“YOU HAVEN’T RESTED AGAIN,” Rachida chides me when she pushes open the door of the room to check whether I’m still snoozing, and now she sees that I’m wide awake she contracts her eyebrows into a frown of feigned anger. She can never get angry with me, and she knows that I know, and also that I’m quite capable of exploiting it.
She walks round the bed, meanwhile laughing and wagging her finger: “You’re a rascal, Mrs Helena.”
“Thank you, child. Always have been.”
In passing, on her way to the window, where she opens the blinds, she catches sight of the exercise book at my side. “You should turn the light on if you want to read or write. You’ll ruin your eyes otherwise.”
She opens the window. The smell of the summer evening. The residual warmth of the day in the stones on the front of the building. The scent of asphalt, grass, the acid aroma of the tame chestnut trees in the street without a breath of wind.
“I’m as blind as a bat anyway, child.”
She takes the tray off the bedside table, stops at the edge of my bed and gives a leisurely, theatrical sigh. “Again you’ve not eaten anything… just half a sandwich this morning and now just some cold soup. You must eat, Mrs Helena.”
She walks round the bed again, towards the door. “Eat and sleep. That’s what Dr Vanneste says.”
*
Dr Vanneste. The new one. Fresh from university, still wet behind the ears. God knows what’s happened to the old one. Perhaps he collapsed or tripped over his bag on the stairs and broke his neck. One can but hope.
The new one came in, put out his hand and said, undoubtedly because it’s in the course on How to Break the Ice with the Patient: “Hallo. I’m Yannick Vanneste.”
“And I’ve got migraine,” I said.
“I’m doing a practical internship.” He put the pressure gauge round my upper arm and pumped the air in so hard that my lower arm almost came out of the elbow socket. “But next year I shall be qualified.”
Twenty-six or twenty-seven. Solid, tall. A real hunk, but in his head there was a little boy throwing walnuts. When he pushed the thermometer into my mouth I instinctively sucked down on his fingers with my whole palate and he muttered something like “those little chompers of yours are still in good shape, little lady”—meanwhile checked the blood pressure and said to Rachida that it was on the high side: “Fifteen…” He took the thermometer out of my mouth. “And you’ve got a wee bit of a temperature…”
Wee bit of a temperature. Little lady. Baby talk: verbal dummies. If I were his age, I’d give him a proper temperature.
“Is she eating enough? Is she sleeping enough?” He asked Rachida. Then bent over the bed and winked: “Let’s have a listen.”
He slid the stethoscope across my ribcage over the thin material of my nightdress. Those fingers. The intent listening. The supple wrinkles on his forehead, which do not yet make lasting furrows.
“Looks good.” He took the stethoscope out of his ears. “Is her liquid intake sufficient?”
I ostentatiously coughed up some phlegm from my windpipe and muttered: “I have been suffering from vaginal dryness for quite some time.”
I saw Rachida’s jaw muscles tensing, her eyes didn’t know where to look. Dr Vanneste went pale.
“You’re blushing, doctor.”
He blinked, recovered and opened his bag. “I’ll prescribe diazine, for the blood pressure. One tablet twice a day… There you are.”
Rachida took the prescription and let him out.
“Liquid, liquid… If I were sixty years younger, I’d have shown him what liquid is… What do you say to that, child?”
“You were very very naughty, Mrs Helena,” she says, putting the tray down and coming and sitting on the edge of my bed. “I’ll boil an egg. I’ll pour you a glass of milk and do you a sandwich. And then…” She pats the blankets with the flat of her hand. “Then I shall come and sit with you and I shan’t go away until you’ve finished everything… Otherwise we shall get very angry.”
She gets up. Pulls me upright. Arranges the pillow behind my back. “I’ll tell a story. While you eat, I’ll tell you a story for a change.” She pulls the sheet over my legs and smoothes it out. “Is that OK? The story of Said with the Lovely Eyes.”
“Who’s that? A desert prince who turns old women into salamanders?”
She giggles. “I shall tell his story the way my mother always told it to me. But if you stop eating…” She takes her hands off the sheet and holds them at shoulder height with fingers spread wide… “Then I’ll stop talking at once. You’ll have to decide for yourself how it ends.”
She adjusts my nightdress, straightens the collar with a few strokes of her index finger, then goes over to my chair, folds the blanket up and shakes out the cushions.
