by Karine Tuil
* * *
Samir’s sudden appearance in their lives caused the first cracks in their suffocating union: from now on, there were three of them, joined at the hip, moving as one, like a wave. You could see them from afar: the gang, friendly and complicit, without even a hint of jealousy or deceit; the loving couple and the free electron. Everyone in college gossiped about them: look at them, always together, showing off their intimacy, their collusion. And, deep down, they were excited by this: it was their own private game. But then, out of nowhere, tragedy hit. A few days before the oral exams, not having heard from his parents since the ignored ultimatum, Samuel learned that they had died in a car accident. A policeman told him at dawn, having first asked if he was the son of Jacques and Martine Baron. Yes, that’s me. And he truly was his father’s son in that moment when the policeman told him that their car had veered off the road and fallen into a ravine. Samuel does not remember how he reacted—the aftermath of the announcement is a black hole. Perhaps he collapsed, cried, yelled out, It can’t be true I don’t believe you Tell me it’s not true! And the policeman: I’m sorry, but it is. But he remembers the wake, the vision of the two corpses covered in a shroud, with those men in black praying around them and him standing there with his prayer book in his hands, saying Kaddish for the peace of their souls. Samir was there, in the background, wearing a skullcap, hands crossed over his stomach. He too was thinking of his father: there had been no one at his funeral, no one to cry for him. That same day, Samuel, accompanied by his aunt, repatriated his parents’ bodies to Israel, in line with their last will and testament. But before leaving the morgue, he took Samir to a quiet corner and solemnly told him: “Look after Nina for me. Don’t leave her on her own. I’m counting on you.” And that was exactly what he did. He took her out to eat, to watch movies, he gave her books, he went with her to bookstores and museums, he helped her revise, and barely a week after Samuel’s departure, when she returned from an oral exam in tears, Samir led her to a room that a friend had lent him, took her in his arms to calm her down, and there, within a few minutes, was on top of her (she was still crying) and removing her clothes (she was wearing a skirt, luckily) and pacifying her the only way he knew. Sex was his form of consolation, his way of making things better; it was his reply to the brutality of life—the purest reply possible, he had never found a better one. That might have been the end of it, but no, it was impossible. Whatever there was between them was too strong, too powerful. It overwhelmed them. They were suddenly defenseless, interdependent—they had never expected this. And while he should have told her that it was a mistake, while he should have walked away—this was how he normally acted, in all sincerity, because he got bored quickly; he didn’t like to repeat his conquests—instead he fell in love. Not only did they see each other again, they never left each other’s sides. For several days, they were inseparable. He loved her, desired her, wanted to live with her, and he told her this. It was the most terrible betrayal: Samuel would return; he’d just lost his parents in tragic circumstances; Samuel was his friend. In a fair, just, moral world, his behavior was outrageous, but, We do not live in a fair, just, moral world. That was what Samir thought. I know what I’m talking about, because I know where I’m from. The world is violent. Violence is everywhere. This was all he could find to tell her. Love is violent too. You must choose.
* * *
Samuel returned, but they did not confess their affair. Samuel thanked Samir—a true friend, someone you can rely on when things get tough, a brother you can trust. It went on like that for nine months, maybe more. Nina did not want to tell Samuel anything. He was living alone in the apartment his parents had been renting, surrounded by their furniture, their belongings—a death chamber. She never went to see him and he never went to see her. It was over between them. They never made love anymore. And when the school year ended, Samir gave her an ultimatum: It’s him or me.
Samuel had no trouble remembering those years, and soon he would no longer be able to hold back the tide of images of Samir the Star that flooded his mind, the waves of Samir crashing through the barriers that had been repaired, smashing down the fragile interior edifice he had spent years reconstructing and which now exploded and was drowned and dispersed by Samir Samir Samir.
* * *
You’re impressed, aren’t you? By his success. Admit it!
Nina looked at him with a mixture of pity and anger.
Yes
It’s true
You’re right
So here we are . . .
For a brief moment, she had imagined what her life might be now had she gone with Samir twenty years ago, had she made a different decision when he commanded her to choose: irresistible Samir, so confident, so self-assured, versus Samuel, weak in love, cowardly in adversity, devastated by the violence of the break that Nina had provoked and who could find no better way of keeping her than slicing open his veins with a box cutter in the college auditorium, one of those small knives with a retractable blade, made of blue plastic—you just push the safety catch, once, twice, you have to do it in a single movement, press down hard, even if it hurts, then let the blood pour out and the sadness with it—Samuel who had found no better way than this of proving that he loved her, that he was ready to die for her, to put an end to this unbearable pain, to cure all his ills with the stroke of a blade.
