Simon was buried in the Jewish cemetery. The whole village was in attendance, crowded around Émilie and her son. Émilie wore black and her face was hidden by a veil. She was determined to be dignified in her grief. She was flanked on either side by members of the Benyamin family from Río Salado and elsewhere. Simon’s mother sat on a chair, devastated, weeping, deaf to the whispers of her husband, an ageing, sickly man. Some rows back, Fabrice and his wife stood holding hands. Jean-Christophe was with the Rucillio clan, with Isabelle invisible in his shadow. I stood at the far end of the cemetery, behind everyone, as though I had already been banished.
After the ceremony was over, the crowd silently dispersed. Krimo helped Émilie and her son into a small car that the mayor had lent. The Rucillio family left. Jean-Christophe exchanged a brief word with Fabrice, then rushed off to join the rest of the family. Car doors slammed, engines droned, the cemetery slowly emptied. Only a group of militiamen and a few policemen remained around the grave, clearly devastated that they had let the tragedy occur. From a distance, Fabrice gave me a little wave. I had thought he might come over and comfort me; but he helped his wife into their car and without turning back, climbed in and drove off. When the car disappeared behind the cemetery wall, I realised that I was alone among the dead.
Émilie left Río Salado for Oran, but she never left my thoughts. I felt sad for her. Since no one had heard anything from Madame Cazenave, I could only guess at the depths of Émilie’s loneliness, of her grief. What would become of her? How would she start again in a city like Oran, surrounded by thousands of people she didn’t know? In the city, she would not find the compassion and the sympathy she had known in the village. There, relationships were based on self-interest, and a newcomer had to negotiate difficult hurdles in order to be accepted. Especially while a war was raging, one that grew more bitter with every passing day. The streets of Oran were dangerous; there were attacks, violent reprisals and kidnappings; every morning the citizens awoke to some fresh horror. I could not imagine how she would survive in the madness of that city, that war zone drenched in blood and tears, with a son to provide for, far from everything she knew.
In the village, everything had changed. The end-of-season ball was cancelled for fear that a bomb might turn the event into a tragedy. Muslims were no longer tolerated in the streets. They no longer had the right to leave the fields and the vineyards without permission. The day after Simon’s murder, the army launched a wide-ranging manhunt, combing Dhar el Menjel and the surrounding scrubland. Helicopters and planes shelled any suspect village. After four days and three nights, the soldiers returned to their barracks exhausted and empty-handed. Jaime Jiménez Sosa’s militia set up ambushes throughout the area, a tactic that eventually paid off. In their first ambush, they intercepted a group of fidayin on a supply mission for the rebels. They slaughtered the mules on the spot, burned the provisions, then drove the bullet-riddled bodies of the fidayin through the streets of Río Salado on a cart. Krimo enlisted with the harkis– the Algerian soldiers loyal to the French – came upon eleven rebels hiding out in a cave, lit a fire and asphyxiated them with the smoke. Emboldened by his feat, he later lured a whole squad of mujahideen into an ambush in which he killed seven and dragged two, badly wounded, back to the village square, where the crowd all but lynched them.
I did not dare go out any more.
There followed a period of calm.
I thought of Émilie constantly. I missed her. Sometimes I would imagine she was there with me and talk to her for hours. Not knowing where she was, what had become of her, tormented me. When I could bear it no longer, I went to see Krimo to ask if he could help me find her. He gave me a chilly reception. He was sitting in a rocking chair outside his shack, an ammunition belt strung across one shoulder, his rifle between his legs.
‘Vulture!’ he said. ‘She hasn’t even grieved for her husband and you’re already thinking about how to win her round.’
‘I have to talk to her.’
‘About what? She was pretty clear the other night. She doesn’t want anything to do with you.’
‘This is none of your business.’
‘Oh, but that’s where you’re wrong. Émilie is my business, and if you ever try to contact her, I’ll rip your throat out with my teeth.’
‘What did she tell you about me?’
‘She didn’t need to tell me anything. I was there when she told you to go to hell, and that’s enough for me.’
I had no hope of getting any information from the man.
For months I wandered the districts of Oran hoping to run into Émilie. I haunted the schools when class let out, but saw no sign of Michel or his mother among the parents. I hung around the stalls and the supermarkets, the gardens and the souk, but there was no sign of her.
A year to the day after Simon’s murder, when I was finally about to give up, I saw her. She was working in a bookshop. I could barely breathe. I went to the café across the road, took a table half hidden by a pillar and waited. At closing time, she left the bookshop and caught a tram from the stop at the end of the street. I didn’t dare get on the tram with her. I had seen her on a Saturday, so the whole of Sunday I was forced to kill time. Early on Monday morning, I went back to the café opposite the bookshop and sat at the same table. At nine a.m. Émilie arrived wearing a black trouser suit, her head covered with a scarf. My heart shrivelled in my chest like a sponge being wrung out. A thousand times I took my courage in both hands and set off to cross the road, but every time, the very thought of speaking to her seemed somehow indecent.
I don’t know how many times I walked past the bookshop and watched her serve a customer, climb a stepladder to get a book, ring something up on the till, rearrange the shelves, and still I did not dare push the door open. The simple fact that she was alive, that she seemed well, filled me with a vague but tangible joy. I was happy just to watch her live her life. I was afraid that if I came too close, she might disappear like a mirage. This went on for over a month. I spent little time at the pharmacy, leaving Germaine to cope as best she could. Often I would forget to phone to tell her I would not be home. I slept in a dingy fondouk so that I could be there, every day, watching Émilie from the café.
One evening, as the bookshop was about to close, I ventured from my hiding place, and, like a sleepwalker, crossed the road and found myself stepping through the door of the shop.
There were no customers, and the bookshop was almost in darkness. A fragile silence hovered over the shelves. My heart was beating fit to burst and I was sweating. The unlit lamp above my head was like a sword that might fall at any moment. I was seized by doubt: what was I doing here? Why was I determined to reopen old wounds? I gritted my teeth: I had to do this, I could not go on constantly brooding over the same questions, the same fears. A cold sweat clawed at my back like nails. I took a deep breath to try to expel the poison I could feel inside. Outside on the street, cars and pedestrians moved in a strange and intricate dance. The blare of car horns slashed at me like steel blades. I waited. Inside me, I heard a voice say: leave . . . I shook my head and the voice was still. Darkness unfurled, filling the shop, delicately silhouetting the towering piles of books . . .
‘Can I help you, monsieur?’
She was behind me. Fragile, ghostly, she had appeared out of the half-light just as she had on the night of the fire. A night she still wore about her, her black dress, black hair, black eyes bearing mute witness to a grief a year had done nothing to diminish. In the darkness, I had to peer to make her out. She was standing three feet away and I saw that she had changed, that her beauty had withered. She was a shadow of the woman she had been, a heartbroken widow who paid no attention to her appearance. Life had taken from her more than it could ever repay. I immediately realised my mistake. I was not welcome here. I was a knife in a wound. Her icy aloofness bewildered me and made me realise just how wrong I had been to think I could come here and make right something that I myself had shattered. And then there had been the word monsieur, peremptory, disarming, unendurable, hurling me into an abyss, wiping me from the face of the earth. I truly believed that she had survived that tragedy only so that she might hate me. She did not need to say it; I could read it in the blank, expressionless eyes, which repelled me, dared me to try to hold her gaze.