Translated by David Ball
Man, it stinks in here.”
The commuter station at Saint-Michel did stink. Sour smells slithered along the corridors looking for their prey.
“Let’s get outta here.”
They were ugly, dressed ugly, but they didn’t give a shit, or at least that’s what they wanted you to think. Had to pass unnoticed, melt into the gray mass of the buildings in the projects. They didn’t change when they went to Paris. They were dressed in war clothes, psychiatric ER style. Watch out, high-voltage box! White Nikes, Sergio Tacchini tracksuits, international class. They were untouchable!
“Your ID!”
Not so untouchable. The cops lined them up against the tile wall of the corridor and began going through their pockets. Then they opened their backpacks. New shoes inside.
“You stole them!”
“No, officer. They’re ours.”
The younger guy even took out a receipt. One of the cops sniffed the paper as if he’d wiped his ass with it that morning.
“Yeah, sure. Buncha thieves, fuckin’ Ayrabs.”
The Ayrabs didn’t bat an eyelid. Nothing. So little reaction the cops wondered how to stir them up more, let’s have some fun. Too bad, really too bad we’re not in the middle of the Algerian War anymore when you could pitch the sand niggers into the Seine, not far away, right next door. For these policemen, no doubt October 17, 1961 was a happy day: four hundred towel-heads in the Seine, outta sight! Okay, times change and so do certain methods. But you can still get in their face, make it psychological. But here, nothing doing. You could feel them up, no problem, they were like sheep, the sweat-heads.
“Leave the women alone, Robert. Can’t you see they’re shy?”
The cops laughed and walked away, waddling on their big feet like belly dancers.
“Actually, theyare the women,” said Big Brother.
The two guys closed their bags and walked to the exit on the Seine side. It was raining out. They walked along Quai Montebello for a bit, across from Notre-Dame cathedral. The elder spoke to the younger in this way:
“You see, Rachid, never, ever play those assholes’ game.”
“The po-lice?”
“You got it. Guys like us turn them on. Gandhi understood all that.”
“Gandhi?”
“What school did you go to?”
“Yours.”
“Gandhi thought force couldn’t accomplish a thing. All it did was legitimize the violence of the occupiers. The cops— they’re our English, get it? And we’re the Hindus.”
Rachid did not understand. In any case he obeyed Big Brother, did like he told him. It had always paid off and it was a lot simpler than getting your head twisted with stories of Indians and English. This guy was an enigma. Sometimes he’d go on for hours about stuff way over your head. To Big Brother’s credit, it had always paid off, you gotta admit.
“Do you know, Rachid, that we’re in the old student quarter—the Quartier Latin, if you prefer?”
“I don’t prefer shit. I don’t like nothin’.”
“Don’t be negative. And you know why it’s called the Quartier Latin?”
He had no idea.
“Because in the Middle Ages they talked Latin here and only Latin. All the literate men in Christendom spoke to each other in Latin. Do you know who lived across the river, behind Notre-Dame?”
“…”
“The monk Abelard lived near the Quai aux Fleurs. You heard of Heloïse and Abelard, Rachid?”
“Never.”
“Abelard was the son of a Breton aristocrat who gave up his birthright to learn to philosophize. Since the Notre-Dame cloister was getting too small for him, Abelard broke away from his masters and founded a school on the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève. His scholars followed him. He was young, handsome, and very eloquent. At night he would walk down the Montagne to the Seine and return to the house of Canon Ful-bert, where he rented a room. The canon had a very beautiful niece, Heloïse. She became Abelard’s studious pupil. Naturally, she got pregnant. Abelard married her, but the canon thought he had been betrayed: He hired some thugs to break into Abelard’s room and castrate him.”
“Castrate him?”
“Cut his balls off, man. Abelard retired to a monastery and Heloïse to a convent. They wrote each other love letters for years. But it was all over, you understand.”
And Rachid did understand, for once. He loved Mi-quette, who would often give him blowjobs in the basement of his building. He went wild when she licked his balls, there, a little lower. Can you imagine having them cut off? He could imagine this guy Abelard suffered a lot after that, alone in the basement of his monastery writing letters to Heloïse. The story also taught him to watch out even more for Miquette’s father, the Fulbert in an undershirt who walked his German shepherd through the project every night before going out for a good chat with the crime squad so he could tell them about his Algeria, the one during the war. Her old man didn’t talk Latin; he growled at his mutt in French, blew his nose in a dish towel, and gave Rachid dirty looks when he walked by the door to their building. If he had any idea that his daughter and Rachid …
“Let’s keep going, okay?”
