The Influence Peddlers

by Hedi Kaddour

  “If you’re here, it’s probably for a passport,” said the man, “You’ll see, it’s the same thing over there, in the Rhineland, wherever we have our occupation troops: the é Menschen, a profession of the future for Alsatians!”

  He was being both sarcastic and proud.

  “No, I haven’t always worked here. Before, I was a German teacher. We need fewer of those today.”

  Once the formalities had been completed, Raouf and his friends went to treat themselves at a salon de thé. There were even more pastries than in Paris, and according to Gabrielle that was intentional: the government wanted the return to the motherland to be done under the best of conditions. Raouf told them about his conversation with the é man.

  “What machine do you use?” Ganthier asked Gabrielle.

  “A Remington,” Raouf immediately said.

  “He’s more observant than you are,” Gabrielle said, and Ganthier:

  “Another foreign brand.”

  “Yes, but adapted to the French language and ‘made in France.’”

  “In any case,” Ganthier said, “with a machine it’s not the same French, you’re not writing, you’re typing!”

  There was condescension in Ganthier’s voice. Gabrielle defended herself: on a machine you can’t go back and correct yourself; it required writing without needless embellishments. For Ganthier it was the end of style.

  “No,” said Gabrielle, “it is a return to the classics, direct order, essential words, and a quick phrase, like a watercolor.”

  “But the clacking of the machine . . . a pen lives, not a keyboard!”

  “Do you know what Joubert said? Music has seven letters and writing has twenty-six notes . . . I love my keyboard.”

  From time to time Raouf looked around the room, which was filled with massive furniture. Not far at another table there was a young woman, alone, seated on a banquette, a very powdered face, bright red lips, a very soft, black leather jacket with a fur collar. She was concentrating on her movements, her spoon moving slowly above the assortment of red fruit accompanied by cookies that filled the large bowl placed in front of her next to a cup of steaming chocolate.

  “Are you still here, Raouf?” Kathryn suddenly asked. Raouf looked at her without understanding. Kathryn waited a moment, as if she was waiting for an answer, then:

  “Because if I’m cramping your style, I can leave!” Her tone had become hard.

  “And on my way out I can ask her if she’d like you to join her. I’m sure she’ll be happy. You might even be able to put your hand between her legs.”

  Ganthier and Gabrielle looked at each other, ill at ease, Ganthier not even daring to turn his head toward the other table. Kathryn had become pale. It was a true scene, in public. Raouf felt lost. He had simply wanted to see what the girl was eating. He was maybe going to order the same thing, that’s all, he hadn’t realized . . .

  “That’s what drives me crazy,” said Kathryn, “He doesn’t realize, he was really looking at what she was eating, and he didn’t see the way she had been looking at him for ten minutes!”

  Then, with her voice scarcely any lower:

  “That . . . bitch knows that he’s with me, that doesn’t prevent her from . . . with her eyes . . . do you have a verb in French?”

  “Zyeuter—to eyeball,” said Gabrielle.

  “Mater—same thing,” said Ganthier, “but it’s slang.”

  “It’s the same thing as zyeuter?”

  “It’s stronger, it’s when a man possesses a woman with a look.”

  “But that’s what that bitch is doing, she was possessing Raouf.”

  “But it’s not Raouf’s fault,” said Ganthier.

  “That’s it, defend him.”

  “I didn’t do anything, nothing,” said Raouf. Gabrielle also defended him, he hadn’t seen anything . . . For Kathryn that was the worst:

  “One day, without seeing anything, he’ll find himself in bed with a bitch.”

  “That’s a bit much, isn’t it?” asked Ganthier.

  “If he loves me he should be able to recognize women who want to harm me!”

  Ganthier thought that would be a lot of people to watch, but refrained from saying so. While they were talking the woman had left the salon de thé. Kathryn calmed down. She stroked Raouf’s hand. Later, Gabrielle to Kathryn:

  “You’ve dressed him up like a dandy, and now you’re furious that women are noticing him.”

