AT “LA CHAPELLE.” A bar run by a Kabyle guy, a clothing store of a Chinese from Nanjing, the Tunisian lady’s bakery, a Pakistani’s hardware store, an Indian jeweler, another bar of another Kabyle with a Senegalese clientele, the Tamil’s call shop, another Pakistani’s hardware store, an Algerian butcher, another Chinese’s clothing store (but this one from Wenzhou), the Moroccan’s second-hand shop, the Wenzhou-Chinese bar-tabac, a Turkish restaurant that you’d better not confuse with the Kurdish sandwicherie next door, an Algerian Djurdjura butcher, a Balkan boutique, Moroccan grocers specializing in African and Antillean cuisine, Kabyle bar number three, a mini-corridor of a second-hand shop run by a surly Yugoslavian, a Korean electronics mart, the Malian’s TOPY shoe repair, the Tamil’s hardware store, another Moroccan grocer, Kabyle bar number four specializing in alcoholics at the pre-terminal phase, the Korean’s African grocery, the backroom Croatian casino, Tamil hairdresser, Algerian hairdresser, African hairdresser from the Ivory Coast, Cameroonian grocer, Antillean boutique selling esoteric objects and bois bandé, Jewish doctor’s office … Going down Rue du Faubourg-du-Temple is like walking on a Tower of Babel that’s been toppled by pyrotechnicians and set down between Belleville and Place de la République. What if the hidden treasure of the Templars was this incredible diversity of origins and cultures in the city’s old faubourgs? Around the Goncourt metro station, Avenue Parmentier meets Faubourg-du-Temple at a perpendicular. The ambiance here is more Parisian, more French, more Occidentally homogenous, more “normal”: bobo bars, Caisse d’Épargne, an old-style bakery with real quality floured baguettes, Le Crédit Lyonnais, Italian pizzeria, Le Crédit Agricole, Apple retailer, bookstore-stationer, BNP Paribas, restaurant mentioned in the Michelin and Hachette guides, Le Crédit Mutuel, sound engineer, Société Générale, a secondary school named after a dead person, Swiss HSBC bank, shoe store specializing in large sizes, another Crédit Lyonnais, two primary schools with lists of children deported during the war, municipal pool … Farther east is the 11th arrondissement’s town hall, where the gold and the tricolor on its roof of black slate leave no question as to whether it’s a building of the Republic of France. For Ossiri, making the trip from there to the Camaïeu store on Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Antoine was like traveling through time.
During the “La Chapelle” era, he and Kassoum would take in all the neighborhood’s streets like surveyors: systematically. Up to the shadows cast by the little gilded buttocks of the angel on top of the totem pole at the Place de la Bastille, this part of the 11th arrondissement was, along with the Champs-Elysées, one of the great amusodromes of Paris. Funky bars, concept bars, exotic restaurants for every latitude on Earth, lounges, secret clubs, night clubs, dance bars, little concert halls, etc., attracted crowds every night, especially on the weekend. Less entertaining was the fact that this district had the highest concentration of clothing stores run exclusively by Chinese owners. Legions of their compatriots, mostly undocumented, worked to pay off their border-crossing debts in poorly ventilated areas, windowless rooms, dark courtyards, modified atriums, and rearranged hallways, or out on converted patios. They never took any breaks or vacation except for their New Year, a day that resounded with the popping of firecrackers. Chinese bosses would make a lot from such model—top model, even—employees. The production costs for the latest fashions were very low in a country with high standards of living and consumption levels. Having numerous qualified workers that were underpaid, non-unionized, and all-you-can-exploit was outsourcing at the local level. That’s some serious capitalist prowess for the children of China! This meant that those who partied in Bastille were among the privileged few in France who could barf up their surfeit of alcohol before the gate entrances used by the very workers that made the clothes, now reeking of smoke, in which they’d fidgeted, danced, and sweated the night away.
Sightings of bedraggled revelers first thing in the morning, especially Sundays, were among the shared moments that Kassoum and Ossiri cherished the most. At dawn they had to leave their little studio apartment, which they called “La Chapelle” because it was right above the Chapelle des Lombards nightclub, to free up the apartment for Zandro, who worked as a bouncer downstairs. Since they didn’t work every day and didn’t always know where to go so early in the morning, they’d party it up with the last of them. Ossir and Kassoum would be fresh and lucid. The straggling partiers were tired, drunk, and/or drugged up. With his old reflexes from growing up in the Treichville* ghetto, Kassoum couldn’t help thinking that it would be easy enough to relieve these dawdling dandies of some of their jewelry or the money they’d brought with them for the night; he’d had plenty of experience of this sort in Abidjan. But it seemed like Ossiri could read his thoughts, and just one look would get him back in line. “Leave vultures’ work to the vultures,” he’d often say. So Kassoum had to content himself with having front-row tickets to laugh at the closing-time circus starring the Parisians and those who’d come in from the banlieues. And Ossiri was unyielding, even the day when that completely drunk girl jumped on him, shouting in English “Take me! Take me!” Her handbag was half-open, showing a wad of blue 20-euro bills that seemed to implore Kassoum for a more peaceful sanctuary in his own pockets. He hadn’t seen a single euro coin for a week, and even Fologo, the clumsiest pickpocket in all the Colosse ghetto in Treichville, could have pulled it off.
