The Influence Peddlers

by Hedi Kaddour

  Taïeb met the suitor as if by chance, at the barber’s, an Italian who had settled in the busiest spot in the European city, a commercial strip inside a block of buildings. It looked like the ancient city, the lack of sky, the narrow passageways, but with the brilliant effects of electricity and French-style shop windows, a good place for a chance encounter, two men talking seated side by side in a corner at the barber’s.

  “You know what a widow is, she’ll claim to know more than you . . .” Taïeb had also stressed that his sister wouldn’t bring a lot to the marriage: “You’re going to spend a lot for her, but she will not bring much, we’re not rich, and when I become head of the family I won’t be in a position to help you.”

  The man didn’t give in, and Taïeb told his father that the suitor thought only of money:

  “He thinks that you’re going to wrong me to set up my sister. Tell him that’s false!”

  Taïeb avoided adding, Anyway, you don’t have the power to do it. Aside from Taïeb’s inconvenient intervention, things weren’t said directly. They were reported by the matchmakers, who went back and forth between the families. The suitor was undecided, and the brother and the sister confronted each other while taking care not to bother Si Mabrouk too much. That suitor had been had in his first marriage—everyone knew it—and as soon as the second marriage would be officially announced, they would ask why Si Mabrouk would accept a used man, as the French say, for a son-in-law.

  “You know people,” Taïeb said to his sister, “For the time being they’re not biting, but as soon as they’re sure, they’re going to be rabid, they’re going to put you on the same level as the one before, they’re going to say that the man has a habit of women . . . (Taïeb looked for a word, frowning) . . . imperfect women,” and he continued rapidly before his sister had time to react:

  “Is that what you want people to say about us? That we have sold off an imperfect woman cheaply?”

  It was clear he was enjoying those words. He wasn’t claiming them for his own, of course. He even regretted having to use them, but that was life. He spoke while taking care to stay at least twenty feet away from his sister:

  “You must understand. Don’t think that I’m insulting you, I’m saying that that is what people will say, what you will become in their opinion. If you marry a man without reputation you will lose yours. He won’t need to cloister you. You won’t dare go out anymore. Do you really want people to talk about it to our father?” Rania’s defenses started breaking down, then she resumed defending the importer, and Si Mabrouk was worried.

  To counter his sister, Taïeb quickly spoke of another suitor, whom he had been keeping in the shadows up to then, a theology professor, a good reputation in his neighborhood, often called to lead prayers, but not at all a backward-looking imam, sometimes even dressed European style, speaks French well, but intransigent on the true religion. And Rania in turn asked around about the man, and she quickly had a lot to worry about. He was truly virtuous, no alcohol, no adventures, a man born in the country, a believer, honest. How had her brother managed to discover this rare species? She ended up attributing Taïeb with the intelligence that she had denied him for years. Seeing Rania’s eyelids become heavy with boredom, the matchmaker said to her: “I’ll continue to find out more about that man. I will find out, my girl, I will find out. All camels have a hump.”

  29

  KINDER DES VATERLANDS

  The four of them left by train for Germany, into the Rhineland that had been occupied by French troops since the end of the war. In Baden-Baden they stretched their legs while waiting to change trains for Mayenburg. The main street in the city was a mixture of beautiful store windows and a half-starved populace. From time to time they saw a line of people waiting in front of a store, drawn faces, a few vocal outbursts, but not for long, as if no one had the strength to continue a conversation. “Or rather,” said Ganthier, “as if hunger isn’t capable of destroying their sense of discipline.”

  A bit later, when they were returning to the train station, they saw a group of men marching behind a flag; a new nationalist emblem, Gabrielle said, the swastika. A patrol of French soldiers appeared and the demonstrators dispersed. To the left of the station, in a little street, there were a dozen or so women with laced up boots.

  “They all have the same boots, why?”

  “The boots indicate their specialty,” Gabrielle said to Raouf.

  “I don’t understand . . .”

