by Karine Tuil
* * *
Berman spots her as soon as he enters the café. He knows it must be her: she’s like a diamond in a coal mine. There are plenty of pretty girls in this packed café, but a woman like her—so beautiful and deliciously sensual—stands out instantly, without any effort, without any aggressive exhibitionism, without the artificial paraphernalia of seductiveness (the usual battery of beauty care products—polished nails, styled hair, powdered face, black-lined eyes, skintight dress showing every curve of her body—and the usual sideways glances). She is simply there, without any affectations, with a beauty so pure that he envies Samir as soon as he lays eyes on her. He wonders if even he would have been capable of resisting her, then immediately answers his own question: No, I would not be capable of resisting her. He moves toward her, shakes her hand with excessive amiability, and sits down. He looks her over—he can’t help it—but Nina is used to these moments of silence while men’s eyes linger on her face, her body, and she waits patiently. Finally, he explains that he arranged to meet her because “there are things that can’t be discussed on the phone.” He tells her she doesn’t need to explain the situation: he knows who she is and why she has come. Nina struggles to conceal her surprise. Samir never told her that he had mentioned their relationship to anyone, and this fact reassures her, makes her feel more valued. She almost relaxes. Does he know where Samir is? Is he okay? She hasn’t heard from him and she is worried: that’s why she felt compelled to call his office. Berman’s mouth tenses and she understands that something serious must have happened—probably something irreparable—because why else would he suddenly look so stricken? Why else would he touch her hand in a gesture of friendship when she doesn’t even know him, has never seen him before? The world tilts toward horror. One of those appalling twists that life takes sometimes. She can feel her heart quiver violently in her chest, as if a torrent of blood were rushing through her veins, destroying the fragile edifice of her rib cage and transforming the slow pulse of ordinary life into a succession of jerks and jolts that betray her fear and anguish. She wishes she could force him to say everything now, right away: get it over with, just stick the damn needle in her and be done with it. But she says nothing, remains outwardly impassive and immobile, like someone who knows her turn is coming and that she must remain calm and mute before the fatal moment. For a long time there is silence between them. They are inside a bubble, indifferent to the shouting of the waiters and waitresses, to the hubbub of voices from other tables, to the ceaseless flood of words all around them, and suddenly Nina surprises herself by praying, silently, that Samir is alive, just as Berman says in a whisper that sounds like a monk’s chant: “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I don’t know how to break this to you . . .”
* * *
1. It has to be said that Maria Electraz is something of a terror. Fifty-six years old, she is divorced, with three children, and has only one obsession: her job. Her rigorous screening of calls has led to Tahar nicknaming her Checkpoint.
2
What more could he have asked for, this man who had made his desire to write the driving force of his entire life? A man who had organized his professional, personal, and social existence around this vocation despite the fact that he had no training and no one had ever encouraged him—least of all Nina, who had never taken his writing seriously for a reason that remained obscure to him. Because, while she never read his work and never asked to read it, she would buy any and all novels that he recommended to her, reading them intently and commenting upon them with formidable seriousness—the kind of seriousness that only someone who considered literature the most important thing in their life would exhibit. (And how humiliated and jealous he felt, noting the contrast between her indifference to his own work and her fascination with that of other authors, some of them less talented than him!) So, yes, for a man like him, whose previous books had been rejected by so many publishers, as if every possible factor (human and situational) were opposed to the realization of his literary aspirations, what could be more exciting than to be accepted by one of France’s biggest publishers and, upon publication, to be immediately consecrated as a great writer? All his life, he had thought of himself as a failure—because his parents, crushed by the tutelary intellectual figures that they kept choosing, had raised him to a position of inferiority and denigration, according to which a person is as nothing before his masters and before God. He had also thought about the day he discovered the truth of his origins, imagining himself the son of an alcoholic, a loser, a nutcase, because what other kind of father could have produced a being as spineless as him, a man who had experienced only one piece of good luck in his entire life: meeting a woman as beautiful as Nina and managing to keep her for twenty years, though even that he had accomplished only through blackmail and cunning. What a failure! This fact had been confirmed to him each time Nina had left him for Samir, each time he had read people’s thoughts as they looked at him and Nina together: What the hell is she doing with him? Everything in his life brought him back to this contemptible self-image. He saw himself as a dull man, physically and intellectually incapable of wooing or keeping any desirable woman, incapable even of finishing the degree he’d begun. And what was he trying to prove by systematically and efficiently sabotaging any plan that fortune had enabled him to put in place, if not his own stupidity and incompetence? Yes, all his life he had felt mediocre, and yet now here he was being described as “brilliant,” “dazzling,” “talented.” Who were they all talking about? He wanted to tell them that they had it all wrong. His continual self-deprecation and self-flagellation was his way of justifying his failures—of protecting himself, essentially—and he had ended up finding a certain comfort in that marginal zone where no one ever deigned to visit or hold him to account. He was used to it.
