Men Don't Cry

by Faïza Guène

  ‘Right! That’s enough of these games! Switch everything off! Harry, it’s time for you to go home. Mourad has his homework to do. You may have parents who can read French, who can help you revise for your exams, who can find you an internship, a job, a nice place to live. But Mourad will have to get ahead by the sweat of his own brow. He’s going to have to work twice as hard! Come on, unplug everything, now!’

  Then she stared at Harry’s feet.

  ‘And you haven’t even taken off your shoes! Didn’t anyone teach you to take off your shoes off before going into other people’s houses? Tfffou! I suppose you pay for a cleaner at your place?’

  ‘No, Madame Chennoun.’

  ‘Well, in that case, it must be very dirty indeed!’

  The poor guy was petrified. He stuffed his console into his backpack and cleared off. I stayed where I was without uttering a word. My knees were trembling.

  It goes without saying, Harry never came back to our house. If we passed each other in the school corridors, he’d give me a pitying look, but he never spoke to me again. I bet he had nightmares about my mother. In horror movie mode.

  Sequence I – Interior night – Deathly silence. A backdrop of plastic flowers. An overweight woman enters the room; she resembles a hysterical horse about to be given a lethal injection. Her mauve headscarf is poorly adjusted and she is wielding a magnifying glass as her weapon.

  My mother had made baghrirs that day, Algerian-style pancakes.

  When I was alone at last, I didn’t want anyone to hear me crying, so I pressed my face into the pillow. Yes, Big Baba had drummed it into my head once and for all: Men. Don’t. Cry.

  Thankfully, my father came home not long after and he could tell that something was up.

  Perhaps the pancakes left an aftertaste. In any event, Big Baba had no trouble in making me spit out the story. It was the only time I saw him genuinely lose his temper with my mother. He thought her behaviour was shameful.

  ‘What on earth came over you? And what about the boy’s parents? What are they going to think? That we’re uneducated savages!’

  ‘Their son already has a savings account that’s full to bursting! They couldn’t care less.’

  ‘What are you talking about?! And why are you being so headstrong? Can’t you see how unhappy you’re making the boy? He’s 16. He’s not a baby anymore. Do you want him to walk out on us as well?! At this rate, he’ll have packed his bags by the time he’s 18! And don’t come complaining to me when he does! Do you want to drive them all away?’

  ‘What are you trying to say? Go on, out with it…’

  ‘You’ve understood!’

  ‘I’ve only got one son! One! I want him to focus on his future! I don’t want him keeping the wrong sort of company! Is that a crime?’

  ‘The wrong sort of company? The boy brought a video game round to our house! The way you’re talking, anyone would think you’d caught them selling drugs!’

  ‘Listen, it starts with video games and, before you know it, we’re talking syringes and police custody! Do you begrudge me wishing the best for my child? Eh? Am I a bad mother, in your eyes?’

  Big Baba tapped his index finger on his forehead, as if to say, You’ve got a screw loose. My mother was beside herself. She kept gasping for breath as she returned to her cooking, the tears pouring down her neck.

  That’s why I didn’t put up a fight. I never put up a fight. For fear of increasing her palpitations, her blood pressure, her hyperglycaemia, or triggering some other drama.

  I learnt to be alone. Sometimes, I even got a kick out of being bored.

  On weekends when the weather was fine, I perched on Big Baba’s referee’s chair, at the bottom of the garden, and buried my nose in a book instead of heading into town.

  I would read for hours on end, especially in summer. With the sun beating down on my forehead, I’d read until I couldn’t take the heat any more, at which point I’d climb down and pour myself some homemade citronnade.

  As the years went by, I became increasingly isolated. I even came round to the idea that my mother wasn’t completely wrong.

  After all, guys my age only have one thing on their minds: making the beast-with-two-backs in the rear of their three-door Twingo with P for Provisional Driver plates. In the evenings, there’s always a party at someone’s apartment, and a shy girl chewing the edge of her plastic cup waiting for someone to hit on her.

  Student discounts aside, I didn’t have much in common with my peers.

