Babylon Read online

  BABYLON

  Yasmina Reza

  Translated by Linda Asher

  Seven Stories PressNew York • Oakland • London

  Copyright © 2016 by Yasmina Reza, Flammarion.

  English translation © 2018 by Linda Asher

  This work received support from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States through their publishing assistance program.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, writing or recording, or through any other system for the storage or retrieval of information without the written permission of the publisher.

  Seven Stories Press

  140 Watt Street

  New York, NY 10013

  www.sevenstories.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Reza, Yasmina. | Asher, Linda translator.

  Title: Babylon / Yasmina Reza ; translated by Linda Asher.

  Other titles: Babylone. English

  Description: Seven Stories Press first edition. | New York, NY : Seven Stories Press, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018003838 | ISBN 9781609808327 (hardcover) ISBN 9781609808334 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Murder--Investigation--Fiction. | GSAFD: Suspense fiction

  Classification: LCC PQ2678.E955 B3313 2018 | DDC 843/.914--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018003838

  Book design by Jon Gilbert

  Printed in the USA.

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  for Didier Martiny

  “The world isn’t tidy; it’s a mess.

  I don’t try to make it neat.”

  —GARRY WINOGRAND

  He’s against a wall, in the street. Standing there in suit and tie. He has ears that stick out, a frightened glance, short white hair. He’s thin, narrow shoulders. He’s holding out a maga-zine with the word awake on it. The photo caption reads “Jehovah’s Witness—Los Angeles.” The picture dates from 1955. He looked like a little boy.

  He’s been dead a long time. He was properly dressed for handing out religious tracts. He was alone, driven by a sad, sullen perseverance. At his feet there seems to be a briefcase—the handle shows—that holds dozens more copies that nobody, or hardly anybody, will take from him. And those tracts, in huge printings, recall death as well. The spurts of optimism—too many glasses, too many chairs—that drive us to accumulate things and soon turn them futile. Things and our efforts. The wall he’s standing against is massive. You sense that from its heavy opaqueness, from the size of the stone blocks. It is probably still standing, there in Los Angeles. The rest has gone scattered somewhere: the little man in a loose suit with his pointed ears who’s set up in front of it to hand out a religious magazine, his white shirt and his dark tie, his trousers worn thin at the knees, his briefcase, his magazines. What does it matter what a person is, thinks, becomes? You’re somewhere in the landscape until the day you’re not anymore. Yesterday it was raining. I picked up Robert Frank’s The Americans, it had got lost in the bookcase, stuck at the back of a shelf. I reopened the book I hadn’t opened for forty years. I remembered the fellow standing on a street selling a magazine. The photo is grainier, paler than I thought. I wanted to see it again, The Americans, the saddest book on earth. Dead people, gas pumps, people alone in cowboy hats. Turning the pages you see a parade of jukeboxes, television sets, trappings of the new prosperity. They’re just as alone as the man, these oversized new objects, too heavy, too bright, set down in spots unprepared for them. One fine day someone carries them off. They’ll make another little journey, jostled along to the dump. You’re somewhere in the landscape until the day you’re not. I thought of the Scopitone jukebox in the harbor at Dieppe. We took off in the little Renault 2CV at three in the morning to go and see the sea. I must have been no more than seventeen and I was in love with Joseph Denner. We barreled along, seven of us, in the jalopy with its belly dragging on the road. I was the only girl. Denner was driving. We headed toward Dieppe drinking from a bottle of Red Valstar. We got to the port at six, we went into the first tavern we saw and got some Picon beer. There was a Scopitone in the place. We cracked up watching the performers. At one point Denner put on Fernand Raynaud, “The Butcher,” and we laughed till we cried, from the show and from the Picon.

  Then we drove back. We were young. We didn’t know it was irretrievable. Today I’m sixty-two years old. I can’t say I’ve figured out how to be happy in life, I couldn’t give myself a score of fourteen out of twenty when I come to die, like that colleague of Pierre’s who said “Well— maybe fourteen out of twenty,” I’d give myself maybe a twelve, because less would look ungrateful or hurt someone, I’d cheat and say twelve out of twenty. When I’m in the ground what difference will it make? Nobody will care whether or not I managed to be happy in life, and I won’t much care either.

