Maylis de Kerangal - The Heart

* * *

The first call comes on the night of August 15. The window is open: it’s 8:00 p.m. and the room is suffocatingly hot. This is the Pitié, we have a heart for you, tonight, now — always the same phrasing. She’s not prepared. Putting her fork back on her untouched plate, she looks at her family, gathered around her, reunited for her birthday — you have to celebrate your fiftieth — they all stand with their arms dangling at their sides like birds’ wings: her mother, her three boys, the young woman who lives with her eldest and their little boy, all frozen except for the child with his garnet-colored eyes, all listening: I’m going, I have to go, chairs shoved backward, champagne flutes trembling, spurting, spilling, a bag packed with toothpaste and eau de toilette, the stairs descended with that rushed slowness that makes people trip and yell at each other — we forgot the sorbets in the kitchen, forgot the medical card, forgot the cell phone — then the sticky asphalt, the smoky sky, people leaning through open windows, a shirtless guy walking his dog, the little boy running on the sidewalk, grabbed by his mother, the tourists checking their maps as they emerge from the metro, and at last the hospital, ringed with little lamps, the admissions process, the newly scoured room where she waits again, sitting on the edge of the bed that she will never open because, finally, there is movement in the corridor, the sound of heavy footsteps, and Harfang appears. He stands before her, thin and pale, bags under his eyes: In the end, we decided to refuse the organ.

She listens as he explains his decision, her face blank: The heart wasn’t good, too small and poorly vascularized, there’s no point taking a risk like that, we’ll just have to keep waiting. Harfang imagines she must be in shock from the disappointment, her hopes dashed, but in fact she is stunned, stupefied, and soon she has only one thought in mind: to get away from here. Her feet hang in the void, her backside slips insensibly off the edge of the bed, and she lands softly on the floor, then stands up — I’m going home. Outside, her sons kick bushes that instantly give up clouds of burning dust, her mother bursts into tears, comforted by her youngest son, the eldest son’s girlfriend keeps running after the little boy, who refuses to go back to the house, and everything falls apart. The group crosses the road in the opposite direction, no longer feeling hungry: it seems impossible to start eating the meal where they had left it. But they can still drink — a pink champagne served in bubble-glass flutes — and Claire ends up lifting her full glass above the table, arm outstretched and smiling, looking beautiful now: Come on, put your heart into it! You’re not funny, you know, her youngest son mutters.

* * *

After that, the nature of time changes — it regains its shape. Or, rather, it takes the shape of waiting: hollow and stretched out. From that point on, the only purpose of hours is to be available during them, knowing that the transplant operation could suddenly become reality, a heart might appear at any moment: I must stay alive, I must be ready. Minutes become supple, seconds ductile, and finally fall arrives, and Claire resolves to bring her books and lamps to this tiny apartment. Her youngest son installs Wi-Fi for her, and she buys an office chair, a wooden table, gathers together a few objects: she wants to start translating again.

Her editor is delighted by this news, and sends her Charlotte Brontë’s first publication, a collection of poems published under her and her sisters’ masculine pseudonyms: Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. She spends the fall in an icy cottage, battered by the wind, where three sisters and a brother write and read together by candlelight, communing with each other through books: feverish, exalted, tortured geniuses, inventing worlds, walking the moors, drinking quarts of tea, and smoking opium. Their intensity wins Claire over, and she gradually perks up. Each day spent working yields a slender batch of pages, and as the weeks pass she finds her rhythm, as if it’s a question of synchronizing the waiting — which becomes sharper and clearer as the state of her heart declines — with another kind of time: that of translating poems. Sometimes she feels she is replacing the painful contractions of her sick organ with a fluid back-and-forth, between her native French and the English she has learned, and that this reciprocal movement is digging a cradle-shaped crevice inside her, a new cavity. She’d had to learn a new language in order to understand her own, so she wondered if this new heart would allow her to better understand herself: I’m clearing a space for you, my heart, I’m making you a home.

* * *

On Christmas Eve, a man resurfaces, placing a bouquet of purple foxgloves on her bed. She has known him since childhood: they grew up together — lovers, friends, brother and sister, partners in crime. They are, for each other, almost everything a man and a woman can be.

Claire smiles and taps her chest: it’s not a good idea to surprise me, you know. In fact, she has to sit down and recover while he takes off his coat. The flowers are from her garden, she can tell from their scent. You know they’re poisonous? she says, pointing at them. One of those flowers that children are forbidden to touch, breathe, gather, taste — she remembers staring, fascinated, at her fingers, coated with fuchsia powder, alone in the street, and the word “poison” appearing in a thought bubble above her head while she lifted her hand to her mouth. The man slowly pulls off a petal and places it in the palm of her hand: Look at that. The petal is so brightly colored that it looks artificial, made of plastic. Trembling in her palm, it is covered with microscopic wrinkles. Actually, he tells her, the digitalin contained in the flowers makes the heartbeat stronger, slower, steadier. It’s good for you.

She sleeps with the flowers that night. The man carefully undresses her, removing the petals one by one, then placing them on her naked skin like the scales of a fish, a sort of organic jigsaw puzzle that he painstakingly perfects into a ceremonial gown, whispering don’t move from time to time, even though she has long been asleep, in a luxuriant catalepsy, nursed and ornamented like a queen. It was still night when she awoke, but the children in the apartment above hers were already running around excitedly, shouting, their footsteps hammering the floorboards, rushing into the living room to tear the wrapping paper from the presents that had appeared during the night around the ectoplasmic Christmas tree. Her friend had gone. She shook the petals from her body and made them into a salad that she seasoned with truffle oil and balsamic vinegar.

* * *

A T-shirt, a few pairs of underwear, two nightgowns, a pair of slippers, beauty products, laptop, cell phone, chargers. Her medical file — administrative printouts, latest exams, and those large, rigid envelopes containing scans, X-rays, and MRIs. She is glad she’s alone to pack her bag, to walk cautiously downstairs, to take her time outside. She crosses the road diagonally, trying to catch the eyes of drivers who slow down when they see her, listening to the hot rail tracks vibrating over her head; she would like to see an animal — a tiger, ideally, or a barn owl with a heart-shaped face, but a stray dog would be fine, and bees would be wonderful. She is more terrified than she has ever been; she is anesthetized by terror. But she should call to let people know, she thinks, as she enters the hospital grounds. She looks up her sons’ numbers and sends them a text — it’s now, tonight — then calls her mother, who must already be asleep, and lastly her foxglove friend on the other side of the world: signals sent in this very instant that stretch out a long way through time. She turns back one more time, looks at the window of her apartment, and suddenly all the hours that she has spent behind that pane of glass, waiting, are condensed into a single shard of time, converging at the base of her skull at the precise moment when she walks through the hospital gates, a lightning-quick finger snap that launches her into the enclosure, onto the asphalt ribbon that runs beside the buildings. Then, as the path bends to the left, she enters the Cardiology Institute: a lobby, two elevators — she forces herself not to think about choosing the one that will bring her good luck — up to the fourth floor and that corridor illuminated like a space station, the glass-walled workstation, and Harfang standing there, in a clean and neatly ironed shirt, white cowlick combed back off his forehead: I’ve been expecting you.