Jean-Philippe Toussaint - Self-Portrait Abroad

My watch now showed something like eleven o’clock in the evening, a Japanese time that was no longer relevant anywhere, neither in Berlin where I was headed nor in Hong Kong where I still was. Because I was in Hong Kong, yes, though I might as well have been in a novel. But enough of verisimilitude.

The Berliners have a reputation for being terse, impatient, dislikeable. When you go into a store, for example, they say that after having wiped your feet you almost have to apologize for wanting to buy something. When you speak German as badly as I do, and with a strong accent (although the question of accents is entirely relative), you are generally treated with very little patience, and if, after audaciously expressing the desire to purchase something you are reckless enough to ask that the person behind the counter repeat her question with a nevertheless perfect little Wie bitte? , you get snubbed all the more for having cast suspicion on the way the question had been formed, although it was in perfect German, judge for yourselves: Wie dick, die Scheibe? Normal, I said, a normal slice: The young woman, because it was a young woman, a mean and pudgy young woman, looked at me with suspicion. She cut me a slice of ham, threw it down on the counter. Noch einen Wunsch? Das , I said, and I pointed at a tray of aspic. She hurriedly cut a minuscule slice of aspic, I mean really minuscule, at best you could have coated your passport with a slice of jelly that thin, or wiped your glasses off. Dicker , I said. That was the turning point in our encounter, I said it very dryly, and, immediately, without weakening, I looked her intensely in the eyes with a mean stare, and there were only two possible outcomes, either she would send me packing with an insult, explaining while kicking me out of the shop that as I had not indicated the thickness of the slice she was entitled to assume I’d wanted it very thin (which, if she’d rattled it off in German, I could hardly have contested), or she would buckle and cut my slice as I wanted. She obeyed. Putting the minuscule slice to one side, to eat later, who knows, to roll it into a ball and swallow it in an idle moment, she took the whole dish from the window. She placed the knife on the terrine and gave me an inquisitive look. Like that? she said. Bigger, I said. She moved the knife to the right. Like that? she said. A little bit smaller, I said. She lifted her eyes and gave me a look, but she no longer resisted, now she was under my thumb. Again she moved the knife to the right. No, no, not so big! I said. She moved the knife to the left, quicker and quicker now, things were accelerating more and more, she moved the knife slightly to the left, slightly to the right, slightly to the left, slightly to the right, she couldn’t get it right, she was unable to satisfy me. Too bad, you had it, I said. Start from the beginning, I said. She stopped, lifted her knife from the terrine. She was perspiring, large beads of sweat fell into the dish. Relax, I said, you’re too overwrought. Come on, give it another try. Like that? she said. Perfect, I said. You see, I said, if you really put your mind to it, and I almost stroked her cheek. She wrapped my slice with care and handed me my change with infinite respect. She was at a loss as to what else she could do for me, what to propose, what favor she could bestow upon me, a plastic bag perhaps, a little aperitif, could she call me a taxi? I left without saying good-bye (I don’t like unpleasant people).

Let’s not talk about Prague. We spent a lover’s weekend there, Madeleine and I, around Easter, in an almost windowless attic room which gave the impression of being in some tawdry flophouse, with its mezzanine floor and half-closed blinds, dark, dusty, a bit smelly (we left an envelope with a couple of deutschemarks on the coffee table for the little racketeer who’d sublet it to us when we left).

And yet the trip had started off well enough. In Berlin, full of hope and using my German, which got better by the hour, I’d reserved two very promising train tickets for Prague in a travel agency on Kurfürstendamm, one of those large and prosperous travel agencies whose bay windows carry an ever-changing array of yellow and white banners with mouthwatering travel suggestions, listing prices and destinations with unbeatable offers for trips to the Balearic Islands, Florida, or Tunisia. I’d bought two train tickets for Prague, two first-class seats on the morning train that passes through Prague once a day on its way to Budapest, one of those old-fashioned trains that makes you drool just looking at it, all decked out with velvet upholstery with small nets for newspapers on the seats, pillow headrests, and lovely velvet footrests as soft as cushions and as round as prayer benches. No sooner had we left — our bodies reclining in our adjustable seats, our shoes already off — than we started to unfold our newspapers and flip through them leisurely, Madeleine and I, softly rubbing our stockinged feet; at first every man for himself in the unreflecting comfort of solitary reading, then, little by little, together, mingling our feet and arms to the unbridled delight of our senses, uniting our mouths in the euphoria of the voyage we were commencing, our legs, our hands, what do I know, our thighs, our hips. You don’t know how to make love in a train, she said with a smile.

