Castro's Dream Page 3

Astrid let go of her hair.

  I have to go.

  Are you coming with me?

  Astrid picked up her bag from beneath her stool.

  I can’t.

  She could feel her throat tightening. She had to get out of the flat and walk fast along that bridge that crossed over the railway lines. She had to breathe deeply. Lola was going away. She would get on a train and go south to find Mikel, her beloved, who had been locked up for twenty years for something he had done and for which he had been rightly punished.

  Please, Lola was saying.

  But Astrid was heading for the door. She was thinking of a letter Mikel had written to her from prison. It was the letter that had pulled her in:

  I dream of a simple life with you, Astrid. I want to build you a house.

  Lola was standing by the front door, smiling at her. She tugged one of Astrid’s curls and released it.

  What’s the name of that syndrome you told me about?

  What syndrome?

  The one about regressive sexual behaviour.

  Astrid stepped out onto the landing and pressed the button to call the lift. The machinery clanked into motion. Her face was flushed and she could not look at her sister.

  It’s not a syndrome. I’ve only ever read about it in French. They call it le fantasme masturbatoire originaire.

  Why masturbatoire?

  It’s a kind of debilitating nostalgia for the first sexual experience, which is generally auto-erotic. The idea is that when you masturbate for the first time there is a flash of recognition, a total recall of the mother’s fusional embrace. People with addictive tendencies …

  Like me, Lola interrupted.

  I don’t think so. These kinds of people are said to be prone to a quest for an ultimately unreproducible kind of ecstasy.

  Lola reached for her sister’s hand and kissed it.

  Mikel was my first sexual experience, she said. I was fourteen. Not masturbating. I didn’t masturbate until after he went to prison. I was fourteen, Astrid.

  I know.

  And I’ve never got over it.

  Astrid watched the lift approaching, her hand on the gates.

  Do you remember our first march, in Donostia?

  Astrid nodded. It irritated her that Lola still gave San Sebastian its Basque name.

  It was a students’ march, Lola said. Remember? It was the summer of 1976. Yes, Astrid said. I remember.

  The lift slammed to a halt in front of her. She wanted to open the door.

  It was so exciting, Lola said. Mikel was wearing a red scarf over his mouth to hide his face. I remember watching him throw a Molotov cocktail. I remember seeing that arching motion, the power in his arm and I fainted. Remember? You took me to a bar but the owner wouldn’t let us in, so we sat on the step. You thought it was the crowd that had made me faint, or my asthma, but it wasn’t. It was the sight of Mikel throwing that thing. I fainted from love. That was ecstasy, Astrid. I thought it was politics but it was love.

  Astrid felt the tears rise in her throat.

  He killed people, Lola.

  Yes, but it was a different time. And Mikel was never like the others. You know that. Only the military, the police or the judiciary. No innocent bystanders. Mikel always condemned random targets.

  Astrid could hear Mikel’s old voice coming through her sister’s words. But he did not speak like this any more. Astrid looked at Lola’s lovely face. It had not changed as far as she could see. Mikel would still find that insolent look in her eyes, that sweet, soft mouth. She still moved her hair out of her eyes with the same childish gesture. She still beamed when she caught sight of you in a public place and threw up her arms or waved vigorously. And every time Astrid saw her, every single time, she felt a moment of joy, but then when Lola hugged her and sat down with her, stealthily the feeling would creep back in, the persistent nausea, as though somewhere inside her, a lift with severed cables were plunging.

  Astrid grabbed her ringing mobile from her pocket. It was Chastel’s secretary. She slid open the lift gates and backed in. Lola was mouthing at her: Please come. Astrid held the phone to her ear like a talisman against her sister’s plea. She let the lift gates slide shut. Lola was cut into diamonds on the other side. Chastel wanted to meet her at the Brasserie Lipp that evening at eight.

  I’ll be there at eight, Astrid said.

  Lola shook her head vehemently.

  Yes, Astrid said. I’ll have the article.

  She pressed the button and watched Lola slide upwards. By eight Lola would be on the train to Irún.

