‘Yes, well, he also spoke about other issues,’ Toufik ventured, blushing right up to his frizzy hair. ‘He made it clear he would be the president who would unite the French instead of dividing them.’
‘Yes, yes,’ Raouf conceded, ‘he did show that he placed himself in the continuity of French history, he finally spoke about the rough suburbs and … and, you have to admit it was impressive, well, I don’t want to sound like Fouad, but we have a candidate who, in the middle of a debate took the liberty of quoting Keynes, Proust and Saint-Simon …’
You could count on your ring finger the number of people sitting around the teapot who knew of Keynes, Proust and Saint-Simon.
Aunt Rabia made fun of this without malice by putting on a posh voice to quote from Titanic: ‘And who is this Keynes, a passenger?’
Everyone burst out laughing.
Raouf didn’t wait for the cloud of goodwill to clear before retorting: ‘But we don’t care about him showing off his education. What matters is—’
His mother gently interrupted him: ‘Oh no, we do care, at least he’s showing the French that he’s as educated as they are.’
‘That’s not the point, Mum!’ Raouf was heating up. ‘He doesn’t need to show anything to the French – he is French!’
‘And what’s more, he went to ENA,’ Toufik murmured, delighted to contribute an intelligent piece of information in the midst of the hubbub.
For a fleeting moment his eyebrows formed a V for victory.
Those three prestigious letters, E, N, A – Ecole Nationale d’Administration – filled Dounia and Rabia with pride. They puffed out their chests and looked at each other, laughing, while on the muted TV i-Télé’s news bulletin showed images of the charismatic Chaouch speaking without a tie to textile workers who had formed a horseshoe around him.
In a corner beneath the herd of advisers and bodyguards, the camera picked out the inscrutable face of the candidate’s daughter; she was a young, pale, hook-nosed woman whom Rabia seemed to dislike.
‘She’s bizarre, that girl,’ she said into Dounia’s ear. ‘You know why she never smiles?’
Dounia moved her chair in and stared at the TV.
‘It’s because she has vampire teeth. Wallah, I’m telling you.’ As her sister didn’t react, she added, ‘Honestly, you wouldn’t think she was Kabyle. Maybe her nose. But she gets her nose from her mother – you know Chaouch’s wife is Jewish?’
All eyes were soon on the TV. The continuous news feed indicated that the campaign had officially ended at midnight the day before. Someone turned up the volume and everyone listened as the pretty news anchor explained that the last opinion polls for the second round showed Chaouch in the lead with 51.5 per cent, but that the turnout remained the great unknown of the election. Opinion polls had never been so tight on the eve of a second round. As a point of comparison, the previous election had been decided right from the middle of the first week between rounds, a 55–45 that hadn’t budged.
An uncle who was thought to be asleep sat upright in his armchair. ‘Wallah, they’re not going to elect him …’
This fit of defeatism suddenly seemed to be shared by almost everyone in the room. Rabia gestured to Toufik to turn the sound down and asked Dounia for news of Nazir.
Her sister’s face clouded over as she thought of her eldest son. ‘Eh, I swear those two are giving me a lot of worry.’
‘It seems he’s got a wedding in Paris, so that’s why he can’t come?’
‘Don’t know, he doesn’t speak to me much these days. And when he does, he’s strange, always asking me if I go to the cemetery, if I go to the Tower from time to time. You’d think he wants me to live in the past.’
‘You know what Nazir’s like. He’s intransigent.’
‘He’s harsh,’ Dounia corrected, her eyes misting over. ‘He’s too harsh.’ Her lips remained half-open, but the rest never came.
‘Anyway you can’t have three identical sons,’ Rabia said philosophically. ‘As many sons as personalities!’
Dounia had brought up her three children in the Plein Ciel Tower in Montreynaud, on the thirteenth floor, lift B. Fouad spoke of this skyscraper as if it was a total aberration and regularly got annoyed that it still hadn’t been demolished. Nazir believed, on the contrary, that it had to be kept as a symbol. But the two brothers hadn’t spoken to each other for three years and had therefore not had the opportunity to debate this, to their mother’s great dismay. She was said to be wise, but confessed she was completely overwhelmed by this fratricidal conflict whose motivations she couldn’t fathom.
