Sherazade

by Leïla Sebbar

  Basile didn't think Pierrot would have called him a gigolo if he'd told him his adventures on the party nights. The women didn't give him any money. He went with the ones he liked and who liked him. That didn't stop him coming back to the squat, continuing his militant activities, making music with his pals. The idea had never crossed his mind that he could make anything out of these encounters and if he happened to see one of the women again, it was because he liked her more than the others. The affair lasted until Basile got the feeling that he was being trapped by himself and by her. He always said he didn't want to fall in love.

  Basile stopped reading the small ads and remarked, 'Suppose we went to Africa, Pierrot?'

  'To do what?'

  'As lorry-drivers. We could go as far as South Africa, Mozambique, Madagascar and all the little islands round about. Pass me your map.'

  'It's Paris.'

  'What are you looking at? Don't you know Paris?'

  'Not very well. But the map's given me an idea. You know what? You'll see, we're going to have some fun.'

  'Tell me, just the same.'

  Sherazade was standing at the door. She'd read Pierrot's note, then she'd folded the bit of paper in four and put it in the inside pocket of her jacket. She wasn't going to mention it.

  Oliver

  They looked at Sherazade, wondering if she'd really been crying. She stood there, looking for all the world as if she'd just got up from a salutary siesta, hardly a hair out of place. She was smiling slightly.

  'You've scoffed everything, you rotters. There were two yoghurts left, I open the fridge, nothing.'

  'It's Krim,' Basile said.

  'Me? I ate the harissa.'

  'Then it was Pierrot.'

  'Yes, it was me . . . but I've got an idea for this evening. It'll be brilliant. We're leaving in ten minutes. We wear our balaclavas, tennis shoes or trainers, all dressed alike, Basile as well, we're not going out for a lark. . .'

  'Stop bossing us around,' Basile said.

  Pierrot explained what he'd got in mind for them. They all fell in with his idea, Sherazade as well, but she hadn't got a hood. Pierrot went and rummaged in Driss's cupboard; one day Driss had brought back a supply of the sort of balaclavas immigrants wear when working on building-sites or the roads. They'd all said, 'We're not Sonacotras;* we're not going to wear those things.' They didn't understand the purpose of such grotty woollen bonnets. Basile, in particular, would never have agreed to wear such a whatsit; he was absolutely crazy about all sorts of headgear that his pals, girls as well as boys, brought him that they'd found at the flea markets or in dustbins, he had quite a collection and every day he wore a different one. One day an African pal said, 'The only thing you haven't got is a tropical helmet.' The next day Basile walked into the kitchen wearing a white plastic tropical helmet. Pierrot promised to find him a genuine one that he'd seen in his mother's family, an uncle who'd spent some years in one of the French African colonies had brought it back, but in the North of France, the sun . . . Driss only had to put the balaclava on properly for them to understand what it could be used for. Eventually they all used them and each had his own which they wouldn't lend to anyone.

  Pierrot fetched a dark blue hood for Sherazade, who tried it on straight away in front of the mirror above the fireplace. This was very tarnished but she found a bit of glass that wasn't damaged. She could only see her eyes. Pierrot said, 'Sherazade's got green eyes.'

  Krim looked at her. He hadn't noticed the colour of her eyes. Suddenly he exclaimed enthusiastically, 'Like my mother. My mother's a Berber, she's fair with light blue or green eyes, I'm not quite sure which. The next time I'll look more closely.'

  Krim was slightly red-headed and had light-coloured eyes, more of a greyish-green. He always told Eddy he looked more like an Arab than he did; once the cops had stopped them in the Metro to check their papers, stopping Eddy first who was walking slightly in front. Eddy was born in Sarcelles to a Tunisian Jewish family.

  Pierrot checked that Driss was still asleep. Eddy had gone out some time ago, no one knew if he'd be back. Basile picked up two large grey dustbin-liners and stuffed them inside his jacket, under his arm.

  'Shall we take dark glasses?' asked Krim.

  'We're not going sun-bathing . . .'

