The Age of Reinvention by Karine Tuil Read Free Book Online Page A

he says distantly, secretly furious. Anyone who makes demands on him, who questions him, he automatically eliminates from his life. As soon as she’s gone, he airs the room and finishes tidying it. Then he leaves. A police siren screams through the night. He smokes a cigarette as he walks to his car, and it is only behind the wheel of his Aston Martin, driving at eighty miles per hour, that he remembers the message his mother sent him a few hours earlier. At a stoplight, he grabs his phone and finally reads her text: “Samir, call me back, I beg you. It’s about your brother.”
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    1 . James Liver, forty-three, a poker player who dreams of winning the big prize that would “change my life.”

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    How his mother can write “your brother,” Samir has no idea. He knows nothing about this person, doesn’t want to know anything. He is not his “brother” but his “half brother”—they do not have the same father, or the same identity. For him, this man is nothing, he is a stranger. He is twenty-four years old and looks/acts about eighteen. He still lives with their mother. A tall, thin man with reddish blond hair and blue eyes: a European type, nothing like Samir at all. Whenever she was with him, his mother (dark hair, black eyes) would always be asked: “Are you the babysitter?” “No, I’m his mother.” And Samir had to reply: “He’s my brother —François.”
    Three years after the death of his father, in the first months of 1982, his mother discovered she was pregnant. By whom? How? She didn’t say anything to begin with: she hid her pregnancy, vomited secretly at night or out in the street, cried alone and in silence. She bought baggy clothes, size XL—ponchos, lots of black—and claimed she was getting fat: it was stress-related, hormonal. She covered the dark rings around her eyes with thick layers of foundation, but it did no good: they stayed purplish, like bruises, while her legs became heavy and swollen, in spite of the support stockings that her pharmacist recommended. She was on her feet all day long. Her employers noticed nothing, or pretended to notice nothing: they didn’t want to have to give her a day off, an hour of rest. As she came toward the end of her pregnancy, however, it finally became impossible to hide. She might give birth any day—on the sidewalk, in the bus, in the dirt, like a dog . . . Samir had seen that happen once: a little, short-haired, blood-smeared mongrel, hiding behind the trash cans, three or four damp puppies curled up beneath her. He must have been eight years old at the time. He had wept with rage. Later that day, he saw the bitch wandering the streets alone. Apparently the garbage collectors had thrown the puppies into the dumpster, laughing as they did so, all of them crushed together in a little mass of flesh, and the same thing might happen to her if she didn’t say something. It could happen at any moment—and then what? Samir found some papers in her underwear drawer: her maternity folder, containing ultrasound images, blood tests, etc. He was so shocked, he made her confess, holding the pictures up to her, and she whispered (tearfully): “Yes, I’m pregnant.” Then, a few seconds later, in a solemn voice: “That’s all I can tell you for now.” “That’s all you can tell me?” A single mother, in the ghetto . . . he feels ashamed. They’ll be a target for the prudes now, the religious freaks, the Islamists—there are more and more of them around these days, watching over those they consider too modern, too free, those who expose too much bare skin. Opprobrium is guaranteed. They have to get out of here, and fast. They steal away one night, like thieves. Not a word of goodbye. The neighbors will be gossiping about this for months. Samir has no idea where they’re going: his mother won’t