The Meursault Investigation by Kamel Daoud

Author:Kamel Daoud [Daoud, Kamel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-59051-752-9
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2015-11-10T05:00:00+00:00

VIII

I squeezed the trigger and fired twice. Two bullets. One in the belly, and the other in the neck. That makes seven all told, I thought at once, absurdly. (But the first five, the ones that killed Musa, had been fired twenty years earlier …)

Mama was behind me, and I could feel her eyes on my back like a hand pushing me, holding me upright, guiding my arm, slightly tilting my head at the moment when I took aim. The face of the man I’d just killed kept its look of surprise — big, round eyes and grotesquely contorted mouth. A dog barked in the distance. The lemon tree in the courtyard of our house trembled under the black, hot sky. My body was entirely rigid, as though frozen by a cramp. The butt of the gun was sticky with perspiration. It was night, but everything was clearly visible. Because of the luminous moon. It looked so close, you could have jumped up and touched it. The man was giving off his last drops of terror sweat. He’s going to sweat until he returns all his water to the earth, I said to myself, and then he’ll steep for a while and mingle with the mud. I began to imagine his death as a disintegration of elements. The monstrousness of my crime would vanish with them somehow. It was not a murder but a restitution. I also thought — even if it may seem odd for a kid like me — that he wasn’t a Muslim, and that therefore his death wasn’t forbidden. But that was a coward’s thought, and I knew it right away. I remember the look in his eyes. He wasn’t even accusing me, I don’t think, he was just staring at me the way you stare at an unexpected dead end. Mama was still behind me, and I could gauge her relief by her breathing, which calmed down and suddenly became very soft. Before, she’d done nothing but wheeze. (“Ever since Musa died,” a voice said to me.) The moon was looking on too, it too; the whole sky seemed to be nothing but moon. It had already begun to soothe the earth, and the damp heat was rapidly diminishing. The dog somewhere on the dark horizon started barking a second time, at length, and nearly roused me from the languor I’d fallen into. I found it ridiculous that a man could die so easily, that he could conclude our acquaintance with such a theatrical, almost comic collapse. My temples were throbbing from the deafening panic in my heart.

Mama made no move, but I knew she had just withdrawn her immense vigilance from the universe. She was packing her bags, on her way to meet her old age, which she’d finally earned. I knew it instinctively. I could feel the icy flesh in my right armpit, under the arm that had just destroyed the balance of things. “Maybe things are finally going to return to the way they were,” someone said.

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