Infrared (8 page)

‘Oh, isn’t she cute?’ Ingrid coos.

‘Thank you, madam. Soon I have another child.’

‘Really? That’s wonderful!’

‘God willing, I go to visit them next summer…’

This is October. Rena studies the young hat seller, searching his features for signs of anxiety over his future—money problems, the children not recognising him when he comes home on his annual visit…Objectively, his life seems grim indeed, and yet his face shines with hope.

After trying on some two dozen hats, Simon finally selects a brown fedora almost identical to Rena’s.

Ingrid frowns. ‘That’s not your style,’ she says dubiously.

‘It can
become
my style,’ Simon retorts. And he begins to haggle over the price. But even haggling is something Simon can’t do the way other people do.

The young salesman, who had instantly knocked the price down from twenty-five to twenty euros because his merchandise was overpriced to begin with, wants to knock it down some more. ‘I’ll let you have it for eighteen,’ he says, touched by their admiration of his daughter.

‘No,’ says Simon, digging coins out of his change-purse and laboriously counting them out. ‘You said twenty, I’ll pay you twenty.’

‘No, really, I insist,’ says the young man. ‘Fifteen, come now, fifteen. You’ve been so kind.’

‘Twenty-three,’ Simon says.

This goes on for another five minutes. When at last they move away from the stall, Simon has paid twenty-five euros for his hat and everyone is beaming.

A moment of peace.

Rena showers, puts on fresh clothes and smokes a cigarette, sitting next to the window in her room’s only armchair. Down below, the garden is no longer empty: a bare-chested young man stands next to the white plastic picnic table, shouting into a mobile phone.

He looks about twenty—Thierno’s age. His authoritarian tone contrasts comically with his fragile body—narrow shoulders, almost hairless chest and tummy. Physically, he reminds her of Khim—the slender, gracious Cambodian she married to do him a favour, shortly after Fabrice’s death…

Tell me,
murmurs Subra.

Khim was forty at the time but looked twenty. He was a gastro-enterologist and had received his medical degree in Phnom Penh before the Khmer Rouge came to power. After the five years of the genocide, during which he’d been ‘re-educated’ in the rice fields, he’d managed to leave Cambodia following the Vietnamese invasion, thanks to a patient of his who was in the Viet Cong. Once in Paris, Khim discovered that, unless he acquired French nationality, he’d have to start his education all over again, so he set about looking for a French wife. I’d been naturalised thanks to my marriage with Fabrice—who, though Haitian-born, had himself acquired French nationality thanks to his first marriage with a woman from Madagascar, who in turn had been previously married to a Basque. That sort of daisy-chain of mutual assistance was easier to bring off in the eighties than it is nowadays…

Subra snickers obligingly.

Anyway, I was happy to be able to help Khim—a lovely, feminine, traumatised, delicate man, Buddhist into the bargain—by wedding him. Our marriage was as light and ephemeral as a butterfly. We
lived together for a year, not making love (he was gay) but taking acute pleasure in each other’s company. By the time we divorced by mutual consent, I’d taken a thousand photos of him and he’d told me a thousand stories…

Returning to
Inferno,
Rena stumbles on a passage that makes her sit up straight:

Per l’argine sinistro volta dienno; ma prima avea ciascun la lingua stretta coi denti, verso lor duca, per cenno; ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta.

Incredulous, she checks the English translation. Yes, that’s really what it says.

Along the left-hand dike they wheeled about; But first had each one thrust his tongue between His teeth towards their leader for a signal; And he had made a trumpet of his rump.

She laughs out loud at the seven-hundred-year-old fart. At that very second there’s a knock on her door and she jumps out of her skin—as if she herself had been caught farting.

Revived by their nap, Simon and Ingrid have come to see her room. Not much to see, but…Simon finds it a pity that she doesn’t have a balcony. He goes back out into the hallway, sees a door with the universal no-entry symbol on it—a red circle with a white horizontal line—and opens it at once. Rena represses a flare of anger.

He can’t help it, Subra reminds her. That’s just the way he is.

