Once in Europa (19 page)

I started to laugh. As with my tears, I didn't know why.

There was an old man in the hospital. He wasn't a patient and he wasn't a member of the staff… he was there every day. He went out to buy whatever we asked him—papers, fruit, tobacco, eau de cologne—and in return we gave him the change. He was eighty-two. When he was younger he'd been a railwayman. He was a fire-cutter. I saw him take the pain away once. A nurse scalded her hands with boiling water, and the old man put a stop to her suffering in two minutes. According to him he was getting too old, said the effort of cutting the fire took too much out of him. So, one day he announced he'd been watching us all very carefully and now he'd decided, now he'd chosen his successor. And it was to be me. He gave me his gift.

How?

Like that.

What did he do?

He just gave me his gift.

We were in Cluses and Michel drove us to the front door. You were already asleep in my arms. Despite my protests he insisted on getting out of the car. He moved his legs with his arms. He pulled himself up with his arms. His neck and shoulders were much thicker than they had been. He extracted himself like a man climbing out of a trench he's dug. There he stood on the pavement, swaying slightly from his hips.

If you ever need me, you know where to find me now. I was so sorry, he repeated again, to hear what had happened.

Do you remember Stepan? I asked him.

I remember him. He was very tall, with blond hair. Didn't he have blue eyes? We worked a couple of nights in the same gang, two or three nights I think—before I collected this packet. He slapped his hip.

I don't even have a picture of him, I said.

You don't need a photo, he said, fingering your woolen bonnet, you have his progeny.

Strange word, progeny!

You can't have closer, he said. Good night.

The long years began, the long years of your boyhood. Do you
remember the flat we lived in? You did your homework on the kitchen table. You were always wanting me to make potato pancakes for supper. You kept a soccer ball in a net hung from the ceiling over your bed. Your room smelt of glue because of the models you made. The same smell as my nail varnish. You could change washers on a tap before you were ten. In my room there was the oak bed with the carved roses, when you were ill you slept in it with me and sometimes on Sundays too. Remember when we painted the living room and you fell off the ladder? You were all I had in the world and I thought you were dead.

Why do I have the same name as you, Maman, why am I called Christian Blanc?

Because your father died before you were born.

What was he like?

Strong.

What did he look like?

Big.

Was he like me?

Yes.

Was he interested in aircraft?

Not particularly, I think.

You don't know much about him, do you?

As much as anyone ever knows.

Guess what I really want to do, Maman. I want to build a glider. One that will fly. I saw a picture in a book at school. It'll have to be big, as big as a car.

Big enough to fly us round the world?

Yes … I'll need lots of glue.

The long years began. Where could we go to be at home? Régis got married to Marie-Jeanne. Her condition for marrying him was that he give up drinking, and for a while he did. Mother sold the last cow, keeping only the goats and chickens. The trees of the forest, up by the path to Le Mont, began to die. The hillside above the river became the grey rusty colour of dead wood. Emile got a job loading drums in a paint factory near the frontier and Mother lavished all her attention upon him. Every evening he came home
to a hero's welcome. His weaknesses inspired her determination to live to be a hundred. As she aged, Emile became the love of her life. She changed the hay of his mattress every week.

I bought an atlas to study how to go to Stockholm. I found the Ukraine and the river Pripiat. Yet what could we have done there? We'd have been further from home than ever.

Why are we going up so fast now?

The boss at the Components Factory pursued us for a while. You remember he bought you a Sputnik with a dog inside, and you lost the dog? I went to his house for supper several times. He took us to the lake and we ate a fish like a trout but stronger tasting. You said fish find their way in the ocean through their sense of smell. His wife had left him years before. He was nearly forty, you were nine.

Do you want to marry Gaston, Maman?

We are still climbing into the sky.

No, I don't want to marry him.

I think he wants to marry you.

I don't know.

He told me he's going to buy a Citroën DS.

That's what interests you, isn't it?

If you didn't have to work for him, Maman, I think I'd like him more.

