Aïcha never had a mother. She had to make do with this protective, methodical little man. A man who rarely told a joke. Sélim did not inherit his mother’s good nature. The more Aïcha grew, the more Sélim forgot to laugh with her. Many things happened that he only understood when it was too late.
With the washing machine set to thirty degrees, Sélim sits down at his desk. He feels helpless, he has so much work overdue. He spends much of his time drawing up schedules, he tries to be methodical, to classify tasks according to their urgency. Email has become a nightmare. What did people do in the nineties with all that time not spent replying to emails? Baptiste cannot make the dates for the seminar, he has to go down to Avignon for his daughter’s birthday. He had forgotten what month it was when he originally agreed to the dates. The guy is infuriating when it comes to his kids. He has two, by two different mothers, his new girlfriend is not even thirty so he’s probably already working on a third. Baptiste gives the impression that he is the only member of the staff at the university who needs to plan things around his commitments as a parent. No woman would ever take the liberties he does. Maurice has canceled a whole week of classes, he has huge problems as director of staff training and facilities, it turns out there has been a misappropriation of funds and his signature has been forged. It looks as though he may face charges, he has other things to worry about. Laurence has managed to get everybody’s back up, the students are complaining that she is authoritarian. She claims it is sexism. She is an exceptional teacher, but right now things are not going well. She has missed all the appointments they have made for her, she has stopped replying to emails, except this morning, when she has decided to send a particularly long and abusive email about a student who had complained about her failure to attend tutorials. If things carry on like this, the whole program will implode. François, who is coordinator for the seminar on techniques with the body politic, is having a nervous breakdown. Every time someone asks him a question, he shrugs and mutters, “Doesn’t matter what I think, nobody gives a shit.” No one knows what to do with him. He didn’t get the promotion he was expecting and that undermined his morale. And now, Sélim has been stuck with organizing one of the ceremonial meetings that universities so love. As if that were not enough, he has to deal with his assistant, Mireille. A dragon. Her approach is very effective: the minute someone asks her something, she screams. Needless to say, people think twice before bothering her.
When Sélim was appointed director of the in-house training program, he bought a case of champagne and threw a party at his place. That was two years ago, he felt he had been rewarded, that he had finally been acknowledged. He imagined he’d be able to put a number of pet theories into practice, to delegate more. He had been warned that the post came with a lot of administrative responsibilities. He had not been told that he would effectively become a supervisor for a bunch of deranged fiftysomethings.
Two years ago, Aïcha had just started her final year in school. She was his pride and joy. For Sélim, who had raised her single-handedly, her success was his crowning achievement. They had dodged the raindrops of misfortune, he had proved to be a good captain for his little princess. They had just spent the summer together in Brittany. Though he did not know it yet, it was the last year they would be so close. He hopes that it might come back. Because autumn had not gone according to his expectations. His department had been the first affected by budget cuts—what can you destroy without anyone noticing? Research and training. He also came to understand why no one had ever held the job for more than two years: the workload was insane. It did not matter how many hours you put in, you were doomed to fail. As a father, he had been less available, less attentive. His daughter was not a problem. He had not been vigilant.
She had found her faith. To him, it was a condemnation of everything he was. It meant: Your love of French cinema: fuck that. Drinking wine without your friends: fuck that. Your tickets to the opera: fuck that. Reading Guyotat and Deleuze: fuck that. Your lectures about Godard and Pasolini: fuck that. Everything you represent, everything you hold dear, everything you are: trash it. Your efforts your commitments your hobbies your friends: trash it all.
Islam seemed to him no more stupid than any other religion. But, knowing it better than any other, Sélim knew that it demanded a complete abnegation of critical faculties. He would have been beside himself at the thought of his daughter embracing any religion. An intellect like hers should not be checked. Her memory, her ability to see connections, her curiosity—the very thought of his little girl subjugating her mind to any theological system sickened him. A mind like hers should not be denied books, nor prevented from embracing complexity on the pretext of following some obscurantist mumbo jumbo … Nonetheless, it had been particularly heartrending to see her turning to a religion that he knew, one that he had spent his life freeing himself from. He saw her taking advice from imbeciles. He heard her talking about Islamic scientists, half-wits capable of claiming that the earth is flat. His daughter was prepared to idolize any idiot if his beard was long enough and he refused to shake her hand.
He could not take a step back, put things into perspective, as his friends advised. He trotted out asinine arguments about the importance of postcolonial identity—he would like to hear someone explain how, by going to mosque, his daughter is freeing herself of the colonial yoke, at this stage he is prepared to listen to anything. Others take the opportunity to get on high horses that are mettlesome to say the least—suggesting in no uncertain terms that the left was wrong not to take a more radical approach to the immigration problem. He has not the faintest idea what they mean—more prisons, more assessments, perhaps more executions? The sort of solutions that turn out to be problems more serious than those they claimed to solve.
