PENGUIN BOOKS
PEOPLE LIKE THEM
Samira Sedira is a novelist, playwright, and actress who was born in Algeria and moved to France with her family when she was very young. In 2008, after two decades of acting for film and the stage, she became a cleaning woman, an experience that inspired her autobiographical novel L’odeur des planches (The Smell of the Stage). People Like Them is her fourth novel and the first to be translated into English.
Lara Vergnaud is an award-winning translator who specializes in North African literature.
PENGUIN BOOKS
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Copyright © 2020 by Éditions du Rouergue
Translation copyright © 2021 by Lara Vergnaud
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Originally published in French as Des gens comme eux by Éditions du Rouergue, Rodez.
library of congress cataloging-in-publication data
Names: Sedira, Samira, author. | Vergnaud, Lara, translator.
Title: People like them : a novel / Samira Sedira ; translated from French by Lara Vergnaud.
Other titles: Des gens comme eux. English
Description: New York : Penguin Books, [2021]
Identifiers: LCCN 2020049115 (print) | LCCN 2020049116 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143136279 (paperback) | ISBN 9780525507871 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PQ3989.3.S44 D4713 2021 (print) | LCC PQ3989.3.S44 (ebook) | DDC 842/.92—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020049115
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020049116
Designed by Sabrina Bowers, adapted for ebook by Estelle Malmed
This is a work of fiction based on actual events.
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For my son
Contents
Cover
About the Authors
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
People Like Them
Author’s Note
We cannot despair of humanity, since we are ourselves human beings.
—Albert Einstein, The World As I See It
There’s no cemetery in Carmac. The dead are buried in the neighboring towns. But animal corpses are allowed. At the foot of a tree or in the corner of a garden. Here, animals die where they lived. Men don’t have such luck.
The small chapel overshadowed by a row of hundred-year-old plane trees doesn’t have much use anymore. People take refuge there in the summer, when the air becomes unbreathable. A haven of silence, coolness, and shade. Inside, thanks to the cold, moist stones, it feels like breathing deep within a cave. In the month of August in Carmac, everything burns. The grass, the trees, the children’s milky skin. The sun allows no respite. The animals drag, too; the cows produce less milk; the dogs sniff at their food, then return to the shade, nauseous.
In the winter, it’s the opposite—everything freezes. Cloudy River, which crosses the valley, gets its name from that particularity: transparent and elusive in the summer, cloudy and iced over in the winter.
The village, built on either side of the river, is connected by a stone bridge called Two Donkeys Bridge. It has a grocer’s store, a post office, a town hall, a small bus station, a bakery, a café, a butcher shop, and a hairdresser. There’s also an old sawmill whose machines haven’t whistled in more than twenty years. Now it serves as a hideaway for forest cats when it snows, or when the females give birth.
If you approach the village from the hillside road, it disappears into a vast pinewood, revealing its plunging valley only when you emerge from the last turn.
The most peaceful season here is autumn, when the western wind sweeps away the last of the summer heat. Beginning in September, the sharp air cleanses the stone and rinses the undergrowth. The valley finally breathes. The autumn purge. White, clear, unrebellious sky. All that remains is the fragrance of wet grass, a smell of the world’s beginning with hints of pine resin. At dawn, the beams of the school bus announce a new day. Chilled, sleepy teens pile in. They’ll follow the river for a few miles until the intersection, when, at the call of the town’s first murmurs, the bus will change direction. It’s the hour when the youngest go to the village school and the adults to work. There are only two families of farmers left; all the others commute every day.
Life is peaceful in Carmac, calm and orderly. But the most striking thing here, when winter arrives, is the silence. A silence that spreads everywhere. A tense silence in which the slightest sound stands out: the footsteps of a stray dog crackling over dead leaves, a pinecone tumbling onto dry needles, a famished wild boar digging feebly at the ground, the naked branches of a chestnut tree rattling against one another when the wind picks up or crows fly by . . . And even sounds from miles away can be heard here. At night, if you listen closely, you can hear the tumble of rocks the weary mountain drops into small turquoise lakes, as milky and murky as blind eyes.
When evening comes, when the smoke of fog intermingles with that of burned fields and outside everything retreats, the houses fill with noise. Conversations are held between one room and another, the workday recounted, voices swelling, rising above the gurgling of the dishwasher, the sizzle of onions, the cries of a child who’s dreading bath time and the loneliness night brings.
Maybe it’s because of that din that nobody heard anything the night they were killed. They say there were screams, gunshots, begging. But the chalet walls absorbed everything. Carnage behind closed doors. And nobody to save them. Yet outside, not the slightest breath of wind. Nothing but an interminable winter silence.
The first month I cried and couldn’t stop. For a long time, I tried to understand what had happened. Even now, I keep going through the story from beginning to end, trying not to forget a single detail. Sometimes one piece of the story will stick in my mind, to the point where I’m not able to sleep for several nights in a row. A detail that I unwind, analyze, dissect until I go mad, and that slips through my fingers as soon as I’m about to pierce its secret. These ruminations always seem ordinary enough, no different than the previous ones—that’s what I want to believe—but when night comes, they charge, the pain in the back of my head rousing my memories before casting me, alone, into a cold corner of the bed at dawn.
