Sila's Fortune (8 page)

The retort seemed about right. He was rather proud of it.

‘I'll leave you to the tiger's tender mercies,' Simon quipped to Julie as he left. ‘Call me when you've had enough. And if he attacks, just yell and I'll come running.'

Very proud, in fact. His casual tone surprised even Matthieu.

In a particularly good mood, he did the rounds of his guests, slipped into the kitchen, inhaled the wonderful spicy aromas of the two huge saucepans of vegetables, lifted the tea-towel covering the couscous.

‘We can serve up in half an hour,' he said in a tone he hoped was firm and then worried it sounded officious.

‘Up to you,' said his cleaning lady, radiant, barefoot. In her
kitchen she reigned supreme and clearly considered her boss a fool.

A cool breeze blew through the living room. The guests had moved out to the terraces and the yawning gulf had dissipated into indifference. The guy with the shaven head was chatting to a female researcher who was staring at him too insistently, too intensely. In short, the party had begun.

When the three women carried out the platters piled high with couscous, there was a burst of applause. Everyone sat around the table on the big terrace, squeezing up to make room, passing each other plates. The skinhead, brandishing two bottles of red wine, began filling glasses.

Sitting next to Julie, Matthieu smiled at his success. Simon appeared, bent double from the weight of the huge stockpot which elicited a roar of approval. He set it in the middle of the table.

‘I'll serve.'

When he had finished he went inside and checked the living room, where he found a dozen people chatting. ‘No need to go out to the terrace,' he said to them, ‘I'll sort you out.'

He picked up some plates and with the help of the three cooks piled them with food and passed them around.

By the time he went back out onto the terrace, everybody was eating and joking. No one had saved him a place. He considered the people. If the two camps did not quite form a harmonious whole, the food and the wine had clearly created bridges between them. In the gathering darkness, differences melted away. Simon was thrilled with his success until he saw Julie, staring into space, smiling at Matthieu who was talking
to her in a soft voice, verging on a whisper, the dangerous tone of seduction. His shyness boiled over.

‘Matthieu,' he said, his voice quavering slightly, ‘aren't you going to look after your guests?'

His friend did not hear. Raising his voice, he said again, ‘Matthieu, could you help out a bit?'

‘That's what I've been doing.'

‘What about the people in the living room?'

‘They're old enough to take care of themselves.'

‘Really? I just served them.'

‘Chill, man. It's a party!'

Then, in a magnanimous tone, he said, ‘Come on, join us, help us eat this delicious couscous!'

People moved up to make space and Simon squeezed in beside his friend. Matthieu turned away from Julie for a moment to liven up the general conversation. Simon sat in silence. He had nothing to say. He would have liked to talk to Julie about maths. Would have liked to ask about her professors, talk to her about his research, discuss the pros and cons of different universities, bring up her maths degree again, maybe suggest some way they might work together. He would have liked to be interesting, to be attractive. Attractive to her.

But right now the whole table was roaring with laughter at one of Matthieu's jokes and he felt so small, so drab, so boring, a dreary
lab rat
… Why would this beautiful young girl be interested in talking about professors and mathematical theorems? How could she talk to him without yawning?

Simon drained his glass of wine, hoping for some miracle, for a warm rush of Dutch courage.

‘Anyone want more couscous?' he asked pathetically.

Nobody answered.

Reaching behind Matthieu's back, he touched Julie's arm.

‘Are you okay? Would you like some more couscous?'

‘Perfect, I'm all set,' she said politely before turning away.

Simon gazed up at the sky. Wisps of blue still streaked the darkness. The moon had risen. He stared at the translucent circle, longing to join the tranquillity of the stars, far from frustrations and humiliations. To become one with the heavens.

But it was not he who melted into the heavens. Some hours later, high above the party, as the evening wound down and the last notes of the music faded, as the guests sat or sprawled on beanbags sleeping off the wine, as the cooks, having tidied the kitchen, headed home with the serving dishes, happy to have been feted and handsomely paid, up on the roof terrace Julie, naked, stared into the heavens, in the passion of a fleeting embrace, quivering with the pleasure of this single, ephemeral, never-to-be-repeated evening, her eyes taking in the moon, the stars, the bright nimbus of the city lights and Matthieu's face, contorted with pleasure.

