The Last Life (21 page)

The Gambettas stood beyond surprise. Madame Gambetta's cherry mouth fell agape, and her fingers fluttered to her hair as if its bun might unravel from the shock.

"What's this, what's this?" sputtered Gambetta.

"My family—a funeral—she must come with me to France."

"Quite. Oh, quite, but my boy, I don't see how—"

"I thought we could put her on the floor. I'll sleep on top of her. She wont really be in your way. Its not so far. I'm sorry, but you must understand—"

"Quite. Oh yes, of course, but I don't—well, no. I see." Monsieur Gambetta sat back on his suitcase, his features crumpling in defeat. "No, you're right. Naturally. We'll manage. She is, uh, properly—I mean, the box is—" He pulled at the fleshy lobe of his ear. "It's just, it's very hot weather, you know?"

"It's a proper coffin. Very solid."

"Yes, I can see that. It seems extremely—big."

"He didn't have her measurements."

"No. I see."

Madame Gambetta stepped forward and spoke in a whisper from behind her linen handkerchief. "You're absolutely sure she won't smell? I'm very sensitive, I can't help it. I should be sick."

"There's been no time. She's only just gone. And the coffin is very solid."

"As long as she doesn't smell."

How I pity the poor Gambettas, whose kindness was repaid with a corpse. But they were not going to abandon the boy there—how could they?—and he too young to be mixed up in such a business. He should have been flirting on the esplanade, as handsome as he was, not standing hunched and crushed before them with the burden of the dead on his shoulders.

"We're all on a hard road," said Gambetta. "But we're on it together."

"And Our Saviour will guide us," said Madame, crossing herself. A moment later, when she thought my father's attention elsewhere, she rolled her eyes at her husband and hissed, "
Quel cauchemar!
" What a nightmare.

But the Lord showed mercy upon the Gambettas. When the moment came to board, Monsieur was called upon to fight for my great-grandmother, and he did. "I paid for the cabin and I can put in it anything that I choose. I could transport a horse or a washing machine if I wanted to. The space is mine. Now give this boy a hand and show some respect for the dead."

Madame stood to one side, all sombre dignity, and shook her head. "Imagine," she murmured to a cluster of fellow passengers. "The boy is bereaved and they want to rob him of a proper funeral. As if selling out our homeland weren't disgrace enough."

A minor uproar ensued—had these people not lost everything? could they countenance a further theft?—as a result of which the coffin was hoisted up the gangplank by two sailors, on whose impressive musculature the great weight appeared to float. The Gambettas followed, and Alexandre, all of them laden with the
bibelots
of the Gambettas' apartment in bulging leather cases.

The party crossed the deck and stood, arrested for a time, while the deceased and her casing were maneuvered down the narrow well to the floor below, where the Gambettas' cabin was located. There, the grey corridor was very narrow, and the coffin could only advance on its side.

"Be careful," urged Alexandre, picturing his grandmother pressed between the velvet cushions.

"Show some respect," admonished Gambetta again.

But when they reached the cabin door, it immediately became clear that there was not sufficient space to turn the coffin.

"We won't be able to get it in," said the sailor in front. "There's no room. The angle is too sharp. The corridor's too narrow. Won't go round."

"Try, man. You haven't even tried," said Gambetta. Madame shook her head, whether in agreement with the sailor or her husband it was not clear.

They tried. For a quarter of an hour they tried. They tipped the coffin on its end, they pushed and scraped it; they pulled and grappled with it, their breaths spuming in the heat. Even the strong men wearied at the box's terrible weight. And the sailor was right: my great-grandmother would not, could not, share the Gambettas' cabin.

"What now?" asked my father, his limbs jellying from the prolonged emotion.

"What indeed?" asked Gambetta.

The first mate was summoned, and then the captain. The corridor, so full of people, grew stuffy, and Madame, tightly corseted, threatened to faint. Alexandre fanned her busily with the packet of family photos from his bag, which made only a little breeze.

The captain, a slight man with a prissy moustache and crooked teeth, stood silent for some minutes, his arms folded across his brass-buttoned breast.