That’s what happened last night: a question repeated without end, an unsolvable riddle that I turned over and over as the hours went clammily by. And yet this question that kept me awake all night, that I tirelessly picked at without finding an answer, had already been asked of you clearly enough, by the prosecutor in the courtroom:
Why did you go to wash your hands in the frozen river after you butchered all the members of the Langlois family? It’s more than five hundred yards from the crime scene. Why not use one of the many sinks in the house? Anyone else would have done so. It’s logical. Anyone else would have used the sink in the bathroom or in the kitchen, or even the toilet! But not you. You ran like a lunatic, with no fear of being seen, and once you reached the river, you pummeled at the ice because, as you said in your deposition, you absolutely had to wash your hands. You have to admit that’s a bit strange. Why did it have to be the river?
Met with your hunted look, the prosecutor got annoyed. Stop
staring at me like that, please, Mr. Guillot, and answer!
His voice naturally carried far; volume cost him no effort. Meanwhile you said nothing, just stared at him obstinately. Only your lips twitched.
Contradictory feelings waged war inside you: the desire to speak led disastrously to the inability to formulate the slightest explanation. Cornered, you found no other way out but to smile dumbly. In reality, you had no answer to give him, and your muteness echoed like the desolation that follows a major disaster. For the first time since your trial began, I felt pity for you.
The prosecutor who had taken your reaction as a personal affront (no surprise there) immediately rose from his chair. In your position, and for your sake, Mr. Guillot, I would abstain from smiling!
His deep voice brimming with natural authority had exploded in a roar with those words, prompting everyone to sit up abruptly in their seats.
Your smile disappeared at once. The prosecutor swallowed before continuing. You ran out—that’s what you told the police officers—and, I’m quoting, “sprinted all the way to the river.”
The prosecutor then raised his arms, like he was being held at gunpoint, and curled his upper lip. A sprint?! He paused. Who . . . He paused again. . . . sprints, in the middle of winter, with temperatures below freezing, to go wash their hands soaked in the blood of their own victims? What exactly were you running from? Pause. He repeated, What were you running from?
He obviously wasn’t expecting a response, seeing as he stopped for a few seconds to gather his thoughts, and then said, without even glancing at you, The river was frozen, but that didn’t stop you, Mr. Guillot. You banged at the thick crust of ice like a madman, first with the butt of your rifle, then with your fists, until it yielded. There were four inches of ice! Four inches, can you imagine?! It takes some rage to break through four inches, and you had just murdered an entire family with a baseball bat! You hit at the ice so hard that your hands split, “gushing blood.” Those are your words, are they not?
The prosecutor approached the stand, slightly out of breath, arms hanging alongside his body.
He had his back to the members of the jury, who were listening raptly. The prosecutor knew that nothing he said would escape their attention, and that a single word could suffice to reverse their final decision. As a representative of the law, he was responsible for people’s consciences.
He looked at you intently and then asked, Do you remember what you said during your deposition?
You shrugged, a little lost.
All right, I’ll tell you. You said: “My blood mixed with their blood. I couldn’t handle it.”
The prosecutor shook his head, and with an air of feigned astonishment, he repeated, a little softer and overly articulating every word: “My blood mixed with their blood. I couldn’t handle it.”
At that exact moment, he let out a mean snicker. It was odd, inappropriate. He must have realized it because his cheeks reddened. To contain his embarrassment, he resumed immediately, pointing at you with one stiff jerk of his chin to bring the attention back to you. And you added, to explain your revulsion, “I wasn’t there with my wife the times she gave birth. I’m not comfortable in hospitals. When I see blood, I pass out.”
A long silence followed, filling the audience with a sense of dread and icy stupefaction. He had cornered you in a dead end. Trapped you like a rat. He couldn’t believe you were the kind of man to be afraid of blood. To him, it was a strategy aimed at softening the jurors. How could someone who was capable of killing five people tremble at the sight of blood? It seemed ludicrous, unimaginable. And yet. You really were horrified by blood. You could never bear to see the smallest drop. When one of our daughters skinned her knee or hand, you’d be paralyzed, watching her whimper, incapable of the slightest movement, and you invariably ended up calling me to clean the wound. Later, a psychiatric expert will corroborate the idea that a fear of blood doesn’t prevent someone from killing. We’ve already seen soldiers head bravely to the front and faint at the slightest prick of a vaccine shot!
But at this stage of the trial, nobody wanted to believe you. You gritted your teeth, head down, face pale.
Then, for some odd reason, the prosecutor abruptly turned toward me, as though I was a last resort. Clearly separating each word, he said, For someone who can’t handle the sight of blood, looks like you overcame your phobia easily enough. Laughter in the room. He was staring at me, at least I thought so until I realized that in reality, he wasn’t actually seeing me. His gaze had lingered at random, and unfortunately it was in my direction that it had stopped. In the confused state in which I found myself, I felt guilty, the same as you. As if the mere fact of being your wife automatically incriminated me. Tears rose to my eyes. The calm veneer I had managed to maintain until then, at the cost of considerable effort, had cracked like dead wood. I was nothing but a piece of trembling humanity. A murderer by proxy.