No, it was not Simon who became one with the heavens.

Sila lived in a derelict warehouse in the suburbs of Paris, in a quiet neighbourhood not far from the Bois de Vincennes. There were about a dozen people living there, and since most of them had papers, police raids had become desultory and rare. When there were raids, Sila would quietly creep down into the cellar and hide in an old oil tank. The cops, bored and tired, would try to work up a little aggression for the occasion
to prove that they too could be hard men, like the Robocop units who dealt with more difficult suburbs. But they had no riot helmets, no boots. At the end of these courtesy visits, there was always someone who would shout: ‘See you soon, guys. Nice of you to drop by.' At which point the cop in charge of the squad would nod and say, ‘Watch it. Don't go taking the piss. And I've told you a thousand times, this warehouse isn't safe. One of these days it's going to collapse on top of you and you won't be laughing then.'

For some time, the local council had been planning to evict the residents of 14 rue de Verdun in order to demolish this dangerous warehouse which was unfit for human habitation, but two associations had complained and taken them to court and so, in spite of the mayor's aggressive posturing, discussions dragged on from one council meeting to the next. Given the usual swiftness of the law and the city council, the residents at 14 rue de Verdun could probably expect to stay for another decade. This was a good thing, because the warehouse was a convivial place, even if the makeshift communal showers and the Turkish toilets set up in one corner of the building, though they were scrubbed down every day, did not quite provide the level of comfort modern man has come to expect. The warehouse had been partitioned to create comfortable rooms, most equipped with televisions, whose only drawback was the lack of soundproofing, which meant it was impossible not to overhear people having sex and, nine months later if contraception had failed or been forgotten, the wailing of a healthy newborn baby. The best room was on the first floor where Roger lived with his wife, a Cameroonian woman of about forty with a noble,
thoughtful face. Roger behaved as though he owned the warehouse – though no one knew whether he actually did – and he had picked the best space. His apartment of bare breezeblock walls, well furnished and pleasantly warm compared to the ground floor, which was freezing in winter, had lovely views over the city and the rolling expanse of the Bois de Vincennes through the huge window of what had clearly once been a large office. Sila liked to come up in winter to enjoy the warmth and thick, richly coloured rugs which Roger had acquired through one of his dodgy business dealings.

As any estate agent would have pointed out, one of the features of the property – besides being preferable to sleeping under a bridge – was its proximity to the Bois de Vincennes. After arriving on the cargo ship, Sila had got a job washing dishes in a tourist restaurant in Montmartre. Fos, who had contacts all over the world, had put him in touch with a friend whom he had asked to find the boy a job and somewhere to live. Then he took his leave of Sila, telling him, ‘Don't worry. You'll be fine. I'm sure of it. You have the light.'

The exact nature of this ‘light' was difficult to understand. And given Sila's fate, Fos's prediction might seem like a mocking laugh. But it is true that for a long time, Sila seemed to benefit from the light. It took Fos's friend less than a month to find the boy a room in the warehouse and a job at the restaurant. At first, Sila was grateful to his employer – he was, after all, employing an illegal immigrant – until he realised that the man was simply exploiting him, paying half the minimum wage and no social security. In short, Sila cost his boss a quarter as much as a French employee. Even so, Sila grew accustomed to his
job. He became a perfect illegal immigrant, commendable in every respect.

