Fiction France n°4 (version anglaise) by Institut français

Twenty new books of French fiction to be read and translated

foreword

Published twice a year, Fiction France offers a selection of excerpts from French fiction, along with English translations. The French publishers wish to highlight these books abroad by targeting translators, agents and publishers who take the risk of promoting contemporary fiction. Fiction France’s aim is to create a new burst of enthusiasm for translations of contemporary French literature, to be a literary showcase for book professionals around the world, as well as an essential support to the French book market abroad. It is a tool which fully reflects the mission of culturesfrance.

How can you take part in Fiction FRANCE ? A selection of 16 to 20 titles are compiled in cooperation with the Publications and the Written Word department of culturesfrance, the staff in the foreign rights departments of the French publishing houses and the staff of the book offices in London, New York and Berlin—French Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs. What are the selection criteria? • The book must be French-language fiction (novel, short story, narration). • Recent or forthcoming publication (maximum of 12 months before the publication of Fiction France).

Page 127 of this fourth issue of Fiction France, you will find those titles presented in the previous issues whose foreign rights have since been sold. The record so far is both satisfying and promising! Please do not hesitate to contact the Foreign Rights Managers of the publishing houses at the addresses listed in the table of contents and on the page presenting each text. Olivier Poivre d’Arvor director of culturesfrance

How should work be submitted? • The publishers should submit the book/draught/ manuscript. They will themselves have selected an extract of 10,000 to 12,500 characters. • Every entry should be accompanied by a commentary, a biographical note and the bibliography of the author (maximum of 1,500 characters). • Two printed examples of every proposed work will be sent to culturesfrance. Next deadline for submitting texts: 15th May 2009 Next publication date of Fiction France: 15th September 2009

CULTURESFRANCE is the cultural exchange operator of the French Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs and the French Ministry of Culture and Communication.

Fiction France is disseminated free of charge through the French cultural network to its partners and to book industry professionals around the world. Fiction France is also available on line at www.culturesfrance.com

contents

p. 8

p. 16

Éliette Abécassis

Olivier Adam

Sephardi

Unfavourable Winds

Publisher: Albin Michel Date of Publication: May 2009 Foreign Rights Manager: Solène Chabanais

Publisher: Éditions de l'Olivier Date of Publication: January 2009 Foreign Rights Manager: Martine Heissat

solene.chabanais@albin-michel.fr Translation: Catherine Spencer catherinemarielouise@yahoo.co.uk

Translation: Euan Cameron

aecameron@btinternet.com

p. 22

p. 30

Antoine Bello

Benjamin Berton

The Pathfinders

Alain Delon, Japanese Superstar

Publisher: Gallimard Date of Publication: February 2009 Foreign Rights Manager:

Publisher: Hachette Littératures Date of Publication: April 2009 Foreign Rights Manager: Virginie Rouxel

Anne-Solange Noble anne-solange.noble@gallimard.fr Translation: Howard Curtis curtis9@talktalk.net

mheissat@seuil.com

vrouxel@hachette-livre.fr Translation: Polly McLean

pollymclean@googlemail.com

p. 35

p. 41

p. 46

Catherine Cusset

Mercedes Deambrosis

Didier Decoin

New York, Cycle Diary

Just for Fun

Is This the Way Women Die?

Publisher: Mercure de France Date of Publication: March 2009 Foreign Rights Manager: Bruno Batreau

Publisher: Buchet-Chastel Date of Publication: January 2009 Foreign Rights Manager:

Publisher: Grasset Date of Publication: February 2009 Foreign Rights Manager: Heidi Warneke

bruno.batreau@mercure.fr Translation: Imogen Forster imogen.forster@talktalk.net

Christine Legrand christine.legrand@buchet-chastel.fr Translation: Michael Mitchell mikem@phonecoop.coop

hwarneke@grasset.fr Translation: Sophie Lewis sophie_l@fastmail.fm

p. 52

p. 58

p. 63

Patrick Deville

Jérôme Ferrari

Alain Fleischer

Equatoria

A God an Animal

Me, Sàndor F.

Publisher: Éditions du Seuil Date of Publication: January 2009 Foreign Rights Manager: Martine Heissat

Publisher: Actes Sud Date of Publication: January 2009 Foreign Rights Manager: Élisabeth Beyer

Publisher: Fayard Date of Publication: March 2009 Foreign Rights Manager: Anna Lindblom

mheissat@seuil.com Translation: Ian Monk ian.monk@wanadoo.fr

e.beyer@actes-sud.fr Translation: Sophie Leighton s.leighton@clara.co.uk

alindblom@editions-fayard.fr Translation: Trista Selous trista.selous@btinternet.com

p. 67

p. 72

p. 78

Pascal Garnier

Sylvie Gracia

Mohamed Leftah

Captive Moon in a Dead Eye

A Spanish Interlude

Venus

Publisher: Zulma Date of Publication: January 2009 Foreign Rights Manager: Amélie Louat

Publisher: Verticales Date of Publication: January 2009 Foreign Rights Manager:

Publisher: La Différence Date of Publication: January 2009 Foreign Rights Manager:

amelie.louat@zulma.fr Translation: Ian Monk ian.monk@wanadoo.fr

Anne-Solange Noble anne-solange.noble@gallimard.fr Translation: Louise Lalaurie lalaurie.rogers@gmail.com

Parcidio Gonçalves administration.ladifference@orange.fr Translation: Lulu Norman lp.fn@virgin.net

p. 84

p. 91

p. 97

Julie Mazzieri

Giulio Minghini

Naïri Nahapétian

Funeral Oration for a Village Idiot

Fake

Who Killed Ayatollah Kanuni?

Publisher: José Corti Date of Publication: January 2009 Foreign Rights Manager: Fabienne Raphoz

Publisher: Allia Date of Publication: January 2009 Foreign Rights Manager: Estelle Roche

Publisher: Liana Levi Date of Publication: January 2009 Foreign Rights Manager: Sylvie Mouchès

librairie-corti@orange.fr

edallia@wanadoo.fr Translation: Paul Buck & Catherine Petit paul@paulbuck.co.uk

s.mouches@lianalevi.fr Translation: Josephine Bacon bacon@langservice.com

Translation: Adriana Hunter

adriana@hunter157.freeserve.co.uk

p. 104

p. 110

Theresa Révay

Jean Rolin

All the Dreams of the World

A Dead Dog After Him

Publisher: Belfond/Place des éditeurs Date of Publication: May 2009 Foreign Rights Manager: Frédérique Polet

Publisher: P.O.L Date of Publication: January 2009 Foreign Rights Manager: Vibeke Madsen

frederique.polet@placedesediteurs.com

madsen@pol-editeur.fr Translation: Ros Schwartz Translations Ltd schwartz@btinternet.com

Translation: David Macey

davidmacey18@btinternet.com

p. 115

p. 121

Antonin Varenne

Tanguy Viel

Fakirs

Paris-Brest

Publisher: Viviane Hamy Date of Publication: March 2009 Foreign Rights Manager: Julie Galante

Publisher: Les Éditions de Minuit Date of Publication: January 2009 Foreign Rights Manager:

julie.galante@viviane-hamy.fr Translation: John Flower j.e.flower@kent.ac.uk

Catherine Vercruyce direction@leseditionsdeminuit.fr Translation: Frank Wynne frank.wynne@mac.com

Éliette Abécassis

Sephardi

Publisher: Albin Michel Date of Publication: May 2009 Foreign Rights Manager: Solène Chabanais solene.chabanais@albin-michel.fr

Translation: Catherine Spencer catherinemarielouise@yahoo.co.uk

Biography Wanting to give her an unusual name, her parents chose Éliette, a variation of Élie. She was born on 27 January 1969 in Strasbourg. Her father, Armand Abécassis, a philosophy teacher, was a reputed historian of Jewish thought. Her mother Janine was a child psychology teacher. They were both born in Morocco. “I grew up surrounded by books, in an atmosphere based on the transmission of knowledge.” Publications Her most recent works, with Albin Michel, include: Mère et fille, un roman, 2008; Le corset invisible, 2007; Un heureux événement, 2005; La Dernière Tribu, 2004; Clandestin, 2003. These titles are available in paperback edition, LGF, “Le livre de poche” collection.

“We all have multiple identities.” The narrator, Esther Vidal, is Jewish, Sephardi, French and Alsatian. A multiple identity that presents her with quite a few problems. She recounts the story of the Sephardis and of her, the daughter of very religious Moroccan Jews who settled in Strasbourg after the war. They are the elite of Moroccan Jews, who come from Fez and Mogador, not Meknes like the family of Charles, whom she is to marry in Tel

Aviv. Her parents are opposed to the marriage, for Charles is not the ideal son-in-law. Against the backdrop of this wedding, the destiny of a family is painted: nothing is missing—star-crossed but eternal love, weavers of spells, family secrets and the philosopher’s stone. Traditions are depicted but the author also speculates about the possible end of the Sephardi world.

Part one We all have multiple identities. We all come from a country, a town or a street that defines us and marks us for ever, the products of an ancestral culture that imprisons as much as it enriches us. We play roles in life that change according to the situation and the characters, the place and the moment: we exist, multiple to ourselves, unaware of the origin of these identities that surge up despite ourselves and which determine us, our actions, thoughts and feelings. We are borrowed and stolen by our past, which we borrow and steal in our turn, in an attempt to find out who we are, in that infinite quest that begins with the first cry and which never ends—life itself. […] Esther Vidal was French. That is the first thing to be said, because she was born in France and because she owned her language and her way of being to France. As well as her way of thinking, the critical humour, the blandness, the warm coldness, the feigned politeness, the self-mockery tinged with cynicism, the aloofness, the individualism, the distrust of others, the self-denigration, the chronic depression and a whole heap of things that were natural to her. […] For the Jews who repopulated the region that had been destroyed during the war and who rebuilt the synagogue burnt by the Nazis, the realisation that Germany was only a dozen miles away was a difficult one. At school, Esther chose

to learn Spanish, while everyone else took German as their first or second language. Why Spanish? It wasn’t her parents’ idea; it was, although she had not the faintest idea of it at the time, the language of her ancestors who had had to leave Spain, the country in which they had always lived, taking with them one or two bags, a few jewels, the keys to their house and the mad hope that they might perhaps one day return. […] At the Jewish nursery school, Esther mixed only with Jews, some of them Ashkenazis, others Sephardis. Then her parents decided to send her to the state school. Suddenly alone among all the rest, she learnt very young to see her difference as a handicap, just like the strange name she bore, unknown to all. Esther … How much she wanted to be like the others, a good student called Laurence or Véronique. But she was called Esther. Esther Vidal. When she asked her parents if she could change her name, they replied that she had only to take on one of her middle names. […] Esther was too shy to speak to Charles. She contented herself, year after year, with watching him grow up and mature, as he took his bar mitzvah, his voice broke, he became handsome and seductive with gestures that fascinated. The older he got, the more attractive he became. His body developed, became agile and taut; he must devote much time to sport, presumably football. From upstairs, she could see all the details, for the Halévy tribe lived just opposite: his new haircut, his airs and graces, the seriousness with which he prayed, and at the same time the sense of distance, as well as the gaiety, that always radiated from him. He would often lean towards his brother, his father, his grandfather or his great-grandfather, and say something that must have been funny, about the prayer, or about what was happening, because it would make them laugh. Relaxed, amiable, warm, comfortable with himself. Wherever he was, he was at ease. […] Over the following nights, Esther dreamt about Charles. She imagined him at home, in the house, as her husband. She was unable to think that someone could be in her life without being part of her family. […]

Her whole life was aimed at a single goal: pleasing her parents. From babyhood, she had been inculcated with the fundamental values of religion, the group and the family and it was through these three systems, these three circles, that she saw the world. There was no place for the individual. […] Éliette Abécassis

Had Esther not wanted to marry in Israel, things would have been different. Deciding to have the wedding in this far-off place had not been easy; but Esther had wanted to marry there out of attachment to the land of Israel. As always when she had to get on a plane, she panicked. Throughout the trip she was terrified.

Sephardi

[…] Esther was unable to set limits on the sacrificial gift of her time, her space, her freedom. There were no limits for her, as there were none for them. She did not imagine for a single moment that she could say “no” to them. When she met Charles, she tried to put her parents at a distance in order to devote herself to him. However, as if by magic, the frequency of parental visits only intensified. One evening, several months before their marriage, Charles arrived at her house without warning, thinking that they had left. Her father welcomed him, white as a ghost, so shocked that he could no longer utter a word, and her mother said to her: “You see what state you have put your father in?” “What state?” “You will end up killing us!” Esther looked at the dress that she was to wear for the ceremony. She no longer knew who this finery came from: her mother, grandmother or great-grandmother? It was a heavy tribute that had been transmitted from mother to daughter for generations, a starched velvet dress that transformed them into queens for a night: Lala, which means “Madam, princess”, an aristocratic title—here is your dress, my daughter, the burden that comes with your status as a woman, of being born a woman, of giving birth, of raising a man’s son and cherishing him, of making him into a man, and then of being abandoned, forsaken by your man, left by your son … Lala, princess for an evening, a rose that fades too soon, take advantage of your young beauty, for your life is here in this dress that already weighs down your shoulders, stopping you from getting away, from flying off, escaping. Here is the dress that will always cover your nakedness, protected but submissive, a dhimmie among the dhimmi. Oh dress, oh destiny of the Sephardic woman!

[…] Sol looked her grand-daughter up and down … At her age, she already had three daughters: Solange her mother, Colette and Yvonne. She did not understand how one could get married so old, but she refrained from saying so out of tact. As a general rule, Sol did not speak much. She was discreet, as if she did not want to disturb anyone, even if she continued to reign over her world. […] Esther took the glass of tea that her future mother-in-law held out to her: it was burning hot and she put it down very quickly. Why drink tea in glasses when they burn your fingers and lips? That too formed part of the ritual, placing the tea hurriedly on the table. It was also a way of recognising authentic Moroccans. They would never agree to drink tea out of a cup. That would have seemed incongruous, even impolite. In the same way, it was impossible for a Moroccan to make tea without sugar, which also had to be presented with an assortment of cakes and patisseries, “gazelle horn” pastries stuffed with marzipan, dates or nuts. […] Afterwards, when she was walking around Venice with Charles, amongst the happy couples, Esther felt a kind of nostalgia, something indefinable, a kind of unfathomable sadness. Why could she not simply be a woman in love walking with her lover in the city of love? Why was it that whatever place she visited, she found herself making for the ghettos, the mellahs, the Jewish streets, the burntout streets? Why in the very heart of their jaunt, was there this melancholy, this doubt that overtook her, immense and dizzying, not about her feelings but rather the duration of the relationship? Was it possible that they could make this moment last or would they disappear among the mass of couples who loved and then separated, playthings of history and of the great wheel of time? Esther was in a state of dependence. She had freed herself from the dependence on her parents, their heritage and religion, to place herself under the invisible dependence of the Sephardis. It was as if she had not managed to free herself from her Sephardi past and it was this past that was now pulling her into the grave, where thousands of murdered ancestors already reluctantly lay. […] Sol and Yacot looked at each other, like two fairy-tale witches from the time when women prepared concoctions to work good and evil and when they

confronted each other through their demons, their true demons. It was as if, in that moment, the fiends and afreets were dancing demonic dances around them, preparing to bewitch them, to insinuate themselves into their hearts and their souls, casting spells through them, waging an infernal battle until death. In that instant, the demons that had won victory over mankind rejoiced, moving excitedly all over the room, before being released into the air, right into everyone’s presence, to spread evil. For the time being, they slipped, voluptuously and with great delight, between the two women, stirring them up with their hatred, their avenging passion, their jealousy that was so destructive that it sowed hatred in the depth of their eyes and their soul. The demons were there.

Éliette Abécassis

Sephardi

The two women stood facing each other. They looked at each other with the same intensity as when they were children with the hatred that had accumulated over the years, the inextinguishable hatred of Yacot who was jealous of Sol, for she knew that her husband had been destined for her, and Sol’s towards Yacot, who had ruined her life. […] When he met Esther, Charles had stopped seeing all his mistresses. Or rather, it was she who had made him get rid of all the women who danced around him in a sort of ballet composed of girls whom he had met during his shows, in Paris, of exes who could not manage to detach themselves from him, whatever he said, or of “best friends” with a single goal—to take first place—and future candidates , those he was currently in the act of seducing. Because he had no more desire for it, because he had had so many experiences that he had wearied of it all and above all because he was in love with her, Charles had agreed to get rid of these women. He no longer saw them. Only one remained, who would always be there, because, in a sense, she had been the first one in his life, ahead of all the others and even ahead of Esther: his mother. […] Esther no longer knew when she had begun loving the idea of Israel, nor from where this love had come. Doubtless from something in her culture and education, even if she could not remember the smallest parental encouragement for this or a real Zionist education. […]

Esther had got to know Noam Bouzaglou at the time she met Charles. Noam was the son of Isaac Bouzaglou, her father’s best friend, who had left to live in Israel when Moses emigrated to Strasbourg. She met him again by chance in the plane that was taking her to Tel Aviv. […] The closer she grew to Noam, the more obvious his psychological strength became. He had undergone a physical and mental preparation in the army, with gestures, blows or beatings that accustomed the body to painful sensations, all forming part of the preparation for having a fit, fed and rested body, before moving on to exercises in more realistic situations: an underfed body, sleepless nights and intense mental and physical fatigue. During the night watches, food rations were decreased; physical suffering, brainwashing and unbearable treatment had to be borne. […] Having infiltrated the members of Hamas, he had to show that he was one of them. One day, in a meeting in which a mullah was delivering a fanatical speech, a man shook his head, lowering his eyes. People saw him and began manhandling him. He protested and that was when he was lynched by the raving mob, who beat him with their fists and their feet. His skull cracked in a pool of blood, his face and his ribs broken. The man lay there. Dead. Noam thought then of his left-wing friends, in France and Israel. He thought of the organisations supporting Palestine. He found it hard not to weep as he contemplated their naivety. He thought of all those attacks, of the one on the central bus station in Jerusalem that had killed 26 people. The one on the bus in Jaffa street, in Jerusalem, with 19 dead. That of the shopping mall of Dizengoff, Tel Aviv, with 13 dead … The list was long, so long. He was carrying out a vital mission and he had given his life to this aim, for which Esther could only respect and admire him. […] Noam pulled her out of her daydream, as if he could read her mind. “This is really the right time to ask you my question, Esther.” “What?” “You said that it was never too late. At least, you wondered, you asked me if it was never too late. And I am telling you that it is the right time to ask you the question. I think it is never too late. That is what I think.”

Esther thought of that wedding ceremony in King Solomon’s mines, near Eilat, in the Neguev desert, to which Noam had taken her … They had just met each other and yet, that day, they had felt the same thing: it could have been their wedding. It could one day be their wedding. Noam had done all he could to impress her, introducing her to his family and friends. Then they had gone off by themselves, a little way off from the celebration. And there, at the foot of the quarries, in the dusk breeze of that glowing desert, he had talked to her: about himself, his brothers, his relationship with his family, his father, a terrible, dominating character who had brought up his sons with an iron hand.

Éliette Abécassis

Sephardi

Esther’s chest tightened as she thought again of that night of confidences under the Neguev stars. What was she doing with her life and what was the meaning of it? At that moment, she could have been about to marry Noam. Perhaps she should have been? […] Esther went back into the room where she had got dressed, trying to gather the thoughts that jostled in her head. All that had happened since the beginning of the evening, the shrur, Sol, Solange, Isaac Bouzaglou and Noam’s declaration, the philosopher’s stone, the arrival of Charles, his departure, the argument between the two fathers, then the departure of her parents. The rupture with them. With her family. All her family had left and she was alone with the people from Meknes. Alone with herself. So she was to marry, cursed by her parents. Rejected, excommunicated, the herem on her. Impure, dirty, unfit for any relationship because she had been repudiated by her people. And she had chosen not to follow her parents, her family and ancestral tradition. She had chosen to listen to her grandfather Nissim, endowed with the lessons of his story. Non-finalised text, subject to modification.

Olivier Adam

Unfavourable Winds

Publisher: Éditions de l’Olivier Date of Publication: January 2009 Foreign Rights Manager: Martine Heissat mheissat@seuil.com

Translation: Euan Cameron aecameron@btinternet.com

Biography Olivier Adam was born in 1974 and grew up in the suburbs of Paris. He maintains that he has spent his life in a black hole of depression for some ten years and that he continues to be a “specialist in disappearances”. After living in Paris, working for a cultural engineering agency, and later, as an editor, at Éditions du Rouergue, he went to live near Saint-Malo. He has been a member of the programme planning committee of the “Les Correspondances de Manosque” literary festival ever since it was founded in 1999. He has written novels as well as books for children. Several of his books have been adapted for the cinema, and Olivier Adam has recently been working with Philippe Lioret, with whom he co-wrote the screen adaptation of his own first novel, Je vais bien, ne t’en fais pas (2006, winner of a César award in 2007). A further project is the adaptation, in Quebec, of Sous la pluie by Patrick Goyette. Publications Among those most recently published by Éditions de l’Olivier are: À l’abri de rien, 2007 (paperback edition, Éditions Points, 2008); Falaises, 2005 (paperback edition, Éditions Points, 2006); Passer l’hiver (short stories), 2004 (paperback edition, Éditions Points, 2005; Goncourt short story scholarship in 2004).

Ever since his wife disappeared without trace, Paul Anderen has lived alone with his two young children. A year has passed, a year in which every day had to be reinvented, and Paul is exhausted. He hopes to start a new life by returning to his roots, and so he moves to Saint-Malo, the town inÂ which he grew up. But who then is Paul Anderen? A father who, in order to salvage the world in the eyes of his children, has to wrestle continuously with his own anxieties and, with boundless love, confront the dangers that threaten their lives. In this luminous book, with its ocean-swept landscapes, Olivier Adam effortlessly confirms his powers as a novelist and his sense of kinship.

The children were leaving the classroom one by one, laying aside their colouring books and getting up from their miniature chairs to rush into the arms of their parents under the kindly eye of the schoolmistress, a shy, slim girl whom I had had nothing to complain about in almost three months. When saying goodbye, Manon had kissed her on the lips and the teacher had not flinched; her eyes sparkled as she wished us good luck: she envied us going to live by the sea. I caught up with Manon at the far end of the room, in the midst of the plastic vegetable stalls, where she was hugging Hannah tightly; they were clinging to one another, worried lest they should lose touch. Hannah was a pale-faced little girl and I had no idea whether she was even capable of speech. I had invited her home on two or three occasions, however, and they had played all afternoon; hidden beneath the branches of the tamarisk tree that dipped so low they formed a cabin. I was barely aware of them, and just had time to give them a glass of milk, a chunk of bread and a piece of chocolate for tea, which they had gulped down as they sat at the rusty metal table with its white paint that was flaking off in places. Occasionally, little Hannah gazed up at tower block B of Les Bosquets; she lived there, and this back to front view of things must have seemed strange to her; from her bedroom she could see us in the garden, but those summer nights with the music, the lights in the old cherry tree, the smoke from the barbecue, the beer and all the neighbours who turned up, had become so rare that recently I had not even bothered to open the shutters, and everything had fallen into neglect. We had left school, it was not yet five oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;clock and the sky was already growing dark in the west. From the other side of the railway lines, the road climbed

up towards the blocks of flats that scarred the horizon. The house was at the furthest point; with its cracked roughcast walls, it looked as if it had been placed there by accident, and beyond it there was nothing but a dense mass of monochrome blocks that extended endlessly towards the network of motorways. Manon walked at a slow pace, advancing reluctantly, and dreading what was to happen next. Along the pavement, a removal van with its doors wide open justified her fears. Most of our furniture was piled up inside it, virtually hidden by the cardboard boxes. The little girl let out a cry. I took her by the hand and led her into the house. Everything was empty and crumbling, and only a few traces of our life remained there. The picture frames had left their mark on the yellowing walls, white rectangles of differing dimensions, their edges darkened by the years, the tobacco and the dust. Five years previously, we were moving in there and Clément was running around the newly-painted rooms. Sarah, notebook in hand, her belly swollen beneath her apple-green dress, was taking measurements, pretending to make future improvements. I lifted up her hair and nibbled the nape of her neck. Manon walked into the middle of the sitting-room: a floor, a ceiling, four walls and nothing else. I laid my hand on her shoulder. “All right, my darling?” She didn’t answer me; standing stiffly, her face pale, she was contemplating the extent of the disaster. We could hear the lads bustling about in the garage; from time to time an object would crash noisily to the ground and a stream of swear-words immediately ensued. When she turned towards me, she was trembling, with tears in her eyes. I took her in my arms. I didn’t know what else to do. Words refused to come; physical gestures were all that was left. She came and snuggled her face in the hollow of my shoulder and she began to weep loudly. “I don’t want to. I don’t want to.” “What don’t you want, my darling?” “To leave here. If we go away, Mummy won’t be able to find us, she won’t be able to come back.” The only response I could give was to clasp her still tighter. I had nothing more substantial to offer her, no worthwhile argument. Her tears were running down my neck, making my shirt damp. Outside, the dusk had fallen, reducing the world to blurred illuminations, trails of light, shadows and liquid reflections. With her tear-stained face and her mouth full of mucus, she fell asleep; this was how it always ended: in the damp, lukewarm exhaustion of sorrow. I lay her down on a blanket on the floor. With her flushed cheeks and her hair clinging to her forehead, she groaned as she curled up. She was still so little. Sometimes, I tended to forget this. Kneeling down, I kissed her feverish brow and her tiny mouth. I lay down beside her. She nestled against my stomach. The tiled floor was smooth and freezing cold; Sarah loathed it and

had had it entirely recovered. Overlapping rugs concealed the tiniest fragment of tiling. I heard some coughing behind me. Standing there side by side and looking embarrassed, the removal men were observing us. I got to my feet as quietly as possible so as not to wake Manon. “It’s not always easy for the children,” muttered the tallest of them. He looked genuinely upset and gazed tenderly at the little creature. In a muted voice, he informed me that they were ready to leave, and that all that remained was to load on the bicycles. I could hardly believe it. Dismantling the furniture, filling the cardboard boxes, emptying the garage, the washingmachine, the sofa, the fridge, they couldn’t have done all that in four hours. I thanked them and wished them a safe journey; I wasn’t going to delay much longer myself, and we would no doubt meet on the main road. They left the room on tip-toes; afterwards I heard their footsteps crunching on the pale yellow gravel in the yard. The engine droned for a minute or two before the sound dissolved into the hum of the evening. Clément arrived shortly afterwards, his hands in his pockets and an unreceptive expression on his face. I hadn’t a clue as to what the hell he could have been getting up to outside all this time; ever since September, I no longer collected him from school, and he normally turned up at about six o’clock, helped himself to a large glass of Coca-Cola, grabbed some biscuits and disappeared into his bedroom. I imagined him hanging about the river banks, kicking pebbles around or trying to make them bounce on the surface of the water, his gaze lost in the continuous muddy stream of water. He really loved this place: every weekend we had to get out the bikes and cycle along the river; the path narrowed behind the line of trees, a slight depression had caused it to subside and the earth mingled with the sand: a miniature beach a few feet away from the cars. Behind the buildings on the other side, the hospital overlooked the town and he never stopped peering at it, as if his mother might still have been there. I let him wander around the rooms, press his head against the window-pane and glance at the nettles, the mushrooms, the lawn yellow with chickweed. By lamplight, everything looked smooth and brushed, but in the daylight it was nothing but a desolate patch of wasteland. In his own mute and intent way, Clément was taking his leave of the only house he was able to remember. But it was to everything else that he was attempting to say goodbye. “Will you be all right?” I asked. He sighed deeply and gave me a mockery of a smile; seeing him make an effort like that devastated me, he looked so like his mother: careful not to be a burden in any way, anxious about everyone else and not bothered about himself, concealing his own pain so as not to alarm me. In an absent-minded motion, he removed his jacket and let it slip to the ground, then he lay down beside his sister, the palms of his hands pressed flat against the stone floor

Olivier Adam

Unfavourable Winds

and his eyes fixed on the ceiling where only a solitary light bulb dangled. With their hair intermingled, their hands touching and their arms outstretched, they formed the beginnings of a star. I lay down in turn and I completed the circle.

The wipers did not succeed in removing very much and entire patches of the windscreen remained smeared. Manon was asleep, partly slumped over her brother. I put on Johnny Cash, and his voice blended with the sound of the engine and the hissing of the tyres on the damp asphalt. “Were you able to say goodbye to your friends?” “Yes.” “Did you give them the address?” “Yes, yes.” “You did tell them that they could come this summer …” Clément was staring at the road and replied absent-mindedly. In the rearview mirror I could see him gently pushing his sister away and pulling out his Game Boy from his jacket pocket. His fingers began clicking on the buttons. The road was almost deserted and only lorries, weighed down by the night, were on the move. My eyes lingered for a moment on his face; he had grown up suddenly, without my really being aware of it, and he still had that sleek, solemn expression of an uncommunicative little boy that made him look even older. Uncommunicative, mysterious and mocking, I had been informed one day by his teacher, a plump woman with glasses, who always wore flowery dresses and who seemed to derive her vocabulary from the psychology pages of a woman’s magazine. She never stopped urging me to consult one of her child psychiatrist friends, and if she were to be believed only a doctor could help Clément “to emerge from his lethargy, to extricate himself and overcome the phase of denial in which he was bogged down up to his neck.” In the end I did not even bother to conceal my irritation at all this stupid nonsense and I requested her kindly to confine herself to teaching arithmetic and spelling, I would take care of the rest, and would she please piss off. I had taken Clément by the hand and we had left the school in silence. As he munched his nuggets at the McDonald’s, a smile broke over his face, something I had not seen for such a long time that I could not get over it. “Why are you smiling?” “No reason. Because of what you said to the fat cow.” “The fat cow?” “Yeah. That’s what we call her.” “Didn’t it bother you that I spoke to her like that?” “No. On the contrary. This way perhaps she’ll piss off from me too.”