  “Their specialty is cracks of a whip.”

  And Ganthier, without looking at Gabrielle:

  “They, at least, do it for money.”

  On the pavement the snow had turned into dark gray soup. In front of the station some grooms were picking up a horse that had fallen in front of its cart. They finished unharnessing it, tried to get it onto the flatbed of a truck. The horse found some energy, resisted.

  “The truck must smell like the slaughterhouse,” said Ganthier. One of the grooms managed to put a ring around the horse’s ear. He pulled it, and the pain kept the animal from rearing up.

  They were back in the train. They arrived in Mayenburg on January 10, in the Rhineland under French occupation. Their hotel looked out over Schiller Platz. At the end of the afternoon they took a walk in the neighborhood, rows of large homes, between maples and pines. Ganthier pointed to the facades with two balconies:

  “And they say they’re too poor to pay their war debts!”

  Passersby looked at them coldly. There were a lot of French soldiers in the streets. Some officers forced the Germans to get off the sidewalk when they went by.

  “They exercise preponderance here, too?” Raouf asked. Ganthier didn’t say anything.

  They had dinner in a large brasserie on the square. The maître d’ told them that because of shortages, themselves due to a series of causes escaping the good intentions of the country, and from which they couldn’t really see how they would ever recover, there was unfortunately, at noon and in the evening, only one dish that could be served. Gabrielle and Ganthier translated, Ganthier commented:

  “A single dish, potatoes and meat sausages! Everything is sausages in this country . . . Their women are sausages! Even their sentences are sausages!”

  Ganthier knew that Gabrielle wouldn’t like that sort of comment; he said it on purpose. At the table next to them three men, in their fifties, were talking with beers on the table in front of them. Noticing that Ganthier and Gabrielle spoke their language, they tried to explain Germany to these nonmilitary invaders:

  “Welcome to the country where the sky, the earth, and hell have finally united!”

  The conversation was slowed as translations were provided for Kathryn and Raouf. The three Germans enjoyed looking at Kathryn while she was being told what had just been said. Then they continued cheerfully: To understand us you must first understand what the Gemüt is (two of the men put a hand on their chest, the third pointed at the ceiling). It is the heart, the heart naturally tending toward good, to the ideal, Gemüt, and Gemütlichkeit, the state of what is good and calm, which you find at home, in a nice home. Never forget that one of the first stories we tell German children is that of a house made of gingerbread!

  Ganthier kept his thoughts on German sweetness to himself . . . But sweetness, continued their interlocutor, carries a risk, doesn’t it? The risk of getting soft, laziness is just waiting to overtake us. The proof is that we have several words just for laziness, Bequemlichkeit, Müssigkeit, Untätigkeit, and apathy, Gefühllosigkeit, and above all . . . Leidenschaftslosigkeit. Yes, it’s when they get to six syllables that our words get to the heart of things, Leidenschaftslosigkeit, a lack of passion . . . with the understanding that passion is suffering, Leiden, which you experience in passion, but for us the lack of that suffering is more painful than the suffering itself! Fortunately, when faced with that lack of passion, we have something in the depths of our being that we use to stay alert, something you would translate on the contrary with some half-
dozen different words, said one of the Germans who spoke French better than he had at first wanted to show: inquiétude, anxiété, affolement, nervosité, agitation . . . various words, whereas in German . . . the man made a fist and held it up in front of his face, for us it is a root word, Unruhe . . . the great upset, the great emotion, which battles the lack of passion, and which is one of the two indissociable beasts of the team with which we set off to encounter Wirklichkeit, reality. Yes, you’re right, Unruhe is not a root word—the root is calm, Ruhe—but that’s our German paradox: the compound word has become like a root, because what comes first for us is Unruhe, and Ruhe we obtain only afterward, thanks to the other beast of our team, which is thus inseparable from Unruhe. That other beast is Ordnung, of course, the other half of life, order. Ordnung is also the rule that enables things to be put in order, Unruhe und Ordnung . . . And we set off behind that team to confront reality, the shock of which awakens in us, guess what . . . Streben! Hope, pursuit, quest, ambition, in a word? Drive! But not just any drive, not anarchic, Streben nach Vollkommenheit, drive toward perfection . . . We’re complicated, aren’t we?

