The Last Life (24 page)

We looked around and saw only occasions for repentance and torment, even where others were rejoicing. For the first time my eyes were drawn, at table, to the frames behind my father's head: there, on the dining room wall, couched in gilt, writhed Burmese depictions of hellfire that my parents had acquired in happier days. Colorful and superficially pleasing, they were also the stuff of nightmares: pallid, frog-faced men and women stirred and bobbed in vats of boiling oil, jabbed by flaming pokers. One woman was made to fornicate with a livid spike while demons danced behind her. And the demons themselves: empurpled and engorged, fanged, with looping tongues and spidery scarlet wings at their backs. All around them surged a burning sea, molten, gold and red, and rather beautiful. How had I seen only the gilt for years? And how could I not see it all, glaring down at me, as an omen?

In November, the Berlin Wall came down, a televised fiesta of torch-bearing, seething, ecstatic youth. In the screen's darkness, in the flames, in the pallor of the young faces, the images were not, alas, unlike those before which I had been lately and unhappily dining. And my father but glanced at the set as he walked through the room, and said, "There'll be a price to pay for that, too."

My mother, who had had a letter from Eleanor, announced that Becky was being threatened with the public high school for her final year if she foiled to improve her grades, and added, in doleful tones, with an unfamiliar brutality, "Well, that's her future shot. Eleanor might as well cut off the girl's legs." I, at the time, was more concerned with Becky's crimes: "What did she do, exactly?" "Eleanor doesn't say. I told you. She's always had trouble with Becky. I've always thought she didn't really want to be a mother. Not then, anyway, and that was why." But looking back, I am struck by the menacing gloom that my parents cast in concentrated beams onto the wider world, surely hoping that thereby my grandfather's guilt—his own, particular sin, which was theirs also—would remain obscured.

The trial crept up on me. I was, of course, trying very hard to ignore its coming: that had preoccupied me for months. For that I was prepared to lounge in alleys and arcades with friends whose company, already by December, had grown dull to me, and to feign interest in their petty diversions. (Although perhaps this disenchantment is in some measure retrospective: at the time, Machiavellian though I thought myself, I would never have considered that I could simply walk away, that I was using them, like an undercover cop, for my own purposes. From an American perspective, I see myself in those months like a member of the Witness Protection Program, surrounded by an odd human assortment chosen only for the efficiency of disguise; but somehow, nevertheless, inescapable.)

Had I been observing more closely, I would have noted the preparations taking place under our own roof. For a start, there was the resumption of family supper. My father resurfaced at the table one night, and then night after night: hence the conversation about Marie-José hence my sudden involvement with the pictures behind his head. For a time that fall, my father, like my grandfather before him, had been the unpredictable, the ghost of suppers—long a tendency, it had become a pattern: a place always, or usually, set, often unoccupied, cleared away after a hasty phone call once my brother, mother and I were already tucked in front of our soup. What with my mother's lack of interest in food and the fact that my brother had usually been fed by Magda beforehand, I loathed those fatherless evenings; the only eater, I felt as if I were a guzzling panda or sleek potbellied pig supping for display.

So I noticed my father's return, and was grateful, and pleased, too, to have him stay in upon occasion after dinner, with a scotch and a book, in his study upstairs, or even, once or twice, in the living room with my mother. But it didn't occur to me that this togetherness was anything other than spontaneous. In fact, my parents were steeling themselves. My father—who, given his elation, must have wanted more than ever to be out of our family mausoleum, fluttering and humming and ferociously alive—sacrificed his desires for my mother's benefit, to pacify and reassure her that the life would continue, by re-creating antique rhythms, for even a month, and pretending that nothing had changed.

My brother's outings in the car were stopped, his walks confined to a few short blocks around the house, because my mother—so she told me later—woke up one morning convinced that the press, in seeking further to defame the House of LaBasse, would seize upon poor googly-eyed Etienne, innocent and indefensible, as the emblem of our distress (the way Zohra, because of him, saw me, metonymically, as tainted and pitiable), and would plaster his photograph on the front page, or at the very least, in color on the back. (In fact, during the trial, not a single paparazzo plagued us, although a snapshot of my grandparents entering the courthouse on the first day did appear on the local page three, a picture in which my grandmother, scowling so that her brows met above her fearsome nose, and with her torso billowed beneath its loden coat, cut far manlier and more robust a figure than her slight husband, my grandfather, whose white horseshoe of hair was fluffed like a chick's, and whose eyes sagged wet and mournful above his milky jowls.)

