‘What?’
‘Some weed, for example.’ Raouf hesitated, chewing on his lips, then added, ‘Have you heard of, what’s it called, MDMA?’
‘No. What’s that?’
‘Forget it. It’s Ecstasy, or a compound of it.’ Raouf put his hand on his neck and added dreamily, ‘People are calling it the love drug …’ With this he plunged his hand into his pocket and took out a fifty-euro note, which he stuffed directly into Krim’s palm.
‘In case you find something. And if not just keep it. Sadakha.’
Krim said he would let him know. Raouf asked for his phone number and called him straight away so Krim would have his. Then the two cousins disappeared into the muffled activity still floating over the car park.
Montreynaud Neighbourhood, 4 p.m.
A few moments later, in Uncle Bouzid’s car, Krim sent a text to Fat Momo asking about MDMA. Bouzid turned the sound down.
‘Well, Krim, I promised your mother we were going to have a little chat. You’re seventeen. When’s your birthday?’
‘It was yesterday.’
‘Okay. As of yesterday, you’re eighteen, so listen to me carefully …’
Krim knew very well what this was about. He went onto autopilot and chose to nod every fifteen seconds.
As he heard himself being scolded for having resigned from McDonald’s after two days, for having slapped his chignonned superior, and for slowly killing his mother, Krim delighted in his uncle’s smooth driving, which reminded him of his father’s and those evenings when, just because everyone was in a good mood, he was allowed to take the front seat and enjoy the shock-absorbed bumps offered by the road under a full moon. Krim could recreate this feeling whenever he played GTA IV: he stayed on the sidelines and kept away from the missions, the cops and the thieves, and just drove endlessly around those tentacular virtual cities where the world stopped, like in the good old days when the earth was flat, at the edge of an abstract ocean beyond which it was inconceivable to venture.
Uncle Bouzid, just like his father and just like Krim himself behind the wheel of his pixelated car, took ample and generous turns. In his uncle’s case, this was down to his professional training: he drove the formidable Number 9 for the Saint-Etienne bus service, linking the difficult neighbourhood of Montreynaud with the city centre. The habits of a wide turning radius and a steering wheel three times bigger than average could explain Bouzid’s way of forgetting the lines on the road when rounding a corner. Some of his turns made Krim shiver with bliss. He felt beautiful, worthy and important next to a man who drove his vehicle so serenely that you might let yourself imagine the same held true for the way he led his life. But it wasn’t the case – quite the opposite: Uncle Bouzid was in fact beginning to get worked up. He was looking in the rear-view mirror more and more often, and less and less at Krim:
‘… and then the moment comes when you have to have a bit of honour – néf, tfam’et? I too did some stupid things when I was young. What do you think? That you’re the only one? We’ve all been there. But hey, you’ve got to grow up at some point. And then you have to stop hanging around with your homies. People blame the right, what they say about immigrants and thugs … But the truth is, they’re right! I too would wipe out all those little scumbags with a hose. I see them every day, those wesh-weshes, those punks. I’m telling you: if one of them lights up a spliff or bothers an old lady, he’s going to hear from me. What do you think, that these thugs are going to rule the place? Well, now you’ve got to own up to your responsibilities. Especially with Chaouch’s election. I hope you’re registered to vote? You’re eighteen, so there you go, you can vote. Now, there comes a time when …’
Krim received a text as the car exited the fast road and pulled onto the winding road that climbed the hill of Montreynaud. He read it, hiding the phosphorescent screen with his hand.
Received: Today at 4.02 p.m.
From: N
D-1, I hope you’re ready.
Krim’s face clouded over. These last months Nazir had sent him an average of ten texts a day, ranging from ‘How’s it going?’ to philosophical maxims like, ‘Hope only makes people hopeless.’ Krim had learned to think for himself ever since he’d first been approached by his older cousin – to whom he probably owed his life. Maybe Mouloud Benbaraka would only have gouged out his eyes or cut off his balls. It was rumoured he once burned some guy alive who had disrespected his old mother…
Nazir had been able to negotiate with Benbaraka and save his little cousin’s skin because Nazir was of the same calibre as Mouloud Benbaraka: he was a man who saw things as they were instead of deluding himself. The texts he’d sent Krim were witness to that and Krim had carefully archived them, even though Nazir had categorically forbidden it. He’d even copied the most important ones on a piece of paper folded in three, which never left his tracksuit pocket.
