The Godmother

by Cayre, Hannelore; Smee, Stephanie;

  At this point she hesitated, then asked me in Arabic: ‘So, you know everything about us, then?’

  ‘I don’t know about everything. I’ve been following your family for five months; you, your son, your brother as well as the driver who works on the farm,’ I answered in French.

  ‘That’s very embarrassing.’

  ‘It’s really nothing to be embarrassed about… You’ve seen all my dirty laundry, too… Look at me, unable to touch my mother, unable to change her nappy, even to make her eat a bit of yoghurt… I’m the one who should be feeling embarrassed about making such a spectacle of myself. You’ve done so much for her… and for me.’

  Khadija started sobbing in French: ‘The police, they trashed everything at my place, and talked to me like I was dirt. We’re good people, Madame, we’re not low-life.’

  ‘I know, you just want your life to be a little easier. We’re all in the same boat, you know.’

  ‘My son said my brother’s neighbour is the one who informed on us because we found a source of water and he hasn’t. Before, we used to grow almonds on my family’s land, and then my brother, when he found that cursed spring, he said to himself that he could finally grow khardala like everybody else because it’s a crop that needs a lot of water.’

  ‘… from which he extracts the resin and then presses it, I know all about it.’

  ‘Yes, he’s making the tbislas himself. It’s a lot of work. At first, I wasn’t at all happy because I said to myself it would only bring trouble, and then my son convinced me that with our cousin who’s a customs officer, there wouldn’t be any problem getting it through. You know, my son, he’s very intelligent. He’s always been first in everything. He has good qualifications, but nobody here wants to give him any work.’

  ‘How long has he been doing this?’

  ‘This is about the third crop. My brother used to tap the stalks and flowers through sieves and that would take a lot more time. It was my son who told him how to do it much faster by freezing the seedlings. You could say that it’s really his, this product, he’s even designed the logo himself. He’s already done a lot of trips, but he had never brought in as much as he did this time… I knew it was going to end badly but nobody listens to me. Luckily my brother was able to pay back the saraf for our share, otherwise…’

  She held her hands up to the ceiling as if to show that the family had only narrowly avoided being struck down by divine forces.

  ‘Your share? I don’t follow…’

  ‘In the truck there was also merchandise that he was carrying for other people… And I’m certain they’re following me, those people. Whenever I go anywhere I feel like I’ve got eyes on my back.’

  ‘It might be the police. They want the drugs too.’

  ‘No, no, I know what I’m talking about. Those people, they’re from the bled. The police have told me to check into the station twice a week, like a criminal. They’re not letting me see my son in prison and I’m no longer allowed to have any contact with my brother, but I don’t care about that because my daughter has shown me how to talk to him using the PlayStation so nobody can listen in on us.’

  We were interrupted by my mother who started to scream in bewilderment and terror, pointing her one good finger at some imaginary spot in the direction of the toilets:

  ‘Neyn, ikh vet nit! Neyn, ikh vet nit!’

  ‘Stop, mama!’

  Khadija was stroking her face to calm her down.

  ‘Poor thing, she’s been like this ever since they brought her back from the hospital. Especially at night. Nobody understands the language she’s speaking. She really does look like she’s very, very scared.’

  ‘It means, I don’t want to! in Yiddish. She saw some terrible things when she was young. Please, can you give her something to calm her down… Some sort of medication that will make her sleep all day so she doesn’t have to wake up anymore except to eat.’

  ‘I don’t have anything to give her unless the doctor prescribes something, but you could always bring her something and I’ll take care of it. It’s the least I can do.’

  ‘The most important thing is, you mustn’t change your number, otherwise they’ll be suspicious and think you have something to hide. If they’ve let you keep your telephone, it’s because they’re tapping it. If they haven’t found the drugs that Afid has hidden, it’s because they’re looking for it in the wrong place; the last place they were able to ping his phone before he ditched his mobile. Make sure you only speak Arabic on the telephone, that way they’ll always have to run your conversations through me to translate them. Speak Arabic to everybody, always!’

