The Age of Reinvention

by Karine Tuil

  “What do you mean, you have no information? Have you arrested him or not?”

  “I can’t tell you anything.”

  “So it could be the Mafia—is that what you’re telling me?”

  “No, this has nothing to do with the Mafia . . .”

  “So you do acknowledge that my husband has been arrested?”

  “He’s been arrested, yeah, but not by us.”

  “I don’t understand . . .”

  “I can’t tell you any more than that for now.”

  “They didn’t even want to show me their badges! They arrested my husband and took him away like a common criminal.”

  “That is correct.”

  “Doesn’t that shock you?”

  “Not as much as the crimes for which your husband has been arrested.”

  Now she screams: “What are you insinuating? I don’t even know what the charges are! They didn’t tell us anything! Not me, not my lawyer. I have the right to know who pressed charges against my husband!”

  “You’ll be informed in due course.”

  “No, you are obligated to tell me! This is a democracy, isn’t it? I have connections, you know . . .”

  “Please, ma’am, don’t threaten me. In a case like this, if I were you, I wouldn’t dig any deeper . . .”

  “What are you implying? Just say it! I have the right to know. Who has pressed charges?”

  And suddenly, hands on hips like a comic-book hero, the chief of police turns toward her and calmly replies: “The United States of America.”

  * * *

  1. Samantha de la Vega, forty-five, would have no hesitation in saying that she hates her husband and her job.

  2. David Beer, twenty-six, felt “drawn” to enroll in law enforcement.

  3. John Delano, sixty-two, has the career he always dreamed of.

  8

  No one is made to cope with fame. It is not natural to be known/loved by thousands of people. Ten or twenty thousand is a lot, but hundreds of thousands? Samuel could never have imagined how violent this sudden shift from anonymity to celebrity would be: physically violent, morally violent; an intense human experience that electrifies and short-circuits the brain. He is flooded by incessant calls, ass-lickers and sycophants hoping for a helping hand up the social ladder; requests for meetings (people who want to see you, approach you, invite you places because you have become interesting; now they want to be seen with you because your presence brings a certain added value—you are great, gifted, exceptional, call me back). He used to dream of this kind of success, passionately desire it; he remembers the rage he used to feel at not being able to have it. And now he feels slightly ashamed to acknowledge that he cannot bear this false, superficial fame, the crowd of courtiers at his heels. He can no longer bear all the traveling, in France and abroad, when he would rather stay home and write. He can also no longer bear the media coverage and all the preparation it requires: the hours spent with makeup artists and hairstylists so that “the camera loves you,” so that “you can steal the limelight,” the confessions he must make to millions of unseen judges. He wishes he could say no, or love his celebrity, but instead he just keeps quiet. Michel Houellebecq is right: success makes you shy.

  * * *

  What does he miss? Silence. The silence that precedes, surrounds, and accompanies writing. Every morning, when he discovered the vast number of messages that had accumulated on his cell phone, he would feel paralyzed by anxiety. Unwittingly, unwillingly, he found himself at the controls of a noisy machine, this man who had chosen writing because he liked silence and solitude.

  He can no longer bear human contact—interviews, book signings. He feels like a captured beast, being prodded and examined. When this happens, he despises himself. He despises himself for smiling at a potential reader who picks up his book and says: “Give me one good reason why I should buy it.” He despises himself for brandishing a copy of his book and waving it above his head after a bookseller reproached him for not daring to sell it like a newspaper vendor: You don’t know how to do it. He despises himself for not having punched the writer who said to him, on a train station platform: “You must have sucked a lot of cocks to get the kind of reviews you got for your first book.” He despises himself for not quoting Jim Harrison to his publisher when the two of them had a violent row because he refused to take part in a prime-time TV show: “Being an author is a curse and a mission. I realized that at 21, when my father and my sister were killed in a car accident. After a loss like that, no compromise is possible, with publishers or with anyone else.” He despises himself for having agreed to do a big interview in a national newspaper and for having told his life story to a stranger who betrayed him by writing that his father was a “crank” because he became an Orthodox Jew. He despises himself for not having had the courage to send an insulting letter to a journalist who wrote: “Samuel Baron uses the death of his parents to move his reader.” And, most of all, he despises all those people who now only talk to him about the money he’s earning, who alter the way they behave toward him because of his material success. Money affects everything. It affects your relationships with your friends and family, it affects the people you meet, and it affects you: it’s like a strange soul that seeps into your body and makes itself at home, mutating you without you realizing, making you become what you hate.