—Kass, leave vultures’ work to vultures. (Ossiri)
—Take me! Take me! (The girl)
—But it’s really too much, she’s just giving it up. There’s no offside when the ball’s delivered by the other team, Ossiri. (Kass)
—Take me! Take me!
—What’s she saying?
—She’s saying to take her.
—I swear, she’s taunting me.
—You touch her, we don’t know each other anymore.
—Take me! Take me!
—Fucking rich kid!
“Fucking rich kid!” was Kassoum’s phrase of surrender every time they disagreed about how to get by during tough times. When the girl started to throw up first on his shirt, then on his shoes, Kassoum decided to “wake up the ghetto inside” to deal this drunkard a “python”—a sharp headbutt, well-aimed and well-timed, that vigorous cephalic strike that his reputation was built on and that made all of Colosse dread facing off against him. “Ossiri, I slept in the ghetto for years and years. Now, the ghetto sleeps within me.”
But something in this girl’s eyes kept him from striking. Kassoum couldn’t do it, but he didn’t really know why. Distress, maybe. Distress that he’d read so often in the eyes of his neighbors in the Colosse who didn’t know how to face a new day just as miserable as the one before. Or maybe it was the light green of her eyes. In the stories of his childhood, some monsters were described as having green eyes, the color of the deep forest. Kassoum had never seen eyes that color from so close. His reaction must have been noticeable.
Behind him, Ossiri was pushing his luck, telling him to take her to La Chapelle so she could lie down, and to watch over her until she came back to her senses. Zandro wouldn’t say anything—he certainly didn’t even have to know. He was always too exhausted from his night of handling people who were violent, people who were hysterical, pickpockets, drunks, line-jumpers, the indignant, the paranoid, the depressed, the dealers, the junkies, and all the hotheads who believed they were stronger than everyone else in the world after a line of cocaine or a couple ecstasy pills. By himself, Kassoum carried the girl into the narrow stairwell. Her long blond hair fell onto her sturdy judoka shoulders, and even though she’d withered from the booze, she was a good head taller than him. She must have been descended from white tribes of the great cold and glacial north who had regularly invaded the more southerly shores of Europe to sow terror, chaos, and sperm. Ossiri didn’t give him any help, under the pretext that the sight of two black men transporting a semi-conscious white woman down a dark and deserted street would arouse suspicion. He wasn’t wrong but, as was often t
he case, he pushed his logic too far. “Here, betrayal is a sport that became a national institution during World War Two. When the Germans controlled the country, people would turn in Jews and members of the Résistance. After the Allied victory, people turned in the traitors and collaborators. Here, there are always informants and people to be denounced,” Ossiri had concluded peremptorily. But Kassoum had already tuned him out. Like a panther straining to pull a heavy doe into a tree so as to protect her from the scavenging greed of a pack of hyenas, he trundled the strapping girl up to “La Chapelle.” This is how Kassoum first met Amélie, who was from Normandy and taught English at a high school in the banlieue west of Paris …
The parvise of the 11th arrondissement’s town hall opens onto a roundabout, where traffic is distributed between Avenue Parmentier, Boulevard Voltaire, Rue de la Roquette, and Avenue Ledru-Rollin. Ossiri’s bike goes through the red light and weaves in and out to reach Ledru-Rollin. There’s a Monoprix at the intersection with Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Antoine. His aunt Odette has been the department manager there for twenty-eight years. Thirty years ago, when her husband brought her from her village in the sylvan confines in the western part of the Ivory Coast, she barely knew how to read and write and had never seen people apart from those that had been roaming for millennia beneath the vines and tall trees of Issia. She’s seen a lot and learned a lot there at her Monoprix. But still, twenty-eight years to get up from her seat at the cash register … A melanine rate of promotion? She no longer asks these kinds of questions. She’s two years away from retirement. For the two weeks that Ossiri’s been assigned to the Camaïeau at Bastille, this stop at Monoprix has been something of a ritual. Tantie Odette offers him a coffee. He accepts, and they go into the break room. He asks her about Ferdinand, and she answers matter-of-factly. She asks after Angela, and he makes up stories using lyrical phrases mixed with general news about their homeland. She laughs. She laughs a lot when he speaks. Then he says he has to go, otherwise he’ll be late. She accompanies him through the aisles and presents him as her son when they pass an old colleague from the eighties. A kiss on the cheek and Ossiri detaches his bike from the “No parking” sign. Camaïeau isn’t far. He walks.
