Chez Max

by Jakob Arjouni

  The usual method employed by the Mental Health Department, responsible for the protection of democracy and minorities, was to publish the photograph of some ‘father’, ‘brother’ or ‘son’ shot by Israeli soldiers. Or there were films of Israeli soldiers destroying a suicide bomber’s family home with diggers in retaliation for their son’s action, or cordoning off the borders between Palestinian areas. There was generally a call for demonstrations the next day. That way, people could vent their aggression and anger and forget about price rises or other state demands for the time being. Basically it was a good, sensible arrangement, calling for a very small sacrifice if you thought of the social satisfaction that it provided.

  Naturally the media also mentioned attacks by Palestinians and showed pictures of the victims, but who would dare side with the one oppressor we still had in our Western world? Sometimes Jewish student associations organized petitions at the Bastille, or distributed leaflets about the history and mainly peaceful everyday life of Israel. And of course the pamphlets always reminded readers of the Holocaust. But even someone like me, a German who still, after many generations, took on the inherited burden of guilt and was even glad to take it on – after all, it helped me to gain a better understanding of myself and my cultural origins – even those like me had to admit that the subject didn’t interest anyone any more, except for jokes about Nazis made in Chen’s inimitable style and the annual Never Again Fascism Day. Condemnation of Israel was the stance to take, as the politically engaged segment of the population had unanimously agreed. Well, no other option was open to them.

  They’re not all that interested in recipes for ceps…

  What an arrogant idiot! If I’d known then what was clear to me now, I could have replied, ‘What, not even your comrades eating their last meal in this world? Or do they have some other term for it before strapping on explosives, going into a department store, preferably picking the children’s department, and blowing themselves to bits?’ Because apart from such exceptions as the Rue de la Roquette, most of the potential suicide bombers who had got past the Fence naturally disappeared in the teeming masses of the suburbs. Or I could have been even wittier, even more cutting; I could have said, ‘Oh no? What about recipes for mushroom clouds?’

  A terrorist group from the Caucasus really had set off a small, home-made nuclear bomb four years ago in a Moscow suburb. It is true that only a few hundred people had died in the blast, but because the entire contaminated area hadn’t been cleared because of the expense, an unofficial report indicated that thousands of its inhabitants died annually from the long-term effects of radiation. To be sure, most of those who had settled in that part of the city since the explosion were Caucasians, ‘and that,’ said one of our Russian colleagues dryly at the Ashcroft Christmas party, ‘has at least brought the whole thing full circle.’

  They’re not all that interested… what could someone who so far had seen the suburbs only on the news say in answer to that?

  ‘I think we’d soon find something to talk about,’ I said lamely, and then went on the attack myself. ‘What were you trying to say anyway? Someone who lives in a hovel can’t be expected to think up ways to improve the world, is that it?’

  At the time I still assumed that, even for Chen, a faux pas – which if interpreted with malicious intent might be a criminal offence – was still a faux pas, and what I said would at least shut him up for a moment.

  But instead he gave me a bleary stare, then closed his eyes, tilted his head to one side and made snoring noises.

  ‘Oh God!’ I exclaimed angrily.

  After a while Chen opened his eyes again. ‘Max,’ he whispered, with a despairing expression on his face, ‘dear Max, oh, please don’t inform on me for speaking out against the state!’

  ‘Ha, ha,’ I said humourlessly.

  ‘Ha, ha!’ he imitated. Then he sat up straight and said, in his normal tone of voice, ‘I’m the one who should be informing on you. Mention of improving the world instantly makes you think of revolutions or something of the kind. Like a sexually disturbed man who undoes his flies the moment he sees women eating bananas. Let me remind you that it’s our task, as the Ashcroft Oath puts it, “to do our daily part towards the constant improvement of the world”.’

  ‘But that’s not what you meant just now,’ I said childishly, and a bit hysterically. As always in an argument with Chen, I was losing my footing. Yet I knew perfectly well that he’d been thinking of anything but the Ashcroft Oath.

  ‘Oh, Max!’ Chen cursorily ended the conversation. ‘That’s no way to have an argument. Sometimes you are just so thick.’

  Just so thick! And uttered in such a gentle, warm, totally hopeless tone of voice! Not just that – Chen of all people trying to tell me how to have an argument! So I suppose snoring noises were okay?

  I signalled to the café owner to bring me another Calvados. There was nothing to eat except for sandwiches and greasy quiche, and the rapid way my mind was turning over would keep me from getting drunk.

  I shook my head. How had I managed to stand working with Chen for so long? If I could only nail him once and for all! I could almost feel Commander Youssef’s hand on my shoulder and hear his words. ‘Well done, Schwarzwald. I’m very grateful to you. What Wu might have done if you hadn’t picked up his trail doesn’t bear thinking of.’

  Yes, and a lot of people at Central Office would be grateful. There was hardly one of our colleagues who Chen hadn’t called a ‘careerist’, a ‘creep’, a ‘corrupt arsehole’, ‘enough to make you sick’ or ‘a heart amputee’. All of them favourite expressions of Chen – the man who knew how to have an argument! ‘Heart amputee’ in particular always surprised me. How could a man who obviously had no heart for anyone or anything at all (except perhaps for a night with a young woman all tarted up but on closer inspection perfectly ordinary, like the one on the park bench), how could a man like that think up such an insult? It was probably what they call projection.

