The Influence Peddlers

by Hedi Kaddour

  “I told you to get some! You never listen to me! As if I were nothing!”

  Gabrielle was distraught. Ganthier, instead of enjoying this role reversal, did what he had wanted to do: he paid the porter. When he turned around he saw the young girl pass her handkerchief under Gabrielle’s eyes while murmuring: “I’m sorry, so sorry . . .”

  There was a moment of calm. The young girl thanked Ganthier in an almost friendly tone. He offered her a cigarette; she refused. He held his case out to Gabrielle, who glanced at her friend before refusing. Ganthier put his case back in his pocket. The young girl looked him up and down while smiling sweetly. Then she stared at Gabrielle, who quickly held her hand out to Ganthier to thank him, suddenly seeing in front of her a friendly and tender man, very different from what he had been up to then, and who was suffering. It was too late. The young girl in turn held her hand out to Ganthier, a hand that was both slender and hard at the same time. Ganthier turned around and left along the platform, leaving the two women to talk in front of the door of their sleeping car. He didn’t dare turn around.

  And a few days later, in the train from Berlin to Paris, he had been surprised not to see Gabrielle in the reflection of the window, not to be able to observe her the way he did during their travels. Sometimes their looks would cross each other in the reflection, and Gabrielle smiled like a hunter who has just surprised another one. He closed his eyes . . . Their discussions . . . the articles she gave him to read . . . the Tiergarten . . . the ruined night in Paris . . . He again looked through the window and she appeared, naked in her armchair, her feet in a basin of hot water. He had gotten up to go into the corridor, leaving Raouf alone in the compartment. He looked out at a distance at the landscape while thinking: Pain is a desert island, then: I am the king of fucking idiots.

  In Paris Ganthier decided to make the trip from Paris to Marseille by car, and had immediately bought one.

  “I want to drive it myself, and learn how to repair it. I don’t want to be at the mercy of mechanics!”

  He chose a Peugeot, a convertible, a large four-seater to replace the Panhard that was aging in Nahbès, and he spent six days at the garage taking it apart and putting it back together, under the watch of the mechanics.

  “Your friend is a real grease monkey, can’t you leave him with us?” the owner had said to Raouf.

  “What’s more, I’m paying to work, a nice deal for you,” Ganthier had added. This fantasy had cost him a lot, but he was happy. Raouf, too: he had had free rein while Ganthier was learning about his car, and spent it in discussions with his Maghrebi and Asian friends, and especially with David Chemla, who had decided to do his studies in Paris while working for the Communist Party. They hadn’t seen each other for months, since before Raouf left for Europe. Chemla had become harder, and Raouf sensed that a world separated them. He, himself, had decided not to get his card from the party, even clandestinely. David hadn’t reproached him, but Raouf sensed that he no longer judged him worthy of their serious discussions. He had cut himself off from the avant-garde; he shouldn’t be part of the debate; he had the right only to stock responses. It hurt him. He had, however, willingly told about his trip to Germany, the thwarted revolution, the nationalist demonstrations.

  “The hope that must be protected now is the Soviet Union,” David had said.

  The day before they left, Raouf had gone to find Ganthier at the garage. Ganthier was sweating. He had changed a drive shaft and finished putting a tire back on. Raouf said to him:

  “A car like that replaces many things.”

  “Do you know why I really like your conversation, young Raouf? Because you take care of all the clichés, it’s comforting.”

  Ganthier continued to tighten the bolts, looked up at Raouf:

  “What about you, is all well, have you remade the world with your Chinese?”

  He had a smile that Raouf hadn’t seen before, then, in a low voice:

  “We both need to keep busy . . .”

  With his back turned, he continued: “Except that you’re becoming an adult, your days are not yet cadavers!”

