She went back to her family’s house in Crécy-en-Brie. The operation was scheduled for 17 July. Michel and her mother went with her to the hospital in Meaux. She wasn’t scared. The operation lasted a little more than two hours. When Annabelle woke up the following morning, through her window she could see blue sky and the wind in the trees. She barely felt anything. She wanted to see the scar on her abdomen, but didn’t dare ask the nurse. It was strange to think she was still the same woman, except that her reproductive organs had been removed. The word “ablation” hung in her mind for a moment before giving way to a more visceral image. They’ve gutted me, she thought, gutted me like a chicken.
She left the hospital a week later. Michel had written to Walcott to tell him that his departure had been postponed; after some vacillation, he agreed to stay at her parents’ house in her brother’s old room. Annabelle noticed that he and her mother had become closer while she had been in the hospital. Her older brother also dropped by more often, now that Michel was there. In fact they had nothing much to say to each other; Michel knew nothing about small businesses, and Jean-Pierre was completely ignorant as to the issues raised by research in molecular biology. Nevertheless, over a nightly aperitif they’d managed to establish a semi-illusory male bond. She needed to rest and to avoid lifting heavy objects, but at least she could now wash herself and eat normally. In the afternoons she would sit in the garden; Michel and her mother would pick strawberries or plums. It was strange, as if she were on vacation or a child again. She felt the sun caress her face and arms. More often than not she did nothing, though sometimes she did a little embroidery or made stuffed toys for her nephew and nieces. A psychiatrist in Meaux had given her a prescription for sleeping pills and some strong tranquilizers. For whatever reason, she slept a lot and her dreams were happy and peaceful; the mind is a very powerful thing, as long as it remains in its sphere. Michel lay beside her in bed, his hand on her waist, feeling her abdomen rise and fall regularly. The psychiatrist came to see her frequently, and muttered, worried, talked about “dissociation.” She had become very gentle, and her behavior a little strange; sometimes she would laugh for no reason, other times her eyes would suddenly fill with tears. Then she would take another Percodan.
After the third week she was allowed out, and would take short walks along the river or in the surrounding woods. It was August, and the weather was exceptionally beautiful: day after day, each one identically radiant, without so much as the murmur of a storm or anything that might signal an ending. Michel held her hand; often they would sit together on the bench beside the Grand Morin. The grass on the riverbank was scorched, almost white; in the shadow of the beech trees, the river wound on forever in dark green ripples. The world outside had its own rules, and those rules were not human.
3
On 25 August, a routine examination revealed metastases in the abdomen; under normal circumstances, she could expect it to spread. Radiation therapy was a possibility—in fact, it was the only possibility—but it was important to realize that it was an arduous treatment and the chances of success were only fifty percent.
The meal was a silent affair. “You’ll get better, darling,” said Annabelle’s mother, her voice trembling a little. Annabelle put her arm around her mother’s neck and pressed her forehead to hers; they sat like that for almost a minute. After her mother had gone to bed, she stayed in the living room, leafing through some books. Michel watched her every move from the armchair. “We could get a second opinion,” he said after a long silence. “Yes, we could,” she said lightly.
She could not make love—the scar was too fresh, too painful, but she held him in her arms for a long time. In the silence, she could hear him grinding his teeth. Once, as she stroked his face, she found it wet with tears. She stroked his penis gently; it was exciting and calming all at once. He took two Halcion and at last fell asleep.
At about three a.m. she got up, put on a dressing gown and went down to the kitchen. She rummaged in the dresser and found the bowl, inscribed with her name, that her godmother had given her for her tenth birthday. She emptied the contents of a tube of Rohypnol into the bowl, then added a little sugar and water. She didn’t feel anything, unless perhaps a very general, almost metaphysical sadness. That was life, she thought; her body had taken a turn which was unfair and unexpected, and now could no longer be a source of joy or pleasure. On the contrary, it would gradually but quite quickly become another source of pain and embarrassment to her and others. And so she would have to destroy her body. A big wooden clock loudly counted off the seconds; her mother had been given it by her mother, and she’d had it since before she got married. It was the oldest piece of furniture in the house. Annabelle added some more sugar to the bowl. She was far from accepting; life seemed to her like a bad joke, an unacceptable joke, but acceptable or not, that was what it was. In a few short weeks her illness had brought her to the feeling so common in the elderly: she did not want to be a burden to others. Toward the end of her adolescence, her life had speeded up, then there had been a long dull period. Now, at the end, everything was speeding up again.
Just before daybreak, as he turned over in bed, Michel noticed that Annabelle was gone. He dressed and went downstairs: her motionless body was lying on the sofa in the living room. Nearby, on the table, she had left a note. The first line read: “I prefer to die surrounded by those I love.”
