I’ve tried to think what must have been going through his mind when he first opened the suitcase in our old house in that douar in the middle of nowhere. The way I imagine it, it’s dark, sleep has abandoned him somewhere along the way so he gets up, makes a cup of tea and sits drinking it, thinking about our papa and maman, about what happened on 24 April, or maybe he’s thinking about Ophélie waiting for him back at home and suddenly the business about how the names on the Ministry of the Interior’s list starts bugging him. He’s thought about it before, asked at the embassy. I’ve thought about it myself. Why do Papa and Maman appear on the list under different names? The names are real enough – Majdali was my mother’s maiden name and Hassan was the name Papa took when he converted to Islam. But why list him by his first name rather than his surname? And why does the name Schiller not appear on the list at all? The names on the gravestones were the same, but who decided what to write? Was it some bureaucratic fuck-up? A political decision – I know that’s what Rachel thought – was the government worried that a foreign name on the list of victims would set off a diplomatic incident? If the European press, the German newspapers in particular, got hold of the story, questions might have been asked of the Algerian government, and their reputation isn’t exactly squeaky clean, given that they’ve been accused of genocide, crimes against humanity, torture, systematic looting and I don’t know what else. Anyway, this whole business is bugging him so he gets up and wanders around the house and ends up in our parents’ bedroom, he’s looking for something though he doesn’t know what, then he finds this suitcase on top of the wardrobe or under the bed. An alarm goes off in his head. I heard it myself the first time I picked up the suitcase. Rachel hid it in the tool cabinet in the garage, the one place in the house he knew Ophélie would never look. And I did what he had done two years before.