All in all, things had fallen into place pretty automatically.
Anthony turned eighteen in May. Then in June he passed the technological baccalauréat without having to take the orals, and also without any illusions about what would happen next. In any case, it no longer mattered. In March he and his class all went to a career fair in Metz. Schools had come to the freezing exposition hall there to push their offerings. Technical and engineering diplomas were touted; the universities made their pitches. There were lots of daunting possibilities Anthony knew nothing about. The army had a booth as well. He took a prospectus and talked with the woman there, a cheerful blonde in uniform. She gave him a CD and showed him images of a marine, a submariner, a helicopter pilot, and jungle warfare training in Guyana.
Anthony signed the enlistment papers in April. He was leaving on July 15. That was tomorrow.
Meanwhile, he did his daily ten-mile run in the cool morning of July 14. He crossed the Petit-Fougeray woods, then ran around the lake before following the departmental highway to the Relais des Chasseurs, where he retrieved his Opel Kadett. His head was empty; he felt light and hard. He felt good.
His mother had given him her old car as a reward for passing the baccalauréat. Some present! It broke down every chance it could. Fortunately, Anthony could go see the Munsterberger brothers, who ran a little garage on the Lameck road. They rebuilt his clutch for free, then did the spark plugs, carburetor, and brake pads, all still for free. But during an oil change, Cyril Munsterberger finally decided that enough was enough.
“We’ll show you how to do it, so you won’t go on being such a pest.”
The brothers were pals of his father, big guys with butt cracks on permanent display. They were rough-hewn and nice, with hands that never got clean. Hélène called them the scrap dealers. Their mother took care of the paperwork. She was still young, and dressed well. From her glassed-in office, she watched to make sure the shop ran smoothly. Anthony now knew how to fix his car himself. These days when he went to see the brothers, it was to have a cup of coffee and talk.
Once back at his mother’s place, Anthony went directly to the little garden out back. Hélène had found herself an attractive little one-story row house, and the rent wasn’t too high. The neighborhood had been built on the site of an old orchard. A few sickly trees remained from that rustic past, including a plum tree that Anthony had hung his pull-up bar on. He took off his T-shirt, strapped a weighted belt around his waist, and began his series: five sets of twenty. It was ten in the morning, and despite the plum tree’s shade, sweat immediately began to run down his sides and back. He continued with sit-ups, push-ups, and stretching. His back, arms, thighs, and belly all felt sore. He was satisfied. He checked out his reflection in the glass door to the kitchen: slim body, well-defined muscles. He flexed his deltoids. His mother opened the door.
“What are you doing right now?”
“Nothing.”
“Help me fold the sheets, then.”
Anthony picked up his gear and followed her into the living room. The shutters were closed, and she was doing the ironing while watching Laurent Cabrol’s TV shopping program.
“Here,” she said, handing him the corners of a fitted sheet. They backed up, tightened the sheet, then folded it.
“Is your bag ready?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you think to go to the train station, to check the schedules?”
“Yeah.”
He was lying. For the last week she hadn’t stopped pestering him about this. For Hélène, preparations for his departure had taken on a nearly existential dimension. She made lists, couldn’t sleep, feared unlikely calamities. The train schedules in particular were the topic of constant concern. Anthony let her talk. She spent all her time worrying anyway.
Once the laundry was folded, he went into the neat little kitchen. He opened the fridge, took a bottle of Contrex mineral water, and downed it almost in a gulp, his head thrown back, naked to the waist, his hair wet.
“Hey, the fridge…”
Anthony closed it with his foot, then stretched his arms overhead, fingers laced and palms out. Hélène didn’t like what she saw. From dorsals to trapezius, he was all of a piece, a dense, veined pattern that gathered at the shoulder to burst out in his triceps. To Hélène’s eyes, it was just violence in reserve. Beneath the muscle, she sensed the possibility of punches. She’d seen too many of them and now hoped only for peace, a calm paradise without shocks or remorse. A dreamy gray flatness.
“You’re going to hurt yourself, with all that exercising.”
“I’m gonna take a shower.”
“Think about your bag.”
“Okaaaaay!” he said, spreading his arms wide. “Enough! Stop it!”
