The Age of Reinvention

by Karine Tuil

  “I know . . .”

  “But I’m not guilty!”

  “It’s not that simple . . .”

  “What do you mean?”

  “In a way, as far as America is concerned, you are guilty. And doubly so: because you are an Arab and a Muslim, and because you sought to hide the fact.”

  “I’m guilty because I’m a Muslim?”

  “In this particular context, in this particular country, with all the traumas America has suffered in recent years, yes, you are guilty. That will be the prosecution’s argument.”

  “But that’s racist.”

  “It’s political. The whole racial issue is political. Listen, the evidence that the prosecution has against your brother includes not only guidebooks on how to be the perfect terrorist, Bin Laden’s preachings and bomb-making manuals, but a copy of the Koran! Incredible, isn’t it?”

  “The terrorists are perverting the values of Islam. The Islam I grew up with has nothing to do with them. What do we have in common with people like that? How could my brother have become a fundamentalist? What could have happened to him to make a simple, stupid guy like him, obsessed with girls and consumer objects—this kid who said he ‘adored New York’ and spent an hour on public transport to get to the hippest shoe store in SoHo, where he spent two hours staring at a $1,500 pair of sneakers—seriously!—what the hell could have happened in his life that would make him decide to become a jihadist who hated America and was ready to die for the glory of Allah?”

  “They indoctrinated him. It’s as simple as that.”

  “The real problem here isn’t that you gave all that money to François—because I honestly don’t see how they could prove that you knew what the money was being used for—but that you lied about your identity. You’re a Muslim and you pretended to be a Jew. To the judges, that has to look like aggravating circumstances.”

  “Yes, but only because people thought I was a Jew! Because society obligated me to hide my true identity. Believe me, I was ashamed of what I did—denying my origins, my history, my parents’ history . . .”

  “You married Rahm Berg’s daughter! Rahm Berg—the great defender of Jewish memory! That’s why you lied!”

  “All right, so I’m guilty. So what do I do now?”

  “Now, you do what I tell you.”

  20

  Within seconds of learning that her two sons were incarcerated on U.S. territory, accused of involvement with international terrorism, and that they risked spending the rest of their lives in jail, she fainted—as if the news were a wrecking ball that smashed into her body. On the floor, she seemed to deflate, all the air leaving her lungs in a single gasp, and none returning.

  * * *

  I’m not breathing.

  Later, she told the emergency team who came to her apartment and resuscitated her (called there by her neighbors, who had been worried by the prolonged silence) that, if she’d had the courage, she would have thrown herself off her balcony: I wanted to put an end to this terrible pain. In the ambulance that speeds across town, sirens wailing, toward the nearest hospital, she feels as if she is floating, her body lifted above the ground by some invisible force.

  * * *

  I want to die.

  * * *

  She wakes up in a bed, her arms lying flat beside her body, in a room with pink walls. She is alone, completely alone, as alone as she would be in the face of death. Yes, that’s it—she is one of the living dead: physically she’s still here, but in every other way she’s absent, broken. And it is only in the moment when she feels herself falling (her blood pressure plunges, her heartbeat decelerates, her movements become abnormally slow) that she decides to pick up the phone and call François Brunet. She hasn’t seen him for years, but she knows what he has become. She reads all the articles about him in political magazines and even, sometimes, in the newspapers; she sees the pictures of him posing with his wife, children, and dogs in the garden of his wife’s family mansion, where a thousand varieties of flowers grow. In one article, the journalist recounts how this brilliant man points out the different species and names them, savoring the most poetic ones: That’s an eleven-o’clock lady. That’s a love-lies-bleeding. Those are wild teasel, and at the back, over there, you can see some black-eyed Susans. Susan is his wife’s name, and he says it with a certain tenderness, in spite of the fact that he has never been able to stand his wife. The thoughts of all those flowers makes Nawel dreamy. She envies his bourgeois life, the smooth-haired spouse he holds by the shoulders for the cameras like an artist exhibiting his work. How she would love to stand where that other woman stands now—in his arms, in the photograph. She cuts out every article she finds about him and rereads them occasionally. She knows his answers to journalists’ questions by heart. She sees him on television on Wednesday afternoons, when the parliamentary debates are reshown. Whenever she catches a glimpse of his face, whenever she hears his voice, she is moved. She tells herself silently: I made love with that man. All she remembers is the wild sexual passion of their affair. He never held back, and she loved being under his authority. What she liked best was his apparent indifference, his cold anger—that distance he set between them quite naturally as if warning her that she would never belong to his world, that she would never have any real connection with him. But when they made love, they were closer, more intimate, than either of them had ever been—or would ever be—with anyone else. So that was what she thought about when she heard him on TV, talking about France’s taxation policy.

