On the screen, bundled corpses were being piled in common graves dug with a backhoe. Goma was short of quicklime, and an epidemic was threatening. Father and son listened to the news with dull indifference. Everything that came out of that box seemed far away, and a lie. As it happened, the government’s spokesman appeared just then, using high-flown, trans-border phrases. Father and son ate their spaghetti before it got cold. From time to time Patrick tried to say something. “It was hot today.” “When do classes start?” and “How’s your mother doing?”
“Fine.”
“What about her guy?”
“I don’t know. We don’t see him much these days.”
“Ah,” said his father, his lips pursed. “He headed for the hills.”
Anthony shot him a pained look. The old man just couldn’t help himself. It all came down to resentments and sniping.
In an effort to make it up to him, Patrick said:
“Well, it just so happens I’m giving your mother a present.”
“How so?”
Patrick left the table and fetched the jar full of money from the sideboard. On the news, people were recalling the first moon landing. An unidentified astronaut took historic little hops in the dust. A phrase that had been heard a million times crackled in the warm living room.
Anthony was startled to see all the money.
“I’ve been saving up for quite a while, to treat her to a vacation.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Do you know how many times she criticized me for not taking you all on vacation?”
“You can’t do this.”
“I don’t want any more reproaches.”
“What reproaches? She doesn’t talk to you anymore.”
“I know what I’m doing.”
“She’ll never take it. You’re crazy!”
“Whose side are you on, for god’s sake? I’m going to treat her to a trip, that’s all.”
Anthony could see the old leathery face reappearing, with the prominent cheekbones and the fiery eyes under the bushy eyebrows. It had been a long time. He immediately went back to his plate. The food was almost cold now, and each bite cost him.
“Listen, she can do whatever she likes,” said his father, softening. “Me, I pay my debts, that’s the way it is.”
Just then, the telephone rang. Patrick checked the time on his watch, and a worried look crossed his face. He stepped into the hallway to pick up. Anthony lowered the volume on the TV. His father was answering in monosyllables, with an occasional questioning “Yes?”
“Really? When?”
His voice suddenly cracked. Anthony turned in his chair to see. There was his dad standing in his slippers, the phone in his hand, looking stunned. “Yes…yes…all right.” With a familiar gesture, Patrick patted his thinning hair. In the shadowy hallway, Anthony thought he looked aged and gray, skinny in spite of his gut. At every moment, his voice betrayed his thoughts, this old man’s whole inner life, his bitterness and his surprises, which were once unknowable. The first fissures.
The phone call went on for a few more seconds on the same tone of embarrassed disbelief. Then Patrick hung up and, eyes wide, said to his son:
“I have some bad news…”
5
Hacine was early, so he drove around below the ZUP towers for a while. He recognized the courtyard, the dust, the shady places where he’d so often been bored out of his mind. The bumper-car carousel wasn’t there. He didn’t see any familiar faces. Like it or not, this was home. The heat was stifling.
Because he dreaded that dead time before dinner, he couldn’t bring himself to go home to his father’s right away. He could’ve looked for Eliott and the others, but he didn’t feel like that, either. He was returning after a long absence in a halo of rumors and questions. He didn’t want to dissipate the shaky credit created by distance too quickly.
So he decided to spend some time downtown. He parked the Volvo and walked, to stretch his legs. In the three days since he left Morocco, he’d hardly said a word to anyone. He found himself in a fairly pleasant state of weightlessness. He had slept a lot, these few weeks. As for Heillange, it looked exactly the way it did before he left. Yet a thousand details contradicted that first impression. There, a kebab stand had recently opened; here, a video game store. A bus shelter looked abandoned. Brand-new Decaux billboards advertised Parisian perfumes and cheap shoes.
