Abduction

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 little 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…

Yes, that’s Kader mounting his mate right now. The Arab world has shafted America this morning. But I think that geopolitics is, erm, quite democratic in this case; they take it in turns.

Hajji Sadok stared me in the eye and his gaze was clearly to remind me of the respect due to a superior, even an acting director. Suddenly he commented irritably, This habit of giving them human names is ridiculous. What’s more, they look so like us… In my opinion, it’s verging on blasphemy.

Still worried, he added, I hope these stupid apes tone things down. Can you imagine if a group of school kids walk past? Not to mention all the beardy weirdies lurking around the zoo to flush out illegitimate couples. They’ll accuse us of corrupting youth.

Adopting the neutral tone of a bureaucrat weighing up the pros and cons, I replied, "They’re quite capable of chucking a bomb into the monkey cages or sending us a kamikaze in a hurry to swap his ugly wife for a harem of houris. But let’s not forget the pimps making sure their prostitutes are hard at work in the bushes all over the zoo. They’ll be desperate to jump on our bonobos’ bandwagon! Men in Algiers are so scared of stray bullets and bombings, they’re not as horny as they used to be. Stress is a real downer. Thanks to our bonobos, our hookers soon won’t know what’s hit them!"

I pretended to look pensive.

Maybe we should ask the procurers to pay something towards the cost of looking after our animals? These Congolese Casanovas are providing a social service, right? Maybe a political one too, if their fine philandering encourages a few beardies to look for a little tenderness behind a bush rather than poisoning our lives…

Hajji Sadok stared at me with a mixture of amazement and revulsion. He glanced around to check that no one had overheard me.

You speak like you spit; you take nothing seriously. You’ll live to regret it some day.

My face must have clouded over because a mocking expression lit up the old man’s.

I didn’t know you could be so touchy. Got some shame after all, boy?

Firstly, I’m not a boy. And secondly, you’re only the second person to accuse me of not taking anything seriously today.

He burst out laughing.

"But you take that seriously? Well, well, that is progress, boy!"

I deflected the conversation by pointing to what we called the monkey enclosure, a small space separated off from the public by wire fencing and a wide ditch with a series of cages at the back that were open during the day. Having just exchanged something more than a few caresses, the two anthropoids were now sharing some fruit. One of them was chewing on his orange with such languidness that it made me think of smoking a cigarette after sex.

Anyway, great apes fucking each other up the arse isn’t the only thing in life! exclaimed Hajji Sadok with unexpected cheerfulness and crudeness. God created what He wished and who are we to question His decrees. Come on, Aziz, I’m going to have a nose around at the ministry; you take a look at the Addax antelopes and then think about getting ready for the visit.

He scratched his head and screwed up his face.

How about slipping a dose of Valium into their grub?

Do you really mean that? (I stared at my boss: the old man really did mean it!)The vet will never buy it. He’ll point out that we know nothing about the effects of Valium on these animals and that you are mistaking the bonobos for regular conscripts.

Quit your mocking. With the committee members coming tomorrow, tell the keepers only to let the females out.

I interrupted him.

But when the females are together they…

He broke in.

Yes, but a woman with a woman is much less shocking than a man with a man.

I stared wide-eyed at him; he’d used the words woman and man instead of female and male. He realised his mistake. Ashamed, he pretended to absorb himself in reading the plaque that explained, in gold letters, that the seven bonobo chimpanzees (Pan paniscus)were a gift from the Republic of Congo to their sister Republic of Algeria as a token of their eternal friendship after the visit of His Excellency the President, waffle waffle waffle…

My prudish boss walked back to his car grumbling that he couldn’t bloody figure out why the Congolese dictator had given our president these kind-of-failed humans instead of some decent animals like those funny lions or elephants.

I hung around for a good quarter of an hour watching Lucette and her mother, whom Shehera and I had rechristened, giving her the obvious name of Lucy. While her baby was suckling, snuggling up to its mother in a disturbingly human way, the female bonobo (a little under 15 years old if the Congolese diplomatic service’s official papers were to be believed) flashed me a slightly contemptuous look, as if to say: You lazy git, haven’t you got anything better to do than goggle at the misfortunes of an honest mother and her brat?

Still clutching her load, she put her fingers through the steel fencing and shook it violently, first with one hand, then both, and finally bringing her lower limbs into play. The baby was thrown off-balance and only just managed to cling on to the hairs on its mother’s breast. The female’s screaming grew to a deafening crescendo before she suddenly broke off, her throat cramped up. Then, with one last exhausted yelp, she crumpled to the floor in the middle of the patio. She examined her chafed thumb. Sucking the battered digit, her eyes wandering, still panting, she scratched the back of the black ball clinging to her breast with her other hand. The newborn baby’s mind must have been full of terrified questions about how the order of her world could have been turned so dreadfully upside down.

The mother ape looked round at the two males, Kader and John, who were picking lice off each other. She thought about getting up, then changed her mind, wedged her baby on one side, placed her fingers on her two labia majora and started massaging her clitoris – without any enthusiasm, as if she were merely passing the time.