  On my sixtieth birthday, Jean-Lino Manoscrivi invited me to the racetrack at Auteuil. We ran into each other in the stairwell, we were both going up on foot, I to keep a presentable figure, he out of a phobia for enclosed spaces. He was skinny, not tall, a pockmarked face, a high forehead stretching back to the balding man’s usual comb-over. He wore glasses with thick frames that made him look old. He lived on the fifth floor, I on the fourth. It made for a kind of complicity, these encounters in the enclosed stairwell no one else ever used. In some modern-day apartment buildings, the stairs are set off and ugly, only used by moving men. In fact the tenants call it the service staircase. For a while, he and I weren’t really acquainted, I just knew he worked in appliances; he knew I worked at the Pasteur Institute. My job title—patent engineer—means nothing to people and I no longer try to describe it in any appealing way. Once, Pierre and I had gone upstairs to have a drink at their place, as couples. His wife was some sort of New Age therapist who used to manage a shoe store. They were recently married—I mean, compared to us. Running into Jean-Lino in the stairwell the night before my birthday, I had said, “I’m turning sixty tomorrow.” I was dragging my feet and it just came to me like that. “You’re not sixty yet, are you, Jean-Lino?” “Soon,” he answered. I could see that he wanted to say something nice but he didn’t dare. As we got to my floor I added, “It’s all over for me, I give up.” He asked if I’d ever been to the races. I said no. Stammering a little, he suggested that if I was free, maybe I might join him the next day at Auteuil at lunchtime. When I got to the track he was settled in the restaurant, pressed against the glass wall over the paddock. On the table, a bottle of champagne in a bucket, the turf papers spread out all marked up, peanut shells scattered among old ticket stubs. He was waiting for me like a relaxed fellow hosting friends at his club, in total contrast to the way I knew him. We snacked on some rich dish he chose. He got excited over each race, jumping up, roaring, brandishing his fork with its dangling strands of poached leek. Every five minutes he would go out to smoke half a cigarette and come back in with new strategies. I’d never seen him with that level of energy, and certainly not of happiness. We placed some minor bets on horses whose potential we knew nothing about, he had “a hunch” about them, his private convictions. He won a little bit, maybe the price of the champagne (we’d drunk the whole bottle, mostly he). I pocketed three euros. Three euros, I said to myself, on the day you turned sixty—nice. I sensed that Jean-Lino Manoscrivi was lonely. A Robert Frank character for our times. With his Bic pen and his racing journal, and especially with his fedora. He had put together a little ritual for himself, he’d carved out a space in time that suited him. At the racetrack he took on broader shoulders, even his voice changed.