  * * *

  After the doctor’s visit, she calls him, but it is his secretary who answers: What is this regarding? Who are you? Etc. The usual screening process. She is insistent, almost threatening, and he calls her back on the number she left. He says: “Hello? What do you want?” He is cold. It’s not a good time—he has work, files to prepare—and he dispatches her in a single sentence: “I have nothing to say to you.” She replies that she is in a hospital. He says he is sorry and, out of politeness, asks her why she is there. She admits: “François is in prison. Everything is going wrong.” Hearing the word “prison,” Brunet goes into a cold sweat. He knows all he has to lose if this affair were to become public; he knows what damage, however collateral, this kind of story can do to a political career. That son of his is a liability. He has no wish to know anything about him, and he says this to Nawel. Suddenly she is angry: “You don’t understand! This is serious . . . François became a radical Islamist . . . he was arrested in Afghanistan by the Americans. He’s incarcerated in Guantánamo.” And with those words, Brunet’s world caves in—that protected bourgeois world where everyone speaks in whispers, where no one complains. “I don’t believe it.” “I’m telling you the truth.” Too late, Brunet becomes cold and decisive: It’s not his problem. He didn’t raise the child. There’s nothing he can do for him. “Really?” For the first time, Nawel goes on the offensive: “If he’s gone crazy, it’s your fault! Because you rejected him! Because he grew up without a father! You have to help me!” Brunet does not reply. But Nawel hasn’t finished: “Do you want your wife and kids to find out about this from me? If the newspapers get hold of this story, your reputation will be ruined. So help me, or I’ll tell them everything.”

  * * *

  I’m on my way.

  * * *

  He goes to see her. He has no choice. He has to talk to her—to convince her to keep quiet, to disappear. Two hours later, he is in her hospital room. Nawel has found the strength to put on makeup and get dressed: a pink nightgown, some lipstick. In spite of everything, she wants him to be attracted to her. When he enters the room, he has a sudden flashback to the birth of his son: seeing Nawel with her hair in a bun and the little one in his crib beside her—his spitting image. Twenty-five years later, this scene is replayed: the protagonists are older, and the child is no longer in his crib, but in prison. François Brunet moves toward Nawel. He sees her beautiful face distorted by pain, her eyes so intense and unforgettable, and sudd
enly he feels his heart contract. He is deeply moved by the sight of this woman whom he once loved. The reunion affects him much more profoundly than he could ever have imagined. He wants to sit on her bed and take her in his arms, to hold her tight against him and console her. But all he does is offer her his limp hand and tell her that he will give her the telephone number of a good lawyer, that he will cover the lawyer’s fees, her travel and accommodation costs, and that this is all he can do for her. She starts to cry, begs him to help her, and he accuses her: this is her fault—she made a mess of raising François, he is badly educated, a wild beast without morals. At this, she stares at him, her gaze harder than he has ever seen before, and in a firm voice orders him to leave. Head lowered, he obeys.

  * * *

  Nawel looks at herself in the bathroom mirror of her hospital room. She is still a beautiful woman—more beautiful than François’s wife, she tells herself—and she thinks how different her life might have been, how much more exciting, had she not been enslaved by her sons, by these men. She gave them everything—but what did they ever give her? She went from being a servant to her father and then to her husband, only to end up the slave of François Brunet and her sons. She will not go to the United States. She will not call Brunet again. For the first time in her life, she wants to be a free woman.

  21

  Suspicion, racism, discrimination—again. And for Tahar, a man who is respected, admired, and feared, a lawyer whose reputation goes far beyond the borders of the state of New York, this is not only unjust but unbearable. Which is why he loses his temper in front of his legal representatives, who come to the visiting room and act like military strategists (considering the best tactical approach to his case), like psychologists (trained to soothe the tensions provoked by this arbitrary incarceration in a suffocatingly small, high-security cell—and Samir needs to hear them, talk to them, so isolated and oppressed and stifled does he feel, as if his head were locked in a pillory), like war leaders (because that is what this is, they explain to Samir: a war against all those who seek to damage American interests, who wish to destroy the values of democracy and the West. And you have to understand that they see you as a threat—a real threat. Him, a threat? The most harmless, least aggressive guy on the planet? Someone whose personal mantra was, Never talk about religion or politics at the table? Sure, that never stopped him from speaking his mind to his closest friends, to people who knew him well and wouldn’t be offended by his more provocative statements, who would understand his sense of humor. Sure, he sometimes let loose like that, but now they are asking him to justify his opinions in the light of recent events: they are asking him to explain why, during one dinner party, he criticized Salman Rushdie by saying that he owed his fame to the fatwa that had been declared upon him by the Ayatollah Khomeini rather than to the literary qualities of his book, and that he should have stayed home instead of constantly fleeing in search of safety “from a danger that he himself solicited.” Wasn’t it true that he had offered a violent critique of Israeli politics in front of one of his father-in-law’s closest associates, provoking a rift within the family that took a great deal of time and effort to heal? Wasn’t it true he had sometimes fasted during Ramadan? Wasn’t it true he had made an “anti-American diatribe” in front of two French colleagues? Wasn’t it true he was a member of a shooting club? And if so, to what end? Wasn’t it true he had revealed to someone at his firm that he intended to take flying lessons? Wasn’t it true he had been seen near a mosque? Wasn’t it true he had once said, to his wife, a few months after the attack on the World Trade Center, “People here are racist against Arabs, don’t you think?” and “Bin Laden was created by the CIA”? Wasn’t it true he had been seen standing next to the president of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee in a Manhattan restaurant? And wasn’t it true he had once worn a badge emblazoned with the words “Islam is not our enemy” during a rally in support of two Muslims who had been the victims of a street mugging?).

