by Karine Tuil
* * *
Four months before this, before the book was available in stores, Léa Brenner had sent a note to Samuel via his publisher, explaining that she’d read the proofs of his novel and thought it wonderful. She loved him before she ever met him; she loved him because she’d read him. She knew that meetings with authors whose books you love could sometimes be disheartening. She remembered an evening spent with an American writer, whose work she had studied at university, but who, when she met him, had seemed obscene, disappointing, completely lacking in subtlety, whereas his work was so powerful. It was as if the writer, obsessed by his oeuvre, had emptied himself of all substance, given the best of himself, leaving nothing but a dried-up husk.
* * *
She imagined making love with Samuel, the erotic attraction fed by the reading of his book. For her, words alone were enough to trigger desire. Which was why all her romantic relationships had been with writers. Before Samuel, there had been a long love affair with an Israeli writer, but she didn’t want to talk about that, she said, because the mere mention of his name could make her cry.
* * *
Samuel had replied with a short, polite note, and—that same evening—she had written him another letter, a long one this time, in which she discussed not only his work (in great detail, mixing criticism with eulogy), but also—and this was what touched Samuel—the death of his parents. At the end of the letter, she suggested they meet for coffee at her place—a large apartment that she rented in the seventh arrondissement.
* * *
Three weeks later, he found himself in her living room, the walls covered with old books. He was impressed by this, having always borrowed books from libraries or bought them as cheap paperbacks or from the secondhand booksellers who offer their wares by the banks of the Seine.
* * *
Meeting him for the first time, she was paralyzed for a moment. This man awakened something in her. As soon as she shook his hand, she knew they would make love that very day.
* * *
They made love and it was a disaster. Samuel could not get hard. She told him it didn’t matter, but it did to him: he picked up his things and left. She kept calling him until he gave in. They saw each other for a while. They could talk for hours about Russian poetry or South American/Italian literature or politics/philosophy, but in bed, their bodies had nothing to say to each other. Not that she was repellent. On the contrary, she was a beautiful woman, tall and slim, with very short blond hair and milk-white skin, but he was never able to feel any sexual intimacy with her. The injustice of sexual attraction. Why could he not fall for the curves of her body, the scent of her skin? Everything about her was perfect for him, so why did he feel only the most profound indifference? After two failures, she advised him to see a doctor and he refused. She didn’t understand: he didn’t desire her and never had. He had loved Nina so much, loved her body so much. All he’d ever had to do was look at her, brush her hand, and he would want her instantly. Now he missed her more than ever. This was the first time he’d slept with another woman since her departure, and he realized it would be the last time. He had thought he’d managed to forget her, but suddenly the memories were overflowing, spilling everywhere. So it was possible, he understood, to be cursed and blessed at the same time, to be a winner and yet a loser, to be happy and yet unhappy.
* * *
1. Léa Brenner became a novelist in order to “disappoint” her father.
5
Samir’s arrest lasted only a few minutes. In front of the building, all has returned to normal. Ruth walks back into the lobby, fists balled in the pockets of her overcoat. She has the impression that her husband has been swallowed up by some great beast—crushed in the powerful jaws of a shark, pulverized by the aftershock of a Tsar Bomba, wiped clean from the surface of the world. This is the first tragedy of her life: her parents have sheltered her from everything until now, sparing her pain, want, loss. No man has ever made her suffer, because no man has ever left her. No friend has ever hurt her, for who would dream of knowingly passing up the opportunity to be invited to her home, to spend their vacations at her summerhouse and to say: “I was staying with Ruth Berg”? No professor ever gave her bad grades—she was beautiful, intelligent, influential, so