5

Ingenuous Preliminaries

RAFIK NASSIRI’S LONGSTANDING FASCINATION WITH his own career as a brilliant detective ebbed away as he grumpily climbed the stairs to the top floor, heading to the office of the police commissioner. Under his arm he carried a file of inconsequential documents. You’re judged by results and in this case the mission was to track down the wanted man. But Rafik—and he alone—had come back empty-handed. This was the third time in ten days he had been summoned to say what progress he had made in the case. Now he had started to have doubts even about the wanted man’s name and, as he knocked on the door, he began to wonder if the man ever existed in the first place. Was his boss playing games with him? And why might they be targeting him? He had been obedient and hardworking for twenty years, he was as sharp as a trained dog, and he had no enemies worth mentioning, just people with whom he might have had passing disagreements.

The commissioner returned his greeting. “I hope you’ve found him, or at least found out where he’s gone,” he added. “We have to tell them something. In the end we’re not looking for a ghost,” he continued, but he sounded like he expected a disappointing response.

Rafik didn’t utter a word. He didn’t intend to apologize profusely to justify his failure. The commissioner, Abdel Ouahab Chaal, waited for him to say something but was then distracted by a phone call, which alleviated the awkwardness for the minutes he was talking. Then he went back to looking at the detective.

“Sir, I found myself in an unprecedented situation and I’m sorry to say the man couldn’t be found,” said Rafik.

After an unexpected calm, the commissioner grew agitated again. He lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out slowly and methodically, like someone in the habit of setting the tempo for everything. The detective repeated what he had said in another way, this time with the insistence of someone who wants to emphasize the exceptional nature of the situation.

“There’s no trace of him, sir. Or, to be more precise, he’s a man whose tracks have been completely obliterated. He might exist, but he’s no one,” he said. “What else can I say?” he continued after a quick pause. “He might have existed but in effect he doesn’t exist now.”

The commissioner angrily dismissed what he had heard. He was a man accustomed to obedience and tangible results, a man who hated inconsistencies and riddles that couldn’t be solved. “Might he have died?” he said in bewilderment. “Might he have been kidnapped? Killed himself and his body decomposed like a dog that’s died without anyone noticing? What’s his story and where did this ‘no one’ disappear to?”

The detective started to go into detail, avoiding looking directly into the commissioner’s eyes. In the neighborhood where the wanted man was supposed to be living, the residents had given contradictory statements. They knew him and they didn’t know him. They gave irreconcilable accounts of his name and his appearance. Everyone knew him and no one knew him. He was an introvert who avoided everyone and sometimes wasn’t seen for weeks. The lights at his apartment had been on but there was no noise inside. The owner, the dead man, had been elderly and infirm, and he had one son who had emigrated to Germany. It was the son who had rented the apartment without a contract.

“When we inspected the apartment, it was clean and tidy. There were some food leftovers on a small table, a bag of rice, a lighter, an ashtray, and some other insignificant things dispersed around the bedroom, including an empty perfume bottle. The other rooms were completely unfurnished and closed up. The strange thing is that we didn’t find any fingerprints, as if the person living there had had their fingers cut off. I went to ask a shopkeeper nearby, and then the owner of a nearby café, and they both said they had seen him a few times, but the puzzling thing was that they were speaking about different people.”

The detective stopped and looked deep into the commissioner’s eyes to find out if he should continue. The man gave him no sign, so he continued: “The problem is we don’t have a recent picture of him, just an old one from when he was a teenager and a very worn-out copy from an ID card that expired eight years ago, and the file for that in the archives went missing when the municipality where he was registered was moving to its new headquarters. Commissioner, sir, I’ve often wondered if he goes around in disguise sometimes because, according to those who’ve described him, he once appeared as a man in his seventies with gray hair and wearing thick glasses, and limping slightly, and another time as a man in his forties, healthy but with a haggard face, like someone with a long history of misfortune. And when we asked other government departments whether he appeared on their lists of suspects they said he didn’t. There’s no passport in his name and the border police say no one by that name has left the country or entered the country in the last ten years. In the Interior Ministry they told us there are dozens of people with the same name and with similar particulars.”

“Ah, his particulars?”

“That’s just about it, sir.”

“That’s nothing, comrade. You lot have been playing around.”

“There’s no name in the courts, nor in the lists of missing people. There’s no trace of him in the hospitals, or even in the death certificates or burial permits.”

He stopped a while, got his breath back and looked up at the commissioner.

“You might make fun of me if I told you how much trouble this guy gave me making inquiries after him,” Rafik added.

“What?”