To this text Krim simply replied that he was okay, that he felt ready. And then the car stopped at a red light, in front of a picture of Chaouch staring Krim straight in the eyes. Krim looked away and added, ‘What’s MDMA?’ which he blamed on the joint and to which Nazir replied in a bizarrely abrupt way:
Received: Today 4.09 p.m.
From: N
Mind your own business. And no drugs today.
The neighbourhood where his uncle lived was perhaps the most dilapidated in the city. It was also Mouloud Benbaraka territory and Krim unconsciously sank into his seat for fear of being spotted.
The streets on the hill were named after illustrious composers, the buildings after birds with melodious sounds: warblers, robin redbreasts, chaffinches … Here and there tower blocks sprouted up, thousands of windows bristling with satellite dishes that sparkled intermittently under the blazing sun. The concrete balconies were crumbling, the curtains and the walls were losing their colour. It was roundly expected that at any moment, despite the pushchairs loaded with shopping bags and the mothers who quarrelled with the madwomen on the first-floor landing, the towers could explode just like on TV. Twenty floors suddenly vapourized: no one would have been surprised. The landscape was desolate. It called for demolition like the jungle calls for rain.
‘Come on, we’ve no time to lose,’ said Uncle Bouzid, stepping over a twisted door at the entrance to his block of flats, on which a sheet of paper warned: THERE’S NOTHING LEFT TO STEAL HERE.
Uncle Bouzid stormed up the staircase and into his studio flat, where a thick smell of feet stagnated – coloured by that of his musk aftershave, the one he’d been buying since his teenage years in the seventies.
‘Try this one,’ he ordered Krim, pointing to a grey suit, blue shirt and brown tie that he’d just grabbed from his wardrobe.
On the door to the left were traces of a recent assault that had probably been carried out with fists. To confess his dark secret, Bouzid seized the moment when Krim was changing in the bathroom. He was just on the other side of the door, but thanks to the deafening ventilation system that came on with the lights, Krim could only hear about a third of his uncle’s speech.
When he came out holding his jacket, a bit dazed by the hunger that had begun to gnaw at him because of the joint, his uncle stood there staring at him with big brown eyes full of emotion. His chin trembled like Charles Ingalls’s in Little House on the Prairie: he looked like he was at the end of his rope.
‘For the rest of my life, I’ll have to pay. For the rest of my life. Five hundred euros a month, all that because of, zarma, a fight in a bar …’
Krim didn’t know how to react to solemn declarations like these. His mother also made them sometimes, with the same dilated eyes that tried to convince you that you were all part of a large artichoke called humankind. Feeling uneasy, he looked down and noticed that he would need some loafers. Had Uncle Bouzid thought about that?
‘You’ve got to stop all that stupid stuff, Krim. For fuck’s sake, you’re young, you’re intelligent, you’re in good health hamdoullah, you have your whole life ahead of you. Prom
ise me you’re going to stop?’
‘Yes, yes, I promise.’
‘No, no, I’m serious here. Swear you’ll stop.’
‘Yes, it’s okay, I swear.’
‘Good,’ whispered the uncle, pinching his shoulder. ‘I swear that things are going to turn out fine. And look, tomorrow’s the election, aren’t you pleased, Chaouch’s becoming president, insh’Allah? An Arab president, just to see the faces of those shit-scared Frenchies I want to see him elected, don’t you?’
‘Yes, yes.’
‘Good, then come here, we’ll find you some shoes and a tie. Do you know how to put on a tie? You have to, you know. It’s not every day Slim gets married!’
He seemed finally to notice his nephew’s odd appearance. ‘Okay, it’s a bit big, but it’ll do. Hey, you’ve got to eat a bit more, you don’t want to end up looking like Slim. Miskine, he’s as thin as a rake.’
