by Hedi Kaddour
At the end of three months Belkhodja hadn’t paid back the note to Si Ahmed, who told him in a sad voice:
“Success is a climb, ruin is a descent.”
The caïd gave him an additional month but added the harvest from the trees. A month that Belkhodja spent in nocturnal reveries at the harbor in the capital. At the end of the month Si Ahmed took possession of the orchard, one of the most beautiful in the region, an orchard worth thirty thousand francs, at least. He took it right before the harvest. He wanted the harvest because of the French navy: it had a lot of ships to show the Italians and the Spanish that it was the strongest, and it needed oranges and lemons or else the sailors’ teeth would fall out. Si Ahmed sold the harvest to the French navy, a net profit of three thousand francs, four times the price at auction, but real citrus fruit, on the verge of maturity, and then he told the French that they could come pick the fruit themselves, and the sailors came. At the end of the day they were even offered the opportunity to go into a large wooden shed that had been hastily constructed outside the orchard that was guarded by police, five minutes for each man, with wine and the sounds of women. The shed could be seen. It could have been hidden in the orchard, but for Si Ahmed there was no question of sullying his property.
When the whole story came out, the people of Nahbès said that morality had been saved. Belkhodja was nothing but a leaking bucket. He had even lost the money put aside for his pilgrimage, and since he was diabetic, he didn’t know if God would leave him enough time to recover that sum. God could one day decide that he had done enough for people like Belkhodja and allow the final creditor, death, to demand its due. It was Si Ahmed who stepped in, while Raouf was still in Europe. He came to Belkhodja’s aid. He paid for his doctor; he allowed him to survive. People said that it didn’t cost him very much, hardly a fraction of his profit from the oranges and lemons sold to the French—alms are only a condiment for the rich—but everyone still showed admiration at that gesture. Si Ahmed had saved a soul with the money taken from the Christian sailors, the soul of Belkhodja, a habitué of evil places in the capital, a drug addict, a man who was falling into paganism. He had even been seen in Ghouraq at the home of a Maltese woman who performed fumigations, and the rumor that the former merchant had had dealings with the French police spread even faster. Si Ahmed had given Belkhodja much less than the percentage he should have given through the simple duty of charity if he had been a true believer, said some, but for Si Ahmed, what counted was not the amount of the alms but, like oil, the quality.
The man from Ghouraq who had bought Belkhodja’s oil at the wholesale market for fifteen thousand francs in bills that rustled in the hand never returned to Nahbès, and Belkhodja didn’t need to know that the man was only an agent of Si Ahmed. No one told him. He had absorbed all the bitterness of the story; he didn’t need to vomit it back up.
31
IN AN OCCUPIED COUNTRY
Red and black on white, it was cold at the steelworks of the Ruhr, with sometimes an anemic fire outside on the snow, something elementary, and crowds, gray and black, in front of the doors, picketing, French troops, sometimes a salvo, then calm. Some evenings Gabrielle typed out her reports, Ganthier asking: “May I?” and Gabrielle: “Of course.” Ganthier expecting to read a story and falling on a list of measures taken by the French occupation authorities to regulate customs duties, taxes on wood, the circulation of barges, alcohol, tobacco, people, and iron, and bans on traveling on a given road, unless one had a safe passage signed by such and such an authority, with all the special powers of the allied mission.
“In fact, we don’t have any more allies,” said Gabrielle, “The English and the Americans are against us, we have only the Belgians.”
There were also regulations about unions and associations, the press, trains and tramways, and French laws on German laws, civil rights, penal law, traveling, newspapers, waterway locks, currency . . . And Ganthier:
“Isn’t it a bit mad to put all that in an article?” His tone was peaceful, to make the word mad go down. Gabrielle had smiled:
“You know that my mad list is going to please the military censors, don’t you? And it will be successful . . . not only in Paris.”
Gabrielle’s articles were sometimes published in translation in the States. She continued, in a sort of dark joy:
“Can you imagine the people in New York, seeing all these taxes and regulations? They’re going to think that Poincaré is installing communism in Germany!” And Ganthier:
“That’s not very honest . . .”
Kathryn came out of her silence, her voice tense, saying that the French press was no more honest with Americans:
“When you read Le Figaro you have the impression that we spend our time fighting about contraband whiskey with gunfire! Just because we don’t support this invasion . . .”
