The Influence Peddlers

by Hedi Kaddour

  “They have property to defend, and are bitter because they don’t have enough,” said Raouf, “This is the Prépondérants’ turf.”

  The quarter was calm, peaceful. The natives were there only to serve and went back home in the evening, except for the guards, who lived on the street in shacks. Behind the houses the gardens often gave directly onto the countryside. Passing in front of a house with Provençal roof tiles, broken shutters, flaking paint, Raouf and Kathryn heard a whinnying. They glanced over through the screen of reeds that covered the front gate: an old servant woman was putting a bandage on an old horse, which still had some energy left.

  “I bet she’s also the nanny, the maid, and the cook,” said Raouf, “and her master goes out strutting on the horse on Sunday afternoons among all the beautiful people, at the stable riding ring where they look down their noses at him. Luckily for him there are Arabs he can look down his nose at . . .”

  “You don’t know anything about them,” said Kathryn, “I think you sound bitter.”

  “I have trouble sympathizing with a guy who has his horse bandaged by an old servant woman.”

  They arrived at the front door of Gabrielle’s house. The metal doorknob was a bit shaky. Raouf said to Gabrielle:

  “You’re settling down in this country.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Last year you would have had that doorknob repaired within a day.”

  Gabrielle laughed: “I’m beginning to enjoy taking my time.”

  Raouf: “L’ajala min echcheitan . . . haste comes from the devil!” And after a moment: “Here we respect time, we even think it’s capable of repairing doorknobs.”

  Gabrielle hadn’t dared ask Raouf if he knew a workman. Ganthier ultimately recommended an Italian to her, Mazzone. Mazzone was good, but he charged a lot, especially to the French and other foreigners. He knew how to add things on that left the client with no means to protest or barter. When he had to put a screw into a wall he charged for the drilling of the hole for the wooden peg into which the screw would go. He charged for the cement and the making of the cement that was used to set the peg. He of course charged for the peg and the whittling he had to do to adjust the peg: he called that “fashioning the peg.” The clients were stuck. One couldn’t haggle about a detail costing a few coins—it would have been obscene—and his entire bill was made up entirely of details costing a few coins, and if one raised an eyebrow at the exorbitant total of all those few coins, Mazzone’s finger would slowly begin to go down the list of his materials and work while, with his light blue eyes of a Piedmontese who has confidence in divine harmony, he watched for the moment when the client would find an error that didn’t exist. That was Mazzone’s strength, he was honest in the details, but the final bill made you want to scream, and his best defense was that his work was excellent, and everyone knew it. His only employee was Hassan. Hassan was proud of his boss, the best in the region, and Mazzone was proud of his employee: “He’s not like the others, he doesn’t steal!”

  Hassan was apparently satisfied with his somewhat unusual situation, between the others and m’sieur Mazzone, the one the French called “the macaroni” when they were among themselves, or only with Hassan, in the kitchen where he had come to unblock a pipe. They knew that Hassan would repeat the word to his boss and they said it on purpose, to emphasize the existence of a hierarchy that good manners forced them to ignore when “Monsieur Mazzone” came to their homes. Hassan didn’t take offense at hearing his boss called “macaroni”—that was the way of the world, a world in which Hassan knew that his boss didn’t take offense, either, when they told him on the telephone: “Be so kind, if you can’t come right away, at least send your wog . . .” A world in which, when they spoke of some good clients, Mazzone and Hassan would say “that Frenchie dog” or “that French bitch”: such was life.

  At the bar of the Grand Hôtel, they had resumed their habits, and so as not to spoil the ambiance, Gabrielle and Kathryn hid their anger at not having been invited to the camel fight. Gabrielle said that in the Middle East one could see even worse things. But according to Ganthier the Middle East was more puritan than the Maghreb, so it should on the contrary be less spicy.

