‘Fat Momo, ha ha. He spends his time hitting on girls, I’ve never seen anything like it. He even hits on my Facebook friends.’
‘Dude, you’ve got to tell him …’ Krim said indignantly.
‘Nah, it’s funny, I don’t care. Last time he tagged one of his girlfriends and he also tagged himself in the photo, even though she’s the only one in it.’
‘Ha, ha’ – a laugh Krim felt impelled to force out, even though Fouad’s story wasn’t finished.
‘Then the girl asks him: where are you in the photo? And you know what he replies?’
‘No, go on, tell me.’
‘In your heart.’
Krim looked down, unable to relax and laugh without pretending.
‘All right then, I’ll go and say hello to the others and I’ll see you in the other room, okay?’
‘Okay.’
‘And wait, one more thing: what has to be thrown in the Furan?’ Fouad asked with the glimmer of a grin.
‘Nothing,’ Krim said hesitantly. ‘Some dickhead who does things, I don’t know, he wants me to come with him, but, but I’m not into that stuff.’
Krim had no idea what his lie had sounded like. He hadn’t heard himself say it and nothing in Fouad’s expression indicated that he didn’t believe him – not a trace of disapproval. There was only cheerfulness and trust.
Fouad stubbed out his half-finished cigarette and joyfully left the balcony, winking knowingly at his little cousin.
‘That’s what you call a true film star!’ Rabia exclaimed, pressing kisses on his cheeks.
‘A TV star, you mean. The star of the small screen … that’s me!’
‘I don’t miss an episode, wallah, it’s so great! Ah, and the other guy, the baddy with the wart. Ah, I can’t stand him. You know him?’
‘Ha, ha, you mean François! In real life he’s the nicest guy in the world.’
All the aunts were soon gathered around the prodigal son. They spoke for ten minutes about Man of the Game, the series he’d joined the previous autumn in which he played the manager of the most popular fictional football team in the country. He had quickly become so indispensable that his name headed the opening credits. Man of the Game on Channel 6 had even toppled the 8 p.m. news. It was the television event of the past year, and attracted both football fans who were curious about what went on behind the scenes – they admired the series’ realism – and their wives who were perhaps more interested in the romance.
‘So,’ ventured Rabia, who seemed to be the most ardent fan in the family, ‘are you going to stay with Justine until the end of the series?’
‘Well, um,’ Fouad joked, ‘I’ve signed a confidentiality agreement, I can’t give anything away!’
‘Zarma – you sign confidentiality agreements now!’ Rabia mocked. ‘Well, well, well … Don’t forget I used to change your nappies, so you can’t use that confidentiality agreement thing on me!’
Fouad burst out laughing and agreed to reveal a small part of what he knew.
But after a moment, although he was generally at ease and immune to any form of embarrassment, he felt the desire to confess that he didn’t think very highly of the series, which he considered a day job above all. He wanted to tell the truth, to share his deepest thoughts, but he quickly changed his mind: his aunts would never have understood why he of all people spat on their favourite show, the one for which they had all sacrificed the sacrosanct evening news bulletin. And it was thanks to this series that they no longer felt shame when their friends showed off about having children who studied medicine or who made so much money in their import-export business that they could build houses back in Algeria and take holidays in Dubai.
A few moments later the fever had died down a bit, or rather, it had moved to Granny’s bedroom. The youngest had all gathered around Fouad to watch and applaud little Miriam, who had memorized the choreography of an already outdated Katy Perry track. She wanted to become a professional B-girl. In the meantime, murmuring the words to ‘Firework’, she threw her arms out in front of her and back to her sides, blowing on the locks of brown hair that got in her way. At the chorus she very convincingly mimed the fireworks shooting from the characters’ hearts in the video. Her little brother wanted to take advantage of the aura surrounding the little dancer and do a duet with her, just as she had regularly forced him to do in the secrecy of their bedroom. Miriam blew on him with comic ferocity, as if he was one of her locks of hair.
