Abdellah

Abdellah is Driss’s father, a bereaved man whose decision about David Henniger turns the question of punishment into a test of truth and a meditation on how little one person may know another. To David, Abdellah first appears to be the only person whose forgiveness could matter; to Abdellah, the accident is inseparable from the more enduring pain of having lost a son whose inner life remained partly inaccessible to him. His eventual decision to let David go does not settle that grief. It leaves Abdellah confronting both his restraint and the knowledge that Driss’s past is now beyond recovery.

Identity and the Demand for Atonement

When David is told that the people accompanying him will insist he return to the village, he understands that their request is not simply a courteous invitation. He anticipates being kept there until he agrees, and initially interprets the demand through his own prejudices, imagining an effort to extract money from an outsider. Yet he also recognizes that paying a handout would not answer the real need. In his mind, Abdellah has become the one person who might forgive him, while official exoneration and personal forgiveness remain distinct matters. David accepts that returning is, as he sees it, his only way forward.

This decision establishes Abdellah’s authority without making him an agent of the authorities or reducing his role to a demand for compensation. David’s fear of remaining unforgiven gives the journey its moral pressure: he believes that whatever judgment the law might deliver cannot substitute for Abdellah’s response. At the same time, the account shows how David’s assumptions color his understanding of the people around him. What he calls predictable extortion is also a demand that he acknowledge a personal responsibility that a legal finding alone could not resolve.

Grief and the Memory of Driss

At dawn, Abdellah emerges as a man whose grief remains visible and whose movements are deliberate. He waits with David and the other travelers near the Ziz gas station, eating a half-peeled orange as breakfast. His face still bears the strain of mourning; he holds himself stiffly, as though containing an energy he cannot yet release. The scene sets his private bereavement against an ordinary town morning, with men and boys asleep on mats and work beginning nearby. Abdellah’s grief is not an interruption of daily life so much as a burden he carries through it.

At Driss’s burial, Abdellah remembers his son at ten years old, when he took him prospecting across the mountain alone. He recalls the boy’s face and a Dicranurus trilobite they found near the trenches, still kept in Driss’s room. The fossil makes their shared past concrete: father and son had once gone out together in search of specimens, before the later distance between them became part of Abdellah’s sorrow. As the body is laid in the grave and prayers are said, Abdellah’s tears are spent. What remains is sight and memory, not the release of grief.

After the burial, Abdellah’s central concern is whether David will tell him truthfully how Driss died. He has considered what to do to the man responsible, but has not settled on a course of action. In his judgment, the decisive distinction is between an accident and a deliberate lie: the accident was not an intentional act, whereas a lie would be a chosen act of individual wrongdoing. He therefore postpones judgment until after the burial and after speaking with Ismael. His demand is not simply for an account of the death; it is a measure of whether David will accept the obligation to speak plainly to the bereaved father.

David, the Fossil, and the Knife

When Abdellah later meets David, he has shaved his head and carries a candle fixed to a saucer. He speaks French, and asks David to sit. Two apples and a SOG knife are beside him. The domestic ritual of peeling fruit gives their encounter a controlled, deliberate quality, but Abdellah also uses it to introduce an object that connects the conversation to the death: the fossil Driss was carrying when David’s car struck him, which the police recovered. David blushes and says he had not heard about it. Abdellah presents the fossil as a material trace of the event, bringing Driss’s work and the circumstances of his death into the same room as the man who caused it.

At first light, Abdellah finds David out near fossilized sea-creature slabs. He arrives with Anouar, concentrates on David, and observes that there is nowhere to run or hide. Once the headlights are switched off, the two men stand alone in the wind. Abdellah takes out the same knife he had used to peel apples the night before. He remains undecided, gripping it and then pointing it toward Alnif, but does not advance. The gesture makes his conflict visible without resolving it: he has the means to act, yet pain, not a settled intention, governs the moment. He tells David that Anouar will take him back and that his bags are already in the jeep.

David’s release is Abdellah’s choice, not proof that his grief has passed or that he has reached certainty about David’s guilt. After lowering the knife, Abdellah walks back toward the village without getting into the jeep. He controls the emotion rising within him and takes some private satisfaction in being able to restrain what is darkest in his nature. He then returns home to prepare tea and smoke a pipe. The decision to spare David is therefore both an outward act and an inward effort at self-command.

The Son Abdellah Could Not Know

In the days after the release, the sounds of children tapping at the cliffs recall Driss as a fifteen-year-old, secured by a long rope while prospecting on a high ledge. Abdellah holds on to such fragments because they are among the memories left to him of his only son. In Driss’s room, he lingers among the boy’s possessions and remembers his return from France: keeping secrets, smoking kif alone, going out at night, and later seeking work again at the quarries. Driss had come back changed, more aloof and unwilling to explain what he had earned in Europe. Abdellah had let him go without speaking; the son who returned seemed to have little to say to his family.

Abdellah’s recollections do not turn Driss into a simple object of idealized mourning. He remembers his son’s long hands, a small scar, wandering eyes, and habit of hiding banknotes in his socks. He recalls the music raï, reports of drug dealing and illegal trilobites, and the dishonor that reached the family. Yet he also judges Driss as no worse than other young men, only less discreet and less able to hold his tongue. These details make grief inseparable from uncertainty: Abdellah knows the habits and stories attached to his son, but they do not add up to complete knowledge of him.

During the following night, Abdellah regrets that he did not kill David—not because he has become certain that David was guilty in every respect, but because he cannot forgive him for Driss’s death. He reconsiders the moment at first light, when the knife was in his hands, as a failure to exact punishment. Beneath that regret lies a more intimate wound: what he had wanted to avenge was that he had never truly known his son. Driss’s death has made that ignorance permanent. In Abdellah’s ending, sparing David does not bring resolution; it leaves him with the memories of a son whose private past, buried with him, can no longer be entered.