The New Republic

by Lionel Shriver

  Yet Nicola’s version of completing a project was to give it away. Edgar had already benefited from this compulsion in the form of a hand-knit watch cap stitched with the National Record logo, a pinwheel (Cinziero youth craze) covered in harlequin silks, and a regular deluge of cod balls, pizza rusticas, and tray cakes that Nicola persisted in calling “leftovers.” No one had ever made him feel so stingy in comparison.

  The Record bureau shared its hall with the offices of the Guardian, the New York Times, the Independent, Le Monde, the Washington Post, the Tokyo Times, Reuters, and Trudy Sisson’s one-woman photographic agency—the sort of clannish line-up from which the term “hack pack” derived. Certainly for journalists covering the same beat to be concentrated on a single floor of Casa Naufragada increased the likelihood that they’d all tumble off to catch the same events, like kids carousing from the classroom for a school trip.

  Too, once arrived at a newsworthy spectacle en masse, these world travelers, like travelers everywhere, tended to cling to one another, in preference to dispersing into funny-smelling crowds. Before filing, Edgar’s cohorts often dropped by adjoining offices nervously to compare notes. Since an editor’s primary sources of information about their patch were other newspapers and wire services, it was far less crucial to square their copy with the truth than with other copy.

  Theoretically, Edgar abhorred this clubby office arrangement. He deplored consensus journalism as bland, packs of any sort as insecure. News gatherers roving together in throngs narrowed coverage, diminished its dynamism, and encouraged a timid, tidy company line. Besides, Edgar thought of himself as a loner, if he’d never been thoroughly sure that this was a role he’d chosen and not one he’d been stuck with, of which he’d learned to make the best.

  In practice, however, Edgar adored cruising down Hack Hall of Casa Naufragada and poking his head into succeeding doors. He loved lingering by the coffee machine to trade insider tittle-tattle. He secretly relished covering Creamie rallies flanked by garrulous cohorts, to whom he could make caustic asides while they aggregated aloofly at the back. After teeming north in a convoy, Edgar flushed with a warm, safe glow seated between his fellow Known Quantities at Lisbon press conferences, scrawling messages on his pad, like “That’s the fourth time he’s used the word fiendish,” and passing them to Win.

  Edgar’s pleasure at being ensconced snugly in a collegial covey didn’t reduce to so wholesome a matter as an embracing affection for his colleagues. He wasn’t sure he liked them that much, as individuals, and as a group they were ludicrous. But he liked knowing their names. He liked that they knew his. He liked it that, little by little, some of them seemed to like him. Oh, wallowing in this cozy clique was weak, it was frail, it was intellectually bankrupt and professionally suspect and probably even pathetic, but it was also every former fat boy’s dream.

  So when Edgar got word that in the North African ghetto of Novo Marrakech a BEIP house-to-house sweep for illegal immigrants was turning nasty, he happily mustered the troops down the hall. It was that dickhead João Pacheco who’d tipped him off. Creamies were keen for publicity about “Beep” raids, for while never satisfied that the new get-tough immigration policy was adequate, and reluctant to cede their professional-victim status to competing unfortunates, they gleefully reaped credit for making Lisbon dance.

  Serendipitously, Nicola had just stopped by to dispense a basket of date-nut squares, and Edgar entreated her to join their joyride. While for denizens of Casa Naufragada the premium enticement to any excursion was its potential for violence, Nicola was one of those obtuse creatures who regarded the fact that someone might get hurt as reason to steer clear. Edgar was obliged to assure her that Cinziero “riots” were akin to impromptu street fairs, replete with vendors hawking fresh tortas de uvas peludas and opportunistic minstrels.

  Henry greatly assisted Edgar’s case by pontificating stiffly that a riot was no place for a girl, and that Henry himself “only risked his life for journalism” in order to “get to the bottom of what happened to his family and why,” not in the capacity of a “conflict voyeur,” after which Nicola flung her basket of goodies on the desk and said she “wouldn’t miss their silly riot for the world.” In all, she seemed to be growing impatient with her husband’s icy histrionics (for which, to his credit, Henry displayed little flair)—although not, to Edgar’s despair, quite impatient enough.

