by Abdel Sellou
We’ll find out pretty fast: the door opens and they come to get us for an immediate court appearance. All three of us are going before a judge, but so are a dozen other defendants who join us in the hallway. We climb the stairs together to the courtroom.
I’ve never been to the theater in my entire life, but I saw plays on television when I was little. “Set design by Roger Harth and costumes by Donald Cardwell . . .” Well, here we are, and I’m ready to do some improv. The staging seems pretty well done, the roles given out judiciously. There’s the one who’s sobbing to soften up the judges. The one trying to look sorry, as you might at confession, or at least that’s what I imagine. The one cringing in pain, or pretending anyway, even if nobody’s interested. There’s the nonchalant guy, lips pursed, whistling softly between his teeth. Then there’s the happiest kid in the class, to the point where you wonder if he isn’t a complete idiot—he’s thrilled to be here! Then finally, there’s me, hands in pockets, stretched out on my bench, pretending to be asleep for the first several acts. With my eyes half-closed, I watch, scrutinize, savor. I’m filling in the blanks for my inventory of humanity, but I still come to the same conclusion: there are a lot of dominated, a few dominants, and the judges obviously belong to the second group. They’re sweating in their black robes, they sigh with each new case, they barely look up to see the defendant coming forward, they yawn during the defense attorney’s little speech (to call this pleading a case is an insult to the attorneys I sincerely admire and respect). The head of the court declares the sentence and slams his gavel down on the table.
“Next case!”
He must want to wrap things up fast. I look at him and wonder if it was worth it studying all those years just to end up here, in a dusty courtroom, sitting in an uncomfortable chair, teaching lessons to pre-retirement-age Mohammeds who steal wallets. By the way, what kind of studies do you have to do to get here? The young elite from the XVIth are always talking about “doing law at Assas,” a public university. But what is law, exactly? The law, my law, is whatever I decide for myself. I’m eighteen years and a few weeks old, I go around wearing a Lacoste jacket, I pick up girls easily at the parties I crash, I steal one of their daddies’ Volvos, go eat seafood in Normandy, leave the car on the side of the road when the gas runs out and hitch back to Paris. I haven’t learned anything yet.
A man leaves the courtroom between two policemen, crying like a baby. He’s almost out the door and still begging.
“Your honor, I swear I’ll never do it again!”
The judge isn’t listening. He’s already moved on to the next case. It’s Mr. Happy’s turn, accused of destroying the ticket counter of a metro station by throwing a trash can through the plate glass window.
The attorney jumps right in.
“Mr. President, I ask you to take into account the fact that my client committed this unfortunate act at a time when no RATP employee was sitting behind the window. He therefore knew he would not injure anyone.”
“Surely, Counselor . . .”
What, already? Obviously, the judge has forgotten the attorney’s name. He addresses the defendant.
“Over the last six years, you’ve spent more than five years in prison, and always for the same kind of vandalism. Can you explain to me why it is you start up again at every opportunity?
“Your honor, I don’t have any family. Life’s hard on the street . . .”
“So that’s it . . . well, I’m sending you back to get pampered in jail . . . six months at the prison farm.”
He practically asks the defendant if that’ll be enough. The guy’s not just happy now, he’s ecstatic.
The old guy who stole the wallet is relaxed. For me, it’ll be eighteen months inside, with eight months suspension and immediate incarceration following the hearing. The sentencing only takes a few minutes. I had owned up to all the accusations. But the court doesn’t try to find out anything else, and actually, there was probably nothing else to know.
Ten months inside, so not even a year. The sentence doesn’t scare me. I’m almost relieved, like the homeless guy looking for a place to stay. As far as I’m concerned, I’m just dreaming of a bed. And to disappear a little. To erase myself, at the least. There’s always a mattress for me at Beaugrenelle, and clean sheets scented with lavender or rose, but I’ve barely set foot in my parents’ home in months. Even if I don’t show them respect, even if my attitude, on the contrary, shows that I don’t care what they think, I still don’t walk through their door at dawn, face battered, woozy from the blows given or received the night before. The moment when I pass out is the one when my father gets up. He drinks his coffee at the kitchen table and joylessly gets ready for another day at work—he’s old, tired. I’ve understood how indecent it is to dive into the sheets Amina irons for a long time now.