“Haaa!” she growled irritably, shooing him away like a fly.
She hated his weightlifter look, those beefy arms angling out away from his body like the Michelin Man. She hoped the army would know what to do with that big, idiotic body. Anthony saw things differently. Like thousands of poor kids who had never been happy in school, he was going off to make his way, learn to fight, and see the world. To fit the idea that his father had of what made a man. Watching all those Clint Eastwood films hadn’t been in vain. He had explained this to his mother. Hélène just laughed. She had seen plenty of boys sign up, hoping for combat and exoticism. They came back disgusted with the discipline, bureaucratic and nitpicky, having never left their barracks except to go drink bad beer in small-town bars.
After his shower, Anthony shaved. In the mirror, he no longer saw his lazy eye, only the taut cabling of his shoulders, the flat vertical of his pecs, the obliques, the biceps that bulged even at rest.
The skittering pschtt of the pressure cooker valve could be heard, and a smell of cooking spread through the house. Hélène was listening to Radio Europe 1, as usual. Hit parade titles alternated with falsely cheerful chatter. Anthony recognized “Gangsta’s Paradise.” Then the phone rang while he was brushing his teeth. He turned off the faucet and cracked the door to listen. Between the pressure cooker and the music, he couldn’t hear much. Hélène was talking quietly, “Yes…No…Yes…Yes, of course.” She called up to him:
“Anthony!”
He stood in the doorway without saying anything, toothbrush in hand. The mint flavor tingled on his tongue. He held his breath. After a few moments, his mother repeated:
“Anthony!”
“What?”
“It’s your father!”
“I’m in the shower.”
“No you’re not, I can hear you.”
“What does he want?”
“How do I know? Come on.”
“Tell him I’ll call him back.”
“Come down, for god’s sake.”
“No, I’m naked.”
“Then get dressed, dammit!”
He slammed the door, so she would get the message. Then he went back to the washbasin, spat, and rinsed his mouth. His forehead knit in a worried frown. He looked at his reflection in the mirror for a moment. He really didn’t see how he could avoid it.
When he joined his mother in the kitchen, she was smoking a cigarette and leafing through an old copy of Point de vue that her neighbor had given her. The table was set. The pressure cooker was still hissing. The windows were steamed up, and you couldn’t see out. Anthony sat down facing her, waiting for Hélène to decide to look up. She didn’t.
“So what did he want?” he asked after a moment.
“What do you think?”
She looked at him over the top of her glasses (on sale, two for the price of one) with that expression both annoyed and satisfied that he found so irritating. He forced himself to breathe calmly. This would all be over tomorrow, no point in getting angry.
“He’s your father.”
“I know.”
“When do you plan to go over?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re leaving tomorrow.”
“I know.”
She took a drag on her cigarette, carefully stubbed it out, then stood and walked over to the stove.
“I made a roast and green beans. Would you like some noodles, too?”
“Yeah, sure.”
He needed slow sugars for energy and protein to build bulk. Anthony’s nutritional regime had become a big thing. Hélène had to cook him meat at every meal. His bodybuilding was a bottomless pit.
“What did you tell him?”
“That you were in the shower. What else could I say?”
“What did he say?”
She filled the pot at the faucet and took a package of macaroni from the cupboard. The bluish gas flame hissed as she waited for the water to boil. Hélène still had her back turned to him. He saw her shake her head no.
“He didn’t say anything special.”
“I’ll stop by later,” said Anthony.
“And this evening?”
“What about it?”
“You aren’t going out, are you?”
“I might go out for a while.”
“Let me remind you: you’re leaving tomorrow.”
“I know.”
Hélène wheeled around, holding the macaroni. She wore that face of hers, the face of the devoted, self-sacrificing mother. She had been struggling to make things work for so long, and nothing did, and in the end, there was so little you could do. Over time, she could no longer stand the way other people acted, the conflicted functioning of the world, the way obstacles to her great dream of peacefulness were constantly popping up.
“You know that if you’re late, you’re considered a deserter.”
“Oh, give me a break!”
Fortunately, the timer rang just then. Hélène served lunch. Anthony didn’t lift a finger to help. He complained that the meat wasn’t salty enough. Hélène got up to get the salt.