  ‘Excuse me, Monsieur, but I’m closing in a minute. If you’d like to pay, please.’ The café owner put down a plastic plate with my bill on it.

  ‘Of course.’ I reached for my wallet. In the park opposite, Chen was still on his knees in the flower bed, planting roses and talking to the woman. It was now ten-fifteen. Although I knew the Boulevard Richard Lenoir very well, and for a short stretch it even bordered my own area of operations, at this moment I couldn’t think of a bar or brasserie likely to be open at this time of night near the Bastille end of the boulevard. I didn’t fancy the prospect of having to lurk in the entrance of some building. In addition, I was feeling the effects of the Calvados, and my desire to unmask Chen as soon as possible was getting stronger all the time. That’s the only way I can explain how I came to make such a stupid mistake.

  ‘Tell me,’ I said to the café owner in a deliberately casual voice and with a heavy German accent, as I put my money on the plate, ‘is there another bar with a view of that lovely little park over there, a bar that would be open at this time of night? I’m a town planner, I come from Germany, we don’t see parks like that much at home.’

  The café owner, who had been wiping down the counter, stopped in mid-movement and looked at me, frowning. I remembered his unfriendly glance earlier, and even before he could reply I guessed what was coming, and froze. This café was much too close to Chez Max.

  ‘Town planner,’ said the man. ‘Well, that’s a good one!’ The expression on his face didn’t tell me how he meant it, and I had no alternative but to smile gormlessly and hope my presentiment was wrong. My hopes were in vain.

  ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘I needn’t have spent a king’s ransom on three tiny meatballs in piquant sauce at your place the other day. But my wife was dead set on going to that smart German restaurant for once.’

  I just went on smiling. Perhaps he’d think better of it. After all, I was his customer.

  ‘So now the restaurateur who only recently shook my hand as I left come
s into my own café, keeps watching our gardener and his girlfriend all the time, and tries to tell me he’s a town planner from Germany. Talk about weird.’

  ‘Listen…’

  But he wouldn’t let me get a word in. ‘Either this is something to do with Wu’s girlfriend, even if you seem to me a little old for the part of jealous husband, or…’ He looked me up and down, my glasses with the lenses that were rather too thick, my unobtrusive clothes, my comfortable shoes, ‘or you’re a snoop. One of that lot.’ He gestured in the direction of the Eiffel Tower.

  Even though the Ashcroft Central Office was camouflaged as a scientific institute, and in part of the building several research labs did in fact work on ways to extract energy from the earth’s core, most of the population of Paris knew or guessed who was really based there. Not that people talked about it. Certainly not to someone thought to be one of its employees. The café owner had definitely gone too far.

  My expression froze. Without taking my eyes off the man, I took off my binocular-lensed glasses, placed them slowly in their case and put them away in my jacket pocket.

  I let a couple more seconds pass before saying, in a menacingly quiet tone of voice, ‘One of what lot?’

  The café owner, who had held my eyes until now, looked away. He obviously realized what might be in store for him if I really was an Ashcroft man.

  ‘And suppose I was “one of that lot”, who do you imagine you are? Maybe someone whose miserable little café can’t be closed down double quick? Who can’t have any tax dodges or infringements of the hygiene regulations proved against him? Who can simply break the social contract with impunity? Since when does anyone talk about the people over there,’ I concluded, gesturing to the Eiffel Tower as he had done, ‘as if they were the dregs of society?’

  ‘I didn’t mean it like…’

  ‘Keep quiet.’

  He bit his lip.

  I was in full flow now. It wasn’t only that this was a way for me to work off the pressure that had built up over the last few hours – above all, I had to put enough of the fear of God into the man to keep him from going straight to ‘our gardener’ and telling him about me. All I needed was for Chen to hear that the proprietor of Chez Max was probably an Ashcroft man and was after him.

  ‘And what do you mean, “our gardener”? Do you pay his wages? No, the state pays them. The same state whose employees look after our security, though you describe them as snoops.’

  ‘I only meant…’

  ‘So why “our gardener”?’

  Admittedly that wasn’t just a peg to hang something on in order intimidate him. It annoyed me to find that it sounded as if in this sphere at least, Chen was an accepted or even popular member of society. I’d never heard anyone say of me ‘our restaurateur’ or ‘our German’. (Or only one man, and he was the one I’d had jailed for a few cigarettes.)

  ‘Well, because that’s what he is,’ said the café owner in an anxious but slightly surprised tone of voice. ‘I mean, he’s our gardener in this part of the city. He just belongs here. I’ve known him quite a while. He often has his coffee in here. A nice guy.’

  A nice guy. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard that Chen found it easy to make friends with ordinary people, after a fashion. Of course it was all just a trick. In reality, he probably thought the café owner a primitive proletarian. I’d have liked to tell him who that nice guy actually was: not just one of the ‘snoops’ he disliked, but a terrorist, a man who despised the human race if ever I saw one. But blowing a colleague’s cover was punishable by a prison sentence of no less than two years. And Chen was still my colleague. I pulled myself together.

