Stop horror !!! - Page 1 - Bouzid Boudlali Stop horror !!! Novel Éditions APARIS – Edifree 75008 Paris – 2009 5 www.edifree.com Editions APARIS – Edifree 56, rue de Londres – 75008 Paris Tel : 01 44 90 81 42 – Fax : 01 53 04 90 76 – mail : infos@edifree.com Tous droits de reproduction, d’adaptation et de traduction, intégrale ou partielle réservés pour tous pays. ISBN : 978-2-8121-0729-0 Dépôt légal : Janvier 2009 © Bouzid Boudlali L’auteur de l’ouvrage est seul propriétaire des droits et responsable de l’ensemble du contenu dudit l’ouvrage. 6 I owe a great deal of thanks to my father and mother, brothers and sisters who helped me accomplish this aim. They taught me to believe in myself and to work hard to meet my goals. And, with their love, support and encouragements, I was able to pursue graduate education and appreciate the simple things in life. I also would like to thank my wife "Christine" who defines everything good in my life and makes me happy. Thanks to her love I am the person who I am. I love her in my heart. Next, very special thanks to my teachers, editors and advisors for their guidance and wealth of knowledge. I thank them whole heartedly for their kindness and understanding. I hope greatly the very best and lift my prayers for peace, joy and prosperity for everybody in the world. 8 AUTHOR’S NOTE When I was in Morocco, my attitude mainly towards future was derived from the harshness of this future itself. Although I have spent a great part of my life studying and have held diplomas, I was lost and without social value. Then I was worried about my future, and I always wondered to what extent this anxiety might remain. There was the problem of unemployment which made me dissatisfied with my life, and there was no means of responding to my necessary needs, that made my future dark. Even if I have succeeded to work as a technician in a firm, and as a foreign languages teacher in a private school, I could not realize my ambitions and desired aims, because of the insufficient wages I earned. The feeling of fear and worry about the future pushed me to look for an alternative solution which was “Go to continue my studies at New York University, with the idea to find a job there after graduation, to lead a good, fantastic, and better life.” I believed that the USA was a land of Justice, Democracy, Equality, and a land of boundless opportunity, a land where I could be respected as a 9 human-being. I have thought of it as a place of the divine scheme of things that was set aside as a promised land. However, once being there, disappointment and resentment would be a solid bitter rising lump inside me for a time. Though I experienced and carried Peace in my heart, I had faced Racism and suffered from it because of my origin, my race, my religion, and my culture. Moreover, I have been thinking of writing this book to recapture and document for the reader this terrible bloodied battles period in our history. So I would tell every person, in the worldwide, about how to carry Peace and avoid any action killing the human-beings. It might seem surprising that a peaceloving man like me should now become upright and ask peace-loving company like you, to get against those whose professed trade is War. To me, War, Homicide, Crime, Terrorism, and all sorts of Violence conjured up no vision of fame and honour, no glamour, and no heroics. We should never start a war ourselves and go – as we have gone in bygone times – to every possible length to ward off one if another nation should threaten to use force against us or against any other peace-loving country. Loving Democracy, Justice, Freedom, Equality, and avoiding all kinds of Racism, Slavery, and all the inhuman acts are the surest way to keep the world’s peace. 10 CHAPTER ONE I was born, raised and have lived most of my life with my family in an exotic area in Morocco. My parents were in their fifties. My brother was seventeen, my sister was eight, and I was sixteen. Our existence was about all we ever received from our life on the small farm we had. As far as I can recall we were a happy family. We were well fed, well clothed, made to go to school, and brought up in a good education based on honesty, respect, brotherhood, unity, love and peace. The little wooden house my father had built for us was our shelter. It was surrounded by a huge wild forest. We had no electricity, no running water but a well outside from which we got water. We had neither shower nor bathroom and no TV. We had got only a small radio from which we got information and listened to the music. We also had a small traditional flour-mill in which my mother crushed the wheat to make flour. She cooked bread and meals on the open fire she made with branches of the acacia-tree and firewood which we gathered in the surrounding cedar forest. We used candles or lamps to have light in the house. We had got only two small rooms. We 11 gathered in one, and my father and mother in the other. We had also a small kitchen but no toilet. Our household possession was a cow, a dog, some sheep and chickens, and a mule that was used to carry supplies and for ploughing in the field. Somehow we made out OK all during the draught periods, of course, our belts were tightened up when the harvest was thin, and our stomachs were filled when we had a good farming result. In fact, as well as I can remember we never did go hungry. We were very well satisfied with how things were going for us. At the sunset it would be dark in the land where we lived and no one wander around. We were isolated and we could hear only dogs barking in the wilderness. This night I struck a match and lit a small candle in the small darkened room. It filled the room with the light whose flickering allowed me to see my brother and my sister lying on the floor on an authentic, traditional and aesthetic oriental rug, covered with