“Here.”
“Thank you.”
“What time is your train?”
Bent over his food with an arm folded between him and his plate, Anthony ate one big forkful at a time. The food in his mouth was hot and comforting, with a taste of butter he’d grown up with.
“I’ve told you a hundred times, it’s the ten-fifteen.”
“If I were you, I wouldn’t go out this evening. Stay home and take it easy. Rent a video. We could have pizza.”
“For god’s sake, Mom!”
He had straightened up and was talking with his mouth full, eyes wide, as if his gaze could compensate for his trouble speaking.
“Today’s Bastille Day,” he said. “It’s stupid to just stay home.”
“Thanks for calling me stupid.”
“I never said you were stupid!”
“How else do you expect me to take it?”
“Oh, for chrissakes…”
The meal continued in silence. Hélène barely touched her plate, choosing instead to contemplate this son of hers gulping down the food she had cooked for him, one bite after another. Just the sound of chewing, his breathing, the clicking of his fork on the plate. He served himself seconds of meat and macaroni, then ate two Danette yogurts for dessert. Finally, she told him he could do whatever he liked; it was his life, after all.
As she loaded the dishwasher, he turned on the TV. The Olympic Games were starting soon. You saw the same faces, big David Douillet, Marie-José Pérec, Jean Galfione, and Carl Lewis, old now but still looking great. From the air, Atlanta looked like a glittering Monopoly board, bristling with tall glass and steel towers. Everything was the color of mercury, clean, sharp, exorbitantly modern, under a blazing sun reverberating a thousand times, 104 in the shade. Fortunately, this was the Coca-Cola city, so there was no shortage of refreshments. The hum of the dishwasher forced Anthony to turn the volume up a little. When she was finished, Hélène wiped her hands on her apron and lit another cigarette. She looked at her son, then came over to sit down.
“It does feel strange, all the same.”
Anthony’s eyes were glued to the screen. With his tongue, he was trying to free a little piece of meat stuck between his teeth.
“What does?” he asked absently.
“No, nothing.” After a few moments she added: “You might want to take your things up to the attic.”
“What things?”
“All that iron junk.”
“Yeah, sure.”
Hélène meant Anthony’s weightlifting gear, the dumbbells, barbells, and weight bench, all put on a Sofinco credit card. At least he wasn’t smoking dope when he was working out.
“Not, ‘Yeah, sure,’ ” she said. “Right now.”
“Okay, okay. I’m watching the news. You can wait two seconds.”
“Right now. It can’t be done after you leave. It’s too heavy. I can’t do it all by myself.”
Anthony took his eyes off the screen for a second. His mother wore that imperious, bruised expression that had become her shield and her sword. It was her way of saying, “I may be a drag, but this is still my house.” Since the two of them had been living together, she’d given in to Anthony on almost everything, and objectively he had taken total advantage of it. That’s how he wound up with a motorbike, a PlayStation, and a TV in his bedroom, not to mention three pairs of Nike Airs gathering dust in the front hall closet. At the same time, by some mysterious phenomenon of compensation, his mother was punctilious about details, strict about schedules, and frighteningly demanding about keeping the floor clean and his closet neat. This yawning divide led to ever-renewed arguments. Like an old married couple, they bitterly endured each other. Which was also what had made Anthony decide to get the hell out.
“Now,” ordered his mother, her arms crossed and holding a cigarette.
Sighing, he stood up. But she had to have the last word:
“And don’t do it in slippers! You’ll track in all sorts of dirt.”
True, his equipment took up a heck of a lot of room. In fact it was because of that they parked their cars outside. He stored the weights in big tricolor shopping bags, sorted the bars, and dismantled the bench. Gradually, Anthony’s irritation subsided. He had to admit that his mother had gone through a lot. First the divorce, then his father’s trial. Patrick hadn’t gone to jail, but that had seemed the only logical outcome, and they’d dreaded it until the very end. In any case, the violent fight had cost the family what little money it had left. Patrick would be in debt for the rest of his days. It practically wasn’t even worth his working; he would never be able to pay what the lawyers and the courts demanded of him. Between the fees, the fine, and what the loss of his job cost him, he was busted for good.
