‘Listen, we’ve got two or three things to sort out upstairs, so we’ll give you a moment. But not for long.’
Zoran continued to tremble: his bulging eyes stared at the lamp like two mauve moons, injected with blood and terror.
‘We’ll leave my little friend here with you, right, so you’ll have a bit of company. And when you’re ready to tell me how you know Slim, who’s just married my favourite great-niece, we can each return to our own lives, to each his own and God for everyone, all right?’
Frustrated at not having been permitted to disfigure the drag queen, Farid put the cage down in the middle of the room and opened the door. A metre-long river rat pointed its nose around, then ran and hid beneath the desk.
Zoran screamed hysterically.
Farid blocked the door with two piles of boxes before joining Fares and Benbaraka upstairs.
Benbaraka had poured himself a bowl of coffee and was concentrating on his BlackBerry screen. ‘How do you put those smiley faces in a text?’
Fares leapt up, only too delighted to be of use.
‘There’s a thingy for smileys, normally.’
‘Okay, do it.’
Benbaraka stretched out in his chair and congratulated himself on the texture of his jacket. He watched Fares, who was busying himself, trembling, on the phone’s touchpad, perhaps trying to forget poor Zoran’s cries. ‘Is it true you remember numbers?’ he asked.
‘Who, me?’ Fares felt himself blush.
‘Nazir told me. You have a memory like a computer, you’re given a number and you remember it. Is that true?’
Fares chuckled and said ‘Yes’ while looking at the floor, to avoid seeming boastful.
‘Do you happen to know what Nazir’s up to at the moment?’ Benbaraka asked in an unctuous tone. ‘He’s all agitated on the phone, I wonder if he’s up to something. Like planning to take off after leaving us in deep shit … What do you think, Farid? Sorry, Fares. I mean Farid. Whatever, one of you.’
‘Me? I don’t think anything … No, no, I don’t know.’
Farid looked on keenly as his brother lied.
‘I don’t know why,’ Benbaraka declared as he walked over to the window, ‘but I have a feeling that my dear Parisian associate is trying to rip me off.’
Fares kept silent. His ears turned beetroot while he stared at the screen of the phone, no longer seeing it.
Benbaraka’s voice made him jump. ‘You see, Farid, in this city there are two kinds of people: those who work for me and those who work against me. So listen to me closely, I’m going to ask you a simple question, and I’m even going to leave you a few seconds to reply. All right?’
‘But …’
‘Here’s the question, and once again, I insist, think hard before giving me your answer: would you say you work for me or against me?’
Horrified, Fares’s eyes sought his twin brother’s.
‘Take your time, take your time. Think hard about the question.’
Fares forced himself to salivate so that his mouth would be less dry when he replied. Zoran’s screams reached them without ever decreasing in intensity. But habit being what it is, they no longer tore at anything, those screams, not even at Fares’s attention. For Fares, the only thing that mattered was what he would say to Benbaraka.
‘For you, um, I work for you.’
‘Good,’ Benbaraka declared. ‘That was the right answer. Now show me the phone, you idiot.’
Fares joined him, offering him a choice of several smileys for the text that Benbaraka had written and which ended with an unfathomable: ‘You will know it’s me when I say the word mademoiselle. XO Omar.’
Benbaraka, looking at the dormant engines in the garage and clenching his teeth, impatiently opted for the simplest smiley face:
4
At Granny’s
Granny’s neighbourhood, 6.30 p.m.
Of the half billion results potentially awaiting him in Facebook’s search engine, Krim only cared about one. He turned around to check that the manager was engrossed in his Sudanese songs and typed in the girl’s name: A-U-R-E-L-I-E. Several possibilities were displayed, but he chose the photo of the young girl with light hair. Surname: Wagner. Aurélie Wagner.
Aurélie and his sister (password: daddy) had a mutual friend – a little gymnast from Hyères – which usually gave Krim (aka Luna) access to Aurélie’s photos, her videos, and most importantly her wall, where she posted snippets of her life and her favourite clips. But today when he clicked on her profile, the photo was still there, but nothing more – just the list of her 647 friends and a banner that announced pitilessly:
Do you know Aurélie? To see what she shares with friends, send her a friend request.
