Savages- The Wedding
Page 14
‘But that’s precisely what it is!’ Fouad cried. ‘That’s it! To be French means having a French ID and the rights that go with it. Full stop! National identity is a purely administrative problem. I can’t believe you let yourself be taken in by all this bullshit. If that were explained to Krim, he’d stop living like some sort of exotic creature and harassing his little blonde countrymen!’
‘Chaouch,’ Raouf asserted, sticking out his chest to process a burp, ‘is the man who’ll finally get us out of this debate. It’s a matter of image, it’s about who he is.’
‘No, I don’t agree.’
‘But it is. Chaouch is the one who comes along and says: I’m forty-nine, I’m handsome, I studied at the best schools, I’m charismatic and competent, I’m the mayor of a rough suburb, I’m the only French politician who can speak Chinese, I’m the party’s expert on economic issues, I know what I’m talking about and I can do the job. And what’s more, given that I have no foreskin and curly hair, my dear friends, fate has singled me out to rid us of the bogus civil war that my opponent and future predecessor has depicted, and we’re finally going to move on to serious things. He makes nice speeches, filled with symbols, but he does it precisely so we can get away from symbols!’
Fouad was about to react when the bride’s father suddenly appeared in his field of vision. He was an old man with beautiful hands and a profound expression.
‘Chaouch,’ he declared, pointing to the sky, ‘is a great man!’
The way he’d nodded at his own words, his accent from the old country and his air of mystery – these reduced the two cousins to silence.
‘Chaouch is a great man,’ he repeated. ‘I mean it, I’m telling you and I swear by the Koran it’s true: Chaouch is a great man.’
Dounia got them out of this impasse. They nodded their heads gravely to leave a good impression and went out to smoke. Fouad felt bad about abandoning him like that: he turned around, smiling kindly at the old man, who kept pointing his finger and moving his head up and down like a prophet of doom.
* * *
Out in the car park, Rabia put her arms around Fouad and Raouf. She’d just escaped from Omar when he’d gone to the toilets. ‘I hope you’re putting the world to rights. What are you talking about?’
‘Oh, this and that,’ Raouf replied, drawing a puff on his cigarette.
‘We’re talking about national identity,’ Fouad corrected, kissing his mother, Dounia, who’d just arrived.
‘Ah, national identity!’
Rabia looked a little drunk. She hadn’t had a drop of alcohol since her evening out the previous month with her French friends, but the dancing, the music and the crowd had made her cheeks red, and she wanted to have a conversation with some interesting and amenable young people during which she’d inevitably say more than she’d planned. Happy to find some familiar faces, she set the cat among the pigeons. ‘You’re another generation, you’ll succeed in life. We’re finished.’
Everyone protested, except Fouad who gave her a tender, earnest look.
‘We don’t belong anywhere. Over there we’re not at home, and over here we’re not at home! Where is home?’
‘Oh Auntie, you’re going too far,’ Raouf whispered without looking at her.
‘How is this going too far? You didn’t live through all that, but in the seventies, the seventies, we had to stand up in the bus and give our seats to the French!’
‘Ha, ha, you’ve seen Malcolm X too many times,’ Raouf laughed.
Rabia frowned and threw her arms about in protest. ‘I’ve seen Malcolm X too many times? I’ve seen Malcolm X too many times? It wasn’t that different, my boy. You know what happened to all the Arab girls at school? They were sent to vocational training! Eh, you didn’t know that, did you? I’ve seen Malcolm X too many times, well, I swear … Your mother,’ she exclaimed, pointing at Fouad. ‘On Granny’s life, Dounia was better than all the French girls at school. I remember, the teachers saw it, she got straight As. In French, in maths, everything! And you know what happened? Like everyone, oh yeah, like all the Arabs: sent to vocational training at Eugène Sue! Vocational training the … Zarma, you’re going to learn a trade to help your parents. But not a doctor, teacher, lawyer trade, of course. Oh, no …’
‘Yes, but that’s all changed now,’ Raouf said to calm things down. ‘Now almost everyone gets their baccalaureate.’