Manon woke up shortly before Rennes; she had no idea where she was or where she was going. “I want to go home, I want to go home,” she kept on repeating. I did whatever I could do to distract her, going through all the records and games that I knew, but she wouldn’t stop. Eventually, I turned off the road. The service station was ugly and crowded; we wandered around the shelves for a while, Manon sniffing and clasping my hand as if she were frightened of getting lost. I dragged her towards the cuddly toys—some panthers with gleaming eyes, a sheep with drab fleece and a weird-looking pig were fighting for the top shelf—but nothing appealed to her. Keeping himself to himself, Clément was leafing through magazines about video games. I found it hard to understand the interest people could have in these kinds of things—in this field as in many another none of these things seemed to me to be worthwhile— but I nevertheless pulled out four euros from the back pocket of my jeans and we set off again. The children hurried back into the car, Manon appeared to have calmed down and Clément was clutching his magazine to his chest. As I smoked a couple of cigarettes, I watched them wrap themselves up in an old rug. The engines droned beneath the dark sky and the ribbon formed by the motorway cleaved the horizon with a streak of light. I stretched my limbs and tried to touch my toes with my fingertips; down the length of my spine, my nerves formed knots in between my bones. Packing cardboard boxes and emptying the house had screwed me up; my back was a mess and my body plagued me relentlessly, making me pay for the years of ill-treatment, the hundredweight of tar, nicotine and alcohol of all kinds that had worn me down. Before setting off again, I examined my face in the rear-view mirror, and it didn’t look too good: circles under my eyes, yellow complexion, haggard features and the teeth of an old man. “It’s like the Alamo in there,” the last dentist whom I had had the courage to consult had admitted, before emitting a sigh that spoke volumes about the extent of the damage and the amounts I would have to spend in order to be able to chew my steak for another few years and pay for the cost of his brand new set of golf clubs. Naturally, I had never been back to him, offering the excuse that I did not care for him and that his conversation wearied me. Sarah had shrugged her shoulders: “They’re your teeth, after all,” she had said to me, addressing me as if I were a foolish, awkward little child.

Olivier Adam

Unfavourable Winds

Antoine Bello

The Pathfinders

Publisher: Gallimard Date of Publication: February 2009 Foreign Rights Manager: Anne-Solange Noble anne-solange.noble@gallimard.fr

Translation: Howard Curtis curtis9@talktalk.net

Antoine Bello was born in Boston in 1970. He now lives in New York. Published by Gallimard: Les Falsificateurs, 2007 (paperback edition, “Folio” collection, 2008); Éloge de la pièce manquante, 1998 (paperback edition, “Folio” collection, 2008); Les Funambules, 1996.

Biography

Publications

In this book, we meet again the hero and narrator of Les Falsificateurs (The Falsifiers), Sliv Dartunghover, the brilliant Icelandic geographer who has become one of the best agents in the CFR. The Consortium for the Falsification of Reality is a worldwide organisation which fabricates historical events in order to influence public opinion and political leaders and affect the geo-political balance. Despite his successes, Sliv still wonders about the true aims of the Consortium. In 2001, he is entrusted with an operation which involves infiltrating the United

Nations in Timor and on which he finds himself in partnership with his bitterest rival, Lena. This time, Sliv and Lena will have to learn to work together to ensure the success of the operation despite their disagreements. As brilliant as The Falsifiers, highly original, well-documented, fast-moving and witty, this cleverly constructed thriller set against the backdrop of the war in Iraq throws new light on contemporary history. The Pathfinders forms a diptych with The Falsifiers, but can also be read independently.

Gunnar placed a cup in front of me and sat down in the second armchair. “So tell me, have you identified the sixth member of the Excom?” On my return to Reykjavík, Gunnar had thrown down a challenge: “If no one will let you in on the purpose of the CFR, why don’t you try to guess it? You know only that the six members of the Executive Committee are in on the secret of the CFR. Begin by finding out the identities of these members, then study their reports and their actions. That’s sure to give you vital clues as to their motivation.” It wasn’t a bad idea at all, especially as my current position was an ideal vantage point. As an agent for Special Operations, I was entitled to examine any report I wanted, provided I knew of its existence (the proviso was an important one: I couldn’t just pull out all the reports produced by a particular agent, unless I was suggesting that that agent was endangering the organisation and had to be put under surveillance). But I enjoyed another, even greater advantage. Three years earlier, Angoua Djibo, the chairman of Planning, had asked me to go round the main branches of the CFR presenting a major reform I had initiated: quite simply, the abandoning of physical falsification. I had been the first to put forward the idea that developments in technology were bound to make old-style forgeries obsolete. A falsified map like the one of Vinland, on which I had worked, might have fooled the experts at the time but, sooner or later, science would make it possible to determine its provenance beyond any possible doubt, thereby calling attention to the means by which it had been circulated. The CFR would do better, I had written, to concentrate on electronic falsification, which was both more effective and less risky. I carried out Djibo’s

mission with an energy which surprised him. In less than six months, I had met personally the directors of the fourteen CFR centres and the heads of almost two-thirds of the offices. Obviously, I was convinced of the importance of my mission, but I had seen it above all as an opportunity to make contact with the middle management of the CFR, the men and women who piloted the ship on a daily basis and who were the most likely to satisfy my insatiable curiosity. “Unfortunately not,” I replied. “Nor am I at all sure of the other five.” “Let’s go over this. What do you know with certainty?” “With absolute certainty? Not a great deal. I know Angoua Djibo is part of the Excom. You told me that one day and he’s never denied it whenever I’ve referred to it in his presence.” “You can take that as read. And apart from him?” “Since Djibo is also in charge of Planning, I’m inclined to think that Yakoub Khoyoulfaz and Claas Verplanck, who run Special Operations and the General Inspectorate respectively, are also part of the Excom.” “Yes, I see,” Gunnar said meditatively, blowing on his scalding-hot tea. “The chairmen of the three main branches are assured of a place on the Excom: that seems logical.” “After that, I can only speculate. The first possible angle of attack: the hierarchy. I don’t claim to know the structure of the CFR in detail, but all the same I do have a relatively clear idea. Each of the main branches has several deputy chairmen—” “Do you know their names?” “Yes,” I said, consulting my notes. “Ching Shao, Jim Lassiter and Per-Olof Andersen in Planning; Martin De Wet and Carolina Watanabe in Special Operations; Diego Rojas and Lee-Ann Mulroney in the General Inspectorate.” “Aren’t there the same number of deputies in all the main branches?” “Not as far as I know. De Wet and Watanabe are the only two in Special Operations, that much I’ve established. I’ve worked out there are at least three deputies in Planning, but then that is the biggest of the branches. As for the General Inspectorate, there aren’t many more of them than there are of us: they must be able to function with only two deputies.” “That still gives you seven candidates for three places,” Gunnar calculated. “Which was what gave me the idea of taking a look at the operational departments: Human Resources, Finances and I.T. After all, when agents leave the Academy they either go into one of the main branches or one of the operational departments.” “But you know as well as I do that those who leave with the best grades invariably choose the main branches. The operational departments don’t have much of a reputation.” “I wouldn’t say that. They’re less prestigious only because they’re more standard. What’s the point of joining the CFR if you’re going to work in Human

Resources or I.T.? But these departments fulfil a vital role: I don’t think it’s absurd to suppose they would be represented on the Excom.” “I don’t know,” Gunnar said, pensively sipping his tea. “Human Resources at a pinch, but Finance and I.T., no, honestly, I find that hard to believe.” I had learned to trust Gunnar’s intuition. Even though officially he was very low down in the hierarchy of the CFR—he was not even head of a unit—he knew its structure better than anyone. I pencilled a cross next to the name of the director of Human Resources, Zoe Karvelis. Unwittingly, Gunnar had just confirmed one of my theories. “Now I come to my second angle of attack: balance. I suspect that the makeup of the Excom is carefully balanced in terms of—” “Race and gender,” Gunnar cut in. “Yes, I’ve often thought the same thing.” “Probably religion, too. Let’s start with gender. Based on recent graduates from the Academy, I’d say there are currently almost as many women as men in the CFR.” “That wasn’t always the case,” Gunnar said. “The first five agents I recruited were all men.” “That’s as may be. But I’d be surprised and even a bit shocked, to be honest, if the Excom didn’t include at least two women. As Djibo, Khoyoulfaz and Verplanck are men, that would leave two women for the three remaining seats.” “I think we can rule out there not being any at all,” Gunnar admitted. “I’d say one or two. Certainly not three.” “Now, let’s take race and religion. The CFR is a genuine multinational, active on all five continents. The Excom almost certainly reflects that diversity. Djibo is African: he told me once that he was brought up as an animist, but I don’t think he practises any religion. Khoyoulfaz is an Azeri and a Muslim. Verplanck is white and a Catholic. What are we still lacking?” “I find your question somewhat dubious,” Gunnar said with a frown. “It assumes that the make-up of the Excom has more to do with geographical considerations than the actual abilities of the candidates. But let’s say you’re right.” He put down his cup of tea, sat back in his armchair and closed his eyes. “What you’re lacking is a pure-blood Asian; a South American; another white person, probably North American, I’d say; and perhaps a second black person, preferably Muslim. My God!” he cried, opening his eyes again. “If they could hear us!” “If it’s any comfort, I was thinking along pretty much the same lines. Now let’s put those four criteria together: position within the hierarchy, gender, race and religion.” Gunnar thought for a few moments. “I understand now what you were getting at when you mentioned the operational departments. Zoe Karvelis certainly seems to tick several of those boxes: she doesn’t belong to one of the main branches, she’s Greek, a woman, white, and as for her religion, what is it, Orthodox?”

Antoine Bello

The Pathfinders

“Touché,” I replied with a smile. “Ah-hah!” said Gunnar triumphantly, getting into the game. “Now, for the second woman, Carolina Watanabe seems a good bet to me. Deputy Chairman of Special Operations, Japanese parents, born in Brazil. Catholic or Buddhist?” “Buddhist, but her children attend a Catholic school in Rio.” Gunnar looked at me in astonishment. “Good Lord, you really know your stuff!” “Would you like the names of her two cats? Seriously, though, I have a problem with Watanabe. She’s never lived in Asia. As far as I’m concerned, the two genuine Asian candidates are the Chinese woman Ching Shao, Deputy Chairman of Planning, and the Indian Marvan Nechim, director of I.T.” “Forget I.T.,” Gunnar snapped: he clearly had little respect for computer freaks. “Shao’s your second woman. I met both Watanabe and Shao on my journey. The Chinese woman struck me as more enigmatic than the Brazilian, partly due, I’m sure, to the fact that I didn’t understand half of what she said when she spoke in English.” I put a cross next to her name. “That would leave us two serious candidates for the last seat: Jim Lassiter, who’s black, and an American, deputy chairman of Planning—” “A second member from Planning? Cross him off your list.” “Or Parviz Shajarian, an Iranian, a Muslim, financial director of—” Gunnar shook his head. “The CFR is worth billions, I don’t see why the Excom would lumber itself with an accountant. No, the most likely thing is that the sixth member is an exceptional agent you’ve never even heard of. You know what would be awful?” “What?” “If he’s a Scandinavian!” Gunnar guffawed. “If there’s a grain of truth in your balance theory, you can say goodbye to any idea of getting on the Excom.” That prospect had obviously crossed my mind, but another recent discovery had alarmed me even more: among my seven or eight favourites, only one— Lassiter—was over sixty. There presumably wasn’t an official retirement age on the Excom, but I couldn’t help thinking that the youth of the current members didn’t bode well for me. “Let’s forget the sixth man for a moment,” Gunnar resumed, as if to stop me giving in to despair, “and consider the reports by the five supposed members. How many have you found ?” “The answer to that question is not as simple as it seems. We have to rule out the reports produced by each member before he was co-opted onto the Excom, in other words, before he was let in on the purpose of the CFR. But—” Gunnar finished my sentence. “The dates when they were appointed haven’t been made public.” “Exactly. We can still try to find them out, though. Djibo, for example,

apparently produced two reports a year until 1988. I say ‘apparently’ because records won’t give me a list. Then he didn’t publish anything between 1989 and 1991—or at least nothing that’s come to my notice—and only one file a year on average since 1992.” “In other words, what you’re saying is that his new duties took up all his time in the first two years. It’s not much of an argument.” “Especially as there are other explanations for his silence,” I conceded. “He might have taken on other responsibilities that year—the chairmanship of Planning, for example—or taken a sabbatical year, or whatever. But anyway, I’ve managed to establish a theoretical date of arrival for each of my five favourites: 1988 for Djibo, 1990 for Khoyoulfaz, 1986 for Verplanck, 1996 for Shao and 1997 for Karvelis. From what I’ve been able to find out, between them they’ve produced twenty-six reports.” “Is that all?” “Actually, I think it’s a lot. It takes weeks to come up with a good report. I wonder how they manage to fit it into their schedules. Actually, I think I’ve worked it out. The leaders of the CFR are still agents before anything else. Producing reports is their life. In a standard organisation, those who rise within the hierarchy are generally only too happy to give up their everyday chores for what are considered worthier tasks. The CFR is quite the opposite: the senior executives have fought to preserve the right to take on the work of rank-andfile agents.” “They must have help,” Gunnar muttered. “I can’t imagine Djibo calling Berlin and asking them to stitch a story together for him. But that’s neither here nor there. What have you gathered from the reports?” “Nothing very specific, I’m afraid. There are all kind of subjects, from serious ones like the war in Rwanda to completely trivial ones like the disappearance of an imaginary language similar to Aramaic, called Mlahsô.” “Do the reports at least fall into broad categories?” Gunnar asked. “Not really. Two of them are about territorial conflicts. Khoyoulfaz has concocted some arguments to support Azerbaijan in its dispute with NagornoKarabakh over the Lachin Corridor—” “Never heard of it.” “It’s the shortest route through the mountains between Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh. A bitterly contested route, but not exactly of major strategic importance. Ditto for the other conflict, over Kutsuzov Island, which is claimed by both China and Russia—” “Let me guess,” Gunnar cut in. “Shao comes down in favour of China?” I nodded. “In other words,” he commented scornfully, “everyone’s flying their national flag … You’re barking up the wrong tree there.” “I have three reports which could be put together under the heading ‘Reform

Antoine Bello

The Pathfinders

of capitalism’,” I continued. “That sounds more interesting,” Gunnar said, sitting forward in his armchair and pouring himself another cup of tea. “Verplanck has created false evidence for the European Union to use in its action against Microsoft for abusing their market dominance; Karvelis is helping the union of artistic creators in their campaign to have the period of copyright extended by twenty years; Verplanck, again, is moving America to tears over three cases—all fabricated—of children who died because of a lack of medical care, to speed up the passage of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.” Gunnar was thinking, trying hard, just as I had done a few weeks earlier, to find some connection between these three reports. “An attack on monopolies, a fair reward for intellectual work,” he said at last. “It sounds like a return to the origins of capitalism. But obligatory medical cover for children: now that puzzles me.” “Perhaps an attempt to cross Anglo-Saxon capitalism with a little European-style humanism,” I ventured, although I didn’t really believe it myself. “What else?” “A very good report by Djibo on the illegitimate children Thomas Jefferson is supposed to have had with one of his slaves, Sally Hemings—” “Stories about slavery are his hobby horse,” Gunnar cut in. “Actually, he does them very well.” “An almost exact repetition of the Laika report, about the launch of Kwangmyongsong, the first North Korean satellite. The rocket never left the launch pad, but the Koreans claim that the satellite has been whizzing around above our heads since September 1998. On the same lines, Karvelis has embellished the story of Hugo Chávez’s imprisonment between 1992 and 1994.” “I didn’t know he’d been in prison. What was it for?” “After the total failure of his attempted coup against President Pérez, Chávez went on TV, live, and won the hearts of millions of Venezuelans by claiming to be the alternative to Pérez’s kleptocracy. He spent two years in prison and when he came out he had a fleshy excrescence on his eye which affected his sight. Karvelis claims that Chávez caught it during his imprisonment, implying that it wasn’t properly treated and thereby reinforcing his image as a martyr. In fact, Chávez’s carnosity goes back to his adolescence, but until then it had been kept within reasonable proportions.” “What’s the connection between Chávez’s eye and a North Korean satellite?” Gunnar asked, clearly sceptical. “In both cases, the CFR supported declared enemies of the United States. There are also two reports about the rise of China. One of them aims to give the impression that the People’s Republic is further advanced that it in fact is in building a nuclear aircraft carrier. The other one brings together several

young Chinese artists under the banner of an imaginary movement called cynical realism.” “Hard to know what to think of that. Has the CFR been furthering the expansion of China with its reports, or simply going along with it? … Yes, come in!” A young woman opened the door, her arms laden with a stack of files that looked as if it were about to collapse. I rushed forward to relieve her of part of her burden and froze when I saw her face, which was half hidden by a long lock of blonde hair. She had recognised me, too. “Nina Schoeman!” I cried. “What are you doing here?” “Temping,” she replied. “I started last week.” She turned to Gunnar, who had remained in his seat. “I’ve photocopied the first three files, I’ll do the others tomorrow.” “Thank you, Miss Schoeman,” Gunnar said in his most dignified tone, putting down his cup of tea. “I’m well aware that the Icelandic constitution guarantees you a certain number of basic rights, but do you think you could possibly dress in a slightly more classic fashion in future? We regularly receive clients at the agency, and I would hate for your, shall we say, cutting-edge style of clothing to make some of them redirect their budgets to more traditional agencies.” What a pity I didn’t have a chance to warn Gunnar. I would have spared him the scathing rejoinder that followed. “Then I think you should choose your clientele more carefully,” Nina retorted sourly. “How can you accept money from those polluters from Molenberg who dismantle their factories, stuffed full of asbestos, and rebuild them in Third World countries?” This reference to Baldur, Furuset & Thorberg’s first client almost made Gunnar choke. I signalled to him that I’d be back for my things and bundled Nina out of the office.

Antoine Bello

The Pathfinders

Benjamin Berton

Date of Publication: April 2009 Foreign Rights Manager: Virginie Rouxel vrouxel@hachette-livre.fr Translation: Polly McLean pollymclean@googlemail.com

Alain Delon, Japanese Superstar

Publisher: Hachette Littératures

Biography

novel.

Benjamin Berton was born in Valenciennes in 1974. Alain Delon est une star au Japon is his fifth

Publications

Published by Gallimard: Foudres de guerre, 2007; Pirates, 2004; Classes affaire, 2001; Sauvageons, 2000 (paperback edition, “Folio” collection, 2004, Goncourt first novel prize, film adaptation in progress).

In the small hours of the morning, Alain Delon is accosted by an autograph-hunting Japanese girl as he leaves his Paris apartment for a bike ride. Somewhat shocking at this early hour, but Delon knows he is a star in Japan, and so agrees to place his precious scrawl on the photo held out to him by the girl. Suddenly, he is sent staggering by a sting to the nape of the neck. The Japanese girl’s accomplice boyfriend has just administered a powerful sedative: France’s greatest living actor is being kidnapped. The two young torturers take him straight to an isolated farm in the Creuse region, where they hold him prisoner for several days. While they obtain a ransom? No, while they commission a DNA test proving that he, Alain

Delon, is in fact the father of the young man, who is Japanese with remarkable blue eyes. The plot thickens as the positive test results are intercepted in extremis by the young man’s official father, seemingly a respectable businessman but in fact a hardcore yakuza, who doesn’t appreciate this paternity search at all. The star becomes a burdensome weight, all the more so when a neighbour finds Alain Delon’s identity card— dropped during a stroll with his jailors—lying in his field … This gripping novel, constructed like a thriller, is both true to life (everything Berton says about Delon is accurate) and entertainingly mad.

Chapter 1 After three wonderful weeks spent with his children at a luxury hotel on Mauritius, Alain Delon is back in Paris. Few men of his age would have impresed themselves such a busy leisure time! 1. Delon had jet-skied, he’d paraglided, he’d mountain biked twice round the island with his kids aged 8 and 17, he’d swum the equivalent of the channel crossing. Paradoxically, when for the past few years he had been trying to conserve his strength by refraining from all sporting activity, he felt quite reinvigorated by this sudden spurt of energy. One doesn’t develop a fatherly spirit in the sunset years—and yet he had felt an instinctive bond with the flesh of his flesh, for the first time since the birth of his son 45 years earlier. These two kids would never see him as an old man, a Derrick Astley 2 as they viciously described the decrepit tourists milling around the exclusive beach. For them, he would always be their brave, healthy dad, strong and keen enough to stand his ground in all their games. The young people did not speak like their father. They used expressions he didn’t understand and threw themselves, creature-like, into entertainments unheard of in his youth. And yet the connection had been admirably maintained throughout the stay. Delon felt he’d moved right into their hearts and lives. Old age is a curse to body and soul, but one can nevertheless fend it off, on favourable ground and with a strong sword. The kids’ departure to their mother’s place had left him in an unexpected autumnal slump. The first three days had been painful, and Delon had experienced some difficulty resuming his bachelor lifestyle. Naturally this was a Delonesque bachelorhood, stuffed with hangers-on and con-men, an albatross-like bachelorhood to which he could decide, on the spur of the moment, with the simple reaching out of a hand, to add whoever he might wish—wife, mistress or one-night stand.

1. In 2007, Alain Delon starred in more than one hundred performances of The Bridges of Madison County.

2. Composite of Derrick (German TV detective) and Rick Astley (British pop star), implying an old has-been.

3. Hong Kongese film director. He is the film maker of Full Time Killer, A Hero Never Dies, Mad Detective … He has renewed in his own way the detective novel genre by miding epics, backfires, and a realistic approach.

But in the absence of this desire, the weight of the years was gaining the upper hand as he wandered around the apartment. He had not let it bother him when his agent told him that the Johnny To 3 shoot planned for the autumn would not in fact take place. But he had certainly felt it. Officially, the project had been abandoned for financial reasons, but Delon was sure this wasn’t the real reason. He was certain the project had foundered on his name. The insurers must have decided that such an ambitious project (a 120-day shoot just for the star and the incessant stunts) could not rely on a clapped-out poster boy. The doctors may have signed certificate on certificate confirming that his heart problems were behind him, but no one was convinced. Hollywood, which had never much liked him in the first place, didn’t want to know. This morning, he rose early and decided to lift his mood by cycling around the city. He’d better leave promptly and take an obscure route, unless he wanted to end up with a hundred people in his wake. Paris was full of little streets, tiny alleyways and ancient lanes one could whistle through in the small hours. The city was his favourite playground. Starting with teenage adventures, he had crossed it so often he knew every square inch like the surface of a postage stamp. Give me those paps, he would sometimes joke, a hundred, a thousand, as many as you like. Give me two minutes’ head start and they’ll never get so much as a snap of me on my bike. He glanced out the window, pulled on a pair of jeans and a short-sleeved sky blue shirt. Alain Delon never went out in disguise, unlike other stars. It was an aberration; the best way to get yourself spotted. For years, Catherine Deneuve had been hiding behind old lady costumes and sunglasses so big they would fit a horse’s head. She had never been able to walk fifty yards without being recognised. People just thought: why is Catherine Deneuve out shopping in a Bavarian wig and those ridiculous shades? He stepped out onto the pavement and walked calmly to the nearest bank of Vélibs. His bodyguard would start work again Monday morning. His assistants had cautioned him not to take the slightest risk; he mustn’t go running around all on his own. He didn’t give a damn. He didn’t blow all that cash just to be told he couldn’t go out for a spin when he felt like it. As he left, Delon didn’t notice the white Renault Clio parked thirty yards away, its street-side door ajar. His watch said 5.30 a.m. The city wouldn’t wake for at least another two hours. Apart from some random delivery vans (and those hardworking guys weren’t exactly the type to groupie him), there was never anyone around before 7.30, in August. Paris is a museum, he thought, a fat country dame complete with heavy leaden bust, snoring just to prove she’s alive. There was nothing alive here anymore, no real activity. Spontaneity and zest had absconded from the western world, decamped to other lands. Suddenly, the girl leapt out of the pale, deserted morning and shouted at him: “Mr Delon? Mr Delon?”

Alain Delon turned towards the Japanese girl. His avoidance tactics worked for almost all fans, but not the Japanese. They were made from sterner stuff. They rose well before dawn and could easily maintain a hideout for days on end, with no food or anything. At your first sign of weakness, they leapt out of their hiding place and jumped on you, as tigers Shotokan 4. The girl was a nonentity, barely out of adolescence, quite unattractive at first sight and most importantly, not at all aggressive. He formed the smile that would give her what she had come for: Alain Delon-san, the figurehead of French cinema, the international star, the rebel face of ritzy goods. Producing this kind of smile didn’t cost him much. In fact, he was rather proud of it. All he had to do was slightly raise the corner of his lips, revealing a little of the top row of teeth, and then unleash some frothy sparkle into his gaze. With time, the gesture had become unconscious and would set itself in motion—a kind of instinctive protection—as soon as he found himself faced with a potential threat, or someone he didn’t know. He gave her the all ages® version. “Mr Delon”, she said again, admiringly. He had never understood by what miracle the mere fact of being in a woman’s field of vision could so light up one’s features. The effect had not faded with time. Scientists had measured the proportions of his skull, they’d analysed the distance from eyes to nose and nose to mouth, checking for a magic number or some other source of mathematical truth. But they’d never managed to establish the basis of the phenomenon. The Japanese girl pulled a notebook and pen out of her rucksack. She was shining like a halogen lamp, and waving her things in front of his nose. “Autograph?” she thought it necessary to explain. “You, big movie star. Mr Delon.” “And your name?” Alain Delon thought to himself that the girl seemed odd. Her French was questionable from a grammatical point of view, but she pronounced each word perfectly and the accent was immaculate. Yes, definitely odd—but he didn’t have time to finish his thought. As he was scribbling on the graph paper, Alain Delon felt something like an insect sting at the base of his neck. He dropped the pen and rubbed his neck where the needle had struck. He paused for a moment, stared at the girl who suddenly seemed horribly young and ugly, and blacked out. “Tetsuko,” he heard her saying, from miles away. “Tetsuko to môshimasu.” 5 The stuff they had injected him with didn’t even knock him off his feet. The blend of prime curare and GHB had left him standing, but unconscious and docile. The risk of complications was enormous. Tetsuko’s accomplice Kaizuo rushed up and helped her support the actor, so they could bundle him into the Clio. The young man shut the door on the star and walked round the vehicle

4. Tiger Shotokan is an imaginary Japanese tiger. It became the emblem for Karate clubs of Shotokai Style. It is synonym for courage, mobility, strength and agility.

Benjamin Berton

Alain Delon, Japanese Superstar

5. My name is Tetsuko (in Japanese).

dropping the blinds. They crossed the Seine by the Jardin des Plantes, and made their way across a heat-soaked Paris to the peripherique. Alain Delonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s head rested lovingly on the young womanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s shoulder, his nauseous gaze staring vacantly into space. The young Japanese criminals kissed each other and, as if fleeing with the crown jewels, let out a shriek of challenge to the old world.

Catherine Cusset

New York, Cycle Diary

Publisher: Mercure de France Date of Publication: March 2009 Foreign Rights Manager: Bruno Batreau bruno.batreau@mercure.fr

Translation: Imogen Forster imogen.forster@talktalk.net

Biography Catherine Cusset attended the École normale superieure in Paris. She holds an advanced degree in classics and is a specialist in eighteenth-century literature, which she has taught for the past twelve years at Yale University. She has written a dozen or so novels, and lives in New York with her husband and daughter. Publications Her most recent novels from Gallimard include Un brillant avenir, 2008 (prix Goncourt des lycéens); Amours transversales, 2004 (paperback edition, “Folio” collection, 2005); Confessions d’une radine, 2003 (paperback edition, “Folio” collection, 2004); La Haine de la famille, 2001 (paperback edition, “Folio” collection, 2002).

Catherine Cusset has chosen to set her selfportrait—a portrait whose features are vivid, limpid, funny and at once tender and cruel—in a specific city, at a specific time. We’re in New York, in 1995. In the course of a cycle-ride through the city, the reality of New York itself, its insistent beat, its craziness, passes before the reader’s eyes. We ride along its streets, we discover its neighborhoods, we get stuck in traffic jams, we curse and we get drunk on the mere fact of being alive. We stop to catch our breath in its public gardens or beside the river, and we suddenly realize that the city is a body, that it carries within itself its own cycle of life and death, and we understand the book’s real purpose, which is to describe a much-loved city but also to tell the story of a woman who wants a child, following her own cycle, counting days and weeks, and struggling against time. There’s a secret

behind this sense of urgency, but this isn’t the place to say what it is. The pages of this book exude an amazing energy, but also a sense of anxiety. They’re full of funny dialogue and situations and above all, they communicate the enormous pleasure of reading. It’s the story of a marriage, and also of a city, two strands that are developed together with extraordinary skill. And the visual imagery that accompanies this self-portrait? It’s a series of bicycles photographed by Catherine Cusset in New York: bicycles that are broken or brand new, abandoned or attached in some weird way. Bicycles that have become pieces of sculpture, that thread their way though these pages. Majestic cycles that tell the story of life lived on the edge.

Prologue Fifteen years later, and New York has changed.

* Words in italics are in English in the original text.