Gaston is very kind. He and I don't know the same things, that's all. What he knows doesn't interest me a lot and what I know would frighten him.

You couldn't frighten me, Maman.

When we turn, Christian, it's strange, for there I am looking not up but down at the blue sky.

Michel's shop in Pouilly was unlike any other in the district. The newspapers were arranged in a special way, the left-wing ones always in front. When a customer asked for
Le Figaro
, Michel bent down and brought one up from under the counter with a look of disgust, as if the paper the man had demanded were wrapped round a rotten fish. He sold bottles of gnôle with a pear the size of my fist inside the bottle.

How did the pear get inside? you asked.

It grew from a pip! Michel said and you didn't know whether to believe him or not.

He also sold toboggans and radios. He was mad about radios and could repair anything. On the back wall of the shop he pinned a large map of the world and on each country he stuck little labels like the ones they sell for jam pots, indicating the city, the wavelength, the hours of broadcasting. There were those who said that Michel with his politics and his radios could only be a spy for the Russians! His reputation as a fire-cutter spread. People from other valleys came to him to have the pain of their burns taken away. He categorically refused any payment. It's a gift! he repeated.

Do you remember when I took you to him? You'd burnt the palm of your hand with a firecracker. It wasn't serious but you were howling your head off. Michel came out from behind the counter with his stiff, swaying movement—like a skittle. Let's go into the back room, he said. I made as if to accompany you but he shook his head and the two of you disappeared. He closed the door and within seconds you stopped howling. Not gradually but suddenly in mid-cry. There wasn't a sound in the shop. Total silence. After what seemed an eternity I couldn't bear it anymore and shouted your name. You came bounding through the door laughing. Michel lumbered after you. There were already grey hairs in his black head.

You don't have to burn yourself in order to come and see me, he said when I thanked him and kissed him good-bye.

Later I asked you: What happened?

Nothing.

What did Michel do?

He showed me one of his burns.

Where?

Here—you pointed at your tummy.

And your hand stopped hurting?

No, it wasn't hurting anymore. It stopped hurting before he showed me his burn.

Why did he show it to you then?

Because I asked him.

What are we doing here, Christian, on this earth, in this sky?

I'd been working in the Components Factory for ten years. On the wall beside my bench there were thirty postcards of the Mediterranean and palm trees and cows and cherry trees in flower and a village with a steeple—all of them sent to me over the years by friends on holiday. Gaston had understood the reality of our situation. When he stood behind me, pretending to oversee my work, I could sense his regret in my shoulder blades, because I could also sense my own. The racket of the machines month after month, year after year, wore away principles. The years were long. When I didn't sleep the nights too were long.

The factory shut for the month of August. We never went away for a holiday like some of the others. I gave Mother a hand in the garden. I made jam and bottled the last of the runner beans. When I passed the factory I no longer thought of Stepan. There is nothing in the factory which can have a memory. I thought of him when I ironed your shirts and cut your hair. I thought of him too when I did my face in the mirror. I was ageing. I looked as though I'd been married for twenty years.

Do you know how to measure a smile? Stepan asked.

Yes, I said.

He bent down and picked me up so my mouth was level with his and he kissed me.

You had a friend called Sébastien, whose father was the caretaker of the holiday camp in Bakon, on the other side of the Roc d'Enfer. Some Thursdays when there was no school, you spent the day with him up there. I was glad because the mountain air did you good. Cluses is like a dungeon. When the holiday camp was full of kids from the cities in the north, you wanted to go and find out if there were any flying enthusiasts. Here, you said, people don't have a clue. Already I couldn't follow you talking about “aerofoils” and “wing loadings.” I'm not sure Sébastien understood much either. His passion was fiddling with television sets. He could come into Michel's shop and talk like a schoolmaster for an hour about new transistor circuits. Sébastien was twelve and you were eleven when in August '66 you went to spend a whole fortnight with him up in Bakon.

