Several times I touched your shoulder to make sure you weren’t falling asleep, and at one point you put your hand on mine. The toll booth took it away from me again, but there were still a lot of stars around our vessel that night, weren’t there?
So many stars . . .
Yes, if there is a paradise, you must be making quite a shambles of it up there . . .
But . . . what could there be?
What could there be after you?
He fell asleep with his hands by his sides. Naked, feeling queasy, and all alone on Ulitsa Smolenskaya, in Moscow, in Russia. On this little planet which had become – and that was his last conscious thought – terribly boring.
9
HE GOT UP, returned to his quagmire, shut himself inside a smoke-filled hut once again, handed over his papers once again, took the plane, claimed his luggage, climbed into a taxi where the hand of Fatima was dangling from the rear view mirror, came home to a woman who no longer loved him and a young girl who did not yet love herself, gave each of them a kiss, showed up at his appointments, had lunch with Claire, hardly touched his food, assured her that everything was fine, sidestepped the issue when the conversation strayed from classified green light areas and programmed maintenance operations on buildings resulting from decentralization, realized that the deep crevasse was gaining ground when he watched her disappear round the corner and his heart was in his boots, shook his head, tried to dissect his feelings on the Boulevard des Italiens, drilled himself into silence, analyzed the quality of the terrain, concluded that he was dealing with a display of sheer self-indulgence, despised himself, flogged himself, turned on his heel, put one foot in front of the other and started again, changed his currency, began smoking again, was incapable thereafter of swallowing the tiniest drop of alcohol, lost weight, won tenders, shaved less often, felt the skin on his face flaking off in places, stopped scrutinizing the drain plug whenever he washed his hair, became less talkative, parted with Xavier Belloy, made another appointment at the ophthalmologist’s, came home later and later, and often on foot, suffered from insomnia, walked as much as he could, found himself skirting the edge of the pavement, crossed outside the zebra crossing, went over the Seine without looking up, no longer admired Paris, no longer touched Laurence, realized that she was forming a trough in the duvet between their bodies whenever she went to bed before him, began watching television for the first time in his life, was stunned, managed to give Mathilde a smile when she told him her mark in physics, no longer reacted when he came upon her doing her shopping on LimeWire, couldn’t give a fuck about the ambient looting, got up in the middle of the night, drank litres of water on the cold kitchen tiles, tried to read, gave up on Kutuzov and his troops at Krasnoye, replied when he was asked a question, answered no when Laurence threatened him with a real conversation, repeated himself when she asked whether it was out of cowardice, tightened his belt, had his Derby shoes resoled, accepted an invitation to travel to Toronto for a conference on environmental issues in the construction industry which left him utterly indifferent, lost his temper with an intern, ended up unplugging the intern’s computer, grabbed a pencil in passing and thrust it in his hands, go on, losing his patience, show me, you, show me what I am supposed to see, launched a project for a hotel complex near Nice, made a cigarette hole in the sleeve of his jacket, fell asleep at the cinema, lost his new glasses, found his book on Jean Prouvé, remembered his promise and went to knock on the door to Mathilde’s room one evening and read her this passage out loud, ‘I recall my father saying to me, “You see how the thorn clings to the stem on this rosebush?” And he opened his fist and ran his finger over his palm: “Look . . . Like the thumb on your hand. It’s all well made, it’s all solid, both are shapes with equal resistance, in spite of everything it’s flexible.” I’ve never forgotten. If you look at some of the furniture I’ve made, nearly everywhere you’ll find a design of things that . . .’, realized she couldn’t give a toss, wondered how that could be possible, she used to be so curious about things in the old days, left her room walking backwards, put the book back any old place, leaned against the side of the bookshelf, looked closely at his thumb, closed his fist, sighed, went to bed, got up, went back to his quagmire, shut himself inside a smoke-filled hut once again, handed over his papers once more, took the plane, claimed . . .
It lasted for weeks, and it could have gone on for months or years.
Since it was the braggart, in the end, who’d won the bet.
And it all made sense . . . It’s always the braggarts who win, no?
*
For nearly twenty years he’d lived next door to her, never seeing her, so why should he be so impressed by three little words that hadn’t even had the manners to come forward and introduce themselves? Sure, it was Alexis’s handwriting . . . and so what? Who was that Alexis, anyway?
A thief. A bloke who betrayed his friends and left his girlfriend to have an abortion all alone, as far away as possible.
An ungrateful son. A little whitey. A talented little whitey, perhaps, but so spineless.
It was years ago now, when he had . . . No, when Anouk had . . . No, when life, let’s say, had given up on them, Charles realized – and this was very painful – that he was having great difficulty in reading the specifications for this project that others called life. He didn’t really see how any of it could hold together when the foundations were so shaky, and he even wondered if he hadn’t made a mistake right from the start . . . Charles? This pile of gravel? Build something? That’s a good one. He went along with it because he didn’t have a choice, but God, it was . . . tedious.
And then one morning he stretched and grunted and got his appetite back, took pleasure in pleasure and enjoyed his profession. He was young and gifted, they kept telling him. He was weak enough to believe them once again, he forced himself, and started piling up his bricks like everyone else.