  In truth, Raouf was suffering less than Ganthier imagined. Certain things had come to an end, by themselves. Others had started again, also by themselves, and had also come to an end. Kathryn had brought an end to their relationship. No, that wasn’t entirely true. Anyway, nothing had been said. One night she hadn’t returned to their hotel on Kurfürstendamm. Raouf hadn’t asked. He had realized that for some time he only thought of Kathryn when he was with her. The following days they had continued to talk, to walk. He had come several times to the studio to pick her up with Ganthier, who avoided making any reflections on the rather platonic role of escort. Kathryn still considered Raouf a part of her life, but in a different place. She had even once insisted on taking him to Metilda’s parents’ home, where he was having dinner, and she had left with Ganthier in the car that Wiesner put at her disposal. Ganthier seemed sad. She knew why and she had told him:

  “I don’t like that Englishwoman Gabrielle managed to dig up . . .”

  Ganthier hadn’t responded. Another time, Raouf, by himself, had gone back to the room he had never been in, without knowing if he was doing that of his own volition or if he had sensed that Kathryn was going to ask him to. He returned from Metilda’s apartment. He considered it very modern not to have spent the entire night together.

  To provoke Ganthier Raouf had gone to visit a competing garage, at the Ford dealership. He got behind the wheel of the latest model, the “T,” and he rolled the car down the avenue Foch, his cap in the wind, in the company of Ganthier and the Ford mechanic. That had shocked Ganthier. The kid looked like a Californian. Raouf had seen his face:

  “Do you realize, if we started buying American cars in the Maghreb? The short-circuit?”

  “You should stay to your right.”

  “You’ll have to teach a lot of natives French if you want them to continue buying from you in the twentieth century.” Raouf’s driving was alarming.

  “I’m not refusing to listen to your wild imaginings,” Ganthier said, “but you should concentrate on your driving.”

  “And when you will have accomplished that noble task and your dear natives will have all read Les Misérables and The Social Contract, they will nicely show you the door . . . to go get things from the Americans.”

  “That will be progress, the protégés of France who become flunkeys of the dollar!”

  “Except if we have a revolution!” Raouf had said, laughing.

  “Keep to the right, slow down, and don’t go onto the roundabout at the Arc de Triomphe. You’re stricken with the arrogance of drivers!”

  Raouf had accelerated, and found himself turning around on the place de l’Étoile. The madness came from everywhere. Sometimes a policeman blew his whistle. No one paid attention. You must above all not stop. Raouf went around for a while before being able to get out of the infernal circle.

  “That’s the modern world, Raouf, if you stop you’re lost!”

  Raouf had managed to get onto the avenue de la Grande-Armée, concluding:

  “In the end, I prefer the fantasia . . .”

  “Are you talking about that horse race that ends only in shooting blanks? That’s revolution? That suits you!”

  They finally left Paris in the hum of cylinders, goggles over their eyes, coats and gloves of black leather.

  “We’re going to be taken for secret service agents,” Raouf had said, “and in your case it’s not completely false.”

  Sometimes Raouf became sad. He preferred attributing it to the inexplicable, working a memory in silence, the first time, a hand that had suddenly taken his in Nahbès, one day when they were both at Gabrielle’s, waiting for her.

  “No one is here, come on!” Kathryn had said to him, her lips against his ear. And in the bedroom the hands and mouth of Kathryn had continued to explore Raouf. He had remained silent. She spoke only a few words, in a tone of sweet statement: You�
�ve never had sex before . . .

  While he was driving, Ganthier spent his time regulating the carburetor of the motor with the help of a button on the dashboard, happy as a kid with a new toy. From time to time he tapped on the steering wheel, as he would have patted the neck of a horse. He breathed with ease in seeing a nice curve up ahead or, better, a tight bend. The road became more and more beautiful. Sometimes it was bordered by plane trees, and some mornings they saw white frost on the grass of the fields, like the haze of a dream.

  “We have time,” said Ganthier, “The boat leaves in six days.” He let some geese with large behinds cross in front of them. They were hurrying to cross the road while sticking their heads and necks out in front. “It’s a counterweight,” said Raouf, laughing.

  The car slowed down to enter small towns dozing in the middle of the day.

  “In Germany people always seemed to be doing something,” Raouf had once noted, “Here you might say that time has stopped.”