  Meanwhile, from the exuberance along Hack Hall you’d have thought they were preparing for a picnic. Trudy tied a pink ribbon around her straw hat, checking for stray blond hairs with her compact while stuffing her Real Photo-Journalist’s Vest with extra film. Roland donned a pair of Barba’s traditional plastic goggles, ostensibly to shield his eyes from wind-borne grit but more probably because he’d concluded they looked cool. Martha wrapped up a packet of date-nut squares for a snack she might better have skipped. Win shrugged into his coat-of-many-countries, its zipper shot and leather worn soft, while whinnying a weary here-we-go, another-fucking-riot sigh; Pyre had mastered the ownership-through-boredom gambit before Edgar was born.

  Her plans to shift to Jerusalem put on indefinite hold, Alexis yanked her cellular phone from its recharger and lunged for the elevator, but Edgar beat her to the button. Now that Barrington had relinquished his role as class bathroom monitor, Alexis was ever anxious to assert her a priori leadership just because she worked for the Times. Edgar had grown equally anxious to deny her that authority by the pettiest means possible. Maybe no one would ever replace Barrington quite, but if anyone stepped into the breach it wasn’t going to be that officious, sexless prune.

  The Jap, the Frog, and a collection of visiting leeches from Fleet Street and the Wall Street Journal Europe brought up the rear, and the field trip commenced. Gloriously, Nicola was still pissed off at her husband and shared Edgar’s Turbo. Yet once settled in the adjacent bucket seat she went quiet, running her finger dolorously along the dashboard and taking deep lungfuls with her nose lifted. Edgar didn’t get it until she murmured, “That smell.” Right. She was bent out of shape because this was Barrington’s car.

  It was all Edgar could do to stop himself from exploding, yeah, we’re in Saddler’s Saab, and I’m wearing Saddler’s shirt, and Saddler’s musky fuck-me cologne as well, and we’re on our way to a hullabaloo that probably wouldn’t even be happening if it weren’t for Saddler’s twisted notion of a good laugh. We’ve got everything, honey, except Saddler himself, who left you without so much as a fare-thee-well, though not before bolting a chip on your husband’s shoulder the size of a two-by-four. So how about turning that pretty face in this direction, sister? I may be a powerful disappointment in comparison, as you said yourself lost, hostile, and hunkered into the paranoid posture of a rope-a-doped boxer. I may be a former fat boy just looking for love, in the words of our mutual friend whose very absence talks. But the one thing I’ve got going for me is that I’m not a myth or an icon or a void in all of Cinziero’s social life but a man with the standard equipment who’s actually here.

  “I should obviously buy,” was all Edgar said aloud, “one of those cardboard pine trees.”

  After several minutes of laden silence, Nicola said softly, “I’m sorry about Henry’s behavior, back in the office. I know he sounded—”

  Edgar provided, “Like a prat,” a Britishism for which he was finding multiple applications.

  “This morning.” She sighed. “He found the postcard.”

  Since Edgar’s whole, total, entire life was not consumed with Barrington Saddler—quite—it took him a moment to remember postcard-from-supposedly-whom. “Big deal. You said it was blank.”

  “Well, that’s suspicious, isn’t it? Addressed, with no message? Better he’d written some innocuous wish-you-were-here, and signed someone else’s name. I swear, that is typical of Barrington: to go through the motions of discretion, without thinking it all the way through and being genuinely considerate!”

  Given that Saddler had walked out cold on his every fr
iend, relative, and responsibility without explanation, complaining that the composition of his alleged postcard was inconsiderate was rather like objecting that Son of Sam didn’t pay his gas bill. Yet instead of emphasizing this absurdity, Edgar found himself indulging Nicola’s desperate fantasy that the card could only have been posted by Himself.

  “Do you wish he’d never sent it?”

  Nicola snapped, “Don’t be stupid.” Henry wasn’t the only one in a bad mood.

  “If you thought the sender was recognizable, why didn’t you throw it away?”

  She threw up her hands, and glared out the side window. “I don’t have—! I don’t have much. Physically. To remember him by. Bin it? I simply couldn’t. But I’m not very good at hiding things.”

  “Where’d you put it?”

  “My top dresser drawer.”

  “You’re right,” said Edgar. “You suck.”