  They went down to Pierrot's old Renault 4L. He said he'd found it in a cul-de-sac. It could have been true. Pierrot had an infallible system for opening locked vehicles and switching them on without a starting-key. Basile always asked him to look out for a really smart job, a BMW, a Porsche . . . He replied, 'I don't come from Lyons, I've got no time for cowboys or roadhogs.' Basile called him a yobbo and a racist oik, which got Pierrot's goat and he told Basile to push off and shift for himself, like Krim who at least managed to pick up things he liked without bugging anyone. It was a fact that Krim had the knack of somehow or other laying his hands on magnificent bikes, powerful Japanese models. He'd passed his mechanic's diploma with distinction, but he couldn't stand having to obey a boss. He'd quit several good jobs. He read all the biking magazines and journals; he was given them or pinched them; he continued to improve his knowledge, taking stolen bikes to pieces and reassembling them in a secret outhouse he'd built at the bottom of the uncultivated garden of the house in the suburbs his father had managed to buy after fifteen years steady work at Renault's. Never absent, never ill, his father was considered a good worker and the foreman had recommended him for internal promotion. The house hadn't cost a lot. At the time there was a scheme for developing a ZUP* and the owners of the houses which were going to be demolished got a good price for them. The ones which were spared immediately depreciated in value, no one wanted to live near a ZUP which was going to house all the immigrants that the renovation of inner-city areas of Paris was driving out to the suburbs. Krim's father had first settled in Lyons. He'd sent for his wife and children. Krim was born in Lyons, then they'd gone to live in Grenoble and finally Paris where his father decided to stay when a cousin tipped him off about this affair. It was a good move. He didn't know whether he'd return to Morocco one day. He came from a village on the other side of the frontier. His wife was Algerian. They had met and married over there. She was very beautiful and flirtatious. She'd learned dressmaking in a sort of ladies' sewing circle and her husband, when he bought the house, had set aside a room for her to work at home. Orders were brought to her and she made them up at home. The father hadn't time to look after the garden; however he came from the country; he'd wanted to teach Krim to work the land, but Krim had always resisted. He loved city life and the suburbs. He didn't care for nature or country life. So he'd set up his workshop that no one entered at the bottom of this garden where nothing grew except the Arab parsley and mint that his mother cultivated near the kitchen, and there he stored Yammies and Kwakkers . . . He amused himself making new models on an empty frame. He drew them first and then tried to carry out his designs. He thought that one day he'd be famous for his new designs for bikes. For the moment, he got along.

  Basile hoped the Renault wouldn't start. Then Pierrot would be forced to take another car, any other one. It started at the first turn of the key. Basile said, 'Shit !' and no one understood why.

  Whenever Pierrot drove he began to sing at the top of his voice. He had a good voice but this habit never failed to irritate the 'users' as he called the people who travelled in his car. After a few minutes they all shouted, 'Shut up!' Pierrot kept quiet for a minute and a half and then started up again louder than ever.

  'We're here,' Pierrot said. 'Look out!'

  He stopped the car in a small dark street and left the doors unlocked.

  'We meet again here, if you don't screw things up.'

  Basile and Pierrot hadn't forgotten the .38 revolvers. They were not loaded. The could be mistaken for children's toy pistols.

  Protected by a car, they kept watch on the entrance to the restaurant. Pierrot went down to the toilets, to look around. Not too small or too big. Very select. A restaurant wh
ere Oliver said he did the cooking himself. But as he owned a chain of Oliver's Restaurants he couldn't be everywhere at once. Pierrot didn't go to check whether Oliver was lending a hand in the kitchens. It smelt good. It was elegant and the Waiters well trained. The maître d's were not obsequious. The customers all wealthy middle-class. Pierrot had a pee and came back upstairs. Krim and Basile had peed behind the car while Sherazade was walking up and down. Pierrot returned.

  'Remember! This is an auto-reduction;* it isn't a hold-up . . . We can say that if we like, if we have the opportunity. Basile, you give one sack to Krim for the food and wine, one to Sherazade for the money, jewellery, watches. Put on the balaclavas. Good. Let's go.'

  They went in, holding the .38s. Pierrot and Basile walked over to the head Waiters.

  'Don't move.' Pierrot kept the staff and the seated customers covered. Basile went round the tables with Krim and Sherazade. Krim took the unopened bottles; for the food it was difficult. Pierrot hadn't thought about the napkins and tableware but Krim tipped everything into his sack. Pierrot offered the Waiters glasses of wine which they drank under the threat of the .38. He asked the proprietor for his cigars which he distributed among the bewildered Waiters. Each of them put the cigar into his waistcoat pocket. At one of the tables Basile recognized some people he'd met at one of his parties: none of them took him for Louis or Bob. Basile mercilessly made them empty their crocodile handbags and hand them over with money, jewellery, necklaces, bracelets, rings, earrings, signetrings, watch-chains. Some of them hid their watches. Basile seized their wrists and recovered another dozen watches. Pierrot shouted that if any of them were students or were broke they could be let off. But they had to be quick. At the last table, near the door, Pierrot gave the signal, calling out, 'This isn't a hold-up; it's an auto-reduction.'