  I thought about my father’s sixtieth birthday. We went to eat choucroute at Ré
publique. That was the age for parents—an enormous, abstract age. Now you’re the one who’s that age. How can that be? A girl cuts up a little, trots through life in spike heels and face paint, and suddenly she’s sixty. I would go off to take pictures with Joseph Denner. He liked photography and I liked everything he liked. I cut my biology classes. Nobody worried about the future in those years. An uncle had given me a secondhand Konika, real professional-looking, all the more since I’d picked up a Nikon strap. Denner had an Olympus that wasn’t reflex, we’d focus with a built-in rangefinder. The idea was we would both shoot the same subject at the same instant from the same position and then each make our own image. We’d shoot the street like the greats we admired—passersby and animals at the zoo across from school, but mainly inside the bars Denner was fond of around the Cardinet Bridge. The drifters, the barflies mummified in the cubicles in back. We would develop the contact sheets at some friend’s place. We’d compare them and pick the good ones to blow up. What was the “good” one—the best composed? the one that caught some tiny unfathomable interaction? Who can say? I think about Joseph Denner regularly. Sometimes I wonder how he would have turned out. But a guy who dies of cirrhosis of the liver at thirty-six, how could he turn out? Since this thing happened here, it’s as if he’s been invited back into my head. The whole business would have really made him laugh. The Americans gave me back some images of being young. We daydreamed and did nothing. We’d watch people go by, we’d make up lives for them, decide what objects they looked like—a mallet, a bandage . . . We’d laugh. Underneath the laughter there was a slightly bitter boredom. I’d really like to see them again, those pictures we took around the Cardinet Bridge. They probably got thrown out here one day with old papers. After that birthday at Auteuil, I developed some affection for Jean-Lino Manoscrivi. If we left the building at the same time we’d walk a little ways together and sometimes we’d have a coffee at the corner. Outdoors he could smoke, at home not. I saw him as a very gentle man, and I still see him that way. There was never any familiarity between us and we always used the formal vous. But we did talk, we sometimes told each other things we didn’t tell other people. He especially, but it could happen that I did too. We discovered we had the same dislike for our childhoods, the same desire to just cross them out. One day, speaking of the course of his life journey, he said, “Well anyhow, the worst is over with.” I agreed. Jean-Lino was the grandson of Italian Jewish immigrants on his father’s side. His father had started out doing odd jobs in a trimmings workshop. He went on to specialize in ribbons, to the point of opening a notions shop during the sixties. A little alleyway storefront on Avenue Parmentier. His mother tended the register. They lived in a courtyard flat a few steps from the shop. The parents worked hard and were not affectionate; Jean-Lino didn’t expand on the topic. He had a brother, much older, who did well in the garment industry. He himself got into trouble, his mother threw him out of the house. He went into the food line after getting a certificate in pastry making. At the most hopeful period in his life, he set up a restaurant. It was hard—no vacations, too little business. In the end, the government employment center paid for his training in mass marketing and a placement agency got him into the Guli stores where he handled after-sales support on home appliances. He’d never had a child. That was the one reproach he dared to level at the fates that ruled his existence. His first wife had left him after the restaurant failed. When he met Lydie, she was already a grandmother by a daughter from an earlier marriage. For the past two years the child had been coming regularly to their apartment. The parents had separated on such bad terms that Social Services got involved, and they would unload the kid at grandma’s place on the slightest excuse. With a tenderness that had never found an outlet (except with his cat), Jean-Lino had welcomed little Rémi with open arms, and tried to get the boy to love him. Is it right to want to make someone love you? Isn’t that the kind of project that’s always doomed to disaster?

  The beginnings were chaotic. Five years old when he arrived—the family had been living in the South—the child made a point of ignoring Jean-Lino completely, and would cry the moment Lydie moved out of sight. He was an ordinary little boy, rather plump, with a nice smile and dimples. The difficulties of taming were made worse by Jean-Lino’s cat Eduardo, an unpleasant animal picked up on the streets of Vicenza who could only be spoken to in Italian. Lydie had worked things out with Eduardo. She’d dangle her pendant before him and the cat would follow the swinging rose quartz, mesmerized (the stone had been “a gift” to Lydie somewhere in Brazil). On the other hand, Eduardo had taken against Rémi. He would swell to twice his size whenever the child appeared, and would hiss in a disturbing way. Jean-Lino tried to bring his cat into line with no help from anyone. Lydie had solved the situation by keeping Eduardo in the bathroom. Rémi would go and torment him by imitating his miauling through the door. Jean-Lino tried to stop the boy but he lacked authority. When there was no one near, he would go quietly to soothe the animal through the door by murmuring a few Italian endearments. Rémi refused to call Jean-Lino “Grampa Jean-Lino.” Actually, it’s wrong to say the boy refused; he simply never did call him Grampa Jean-Lino, despite the man’s constant chant of Grampa Jean-Lino’s going to read you a story now, or If you eat all your fish, Grampa Jean-Lino will buy you this or that. Grampa Jean-Lino was simply disdained by Rémi, who did not give a damn about him. When the boy had any reason to use his name at all he called him Jean-Lino, who felt foolishly touched by just the use of his first name uttered with no familial qualifier. As time went on, changing strategy, he got it into his head to win the boy’s heart through fun and games. He taught him to say silly things like Howdydoody, which the boy loved and instantly converted to Whodiddoodydoody, then just Youdodoody, chanting it over and over, putting on crazy voices or yelling it right at Jean-Lino, in public if possible and very loud. I was a spectator at this little performance myself in the apartment-house lobby.

  Pretending to laugh along, Jean-Lino told the boy, “You know, if you repeat a joke too often it stops being funny.” He could no longer cut off the routine. The more he tried to reason with him the more the boy repeated the line. Lydie offered no help, holding with the theory that you reap what you sow. When she sensed a kind of disheartenment in Jean-Lino she would just say, in a sorrowful tone, Look, leave the poor kid alone, you can’t go blaming someone who’s a victim of their parents’ bad behavior. In hindsight, I suppose she sensed the dangers in her husband’s one-sided attachment.