  “Every detail, every word, every act will be used against you,” Dan Stein explains, in a professorial tone, “so try to remember anything you might have done or said so we can anticipate the prosecution’s arguments.”

  “I ate a kebab in Steinway Street once. Does that make me guilty of terrorism?”

  “You can’t imagine the things they’ll find out and use against you. They are going to dig up your past, search your apartment, interrogate everyone you’ve had contact with, even the women you’ve tried to seduce. They are going to try to find anything that might compromise you. By any means necessary. Have they mistreated you?”

  “You mean: Have they tortured me into making confessions? Well, that depends. Is bullying and psychological pressure considered torture? What about harassment, insults, blackmail, threats, intimidation? Are those things torture? Can being slapped in the face and placed in the most uncomfortable and humiliating situations—and I insist upon the term ‘humiliating’—can those things be construed as torture? No, they didn’t hang me upside down from the ceiling and beat me half to death, if that’s what you’re asking. I’m sure they wanted to, but I must have told them a dozen times that I was a criminal lawyer, that I knew my rights, and that I was ready to do anything to prove my innocence. I imagine they probably didn’t want me to file a complaint to the International Court of Human Rights.”

  “All right. Try to stay calm at the hearing.”

  Early in the morning, Samir is taken in an armored van, cuffed at the hands and feet. He feels like a predator, a wild beast being transferred from one zoo to another, warily surveyed by men with guns because they know him capable of inflicting a mortal wound. Some of the guards are very young, and when he asks one of them (the oldest) to loosen his cuffs because the metal is digging into his skin, he is told simply: “No. You are considered a dangerous individual.” After a drive of about an hour, he is ordered to leave the vehicle, keeping his head down. Does he want a scarf to hide his face? “No, I’m not ashamed,” he says. “I haven’t done anything wrong.” A crowd of photographers is waiting for him, cameras and telephoto lenses aimed at him, stealing his image so they can sell it to the tabloids. Journalists prowl, holding their microphones like weapons, pointed at his mouth. He says nothing, moves forward, eyes down, faithfully following his lawyers’ advice: don’t talk to the press, keep a low profile. Even if someone asks you a question or insults you, just keep your mouth shut.

  * * *

  He enters the courtroom, frightened/distraught/exhausted. A thousand eyes track him as he sits in the dock. His foot taps nervously, in time with the throb of his anxiety. He is drowning in fear. How to stay calm, how not to tremble when all around him is disintegrating? He feels as if a fragmentation bomb keeps exploding inside him, sending shards of pain all over his body. He is a walking wound. Mouth ulcers burn his tongue and his gums; psoriatic plaques have appeared on his forearms, making him itch furiously; his lower lip is covered with blisters; shoots of bile inflame his esophagus—and no one, in prison, has done anything to relieve these symptoms.

  * * *

  His lawyers—Stein and one of his partners (Pierre Lévy having decided not to plead because, although he is a member of the New York bar, he has not worked in the U.S. for years)—sit beside him. Wearing dark suits, they greet him with a friendly squeeze of the shoulders. “The only thing I don’t have is leprosy,” he whispers to Stein, showing him his mouth and the reddish patches on his arms. The words are whispered in his lawyer’s ear, barely audible, but Stein motions for him to stop talking. The judge has entered the room through a back door, like an actor taking the stage. The buzz of conversation fades to silence. The judge is a very thin man, in his fifties, with gray, almost purplish hair. Renowned for his professionalism, he has a reputation for being rigid and conservative. He sits on the thronelike chair in the front of the courtroom and, in a very quiet voice, summarizes the facts of the case and pronounces the charges. Listening to this, Samir feels as though he must be
talking about someone else. He remembers having taken part, years before, in a meeting with law students, and the speech given by the famous law professor who had brought them together in praise of Sami Tahar: a speech that highlighted his rhetorical powers, his diplomacy and courage, reminding his listeners, who laughed appreciatively, that this was no mean feat for a Frenchman who had had to overcome the complexities of both the English language and the American penal system. Not so long ago, hundreds of future lawyers had applauded him as he ended an improvised, unprepared one-hour speech, hailing him as a “great lawyer,” but now, sitting in front of the judge, he feels like an impostor. The prosecution lawyer stands up—a woman with diaphanous skin, pure features, dressed in a blue cotton suit. Simple, classic. The kind of woman Samir might have fallen in love with, the kind he would undoubtedly have desired.

  * * *

  She goes in for the kill.

  * * *

  He is guilty of having financed terrorist activities.

  He is guilty of having supported a radical Islamist who intended to commit an attack against American interests.

  * * *

  She speaks for a long time, but Samir tunes out. What is the point of listening to every detail of his own execution? They can organize his death without him. For the first time, he gives up. He thinks about his children. He thinks about Nina. Will he ever see them again? Here he is, he thinks, in the dock of a courtroom, the accused, in a place where he once reigned as a defense lawyer.