  She agreed with an air of collusion.

  ‘Khadija, I can sell your product. True, I’m not exactly sure how, but I feel it must be possible because of my job. I’ve shown you that you can trust me… I need money! Everything I’ve earned my whole life has gone to raising my children and paying for this hospital. If I don’t do something very fast, I’m going die on the streets, homeless…’

  She gently placed her hand on my arm. ‘Are you sure I can talk on my telephone?’

  ‘Absolutely, that’s safe.’

  ‘Alright, I’ll organise a meeting with my brother. Tomorrow.’

  At the time, I didn’t understand what that was supposed to mean.

  When I returned to the hospital at the same time the next day with some Diazepam, Khadija called me over with a conspiratorial look and led me into my mother’s room, locking the door. Then, while I was drugging her with a concoction tinted blue from twenty drops of the stuff – although the maximum dose is meant to be five – the carer plugged a game console into one of the home’s laptops and started a private session on Grand Theft Auto 5.

  She’d chosen a sporty young woman for my avatar, with long white hair and blue eyes, and I appeared on a military airport runway in the middle of the jungle.

  A big twin-propeller aeroplane landed, and out of it emerged an older-looking man.

  ‘Look, that’s my brother,’ Khadija said proudly.

  Then the figure started sprinting towards me. I was totally flabbergasted. Once he had come to a stop, the two characters stood there, moving awkwardly from one foot to the other, arms dangling, in a state of suspended animation.

  ‘Say something. He can hear you.’

  ‘Hello. Are you… Mohamed?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The conversation continued in Arabic.

  ‘My sister told me you wanted to speak to me.’

  ‘I know you have no more contacts to sell your product, but I can supply you with some because of the work I do. For example, I’m currently listening to these Moroccan guys who have a decent clientele in the south of Paris: around Nation, Vincennes, Saint-Maur…’

  There was a long pause.

  ‘I don’t… I don’t know them, these guys you’re talking about.’

  The man was a lout; barely civil.

  ‘I’ll give you their names and you can make some enquiries so you can satisfy yourself that the families are trustworthy.’

  ‘Yeah… trustworthy…’

  ‘If you work with these boys, there’s some fat cash to be made, and fast, because I’ll always be one step ahead of the police.’

  Some fat cash to be made… Having regularly encountered this obscene and gluttonous term in my intercepts, I knew it had a magical effect on dealers, like attracting children with the promise of cake.

  ‘What would you know about it? Nothing.’

  ‘The poorest quality is worth 250-300 a kilo in Morocco and is traded for 800 in Spain once it’s across the border. The Pakistani variety is being bought for 1,200 and sold for 2,500 in Spain. The olive variety – your resin – gets 1,400 in Morocco and 4,000 in Spain, because it’s rare. After that, between Spain and France, it goes up on average 1,000 a kilo. As for the pollen, the Abdallah, you’re not making it but you should, because those guys I’m telling you about have some customers with a lot of money. But I think we co
uld ask for up to 5,000 a kilo for your drug, retail, seeing as the quality on the market at the moment is so bad.’

  ‘Yeah…? You think?’

  ‘And I’d take 20 per cent of the retail price.’

  ‘Oh, right…’

  ‘What I’m offering you is to set up a secure, on-going organisation, with continuous supply to a whole lot of people who I’ll be choosing after having tested them at length by listening in on them without them knowing. And I’m just saying – the drugs are sitting out in the open somewhere. If your nephew tells you where he’s hidden them, Khadija and I can go and put them somewhere safe. You can trust me.’

  ‘How am I supposed to know where they are? Along the road somewhere! Afid didn’t send me the GPS coordinates because you had the bright idea of telling him to ditch his phone before finding a place to hide the shit. Now, because of you, I have to wait for him to make contact with me.’

