by Karine Tuil
* * *
When Pierre Lévy enters the visiting room, he has difficulty concealing his shock. Sami? Samir has a slightly wild-eyed look, his lips tensed. There are bald patches in his hair—a new geography marking out the borders of his pain. His skinny arms hang down by the sides of his gaunt body like artificial limbs, moving only when the handcuffs dig into his wrists. Which they often do, clearly, because his wrists are ridged with swollen red marks. His face is emaciated, the complexion waxy, almost yellowish. His eyes, deep in their hollowed-out sockets, betray a new fear. His cheeks are overgrown with a thick black beard that gives him a neglected appearance. He looks weak and sick—so different from the Tahar that Lévy last saw in Paris. This is what a fall from grace can do to a man. This is what mental confusion can do. A complete metamorphosis, as if the pains that racked his body had contracted his muscles, shrunk his stature as a man. Samir can’t hide his surprise at seeing Pierre. Never would he have imagined them approving this meeting. His former boss must have pulled some serious strings to make this happen, using his political connections, making promises. And here he was. “You came,” Samir whispers. “Thank you.” Samir sits down and collapses, burying his head in his hands. This lasts three or four minutes. Finally, he controls himself and sits up.
“Pierre, I’m begging you—you have to get me out of here!”
“Don’t worry. I’m here to help you.”
“I know what you must think . . .”
“You’re going to explain it to me, I hope?”
“All I did was give money to my brother. I had no idea it was funding terrorist activities. How could I have guessed? I swear it’s the truth! I was completely in the dark over this!”
Pierre moves closer to Samir and whispers into his ear: “First, does anyone other than me know that you’re a Muslim?”
“No. Well . . . a few people.”
“Have you told your lawyers?”
“No.”
“You withheld something as important as that from the people who are representing you? How do you expect Stein to defend you? Can you imagine what would happen if the prosecution revealed that information in court and your own lawyer didn’t know?”
“It seemed better to keep it to myself . . .”
“Are you aware of the implications of that?”
“What do you want me to do?”
“You have to tell them. They’ll find out anyway, sooner or later . . .”
Samir nods and lowers his eyes. Without looking at Pierre Lévy, he asks: “Do you doubt me?”
“You want me to be honest? I don’t know. You have to acknowledge it’s disturbing.”
“You think I would have revealed my real identity to you if I’d been intending to take part in a terrorist attack?”
“No.”
“I had no idea what my brother was doing with the money . . .”
“Weren’t you curious?”
“My mother told me he did some traveling and that he was training to be a butcher. She said he was thinking of opening a shop and that she was going to work with him . . . and I believed that. I never doubted it for a moment!”
“So your defense is gullibility, thoughtlessness, good faith . . . I’m not sure a judge will believe you. Didn’t your mother tell you he’d converted to Islam?”
“No, she didn’t tell me anything! If she had, I would have stopped sending him money! I would have been suspicious, obviously. Did she keep it from me because she was afraid I’d cut him off financially? I don’t know! How could I have known what he was plotting? He was in France and I was here! Do you believe me, Pierre?”
“You have to tell the truth—the whole truth—to Ruth and to Dan Stein.”
“How can I? Ruth will divorce me if I do that! And Dan will refuse to defend me . . .”
“You don’t have a choice, Sami. If you say nothing, they’ll find it out for themselves, and that will be worse. You can’t hide this—Berg is going to investigate your personal life, and believe me, he’ll find plenty of people to testify to your amorality! Berman will be first in line. He’s after your blood! And he’s blaming me for everything. I vouched for you. It was my idea to create this branch in New York and to put you in charge of it. And what about Berg? Have you any idea what a man like him will be prepared to do if he feels offended? And if your wife discovers the truth from the police, she’ll think you really did fund terrorism! Is that what you want? If your wife stops believing in you, you’ll lose everything. You’ll spend the rest of your life in prison and you’ll never see your children again!”
“But all I did was help my brother! I didn’t know what he was doing with that money! I’m innocent!”
“Have you heard from him since this whole thing blew up?”
“No. All I know is that he’s incarcerated in Guantánamo.”
“Don’t try to find out anything else. That’s not your problem now.”
“I’m innocent . . .”
“You’ll have to explain that to Stein, the police, and the judge. But first, you have to tell your wife everything.”