The ending. Why always that last dessert? Why that elaborate laying of the table, that juggling with cutlery, that measuring of the distance between the glass and the plate, that elegant folding of napkins, setting out bouquets and polishing candlesticks? I like table tops covered in crumbs and smeared with jam, and the casually folded newspaper which equally casually counts its fatalities and crimes—a chance form for the formless chance of every day.
The words and the voice of my mother, and the silence of the body, and the war, which never let itself be embraced by its name. When I was young I wanted to be able to capture it in one light, call down the consolation of completion upon things and my thoughts. But I couldn’t. I thought I was still too green, too impatient, and now I don’t want it any more. No more consolation, no rest. Just sleep without sleep.
There comes an age, Rachida child, at which I won’t say you hunger for death, but you are ready to await it. To be able to become old enough, so that you can await death with the same casualness with which you wait for the bus at the corner of the street, without excitement or hope—it would be my idea of bliss, if I still worried my head about such things. I’m already in seventh heaven if I can keep all my teeth in my mouth while you watch how I eat.
My finiteness, or what is left of it, can still, albeit seldom, fill me with fear and dismay, but at the same time in the certainty of death there is a dim vision of an impersonal consolation which is not necessarily at right angles to life and may be a close continuation. The certainty of one day no longer having to eat or drink or sleep, or, despite all hormonal dryness and fragile bones, fanning the fire of desire—no longer having to go round in circles or send best wishes to people whose birthday I always forgot anyway, but freed from time to return to the great scheme of things.
“If I were young now, I would go out of town, Rachida my girl. Cycle out of town and swim in one of the old river branches. I would go into the water in my bare feet through the reeds on the bank, to be able to feel the mud like a soft cushion under my soles. And then I would say: it’s just dead earth, dead, soulless earth. An old mountain range, a tombstone that has worn away.”
I take her hands in mine. Stroke, as my mother’s ancient grandmother once did, with my thumb over the backs of her beautiful olive-coloured fingers, so soft and smooth in my calloused claws.
“I can dab them with iodine,” she says. “That will make those spots paler.”
I thought for far too long that words have nothing more to say, but it is so good that they do not completely fit with things and lead a life of their own. Did I say it aloud? She’s smiling, but I can see that she’s not really listening. Perhaps she thinks I’m starting to wander. She frees herself from my hands, retrieves the hairbrush from the drawer of the bedside table and runs it through my hair—or what’s left of it.
“It’s almost music, the cadence of your brush in my hair. I should stick words on it. Listen, pull it slightly slower through my hair and listen: ‘The lamp had to burn far too long in the vacuum…’ When I used to go walking with my father I always made up sentences that fitted into the rhythm of our footsteps.”
She draws the brush with long strokes across my crown, keeps her eyes fixed on me, snorts a laugh. I can see her thinking: she’ll come round. But she says: “You’re dreaming aloud again, Mrs Helena. That’s what happens when you get so little sleep.”
“No, child, I’m wide awake. We’re apes, we preen each other with words. Listen to what your brush sings: ‘Time… to break bread… on the table again.’”
“That’s what I like to hear,” she smiles. “I’ll put plenty of butter on.”
When I was young I regarded words as compact, stable units, intriguing stones that I collected so as not to be empty-handed in the face of the world. I made breakwaters from them against the spring tide of light and colour, of smell and sound that could sometimes descend overwhelmingly on me—the world in its brutal splendour, its breathtaking selfhood, which would overpower me and annex me in the tumult of its constant becoming. In other words I was afraid I would die of pleasure.
As time went on I came to see them increasingly as mirrors or lenses, or prisms which dissect the white, undifferentiated glow of the world—as my father was wont to reflect when, at home after a storm, I stood next to him at the window, looking at the rainbow over the wet roofs: “And to think that such splendour consists solely of refracted light…” Carnival in hell was what Emilie called such weather, when the sun shone and it rained at the same time.
I regard them as mini solar systems, words, atomic nuclei around which the electrons of meaning charge, like little planets with weak gravitational fields, the ethereal atmospheric layers, and deep down in their geology a messy memory, although unlike this planet they have no core, not even a figurative one. All I try is to order them in such a way that their constellations evoke figures that otherwise would remain unseen and unknown. I have never filled all those exercise books with their signs for any other reason than in the act of writing to squeeze my foot in the door of the definitive, like a pushy door-to-door salesman of magic cleaning products.
