Herve Le Tellier: Enough About Love

Anna Stein. Twelve years of treatment, now reaching the end. For the first few years, like many people, Anna did nothing but talk. She unrolled her life. Then when she had exhausted her recollections, grappled every crumb of memory, she felt like a river that had run dry, been spent, used up, and she could not think straight for a year, perhaps more. It was when she admitted defeat, when she gave up, angrily—“Well, what else do you want me to say?”—that she could start talking without thinking, to say, as Freud put it, “whatever came into her head,” without trying to re-create some fiction or construct a logical narrative. Now Anna makes associations, discovers links, reestablishes meaning. She is getting somewhere.

Two days earlier, in the last minute of the session, she blurted: “I’ve met someone. I’ve met with someone. A man, a writer.” In the big book dedicated to Anna Stein, Thomas merely jotted down a few words, unhurriedly, “met with someone”—the pleonasm intrigued him — then added “man,” “writer.” On the left, he isolates what he perceives to be factual about something, on the right he underlines what he feels is caught in the words, sifting out the formalities. Anna added, “a real thunderbolt.” Thomas was amused by the expression, so electric and unequivocal.

Then, in pencil, he drew a dotted line, and at the end of it he wrote the letter X, which he linked to the A of Anna. Changing perspective, shifting logic, he associated the two letters X and A in an oval diagram, a Boolean notation. He did not press her for more information. His Westminster clock was already several minutes past the half hour. He simply said: “See you on Thursday.”

1. If you think it’ll, itll itll itll, go on forever, this season of, unov unov, season of love …

• •

A NNA STEIN IS ABOUT TO TURN FORTY. She looks ten years younger in these well-heeled circles where the norm is more like five. But the imminence of this expiration date and the witchery of the number itself send a chill through her, and to think she still feels she is in the comet’s tail of her teens. Forty … Because she thinks there is a before and an after , as in commercials for hair products, she is already living in mourning for what has been and in terror of what is yet to come.

Childhood memory: Anna is seven, one sister, two brothers, the youngest barely talking yet, she is the eldest. It is not easy being the big one, the one who is argued with because the others are too little. But Anna the charmer managed to remain her mother’s favorite. She sits her brothers and her sister around her in a semicircle. The golden light pouring through the window is that of a day coming to a close, probably a Sunday spent in the country. She is standing, book in hand, reading out loud. She spices up the story, which is too straightforward for her liking, with dragons and fairies, ogres and princes, and it all becomes very muddled, she even gets lost herself in places. The children listen to their happy, glowing big sister, fascinated, captivated, frightened too. Gesticulating wildly with her arms, sometimes jumping about, Anna mimes the action and makes sure her intonation sustains the attention of her young audience. She has no doubt: she will be an actress, or a dancer, or a singer.

At fifteen, Anna ties her black hair up to reveal the nape of her neck. She triumphantly inhabits her brand-new woman’s body: she wears leopard-skin leggings and high heels, aggressive bras. She dreams of a life in the public eye, a career under the spotlight, and the names of cities — New York, Buenos Aires, Shanghai — make her swoon. She starts a rock band with herself as the singer, and baptizes them Anna and Her Three Lovers. The lead guitarist, bass player, and drummer are all in love with her, after all. In vain in all three cases, one a little less than the others, but so little.

At twenty, Anna looks elegant in her medical student’s white overalls. She chose one that barely fit her, sacrificing comfort for elegance, wearing it open one button too low at the front, and, as her shoes are the only other thing that show, she puts a great deal of energy into picking them out. Often they are fluorescent. Over the years she becomes Dr. Stein. Intelligent but with a dilettante attitude, she passes every exam: she is probably too proud to mess up in her studies. She is not yet proud enough to dare to want to fail. The adventurous life that would have required so many transgressions is now further and further from her, and she knows that, despite her long legs and beautiful breasts, she will never dance in cabarets. Her mother is a doctor and Anna becomes a psychiatrist, she marries a surgeon, also Jewish, they have two children, Karl, then Lea. “A little Jewish business,” she sometimes laughs. But she has kept something from when she was twenty, a hint of nostalgia for the bohemian: a bold quality in her walk, a light in her smile. Her own tactful way of admitting that she has never completely given up the idea of the stage.

Yes, Anna became Dr. Stein. But does she completely believe it?

Once when she called the hospital to speak to a colleague, she said confidently: “Hello, could I speak to Dr. Stein please?”

Utterly stunned, she hung up immediately, praying the receptionist had not recognized her voice. It was more than an hour before she had the courage to call back.

• •

“T HUNDERBOLT.” At first Thomas Le Gall smiled to hear Anna use that expression. He did not ask whether she had counted the seconds between the flash of lightning and the sound of thunder. But life is facetious: a few hours after that appointment with Anna, Thomas was to be struck by a thunderbolt too. It would be at the “ritual” dinner held by Sammy Karamanlis, a young sociologist who held an open house evening once a month. Thomas did not know Sammy, but a friend took him along: “You won’t be bored, you’ll meet people, pretty women, delightful people.”

Sammy lives in a one-bedroom apartment on the rue de Grenelle, just where the Seventh Arrondissement likes to think it is already part of the Latin Quarter: high ceilings, bourgeois furnishings, views onto a massive paved courtyard. It would be improbably luxurious for an employee of the National Center for Scientific Research if the researcher’s father were not involved in banking in Lausanne. The guests, about thirty of them, seem to be regulars, but their conversations only rarely roam in the direction of their private lives. Thomas circulates discreetly from one group to another: someone else might have fun diagnosing a case of hysteria here, a breakdown pending there, the odd depression. Thomas knows how social posturing can mislead with its pretenses, appearances, and control. He forbids himself opinions.

He quickly notices a young woman with short blond hair, pale eyes, and a lot of people around her. She is leaning against the wall in the huge hallway, holding an orange-colored cocktail glass, its surface quivering from her voluble conversation. Thomas moves closer, listens. He grasps that she is a lawyer. She is talking about Chinese, Albanian, and Romanian mafias, about their extreme violence, their explicit threats, about the interpreters who dare not translate every word, she describes terrified witnesses and the sinking fear in her stomach when she looks into the cold eyes of a killer. Three weeks earlier, a Romanian pimp bound one of his girls’ hands and feet, gagged her with duct tape, and threw her in the bathtub. Then, slowly, with a razor, he slashed her, really deeply, almost cutting her into pieces. All the blood drained out of her, “two or three hours,” the pathologist reckoned. So that they knew what he was capable of, he made all his girls file through the bathroom, one after another, forcing them to touch the blood-soaked woman who was still gasping for breath, her eyes bulging with fear and pain. She eventually died. A colleague has to defend this man, and the young lawyer is haunted by the case. Just by describing it again, she relives the nightmare that words still cannot drive away.