* * *
When he awoke, he understood that she had chosen him. Putting her love to the test. The risks and dangers of this. And yet, it had to be done. And there she was, hair messed up, face pale, almost corpselike—he is suffering, so I suffer too—sitting on the edge of the bed, practically at his feet, like a dog, he thinks. There she was: Nina, fully present, plumping his pillow, holding his glass as he drank, helping him to eat—time to atone, to set in motion the mechanism of expiation—Nina, surrendering to the heroic romanticism of suicide for love. How beautiful it was, how powerful, how great. Nina never leaving the room except when the nurses asked her to. As for Samir, the case was closed. Neither of them ever attempted to see him again. His name was taboo. They pretended to forget him.
* * *
Upon his release from the hospital, Samuel quit his parents’ apartment (too expensive), donated their furniture to charity, rented an efficiency, and gave up pursuing his law degree. (He even wondered why he had begun it: to piss off his father, he supposed, but he was no longer very sure. His suicide attempt and the spell in the hospital that followed it seemed to have annihilated all his determination and willpower; from now on, his vision of life was blurred and murky, everything ambiguous.) He took a literature degree by correspondence and began a job teaching foreigners to read and write. Nina too gave up her studies—she had never liked law—and became first a sales assistant, then a waitress, then a receptionist. Nowadays she worked as a model for a few major store catalogues—Carrefour and C&A, mostly.
* * *
Look at him! My God, look at him!
* * *
There was something masochistic in the way they kept watching Samir’s media consecration. They could have changed channels, but no—their suffering fed their rage, their fury. (Finally fuel for a book, thought Samuel. Finally a chance to write a novel that might actually be published!) Samuel and Nina sat petrified in front of their Firstline TV set, bought at Carrefour for €545, payable in three installments, interest-free—an object whose acquisition had caused so much tension and discord between them, with Nina pleading for its purchase for years while Samuel argued against, seeing it as a threat, before finally yielding—realizing that nothing would ever be the same again, that something had been corrupted/destroyed/soiled forever, something like innocence, like the artificial bliss that ignorance provides.
* * *
Moving closer to the screen, Samuel examined Samir, wondering if he’d had a nose job, scrutinizing his tumid lips, his amazingly smooth forehead, the way he shone and swaggered on the screen, and seeing his own reflection superimposed on Samir’s
image, in a cruel comparison. “Get out of the way!” Nina shouted. “I can’t see!” Samuel moved aside, then walked behind Nina, watching her as she knelt in front of the TV, in a sacrificial posture, intoning something—but what?
* * *
Samir smiled mechanically at the journalist, proud and happy to be where he was, where he belonged—you could see it in his puffed-out chest, the quiver in his upper lip. He lit up the screen. Nothing they had been through seemed to have affected him in the slightest. He was like a man who escapes from a crashed and burning car without a scratch, while the vehicle’s other occupant is dead at the wheel.
* * *
1. Santiago Pereira, twenty-two, and Dennis Walter, twenty-five. The former dreamed of becoming an artist but was pressured into enlisting by his high-ranking father. The latter stated: “Success, to me, means fighting for my country.”
2. Kathleen Weiner. Born in 1939 in New Jersey to a shoemaking father and a housewife mother, Kathleen graduated from Harvard. But her greatest claim to fame remained her supposed liaison, at the age of sixteen, with Norman Mailer.
3. Her employer, François Brunet, is a French politician, born September 3, 1945, in Lyon, Socialist Party member and parliamentary deputy, the author of several books, the latest of which, Toward a Just World, had been a best seller (source: Wikipedia).
4. The daughter of Polish farmers, Sofia Antkowiak dreamed of becoming a famous dancer but became pregnant after a one-night stand with a soldier. Two months after giving birth, she threw herself under the wheels of the Warsaw-Lodz train.
