But Krim couldn’t get hard. After tugging away in vain for a quarter of an hour he gave up and catapulted his faithful sock against the screen.
The computer’s puritanical purr ended up lulling him. Slightly stoned, he meditated on his obsession with tall, big-breasted girls. It wasn’t the breasts themselves he craved, but the undeniable and more or less spectacular physical event they constituted: instead of there being nothing in that space there was something, two mighty globes of flesh that beckoned inwards. In fact, Krim preferred their cleavages above all else. He liked it when there was something going on; who didn’t like it when there was something going on?
He threw the sock and the tissues from his pockets into the rubbish and checked his watch for the first time. As a precaution he hadn’t switched off the computer, which could take ten minutes to reboot. He returned to it briefly and logged into Facebook with a sigh. Slumped against the back of his chair, he didn’t immediately see the red notification that was going to change his life. His eyes were open but he couldn’t see a thing. He was thinking of the Chaouch poster, of Uncle Ferhat lying on the floor, and it was while remembering that he needed to delete the message he’d sent Aurélie from Luna’s Facebook page that he realized she’d replied.
He sat up in his chair and read:
Aurélie: Krim!!! I tried to find you on FB but it was impossible! Of course I remember you! It was so much fun on the boat! For the friend request what should I do? Should I accept even if this is your sister’s FB? Whatever you like. If not I’m at home in Paris, so if you stop by one of these days give me a shout. My number: 06 74 23 57 99.
Krim trembled, reread the message ten times, and paced around his bedroom. He looked up at Rihanna, Kanye and Bruce Lee. He didn’t know which of these divinities to thank for the immense warmth that had just filled him. He’d completely forgotten how much his hands hurt.
A text from Nazir tore him from his bliss:
Received: Today at 4.45 a.m.
From: N
Your train’s in an hour. Hope you’re not sleeping.
Krim wondered if Nazir knew what had just happened at the community centre. Apparently not. He texted back that he was ready, that he wasn’t sleeping. And then he put on his second tracksuit with the fluorescent stripe, the one from which he’d torn off the Coq Sportif logo. He found his finest Lacoste polo shirt and decided at the last minute to wear a leather jacket. However, he made the mistake of choosing the pair of new trainers he’d bought with Nazir’s money, but which were the wrong size. His feet mysteriously continued to grow: he was now a size 11 when the previous summer his size 10 trainers had been slightly too big.
His mobile indicated that he’d received eight calls from his mother since he’d left. Not one from Fouad. After one last look at the highest C-sharp note on the keyboard he’d hidden beneath the bed since Fat Momo’s visit, he took the envelope from his inside pocket and looked at the train ticket. It left Châteaucreux at 5.48 a.m., there was a long transfer at Part-Dieu, and he would get to Paris at 9.27 a.m. A yellow Post-it on the ticket indicated what metro line to take once he got to Gare de Lyon.
He took out the rubbish, tying the black bag up nicely, and then went to the bathroom. When he flushed the toilet he was overcome by emotion, a feeling of finally being free from the weight of things, one that he felt again while tossing the rubbish bag into the long vertical bowel that led to the bins in the cellar.
When he left the building and made his way to the station, he could hear the birds singing in the trees. The desolate wind had finally subsided without giving way to more than a few minutes of drizzle an hour earlier. There remained a few playful gusts that no longer promised storm but sun, renewal, and dew on the lawns.
Krim passed through the city centre in slow motion. He listened to the fluttering foliage of the poplars, the weeping willow and the plane trees. Some shoots of pruned branches suddenly emerged at the edge of the streets, and Krim was astonished to see them covered with buds where all the others had leaves.
He stopped in front of the railing of a little square. The sprinklers were still, the trees stripped of blossom, the sand damp. Why did an empty square always seem to him to have just been deserted?
When he arrived near the station he lit a cigarette, in the midst of the arrogant lunar décor. The ultramodern façade had ten, fifteen, twenty long strips of mirrors folded in pleats, which reflected the immense sky where Krim could still see nothing of the breaking day.