  “You won’t get me to talk by provoking me,” Gabrielle replied. The others begged her, and Neil asked in which country did the worse things take place. It wasn’t exactly a country, she said, rather a zone, ever-changing, unstable, straddling several of those countries that we created out of the Ottoman Empire by dividing up the oil wells: a region of assassins, or haschichins if you prefer, a land of drugs. I spent two weeks in their villages. They haven’t abandoned hashish, but they don’t kill as much . . . and for entertainment they have their old cults . . . The most famous one happens once a year, at night, not just any night, it has to be a cloudy night with no moon, when you can’t even see the path in front of you, but that’s not good enough, there is always a bit of a glimmer, so they create darkness within darkness, a large, sealed room in a big house . . .

  “Were you there, or did you hear about it?” asked Cavarro. Gabrielle smiled . . . A large room, all the adults in the village, men and women, including the sheikh and his wife, there could be fifty people; no one is allowed to speak, you can only move; there is only the sound of breathing and the rustling of fabric, the sound of sequins on fabric . . .

  “That means you were there,” said Ganthier, laughing. Gabrielle continued: Not the slightest glimmer of light, a true cult. They begin with invocations, and then they chant, and continue to chant. You can’t get used to the darkness, you can’t see a thing, it’s hot, and you start feeling dizzy. They keep chanting and then there’s a great silence, and someone says something; it is repeated in a chorus; something else, more chanting; and while chanting each man takes a woman in the darkness and has her . . .

  “Fantastic,” said Cavarro, “We did the same thing in Hollywood before Fatty’s shenanigans. They were great orgies!”

  “It was like that, up to a point, if you wish,” said Gabrielle, “but there’s something that makes it truly unique, a detail that changes everything!”

  She interrupted herself, gestured to the waiter, two ice cubes, please.

  “They’ve made progress with whiskey, don’t you think?”

  “If your story is really good, you shouldn’t keep us waiting,” said Neil.

  “The detail changes everything,” said Gabrielle, “It’s a rule of the game, which you probably don’t have in Hollywood . . . an absolute rule: the sheikh’s wife must be . . . respected. And to avoid any mistakes, they put a little bell around her neck.”

  Gabrielle also resumed her habit of visiting Rania at her farm. Kathryn and Raouf often joined them. Rania surprised Gabrielle; she routinely wore her glasses. Gabrielle asked her about that.

  “It’s to show that I’m not just someone who rolls couscous,” Rania said, “That said, I roll couscous perfectly.”

  Once, from the veranda, they saw Ganthier in the distance going by on horseback.

  “You really should settle your land issues with him,” Raouf said to Rania, “It’s becoming grotesque!”

  Kathryn joked: “If you accept the exchange, you will no longer be able to watch the elegant rider go by.”

  “I’ll find another way,” Rania replied, happy to be able to joke with her friends. When they were alone Kathryn asked Gabrielle: “Where do things stand with you and our dear colonist?” This time the journalist replied: “He is, as you say, giving me the cold shoulder.”

  Raouf also told them about a scandal that was rocking the capital. It happened during a reception at the general residency of France: a young lawyer, the youngest son of an important family in the region, the Baghdadis, had dared to appear with his wife, and the wife wasn’t wearing a veil! Gabrielle was delighted. Rania approved the bold move, but not the choice of demonstrating it at the general residency. Raouf said that he agreed with the move, but many of his friends thought it would be better to wait
to have independence to do such a thing . . .

  “If we want to liberate men, it appears we need the support of those who want women to remain prisoners,” he added, laughing.

  “While we wait,” said Rania, “our dear modernists will always have the possibility of marrying European women.”

  And Gabrielle said to Raouf: “Are the women who marry Europeans here any freer?”

  “There aren’t very many of them,” Rania said, “The European has to convert, that makes them hesitate . . . That’s why things usually remain secret.”

  Then there was the storm, huge masses of dark gray that came from the sea and suddenly covered the entire horizon, with lightning that broke the sky like the blows of an ax, a massive storm, a river pouring down from above, a godsend, moreover, because the land was very thirsty, and people wanted the rain. In the city, the first drops that crashed down onto the dust were already the size of bottle caps, and people thanked God. Then the water started falling in sheets and flowed everywhere, like it does when it won’t last long. It carried away the lightest things, the sand in the streets, the stones, paper, then dry bushes that one pointed to, saying: “It’s the great washing day!” It continued to fall harder and harder. With the help of the wind it carried away all that carelessness had left for it: chairs, tables, stalls, watermelons from the market, children’s carts, parasols. It was violent; throughout the city people ducked their heads and began to run like chickens. Some found shelter under a doorframe while waiting for the end under a purplish sky. This was the height of the violence and it was going to leave as it had come.

