Chourmo (7 page)

“Oh,” he said, recoiling. “Hi.”

“Who is it?” the woman asked.

“A man,” he replied, without turning around. “Are you a cop?”

“No. Why?”

“Well . . . ” He looked me up and down. “Well, because of what happened earlier, you know. The French guy who was shot. I just thought. You were talking to the cops like you knew them.”

“You're very observant.”

“Well, we don't really talk to them, you know. We avoid them.”

“Did you know the guy?”

“I didn't really get a look at him. But the others say they'd never seen him around here.”

“So there's nothing to worry about.”

“No.”

“But you thought I was a cop. And you were scared. Any particular reason?”

The woman appeared in the corridor. She was dressed in European style, and on her feet she wore Turkish slippers with big red pompons.

“What is it, Mourad?”

“Good evening, Madame,” I said.

Mourad retreated behind his mother, but didn't go away.

“What is it?” she repeated, to me this time.

She had magnificent black eyes. Her whole face was magnificent, framed by thick curly hennaed hair. She was barely into her forties. A beautiful woman, just starting to fill out a bit. Imagining how she must have been twenty years earlier gave me an idea of what Naïma looked like. Guitou had good taste, I said to myself, and it made me feel quite happy.

“I'd like to talk to Naïma.”

Mourad came forward again, boldly. His face had grown somber. He looked at his mother.

“She isn't here,” she said.

“May I come in for a moment?”

“She hasn't done anything stupid, has she?”

“That's what I'd like to find out.”

She touched her heart with her fingertips.

“Let him come in,” Mourad said. “He's not a cop.”

 

I told my story, drinking a mint tea. Not my favorite drink after eight o'clock at night. I was dying for a glass of Clos-Cassivet, a white wine with a vanilla fragrance, which I'd recently discovered during my trips inland.

That was what I usually did at this time. I'd sit on my terrace, facing the sea, and drink, earnestly, savoring the taste. And I'd listen to jazz. Lately, Coltrane or Miles Davis. I was rediscovering them. I'd dug out the old Miles Davis album
Sketches of Spain
and, on evenings when I particularly missed Lole, I played
Solea
and
Saeta
over and over. The music made me think of Seville. That's where I'd have liked to be, right now, this minute. But I was too proud to do that. Lole had gone. She'd be back. She was a free agent, and I shouldn't go running after her. It was a lousy argument and I knew it.

In my desire to convince Naïma's mother, I mentioned Alex, saying that he “wasn't a very nice man.” I told her how Guitou and Naïma had met, how Guitou had run away, how he'd taken money from the cash register, how his mother, my cousin, hadn't heard from him since, and how worried she was.

“You can understand that,” I said.

Madame Hamoudi understood, but didn't reply. Her French vocabulary seemed to be limited to “Yes. No. Maybe. I know. I don't know.” Mourad hadn't taken his eyes off me. Between him and me, I felt a kind of rapport. His face, though, remained inscrutable. I was starting to think that things weren't as simple as I'd imagined.

“Mourad, this is serious.”

He looked at his mother, who sat with her hands clasped on her knees. “Talk to him, Ma. He doesn't mean us any harm.”

She turned to her son, took him by the shoulders, and hugged him to her chest. As if she was afraid that someone would take her child away from her. It wasn't until afterwards that I realized it was the gesture of an Algerian woman assuming the right to speak under the authority of a man.

“She doesn't live here anymore,” she began, her eyes lowered. “She hasn't been here for a week. She's living with her grandfather. Since Farid left for Algeria.”

“My father,” Mourad explained.

“About ten days ago,” she went on, still without looking at me, “the Islamists attacked my husband's village, looking for hunting rifles. My father's brother still lives there. We're worried because of what's happening in our country. So Farid said, ‘I'm going to find my brother.'”

She drank some of her tea.