The station was vacant. Whether on the platform, at the ticket desk or in the waiting room, there wasn’t a soul in sight. No travellers, no uniformed employees, no families there to say farewell to early-rising passengers. The lighting was faulty, and entire areas of the station were lost to darkness. In the vending machines, long metal hooks were empty of their snacks. The revolving billboards were devoid of posters.
The SNCF train jingle rang throughout the station – C, G, A flat, E flat – and a recorded voice announced the train for Lyon. As the loudspeaker went silent Krim could hear only one thing: the quavering neon lights of those screens that would soon be praising the morning radio programme on France Inter, or Luc Besson’s new film, or advocating the consumption of five portions of fruit and vegetables a day.
He switched on the spell-check function on his mobile and thought about what to write to Aurélie.
Community Centre, 4.50 a.m.
The bride’s mother tore out two strands of hair with each hand when she saw the police arrive, just a few minutes after the ambulance carrying old Zoulikha had left, followed by her sisters in Bouzid’s and Dounia’s cars. The blue flashing lights drove the point home and confirmed her worst fears: this stupid Kabyle family had managed to ruin the most important day of her life.
Slim bumped into her while trying to join his brother, who was negotiating with the police.
‘What are you doing?’ the bride’s mother said indignantly. ‘You’re not leaving as well, I hope?’
Slim remained still, unable to focus on finding the right response.
Fouad, who’d overheard some of the conversation, asked the policemen to wait a moment and went over to the bride’s mother: ‘Now that’s enough from you!’
The bride’s mother took a deep breath and prepared to make a scene.
Fouad stopped her by raising his finger and shooting her a dark look. ‘Slim, you can stay if you like – I just want to file a complaint at the station. But tell me, do you know anything about this? Ferhat says it happened ten days ago, the attack, but he’s not really making sense.’
‘I don’t really know,’ Slim replied. He was having trouble breathing, trying his best to live up to the situation. ‘He’s been acting strangely for a while, yeah, maybe ten days. You’d have to ask Zoulikha.’
‘Yes, well, that’s not possible right now. So, what are you doing?’
Faced with his brother’s bewildered face and knowing he was incapable of making a decision alone right then and there, Fouad decided for him. ‘Stay, stay with your wife, it’s better that way. The reception will soon be over anyway.’
But a deafening burst of music contradicted him, a heavy beat Rai song, which seemed to have been put on specifically to make them forget Ait Menguellet’s ‘We, the Children of Algeria’. Fouad closed his eyes in acquiescence for a second, to show Slim that he didn’t mind if he stayed. It was his party; he couldn’t leave while the guests still wanted to have fun. And he would be useless at the station in any case. Slim wiped a tear from the corner of his eye and joined Kenza, who put an arm around his neck and kissed him generously under her mother’s nose.
Toufik and Kamelia hadn’t followed the ambulance cortège: they asked to ride with Fouad. Fouad agreed, but Toufik no longer had a car. The police, who had recognized and were consequently well disposed towards Fouad, agreed to take everyone in the back seat.
At the same moment, the ambulance arrived at North Hospital. The on-duty nurse and a small, red-eyed ER doctor transf
erred Aunt Zoulikha from the stretcher to a gurney waiting for her at the entrance. Rabia’s older sister, who was having trouble breathing, pointed at her.
‘You have to let her breathe a bit,’ the doctor said, putting his stethoscope on Zoulikha’s deathly pale, shrivelled flesh.
‘Where is Krim?’ the old woman asked between two breaths of oxygen.
They put a mask on her and led her into an exam room. The nurse asked one of her colleagues to look after the family. Rabia wanted to follow her sister, but the nurse was firm.
‘No, no, Madame, your aunt …’
‘My sister!’
‘Sorry, your sister is having a minor heart attack, you must go to the waiting room now.’
‘A heart attack?’ Rabia’s eyes filled with tears.
Dounia took her sister by the shoulders and led her to one of the seats by the coffee machine. ‘What did she tell you?’
Rabia was on the brink of explosion. Luna came and took her mother in her arms and began to sob, thinking more of the kiss that the bride’s brother Yacine had stolen than of what had happened to her great-uncle, the significance of which she didn’t quite grasp.
‘She was asking after Krim,’ she replied to Dounia.