We’d gone back to the restaurant car and, after a studious browse through the greasy old menus wrapped in wine-colored plastic proposing in Czech and German different types of sausage and pork embellished with an unavoidable side of potatoes, we ordered the most expensive dishes on the menu, pork and sausages, it was either that or fried eggs, asking our waiter to throw in two bottles of cold Czech beer. We’d already drunk a few sips of fresh Budweiser and were calmly eating our meal, now and then giving each other a bit of pork across the table, more like an attentive couple than enflamed and suicidal Bohemian lovers ladling sizzling drops of zabaglione into each others’ mouths with long silver spoons (as Madeleine and I used to do when we were young), when, in this almost deserted restaurant car whose touching old-fashioned decorations we found endlessly delightful, the sun suddenly shone through the clouds and lit up the Saxony countryside. That is the image I will remember from this trip, Madeleine and I sitting face to face in the sunny restaurant car on our way to Prague. The winding shores of the Elbe flashed by the compartment window as the train hugged its curves, chugging along beside the river, accompanying its bends and meanders. I’d finished my beer a few moments earlier and my whole being was bathed in the feather-light beginnings of drunkenness, massaging my temples like an aura of honey. Rocked by the imminent promise of Prague (which no reality, however small, had yet tarnished), I looked at Madeleine who smiled across from me in the fullness of our intact hopes while the air shimmered around us, wafting softly and lightly along the stitched lace curtains of the compartment window, above our plates, over the knives and forks, over our glasses, over our hands entwined on the table, over the flies.

The day had begun in a perfectly innocuous way. We were expecting a couple of friends for lunch on this Wednesday, August 10 (the date is now forever engraved in my memory), and we’d already set the table in the garden in the shadow of a large white canvas parasol. Madeleine was varnishing the wooden shutters while waiting for our friends to arrive, wandering thoughtfully along the front of the house in her bathing suit with a bowl of Fongexor varnish and a paintbrush in her hand, on the lookout for any spots on the shutters in need of a handy touch up here or there (or on the wooden table, the chair legs, the parasol stand — everything was fair game for her when it came to Fongexor, so watch your pricks). As I walked back blithely toward the house after taking a swim among the rocks, my hands in the pockets of my baggy Bermuda shorts, I noticed a little poster tacked to the spotted trunk of a plane tree at the turn coming into the village, a rectangular white poster announcing a boules tournament in perfect type (a font called “New York,” if I’m not mistaken). The contest was to take place the same day in the neighboring village of Tollare in the middle of the afternoon, and it just so happened that Ange Leccia, who we were expecting for lunch, was my official boules partner. The fact was that Ange and I were what you might call enlightened enthusiasts. We focused on every point and didn’t squander our boules, making calculated and circumspect throws after studying the terrain by digging in our heels to gauge its softness and ductility, and then returning pensively to the circle, crouching down and pointing with equanimity. As a team we were somewhat lacking in practice and method, and in agility as well, we weren’t exactly spring chickens, and of course being rather more alike than complementary in style we lacked the panache of a real team, with its natural-born, instinctive shooters (we were both pointers, unfortunately, crouching low to the ground like little old men). In short, and to give an honest summary of our boules season so far, we’d got past the first round at Muro before being eliminated by a couple of tourists, two awkward and lucky freeloaders on vacation, and we’d cancelled our participation at the tournament in B. for personal reasons.