Fiction France n°5 (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 Book and 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.

Page 125 of this fifth issue of Fiction France, you will find those titles presented in the previous issues whose foreign rights have since been sold. 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

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). 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 December 2009 Next publication date of Fiction France: 25th March 2010

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. 14

Gwenaëlle Aubry

Marie-Odile Beauvais

No one

In Search of Gretl

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

Publisher: Librairie Arthème Fayard Date of Publication: August 2009 Foreign Rights Manager:

bruno.batreau@mercure.fr Translation: Trista Selous trista.selous@btinternet.com

Carole Saudejaud csaudejaud@editions-fayard.fr Translation: Marjolijn de Jager marjolijn@igc.org

p. 18

p. 23

Samuel Benchetrit

Jocelyn Bonnerave

A Heart Outside

New Indians

Publisher: Grasset & Fasquelle Date of Publication: September 2009 Foreign Rights Manager: Heidi Warneke

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

hwarneke@grasset.fr

mheissat@seuil.com

Translation: Josephine Bacon

Translation: Alison Anderson

bacon@langservice.com

alisona@mindspring.com

p. 31

p. 38

p. 44

Frédéric Castaing

Jean-Yves Cendrey

Jean-François Chabas

Hell of a Century

Honecker 21

Rapture

Publisher: Au diable vauvert Date of Publication: August 2009 Foreign Rights Manager:

Publisher: Actes Sud Date of Publication: September 2009 Foreign Rights Manager: Elisabeth Beyer

Publisher: Calmann-Lévy Date of Publication: August 2009 Foreign Rights Manager: Andréa Field

Marie-Pacifique Zeltner rights@audiable.com Translation: Catherine Spencer catherinemarielouise@yahoo.co.uk

e.beyer@actes-sud.fr Translation: Paul Raymond Côté prc@videotron.ca

afield@calmann-levy.fr Translation: John Fletcher j.w.j.fletcher@kent.ac.uk

p. 50

p. 56

p. 62

Hélène Frappat

Hélène Gaudy

Brigitte Giraud

Break-in

If Nothing Changes

A Year Abroad

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

Publisher: Éditions du Rouergue Date of Publication: September 2009 Foreign Rights Manager: Elisabeth Beyer

Publisher: Stock Date of Publication: September 2009 Foreign Rights Manager:

edallia@wanadoo.fr Translation: Imogen Forster imogen.forster@talktalk.net

e.beyer@actes-sud.fr Translation: Linda Coverdale ljcoverdale@aol.com

Barbara Porpaczy bporpaczy@editions-stock.fr Translation: Will Hobson hobson.will@googlemail.com

p. 67

p. 73

p. 79

Jean-Michel Guenassia

Hubert Haddad

Thierry Hesse

The Incurable Optimists’ Club

The Geometry of a Dream

Demon

Publisher: Albin Michel Date of Publication: September 2009 Foreign Rights Manager:

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

Publisher: Éditions de l’Olivier Date of Publication: August 2009 Foreign Rights Manager: Martine Heissat

Solène Chabanais solene.chabanais@albin-michel.fr Translation: Constantina Mitchell constantina@videotron.ca

amelie.louat@zulma.fr Translation: Louise Lalaurie lalaurie.rogers@gmail.com

mheissat@seuil.com Translation: Donald Nicholson-Smith mnr.dns@verizon.net

p. 84

p. 89

p. 95

Hadrien Laroche

Hervé Le Tellier

Laurent Mauvignier

Restitution

Enough About Love

Some Men

Publisher: Flammarion Date of Publication: August 2009 Foreign Rights Manager:

Publisher: Éditions JC Lattès Date of Publication: August 2009 Foreign Rights Manager: Eva Bredin

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

Patricia Stansfield pstansfield@flammarion.fr Translation: Adriana Hunter adriana@hunter157.freeserve.co.uk

ebredin@editions-jclattes.fr Translation: Ian Monk ian.monk@wanadoo.fr

Catherine Vercruyce direction@leseditionsdeminuit.fr Translation: Shaun Whiteside shaun.whiteside1@btinternet.com

p. 100

p. 106

Léonora Miano

Marie NDiaye

Crimson Dawns

Three Strong Women

Publisher: Plon Date of Publication: August 2009 Foreign Rights Manager:

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

Rebecca Byers, Sylvie Breguet rebecca.byers@editions-plon.com sylvie.breguet@editions-plon.com Translation: Jane Marie Todd fmost@aol.com

Anne-Solange Noble anne-solange.noble@gallimard.fr Translation: Ann Kaiser kaisertranslations@yahoo.com

p. 112

p. 117

Jean-Philippe Toussaint

Martin Winckler

The Truth About Marie

The Women’s Chorus

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

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

Catherine Vercruyce direction@leseditionsdeminuit.fr Translation: Alyson Waters alyson.waters@yale.edu

madsen@pol-editeur.fr Translation: Hester Velmans hestervelmans@gmail.com

Gwenaëlle Aubry

No one

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

Translation: Trista Selous trista.selous@btinternet.com

Biography

Dr Gwenaëlle Aubry studied at the École normale supérieure and Trinity College Cambridge and is now a research professor in philosophy. A contributor to many works of philosophy and ideas, in 1999 she published her first novel, Le Diable détacheur, in which we sense the author’s clear-eyed maturity through the emotional outpourings of an 18 year-old girl madly in love with an older man. This was followed in 2002 by L’Isolée, whose feverish tone expresses the violently disturbed state of a woman cut off from the world by love. The year 2007 saw a radical change when Aubry abandoned the pure novel form for something more akin to an essay. Publications With Mercure de France: Le (Dé)goût de la laideur, literary anthology, “Petit Mercure” series, 2007. With other publishers: Notre vie s’use en transfigurations, Actes Sud, 2006; L’Isolement, Stock, 2003; L’Isolée, Stock, 2002; Le Diable détacheur, Actes Sud, 1999.

Viewed from twenty-six angles, but with an empty centre, No one is the portrait of a man without a self, a melancholic (or, in harsher, less literary terms, a manic-depressive). From “A” for “Antonin Artaud”, taking in “C” for “Clown”, “K” for “Kabyl” or “H” for “homeless” right through to “Z” for “Zelig”, we witness the successive roles into which he projects himself—a procession of doubles, a population of masks contained by a single man. As the rugged inner landscape of melancholy takes shape, letter by letter, the “me” that emerges proves to be more of an “us” or a “them”.

This alphabet is also an ABC of memory and the impossibility of coinciding with childhood words. No one is a place where absence unfolds as the identity of a man whose incapacity for solidarity with himself has left space for all the others within him. Lastly, it is a mask, a persona adopted by a living being to give voice to the dead, and by literature to convey madness.

Antonin Artaud On 9 December 1945 Antonin Artaud wrote to Henri Parisot from Rodez. he complains of the army of spell-binders waiting to burst into him from all sides, to camp in his mind, feed on his flesh and live his life he describes what it is to carry such an army inside him, to be a teeming, deserted land, to have nothing inside but a hell of external others, he says that, worse than pain, than eternal hell, is the exploding of his real self. In this letter of 9 December 1945 he raves—we can call it that too—that he’s Jesus nailed to the cross in Golgotha and then thrown on a dungheap; he’s the blasphemer and the bishop of Rodez, St Anthony and Lucifer and in the notebooks he writes in that winter he also proclaims himself to be father-mother, man-woman, frenetic substance of all begettings, womb for countless daughters his body has taken on the dimensions of the entire universe, has become the adopted land of theogonies, his mind eludes him, but gathers in the whole history of humanity, he is master of reality, possibility is what he decides, the infinite obeys him because, he says reality, don’t get it he himself is reality, sonorous, overflowing, throbbing, he is also Antonin Artaud M. Antonin Artaud, born 4 September 1896 in Marseille, to be precise, he still notes it, but it’s of little interest, an idea at the back of his mind, an outdated thesis,

on the other hand one thing he knows, floating in all this wreckage, one calm, clear truth to which you feel, when he utters it, that he could, for a moment, cling: I’m a great poet, that’s all. In the winter of ’45 Artaud had already been locked up for eight years. He had been in the asylum of Sotteville-les-Rouen; in Sainte-Anne, where Lacan judged him “set” in his madness, forever incapable of writing; Ville-Evrard, where he was transferred from the ward for agitated inmates to that of the epileptics, then the senile, and then from the ward of the senile to that of the undesirables. In Rodez, where he arrived in February 43, half starved and dressed like a tramp, he spoke of God with Dr Latrémolière and poetry with Dr Ferdière; he translated Lewis Carroll, genuflected in the cathedral and spat and crossed himself on passing pregnant women. He was also subjected to twelve hundred electric shocks in three years. He would emerge from these sessions broken, boneless and formless, no nerves in his body, no blood in his head, a puddle state. For weeks he would be in pursuit of his being like a dead man alongside a living man who is no longer him. But he started writing again, drawing, filling notebooks. On 10 December 1945, the day after Artaud’s letter to Henri Parisot, my father was born. I don’t know when he was first hospitalized. I might have been able to find some record, perhaps, in one of his notebooks—black leather diaries, school exercise books, “rough books”, blocks of headed notepaper from hotels, loose sheets, jottings scribbled on the back of class notes, enough to fill several cardboard boxes. Some could be ascribed with the names of the hospitals and nursing homes he’d spent time in—the La Roseraie notebooks, La Verrière notebooks, Épinay notebooks and so on. My father was not a great poet, that’s all. He didn’t enshrine his suffering in beauty and power, or his madness in genius, he didn’t invent a language of consecration and conflagration. I’ve read some of his notebooks and forgotten them. All I know is that every day of his life, more or less, he wrote. Every morning, every evening, he’d sit down at his desk, light a Pall Mall or a Craven A —their ash burned holes in the pages—and try to reconstitute his life. No stories, apart from dreams, but accounts, overviews, to-do lists (“Phone the girls, pay the rent, hold on until tomorrow”, and the next day he would cross them out and write “DONE” in the margin), and most of all diagrams, drawn and drawn again, straight lines split into segments—of happiness, sadness, times with or without alcohol, with or without hospitalization—bristling with dates and names, then, gradually, the straight lines became fewer and fewer and there were series of upturned triangles, peaks and troughs, crests and rifts, tracing the map of his melancholy on the squared paper. All I retain of my father’s life is its inner relief, its seismographic account. I would

be no more able (or willing) than he to recount it, to go through the names and dates that make up this story in whose shadow I grew up. I can follow its rugged geography, its imprecise geometry, with my finger. I know these are the contours of the dark, negative side of my life, that its rifts correspond to his absences and that, even at a distance, I fell down them with him. I don’t know who he was any more than he did. All I know is that every morning, every evening, when he opened his notebooks, it was this he was looking for. Even in his worst moments these countless lines and elegant, regular characters wove the net in which he tried to catch himself, or stretched the canvas on which he was the empty centre. This was what he wanted: to grasp, catch, collar himself. Somewhere—I don’t know where—there’s the story of the Golem who, because he could never find his clothes in the morning, decided one evening to make a note of where they were. When he woke up he was at last able to put his hand on each garment—trousers, jacket, hat—until the moment he realized something was still missing: myself, he wondered suddenly, where did I leave myself? Where am I? This, I think, is what my father used to do every morning. He would pick up his cigarettes, pen and notebook and he would wonder where he’d left himself. He would reach out his hand and find tatters, patched suits, Harlequin coats. The masks of his inner stage would appear on the white paper—a motley, staggering crowd: the Prodigal Son and the Spurned Lover, the Clown and the Pirate, the Cop and the Robber, the Monk and the Rake, the Bourgeois and the Tramp, the Sage and the Madman. But in all this he himself was absent. Sometimes he would attempt a portrait: he would list his qualities—name and surname date of birth profession identifying marks—then suddenly stop, as though he didn’t believe a word of it. Himself, where had he left himself? Where was he?

Gwenaëlle Aubry

No one

You know I was born to a human mother and father. My sisters haven’t got four legs, or animal faces or red eyes. Nor have my children. And I look like a human being too—on the sombre side perhaps. I like grass, but I don’t graze, and I live in a studio flat looking out over the trees in Montmartre, just below the Sacré-Cœur. It’s here that I become aware of my life again. It must have contained things that have completely escaped me— because I didn’t seek them out. The words I transcribe here are the beginning of a piece of writing called The melancholic black sheep. Almost two hundred pages of careful handwriting, corrected and annotated all the way through. On the cover of the blue file that holds them my father had written “To be novelized”. This work was intended for others, in the first place my sister and me. He spent the last months of his life writing it, in the little flat we’d fixed up for him: a light, white room on the ground floor of a modern block, reached via an L-shaped hall with the kitchen, bathroom and cupboard opening off it, its end wall entirely filled by a bay

window looking out over a tree-lined path. The place had something impersonal and reassuring about it, the way some hotel rooms do. As soon as we saw it we knew he would be all right there, and escape from his fears. We brought in furniture and ornaments rescued from the sale at Drouot, a large bookcase to hold his law books and boxes full of his notebooks, a divan bed and a desk, worn carpets, an Empire table, my grandfather’s paintings, a black and white photograph of the big house at Saint-Méloir-les-Ondes—relics of a dynasty of notables, surrounding him with the decor of a slow, cosseted, respectable life. The psychiatrists had allowed him to leave the clinic where he’d been locked up for a year. He would be able to start to live again. It was in this room that he died, nine months later. At once he made this new stage his own. And during those nine months— a gestation period—he invented a new role for himself. He had been the Patient, now he was the Doctor; he had been the Madman, now he was the Sage. He started reading again—not novels, but essays, St Thomas Aquinas and Hannah Arendt, Jung and Plotinus (it’s neurotics who read novels, I was told shortly after his death by a psychiatrist I’d met, psychotics prefer poetry and philosophy, they dig deeper into reality). He himself, in his white room, dreamed of being a thinker, a scholar monk; he was the isolated, banished Abelard or a Renaissance melancholic seated at his writing desk, surrounded by books, globes, vanities and tarnished mirrors. The piece he was writing is not the story of his life but of his illness. I don’t know the identity of the “you” he addresses at the outset, the you who “knows”—another patient, a comrade, a soul-mate? The man within him, whom illness had left unvanquished and impassive? The “implacable Prosecutor” he had feared all his life, as he says, and whom he hoped to sway at last? Or a woman perhaps, a dream companion like those invented by unhappy children and lonely youths, a Heloise. He says, “Why do I not have a Heloise to whom I can write sometimes in my loneliness?” He wanted to heal through this writing, and also no doubt to treat himself. A son and grandson of doctors, he had become a law professor. He wanted to die in his chair, on stage: “Like Molière, I should have liked to die in the middle of a class with my beloved students. God did not want it so, if he really did express himself through the psychiatric college”. He organized his writing like one of his classes, with the same attention to detail: two parts, each comprising three chapters split into sections. Here he kept all his fault lines and absences, his anxieties and ravings, in big “A”s and small “b”s. There’s a crazy effort in this writing. I know who he was as he wrote it—exhausted body, failing heart, money problems, lists of medicaments sellotaped to the bathroom mirror. I know what he had lost—furniture, flat, job, the social identity that had meant so much to him, and those who had been close to him and who now turned away. Yet in this writing no charges are pressed, there are no defendants, just an insane

effort to see beyond the ruins inside him to the man that illness had left intact, still capable of understanding, thinking, writing and hoping. I can measure this hope by certain rearrangements, mismatches or lies, the things his writing has already novelized (for example, he didn’t live in Montmartre, below the SacréCœur, but much lower down, in a little street off Rue des Martyrs, from where, it’s true, you can see the Sacré-Cœur, but way above the rooftops. And in the notebooks he was writing at the same time, for himself alone this time, I read the dark pages, the pit every plan falls into, the fear of dying alone, the poison of the past, the absent future, the vanity of all novels. There remains this writing. On that empty set, that vacant stage from which he himself is now absent, it’s the last role he played. From where he’s now scattered—shadows or light, I know not which—he still projects, black on white, these words, his voice, the smell of his tobacco, the uncertain, flickering light of a vanished star, the black sun of his melancholy. On the file that contains his manuscript he wrote “To be novelized” and beside that a subtitle which he later crossed out: “A disturbing spectre”. That was what he called his illness. But perhaps he was also thinking of this writing, his bequest to my sister and me, and was afraid of burdening us with this most heavy of weights. The spectre doesn’t disturb me. It walks with me and I hold its hand, entwining its words through my own; in writing I lend it my breath, give it back its form. Through this book I keep it with me, anchoring it on my own shore. Shortly after his death and when I already knew I would write about him (this book needed to be written anyway, but while he was alive it would have been a black book, full of confessions and violence), he came to me in a dream, one of those dreams that are so dense, detailed and frank that they are the sudden imposition of a presence. He sat massive, serious and calm at the tiller of the old sailing boat he used to anchor in the bay of Arcachon and, never taking his eyes from me, sailed away over a calm sea that seemed to melt into the sky from the power of light. I rediscovered this dream later in a poem by Michaux—“Emportez-moi dans une caravelle,/Dans une vieille et douce caravelle,/ Dans l’étrave, ou si l’on veut dans l’écume,/ Et perdez-moi au loin, au loin” [“Carry me off in a caravel / In a gentle, old caravel / In the stem or even the foam / And lose me in the distance, the distance”]. You can’t lose a father, particularly a father who was lost, or lost himself. It was perhaps while he was alive that we lost him, that we no longer knew who or where he was. Now that he’s dead we gather up what he left, the crumbs and pebbles strewn in the forests of his anxiety, the treasure and the wreckage; we construct a void, we sculpt an absence, we seek out a form for what remains of him in us and has always been a temptation towards formlessness, a threat of chaos; we seek out words for what was always the secret, silent part in us, a body of words for a man who has no grave, a castle of presence to protect his absence.

Gwenaëlle Aubry

No one

Marie-Odile Beauvais

In Search of Gretl

Publisher: Librairie Arthème Fayard Date of Publication: August 2009 Foreign Rights Manager: Carole Saudejaud csaudejaud@editions-fayard.fr

Translation: Marjolijn de Jager marjolijn@igc.org

Biography

Born in Paris, Marie-Odile Beauvais spent her childhood and adolescence in Pavillons-sousBois in Seine-Saint-Denis. She spends her days reading, writing, and—as an inveterate food lover— cooking. Other than a lengthy stay in Vienna, she travels primarily to Italy, and often misses Venice and Turin. She has been hostess at aeronautical and machine-tooling trade fairs, fruit and vegetable vendor, actress in an Austrian television series, tutor of literature, cook, and journalist. Publications Proust vous écrira [Proust Will Write You], Léo Scheer, 2004; Discrétion assurée [Discretion Guaranteed], Léo Scheer, 2003; L’Été de Loulou ou les plaisirs du jeune âge [Loulou’s Summer or the Joys of Youth], NiL editons, 2001; Égoïstes [Egotists], Denoël, 1999; Les Forêts les plus sombres [The Darkest Forests], Grasset, 1996.

“My grandmother handed me the photograph of a young woman. “That was your grandfather Paul’s first love,” she told me. ‘She was German. They had a daughter.’ She was divulging a family secret to me as if it meant nothing. […] I read the letters. In the military service at the time, young Paul was promising his pregnant fiancée he would come for her on his first leave. But it was already too late. ‘The war separated them.’ My grandmother was stating the obvious. She wasn’t telling the whole story. I followed it up. I’m a writer. Writers invent stories because they’re obsessed with the truth.” Two world wars will separate a father and his daughter, divided into two different camps against their will in a tragic creation of symmetry. In another era Gretl might have

been the incarnation of Europe. Born in 1915, she will only incarnate the disintegration of the twentieth century. Superimposing a grid of modern literary reading over this period in history, Marie-Odile Beauvais has us share the everyday thoughts of these young Germans who grew up in a defeated land before they entered Paris as victors. In spite of the war, not a single gunshot is heard in this novel. The tragedy lies elsewhere, in the muted pain that any form of revenge contains, in the secret shame of living as a conqueror in a place that conquered you. But most of all in Gretl, this unforgettable character, torn apart before she was born, to whom life certainly did not offer any recompense.

My grandfather came back from Bavaria. He brought a box tied with a ribbon. The tissue paper rustled like the wind, lifting the skirt and the puffy sleeves. It was for me. He called it a Dirndl, an outfit little German girls wear. It had everything—the dress printed with red flowers, the apron, the frills. I wanted to be dressed like that every day. My mother didn’t like it. “No, you’re not going to run around like a little Eva Braun.” I didn’t know what a liddlevabroun was. I was wearing the Dirndl for my grandfather. He was watching me, saw only me, with or without Dirndl. When we were alone he would tell me a story, always the same one, about Hansel and Gretel. Walls made of nougat, a gingerbread mattress, caramel paving stones. He often went to Germany for business. Usually he’d bring back toys for me, not clothes. A hedgehog family or wind-up animals—a bear playing the cymbals, a monkey pedaling around on a tricycle. Had he picked out the dress by himself? Quality and restraint served him better than taste. Rules of things unbalanced, those artificial quirks governing what goes into a Dirndl dress were unknown to him. Who had put together this little German girl’s outfit? Flowers, stripes, checks, silver-buckled shoes, oak leaves, tassels made of fawns’ baby teeth. An outfit incongruous as a collage. I don’t like double names. Mine was meant to please him—Marie because he was a practicing believer, Odile because she’s a saint of his region, Alsace-Lorraine. Baptism had cured Odile’s blindness. When the Bishop of Ratisbonne poured water on her face, she opened her eyes and could see. Today I’m coming back from Ratisbonne, Gretl’s town. I wanted to see, I wanted to know, but I didn’t know what.

One Sunday a few years before her death, my grandmother Suzanne took me to her bedroom. She closed every door behind us. She opened a drawer and handed me a large envelope held together with tightly knotted string. “Here, take it, this is for you. Your grandfather had a daughter in Germany, during the war, the first war, when I didn’t know him yet. He told me right away, when we saw each other outside the office. It was at Brocco’s, the tearoom near the Place de la République. I asked him why he looked so sad, as he often did, you know, that look of not being present. He said: ‘It’s because I’m thinking of her.’ I was desperate; I thought he loved another girl. ‘No, it’s not what you think, it’s my daughter, Margarethe, my daughter in Germany, my little Gretl. She’s seven. I lost her because of the war. I’ve only seen her once in my life.’” “Why haven’t you told me this before?” “I couldn’t, it was too painful for him.” “Did he see his daughter again later, after the war?” “Yes, but she was grown-up. I’ve seen her, too.” “What was she like?” “Pretty. All you need to do is look, there’s a photo of her inside the envelope; no, not like that, you’re going to rip it, take the scissors.” I emptied the envelope on the bed. One of the pictures showed two young girls. One was leaning her head on the other one’s shoulder. “Which one is she?” “The prettiest one. The other is Erni, her half-sister. That’s what it says on the back.” “She spoke French?” “Yes, but everything’s written in German. There may be things in there I don’t know anymore, things I’ve forgotten or that he didn’t tell me. You know how I am with German, it’s all Chinese to me.” […] I didn’t go looking for Gretl after the secret came out. You don’t go looking for someone who’s dead. A few years ago, when I was spring cleaning, the file reappeared. The lost child and young girl were looking at me through the transparent pockets. Over the course of time, Gretl had just two ages and two faces—five and twenty years old. How can you construct a chronology from words and images alone? Who was Gretl? What did I know about her? Her birthdate, her name, Mühldorfer, her mother’s maiden name, Fischer, and an address in Ratisbonne in 1937. Mozart speaks about that town in a letter to his wife of 28 September 1790: ‘In Ratisbonne we had a sumptuous lunch, with divine music, English-style service, and an excellent Moselle wine.’ The town didn’t only cherish the good life and good manners. Nabokov mentions

another one of its specialties: until 1918 they executed the condemned in public, with an ax. On the Internet I search through the Ratisbonne phonebook. I find twelve addresses under the name Mühldorfer. The two women and ten men by that name are going to receive a letter from me with Gretl’s story. I spend an entire day composing it. My declensions are tentative, the German spell-check is lenient. It doesn’t pick up any mistakes. I’m as proud of it as a peacock. ‘Proud as a peacock’ was one of my grandfather’s expressions. I didn’t know what a peacock was and suspected it wasn’t all that competent. I enclosed photocopies of the picture of Gretl as a young woman and of a letter from her adoptive father. I didn’t pick the one from 1937 in which he speaks of the racial laws to ask for the baptismal certificates. And even less so the one where he is thrilled that he had applauded ‘unseren herrlichen Führer’—(our magnificent Führer)—, I don’t want to frighten anyone. I chose one of those from 1919 in which he maintains that the child must know nothing about her birth. To have a better chance of receiving a response I’m careful with the presentation: watermarked paper, matching envelopes, commemorative stamps. I end my account with three questions: Have you ever heard of Margarethe Mühldorfer? Who was she? What has become of her? Silence. Gretl didn’t vanish into thin air in 1945. Somewhere she exists. In a file, in a register, in a grave. Endless letters to every public administration in Germany, endless waiting, endless useless telephone calls to all the Mühldorfers in Bavaria and BadeWurtemberg, endless visits to the archives, the registration office, and endless rejections. Most of the time my interlocutors are discouraging and suspicious. Some answer reluctantly. Some take me for a Nazi hunter—that would be my only glory. For her, I crisscrossed Germany from Baden-Baden to Ratisbonne, from Munich to Rothenburg, from Göppingen to Landau, from Stuttgart to Berlin. For her, I followed paths that led nowhere and then retraced my steps. For her, I wrote dozens of sentimental letters, as the Germans do, accompanied by touching photocopies—a lock of hair, the photo of the sad little girl, the letter in which Gusti asks Paul to forgive her. Some of the mail made an impression in the end. I will never be part of her family. Did she have a family? Step by step, over time, I managed to get to her. Gretl was waiting for me thanks to the eloquence of civil registers. In Germany, secrets of private life so well-guarded today can be revealed for the dead—but you must truly persevere. I could have done better. I should have started sooner. I’m rarely early. For her, I spent time with people I didn’t like and who didn’t like her. I wrote ‘for her.’ That’s wrong, it wasn’t for her. It was for me.

