The Lost Sailors

by Jean-Claude Izzo

  Just before his sperm had flooded into her.

  Gaby had looked at Lalla, more tenderly than ever. “Call Doug.”

  Gaby wasn’t the manager of the Habana. But she was the one who kept it ticking over. She and Lalla. They were the best at wearing men down. Head and shoulders above the three other girls who worked there. That must have been because Gaby and Lalla enjoyed doing what they did, because neither of them believed in the miracle man who would take them away from here, and, above all, because they refused to sleep with the customers.

  Doug could still remember the time Lalla confessed to Gaby that she had gone to a hotel with a customer. Lalla had only been there two months. She had come back at noon, looking sheepish. Gaby, in whose apartment she was staying, was waiting for her at the Habana. She was furious.

  “How much did he give you?”

  “A thousand.”

  No, she wasn’t proud of herself. The guy in question, a journalist from Paris, had promised her triple that.

  “A thousand for a trick?”

  “For the night.”

  She had slapped her. “In one night, any hooker in the area easily makes five or six times that.”

  “He promised—”

  Another slap.

  “You take their money first, then you fuck them. That’s the rule, Lalla. So if you want to be a hooker, fine, but learn to do it properly.”

  Doug had come in to see Gaby, as obedient as a dog. Reluctantly, he’d let Diamantis go. He’d wanted to beat him up. But Doug was afraid of Gaby. And even more afraid of Ricardo. Ricardo owned the Habana. He owned Gaby, too.

  They drove along the Corniche. Nedim managed to take his eyes off Lalla’s thighs to look at the harbor. Surprised by so much beauty. The sky and the sea melted into one another, and you couldn’t tell exactly where the horizon was.

  Nedim had never come as far as this. Marseilles, for him, was the Vieux-Port and half the Canebière. He’d never even taken the trouble to go farther than that. Cities didn’t exist for him. This one or any one. He just passed through them, indifferently. A city was just a collection of bars, night clubs, and hookers. The cities he loved were those where he’d had a good time. Istanbul was the only one that really existed.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Lalla said.

  “Do you know Istanbul?”

  She didn’t. She had never left Marseilles. She wasn’t even all that familiar with Marseilles. She had grown up outside the center of the city. In Beaumont, an Italian neighborhood to the east, where she’d lived with her grandmother on Rue Tosca. A village of apartment blocks with gardens, where everyone grew tomatoes and whistled arias from the operas that the streets of the neighborhood were named for: Lakmé, Aida, Manon, Norma.

  “If you saw Istanbul, you wouldn’t be able to resist it.”

  He told her about the streets and avenues. The roar of the buses, the car horns, the brakes, the hubbub of voices, the crowds.

  “Just like here,” Lalla said.

  “This is nothing. Do you know what they used to call Istanbul?”

  “Constantinople.”

  He was surprised. He’d forgotten it was called Constan­tinople. “Yes, that’s true. But there’s a better name than that . . .”

  He looked at Lalla. He’d caught her out.

  “The Gate of Felicity.”

  Constantinople meant nothing to Nedim. But the Gate of Felicity brought back lots of good memories. The first time he drank a beer, the first time he smoked a cigarette. And the first time he went with a hooker. All those things. The Gate of Felicity. He had never found a better expression for having a fuck.

  “Yes, the Gate of Felicity.” He laughed long and hard.

  “What’s so funny?” Lalla asked.

  “Nothing, nothing . . . You’d be a great hit over there.”

  “Oh yes?” she said, evasively, switching on the turn signal.

  She turned left onto Chemin du Vallon de l’Oriol and looked for a parking space.

  Nedim’s mind was working overtime. He’d take Lalla with him to Istanbul and open a club like the Habana. On Well Street, at the end of the crowded Yuksekkaldarim Street. Lalla would teach other girls what to do. They’d easily find a fucking nigger like Doug. He’d be a millionaire before long. He’d build a superb house for Aysel. He’d get his mother to live there, too. To keep an eye on her. Because obviously he wouldn’t spend much time in the village. Especially at first, when he had to see that the business got off to a good start. Afterwards, he would find a partner. Or a manager. What if he made Lalla his manager? Women are often more honest than men.