Krim buried his head in his hands and massaged his temples for a long time as he tried to think of a solution. He returned to Aurélie’s profile picture and unsuccessfully tried to enlarge it: Aurélie, standing on a lawn, held the Eiffel Tower between her thumb and index finger, enjoying the play on perspective as her other hand covered her mouth in a look of pretend amazement. Her different coloured eyes laughed sincerely, and she was irresistible.
There were three possibilities: Aurélie had removed Luna’s gymnast friend from her list of friends; Luna had removed this friend; or – a true vision of the apocalypse – Aurélie had decided to lock her profile and no longer share the highlights of her rose-tinted daily life with anyone but her friends IRL.
Krim pulled himself together and decided to dismiss the third hypothesis. In a genuine act of faith, he spent half an hour going through Luna’s gymnast friend’s wall, looking for a link that would give him access to the fortress of Aurélie’s profile. Unfortunately the only one he found was blocked. The final hypothesis was therefore confirmed: Aurélie had deliberately restricted her profile. Perhaps she was even in the process of deleting her Facebook account.
For diversion from his distress, Krim went through Luna’s photos. She had twenty albums, a good half of which were pictures of gymnastics competitions: Luna in a shiny leotard on the beam, Luna in a shiny leotard on the bars, Luna in a shiny leotard saluting the jury with her powerfully shaped body, Luna in a shiny leotard at the edge of the mat encouraging Lea, Margaux, Héloïse, Chelsea, all in shiny leotards…
Other photos showed her with a slew of best friends, those she’d solemnly declared to be her ‘sisters’ in several of the captions. Afternoon with the Girlz, Gym in the park with the Girlz, Cracking up on the train with the Girlz, strength conditioning, Julie’s b-day, Hélo’s fifteenth, Me (from the infamous album where she was striking provocative poses on a pommel horse), Jennifer’s party on 22 November, and an unlabelled image made up of virtual hearts, in all sizes and colours, where the boys and girls she liked were tagged and accompanied with smiley phrases as mystifying to the profane as they were to the young initiates.
Facebook stalking is like good old channel-surfing on TV: hours can go by unnoticed. Krim felt his mobile buzz in his pocket; he left the dizzying maze of photos where he had no chance of catching Aurélie’s pretty little face. But a post on Luna’s wall caught his eye. Just yesterday evening, Luna had downloaded an app that showed which of her ten friends visited her profile the most. You might have expected one of her gymnastics friends to take first place, but it was Nazir Nerrouche. Krim wondered what interest Nazir could possibly have in looking at his insignificant little cousin’s profile, and concluded that the app was not reliable.
Hunger pushed him to leave the cybercafé, where the boss refused his payment. He was smartly dressed, no doubt because of a happy event, so the tall Sudanese man with deep black skin and kind eyes insisted on giving Krim the hour he had just used up, as a gift.
He arrived at Granny’s in the middle of the all-time classic: a big family discussion about the difference between Kabyles and Arabs. His mother’s lynx-like eyes (she was, as always, on the front line of the debate) immediately pinpointed him in the crowd of cousins amassed in the corridor.
/> ‘Krim, Krim, come, come here, love. The poor boy must be hungry.’
Krim slipped between his aunts and uncles to reach the tiny little space his mother had made for him on the sofa. There were new arrivals: Rachida, the youngest of his aunts, was biting her nails on a chair slightly away from the excitement around the coffee table, shouting from time to time to her children, who were playing noisily with their father, Mathieu. Other cousins gathered in the room next door, as well as the third ‘Elder’ sister, whose husband had just had a heart attack.
‘Say hello, Krim, say hello to your uncle.’
The old uncle accepted the pecks on each cheek without getting up from his armchair. He was a man of considerable stature – almost one metre eighty-five – with a chest like a barrel. His thankless life spent on construction sites had not kept him from showing up in public wearing well-tailored grey suits, polished loafers and clean fingernails. Actually, his fingernails were the only telltale sign that he was getting old: some, Krim noticed, were ringed with black, most needed to be cut, and two or three were even dirty. He took the nape of Krim’s neck in his enormous mitt and spoke to someone invisible between Rabia and his son Toufik on the sofa opposite.