They—my parents—anticipated press attention, and stress, and anxiety even in their idiot son, and in their anticipation doubtless created all these things except the first; but such fretting was unusual, because the trial's verdict was never in doubt. Nothing if not honorable, even in depression, my grandfather was to plead guilty to his crime.

This was not at all to my grandmother's liking. She sat on the sofa in our living room one Saturday afternoon days before the event, wrapped in a scarlet sweater that made her look like a large bloodstain blotted on the white damask, and she wept. I cast an eye from my corner, my fascination masked by the geography text in front of me.

My mother, as I have said, was prone to tears, and their formation and course along her cheeks were familiar to me; but my grandmother had never cried openly in my presence.

"Ah, Carol," she muttered several times, twisting her tea napkin back and forth, "the shame of it. I thought I could persuade him not to; he's never listened. It may be the drugs he's been given, or someone else—that lawyer, Rom—I've disliked him from the first. He seems to think—and Jacques seems to believe him—that this is the only way."

"Explain to me again?"

"The only defense, apparently, is incompetence, insanity, whatever. To plead not guilty, that is. Given all those horrid kids, all ready to stand up and point the finger. We have to see them, too. That boy, that smarmy one who never grows, the accountant's son—he practically spits on us when we pass him. He was such a well-brought-up little boy, too. I don't understand why Alexandre hasn't sacked their parents, I really don't."

"But not a one of them is sixteen, are they? They can speak, but they aren't witnesses—isn't that what you told me, months ago?"

"The little slut, that Marie-José Dérain—she's had a birthday now. She's sixteen. And the one from Pans, the girl who was hit. Her too."

My mother stood to pour more tea. She was using the silver service, a present from my grandparents. Etienne tried to reach for the bevelled pot, which shone in the lamplight.

"Calm, my sweet, calm," said my grandmother, patting at her grandson's dry brow with her crumpled serviette.

"He's finding it all a strain, poor love," said my mother.

I allowed myself an exasperated snort—how could she know?—but not loudly enough for them to hear.

"Aren't we all?" My grandmother sighed. "You see, we've got the mitigating circumstances, which Rom says will emerge regardless, and to better effect if Jacques is straightforwardly conceding his wrong."

"But—"

"If it weren't for the little Parisian howling for blood..."

"So you've said."

"But my dear, the worst of it is—what I can't stand is—" Here my grandmother's voice wavered like a warped record, and I abandoned all pretense of reading. "They might—he might have to go—to prison."

The last word emerged in a prolonged wail, and it was as if the tears erupted in a single burst all across her face. Slicked with them, her features, like the teapot, reflected the lamplight.

"I know, my dear, I know." My mother—could it be?—perched beside her formidable parent-in-law and embraced her, burying her face in the older woman's powdery neck, muttering soothing platitudes. "Sh, sh, sh," it sounded like. Etienne found this sight exciting and started to bob back and forth.

"It might kill him," said my grandmother in a raspy voice. "It could."

"Well it won't. And it won't happen, so don't worry. It'll be a fine. A man like him? They'll just fine him. It's the not knowing that we find so difficult." My mother said this with her torso still clamped against my grandmother's, but her head drawn back. She resembled both an ardent suitor and a cobra preparing to strike.

"He's guilty as sin. He should go to jail," I mumbled from my chair. I thought myself inaudible, but my mother arched further and glowered over at me.

"What did you say?"

"Nothing. Really. Nothing."

Features rigid, fists clenched, she pulled herself upright, knocking my grandmother's teacup and splashing a buoyant brown stripe along the sofa's white arm. Etienne rocked in a frenzy and started to crow.

"Here," I offered, on my feet at once, "I'll take him to the kitchen. And I'll bring a sponge."

