He would have had to be extremely naïve to use such worn-out words. Said over and over again and so poorly tailored that they could clothe any bloody idiot on the planet. But never mind, he’d deal with it. It felt good to be back in these titles, this music, these songs, the way he used to be. To be the tall gangly bloke again, confining his life within other people’s emotions.
A guy blowing into his trumpet and there you were. Jericho.
*
He didn’t like the word ‘tramp’, which was ambiguous. Vagabond, rather. A barefoot beggar she may well have been, but where the rest was concerned, her foolish heart could defy even Newton.
September Song.
He opened his hand. They’d heard that track together . . .
Such a long time ago. At the New Morning jazz club wasn’t it? And how handsome he still was, then.
Terrifyingly handsome.
But a mess. All thin and gaunt and toothless and ravaged by alcohol. And he winced, and moved oh-so cautiously, as if he’d just taken a beating.
After the concert, they’d had a row precisely because of that. Alexis couldn’t stay still, he was in a trance again, swaying back and forth and drumming on the bar with his eyes closed. And he could hear the music, could even see it, could read a score the way other people flip through a page of advertising, but it wasn’t really his thing, reading scores . . . Charles, on the other hand, had left the concert feeling depressed. The guy’s face was so full of suffering and exhaustion that he couldn’t listen to him, he was too scared to sit there staring at him in silence.
‘It’s horrible. To have so much talent and fuck yourself up like this.’
His friend had leapt at his throat. The wrong chorus. A torrent of insults on the very friend who’d offered him the ticket.
‘You don’t get it,’ said Alexis in the end, with a nasty smile.
‘No.’
And Charles buttoned up his jacket.
‘I can’t.’
It was late. He was supposed to be up early the next morning. He was working.
‘You never get anything, anyway.’
‘No, of course not.’ He got rid of his change. ‘I know, and I understand less and less. But at your age, he’d already done amazing things.’
He’d said the words so quietly that Alexis couldn’t possibly have heard him. And in any case he’d already turned his back on Charles. But he had heard them. He had a sharp ear, the swine . . . Never mind, his friend was already pushing his glass across the counter . . .
Charles leaned over to pick up Mathilde’s rubber, and as he rose to the surface, he knew that he would call Alexis.
Chet Baker threw himself out of a hotel window a few years after that concert. Passers-by stepped over him, assuming he was some wino, fast asleep, and he spent the night like that, dislocated, on a pavement in Amsterdam.
What about Anouk?
He wanted to know. He wanted to understand, for once.
Just understand.
‘Charles?’
He didn’t answer.
‘Hello? Hello? Control tower to Charlie Bravo, do you copy?’
‘Sorry. Right . . . where were we? So what is opposed to the weight of your mobile?’
‘Huh?’
‘What?’
‘I can’t take your music any more.’
She switched off the sound with a smile. He’d got what he wanted.
End of improv.
He would call.
*
When Laurence came home from the Turkish bath with her friend Maud, Charles took all his little gang to the pizzeria on the corner, and they celebrated her birthday once again, to the sounds of Come prima.
They put a candle on her slice of tiramisu, and she pulled her chair closer to his.
For the photo.
To make Mathilde happy.
So they could smile together on the tiny screen of her mobile.
Since he had to get a plane at seven the next morning, he set his alarm for five and rubbed his cheeks.
He slept badly, and not enough.
They never really found out whether he’d thrown himself from the window, or fallen.
Sure, there were traces of heroin on the table, but when they finally turned his ethereal carcass over, he was still clutching the window handle.
Charles switched off the alarm at four thirty, shaved, gently closed the door behind him and didn’t leave a note on the kitchen table.
How did Anouk die? Had she fussed with some bloody window catch, too, to let the others off the hook?
She had watched so many people die. She’d stopped counting, one window, one annoyance more or less . . . Particularly back then. The heyday of the New Morning, in the early 1980s, when Aids was killing off all the healthy young men with a vengeance.
They’d had dinner together in those dark days and, for the first time, he’d seen the doubt on her face:
‘The hardest thing is when you have to tell them.’
She was choking up, already.
‘Because of the risks of infection, you see . . . You have to tell them that they’re going to die like a dog and that there’s nothing you can do for them. That’s actually the first thing you tell them . . . So that they’re careful not to go off and shoot someone when they leave. Yes, you’re going to die but hey, don’t waste any time. Go quick and tell the others, the ones you’ve loved. So they know straight away that they’re next in line, too . . . Go on! Run! And see you next month, all right?
‘And you know, this is the first time we’ve been through something like this. The first time. And we’re all in the same boat, fat cat doctors and little helpers alike. We’ve all been swept away by this bloody thing. There’s no stopping it, either, it’s bombarding us, bloody bitch of a disease. No quarter. We’re all utterly useless. You know . . . I’ve closed a few eyes in my time, and up until now, well, it’s been my life, so what. Yes, of course, you know me. And even if I always clenched my teeth, I would call the nursing auxiliary when the body had gone down to the fridge and we were doing the room. Yes, we’d put on fresh sheets for the next one, and then we’d wait for him, and when he arrived, we’d take care of him. We’d smile, and look after him. We looked after him, you hear? Isn’t that the very reason we’ve chosen such an insane profession?
