Ясмина Реза - Babylon

“What do you want to say to her?”

“Just two seconds, Pierre.”

I made a little sign like, the situation is under control, and I took Jean-Lino’s arm to draw him out of the bedroom. Jean-Lino plunged into the bathroom and closed the door behind me. In a very muffled voice and without turning on any light, he said:

“Could you help me put her into the elevator? . . .”

“But . . . what do you mean?”

“In a suitcase . . .”

“In a suitcase? . . .”

“She’s tiny, she doesn’t weigh much . . . Someone has to go down with her . . . I can’t go in the elevator.”

“Why go with her?”

“To handle the arrival downstairs. In case someone had rung for it from there.” That made sense to me.

“You’ll do what with her? . . .”

“I know where to take her . . .”

“You’re going to drive her somewhere in the car?”

“The car’s right out front. Just help me get her down, Elisabeth, I’ll take care of the rest . . .”

There was a familiar smell of laundry soap. We were standing in utter darkness. I couldn’t see him. I could hear the urgency and distress in his voice. I thought how we’d have to be sure the parking lot was empty too . . . The door was wrenched open.

“You’re thinking of helping this nut to stick his wife in the elevator, Elisabeth?” Pierre gripped my arm with steel fingers (he has beautiful hands, and strong). “We’re going downstairs and I’m calling the police.”

He was pulling me, I resisted by clutching some bathrobes hanging from a hook—this lasted maybe three seconds. We must have set off some switch because a neon wall fixture went on. Everything turned yellow, that old-time yellow like we used to have in Puteaux.

“Go, Elisabeth, go on back to your place my dear Elisabeth, I’m crazy, you should leave here,” Jean-Lino implored with his arms stretched before him.

“But what will you do, Jean-Lino?” I said.

He put his head in his arms and sat down on the edge of the bathtub. Rocking slightly and without looking at us, he groaned, “I’ll get hold of myself, I’ll get hold of myself.” I felt insanely sad for him, huddled like that, his hair a mess, beneath a laundry wall rack in the crowded bathroom.

Pierre started to pull at me again. I said, “Stop pulling me!”

“You want to go to jail? You want to get us all thrown in jail?”

Without looking at us, and with great effort like a child being scolded, Jean-Lino said, “She kicked Eduardo.”

“Lydie kicked Eduardo?!?” I repeated.

“She kicked the cat and he strangled her. And we’re out of here,” Pierre said.

“But she adores animals!” I said.

Jean-Lino shrugged.

“She had me sign a petition this very afternoon!”

“What petition did you sign?” Pierre demanded to know.

“A petition against grinding up baby chicks.”

“OK, OK, that’s enough,” Pierre said, furious and pushing me toward the hall door.

Fur bristling and teeth bared, Eduardo slipped out of the bathroom.

“ Non aver paura, tesoro . . . He’s got kidney stones, the poor thing.”

“Are you going to call the police, Jean-Lino?” I asked. “It’s got to be you who does it.”

“There’s no other solution,” Pierre said.

“Yes . . .”

“None, Jean-Lino.”

“Yes.”

Pierre opened the front door and shoved me out onto the landing. Before he closed it, I called in, “Do you want someone to stay with you?”

“Wake up the whole building!” Pierre whispered, carefully closing the door. Then he pulled me into the stairwell, gripping me with his steel hand. Back in our apartment he kept me moving on into the living room as if to avoid our being heard. He tried to draw the drapes, which are purely decorative, and tore off a corner of one.

“What the hell are you doing, Pierre?”

“Those stupid panels!” He tossed down a glassful of cognac. “You were ready to help him get rid of the body, Elisabeth?”

“It’s offensive, you coming to eavesdrop at the door.”

“You were ready to take the elevator with a corpse . . . Can you see yourself going down alone, four floors with a stiff ? . . . Answer me please.”

“In a suitcase.”

“Oh, all right then—excuse me!”

“You would have known that if you’d been a little patient.”

“You realize what we’re discussing? This is really serious, Elisabeth.”

I was suddenly cold, and my head hurt. I put on a shawl and went to heat some water in the kitchen. I came back with my tea and huddled in a corner of the couch, at the opposite end from where the Manoscrivis had sat. Pierre strode around the room. I said, “I think it’s awful we’ve abandoned him.” He sat beside me and rubbed my shoulder, a gesture that could have been intended either to warm me up or to calm a crazed mind.

On the other side of the parking lot the building was entirely dark. We must have been the only people who had not surrendered to the night. We and the upstairs neighbors.

Lydie, watched over by the black cat, stretched out in her party dress, and Jean-Lino abandoned beneath the hanging laundry. In a storybook I used to have, the princess pricked herself with a spindle and fell into a deep sleep. They had her laid out on a bed embroidered with gold and silver, she had those same coral-colored tresses and her lips were like a red red rose. A text came up on my phone.

Pierre said, “You’re not answering him!”

“But it’s your son!”

Emmanuel had written “Great spring celebration, Mom!” with a smiley face and a snowman. That sent me into tears, without understanding why. That message in the middle of the night. The snowman. The little figure of happiness that sends you right back to everything that ends, to loss. The children are way out ahead, like the children of Etienne and Merle on the mountain trail. As I had hurled myself far away, so far, from my parents. It’s not the big betrayals but the repeated tiny losses that make for the melancholy. When Emmanuel was small, he ran a shop. A little low table, in a corner of his bedroom, where the merchandise was laid out and where he sat behind it. He would sell things he made himself, all kinds of cardboard items painted in decorative patterns, rollers from Sapolin paint and toilet paper, finds picked up outdoors, acorns and twigs he also painted, little figures in modeling clay. He had made his own currency—the “pestos”—just bills, bits of paper torn any whichway. Every day he would call out from his room, “The store is open!” Neither Pierre nor I would react; we’d got used to the call. He never repeated it, so a long silence would follow. Then there’d come a moment when I remembered that I’d heard him, and I’d picture him all alone there, the little businessman behind his counter, waiting for the customer. I’d go in, carrying the purse with pestos bills in it. He was pleased to see me arrive but quite professional nonetheless—we said the formal vous to each other. I would make my selection, pay for it, and leave with my bag of river pebbles and painted chestnuts, faces on the white discs smiling or scowling. On that list of hollow concepts we had put the duty to remember. What an inept expression! Time past, good or bad, is nothing but an armful of dead leaves we should just burn up. We’d also listed the work of mourning .Two expressions utterly empty of meaning, and contradictory besides. I asked Pierre, “What shall I say?”

“You can tell him the neighbor bumped off his wife an hour later.”

“Anyhow, he thinks we’re asleep.”

We pulled the shawl over us both as if we were expecting to spend the night on the sofa. Suddenly he got up, I heard him bustling in the entryway. He came back with the toolbox and the stepladder, which he unfolded at the window. I watched him climb the rungs in his pantyskirt and his loafers. Driven by some feverish energy, he tried to repair the curtain rod. The rollers were caught in the rod and the fabric hem was torn. He tried to patch it together. Scrabbling in the toolbox, he asked me whether we had any extra hooks. I said I had no idea. He got irritated, tugged at the cord, pulled on the linen panel and sprang all the hooks, and wound up tearing the whole thing down in a fury. I had no reaction. Pierre sat on the top of the stepladder, hunched over, belly hanging forward, hands crossed, elbows on his thighs. We stayed like that for a strange moment, without speaking. I was suddenly overcome by a crazy giggle, a thing at the back of the throat that I more or less stifled in a cushion. He stepped down, folded the ladder, and put it back in the entry closet with the toolkit. Coming back to the living room he said, “I’m going to bed.”