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  When they don’t fear death, they fight like demons. Their trainer warned them of underestimating the jinn and urged the GIGN officers to take them seriously.

  As Raphael sat and watched the rebel devour sweets, he was consumed by a craving to rip the flesh off him with his bare hands, to uncover the jinni inside and tear it to pieces. If given the opportunity, he wouldn’t stab or shoot; he would plunge steely fingers into those soft muscles.

  Suddenly Sayfullah raced to the bathroom and vomited up everything he had swallowed, as if he were vomiting his very bowels.

  When he returned to the room he seemed at a total loss, unsure what to do about his captive or the situation in general. With no particular aim in mind he brought a carton of biscuits to Raphael, freed his left hand from its restraint, and stood watching him eat. At the same time, he was angered at being so nerveless he was feeding his enemy.

  “J’ai soif.” Raphael mimed drinking water while Sayfullah stood watching him impassively, reveling in his thirst, aware that he had probably vanquished his victim, this Western infidel. In an outburst of fury, Raphael flung the box of biscuits away from him; immediately Sayfullah responded with a series of violent kicks to his chest and thighs from his bare feet. With his free left hand, Raphael abruptly seized the attacking foot and launched Sayfullah into the air so that he landed on his back. Feverishly, Raphael turned his attention to the cables that bound him, and was on the brink of freeing himself when Sayfullah hurled himself upon him, yelping, “God curse you, you filthy infidel!”

  It was a losing battle between the half-bound French GIGN officer and the slim rebel, who wasn’t haunted by jinn, but by the will of death itself; his spine and muscles were accompanied by hundreds of others—the spines and muscles of the murdered comrades he had left behind.

  “I am nothing unless I am Sayfullah, the Sword of God, and I slice with the will of God,” Sayfullah panted, regaining the upper hand and viciously retightening the cables around his opponent’s wrists. “Try to escape again and I will throw you back into the hell pit you came from.”

  “You mad shit, you should be buried in those sewers with your cockroach friends!” the GIGN officer exploded in Arabic marked with a strong Algerian accent, much to Sayfullah’s surprise. Petrol had been poured onto Raphael’s hostility; he had felt the full insult of being called a filthy infidel.

  “I’ll starve you to death, dog, and I’ll feed you to Hell piece by piece,” Sayfullah said.

  “The police dogs will hunt you down soon, and I’ll enjoy watching them tear you limb from limb.”

  Verbal abuse gave Raphael a brutal pleasure. He felt his words sinking into the flesh of the infuriating rebel, leaving behind fissures impregnated with his hatred.

  Spitting in Raphael’s direction, Sayfullah headed for the stairs leading to the lower floors. Nervous, spasmodic movements revealed he was troubled in his mind and soul.

  He descended the stairs, examining every floor. Like most houses around the Grand Mosque, the house was made from volcanic rock, and it was illuminated by a subdued light that crept in from windows covered with wooden latticework. All the ancient wooden doors had been replaced with iron doors, which were firmly locked, effortlessly mocking Sayfullah’s desperate attempts to force them. Sweat was dripping from the rebel’s face when he was forced to go back to the roof terrace. He felt he was falling into the trap of that warped playroom; it was a crude and derisive incongruity, a total discord with the scene of death he had wasted no time in escaping.

  Hunger led Sayfullah to the kitchen connected to the playroom, where he was confronted with a farce: in all the drawers and on all the shelves, he found nothing but box after box of sweetened oatmeal for babies and high-fiber multi-seed Quaker Oats. He felt the insult to his comrades’ martyrdom when he gave in and prepared the porridge. Every spoonful deepened the pit buried inside him. He sat opposite Raphael and silently ate the bodies of his comrades. Without preamble, he surprised his adversary by offering him some, and it was accepted without hesitation. The French officer obediently ate a spoonful of porridge, then another, faithful to his GIGN training to survive at all costs.

  “I’m fattening you for the slaughter,” Sayfullah muttered, justifying this generous impulse to himself and his opponent in an attempt to avoid focusing on the other’s diabolical nakedness—the sinful nakedness that filled the room with hot, slick steam.