The head of emergency services at the hospital in Meaux was a man of about thirty, with dark curly hair and an honest face; he immediately made a good impression on them. There was little chance that she would regain consciousness, he explained, but they could stay with her if they wished, he had no problem with that. Coma was a strange condition, and one which was poorly understood. It was probable that Annabelle was unaware of their presence. There was, however, some weak electrical activity in the brain, which had to correspond to some mental process, but as to what that process might be, nature was defiantly enigmatic. The medical prognosis was far from certain; there were cases where a patient remained in a coma for weeks, even months, before suddenly regaining consciousness; more often, unfortunately, coma slipped just as suddenly toward death. She was only forty, and at least they knew that her heart was strong; that was the only thing they could say for sure.
Day was breaking over the town. Sitting beside Michel, Annabelle’s brother shook his head and muttered. “It’s not possible . . . It’s not possible,” he repeated endlessly, as though the words themselves had some power. But it was, obviously. Anything was possible. A nurse walked past pushing a trolley full of rattling bottles of serum.
Later, the sun ripped through the clouds and the sky turned blue. It would be a beautiful day, as beautiful as the previous ones. Annabelle’s mother stood up with difficulty. “We should get some rest,” she said, struggling to control her voice. Her son rose too, his arms hanging limply by his sides, and followed her like a robot. Michel shook his head to indicate that he wasn’t coming. He didn’t feel in the least tired. In the moments that followed, he was strangely aware of the visible world. He was sitting on a plastic chair in a sunlit corridor. This wing of the hospital was very quiet. From time to time, a faraway door opened and a nurse came out and hurried toward another corridor. The noise of the town some floors below was greatly muted. In a state of complete mental detachment, he went over the events, the circumstances and the stages of the destruction of their lives. Seen in the frozen light of a restrictive past, everything seemed clear, conclusive and indisputable. Now it seemed unthinkable that a girl of seventeen should be so naïve; it was particularly unbelievable that a girl of seventeen should set so much store by love. If the surveys in magazines were to be believed, things had changed a great deal in the twenty-five years since Annabelle was a teenager. Young girls today were more sensible, more sophisticated. Nowadays they worried more about their exam results and did their best to ensure they would have a decent career. For them, going out with boys was simply a game, a distraction mot
ivated as much by narcissism as by sexual pleasure. They later would try to make a good marriage, basing their decision on a range of social and professional criteria, as well as on shared interests and tastes. Of course, in doing this they cut themselves off from any possibility of happiness—a condition indissociable from the outdated, intensely close bonds so incompatible with the exercise of reason—but this was their attempt to escape the moral and emotional suffering which had so tortured their forebears. This hope was, unfortunately, rapidly disappointed; the passing of love’s torments simply left the field clear for boredom, emptiness and an anguished wait for old age and death. The second part of Annabelle’s life therefore had been much more dismal and sad than the first, of which, in the end, she had no memory at all.
Toward noon, Michel pushed open the door to her room. Her breathing was very shallow, the sheet covering her chest almost still—though, according to the doctor, it was sufficient for oxygenation. If her respiratory rate dropped further, they intended to put her on a respirator. For the time being, a drip was hooked up to her arm just above the elbow and an electrode fixed to her temple, that was all. A ray of sunlight crossed the immaculate sheet and lit a lock of her magnificent blonde hair. A little paler than usual, her face, eyes closed, seemed completely at peace. All fear seemed to have disappeared; to Michel, she had never looked so happy. It is true that he’d always had a tendency to confuse happiness with coma; nonetheless she seemed to him completely happy. He stroked her hair, kissed her forehead and her warm lips. It was too late, of course, but it was nice. He stayed in the room with her until nightfall. Back in the corridor, he opened a book of Buddhist meditations compiled by Dr. Evans-Wentz (the book had been in his pocket for some weeks; a small book with a dark red cover).
May all creatures in the east,
May all creatures in the west,
May all creatures in the north,
May all creatures in the south,
Be happy, and remain happy;
And may they live in friendship.
It wasn’t entirely their fault, he thought: they had lived in a painful world, a world of struggle and rivalry, vanity and violence; they had not lived in a peaceful world. On the other hand, they had done nothing to change it, had contributed nothing that might make it a better place. He should have given Annabelle a child, he thought, and then he remembered that he had, or tried to, that at least he had accepted the idea; and this thought filled him with joy. Now he began to understand the peace and gentleness he had felt in these last weeks. He could do nothing more now, as one could not battle against the empire of sickness and death; but at least for some weeks she must have felt loved.
If a man practices the thoughts of love
And does not abandon himself to wantonness;
If he severs the bonds of passion
And turns his gaze toward Faith,
Because he was able to practice love,
He will be born again in the sky a Brahma
And soon will merit deliverance
And forever inherit Nirvana.
If he does not kill nor think of harm,
Nor seek glory in the humiliation of others,
If he practices universal love
At his death will he have no thoughts of hatred.
In the evening, Annabelle’s mother came by to see if there was any change. No, there were no developments; deep coma could be a very stable condition, the nurse reminded her patiently, and it might be weeks before a prognosis could be made. She went in to see her daughter and after a minute came out sobbing. “I don’t understand . . .” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t understand how life can be like this. She was a lovely girl, you know, always very affectionate, she never gave me any trouble. She never complained, but I knew she wasn’t happy. She deserved better from life.”
