Arab Jazz

by Karim Miské

  He imagines her listening, captivated. He pictures her lying on the grass, floating in the clouds, her big eyes staring at him, drinking up the words that send her to a more distant place than any long-haul Air France flight. Light years from the suffocating world of her childhood that she struggled so hard to escape from. On the landing of their apartment block, Laura had recounted her early years to her neighbor on more than one occasion. The horror of growing up with Jehovah’s Witness parents. He had listened to her patiently, not saying a word. That had been enough for her. A recent memory comes to the surface, almost a revelation. It happened in the stairwell barely ten days earlier. Laura had just gotten back from Niort. For a full fifteen minutes she told him how she had called her father a liar, an impostor. He had poisoned her childhood with every sort of absurd prohibition; had made it his business to control the sex lives of others. And now he, who was beyond reproach, had a mistress in New York, and she had seen her with her own eyes. She was the same age as Laura, his daughter! She had told her mother everything on the front steps of the family home she was no longer allowed to visit. Mathilde Vignola had called her a lying whore. She had yelled and tried to claw at her. In the end her father had stood between them, pronouncing the irreversible verdict. “Vile, dirty girl! You will regret this insolence! Bitterly. In this world, not in the next!” At the time Ahmed hadn’t paid it any attention. Just like the other times, he was content with listening politely, not reacting, half absent, half present. It was only today, freed from his prison, his mind enlivened by the smoke in his lungs, that he understood the true meaning of the phrase. Laura’s father had explicitly threatened his daughter. This made him a prime suspect. But what’s the link with him and Sam? No matter. Time to call Rachel.

  Once, he can’t remember where, he read that in Yiddish the suffix “lé” is added to form a sort of affectionate diminutive. Rachel, Ra-che-lé.

  RA-CHE-LÉ

  30

  Lincoln Center, Manhattan. Thirteen days earlier.

  Ten minutes he’s been following her without her noticing, so absorbed is she in her search for the books listed on a printed sheet. Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, W.E.B. Du Bois, Toni Morrison, V. Y. Mudimbe. Dov observes every minute gesture, records the title of each of the books she places in her basket. Looks at the photo, then looks at her. And again.

  In the photo: light brown hair, long skirt, wool coat. A look of contrived humility.

  In the flesh: darker brown, curly hair loose on her shoulders, jeans, camisole top. The picture of calm assurance.

  And yet the same full, slightly pouting lips, the same beauty spot between her cheekbone and her right eye, the same piercing, electric-gray eyes. No doubt whatsoever.

  Black Skin, White Masks joins Beloved in the basket. When Rébecca settles into the queue, Dov stations himself in the courtyard outside, three yards from the entrance. What’s he waiting for? For her to explain to him why she didn’t want him, the tubby American Hasidic Jew? Hopeless! He’s understood perfectly from watching her move, breathe, just be for the last ten minutes. There’s nothing—absolutely nothing!—ultra-Orthodox about her. Susan was right. Rébecca was in character. Why? Who cares why? He could just forget it and disappear from her life forever, a life in which he will represent nothing more than a fleeting image, and a future in which he will not play the slightest role. But Dov stays. Just so he can say to her I’m here, I exist, I’m not like the person in the photo either. A sense of boyish indignation. This whole thing has left him hurt.

  She emerges, her plastic bag full of course books for the Center for Black Studies at Northern Illinois University. He goes up to her.

  “Rébecca!”

  Taken aback, she looks up at the stranger who’s addressing her by name in this vast city where she doesn’t know a soul. He is wearing jeans flapping over green Converse sneakers, a Marcus Garvey T-shirt so baggy his tzitzits are barely visible, a green, yellow, and red skullcap. Never in her life has she been confronted by such a phenomenon: an ultra-Orthodox Jewish Rasta built like a chubby rugby player. And he is smiling at her. Somewhere in her head—right at the back—a little light comes on that she’d like to switch off.

  “Yes?”

  He hands her the photo without saying a word. Rébecca turns deathly pale, like she’s seen a ghost. Making no attempt to deny the evidence, Rébecca grabs hold of the image and studies it carefully before turning back to the funny-looking man. The outline of a soundless question on her lips. “Dov?” He too answers in silence.