Marie-Odile Beauvais

In Search of Gretl

Samuel Benchetrit

A Heart Outside

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

Translation: Josephine Bacon bacon@langservice.com

Biography

Samuel Benchetrit, who was born in 1973, is a writer, actor and director ( J’ai toujours rêvé d’être un gangster [I always dreamed of becoming a gangster], 2008; Janis et John, 2003) as well as a playwright (Moins deux [Minus Two], 2005; Comédie sur un quai de gare [Play on a station platform], 2001). Publications Published by Julliard: Chroniques de l’Asphalte [The Asphalt Chronicles], volumes I and II, 2005 and 2007 (republished by Pocket, 2007 and 2008) ; Récit d’un branleur [Story of a Lazy Swine], 2000 (republished by Pocket, 2004).

This novel tells the story of Charly Traoré, an adorable ten-year-old black kid, originally from Mali, who lives in one of Paris’s outer city housing estates, consisting of two tower blocks, the Tour Rimbaud and the Tour Simone de Beauvoir. His whole world revolves around his gang and his girlfriend, Mélanie, his older brother the drug addict, but especially his mother—who has been ‘nicked’ by the police at the start of the story because her papers were not in order. For a whole day, hour after hour, Charly wanders through the housing estates, looking for his brother, Henry. He meets some great people, rubs up against a few gang members, plays a game of football, plays truant, daydreams, follows his crazy associations of ideas, his grown-up-child digressions, while

endlessly waiting for his gentle, affectionate mother … Le Cœur en dehors, has a language, a style, an innocent vision of the world. It is Charly’s voice, it is he who is speaking, thinking, watching—and it’s hard not be reminded of Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. That’s because little Charly is so likeable and the way he looks at his sordid ‘banlieue’ is filled with witticisms and wonderment in every line. At the start of the book, he thinks that Rimbaud is just the name of a tower block. At the end of the novel, he will discover that Rimbaud was a famous poet who said things that seem to be true and relevant to Charly. His dawn-to-dusk Odyssey is an unforgettable one.

Chapter II 8 a.m. I’m off to school at eight in the morning. Classes start at eight-thirty, but I need half an hour just to get through the estate. Winter and summer. It might snow and everything, so I need to leave at eight and I can manage to sneak through the estate like a miserable frozen creep. So, this morning, at about eight I found myself in the lift. What’s so amazing is that this thing is only working once in a thousand years. But when it’s actually operating, you feel like you’ve won the lottery. When the doors opened, I almost fell into the arms of a bunch of cops. There were three of them. And some old bag was with them. One of those tightarsed types. She reminded me of Mrs Boulin, my head teacher. She was the spitting image of her, in fact. I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed, but when you meet two people who look really alike, they get muddled up in your head and you have a hell of a job remembering which is which. The cops and the woman looked right out of their depth and you could feel they didn’t feel at home in this building. The old cow bent towards me, wearing one of those stomach-churning expressions. She asked: — Do you know where Joséphine and Henry Traoré live? — Er, on the sixth floor. And without so much as a thank-you, they barely let me get out of the lift

before they grabbed it and went up in it themselves. I swear it made my blood run cold. It wasn’t so much that the cops were asking me, for my own address— that was weird enough. But I’m used to it, cos of my brother Henry who spends his life getting into trouble. No. It was that old bag being there. And the way she used the name “Joséphine”. That’s my Mum. Usually, they’re just looking for Henry, that’s all. They take him round the nick and my Mum has to go down there and beg them to let him go, and everything. That’s the routine, and most of the mums of addicts know the way to the nick by heart, with its horrible interview rooms. When I was too young to stay at home alone, I went down the nick a couple of times with my mum. What a drag! It made me feel sick to see my Mum go down on her knees to beg them to let Henry go. After, she’d take us to get something to eat in the caff at the shopping centre and she seemed pleased that they were together again. Personally, I punched Henry a few times to get him to stop messing about. But my Mum is always happy to get him back. I heard the question over again in my head: — Do you know where Joséphine and Henry Traoré live? The lift doors closed. So I decided to go back up to see what was going on. I took the stairs, something I’m used to doing. When the lift has broken down. Or racing against my pal Jimmy Sanchez who lives on the fourth floor. I’m a cool sprinter, you know, and when I’m at my best I can get there quicker than the lift. My record is the seventh floor. I swear, you need to be a terrific runner to get to the seventh floor before the lift, and Jimmy Sanchez can tell you how good I am. But this time, even though I took the stairs four at a time, I still got there afterwards. That’s because it was eight o’clock, and I’m not at my best in the mornings. I opened the door onto the landing and I saw my Mum standing in front of the cops and the old bag. My Mum was already dressed, wearing make-up and everything. She must have been getting ready to go to work at the Rolands’ place. She usually leaves at ten past eight so she can catch the bus at twenty past. Mum always has to put on make-up. It suits her ok, and she doesn’t overdo it, but I’d really hate to have to have to plaster stuff all over my face every morning of my life. Women are funny creatures. The old bag was wearing quite a lot of make-up too, and I was thinking how Mum and her had to get up earlier in the morning to slap all that stuff on their mugs, and that now they would be facing up to each other in their make-up. The old cow took a piece of paper out of her handbag and read it out to Mum. I couldn’t hear anything, but it didn’t look too clever. Mum seemed far from happy but she wasn’t staring the old bag in the face, she was looking at the piece of paper. The old bag said something then and Mum looked up. When she did, I got the feeling she was crying. Then there was one of those pauses. Mum went inside and the cops and the old bag followed her. They didn’t slam the door behind them, so I thought they’d be out again quickly. I decided to wait, and realised that my heart was beating really fast. It’s something that happens to me sometimes.

If you saw me, you’d think I was completely cool-headed and all that. But to tell the truth, I can get all worked up over nothing. I may seem calm and sure of myself, but it’s all a front. And I know most guys are the same. You need to show that you don’t care about anything to survive. The cops came out again with the old bint and Mum behind them. She still looked a bit strange, she was wearing her coat and carrying a sort of sports bag. I can’t remember where the bag came from but I think it belonged to Henry from the time he was into athletics. His thing was sprinting. You ought to have seen him, he was off like a rocket. Even I looked like an old banger, running beside him. But the drugs slowed him down a lot, if you get my drift. Anyway, Mum was carrying the bag and it looked as if it was full to bursting. She closed the door and the cops called the lift. It was funny seeing Mum with those people. I don’t know to explain it, there was something not quite right about it. Mum looked straight ahead of her, as if nothing special was happening. She has a gift for doing that. She could have worked at the town hall or got into politics or something. But when you know her as well as I do, you can see when she’s upset or whatever. And while she was waiting for the lift she might have looked as if nothing special was happening, but I could see she was very upset about something. What happened then was that she suddenly turned her head in my direction. And she found herself looking straight at me. My heart was in my mouth. It was funny, that, because my Mum has looked at me a thousand times. In fact, I feel that she looks at me all the time. Sometimes when we’re sitting watching the TV I get the feeling that Mum is watching me. And even if it’s a wicked programme, she’s still looking at me. I was slightly worried that she had seen me lurking behind the door to the stairwell. Not because I should have been on my way to school but because I really looked like I was up to no good, hiding like that. And then, I know my Mum can read fear in me. I can put on a show like the best of them, and pretend that everything’s going great, but if something’s upset me, she can see it immediately. And because I was annoyed that she’d seen me, I smiled at her. A big grin. I must have looked pretty silly. With a worried expression like I sort of didn’t understand what was happening, and on top of it a huge grin as if I’d come top of the class. Sometimes, you can make some pretty funny faces. Especially if you’re out of your depth. But then, smiling just isn’t me. There are guys who wear a permanent grin on their gobs. I can’t stand that kind of guy. Like that kid, Anthony Meltrani, who’s always grinning like the village idiot. If you meet him in the street, he’ll be wearing a big grin on his face. If he starts to cry, the dickhead still smiles. During a stop-and-search, the dickhead smiles. I bet that even at night, when he’s asleep, he still wears a huge grin on his ugly mug. I mean, it’s depressing.

Samuel Benchetrit

A Heart Outside

My Mum watched me for a few seconds with that silly grin on my face, and then she did something absolutely weird. If it hadn’t been her, I’d have thought she was a monster. She turned her head away. Just like that. Not a wink, nothing. She just turned her head. As if I wasn’t there. And what’s more, the lift suddenly arrived. They got inside and I heard the doors closing and the sound that meant that it was going down to the entrance. Talk about a shock. And my heart continued to beat like mad. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but it’s always at the most unexpected moments that the craziest stuff happens. There you are, peacefully on your way to school, and a gang of cops with an old bag who is the spitting image of your head teacher come calling on your Mum, without you having the slightest idea why. Sometimes, I’d like to have a rubber hanging over my head so I could erase everything and start the day all over again. I decided to go back home. Ever since the start of the year, I’d had my own bunch of keys and my Mum had gone on and on at me, telling me how much she trusted me and all that. Actually, she had no choice because as soon as I started going to the big school I often got home before her in the afternoon. My hand was trembling like an old man’s, and I couldn’t get the key into the lock. But when I finally managed it, I realised it wasn’t locked at all. Maybe Mum had done it on purpose, in case me or Henry had forgotten our keys. Or perhaps it was only because she’d forgotten to lock up. When I opened the door I got the funny feeling that I was sneaking in like a burglar. It must have been the fact of seeing the filth just a moment ago, and also because I was supposed to be at school. I crossed the living room to go and look out of the window overlooking the entrance to the building. I didn’t open the window wide, but just opened it a bit and stuck my head against the pane. My Mum had come out of the tower block with the cops and the old bag. There was no one else around, which is often the case at that time of day. Some people have gone to work and the rest are still asleep. I knew it was better that no one was around, Mum certainly wouldn’t have liked being seen with those guys. They walked over to the pavement where a police van was parked. One of the cops opened the sliding door at the back and signalled to Mum to get in. The old bag also got in the back, next to my Mum, with the coppers in front. When the van drove away, I tried to see my Mum through the window, but I couldn’t. It felt as if I might never see her again.

Jocelyn Bonnerave

New Indians

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

Translation: Alison Anderson alisona@mindspring.com

Biography

Jocelyn Bonnerave was born in 1977 in the Marne. He studied literature and social sciences, anthropology in particular. He often associates his musical and literary activities in performance. Nouveaux Indiens is his first novel.

Nouveaux Indiens takes the form of an investigation that changes topics along the way. Against the background of an American presidential election campaign, a French anthropologist arrives in the United States to study the lives of a few musicians and is forced to put aside his scientific reserve when he uncovers the turpitudes of a strange bunch of people: young artists, confirmed intellectuals, a surgeon, and a homeless woman who wears lovely amber beads around her neck. Other characters encountered include a cellist with magical powers, and an old Buddhist who is also an irrepressible foodie. Has the New World really changed all that much since the time of the Renaissance savages?

Homeless There is something much lighter about the campus than the city. The central walkway, wide and straight as a street, branches off in a thousand sudden places, paths diverge and shrubbery conceals what is behind the curves. You can walk across the lawns as much as you like. Many Nobel prize winners come from UC Berkeley, and many homeless people settle in the city. The central campus is a park of several hundred acres where, in the shadows of the trees, you glimpse various figures licking their wounds. The sun in California is known for its mildness, but the surprisingly varied list of health recommendations in the Lonely Planet guide includes a warning to avoid prolonged exposure without sunscreen, even specifying the appropriate factors for various brands of sunscreen and body lotion. The homeless go without sunscreen. They live in the midst of innumerable gray squirrels which, when on the ground, advance by wiggling between tail and body, tracing S’s across the green carpet of lawn. Some of the homeless people collect things: newspapers, jewelry, rubber dolls. You see hardly any obese people on campus. The students eat well, on the whole, and the homeless don’t eat much. In town you see fat people everywhere. Near the university music building, I come upon a woman with a charming smile, wrapped in a faded blue comforter, leaning against a flower tub which has her name written on it, it’s her flower tub, and has been for nearly seven years. She managed to find some silk thread and little amber stones to make herself a necklace. She threads the beads with fingers as agile as they are dirty, because amber, in winter, protects your throat and your bronchial tubes. You have to plan: until Christmas, she sings every night at the San Francisco Opera, she says, I am Carmen for a million spectators, she looks me straight

in the eye as she strikes up the toreador’s aria, Prends gaaaaaaaaaaaarde à toi!, in French in the text, and in my head it goes back and forth from French to English qui n’a jamais connu de loi because in the meantime, after a magnificent summer, she has turned red as a lobster, which she’ll never eat any ever ever bye bye bacon omelette, homeless American style new Redskins, no more need to steal their space they lost it all on their own, Campus illegal camping, Bohemian life style no more tepee boo boo on the mouth under dirty blankets, bad times for anthropologists.

Jocelyn Bonnerave

New Indians

Right, getting annoyed now. I breathe normally. On I go. The first day or two, in my hotel room, I have jet lag. My strolls around campus are the only outings my illogical sleep patterns will allow. I have really sharp headaches, too, and sometimes it all gets mixed up, in fits and starts. It’s like in the song: que hora son? What time are they? My appetite is affected by the problem too: when America is waking up, it’s already lunchtime for my stillEuropean stomach. I wolf something down when I wake up, then fall asleep again. It won’t last, but for the time being, it’s giving me a hard time, thinking it through carefully, stating it clearly. Must be patient. When I’m not asleep but don’t feel like going for a walk, I read Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, or I look for a roommate on Craigslist. Just one serious appointment so far, on Alcatraz Avenue. Charming address. The advertiser seizes the problem by the horns: yes, the island of Alcatraz is visible on the horizon, you can totally see it from the end of the avenue, the most famous prison in the world. But it’s been closed for years, and in any case number 510 is a haven of peace, just look at these photos of the garden. Comes a point where you shouldn’t get bogged down with symbols. Craigslist is a community website and it’s very practical for finding a place to live or a bike or a camera or a whore who’s way too young and who’ll offer you a quick one in the neighborhood, amateur photos to prove it. E-mails from family and friends aren’t enough to fill my solitude. The only person I know here is Frank Firth, and I only saw him once, last summer in Paris. When the solitude weighs too heavily, and, in addition, everything starts to get mixed up, I start repeating things to myself. I’m not a bum, I’m not a Nobel prize winner either, I’m a researcher in anthropology; I’m only passing through Berkeley, three months, for the books. It’s mainly in adjacent Oakland that I have things to do. I’m here to observe Frank Firth, the musician, who’s teaching his students at Mills College how to really play together when they’re playing music.

People’s Park I liked Jean de Léry’s book, I found it used on the French shelf at Moe’s, during a walk which took me over to Telegraph Avenue, just beyond the campus. Four centuries ago, Jean de Léry set off on his own for the Americas, into Indian territory. Appointment at 2:00 p.m. at Alcatraz Avenue. Very calm, I read the opening pages of the History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil on a bench in People’s Park. Then I glance at the gilded plaque that explains the history of the place, then I sit back down, and there everything gets mixed up. In the 1960s, the “people’s park” was at the heart of the protest movement: public gatherings, demonstrations, sit-ins, circles of naked women. Today, campaign posters for the presidential election hang on the fences. Today, I am sitting alone, with a difficult book, the people in the park are homeless people kicked off the UC campus, there are women lying down on lawns with holes in the grass that show its melanoma, they are badly dressed but not totally naked so that’s good news. Beer, beards, lobster red Cancer skin (no wait, it’s Capricorn that goes through Brazil), Henry Miller walking through Paris on the surface of the planet the way Jean de Léry did much lower and much earlier, Indians without land homeless Redskins are an absurdity, land not property but the infinite possibility of … of taking walks? People of the park! Who will be your man? Bush means buisson in my language and Kerry means nothing at all and if you’re going to tilt at windmills, the wheat has to grow somewhere, doesn’t it, Miller is meunier in my language and if the mills are giants Henri Meunier is their heart, and it beats in my language.

Gardening Instructions for living at 510 Alcatraz Avenue 1. This space is your space. Make yourself comfortable in your own private space, but don’t forget to create a sense of community for everyone. 2. You will have noticed that you must pay to use the dryer. Be sure to have change before Sunday morning. The machine takes coins of 10, 20, 30, etc. and I collect the change once a month. 3. Interior decoration: everything is allowed provided you all agree and the space is made completely neutral again once you leave the premises. You can bang nails into the wall during the day, I’m not here and my mother is deaf. 4. Clean the shower regularly, the walls get moldy very quickly. Please use cleaning products like Green Tide, EcoHousehold, etc. Our earth is a little bit like the garden behind the house. Soap is no good for the soul.

5. English is a little bit like French. Soap, savon, soupe, soul, moule, mold, etc. 6. Housekeeping is like gardening, it’s a bit like the big bang: my soap has repercussions, it’s responsible toward the cosmos, you pollute your garden you pollute your planet, no jet lag from Original Sin, this space: your space, big bang, big soap opera, etc. 7. Etc. 8. In my head, it all gets mixed up, but it shouldn’t when I’m signing a lease agreement, I’m writing my name. 9. Etc., your rent is deliberately low. In exchange, I ask you to do two hours of gardening a week. That helps to create a strong feeling of community, and it makes things easier on my back. I hope that you will take away from your stay at 510 Alcatraz Avenue the following: 10. Gardening is very good for the soul, 11. Chatting is soap for Sam, 12. Au gratin is vizir good for soup, 13. Jardiner c’est très bon pour l’âme.

Jocelyn Bonnerave

New Indians

Signed: The owner: Cinnamone Weyle The tenant: A. the anthropologist

Meeting Sweating, out of breath, a vile taste of vomit in my mouth, I find the place for the meeting, and in the lobby there are photocopies tacked up all over the walls: We miss you Mary that I don’t understand, in fact I don’t understand a thing except that there are these people in a circle who are getting ready to play some music, and there’s Frank in the middle of the circle. I tap him on the shoulder, he turns around and says, Ah, hey there, what’s up? It’s scandalous. He is not going to get away with this. “Uh, not much, same old shit, what about you?” What a dork! I am pissed, it’s enough to make you eat your tongue! That’s not at all what he’s supposed to say. Scream! Scream at him! Otherwise they’ll never know! What’s up? I’ll tell you where to put your what’s up, I will! I come halfway around the world to see this gentleman, vomiting in the plane, that’s how much I like flying (and that flight attendant bitch telling me to breathe normally), I cross an entire ocean and two really pointy mountain ranges, when I get here

it’s Bugs Bunny who meets me, 5 foot 5, his paunch sticking out, munching on his carrot with his stiff British upper lip? What’s up? Obviously, he doesn’t give a shit, Frank Firth, eleven hours in a plane, that’s peanuts, he’s a cosmopolitan gentleman, he’s used to long flights for his sold-out concerts, London, Moscow, Tokyo, Zagreb, so Paris-Berkeley for him, you understand, is a joke! He’s at home in an Airbus, Frank Firth, he’s an air-pocket dweller! A glitch-free career, all by plane, gliding along: guitarist, English rock n’roll at twenty, New York free music at thirty, serious composer at forty-five, and always a great teacher … As for jet lag, he’s immune to it, what can I say? Basically, that’s why he interests me … “Did you have a good trip?” And now he’s worried! Okay then, quick quick, he’s got twenty people around him with their bows lifted their lungs inflated amplifiers turned up to the max average age twenty-two, ready to let ’er rip. So all the small talk, it’s really just to be polite. I answer, yeah yeah, nice trip, really nice—I can still see the stain splattered above the Atlantic: my barf. An anthropologist is not supposed to dislike traveling. Hiking boots, socks rolled down just below the knee, thin band of flesh then off-white Bermuda shorts up to the waist, very bulky binoculars hung over a fishing vest with compass pocket, Aspivenin pump pocket, map pocket, pen knife pocket with saw-blade, spoon-blade, scissor-blade, knifeblade of course, and finally the pith helmet with huge motorcycle goggles on a rubber strap, don’t try to tell me otherwise, for you that’s what an anthropologist is: an explorer. A lover of faraway places, fond of the unknown. Well not for me, and you can believe me, I’m not a one-off. That Tarzan stuff, it’s all done, old chap! Anthropologists are library rats who do sometimes leave the library with fear in their guts because there’s no book written yet about the people they’re interested in, and that book, even if it means fevers and voodoo, well, someone’s got to write it. So Frank Firth makes me break out in a cold sweat, but he interests me. “Okay, hi everybody, before we begin, I wanted to tell you, today we’re welcoming a young scientist, I’ll let him introduce himself.” I tell them my name is A. the anthropologist, and everybody laughs. I think, good job I left in plenty of time. I didn’t think this kind of thing happened anymore in developed countries. Picture this: the bart train that takes me from Alcatraz Avenue to the connecting train in West Oakland was hassle-free. bart is like the rer in Paris, in a way. As I am keeping an appointment I made

months ago, six thousand miles from here, I leave for Mills College well in advance (two hours: if I’m early there’s always a café where I can wait with a good book; I know from experience: I’m always early). Well, two hours was almost not enough, because I hadn’t allowed for Timo Lopez. “My name is A. the anthropologist. In the old days anthropologists studied villages where savages lived but nowadays that no longer exists (I put on my best accent to inform them of this). So, now we fall back on eccentrics, artists, you see (I pronounce it aaahtists, everyone laughs), so my savage is Frank on the campus of Mills College.” And Frank makes faces like a savage and everyone laughs.

Jocelyn Bonnerave

New Indians

Lonely Planet warns you that Oakland is known to be dangerous. Timo Lopez, after holding up a bank in the center, is still too poor to use any other means of transportation, so he gets on my bart train that had so far been hassle-free. He hijacks it, he’s got a really big gun. The driver warns us: we must be brave. We stop between two stations—tears, terror, helicopters in the sky—you can hear the rotors now and again. He asks for a ransom. That’s already a lot of emotion, but the best is still to come. What’s up? Well the cops are pretty efficient in this country. Timo Lopez takes aim at a little girl, but very quickly he also gets a big red dot on his forehead. It looks like a third eye, but it’s actually the laser sight of a sharpshooter who’ll be paid by the State if he has to take the shot. That’s the story they told me afterward, because he wasn’t in my car. He gets out with his hands in the air, without the kid. It’s all good. Now I can see him live, next to the tracks. He’s young, small, lean but sturdy, apparently he’s surrendered to the two cops in riot gear who pin his arms behind his back, fairly gently. Now he’s walking along past the bart to a squad car, they’re filming on all sides, you can see the revolving lights on thirty or more unmarked police cars more and more clearly as night falls. Headline news on TV tonight, tomorrow a paragraph in the national press, and then that’s it. But California cops’ vests don’t go down to their forearms. So? So, very distinctly, I see Timo Lopez suddenly lunge forward, planting his teeth in the wrist of the cop on the left, apparently piercing his blue jacket with no problem, then he raises his head again with a bit of flesh in this teeth, while the other guy is writhing on the ground. The cop on the right loses his temper, manages to subdue the cannibal, screaming of sirens, fuck I feel jet lagged, rotors in the sky and blue emergency lights whirring like rotors, an ocean, two mountain ranges, a forest in a dangerous city, fifty-seven degrees at night, it’s spinning, all mixed up, anything else and I’ll barf, and fifteen people with me just in the car I’m in. It’s all over. Timo Lopez has been overpowered in less than an hour and forty-five minutes, I go through the psychological support cell, jump in a taxi, and rush off to tap on Frank Firth’s shoulder, and casually he asks me what can possibly be up. The cannibal and Bugs Bunny. Thanks for the welcome.

I don’t say tell them any of that. I breathe normally. Frank is one of the last savages in a world where they no longer exist of course, but he’s just the chief, right, so in fact it all depends on you, so thank you for pretending I’m not here, and then they let ’er rip.

There will be music, other cannibals, other ways to use flesh, two more elections, more music. There will be an investigation, and then another investigation. For the moment I don’t know any of that, yet. For the moment, it’s just starting, and for good: who is the young woman on the poster, “We miss you Mary”?

Frédéric Castaing

Hell of a Century

Publisher: Au diable vauvert Date of Publication: August 2009 Foreign Rights Manager: Marie-Pacifique Zeltner rights@audiable.com

Translation: Catherine Spencer catherinemarielouise@yahoo.co.uk

Biography

Frédéric Castaing was born in the Tarn region of France in 1944. After studying classics at a lycée in Chartres and then at the Sorbonne, he was a history teacher for 10 years at the renowned Lycée Henry iv before becoming an expert on handwritten and historical documents and opening a gallery in Paris. A specialist in 18th century manuscripts, he has been president of the Syndicat National de la Librairie Ancienne et Moderne (slam) since 2004. Publications Rouge cendres, Ramsay 2005; Ça va?—ça va! Gallimard, collection “Série noire”, 1996; J’épouserai plutôt la mort, Gallimard, collection “Série noire”, 1994.

Incarcerated since the age of five in a rehabilitation camp for children who have committed particularly heinous crimes, the hero of Siècle d’enfer is freed at 22. This new Candide then discovers the outside world—a world bearing a strange resemblance to ours, or one that could be a direct extension of it: a totalitarian state, with violent and destructive social relationships, and equally violent, souldestroying human relationships. He sets off on a voyage of self-discovery, wanting to find out what provokes his bouts of nausea in the presence of certain people, or when faced with certain events. Gradually, as his

exploits and encounters unfold, the mystery lifts surrounding his real identity and past. This erudite, weighty author, who acknowledges the influence of Céline and Hemingway, has his own lively voice which keeps the reader on tenterhooks while the theme of savagery lies at the heart of his novels—the social savagery of exclusion and unemployment and the political savagery of the totalitarian state, two sides of the same menacing coin. With his fine originality and lively, urbane language, Frédéric Castaing is a superb new addition to Au diable vauvert’s catalogue.

