Montecore: The Silence of the Tiger by Jonas Hassen Khemiri; Rachel Willson-Broyles

Author:Jonas Hassen Khemiri; Rachel Willson-Broyles
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Fiction:Historical
ISBN: 9780307270955
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-03-01T06:46:52+00:00

The journalists.

The publishing people.

The art critics.

The queen.

The most important ones seemed to be conspicuous in their absence.

Here follows a section that we can call “Studio Silvia awaits success.” We wait patiently for the attention of journalists. We observe newspapers in hope of praising reviews, we correspond yet another series of invitations to art critics. The result? A monumental silence.

Three weeks after the opening ceremony, your father received a letter from the Swedish palace. The envelope bore the king’s official seal and the queen’s typed “thanked for the congratulations.” Your father framed the letter behind glass and placed it in the display window, to the right of the photograph that sparked his brain with the idea for the studio’s name.

My official task at Studio Silvia was soon transformed. From photo assistant and makeup-responsible to coffee maker, backgammon player, and general waiter.

Your father tried to putter parallelly with a new artistic collection, but he had difficulty finding inspiration. He noticed that time was limited, that he had invested his wife’s patrimony in an uncertain photographic studio. The future suddenly seemed to glide uncertainly like a water slide.

In the summer of 1986, your day care was annulled to save economy. Instead you spent your time down in the studio in our company. Do you remember those summery days? Do you remember how your child arms helped us spread leaflets in the newly built shopping center, where many retail spaces still stood unrented? Do you remember how we let you sneak into the nursing home and nail leaflets onto the bulletin board? You worked very effectively, although your age was that of a child. And although your father perhaps did not pronounce it in your presence, he was very proud of you. Very, very proud.

Do you remember how we partook our lunches? How we assisted your father when he apart-took his camera? How we began to roar rude Arabic insultations after the customers who invaded the studio, encountered your father’s welcome greeting, and then for some bizarre reason returned out to the courtyard with a regretting exterior? And do you remember how you often imitated your father when he nervously drummed his fingers against the perpetually silent booking telephone; you drummed your small fingers in the exact same rhythm and your father lost his train of thought, silenced the drum, and regarded you, a copy of himself when young, the same suspect imagination, the same speech-related problems. He lovingly patted your cheek. But the telephone continued its silent rest.

And you remember the silence, the ticking of the kitchen clock, the gaze from the blown-up Silvia portrait, the framed letter, and Dads, who drum their fingers, the sun which moves over the courtyard and filters through the curtains, and Dads’ friends, who drink coffee and billow cigs and play backgammon, joke about cheating at dice, and sometimes borrow the bathroom, and once Kadir, who wants to fix the washer in the dripping faucet, the faucet that’s bothered Dads for several weeks but that now they want to keep.

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