I didn't have to go to work and I was by myself, alone as I
hadn't been for ten years. On the second day I did something I hadn't done since Stepan's death: I didn't get dressed at all, I lay in bed, I listened to the radio, I took a shower when I was too hot, I remembered, I didn't get up. Mother would have been deeply ashamed of me. Papa, examining the cruel crevices in his hands, would have looked up and said with a wink: Why not, if she can? My life already seemed inexplicably long. The next day I spent at the swimming pool sunbathing. From having to stand too much at work I was developing varicose veins. My hands weren't like Papa's but they were red and rough. I was never taught to swim. I made an appointment at the hairdresser's. Mother had never once been to a hairdresser in her life.

Coming out of the hairdresser's with a scarf over my head, I saw Michel on the other side of the road. He was walking on crutches. I waved and he didn't see me. His head was down and it looked as though the going was painful. I waited for the traffic and then I ran across the street. When at last he saw me, his face, red and glistening with sweat, broke into a smile.

What a surprise! Always in his faraway voice.

I've just had my hair done.

Come and have a coffee.

We went to the brasserie by the post office. A waiter offered him a chair. Obstinately he took another.

Why don't you take off your scarf?

Order me a café au lait and I'll be back. I went to the toilet.

Ah! Odile! A beautiful head of hair you have there! All his words had to be hurled across the ravine of what had befallen him.

It's too fine. It breaks too easily.

Too fine? I wouldn't know what too fine was! He drank from his glass of white wine and lemonade. You remember the trip we made to Italy?

I nodded.

Thirteen years ago.

The only time I've ever been on a motorbike. Afterwards you told me I was a good passenger.

Your outfit has closed down for the whole month?

Like every year.

What about a trip to Paris?

Paris! It's hundreds of kilometres away.

We take the car and we take four days, there and back. I have to go anyway to get a prosthesis adjusted. It's not satisfactory … the left one here. If you came with me, it would be a holiday. What do you say?

It's a long way.

Don't put your scarf on again.

Are we, Christian, a mother and child flying in the sky?

At that moment I was twenty-nine; Michel was thirty-seven. If I'd been told as a child what the life of an adult is like, I wouldn't have believed it. I'd never have believed it could be so unfinished. When young we lend so much authority and sureness to our elders. Michel and I had seen and lived a good deal, and yet, as we followed the Rhône along the gorge through the end of the Jura Mountains, we were like children. When I think of it now, I want to protect us.

It was a white Renault 4. He had covered the seats with a fabric, striped like a zebra skin. He liked putting on a strong eau de cologne which, mixed with sweat and the August heat, smelt like mule. I'd bought a pair of white net gloves for the trip. In my whole life I never dreamt of wearing gloves in the summer but I'd seen this pair in a shop in Cluses, a shop where the bosses' wives bought their haberdashery, and I said to myself: What the hell, Odile, if you're going to Paris, Paris of all places on this earth, and you've got a smart pair of white shoes, you may as well wear white net gloves in August. In addition, they were at half-price.

When I think of us on our way to Paris, I want us to come to no harm.

The white cat died last week. She was hit by a car. Michel was at the shop and I went out into the garden and I heard a meow. She was in the grass by the edge of the road. Her back was broken, so I put her to lie on a blanket by the stove in the kitchen. She lay there, her white mouth a little open and her tongue scarcely less white than her teeth. She turned—or her body turned her—onto her side with her four legs stretched out and her hind legs
straight behind her, as if she were leaping. Slowly, with her two forelegs she wiped her face, moving her paws down from her ears over her eyes towards her mouth. She did this once only, rubbing the vision of life out of her eyes. When her paws reached her mouth she was dead.

Can there be any love without pity?

The Jura are not like our mountains. They are more morose, more resigned to their fate. They would never cover a car seat with zebra skin nor wear white gloves in August. We passed a lake which looked as though no boat had ever sailed upon it. Michel talked about General de Gaulle and I didn't know whether he hated or admired him. Next he talked about the factory. It belonged now to a multinational with factories in twenty-one different countries. TPI. The multinationals, Michel said, are the new robber barons of our time. TPI made eight thousand five hundred million francs profit in '66.