The Age of Reinvention

by Karine Tuil

  “Considering how much I’m paying them, my lawyers have a duty to be optimistic.”

  “They say there’s no evidence against you, and that’s why you haven’t been sent to Guantánamo.”

  “So? You think it’s any better here? This place is hell! And I have special privileges too—they’ve put me in an isolation cell. Thank God—I’d never have survived amid the gangs otherwise. If you could see what it’s like . . . They team up along ethnic lines and spend all their time beating the shit out of each other . . .”

  “You’ll be out of here soon . . .”

  “So why don’t they let me go now? If I’m innocent, if they have no evidence against me, why are they treating me like a dangerous psychopath? The only dangerous one in this case is my brother. He’s rotting in Guantánamo, and deservedly so, the dumb little fascist! But me—what have I done?”

  “I’m going to help you.”

  “Why would you do that? So I can get Nina back again? Because you like me and care about me? Shall I tell you why I think you’re here? You came here purely and simply because you want to write a book and make money out of my misfortune.”

  “I could write a book without coming all the way here.”

  “Bullshit! You came here to observe me, that’s all.”

  “You’re losing your mind . . .”

  Suddenly Samir gets to his feet. Standing up, he looks even scrawnier. His legs are barely strong enough to hold him.

  “Yes, I’m going crazy! I’m turning into a fucking lunatic, locked up like this all the time! Sometimes they leave me in total isolation for four or five days in a row. I never see anyone, so I start talking to myself. I’ve created a double, and it’s him I talk to! You’re right—I am going crazy. Do you have any idea what I’ve gone through here? The interrogations in the middle of the night, in overheated rooms where they let me die of thirst so I’ll confess to a crime that I didn’t commit, so I’ll say I believe in things I don’t believe in at all? Or being left alone, naked and shivering, in a damp, freezing cell. Or having to stand up inside a cage so small it’s impossible to sit down! Have you ever tried standing up for more than twelve hours, without even being able to bend your knees? Yes, I’m going crazy, of course I am, but I’m still lucid enough to understand that you are here to write a book about my downfall! My God, how that would sell! So go on, tell me, what are you going to write?”

  Samir begins to pace in a circle.

  “That’s enough. Stop it!”

  “You’re going to write that I’ve lost my mind. No, you’ll write that I’m like a Giacometti sculpture because that’s more poetic. This is literature, after all—it has to have meaning, style, an appropriate form!”

  “Stop it, you’re insane! I’m not going to do anything.”

  “You remember the ultimatum you made to Nina: Stay with me or I’ll kill myself? You remember your moment of glory when you found her sitting next to your hospital bed after you’d slit your wrists? Well, this is exactly the same: If you write about my life, if you misrepresent an element of my existence, if you distort every compromise I’ve had to make in order to survive, I will put a bullet through my head! You hear me? That’s what I will do if you soil my reputation, if—because of you—my children never want to see me again! I won’t survive that! And you won’t survive it either, because your conscience won’t leave you in peace! Your conscience will bother you night and day, just like mine bothered me when I slept with Nina while you were burying your parents, just like it forced me to take antidepressants for years so I could bear the shame of having denied my own identity, my origins, of having kept my own mother a secret in order to protect myself but also because I was embarrassed of her! But you’ll do it—you’ll write the book, I’m certain you will. The trouble with writers is that they’re egocentric, narcissistic, and manipulative! I’ve known a few. There’s nothing honest or true about them, because the only thing that matters to them is writing their book. Everything they do, they do for themselves. And yet how many books are there that make us think: That book changed my life, orthat book is dangerous, or I couldn’t live without that book? Very few! So they have to justify their madness, their lies, their abuses with literature that is sanitized, boring, unexceptional. Shall I tell you the truth? I didn’t like your book. It’s teary-eyed, sentimental crap. And you know me—I hate pathos. People are always telling me I’m rude when the truth is I’m just direct. You’re living outside social reality now, Samuel. So your ambition is to write a successful book? To find the mot juste? The perfect form? I’m sure you go around telling everyone that there is nothing in life harder than writing . . . Bullshit! Writing is just another way of getting ahead in the world, of keeping your place in society. My only ambition now is to be free again.”