All in all, it was pleasant to stroll along streets he knew so well. Like a good expatriate, Hacine felt envied and important, as if the people who’d stayed here led lesser lives and hadn’t done much of anything except wait for him. He had a cup of coffee on a terrasse on Place des Flamands, near the fountain. A lady was walking her dog. A nanny watched two nearly naked children splashing in the pool. The people who dared to venture outside looked like tourists on the loose. The sweltering heat was an invitation to wander aimlessly.
When Hacine got back in his Volvo, it was almost five. He felt relaxed, floaty. The mood in town was almost that of a seaside resort, an off-season softness. He savored the calm a little longer, driving as slowly as possible, one elbow out the window, breathing in the enjoyable smell of a familiar landscape.
* * *
—
Over there, he had also experienced moments like that, of being in suspension, on the evening air. He remembered smoking joints with Rashid, Medhi, and the others, while looking at the sea. When he first landed at Tétouan, he was sure he would meet only retards and bumpkins. But then his cousin Driss introduced him to his pals, and Hacine soon realized that their pastimes were no different from his. Hanging out, smoking blunts and playing video games, laughing, thinking about girls. Except that here, you were at the mother lode. The hash you could get in Morocco was of incredible quality, fat and soft, a beautiful, matchless brown color. It gave you the munchies and fits of laughter that wouldn’t stop, and it was dirt cheap. You smoked it in big three-sheet blunts, or straight, in a pipe, before gorging on pastries that left your fingers sticky with sugar and honey. And then you did it again, drinking mint tea, as the heat outside plunged you even deeper into that state of paranoid lightness and exhausted pleasure. Sitting barefoot in jeans and short-sleeve shirts, leaning against the wall in an empty room, Hacine had spent incomparable hours gazing at sunlight filtering through the blinds. Dust and smoke made marine eddies in the air, the sprinklings of dreams. Muted music carried you far away. Even poverty took on a singular beauty. You watched all that without ever tiring of it. Abdel once brought The Guinness Book of Records over. Stoned out of their minds, the boys dwelled on the pages dedicated to record giants and diminutive dwarfs, and went off on endless peals of laughter seeing one odd little guy who was barely taller than a telephone handset.
Hacine had often come to Morocco during summer vacations but never wanted to get involved with the locals. He found them repulsive. There was something medieval about their mentality that scared him. This time, since he was stuck here for good, he learned what was going on beneath the apparent inertia. Each year, the Rif produced thousands of tons of cannabis resin. Fluorescent green fields covered entire valleys as far as the eye could see. If the land recorder looked the other way, everybody knew what they could get away with. Under their respectable appearances, those cunning men with mustaches and big bellies that you saw on café terrasses were as voracious as anyone on Wall Street. The money from the traffic sustained the place from top to bottom. The millions were used to construct buildings, cities, the whole country. Everyone got a taste, at every level: wholesalers, bureaucrats, moguls, mules, cops, politicians, even children. People wondered about the king, but without daring to say it aloud.
Like everyone else, Hacine wanted a piece of the action. His cousin Driss slipped him a few dozen grams, and he got his start that way, with low-level dealing to tourists, practically in the street, the pits. From then on
, things began to click. With that money he bought his first kilo, then invested in shipments headed for France and Germany. He came home in the evening and had dinner with his family, normal as all get-out. He was adding up dollars and francs in his head while his mother asked if he wanted more vegetables.
And to think he’d been sent here to get reformed. The opposite happened. He got stoned, went with whores, and earned in a day what his old man used to make in six months. As he thought of it, what struck him as funny was the way the business worked. In many respects the traffic mimicked the same old patterns as heavy industry, from its modes of supply, the personnel it used, and the families it supported all over Europe. A large workforce, concentrated in dormitory towns, poorly educated, often foreign-born, lived off this welcome business, with street dealers instead of blue-collar workers. But that was where the comparison stopped, since this new proletariat’s philosophy hewed closer to business school than to class struggle.