  Had he looked awkward and surly in his Hasidic garb like in the photo Ruben had given her, she’d have known how to react. She’d have mocked him and then left him standing there. All over and done with in a couple of minutes. But now she’s stumped. Sure, he’s got the skullcap and the tzitzits, but she can tell immediately that something’s up. He’s about as hard-line as she is. What does that mean? What’s this all about? How have two Jews clearly more attracted to hip-hop culture than to the Torah ended up on the verge of an arranged marriage that harks back to the shtetl or the mellah? “What the fuck?” She’s uttered these last words aloud. Dov, deep in thought, echoes her.

  “Yeah—what the fuck! Come on, let’s grab a table in Starbucks and talk. We owe each other that at least.”

  Half an hour later, Dov has detailed his journey from Wichita to Brooklyn via Harvard and prison, omitting only the part about how his chemistry skills have enabled him to manufacture a new drug that is starting to flood the French market thanks to a distribution network in which Ruben, her own brother, is unwittingly playing a vital role. The union that Rebbe Toledano was hankering after was a business contract of sorts. It sealed the transatlantic links between the two branches of the Sephardic Hasidic movement which was without a doubt about to experience a new and dazzling prosperity with the money brought in from the sales of Godzwill. Dov keeps quiet about all this. For the first time he feels a bit ashamed about it. The girl’s sincerity touches him in a new, unfamiliar way. It almost irritates him to realize how affected she is by his story. Because his tale of family breakdown and the abandonment he felt in prison moved Rébecca profoundly. Trying to curtail this unfamiliar outpouring of emotion, he asks her how she came to have her photo taken in full Hasidic getup and how she nearly went ahead with an arranged marriage.

  So she sets about explaining how her mother had found comfort in religion after her husband had left her, as had Ruben, who had reacted very badly to the breakup of his hip-hop group. An ultra-Orthodox synagogue had opened down the road from where they lived, run by Rabbi Haïm Seror, a Moroccan like them. Within a few months the whole family was under his influence, including Rébecca, who was worried about losing the two people, besides her girlfriends, she loved most in the world. She changed the way she dressed, observed the Sabbath as much as possible, but still went to school and on to college. For almost four years they left her alone, though one by one all the girls her age in the community started getting hitched. Then they began talking marriage. She played for time, maintained that she wanted to finish her studies, that she wasn’t ready. Her mother insisted, Ruben too, and her resistance was worn down. She gave in because of her love for them. Their sadness made her feel desolate, that the world was tumbling down. Her marriage had become like an obsession, the focus of their lives, as if it would turn back the clock, erasing all memory of her father’s flight. The rabbi’s wife joined forces with them, talking about a young Jew from Brooklyn—Ashkenazi, of course, but educated at Harvard—who was Rebbe Toledano’s protégé. That really did get them going, those Moroccan and Tunisian Jews living in the nineteenth in Paris, all this talk of the rebbe and Brooklyn! To them it was the Messiah and New Jerusalem! So in the end she agreed, anything to see her mother smile at last. The photo was taken that same day.

  After that she quite literally blanked it from her mind. She didn’t even tell her girlfriends, with whom she shared everything, and who were so worried about her since she started following—or at
least pretending to follow—her mother and brother on the family teshuvah, the return to the “true” Jewish faith. The subject wasn’t broached again for another three weeks until, a few days after her midterm exams, her beaming mother announced that Dov was coming to Paris in six days’ time to mark their engagement. This was her wake-up call. The Rébecca of old came back with a jolt, and she called her friends.

  An emergency meeting was held at Laura’s with Aïcha and Bintou. The immediate, unanimous decision was to get Rébecca onto the next flight Laura was working on. By an ironic twist of fate, its destination was New York. As chance would have it, her passport had been renewed for a trip to Israel four years earlier. On the Thursday morning, after scribbling a note for her mother and brother, and without looking back, she left the apartment, the building, the street where she had grown up. At Laura’s she got changed, became herself again. Sixteen hours later the two friends were getting off the Newark–Grand Central shuttle.