  The conversation lasted a long time. Ganthier defended what he called French clarity against the great German tumult: all your words that end in keit or heit . . . You’re confusing rhyme with reason. French, on the contrary, is the language of reason. Ganthier cited Antoine de Rivarol, clarity . . . subject, verb, noun . . . direct order . . . Passions may move us, but French syntax is unbending!

  Replies and opinions flew back and forth, in the headiness of a shared between-two-worlds, which was suddenly more attractive than either world taken separately: one discovered oneself a stranger opposite the other, a moment of vertigo, and Kathryn ended up confiding that her maternal grandfather was born in Kiel. The Germans congratulated her. She answered that it was like all births, chance, and one needn’t congratulate chance. They changed the subject. They continued their convivial exchanges, made warmer by rounds of beer. In the back of the room a short round man was beating out a tune on the piano.

  In the morning Raouf woke up with a start. A din outside, shouts that reached the windows of the fourth floor, words in German first, then more words in French, short, and to the point. He started to open the shutters. Kathryn came over and put her hand on his, saying:

  “Be careful, I don’t like this.”

  He opted for glancing through an opening in the shutters. Gabrielle joined them. She also dissuaded Raouf from opening the shutters:

  “Random bullets love spectators.”

  But Raouf was able to see people who were gathering around the statue of Schiller. They weren’t in uniform. Their numbers grew, a mix of bourgeois hats and worker or student caps. There were also women. In front of the group there was a large void, then thick lines, rows of soldiers, with helmets, in blue coats.

  Someone knocked on the door, and Raouf went to open it. It was Ganthier, dressed for the day, whereas the other three were still in their pajamas. At first Ganthier seemed suspicious; then he also started to look through another window. The day before the colonel commanding the French garrison had told him: “Tomorrow, sparks will fly, so your little bicot will stay in his room, or else we’ll bring him in, and the American woman, too, whether or not they are authorized. You shouldn’t even be here.” Then the officer’s tone softened: “If at least you could . . . at least a bit . . . control . . . Madame Conti, we would be very grateful.” Ganthier had nodded his head. Soldiers don’t like journalists, especially women journalists.

  The colonel’s “sparks will fly,” came with the announcement that the French army, at the beginning of January 1923, was no longer content with occupying just the Rhineland but was now taking possession of the entire Ruhr, including its mines and steelworks. The officer had added: “You know their saying? ‘You have to let rot that which you hold not’ . . . Well, they signed a treaty in 1918, and they’re going to honor their signature, without complaining!” When he had stopped speaking he had almost hit the top of his boot with his switch; he often did that with civilians, but then he remembered that Ganthier had also spent four years in the war.

  On the square the shouting became louder and louder, isolated shouts, then chants, in a chorus. They were able to make out a few phrases, “Soldaten raus! Franzosen raus!” and Gabrielle translated others, Besatzung, that meant occupation. The demonstrators were all pressing together.

  “These people are used to demonstrating,” said Gabrielle, “They are making a bloc.”

  “Yes,” said Ganthier, his mouth thickened by the beers from the night before, “They’ve been spending their time at this since the end of the war. The soldiers should immediately go in with the butts of their guns; otherwise they’ll have to shoot into the mass!” Raouf in a neutral tone:

  “Like back home?”

  There were other orders in French, the soldiers taking three steps back.

  “Maybe they’re going to calm down,” said Gabrielle.

  “That would surprise me,” said Ganthier, “and our soldiers shouldn’t have stepped back.”

  Commands continued to be shouted out, the sound of rapid steps. Other soldiers had erupted onto the square, occupying the space freed by the first row, facing the demonstrators.

