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  One day, with no warning, Rémi put his arm around Jean-Lino Manoscrivi’s neck.

  It happened one Sunday at the Hippopotamus. The three of them were having lunch with a couple of friends from Lydie’s jazz club. Rémi, who was bored the way all kids are at the table, had asked permission to go blow bubbles on the open veranda. Jean-Lino was keeping an eye on him when suddenly there was no more Rémi. Jean-Lino goes to see.

  No Rémi. He runs down the steps, looks up and down the Avenue General Leclerc:

  Nothing. He goes back inside, looks upstairs. No one. Grandma Lydie is frantic. Jean-Lino and she go back outside. They rush to the right, to the left, spin about, run back into the Hippopotamus, question the waiters, run out again. They shout the child’s name, the cityscape is empty, wide open to the winds. The jazz friends have stayed at the table, petrified, no longer touching their plates. A nearby couple discreetly tilt their chins toward a sideboard with a kind of potted palm alongside. Lydie’s girlfriend finally understands the signals, she gets up and finds Rémi crouching behind the flower tub, giggling over his prank. The desperate Manoscrivis return. Lydie flings herself on the child and hugs him to her. She all but congratulates him on his reappearance. Order returns. Jean-Lino hasn’t said a word. He has sat down, pale and somber. Rémi too is back in his seat. They offer him an île flottante for dessert. He rocks on his chair like a smug kid and then, nobody knows why, he stands up, goes and puts his arms around Jean-Lino, and lays his head on the man’s shoulders. Jean-Lino’s heart swells beyond reason. He believed in the secret triumph of love, like all rejected lovers whose fever flares up anew at the slightest unexpected gesture. Those same gestures mean nothing coming from a person who’s already been won over. I could write plenty on the topic. The guy who never gave you a glance and then one day just randomly, out of inadvertence or perversity, shoots you an unexpected signal—I know what that can set off.

  I should find out how Jean-Lino’s aunt is doing. The visit from Ginette Anicé made me think of her. Jean-Lino had brought his father’s sister to France and got her placed in a Jewish retirement home. I had visited there with him one afternoon. We went to the cafeteria, a large lobby converted to an entirely functional space—floor in patterned tiles, glossy walls, people in wheelchairs seated at tables with visitors. You would have thought that all the materials in the place had been chosen for their high capacity for echo and resonance. The aunt charged ahead with her walker. Quick wit, lively legs. The body, and especially the head, shaken by constant uncontrolled movements that seemed not to bother her but that made her speech muffled and halting. And at the same time, she spoke three languages: a disciplined, old-fashioned French, now half-forgotten; Italian; and Ladin, a dialect of the Dolomite mountains. Jean-Lino settled us at a rear table, in front of a television set tuned at top volume to a channel running short films. During the conversation (if you can call it that), Jean Lino plucked hairs from her face with his fingers. Does she know what’s happened to her nephew? Who does she ever talk to, with her bobbing head, in the wilderness of that hall? The slightest thing can make me doubt the coherence of the world. Its laws seem all independent of one another and they clash. In my little closet of an office at the Pasteur, a fly is exasperating me. I can’t stand it when a fly is stupid. I open the window wide and, instead of heading out into the trees around our building, it comes zigzagging back into the room and toward the far wall. Two seconds ago it was beating against the windowpane, flapping every whichway to get out, and now that the air is flowing in and the sky is spreading its welcoming arms, the damn thing is back indoors wandering crazily about in the shadows. It would serve the bug right if I shut it in and washed my hands of it. But it has that odious buzz going for it. In fact I wonder if that buzz wasn’t created just to protect flies, keep people from imprisoning them. If it weren’t for that performance I’d be merciless. I grab my big patent-law book and chase the fly toward the window, I mean I try to, but instead of surrendering to the merciful weapon it swerves, keeps just out of reach, and goes up to cling to the ceiling molding. Why do I have to put up with such a waste of time? The aunt used to live in the mountains. She still talked about her chickens, the chickens would come into the house and perch everywhere. She wanted to go back to her village to see the yearly cattle-drive up into the hills, she wanted to hear the clang of the cowbells. I’m going to phone the rest home.

