Savages- The Wedding

  He recounted this last vision to Nazir, who snapped back with advice that sounded more like an order: don’t get distracted.

  Krim decided he could hold off on pissing and returned to his plate. Well and truly alive, his mother was monopolizing the conversation as she cursed the bride’s mother.

  ‘This is just too much! And that music, it’s too loud, someone has to tell them, look at poor Uncle, he has to cover his ears! I swear to you, the Oranese … the truth is the Oranese are a rotten lot.’ Rabia threw her thick curls from one shoulder to the other, revealing the small mole on an angered vein at the base of her neck.

  Krim saw some bloke at the next table wave to him. He had just recognized a song, and had rushed onto the dance floor, pointing to his own chest and waiting for Krim to react. He continued to whisper ‘Come on, come on’ in his direction, joining his gestures to the words and dancing with his elbows, wrists and neck so ardently that you might have thought the end of the world was nigh. Suddenly Kamelia left the table and Krim realized that she was the one he’d been after from the start.

  About ten people were now dancing to the tune of ‘Sobri Sobri Sobri’. Kamelia must have learned not to show off her bosom too much when she shook her hips, but Krim couldn’t take his eyes off them: those incredible big breasts and how they transformed their owner, a little piece of flesh and blood with a social security number like everybody else, into a unique and irreplaceable goddess of fertility, of springtime, of love, of all that was most beautiful and terrible in the world.

  To change the subject, Fouad mumbled a ‘Hmmm’ while swallowing his glass of Coke. ‘That’s funny,’ he went on. ‘I thought the song went: chole chole chole Algerians watch out …’

  ‘Pff,’ Rabia groaned, ‘their Arab songs are crap …’

  ‘Rabia, sesseum,’ her big sister scolded.

  ‘I mean it! It just isn’t right. We’ve been hearing their songs all evening! Don’t forget the groom is Kabyle. It should be half and half – half Arab songs, half Kabyle songs! That would be fair!’

  ‘Wallah, she’s going to get us into trouble!’

  Fouad took his aunt by the shoulders before she became the scapegoat of the entire table. He kissed her cheek and invited her to dance.

  ‘But wait, I haven’t finished!’

  ‘You can finish later!’

  She let herself be pulled towards the dance floor, which was finally getting crowded. Fouad parodied flamenco while an overexcited young man with a frizzy mullet thrust himself forward with each drum beat. He was soon the centre of a small circle where people applauded, shouting ‘eh-eh-eh’ to the rhythm. An old woman launched into a series of ululations, and the manic dancer knew that his moment of glory was just beginning when the first notes of Cheb Mami’s ‘In Wonderland’ rang out: ‘My heart’s in wonderland! My heart’s in wonderland! La la la la la, abuma djaou s’habi ou djirana!’

  ‘Well, you asked for it, there’s your Kabyle song!’ Fouad shouted into his aunt’s ear.

  ‘Yes, but it’s not the original version! It should go: E y azwaw …’

  Rabia stopped talking so Fouad could appreciate the young man’s incredible dancing. Fifteen people had just joined the circle around him. They watched him in astonishment, and occasionally with some irony, as he invented before their very eyes what came to be known as the head-butt dance. Indeed, he was re-enacting Zidane’s World Cup head-butt against Materazzi, and his whole being glowed as he walked the tightrope of ridicule: his long laughing face, his big bulging eyes, the curls of his sweat-soaked mullet, the way he dramatically spread his hands out wide each time he changed direction.

  ‘Ha ha,’ Rabia laughed, ‘this guy is incredible!’

  She was the first to imitate him. She was followed by a small group of dancers, a lot of young men and soon some children who wanted to see what all the fuss was about.

  A forty-year-old woman suddenly heckled Fouad: ‘Hey, I’ve seen you on TV! Aren’t you the actor in that series, shit, what’s it called? Hey, Boubouche, Boubouche, come and see!’

  Boubouche was dolled up like a stolen car, probably to divert attention from her twisted nose and her heroically proportioned chin. ‘Oh yeaaaah! You’re right!’

  ‘Yeah, it’s him! Man of the game!’

  That’s when Slim appeared with his wife, surrounded by a cloud of little children all wearing grey sleeveless sweaters. ‘Oh yes, it’s the great actor Fouad Nerrouche! But above all, he’s my brother!’ He took Fouad’s hand and belly-danced around the children.

