It wasn’t long after I’d first arrived in the projects that I rubbed shoulders with the three groups who stand out from the crowd and freak people out, not just people downtown, but people in the projects too: the punks, the junkies and the dropouts. The punks are teenagers with a long experience of crime behind them. Holdup men, dealers, racketeers. Some, although barely seventeen, have already done a couple of years in the joint, with several years ‘conditional discharge.’ They’re young, tough and scary, and they’ll use a flick knife at the drop of a hat. The junkies, on the other hand, aren’t looking for trouble. It’s just that sometimes they need cash, and to get it they’d pull any stupid stunt. Whatever they get, they have it coming. Just showing their faces is tantamount to a confession.
The dropouts are cool guys. They don’t do anything stupid, and they don’t have a police record. They’re enrolled in vocational courses, but never attend, which suits everybody just fine: it reduces class numbers and allows the college to hire extra teachers. They spend their afternoons at FNAC or Virgin. Scrounge a smoke here, a hundred francs there. They’re resourceful, and clean. Until the day they start dreaming of driving a BMW, because they’re pissed off taking the bus. Or they’re suddenly ‘inspired’ by dope and start shooting up.
Then there are all the others, the ones I discovered later. A whole mass of kids who have no story other than that they were born here. And that they’re Arabs. Or blacks, or gypsies, or Comorans. High school kids, temporary workers, the unemployed, public nuisances, the sports fans. Their teenage years are spent walking a tightrope. A tightrope from which they’re almost all likely to fall. Where will they land? Punk, junkie, dropout? Nobody knows. It’s a lottery. They’ll find out sooner or later. For me it’s always too soon, for them it’s too late. In the meantime, they get picked up for trivial offences. Riding a bus without a ticket, a fight on the way out of school, petty shoplifting from a supermarket.
These were the kind of things they discussed on Radio Galère, a talk radio station I listened to regularly in the car. I waited now for the end of the show, with the car door open.
“Our old folks can’t help us anymore, dammit! Take me, for instance. I get to eighteen, I need fifty or a hundred francs on a Friday night. It’s only natural. There are five of us. Where do you think the old man’s going to find five hundred francs? So, then what happens, I don’t say me, but... my brother for example, he has to—”
“Pick someone’s pocket!”
“That’s no joke!”
“Right! And the guy who gets his money stolen sees it’s an Arab. And straight away he joins the National Front!”
“Even if he isn’t a racist, man!”
“It could have been, I don’t know, a Portuguese, a Frenchman, a gypsy.”
“Or a Swiss guy! Shit, man! There are thieves everywhere.”
“Just your luck that in Marseille, it’s more likely to be an Arab than a Swiss guy.”
Since the neighborhood had become my beat, I’d collared a few real gangsters, and a reasonable number of dealers and holdup men. Caught them red-handed, chased them through the projects or out along the beltway. Next stop Les Baumettes, Marseilles’ biggest jail. I had no pity for them, no hate either. But I did have my doubts. Whoever the guy is, he goes into the joint at eighteen, his life is screwed up. When I was doing holdups with Manu and Ugo, we didn’t think about the risks. We knew the rules. You play the game. If you win, fine. If you lose, too bad. If you don’t like it, you might as well stay at home.
The rules were still the same now. But the risks were a hundred times greater. And the prisons were overflowing with minors. Six minors for every one adult. A figure I found really depressing.
About ten kids were chasing each other, throwing stones as big as fists. “As long as they’re doing that, they aren’t doing something stupid,” one of the mothers had told me. What she meant by ‘something stupid’ was something you called in the police for. This was just the junior version of the OK Corral. In front of Block C12, six Arab kids, aged from twelve to seventeen, stood talking. In the few feet of shade offered by the building. They saw me coming toward them. Especially the oldest of them, Rachid. He started shaking his head and making blowing noises, convinced that just my being there meant the hassles were starting. I had no intention of disappointing him. “Open air classes today?” I said, to no one in particular.
“It’s teachers’ day, monsieur,” the youngest of them said. “They have classes for each other.”