Krim let his uncle plunge head first into the cupboard by the front door, using the chance to look around the place where Bouzid had lived since his ‘girlfriend’ had left him. He only went out with French girls, and each time it ended in merguez gravy, as he would say: they weren’t serious, they spoke to him rudely, so much so that he swore every time on Granny’s head that this was the last time, the very last time. He would find himself a girl who was good – Muslim, that is to say, sweet and fertile.
‘Do you know Ait Menguellet?’ he asked Krim, who was checking out a CD whose cover showed the spitting image of his father close up. A man of forty with a face that was long, fine, fair, tragic and moustached.
Krim shook his head.
‘Then consider it a present, for your birthday. We can listen to it in the car if you like, a bit of a change from the Rai. After all, our ears are going to be ringing from their towel-headed music tonight …’
Krim stuffed the CD into the pocket of his new jacket. It was the first time he’d worn a jacket with shoulder pads, the first time too that he’d worn canvas trousers with that kind of sophisticated fly. The grey, blue and brown top with the smart tie pleased him, but not the bottom part, where his black loafers clashed with the light trousers, as egregiously as a pair of white socks with a dark suit.
Uncle Bouzid pushed him towards the exit and fastened the three locks on the steel door. ‘What about the Army?’ he suddenly said. ‘Have you thought about the Army? No, really, I’m telling you, there are lots of possibilities. Or the Navy! A cook in the Navy! You need plans, you know. The most important thing in life is to have plans.’
Krim let his eyes rest tenderly upon that shiny pate. He soon heard the voice of a little girl at the other end of the landing; she was gearing up to leap down the six steps to the lift, all in one go. The dust in the corridor was irresistibly drawn towards a flood of light, which crossed the stairwell from the broken windowpanes all the way to the little girl’s caramel-coloured thighs. When she finally jumped, Krim felt the impression, the premonition, and soon the absolute certainty that this was the last time he would ever set foot in this building.
2
At the Town Hall
City centre, 4.15 p.m.
Twisting his neck, Zoran reached up towards the fourth floor of the narrow building, trying to prevent the little cat he’d spent the morning with from venturing out onto the ledge. He was making grand, useless gestures and whispering pleas, trying to avoid shouting out loud so as not to frighten the animal. For a moment he considered calling the fire brigade, but he didn’t know the number, and the cat had already turned back, no doubt frightened by a couple of pigeons cooing on the drainpipe.
Two passers-by turned towards Zoran, whose outfit, which he was wearing for the first time, couldn’t go unnoticed in this neighbourhood. He’d decided on it at the last moment, on a whim, in front of the wardrobe mirror that silhouetted his slinky figure against the depressing disorder of the studio flat from which he’d just been evicted over the phone: low-cut jeans faded at the thighs, with studded back pockets, iridescent ballet shoes; and a spangled t-shirt decorated with the Union Jack, which he’d cut away and shortened so people could admire his flat stomach and pierced navel. The jeans were a gift from a guy he’d met in Lyon who liked to see him in drag. As for the top and the ballet shoes, he had no idea who they belonged to. He’d simply taken them in the flat where he had been staying before being kicked out, thinking out loud in Romanian – maybe also for the edification of the cat, with whom he’d spoken at least as much as with his ‘roommate’ during the previous days – ‘If you’re going to be taken for a thief, you may as well have stolen something.’
After nodding to a guy who’d stopped dead in his tracks to observe him with his fist on his hip, Zoran took his suitcase and looked up for the last time at the half-open window, which peacefully welcomed the reflection of blue interspersed with an almost motionless white beam, indicating the passage of a plane or other motorized creature in the crystal-clear sky.
He walked along the cemetery that crested the hill, the one he had seen from his window for the past three weeks, then entered the bar where he had arranged a meeting for 4 p.m. sharp. He was late, but there was no trace of the person he’d planned to get together with. His favourite bartender wasn’t behind the counter, either, and the red-haired woman who’d replaced him looked like she was in a bad mood. She was dumping a pint of yellowish foam into the sink.
‘The barrels are empty,’ she immediately warned him.