“The time is finally ripe, child, to clear the last shelves. Put everything in boxes and take them away. Distribute them, all those written sheets. Do what you want with them, but make sure their fate is uncertain.”
“First I’m going to boil your egg, Mrs Helena. We still have time.”
“I’d like to be buried in those bookshelves. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to pull them off the wall and make a nice coffin of them?”
“For that you’d need to shrink a lot. At least forty centimetres. Now I know why you eat so little.”
The books, the dead, my mother’s voice in my sleep and the garden without limits; in my head they open more and more grandly that space without location, where a time prevails outside time, and which since childhood I never have stepped out of with more than one leg. The greater part of our mind is an Indian god stretched out in the alert sleep of a cat, dumbstruck, but far from deaf, and if necessary all-seeing. As we get older, Rachida my child, I’m not ranting, as we get older everything we do or don’t do, and say or keep silent about, is drowned out ever more loudly by the breath of that alert sleep in us, which we try in vain to tuck in with words, but which also drives our words. We all speak from horror vacui.
“Do you want me to take the photo of your mother too, Mrs Helena?” she asks casually, treacherously casually. I know that she’s testing me, that she thinks: she won’t go through with it. How many times have I resolved finally to clear the decks, and how many times has she hoisted me up on the tough thread of her joie de vivre?
My mother. She now hangs in a distant corner of my mind; in the dust clouds and gassy mists that make up memory she is a dark, burnt-out star. Her messages reach me as a radiation that is not light, more an energy with different wavelengths, travelling from a tangible absence. All I can do is demarcate a space in which her dull echo can resonate.
She becomes even less material when she occasionally appears in my dreams, whereas I still associate my father with the material, with words like wall, buttress, rafter—my father, who was basically more maternal than she was, the head of the family, the man who formed the mould from which she derived her severe figure. I have never seen anyone as helpless as she was when he died. Even I never equalled her when I lost my husband in turn, but maybe I did with my daughter—when I received the news that she was dead, I broke into a rage that was perhaps nothing but desperation turned on its head. How strange, the manoeuvrability of our emotions. Pain becomes pleasure. Fear euphoria. Love hatred.
When on my last reluctant walks through town I passed places to which memories were attached, I was no longer seized by the melancholy that I experienced until I was about fifty, the years when youth seemed about to tip over into old age. I recognized the fronts of houses where I had once partied and dined. The bourgeois ostentation of cornices and balustrades in wrought iron had a museum-like feel. Some of those houses had become shops, wine merchants’ premises or restaurants, or clothing outlets in whose windows one glimpsed the unmoving elegance of mannequins. Some were still inhabited and had remained more or less unchanged, paintwork a little flakier, stones a little more impregnated with rust, and divided up into student rooms. Sometimes, through an open window, I could see a bit of ceiling, a rosette in stucco, meanwhile stripped of the chandelier under whose arms I had raised glasses, sung, danced, argued, and hushed up forbidden loves. Or I saw a section of a mantelpiece, meanwhile painted in different colours, a corner of a poster in the place where once a tall mirror hung which long ago confronted me with my own reflection like a satirical poem. There was where the pianola must have stood whose melodies we sang, and over there the sofa where I was unfaithful under subdued lighting, or the palm plant in the stairwell, under which I blubbed at my own restlessness and shame, while I bobbed merrily along on the weightlessness of those centrifugal years between the two wars, when I finally escaped from under my mother’s wing by marrying—against her will, but without her sulking.
Times had changed. My brother took over my father’s business and brought it to new prosperity, and I left my daughter with my parents in order to follow my husband on his travels and study history. History. In my mother’s eyes an idiotic but otherwise innocent pastime, a form of flower-arranging for decadent people like me. I didn’t stick at it for long, I had a child that wanted breast-feeding, and noticed that knowledge infected my writing, impoverished my thoughts till they became nothing but sociology set to music. History, that prosthesis cobbled together with erudition from scraps of paper, potsherds and bone fragments, on which we limp through the annual accounts as if time were full of signposts. I gave it up. My mother triumphed, for once without a word.
I still judge her and her life too unjustly, the narrow niche that she was able to carve out for herself in time, which without her choice or will was hers, as if the dubious freedoms I was able to appropriate were a personal achievement—as if time is the work of my hands.