  9

  “I want to speak to my lawyer! I’m innocent! I didn’t do anything! Let me out of here!” But Samir’s demands fall on deaf ears and he remains behind bars. One hour later, two men open the door of his cell and lead him out. “We’re going to interrogate you now by putting your version of events against your brother’s.” Samir nearly faints when he hears these words. And then it comes to him: that dinner in the Indonesian restaurant, his brother’s confessions about attacking a woman, his fear, his desire to go back to France as quickly as possible. Samir hadn’t taken him seriously. “My brother did something bad?” One of the policemen starts laughing, repeating the words: “Something bad?”

  “Listen, I know nothing about this. I haven’t done anything wrong, I swear it.”

  “Sure . . .”

  “I don’t know anything about this!”

  “That’s what you both say! That’s what they taught you to say! You’re fucking liars! Liars and parasites!”

  They lead him into an overheated interrogation room. Samir asks for a drink of water.

  “Talk, and then you can drink.”

  “I don’t have anything to say.”

  “All right, then . . .”

  One of the men turns up the heat and taunts Samir by holding a bottle of cold water in front of his face.

  “Want some? Then you’d better start cooperating.”

  “I don’t understand! What am I charged with?”

  “Like you don’t know . . .”

  “I don’t know!”

  “You’re charged with involvement in a terrorist operation against American interests.”

  The dread that invades his body in a matter of seconds. What happens when a man is destroyed? At the instant when he feels the sharp metallic teeth of the crusher puncture his skin. What happens in the moment of his fall? Is he afraid? Does he feel suddenly light, relieved of the weight of his lies, his compromises, his fictions?

  “Do the words ‘Al Qaeda’ mean anything to you?”

  Hearing this, Samir begins to tremble. It takes him a few seconds to calm down and reply.

  “What does that have to do with me? I haven’t done anything!”

  “You are suspected of being a member of Al Qaeda.”

  “This is insane! I don’t understand! What am I charged with?”

  The policeman plays with the bottle of water for a while, then finally responds: “I told you. You’re a terrorist.”

  Samir passes out. When he comes to, he asks to see a doctor. One of the cops laughs. “This one obviously knows the drill!”

  “What are you talking about? I feel sick. I’m h
aving trouble breathing.”

  “I know what you think is going to happen: you ask to see a doctor, then you demand to speak to a lawyer. You say you need something to eat. You deny all the accusations against you. You claim they were fabricated by the intelligence services. It’s classic . . . but let me tell you, buddy, that’s not going to work this time.”

  Samir’s hands are cuffed behind his back. This hurts his wrists, so he begs the policeman to remove them. “I’m-innocent-this-is-all-a-mistake-I-haven’t-done-anything-I’m-a-lawyer.”

  A man with pale blond hair comes closer: “You are suspected of having participated in a terrorist operation on behalf of Al Qaeda.”

  “What are you talking about? I haven’t done anything. I don’t understand! You can’t possibly have any kind of evidence against me because I haven’t done anything wrong! Who made this accusation?”

  “Shut the fuck up!”

  “Someone’s framing me. It’s a lie! You have to set me free! You have no evidence!”

  “In the war against terrorism, suspicion is enough for us to detain you.”

  “What is your connection with Djamal Yahyaoui?”

  “Djamal?”

  “François Djamal Yahyaoui claims to be your brother.”

  “His name is François, not Djamal, and yes, he’s my half-brother. But what does that have to do with me? Is he mixed up in something?”

  “Your brother is a jihadist. He was arrested in Afghanistan, where he was being trained to carry out an attack against American interests. The federal police have evidence that you financed his terrorist activities.”

  “What?”

  “They discovered his bank account in France and saw that you have been putting money into it every month for the past year. That money was used to pay for your brother’s trips abroad, his paramilitary training, and to distribute his incitements to murder.”

  It takes him some time to reply to this. He feels as if he’s been plunged into black water, his head held down, his mouth full of mud, suffocating. He stammers over his words like a man learning to breathe again.

  “This is a mistake! François came to New York because he needed money. He was going through a rough time. There’s no law against giving money to your brother! I agreed to help him, but I didn’t know anything about his activities. How could I know what he was doing with that money? I’m a lawyer, let me remind you! And anyway, why would I want to finance terrorist activities? What connection could I possibly have with Islamic terrorism?”

  “That’s exactly what concerns us.”

  “I’m an American citizen. I have a half-brother in France who I barely know, but who I felt obligated to help so that my mother wouldn’t have to—that’s all! My brother is not an Islamist. I don’t understand! How could he have ended up like that?”

  The man hesitates for a moment, then stands up and says: “We’re going to tell you.”