“Yeah, to see if they’re good enough to stuff our heads with their shit,” another kid said.
“Great. So I guess this is kind of like your practical work right now?”
“What do you mean?” Rachid said. “We ain’t doin’ nothin’ wrong.”
For him, school was long over. Expelled from vocational college, after threatening a teacher who called him a moron. A good kid, all the same. He was hoping for an apprenticeship. Like a lot of kids in the projects. That was the future, waiting to go on some kind of course, whatever it was. It was better than waiting for nothing at all.
“I didn’t say you were, I was just asking.” He was wearing a blue and white tracksuit: the colors of OM, the Marseilles soccer team. I felt the material. “Mmm. Brand new.”
“It’s paid for. My mother bought it for me.”
I put my arm around his shoulders and pulled him away from the group. His friends looked at me as if I’d broken the law. They were ready to scream.
“Look, Rachid, I’m going over there to B7. You see? Fifth floor. To Mouloud’s apartment. Mouloud Laarbi. Do you know him?”
“Yeah. What about it?”
“I’ll be there... oh, maybe an hour.”
“What’s it to me?”
I walked him a few more steps, toward my car. “Now, this is my car. Nothing amazing, I can hear you say. I agree. But I like it. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to it. I wouldn’t even want it to get scratched. So I’d like you to keep an eye on it. And if you have to go take a leak, get one of your buddies to take over. OK?”
“I’m not the super.”
“Get in some practice. There may be a job for you there.” I squeezed his shoulder a bit harder. “Remember, Rachid, not a scratch, or else...”
“Else what? I’m not doin’ nothin’. You can’t accuse me of nothin’.”
“I can do anything I like. I’m a cop. Don’t forget that.” I ran my hand down his back. “If I put my hand here, on your ass, what’ll I find in your back pocket?”
He freed himself quickly. He was on edge. I knew he didn’t have anything. I just wanted to be sure.
“I don’t have nothin’. I don’t touch that shit.”
“I know. You’re just a poor little Arab being harassed by a stupid cop, right?”
“Didn’t say that.”
“You think it, though. Keep an eye on my car, Rachid.”
B7 was no different than the other blocks. The lobby was filthy, and stank of piss. Someone had thrown a stone at the light bulb and smashed it. And the elevator didn’t work. Five floors. Climbing them certainly wasn’t taking a stairway to Paradise. Mouloud had called last night and left a message. Surprised at first by the recorded voice, he’d said ‘Hello’ a few times, then left a silence, and then spoken his message. “Please, Monsieur Montale, you must come. It’s about Leila.”
Leila was the eldest of his three children. The others were Kader and Driss. He might have had more, if his wife, Fatima, hadn’t died giving birth to Driss. Mouloud was the immigrant dream personified. He’d been one of the first to be hired for the Fos-sur-Mer site, at the end of 1970.
Fos had been like Eldorado. There was enough work for centuries. They were building a port that would welcome enormous methane gas tankers, factories to produce steel for the whole of Europe. Mouloud was proud of taking part in this adventure. That’s what he lik
ed, building, constructing. He’d molded his whole life, and his family, in that image. He’d never forced his children to cut themselves off from other people, to keep clear of the French. All he’d asked is that they avoid bad company. Keep their self-respect. Acquire decent manners. And aim as high as possible. Become integrated in society without denying either their race or their past.
“When we were little,” Leila told me one day, “he made us recite after him: Allah akbar, la ilah illa Allah, Mohamed rasas Allah, Ayya illa Salat, Ayya illa el Fallah. We didn’t understand a word. But it was nice to hear. It reminded us of all the things he’d told us about Algeria.” It had been a happy time for Mouloud. He’d settled with his family in Port-de-Bouc, between Les Martigues and Fos. They’d been ‘kind to him’ at the town hall and he’d soon obtained a nice public housing unit on Avenue Maurice Thorez. The work was hard, and the more Arabs there were, the better it was. That was what the veterans of the naval shipyards, who’d all been taken on at Fos, thought. Italians, mostly Sardinians, Greeks, Portuguese, a few Spaniards.