How could I not look back with at least mild mockery at the little hussy I now see reflected in my mind’s eye: a child that smoked cigarettes in cigarette-holders to make a sophisticated impression and adorned herself with affairs and friendships which all too soon went flat or sooner or later turned to melancholy, mine or theirs. As I found moving around town increasingly difficult, looking more and more often at the ground, frightened of the slightest unevenness in the paving stones of the pavement, I looked increasingly inwards, into my own rooms.
I wish I could keep life in my fingers, so it would show the compactness and brilliance of a diamond. I would turn it over and over, study each of its facets, absorb every play of the light, until it extinguishes in my palm because my fascination has finally been quenched. Melancholy turns out to be no more than a thin, transparent membrane, the umpteenth amnion surrounding a human life until, having become brittle, it tears open or springs loose and we stand a little closer to our original nakedness.
When I had trouble walking, I took the tram to scour the city, got off at certain stops and made short journeys on foot, to the next stop, and later still I could usually persuade my daughter to take trips in the car. She did it devotedly; no one could act as scornfully as she could. As long as we didn’t have to spend too long in one room, searching for words that didn’t sound too untrue, she was prepared to do anything for me.
It was she who found my husband. While waiting for the taxi that was to take him to the airport he had lain down on the bed for a moment. The taxi came, the driver hooted. No one came down. My daughter ran upstairs and was gone some time. The taxi hooted again. When I went upstairs I found her in the doorway of my bedroom. She was standing speechless watching my husband on the bed, in his light-beige summer jacket, his hat on his chest, feet hanging over the edge of the mattress, next to the valise. When the taxi driver hooted again she went back downstairs. “I’ll send him away,” she said. “He’s not needed any more.”
I never saw her cry, and I couldn’t either. We sat through the funeral service like stiff dolls, my insides seemed to have turned to zinc, dry rain pipes in which my heart pounded dully. My only thought was: it was just about time. His eyebrows were starting to get bushy, his nose hair too. Down appeared on his ears, he already had a double chin. He wasn’t made for old age. What more is there to say?
He stays away from my dreams, like my child. I sometimes imagine that the two of them are enjoying themselves royally somewhere in a part of my head, some convolution of the brain to which they had mislaid the key. I stand at the door and knock in vain—all I hear is an echo of zinc. Only once did I dream of him. He was sitting here in the chair by the bed when I dreamt that I woke up. He had lit a cigarette; I also caught the smell of the nylon of his summer jacket. He inhaled and blew out the smoke.
“You do know, don’t you, Helen, my lovely, why I drop by so seldom?” he asked and went on smoking. He looked dejected.
After his death I asked my child to take me every year at the end of the summer to the house where my mother had been born; the others had dropped out, being too old by now, too weak, too dead. She always acceded to my sighs with infectious reluctance and on the way there we were as silent as the grave. Once we had arrived and she had parked the car at the foot of the hill, near the path leading upward, she didn’t even need to refuse ostentatiously to go any farther with me. She knew that it was quite enough to get out, light a cigarette leaning against the bonnet and search for a scarf in her eternal handbag, the scarf that betrayed the nun manquée in her, like her belly, the belly of a virgin in a panel by Memling, apple-shaped, swelling, as if her skin, her membranes enclosed not a womb but a clenched fist.
I blamed myself for years for having sent her, in a fit of conformism or to please my mother, to the nuns’ school from an early age. I saw her change over the years into a bigoted type, against whom my mother, for as long as she lived, would never hear a word said, since for her everything was preferable to a creature like me, who mostly got things wrong in life.
She only survived my mother by a few years; just before her death she got one of the nuns to call me, a colleague of hers, at that girls’ boarding school where she had hung on after her schooldays as a teacher of religious studies and practical nincompoop. The nun said I must hurry. In her voice lay the dregs, I imagined, of the repeated reproaches she must have heard from the mouth of my child, but I did not even pay my respects to her body. I didn’t even know she was ill.