  SIX

  Kader Benmassoud threw the first shovelful of earth onto his dead dog’s body. He was struck by the hollow sound made by the earth falling upon the drum of his belly. El Niño’s tongue was lolling from his mouth, which was pulled back into a smile. But, thought Kader, You’ve not had the last laugh – not yet, boy.

  Kader went on shovelling earth onto his beloved dog until he was completely covered, then he paused and leaned on the head of his spade. He looked across the valley to the Pont de Bezons and the Eiffel Tower beyond. In the foreground were the shining white tower blocks of the Cité Pablo Picasso. His estate had no doubt been named in the seventies by some well-meaning bourgeois, wanting to bring art to the masses. Kader knew that it was pollution making the dawn sky so magnificent, but its beauty still did him good.

  He patted the earth with the flat of his spade and then marked the initials E.N. across the top of the grave with pieces of gravel, which he had gathered from the path along the canal. Then, without looking back, he crawled under the wire fence into the dump site. The scorched piles of rubbish smouldering here and there made the place look like some volcanic planet. Burning refuse, smelling of soot and rubber, stung his nostrils. In the distance he heard the first siren of the day.

  El Niño was killed by a flashball, a weapon invented by the Americans for riot control. The French police got hold of a few in the mid-eighties, sold cheap by the FBI who had stopped using them: an internal note had indicated that the flashball was generally left behind on the weapons table and was considered pansy by US law enforcement. The French found the weapon useful for immobilising ringleaders. The rubber ball, fired at high velocity from a metal tube, could knock a man to the ground at twenty metres without inflicting much damage except perhaps a broken rib or two. Fired at a dog at close range, it could cause internal bleeding which would lead, sooner or later, to death.

  The gates of the dump were now open. Kader pushed the shovel back into the pile of sand behind the portacabin at the entrance, then he drove his hands into the deep pockets of his tracksuit and jogged through the gates. A shout went up but Kader kept moving, stepping lightly over the ground, weaving through piles of rubble, down the hill to the railway line. He could hear the TGV but not see it. He ran across the tracks, feeling a tightening in his bowels as the train reared up from nowhere. The rush of air being displaced as the train passed blew his track-suit top over his head. Kader shook it off and continued at a walk. Someone had once put cement breeze blocks on this track and the train had run straight over them, crushing them to rubble without derailing. Kader wondered what kind of deranged individual would do a thing like that. For months, the bearded on the estate had been persecuted by the police but Kader knew the imams were not behind the act. It was not their style.

  He walked along the high wire fence beside the Renault depot. They were all Twingos: ugly cars thought up by men to make women drivers look stupid and designed by some weirdo who never got over kindergarten. Kader thought of his own kindergarten. He remembered Mademoiselle Anne. She was dark, could even have been Arab but wasn’t. She was a Catholic from Brittany. She smiled constantly, even when he cried. And as a kid, he cried all the time. He cried when his mother left him. He sat all day watching the swing doors with snot all over his face, waiting for her to return. When at last she came through those doors, he jumped to his feet and hid behind her legs while she talked politely to Mademoiselle
Anne who just kept on smiling as if nothing was wrong. After kindergarten when he had to give up crying, nothing had ever gone right and his mother went on talking respectfully to the teachers, year in year out, as though it were enough that she could stay respectful, even if her son was a delinquent.

  Kader walked past the recycling plant, past huge piles of some indeterminate by-product, in different shades of grey, like sludge. Occasionally, Caterpillars came and took chunks out of the hillocks, leaving behind marks like a fork in butter. A friend of his had had a job here once. He should have asked him what the stuff was. There were a number of questions like this one, which he wanted to ask but did not. That was one of the first things he had learned, never to ask questions. Ever. Not at school and not in the street.

  El Niño had taken three days to die. The vet had refused to operate. When he turned down his cash, Kader had threatened him.

  Listen, mister. If you don’t save my dog, I’ll pick up your daughter from school tomorrow.

