Happy Are the Happy (11 page)

five minutes later, he turned into a cane toad, suffocated by his Lanvin suit and his seat belt. His car was a Peugeot convertible, and as he was entering Paris, a pigeon shit on him. I look for the Hutners. They’ve moved to the end of their row, just in front of the Condamines. Jacob’s on the very end. Looking humble and reserved, I notice, like a person who doesn’t wish to attract attention. André Taneux has replaced the master of ceremonies at the lectern. Blow-dried, brushed-back, high-standing hair dyed a radical shade of brown (slightly purple in the diffused light from the stained-glass windows). Odile and Jeannette had been reluctant to let him speak, but he’d seemed quite determined to express himself. He slowly unfolds a sheet of paper, uselessly readjusts the microphone, begins to read: “An imposing silhouette abruptly moves away, leaving in its wake a scent of Gauloises and aristocracy. Ernest Blot has left us. If I come here today to make my voice heard – thank you so much for your permission, Jeannette – it’s because with the passing of Ernest Blot, we haven’t simply lost a loved one. We’ve lost a happy moment in our history. In the immediate postwar years, with much of France in ruins, there unexpectedly arose a party capable of reuniting people of all backgrounds and all convictions, believers and atheists, left and right: the party of modernization. Its necessary task was, at one and the same time, to reconstruct both the State and the fabric of enterprise, to build up savings again and place them in the service of growth. Our friend Ernest Blot was one of the emblematic figures in that party. ENA, Inspection of Finances, ministerial cabinets, elite bank: a life lived in a straight, unbroken line, in a period that alas no longer exists, a time when alumni of the National School of
Administration were not technocrats but builders, when the State was marked not by conservatism but by progress, when banks meant not the gambling of wild sums of money in a globalized casino but the stubborn financing of the productive base. It was a period when men of talent dedicated themselves not to making their career or their fortune but to serving their country, in public and private, without venality and without vanity. I feel deep sorrow at having lost Ernest, but I console myself with the thought that a great gentleman has left a world that no longer resembles him. Rest in peace, my friend, remote from a time unworthy of you.” And you’d better hurry back to the hair colorist, I say just for Odile to hear. Taneux refolds his sheet of paper, clamps his lips together in grief, and returns to his seat. The funeral director waits for the echo of his footsteps on the marble floor to subside. The director lets another moment pass and then announces, Monsieur Jean Ehrenfried, administrator and business executive, formerly chairman of the board of Safranz-Ulm Electric. Darius Ardashir is leaning over Jean to help him rise to his feet and support himself on his crutch. With cautious, limping steps, Jean moves toward the lectern. He’s thin and pale, wearing a checked beige suit and a tie with yellow polka dots. He puts his free hand on the top of the lectern to assure his balance. The wood creaks and resounds. Jean looks at the coffin and then turns his eyes to the assembly. He takes out no sheet of paper, puts on no eyeglasses. “Ernest … you used to ask me, what in the world can I say about you at your funeral? And I’d reply, you’re going to sing the praises of an old, stateless Jew, try to say something with some depth for once in your life. I was older than you, and sicker, we didn’t anticipate that the situation would be
reversed … We spoke regularly on the telephone. The phrase that kept being repeated was, where are you? Where are you? Our work took us to many disparate places, but you had Plou-Gouzan L’Ic, your house near Saint-Brieuc. You had your house and your apple trees, in a little valley. When I said, where are you, and you answered, at Plou-Gouzan L’Ic, I would envy you. You really
were
somewhere. You had forty apple trees. You produced one hundred and twenty liters of cider per year, frightful stuff I eventually came around to thinking was good …” He stops talking. He sways and holds on to the lectern. The funeral director seems to want to intervene, but Jean prevents him and goes on. “It was, to use your own words, a hard, rough cider, put up in plastic bottles with detergent bottle caps, a far cry from the corked, fizzy ciders of the bourgeoisie. It was your cider. It came from your apples, from your land … Where are you now? Where are you? I know your body’s in this casket, six feet away. But you, where are you? Not long ago, in my doctor’s waiting room, one of his other patients said this: After a while, even life is an idiotic value. It’s true that at the end of the road, you fluctuate between the temptation to oppose death energetically – I recently bought a stationary bicycle – and the desire to let yourself slide down into the dark, unknown place … Are you waiting for me somewhere, Ernest …? Where …?” This last word might not be what he says. It’s barely audible and could just as well be the first syllable of an unfinished phrase. Jean falls silent. In several tiny stages, careful to dissemble his physical weakness, he turns almost entirely toward the coffin. His lips open and close like a famished bird’s beak. His right hand firmly clasps his crutch, and he sways on its pivot. He remains in this precarious position for a long time,
murmuring, as it were, into the dead man’s ear. Then he looks over in Darius’s direction. Darius immediately comes to help him return to his seat. I squeeze Odile’s hand, and I see that she’s crying. The director, back at the microphone, announces that Ernest Blot’s coffin will now be transferred for cremation, which, he adds, is in accordance with the wishes expressed by Monsieur Blot himself. The bearers raise the coffin again. They climb the stairs in silence and reach the catafalque, which looks ridiculously high and far away. A mechanism goes into operation. Ernest disappears.