why would they penalize her? “Even God Himself never dared slight you!” one of her friends had joked once. But Ruth hadn’t laughed: she felt certain that, sooner or later, good fortune would have a price. And she was paying that price now. She was paying for all those years of carefree happiness, those years when, displayed and kept safe like a priceless painting by her loving father—a father who was literally crazy about his daughter, who had no qualms about spending a fortune to satisfy her every whim, who had organized his life around the realization of her dreams—she had never once been the subject of the slightest criticism. What could anyone possibly say against her, after all? She wore the most fashionable clothes; she had good taste, sensible opinions. You couldn’t even accuse her of lacking thoughtfulness or introspection: she was subtle—and spiritual with it. Her father liked to repeat the story over dinner of how Woody Allen had once said of her: “If I had to be reincarnated as a woman, I’d want to be Ruth Berg!” Had she ever suffered a setback? No. Not even the smallest failure. And no one had ever called her a “filthy Jew” in public. Oh, she knew her father regularly received anti-Semitic hate mail, but she had never been sent anything of the kind. She had been spared even that. Perhaps she had felt slightly disillusioned when her father told her that she must not look for love beyond the exclusive breeding tank of wellborn bourgeois American Jews (men who had gone to Harvard, Princeton, Columbia)—but even that minor ruling, she had defied. She had fallen in love with a Frenchman of uncertain origins and her father had finally accepted her choice. Why? Simply because he didn’t want to lose her, was reluctant even to upset her. How could she ever have imagined she would one day have to witness a situation as horrific as the dawn arrest of her husband, in their own home? Ruth, you have been spared unhappiness for three decades, she thought to herself, and now it is your turn. You are going to experience the trials of Job. Your life is stained now, and this stain will never wash out. Now matter how many times you rewrite the family history, your husband’s arrest will always be part of it, a sordid little news item that will dishonor the Bergs unto the third generation! This is what she thinks as she walks back to her apartment. Had there been any signs or omens heralding this fall? Had she really seen nothing, or simply looked away? She stands in the hallway of her apartment now, her face a mess of bitter tears, and looks up at the photograph of a famous rabbi, begging him for help. And she prays—prays that her husband is innocent and her family protected, prays for the return of a normal life, prays that this is just a nightmare, and prays for herself, that she might become again what she was before this morning’s tragedy—that spoiled woman, carefree and lighthearted, who likes green tea ice cream, Visconti’s films, vacations in Porto Cervo, and navy-blue cashmere sweaters. Her thoughts are interrupted by the sound of her children’s footsteps—and suddenly there they are, their eyes still sleepy, asking what has happened, where is their father. She reassures them: it’s all over now, they should go back to bed. And that is exactly what they do, with a docility that amazes her. When the apartment is silent again, she sits down, clears her throat until she is able to speak in a normal voice—a voice that does not betray her feelings—and calls the family attorney, Dan Stein. It is early, but she knows that when he sees her name on the screen of his cell phone, he will take the call instantly. She doesn’t call her father, not yet, because he’s abroad, and anyway, with him, everything takes on a political dimension. To inform him is to expose him, and for now, she sees no reason to do that. It is herself she’s protecting, really, of course, for as soon as her father is aware of the situation, he will take over, and perhaps in a way that will make her uncomfortable. Ruth knows that her father has never really liked Sami and that he is waiting for an opportunity t
o exclude him from their lives. All it would take is a single wrong step and he would solemnly tell him: “Get out, Tahar. Go back where you came from.” She tells Stein what happened. He listens calmly, and when, at last, she asks him what she should do, he replies: “Don’t do anything. I’m on my way.”
