Ясмина Реза - Babylon

They were someplace in the landscape, they still go on existing a little in my memory.

At Pasteur, our department is in a building that was once the hospital. It was built early in the twentieth century and it’s landmarked. It’s made of stone and red brick, in the style of the historic building. The two wings are separated by gardens and linked by a marvelous greenhouse, no longer in use because the glass structure could collapse. Still, the plants go right on growing there like in a little jungle. The window of my own ground-floor office looks onto a hedge and trees. Beyond them is a newer building with a glass façade. On days when the sun shines the façade of our own is reflected in it. I daydream, I travel back, imagining the life there in the old days when contagious patients were kept in isolation, there were wooden beds and nurses in stiff caps or white veils. I see things I did not see before.

After a while I no longer heard a sound from our bedroom. I went to look. Pierre was burrowed in on his side. He’d fallen asleep. Asleep. While just above, on the other side of the ceiling . . . I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at his graying hair. I really like his hair. It’s thick and wavy. I stroked it. He was sleeping. That disturbed me. He himself said, later, that he was knocked out by the series of shots we’d drunk in our panic and disarray all evening long. No matter. He’d gone to bed, he’d pulled up the covers, he’d settled into the position of a man consenting to sleep. He had left me all alone. Unsupervised. He had come to take me back with his steel fingers for nothing. I was willing to obey the paternal voice as long as it stayed firm. The stern voice had scolded for a couple of brief minutes and then let the matter go. A sleeping guy is a guy who’s dropped you. He’s no longer worrying about you. I had thought him a little ridiculous as the stern taskmaster ready to phone the cops, but I did think, Well, he’s afraid for me, he’s protecting me. Actually, he had herded me back into the fold and then washed his hands of me. No worry, no concern for another person. One more unkept promise. And what should I make of—I thought, there on the edge of the bed in the dark— what should I make of his lack of curiosity? Pierre had never been interested in crime stories in the news, in the troubles of common folk. He sees no shadowy dimension there. For him it all smells of piss or these people are garbage. In a way I’m closer to Ginette Anicé than I am to my husband. I went into the bathroom. I sat on the toilet seat and examined the samples I’d been given along with the Gwyneth Paltrow anti-aging product. There was a nutrient mask from the Dead Sea that you leave on to work through the night. I put it on, thoughtfully. No clear ideas. The other day on TV I heard some not-old fellow say, “The Lord guides me, each day I ask his advice, even before coming here on the program.” God does a lot of advising these days. I remember a time when such a remark would have provoked wild laughter. Today everyone considers it normal, including on the intellectual TV talk shows. I would like someone to help me out, or enlighten me. Here in the bathroom I had nobody, not even a double like Danielle’s who would call me “hey girl.” I went to the front door and looked through the peephole. Total darkness. I went back into the living room, I turned off the lamp and opened the window. I stood at an angle to the balcony. No one in the parking lot. The Manoscrivis’ Laguna, parked just below. I listened to the silence of the damp night, a touch of wind, a car engine. I closed the window again. No sound came from upstairs. Nothing. I started prowling the living room, tracing pointless rounds in my fake-fur slippers. I caught myself doing a few little skips among the furniture. Despite it all, something in me was dancing. I had known that effect before, that irrepressible lightness at a moment when the full force of misfortune has just missed you. Is it a kind of drunkenness at reprieve? At the sense of keeping your footing on a pitching deck? or just stupidly, as for Ginette Anicé (her again), at escaping boredom? In the program for the night there was suddenly the chance to go off-piste. My husband having abandoned me, I could just as easily go back into the stairwell. It’s not a bad thing that an expectation is disappointed—the space of disappointment is where our Faustian gene gets expressed. According to Svante Pääbo, one of my biology professors, we diverge from the Neanderthals by only an infinitely small modification in a particular chromosome. An odd mutation in the genome that might enable a thrust into the unknown, the crossing of the oceans with no certainty of finding land beyond the horizon, the whole human fever of exploration, of creativity and of destruction. In other words: a gene for madness. I went back into our bedroom. Pierre was sleeping deeply. I grabbed a cardigan lying there, took the keys from the vestibule, and quietly left the flat. Upstairs, I knocked as I whispered Jean-Lino’s name. He opened the door, unsurprised, a syringe in his hand. The place smelled of smoke. I’m in the middle of doing the medications, he said. For a moment I thought he was talking about Lydie and that he’d lost his mind. Following him into the kitchen, I understood that he meant Eduardo. “He has kidney stones. He has to take six pills a day and a new diet of fish patties that’s not helping him at all,” said Jean-Lino, bustling about. “Please sit down, Elisabeth.”

“The poor baby.”

“The first day, I spent an hour and a half getting him to swallow one antibiotic tablet. The vet told me You just stick the pill in his mouth and you hold his jaws closed. Oh sure. The minute I let go of his jaw he’d spit it out. I understood that to swallow, a cat has to open and close his jaws, as if he’s chewing. But the worst part,” Jean-Lino said, “is the yeast.”

As he spoke, he was pouring a mixture he had previously spoon-stirred from the bowl into a baby’s nursing syringe.

“Those fish patties give him diarrhea. The vet says it’s not them, but I say it is. A urinary-stress formula. He gobbles them up in half a second, he adores them, and they give him diarrhea. The antibiotics and the anti-kidney-stone things, I’ve figured out a system. They’re real tiny, about the size of a lentil, but the Ultradiar capsule, I have to dissolve that in water and feed it to him with the baby syringe. OK, where’d he go, the little diablo ? I’ll go look for him.”

I stayed on for a moment alone in the kitchen. On the table was a circular with Lydie’s picture. lydie gumbiner Musicotherapy, Sonotherapy, Massage with Tibetan bowls. In the foldover section there was the photo of a gong, and below it, the line The voice and the rhythm matter more than the words and the meaning . I looked at the straw basket on the countertop with its cotton Provençal neckerchief, I put a name to all the herbs in the collection—garlic, thyme, onion, oregano, sage, bay laurel. Charmingly arranged by a caring hand, I said to myself. With some dish in mind? or just to make theater of daily life? Jean-Lino returned with Eduardo in his arms. He sat down and began to feed him the solution the way you’d give a bottle to a newborn. I’m never comfortable in the presence of that cat, a savage little thug, but now he looked beaten down, accepting the treatment and the humiliating position with fatalism.

“This is the hard part,” Jean-Lino said, “you’ve got to be very careful he doesn’t swallow the wrong way.” Was it that line? The almost pedagogic posture of his body? I had the sneaking sense that he was preparing Eduardo’s immediate future. In short, that he was hoping to entrust the cat to us. That threw me into a panic. I said, “What do you mean to do, Jean-Lino?”