Ясмина Реза - Babylon

And that’s how . . . And that’s how it happened that I saw the elevator light blinking. I opened the door, I heard the sound of someone running down the stairs. I called out to my friend Jean-Lino. I grabbed my keys and I rushed down the stairs myself. I got to the bottom just as he was heading for the front door with a huge red suitcase . . . I begged him not to do this stupid thing. The second-floor neighbor came in . . . After all, I was in slippers and pajamas, nothing like a person set to go out into the wet night . . . That story made sense. That could work. It could also work for Pierre. No. He knew the suitcase. He knew the damn suitcase intimately. In fact it was pretty much his suitcase. How to explain to Pierre what the red suitcase was doing there? Not to mention the cargo. Maybe I could have lent it to the Manoscrivis for some upcoming trip? Or to move things? Yes, that’s good—I could have lent it for moving things over to the psychotherapy office. Without telling him? Well sure, I don’t tell my husband about lending somebody a suitcase. Or better . . . Better: we didn’t know about any of it. Jean-Lino never came downstairs to us, we never went upstairs. I’d given a party. I go downstairs to the trashbins, and who do I see? As I’m coming back through the lobby? Jean-Lino Manoscrivi! Pulling the big red suitcase I’d lent to Lydie . . . I didn’t wonder what was in the suitcase? No, Jean-Lino tells me he’s putting it in the trunk of the car for the next morning. The second-floor neighbor walks in from a party. She sees us on our way out . . . Not me. I’m not going out. I’m there by coincidence, just walking my friend over to the lobby door. It’s completely nothing. I just have to brief Pierre. He’ll understand that it’s in our interest.

He came back. I heard the outside door. I recognized the sound of his walk. He sat down next to me in the nook. His scalp drenched because he’d left his hat off. The rain must be coming down hard. The comb-over hair was plastered to his forehead and crimped up at the edge. He said, “What’s the drill?

“We can go back up . . .”

How could I tell him how close I was to abandoning him?

“ . . . but that won’t help because we could never explain what the two of us were doing here in the lobby.”

He had taken off his gloves (the gloves were sticking out of the side pockets of the biker jacket like two ruffled ears). Doubled over on the stair, he skimmed a hand over the red canvas of the suitcase, tracing vague curves with his finger. The pitted cheeks gleamed, I thought from the rain, but he was crying. When Jean-Lino was a child, after the evening meal his father would sometimes pick up the Book of Psalms and read a passage aloud. The bookmark ribbon always opened to the same place. It never occurred to his father to move it, so he always read out the same verse, the one about exile: By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down and we wept, remembering Zion . Jean-Lino remembered the book, its bronze cover, the fraying ribbon, and especially the engraving on the cover: people with slack expressions, half-naked, slumped against one another, on the banks of a warm stream, with a harp hooked onto the branch of a tree. He said he’d never made the connection between the verse and the image. When his father recited the words Jean-Lino would hear the roar of many rivers, picture the tumble and crash of driftwood logs beneath a sky of defeat. And as to sitting and weeping, for him that meant being in a condition of waiting, huddled and alone. He’d had no religious instruction. The Manoscrivis observed a few holidays with the mother’s family, but that was mainly for eating stuffed carp. Jean-Lino understood nothing about the lines his father read him (neither did his father, according to him) but he liked hearing the phrases from the past. He felt he had some part in the history of mankind, even deep in the Parmentier tenement courtyard, and he likened himself to those wanderers, to those stateless exiles. What had that silly bitch from the second floor actually registered? I went over the scene again. I saw myself by the big windowed front door, behind Jean-Lino, holding the purse and the coat. Holding the purse and the coat! Holding Lydie’s purse and the long flared green frockcoat that the whole neighborhood knows . . . I’d have to drop the trashbin story, go back to the previous version. Yes, I was carrying the purse and the coat. I had torn them from Jean-Lino’s hands to keep him from committing an insane act. “Jean-Lino,” I murmured, “we have to call the police.”

“Yes.”

“I have a little idea for what we can say about my being there . . .”

“Yes . . .”

I set out the story. Lending the suitcase to Lydie, his panicky arrival at our place, our visit upstairs to check the body, my lookout watch, the peephole, me imploring him in the lobby. He had no reaction, he didn’t care. It made me angry that he wouldn’t care about getting me out of the situation. He kills his wife, I do my best to help him, and now that it’s ruined he doesn’t give a damn about the whole thing. I shook him, “You listening to me, Jean-Lino? It’s not about you anymore, it’s about me. It’s important for us to have the same version of what happened.”

“Yes, it’s important . . .”

He fumbles in a chest pocket, pulls out some tickets and balls of colored tinfoil. There’s also a transparent square of self-stick arrows that he tosses on the floor with the rest.

“Can you repeat what I just said? What do I say when I get to the lobby and see you with all this stuff ?”

“You snatch the purse and the coat away from me . . .”

“And—?”

“And you say, ‘You’re crazy.’”

“No, I don’t say right away that you’re crazy, first I say, ‘What are you doing? What’s in that suitcase?’”

He looks at the floor and the bits of paper. “Yes . . .”

“You listening, Jean-Lino?”

“You say, ‘What’s in the suitcase?’ . . .”

“And then I say, ‘You’re crazy, don’t do that!’”

“Yes yes, sure Elisabeth, I put you completely in the clear, completely . . .”

He shakes his head, the mouth tic is seriously back. Not a very reassuring sight.

“You have your cellphone with you?”

“No.”

I open Lydie’s carry-all bag and take her phone out. “We can use this one . . .”

“For what?”

“To call the police.”

He gazes at the thing. An Android in a yellow case with a dangling ornament topped by a feather. I immediately regret my harshness. Everything’s out of kilter. I wish I’d listened to Pierre, hadn’t left our apartment. Jean-Lino seems completely elsewhere. He keeps silent; then, in a faint voice, he says, “I’ll never see the mosquito laboraTory.”

“Someday, sure you will.”

“When?”

“When you come back.”

He shrugs. I had promised to take him to Pasteur and show him the museum, but especially the insectarium. Jean-Lino yearned to see the magical premises of knowledge. To go where life is learned about. At the Guli megastore he languished among the racks where large cold beasts were stacked: washing machines, stove hoods, ranges, freezers evoked nothing for him. He dreamed of being brought into the world of living things, dangerous things. I’d told him about the insectarium, a steamy incubator area of a few rooms underground where there lived hundreds of larvae in white basins and as many mosquitos from all over the world in containers sealed by knots of netting. A place that is half laboratory, half laundry, with everyday gadgets and a sewing machine for the netting. I had told him how the larvae are fed liquid cat food, how the adult males gobble up nothing but sweets and don’t bite. On the other hand, I explained, their womenfolk do bite and every three days they gorge on the blood of some poor mouse that gets dropped into their cage. Jean-Lino exclaimed, “Not a word to Lydie!” I had made clear that the mouse was anesthetized, but he didn’t listen. The fact was that Jean-Lino did not want to share the privilege of his visit into the culicines’ lair.