Mouloud joined the CGT. He was a worker, and he needed to find a family of workers, to understand him, help him, defend him. “This is the biggest,” Gutierrez, the union organizer, had told him. “When the building work’s finished,” he’d added, “you can go on a course, learn to handle steel. Stick with us, and you’ve got a job in the factory for sure.”
Mouloud liked that. He believed it, with a kind of blind faith. Gutierrez believed it too. The CGT believed it. Marseilles believed it. All the surrounding towns believed it, and built one housing project after the other, along with schools and roads, to welcome all the workers expected in this Eldorado. The whole of France believed it. By the time the first ingot of iron was cast, Fos was already nothing more than a mirage. The last great dream of the Seventies. The cruelest of disappointments. Thousands of men out of a job. Mouloud was one of them. But he wasn’t discouraged.
He went on strike with the CGT, occupied the site, fought the riot police who came to dislodge them. They’d lost, of course. You can never win against the arbitrary decisions of the men in suits. Driss had just been born. Fatima was dead. And Mouloud had a police record now as an agitator, and couldn’t get any real work. Just little jobs. Right now, he was a packer at Carrefour. Minimum wage, after all these years. But, as he said, ‘it was an opportunity.’ Mouloud was like that, he believed in France.
Mouloud had told me his life story in my office at the station house one evening. He told it proudly. He wanted me to understand. Leila was with him. That was two years ago. I’d taken Driss and Kader in for questioning. A few hours before, Mouloud had bought some batteries for the transistor his children had given him. The batteries didn’t work. Kader went down to the drugstore on the boulevard to change them. Driss went with him.
“You don’t know how to use them, that’s all.”
“Yes I do,” Kader replied. “It isn’t the first time.”
“You Arabs always think you know everything.”
“It’s not very polite of you to say that, madame.”
“I’m polite when I want to be. But not to filthy Arabs like you. You’re wasting my time. Take your batteries. They’re old ones, anyhow, and you didn’t buy them here.”
“My dad bought them here earlier.”
Her husband came out of the back of the store with a hunting rifle. “Tell your lying father to come here, and I’ll make him swallow his batteries.” He threw the batteries on the floor. “Get out of here, you sons of bitches!”
Kader pushed Driss out of the store. After that, things happened very fast. Driss, who hadn’t said a word so far, picked up a big stone and threw it at the window. He ran off, followed by Kader. The guy came out of the store and fired at them, but missed. Ten minutes later, a hundred kids were besieging the drugstore. It took more than two hours, and a van of riot police, to restore calm. Nobody dead, nobody injured. But I was furious. Part of my mission was to avoid calling in the riot police. No riots, no provocation, and above all no mistakes.
I’d listened to the druggist.
“Too many Arabs. That’s the problem.”
“They’re here. You didn’t bring them. Neither did I. But they’re here, and we have to live with them.”
“Are you on their side?”
“Don’t be a pain in the ass, Varounian. They’re Arabs. You’re an Armenian.”
“And proud of it. You have something against Armenians?”
“No. Nothing against Arabs either.”
“Yeah, and what’s the result? Have you been downtown lately? I have. It’s like Algiers or Oran. Stinks just the same.” I let him talk. “Before, you bumped into an Arab on the street, he’d say sorry. Now he wants you to say sorry. They’re arrogant, that’s what they are! Shit, they think this is their home!”
I didn’t want to listen anymore, or even argue. It sickened me. I’d heard it all before. The local far-right newspaper Le Méridional printed hateful crap like that every day. Sooner or later, they’d written once, the riot police and their dogs will have to be called in to destroy the casbahs of Marseilles... One thing was sure: if nothing was done, all hell was going to break loose. I didn’t have any solutions. Neither did anyone else. We just had to wait and not resign ourselves. Wager on Marseilles surviving this latest racial mix and being reborn. Marseilles had seen it all before.
I’d sent them all on their different ways, with fines for ‘public disorder’ preceded by a little moral tirade. Varounian was the first to leave.
