‘I dunno.’
‘What do you mean you dunno? What the hell are you doing hanging around here? Have you taken up hash again? Show me your eyes … You swore you’d stopped, so what’s this all about? Does it mean you can never be trusted? Look at me. Have you been smoking again?’
‘No, I haven’t.’
‘So you’re coming along, then?’
‘I just dunno. I. Don’t. Know.’
‘Well, if you don’t know, don’t come. What is it, you don’t want to show support for your cousin at his wedding? You don’t have a choice anyway! Do you really not give a damn about supporting him?’
‘What are you talking about?’ Krim snapped. ‘Support my cousin, as if we’re at war? And why are you being so pushy?’
Rabia looked up from her phone and dragged her son over to the changing rooms, which had been opened up by the building manager to store a stash of chairs. She went directly to the showers and raised her voice.
‘Krim, you’re not going to start jiving with me, are you? Not today, I’m warning you now.’
‘Just go away, and get your head checked. And nobody says jiving.’
‘What?’
‘Forget it.’
‘It’s all my fault: if I’d been a horrid mother you’d be kissing my feet. Reddem le rehl g’dunit, serves me right. Too kind, too stupid, as usual. Chai, that’ll teach me …’
She consulted her inbox for the tenth time in five minutes. She may have been only in her forties, but the mobile phone remained a mysterious object to her, to be handled fearfully, her fingers tense and perpendicular to the screen, her full focus trained on not missing a key. She again raised her curly finch-like head towards her son. All those years in municipal daycare centres looking after ‘cutie pies’ had prevented her eyes and voice from taking things seriously. Volatile, restless and naive, she resembled those little girls with disproportionately large dimples and eyes, those children who adored her almost despite themselves because she had never stopped being one of them.
‘Well then, sweetie, are you coming with us?’
‘God, you drive me nuts. You’re driving me nuts! Don’t you get it?’
‘Promise me you’ll stop the hash,’ she begged. ‘Think of your sister. If you won’t think of your father, at least think of your sister.’
‘Whatever, it’s fine. I get it.’
‘Where do you think it’ll lead you if you—’
‘All right!’
‘Dad was right: you’re turning into a donkey, like Pinocchio.’
‘All right, I said!’
With his eyes, his shoulders, his hands, his whole physiognomy on edge, he sought the nearest door.
Rabia was insisting on the town hall because Krim (whose real name was Abdelkrim) was not only the second groomsman but also, out of all twelve cousins, the one that Slim had been closest to. Rabia and Slim’s mother, Dounia, were the best of friends, sisters bound both by blood and destiny – having both married for love and then been widowed young. Despite their two-year age difference and increasingly divergent lives, Slim and Krim had remained inseparable. They had once nicknamed each other Mohammed and Hardy, and together they had seen it all: games of tag at Granny’s; outdoor barbecues where their fathers bet on horses that shared their birthdays; the mock-fearsome I’ll see you at the school gates, which they marched through side by side at five o’clock, chins up like Western action heroes; the parquet floor of the principal’s tiny office; weddings where they tormented their little cousin; and finally and especially the smell of the pine trees in the city centre, at the foot of which they urinated while studying their circumcised willies.
Slim would never forget the day Krim had whooped in the changing rooms to announce with proof in hand that he, at last, had the dick of a man:
‘Pff, what, you’re saying that’s a man’s dick?’
‘Come on, then, show me yours.’
‘Pff – if I show you my cock, you’ll faint.’
But Krim was no longer listening, too fascinated by his long curly pubic hairs, which he could almost count around this new olive-coloured penis whose size was indeed considerable.
Abdelkrim was known as Krim – or Krikri, even, right up to the moment the puberty fairy precociously and rather mischievously doubled the volume of his forearms and drew a threatening tuft of hair on his upper lip. From that moment on, everything had decidedly gone downhill. At the end of middle school, he was advised to concentrate on vocational studies, though not on the basis of his results in such subjects, which were hardly less mediocre than his other grades. They had found his calling, and, besides, it was stupid and downright criminal to discredit the manual trades, etc. It was the same speech that had been given to his aunts thirty years earlier, when they were placed on the vocational track. A lost generation.