I know, sighs Rena. As an adolescent, following Leonard Cohen’s example, Simon rebelled against his father Baruch, the sweetest pious Jew who ever lived, and all the restrictions of their milieu. ‘Jews are born bargainers, my little Rena,’ he told me one day. ‘More than anything else, they love to bargain with God. “Listen, YHWH, you
don’t want us to do
this,
but you don’t mind if we do a little of
that,
do you? Will you spare the city of Sodom if we can find fifty good people there? How about if we can only find thirty? How about ten? Hmm, let’s see…If there’s only
one
good person, will you spare the city then?”…Or else: “All right, you don’t want us to use electricity on the Sabbath, but you know how it is in modern-day cities, it’s no fun walking up eleven flights of stairs, so listen, YHWH, let’s make a deal. Next to the Goy elevator we’ll build a Jewish elevator—it’ll stop automatically on every floor without our having to press a single button—that all right with you? You won’t notice a thing, will you?”… Or again: “You told us not to move stuff from one house to another on the Sabbath, but the fact is that in this Goys’ world Saturday’s the most convenient day for moving. So we’ll just put an Eruv around the neighbourhood—very discreetly running an almost invisible plastic or metal wire through the trees and bushes—that way the whole neighbourhood can be thought of as a single ‘house’ and we can move as much stuff as we like from one ‘room’ to another—all right, will you go along with that? You won’t notice a thing, will you?” People set limits where they need them, my little Rena. As for my own limits, God and I came to an understanding long ago: I tell him I don’t believe in Him, and He says that’s fine with Him. That way I can study brain synapses without having to worry about blasphemy.’

Simon thus allowed himself to be carried away by the radical ideas he gleaned from Leary’s books
(Start Your Own Religion, The Politics of Ecstasy, Your Brain is God,
and so forth), and was hypnotised by his endlessly repeated order to ‘Question authority’. As a result, the minute someone forbids him to do something, he feels compelled to do it—apparently not noticing that this implies unquestioning submission to the authority of Timothy Leary.

The forbidden door opens onto a fire escape, and Simon promptly sits down on it. ‘Isn’t this terrific?’ he says proudly. ‘It’s almost as good as a balcony.’

The young man in the garden looks up and glowers at them.
‘Proprietà privata,’
he says in his booming voice.

‘Scusi, signor,’
says Rena.

She drags her father back inside—gently but firmly, as if he were one of her sons—and shuts the door.

What Simon neglected to explain to me that day, she goes on, mentally addressing Subra, was that there were in fact two ways of being Jewish in Montreal—
on
the mountain and
behind
the mountain (to say nothing of the many nuances in between). Our own family was emphatically
on
the mountain—the affluent, secular neighbourhood of Westmount, inhabited mostly by male Jewish professionals who had married Goys and chosen, among their people’s motley and contradictory traditions, to perpetuate only scintillating intelligence and self-irony. Outremont, behind the mountain, was another kettle of fish, and the Saturday morning I first went there with my mother was a real shock to me. I must have been twelve or thirteen, and when I saw the frowning, hard-featured, bearded men striding down the street dressed in black coats and tall, stiff, often sable-trimmed black hats, long ringlets dangling from their temples…and the bewigged women with no make-up, thick black stockings, shapeless skirts hanging to mid-calf, my eyes popped out of my head.

‘Who are they?’ I asked my mother. ‘They’re Hasidim,’ Lisa answered absent-mindedly, which didn’t enlighten me much. ‘Hasidim means the very-pious,’ she added. ‘They’re Lubavitches. Orthodox Jews.’ Now she’d lost me completely. ‘Jews? You mean like Daddy?’ ‘Yes, but not like him. Daddy’s a Jew too, but not an Orthodox Jew.’ ‘What kind of a Jew is he, then?’ ‘Well, you see, large
groups of people tend to split up into smaller groups, each with its own customs, its own ways of eating and dressing and celebrating feast days…’ ‘So what are our customs?’ ‘Oh…nothing special.’ ‘Why do those men look so angry?’ ‘They’re not angry—they’re just not supposed to look at us, that’s all.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because we’re women.’ ‘So what?’ ‘So nothing. So they want to concentrate.’ ‘On what?’ ‘How should I know? On what they consider important. The Torah, for example. Especially today, because Saturday’s the sacred day they call the Sabbath.’ ‘What about us? Have we got a Sabbath?’ ‘No. Yes. Well, not exactly. We rest up a bit on Sunday, which is the Christian Sabbath, but only if we feel like it. Sometimes we work Sundays, too, whereas Orthodox Jews never work Saturdays; they have to obey a whole slew of rules from sunup to sundown. I thought Simon explained it to you.’ ‘Yeah, he did, a bit, but…but I didn’t know what they looked like.’

Impressed by the sullen, scowling faces of the Lubavitches, I conceived the plan of forcing one of them to desire me.

Forbidden? Let’s do it, Subra chuckles. Red light? Go for it. Barrier? Plough right through.

I’m not blind, Rena nods. I can see I’m caught in the same double bind as Simon. Not easy to challenge the authority of someone who has ordered you to challenge authority. The more I rebel against my father, the more I resemble him.