The Twin Towers no longer occupy the center of your field of vision as you cycle down Fifth Avenue or glide downtown along the Hudson. The East Village, Alphabet City and the Lower East Side have become gentrified. The Williamsburg Bridge has been repaired and now leads at both ends to neighborhoods full of cool young people. With the growth of the internet, the bike couriers have almost disappeared from midtown. A park is being built along the Hudson, bit by bit, from Battery Park City to the Upper West Side. And now that a cycle track has been created beside the highway, you’re not allowed to ride right next to the water any more, along the elegant pedestrian walkway. Even at night or in the rain, when it’s deserted, the walkway’s patrolled by little white cars driven by park rangers* in khaki uniforms, who threaten to fine any cyclist drawn by the city’s lights shimmering on the black water. New York’s all police nowadays. The gay men and drag queens no longer congregate at weekends on the piers at the end of Christopher Street—they were driven out of the neighborhood when Richard Meier’s glass towers went up and ten-million-dollar lofts were built. The fashion for roller-blading has faded away. And I don’t have my old bike any more. I abandoned it without its even having been stolen, because it was too hard on my poor old hip-bones.

Some things haven’t changed: the light on the Hudson, the blazing sunset skies, the beauty of the bridges, the city’s energy, couples’ misunderstandings, my anger at drivers who stray into cycle lanes, the sadness of a blank box on a pregnancy test when you want a child. At ten o’clock last night, we’re going down Fifth Avenue towards Washington Square. At the 9th St pedestrian crossing, a yellow cab brakes suddenly in front of us to let the passenger get out. It stops at an angle in front of a black car that has been trying to park and is getting ready to move off, with its lights on and its wheels pointing to the left. Just as the door of the cab slams shut, the 9th St bus come along at full speed and cuts in diagonally in front of the two vehicles. The black car gets cut off by the cab, which is boxed in by the bus, which is blocking the street and holding up traffic in both directions, preventing it turning onto 9th St. On the Avenue itself, the lights turn green; two lanes of traffic can’t move because of the cars boxed in by the 9th St bus. This causes a deafening chorus of horns, which has scarcely any effect on the bus-driver. Without looking round, he’s conscientiously counting the coins that a passenger has dropped into his see-through plastic box. My husband and I pass in between the bus and the boxed-in cars. I laugh and say, New York’s divided into categories, pedestrians, skaters, cyclists, cars, taxis, buses and trucks, and they all have a single thought: fuck the others. Fuck the others*, my husband says.

Catherine Cusset

New York, Cycle Diary

At the bar on Sullivan Street, we meet Ben and James. In his high voice James tells me how today, on a sidewalk in Brooklyn, he’d heard the sounds of rollerblades coming up behind him and had stopped instantly to avoid causing confusion. The girl who was skating along, dancing from one leg to the other— on his chair James imitates the movement of her swaying hips—gave a little sideways jump, zip—James’s hips swerve to the left—to avoid him. Fuck the rollerbladers*, James says. I ask him if he isn’t going to take up rollerblading. No. He doesn’t like the idea of being a beginner. What he’d like to have is one of those motorized scooters you sometimes see in Central Park on a Sunday. Vroom vroom! He imitates the sound of the motor, his lips sticking out, his head held straight up and his hands on imaginary handlebars. James thinks these skaters who use the road and the sidewalk and come at you from all directions are dangerous. He doesn’t have medical insurance. I look at him wide-eyed. But that’s really hardly surprising. James is writing a novel that’s already nine hundred pages long, and in the meantime he doesn’t have a regular job, only bits of casual work paid by the hour. What about his daughter? He says she’s OK, she’s covered by her mother’s insurance. As for him, if he had an accident he could be out on the street, in debt for the rest of his life. James says all he has to do is give it a couple of anxious minutes’ thought every day and then nothing’s going to happen. We both knock on wood.

As I cycle off to catch the green light on Broadway, I hear a shout. A car in front of me has slowed down just beyond the pedestrian crossing, and a man standing behind it strikes the trunk a violent blow with his fist. I slip past on the right. Fuck you, fuck you!* the man yells, in the middle of the street, gesturing at the driver as if ordering him to get out of the vehicle. He’s hefty, and lands another punch on the lid of the trunk. The Asian driver has turned round as if to apologize, but he drives off. Motherfucker!* the pedestrian screams, hoarse and shrill, waving his fist in the air. Some people have stopped to watch what’s going on. Today I cycled to a little travel agency in the Empire State Building, at 34th St and Fifth Avenue, where they sell low-price tickets on Pakistan Airlines. I went back up Sixth Avenue, the only one where there’s a cycle lane. Going through midtown at four o’clock on a Friday afternoon, or at any time of day on any day of the week, for that matter, is a nightmare. A beige van veers into the cycle lane just in front of me and I’m forced to brake. It’s impossible to get through on the left—the space between the van and the parked cars is too narrow—impossible to overtake on the right because cars are coming at speed, skimming the cycle lane. When I finally pass the van, I hit the right-hand window of the cab hard as I go; the driver, who’s Indian or Pakistani, is startled and turns towards me. I shout, Bike lane!* in a furious voice. He makes an apologetic gesture, as if to say “what can I do?”. He doesn’t look mean, this guy—he’s young, a bit lost. I regain possession of the cycle lane ahead of him. It’s clear for several blocks. Too bad I’m so tense, I say to myself. My back’s going to start hurting again. But it’s a nice day, the first day of summer, and I’ve even had to stop at a red light to take off my parka and my sweater and roll them up in the basket on the front of my bike, I’m so hot. I hardly notice the nice weather. I’m getting more and more tense, irritable and bad-tempered. Never mind the bright sunshine, blue sky and balmy air—it would be all the same to me if it was raining cats and dogs. I try to calm down. On my right, couriers, and other cyclists, some of them Chinese, and in-line skaters flow past me in a steady stream. They seem to pay no attention to the two lines of cars that have stopped in the cycle lane, or even to the ones that make a left turn without a thought for the people riding alongside them. They’re the worst. I feel like shooting the drivers. Pedaling for all I’m worth, I go straight ahead as fast as I can to catch the green light, when an idiot on my right makes a left, swerving in front of me and I’m forced to brake. I come within an inch of hitting his fender and I miss the green, while the car that hasn’t even noticed me stops for the pedestrians on the cross-street before calmly making his left turn. As for pedestrians who wander into the cycle lane to hail a taxi, or to avoid the crush on the sidewalk, I’d just like to run them over. From a distance, I yell Be careful!*, in a horrible French accent, and sometimes I add the French word for

asshole or dickhead. I have my hand on the brake, but I make sure to give them the closest possible shave. When a woman jumps back in fright, I’m happy. If some guy or bitch bawls me out, I shout straight back Bike lane!*, good and loud, sure of my rights. I belt up Sixth Avenue to catch the green light, so that I don’t have to stop on the slope in Chelsea. A guy’s standing right in the center of the cycle lane. I shout Watch out!* He sees me coming but doesn’t move. Just as I skim past him, a searing pain nearly makes me fall off my bike. I stop ten yards farther on and look round. The guy gives me a nasty look. From where I’m standing, I shout You hit me!* I can hardly believe it, but the pain’s burning all the way up my arm and into my shoulder. He must have hit me as hard as he could. A surge of adrenaline stops me thinking straight. I turn round and walk towards him, pushing my bike. I’m going to call the police!* The guy runs off.

Catherine Cusset

New York, Cycle Diary

My husband says I’m crazy. One of these days, one of the people I yell “ Asshole!” or just Bike lane!* at is going to pull a revolver out of his pocket and shoot me without even getting out of his car. That’s New York. They’ll say I provoked him. Like the black kid who aimed a revolver at a white girl coming out of a club on the Lower East Side at three in the morning. And what are you going to do now? Fire?, she asked. He fired. She’s dead. Yesterday I saw a cycle accident right across from where I live. A cab-driver cut across the cycle lane to drop his passenger, who opened his door and knocked over a Chinese cyclist who was passing at that moment. He wasn’t knocked out, but his face was white. Sitting in the road, he put his hand on his chest as if he was in pain. He didn’t speak a word of English. The cab-driver and his passenger stood waiting, worried and talkative. A fire truck and two ambulances with their sirens going took barely ten minutes to get there. One of them picked up the poor Chinese guy, who was most likely an illegal immigrant. The first time I use my bike in New York, I don’t know [there’s a cycle lane on Sixth Avenue and I go through midtown to Central Park by way of Third. I have an appointment with the deputy cultural attaché at the French Embassy, to talk about Crébillon fils. When I get to 78th St, I’m sweaty and exhausted. The deputy cultural attaché invites me for a coffee in the Regency Room at the Carlyle Hotel, and I tell him I’ve just cycled through midtown for the first time. He shows little interest in my feat. On the way back, I go through midtown on Second Avenue. The traffic here’s just as bad. I ride down the right-hand side of the avenue, my eyes fixed on the parked cars, the door of any one of which could open at any moment. Every couple of minutes taxi or a bus cuts in front of me and I have to brake hard. To be sure of avoiding them, I turn my head, and

twisting it gives me a stiff neck. There’s no way to get through; several lanes of vehicles are streaming by at full speed. Ten times I think I’m going to die. When I get home at six o’clock in the evening, I have a migraine and the muscles in my neck and back are tight and painful. I’m so tired I have to get into a hot bath and stay there for an hour with my eyes closed, without moving. What annoys me is to think that it really wasn’t worth fighting with my husband for several weeks when he wanted to deprive me of something I needed, with the excuse that the apartment was too small to store something as ugly and cumbersome as a bike. I was already happy, but with my bike I’d be even happier, because to me, a bike means freedom. Crossing midtown to buy a pair of pants at Gap in Herald Square, I got trapped in the cycle lane between a van coming out of its parking space and a car that had stopped at a red light. When the light changed, the van on my left moved slowly forward, but the car on my right hadn’t moved yet. The van grazed my leg, and I was stuck. Another inch and its steel body was touching me, another one and it was crushing my leg. The driver couldn’t see me—I was in his blind spot. I panicked and banged on the door as hard as I could, yelling. The guy heard either the banging or my yells, and he stopped. The car on my right had moved off. I got going again, but I had a sore throat for the rest of the day; my screaming had inflamed my vocal cords. I’m turning onto 11th St. This early May day, the air’s soft. I’m on my way back from D’Agostino’s, where I’ve brought a pot of coffee-flavored Haägen Dazs frozen yogurt. I glide beneath the trees on which little bright-green buds are opening at last, and I smile, at the thought that I’m definitely pregnant: I’m ten days late, and there’s no sign of my period coming. It’s true that I don’t have any of the signs of being pregnant, either, apart from this sudden irresistible craving for coffee ice-cream, but this time I know it’s worked—I can feel it. There are miracles that you’re granted only after shedding many tears. When my belly’s nice and big it’ll be funny to remember our quarrel in April and my childish despair about not being able to do something so simple and so natural that it’s usually harder to prevent than to accomplish. We’ll laugh about it. For my husband, it will be proof that I’m going way overboard, and panicking, as usual, but I’ll know that if I hadn’t cried like that and made such a fuss, it would never have happened. My bike glides over the fresh tarmac. I turn on Fifth Avenue. Careful, mustn’t day-dream. Taxis can’t see you , and my body that’s carrying you is so precious now.

Mercedes Deambrosis

Just for Fun

Publisher: Buchet-Chastel Date of Publication: January 2009 Foreign Rights Manager: Christine Legrand christine.legrand@buchet-chastel.fr

Translation: Mike Mitchell mikem@phonecoop.coop

Mercedes Deambrosis was born in Madrid in 1955. She has published four novels and a collection of short stories with Buchet-Chastel. Publications Published by Buchet-Chastel: La Plieuse de parachutes, 2006; Milagrosa, 2004 (paperback edition, Éditions Points, 2008); La Promenade des délices, 2004 (paperback edition, Éditions du Seuil, “Points” collection, 2006); Suite et fin au Grand Condé, 2002; Un Après-midi avec Rock Hudson, 2001; (paperback edition, Éditions du Seuil, “Points” collection, 2006). Published by Éditions du Chemin de Fer: Candelaria ne viendra pas, 2008. Biography

1942–1987: Paths crossing. During the Occupation Inspector Lambert takes part, much against his will, in the round-up of Jews at the Vélodrome d’Hiver. Outraged, he tries to protect Adélaïde Meier, who has been cooped up there together with her husband and children. Until this point the Meiers had lived a life of luxury. They have been denounced by their maid, who is Monsieur Meier’s mistress and married to Désiré Cottencin. After they have been arrested, Désiré takes over their apartment; he collaborates with the occupying force and with a man called Gaillard to get his hands on as much Jewish property as possible. Édouard Gaillard is someone who changes both his identity and his country several times during these turbulent years: in Spain he fights for the

Reds at first, then for Franco; as Zacharie Poletti he works alongside the SS in Germany; in France he’s a collaborator and kills just for pleasure. Inspector Lambert is in charge of the investigation, but no one’s interested in his inquiries. History has other fish to fry …Years later, consumed with guilt, Lambert sets off in search of the past, a search haunted by the shadow of the evil Gaillard. But his questions remain unanswered: “For one can never forget, never forgive everything.” Juste pour le plaisir moves with the pace of a thriller. The serial killer, a figure of absolute evil, is the central theme of this realistic novel which asks the question: “What would you have done in their place?”

Spain, Barcelona, 1938 There were many skirmishes during the march on Barcelona. He entered the city with the Moorish Guard and before it had officially surrendered to the rebel army, he had developed a sure hand. Using a knife demands suppleness, know-how and a creative response in all circumstances. Every case is different: positions vary, the victim’s state of mind is a matter of chance. Many things have to be taken into account: the element of surprise, fear, the violence of the assault, the wounded victim’s passivity—or the reverse, one last surge before the final leap, which can be classified as one of the most dangerous. When there’s nothing to lose, reactions can turn out to be fatal. He was very much taken with the bestiality of the Moorish Guard who, with no qualms whatsoever, with obvious enjoyment, killed, raped, slit throats, raped again, massacred everything that came in their way. Seeing Franco when he reviewed his troops, a small, flabby man with a potbelly, flanked by his officers and two priests, dripping with false modesty and delight at the idea that these thousands of men he was praising to the skies were going to clear all the Reds off the surface of the earth, he wondered how the Generalissimo was going to get these jackals back into their cages, once the carnage was over. It was a master class, extremely simple, like all great things. It was something he was not going to forget that soon. When the rebel army raised its blood-and-gold flag over the city, the toughest, most experienced units surrounded the Moorish Guard who, for

want of living enemies, were howling and furiously attacking bodies which had already been horribly mutilated. Calmly, methodically, they machine-gunned over a quarter of them, hanged those who kept up their resistance and gathered the survivors together. These were then provided with new uniforms and silk capes that came down over their saddles and were given as much food and drink as they could take. He realised that brutality, and savagery did nothing for him, it only appealed to the primitive psyche. He had no preference as regards age or sex. An old man, a young man, a woman, a child, they all served his purpose just as well. His pleasure was limited to the very brief moment when he sunk his knife into his victim’s flesh and the spurt of blood brought death in a warm, bubbling stream. After the military occupation of the city, he realised there was nothing for him in the new state of affairs. Like rats emerging from the sewers, the Church was everywhere and extended its hysterical and obscurantist rule at lightning speed. There was one procession after another, expiatory rosaries spread their tentacles. The clergy were everywhere, in the front row for executions, internments, interrogations, a look of rapturous resignation in their eyes, tight-lipped, repressing with difficulty their tremendous joy at the new order. The repression might well offer innumerable opportunities of satisfying his urge, but he rejected them. One evening he swapped his uniform for the rags of a peasant, who was given the honour of a military funeral for services to the crusade, stole a horse and with a skill acquired long ago caught up with one of the last columns of refugees who, starving and desperate, were fleeing towards the French border. There was no one to ask him to explain himself. He immediately offered his horse to be butchered, provided someone else did the slaughtering. He couldn’t, he said, stand the sight of blood … His behaviour was exemplary in everything: he carried children and old people on his back, helped the wounded and the dying, offered comfort to the unfortunate, though they were beyond comfort, having only one thing on their minds—escape. When, finally, his turn came to cross the frontier along with thousands of other refugees, he had no weapons to throw away nor a load to take with him. Before being shut up in a French camp, he hid his French, German and Italian papers in his boots, under cover of darkness. He turned round and saluted his companions in exile with a clenched fist. None responded, they were all asleep, all dreaming already of the soil they would miss until the day they died. But that didn’t bother him, familiar as he was with the quirks of fate and the tricks it can play.

Mercedes Deambrosis

Just for Fun

5 Paris 1987 On waking, the decision he made the previous evening perks him up. In the shower Lambert repeats a list of names he hasn’t spoken for fifty years: Georgette Malivoine, 19, born in Angers, Régine Desmarquets, 15, born, the 20th arrondissement of Paris, and Louise Petitjean, 17, born in Capdenac, in the Aveyron. “All three dead in Montreuil, all three living in Montreuil,” he said out loud. “All three buried in Montreuil.” It’s close on ten o’clock when he leaves the house. The street is unusually quiet. He takes the newspaper, Le Parisien, on the Metro with him and has time to read it from end to end by the time he reaches Robespierre station. Nothing has really changed, the streets still have the same air of centuriesold poverty as they slope down gently between dilapidated warehouses, waste ground thick with weeds, little houses with their gardens concreted over, seedy-looking cafes, dark, with formica-topped tables. He goes into the first he comes across, drinks a coffee at the bar, it’s bitter, makes his guts churn and, as he’s about to pay, he offers the owner the newspaper. “I wouldn’t say no. Customers are rare, I need something to pass the time.” Then he asks, “The cemetery, it’s still that way?” The man doesn’t reply, just gestures with his chin. He goes out and stands on the rutted pavement for a moment, hesitating. That first time he could have found something out, if he’d dared. But fifty years later … He smiles and sets off. Time to get on with it. The cemetery has grown. This addition of tombstones runs counter to the passage of time which decreases, diminishes everything. There are the dead with abandoned graves and the dead with recent graves, shiny, ugly. The wars have brought their harvest, carved out their territory. He can’t remember the path he took for the sad ceremony. He hadn’t seen the crosses, the slabs, he had simply left. And who knows whether anyone ever came back to bring flowers or tears for the three young women who had gone … He glances round, fascinated as always by the ugliness and peace that emanate from such places, where the flowers end up dying as well, laid out on the marble, the granite, where the yellowing faces continue to disappear, smiling all the while, with their hats and holy medals, cherished by their parents, children, neighbours, colleagues, the fire brigade association, the choir of St Étienne du Mont, the very people who will one day come in their turn to feed a soil with no future. He finds them by chance, at the end of a path leading nowhere, a cul-de-sac with a large cross blocking the way behind a pile of broken, abandoned tombs.

Those of the three young women are identical, not maintained, with little, sealed grey-green vases beneath their smiling portraits, which are also pitted with rust. Between the gravestones leaves are piling up, dry, rotting. The three ‘to our beloved daughter’s are still there. And a single flower, plastic, fixed with a piece of wire to the metal cross rising above them. Cheap flowers, made to last. A rose, a poppy, a daffodil. He sits down on a grave opposite, looks round, hoping to see someone to ask. The weather’s still quite pleasant, he feels he’s relaxing, calm, his mind empty. What question could he ask now? Three graves for three dead women, so long ago? Their parents dead, their families gone. Brothers, sisters, friends perhaps? The graves have not been looked after. He gets up. It wasn’t a good idea, those young women really are dead for everyone. He’ll have to find something else to hang on to, to silence all these questions he doesn’t want to answer. After one last glance he, too, turns his back on them. Heading for the exit he comes across a man in a kind of uniform. Without thinking, he takes out his old warrant card. “Tell me, do you keep registers here?” The man responds with alacrity. “Of course. Come with me.” Weariness on his shoulders, eyes that seem to see nothing, blue, pale, the lashes almost white. He asks questions. Not many, he hasn’t much in the way of ideas, nor does he feel like having any. No, he doesn’t know, he has to look after everything here himself, but no, he doesn’t think anyone … Just one thing perhaps. He couldn’t swear to it. He hasn’t seen it with his own eyes but he has noticed— “The flower. The flower’s changed every year, some time in August. I could be wrong.” The man feels he isn’t wrong. “In August, you say?” “Yes. It’s during my holiday. When I come back, at the beginning of September, I say ‘Oh, look, the plastic flower’s been changed.’ ”

Mercedes Deambrosis

Just for Fun

Didier Decoin

Is This the Way Women Die?

Publisher: Grasset Date of Publication: February 2009 Foreign Rights Manager: Heidi Warneke hwarneke@grasset.fr

Translation: Sophie Lewis sophie_l@fastmail.fm

Biography Didier Decoin was born in 1943. A journalist, columnist, scriptwriter and novelist, he has written many books, of which John l’Enfer won the Goncourt prize in 1977. He has been a member of the Académie Goncourt since 1995. Publications Decoin’s most recent novels include: Henri ou Henry, le roman de mon père, Stock, 2006 (paperback edition, Éditions Points, 2007); Avec vue sur la mer, NiL, 2005 (paperback edition, Éditions Pocket, 2007); Madame Seyerling, Éditions du Seuil, 2002 (paperback edition, coll. “Points”, 2003).

“According to the cops” report, there were thirtyeight of them. Thirty-eight men and women who were there, for more than half an hour, witnessing the agony of Kitty Genovese. Nice and warm behind their windows. Some wrapped up in blankets, others who had taken the time to slip on a dressing gown. Not one of them made the slightest attempt to come to the aid of that poor woman.” Didier Decoin was inspired by this news item, which first appeared as a brief paragraph—“local resident stabbed to death in front of her own home”—before being splashed over the front pages of all the papers, which took up the witnesses’ cowardice as the true focus of the story.

New York, 1964; a March evening in Queens, still an unwholesome and dangerous part of town; a poorly-lit pavement. This is the setting for an arresting new novel in which we gradually discover the atrocities committed by a serial killer, half-hidden by snow. Among those who emerge as key players are smartly-dressed Kitty, the victim; the killer Winston Moseley, a father and coldhearted monster whose only pleasure comes from committing murder; the narrator Nathan Koschel; the local residents who were glued to their windowpanes. On whom should rest the balance of guilt? On the criminal—or on the witnesses, whose indifference allowed them to listen to calls for help without reacting?

Just then, Elizabeth Moseley was finishing the washing-up. She decided not to go to bed. From the living room where he was watching a film on tv, Moseley called out to her—and it was at least the third time he’d said it—not to stay up so as to make the most of the whole long night’s sleep she had ahead of her, which only happened every twelve days, and then only as long as the next shift had not been thrown out of kilter by some colleague crying off sick. The choice that Winston and Elizabeth had made both to continue working, he spending his days at the Raygram Corporation in Mount Vernon and she as a night-nurse at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, deprived them of having as much time together with the children as they would have liked. But Elizabeth had read an ornithologist’s opinion in a magazine, confirming that it was in fact the alternation of parental responsibility (one remaining in the nest while the other flew out in search of food) that made the majority of birds so faithful, having no choice but to trust each other. Their local social worker had also reassured them: this system of relays was ultimately more frustrating for them than for their children, who would end up benefiting from always having one parent present and ready to help them. That night, Elizabeth slept well. She always slept well when it was cold outside and she knew that her brood was all together at home with her. Moseley lowered the volume of the tv in order better to hear the springs’ creak when his wife got into bed. After that, he would have to wait until she was sleeping deeply before he could leave the house and do what he had to do.

He had not exactly prepared for what would happen that night. How could he mentally have planned the details of a murder while chatting to Elizabeth about the likelihood of getting their respective salaries raised before the summer? He forced himself to go on waiting. Elizabeth often woke abruptly from her first doze. She would spring upright, eyes wide, rubbing her mouth and chin like someone who had forgotten something. Realising that Winston was not at her side, she might then get up to look for him. She would come into the living room. And there, looking hard at her husband, she would be shocked to see him with that look on his face, with that other look, which she didn’t know, which nobody recognised, nobody except for Annie Mae Johnson and Barbara Kralik just before they died, and perhaps a dozen other women who were not dead but who had had close calls they would never forget. The film was now long finished and only snow crackled on the screen. Of course there would be other programmes on other channels, but Moseley had reached the stage when the horrific mental images he was inventing went far beyond anything the television could offer to compete. Having made sure that Elizabeth was deeply asleep, he walked softly over to the room where the children were sleeping. He stopped for a moment in the doorway to look. They were beautiful; he felt a wave of love wash through him and fought against the urge to lean over and kiss them (if he woke them he would have the devil of a time getting them back to sleep; then it would be too late for him to set out looking for someone to kill). So he made do with whispering “sweet dreams” into the room and wishing them a good day when they woke up. After carefully locking the front door, Moseley headed for his car, hoping she would be good enough to start up straight away. The white Corvair was only four years old, in other words, for a Chevrolet she was just a baby. But that winter her battery had shown some signs of recalcitrance, especially when it was cold like tonight. Yet Moseley did what he could to keep her charged. In fact he made more effort than most: all those nights he spent driving around, sometimes four or five hours at a time, at the same, even pace, not too fast and not too slow, for a car that crawls around will draw the attention of the police as surely as a racer breaking the speed limit. Moseley was not keen on being stopped by a patrol. He had all the necessary documents with him and the police could strip the Corvair without finding any trace of illicit substances, but the questions they would inevitably ask might make him lose track of his thoughts—or rather of his thought, his only, obsessive thought, as tense as a strung arrow.

He must not let himself be diverted from the impulse which had so recently awoken in him, which had begun to throb in him like a second heart, at once powerful and delicate. Powerful because it multiplied his desire tenfold, while completely subjugating Moseley’s physical and mental functions to this single aim; delicate because the slightest disturbance—a train’s passing, the sharp odour of the fog, a song on the radio—would be enough to interrupt its profound vibration. If this happened, the desire seemed to shrivel until it flickered out and vanished. In fact, it was only dormant, but Moseley could never predict when it might show up again. He knew only that it would return even more compelling than the time before. A day might come when Winston Moseley would have no other purpose in life than to assuage this desire. It would finish by merging with him, just like the corpses that other murderers—those who kill for a reason: for revenge, or out of spite or love, indeed for all those motives that have nothing to do with pleasure—leave to melt into quicklime. Thus he would go from the joy of administering death to the joy of being Death. On that day, Moseley would lose all capacity to think, he would consist of no more than pure, basic, brutal sensation; he would, perhaps, go so far as to enact in bright daylight, in front of a dumbstruck crowd what until now he had reserved for places of darkness and solitude.

Didier Decoin

Is This the Way Women Die?

It must have been between one-thirty and two in the morning when Moseley drove the Corvair into Sutter Avenue. He turned in the direction of Queens Boulevard and Yellowstone, criss-crossing the area in search of a car driven by a lone woman. At last, one hour later, he caught sight of a small red Fiat with a female profile at the wheel. He began tailing her in the Corvair, without trying to find out anything further about the driver, hoping only that she was going home and that her place was not too far from where he had come across her. He wanted to get on, to act. He was less and less able to bear coming home without having realised his plan. The frustration made him uneasy for days afterwards. Luckily for him, the pursuit was brief: a dozen blocks on down Austin Street, the red Fiat slowed and drew up in the open-air parking lot at Long Island Railroad station. In the time it took the car’s driver to find a space, extinguish her headlights and cut the engine, step out of her car and lock it, Moseley had already abandoned his Corvair somewhat haphazardly at a nearby bus-stop and was entering the parking lot with a German hunting knife in the right pocket of his jacket, a Silengen & Mazo that he had bought three weeks ago.

Lawyer Sydney G. Sparrow: At that precise moment, Winston, when you were preparing to stop her, had you decided to kill her? Moseley: Yes. Lawyer Sparrow: Why? Did you have any reason to kill her? Moseley: No, no particular reason. Lawyer Sparrow: Had you already seen her before that night? Moseley: No, never. Lawyer Sparrow: Did you know whether she was carrying any cash? Moseley: I had no clue about that. Lawyer Sparrow: But was it important for you that she should have money on her or not? Moseley: Not particularly important, no. Lawyer Sparrow: At that point, Winston, were you planning to rape her? Moseley: Just then? No, not at that point, no. Kitty Genovese saw Moseley in the fraction of a second that it took her to withdraw her key from the Fiat’s door. By then he was about fifteen metres away, perfectly still, every one of his muscles in painful tension. She did not take the time to look at him properly: she knew instantly that he was dangerous, and she cast about for the best way of escaping the danger. Since living in New York, especially since she had been working at Ev’s Eleventh Hour, Kitty had acquired a certain set of reflexes. If she were attacked, even before her aggressor could touch her and she was in a position to stick her carkey into his eye or knee him in the crotch, she had to persuade him that she was not as solitary as she appeared, that angels were watching over, ready to drop from the skies to help her. These angels need not be real for them to work; the point was that her assailant should believe that the threat had suddenly changed places, that it was now directed against him. Kitty’s angels might come in the form of an imagined dog, supposedly frisking along a few metres behind her, to whom she had only to whistle and call by a bellicose name such as Warrior, Rebel or Tiger; or it might be a cop strolling away just out of sight to whom she could simply wave: “Good night, officer, and thanks again for your help. Without you I’d never have found the right house!” That night, the angel would be an emergency telephone box for calling the police. There it was, only thirty metres away, on the corner of Austin Street and Lefferts Boulevard. Kitty needed no more than five or six seconds to reach the telephone, half that again to lift the little blue cap labelled “police” and press the button beneath. Of course, the operator would not reply straight away, but she would talk without bothering whether or not there was anyone at the other end; she would say loudly: “There’s been an assault on Austin and Lefferts, I repeat: assault …” If the guy were a druggy in need of cash, and Kitty could

not imagine his having any other purpose, this would be enough to make him bolt—these miserable addicts are easily thrown off balance. She turned and flew towards the corner. Her soles thundered on the tarmac. Moseley set off in pursuit. As youthful as he (Moseley was only one year older), Kitty’s strides were longer. She would have escaped her killer if she had not been hobbled by the narrowness of her pretty, Ev’s Eleventh Hour hostess’s uniform. She had gone only ten metres when Moseley caught up with her, level with a kind of small bookshop that also sold greetings cards. She gave a preliminary cry: “Help!” and ran on. But Moseley had his long-bladed hunting knife securely in his hand, and he stuck it twice into Kitty’s back.