Krim entered and closed the door behind him at the very moment his sister decided to improvise a game of Name That Tune with Kamelia’s MacBook. After what she’d done to him, Krim would never have ventured into the same room as Luna if he hadn’t felt the irresistible urge to be in Fouad’s entourage, the burning desire to see him and be seen by him, a ferocious, blind and curiously non-violent drive, to which he acquiesced as if he were being carried away by a warm current in a cold sea.
‘Go on Spotify,’ Kamelia advised Luna, who’d taken her mobile.
She went to sit at the back of the room. Leaning on the cast-iron radiator, she checked to make sure the windowpane behind her, which nightfall had now turned into a mirror, did not reveal the reflection of the photos of the singers she was going to play.
Kamelia and Fouad were sitting next to each other; little Miriam was bobbing her head, sitting on the star’s lap. The older cousins were spread out on the bed, where Raouf tried to make a little room for the newly arrived.
‘So?’ Raouf murmured in the ear of his dealer for the day.
‘Yeah, right now it’s dead out there, but maybe in an hour’s time I’ll have something, at the reception hall.’
Krim showed his imperturbable bored face again, the face of someone who would rather not be there despite not actually having anything else to do – but deep down he wanted to be present among his kin, to wait and go with them to the wedding, and for that to never end.
The opening bars had barely started when he shouted out, ‘Michael Jackson!’
Everyone turned towards him. The music continued, and indeed, within ten seconds everyone had recognized ‘I’ll Be There’.
‘Wow,’ Kamelia offered. ‘Krimo one, everyone else nil.’
Luna wasn’t very happy with this turn of events. She deliberately chose a song he would have no chance of knowing. A minute passed and still no one recognized it – except Kamelia, who whispered the answer in Miriam’s ear. They applauded loudly.
Miriam screwed up her pretty face and twisted her wrists while hiding behind Fouad. ‘Come on, next song!’
Luna thought for a moment, deciding to prove that she could be not only the mistress of ceremonies but also a person of taste.
But once again, three notes were enough for Krim.
‘Drake.’
In the following round:
‘Kanye West, of course.’
And then finally:
‘Jay-Z.’
At which point Luna changed her strategy and wracked her brains to find French songs that were so obvious it would be purely a question of speed. The tension in the game gradually disappeared, thanks to Johnny Hallyday and Francis Cabrel, who made you feel more like singing along than moving on to the next song.
Krim, understanding he’d won anyway, decided to let the others sing, even if everyone seemed genuinely delighted that his fifteen minutes of fame hadn’t been marred by a single hesitation.
In the other room, the Elders took advantage of Fouad’s absence to talk about his older brother. The fact that he wasn’t there was regrettable, but you had to acknowledge that Nazir had been very helpful when, a year and a half earlier, he’d returned from a long trip abroad to live with his mother.
‘Ah, yes, yes,’ said an uncle, who had placed himself in the centre, ‘what he did with the Muslim graves of Côte Chaude and Crêt de Roch was really good, wallah. And he was fearless, he went to the cemetery services, the town hall, he spoke to them, I swear, you would have thought he was a politician!’
>
‘That’s for sure,’ Dounia agreed, ‘he’s fearless.’
The very mention of Nazir often created that sort of silence in the family, a silence that rose in the brain like a black tide and made you roll your tongue seven times in your mouth before speaking.
Rabia rolled hers just twice before giving her opinion on the issue. ‘No, and the truth is it’s good a thing, what he did for Chakib. No, you have to admit, he didn’t have to and he’s the only one who … I mean it’s true!’
Chakib’s father, Moussa, was the only of Granny’s sons who’d decided, thirty years earlier, to go off and live in Algeria, in Bejaia, where Chakib came of age with no prospects of work. Nazir had managed to bring him to France by finding him a French woman to marry. No one dared say much about her after her photo was passed around; she came from the back of beyond and looked like Droopy, while Chakib was a postcard Kabyle, with light ginger hair, beautiful green eyes, and the sun-kissed skin of a young man who spent most of the time hanging around on the beach.
‘The truth is, it’s thanks to Nazir that I have a job.’