I’m sorry to be overloading these final pages with corpses; I’ll be as brief as possible. She supervised, she taught, she died. She wore suits of tailored insignificance and devoted herself to a cult of virginity that looked very like grass widowhood. The pupils called her the chalk line. For a while the rumour circulated that she was having an affair with the head, a priest. I would have been delighted, but when I asked her cautiously about it, she shot me a grimace of contempt that immediately gave me intestinal cramp. I blamed myself for not removing her from the school in time, not having encouraged her father more often to pay her a little more attention. Not having told him to his face that I might be happy to be the dovecote at which he could alight at will in between his adventures, but that the child hadn’t asked for it. But one day, I can’t remember when, let alone whether we were having a fight or not—one day we were standing staring out of the window and she said, with a calm that still sends shivers down my spine: “How else can I atone for the shame of being your daughter, Maman?” She turned away with a scornful little laugh. I was in pieces. I didn’t glue the pieces together, for years I walked over them ritually in my bare feet and absorbed the stabbing pain.
The first time I dared to return with her, a few years after the death of my husband, it was a fiasco. I felt her eyes boring into my back after I had left her by the car; she maintained a stupid silence. I had first, with my legs half out of the door, exchanged my footwear for a pair of boots and then taken the path to the back gate. When my husband was still alive, the last owner welcomed me like a princess for a while. “Eh bien voici,” he would cry. “Not’ châtelaine.” He showed us the silos and the milking plant, and the new barn or the potato cellar, but his pride hid a man frightened to death who knew he was deep in debt and liked a glass too many to anaesthetize him against the fear. He had my uncle’s beard, in which the smoke from around the hearth eternally lingered. As the years went by, at the long table in the back kitchen of the annexe where my mother had heated so many kettles, he poured us increasingly generous shots of liqueur, while behind his back his mistress of the moment, as angrily as the previous or following one, scoured pans and counted the glasses with resignation. We drank and indulged ourselves in stories which I have repeated far too often to do it again here. Around us you could almost hear the ivy and the grapevine anchoring the shutters to the window frames and the moss covering the slate roof with wet cushions.
The last time I went there with my husband, the gate was closed. We went to the only surviving café in the village to ask what had happened. A few village elders recognized me, the daughter of the lovely Marianne, the Fleming, comme nous, nous sommes aussi des Flamands, au fond, écoute—and spoke to me in the language I remembered from my childhood. A language like crude ore, like flint. A Flemish that rose from the chalky soil and became flesh before my eyes.
A factory-owner from Calais had bought the property for a song after the bailiffs had seized everything. He had rented out the surrounding land, and had the house locked up and the contents auctioned off.
“There’s nothing there, madame,” he informed me when I rang him to ask him if anyone in the village had a key to look after things. “The place is a ruin. Much too dangerous.”
When the following year my husband died, going back would have affected me too deeply. My life was one great map strewn with places to avoid, a flight from the curse of memory.
Four or five years went by. The day when I finally put the boots on and set off, I felt my daughter’s eyes in my back. I could almost hear her thinking: she’s still not over it, poor old dear, still looking for her forgotten paradises.
I had to return without accomplishing my mission. The back gate was overgrown with brambles, elder had woven its branches between the railings, there was no way through. You should have seen the pity, the haughty pity on my child’s face when I came back to the car with twigs and thorns in my clothes, a gash in my calf and dead leaves in my hair. She said nothing, she was always like that. Too cowardly to say what she thought, always letting other people do the dirty work, intriguing, and letting other people play through her fingers like bobbins, threading the lacework of her cosy little intrigues and always washing her hands in cups of rancid innocence—how did something like that come from inside me, I wondered. I gave birth not to a child, but to a rusty nail.
A few weeks later I forced her to take me there again; I sent her off to the seaside and she left me behind with great pleasure. In the pockets of my overcoat was a big pair of secateurs. I cut loose the branches around the gate until I could use the handle again, and made my way through the brambles and nettles around the first row of stalls, past the chicken runs and reached the inner courtyard, stumbling over the tufts of grass shooting up between the gaps in the paving stones. They were largely buried under sand and rotted leaves, the subsoil seemed to be sucking them up, as if an invisible titanic effort, an army of worms, were burying the house by gradually pulling it into the ground.
At first I couldn’t open the side door, the door on the south front. A lead weight was leaning against the wood on the other side, and only after I had pushed for ages, with my full weight, did it give way and fall with a dull thud on the floor. A shiver of rustling went through the climbing plants across the stones of the house front.
