Savages- The Wedding Read online

  CORSAIR

  First published in France as Les Sauvages, Tome 1 by Flammarion/Versilio in 2011

  First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Corsair

  Copyright © Flammarion/Versilio 2011

  Translation copyright © Susanna Lea Associates, 2017. Translated by Gavin Bowd

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978-1-4721-5320-3

  Corsair

  An imprint of

  Little, Brown Book Group

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  An Hachette UK Company

  www.hachette.co.uk

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  Contents

  Prologue

  A Family Reunion

  1

  Krim: An Introduction

  2

  At the Town Hall

  3

  Wrong Number

  4

  At Granny’s

  5

  Man of the Game

  6

  The Party

  7

  We, the Children of Algeria

  8

  The Election of the Century

  THE WEDDING

  Prologue

  A Family Reunion

  France’s ‘next president’ – one of the eight contenders still in the running – was known to enjoy music, but very few people had anticipated that the Socialist candidate’s melomania would fuel such heated debate behind the scenes during the campaign. Every time he caught a word in a conversation that reminded him of a song, Idder Chaouch would start humming it, regardless of his audience – family members or strangers, kissable babies in the crowd, loud-mouthed lawyers in his staff, smug-faced journalists, off-key political opponents, close friends or envious allies awaiting his downfall – no matter who they were, he would hum in front of them; and when he was in a good mood – that is, almost every day – it got worse: he couldn’t resist the impulse of singing the lyrics out loud, in his beautiful, unpretentious voice, clear and smooth like the skin on top of his hands.

  Before entering the rat race to the highest office, Chaouch had served as the mayor of Grogny. In this once monotonous and sad suburban ethnic neighbourhood, Mayor Chaouch, over the course of his two terms, had planted trees and designed gardens and reduced crime and the public debt. He’d also created music schools that were free for underprivileged kids and built an auditorium that resembled a triumphal arch when seen from the motorway leading to Roissy Airport.

  A reporter mentioned this Napoleonic symbolism during a photo-op: was it intentional? Chaouch didn’t back away from the question, he didn’t confront it either, he just chanted the chorus of the three fairies at the beginning of The Magic Flute:

  ‘Triumph! Triumph! Triumph! Sie ist vollbracht, die Heldentat!’

  How could anyone doubt that Chaouch would make a great president? He knew Mozart’s operas by heart! And of course he was not only charming but handsome: you wouldn’t have guessed at first glance that he was in his late forties. He had full lips, strong and youthful curly hair, shining brown eyes. His smile spread pleasantly across his oval face, and he was starting to wrinkle at the temples, though even these wrinkles deepened the laughter in his eyes instead of dimming it.

  As a young man he had ranked first in the crazily selective Ecole Nationale d’Administration; but he hadn’t chosen the boring and prestigious administrative career that lay ahead of him. It was the first time that this had happened since the School had been created two centuries earlier (incidentally, by Napoleon). Young Chaouch had needed to stretch his eager legs beyond the limits of his native hexagon. Instead of pursuing a path paved with gold in the back alleys of the French State, he had taken off to the New World, and for a few years in the nineties he taught economics at the Harvard Kennedy School. He had a wicked sense of humour. Everyone loved him there – students, professors, baristas, piano tuners. He was a man of many gifts, blessed with a brilliant mind, although his most distinctive trait was his generous and spontaneous and egalitarian way of dealing with people – from the uncomplicated likes of Papageno to the Prince Taminos of this world.

  His senior advisers, however, as well as his Queen of the Night, regarded all this singing business – a living proof of his joyful nature – as a liability: it made him look eccentric, funny, unpresidential, not to mention dangerously un-Gallic, given that many of the songs in his repertoire happened to be opera tunes in Italian or German, jazz standards and pop hits sung in American English. No one had ever won a French election by showing that they mastered the langue de Shakespeare. Quite the contrary; French politicians were fiercely proud of speaking English with a pronounced accent – well aware that ninety per cent of their constituency would mock them lovingly for doing so, and that politics in its age of relative powerlessness also lies in the art of being made fun of in a likeable way.

  Chaouch didn’t partake in any of this cynical wisdom. Still, he was being ridiculed by his many detractors; and music – of all hazards – was becoming his Achilles heel. Right-wing magazines started to call him the songster candidate. They deemed him a fraud, an entertainer, a glittering icon – they even called him a pop star! Somebody had to take action. His spin doctors didn’t know how to emphasize how serious this deceptively petty matter was. So Madame Chaouch stepped in. They had a five-minute talk after lunch; Chaouch promised he would curb his lyrical enthusiasm.