  Krim and Sherazade were already running towards the car. Pierrot came out backwards, holding the .38 in his outstretched hand, Basile covered him from the door, his own .38 well in evidence so that no customer should get the idea of putting a chair or some other object in the way of Pierrot's retreat.

  All four sat panting in the Renault for more than twenty minutes, hearts pounding, exhausted, not saying a word, their feet on the dustbin-liners.

  'This is an auto-reduction,' Pierrot murmured.

  'It isn't a hold-up,' replied Basile.

  * Sonacotra – Société Nationale de Construction de Logements pour Travailleurs, body set up in 1963 for provision of housing for (immigrant) workers. The acronym adopted to refer, usually pejoratively, to the workers themselves. (Trans.)

  *Zone à urbaniser en priorité – priority urban development area. (Trans.)

  *This untranslatable expression derives from the extreme left-wing group in the 1970s, the Autonomes. They called thefts, burglaries, etc. for which they were responsible 'auto-réduction', claiming that they were returning to the poor riches which should have been theirs by right. (Trans.)

  Meriem

  Every day Meriem, Sherazade's sister, listened to messages broadcast from the independent radio stations, and looked at the personal ads in Libération and Sans Frontière, papers that her sister read regularly. She saw Anna-Maria at school but she still had had no letter from Sherazade. Every time the phone rang she rushed to answer it, for nothing.

  Her mother asked her if she knew where her sister was, what she was doing, if she was going to see her. Meriem had no answer. Her mother wept, telling her daughter if Sherazade wanted to return she'd be pleased and so would her father. They couldn't understand why she'd left. She'd got everything she wanted. She didn't go out much, but she wasn't the only one, and her father's hidings weren't so terrible, after all.

  That wasn't a reason.

  Her father hadn't forced her into a marriage. Several times he'd let her refuse a suggested match. And yet several of these would have satisfied her. The suitors had even said she could continue her studies at their expense; they offered good dowries; they had good jobs; some of them were in flourishing businesses. So why did she always say no? She'd got someone else? Their mother had put the question to Meriem. When she came home late after school, where did she go? Meriem kept telling her she went to the municipal library, but her mother couldn't believe her. Yet she knew that Sherazade read at night under the sheets with an electric torch. In the morning she found it under the mattress, with the batteries dead. Her mother couldn't stand seeing her reading like mad all the time when there was so much to do in the house with the younger sisters, but she always let her get on with her homework without disturbing her and she'd trained the little ones not to go into the bedroom where she was doing her prep.

  And now Sherazade had disappeared in the middle of the year, just before taking her certificate exams. She was in her final school year.

  Ever since she left, their father never stopped saying, 'She'd got everything at home, she'd got everything, what more did she want?'

  Her elder brothers had searched for her. They'd gone to all the places where they heard that runaway Arab girls from immigrant housing estates congregated. They'd thought of everything, drugs, prostitution, but never of the library at Beaubourg. They'd gone to clubs where the hostesses were often said to be Algerian juveniles, nightclubs with Arab singers and dancers who looked like Egyptian girls in the Scopitones* in the Barbès and Jaurès neighbourhoods . . . Scopitones for the Sonacotra who watched belly-dances, standing at the bar, with a half-pint in front of them, then another and yet another. The brothers had visited all the low-down joints as well as luxury clubs for wealthy Arabs in Paris on business. They'd actually seen girls who could have been their sister, but never Sherazade. They hadn't given up immediately. They didn't tell either of their parents about their nocturnal attempts to trace Sherazade. Meriem knew they hadn't found her. She told them to keep on. Their father never suspected these expeditions. Meriem had wanted to join in. Her brothers dissuaded her.

  They now knew all the cafés and bars round the Gare du Nord, the Place de la République and the Champs-Elysées. They always went together. They didn't share out the work. The two of them preferred to do it together. There was one more trail which they hadn't yet followed up, clubs for Arab youngsters where they'd have found her if she'd been on drugs. The eldest, who was articled to an accountant, found his money running out, he'd already spent a third of what he had left after handing over a sort of allowance to his father who never questioned him about what he did with his money. They had double expenses every time. It was ruinous. He said they'd have to stop after the Kiss Club, the Ponney Club and Mimi Pinson; they'd still go to the Nouba and the Gibus, even if Arab youngsters didn't meet there so often these days, or so they'd heard. They didn't go to clubs much themselves; they used to go to the Golf Drouot until it shut down. They preferred getting up parties with their own pals or going to Caribbean dances.

