Read Online The Age of Reinvention by Karine Tuil - Free Book Online

hours spent staring at her child, after counting his fingers, checking that he had all his limbs, she called Brunet from the hospital. “Your son has been born,” she told him in a voice no louder than a murmur, a voice that expressed fragility, fatigue, struggle, and solitude. He did not reply at first—he let the silence float up between them—then announced calmly that he would be around to see them before lunch. At two p.m. he entered the room, holding a stuffed animal—a blue dog of breathtaking softness, purchased in the most expensive toy store on Boulevard Malesherbes. He showed her no tenderness at all, but he took the child gently in his arms, his hand under the baby’s neck, as if this were something he had done thousands of times before. And then he got a shock. Because the baby was a tiny version of himself, a perfect replica: white skin, eyes that would soon turn pale, that little tuft of strawberry-blond hair. He had imagined the child would be swarthy like its mother, with shining black eyes ( an Arab face , he had thought), but seeing that it was white, and blond, like him, he suddenly relaxed. He could love his son now. “What are you going to call him?” he asked. She looked at him somewhat fearfully, then replied: “François.” “Ah,” he said, and that was all. He didn’t protest. He knew he would not raise this child who bore his name, that he should remove himself from its life, not rename it as he wished. That she could name him whatever she wanted, do whatever she liked . . . He would not acknowledge the child. The next morning, he came one last time to tell Nawel that he would pay her hospital bills and give her two years’ salary to “help with the costs of bringing up the baby,” as he put it. She could have asked for three or four years’ salary and the payment of her rent on the attic room, and he would have agreed: he didn’t want a scandal. But she didn’t ask for anything. He looked into her eyes for several breaths. There was emotion on his face. He still loved her, he knew. But he told her coldly that he did not wish to see them again—neither her nor the child. He had too much to lose: his peaceful marriage, his children, his political career, everything he had acquired through years of sacrifice.
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    He was still in her hospital room when Samir arrived, accompanied by the two students, arms filled with presents. Brunet nodded to them, said goodbye to Nawel, and left. In fact, he would go to see them a few more times, in the attic room, but his visits would end after he met a young right-wing activist with whom he fell instantly in love. 4 Two years later, he would ask Nawel to leave the attic room. He did not admit the truth to her: that he wanted a place to meet his mistress, who was also married. He told Nawel that he had to sell it, but that he would continue to pay her child support. Nawel refused—she had nowhere to go, she had no money—and it was him, “once again,” who found her a two-bedroom apartment in Sevran belonging to a friend of his. It was all settled in a matter of weeks. François Brunet hired a firm to renovate the attic room and, two months later, not a trace remained to show that Nawel and her children had ever been there.
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    Samir had never been close to this brother, who did not look like him and whom he had always regarded with a measure of mistrust. He himself was the child of an arranged marriage, maybe even a forced marriage, while the other son was a love child—a child of corrupt desire, transgressive passion. The other son was Western while he remained Eastern—he knew this, it was undeniable, and it drove him mad with rage, with jealousy. So, no, he couldn’t stand her writing “your brother.” Blood kin? Bullshit. He had chosen his family. His kin was made up of friendships, intellectual and sexual affinities, not the