Someone must have put one of the old mattresses, those ponderous pre-war mattresses, against the door, perhaps to discourage intruders or vandals. The monster lay heavily at my feet, leaving just enough room to push the door open thirty centimetres or so, so that I could get in.
Now I look back on it, it is as if old Moumou, the primeval mother, was pushing against the inside of the door to keep me out with the full force of her primordial size, her femininity without frills—as if wanting to say: “Stay away, child. That’s enough, we’ll manage by ourselves. Decay takes little effort, we can do it alone.”
And when I went through into the kitchen and saw the gap in the floor tiles, the wound of sand where the old stove had stood which the rag-and-bone man had obviously ripped out, of course to sell the steel, the desolation almost assumed the bitterness of a reproach. I saw the dust rings in the wall that marked the silhouette of the saucepans as they had once hung from large to small like a scale of copper above the chopping blocks.
And the farther I went, the heavier the atmosphere became, the more hands seemed to press against my trunk and exhort me to retrace my steps—but I wasn’t there to gape. I had come to mourn, that house was my burial chapel, the storehouse of all my dead, for whom I could weep only there. I wanted, up in my uncle’s library room, to surrender myself to the handful of memories that could transform the sound of zinc inside me into a requiem, take possession again of the longing that seized me in the days when my husband was recovering on the other side of the Channel and my mother guarded me with a restlessness in which I now increasingly detect the signs of the flu that was to confine her to her bed for weeks and release me from her clutches. I wanted to be able to pull that longing over me like a mourning cloak.
Only up there could I escape from her restlessness, flopping on the chair by the table, next to my uncle, who was doing paperwork with mittens on. It was winter, and one of my mother’s attempts to keep a grip on things was to skimp on firewood and coal. My uncle blew on his fingers; I meanwhile pretended to be writing letters.
“The irony, child,” he whispered into his beard, meanwhile listening to check whether she wasn’t coming upstairs again, my mother, for the umpteenth time, supposedly looking for something in the room next to ours, eavesdropping as she rummaged about to the drumming of her heavy heels. She must have been the only spy who hoped that by being conspicuous her presence would not be noticed. “The irony is”, said my uncle, “that we’re not doing at all badly at present. In the past I had to fatten two pigs to get the price they’re now offering for a single ham. We don’t really want for anything.”
She knew it herself. Behind her whalebone our prosperity precipitated as guilt. She made the aunts prepare food parcels for distribution in the village. I don’t know if she sensed any of the resentment that smouldered not even that far under the surface of gratitude, when she paid her charity visits to the poorer families in the area—the paltriness that cries out for revenge of knocking on the door of a woman who has lost half her family with a jar of jam or a piece of pâté.
*
“Are you all right, my child?” asked my uncle. “I don’t think the thaw will be here by tomorrow.”
We felt allied in our penance. Sometimes he interrupted his paperwork, went over to one of the shelves against the walls, and showed me the cover of one of the books he collected for the saucy prints they contained. They were generally daring farces from the eighteenth century, with titles like Plaisirs Secrets, usually sewn into a single volume with the sequel: Le Regret inutile. We could giggle at them like teenagers. “She’ll come round,” he said reassuringly.
I didn’t know that a body could long so violently for another body. My man, my companion, my spiritual brother, his flesh that revealed itself as a synonym in mine. I lay my head again on the soft skin of his belly, the membrane of skin that swells and contracts with his breath between his pelvis and ribcage. I hear the gurgling of his intestines beneath my ear, the hidden processes in the factory of the metabolism, as gruesome as it is ingenious, the beat of his heart, accelerating as he breathes in, slowing with each out breath, pumping his blood through his tissues. Even his brain must pulse to that rhythm under the natural helmet of his skull.
The hair that grew outward in an arc on his forearms and legs fascinates me again as powerfully as when I rested my head on his naked chest for the first time and plucked at those black hairs with my fingers. What hunger, what longing, what lust could rage through my limbs!
I think of my father in the hour of his death, forgive me for digging up yet another dead person from the inside pockets of my memory. I’m thinking of the surge of his breathing, as he lay on his back under the sheets, the increasingly long silence between his breaths—and my fear, which welled up in each interval, but, together with the fear, strangely enough, the amazement at the precision, not to say tact, with which the organism that was my father was recalling the life from his farthest arteries and cells, was drawing the warmth out of his feet towards itself, and seemed to be concentrating everything in his head, and just before he died smoothed the last folds out there too. I saw life sliding out of him, his cheeks sunk, it was almost a kind of relief.