  When the lawyer asked me what Jean-Lino was to me, I said a friend. The man acted as if he didn’t understand the word. He wanted to know what I meant by it. One evening, early in our friendship—the term is absolutely precise—I was coming home from the office a little late. Jean-Lino was outside with his Chesterfield cigarettes, his neck naked to the wind. And every time, that smile when he would catch sight of me, the yellowed teeth and their overbite, dazzling in its way. He was cinched into a juvenile-looking fake-leather motorcycle jacket I’d never seen on him. I said, “That’s new? Where’s the Harley?”

  “Zara. On sale.”

  “Bravo.”

  “You like it? It’s not a little tight?”

  I put an arm around him, laughing, and I said, “I adore you for buying that!” He laughed too. He said the sales-girl had complimented him. He was dying of heat in the fitting room, he couldn’t stay in there longer than ten seconds. I told him there had rarely been a piece of clothing so ill-suited to its owner.

  “Oh really? Shit!”

  The two of us laughed hard there under the streetlamp, him coughing his lungs out. He wiped his eyes behind the thick-framed glasses. His pitted face shone a little, I’d never asked him where that scarring came from. I went inside first. He wanted to stay out a bit longer, get some air—translation: have a last smoke. Turning back at the lobby door, through the glass I saw him walking a little in the parking area, his body stooped in his new biker jacket, one hand pressing his hair down along the sides, that look of delight entirely gone now, the way he probably was just before I turned up. I told myself, That’s where we’re at now—you’re growing older too, just like everyone you know, and I felt how I belonged to that throng moving along, hand in hand, growing old, moving along toward something unknown.

  What matters, looking at a photo, is the photographer behind it. Not so much the person who pressed the shutter as the one who’s chosen the picture, who said, “This one I keep, this one I’ll show.” To a hurried eye there was nothing special about the picture of the Jehovah’s Witness. Not the subject, not the lighting. A tired guy in a business suit and tie peddling a magazine. The classic nobody figure you place in the background on a sidewalk in a film on the 1950s. Among the hundreds of photos Robert Frank must have taken in the course of his trip across America, and among those he ultimately selected, there’s this one. At its center is a white patch, the offered magazine, the wrist turned out to show the title, awake, a word completely at odds with the funereal look of its bearer. But it would be wrong to think that the photograph was chosen for its ironical aspect. I hadn’t recalled the title, myself; what I remembered was the unease of the mouth, or of the eyes, I remembered something that’s not there: the sense of a day of weak sunlight. He could be selling strawberries or daffodils with the same obstinacy, frail inside his suit, swallowed up by that wall erected for a conquering human force. You wonder where he goes at night. You know that at some point there must have been some bad bifurcation.

  I lost my mother a week ago. I was there. She raised one shoulder, as if something was bothering her, and then nothing more happened. I called to her. I called several times. And there was nothing more. My friend Lambert told me that his mother had asked him recently, “How old are you?”

  “Seventy, Momma.”

  “Seventy years old!” his mother exclaimed. “You deserve to be an orphan by now, my boy!”

  Jeanne and I emptied the apartment last weekend. Two tiny rooms at Boulogne-Billancourt. A free cleanout service came to take away the furniture and the kitchen equipment. And all the objects—wooden p
ig, plaster cat, candlesticks, the Provençal doll, glass paperweights, bud vases—that we tossed into the trash bags. In fact, almost everything, except for the contents of a few drawers and the clothing. And the mushroom-shaped nutcracker I made in a high school woodworking shop fifty years ago, found among other knickknacks in a badly battered shoebox from the André shops. I would never have imagined the thing still existed. Jeanne didn’t remember it, she refused to believe I’d made it. From a storage sack stuffed in the rear of a closet we pulled crocheted placemats, cro-cheted pillow covers, the crocheted patchwork afghan spread that used to cover our parents’ bed, all of which for some incomprehensible reason we had spared from the truck. Our mother was the champion of crochet. After she retired, she had nothing but that to do. Errands, TV, the needles and hooks in front of the TV. Before she was even walking, Jeanne’s daughter was crawling around in crocheted diaper covers and little skirts. What shall we do with these? Jeanne asked.