‘And where is he?’
‘I don’t know! I called him ten times, but he isn’t picking up. I’m telling you this is going too far, he’s not going to get away with it!’
She was speaking about the skirmish with Belkacem, whom Krim had thought was Omar. But on thinking about it for more than a second, she knew that she would no doubt never see Omar again after what had happened, and then, suddenly, her unbearably intense thoughts overflowed from her inflamed eyelids and she launched into a litany intercut with sobs. ‘My children mean everything to me, my children are my entire life. Who do I live for? For myself? Do I spend my money on clothes and jewellery, for myself? No, since their father’s death, God rest his soul, I live only for them, I live for my son and my daughter, and I’m telling you now, wallah, cerfen tetew, rebi, may he shoot me the moment they touch a hair of my son or daughter’s head …’
Dounia, who seemed to have inexhaustible reserves of composure, took her sister’s hands and covered them with kisses to make her smile and calm down.
‘He must have gone home. He has his key, doesn’t he? So you see. Everything is going to be okay.’
‘Poor Zoulikha. What happened? One moment, things were fine, people were dancing, and then suddenly …’ She began to cry again.
‘The nurse says it was a small heart attack, you’ll see, and she’s made of solid stuff, wallah, she’s tough, Zoulikha. You remember in Saint-Victor when she helped Granddad put up his tents?’
‘Saint-Victor,’ Rabia repeated in a murmur.
‘That lazy Moussa went off to sun himself and pick up girls, and during that time we sisters had to do all the work.’
‘And yeum, where is she?’
Dounia replied that Granny had long since left with Rachida, who was very angry about the reception, which she had known was cursed from the start. ‘You’re right,’ she added when Rabia didn’t answer. ‘I have to call her to let her know. It’s not like I can wait till tomorrow morning.’
‘And Kamelia? Raouf? Toufik? The great-nephews? Are they okay?’
‘Kamelia and Toufik went to the police station with Fouad,’ Dounia reassured her. ‘Come on, stop fretting, have a rest.’
Rabia looked up abruptly and searched for her brother Bouzid. She rushed over to him and asked what had happened to Ferhat.
‘Hey, calm down, Rab, calm down!’ he shouted. He began to explain what he’d seen on their uncle’s head.
‘And what are you going to do? You’re going to find them, I hope! You’re not going to be like good little Frenchmen and wait for the police? Bouz, look at me! If the men in the family don’t find them, I swear I’ll deal with it myself. Attacking an old man like that …’
The horrific vision of a head shaven and tattooed with obscene signs stopped her from going on. She almost vomited and went back to sit next to Dounia.
Raouf had stayed in the background and now went to stand under the TV, which since early evening had been repeating the urgent non-news that was typical of the dawn of second-round elections. The TV hung from the ceiling so that everyone could watch. But no one did. Those who waited for medical care or bad news were generally not in the mood for TV. Raoul undid his tie and without really watching saw the images he now knew by heart: Chaouch glad-handing the elated crowd at his last event. Some panning shots worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster swept across the hysterical faces and their bulging eyes. It occurred to Raouf, while he ran his hand over the stubble returning to his chin, that this was what Chaouch had done for this country: he’d enlarged people’s eyes. Like in the Japanese cartoons that he watched in the small hours of the morning, since he could no longer sleep more than three or four hours at night: immense, unreal eyes. Eyes enlarged so you could draw more tears from them.
On the motorway, 5.15 a.m.
Fares had never, of course, driven a car as powerful as the Maybach 57S, which he was under strict orders to take to Paris. Night and day during the past few weeks, he’d watched over the garage where Nazir wanted it kept. Fares and another guy took turns pampering it. But it was Fares who’d got to screw on the red and green licence plate. This christening may have tamed the Maybach into a faux diplomatic car, but it didn’t make it any less of a marvel.
Since that winter afternoon ten years ago, when Fares had felt the power of a twin turbo engine for the first time, he had dreamed of one day driving a car such as this. A smile of serene satisfaction made his eyes close halfway. When he reopened them, he was racing at top speed along a wall covered with mirrors. The chromed wheels of his tinted-window meteor sparkled in the abstract night across the motorway.
