“‘I hardly dare suggest it to you…’ he says to me while adjusting his glasses with an extremely distinguished air.
“‘Go on, go on! Anything would be better than being stark naked or wearing a barrel around my waist!’
“‘Two minutes from here, at the corner of rue de l’Étang, there’s an Oxfam Solidarité shop that sells used clothing.’
“‘But it’ll be closed!’
“‘My aunt is the manager, call her, she’ll open the shop. She lives right around the corner.’”
Dassoukine swallows a mouthful of coffee and assumes a tragic air.
“He who has never crossed the Place Jourdan in his pajamas, hair disheveled, searching for an act of charity even though he is the grandson of a kaid, has no concept of the absurd. I rush into the shop where an old woman is waiting for me with an angelic smile.
“‘My God, you’re a giant,’ she chirps, panicked.
“‘At your service, madame.’
“‘The only thing we have in your size is this.’
“She unhooks a rag and hands it to me. Prepare the funeral arrangements! They’re golf trousers, the work of a mad tailor, the trappings of a clown. Oh they have lived, possibly several lives, and hard ones at that. The original colors are now faded but it’s obvious they must have clashed violently in the old days. You can see beneath the fabric, beneath the canvas, I should say, a yellow, a yucky brown, an evanescent green, a burnt amber, red diamonds layered on top…but we mustn’t entirely write off the wreckage, because there is one undeniable advantage: they are exactly my size. I throw five euros on the counter, I forget my pajamas and rush toward the assembly halclass="underline" it’s right around the corner, at the end of rue Froissart. The orderly raises an eyebrow when he notices my trousers but my papers are in order and he grants me entry while deploring in a low voice the end of European civilization. I enter the hall, where my interruption causes a sensation. The members of the committee, who are already there, on a sort of platform, gawk at me with bulging eyes, looking only below the belt, as if I had been reduced to two legs.”
“We are but ants in the grand scheme of things.”
“I sit down on a chair opposite these messieurs-dames of Europe and I prepare to present my plea. I fix my gaze on the eyes of the committee…and then I nearly fall out of my chair. For who is presiding over the committee? I’ll give you three guesses.”
“Uhh…”
“The Hungarian!”
“Attila the Hun?”
“No, moron! The Hungarian from the day before, civilized to the core, the grandson of the Archduke and the Bourbons. He looks at me, knitting his brow (‘I know that face…’), then his mouth gapes open (‘No, not him, not the waiter from yesterday!’), and then I have before me the personification of Hungarian stupefaction and commiseration (‘It’s really him!’), and then he leans toward his colleagues, distraught, and starts speaking to them in a low voice. He forgets to turn off his microphone; the interpreter, imperturbable, thus continues to translate — it is his job after all — and so I intrude on this discussion centered on me, and in particular on my trousers. Monsieur Hongre recounts the reception from the night before and tells them I was the waiter and that, with great dexterity, I walked around with a tray filled with petits fours and incidentally almost poured them onto him; but, he adds with a sense of fairness through which I recognize the true son of a grande tente family (even if they are Habsburgs), that I deserve credit for serving them with great professionalism. The Archduke’s report flabbergasts his peers. Then Europe, as always, divides itself. The Slovak reckons I was making off with the leftovers from the buffet because I didn’t have any money, but the Englishman retorts that I came here on a plane and not a flying carpet, and therefore I must have some means, I couldn’t be completely ‘skint.’ The Italian taps his chin, suspecting some combinazione, but what? The Spaniard grumbles something about the ‘Moros’ who never learn. Was I perhaps staging a hoax, for whatever obscure reason? The Frenchman, Cartesian to his eyebrows, expresses his doubts: being very familiar with Morocco, he can’t imagine a minister of His Majesty arriving dirt poor (much like the wheat) in Brussels; what if he was a doppelgänger?
“‘Doppelgänger?’ interrupts the German. Ach so…But which one? Yesterday’s Kellner or this guy, here, on the stand?’
“The committee, as one single man, straightens up and examines me with a suspicious air. Am I really myself? Or a clown imposter? Or a lackey with a big head?
“The Englishman clears his throat and then squeals in my direction:
“‘Exckiousez-moi…This is highly unusual but…Pievons-nous vouâr vos…papiers d’identity?’
“It’s an international incident. I straighten up, tall in my multicolored breeches, and I play out a great scene of Third World indignation in the face of Western arrogance. What is this, huh? I must be dreaming! Would you demand to see the papers of an American or Russian minister? Or even Albanian? Shall I, while we’re at it, produce my anthropometric measurements? My criminal record? My vaccinations for dengue fever and cholera? The Hungarian, miming gestures of appeasement, motions for me to sit back down, and snubs perfidious Albion, now muttering threats.
“I go back to my discourse on wheat, ‘which we formerly exported to the Roman Empire,’ but no one is listening to me, no one cares about the Rome of antiquity. Then the Hungarian makes an imperial gesture and adjourns the session. These messieurs-dames are going to make a decision. They ask me to wait in an adjoining room, where they serve me coffee and chocolate — go on, have a bite, it’s Belgian. Half an hour later, an usher comes to fetch me: the committee has come to a decision.”
“Well?”
“Well, I got the flour for nothing. They remembered, quite pertinently, that there was an emergency stock for desperate cases, like for Somalia, Chad, and other countries where the ministers dress in rags. Pounds of grain for free! Tonight they’re throwing me an extravagant reception at the Rabat airport. ‘The man who saved his country a hundred thousand euros!’ It’s really my trousers they should be honoring.”
He looks outside, pensively. The façades of the Grand Place glisten. Dassoukine sighs.
“The most beautiful place in the world, they say. And they’re right. But I remember only the Place Jourdan, where I found myself dressed as a clown and a servant in order to better serve my country. Who will ever believe that?”
DISLOCATION
What would it be like, he asked himself, a world where everything was foreign?
What would it be like, he asked himself, walking slowly in the direction of his house, a world where everything was foreign?
What would it be like, he asked himself, walking slowly in the direction of his house, where his wife Anna was waiting for him, a world where everything was foreign?
What would it be like, he asked himself, walking slowly in the direction of his house, where his wife Anna was waiting for him — sweet, kind Anna — a world where everything was foreign?
What would it be like, he asked himself, walking slowly in the direction of his house, where his wife Anna was waiting for him — sweet, kind Anna, whom he had ended up marrying in order to settle down (isn’t that what it was called, in times past, in the world of Parisian courtesans?) — a world where everything was foreign?