by Alexis Jenni
Ahmed was there, staying in the background, crouching beside the stove, silently brewing the mint tea, smiling from time to time at the doctor’s gibes. He filled the tea glasses, pouring from a great height, a technique the Colonel did not emulate, though he insisted he was familiar with it. When they had drunk the scalding tea, the flaps of the tent fluttered, a little sweat evaporated and they heaved a contented sigh.
‘At this time of day, I’d rather an anisette,’ said Kaloyannis. ‘But the eccentricities of Islam mean that Ahmed won’t touch it and I would feel uncomfortable drinking without him. And so, gentlemen, it shall be tea for everyone, the whole war long, as a mark of respect for the hare-brained ideas of all and sundry.’
‘Tell me something, Kaloyannis,’ the Colonel said after a moment, ‘are you a Jew?’
‘I could tell that was eating you up. Indeed I am, Colonel. My first name is Salomon. Though obviously, these days, you don’t saddle yourself with a name like that without solid family reasons.’
The Colonel twirled his glass, making a little eddy of the tea; the flecks of mint leaf pooled in its navel and as he whirled faster it threatened to overspill. He drained the glass and reframed the question.
‘But Kaloyannis is a Greek name, isn’t it?’
Salomon Kaloyannis let out a joyous laugh that made the Colonel blush. Then he leaned forwards, jabbing his forefinger as though chiding.
‘I can see what’s troubling you, Colonel. It’s the old problem of the clandestine Jew, isn’t it?’
The Colonel, as embarrassed as a child caught threatening an adult with a wooden sword, gave no clear answer.
‘The fear of the hidden Jew is just a question of classification,’ said Kaloyannis. ‘I have a rabbi friend, he lives in Bab El Oued like me. I’ve never been one for religion, but he’s still my friend, because, as boys, we played truant together. Bunking off school with someone creates more of a bond than going to class with them. We know each other so well that we know the shortcomings of our respective vocations – nothing to be proud of – and that spares us endless arguments. When he’s sober, he can explain to me with impeccable logic why certain animals are impure and certain practices are abomination. Kashrut has the precision of a book of natural science, and that is something I can understand. What is classified is pure, what defies classification is impure; for the Lord created an orderly world – it’s the least one could expect of Him – and those who do not fit into his categories do not deserve a place there, they are monsters.
‘Now, of course, after a few drinks, the boundaries are not quite so clear. They seem porous. The shelves of the divine cabinet are no longer level. The compartments no longer fit together, some are missing dividers. After an early afternoon anisette, the world looks less like a library and more a tray of cocktail snacks, where everyone helps themselves to a little of everything in no particular order, just for the pleasure.
‘A few more glasses and we have overcome our outrage, our indignation, our terror of monsters. We adopt the only sane reaction to the bedlam of the world: we laugh. An uncontrollable laugh that elicits knowing looks from those around us. They know that this is what always happens when the doctor and the rabbi start discussing the Torah and the sciences on the Place des Trois-Horloges.
‘The next morning I wake up with a headache and my friend feels a little guilty. We avoid each other for a few days and go about our jobs with great care and proficiency.
‘But let me answer your question, Colonel. My name is Kaloyannis because my father was Greek: his surname was Kaloyannis and we inherit our names from our fathers. He married a Gattégno from Salonika, and since Jewishness is passed down through mothers, they called me Salomon. When Salonika as a Jewish city disappeared, they washed up in Constantine, like the survivors of a shipwreck who climb aboard a new vessel when theirs sinks. Oh yes, we deserted a sinking ship; a metaphor you’ve doubtless heard before in a different, more zoological, form. But when a ship sinks, you either jump or drown. In Constantine I was French and I married a woman named Bensoussan, because I loved her and also because I did not want to interrupt a thousand-year-old tradition. After I qualified as a doctor, I settled in Bab El Oued, which is a glorious melting pot, and though I love my community I find life in the community frustrating. There you are, Colonel, now you know the secret of the Greek name that masks the hidden Jew.’
‘You’re cosmopolitan.’