‘But they’ll make up eventually,’ Rabia whispered warmly, kissing her favourite sister. ‘Mezel, be patient.’
‘Eh?’ Dounia said, indignant. ‘Make up? Those two? The enemy brothers? Wallah, the enemy brothers. The day they make up, malat’n g’r’ dunit, will be the day the world ends! Why aren’t they more like Slim, easy-going …’
Rabia dwelled on this last remark. It was true that Slim was easy-going. Helpful, generous, polite and gentle. Come to think of it, where was he?
‘He’s gone for a walk with his brother. They don’t see each other often, but they’ll be back soon, insh’Allah. We’ve got to meet up at Saint-Victor in half an hour.’
Rabia murmured in her sister’s ear that she would like to speak to her alone. The two women went out onto the balcony. First they exchanged a few platitudes about the bride, whom they found very pretty, very polite, very lucky also to have found a boy as gentle and peaceful as Slim.
Then Rabia took a deep breath and plunged her big, dark, mischievous eyes into the gaze of the woman who had been her confidante ever since she was old enough to have secrets. ‘Doune, I’ve met someone on the internet. I asked Luna to register me on, what’s it called? Meetic? I don’t usually like that sort of thing, you know me, but in fact it’s just email. You send little messages, he writes back, you answer him …’
‘But have you seen him?’ Dounia was unable to hide her bafflement.
‘No, no; not yet. You mean with a webcam? No, no. He gave me his phone number and we send each other little text messages.’ Anticipating her sister’s next question, she added, ‘He’s called Omar. Like Omar Sharif.’
‘What, another Arab?’
‘C’mon, he’s not just anybody, he’s older. A sort of businessman, really classy, but don’t you go thinking … no, no, he’s a gentleman, I swear.’
‘I’m not thinking anything, I’m just listening. Omar.’
‘Well, that’s not all,’ Rabia shrieked, dragging her sister to the end of the balcony. ‘Guess what? He’s coming to the wedding. I don’t really understand why he was invited, but there you go, I’m going to meet him this evening.’
‘But how are you going to recognize him if you’ve never seen him? Does he at least have a photo on Meetic?’
‘No, no, there’s no need for photos. If you just want to pick up any old zarma guy, you might as well go to a nightclub, right?’
But Dounia wasn’t reassured: a worrying feeling weighed on her upper lip and kept her from giving her sister the warm smile of blessing that her big eyes feverishly awaited. ‘As it so happens,’ Dounia said, pulling herself together and stroking her sister’s hands, ‘I too have a secret to tell you … It’s about Fouad.’
Krim was staring at his reflection in the teapot, wondering why his father wasn’t there. Five years later, it was still just as inexplicable: others learned to turn the page, but not Krim; he didn’t want to move on. Could it be called suffering? He wasn’t sure. It was more like a sense of unease, like the thought of sinking your teeth into a bar of soap.
Someone put down a plate of little sweets sprinkled with powdered sugar and filled with silvery balls. Krim devoured half of them, much to Zoulikha’s delight.
His mobile vibrated in his trouser pocket.
Received: Today at 7.20 p.m.
From: N.
FM can’t get through to you. Did you train today?
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Krim saw that his hand was trembling. He stood up and moved to avoid Uncle Bouzid’s camera. Bouzid was relaxing, at last, by taking dozens of photos of the people gathered on the other sofa.
‘Krikri! Krikri, love! Come, come here two minutes. Allouar!’
It was, in fact, Kamelia, Toufik’s sister, who was playing with a little cousin. Luna deliberately avoided looking at him when he entered the bedroom.
‘Wesh Krimo, so what’s up? Come and sit down!’
Krim took his place beside her on the bed while Kamelia rubbed his head vigorously.
‘You all right? You don’t look happy.’
‘No, no, I’m just tired.’
He didn’t dare look at his older cousin and couldn’t find anything to say to her. Suddenly he had an idea. ‘Aren’t your sisters here?’