‘And then look,’ Fouad said, ‘look at Chaouch – for the first time, kids in the suburbs are going to think: this is possible. Someone like me can become President of France, of the French, of all the French. Maybe I’m being a bit idealistic, but …’
Rabia conceded, pensively, that Chaouch was probably going to change things.
The youngest, Rachida, joined their little group to sow some discord. ‘Hey, give it a rest. It’s Chaouch this, Chaouch that. But what’s that going to change? He’s a politician, that’s all. He’s going to be elected and that’s that, the poor will stay poor and the rich will get rich. I swear. The way you lot go on, you’d think Chaouch was God. Wallah, you’re pathetic. Honestly, you’re pathetic.’
‘Are you voting tomorrow, Auntie?’ Fouad asked.
‘Me? No way!’
‘I’m going to vote!’ Rabia protested.
She took out her polling card, the second she’d ever owned. The first and last time she’d voted had been in 1988, for Mitterrand’s re-election.
‘And you, Dounia?’ Rabia asked.
‘My card? It’s in my bag.’
‘Well, that warms my heart,’ Fouad commented.
‘Anyway, you’d better stop believing these things,’ Rachida slurred. Her mouth felt all furry, as if she’d just swallowed some medication. ‘Even if he’s elected, he’ll be assassinated. Stop …’
‘Nonsense,’ Fouad snapped.
‘Oh yeah? Look at his chief of security, who left because Chaouch zarma didn’t want enough protection. On Granny’s life they’re going to assassinate him. What do you think the French are going to say? “Well, we’ve got an Arab president, okay, sure, why not”? Dream on.’
‘Wait,’ Fouad cut in. ‘There’s a good reason he doesn’t want to be surrounded by an army all the time. He’s said so himself, he wants to be close to the people, close to the crowd. He’s being trusting, instead of playing on fears. That’s all, and it makes sense.’
‘We’ll see if it makes sense when members of the National Front stick a bomb under his car.’
Rabia scowled at her little sister with disapproval and returned to the battleground on which she had something to say. ‘Okay, yes, but how long did it take for this to be possible? And even now, what tells you he’ll be elected? You have no clue, you’re too young, your generation has had it easy, you weren’t around for the attacks against the Arabs. Go ask your uncles how it was back then. No, I swear there’s nothing you can do, the French are all racist at heart. They tolerate us but we’re still just guests. Wallah, we’re just guests here!’
‘You sound like Puteoli,’ Fouad protested gently, in reference to the editorial director of Avernus, an online newspaper that had brought together all the right-wing writers in the country at the height of the campaign. ‘But I’m telling you, it’s true. You’d think colonization wasn’t in the past but happening now, you’d think we’re the ones threatening France with colonization!’
‘Our hair!’ Rabia exclaimed, calling her locks as a witness. ‘Yes,’ Fouad sighed.
‘When we were little we were told that we shouldn’t have curly hair! Oh yeah, you don’t know everything! We were told that curly hair was for lice. On TV, you never saw newscasters with curly hair, they always had straight hair!’
Dounia, who was less interested in these debates than her sister, couldn’t keep herself from laughing at the last sentence. Fouad placed a kiss on her forehead.
Rabia took a phone call and launched into an excited monologue about the jewellery belonging to a woman in the neighbourhood who’d just died, abou
t those stupid Arabs’ taste for gold, and the deceased’s youngest daughter’s greed, who had rings and necklaces popping out of her eyes just like in a Walt Disney cartoon. A few moments after hanging up, in great sparkling form, she moved the conversation over to their late granddad, whom she claimed wasn’t being spoken about enough. She had called her nephew Raouf as witness, he who had the same nervous-little-man morphology, but was good at heart all the same: ‘You know what they used to call him? Alain Prost! Because he drove faaaaaast! A vava l’aziz, he drove so fast.’
‘Yes, and not very well either,’ Dounia added.
‘Eh? He didn’t drive very well? You mean he was a reckless driver? He’d how many accidents? Ten, twenty?’
‘Ha, ha, he had two. You exaggerate so much!’