  It was neither the first nor, probably, the last time Slim showed an embarrassing outburst of affection. Fouad smiled calmly while Rabia went back to their table for some refreshments.

  In her excitement, she remained oblivious to the others’ gloom. ‘Doune, come here! You’ve got to get up and dance a bit!’

  Her good mood finally spread to Dounia, who had the bright idea of tying a scarf around her waist. Rabia grabbed it in turn, fastening it around her own waist and swaying her hips, the way she used to do at parties long ago.

  ‘Krim! Come here! Come dance!’

  Krim was slumped in the chair he’d found at the end of the table, between Zoulikha and Ferhat, whose forced smile had become a grimace. Ignoring his mother, he asked his great-uncle if he knew how to play ‘We, the Children of Algeria’ on his mandolin.

  The old man caressed his great-nephew’s cheek. ‘Umbrad, umbrad, my son.’

  Later. But Krim hadn’t been asking Ferhat to actually play it.

  ‘Hellooo, anybody there? Earth calling the moon, do you copy? Krim?’

  Krim looked up at his mother and stared at her furiously.

  ‘Yeah, okay, there’s no point in even asking, is there … Lulu darling, you want to dance?’

  Luna jumped up from her chair, immediately joining Kamelia, whom she danced with for at least fifteen minutes.

  ‘Now, who’s this little princess?’ Yacine asked Kamelia, undoing his tie.

  His satin suit continued to gleam in the darkness of the dance floor. Kamelia murmured something in his ear and started dancing with her little cousin again. But Luna couldn’t take her eyes off the handsome Yacine. He was about twenty, perhaps even younger, with sparkling eyes and a determined chin.

  ‘Can I dance with him?’

  ‘With Yacine? Sure thing, sweetie, go ahead, it’ll give me a break!’

  Luna didn’t know what her cousin had meant exactly, but she wiggled around in front of Yacine anyway, while he watched the voluptuous Kamelia disappear into the distance.

  Saint-Priest-en-Jarez, 9.30 p.m.

  After an hour of skidding and careening through the quiet neighbourhood streets around his office, Mouloud Benbaraka slammed on the brakes, drove up onto the pavement and called for Farid’s car to join him. It showed up a few minutes later, and the twins stepped out empty-handed.

  ‘I can’t believe this!’ Benbaraka shouted. ‘He can’t have just disappeared into traffic like that!’

  Farid was paralysed by his boss’s anger. He stared at the ground and wiggled his toes to see if the movement showed through his leather shoes. He was about to suggest something, but Benbaraka refused to let anyone speak.

  He kicked his tyre. ‘Look, I’ve got to go to the wedding now. Do you understand? So this is what you’re going to do: you’re going to split up and keep looking for him. You’ll stay around here to check all possible paths, as far as the North Hospital, OK? And you,’ he added, staring at Fares, ‘look at me! You’ll go into town, near place Marengo where that fucking gypsy camp was. You’ll ask everyone you meet. Fuck, how hard can it be? The fucking tranny stands out like a sore thumb!’

  Fares lifted his finger to say something.

  ‘But what about the wedding? Why don’t we go straight there and look for him at the wedding?’

  Mouloud Benbaraka had exhausted his thin reserve of patience.

  Farid took the initiative. ‘Fares, how can you be so fucking stupid? If there’s o
ne place he won’t go, it’s the wedding! He knew we were asking him about it, he’d be going straight into the lion’s den, you stupid arioul! As for the cars, you keep yours, and you take the other Kangoo from the office.’

  ‘And Nazir?’ ventured Farid.

  Benbaraka didn’t reply. He jumped into his BMW and sped off. Lighting a cigarette, he dialled Nazir’s number.

  A few moments later Nazir called back. Their conversation lasted about ten minutes, until Benbaraka was in the community centre car park. He was seething with rage, and hadn’t even switched off the engine when he exploded, roaring into the mobile, ‘But that’s blackmail! How dare you …’

  One sentence from Nazir was enough to silence him, but once he’d hung up, he pounded his steering wheel, taking no notice of the hoots he sent into the void. A few people who were smoking in the car park turned around. Benbaraka rang Fares: ‘Forget the Kangoo and the tranny. I just spoke to Nazir. Go home, have a rest, take a shower and do what he’s asked you to do.’