  People began to get very worried when, in the lower part of the city, they saw a cart floating without its animals, then two donkeys, on their backs, swollen like balloons, and a panicked rat, clinging to one of them, the growling water carrying it all away, toward the ravine, toward the wadi, where the water was rising faster and faster as if in a hurry to meet that which was falling. In asking too much for rain they had awakened the waters of hell, which had also come from the sea, knocking the boats in the harbor against one another, and it wasn’t the worst thing to be a boat in the harbor because, in the distance, other boats had begun to disappear between two crashing waves, rendering back to the depths the thousands of fish they had taken from it, and the worst wasn’t saved for the feluccas: there was one out of two chances they’d survive and right themselves while being baled out as quickly as possible. The worst was saved for a few trawlers with motors because a trawler with a motor is a shell constructed around a block of cast iron and steel, a motor that is more than half the tonnage of the boat and that has but one desire, to escape as quickly as possible and return to the bottom of the sea, to the rocks and minerals, the raw matter out of which it was made. It took only two or three big waves more violent than the others: the luck of the sea, that’s what they say.

  And on the land they congratulated one another for not having to confront the waves. On the land there were only gusts of wind, but all the same, those gusts began to pull down walls, for they were the most destructive of gusts, backlashes of a whip from the fight among the winds. They even pulled up houses, those on the ravine, that then joined the tons of detritus flowing from the discharge of the open sky, and the brickwork, and the cement sentry box at the entrance to the bridge between the Arab city and the European city. Everything was carried off in whirling torrents, for hours. Sometimes a man struggled, died, with or without shouting. Some tried to save others, right in the street, with water up to their chest, in both cities; others huddled up under eaves. Night fell. It didn’t change a thing.

  In the morning the rain stopped. The clouds thinned out, and then disappeared. The surface of the sea was once again smooth. Misfortune had stopped moving; it could now be observed; they called that taking stock. People began cleaning up the mud, and buried some twenty dead, also mourning those whom the waves hadn’t returned. And there were a lot of people in the church of Nahbès for the funeral of the assistant harbormaster, killed during the storm by falling beams. He was well liked. All the employees, all the dockworkers, one after the other, remembered owing something to him. He hadn’t always been like that, but he had lost his two sons in the war; he had become emotional. He couldn’t abide suffering, and suffering had taken revenge. In fact, the entire city was there, in front of the church, in the church.

  “Can you imagine, Arabs coming into the nave with their bicycles!”

  Ganthier was next to the man who had said that, and he had replied to his indignation:

  “Rest assured, they won’t be bringing their bicycles to your funeral!”

  A hearse with six horses then went through the city on avenue Gambetta to the gravesite of the assistant harbormaster. All the metal parts of the hearse and the carriages in the procession, anything that might have shone, had been covered in crepe. Even the whips had black ribbons.

  In the days that followed, people started to get back on their feet, and life got back to normal under a sky that was once again immense and vacant. There hadn’t been any flooding on the film set, only gusts of wind, nothing serious for Americans used to the climate of the Pacific. The heavy machinery had held up fine, the rest a bit less so, nor did the local scenery, especially the tents. So there was some delay in resuming work. But no one was unhappy, and the damage was even covered by the insurance policy.

  41

  THE HUNT

  Three days later, in the middle of the countryside, twenty miles from the city, the water was still flowing in the wadi, churning and bubbling, but the dog still dove in eagerly before Ganthier had time to shout, “Stop!” Raouf, Ganthier, and the other hunters saw the dachshund disappear into the yellow water. Raouf heard himself shout, “Kid!” and Ganthier gestured to him to stop shouting. Raouf understood: Let the dog go ahead, it was his only chance now, but a slim one. A human would let himself be carried by the current, try to swim on the diagonal to the opposite side, but Kid didn’t want to go too far from his goal.

