The Influence Peddlers

by Hedi Kaddour

  “You know, I don’t think like you do . . . ,” and Mokhtar:

  “Since you’re not a Social-Democrat . . .”

  A slap on Raouf’s back, then:

  “A progressive bourgeois, that’s worth all the social traitors.”

  A bed, and a mattress on the ground: Quôc was staying with Mokhtar, who was helping him survive, did the cooking for him.

  They went into the great murmurings on Granges-aux-Belles just as a voice at the podium was saying:

  “It isn’t possible to think like our invaders, nor is it possible to think and act as we did before.”

  It was the auditorium of a music hall. There was a bar at the entrance, separated from the room by a guardrail, and an area with some hundred bistro tables, and a passageway along the walls. People were listening to the speakers or talking in more or less low voices. The balcony was also filled with people, a cloud of smoke on the ceiling, very few women, apart from those who, on the left, at the corner of the bar, were keeping a few silent and attentive men company.

  “Annamites?” Kathryn asked.

  “No,” said Mokhtar, “Chinese, they are the only ones who come with women, and who talk to them.”

  “Do you know them?”

  “Not really, Quôc introduced me to one of them.”

  “The short, fat one, the tall, thin one, or the average, distinguished-looking one?”

  “The distinguished-looking one.”

  The Chinese were in sharp contrast with the rest of those in attendance, their factory worker uniforms and a calm tone and subtle gestures, Mokhtar pointing out:

  “Student workers.”

  One of the Chinese went to the podium, the tallest, a softer voice than those of the other speakers, but he spoke very clear French. He spoke of a country-continent to overthrow, of justice to be had, was called a reformist by one of the Frenchmen present, responded by asserting his desire for total revolution, and for another Frenchman China was only a peasant reserve, which should wait for the revolution in the cities:

  “Let the bourgeoisie have its day, you can settle things with it afterward. Otherwise you’ll have fascism, like the Italians!”

  The Chinese man defended himself:

  “We already have fascists!”

  Kathryn was intrigued by the presence of the young women whom the men were apparently treating as equals.

  “Because they are bourgeois like Raouf,” said Mokhtar, laughing.

  “No, it’s because they are in advance,” said Raouf.

  Quôc had joined them. He introduced them to the Chinese, who bombarded Kathryn with questions about America. The tallest, who had left the podium, answered before Kathryn had a chance to respond:

  “Aggressive politics, division of the working class, big club politics.”

  Kathryn didn’t understand much, preferred the questions of the short, fat one. He was called Deng; he loved factories, machines, and department stores. The most distinguished was named Chou. He also asked a lot of questions, smiled while saying:

  “We came here to explore the heart of the monster.” He also said that France had helped him to progress:

  “When I arrived, I was a young reformist.”

  “Like him,” said Mokhtar, taking Raouf by the shoulders. And Quôc:

  “We have all been reformists . . .”

  Chou continued: “I’ve been here three years, I’ve finally understood the enemy, we have to forge a weapon of steel,” and Quôc, in a cheerful tone:

  “That means they have become communists!”

  “And that we don’t need a master . . . ,” added Chou.

  The young women looked at Kathryn, both fascinated and distant. They asked her questions and responded to her questions. Yes, they were cable women in an electrical factory, Kathryn avoiding asking them if it was difficult. One of the women was called Fan. She wanted to become an engineer in radio transmission.

  “In China it’s impossible, but since everything seems impossible, it can become possible.”

  She had attended a demonstration of an experiment at the Sorbonne. It was in the Descartes amphitheater:

  “I thought it was wonderful to have it in that amphitheater, we really like Descartes. The man who did the experiment was called Belin. There were images he was able to transmit through a telephone, Édouard Belin, he called that a wave scene, he put a drawing into a big machine, and the drawing reappeared in another similar machine, thirty feet away, without a cord, a wave scene!”

  The distinguished-looking Chinese man, pointing at the young woman:

  “She knows how to build a radio!” Raouf noted that he hadn’t said even knows how to . . .

