The Godmother

by Cayre, Hannelore; Smee, Stephanie;

  When my father died, my mother swiftly sold it and everything in it for next to nothing. The guy who bought it was an arrogant arsehole – a despot for whom The Estate was the perfect cover for his villainous tyranny over the family he would keep confined behind the walls and isolated by the deafening noise of the motorway. While signing the contract, he threw a salacious glance at his three daughters and confided that he had been quite taken by the place… They were choice recruits – I’d sensed it as soon as I set eyes on them – for the People of the Road.

  Not so long ago, I drove by and climbed onto the bonnet of my car to look over the wall. The necropolis has been planted over. But if you were to fly over the garden at low altitude, you would notice immediately that the plants there are abnormally green; the sort of green that indicates soil bloated with phosphates.

  I must have been fifteen, the last time I saw the .357 Magnum in action.

  In addition to being located alongside the road of death, The Estate was bordered on the other side by the Presidential hunting grounds, from which it was separated by a mere wire mesh fence. Whenever France sent its Ministers and their guests on an excursion to kill some innocent animals in an attempt to assert its identity as a big-swinging-dick of a country, said innocent animals used to run to our place for cover at the first sound of a shot fired. So the garden would be strewn with fifty or so pheasants and partridges; fat, over-nourished birds taunting the hunters from our green lawn. The beaters would do their best to recover them, but every time they tried to gain access, they were always met with the same flat-out rejection from my father.

  But one Sunday, on the occasion of a visit by an African potentate, the situation turned to tragedy.

  In order to entertain French Africa, a military truck filled with hapless deer had been brought from Chambord so they could be released into the forest. One of them had given the hunters the slip and had leaped over the wire fence to seek refuge under our sun porch. This time, the beaters didn’t ring on the door politely but invaded The Estate, cutting through the wire. The potentate and his courtiers followed, all done up like the subjects in that 19th-century painting King Maximilian II of Bavaria returning from the hunt, their hats adorned with a pheasant’s plume.

  My father rushed out like a Fury, brandishing his Magnum – but realising he couldn’t get away with shooting anybody, he took aim at the head of the deer, which exploded as he shot it at point-blank range, splattering the black king’s pretty tweed outfit with blood.

  French Africa departed The Estate very disgruntled; my father had ruined his day.

  I knew how to use the Magnum. My father, good colonial that he was, had taught me at the same age he himself had learned, that’s to say, at the age of ten. I still remembered the recoil ripping into my shoulder as he made me shoot, over and over, until I could absorb the shock with my body. So when my parents went out to a restaurant, they could leave me alone between the motorway and the forest with the revolver on my bedside table and not waste a moment worrying whether or not I might be scared – after all, what baby-sitter could be as good as a .357 Magnum?

  Now my old companion was resuming its place at my side. Just in case.

  It had taken me two days and a night to transfer the drugs from the wind turbines to my place.

  I understood why Khadija had used the term little fish when she had spoken with her son on the telephone: the Benabdelaziz’s trademark was two fish, drawn head-to-tail, yin and yang, branded into their resin. But that was only the loose bricks I had found stashed into the pile of gravel. The rest – the Moroccan bags – belonged to the other families she’d told me about. Other tags, to use the lingo, were thermo-engraved onto the bricks. A third were branded with the Audi logo, with four interlocking circles; others with the number 10, in the style of some hot-shot dude’s team football shirt; and others had some bizarre symbol that looked like a pentagon.

  Before closing my cellar door, I stepped back to admire my organisational handiwork: there in the cellar were 1.2 tonnes of cannabis. One thousand two hundred kilos of top-quality frappe, at 5,000 euros a kilo. I hardly dared do the sums I was so overcome by my audacity. I had shifted 1.2 tonnes on my own back. Fifty-two Moroccan bags, each weighing twenty kilos, two per airtight container that I had filled one at a time, stacking them up as I went, as well as one hundred and sixty loose one kilo blocks. I had even thought of a little step ladder.

  *

  Completely exhausted, I dropped in to the geriatric intensive care unit at the hospital to see how things were with my mother.