Didier Decoin

Is This the Way Women Die?

Patrick Deville

Equatoria

Publisher: Éditions du Seuil Date of Publication: January 2009 Foreign Rights Manager: Martine Heissat mheissat@seuil.com

Translation: Ian Monk ian.monk@wanadoo.fr

Biography Patrick Deville was born in 1957 and runs the Maison des écrivains étrangers et traducteurs (meet) in Saint-Nazaire, as well as the review of the same name. He has published five novels with Éditions de Minuit and two with Le Seuil. His work has been translated into several languages. Publications Among his most recent novels: Published by Éditions du Seuil, in the “Fiction & Cie” collection: La Tentation des armes à feu, 2006; Pura vida. Vie & mort de William Walker, 2004. Published by Éditions de Minuit: Ces deux-là, 2000.

This is the record of a journey across the continent of Africa along the Equator, from the former Portuguese Atlantic colonies of São Tomé and Principe to Zanzibar in the Indian Ocean. The initial pretext is the controversial transfer of the remains of Savorgnan de Brazza and of his family from Algiers, where they have been buried since the beginning of the twentieth century, to Brazzaville where a mausoleum is being built for them. On the way, Patrick Deville runs into many picturesque characters and re-examines the history of the exploration, colonisation and the

Cold War, and sketches the portraits of several remarkable people (Albert Schweitzer, Stanley and Livingstone, Tippu Tip, the slave dealer of Zanzibar who became a sultan in the heart of Africa then a governor in the service of King Leopold II, Jonas Savimbi, the Che during his disastrous African adventure …), while also evoking Conrad (Heart of Darkness, of course), Céline (Journey to the End of the Night) and Jules Verne (Five Weeks in a Balloon). He is a learned traveller, curious, in no hurry, attentive to incongruities as well as to the beauty of things.

In Port-Gentil On Monday, January 2nd 2006, the air is amazingly clear and bright over Cape Lopez, by the mouth of the River Ogooué. It’s low tide. Some avocets are scurrying elegantly across the mirror-like surface of silt looking for molluscs and the other little beasties they delight in. The manoeuvres of loading tankers can be seen in the distance. As the holds fill up, the red Plimsoll lines sink further down into the bright blue water of the Sogara oil refinery. Brazza is still lying in his Algerian tomb. Some—architectural or diplomatic—difficulties have caused delays in the construction of his mausoleum on the River Congo. Disused or abandoned drilling material has been covered with weeds. There are a few misshapen palm trees. It’s the end of the day, and the terrace of L’Atlantique Sud, a cheap dive, is currently enjoying the probably short-lived privilege of being free of any audio equipment. The barmaid is young, wearing a turban and sitting upright behind the till. She is brandishing like a sceptre one of those electronic fly swatters which are all the rage in Gabon. Burning wings and a short circuit set off a crackling, mauve flash. I open L’Union, the Gabonese daily paper which has been left out for the customers. It informs its readers that the President of the French Republic, during his 2006 new year’s address to the nation, has just announced the withdrawal of a rather absurd sub-amendment to a text highlighting the positive role France has played overseas. This sub-amendment, interpreted as an apology for colonisation, has raised quite a storm in Francophone Africa over the past year. The princess unscrews the handle of her swatter and lines up the batteries on the counter, to show that the establishment is about to close.

When I get back to the Hotel Hirondelle, a message from Sicilien-Ko is waiting for me. He’s off to deliver his logs to the timber harbour and is waiting for high tide. He’s going to spend the night on his raft, in the middle of the river. We’ll take the pirogue tomorrow. He asks me to buy him some bread, bananas and a carton of cigarettes. […] Sea charts The man some people today want to construct a mausoleum for—while others would prefer to throw his bones deep in the river—is an overly serious young man aged seventeen, a tall scrawny lad who has been admitted to the naval academy of Brest as a foreign student. He is a young Roman exiled in Finistère. The family of his father Ascanio claims descent from the Emperor Severus, while that of his mother provided Venice with a number of doges. The light is bronzing over the harbour and the hull of Le Borda. He closes his book and lies down along the edge a damp sea-wall. Five years back: he is in the library of the family residence of Castel Gandolfo. Around him, there are musty rays of light, with dancing moats, bookshelves containing the works of his father’s friend, Walter Scott, globes, waxed tables, his padlocked trunks stand beside him, waiting for his departure. He looks at the sea charts. They belonged to a great-uncle who, at the end of the eighteenth century, set sail for the Indies, China and Japan. In other rooms, his father Ascanio painted frescos on coming home from his journeys to Greece, Turkey and Egypt, and from his voyage up the Nile as far as Sudan. That was twelve years ago. Pietro Savorgnan di Brazzà. His name is still spelt with a grave accent. He is passionate about birds. His tutor, Dom Paolo, who forces him to lead a frugal austere lifestyle, with Latin, Greek and French lessons, but also canoeing and swimming, astronomy and ornithology, comes into the library with a family friend, Ships’s Commander de Montaignac. His trunks have been loaded, the coachman takes his place, the gravel crunches beneath the hooves and iron-rimmed wheels. Brazzà leaves Rome for the Jesuit College on Rue des Postes, in Paris. He wants to be a sailor. He will be a hero. A discoverer of rivers. He belongs to the last generation of mankind for whom the entire network of the planet’s waterways has not yet been mapped out. For geographers, he is the man who will add to the set of the world’s rivers and streams the Ogooué and the Oubangui, as well as the Mpassa, Leconi, Lefini, Alima and Sangha.

For ornithologists, he is the man who will describe a species of swallow endemic to the Batéké Plateau (Phedinopsis brazzae). For historians, he is the man who would push back slavery and its trade with the prow of his pirogue, while bringing the colonisation of Congo in his wake.

Inventing the Ogooué It is an era when the white parts of maps are melting like snow in sunlight. Those youngsters who join the Brest Naval Academy in 1868 must be impatient to leave Europe behind, to swarm across the seas and continents, and ink in that shrinking whiteness. But they will have to spend four years between those damp walls, sharing their teenage thoughts every evening. One of Savorgnan di Brazzà’s fellow boarding students is Julien Viaud. Soon both of them will change their names and adopt the same forename. One will be Pierre Loti and the other Pierre de Brazza. The reason why La Royale Academy was built in such a grey town was perhaps to give its budding seamen a taste for faraway places. They stare at a bluish line where the sun drowns in the harbour beneath the rain. Julien Viaud writes to his family that many of them are contemplating the idea of hanging themselves. The survivors will later throw themselves whole-heartedly into the brush and the waves. The man the explorer Aloysius Horn would later call a perfect gentleman capable of staying silent as a duke requested French nationality after the defeat of France in 1870. Our two seamen, who qualified as First Class Midshipmen in 1871, were about the same age as Arthur Rimbaud. Then came their posting, which were the luck of the draw. Viaud left for Polynesia, the Marquise Islands and Tahiti. In Arles, Van Gogh and Gauguin were later to read together Loti’s Marriage and dream of the wild blue yonder. Van Gogh wrote: “I can easily imagine a painter nowadays producing something like that is described in Pierre Loti’s book.” But it was Gauguin who would follow his trail to the Marquise Islands. In the same year of 1872, when Loti sails to the Pacific, Brazza takes ship aboard the Venus under Admiral du Quilio, who commands the South-Atlantic naval division. He is to spend two years at sea. The Americas, the Cape … On putting in at Gabon, in 1873, he learns of David Livingstone’s death in Tanganyika, and how his mummified body has been transported to the shores of the Indian Ocean. Like a man insanely pursuing his childhood madness dream stubbornly into adulthood, this twenty-year-old travels up the estuary of the Gabon towards the Komo, down Cape Lopez, and then navigates the Ogooué by pirogue as far as the village of Angola. He wants to be the man who penetrates the heart of Africa. A new Livingstone.

Patrick Deville

Equatoria

On the Ogooué Sicilien-Ko isn’t Sicilian. He’s a Fang. A kung-fu champion. He owes his nickname to his taste in clothes, his two-tone shoes, and films with Al Pacino. This morning he’s wearing a torn grease-stained T-shirt and canvas shorts. He’s in a very bad mood, because the pirogue the logger has lent him is equipped with such a low-capacity off-board motor that our chances of reaching Lambaréné before nightfall are slight. We fill the two jerrycans with fuel, load up with bread and bananas, then draw away from the jetty of Port-Gentil. For several years, Sicilien-Ko was a famous disc-jockey much sought after by the nightclubs of Libreville. As he neared the age of thirty, and on the arrival of the coupé-décalé dance vogue—although the two events are not necessarily connected—he gave up the capital and nightlife for his native village on the Ogooué. He now lives from net-fishing and trade on the river, topping up his income by working as a log-roller. Two days and two nights spent coming from Lambaréné, sleeping and eating on a raft driven by Diesel tugs. They are slabs of gaboon, or sometimes of teak, measuring between one metre and one metre eighty across. Around fifty trunks are strapped together with steel cables, which then have to be guided along the middle of the current. At night, the men light fires, and take turns to watch the drifting dead trees. Alcohol is forbidden aboard, he warns me, just in case I might try to get taken on as a roller. This regulation generally stops people from slipping on the damp wood and falling into the river, or else crushing a foot between two masses weighing several tons. The main arm of the river is wide, and the pirogue tiny in the middle of it, in the sunlight. On either side, imposing armies of trees are being reflected in the yellow muddy water, the large pinkish boles of the kapoks kept in balance by their spurs, while raising to the skies their garlands of creepers and epiphytes, their theatre of howler monkeys and turacos. On nearing the ocean, after over a thousand kilometres of serene, ruddy majesty amid the emerald jungle, or the bubbling of rapids, the Ogooué spreads out, grows tired, slows down, and becomes lost in a multitude of damp pastures, meanders, mangroves and lagoons, but without any estuary. For several centuries, the Orungu, benefiting from this watery maze, managed to conceal from the slave traders on the coast the very existence of a thousand kilometre-long river. On an island, a village of fishermen is sheltered by mango trees, with a landing stage which Sicilien-Ko is now heading for. A few pirogues are being unloaded in front of the stalls, where the forest meat is bartered for river fish. On the shelves, there are candles and batteries, salt, beer, boots and Celtel phone cards. Some diesel oil and petrol cans are rusting beneath a lean-to. Apart from this subsistence store and the floating logs, the Ogooué is far from having acquired the volume of trade which the early navigators foresaw for it.

Brazza is not one to lose his way. Over five years and in two expeditions, tracing his way eastwards towards terra incognita, he travels up the Ogooué as far as the River Mpassa, over the Batéké Plateau and its watershed, down the Lefini to the River Congo, on whose bank he founds the trading post which will become Brazzaville. When it comes to the Ogooué, such achievements are in vain. The river slips back into the secret of its jungles and its impregnable falls. It will later be navigated only as far as Ndjolé, by ivory traders, panther hunters and Christian missionaries. At the beginning of the 20th century, tramp ships from Port-Gentil supplied the logging companies and scattered missions: the Mandji owned by the “Chargeurs Réunis”, then vessels like the Fadji and Dimboko (the former with bunks, the latter with rocking chairs). A few years after Brazza’s premature death, a couple sailed up the Ogooué on the paddle-steamer Alembé. It was in the spring of 1913, on April 15th. The well-built man sported a moustache and a white suit, the woman wore a white dress; both had pith helmets. They were the first people to navigate up the Ogooué with a piano.

Patrick Deville

Equatoria

Jérôme Ferrari

A God an Animal

Publisher: Actes Sud Date of Publication: January 2009 Foreign Rights Manager: Élisabeth Beyer e.beyer@actes-sud.fr

Translation: Sophie Leighton s.leighton@clara.co.uk

Born in Paris in 1968, Jérôme Ferrari taught philosophy at the international lycée in Algiers and now lives in Corsica, where he has been teaching again since 2007. Publications Published by Actes Sud: Balco Atlantico, 2008; Dans le secret, 2007. Published by Albina: Aleph Zéro, 2002; Variétés de la mort, 2001. Biography

“You left, the world didn’t take you up and, when you returned, your home didn’t exist any more”. Addressing his protagonist as “you”, Jérôme Ferrari evokes the fate of a still young but ravaged man, who took the decision one day to leave his village, “a graveyard of the living dead”, to don a mercenary’s combat uniform and seek out the true desert, the one surrounded by so many armies in various uniforms since 11 September 2001. In the existential desert that has long been the life of this man who chose exile at the gates of Baghdad in the violence and bloody chaos of the war, the one redeeming image that stood out from the dismal landscape of his youth was that

of the wonderful Magali Bielinski, his adolescent love. Having lost sight of her many years ago, he still embraces her in his heart for all eternity, under the immutable arches of the village fountain, one particular month of August. A requiem for a contemporary civilisation transfixed both by the sombre mirages of war and by the forms of unprecedented violence unleashed in the commercial world, A god an Animal is a hard-hitting novel with mystical resonances in which the impossible advent of love between two human beings symbolises the devastating failure of the individual’s sovereignty in the exercise of his freedom.

Of course, things turn sour, but still, you would have left, and when the world’s grip had become too powerful, you would have gone back home. But that is not how it happened, for things turn sour in their mysterious and cruel way, shattering every illusion of lucidity in their wake. You left, the world did not take you up and, when you returned, your home no longer existed. There they all were—your parents, your house and your village—and miraculously it was not your home any more. Your mother embraced you with her silent love, then your father, and you rediscovered their smell, the smell that had belonged to your grandparents, and all your anonymous ancestors, and that you were so afraid would one day become yours. It was the clammy, sickly-sweet smell of Marseilles soap, wood-smoke, cold sweat, eau de Cologne and wearied flesh that even daily showers and the attrition of the massage glove could no longer alleviate and that had so long permeated the whole house—the stench of old age and death, and all that is done and dusted. But it no longer frightened you because this was no longer your home. So the day your turn came, having lurked around you, it would finally just fade away, because it would have failed to recognise you, and it would have found no one to fulfil the law of its transmission. When your mother asked you how you were, stroking your injured arm, you gently removed her hand and, for the first time in so long, you could hold her close and reassure her and breathe in her hair without a shudder of revulsion, as if this were no longer your mother but simply an unknown old woman who deserved your compassion. Now you’re walking around the village and you remember how desperate you were at finding it so totally unaltered the last time you returned, and it is still so astonishingly similar—but it is no longer

your home. You’re walking past Jean-Do’s house and Jean-Do’s father is on the terrace, despite the cold, and he’s smoking, he’s watching the sun setting over the sea through the hazy valley, and he doesn’t turn his head in your direction. You think he hasn’t seen you and you go right up to him, quietly calling “Monsieur de Peretti, Monsieur de Peretti”, but still he doesn’t turn his head and he says, looking straight ahead of him, “I’m not angry with you, I don’t wish you any harm; my son always did just as he thought fit, that’s how it was from a very early age, it’s no one’s fault, but now I prefer to think that you died with him, it’s right you should know this, and that’s why I’m talking to you now, but I’ll never speak to you again, and I don’t want to hear any more of you and I never want to see you again’. Respecting his wish, you move away as soundlessly as a dead person and you carry on walking in the dusk. You hear the jingle of a little bell approaching and a boar-hunting dog sets its large fearful eyes on you, wags its tail and arches its spine as it passes you. You walk on for a long time without seeing any other person. You sit down on a stone wall. Night has fallen. You look at the huge houses, with the shutters closed over frozen bedrooms, and the sparsely scattered lights in the bleak windows. The bell jingles faintly in the dark and the dog reappears. It turns around for a moment, blinking mistrustfully, and then approaches, trembling in fear of being beaten. When you stroke the dog, it makes a high-pitched moan, lies down in front of you and licks your hand. Long ago, remember, when it was still your home, you would complain that the village was a desert. But you were wrong. A desert is something else. You know, there was a time when men went into the desert in search of God. They would eat bitter roots that made them excruciatingly thirsty in exchange for a few paltry visions, and they talked out loud in front of the sand dunes and tried to tame scorpions. They would cry from the solitude because no demon came to tempt them in a test of their futile love and faith and they did not find God, they found only the abyss of their soul, and God was the abyss of their soul. Maybe I was one of them, I don’t remember any more, but I know what a desert is, and it is not that; it takes more than silence and tedium. No one would come in search of God here, in this graveyard. And one day you realised this. You were suffocating with heat at the checkpoint leading to the green zone, sweaty under your bullet-proof vest, with Jean-Do and the Serb, just a few weeks before the car of your agony exploded, perhaps at the very same place where Mansur alHallaj, overwhelmed with love on his cross, hands and feet severed, had finally found God. But you had no interest in the ancient blood of martyrs. You were waiting for the children. They had been coming there for a few days, they would look at you and throw little stones and Arabic insults that made them laugh. The day before, you had obtained some chewing-gum. When the children arrived, you showed it to them. You waited a moment and you signalled to them to come over. At first, they did not move but finally one of them approached.

He was a small curly-haired boy, slender and graceful, with light-coloured eyes. He was probably eight or nine years old. You held out a piece of chewing-gum, and he put it in his mouth and started chewing. You asked him his name, and you repeated it several times, “Ismak? Ismak?”, and he chewed his piece of gum, laughing. You gave him a second piece, and then a third, and the man arrived. He struck the child and forced him to open his mouth and spit out the chewinggum, and he threw the other two pieces on the ground. He forced the child to look at him, and he shouted and struck him again. You thought it was his father and you should keep quiet because it might annoy him even more if you rose to his son’s defence. Jean-Do stepped forward but you told him, “stay where you are, shut your big mouth, for once, shut it”. The man grabbed the little boy by the collar and moved away from the checkpoint, forcing him to walk in front of him, and he pushed him and the little boy jumped forward and nearly fell over, and the man shoved him even harder; the little boy stumbled and his arms flailed around but he stayed upright, and the man pushed him one last time and the little boy fell flat on his face on the dusty pavement. He was so light that he made no noise as he fell. The man looked at him for a second and, at that moment, you’re certain of this, he had not the least idea what he was about to do, not the slightest, but as he looked at the legs sticking over the edge of the pavement it was as if you had been right inside his mind, remember, as if you had had time without being able to do anything about it to see his thoughts take seed and grow and become actions, before he was aware of even having thought of it, and you would be willing to swear that, when he brought down his heel in a sharp blow, bearing his full weight, on the little leg, and you heard the bone cracking and the child screaming, you had already taken aim at him. The man lifted his gaze towards your trained rifle and he stared you right in the face with the hideous look of the truth, and he raised his heel again and broke the other leg. Jean-Do shouted, “kill that piece of shit for me, that asshole, kill him,” and the Serb shouted “don’t mess around, don’t shoot, don’t mess around,” and you kept still, transfixed by that man’s gaze, and you knew that you would not shoot. He did not defy you; he had no fear of death, and no fear of you. He was so utterly suffused with hatred and love that there was no room left inside him for anything else, and he looked at you from a lost world beyond any castigation and judgement in which your desire to punish him could never touch him. He did not look at you for long, he crouched down by the child, as if you and your rifle had never existed; he stroked his hair and took him in his arms, planted a kiss on his forehead and took him far away from you, perhaps murmuring some words of consolation into his ear. In the evening, at the hotel bar, you told Conti, whom you could still call nothing but “sergeant”, although you were now serving in an army without rank or flag, “it’s going to be a disaster, here, sergeant, a horrific defeat, we’re going to be slaughtered, there won’t be a thing we can do.” Conti called for a

Jérôme Ferrari

A God an Animal

bottle of whisky and one glass, and poured you a drink, and he said, “some people think they came for the money, others have to invent their reason for being here every day, but you and I, we’ve known the truth from the start, we don’t need to tell ourselves any of this crap, we don’t lie, we came for the war, the only valid reason, the war; these stories of defeat and victory don’t interest us, leave that to the Arabs, leave that to the Americans, you’re worth more than that,” and you acquiesced, but you realised he was beginning to annoy you with his Nazi philosophy. You were afraid you would end up despising him for the same reasons you had always admired him, and you did not know that you would not have time for that. You acquiesced and said nothing; you did not say, “you’re lying too, sergeant, you’re much more interested in defeat than the Arabs and the Americans, you’re fascinated by defeat, that’s why you like war, and you find victory vulgar; that’s your brand of nobility, you’ve always regretted being born too late to storm Dien Bien Phu or get yourself slaughtered at Thermopylae or have an English soldier lift your knight’s helmet with the end of his pike and make you bleed like a pig on the fields of Agincourt, and now you’re glad to be here, you’re happy that history is finally giving you the opportunity to take the thrashing of your dreams.” No, you kept quiet and you went on acquiescing in everything he said until he left you alone with the whisky bottle. Before intoxication came to twist the course of your nostalgia, you felt you would like nothing more than to find your way back to this village you had so often wanted to flee. You wanted to return home to rediscover something you had possibly already lost at that moment, and lost for ever. And you went on drinking and things were suddenly horribly clear; you measured the giddy scale of the impending defeat, and your powerlessness, and you thought that if you showed a shred of courage and compassion you should in fact return home in silence, while everyone was asleep, and put a bullet in your mother’s nape and a bullet in your father’s nape, and go from house to house, and steel yourself with the courage and love to kill the old men and cut the throats of the babies in their cradles, and their parents in the warmth of the conjugal bed, and all the children one by one, and pierce the beating hearts of the young girls with their foolish dreams. And you could picture yourself standing, as prophet and redeemer, arms outstretched in the dark and blood-spattered among the houses you had transformed into vaults, waiting for the sun to light up your work and shine in gratitude to you for having finally enabled your village to fulfil its graveyard vocation. But you’ve no trace of courage or compassion left. You’ve abandoned the world to the tedium of its slow death. There is no sun shining and you are alone in this winter night, in this graveyard that you have long taken for a desert, with a dog at your feet, who follows you when you get up to return home to sleep.

Alain Fleischer

Me, Sàndor F.

Publisher: Fayard Date of Publication: March 2009 Foreign Rights Manager: Anna Lindblom alindblom@editions-fayard.fr

Translation: Trista Selous trista.selous@btinternet.com

Biography Alain Fleischer is a photographer, film-maker and writer, born in Paris in 1944. He studied literature, linguistics, semiology and anthropology and has taught at the University of Paris III, the University of Quebec, Montreal, and in various schools of art, photography and film. His work as an artist and photographer is regularly shown in group exhibitions and one-man shows in galleries and museums in France and elsewhere. Alain Fleischer has also made around a hundred films. Publications His most recent novels include: Descente dans les villes, Fata Morgana, 2009; Prolongations, Gallimard, 2008; Le Carnet d’adresses, Éd. du Seuil, 2008; L’Ascenseur : fiction, Le Cherche Midi, 2007; Quelques obscurcissements, Éd. du Seuil, 2007.

“Can one person repeat another, or continue him, prolong him, from one generation to the next?” By adopting, for the space of a novel, the Hungarian first name he should have borne, Alain Fleischer acknowledges the survival in himself of the personality of his uncle Sándor, who died three months before he was born, his spine snapped, in a cattle wagon on its way to Auschwitz, in 1944. As he fills his alter ego’s dying moments with the imagined memories of twenty-seven years of life, they become his own. It seems to him that his own life is adopting, pursuing and completing all that his uncle’s (or his twin brother’s) could only begin, due to its untimely end. Though personal to him, his tastes and talents—the interest in girls

that started when he was a boy and his similarly early passion for photography and film—are also legacies. Alain Fleischer uses an unusual narrative form to merge the two Sándors into one, giving us one of the most disturbing novels ever written on the two-fold mystery of identity and inheritance. Me, Sándor F. is also a masterpiece of post-Holocaust literature, which Jean Cayrol has described as a “Lazarean” literature of resurrection. This ambition “to restore, repopulate the world, to make it feel whole again” in the aftermath of the death camps offers an exemplary manifestation of the power of imagination “to rectify and correct history”.

I, Sándor F., don’t know the man who could write my life because I’ve never told it to anyone. Because there’s nothing extraordinary to mark it out from so many other lives. The people who’ve known me, including the ones who are witnesses to my end, will soon have forgotten everything of what we’ve been. Because they’re all destined for the same end—which mine will precede by just a short while, before oblivion swallows us all. But I could also look at things from a different angle and begin by saying, “I, Sándor F., never knew the man whose life I will write, because he died before I could meet him. And even if that meeting had taken place, it would have been in the earliest months of my life, at an age before speech, before one is even aware of being alive and that someone else can die.” I, Sándor F., was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1917, and I’m going to die somewhere between the city of my birth and Poland, this April day 1944, aged 27. Who will be able to remember this? Who will be able to tell the story of these twenty-seven years or so of ordinary life—years that are, for other people, just childhood, adolescence and youth, but that make up a whole lifetime for me, till I’m old enough to die, one of a species whose members never reach the age of thirty. Besides, I don’t know whether, if I lived longer—into old age—and turned my life’s project into reality, it would have been any different from so many others, with any achievement of sufficient note to warrant the telling of my story by someone who might find some interest in it. Yet I, Sándor F., born 1917 in Budapest, am a character in an autobiography—that’s

autobiography, not biography, I know what I’m saying—whose author, Sándor F.—yes, me—was born January 1944 in Paris. What can Sándor F. know of me, Sándor F., of the years of my short life and miserable, anonymous end? And who is he to be interested in such an obscure existence, which becomes his own in this autobiographical work (unless in fact it’s really a novel)? Let the reader not deduce from this that there are two Sándor F.s—one real, one fake, one authentic, the other a usurper, one who legitimately lived under the name and a second who borrowed the name and identity of the first so he could tell his life story as his own. That’s not quite how it is. There are two successive “I”s forming a single Sándor F., two periods in the history of one person with, between them, a brief transition—a “dissolve” as the film-makers say—from the passing of one to the arrival of the other, over a dozen weeks from January to April 1944. There’s the man I was, who died at the age of 27 without the time to tell his life story and who, now, through this autobiographical account, is prolonging his existence in the man I am now, the one who’s writing. There’s the man who should have gone on living and who—in this autobiography I’m writing in his place—becomes the man I could have been. I, Sándor F., born 1944 in Paris, I too could have died at just a few months old, on a one-way trip with my parents. We could have been taken in one of the raids on French and foreign Jews in Paris, designed to finish the job started by the Vel’d’Hiv round up that took place eighteen months before I was born and claimed thirteen thousand victims, of whom four thousand were children and six thousand women. Meanwhile I, Sándor F., born 1917 in Budapest, could have avoided the fate that met so many of our people in Hungary. Touched by a life cut cruelly short after just three or four months, I could have imagined and written, in autobiographical form, what might have been the life and fate in post-war France of the little boy born 1944 in Paris to a Hungarian father—my brother—and a mother half-French, half-Spanish.

Alain Fleischer

Me, Sàndor F.

I, Sándor F., was born 1917 in Budapest—I can’t be more precise about the place or date, I don’t remember, never knew them—and I’m going to die in a few hours or a few minutes, this April day in 1944, somewhere between Hungary and Poland—I can’t be more precise about the date or place because I’ve learned nothing more that might have enabled me to remember my death more precisely—and I know for certain that I’ll never reach the destination. Even if the springs of my memory were quicker and more abundant, I couldn’t be more precise about the place where I’ll meet my end as, in this seatless, windowless wagon designed for the transport of animals, into which several dozen of us have been crammed, there’s no time to read the names of the stations as we rush through them. There’s no time to contemplate the passing landscape, in which I might make out one last image of the Earth. Entering through my eyes, it would encounter my last breath leaving through my mouth. There are many

of us, all from the same Budapest suburb of Ujpest, all squashed together in the darkness of a wooden wagon. The light struggles through the gaps between the planks and one or two air vents, high up, placed there to allow the animals to breathe and so to reach the abattoir alive. For me, Sándor F., born 1917 in Budapest, the last image of the Earth will perhaps be the station platform I fell against, my back, my spinal column snapped by the butt of a gun wielded by a German soldier, impatient at my unwillingess to climb into the wagon. I should have died there and then, on that platform, and my resistance would have been successful. I’d have stopped there—they’d have had to spare me the journey. They’d have thrown me to one side and found a place for me in this land of my birth—not out of kindness, but because a body can’t be left to decay out in the open, its stench poisoning the air breathed by those who go on living. But it’s going to take me a few hours to die and, as I’m not already a corpse, they’ve managed to heave me up—crawling, groaning—and shove me into the wagon among the living, who pity my fate—they see themselves as luckier than me. They try to comfort me, promising to convey news of my end to my family and the people who know me, starting with my mother and father. My parents have been taken off in another wagon, perhaps in another convoy. On arrival these people will seek them out in the crowd. So they’ll be travelling some of the way in the company of a corpse and, at their destination, I’ll be the first dead person in that place where death awaits them all. I won’t have won with my initial act of resistance, but I’ll have escaped the arrival, and my fate will pose an individual problem in the general process. They’ll have to carry me off all by myself to a heap of other bodies, destined for the cremation oven. I, Sándor F., was born January 1944 in Paris, barely three months before the man I could have become was to die, aged 27, having never had the chance to meet me. Throughout those twenty-seven years he was unaware of the man I became—throughout that first life begun before the life that, sixty-four years later, enables me to find in myself the man who will tell my story. He’s a man I never knew, who never knew me, whose life I’ve only heard of, certain only that he was born. Can an uncle and his nephew be twins? Can one person repeat another, or continue him, prolong him, from one generation to the next? Can one person, by surviving another, represent the survival of that other? Can such a transfer, such a continuity occur? These are questions that literature—and not just science fiction—could pose to the laws of biology, genetics, psychology, sociology and morality. Or rather—to answer in the affirmative—this is the kind of law that literature can impose, in order to rectify and correct history. And to parody Corneille—an author much appreciated by the Hungarians in splendid translations into their language—I would say, this autobiography is finished. It remains to me only to write it.