  28

  Locked in his cell, lying on his mattress with his arms by his sides, his body as stiff as if he were imprisoned inside an iron lung, Samir can no longer move his limbs—only his mind still functions—and this is, he thinks, how he’ll be until the end of his life, condemned as a pariah for a crime he did not commit. I didn’t do anything, he protests. He didn’t do anything, confirms his brother. He had no idea what was going on. I spent the money he gave me without ever telling him what I was using it for. He is innocent, he is pure as the driven snow, agrees Nawel, hospitalized in Paris. Samir knew nothing about any of this. He is a good son, who always sent me money, checked that I was okay. And he is a good Muslim, an upright, exemplary, loyal man—a model of virtue. Free him.

  * * *

  Upon his return to Paris, Samuel had written a long article denouncing the treatment of Samir. Demonstrations in support of Samir were organized in many places. An American novelist even offered to write his story. (He refused.) He received abusive letters and letters of support, marriage proposals and death threats, an anonymous postcard saying that his wife was suffering and his children missed him—he reread that card every day. In Paris, voices were raised, denouncing his arbitrary arrest; other voices condemned him. But in his head, he heard always the same threat: They can keep you here for as long as they like.

  29

  Lying on the velvet sofa in the large apartment he now rents in Paris, on the respectable/chic/bourgeois Boulevard Raspail, Samuel fast-forwards through memories of his love affair with Nina. In which precise moment did he lose her? Where is she now? Where should he look for her? Where Nina is concerned, he no longer knows anything; Nothing remains of our love, he thinks.

  * * *

  So he grabs a book,1 lies down, gets up, takes a bath, feels restless, and finally goes to bed. All he wants is to see Nina again, and one morning—after a sleepless night when every thought held him in a state of tension and wakefulness, when everything he saw brought him back to this woman—he decides to call a detective, a man he knew when he was a social worker, and who might be able to help him find her again: Lin Cheng.2 He arranges to meet the detective that day in a tourist café on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées. Cheng, a tall man in his forties, gets there early. Samuel sits down next to him and quickly, without even taking the time to order a drink, in a toneless voice, a voice that betrays his urgency, his panic, his longing, the words rushing out in a jumble, unpunctuated, like people jostling to exit a building, he explains the context, then hands Cheng a photograph of Nina—Nina in her glory, at the peak of her electrifying beauty, her gaudy sensuality—and the detective, of course, is blown away. “My God, she’s incredible!” he says, then asks if she has any friends in Paris, if she has enough money to be able to stay in a hotel. Samuel replies that, as far as he knows, she has nothing. Cheng hesitates, then asks whether he thinks she might be living on the streets. The question sends Samuel into a panic. He has wondered it himself, of course, and not wanted to think about the answer. He can’t imagine her sleeping on the ground, on a piece of cardboard salvaged from a dumpster, exposed to the eyes of other men, perhaps even to the desires of those few men who—due to inadequate schooling, lo
w intelligence, a lack of care—have become like savages, beings without souls or consciences, with long criminal records, who would rape her in the middle of the night, and no one would hear a thing, because no one ever wants to hear a cry for help in a society like ours. He doesn’t want to think about her lying on the ground, hand outstretched; he believes she must have gotten by somehow, because the contrary is impossible, unthinkable. He will do anything to find her, and he says this to Cheng, who listens while sipping his coffee. “I will give you whatever you want, but find her for me, please—I’m begging you.”

  “I have to be honest: the chances of finding her are pretty slim. She might have left the country again . . .”

  “I’m not paying you for you to tell me that you’re not going to succeed.”

  “I’m just saying: It won’t be easy. It could take a long time and . . .”

  “You have to find her. However long it takes.”