Black moleskin notebook, format 8o (10/16 cm) of around 300 pages. Good condition. Some foxing on pages 27, 47 and 138. 327 handwritten pages, of which the first 321 are written in the same hand in black ink, the last ones initially in another hand, in black ink, signed Robert, then in a third hand, in blue ink and signed Rica. Tuesday,4th February, 4 a.m. Camp hotel They came to get me at noon, after our match against C block. A new one his gold buttons gleaming in the dark, and André—I could pick out the sound of his keys anywhere. We had just got into the changing rooms, I was going into the shower and André came up … We’re taking you to the principal, hurry up … ! He looked at me like he always did. Arthur says that one day he’ll punch his face in but so far he hasn’t done anything, which really makes me laugh. I put my pants on and slipped on my tracksuit and trainers, taking my time. I was packing my bag when the new one put his truncheon on my stuff and pushed me backwards … Leave that, you! People around had stopped in their tracks and you could hear nothing but the TV, an ad for those new pills for depression. The new one was scared and he looked at André who had shoved us into range of the CCTV surveillance area

and the flashing red light on the screens began to whine. Ramdam immediately clapped his hands and quickly pushed the others into the showers. I barely had time to signal to Kevin for my things before we were off. The new one went on ahead. André held me by the arm and wouldn’t let go; I wriggled free and he winked at me. The others were thumping in time on the shower doors, bang, bang, accompanying us for a good while, bang bang, a good while, bang bang. We got on the new shuttle reserved for teachers and office staff. It was green, very long, with leather seats that had TVs on the back. A brunette was on the screen, her breasts jutting out, her lips kissing a new blood-red Barracuda with its multiple bumpers. André got out a bar of chocolate and offered me a piece. I turned towards the window and he laughed. To get to the principal’s these days, you have to turn in front of the workshop and go alongside the school instead of round by the gym. It’s a much shorter route. We went past the teachers’ house next to the little gardens and arrived straight at security. While he was frisking me, Manu murmured into my ear … So, you little bastard, the great day has arrived … Afterwards, it’s scrubland all the way for a mile or two, before you get to the administrative buildings. Fifteen years ago, they were grey and dirty, and looked huge to me. They have since been repainted blue and flowers have been put in the windows to go with the white curtains. They had stuck a flag on the first floor and the roof was covered with aerials. They had done up the foyer as well and now it’s a spacious room with low tables, several armchairs, screens everywhere and two or three guards around the security door. André made me sit down at the end, next to him, talking to me in a low voice … I dreamed about you again last night, my love. You had nothing on, you were running across the scrubland … The new one was reading the newspaper.

Frédéric Castaing

Hell of a Century

André was on his third bar of chocolate when a tall brunette, new as well, in a yellow suit and flat-heeled shoes, came to get me. The other two got up and were about to follow us, but she motioned them away with her hand and we went up to the third floor. The lift opened straight into a conference room with a lectern and chairs. She took me into a smaller room, at the back, and sat down behind a desk that looked like an early aeroplane. I stood waiting. She threw some papers in the bin and pushed over a stool on rollers with her feet.It bumped into my legs. I sat down. She typed on her keyboard and turned the screen towards me. My file began running. It said that during my first year I used to wet the bed, that at nine I broke an arm and two ribs in the shower, that at 15 I gashed open my forehead on a glass

in the refectory, that I got asthma in the spring, that I was semi flat-footed, that I had very good swimming times in the 400 metres freestyle, the best test marks in the camp and record winnings with American clients. Also that I didn’t talk much. Finally there were remarks about my left ear with its revolting scars which ooze in summer and hurt in winter. At the end, she looked at me … Anything to add? I said nothing, she sighed and pointed at my ear. “What’s that?” “I don’t know.” “You got caught in a fire?” “I don’t know.” “You don’t remember anything?” “I’ve always had it.” “Nothing about it in your case-history when you arrived.” “So?” “There should be.” She was staring at the screen … Can I see your buttocks? ... Like the guards when they wanted to mark the occasion … Get undressed! Bend over! Lower! ... I looked at her and she blushed. I turned round and lowered my trousers. The sound of a chair, she came towards me and then thanked me. I pulled my trousers back up. She went back to her chair and sat down, thinking. She made me take the corridor leading to the principal’s office. I remembered it as being dark and dirty, with black marks on top of the radiators. They had repainted it pink, and added two light fittings. They had also removed the prints—Christopher Columbus with savages on the beach and that guy in underpants, an apple in his hand, in front of a pale fat woman. In their place they had put up photos in a line. Portraits. Ducrot, the head psychiatrist, who arrived last year, Martial, Maréchal … And Blanchard, eyes half-closed, cigarette in mouth. He was smiling at a bald man in a double-breasted suit, who was shaking his hand, while the principal applauded in the background. Apparently Blanchard is famous and has written books … And Dr Boyer, with his pipe. But he must be dead. For the first few months after I got here, he interrogated me for hours about Karen, but I never said a word. In the end he let me watch films while he read the newspaper … And Carrel who takes us for training sessions every morning in the pool. In competitions he pushes me on with his short whistle blasts which pierce through the din and give me a rhythm. I can still hear him, at the jubilee, during the final of the 200 metres … And Moreau! Moreau with his ginger mane … The girl explained that it was for the 20th anniversary of the camp’s foundation. The TV would be there and the press as well as a minister and the top management of Blue, so everything had been done up as good as new.

We stopped at the end of the corridor, in front of a black plexiglass door. She knocked, no answer, we went in, she showed me an armchair and left me there. In the principal’s office. He had added his new bodybuilding equipment from California and changed the carpet. A big photo of the President, in a mauve suit and pearl necklace, flashing her teeth in front of a barrier of TV screens, lit up the back wall. But the flags, one with stars and the other with cicada, were still in place, on either side of his desk. There was the sound of a toilet flushing and a door slamming. I stood up. He now barely reached my shoulders, but it was the same shaved, dirty grey head, with that white scar above the ear that had scared me out of my wits in the beginning, and that same bundle of nerves squeezed into the same black suit, capable of standing up to a group of a hundred and kicking them back home. He pushed me back towards the armchair and leant his backside on the desk. He said how proud he was of me … Your test results are excellent … He went on again about my jubilee speech concerning Victor Hugo as the father of Europe … Thanks to you, Brussels doubled its grant … He talked again about that win in the 200 metres … without you, Blue would not have paid for our Olympic pool … He had always aped those guys from Street on TV Star, but now he had plucked his eyebrows like the rappers of Sixty Two. He had also had a Haka tribal tattoo on his left hand, as a sign of supreme strength; so he must have another on his right calf and around his belly-button … So you’re as chatty as ever? ... I am talking to you … Why can’t you make an effort … ? Finally, he announced that the committee had decided to release me … You’ll leave us tomorrow morning, by the seven o’clock bus … And they had created a new identity to protect me … The law has taken care of everything, we won’t abandon you … He stared at the tips of his shoes … You were five years old, a unique case … With that he got up; it was over.

Frédéric Castaing

Hell of a Century

And then, when I was already out in the corridor … Come back! Wait! ... He caught up with me … That habit of writing in secret … ! They had found my notebooks under my bed … Instead of communicating, getting completely involved in modern life … He produced one from his pocket and waved it under my nose … A solitary habit, negative, dangerous, anti-social … He opened it and began flicking through … Not to mention that crazy plan! ... His dry, nervous fingers crumpled the pages … No-one wants to become a writer these days … He stopped, started walking away, came back … A rapper, model, rugby player, TV presenter—all well and good … He eventually closed it and sighed. But a writer, a writer …

He put it back in his pocket and took me by the arm … You know, you’ve been incredibly lucky … He dished up his jubilee speech again … A model establishment, unique in the world, the best teachers, psychiatrists, everything computerised ... He walked a little way with me … Everywhere else, you know, they make people glue soles onto trainers all day and shave their heads … . Just then he spotted a stain on the lapel of his jacket and tried to remove it … I have looked at your file. All those hours in the library! A waste of time, my lad … He scratched at his jacket, in annoyance … And anyway, in six months’ time there’ll be no more library! I am taking over the building and putting new Blue Nose computers in there! There, I’ve got a stain! ... So you find that funny, you little bastard! He took hold of me by the collar and pushed me against the wall, half strangling me … You stick your finger up at everything, don’t you? … And then he saw the photo of Blanchard and let go of me … Still, it’s not totally your fault … His watch rang and he shook my hand … So, off you go, good luck my lad … He got out my notebook again … And stop this filth! The girl in yellow was waiting for me a bit further down the corridor. She gave me an envelope … Your new identity … I was going to open it but she stopped me … Wait until you’re outside, by yourself … then she gave me another envelope … Your final instructions … I put it in my pocket with the other one. She smiled … No, open that one, I have to check it over with you … . There was a permit for D and F zones with a prohibition against returning to zones A and B, to get my things or see the others again, 300 euros in vouchers for our shop, a coupon for one night with breakfast in a hotel, in the visitors’ zone, a bus ticket valid as from tomorrow morning and 1,000 euros in 100 euro notes. I had been expecting 20 times as much. We went through her office and returned to the big room with its empty chairs, where a man in blue overalls was putting a ladder away while another was piling up pots of paint. The girl in yellow had fat calves. I have already forgotten her face but I think I’ll always remember those calves. The lift came and she put her hand on my arm but she said nothing. I felt her slipping something into my pocket. I looked at her, but she put a finger to her lips and pushed me into the lift. The door closed slowly, the girl in yellow gave me a little wave with her hand. A piece of paper folded in four and some words written in red felt-tip … . Irregularity in your file. Be careful. Good luck … André and the new one had long gone. I sat down under the TVs and opened the other envelope. They say that for the names, the principal shuts himself in the room with the deputy, several bottles of booze, tablets and two or three girls. When they are well away, they christen us. Bernard had mentioned Mypussy or Myballs. And Ken says it excites them.

Some nights, it seems that terrible screaming can be heard from D block, near the administrative buildings, like animals having their throats cut, a sound that freezes your blood according to Médine. And Lucas described how, on New Year’s Eve on St Rita’s night in summer, the principal and the deputy come to get some of the little ones and how they were never seen again. As for Enzo, he thinks that they traffic organs, eyes, livers, hearts, lungs. It seems they sell them to rich old people who are waiting for them in fancy clinics. For the first few years, on full moon nights, I stayed awake the whole night, in fear that the men in black would come to get me and cut me up into little pieces—and I wasn’t the only one. Meanwhile, my new name was Durand—luckily enough—and I had to get work experience on TV Star in Paris, at least that is what it said on the blue sheet of paper, covered with seals and signed by members of the committee. They had also found me accommodation, on Boulevard Voltaire with a Mr and Mrs Plonk, where I had to be back every evening by eight.

Frédéric Castaing

Hell of a Century

Jean-Yves Cendrey

Honecker 21

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

Translation: Paul Raymond Côté prc@videotron.ca

Biography Jean-Yves Cendrey was born in Nevers on September 11, 1957. He studied literature in Poitiers and subsequently enrolled in an art history program in Bordeaux. Over a ten-year period, he spent most of his time traveling, especially in southern Europe. In 1985, he met author Marie NDiaye. They married and settled for a while in La Rochelle, then resided successively in Paris (1988), Barcelona (1989), Rome (1990-1991) and Berlin (1993). The family returned to France in 1994 and took up residence in Cormeilles, a small town in the Auge region of Normandy, destined to become sadly famous. After spending a year on the Caribbean island of Marie-Galante (2000), they lived in the Gironde area from 2001 to 2006 before moving to Berlin where the family currently resides. Novelist Jean-Yves Cendrey has also authored works for stage, radio, and film. Publications Recent works include: Published by Éditions de l’Olivier: La maison ne fait plus crédit, 2008; Les Jouets vivants, 2005, republished by Editions Points, 2007; Une simple créature, 2001. With other publishers: Corps ensaignant, Gallimard, “Blanche” collection, 2007; Puzzle: trois pièces (co-authored with Marie NDiaye), Gallimard, “Blanche” collection, 2007; Parties fines, Mille et une Nuits, 2000 Trou-Madame, p.o.l, 1997.

Honecker 21, or twenty chapters in the life of an average Berliner, tells the story of an ordinary man trying to cope with problems he considers to be extraordinary, unique only to him. In reality, they are the common ills of our thriving society, somewhere between unbridled bureaucracy and jeering liberalism, employer tyranny and emotional indifference, the rampant pursuit of comfort, impulsive spending, and of course repeated visits to those humiliating places known as customer service departments … Reminiscent of a unhappy, jealous and at times even spiteful Charlie Chaplin, Matthias Honecker makes us smile and even laugh precisely because of who he is: someone just like us, a brother who gives us a taste of our own here and now.

He had promised her he’d take care of it all himself, absolutely everything, and whatever else needed to be done: canceling their lease, making arrangements with their bank, city hall, the insurance company, the electric company, the gas company, the telephone company (it was time to look over the hard-to-read fine print on the back of the contracts—the stuff that gets you every time), and, of course, the endless details and tedium of their move. It was anything but fun. On top of that, the notary was having problems with the Land Services office and was sending him a growing number of cryptic notices. And on top of that, the Corbusierhaus management trust was demanding advance payment on its unpleasantly steep fees. On top of that, the sellers announced that they wouldn’t be able to remove their furniture by the scheduled date because of the Christmas holidays, which would have been a problem for the painter who was supposed to repaint the ceilings and walls white, but he had already cancelled. On top of that, since their landlord had found a tenant, it was imperative for them to vacate by the agreed date. And on top of that, choosing a mover was painful: their quotes were so exorbitant, the cubic footage estimates so unreliable and their services so hard to compare. When, shortly before D-Day, Honecker phoned the mover they had finally selected to make sure he hadn’t gone bankrupt or wasn’t hovering between life and death on some hospital bed, the man asked if he had contacted the proper authorities to reserve parking in front of the building. Honecker hadn’t, but promised to get on it immediately. Based on his experience with bureaucracy, however, the mover snickered, assuring him it would be a waste of time. He snickered again, asking Honecker where he was supposed to park

his truck since, as a man of principles, he would never think of blocking traffic. Honecker was offended by his lack of professionalism. After all, it was the mover’s responsibility to inform him about the parking situation. The mover said he wasn’t Honecker’s mother and that, even though he was Albanian, he could show the Germans a thing or two about being well organized, demonstrating respect for public roadways and ensuring the safety of workers. Honecker was discouraged by such ostentatious integrity. The final blow came when the mover ordered him to call back later to set up a new moving date because he didn’t have his schedule in front of him. He told Honecker that it wouldn’t be easy as he was heavily booked and couldn’t understand why everyone wanted to move in the middle of the holiday season. Fortunately, Honecker remembered that he had friends. And what’s the first thing friends are good for? Moving, of course. Of the three he contacted, he managed to recruit two, not that they were overjoyed at the prospect of straining muscles and getting their fingers smashed on New Year’s—but true friends know how to conceal their hostility, and these two fellows managed to do so reasonably well. Moving on January first seemed like the best plan to him: the city would be empty and everyone would be getting over their partying from the night before. With the dawn of a new year, simply being among the living would suffice to make them happy. And surely they’d be more inclined to tolerance—even the neighbors awakened by falling bookcases and loud comings and goings. Christmas stuffed itself with sausages and mulled wine, and then burst. On December 30, Honecker came home from the office with a leaden stomach and a severe case of aerophagia due to acute stress. He had just learned that his boss was inviting him, along with a dozen executives from the office, to a “motivational dinner” on the evening of January 1st. The boss sent out his invitation, a.k.a. injunction, at the last minute so as to better assess his staff ’s motivation, forcing them to change their plans and, he could only hope, obliging them to make sacrifices, particularly where family was concerned. This was especially true for those who might have presumed to think they were in charge of their own schedules during the holiday. More perverted still was the fact that he’d decided to hold the meeting at a hotel´ restaurant in Swinouj´ scie, a little Polish resort town on the Baltic. Although it was located virtually on the border, it was still over a two-hour drive from Berlin and hard to get to, forcing them to travel over winding and narrow roads through the marshland. The pretext for choosing the location was that the border post was going to be permanently closed on the night of the 31st, a marvelous symbol of how Europe was opening up. It was so easy to blame it on Europe. The master was going to whistle up his dogs, making sure they obeyed, groveling and gathering around him at precisely 8 p.m. and dutifully listening to him before going to bed—because of course they were spending the night.

Up to that point, Honecker had viewed his move as a weightlifting event. Now it had also become a speed competition. Even if he were foolish enough to presume he might finish on time, he’d still be forced to leave Turid and their child in the middle of all the chaos—stack upon stack of depressing boxes, like so many mounds of mistakes. When he gave her the bad news, his phrasing was so diplomatic and his aerophagia so incapacitating that at first she thought he’d decided to leave her for good but couldn’t express himself clearly. Wanting to appear reassuring as to the outcome of this daunting exploit, he tried so hard to hide his concern that his face became a mask of pain. He was sweating like a paunchy actor in a sleazy third-rate play who suddenly finds he’s in trouble. Turid started to cry, murmuring, “It’s horrible. Our lives have become totally insane.” Late in the afternoon of the 31st, Honecker went to pick up the rental truck he had reserved and was given one that was substantially larger than what he had expected. He felt no pride behind the wheel of the cumbersome vehicle, which he nonetheless managed to wedge into a space not far from the ideal spot he’d naively hoped to get. He spent the evening taking things apart, sorting and wrapping. He was as distressed by the sheer bulk of his possessions as by the number of items he could easily do without. True to his promise, he never asked for Turid’s help. Not once. It would have come in especially handy when he was taking the bookcase apart, as evidenced by the falling bookshelves and the pathetic racket and swearing that so often punctuated the lone handyman’s work. Turid had sought refuge in their bed with their sleeping child. She only interrupted her reading—an activity which under the circumstances signified her outright disapproval—to ask for less “advertising,” which is what she called Honecker’s all-too-noisy exertions. Around eleven o’clock, the two friends who were supposed to help him lift the heavy items surprised him by actually showing up. An overindulgence in mulled wine had put them in high spirits. With reeking breath and eyes aglow, they felt the need to yell out the most nonsensical things imaginable. Honecker had no trouble persuading them that it would be better, given their condition, to start with the books rather than the china. They hadn’t come to be useful, and they said so in no uncertain terms. Actually, their plan was to drag their buddy Hony to Tiergarten, where every December 31st at midnight a huge crowd gathers around the Victory Column to set off fireworks in a surge of total anarchy. And these party animals had come equipped! They had two backpacks loaded with fireworks they were determined to set off with their pal Hony, good old Hony. When he turned them down, their shouting became progressively louder.

Jean-Yves Cendrey

Honecker 21

Honecker remained adamant, asking Turid to reason with the two nut cases. She shrugged and said, “The way things are going, you may as well go over there and waste your time with them. It won’t change a thing.” Honecker was deeply wounded but didn’t react. In the meantime, one of the loudmouths was helping him on with his coat while the other wrapped his scarf around his neck. And so he gave in and went along. He didn’t bat an eye when he found out they were going by bike. He sheepishly unlocked his bike and got on it with a groan. Flanked by his guardian angels doubling as ballbreaking devils, he pedaled to the zoo and Landwehrkanal, his teeth clenched all the way. His vision was blurred by tears, the freezing drizzle, and thousands of reflections on the slippery pavement. Families were waiting on every corner for their moment, impatiently tapping their feet amidst fireworks stuck in bottles. The kids all had lighters and were practicing throwing firecrackers. Honecker drove by them without flinching, a ghost of the year that was coming to a close, resigned to his fate. Let them go ahead and throw those flaming, uncivil, joyful little sticks at his wheels, there was no way he was going to swerve off the path. He didn’t jump when the firecrackers exploded behind him, depriving the little hellions of their anticipated pleasure. But they were in too much of a festive mood to feel disappointed and not burst out laughing. He was totally out of sync with all the merriment. He imagined himself in a year or two, not more than three in the best of cases, standing on a corner and tapping his foot, pretending he was having fun with his offspring. Remembering that he was a father made his legs go stiff. They were swelling painfully in the penetrating drizzle—the annoying visitor who had thrown his coat on him hadn’t gone so far as to button it up. The night smells turned animal-like. A cow was bellowing in its pen. An elephant was hooting in its cage. True. False. I don’t know. Honecker didn’t know, didn’t want to know, knew all too well that one day he’d be there on the other side of the iron fence, separated from a group of melancholy hyenas by a concrete pit, from a pitiful gorilla by a thick glass wall. In his capacity as a father and educator, he would point to it, saying, “Notice how much he looks like us.” With his nose glued to the glass, the child would marvel at how riveting the boredom of living could be. He’d ask, “Why isn’t he moving? Is he dead?” His father would answer, “That’s probably what he’s wondering about you.” The child would pound on the glass with the palm of his hand, yelling, “Hey! Hey! I’m not dead!” He’d hear his father say,

“Come on, let’s go look at the fish. People find them lively.” Honecker was always able to joke about his misfortune at not being able to stomach the spectacle of nature in a bottle. He spotted a small gathering in front of him on the bank of the canal. Five or six people were standing near the commemorative plaque honoring the martyred Rosa Luxemburg. It was part of the handrail, tilting strangely toward the murky waters like an enormous washboard. Despite its simplicity, seeing it was always an emotional experience for him. It marked the spot where it is believed Rosa’s body was thrown—or where her remains were found, he wasn’t quite sure anymore. He would tell the child that she died for her ideas, hoping that would make more of an impression on him than the zoo. He would say that her body had remained in the canal for months. The child would look at the garbage floating in the water, thrown from the sightseeing boats—french fry containers, soda cans, cigarette butts—and he would shudder. Or it would be hopeless trying to get someone so young interested in politics. Hand in hand, they would continue to the underbrush where Karl Liebknecht was shot, and he would say, “He too died for his ideas.” The child would ask, “Were they good ideas?” Honecker would be at a loss for an answer. As a little boy, he had never really listened when his own father had tried to interest him in the Spartacist League founded by Karl and Rosa. He only remembered one thing: Rosa’s love of anemones. He got off his bike and joined the group standing in front of her plaque. While he searched his mind for another reason to be a father, other than repeating the same mistakes, his two pals were starting to lose patience. They were worried because it was getting late, and there was still quite a distance to cover between the spot where Rosa had suffered and their incredibly insignificant destination. Propriety kept them from braying their discontent, and Honecker took delight in making them wait. Even though they peddled like crazy after that, hoping to at least get a glimpse of the Victory Column at the far end of Fasanerie Allee, a thundering boom resounded before they arrived and joined in the commotion. The crowds were exploding with joy as they set off a burst of fireworks right next to a sea of ears already aching from the cold.

Jean-Yves Cendrey

Honecker 21

Jean-François Chabas

Rapture

Publisher: Calmann-Lévy Date of Publication: August 2009 Foreign Rights Manager: Andréa Field afield@calmann-levy.fr

Translation: John Fletcher j.w.j.fletcher@kent.ac.uk

Biography

Jean-François Chabas was born in Paris and now lives in the Drôme. He did many jobs before devoting himself to writing. He is the author of more than fifty novels for children and has won thirty or more prizes, including the Montreuil Festival Prize and the Télévision Suisse Romande Prize. His writings for children are considered likely to become classics in the future. Les Ivresses [Rapture] is his second novel aimed at an adult readership. Publications Les Violettes, Calmann-Lévy, 2004. His recent children’s titles have been published by L’École des Loisirs.

In a remote house on Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon, a French archipelago off the coast of Newfoundland, Jonas, 36, is gravely ill and close to death. Writing a letter a day, he sets about telling his story to a mysterious woman called Ava, whose fleeting importance in his past life becomes clearer as the story unfolds. Jonas has lived many lives and survived much unhappiness. He was born into a wealthy family, but his parents died when he was small. He was taken in by an aunt who was cruel to him. Then he was adopted by Jean and Christine, a loving, upright, proud couple who ran a boxing gym. But misfortune strikes again: finding themselves in the wrong place

at the wrong time, they got caught up in gangland violence and died before Jonas’s very eyes. For him a life of wandering now began, punctuated by various encounters and marked by break-ups and loneliness. He is saved by the things that give him pleasure: painting, boxing, the countryside, and the company of women. Fetching up in SaintPierre-et-Miquelon, he cultivates an air of harsh unapproachability to shield himself from the pity of his neighbours. But he has lost none of his humanity which, together with his dynamism, he strives to convey to Ava, in letters that are by turn reticent, tender and violent.