“We’ll get you and cops like you,” he said as he opened the door. “Soon. When we’re in power.”
“Goodbye, Monsieur Varounian,” Leila replied, disdainfully.
He gave her a filthy look. I wasn’t sure, but I thought I heard him mutter the word ‘bitch’ under his breath. I smiled at Leila. A few days later, she called me at the precinct house to thank me and to invite me to have tea with them on Sunday. I accepted. I liked Mouloud.
Now, Driss was an apprentice in a garage on Rue Roger Salengro. Kader was in Paris, working in his uncle’s grocery store on Rue de Charonne. Leila was at college, in Aix-en-Provence, and was just completing a master’s in French language and literature. Mouloud was happy again. His children were settling down. He was proud of them, especially his daughter. I understood how he felt. Leila was intelligent, confident and beautiful. The image of her mother, Mouloud had told me. And he’d showed me a photo of Fatima, Fatima and him in the Vieux Port. Their first day together in years. He’d gone to Algeria to fetch her, to bring her over to Paradise.
Mouloud opened the door. His eyes were red.
“She’s disappeared. Leila’s disappeared.”
Mouloud made tea. He hadn’t heard from Leila in three days. That wasn’t like her, I knew. Leila respected her father. He didn’t like her to wear jeans or smoke or drink aperitifs, and told her so. They’d argue about it, shout at each other, but he never imposed his ideas on her. He trusted her. That was why he’d allowed her to take a room at the university residence in Aix. To be independent. She phoned every two days and came to see him on Sundays. Often, she slept over. Driss left her the couch in the living room and slept with his father.
The thing that made Leila’s silence worrying was that she hadn’t even called to tell him if she’d gained her master’s or not.
“Maybe she failed, and she feels ashamed... She’s in her room, crying. She doesn’t dare come back.”
“Maybe.”
“You should go find her, Monsieur Montale. Tell her it doesn’t matter.”
He didn’t believe a word he was saying. Neither did I. If she’d failed her master’s, she’d have cried, sure. But hiding away in her room, no, I couldn’t believe that. Plus, I was convinced she’d gained her master’s. Poetry and the Need for Identity, her thesis was called. I’d read it two weeks earlier. I’d thought it was a
remarkable piece of work. But I wasn’t one of the judges, and Leila was an Arab.
She’d taken her inspiration from a Lebanese writer named Salah Stetie and had developed some of his ideas. Her concern was to build bridges between East and West, across the Mediterranean. She pointed out, for example, that Sinbad the Sailor in the Arabian Nights recalled certain elements of Ulysses in the Odyssey, especially his ingenuity and his mischievousness.
What I liked most was her conclusion. As a child of the East, she considered that the French language was becoming a place where the migrant could draw together strands from all the lands through which he had passed and finally feel at home. The language of Rimbaud, Valéry and René Char would crossbreed, she asserted. It was the dream of a generation of North African immigrants. You already heard a strange kind of French spoken in Marseilles, a mixture of Provençal, Italian, Spanish and Arabic, with bits of slang thrown in. Speaking it, the kids understood each other perfectly well. At least on the streets. At school and at home, it was another story.
The first time I went to see her at college, I found the walls covered with racist graffiti. Insulting, obscene graffiti. I’d stopped in front of the most laconic: Arabs and blacks out! I’d assumed the law faculty, some five hundred yards from there, was the fascist stronghold, but clearly, human stupidity had reached French language and literature now! In case anyone hadn’t gotten the point, someone had added: Jews too.
“It can’t be a pleasant atmosphere to work in,” I said to her.
“I don’t see them anymore.”
“Yes, but they’re in your head, aren’t they?”
She shrugged, lit a Camel, then took me by the arm and led me out of there.
“One day we’ll get people to take our rights seriously. I vote, and that’s the reason why. And I’m not the only one anymore.”
“Your rights, maybe. But you’ll still have the same face.”
She turned to look at me, with a smile on her lips and a gleam in her dark eyes. “Oh, yeah? What’s wrong with my face? Don’t you like it?”
Total Chaos Page 5