The Age of Reinvention (2 page)

But there was something else too . . . You could sense the predatory nature of this son of Tunisian immigrants; you could sense the belligerence, fed on a feeling of humiliation so powerful that it was impossible to work out who, in his personal history of relationships marked by mistrust, could have had such an enduring and forceful effect upon him. He had his mother's ambitions for himself: he wanted to succeed, to break the cycle of failure and poverty, of surrender and defeat; the family cycle, in short, which had already cost the life of his father, destroyed the dreams of his mother, and caused the breakup of a family. He was going to cut through the bars of his social jail cell, even if he had to do it with his teeth. A social climber? Sure, if you like . . . He was an immigrants' son who refuted social mimicry—one of those who had assimilated the republican message: study hard, work hard. A role model. People envied his provocative, transgressive boldness, his aggressive way of thinking, which was not without charm. How could you not be won over by this slightly mocking student who could tell you about his childhood in the poorest part of London or in a dilapidated ghetto, then his adolescence in a tiny attic room and his return to a seedy public housing project, with a flair for the sordid details that could move you to tears and, five minutes later, talk about a meeting between Gorbachev and Mitterrand as if he had been there? His strength was his taste for politics and for stories. He could spend whole evenings reading autobiographies and speeches by Nobel Prize winners; he liked learning about these people who had achieved greatness, because that was what he wanted for himself: greatness. The aura, the charisma . . . he already had those.