The detective wiped his forehead and, despite his embarrassment, told the commissioner he had gone to the imam of the Takoua mosque in the neighborhood and asked about the man. The imam hadn’t told him anything definite, so he had asked if the djinn ever kidnap people. Abdel Ouahab Chaal let out a prolonged laugh and slammed his fist down on his desk. “Stop. I’m not in the mood to laugh. Has some devil possessed him and flown off with his body? Has he been roaming around the streets and towns like a dervish? Who is he and where is he?”

The detective asked to take his leave, said goodbye, and left. But first he asked to be relieved of his assignment to track down this particular man. Detectives hate reaching a dead end. Their job is to solve mysteries and he had failed. He insisted on his request even after he was warned it might damage his stellar career as a detective. He went down the stairs, and at the gate he stopped and carefully examined all the people walking past him. In each of them he saw something of this Nobody that they had described to him and that he hadn’t been able to find. Each of them had something of him and this Nobody could be a part of all those he saw walking past, as if he had melted into the multitude.

The commissioner had known Rafik a long time. The detective clearly didn’t have enough enthusiasm to bring about a breakthrough in the case, so he decided to give him a break for a while, in the hope that he’d do better when he came back. The detective had started losing enthusiasm for his work anyway, after receiving threats in connection with a real estate corruption case. The investigation into that case had been suspended and finally abandoned. The country was riddled with corruption and that was no secret. Although the detective knew about the corruption, he did feel he had been stabbed in the back and that he was now without protection. The heart isn’t a machine that never tires and he had lived through many similar cases, even if they hadn’t reached the stage of him being physically threatened. But this time he’d had his fill. He’d told the commissioner he had decided to put in a request for early retirement, or even to submit his resignation and, if that was rejected, to neglect his job so seriously that he would be dismissed for abandoning his duty. Running away is the strategy chosen by cowards. No one had ever accused him of that, although people were now so demoralized that there was no longer any point in fighting for anything. Life is difficult and being forced to obey is painful and sometimes humiliating. He understood all that and he was well aware that doing one’s duty has its limits for someone who wants to retain his dignity. Colleagues from the same intake as him had grown rich from the job. They had come to terms with the decadence, and when they found it was impossible to prevent evildoing, they thought it would be stupid not to take advantage of it. He had continued to swim against the tide. But everything has its limits. The obligation to do one’s duty comes to an end when the rule of law starts to break down. To deter the big chiefs it takes more than one enthusiastic officer or an honest judge who knows the penal code by heart.

He liked to take on the challenge of solving big puzzles. That’s why the commissioner had banked on him and been unusually patient with him. He thought about the case for two days and couldn’t make up his mind. It was a simple case but puzzling, and it might not deserve any special attention. First impressions are dangerous and a detective can become trapped or misled by them. Something was making him uneasy. What did it mean when he couldn’t find any lead to track down a man who had lived in a rough neighborhood and then disappeared without a trace, when the most he had managed to glean, after going back and forth, was a few contradictory statements? He reckoned he must be dealing with an extraordinary man who had tricked everyone. Who had killed the old man? And was he really murdered? The forensic pathologist said that Suleiman Bennaoui, eighty-seven years old, had probably died of a heart attack four days before he was found. In his report he wrote that there were no signs of violence on the body. Rafik had learned from previous experiences not to take the word of a forensic pathologist as indisputable, so he took the report simply as one element that might give one hypothesis more weight than another.

On a cloudy Thursday morning in January, an informer told the police that an old man had died in his apartment on the top floor of the fourth building to the right from the entrance to the One Hundred Houses area near the railway station in Rouïba. The putrid smell had caught the attention of the neighbors and the front door of the apartment was unlocked, so they went in and saw that their neighbor’s dead body had turned dark blue and started to decompose. The dead man was found lying on a long sofa. The television in front of him was broadcasting a recitation from the Quran and a tube attached to an empty bag of solution was still inserted in his arm. The deceased, Suleiman Bennaoui, was from Bordj Menaïel and had fought in the War of Independence. He had one son called Mourad and no one knew why he had left him and gone off. Mourad had been living in the apartment next door to his father’s, probably renting it cheaply from the owner, a man who worked for a company in the south and had had many problems with the neighbors. He had brought women to the apartment and on one occasion the women and children ganged up on him and besieged him until the police came. He left in disgrace and never went back. Mourad got engaged to one of his relatives and a week before they were due to be married, he broke off the engagement, and disappeared three months later. No one had seen him since.