He glanced at his telephone, which would soon be charged, and switched on the stereo. Only classical music seemed a worthy match for the magnificence of this masterpiece of European civilization at whose wheel he flew over the landscape. A Beethoven sonata ended, and the female presenter’s soft morning voice told him he’d just listened to the first movement of ‘L’Aurora’. Indeed, some bluish beams set fire to the horizon on his right. Pleased with this happy coincidence, he switched off the stereo to take full advantage of the musical silence of the Maybach’s engine.
His daydream did not last long. When he consulted his text messages, he discovered his twin brother’s and decelerated dramatically. There was no car behind him, so he switched to the right lane and checked the road signs for a petrol station. Nazir had forbidden him from going over the speed limit or stopping the car, but Fares considered that this was a case of force majeure. Getting out of the vehicle, he took great care to put on his suit jacket and do up his tie. The driver of such a car could not loaf around in jeans and a t-shirt.
His first reflex should have been to call Nazir to inform him of the situation, but he didn’t want to have to justify the stop. He therefore dialled Mouloud Benbaraka’s number, which he’d memorized earlier that day. It took three tries before he picked up. He was in Saint-Etienne, right in the middle of an overlit car park, stretched out in his BMW driver’s seat, reclined all the way to block out the combined beams of the neon lights.
Fares shared the message he’d received from his brother.
Mouloud Benbaraka sat up. ‘When did he send you the message?’
He didn’t listen to the reply.
‘So that’s why he was no longer answering, that stupid fuck.’
‘So what do we do?’ Fares asked, worried.
Benbaraka let out a nasty, two-toned laugh. ‘What are you going to do, you mean? I’ve got enough problems as it is. If your brother gets caught, that’s none of my business.’
He hung up in the middle of Fares’s reply and shifted to the passenger seat. There was some commotion by the ER exit. After a few moments of confusion, a small part of the groom’s family made for the
cars, leaving Rabia and her sister behind, still dressed to the nines and lighting cigarettes, as they rubbed each other’s arms to warm up. ‘What do I do?’ he asked Nazir, who’d answered immediately.
‘You stay away for now.’
Nazir didn’t hear Benbaraka’s sigh, or the dull thud of his clenched fist as it hit the dashboard; he’d already hung up.
On the Train, 5.45 a.m.
Krim saw the day break between Saint-Chamond and Rive-de-Gier: an irradiation of reds that were more and more orange, and of blues that were more and more pale. But the sun’s disk didn’t appear, hidden as it was behind the hills and the train’s trajectory.
A woman in Capri pants entered Krim’s carriage at Givors-Ville. She had her cheek pierced, and the ring looked like a shiny mole that spoilt her dimple. When her eyes met Krim’s she walked to the back of the train and dropped her head against her fist, pretending to be tired.
On arrival in Lyon, Krim chose the same spot in the waiting room as the one he’d occupied the previous summer, when he’d taken the TGV to Marseilles and the local train for Bandol. Though his mobile showed twenty-seven missed calls, Krim allowed himself to doze off. He briefly dreamed of the South and woke up just in time to catch his TGV. There was no one sitting next to him, or in half of the carriage for that matter. He stretched his legs out on the seats and heard a man in a grey jacket and red shirt speaking about the campaign on the phone.
‘Well, I’m going home just for that,’ he explained, rubbing the base of his neck. ‘Who cares about the opinion polls in the end: people faced with the ballot paper are going to be reasonable, there’s no doubt about that. And then if they’re not, I’m sorry, if he’s elected I give up, I’m going to live in England with my niece. There’s only so much you can take.’
During the fifteen minutes that followed, Krim couldn’t work out who the man was going to vote for. What tipped the balance in favour of the hard-right candidate was not his phone conversation, but the surreptitious, panic-stricken, contemptuous look he gave Krim after realizing he was being watched – that way the French had of never attacking you face-on but always from the side. A nation of cowards, Nazir had written in a text. Genetically cowardly, he’d said. The ruddy guy with his double chin, with his red-checked shirt and shifty eyes, seemed to be living proof.
Savages- The Wedding Page 17