He doesn’t give a damn about immigration, he is talking about a girl who was brought up here. His daughter should not have to worry about where her grandparents came from. If she had been fascinated by the language, the literature, the history of the country, or the music of the Gnawa, he would have seen things very differently. But he finds it painful to hear certain colleagues hold forth about the right of girls to wear hijab or to reconnect with their roots. They’re the same ones who cry when they hear that Chavez is dead. If the French president stood up tomorrow and called on Jesus to cure his cancer, they would be incensed, but in a tin-pot country, a brain-dead megalomaniac is a charismatic leader. Someone like Chavez is good enough for Arabs, the same way that Putin is good enough for the Russians. If their own daughter married a royalist, they’d take to their beds for two weeks, but when his daughter starts wearing the veil, they remind him that it is an ancient tradition and start going on about couscous and the Algerian War. This is what it has become, the left wing that so inspired him as a young man. On the one hand, there are those who still nurture a contempt rationalized by exoticism: let the darkies take comfort in their prayer mats and their suras, it’s all their brains are capable of. And on the other hand, there are those who misappropriate secularism to demand that the sons of immigrants be zealous renegades, ever ready to dissociate themselves from their own kind in order to win the medal for exemplary integration. Submissiveness—that is what both sides expect of Arabs—he can submit to the barbarism of his own kind or the violence of the French state, it doesn’t matter, as long as he surrenders his dignity. And when they talk about Arabs, it is the poor they are really talking about: deep down, what his left-wing colleagues are demanding is that the destitute learn to suffer in silence. Through his daughter, Sélim has recovered his status as the child of immigrants: he is faced by an irreconcilable double bind. He is torn apart. He refuses to accept Aïcha’s choice just as he refuses to condemn it and side with those who have not experienced what she is experiencing.
He loved this country madly. His school, the spotless streets, the railway network, the preposterous spelling, the vineyards, the philosophers, the literature, the institutions. But all around, the French no longer live in th
e France that he so loved. They are suffering. It is difficult to say what is tormenting Europe’s pampered children. Living here, he thinks, it is true there is a part of the collective memory that he does not share: the double humiliation of the Second World War, which made France a country twice defeated, forcibly occupied and forcibly liberated.
When it all began, when he first heard the French start to attack immigrants to the thunderous blast of “Beaujolais and saucisson,” he did as many others did: he pretended not to understand. And yet, it said all that needed to be said: this was what the French thought of the country of human rights. Wine and pork products. This was their great cultural program. Even from the right wing, he expected better.
A girl like Aïcha could have become a scientist—she had the unbelievable good fortune to be gifted at math, when she was in high school, the finest career paths were open to her. But her encounter with the Qur’an means that she is forbidden from studying science. She also avoids literature, which would expose her to too much moral filth, film, obviously, since in movies everyone is constantly fornicating, which leaves languages— studying grammar poses no ethical problems—business studies, and law. Being more pragmatic than she would care to admit, she chose tax law, keenly aware that, to the great displeasure of the country in which she was born, the bulk of capital these days comes from governments who would take no offense at her wearing the veil. Quite the opposite.
He misses the closeness that he and Aïcha had shared. Things were easy between them. Their shared life was effortless, they did not weigh each other down. He did not worry. When breaks came around, they enjoyed going away together. There was no awkwardness. They were not joined at the hip, Sélim never felt suffocating or suffocated. They had never felt isolated, like some single-parent families he knew. Aïcha had always had friends and hobbies and Sélim had a busy social life that he found fulfilling. He never brought his girlfriends home, but he never felt as though his own daughter was judging him. They had an understanding—movie evenings, spring cleaning, Sundays at the swimming pool, eating pancakes all week during Candlemas, a series of rituals that, as Aïcha grew up, evolved but never disappeared. He knew that this made him happy, but he did not know it would not last. His daughter trusted him, asked his opinion on subjects he found complex, he enjoyed formulating his answers. He loved being her papa. She had been, and would probably always be, the woman who had brought the most joy to his life. Things fell apart. He had been anticipating her teenage years, the surreptitious spliffs, the boyfriends who were a bit too forward. Things did not go as he had expected. He had been unable to take a step back, what was happening hit close to home, it challenged him directly. He had not been able to stay calm. People talk about adolescence as a period of raging hormones and confused identity from which children emerge as adults. In fact, Sélim now understands, though the knowledge is useless, it is an unconscious dialogue: Aïcha comes to him and, as best she can, says this is the shit you’ve bequeathed to me, Papa, by pretending you were in control of the situation, this is all your shit, and this is my contempt. Adolescence is played out between two parties: the parents struggle not to hear what the alien is trying to tell them. There is nothing more painful than having to give up his role as a beloved papa.