15
Ruth didn’t bat an eyelid when she discovered the reason for the arrest. The first thing that went through her head was that it must be some terrible misunderstanding, a miscarriage of justice, a plot against her husband/the firm/her father’s interests/her. As a couple and as a family, they inspired so much admiration/envy/jealousy that a multitude of people might seek to cause their downfall. She wasn’t frightened. Her husband was innocent. How could a Jewish-American lawyer possibly fund Islamist groups that were anti-Semitic and anti-American? There must be some logic behind the accusation, so let’s establish that. Let’s be serious. Let’s be objective. Yes, the federal agent agreed calmly, it would be surprising. But so what? He’d seen plenty of other cases; he knew what men were capable of: betrayal, manipulation, crimes of hubris, indoctrination, and madness . . . yes, the madness of men was all he saw in his job, every day. Nothing surprised him. The ability to assimilate, to transform into Evil, it fascinated him. Anything is possible. Did she know about double lives, about secret agents? He had evidence and he would verify it; he would carry out his investigation. The facts were there. Objectively, they were flagrant. “You can’t deny the facts. A Frenchman who had converted to radical Islam was arrested in Afghanistan while preparing to commit an attack on American interests. This Frenchman, Djamal Yahyaoui, is known to the security services for his extremist views: anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial, incitement to racial hatred.” Ruth looked away; these words shocked her. Mechanically, she tapped with her fingertips on the edge of the desk as her emotions came surging back—her existential crises, deeply anchored in her personal history: a family history of loss. “Now, this man, who was arrested while in possession of a weapon, had a bank account in France into which your husband made a monthly payment.” “That’s impossible.” “We have proof! It was this money that enabled Djamal Yahyaoui to pay for his trips to Yemen and Pakistan, enabled him to pay for sophisticated weaponry and for the dissemination of his anti-Semitic tracts. And believe me, those tracts were bad: he was inciting murder. Come here, I’ll show you something.” The man led her to an adjacent room in which stood a huge desk covered with monitors. “Sit down,” he said, gesturing to a broken-backed chair. Then he played her a video in which she could see a very pale man with a light auburn beard, wearing a long cream-colored gandoura, yelling at the camera: “Have you seen how they treat us? The land of the free? Don’t make me laugh! That country is controlled by the Zionists! But we will take our revenge! Allahu akbar! We’ll kill them all!” As Ruth listened, she felt the terror mount inside her. She recognized this man on the screen: he was the same man who had come to her home one evening and introduced himself as a colleague of her husband’s. She had forgotten his name. He had been dressed differently then and he had been clean-shaven, but there could be no doubt: it was the same man. She felt a sudden wave of anguish, but did not let it show. In a cool, c
omposed voice, she said: “Someone is framing him.” Now it was up to him to prove her right.
* * *
A conspiracy. An anti-Semitic plot. Someone wants to bring him down because he’s a Jew. But why in this way? What are they aiming to destroy? Stein—to whom Samir has still revealed nothing—has a theory. “It’s manipulation. Sowing the seeds of doubt. Letting people believe that a French Jew might be an enemy to Americans. And not just any Jew: the son-in-law of Rahm Berg. Your father is the target here. It’s his company that they want to damage. The accusation is grotesque and outrageous, of course, but that only intensifies the rumors, the debates, the sterile concatenations. Remember what happened after 9/11: some people started whispering that there were no Jews among the victims, that the Jews had been informed beforehand that a terrorist attack was imminent. It’s misinformation, provocation. What they want is to bring you down and, in doing so, sully your father’s reputation. They want to destabilize you. It’s fairly standard practice in big business.” Ruth is convinced by this theory. Her husband is innocent, and nothing—not the federal agents’ words nor the devious and deceitful remarks of Berman, who is railing against Sami again—can shake this conviction. They manipulated him.