  I should say something about the building lobby. It’s a long space, lit in the daytime by the half-window in the entry door. The elevator is in the center facing the door. You get to the stairwell through a side door in a recess on the left. The right-hand corridor leads back to the trashbin area. When the three of them were together, Lydie would take the elevator up with her grandson while Jean-Lino climbed the stairs on foot. When Jean-Lino was alone with Rémi, the boy insisted on the elevator. Getting him into the stairwell meant dragging him there howling. Jean-Lino couldn’t take the elevator. Over his lifetime it had grown impossible for him to take airplanes, elevators, the subway and the new trains with their sealed windows. One day, the boy clung to the stairwell gate like a monkey to keep from going in, and Jean-Lino finally sat down on the bottom steps with tears in his eyes. Rémi sat beside him and asked, “Why don’t you ever want to take the elevator?”

  “Because I’m afraid.”

  “I’m not afraid, I can do it.”

  “You’re too young to go alone.”

  After a while, Rémi did climb the stairs, hoisting him-self along the banister. Jean-Lino followed along behind.

  If I had to pick a single image from among all those that persist in my head, it would be the one of Jean-Lino seated in the half-darkness on the Moroccan chair in our living room, his hands locked onto the armrests in the midst of a jumble of chairs that no longer had any reason to be there. Jean-Lino Manoscrivi petrified on that uncomfortable chair, in t
he room where the glasses I’d frantically bought for the occasion still lined the buffet, the platters of celery and chips, all the leavings of the party arranged in an optimistic moment. Who can determine the starting point of events? Who knows what murky, and perhaps long-ago, confluence of circumstances governed the business? Jean-Lino had met Lydie Gumbiner in a bar where she was singing. Put that way, we’d imagine a swaying party girl sending a sultry voice through a mike. In fact she was a little creature without much of a bosom, dressed gypsy-style and draped in pendants and charms, who made much of her hairdo, a big orange frizz tamed by decorative barrettes (she wore a charm anklet as well . . .). She was studying jazz with a singing coach, and would occasionally perform in bars (we went to hear her once). She had sung Henri Salvador’s “Syracuse” gazing at Jean-Lino who by chance was seated that night at the edge of the stage, mouthing the lyrics along with her: “Before my youth is worn away and my springtimes are over . . .” Jean-Lino was a Salvador fan. They liked each other. He liked her voice. He liked her long gauzy skirts, that taste for the gaudy. He found it appealing that a woman her age had no use for Paris convention. In fact, this was a person who in many regards could not be classified, and who lived her life as if she had certain supernatural abilities. Why did those two beings come together? I had a friend when I was getting my Intellectual Property degree in Strasbourg, a girl who was fairly withdrawn. One day she up and married a gruff, taciturn man. She told me, “He’s alone, I’m alone.”Thirty years later I ran into her on the train to Brussels, her company was building hot-air balloons for amusement parks, she was still with him and they had three grown children. The end of the story is not so cheerful for the Gumbiner-Manoscrivi couple—but among the infinitely varied arrangements in the world, isn’t it often the same pattern? I took some snapshots at our little gathering (I’d called it a “Spring Celebration”). In one picture, JeanLino is standing behind Lydie, who’s seated on the couch dressed in one of her getups, they’re both laughing, faces turned to the left. They’re in good form. Jean-Lino looks happy and flushed. He’s leaning on the back of the sofa, bent a little over the reddish pouf hairdo. I remember exactly what it was that had made them laugh. The photo was used in the dossier. It caught what any photo catches, a frozen moment never to come again, and which maybe didn’t even happen that way at the time. But given that there will never be any later images of Lydie Gumbiner, this one seems to hold some secret meaning, it’s suffused with a venomous aura. In some magazine I recently saw a picture of Josef Mengele during the 1970s in Argentina. He is sitting outdoors somewhere, in a polo shirt, in a crowd of notably younger boys and girls. One of the girls is clinging to his arm. She’s laughing. The Nazi doctor is laughing. They’re both merry and relaxed, a testament to the sunshine and the lightness of life. The photo would hold no interest without the date and the name of the central figure. The caption upends the interpretation. Is that true for all photographs?