  I was at one remove, picturing them in 20 years’ time with a mortgage, driving around in a family estate car, plucking up the courage to ask for their next salary rise, even if it meant pandering to their pot-bellied boss and his condescending attitude.

  I wasn’t under any illusions: it was unlikely that I’d be allocated a local teaching post.

  More teachers applied to work in and around Nice than almost anywhere else. Priority was given to experienced teachers, married teachers, teachers with kids, and those who were all of the above.

  It’s probably the same with the police. Fast forward to the guy with the Marseilles accent and the freshly issued police uniform who finds himself in the banlieues north-east of Paris, patrolling the forlorn tarmac of the gritty 93 postcode. He’ll bring a ray of Provençal sunshine to an ID check that’s turning nasty.

  Big Baba was worried about me leaving the south for the start of the new academic year.

  ‘There’s a 12-year-old kid in Seine-Saint-Denis who stabbed his History and Geography teacher for giving him a bad mark!’

  My mother couldn’t resist wading in.

  ‘If I’d known you were going to be a teacher, we’d have gone back to Algeria after your father retired. At least they respect the teaching profession over there…’

  ‘Respect? On 30,000 dinars a month? That’s less than they pay their refuse collectors! Stop talking nonsense, Djamila!’

  ‘I don’t mean the salary! I mean the students! In Algeria, no student would ever dare to throw a book or a piece of chalk in the teacher’s face, let alone attack them the way they do here!’

  ‘Of course, they wouldn’t! They haven’t got any books, or any chalk!’

  ‘Stop talking nonsense, yourself! You always exaggerate! Tfffou!’

  I felt guilty every time I gave my parents cause to worry. In our family, Mina was the only one who didn’t make waves.

  ‘What was I like when I was a little girl, Maman?’

  ‘Why do you want to know?’

  ‘I’m just curious. The kids ask me sometimes.’

  ‘I don’t remember, benti, you were kind. The same as you are now. You were a good girl.’

  ‘Didn’t I ever do anything silly?’

  ‘Not that I can remember. You were always sensible.’

  ‘What about at school, wasn’t I ever in trouble?’

  ‘No. Now I come to think about it, I don’t remember you being in trouble. You were a nice kid at school. “Nothing to report!” your teachers used to say. Mourad, on the other hand, was always getting into trouble, that’s for sure! One day, he climbed up onto the primary school roof and stayed there for hours, like a cat! The headmistress telephoned me. I remember having palpitations, I thought my chest would burst! “Madame Chennoun,” she said, “Could you tell me why Mourad isn’t in class today?” And I said: “What do you mean, not in class? Of course he’s in class, I dropped him off at eight o’clock this morning!” My God, I’ll never forget that day! It turned into a kidnap alert! I kept thinking about those men who open their raincoats in front of schoolchildren to expose their private parts. I said to myself, Our Mourad’s so wet behind the ears, he must have taken sweets from a stranger and climbed into a white van! The police combed the neighbourhood. And then we found him, about ten o’clock that night, fast asleep on the school roof. I screamed. The shame of it! People must have thought: “They don’t have a bed at home!”’

  ‘Yes, I remember, Maman, the story made it onto the r
egional TV news, and you recorded it so you could send the cassette to Algeria …’

  ‘What do you expect? It was the first time anyone in our family had been on telly.’

  The Article

  I wasn’t the only person in our family to interest the press.

  That morning, Big Baba looked irritable on his return from the covered market, and I don’t mean in a can-you-believe-the-price-of-tomatoes kind of way. Feverishly, he unbuttoned his khaki coat and took off his black fur hat. In winter, I’ve always maintained he looks like a Russian army colonel with that karakul on his head.

  He was frowning as he held out the newspaper, which he had carefully folded in four and tucked inside his jacket pocket.

  ‘Take a look at that.’

  It was a copy of Nice Matin. On the front page, in the bottom-left inset, was a photo of my sister Dounia. The first thing I noticed was her strikingly short haircut. It suited her.

  ‘Well? Why is her photo in the newspaper? Is she dead?’