Zoran hesitated to cross the few metres separating him from the counter. He couldn’t stand the tiled floor and the constant squeaking of the chairs.
‘Give me whisky,’ he said, dropping his suitcase at the foot of a high stool. He rested one buttock on it and repeated, looking her straight in the eyes: ‘Give me whisky.’
‘Can you pay for it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then show me the money.’
‘Why me show? Why he not show?’ He pointed at an obvious regular at the other end of the counter.
‘Listen, if you’re here to make trouble,’ she spat, ‘the answer’s no! We’re sick of …’
‘Sick of what?’
‘Of all you lot! When are you going back home to Romania? Don’t you see you can’t stay here? There’s no room here, no work! Are you at least here for work?’
‘None work in Romania.’
‘None work here either. Nothing at all, nada. I’m serious …’
The regular, who had been using his thumb and index finger to smooth the ends of his sandy moustache, grunted indecipherably. Did he want to prevent the barmaid from going too far or was he just suggesting she keep her voice down?
Zoran continued to stare at this horrible woman, to show her that they were equals. But his difficulty forming sentences in this impossible language made him stammer and look at the floor despite himself. ‘I have meeting man, four o’clock, he pay thousand euros. If I thousand euros, I ten euros. So give whisky, expensive whisky.’
The barmaid looked to the heavens and slapped her thick, flat palm against her forehead.
‘What do you mean a thousand euros? Hey, this isn’t a brothel, you get me? Get out right now! Out! Go on, out!’
At that moment, a customer appeared, a small man in a suit, sweating profusely. He came down the stairs that led to the bedrooms, or perhaps the toilets. Zoran stared at him until he was out of his field of vision. The barmaid waved at the man politely as he left, and Zoran felt like killing her when he saw her look him over in disgust.
‘Right, come on, time to leave now. Or I’ll call the police.’
Zoran slid off the stool, insulting the barmaid in Romanian.
He asked the drunk, now sprawled against the counter, what time it was – he hadn’t seen anyone since early afternoon. It was 4.30 p.m., and his ultimatum had not worked.
He wandered around the city centre in hope of finding the man who was to make him rich. Most of the people who saw him that afternoon turned round as he passed and made rude comments, sometimes
mouthed in silence, sometimes muttered quietly. There were also a few who spoke loudly enough for him to hear: a goateed grocer, a young mother smoking a cigarette by her pushchair, some Arab teenagers in tracksuits, two construction workers on their break, and an electrician with hairy shoulders. They all hated him the instant they realized he wasn’t a girl, but their hatred was fuelled by the fact that he was in no certain and definitive way a non-girl; he personified sexual ambiguity long after the first impression, from the provocative swaying of his hips to the slightest of his delicate gestures. His carmine nail varnish, which he openly continued to blow on, thus contributed to the hatred, as did his stubborn expression, his air of defiance, his twitching nostrils that asked for trouble. And then there was the mole under his left eye. It happens, when you find someone particularly unpleasant, that all the hostility he inspires in you is focused on one of these moles. Zoran’s was bluish, compact and disgustingly round. Through it, his whole unstable character screamed for attention. Because of it, his father had often beaten him. In public, Zoran appeared sure of himself, all-conquering. With his yellow eyes, broad shoulders and dark blemished skin, he wasn’t beautiful by any measure. But with the sort of men whose eye he sought to catch, being beautiful wasn’t much use; it was enough to be young, well made-up, have a slender body and a hairless torso, and give off an animal warmth, a smell of stables and sin.
After buying some gum, he walked around the cathedral square where children rode an old merry-go-round. Suddenly convinced he was being followed by a man in a beige jacket, he walked towards the centre of the square where nothing could happen to him. Three fountains sprang from an invisible source between the flagstones. When the sun reappeared after a brief absence behind the clouds, Zoran observed the shadow of one of the vertical jets of water, which seemed to flow more slowly. His own shadow also seemed to move on a delay, and he took advantage of that to look at it closely. It was then, while he cursed his shoulders, his stature and his penis, that he heard the honking.
Savages- The Wedding Page 4