Basically, it was an incredible lesson. If you step out of bounds, society has a whole set of tools to bench you for good. The lawyers and your bank are only too happy to arrange it. When you’re carrying a six-figure debt, there’s nothing to do but to go drinking in a bar with other assholes just like you, and wait for the end. Patrick Casati didn’t have the slightest excuse. He’d proven himself stubborn, drunk, and brutal his whole life. Still, the result was stunning: he’d been made an outcast, without appeal.
During the trial, old Bouali was called to testify. He answered all the questions politely and softly in his beautiful, gravelly voice. He came across as both overwhelmed and dignified, which greatly appealed to the judge. At the end, she gave him the chance to talk directly to Patrick, his former workmate. Did he want to tell him or ask him anything? Bouali answered that he had nothing to say. His passivity looked like wisdom. But maybe he was simply tired.
“What about you, Monsieur Casati? Do you have something to say to Monsieur Bouali?”
“No, Your Honor.”
“But you do know each other, right?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“All right…” she concluded, twice tapping the file before her with her ballpoint pen.
Each side departed with its story and its grievances. Their failed meeting weighed heavily when the verdict was delivered.
After the period of the trial, Hélène Casati had to face further indignities. The management of the company where she’d been working for twenty-five years decided to reorganize its administrative functions, now newly renamed support functions. Her supervisor made her take a battery of tests to be sure she knew how to do the job she was already doing. Then an outside auditor, a guy from Nancy who wore Ted Lapidus suits and used hair cream, decided she didn’t, quite. So she had to drive all the way to Strasbourg for training, her stomach in knots, to relearn what she already knew. She became a child again, gently rebuked, who needed to be helped along and introduced to new tools in a changing world. When all was said and done, her job still consisted in tracking salaries, that is, adding lines that produced a total down on the lower right-hand side of a page. Only now the whole surrounding apparatus had abruptly changed, becoming opaque, sententious, and anglicized.
A new manager soon showed up at the office. She was twenty years younger than Hélène, had ideas, and had just earned her MBA in the United States, a fact she pointed out every chance she got. She was forever lamenting the pointless obstacles that in France still stood in the way of the essential forward march of a whole civilization. In Berlin, a wall had fallen. Since then, history had been made. It was now time to use office software to overcome the final remaining difficulties and organize the peaceful melding of the world’s five billion human beings. The promise of endless progress and the certainty of amazing unity were on the horizon.
It didn’t take Hélène long to figure out that she was one of the brakes slowing this historic movement. Which led to a feeling of resentment and in turn to a two-month work hiatus and a prescription for antidepressants. When she returned to her job, she found that her office had been given to colleagues two levels higher on the food chain, newly hired marketing staffers. She was assigned a desk in an open-space work area. She’d had to write a registered letter to the work inspection service in order to be allowed to display a green plant and photo of her son on her desk.
From then on, Hélène didn’t do much. She was forgotten. She kept boxes of cookies, candies, and peanuts in a locked drawer, and nibbled. She gained twenty-five pounds. Fortunately, she had a healthy metabolism, and the recently acquired fat was spread around in a fairly harmonious way. Besides that, she was diagnosed with thyroid problems and put on Levothyrox. She often felt tired, depressed, uninterested in anything. She felt hot, but her office mates didn’t want to open the window, since they had air-conditioning. She found a new boyfriend, however. Jean-Louis wasn’t all that bright and his glasses were constantly sliding down his nose, but he was nice. He worked in a restaurant and always carried a whiff of French fries. At least he was good in bed.
It took Anthony nearly two hours to lug all his gear up to the attic. After that, he needed to take another shower, but decided to deal with his bag first. Time was marching on. It was already three o’clock.
When he went into his bedroom, he found all his things laid out for him. On the bed stood a stack of ironed T-shirts, two shirts, underwear and socks, a clean pair of jeans, and a brand-new toilet kit. He opened it and saw that there, too, everything was in perfect order: razor, deodorant, toothpaste, cotton swabs, et cetera. His mother had thought of everything. She annoyed him. He was touched.
He took his big sports bag from the closet and started stowing his things in it. When he picked up the pile of T-shirts, he found two Snickers bars underneath. He picked them up, and his throat tightened. This time he was leaving for good. Childhood was over.