My husband, on the other hand, lay on the bed with amused surprise, as if he would never have expected that nothingness could be so friendly, while when we had sex he was always a lover who gave himself over in deep contemplation to le petit mort. There are men who climax with a blissful grin, as if an opium bubble is popping in their head, and there are those, like my husband, who in those few seconds of ecstasy seem to dream up a whole treatise, a concise theology of ejaculation. Only when I saw the wrinkles appearing in his forehead and his midriff tensing did the spasms start in me, shimmering as far as the roots of my hair and my nipples. They sent starling swarms of gooseflesh through my pores.
Naturally I never talked about such things to my uncle up in his study. He was no longer alive when my husband died, and he was more the type who liked corny puns. But I did tell him about the sense of loss, the confusion of suddenly having a body that could no longer define itself, and did see him more than once give a melancholy nod. When he read my letters, the letters my mother told me to write, he sometimes said: “You’re threatening to become a mystic, my dear niece. Albeit the excommunicated type. But that doesn’t matter, they’re the best.”
After that one time I never returned. I went to the village and waited in the café next to the mairie until my daughter, who had actually caught the sun, returned from the coast to pick me up. I still don’t know if I trembled with rapture when I left the property under the shade of a hedge that had grown into a substantial row of trees, I savoured the dry smell of the bricks for the last time, and the dull, ochre-coloured sand under my feet, and on the bluestone slabs heard the lizards shooting off as shyly as a name or a date you can’t remember—or was I on the contrary shivering with the deepest fear a person can feel: that of their own futility, when the scrolls close and the hymns fall silent and above the candlesticks and flames go out, till we hang blind in time like a glass window behind which no sun any longer glows?
What more is there to say? The house later finished up in the gravel mills of that factory-owner from Calais, ground into sand, and the trees on the farm may already have been cut up for firewood.
I hear Rachida coming upstairs. I recognize the jingling of the cutlery on the tray now she is climbing the stairs. Listen, first she will try to turn the door handle with one hand, without letting go of the tray, but she seldom manages it. She will whisper a few curses and put the tray on the cupboard next to the door.
*
Of course she will have taken endless trouble as usual. The egg perfectly soft-boiled, the top cut off and the yolk sprinkled with fresh pepper. She will have toasted the bread in the oven, poured the lukewarm milk into a jug—the smell hits my nose. She will also have put a flower in a vase, a marigold or orchid that she cadged from the flower stall on her way here this morning. “He goes for my smile,” she always says. “The wider my smile, the dearer the flower he pinches off the stem.” If now, while she opens the door and disappears back into the hall to get the tray off the cupboard, she hums the ‘Snap, Crackle and Pop’ jingle, I fear that she’s having a frivolous spell today. Listen.
“Look at everything I’ve made for you, Mrs Helena,” she says triumphantly. “And what a lovely rose from the garden. It must make your mouth water when you see this. And you remember what I promised you just now?”