  “All right. Be patient.”

  * * *

  1. Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman. After being banned for a long time, this great novel was finally released to huge acclaim.

  2. Lin Cheng has only one ambition in life: “To get out of here.”

  30

  A few days later, Samir discovers that the prosecutors have dropped the charges against him. As if from afar, he hears Stein’s voice repeating: The nightmare is over, the nightmare is over. And yet he remains motionless, as if encased in ice, insensitive to pain. His right eyelid flickers slightly. He has been in prison for sixty-six days. He kept count. Each day, he chalked a line on the wall, each line representing a day of confinement.

  * * *

  I’m free.

  * * *

  Stein explains that his liberation will take a few days, but that he should prepare himself. Samir can’t hide his emotion. He thanks Stein over and over again, and as his lawyer is about to leave, Samir swears that he will pay his fee, one way or another, even if it takes him ten years: he will honor his debt. “You don’t owe me anything,” Stein replies laconically. “Don’t say that! I will never accept that! I will pay every cent of your fee—it’s a question of principle . . . of dignity, even.” “You don’t understand,” Stein says. “The fees for every employee who’s worked in the shadows to prove your innocence have already been paid.” “It’s Ruth, isn’t it?” Samir asks, suddenly moved by the idea that his wife has secretly been supporting him. “No, Ruth stopped paying us as soon as she left you. But that was never a problem, you know. I continued to—” “But who was it, then?” Samir interrupts. “Pierre Lévy.”

  * * *

  In the last days before his release, he can’t sleep. Will he be able to cope with a return to normal life? The confrontation with his former colleagues? With his family? What will become of him, once he’s out of here? How will he be able to reconstruct himself? Will he be allowed to see his children on the day he’s released? Will he go back to France to talk to his mother? He has been told he will be freed within a week, but has been given no further details, and this uncertainty has put him in a state of extreme nervousness: he exercises like crazy, writes down everything that comes into his head, desperate not to forget these last moments. The waiting.

  31

  “Turns out she wasn’t very far from you,” says Cheng, a few days later, handing Samuel a sheet of paper containing an address. “I didn’t have much difficulty finding her.” Samuel immediately grabs the paper, thanks the detective, and takes an envelope from his pocket. “It’s as you feared,” Cheng continues. “Prepare yourself. You showed me a photograph of her, the last time I saw you . . .” Samuel freezes, incapable of moving a muscle. “Well . . . let’s just say you may not recognize her. She’s living in a women’s shelter an hour from here.”