His new school was in the middle of nowhere and architecturally depressing: a concrete block perched on a small hill near an industrial park, waving a flag so suggestive of a skull and crossbones that the Eugène Sue Technical School had been nicknamed ‘the Titanic’. Indeed, its four chimneys floated in the early morning mist, and the classroom windows were covered with wire mesh all the way up to the third floor, with the fourth housing, as one might expect, the offices of the school administration.
At the start of the academic year, Krim, who would henceforth come to blows with any stranger who dared call him Krikri, met the misfit his kind and frail father dubbed Lucignolo, after the young charismatic thug who leads Pinocchio astray. Krim became his henchman and started to smoke. He gave up his football team and the piano lessons he was now ashamed of. His mother had signed him up for piano because his Year 3 teacher, who played the violin, had proclaimed that he was not only exceptionally gifted, but also possessed what she called, with incomprehensible reverence, ‘perfect pitch’. Indeed, it was that same winter that an ENT doctor from Lyon diagnosed young Krim as hyper-acoustic: he could hear more and better than anyone else, which probably caused his terrible headaches. Could he be cured? No. So they bought some earplugs and thicker curtains, and it was never brought up again.
Right in the middle of the Christmas festivities, when snow had fallen for the first time in years, Krim’s father died, succumbing to an accident at the factory where he had inhaled toxic fumes. It is a well-known fact that snow stifles noise, dulls pain, and confers dignity upon the world – while it lasts. But in this case it was powerless against this tremendous, cataclysmic, unconscionable event that ultimately cast Krim out to the margins of a system that, when all is said and done, offers very little to those who play by its rules.
Everything proceeded smoothly from bad to worse until the day Krim incurred the wrath of an authority more brutal than that of the State: Mouloud Benbaraka, an elusive gang leader, the ‘Bernardo Provenzano of the Rhône’, as he had been nicknamed by the local paper. Krim had been a lookout; he kept watch outside the stairwells where deals took place and hooted like an owl when he caught sight of an unmarked police car. At the age of sixteen he was making fifteen hundred euros a month, something his father had never earned. One day he managed to steal fifty grams of the best pot that had been seen in the area for years. Mouloud Benbaraka summoned him and started by tweaking his ear. Krim fought back and received a few punches in the jaw. When Mouloud Benbaraka leaned his jackal-like head forward for an explanation, Krim bit his left earlobe. It took all the diplomatic talent of his powerful cousin, Nazir, Slim’s big brother, to calm the fury of the lord of the Saint-Etienne underworld, who nevertheless swore that if he ever happened to bump into Krim again he would rip him to shreds.
Rabia knew nothing about this episode, of course, and neither did anyone in the family. It was, as Nazir said, something between him and Krim – though Fat Momo, Krim’s best friend, ended up catching wind of it. For his part, Krim learned to live with this Damoclean sword hanging over his head. In fact, the worst problems tend to disappear on their own if you stop thinking about them 24/7. On even
ings of sorrow and anguish, he simply closed his eyes and repeated one of the sonatas he had once played on the keyboard his granddad had given him. The music lit up and purified all the passageways in his mind. It shut out the chaos of the world.
There was, however, another problem: his little sister Luna, whom he had always pampered in his own way, his own rough way, and who wept every time their mother was summoned to the police station for another of Krim’s misdeeds. There was no escaping the turmoil awakened by Luna’s sadness. Years later, she still spoke to him in the same nagging tone, as if there was something in his face that provoked sermons and scolding:
‘Why did you tell Mum I was prancing around naked on Facebook?’
‘What?’
All grown up, Luna was decked out in her fanciest black dress, covered with sequins that gleamed absurdly even in the shade of the building. For a moment, Krim thought he had misheard; the sound check was getting louder and louder with each skip to the next Rai track.
He jerked his face away as if to escape an invasive ray of light and moved back a few metres. ‘Why the hell are you hounding me about Facebook?’