She left shortly afterward, visibly shattered. Strangely, Michel was neither hungry nor tired. He paced up and down the corridor, then went down to the lobby. The West Indian at the information desk was doing a crossword; he nodded to him, then got a hot chocolate from the vending machine and walked to the windows. The moon hung between the buildings; a few cars drove along the avenue de Châlons. He knew enough about medicine to understand that Annabelle was but a whisper away from death. Her mother was right to refuse to understand; man is not made to grasp death, neither his own nor that of others. He walked up to the security guard and asked for a piece of paper; a little surprised, the man handed him a sheaf of hospital stationery. (Later, the letterhead helped Hubczejak identify this text among all the other papers at the Clifden house.) Some people cling fiercely to life; they leave it, as Rousseau said, with bad grace. Michel already knew that such would not be the case with Annabelle.
She was a child intended for happiness
And gave to everyone her heart’s treasure
She could have given her life for others,
Among the newborn of her bed.
By the cry of children,
By the blood of the race
Her ever-present dream
Will leave a trace
Written in time,
Written in space
Written on flesh
Forever sanctified
In the mountains, in the air
In the river waters clear,
And in the changed sky.
Now you are here
On your deathbed
Still in your coma
You love here still.
Our bodies will become cold, my Annabelle,
Simply present in the grass,
Such will be the death
Of every individual.
We will have loved little
In our human forms
Perhaps the sun, the rain on our graves,
The wind and frost
Will end all our pain.
4
Annabelle died two days later, and from the family’s point of view it was probably for the best. When death occurs people tend to say shit like that, but it’s true that her mother and brother would have found it difficult to cope with prolonged uncertainty.
In the steel and white concrete building, the same place where his grandmother had died, Djerzinski became conscious for the second time of the power of emptiness. He crossed the room to where Annabelle lay. The body was the same one he had known, yet its warmth was slowly ebbing away. Now her skin was almost cold.
Some people live to be seventy, sometimes eighty years old believing there is always something new just around the corner, as they say; in the end they practically have to be killed or at least reduced to a state of serious incapacity to get them to see reason. This was not how it was for Michel Djerzinski. He had lived alone all his adult life, in a vacuum. He had contributed to the sum of human knowledge—that was his vocation, the way he’d found to express his talents—but love was something he had never known. And Annabelle, despite her beauty, had not known love either; and now she was dead. Her body lay useless, like pure weight in the light. They sealed the coffin.
. . .
In her final note she had asked to be cremated. Before the ceremony, they had coffee at the Relais H in the hospital waiting room; at the next table a Gypsy on a drip talked about cars with two friends who’d come to visit him. The lighting was poor—just a couple of bulbs in the ceiling, set into an ugly plaster relief that looked like huge corks.
They walked out into the sunshine. The crematorium was not far from the hospital building, in the same complex. The incinerator itself was a large white concrete cube set in the middle of an equally white courtyard; the reflected light was blinding. Currents of warm air wove around them like a multitude of small snakes.
The coffin was placed on a moving platform leading to the furnace. They had thirty seconds of silent thought, then one of the staff started the motor. The cogs that moved the platform grated a little; the door closed. It was possible to watch the blaze through a Pyrex porthole. At the moment the flames leapt from the huge
burners, Michel turned his head away. For about twenty seconds, a red smudge persisted in his field of vision and then was gone. One of the staff collected the ashes in a small rectangular box of white pine and gave it to Annabelle’s elder brother.
They drove slowly back to Crécy. The sun shone through the leaves of the chestnut trees along the allée de l’Hôtel de Ville. He and Annabelle had walked along that same road after school twenty-five years before. A dozen people were gathered in the garden of her mother’s house. Her younger brother had come from the States for the occasion; he was thin, nervous, visibly stressed and dressed a little too elegantly.
Annabelle had asked that her ashes be scattered in the garden of her parents’ house; that, too, was done. The sun was beginning to sink. Like powder—a whitish powder—she settled as gently as a veil on the ground between the rosebushes. At that moment they heard the bells at the train crossing ringing in the distance. Michel remembered the afternoons when he was nearly fifteen and Annabelle used to come to the station to meet him and take him in her arms. He looked at the earth, the sun, the roses; the suppleness of the grass. It was incomprehensible. Everyone was silent. Annabelle’s mother had poured wine for a toast. She offered him a glass and looked into his eyes. “You can stay for a couple of days if you like, Michel,” she said in a low voice. No, he would go; he would go back to work. He didn’t know how to do anything else. The sky was streaked with sunlight; he realized that he was crying.
5
As the airplane dipped toward the clouds that seemed to stretch out endlessly beneath the sky, he had the feeling that his whole life had been leading up to this moment. For several seconds more, there was only the enormous blue vault and a vast expanse in which matte and brilliant white alternated, and then the plane dropped into a middle zone, gray and fluid, where his senses were confused. Below, in the world of men, there were fields and trees and animals; everything was green, damp and infinitely detailed.