  In the corridor off her room, I came across the inevitable families bivouacking under the fluoro lights with thermos flasks, blankets and Candy Crush, no use to anyone but there because… well, because they had to be there, didn’t they, so that whatever happened they didn’t miss the last wheeze of the Ancient One.

  The manager of the unit, a woman as neat as she was disagreeable, and an absolute dead-ringer for Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, received me, explaining what was likely to happen in the coming days.

  ‘Your mum is not yet terminal…’

  ‘I think you’re mistaken there! In fact, it’s been quite some time now that she’s been terminal, that she’s been suffering and all you’ve done is stuff her full of sedatives,’ I replied bitterly.

  ‘She’s able to swallow again, and so apart from the macular degeneration, she’s not suffering from any other illness. She hasn’t got any bedsores and her bloods are like those of a young woman…’

  ‘There’s nothing left of her mind and even less hope for any improvement… and her back is in agony as a result of her being confined to her bed!’

  ‘We’ve done another scan, and the bleeding which was apparent in her left hemisphere is now in the process of being reabsorbed. I think she’s going to be able to make a slow recovery to her previous condition.’

  ‘Previous to what? This is grotesque! She’s in pain, do you hear me! She’s been suffering like a dog now for two and a half years. The manager of the aged care facility assured me you would be putting her under continuous deep sedation…’

  ‘Listen, your mum…’

  ‘Please! Stop saying mum as if I were some seven-year-old. I can’t stand it any more! Everybody has been talking to me about my mum since the start of this nightmare… One day I’d like somebody to explain to me this idiotic practice. You’re all doing it, so it must be what you’re all taught at college, right? What’s the idea? To infantilise people so that whatever happens they don’t suffocate mum with a cushion.’

  I felt utterly outraged by this woman, this intermediary of death, knowing all the while that my indignation would crash headlong into a brick wall. And sure enough, she continued in exactly the same tone:

  ‘Two days ago, your mum had problems swallowing; that’s no longer the case. If that had continued, we would have had to consider whether to insert a feeding tube. Artificial nutrition is a form of treatment and the law authorises stopping treatments. Your mum has started eating again without any issues, so she has evidently not decided to die.’

  ‘You don’t have the right to let people who have deteriorated to this point continue to live! She’s completely delirious, she’s blind, she’s utterly bedridden and since this most recent stroke, she has been living – and when I say living, I’m weighing my words carefully – she has been living in a completely terrified state twenty-four seven.’

  ‘Your mum survived the camps…’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Our ethical duties require us to recognise our patients’ wishes to the extent we’re able, even if they themselves are not in a position to formulate those wishes expressly. I think that when you have survived such testing circumstances, it is inconceivable that you would give up the will to live. I myself would have opted for the feeding tube.’

  ‘You don’t say. You would have opted… What do you know about what she thinks? Are you a member of one of those bullshit religious group
s or something – the Society of Saint Pius X, is that it? And I just have to cop it?’

  She gestured with her hand to indicate the matter was closed.

  ‘We’re going to keep her here under observation for a few days to allow her to regain a degree of comfort, and if she continues to eat as she is now, she’ll return to the aged care facility.’

  I was speechless.

  Then she added in a glacial monotone:

  ‘We’re not here to put people down, Madame. If anybody is suffering here, it’s you.’

  As to that last point, she was right.

  I went home, went to bed and slept for twenty hours.

  Two days later, flicking through Le Parisien with my croissant and coffee at the local café, I read an article that both saddened me and filled me with relief: the previous day an inmate by the name of Afid B. had had his throat slit at Villepinte prison.

  Most women spend their life trying to extricate themselves from the example set by their mother… There was no getting around the fact that I was doing exactly the opposite. In fact, I was going even further. I was remaking myself in the image my own mother used to hold up as her ideal: the intrepid Jewish woman.

  4

  THE CHAMELEON THAT SNOOZES, LOSES

  It was the end of July. The sun was scorching the sky; Parisians were migrating to the beaches. And just as I was getting started in my new career, Philippe, my cop fiancé, took up his position as Commander of the drug squad for the Second District DPJ.