‘Absolutely. I was born an Ottoman, something that no longer exists, and now I am a Frenchman, because France has always been a refuge welcoming the non-existent, and we speak French, the language of the Empire of Ideas. Empires have much to recommend them, Colonel, they leave you in peace, and you can always belong. There are no conditions to being an imperial subject – you need only agree to be one. And you get to keep your ancestral roots, however contradictory, without being martyred for them. Empire allows a man to breathe easily, to be similar and different at the same time. To be a citizen of a nation, on the other hand, is something one earns, by birth, by nature, by a painstaking investigation of one’s origins. This is the drawback of nations: you belong or you do not belong, and there is constantly suspicion. The Ottoman Empire left us in peace. Once the tiny Greek nation got its hands on Salonika, people were forced to state their religion in their identity papers. This is why I love the République Française – the capital ‘R’ makes all the difference. The République does not have to be French; this glorious concept can take a new adjective without losing its nature. Talking as I am to you, in this language, allows me to be a citizen of the world.
‘But I have to confess that I was disappointed when confronted with France itself. I was a citizen of la France universelle, far removed from the Île-de-France, and then suddenly metropolitan France was picking a fight with me. The Maréchal, ever the rural policeman, inherited a city and he wants to turn it into a village.’
The Colonel made an irritated gesture, as though this were an issue only to be discussed among one’s own.
‘And yet you came to fight for France.’
‘Not at all. I came to take back something that was stolen from me.’
‘Assets?’
‘Of course not, Colonel. I am a little Jew with no capital and no assets. I’m a doctor in Bab El Oued; it’s a far cry from Wall Street. I was living a peaceful little life, a French citizen basking in the sun, when murky events took place in the far north of my quartier. The result was I was robbed of my status as a French citizen. I had been a Frenchman, now I was merely a Jew. I was forbidden from practising my profession, from studying, from voting. Education, medicine, the Republic, everything I believed in was taken from me. And so I got on the boat with various other people and came to take it back. When I go home I will distribute what I have recovered to my Arab neighbours. The Elastic Republic that is our language can encompass an infinite number of speakers.’
‘You think the Arabs are capable?’
‘As capable as you or I, Colonel. With education, I’m sure I could transform a Pygmy into a nuclear physicist. Look at Ahmed. He has been trained, he works with me, his nursing care is impeccable. Put him in a French hospital and no one would notice. Apart from his moustache, of course; the men in metropolitan France have rather small moustaches. We were surprised by that, weren’t we, Ahmed?’
‘Yes, Doctor Kaloyannis. Very surprised.’
And he poured the tea, brought over a glass. Salomon thanked him gently. Doctor Kaloyannis got along very well with Ahmed.
Commentaries IV
Here and there
THE MORNING AFTER my night of pain, I felt better. Thank you.
This pain was mine, it ravaged my throat; not seriously, but it was my throat. I could not get rid of it. My pain stayed with me like a mouse accidentally trapped in my spacesuit. I was the cosmonaut; we had been launched in a rocket ship that was to orbit the Earth several times before returning. All the cosmonaut can do is wait; and he feels the mouse scurry here and there over his
body; it is trapped with him; he flies through space, it flies with him. He can do nothing. The mouse will land with him at the appointed hour, and until then he can only wait.
In the morning I no longer felt my pain. I had taken analgesics, anti-inflammatories, vasomodifiers, and they had dispelled it. The mouse in my spacesuit had disappeared, dissolved. Analgesics are the greatest achievement of medicine. Together with anti-inflammatories, antibiotics and tranquillizers. Unable to actually cure the agonies of living, science gives us the means to feel no pain. Day after day, pharmacists dole out the means of inaction by the crateload. Doctors and pharmacists urge the patient to have more patience, always more patience. The priority of the sciences as applied to the body is not to cure, but to soothe. Someone who complains is given help to endure their reactions. He is advised to be patient and rest; in the meantime he is given a calmative. The pain will be dealt with, but later. Meanwhile he needs to calm down, not get himself in such a state, sleep a little, so he can carry on living in this devastating condition.