  Ganthier had spent the hardest six months of the war on the slopes of the Vieil-Armand, above Cernay. He wanted to see what it looked like now. They made the trip by car through the plain, then the vineyard. In Ribeauvillé they stopped for lunch at an inn, a nice chicken with cream sauce. They were the only customers and the owner spoiled them.

  “We make French fries here, like in France. Even when the Germans were here I made fries. They never said anything to me. They were happy to come and eat them.”

  She was a woman with a nice face and round body, a good-looking fifty-something. She appeared to have a crush on Ganthier. She kept coming over to their table, carefully moved her hips when she went back to the kitchen, in a trot if she wanted them to appear lively and ample. She spoke to them a lot, even sat next to Ganthier on the banquette, stood up, expressed her admiration for his hair, couldn’t hold herself back, and passed her hand over his head, saying, “S’esch a guete Kerl!” in a throaty voice that she tried to make sound chirpy, and everyone burst out laughing at this good woman’s attentions, Ganthier as a “good boy,” the seducer at the inn.

  They were spending the night at a hotel at the top of the Grand Ballon of Guebwiller, a large wooden chalet. They ate off plates painted with scenes from daily life, farmwork, walking, a dance with tuba players. The beds were tall, narrow, covered with red duvets. Kathryn was sweet. In the morning it was very cold. It was still snowing. “Star Lou beautiful breast of pink snow,” Raouf had murmured in Kathryn’s ear, awakening her. Later, Kathryn wanted to put some protective cream on Raouf’s face, but he didn’t allow it. They continued to play. Outside, it was a world of silence, of pine trees, larches, cloudy, with blue openings between two rounded mountain peaks. Raouf liked walking in the forest, more silence, the noise of shoes on the powder, observing the prints on the ground, the same marking repeated at almost a yard apart until the entrance to the woods, two paws close to each other, and behind the paws, a longer print, deeper.

  “A large rabbit,” said Ganthier, “It’s also called a variable hare.”

  “Why?” Raouf asked.

  “Because it changes colors with the season, from brown to white, to avoid being seen.”

  “A true rabbit of the protectorate,” Raouf had concluded.

  They found themselves facing an expanse of snow, barred in the distance by a curtain of pine trees, and behind the trees, very far, other peaks. Log cabins were wearing huge white hairpieces. A path suddenly veered off from theirs, marked by snowshoes, disappearing behind an escarpment in the terrain. On the horizon the snow blended with the lead gray of the sky. White powder fell from the trees whenever a gust of wind moved the branches. They heard the cries of rooks. Raouf loved to feel the burning of the snow in the hollow of his hand. Sometimes the sun slid between the clouds and a spot of light appeared on the snowy mounds.

  “Let no one utter the adjective ‘fairylike,’” Gabrielle said. Raouf and Kathryn went up to bed very early. Gabrielle and Ganthier talked for a long time in the hotel parlor. Ganthier had the feeling that Gabrielle was getting used to him; one night they would naturally find themselves in the same room.

  The next day they got back on the road, climbed the Vieil-Armand, which the locals still called Hartmannswillerkopf, Ganthier saying:

  “We called it La Mangeuse—the eater . . .”

  Raouf stopped provoking him. They were walking on the scorched mountain, between bunches of rock and cement, pieces of rusty beams, a trench suddenly widened by a shell hole. Ganthier was surprised to have so few memories,
a man wounded in the stomach who had asked for the canteen and almost inhaled the metal . . . He started to talk to forget the black blood that smelled like tripe, a few words, potholes, mortar shells, one hundred thirty pounds, those damned potholes, you could put ten men in the holes that they made, and the flame throwers, the gas, but not often, the fronts were too close to each other, sometimes scarcely sixty feet, you could even hear them talking over there, “and the two crests that went down on our left and our right. We didn’t call them crests. We said the left thigh and the right thigh, exciting, right? The worst was December seven years ago. We had gained a quarter of a mile. Those idiots in command hadn’t bothered to send us reinforcements in time. The reinforcements were for the ones across from us, and they even came up behind us. The command had forgotten to clean up the fortifications that had been breached. The Boches came out at our backs. The entire 152nd was obliterated—excuse me, I’m boring you.” Farther, among the graves, a few women were sharing a watering can.