  ‘If I hadn’t been there, everything would have been lost so you could say that it’s thanks to me you still have your product. By the way, I don’t think I’ve heard a thank you.’

  Frankly, he was beginning to irritate me.

  ‘Yeah…’

  ‘How much was there?’

  ‘To be honest, I don’t even know why I’m talking to you.’

  And the figure disappeared from the screen, leaving me alone in the jungle.

  ‘My big brother is a bit old-fashioned,’ said Khadija, by way of excuse.

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘I think it’s because you’re an educated woman. He feels humiliated.’

  ‘But that’s ridiculous!’

  ‘It’s just how it is.’

  ‘My whole life, I’ve copped it for being a woman.’

  ‘Me too. But who cares… it’s their problem! I like my life the way it is.’

  My mother had started to smile as though she was following the conversation, despite being completely out of it. We sat there, watching her in silence.

  ‘She told me a story… I’ve always wondered if it’s true. At the end of the war, she caught some nasty bug and had a fever of 41 and a half. Everybody around her agreed she wouldn’t make it through the night, and while they were all there, talking about how sick she was, something appeared on her pillow that looked like rays coming out of her head. They all knelt down to pray, saying she was a saint, except my grandmother who didn’t believe in anything, and certainly not that her daughter had been touched by some sort of grace. She leaned in closer to get a better look at the supposed rays: they were colonies of lice leaving her head in single file because she was dying. Have you ever heard or seen anything like that?’

  ‘No, no I never heard of such a thing.’

  ‘Yeah, me neither.’

  Two days went by, and while I was at the Second District offices of the DPJ in the 10th arrondissement translating the interview of somebody being held in custody, my telephone started ringing insistently. The number on the display was my mother’s aged care facility.

  In the end, in the middle of the job, I took the call, apologising profusely. It was the manager.

  ‘You have to come right away. Your mother hasn’t stopped screaming the whole night. Not only that, she hit a carer, who then of course decided to take advantage of the situation and take sick leave. I think the time has come for everybody’s sake for her to be admitted to palliative care. Otherwise you’ll have to start paying for an extra carer.’

  ‘Look, I can’t leave work just now. I’ll get a break in two hours.’

  ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, but I can’t afford to have such a difficult patient. I’m managing with three carers here in circumstances where I really need double that number. We have a community here, and your mother screaming day and night upsets the other residents, especially those with Alzheimer’s who are already difficult enough to handle at the height of summer.’

  ‘But I saw her the day before yesterday… she was calm. Khadija is really good with her and…’

  ‘Khadija has passed away!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Apparently she had a heart attack yesterday evening outside her place while somebody was stealing her bag. Yes, I know, it’s dreadful, we’re all completely in shock. That’s why, you’ll understand, I have to work out a more appropriate solution for your mother as a matter of urgency. I’ve found her a place in geriatric palliative care. All I need is your signature.’

  I finished translating the interview, concentrating as best I could, then left in a taxi for Les Eoliades.

  When I got to my mother’s floor, I found Khadija’s colleagues in a complete state. The official story was that she had had a heart attack after a group of thugs apparently followed her into the building where she lived in order to steal her bag. But I had my own ideas. It had to be the other owners of the drugs her son was carrying who were responsible for her death; the men from the bled who she knew had been following her. Or could it be a simple case of Radio Prison having broadcast to all the dealers in the Île de France that a certain Benabdelaziz and his Vitry gang had been brought in without their fat stash of superior quality product? Whatever, some guys had gone to put some serious pressure on poor Khadija to encourage her to tell them where Afid had hidden the drugs, and her heart had given out.

  So that was it. Now I was up to my ears in it, in the business. The place out the back that my father used to keep hidden from us, where the rubbish bins were kept. Those times when he would come back from one of his trips with his jaw clenched, and all of us in the house knew it’d be a good idea to just shut up…

  Raging, deprived of the extra medication which Khadija had been administering to her on the sly, my mother was screaming louder than ever as she thrashed about in her bed as if she were about to drown. The sight of her dirty, uncombed hair, of her half-paralysed face, contorted by demented grimaces, was more than I could bear.