‘No, no …’ Kamelia replied, as if repeating it for the fifteenth consecutive time. ‘They’ve stayed at home. Hey, you have to come up to Paris! I’ll show you around, I promise, we’ll go to the Eiffel Tower, the Sacré-Coeur; you’ve never been, have you?’
‘No, never. But …’
‘But what?’
‘No, nothing. I’m going there soon, in fact. I … I’ve got my uncle on my father’s side, my Uncle Lounis, you know. He lives in Seine-Saint-Denis.’
‘That’s nice, I didn’t know you were still in touch.’
‘Actually, I haven’t seen him for a long time …’
The thought of Uncle Lounis always brought back the smell of wood. His father and Lounis – dry, brusque, nervous men – worked as lumberjacks when Krim was a toddler, and even now the strong smell of wood seemed to be the only source of unadulterated splendour in his life: the heady fragrance of the fir plantations encircling Saint-Etienne, the deep, acrid smell of the chestnut groves where they walked in the first days of autumn. One day the men were no longer needed in the forests. Krim’s father then got a job with Monsieur Ballerine, a sort of scrap dealer cum bric-a-brac trader who kept an Ali Baba’s cave on the side of the motorway. The trinkets his father salvaged from there were the apples of Krim’s eye: an old enamel coffee pot with intact white paint, a fat copper Buddha with a shiny gut, an aluminium coffee mill, or that famous sculpture with the three little monkeys – the one who hides his eyes, the one who covers his mouth, and the one who covers his ears.
Krim still owned the scraps of wood his father had used to teach him words as beautiful as cherry and beech. He’d saved the tin figurines – a couple of flamenco dancers in traditional costumes raising their fingers – as well as a series of paintings that portrayed violet sunsets and boats left at lakesides where each wave formed a crust that could be scratched, cut away and rubbed out as you liked. He had been furious with his mother the day she got rid of an apple peeler and a fluffy orange pouffe that held too many memories for her.
‘So you’ll have to come and see me?’ Kamelia said, jolting him back to reality.
‘Where?’
‘Are you asleep or what? In Paris, not on the moon!’
Kamelia put little Miriam down and took off her leather jacket. She was wearing a black sleeveless dress with a push-up bra covered by a polka-dot scarf. The scarf was translucent and Krim had to use all his willpower not to look at her full, smooth breasts; only the cleavage, sewn with tiny creases, indicated they belonged to a woman in her thirties.
Ill at ease, he felt two thin trickles of sweat flow from his armpits.
‘Well, apart from that, what’s new? Do you have a girlfriend?’
Krim turned bright red. Luna, who’d heard it all, decided to take revenge. ‘Yeah, he’s got a girlfriend, but she’s just called N.’
Krim got up to smack his sister, but she was quicker than him and his hand just swiped thin air.
‘She calls him all the time on his mobile and he’s so afraid they’ll discover her that he doesn’t even write her entire name. N – who could this be?’ Luna was jumping on the bed, hopping from one side to the other to avoid her brother’s arm. ‘Nathalie? Najet? Ninon? None of the above?’
Krim left the room as Kamelia gave her little cousin a sermon.
‘But it’s his fault. He tells Mum I’m acting like a slut on Facebook, what do you expect me to do, let him get away with it?’
Saint-Priest-en-Jarez, 7.25 p.m.
Zoran’s screams had devolved into endless sobbing. Taking refuge on the top of the sofa, he was on the verge of suffocation. It was fear, the fear that hadn’t left him since his abduction, that prevented him from pushing open the door to release the gigantic rat that scampered around and around the room making thin, plaintive, senseless, abominable roars.
A moth suddenly appeared in a corner of the ceiling. Zoran watched its wings beat and wanted to latch onto it so as to breathe more calmly. But the river rat’s eyes were staring straight at him, gleaming in the dark, erasing the rest of the universe. Unable to focus on the moth instead of the fat rat, Zoran began to hiccup: his shrivelled lungs were not going to hold out for much longer. He followed the moth’s harmonious flight and stopped himself from looking at the monster.
In the rodent he saw Evil incarnate – the devil among the living, with his sinuous movements, his hairy gestures. In contrast the moth was a creature from heaven, who brought heaven into the scents of the flowers, into their colours that breathed life into the weight of the fields of the earth. The moth might be grey, but it was a dense, rich, even luminous grey.