Ganthier refused the confrontation, turning instead to contemplate an etching hanging above the table where Gabrielle was working, a charge on horseback, one of the riders with a bow, another with a sword, another with the scales of justice, and a fourth, a thin, old man armed with a trident—Dürer, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—then he went back to Gabrielle’s article, names followed by professions, doctor, lawyer, professor, journalist, pastor . . .
“What’s this?”
“They’re hostages, they’re put on trains. By order of the command, they will be the first victims of sabotage.”
“Hostages are something the Prussians do. A French officer would never do that, that’s false!”
Then Ganthier said to himself that it was probably true, and the Paris press would even brag about it. Kathryn added that the day before, a French officer had told her that he was there to repair the mistakes of President Wilson.
They had spent a few days between Duisburg and Dortmund. They dined early, in loud places where smells of fat, onion, and beer prevailed, odors made enjoyable by their walks in the cold air. Afterward they met in one of their rooms to talk, sometimes seated on a large porcelain radiator in the shape of a corner banquette, for which the coal was sold to them on the black market at triple the cost. Each porcelain tile represented either a young man or a young woman, sometimes a couple, peasants, three motifs that were repeated over the entire surface, in blue and white.
They left the next day, getting out of the car at regular intervals, walking carefully on the ice, mixing in with passersby, lingering in front of a poster before a patrol came to pull it down, France as an ogre crouching over the factory smokestacks, Gabrielle sometimes taking a photo, to the great disapproval of an officer who was watching them from a distance but who always let them carry on upon a nod from Ganthier, Raouf saying:
“I wonder where that discreet power you have over them comes from . . .”
And Ganthier: “You’re not going to start complaining now, are you?”
He pointed at a group of thin, tired-looking workers:
“Look around you, do you really believe those people are going to stage a revolution?”
That was Ganthier’s goal, to get Raouf to wake up, to act like Kathryn, to teach him about life, “I should be at least as capable as an American actress, in politics, I mean,” he confided in Gabrielle to make her laugh. It also happened that he defended Kathryn, excusing her harsh treatment of Raouf, her fits of jealousy: she was suffering, and she was fragile. Gabrielle responded:
“Fragile? Did you see her nails?”
“What about them?”
“They never break.”
Kathryn had received a letter from Paris. Raouf saw the envelope but didn’t say anything.
“It’s from Tess,” Kathryn said, “She’s in Montparnasse and is very happy.”
Since Raouf was still not talking, Kathryn told him the unknown story behind Tess’s being sick in Nahbès, what she knew about a pursuit in Louisiana, where Tess was from, when she was called Lizzie. No, it wasn’t she who was being pursued, it was a man. He was running fast in the woods, and a pa
ck of dogs was chasing him. It was almost like in a film, you know, you can imagine. He outruns them, and because he senses that he is outrunning them he runs even faster, until the dogs start barking, and he understands that it’s going to be harder, but he continues to run, until he realizes that the dogs aren’t behind him but are moving up on the sides. And the rest of the story, as reported or imagined by Kathryn, was one of biting, then blows with a stick, and an order that had stopped everything, and they put the runner in chains. Perhaps a voice had even said, “with iron, no surprises,” and that had made everyone laugh, and the rest was in the newspaper, a photo, the newspaper that Tess who didn’t know anything about it had opened two days later. This type of thing was so common that it didn’t appear on the front page but inside, a photo with the name of her cousin, the body of her cousin, what remained of it, on a bed of ashes on the ground, a ditch with a bed of ashes. The photographer had even captured the smoke, and all around there was a crowd of onlookers, policemen, and a caption underneath, “The rapist ends up on the ashes of hell,” and the following week they discovered that the cousin was innocent. People didn’t even attempt to deny his innocence. They said “he was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” adding, “during a moment of legitimate anger by the population”—those were the words of the prosecutor when he had refused to pursue the matter any further—Kathryn saying: “‘Legitimate anger,’ you can imagine what Tess must have felt.” Later Raouf dared say: “I know Tess’s writing. It wasn’t on the envelope.” Kathryn said that the rest of the story was too difficult to share.
