IN MY SLEEPLESS night, I can hear the rounds from the Kalashnikov and picture the way Georges looked at me, etched in my mind forever, a look of love, of distress. Dressed in black and wearing a balaclava, the trained killer is calm; he aims and fires with no hesitation and no concessions. The first bullet pierces the aorta and heart of my beloved, then his body drops. The other three bullets were pointless. His body, facedown on the ground. Someone else slumps down at his side, a friend, a brother, and then another, and another. Ten would fall from the Kalashnikov’s thirty-four bullets. Four would be wounded. The night is very dark, silent, and I know I won’t go back to sleep. The sound of gunfire will return to haunt me, keeping me awake. And when I finally drift off, another scenario plays out its scenes of terror.
I see them every night, at around four o’clock, and I start trembling, shaking that won’t stop until daybreak. The two terrorists burst in without difficulty, because there are no obstacles, they scream, aim their weapons at the Charlie Hebdo team, who are dumbstruck. I try to picture the look on Georges’s face, but I can’t. It’s as if his expression has disappeared. I ask myself questions. No, Georges didn’t have time to form any expression at all. His astonishment got the better of him. I prefer that he fell without thinking. Without suffering. I picture it: with his four or five stents, because of his arteriosclerosis, his heart must have failed. A heart attack took him before the terrorists’ bullets. From the first day, I tell myself the story of the heart attack. It calms me down. And still, I cannot get back to sleep. Images, shouting, the barrage of bullets, the violence, the bodies falling one on top of the other. And the color red bursts forth like sparks in my eyes. Carnage. Burning into my impossible nights. Why does evil exist? Where does it come from, if not from man himself, then from fanatics convinced they hold the truth? Doesn’t a good life consist of seeking the path to truth without ever claiming to possess it?
Humor killed. A few strokes of an impertinent pencil and death at the end of that pencil, or felt-tip, or pen. There will be nothing but anxiety now, because there will never be an answer. Sleepless nights, or endless nightmares. The Kouachi brothers, whose photos I constantly see in the press—the very sight of them is a knife to my heart—scale the facade of my building, break the windows, and murder me the way they executed Georges and his friends. This other scenario began after I received a threatening letter. Nights filled with ever more questions. Nights when I write letters dictated by vengeance and despair. Letters that will never be sent. The slightest word in an article, the least mention on the radio or during a gathering of victims, and I explode, get carried away, give free rein to my anger. As soon as the sun sets on the horizon, wherever I am, I am filled with fear. Georges’s eyes have closed forever. I have lost my light, my confidence. Will day break again tomorrow? There is no longer a road ahead of me, only an expanse of happy days or less-happy days between today and the past. Night and day, I must continue to fight without him, without the man who was my support in life.
A war scene in which Georges was killed. These last few years, there have been scenes of war everywhere in the world, on every continent. The fanatics at work. It’s bread and butter to television and to certain newspapers. But is it possible that such a scene could have taken place in the offices of a satirical newspaper, on the second floor of a peaceful street in Paris? Sleep has abandoned me, once and for all; waking up plunges me into the horror of the massacre. Massacre is the word the journalists use over and over again. I turn on the radio and hear: “Massacre at Charlie Hebdo.” Or “Massacre on January 7.”
On the seventh of each month, I shudder at the thought of hearing those words. January 7, 2015, will, of course, be a day marked with the seal of terror in the history of France. To me, it will remain the date when Georges died because of the most extreme violence. The cruelty of separation. The destruction of life. The unimaginable and the horrific fill me. There is also the fear of Georges’s fear. Fear of his suffering. Like François Cavanna, Georges hated death.I He feared it, rejected it. I pointed out to him that he lacked humility. “Stop crève” (“Stop death”), Cavanna wrote. He wanted to believe in immortality and remained convinced that someday scientists would discover how to make us immortal. Georges smiled at his words. He did not wish to be eternal, but he also couldn’t live with the idea of death.
