriminations with a joke. And that had really got her angry. She’d slammed our bedroom door and slept on the couch. The next morning we hadn’t mentioned our argument, but that day and the following ones she refused to let me give her my usual quick kiss before we parted for the day, me heading off to my bread-and-butter job as a biologist at Algiers Zoo, and she to her foreign language institute. I had left earlier than her this particular morning; we had only one car, which we used alternately, and it was my turn to take the bus.

  She had caught me on the doorstep – after once more rejecting my kiss – and told me in a concerned tone of voice, “Our girl’s having trouble at school. I’ve looked through her exercise books – they’re a right mess. We’re going to have to crack down on her.”

  “Can you really see me lecturing her on her birthday?”

  “Her birthday’s no excuse.”

  She gave me what I call her ‘responsible mother’ look (which meant: look out, you little pervert, this has got nothing to do with any of our kiss-and-make-up stuff or our more and more frequent arguments. It’s about something more serious, sacred even – the-fate-of-our-daughter!)

  “I think she’s got a boyfriend…”

  I didn’t like the way those three suspension points had virtually materialised in the air between us. I grumbled, pretending that I didn’t understand.

  “She’s got several boyfriends, and some girlfriends too, hasn’t she?”

  “Don’t act the fool, Aziz! You know what I’m talking about. I found a note from some little shit in with her things. He arranged to meet her at the cinema in the Ryadh el-Feth shopping centre. And guess how he signed it?”

  She threw her arms up.

  “‘I luv you, darlin’, with ‘love’ spelt wrong and no ‘g’ on the end of ‘darling’. The kid’s an ignoramus too.”

  A look of dumb protest must have appeared on my face, something like: Come on, she’s too young for stuff like that! I went bright red. I must have blushed (to judge by my wife’s mocking expression) as badly as when she had told me six months earlier in a normal, chatty tone of voice that our daughter – whom I still called my baby far too often – had had her first period.

  “At the cinema? The day before yesterday? But she was at school…”

  The same suspension points, but this time it was I who had uttered them.

  “Yes, she skived off. Your beloved daughter is a liar. Girls often lie at her age, and later on too. Didn’t you know that?” she added with that little condescending laugh that really got under my skin.

  A worry line quickly creased her brow.

  “Remember the kind of neighbourhood we live in. The woman next-door whispered to me that the imam’s wife is spreading nasty gossip about our daughter.”

  “Well, you know where those yokels the imam and his wife can stick their gossip?”

  “Gossiping yokels wearing hijabs and beards can be dangerous in this crazy country!” she hissed. “Half of our neighbours in the City of Joy would sell their souls if the Islamists told them to, remember?”

  Bloody City of Joy! Of course I remembered, just as I remembered the overjoyed looks on the faces of some of our neighbours the day after the first attacks on intellectuals and journalists thought to be anti-Islamists. After the sordid murder of a writer in front of his wife and daughter, even the pretty young widow on the sixth floor who made ends meet by trading on her charms had felt obliged to tell me that a new era of justice, free of heathens and heathenism, was nigh.

  This bloody City of Joy and bloody us too! We had been forced to
hide our worry and feign a neutrality that could be taken for approval. Meriem was careful about her appearance now, and we were both sick of the duplicity we imposed on ourselves. We had realised though that this excitability was not just some burst of political hotheadedness and that it might pose a threat to our physical safety. We had never entirely thrown off that tension, that vital obligation to weigh what we said, since. We weren’t the only ones, far from it, who drew a veil if not over our bodies, then at least over our words. Many Algerians, maybe even most – who could know with such a silent people! – waited in spineless anxiety to see which way the wind would blow. While fate dithered over whom to make the country’s new rulers, it was better not to get one’s feet wet. “If you are killed in this godforsaken, lawless country, only your mother will mourn you for more than a day; everyone else, starting with your closest friends, will hasten to dry their tears for fear that their grief will identify them to your enemies!” were the words of wisdom doing the rounds in Algiers.