Everyone nodded gravely at Toufik’s remark. If Dounia hadn’t been in the room, they could have let loose and talked about the scandal, namely that Nazir wasn’t even coming to his little brother’s wedding.
Instead, Toufik recounted how Nazir had managed to get a meeting with the mayor by waiting outside his office for three hours.
Fouad, opening the door and hearing his brother being talked about, prepared to return to the surprise party in the bedroom when he saw Mathieu, Rachida’s husband, gesturing to him. He manouevred them into the corridor, where they chatted about Bruce Springsteen and Chaouch’s economic programme. Fouad liked Mathieu, the whole family liked Mathieu – they just felt bad about having burdened him with the insoluble problem that was his wife. They had two children now, two beautiful mixed-race children with already sad eyes, so it was now out of the question to advise Mathieu to do the only thing that could be in his interest: to take to the hills.
Just as he was declaring himself in favour of an increased dose of protectionism (he himself, as a skilled worker, had been the victim of unbridled globalization when his business had been outsourced to Shanghai), Rachida wandered over to their little corner of shadow and stood before them, expecting to be invited to join their confab. To avoid the inevitable ire that came from looking at her, Fouad just greeted his aunt with an affable smile and focused more exclusively on her young husband. He had round eyes, thin brows, and that panic-stricken but firm look that clarinettists display when they work through a passage full of high notes. In fact, he looked more like a clarinet than a clarinettist, with his long thin neck and narrow face, spotted with acne and shining with a fine film of sweat, particularly when his eyes lit up as now with pedagogical passion:
‘I’ll put it this way, that’s the problem: why do all the other countries of the world have the right to protect themselves while we let ourselves get screwed?’
‘Ah, you’re still talking all that rubbish,’ Rachida said. ‘I’m going, all that stuff pisses me off. And while we’re at it, when are we going to the wedding?’
Slim, who had been with the old relatives from the start, came and joined their little group.
‘Would anyone like some tea?’
‘Slim, are we going to the centre soon?’
‘Granny said in fifteen minutes. There’s no point arriving before she’s there. But I’ve got to go and prepare the hall a bit and check that everything’s ready.’
‘Anyway, bravo, Slim,’ Mathieu said, patting his shoulder. ‘She’s very pretty, and she looks like a nice girl, and serious as well.’
Slim thanked him warmly while Rachida began to sulk, hoping to be noticed and asked to explain her mood change. Everything about her was round: round back, round lips, and round eyes that were always on the edge of pity but now shined with a malicious gleam.
‘So, Fouad, as soon as we start talking about Nazir you leave the room?’
‘Rach, stop it.’
But Mathieu had no authority over her.
‘What do you think, that I didn’t see you? I see everything. I say nothing, but I see everything.’
‘Well, Auntie, I’m sorry to disappoint you but I was in the other room, and I didn’t know you were talking about him.’
‘You see, you don’t even want to say his name!’
‘Ha, ha,’ Fouad said, unsmiling.
‘Come on, say it.’
‘What?’
‘Your brother’s name!’
‘But why would I say it?’
‘Nazir. Na-zir. He’s your brother, after all! Friends come and go, but family … That’s what they say, right? And what’s more, he came here two, three years ago, pshhhhhh, you should see all he did! Oh yes … And all on his own as well: he gave cash to everyone, he found work for Toufik, didn’t he? I know it’s off limits to say it, but you know what, I don’t give a hoot about taboos: he even went on a crusade to make the Muslim graveyards bigger. I swear he was a benefactor of mankind, on Granny’s life, a true revolutionary!’
‘An armchair revolutionary, yes.’
Mathieu was nearly breathless. Then he did in front of Fouad what he’d never dared do in front of anyone: he took his wife by the arm and led her into another room to have it out with her. Rachida was so surprised that she didn’t know how to react; her only attempt to protest was extinguished by a severe look from her husband, who was sick of being a wet blanket.
‘Hey, let me go,’ she whispered loudly. ‘Let me go!’
Fouad and Slim remained side by side without hazarding a word to each other. Slim noticed that his big brother’s fists and jaws were clenched. But a moment later he was walking towards the living room, making them all fall about with laughter:
‘Seniors, I hope you’re having as much fun here as they are in that bedroom!’