I wolfed down the remedies and the following morning I felt better. Thanks.
Thanks to analgesics, I felt like nothing was wrong. But everything’s going wrong.
Everything’s going wrong.
I visited Salagnon once a week. I went to a painting class in Voracieuxles-Bredins. The mere mention of the name would make a native of Lyon shudder. It is a name that makes people flinch, or makes them smile.
This town of towers and suburban houses is at the terminus of all lines of transport. The buses go no further, the city ends. The metro dropped me in front of the bus station. The platforms are arranged under a plastic awning stained by rain and sunlight. Large orange numbers on a black background indicate the destinations. Buses departing for Voracieux-les-Bredins leave rarely. I sat on a sun-bleached plastic seat with its scuffed back, leaning against a glass windbreak crazed with cracks from some impact. In the glorious analgesic haze, my feet did not quite touch the ground. The badly designed seat did not help; too deep, the front edge too high; it raised my legs, so my feet barely grazed the stained tarmac. The uncomfortableness of street furniture is not an accident: discomfort discourages loitering and encourages fluid movement. Fluidity is the necessary prerequisite of modern life, without it the city dies. But, stuffed to the gills with psychosomatotrophic drugs, I was feeling fluid inside, I barely connected with my body, while my eyes floated above my seat.
I was far from home. People like me do not go to Voracieuxles-Bredins. To the east, the last metro station is the tradesman’s entrance to the city. A harried crowd of people exits, enters, and they are nothing like me. They brushed past without seeing, a rushing throng, dragging heavy luggage, clutching children, pushing strollers around the maze of platforms. They walked singly with heads bowed, or in tight little groups. They were not like me. I was reduced to my eye, my body absent, loosed as it was from my weight, disconnected from my sense of touch, floating in my skin. We are nothing like each other; we brush past each other, unseeing.
All around me I heard voices, yet I could not understand what was being said. The voices were talking too loudly, hacking sentences into short phrases, blunt exclamations enunciated with a curious emphasis; when I finally realized they were speaking French, the language was utterly transformed. All around me, as I sat perched on this seat nearly too small to hold me, I could hear a strain of my own language as though distorted by echoes. I found it difficult to follow this music, but the analgesics that soothed my throat impelled me towards indifference. What was this weird plastic cavern in which I found myself? I did not recognize anything.
I was sick, feverish, probably still contagious, and everything seemed strange. People came, they went and I could not make sense of anything. They were not like me. All these people passing were alike, but they were not like me. In the area where I live, I experience the opposite: the people I meet are like me, but they are not alike. In the centre, where the city warrants its name, where one can be most confident of being oneself, the individual takes precedence over the group; I recognize each person, each is an individual, but here in the suburbs it is the group that I see, the individuals blur together. We are primed to identify groups, it is an anthropological necessity. Inherited social class can be spotted at a distance, it is worn on the body, it is written in the face. Resemblance is a form of belonging and I do not belong here. I float in my seat-shell while I wait for the bus; my dangling feet do not touch the ground. I see only through my eyes, which float, oblivious to my body. Thought completely disconnected from body is entirely focused on resemblances.
These people recognized each other, greeted each other, but I did not recognize the greeting. The boys slapped fingers, bumped fists in complex sequences I was surprised they could remember. Older men solemnly shook hands and, with their free arms, hugged the other closer and kissed without using their lips. In less effusive greetings they brought the hand that had touched the other person to their heart, and the very sight of this triggered an intense emotion in me. Unsteady young men waited for buses, gathered in jostling groups, wavering on the edge of the circle they formed, looking outwards and then looking back, rolling their shoulders, shifting their weight to the other foot. The girls passed in gaggles, giving the boys a wide berth, rarely saying hello to anyone. And when they did, when a fifteen-year-old girl said hello to a fifteen-year-old boy, who drifted away from his unstable group, she did so in a way I found baffling as I floated above my sun-bleached seat-shell, barely touching the ground: she shook his hand, as though she were a businesswoman; her hand perfectly straight at the end of her outstretched arm, independent of her body, which remained stiffly aloof when she touched a boy’s hand. In a loud voice she would inform the girls with her that he was a cousin; loud enough so that I could hear her, me and anyone else waiting for the bus to Voracieux-les-Bredins.