The man who said the Friday evening prayer with a glass of blessed wine in his hand and a yarmulke on his head; who attended auctions of Judaic objects and always returned, on his own initiative, with illuminated Hebrew Bibles, with portraits of rabbis, their faces lined by nights of studying, with books in Hebrew that once belonged to Rashi, Buber, Steinsaltz; this man who never missed a Kippur service, who ate lunch at least three times a week in a kosher restaurant where he would at least be sure not to end up with pork on his plate . . . this man could not possibly have any connection with Islamist movements. And when Ruth saw him through the glass of the visiting room—his face gaunt, his hair disheveled as if a bird had nested there, his hands crossed in a defensive gesture as if he were anticipating an attack (And perhaps they have beaten him, Ruth thought, and the vision of her husband being assaulted by torturers brought tears to her eyes)—she reassured him: she was going to get him out of there. She loved him. She would support him. I trust you. She repeated it to him: how she loved him, how she would always be there for him, how he could count on her, her love and support, she had hired the best lawyers to defend him, he’d be free within a few days. She knew perfectly well that he hadn’t paid that money; the bank transfers must have been made without his authorization—he’d never been very careful when it came to things like that—it must be a hacker or—But Samir interrupted her. He relaxed his hands and said in a solemn voice: “I put that money into François Yahyaoui’s bank account.” (The confession—the horror of the confession.) “What?” He saw the panic in his wife’s eyes, the frenzied blinking of her eyelids; he saw the tension in her body, which began to twitch. Something had been lost, he knew, something that could never be found again. “What? What did you say? Say it again!” “Calm down, please. Let me explain.” “Explain what?” “Listen to me.” And she went silent. She edged back a little, moving away from the window as if she wished to keep a safe distance between the two of them, as if she had suddenly become aware that she was in the vicinity of a wild beast and she was frightened. “You remember the man who came to the apartment—the guy who said his name was François Duval and who claimed he was a colleague of mine from France?” Yes, she remembered. (She said this coldly as if already seeking to detach herself from him.) “That man is François Yahyaoui. He’s my half brother. I never told you about him because I barely knew him—he was very young when I moved here. He came to the U.S. purely because he wanted to squeeze some money out of me. He told me he was broke and he wanted to go to college, so that’s why I made that monthly transfer. To help him. I felt sorry for him—you understand? I did it out of pity!” “You have a brother and you never told me?” “I hardly even know him. I have absolutely nothing in common with him—I’d expelled him from my life. If I’d talked about him, that would have brought him back into it. He’s a dropout, a failure. What else could I have done?” “And you made a monthly payment to a man you hardly even know? Why? You could have refused. He would have gone home and—” “No, it’s more complicated than that! I was forced to give in, otherwise he would have blackmailed me.” “Blackmail? For what? Were you hiding something?”
Yes.
The moment had come to tell her everything, he decided. She would end up finding out anyway, from the newspapers or the police. The moment had come to break the vicious circle of lies and hypocrisy. The thought made him nervous, it terrified him, but he did it anyway—he confessed everything, from the very beginning. He spoke quickly—they didn’t have much time. How can you tell the story of your life in only a few minutes? Finally, he admitted: “My real name is Samir. My mother’s name is Nawel. She’s alive. I’m not Jewish, Ruth. I’m a Muslim.”
* * *
And then, something completely unexpected happened—an option that Samir had never envisaged, pure tragedy unrelieved by any comedy, not even preceded by the kind of lull that sometimes intervenes in moments of high emotion. He had imagined her walking out—getting up without a word and leaving the room—or forgiving him out of love (a less likely option, admittedly) or rejecting him for a period of time (days? weeks? months?), during which he would of course fight to regain her trust, fight to keep her, to obtain her forgiveness and to have, once again, the position he had before this revelation: that envied/enviable position that had provided him with access to everything he had always wanted—respectability, esteem—notions that might strike others as old-fashioned but which, for a man like him, who had come from nothing, who had been raised by parents with no money, no power, no illusions, just poor simple folk, were hugely important because they gave him so much confidence, so much pride. Yes, he had envisaged each of these possibilities quite vividly, but never, not once, had he thought that his wife would go stark, raving mad. But, as soon as he had ended his confession, she threw herself against the visiting-room window, slapping and punching it with all her strength, driven by rage, her eyes unseeing, screaming abuse at him. He had never seen her like this before: this woman was a perfect stranger. She looked capable of smashing the Plexiglas divider and killing him on the spot. Finally—after a long, nightmarish period that lasted no more than a few seconds—the police appeared and subdued her. That’s enough, lady! But when she lifted her face and their eyes met through the blood-streaked window, he understood the truth: they were at war now.