He denied her. Worse still, he belittled her.
Reduced the scale.
Anyway . . . That is what he had cobbled together for himself. Until one Sunday afternoon he happened on a magazine that was lying around at his parents’ . . . He tore the page out and read it over again, as he was standing in the metro, with his doggy bag under his arm.
It was all there, clear as day, between an ad for a health spa and the letters to the editor.
It was more of a relief than a revelation. So, this is what he’d got? Phantom limb syndrome? They’d amputated, but his idiot brain hadn’t followed and still sent him erroneous messages. And even if he had nothing left, because there was nothing there any more – and that he couldn’t deny – he continued to perceive very real sensations. ‘Heat, cold, stinging, prickling, cramps, even pain, at times,’ said the article.
Yes.
Precisely.
He was suffering from all of those things.
But in no one place.
He’d scrunched it up into a ball, given some slices of cold roast to his flatmate, lowered the lamp and raised the table. His was a Cartesian mind that needed proof in order to keep going. And this proof convinced him. And calmed him.
Why should things have changed, twenty years on?
It was that phantom that he loved, and you know what? Phantoms never die.
So he went through the events enumerated above, but without suffering any worse than that. He lost weight? Actually rather a good thing. He was working harder? No one would notice the difference. He’d started smoking again? He’d stop, all in due course. He bumped into passers-by? He was excused. Laurence was losing it? Her turn now. Mathilde would rather watch a brainless soap? Too bad for her.
Nothing serious. Just a bad blow to the stump. It would pass.
Perhaps it would, indeed.
Perhaps he would have gone on living like that, but taking things more lightly. Perhaps he would have done away with the commas, and taken the trouble to start a new paragraph more often.
Yes, perhaps he would have started up again wit
h his rubbish about breathing and fresh air . . .
But he’d eventually given in.
To her entreaties, to her gentle blackmail, to her voice, made to sound quavering as she twisted the phone line.
All right, he sighed, all right.
And he went once again to dine with his elderly parents.
He paid no attention to the cluttered console and mirror in the entrance, he hung up his raincoat with his back turned, then joined them in the kitchen.
They were models of propriety, all three of them, chewing slowly on each bite, and they were careful to avoid the subject that had brought them together. During the coffee, however, and with an air of oh-I-know-it’s-really-foolish-but-I-was-about-to-forget, Mado gave in and turned to her son, looking somewhere well beyond his shoulder:
‘Oh, by the way, I heard that Anouk Le Men is buried near Drancy.’
He managed to strike the right note: ‘Oh, really? I thought she was in Finistère . . . How did you find out?’
‘Through the daughter of her former landlady.’
Then he gave up.
‘Well, then, you finally got round to chopping down the old cherry tree?’
‘Yes, we were obliged to . . . Because of the neighbours, you know . . . Guess how much it cost us?’
Saved.
Or at least that is what he thought, but just as he was getting to his feet, she put her hand on his knee and said, ‘Wait.’
She leaned over the coffee table and handed him a large brown envelope.
‘I was tidying up the other day, and I came across some photos which might amuse you . . .’
Charles stiffened.
‘It all went by so quickly,’ she murmured, ‘look at this one. How sweet you look, the pair of you . . .’
They were holding each other by the shoulder, Alexis and him. Two beaming Popeyes, smoking a pipe and inflating their tiny biceps.
‘Do you remember? There was that odd chap who used to dress you up all the time . . .’
No. He wasn’t in the mood for remembering.
‘Right,’ he interrupted, ‘I’ve got to get going now.’
‘You should keep these.’
‘No, thanks. What am I supposed to do with them?’
He was looking for his keys when Henri came up to him.
‘Have mercy,’ he joked, ‘don’t tell me she’s wrapped up the apple pie!’
Charles looked at the envelope trembling beneath his father’s thumb, let his gaze wander over the ribbing on his waistcoat, the worn buttons, his white shirt, the impeccable tie he had knotted every God-given morning for over sixty years, his stiff collar, his transparent skin, the furrows of white hairs that the blade had missed, and finally, his gaze.
The gaze of a discreet man who had spent his entire life with a bossy woman, but who hadn’t given in to her on everything.
No. Not everything.
‘Take them.’
He obeyed.
As long as his father went on standing there motionless he couldn’t open the car door.
‘Papa, please . . .’
His father said nothing.
‘Hey! You need to move, now.’
They stared at one another.
‘Are you all right?’
The old gentleman, who hadn’t heard him, stepped to one side with a confession: ‘For me, it wasn’t as –’
A lorry went by.
As long as the road allowed it, Charles watched his father’s figure growing smaller as the horizon receded.
What was it that he had muttered?
We shall never know. As for his son, he had a hunch, but he lost it at the following traffic light in the pages of his guide to the suburbs.
Drancy.
They were hooting their horns at him. He stalled.
10
HIS PLANE FOR Canada was at seven in the evening, and she was a few kilometres from the airport. He left the agency at lunchtime.
‘With his heart slung over his shoulder’: a lovely expression from a French pop song.
So he left with his heart slung over his shoulder.
Nothing in his stomach, filled with emotion, as nervous as if he were on a first date.