  “Here comes the best part of the show!” said Ganthier, and Raouf:

  “Those are the Spahis.” Ganthier continued, in a dark voice, “Yes, the Germans adore being struck down by colonials, and when we really want to annoy them we send in our Senegalese, but this morning they must already be in the Ruhr.”

  On the square, the Spahi officers were walking back and forth in front of the men who had been commissioned whether they liked it or not from a mountain tribe in the southern Mediterranean, and who were now standing, carrying weapons on the line where for centuries the descendants of other tribes had confronted each other, themselves coming not from the south, but from the north and the east, the next to last to arrive, the Franks, having turned against the following wave, the Germans, Kathryn saying in a shaky voice:

  “They’re not actually going to shoot, are they? Those demonstrators don’t have weapons. If they fire on them I’m ready to testify that they didn’t have any weapons!” And Ganthier:

  “And then you will also be able to explain to some twenty or so American journalists what you were doing in this hotel . . .”

  He was watching the square, imagined himself standing next to one of the officers in the first row, two great tribes, the Franks and the Germans, the Franks themselves ancient Germans who above all no longer wanted to hear about that common origin, two groups who over the centuries had refined their reasons to massacre each other—border, throne, church, reformed or not—to the point of each rallying behind two words that struck louder than all, the Patrie and the Vaterland, Ganthier adding:

  “Of course, the people who are shouting are patriots, but there are moments when patriotism means accepting one’s defeat,” the two words Patrie and Vaterland then ceding the main role to idols judged to be more effective, Kultur for the people from the northeast, and Civilisation for their adversaries in the west, idols in the names of which the last massacre was carried out, Raouf looking at the statue of Schiller:

  “And those people, there, would you say that you’re here to civilize them?” The two tribes finding themselves again on the banks of the Rhine, five years after the peace, in a face-off. Gabrielle commented dryly:

  “It’s Poincaré who wants this . . . to force the Germans to pay . . . and they aren’t able to pay . . .”

  Ganthier didn’t say a word. In any case, he couldn’t have cared less about Poincaré at that moment, Raouf and the two women in pajamas in the same room . . . A glance at the large bed, which looked made up, the comforter smooth, Raouf and Kathryn, yes, of course, and it was even stupid to pay for two rooms, but Gabrielle? What was she doing there? A dressing gown on one of the armchairs, hers? Put on to walk down the hall and come here? Then taken off? Gabrielle�
�s pajamas were light gray, the same ones as in Paris. She still filled them very well. Ganthier saw her in profile: tempting, she is still on the edge of being overweight, but never goes beyond it, how does she do it?

  Gabrielle stuck her head through the gap in the shutters. She sensed Ganthier was looking at her, turned around, smiled at him, as if to make peace, returned to the spectacle in the square, taking notes all the while, like an eye without lids, the crowd of shopkeepers or office workers in suits, people in gray aprons, those out of work. How did you recognize someone out of work? By his gestures? More violent? A mother and four kids, one in her arms, workers, people still waking up, a crowd that could become a true testimony not in the eyes of the French and the Belgians whom the French dragged around everywhere with them to be able to talk about the “allied troops,” but in the eyes of the English and Americans who didn’t want this invasion . . . the Anglo-Saxons whose stock markets in London and New York would lose no time making the French understand that they had made a mistake . . . as the German newspapers had been saying for several weeks, adding with sinister joy that then the mark wouldn’t be the only currency to plummet.

  The slogans and the chanting made the panes of the third window that had remained closed vibrate even more. A perfume floated in the room. Ganthier hesitated: Was it Chanel, Kathryn’s? Or Gabrielle’s? Gabrielle must have put on some perfume in her room before coming to join these two. Yes, but she might also have borrowed Kathryn’s . . . Given how close they had become they could very easily share their perfume. That little runt must have been their plaything all night long. He has learned to live with his times.