  Although fear gave him a mounting lust for murder, Raphael was aware of the unreality and weirdness of the scene around him. He attributed it to the effects of the gas and the blows to his head. There was something ambiguous, something he couldn’t explain in the body of his opponent who had deprived him of his metal armor. Was it the beating he had undergone at the hands of this nonentity, this skinny extremist? Or was it the humiliation he was savoring now, after years of moving through battlefields like an untouchable god, taking and bestowing life according to his will? Or was there an invisible force in this country of jinn and ghosts; something that shattered the armor surrounding his pride and stripped his ego of its grandeur? Raphael was deeply troubled; of all the emotions hatching inside him, terror was the most prominent. Human frailty was a betrayal of the image he had created for himself: he was a tank, a war machine with legs. With every passing minute, Raphael had the increasing and uncomfortable feeling he was a tortoise that had been stealthily and involuntarily pushed outside its steel shell.

  There was something in Sayfullah’s body and movements he couldn’t explain. It reminded him of his own body in its adolescence, before he joined the GIGN and surrendered his body to brutal training, bodybuilding exercises, and anabolic steroids, until the moment came when he incorporated his mother’s despotism and was able to kill the ghostly body of his father latent within him. Raphael’s body had thrown off its leanness; it bulged and swelled like a magical giant released from a bottle. He had succeeded in burying his skinny body so deeply it could never emerge, but now this Bedouin nonentity had come along and brought it out of its grave. It had been returned to life, and with it a temptation to give into the vulnerability he had denied for so long. Raphael felt like a modern Narcissus, falling in love once again with an old image of himself.

  Without realizing it, he was allowing something odd to weaken the killing mechanism constructed inside him by years of fighting on battlefields where people were worth no more than insects, where breaking a person’s neck held the same satisfaction as smoking a cigarette after a rich meal, and where a human body crushed beneath your boots was a signature on a picture drawn in blood. The course of his life had been driven by anger till this point, but toward whom, or on account of what, he didn’t know.

  With profound self-contempt, the two enemies seemed to be floating inside a surreal hallucination, in a slippery, emotional nakedness, in such a way that the world, which had baptized them in blood, didn’t touch them. Very gradually, their rhythm slowed, and they had no choice but to surrender to this snare, contemplating the world from above while they were separate from its laws and its restrictive templates.

  The insurgents finally surrendered, more than two weeks after the first attack on the mosque. Clouds of dusty, disheveled, bearded ghosts were flung into the shadows of a locked truck. They were consumed by lice and filth, by starvation from the long siege and by the rage of the open-mouthed bodies all around them. They heaved a sigh of relief to be leaving a hell of their own making. The houses surrounding the Grand Mosque watched intently and in silence; none of the remaining inhabitants dared to feel safe or break the curfew until it was announced officially that the siege was over. News of the insurgents’ surrender hadn’t spread through the city yet, and whenever a bird landed, children and adults started in shock, deeply disturbed by the bullets, sights, and memories of those terrifying weeks; many residents still expected to be felled by a crazed bullet from one of the snipers who had been hunting them for a fortnight.

  The courtyard of the Grand Mosque was sunk in total silence, spattered wi
th blood and body parts, and human limbs blocked the path of the attacking soldiers. Gas clouds hovered over the scene, protecting the troops in blue and khaki as they scoured the halls, corridors, cellars, and minarets of the Grand Mosque, purging them of the last pockets of resistance.

  The houses trembled from the influx of armored cars and tanks crawling along the roads. From peepholes and cracks in windows, eyes peered out onto a string of military trucks carrying the bodies of the dead, thrown into indiscriminate piles; they had not been covered with khaki canvas. The vehicles proceeded along al-Khalil Street then turned south to Bir Yakhour, where their cargo would be thrown into a mass grave and forcibly forgotten.

  Flocks of doves watched from the rooftops, unsure whether it was safe to resume flying over the Grand Mosque alongside the giant birds with metal rotors. Their memories still held images of bearded snipers in the minarets who had fired on every moving shadow.

