Free Infrared by Nancy Huston Page A

wait for the ideal victim. The Hasidim men strode past me in their great black fluttering coats, looking for all the world like sinister crows. Finally I saw a young man approaching—mid-twenties or so, tall, thin, angular and nervous-looking, wearing a hat that was too big for him. I made up my mind on the spot: he’d be the one. Carefullyconcealed behind my tree, I let him go by, then leapt on my bike and zoomed past him, hitting him just hard enough to knock off his hat. As the man was picking up his rolling hat and clamping it back on his head, I braked and turned at the same time, let out a yell and tumbled painlessly to the ground. There I was at the poor man’s feet, spread-eagled on the footpath with my skirt awry. ‘Ow, ow, I’m sorry, sir,’ I moaned. ‘I’m terribly sorry, but a bee stung me…and now I think I must have sprained my ankle. Oh, it hurts, it hurts…’
    Torn between the instinct to help a fellow human being and the impulse to flee, the man froze. Taking advantage of his momentary paralysis, I caught his gaze and hung on to it. That was when I first learned the technique of breaking and entering a man’s soul through his eyes, swimming in deeper and deeper until I could tell he was mesmerised by my green gaze…Ah. Yes.
    I was inside. I’d captured and captivated him. He was at my mercy.
    The man knelt by my side, glancing nervously left and right to make sure no one was watching us. I noticed he was wearing a thin gold wedding band. In tears, I reached up and flung my pretty arms around his neck, so that he had no choice but to rise to his feet with me in his embrace, his body and ringlets fairly trembling with desire. ‘Thank you, sir,’ I whispered into his ear. ‘I’m so sorry…I just need to rest for a few minutes, I’m sure I’ll be all right…It’s probably not even a real sprain. I’m just a bit shaken up, that’s all…’
    Clutching me to him, convulsively now, the way a thief clutches a just-stolen wallet or a tiger its prey, he carried me to his home in a blind trance of desire. I could tell that laws were toppling like dominos in his heart, and that he was firmly convinced he had some important things to reveal to me…but I decided to leave it at that. I’d achieved my goal and that was enough; I didn’t want to plungethe poor man into the throes of eternal guilt. And so, after a few delicate caresses, as light as they were intoxicating, after the delight of watching the young man’s lips part in a joyful smile, his eyes shine with gratitude, his hands run over my naked thighs, and his tongue play with my nipples—I tore myself out of his arms, thanked him profusely and saved us both.
    I’m a sin for him, I said to myself as I moved away from his house, heart pounding.
    It’s weird to be a sin for someone, comments Subra.
    Yes. I was to discover this on countless occasions in my adult life, always with the same incredulity—whether in Gaza, Istanbul, the Vatican, Mount Athos, or at the entrance to an ordinary café in one of Paris’s impoverished suburbs. I, Rena Greenblatt, without moving or speaking or misbehaving or taking off my clothes or baring my bottom or sticking out my tongue or brandishing a gun or selling Kalashnikovs or heroin or child porn, just by standing here, calm, smiling, motionless, with my face visible and my genitals invisible—am a sin for the men who are looking at me right now.
    It’s not their fault they get hard-ons, the poor guys. Since Cro-Magnon days, their pecker has been programmed to stiffen whenever they set eyes on a shtuppable lady; their gonads are plugged directly into their retinas. Actually, they’d just as soon dispense with this reflex because it’s painful to them. I’ll never forget the day Alioune taught me that, during a Fela Kuti concert in Dijon in 1993. As Fela’s sublime dancers filed out on stage (to avoid jealousy amongst them he’d married them all, so there were no fewer than twenty-seven gorgeous