Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow (2 page)

Someday I'd like to work at something glamorous myself, but I don't know what exactly ... The trouble is, I'm no good at school. Completely useless. The only class I even scrape by in is Art and Design. That's fine and all, but I don't think gluing leaves on drawing paper is going to be a big help for my future. Whatever, I just don't want to end up behind a fast-food register, smiling all the time and asking customers: "Would you like a drink? Regular or supersized? For here or to go? For or against abortion?" And getting torn up by my supervisor if I serve a customer too many fries because he smiled at me ... No lie, that guy could have been the man of my dreams. I would have given him a discount on his McMeal, he'd have taken me to eat at a swank steakhouse, asked me to marry him, and we'd have lived happily ever after in his five-room to-die-for apartment.

Our welfare stamps
finally came. Just in time—now I won't have to go to the big charity store in the middle of town. That place is too much to bear. Once, me and my mom ran into Nacéra the witch near the main entrance. She's this woman we've known since forever. Mom borrows money from her when we're full out broke. I hate her. She only remembers we owe her cash when there are tons of people around, always just to fuck with my mom's image. So we run into Nacéra at the main entrance. Mom's squirming, but this other woman, she's just over the moon.

"So, Yasmina, you've come to the goodwill to ... pick something up?"

"Yes..."

"And I've come to ... give!"

"May God reward you..."

Yeah right. I hope God rewards her with nothing except the nastiness of being an ugly old woman. In the end, we went home without getting anything, because Mom didn't want to chance picking clothes that belonged to the witch. It would just give her another excuse to open her big mouth, like, "Oh, that skirt you're wearing used to be mine..." I was proud of my mom. That's real dignity—the kind of thing you don't learn at school.

Speaking of school, I've got to do a homework assignment for civics, all about the idea of respect. Monsieur Werbert gave it to us. He's an OK teacher and he's nice, but I don't really like him talking to me too much, because I get the idea he feels sorry for me or something and I hate that. It's like at the charity store, when Mom asks the old woman for a plastic bag to put our sweaters in and she looks at us all misty-eyed. Every time, we just want to give her
back her sweaters and get the hell out of there. With M. Werbert it's the same. He makes out that he's some kind of prophet of the people. He keeps telling me I can have a meeting with him, if I ever need one ... But it's just so he can feel good about himself and tell his friends in some hip Paris bar how hard it is teaching at-risk youth in the ghetto suburbs. Yuck.

So what could I say about respect? The teachers don't give a shit about our homework. I'm sure they don't even read any of it. They just stick on a random grade, rearrange the papers, and go back to sitting on their leather couches between their two kids—Pamela, ten, who's playing with Dishwasher Barbie, and Brandon, twelve, who's busy eating his own snot. And don't forget Marie-Hélène, who orders takeout because she's too lazy to cook dinner, and who's reading an article in
Woman Today
about waxing your legs. Now that's a good example of disrespect. Waxing hurts, and if you hurt somebody it shows a lack of respect.

Whatever, I want to drop out. I've had enough of school. It gets on my nerves and I don't talk to anybody. Really, there are only two people I can talk to for real anywhere. Mme Burlaud and Hamoudi, one of the older guys in the complex. He's probably about twenty-eight, he spends all day every day hanging around all the lobbies in the neighborhood towers, and, like he's always telling me, he's known me since I was "no bigger than a block of hash."

Hamoudi spends most of his time smoking a lot of spliffs. He's always high and I think maybe that's why I like him. The two of us, we don't like our reality. Sometimes when I get back from running errands, he stops me in the hall to talk about stuff. "Just five minutes," he says, and then we talk for an hour or two. Well, it's mostly him. A lot of times he recites for me these poems by Arthur Rimbaud. At least the little he can remember, because the hash can really fuck with your memory. But when he says them to me in his accent with those street gangster moves, even if I don't catch all the meaning, it seems beautiful to me.