  “Yes, with all the dead from the war things now only happen in the rhythm of parents and grandparents.”

  In an issue of Le Petit Parisien Raouf read an article out loud:

  “Nationalist troops marched yesterday in Munich . . . Hitler declared that they constituted a national army destined to deliver Germany . . . complete equipment . . . hostile shouting at France and the Jews, crossing the city with a band in front of them . . . They call Hitler the ‘Bavarian Mussolini.’”

  “Gabrielle was right,” Raouf had added, “Three months ago that guy was nothing, and now every time a civilian is killed by the French he gains thousands of supporters.”

  “Maybe, but in another three months he won’t be anything anymore, he’s just a donkey with horns.”

  “Do you think Otto is now one of them?”

  “Otto was born to be shot, by someone or other,” Ganthier said.

  Raouf couldn’t understand Otto, a revolutionary and a conservative, and capable of spending entire nights having fun in places that he wanted to get rid of. That was Berlin, everyone was changing, it just took a stay in the city to change. Berlin was reinventing the world! The passions of the old world had given death. Metilda’s generation no longer wanted to hear about the old world but instead about free minds, free love, liberated bodies. One morning she had taken Raouf in a car to the banks of a lake where men and women were running out of large saunas, running naked into the icy water, then coming back out onto the banks and whipping themselves with birch branches, laughing, before going back into the sauna. Raouf had ended up agreeing to join them with Metilda in one of the steamy sheds.

  Raouf didn’t drive. He took care of navigating, surprising Ganthier. He was almost never wrong.

  “How do you do it?”

  “A visual memory.”

  “We’re going south and you don’t need to turn the map around. You never confuse the right and the left?”

  “I’m good in geometry.”

  Raouf didn’t point out that in the evening he worked on their itinerary. It is good that mature men continue to believe that youth is a miracle.

  When Ganthier was able to reserve a hotel room by phone he was happy to drive until eleven at night. He liked to drive in the light of his headlights, swerving the steering wheel to avoid a rabbit or, worse, a cart without a lantern. Raouf watched the Michelin billboards. Silence settled between them. Kathryn returned to Raouf’s thoughts, or Metilda. He tried not to feel vain. Kathryn’s scenes of jealousy didn’t seem like bad memories to him. He told himself that she had only anticipated, that she had become intolerable, and that his meetings with Metilda had then become much easier. Anyway, in Berlin that jealousy had quickly lost its energy. He was getting ready to see Kathryn again in less than six months. Neil had confirmed that the whole team was coming back to finish Warrior of the Sands, and to start a new film. “To be able to work again in calm, without producers spying on and photographers stalking us,” he had written, “that’s priceless.”

  Sometimes the Peugeot broke down, to Ganthier’s great displeasure, but up to then he had always been able to repair it and concluded with: “And this is work!” They had easily gone over the hills of Burgundy. One evening they went to a village dance. The musicians were either old or very young. In a too large room many young women were dancing together; others, themselves not yet thirty, danced with a bored or sad child, while looking toward the door of the room; the music was slow. People stole looks at Raouf and Ganthier, who didn’t dare leave the bar. They observed the room in the mirror above the counter, and Raouf: “You wouldn’t say that we’re in a country that won the war.”

  They usually left early in the morning. On the straightaways the Peugeot became a race car, Ganthier and Raouf became race drivers, from head to toe, in their nerves, hearts, muscles, those in the abdomen especially. Raouf was afraid, would never have admitted it, but had realized that, when he spoke of Ganthier’s farm, he never went above an honest twenty-five miles per hour. Then the headiness took over, acceleration to close to forty miles per hour, and the trees flew by.

  In Berlin Metilda had been surprising.

  “In Vienna I am Viennese,” she said, “Here, I’m a Berliner, we don’t know what is going to come, the old ways of loving are dead and we must try everything. I’m not angry with you about what didn’t happen on the boat, I’m angry that you didn’t talk to me about Kathryn, to have preferred to pass for a virgin, whereas you know a lot,” she said, laughing, under Raouf’s caresses, “I’m not jealous of Kathryn, I’m very grateful to her. You know a lot of things and you give the impression that you invented them, but your error is in considering women as trophies.” In love her movements could be quite violent—but first she folded her clothes.