TRANSLATED BY TEGAN RALEIGH
* Treichville: a working-class neighborhood in Abidjan.
[GERMANY]
ANN COTTEN
Chafer
SHE CANNOT BE SLEEPING. One doesn’t do such things when one is asleep. I must acknowledge that there is a conscious mind inside the head that leans against mine, one that considers it a good idea to stroke me in a repetitive manner. We are on our way through arid plains, the lights are dimmed, the whole bus is asleep or dreaming. Dreaming with the bus driver as he hits the tapestry-lined dashboard in time to the music with a many-colored little leather whip, making the tassels wobble. Something—an electric guitar, a flute, or a woman’s voice—wanders in serpentines through the upper regions of the human hearing range. In the lower parts, close by us, a karkabèn, crude iron double-clapper, expresses its calm and regular excitement. The young man in the yellow caftan, who has been sitting at the front of the bus in the seat behind the young women passengers for the whole trip, whispering various things to them, his cheek pressed to the back of their headrest—even he is sleeping now. At the first rest stop, as I, smoking, shifted my weight from one leg to the other, feeling odd to be a woman for no reason, like a donkey on hooves, he crossed the road to pick a yellow asphodel. Now his head leans softly against the seat in front of him, where the beauty he was harassing, who ignored him with habitual grace, is sleeping too, or at least holding herself completely still. The two boys who got in without baggage to work for a few months in a place where the bus will let them out by the roadside, are awake and whispering. Behind them their mother, before them seven hundred goats, and in between, dominant in the moment, their beauty, the elegance of their manner, their wise feet. Outside, dusk is flying through the cities through which the bus passes, along the dusty roads under a rosy sky that seems to utter jokes and scatter unmistakable signs. Dusk falls on all inhabitants, those in a hurry and those who linger in the square, thinking of someone or some problem that is scuffed like an old canister and covered with dust every day afresh. And people in business and people visiting relatives, whose inner life I cannot imagine.
Our two sweaty heads have fallen toward one another, rolling in the swell of the road, hidden by the window curtain, flashed by the street lighting. Krassa has laid her thin scarf over our laps, a trick to allow freedom of movement, unwatched. Her small, hot hands take advantage of the little realm she has created to stroke mine. Rolled between Krassa’s thumb and fingers, I wonder when it will stop, this going and coming, back and forth. She strokes and strokes. In clouds, in swarms, in schools, waxing and waning in scope.
Please remember this scene. It is to return again and again, disturbing and annoying me. I would like to use an explanation with ghosts. This supplement to the visible world might offer an exit from the circular arguments I have been wasting my time with, using only rational reasoning to address the old problem that it is impossible to understand what is going on and to act at the same time. Not that I was looking for epiphany, but … why not? After all, is it not something of the sort that one seeks in literature, in sex, in amour fou? The idea that one might be forever just taking turns allowing the other to experience some irreal intoxication one is incapable of feeling oneself. One keeps quiet and behaves as cooperatively as possible so as not to disturb the other’s illusion until it’s over. And then, in the worst moments, when pressed until survival seems to demand a fast getaway involving the use of a verbal machine gun, one will stumble word for word into hurtful honesty, breathing deeply in surprise at the uncomfortable fact that one does truly forever preclude the other: one never felt anything of the sort.
It is a moral question I am revolving around, but also a physical one: How can it be possible that one person loves and the one he loves dislikes him? Is love not the kind of thing that can only come into being from two sides at once, in a kind of feedback loop? From the party of unrequited love we have enough reports. Regarding it, and regarding supermarkets and tourism and imperialism and other irrational swellings of one-sidedness, it appears to me quite clear that it is a simple case of self-delusion, swelling in time, multiplied by imperious notions of righteousness. And again it’s not mere chance that the depiction of delusion is a specialty of literature.
I have always known that to love means to get lost. But I thought it meant losing oneself to the truth, a daring escape from the labyrinth of false ideas that is society. What worries me is whether I am not now, by rejecting a woman in love, betraying the truth, and then putting myself in the hands of society for protection against her revenge. For this reason I have always refused to admit that anyone I don’t love might ever fall in love with me, and even now I keep glancing toward the easy way out, to claim that what is driving these people out of their minds is merely a hairball of clichés, not love—otherwise I would be in total agreement.
Now, however, I am able to report from the other side, and willing to do it with the best of hearts. Recently in love affairs I have found myself sprawled on other people’s windshields, all six legs scattered around me, the last organs gurgling their elegiac upheavals as I drown in my own blood. It would make sense to draw some conclusion from this, some philosophical insight that could guide me in fixing up some principles, like one fixes a paper collar with chalk. Of course I have for some time been suspicious of my indulged idiosyncrasies, and of the way my own timidity makes a monster of me, as it does with others; but first of all I am worried that I generate brutality precisely through my conviction that I must find some way of dealing with myself before I dare to hand myself in to others. Why is that?
Best European Fiction 2017 Page 11