  Look, young man. I could operate, I could take your money off you but your dog’s going to die anyway. I suggest you take him home and make it easier for him. Help him through it.

  The vet was a good man.

  Kader quickened his pace as he approached his friend’s block. It was a high-rise like his own but facing east instead of west, so poor Amadou got the sun in the morning. It came through those terrible windows that you were supposed to be able to slide open but which never slid. One pane was transparent and the other smoked-glass so the block looked like it had hundreds of black eyes. Kader had left the piece under Amadou’s mattress because his own mother cleaned out his room ten times a day. Amadou’s mother, on the other hand, cleaned the toilets at Roissy airport for a living, so her hygiene standards were not as high.

  As Kader ran up the stinking stairs to the tenth floor, he recalled the sight of Fabien Leman standing on the doorstep of his café with his mates. Fabien Leman had once employed Kader’s father as a plasterer and had never paid him. He was often seen at the National Front’s annual festival. Kader had hated him before he killed his dog. He now realised that Fabien must have borrowed the flashball from his cop brother with one idea in his shaven skull, to use it on his pit bull. Kader remembered smiling in disbelief at the sight of Fabien standing there with two clowns, jeering at his new trainers. In the moment that Kader had unleashed El Niño, he had seen Fabien’s triumphant expression and sensed a trap. But it was too late. His dog lurched forward and sprang, haunches gathered beneath his compact little body. Fabien had already pulled the weapon from thin air and taken aim. Kader could still hear El Niño’s yelp being knocked out of him as he hit the ground.

  Amadou was waiting for him in his room. He was lying on his bed, his hands behind his head, listening to his Discman. There was a large photo of Lilian Thuram on the wall above his bed. It was the shot of Thuram during the France–Croatia World Cup semi-final. He had just scored, running as he did, like a gazelle up from the defence, and he was on his knees, his finger pressed to his lips in a gesture of mock perplexity. Thuram was Amadou’s role model. Thuram was a superior man: strong, smart, witty and always in control.

  Amadou grinned at Kader and held up a hand. Kader swept Amadou’s rough palm and dropped into the white plastic bean-bag on the floor. Amadou took off the headphones. Kader rubbed his eyes.

  I’m tired.

  Did you sleep?

  Kader shook his head.

  You should of.

  You on tonight?

  Yep.

  What shift?

  Ten till six.

  How’s the old man? Kader asked.

  Amadou raised himself up onto his elbows.

  I dreamed I left. Earlier, before you came I dreamed I gave in my notice. The man broke down and wept. His face was dripping with Turkish tears, man. I swear to God.

  Amadou spoke with his hands. He had big hands with long fingers. He smiled as he talked and his black skin made his teeth whiter than white. Kader could see why the women loved him. All, that is, except one, the woman of his heart, who happened to be Aisha, Kader’s elder sister, a stuck-up, fundamentalist bitch. But Amadou was not wrong. Aisha was in a category of her own. There was no other woman in the whole of Nanterre who came close to her. But it was a lonely business, being in love with the Queen of Sheba, and Kader tried to encourage Amadou to break his vow of chastity because he was afraid it was damaging to his health.

  You’re going to walk out? Kader asked him.

  Amadou clicked his tongue in a negative. He swung his legs over the edge of the bed and rubbed his thighs. He was wearing a pair of black satin Adidas shorts. Amadou only ever wore Adidas. He was a one-woman, one-brand man.

  It was a good dream, though, Amadou said. We were standing in the warehouse and there was a whole shipment of shower-heads to be loaded. Eighty-four boxes. I took off my gloves and handed them to the old man and he started swearing at me. You know, as he does.

  Kader remembered; the Turk was eloquent.

  Then suddenly the sound went and I watched his mouth moving under that moustache and I remember thinking in my dream, I wish this happened in real life, and I just left and I knew as I walked away, through all the boxes, that I had somewhere to go. Somewhere good.

  Kader raised his eyebrows.

  Oh yeah?

  Can’t remember where, Amadou said.

  Course you can.

  Amadou hid his smile, reaching for the remains of a joint in the ashtray by his bed.