Rachid was beginning to like it there on the banks of the Seine across from Notre-Dame. He lacked the knowledge to put a date on the gothic building. Contrary to Big Brother, Rachid didn’t read books. He listened to NTM, Tupac Shakur, 50 Cent, Dr. Dre, and Snoop Dogg, but he never opened a book, no way.
“You know who killed Tupac?”
“Society, Rachid, society.”
“They say he was still alive in his producer’s car.”
“Now he’s dead. Mozart is dead too. One day you’ll die.
No matter how, you will pass away. There are more dead people than living on this earth, Rachid. And Tupac is part of the multitude now.”
“But the imam in the projects says that on Judgment Day we will rise from among the dead.”
“Who’s we?”
“Muslims.”
“How about the others? The Jews? The Christians?”
“I don’t know.”
“For Jews, Christians and Muslims are dead for good and they won’t rise up at the end of time. According to the Christians, Jews and Muslims are damned because they have the bad luck not to be Christians. And for some Muslims, the Jews and Christians are going to burn in hell to the end of time.”
“So they’re all wrong?”
“Maybe they don’t have the same god. Maybe there’ll be a war of gods at the end of time. Ever think of that, Rachid?”
“You’re blaspheming. There’s only one God. The imam says so.”
“The Jews and Christians say so too. So tell me why you’re not a Jew or a Christian, Rachid? And why Christians and Jews aren’t Muslims?”
“You’re driving me crazy, for God’s sake!”
“And what about the others?”
“What others?”
“Buddhists, animists, atheists, agnostics.”
“They’ll go to hell along with the Jews and Christians,” Rachid decided.
“That’s a lot of people. We’ll be in good company in hell.”
“Impossible.”
“If the god of the Jews is right, we’ll burn in flames, because neither of us are Jewish. If it’s the god of the Christians, then we’ll go to hell with the Jews.”
“Allah is the one true God.”
“One chance out of three, Rachid, once chance in three. It’s mathematical.”
“God doesn’t play with dice!”
“Einstein thought the same thing, Rachid. May He hear you both! Besides, maybe it isn’t the same one.”
Big Brother began to laugh as he looked at Notre-Dame over there, so near, and so far away. Sometimes seagulls would fly up the Seine and get lost. They were having fun too, in a way, they were playing as they flew over the work of Maurice de Sully and Louis VII. An endless project; its construction was still going on. It seemed to him that generations were disappearing into the limbo of history, into the nocturne of memories.
“What about people before us, Rachid? What do you do with the Arabs from before Islam? Will they go to hell? Mohammed hadn’t taught them Allah existed yet. Mohammed himself didn’t exist yet. What do you do with those men, Rachid?”
“They’re dead, that’s all.”
“That’s a lot of dead people, don’t you think?”
They crossed the quay and entered rue du Fouarre.
“Fouarre means straw.”
Big Brother had already gone on to something else. Ra-chid was still on their discussion about God and his worshippers. It was bothering him some. If Big Brother was right, then nothing made sense. But Big Brother must be wrong, no doubt about it.
“Straw Street. Funny, isn’t it, how the streets of Paris always have a hidden meaning, a new story. Here they used to cover the street with straw so the students could sit down on dry spots to take their classes. The whole street was covered by those studious people. It was closed to traffic. And if a cart happened to go through during the classes the monks were teaching, the students would beat up the driver and they’d dump his load on the ground. To avoid fights, the city authorities would close the street off with chains. Classes began in the morning, after mass. Since bums would come and sleep on the straw at night, they had to kick them awake before they changed the straw for the students in the Middle Ages. Hence the expression the last straw.”
“How d’you know all that?”
“Books. Man’s best companions.”
Now they were walking along rue Dante.
“Dante is supposed to have lived here after he fled Florence.”
“Florence?”
“Shit, man, you really should get out of La Courneuve from time to time!”