  My father’s frozen expression made me realise he wasn’t so much irritated as beside himself with worry.

  ‘No, Papa. She isn’t dead.’

  His eyes said phew, but his mouth said, ‘Anyway, it’s as if she is dead to me…’

  After a long silence, he added, ‘What does it say about her? Read it to me.’

  There was just a short paragraph. And the photo.

  ‘Read it in a journalist’s voice.’

  Big Baba always asked me to help him out whenever he needed to read something: Doctor Zerbib’s prescriptions, a leaflet from the CGT general workers union, articles from Healthy Ageing, letters from the bank, or else the catalogues with supermarket special offers.

  And for each document, no matter how different, he was adamant that I read it ‘in a journalist’s voice’.

  Headline. Daring to be Diverse: The New Team of Councillors.

  Underneath. Spotlight on Dounia Chennoun, Mayor Yves Peplinski’s trump card in his bid to attract new voters as he stands for re-election. This 36-year-old lawyer, born to Algerian immigrant parents, is as ambitious as she is determined. Following her involvement with the controversial feminist organisation ‘Speak Out Sister!’, she’s one to watch at the start of a promising political career.

  Don’t forget to register on the electoral list before Saturday 31st December, blah blah blah…

  ‘What do you mean blah blah blah? Is that all?

  ‘Yes, that’s all, Papa.’

  ‘Why did they write “born to immigrant parents”? Why didn’t they just put “lawyer”?’

  We heard my mother turning the keys in the lock. She was back from the school fair with Mina and the kids. Mohamed and Abou Bakr both had their faces painted as tigers and Khadija was sporting a ladybird look.

  ‘How does this stuff wash off? My sink’s going to be unspeakable by the time you’ve all rinsed your faces!

  ‘Don’t worry! I’ll deal with it, Maman!’

  ‘Thank you, benti!’

  The little ones gave Big Baba a kiss.

  With vibrant colours on his cheeks, half tiger, half ladybird, he turned towards me and his eyes flashed, Let’s keep this information secret!

  Yes, Big Baba has eyes that speak.

  I folded the newspaper discretely and slipped it into my jeans pocket. My mother sailed into the living room, one eyebrow raised in a quizzical circumflex while the other sloped in a frown. It’s what she does if she suspects something. She’s a woman with a talent for pulling faces.

  ‘What are you both up to? You look like you’re plotting a military coup in Africa!’

  Neither of us responded. She untied her scarf, still looking suspicious. Then she pointed at Big Baba.

  ‘What are you scheming, Abdelkader? Are you planning on taking a second wife? Eh? Is that it?’

  Big Baba gave a big belly laugh, worthy of a studio audience member falling off their seat during the recording of an extratacky Benny Hill sketch.

  ‘A second wife? Are you kidding me? You’re as much trouble as four wives. I’ve reached the max just with you!’

  At least we knew where to find Dounia now. But from there to voting for her… let’s not get carried away.

  This city has been right-wing since the Stone Age. It wouldn’t surprise me if Peplinski croaked in office. He’s like an Africa-style president for the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region.

  No amount of piecing together scraps of memories could help me to understand my sister’s turnaround. To be actively engaged in right-wing politics, in a council with more varicose veins and incontinence than ideas and electoral promises? That’s not the Dounia I know.

  I’ve lost track of the number of times I’d tried to imagine Dounia’s life, following her dramatic departure.

  Was she still in France? Did she have children? And if so, how many? Did she end up marrying Daniel, with his hairy wrists and enormous watch? Or had she decided on something radically different? I’d made a list of wild guesses about what might have happened to her.

  Perhaps she’d moved to Brazil to fight against deforestation. Or to somewhere in Peru to defend bankrupted farmers. Perhaps she had become an ambassador for UNESCO and travelled around India promoting education for young girls? But no. Not a bit of it. Turns out she had moved a few kilometres up the road, and now, in the name of the ‘diversity’ she supposedly represents, she’s at number eight on the list as part of the team to get that old alcoholic Yves Peplinski re-elected as mayor, for his 250th mandate.