  “Henry said, it came the day Grant’s Tomb was bombed, didn’t it? He said I’d been too ‘giddy’ when news of the bomb came in, and he knew something was up. Perverse, isn’t it, when happiness is a sin?”

  “I assume you denied all this.”

  “To what end? He’d know I was lying.”

  Edgar hit the steering wheel. “Woman, you’re hopeless. You lie to allow them to lie to themselves. It doesn’t matter if they believe you. Not at first. Just stick to your story and don’t budge. Eventually you’ll talk them into it, because they’ll talk themselves into it, and you’ll talk yourself into it, too. Say anything enough times and it starts to sound true, since most people don’t know the difference between the true and the merely familiar.”

  “I won’t lie,” said Nicola stolidly.

  “Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.”

  “But I didn’t—”

  “Save it for Henry,” he cut her off. “You got nothin’ to explain to me.”

  Edgar’s portrayal of Barban civil strife as one long Ninth Avenue Food Fair was exaggerated, though the last “riot” he’d covered in Cinziero amounted to little more than a shouting match between some unemployed Creams and an Algerian construction crew. An enterprising vendor had indeed materialized to sell the journalists, who outnumbered the antagonists by half a dozen, soupy cups of pistachio gelado. This time, however, as Edgar approached Novo Marrakech the melee was audible from farther away, and he was already considering parking the Saab safe from projectiles when the choice was made for him: a Beep van had blocked the road and was turning all traffic around. Edgar flipped his Record ID—a gesture of instant access that still brought him boundless joy—then swung the car up on the curb, pulled the pouting Nicola from her seat, and proceeded on foot.

  Being dirt-poor, Novo Marrakech was one of Cinziero’s few neighborhoods whose eighteenth-century housing stock hadn’t been leveled, and was consequently one of Edgar’s favorite haunts. The row houses were faced with painted tile, the lanes paved with slippery cobble, the air sharp with garlic and chili oil. The area had an animated, chaotic feel, flashing with opalescent scarves, tingling with obscure spices, lively with tongue-lashing vendetta and tearful reconciliation—like a real foreign country. Oh, lately when Edgar ventured into this maze for a lamb kabob the residents seemed more closed, their smiles less ready, their service brisker in an apparent anxiousness to be done with him, but Edgar hadn’t been sure if the Moroccans had really changed or if he’d merely become more alert to his own status as an intruder.

  This afternoon, the chaos wasn’t rambunctious but forbidding, and the hostility toward anyone not a card-carrying rag-head went well beyond normal wariness of strangers in an ethnic enclave. As Edgar took Nicola’s hand and threaded toward the dull poom of rubber bullets, householders slammed shutters and locked front doors. Garbage rained from overhead, and Edgar nimbly dodged potato peelings and soft tomatoes. Since the narrow passages doubled as wind tunnels, the refuse assumed a horizontal trajectory in gusts, and followed them down the road.

  When the duo arrived at the small commercial square where the commotion appeared to be centered, Edgar pulled Nicola into the entryway of an optometrist’s that seemed safe enough, since its every window was already smashed. A red Beep van was parked across the square, full of arrested locals presumably, since it boomed with a rhythmic pound of protest from inside. Pistols at least still holstered, Beeps in riot gear ringed the middle of the plaza waving wide-barreled rubber-bullet rifles in aimless, jerky circles. Masked by hard plastic visors, any expressions of alarm or confusion would be obfuscated by glare, but full-blown riots had been hitherto unheard of in this town, and the rookies couldn’t have had the faintest idea what they were doing. Which was dangerous. Most of these immigration cops were likely to panic by running away, but there was another sort of panic you got from people with guns, and it was the stuff of tribunals.

  By contrast, the Moroccans did seem to know what they were doing, since the cardinal rule of rioting is that you foul your own nest. That is, you concentrate wreckage in the area where you, your family, and your friends live; you put your own well-being at risk far more than the health of anyone trying to contain you; and you vent most of your anger not on its real object but on your own kind.