Big Brother traveled a lot, crazy as it may seem. He had disability papers that allowed him to take the train free and gave him discounts on most airlines. He had been wounded in Sarajevo while defusing an antipersonnel mine. At eighteen, he had joined UNPROFOR and was sent to Bosnia. After he was discharged, he lit out for Italy, as he told Rachid, who’d never been out of the projects of La Courneuve: The only Italian he knew was pizzaand spaghetti. What’s more, he got bawled out by Big Brother whenever he cut his pasta before he gulped it down.
He had traveled, he said, to set his mind aright after the horrors of the war. A kind of convalescence. Rachid couldn’t really remember all the places on his journey. But he did know Big Brother had a disability card. And he was very discreet about his war injury. He never talked about it. When Rachid insisted, Big Brother would tell him to read The Sun Also Risesby Hemingway. But Rachid never opened a book, everybody knew that. Actually, that was the problem. If Rachid had the slightest bit of interest in anything written, he would have understood his older friend a lot better. But since hanging out with Big Brother had always paid off, Rachid just said forget it, even if his ignorance could fill the Seine.
“In 1309, Dante leaves Italy. He comes here, to Paris, to attend the lectures of Sigier de Brabant. Right here, on the straw of rue du Fouarre, he absorbs those odious truths, demonstratedwith syllogisms.”
Rachid was feeling the pangs of hunger. A sweet, heady aroma of kebab was tickling his nostrils: The only truth he managed to put into a syllogism was not at all odious to his belly.
“I’m starving.”
“One should have an empty belly and a light mind.” Big Brother began to recite, in a loud voice, right there in the street: “Is this the glorious way that Dante Alighieri is called backto his country after the affliction of an exile that has lasted almostfifteen years? Are these the wages of his innocence, obvious to oneand all? Is this, then, the fruit of the sweat and fatigue of his studies?Never will the man who is an intimate friend of philosophysuffer the disgrace of being chained like a criminal to be rehabilitated!Never will the man who was the herald of justice, and wasoffended, accept the idea of going to his offenders as if they werehis benefactors, to pay tribute! This is not the way to return toone’s homeland, father. If you or someone else can find a way thatdoes not blacken the reputation and honor of Dante, I will takeit, without hesitation. If there is no honorable way to see Florenceagain, I will never return. What then? Can I not see the sun andstars from any corner of the world? Can I not, under every part ofthe heavens, meditate on the truth, the most precious thing in theworld, without becoming a man who has no glory, dishonored inthe eyes of the people and city of Florence? Even bread, I am sure,will not be lacking.”
Big Brother fell silent.
Big Brother was born and grew up in Algeria, in Cirta.
When he was ten years old, his father, an immigrant he had never known, sent for them, his mother and him, to come live on the outskirts of Paris thanks to the new policy of family entry. Ever since then, he’d always felt exiled: Hence his excessive love for Dante and Joyce, his pantheon of the banished.
Above all, he was drawn to lives that had been ripped away from their childhood, broken by political events, wars, famine. Or simply alienated through an absence of attachment to the environment where they were born and grew up, a bit like Joyce fleeing Dublin, which had become too narrow for his genius. He himself felt that France had become a suit that restricted his movements; this explained his enlistment in the army at eighteen and then his flight to Italy, a copy of The Divine Comedyin the pocket of his khakis.
“To return to our conversation, you should know, Rachid, that Dante put men with no religion in Purgatory, that antechamber of Paradise. And do you know where Mohammed is, in The Divine Comedy?”
“No.”
“In hell! Even Averroës—Ibn Rushd to us—the second Master after Aristotle, is in Purgatory, ahead of our Prophet. You see, Rachid, you have to relativize things. Always relativize.”
Big Brother liked to talk. He would hold forth whether or not Rachid was following what he was saying. In fact, he kept himself somewhat aloof in the projects. He didn’t hang out with anybody and was utterly discreet about his little trips back and forth to Paris. Naturally he needed Rachid as a foot soldier, but the boy was kind of simpleminded: Only the neighborhood imam had any concern for him. The other kids his age made fun of him and kept him away from their business—making little deals, stealing motor scooters, taking night joyrides that let them extract a little pleasure from their sordid lives between the huge buildings of the project where the only flowers that sprouted from the asphalt were the ones they smoked at night when they hung out and bullshitted for hours.
Now they were walking down rue Dante. They reached boulevard Saint-Germain and took it toward boulevard Saint-Michel. They went into the McDonald’s at the intersection, waited a few minutes in front of the registers, and ordered two combo meals from the sexy student in a red apron. They walked upstairs with their sandwiches, fries, and drinks.