In the space of a few short months, they found themselves separated by a yawning chasm. He began to fear dinnertime, the protracted awkwardness that was an uninvited guest at the table. They would turn on the TV so as not to have to look at each other. She only had to open her mouth and he felt like screaming. All this mumbo jumbo, so impenetrable yet so familiar. Not her. Not his little treasure. He had felt a certain fondness for the faith of his mother and his aunts, the way one passionately cherishes something that is fated to disappear, beliefs for which they could not be held responsible. He could never have imagined that they would manifest themselves again in his daughter.
The worst thing is the feeling of being judged. Aïcha would never say: “I despise everything you are.” But her choices speak for themselves. Her terrifying fervor and her piousness are a daily declaration: I think you’re pathetic. Sélim often thinks about Satana. There was someone else who had not really been susceptible to what he considered his intellectual qualities. She would rather have been with any moron, as long as he had a well-defined six-pack. His daughter is doing the same thing, except that she is trading washboard abs for a goatee beard. History stumbles.
Sélim is hulling strawberries for dessert. When Aïcha comes home, he feels a knot in his stomach. This is what their relationship has come to: they are tense whenever they see each other. He is late. She is usually punctual. She seems worried. He does not immediately ask: “Where were you? Is something wrong?” He fumbles for words that will not seem intrusive. He is afraid of blundering, they can argue for hours over nothing. He would like to be able to be frank, to say—things aren’t easy for me at work right now—he would like to be able to grumble to her and for her to help him to see things clearly. She would say: “Papa, I’ve got problems at school,” and he would put his arm around her shoulders, what’s the matter, baby, are you stressed out? He doesn’t touch her anymore. He doesn’t kiss her. He can tell it makes her uncomfortable.
When they are in the street he has noticed she lowers her eyes when a man walks past. It is not a sign of submission. She avoids their gaze to show that she is pure. He could weep.
Usually, when she comes home, she rushes up to her room. Throws herself into her work to avoid him. But tonight, she leans against the counter, arms folded, a stubborn expression on her face. She stares at the floor, her jaw tensed, unable to decide whether to say something. He sprinkles sugar on the strawberries and puts them in the fridge. He will add the cream when he serves them. He tries to appear relaxed, he knows whatever he says will ring false.
“Is something wrong?”
“I know … about Maman.”
He has been preparing to have this conversation with her ever since she was a tiny creature. But, as with every carefully rehearsed scenario one has never found the opportunity to broach, he finds himself disconcerted by the circumstances. He has imagined this scene a hundred times, but it never happened “just like that.” He wishes he could press “pause” and engineer more appropriate circumstances. For a moment, he is speechless. Aïcha reassures him:
“Don’t worry. I’ve known for ages. I’ve talked to my Islamic tutor about it, he’s helped a lot. I’m not responsible for my mother’s actions. Any more than you are. I didn’t want to embarrass you by bringing it up. But a couple of days ago I found out some other things, and I need to know what you think.”
“Other things? What things? Who…”
“The Hyena. She invited me at the last minute. She said it was important. You know the singer Alex Bleach…?”
“Of course.”
“He says she didn’t kill herself. He says she was murdered.”
“She took an overdose, darling, I’m sorry I didn’t have the courage to talk to you about this long ago … She overdosed, but they think it was a suicide. I know it must be hard for you to find out. We should talk about it. Don’t get caught up in the sort of morbid conspiracy theories people—”
“I don’t think the guy was raving. Let’s say I’m not sure. And I thought it was something I shouldn’t keep to myself. I thought you had a right to know. Your friend, the Hyena, still has the tapes, but I don’t think she’s planning to keep them for long, so if you want…”
“What the hell gives that idiot the right to interfere? What nonsense has she been filling your head with?”
“Listen, Papa, you were the one who went looking for her.You don’t like it when I listen to the imam, you don’t like it when I listen to your friends … If you don’t want me to talk to anyone, you’re going to have to lock me in my room.”
Angrily, she turns on her heel and leaves the kitchen. Sélim thinks he reacted badly. He did not ask the right questions. She caught him off guard. He had promised him
self he would talk to her about this when she was old enough to understand. But no one is ever old enough to deal with something so difficult. And, if he is honest, he has to admit that he has never come to terms with Satana’s profession. The simple fact that she changed her name was a problem. While she was still alive, she killed the woman he had loved.
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