a heavy hand-woven blanket to keep them warm. They were sleeping silently like mice in the cheese. Although the room was rough and cold it was overwhelmed by the honeydew aroma provided by the cheery and reassuring little streaming flames of the candle which was placed on one end of a small table. It hovered before my eyes generating soft light that permitted me to see the paper and write my memoir to complete my Master’s degree, when I wished I had wire to shoot all my thoughts from my brain to deal with professional rules and facts of today’s real world. But the shadow of the paper threw into obscurity almost all the room and darkened the faces of my brother and my sister. And, apparently, after a while, the writing became not very legible that 12 I held the page close to the flame of the candle to get a stronger light on it. However, the light could not hope to penetrate the sombre darkness. I was writing right now with flies buzzing all around me as I watched bugs crawl across the walls, which might sound terrible, but I was, actually already comfortable here. The room was always my peaceful sanctuary. It suggested an impenetrable, inscrutable barrier, and a protection against the outsider world. From the bland darkness outside came in, through the aperture that served for a window, all the ever unfamiliar noises of night in the wilderness. I broke my silence on the horror, and I revealed the real events going on in the world in the recent decades in a stark and evocative details. I truly began to gain insight in the human condition. From the Media and society, I learned that people of this planet are confronted with savagery and unforgiving humanity that bring them closer to despair. They suffered psychological, spiritual, even metaphysical shock. “War projects pains for which there’s no solace, no larger consolation and no redemptive possibility. It’s a danger, a sinful act, a horror and evil linked to the blindness of Mankind and their badness. They still can’t return to their consciousness and have real vision to their reality, but they intend to do evil deeds and play them out.” The world of violence had defined the use of violence such as sign of power, heroism and greatness; and people’s human nature depended on these guide-lines, values and morals. While we all would thrive to better our own lives and want peace to come into the world to sweep sadness, despair, 13 every raw deal, every horrendous tragedy, and every evil plan. We would want peace to win. Later, after midnight, for a long time I lay down with my eyes open next to my brother and sister, listening to their breathing, waiting for sleep to claim me. I rolled up the blanket and turned my head on the pillow so that I could see their faces fully. However, the last candle light hided most of their faces in shadow, just a fiery line along their checks and jawbones, was limned in a long painterly stroke, and I was caught out in a thought I most often kept hidden, even from myself. When deeply asleep, I had miraculously dreamt of the danger I faced when I tried to extract water from the well we had outside as I complained of thirst. When I went out, I tried to pull up the bucked that I thought, as always, it was attached to the bottom of the rope, but, the thing whatever so heavy it was, it dragged me down because the rope was taut that I slid down on the water and I was sinking. The water, dark, deep and alive with an unnameable horror, closed over my head. I cried for help, but no one was there to save me. They were all deeply asleep at that darkened and quiet moment. Each time the water closed over me, I heard a musical sound, as of the bells were sounding, echoing from ridge to ridge in the forested mountains. The water, whirling with a malevolent current was alive with sounds and smells from I knew not where. It sought to drag me down, and once again I was sinking. No matter how hard I struggled then, how desperately I stroke out for the surface, I felt myself spiralling down, as if weighted with lead. My hands were scratching at the thick rope tied around my right 14 ankle, but it was so slick and slimy with weed that it kept sliding through my fingers. “What is at the end of the rope?” I peered down into the shadowy depths through which I was sinking. It seemed imperative to me that I knew what was dragging me to my death, as if that knowledge might save me from a horror from which I had no name. I was falling, tumbling into darkness, and unable to understand the nature of my desperate difficult situation. Below me, I couldn’t see precisely what was at the end of the taut rope, because it disappeared into the blackness, but I saw a shape – the thing that would cause my death. Desperately, I reached down, my bloated fingers scrabbling to free myself. Emotion stuck in my throat, and as I tried to define the shape, the musical sound came to me again, clear this time, not bells, something else, something at once intimate and barely remembered. At last, I identified the thing that was causing me to drown. It was not the bucket, but a human body. All at once I began to weep. Suddenly, I awoke with a start, as always, racked by a horrible sense of fear, and a whimper caught in my throat. For a time, the recurring nightmare still pulsed evilly in my mind. Reaching down I touched my right ankle as if to reassure myself that the rope was not tied to me. Then, gingerly, almost reverently, I moved my fingers up the taut, slicked muscles of my abdomen and chest. When I found myself intact, I realised it was just a dream. However, I still remained thinking of all the miseries and horror of the world. Tears came to my eyes, then, when I was sitting on a stone in a corner just outside the shelter door before anybody was up yet. I bit down hard on my lips, looked around the 15
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