  The next day, at the hotel, Kathryn wanted to know everything about the world of politics. She had newspapers brought to their table at breakfast and said to Ganthier and Gabrielle, “Explain France and old Europe to me!” pointing to Le Figaro, L’Avenir, Le Temps and (to Ganthier’s displeasure) L’Humanité. When the maître d’ handed that paper to her with obvious disapproval, Ganthier assumed the same air, and then was mad at himself for being on the same side as a flunky. Gabrielle commented on events with an intelligence that Ganthier didn’t like, but he reserved his arrows for Raouf:

  “Reading the newspaper is the morning prayer for modern man, but that is no reason to neglect your own, with the rug, faith, intention, and all that . . .” Raouf smiled sweetly, without answering, and his good mood bothered Ganthier. He told himself that it came from the night before, and that little bum is still being pleasured by watching his girlfriend swallow her toast and jam!

  They also commented on the Saharan raid by the French half-tracks. Ganthier liked the expeditions, the space, the future. Raouf remained silent. Ganthier demanded admiration. Raouf finally said:

  “Your expeditions serve above all to show that France is at home everywhere.”

  There were also the tensions in Europe, the question of the war reparations to be paid by Germany. For Gabrielle the French had invented the concept of a war that cost nothing:

  “The bourgeoisie gave their sons, but not money.” Ganthier responded:

  “The defeated must pay!” And Gabrielle:

  “But not until 1980!”

  They stopped arguing and opened their mail, a letter from Nahbès for Ganthier, Gabrielle asking if it was news of his dachshund, and Raouf saying that Ganthier didn’t need news of Kid by post because he got it every day by phone. The letter was from Si Ahmed. He informed his old friend that all was very well on his property, but he regretted to tell him that he hadn’t made any progress on the question of land consolidation; the opposition was stronger than foreseen. Ganthier said to himself that he would take care of all that when he got back, I will ride my horse right onto Madame’s veranda, and I will have a discussion with her, I should have done that a long time ago.

  Si Ahmed’s letter didn’t ask any questions about Raouf; it would have been inappropriate. Ganthier was annoyed. Gabrielle noticed:

  “Rania is making you mad . . .”

  “Do you know her as well as that?”

  “She’s a true friend. We write, I even have a photo.”

  Ganthier had watched the young widow grow up; he had always found her a bit boyish. In the photo he saw the face of a beautiful woman with large eyes, high cheekbones, slender lips, a long and powerful neck. He dared say:

  “A lovely artist’s print . . .”

  “You’re an ass,” said Gabrielle, “There’s no retouching.”

  “I don’t recognize her.”

  “Because a photo is something other than a habit.”

  Ganthier frowned. Gabrielle:

  “I’ve even seen photos of you where you aren’t too bad.”

  They continued to talk about Rania; for Ganthier she was a fanatic, anti-French.

  “You don’t understand anything,” said Gabrielle, “For her, theology is a weapon,” Raouf adding:

  “She is far from being credulous,” and Gabrie
lle:

  “As for being anti-France, you say that as soon as anyone states that a protectorate is not a colony.”

  Raouf was having fun. Ganthier was more patient with Gabrielle than with him. Ganthier wondered what that meant, “You aren’t too bad,” a way of putting me in my place, or an invitation . . . One day, when all this is done, I will discover that she was in love with me, I have to go back to her place . . .

  Kathryn had plunged into a newspaper, then, laughing, she showed them a full-page ad in the Petit Parisien: “Arthritis sufferers, defend yourselves!” and Raouf, looking right at Ganthier:

  “That’s the new ‘Arise, Ye Dead’ of the bourgeoisie.” Ganthier had had enough. The kid was making fun of him, I put him into the modern world and he calls me an arthritic bourgeois! On the other side of the Mediterranean Ganthier incarnated the new civilization; here, a son of a notable dreamt of the red dawn and turned him into a relic of history.

  Later, during a stroll in the Jardin d’Acclimatation, Ganthier slapped a man he had just passed on the path going in the opposite direction. Raouf, Gabrielle, and Kathryn, who were walking in front, turned around. They didn’t understand. The very pale man was holding out a card, saying: “Sir, I beg of you . . .” Ganthier interrupted him: “Pistol? Sword?” The man had seen the ribbons in Ganthier’s buttonhole, and he left without saying anything more. Raouf asked what had happened,

  “He bumped into me, that’s all.”