‘But now, with this? What are we supposed to do?’
She stole my cigarette.
‘This is the first time in my life that I’ve had to learn to be creative, Charles . . . First time I’ve seen Death like this, with a capital letter. You know, that thing in your French homework, that thing all the teachers used to love, what was it called?’
‘Anthropomorphism.’
‘No, it had a smoother sort of ring to it.’
‘Allegory?’
‘That’s it! I’m allegorizing death. I can see it lurking about with its skull and its bloody scythe. I see it. I can sense it. When I start my shift I can smell it in the corridor and often I even turn around with a start because I can hear it walking behind me and . . .’
Her eyes were shining.
‘Have I gone stark raving mad? D’you think I’m losing my mind, too?’
‘No.’
‘And the worst of it is that there’s another new element along with all the rest . . . Shame. Shameful disease. Sex, or drugs. Hence, solitude. Death and solitude. The families don’t come, you use complicated words to confuse the cretinous parents who still go round sniffing their children’s sheets . . . Yes, Madam, it’s a lung infection, no, Madam, there’s no treatment. Oh, yes, you’re right, Sir, you might say it does affect the other organs, indeed . . . Very perspicacious, I see. How many times have I felt like screaming and grabbing them by the collar and shaking them to get rid of every last bloody prejudice, till every last one comes crashing down at the foot of . . . Of what? Of what’s left of their child? Of . . . there’s not even a name for it, what we . . . Those beds where they’ve lost even the strength to close their eyes,
so they won’t have to put up with it any more . . .’
She looked down.
‘What is the point of having kids if they don’t have the right to talk to you about love when they grow up, huh?’
She shoved her plate back.
‘Huh? So what’s left? What’s left if we can’t talk about love, or pleasure? Our pay slips? The weather?’
She was losing her temper.
‘Children – they are life, damn it! And it’s because we had a fuck, too, that they are here, no? Besides, who gives a damn about another person’s sexual orientation! Two boys, two girls, three boys, a whore, a dildo, a doll, two whips, three sets of handcuffs, a thousand fantasies – where’s the problem, huh? Where is the problem? It’s night-time, no? And at night, it’s dark! Night is holy! And even when it’s daytime, it’s . . . that’s fine, too . . .’
She was trying to smile, and she poured herself another glass between each question mark.
‘You see, for the first time in my career, I – I’ve become utterly useless . . .’
I touched her elbow. I felt like taking her in my arms, I . . .
‘Don’t say that. Hey, if I had to die in the hospital, I’d want to be near –’
She interrupted me just in time. Before I fucked everything up, yet again.
‘Stop. We’re not talking about the same thing. You see a tall, pale young man stretching out his hand towards some bloody allegorization, whereas I’m talking about the runs, and herpes, and necrosis. And when I said like a dog just now, I was miles off. A dog at least, when it’s suffering too much, they put it down.’
The people at the next table were giving us funny looks. I was used to that. It had been going on for twenty years. Anouk always spoke too loudly. Or laughed too quickly. Or sang too shrilly. Or danced too soon, or . . . Anouk always went too far and people would look at her and whisper crap. Never mind. Under normal circumstances, she would have got back at them by raising her glass. ‘Here’s to love!’ she’d have winked at the model father and husband, or ‘Here’s to sex!’ or something even worse, depending on how many glasses she had already raised by then, but that evening, nothing. That evening, the hospital had won. People who were sound in body no longer interested her. Could no longer save her.
I didn’t know what to say. I thought about Alexis, whom she hadn’t seen in several months. About his downward spiral, and his pupils that were always dilated. Her son who reproached her because he’d been born a white man, and who wanted to live like Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, and all the others.
Who was overdoing it. Who was fed up with stamping his feet impatiently. Who sought himself wherever he went, by lying in bed all day.
And who blinked in the daylight.
Had she been reading my thoughts?
‘With the junkies it’s another story altogether . . . Either there’s no one, or else the parents are so devastated that it’s as if they need looking after as well. And those parents, the ones who are still there, the ones who have always been there, do you know what they say?’
I shook my head.
‘“It’s our fault.”’
Around the time we had that dinner – it must have been in ’85 or ’86 – Alexis was still relatively clean. I think he was smoking, mainly. I don’t remember, but he wasn’t yet into the tourniquets and the long sleeves, otherwise I’d remember what I’d said. In this case she was talking about other people’s parents, and I was quietly agreeing. Other people.
What I do remember is that I had managed to change the subject, and we were chatting about things that were not so serious – my studies, our respective desserts, the film I’d seen the weekend before, when her smile suddenly froze.
‘I was on duty Sunday,’ she continued, ‘and . . . And there was this kid there . . . scarcely any older than you . . . a dancer . . . He showed me some photos . . . A dancer, Charles. A magnificent body and –’
She flung her head back, staring at the ceiling to drive it all away, saliva, snot, everything that was blurring her vision, and then she came back and took aim at me again.