  Presently, a group of families overcame their terror. They rushed to assist in cleaning up the mosque, eager to hurry the moment when the minarets would shower them with the call to prayer, rather than random bullets. However, most houses remained paralyzed by rumors that some of the rebels on the outskirts of the mosque had escaped. These rumors were corroborated by the gunfire that broke out in various districts of the city, the result of attempts to capture them.

  Day Three

  Sayfullah walked through the room barefoot, his face and arms shining from his ablutions for prayer. He glanced around, looking for a spot where he could pray. Raphael watched, seeing Sayfullah’s anxiety when he was unable to find a spot where he could escape seeing the girl who hunted him from the walls. Raphael closed his eyes, vanquished by the strong emotions swelling inside him. Growing rage was mixed with an attraction to the self he saw reflected in the mirror of that slim body. He was ashamed of admitting an intolerable need to squeeze and rend those arms, hairless and elegantly molded, and those long fingers, soft and as far from the fingers of a fighter as they could be; but despite their softness, they had left painful bruises on his body from their last struggle. The water from Sayfullah’s ablutions softly illuminated his delicate features, and there was something in his movements while praying that unsteadied and hypnotized Raphael. The humiliation Raphael’s body had endured, and the destruction of the steel shell that had protected him, had left him raw, and now he was in a state of excessive sensitivity; his senses were whetted to such a disorienting pitch that no movement or smell, not even the crawling of an ant, escaped him. His state of vigilance was painful.

  Sayfullah stood as if nailed to the floor. He became conscious of the dolls, which he had pushed into the background and forgotten about. Now he felt the outlines of their faces were slipping out from beneath the covers he had placed on them and peering at him. Plastic arms and legs began to raise their coverings and writhe lasciviously, with a sinuousness that was almost liquid, scattering the angels who had descended to witness and receive his prayers. The plastic nakedness filled him with horror, the more so as he felt the Devil in those malignant gyrations which mocked him and his attempts to be purified of death, to evoke God in this room so He could apportion the reward of that lost battle.

  Rapidly, he turned around so he could pray at the entrance of the room overlooking the terrace, offering his defenseless back as a target for the stares of the dolls and Raphael, which focused mockingly on his round backside. As Sayfullah performed his prostrations, his entire abdomen quivered, his blood rushed burning to his ears, and he lost his balance. He tumbled onto his hands and knees and the moment his forehead touched the ground, his dry eyelids exploded with scorching tears that blinded him as they fell onto the cold floor, and his limbs plunged into a long prostration, while he yearned for a hole or a grave in whose dust he could find peace.

  “Oh Lord, I am Your broken sword if You do not guide me with Your mercy. The Devil is filling me with doubts; God, do you see me fleeing from him? I am nothing but Your slave. I surrendered to Your will for us there, when You struck us with an earthquake in Your sacred house, and You were our witness when we fought to the last breath, and our hearts were in our throats and we looked into the eyes of Azrael the angel of death. I ran away so I could continue fighting, and here I am, in Your hands, but I am too weak for this test. It is beyond any test You sent me before.”

  Something bombarded Raphael’s heart when he caught Sayfullah’s faint wail. He could hear the explosion in senses that for years he had thought impregnable, incapable of being moved or softened. The sight of Sayfullah squatting on his prayer mat made Raphael quiver uncontrollably. He had a vision not of Sayfullah’s body, but of his own, Raphael’s, squatting in exactly that position while he was mounted by countless destructive human monsters. Long-repressed memories escaped from the bottle where he had imprisoned them all these years, and here he was, confronting the incident that had occurred during the second month of the hellish exercise he had embarked on in order to join the GIGN forces. For two months they had driven him beyond the limit of endurance; for two months, which lasted an eternity, he had been tempted to throw himself into the path of a stray bullet or an exploding bomb so the torture would end. Inevitably, his trainers caught the scent of his desperation, and it pushed them to ensnare him in even more violence so he would be driven to exceed his capabilities. It had happened during a survival exercise in the wild, when they were flown to the rainforests of Madagascar. Each of them was left to battle nature and find a way to survive. Raphael had found himself in a lost world, haunted by fabled creatures and turbulent conditions. This primitive theater had been carefully selected to pluck out the last roots of gentleness and humanity hidden within them, on both a physical and a psychological level.