  But at the end of that same day, he was attending a campaign event in Lyon, meeting with the left-leaning president of the General Council of the region. The public conference was televised. Ten minutes after the beginning of his speech, someone shouted something in the audience. Chaouch loved hecklers and being able to free himself from the dullness of a monologue about fiscal reform; besides, he enjoyed exercising his wit with improvised sparring partners. But this particular partner had attacked him for his Algerian background, and was advising him to run for president of Araby instead. The use of this old-fashioned and improper term was more than enough to trigger the melodic function in the candidate’s mischievous brain:

  ‘Well … I am the sheik of Araby … your love belongs to me …’

  The crowd burst out laughing, they cheered and they applauded, and Chaouch got back to his five-point plan to make the tax system more equitable, and to improve solidarity.

  One might say he had his own brand of wisdom. Who knows, this may even have been a strategy from the start – lulling the enemy to sleep; singing his way to the top of the world. For he was definitely getting there. And he knew it better than his advisers, better than the pollsters, better than anyone – well, almost anyone.

  At the candidate’s request, an American big-data expert had been hired to provide the Paris-based staff with the most recent black magic from the tech industries. She wanted to work from Chicago where she was based, but Chaouch didn’t like working with people he couldn’t touch. He wanted to see real human beings, to hear actual voices, unmediated by echoey conference lines; he needed hands to high-five
, smiles to reward with his own, shoulders to pat enthusiastically.

  Sari Essman possessed such shoulders, in abundance, so to speak: she was indeed an accomplished Crossfitter, albeit of the nerdy kind; her rippling upper body contrasted powerfully with her pale, glassy-eyed and thick-spectacled mousy face. Still in her early thirties, she was making a fortune foreseeing and nudging the outcomes of national elections all over the world. Her methods were disquietingly accurate; she had offered her services to the previous US Democratic presidential campaign, and was now determined to help crown the ‘French Obama’, as the American media had dubbed Chaouch – and she was working pro bono this time, firstly because French campaigns were cash poor compared to American ones, and also because she had heard the left-wing candidate sing her long-forgotten favourite tune in a leaked video on YouTube.

  Usually Sari Essman was not prone to sentimentality; in her free time she participated in those heroic Crossfit contests, where she squatted and deadlifted and snatched boulders and sprinted miles while carrying her own body weight and did endless series of muscle-ups – that wicked exercise involving two rings simply floating in the air, a bionic pull-up of sorts. She hadn’t managed to make the top rankings yet – most of her competitors were full-time She-Hulks, while she was coding and analysing data and meeting with important people in between her daily workouts.

  This unexpected trip to the South of France made her miss a regional event in her beloved blizzard-bound home state. But early spring in Petite Camargue made up for the loss – the place was lovely: vineyards and poppy fields surrounded by majestic lines of cypresses; blooming fruit trees everywhere; and Camargue horses playfully racing alongside the black SUVs of the motorcade. Chaouch had decided to spend a whole weekend in this poverty-stricken region where the extreme right party registered its highest scores. Many people living in these small towns were seasonal workers – unemployment rates grew faster here than anywhere in France. Sari Essman had studied the numbers on the plane – by now she and her data probably understood the département better than its own representatives.

  The first time she saw the candidate, he was delivering a speech in the outskirts of a small village, in front of a leery crowd that was ostensibly divided into two groups. Chaouch’s campaign manager told her that the locals stood on the left, while on the right she could see the Arabs from nearby housing projects. Could she, really? Sari Essman’s ethnic radar was no good at differentiating these olive-skinned, dark-haired, bushy-browed villagers. Like all Americans, she could identify a light-coloured black person in a fraction of a second; but these Mediterranean folks all had the same strong noses, the same eye colour, they all folded their arms in the same mistrustful manner. It reminded her, she said, of Freud’s narcissism of minor differences, but the campaign manager wasn’t well versed in psychoanalysis.

  ‘The more you look alike, the more virulently you hate each other,’ Sari explained.

  He sighed and stared at her. She wore classic black trousers and a long-sleeved pearl-coloured blouse, but her unusual physique had earned her more sneers during these couple of hours in France than she had ever received in Chicago.

  Sitting backstage, the campaign manager had introduced himself as Jean-Sébastien Vogel, and pronounced his name as if it were some sort of scandal not to know it already; he was a lean, cool-headed fifty-something Parisian politician, with an expensive blue suit, a shiny silk tie and no time to lose – he was to become France’s next prime minister if Chaouch won the election.

  ‘Listen,’ he said in English, with an odd accent that sounded more German than French, ‘I don’t really know what you’re doing here, but if you want to be useful there’s a very simple way: when you meet him later tonight, tell him that there’s nothing for us here, that we’ll lose in the South no matter what, and that we should move forward and up north ASAP. Got it?’

  ‘Pardon me, sir, but the race might be tighter than you think, and staying here …’

  Vogel’s jaw was clenched; his nostrils flared.

  ‘It’s not an American election, you know. We don’t have big fundraisers or crazy ad budgets. It’s not all about the money here, mademoiselle. What’s your name, by the way?’

  He brusquely stood up while she was still clearing her throat to answer.