A murderer’s wife is reproached for everything: her composure when she should show more compassion; her hysteria when she should demonstrate restraint; her presence when she should disappear; her absence when she should have the decency to be there; and so on. The woman who one day becomes “the murderer’s wife” shoulders a responsibility almost more damning than that of the murderer himself, because she wasn’t able to detect in time the vile beast slumbering inside her spouse. She lacked perceptiveness. And that’s what will bring about her fall from grace—her despicable lack of perceptiveness.
The prosecutor finally looked away and stared at the ground, vaguely annoyed. His lips quivered. I thought I heard him mumble: Keep going, keep going.
It was as if everything that had been said up to then had suddenly brought about some great inner turmoil in him. His back slumped. The powerful man he had forced himself to appear to be gave way to an ordinary one, as disconcerted as anyone by the great mystery of human nature. He was standing in the middle of the courtroom, with everyone else seated, and I remember wondering, observing his black, perfectly polished shoes, if he had shined them himself or if someone had done it for him.
Later, during the trial (I can’t remember the sequence anymore), the judge asked you to describe the night of the murders while trying not to forget anything. Everything. Everything that you’d already told the police. The facts, nothing but the facts.
The words didn’t come out right away; they had to be knocked around, shoved forward. But as soon as they were freed, you let them leap out of you, cold, without any particular modulations or emotions. None of it seemed to concern you, as though someone else had done the dirty work. Or as though you were reading text from a teleprompter. Guided by that escapist logic, you let that “someone else” talk; the other, the true perpetrator. Later, the psychiatric expert called to the stand will explain that it’s not your “conscious self” who killed. And to illustrate his point, he will cite Nietzsche: “ ‘I did that,’ says my memory. ‘I could not have done that,’ says my pride.”
No, none of it seemed to concern you. The memory of your confession still goes with me everywhere, like a black cloud above my head. I remember every one of your words, in detail, every single hesitation:
I grabbed the bat with both hands, like this, and I hit him hard behind the neck. The kid was having a snack at the big table, chocolate milk in a white bowl. A hard blow to the neck, like this, with both hands. I think that’s when his baby teeth came out. . . . The police officers told me that they’d found two teeth between the floorboards. Baby teeth, they said. . . . His head . . . his head fell forward onto the table, it made a sound, a loud sound, a . . . terrible noise; the bowl fell, too, pieces all over the ground. I threw up the first time. I felt nauseous, couldn’t hold it back. He died instantly, I swear. I’m saying that for the family. He didn’t suffer, I swear. The oldest came down from her room, yelling. She wasn’t happy. “What was that noise? Nono, what did you break now? I can never do my homework in
peace!” She was waving her arms all over the place, annoyed. I ended up face-to-face with her in the living room. First she smiled. Odd, I thought, why is the kid smiling? And then, when she saw the blood on the bat, her eyes got black, black, and her mouth trembled. She looked around. “Where’s Nono?” she asked. Her face was anxious, her eyes like a hunted animal’s. . . . I didn’t answer. That’s when she saw him. His head on the table. The blood. The bowl on the floor. She understood. She said, crying, “What’s wrong with Nono, why isn’t he moving?” She lifted her arms, she said, “I didn’t do anything, it’s a joke, right, Constant, this is all a joke, isn’t it?” Sorry, I . . . Are all these details useful? For the family, it . . .
The judge encouraged you to continue with a nod.
Okay, well . . . I . . . I was saying that she was crying and screaming, “Please don’t, Constant, please, I want to see my mom, Mom, I want my mom.” She repeated “Mom” over and over, like she’d lost her mind, over and over. I raised the bat, I threw up again. She didn’t try to run, nothing, she just crossed her arms over her forehead, she crouched in front of me, and “Mom” again, “I want my mom” over and over. I closed my eyes so I could go through with it. I hit her. Again. And again. I . . . I opened my eyes, blood, lots of blood . . . she . . . she was dead. I threw up again. Then I went upstairs to find the third one. She was hiding in the bathroom between the toilet bowl and a small cabinet, sucking her thumb. I told her to come out, to turn around—she obeyed without crying, nothing. I raised the bat high, real high, then against the neck again. Dead on the spot, like the first one.
I threw up one last time, then I checked the time. Their parents would be back soon. I thought that it would be impossible with the bat, the dad was too strong. I ran all the way to my garage. I grabbed the rifle, a double-barrel, I loaded it, then I went back to their house. The street was empty. In that weather, not a soul. I waited for them, hiding behind the door. It got dark. In winter night comes on quick here. In the silence, the dead bodies next to me, I . . . I was scared. I could hear their breathing. A corpse doesn’t breathe, I told myself, but nothing doing, I heard it. And the smell of blood . . . I almost threw up again, but I managed to keep it down that time.
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