16
Ruth spends the hours that follow in a state of shock and mute fury, curled up like a snail in its shell. Inside her husband’s office, the door double-locked, she sits in an emergency meeting with Pierre Lévy and Dan Stein, who has learned the truth from Lévy. Ruth is clear: she never wants to see him again, she can no longer trust him, she wants to divorce him. As for his defense, sort it out between yourselves. Stein is persuaded by Lévy not to withdraw his services. The meeting becomes a discussion of strategy, a war council. This is a serious, sensitive case. They must be strong, solid, together, and it is Pierre who convinces Ruth to go back on her decision, who persuades her not only of Samir’s innocence but even of the need to forgive him. “He lied because he had to. He had no other choice if he wanted to work as a lawyer in France. You can’t imagine how much discrimination there is over there. It’s different in America. There are safeguards, due processes. Discrimination is a political issue here—a social and electoral issue. In France, the subject is still taboo. I’m not saying that no one ever mentions it, but the debate is poorly handled. Why do you think would-be lawyers in the U.S. don’t have to pass oral exams in order to get into law school, like they do in France? Quite simply because, here, you have raised the issue of religious discrimination, facial discrimination, racial inequality! In France, a black or North African student, a student with a name that sounds Jewish or foreign, can fail their oral exam and think that their failure is due t
o their origins. It’s poisonous, this suspicion of inequality. And the worst thing is that, sometimes, they are right to suspect that. When I received Samir’s CV, I noted his skills and qualifications, and I also noted the fact that he was Jewish. Did that influence my choice? Maybe. Would I have chosen him if he’d told me he was of North African origin? Probably, because I have often hired people from many different places and origins. I can’t be sure about that, though, and he felt sure that he wouldn’t be hired if he told the truth. He believed that his best chance of success lay in skirting around the ethnic issue, and he failed because the only way he could do this was to lie about his identity. It was deceitful, treacherous, yes, but can we really blame him? How would I have acted if I’d found myself in the same situation as him, with the same doubts, with the same obstacles put up by society in violation of the most elementary requirements for equality? To be honest, I think I might have acted like he did! And I’ll admit something else—I have actually lied sometimes, by omission; there have been times when I’ve not mentioned the fact that I’m Jewish because I thought it would damage my chances . . .” “With a name like yours,” Stein jokes, “that must be rather difficult . . .” “Yes, but there were times when I didn’t make it clear, when I let the subject remain unclear. You can have a Jewish-sounding name without actually being Jewish.” “It’s pretty rare.” “Yes, but not impossible.”
* * *
Ruth remains impassive, as cold and immobile as an ice sculpture; this frosty attitude preserves her, keeps her alive at some level of consciousness. If she starts to cry, she will collapse. She is in shock. Pierre understands this: he would feel the same way in her situation, discovering that the face of the person she loved most in the world was merely a mask. She is mad at Sami—and who wouldn’t be? It’s a normal, human reaction. She has discovered that the man she has been living with is a stranger to her, that their closeness was a fiction. She is bound to feel disillusioned, despondent; he had felt the same way when he found out the truth. When Sami told him, he had felt betrayed. “I believed in him. I gave him everything he needed to succeed. I was like a father to him—probably more than his own father had been—and for what? I could simply assume that he had never trusted me, that he had manipulated me, but I think it’s more complicated than that. You have to put yourself in the other person’s place. You have to understand the defense mechanisms that are triggered when your career, your integrity, your very being are put in danger.” Stein listens to Lévy for a long time without interrupting, then suddenly cuts in, because there is a moral problem here that he wants to articulate in front of Ruth: he needs to be sure that Samir is innocent before officially agreeing to represent him. As a Jew, he cannot possibly defend an Islamic terrorist. Lévy waves away his fears with a sweep of his hand: “On that point, I think we’re all in agreement.” “But how can we be sure at this stage?” “Their suspicion was enough for him to be locked up and accused of a terrible crime. Our intuition, our years of friendship and trust, should be enough to convince us of his innocence and for us to do all we can to free him.” Lévy stands up and takes from his pocket a letter that Samir wrote to his wife and children in which he asks them for forgiveness—a long, moving epistle, tough to read and tough to write: he was in tears as he wrote it. Pierre hands it to Ruth, asking her to give the matter some thought and to change her mind: “Sam needs us. We can’t abandon him. He was manipulated by his brother. He is innocent, and we will prove it.”