by Karine Tuil
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God knows why he has such an effect on her. He’s older than her, indifferent to her charms. But she goes for it anyway, asking another woman6 from the law firm out for a coffee, one day after work. She wants to know more about him, to discover details, anything that might increase her chances. Six months after her fling with Tahar, the girl is still bitter. She is practically in tears as she tells Ruth how their relationship “destroyed” her. “Keep away from that man—he’s an opportunist, a manipulator.” Watch out! Danger! He attracts her, and she doesn’t know why. It’s as if he’s a vacuum cleaner and she’s a dust bunny. She swears that Tahar is not her type and her colleague laughs. “Tahar is everyone’s type.” There’s a silence. Ruth watches her intensely as the other woman goes on: “He’s everyone’s type, men and women, because he’s not like the others. He’s shadowy, secretive, dominant . . . it’s exciting.” Suddenly her tone softens and she leans closer to Ruth: she is going to tell her a secret. The woman smiles, flicks her hair away from her right eye, and, in a tone of false complicity, says: “He is—” But she doesn’t have time to finish her sentence. Ruth Berg stops her with a movement of her hand. All she needs to know is his social image.
* * *
So how did Ruth grab Tahar’s attention? How did she manage to tame him? Not through sex, of course—she was too disciplined, too predictable for him. There was nothing surprising about her. She was a virgin when they met, incredible as that may seem. She must have kissed three or four boys in college, but even then she hesitated to use her tongue the way she’d been told to, the way she’d practiced, alone, licking the palm of her hand like a cat (it tickled, nothing more), and even when she had tried to submit to the desires of the computer studies undergraduate who had taken her somewhat roughly in his arms, due to his inexperience (Adam Konigsberg, the son of a surgeon from Mount Sinai Hospital; highly eligible),7 the only thing she felt was disgust, the sensation of having something gluey and viscous in her mouth, like an inedible oyster. Was this what all the fuss was about? She had let a boy fondle her once (Ethan Weinstein, the son of a Republican senator),8 but he had grabbed her tit like his hand was a mechanical shovel, as if he were trying to crush it. She had developed a genuine aversion to human contact after this, and when Michael Abramovich (the son of a New York banker)9 had tried to slide his hand into her panties (somewhat clumsily, as he was right-handed but was having to use his left hand) in the movie theater, while watching A Clockwork Orange, she had lost all self-control: she had slapped him and screamed at him and, on her way out of the theater, had hidden herself in a darkened corner to throw up the popcorn he had been generous enough to buy her before feeling her up. “What did you expect?” said her college roommate.10 “Any guy who takes you to see A Clockwork Orange on a first date is either a movie buff or a psychopath.” She suspected the latter was more likely. The boys she met—all upper-class Jewish-Americans, either spoiled, very spoiled, or completely spoiled, whose ambitions extended no further than blowing Daddy’s money on the beaches of Goa or Cancún—were not the types to inspire a girl like her: a Jewish princess raised on milk and honey. She had grown up with them, she’d studied with them, and on religious holidays she had prayed with them in the same synagogue, surrounded by worshippers who lived in the same neighborhood, frequented the same clubs . . . and now she was expected to marry one of them? The horror! Social horror/community horror. “You will marry a Jew”—the eleventh commandment, imposed by the father. You will not marry the son of a gentile, you will not share his bed, you will not bear him children. A dilemma. She had seen Sam Tahar. A Jew, she thought, but also a Frenchman. A Sephardic Jew—not the same thing. She’d heard that Tahar’s father was a Jew of Tunisian origin who had moved to France in the fifties. She’d heard that his mother was a Jew born in France whose parents, Polish Jews, had fled their country during the First World War. She’d heard that his parents had died in a car accident when Sam was twenty. That he was an only child. That he had no family. She’d heard he was a nonpracticing Jew, an assimilated Jew (“ashamed,” some said), anticlerical and pro-Palestinian. And provocative too. Capable of reciting a poem by Mahmoud Darwish11 at the table of honor during the annual meeting of the National Jewish Committee. Don’t mention religion. Don’t mention Israel. Don’t ask him to be the tenth man to make up a minyan (not back then anyway; once he came into contact with Ruth and her family, he quickly fell into line with their religious habits and adapted to their ways of thinking). Avoid