  Illustrating that Novo Marrakech dwellers had graduated from Riot School with honors, the square was strewn with oranges, eggplants, and squashed pumpkins from nearby fruit-and-veg stands, glopped with broken eggs, rolling with burst sacks of dried chickpeas, and fragrant with toppled tubs of coriander seeds. Frames from the optometrist’s behind him crunched under Edgar’s feet and mangled across the front walk. The display case of the electrical appliance shop opposite was empty, its window smashed, like most of the glass in sight on ground level and several residential panes on upper floors. A Ford Cortina on the corner was on fire, and chances were good that it belonged to someone in the neighborhood. Though the vicinity was hardly blanketed with fallen bodies, half a dozen Moroccan youths glowered from entryways, cradling arms or pressing T-shirts to bloodied foreheads; brandishing three-foot shields and padded like cricket players, the Beeps had suffered no serious injuries that Edgar could see. Magnificent if only for its voluptuous irrationality, rioting is a carnival of self-destruction.

  Yet since they’d previously been prepackaged into three-minute TV news segments, before this journo gig Edgar had missed certain essentials about riots. A well-edited broadcast splices together several pitched sequences to evoke nonstop tooth-and-nail pandemonium. Fine entertainment. Not remotely true to life. A respectable riot goes on for hours, and even experienced, ultra-fit troublemakers cannot sustain full-tilt havoc for more than a few minutes at a go. Violence is exhausting, it’s hazardous, and it demands a surprising degree of ingenuity. Rabble-rousers need continuously to light upon new objects to hurl, new vehicles to burn, new abuse to scream, new premises to loot, and new stashes in which to hide microwaves.

  Accordingly, bouts of ferocity were fitful, and the abiding atmosphere in the square was desultory. A group of young men would charge the Beeps in the middle, pitching stones, flinging fistfuls of hard chickpeas, thumping the plastic shields with their tennis shoes and scampering back again as if playing a civil-disobedience version of kick-the-can. Or a chorus would rise from an alleyway, reminiscent of the “Hell, no, we won’t go!” chants from the Vietnam era, albeit whatever they were shouting was completely wasted, since Arabic flew right over the heads of most Portuguese cops. Alternatively, veiled women in djellabas leaning out upper windows would mobilize a hailstorm of old shoes. Though at one point another sedan went up in flames, all these instants of unruliness punctuated an uneasy stalemate, as gangs regrouped and Beeps propped shields on the ground because their arms were tired.

  Another curiosity about riots in the round is that they’re not that loud. Yelling, sure; the odd poom of rubber bullets (cast in a fleshy pink, the thick, snub-nosed cylinders scattered the square like discarded marital aids); the rattle of hurtled cans bumping across the cobbles to a standstill; Martha Hul
bert’s cries of “Edgar! Over here!” from beneath an awning where his colleagues had all congregated—cries he ignored, not wanting to seem prey to the herd mentality in front of Nicola. But Edgar had arrived too late for the smashing of glass; the gas tank in the sedan refused to explode, and for stretches the only cacophony within earshot emitted from seagulls.

  Yet the silence, in its relentless demand to be filled, was ominous. And so was the occasion’s perfect lack of structure, which called out for an imposed climax. The Moroccans were running out of both impromptu ammunition and ideas. Beeps did not know what to do or where to go or whether to fire their weapons or at whom. Neither the cops nor the immigrants had a plan. The fracas had no leaders and frankly no purpose, and neither party to the stand-off seemed clear on how to bring the impasse to an end.

  With the rumpus so sporadic and dispersed, Edgar was hard-pressed to decipher what exactly was going on. In his latter days as a lawyer, when he’d been pining to become a foreign correspondent, he’d imagined that in the thick of world events eyewitnesses were granted absolute access to the truth, which those forced to consume news secondhand would at best piece together in hearsay dribs. An attractive fiction. A news story was a postmortem construct. Those We Were There books were full of lies, since when you’re there you’ve rarely the tiniest notion of what’s happening. Odds are if you were “there” at Pearl Harbor you didn’t know the Japanese had bombed any ships, any more than grassy-knoll rubberneckers grasped in the very moment what those cracking sounds meant in Dallas. Nevertheless, We-Were-There Edgar was now professionally responsible for putting all those eggplants and chickpeas into credible narrative order for his readership.

  “Edgar, we should leave,” Nicola whispered. “Without any journalists watching, everyone might just go home. With all these television cameras, Trudy snapping away . . . Look: those kids are showing off for her. You scribbling on your pad . . . You’re inciting them. If you keep waiting for a story, they might just give you one.”