  ‘A nice guy. If I were one of “that lot”,’ I said, pointing to the Eiffel Tower again, ‘do you think I’d go spying on a nice guy?’

  The café owner was visibly squirming with discomfort. ‘Well, I’m sure you’d have your reasons. I mean, I hardly know Wu. But he’s always friendly to me. However, I’ve heard here in the café how he can be rather nasty to other people.’

  ‘Nasty in what way?’

  ‘Well…’ He looked at the floor. ‘If he thinks they’re talking twaddle. Repeating something parrot-fashion, truisms of some kind or what they read in the papers. If they talk big and act as if they know all sorts of stuff. For instance, once he lost his temper because someone said something – I can’t remember what – was the truth. “The truth!” Wu snapped at him. “A truth or your truth, but not the truth – what a fool.”’

  That sounded much more like the Chen I knew.

  ‘I guess,’ said the café owner, glancing briefly at me, ‘that could be one reason the state security services might be interested in him. Because he sometimes talks about political stuff.’

  ‘Oh, does he?’

  ‘Nothing actually forbidden, but now and then he brings up some very unusual subjects.’

  ‘For instance?’

  The café owner hesitated. He was nervously kneading his fingers. ‘You won’t close my café down, will you?’

  I gave him a chilly smile. ‘Who am I? How would I be in any position to do so? Forgotten already? I own the Chez Max. I’m a café proprietor like you. But of course, like any other citizen, I can go to the police if I notice anything wrong.’

  He quickly glanced around: a reflex action. His café was as faded and grubby as many of its kind. And as in most of them, there were sure to be a few frozen dishes in the storeroom freezers which were past their use-by date, or some mould in a fridge, if not even a crate of spirits with a forged brand name.

  ‘Well?’

  He kneaded his fingers again, staring straight ahead of him as if looking down a hole.

  ‘… it’s really only that he – well, normally nobody talks about the countries the other side of the Fence and life there. But Wu does. He doesn’t give any opinion or suchlike, he just says certain things are fact.’

  ‘The truth,’ I derisively suggested.

  ‘I don’t know. I guess he just tries to see things the way they are. For instance, he once said – seeing we’re talking about the truth – he said how that brown sugar there, you have it in your own restaurant to go with coffee too…’

  He tried a conspiratorial smile. The attempt failed dismally.

  ‘Well, anyway, that sugar, the kind everyone says is the best and healthiest, Wu once listed all the people it wouldn’t be good for, he said it could sometimes be lethal.’

  ‘Lethal sugar?’ I laughed briefly. As I did so I looked across at the park. Chen had risen to his feet and was knocking the earth off his trousers.

  ‘He said how in the sugarcane plantations or in the factories it must be, like, back-breaking work. And of course all the plants are sprayed, and the workers are always in contact with that poisonous stuff. And seems like they get very low pay, they live in huts without running water and all that – almost like slaves. Well, so then if their truth about brown sugar is different from ours, that makes sense.’ The man looked up, saw my expressionless face, and hastily added, ‘I mean, I don’t have any idea myself, that’s just what Wu said. And I’m not really interested. I’m only telling you so you’ll know the way he sometimes talks.’

  There was no end to Chen’s surprises. Here he was, publicly engaging in agitation and discussion of the Second World! Had he no scruples at all? No conscience? No sense of common decency? Because of course the sugarcane story was sheer propaganda, a fairy tale. And because Chen couldn’t know the first thing about working conditions in the Caribbean islands. And the reason for that was that no one knew anything about them, for the islands had been a quarantined area ever since repeated epidemics of Bodo disease had broken out there, killing thousands. I myself had heard about it only because I knew someone who worked in the Health Ministry. The Bodo virus, for which no treatment had yet been found, attacked the gastro-intestinal tract and led to over eighty per cent of victims literally puking themselves to death within a few weeks. The only certain thing was that the sug
ar itself didn’t carry the virus, and our supplies were thus secure for now. All the same, the state laboratories were working flat out in their search for a vaccine, while the local authorities were doing all they could, as my acquaintance put it, to protect and care for the native population. Special clothing and face masks were being distributed, water pipes were being laid even in the most remote villages, and centres known as Welcome Camps had been set up, where the last weeks of the lives of the infected were made as tolerable as possible with films, concerts and computer games.

  Lethal sugar – if the subject hadn’t been so serious, I’d have laughed out loud.

  I looked out of the window again.

  Chen had put his spade and bucket in a wheelbarrow and, with the woman, was turning to go.

  I turned to the bar counter and looked hard into the café owner’s eyes.

  ‘I have to leave now. You’ll forget our little talk, is that clear?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Because if I ever hear that you’ve been saying anything about this to anyone at all, or that you ever expressed a certain suspicion in connection with me, then…’ and here I leaned towards the window and read the name of the café in lights on the neon sign above the door ‘... then it’ll be curtains for La Palombe. And I get to hear a lot.’