  10

  After his brief stay in New York, François returned to France in the middle of 2007. He became friends with an ex-con, Eric, now known as Mohammed. The circumstances of their meeting are not clear: some say they knew each other from the housing estate, others that it was François’s mother Nawel who put them in touch, after encouraging François to donate a portion of the money he received from Samir to the mosque’s social activities. Eric/Mohammed is a charismatic guy in his forties, dark-haired and black-eyed, whose mission in life is to spread the word of Islam to the greatest possible number of people; a proselyte who can be seen around the neighborhood preaching from the books he carries with him. One morning, when they are in Paris together, he suggests that François accompany him to a mosque where he often goes. Eric/Mohammed discovered Islam in prison through one of his fellow prisoners. He converted while he was there and, as he explains to François, “found peace.” Hundreds of worshippers are crowded around the temple, which is hidden behind the porch of an abandoned-looking building. François walks in. The imam, Hamid Oussen, is a small man with a thick black beard dressed in the traditional garb of an immaculately white qamis. As soon as he begins to speak, François falls under his spell. Eric/Mohammed whispers to François: He admires this man; he knows how to reach the young people who regularly gather around him. He speaks to them and listens to them with great gentleness. Never forcing the issue. He understands their social distress, shows his anger at the injustices they suffer. He vibrates when he speaks, and soon the whole room is trembling. Truth is in prayer, he says. Let us pray together. And when they kneel together, pressed close to their neighbors, François knows that the truth is indeed here, in this communal prayer recited in one voice. He knows he is one of them—one of God’s children. One evening, on his way out of the mosque, François goes to speak to Hamid Oussen. He has been deeply moved by all he has heard and seen. He never imagined he would find such brotherhood—he dares use that word. This is the first time the imam has noticed this young blond man with blue eyes who says his name is François, and he asks him if he is a convert. François hesitates before replying—he is impressed by this man in his white gandoura—and in the end it is Hamid Oussen who, understanding the young man’s embarrassment, takes him aside and asks him to tell his story. They sit on large purple velvet cushions and François talks about his father, whom he has never known but who is, he knows, “a famous politician”; about his mother, who tried to “integrate herself in French society so she could become a real French person”; his brother, whom he never sees anymore and who gives him money every month “to ease his conscience”—he talks about how alone he feels. Hamid listens, sympathizes, analyzes: “You don’t know who you really are. You must choose your side.” What most intrigues Hamid is François’s claim to be the son of a politician. The young man may be a lunatic or a liar, of course, but if he is telling the truth, he should be careful about what he admits to him. He invites François to his home, a nice house in the center of town where he lives with his wife—a small, dark woman whose hair is hidden beneath a large headscarf—and their four children, all dressed in traditional clothes. There, during a meal consisting of chickpea soup and home-baked bread, he asks François many questions, seeking to discover what the young man is really looking for. François seems disturbed to him: he is a very inhibited young man, full of suppressed rage, whose only ambition appears to be to avenge his mother’s stolen honor; his target is his father. But Hamid tells him this is not true: it is not only this man who is guilty, but the entire society he embodies, “this society whose values are not ours. They dare to tell us that we mistreat our wives because we protect their virtue, their modesty, but look what they do to their own women! Look how that man treated your mother! Like an object! He violated her honor and then he threw her away like garbage! Believe me, it is the infidels who are wrong—we have found the truth!” François is moved: feeling tears rise behind his eyes, he has to breathe heavily to hold them back. Hamid puts a hand on his shoulder and gives him a book about Islam: “You will find peace in this book.” François takes the book and puts it on the table. He feels suddenly calm. Religion helps him orient himself, helps him find his place in the world. “What should I do?” François asks. “First, you should change your name.” François is thrilled—this is something he has always dreamed of doing—and, with Hamid’s help, he chooses the name Djamal. When he goes home that evening, he announces to his mother: From now on, my name is Djamal. She does not protest. Djamal means “beauty.” Yes, Djamal—that’s a good name. It holds the promise of a better life.

  * * *

  After that, Djamal stays close to Hamid. He feels good in his company, strong. The older man seems to fill the gaps inside him. He knows nothing of his mother’s cultural and religious heritage. He neither reads nor understands Arabic. He doesn’t eat pork, but he has never observed Ramadan. He would like to learn. Together, they study a few texts and the rudiments of Arabic. In these moments of complicity, Djamal feels reborn. He thinks of Hamid as a father, a brother, a spiritual guide. H
e goes to the mosque every Friday evening. Hamid has many worshippers and friends there, some of whom are militant Islamists linked to the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat. There, surrounded by hundreds of fellow believers, François knows this is where he belongs. Never has he felt so intensely this spiritual communion, this conviction that he is included, loved, that he is part of the same family. They eat together, sitting on the floor. They sing together and his soul awakens. His blood family would never understand. His mother and his brother don’t know what it is to find a true family, to belong to a community, a group, a clan, to have not one but a hundred brothers, a thousand brothers around you, sharing the same ideals, working toward the same goal.