‘And on that Sunday morning, I was cooling his body with camphorated water, which means I really wasn’t doing much at all, it was just a sham, really, I helped him bend over so I could do his back and do you know what happened, right there in my hand?’
She showed me her hand.
‘Beneath this hand, right there . . . The hand of a registered nurse who has dressed thousands of patients for over twenty years?’
I didn’t react.
‘On –’
She broke off to empty her glass. Her nostrils were throbbing.
‘On the crest of his spine his skin –’
I handed her my napkin.
‘– tore apart . . .’
*
He had just claimed his suitcase and was waiting impatiently at the check-in counter. He could already hear Russian all around him and three girls were giggling and gushing as they compared the contents of their respective shopping bags.
You could see their bellies.
He felt like a coffee.
And a cigarette . . .
As he pulled out his book, he dropped the stub from his previous boarding card that he’d been using as a bookmark. No panic, they’d be giving him a new one a few metres from here . . .
XXXIII
The main action of the battle of Borodino took place over a stretch of seven thousand feet between Borodino and Bagration’s flèches. (Outside that stretch, on one side, there was a show of Uvarov’s cavalry in the middle of the day, and on the other side, beyond Uti—
Not a window . . .
She’d always had vertigo . . .
—tsa, Poniatowski’s collision with Tuchkov; but these two were detached and feeble actions in comparison with what took place in the cen—
He could not understand a thing.
His mobile was vibrating: the agency. This early?
No. The message was from the night before. Philippe. One of Pavlovich’s minions had sent a catastrophic e-mail. The second screed would have to be completely redone, there was a balls-up in their calculations, the blokes from Voradin didn’t want to know and they’d found a bloke dead on the western site. A bloke who wasn’t registered anywhere, obviously. The police would be coming by again.
Right then . . . Why hadn’t the guy just disappeared?
There was no more concrete?
He took a deep breath to expel his anger, looked for an empty seat, closed his book, put the two emperors and their half a million dead each in the bottom of his briefcase and pulled out his files. Checked his watch, added two hours, got voicemail, and began to swear again in English. Good Lord, he went at it with relish. The fucking bastard wouldn’t listen to his message to the end anyway.
All of a sudden, it all vanished. Alexis and his pathetic cruelty, Claire and the little chapels on Skopelos, Laurence’s moods, Mathilde’s pouting, his memories, their future, the lapping of the past and all that quicksand. Off it went. Deleted. The shambles on the site was beginning to seriously piss him off and he’d get back to his life later on.
Sorry, mate, but there just wasn’t time.
So Balanda, with his engineering degree, his Master of Sciences, his School of Architecture, his government certification, his membership of the Society; Balanda the workhorse, with his awards and medals, everything you can imagine, yes, everything you can imagine, everything you could possibly fit onto a business card when you’ve had enough, tossed that other, wobbly, self out.
Aaah. That feels better.
Everyone, at some point or another, had reproached him for giving too much importance to his work. His fiancées, his family, his colleagues, his collaborators, his clients, the cleaning ladies who officiated at night, and even a doctor, once. Well-intentioned people said he was conscientious; others said that he was needy or even worse, academic, and he’d never really known what to say in his own defence.
Why had he been
working so hard for so many years?
What was the point of all these sleepless nights? Life on a scale of 1:100? This relationship that was so shabbily constructed? This nagging little stiffness in his neck? This urge he had to climb the walls?
Or was it simply a trial of strength, lost from the start?
What . . . No, he’d never known how to justify himself to obtain absolution. He’d never felt the need, to be honest. But now, yes. Now he did.
That morning, as he got up and took out his passport, surprised yet again at how light his luggage was, to the sound of Passengers on Air France flight 1644 departing at seven ten for Moscow Sheremetyevo are kindly requested to proceed to gate 16, he had his answer: it was so that he could breathe.
Just breathe.
The hours, the little we’ve seen of him thus far, the abyss, might all seem to suggest, how to put it . . . that we should have some doubts as to just how clear-sighted Charles’s explanation really is, but anyway . . . Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt for once.
Let’s let him breathe as far as gate 16.
8
THE FLIGHT REACHED its cruising speed of nine hundred kilometres an hour. He’d scarcely had time to switch on his laptop when the captain came on to inform them that the temperature was two degrees Celsius at their destination, wishing everyone a pleasant flight, and the usual blah blah from SkyTeam.
He located Viktor, his chauffeur with the gentle smile (a hole, a tooth, a hole, two more teeth); Charles would discover, after dozens of hours of traffic jams (in no other country in the world had Charles spent so much time on the rear seat of a car. Puzzled at first, then worried, then annoyed, then enraged, then . . . resigned. Oh! So this was the legendary Russian fatalism? Watching, through a steamy car window, as one’s goodwill dissolves into the endless ambient confusion?), that Viktor, in another life, was a sound engineer.
He was talkative, and told countless amazing stories that his passenger did not understand, all the while smoking dreadful-smelling cigarettes that he pulled out of charming little packets.
And when Charles’s mobile rang, when his client began putting on the pressure again, he would hasten to turn on the music at full volume. Out of discretion. No balalaikas or Shosta, no, just the local rock group, his own. The needle well into the red.