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  The soldier orders me to follow him. I’m led to a tent where a woman sits in front of a computer protected by a sheath of khaki cloth. Even this machine can’t resist the desert!

  “Elohim, your nationality?” “My country no longer exists. I don’t have papers.” “When did you come here?” “A while ago.” “Where do you live?” “I move from place to place. I stay in one place only a couple of days.” “Without papers?” “There’s only sand. Walls of sand. I go from west to east, from north to south.” “Have you met or associated with terrorists? Have you spoken to them?” “Yes.” “Where?” “Everyone in this country is a terrorist. Even me. I walk the open road.” “Where did you do your training?” “I’ve had none. I told you I walk the open road, I enjoy living like this. Everyone here walks.” “For what purpose?” “I don’t understand your question.” “Where are you walking?” “From west to east, north to south, it all depends. I walk from one place to another. Why?” “Have you attacked others?” “No.” “Why did you say you’re a terrorist?” “I’m your prisoner. I was walking when you arrested me. If you arrest us, me and everyone else here, it’s because we’re in your way. Whoever gets in your way becomes your prisoner. I’m not a soldier, not a combatant, and you arrested me, and so it follows that you think I’m a terrorist. How could I say yes to that? I’m not a soldier like you. You get in my way. I walk, but you arrest me. You get in my way. I’ve always walked here, and you come, and you arrest me. I walk, and so I’m in your way. You get in my way because I know that your presence spells the end to my walking. Your presence here makes me a woman who will no longer walk. I don’t want papers. Or an identity. That would justify your conquests. No, I don’t want anything to with that principle. It’s what they teach you in your military academies. Document, write down, note, identify the other. You’re sick. Sick from hunting down others. Sick from surviving, sick from your ignorance, sick from being you and having your illnesses, sick from your cures, from your pills, from your drugs, from your heavy burden, from your stupid forced feeding, from your stupid games. I know you. I know what you’ve done. I don’t care anymore about your conquests. You don’t think that we can follow you. Do you really believe in what you’re doing? Why don’t you say something? You’re just a tool. A site manager of a shameful cause. You haven’t won anything yet. Your contract will run out. It’s a job they sell you by calling it patriotic. Your future comes at this price. You have to pay first. The people paying you refuse to die in your place. In their heart of hearts, they know their ambitions are vile. Do you think they’re lying in their feather beds thinking about this horror? They know it’s horror. They’ve traded in their righteousness for this demonic undertaking. ‘The apocalypse awaits us all,’ they say to us, thinking they’re the real sons of Noah. Crazy, we’re crazy, they’ve made us crazy, and only they’ll be saved. It’s nameless. It’s the true face of the country that pays you. It’s their culture. Their culture ratcheted up to the highest degree of exploitation. You’re the tool of a mechanical force that destroys people. You belong to a crazy race. First you killed people in the thousands. You chased them from their plains. You killed off the people who didn’t believe in property and war. It never crossed their minds that one could own the earth. Never. So how could they not have been defeated? After killing them, you took the land for yourself. You took what they regarded as inviolable. A land that belongs to no one and to all. A land you had to learn how to give back once having conquered it. You destroyed that intelligence. Not only did you kill them, but you also destroyed the only idea, the only logic for humans on earth. We don’t own it. Are you listening? We don’t own it! And now because of you it’s rotten to the bone. And wherever you go, you poison it. Your sick children, your anonymous vulgarity, your moral stupidity, your arrogance, your mouth of lies, your pollution disgusts me. You don’t eat, no, you don’t graze, you’re a special kind of carnivore, more powerful than the herbivorous dinosaurs that could decimate a forest. By your existence alone, you could chase despair from the world. But what do you do? How do you live?”

  I lose track of what I’m saying. I’m exhausted from standing. A person can’t walk in a country at war. I’m exhausted from all they’ve made me endure since they started hunting me down.

  “Can you please uncuff me? I can’t speak anymore.” “You’re not from here. People from here don’t think like you. They’re scared. They don’t talk.” “I’m the one who’s scared. Not them. They don’t trust you. They don’t talk to you. You’re an abomination in their eyes. An abomination. Do you understand? Me, I’m scared. I don’t have their conviction.” “What’re you doing here?”

  I don’t reply.

  The soldier behind me orders me to stand up straight to have my photo taken. I turn toward him. Face forward: one photo. Right profile: one photo. Left profile: one photo. Another soldier uncuffs me. I rub my wrists. My shoulders feel heavy. I try to ignore their pain. I bring my arms to my sides, and I collapse onto a stool. I put my hands on my legs. This lasts just several seconds. The soldier takes my right hand. Thumb, index finger, middle finger, ring finger, pinkie. He takes my left hand. Each finger is pressed into blue ink and then upon the paper. He takes my hands again. He puts them behind my back and secures the cuffs again. He takes me back to the other female prisoners. I walk fifty meters then sit down.

  Because there’s no wall to lean against, I let my left side fall to the sand. I stretch out, my hands cuffed behind me, my legs in the fetal position, I turn my back on the other prisoners. My shoulder hurts. I would like to put the palm of my hand beneath my head for a pillow. I tell myself to forget the pain. And to sleep. To sleep in the broad daylight, beneath the sun. I close my eyes. I can hear only the blades of the murdering machines. I fall asleep listening to my stomach growl. I’m hungry.