  They went back to Strasbourg. In the lobby of the train station Raouf bought some postcards. Kathryn didn’t ask for whom, but in the taxi that took them to the hotel, her mood darkened. Raouf refrained from asking her why and asked Ganthier:

  “Is it true that after 1870 the Germans supported your colonial conquests to turn you away from Strasbourg? They would have paid for your defeat? And in 1918 all of the Germans really left to go to the other side of the Rhine? After all those years in Alsace? Even those who had bought land, built buildings, factories? Left without compensation? Now that’s good decolonization!”

  Raouf was quiet a moment, then, looking out the taxi window, at a massive building just below the violet sky:

  “Everything they built is beautiful, the Rhine Palace, the courthouse, the opera, the museum, even the train station . . . My favorite is the university, and the library, it’s huge . . . Do you think you’ll do the same for us one of these days?”

  28

  THE SUITOR

  Rania finally agreed to leave her father’s house and return to Nahbès. She took the train accompanied by two servingwomen, under the watchful eyes of European travelers who could perhaps accept that a native dressed in silk and wool might travel in first class, but the two servants, she could have put them in third: Was she really that afraid of being alone? Some people even looked at her hostilely in the waiting room, when they noticed that she was holding a book—that seemed bold, and a French book, literature! She’s even holding her book the right way. It seems it is one of their favorite authors, but even so, she’s doing it on purpose: she could have chosen the Comtesse de Ségur, or Sans famille. Did you see the faces of the other two natives when they saw a woman of their religion with a French book? She could have propositioned men and it would not have been worse! Rania and her servants found themselves alone in their compartment.

  When they arrived things were different because Si Ahmed and Marfaing had come to meet her to get news of Si Mabrouk, a French traveler confiding in his wife:

  “For Marfaing to have accompanied the caïd, she must be the daughter of a great family, but I still don’t see why: one, she is traveling without her husband; and two, why would that husband allow her to read Rousseau?”

  “I’ve always been told not to read him,” the wife said, “Apparently that Nouvelle Héloïse is full of vice.”

  At the farm it was cold. Rania couldn’t stand the smell of gas stoves. She read in front of the fireplace, wearing a camel-skin burnoose whose hood she even sometimes put on. She only raised her head at the onset of dark ideas. She chided herself . . . It’s the lack of activity that’s making me cold, tala layli min hubbin man la arahu muqaribi, my night is getting longer, the one I love is not beside me . . .

  She went out as often as possible, walked in the countryside, in front of the cart, remembering that Gabrielle had once told her, “Walking just to walk, without obligation, is an invention of rich Europeans.” She was often on the verge of tears. Then her breathing became deeper. She was absorbed in the plants she saw, but it wasn’t a mere spectacle. Everything reminded her of things to be done: weeding, pulling, righting, taking out stones, digging, especially digging irrigation ditches. They had been left without care for two weeks under the pretext that it was winter, and they were filled with dirt and sand. A peasant had been putting off the task until the next day for centuries, and so on, and the country had died from it, for centuries. Not completely: they had done enough to survive but not enough to launch themselves into true work, due to the religion, Raouf often said in his most critical moments, the fault of the Turks, the fault of tyranny, the fault of the peasants themselves, the fault of no one and the fault of everyone, and someone always ended up saying that it was written in the great book of immutable things. She remembered something Ganthier had said to her uncle (some memories made her hate Ganthier): “In this country they haven’t even been capable of inventing a broom handle, as if a woman bent over to the ground, a whisk in her hand, was the height of human innovation!” Her uncle had called him a racist while laughing:

  “You took centuries to invent the halter, and you’re criticizing us for being slow!”