  An incident occurred towards the end of the event. The region was famous for its bullfights and hot tempers. A man and a woman started insulting each other – unsurprisingly, the bone of contention was the Islamic veil that some of the women in the Arab crowd were wearing. Chaouch wanted to address the issue, but the argument quickly turned into a brawl; security was on edge; Chaouch was asked to cut his speech short and leave the stage.

  The whole delegation was driven to a four-star hotel in nearby Nîmes. Sari Essman was supposed to have dinner with the candidate, but he had instead locked himself in his suite as soon as they arrived. His wife and his daughter Jasmine were expected the following morning. In the hotel restaurant, much of the senior advisers’ conversation revolved around Jasmine’s boyfriend, an actor who was apparently popular enough to have drawn the attention of the national media when he announced his endorsement. Endorsement was too strong a word – he was merely an actor, after all. But the twelve to twenty-five year olds adored him, as did the eighteen to thirty year olds, and the latter – one fourth of whom was struck by unemployment nationwide – happened to be the main target of the extreme right party. Shallow as it seemed, you couldn’t neglect the influence of such support in this complex and unpredictable race. Or could you?

  No consensus could be reached around the table about Fouad Nerrouche, who was either referred to as the boyfriend or the actor – and always in the same condescending tone. The candidate had talked to him several times, behind closed doors; he figured this southern escapade was the perfect time to ‘officially’ meet him. When one adviser mentioned the candidate’s vision of a photo-op with Fouad at lunch, the table wobbled. At last there was a consensus: it was the worst idea of the week! Fouad had the same Algerian origins as the candidate. In the South – in this South – it would be considered sheer provocation! Fouad would bring with him a nasty whiff of television hype and Parisian jet-set; the whole of France hated Paris and its success – why would this remote godforsaken town prove an exception? No, no, a lunch with Fouad would send the worst possible message. Big, big mistake.

  When the cheese cart arrived, postures loosened and jokes began. It had been a long campaign; Chaouch was still the frontrunner; there was no reason not to open another bottle of this rather respectable local red wine.

  Sari hadn’t done anything to conceal her surprise and discomfort; but nobody cared about her. Three out of the seven main advisers were women; Sari detected a hint of hostility from them, as well as a touch of mockery. When she returned to the table after leaving to take a phone call, she thought she heard the word steroid. Female empowerment had obviously not crossed the Atlantic draped in physical fitness; it was inevitable that they would look upon her with suspicion. Those sophisticated French liegewomen seemed super-thin; and they didn’t care too much for outsiders, especially foreign outsiders, and certainly not a month away from the first round of the election – you didn’t want one of the vipers embedded in the press pool to churn out articles about Chaouch calling in American muscle for help so close to the finish line.

  The bodyguard who knocked at Sari’s door raised his eyebrows when she appeared in the doorframe – she was wearing a Superman T-shirt, moulding her impressive chest and revealing bulging biceps and forearms that would most likely defeat his own in an arm wrestle.

  ‘Wait, what time is it?’ she asked in French.

  She didn’t understand the answer – she was still half-asleep and he didn’t articulate; his eyes were too busy voicing their own questions: what sort of chicken do they feed women in America? And what was he waiting for to go back to the gym on a daily basis?

  Sari clumsily stepped back and scrambled around in the
dark to fetch her glasses on top of the nightstand. She stumbled upon the alarm clock she had punched and bashed up after waking with a start, less than a minute earlier. It was still functioning and indicated 4.45 a.m.

  ‘What the hell?’ she mumbled.

  ‘Monsieur Chaouch wants to see you.’

  She put on trainers and a tracksuit top and the bodyguard escorted her out. Then he drove her into the countryside, back in Petite Camargue. The roads were empty and the night was still thick, with no trace of red or orange in the star-spotted horizon. The car eventually passed an ornate wrought-iron gate, and parked in the muddy courtyard of what appeared to be a horse farm. As she stepped out, Sari smelled the odour of dung and thought: eight thousand kilometres east across the ocean to end up in the Wild West – well, a tiny version of it.

  She suddenly saw dozens of torches, directed at the candidate smiling on top of a whitish-grey horse, with large limbs and a streak of blonde hair that made his clever-looking head appear as if it had been customized by some dimwitted Valley Girl.

  ‘Do you like riding?’ said Chaouch.

  She nodded, even though the last horse she had encountered was a coughing pony in summer camp, some twenty years ago – the other kids had bullied her for days after she had fallen off the poor sick animal; the little pricks had even invented a game: who’s more awkward? Sari or … – filling the blank with anything mean that crossed their minds.

  Dawn was now breaking. Bulky clouds prevented the ball of the sun from materializing above the lines of poplar trees; flaming colours still managed to find their way around the misty landscape where two horses and thirty looming and giant-stepping shadows marched together in the chilly air, at a very slow pace, among the loud and invisible early morning birds.

  ‘I’m very glad you came,’ Chaouch told his special guest.

  Sari heard a toad croaking just below her; she hoped the horse would avoid stepping on it.

  ‘Sir, I’m afraid you’re not going to like what I have to say.’