  “We can give them to some charity.”

  “Who’d want them?”

  “We should’ve dumped them with the rest of the stuff.”

  “Yes.”

  “And the clothes too.”

  “Yes.”

  The clothing was carefully hung, pressed tight into a narrow wardrobe. Till the very end, even totally bedridden, she insisted on being presentable. She would say, “I’m afraid they’ll find me dead and dirty.” The dirty old lady, that’s what I dread. We pulled out blouses, cardigans, the winter coat. We laid them on a three-level step stool, the single leftover from the stripped house. We knew it all by heart. We’d seen it all for years. Outfits out of fashion, out of season. The wardrobe of an ordinary woman who lives quietly, goes off to work, comes home from work, keeps a proper household, never even conceived of committing the least friskiness, not in appearance or perhaps in anything else—but as to that, who can say. Jeanne and I knew every item in the armoire since almost forever, she was wearing them already back in Puteaux, the same rough woolens, the same matching sets, mostly deep green trimmed in beige, the polyester bathrobe less aged but still seen for years.

  Nicely folded in a corner there were the silk scarves we’d given her when scarves were in fashion, we’d kept giving her new ones in pleasing colors, without noticing that she never wore the earlier ones. They were wrapped in tissue-paper dustcovers. Jeanne took one and wrapped it around her head, meaning to do her Audrey Hepburn. I said, “So when does Ramadan start?” We laughed and a weird kind of sorrow rose in my throat in that tiny empty flat where just about nothing was left of an entire life. Fat Anicé had felt obliged to accept the doily. She’d said, “As a keepsake, sure,” with the gesture of a good girl doing a service. She could have pretended to be touched or to admire the work, but no, she stuck it into the bottom of her bag like a meaningless thing. I’m mad at myself for giving it to her. A woman crochets her whole life long and leaves some bits of craft that are no use to anyone. She would invent patterns but nobody cared. Who’s interested in crochet patterns? Death carries everything off, and that’s good. Got to make room for the newcomers. In our family we carried this to extremes. The biblical model—this father begat that one who begat etcetera— not in our house. On neither side. I knew none of my grandparents except for my father’s mother, the widow of a railroad man, a woman who loved nothing but the birds she overfed on her windowsills.

  The apartment upstairs is still sealed. The yellow tape and the two wax seals are still on the door. From time to time I go up, on purpose to see. What happened here has gradually wafted away, the air is as it was before, I lean out over the railing of my balcony and there’s nothing but the ordinary scene: the privet hedges, the shrubs in their basins, the cars parked between the freshly painted lines. I used to see the Manoscrivis go by in that parking area. I would see them climb into the Laguna station wagon, she always at the wheel when they were together. He would finish his cigarette before getting in, she had time to back out of the space.