Saint-Pierre, 2 November Ava, This Saint-Pierre is Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon, near Newfoundland. I arrived just over two months ago. The Portuguese discovered these islands in the sixteenth century and called them “The Eleven Thousand Virgins Islands”. It was Jacques Cartier who changed the name a few years later. What an idiot. I’m living in a low-roofed house with thick walls. It’s quite old but it does have double glazing. It’s draught-proof and is as well insulated as possible against bad weather. That’s fortunate: I don’t think I need to go into detail about the climatic conditions as the winter draws in. If you want to locate me, borrow an atlas from the library, or request one; I don’t know how such things work where you are. More than the cold, it’s the dampness that gets you. And the wind, of course. The winds blow from every quarter. They’re making the rafters creak as I write. This house is my prison. You’ll curse me as you read this, since I freely admit I’m a prisoner by choice whereas you’re being held against your will. But I can hardly move any more, and when it came to choosing the place of my imprisonment, I had only one thing in mind: the house I lived in had to be surrounded by wilderness. As luck would have it, I met an old sailor who’d moved to France having left this archipelago because he’d lost two of his brothers during a deepsea fishing voyage. I got to know him in a bar called “Le Rêve” at the bottom of Rue Caulaincourt near Montmartre Cemetery. As one glass led to another he

explained that he had a house for sale up here, but I didn’t believe him: people make things up when they’re drinking with casual acquaintances. A few weeks later, though, this old gentleman and I found ourselves in a notary’s office where we clinched the deal. I’d only ever seen a photo of this house; I could have bought a ruin, but I have to admit it’s in very good nick. It’s situated right at the top of Saint-Pierre, close to the shore, opposite a smaller island, a tiny piece of land called Grand-Colombier Island. What charming names, when you think how hostile the environment is. It makes me happy, writing to you. If you happen to read this—that’s to say, if I manage to reach the goal I’ve set myself—I hope reading me will be just as much pleasure for you. In spite of the heating being on at full blast, I’m cold sitting at this desk. I’m going to make a pot of tea. Jonas

Saint-Pierre, 3 November Ava, I thought of you last night, and was cross with myself for not going back to my letter instead of curling up under the duvet: exhaustion makes me shivery. Time is short and I don’t want—wait, I’m taking a break to sort out the mess in my mind. It would be silly if you took me for a nutter. Since I’m embarking on this long text and won’t post it until it’s finished, and since I lack the talent to organise a coherent autobiography, I may as well explain what I’m doing. I don’t like being muddled. I’ve decided to write to you every day to talk about what I’ve lived through and what’s brought me here, then to let these letters pile up and send them to you in the form of a sort of manuscript. Not letter by letter, I’d be too afraid of getting a kick in the teeth by return of post, or of being rejected point-blank; afraid, too, that you’d feel obliged to reply, which would be even more humiliating once I managed to understand the implications. I’ve got two reasons for writing this account. The first is my total isolation, allied to the prospect of my fairly imminent death. I’ve no one in my life any longer, no living person I can talk to, write to, even think about. I don’t know if it’s an acceptance of failure or proof of courage, but the fact is that you are the only one I have in mind, the only one who can vouch for my existence. The second reason behind this strange journal—but I don’t like the word “journal”, which is usually something written by people who circle around themselves as though looking at a painting, or who pretend when they take up

writing that they’re subject to a disinterested and ascetic discipline, whereas they’re set on opening up their private lives to posterity. The second reason for writing these letters is that I want you to share my experience in the hope that you can derive some benefit from it. You’re eighteen, exactly half my age. When you were in the car with me, no, when you got into the car, I saw how beautiful you were, with a special kind of beauty. I know you’ve used that like a weapon, probably for years, but I’ll never know how a person—man or woman—feels when possessed of such a gift. Is it a blessing or a burden? What’s good about my situation, since there have got to be some advantages to it, is that I can write these things to you without your suspecting me of trying to seduce you, or to get something out of you. When you sat down beside me I noticed how beautiful you were, and it hit me like a blow in the stomach. You must remember how for at least a minute I was incapable of uttering a word. I suppose for you my reaction was nothing out of the ordinary, but the only thought going through my terrified brain was that I’d never in all my life seen such a beautiful girl. So strangely beautiful, as if an unknown creature had emerged from the mists of the world of the imagination and stepped into my car.

Jean-François Chabas

Rapture

Jonas

Saint-Pierre, 4 November Ava, I wondered if I wouldn’t have done better to stay in France in order to help you. And visit you, since I was led to understand that you were all alone, not perhaps as much as I am, but at least without relations determined to stand by you in this ordeal. I’ve left a little money with your lawyer, because everything has a price in those hellish prisons where social injustice is even more glaring than it is outside, so that you will be able to meet some essential expenses, but this will do nothing to relieve your loneliness. I hope at least that your cell-mates leave you in peace—I believe, in fact I’m certain, that you’re quite capable of defending yourself. Yes, I could have stayed, but I could just see myself, crawling like a slug through a world I detest, surrounded by concrete, bowed and seedy, panting for breath, and I realised not only that I had no wish to show myself to you looking like this, but also how I’d be driven to seek comfort from you rather than offering you any. I’m much better off here. And you’ll get out. You’ll be freed.

When you smile, your whole face changes. Your very serious features light up in a most unusual way, like a fairy’s: you turn into an imp. Jonas

Saint-Pierre, 5 November Ava, After writing to you yesterday I went out and was blown away by the wind. Like a dead leaf. Not an experience I’d recommend. As the snow had started falling again, I felt it was a good moment to take a little walk outside. I know nothing about this part of the world and thought those snowflakes would afford nature a sort of brief respite under a snug blanket of cotton wool. I’d hardly taken a few steps when a gust grabbed me and I found myself lifted up as if by a giant hand. I was adrift for an eternity and then came down in a snowdrift that saved my life. A rock would have smashed me to pieces. I remained stretched out on a heap of snow, with the hood of my anorak stuck to my cheek and my legs above my head, so badly stunned that I couldn’t get up despite making ludicrous efforts—a bit like a beetle floundering on its back. After thrashing about like that to no avail, I would have let myself die, without a qualm since there was a chance of speedy deliverance, but the grocer, the lad I phone to have him deliver me food and other supplies, found me as the snow started to cover me up. He’s only a kid—I ought to cross that out, he’s your age—a young man who’s not yet twenty and already married with an eight-month-old baby. His name is Marc. He’s well-built, a colossus, and the wind didn’t even make him wobble. To my deep shame, he scooped me up in his arms as he would his own child and carried me indoors. Then he made me have a hot bath, but that was quite complicated because of the prosthesis they put in my stomach—I’ll spare you the details. When the big lad saw me naked he was so terrified he left in a rush. “I’ve already seen a willy”, he said laughing as he made me take my clothes off. He’s not laughing any more. That’ll teach him to treat me as if I were his baby. This evening, I’m fine. I’ve even got great memories of that unexpected flit. From now on all novel experiences are worth seizing. Jonas

Saint-Pierre, 7 November So there we are … I was showing off, but yesterday I couldn’t get up. I was hurting from head to foot. It’s barely a week since I vowed to write to you every day and I’m already going back on it. It wasn’t from want of trying. I fell while fetching my pen and a sheet of paper, then fainted. When Marc called by in the early evening to see how I was, he found me on the floor. He fetched the doctor who told me I was mad to live alone in my condition and tried to persuade me to go back to France. But after I talked to him he calmed down because—bloody hell—one has the right to choose where one is going to die. No? And I have enough medicines and various bits and pieces to hold out for one year longer. To cut a long story short, after laying into him I managed to get the crow to leave, but he got his own back by telling the lad that he had to phone me or call by every day. And Marc is not the sort of person you can reason with or drive away. “Yes, yes”, he kept saying in response to all my objections, and in the end I got even crosser than I did with the doctor. I shouted: “Fucking jerk, don’t talk to me as if I were senile, I’m only thirty-six!” Do you think he was taken aback by that? “It’s not only old people who’re a pain in the arse”, he said, and “I’ll be back tomorrow at seven. If you’ve still been mucking about, you’ll soon see that you’re not the only one who can let rip.” “I won’t open the door”, I replied. He assured me that a good wack at the door would be enough to let him in, and I’m sure the nitwit’s capable of it. A man’s home is no longer his castle. I was choking with rage. But now I’ve got the table within reach, and my pen, my pencil-case, a pack of paper, and an old red-leather blotter which I found in the house and which I’ve put on my lap as a kind of escritoire. I won’t leave you in the lurch again. On one sheet of paper I’ve done some doodles, of the kid’s hands from memory. Huge paws, with thick, stubby fingers like black people sometimes have, you get the idea? Thick and stubby. I’ve also drawn you. Upstairs I must have about fifty sketches and chalk or charcoal drawings of you. Nothing great, but it keeps my memory busy—I’ve no photo of you. I had kept the press-cutting in which you are shown getting out of a police van wearing handcuffs beneath your leather jacket, but you have such a look of hate and despair, like a fox caught in a trap, that I threw it away. I’m beginning to realise that I’m not doing at all what I said I’d do. It really is a journal I’m writing, whereas I intended to explain things to you … but what? Trying to get people to know you as you see yourself, or as you would like to be seen, is perhaps monumental vanity. No, it’s not. What I want is for you to know that I’m not as different from you as you imagined when you pulled that gun on me. I’ll get down to it tomorrow.

Jean-François Chabas

Rapture

Jonas

Hélène Frappat

Break-in

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

Translation: Imogen Forster imogen.forster@talktalk.net

Biography

Hélène Frappat was born in Paris in 1969. She is a writer and film critic, and since 2004 she has produced the monthly radio magazine programme Rien à voir for France Culture. She is also a translator and the author of a number of essays. Publications Published by Allia : L’Agent de liaison, 2007; Sous réserve, 2004.

Digging around in the Clignancourt flea market, the narrator buys a box of home movies dating from the 1950s. In them he discovers Aurore, the daughter of upper-middle-class parents, whose life up to the age of 30 has been filmed, first by her father, then by her fiancé. He is astonished when he finds the story and dreamlike visions of A, a young woman with telepathic powers superimposed on the images of the young woman. The mystery becomes ever more disturbing as he begins to suspect that the two characters are one and the same. Under its charming surface, the portrayal of this provincial bourgeois family, with its

hidebound, conventional ways, gives Break-in the power to draw the reader into the very heart of the issues facing the contemporary world. The author is constantly breaking down the fragile boundary between what is public and what is private. The novel’s “intimate thefts” reflect a pervasive atmosphere of voyeurism, and each of the characters has in his or her gaze some aspect of this: A’s young friend, Sabrina, who insinuates herself into the home of a classmate’s parents, or the narrator, who watches these filmed moments. But this voyeurism also has a subtle and insidious effect on the reader, who “breaks in” to the characters’ lives.

Aurore … Aurore … and Aurore again! I On Sunday September 23 2004, in a side-alley of the flea market at the Porte de Clignancourt, you bought for the sum of 40 euros a yellowed cardboard box with the Franprix logo on the side. The stall-holder (who was offering an assortment of “old” bits and pieces) told you, without going into detail, that the lot consisted of home movies. When you got home to 17 rue des Deux Gares, in the 10th arrondissement, you didn’t open the box right away. It stayed in a corner of your bedroom, with the rest of your purchases (a jacket that was too big but which you didn’t bother taking to be altered, an incomplete run of a Marxist journal and a few LPs), until that evening when, without knowing why, you projected the reels onto the white walls of your room, just as they came to hand. II In the first shaky, unsteady sequences she appears in black and white. Of the blurred shape of a tiny baby, the super 8 camera catches no more than its smile. The images go by too fast, the way they do in silent films. The baby stirs in its cradle, raises its arms, plays with its feet and then, suddenly, turns its face away with a movement that will become familiar.

In the grounds of a large house, whose outline you can make out by peering almost furtively at it, under the shade of an oak tree the baby’s mother is rocking it, wrapped up in lace and embroidered baby-clothes. The dark-haired, serious-looking mother bends over the wicker basket to the jerky rhythm of the film. III The first time A felt that she possessed a strange gift, she was alone with her piano-teacher. Throughout the lesson, the dissonant racket of her scales could not conceal from the little seven-year-old the sad thoughts that emanated from her silent teacher’s head like the luminous dance of spirits set free by a witch’s magic spell. Embarrassed at having access to the private dreams of an adult who was standing politely behind her, A excused herself by pretending to have a series of illnesses, until her parents got tired of insisting she learn the piano. Shortly after the teacher’s departure—the governess accompanying him to the front door, where his hat and overcoat were waiting—A took refuge in the old nursery, suffering from a violent migraine. She stayed for hours in the unused room in the attic that now served as a laundry, hunched up on the rocking chair where her nurse used to lull her, waiting for nightfall, when she hoped her migraine would stop. She did not know at the time that every manifestation of her mysterious gift would be followed by a violent headache. Before she had learned the rules that governed the adult world, A understood her unspoken situation: the impossibility of silence. Day and night, in noisy city streets or in the muffled hush that stifled every sound in their house, whether alone or in company, with friends or in front of the mirror, adults never stopped talking. They carried on conversations with other people much less frequently than they talked to themselves, usually contradicting the words their mouths had politely spoken out loud with a secret monologue in which they poured out passions and bitter feelings. Their voices passed through walls, floors, ceilings, doors and windows to lodge themselves in A’s ears, and she developed the habit of hiding under her dark plaits the pink wax earplugs she bought discreetly at the village pharmacy. She started by putting them in at night to protect her sleep from the dreams of her parents and sisters, then she wore them even during the day, preferring to give strange answers to the grown-ups’ questions than to hear the discordant background behind them. At school, all she had to do was to gauge her teacher’s mood from time to time, and she could continue to appear to the class as a slightly absent-minded, average pupil. At home, her parents—who were often away—entrusted their three daughters to the stiffly formal care of staff who were trained to keep their mouths shut; when A’s parents returned from the weekly business trips, on

which her father invited his wife to join him, motivated perhaps by some kind of presentiment they never worried about their youngest daughter’s silences. They would ask the governess a few questions about how she spent her time, before sharing with their two elder girls amusing anecdotes from their travels. Very soon, within the family’s extensive property, A set the boundaries of her own territory with the tacit agreement of her parents and sisters. She took over an empty house at the far end of the grounds that the caretakers had given up (the old couple had moved into the top floor of the big house, an attic that had been turned over to the staff), and every day, when she got home from school, she would take refuge in the old-fashioned rooms protected from human noise by the foliage of the tall trees. A never heard anything but manmade noise; all her life she remained deaf to the indecipherable messages from the world of birds, plants, oceans and stones, seeking in vegetable and mineral silence a respite from the cacophony of human life.

Hélène Frappat

Break-in

IV A dream about the house of magic spells. A spell holds sway over this house whose granite façade dominates the upper end of a dreary hamlet. In its odd way, the house chose me. Its walls— I don’t know what tranquil or terrible life they lead when their occupants are away—send me signs, and sometimes wink at me. A shutter comes loose in the night, and bangs. The cold tap in the kitchen runs boiling hot. The door of a worm-eaten cupboard comes crashing down. The sky, blocked out by the low window-frames, darkens, the way it does during an eclipse. Nature mingles its voice with the voice of the stones. An army of red ants creeps around my ankles, pricking my skin like needles. Day by day, the sandy beach at the end of the village is disappearing, swallowed up by falling tree-trunks and the strangely rapid advance of the pine forest. Under the water, whose surface reflects the pink and grey rays of the setting sun, mauve shoals of jellyfish, pelagia noctiluca, harass me—never in vain—with their venomous filaments. On the highest branches of the pines the tiger mosquitoes are dozing; they’ll attack at dusk. V When you recall that winter evening you spent projecting the films, not even leaving your bedroom to answer the phone that rang relentlessly on the other side of the door, your memory puts these reels—which you had found in a complete muddle—in the wrong chronological order. Long before you had meticulously organised and numbered the reels, Aurore’s life appeared before you, in all its reckless and chaotic adventurousness.

Spring 1949 …

VI Each reel lasts three minutes. Sitting on the edge of your bed, you keep an eye on the projector, wedged between two cushions on your left. The time it takes to load the films seems interminable. Nothing exists but Aurore’s dazzling smile. At the end of the rue des Deux Gares, at the top of the steps looking down over the railway lines of the Gare de l’Est, under the vast sky the noise of the trains has stopped completely. VII Perhaps disappointed at not having a son, or perhaps anxious at the thought of bequeathing to their three daughters their hundred-year-old country house, Loup-Boiron, A’s parents decided to have another child. The two elder girls were settled, one in Paris, the other in Geneva, each with a fiancé they wasted no time in marrying, each in an apartment bought by their parents with that in mind. A was left alone. As a newcomer without any friends, who made no effort and did not shine in the last year of primary school, she hid the radiance of her inner visions behind a mask of dullness. After school on Friday evening, she would go to her maternal grandfather’s house, a few miles from her parents’ home, and would stay there until Sunday evening in the company of the old man, who no longer had the strength to perform his duties as a Senator in Paris. Her grandfather had a gentle voice, and tranquillity emanated from him in waves. After lunch, while he was resting upstairs, A would shut herself in his study, and practise breaking into the safe hidden behind a still life, hung between two French windows. Standing on the slippery leather armchair, her ear pressed to the cold metal of the safe, she tried again and again to break the mechanism’s sixteen secret codes, waiting to catch the characteristic “click” of the lock when the safe opened. This safe with its sixteen indecipherable combinations, its four-times-four puzzles that all her mental strategies never managed to crack, this enclosure inside the wall was a challenge to her, less for its contents (bundles of letters and bank notes) than for the perfect mystery of its combination, which she was always wary of trying to tease out of the old man. One Sunday evening in winter, A was playing on the front steps when she caught a snatch of conversation between her grandfather and her parents, who had come to take her home. As if they had guessed that their voices could be heard through the thick stone walls and the French windows, frozen shut by

the cold, her parents were almost whispering, but a sound with a particular strident frequency pierced the walls and windows and lodged deep inside A’s ear. Her mother’s grave voice was going out of control, sliding into the shrill register that broke its unvarying dying fall whenever she fell prey to fatigue or anxiety. “Child’s too solitary … Perhaps if she had a little brother …” On the nights that followed, A’s dreams were so loud she did not hear those of her parents.

Hélène Frappat

Break-in

Hélène Gaudy

If Nothing Changes

Publisher: Éditions du Rouergue Date of Publication: September 2009 Foreign Rights Manager: Elisabeth Beyer e.beyer@actes-sud.fr

Translation: Linda Coverdale ljcoverdale@aol.com

Biography Hélène Gaudy was born in Paris in 1979. Her Young Adult story Atrabile (Éditions du Rouergue, Coll. “doAdo,” 2007) was a finalist for the Prix Chronos 2008, and she has shared authorship in several collective works, including Une chic fille (Naïve, 2008) and Vingt ans pour plus tard (Elyzad, 2009). She is on the editorial board of the magazine Inculte. Publications Vues sur la mer, Les Impressions nouvelles, 2006 (Short-listed for the Prix Médicis).

As she has each year since she was born, fourteen-year-old Nina is spending the summer on a Mediterranean island. Hidden in a pine forest, the house and swimming pool provide a sheltered refuge where every vacation drifts smoothly along in a timeless and peaceful rhythm. This summer, however, the simple presence of sixteen-year-old Sabine will disturb this family equilibrium, and the wonderful vacation will soon fall prey to a ferocious game. At loose ends and trusting in their newfound powers, Nina and Sabine begin boldly to experiment with the force-field of human relationships. Until things go too far. Nina and

her family then discover just how far they will go to make sure that nothing changes … In this, her second novel, Hélène Gaudy examines with the precision of an entomologist, an ordinary, happy family suddenly challenged by a teenage girl from outside their milieu. In the tranquil setting of an island off the coast of southern France, adults and adolescents alike will be swept up in a dangerous current of everincreasing tension. Each meticulously crafted sentence carries us deeper into the exploration of the growing friendship, that drives both intense and cruel, this story of gripping emotional impact.

From a distance the house is lightweight and rickety. One kick and it would collapse. The door sticks; it does that every year because of the winter’s drifts of dirt, the way the walls shift, the warped walls and uneven ceiling. That’s part of the house’s charm, they say, the warped walls like cardboard, that’s part of the charm of summer homes perched there forgotten like the playhouses kids build. You have to pull the front door toward you as you push in the key. Nina tries every year but never manages it. Year after year her mother encourages her. This year you’ll get it, and each time Nina thinks, if someone’s chasing us like in a horror film, I’ll be stuck at the door with the killer closing in, I’ll be here rattling the door and unable to get inside. This year, her mother doesn’t suggest that she attempt to open the door. She doesn’t mention the piled-up dirt, the crooked walls on a slant. This year, she feels rather proud of this not-so-bad house, of the pine forest and the swimming pool, of the sea down there, close by. Proud to show them off to someone. Right behind her mother, Nina glances at Sabine from the corner of her eye. She hopes Sabine sees it all, all around. Hopes that nothing escapes her. Neither the sea nor the swimming pool nor the pines that are so tall, so old. She would like to show her things one by one. To watch her eyes grow wide. Sabine’s gaze brings a lump of joy to her throat, a velvety pride, a silent cooing that changes the sound of her words when she says offhandedly, Look, the Sénéchals have arrived. She points out to her parents the home across the way, glimpsed through the trees: the stone house with its shutters flung wide open. Those other years, she never says, Look, the Sénéchals have arrived.

With a smile her mother replies, Yes, I saw their car in the lane. Nina nods. She would really like to add something else, a well-timed memory demonstrating even more clearly that she is at home here, and proving how close she is to the Sénéchals, to the pines the sea the swimming pool, one of those brief remarks by someone long familiar with a place, remarks that provide their special satisfaction, however, only when familiarity is not complete, the place not yet entirely possessed. She nods again. Mustn’t miss any of Sabine’s gaze, the movements of Sabine’s head on her thick neck, Sabine’s feet treading on the dirt and the pine needles. Sabine does not turn her head toward the Sénéchals’ house. She does not look at the sea, either. She stares at the swimming pool, and walks toward it. Nina would like to grab her arm, to push her along in front of her so she would be the first one to go inside. She would place her hands on her shoulders and guide her, to savor every movement of that gaze Sabine would surely turn upon the American-style open kitchen with the wooden counter, the low table in the middle of the room. And Nina would show her her bedroom, their bedroom, the way she has imagined doing so many times. But Sabine is staring at the pool. Inside, her parents set down their bags, turn on the electricity. Nina watches Sabine go over to the pool. Walk all around it. Not looking at the sea, just the pool. The sweet lump in Nina’s throat comes back. Sabine gazes at the pool. At her pool. Nina walks over there quietly, so as not to disturb her, and smiles with a smile she wishes were less blissful. Sabine is pouting slightly, which turns up her nose. No water in it, she says. The villages—the real ones—are all inland on the island, tightly clustered among the mountains. At the seashore there are mostly houses like this one, ramshackle and white, usually empty. The coast is flat, edged with oleanders. They have been coming here every year for ages. No need to look any further, once you’ve found a place like this one you return to every summer, exotic, steadfast, unchanged. Usually they only go into town now and then to please Nina, because her parents soon find it difficult, almost painful, to tear themselves away from this place where they would happily stay on day and night. Nina fidgets and grows bored as soon as the sun begins to set, when darkness erases the presence of the sea and the games on the beach. The distant town then comes alive with light. Nina always dresses up before going out. It’s incredible, says her father, the time you spend in the bathroom only to come out looking exactly the same. Nina gets dressed for no reason, no one in particular, simply to catch sight of herself in mirrors as if she were meeting herself by chance. Then they drive into town and park near the harbor. Nina walks alone ahead of her parents.

She always keeps the same distance between them. She would like to lead the way but knows perfectly well that they are leading her like a dog on a leash. At night, the only lights in the pine forest are their cottage and the Sénéchals’ place. And yet there are other houses, hidden in the vegetation in a seemingly random pattern intended to simulate the appearance of villages. You must go closer to the shore, beyond the pines and their twilight, to find the luminous jagged curve of the coast. Here, identical memories follow and cancel one another out every year, so that Nina remembers only those images she finds in this place summer after summer, as if time were not passing, not changing anything, as if it were impossible to grow up here. Nothing much ever happens to Nina, who often imagines with guilty appetite tragedies both large and small that would distinguish one year from all the others, send it flying into the landscape, cracking the façade at last. Every year she concocts a different scenario. When a car accident wears out its intense appeal, she replaces the twisted metal and shredded flesh with a silent parental disappearance. She would get up one morning to find everyone gone. The pines would rustle alone in the forest as in a silent film. This year, Nina doesn’t know what to use instead of the car crash and the hushed vanishing of her parents into the stillness of the island. This year, just at present, her thoughts are elsewhere.