‘Hold on,’ Dounia interrupted, ‘something’s happening around the bride over there.’
Everyone turned to look. The music had stopped for the first time in at least an hour, and the crowd had gathered around the throne.
‘That must be the henna,’ Rabia commented, turning to her sister. ‘You know that the mother’s not even an Algerian. She’s Moroccan!’
‘Wallah, you sure …’
‘On Krim’s head if he dies right now! She’s Moroccan; her father’s the Algerian one, from Oran. And I’ve seen him, the poor soul made me sad. But she’s Moroccan. Which explains everything.’
Dounia and Rabia disappeared into the hall to see the henna ceremony. It was applied to the bride’s hand by a woman who then slid the hand several times into an enormous red glove. The two inseparable sisters returned almost immediately – there were too many people.
They never knew that what they were missing was in fact a completely different ceremony. The DJ stopped the music, and the neon lights shone again on the sweat-drenched crowd, where most of the men had taken off their jackets and opened their shirts. The bride’s mother appeared on the platform, all the while sending emotional looks to her daughter’s throne, reading out the list of cheques that had just been given out by the guests.
‘The Boudaoud family, two hundred euros. The Zarkhoui family, three hundred euros. The Saraoui family, two hundred euros!’
The first three families had no luck, unlike the following ones who were congratulated by applause and cheers, so much so that the size of their cheques could not always be heard.
Slim was suffocating in his second suit, which had an excessively thick waistcoat. He wore the look of a condemned man whose punishment was to smile while the soles of his feet burned; with his mouth half-open, he neutralized any movement in his cheeks by keeping the corners of his lips still.
‘You all right, dear?’ Kenza asked him.
‘Yes, yes, I’m suffocating, that’s all.’
After a burst of feedback, Kenza’s mother restored the microphone to the right distance and continued: ‘The Naceri family, five hundred euros. And the Benbaraka family, one thousand five hundred euros!’
‘Bravo! Bravo!’
Kenza shook her head disapprovingly.
Slim took her hand. ‘Kenza, I think we have to talk,’ he said, stopping three times to swallow. ‘There’s something, there’s something I’ve got to …’
But the sentence died in his gullet. Sweat had stuck his black hair to his temples and terror prevented him from putting his thoughts in order: at the back of the hall, a little bit away from the guests who had started to dance again, Zoran, dressed in a strange, dirty outfit, was glaring right at him, completely motionless in a pool of multicoloured light.
7
We, the Children of Algeria
Community Centre, 1 a.m.
Mouloud Benbaraka strode towards the buffet to the tune of loud applause, where he shook hands like a president on a walkabout. He was undoubtedly wearing the most expensive suit at the reception, with a shirt open at the chest to display an enormous hamsa. Hanging from a gleaming chain that matched its owner’s golden canines, the amulet disappeared into his torso swathed in greying, curly fleece.
He observed a precise yet mysterious ritual as he made his way through the crowd. Every fourth handshake was enhanced with an impromptu visit from his other hand. When Benbaraka reached the buffet, this same second hand took the unsuspecting Toufik in a neck embrace.
Toufik thanked him profusely and began to blush.
‘Why do you thank him? Saha rebi saha!’ his mother said indignantly.
Rabia came up behind her, putting her hands on her eyes and shouting, ‘Guess who?’
Her sister was not in the mood. ‘Will you stop all this child’s play for a bit?’
Rabia sulked and ran in Luna’s direction; she was sitting at a table with the young man who’d been flirting with her. She kept her distance, seeking in her daughter’s demeanour the teenager she herself had been twenty years earlier. Physically, it wasn’t obvious – Luna was too athletic to look like her – but mother and daughter shared an undeniable joie de vivre.
While Luna poked at a bowl of melted ice cream, Yacine looked at her ironically, his fist crushed against his jaw and his right eyebrow raised. When Luna began to noisily suck up the last drops of ice cream through her pink straw, Rabia suddenly had a bad feeling – one of danger and scandal.
‘Well, well, are you all avoiding me?’
