Maylis de Kerangal - The Heart

* * *

He was twenty years old when he left the prosperous family farm, which was taken over by his sister and her husband. He bid goodbye to the school bus and the muddy courtyard, the smell of wet hay, the lowing of a lone cow waiting to be milked and the hedge of poplars grown close together on a grassy bank; after that, he lived in a tiny efficiency in the center of Rouen rented to him by his parents, with an electric radiator and a sofa bed, and he rode a 1971 Honda 500. He started nursing college, loved girls, loved boys, couldn’t decide, and one night — during a trip to Paris — entered a karaoke bar in Belleville: it was full of Chinese people, vinyl hair and waxy cheeks, regulars come to polish their performances, couples mostly, admiring and filming each other, reproducing the movements and postures they’d seen on television, and then, suddenly, yielding to the pressure of the people there with him, he had chosen a song — something short and simple, Bonnie Tyler’s “It’s a Heartache,” I think — and, when it was his turn, had taken the stage and slowly metamorphosed: his sluggish body beginning to move, a voice coming from his mouth, a voice that was his but which he didn’t recognize, a voice with amazing timbre, texture, range, as if other versions of himself had been hiding there inside his body: a tiger, the sea crashing against a cliff face, a prostitute. Realizing that there was no mistake — it really was him singing — he seized upon his voice as his bodily signature, as the form of his singularity, and decided he wanted to get to know it. So he began to sing.

By discovering song, he discovered his body. Like a sports enthusiast the day after an intense run or bike ride or gym session, he felt tensions he had never felt before, knots and currents, points and zones, as if his body were revealing to him unexplored possibilities within himself. He undertook to identify everything of which he consisted, to map out a precise anatomy, the shapes of organs, the variety of muscles, their unsuspected powers; he explored his respiratory system, and how the action of singing gathers and controls it, constructing himself as a human body and, perhaps even more than that, as a singing body. It was a second birth.

The time and money that he devoted to singing grew through the years, and it ended up dominating a large part of his daily life, and of a salary swelled by extra shifts at the hospital: he practiced his singing exercises every morning, studied every evening; twice a week he took lessons with a bulb-shaped opera singer (giraffe-necked, reed-armed, large-breasted, flat-bellied, wide-hipped, with wavy hair down to her knees, swaying around in her flannel skirts), and at night he would find recitals, operas, new recordings on the Internet, download them, pirate them, copy them, archive them; in the summer, he traveled all over France, attending opera festivals, sleeping in tents or sharing a bungalow with fellow buffs; one day he met Ousmane, a Gnawa musician and shimmering baritone, and that summer — last summer — he went to Algeria and bought a goldfinch in the Collo valley, spending all the money he inherited from his grandmother on it: three thousand euros in cash rolled up in a batiste handkerchief.

* * *

His early years working as a nurse in Intensive Care reinvigorated him: he entered an underworld, a parallel universe, a subterranean space on the edge of the ordinary world, stirred by continual overlappings at their border, this world suffused by a thousand sleeps where he himself never slept. To begin with, he roamed the department as if mapping it internally, aware that, here, he inhabited the other half of time, the cerebral night, the core of it all. His voice became clearer, more nuanced. At that time, he was studying his first lied , a Brahms lullaby, a simple song that he sang for the first time at the bedside of an agitated patient, the melody working like an analgesic. Flexible hours, heavy workload, everything in short supply: the department was a world apart, obeying its own rules, and Thomas had the feeling that he was, little by little, cutting himself off from the outside world, living in a place where the separation between night and day no longer made any difference to him. Sometimes he felt that he was in too deep. To clear his head, he took more singing lessons, emerging from them exhausted but with an ever deeper insight and a richer voice, continuing to work with an energy which began to be noted at staff meetings, becoming expert at dealing with patients in every grade of coma and sedation, including awakening, carefully handling the machines that monitored patients and kept them alive, showing an interest in pain management. He worked like this for seven years before deciding he wanted to change jobs but remain in the same sector. He became one of the three hundred nurses who coordinate organ and tissue removal for the entire country, based at the hospital in Le Havre. He is twenty-nine years old and he is at the peak of his powers. When people ask him about this new line of work, which naturally involved extra training, Thomas talks about relationships with loved ones, psychology, law, the collective aspect, all of which is central to his work as a nurse, of course, but there is something else, something more complex, and if he trusts the person he is talking to, if he decides to take the time, he will tell them about that singular uncertainty on the threshold of the living, about his questioning of the human body and its uses, about an approach to death and its representations — because that is what it’s all about. He ignores those who tease him — what if the electroencephalogram messed up, what if it broke down, an electrical fault or whatever, and he wasn’t really dead? Huh? It’s not impossible, is it? Ooh, you’ve gone over to the dark side, Tom! — and just keeps smiling, coolly chewing another matchstick, until the night he receives his master’s in philosophy from the Sorbonne and buys everyone a drink. Famous for swapping shifts with his coworkers, he would often manage to be replaced for the five half-day seminars at Rue Saint-Jacques, a street he liked to follow down to the Seine, where he would listen to the hum of the city, and sometimes sing.

* * *

Impossible to plan anything today: Thomas Rémige is on call, so the ICU could summon him at any time during the next twenty-four hours. As always, he has to find a way to cope with this dead time, vacant without being free — this paradoxical time that is perhaps another name for boredom — by trying to organize it, an attempt that often ends up completely screwed, with Thomas incapable of either relaxing or doing something useful, suspended by the uncertainty, paralyzed by the procrastination. He gets ready to go out, then decides to stay home; begins baking a cake, watching a movie, archiving sound recordings (the song of the goldfinch), then gives up, leaving it until later … but there is no such thing as later: later is an abstract concept, thrown into flux by his random hours. So, seeing the hospital’s number on the screen of his cell phone, Thomas feels a simultaneous twinge of disappointment and a pang of relief.

* * *

The organization he runs functions independently from the hospital even though it is situated within its walls. But Révol and Rémige know each other, and the young man can guess exactly what Révol is about to tell him; he could even say it for him, this phrase that standardizes tragedy in the name of increased efficiency: One of the department’s patients is in a state of brain death. An observation that sounds conclusive, terminal, but for Thomas it has a different meaning altogether, announcing the beginning of a movement, the first step in a process.

* * *

One of the department’s patients is in a state of brain death.