  By the time Lalla finally found somewhere to park, Nedim had abandoned this idea. There were too many unknown factors. Lalla, for example. He wasn’t really convinced she would agree to follow him. Or join him. He’d found a simpler idea. Steal Lalla’s car and papers and get out of here as quickly as possible. In three hours tops, he could be in Italy. He’d better make sure there was enough gas in the tank.

  Well, best see how this afternoon panned out first. With Lalla and Gaby—and Diamantis, if he resurfaced. Because, shit, if there was any chance of having this girl before he left, he didn’t want to miss it.

  “Are you coming?” she said.

  Gaby was waiting for them on the Prophète Beach. On the terrace of a bar. The Flots Bleus. She was drinking a Coke. The beach and the sea were both packed with people.

  She smiled at Nedim. “How have you been since the other night?”

  This woman cast a spell over him. She intimidated him, made him uncomfortable. In her presence, he felt naked and defenseless.

  “Good, I’ve been good,” he stammered, sitting down next to her, exhausted all of a sudden.

  She smiled again. “What are you drinking? My treat,” she added, with a laugh.

  Clearly, she’d called a truce, he thought. Things were back to normal. Thanks to Diamantis. She must have taken a fancy to the fucking Greek. That was the only explanation for all this. Being here with the two girls. He didn’t have a cent, he didn’t know how he was going to get out of this fucking city, but hey, there were people worse off than him.

  “Er . . . I’ll have the same as you’re having. A Coke.”

  “You can have a gin, if you like,” she said, with a touch of irony.

  He looked at his watch. “Well . . . Maybe it’s a little early.”

  “A Coke, then?”

  “No, I know what, I’ll have a beer.”

  “How about you?”

  Lalla had sat down opposite Nedim, and was touching up her lipstick.

  “Peppermint cordial. Can you hold this for me, Nedim?” She handed him a little mirror. As she did so, her knees touched his, and he quivered slightly.

  “Hey, don’t move!” she said.

  She put away her makeup, and looked at him with a little amused smile.

  “Am I O.K. like this?”

  “Great.”

  “You mustn’t be angry at us for the other night,” Gaby said. “We were just working. If we don’t make enough, we get punished.”

  “They hit you?”

  “Like the lady said,” Lalla replied.

  Nedim turned back to Gaby. “What about that?” he said, pointing to the scar under her eye. “Is that because of what you do? Because of your job?”

  He was dying to know what a woman as beautiful as her could have done to deserve being marked like that. He still thought it was a knife wound.

  “It’s not recent, is it?”

  Asking the question helped him to keep Gaby at a distance. To force her to change her tone. He could sense that she despised him. So it didn’t bother him that he was touching a sore spot.

  “Well, that’s a whole other story.”

  He didn’t insist.

  18.

  WH
EN YOU GIVE YOUR WORD,

  THAT’S IT, UNFORTUNATELY

  Abdul Aziz left the Bijou Hotel feeling even sadder, even more helpless, than when he had gone in. The certainty was growing in him that, one way or another, he had used up all the credit in his life. From now on, he was just one more loser. The girl, Stella—at least that was what she said her name was—had realized that.

  “You weren’t thinking about me, were you?” she asked him afterwards, smoking a cigarette.

  She was lying on her back, naked. Her right forearm behind her head. Her thighs shamelessly parted.

  “No,” he admitted.

  “You have a wife somewhere, is that it?”

  “Yes.”

  But he hadn’t been thinking about Cephea while he fucked Stella, he’d been thinking about himself. About the way his life was crumbling. He’d always been a coward. Not in his professional life, no. He considered himself a good captain. None of the crews he had had under his command could assert the contrary. He made every effort to command according to the rules, and he never departed from them. Not even for himself. It was afterwards that things became complicated. When he hit land. In daily life, the law of the land was different than the law of the sea. And between the two, he would lose his way.