  After 12:30 in the afternoon Ganthier lost all interest in driving. He started looking for a restaurant. “Not here,” he often said. When Raouf showed surprise in front of a promising facade, Ganthier said the same thing to accompany his refusal: “They’ll have today’s sauce but yesterday’s meat.” They ended up finding a suitable place. Ganthier took time choosing, discussed with the owner, changed his mind during the discussion. Then it was a question of the wine, Raouf saying, “I won’t drink any, or a half-glass, choose for yourself.” Ganthier ate slowly, Raouf like a wolf. Then they left. The weather was good. After an hour Ganthier slowed down, drove into a field, climbed into the back seat, time for a nap. He was as regulated as a musical score. Raouf read, dreamed, lost himself in observing the flight of swallows, or wrote to Metilda. When he had said good-bye to Kathryn they both knew that they would be seeing each other again soon. With Metilda it was different, true adieux, but she had said: “We’re not going to dissolve into tears, are we?” Raouf missed the Metilda of the boat, the one who spoke of hunting happiness, but he proved to be as strong as the Berlin Metilda, and they each wished the other many good encounters to come.

  After a forty-five-minute nap Ganthier got back behind the wheel, stopping around 5:30: We’re not going to miss an opportunity to relax, look at that shadow, magnificent! They settled in the magnificent shadow, under an arbor surrounded by trees. The branches seemed to be moving amid the clouds. Ganthier ordered pastis, began to think about the place where they would spend the night. When they arrived at the hotel, his first concern was to have a trunk filled with what was most precious to him taken to his room: a toolbox, air cylinders, a stock of candles, a spare clutch, and even a new cylinder.

  One afternoon they were going through a village. “Look!” said Raouf. A dozen or so boys between fifteen and twenty years old were sitting in the sun on a stone wall. They were singing while clapping their hands.

  “That’s it, we’re in the south,” said Ganthier.

  In Marseille, Raouf was happy to see the Jugurtha, which seemed smaller to him. He sometimes went alone to the bow, thinking of his two female friends, dreamed while making them talk to each other. In Berlin such occasions had been too rare, and when Metilda proposed organizing a dinn
er with Wiesner, Kathryn, Raouf, and her, Kathryn became sullen. The dinner never took place.

  The crossing was storm-free, and at the moment when the Jugurtha entered the harbor, Raouf said to Ganthier:

  “They traveled, they knew the melancholy of ships . . . they returned . . .”

  Ganthier laughed: “I don’t want to think about that anymore. I need to take care of trees and livestock out in the open air . . .”

  “And you’re going to see Kid again, do you think he’ll recognize you?”

  “You’re getting on my nerves, young Raouf . . . And you, what have you decided? Where will you do your studies, there or there?”

  Ganthier had pointed at the bow, then the stern.

  “I don’t know yet,” Raouf said and, changing the subject, “This trip didn’t work, you didn’t succeed in converting me to the Great Empire.”

  “Mektub,” said Ganthier.

  “You don’t believe in it anymore?”

  “In what?”

  “The France of a hundred million inhabitants . . .”

  “Nobody wants it, especially not those who talk about it.”

  “And your preponderance?”

  “With a generation like yours, it’s going to be difficult. Ultimately I don’t believe it anymore, what interests me is not to weigh on people, it’s to create more French, we must defend the Mind!”

  “Your Catholicism is returning . . . with age.”

  “You’re bothering me, young Raouf.”

  “Yes, master!”

  “And the revolution?”

  “Revolutionaries don’t want it to happen at home. They want to leave the primary role to the bourgeois, and since there aren’t enough of them yet, it could take a long time . . .”

  “So we’re going to continue to talk in Nahbès, eh? You should marry your cousin, we would be neighbors.”

  “I know her. If she is thinking of someone, it’s not me.”

  “You don’t know anything about it.”

  “Nor do you.”