foreign politics. Talk to him about women instead—that’s what everyone told her. And in that domain, the only person who could exert any influence over him was his American partner, Dylan Berman,12 the only person able to tell him: “This is ridiculous—you’ve gone too far now and you need to stop.” He was also the first person to warn Tahar, when he realized that Berg’s daughter was fixated on him: “Leave her alone—she’s not meant for you.” Tahar replied with a smile, as Berman argued: “Go out with your secretary, call your ex, you can even screw one of the firm’s clients if you want, but stay away from this girl!” “Why? She’s an intern. She’s not a minor. And she likes me—it’s obvious that she likes me.” But Berman was not the kind of man to mess around with influence, power, and money: those things enabled him and his family to live, they kept his firm going, provided him with a very healthy income and a spotless reputation; Berman did not mix up the bedroom and the office, love and finance: “No sex in business! She’s Rahm Berg’s daughter. Berg—one of the richest men in the U.S.! This firm’s most important client! If we lose him, we’re fucked—do you understand? Hurt his little girl and, believe me, he will make you pay. Listen, if you need to make photocopies, ask your assistant or do it yourself. Don’t ask her anything, not even the time.” “You think your threats are going to stop me? The more forbidden this girl is, the more she excites me.” “Then why don’t you screw the prosecutor’s assistant, Nabila Farès?” “Nabila? Are you kidding? That’d be like screwing my sister!” “What do you mean? She’s an Arab!” He often made this kind of mistake, forgetting the man he had become: a Jew among Jews. “Look, Sam, just forget Ruth Berg! If you touch a hair on her head, her father will kill you.” But Berman was not counting on his associate’s stubbornness—Tahar’s obstinacy was that of a workingman’s son, a boy who had suffered humiliation; it was a kind of revenge—nor on his charisma, his powers of invention, and his attractiveness. Women liked him, and so did men. Even children adored him. And as for the clients . . . even at $1,000 per hour, he was the one they all wanted, demanded—no one else.
* * *
In his office, there were articles about him strewn all over the coffee tables. He also collected them in a large black leather folder on which his initials were embroidered in gold thread, and he kept this folder on a shelf filled with law books that hung on the wall behind his glass desk. There were articles in which he was only quoted, and some short pieces, but also major spreads, some laudatory, others damning. He cut them carefully from papers and magazines himself and placed them inside transparent sheet protectors with the meticulousness of a lepidopterist. Ruth Berg read them all, didn’t miss a single one—not even that sex test in a men’s magazine that he’d taken the time to fill out. That was how she knew, from the very beginning, that he would never be faithful, that he thought about sex all the time, and that he had tried everything. She sought out information on the Internet, then used it to compliment him. She was sweet and perspicacious. Any man would soon notice a girl as powerful and self-assured as her, and Tahar more quickly than most. Another man might keep his distance, thinking she was too difficult to seduce, too intimidating. But not Tahar. He had far too much confidence in his ability to make women love him. He knew all about sexual dependence and how to arouse it: in that field of inquiry, there was nothing that anyone could teach him. He had drawn a line under his love affair with Nina—too much suffering. Even now, thinking about it was still painful. When he met Ruth, he already knew what he didn’t
want: to be in love, to feel tied to someone, attached. It was not through her freedom or her sexual curiosity that this intern in Prada boots would seduce him, but through her social invulnerability—because that was truly rare. That in itself was enough to justify him giving up on other women and centering his life around her. This was a woman who never feared other people’s looks, who never felt offended or humiliated, who had nothing to gain or to prove. She had never had to fight for anything. Politics, for her, was a game; money, a resource; social position, a question of relationships and opportunities: it was all there, revealing the world to which she belonged and making clear her success. Her class reflex was, spontaneously, to think in terms of her clan. It was to travel in a private jet and consider it normal; to sit between Bill Clinton and Shimon Peres at dinner and think it dull. Her idea of a moral dilemma was to hesitate between donating to a foundation that battled poverty in Israel and a foundation that battled hunger in the Sahel region. But this was not a girl who had been corrupted by money. She was not one of those