“The girl behind the counter, you think about what her pussy must smell like?”
“Rachid, I’ve already told you not to be vulgar.”
“She must smell of french fries and grilled meat. I wouldn’t want to stick my nose in it.”
“No one’s asking you to, you know.”
Rachid got out his cell and began tapping on the keys, which lit up and gave out musical notes as he typed.
“What the hell you doing?”
“Sending a text.”
“Who the hell to, for chrissake?”
“My lady.”
“You out of your head? We’re on a job here!”
“I ain’t gonna tell her where we are. She’s working too.”
“Where’s she work?”
“At the Quick on the Champs.”
“What about her? She smell of fries too, your Dulcinea?”
“Dulcinea? You raggin’ on me?”
“No. Or, if you prefer, yes. Show me the message you’re sending her.”
Miquette huny I digon u big i swair. Will call tonite. Mebbeur oldman take da dog out. We fuk inna seller. I eat urapricot. Take shower first. Kisses monamour.
“Rachid, that’s poetry! You should write more often. Mi-quette must be happy.”
“My Big Mac’s gonna get cold.” He pounced greedily on the two-story structure of bread and meat. He gulped it down with gusto, not forgetting to add the mushy, smelly fries. He drowned the whole thing in a quart of icy Coke. He punctuated the end of his meal with a resounding belch that made Big Brother flinch in disgust.
As for Big Brother, he hadn’t touched his tray. Ate like a bird, Big Brother. Skin and bones. Dry as a reed. A thinking reed. Who didn’t know if he should laugh or cry over Rachid and his lovelife. Over Rachid’s life, whose squalor did not escape him. Over the garish, dirty light that permeated the cardboard set of this restaurant, a food factory for all the poor bums in Paris. And over the confused tourists with no place to go, lost en el corazón de la grande Babylon.But he wasn’t going to cry about their lives. That’s the way they were. Okay.
Often he missed his childhood under silvery skies, at the edge of a sea that seemed infinite. And the shimmering of the waves, bursts of sun under the steel blue. But wasn’t that just a mirage that hit him in front of these walls covered with Keith Haring reproductions? Little stick figures holding hands on the piss-colored yellow. Imitation leather seats and formica tables had become his world, unique, impossible to steal from. There was nothing to take away. You could die here with no regret, he was sure of this.
He grabbed his bag, stood up, and walked to the restroom. Inside, he locked the half-door and began taking off his tracksuit. Underneath, he was wearing a suit jacket and flannel pants. He opened his bag and took out the new shoes. A world apart from the Nikes he stuffed into his bag with the tracksuit; once he was out of the restaurant he’d throw it away. From the pocket of his Hugo Boss jacket he pulled out a club tie that matched his light blue shirt. When he came out of the bathroom he no longer looked like a young guy from the projects, but some kind of yuppie, almost.
“Your turn now,” he said to Rachid.
The same operation witnessed the transformation of Cinderella, but this time the princess had balls, and whiskers on her chin.
“You might’ve shaved this morning.”
“I forgot, Big Bro, I swear to God.”
Mickey D’s is a very good place for this kind of metamorphosis: You could stand in the middle of the room, unzip your fly, and jerk off without stirring up the slightest ripple in the public. The people who eat there become deaf and blind, concentrating only on their pouch of ketchup or mayonnaise, sort of like the subway, where the greatest indifference is the norm. One of the rules of this kind of place is to never stare at anyone. At most a glance out of the corner of the eye, but no staring. If you scrupulously follow this one rule, you can easily bump off a stranger and get away without anyone remembering your face. That’s why Rachid admired Big Brother. He had the gift of identifying the dead spots of modern society.
They went out. This time, they walked along boulevard Saint-Michel. They almost decided to follow boulevard Saint-Germain toward Odéon. But something held them back. Some obscure commandment. Almost as if someone far away was laying out the lines for them to follow, the border not to cross. Big Brother often thought he was merely the protagonist of a story told by an idiot, full of sound and fury. It was probably his reading that blurred his judgment. He often had the feeling that life, his life, was burning in the forests of the night.
They crossed rue des Écoles, kept going up boulevard Saint-Michel, walked by the Collège de France without a glance, not far from the spot where Roland Barthes was run over by a milk truck.