  —

  I NEVER HAD A CHILD. If my child looked for me, he wouldn’t know where to find me. And I would have abandoned him to those who secretly fear me. I would say, “Forget me. Forget that I ever existed. They’ll tell you things about me that I never knew, and you’ll be wrong to believe them. Forget that I ever existed. Don’t go looking for what I wanted. You’ll die. Stay on the side of the strongest. Don’t keep any secrets. They’ll come back to haunt you. Forget. Try to still yourself, still even your breath. That which rules now doesn’t acknowledge trembling or doubt. Don’t ask where you’re from. You may have to commit crimes. Tell yourself that you’re with them. That you’re one of them.” I would have given the baby another name. Not mine. But would that have saved him? He would have had to prove that he was more zealous, proud, and competitive than anyone else. But I wouldn’t have been able to change his face. I never had a child.

  In Saudia Arabia, well before Islam, the polytheists called the God of the Jews and of the Christians “Rahman,” by which they meant The Merciful. This name, which is also mine, spread. It’s said that in Hebrew this word’s root means “form.”

  To my child, I would have liked to say, “There is only one true God, and he leads us all to Mount Sinai. You don’t belong to this God’s people. But you’ll respect his people more than any other. You’ll live your life in such a way that you’ll never forget that it’s his history and his uniqueness that lives in you.”

  I never had a child.

  I WAKE UP IN THE night. The silence is real. I look at the other female prisoners, they aren’t asleep either. Some lie down, others are seated, but their eyes are open. I always liked their eyes. Their moist, black eyes that can see at night as well as during the day. What’s the desert? I couldn’t get through a night without a shelter. But they sleep without protection. At one point, I fell in with others on the open road. Those whose paths you cross, those whose route you share, you fall in together. It’s a rule, a custom of walking in the desert. When the road is the same, you go it together.

  “Elohim, get up.”

  The flashlight shines in my eyes. It’s night. I was lost in thought. I follow the
female soldier to a small shack of corrugated tin. I enter. I sit down on a soft bed. There’s a hole in the ceiling through which the starry night is visible. I close one eye and use the other as a telescope to get through what I have to get through. I’m under arrest. “Elohim. That’s not your name,” the woman says, closing the door.

  ONE NIGHT, THREE SOLDIERS COME in. Two take my arms. I don’t know how much time passes. I wake up tied inside the hull of a military transport plane. There’s a flag draped over several coffins. There are corpses inside. They are being returned home with dignity.

  I leave the plane with my eyes blindfolded. I don’t know what they did with the coffins. I’m put into a vehicle. It must be an open-air vehicle, I feel the wind on my face. Then I’m walked across wooden planks, a soldier holding my arms. He uncuffs me and pushes me forward. I hear a door close. I remove my blindfold. I’m again in a cell. The same cell. Exactly the same. There’s a hole in the ceiling. I wait for night, wondering whether I’ll see the same starry sky. There’s a bar of soap and a rag on the sink. On the table, there’s paper and some pencils. Next to these, the Quran.

  I drink water. Then I change clothes. I wash up. I’m hungry. I take the water bottle. I drink. I stretch out on the bed.

  I don’t recognize a single constellation.

  “YOUR NAME! I KNOW YOUR name!” An officer raises the shack’s latch, the murderer who brings food and things. “I know your name.” I go up to the door. “What did you do with your papers? Your French papers? Who did you give them to?” I’m not able to answer. I finally understand that I’m there because I’m accused of treason. “Who did you give your identity to?” “What do you want from me?” “That you die.” I have a name. A name. Since then I’ve been waiting for them to take me.

  I dedicate this text to three of the disappeared—to Mrs. Boulanger who taught me to read, to Mr. Dellys who taught me dignity, and to Anne-Marie Vuilletet who taught me why sometimes betrayal is necessary.

  The Algerian-born academic and author ZAHIA RAHMANI is one of France’s leading art historians and writers of fiction, memoirs, and cultural criticism. She is the author of a literary trilogy dedicated to contemporary figures of so-called banished people: Moze (Sabine Wespieser Editions, 2003); “Muslim”: A Novel (Deep Vellum, 2019); and France, Story of Childhood (Sabine Wespieser Editions, 2006). The U.S. edition of France, Story of Childhood was published by Yale University Press in 2016. The French Ministry of Culture named her Chevalier of Arts and Letters and as a member of the College of Diversity. As an art historian, Rahmani is director of the research program on art and globalization at the French National Institute of the History of Art (INHA), an interdisciplinary program that focuses on contemporary art practices in a globalized world and links many networks in France and abroad. She is the founder and director of INHA’s ambitious Interactive Bibliographic Database on the globalization of art, its history, and its theoretical impact. Rahmani is a member of the Global Visual Cultures Academic Committee, and she also created the graduate research program at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts, which she directed from 1999-2002. Her multiyear international research project at the INHA in Paris and Marseille culminated in Made in Algeria: Genealogy of a Territory, a book and current exhibition of colonial cartography, high and popular visual culture, and contemporary art at the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations (MuCEM), located in Marseille.

  MATT REECK is a poet and translator from the French, Urdu, Hindi, and Korean. He is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to India, and fellowships from the NEA, the PEN Foundation, and the American Institute of Indian Studies. He has translated from the Urdu of Saadat Hasan Manto, Bombay Stories (Random House India, 2012; Vintage Classics UK & US, 2014); and Mushtaq Ahmed Yousufi, Mirages of the Mind (Vintage India, 2014; New Directions, 2015). His translations from the French include Abdelkébir Khatibi’s Class Warrior—Taoist Style (Wesleyan University Press, 2017) and Patrick Chamoiseau’s French Guiana—Memory Traces of the Penal Colony (Wesleyan University Press, 2019). He earned his PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of California Los Angeles.

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