  End of. Talk about an anti-climax.

  The Diagnosis

  One look at Doctor Zerbib would tell you where Big Baba sourced his inspiration for dressing up as a respectable intellectual. Their outfits were almost identical. Tweed jacket, corduroy trousers, striped tie and glasses so far down the nose they’re on the brink of committing suicide. Not forgetting the Bic biros, of course, clipped to the shirt pocket.

  The biggest difference between Big Baba and Zerbib, apart from years of studies, was probably personal hygiene. I don’t think our family doctor washed his hair very often. I remember he was forever dusting off his shoulders, so you felt like you were inside a paperweight snow globe, without the fairy tale.

  Big Baba liked things that were old and reassuring: my mother, the junk piled up in our garden, his Renault R11 turbo and his black fur karakul. Which explains why nothing in the world could have persuaded him to choose a different GP.

  Doctor Zerbib’s surgery was always open, except for Shabbat. He refused to use a computer, he had one of those colonial-style wooden consulting rooms and he had even organised a regional conference about the damaging effects of automated measuring devices for arterial tension.

  ‘Tfffou! He’s a charlatan, that doctor! People only see Zerbib to get signed off work! Everyone knows that!’

  One point to my mother. But that was before the changes to the health benefits system. Patient reimbursements worked differently from then on, Zerbib had the medical insurers breathing down his neck and the era of being signed off work for a fortnight was over. As a result, so many people deserted the practice that, in a matter of months, the average age of his patients went from 45 to 75.

  Given the risk of being struck off, Doctor Zerbib became conscientious to a fault. The day he diagnosed my mother as being a hypochondriac, she took against him for good.

  ‘You’re perfectly healthy, Madame Chennoun! I bet you’ll live to be France’s next-oldest citizen! If God wills it so, you’ll overtake Jeanne Calment and her 122 years!’

  ‘So, what are you prescribing me? Peppermints?’

  ‘No, Madame Chennoun, homeopathy. You’re just a little bit anxious. These will calm you down and help you to sleep better.’

  ‘That’s it? And you’re asking me for €22, Dr Zerbib?’

  ‘23. It’s gone up.’

  ‘€23 to tell me I’m hysterical?’

  ‘I didn’t say hysterical, I said hypochondriac, let’s be clear.’

/>   My mother eventually unearthed a different doctor who didn’t balk at issuing her with a wad of prescriptions, and who diagnosed her with diabetes, hypertension and osteoarthritis.

  Thanks to him, she won the ultimate argument for the rest of her days: the state undertook to pay 100 percent of all medical expenses in recognition of her long-term incapacity.

  On the bus: ‘Excuse me, young man, could I have your seat please? I’m on 100 percent!’

  At the supermarket till: ‘Sorry, but do you mind if I go ahead of you? I’m on 100 percent!’

  To my father: ‘Stop getting on my nerves, Abdelkader! I’m on 100 percent!’

  Despite all the doubts concerning Marc Zerbib’s competence as a doctor, Big Baba remained his most loyal patient.

  Until the day he said to Mina, ‘I’ve got a very bad headache.’

  It was rare for Big Baba to complain. Mina gave him some paracetamol and a glass of water and told the children to play quietly. That was when she noticed my father was struggling to raise the glass to his mouth.

  ‘What’s going on, Papa?’

  Big Baba was staring into space.

  We rang Doctor Zerbib, who recommended the patient rest up for a few days while we waited on a scan appointment.

  But the reality was that Big Baba was suffering a stroke, otherwise known as a cerebrovascular accident. CVA: three letters that conceal a life-threatening emergency.

  When my mother noticed that Big Baba’s right arm was swelling up, she remembered hearing from a neighbour about her sister’s father-in-law, who had suffered a stroke back in Algeria…

  Long story short, we called the emergency services and rushed straight to hospital.

  Half of Big Baba

  It was July and, just like every summer, old ladies with facelifts were well represented in Nice. They’re a protected species in the Alpes-Maritimes.