* * *
He’s there twenty minutes later, attaché case in his right hand, cell phone in his left. Ruth is soon sick of his ringtone, which imitates the sound of a harp. He is a man of average height, with a round face, at the center of which is a wide, flat nose with abnormally large nostrils. The first thing everyone thinks when they see him is: What happened to his nose? For twenty years, he had a very big schnoz with a dent in it; finally, he decided to have a nose job, but the operation went wrong and he was left with this wide, flat, short proboscis that made people think he was the child of a mixed marriage. “Yep, I’m the son of Mordechai Stein and Tina Turner,” he would joke. In a family environment, he often came across as the strong and silent type, but put him in a courtroom and he instantly became a great orator, with a sense of tragedy, theater, emotion, and humor. Before becoming one of the most renowned criminal lawyers in America, he was a stand-up comedian at Carolines on Broadway. His inspiration was the brilliant and outrageous Lenny Bruce, and he didn’t need to be asked twice to perform those sketches for his friends. He got up onstage and everyone laughed, but then his father died of a heart attack and his mother told him: “Dan, either you pass your bar exam or I’ll go the same way as your father. Do I really need a bodh’en in my family? No. A lawyer, however, can always be useful.” He gave in to this emotional blackmail, quitting his comedy career and transforming himself into this famous attorney who treated the courtroom as his theater stage, the jury as his audience. His trials were the star attraction of the New York legal circuit because when Stein pleaded his case, you knew you were about to witness something unforgettable. This morning, however, in the Tahars’ apartment, he was keeping a low profile. He had called the prosecutor’s office on the way here and been met with a blank wall of silence. He wanted to find out if Ruth knew anything about this—if she was aware of any danger, anything that Samir might be involved in. “He’s been kidnapped.” She says this suddenly, in her usual cold, disdainful voice, and Stein wonders if she is being serious. He does not believe it for a second, not because it is out of the realms of possibility—people as rich and famous as the Bergs are always targets for extortion—but because he cannot imagine armed men would turn up at the most secure building on Fifth Avenue to kidnap someone. They would wait until he went out. This is what he believes. He does not say anything, though, because he does not want to risk offending his client: at an hourly rate of $800, he knows when to keep his mouth shut. Ruth explains what she means: she never felt that the men in her apartment were real policemen: “They didn’t read him his rights or tell him he could contact a lawyer, and they were so brutal! I never even saw a badge. They stormed in, they took him, and they left.” Stein asks her several times if her husband had enemies, if he ever felt threatened, and suddenly it comes out. Ruth says yes, he has often been absent recently—not only physically but mentally: “When he was with us, he would look worried, suspicious. Yes, he’s been like that for a few weeks now. I did ask him about it, but he told me it was nothing.” Stein suggests she wait an hour or two. If, after that time, she has not received any news, she should inform the police. Ruth nods, cool and dignified, and accompanies Dan Stein to the front door. Two hours later, she still hasn’t heard anything.
6
Hooded like a man being led to the gallows, Samir yells that he wants to know where they are taking him and why. He’s still inside the van, the tires squealing on the asphalt. They drive for a long time, and then finally the vehicle comes to a halt. He hears doors banging. He feels hands grip him violently, fingers like metal vises on his arms, and he is propelled outside to the sound of laughter and insults. He feels like a captured beast. He is suffocating under the black cloth. He tells them he wants to breathe fresh air and someone answers: “Shut your mouth.” He walks, shakily, tentatively, for about a hundred feet, like a man who has been drinking, although the truth is that he has never felt as lucid in his life as he feels now in this instant of terror. He is taken inside somewhere, down some stairs, and he tries to guess what it is: A cellar? A cave? A basement? The air is cold and damp. A stale smell. The stink of sweat. He hears voices, sounds, distant shouting. “Where are we?” he asks. “Somewhere no one will ever look for you,” a male voice replies. A heavy hand pulls the hood from his head, scratching his right eyelid. It takes his eyes a few seconds to adjust to the light, then he sees that he is inside a concrete space that looks like an interrogation room: a table, three chairs, a bare bulb hanging from a faulty electric wire. “State your name. Place your finger there. Hold this sign in both hands. Higher . . . yes, under your chin. Don’t move.” Click! You evil bastard! You fucker! Body search. Thorough. Invasive. “He’s hiding something.” You piece of shit! You lying cunt! Incomprehension, confusion, and, yes, terror—Samir is terrified. He tells himself over and over again that it is a nightmare: Any second now, I’m going to wake up. What are the charges? He’s done nothing wrong—he can prove it. This is a mistake. “Let me go! Call my lawyer. Call my wife. I’m Rahm Berg’s son-in-law!” And one of the men starts laughing. “Yeah, well, we’ll see if your father-in-law still supports you after this.” “I’m innocent! I haven’t done anything!” The door bangs shut, and Samir Tahar is left alone in a tiny prison cell.