* * *
Nothing had prepared him for this reception. Only a few weeks after sending out his manuscript, he had been contacted by a publisher whose back-catalogue Samuel greatly admired, and this man had asked to meet him. He had phoned him around eleven a.m.—it was a Monday morning; he remembered it vividly—and had simply announced his identity, then asked: “Am I speaking to the author of Consolation?” “Yes.” “Have you signed a contract for this book with another publisher yet?” “No.” “Do you live in Paris?” “Near Paris.” “Could you come to my office tomorrow? Let’s say . . . around three p.m.?” “Yes.” And, just as he was about to hang up, he’d heard the publisher’s last words: “Oh, I almost forgot . . . your book . . . it’s very good. I mean that sincerely—you have a great talent. And I am not the kind of man who uses that term lightly.”
* * *
He didn’t sleep that night. All he did was rehearse in his head what he would say to the publisher the next day. And yet, when the time for their meeting came, they barely exchanged a word. The publisher spoke very little, Samuel not at all. But he signed a publishing contract. Later, when a journalist asked him the question, Where and when were you happiest? he replied: “In my publisher’s office.” During the weeks that followed, the publisher called him several times to suggest a few changes. He remembers a phone call at dawn about a comma: Should it be kept or deleted? He wasn’t sure. It was in this world and no other that he wished to live from now on—a world where the position of a comma was more important than one’s position in society.
3
You are under arrest.
* * *
It is six in the morning when the heavily armed policemen (are they soldiers? how many of them are there?) surge into Samir’s home. Hands up! Turn around! Don’t move! Handcuffs click, boot soles clack . . . brutality, pain, authority. But what are the charges? I haven’t done anything! Tell me what the hell is going on!
* * *
All it takes is a glance through the window, at the cloudy sky, and Samir can see it’s early morning—not night anymore, but the sun is barely illuminating the misty, Klein-blue expanse. Follow us! One of the men presses a heavy, damp hand on Sam
ir’s head to hold him still while another handcuffs him in front of Ruth, who is screaming that she doesn’t understand, screaming and threatening, invoking her influence, her power—You can’t do this, you’ll regret it—demanding the names and ranks of these men who act like the police, but who are they really? “Who are you?” Ruth yells. “Show me your badges. I’ll file a complaint against you!”
* * *
Take it up with the authorities, ma’am.
* * *
Ruth stands in the doorway of her apartment, head bent forward as if she’s about to fall over. She’s wearing beige silk pajamas, hardly a hair out of place, but her face is distorted by tiredness/incomprehension/anger. That aura of the untouchable aristocrat, the perfectly controlled sovereign, is gone, her urbanity vanished in a few minutes. How could she ever have imagined she would one day experience anything this dreadful? A dawn arrest, carried out with brutal efficiency: it’s the kind of thing you associate with movies or the Bronx or novels with embossed lettering on the covers, not with an opulent building on Fifth Avenue, not with this apartment complex where no one may enter without ID, a place of perfect social respectability filled with slick-haired yuppies and white-haired patricians—a place that has never been burgled, and you can see why. Take a look around: an armed guard outside, a crabby, paranoid caretaker inside, and surveillance cameras placed in every corner by the best security technicians, each one linked directly to the security firm’s headquarters, where men and women work four-hour shifts, zealously watching the feed to ensure no one disturbs the serenity of the building’s occupants. At the slightest sign of trouble, five men armed with assault rifles are poised to arrive within five minutes . . . but there are more than five here today (seven or eight, maybe?) and they are here not to defend the owners of these luxury apartments but to arrest one of them like a drug dealer or a gangster—the horror! Ruth looks up and notices her neighbor,1 who has emerged from his apartment to observe the landing with a hard, judgmental stare. In these apartments, where a square meter is worth more than thirty-five thousand dollars, scandals are frowned upon, as is anything that might devalue the asset, and the neighbor retreats into his apartment as if he has seen nothing and has no desire to know what is going on in the apartment across the landing. Ruth looks at the neighbor’s closed door—a door that he has double-locked (she heard the key turn in the latch, the metallic thud of the dead bolt)—and she feels as if she might faint with shame. Something has died here, on the landing outside her apartment, something that has dethroned her forever. She forces back her tears and watches the policemen, without yelling this time—her husband is struggling like a fish trapped in a net—then puts on an overcoat and follows them to the elevator. They go inside, Samir repeating that he has done nothing wrong and demanding: “Who are you? What do you want? Show me your badges!” Ruth takes the stairs, hurtling down them, breathing heavily, almost tripping more than once, and catching up with them as they walk past the dumbfounded caretaker and the cleaner who is mopping the floor and does not dare stop. The policemen move forward quickly, pulling Samir by the arms, and noisily exit the building, watched by a few joggers in Central Park. Some of them stop and take pictures or videos on their cell phones, which they will later put on YouTube, those bastards. A dark-colored van is parked out in front of the building. Ruth walks toward it, but Samir does not even have time to say a word to her before he is shoved inside, flanked by two heavyset policemen, and the door is banged shut. The van speeds away, immediately followed by two other police cars, sirens screaming.