Hélène Gaudy

If Nothing Changes

They have not yet put away their belongings, opened the dusty cupboards. They try to put the gloss of habit on, things they never do when they are on their own. Spreading a cloth on the table. Opening a bottle and offering the girls a sip of the syrupy wine. It’s like a birthday dinner, thinks Nina: all that’s missing are candles out here under the bower. The night is mild and the sound of the sea seems muffled, reassuring. It’s like a birthday dinner, only better, since even birthdays are all alike year after year, whereas today everything is unusual, including their voices, which sound different to Nina. Nina has always preferred to eat inside but now she refuses the jacket her father tries to drape around her shoulders, her father whom for the past few hours, out of the blue, she has taken to calling Samuel. He had looked at her with slightly ironic pride, the kind reserved for those who are playing at being grown-up, who are perhaps already a lot more so than others realize but who always seem to us to be mimicking habits in reality adopted long before. Unable to bring herself to address her mother as Lise, Nina prefers not to address her at all. To ask her something, she lightly touches her arm, momentarily re-experiencing a contact that is brief, glancing, familiar. Take a sip, Sabine, says Samuel playfully, and Sabine readily drains her glass of wine in one go. Samuel applauds. Sabine serves herself generously without any prompting. Lise watches in satisfaction as the girl eats with gusto, wolfing down the tomatoes and mozzarella at a steady pace. Sabine, at least, knows

how to do justice to a meal, she says, and adds, So, girls: tomorrow morning, the beach? Nina looks up from her plate; that girls makes her feel funny. The strangeness of Sabine here—Sabine beneath the bower, Sabine hanging around the swimming pool—might melt away in that word, girls, and she, Nina, would become one half of two, a small part of something. Beach, yes. Sabine says nothing in reply, barely raising her face from her plate, and Nina can see that she has noticed nothing of what has made this evening exceptional, nothing of the effort to make it seem to her like business as usual. I’m going to bed, says Nina, without waiting for the liqueurs that tempts you to stay up late, sitting by the uncorked bottles and dirty dishes they will clean up only the next day. Lise stretches out on the bed. Her head nestles in its place on Samuel’s chest. Sit up a bit, she says, your shoulder’s drooping, and she tucks her cheek into the soft niche. My feet are killing me, murmurs Lise, and it rather does her good, to be so tired, and gives her the oddly reassuring impression that they will never be able to leave again. On the white wall the lamplight is faint and orange. The bedroom is almost empty. They like not bringing much here. Playing Swiss Family Robinson on their familiar island. Lise is obsessive about keeping the walls white, the tile floors spacious and bare. Do you think they’ll get along? Uh-huh, replies Lise. The question makes her a touch uncomfortable, as does Samuel’s shoulder, which is sagging again, leaving her head at an awkward angle. She’s nice, that girl, continues Samuel. She doesn’t say much, but she’s nice. And she’s a good eater. Lise snorts in amusement against Samuel’s shoulder. Weary and uncomfortable, she can’t help finding this conversation tiresome and comical keeps seeing Sabine’s bulging cheeks, Sabine’s jaws industriously chewing tomatoes and mozzarella, and she laughs even louder, saying over and over, on the edge of hysteria, Oh, no question, she’s a hearty eater! Cut it out, says Samuel, don’t be silly. The girls are sleeping in the same room. Two twin beds, which Nina has taken care to draw closer to each other. It’s hot and the window must be left open. Mosquitoes are coming in, buzzing around. In the darkness Nina listens to their flight. Their silence when they land on a wall. She raises one of her sandals very slowly—then squishes them with one blow, making tiny thick brown stains she hurriedly wipes away, wondering each time whose blood it was they had gorged on. Tonight there is a tepid breeze from outside and the presence of the other girl, who has fallen asleep right away, mouth open, head buried in the pillow. Nina has someone sleeping near her for the first time in a long while, since when she was a tiny thing, in the crook of her mother’s arm. Afterward, empty beds. Nina sleeps all the worse for it, as the slightest noise awakens her. Perhaps

her parents always made so sure nothing disturbed her sleep that she has grown used to being on the alert in that safeguarded silence, a diminutive sentinel throughout the overlong nights. If anyone were to enter their apartment— lock quietly picked, a silhouette in the doorway—it would be she, Nina, who would sound the alarm have just enough time to hide under the bed before the intruder entered the room. She is always the first one awake, even before the alarm goes off. Always the last one asleep, because you never know. And here she is now with this body near hers, lying heavy and open-mouthed instead of chatting with her beneath the coverlet. Nina tosses and turns. She’s sorry she pushed her bed closer to Sabine’s. The incongruity of this presence nearly stifles all sleep. Even with her eyes closed, she knows she is there from her labored, whistling breathing. Might as well see her up close, she decides, once and for all, then I won’t think about her anymore and I’ll go to sleep. Nina gets up. Looming over Sabine, she leans down. Crouching on the tile floor, she looks at this open mouth she thought would be bigger and blacker. The teeth are large and white, and the lips, puffy. Sabine in her sleep has the calm and weighty immobility of a stone or a beached whale. Her skin is smooth, damp and sleek like the skin of a cachalot, thinks Nina, because she considers cachalot less insulting than whale. Sabine’s hair on the white pillow seems longer, curlier, thicker than in daylight. From beneath the sheet peek out her round shoulder, the strap of her nightgown. Her body swells with each breath and gently rises almost to Nina’s cheek as Nina leans ever closer. Her gaze is fixed on Sabine’s body as on that of a dead woman, fascinated by what this immobility allows and reveals. Surrounded by beings as familiar as objects, Nina does not remember ever having drawn this close to anyone before. She can even smell Sabine’s perfume. Until now she has been familiar with only the odors of her own kin—same blood same skin—and her mother’s above all, that pungent scent of bruised leaves. Sabine smells like girlish eau de toilette, cheap berries, and sunscreen. Toward that supple cetacean skin as soft as butter, Nina stretches out a curious finger.

Hélène Gaudy

If Nothing Changes

Brigitte Giraud

A Year Abroad

Publisher: Stock Date of Publication: September 2009 Foreign Rights Manager: Barbara Porpaczy bporpaczy@editions-stock.fr

Translation: Will Hobson hobson.will@googlemail.com

Biography

A Year Abroad reflects the distinctive intimacy of Brigitte Giraud’s fiction whilst breaking new ground in its exploration of the world and human nature. For when a language proves impossible to grasp because the codes by which a group of people operate, and the ways they function remain opaque, it’s the world itself that seems to be conspiring against you, constantly receding out of reach and thwarting your attempts to live your life. Publications Brigitte Giraud’s recent publications include: L’amour est très surestimé [Love is Very Overrated], Stock, 2007 (Goncourt Short Story Prize, 2007), J’ai Lu, 2008; J’apprends [I’m Learning], Stock, 2005, lgf Paperback, 2007; Marée noire [Oil Slick], Stock, 2004, lgf Paperback, 2005.

When she goes to Germany to work as an au pair, seventeen-year old Laura discovers she doesn’t know the language of this unfamiliar land as well as she thought. Then there are her uncertainties about her host family. Is she there to look after the children, help around the house, improve her German or simply grow up at long last? They are a seemingly ordinary family, with fewer tensions and secrets than the one she’s left behind, but this doesn’t mean they don’t have mysteries of their own. She finds herself longing to discover the truth about these individuals, and make sense of them in a way that will finally allow her to fill in the gaps

and silences of her own interminable adolescence. When she comes across a copy of Mein Kampf at the house of the children’s grandfather’s, she is tempted to draw over-hasty conclusions and, with a mixture of repulsion and fascination, almost involuntarily starts reading this banned work. Then the children’s mother falls ill. As the days pass, the father seems to be making evermore insistent overtures. What does he want from her? Laura begins to wonder what price she will have to pay to become a woman, face up to her future and leave this house so that she can return to hers.

All this takes place in a cold German winter. I get off the train after travelling over six hundred and twenty five miles. Mrs Bergen is waiting for me at the end of the platform, a tall, serious, beautiful woman. Our first conversation is brief and stilted. I’m not sure I understand every word she says, but I nod anyway as a sign of goodwill. I don’t exactly know why I’m here. My home situation isn’t that easy to explain either. Let’s just say, for simplicity’s sake, that the official plan is I’m going to improve my German, which I studied at school. I am here to learn. So let’s not waste any time; here I am, ready and willing. And, as if on cue, despite the fact I feel I’m about to conk out from exhaustion, the learning process begins immediately. I learn you can’t walk on ice in trainers. I also learn that, despite doing four hours of German a week, I can’t understand a single sentence all the way through. I put my bag in the back of the family vehicle, a Volkswagen minibus, and blow on my freezing fingers. I haven’t slept for twenty-four hours, but I’m young and resourceful, as my parents are always saying. All this takes place in a port by the Baltic Sea. I have just celebrated my seventeenth birthday. Mrs Bergen drives slowly, while I concentrate on not falling asleep. She asks me a question in which I recognize the German for ‘supermarket.’ Clinging onto the word, I concur, but it turns out not really to be a question, more a piece of information. Even if I didn’t agree, my vocabulary wouldn’t be up to conveying in a clear and inoffensive way that there’s only one thing I want to do, and that’s go to bed. We cross a river whose name Mrs Bergen tells me before expressing surprise that I’m not commenting on the scenery, so I say ‘das ist sehr schön’ (It’s very beautiful). I don’t know if it is, but I don’t dare remain silent. My overriding impression is that it’s a long way from home. It’s also incredibly white: the pavements, the trees, the sky. We drive past the commercial port and Mrs Bergen explains something, taking her hands off the steering wheel as she

does so. I think she’s telling me about a canning factory where a relative of hers works, but I’m not sure; at any rate I imagine that’s what she’s saying, maybe a brother of hers who packs herrings into cans, unless it’s her husband, or her husband’s brother. Then we turn up a steep alley and stop in a virtually empty supermarket car park. Mrs Bergen buys slices of liver for the evening meal after checking that I like liver. Of course, I nod again, smiling to hide my mounting anxiety. I am afraid I’ll regret coming here to eat slices of liver with a family I don’t know, who live hours by train away from the family I do know. We go to the checkout and I carry the bag of potatoes and the rye bread. It’s only three in the afternoon but already it’s getting dark. Mrs Bergen is excited at the prospect of me meeting the children who are waiting for us at home: Thomas and Susanne, 14 and 9, as it said on the form I was given before I accepted this position. I hesitated for a moment when I saw the boy’s age, but in the end I decided it wouldn’t make any difference. I hadn’t realized the house wasn’t in the town. We take a motorway and drive for about twenty minutes in the dark alongside a snow-covered forest. Mrs Bergen puts on the radio and talks to me about the results of the elections. I don’t know which elections she’s referring to, but resolve to buy a newspaper tomorrow to keep informed about all the ins and outs of my new German life. We turn off onto a wet road and I take in some of the differences between Northern and Southern Europe as we drive along with the windscreen wipers and headlights on. Finally we pull up in front of a large, secluded house by a railway. A dog puts its paws on my hips and sniffs my shoes and bags while the children stay parked in front of the television. I stand in the hallway with wet feet and eyes shining with tiredness. I’m Laura, the au pair, and this will be my native land for the next six months. I am probably making a mistake coming to live here. I don’t know yet, but, whatever happens, there’s no getting out of it now. The children show me to my bedroom, a little cubby-hole in the basement at the bottom of the stairs. There’s a powerful smell of petrol and I want to ask where it’s coming from, but I don’t know enough words to construct a correct sentence. So I don’t ask anything, I simply smile and accept what I’m given. I perch my bag on the bed. Thomas opens the wardrobe and points out the empty shelves and the mirror on the inside of the door. Mrs Bergen joins us and apologises for the reek of petrol. Apparently Thomas parks his moped outside, just by the fanlight. I look up and, sure enough, a bike is visible through the pattern of the curtain. ‘Ja natürlich’ (Yes, of course), I say, because I don’t see what else I could say. ‘Why doesn’t he park it somewhere else?’ for instance. Then Mrs Bergen gives me a tour of the basement. Here’s the laundry room with a washing machine and linen hanging up to dry, there’s the boiler, and,

opposite my room, what she calls the ‘Diskothek,’ a wood-panelled room with a bar, high stools, a bench and a little dance floor. I don’t know what to do after putting my clothes in the cupboard and setting up my cassette player on the bedside table. The simplest thing would be to get under the sheets and surrender to the tide of melancholy I can feel welling up inside me, but I am afraid to let myself go. I have to keep moving. I open the wardrobe and find myself facing the mirror, sitting on the little bed. I can’t work out how I could have given myself such a horrendous haircut before I left. Hacking away at it in my French bedroom, I cut it so short that my skull is showing in places. I didn’t dare come out afterwards and face my mother. When I finally emerged, she asked me with a sort of pity in her eyes why I wanted to make myself look so ugly. Now, as I stare at myself in the mirror in my German bedroom, I realise she had a point. I’ll buy some gel tomorrow and try and sort out my new look. What now: go back to the living room where the children have started watching television again, help Mrs Bergen in the kitchen? I climb the stairs just as Mr Bergen makes his entrance. It’s only just six, and in no time we’re sitting down to eat.

Brigitte Giraud

A Year Abroad

Everyone talks a lot, very fast, in loud voices. I clutch at the odd word that puts me on the right track, then I instantly lose the thread and veer off before rejoining the conversation in a state of complete confusion. I have to get questions repeated, and stare intently with a frown at Mr Bergen when he asks if I’m ok with early starts. The children have to be at school at 7.30 and apparently it’ll be my job to take Susanne. Mrs Bergen puts the biggest slice of liver on my plate before I can protest, and I know there’s no way I’ll be able to eat it. My first meal and already I’m faced with two insoluble problems: how to get through this huge slab of liver whose smell is making me feel sick and how to assimilate the mass of information I’m being given about tomorrow. Something else is making me anxious, the fact that they all must be wondering who on earth this girl is, the virtual mute looking questioningly back at them, a smile frozen on her clueless features. She’s hopelessly embarrassed and out of her depth, I can hear them thinking; she’s probably perfectly nice—look at the way she’s stroking the dog as she picks at her food—but poor thing, she seems like a bit of a lost soul, and that weird haircut, there’s definitely something mentally unstable about her. I get up to offer to help Mrs Bergen, tramping off into the kitchen after her, but she immediately tells me to go and sit down, thereby exposing me to the children’s questions and her husband’s mysterious advice which, to make matters worse, he delivers with a lot of heavily rolled r’s. I do my best to distract attention from my slice of liver but no luck; everyone laughs at my lack of appetite. Mr Bergen is so entertained he forgets to wipe off the flecks of grease from his moustache. A good time, it seems, is being had by all. The volume goes up a notch. The parents open their second beers and light cigarettes. The children

play with the dog, which barks without anyone seeming to be disturbed. Like characters in a play, everyone comes on stage and shouts, rather than says, their lines, and I’m afraid I won’t learn anything about what’s in store for me tomorrow. Everyone’s got something to say but no one listens to anyone. No one asks me who I am, where I’m from and why I’m in their house rather than mine. It’s Susanne who knocks on my door at six the following morning, interrupting a night that feels as if it could have gone on forever. The boiler next to my room wheezes noisily. No one is stirring in the house. Susanne gets her breakfast herself and assumes the teacher’s role, telling me what I should do. We sit facing one another in the harsh kitchen light, and I sense her observing me as if I’m from another planet. I don’t know how to work the coffee machine and have to open all the cupboards before finding what I need. Susanne’s words hang in the air like riddles waiting to be deciphered. I get the feeling I’m disappointing her and worry about not living up to expectations. I sense she’s judging me and don’t know whether she finds me amusing or irritating, but it’s obvious she’s putting on a show of her savoir-faire and independence. Any moment now she’s going to start making fun of me and, until then, she’s going to subject me to various tests. Time to regain control of the situation. I ask her to go the bathroom and then get her schoolbag ready, which would be fine except she corrects my German. I haven’t yet fully mastered the difference between direct and indirect objects and in German that can soon cause terrible problems. I don’t know if her parents are ‘schon weg’ (already gone) or ‘schlafen noch’ (still asleep). Susanne asks me to get the knots out of her hair, which gives her the chance to writhe in agony in front of the bathroom mirror while shooting me filthy looks. We leave the house and the parents’ two cars are still there, in front of the garage. Nothing is stirring in the house. We walk through the dark to the school bus stop and wait there on our own. The trees on the edge of the forest buckle in the wind, while snow falls in clumps from their branches. When the bus arrives, Susanne gets on without saying goodbye. I don’t know how long I’m going to be able to cope with this, setting off at the crack of dawn in the icy wind, while the parents of the little girl I’m looking after are sound asleep in their beds. There’s something about it I don’t get, something someone may have told me but which I seem to have failed to grasp. I walk back along the railway track, my head sunk in my hood, not knowing what’s prompting me to go back to the Bergens and walk through their door, when I’m under no compulsion to do so. I walk along, looking for the first signs of daybreak, but the night seems endless and the only sound I hear is my boots crunching in the snow.

Jean-Michel Guenassia

The Incurable Optimists’ Club

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

Translation: Constantina Mitchell constantina@videotron.ca

Biography

Jean-Michel Guenassia was born in 1950. He has worked as a lawyer, screenwriter and playwright. In 2002, he dropped everything to focus exclusively on writing Le Club des incorrigibles Optimistes/The Incurable Optimists’ Club. Publications Pour cent millions, Liana Levi, 1986.

Paris, 1959. Twelve-year-old Michel has two families—the Marinis and the Delaunays—and they hate each other. He is a student at the lycée Henri-IV in Paris and likes to play foosball in the local cafés. The Balto at Denfert is one of his haunts. That’s where he discovers the Incurable Optimists’ Club whose members include Sartre and Kessel. The Club is actually a chess club composed of self-exiled Hungarians, Soviets, Poles and Germans. They are all communists, penitents, traitors, or renegades, racked by questions and remorse. Each of them has an outlandish or tragic past, and they all saved their skins by escaping from behind the Iron Curtain.

Michel’s family is slowly falling apart. His brother goes off to fight in Algeria, only to later become a deserter. Meanwhile, as Michel is going through the awkward stage of adolescence, he comes to know the History of these tortured men and recounts their many-faceted lives, marked by both greatness and cowardice. In this monumental panorama, History with a capital H unfolds along with a family saga, and lives sacrificed in the name of ideals become the subjects of magnificent narrative.

April 1980 A writer is being buried today. Like a final protest march, an unexpectedly large, silent, respectful and chaotic crowd is blocking the streets and boulevards surrounding the Montparnasse cemetery. How many are there? Thirty thousand? Fifty thousand? Less than that? More? They say it’s important to have a lot of people at your funeral, but if someone had told him there would be such a large turn-out he wouldn’t have believed it, he would have laughed. He probably didn’t give it much thought when he was alive. He’d expected to be hastily buried, with only a dozen faithful friends on hand for the send-off, not with honors worthy of a Victor Hugo or a Tolstoy. It’s been over fifty years since a crowd this size has paid its respects to an intellectual. You’d think he’d been indispensable or had been loved by all. Why had they come? Considering what they knew about him, they should have stayed home. How absurd to pay homage to a man who had been wrong about almost everything. A man always on the wrong track, dedicating himself to defending the indefensible. They’d have been better off attending the funerals of those who’d been right, the ones he’d despised and lambasted. Nobody bothered to show up for them. But what if there was something more, something admirable behind the failures of this little man, his drive to push destiny to the limit, to persevere against all logic, to never give up despite the certainty of failure, to embrace the inconsistencies of a just cause and battles already lost, a never-ending struggle that constantly begins anew and for which there is no solution? It’s impossible to get into the cemetery. They’re trampling graves, climbing over monuments and knocking over tombstones to get closer and catch a glimpse of the casket. You’d think they were burying a rock star or a saint. They’re not just burying a man, an age-old idea is being interred with him. Nothing is going to change

and we know it. There will never be a better society. You either accept that or you don’t. With the loss of our beliefs and illusions, we’ve already got one foot in the grave. The crowd is like an absolution, expiating sins committed in the name of an ideal. That doesn’t change much for the victims. There will be no apologies, restitutions or first-class burials. What could be worse than doing harm when your intent was to do something good? It’s a whole bygone era that’s being laid to rest. Living in a world with no hope isn’t easy. Right now, no one’s looking to get even. No one’s passing judgment. We’re all equal: all of us are wrong. I didn’t come for the great thinker’s funeral. I never understood his philosophy. His plays are hard to take, and I can’t remember a thing about his novels. Old memories are what prompted me to come. But seeing the crowd has reminded me of who he was. You can’t mourn a hero who sided with the executioners. I’m turning back. I’ll bury him in a remote corner of my mind.

Jean-Michel Guenassia

The Incurable Optimists’ Club

There are seedy places and streets where it’s better not to linger because they tend to bring you back to your past. You imagine you’ve forgotten because you don’t think about it, but it can resurface at the slightest provocation. I avoided Montparnasse. There were ghosts there I didn’t know how to deal with. I spotted one in a side lane that runs along the boulevard Raspail. I recognized his unmistakable light-colored herringbone coat, like Bogart in the 50’s. You can judge some men by the way they walk. Pavel Cibulka, the believer, the partisan, champion of the great ideological divide and cheap jokes, was slowly walking toward me, a haughty but fine figure. I passed him by. He had put on weight and could no longer button his coat. His unruly white hair made him look like an artist. “Pavel.” He stopped and stared at me. He was trying to recall where he had seen my face before, I must have conjured up a distant memory. He shook his head. He couldn’t place me. “It’s me … Michel. Remember?” He looked me over, incredulous, still wary. “Michel? … Little Michel?” “Wait a minute. What do you mean, ‘little Michel’? I’m taller than you.” “Little Michel! … How long has it been?” “The last time we saw each other was here, for Sacha. That was fifteen years ago.” We stood there silently, overwhelmed by our memories. We fell into each other’s arms. He hugged me tightly. “I would have never recognized you.” “Well you haven’t changed a bit.” “You’ve got to be kidding. I’ve gained a hundred kilos. Because of diets.”

“It’s great to see you. Aren’t the others with you? Did you come alone?” “Are you crazy? I’d rather croak! I’m on my way to work. I’m not retired you know!” His slow Bohemian accent had suddenly taken on an emphatic tone. We went to the Sélect, a brasserie where everyone seemed to know each other. […] “I can’t believe it! Did you see the bunch of idiots who turned out for that son of a bitch? They got shit for brains or what?” “He was a symbol.” “Well I’m going to go pee on his grave. That’s all he deserves. There’s nothing to be proud of. “He couldn’t go back on his word.” “He knew. Ever since Gide and Rousset. I told him about Slansky and Clémentis. He didn’t say a thing. He knew about Kravchenko. He denounced Kravchenko. How do you explain that? Howling with the pack. Looking down on the martyrs. Denying the truth. Isn’t that being an accomplice? He was a bastard.” He remained pensive, his head tilted forward, his face tense. “Far be it from me to tell people how to act. I shouldn’t be saying things like that.” “I don’t understand.” “At the very least we should be grateful to the hand that feeds us. We managed with the cash they used to slip us. That’s how we survived. “Who used to slip you cash?” Pavel looked at me sideways, as if I was only pretending I didn’t know. Then he realized I wasn’t kidding. “Both of them. Kessel and Sartre. They pulled strings to get us translations and odd jobs. They knew a lot of people. They used to recommend us to magazines and newspaper editors. We freelanced. When we were broke, they paid the landlord debt collectors. How could we have made it without them? We didn’t have a cent. We had lost everything. If they hadn’t helped us out, we’d have ended up living under a bridge. It got harder after he went blind and didn’t go out anymore. They got Vladimir out of a jam a couple of years ago. Remember him?” “As if it were yesterday.” “He had problems.” Pavel was just itching to tell me all about it. I could still picture Vladimir Gorenko doling out food in the back room at the Balto. “What became of Vladimir?” “He ran the Odessa oil complex before defecting to the West. He was given political refugee status when he got here. But he couldn’t find work. None of the oil companies wanted to hire him. Even the ones he knew and had done

business with. Nobody lifted a finger to help him. You know why? They were afraid of Moscow. If they gave him a job, they’d be at odds with them. They bitched about the commies but did business with them just the same. Remember Marcusot, the owner of the bistro? He was a nice guy. He found Vladimir a maid’s room above a pork butcher’s store on rue Daguerre. Vladimir did the shop’s bookkeeping.” “The butcher paid him with sausages and cooked food. Actually, ‘paid’ is an exaggeration. Vladimir would complain that all he got was leftovers ready for the garbage.” “We were lucky. Vladimir used to share what he had with us. Some of the other shopkeepers had him do their books. Little by little he built up a clientele. Things were going well for him. The accountants in the area weren’t pleased, to say the least. They lodged a complaint. Vladimir’s got lots of good points, but he thinks he’s an authority on everything. As far as he’s concerned, he’s always right. He’s no diplomat, if you catch my drift. When the cops showed up, instead of acting dumb and keeping a low profile, he got all worked up and started being condescending: ‘I’m not afraid of the kgb. I got out of Stalingrad alive, so don’t think you’re going to scare me. I work. And I pay my taxes. So screw you!’ He wouldn’t listen to reason. He kept on working despite the warnings. You won’t believe this, but they put him in the slammer for illegally practicing the profession of certified public accountant. He told the judge off. He got four months. Imagine that! A guy who speaks six or seven languages. They shut down his office. He had to declare bankruptcy. And who do you think came to his rescue? Kessel went to see the judge and Sartre paid the fine.” “What’s Vladimir doing now?” “He’s working for the accountant that squealed on him. He’s got his clientele back, but he’s not allowed to take the certification exam.” “Sacha mentioned it a couple of times, but I never realized they were helping you.” “I didn’t know you and Sacha were friends. I thought you were a friend of Igor’s. Nobody liked Sacha. He was …” Pavel stopped because of the way I was looking at him. We sat there in silence amidst the commotion and the memories that had come back to torment us. “I was friends with both of them.” “You couldn’t be friends with both of them. It’s not possible.” “It was for me. Sacha told me once that Kessel paid the rent for his maid’s room. He was late with it, as usual, and didn’t dare ask him.” “Kessel had a good heart. Right to the end, last year, he helped us out. You see, I can be a bastard too. You can’t expect anything from anyone. You do something nice and they spit in your face. I can’t help it, but I can’t get what Sartre said out of my mind, what he let them say, and especially what he didn’t say. That’s why nobody liked him that much. He was a dirty prick, an armchair

Jean-Michel Guenassia

The Incurable Optimists’ Club

revolutionary. But he was generous. Still, money doesn’t make up for it.” “All those years I never noticed a thing. I was young. I got the impression he liked you.” “I used to tell him jokes. They made him laugh. He had such a good memory, but he never remembered any of them and would ask me to tell them to him again.” “I remember Léonid and his joke about Stalin and the sun.” “Go on. Tell it to me. I’d like to hear it again.” “Wait, I have to try to remember it. It goes like this. One morning, Stalin gets up. It’s a beautiful day and he asks the sun: Mr Sun, tell me, who is the handsomest, the smartest, the strongest? The sun doesn’t hesitate for a second: Why you, oh Stalin, light of the universe! At noon, Stalin does the same thing: Tell me, Mr Sun, who is the most brilliant, the most ingenious, the most remarkable man who ever lived? The sun replies: Why you are, oh great Stalin. Before dinner, Stalin can’t resist the pleasure of asking the sun one more time: Who’s the best communist in the world. The sun answers: You’re sick, Stalin. You’re a psychopath and a raving lunatic. Up yours! I’m in the West now!” Pavel burst out laughing as if he were hearing it for the first time. “You’re a lousy joke-teller. The French don’t know how to tell them. You have to really milk it. When Léonid told that joke, it lasted an hour.” “That’s true. It was amazing. Do you really think he told it to Stalin?” “That’s what he said. Léonid wasn’t one to boast. Say, if I remember correctly, you and Léonid were friends, weren’t you?” “Very good friends. I’d like to see him again.” “But he hated Sacha.” “That’s just old gossip that doesn’t interest anyone anymore. It’s not very important now.” He didn’t answer. He paused for a moment and then shrugged his shoulders. He took another croissant. [ … ] “How about telling me a joke, Pavel?” “Do you know the difference between a ruble and a dollar?” I’d heard that half-assed joke before. He may have even been the one who told it to me fifteen years earlier. I tried to remember the punch line but couldn’t. “No, I give up.” “A dollar!” He cracked up. He loved that joke. “What’s going on, Michel? We were getting news about you for a while and then nothing.” “After Sacha died, I continued to see Igor and Werner. Do you still see any of the others?” “You’re the only one we never see anymore.”

