Ясмина Реза - Babylon

“The Jewish prayer.”

“Fine.”

“But Lydie is Catholic.”

“First I’ve heard.”

“She had other beliefs too, but she was firm about staying Catholic.”

“So make the sign of the cross!”

“I don’t know how.”

“OK, OK, let’s put her in the suitcase, Jean-Lino!!”

“Yes, I’m talking nonsense.”

I took up a position by the feet. Jean-Lino slipped his arms beneath Lydie’s shoulders. He said, “Got to double her over first and then slide her in.” I was glad to see him get back to technical style right away. I’d never manipulated a dead body. Touched one, kissed one, yes. Manipulated, no. She wasn’t wearing tights, the contact with her skin startled me with its tepid temperature. We easily turned her onto her side. She half-rolled onto her belly, stretched out long as if she were mocking us. Before shifting her into the valise we’d have to fold her up. I sensed that Jean-Lino wanted to handle the job by him-self. He circled the suitcase, he lifted the thighs through the skirt and drew them to the front so the knees bent. Next he grasped the waist so that would fold too. He finished by curling the upper body. All done with swiftness and delicacy. Lydie politely let it happen, with her kerchief and her tranquil countrywoman face. In the end she looked like a little girl asleep on the bed in the fetal position. I felt that Jean-Lino was uneasy about tipping her in. I offered a hand, thinking to hold her back and avoid a rough drop into the suitcase. She got there rumpled and askew. We had to rearrange her and tuck in whatever stuck out. The look of childlike serenity was gone. Lydie was compressed, contorted. Her curly hair bulged out of the scarf in a strange clump against the red lining.

We’d had to take off her shoes and jam them into the interstices. I could see that Jean-Lino was suffering. I took it on myself to work the zipper closed. But buckling the straps required pressing down and sitting on top of the suitcase. I did sit on it. I felt the soft bulk of the body give way beneath my buttocks. I said “Help me.” He took up the other buckle strap and pulled.

“This is awful.”

“She’s dead, Jean-Lino, she doesn’t feel anything.”

It didn’t close. There was still a gap on one side. Jean-Lino sat too. I stood up to drop on my rear as heavily as possible. Jean-Lino did the same, we stood and we dropped, gaining a quarter inch or two of zipper each time. Finally I lay full length on the thing, Jean-Lino lay in the opposite direction, both of us squirming on the bulges like rolling pins on a crust. When the tab had swallowed up the last few teeth, we were exhausted. Jean-Lino got up before I did. He slapped down and smoothed his hair ten times in a row. Now the purse and the coat, he said, fitting his glasses back on. I followed him into the living room. Lydie’s bag sat on the floor, wide open, next to the desk. I took a quick look at the notepad beside the computer. I made out the words ulcers , cannibalism , then the figure 25,000 , then an arrow and the words, underlined, Life and death of a bird. Procedures like Frankenstein’s. Suffering imprinted into their (very) genes. The pen lay across the page. The lamp, with its saffron shade, was lit. I’d never seen her handwriting. Those words, slightly slanted, a memo, gave me a sharper sense of Lydie’s existence than any moment of her physical presence ever had. The act of noting, the words themselves, and the unknown person they were meant for. And more mysteriously, the word bird . The word bird applied to poultry. Jean-Lino, in a crouch, was checking the contents of the purse. He took the cellphone from the table and put it into the bag. Eduardo came over and looked inside too. A terrible anguish gripped me. I no longer understood what we were doing. I saw myself a few hours earlier in that same spot, a chair in one hand, signing the petition against grinding up baby chicks. Lydie Gumbiner opening drawers to find things to lend me. The brevity of the passage from life to death felt dizzying. A bagatelle. Jean-Lino opened a closet, he took out the green coat I knew well—a long Russian redingote style, tight through the waist and flared below. I used to see her from my window trotting through the parking lot in that coat and short boots. Every winter, I’d see the redingote reappear, it marked the flow of time for me in Deuil-l’Alouette. I’d worn an ankle-length coat myself back in that maxi period. I’d never got completely into the style. One day, on an escalator in the Galeries Lafayette, the hem had caught between two steps. The machinery jammed and made the thing stop short. I waited there in my coat for someone to come and free me; it never occurred to me to slip out of it. Jean-Lino went back into the bedroom. I heard a collision, then the sound of wheels in the small hallway. I saw my red valise in the doorway. Swollen, monstrous, the telescoping handle raised to its highest position.