* * *
The van is driven at breakneck speed, running red lights. It starts to rain, hammering on the windshield, and the wipers wave like two metronomes. Samir can hear the noise of the city beyond the van’s walls. He can hear crackling voices on the cops’ walkie-talkies: Operation successful. He finds himself remembering the opening words of Kafka’s The Trial: “Someone must have been spreading lies about Josef K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one morning.” That was exactly what had happened to him: he had done nothing wrong, and yet men had come to arrest him.
* * *
1. Allan Dean, seventy-six, a person of independent means. His only ambition is to acquire the Tahars’ apartment.
4
The good fortune—or misfortune—of finding success just at the moment when he had given up hope. The good fortune—or misfortune—of being famous, admired, and loved for a book, because he had written a book, while as a man he had felt isolated, profoundly alone, not through choice but because he had never been popular, never at the center of things: he had spent his life on the sidelines. What had he done that was so extraordinary? What had he done to deserve this renown? He had fictionalized his own life, he had lined up a bunch of words—that was all. Was his book really so exceptional? He had been lucky, that was what he thought: his book had been read at the right time by people who happened to be in the right mood; the critics who reviewed his novel had just fallen in love or they’d read it while they were drunk. All success is based on a misunderstanding, his more than most. There had been an error, a terrible mistake, and in a few days or weeks, everyone would discover this fact and he would return to his habitual anonymity. But this is not what happened. Every day brought him more encounters, more good news. The week before publication, there had been reviews in all the biggest newspapers and his book entered the best-seller list on the very day it first appeared in bookstores. Foreign publishers outbid each other for the rights in various languages. He imagined his picture on those WANTED posters you always see in old westerns, with a vast sum of money emblazoned beneath. Everyone wanted him and they were ready to pay.
* * *
His success was so overwhelming that he had to take time off work. His publisher put him up in a grand Parisian hotel, and his days became a series of interviews with journalists, answering readers’ questions, posing for photographs in magazines, and traveling—around France, around the world—to sign copies of his books. Everywhere he went, he was treated like a king . . . or a foreign secretary, at the very least. And every single time, he felt there must surely have been a mix-up of some kind, a case of mistaken identity. Surely it wasn’t really him that all these people had come to lionize!
* * *
To begin with, he had been flattered by all these panegyrics. People kept telling him he was exceptional, and he ended up believing it. He felt important. He felt untouchable. Now he had access to places he had never dreamed of entering, he was able to meet people he had long admired—intellectuals, politicians, even actors, including one particularly great actor whom he had hero-worshipped since childhood, and who asked him to write a role for him.
* * *
What you wrote about filiation, about determinism, about the pressure that parents/society put us under . . . I have lived through that. This was what all his readers told him, in person or in writing. And he listened to them, read their words, feeling helpless, having no desire to be a spokesman for anyone or anything.
* * *
With women too, he discovered that he was suddenly endowed with new qualities. Beautiful girls called him, asked him out. It was in this way that he found himself in bed with a female novelist1 (a fact which, far from being a minor detail, actually made the situation more complex, with the writing intensifying the strife between them, as if each lover were reliant on conflict and anger as the engines of their creativity). Léa Brenner was a fifty-two-year-old woman, the author of a challenging and much-feted oeuvre, who had contributed to his meteoric rise on the Parisian literary scene by writing a rave review of his book in a prestigious literary supplement—a review that was immediately reduced to a single word, printed on a red strip of paper that embellished the cover of this book by an unknown author (“though not for long,” as she proclaimed everywhere she went): “Prodigious”—a word that might have been dictated by admiration or love, or quite possibly both, and which seemed to describe not only the book
itself (a book Léa Brenner really did find interesting, and in which she detected some of the biting irony of Chekhov’s best stories), but also the love that she instantly felt for the man who wrote it (even though he was quite cold and distant).