I can’t stand it anymore. I’ve slept in commuter trains too many times. I’m wiped out. I want a blanket, hot meals. I want to watch Looney Tunes every Sunday night on TV. So, here it goes. I’m on my way to Fleury.
15
Welcome to the rest home.
The day starts gently with a news flash. At eight o’clock, a reporter rattles off that a train jumped the tracks in the Doubs region, with four minor injuries and passengers suffering from shock evacuated by rescue workers. Cock-a-doodle-doo. Alain Prost won the Grand Prix in Budapest, Hungary. The weekend weather: sunny skies and scattered clouds in the northeast with a chance of rain, seasonal temperatures. I slowly wake up, the news anchor gets replaced by a bad song from Jean-Jacques Goldman, but I’m not worried. During the course of the day, I’ll get treated to La Lambada, the summer hit, from what I understand, at least three or four times. At least that’s what they’re trying to make us think, anyway . . .
The locks fly open. I stretch and rub my neck, yawn wide enough to break my jaw. Won’t be too long till coffee; I can hear the cart coming down the hallway. I hold out my bowl, grab my tray, head back to my bunk. It’s a commercial break on Cherie FM. A chorus of girls is excited because shoes are at 199 francs. According to them, “you’d have to be crazy to spend more.” How ’bout if I told them I have a ton of ways to not spend anything at all? I dunk my toast, the margarine dissolves and forms tiny yellow beads on the surface . . . Breakfast in bed, what more could you want? Some quiet, maybe. I turn the radio volume down as much as possible—it’s going to continue its serenade until lights out. It’s impossible to shut it up completely. Liane Foly, Rock Voisine, and Johnny Hallyday are the worst kind of torture for the inmates of Fleury-Mérogis. Like Chinese water torture. You could go nuts if it weren’t possible to drown out the asthmatic meowing of Mylène Farmer with the reassuring purr of the television. I’m rich, with more than twelve thousand francs when I got here, and you only need sixty per month to rent a AV set. I treat myself. We get all six channels including Canal+. Now it’s time for teleshopping.
Pierre Bellemare wants me to call him. He’s trying to sell me a waffle iron. I look around my cell, no need to get up. Sorry, Pete buddy, but there’s no more room for powdered sugar in my pantry. It’s full of cigarettes (for newcomers in need, because I don’t smoke) and Pepitos (for snack time). When I need to go shopping, I give my prison ID number, which is the same as my account: 186 247 T. I’m debited directly at the source, with no sales tax, and no withholdings. I improve on the ordinary, but I really can’t complain anyway: the day I got here, I was welcomed by Ahmed, a buddy from Beaugrenelle. Since he was about to get out, he gave me all the necessities: a sponge and Saint-Marc detergent, a small, rectangular mirror in a pink plastic frame, soap that doesn’t dry your skin out, the AV set for listening to CDs, headphones included, of course, and a thermos for keeping water cold or coffee hot.
My world has been reduced from limitless to a few square feet. I still breathe fine all the same. Mid-morning, a guard suggests I get some fresh air. It’s not mandatory; I could stay and watch out for deals from the old mustachioed guy on the shopping channel. But no, I lik
e to go outside. It’s often a chance to do business. Being weaned off Gitanes can be cruel for the newly arrived smokers. With a little bit of luck, and if they happen to get a sympathetic cop monitoring their break, they might get through one or two, but they’re still far from their usual daily dose. We spot the new guys easily: they’re wearing the uniform that they got when they arrived; they still haven’t had the time or the opportunity to send for their personal clothes. They stand in the secondhand-smoke clouds exhaled by older detainees and dive for the butts they toss with disdain. The negotiation can now begin.
“Hey, I’m Abdel. You want some smokes?”
“Ousmane. Yeah, I want some! What do you want in exchange?”
“Your jacket there—that a real Levi’s?”
“It won’t fit you, it’s too big.”
“Don’t you worry, I know what to do with it . . . four packs for your jacket.”