Hubert Haddad

The Geometry of a Dream

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

Translation: Louise Lalaurie lalaurie.rogers@gmail.com

Biography

Hubert Haddad was born in Tunis in 1947. He published his first collection of poems, Le Charnier déductif, in 1967. His first novel, Un rêve de glace, was published by Albin Michel in 1974, since when he has published numerous novels, short stories, plays and collections of poetry. His earlier work explored fantasy and magical realism in a fresh, hallucinatory light, while his later writings have focused on a critical approach to history. His protean approach to the craft of writing, and his long experience as a teacher of creative writing workshops, inspired his book Le Nouveau Magasin d’écriture (Zulma, 2006), a kind of interactive encyclopaedia of literature and the art of writing, offering a wealth of new literary games for writers eager to sharpen their skills. A second book, the Nouveau Nouveau Magasin d’écriture followed in 2007, exploring the role of visual art as a stimulus to the imagination, and featuring two hundred images (engravings, drawings, paintings, caricatures …) chosen for their evocative, inspirational power. Publications Recent novels (published by Zulma) include: Palestine, 2007 (prix des Cinq Continents de la Francophonie), republished by lgf-Livre de Poche in 2009; La Cène, 2005; Le Ventriloque amoureux, 2002; L’Univers, 1999, republished 2009; Tango chinois, 1998; La Condition magique, 1997 (grand prix du roman de la Société des gens de lettres).

In a remote manor house facing the Atlantic, on the coast of Finistère, a writer struggles to forget Fedora, the woman he loves more than life itself. Inspired by the spirit of this wild place he begins a journal, its pages gradually peopled with figures from fiction, history and the author’s imagination, all drawn with the same, very real intensity: Fedora, the professional soprano who gives herself by day but withdraws at night, the Japanese student persecuted by her yakusa brother, the heroes of his own novels, mistresses past, or the American writer Emily Dickinson. Géométrie d’un rêve is an Arabian Nights by an insomniac storyteller intent on “telling tales” to himself, summoning the characters of Faust, Tosca and Othello to a novel of inexpiable jealousy and insane love.

No one has loved as I have loved. And yet there have been other women. I have known other mornings since that London night. I would burn each of my manuscripts with dark joy, just to experience such love once more, to betray Fedora in the very madness of my thoughts of her. To begin all over again, devoid of memory. But the roaring ocean waves are not the waters of Lethe. Here in Ker-Lann the wind seems to speak, in a familiar voice reminding me of the saga of my faults and wrong-doing. With Fedora, I lost everything. My loneliness is such that I must take care to secure the doors and windows. At nightfall, a child’s fear comes to me with the insistent inrush of dreams. It is a kind of infirmity, this inability to distinguish the living from the dead, the instant my eyelids droop. At my age, the accumulation of ash is such that the embers barely glow, and then only in the deepest sleep. Yet each sudden awakening is a premonition of fire. Insomnia does not set the night aflame: ten times, I rise from my shroud to watch the crossed beams of the lighthouses on the Pointe d’Ar-Grill sweeping the abyss of the open sea, so like oblivion, beyond the reefs and the Iles de la Fée. When a writer has no other outlet, it quite naturally occurs to him to keep a journal, something which I—even as an adolescent—have never done, not a single page. The exercise always seemed apocryphal, fake, like an album of family photos. “The most hateful lies are those that come closest to the truth,” said Gide, an expert in such things. But now, I must confess or keep silence. And silence would be a kind of drowning. These pages mark the beginning of

an unprecedented, absurd exercise, slithering down the slope of my remaining time: an attempt to keep my head above the dead waters of the everyday by some means other than fiction. A Monday in October. The sky roars above the pines and ash trees in the grounds, and plunges like a mountain torrent into the glimpsed ocean, a scarf of white tossing between the rocky shoulders of the Pointe d’Ar-Grill. Hubert Haddad

The following, overheard just now in the village pharmacy: “Would you have something to clam the beaks of squawking gulls?” A deadpan question from Braz, an old-timer well known for poaching in the creeks by torchlight. When indeed an effective remedy be found, prescribable to every inveterate chatterer and gainsayer, as a protective measure for their neighbours? In the meantime, I come back from the dispensary with a box of sleeping pills. The Ker-Lann night will be soundless, devoid of mystery.

The Geometry of a Dream

When the sky clears at the right moment, daybreak in the cove at Ar-Grill opens a fan of diamonds, gold sequins and rose petals over the sea. It is a moment of solemn luxury, to be savoured still once the lid of spitting mist has come down until dusk. But the night was impeccably thick and heavy, devoid of spectres and will-o’-the-wisps. The moor beyond the grounds has the feral hue of a fox’s back and the sea shines in the dark like a vacant mirror at the base of the high rocks. “Those who know how to keep silent become children of the gods” (Søren Kierkegaard). I have no plan other than to come as close as possible to my truth while steering clear of the genre’s inherent pitfalls and approximations. It’s a question of survival, of keeping alive what’s left. The time remaining will never be worth one morning of my life with Fedora. I must explain myself, recount the essential details of the years spent in her light, her dark brilliance. Omitting none of the storms, the madness. And so it seems I could never have loved another woman more completely, despite the endless revolts, the feeble attempts at escape. Despite our truncated relations, like real or make-believe actors playing out the scene of a single day. In the role of the praying mantis, the brain-sucking spider, Fedora seemed quite deliberately to reduce our liaison to a struggle to the death, a coupling of insects in a shaft of moonlight. I don’t doubt that she loved me, in her maniacal, distracted way. Her jealousy was, indeed, matched only by my own, and we played on it, like tightrope walkers on the brink of an abyss. Subject for a short story: a man plans to commit suicide but is held back by the inability to attend his own funeral. Until one day he hears of the death of an exact namesake. Quickly, he sends a detailed announcement to his friends, and

attends the ceremony in disguise, determined to put an end to it all once the obsequies are over. With grim delight, he observes the effect (or lack of effect) of his disappearance on the faces present—those unique, infallible captors of true identity, the faces of those closest to us. Such an ordeal might very well persuade our disabused potential suicide to set sail for new horizons. No one kills themselves for so little … Born of a dead woman, I was plunged into a torrent of fantasy. My maternal grandmother, albeit afflicted by inconsolable grief, was the most entertaining and inventive nursery nurse. These formative years easily explain why I became a novelist and story-teller. Out of vital need. Without it, the fiction of origins would probably have sent me barking mad. Elzaïde was barely fifty when she inherited me from her daughter, dead in childbirth. She was still a fine-looking woman, with a strong face and ample bosom. A childbed fever had left her sterile and prone to eccentricities. Naturally, and with the widower’s tacit consent, Elzaïde took charge of my care while waiting for a decision from the family magistrate, or the health authorities, which took some time. When I reached school age I was placed in a public institution, but remained under her care, and stayed with her at weekends and through the summer months. But long before that, from the moment I understood my first words, Elzaïde took charge of my fantastical, largely unmethodical education. My grandmother was an encyclopaedia: no phenomenon, no event escaped her unschooled commentary. She was possessed of an extraordinary if archaic imagination and a rich storehouse of exempla, variously fabricated. She explained the world continually and in exhaustive detail, with scant concern for the contradictions that added further layers of mystery to her extravagant pronouncements. Elzaïde gave great satisfaction at the age of the question “Why?”. My endless queries, finger pointed at the moon, enjoyed her unwavering, exalted attention. Later, I would remember her as an aged Scheherazade striving, through her stories, to halt the inexorable march of reality. How I came to cut short my adventures and drop anchor in this remote spot, Penn-ar-Bed, is another marvel: there is nothing to hold me here but the savour of the sea-spray, the taste of departures and exile. As if I had rented an Egyptian tomb to enjoy the desert night, sheltered from the storms. The spirit or desire for fiction left me the day I understood that I was myself the prisoner of an absurd story, from which I thought to escape by taking refuge on this wild coastline. Pain in itself does not, ordinarily, prevent the pursuit of a piece of work—unless the excess of implausibility invades your mental space. In my current (literally) irresolute state, I would no longer know how

to provide that mix of distraction with the requisite dose of folly that results in a work of fiction, a novel. Angels are the exception. We are all prisoners of our sex, whether openly acknowledged, suppressed or lost. And what we experience in others is this tearing apart, more or less effectively disguised. The end of a great love is always a kind of bereavement, the rejection of a state of grace. And yet it was so lightly undertaken. Joy enters our being unannounced. A supernatural energy, a kind of revelation. Chance dictated our first two meetings. It sometimes happens that we meet again someone we first met the day before, or the day before that: a second chance before the fatal anonymity of the big city drags them under forever. I came alongside her for the first—and for me decisive—time under unusual circumstances. It was the ninth of November 1989, the day the Berlin Wall came down. The rain fell in golden sheets that evening. Installed in the back of a taxi, I was returning home passably drunk after a cocktail reception given by my main publisher. The Paris boulevards coursed with the confused bustle of autumn: crowds, car horns and lights. A chance red light and suddenly, the rear door opened. I was submerged in a rustling, fragrant wave of silk or satin. An immense smile, precious and perfect as a fine necklace of pearls, eyes like the cut gems of the soul and, on my cheek, a soft breath more troubling than a stolen kiss: Fedora had thrown herself in next to me, her hip against mine, pleading brightly: “Quick, drive me to the Palais Garnier, I sing Tosca in two hours, hardly time to make up!” She tossed a hundred-franc note onto the front seat. The amused driver quizzed me with a glance in the rear-view mirror. I was headed in the opposite direction, of course, but the idea of giving up the taxi and hailing another never crossed my mind. “Fine, we’ll make a detour, but please, put your money away.” “No way! What do you for a living? An artist, for sure! Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore … What’s your name? Do you have children?” The sharp, quick-fire questioning trilled in the mouth of a coloratura soprano. Her agitation was driven by stage fright and a dread of arriving late. Turning on the charm, I declared my status as an author, and spelled out my as yet pathetically little-known name. “I have read nothing of yours before long!” she exclaimed. “True, I only like poetry. Do you know these lines? I drink within your rift I spread your naked legs I open them like a book In which I read my death.”

Hubert Haddad

The Geometry of a Dream

The taxi continued up Avenue de l’Opéra. In a few moments, Fedora would slip from my grasp. Speechless with emotion, I searched in panic for a saving phrase. But she was already thanking the driver and me—thanking us both equally, it seemed. Already, the taxi was heading for the kerb, turning sharply to pull up in front of the stage door. “Come and see me!” she urged gravely, playfully. “Tosca dies every night …” We watched as she slipped through the stage door and disappeared, in a single dancing movement. Captivated by her scent, her voice, while the car retraced its route towards the Left Bank, I already knew—crushed by her gracile beauty, her enveloping aura of prestige—that I make no attempt to see her again. “I do not exist. I have ceased to exist so that I may be yours,” wrote Johannes, Kierkegaard’s Don Juan, to his giovin principante. But in reality, when we feel destroyed, annihilated, thunderstruck by a momentary encounter, our urge to seduce is quickly submerged in the emotional turmoil; and nothing remains but a feeling of mortification, a deep pool of regret and disappointment to be wiped away, eventually, by the universal mop of time. I could tell her story like this, if I had the heart: on her travels, in great secret, she changes, it seems to her that she becomes younger, that she truly becomes someone else; memories come to her that she has never experienced, or forgotten, as if she had been granted another existence, as if she had entered into the body and thoughts of another woman, younger each night, younger and freer, and so different, as if truly, each night, she became another person.

Thierry Hesse

Demon

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

©Thierry Normand/Éditions de l’Olivier

Translation: Donald Nicholson-Smith mnr.dns@verizon.net

Biography

Thierry Hesse lives in Metz, where he teaches philosophy. Éditions Champ Vallon: Le Cimetière américain, 2003 (Winner, Robert Walser Prize); Jura, 2005. Publications

Families are always the losers in war. Having traveled the length and breadth of the Horn of Africa as a distinguished reporter, Pierre Rotko is well aware of this. He feels this experience of defeat personally, however, when his father, after years of silence, tells him the history of his own family: the fate of his parents, Franz and Elena, Russian Jews murdered by the Nazis, his exile in 1953, and all the suffering shared by those caught up in the nightmare of the war. Pierre realizes that a page of his life, a page of silence and denial, has been turned once and for all. Abandoning his

job and his partner, he embarks on research that he hopes will bring him into possession of his own history. It is during this feverish quest that his demon appears. Does Pierre want to live in fear? In the presence of death? That is precisely what he wants: to experience for himself what is experienced by those cast aside by History. And it is to Grozny that he goes. For Grozny is a city in the midst of war, and, with Chechnya once more under the Russian heel, it turns out to be a tragically perfect place to experience utter desolation.

Prologue This morning around four I was awakened by the nineteen-year-old soldier in the room across from mine. He was groaning. Out on patrol in the region of N’Djamena in Chad, he stepped on a mine—an old model manufactured by Matra Armement, as Richir notes ruefully. Since my repatriation and admission to the Val-de-Grâce Hospital, Richir has been my surgeon, and he is trying to save my leg. The moans of the young soldier alternate with mournful cries. A week ago Richir amputated both his feet, and yesterday he was visited by a captain, sent, I suppose, by the Ministry. I saw a straight-backed, stone-faced officer passing by my door in an impeccably creased uniform. He must have stood stiffly next to the young man just long enough to brief him about his future prostheses, his pension, and his return to civilian life. What could such a ramrod know? Does Matra Armement also manufacture prostheses? The young man’s thighs, spleen and small intestine were all perforated by shrapnel. According to MarieAgnès, who changed my dressings a short while ago, he cries in his sleep. I feel sure he is dreaming about his last patrol. Sometimes I myself dream about my last day in Chechnya. Merab, my Georgian driver, had picked the neighborhood of Michurin for me. A suburb to the northeast of Grozny, Michurin was where the Maïbeks lived. Merab had got to know the family when, after the first Chechnya war, he and his father came to repair cars. Night was falling on the city as we reached Michurin. Ahmad and Zarima Maïbek were quite willing to put me up. A journalist was

a rare bird in Grozny. They accepted my gifts—canned food, an electric razor, a watch—but would not take my money. Their apartment, in a small building at the end of a street, had been damaged but was still habitable. The major damage, Ahmad told me, dated from the second war. Shattered windows. Façades in flames. Torrents of brown smoke. Debris hurled high into the air. Dismembered corpses. Piles of body parts. Streams of blood. By the end of February 1999, with the second war just three months old, Michurin was no longer Michurin. Almost the entire suburb had been transformed into a magma of great dark chunks of masonry, bristling with rusting metal bars and severed wooden beams, under clouds swelled with filth and dust. Beyond Michurin, Grozny as a whole had suffered a similar fate. A fate comparable to that of so many German cities turned into vast expanses of ruin by the Anglo-American air raids of 1942-1945. In those cities, the volume of debris divided by the number of inhabitants was in the tens of cubic meters: more than thirty for Cologne, more than forty for Dresden. And while one cannot compare the aggressors and victims in Dresden and Grozny, the two cities present the same apocalyptic vision of the end of the world. No more than twenty or thirty buildings in Michurin survived the aerial assaults intact. Few families stayed. “People live here” read a message on the door of an apartment building alongside that of the Maïbeks, but the great majority had fled, between bombings, either north towards Ingushetia or south towards the Caucasus Mountains. In December 1999, a few blocks from the Maïbeks’, a Russian tank regiment had come under attack from a commando of boiviki holed up in the surrounding ruins. Hours of fierce fighting led to a Russian withdrawal. It turned out that the boiviki had killed almost a hundred Federal soldiers, reducing a dozen armored vehicles to scrap metal. The bloody corpses of the Russians were left to rot on the street until the next morning. During the night, packs of dogs wandered among the burnt-out tanks, chewing on the odd crewman’s ear, tearing at a hand or dragging off half an arm. And now the Russians had got into the habit of shooting all dogs on sight. In this way they had destroyed thousands of them, or so it was said. The dead animals could be seen all over town, though the number of canine corpses never came close to the number of human ones. Boiviki is what the Russians called the Chechen fighters. It is a pejorative term, closer in meaning to “scum” than to “rebels.” Russians also use the designations “Czechs,” or “black assholes,” or even “Jews” for the peoples of the Caucasus, and many believe, like Lieutenant-General Chamanov, former commanding officer of the 58th Army, which gave its all in Grozny, that the Chechens are the lowest form of life. During my first six weeks in Chechnya I saw no fighting, and no bombs fell on my head. I was in the midst of the war, yet I was, so to speak, in the dark. I often heard shellfire, explosions. I stumbled over corpses, and I sensed

Thierry Hesse

Demon

the despair of people abandoned to their fate. I snapped photographs and took notes. Occasionally I reminded myself that it was my job. The Maïbeks believed as much, and no doubt it was best that they did so. That first evening, Ahmad had asked his wife Zarima to serve us tea and honey cakes. They both wanted me to tell them about Paris, about France. There were four of us around the table: Ahmad, Merab and I—and Zeinap, the “fox-woman,” who before long would come to occupy my thoughts. Once we got past the phrases of welcome, the customary niceties, our conversation languished. It was not merely a matter of language difficulties. Old Ahmad made an effort to be hospitable and friendly in every way, but things were simply not normal, not relaxed. And how could it have been otherwise? I already had it from from Merab that the family no longer had their two boys: Timur, the younger, and Djohar, his brother. The first, killed; the second, missing in action. No one even mentioned them. When you invite a stranger to your home, you silence your troubles. The journalist might report on the Russians’ brutality, describe the destruction of a capital city, a people decimated, and strive to awaken the conscience of Western public opinion, but when it came to Timur and Djohar, that was the family’s own story, their secret sorrow. And yet, wasn’t this what I had come for? Not to alert public opinion and stir consciences, but precisely in search of these secret sorrows? A single idea haunted me: families are always the losers in war. That was what had brought me here. When the celebrations begin on the brightlylit boulevards, when the victors are hailed beneath the bunting and politicians hold forth from their platforms, when the crowds hug and kiss, the families weep as they remember those they have lost, closing themselves up in their sadness It was not yet noon on 27 January, 2002 when I encountered a column of tanks behind the bus station. On the former Lenin Avenue, their heads enveloped in scarves, three women were using long metal rods to delve into the remnants of the post office, searching for dry and not too heavy planks for firewood. I was photographing them when I heard the tanks’ engines. I crossed the avenue, skirted a great hole that had swallowed up half the sidewalk, and started clambering up the rubble. It was piled some ten meters high, coated with the grey and slightly greasy film that lay over the whole city—not just over houses and streets (or what was left of them), but also over the puddles, heaped-up household trash, wrecked cars, animal carcasses, and small bootleg fruit-andvegetable stalls. A painted wooden panel that must have been a door broke under my weight as I tried to avoid sheets of broken glass; eventually I reached the ruined building’s rear wall, which was almost intact, and climbed onto a fairly solid platform, some four square meters in size, and shaped like a jigsaw piece, which was the remains of the second floor. Crouching down, I spotted five or six tanks less than a kilometer away to the west, probably T-90s,

followed by two trucks carrying troops. The convoy was heading in our direction. I signaled to the women. They looked up, exchanged a few words, then without even speaking to me they scrambled off the pile of detritus and bolted down an alley. The sun at this hour was weak, a pale gold, yet I had the impression that the line of tanks was emerging from a ragged fog of ash, water and dust. Advancing through this haze, the column halted every hundred meters or so. At each stop a trio of soldiers, heads hunched into shoulders, rifle in hand, would leap from their vehicles and slip away. At the head of the avenue the column came to a halt. That morning, all of a sudden, I was afraid: the first time I had felt fear in Chechnya. But the fear was not for me. I was afraid for Zeinap, for her sister and her mother, for the Maïbeks too, for all the families that put me in mind of my own. None of which prevented me from taking several rounds in the leg.

Thierry Hesse

Demon

Tonight, from the window of my room, I can see athletically built young men in the courtyard. Some are missing an arm, and many are moving about with difficulty, in wheelchairs or relying on artificial limbs. For my part, I am back at square one: Paris-Grozny-Paris. I am just ten or so metro stations from my home, which is barely half an hour’s walk from my father’s. I have not been back to his place since he killed himself. Once I am able to, once I have pushed open the door to his apartment and set about clearing it out room by room, I am sure I shall feel better. In the meantime I propose to recount the story of my family, before, during and after the war that, some sixty years ago, destroyed Europe and half of the world. The same war which led me to Chechnya and made that history truly mine.

Hadrien Laroche

Restitution

Publisher: Flammarion Date of Publication: August 2009 Foreign Rights Manager: Patricia Stansfield pstansfield@flammarion.fr

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

Biography

Born in Paris in 1963 and a former pupil of the École normale supérieure, Hadrien Laroche is the author of an essay on Jean Genet, Le Dernier Genet (Seuil, “Fiction & Cie” collection, nominated for the Prix Fémina for best essay, and translated into English and Japanese), as well as several novels. Restitution is the last part of a triptych about how “man is orphaned by humanity”. Publications Les Hérétiques, Flammarion, 2006; Les Orphelins, Allia, 2005 and J’ai Lu, 2006.

Henry Berg was abandoned by his family as a child during the war. He went on to inherit the family fortune then squandered it and erased his identity. His son is now in Vilnius attending a conference on works of art plundered during the Holocaust, and he is staying at the Mona Lisa guest house, the nerve centre for a child trafficking ring. His father’s fate is echoed in the stories of despoiled artefacts and the laughter of orphaned children. Restitution provides a fictional setting to tackle the question of pillage, and is a sometimes uncomfortable exploration of memory, identity and indebtedness.

No one was waiting for me with my name. Vilnius airport is not far from the city, and on the way I could see the driver’s name, to the right of his portrait on the licence which was displayed where customers could read it. The Mercedes hurtled down a boulevard and turned twice before going back onto the ring road that took traffic round the old city. Then we turned off into the old town and quite soon came to a stop at a crossroads in its tortuous streets. On paying, I thought I stowed my wallet back in the pocket of my raincoat but actually dropped it straight onto the seat. Black leather on black moleskin: invisible. Before driving away with my wallet on the rear seat of his vehicle, the driver dropped me off under a lamppost outside a hotel that was closed. Great start. I paced round the building under that yellow light for a good hour. The stone walls suggested not so much an establishment for travellers as a monastery. For a hallucinatory moment, those walls reminded me of my family’s imposing house on rue Vivant Denon. Bankers from father to son. No lights at the windows. No one. Luckily a woman came past; I saw her appear a bit further down, at the point where the street turned a corner, a scarf over her head, a shopping bag in her hand, the other hand dangling by her side. It was late and the old woman was going steadily home. She led me two or three streets further on, passing through a small square, along a corridor of scaffolding up against the side of a building, below a wooden roof then across a courtyard where cars were parked. Standing under a porch, she pointed further up the street to the sign for the Mona Lisa guest house. The reception desk was on the first floor of this Neo-German, alpine style building. The staircase up to reception was steep, and I went up to the counter with my leather suitcase. There was a girl there clattering away on the keyboard

of the computer, surfing on a celebrity site—something like Hello or Okay— whose pages lit up the screen and beyond. As I leant over the counter, I was met by a sour expression, or rather a serious one, which then softened. Green eyes, black hair. She raised her eyebrows at her visitor: an alert face, pale as milk and alive with thousands of micro-movements. In the depths of the sea the sun’s rays glimmer off stones, creating a myriad flashes of coloured light, bright glints of colour that appear to swim through the deep. Lit by the screen which was now back on the guest house homepage, in the glare of this luminescent aquarium, her skin quivered with the nervous energy of a hummingbird. This girl was extraordinarily alive. Then her fingers, with their painted nails, slowly began the registration process. My eyes undulated over her strawberry T-shirt. “First name?” she asked in English. “Hen-” Just as I was giving her my name a blast of noise from the floor above swallowed my words like the goat chomping the telegram in that scene from Jour de fête. “With an ‘i’.” “Surname?” “Berg.” The place did not seem to want an imprint of a credit card or any proof of identity. Just as well. In a language that was foreign to us both, I explained that I was looking for somewhere out of the way, good value and in a lively part of town, that a reservation had been made for me at a nearby hotel, that I had arrived that same evening and found the door shut, and a passer-by had brought me to where I was now. I pointed out that, by telephone, I had secured a very favourable rate in the other establishment and I did not want to pay any more. “How much can you pay?” In my native language. Solemnly, detached, with icy determination. It was a gamble. My surprise and a sense of urgency made me name the sum agreed with the other hotel, less fifteen percent. “We’ll sort that out tomorrow,” the girl concluded. What the hell is that little boy doing in the corridor? He should be in bed at this time of night. And what a lot of trophies on the walls of this spiralling staircase! And what a huge bookcase for such a modest guest house! With my raincoat folded over my arm, I slipped into my room on the top floor. It had a sloping wooden ceiling. I was thirsty, and looked around for a glass. In that bare room—table, chair, somewhere to wash, wardrobe, nothing more—there wasn’t one. Barefoot, I went back down to reception to ask for one. When I was on the landing, I just glimpsed a man holding a small boy, the adult’s hand forming a clamp on the child’s forearm. Although the boy made no effort to fight, he did not look happy about being manhandled like that. From behind