  ‘We’ll see each other more this way,’ he’d said cheerfully, when he’d announced the news two months earlier, on the day of his appointment.

  I was genuinely happy for him – but back then, I was only a simple court translator-interpreter and I didn’t yet have 1.2 tonnes of hash in my basement.

  Philippe.

  So, he’s a man. Broad-backed, muscly, carrying a bit of extra weight, big, beautiful hands. A kind face with a thick head of hair, a rare thing at fifty-eight. The sort of guy everyone wants to please, who can be measured by his generosity, by the number of friends he has, or the number of godchildren – by everything, really… A guy whose social standing was plain for all to see at significant occasions such as birthdays or leaving drinks. A guy whose funeral would mean a graveyard crowded with mourners.

  Physically, I couldn’t say whether he was my type. In any event, he looked nothing like the only man who had ever really meant anything to me, namely, my husband, whom people always assumed was my big brother, we looked so alike. In fact, prior to Philippe, I hadn’t ever really experienced physical otherness. I’m not saying I’d lived like a nun for twenty years, but my sex life had been limited to one-night stands, always with criminal lawyers, by definition a bunch of lying, unfaithful, narcissistic womanisers… And this was when I still belonged to the Milf category – mother I’d like to fuck. Once I hit forty, it was all over.

  It was Philippe’s desire for me that really won out; a desire that was strong and genuine, that shone in his eyes when he looked at me, and that would have carried away any menopausal creature…

  I loved having him around – who wouldn’t have? – because as well as being integrity personified, he was intelligent, cultured and witty. By combining my life with his, I told myself at the time, a bit of his solidity might perhaps rub off on me. But when he was with me, or worse, on top of me, I felt as if I was being swallowed up, both literally and figuratively, without knowing if I even liked it. Sure, he was a considerate lover of whom I could ask anything and who was able to make me come for hours at a time… but after enquiring whether I was completely satisfied, he would snuggle up against me, bury his face in my neck and slip blissfully into a peaceful and grateful sleep. And then, with his body like a dead horse cutting off my circulation and killing my back, and his deep, hot breath condensing on my skin… how can I say this… I had only one wish, and that was for him to leave. One time I stayed the night at his place and I didn’t get a wink of sleep the whole night. The colours at his place, his carpet, everything… In short, I would have the taste of congealed fat in my mouth until he turned off the light. If he hadn’t had custody of his son, I think he would have suggested we live together… and what would I have said? Especially since he was ready to make all sorts of concessions. I could have said: I’m sorry, but I don’t like having somebody stuck to my back when I’m sleeping. Or: The decor at your place makes me feel like throwing up. And he would have agreed to change to make me happy because he was in love. Not just the way you can be when you’re 58 years old, facing the terror of growing old alone – no, he loved me with enthusiasm and kindness. And me? From time to time, when I was swept up by one of those waves of despondency to which I was prone, it comforted me to feel the warmth of his body, the beating of his heart. Like an animal. But to go from that to thinking about him when he wasn’t there, to waiting impatiently for him, to holding his hand, just like that, for the pleasure of touching him? No!

  We would see each other when our schedules permitted, so that we had the feeling of being shortchanged, of not having the time to really get to know the other’s personality or their faults. And while I had plenty of faults, he had one big one: he believed in God. Philippe, this man who was integrity personified, intelligent, cultured and witty… believed in God! It just seems so unlikely that anybody could give any credibility to such a load of rubbish. He could have confided in me a belief that our fate as humans was pre-determined by a dish of celestial noodles, and I would have found it less ridiculous.

  One day, when I was taking my daughters to the Natural History Museum, I remember seeing a couple of Saudi tourists: a woman in a niqab accompanied by her husband. At the time, there was a lot of talk of creationism in the United States and you’d often come across nonsense like the fact that dinosaurs disappeared because they were too heavy to climb onto Noah’s Ark.