Anthony had certainly taken advantage of it. How many times had people told him, “You’re lucky you’re a minor.” All those years of looking for trouble, getting involved in drug deals, stealing scooters, hanging out and skipping classes, and cheerfully degrading the built urban infrastructure. But being a minor has this ambiguous virtue: it protects you, but when it ends, you’re suddenly tossed into a world whose ferocity you hadn’t suspected. From one day to the next, the reality of your acts is shoved in your face, you don’t get second chances, and people are fed up with you. Anthony had dreaded that turning point without really believing in it. The army was another bosom where he could go hide. There, all he had to do was follow orders.
Most of all, it was the way to escape. He wanted to leave Heillange at all costs, and finally put hundreds of miles between himself and his old man.
After the trial, Patrick had been forced to move again. He now lived in a two-hundred-square-foot ground-floor studio apartment in a converted barracks on the highway out of town toward Mondevaux. From his window he had a view of the health services office, a roundabout, railroad tracks, and a billboard urging him to shop at Leclerc or Darty, depending on the day. Anthony once found himself doing community service in the neighborhood and saw his father coming out of the grocery store carrying a case of beer. Check it out, said Samir, the guy who was pulling weeds with him. Patrick staggered under the case’s weight. It was Aldi, cheap beer. He went to open his apartment door, put the beer down, searched his pockets, found his key, opened the door, and forgot the case outside. Two minutes later, he came out to get it. Samir laughed.
Over the last two years, Anthony had several times found his father asleep in his bed, fully dressed and half comatose. It was a sickening sight. The stained pillow, the open mouth, the sleep like death. After checking that he was still breathing, Anthony took the opportunity to do some housekeeping. He filled twenty-five-gallon bags with empty bottles, vacuumed, changed the sheets, ran the washing machine. He left when he was finished, locking the door behind him; he had the key. From time to time he also came by with food that his mother had cooked. Patrick didn’t drink when his son was there. Anthony heated the plate of lasagna and watched him eat it. He didn’t stay long. At the end of the meal Patrick rolled himself a cigarette. His hand was steady. He was scarred, but that was it. Somewhat thin in the arms and legs, a puffy face, eyes that occasionally vacillated. He was still Patrick, only harder and more secretive. Anthony watched him vanish in the smoke of his hand-rolled cigarette and said, “Okay, I’m on my way.” “Go ahead,” said his father. It suited him, he was thirsty.
During this whole period, night and the pleasure of riding his motorbike helped Anthony keep it together. He went putt-putting along, precisely driving down streets that over time had become written in his guts. He’d been roaming the area since he was a child and knew every house, every street, every development, even the rubble and the potholes. He’d gone on foot, by bicycle, on his motorbike. He had played in that alley, been bored sitting on that wall, French-kissed in this bus shelter, and wandered the sidewalks along those huge warehouses where in the evening refrigerator trucks waited in dead silence.
In town, he saw the little stores that sold clothes, furniture, and household appliances and that would soon be killed off by the new des Montets enterprise zone. There were the well-crafted apartments downtown, rented for a song to professors and prefecture officials. Palatial houses that stood vacant now that the noncoms had shipped out with their regiment. And this was without counting all those little shops along the street, IT service outlets, clothing stores, bakeries and pizzerias, kebab stands, and a good fifteen cafés open to the sidewalk, with foosball, pinball, TV, scratch-off games, a few newspapers, especially the local ones, and often a dog lying in the corner. Anthony made his way through a landscape that was as familiar as a face. Speed, the gray blur of building facades, the intermittent flash of streetlights, oblivion. He would then find himself on the departmental highway and would continue straight ahead, there, to the end. From school to the bus stop, from the swimming pool to downtown, from the lake to McDonald’s stretched a world, his world. He covered it without letup, at top speed, pursuing a risk, a straight line.
Tonight he would take his 125 out for the last time; he would go to the party. He would drink and dance. And tomorrow at 10:15, the train. Ciao tutti.
The phone downstairs rang again. His mother answered it. Then he heard her call up to him:
“Anthony!”
“What?”
“It’s your father.”