Pascal Garnier

Captive Moon in a Dead Eye

Publisher: Zulma Date of Publication: January 2009 Foreign Rights Manager: Amélie Louat amelie.louat@zulma.fr

Translation: Ian Monk ian.monk@wanadoo.fr

Born in 1949 in Paris, Pascal Garnier spent his teenage years globetrotting. His first two books, L’Année sabbatique and Un chat comme moi, were published in 1986. An exponent of short texts, but also the author of novels and children’s books, Pascal Garnier is both a prolific and varied author who is unexcelled when it comes to depicting insipid characters leading dull existences. But his lucid pen never becomes over-sharp or mean. “A new presence in the landscape of the roman noir” (L’Humanité), Pascal Garnier now lives in Lyon, where he continues to paint and write. Publications Among his most recent books from Zulma: La Théorie du Panda, 2008; Comment va la douleur ?, 2006 (paperback edition, LGF, “Le livre de poche” collection, 2008); La Solution Esquimau, 2006; Flux, 2005; Les Hauts du bas, 2003 (paperback edition, LGF, “Le livre de poche” collection, 2009). Biography

Martial and Odette have allowed themselves to be persuaded by an estate agent specialising in senior citizens’ residences. They have left their grey suburb for a little tailor-made “paradise” in the south of France, and are now pioneers at Les Conviviales, a sort of perpetual holiday camp made up of identically-designed detached houses, but which provides the greatest comfort of all: “feeling protected and in permanent security”. A new life begins for Odette and Martial. But soon, glitches in the security system add to the tedium of their solitude. Their first neighbours, Maxime and Marlène, move in at last, followed by a lone woman, who is not what she seems. The club-house entertainment manager,

who is a bit of an old hippie, can at last get to work. Before long, this self-contained universe turns into an explosive cocktail shaker, while the eternal world, with its nomads and creatures of the night, becomes all the more terrorising to our residents for being kept outside. One and all lose their cool. Especially when the janitor beats a cat to death with a spade or when the slightest thunderstorm paralyses the security system. Such disturbing obsessions and concealed traumas build up until, one night more terrible than ever, the moon is seen reflected in the janitor’s right eye, which has been ripped out by a stray bullet …

les conviviales is the expert in senior citizen residences Les Conviviales is a new lifestyle concept for retired people who have chosen to live out an active retirement in the sun … In brief, Les Conviviales means: An enclosed, secure residence Nowadays, the greatest of all comforts is to feel well-protected and in permanent security. The janitor-steward who is present all year round is there to watch over the residents’ peace and quiet. Martial compared the photo on the cover of the brochure with the scene through the window. It was raining. It had rained nearly every day for the past month. The rain was greening over the Roman tiles of the rigorously identical ochre roughcast houses, each with a little apron of brilliant green grass in front of it, like a synthetic rug. The shrubs, which had been planted like brushes at regular intervals furnished no leaves, flowers or shade at that time of year. All of the shutters were closed. The fifty-odd maisonettes were neatly lined up on either side of a broad central avenue, with gravel drives branching away on either side of it, leading to the habitations. From an airplane, it must have looked rather like a fish skeleton. dwellings dedicated to comfort Our bungalows provide perfect ease of access: terrace, patio, a functional kitchen, an ergonomic bathroom, two fine bedrooms … Though holding onto the odd stick of family furniture, which stubbornly refused to fit into its new home, Odette had seized the opportunity for refurnishing. Consciously or not, she had chosen items strangely similar to the contents of the show house they had visited a few months before. Martial just

couldn’t get used to it. It all felt so new, like plastic. Admittedly, everything was practical, and worked, but he felt as though he was living in a hotel. Meanwhile, Odette colonised the premises with a missionary-like determination. Every time they went into town, she came back with something, a useful or else decorative object, a bath mat, a vase, a toilet-paper holder, a monstrous yellow and black ceramic cicada … The only territory she had left for him was a corner of the basement where he could put his workbench and tools. Since moving in, he had spent most of his time there, lit by a desk lamp, sorting by size his screws, nuts and bolts before putting them into small boxes which he labelled and lined up on the shelves. It was a dull, but peaceful way to pass the time.

Pascal Garnier

Captive Moon in a Dead Eye

A club-house The residence’s club-house, which is a veritable Leisure Pavilion, is the place to socialise. Everyone will love meeting up there for a chat, a game of chess, to surf on the web, have a game of billiards, take tea, make pancakes … Our secretary/entertainment manager will be both attentive and good-humoured in her organisation of competitions, excursions, outings, surprises and parties. For the moment, it was closed and they had never met or even glimpsed the secretary/entertainment manager. If the truth were known, Martial didn’t really care. He was even dreading the opening of the club-house. He had no desire whatsoever to participate in pancake-making competitions with strangers. A solar-heated swimming pool To mingle health and pleasure, in delightful moments of freshness. The pool was empty. Just a few centimetres of stagnant water covered the bottom. Sunshine all year long All of our residences are located in the south of France, so as to … “Fat chance!” The catalogue flopped down onto the smoked-glass coffee-table, whose gilded metal legs looked like lions’ paws. Martial folded his hands behind his head and shut his eyes. Suresnes, where they had lived for over twenty years, now seemed like a paradise lost. All that time they had spent building up little habits with single-minded determination to weave the fabric of a cosy existence, calling their tobacconist, baker and butcher by their first names, with the market on Saturday mornings, then their Sunday stroll on Mont Valérien … Then, come a certain age, someone retires to the centre of France, another one goes to Brittany, or to Cannes … or else the graveyard. The neighbourhood

changed, almost overnight, without anyone even noticing. The population too. Their peaceful territory had metamorphosed into a sort of a hysterical playgroup where they no longer had their place. After Odette had pestered him for months about this idea of a secure residence, dripping with sunlight, he had at last given way in a moment of weakness. They had gone down to see the show house at the beginning of September. The weather had been wonderful. “Just imagine it, Martial, it’ll be as if we’d gone to live on holiday all year!” Monsieur Dacapo, the estate agent, was a charming chap with a divine gift of the gab. Martial and Odette exactly matched the profile of home-owners which the developers were looking for. They were both retired executives on comfortable monthly pensions. Selling their house in Suresnes would provide a perfectly satisfactory capital. They had no children at home or pets. Little by little, Monsieur Dacapo had succeeded in highlighting all of the residence’s many advantages, in particular its security, its impenetrable perimeter fence, with surveillance cameras placed in strategic positions, and of course the janitor-manager who was described to them as being a sort of cross between a bodyguard and a guardian angel. Building work had not yet been completed, but in December their house would be ready to welcome them home. Of course, they did still have a little time in which to consider the offer, but not too long. Last year, during a reception weekend at a similar residence, the promoters had been expecting around a thousand visitors, but three times that number had turned up! The deal was concluded within a month, during which Martial felt as though he had been hypnotised, signing documents which he had not even read, borne along by Odette’s torrent of enthusiasm. As they were the residence’s first inhabitants, they had now been living in utter solitude for a month. They saw no one, apart from Monsieur Flesh, the janitor-manager who they ran into sometimes by the gate. He was a solid but rather taciturn fellow, and though he certainly looked the part, he inspired them with no desire to slap him on the back or have a friendly chat over a drink. From his accent, he came from Alsace, or Lorraine. All that Martial had managed to grasp from this fierce guard-dog’s semi-sealed lips was that another couple were due to arrive in March or April. Martial stood up and rubbed the small of his back. This new armchair was dreadful. He should have insisted on keeping his old one which, over time, had ended up perfectly moulded to the shape of his body. The new one had such compact stuffing that, on getting up, it left the impression that no one had ever used it. Through the window, the TV aerials lined up in infinite regression made him think of crosses on tombstones. “And we’ve taken a life tenancy …” Odette’s voice rose up from the basement. “Martial, what are you doing?” “Nothing, what do you expect me to be doing?” “Come down to the basement.”

There was no need to yell like that, the place was far smaller than their house in Suresnes. “Look, I’ve made room for the ironing board. You’ll have to put some shelves up for me, there and there.” “OK. I’ll buy some planks, and brackets … plus some rawl plugs, I’ve run out.” “We could go now, it’s only just 3 o’clock.” “If you want.” “While we’re there, I’ll buy things to make jam.” “Jam?. … But you’ve never made jam …” “That’s right, and it’s high time I started. I’ve found an old cookery book.” Now we’re living in the countryside, I’ll make my own jams, it’ll be more economical. “The countryside? This is the countryside? … Where’s the fruit? At this time of year, there are just apples.” “In that case I’ll make apple jelly, it’s really good.” “Why not, if you want to … All right, I’ll take the measurements for the planks and off we’ll go.”

Pascal Garnier

Captive Moon in a Dead Eye

Martial had pressed the remote control to open the gate three times, but it still remained stubbornly shut. “What’s going on?” “Hoot the horn, Monsieur Flesh will open up.” At the second attempt they saw, in the fan formed by the wipers on the windscreen, the janitor with his jacket over his head, leaping between the puddles. Martial wound down his window. “Good afternoon, Monsieur Flesh, I can’t open the gate, maybe it’s my remote control?” “No, it’s because of the thunderstorm this morning. It seems to have put the electrics on the blink.” “Oh …” “I’ve called the service department. Someone should be along later to sort it out, but I don’t know when exactly. “And you can’t open it manually?” “No, that’s impossible. It’s the security system. But if you need anything urgent, I can go for you. I’m parked on the other side.” “No, that’s OK, thanks. But do tell us when it’s been fixed.” “Of course. Have a nice day.” They spent it watching TV like two children who had been forbidden to go out, until dinner which they ate half an hour earlier than usual just to get it over with. Then, as they didn’t like the programmes which were on that evening, they went to bed early. As he turned out the bedside lamp, Martial thought how, apart from the janitor’s light, all must be dark for kilometres around them. They snuggled up close together.

Sylvie Gracia

A Spanish Interlude

Publisher: Verticales Date of Publication: January 2009 Foreign Rights Manager: Anne-Solange Noble anne-solange.noble@gallimard.fr

Translation: Louise Rogers Lalaurie lalaurie.rogers@gmail.com

Biography Born in 1959, Sylvie Gracia is an editor with Éditions du Rouergue, where she founded the literary list “La brune” in 1998. She is also the director of two lists of novels for adolescents and teenagers—“doAdo” and “Zig Zag”. Une parenthèse espagnole is her second novel with Éditions Verticales. Publications Regarde-moi, Verticales, 2005; L’Ongle rose, Verdier, 2002; Les Nuits d’Hitachi, Gallimard, 1999; L’Été du chien, Gallimard, 1996.

Sylvie Gracia’s earlier novels present segments of real life, exploring the questions and obsessions that coalesce in moments of crisis. Une parenthèse espagnole takes this exploration to new levels. The first-person narrator is a man in his late forties, a French teacher in a Paris lycée, father of two daughters, struggling to get over his divorce from their mother, Florence, and embarking on a new relationship with Esther, a colleague twenty years his junior. This everyday scenario is shot through and shaken by two events opening a double parenthesis at the heart of the narrative. The book’s remarkable plasticity owes much to its shifting planes of memory, and its complex,

spiralling (but never confused) chronology. Other contemporary narratives are grafted onto this framework, echoes that contribute a further sense of depth and perspective to the novel. Evolving across a extended, fragmented, disassembled space of time, the portrait of the narrator is remarkable for its solidity and humanity. Sylvie Gracia transcribes this imbroglio of reminiscences with poignant immediacy, in limpid, sensitive, sparse language. Beyond the faultlines, grieving and defeat, Une parenthèse espagnole is shot through with an intense light that casts deep shadows and shapes this memorable portrait of a destiny grappling with its own normality.

The day we took in Luz for the last time, when I found her in a deep, drunkard’s sleep on the red sofa the minute I rushed into the house, my first instinct was to roll up the futon I had left lying in a corner of the sitting room, and hide it under the bed. I was moving out of the family home, and I had stopped pretending in front of my daughters. I remember they always woke up very early then, and I see now that they must have been hoping every morning that their parents had slept together. That was what I was inflicting on them; but Luz should be spared. I was roaming the streets around the Gare Saint-Lazare when my mobile rang. Jeanne, in a panic, telling me to come home as fast as possible, shouting in my ear, Luz is here, she’s ill, come quickly, Papa. It was late on a winter afternoon. Stepping down from the train on my way back from the lycée, I had decided one more time not to head straight up the rue de Rome towards home, near Batignolles. I just couldn’t do it any more. Since informing my wife that I was leaving, the apartment had become the theatre of a cold, silent war. Like some ageing adolescent, I left home as early as possible every morning, and came back late at night. I stood for a few minutes at the top of the white stone steps, breathing the endless muddle and confusion. I needed noise, the fevered scurry of suburbanites between trains. Then I slipped between the builders’ barriers that had cluttered up the station concourse for years. Waiting at the light to cross the rue d’Amsterdam, opposite the Quick burger bar, I noticed the two itinerant rose-vendors, probably from Pakistan. They always set up

their stall on the same spot. A camping table covered with a pile of bouquets laid flat, already wilted before they were sold. The younger of the two, perhaps the only one with a few words of French, shouted out continuously above the traffic, Trois euros, les fleurs, trois euros! with a guttural rolling of the ‘r’s that reminded me of my father. It was cold in those last weeks of February, and time I should have devoted to making the rounds of the estate agents, to find an apartment, was spent walking aimlessly but quickly, a product of my need to appear in a hurry, rather than the wintry temperatures. Unlike me, every person I passed would have shopping to do, or an eagerly-awaited rendezvous in a bar. I would have liked to come across people I’d encountered before, but within the narrow compass of the streets around the station, the crowd changed and was renewed from one day to the next. A familiar face would have been a miracle. And yet. Certain women’s faces stood out from the anonymity of the streets, catching my eye with a more intense gaze, a proud carriage of the head, an exhortation to life. I dreaded that one day I would find Luz sitting on a patch of pavement, drinkaddled and begging, stretching out her hand, aggressive in her degradation reeking bodily. But I knew she seldom left the working-class streets north of avenue de Saint-Ouen, where she rented a studio. Her State benefits—longterm sickness pay, housing support—allowed her to stay holed up at home or, when she was feeling flush, to drink herself into a stupor in one of the hard drinkers’ bars near La Fourche. Fred, the only one of us who still saw her, was always full of talk when he came back from a visit, picking up the telephone straight away to debrief me, although I never asked him for details. The more I tried to run away, the more her spectre threatened to seek me out. I was deliberately vague when she telephoned. I don’t want to see her, I would say, when Fred insisted. No. I just can’t do it. I haven’t got the strength, leave me alone. The clothes shops on passage du Havre were looking forward to spring. The sales were over. I stopped in front of a window decorated with crepe-paper flowers. Even the heads of the dummies, with their long, straight wigs, sported flowery coronets like Sixties pop fans, a colourful revival that raised a smile for a few seconds when, reflected in a mirror, I caught sight of myself. A threeday beard, white at the chin. A middle-aged gut softening my silhouette. My high state of nervous energy, which for years had compensated for my heavy build and allowed me to pass for a slim figure of a man, had dissipated over time. I was stocky now, with thick labourers’ arms whose proud ownership my father had tried to pass on. You’ll never go hungry with arms like these, he would say, squeezing my muscles with a manly complicity that delighted me at the age of ten. Like all my generation, I clung for years to the illusion of eternal youth. And now this was how my students saw me, with their pitiless eyes and tongues, instantly noting every last detail of their teachers’ neglected wardrobes, the bags under the eyes, their weary gait. Peering at the wax dummies,

I unbuttoned my grey cashmere coat, bought the previous winter, when Esther was appointed to the lycée. I had never spoken to her, we had no classes in common, but one morning in the staff room her black-stockinged legs under a flowery silk skirt had swelled my heart, and the rest. Unbuttoned, the coat emphasized my shoulders, restored my appearance. And Jeanne’s call had startled me at that moment. Her voice, the childish timbre I loved, the high-pitched tones that would soon disappear in the transition to adolescence, was muted now, almost unrecognisable. Papa, papa, she repeated, speaking quietly into the handset. What’s up? Tell me! But all she could say was Luz is here. She’s ill, come quickly. Luz was part of our family landscape, one of that community of friends my daughters were used to having around since birth, a family circle chosen by my wife and myself, who we would see for meals on weekends, go away with on holiday, who peopled our conversations. The most faithful among them, I now recognise, were from “my side”, part of the circle of friends I had met during my extended adolescence, and whom I had subsequently imposed on Florence. There was Luz, there was Fred, and others who have since moved away, to lives outside Paris. Soul brothers and sisters. If I try to make explicit the things that held us together, beyond the facile folklore of our collective youth, the relentless drum-beat of sex and drugs and rock and roll, the best word for it would be rupture. I was twenty years old in 1979, and as the decade drew to a close, the utopian ideals cultivated by the optimistic post-war generations had begun to disintegrate, although we didn’t know it. We wanted to be like them, still. We dreamed of forging a new humanity, new relationships, different desires. We were riding on the tail of a comet hurtling into the unknown of the next millennium, and we were blind, thinking we could still invent things a-new when what we should have been doing was trying to preserve—what? Nothing much, perhaps just a few corners of private space, to keep us from sinking. In our little community, Luz occupied a place apart, and my daughters, who knew nothing of my connection with her, had nonetheless spotted straight away that she was different, even before she began her long intimacy with alcohol. They had spotted it with the animal instinct of children who cannot put things into words, but know who they can charm and who they can’t. In her first years Jeanne—and still less Anaïs, who was shyer than her older sister— would never try to take Luz off to her bedroom to show her her dolls. Neither of them had ever tried to climb onto Luz’s lap. They could see already the faultline of despair that would soon terrify them. And even today, years after her death, if Luz’s name comes up in conversation, my daughters will look away. I hope they will tell me, some time, what they saw on the day of the red sofa. And perhaps they will forgive me. The weekend after Jeanne was born, Luz had rung the door-bell half an hour after calling to say that she was on her way, although I had tried to put

Sylvie Gracia

A Spanish Interlude

her off, invoking the time, the sleeping baby, in short, that her visit was not a matter of any great urgency, that everyone was fine, mother and baby … When I opened the door, the sight of her small Eurasian body in its tight-fitting short black dress, in the aggressive light of the landing, left me rooted to the spot. A sudden flash of fear. Black was her colour. Her acrylic slip had been black in the bedroom in Barcelona where we made love for the first and last times. Every scene involving Luz was clear and precise, the result of lengthy revisitations, although I quickly saw that I was twisting their meaning in my attempts to reorganise our ambivalent relations in my favour. Florence, in the throes of breast-feeding and insomnia, sat stiffly on the sofa, blouse stretched tight over her hard breasts, her skin white with fatigue. Luz had exhibited her gift, a lace dress of luxurious make, fit for a baptism, then left it on the table. Turning and twisting in her black dress, she had disappeared into the kitchen to fetch flutes for the champagne she had brought with her, and she and I had clinked glasses. Suddenly, without a word, Florence had left the room. She had heard Jeanne crying, detecting the sound before us, behind the wall. And we had stayed sitting opposite one another, glasses in hand. Luz had outlined her new relationship with her boss. This married man clearly supplied all the delights of passion—assignations in hotels, sumptuous gifts, impromptu nocturnal telephone calls—so many small concessions to his own constraints and egotism. Luz laughed, and I looked at her. From time to time she pulled nervously at her dress as it rode up her thighs. At the height of her glory, she radiated a raw hunger, a primal, conquering energy that affected anyone who saw her, man nor woman. But there were cracks. She looked too good that evening, and for the first time I had felt that sense of desertion that was soon to taint our relationship forever. My desertion of her, and her betrayal of me—a lucid analysis on my part, doubtless constructed with hindsight, in the light of passing time, and her death. When Florence had returned, with Jeanne in her arms—Jeanne, a small ball of flesh curled in upon herself, her arms moving and her mouth sipping the air in search of a nipple—Luz hadn’t got up to greet her, hadn’t taken the child in her arms or pronounced the usual incantations, What a lovely baby. Now, who does she look like? Florence had produced a breast, and Jeanne had fastened upon it with that gluttonous, new-born haste that has always left me feeling uncomfortable. Luz had carried on talking, I remember that. She was holding forth, and when the feed was over, Florence had held my daughter out to me, and Luz had followed me to the bathroom, standing motionless in doorframe, watching me fumbling as I changed my daughter, disengaging her hips and legs from the baby-suit, unpinning the soiled nappy, cleaning her bottom and sex with a swab of cotton wool. The narrow bathroom stank of babies’ liquid stools, milk, my daughter’s warm body. You do that? Luz had asked, astonished, I would never have thought it of you.

In the morning, Florence had carefully folded the white dress (size three months) that had lain overnight on its tissue paper, arms open in a cross. Jeanne probably wore it once or twice, babies grow so fast. And the dress was a gift from Luz: Florence hadn’t made much of an effort. Years later, our oldest daughter had discovered it in the bottom of a drawer and dressed her favourite doll in it, an ugly plastic thing with brutish features, of indeterminate sex. The fine cotton and crepe fabric had yellowed, the buttons had come off, and Florence had sewn them back on at Jeanne’s insistence. My daughters often fought over it. A symbol of that infantile jealousy that seizes on toys while it waits for something better. I don’t think I ever told them where the dress had come from. And if, on her visits, Luz saw the doll dressed in lace, lying about the apartment, she never passed comment. Perhaps she didn’t recognise it. Luz forgot a lot of things.

Sylvie Gracia

A Spanish Interlude

Mohamed Leftah

Venus

Publisher: La Différence Date of Publication: January 2009 Foreign Rights Manager: Parcidio Gonçalves administration.ladifference@wanadoo.fr

Translation: Lulu Norman lp.fn@virgin.net

Biography Born in Morocco in 1946, Mohamed Leftah began his studies there, arriving in Paris in 1968 and entering an engineering school. During the events of May ’68, he wrote poetry and got drunk. Back in Morocco, he became an IT specialist and literary journalist. He gave up publishing his work after the publication of his first book, Demoiselles de Numidie, in 1992 until, in 2006, La Différence undertook to publish his (very substantial) works in full. Mohamed Leftah died on 20 July 2008 in Cairo, where he had lived for some years. Publications Previously published by La Différence, in the “Literature” collection: Une Chute Infinie, 2009; L’Enfant de Marbre, 2007; Un martyr de notre temps (short stories), 2007; Au bonheur des Limbes, 2006; Ambre ou les Métamorphoses de l’amour, 2006; Une fleur dans la nuit together with Sous le soleil et le clair de lune (short stories), 2006. In the “Minos” collection: Demoiselles de Numidie, 2006.

Perturbed by the beautiful photograph of Aisha, a journalist and militant feminist whose passport has been confiscated by the Moroccan authorities, Khabir, police superintendent for the security branch, summons her for an interview. But all around him, fundamentalist ideas are taking hold and he himself, influenced by his stepbrother Jalil, has converted to orthodox Islam. Jalil, moreover, has proclaimed himself emir of a fascistic sect

that is plotting Aisha’s kidnap. But Aisha’s beauty torments the superintendent … By the author of Demoiselles de Numidie (acclaimed by critics as a masterpiece) this novel condemns fundamentalism, contrasting it with beauty and love. Its characters grapple with their ideals and conflicts, mirroring the tensions in contemporary Moroccan society.

It wasn’t yet six, that Friday, when the call of the muezzin for the first evening prayer rang out, rousing superintendent Khabir from the methodical, intense and severe meditations—severe because the person whose file he was studying was a leading light in the feminist movement, photographs of whom peppered the file, softening its impact, its accusatory force—in which he’d been plunged all afternoon, almost without interruption. “Allah Akbar!” he muttered automatically, echoing the muezzin, then, after a last angry glance at a photo of the beautiful, smiling face that seemed to mock him, he looked up, his eyes weary of this file which, in spite of the coded language and the dry reports it contained, was almost buzzing, palpitating with the most intimate, most secret life of a woman. Feminist! The superintendent spoke the word in his head: with surprise— he wasn’t yet used to the word’s exotic sound—with contempt, with rage. He wasn’t sure if he was still in a state of purity since his mid-afternoon prayer, but even if he was, he reckoned he would still have to perform his ablutions again. That long afternoon spent going over, studying, examining the items in the file, as much if not more than the beautiful face, in all its forms, that was cropping up everywhere: who can count themselves immune to the adulterous gaze? The superintendent cursed Satan, snapped the cover of the file shut and headed for the huge room adjoining his office which, since his appointment to his current position—chief superintendent of the intelligence service—he had converted into a room for ablutions as well as a mini mosque for his own private use. In fact it wasn’t so rare to find such a room, an annexe to the official office of high-ranking employees, generally offering the convenience of a bathroom but also, however ridiculous it might appear, that of a vast and

comfortable bed. So that the modern, functional bathroom should fulfil its new purpose, the superintendent had simply brought a few sundry, humble objects with specific uses: a low wooden chair on four squat legs, two plastic buckets and a container for decanting the water, sandals with thick wooden soles, a pumice stone, and finally a kind of belt made of vegetable horsehair, extended by two supple cords at each end woven in the same material. The presence of this “belt” here suggested an instrument for intimidation, even torture; in fact it was used for rubbing the back, during the “great purification”, in which the least particle of the body must be offered up to the lustral water. As well as this equipment, which was, after all, very modest but which met the demands of a minute and obsessive purification ritual, the superintendent had also placed, on the small glass shelf above the basin, products used by women as cosmetics, but also used by the most fastidious believers; only, for the latter, not from childish coquetry or a desire to beautify, but with pious intent, an ardent aspiration to imitate in the smallest detail what the books of the Sira reported of the prophet’s behaviour in his daily life. Thus a hadith advised believers: “Put souak on your lips, for they carry the words of the Koran.” On the glass shelf, then, as well as a bundle of souak were phials of different shapes containing, alongside other traditional beauty products, henna and kohl (black eyeliner for the rim of the eye. Besides the sharp, penetrating look this conferred, it was meant to possess magical prophylactic virtues, warding off the evil eye). Finally, the only real change the superintendent had made was to install a sliding door to partition off the washing room, which a malicious person might think related to the bed, from the rest of the room, which would serve as a mosque. A mosque that was very small and sober to the point of asceticism: on the floor, a prayer mat, and hanging on the side walls and so facing each other, amber prayer beads and a framed photo of the “mother of cities”, Mecca. And the wall facing the praying man was bare and immaculate, like the superintendent himself at that moment. He was saying his prayers, but with no sense of calm; wildly contrasting thoughts and feelings flashed through his mind and heart. It was as if the room for ablutions he had set up was unleashing its evil power, was revealing its face, though veiled—separated from the sanctuary—and its intimate spells, leaking its heady fragrance through the sliding door. Who had disturbed the calm of this space where up till now, in spite of the thin partition, there had been no break in continuity, no hiatus, between a place for purification and another for contemplation ? Without articulating it in words, the superintendent had a dull feeling throughout his being, in his every prostration, in every genuflexion, that an insidious, invisible yet almost tangible evil had crept into his impregnable sanctuary; a place where, each time he entered it, an inexpressible, complete calm enveloped him in its soothing maternal arms, making him forget charges, his obsession with intelligence, files … That was it! That

was the treacherous object that had cast the baleful spell that had invaded his sanctuary: The File! The Face, the Body he’d been examining, perusing relentlessly throughout this short, this long winter afternoon until evening came, uncelebrated by any sunset in an explosion of colours, but only by the age-old resounding call of the muezzin: “Allah Akbar.” The superintendent uttered the sacred proclamation in a firm voice, rising from his knees, but doubt assailed him: was that genuflection the one that ended the first evening prayer? Such a doubt was unacceptable and invalidated the prayer, which would have to be said again. Since starting the scrupulous observance of his five daily prayers, it was the first time the superintendent had been so distracted. Before repeating the prayer that was no longer valid, he still had to complete it according to the ritual. So he mentally recited the final codified thanks offering, turned his head to right and left as he spoke the ritual peace salutation, then remained kneeling for a while, his mind empty; when suddenly, as if escaped from the file the superintendent had slammed shut, the beautiful smiling face came to dapple and irradiate the bare, immaculate wall. Again and again, that shimmering, satanic face. Aisha! That was her name, the immoral, atheist feminist; she had the same name as the mother of the faithful, the Prophet’s favourite wife. “God, such women should be forbidden from having, usurping and sullying that name! If it was up to me, I …” The superintendent now had no doubt that Satan had wormed his way into his austere office and burst into his sanctuary, disguised as that accursed feminist: “I will start proceedings to force her to change it, strip her of that marvellous adornment she wears with impunity. And why not?” The superintendent had just made a connection that seemed to him more than justifiable. Recently, an eminent lawyer had brought an action to separate a couple, after the husband had written a book that in his view slandered Islam, excluding him from this religion and therefore prohibiting him from remaining married to a Muslim woman. Only, the superintendent reflected, that bold initiative from a respected lawyer—and an equally respected figure in the Islamist movement— had taken place in Egypt, a country where the Muslim Brotherhood was very influential, to say the least; while in our kingdom, although Islam is the official state religion, there’s so much tolerance, so much laxity; for instance, the secular, atheist political parties, the anarchic freedom of the press, the subversive trade union organisations and, to top it all, this feminist movement led by a woman whose way of life, writing and public speeches were quite simply intolerable. The superintendent, on his knees and deep in these bitter thoughts, shook his head several times as if to banish them and empty his mind, so as to prepare himself, calmly this time, to say his prayer again. But just at that moment he heard a familiar knocking at his office door. He cursed his assistant (it could only be him), swiftly stood up, shouting out for form’s sake: “Who is it?”, thus giving himself time to put on his shoes and jacket, glance rapidly in

Mohamed Leftah

Venus

the mirror, smooth his hair and make sure his face had assumed its customary mask of severity. As he left his sanctuary, his eyes met his assistant’s who, with a stack of files under his arm, his hand still on the door handle, seemed embarrassed to have arrived at such an obviously inopportune moment. “How many times have I told you not to disturb me during prayers,” the superintendent barked, averting his eyes and heading without thinking for his desk. His assistant apologised—“Hypocrite!”, he said to himself as he made his excuses, because he considered it abnormal that at fixed hours his superior’s office should be turned into a forbidden place of worship—pleading the urgent nature of the files he was carrying. A snarl briefly distorted the superintendent’s face and he shouted at his assistant: “Urgent! Urgent! Everything’s urgent when you work in intelligence. Here’s another urgent one!” And angrily lifting the file that had occupied him all afternoon, the superintendent waved it like a black flag—the one that signals a rough sea, that announces a storm—before the assistant’s eyes. The man had time to read, on the rectangular white paper stuck to the cover: Feminist movement A. AISHA Written in red felt-tip pen. The assistant, imagining the rigorous superintendent writing this joylessly, angrily even, he was sure, on the rectangular white paper, formed a mental picture that gave him malicious pleasure. He imagined the incriminating file the superintendent was brandishing transformed into an affectionate dedication, an extraordinary declaration of love: TO AISHA! But the dry order his superior abruptly issued jolted him from his reverie: “Summon this woman for an interview next Friday.” “That woman” was the one whose life was imprisoned—had she any idea?—compressed between the thick black bound pages of a file with her name as its title, or more precisely its subtitle. “OK, chief.” After noting the woman’s surname, first name and address, the assistant left the room, feeling perky and humming to himself the title of Stendhal’s famous novel, The Red and the Black, which spontaneously came to his lips each time he saw those two colours together. When this occurred in a woman’s clothing, he never failed to say to her whoever, she was, colleague, friend or perfect stranger, as if it were the handsomest compliment: “Ah! You are truly stendhalienne!”