Suleiman Bennaoui continued to pray in the mosque until about a year ago, when he was incapacitated by disease and stayed at home. He was friendly with everyone and was not known to have any enemies or to have done anything that might make anyone seek revenge in any way. There was nothing suspicious about the state of the apartment. His papers were untouched and the crime certainly had nothing to do with theft, although no money was found at the scene. Rafik had not decided whether the old man’s death resulted from a crime and his main interest was to find the young man who had lived with him for the last months of his life. Someone said this young man had last been seen a week earlier, that is three days before the death, while the café owner there, who was known as Uncle Mubarak, said he had been away in the days before the old man’s death and did not know anything. The informer assigned to the station district, who was meant to be the government’s eyes and ears but in this case was struck blind, had nothing to say. He was apparently unaware of what was going on around him. When Rafik saw Suleiman Bennaoui’s body, he had the impression the man had been lucky to live as long as he had. He was emaciated, his cheekbones protruded, and he should probably have died several times over already. In the living room, where he was found, there was a photograph of him on the wall, in military uniform with a gun, standing next to some other people. Another picture on the wall opposite showed him with bushy eyebrows and a full, healthy face. A manly mustache was his most distinctive feature.

The neighbors said that the young man who looked after him was a friend of Mourad’s, or a relative of theirs who had come from far away. Others said that the old man lived on his own and they hadn’t seen anyone go into or come out of his apartment. The woman who used to clean for them had moved from her shanty home a while ago. Her husband had died in a small metalwork factory and, since he had no insurance, she received no compensation. She adapted to her new circumstances by working in the home of Uncle Suleiman, as she called him. Rafik found out her name was Saadia by consulting the local authority’s lists of rehoused people, and he asked her about the young man and if he might have killed Suleiman. Saadia said that it was inconceivable and that he was a nice person. He used to complain about looking after him, but he never abandoned him. He had taken him to the hospital when his condition deteriorated. She paused a while and seemed to be really sad about the old man. Then she said the young man was like God’s gift to Suleiman. He looked after the old man as a son should look after his father, or even better. The poor old man was ill and had been expected to die any day. Asked about the young man’s name, she said Suleiman used to call him Mourad but she didn’t always see him and she exchanged words with him only a few times. Saadia struck him as honest and extremely objective, although she didn’t hide her sympathy for the mysterious young man. She was too young to be a mother to him. Everything was possible, and she would definitely recognize him easily if she saw him again or if she saw a picture of him. Saadia had looked after everything in the old man’s house and what she said about having only a few meetings with him was not entirely truthful. She wanted to avoid being dragged into a complicated criminal investigation. Rafik had assumed that the mysterious man was Mourad himself and that he had run away out of shock at his father’s death or for some other reason. But he ruled out that assumption when he heard her account of events, and when the border police later confirmed that the man called Mourad Bennaoui was abroad.

Mourad’s name appeared on the list of travelers leaving the country and Rafik looked in vain for a way to tell him that his father had died. He had left for Germany a year earlier, abandoning his father right at the end of his life—behavior that might look quite deplorable to someone who has the time and leisure to feel surprised at everything new that humans come up with. With maternal compassion, the government took care of burying the old man. The neighbors gathered around in shock and children were kept away from the scene while the Protection Civile people moved the decomposing corpse to the hospital. A correspondent from one of the TV channels was there, looking for a scoop. He seemed eager, but with his modest experience he was unable to obtain a single important statement. In the evening some viewers gave the news minimal attention when it appeared on a streamer at the bottom of the screen during an advert for ِAlways sanitary pads. The forensic pathologist had had a sleepless night—too much attention to detail is a strain on the heart, and no report he had written had ever brought anyone back to life, so the gains to be expected from his examination of the body were very limited. The report went to some department and was then buried in the archives, just as the person it was written about would be buried. In the morning the body was brought back to the neighborhood in a coffin. In the hospital they washed and shrouded the corpse at government expense. At the funeral in the Takoua mosque, Cheikh Hassan Daffaf said prayers for him with a heart that was only half reverent. He was grateful for the death because it eliminated a possible witness, may God protect humankind. As the coffin lay in front of him, a blue haze clouded his vision, and in his heart he felt a mixture of nostalgia and desire. He tried but failed to internalize an insincere sense of repentance. Time can solve anything and a clean record requires that no flaws are visible. Where had that man gone, the one whose name he didn’t know? He hoped he would disappear forever, that he would vanish into thin air and remain a phantasm, as he had been to him when he met him. A clean record that would clear the way to glory for him. He was not the kind of person who sought worldly advantage at the expense of his religion, but it is virtuous to strive for high office. He had been nominated for the position of dean of the city’s imams and he was going to move to the city’s biggest mosque. The old dean had died and Cheikh Hassan was the man best placed to succeed him. The security agencies had recommended him and were grateful for his cooperation, and his path seemed to be clear. Some well-meaning neighbors had asked an itinerant merchant from Bordj Menaïel to tell the old man’s relatives of his death, if he still had any family left in his hometown. It was a futile effort. The old man had lived far away and no one remembered him. Twenty men or less took part in the funeral procession. Two of them had volunteered to dig the grave and they were helped by two workers from the municipality. Since he had fought in the War of Independence, he deserved to be spared any further humiliation and his body should not remain a source of permanent revulsion. It wasn’t a happy ending in any case. Dying alone, with no one to shed a tear of sadness, is not something he could boast about to the heavenly hosts. But he finally found a grave, and the old saying proved true: “No one remains without a grave forever.”

