I WAS WEARING A BLACK SWEATER DRESS AND A peacoat. The baby kept kicking. The baby kept crying out, “Goodbye, goodbye.” I kept opening my hand for Nicolas to take it as I walked down the street toward the funeral parlour. But there was just emptiness there. It was just an instinct that he should be showing up any minute to make me feel better. But he wasn’t.
I felt as if I could hardly walk. We always imagine the sidewalk to be so strong. But it is hardly true. It could give any second. Grief turned everything to liquid. Grief could deny the reality of all this. All the bricks were holding one another up. But any second, they might just give up hope. They might stop seeing the point and then they would all come crashing down. And the windows and signs and beds and all the nonsense that we fill our apartments with would end up lying on the street. As if we had all been evicted from our homes at once—if we’d been foolish enough to think that we’d ever had one at all.
Someone else had called the police. They had heard the shot, heard me calling out, “Au secours!” over and over again. Although I didn’t have any memory of calling out to anyone at all. It was hard to remember. Everything had a make-believe quality to it still. And I was skeptical that it had happened.
The words CHAMPOUX ET FILS were written on the glass of the front door with gold letters. The son was a seventy-five-year-old man. He did everything by himself. There was no one as organized as these old men who had been doing the same tasks for forty years. They knew how to look terribly sad but also completely in control.
The place hadn’t been redecorated since the sixties. There was something anachronistic about it. Even the hearse outside seemed old-fashioned. The driver wore a small blue sailor hat and a suit.
Some of the white tiles on the lobby floor were broken because so many people had walked across the lobby floor. Every day there were lines of people trudging up the stairs who were going through the exact same thing that I was going through.
I had already been here for three funerals. It made me feel a little bit comforted to know that I was at least some place that was familiar. Raphaël wasn’t the only person on earth that had ever died. My grandmother’s funeral had been here when I was five, but I could hardly remember it.
I could not make any sense of death. Even though death was just about the most ordinary thing that could happen to a person, it defied everything that I knew about the world. It was like anything could happen now. If King Kong had reached his hand through the window and snatched me up, I wouldn’t have kicked up a fuss in the slightest. I would just have let him wrap me up in his fist and looked out at all the sights around me.
Everyone in the neighbourhood was there because it had been on the news. They were all crowding in and squeezing up the staircase. They didn’t know Raphaël enough to really be devastated. In a meaningless world, they were desperate for a ritual. Everyone loves a sad little tune.
I had been trying to learn how to be alone. But there was a way of being alone that made you feel as if you didn’t exist at all. That was too terrible. All these people in their black suits were squeezing in around me. It seemed as if all the people on earth were gone and all that was left of them were their shadows.
The room where the coffin was had light blue curtains on the wall. There were two vases of lilies on either side of the closed coffin. There was a photograph of Raphaël that had been taken on our wedding day next to the casket. There was also a photo of him from school. Who knows where Véronique had found it, seeing as how he had tried to erase all evidence of his past.
A cold, clammy feeling of dread came over me. It was as if my insides were all rotten and black. Someone asked if they could take my coat and I whispered no.
I looked around for someone to comfort me. Loulou was sitting on a chair. He was shaking his head in disbelief the way that he had when I told him that I was marrying Raphaël. He was never going to be able to understand Raphaël. This was just the cherry on the cake. He couldn’t understand any of us as adults. He only really understood tiny babies who needed to have their diapers changed and their bottles put in their mouths.
Someone whispered to me that my father was here. Étienne was indeed standing in the doorway in a raggedy suit, holding a hat up to his heart. I had never actually seen him look so sorrowful. He was almost acting like it was his fault. He walked over and put the tip of his finger on the flower that was pinned on my lapel. I couldn’t for the life of me remember how it got there.
Étienne was trying to say something. Maybe he actually was saying something but his words didn’t seem to be making it to my ears. His words were like badly constructed paper airplanes that just went straight to the floor instead of having any glide. He didn’t have the words to comfort me. Because he would have to have had a lifetime of comforting me in order to be able to comfort me now.
He didn’t have any favourite lullabies. He didn’t know how I felt about love.
For once, nobody cared that Étienne was in the room. Raphaël had stolen the show. It was a marvel. Death pulled the tablecloth out without upsetting any of the dishes that were on it. Everything was the same even though the world was completely altered.
