Ясмина Реза - Babylon

“Don’t know the place,” Lydie said.

“It’s luscious,” said Catherine Mussin.

“Delicious,” Danielle confirmed as she sliced a piece, with seductive care, for Mathieu Crosse.

“Have you tried it, Lydie?” I asked.

“No, I don’t eat chicken unless I’m sure of its source.”

“Well, that’s certainly true!” cried Jean-Lino. The Jean-Lino from the racetrack.

“Yes of course it’s true,” Lydie said tightly. “Besides which, I’ve just about quit eating meat altogether.”

“But she keeps an eye on what other people eat!” Jean-Lino chortled.

“She’s right,” said Claudette El Ouardi, in one of her few utterances of the evening.

“I’ll tell you a story,” began Jean-Lino—the racetrack Jean-Lino. “The other night we went out for dinner at the Blue Cartreaux with our grandson Rémi. I was thinking I’d order Basque chicken, and Rémi wanted chicken with fries. Lydie asked the waiter first off if the chickens had been raised on organic feed.”

Lydie nodded to confirm the tale.

“When she was told that they were raised on organic feed,” Jean-Lino went on, pleased at managing the language, “she asked if the chicken was free-range at the farm, if it had been fluttering around and roosting in the trees. The waiter turns to me, he repeats Fluttering? In the trees? with the look of a person dealing with some crank. I gave a little shrug of sympathy, the kind of automatic move us men make sometimes,” he joked, “and Lydie repeated, very seriously, that yes, hens do roost.”

“Yes, a chicken roosts,” Lydie affirmed.

“There, see?” Jean Lino laughed, calling us to witness. “When the waiter left I told Rémi, “If we want Grandma Lydie to let us order chicken, the chicken has to roost in the trees!” The little guy asked why the chicken had to roost? She says, because it’s important for the chicken to have a normal chicken life.”

“Exactly,” said Lydie.

“We said, ‘Yes, yes, that we know, but we didn’t know that meant the chicken had to roost in trees!’”

“And it’s got to take dust baths, too,” Lydie added now, with a stiffened neck and tone of voice that should have chilled Jean-Lino if he’d been more sober.

“Ha ha ha!”

“To groom its feathers. Personally I don’t think it’s enough to announce, like your friend that stupid waiter who doesn’t even know what he’s serving, that the chicken ate bio grains, I want to know if the bird has lived a free-range life, in the open air and suited to her species.”

“She’s right,” Claudine El Ouardi said again.

“And I wasn’t too pleased, you know, to see you ganging up with the waiter and the boy.”

“Oh please, a person’s got a right to laugh, the whole business isn’t that serious, honeybun! Rémi and I have a new game we play now. Whenever we see the word ‘chicken’ or hear it, we start fluttering!” he said again, and with his eyes half-shut and his elbows crooked, he flapped his hands at shoulder level, so weirdly that Georges Verbot guffawed—a hoarse, drunken laugh that made everyone uneasy except Jean-Lino, who, in his excitement, improved on his act by stretching out his neck, even emitting (believe it!) a few deep clucks, and rotating his shoulders and back. It was like a kind of incarnation. Georges declared that he was going to work up a new cartoon character—an organic chicken, a next-generation terrorist who’d spread germ war-fare—maybe call it “The Devil’s Doing”? He could see it already—he would sling a merino wool scarf around its neck . . . Then, leaning into Catherine Mussin who stared back in a panic, he murmured, “You know, merinos? The sheep they shear to hell and mutilate in Australia?”

Thinking about it again now, it seems to me Lydie never opened her mouth for the rest of the evening. Pierre, though he’s less given to observing people, has the same impression. At the time, of course, no one paid any attention. It was actually a good party, that Spring Celebration of mine. I said so to myself as I looked around at our friends in the little living room, lounging casually, all of them talking fairly loud, smoking, guzzling food, mixing together. Danielle and Mathieu Crosse cooing out in the hallway, Jeanne and Mimi half-gone, sprawled like teenagers on the hassock giggling quietly. The expression creating a bond came to mind again, and I broached the theme of hollow concepts. We came up with a bunch of them, including, oddly, the idea of tolerance . It was Nasser El Ouardi who suggested it, declaring that it was a stupid concept to begin with, as tolerance can only be exercised on condition of indifference; once it’s no longer tied to indifference, he said, the concept falls apart. Lambert and a few others undertook to defend the term but Nasser, sitting tall above us on the Moroccan chair, held to his viewpoint by taking the notion back to the simple verb “love,” arguing with a panache that stumped us. Around eleven o’clock, Pierre’s brother Bernard arrived with a Black Forest sausage that could not be sliced. Anyhow, we had long since started on the desserts. He is an engineer for a German company involved in developing an elevator that works without cables and horizontally. My brother-in-law is a great seducer, a love-’em-and-leave-’em guy every woman ought to flee instantly. Catherine Mussin, who has no alert system, instantly signed up for the magnetic levitation. The first guests to arrive were also the first to leave. Hardly had the El Ouardis stood up than Lydie tugged Jean-Lino by the sleeve. I realize now that Jean-Lino was reluctant to go. The El Ouardis and the Manoscrivis parted with an embrace on the doormat where they’d met. There was even some talk of going together, one day soon, to hear Lydie at a jam session .

At the end the only people left were the Dienesmanns, Bernard, and us. Bernard started ranting about Catherine Mussin, bawling us out for not coming to his rescue. She apparently told him that she was “in her third season.” A woman tells you I’m in my third season, that’s a sure cock-strangler, he said. We described her scene with Georges, who got Bernard’s full sympathy. And then we talked about the snow again. And about cycles, about the absurdity of believing in linear time, about the past that no longer exists, the present that doesn’t exist either. Etienne talked about how, long ago, he used to hike with his father in the mountains; when Merle came along, he and she would pull far ahead of the older man, cutting cross-country, tearing up the slopes—they were the young folks . Then later, with their own children, for a long time the two of them still used to walk on ahead of the others. Etienne said, “We’d look back and say, What a drag waiting for you guys to catch up! Today, after a few steps all of us together, the kids are already way out of sight. Uncatchable without even realizing it, the way we must have been. We’d wait for my father at the foot of the hills. When he appeared at the bend of the trail, he would act as if he’d been dawdling on purpose, taking in the beauty. He’d say, Did you see that big field of gentians? And those forget-me-nots? . . . Now it’s us who hold up the group,” Etienne said. “The details of nature slow us down too. The whole damn thing goes so fast. Anyway, I’ll soon have a good excuse with my eyes! . . .” We were content there, the five of us in the nighttime, feet up on the coffee table, at peace and a little old, in the messy apartment. We were content in our world of nostalgias and slow banter, sipping at our pear brandy. I thought how Etienne had been lucky, walking in the mountains with his father. My father wasn’t really the sort of guy you could go walking in the mountains with. Or walk anywhere else with, either. And forget about forget-menots!