Older Brother by Mahir Guven

Author:Mahir Guven
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Europa Editions
Published: 2019-08-06T00:00:00+00:00

19

OLDER BROTHER

The next morning I booked it to the lawyer’s office. There was a painting of a blindfolded woman on the waiting-room wall, holding a scale in her right hand and a sword in her left. At first I thought it was Marianne, the symbol of France, but I wasn’t sure, so I asked my smartphone: “Woman, sword, scale, meaning.” It answered back: “Goddess Themis.” The Greek goddess of justice. The scale she holds is to weigh arguments against one another, the blindfold is so she will judge without prejudice, and the sword is for handing down the sentence.

The lawyer’s office was in the new part of town by the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Modern, with glass buildings and wide sidewalks, full of light and space. It was nothing like the ragtag Paris I loved. Haussmann and all that hoo-ha, like in Walt Disney’s Ratatouille, you know? And the office was on the rue René-Goscinny. No lie. Images of Astérix and his buddies were all over the place. Ridiculous, man. So at number thirteen on this street, behind the white facade of a brand-new building, through a heavy glass door, was a lobby with a fifteen-foot ceiling. Slate tiles on the floor, mirrors all along the left-hand wall, and, on the right, a metal sculpture a meter wide and almost as high as the ceiling, all to remind you that you had come to a Very Important Place. Again, crazy. A bizarre thing, that sculpture; it looked kind of like warships fighting with the ocean. A plaque next to it said F. Guimez, who I guessed was the guy who cobbled the thing together. I don’t understand life sometimes. We get up in the morning, get in the car, get people where they need to go, so we can put food on the table for our families. And then there are them, the ones who get to just stand still, clear-headed, and bash a chunk of iron around and then sell it to someone else who’s got so much money he’ll happily fork it over to buy a piece of someone else’s dream. It’s a drug like any other. Everyone’s got his own madness; everyone, his own shit, his own life.

The secretary behind the reception desk told me to have a seat. The coffee table had the usual pile of magazines, and their latest covers. Islam here, there, everywhere. Crazy; they’re all crazy. As if Islam itself decided to carry out these attacks, just decided it one morning with a snap of its fingers, just for fun. It might sound bizarre to say it that way, but they didn’t really understand what Islam was. Allah forgive me, but Muslims shop for shoes the same way as the rest of us, bro. They find a pair they like, in the size that fits, to walk toward whatever they’re looking for. What relationship does a mosque have to some idiot who blows himself up? What does a woman who wears a veil

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