When the assistant, an admirer of Stendhal in his way, was gone, the superintendent locked his office door and went back into his sanctuary. This time he emerged victorious over Satan, completing his prayers according to the rules, without forgetting or becoming distracted, his mind truly liberated from worldly concerns; which, however, instantaneously fastened on him like vultures as soon as he was back at his desk. In the half-light, along with the rest of the room, it seemed to the superintendent that the name written in purplish red gleamed intermittently like the tip of a smokerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s cigarette in the dark. Giving up his examination of the evil file, he stood up and reached for his coat hanging on a peg, and when he had put it on and begun to button it, once again the purple-red name seemed to shimmer, as if taunting him, saying silently: â&#x20AC;&#x153;See you tomorrow, superintendent!â&#x20AC;? Without thinking, he reached for the file and without knowing why, like a thief, slipped it between the trousers and waistcoat of his three-piece suit. Only then did he finish buttoning up his coat and leave the room. A moment later he was greeted by an icy North wind, in a boulevard that was already almost dark. Drops of rain sprayed his thick black glasses, slid down his cheeks, but his driver, in navy blue livery, had already opened the passenger door of the black Citroen DS and reverently awaited the superintendent who, as usual, moved solemnly but, because of the rain, with his chin tucked into his chest.

Mohamed Leftah

Venus

Julie Mazzieri

Funeral Oration for a Village Idiot

Publisher: José Corti Date of Publication: January 2009 Foreign Rights Manager: Fabienne Raphoz librairie-corti@orange.fr

Translation: Adriana Hunter adriana@hunter157.freeserve.co.uk

Biography Julie Mazzieri was born in Quebec in 1975. She has a Bachelor of Arts degree and can boast many publications, including a variety of articles primarily about how writing begins with the end, and the rhetoric of “the idiot” in the works of Faulkner, Bernanos, Dostoevski and Denis de Rougemont. She has taught translation at McGill University (Canada) and is currently working on the French translation of an unpublished work by Jane Bowles. She lives in Corsica. Le Discours sur la tombe de l’idiot is her first novel.

Outraged by the village idiot, the mayor of Chester and his deputy plot to remove him. One spring morning the two men abduct him and drive off to throw him down a well. But, three days later, the idiot starts wailing from the depths of this pit. From the opening pages of Discours sur la tombe de l’idiot, the reader knows every element of the crime that rocks this usually uneventful village. Having quashed the possibility of detective intrigue, the novel focuses chiefly on the spirit of blame and on deception: the lengths to which the mayor will go to name a culprit while struggling to maintain silence from his accomplice who is threatening to succumb to overwhelming remorse. From the various trails laid down as diversions, the ideal culprit emerges—Paul Barabé, a new

workman who has come to the country to reinvent his life, and whose arrival at the Fouquets’ farm coincides with the idiot’s disappearance and another sinister discovery. The novel certainly has a detective feel to it, but it is first and foremost a book about guilt. The narrative does follow Barabé’s fate, but it really explores what happens to the whole village of Chester “taken from within”. The succession of set pieces have the giddying momentum of mounting rumours, their coherence established from haphazard details and searingly intense images, their innate logic revealing Chester’s villagers in a disturbing light … as if even the narrator could not quite bring himself to make the mayor and his deputy the only culprits in their crime.

The murder 1 In broad daylight. They threw him down the well on the far side of the village. They took him by the legs and tipped him in like a sack of wheat. On the count of three. The mayor and his deputy. A few days earlier the two men had stayed behind at the town hall after the meeting. They hadn’t even bothered to sit down. Just loosened their ties and talked in the doorway. The place hadn’t properly fallen silent yet. The mayor’s neck was flushed red, almost puce. He was the first to speak. He had seen him that same morning as he came out of the post office. He was in the village square and didn’t seem to be waiting for anything or anyone. He was sitting on the bottom step of the square with his oversized trousers slipping down over his hips. The mayor wanted to sit down to read his mail. The postmistress had just given him a special delivery letter and he had thought to himself I’ll stop in the square and open it; there’s no one there at this time of day, I won’t have to chat. He hesitated when he saw the other man on the steps, then walked along the low wall and sat down on a bench. After all, he was the mayor and this was the village square. The other man didn’t notice him; he was rocking aimlessly, staring at the ground in front of him. He had been doing it for a very long time, not stopping once. The movement began at the nape of his neck, a slight jerk, a brief stiffening which threw his head forward

like a pendulum. His face was a horrible sight when it came back up, fat and blank, like a pomegranate. The mayor put his letters in his lap and shouted at him to scram. The other man looked up and cast around to see where the words had come from. He couldn’t see anything, not with his idiot’s eyes. He looked at the mayor on his bench, but didn’t see him. His mouth was always half open, pasty, as if the lower lip were too heavy. As if someone had drained his brains through his nostrils, with a straw. Hard to read with a moron like that fidgeting in front of you. The mayor waved his hand at him to drive him away. Nothing. A surprised little sound rose in his throat, a halting croak, then he smiled doubtfully. Repulsive, said the deputy. The mayor described it again: a croak. A croak. And then went on. The idiot had started rocking again, now keeping his eyes pinned on his own shadow as it kept time with him in the dusty square. The mayor on his bench had already ceased to exist. The idiot gave a second croak and leant forward to move a pebble lying near the top of his shadow. Then he dropped to his knees to pick up all the other pebbles and twigs that annoyed him. It was then that the mayor saw, saw with his own eyes, between the jacket that was too short and the belt that had slumped down with his trousers, a strip of skin so white it made him feel sick. Thin as silk and distended with fat, he said. Right there, in the glare of the sun, without a hair on it, not even downy hairs covering the body of that … that worm. The deputy said “repulsive” again. He wanted to add something else: another word, perhaps an explosive sound, but the wind was taken out of his sails by the mayor’s raised hand. He hadn’t heard it all, there was worse to come. The mayor had had to put his letters down on the bench to check what he was seeing. Leaning his body along the tops of his thighs, he was now on a level with the idiot’s stomach. The idiot was completely absorbed in his antics and didn’t notice him. The mayor stayed in this position, praying no one would notice him, waiting to catch a glimpse every time the other man straightened because there, in the middle of that veiny belly, he couldn’t see it. The navel. He screwed his eyes up trying to find it. He hadn’t seen one because there simply wasn’t one there. The stomach was smooth, uniform; perfectly undisturbed. Someone must have rubbed it out or erased it. To ward off bad luck. The mayor couldn’t manage a whisper. Spitting his words out made them much more powerful than he would have thought. The deputy smelt his jaded breath more than once. He leant against the doorpost and listened to him until he had finished. The idiot had cleared his shadow and stayed kneeling before it. A tree planted on the town square, the mayor said. The deputy pictured a hazel. The idiot had swayed imperceptibly as he knelt in contemplation. It was

just too much, you see. This whole performance, first thing in the morning. Just after the other business. Too much. The mayor had stood up and gone over to the idiot to get rid of him once and for all. But, just as his foot landed on his shadow, the other man started braying with all his strength: “nah, nah, nah” as if someone was going to tread on him. The mayor backed away to the pavement. Then, for no reason, springing to life as if he really were a tree and had been struck by lightning, the idiot spread his arms wide and started to laugh. His slack mouth twisted, his fingers—no longer governed by his nervous system—metamorphosed into arthritic pincers, and his belly, my god that navel-less belly, started rumbling. Praying the hideous spectacle would end, the mayor walked away. The idiot lay down on his shadow and kissed it with glee, as if reunited with a long lost friend … And the mayor knew from the dusty taste in his own mouth that the idiot had to go.

Julie Mazzieri

Funeral Oration for a Village Idiot

The deputy didn’t even need to nod in agreement; they met in the mayor’s garden the following Tuesday morning. The sun was already beating down on the early morning, and the mayor’s wife had decided to weed round her spring bulbs. She didn’t know. She worked bare-handed in the damp soil, still chill at that time of year. Several stems had poked up through the earth. She stood up to greet her husband’s deputy and then thrust her hands straight back into the ground. Everything had to be perfect, the mayor explained. He’d thought of everything. From the far end of the garden, the mayor’s wife hoped there wouldn’t be any more frosts. The mayor had put on a lovely shirt when he got up and, as she passed behind him, she had stopped and adjusted his collar. She had thought him handsome. He’d worked everything out; all he need do was follow him. He held out his hand and asked his deputy to give him the keys to his car. They had found him on the corner of the main road and Craigs Road. He was sitting on the grass. He had crossed over to the side of the road that wasn’t tarmacked. One of his hands was moving inside the pocket of his trousers and the other gripped the barbed wire fence round a field. He didn’t hear the car stop behind him. The barb was grazing his palm and he wouldn’t loosen his hold. The deputy opened his door and the mayor grabbed his arm to make him understand: he’d worked everything out, all he need do was follow him. He got out of the car alone and approached the idiot from the side. He must have been there some time because his face had gone red. The mayor said hello, cautiously, as if setting a snare. The idiot turned round and stared at him without replying. His hand still wrapped round the wire. The mayor said hello a second time and the idiot started screaming. Screaming demonically, transforming the air around them into a nightmare. The mayor delved into his jacket pocket and produced a piece of cheese. He flattened it against the idiot’s face to stop

him crying out. The idiot recognised the caseous smell. He stopped screaming and gulped in the piece of cheese whole. Mouth wide open, he struggled to chew it, making louder and louder clicking noises with his tongue in his efforts to get the whole lot down his gullet. The mayor said “eat it, eat it”. Long strings of saliva drooled onto his jacket and, his face all the redder from the pleasure of eating, the idiot smiled at the mayor and gave an inadvertent little yelp. The mayor said “follow me” and he followed. The mayor said “get in the car” and he got in. Sitting on the back seat, the deputy wanted to change places. He hadn’t said anything but, all the way there, he had prayed he wouldn’t have to sit next to the idiot. And now here he was beside him, with little bits of curdled milk in the corners of his mouth. The deputy tried not to look at the idiot, who seemed to be enjoying the excursion. No one had thought to switch on the radio. The mayor was breathing heavily and driving fast. They had already gone over three crossroads. The idiot had started breathing heavily too, and the mayor turned round to ask his accomplice what had come over him. He shrugged. Dunno, how should I know why he’s breathing like that. Then he said shut up stupid idiot we’re gonna chuck you down a well. He said it because he didn’t want to, not any more; he’d had a change of heart, as they say. The idiot was panting. He was the only one having fun. The mayor turned left onto a track that was barely that: it was more of a path, a very narrow byway overrun with weeds. You could still just feel the dip of ruts under the car tyres. The idiot had stopped his performance and was now flattening his forehead against the rear windscreen, watching the track spooling out behind them. The deputy wanted him to stay sitting. Quietly. He tugged his sleeve. Shouldn’t look out the back like that. Shouldn’t. Throw an idiot down a well on a Tuesday morning. Should stay in bed and say you’re ill. The deputy wanted to look out of the back himself, but they had arrived; the well was there, on their right. It was a covered well, dug by a local farmer in the last century. The mortar had held out despite the passing seasons, and had crumbled in only a very few places. The idiot started moaning self-pityingly when the car stopped. The mayor helped him out, holding him by the elbow. Thirty-eight years old, he thought, and still can’t get out of a car. He headed straight for the well, running along on his tiptoes. It was only the copings that stopped him. The two men were astounded: it was so easy. The idiot leaned over the void and listened to the depths and his own breathing mingling together. He smiled when the mayor and deputy came and joined him, affording them both a view of the gaps between his incisors, his pink gums. He himself was enthralled, inviting them to have a go. Inviting them with his pale, washed-out eyes. And they each saw themselves in those ecstatically happy eyes. They saw themselves. So tiny. So ridiculously tiny. Seeing them both so ashen-faced, he closed his eyes and

roared with laughter—it was intolerable. So that was when they took him by the legs and tipped him in like a sack of wheat. On the count of three. The mayor and his deputy. And scuttled round the field looking for stones to seal the gap. Just in case. On the drive back the mayor attempted a joke, a pun, then they didn’t utter another word. They had already started to forget. The mayor took a different route back to the village, and they returned to their separate homes, each forcing himself to think of something else. But they didn’t know … they should have been told, warned. That three days later they wouldn’t recognise the sky above their heads: a black sky, only just emerging from total darkness, a threatening sky, even though everyone had made much of the fact that spring had arrived. A sky black with rage, and winds so strong it was impossible to tell which direction the storm was coming from.

Julie Mazzieri

Funeral Oration for a Village Idiot

Panicking cattle had come back up the meadows along the fence lines and were waiting at the gates—flank to flank, motionless, eyes half closed—for someone to come and get them. All round the houses people clattered their windows closed. And not a single drop of rain. A barely perceptible sound carried through the whistling of the wind. It sounded like a lament; a feeble, haunting voice. Women hurried out to pluck clothes and sheets that had been wrenched off washing lines from the hedges. And the noise grew even louder. All over the countryside the wind had whipped up dust along the roads and tossed trees from side to side, doubling over the larger ones and flattening the smaller ones, tearing off branches, and roof tiles, dragging chairs and loose planks into ditches. Farmers looked up at the sky and said it’ll break eventually, it looks so heavy, so low, you can almost touch it, it’s got to split open, when it’s that black. To think they had only just taken the herds to pasture, God alone knew where the animals would end up. And they hovered by windows waiting for the right moment to go out and look for them. The storm held out right through till evening; furious, tireless gusts threatening to take everything in their wake. Then all at once, just before nine o’clock, the wind suddenly dropped, almost too quickly, as if it had only ever existed in the locals’ imagination, and they came out and walked cautiously round their houses, dazed that the whole show had come to such an abrupt end. If they looked up they could see that away in the distance, in the village, the electricity was back on. The farmers found their animal sheds in total chaos: what with upturned cages and carpets of feathers, the rabbits and chickens standing in their feed troughs and on window ledges, and calves lying on soiled straw, wide-eyed, still poised

to snort in terror. Then people went to count the stock that had stayed out in the fields. But no one went very far. A breeze lifted out of nowhere. For a few minutes the wind hesitated to come back, then there was a gust, just one, and the breeze picked up even icier than before. The men who had set off for the fields didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know whether they should turn for home. They pressed on further across the land before being caught out by further blasts carrying with them the same doleful sound, the same intermittent lament they had heard at the beginning of the day. The storm started up again, blowing its fury on them, leaving them stranded in the middles of fields, yelling that they must turn back, get home. Over and above all this tumult rose a searing sequence of incongruous, strangulated sounds. Back in the village, the mayor found the deputy on his doorstep. His face lashed by the wind, he was clinging firmly to the handle and knocking with his free hand. Outside, along with him, was a terrifying whistling. Standing on either side of the window, the two men looked at each other for a long time. They eyed each other until they no longer recognised the face they were looking at. Then the children started crying in the living room, and the mayor walked away. He had not opened the door. The deputy thought that, perhaps, from the depths of his pit, the idiot had started wailing again.

Giulio Minghini

Fake

Publisher: Allia Date of Publication: January 2009 Foreign Rights Manager: Estelle Roche edallia@wanadoo.fr

Translation: Paul Buck and Catherine Petit paul@paulbuck.co.uk

Giulio Minghini was born in 1972 in Northern Italy. He travelled a great deal in Spain before settling in 1994 in Paris, where he lives today. In 1999, he contributed to two books for Éditions Allia and started to work for the Italian publisher Adelphi as a reader and translator of French and Spanish. Fake is his first novel written in French. Biography

Following a painful break-up, a young Italian living in Paris registers, on the advice of an ex-mistress, with an on-line contact agency based on cultural affinities. There he discovers a kind of parallel universe where intellectual pretentiousness is appropriate and whose captive he quickly becomes. This man in his thirties, whose literary references are well-established, is about to devote his time, surreptitiously at first, then exclusively, to meeting women. Between a botched rendezvous and a nostalgic letter to his ex, a surprisingly pertinent quotation from René Crevel and a sip of vodka, a pithy criticism of his country of birth and the avid succession of bodies, an acerbic look at the Parisian “boho” milieu and the taking-up of scattered notes, an appetite for seduction and an infernal addiction, the narrator

catches the impressions that this new life inspires in him. But rather than a “sociological” study of the phenomenon, it’s the personal story of a man that unfolds beneath our eyes, like an unravelled reel of short-lived encounters. The fragmentary writing fits in with his lifestyle, gradually reduced to a simple kaleidoscope of solitudes. In a nervous, limpid language, there follows a succession of crude or poignant portraits of women, and selected passages of caustic lucidity and corrosive humour. A hallucinating series of literary and virtual plunges into the abyss, this novel could be read as a true contemporary choral Odyssey. At the same time a picaresque and vibrant “j’accuse” aimed at today’s entertainment market that invades our sphere of feelings, Fake is above all a politically disjointed chronicle of the new “love” disorder.

1 I spewed myself. Created myself. Transformed myself. Spat myself … out. Several times. My dosage: five bottles of Wyborowa a week, three packets of Senegalese Marlboro a day, and two Prozac. Three quarters of a Lexomil to sleep, the last quarter on waking, before turning on my computer. My face was ravaged with scratches, my skin flaking. In the mirror a frightening mask pretended to smile back. My nails resembled commas. That bled. Once up, I checked my mail. Reading, replying, chasing up, inventing traps, lies and more lies. Making out slightly blurred photos, trying to guess the intentions behind empty or cheeky ads, declarations that said too much or not enough. I was naked in front of the screen, I was sweating, I wanted to go faster, I was hardly eating. I was swallowing raw eggs mixed with pepper to keep going. And I was moving forward. Nobody had told me that there was an entrance but perhaps no exit, and no monster at the heart of that labyrinth. Or else, if one, much too hard to kill, for it was multiplied tenfold by mirrors. It was Anne who had first mentioned pointscommuns.com. I used to sleep with her when she was 16 and I lived in Batignolles. Then we had lost touch for years. “A site for contacts,” she had explained, “but not quite like others.” “It’s based on cultural affinities and shared tastes.” She knew how to be persuasive: “You’re not going to carry on playing chess every night like some autistic, are you? You need to get out a bit, meet people …”

That afternoon, at the terrace of the bar on rue Claude-Bernard, I thought I caught, in her eyes, a glimpse of tenderness mixed with compassion. “You only have to register on line, you’ll see.” The street was practically deserted. Only a few passers-by lingering before the racks of the bookshop facing us. I also remember Anne’s white legs and her overly tight skirt. I didn’t know what was waiting for me through that month of September, and that’s not saying much. Giulio Minghini

Two weeks earlier, Judith hadn’t bothered to answer a purely formal text message I had sent when she was about to spend a weekend at a friend’s in the country. It was something along the lines, “I’m going to miss you”. I had felt, almost as soon as the message was sent, that it couldn’t last any longer, that everything was about to collapse. The summer spent in the south, in the house of her father, the Great Philosopher, had wrecked everything between us. We had slaughtered one another. We had succeeded in turning a month of holiday into a nauseating nightmare. Judith could no longer bear the laziness I flaunted, or my misplaced bouts of masturbation, or my lack of shared projects. When we tried to make love on the badly-lit garden table after a game of Scrabble (I used to lose in French, but also in Italian, my mother tongue), we could scarcely give each other pleasure. In the morning she remained silent behind her newspaper and coffee. A heatwave was upon us. We suffocated. We had nothing more to say to each other. Nevertheless, when she announced, two weeks after our return to Paris, that she wanted us to stop, I felt it as a sharp snap. Three years of living together were about to end just like that, at a stroke.

Fake

That month of September the nights were chilly. I went down the rue de Ménilmontant, an empty look on my face. At the counter of some third-rate bar I lit a cigarette, then another while I lost myself contemplating the old posters of Oriental singers lining the walls. (Those girls were outdated but stunning. Time must have done away with them since, I thought). Some evenings I called friends but, too often, they were busy. One night when I burst into tears in front of Julien and Bernardo, at a loss to know what to do, the waitress, an old Kabyle whose hair was coloured red, offered me a large glass of cognac without saying a word. Things went bad. In the morning I woke up too early, with invisible shoelaces pulled tight around my throat and a deafening silence in my ears. “Provided your steady gaze, your precise words, your perfect smile disappear. Provided something suddenly erases you, a blinding light, the brilliance of snow.”

I had sent Judith those words from a song by Silvio Rodríguez in the hope she would understand. But what, exactly? I refused to admit the decision she had taken was for the best. That it was a relief for her as well as for me. One evening, somewhat high, as I left a book signing, I broke my vow of no longer talking or writing to her. The phone had rung a good few times but no one had picked up. Finally her voice, flat. She was having a drink with a friend, I was bothering her. “I won’t take long,” I promised, with a trembling voice. She had listened to me in silence while I deliriously talked for half an hour about children never born and houses to do up near Béziers. Then she had interrupted firmly with, “It’s not working between us.” That phone call had sparked the final explosion. I took the vodka from the fridge first thing in the morning. And, a few days later, in a state of advanced intoxication, I had called Anne, who became worried. It was the beginning of a sleepless night that was to last a whole year, metamorphosing my waking hours and embraces through its pixelized light. I filled in the form to register with pointscommuns. Size, weight, look (“good looking,” “feeling good about myself ” …). I added a black and white picture showing me smoking a cigarette in front of my window. In the box “relationship sought,” I hesitated for the first time. “Love?” No thanks. “Friendship?” What for? “Adventure” is surely full of suggestive charm, but “Casual” fitted better. It leaves everything open, and with a hint of mystery. For profession I chose “Florist”. Later I would conform to the more ambiguous “Others”. I was only left with writing a “self-promo” (Anne made it clear that it was of the utmost importance), but, initially clueless, I left the page blank. As for the pseudonym, I found something quite sophisticated: Delacero, a word discovered in a book devoted to Italian brothels. In the up-market brothels, right up to the end of the 1950s (before some cunt decided, through a vicious law, to close the “bordellos”), one could use the services of the delacero. When a client wanted to fuck a prostitute in the company of a man, the delacero was called. If he wanted to see the girl he had chosen fucked by another man, he paid a supplement to watch the delacero at work. When, later, I would be asked the meaning of my pseudonym, I would invent far-fetched definitions (“It’s the name of a deceased friend”, “a town in the South of Italy”, “a game with very complicated rules”). I had no desire to explain.

I had the possibility to outline my personality with qualifiers like: “funny”, “traveller”, “tolerant”, “disorganized”, “understanding”, “shy”, “rock”, etc. At first “inquisitive/secretive”, Delacero would later become “extrovert/introvert”. With “material situation”, I hesitated between the two extremes “well-off ” and “hard to make ends meet”. I could avoid dwelling on such a delicate subject and declare, “I keep it to myself ”, but that would seem a tad dubious. Having always favoured fiction over reality, I ticked the first box. In the section “Addictions”, I listed them all except sex, which was conspicuous by its suspect absence.

Giulio Minghini

Fake

Once the registration fees were paid with my bank card, I could finally have access to the profiles of the females registered. I had fun contemplating the faces of all those young women pinned like butterflies on my screen. I sometimes wondered if the action of opening their file—sometimes several times in a row—brought about by the simple pressure of my finger on the mouse, didn’t correspond to the moment of penetration. By the sheer act of sending indiscriminate emails to the girls who appeared attractive—rather courteous emails, in which I explained briefly my worthy passions—I quite quickly managed, against all expectation, to secure two or three meetings. Lili74 is in fact called Miriam. I meet her at the Cannibale, in her neighbourhood. Blond, very small, Miriam, a graphic designer, has lived in Paris for five years. After two Corona, she offers me dinner at her place. I can see promising breasts under her black tight jumper. Her studio, in the most perfect mess, is rather filthy. Too few books. Mostly Nietzsche and Faulkner, whom she surely has not read, I tell myself, as I listen to the thin voice that doesn’t tell me anything particularly original. Or rather, a little story after all, that of a relationship that lasted four years: “He always wanted to fuck me the same way. Fellation, penetration, sodomy. Then, ejaculation all over my face.” That bloke used to film her at each session. After, he liked to re-watch it, in slow motion, looking for the expression on his girlfriend’s face to judge the degree of sincerity of her pleasure. Upset by his increasingly irrational fits of jealousy, she had finally left him. Since then, Miriam experiences ephemeral relationships imbued with a strong sense of guilt. When I start to undress her, she looks hesitant, vaguely ashamed. I don’t want to force the thing on her, but nevertheless, in doubt, I pull it out. I had never seen that same mix of amazement and greed before on a woman’s face. I see her still from time to time. When we meet her behaviour seems more and more erratic. She arrives late, without necessarily warning me in advance. Sometimes she doesn’t even show. One evening, finally, I manage to invite

her to have dinner at my place. She insists in preparing pancakes (a failure). At table, I imperceptibly lead the conversation towards amateur porn, one of my first real passions. Miriam is intrigued. In the scene of the film I show her, a blond girl, her wrists attached to a bar, is upright and being penetrated by four men, one at a time, before swallowing their cum in turn. I have always been fascinated, in non-professional productions, by the relative ugliness of the male performers and the badly hidden imperfections of the actresses. I should never have shown it to her. It makes her feel sick. She runs to the loo, and when she comes out, pale, she announces that she doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t feel at all well and that sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d rather go home. She no longer answers my texts. With my careless attitude, I have re-immersed Miriam in the ritualised scenario that her boyfriend had imposed on her as the only rule of pleasure: the scenario of every porn film. AÂ few weeks later, I add to my photo album the five pictures I had taken of her on my mobile. The best is the one when she holds my dick in her mouth while she stares at the lens with bovine eyes.

Naïri Nahapétian

Date of Publication: January 2009 Foreign Rights Manager: Sylvie Mouchès s.mouches@lianalevi.fr Translation: Josephine Bacon bacon@langservice.com

Who Killed Ayatollah Kanuni?

Publisher: Liana Levi

Biography Nairi Nahapetian was born in Iran in 1970 but left after the Islamic Revolution. As a freelance journalist for several years, she wrote many articles about Iran (published in Le Journal de Genève, Le Nouveau Quotidien, Politis, Charlie Hebdo, Témoignage Chrétien and the periodical Arabie). She is currently working for Alternatives Économiques, and in 2006 she published an essay entitled L’Usine à vingt ans [The Factory at the Age of Twenty]. Qui a tué l’ayatollah Kanuni? is her first novel.

Narek Djamshid arrives back to an Iran in the throes of a presidential election campaign hoping to make two dreams come true. He wants to uncover his lost family origins and start a career in journalism. One week later, as the candidates battle it out and an unknown candidate called Mahmoud Ahmadinejad emerges, he is still far from achieving his twin goals. Pampered by a great aunt who smothers him with tasty little dishes and endless chatter, despised by Tehrani women who hide their sequins beneath the regulation shapeless, all-enveloping garments, disorientated by a society run by hermetic rules, Narek feels as if he’s just not “getting” Iran.

So when Leila Tabihi, a famous Islamic feminist who is also standing in the elections, gives him the chance to get inside the Teheran Law Courts, Narek doesn’t hesitate for a moment. This is the perfect place in which to approach the bearded ones’ who rule the roost in the Republic of the Ayatollahs. Yet this initial encounter, far from shedding any light for him, sends him down a slippery slope … Through this subtle detective novel—the first in a series—which covers the blood-stained rise of the Islamic Republic as well as delving into the opaque operations of the religious foundations and oil companies, the reader can gain a better understanding of the Iran of today beyond the clichéd images.