I could see a bald head, traditional shooting clothes, a green Loden coat and an alpenstock both dotted with little emblems, and in his free hand an umbrellacum-shooting stick, just what you need between drives. They both disappeared through a concealed door. On my way down, I picked up from one of the stairs a bendy crocodile, two more or less edible snakes with rings through their noses and a saucer; there was also a small green wax taper. Delicious. I went up to the counter at reception. The computer screen was displaying a diptych. Two photographs, taken at school or in a photo-booth, showing the faces of a girl and a boy of about ten. They were stuck into the digital family album of some sort of kinship, although it was glaringly obvious that there was nothing to connect these representatives of different nationalities, yet it was equally clear that they had more than one feature in common. The green-eyed chamber maid popped out from behind the crimson curtain masking her lodge. She immediately tapped away at the computer keyboard and switched the screen to her precious celebrity site. Still, I did have time to recognise a face in the pair of butterflies pinned to that now hidden virtual page: the little boy with the head of blond hair I had seen earlier being dragged along the corridor by a fist of steel. I looked at her. And she me. Somewhere in our eye contact I could make out the hint of a rich man’s joy in the depths of a poor man’s eye. “There isn’t a glass in my room. Could I have one please?” “I’ll be right up,” the girl replied. I went back up. A little later someone knocked at my door. Instead of half opening it, putting my hand out and taking the glass, I stepped aside to let the girl in. Holding the glass of water out in front of her in her left hand, she walked into the room and put it down on the desk. She turned round. I asked her name. “Letitia. Letitia Ann Lew. Pronounced loo,” she added, before leaving the room as she had come in, gracefully. Then I hung up my raincoat which I had thrown onto the bed when I first came in. As I had just seen in the taxi, the pocket of that raincoat had an in-built emptying facility. More of a hole than a pocket. I can genuinely say I throw money down the drain of my raincoat through that pocket. I bought it secondhand, and the circumstances were unusual enough for me to remember them. Every Thursday I go to my butcher in the capital city where the Organisation is based. Three people work in the shop: him, his wife who operates the till, and a solid man who does not look happy to be there, the odd one out. He never serves me as pleasantly as the boss. The woman sits behind the counter beside two refrigerated units at right angles to each other: one for cooked meat, the other for raw. Chickens and ducks roast on spits out on the street. After school their daughter sits on the stool her mother has vacated and leans on the counter reading. They make a thankless trio. He wears a cap, is scrappily shaved and has red blotches on his cheeks; his wife wears glasses with great

Hadrien Laroche

Restitution

thick lenses, and a green hand-knitted woollen pullover. “Chateaubriand!” the boss announces as I come in. “Yes, Mr Meurtdesoif.” And as usual, there in that butcher’s shop, which is on the next street to the second-hand shop, not far from the headquarters of the Organisation that has sent me here on official business, I was given a prime steak yet again. The man in the cap told me what to order. I didn’t dare ask for anything else because it would feel somehow like breaking the contract I had with the peak of the boss’s cap. A tacit agreement that means every Thursday I pay by credit card for a fillet steak which I eat blue. “Finishing the Materoli soon?” Meurtdesoif also asked anxiously when he handed me the credit card machine. At the time the Mission was keeping me busy with the international version of a report called Mattéoli, about how French Jewish property was plundered, in particular the volume devoted to the illicit traffic in and restitution of works of art. The day I ask him for three prime lamb chops from homebred Périgord sheep will be quite a relief. Then I will feel I am exercising my free will. Shifting from chateaubriand to chops would confirm that there is a possibility I can change direction in life. Next I went to the second-hand shop. When I got there I put the dripping chateaubriand, which had been wrapped in paper and slipped into a pink plastic bag, onto a shelf above the till. Butchers do not usually take too much trouble with packaging what they sell. Similarly, they joint carcasses without any fuss, hacking meat the way Moses beat the Rock, without hate or passion. I put my bag with its piece of meat on top of the gloves, close to the ties and wallets, perhaps with the consent of the manager, a man with a bald head, who can keep an eye on things left above the till; most likely I did not ask him at all. I did it to have my hands free so I could flick through the rails of shirts, suits and coats on hangers. It is almost impossible to flick through clothes properly without two free hands. The right hand holds the hanger while the other feels the fabric, opens the collar, checks the brand name and size, runs down the sleeve, fingers the ticket attached to the cuff buttons and notes the price, before going onto the next one and then to the till. That is how I found my second-hand raincoat. After unpacking my bag in my room, I perched on the dormer window. I smoked a cigarette on the windowsill, looking out over the town’s roofs and the sky overhead. Two women had already welcomed me since I arrived. They had done it kindly but without emotion, as you would with a starving man, by handing him a glass of water. It is not the first time I have lost my papers and money. Last year I lost two credit cards then my own father, twice. I am still alive, though. Tomorrow I plan to ask Herb if he wouldn’t mind being my bank for a couple of days.

Hervé Le Tellier

Enough About Love

Publisher: Éditions JC Lattès Date of Publication: August 2009 Foreign Rights Manager: Eva Bredin ebredin@editions-jclattes.fr

Translation: Ian Monk ian.monk@wanadoo.fr

Biography

Hervé Le Tellier is a writer, member of the Oulipo and one of the “Papous” of the famous France Culture radio show. His most recent book was a collection of poetry, Zindien (Le Castor Astral, 2009). Publications Among his recent novels and short fiction: Je m’attache très facilement, Mille et une nuits, 2007 (prix Guanahani du Roman d’amour); La Chapelle Sextine [The Sextine Chapel] Estuaire, 2005; Inukshuk, Le Castor Astral, 1999. Two of his books, The Sextine Chapel and All our Thoughts, will shortly be published in the usa by Dalkey Archive.

“That year, the planet experienced its warmest autumn for five centuries. But no more mention will be made of this providentially clement climate, even though it did perhaps play a part. This tale covers a period of three months, or a little more. She—or he—who doesn’t want—or no longer wants—to hear about love should put this book down now.” So begins Enough About Love. Anna and Louise could be sisters, but they don’t know each other. They are married, mothers, and happy. On almost the same day, Anna, a psychiatrist, crosses the path of Yves, a writer, while Louise,

the lawyer, runs into Anna’s analyst, Thomas. At forty-something, such a decisive moment in life (although lives are made up entirely of such decisive moments) love at first sight is still possible. But when you have mistakenly thought that your life is already mapped out, desire and freedom come at a high price. Hervé Le Tellier gently follows the curves of their trajectories. With real affection, he has created a gallery of tender yet unflinching portraits of wives, lovers and husbands.

Thomas Towns should have spacious parks. Parks are the precondition for young people’s lives to change, to take a side alley, or an unexpected direction; so that they can fulfil at least a part of their potentialities. So it was that on a February morning in 1974, a teenager entered the Luxembourg gardens in Paris. He was wearing a woollen scarf, had long hair, and his name was Thomas. Thomas Le Gall. Thomas was a good pupil. At the age of just sixteen, he was already studying advanced mathematics. He was supposed to fulfill his mother’s ambitions and win a place at a prestigious grande école, preferably the Polytechnique. But on that February morning, when Thomas left home and took the metro—in the Barbès quarter of the eighteenth arrondissement of Paris—he did not get off at the station near his school. He continued on line No 4 to Saint-Michel station, then walked up the boulevard to the park. Then he headed towards the octagonal pool and strolled past the statues of the queens of France, before sitting down on a metal chair. He had prepared his escapade. He had several books in his bag. It wasn’t that cold. That evening, he went back home. He was hungry. All he had had for lunch was a baguette and some fruit. The next day, the day after that, and then every day, Thomas went back to the Luxembourg gardens. They became his home base. He sometimes met up with fellow Bohemians there: a girl of his age called Manon, a blonde, with a turned-up nose and freckles, even more lost in life than he was—the smell of

patchouli would always remind him of her—and Kader, a tall black man, aged probably about thirty, who played guitar in the metro. When it rained, Thomas would stand under one of the kiosques, or warm himself up at Le Malebranche, a smoky café where he soon became a regular, with student friends from Lycée Louis-le-Grand. During their discussions of politics, books, their rows about Proust, Althusser, Trotsky and Barthes, his vehemence was in direct proportion to his ignorance of the texts. Later, when he really read them, he blushed at all the nonsense he’d said, amazed at the impunity of imposture. March arrived, then April. Thomas informed his teachers that he was dropping out. But of course he lied to his parents. He discovered how simple and even exciting lying can be, and how good he was at it. Did he stink of tobacco? He would rant about the students smoking during their exams. Did he need more money for lunch? He would claim that meals now had to be paid for in cash, and that he suspected the manager of lining his pockets. Had he come home too early by mistake? In that case, an oxidation-reduction experiment had gone wrong and—“you’re not going to believe this,” the chemistry teacher had burnt himself. He had never talked so much about school before he stopped going there. One May evening, Thomas had just come home and was spinning that day’s tale. His father looked at him in silence. Suddenly his mother erupted. They knew. His school had phoned: he had forgotten to return a library book, even though he’d left three months before. Arguments, rage, rupture. Thomas would never go to a prestigious grande école. He left the family home and took refuge with a friend. He survived thanks to odd jobs—still possible thanks to the full employment of the time—while off and on studying psychology and sociology, lengthening his adolescence by another ten years. One May morning, a call from a police station abruptly ended it. Piette, the woman he loved, had just been discharged from the hospital where she was being treated for depression. She had thrown herself under a train. Over the next three days, Thomas took care of the arrangements organised the ceremony and buried his lover. Once they had filled in her grave, he went home. He only came out again a week later, clean-shaven, with his curly black hair shaved down to a crew cut. He started studying again, really studying. At the time this tale begins, a brass plaque beside the entrance to 28 rue Monge, not far from the Luxembourg gardens, summed up his career.

Hervé Le Tellier

Enough About Love

Dr THOMAS LE GALL psychiatre, psychanalyste ancien interne des hôpitaux psychiatriques de Paris

It portrayed him as extremely professional. But then Thomas Le Gall was now extremely professional. On the fourth floor, a three-room family flat had been turned into a psychoanalyst’s consulting rooms. Thomas had kept the modern, spacious kitchen. He sometimes lunched there off a spring roll bought at the Chinese takeaway. The bedroom, to the left of the front door, was now the waiting room: its waxed floor, two deep armchairs and coffee table made it look vaguely like an English club; the curtain-less window looked out over the street. His thirty-minute sessions were organised once every hour, so his patients never encountered one another. On certain days, Thomas consulted in the large living room: there would have been a clear view of the sky and the plane trees in the courtyard if exotic wooden blinds were not filtering the sunlight. The door was lined with black velvet, while the olive green of the sofa was intended to be relaxing. African masks looked down kindly on the room, like the Moai statues which protect Easter Island while turning their backs on the sea. Behind the LouisPhilippe desk, there was a Stephen Lowry industrial landscape, of a bluish grey. The other wall featured a very small, very dark painting by Bram Van Velde, from the time of his friendship with Matisse. It was the only piece of any real value. Thomas had acquired it at the Drouot Auction Rooms, and had paid rather too much for it—if paying too much for art has any meaning, apart from reminding one to stop going to auctions at Drouot. Thomas was well aware that what he had was a caricature of a psychoanalyst’s study, but at least he’d left out the Dogon statues and nail-filled fetishes. But the expression of decorum is not without importance, and Thomas paid attention to this point. In the high, long bookcase covering the far wall, literature cohabited with psychoanalysis in easy-going conflict. Joyce rubbed shoulders with Pierre Kahn, Leiris was wedged next to Lacan, a Queneau—not neatly put away, a good sign for a book—leant against a Deleuze. When Queneau died, Thomas had not yet turned fifteen. As for Queneau’s famous song performed by Juliette Greco, Si tu crois xava, xava xava xa, xava durer toujours la saison des za la saison des zamours … Thomas Le Gall had not believed in the “season” of lurve for a very long time. His wrinkles were more pronounced, his curly hair, now more salt than pepper, was receding up his forehead, his face had widened, becoming a little puffy. From being forty-something, he was now well on the way to being sixty-something, expecting things to go from bad to worse. The half-moon clock on the mantelpiece showed nine o’clock. Thomas had turned off its chime so as not to be disturbed during his sessions. He was waiting in his desk chair, reading a two day old Le Monde, and tidying away a few papers. His first appointment was late. Anna Stein was always late. Two, ten, sometimes fifteen minutes, and always for excellent reasons: the babysitter not turning up, Parisian traffic jams, no place to park. Thomas had suggested

a different time of day, but she had refused. Perhaps she liked making men wait. Thomas believed in the wisdom of popular sayings. Anna Stein. A twelve-year analysis that was now coming to an end. For the first few years, like most people, Anna had just talked on. She went through her whole life, then when she’d gone through all her memories, extracted every last crumb, she felt like a dry riverbed, at a loss for words. She then went around in circles for a year, maybe more. It was only when she admitted defeat and finally said in anger: “What else do you expect me to tell you?” that she was at last able to start speaking without thinking and, as Freud put it, say “whatever comes to mind,” without trying to create a fiction or construct a logical narrative. Anna was now making associations, discovering connections, recreating meaning. She was making progress. The day before yesterday, at the very end of her session, she had revealed: “I’ve just met someone. A man, a writer.” On the large notebook devoted to Anna Stein, Thomas slowly jotted down a few words: “met someone”—who else can you meet but someone, he wondered—then “man” and “writer”. On the left, he would separate out what seemed to him to be the factual elements of what she had said then, on the right, he would write what he took to be her word game, or formalisation. Anna had added: “It was love at first sight”. This clichéd expression had amused him. Then, in pencil he had drawn a dotted line, at one end of which he had written the letter X, then an A for Anna. Changing perspective and logic, he had then put the two letters X and A together in an oval diagram, in a Boolean set. He had not tried to make her say anything else. On his Westminster clock, it was now several minutes past the half hour. He had just said: — See you Thursday.

Hervé Le Tellier

Enough About Love

Anna Anna Stein was about to turn forty. She looked ten years younger, while in her comfortable milieu the average is five years. But the imminence of decline and the voodoo of numbers chilled her, even though she still felt as if she was riding the tail of the comet of her adolescence. Forty years … She imagined that there was a Before and an After, as in advertisements for hair tonics, already mourning for what once was, and in terror of what was still to come. A childhood memory: Anna is seven, with a sister and two brothers, the youngest one can barely talk, while she is the oldest. It’s not easy being the oldest, the one who gets told off because the others are still too young. But Anna is a charmer, she is still her mother’s favourite. Anna has arranged her sister and brothers around her in a semi-circle. The golden light coming through the window is from the setting sun, probably a Sunday in the country.

Standing with a book in her hand, she is reading aloud. But she is also spicing up the story, which is too simple for her taste, with dragons and fairies, ogres and princes. Then things become extremely confusing, she herself occasionally loses the thread. The children listen to their joyous, radiant big sister. They are fascinated, captivated, frightened too. Waving her arms about and with the odd leap, Anna mimes the action, careful to hold her young audience’s attention. She’s sure of it: she’ll be an actress, or a dancer or a singer. At the age of 15, Anna pinned back her dark hair to reveal the nape of her neck. She triumphantly adopted her brand new woman’s body, wearing panther sheath dresses and high heels, with aggressive bras. She dreamed of a life in the limelight, in the public eye, and the names of cities such as New York, Buenos Aires or Shanghai bewitched her. She started a rock group, with her as the singer. She called her band “Anna and her Three Lovers”. After all, the guitarist, bassist and drummer were all in love with her. But in vain; one slightly less than the others, but only just. At 20, Anna slipped on the white coat of a medical student. Hers fitted her snugly, more for elegance than comfort, with a low neckline and, as only her shoes peeked out underneath it, she expended a great deal of energy in choosing them. They were often fluorescent. After a few years, she became Doctor Stein. Being an intelligent dilettante, she passed all her exams: she was far too proud to fail, and not yet proud enough to dare to fail. The adventurous life with all of its necessary transgressions drifted away, and she now knew that, despite her long legs and beautiful breasts, she would never dance in a cabaret. Her mother was a doctor, Anna became a psychiatrist. She married a surgeon, also Jewish, and they had two children, Karl, then Lea. “A little Jewish enterprise”, she would sometimes say with a laugh. But she still kept the intrepid gait and the gleam in her smile from when she was twenty, her nostalgia for the Bohemian life. It was her delicate way of showing that she had never really given up on being in the limelight. So, Anna had become Doctor Stein. But did she really believe it herself? One day, when she called the hospital to talk to a colleague, she said sharply: — Good morning, could I please speak to Doctor Stein? In a daze, she hung up at once, praying that the operator had not recognised her voice. She waited over an hour before daring to ring back.

Laurent Mauvignier

Some Men

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

Translation: Shaun Whiteside shaun.whiteside1@btinternet.com

Biography

Laurent Mauvignier was born in 1967. With Les Éditions de Minuit: Dans la foule, 2006 (Prix du roman Fnac 2006) (re-ed. coll. “Double”, 2009); Le Lien, 2005; Seuls, 2004 (re-ed. coll. “Double”, 2004); Ceux d’à côté, 2002; Apprendre à finir, 2000 (Prix Livre Inter 2001) (re-ed. coll. “Double”, 2006); Loin d’eux, 1999 (re-ed. coll. “Double” 2002).

Publications

They had been called to Algeria at the time of the “événements”, in 1960. Two years later, Bernard, Rabut, Février and others have returned to France. They have kept their mouths shut and got on with their lives. But sometimes it takes almost nothing, a winter birthday and a present in a pocket, for the past to surge back up into the lives of people who thought they could bury it.

It was just after a quarter to one in the afternoon, and he was surprised that all eyes weren’t on him, that no one seemed surprised about how he too had made an effort and was wearing a matching jacket and trousers, a white shirt and one of those leatherette ties that they used to make twenty years ago and that you can still find in discount stores. Today, they’ll say he doesn’t smell too bad. They’ll joke that he’s there for a free meal and that for once he won’t have to pretend that he’s just dropped by. They’ll call him Charcoal, as they have done for years, and some will remember that he has a real Christian name under the filth and stench of wine, under the slovenliness of his sixty-three years. They will remember that behind Charcoal you could find Bernard. They will hear his sister calling him by his Christian name: Bernard. They will remember that he hasn’t always been this guy who sponges off everyone else. They will watch him surreptitiously, so as not to arouse his mistrust. They will see him with the same hair grown grey and yellow from the tobacco and charcoal, and the same thick, dirty moustache. And then there are the deep blackheads on his pockmarked, bulbous nose, as round as an apple. And his blue eyes, with pink, swollen skin below the lids. His broad, solid body. And this time, if they paid attention, they would see the traces of a comb in his swept-back hair, and make out his attempts at cleanliness. And they would even say he hasn’t been drinking and doesn’t look too bad. They saw him park his moped outside Patou’s, as he did every day, and then take a detour before crossing the street to get here, the village hall, to find his sister Solange celebrating her sixtieth birthday and her retirement with all the rest of us, cousins, brothers and friends.

And it’s not right then, but afterwards of course, when it’s all over and we’ve left behind that Saturday and empty village hall with its smells of cold tobacco and wine and its torn, stained paper napkins, after the snow has finally covered the concrete slabs in the doorway and the footprints of all those guests who have left to go home in wonderment at that day, it is only then that I too will see each scene again and be amazed that they are all so clear and present in my memory. I will remember that when the time came to give the presents I had watched him, standing a little aside from the others, fumbling with something in his jacket pocket. And though I’d never seen him wearing it, I recognised that jacket. I mean I’d never seen it on him, it was a suede jacket lined with wool as could be seen from the collar. It was worn, which made me think that it must have belonged to one of his or Solange’s brothers, who had given away some of his old things in exchange for a bit of help, a load of firewood to put in the garage, or even for nothing, just to give a brother some unwanted clothes. That’s what I thought as I watched him, because he kept his hand deep in his pocket and seemed to be holding or handling an object, maybe a pack of cigarettes, no, obviously not, because I’d seen him take his cigarettes out of the seat pocket of his trousers then put them back.

Laurent Mauvignier

Some Men

People had started talking more loudly and laughing too, with laughter that spread from one mouth to another, to the sound of corks from bottles of sparkling wine and clinking glasses. Solange had watched dozens and dozens of friends and acquaintances passing in front of her, with faces as familiar as the photographs in the glass display case in her sitting-room. Come on, Solange, you need a drink. And Solange had drunk. Go on, Solange. And Solange had smiled, talked, laughed in turn and then we almost forgot that she was there, letting her pass from one group to another, because groups had formed, according to closeness or acquaintanceship, with some people slipping from one to another, while others avoided one or another. I don’t know if she avoided coming towards him, given that she couldn’t dodge this invitation, but I do know how much she dreaded it, even more than she dreaded the presence of Owl and her husband, and Jean-Jacques, Micheline and Évelyne, and others besides. But him there. Just there. Charcoal. Bernard. That unease I had noticed in her several times from the guilt she felt when she hid in the kitchen so as not to open the door to him, when he went down to La Bassée and, after a lengthy stop at Patou’s, he reached the gate, bawling that he loved his sister, that he wanted to see his sister, that he had to speak to her, I have to, I have to, he said, yelling until sometimes he got threatening, because

no one came and all the new houses around him only echoed with silence and emptiness. Amid this silence and houses as hollow as caves his voice seemed to lose itself, dwindle away, fade until he gave up and grumbled all the way along the road to his moped, which brought him home or back to Patou’s, where he would finish drowning his disappointment at drawing a blank by having another drink, just one for the road, until Patou finally convinced him that Solange must be at work, people have to work, she is a single mother, after all. And in the end he would say yes, probably, I understand, my sister is on her own, my sister and her children. He would lower his eyes and blush at such unfairness, such a mess, he would say to the customers, to anyone who would listen, or rather to people who had nothing better to do than stay there to hear him rather than listen to him, in spite of Jean-Marc’s or Patous’s voices kindly lecturing him. Yes, Charcoal, we know, yes, Charcoal, yes, it’s true, Charcoal. And as he left at last he would spit by the door, always in the same place, always unsteady, two inches away from collapsing, but never collapsing, robust even in his way of remaining pitiful, weak and sick at heart. It was his impatience. It was his way of smiling. With a kind of hostility in his presence, or mistrust, as always, or even, in fact, a kind of condescension. That’s what I’ve always thought. Even when seeing him like that, more scoured than clean, all his cleanness smelling of effort, work, a desperate need to be presentable. And that afternoon I looked at him for a long time. I don’t know why, but my eyes drifted back to him. And he didn’t see me. So I watched him swapping a few words with Jean-Marcel, or Francis, I watched him smiling at children he didn’t recognise. And then all of a sudden he made up his mind. I saw him pulling himself up, standing completely straight and looking around quite openly this time, not as he had done until now, on the sly, but stretching his neck and opening his eyes wide. I noticed that he’d taken an object out of his pocket, but it was too small for me to see or understand. I just spotted a black shape being swallowed by his palm. His fingers closed immediately. His fist was tight, broad, thick and wrinkled. And then he stepped forward. And then he called Solange. And then, stepping towards her, he called Solange more and more loudly. Until people stopped for a moment, looking at him in amazement at his momentum, such sudden movement, his smile and his energy, and I would have been inclined to say that he had a visionary’s faith and I have my reasons for thinking so and seeing him like that. But it wasn’t that, it was the joy of a slightly odd man who was out of step with the world, who can’t have liked being there, and who certainly wouldn’t have come if it hadn’t been for Solange’s invitation. I mean he

wouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have come if the invitation had come from any of his other brothers or sisters, who he spoke to every now and again while still sometimes accepting a few of their rare invitations, but only to thank them for a gift of old clothes or because he needed to eat, from hunger, because it was hunger that drew him out of his lair. They parted to let him pass. It took a certain time for the amazement to swell enough for movements, glances and speech to stop. It took time for movements to slow and settle. But it took more than a gesture or a laugh. ItÂ took a cry.

Laurent Mauvignier

Some Men

Léonora Miano

Crimson Dawns

Publisher: Plon Date of Publication: August 2009 Foreign Rights Manager: Rebecca Byers, Sylvie Breguet rebecca.byers@editions-plon.com sylvie.breguet@editions-plon.com

Translation: Jane Marie Todd fmost@aol.com

Biography

Léonora Miano was born in Douala, Cameroon, in 1973, and has lived in France since 1991. To date she has published three novels, which were hailed and acclaimed by critics and the general public. She also published five short stories in spring 2008 in éditions Flammarion’s “Étonnants classiques” series, under the title Afropean Soul et autres nouvelles [Afropean soul and other stories]. In early April 2009, Soulfood équatoriale [Equatorial soulfood] appeared in the “Exquis d’écrivains” series of NiL Éditions, which asks authors of fiction to write unreservedly texts inspired by the pleasures of the table. In this short collection, Léonora Miano depicts a journey in an Africa more peaceable and personal than the country depicted in her novels. Publications From Plon: Tels des astres éteints [Like dead stars], 2008; Contours du jour qui vient [The shape of the coming day], 2006, winner of the prix Goncourt des Lycéens (repr. Pocket, 2008); L’Intérieur de la nuit, 2005, winner of the prix révélation des Lauriers verts de la Forêt des Livres 2005 and the prix LouisGuilloux 2006 (repr. Pocket, 2006), translated into English as Dark Heart of the Night, forthcoming at University of Nebraska Press.

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Epa was recruited by Isilo, the warlord who dreams of restoring the grandeur of a whole region of equatorial Africa. Taken deep into an isolated area to be trained in combat, Epa discovers that he is surrounded by mysterious presences: on several occasions, he glimpses shadowy figures in chains, demanding reparation for past crimes. Across the continent, the spirits of the disappeared from the slave trade exude bitterness and madness, waiting for justice to be done … . Having managed to escape, Epa encounters Ayané, an enigmatic and attentive girl who helps

him recover his taste for life. How to give the continent the chance to experience luminous dawns? Epa, to exorcise the past of an Africa that persists in causing suffering to itself, will have to find his former companions in misfortune and return them to their families. After L’Intérieur de la nuit and Contours du jour qui vient, Les Aubes écarlates completes the trilogy that Léonora Miano has devoted to the soul of the African continent.