Since my parents paid scant attention to my comings and goings, it was no problem for me to jump on my bike the following Saturday and pedal all the way to Outremont. I hid behind a tree on Durocher Street to wait for the ideal victim. The Hasidim men strode past me in their great black fluttering coats, looking for all the world like sinister crows. Finally I saw a young man approaching—mid-twenties or so, tall, thin, angular and nervous-looking, wearing a hat that was too big for him. I made up my mind on the spot:
he’d be the one.
Carefully
concealed behind my tree, I let him go by, then leapt on my bike and zoomed past him, hitting him just hard enough to knock off his hat. As the man was picking up his rolling hat and clamping it back on his head, I braked and turned at the same time, let out a yell and tumbled painlessly to the ground. There I was at the poor man’s feet, spread-eagled on the footpath with my skirt awry. ‘Ow, ow, I’m sorry, sir,’ I moaned. ‘I’m terribly sorry, but a bee stung me…and now I think I must have sprained my ankle. Oh, it hurts, it hurts…’

Torn between the instinct to help a fellow human being and the impulse to flee, the man froze. Taking advantage of his momentary paralysis, I caught his gaze and hung on to it. That was when I first learned the technique of breaking and entering a man’s soul through his eyes, swimming in deeper and deeper until I could tell he was mesmerised by my green gaze…Ah. Yes.

I was inside. I’d captured and captivated him. He was at my mercy.

The man knelt by my side, glancing nervously left and right to make sure no one was watching us. I noticed he was wearing a thin gold wedding band. In tears, I reached up and flung my pretty arms around his neck, so that he had no choice but to rise to his feet with me in his embrace, his body and ringlets fairly trembling with desire. ‘Thank you, sir,’ I whispered into his ear. ‘I’m so sorry…I just need to rest for a few minutes, I’m sure I’ll be all right…It’s probably not even a real sprain. I’m just a bit shaken up, that’s all…’

Clutching me to him, convulsively now, the way a thief clutches a just-stolen wallet or a tiger its prey, he carried me to his home in a blind trance of desire. I could tell that laws were toppling like dominos in his heart, and that he was firmly convinced he had some important things to reveal to me…but I decided to leave it at that. I’d achieved my goal and that was enough; I didn’t want to plunge
the poor man into the throes of eternal guilt. And so, after a few delicate caresses, as light as they were intoxicating, after the delight of watching the young man’s lips part in a joyful smile, his eyes shine with gratitude, his hands run over my naked thighs, and his tongue play with my nipples—I tore myself out of his arms, thanked him profusely and saved us both.

I’m a sin for him,
I said to myself as I moved away from his house, heart pounding.

It’s weird to be a sin for someone, comments Subra.

Yes. I was to discover this on countless occasions in my adult life, always with the same incredulity—whether in Gaza, Istanbul, the Vatican, Mount Athos, or at the entrance to an ordinary café in one of Paris’s impoverished suburbs. I, Rena Greenblatt, without moving or speaking or misbehaving or taking off my clothes or baring my bottom or sticking out my tongue or brandishing a gun or selling Kalashnikovs or heroin or child porn, just by standing here, calm, smiling, motionless, with my face visible and my genitals invisible—am a sin for the men who are looking at me right now.

It’s not their fault they get hard-ons, the poor guys. Since Cro-Magnon days, their pecker has been programmed to stiffen whenever they set eyes on a shtuppable lady; their gonads are plugged directly into their retinas. Actually, they’d just as soon dispense with this reflex because it’s painful to them. I’ll never forget the day Alioune taught me that, during a Fela Kuti concert in Dijon in 1993. As Fela’s sublime dancers filed out on stage (to avoid jealousy amongst them he’d married them all, so there were no fewer than twenty-seven gorgeous young Madame Kutis; later on, as punishment for the singer’s virulent political lyrics, the Nigerian government would arrange to have all his sweet wives raped and his elderly mother tossed out of a window, but on the night of the Dijon concert none of that had happened yet), Alioune leaned over to me and moaned softly into
my ear, ‘It hurts,’—I’ve never forgotten it. Seen from the front, the dancers hardly seemed to be moving at all, their hips and shoulders barely undulating—but when they spun around you saw their bead-fringed rear ends jouncing wildly up and down in synch with the wild Afro beat. Of course men find this painful. They can control the world but they can’t control that crucial part of their anatomy. It has this maddening way of standing to attention when they don’t want it to and refusing to budge when they most desperately need it to perform. Whence their tendency to cling to things whose firmness is reliable—guns, medals, briefcases, honours, doctrines…They can’t stand the fact that females hold the remote control to their cocks. It scares them, their fear makes them angry, and the effects of that anger are apparent everywhere. Since they can’t control their own bodies, they control ours by declaring them taboo…