Before leaving the house, someone managed to persuade Granny to play a home video on her flatscreen. Toufik had to adjust the wiring so the old camcorder could read the VHS tape she’d just found by chance in the bookcase. The setup devised by Toufik – it was his trade, after all – worked perfectly, and all the adults saw Krim appear on the screen, as a child of maybe nine years old, filmed by the late granddad while practising on the keyboard he’d just been given for Christmas.
At first unaware of his audience, he was playing Grieg’s ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’ from memory, retrieving the notes on his own and having to start again only once, when his left hand failed to hit a bass chord sequence in a dramatic enough manner. When he resumed his playing, intending to apply his left hand more deftly and add some trills, he noticed Granddad’s camcorder and hid his eyes with his forearms, smiling, revealing a little boy’s shiny mouth from which two front teeth were missing.
‘He’s too cute,’ Kamelia cooed. ‘A little Mozart.’
‘He’s always been shy,’ Dounia added, creasing her eyes to fight back the tears, probably moved by her own father’s voice.
The adult Krim entered into the family’s view, to the right of the TV. The contrast was striking, between the little Mozart bent over the keyboard and the problem teenager with a severely shaved head and a drooping, bellicose bottom lip.
The famous music by Grieg, or rather the wrong notes, had caught his attention. The aunts made a big fuss over him, and his cousin Kamelia moved onto the arm of her chair so he could come and sit next to her, but Krim preferred to remain standing.
On the screen, Granddad, with his warm and gentle voice, managed to persuade his favourite grandson to play something for the camera. The scene took place in the living room of the flat where he had been born and raised. A young Rabia could be seen preparing meatballs and, very briefly, her husband appeared reading Paris-Turf, the racing sheet, while Luna endured his teasing. She was the most precious thing in Krim’s life back then, both mascot and living toy, an agile and explosive little creature whose every funny face, every
remark, the slightest cartwheel, the smallest burp, made headlines in that magical newsreel that had been their happy childhood.
While child-Krim struggled away at the keyboard on screen, Rabia, eleven years later, made coffee in the kitchen. Losing herself in the shimmering green earthenware, she pinched her lips and shook her head to keep from crying.
Granny came in. ‘No, no, no, why are you making coffee? We’re about to leave!’
Krim retreated into the bathroom so that he didn’t have to listen to himself massacring Mozart’s Sonata facile. He locked the door and looked at himself in the three-way mirror on the Formica cupboard above the sink. The wings could be folded like those of a church altarpiece, and Krim enjoyed looking at these other Krims: in profile, in three quarter profile, one quarter profile, all of them more ugly and ridiculous than the last; they had secretly coexisted for years with his normal face, which all of a sudden he no longer seemed to know.
His mother had always told him, with ever so slightly contemptuous tenderness, that he had a ‘really small HC’, like all Algerians. HC meant Head Circumference, and was one of those medical terms she habitually used, as if she were talking about his nose, foot or forearm.
Krim opened his mouth, pretended to vomit, studied his little Adam’s apple and the annoying mole that jutted out ironically between his collarbones. He tried to adopt a serious pose, the look of someone you don’t mess with. But his squashed cheekbones, his temples and his smooth cheeks, his feminine jaw and his rounded upper lip – all proclaimed that he was a child, a little Arab of which there are millions, who couldn’t even stand his own stare in the mirror for more than ten seconds.
* * *
‘Ferhat with his fur hat, we’ve all told him but he doesn’t want to take it off. You want to know what I think? I think it’s miserable being old …’
The wind was blowing harder and harder, roaring powerfully through the car park. No one could have imagined that morning that it would rain, and yet it was now the most probable scenario. By chance Krim found himself in Dounia’s car, with his mother in the front seat and him in the back next to Fouad. Dounia put on a CD by Lounès Matoub, and Krim, who was feeling confident thanks to Fouad’s presence at his side, asked his aunt if she didn’t by chance have any Ait Menguellet.
Savages- The Wedding Page 11