Prologue 26 May, 2005 The summer was promising to be a dry one in Tehran, which vibrated with the traffic jams that brought the overcrowded buses to a standstill in a sea of cars. The heat beat down on Leila in the silence of her apartment, a silence shattered by unexpected phone calls after evening prayers. That night she kept reliving the calls in her head. First, there was Kanuni, in person, arranging a meeting; after that, Massoud, after all these years …Her mind kept whirring, chasing away sleep. She ought to have been thinking of other things, her nephew’s university entrance exam, for instance. Amir-Ali was a serious, hard-working boy, he thought he wouldn’t pass but had been pushing himself for months now. God would be with him. Leila turned over on to her back, trying in vain to use the sheet to drive away the heat that pressed down on her body. However hard she tried to cling to pleasant thoughts, the premature arrival of the hot weather stopped her from sleeping. Or was it more the memory of Nora? The next morning, when she arrived at work, Leila Tabihi headed straight for her office, without bothering Aghdas Khanoum who had her back to her, busy with the samovar. She sat at her desk for a while, her forehead creased with anxiety before rising and going down the corridor. Abdul was sweeping it, using short, brusque movements, bent over in the dust. The poor man was very old now and could barely see anything—his cleaning was getting worse and worse despite Aghdas Khanoum’s remonstrances. “Salam, salam”, he called out, giving her a wide toothless grin. She nodded her head in greeting and approached Mirza Mozaffar’s office, praying he would be there, even though it was still so early in the morning. Nodding at Aghdas Khanoum who was walking past, enveloped in her chador, Leila knocked at the door.

When Mirza opened the door, she did not acknowledge his smile but went straight in without a word. “What’s happening?” he asked, anxiously. “Guess who called me?” she replied, as she shut the door behind her.

Chapter 1 A taxi ride in Tehran Narek Djamshid hailed a shared taxi on the Avenue Vali Asr and took a seat next to a woman in her forties who threw him an indifferent glance, before adjusting the light cloth thrown over her hair. The taxi set off and Narek began watching out of the corner of his eye his fellow passenger’s bright red lipstick and her ochre-coloured eye shadow coloured to match her headscarf. She had that too-perfect retroussé and slightly pinched profile peculiar to Iranian women who spend their fortunes reducing their nose to a Western size. A gold lamé pencil dress peeped out from under her Islamic gown. Where was she going? Probably very close by, to one of the villas in the area, invited to one of those posh parties whose din he could just make out while in his room on the top floor of a grey tower block rising above all the surrounding buildings, sprinkled with satellite dishes. It was already 1 June, five days since he had left Paris, and Narek had made practically no progress with his article. Time dragged by at his elderly aunt Vart’s who would insist on introducing him to a new member of his Armenian family every day. He felt as if his whole life was being spent sitting round the table with these long-lost uncles and cousins who would revive memories of which he had absolutely no recollection. They had immediately taken him under their wing as an Armenian, seemingly forgetting that his father Massoud had not been one of them. For that matter, it seemed to be difficult to meet any Persians through them. And if Narek asked his aunt about the Djamshids of Tehran she would just shrug her shoulders as a sign of helplessness. He had tried to escape from this endless parade by taking trips in taxis, watching the female residents of North Tehran who hid their extravagant outfits under the revolutionary uniform. Where did these women buy such clothes, he wondered as he examined the slit in his fellow passenger’s dress. She stretched out a long brown leg and sighed with exasperation, to let him know that the way he was staring at her was inappropriate. Embarrassed, Narek began rifling through his rucksack to check he hadn’t forgotten Leila Tabihi’s address which Mariam had scribbled on a scrap of paper. “Go to your mother’s aunt”, had been his father’s terse response when he announced his trip. This reply hadn’t surprised him, given the lack of reaction when he had told his father about his plans to do a story about Iran. Narek knew better than to hope for anything—his stormy relationship with his father

Naïri Nahapétian

Who Killed Ayatollah Kanuni?

had evolved into mutual indifference a few years previously. So he had scoured the haunts of the Iranian community in Paris in the hope of finding Mariam Bliss, an old friend, one of the few who remembered the family after their arrival in France. She was, in fact, the only person who had ever broken into his lonely life with his father when he was a child, until the day when, after some mysterious row with Massoud, all signs of life from her stopped. That was in 1995; ten years ago. When Narek decided he was going back to Iran, he spent months trying to track her down, haunting the Iranian grocery shops on the Rue des Entrepreneurs, leaving messages for her with all the shopkeepers. “Are you Iranian?” they would ask him, put off by his Farsi which had become rusty since he had stopped seeing his father regularly. Then one day, she suddenly appeared at his side in the grocery shop run by the former mayor of Isfahan. She called him “Narek jan, my dear Narek”, as if no time had gone by, paying no attention to his appearance: his black shirt and trousers, his long sideburns accentuating his emaciated face, and the collection of rings he’d picked up in the Flea Market which his father particularly disliked. She took him home, to one of the tower blocks in the Beaugrenelle district by the Seine, where many Iranians had set up home immediately after the Revolution. So it was in her tiny lounge, piled with overlapping faded Persian rugs, that Mariam had given him Leila Tabihi’s contact details, with the recommendation to “talk to Massoud about it” so as to ensure he would let her know in person when he was arriving. But my father doesn’t know this Leila Tabihi, Narek mused to himself, though not making an issue of it. He was only too happy to have a contact, only too happy to have this contact. Contrary to all expectation, his father did what he was supposed to, shutting himself in his room to telephone her while Narek waited outside the door. The taxi stopped at the crossroads of Revolution Avenue and the woman handed 500 tomans to the driver, a podgy individual wearing a pale-coloured felt trilby. He made expansive gestures to indicate his refusal, insisting her ride was on the house: Such a beautiful woman, who reminded him so much of his daughter … She smiled back, and took her turn at indulging in taarof, the courtesy rituals, pointing out that she was surely double his daughter’s age, and asking him to take the money before she left—without a word or a glance back at Narek, who had been clearly relegated to the category of a loser. He tried to stretch out his legs but they hit the seat in front of him. In Paris, he was already a head taller than the crowds of people in the métro but here in Tehran he felt tragically tall. He had hidden away his rings and tight trousers and was hoping that his dark skin and bushy eyebrows would let him to blend into the crowd, but he still stood out unmistakeably as a foreigner. The first round of the elections would be held in a fortnight, time was passing and Narek was scared that he might have to return to Paris having learned nothing about

100

Iran other than his endless rides along Vali Asr, squashed up in the back of a shared taxi. Of course, it wasn’t as if he had actually been commissioned to write an article. After repeatedly calling the newsdesks of all the Paris papers, L’Hebdo, a newly created independent, had finally shown some interest in the Iranian presidential elections. “Some candidates are blurring the usual moderate/hardliner split,” he told the magazine’s editor, a chubby little chap, who had treated him from the start with that kind of familiarity that is common among media types. “Your stuff sounds pretty highbrow if you ask me. Anyway, I can tell you one thing for sure, a mullah is going to win!” “So what if it’s highbrow?” retorted Narek. The journalist, who seemed to have realised the interest there might be on an article about Iran, liked his reply: “Give me a ring once you’ve covered some ground.” No other paper had agreed to see him. This rather gruff guy was his only chance. So his meeting with Leila Tabihi might finally be the only opportunity of getting to grips with this country that he had left twenty-three years earlier in his father’s arms, when he had been too young to understand what was going on.

Naïri Nahapétian

Who Killed Ayatollah Kanuni?

A man opened the taxi door and took the seat where the gold lamé woman had sat. “Let me off at the Avenue of the Imam please.” The man was dressed in black and had a leather briefcase. The driver nodded after examining his passenger in the rear-view mirror. The short, skinny, bearded man wore a shirt with a Mao-style collar, in the strictly orthodox Revolutionary style. His gold signet ring added the perfect finishing touches to his Islamic Republic ensemble. He clutched his briefcase tightly in front of him, staring out of the window without paying any attention to Narek, who checked again that he had Leila Tabihi’s address with him. The taxi stopped and the driver called out “Sepah-Pahlavi!” The man, who was waving a banknote, paused then leaned towards the driver, explaining coldly: “You are wrong, my brother. This is the corner of Imam Khomeini Avenue.” The driver turned towards him without accepting the proffered money. “Yes! Avenue of the Imperial Army, Sepah!” The man looked him up and down, shot a glance at Narek—who looked down at his feet—before repeating pointedly: “You mean Avenue of the Saint Imam Khomeini, our late lamented Guide of the Revolution.” Most Tehran taxi drivers were still using the old names for the main streets of the city, commemorating the glory of the Pahlavi dynasty, before they had been renamed by the Islamic Republic. It was probably more from habit than out of any loyalty to the Shah’s regime, Narek thought. Surely the driver would realise he was dealing with a fanatic and drop the subject.

101

“You’re delaying my passenger, Sir. We’re now at the corner of Avenue Pahlavi and Avenue of the Imperial Army, what you asked for. I assume you’re going to the Law Courts. It’s right near here, if you go through the park. Khahesh mikonam, if you please.” The Law Courts? Narek tried in vain to think up a pretext for getting out of the taxi as quickly as he could. “Your name, my brother?” asked the man in black, without changing his polite tone. The driver responded with a wide grin: “My name is Hayati Kian. And you?” The man took out a small brown notebook from his briefcase and started to write in it. It seemed to take an eternity. He must have been putting down the driver’s name, with a detailed description of him and of his passenger. Could he be from the Savama? But if he belonged to the secret services, surely he wouldn’t dress in such an overtly Islamic way, Narek reasoned to himself. In any event, many Savama men had belonged to the Savak, the Shah’s secret police. The Islamic Republic had merely removed the organisation’s leader and given it a new name. Only the Americans were stupid enough to restructure their secret services from top to bottom before launching the umpteenth Gulf War. While all this was going on, the driver continued to decline the man’s payment for the ride. But this time it had nothing to do with courtesy, and the man in black refused to get out without paying his fare. Narek looked at his watch: 5.30 p.m. He was going to be late for his meeting thanks to this stupid Pahlavist driver. As Narek’s stress levels were rising he found himself glancing down into his fellow passenger’s half-open briefcase on the floor. He could see something metallic inside. It’s only a mobile phone, he thought, battling the paranoia that had been building up inside him ever since he had arrived in Iran. Yet the object did look remarkably like a firearm. So he must be a Savama man, then. And Narek, who had done absolutely nothing to deserve it, was now going to find himself caught up in this ridiculous situation which looked as if it were going to turn nasty at any moment. He had only been in Tehran for five days and the secret services of the Islamic Republic were already going to open a file on him! “What do you know about Islamic Republic, dear boy?” Mariam Bliss had asked him when he told her about his trip. Indeed, what did he know about this country, Narek Djamshid thought, as he sat there watching the two men outstaring each other. “Can we get inside?” Two old men leaned towards the door. The Savama man finally decided to leave, making sure to leave his banknote on the seat next to Narek.

102

The old man who took his place handed the money to the driver, but looked only slightly surprised when the driver threw it out the window. The driver winked at Narek in the rear-view mirror. He set off again down Vali Asr as if nothing had happened, as if ignoring the fact that some Islamic Republic bigshot had just taken down his name in a small brown notebook a stone’s throw from the Law Courts building. The new passengers discussed their predictions for polling day on 17 June. Former president Rafsanjani was bound to win, that much seemed certain. “Why not, at least he’s a pragmatist, and definitely better than Larijani”, said one of them, while the other pointed out that Rafsanjani was one of the most corrupt men in Iran. Or did he actually say “cunning”? They were not going to vote in any event. “What’s the point?” said one of the old men before getting off near the bazaar. The taxi suddenly filled up. Two women wearing flowery chadors squashed up next to Narek. The late afternoon sun heated up the taxi as they left the shaded streets of North Tehran to head down south. A Paykan, a locally made car, belching black smoke, stopped beside the window. Narek held his breath. Tehran was even more polluted than Mexico City or Bogotà which he had visited with his girlfriend, Hélène. In South America, he had never seen traffic jams like those in the Iranian capital—drivers seemed to get stuck for hours on end, while hurrying pedestrians would weave in and out of the vehicles, in the midst of the exhaust fumes. A few isolated traffic lights were meant to regulate the traffic in this megalopolis of fourteen million inhabitants, cut through with slip roads leading to the gigantic motorways. But the universally ignored red traffic lights looked rather lost in the midst of this anarchic crush with its permanent symphony of car horns. In the affluent part of town where his great-aunt lived, high up above this concrete jungle built on a mountainside, you could still breathe. But as soon as you left the North to go down towards “the slums”, the traffic and the air quality deteriorated as the building sites and rubble multiplied. The ultra-conservative mayor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was completing the rebuilding of the areas in which the “Republic’s disinherited” lived. It was no accident then that the offices of Leila Tabihi, daughter of the Ayatollah Tabihi, a historic figure of the 1979 Revolution, were located in these very districts. “We’ve reached the end of the Vali Asr, my lad.” Narek jumped up, thanked the driver and paid him, avoiding the taarof courtesy rituals, because he never knew how he would pay his fare according to the rules when a driver refused payment. Nervously he realised that it was 5.50 p.m.: he was 20 minutes late.

Naïri Nahapétian

Who Killed Ayatollah Kanuni?

103

Theresa Révay

All the Dreams of the World

Publisher: Belfond/Place des éditeurs Date of Publication: May 2009 Foreign Rights Manager: Frédérique Polet frederique.polet@placedesediteurs.com

Translation: David Macey davidmacey18@btinternet.com

Biography Theresa Révay is a novelist and translator. Her series of historical novels (Belfond) continues to enjoy growing success. Publications Published by Belfond: La Louve blanche, 2008; Livia Grandi ou le souffle du destin, 2005; Valentine ou le temps des adieux, 2002. Foreign rights in La Louve Blanche have been sold to Germany, Spain, Portugal, Russia, Serbia and Hungary.

104

Tous les rêves du monde continues the story of Max and Xénia (La Louve blanche) as they travel across a devastated Europe. The author brings to life unforgettable characters and paints a masterly picture of a turbulent period, set in Paris, Berlin and New York. 1945. They are young and have already lost their illusions. Caught up in the lies and aberrations of an accursed generation, the son of a fanatical Nazi, young Jewish survivors from the camps and a lost adolescent girl all go in search of their own truths.

That day, he went on a pilgrimage. He needed to get a grip on himself and keep his wits about him. Félix Seligsohn used every ordeal to try to improve his selfcontrol. His outbursts of anger or indignation were becoming less frequent. He did not want to waste his energy. It was too precious. But this time, he had to go back to the skeleton of the Lindner house. The dome was open to the sky. He ran his hand over one of the pillars that used to support the glass roof. His nails were encrusted with plaster and dust. He’d been busy in areas far away from the city centre and hadn’t been back here for months. He did not like to dwell on a painful past. Félix was no great lover of ruins. But as he looked around him, he felt for the first time that he might lose this place. So, Kurt Eisenschacht had survived. A leading Nazi, press baron and property developer who loved contemporary art … so long as it was not degenerate. Before the war, he used to strut around at the official receptions, his magnificent wife on his arm. Félix was so bitter that his stomach was in knots. Finding out his name had upset him badly. So long as he was fighting something that was so nebulous he could scarcely see it, it had all seemed so much easier. But now he had to deal with a man whose tentacles touched people who were close to him. Life plays some funny tricks on you. People’s fates were so entangled that it was sometimes hard to credit it. He remembered how dejected his mother had looked when she signed over the deeds to the house. Shadows under her eyes like bruises. Frail but dignified. The reflection of her tears. But she never lowered her eyes. Not once.

105

The bastard’s comfortably settled in Bavaria, thought Félix, his jaw set. If he thinks he can get away with it like that once he’s settled his little problems with denazification! He struck the pillar with the flat of his hand. Mad thoughts ran through his mind. Black and white flashes. A dizziness that reminded him of the anger he sometimes saw on his sister’s face. Why hadn’t Uncle Max told him about something he must have known? The scent of betrayal made him feel sick. Max was his rock, and Félix could not bear to see his rock crumble: he had already lost too many things in his life. He thought again of how helpless Natacha had looked when she learned that her mother had betrayed her by keeping the truth from her. Surprised at the violence of her reaction, he thought at the time that she was overdoing it. But now he told himself that she hadn’t been wrong. He felt bitter. How could anyone accept the things that were left unspoken, the silences that were as unfathomable as lakes? You could drown in them. Some said they were still too young to understand the subtleties of life that led you to tell lies, but surely it was all a question of temperament? “Some times you keep quiet to protect people”, Aunt Xènia had said one day when Natacha accused her of being a coward. “Keeping quiet can be another way of killing!” replied her daughter. As he retraced his steps, Félix noticed part of a sign that had been left in a corner. He tugged at the big metal plaque; it was covered in dust and had been twisted by the heat of the flames. He could make out the Gothic inscription: Das Haus am Spree. The name chosen by the usurper. Félix kicked it, and then kicked it again. “What are you doing here?” The voice was angry. A slender boy with brown hair was standing in front of him. He looked stunned. He was wearing a jacket that was worn out at the elbows and his beige trousers were rolled up over his ankles. He had an artist’s portfolio under his arm. Félix’s heart was beating. The adrenaline was setting his veins on fire. “What’s that got to do with you?” he replied, with hatred in his voice. “You’ve no right to come in here like that and trample on that sign. Are you out of your mind or what? Where do you think you are?” “At home!” shouted Félix. “This is my place and I’ll do what I like!” He thought of the Russian he’d punched in Paris when Natacha had got into trouble with people she thought were friends. He felt the same need to lash out now. All at once, all his attempts to control his impulses were just a memory. The boy backed off instinctively. He screwed up his eyes and hunched his body. The birds perched in the rafters were squawking above their heads. “I don’t know what you’re getting at”, he said at last. Félix suddenly let the sign drop, grazing the palm of his hands. The sound of the metal hitting the floor echoed though the cavernous room.

106

“I’m Félix Seligsohn. The Lindner heir. The rightful owners of this house.” “The boy turned pale. He bit his lip, but an angry gleam lit up his face. “So what? There’s nothing to say you’ll get it back.” Félix had a nasty feeling. The boy’s self-confidence had caught him unawares. He must be yet another of those damned little Nazis who were still nostalgic for the glory days when they had paraded in their brown shirts and shorts, carrying flaming torches and singing the praises of a racially pure Germany. The same boys who had shouted at him at school, thrown stones at him and called him a dirty Yid. You don’t emerge unscathed when you’ve been weaned on National Socialism. The weeds would be flourishing for a long time to come. “It’s not the way it used to be under Adolf Hitler.” He spat out the words with contempt. “That scum that guys like you called the Fuhrer. The courts will settle this business. And I’ll win my case, you can count on that. And no rotten Nazi hiding in Bavaria is going to stop me.” Alex stared at Félix Seligsohn as though he had seen a ghost. His uncle had often talked about him. And he knew that he had come back to Berlin. It was strange that they hadn’t already bumped into each other at Max’s. He was younger than he had thought at first. Even though his double-breasted suit was covered in dust, Seligsohn had the elegance of a grown man. He held himself haughtily and was looking him up and down with what looked like condescension. It was ridiculous. Axel was torn between the desire to smash his face in and a detachment inspired by the irony of the situation. Here they were, squaring up to each other in the ruins of a building that, for different reasons, meant a lot to both of them, and they didn’t even know whether or not Berlin was going to fall into the hands of the Soviets, who had just declared that the city was completely blockaded. If it did, neither of them would get anything. Axel knew that his father was alive, but this was the first time a stranger had mentioned his name in his presence. It made a strange impression of him, as though his father had come back from the dead. He could still remember the worried face of his mother as she told him. Marietta had taken to her bed again. To his annoyance, she had made him sit on the edge of the bed and told him that she had exchanged a few letters with his father, who was now living near Munich. Did he want to write to him? To re-establish contact with him after a few years without any news from him? Axel didn’t know what to say. He was at once relieved and filled with anxiety. The courts were still sitting. Until then, he had been reading the papers in secret, looking for his father’s name in the lists of those on trial, not knowing what to hope for. Feeling vaguely uneasy, he shook his head. For the moment, he didn’t want to know about Kurt Eisenschacht. It brought back too many poisonous memories. He had looked at Uncle Max’s inscrutable face, and then left the flat to walk the streets, feeling strangely disoriented.

Theresa Révay

All the Dreams of the World

107

“You’ve no idea who I am, have you?” Axel calmly asked. Félix watched him suspiciously. His grazed hands were on fire. He was surprised that the boy hadn’t reacted to his aggression. He was the kind who was always looking for a fight. That’s what the Hitler Youth had been taught to do, wasn’t it? Right is might. Always. “I’m not sure I want to know”, he muttered. “I’m the son of the Nazi scum who bought the Lindner house from your mother. In a way, I’m his heir, in the same way that you’re your mother’s heir.” It was as though he’d thrown down the gauntlet, and Alex was the first to be surprised. Anger had come over him like some sudden fever. There he was, with the ghost of his father at his shoulder, and all the terrible confusion his memory inspired in him. He had been unable to stop himself challenging this Félix Seligsohn, so sure that he was well within his rights, so ambitious and so arrogant. He felt a magma of foetid impressions he thought he had forgotten welling up inside him. His anger brought them back: Axel sensed that the boy, who had been described to him as an enemy and a subhuman parasite, was right: one day, the Lindner house would revert to him. That day might be a long way off, but it would come. Whether or not the Eisenschachts decided to contest the case was irrelevant, because that was why men like Max von Passau had risked their lives. Because they had to if they wanted to rebuild anything in this cemetery of ruins, and because it was the right thing to do. It was Félix’s turn to be at a loss for words. All at once, his enemy was there in front of him, but he had the features of a boy of his own age, his cheeks downy with the beginnings of a beard. This wasn’t what he wanted. He wanted to be faced with someone from the accursed generation of his parents and their enemies, which had had left them all this poisoned heritage. His rival had no right to have inky fingers, to have his hair all over the place, or to have that sulky pout that strangely reminded him of his first cousin Natacha. “So it’s your fault”, he whispered. “What do you mean?” “Max didn’t tell me that your father had bought the Lindner house. A little white lie. By omission.” He was being ironic. “I understand now. It was his way of protecting you. But he must have known that our paths would cross one day.” “I don’t need anyone to protect me!” Axel flared up. “I’ve been getting by on my own for a long time now.” At that point there was something so young and so fragile in his eyes that Félix could not stop himself from smiling nervously. “Then we’re both the same.” A loudspeaker suddenly began to crackle. Ever since the Soviets had cut off the electricity supply from the power stations in their zone, Berliners had lost the radios and the news broadcasts they needed to survive. For the technicians

108

at the RIAS radio station in the American sector, the solution was obvious. If listeners could no longer get the news in their homes, they would have to broadcast it in the streets. Ochre-coloured trucks began to criss-cross the city, and passers-by rushed to listen to them. Instinctively, both boys turned their heads to listen. When the truck drove off a few minutes later, they looked at each other again. You could read the same astonishment in their eyes. Axel was shattered by the news. “They can’t abandon us”, he murmured, clutching his portfolio to him. “We’d be cut off from the outside world, completely isolated.” “An air lift … added Félix, who was just as astonished. “The Americans and the British will bring us supplies with planes brought in from all over the world. Madness. A Dakota touching down at Tempelhof every eight minutes. And British seaplanes on the Havel. How can they do that? What about the logistics?” Axel shrugged his shoulders as though he couldn’t believe it. “I want to see this for myself ”, he said, before turning on his heels and walking away. Félix hesitated for a moment. The end of the quarrel had been as sudden as it had been incongruous, but only two Berliners born and bred could understand the significance of what they had just heard. Berlin, their city, held in contempt, marked with the seal of infamy … the bottom of the Wilhelmstrasse of sinister repute was only a few hundred metres away from the spot where they were standing …” all at once Berlin was something American and British pilots were willing to risk their lives for. And only three years ago, pilots just a few years older than them had been trying to reduce it to rubble. It was incredible. Miraculous. Without waiting any longer, Félix ran to catch up with Axel. They both wanted to see the planes, to make sure they hadn’t been lied to. Not this time. They had to see them now, right away, with the impassioned impatience of the young. They had to see the planes whose engines were already throbbing in the bright light of the early summer.

Theresa Révay

All the Dreams of the World

109

Jean Rolin

A Dead Dog After Him

Publisher: P.O.L Date of Publication: January 2009 Foreign Rights Manager: Vibeke Madsen madsen@pol-editeur.fr

Translation: Ros Schwartz Translations Ltd schwartz@btinternet.com

Biography Jean Rolin was born in Boulogne-Billancourt in 1949. He is a novelist and journalist, writing for daily newspapers such as Libération and Le Figaro. He won the Albert-Londes prize in 1988 with La Ligne du Front and the Médicis prize in 1996 for L’Organisation, and in 2008 he was awarded the Mar de Letras prize. publications Rolin’s recent novels published by P.O.L include: L’Explosion de la durite, 2007; Terminal frigo, 2005; La Clôture, 2002. These titles are available in paperback edition, Gallimard, “Folio” collection.

110

At the beginning of Moby Dick, Ishmael, about to board the Pequod, observes that the captain has the name of a biblical king who was “very vile”, and whose body was fed to the dogs when he was slain. Countless heroes of the Trojan War narrowly escaped the same fate. Fascinated by stray dogs, Rolin roams the world and literature in pursuit of his subject matter, from the Moscow suburbs to the outermost limits of the Australian deserts. Taking its title from the last sentence of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, Un chien mort après lui [A Dead Dog After Him] explores Rolin’s fascination with canines. As in his previous works, the world he describes is contradictory, violent, dark and despairing.

We’d barely settled into the Hotel Kasar when the police paid us a visit. This was in the closing years of the twentieth century, in Turkmenbashy—formerly Krasnovodsk—on the shores of the Caspian Sea. We had taken three separate rooms on the same floor, their level of comfort more like a prison than a hotel. Shortly before the police arrived, I’d gone to the interpreter’s room to pay her what I owed her. The interpreter had green or hazel eyes and long hair of a very dark auburn colour, possibly of that shade known as “mahogany”. We’d hired her a few days earlier in Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan. She’d been one of a team of multilingual reception staff in a big hotel, an establishment that was much more luxurious than the Kasar, and, were it not for the absence of guests, might have been any hotel of the same category in any capital. The ostensible luxury and the emptiness, common to most of the hotels in Ashgabat, created the instant impression that their purpose was not to accommodate visitors, or that this was very much a secondary concern. And the abundance of staff was inversely proportionate to the number of guests—there must have been at least ten people behind the reception desk. My choice of interlocutor lighted without hesitation on the young woman with dark auburn hair, and I’d immediately offered her the job of interpreter for the duration of our stay in the country. And the extraordinary thing was that she’d agreed, almost immediately, without giving this sudden offer the scrutiny that in my view it deserved, coming from two men she knew nothing about, except that they came from far away and claimed to be gathering data on the fluctuating levels of the Caspian Sea.

111

Now we were back in Turkmenbashy, and our trip was coming to an end. When I’d entered her room, the interpreter had offered me the seat opposite her. We probably exchanged a few jokes, or other small talk, I’d given her the money, and then, instead of leaving straight away, as I should have done, I’d hung around for a moment looking at her, marvelling at the striking beauty of her hair with its mahogany glints. But as soon as I caught a look of surprise in her green (or hazel) eyes, seeing me still hovering, and before she had a chance to voice it, I’d left the room, vaguely ashamed at what might have appeared to be presumption on my part. And rather piqued, too, needless to say. I was sitting brooding when there was a knock on my door, and, when it opened, perhaps I was vain enough, for a split second, to imagine that it was the interpreter who’d regretted her initial reaction and come round to the idea of spending (more) time with me. Then when the two police officers marched in, I probably saw this intrusion as a punishment, divine or otherwise, for my persistent presumption. Besides, given what we know about Turkmenistan, and its police methods, this search was carried out with a great deal of tact, not to say cordiality. The two officers must have picked up one or two objects, and I’m still not sure they did, perhaps they merely checked my visa was in order. I assume they’d been a little more insistent with the interpreter, but she herself could only confirm what we’d said from the start, which was that we were conducting a study on the fluctuating levels of the Caspian Sea. A few hours before checking in to the Hotel Kasar, we’d returned aboard the launch Almaz from the island of Kizyl Su, which means Red Water in Turkmen. The Caspian Sea, however, was not red at all, but perhaps the name was a hangover from the days when everything was red, starting with the place names, like the town of Red Barricades in a neighbouring country where we’d stayed for a while. The sea level was fluctuating, there was no doubt about that, even though I can no longer remember whether it was rising or falling: in any case, whichever it was, it reversed itself, with random frequency, and this alternation is one of the Caspian Sea’s most original features, one of the most worrying too, from the point of view of the communities living on its shores and of the oil companies. (To further complicate matters, especially for the oil companies, the Caspian Sea freezes over in winter, but only the northern, deepest part, an area that varies according to changes in the climate, to such an extent that it hasn’t been established whether nowadays the wolves of Kazakhstan—assuming there are any left—can journey on foot, each winter, to the islands of O-va Tjulen’i, as they used to do so as to eat the seals there). If the level was rising—as I presume it was, since on the opposite shore we’d noticed roads, ports and other structures inundated or destroyed by the waters—the island of Kizyl Su was threatened with imminent submersion, for it was completely flat: as I recall, there wasn’t even a hill or a mound where, in the event of flooding, the population could seek refuge while waiting for

112

help which would be a long time coming. My recollection is that the island is shaped like a curved blade, with a Turkmen village at one end, and at the other, a lighthouse occupied by a Russian family. It is likely that this Russian family—which had at least one “idiot child”, aged about ten at the time, dressed in camouflage fatigues and usually busy fishing off a jetty—it is likely that this Russian family had been living in the justifiable fear of being attacked by the Turkmens one day, despite the convenience of the lighthouse as a safe haven, particularly since next to it stood the ruins of a small fortification, apparently an anti-aircraft missile battery with its fire control radar, all of it out of service and soon to return to dust. The Russian lighthouse was separated from the Turkmen village by a sandy stretch of several kilometres, grassy in some places, marshy in others. Several camels returned to the wild lived on this land, giving off a terrible stink, even from a distance. The Turkmen village, itself built on the sand, or rather growing out of it, consisted of a hundred or so houses—a very rough estimate—mostly on piles. In the not-so-distant days of socialism, the village must have survived partly from metallurgy and partly from industrial fishing, suggested by the large number of wrecked iron trawlers and the ruins of a shipyard. Nowadays, the men of the village seemed to spend most of their time among these ruins, a reminder of the glory days, which afforded them a little shade. They were often drunk and nearly always sullen. Occasionally, they fished with nets from the shore, but surreptitiously, ready to swear, should they be questioned, that they were doing nothing. The same went for the women who, at irregular intervals, would board Almaz with sacks of dried fish. Were they going to sell them or barter them at the market in Turkmenbashy? “No”, and they’d turn their back on you. The nature of the regime—where everything depended on the will or the whim of one man who was half mad to boot, and who, not content with making it compulsory for schoolchildren to study an epic poem he’d composed celebrating his own greatness, had just sent a copy into orbit on a Russian rocket—the nature of the regime was no doubt the reason for these denials. Any undeclared activity (in other words any activity not subject to plundering by the servants of the regime, or by their leader himself) was banned on principle. Despite the islanders’ steadfast silence and the apparent confusion in their activities, resembling those of the damned in films, wandering blindly in a world devoid of all hope, it was possible to conjecture, at the least, that the collapse of the male-dominated industrial activity and its gradual replacement by a barter or DIY economy, in which women coped best, had led to a parallel and no less cataclysmic change in their family and social structures: broadly, insofar as one could tell, the men, deprived of paid work, were beginning to lose power, and the women to seize it. Even men’s relative physical superiority, to say nothing of their status, was being eroded by their inactivity and drunkenness.