  Raphael had hardly jumped out in his parachute when he was swept away by a tropical storm and flung thousands of feet down a precipice into the flooded rainforests. Caverns ran underground where sunlight couldn’t penetrate. Even if there had been light, Raphael wouldn’t have been able to see; his senses were dulled after hours spent wandering through intersecting caves filled with darkness and damp, foul-smelling algae, and calcified rats. A hostile, implacable world snatched him up and he plunged deeper and deeper until he finally hit the bottom, shackled by mud and tree bark and creatures it was impossible to imagine.

  Raphael stumbled on, trying to discover a path, any path, but he couldn’t get far or even follow his compass. Every piece of equipment he was carrying proved ineffectual in his hands; he had fallen victim to his inner lack of direction. He was like an insect in the face of the forest of never-ending trees and rivers that suddenly gushed forth and then dried up, and vicious traps that multiplied all around him. Numb, Raphael curled up under a mass of roots that had grown into a sort of canopy, and he lit a sluggish fire that emitted no light or warmth and only succeeded in lengthening the threatening shadows all around. He didn’t dare to move as his shadow bulged and spilled over everything, in every direction. Wherever he turned there was nothing but his own self, lying in wait, engorged and attracting the endless monsters who roamed this island. Raphael couldn’t lie down. Everything was slipping under his feet; the earth was covered with a carpet of lizards like miniature omens of misfortune, and over his head hung a bower of boas, of every snake from the seven continents, hissing and twining and staring at him. He didn’t dare leave the canopy; all around his refuge he had been able to hear the bellowing of that mythical bull which moved relentlessly, fast as lightning, devouring everything in its path. Those myths provoked none of the mockery now that they had in the training programs. He and his comrades had laughed at those beings, those imaginary creatures that had risen from the heads of the primitive and naive Malagasy, but in these lethal forests those myths were more real and dangerous than the sophisticated weapons on his back.

  An age seemed to pass while Raphael hoped the forest would retreat and leave him alone to rot—or that all its demons would descend on him and rip him apart. He was in the perfect place to giv
e up and die, but the wait became more oppressive than dying itself. He had to move on through this nonexistence. Sometimes at a crawl, sometimes at a blind gallop, he began to push through cavities and hollows that contained no distinguishing features other than their skin-flaying humidity. It was difficult to determine whether it was night or day as sunlight couldn’t reach the bottom of the trees, and Raphael spent days in the several caves he came across, letting his body slip from one humid womb to another even more dank and dark. Bladelike plants left deep wounds in his aching body, and once he turned away from a human corpse that had been dispatched to his pit to rot. As he walked, burdened with revulsion and despair, some ghost came between him and the discovery of a way out of this hell. Things had lost all meaning; the lines and the knowledge of the maps he carried were useless. He began to be convinced that all human life had vanished, everything had drowned in the darkness, nothing was left but ghosts hatched out of the nothingness that dug into the wounds he had unknowingly buried since childhood. He sat in the undergrowth and probed the scars made by his father’s suffering, itself caused by his mother’s repeated betrayals. He plunged into the depths of his father’s despair; the same despair that had possessed him as an adolescent and driven him to join the army with the aim of taking revenge on life in general. His father’s anguish was infinite and it ate away at Raphael in the same way bones are crumbled by humidity, so that he was no longer sure how much time he had spent on this island. Minutes? Hours? An age? There was no time of any kind here, nor any will to go on. He didn’t care about time. All his attention was concentrated in finding a ray of light, any light, even if it was the light of death, but he kept roaming through a nihilistic slice of pitch blackness. Minutes swelled into hours without noticeable alteration, like a fat black scorpion hiding from view.