  Eighteen people came. I had prepared for twice that many. Pals from forever, some colleagues of Pierre’s, Jeanne and her ex-husband, my niece, the Manoscrivis, my girlfriends from Pasteur or from Font-Pouvreau with or without boyfriends, and also, though he didn’t stay long, Emmanuel. No sooner did Jeanne arrive, carrying a homemade orange cake as if she were bringing a tub of caviar, than she rushed into the kitchen to wrap the cake in a towel and shove it hard into the fridge. I saw immediately that she was in one of those elated moods that exhaust me. My sister has completely unstable mood swings. She can change from one hour to the next, even less. The bad mood is radical, a state of gloom, almost silent and somewhat pleasant. But the good mood is worse. She sings under her breath, a show of good cheer with girlish flourishes and determinedly silly inflections. She was beginning a secret affair with a picture-framer. In the euphoria of the start-up, she had just bought herself an S&M leash and collar. She insisted on drawing me aside to show me the kit on her cellphone. She also wanted to get hold of a small whip, she’d seen a very nice one on the Internet, a knout with four tails on a crocodile handle. But it cost fifty-four euros and the site said “Beware! This object is VERY painful!” I asked to see what the framer looked like but she didn’t have a picture of him. He was sixty-four, five years older than she, married, arms thick and muscular from rowing, she said, and tattooed. I thought, So how come no tattooed guy with a whip turns up in my life? I felt finished, out of the game, fit for putting together little suburban parties with family and ultra-conventional folks. I’m irritated with myself for thinking that way. I’m happy with my husband. Pierre is cheerful, easy to live with. Not overtalkative—I don’t go for talkative. He is at my disposition without being a pushover or submissive. He’s loving. I like his skin. We know each other inside out. I object to his too-unconditional love. He doesn’t put me in danger. He doesn’t magnify me. He loves me even when I look bad, which is not at all reassuring. There’s no electricity between us; was there ever? What a pitiful inventory! I’m the fir tree in that Hans Christian Andersen story: If only something more alive, more intoxicating, would come along! No matter the forest, the snow, the birds, the hares—the fir tree takes no pleasure in any of all that, all it wants is to grow, to be tall enough to view the world. When it has finally grown tall, it dreams of being cut down and carried off by the loggers to become a ship’s mast and travel the seas; when its branches have grown out full enough, it dreams of being cut down and carried off to become a Christmas tree. The fir tree languishes, dying of desire. In the heated parlor, as it is being trimmed and decorated, hung with garlands of sweets, a star set on its top, it dreams of evening-time and candles on its branches, it dreams that the entire forest will come to press against the windowpanes in envy. Later, alone in the attic, stripped naked, its needles dropping off in the dry winter chill, it takes heart in looking forward to the return of springtime and the outdoors. When it is out in the courtyard, sprawling withered among fresh sprouting flowers, it longs for its old dark attic corner. When the hatchet and the match come along, it thinks of the old summer days, back in the forest.

  The Manoscrivis were the first to arrive, at the same time as Nasser and Claudette El Ouardi. A brilliant, austere couple. I knew Nasser from Font-Pouvreau where he was working as an attorney for the EU. He had since set up his own practice in industrial-property law. Claudette is a researcher in bioinformatics. Lydie and Jean-Lino had already introduced themselves at the door as people who’d gone through enormous hardship traveling so far to get to our place. The El Ouardis laughed politely at the joke. The Manoscrivis brought a bottle of champagne and Jean-Lino held a bouquet of small mauve roses with their stems cut very short. Before Jeanne and her ex-husband Serge arrived, we were briefly just the six of us. An absurd void, hesitation, silences, the two couples having settled into opposite ends of the couch, while Pierre and I, half-up and half-down, fussed with drinks or the crudité plates. Jean-Lino was sitting forward on the edge of the cushion, his comb-over firmly plast
ered to his pate, hands clasped between his spread knees, in a posture of confident expectation. He was wearing a lavender shirt in an American cut, quite elegant I thought, and eyeglasses I didn’t recognize—half-round frames the color of sand. Lydie passed around the celery sticks. Not a word took root, no exchange caught on. Silence greeted the end of every sentence. At one point Nasser mentioned Boulevard Brune, and Lydie exclaimed, “Ah, Boulevard Brune, we’re doing our next jam session there!”

  “Jam?” Nasser said. “What does that mean?”

  “Jazz sessions, in public,” Lydie answered, smiling broadly.

  “Ah, nice . . . very nice. You play an instrument?”

  “I sing.”

  “You sing. Bravo.”

  Jean-Lino nodded with pride. I added, “She sings very well,” and all acquiesced with kindly murmurs. You’d expect some further talk, some minimal curiosity, but no—the conversation fell back into the yawning hole it had risen from. I glanced outside and saw snowflakes. It was snowing! On the first day of spring! “It’s snowing!” I cried. I opened the windows. The cold air rushed in. It was snowing. Not little flakes, either—the beautiful heavy flat kind. Everyone rushed out onto the balcony. Claudette and Lydie leaned over the balustrade to see if they melted when they hit the ground. The men said, “It won’t last,” the women said, “It’ll last.” People started talking about the climate, the seasons, the I-don’t-knowwhat, everything. Pierre opened a bottle of champagne and the cork shot out among the snowflakes. “Polluter!” Lydie cried. We all laughed as we drank a toast. Pierre told a story about Emmanuel when he was little.