  After a month Rania went back to see her father. She immediately asked one of the nurses if she ever thought about changing her uniform, and pointed out to the family doctor that he was coming by only every third or fourth day: You know my father, he has to feel like the police are coming! The doctor was accompanied by a young man with a red face whom he introduced as the assistant to the cardiologist. The young man remained silent. One of her father’s servants came in with tea. Where is the sugar? Rania asked. In the tea, the servant said. Rania tasted. It was syrup. She spoke in a cold voice: There were instructions, the tea should be served unsweetened, and my father can put a half-spoonful in his glass, no more. The servant lowered her head. You know that in addition sugar makes you hungry, hchouma, Rania added, content to shame the servant. She raised her head, looked Rania in the eyes, and Rania understood perfectly what was in that look, and in the two seconds it had taken her to look at her, it was no longer a matter of sugar, but of an unveiled face in front of two strangers . . . Later Rania had taken the servant aside, she said: Those men are doctors, they see many things other than faces . . . and you’re going back to your village! Si Mabrouk tried to defend the servant. Rania asked what that woman was doing in the house: “I can find out very quickly, you know. When one tries to teach someone a lesson one often has something to hide. She’s going back to her village, and if she ever returns I’ll know about it very quickly. You have to recover your health, not tax it.”

  In twenty-four hours things were back to normal, and she was able to start talking to her father. She had perhaps found a suitor.

  “You? All by yourself? So quickly?”

  “With the help of a woman from around here, one of Raouf’s aunts, a distant aunt.”

  “Did you use a matchmaker? Don’t tell me you also went to make offerings to a marabout!”

  Rania hadn’t responded to any of her father’s sarcasm. She continued: He was a man from a good family, thirty-six years old, yes, still a bachelor.

  “Not married at thirty-six?”

  Si Mabrouk thought he might have a hidden vice. This very careful girl was going to end up with someone who went to brothels, or . . . He remembered a story that had gone around in the capital, a father who didn’t want a son-in-law chosen by his wife, and who had found an infallible means to get rid of him. He had demanded of the man a medical certificate swearing that he was not a passive homosexual. Si Mabrouk refrained from telling his daughter why he was smiling. She saw it as indulgence, took advantage to say that at thirty-six men have history, and in this case it was perhaps a story of a failed first marriage, the bride’s lungs.

  “Engagement or marriage?” her father had asked, “they’re not entirely the same thing!”

  Rania realized that she didn’t really know. That surprised Si Mabrouk:

&nbs
p; “I thought you were more thorough . . . Okay, go on!”

  The man hadn’t been stricken by the illness, he was in good health, and . . . “And you must be careful,” Si Mabrouk said. The next day he started asking around: a businessman from the capital, importer of French agricultural machines.

  “A profession of the future,” Si Mabrouk said, “Each machine puts thirty families into poverty!”

  “But they increase the yield,” Rania said, “They create more food for people, so . . .”

  She was interrupted. Her father didn’t require a lesson in economics, and he knew what was coming next: If you wanted to survive you had to farm like the French did and do it even better; you could call that a curse or damn the curse and make progress. Rania forced herself to think of practical things, which held her tears at bay. She wanted to take advantage of her stay in the North to buy some livestock from the White Fathers, the French monks who were creating hybrid cows that people were beginning to talk about. She had seen an animal that weighed almost a ton, a zebu with a beautiful light gray coat, very lively eyes. It had made its skin vibrate with such force that no horsefly had been able to stay on it, and it walked away with the majesty of a wild beast. Rania was interested in three things: large livestock resistant to drought, grain machines, and the manpower needed for the olive trees, almond trees, fruit trees, vegetables, all of the best quality . . . In the capital, demand was increasingly high. If the White Fathers were surprised to be doing business with a woman, they didn’t show it.

  The suitor also had the reputation of being authoritarian and eager to succeed. That had surprised Si Mabrouk, his daughter’s interest in such a man. In veiled terms Rania had said that it was time she accept the world as it was, “and you know that I like progress.” The father talked to Taïeb as if he had himself found the man, but Taïeb had quickly understood. This came from his sister; he didn’t like this plan. This suitor was a modernist. He had already tried to marry a modern woman. It had been a catastrophe. He wanted to begin again. They would make the worst sort of couple, with the worst consequences for the reputation of the family. Taïeb had tried on purpose to question the man’s health, tuberculosis . . . or maybe something else. He seemed delighted to be telling that to Rania. In any case, she replied, a third of the men in this country are syphilitic, and then she left their father’s room.