  Up until then it had been a fairly routine hunting outing. They were trying to renew a passion, after the catastrophe, but it was like the beginning of a lot of hunting parties: a long, discouraging walk, a few quail that were scarcely worth collecting after they were shot, a young rabbit. They were ashamed, and the majestic nakedness of the landscape increased their shame.

  “This makes you happy?” Raouf had asked. This was his first hunting trip. He didn’t like it, but Ganthier had invited him to come with the group. Without a gun. Raouf had understood: It wasn’t a proposal to convince him to come, but a condition set by the other hunters: An Arab? Why not! Especially the son of a notable. But no gun. “You’ll see,” Ganthier had added, “It’s seductive. It will be a change from your books, your ideas.” Those ideas aren’t doing so well these days, are they? The shock of Europe? Sheikh ‘Abduh and Lenin, all that stuff, can you still manage? And civil rights in Paris, and Gandhi, and the newspapers . . . in Arabic, French, English maybe, always the mixture, revolution, the pillars of religion, the nation, the glorious past, defeat before the foreigner, and then independence, to come, if you’re good, equality, the evil colonist and his school, and university in the mother country now, of which you know so well how to take advantage. Come on, let’s get a taste of pursuits in the open air, and if you want a gun, we’ll see what we can do.

  “You’re not afraid a gun will give me ideas, like those Rif mountain folk who are shooting the Spanish so well right now?” Ganthier didn’t respond.

  Raouf had agreed to go because Jules Montaubain was a member of the group. Montaubain had gotten rid of his rifle in 1915 when he returned from the war, but he accompanied the hunters with his pointer. He had begun his career as a primary school teacher in Nahbès, then he became a French and history teacher in the little lycée in the city. At least half the hunters had had him as a teacher; that’s why they invited him, in spite of his Bolshevism, and also because he had left an arm in the trenches. Every time Raouf encountered t
he man who had been his teacher for five years, he was delighted. With Montaubain you could be certain that when you entered his class you would learn something important, the use of the imperfect, the structure of chalk, proofs using nine, the Battle of Valmy, the poems of Lamartine . . . Those were happy years, during which Raouf had competed with David for who could know the most things the quickest. Montaubain found that amusing, and was careful not to show favoritism between two kids enamored with learning and reasoning. The best moments were when he read François le Champi and Les Misérables to the entire class. Some parents said the teacher should do less reading and more dictations, but all the former students agreed: those readings were what they remembered the best.

  They had left the cars at the head of the path, under the watch of two auxiliary soldiers, and after an hour and a half of exasperated walking, the group had finally managed to sight a covey of partridges. It had taken a bit of time to walk around them, and the birds flew off before they were within shooting range. No one understood why. Rather, no one had sought an explanation. They weren’t going to start arguing about some random noise. Using the binoculars they could see the birds landing at more than a mile away. Another walk around them, wider this time. The terrain was climbing, slightly, but the sun made it seem steeper, a rocky terrain, no trees, not really any grass apart from clumps of esparto, and bushes gray with dust plunging their roots more than thirty feet into the ground in search of water. They held on to the dogs to keep them from overexerting themselves. Ganthier had wanted to carry Kid under his arm. The dachshund would have none of it. He trotted between his master and Raouf, sometimes turning toward Ganthier, waiting for his liberating “Go!” An hour to get where they were going, against the wind. The other dogs, big, speckled, long-legged pointers, who were also becoming impatient, and who were finally liberated by a whispered “Go look . . . Go on, look . . .” advancing close to the ground toward the bushes, their legs bent, progressing by inches, noses full of living smells, stopping, interminable, a voice that said, “Careful, we’re close,” and suddenly the sound of panicked wings, flight into the sky and salvation, and each bird standing out on the blue background, violent with light, shots fired. Of all the hunters only Ganthier hit two birds with both barrels. Eight partridges fell to the ground, seven on the hunters’ side of the wadi, the eighth on the other side. The big pointers stopped at the edge of the water. A survival instinct. For Kid, the retrieval instinct was stronger. They didn’t see him anymore. The yellow of the water was a thick clay that could only make the dog’s coat heavier. They saw the top of a fawn-colored head, then nothing, the tip of a snout, or an ear, it wasn’t clear, then nothing.