  He lit another cigarette and sat silently. People were filing steadily in and out of the community centre, and some were even dancing in the car park. His cousin, Kenza’s mother, had called him ten times. He debated whether to put on a tie but ended up opting for an open shirt.

  People recognized him as soon as he arrived on the dance floor. He greeted those he had to greet and asked where the groom’s family was. His cousin pointed out a far corner and a few people dancing in the middle of the floor.

  ‘Zarma, the Kabyles,’ the bride’s mother added with a disdainful look.

  Benbaraka joined the crowd of dancers and moved in close to a woman who looked about forty. Between songs, he reached out to her. ‘Mademoiselle? Rabia?’

  The woman shook her head and pointed out another woman with big dark eyes, who had tied a scarf around her waist and was laughing while fanning herself with her hand.

  After spotting the small group around her and assessing the calibre of the men who might want to protect her, Mouloud Benbaraka moved towards her and whispered in her ear, ‘Can I have the honour of the next dance, mademoiselle?’

  Rabia stepped back from the gold chain that hung in the middle of Benbaraka’s chest like a stolen decoration at the prow of a pirate ship. She leaned towards the intruder’s ear and shouted, ‘Omar? Is that you?’

  Mouloud Benbaraka made a gesture with his head that could also have meant no. Not standing on ceremony, he took Rabia’s hand and led her slightly off to the side. Rabia acquiesced but looked back to Fouad and the others. They were dancing a few metres away, the darkness spangled with multicoloured lights zigzagging on moving bodies and sweaty faces, with the exception of Omar’s, which was parted in a wolfish smile.

  Back at the table, Kamelia noticed that all the young people had left, except for Rachida, who was trying to feed her daughter, and Krim, who looked depressed.

  ‘Krim, Krim, Krim! My little Krim, you’re not dancing?’

  ‘No, it’s not my thing.’

  ‘You okay? You’re all red, you’re not too hot?’

  Before he could reply she turned to old Ferhat, who was on the brink of apoplexy.

  ‘Uncle, you’ve got to take off your hat!’

  Maybe he didn’t hear, or maybe he deliberately didn’ t hear, but nonetheless Ferhat didn’t move until his ear began to itch. He then just readjusted his ushanka while Zoulikha, facing the dance floor, offered polite smiles to people who couldn’t see her because of her position in the darkest corner of the room.

  ‘Come on, it’s just the two of us,’ Kamelia whispered. She apparently had the same inability as her mother, indeed as all the women in this damned family, to remain silent in someone’s presence. ‘Who’s this girl, you can talk to me, you know, what are older cousins for?’

  ‘No, but …’

  ‘She’s called N and what comes after?’

  ‘No,’ Krim snapped, ‘she’s not called N!’

  ‘Then, what is she called?’

  It was too much. Kamelia’s breasts were quite simply too big, too round, too perfect, so he figured she wouldn’t notice it if, from time to time, he glanced at them furtively. ‘Aurélie. Her name is Aurélie.’

  ‘Aurélie,’ Kamelia repeated greedily. ‘I’m warning you, I want to know everything about her. Absolutely everything!’

  She took up the lotus position on her chair, no doubt like all the girls did at those infamous pyjama parties where they took turns sharing secrets while sucking on a Mr. Freeze.

  ‘Have you met her? Does she live here in Saint-Etienne?’

  ‘No, no, she lives in Paris. But I met her last summer, when I went down south.’

  ‘Oh yeah! That’s awesome! Where?’

  ‘In Bandol.’

  ‘And have you been going out for a long time?’

  ‘Yeah, quite a while. It’s beginning to be quite a while.’

  ‘And a long distance relationship’s not too hard? I’ve had enough long distance relationships, but then again, you’re young.’

  Krim was grasping for a reply when he felt his mobile vibrate.

  ‘Who is it? Is it her?’ Kamelia’s eyes were shining.

  He stood up. ‘Yes, yes, it’s her. Hold on …’

  ‘Go on, go and talk to her, you can have some privacy.’

  Krim stepped outside for the first time that evening and wondered why he hadn’t done so sooner: the wind was strong and it was no longer that warm, but at least he could smoke and avoid the awkward silences and conversations.