Ridiculous.
And not quite exact. He wasn’t on his way to a dance, but to a cemetery, and it wasn’t so much slung over his shoulder as wrapped up in a sling, that crippled little muscle of his.
It was beating, true, but any old way. It was pounding as if she were alive, as if she were looking out for him among the yew trees, and would tick him off, to start with. Ah, at last! You certainly took your time! And what are these horrible flowers you’ve brought me? Here, put them over there and let’s get out of here. And what were you thinking, telling me to meet you in a boneyard? Did you fall on your head, or what?
Yet again, she was exaggerating . . . He glanced quickly at the bouquet. They were fine, those flowers . . .
His heart in a straitjacket – that, yes.
Hey, Charles . . .
I know, I know. But leave me alone.
A few more kilometres, my last cigarette, Mr Executioner . . .
*
It was in the outskirts, a little provincial cemetery. No yew trees, but wrought iron gates, the Holy Ghost on the windows of the tombs, and ivy on the walls. A cemetery with a verger, a rusty tap, and zinc watering cans. It didn’t take long to walk around it. The newest arrivals, that is, the ones with the ugliest tombs, dated from the 1980s.
He shared his puzzlement with a little woman who was polishing up her dearly departed.
‘You must be confusing it with the cemetery in Les Mévreuses . . . It’s over there that they bury people nowadays. We’ve got a family plot here . . . And even so, we had to fight, you know, because the –’
‘But . . . Is it far?’
‘Do you have a car?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then the best thing is to take the national road as far as the big DIY and . . . Do you know where it is?’
‘No,’ said Charles hesitantly; he was beginning to find his bouquet rather awkward. ‘But, uh, go on, I’ll find it . . .’ ‘
Otherwise you can get there from Leclerc shopping centre . . .’
‘Oh?’
‘Yes, you pass that, then under the railway lines, and after the waste dump, it’s on the right.’
What sort of cock-up was this?
He thanked her, and went off lost in thought.
No sooner had he unbuckled his seatbelt than he fell to pieces.
It was exactly as she had described it: after the DIY and the Leclerc shopping centre, there it was: a dog pound for stiffs, right up next to the Regional Motorway Maintenance offices. With the RER suburban train directly overhead, and the cargo jumbos playing softly in the background.
Recycling bins in the car park, plastic bags clinging to the bushes, and walls made of concrete slabs that served as pissoirs for all the local taggers.
No. He shook his head. No.
And yet he wasn’t the squeamish sort. It was his job to notice when developers fucked up, but this, no.
His mother must have made a mistake. Or that other woman mixed things up. The landlady’s daughter – what were they talking about? And that landlady had fucked about with Anouk’s mind too, she was a right one. It wasn’t hard to make an impression on a young woman who was raising her son on her own, who came home knackered just when the bitch was taking her ratters for a shit on the square . . . Yes, that was it, it was all coming back to him. Madame Fourdel. Anouk’s heart was in her boots whenever she saw her, one of the few people on the planet who could make her feel that way . . . The rent. The rent for old Mrs Fourdel.
The absurdity of this car park must be the last dirty trick on the part of that usurer. A mean trick, a gossipy mistake, an address remembered the wrong way round. Anouk had nothing to do with this place.
Charles kept his hand squeezed tight round the keys, and the keys were in the ignition.
Right. One quick look round.
He left the flowers behind.
Poor dead people . . .
The sheer weight of so much bad taste . . .
Marble lids which shone like kitchen Formica; plastic flowers; open books made of craftily cracked porcelain; hideous photos in yellowed Plexiglas; footballs; three aces; sculptures of lively looking pike; pathetic epitaphs; words dripping with lame regret. All of it carved there, for all eternity.
A gilt German shepherd.
Sleep, Master, I lie watching by your side.
It was probably not as bad as all that, or at least there might have been a touch more tenderness, but our Charles had decided to despise them all.
On Earth as it is in Heaven.
A typically French cemetery, laid out in a grid like an American town. Numbered rows, graves all lined up tight together, sign-posting for the soul in B23 and eternal rest for H175, aligned chronologically, the really cold ones towards the front, the more lukewarm ones towards the rear, the gravel neatly raked, a sign warning about recycling rubbish and another one about some crap manufactured in China and endlessly, ceaselessly, the infernal racket overhead, those bloody trains thundering right through their sleep.
This time it was the architect who was protesting. Surely there were terms and conditions to be respected where the dead were concerned, too? At least a bare minimum? Just a little bit of peace, excuse me – you mean it isn’t included?
Why should it be . . . They’d been taken for a ride when they were alive, crammed into those wretched prefabs that had cost them three times what they were worth and left them in debt for twenty years – so why should anything change now that they’d snuffed it? And how much had they paid to have a view of the waste dump, until kingdom come?
Oh . . . that’s their problem after all. But what about his belle dame? If he found her in this tip, he –
Go on. Finish your sentence. What would you do, you wanker? Start scratching at her grave to get her out of there? Dust off her skirt, take her in your arms?
What’s the use. He can’t hear us anyway. There’s a freight train going by, lifting the carrier bags, depositing them a little farther along.