  “I was so happy! The skyscrapers all around me! I felt more free than ever. And—if you’ll excuse me—all the more free because this had meant to be a place of confinement . . .” She stares at him in amazement before continuing. “And here we are today sitting and chatting in Starbucks . . . It’s so weird . . . I should have run a mile when I saw you. But I came in here with you instead. It’s nuts! Like some kind of dybbuk story. Spooky! But it’s been like that from the word ‘go’. When we got off the bus at Grand Central, we hung around five minutes to buy some water and a paper from a Pakistani guy’s stall. And all of a sudden Laura went white as a sheet, staring straight ahead. I saw her mouth the word ‘Daddy’. I followed her gaze: a beautiful young blonde was passionately kissing an old, awkward, graying man of about fifty. He didn’t spot us. He got onto the bus to the airport and disappeared. My friend was petrified. Arriving in New York only to find her father—a super-strict Jehovah’s Witness—in the arms of a girl the same age as her. It was all too much!”

  “Your friend’s a Jehovah’s Witness?”

  “No, she got out of there. Her childhood and teenage years were a living hell . . . Her father is head of a local branch of the organization somewhere in France.”

  Rébecca loses herself in thought for a moment. When she tunes back in she sees that Dov is in a state of shock.

  “What’s up? Something upset you about my story? You look like you’ve seen a ghost!”

  Dov pulls himself together, manages the hint of a smile, and checks his watch.

  “No, no, I . . . I just realized I’m running late for an important meeting. I’m sorry, Rébecca, but I’ve got to bust now. Can we do this again?”

  “I’m leaving town tomorrow. Listen, Dov, I’m not sure I want to see you again. This chapter of my life is over. Give me your number . . . If I feel up to it, I’ll call you. But you . . . I’m asking you not to look me up. Can I trust you?”

  “Yeah, of course, don’t mention it. I’ll leave you in peace.”

  Five minutes later and three streets away, standing stock-still before a pedestrian crossing, Dov stares at his telephone. Contacts: the name “Susan” on the screen. His hesitant thumb hovers over the green button, an unsure look in his eyes. He blinks and presses the button. Perfectly aware of the consequences.

  31

  The girls are standing in front of Le Point Éphémère club. Its name a metaphor for the temporality of existence in general, and for theirs at this particular moment. They are tense and fidgety as they wait for Rachel. All their hopes, all their trust strangely resting on this one policewoman. They want to see Laura’s killers punished, of course. They also want to lift the shadow that has overwhelmed their beloved brothers. It’s still a mystery to them. Why the boys and not us? At what point did they start crossing over to the dark side? As kids and teenagers they admired their big brothers more than anything. The 75-Zorro-19 days were like one long trance. Bintou, Aïcha, and Rébecca didn’t miss a single show, tagging the group’s name on every wall in the neighborhood. Until that unforgettable, exceptional evening when they got on stage in front of all the local kids and did the dance routine they’d rehearsed for months, inspired by the start of that Spike Lee film Do the Right Thing. Five minutes of pure energy and fun. It felt like right then, at that precise moment, their lives had officially begun. After that they got their heads down to review for their baccalaureate. They forgot about hip hop and their brothers for several months. Then there was that strange period when Moktar started going crazy. Hawa, Bintou’s mother, said that it all stemmed from there. Fair enough, she couldn’t stand Codou, the beatmaker’s mother. The mere mention of her name would make her face shut down and her mouth harden, little lines appearing at the corners of her lips. “It’s her, it’s Codou. I knew her from back home. She’s always been jealous, envious. She didn’t even want her son to succeed. So she cast a spell on the whole group. That’s why you’ve got Moktar hanging around the crossroads dressed in that stupid long kamiss of his, and Ruben with his bizarre gangster hat. As for Alpha and Mourad, they spend half their time in that tiny prayer room with their phony imam. I tell you, every day I pray they’ll snap out of it. And they will, you’ll see. They’re my children, all of them. I nursed them, I watched them grow up. As for that Codou, let me tell you! She’ll get her comeuppance in Paradise!” Aïcha and Bintou only half believe in charms, prayers, and protection spells, in all that stuff from the bled. Their brothers’ gradual decline remains a mystery to them. Why them and not us? The truth is they do know why, even if they’ve never said so out loud. It comes from their parents, their way of being, moving, speaking. Words, gestures, and ways of seeing that the girls wanted to adopt, while their brothers only sought to adopt them in part, mostly craving the validation of others. They were more prone to focusing their energies on countering a section of society’s scorn toward “Muslim youths,” that dangerous new class of the postcolonial Republic. They were frequently tempted to reverse the feeling of stigma, to brand themselves proudly with the very religion that brought them such relentless contempt.