In the last year of her life, your grandmother was a little out of her mind, Marguerite says. She wanted to go into the village and fetch her children. I’d say, Maman, you don’t have little children anymore. Yes I do, yes I do, she’d say, I have to get them and bring them home. We’d go looking for her children in Petit-Quevilly. It was a way for me to get her to walk. And it was funny, going to look for Ernest and me as we’d been sixty years before. We’ve just passed Rennes. Marguerite’s sitting by the window next to Robert. Since this trip began, hers has been practically the only voice anyone has heard. Since our two companions have withdrawn opaquely into themselves, my aunt addresses no one but me, in sporadic bursts, exhuming various episodes from the past lives of the dead. We’re in one of those new, modern train compartments that are open to the aisle. Maman’s sitting next to me and across from Marguerite. She’s wedged the Go Sport bag between us. She didn’t want to put it up on the rack above our heads. Robert’s been sulking ever since he found out we have to change trains at Guingamp. It’s my secretary’s mistake. She got us round-trip tickets, Paris–Guernonzé, but with a change on the way there. By the time Robert noticed, we were already in Gare Montparnasse, and he accused us of always wanting to complicate things when it would have been so much simpler to take the car. He walked ahead of us on the platform, being obnoxious
and carrying the black-and-pink-striped Go Sport bag with the cinerary urn inside. I have no clue about the choice of that bag. Neither does Marguerite. She asks me on the sly, why has your mother put Ernest in that thing? They didn’t have something more elegant, like an overnight bag? Outside the window, warehouses go by, along with scattered, dreary industrial zones. Farther on we pass housing developments and then fields of turned earth. I can’t figure out how to adjust the back of my seat. It feels as though it’s projecting me forward. Robert asks me what I’m trying to do. I’m disturbing his reading, a biography of Hannibal. There’s an inscription on the cover, a line from Juvenal: “Weigh Hannibal’s ashes: how many pounds will the great general come to?” Maman has closed her eyes. With her hands on her thighs, she lets the train’s movements rock her to sleep. Her skirt’s too high up on her blouse, which she’s tucked in all wrong. It’s been a long time since I really looked at her. A portly, weary lady to whom no one pays any attention. In Cabourg, when I was little, she’d walk along the promenade in a tight-waisted muslin dress. The pale fabric would float in the sea breeze, and she’d swing her canvas tote bag. The train passes Lamballe without stopping. We have time to see the railroad parking lot, the doctor’s red house! (Marguerite says to us almost yelling), the buildings of the train station, the fortified church. All the shapes are blurred by the treacherous fog. I think about Papa, ground up and inside a gym bag, passing though his childhood town for the last time. I feel like seeing Rémi. I feel like having some fun. What if I experimented with nipple clamps like Paola? Poor Paola. Luc drags her around here and there – I wonder if Robert knows that? If I were a generous friend, I’d introduce her to
Rémi Grobe. They’d like each other. But I want to keep Rémi for myself. Rémi saves me from Robert, from time, from all kinds of melancholy. Last night Robert and I stayed awake in the dark for a long while without speaking. At one point I said, so what’s Lionel for Jacob now? I felt Robert considering the question, and I could tell he didn’t know the answer. The train stops in Saint-Brieuc. A long ribbon of white houses, all the same. A freight car from the cooperative
Starlette de Plouaret-Bretagne