"I have a proposal," he said at length to Monsieur Gambetta, leaning forward on his toes as if sharing a secret.

"This young man is the next of kin," said Gambetta. "Put your proposal to him."

"In principle," said the captain, turning to lean towards Alexandre, "coffins aren't allowed. Not at this time, when we need every square foot for passengers. They count as furniture, you see."

"But my grandmother—"

The captain raised a hand to silence my father. "Hear me out, young man. I appreciate your difficulty. I was going to suggest, for the dignity of all concerned, a burial at sea."

"Well—indeed," said Gambetta.

"How perfect," breathed Madame, her color returning. "A solution."

"I suppose—I guess—what choice do I have?" asked my father, who by now felt so unwell that he had turned his improvised fan on himself, and was beating furiously.

"None," said the captain. "If you wish to sail today."

And so my great-grandmother came to rest in the mouth of the Bay of Algiers. No sooner was the ship under way (its decks a writhe of passengers, their waving arms like an infestation of worms) than the captain stood up at the stern, the coffin held aloft beside him by four solemn-faced sailors (one of them all but chinless, so that his mouth seemed inadvertently to fall open) and read through a silvery megaphone the prayers for the dead. My father stood there also, by the railing, and when he bent to kiss the coffin, his tears fell in splotches onto the rough wood.

The crowd on shore could see the funeral too, or so my father believed, because they seemed to grow still, and a hush fell over the bay in the brilliant afternoon sun. When the coffin slipped, with a muted splash, into the oily Mediterranean, and was swallowed, the ship's human cargo stood motionless and wide-eyed: mourning this reminder of the dead they left behind, and their own deaths to come, and the glinting white glory of their city, lost to them like Adantis, wavering there on the hillside, so near, but gone forever.

So I, who then still could, went home. It was, as my father took my bag from the BMW trunk and set it on the white gravel, and Etienne swayed in his chair in the front doorway with such force that his straps squeaked, and my mother, poised to push him down the ramp towards me, paused to hop, a little, and throw her dainty hand over her open mouth in a gesture of girlish pleasure; as the hairs on my skin rose to the dry salt breeze, which carried upon it an edge of burning and the end of summer—it was as if, with my father's arm around my shoulder, and our steps on the shimmering stones as crisp as those on Arctic snow, closing the gap between us and my mother and brother until there was none, and the insects seemed to quiet their whirring and the very air to pause—as if I had come home to utter reassurance, and to rest. But that sun-sprinkled reunion on our drive was only an apparent amnesty.

My grandfather had returned to the Bellevue, of course, and to his wife, whose brisk solicitude and defiance would drag him, combed and jacketed, through the next day and the next; and so our house—my house, the one in which we had lived since I was five or so, built in readiness for the wheelchair my brother did not then yet have; and so, perhaps, more his house than mine—was ours, or mine, or his again. But the shadows of that first week and of the trial yet to come flitted in the corridors as present as ghosts or mice, scrabbling in the walls, or in our minds, intermittent but never wholly gone.

In my absence, my mother, who had no extra flesh to lose, had nonetheless shrunk, so that her stylish blouses hung with breezy awkwardness from her shoulders and her tendons bulged. My father, as if he had fed upon his wife, had billowed, his neck like a toad's in full song, itching, slickly shaven, at his collar. The living room looked whiter, the light more harsh, and my footsteps on the marble rang more loudly than I recalled, like footsteps in a hospital. Only Etienne was the same, grasping—or trying to—for my hair, my T-shirt, my biscuity airplane smell.

"You've grown," my mother said.

"I don't think so."

"You've lost weight, then."

"In America? No chance. You're the one—"

"Don't be silly."

"She's like a bird, your mother. I'm waiting for her to fly away."

"Oh Alexandre!"

He put his arms around us both. "I'm just glad to have both my beautiful women with me, where you belong."

We squirmed, wife and daughter. It shames me to remember it, but we did.

"You're so hot," my mother complained, wriggling free. "You emanate heat."

"One kiss?" he called after her, as she headed for the kitchen.

"Not now."

"Why not?"