“He let himself die.”
“Who?”
“Roland Barthes. He was in mourning.”
Rachid had no idea that a man had written books here, taught students—loved some of them—and died because he couldn’t bear the loss of his one love: his mother.
Big Brother did not have great esteem for his parents. He blamed them for not preparing him for this life. He had to learn everything by himself, and he had begun late, too late no doubt. He got his education after the army, during his long wanderings through Europe, with his backpack and soldier’s pay for all baggage. The pay wasn’t much more than an empty promise. But it still enabled him to buy books.
Yes, his parents had been imported from a foreign country; they’d been used by the huge industrial machine and then crushed, like an old version of a computer program.
But their children had never been part of the program. They had proliferated like errors in a line of code. The change in centuries hadn’t caused the big computer crash, the huge worldwide bug, but a few individuals who became adults at that time had quite simply tripped out in their corner of the world. Of course, not all of them had gotten on the American Airlines plane one morning in September 2001, but most of them had taken risky paths across the world, since the huge machine had spread over the whole planet, using people like simple material, interchangeable and disposable, just as it had used his parents.
That, he couldn’t explain to Rachid. How to explain that the rich no longer needed to import the poor to keep their factories going since they’d now set up the same factories in their own countries—work at home, you might say.
“If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.”
“Uhh …”
“Malcolm X.”
They stopped for a moment in front of the Place de la Sorbonne. Where once again, no doubt to make fun of him, Big Brother gave Rachid a lecture.
“On rue du Fouarre, every house was a school. But how could they house all those people who were piling up on the straw during the day and wandering around looking for a place to stay at night? So they created colleges! They were a dormitory, a shelter, and a cafeteria all in one. Robert de Sorbon, Saint Louis’s chaplain … May he rot in hell, King Louis. Robert de Sorbon received a house near the Baths from the King. The man took in sixteen poor students who were studying for their doctorates in Theology. That’s how the Sorbonne was born, on the very same spot as this late nineteenth-century complex, which is quite ugly, with a seventeenth-century chapel in the middle of it that is quite lovely. Cardinal Richelieu is the one who gave the Sorbonne that magnificent chapel, in which he is buried. A masterpiece of classical architecture.”
Big Brother was playing tour guide, pointing to the façade of one of the most famous universities in the world. As for Ra-chid, he was watching the female students who were coming out of their last classes of the day.
Night had fallen and only the cafés around the Sorbonne lit up the square where these long-haired enigmas were walking by. They intrigued Rachid.
Blondes, brunettes, redheads, tall ones, small ones, some wrapped up in warm clothes, some undressed in spite of the cold or because of the cold, with pink cheeks—they flashed by, their legs like rockets, flashed by like mercury to catch their bus, or to get swallowed up by the Metro, to disappear forever from the face of the earth for at least one night; for the next day, with the first gleam of light, these early-blooming bouquets would swing into motion again, stems in the morning wind.
Rachid was beginning to have a poetic soul. Was he getting all emotional from the contact with Paris, the City of Lights? Were Big Brother’s lectures beginning to bear fruit?
As for Big Brother, he didn’t give a shit about women, cared for them about as much as his first VD, which he got at fifteen from the wife of the super of his building, avid for youth and exoticism. Since then he’d had no time to waste on all that. He didn’t even have the means to do it anymore.
They stationed themselves in front of the first building on rue Gay-Lussac at the corner of boulevard Saint-Michel. Big Brother played the keyboard of the access code box, the big door opened, and they moved into the lobby. A friend in the post office who owed him one had given him the code. Life is hard for those men of letters and a little white powder livens up the deadest days. And then, everybody knows a mailman’s salary doesn’t cover the needs of a runny nose and a brain above it in withdrawal.
The superintendent wouldn’t be in, his cokehead friend had assured him. And it was true.
Big Brother looked up a few names on the mailboxes. He pushed a button on the intercom and waited. Nothing. They shouldn’t hang around too long, he knew. He tried another name. Silence. Then a crackle. He heard a sleepy, slow Yes, no doubt the voice of an old woman.
“Package for you, madame.”
“At this late hour?” said a suspicious voice.
“You areMadame Hauvet, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Special delivery, madame.”
“Fourth floor, first door on the left.”
The glass door gave out a shrill sound and opened.