‘He’s grown, eh? Big boy now …’
Krim didn’t know how to react. He’d been this size for at least four years now, but he understood from his aunt’s gentle and dreamy look that the old lion was perhaps starting to lose it.
‘Come on, Krim. Here, take some! What do you want, a zlebia? A makrout?’
Before eating he had to kiss Toufik, which was a genuine ordeal because of the habit his cousin had of kissing four times instead of two, his mouth so perpendicular to the cheek that it felt like a kiss on the lips.
‘There’s a surprise,’ Rabia chuckled into her son’s ear, incapable of containing her excitement for long.
At first Krim figured it must be about the old couple’s daughters: Kamelia, Ines and Dalia, the joyful trinity, the older Parisian cousins who were each more beautiful than the next and who were the pride of the family, both at parties and at funerals. But Krim couldn’t see them anywhere and above all he couldn’t hear them. Their habit of shouting at the slightest comment, their madwomen’s exclamations, their Parisian accent and never-ending giggles – these created a very peculiar sort of atmosphere even when they temporarily left a room, like a shiver of coolness and joie de vivre that lingered in the sixth sense. Krim would have felt it in the core of his being if they had been the surprise Rabia was referring to.
Quite the contrary: in the kitchen he could see Uncle Bouzid’s authoritarian head chastising his sisters within reach.
Bouzid came back into the living room, where Toufik got up so his uncle could take his place on the straw chair that was missing half its back.
In the rear room of the flat, Granny was looking after the young cousins and Luna, who gave Krim a dirty look coupled with a cutthroat gesture. Granny really loved only the children in this family; she had installed an Xbox in her bedroom and pulled out some old-fashioned dolls (blonde mop of hair, big royal blue eyes with endless lashes) that she generally kept tucked away in a bureau stuffed with sheets, flannels and towels that no one had used for two decades but which she continued to wash and perfume every week with eau de Cologne.
And then right in front of him, Krim suddenly saw Zoulikha, Granny’s eldest daughter, who was sending worried looks towards the kitchen where everyone was used to seeing her busy. Old Aunt Zoulikha, who traditionally chimed the first ululation and who always began to soak chickpeas in the early hours the day before, polished her two couscoussiers until midnight, and found time the following morning to go and personally choose the bags of extra-fine semolina, which she transported in her cart from the Kabyle shop seven tram stops away, so as not to have to go to the Moroccan shop on her own street, where she had once spotted two cockroaches crawling up the till of the near-sighted shopkeeper. Zoulikha, who prepared the cloths, the ladles, all the utensils that might be needed, and who made sure that the women had their dresses and that the men had bought the right cuts of meat.
But this time she had been unable to do all that because the bride’s mother had decided there would be a caterer, full stop.
Krim observed her pink, chubby hands and was sad to see there were no grains of semolina there. Aunt Zoulikha was a spinster but was easily taken for a widow, even though she no longer seemed to care, being the only one of her mother’s seven daughters never to have found the right man. After her Uncle Ferhat’s wife died (in 1999), she had come to live with him to make sure he would enter the new millennium with his feet stretched out under the living-room coffee table, his chorba brought to him on a tray while he watched the familiar faces of his favourite news anchors. This odd couple had people talking for a while and then everyone had accepted it, once it was pointed out that Zoulikha remained and would forever remain that valiant and silent pair of hands, capable of preparing, without batting an eyelid, dozens of dishes for weddings, funerals and circumcisions, and also capable of listening to the most fiery confessions without ever suspecting there might be the slightest bit of gossip to pass on.