I turned away from Étienne, still looking for someone. I wanted someone to say that it was okay that I hadn’t stayed in the country. I needed to be convinced that there wasn’t something that I could have done. I wanted to feel that I hadn’t betrayed Raphaël, that I hadn’t been the flakiest wife on the whole planet. Someone had to tell me that I had loved him properly.
I didn’t think that I could bear having no one to help me with this terrible confusion and sorrow. Everyone in Raphaël’s family was feeling their own dreadful emotions. It wasn’t for any of them to do anything but deal with their own horrific loss. It would be selfish of me to ask any of them to help me. But I had been desperate, since this happened, for someone to come and let me share my pain with them.
And how could I ask Raphaël to come out of his coffin and whisper to me that I was the most wonderful girl on earth? I thought for a second that I must faint. That was the only way out of this.
Someone asked the people next to me to give him some room. I looked up and saw Misha squeezing through the rows of chairs to come to me. I hadn’t seen him in ages. I don’t know how he knew about the funeral. I never knew how it was that he was always able to follow what was going on with me. He just knew the way that a parent knew and would show up at your school with your lunch before you even realized that you had forgotten it. And I felt about Misha the way that a child feels about a night light when they are afraid of the dark. For some magical reason, its presence would make the existence of monsters impossible.
It was Misha who came and put his big, fat arms around me.
“You’ll be okay, my squishy, tiny sweetheart,” he murmured. “There was nothing that anybody could do for that boy. He was very, very lucky to have had you. Everybody, even the butchers and bakers and candlestick makers, wanted to be married to you. He will always be thinking of you in heaven.”
This made me smile. I knew that he was an atheist. I knew that he was telling me that it wasn’t my fault. There are things that you need other generations to help you with. They knew the tricks of dealing with suffering that have to be given from one person to another. You can’t discover them on your own.
Misha had been to funerals before. Misha knew what to do. He knew what to say. He believed that there was a way out. In Moscow there were a hundred different words for sadness, and one of them was joy.
I put my head against his enormous heartbeat. Up close like that, it was like the rolling of drums. When you are waiting and waiting and waiting for a parade, you finally feel the drums first, rumbling inside of you, and you know the wonderful spectacle is on its way. Before you can actually see the parade, you feel it inside your belly.
And I suddenly wasn’t in shock anymore. I was able to cry and cry and cry.
Sometimes I wondered why we were given all these amazing emotions. How come you got to feel happy while riding the metro with your friends? Why did you feel so awesome getting high? How come you were able to get that rush when someone’s dick went in you the first time? Why did you feel so frightened on a roller coaster? And then I realized that these emotions were given to you just so that you could experience the full impact of death.
Étienne moved away from us. I think that Étienne was suddenly humbled at seeing Misha do what he should have done.
One of Raphaël’s brothers gave a speech. He stood at the podium in a black suit, shaking and reading from his loose-leaf sheet of paper.
“Raphaël was always a really wonderful big brother to me. He would talk us into going to school in the mornings and come pick us up, even though this must have been really, really uncool to the other kids his age. He would always read to us for hours before we went to bed. We would fall asleep and he would still go on reading. Once I woke up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, and Raphaël was still reading out loud to us.”
He stopped because his voice was too choked up.
My family would be allowed to get over Raphaël. But his family would never ever be. This was the boy who they had raised. They hadn’t been able to look after him properly. They hadn’t been able to understand what he had been trying to communicate. This was their tragedy. Nicolas in prison was ours.
When we got into the limousine, Étienne was standing outside on the sidewalk. There was no car for him to go in. He had been left behind. He didn’t belong. Who knew what he felt about anything? Who knew if he felt at all? Étienne, who wanted everyone in the whole world to revere him, was the one who was absolutely alone.
Where does a mythology come from? Who are the mythological figures in Québec culture? They were brand new. Whereas the Greeks had Zeus and Athena, we had people who still lived in Verdun. They had a lot to bear on their shoulders. They had to invent the whole world themselves. They were supposed to have supernatural powers and achieve sainthood. When really they just found themselves peering into the mirror above the bathroom sink, looking to see how they were aging. Sitting in the bathtub, smoking a cigarette, terrified of death like the rest of us.
Raphaël’s coffin, piled high with roses, went down the street. All the wee children came to the edge of the sidewalk as if it were the edge of the water. And they crossed themselves as the coffin went by.
So many hearses had passed me on the street since I was a little kid. I had always wondered who was inside them. Raphaël had been inside each and every one of them and I hadn’t even known it.