  Bintou and Aïcha never felt the so-called war against Islam had anything to do with them. They quite simply couldn’t have cared less. It had no bearing on the way they defined themselves in the universe. Aïcha’s worldview was largely influenced by her father. Arzeki had spent his entire career as a pâtissier at Dalloyau, just opposite the jardin du Luxembourg. A decent man, she had never known him to harm or speak ill of anyone. A calm man too, never one to pray, fast, or say anything about God. Of course she loved her mother Khadidja, a reasonably pious lady, but she felt much closer to her father. It was his example she followed. Instinctively and without question. Bintou’s role model was her mother, Hawa. A spirited woman who had her own reasons, deep inside her, for railing against a world order that she felt was grossly outdated, though she seldom spoke of it. Except once, to her daughter. A conversation that left an indelible mark on Bintou’s memory.

  Lieutenant Kupferstein approaches the two girls with long strides. Rachel is the precise representation of what they want to be “when they grow up.” Not a police officer, no; just an upstanding woman. She pauses when she reaches them, looks both of them in the eye, then nods to the towpath. No time to sit down before the next meeting, so a little walk together down the canal will have to suffice. It should be enough to talk everything through. Almost, at least.

  Bintou takes a deep breath before starting, like she used to back at primary school before diving into the blue water of the swimming pool with its trembling lines.

  “We were there, on the corner of the street, and they filed past us without noticing us, one after the other. What time was it? One in the morning. It was hot. We hadn’t gone our separate ways yet. We needed to talk some more. To be together, the two of us, a bit longer. We’d just been on Skype with Rébecca for an hour. Laura wasn’t there. She was meant to be coming back from Los Angeles the following morning, after we left for college. We never thought we wouldn’t get to see her a
gain. Why would we have? How were we to know that her fate was playing out right there under our noses?”

  Bintou stops, lowers her head. When she looks up her eyes are filled with tears. Rachel takes it on board, but subtly keeps things moving.

  “Did you try to see her after she got back?”

  “We called her but her cell was off. We didn’t insist too much because she worked on long flights and got jet lag really badly. She needed to recover. Anyway, we weren’t worried about anything.”

  Rachel urges the girls on again.

  “So who appeared that night on the street corner?”

  “75-Zorro-19: the whole gang. It was surreal. Moktar, wearing a three-quarter length Adidas tracksuit that was a bit too long, his kamiss and his prayer cap, followed thirty seconds later by our brothers, Alpha and Mourad, looking like your average computer geeks. Then, after five minutes, there was Ruben, with his skullcap and tzitzits. All heading into Sam’s. We had to pinch ourselves. But we were both there, and we both saw the same thing. Our instinct was to hide as soon as we saw our brothers. Over the four years they’ve been going to Haqiqi’s prayer room with Moktar they’ve belonged to another world, and we’ve lost touch. They tried loads to convert us, but it didn’t work, so they dropped it. Since then, we’ve barely had anything to say to each other, and we’ve kept out of one another’s way. When Ruben went into the barber shop he sat down next to Sam and just nodded to the others. There was no warmth in it, but it’d been ages since they’d spoken a word to each other . . . We left them there, went home feeling pretty confused. It was all so weird that at the time we didn’t talk about it. But since Laura was found dead we haven’t been able to stop thinking about it . . . We can’t let it go: it doesn’t add up. Why are these former friends who had a bad falling-out all meeting up like that? And why at Sam’s?”