  As for me, after a few years of this exhausting ordeal, I had become a master of the art of charting a course between completely opposing opinions and leaving my interlocutor from the City of Joy – no matter whether he was an Islamist, a policeman or just an ‘ordinary’ neighbour! – convinced, through a series of knowing expressions and smiles, that I wholeheartedly agreed with him. With one exception: the overly friendly ground-floor tenant, always dressed in the same dark jacket, who said he was a simple postal worker and whom I suspected of being an army or police informer, albeit a lowly one, since he lived in the same trashy block of flats I did.

  Fifty-odd and balding, he had an unpleasant way of pressing your fingers while asking his harmless questions. I felt both sullied by the touch of his hand and vaguely uneasy at the feeling of guilt he inspired in me, even when he was asking me what I thought of the weather. “Rat-man!” I had once insulted him under my breath and I had thought, later, that this name suited him well. Rumour had it that he had been involved in the riots of October ’88 while officiating in a different part of the Algiers area, and that he had taken advantage of this to rape some teenagers who had been arrested during the troubles. These events had taken place in a police station according to some, and in a paratroopers’ barracks according to others. The man didn’t seem to have got wind of these grave accusations – or else he couldn’t care less – because he didn’t think twice about going to the mosque every Friday dressed in a magnificent white burnous.

  I had inherited this miserable dwelling after my father died in an accident; my mother had been divorced since I was a teenager and had opted to go and live out her days with my older sister in the village of her birth. Mine and Meriem’s salaries didn’t allow us to rent a flat in a less seedy area. I had resigned myself to living in this hole infested with bearded men for a few more years while we saved up a few hypothetical wads of dinars.

  “OK, OK,” I had granted Meriem in my cowardice, “we’ll talk about it with Shehera this evening if I don’t get home too late. You better believe it; it’s going to be a real family council with lots of arguing. And some beatings, if you insist! By then I’ll have grown a moustache so that I’m up to the task! And I’ll buy a burqa too, just to be on the safe side.”

  “You never take anything seriously, do you? You always find a way to wriggle out of it,” she’d muttered, but broke off because our daughter, barefoot and in her pyjamas, had joined us by the front door. Although her eyes were still sleepy, she already had one Walkman earphone in her right ear, which she claimed was the more ‘musical’.

  “Hi Mum, hi Dad,” she’d called with a lisp that an expensive speech therapist was battling to correct – but which still made me melt with selfish affection.

  “You’re late getting up, Sheherazade.”

  I always used the full version of her first name when I was about to tell her off. She didn’t like her first name – the cliché of the tacky Oriental princess – and in any case, she said firmly, no man, not even a king, would keep her nattering away for a thousand and one nights.

  “My first lesson’s at 10 o’clock. The maths teacher’s off ill. Lucky really, because I don’t understand a thing he says!”

  “We need to talk to you, Shehera. I haven’t got time now – we’ve got a rush on. A committee from the ministry is descending on us tomorrow. And take that earphone out – you’ll go deaf!”

  I had put on a stern voice, but my charming (and lying) daughter took no notice. She pushed me out of the door.

  “You’ll miss your bus and your animals will die of boredom without you. Don’t forget to give Lucette a kiss from me. Tell her I’ll be over soon to teach her about DMS.”

  ‘DMS’ stood for ‘Daddy, Mummy, Sweetie’, Shehera’s first words, and the only ones she had uttered for so long that we had worried that she might be retarded… until, overnight, our daughter had decided to chatter more than a flock of magpies in spring.

  I had smiled and Meriem, disheartened by my attitude, had shrugged and reminded me not to forget to invite my vet colleague to Shehera’s birthday lunch, which we had put back to the weekend.