But still Sila missed the natural world. Surrounded by a sea of concrete, he felt suffocated. He took deep breaths, tried to suck in lungfuls of air … but it didn't work. Everything was so polluted, the crashing waves of grey concrete and stone were impossible to escape. So the Bois de Vincennes was not simply an estate agent's talking point. In these woods – though crisscrossed with man-made paths that were often deserted during the week - there was air, he felt he could breathe. Sometimes one of the other residents at the warehouse would go running with him, but who could keep up with Sila when he ran? How could anyone measure up to that natural energy, that boundless ability to run? Sila was indefatigable; running to him was as natural as walking. He would set off along the paths, jogging slowly so as not to leave his running mate behind, but as time passed and the other runner began to tire, struggling to keep up, Sila would suddenly take off, flying like an arrow for the sheer thrill of the speed, crashing through thickets, hurdling hedges. No one could keep up. ‘Sila's a champion,' they said in the warehouse. ‘He shouldn't be a waiter, he should be an Olympic runner.' And Sila would smile and shake his head, then go back to the basement of the restaurant.

It was on his return from one of his runs that he discovered Roger's wife, Céline, was celebrating her birthday ‘upstairs'.

‘Which birthday?'

‘We don't know. But it's her birthday. She's been cooking since this morning, making dinner for everyone in the warehouse.'

‘Dinner? With what?'

‘We don't know. It's a surprise. We'll find out soon enough.'

Sila, who was not without a certain pride in his appearance, washed himself carefully, slicked down his hair with a cream that made it look even blacker and shinier, put on his best clothes and, at the appointed hour, appeared in the apartment upstairs.

‘Sila!' his hostess greeted him. ‘How handsome you look. I'm honoured.'

The others laughed and poked fun at him but he didn't get annoyed, he simply sat down; he knew they all liked him. Through the window, beyond the city, beyond the motorway, he could make out the trees of the Bois de Vincennes.

‘Did you have a good run?' asked Céline. ‘You were out there for hours apparently.'

‘Yes. I caught a rabbit.'

‘A rabbit?'

‘There are lots of them. They're hard to catch because they're fast and they zigzag in a way that's difficult for a person to copy. But I cut him off a couple of times and eventually I caught him.'

‘Did you bring him back? We could cook it.'

‘It's just a game. I let him go as soon as I caught him.'

‘Sila's fast,' they whispered to each other.

They drank a toast to Céline. With a sparkling wine that tasted a little bitter but not bad.

There was a sort of philosophical serenity in the incantatory tones of the Cameroonian woman, in the stillness of her face that made even the most banal phrases seem profound. She constantly seemed to speak in epigrams, her language refined
and old-fashioned with classical twists as though all the wisdom of the world were being expressed through her.

People chatted. Everyone was on their best behaviour, carefully groomed and dressed to the nines, as though self-conscious at finding themselves ‘upstairs' with the owners. In fact Roger asserted his status as landlord by being casually dressed in an old pair of trousers, a yellow shirt and braces.

They sat at the large kitchen table in the spacious, bright room crammed with bric-a-brac.

‘I've made typical food from my country,' said Céline, ‘food that is maybe a part of your own culture … or maybe not.'

Céline served a spicy fish dish and the smell stirred memories in Sila. He began to eat, attentive to every sensation, chewing carefully to extract from the flesh images of the past, to conjure in the spaces between flavours the memory of a fish he had once watched the Uncle fillet in the City of Nowhere. The flesh had been firm, pinkish near the backbone and had no sharp bones, only a profusion of small spines which the Uncle had patiently removed for the child. As Sila looked up, his eyes misting over, lost in this memory of the past, he saw others around him staring into space as though this humble fish had reconnected each of them with their past, with their homeland, with beginnings made half unreal by the glorious memories of childhood.

‘In my country,' someone said, ‘nothing worked. Everything was always rotten. Everything crumbled and every year the whole country crumbled a little more.'

He said this tenderly, as though talking about a wayward child. Then each in turn began to talk about his past.

‘How did you get here, Sila?' asked Céline. ‘You've never told us what happened.'

Sila sidestepped the question. He said only that he had stowed away on a ship.

‘You were lucky not to be thrown overboard,' said someone.

‘And to get into France.'

‘Things aren't easy in France. They've gotten tougher.'

‘These days you're better off going to Canada.'

And everybody nodded. ‘Oh yes, Canada is the place to go.'