  ‘Wesh, where are you?’

  Fat Momo replied that he was in the area and had something for him.

  ‘In fifteen minutes at the gym. Sahet, my brother. No. Wait, not at the gym, just up from it, at that little stadium there. See you.’

  Krim was on the way to the playing field; he saw a grocery shop with its lights on, overlooking the complex where, in addition to the community centre and the gym, there were two hard tennis courts and a discount store.

  He crossed the car park, walked up the road opposite the traffic, and turned onto a street where he remembered there was an internet café. When he stepped in, a bearded man took off his headphones to point to computer 2. On computer 2 Krim launched Firefox and logged onto Facebook. He connected to his sister’s account and wrote a message in the dialogue box that had popped up on Aurélie’s profile, in one go, and without any spelling mistakes:

  Luna: Hi Aurélie do you remember me? It’s Krim. I’m on my sister’s Facebook account because I don’t have my own. Here’s my number if you want to call me. Before tomorrow or tomorrow but no later. PLS.

  After which he typed in his mobile number and waited seven minutes, seven long minutes during which the counter wouldn’t stop ticking, before pressing Send.

  He reached the stadium at the same time as Fat Momo, who had indeed brought a surprise: instead of the rotten dope they’d been used to lately, he’d been given some weed, some quality weed that Krim sniffed sensually, plunging his nose into the plastic bag.

  ‘Hey come on, Leon, let’s have us one.’

  ‘Wesh my man,’ Krim replied. His heart had not stopped racing since he’d left the internet café. ‘Come on, I know a hideaway in the bushes over there.’

  * * *

  Dripping with sweat after a frenzied ten-minute dance with his daughter, the bride’s father sat down next to Raouf and Fouad, who were busy sparring on the Socialist candidate’s attitude towards national identity. Raouf approved of Chaouch’s republican values – he was clearly passionate, but didn’t want to overdo it. He also admired Chaouch’s intransigence on the issue of secularism, and above all he valued Chaouch’s ‘pragmatism’, a word he systematically turned to whenever he lost the thread of his argument.

  The music prevented the conversation from developing harmoniously, but after thirty minutes of volleying sentence fragments over the tinny voices and bagpipes, the two cousins managed to express, for the umpteenth time, that which they held closest to
their hearts, which would have united them in their division or divided them in their union, even if the argument hinged on the colour of the tablecloth – that enigmatic, distorting phenomenon they sometimes clung to as if their lives depended on it: their opinion.

  ‘But anyway,’ Raouf said without looking at his cousin, ‘you live in a world of fantasy ten thousand kilometres away from reality. At first I, too, thought Chaouch was just that, a yuppie candidate who’d allow intellectuals to …’ – he almost said ‘jerk off’ but opted in extremis for convention – ‘masturbate. Fortunately he’s got a good team behind him, and isn’t as bad at economics as the lefties who support him.’

  ‘You saw the debate?’ Fouad asked. ‘When he said, “Democracy isn’t when we’re all equal, it’s when we’re all noble”? Didn’t you hear that?’

  ‘Yes and so what? That’s just a slogan, who cares? It’s like support from stars and intellectuals, Zidane and co. It’s a load of bull.’

  ‘Yes, I would have said the same about any other candidate. But when Chaouch poses for a photo in front of historical France with its church towers and wind farms with his slogan, “The future is now”, I believe it. The future is now. He’s not saying we’re sick of the past – he knows very well that would annoy born-and-bred Frenchmen – so he says: what unites us is the future, and if you think that’s just a slogan or PR, then we may as well stop there.’

  ‘You only care about symbols,’ Raouf complained, ‘not reality.’

  ‘Yes, but that’s what a country is, an idea above all else! And symbols are reality as well. When Chaouch wants to abolish the legion d’honneur, for example, it’s not just a symbol he wants to get rid of: it’s an aberration!’

  Raouf rolled his eyes the way he always did when a conversation lingered on a theme where his eloquence lacked the theoretical nails to hammer in. He moved the debate back towards his preferred ground: ‘That said,’ he insisted, undoing his tie, ‘we’re not that far apart. In my view Chaouch is the only one capable of getting the integration machine going again. To make sure that being French is not just about a social security number and an ID card.’