Chez Max by Jakob Arjouni Read Free Book Online Page A

Tower and on the Champ de Mars, with the appearance of the rainbow and a performance by the Veterans’ Band of the Border Guards. After that there would be speeches by several members of the Brussels government, as well as the Governor of France and the Mayor of Paris, followed by an aerial ballet performed by the famous Danone School of Dance from Montpellier, a TEF air show, and finally the opening of the Peace Buffet, which was one and a half kilometres long. For the rainbow was to symbolise, not least, Europe’s progress from the building of the Fence and the Wars of Liberation into an ever more peaceful and better future in which life would be more and more worth living.
    Without taking my eyes off the Eiffel Tower I said, in the patient and forbearing tone that I had determined to adopt for this meeting, ‘Well, it’ll be nice if the rainbow makes a few people happy.’
    â€˜Why will it be nice? I’ve known people who were made happy by beating their own children or gunning someone down.’
    â€˜Oh, Chen …’ I sighed. ‘That’s nonsense. It didn’t make them happy. Such people are sick. And even if it did make them happy, surely it’s better for them to look at a rainbow.’
    â€˜You mean that’s the choice? Gunning someone down or the rainbow? Maybe you’re right. Many might see it that way. But I’m afraid most wouldn’t want to commit themselves. And then again: just how brutal is it, looking at a rainbow when someone’s snuffing it next door?’
    Oh please, I thought, not that stupid stuff again. Sometimes Chen really did talk like a depressive sixteen-year-old, or a rabble-rouser at some provincial university. After four years it was still a mystery to me how a man of his intelligence could seriously come out with such hollow, outmoded ideas. He probably just wanted to provoke me, but sometimes he took a tone that made me feel that these were the only ideas he really believed in.
    Maintaining my equable tone, I replied: ‘No one will be snuffing it next door. What ideas you think up! Far from it. We’ve never had it so good. There’s enough food to eat – and although that doesn’t interest you, it’s quality food – there’s enough work, nature is healthy, our seas are clean, medicine is making progress all the time, soon we’ll have an average life expectancy of a hundred, and according to the latest surveys seventy per cent of the population consider themselves happy.’
    Chen looked expressionlessly at me for a moment, shrugged his shoulders, threw the empty plastic container into the waste paper basket and the fork into the washbasin and said, sounding bored, ‘I don’t know if you’re suffering from some kind of partial memory loss. Let me remind you that there’s no question that there is not enough food in many areas behind the Fence, let alone “quality food”.’
    I felt the blood drain from my face. And I’d firmly determined not to let that happen in front of him today. Because Chen registered everything, and once he’d exposed my emotions he’d find it easy to hit me below the belt, if that was what he wanted to do, by the mention of Leon’s arrest, enriched by a wealth of allusions. And in fact I’d been surprised that he didn’t bring the subject up as soon as we were in the office together. ‘Well, my dear Max, busy protecting society again? Hauling a friend in front of the Examining Committee because he wanted to buy cigarettes! I suppose we all have our priorities.’
    I’d been prepared for that, but not for what he’d just said. Because in spite of his unconcealed dislike of many aspects of present conditions, during the years we’d worked together Chen had seldom overstepped a certain line, and then only when he was drunk – which had always given me a good reason to forget the incident quickly. But the