The cemetery was guarded by Djelal, a man who managed to live on only one quarter of his senses. Life is crazy and cannot bear too much awareness. The guard had in fact visited Mourad’s apartment not so long ago. Silence is a strong shield, the government is inquisitive by nature and might continue to investigate, and everyone would rather do without being questioned. From early childhood he had heard people call him Bleary Eyes. But his birth certificate gave another name, one he felt had nothing to do with him. People aren’t even free to choose the names they like, he once said to his only friend, Kada, the police informer who was known to everyone living in the station district. As if his name was the most serious problem he faced in life. He lived his life ignored, in a hut in the cemetery, where he worked and lived permanently, in perfect harmony with the dead. Sometimes he visited his mother and brothers, spent generously on them, and then came back to play dominoes with young men till late at night. His work gave him a chance to take symbolic revenge. Not far from the cemetery there were rich people living in villas. They went out in their cars every morning to make more money and came home late at night after spending the evenings with their mistresses, telling them that money doesn’t bring happiness. Their well-groomed daughters headed to school and their scowling wives went on spending sprees to forget how tedious and unpleasant it was to live in the company of their unfaithful husbands. And he just sat at the cemetery gate seeing how their lives progressed smoothly while for him time was frozen and he waited to join those lying at rest inside the cemetery. Only when they died was he allowed to be master over them. The ground swallowed them up, everyone forgot them, and then they were at his mercy. When he was half-conscious, he could do deals if he wanted and make money from the remains of their bodies, which had themselves thrived on ill-gotten gains. The biggest cemetery in Rouïba, where there are factories and villas, was the scene for another act of revenge—the grave-robbing that he carried out, unknown to anyone else. He had no score to settle with the people buried and no reason to seek revenge, whatever their rank in life might have been. He felt a little sad for them. He knew from the number of mourners what kind of lives they had led, and what status they had among the mourners.

Some of the local people—the café owner and a group of his friends, including Cheikh Hassan Daffaf—misled the investigation, either deliberately or not, in that they gave conflicting testimony and smiled inanely, and the damned informer assigned to the neighborhood didn’t tell the detective anything. In their statements they each gave Rafik reason to believe that someone else among them might be the missing man, and it looked like they were making fun of him. A detective doesn’t have to believe everything he’s told, and he saw this as merely an incidental distraction, but in the end he came up with almost nothing anyway. The mystery man had been there but there was no trace he’d been there. Was it conceivable that they didn’t even know the man’s name? Or that they couldn’t agree on what he looked like or that they gave ridiculously varying estimates of his age? He went back and lay on his bed till nighttime. In the morning he had to brief the commissioner on the latest developments, but what developments were there? There was no solid information. He opened the window and a cold breeze blew in. He thought he should stop deceiving himself. This endless pursuit of new secrets to uncover and being up to his ears in work. For what? He didn’t have anyone waiting for him in the evening and he spent every weekend as insubstantial as the wind, as hollow as a reed. He worked himself to death in order to forget he was alone and deprived in a way that might be unprecedented. Now he had a chance to rest. He hadn’t taken his annual vacation for three years, but now he should. That was the conversation he had with himself every night. He thought over his life at length, then went to sleep, woke up early in the morning, and headed off to work as if all the advice he had given himself was just hot air. Hoda was waiting for him but he was reluctant to accept that she was his future, as if he were being dragged to his death. He closed the window, had a short nap, and then went back to thinking. His sympathy for the old man was straightforward and superficial: what had caught his interest was the young man who had lived with the old man until his death. It wasn’t exactly solving a hypothetical crime that preoccupied him. It was where the young man had come from, where he had gone, and how everyone had come to see him as no one.