It's way too bad he didn't keep up with school. It's because of prison. He told me that he and his friends got mixed up in some kind of bad business, but he won't tell me what—he says "it's not for kids your age." When he got out, he dropped everything even though he was pretty far along with his studies. At least as far as the bac, the college entrance tests. So when I see the police patting Hamoudi down near our lobby, when I hear them calling him stuff like "little bastard," or "piece of trash," I tell myself that these guys, they don't know shit about poetry. If Hamoudi were a little older, I'd have liked him for my dad. When he found out what happened to us, he talked to me for the longest time. Rolling his billionth joint, he said: "Family, that's the most sacred thing." He should know: He has eight brothers and sisters and almost all of them are married. But Hamoudi says he doesn't give a fuck about marriage, that there's no point, that it's just something else to hold you back, like we don't have enough of that already. He's right. Except me, I don't really have a family anymore. We're just a half family now.

I was feeling kind of bored
, so I decided to hop a ride on the metro. I didn't know where I was going, but the metro takes my mind off stuff. You see so many different kinds of people, it's kind of a riot. I did the whole of Line 5, end to end.

At one of the early stops, this Romanian guy with an old, fake leather jacket and a gray hat got in. He had an accordion, all worn out, with dust on the keys he never uses. He played bits of old tunes, like the kind you hear in artsy films or on those mind-numbing documentaries that run on late-night TV. It was cool because he really made the trip more fun. I saw even the most uptight old people in the car tapping
their toes on the sly. And the gypsy guy bobbed his head with each movement of his instrument, and when he smiled he flashed all his teeth, at least the ones that were still left. His whole face was straight out of a cartoon, kind of like the cat in
Alice in Wonderland.

I sat there imagining that he lived in a caravan, the descendant of a great dynasty of nomads who'd crossed land after land after land; that he lived in a makeshift camp on a patch of wasteland outside Paris; that he had a pretty wife named Lucia (like the mozzarella brand) with long black hair that falls down her back in perfect curls. These two, they were married on a wide-open beach on the Spanish coast, around a huge fire with giant red flames that danced way into the middle of the night. It had to have happened that way. Anyway, each time he switched cars I followed him, so I could get the most out of his accordion poetry. But in the end, talk about dying of shame. He headed over to me, holding out his McDonald's paper cup with loose change in it, and, well, basically I didn't have anything to give him. So I played the meanest kind of trick, the kind stingy bastards do all the time. As soon as the good man got next to me, I looked the
other way, as in "I'm watching what's going down on the opposite platform." Except, big surprise, there was nothing going down on the opposite platform.

If I win the lottery on Wednesday, I'll give him a swank caravan all tricked out, it'll be the best-looking one on the campsite. It'll look just like the ones you can win in the showcase showdown on
The Price Is Right.

Then I'd buy myself some new mittens for winter, with no holes, because with mine cold air just comes right in. On my left mitten, there's a big hole right over the middle finger. I just know one of these days that's going to cause me big problems.

Next, I'd take Mom to get a manicure, because that's what she was talking about last time with that social worker Mme DuThing, and my mother didn't even know what it was. She looked at her own nails, all completely torn up from those made-in-Chernobyl cleaning products, and compared them with Mme DuThingamajig's. That fool social worker was showing off because her nails were super clean, super shaped, super polished. She even rubbed the corner of her eye with her little finger, her mouth ever so slightly open, the way girls on TV put on mascara. All that just to gloat, to put her perfect nails all up in my mom's face, my mom who didn't even know what a manicure was. I wanted to rip them out one by one.

At the end of the line, when I was getting out of the metro, I passed two Pakistani guys selling hot chestnuts and roasted peanuts. They kept saying the same thing, over and over again: "Hot chestnuts and roasted peanuts to warm you up!" They said it together, all musical, sang it almost, with their Pakistani accents. I couldn't get those words out of my head, and that evening, when I got back home, I ended up singing it while I was cooking Mom her rice.

Friday.
Mom and me, we're invited over to Aunt Zohra's to eat some couscous. We took the earliest possible train so we could spend the whole day at her place. It's been forever since anyone invited us somewhere.

Aunt Zohra isn't my real aunt, but seeing as she's known Mom for a very long time, I call her that just out of habit. Before, they always used to do their sewing together. Then Aunt Zohra moved to Mantes-la-Jolie, which is sort of northeast of Paris, on the way to Rouen. Mom told me she signed up for sewing lessons because it was practically all Maghrebian women and those Wednesday afternoon sessions with
all those women at their eighties-style Singer sewing machines reminded her a little of the
bled.