2
His mother1 hadn’t called (five times—Samir had counted—it was becoming obsessive) to wish him a happy birthday, nor to ask how he was. He knew this because she had left a disturbing message. In a voice that sounded distraught, she had asked him to call her back—it was “important,” it was “urgent”—in spite of the fact that he had long ago made clear to her that he did not want any contact with her. It wasn’t that he didn’t love her—he did, as he had emphasized—or had anything against her. And it certainly wasn’t due to a lack of respect—he held his mother in high regard—that he never returned her calls, but simply a desire for consistency: the need to act in accordance with the life he had chosen. You are forty years old; you have made a brilliant career in the United States; you have married the daughter of one of the richest businessmen in the country. Never mind what you did to get here: this is what you wanted, and you have worked hard to arrive at this point. You have had to fight—it wasn’t easy; no one helped you or recommended you to someone more influential. You have built your own life, and you have acted alone, determined to be number one, to be the best, obsessed by the goal of becoming rich (and what’s wrong with that?), of owning a beautiful house (the most beautiful you can find) and a luxury car (the most powerful you can find). Yes, you have a rich man’s tastes—so what? Why should you care if they call you nouveau riche? That’s what you are, what you wanted to be. You almost gave up, more than once, because the odds were so stacked against you, everything was so difficult: taking a degree in another country/creating an American branch of one of the most prestigious law firms in France, and making a name for yourself there. Sometimes you would worry that you made the wrong choice in leaving France, in severing all connection with your family, with your mother—yes, you have to plead guilty to that private corruption—but what does she want from him now? he wondered. Why had she called? It couldn’t be money: he sent her that regularly, he never forgot: the bank transfers appeased his sense of shame, absolved his sin. He helped his mother. He was a sort of social worker. You’re a good son, his mother had written to thank him, and, I hope, A GOOD MUSLIM. The issue of his racial identity: the very thing he hated
the very thing he had escaped from
and silenced the truth of
and betrayed.
He had burned that letter.
* * *
And while he wondered if his mother had suddenly become irresponsible, reckless, insane, he felt his wife’s hand in his: her perfectly manicured hand, guiding him through the darkness. Blindfolded, he let her lead him. He could see and guess nothing at all as he was taken to a secret place—nothing had filtered through to him, no one had talked—feeling a little confined in his new Dior suit, purchased especially for his CNN appearance. And I was good, he thought: relaxed, eloquent, lucid, “a natural-born TV star,” as the presenter had told him in a complicit voice that suggested she wanted to see him again, wanted to chat, to share a drink/maybe more if we hit it off (that’s what he thought) and, inside his head, he had replied, A natural-born sex star too . . . but you don’t know that yet (that way he had of bringing everything back to sexual performance, as if the bedroom were the sole arena where he could fully express his abilities, measure himself against others, and dominate them . . . that absolute confidence in his own erotic appeal . . .). In those moments, his mother ceased to exist. Hearing suppressed laughter and giggling in the darkness, he knew he had won, that he had rid himself of his past like a murderer dissolving his victim’s corpse in an acid bath. Now there was only him, Samir, surrounded by a huge crowd of people who had assembled purely to wait for him, to acclaim him. With a nimble movement, her fine hand undid the blindfold like a kidnapper releasing a hostage, and Samir saw the hundreds of guests singing, “Happy birthday to you, Sami!,” he saw the lynx, the two wolves of the East, the golden tigers and the white tigers, the Saharan leopard, the Asian lion—caged, tamed by the whips of panther-women in tight-fitting bodysuits that left nothing to the imagination, an elephant2 striding, magnificent, on a foam-covered carpet, an aging gorilla with glassy eyes that might have been stuffed were it not for the fact that it extended its massive, hairy paw toward anyone who dared to caress it through the bars of its prison. This strange menagerie was offered for the enjoyment of men in ties and women in masks—rhinestone-encrusted masks overstitched with gold thread, lace masks (made on bobbins, by hand, with needles), cloth masks, leather masks (natural, pitted, studded, or dotted with long metal spikes in the shapes of reamers), peacock-feather masks, latex masks, raw silk masks, masks in black felt or velvet, masks in transparent net, blindfold-style masks, pirate masks, Zorro and Fantômette masks, oxygen masks, African and Venetian masks, scary masks, and sexy masks—all worn to attract the lens of the photographer who was there to immortalize Samir Tahar’s fortieth birthday party in one of the most exclusive/excessive clubs in New York, filled with the cream of American intelligentsia: politicians, lawyers, publishers, and economists who had come en masse, alone or accompanied, invited here by Rahm Berg’s daughter, Ruth. Sami Tahar’s wife was one of those women with a perfect résumé: a pampered childhood in the bosom of an upper-class Jewish-American family; studied law at Harvard; brilliant at public relations, brilliant at math, brilliant at everything . . . and altruistic too, a humanist who, several times a year, gave out food to the needy; a rich girl, immensely rich, who never forgot to donate 10 percent of her earnings to charity as required by Jewish law; respectful of traditions, naturally; she studied literature and poetry with Joseph Brodsky, who described her as one of his most gifted and subtle students; she studied Latin and Greek, she studied law, but she also studied the Torah with her maternal grandfather, Rav Shalom Levine,3 a rabbi with beard and sidelocks who looked like he had stepped out of a novel by Isaac Bashevis Singer.4 So, she was an impressive girl. And yet Tahar had not noticed her when she first appeared at his law firm, having been invited to work as an intern by his partner, who had not bothered to inform him. How had he failed to notice her? Because she was too sober, too modest, with that look of extreme classicism that young women often adopt when they begin their first job, hiding their inexperience behind long skirts, ruffle blouses, even foulards, clothes borrowed from their mother or their grandmother, silk scarves in richly brocaded colors that age them ten years, because they are ashamed of their youth. They believe that they will win favor by appearing older, that their skills will b
e more easily recognized . . . Yeah, right! What they have yet to understand is that they would gain ten years in their professional ascendancy by wearing split skirts, short skirts, low necklines. They have not yet understood the power they possess. Youth is their power. They are twenty-five/thirty years old. They are highly educated, hardworking, ambitious. They have all the advantages won by feminism without having to demand anything themselves, without having to fight, but they lower their eyes under the gazes of male, sixty-something, unhappily married executives. It’s unbelievable! They lower their eyes when these men compliment them on the color of their hair. Watched by these old predators, they pretend to be frightened deer, pure angels, feeble maidens; they act like women from another era; they fall to pieces and shame their mothers. But look at those men, those apostles of performance, cocks hardened by Viagra, with their flat stomachs and their dyed hair, eyes riveted on their prey, ready to pounce. The attempts at flattery, the first phase of seduction, and then maybe, to round it all off, possession. The young women notice none of this, or pretend not to. The chauvinistic remarks, the double entendres—they are disregarded. The women think this is just part of the game: a hand nonchalantly draped on a shoulder (a sign of friendliness); an invitation to dinner (a work meeting); personal and intimate remarks (at least they’re showing an interest). Their youth weakens them, the women think, so they dress up to hide it. Some of them wear men’s clothing: suits in dark colors, Derby shoes, sometimes even a tie—it’s all the rage apparently. Ruth Berg was one of these women, an androgynous girl who, for her eighteenth birthday, asked for (and received) a breast reduction operation. Oh, yes, it’s true. She got her boobs from her great-grandmother Judith, a cold, brusque woman whose only feminine attribute was that enormous chest, a chest which (according to family legend) nursed practically half of the newborns in Warsaw.5 While most women dreamed of having breast implants, Ruth Berg went to the surgeon carrying a photograph of Diane Keaton in Annie Hall, dressed in pants with darts and a man’s waistcoat, hat glued to her head—a chic little New York intellectual. How could Samir possibly have noticed her? His fantasies revolved mainly around femmes fatales, with opulent chests and voluptuous asses. When it came to boobs and butts, a little excess did not bother him—in fact, it turned him on: it was the first thing he saw. Only afterward did he notice fine features or intellectual curiosity. Ruth Berg was too petite for him, too discreet, flat as a pancake, tits like fried eggs, not even a handful, nothing but skin and bone. She, on the other hand, noticed him right away: that enigmatic man with the strong French accent. She noticed him the moment he emerged from his office, carrying a stack of folders, illuminating the room with his million-dollar smile; the smile told all in an instant about his social position, his desire to be relaxed, cheerful, happy. Ruth wasted no time hunting down her colleagues’ opinions about his life story, but the same words were constantly repeated: brilliant, boastful, secretive, hardworking . . . and a womanizer. Watch out, girl: He’s dangerous. With a magnetism like that, no one can resist him. See her, over there? And her? They’ve both been to bed with him. But it never lasts. As soon as a girl tries to tame him, he bridles and flees—you’ll never break him. “He’s a Frenchman,” they all say, with a sneer. Don’t you understand? That is all he thinks about.