Hacine gauged the advantages of his situation against that of his parents. Even leaving aside all the money he was making, he didn’t have to endure the long hours, the routine, the crushing repetition from Monday to Friday while waiting for vacations, in an endless cycle that took you from youth to the cemetery in the snap of your fingers. His activity gave him a relative feeling of freedom and flexibility. He could get up late and take it easy. True, the work itself was always the same—each time, you had to score a supply, cut, package, and resell it—but the tempo was somewhat sporadic, and transporting the dope had a whiff of high adventure. You felt you were both a businessman and a pirate. Not too bad.
The biggest drawback was jail. Everybody did time, even the biggest and smartest guys. Once they were caught, the government confiscated their goods and bank accounts, even went after their wives’ jewels. In Marseille and Tangiers, sumptuous properties stood padlocked for months, steadily falling into ruin until some little assholes broke a shutter, squatted in the bedrooms, and shit on five-thousand-franc sofas, leaving behind a field of ruins and some anarchist slogans on the walls.
After a year, Hacine came to be seen as a reliable guy within his little network. He had a cool head, plus the enormous advantage of a French passport. When problems cropped up somewhere, in Spain or in France, he would be sent to take a look. He took flights there and back; problem solved. Soon he got the chance to drive some round trips. At first, his job was to lead the way, but he was quickly promoted and put behind the wheel of the main vehicle. The convoy from Costa del Sol to Villeurbanne was well organized. A lead car, five miles ahead, to warn of checkpoints. A sweep behind, to retrieve the dope if necessary. In between them was the cargo car, with five hundred kilos of hash hidden in the doors and trunk, driving at top speed with no stopping, averaging 120 miles per hour the whole way. Hacine demonstrated some obvious talent at that little game. He also had a lot of luck.
In this way, Hacine was already making tens of thousands of francs each month by the time he was twenty. Dressed in Armani from head to toe, barefoot in his sneakers, he was tall and scornful, with no particular aspiration except to get rich. He took to smoking contraband cigarettes and treated himself to a Breitling. He looked sharp. His mother still hassled him a little, but he had improved the lot of everyone in the house so dramatically that she didn’t dare ask him to lead an honest life. To give them a little more room, he rented the upstairs floor. He bought new mattresses, two TVs, and a washing machine, and had the plumbing fixed. The pantry was overflowing. Moreover, he continued living at home, respecting his elders, and stepping outside to smoke. What more could they ask of him?
Hacine’s success in business wound up shaping his thinking about how the world worked. As he saw it, you had a choice in life. You could be like his father, complaining and resenting the bosses, spending your time begging and tallying injustices. Or do as he did, show boldness and entrepreneurial spirit, and create your own destiny. Talent was rewarded, as he himself demonstrated rather brilliantly. Pushed to the margins of society, he adopted its most widespread ideas. Money deserves to be recognized for its extraordinary power of assimilation, which turns thieves into shareholders, traffickers into conformists, and pimps into merchants. And vice versa.
The problem was that all that money took up a great deal of space. The boys spent a lot of it and laundered some through friendly businesses. But that still left accounts and bundles of cash languishing in banks. The inactivity bothered Hacine, and he talked about it to Driss. It infuriated the two boys to have their desire to expand stymied. They went looking for legal investments, preferably in real estate. One of their contacts suggested a deal. The guy in question marketed presold villas to Europeans planning to spend their old age in Saida, Essaouira, Nador, Tétouan, or Tangier. For every dirham invested, you made three back. The idea seemed excellent. The cousins did their research. The guy had an impeccable background, with dozens of completed projects to his name. They went to check things out on the ground. The villas were neat and white, and the bankers and architects all wore beautiful suits. Moreover, their contact accepted foreign currency, cash, everything. They decided to do it.
Once the man pocketed the money, he vanished without a trace.
It left the boys stunned. The humiliation was so stinging that for several days they couldn’t even talk about it. But they soon started getting letters from Saida, Eassouira, and Nador, where they had chosen to invest their capital. A bunch of people there were demanding to be paid. Ground had been broken; workers wanted their pay; bureaucrats expected their baksheesh. And Driss and Hacine’s signatures appeared at the bottom of every legal document authorizing the start of the work. They were being asked for enormous sums of money, on top of what they had already lost.