Aunt Zohra, she's got big green eyes and she laughs all the time. She's Western Algerian, from a region called Tlemcen. She's got a funny story, because she was born on July 5, 1962, the very day Algeria won its independence. For so many years in her village she was like the little child who meant freedom. She was like a baby good-luck charm, and that's why they called her Zohra. It means
luck
in Arabic.

I like her a lot, because she's a real woman. A strong woman. Her husband retired from civil service and married a second wife back in the old country, so he spends six months over there and six months in France. Is this a trend, or what? All these men, it's like they get to be retirement age and they want to totally start their lives over and marry a fresh young woman. The difference is, Aunt Zohra's husband knew how to hit the right balance, rein himself in. He does it part-time...

It doesn't seem to bother Zohra one bit seeing her husband six months out of twelve. She says she's just fine without him, that she can keep herself happy. And then, one time, she laughed and told Mom that a
man his age, he doesn't really serve her purposes anyway. That didn't really click at first. Then I kind of got the picture.

I hung out a little with Aunt Zohra's sons, Réda, Hamza, and Youssef. They spent almost the whole time playing video games. These were the kind of games you see in TV reports on "youth and violence." The idea was to break car-speed records while knocking over as many pedestrians as possible, with bonus points if they were kids or old ladies ... I've known these boys since we were little, but I don't really talk to them anymore. So it was a little tense, no one really knew what to say. They made so much fun of me for that. They kept comparing me to Bernardo in
Zorro,
the short guy who looked like a dumbass and who warns Zorro of danger through a system of gestures. He was mute, poor guy.

At one point, I caught the end of a conversation about my dad between Mom and Aunt Zohra. Mom was telling her he wouldn't go to heaven because of what he'd done to his daughter. The way I see it, he won't be going because of what he's done to Mom. Heaven's bouncer just won't let him in. He'll send him packing, straight out. And you know, it bugs me
they're still talking about him. He's not here anymore. The only thing to do is forget about him.

Aunt Zohra's couscous is so special, and what really makes it are the chickpeas and the very gentle way she prepares her semolina grains. Aunt Zohra cracks me up. She's been in France for more than twenty years and she still talks like she stepped off the plane at Orly a week ago.

Once, a while ago, she was telling Mom how she'd signed Hamza up for "carrots." Mom didn't have a clue what she was talking about. But a few days later, back home, she started giggling to herself. She suddenly realized that Aunt Zohra meant to say she'd signed Hamza up for karate ... Even Aunt Zohra's sons tease her. They say she does remixes of Molière's language. They've tagged her "DJ Zozo."

At the end of the day, Youssef drove us back. He put on some rap and nobody said a single word the whole way. I could see that Mom was thinking about something. She had her face turned to the window, staring into space. Whenever we were stopped, she would just look blankly at the red light. Her head must still be somewhere else.

Youssef drives fast, he's tall, and he's very good
looking. When we were little, we went to the same elementary school and he always stood up for me because I didn't have a brother and he was "a big fifth grader." I remember we did some campaign together called "A Grain of Rice Can Save a Life," back in the nineties when there was the famine in Somalia. He got me to believe the slogan was serious truth, like for every grain of rice we sent over we really saved one life. So when Mom bought me a bag of rice that weighed five hundred grams, I was all proud of saving so many lives. That would have been enough, but I even wanted to count each grain of rice in the package so I could be totally sure there would be a huge number of Somalians who wouldn't die of hunger, thanks to me. Thought I was Wonder Woman. But Youssef was lying to me all along. I'm still pissed at him ... Now that I think about it, I never did hear if my bag of rice arrived safe and sound.

When we got to our building, Mom thanked Youssef and he left. You could say the super of our development doesn't give a shit about our towers. Luckily Carla, the Portuguese cleaning lady, gives them a quick once-over from time to time. But when she doesn't come, they stay disgusting for weeks on end, and that's how they've been lately. There's been piss and globs of spit in the elevator. It stank, but we were all just happy it was working. It's lucky we know which buttons are for which floors, because the display panel's all scratched and melted. Must have been burned with a cigarette lighter.