They took the ancient cherrywood elevator. A little seat was folded up against one of the walls. There was hardly any room for Rachid and him. They hoped nobody had called the elevator on the second or third floor. It had already happened once. Big Brother had to look at his shoes without saying a word for a few seconds which seemed like centuries.
The car rose, then stopped at their floor. Nobody else had called it.
A second miracle was waiting for them on the landing: The door to the apartment had been opened for them.
What was the point of all those armored doors, codes, intercoms with cameras, if you let your guard down at the last minute, when the danger was at its height?
They walked into the apartment and closed the door behind them without a sound. They heard the old lady asking them to put the package on the table and leave.
Big Brother and Rachid did not have a package to put on the console table with a Carrera marble top. They weren’t about to leave the apartment either. Instead, they walked down the long hallway and entered a huge living room, to the great displeasure of the lady; her snow-white, carefully waved hair undoubtedly displayed the finest art of a very chic hairdresser.
“Ah, you probably want a little something?”
The woman got up, lifted her bag, and took out a purse. She opened it in front of them without noticing that they were not dressed like delivery men. She pulled out a five-euro bill and handed it to Rachid. He seemed the most approachable, perhaps because of his youth.
“We don’t want a tip,” said Big Brother, walking toward her. “We don’t want your charity.”
The voice that had uttered these words was sinister. The old lady realized this and her mouth opened wide.
“Whatever you do, madame, don’t scream.”
He showed her his hands and closed them in an oddly gentle way, as if they were already squeezing the woman’s neck. Then he motioned to Rachid, who walked over to their prey and began unwinding the string they’d bought in the Everything One Euro store a little further down the boulevard. He tied her hands behind her back, laid her out on the couch, and then tied her ankles together. They did not gag her.
“If you yell, you’re dead, you get me?”
The woman nodded, her mouth open and empty. Something couldn’t get through, the words remained stuck in her throat.
Big Brother walked out of the living room to explore the rest of the apartment. He went into a big kitchen and walked over to the counter. He opened a drawer and took out a large knife. Then he headed to the end of the hall, opening all the bedroom doors. In one of them, in the back, near the bathroom, he made a discovery that seemed to him, all things con- sidered, rather natural. He came back to the living room and spoke to Rachid in a low voice.
It was Rachid’s turn to go out. He crossed the hallway, passed by the kitchen, saw a second living room full of ugly vases and statuettes, then walked into the bedroom darkened by royal-blue cloth covering the walls. His eyes had to get accustomed to the lack of light to finally understand why he had to be there.
At the same time, Big Brother was pacing up and down the huge room with the knife in his hand, examining the paintings on the walls, the little Native American figurines, and even a Berber vase he picked up from its stand.
“That comes from Algeria,” said the quavering voice. “You can take it if you like. I’ll give it to you. It’s my father … You know, he loved that country. We had property over there.”
Big Brother put the vase down and walked up to the paintings.
“Jean Dubuffet,” he said, pointing to a portrait; it was highly simplified, almost mad—broken lines traced by a child of genius.
“You can take that too, you can take everything.”
Madame Hauvet was getting more and more restless on her couch. She was coming back to life. She thought she had identified a ransom. Everything would be all right again soon. He would take the painting and go away with his horrible sidekick. Perhaps she would offer him a few trinkets and it would all be over with.
“It’s fine right where it is,” Big Brother answered. “I won’t touch it. These works have a soul, madame. They belong to no one. They should be in a museum. And museums should be free.”
She didn’t understand: These drawings belonged to her and she could wipe herself with them if she wanted to. Her ransom had been devalued by those stupid words. These guys were total morons!
“You see, madame, I was sent to Yugoslavia during the war.”
“Oh! It must have been frightful,” she said, feigning great compassion. “You must have suffered a great deal.”
“Me? Oh no, don’t worry. But the Bosnian farmers, yes. They suffered a great deal, as you say.”
He stopped talking for a moment.
“Have you read Dante, madame?”
“When I was young. How boring!”
“Too bad,” he said, very curtly.
She was sorry she’d given her opinion about Dante. She had almost forgotten she was at their mercy. At hismercy. He terrified her. He was not like the others. Not like the ones you see on TV. The ones who had burned cars for two months. Those people were far from her world, far from her. This one was getting too close to be harmless, like the sun to the earth. He was in her home! In her home, my God! She’d been so dumb she felt like crying.
