The Age of Reinvention (30 page)

Nothing had prepared him for this reception. Only a few weeks after sending out his manuscript, he had been contacted by a publisher whose back-catalogue Samuel greatly admired, and this man had asked to meet him. He had phoned him around eleven a.m.—it was a Monday morning; he remembered it vividly—and had simply announced his identity, then asked: “Am I speaking to the author of
Consolation
?” “Yes.” “Have you signed a contract for this book with another publisher yet?” “No.” “Do you live in Paris?” “Near Paris.” “Could you come to my office tomorrow? Let's say . . . around three p.m.?” “Yes.” And, just as he was about to hang up, he'd heard the publisher's last words: “Oh, I almost forgot . . . your book . . . it's very good. I mean that sincerely—you have a great talent. And I am not the kind of man who uses that term lightly.”

He didn't sleep that night. All he did was rehearse in his head what he would say to the publisher the next day. And yet, when the time for their meeting came, they barely exchanged a word. The publisher spoke very little, Samuel not at all. But he signed a publishing contract. Later, when a journalist asked him the question,
Where and when were you happiest?
he replied: “In my publisher's office.” During the weeks that followed, the publisher called him several times to suggest a few changes. He remembers a phone call at dawn about a comma: Should it be kept or deleted? He wasn't sure. It was in this world and no other that he wished to live from now on—a world where the position of a comma was more important than one's position in society.

You are under arrest
.

It is six in the morning when the heavily armed policemen (are they soldiers? how many of them are there?) surge into Samir's home.
Hands up! Turn around! Don't move!
Handcuffs click, boot soles clack . . . brutality, pain, authority.
But what are the charges? I haven't done anything! Tell me what the hell is going on!

All it takes is a glance through the window, at the cloudy sky, and Samir can see it's early morning—not night anymore, but the sun is barely illuminating the misty, Klein-blue expanse. Follow us! One of the men presses a heavy, damp hand on Samir's head to hold him still while another handcuffs him in front of Ruth, who is screaming that she doesn't understand, screaming and threatening, invoking her influence, her power—
You can't do this, you'll regret it
—demanding the names and ranks of these men who act like the police, but who are they really? “Who are you?” Ruth yells. “Show me your badges. I'll file a complaint against you!”

Take it up with the authorities, ma'am.

Ruth stands in the doorway of her apartment, head bent forward as if she's about to fall over. She's wearing beige silk pajamas, hardly a hair out of place, but her face is distorted by tiredness/incomprehension/anger. That aura of the untouchable aristocrat, the perfectly controlled sovereign, is gone, her urbanity vanished in a few minutes. How could she ever have imagined she would one day experience anything this dreadful? A dawn arrest, carried out with brutal efficiency: it's the kind of thing you associate with movies or the Bronx or novels with embossed lettering on the covers, not with an opulent building on Fifth Avenue, not with this apartment complex where no one may enter without ID, a place of perfect social respectability filled with slick-haired yuppies and white-haired patricians—a place that has never been burgled, and you can see why. Take a look around: an armed guard outside, a crabby, paranoid caretaker inside, and surveillance cameras placed in every corner by the best security technicians, each one linked directly to the security firm's headquarters, where men and women work four-hour shifts, zealously watching the feed to ensure no one disturbs the serenity of the building's occupants. At the slightest sign of trouble, five men armed with assault rifles are poised to arrive within five minutes . . . but there are more than five here today (seven or eight, maybe?) and they are here not to defend the owners of these luxury apartments but to arrest one of them like a drug dealer or a gangster—the horror! Ruth looks up and notices her neighbor,
¹
who has emerged from his apartment to observe the landing with a hard, judgmental stare. In these apartments, where a square meter is worth more than thirty-five thousand dollars, scandals are frowned upon, as is anything that might devalue the asset, and the neighbor retreats into his apartment as if he has seen nothing and has no desire to know what is going on in the apartment across the landing. Ruth looks at the neighbor's closed door—a door that he has double-locked (she heard the key turn in the latch, the metallic thud of the dead bolt)—and she feels as if she might faint with shame. Something has died here, on the landing outside her apartment, something that has dethroned her forever. She forces back her tears and watches the policemen, without yelling this time—her husband is struggling like a fish trapped in a net—then puts on an overcoat and follows them to the elevator. They go inside, Samir repeating that he has done nothing wrong and demanding: “Who are you? What do you want? Show me your badges!” Ruth takes the stairs, hurtling down them, breathing heavily, almost tripping more than once, and catching up with them as they walk past the dumbfounded caretaker and the cleaner who is mopping the floor and does not dare stop. The policemen move forward quickly, pulling Samir by the arms, and noisily exit the building, watched by a few joggers in Central Park. Some of them stop and take pictures or videos on their cell phones, which they will later put on YouTube, those bastards. A dark-colored van is parked out in front of the building. Ruth walks toward it, but Samir does not even have time to say a word to her before he is shoved inside, flanked by two heavyset policemen, and the door is banged shut. The van speeds away, immediately followed by two other police cars, sirens screaming.

The van is driven at breakneck speed, running red lights. It starts to rain, hammering on the windshield, and the wipers wave like two metronomes. Samir can hear the noise of the city beyond the van's walls. He can hear crackling voices on the cops' walkie-talkies:
Operation successful
. He finds himself remembering the opening words of Kafka's
The Trial
: “Someone must have been spreading lies about Josef K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one morning.” That was exactly what had happened to him: he had done nothing wrong, and yet men had come to arrest him.

1
. Allan Dean, seventy-six, a person of independent means. His only ambition is to acquire the Tahars' apartment.