‘You hacked my account? No, you’re too dumb for that. You friended one of my friends and you looked at one of my videos? I can’t believe it. You know what you’re going to do now? You’re going to go tell Mum you made everything up. I don’t give a shit what it takes, you go and find something …’
But Krim had started to smile. The joint he’d hidden in his palm was beginning to seep into his system.
‘Loser,’ Luna hurled at him before heading into the gym. Her resolute stride broke into a run: fists clenched, arms outstretched like a gymnast charging towards a pommel horse.
Krim had yet to come around to the idea that a fifteen-year-old girl could be more muscular than most boys her age: gymnastics had sculpted her biceps, abdominal muscles, traps and delts. When, like today, she wore a sleeveless top, the veins of her forearms and her triceps popped out, even when she kept them still by her body.
As if she had heard her brother’s thoughts, Luna hurtled back and threatened him with her finger cocked at her ram-like temple. ‘If you don’t tell Mum you made up the thing about my Facebook pics, I swear you’ll regret it.’
‘Oh yeah? Since when do you even know the word regret?’
‘If I were you, I’d watch out.’ Suddenly more hesitant, unable to look him straight in the eye, she added, ‘I know … stuff about you. If I were you …’
‘Hey, get lost. Wallah, I’m not even listening.’
‘You think I didn’t see you last week with Fat Momo?’
‘Okay, leave me alone, you stupid brat.’
But instead of waiting for her to go away, he preferred to do the honours, moving swiftly towards the thick bushes by the gym.
He walked, minding the thorns of holly, the little bay leaves you are not supposed to eat, and the stems of flowers he couldn’t name. Near the changing room entrance that held so many memories, a path led up to an artificial turf field, but to get there you had to lose yourself in a maze of greenery. This was where Krim found a spot to smoke in peace. He let his attention drift from sound to sound, from raised voices to chirping birds. A pneumatic drill droned on a few streets away, perhaps at the edge of the motorway. There was also, a little further off, the engine of a leaf-blower stubbornly keeping time, a dramatic accompaniment for a melody that would never come.
Suddenly Krim heard a familiar voice:
‘The worst thing is that half the people we’re going to see tonight aren’t registered to vote. That really drives me nuts … But what can you do, force them to vote? … Ah, you mean because they’re foreigners?’
Krim recognized his cousin Raouf and understood from the silences punctuating his sentences that he was on the phone. Raouf was the entrepreneur of the family. Krim could not see him, but imagined him wearing a brown turtleneck sweater and a striped jacket, flashing a perfect Colgate smile.
‘No, no, well, yes, foreigners should be able to vote as well. For the local elections – fuck it, for all elections …’
Raouf had moved to London and hadn’t been seen around for ages. Krim suddenly wondered if he hadn’t smoked a bit too much: he couldn’t remember his cousin’s face. He swallowed a mouthful of saliva and shifted position while trying to make as little noise as possible. Through the branches he could now see Raouf’s silhouette, earpiece and all, kicking the air at the goalpost; he was literally a few metres away. Krim listened carefully, wondering above all if he was going to manage to chase away the mental image of his joint’s contents, its tobacco-brown crumbs shrivelling away with each passing second.
‘Anyway, most of them are not foreigners. I mean, what do you call someone who’s been living here for thirty years? … Give me a break … if you pay your taxes here, you vote here, then that’s that … My Socialist Party membership card? Yes. No, but wait, listen, this is different, this is one of those historical moments when one man can make a difference. Ha, ha … Fuck, I’ve got nothing here, I don’t know how I’ll survive till Monday … What? No, don’t worry, fifty-two to forty-eight in all the opinion polls, even the front page in Le Figaro. Things look solid. I don’t know if the rumour that the Americans helped his campaign are true … but who cares if he wins! And come on, he was so good at Wednesday’s debate … The other guy was so nervous, all that finger-pointing … Whereas Chaouch was … Chaouch …’
Krim was under the impression that if he concentrated very hard, he could guess who Raouf was speaking to. But Raouf scarcely gave the person on the other end any time to catch a breath.