I don’t understand these rules. At the end of the metro line people greet each other differently. How can we live together when the gestures that make contact possible are not the same?
Two black veils floated past with people inside. They walked together, floating in the wind, hiding everything. Satin gloves hid their fingers, only their eyes were visible. They walked together, passed in front of me. I could no more see them than I could a patch of darkness. Two shrouds with eyes swept through the bus station. They had to be women it was forbidden to look upon. My gaze would have sullied them with its powerful desire. Because seeing female forms would have roused me, would have reminded me of my loneliness, of my uncomfortable, creaking plastic seat-shell; it would have urged me to get up, to touch, to kiss this other I would desire as myself. Not seeing them, my body is left to its own devices, unresponsive, almost numb, utterly absorbed by abstract calculations. The rule of reason makes me a monster.
How would I be able to bear this burden that is the other if my desire for it did not cause me to forgive it everything? How could I live with those I meet if I cannot look upon them, follow them with my gaze, delight in and anticipate their passing, since the mere sight of them stirs my body? How? If love between us is not possible, what then remains?
When veiled by a black bag, the other privatizes the street to some extent. Fences off the public space to a degree. Ousts me from my space. Occupies the place where I might be; all I can do is clumsily bump into this other or avoid it with a groan, causing me to waste time. This other is in the way. With an other who reveals nothing I can have only reasonable relations, and nothing is more unreliable than reason. What is left if we cannot lust after each other, even with our eyes? Violence?
The two black veils moved calmly along the platforms without touching anybody. They checked the timetable and climbed aboard a bus. In doing so the veils were lifted slightly and I saw feet. One was wearing women’s shoes with gold trimmings, the other a man’s shoes. The bus started up and I’m glad I didn’t catch it. I’m glad not to be shut up in a bus with two dark shrouds, one wearing women’s shoes, the other
wearing men’s. The bus disappeared at the junction and I don’t know what happened after that. Nothing, probably. I took another psychosomatotrope, because my head was starting to throb again, my throat could barely swallow. Pain racked my head and my mucous membranes. Pain racked the organ of thought and the organ of touch. Proximity becomes painful, the closeness becomes phobic; you begin to dream of having no neighbours, of eliminating everything apart from the self. Violence works on the contact surface; it is here that pain manifests itself and from here that the urge to destroy spreads at the same speed as the fear of being destroyed. The mucous membranes become inflamed.
Why hide under such a large chador? Unless it is to plot dark deeds, to announce the disappearance of bodies: through relegation; through repudiation; through mass graves.
Salagnon smiled at me. He took my hand in his hand, his gentle yet firm hand, and he smiled at me. Oh, that smile! For that smile you forgive him everything. You forget the harshness of his features, his military crop, his cold stare, his terrible past; you forget that he has so much blood on his hands. The smile that softens the lines of his mouth when he greets me wipes away everything. In the moment that he smiles Victorien Salagnon is naked. He says nothing, he simply opens a door and allows me to step into an empty room, into one of those magnificent empty rooms filled only with sunlight that exist in apartments before you move in. His gaunt features are stretched over the bones of his face. A silk curtain next to an open window, and the sun behind it playing in the folds, it flutters in the breeze that carries with it the joyous sounds of the street, the murmur of shady trees filled with birds.
When he shakes my hand I feel prepared to listen to everything he has to tell me. I will say nothing. All desire has flowed from my tongue to my hands. I have no linguistic desire other than to take the brush, dip it in the ink, lay it on the paper; my only wish is a trembling in my hands, a physical desire to pick up the brush and the first black stroke that appears on the paper will be a relief, a release for my whole being, a sigh. I want him to guide me in the path of the unique brushstroke, so that I can hold my head up and unfurl the splendour of ink between my hands.