‘. . . you need to know, your brother was a good man, a very good man. Given all the stuff you know now . . . about your father, Rachel did the only decent thing a man can do, he tried to understand. Doesn’t matter if you’re dealing with a crime committed yesterday or crimes committed years ago, that’s where you have to start: the first thing you have to do is understand (he said it slowly, dragging out every word), you can’t just rush in and judge things. When you were running around in your djellaba with that ratty little goatee beard, I could easily have thought: he’s a fundamentalist, a terrorist, I’m taking him down. But I didn’t, I tried to understand, to get to know you, and I decided that you weren’t one of them, you were Malrich, you were a good guy just trying to live your life like everyone else. Nothing is ever simple. Your brother’s suicide proves that. He tried to understand, but sadly he gradually started to believe that he was guilty, he felt he was to blame for what the Nazis – what your father – did to the Jews during the war. He hated your father but that still didn’t change the fact that he was your father, and like everyone, Rachel wanted a father he could look up to, a father he could be proud of. And it was worse for him, because you guys didn’t live with your parents, because you missed him, because of the terrible way your father died – his throat cut by Islamic fundamentalists with your mother and all those poor souls with only the sun to light the day. But the more research he did, the more he learned, the more he suffered. Something inside him snapped, he turned everything on its head and started to hate himself. Rachel couldn’t help but think of your father as a war criminal, but mostly he thought of him as his father, someone who had fought for Algerian independence, someone loved and respected by the people of his village, Rachel saw your father as a victim of the Islamic fundamentalists and of the Algerian political system that fosters these monsters. It was too much for him, he started to feel guilty, he was ashamed of his success, of his selfishness towards you and the rest of your family, of his affluent lifestyle. That was when he started to cut himself off from everyone – from you, from his wife, from his adoptive parents. It was his way of trying to protect you. In the end, he took it all on himself, he passed judgement on himself in his father’s place. Suicide was his last resort, the only way he could reconcile the irreconcilable, do you understand?’