Chez Max by Jakob Arjouni Read Free Book Online Page B

mere mention of certain global subjects ought to make me report him to Commander Youssef. Of course we could talk about the Fence – in fact we had to, since after all it was one of the duties of an Ashcroft agent to make sure it was maintained in good order and no one could get over it, and we did that by tracking down organizations that aimed to destroy it. A line had to be drawn, all the same. It wasn’t laid down in law or stipulated in any decree, but everyone knew it. Commander Youssef had once put it this way in a lecture that he gave in-house: we had to think of the regions beyond the Fence as we thought of the Moon – politically speaking, there was just as little to be discussed. The Moon couldn’t be liberated either, and no one was doing it any wrong. In the course of an Ashcroft investigation we could, of course, pretend to express certain views to a suspect for the purpose of gathering evidence, but otherwise the rule was: anything said about the regions beyond the Fence, other than the geographical facts, counted as propaganda and an attack on our Euro-Asian community of values.
    That was the official formula in the Civil Code: ‘Attacks on our Euro-Asian community of values.’ Quite a lot could come under that heading, and sometimes even I wondered if the point couldn’t have been made a little more precisely. In most cases it depended on your personal judgement whether something was an attack or just thoughtless talk. Of course I knew that behind it all was the aim of bringing the population up to have a sense of responsibility, motivating citizens to think about what they did and said and examine it, instead of just stolidly keeping the rules. But an Ashcroft agent could sometimes find himself floundering. For instance, was my greengrocer’s casually ironic throwaway remark about ‘A1 bananas from sunny Nantes’ just a joke, or could it be seen as the beginnings of a verbal attack on the Euro-Asian community of values? Because of course Nantes was only one of the ports where fruits and other produce from South America and Africa arrived. But as both Africa and large parts of south America lay beyond the Fence, the only way of describing the origin of the bananas was by their last point of delivery, in this case the northern French port of Nantes with its heavy average rainfall. Then there was the lady who lived next door to me and mentioned her Senegalese grandfather whose native land she’d so much like to visit, adding bitterly that unfortunately Senegal was now under water, so she supposed her distant relations had evolved into fish. It was a fact that on official maps, like those shown on the TV news, all areas beyond the fence were plain blue, as if they were part of the oceans.
    But talk about an alleged lack of food among the population living beyond the Fence – without a doubt, that was a deliberate attack on our joint Euro-Asian values. Because even if, on closer examination, living conditions there might be approaching some critical point or other, claiming hunger was ridiculous. After all, everyone knew that almost all our nutritional requirements were supplied by goods from South America, Africa and Asia. North America did make a contribution, but few thought much of its predominantly symbolic significance. Since the bankrupt USA had been excluded from Europe, European governments had always tried to point out the importance of North America as a supplier of grain and meat to the Euro-Asian world, for one thing in order to justify, to their own people, the huge subsidies granted annually to US agriculture, for another to encourage a sense of community with our ‘poor relation’ Uncle Sam overseas. The logic of this increasingly escaped most Euro- Asians of the younger generation.
    But being poor – or at least not as prosperous as the Euro-Asian community – didn’t mean starving, not by a long way. Neither in North America nor