  Ganthier was on edge. As they were leaving the park he muttered: “An arthritic must defend himself!” And a few days later, this confidence to Gabrielle:

  “I don’t know what came over me. The guy had just passed Kathryn, and when he got to me I heard him say, ‘Arab-fucker.’”

  “Be careful,” Gabrielle said in an amused tone, “You’re going to find yourself siding with the anticolonial left.”

  “Never! All that I want is a France of a hundred million inhabitants, a great nation of equal citizens.”

  “That’s not exactly what your dear Prépondérants are hoping for . . .”

  “Do you know that in 1915 the antiaircraft defense of Paris was commanded by a black graduate of the polytechnic . . . from Guadeloupe . . . the son of slaves?”

  “We can always dream . . .”

  27

  A LIBERATED COUNTRY

  They left Paris for Alsace. It was a Sunday. It had begun to snow early in the morning, an increasingly thick coating on the pavement, the sidewalks, the awnings, the streetlamps . . . the sound-deadening white of snow . . . sometimes a lull. The snow was waiting for the snow, which returned in bigger and bigger flakes, covering the black of the soot and coal around the Gare de l’Est, then was dirtied anew by the greasy exhaust of a bus or the cloud that escaped a locomotive, the flakes then coming to bury what the soiled snow revealed to be an unbearable spot, and after the train departed it continued to snow much more heavily over the landscape. At one point Raouf saw barges similar to those on the Seine, immobile in the middle of a field of snow.

  “The Marne-Rhine Canal,” said Ganthier, “They’re not going anywhere, it’s frozen, it must not be very warm inside.”

  The trip took more than eight hours, with alternating fields, hills, and an increasing number of jagged woods, large cemeteries under the snow, villages often in ruins. In the curves they could see the magma of heavy smoke in the locomotive’s wake. The train stopped often, in small villages or larger towns, where sometimes a church bell rang the hour like a lamentation. On the platforms, Raouf and Kathryn were surprised to see so many travelers in black, women traveling in twos or threes.

  “They’re still looking for the grave of a husband,” Ganthier had said, “or of a brother, son, father . . .”

  Gabrielle added: “And the hotels make them pay as much as on the Côte d’Azur.” After a moment, then: “Rania never wanted to . . . ?” She interrupted herself, and no one continued.

  They then traveled through forests, the trees sometimes beating against the window of their compartment; then the snow drifts became taller and taller, the train tracks seeming to enter an igloo; then a long tunnel; then there was the plain again, an expanse of white.

  “The snow that falls fattens the earth,” Ganthier said, as if to reassure himself.

  Beyond the Vosges the countryside was cleaner, less devastated than that which they had just traveled through, and at one point Ganthier, who was looking out the corridor window, pointed at something like a break in the line of the horizon, a dark object, “The spire!” he said, “The spire of the cathedral, it’s different from the Eiffel Tower, the spire of Strasbourg!” A moment of silence, then: “We didn’t say so out loud, we didn’t want to be called vengeful, but that was what we fought for. They said it was for civilization, but it was for that, a piece of our fatherland. That’s what stokes righteous fury, not civilization!” With Ganthier one never knew how much of what he said was meant to be sarcastic.

  In the streets of the city, Raouf and Kathryn were surprised to hear a strange sort of German spoken, whereas every balcony, almost every window, displayed the French flag. It was snowing even more than when they left, a windless snow, large flakes that fell straight down one after the other to cover everything, settling thickly everywhere, more heavily than in Paris. And on the roofs of the smallest houses one could distinguish superimposed layers, representing the snowfalls that had followed each other for several weeks. In the evening it was even more beautiful. Kathryn wanted to take a walk after dinner. They abandoned the warmth of their hotel on place Kléber, very few people in the streets. They walked in the virgin snow, more than eight inches on the ground, walked down a street with arcades that led into a long, newly restored square.

  “What is that statue?” Kathryn had asked.

  “It’s Gutenberg,” Ganthier said, “Let’s take the street on the left.”