Her voice was faint, around corners and through doors now; but audible. "I don't want to."

"You won't reject your poor father, will you?"

I said nothing, submitted to his moist embrace. It was my first night home, and I saw no reason to spoil it.

That moment in front of the house blooms so clearly in my memory, as if it had lasted for hours, and yet the weeks that followed, the months even, surface in an ill-assorted jumble. Through them all moves the smell of wet earth, the dulled roar of rain. The weather that autumn was bad for morale, bad for the Bellevue's revenues, as the British and other northerners opted to stay home with their own damp rather than to pay for the privilege of ours. Even in the cocoon of my almost-childhood, I caught whispers of global economic disaster: words like "recession" and "downturn" and "belt-tightening" sifted into playground conversation. In those months before Christmas the Berlin Wall would crumble, and the television would echo the Germans' carousing through our living room. The newspapers suggested that all wars might be drawing to a close, that our century's long-abandoned notions of progress—towards a better world, inhabited by better men—should perhaps be dusted off and reexamined. In the same breath, it was proposed that the recession upon us might now be permanent, just punishment for a prolonged era of excess.

But in our lives these momentous happenings and their attendant prophecies tinkled like distant bells. Our days, as they grew smaller and darker, alongside a slate-colored sea, were fashioned around my grandfather's imminent trial. It loomed among us, unspoken, unen-visioned, and we bumped against it only to shy away:

"Christmas? Well, it all depends. We'll see." My mother, to me.

"A dinner party for our anniversary? Not before. I think we'd better wait." Papa, to my mother.

"Not in November. No houseguests in November. You know we can't." One to the other, I don't know which.

In the last days before school started, I didn't go to the hotel once. I have no memory of seeing my grandparents, although I must have: I felt ashamed of my grandfather, and certain that he, too, must be ashamed in front of me. It was my life, after all, that had been most gravely affected by his error, or so I thought, as I began again to miss Marie-José and to dread the lycée. Nobody mentioned that he, too, had lost friends and reputation; or that my parents had; or that he might actually go to jail.

I know that I was denied the shopping spree that usually preceded the return to classes. My mother allowed me one sweater—a charcoal angora turtleneck, which I chose for myself and stroked and held against my cheek in the bluish light of the department store, and again in the privacy of my bedroom; and which, after that hideous autumn, I never wore again, believing somehow that it had soaked up the ugliness and that it rendered me ugly; or uglier, because it was a time in which my looks became extravagantly important to me, when each glance in the mirror disappointed my vanity—and that was all. We couldn't afford more, she explained, in those uncertain times. Maybe later, she said, when the cost of "all this" was clearer.

"Remember, chickadee," my mother whispered in English one night by my bedside, "it's not that your life is so hard, it's just a little harder, for a while. Up till now, we've been lucky, that's all. You'll be lucky again."

I decided, in my anger, that they liked it, that adversity strengthened them: my mother whittled to pure bone, my father sinking into flesh, but both of them emerging purer, more utterly themselves. In those months, they seemed to draw together. The murmur of their voices in the night was rare, but that murmur almost never rose or broke in the waves of ire to which I had long been accustomed. I took this, at least, as a good sign (how curiously we read the runes of everyday life): I deemed the portents of our household, like those of the wider world, mixed.

Fourteen, the Stoics believed, is the age at which reason pullulates, as natural as the spring, in the young mind; but as it mingles with the breast's instinct, or as the two did in me, surely they give birth to unlikely forms. What, after all, is reason, but a means to lead us along the paths of our own desire? We find hope where we can, and where we cannot, invent it.

I went, of course, to school; but school, for me, had changed. I took the same bus, to the same mournful grey brick building. The school was still protected from the street by its forbidding wall and iron gate; its forecourt was still cobbled and rang with adolescent clatter in the breaks; the hallways still smelled of must and disinfectant, and the same wall-eyed Arab mopped them, endlessly, through the afternoons. I was entering the
troisième,
my schoolbag bloated with a panoply of subjects as it would not be again—geography and Latin, philosophy, physics and literature. Soon I would choose, and focus my studies, but there were exams to pass first, at the end of that year.