  As I left the building, I had almost walked straight into the widow from the sixth floor. She’d aged terribly, in her veil and her black gloves. I had said hello to her. Head down, she had mumbled a reply. I had been told that, at the beginning of the troubles, some night-time visitors with sawn-off shotguns had threatened her with the ultimate punishment if she didn’t change profession. Ever since then, the too-beautiful bigot, terrified and desperate to make amends for her bad habits of the past, never left the local mosque. From time to time, however, howling children, spurred on by some jealous wife, would fling oaths at her as she passed. Recalling her once eloquently jiggling buttocks, I caught myself thinking, “What a waste! All those dicks in distress while a magnificent backside that Mother Nature and Darwin put so much passion into sculpting grows wrinkly from lack of use…”

  I had bought a newspaper and some mints from Moh, the limbless man who spent summer and winter in front of a makeshift shelter halfway between the bus stop and the zoo’s ticket office. Torso balancing on a crate mounted on casters, he had called out an offhand “Hello, doctor! Are you doing all right?” to which I had replied, “Yes! And yourself? And may I remind you that I’m not a doctor, unfortunately!”

  I never went any further because the man’s unfailing good mood made me uncomfortable. It was as if I could hear him saying, Look on my misfortune, mate, and acknowledge how brave I am, as someone who moans at every opportunity yourself! Reckon there’s a place with my name on it in heaven? He was always ready with a joke, stammering out the punch line amid hoots of laughter. I had dropped the money in a plastic box covered in verses from the Koran standing on a table decorated with the same texts. One day when I voiced my surprise, he told me that he had surrounded himself with sacred scripture to keep swindlers at bay.

  “As you can see, I can’t run or throw stones! So I make do with appeals to people’s piety. But Holy Scripture doesn’t make any difference because there are as many thieves in this country as flies on a general’s turd!”

  He had lowered his voice. “My poor mother slipped a Koran into the inside pocket of my jacket to protect me. She brought it back from Mecca, where she paid a lot of money for it. That’s what she says anyway. My mother’s extremely stingy, but she must be telling the truth because the cover’s decorated with gold thread. But if guys round here found out, they’d strip me down to my underwear and nick it!”

  I had grimaced. “But you don’t mind telling me your story about the golden Koran?” Rubbing his nose with his stump, he had retorted, “You’re a doctor, not a thief… Well, until proof of the contrary at least!” before bursting out laughing again.

  I had reluctantly shaken the hand of the guard behind the counter of the ticket office. He did have two (sticky) hands – as if he hadn’t bothered to wipe them after wanking, one of my female colleagues said with revulsion. A littl
e further on, I had chucked a sweet into my mouth, a paltry substitute for the cigarettes I hadn’t smoked for some time now. It took me a few more seconds of pity and disgust for the image of the limbless man to fade and to rid myself of the foolish, but persistent impression that the handicapped man’s rotten luck would rub off on me.

  I went out of my way to greet Lucette, as I had promised Shehera – and there I met my boss, already out and about, and took out my spiral-bound notebook to make him think that I was already hard at work. Some time previously, my daughter and I had watched a documentary containing virtual images of man’s ancestors. The film had made a great impression on Shehera, who had claimed that our little female monkey was the spitting image of the computer-generated Australopithecus on the television. She had made me promise to put pressure on my colleagues to officially call her Lucette – the descendant, all the way from prehistoric times, of the venerable Lucy in the film. Luckily, Lounes, a family friend and our zoo’s head vet, had agreed to this with good grace, although he doubted whether the real Lucy had been as wild as the modern cousins of hers we had recently welcomed.

  The baby monkey eyed me indifferently before resuming its suckling, while the two hairy rascals went about the business that had so shocked Hajji Sadok. The acting Director conspicuously avoided looking at the primate enclosure. I saw that he was afraid that this morning’s visitors would be party to the sight of a large male primate fornicating with an ape of the same sex with unrestrained joy.

  Catching an involuntary glimpse of the delighted face of the ape being ‘paid’ homage by its fellow, Hajji Sadok gave a nervous chuckle, much to my surprise.

  “No doubt about it, it’s all these bastards ever think about! What did we call them again?”

  “Kader and John.”

  “And is the Arab the one…”

  “The Arab? What do you think the other one is, a Texan?”

  “Kader the monkey, I mean…”