The central police station on the quai des Orfèvres, the third day after the attack. I climb the large staircase that leads to the office of the police captain in charge of the Charlie Hebdo case. Many police officers, both men and women, go up and down the stairs, pass by each other, in the chaos caused by the crisis. Words are called out: “This time, we’ve got them!” Got who? I can’t understand, because I have no idea what has happened since January 7 at 1:15. My mind is fixed on Georges’s body, his body I cannot find, despite the numerous calls made to the crisis unit on Wednesday and Thursday . . . Not one official could answer my question. Two days without knowing where Georges was laid to rest. Day and night, I thought only of his body, his face, his eyes, his lips that would never again kiss mine, his body abandoned somewhere, shot through with bullets, an autopsy performed, without my knowing a thing. The cruelty of silence.
I have difficulty climbing the stairs, for fear of the details I will be told and which I’d rather not know. Sitting in the police captain’s office, I learn that two bullets went through Georges’s thorax. The officer undoubtedly did not have the entire autopsy report, or he was confusing it with another case. Because there were four bullets, as I would later learn from my lawyer. The first one hit the aorta. He died immediately.
At this moment, I imagined two holes in his chest. Two red holes, as in the poem “Le Dormeur du val” (“The Sleeper in the Valley”), which has stuck in my memory since my youth. The lines by Rimbaud surged up as I listened, dumbstruck, to the police captain. A young lieutenant was typing my replies to the questions being asked on an old computer. Had Georges talked to me about threats that he might have received in the mail? Was he afraid to go to work?
What could I say? That he had recently seemed worried, sometimes in distress? Could he sense the danger? Had he hidden the fact that he’d received threats, to protect me? He never talked to me about the fatwa against Charb, and the information had escaped me, strangely enough, even though I read the newspapers avidly. And we rarely discussed what was happening at Charlie Hebdo. I was aware only of the paper’s financial problems. Was that what was worrying him, or did he have a premonition that something terrible was going to happen and found it difficult to hide that from me? “What’s wrong?” I’d asked him several times in the weeks before the attack. “I worry about you . . .” he’d replied. “When I’m no longer here . . .” “But why think about the end of your life? You’re in good health, you have projects you’re passionate about. And life will go on as long as we love each other.” He’d nodded. “I’ve been too careless in truth, and I love you, but I haven’t protected you as I might have wished. I think about that often.”
The police captain was still questioning me when Arnauld, my daughter’s husband, came in, accompanied by one of my best friends, who was also a police captain. She held me tightly in her arms, which caused a flood of tears I could not hold back. After saying hello to them, the captain stood up and left the office. He came back a few minutes later holding Georges’s briefcase, which I immediately recognized. I had given it to him the previous Christmas. The captain gave it back to me, coldly, for that is his job, then Georges’s watch, which had recently been repaired, the gold chain I’d given him for his birthday, and his datebook. It had been found and examined, undoubtedly by the Anticrime Squad. I opened it to January 7. The day before, Georges had drawn an X through Tuesday the sixth, something he’d been doing regularly for a few years. “Why do you do that,” I’d asked him, “as if you were counting the days?” A strange way of counting things that I’d never understood. Missing was the pen that matched the datebook, which I had given him for our silver wedding anniversary, some twenty years earlier. “We didn’t find a pen with the datebook,” the police captain told me. Finally, he gave me Georges’s wallet, but his identity card was missing. I pointed that out. “We keep the identity cards,” the captain explained. All that was left was his press card and some money. Arnauld had taken the briefcase from me.
My friend was talking to the captain about the repercussions of the attack. I held Georges’s things tightly in my hands, as if they were treasures that had been lost, then found. The captain opened a drawer and took something out; I couldn’t see what it was right away. Then he went around to the other side of the table piled high with files, came over to me, and handed me Georges’s wedding ring. The tears I had managed to control for a few minutes started flowing again. He had worn that wedding ring since July 3, 1971; he’d never once taken it off since the day we got married in Canapville, a village in Normandy where we had commandeered two witnesses. The mayor was over an hour late. His Citroën had broken down. Georges liked reminding me that he had never taken off his ring, and that he was proud of that, because I had already lost two wedding rings, since I can’t stand wearing any jewelry when I’m working. “A wedding ring is not jewelry.” I can hear him saying those words, a loving reproach.
Two red holes while he was still holding his pencil.
I. François Cavanna (1923–2014) was an author and editor of satirical newspapers. He contributed to the creation and success of Hara-Kiri and Charlie Hebdo. He also translated books about famous cartoonists.