By the time the excitement had subsided, the sofa was wet and my grandmother's face dry; and my treachery, by mutual, if tacit, agreement, overlooked.

I retreated to my bedroom to allow them to lament in private. Sprawled across my single bed on my belly, my head dangling over the side so that the blood pooled in my skull and made it feel ready to burst, I longed for a friend I could telephone who would make the whole thing seem like a joke.

Instead, I wrote at last to Thibaud: a long, rambling letter in which I lied about how things were and how I was and what I had been doing. I noted that I thought of him constantly and didn't understand why he had never replied to my letter from America, months ago. The next day, a Sunday, I posted the envelope before I had time to think more about it. In truth, I couldn't believe that he still existed, so unreal did all of it—my whole life before—seem to me by then. The letter seemed, at the time, like an entry in my diary, and nothing more.

The trial began on a Wednesday, the Wednesday after that upsetting Saturday afternoon. I had only half a day of classes, but it was not suggested that I accompany my parents and grandparents to the courthouse. I was too young; insofar as was possible I was, like Etienne, to be spared.

My parents were to pick up Grand'-mère and Grand-père, and so were ready early, when it was still dark, the bloody spill of dawn just washing over the black sea. My mother wore a navy suit, an Hermès scarf with peacocks on it, and carried a little handbag with a large, gilded clasp. She looked more like an actress in a 1940s film than the real daughter-in-law of a genuine felon. I noticed a little ladder in her dark stocking, poking down the back of her left thigh from beneath her skirt; but I didn't tell her. Perfume billowed around her in expensive waves. My father looked less dramatic, but equally spruce: he hovered behind his wife, broad in his pressed grey wool, a glittering pin through his tie and his still-tan cheeks smooth in their fleshiness, his greying curls pomaded and combed. At the door, as I loitered, still in my nightgown, my hair in knotty strings, he made a joke and stuck his tongue out at me: I was struck by its deep pink healthfulness. A trial, it seemed, was like a cocktail party: providing you were sufficiently well dressed, you didn't need to worry about what you would say.

I was to stay home, miss class, spend the day on my homework: that was their plan, and mine also. The house was by no means empty: in addition to Etienne and his nurse, Fadéla, the housekeeper, was at work, already on her knees on the foyer floor.

I had, at my desk, in my room, a pile of library books about Camus and Sartre for my literature project. All I had gleaned from my studies thus far was that Camus and Sartre had initially been friends, and then were no longer; that neither considered themselves philosophical allies; and that Camus, a
pied-noir
like my father and my grandparents and, by extension, like me, too, had been mired and unfriended by the problems of his—of our—country. I had grasped that he was on the Left, politically, unlike my relatives and unlike most Algérois, who were proud of him but suspicious. But just as he disappointed his compatriots in this way, in the matter of Algeria he could never please his allies, could never be sufficiently liberal, because his fundamental aim had been to hold on to the land of his heart and his childhood—to keep his home; while the aim of the Left had been decolonization, justice and the future. Or, as my grandfather saw it, and doubtless my father too, although he never said, the Left's program—and de Gaulle's—had been a wholesale betrayal of France's finer principles, and a betrayal of us, her people, and of the
harkis
in the bargain, who were her people, too. And of Algeria, for that matter. "And who," the old man would say today, if he could, the paper open to that nation's latest atrocities, with a rueful smile on his lips and his eyebrows fanning over his eyes like a madman's, "who is surprised? Not I!" Regardless, Camus was lucky, my family had long believed, to have met his end before his homeland did.

I wanted, really, to write an essay about what it was like to be penned into a corner where every choice was wrong, where nobody would trust you and where the truth could not be told because it didn't exist. Camus knew it, and in my little way I knew it too. We all knew it, in my house, but we didn't talk about it. I wouldn't write about it, either: the assignment was to compare the existentialism of Sartre with that of Camus. My teacher wasn't interested in their lives, or in my relatives' notions about their lives. I had before me
Nausea
and
The Stranger,
and at my feet other books by the two men that I found difficult to read and impossible to understand.