‘No, I don’t believe that crap. They’re driving us crazy with their overzealous caution. “The secrecy of the polling booth”, my arse. I mean, fuck, Chaouch won the first round, right? He ran a perfect campaign, completely positive, he hardly ever mentioned his opponent. You know how people talk about “protest votes”? Here it’s the opposite! It’s a vote for hope, people are proud. At last a little hope, a little enthusiasm and optimism. Chaouch embodies vitality. When people see him on TV they don’t see themselves as they are – nasty, hypocritical – they see what they want to be. They suddenly want to have faith in life, in the future …’
Raouf seemed carried away by his impassioned vision. His eyes darted around but never settled on anything. He looked around in the same way that he spoke: quickly, so quickly that, from this short distance, he seemed on the verge of taking flight.
‘Me, worried about what? The fall from grace? What, “You build a campaign with poetry but then you govern with…” No, no, I’m not worried, I’m sick of being worried …’
Meanwhile, Krim, in stitches with laughter, had stretched out on the slope and was watching the clouds race each other, graceful and dappled across the screen of a matt-blue sky that actually seemed soft, like a pillow – just as he imagined the sky would be in heaven.
He waited for Raouf to start speaking again and rolled another joint for later. Beyond the bushes, the sun drew the contours of the imperfect triangle of a pine tree on the sloping lawn, so distinctly that you could make out the cross-like point at its top. Krim had sniffed out nothing less than the ideal burrow: something between a hiding place and a promontory, an open-air den.
‘Hang on,’ Raouf said in a low voice. Then, scanning his surroundings: ‘I’ve got to ask you something, if you have a minute. Do you remember the last time, when we talked about MDMA? Well, there’s a girl I know, a friend from London who has taken some and is saying some pretty wild stuff on her Twitter feed … The love drug? No, I didn’t know. What, like you take it and then love everyone?’
Raouf drew on his cigarette. The sound made Krim shiver: it was succulent and moist, almost like that of a sluice pump, dampening the filter and proving Raouf had just reached a new critical threshold of nervousness.
‘Honestly, you’ve got to help me here. I’m not going to survive two days with the whole tribe if I’ve got nothing … Ah yeah, while w
e’re at it, why aren’t you coming? Because of Fouad, is that it? No, come on, your little war’s not going to last a hundred years! Hello? Nazir? … Yeah, I lost you for a sec, I was saying why don’t you come, but yeah, okay, I know. But fuck, I mean, it’s your little brother who’s getting married after all …’
A long silence followed, so long that Krim stopped listening. He only bent his ear when he thought he heard Raouf say his name. But he had no doubt been dreaming because Raouf was speaking about Fouad again, their actor cousin who had been on TV five times a week since the start of the year:
‘I know, when I came to Paris in January, there was a party and he didn’t show. Another time I was on Facebook at 4 a.m. and suddenly Fouad appears, I write to him and he doesn’t even reply. The same thing happens the next week. And what’s worse, each time he signs on and there’s my name on the list, he disconnects straight away. I mean, come on, don’t tell me that he’s busy at four in the morning! … If it really pisses him off to speak to his cousins, if we’re not good enough for him now, then screw him, you know what I mean?’
Krim’s mouth felt furry. He stood up with difficulty and went down towards the gym to fetch a drink of water without being seen. But the door was locked again. He was trying to find another entry when Raouf joined him on his way back from the playing field. His cousin winked at him and put a hand on his shoulder to ask him a favour.
There were a few niceties at first – how are you, your health, the family – with Raouf paying little attention to his cousin’s monosyllabic answers. When he finally got round to the subject at hand, it was Krim’s turn not to listen. He was fascinated by the cocaine addict’s tics, how by turns they lengthened and shortened his entrepreneur cousin’s clean-shaven face, its complexion whitened by his new life of dinner parties and the company of moneyed, fair-haired human beings.
‘Krim, you listening? I was just asking you if you could find something by tonight?’
Savages- The Wedding Page 3