Omar was standing motionless behind her. Rabia gestured to her sister who was also returning from the car park, but she didn’t see her.
‘No, no, not at all,’ Rabia replied in a voice that couldn’t help sounding childlike when she pronounced all.
The bride’s mother appeared between them.
‘You all right, Mouloud? Everything going okay?’
Rabia frowned. The bride’s mother didn’t even glance at her and headed back towards the throne.
‘Why did she call you Mouloud?’
Benbaraka took no pleasure in playing this little game. But this woman’s voice and her mysterious youthfulness excited him.
‘I’m going to tell you the truth, Rabia, my name isn’t Omar.’
Rabia gestured again to Dounia and was preparing to join her when Mouloud Benbaraka’s hand clasped her naked wrist.
‘What are you doing?’ Rabia protested. ‘Let go of me right now.’
‘Come on, can’t we fucking talk?’
‘Yeah yeah, that’ll teach me not to play at child’s games on the internet.’
Rabia freed herself from the imposter’s shackles and ran over to her sister.
Benbaraka shook his head disapprovingly and texted Nazir to explain the situation.
Dounia was listening to her nephew Raouf, who was showing off in front of his cousins:
‘Yes, sure, I’ve seen Chaouch, several times, even. At a meeting. And at a debate in Grogny, where he’s from in the suburbs, you know. But that’s normal, as a young entrepreneur you have to meet people in high places.’
Toufik’s unibrow arched in admiration.
‘But did you speak to him?’ Dounia asked, to egg Raouf on a bit.
‘Of course!’ her nephew replied before stopping to check his phone’s screen. ‘I’ve shaken his hand and everything. Wait, I’ll show you the photos. Look, Chaouch’s bodyguard took this one. And that one, see? Seriously, he’s a good guy, and incredibly accessible. Honestly, he’ll make a good president.’
Intimidated by his cousin’s proximity to the most important man in the country, Toufik found nothing to say except, ‘Don’t the bodyguards have anything to do but take photos?’
Dounia saw Rabia appear in her field of vision. She looked worried, but Dounia didn’t let her open her heart straight away. ‘Raouf is such a show-off!’ she exclaimed with a flippant wave. ‘He won’t stop talking about how he met Chaouch, and how he manages restaurants in London, and so on and so forth. It almost makes me want to tell him who Fouad’s going out with … But anyway, I’m holding back, as Granny says – what does she say? Like, boasting attracts the evil eye or whatever … You all right, Rab? What’s going on?’
Dounia understood from her favourite sister’s uneasy silence that she was hiding something, and she didn’t have to deploy great powers of deduction to figure out that her virtual fling had not lived up to its promise. She took Rabia by the arm and forced herself to dance so as not to keep talking about the only subject that came to mind, namely their nephew Raouf’s constant boasting.
Far from the sound and fury of the reception, Krim, stretched out in his lair, hesitated to ask Fat Momo for another favour. By now Momo had taken ten hits on the joint, and when he passed it over, voluptuously exhaling his last puff, Krim didn’t even notice; he was too absorbed in the grey of the evening clouds, which he could almost hear mumbling on the sky’s floor.
‘Wesh you want the last of the joint or not?’
‘It’s weird all the same, zarma.’
‘What?’
‘They always say zarma, zarma it’s a true marriage, zarma we’re going to the beach, zarma you’re doing your James Bond act. Zarma, they always say zarma. Can I ask you a favour?’ he finally asked, apparently waking up.
‘If it’s got anything to do with Djamel, that’s not my business.’
‘No, no, it’s not that … it’s … can you give me a shotgun?’
Fat Momo stared at him, trying not to laugh.
‘A shotgun, what, are you nuts? We aren’t kids any more!’
‘Come on, a shotgun of smoke.’
Fat Momo finally coughed out a laugh, but he wasn’t stoned enough to fail to see that Krim wasn’t. So he turned the joint around and placed the lit end inside his mouth. He then put his open hands around the corners of his lips, and closed them to direct his smoky breath into Krim’s mouth, so close it was almost as if they were kissing.