“I didn't know what we were going to do. We don't have a lot of room here. That's why Naïma went to live with her grandfather. They love each other.” Then she hastened to add, looking me in the eyes this time, “It's not that she doesn't get on with us, but . . . Well . . . There's the boys . . . And Redouane, Redouane's the eldest, he's . . . how shall I say? . . . more religious. So he's always after her. Because she wears pants, because she smokes, because she goes out with her girlfriends . . . ”

“French boyfriends,” I cut in.

“A
roumi
in our home, no, it's not possible, monsieur. Not for a girl. It isn't done. As Farid says, there's tradition. When we go back to our country, he doesn't want to hear people say, ‘You wanted France, and now, you see, France has swallowed your children.'”

“Right now, it's the fundamentalists who are swallowing your children.”

I immediately regretted being so direct. She stopped short, and looked around her, anxiously. Then she looked back at Mourad, who was listening without saying anything. He gently freed himself from his mother's embrace.

“It's not for me to talk about that,” she said. “We're French. Their grandfather fought for France. He liberated Marseilles. With the Algerian artillery regiment. He got a medal for it . . . ”

“He was badly wounded,” Mourad said. “In the leg.”

The liberation of Marseilles. My father had gotten a medal too. And a citation. But that was a long time ago. Fifty years. Ancient history. The only thing people still remembered was the American soldiers, on the Canebière. With their cans of Coke and packs of Lucky Strikes. And the girls who threw themselves at them for a pair of nylon stockings. The liberators. The heroes. People had forgotten about their indiscriminate bombardment of the city. Just as they'd forgotten about the Algerian infantry's desperate attempts to dislodge the Germans from Notre-Dame de la Garde. Cannon fodder for the French commanders.

Marseilles had never thanked the Algerians for that. Nor had France. And at the very same time, other French officers were violently suppressing the first pro-independence demonstrations in Algeria. People had also forgotten about the Sétif massacres, in which men, women and children were slaughtered. We all have short memories when it suits us . . .

“French, but also Muslims,” she went on. “Farid used to go to cafés, drink beer, play dominoes. Now he's stopped. He prays. Maybe one day he'll go to Mecca, on the Hadj. That's how we are, there's a time for everything. But . . . We don't need people to tell us what to do and what not to do. The FIS are scary. That's what Farid says.”

She was a good woman. And a clever one. She was expressing herself now in very correct French. Talking slowly, going into detail, but always skirting the true issue, like a true Eastern woman. She had her own opinions, but she concealed them beneath those of her husband. I had no wish to offend her, but I had to know.

“Redouane threw her out, is that it?”

“You should leave,” she said, getting to her feet. “She isn't here. And I don't know the man you mentioned.”

I also stood up. “I have to see your daughter,” I said.

“It's not possible. Her grandfather doesn't have a phone.”

“I could go there. It won't take long. I just have to talk to her. And I really have to talk to Guitou. His mother's worried. I have to reason with him. I don't wish them any harm. And . . . ” I hesitated for a moment. “This is just between us. Redouane doesn't need to know. You can discuss it later, when your husband returns.”

“He's not with her anymore,” Mourad said.

His mother looked at him reproachfully.

“So you've seen your sister?”

“He's not with her anymore. He left, that's what she told me. They had an argument.”

Shit! If that was true, Guitou was out there somewhere, brooding over a first love affair that had turned sour.

“I still have to see her,” I said, turning back to the woman. “Guitou hasn't come home yet. I have to find him. You must understand that.”

Her eyes were full of panic. Tenderness too. And a lot of questions. She stared at me, seeming to look right through me, searching for answers. Or for someone to trust. When you're an immigrant, trusting people is the hardest thing. She closed her eyes for a fraction of a second.

“I'll go to her grandfather's and talk to her. Tomorrow. Tomorrow morning. Call me around noon. If her grandfather agrees, then Mourad will go with you.”

She walked to the door of the apartment. “You must leave. Redouane will be back, he's always home at this time.”

“Thank you,” I said. I turned to Mourad. “How old are you?”

“Almost sixteen.”

“Carry on with the basketball. You're really good.”