I gulped, thinking: Hey, cousin, if you believe in some bonobo god, this would be the moment for him to show up and remind you that you’re in an Arab country, girl! Worse: Arab and Berber, the stupidity of one added to the stupidity of the other! No more al fresco sex, no more female superiority over men! You’ll soon be entitled to the local holy trilogy – hijab, niqab and idiot imams – from the age of 7 to 77! You and your family would have been better-off if the chief of the Congo had gone gooey over his Swedish counterpart.

It had only been about a month, we had learned, since the monkeys presented to our president had been deported from their equatorial rainforest home, two months at the most counting the time they’d spent waiting to be freighted from Congo to Algeria. Lounes had made me read the email from a primate protection charity recounting how the monkeys had been ‘kidnapped’ close to a Japanese research station, somewhere between the Congo River to the north and the Kasai River to the south. Ignoring the scientists’ protests, soldiers armed with tranquilliser guns had lured the bonobos by leaving bunches of bananas in the spot where the primatologists usually left dietary supplements. Some groggy monkeys had fallen out of a tree and died. Others had lain in the undergrowth for hours in agony. An old male had succumbed to a heart attack. The surviving anthropoids had discovered the unfortunate consequences of a revival of political affection between African despots.

Thus our new lodgers had never been in captivity before. I was growing quite familiar with the fits of anxiety and rage that seized them at certain times of the day, especially at dawn. Maybe at night they retreated into dreams of tender delousing sessions under the canopy of their native forests and hence found the return to reality when they woke up all the more cruel and unbearable?

These bloody primates were too like real people. And had I, the failed biologist, really dreamed of following in the great Pasteur’s footsteps throughout my adolescence only to resign myself to ending up a mere prison guard for near-humans? I sighed, unhappy that I could find nothing to laugh at in my exaggeration.

Sorry, Lucy. If it were in my power, I would open every cage in this miserable zoo. But, well, firstly I’d be out of a job and, secondly, what good would it do you to escape in this crazy country? You’d either get raped to death in the bowels of some police station or one of those fanatics of religious beheadings would tear you apart alive!

I tapped on my notebook. The female ape looked up as if she were listening to me.

You’re right not to believe me, my dear: human beings spend a lot of their time lying. It’s true – I was laughing at you, and that’s not good.

The word ‘lying’ reminded me of what Meriem had said about our daughter. I had a premonition that our discussion was going to be difficult because my sweet, stubborn daughter would probably tie herself up in knots of denial, and Meriem, then I, would get angry, first of all with Shehera and then with each other.

I was overcome with a faint sense of nostalgia for the time not so long ago when, as young parents, and close to tears, we had bent over the small creature we’d just brought back from the clinic. Curfew, bombings and massacres might well be the only tangible reality in Algeria, but in our little abode, Meriem, our still-wrinkled baby and I formed the happiest family in the world.

Even then, of course, I had a big hole in my soul – what Meriem called my almost biological cynicism – as well as the touch of craftiness needed to get by in Algiers somehow. In my defence, there was also the blissful love I felt for my wife. The moment I saw her, everything alive within me – my heart, my balls, my brain, my guts – was shaken to the core. I think that Meriem felt the same wonderful pain. In her more sarcastic moments, she would go on about our first meeting: An unexpected shock in this land of bombings – what could be more normal?

We sometimes forced a chuckle at how the history of our relationship seemed to mirror the ‘political’ almanac of Algeria. We first caught sight of each other during the great riots of October 1988; we fucked for the first time the night of the coup after the Islamists had won the December 1991 elections; and six months later we decided on a rushed wedding following the announcement of President Boudiaf’s assassination after his return from Moroccan exile to play the role of puppet for a bunch of potbellied generals. Maybe we were scared of having our throats slit or being blown up before either of us could do something with our lives.

We indeed took full advantage of those early years. Our discussions were fierce, but our tenderness turned out to be boundless, and our desire was often fuelled by the ludicrous places and times we endeavoured to satisfy it in. One evening, for example, we were on our way back from a dinner on the outskirts of Algiers. There was very little traffic because the curfew had been only partially lifted. It was raining and the journey was dreary. We couldn’t stand it anymore, so we turned off the road and drove down a dirt track along the side of a wheat field. Meriem had already stripped off on the back seat and I was doing likewise when an old 404 with its headlights on full appeared on the track, which the downpour had turned to mud. A whole family was squashed inside, probably local farmers on their way home. Seeing us in the nude, the patriarch in his chèche turban, his wife wrapped in her haik and their swarm of children were initially stunned, but this quickly changed to indignation.

How dare you? You’re on my land, you dogs!

The driver had got out of his car brandishing a club. Panicking, I started the engine while I fumbled with my trousers with my free hand. For a few terrifying seconds, the wheels span in the mud. The 404’s driver was banging on the boot of our car like a lunatic while simultaneously damning us, and any swine that might result from our depravity, to drown in the flaming faeces of hell. Meriem, paralysed with fear, made no move to get dressed. Eventually, with a screech of its battered gearbox, the car leapt forwards and we found ourselves driving like lunatics towards Algiers, squawking with laughter and relief, me with my dick out and her stark naked. Oh, Meriem…

Even as I noted down the alterations that needed to be made to the bonobos’ shelter, I could feel the questions "Were we still just as much in love or was our love getting bogged down in a pitiful mire of disenchantment?" sticking in my throat like fishbones.

Before… Now…

Hey Lucy, could you weave me a magic carpet to take me back to those wonderful times before our doubts?

Lucy turned her back on