Daring to close his eyes, Zoran heard the murmur of the river flowing a few metres from the house.
The moth found its way to the lamp and settled on its fluffy shade. As he looked at its shadow dancing on the silk of the orangey red sofa, Zoran noticed that he was breathing normally again. He sniffed and kept looking upwards. The beast from hell had no reason to move. Zoran found another way to ignore the rodent: he tried listening to the conversation between the monsters in the other room.
The boss was talking about a wedding, describing the place where the reception would be held: a quarter of an hour away by car, near the motorway exit and the DIY store.
Zoran fantasized that instead of being locked up with a rat, he had successfully extorted the thousand euros from Slim and already fled south, to Marseilles for example, where his sister rented a hotel bedroom by the month.
The rodent suddenly caught his attention by banging against its cage. Zoran couldn’t help looking at it again, and therefore couldn’t help resuming his frantic crying. But the animal didn’t seem to mind in the slightest. It was moving about the small rectangle where it had begun its entry into Zoran’s life and had no thought of climbing onto the sofa. It could surely have done so, given its monstrous size and amphibious suppleness, but it preferred to rummage around its cage by the boxes, or under the desk, where it suddenly discovered a little red key, which it examined with its forepaws against its white whiskers.
For the first time, it showed its teeth.
Zoran started screaming again. His previous screams had not seemed to bother the beast, but this time it wanted to defend itself – or the key, perhaps.
Zoran jumped on the bed, shouting, and managed to make the lamp fall on top of the animal. The light cut out, and Zoran realized he had only one solution left: to get out through the door, in the hope that the boxes piled up on the other side were not heavy enough to block it. For if that was the case, if the door was blocked and he had to stay with the beast in total darkness for more than one minute, then there was no doubt his heart would give out before the rodent had even begun to inflict its first bites.
At Granny’s, 7.30 p.m.
As he walked past the kitchen, Krim remembered that he was starving. He nibbled on a few pastries and soon felt the need to get organized. He hesitated to open the fridge, convinced that the whole flat was secretly connected to that thick white door and that he was going to attract everyone’s attention (which he didn’t). Once he’d poured himself a bowl of milk and dipped his makrout in it, his hunger grew insatiable
and now he wanted something savoury. He discreetly got hold of a tube of mayonnaise and heard, while looking for some bread in the cupboards, the France Info radio jingle announcing the evening news. He noticed the old bread basket, which was missing a handle. Granny kept her loaves for several days. She cut up product packages and sent off the coupons to be reimbursed. She spent hours doing this and was reimbursed hundreds of euros a year. But while trying to access the bread that was protected from humidity by three plastic bags, Krim rebelled against the absurdity of the whole process. There was madness in the way Granny tied up the bags. He could easily imagine her tightening knots that only her own fingers, with their ferocious nails, could undo.
Devouring his toast – finally! – and mayonnaise, Krim listened to random interviews of people on the street; everyone, it seemed, was going to vote for Chaouch. Then he listened to a studio discussion featuring an expert on security issues who spoke of rumours of a terrorist attack and of AQIM, which had become, he said, ‘a campaign figure in their own right’ – the expert was audibly proud of the expression he’d coined. The female journalist interrupted him to remind listeners that AQIM stood for Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, after which the analyst, clearly unaccustomed to the way things are done on radio, had some trouble picking up where he had left off. He described the terrorist organization and returned as quickly as possible to current events. The threat was certainly present, but the terrorist alert level had been raised to its maximum since well before the first round of the election.
‘And then you must know,’ the expert continued, regaining his confidence, ‘that the threat is less to the president, as you might suspect, than to the candidate Chaouch. It’s a paradox that really isn’t one at all, if you think about it: AQIM’s last message precisely identifies Idder Chaouch as a – I quote – treacherous dog, who has renounced Islam and deserves death. When you know the Socialist candidate’s sensitivity on these issues, his refusal to have too restrictive a security presence, you understand that there are grounds for concern. I would just like to draw your attention back to that resignation on the eve of the first round of the election …’
Savages- The Wedding Page 9