  He let Raouf and the two women go in front of him, then there it was again, abruptly rising up some forty feet before them, blocking the street they had just taken, four hundred fifty feet of cathedral climbing into the dark sky, with snowflakes that fell on their eyelashes while they looked, the enormous portal, the spire on the left, the pink stone and the snow that danced in the drafts along the facade, in the light projected by a lamp. Raouf was dumbstruck.

  “It sucks you upward?” Ganthier had asked.

  “Magnificent,” Raouf said, “and a purely aesthetic magnificence, like for you.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “No, like you . . . that is . . . like the you of today.”

  Ganthier turned toward the two women. He hadn’t liked Raouf’s allusion to his past as a seminarian:

  “I suspect that our dear Raouf has a small tendency toward atheism . . . an atheism without alcohol . . . That’s rare among Arabs.”

  “You don’t know anything,” Raouf said. To ease the tension, while they were getting nearer to the front of the cathedral, Gabrielle spoke to them about Goethe’s discovery of the cathedral, Alsace, and a certain Friederike:

  “He was seduced by a frilly skirt that allowed a pretty foot to be seen up to the ankle!”

  The next day they had to go to the prefecture, for passport control, and waited in a corner of a large room. On the other side of the room Raouf noticed a man, seated by himself at a table on which was placed an inkwell and penholder, probably some sort of low-level bureaucrat who wasn’t entitled to the four walls of an office and who was put anywhere, in a hallway, a common room, or even on a landing as in Nahbès. This one had the same melancholic look of a chaouch; all administrations were the same. The man had responded to Raouf’s stare with a smile. He seemed to be at loose ends. Then another employee brought him a pile of papers, and he began to make little marks with his pen on each sheet. He was slow, applied, you might have said, a schoolboy who was watching his downstrokes and upstrokes. Raouf asked Ganthier what that man could be doing. Ganthier didn’t know.

  Raouf stood up, as if to stretch his legs. He went ov
er to the man, said hello, showing the right degree of respect: “May I ask . . .” The man was affable. With the tip of his pen he pointed at the sheet of paper he was working on. Raouf heard him say: “I am the et mèn’che.” He didn’t understand, hesitated. Pretend that he understood? And wait to hear more? He often did that in school. Or ask again, outright? He asked what “et mèn’che” meant. He heard the worker respond, “The man of the ets.” He didn’t understand. The man added: “Like this!” And with his pen he put an acute accent on the first e of the word République. The man straightened up, looked at his work, leaned over, put another accent on the last letter of Liberté, raised his eyes to Raouf, “The Germans don’t have our accents.” That was his work, to add the grave, acute, and circumflex accents on all the French vowels that needed them.

  “There are also cedillas!”

  Before the astonished look of Raouf, the man added:

  “You must understand, most of our typewriters are still German. The Germans introduced us to many modern things, they stayed for close to fifty years, and it must be said” (the man lowered his voice), “German typewriters are better. The only defect is the absence of accented French vowels, our dear accented vowels . . . So I am the ‘é man,’ the ‘é Mensch’ in Alsatian.” He also said that no one was permitted to speak Alsatian in the administration anymore; for the French it was a Boche thing. Yes, he put all the accents on all the documents. His task was official; it was included in the list of positions in the new public administration.

  “And believe me, it is an important task. Each time I add an accent I am helping our dear Alsace to return to the bosom of the motherland!”

  Toward the end he spoke mechanically, with the air of not really believing it. Raouf had not, moreover, immediately understood, because the man had pronounced the French word giron—bosom—as chiron. He caught himself, then: “Accents are easier to correct on paper than in one’s voice, perhaps because we’re attached to our voice. We are a great plain that many people have always crossed over, we keep in our throats the trace of that which has happened in our history.” And to be pardoned for seeming doubtful, Raouf had carefully looked at the man’s work, a lovely calligraphy, he said as a connoisseur. Each accent began with the stroke of his pen, and loosened, ending with a light touch. The man’s rhythm was efficient, precise, with a dip into the inkwell every eight or ten accents, just what was necessary to have the right amount of ink without risking a blot.