The good fortune—or misfortune—of finding success just at the moment when he had given up hope. The good fortune—or misfortune—of being famous, admired, and loved for a book, because he had written a book, while as a man he had felt isolated, profoundly alone, not through choice but because he had never been popular, never at the center of things: he had spent his life on the sidelines. What had he done that was so extraordinary? What had he done to deserve this renown? He had fictionalized his own life, he had lined up a bunch of words—that was all. Was his book really so exceptional? He had been lucky, that was what he thought: his book had been read at the right time by people who happened to be in the right mood; the critics who reviewed his novel had just fallen in love or they'd read it while they were drunk. All success is based on a misunderstanding, his more than most. There had been an error, a terrible mistake, and in a few days or weeks, everyone would discover this fact and he would return to his habitual anonymity. But this is not what happened. Every day brought him more encounters, more good news. The week before publication, there had been reviews in all the biggest newspapers and his book entered the best-seller list on the very day it first appeared in bookstores. Foreign publishers outbid each other for the rights in various languages. He imagined his picture on those
WANTED
posters you always see in old westerns, with a vast sum of money emblazoned beneath. Everyone wanted him and they were ready to pay.

His success was so overwhelming that he had to take time off work. His publisher put him up in a grand Parisian hotel, and his days became a series of interviews with journalists, answering readers' questions, posing for photographs in magazines, and traveling—around France, around the world—to sign copies of his books. Everywhere he went, he was treated like a king . . . or a foreign secretary, at the very least. And every single time, he felt there must surely have been a mix-up of some kind, a case of mistaken identity. Surely it wasn't really
him
that all these people had come to lionize!

To begin with, he had been flattered by all these panegyrics. People kept telling him he was exceptional, and he ended up believing it. He felt important. He felt untouchable. Now he had access to places he had never dreamed of entering, he was able to meet people he had long admired—intellectuals, politicians, even actors, including one particularly great actor whom he had hero-worshipped since childhood, and who asked him to write a role for him.

What you wrote about filiation, about determinism, about the pressure that parents/society put us under . . . I have lived through that. This was what all his readers told him, in person or in writing. And he listened to them, read their words, feeling helpless, having no desire to be a spokesman for anyone or anything.

With women too, he discovered that he was suddenly endowed with new qualities. Beautiful girls called him, asked him out. It was in this way that he found himself in bed with a female novelist
¹
(a fact which, far from being a minor detail, actually made the situation more complex, with the writing intensifying the strife between them, as if each lover were reliant on conflict and anger as the engines of their creativity). Léa Brenner was a fifty-two-year-old woman, the author of a challenging and much-feted oeuvre, who had contributed to his meteoric rise on the Parisian literary scene by writing a rave review of his book in a prestigious literary supplement—a review that was immediately reduced to a single word, printed on a red strip of paper that embellished the cover of this book by an unknown author (“though not for long,” as she proclaimed everywhere she went): “Prodigious”—a word that might have been dictated by admiration or love, or quite possibly both, and which seemed to describe not only the book itself (a book Léa Brenner really did find interesting, and in which she detected some of the biting irony of Chekhov's best stories), but also the love that she instantly felt for the man who wrote it (even though he was quite cold and distant).

Four months before this, before the book was available in stores, Léa Brenner had sent a note to Samuel via his publisher, explaining that she'd read the proofs of his novel and thought it wonderful. She loved him before she ever met him; she loved him because she'd
read
him. She knew that meetings with authors whose books you love could sometimes be disheartening. She remembered an evening spent with an American writer, whose work she had studied at university, but who, when she met him, had seemed obscene, disappointing, completely lacking in subtlety, whereas his work was so powerful. It was as if the writer, obsessed by his oeuvre, had emptied himself of all substance, given the best of himself, leaving nothing but a dried-up husk.

She imagined making love with Samuel, the erotic attraction fed by the reading of his book. For her, words alone were enough to trigger desire. Which was why all her romantic relationships had been with writers. Before Samuel, there had been a long love affair with an Israeli writer, but she didn't want to talk about that, she said, because the mere mention of his name could make her cry.

Samuel had replied with a short, polite note, and—that same evening—she had written him another letter, a long one this time, in which she discussed not only his work (in great detail, mixing criticism with eulogy), but also—and this was what touched Samuel—the death of his parents. At the end of the letter, she suggested they meet for coffee at her place—a large apartment that she rented in the seventh arrondissement.

Three weeks later, he found himself in her living room, the walls covered with old books. He was impressed by this, having always borrowed books from libraries or bought them as cheap paperbacks or from the secondhand booksellers who offer their wares by the banks of the Seine.

Meeting him for the first time, she was paralyzed for a moment. This man awakened something in her. As soon as she shook his hand, she knew they would make love that very day.

They made love and it was a disaster. Samuel could not get hard. She told him it didn't matter, but it did to him: he picked up his things and left. She kept calling him until he gave in. They saw each other for a while. They could talk for hours about Russian poetry or South American/Italian literature or politics/philosophy, but in bed, their bodies had nothing to say to each other. Not that she was repellent. On the contrary, she was a beautiful woman, tall and slim, with very short blond hair and milk-white skin, but he was never able to feel any sexual intimacy with her. The injustice of sexual attraction. Why could he not fall for the curves of her body, the scent of her skin? Everything about her was perfect for him, so why did he feel only the most profound indifference? After two failures, she advised him to see a doctor and he refused. She didn't understand: he didn't desire her and never had. He had loved Nina so much, loved her body so much. All he'd ever had to do was look at her, brush her hand, and he would want her instantly. Now he missed her more than ever. This was the first time he'd slept with another woman since her departure, and he realized it would be the last time. He had thought he'd managed to forget her, but suddenly the memories were overflowing, spilling everywhere. So it was possible, he understood, to be cursed and blessed at the same time, to be a winner and yet a loser, to be happy and yet unhappy.