And then Krim saw, standing beside her, his great-uncle Ferhat. He realized he hadn’t even noticed him come in and, for the first time in months, he felt like crying. The old man hadn’t taken off his fur hat all day – he had no more hair on his neck, either – and his eyes were the saddest Krim had ever seen. Ferhat had once been a cheerful and mischievous old man – a musician, no less – gently teased for his stinginess, though he was, according to Krim’s mother, less backward than all his nephews put together. Last Christmas he had even taken out his mandolin, the one he once played to pass the time on the benches in front of the Saint-Ennemond church. Everyone who ever shopped at the butcher’s on this little square had heard his warm arpeggios. And then one day the butcher’s shop was replaced by a prayer room. The benches were ripped up so as not to obstruct the devout on their way out, and Uncle Ferhat, who was known for not being very religious, was asked to go and play his weird-looking guitar somewhere else.
‘Take Chaouch!’ Rabia cried. ‘He’s Kabyle, not Arab!’
An uncle made his voice sound conspicuously measured: ‘He’s Algerian, rlass.’
‘Yes, but he’s Kabyle. In his family they speak Kabyle! He’s called Idder, not Mohammed! I hate to tell you …’
‘Rabia, you don’t even know what Idder means,’ the uncle said, teasing her gently.
‘Idder? Uh, that means Idir, they’re exactly the same.’
‘Yes and what does it mean?’
‘He who lives, no?’ Dounia asked. She didn’t dare express her certainty in knowing the answer. ‘I think it means he’s alive, he lives, though I’m not sure.’
‘I’dder,’ Rabia proclaimed with a flourish of her hand. ‘Eh, I’dder!’
The whole of Algeria was in that twist of the wrist, but not enough to convince anyone in the room.
Rabia suddenly heard the term elomien, ‘the French’, and concluded, only God knows how, that she was the target. But she lost none of her enthusiasm and went on: ‘Well, so what? The main thing is that we’re not the same, that’s all. It can’t be denied. You don’t have to say we’re better or not as good, just that we’re not the same. Not the same language, not the same customs. Not even the same music.’
Dounia returned from the kitchen with tea and coffee. ‘Doune, tell them!’
‘Oh la la, I don’t want to start thinking about— No, no, sweetheart,’ she interrupted herself, saved by one of the little cousins opening an umbrella in the corridor. ‘You mustn’t open an umbrella indoors, it’s bad luck.’
‘It’s like whistling,’ Raouf joked, leaning over the little boy. ‘Granny says that if you whistle it attracts the shetan.’
‘What’s the shetan?’
‘Well, it’s the devil.’
‘Shh,’ Dounia whispered with a frown.
Raouf smiled apologetically,
helped his aunt take away the tray, and cleared his throat to make his own intervention, but his father got there first.
‘Wallah, it’s bigger than that, the truth is that we’re all Algerian, that’s all, and we have to stand side by side and move forward, together.’
‘Like the Jews,’ said a woman’s voice, swallowed up by the children’s cries.
‘And what’s more, I’m fucking sick of the past,’ Raouf added. ‘Comes a time when you’ve got to stop. The main thing with Chaouch is not that he’s Kabyle or Arab, it’s that he’s facing the future, that he motivates young people to create their own businesses … And above all, I’m sorry, but Chaouch is neither Kabyle nor Arab, he’s French! Like you, like me, like everyone or almost everyone around this table.’
Not everyone laughed because not everyone had listened, but Raouf’s father put his hand on his son’s shoulder and gave him a long, slanted smile, as if he considered his naivety touching. Raouf poured the tea, exaggeratedly lifting the pot. He had changed his Chaouch t-shirt for a black and blue suit that was worth three times the fake leather sofa on which he had found some room to sit.
The discussion was running out of steam. Rabia sensed this and put in her two cents. ‘As for me, during the debate I thought Chaouch was wonderful!’
‘Yes, but why was he wonderful?’ Raouf asked, challenging the whole room. ‘Why?’
It was apparently a genuine question. Toufik couldn’t bear the uncomfortable silence, which began to linger in the room as strongly as the smell of coffee. ‘He was wonderful because he managed to keep his cool. That’s all he had to do at that point. Stay calm and keep winning.’
‘No,’ Raouf replied, probably without having registered a word of his cousin’s suggestion. ‘He was wonderful because he wasn’t left-wing! Quite simply! He knows full well that if you keep increasing taxes on small businesses, young people are going to continue to do what I did, and leave for England! Am I right?’
Savages- The Wedding Page 8