Children of War Read Free Page A

Roma origins. His real name was Jacques Sadna and he came from the Camargue, the vast wetlands at the delta of the River Rhônewhere gypsies had settled for centuries and raised their famous horses. Zigi had been a corporal, like Bruno, when they first served together in the Ivory Coast and each had been promoted sergeant during some covert operations on the border between Chad and Libya. Zigi was with the paratroops and Bruno with the combat engineers. He recalled hearing that Zigi had since become an officer.
    ‘Hi Bruno, a heads-up from an old mate, even though you are a Pékin,’ he read. ‘I’m at Nijrab, adjudant-chef, and a muj has showed up claiming to be French from St Denis. Calls himself Sami Belloumi, says he knows you and has a dad named Momu. Seems simple-minded, scars on his back from whippings. Toubib says badly traumatized. He wants to go home but no documents. Photo attached. You know him? Let me know before this gets into official channels. Zigi.’
    Bruno smiled as the old army slang came back to him. A Pékin meant a civilian. Nijrab was the French army base in the Kapisa region of Afghanistan. Bruno couldn’t remember whether they were still doing combat patrols or if the mission had been changed to training the Afghan army. A muj was a mujahedin. A
toubib
was a doctor. Bruno’s grin turned solemn as he read on. He knew Sami Belloumi, a young man who had left St Denis three, maybe four years earlier, supposedly to go to a special school for autistic youths run by a mosque in Toulouse. Sami was the nephew of Momu, the maths teacher at the local
collège
, and now adopted as his son. Momu was also the father of Karim, who ran the Café des Sports and was a star of the town rugby team.
    Bruno clicked to open the photo and it was Sami sure enough. Bruno remembered him being as tall as Karim, but now he looked so thin he was almost skeletal, with prominentcheekbones that emphasized his bulging eyes. He had a long beard and his head had been shaved. The photograph brought back memories of Sami at the tennis club, serving ace after ace, always placing the ball precisely in the corner. Bruno had been able to get back perhaps one serve in three. But Sami had no interest in anything but serving. He never returned a ball, never played a forehand or backhand. He would stay on court alone for hours with a basket full of tennis balls beside him, practising his perfect serves. It was the same with basketball. He could sink the ball from anywhere on the court, but that was all he wanted to do. He wouldn’t pass the ball, wouldn’t dribble or run. And like his tennis serve, he practised sinking the ball for hours.
    Momu said it was something to do with the way his brain worked. Sami seemed able to repair anything electrical or mechanical, from toasters to computers. He could do mathematical puzzles, but if he’d learned to read or write, they were skills he never used. While he was polite and friendly, always shaking hands whenever he saw Bruno, the boy hardly ever spoke. Old Dr Gelletreau at the medical centre had said he was autistic and there was nothing to be done. Momu had tried to get him into a special school, but the lack of them was one of the scandals of the French education system. It was sad, Bruno thought, that Fabiola had arrived in town too late to treat him. It wasn’t that the other doctors of St Denis weren’t good but that Fabiola was special, a gifted healer with an intuitive way of dealing with her patients and establishing trust. Perhaps she might have been able to draw Sami out. Perhaps she could do so now once they had him back home.
    He made a routine call to the passport office to see whenSami had applied for one and to establish its number. What had Sami been doing in Afghanistan, he wondered. Zigi had called him a muj, and in the drab brown garment that was all Bruno could see on the photo Sami was the very image of a Taliban. But most Afghans in the countryside probably looked