All around them the currency and life were deteriorating, while their francs and dollars bought them every privilege. Sometimes Gabrielle disappeared. One evening a French commander took Ganthier aside. He was very upset. They were going to have to take Gabrielle back to France, “Your friend the journalist, five years ago I would have still had the right to put twelve bullets into her. She spent part of the afternoon with German Bolshevists and a French man. That type of contact with the devil should at least suffice to put Madame Conti on a train back to Paris!” Ganthier responded coldly to the commander, who calmed down and gave a few details. The French communist was called Péri. His leaders had sent him to encourage fraternization among the French soldiers and German workers: that association was a crime! Ganthier asked the officer if he had had a look at Gabrielle Conti’s service records during the war, his voice was shaking. Across from him the commander began to smile; without a doubt this civilian was screwing the journalist. Ganthier was getting angry. He was furious at being suspected of doing something he had been unable to do for months. He really wanted to slap the man:
“You well know, commander, where Madame Conti keeps her napkin ring when she’s in Paris, the ministers like to be informed . . . Arrest your Péri if you want, but my friendly advice, regarding Madame Conti, is to leave her alone.”
They finally arrived in Berlin. That city was a bordello, Ganthier had warned them, down-and-out, Raouf said, surprised to see such sunken faces in a European city, a famine in a garden, Kathryn said when their taxi was going along a third large park. Gabrielle allowed the city to pass before her eyes, a blur of images, like that line of amputees in front of a dispensary, even thinner than ordinary passersby.
“They won’t all die . . . ,” said Ganthier, pointing at a huge convertible with a chauffeur in livery and, in the back seat, a man with fat cheeks, a fur hat, wrapped up in traveling blankets; in the distance a crowd was coming out of a church. Raouf remembered something his former teacher, Montaubain, had said, “The war has brought God back, along with gangrene.” Even farther away a procession of men was going by, hard faces behind a fanfare and flags, a city of trucks, traffic jams that were even worse than in Paris, and suddenly the calm of a lake, woods, and then scaffolding, cranes, rolling cranes, factory smokestacks, sites of halted construction, a door in front of which a long line of angry-looking men was waiting. “Rass al-‘atel . . . ,” said Raouf, “The out of work man’s head is full of demons,” a leprous city in places, and impossible to know if the leprosy was advancing or retreating. They moved along, Kathryn with her fits of crazy love and her unpredictable anger, Raouf with his dreams and his maneuvering, Gabrielle with her notebook, Ganthier with his sarcasm, a city even blacker than Paris, entire quarters with facades with closed shutters, dirty windows, blinds falling down, people around a brazier, each person holding a potato on the end of a stick, patrols of helmeted policemen. “The police seem to be dreaming,” said Kathryn to Ganthier.
“Do you know what they’re dreaming about?”
“Food?”
“No, look!”
A policeman had bent down by his shoes.
“See, he’s picking up a cigarette butt!”
A woman went by. Gabrielle said, “The women in Berlin are more often bare-headed than in Paris.” An accordionist was alternating tender melodies and martial tunes. A dozen healthy-looking cows came out of a large doorway, a farm right in the city, red and white animals in the streets, going to the fields. The four friends relaxed while watching a baker’s apprentice wearing a smock go by, a cheerful servant girl, her black dress and light hairband, a straw basket on her arm, an army of mailmen, too, and schoolchildren, a lot of little girls with their backpacks, many more than in France, said Gabrielle. They stopped in front of a building to watch a huge sparkling steel grill slowly sink into the ground, without a sound.
“The people here have a cult of perfection in their mechanics, for the perfect gearing,” said Ganthier, “Fortunately the Versailles Treaty forced them to inscribe made in Germany on their products, that protects us.” As it disappeared into the ground the grill revealed a large window filled with watches and clocks; one out of two items was used. They left, and soon Raouf said:
“I sense that the women here are different from Parisian women, but I can’t put my finger on it.” Kathryn didn’t say a word. He’s making progress, Ganthier said to himself, he’s trying to provoke her, then, laughing:
“German women pay less attention to men, here they have an inner life!”
In some streets the people were cleaning, in others, no.
“They’ve lost the habit of doing things together,” said Ganthier, “All the better for us!”
And Raouf: “Is that what you’ll say in your report to military intelligence?”
A driver raised his cap just as his boss was arriving, and the boss also greeted him by raising his hat, a very serious look on his face. In the salon of their hotel, a talkative German man explained to them:
“Since the beginning of the republic we have introduced a respect for all, and seriousness in that respect, the rest is unchanged. We are a very serious people, but during the war a Herr Doktor was able to sell to hundreds of thousands of my compatriots a recipe for making bread by replacing flour with hay. It was very convincing, he believed in it!”