For a man like Samuel, for whom the whole of existence was nothing but a mass of neuroses and whose only ambition was to use this mental suffering as material for a great book, it was a providential friendship. Because when he first met Samir, he was in pieces. Out of nowhere, he had just learned the truth about his origins—and it was chaos. His parents had waited until his eighteenth birthday to inform him that he was actually born in Poland as Krzysztof Antkowiak. There you go, son, your innocent childhood is over—welcome to the adult world! An open world of perfect transparency is opening its doors to you! Samuel would have preferred to remain in ignorance. He didn't know what shocked him most: learning that his parents were not really his parents or discovering that his true first name was a derivative of Christ's: Samuel had been raised, after all, by a couple who were first secular (a pure, hard, uncompromising secularism, loudly and proudly proclaimed, according to those who knew them at the time) and then Jewish Orthodox—a spectacular turnaround with no rational explanation. That story alone could fill a book. A few hours after his birth, Samuel was abandoned by his mother, Sofia Antkowiak,
⁴
placed in an orphanage, and then adopted by a French couple of Jewish origin, Jacques and Martine Baron. Their names no longer provoke even the tiniest spark of recognition, and yet they were among the most active agitators on the French political and intellectual scene in the sixties and seventies. Members of the Union of Communist Students and the French Communist Party, friends with Alain Krivine and Henri Weber, Jacques and Martine Baron—both of them from the same middle-class assimilated Jewish background—had long ago given up any desire for recognition. Rejecting determinism and gregariousness, they decided to reinvent themselves, transforming their identity in a sort of magic trick. Both of them gravitated toward the major intellectual figures of the time. Together, they had attended a prestigious École Normale Supérieure and had passed the philosophy exam. They taught literature and they were young, beautiful, feverishly committed; they had everything, except “what mattered most”—a child. Jacques was sterile, and for a man like him, who had based his whole life around transmission, this was an unbearable situation. They applied for adoption and, after two years of waiting, were finally approved. That night, they celebrated the imminent arrival of their child, along with about thirty of their closest friends. After several glasses of wine, someone asked what name they were planning to give the child. To their shock, they realized they had never even thought about it. Martine replied first: They could name the child Jacques, like her husband. Or Paul, perhaps, or Pierre. Everyone nodded their agreement and they drank to the future PierrePaulJacques. For Jacques and Martine, that night would be remembered as one of the happiest of their lives. Two weeks later, however, Jacques surprised all his friends by deciding to have his son circumcised, even though he wasn't circumcised himself. He named the boy Samuel—which, in Hebrew, meant literally:
His name is God
—and organized a huge party to which all his friends were invited. And then, just as the rabbi pronounced the child's name out loud, something completely unexpected occurred: Jacques told the rabbi that he wanted to revert to his real surname, Bembaron, and to change his first name: from now on, he would be Jacob. He wished to follow his son into the bosom of the church. The partygoers—consisting essentially of journalists, writers, professors, activists from the extreme left, and atheist intellectuals—were dumbfounded. Their eyes showed incomprehension, even consternation.
So he's returning to the ghetto
?
—that was what they were thinking. Jacques/Jacob appeared a man transfigured: his face was hot and red and he looked exultant, and yet he had not touched a drop of alcohol. But he saw the rabbi, he saw the golden embroideries that decorated the Torah scrolls, he heard the heartrending notes of an organ hidden in the attic, and he had a flash of illumination: there was no other explanation for this sudden turn toward the sacred. Later, he would refer to this event as his “return”—not a return to the ghetto, but a return to himself, to the sacred text. They left the center of Paris behind—the Latin Quarter, the Café de Flore—and they left behind their friends, who no longer understood them, who said,
They're crazy, it's so sad, it's a tragedy, they're going through some sort of crisis, they'll come back
. They never went back. They moved to a two-bedroom apartment on Rue du Plateau, in Paris's nineteenth arrondissement, and enrolled their son in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish school where teachers with beards and black hats taught prayers and sacred texts. There, in the presence of his own teacher—a man in his seventies with a magnetic charisma—Jacob felt good. He had never been as happy as he was with this man who taught him Hebrew and initiated him into the mysteries of the Torah, the Talmud, the Kabbalah. He felt reborn. No longer was he political, rebellious, angry. And if he did, ultimately, keep his surname—Baron—it was only because he was forced to by French law. Samuel knew nothing of his origins. Jacob waited until he was eighteen before revealing the truth. When this finally happened, Samuel at first did not react at all. Then, after a few minutes, he left the room without a word, and then the house. No more than an hour had passed. In a public bathroom, he shaved his beard, cut off his payot, and threw away his black robes. Lies. Bullshit. Betrayal. It was over. His parents had anticipated some anger, but not this brutal rejection, this sudden and absolute rupture. Samuel squatted in various places, and met Nina in college. So she wasn't Jewish? Good! That was what he wanted—to provoke his parents. Because for practicing Jews, worried about the perpetuation of their race, this was a serious issue. They told him: Either you come home or you stay with her and you will never see us again. Nothing could have been better calculated to dissuade him from returning than this unequivocal ultimatum, this aggressive demand. He stayed with an aunt. She kept his parents informed. They colluded with her, the hypocrites, but for them it was better to know that he was safe, was not living on the street. He was deeply in love with Nina at this point, dependent on her to a frightening extent. But Nina, raised in a rather strict military family, was extremely moral: faithfulness mattered to her. Her mother had gone to live with another man when she was seven years old. She woke up one morning and found a card on the living room table—one of those brightly colored postcards that people generally send to thank someone who has invited them to a party. On the front, it said, “THANK YOU.” On the back, a few words in a shaky handwriting. Thank you for the years we spent together. Thank you for not judging me. Thank you for forgiving me. Nina's father burned the card with a cigarette lighter, in front of her. Neither of them ever recovered from this incident. He started drinking, and she filled the vacuum where her confidence had been with morality and rules. Samuel nicknamed her “French Justice.”