stands alone on a track in the yard, some distance from the platform. The poor Hutners. But at the same time, could something like that happen to anyone else? The train starts again. Marguerite says, next stop, Guingamp. When we used to go to Plou-Gouzan L’Ic, we’d get off the train in Saint-Brieuc. I’ve never gone past it. Papa never took me beyond Plou-Gouzan L’Ic, the backwater where he bought the moldy old house he loved and Maman and I detested. The person who supplied the handcuffs and nipple clamps was Luc, Paola told me. Such ideas don’t occur to Rémi. And there’s no way I’m going to buy the things myself. Online? And I’ll have the package sent where? Guingamp, Marguerite cries. We leap to our feet as though the train’s not going to stay still for more than five and a half seconds. Robert picks up the Go Sport bag. Marguerite and Maman make a rush for the doors. We get off the train. Guingamp station. On the platform, a glass shelter, and on that a sign for Brest. Marguerite says, we stay here. A damp breeze slips down my neck. I say, it’s cold. Marguerite protests. She doesn’t want anyone criticizing Brittany. She’s wearing a mauve suit buttoned up to her chin. A silk scarf covers her shoulders. She’s been as careful about her look as if she were going to a romantic rendezvous. In the center of
the platform, inside the glass cage, people are lined up on the only bench. Wan travelers, jammed against one another in front of a pile of luggage. I say, Maman, do you want to sit down? —In there? Surely not. She puts on her overcoat. Robert assists her. She’s chosen flat shoes for this occasion. She looks toward the old-fashioned clock and then at the sky, at slowly moving clouds going somewhere. She says, you know what I’m thinking about? My little Austrian pine tree. I’d love to see what it’s looking like now. Maman once planted an Austrian pine among the apple trees at Plou-Gouzan L’Ic. Papa said, your mother thinks she’s eternal. She bought a six-inch-high seedling because it was cheaper; she thinks she’ll still be there, walking around with Simon’s great-grandchildren. Robert said, Jeannette, with a little luck, right now that tree’s as high as your shoulder – provided it hasn’t been uprooted with the weeds. We laugh. I think I hear Papa laughing in the gym bag. Maman eventually says, maybe it didn’t have enough room to grow among all those apple trees. Robert walks off, heading for the end of the platform. The back of his suit jacket is wrinkled. He walks parallel to the tracks, still carrying the object of our trip, rolling from one foot to the other, looking for some undefined panorama to contemplate from the empty platform. The train we board for the Guingamp–Guernonzé run makes old-time railroad sounds. Its windows are dirty. We pass shacks and grain silos, and then our view is blocked by the guardrail and the bushes. None of us says very much. Robert has put Hannibal away (a few days ago, speaking of him, Robert said this: what a marvelous person) and is busy with his BlackBerry. Guernonzé. The sky has cleared. We leave the station and step out onto a parking lot surrounded
by white buildings with gray roofs. There’s an Ibis hotel on the other side of the station square. Marguerite says, it wasn’t like this at all. Various vehicles are parked in the middle of a profusion of traffic cones, streetlamps, and young trees imprisoned inside wooden pickets. None of this was here before, says Marguerite. Including the Ibis. This is all very recent. She takes Maman’s arm. We cross the traffic circle and go up a narrow sidewalk, past deserted houses with closed shutters. The street curves. Cars come from both directions and brush us as they pass. There’s the bridge, Marguerite says. —The bridge? —The bridge over the Braive. I’m vexed to discover that it’s so close to the train station. I imagined our procession would take longer to arrive. Marguerite shows us a building on the other side of the street and says, your grandparents’ house was right behind that. Half of it was torn down, and the rest is a dry cleaner’s now. Do you want to see it? —Not worth the trouble. —Where that building is was a garden with a washhouse on the Braive. We used to play there. I say, you spent all your holidays in Guernonzé? —Summers. And Easters. But Easters were sad. The bridge is framed by black, iron guardrails. Containers of blooming flowers hang from the rails. Cars cross the bridge in an endless stream. In the distance, a more or less man-made hill makes Marguerite say, there used to be nothing but green up there. Is this where we’re going to scatter the ashes? Maman asks. If you want, says Marguerite. Me? I don’t want anything at all, Maman says. —This is where we scattered Papa’s ashes. —Why not on the other side? It’s prettier. Because the current flows in this direction, Robert says. I believe that real estate agency is brand new, Marguerite says, pointing at the street that runs along the opposite bank of the Braive.
