Total Chaos by Jean-Claude Izzo, Howard Curtis Page B

would welcome enormous methane gas tankers, factories to produce steel for the whole of Europe. Mouloud was proud of taking part in this adventure. That’s what he liked, building, constructing. He’d molded his whole life, and his family, in that image. He’d never forced his children to cut themselves off from other people, to keep clear of the French. All he’d asked is that they avoid bad company. Keep their self-respect. Acquire decent manners. And aim as high as possible. Become integrated in society without denying either their race or their past.
    â€œWhen we were little,” Leila told me one day, “he made us recite after him:
Allah akbar, la ilah illa Allah, Mohamed rasas Allah, Ayya illa Salat, Ayya illa el Fallah
. We didn’t understand a word. But it was nice to hear. It reminded us of all the things he’d told us about Algeria.” It had been a happy time for Mouloud. He’d settled with his family in Port-de-Bouc, between Les Martigues and Fos. They’d been ‘kind to him’ at the town hall and he’d soon obtained a nice public housing unit on Avenue Maurice Thorez. The work was hard, and the more Arabs there were, the better it was. That was what the veterans of the naval shipyards, who’d all been taken on at Fos, thought. Italians, mostly Sardinians, Greeks, Portuguese, a few Spaniards.
    Mouloud joined the CGT. He was a worker, and he needed to find a family of workers, to understand him, help him, defend him. “This is the biggest,” Gutierrez, the union organizer, had told him. “When the building work’s finished,” he’d added, “you can go on a course, learn to handle steel. Stick with us, and you’ve got a job in the factory for sure.”
    Mouloud liked that. He believed it, with a kind of blind faith. Gutierrez believed it too. The CGT believed it. Marseilles believed it. All the surrounding towns believed it, and built one housing project after the other, along with schools and roads, to welcome all the workers expected in this Eldorado. The whole of France believed it. By the time the first ingot of iron was cast, Fos was already nothing more than a mirage. The last great dream of the Seventies. The cruelest of disappointments. Thousands of men out of a job. Mouloud was one of them. But he wasn’t discouraged.
    He went on strike with the CGT, occupied the site, fought the riot police who came to dislodge them. They’d lost, of course. You can never win against the arbitrary decisions of the men in suits. Driss had just been born. Fatima was dead. And Mouloud had a police record now as an agitator, and couldn’t get any real work. Just little jobs. Right now, he was a packer at Carrefour. Minimum wage, after all these years. But, as he said, ‘it was an opportunity.’ Mouloud was like that, he believed in France.
    Mouloud had told me his life story in my office at the station house one evening. He told it proudly. He wanted me to understand. Leila was with him. That was two years ago. I’d taken Driss and Kader in for questioning. A few hours before, Mouloud had bought some batteries for the transistor his children had given him. The batteries didn’t work. Kader went down to the drugstore on the boulevard to change them. Driss went with him.
    â€œYou don’t know how to use them, that’s all.”
    â€œYes I do,” Kader replied. “It isn’t the first time.”
    â€œYou Arabs always think you know everything.”
    â€œIt’s not very polite of you to say that, madame.”
    â€œI’m polite when I want to be. But not to filthy Arabs like you. You’re wasting my time. Take your batteries. They’re old ones, anyhow, and you didn’t buy them here.”
    â€œMy dad bought them here earlier.”
    Her husband came out of the back of the store with a hunting rifle. “Tell your lying father to come here, and I’ll make him