  Every time, they asked, 'Would you by any chance have seen a girl with dark curly hair and green eyes?'

  And they invariably got the same reply, 'Oh, you know, we see dozens of girls like that here, as for saying we've seen that particular one, we couldn't say for sure.'

  'But she's got green eyes.'

  'So what?'

  'Well, you'd notice that, wouldn't you?'

  'Oh, I never notice whether eyes are green, black, brown or blue, so it's no good asking me.'

  They'd decided to leave a note for her at certain places where they thought there was a chance she might drop in. They'd put the same message on them all: Sherazade, we are looking for you. Come home.

  If you don't want to return, phone us.

  Your brothers.

  On the envelope they wrote her name SHERAZADE. Often the Waiter and the proprietor were illiterate and tried to decipher the name, screwing up their eyes with the effort, mangling it so that the brothers would repeat it in chorus, in order to cut short a painful scene, and the Waiter and the boss would repeat it after them, after reading it again on the envelope.

  'But what sort of
a name's that? It's not from hereabouts,' French people who'd never heard of the famous Arabian Nights would say.

  The brothers didn't reply. They'd thank them and go, leaving the Waiter a handsome tip.

  When the proprietor was an Arab or Kabyle, he'd take the envelope and give the brothers an understanding wink, as if to say, 'You can count on me.'

  Two weeks later, the brothers had gone the rounds one last time of the cafés and clubs where they'd left the envelope for their sister. The letter was still there in every place, except in one bar in the Place de la République. But the proprietor was incapable of saying whether he'd lost it or if a girl who'd dropped in had taken it. He wasn't always in the bar and he wasn't always kept informed about everything. The letter wasn't there. He would ask the Waiters who were on duty. There were a great number of them and they worked in shifts; the bar closed very late, the staff came and went . . . the proprietor was repeating what the brothers had already realized; he couldn't make up his mind to question the Waiters. Eventually the brothers found out that the first three had seen nothing, heard nothing, given nothing. Two of the Waiters said they'd shown the envelope to a girl they'd seen and she'd taken it. One of them said she'd got black eyes; the other that they were green or blue, light-coloured in any case, he was sure.

  From that day, the brothers Waited for Sherazade's phone call as patiently as Meriem.

  *Scopitone, the trade name of a sort of juke-box including a small screen, similar to that of a TV, on which is projected a film illustrating the music selected. (Trans.)

  Julien Desrosiers

  Julien Desrosiers was on his way back from the Drouot sale where he'd not found anything to suit his pocket. Orientalist pictures had been advertised, he'd read about it in Le Monde which gave the list of sales. He'd withdrawn money from his bank and rushed there immediately with the wad of notes all ready. He'd recognized the dealers in specialized pictures, antique-dealers, owners of Orientalist galleries. He knew he'd have no luck that day, especially when he saw an English collector turn up; knowledgeable, enthusiastic and a rich heiress into the bargain, she always snapped up everything. Julien attended the sale with an aching heart and a sick feeling. The banknotes that he fingered in his pocket seemed so paltry that he screwed them up into little balls and had trouble retrieving them later when he was looking for money to pay the grocer. He recalled portraits of Arab and Berber women and children, Jewesses on their Moorish terraces, brides bathing, women of the harem . . . He thought he'd recognized a Chassériau . . . He was not mistaken. There were mutterings in the saleroom that this picture was not one of Chassériau's best. . . He would have been satisfied with it. It went to the English woman at a price which, while not reflecting the quality of the painting, was at least an indication of the rarety of a work, which inspired in Julien the same emotion as Esther at her Toilet, the subject being similar in its general composition to that of the picture Julien was very familiar with: a semi-nude white woman, Waited on and celebrated by a Negress in a red and gold turban. He thought of Manet's Olympia that he often went to look at in the Jeu de Paume and which made him feel so uncomfortable, for some unaccountable reason. Perhaps on account of the coldness of the body, like a dead body beneath the knotted turban, whereas the head, in spite of its stiffness, touched him. He was moved by the gravity of the expression, the round earrings, the disproportionately small chin. The servant was also a Negro woman, black in the shadow of the nearly black curtain. She was presenting a sumptuous bouquet to her mistress. He told himself he must get rid of this strange trouble which made his heart beat faster every time he saw these two female figures in an Orientalist picture, so ubiquitous in Western nineteenth-century painting, the one Black, the other White.