  It wasn’t that. He knew it. It was more serious. The rules were the same on land and on sea. For all men, whoever they were. Everything depended on the way you dealt with other people. The rules—laws, codes, conventions—only found their true meaning after that. But he never looked beyond the basic meaning of the rules: a way of managing men. When it came to rules, he had never really thought of men as real people. Man didn’t enter into the law. He had to submit to it. And in the social hierarchy, it was better to command than to submit.

  His father had brought him up that way. To be rigid, to ignore feelings. All that mattered was good manners. Obsequious politeness. Only considering other people from the perspective of what they owed you. It was another way of looking at the world. A more realistic, more efficient way.

  Constantin Takis was the same kind of man as he. They had negotiated the evacuation of his family from Beirut without ever taking into account the human tragedy, the tragedy of a nation and the communities in it. It was only a business transaction, a deal between men of their word. And Constantin Takis’s freighter had only taken on board the four people specified in their agreement. Abdul’s mother and father, and an aunt and uncle. All that remained of his family. But his father, in his joy at being able to escape, appeared on the quay with the Rafic family, who owned the land adjacent to theirs. It was thanks to Rafic that his parents had been able to escape from the Chouf. The captain of the freighter, a man Abdul didn’t know, named Calvin, refused to take them on board. As in all good transactions, Abdul Aziz had paid the right price and no more.

  When he called his father a few weeks later, he learned that the Rafic family had died in a cellar in East Beirut during a bombing raid. His father blamed him for these deaths. “Without them, we wouldn’t be alive now, and here in Limassol.” He used the word “despicable” to describe Abdul’s behaviour. “Such a lack of humanity. That’s not how I brought you up, my son.” His father never spoke to him again, and even on his deathbed refused to forgive him.

  Abdul had been extremely hurt by this. He had saved his family. Saved his father and mother. It was war. Was he supposed to save the whole of mankind? Why couldn’t his father understand that he’d done what he had to do?

  “Of course you did,” Cephea had said. “But you didn’t think about other people . . .”

  Cephea had helped him at the time. Her way of looking at life was different than his. She took things as they came, fatalistically. What mattered in the end was the happiness of living, in the present. An African quality, he had often thought. He had discovered that Diamantis behaved in much the same way.

  Cephea had already helped him ten years earlier, during the Cygnus affair. The deal offered him after the shipwreck set up by Tex Oil had, of course, profoundly sickened him, as he had told Diamantis one night. But once again he’d lacked courage. He had chosen the rule, rather than the exception. Silence rather than truth. He remembered the letter he had received from the parents of Lucio, the ship’s boy who’d died in the wreck. They had implored him to testify against the captain, against the company. They had told him that some of the crew would be ready to back up his testimony. They couldn’t bring an action without him. He had been the first mate on the Cygnus. An officer. He would be listened to, and their case would be taken seriously.

  He had asked Cephea for advice. “Whatever you do,” she had said, “I’ll always be on your side. I love you, Abdul, and love is non-negotiable. But I can’t decide for you. We each of us have to do what we have to do, that’s what I believe. Do what you believe you have to do.”

  He hadn’t answered Lucio’s parents.

  Cephea spoke like her uncle, Diouf the fortune-teller. And Abdul could never listen to his heart. There was only one way of thinking he understood. The kind that made it possible for him to raise himself up, not to owe anything to anyone. The higher he rose, the easier it would be to prevent injustice. It was better to be a captain than a first mate. It was better to have money than to borrow it.

  No, nobody, since then, could have accused him of having made the wrong choices. He had stood up to ship-owners over the sailors’ wages, and over questions of safety, health, and comfort on board ship. He had never mistreated his crews. He had never abandoned a ship, even when things looked really bad. He’d made things right with himself.

  “Lies,” he thought.