“Four! Abdel, my brother, you must take me for a jerk, man! It’s worth at least thirty.”
“I can go up to six. Take it or leave it.”
“Six . . . I can make it for three days with six packs.”
“Take it or leave it.”
“OK, I’ll take it . . .”
The transaction can’t happen during the walk: against the rules. It’ll be finalized later in the day by a tried-and-true system we call yoyo that’s tolerated by the guards. Even detainees who aren’t involved play along: for one thing, because it’s a way to pass the time, and also because everyone needs something at some time—I mean that not playing along means being excluded definitively from our little community. I knot a rag around the cigarettes, attach the bundle to a sheet, slip it through the window, and start to swing it from right to left. When it gains enough momentum, my neighbor can snag the bundle. Then he passes it to his cellmate,who does the same thing, and so on and so forth until the package makes it to the buyer. Then he attaches his jean jacket to the sheet and sends it back to me the same way. Sometimes the sheet gets torn or a clumsy prisoner drops it. If it lands in the barbed wire on the ground, it’s lost forever and ever . . . To avoid this kind of thing, we always make sure we don’t “room” too far away from our business partners.
Now it’s lunchtime. Soon it’ll be nap time. Tomorrow, visiting hours. My parents come to see me once a month. We don’t say anything to each other.
“Are you okay, son? Are you getting by?”
“Great!”
“And the others, in your cell, they leave you alone?”
“I have a single. It’s better for everybody . . . everything’s fine, I swear, it’s all good!”
We don’t say anything to each other, but I’m not hiding anything from them: I lead a nice life at Fleury-Mérogis. We’re all the same here. We begged, we stole, knocked people around a little, we dealt, we ran, we tripped, we got caught. Nothing big.
Some brag that they’re in for holdups. We don’t believe them. The real bad guys live at Fresnes. A guy named Barthélémy boasts about stealing diamonds from the Place Vendôme. Everybody laughs: we know he’s in the slammer for swiping a sausage-and-fries sandwich out of the hands of some suit at La Défense. He was sentenced for “moral prejudice.”
In the afternoon, at exactly two o’clock, I turn up the volume on the radio to listen to the news. I hear that police who were on a raid got trapped by a crazed gunman in Ris-Orangis. Thinking their colleagues had managed to blow down the door of the apartment where the guy was holed up, several heavily armed officers went in through the window. The nut was waiting for them. Being a former security agent, he was heavily armed, too. He shot first. That makes two fewer pigs in the pen. I’m not happy about it, but I’m not crying, either. I don’t care. This world is messed up, it’s full of crazies, and everything leads me to think I’m not the worst, far from it. I turn down the volume and turn on the TV. Charles Ingalls is sawing wood, his kids run across the prairie, Caroline tends the coals in the little house’s fireplace. I drift off . . .
I’m living it up. Fleury is summer camp. Like Club Med, just without the sun or the girls. Those nice counselors, the guards, make sure nothing upsets us. Blows from nightstick, insults, humiliation, I’ve seen all that in movies, but none of it since getting here. And as far as “bending over for the soap” in the showers is concerned, it’s pure legend or fantasy, I don’t know which one. I’m just sorry for the guards, because they’re the ones sentenced to life here. They leave these gray buildings at night only to go to another that’s not much better. The only difference is where the locks are located: theirs shut from the inside, protect them from bad guys like us they haven’t locked up yet. Whether in here or out there, the guards live locked up. The inmates count the days until they get out, the guards count the years until they can retire . . .
When I got here, I counted the days, too. One week was enough to know it was better to stop, let the time pass, live every second without thinking about the next, like always . . . I became social, I knew how to earn the esteem of my neighbors. Between two cells, there’s always a hole in the wall about three to four inches wide and waist high. It allows you to talk, pass cigarettes, and also let your neighbor watch TV if he doesn’t have one. All you have to do is set a mirror on a stool so it reflects the image. The other guy has to watch in an uncomfortable position, his eye glued to the hole, and he has to lean his ear in to hear the dialogue, but it’s better than nothing. Every first Saturday of the month Canal+ shows a porno. A few minutes before it starts, all the inmates drum on the doors, on tables, on the floor. Not to demonstrate some irresistible need to escape, for sure. So why? I don’t know. I join in on the noise like everybody else. I crack up listening to the others, even if I wish they’d shut up most of the time. Fleury-Mérogis is never quiet. Never. Except during the monthly porno. As soon as it starts, nobody makes a peep.
