Ясмина Реза - Babylon

He told me: I collapsed onto her body and I cried. The mouth tic was back in force. A thrust forward of the whole jaw to shape a U with the lower lip. The night was still pitch dark, I could see through the window. From that apartment the kitchen window gives onto empty sky. I wondered if Lydie was floating there somewhere (and watching us through the glass). From time to time that old worry comes back to me—that the dead see us. After she died, my father’s sister came back and broke the ceiling light in our living room. We knew it was her because they’d promised each other whichever of them died first would break something in the other one’s house to prove survival in the afterlife. Aunt Micheline had raised her head and said, I’ll get me one of those tulips up there. The night she was buried, an opaline shade from the chandelier fell and smashed on the table for no reason. Goddamn that’s Aunt Micheline there! But where is she? Jeanne and I asked. They’re here, they see everything, my mother said. After which, all my illicit activities were ruined by Aunt Micheline’s all-seeing eye. Wherever I took cover, there she was. A middle-school friend and I used to go off into the bushes to show and touch each other’s pussy. My aunt would be watching in horror. Not a thicket in the world could shield me from Aunt Micheline. My father too—I thought he must be prowling around somewhere. But by then I was a grownup, that didn’t bother me anymore. He’d mellowed in his last years. There was something unfinished about him. He died just before I got my biology doctorate. I was glad to know he was seeing that. I even lifted the bound dissertation up real high so he could look it over.

I said, “Jean-Lino, what did you want to do with Lydie’s body?”

“Take it to her office.”

“Is that far?”

“Rue Jean-Rostand. A couple of minutes by car.”

“Her therapy office?”

“Yes. She lived there before we got this place.”

Silence.

“But when you got there, what would you do?”

“There’s an elevator.”

“You’d put her inside?”

“Yes.”

“By yourself ?”

“The studio’s only one flight up. I’d have time to get up there ahead.”

“She would have been strangled there in her office?”

“Somebody could have followed her in from the street . . .” Silence. He strides the flat with a few wild swings of his arms.

“She would have gone to her office in the middle of the night? After the party?”

“We’d have had a fight, she’d have left the apartment. She’s done it before.”

“To sleep there?”

“Yes. But she came back.”

The expression upset us. He’d said it that way without thinking. My mother on her bed had suddenly gone flat and she looked like a bird that had been shot. We don’t believe in any metamorphosis for a bird. For birds we don’t imagine some final migration. We accept the nothingness. I stood up, I went to look out at the Deuil-l’Alouette night outside the window. Not much to see—streetlamps, rooftops, building shadows, half-naked trees. An insignificant stage set, a scene that could easily be swept away in two seconds. I thought about Pierre, that he’d abandoned us. I turned around and I said, “Shall we do it?”

“Do what?”

“Take Lydie to her office?”

“I don’t want to get you involved . . .”

“We take her down, I help you put her into the car, and I disappear.”

“No . . .”

“There’s no time to discuss it. It’s now or never.”

“You take the elevator down and that’s all.”

“You won’t be able to put her into the car by yourself. You have the suitcase?”

He stood up, I followed him into the little room where Rémi probably slept and that in our flat had been Emmanuel’s. He turned on the ceiling light; it spread a bluish glow. The bed was covered with all sorts of toys. From a closet Jean-Lino pulled a hard-sided valise, an imitation Samsonite. I said, “You don’t have anything bigger?”

“No.”

“She’ll never fit in that.”

“It holds a lot.”

“Open it up.”

He set the bag on the floor and opened it. I stepped into it, I tried sitting, but I couldn’t manage to double over even halfway. “You’re a lot bigger.”

“This is the only one you have?”

“I think Lydie could fit.”

“No! She could not! . . .”

I took the suitcase and we went into the bedroom. Lydie was still the same, stretched out with her scarf. We opened the valise again, in a glance it was clear she wouldn’t fit into it. I thought of our big red canvas bag down in the basement. “I have one that might work,” I said.

Jean-Lino shook his head, looking distraught. He was annoying me a little. No initiative. “Shall I go get it?”

“I can’t let you do that.”

“The problem is, it’s in the basement, and the key is in my apartment.”

“No, Elisabeth, let it go.”

“I’ll try. If Pierre’s asleep, that’ll work.”

I took the stairs down to my place. I opened the front door quietly. Without turning on the lights, I went to see whether Pierre was still sleeping. He was sleeping and snoring. I closed the bedroom door. In the vestibule, I opened the drawer where we keep the keys. I felt around. The basement keys were not there. Without panicking I thought for a moment. I remembered going down there that day to get the stool. I’d been wearing a cardigan with pockets. The cardigan was in the bedroom. I went back there, I snatched the cardigan that was hanging on a chair, being careful not to let the keys fall out. I dashed down the stairs. Our own storage unit is at the end of a corridor. The floor to it is partly unpaved. It bothered me to walk on it with my fur slippers, I walked the rest on tiptoe. I emptied the big suitcase of a smaller one and a few bags that were inside. As I made my way back along the corridor, the timed lights went out. I didn’t turn them back on. I climbed the steep stairs blind. I edged open the door to the lobby. Empty and unlit. The elevator was there and I took it back up to Jean-Lino’s floor. The apartment door was open. The whole thing done at the speed of a pro. I was rather proud of my cool.

The red canvas suitcase lay open at the foot of Lydie’s bed. Jean-Lino had put theirs away. The red one was wider, suppler. The plan seemed feasible. On the night table burned a decorative candle he must have lit while I was downstairs. The two of us stood there without speaking. Again Jean-Lino’s arms were dangling loose and his neck was ducked forward. What were we waiting for?! After a moment he said, “Are you Catholic, Elisabeth?”

“I’m not anything.”

He opened his hand. He was holding a thin chain with a golden medal of the Virgin.

“I’d like to put this on her.”

“Go ahead.”

“I can’t open the catch.”

“Give it to me.”

Some links of the chain had got tangled around the hook.

“This will take hours,” I said.

He snatched the necklace out of my hands and began laboring over it with unpracticed fingers.

“We don’t have the time for that, Jean-Lino.”

He was no longer listening. He fussed with the chain, his hands a half inch in front of his glasses, clawed like a crustacean’s, his mouth tight with hatred.

“What the hell are you doing, Jean-Lino?”

He seemed beside himself. I tried to pry his hands open, I wound up slapping him.

“I’d like to do something!”

“What is it you want to do?”

“Some ritual . . .”

“What kind of ritual? You already lit a candle, that’s very good.”

“I said the beginning of the Shema. ”

“What’s that?”