  I’m an Arabic translator, and therefore supposed to know everything about Arabs, the religion included – you should know that in Arabic, there’s hardly a sentence without a reference to Allah – so I couldn’t resist approaching this rather unusual couple to enquire as to the precise Islamic view of dinosaurs. You got the feeling the guy didn’t know quite what to think of these immense creatures. He introduced himself as a professor of theology at the Sharia College in Riyadh. After some time reflecting, all the while stroking his beard, he told me with a learned air that there were some verses in the Quran that spoke of the creation of the universe in six days, but that the length of the days was not clearly specified, given that the sun, the stars… all of those things… weren’t really set up, and therefore there was nothing stopping you from envisaging days that were several million years long. The resulting ambiguity accordingly left open the possibility of a very old Earth populated by these huge animals. But to go from there to saying that man was descended from apes or from a bacteria, as suggested by the frescoes at the entrance to the museum: well, that was the stuff of infidels! He finished by inviting me to undertake my Hijrah – that is, to leave France to go and live a wholesome Islamic life in a holy land where such ridiculous notions were not taught.

  Philippe more or less believed the same thing about evolution as that man who had walked straight out of the Middle Ages, and yet he was ready to wage war against him in the name of civilisation. In short, I’m not sure what to do with a belief in God except see it as some form of mental disorder…

  *

  The first customers of my new life were served up to me on a platter by the drug squad case involving three Moroccans which I happened to be working on at the Second District DPJ. It was the perfect convergence. All the stars were aligned: here was a bunch of guys sufficiently idiotic not to wonder where I might have sprung from, and who had an urgent need for product as a result of a delivery mishap.

  I always take great care in my work to translate word for word. That’s my trademark. I don’t miss a scrap of what I’m listening to, and when I’m transcribing I set out to con
vey the tone and style of conversations so as to maximise reading pleasure. And on this point I confess to a shamefully patrician and perverse fascination with stupidity:

  Intercept No. 7235 dated Thursday, 25 July. Intercept taken from the telephone device of the person under surveillance originating from line no. 2126456584539, the registered owner of which is not known to the Moroccan authorities. The person using the line is Karim Moufti alias Scotch. His interlocutor is Akim Boualem alias Chocapic. Words in Arabic have been translated by Madame Patience Portefeux who has been engaged for this purpose and who hereby jointly certifies this transcript.

  Scotch: Don’t start giving me some crap about me being in it ’cos you done put me in it, and you’re in the same shit yourself. Words like that, bro’, I can take it from some nobody I don’t know but not comin’ from you. Every night I’m goin’ to the hookah bar and you’re tellin’ me: Don’ stress man, s’all good, don’ stress… And here I am bro’, here I find myself with some stuff that’s been dunked in petrol. Camel shit that stinks so much of petrol you could light it up with a match. I couldn’t even give that shit away, that’s how much they don’t want it. Hamdullah, if you think you can manage to get your notes back at your end, go ahead bro – and I’m telling you, good luck with that – but don’t ask me to pay for crap in that state… That shit is just trash, man.

  Chocapic: I’m gonna take my notes straight back outta his sonuvabitch hands. I don’t want no more from that motherfucker. I don’t want nuthin’ no more, even if he be coming back to me. Don’t wanna hear nothin’ more from him!

  Scotch: He’s shoved a big fat finger up your ass and you ain’t ever gonna see another cent. You gotta show no mercy! Action reaction!

  Chocapic: It’s makin’ me sick, man. I’m not sleepin’. I’m not breathin’. I’m not eatin’. He’s gone disappeared with my 180 big ones for a metre of crap… He did me with the photo, you feel me, huh?

  Scotch: I can see that, sure, I can see that, but your problem, man, is that you too sure of yourself. ‘Don’t stress man, s’all good, don’ stress, I got this…’ This is what you get, bro’ that’s why you’re sitting here like the world’s own ass-hole. But I gotta deliver, and that’s no matter what! I got nothin’ to go down and I swear on the Quran, it’s breakin’ my balls. I’m the one left carryin’ the can, and that’s stressin’ me, bro’.