 

I lit a cigarette as I left the building, and walked toward my car. Hoping it would still be intact. OubaOuba must have been waiting for me. He came straight up to me before I reached the parking lot. Like a shadow. Black T-shirt, black pants. And a matching Rangers cap.

“Hi,” he said, still walking. “I have some information for you.”

“I'm listening,” I said, following him.

“The French guy they shot, they say he's been nosing around lately. At La Savine, La Bricarde, everywhere. Especially at Le Plan d'Aou. This was the first time they saw him here.”

We kept walking past the buildings, side by side, chatting away like old friends.

“What do you mean, nosing around?”

“Asking questions. About the young guys. Just the Arabs.”

“What kind of questions?”

“About the fundamentalists.”

“What do you know about that?”

“What I'm telling you.”

“What else?”

“The guy who was driving the car. He's been seen around here a few times, with Redouane.”

“Redouane Hamoudi?”

“Sure, you've just come from his place, haven't you?”

We'd walked around the project, and were coming back to the parking lot and my car. I wouldn't get any more information.

“Why are you telling me all this?”

“I know who you are. So do some of my friends. I know Serge was a buddy of yours. From before. From when you were sheriff.” He smiled, his face lit by the crescent moon. “He was an OK guy. He did a lot of favors, they say. So did you. A lot of kids owe you. The mothers know that. So people trust you.”

“I don't know your first name.”

“Anselme. Haven't fucked up big time yet, so they don't know me down the station house.”

“Carry on like that.”

“I have good parents. Not everyone can say that. And the basketball . . . ” He smiled. “And there's the
chourmo
. Know what that is?”

I knew.
Chourmo
, a Provençal word derived from
chiourme
, the rowers in a galley. In Marseilles, we knew all about galleys. No need to kill your mother and father to find yourself in the galleys, just like two centuries ago. No, these days, you just had to be young, whether you were an immigrant or not. The fan club of Massilia Sound System, the craziest bunch of kids around, had taken over the expression.

Since then, the
chourmo
had become not so much a fan club as a friendship club. There were two hundred and fifty, maybe three hundred of them, and they now “supported” several bands. Massilia, the Fabulous, Bouducon, the Black Lions, Hypnotik, Wadada . . . They'd just brought out a brilliant joint album called
Ragga baletti
. That certainly got things rocking on a Saturday night!

The
chourmo
organized sound systems, and used the revenue to publish a newsletter, distribute cassettes of live recordings, and arrange cheap travel so the kids could follow the bands on tour. It worked that way at the stadium too, around OM. With the Ultras, the Winners or the Fanatics. But that wasn't the main point of the
chourmo
. The main point was for people to meet. “To mingle,” like they say in Marseilles. To get involved in someone else's business, and have them get involved in yours. There was a
chourmo
spirit. You weren't just from one neighborhood, one project. You were
chourmo
. In the same galley, rowing! Trying to get out. Together.

Crazy Rastas!

I hazarded another question as we reached the parking lot. “Is something going down in the projects?”

“Something's always going down, you should know that. Think about it.”

When we got to my car, he continued walking, without saying goodbye.

I took a Bob Marley cassette from the glove compartment. I always had at least one with me, for moments like this. And
So Much Trouble in the World
seemed to fit, as I drove through the Marseilles night.

O
n Place des Baumes in Saint-Antoine, I made up my mind. Instead of turning onto the coastal highway and heading for home, I went around the giratory, and took the road from Saint-Antoine to Saint-Joseph. Heading for Le Merlan.

I was thinking about my conversation with Anselme. The fact that he'd thought it was worth coming to me and talking about Serge meant there must be something more to find out. I wanted to know what it was. To understand, as always. A real sickness. I must have the mind of a cop. To leap into things at a moment's notice. Unless I was
chourmo
too! It didn't matter. A little truth, I told myself, never hurt anyone. Not the dead anyway. And Serge wasn't just anyone. He was a good man, someone I'd respected.