In the beginning, the boys just ignored them. More letters were sent. These were handwritten, and abusive. Threats followed. One evening, a fire broke out in the stairwell of the building where Hacine and his family lived. The boys felt spied on, and became mistrustful. Another time, Driss was grabbed near the Beaux-Arts. Two men held him while a third gouged his eye out with a screwdriver. That’s when they paid up, and Hacine decided it was all over. Anyway, his father was having heart problems. He decided to go home.
So that was how Hacine was returning to Heillange: with his fear, his shame, and the last of his savings.
* * *
—
Climbing the stairs to his father’s apartment, Hacine was still brooding over that disaster. He climbed in silence, holding his ax handle. A neighbor kid skipping down the stairs passed him. It took the boy four more steps before it hit him. Looking at the skinny figure slowly climbing the stairs, he realized it was him, Hacine Bouali. It had been two years since he was last seen in the neighborhood. From what people said, he’d been making out like a bandit. His homies had gotten postcards from the Balearic Islands and the Costa del Sol, and started hating him, while secretly feeling jealous. In any case, everyone figured he was gone for good. The kid hurried to spread the news of his return.
Hacine reached the third floor. He had no chance to ring the bell, because the door opened of its own accord. His father was waiting for him, a big smile on his lips.
“Come in, come in,” he said.
Hacine was happy to see how well his father looked. A little more stooped, maybe, his skin a little darker. For some time now he’d started playing boules with his old work buddies. It gave him something to do and got them outside for some fresh air.
“You are all right?”
“Yes, yes.”
They hugged briefly, and his father glanced at the ax handle.
“What is that for?”
All during the trip, Hacine had been imagining the scathing things he would say to him. But now, facing this old man in the building where he’d grown up, it no longer made any sense. His intentions looked like what they were, strictly for show. His father was an old man, gentle, forgetful, and weary. And gla
d to see him again.
“For nothing,” said Hacine. “Stupid stuff.”
* * *
—
Once in the apartment, Bouali announced the program. He had made a big pot of harira soup but had forgotten the parsley. And he was almost out of chickpeas. They would do without. He had bought tea, too, from Bourrane, along with fresh mint. Hacine was surprised to find the old man so talkative. He noticed that a slight, unpleasant smell of dust and aged skin had appeared under the house’s usual odor. He tried to find where the smell was coming from, but it had no origin. It was being exhaled by the walls, the passage of time, his father’s habits. The old man grabbed him by the elbow to get his attention. Hacine felt the strength of that grip, and it reassured him.
“Are you sleeping here?”
“No. I’m not staying.”
“Where are you going?”
“I have to see some friends.”
“Do you have a place to sleep?”
“Sure, don’t worry about it.”
“I got your room ready.”
“Thanks, but like I said, I can’t stay.”
After a pause, his father asked if he had a job.
“Not yet,” the boy answered. “But I’ll look for something.”
“That is good.”
They went into the kitchen, which was full of the roux smell of Moroccan soup. Bouali asked for news of his wife, Hacine’s mother, even though he called her every day.
“She’s fine,” said Hacine. “She’s taking it easy.”
“That is good,” said the old man approvingly.
He served the tea. A new oilcloth covered the kitchen table, decorated with a lovely design of tropical birds on a deep blue background. Hacine listened as his father nattered on and on. He had gotten into the habit of commenting on everything that he was doing, of saying whatever came to mind. “Now I am heating the water, I am cutting the carrots, I am going to open the window, I am starting the washing machine.” He was reading his life out loud, afraid of leaving things only half done. Hacine wondered if his father did the same thing when he was alone. Then he went into his bedroom. There, nothing had changed.
And Their Children After Them Page 22