spoiled, arrogant, superficial girls—she knew she was privileged, she was aware of how lucky she was, but she belonged to the heirs’ club. She was above it all. There was an aura about her, a halo floating over her head. No one had ever made her feel out of place, because she was precisely the kind of girl who knew her place. Up on the rostrum. In the first row. In the foreground of a photograph. And, quite naturally, without posing or making any special effort, she was in all those places. When she spoke to you, you felt elect. As soon as she entered a room, you knew she was important. How? Because she knew it herself. Her father had told her she was, repeatedly. Her friends and family had made it clear to her. Salespeople in the stores where she shopped made her feel it. When she called someone, they always called her back the same day. When she suggested lunch, she was the one who chose the day, the place, the time. No one would dream of canceling on her. And no one EVER made her wait. She knew all about the advantages bestowed by an enviable social position, but there was nothing arrogant or contemptuous about her. She always greeted her father’s employees—hello, goodbye, how are you, how’s the family?—and she did it sincerely. She made it a point of honor not to lose the sense of human contact. And yet, at the same time, she did all of this with a distance that marked her out as different. They were nice people, she respected them, but they did not belong to her world. Her world was a quarter-mile radius around Fifth Avenue and the presidential suites of the most prestigious hotels; her world was an oasis of comfort and frivolity, concealing an empire of darkness. Her world was that of the Reconstruction or the Renaissance: the façade was golden but the foundations were built on ashes. The company was run by her father on behalf of her grandfather—an Auschwitz survivor who was happy to talk politics and ecology, who didn’t mind teaching you to play bridge, who (grudgingly) gave out his recipe for chopped liver, who could spend hours telling you the story of Job and the creation of the world, could explain why Isaac preferred Esau to Jacob. This was a man who helped organize the Bible Quiz every year and who would explain the meaning of a word to you, but would never tell you why there was a number tattooed on his forearm. This was why, when she talked about herself to Tahar, she mentioned the books she’d been reading recently, her vacation in Italy with her daddy on Steven Spielberg’s yacht, the beauty of the beach at Martha’s Vineyard where she once met John Kennedy, Jr., and nothing more. She was the daughter of a man who had built an amusement park over the cemetery of his heart. A girl like that had everything it took to impress Tahar: one of the best address books in New York; social respectability; the esteem of powerful men. For Tahar, this was what counted. For a man like him who had never been esteemed or famous, such assets were important.
Not only did Rahm Berg not kill him, but he gave him and his daughter a three-hundred-square-meter penthouse with a view over Central Park, an apartment valued by one of the most prestigious real estate agencies on the East Coast at more than $17 million. He could have said no, but he wasn’t that proud. This gift consolidated his uniqueness, he thought. In essence, it was a dowry. And what a dowry! Five bedrooms, six bathrooms, and a seventy-square-meter terrace, including a private area with a Jacuzzi. Rahm Berg wanted his daughter to feel good. He wanted her to be happy—and happiness was waking up in a spacious bedroom, eating breakfast with a view of New York, flicking through the New York Times and seeing her name in print. Berg said it jokingly but he said it all the same: “My daughter is a princess.” That was also Samir’s pet name for her—“My Jewish princess.” Ruth’s father, accompanied by her grandfather, wearing a yarmulke and a large black hat on his head, had attached a glass mezuzah to the frame of the front door and of every other door in the apartment—twenty of them in total. Twenty little glass cases containing a Hebrew prayer beseeching the Lord to protect the household. This was an important ritual. He had not forgotten any of the doors, but in fact it was on his daughter’s head that he really wanted to attach a mezuzah, to protect her. A daughter, a home, and a Jewish life—that was what Rahm Berg had given him. It hadn’t been easy, of course. He’d had to assert himself, to plead his cause with the patriarch, but persuading people was his special talent, after all. It was his job. He’d had to win over the mother, an extremely verbose blond woman, the perfect mother, a dermatologist capable of detecting a malignant melanoma at first sight, a peerless cook who would make up to 120 sufganiyot for Hanukkah, an accomplished sportswoman—it was no mystery where Ruth got her many virtues from.