  * * *

  Back at home, Samuel had gone online and found the following information: Shelter for women in distress. Can offer temporary housing for seven women aged 18 and over, alone or with their children, in cases of psychological, social or material distress. The photographs on the website showed an extremely simple, no-frills place: bunk beds, a wooden table, a few chairs, a couch, a TV room. He had difficulty imagining Nina in this stark environment with its reek of desperation and poverty. As he looked at the photographs, he felt sad—sad and bitter. That day, he called the manager of the center and asked to meet with “one of your lodgers, Nina Roche.” He introduced himself as a writer—that always impressed people. And yes, she was impressed, but still a little hesitant. She wanted to talk to Nina first: “She may not want to be seen here. Some of our lodgers prefer not to have any contact with their past life. They want to rebuild themselves first.” So he lied—“She was the one who gave me your number”—and, after a few minutes (during which he made a few jokes, made reassuring remarks, attempted to make the woman laugh as a way of breaking down her resistance), she agreed to let him see Nina on the condition that he give a talk to the women in the shelter about his book. The manager argued her points with the relentlessness of an attorney: she knew him; she had read his book, had quoted lines from it, admiringly; literature was her life—she loved reading, and writing (she had written a novel, actually, that had not yet been published: “If there’s any chance you could read it and let me know what you think . . .”), and encouraged the women in her shelter to do the same, recommending books to them. She had planned a literacy program for the most destitute among them, those who found reading difficult or made mistakes, and foreigners, and dyslexics, and those who’d had no access to education, culture, instruction. “Hard to believe, isn’t it, here in France, in the twenty-first century?” She had even put together a library in the center (he had smiled scornfully at this remark, unable to stop himself from imagining that this library consisted almost entirely of schmaltzy, best-selling trash—what he thought of as women’s novels): it had taken her several years to collect the three-hundred-odd books that lined its shelves. “I know that’s not many, but the most important ones are there: the books that marked my life, the ones that made me think and made me the person I am today” (and only then did he start to change his opinion of her). She talked and talked, and finally, to end this conversation, Samuel agreed to do as she asked—All right, I’ll do the talk—while thinking: I won’t go. This whole discussion had irritated him; all he wanted to do was rescue Nina from the hell to which her relationship with Samir had condemned her. After hanging up, he felt relieved: he was now allowed to go see her. So he had gone to a department store and chosen a bottle of perfume and a scarf, and on the street on the way there he had bought flowers—giant fuchsia-pink peonies—as if this were a first date, as if he were in love, or wanted to seduce her. And what about her—did she love him? How could he rebuild the tower of their love after it had been partly destroyed? A series of betrayals had shrunk their love, and he was going there to reconquer Nina, to take her back in the tried and trusted way, and even the most appalling mental images he’d had of her had not been enough to alter this determination, his simple desire to be the best, the first, the only one to love/protect her. Had she been merely a pawn in a power struggle between himself and Samir? Maybe. What he wanted now was to bring her home, rebuild her, transform her back into exactly the woman she had been when she had left him: that blazing, carnal, solar flare of a woman who had been desired by every man who saw her, and who had been his; that ideal, sublimely erotic woman—he wanted to reinvent her now, and assign her a new position in their relationship. From now on, he would be the dominant partner, the one people noticed; he liked the idea of this inversion of roles. What he wanted was to make her part of his life’s success—she was the missing piece in his jigsaw puzzle—and for that to happen, he had to see her. And talk to her.

  * * *

  He had chosen a black suit, handmade in the finest fabric, with a satin lining that was just a little too shiny, a white shirt with a narrow collar that revealed the vein in his neck, and a black knit tie. He had chosen his clothes slowly and carefully; he
wanted her to like the way he looked. He was no longer the moaning, spineless man he had been before, no longer pessimistic and envious and angry. Before, his arrogance had been all front, his pride the false pride of a failure, a jealous man. His marginality, his unsociability, his rudeness: all that had been a posture. Success had calmed him, given him confidence, an internal peace; he had his place in society now, and—surrounded by all these people acclaiming/approving/admiring him—he at last felt visible, recognized by the world.

  * * *

  It is early afternoon when he arrives at the center, stepping out of a black, leather-lined taxi. The center is a dump with red brick walls, located in a large Parisian suburb, near a residential area. It is a sad, ugly place. What chance would anyone have to rebuild themselves here? Samuel wonders. It’s the sort of place that would finish you off, not save you. The building is located in a backyard overgrown by weeds and brambles, with, at its center, a large gray-brown worm-eaten bench and, in one corner, a little hut containing some multicolored sun loungers that are brought out occasionally, when the weather’s good, as the short, stout, plain, middle-aged redhead explains when she welcomes him. Nothing special physically, but what a personality she has! There is an authority about her, a strong and magnetic presence that suggests courage, combativeness. She introduces herself: she is the manager of the shelter where Nina now lives.

  * * *

  The manager guides him—Watch out for the step, wipe your feet on the welcome mat—explaining that the women have just eaten lunch and gone through to the salon. He smiles as he repeats this expression: “They have gone through to the salon.” It sounds like the kind of thing you’d find in an old bourgeois novel, whereas what he sees here is grinding poverty. They watch TV, read, work, chat. Go ahead . . . at the end of the hallway, on your right. You’ll find Nina there. In the hallway, he covers his mouth and nose with his hand: the air is thick with a strong, stale odor of food and frying oil.