He interrupted her thoughts and began speaking again.
“Yes, madame, hell exists. I saw it with my own eyes. I saw it in those devastated farms where everything had been looted, destroyed, trampled on. I’m not talking about human beings, I’m talking about objects, madame, just objects. Believe me, they have a soul. Like you and me.”
He was preventing her from thinking. He was trying to distract her—worse, he was lecturing her. He horrified her now.
“So leave the paintings and take my jewels, take all of them. They’re in the safe, behind the Dubuffet you like so much. The key is stuck to the bottom of the frame.”
She was on the verge of hysteria.
“That is not very prudent, madame. Anybody could find it there.”
Rachid came back into the living room. He wasn’t alone anymore. When she saw him, Madame Hauvet began blubbering softly.
“Silence!”
He was accompanied by a pale girl. For Big Brother, she seemed to have come out of a Modigliani. For Rachid, she was just kind of skinny and tall. Above all, she was scared to death.
Her whole body was trembling, her eyes still foggy with sleep. She couldn’t be more than sixteen.
“That’s my darling granddaughter!”
The old woman was sobbing now.
“Shut the fuck up!”
She stopped sobbing and Big Brother turned the portrait over, removed the key, and opened the safe. Inside, an ebony box: He lifted the cover. Necklaces, bracelets, several pairs of earrings. He examined the contents under the light of a lamp and closed the little box of black wood again.
“I thought I could trust you,” he said. “You’re really disappointing me.”
“I don’t understand … no, I don’t understand.”
But she did understand. The jewelry was fake. That’s why she wasn’t protecting it. The Dubuffet was a copy as well. Big Brother knew that too. But he liked to give any human being a second chance, even a third one. In Bosnia he had learned that men and women in some places never even got the slightest chance.
He walked up to the old lady, turned her over on her belly, grabbed her hand, and cut off her little finger with the large knife. He threw it onto the white carpet. A spot of blood began flowering like a rose. He had stuck her head into the couch cushion to stifle her screams.
Rachid hardly had a chance to hold her up in his arms— the girl who looked like a Modigliani model fainted. He laid her gently out on the carpet.
When the old woman stopped moving, Big Brother turned her over so she wouldn’t get smothered to death. When she came to, he said, “Now let’s stop playing games. Where are the jewels?”
The old woman was trying to speak through bloody lips. She had bitten them out of pain. Pink bubbles welled up in her mouth and exploded on her chin. Big Brother had to put his face up close to hear her tell him where the jewels were.
He got up and this time walked over to a little writing desk. He ignored the only visible drawer, kneeled down, and stuck his head under the desk. He groped around and found it. He slid a little wooden panel and the precious objects tumbled onto the carpet. He picked them up and shoved them into the pocket of his Hugo Boss jacket. What cop would search a man dressed like him? Especially if he was coming back home in a taxi.
“I have some bad news,” he said to the old lady. “My friend and I cannot allow ourselves to be recognized. By anybody.”
“Oh my God! Oh, my God! I beg you. Please, I’m begging you. Let me live, please! I won’t say a word. I swear to you. I’m imploring you. I don’t deserve to die.”
“No one deserves to die, madame. And yet, one day or another … And just think: You have lived well up to now. You have never wanted for anything.”
“I implore you, for the love of God, take her!Take her. Take my granddaughter. Isn’t she beautiful? You’ll like her a lot, I’m sure of it. Please, please don’t kill me. I don’t deserve it. I’m giving her to you, take her!”
This kind of reaction no longer surprised him. It was, after all, a very human reaction. An old she-bear would have reacted differently, but not a grandmother.
“She deserves to live too,” he said very gently. “She’s so young. Consider what a long way she has to go in life. All the good things she can do for humanity. And believe me, I know something about humanity.”
The old woman began to spit blood.
“She’ll be of no use to anybody. She’s a slut. A lousy bitch.
She’s, she’s … she’s a whore, that’s what she is.”
Big Brother had heard enough and took care of the old woman.
The girl was still lying on the carpet, languid as an odalisque. She was beautiful. And she was sleeping like a princess in a fairy tale. Big Brother was happy she hadn’t seen all that. He was happy for her. Perhaps she would even sleep through her own night, a night without end, a night without glory.