Marguerite, please, stop telling us what things were here before and what things weren’t, nobody gives a damn about that, it’s not interesting, Maman says. Marguerite scowls. I can’t think of anything soothing to say because I agree with Maman. Robert opens the Go Sport bag and takes out the metal urn. Maman looks in all directions and says, it’s awful to do this in broad daylight, in the middle of all this traffic. —We don’t have a choice, Maman. —This is ridiculous. Robert asks, who’s doing it? You, Robert, you, Maman says. Why not Odile? Marguerite says. —Robert will do it better. Robert holds out the urn to me. I can’t touch it. It’s been impossible for me to lay a finger on that object ever since they handed it over to us at the crematorium. I say, she’s right, you do it. Robert opens the outer lid and gives it to me. I chuck it into the bag. He unscrews the inner lid but doesn’t remove it. He raises his arms over the balustrade. The two women press against each other like frightened birds. Robert takes off the inner lid and turns the urn upside down. A sort of gray sawdust spills out, disperses in the air, and falls into the Braive. Robert holds me close. We look at the calm river, streaked with wavelets, and the trees on its banks, lengthening into black spots. Behind our backs, the traffic keeps passing, getting louder and louder. Marguerite reaches into one of the hanging planters, plucks a flower, and throws it. The flower’s too light. It drifts off to the left, and as soon as it lands in the water, it gets wedged against a pile of stones. Beyond a footbridge, some children are getting ready to go canoeing. What do we do with the urn? Maman asks. We throw it away, says Robert, putting it back in the bag. —Where? —In a trash can. There’s one against the wall over there. I suggest we go back to the station. I’ll buy us drinks
while we’re waiting for the train. We leave the bridge. I look at the water, the line of yellow buoys. I say good-bye to Papa. I form a little kiss with my lips. When we reach the wall, Robert tries to fit the Go Sport bag into the trash bin on the corner. —What are you doing, Robert? Why are you throwing that bag away? —This bag is hideous. You’re not going to do anything with it, Jeannette. —Yes I will. I use it to carry things. Don’t throw it away. I intervene and say, Maman, that bag contained Papa’s ashes, it can’t serve any further purpose. That’s complete nonsense, Maman says, the bag was used to carry a vase, period. Robert, please take out that nasty urn, throw it away, and give the bag back to me. —Maman, that bag cost ten euros! —I want my bag back. —Why? —Because! I was stupid enough to come this far, now I’d like to make a few decisions of my own. Your father’s in his river, everything’s perfect, and as for me, I’m going back to Paris with my bag. Give me the bag, Robert. Robert has emptied the bag, and he holds it out to Maman. I snatch it away from him and say, Maman, please, this is grotesque. Maman takes hold of the handle and wails, it’s my bag, Odile! I shout, this piece of shit is staying in Guernonzé! I jam it deep inside the trash can by the wall. We hear an abrupt, heartrending sob. Marguerite, with raised hands, is offering her face to the sky like a pietà. I myself start to cry. There’s the result, well done, Maman says. Robert tries to calm her down and lead her away from the trash bin. She struggles a little, and then, hanging on to his arm, she consents to being guided back along the narrow sidewalk, almost staggering, her body grazing the stone wall. I watch them as they walk, him with his overlong hair and his rumpled back, Hannibal sticking out of his pocket, and her with her flat shoes, her
skirt longer than her overcoat, and it occurs to me that of the two of them, Robert is the more bereft. Marguerite blows her nose. She’s one of those women who still keeps a handkerchief tucked into a sleeve, ready for use. I kiss her. I take her hand. Her warm fingers wrap around my palm and squeeze. We walk up the sidewalk, a few meters behind Maman and Robert. At the end of the street, as we’re coming to the train station’s parking lot, Marguerite stops in front of a low house whose openings are framed with red bricks. She says, this is the spot where Ernest ended up in
The Battle of the Rails
. —Here? —Yes. Your grandparents told me about it, I wasn’t born yet. He put himself over there, among the extras, in front of a bar that doesn’t exist anymore. They were filming a hay wagon. Ernest stood right behind it. He figured at least his legs would be visible. We catch up with Robert and Maman at the intersection. He saw that movie five or six times, Marguerite says. Even when he was an old man – you were a witness, Jeannette – he’d watch it again on TV, hoping to see his seven-year-old legs.