  I saved this for you. Thought you might need it.

  He handed his friend the joint. Kader lit it and breathed deep.

  You sure you don’t want me to come with you?

  Kader swallowed the smoke and looked at Amadou, his eyes watering, and his mouth bitter.

  No. I’m getting out of here afterwards. You’re not. It’ll be bad enough for you as it is. I’m scared his brother will have you down the commissariat in your underpants.

  Amadou was watching him. Kader took another toke and offered it back.

  Finish it, Amadou said.

  He moistened his lips.

  You still taking the gun?

  Kader shook his head as he held the smoke in his lungs. Amadou’s smile was one of relief.

  When I buried El Niño it became clear it wasn’t appropriate. I was throwing dirt on the little fellow and I saw his mouth. You know how he can look like he’s smiling? Well he was smiling and I knew that shooting the bastard wasn’t the answer. I’m going to beat him so hard, though, he’s not going to know who Le Pen is any more.

  I’m coming.

  You can’t come. You come you’ll be a dead nigger. Someone’s got to look out for Aisha.

  How long are you going for?

  I don’t know. But if it’s good down there I’ll call you and you can come and join me.

  Amadou had gone dewy-eyed.

  It’s sunny down there, right? he said.

  Yeah. Marseille’s sunny. Not all year round maybe. Not in January. But it’s not pissing down, so I hear. The sky’s blue pretty much all the time. But it can get nippy. Like in Casa at Christmas, say.

  Like Casablanca?

  Pretty much.

  Have you been to Casa?

  No.

  But you know, right?

  Kader gave a resolute nod.

  You mean sea and sun and football?

  And sex, Amadou. Don’t forget sex.

  Amadou grinned and Kader stood up to leave.

  Here, Amadou said, unhooking the headphones from around his neck. He held out his Discman. Take it for the journey.

  No man. I’m not taking that off you. You need it more than I do. To block out your mum for a start.

  Take it, man.

  Amadou shoved the Discman at him. Kader took it.

  I can get another one, Amadou said with a grin.

  Suddenly Kader wanted to get out of the way of Amadou’s smile because it made him weak.

  Amadou held up his han
d and Kader swept it with his palm, then placed his hand on his heart. They faced each other a moment like two knights before combat. Then Kader turned and left the room where he had spent almost every afternoon since his twelfth year. As he ran down the concrete stairs, the memory of tears assailed him like some fossil emotion that could still make him wretched. He descended through a miasma of piss and told himself that he was leaving for all of them. Not just for himself but for his friend and his mother and his haughty bitch of a sister who was as clever as it was possible for a woman to be but who was heading for nothing better here than to be the wife of some bearded fanatic who would tie her to a sewing machine and feed her until her young body was hidden for ever beneath folds of fat and a shiny pink djellabah. In Marseille his sister could be one of those beautiful Arab women who wore suits: like the woman in a little jacket and skirt and high-heeled shoes he had once seen standing with a clipboard in the lobby of the Hotel Mercure where he had made a delivery for the Turk. He was leaving for Aisha and Amadou, to find a place for them where they were free to love each other.

  As he burst out into the sunshine Kader broke into a run. It was two blocks to Fabien’s café. He pumped around the first corner on his fantastic new running shoes. He was a whirlwind, a desert storm, a simoon, a Bedouin sword …

  As he rounded the second corner, he inclined his body into the curve and then took the last straight line at a sprint, bringing his knees up high, carving the air with the flat blades of his hands, and he closed in on Fabien who was setting out the tables, his back to Kader, a rag in the back pocket of his jeans. And Kader once again saw El Niño springing at the racist but on this occasion there was all the time in the world.

  SEVEN

  Astrid sat waiting for Chastel at his favourite table on the left of the revolving door. Chastel liked it here: one, because he could see people come and go without being seen, and two, because this table was only ever given to the illustrious. Only those in the know turned their heads as they came through the door to look back at the occupants of this table. Sollers sat here and Finkhielkraut and the great Glucksman.