Jean Rolin

A Dead Dog After Him

113

The house where we’d stayed was typical of these transformations. Two evenings in a row, the women who lived there, mother and daughters, had refused to let the father in, on the pretext that he was drunk, which he clearly was, forcing him to spend the night outside in the damp, cold sand, surrounded by garbage and dogs. For wherever there was sand, even underneath the houses, the dogs ruled. Even if the proliferation of stray dogs couldn’t be explained as a direct consequence of the matriarchy, it had accompanied the collapse of the old order and the tentative emergence of the new. These dogs, most likely vestiges, or dregs, of a pastoral activity as defunct as all the others, were considerable in size. Not only had they grown in number, but their confidence—or arrogance—had also grown, to the point where people were now afraid to venture far from their homes into the sands, at least at night. Even during the day, and in the middle of the Turkmen village’s main road, which was unsurfaced, the children on their way to school—where God knows what they could be teaching them, apart from making them endlessly recite the Rukhnama, the verse epic by Saparmurad Nyazov, the one that had been sent into orbit—the children had to make a detour to avoid several dogs’ dens, which were fairly similar to albatross’ nests, like tiny volcanoes heaving with frothing creatures. But these dogs were even more dangerous when they lived outside the village, in the wild, or on the wasteland which I’ve already mentioned was the preserve of the foul-smelling wild camels.

One day, when I’d walked along the shore and ended up a long way from the houses, forcing myself to itemise everything encountered at every step—dead crayfish, water snakes, bits of old iron, delicate bird skeletons, tufts of feathers …—I myself was attacked by one of them. It was a goodsized animal, with pointed ears, that’s all I could tell. I’d neither seen nor heard it coming when it charged me—as if I’d done anything to him, him or his family—from about fifty metres away. Luckily, right at my feet was a metal part from the shipyard, which I managed to grab and brandish. The part was extremely heavy, but if the fear of being devoured by a dog on the shores of the Caspian Sea doesn’t paralyse you, it’s exactly the kind of thing that unleashes your strength. And that is where the movie ends for me, as if the reel were torn or the film stuck in the projector, on this image where you see me, my face contorted by a howl, wielding a heavy bit of iron against the growling dog attacking me.

114

Antonin Varenne

Fakirs

Publisher: Viviane Hamy Date of Publication: March 2009 Foreign Rights Manager: Julie Galante julie.galante@viviane-hamy.fr

Translation: John Flower j.e.flower@kent.ac.uk

Biography United States, Mexico … Antonin Varenne travelled a great deal before withdrawing from the world. Having obtained a Masters Degree in Philosophy in Paris he wanted to write … Aged 33 he published his first novel. Noticed by those in the detective novel business and having been selected for the Polar Cognac Prize, he has continued to offer us stories that “people like to read and not those that they would like to tell to themselves.” Publications Published by Toute Latitude: Le Gâteau mexicain, 2007; Le Fruit de vos entrailles, 2006.

115

What do these two suicides have in common? A naked young man with his arms stretched up towards the sky running along the Paris ring-road, the périphérique, against the traffic; cars swerve to avoid him, scooters crash into the safety barriers, until a lorry going at full speed serves as executioner. Second case: in the Natural History museum a man makes a swallow dive over the skeleton of a sperm whale, crashes down and is pierced by a piece of bone two metres long. Lieutenant Guérin is in charge of the Paris police department that deals with suicides. Saddled with

a shy and rather useless assistant he gets bogged down each day in a conspiracy theory about certain suicides he finds highly suspect. A haemophilic fakir, a Franco-American who shoots bows and arrows in the Jardins du Luxembourg, the lesbian, alcoholic manageress of a bar, all suicides, Mesrine the Dog, an ex-convict who looks like Edward Bunker: a whole collection of crazy people dreadfully embedded in a dark reality. A detective novel about a world that is dirty and without hope with a very fine eye for detail.

On the black and white screen, a naked young man was running along the périphérique, the Paris ring-road, towards the cars, his arms stretched up towards the sky. Cars were swerving to avoid him, scooters were crashing into the safety barriers. With all his wares hanging out he was running, towards the cars, smiling like a prophet. He was shouting, though no one could hear, and looking so happy, while offering his bare flanks to the metal bodywork. At the bottom of the screen, one set of numbers indicated the date, the other the time: 9. 37 a.m. Next to the minutes the seconds ticked by slowly, even more slowly than the man was plying his legs. He was thin, white skinned and had the elegance of a heron skimming across a pool of oil. Everything was silent—the bumps, the crunching of metal, his cries and the broken glass. “What the hell is he yelling about?” “Lambert, what’s he shouting?” Lambert said nothing. Why on earth, for God’s sake, should he want to be acknowledged by these three brutes? According to a witness, the runner was shouting, “I’m coming.” Nothing else. Lambert thought that was enough. Clearly it wasn’t for the other three. He didn’t reply and by not saying anything he felt a bit better. “Hey, we can’t see anything! Where’s he gone?” “Wait, we’ll get it on another camera.” The angle changed and they could now see the young man running from behind, facing the cars as they poured towards him. He came out from under the bridge, the flood of dark vehicles swerving to avoid this white lump with its hairy bum.

116

“Well, he certainly isn’t scared!” “He’s run a good two hundred metres. Must be a record.” Savane,once again nudged Roman, his alter ego from hell. “That’s easy to see, there’s even a stop watch!” There was a burst of throaty laughter. Lambert opened his mouth to protest but the three of them scared him. “Shut up for fuck’s sake, and watch.” “Berlion doesn’t like it when people talk during films!” “Shut it.” Roman, Savane and Berlion. To do good work in the Homicide Department didn’t exclude the possibility of being completely stupid. They proved that three times over. Sensing that the end was coming, their vulture-like instincts made them quiet. The ash from their forgotten cigarettes was falling onto the tiled floor and the only sound was the hissing of the tape in the recorder. A luxury car was bearing down on the kamikaze, straight down the line of the camera. The young man stretched out his arms and thrust out his chest, like the final effort of a runner crossing the finishing line. The car swerved at the very last moment and avoided him. Behind it there was a lorry going at full speed. Without a sound the runner hit the lorry, his crazy running stopped dead and in a ridiculous way he at once set off again in the opposite direction. The blood from the smashed skull, driven into the ventilation grilles, spurted all over the radiator. The whole body disappeared, sucked under the driver’s cab, while the trailer started to slide across the road, its wheels locked. The tape recorder whined and the tape stuck on the last clip of the lorry skidding and the driver’s face petrified in an expression of horror. At the bottom of the screen the digital numbers of the clock had stopped. Ramon stubbed out his cigarette on the tiles. “God, it’s a right mess.” “I told you, it’s completely nuts.” They continued to stare at the screen, sickened and disappointed, uncertain what to do next. Savane turned to Lambert. “Heh, Lambert, what do you think? Is it suicide or is he a serial killer?” They fell about laughing. Savane, gasping, had another go. “Shit! Do you think your boss arrested the lorry driver?” They were pissing themselves when the door opened. Lambert, feeling vaguely guilty, drew himself up and stood more or less to attention. Guérin put on the light. The three policemen emerged from the smokeridden shadows, wiping their eyes. He glanced at the screen and then, slowly, at Lambert. The anger that had been in his big brown eyes disappeared almost

Antonin Varenne

Fakirs

117

immediately, overcome by weariness. The expression on the crumpled faces of Berlion and his associates went from one of mirth to aggressiveness, with the ease of coppers well used to interrogations. They slowly left the room, in front of Guérin. Savane, probably the hardest of them, spat out between his teeth: “Watch out, Colombo, your coat’s dragging along the ground.” And then, when he was further down the corridor, added more loudly: “Be careful not to let it drag in your dog’s shit!” Lambert went red and looked down at his shoes. Guérin ejected the cassette from the tape recorder, slipped it into his pocket and left the room. Lambert, looking like a standard lamp without a bulb, stayed there. After a few seconds, Guérin appeared in the doorway again. “You coming? We’ve got work to do.” He almost said “I’m coming” merrily, but something stopped him. Dragging his feet he went off after the boss along the corridors. He looked hard at Guérin’s figure fearing that he would see anger, but could only sense the ever present tiredness that he carried beneath his coat. A dog and a master who didn’t need a lead anymore. Unlike Savane he didn’t find the idea so degrading and saw it rather as a sign of confidence. The boss had let sleeping dogs lie but Lambert knew what was what. Being nice wasn’t necessary in this building. In the end, you had to admit that it was useless. In this place, being nice was something you stopped as quickly as possible; it was a bit shameful, like losing your virginity between the legs of an old tart. Lambert wondered whether the boss—forty-two years old and thirteen years of service—didn’t make this unnatural effort especially for him. Yet one more reason, he said to himself, not to mess around: for one thing it was a privilege and two Guérin was quite capable of doing the opposite. Pushing this line of thinking as far as he could, trainee officer Lambert sometimes wondered whether his boss didn’t use him as a kind of buoy, a shelter for what he was feeling. When, after a few beers, he got lost in such hypothetical limbo, the image of a dog and its master would come back to him. In the end, it summed up their relationship quite clearly. Lambert pushed open the door of their office, meditating on his own selfesteem, the delicate approach his boss was teaching him to develop. Distant and silent Guérin had immersed himself in the file on the ring-road as soon as he had sat down. His old raincoat hung on him like an old camping jacket, ill-fitting and discoloured. What was the name of that guy on the ring-road? Lambert couldn’t remember. A complicated name with hyphens in it. Impossible to recall.

118

“Look here Lambert, what do you have to say about this? Like you, I don’t think it’s a very kosher way of committing suicide. (Guérin smiled to himself.) You noticed as well the signs he was making to the camera didn’t you?” He supplied both the questions and answers, a habit from the way his assistant reacted. Nothing moved in the office, there was no noise. Looking up at his junior with an encouraging look, Guérin waited for a word, an approval. Lambert was picking his hooked nose, fascinated by what he was extracting and sticking under his chair. “Lambert?” The tall, fair-haired assistant jumped and slipped his hands under his desk. “Yes, boss?” “Go and get us some coffee, please.” Lambert set off through the corridors hoping not to meet too many people. On the way he wondered once again why no-one on the Quai des Orfèvres was called by his Christian name. People always said “Roman has got divorced again”, “Lefranc is depressed”, “That shit Savane is in trouble”, “Guérin is completely crazy” and so on. Never a Christian name. He found this way of distancing your friends strange.

Antonin Varenne

Fakirs

[…]

Lambert came back with two plastic cups, one black with no sugar which he placed on the boss’s desk, and the other with milk and sprinkled with over an acre of cane-sugar, which he placed on his own. Before sitting down he went over to the wall and dramatically tore off a small page from the calendar. 14 April 2008 appeared in red letters and numbers. He sat back down and started to drink his coffee, staring at the day’s date. Two years previously, on coming back from leave, Guérin had been shown to this office. Two tables, a strip-light, two chairs, power points and two doors, as if the entrance and exit weren’t the same. In fact, strictly speaking, the office had no exit. Behind one of the desks, a piece of white coral in the shape of a human face sat turned towards a windowless wall, calmly staring into the future. It seemed to him that since that day Lambert had not budged from his chair and that the future had put off its arrival for good. The office was right at the end of the building, at the western point of the île de la Cité. To get there you had to cross half of number 36 or take a side door and some back stairs. Barnier had given him the keys, making him understand that to go through all the offices simply to get here was a waste of energy. Your new assistant, Barnier had said. Your new office. Your new job. You’re Mister Suicides, Guérin. Guérin the Suicides man, that’s you, now.

119

The second door opened into another, much bigger room, which was entered via their office. The Paris suicide records. Or part of them, those belonging to the police authorities. The fact that he and young Lambert had been chosen as door-keepers to these endless shelves and files was something that he had still not yet fathomed. But he was patient. These files were no longer consulted.They were only the anachronistic remains of papers that had now been digitalised, copies kept for insurance companies and rarely asked for. Almost every month, there was talk of cleaning them out and taking them to a rubbish tip. There was only Guérin left to add to them and to spend hours sometimes with a sociology student in search of some data. These students ensured that the archives survived; universities had made them into research material and their disappearance would have caused a scandal. The oldest files went back to the industrial revolution when, as a kind of counterweight to progress, suicide had enjoyed its golden age. For two and a bit years, Guérin had become a specialist in self-destruction. A dozen or so cases per week, hundreds of hours in the archives; he had become a living encyclopaedia of Parisian suicides. Methods, social class, season, civil status, timetables, developments, legislation, religious influences, age, district … After a week he had forgotten the very reason why he had arrived in this dead-end. Suicides was a chore feared by those on the force. It wasn’t really a department, but part of a job that naturally tended to be separate from others. Every suspected suicide was the subject of a report that confirmed or invalidated the facts. In the case of doubt, an inquest was opened; but in almost every case it was a matter of ticking a box. If there was an investigation it was no longer in Guérin’s hands and fell into those of men such as Berlion and Savane. The hierarchical powers that led to Suicides could only be overturned by other, stronger ones, whose very existence was in doubt. You only left Suicides on retirement, resignation, depression, for a rest-home or else—and examples were more frequent in this branch than in the rest of the police force—by finishing yourself off with you service revolver in your mouth. With various degrees of preference, people had wished any one of these possibilities on Guérin. But what no-one had foreseen was that he would be as happy as a sand boy there.

120

Tanguy Viel

Paris-Brest

Publisher: Les Éditions de Minuit Date of Publication: January 2009 Foreign Rights Manager: Catherine Vercruyce direction@leseditionsdeminuit.fr

Translation: Frank Wynne frank.wynne@mac.com

Tanguy Viel was born in 1973. Publications Published by Les Éditions de Minuit: Insoupçonnable, 2006; L’Absolue perfection du crime, 2001; Cinéma, 1999; Le Black Note, 1998. Biography

121

Obviously my grandmother’s somewhat belated wealth played an important role in this story. Without all that money, it would never have occurred to my parents to move back to Finistère. And I would probably not have left Brest to live in Paris. But the real problem came, when, years later, I had to go back, had to make the journey back from Paris to Brest.

I A View of the Harbour 1 Apparently after the war, when Brest lay in ruins, some enterprising architect suggested that, since everything was going to have to be rebuilt anyway, everyone should have a sea view: the new town plan would have been curved, the buildings taller, the whole town shifted forward to huddle next to the beach. In a sense, everything could have been reinvented. And everything might have been reinvented had it not been for a handful of rich bastards intent on recovering their property, or not the property, since the town was nothing but rubble, but the ground on which their property had stood. So in Brest, as in Lorient, as in Saint-Nazaire, nothing was reinvented, stones were simply piled up again on the buried ruins. As you arrive in Brest, the first thing you see is the town on the far side of the harbour, shimmering wanly, but flat, boxy, truncated like an Aztec pyramid lopped off by a scythe. This, one or two other candidates, is considered the ugliest town in France, because the slapdash rebuilding has made the streets like wind tunnels, because it tries and fails to be a seaside town (fails abjectly, since the one beach, on the other side of the harbour, lies deserted beneath the frantic four-lane motorway that funnels traffic out of the city), because of the constant, unrelenting rain, flaws for which not even the luminous magnificence of the skies can compensate. Brest, like a sailor’s mind, is therefore isolated from the rest of the world like a peninsula. “Yeah,” the Kermeurs’ son would say, “just like a peninsula. And if you hang around here much longer you’ll wind up just the same, you’ll end up like your grandmother.”

122

I can remember sitting facing her on the bus bringing us into town, and reading the exhaustion in the lines of her face, as she stared out the window, at the sea beneath us as the bus came into the port and onto the bridge that straddles the harbour. She’d tap the window with her finger and say “Look.” And I’d stare up at the windows in the distance, high up on the boulevard overlooking the port, the five vast windows of her new apartment, her new apartment “with a view of the harbour,” as she invariably put it. 160 square metres with-a-view-of-the-harbour, she would say again, as though it were a single word. It was a phrase she had used a thousand times, one which conjured the associated images of the blue sea of the harbour, the shifting colours on the water, the hushed tides of August, the glinting rocks, the grey winter hours, in other words the endlessly changing moods of the sea itself. And I knew that as soon as we got off the bus and I offered her my arm, she would insist we went for dinner to her favourite restaurant. “Come on,” she’d say, “why don’t you come to the Cercle Marin with me, you can walk me home afterwards, it’s not exactly out of your way.” And it was true, it was not exactly out of my way, since I lived downstairs from her. And in my heart, all I could think was: I brought this on myself. “You brought this on yourself,” the Kermeurs’ son would say, “Nobody made you live downstairs from her, the deal was totally unacceptable, but you, of course, you just had to accept it, you were dumb enough to accept it.” He would say this every night when he showed up at my place at 9pm, regular as clockwork. My grandmother and I would leave the Cercle Marin at half past eight, she would go up to her apartment at ten to nine and I knew that at nine o’clock the door bell would ring and there would be the Kermeurs’ son, bottle of wine in one hand, cigarette in the other, ready to clap me on the back. “Clap my old friend on the back” he’d say. And in a sense the Kermeurs’ son was an old friend. As he poured me a glass of wine, as though we were in his place, then poured himself one, knocked it back and leaned on the radiator by the window, the dark of night outside contended with the glow of the streetlights, the orange haze that watched over the city and the near silence broken only by the clink of his wineglass against the sink. Then he’d look out at the seagull perched on the rail of the little balcony and he talk to it - a little drunk as always at this late hour—he’d say in the saccharine, sardonic tone he used when talking to the seagull, “You’d like to have dinner with the old lady too, wouldn’t you?” His own voice made him laugh. I didn’t know where he had come up with this expression “The old lady” but it was so accurate, so precise that it was useless for me to pretend I had not heard it. In a sense, he was the winner. Even to me, my grandmother had become “the old lady”, as we went for our little strolls together around the town, from church to cemetery to patisserie. “Our little strolls” was what she called the afternoons we spent visiting graves, cleaning the headstones. In all

Tanguy Viel

Paris-Brest

123

the time I lived in Brest downstairs from hers, I went to the cemetery with her every week—with her and Madame Kermeur, because she sometimes brought her cleaning lady to the cemetery with her. “Don’t you get sick of it?” The Kermeurs’ son would say, “having dinner every night in some old sailors’ restaurant?” To call the Cercle Marin a restaurant was a stretch, it was a sort of private club where it was necessary to prove you had some connection to the Navy to eat there. In practice this meant everyone - or almost everyone—could, since who in Brest was not connected by marriage or by blood to the Navy? And so my grandmother, the widow of a Naval Officer, went every day to this place she thought of as “exclusive”, because of the flight of fifteen steps leading up to the main door, because of the fluttering flags like an embodiment of the French Republic, because the place was overrun with senior Naval officers, lean and stiff as rakes with their hoards of brats. I know what I’m talking about, I’ve been there a thousand times for lunch, for dinner, grudgingly saluting the tall, wiry officers who came to eat in their glass shrine. I began to think the navy recruited officers according to their build, or maybe it was physical regimen, some particular diet that wound up sculpting them into these lanky curiously birdlike shapes, because that was what they looked like, as they streamed though the smoked-glass doors, like turkeys or ducks, with their gaggles of kids—in the Navy everyone has lots of kids—like ducklings, with their arses thrust out, waddling behind. This place was her sanctuary. Here she had no need to fear a speck of dust from outside, here she was always surrounded by people from the same world, people who wore the same clothes, held the same political views, something which assured a certain goodwill towards your neighbour—a neighbour you did not have to trouble to love as thyself, since he and you were exactly the same. Wearing the same clothes, sporting the same haircuts—close cropped hair for the men, hairbands for the women—here, lunching together at the Cercle Marin, was a fantastical group of people from another age, from a time that never really existed, but one which they were convinced they embodied and were determined to bequeath to their children, an antiquated, royalist France as though still reeling from the Dreyfus Affair. “I tell you,” the Kermeurs’ son would say, “the rank and file in France are rank and vile.” And he would laugh to himself. “It’s not like I had a choice,” I’d say to him, “My mother didn’t give me a choice, it was either here or the South of France. What would you have done in my shoes? You’d have done what I did. Anything rather than move to the South.” I heard my mother’s voice saying a few months earlier: “Either you live with your grandmother or you come with us, got that? It’s either here or the south of France with us.” Her eyes rolled heavenward, my mother wrung her hands like an Italian Madonna pleading to some God within herself, endlessly

124

wailing: this can’t be happening, it just can’t be happening, how have I so offended heaven that I have to go and live there in the ugliest part of France. I have to admit, Languedoc-Roussillon is pretty ugly. I’ve never actually lived there, but I’ve never liked the place. I can’t abide the grassland, the bulls, the flamingos, and don’t even talk to me about the ancient stones of Montpellier, or the mistral whistling under the Pont du Gard. I share my mother’s opinion of the place and I pity those who have to live in Languedoc-Roussillon, especially those forced to live there against their will. And my mother lived there against her will. She wanted me to live there too, wanted me to come with them to the South so we could live in exile as a family, suffer as a family. It was her word, ‘exile,’ because of the problems that had forced my father to leave Brittany, terrible problems that I will talk about later. But I didn’t go with them. “I avoided exile,” I told the Kermeurs’ son, because I was now seventeen and capable of looking after myself so I could stay in Brest without my parents. My mother did not share my high opinion of myself, but fortunately my grandmother intervened. I should stay with her, she insisted, and since I wanted to stay, I could take studio downstairs. It was a stroke of luck, actually, she said since her new apartment with-a-view-of-the-harbour was much too big for her. “Okay then,” my mother finally agreed with a heavy heart, “You can stay in Brest as long as you live with your grandmother,” “If living in the South at least cured her panic attacks,” the Kermeurs’ son said. “Chance would be a fine thing,” I’d say, “My mother’s panic attacks are rooted in a deep-seated anxiety. According to the doctors, the only thing she can do is put a plastic bag over her head and take deep breaths, it’s the only thing that calms her down.” “Your mother’s panic attacks are nothing but theatrics.” As I drank the glass of wine the Kermeurs’ son poured me, I sat watching him getting worked up, talking more than I did, and in my head I could still hear the unlikely conversation between him and my mother. Him saying “It’s unacceptable, the deal is totally unacceptable” and my mother’s voice interrupting “I’d just like to remind you that you’re still a minor, in the eyes of the law we’re still responsible for you.” In the eyes of the law. I could still hear her words as I turned up the music so as not to hear my grandmother’s footsteps on the parquet floor upstairs when she got up automatically, as she did every night, to take her sleeping pills go back to bed and finally fall asleep. “Listen to that,” I would say to the Kermeurs’ son, “I have to have music on all the time just to be able to think, but of course when I’ve got music on, I can’t think, I can’t even read.” “As long as you live here in this rainy city, semi-detached from the rest of the

Tanguy Viel

Paris-Brest

125

world, as long as you’re here, you’ll never do anything.” He stared in disbelief at the bookshelves running along the walls, and went on, “You should have done like your brother, you should have been a footballer.” I didn’t say anything because, at that moment, I couldn’t think of an answer as I sat there, doing nothing, in this room, in my 16 square metre studio “That’s a tenth the space your grandmother has …” the Kermeurs’ son would say, “I suppose it makes sense—you’re about a tenth as rich as she is.” This made him laugh, not because I was poor, but because my grandmother was rich. “No, it’s not the fact that your grandmother is rich that’s funny,” he’d say, “It’s how she wound up getting rich, that’s what makes me laugh.” Saying this, he’d pour himself another glass of wine, light another cigarette, sometimes even lie down on my bed—that was the way he was, the Kermeurs’ son, he made himself at home. And, in a sense, given how many years his mother had been working upstairs, this was a little like his home. “And now she works for your grandmother,” he’d say. “But if you’d told me that one day your grandmother would be living upstairs and my mother would be working as her cleaning lady …” And then we would fall silent.

126

Foreign Rights Here are the titles presented in the previous issues of Fiction France whose foreign rights have since been sold or are currently under negociation.

Arditi Metin

Germain Sylvie

Ovaldé Véronique

The Louganis Girl

The Unnoticed

And My Transparent Heart

u German [Hoffmann & Campe]

u English [Dedalus Limited, Great

u English [Portobello, Great Britain]

Actes Sud

u Greek [Livanis] u Russian [Ripol]

Besson Philippe

Albin Michel Britain]

Guyotat Pierre

Éd. de l’Olivier

u Italian [Minimum Fax]

Page Martin

The Accidental Man

Coma

Perhaps a Love Affair

u German [Deutscher Taschenbuch

u English [Semiotexte, United States]

u English [Viking Penguin, United States]

Julliard

Verlag] u Korean [Woongjin] u Polish [Muza] u Portuguese [Editora Novo Seculo, Brazil] Chalandon Sorj

My Traitor Grasset

Castilian [Alianza] u Italian [Mondadori]

Dantzig Charles

My Name Is François Grasset

u Arabic (world rights) [Arab Scientific

Publishers]

Descott Régis

Caïn & Adèle Lattès

u Spanish

Diome Fatou

Our Lives, Unfulfilled Flammarion u German

Mercure de France Joncour Serge

How Many Ways I Love You

Éd. de l’Olivier

u Greek [Patakis] u Italian [Garzanti] u Korean [Munidang] u Portuguese

[Rocco, Brazil] u Romanian [Humanitas]

Flammarion

u Russian [Astrel]

Lê Linda

The Slow Tortoise Waltz

Christian Bourgois

u Italian [Baldini Castoldi Dalai Editore]

u Korean u Russian

In Memoriam

u German [Amman]

Le Bris Michel

The World’s Beauty Grasset

Pancol Catherine

Albin Michel

u Korean [Munhakdongne Publishing]

u Polish [Sonia Draga] u Russian [Astrel]

Ravey Yves

Bambi Bar

u Italian [Fazi Editore]

Éd. de Minuit

Lindon Mathieu

Editura]

My Heart Alone Is Not Enough P.O.L

u Greek [Agra] u Romanian [Bastion

Rolin Olivier

u Dutch [Ailantus]

A Lion Hunter

Majdalani Charif

u Chinese (simplified characters)

Caravanserail

Éd. du Seuil

[Shanghai 99] u German [Berlin] u Italian [Barbes] u Portuguese [Sextante]

[Knaus/Random] u Greek [Scripta]

Reinhardt Éric

u Catalan [La Campana] u German

Énard Mathias

u Italian [Giunti]

Cinderella

Actes Sud

Malte Marcus

u Italian [Il Saggiatore] u Korean [Agora]

Zone

u Castilian [Belacqva/La Otra Orilla,

Spain] u Catalan [Columna, Spain] u English [Open Letter, United States] u German [Berlin Verlag] u Greek [Ellinika Grammata] u Italian [Rizzoli] u Lebanese for the Arabic language [La librairie Orientale] u Portuguese [Dom Quixote] Faye Éric

The Man With No Prints Stock

u Bulgarian [Pulsio] u Slovak [Ed. VSSS]

Garden of Love Zulma

Stock

Roux Frédéric

u Spanish [Paidos] u Italian [Piemme]

The Indian Winter

Monnier Alain

u Chinese (complex characters)

Our Second Life Flammarion u German

Ollagnier Virgnie

The Uncertainty Liana Levi

Grasset

[Ye-ren, Taiwan] u Greek [Papyros] Sansal Boualem

The German’s Village Gallimard

u English [Europe Editions, United States

and Bloomsbury, Great Britain]

u Italian [Piemme]

127