* * *
This must be about morality, Samir thinks. To them, it’s a crime. It’s a crime to have a sex life that is too aggressive, too free. In France, he’s a libertine, but not in cold, corseted New York. For a long time, he had felt sure that one day his sexual adventures would cause him irreparable harm—that he would face charges of harassment or corrupting a minor. That premonition hadn’t caused him to alter his habits, however: he believed himself invincible, untouchable. His pathological craving for sex, and the two or three flings he’d had with minors a year or two ago . . . that was enough to get him locked up for ten years. That was enough to make him a criminal. Had one of those girls brought charges against him? It’s possible. Anything is possible. He’s trapped like a rat, surrounded. There must be evidence—traces of saliva/semen, words that he wrote and forgot, texts he’d sent that were litigious/provocative/transgressive, compromising emails full of sexual allusions. He’d left all this evidence, without a doubt. And yet, each time, he’d moved on to the next thing. Each time, his craving for new flesh had blown away his reservations. He thinks suddenly of that secretary he refused to hire, officially because she wasn’t qualified, but really because she had refused his advances, when he’d been sure that she wanted it, wanted it just as much as he did! He can sense things like that. He remembers the flight attendant whose rump he patted on a New York–Los Angeles flight, shouting out, “What a beautiful ass!” (she had looked a little offended, but had smiled after he apologized), and that young prosecutor with whom he’d had a brief affair purely in the hope of influencing her, softening the charges against his client. (He wasn’t attracted to her—she was ugly—and that was the first time in his life he’d seduced a woman in order to secure a professional favor; he had immediately regretted it and sworn he would never do the same thing again.) For the past few months, fear had shrunk his desires. He knew that a story, real or invented, might come out. He’d said it to Berman over lunch: “One day, a woman will file charges against me. She’ll say I raped her in a parking lot. She’ll do it for the money. Because I would never do anything like that. Never—you hear? I would never rape a woman, and you’ll know that she is lying.”
* * *
So this is what runs through his mind as he sits in the cell. I was weak. I was reckless. Berman warned me! Pierre warned me! But I didn’t listen to them, I didn’t take them seriously. And now I’m going to lose everything! I need to calm down/react/find a so
lution—and quickly. He makes a mental list of all the lawyers who might represent him in such a case. There are three or four who spring to mind—big names, procedural obsessives capable of spotting a technicality at ten paces, zeroing in on the slightest chink in the prosecution’s armor and exploiting it; single men, divorced men who live in apartments on the same landing as their offices. Then he thinks about Ruth, about Nina—about how they will react when they learn the truth. And the question that haunts him: How far would the investigators go to uncover that truth? Would they take everything he had? Would they reveal everything he hid? Fear runs through his veins.
7
On the advice of her lawyer, Ruth contacts the police. She is trembling as she enters the station; thinking about her husband, she is terrified. A small, surly blond woman1 at reception asks her to fill out a form and then wait. But after waiting for forty-five minutes, Ruth can’t take it any longer: her husband was arrested several hours ago and she still doesn’t know why. “You can’t treat people this way! You can’t arrest a man in his own home and refuse to provide his family with an explanation! This is America! We have rights, don’t we? All I’m asking you to do is obey them!” “I would advise you to calm down and sit down until you’re called. Yelling at me won’t change anything,” the woman replies in an aggressive voice. “You’re not the only one here, you know. We’ll call you when it’s your turn.” Ruth’s mind is a whirlwind of confusion. She imagines the worst: an abduction, a false accusation, a financial scandal. She tells herself now that anything is possible. The wheels of the great machine are in motion and she has no idea how to switch it off. And, for the first time in her life, she is alone—there is no one to accompany her or help her. Seventy-five minutes later, she is finally led to a policeman’s2 office—a small, white-walled room hung with missing persons posters. The man asks her to sit down and make her statement. She stares at him while he types her words into his keyboard; she recounts everything, not omitting a single detail, attempting to reconstruct the morning’s events in their exact order. Suddenly, he looks up at her and says there’s a problem. “What problem?” Ruth asks anxiously. “Wait here.” She waits for what seems forever, imagining that Samir is dead—and this thought makes her feverish. She is on the verge of fainting when the policeman returns, now accompanied by a man who is clearly his superior officer.3 The man sits next to Ruth and informs her in a toneless voice that they have no information for the moment.