  Seeing her like that, I went into standby mode. The only thought that popped into my mind, as I fixed the pepper-and-salt tufts of hair poking wildly out from the top of her head, was that I had never noticed a single grey hair before she had gone into hospital. I didn’t even know she was a natural brunette, since I had only ever seen photos of her as a young woman in black and white.

  I signed the papers presented to me by the manager, whereupon, much as one might rid oneself of some large stinking animal, she called an ambulance to carry my mother off as quickly as possible to the very last square on the snakes-and-ladders board game of human degeneration: the palliative care centre.

  No longer required by any commercial niceties to soften her tone, it was in a sharp, abrupt voice that she asked me to empty the room of all my mother’s things so it could be cleaned and re-occupied the next day by another resident. Most importantly, I was to be quick about it. Nail clippers, hair brush, moisturiser, cushion, scarf, onesie… that was all that remained of my mother’s material life. I tossed it all higgledy-piggledy into a box with the nagging feeling that I had already acted out this hideous scene several times in my life.

  When I left her room, the cleaning women were already there.

  All that I kept in the wake of her being spirited away was a soft toy – a life-sized white, brown and black fox-terrier that had cost me a bomb and that had served as a substitute in her blind-woman’s hands for Schnookie, her childhood dog. The rest I left behind. Then I went back to the Second District police station to finish my work.

  Schnookie was the dog who had drowned in ’38 when she and her family were crossing the Danube in a dinghy to escape the Germans. The fox-terrier had panicked and leaped overboard, to be swept away by the current before the eyes of my powerless mother. It’s the only time in my life I cried, she would add, in a quavering voice to whomever was listening at the time. Needless to say, I would feel like killing her whenever she put on this display.

  I took the bus with my stuffed fox-terrier toy standing on the seat next to me. I wasn’t feeling very well. It must have been quit
e a sight, this woman with her white hair in disarray and her soft toy – two people took surreptitious photos of me to post on social media. I’d rather not think about the caption they chose to go with it.

  Once I got back to work, I went and sat down in the break room that was plastered with posters of bad cop films and poured myself a coffee while I waited to be called again. I had a headache, or to be more precise, my brain was ringing with a sort of dull buzzing, like the sound of a blender muffled by a blanket. It was unbearable. At one point I even started to think a blood vessel was going to burst in my brain like it had in my husband’s.

  Up to that moment, I had wept at my impotence, at my enforced submersions into that ghastly aged care facility, at the hideously depressing spectacle inflicted upon me by my mother… But seeing her like that, in her onesie and so out of it as to not even know who she was, had me touching the bottom of the human condition… and it was breathtaking just how far down it was, the bottom.

  Terrifying.

  And now it was my turn. They were going to find me, coffee in hand, in the break room of the Second District of the DPJ, a trickle of blood running from my ear… My god! The energy required just to live… And my girls would feel exactly the same way when they discovered my body, clutching my cup amidst this ridiculous decor of testosterone-loaded film posters… How depressing it all was…

  At some point I was jolted out of my stupor by the sound of loud barking. Platoon and Laser, the two sniffer dogs from the squad, were carrying on at the soft toy animal perched on top of the coffee machine, which they had spotted through the slightly ajar door.

  I went out to show it to them to try to quieten them down. They recognised me immediately, going crazy in their excitement, and bringing me back up to the surface.

  ‘They’re pretty keen on you, aren’t they,’ said the dog squad officer, a likeable young fellow with glasses, about thirty years old.

  ‘I adore dogs, but my apartment is too small for me to have any.’

  ‘All a dog needs is to be with its owner; it couldn’t care less about the size of the apartment. Laser’s going to be looking for a new owner soon. I’ll reserve him for you if you want. You two look like you get along well.’