I figured out how to get away from the ambient noise by making my own music. It’s inspired by films mostly. Once Upon a Time in the West came out two years before the blessed Abdel arrived on this Earth. Luckily, my favorite western comes on TV a lot and I never miss it. I learned the lines by heart: “I asked you to scare them, not kill them!” The cold reply from the other: “You’re a lot more scared when you’re in pain.” Or this one: “I saw three coats like this one at the train station this morning. In each coat was a man. And in those three men, three bullets.” The coolest! Sometimes I come across one of the silent films with Charlie Chaplin and laugh so hard that the guards worry about my mental health. I laugh almost as hard when I listen to the news on the radio or the TV. In Creil, three girls showed up at school wearing full veils, and suddenly the French think they’re in Iran. They’re panicking. The news is so pathetic, you’re better off taking it as a joke.
It’s already evening. The light and the TV go off by themselves after the second movie. It’s already the end of the year, and I’ve pretty much done my time if you consider the suspension period. I must have gained twenty pounds lying around all year like an old pasha. It doesn’t look so good on me, but I’m not worried. I know business is waiting for me on the outside, and I’ll have to get back on top of my game, start right away, run fast and far. I’ll lose the weight. In June, I confessed to everything I was accused of because I thought I’d see daylight a lot sooner if I went straight for the truth. In reality, I could have just denied it, and they’d have let me out on parole until my court date. Maybe I would’ve disappeared, hidden out at a friend’s or with family in Algeria. But I would’ve been wrong, because then I would have missed out on an interesting and not at all traumatizing experience.
On November 9, while I am lying on my bunk, I hear TV newswoman Christine Ockrent say that the wall that has divided Europe for twenty-eight years is coming down. All the news programs are repeating it over and over: the Iron Curtain is falling. Soon I see footage of people prying away cinder blocks and crawling over ruins. An old man is playing the violin in front of some graffiti. The East and West were totally separate f
rom each other until now. It wasn’t a story made up by Hollywood screenwriters, and James Bond, if he existed, would really fight Soviet spies . . .
I wonder what planet I was living on before Fleur-Mérogis. Shut up in my cell for the last six months, I have discovered the world. Ridiculous, I know. Here the guards call me “the tourist” because I take everything so lightly. I have that casual look like the guy who’s just passing through.
By the way, I’ve done my time, I’m out of here. Thanks guys, I had a good rest. Here I am, ready to dive back into the big bath of whatever. In Berlin, at Trocadéro, Châtelet-les-Halles, in the basements of Orsay, it seems like everywhere it’s the same dump. And if I have to go back to Fleury, well . . . I’ll go back.
16
It only took me a few weeks . . . just a handful of days and nights and I didn’t have time to get bored. As soon as I got my shoelaces and watch, I was back in business. There were more and more portable CD players around near the Eiffel Tower, and some truly inspired engineers had worked hard to perfect the quality of video recorders, which were, by the way, lighter and lighter. In Algeria, the Islamic Front was starting to ruin all the fun; my brother, Abdel Ghany—Belkacem and Amina’s other “son”—took advantage of it to come back to Beaugrenelle. He hadn’t gotten his papers, but he needed to make a living: I took him on at Trocadéro. There I found out some guy named Moktar had helped himself to my turf. I smoked him out with the help of some faithful allies by letting him know he needed to be gone, pronto. Moktar got to my brother and used him to scare me. Always the chicken, Abdel Ghany warned me: either I gave up the turf, or he’d get the brunt, my sweet brother. He hadn’t come back to Paris for this . . . I thought about my favorite movie, Once Upon a Time in the West: intimidate, don’t assassinate . . . I chose from my African network, the tallest, the thickest—the best armed—Jean-Michel. Together we paid a visit to my rival. The latter was surrounded by ten of his goons, some who’d worked for me in the past, and a cute brunette.