Whispers, the guys shift in their seats, cough, I’ve never seen them so quiet.

‘What I’m telling you here is the bare truth, it’s all here in these books, I can show you the photos if you promise not to look at them for more than a second, because otherwise they’ll fuck you up for the rest of your life. You won’t be able to believe you’re really men, that your parents are really human, that your friends are really friends, good guys like you lot, like me. Rachel checked it all out, he did research, he went to Germany, to Poland, he saw the furnaces, saw them with his own fucking eyes.’

Idir-Quoi asked a question.

‘What did he do it for, Rachel, I mean?’

‘I’m getting to that . . .’ I said.

‘One day, the whole world got together and declared war on this madness and they killed the imam, the leader, the Führer and all his emirs and they took over Germany. That’s when they found the extermination camps. There were dozens of them and millions of dead and survivors that looked so much like corpses that they didn’t know what to say to them. When my parents and everyone else in Aïn Deb were murdered by the Islamists, Rachel got to thinking. He figured that fundamentalist Islam and Nazism were kif-kif – same old same old. He wanted to find out what would happen if people did nothing, the way people did nothing in Germany back in the day, what would happen if nobody did anything in Kabul and Algeria where they’ve got I don’t know how many mass graves, or here in France where we’ve got all these Islamist Gestapo. In the end, the whole idea scared him so much he killed himself. He thought it was too late, he felt guilty, he said that by saying nothing it was like we were colluding, he said we’re all caught in this trap and if we go on doing nothing, go round pretending like we’re talking about things intelligently, we’ll wind up being Kapos without even realising, and we won’t even notice that everyone around us has turned into a Kapo already.’

‘That’s bullshit – we’re not Kapos,’ Raymond yelled.

‘Really? A while back we were all on their side and we didn’t even know, remember?’

I didn’t have to say any more, they remembered, they’d been up to their balls in it.

‘So, what? You’re suggesting we all top ourselves like Rachel?’ Raymond asked.

‘No, we’re not going to die, we’re going to live, we’re going to fight.’

‘How?’

‘I don’t know, we’ll have to see . . .’

‘Fuck’s sake, all this bullshit and now he says he doesn’t know!’

‘Why don’t we set up an anti-Islamic league?’ suggested Bidochon.

‘Islamic or Islamist?’ asked Raymond.