Samir's sudden appearance in their lives caused the first cracks in their suffocating union: from now on, there were three of them, joined at the hip, moving as one, like a wave. You could see them from afar: the gang, friendly and complicit, without even a hint of jealousy or deceit; the loving couple and the free electron. Everyone in college gossiped about them: look at them, always together, showing off their intimacy, their collusion. And, deep down, they were excited by this: it was their own private game. But then, out of nowhere, tragedy hit. A few days before the oral exams, not having heard from his parents since the ignored ultimatum, Samuel learned that they had died in a car accident. A policeman told him at dawn, having first asked if he was the son of Jacques and Martine Baron.
Yes, that's me
. And he truly was his father's son in that moment when the policeman told him that their car had veered off the road and fallen into a ravine. Samuel does not remember how he reacted—the aftermath of the announcement is a black hole. Perhaps he collapsed, cried, yelled out,
It can't be true I don't believe you Tell me it's not true!
And the policeman:
I'm sorry, but it is.
But he remembers the wake, the vision of the two corpses covered in a shroud, with those men in black praying around them and him standing there with his prayer book in his hands, saying Kaddish for the peace of their souls. Samir was there, in the background, wearing a skullcap, hands crossed over his stomach. He too was thinking of his father: there had been no one at his funeral, no one to cry for him. That same day, Samuel, accompanied by his aunt, repatriated his parents' bodies to Israel, in line with their last will and testament. But before leaving the morgue, he took Samir to a quiet corner and solemnly told him: “Look after Nina for me. Don't leave her on her own. I'm counting on you.” And that was exactly what he did. He took her out to eat, to watch movies, he gave her books, he went with her to bookstores and museums, he helped her revise, and barely a week after Samuel's departure, when she returned from an oral exam in tears, Samir led her to a room that a friend had lent him, took her in his arms to calm her down, and there, within a few minutes, was on top of her (she was still crying) and removing her clothes (she was wearing a skirt, luckily) and pacifying her the only way he knew. Sex was his form of consolation, his way of making things better; it was his reply to the brutality of life—the purest reply possible, he had never found a better one. That might have been the end of it, but no, it was impossible. Whatever there was between them was too strong, too powerful. It overwhelmed them. They were suddenly defenseless, interdependent—they had never expected
this
. And while he should have told her that it was a mistake, while he should have walked away—this was how he normally acted, in all sincerity, because he got bored quickly; he didn't like to repeat his conquests—instead he fell in love. Not only did they see each other again, they never left each other's sides. For several days, they were inseparable. He loved her, desired her, wanted to live with her, and he told her this. It was the most terrible betrayal: Samuel would return; he'd just lost his parents in tragic circumstances; Samuel was his friend. In a fair, just, moral world, his behavior was outrageous, but,
We do not live in a fair, just, moral world
. That was what Samir thought.
I know what I'm talking about, because I know where I'm from. The world is violent. Violence is everywhere
. This was all he could find to tell her.
Love is violent too. You must choose
.

Samuel returned, but they did not confess their affair. Samuel thanked Samir—
a true friend, someone you can rely on when things get tough, a brother you can trust
. It went on like that for nine months, maybe more. Nina did not want to tell Samuel anything. He was living alone in the apartment his parents had been renting, surrounded by their furniture, their belongings—a death chamber. She never went to see him and he never went to see her. It was over between them. They never made love anymore. And when the school year ended, Samir gave her an ultimatum:
It's him or me
.

Samuel had no trouble remembering those years, and soon he would no longer be able to hold back the tide of images of Samir the Star that flooded his mind, the waves of Samir crashing through the barriers that had been repaired, smashing down the fragile interior edifice he had spent years reconstructing and which now exploded and was drowned and dispersed by Samir Samir Samir.

You're impressed, aren't you? By his success. Admit it!

Nina looked at him with a mixture of pity and anger.

Yes

It's true

You're right

So here we are . . .

For a brief moment, she had imagined what her life might be now had she gone with Samir twenty years ago, had she made a different decision when he commanded her to
choose
: irresistible Samir, so confident, so self-assured, versus Samuel, weak in love, cowardly in adversity, devastated by the violence of the break that Nina had provoked and who could find no better way of keeping her than slicing open his veins with a box cutter in the college auditorium, one of those small knives with a retractable blade, made of blue plastic—you just push the safety catch, once, twice, you have to do it in a single movement, press down hard, even if it hurts, then let the blood pour out and the sadness with it—Samuel who had found no better way than this of proving that he loved her, that he was ready to die for her, to put an end to this unbearable pain, to cure all his ills with the stroke of a blade.