When you ask Etienne for news on his eyesight, he answers, It’s all under control . It’s an expression he got from his father who was a police chief. I’ve always heard him say that—“it’s under control”—even when nothing is working. And actually his vision is not at all under control, since what he’s got is the dry macular degeneration, the bad kind, the form that, unlike the wet, is not helped by the shots. We don’t often ask Etienne for news on his vision. We don’t want that to become a topic of conversation. On the other hand, we can’t never worry about it. It’s a subtle balance between reserve and intrusion. On his own in the house last weekend, Etienne thought he could adjust the thermostat by touch, without his glasses or a flashlight. He turned the dial in the wrong direction. When Merle came back, she walked into a white-hot oven. “All under control” has the virtue of closing the chapter that’s barely opened. The line says nothing about reality, nor even about the speaker’s state of mind. It’s a rather practical kind of existential readiness—a standing to attention. And funny too. The body does whatever it chooses, the cells behave any way they want. In the end, what’s serious?

Recently we were talking about an episode from the time when their older son was still in high school. Merle and Etienne had got a notice from the headmaster saying that Paul Dienesmann had behaved very badly at Auschwitz. Etienne called his son into his study and, seated and looking grave, said to him—we still laugh about it—“It seems you behaved very badly at Auschwitz?” Further discussion revealed that Paul had been clowning on the bus that drove the class from Krakow to Birkenau, creating among his classmates an atmosphere antithetical to Remembrance and Contemplation. I’ve taken a dislike to the word “contemplation.” And to the principle as well. It’s become a huge fashion ever since the world has been heading into indescribable chaos. Politicians and citizens (another brilliantly empty word) spend their time “contemplating.” I liked it better before, when you carried your enemy’s head around on a pike. Even virtue isn’t serious. This morning, before I left for the Pasteur, I phoned the retirement home to ask after Jean-Lino’s aunt. With the conversation finished, I think, You’re really a good person, you’re concerned for others. Two seconds later I tell myself, It’s disgusting, this self-satisfaction over such an elementary deed. And immediately after that, Good, you keep a firm eye on your own motives, bravo. There’s always some great congratulator who has the last word. When Denner, as a child, came out of confession, he used to stop in front of Saint Joseph, breathe deep, and say to himself, Now I’m a saint. And right afterward, going down the stairs: Oh shit—sin of pride. One way or another, virtue doesn’t last. It can only exist if we’re not aware of it. I miss Denner. A man dead thirty years ago you suddenly miss. A person who would know nothing about my life, or my work, or husband or child, where I live, the places I’ve seen, or what I looked like over time. Or a million other things unimaginable back then. If he came by now what a laugh we’d have! About everything. Is there, somewhere up in the sky, a little Denner star? Seems to me I catch sight of it now and then. Joseph Denner was four years older than me. Big, muscular, anarcho and alky. His father was a line cook; at fourteen he’d been a dishwasher at the Colmar railroad station. I know that still because Denner always talked about it. Joseph had loved and admired his father, but not his mother, according to him she was a stingy petit-bourgeois monster. They lived in three connected maid’s rooms on the rue Legendre, the bathroom was also the kitchen and they’d cover the tub with a lid for a work surface. I remember a tiny slope-ceilinged living room area. And behind it, set off by a gilded metal gate that was always shut, the parents’ bedroom, also tiny. The liquor was in a cupboard back there. The top of the gate was a twisted scroll section with an opening in it. By some supernatural writhing Denner would slither through it sideways to get us some whiskey. He’d done two years’ military service in Germany with a disciplinary battalion. To scrape by he played guitar in the Pax Quartet, a more or less Catholic band that kept him on out of kindness. He believed in adventure, we dreamed of mountain climbing, about Machu Picchu, while we slugged down Carlsbergs in the Miquel Pub, we never went anywhere except for a few nighttime spins up to the seaside. He was thin-skinned and volatile. We were all younger than him, nobody dared to contradict him. I still have some books that belonged to him, Vian, Genet, Buzzati. He adored them. I’ve always kept them separate, in a corner, wherever I live, alongside the photography books, the little collection the two of us put together—Frank, Kertész, Cartier-Bresson, Winogrand, Weegee, Weiss, Arbus (we swiped them from the Pereire bookstore; at some surplus outlet Denner had found a hunting vest with a big pocket in the back). In certain Garry Winogrand photos the girls come out in the street in hair curlers with scarves wrapped around them. That gives them a slutty, don’t give-a-damn look, really sexy. I did it for a while myself. I’ve always been interested in what people do with hair. You can’t conceive of the world, or even of people in general. You can only conceive of things you’ve touched. All great events nourish thought and mind, like theater. But it’s not the great events or great ideas that make for life, it’s ordinary things. The only things I’ve retained inside me, truly, are things close by, things I could touch with my hands. Everything’s under control.