  “Lies,” he had been thinking for some days. He’d made things right with the social order, not with himself. That was why he hadn’t been able to confide in Diamantis. He had only told him those things that showed him in the best light. Even when he’d gone so far as to admit that Cephea was leaving him, that his life was collapsing. He’d revealed his emotions, but only the emotions of his lies. His self-pity. Nothing else.

  He would also have had to explain why they were stuck here on the Aldebaran. Because Abdul had never dreamed of not paying his debt to Constantin Takis. Even after the tragedy of the Rafic family. He had given his word and that was it. He had to keep it.

  He’d known, when he’d accepted the command of the Aldebaran, that he was there only to allay the suspicions of the international authorities. And most of the crew. The fact that Takis was a crook didn’t concern him. At least in this particular matter. He would have respected his agreement with anyone. In all conscience. Those were the rules. If he departed from them, even if only once, he was convinced that his life would be on the way to ruin. That was what he’d told himself. But it was the opposite that had happened.

  He had made the decision without saying a word to Cephea. He’d presented her with a fait accompli. He was leaving, and that was it. Once again, he’d been a coward. In relation to Takis. In relation to her, too. Especially in relation to her. If he’d been able to answer her, if he’d been prepared to question the life he had made her live, he might have been able to refuse Takis’s crooked proposition. That was when Cephea had decided to leave him.

  Now, asking Diamantis for advice—if it was still possible—asking him for help, meant exposing himself to him. Putting an end to his constant compromising, his constant juggling with the values of life. And that was something that seemed to be beyond his strength. That was the crux of it, the heart of the matter. He was all too well aware of it now. Men’s lives were non-negotiable. Friendship was non-negotiable. So was love.

  Cephea, he thought.

  She had always been on his side. Not him. He liked the fact that she loved him. But had he loved her for herself? He hadn’t always been on her side. On the side of her love. This girl beside him now, Stella, was a cruel testimony to that.

  “You’re thinking about her, aren’t you?” Stell
a asked, putting out her cigarette.

  “Yes.”

  He looked at Stella, the way you might look at an object. A beautiful object. Stella was a pretty hooker. Her damp body glowed. She wasn’t yet worn down by men, alcohol, drugs.

  She had told him she was twenty-one. She came from a small village—he’d forgotten the name—near Iasi, in Romania. She had always lived in the country. Her body had blossomed with the seasons, and the hard work of the land. It was powerful and muscular. Rather like Cephea’s. They both had bodies that wouldn’t easily submit to the unforgiving nature of time, the blows of fate.

  He had met Stella on the terrace of a bar called Les Templiers, on Place Cézanne, at the top of Cours Julien. One of the newly fashionable areas of Marseilles. Some longshoremen had recommended the place to him. “It’s full of girls from Eastern Europe. Yugoslavs, Romanians, Russians . . . You sit down and they’re all over you like flies. You just have to take your pick . . . But be careful,” they’d warned him. “Most of them are doped to the eyeballs.”

  His choice had fallen on Stella, because of her physique. He didn’t like fragile women. They were too passive in bed. He could make love only when there was an element of physical confrontation. Stella hadn’t disappointed him. She had the strength, and enough hatred in her, to give him the pleasure he’d hoped for.

  “I don’t think about anything anymore,” she said.

  He wasn’t listening. She’d already said that. Earlier, on the terrace of the café. Her father and brother shot by the partisans, after the flight of Ceaus¸escu. Her father had been the Party secretary in the village. Vasil, the head of the militia, had raped her. A young peasant, the same age as she. They’d grown up together, danced together when there were parties in the village. He often did odd jobs in her house. He was a protégé of her father’s. “Vasil will be a good Communist, and a good husband for you,” her father would say whenever he saw him. She had always refused to sleep with him, because she wasn’t sure she wanted to be made pregnant by this fucking beggar, who wouldn’t make her any happier than her father had made her mother. She knew life was better elsewhere. In Bucharest. And even more so in the capitalist countries. In Italy, and especially in France.