Later Ganthier added: “That’s one of their problems, they themselves say that a German can’t tell a lie without believing it himself.”
At Raouf’s request one morning they went to walk along the Landwehr canal.
“Would you throw in a rose?” David Chemla had written to him. It was to honor the memory of a revolutionary, Rosa Luxemburg. The canal was deserted, the banks, as well, Raouf had forgotten the rose, promised himself to return, but didn’t do it, probably because Gabrielle had in the meantime informed him that for Rosa Luxemburg nationalist struggles were not true struggles. At the hotel, the same German man told them:
“We are a generation full of despair and contempt, but we have rediscovered the cult of grandeur. We now want the largest brasseries, the largest hotels, the biggest movie theaters, the largest brothels in all of Europe!”
And suddenly, in the street, Kathryn noticed a large advertising poster, the same poster several times along the avenue, Goldfarb Motors. In Paris Ganthier had told her:
“The father is an industrial motor manufacturer, a Jew from Vienna,
Goldfarb.” Since then, Kathryn hadn’t thought of the father again. It was a shock. Metilda was there, with her father, her Berlin mother, not a Tyrol cow, but a girl of the city, with all the freedoms and intelligence of the city. She knew that it was going to happen, and the following days she saw the name of Goldfarb in the streets, in magazines, in movie ads, a great Berlin campaign for Goldfarb motors. Metilda was there, the same age as Raouf.
Kathryn read the gossip section in the newspapers, didn’t see anything. That girl also knew how to hide. Kathryn decided not to get angry anymore; anger only made him stop talking. She needed to laugh, love, flatter, disarm, question. She also imagined falling ill, seriously ill, from her torment, and Raouf at her bedside, finally responding to her questions: he never loved anyone but her, Metilda was only a mistake, a single time; he was crying, yes, he had encountered her in Berlin; Kathryn surprised herself telling him in a final breath that she wished them all the happiness in the world, he no longer controlling his sobbing . . . She awoke from her reverie, shaking her head, telling herself, She is here, he’s screwing her, no, he’s in love with me, but that’s just it, that excites him, but he never goes out without me . . . or rarely, he must tell me if she has contacted him, I don’t ask him much, admit what he’s done. Kathryn invented a dialogue:
“Did you tell her you were my lover?”
“I didn’t dare.”
“Didn’t dare?”
“I would seem to be bragging, wouldn’t I?” Raouf was lying. The real reason was that he wanted that girl to think he was free.
“I must send her a photo of us!” Yes, a photo. She would force Raouf. Both of us in our coats, smiling in the snow like elves at a party. Let her see that we want to go back and get in bed. She’ll understand, and it will hurt her, and she will drop him, and he will also be hurt. He will beg for my forgiveness and at that moment I’ll leave him. Kathryn didn’t like some of the aspects of the role she assigned Raouf. She couldn’t talk to a whiner. Raouf stopped whining, and there was no need to send a photo. There had to be a meeting, to really hurt Metilda, a K.O. The scenario pleased Kathryn, a meeting at teatime, the three of us, and why not with Gabrielle and Ganthier? And perhaps one or two German filmmakers, so a dinner, a lovely table, we’ll talk about everything. I will talk movies with the Germans, I will tell them about America, they will listen, Gabrielle will support me, Ganthier will take care of Raouf, I will be nice . . . Metilda, you’re not saying anything? You mustn’t let us intimidate you like that, tell us about Vienna, is it true that the girls’ schools are very strict? That they forbid you from touching your hair in public? While laughing Kathryn would put her hand on that of a director, Raouf pouting, Kathryn would be winning, and suddenly Raouf would no longer interest her: You have your little Austrian girl, go screw her and don’t interrupt the conversation of the adults, Raouf would beg her with his eyes, Kathryn wondered what the director would look like, the one she had come to meet wasn’t currently in Berlin, she had to wait a few days, he’ll know how to revive my characters, he’s a master of the chiaroscuro, when shadows become an appeal, even on a face, my chiaroscuro, which Neil never wanted to film—he says that my strength is to be sharp and clear. She imagined herself ever more clearly in front of the German director. She became his favorite actress. I’m too hard on Raouf: what’s wrong with me?