SAID WITH THE LOVELY EYES was my mother’s father’s father, Mrs Helena. My mother says that he had opal eyes, thin Said with the opal-blue eyes and the mother-of-pearl teeth. In the street or in the market the girls never first made eyes at him and closed their eyes, because everyone wanted him to look at them and swim in his irises. One of those girls drowned in his eyes and became my mother’s father’s mother—I’m using lots of words, Mrs Helena, because you’re eating slowly and my story is very short, but now you must have a bite, and a drop of milk, thank you. Said, Said al-Amrani, never saw his son. He became a soldier and one day had to sail on a ship to Marseilles. People said a war has broken out on the other side of the sea, the Lord of All Things be praised, that’s one war less for us. That’s what my mother told me when I was little, that’s why I use little words to tell the story of Said with the lovely eyes, I’ve never heard it any other way, because Said has been dead for a very long time, and everything that is dead must be silent—careful, there’s a bit of yolk on your chin. Said had to go to Marseilles on the boat because he was a soldier, a soldier, my mother always said, in the Régiment de Marche de Chasseurs Indigènes à Cheval. When I was little she did a dance with her fingertips in my hair when she said Régiment de Marche de Chasseurs Indigènes à Cheval, she repeated it at least ten times an evening. I laid my head in her lap when she took me to bed, and she rocked me to sleep with her stories and the magic wands of her fingers in my hair. Thin Said with the lovely eyes became a soldier because his own father was dead and his bride and his mother, and also his little brother and sisters were hungry. Said wasn’t a thief, my mother always said, because anyone who steals to fill an empty stomach is not stealing. Without the empty stomachs of our family, Said would never have become a soldier in the Régiment de Marche de Chasseurs Indigènes à Cheval and he would never have seen Marseilles. In Marseilles there are no high mountains, there is no gleaming fringe of ice on the threshold after the night in Marseilles and the women have gold teeth, Said wrote home, to his family, because we could write, we come from a good family, Mrs Helena. Everyone learnt to read and write in our family, but reading and writing doesn’t fill the stomach—you mustn’t leave the crusts, I’m very, very strict this evening. If you don’t eat them I shall soak them in milk and feed them to you. Said had to go to the north, to the far north, where there were no mountains at all, but where there was ice, all day and night ice that doesn’t melt, like with us in the mountains. In the north men creep about fighting in the earth, Said wrote home. My blanket is dirty, it is grey with ice and earth, and all our horses are dead. You think you’ve almost finished, but I’ve caught you out because in the pocket of my apron I’ve got two biscuits, soft chocolate biscuits. One day no more letters came. The mother of the father of my mother’s father waited and Said’s bride waited, with her fat tummy in which my mother’s father was swimming about. They waited a long time, a very long time, but no more letters came, only a message that Said with the lovely eyes was dead. Le soldat Saïd al-Amrani est tué lors d’une attaque à pied au Front Nord. That’s what it says in that letter, I have it at home. The mother of the father of my mother’s father and Said’s bride wanted to know where Said’s body was, but there was no body any more, Mrs Helena, I looked it up, he is just a name on a list, that’s all. My mother said the earth looked into Said’s opal eyes, where are his opal eyes now? First you must drink some more milk, those biscuits are for later. When my father came here long ago, with my mother and my brother, who was already born and is also called Said, my father said: if I find his bones I shall bring them to the surface. I shall wash them and wrap them in a shroud. My father was underground too when I was small. Not to fight, but to work. Digging coal for the stove in winter. If I find Said in the ground I’ll bring him home, he always said to my mother, who in turn always told me, I’ll have them pray Janaza for him and bury him in a worthy grave. But he never found Said with the lovely eyes, only flowers, deep in the earth, coal flowers black as the night, those are my mother’s words. Do you know what the Janaza is? Every evening my father taught me to recite Al-Fatiha by heart—that was his way of telling me stories. I can still do it, with my eyes closed: Bismillāhi r-raḥmāni r-raḥīm… Al-ḥamdu lillāhi rabbi l-‘ālamīn… Ar-raḥmāni r-raḥīm… Māliki yawmi d-dīn… Iyyāka na‘budu wa iyyāka nasta‘īn… Ihdinā ṣ-ṣirāt al-mustaqīm… Ṣirāṭa al-laḏīna an‘amta ‘alayhim ġayril maġdūbi ‘alayhim walā ḍ-ḍāllīn… I said to my father that I didn’t understand the words, but he said: later, when you start Arabic, you will understand the words, but you must repeat Al-Fatiha often enough, much more often than now, because only then will the holy words detach themselves from what you think and start to float, like a roof over your head, and if you do it well, if your lack of understanding is good enough, then between the roof of the words and the roof of your head the whole world looks you in the eyes—and that’s true, Mrs Helena, and that’s why the verse is called “The Mother of the Book”. You are that too. When I come here and my mother asks me who I am going to care for, I say I’m going to the mother of the book, and then she immediately knows it’s you. You’re making a lot of crumbs now. Come on, I’ll wipe your mouth. Eat everything up in your own time. I’ll wait. Afterwards you must sleep. You’ve eaten. I have told you the story of Said with the lovely eyes, the short story of his short life. And as my mother used to say when I was small: that’s all there is to tell. The animals are asleep and the night owl keeps watch. You must sleep now, she used to say, Rachida my almond blossom must sleep. I’ll take the tray with me. I’ll leave the curtain next to your bed open, then tonight you can look at the stars and the lighted windows, but if you close your eyes, Mrs Helena, then, as my mother always said, you’ll soon be fast asleep.