The gathering was silent. Epupa understood that her appearance left them speechless. Even for her it was not so simple taking on this new role. Everything was unfolding as if she had to share her body with another. To stand mute in a place hidden from her own being, while observing the actions of this one wearing her face, using her voice. No one understood a word of what she was saying, beginning with the person she said she was looking for. Eso turned toward the young man who had brought her to that place. He did not breathe a word, but his eyes were eloquent. If this were a joke, it did not amuse him, the guilty party would be punished. Watching her anew, he seemed to be looking for something to say, but not a word came. Something about her left him defenseless. The woman fixed her gaze on Eso, whom she had never seen before and who did not know her. She questioned him, however, as if they were intimates: What are you doing here when Esaka is searching for you? Of Ibon’s children, you’re the only one who did not step over your mother’s grave. Like each of us, you must make your return to the origin. Eso howled plaintively and leapt at the young woman, hands outstretched. Aïda, Ayané, and Dr Sontané spontaneously intervened, throwing themselves as one between the young man and the woman. They all tumbled to the earth, with the exception of Epupa, who contemplated the disorder briefly before ordering Ebumbu to bring her a chair. This was no way to welcome strangers.

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Eso was on the ground, crushed under the weight of Epupa’s defenders. Ebumbu did not know what to do without orders from his chief. Since the latter remained silent, Ebumbu moved toward the back of the room, found a chair, and brought it to the newcomer. She sat down in it and resumed her speech, which no one—apart from Eso and herself—understood as yet. This time, she addressed the gathering. Nonchalantly pointing her finger at Eso, she presented him to them: This is Eso. Son of Esaka and his third wife, Ibon. He was born in Eku, even though he does not seem to remember it, even if it seems to him that no one remembers. One day, when he was twelve years old, Eso disappeared. He had gone off to the big city to work, to bring back enough to help his family. That day, contrary to habit, Eso was alone. On the road between Eku and Sombé, he had quarreled with his best friend, Ewudu. So they separated when they came to the city, making no promise to meet up again, as they always did, at the same place where they had parted, and before nightfall. Epupa explained that, on that fateful day, Ewudu, not so angry as to abandon his friend, had waited. In vain. While working as a porter in the busy market of Kalati, Eso had been kidnapped. Everyone knew the rest. Epupa had not come to explain how Eso had become who he was. The events of the present, she said, interested her only insofar as they arose from ancient breaches left agape in the surface of the Continent. Now the populations spent their existence trying as they might to step around or over these pits. Clearly, on ground riddled with so many graves, symbolic and real, the practice was arduous, inhuman. Was it not time to know exactly what it was about? The world sometimes pretended to ponder the fate of the Continental peoples. It was on television, in the opulent homes of the local bourgeois, who, in the latter part of an evening, would be watching broadcasts produced on apc. From time to time, Continentals who had left behind the furor of the original land were invited to diagnose the malady, to propose a remedy. They would speak a great deal, without having anything to say. At the end of the program, the problem remained unsolved. That was understandable: away from the Continent, the question could not be asked as it ought to be. It arose from depths inaccessible to outsiders, whatever goodwill they might have. They could talk only of economics, politics, law. In reality, they evoked only the consequences of something impossible for them to comprehend. The Continental malady was spiritual. It was in that realm that the drama continued to take shape, engendering the repercussions known to the manifest world. The fault did not reside only in the traffic of human beings, which Continentals were not the only ones to have practiced. The Continental sin lay in forgetting: those who were deported in the triangular trade who had

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not populated or fertilized the Americas had perished in the waves. Words in Continental languages were on their lips at the time. As they were going under, they invoked the name of the god as in their native country. They called out to the clan, the tribe. To this day, their bones had not disintegrated. Something of them remained, screaming still, which everyone claimed not to hear. They demanded memory, a worthy place of burial that would allow them not to be, as they still were, suspended between this world and the next. This cargo whowhich had never reached any shore was asking for the right finally to die. The right to be wrested from silence, which was not death, but the refusal of deliverance. So long as peace was not granted them, these spirits would deny it to the Continent. Their sorrow would seep into the existence of the people, who would no longer know their own would no longer recognize them. Because the people had lost track of their own blood, they had poisoned their own existence, had cast it into the lava flows, immersing it in torrents of mud. That was everyday life now in the bitter heart of the Continent: blood had become water. Like water, it stagnated, grew fetid, made the atmosphere reek.

Léonora Miano

Crimson Dawns

Epupa fell silent for a moment. Everyone felt the weight of her authority. With a light hand, she smoothed a wrinkle in the red fabric of her dress and again fixed her blazing eyes on Eso’s. She said to him: You think your family did not look for you … . Since you’ve been traveling the length and breadth of our country’s heart, on many occasions you’ve had the opportunity to return to Eku. When you went there to kidnap your brothers, you did not utter your name. You did not try to find out if your parents were still alive. Those who were searching for you could not find you because your heart had rejected them. You are not the only one at fault, but we shall see about that later … . Eso did not stir. His eyes were filled with fear of this woman, who knew things about him that he had forgotten. He shared the beliefs of the peoples of that equatorial zone of the Continent and knew that, as the saying goes, Epupa had not come alone. Sitting across from them all, she let them hear the voices of the spirits, the disappeared. She saw beyond the visible, traveled through time. The young man lowered his eyes. Even Isilo had not had that power. If he crossed that woman, the reprisals that would follow were unimaginable. Epupa continued, reminding him that he had been a close associate of Isilo’s for a long time. He had men under his command, the freedom to come and go. It was not as if his parents’village were on the moon. He had never thought of stopping off there. Now these were the facts. Ewudu, returning to Eku alone, had along the way lamented the fate of his brother, persuaded that evil had befallen him. As soon

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as he arrived in the village, he went to Ibon’s hut and told her everything. Esaka was away, as the men of the village often were. He would not return for several months. His wives, Ibon being the third, had no way to get in touch with him. Eso’s mother listened to the child who had come to inform her. Then she withdrew into her hut, asking not to be disturbed. She performed her ablutions, put on a clean pagne, knelt to implore Nyambey to give her the strength to face the situation. Next she went out, walking around the hut to the family’s holy altar. There she called upon the ancestors to watch over her son, bring him back to her. Finally, she went to see Eyoum, the village chief, asking that the council of elders be convened. Eyoum, who was also the healer and chosen intercessor with the invisible world for the inhabitants of Eku, of course acceded to her request. A special meeting was held in the middle of the night, during which inquiries were made of the forefathers. Replies from the hereafter were not auspicious. Darkness had seized hold of the child, Eso. Negative forces hovering over Mboasu and the bordering regions, having assumed the shape of evildoing men, had removed the youngster from the sight of his loved ones. They had also closed his eyes, his ears, through practices that the little boy would never remember having undergone. For years, his heart would be inaccessible to the cries of his loved ones. He would be driven to a life of fraud and violence, until the day he reappeared. He would first be seen roaming the Sombé market, at the very place of his disappearance. They would need at all costs to recognize him right away. Call him by his name, make sure he would answer. Afterward, it would be too late. The child would have to return to the village in the company of one of his parents. If he set foot there without having been previously recognized by them, he would not stay. Hearing Eyoum pronounce the oracle from the invisible world at this special assembly of elders, Ibon threw herself onto the ground. Ripping her cloth, rolling around in the dust, she bemoaned the unjust fate that had taken her last-born from her. The women of her own age wept with her, approving her decision to go to the Sombé market and wait there for Eso to pass, to remind him of his name and where he belonged. Eyoum opposed it. The situation was certainly grave, extraordinary, but it could not justify the violation of all the clan’s customs: it was out of the question for women to go to the big city. Their footsteps should not take them farther than the spring from which they drew water or the fields they cultivated to feed their families. If even one of them defied these rules, he himself would take on the task of punishing her. The women of Eku, Ibon along with the others, bowed their heads. They all knew Eyoum and his way of trafficking in the occult, more often to assert his domination over the clan than to serve it as

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it was his duty to do. Ibon had other children and knew she could not expose them to Eyoum’s fury simply to find Eso. She would have to wait for the return of her husband, Esaka, who was working somewhere north of Mboasu. Of the world, the women of Eku knew only the confines of their people’s lands. They were not allowed to venture beyond them, contenting themselves to imagine what they would never see, with the words of their sons and husbands. Léonora Miano

Crimson Dawns

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Marie NDiaye

Three Strong Women

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

Translation: Ann Kaiser kaisertranslations@yahoo.com

Biography

Marie NDiaye was born on June 4, 1967 in Pithiviers, France, the daughter of a French mother and a Senegalese father. She is the sister of Pap Ndiaye, historian and lecturer at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences and wife of the author Jean-Yves Cendrey, with whom she wrote a series of three plays entitled Puzzle, in 2007. Marie NDiaye studied linguistics at the Sorbonne and won a French Academy scholarship for a residence at the Villa Medici in Rome. She began writing at 12 years old and published her first work, Quant au riche avenir [As for the Promising Future] at the age of 17. She received literary acclaim with En famille [A Family Affair]. She also writes novels for children and is a playwright. Her play Providence was staged at the International French-Language Theater in Paris and her play Papa doit manger [Daddy has to Eat] is only the second play by a female writer to be taken into the repertoire of the Comédie-Française. publications Among her most recent novels and short stories:Mon cœur à l’étroit [My Cramped Heart], Gallimard, 2007 (re-ed. coll. “Folio”, 2008); Autoportrait en vert [Self-portait in Green], Mercure de France, 2005 (re-ed. Gallimard, coll. “Folio”, 2006); Tous mes amis [All my Friends], Les Éditions de Minuit, 2004; Rosie Carpe, Les Éditions de Minuit, 2001 (prix Femina) (re-ed. coll. “Double”, 2009).

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Three narratives, tenuously held together. At the center of each story, a woman who says no. Their names are Norah, Fanta, Khady Demba. Norah, in her forties, arrives at her father’s home in Africa. The former egocentric tyrant has become silent, bulimic, and spends his nights perched in the courtyard’s flamboyant tree. Why did he ask her to come? What Norah will discover is even worse than she could have imagined. Fanta used to teach French in Dakar, but she had to follow her partner, Rudy, to France. Rudy proves to be incapable of providing Fanta with the rich and joyful life she deserves. He remains

under the morbid influence of his mother, who dedicates her life to convincing her entourage of the existence of angels. Destabilized, he wanders through a viscous reality that fills him with anger and spitefulness. By his side, Fanta is a rock. Khady Demba is a young African widow. Penniless, she tries to find a distant cousin, Fanta, who lives in France. The long journey of emigration will be punctuated by unspeakable suffering. Each of these three women fight to maintain their dignity in the face of the humiliation that life inflicts upon them with a methodical and incomprehensible persistence.

And he who greeted her or, who seemed to appear fortuitously on the doorstep of his large cement house, in an intensity of sudden light which his body, dressed in bright colors, seemed to produce and radiate, this man so small, heavy and emitting a white ray like a neon bulb, this man emerging from the entrance of his oversized house had nothing left, Norah immediately thought to herself, nothing of his arrogance, his stature, his youth, which before had been so strangely constant that they had seemed eternal. He kept his hands crossed over his stomach and his head cocked to the side, and his head was grey and his stomach protruding and soft under his white shirt, above the belt of his cream-colored pants. There he was, surrounded by a cold brilliance, having fallen, no doubt, onto the doorstep of his pretentious house from the branch of one of the flamboyant trees in the garden, Norah said to herself. She had approached the house staring at the front door through the fence grating and had not seen it open to let her father come through—yet there he was, appearing at the end of the day, this radiating and dethroned man with a bump on his skull which transformed the harmonious proportions that Norah remembered to those of a fat man with no neck and short, thick legs. Immobile, he watched her approach and nothing in his hesitant rather lost look showed that he was waiting for her arrival, nor that he had asked her to

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come, and had urgently begged her to visit him (in as much, she thought, as such a man was capable of imploring any aid at all). He was simply there, having perhaps flapped down from the huge branch of the flamboyant that shaded the house in yellow, to land heavily on the cracked cement of the front steps, and at that moment it was as if only coincidence had brought Norah’s steps towards the fence. And this man, who could transform any entreaty into a solicitation for his own sake, watched, with the air of a host who, slightly put out, forces himself to hide the fact, as she pushed the gate open and came into the garden, his hand held as a visor above his eyes, even though the evening had already drowned in shadow the doorstep which still somehow illuminated his strangely radiant and electric presence. — Well, it’s you, he murmured in French. Despite his mastery of the language, it was as if the proud apprehension that he had always had about certain difficulties of the language had, in the end, made his voice tremble. Norah did not respond. She briefly hugged him, without pressing him against her, recalling how he hated physical contact and the almost imperceptible way his flabby arms would shrink away from the touch of her fingers. She seemed to detect the smell of mould. It was an odor coming from the abundant blossoms, thought Norah with embarrassment, squeezed from the large yellow flamboyant whose branches grew above the flat roof of the house, and among whose leaves this secret and presumptuous man nested perhaps listening for the slightest noise of steps approaching the fence, ready to take flight and clumsily take his position on the front steps of this vast residence with its crude cement walls. Or perhaps it came from her father’s clothes or his body itself, from his old pleated skin, the color of ashes. She didn’t know, she couldn’t say. Furthermore, it was clear that he wore that day, and no doubt wore every day now, she thought, a wrinkled shirt stained with rings of sweat and that his pants were worn, shiny and extremely baggy around his knees. He must now be too heavy to be a bird and must stumble each time he hit the ground, or, she thought, with a slightly weary feeling of pity, he had become an old neglected man, indifferent or blind to his lack of cleanliness, preserving his habits of conventional elegance, dressing himself as he had always done, in white and fresh light yellow and never appearing even on the front steps of his unfinished house without having pushed his tie knot back up, no matter from which dusty living room he had come or from which flowering-weary flamboyant he had flown. Norah, had taken a taxi from the airport then walked a long time in the heat, because she had forgotten her father’s exact address and had to walk until she

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saw the house she recognized, so that she now felt sticky, and diminished. She was wearing a sleeveless lime-green dress, dotted with little yellow flowers just like those which had fallen from the flamboyant across the front steps. Her flat sandals were of the same pale green. She was shocked to notice that her father was wearing plastic flip-flops, given that he had always made it a point of honor, she remembered, never to be seen in anything but polished beige or off-white shoes. Was it because this unkempt man had lost the legitimacy to look at her critically or disappointedly or severely, or because, now stronger for her 38 years, she no longer worried above all how people would judge her appearance? What was certain was that 15 years before she would have felt embarrassed—mortified—to be seen sweating and tired before her father, whose physique and allure never used to be affected by the slightest sign of weakness or sensitivity to the heat. But today, that made no difference to her and she even shamelessly presented her father with a bare and shiny face which she had not taken the time to powder in the taxi. She thought how surprising it was that she had given such importance to all that. Then she said to herself with a rather acerbic, slightly spiteful gaiety: he can think whatever he likes of me. She could remember the cruel and offensive remarks, casually uttered by this superior man when she and her sister would come to see him as adolescents and all that concerned him was their lack of elegance or lipstick. She would like to say to him now: can’t you see, you spoke to us as if you were talking to women, as if it were our duty to be seductive, when we were only kids and we were your girls. She would like to say this to him gently, with just a hint of a scolding in her voice, as if it had only been a kind of rough joke on her father’s part and they could now laugh about it he, a bit contrite. But seeing him there in his plastic flip-flops, on the concrete doorstep dotted with rotting flowers that he perhaps had made fall when, on heavy and weary wings he had left the flamboyant, she realized that he was no more concerned about examining and judging her appearance than he was about the most insistent allusions to the mean-spirited assessments he used to make. His eyes were deep holes, with a faraway, slightly vacant look. She wondered whether he actually remembered having written her, asking her to come. —Can we go in? She said switching her bag from one shoulder to the other. —Masseck! He clapped his hands. The icy, almost blue gleam of his shapeless body seemed to intensify. A barefooted old man in Bermudas and a torn polo, came out of the house with a lively step. —Take the bag, ordered Norah’s father. Then, addressing her:

Marie NDiaye

Three Strong Women

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— It’s Masseck, don’t you recognize him? — I can carry my bag, she said a moment later regretting saying something that could do nothing but offend a servant who was used to—despite his age— picking up and carrying the most awkward of loads. She then held her bag out to him so impetuously that, unprepared, he faltered, before righting himself and throwing it onto his back, and, bent over, going back into the house. The last time I came it was Mansour, she said. I don’t know Masseck. — Which Mansour? her father asked, suddenly with a lost, almost appalled air which she had never seen before. — I don’t know his last name, but the Mansour in question lived here for years and years, Norah said, little by little feeling a sticky and suffocating discomfort take hold of her. — Maybe he was Masseck’s father then. — Oh no, she murmured, Masseck is much too old to be Mansour’s son. And since her father seemed more and more disoriented and even about to start wondering if she was duping him, she quickly added: But it’s not really important. — I never had a Mansour working for me, you’re wrong, he said with a slightly arrogant, condescending smile. It was the first sign of her father’s former personality and as irritating as this scornful grin always was, it warmed Norah’s heart as if it mattered that this smug man should continue to insist stubbornly on having the last word, even more than on being right. But she was sure that Mansour had been a diligent, patient, efficient presence at her father’s side for years and if, since childhood, she and her sister, had come but three or four times to this house, it was Mansour they had seen and never this Masseck, whom she didn’t recognize. Barely inside, Norah felt how empty the house was. It was dark now. The large living room was dark, silent. Her father turned on a lamp and its dim light, produced by a 40-watt bulb, lit up the middle of the room and its long glass table. On the coarse stucco walls, Norah recognized the framed photos of the vacation village that her father had owned and managed, and which had made him his fortune. A large number of people had always lived in this house, owned by this man who was proud of his success. He was not that generous, Norah had always thought, but, rather, satisfied at being able to show that he could house and support his brothers and sisters, nephews and nieces and various other relatives, so that Norah had never seen the living room empty, whatever time of the day she happened to be there. Children forever sprawled on the couches, stomachs in the air like satisfied cats, men drinking tea while watching television, as women came and went from the kitchen or bedrooms.

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That evening, the deserted room cruelly revealed the harshness of its materials: shiny tiling, cement walls, narrow strip of windows. â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Your wife isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t here? Norah asked. He moved two chairs from the large table, put them close to one another, then changed his mind and put them back in their places. He turned on the television and turned it off before even the faintest image had the time to appear.

Marie NDiaye

Three Strong Women

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Jean-Philippe Toussaint

The Truth About Marie

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

Translation: Alyson Waters alyson.waters@yale.edu

Biography

Jean-Philippe Toussaint was born in Bruxelles in 1957. Publications With Les Éditions de Minuit, most recently: Fuir, 2005 (prix Médicis 2005) (reissued in the collection “Double”, 2009); Faire l’amour, 2002 (reissued in the collection “Double”, 2009); Autoportrait (à l’étranger), 2000; La Télévision, 1997 (reissued in the collection “Double”, 2002).

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Storm, night, wind, rain, fire, lightning, sex and death. “Later, thinking back on the dark hours of that sweltering night, I realized we had made love at the same time, Marie and I, but not with each other.” The Truth About Marie is not, strictly speaking, a sequel, but rather a continuation of Faire l’amour and Fuir.

Later, thinking back on the dark hours of that sweltering night, I realized we had made love at the same time, Marie and I, but not with each other. At a certain time that night—it was during the first hot spell of the year; for three days in a row the temperature rose to over 100 degrees in the Paris area, and never went below the mid-eighties—Marie and I were making love in Paris in apartments that were barely half a mile apart as the crow flies. Obviously we couldn’t imagine at the start of the evening—or later, or ever, it was simply inconceivable—that we would see each other that night, that before sunrise we would be together, and even that we would hold each other briefly in the darkened and disorderly hallway of our apartment. In all likelihood, given the hour at which Marie got home (to our house, or rather, to her house, since we had already been separated for more than four months), and the hour, almost identical, at which I got back to the small two-room place where I had been living since our separation, not alone, I was never alone—but it doesn’t matter who I was with, that’s not the point—it was probably 1:20 or 1:30 in the morning at the latest, the hour when Marie and I were making love at the same time in Paris that night, both of us slightly drunk, our bodies hot in the half-light, the wide open window not letting a breath of air into the bedroom. The air was static, humid, stormy, almost feverish, it did not cool down the atmosphere, but it did comfort bodies in the passive, mighty oppressiveness of the heat. It was before 2:00, I’m sure, I checked the time when the telephone rang. But I prefer to err on the side of caution when it comes to evoking the exact chronology of the events of that night, because one way or another a man’s destiny is involved, or his death, it would be a long time before we would know whether or not he would survive.

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I didn’t even really know his name; it was an aristocratic name of some kind, Jean-Christophe de G. Marie had gone back with him to the apartment on rue de La Vrillière after dinner. It was the first time they were spending the night together in Paris; they had met in Tokyo in January during the opening of Marie’s show at the Contemporary Art Space in Shinagawa.

It was just after midnight when they got back to the apartment on rue de La Vrillière. Marie had gone to get a bottle of grappa in the kitchen, they sat down in the bedroom at the foot of the unmade bed—pillows and cushions everywhere, their legs resting casually on the parquet floor. The apartment on rue de la Vrillière felt hot, dark, stagnant; the shutters had remained closed since the previous day to keep out the heat. Marie had opened the window and poured the grappa as she sat in the half-light, watching the liquid flow slowly into the glasses through the bottle’s narrow silver dispenser, and straightaway she’d felt the grappa’s perfume go to her head, mentally sensing its taste even before feeling it on her tongue, the taste buried inside her for several summers; this perfumed, almost syrupy taste of grappa that she probably associated with the island of Elba—had just resurfaced unbidden in her mind. She closed her eyes and took a sip, leaned over toward Jean Christophe de G. and kissed him, her lips warm, and the sharp sensation of chilliness and grappa on her tongue. A few months earlier, Marie had put some software on her laptop that allowed her to download music, entirely illegally. Marie, who would have been the first to be surprised if anyone had commented on the illicit nature of what she was doing, Marie, my pirate, who, what’s more, was paying a small fortune for a staff of lawyers and international legal experts to fight against her labels being knocked off in Asia, Marie had got up and walked through the room’s dim light to download a soft, sweet dance tune on her laptop. She had found an old slow number that suited her mood, ultra kitsch and languid (we have, I’m afraid, the same tastes), and she began to dance by herself in the bedroom, slowly unbuttoning her blouse, coming back to the bed barefoot, her arms like sinuous snakes improvising Arabian arabesques in the air. She sat down next to Jean-Christophe de G., who slipped his hand tenderly beneath her blouse, but Marie arched abruptly, pushing him away in ambiguous exasperation, perhaps it was nothing more than an irritated “hands off,” at the touch of his warm palm on her naked skin. She was too hot. Marie was too hot, she was dying from the heat, feeling clammy, sweaty, sticky, she had difficulty breathing in the stale, stifling air of the room. She ran out of the bedroom and returned from the living room with an electric fan that she plugged in at the foot of the bed, turning it immediately on high. The fan started up slowly, the blades soon reaching full speed and noisily blasting whirling puffs of air that whipped their

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faces and made their hair dance before their eyes; he had to struggle to catch a lock of hair blowing across his forehead and she, docile, head lowered, amiably offered her hair to the wind, making her look crazy, or like Medusa. Marie and her exhausting love of open windows, open drawers, open suitcases, her love of disorder, clutter, chaos, havoc, dark maelstroms, moving air and gusts of wind. Jean-Philippe Toussaint

In the end they undressed and held each other in the half-light. Marie, at the foot of the bed, had stopped moving, she had fallen asleep in the arms of JeanChristophe de G. The fan was turned down low in the bedroom, stirring up the warm air mixing with the stormy air of the night. The room was silent, lit only by the bluish glow from the laptop, whose screen had gone into sleep mode. Jean-Christophe de G. slipped gently from Marie’s embrace and got up, naked, in two stages, heavily, helping himself with one hand, walking quietly on the creaky floorboards toward the window, where he gazed out at the street. Paris was numb with heat, it must still have been around 85° even though it was almost 1:00 in the morning. A bar in the distance, out of sight, had stayed open and voices could be heard in the depths of the night. A few cars went by in the halo of headlights, a pedestrian crossed the street heading toward the place des Victoires. On the opposite sidewalk, directly across from the apartment, rose the massive and silent silhouette of the Banque de France. The heavy bronze gate was locked, nothing was moving anywhere, and suddenly Jean-Christophe de G. had a dark foreboding, convinced that something tragic was about to happen in the calm of this stormy night, that from one moment to the next he would be witness to a wave of violence, stupor, and death, that alarms would go off behind the massive walls of the Banque de France, and the street below him would become a scene of car chases, collisions, people shouting, doors slamming, shots being fired, and police cars suddenly pulling up, their emergency lights whirling in the night, illuminating the building facades. Jean-Christophe de G. stood naked at the window of the apartment on rue de La Vrillière, watching the night with a diffuse anxiety that weighed heavily on his chest, when he spotted a flash of lightning in the distance. A brief gust of wind washed over his face and upper body, and he noticed that the sky was completely black on the horizon, not the black of a summer night, transparent and blue-tinted, but a dense black, menacing and opaque. Huge storm clouds were approaching the area, moving inexorably in the sky, shrouding the last vestiges of clear night that still remained above the buildings of the Banque de France. There was another flash in the distance, near the Seine, in the direction of the Louvre, mute, strange, streaked, premonitory, with no lightning bolt, no thunderclap, a long, horizontal electrical discharge that ripped through the sky across some hundred yards and lit the horizon in white, staccato, startling, silent spasms.

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Cooler air entered the room in swift, swirling flurries. Marie felt a frisson of cool wind skim her back and she took refuge in the bed, wrapping her shoulder in the sheet. She removed her socks and tossed them at the foot of the bed while Jean-Christophe de G. began to dress in the half-light; he was getting dressed again and she was undressing in a single parallel motion, with divergent goals. He put his pants back on and then his jacket. Before leaving, he went to sit a moment at Marie’s side. He kissed her on the forehead in the half-light, brushed her lips with his, but the kisses lasted longer than a simple good bye, continued and became more heated; they held each other again and he wound up slipping back into bed, completely dressed, pressing himself against her under the sheets, in his black linen jacket and heavy cotton pants, his briefcase in his hand, which he wound up dropping to hold Marie. She was naked against him and he stroked her breasts, he heard her moan and he slid her little panties down along her thighs, Marie helped him by twisting around in the bed, Marie, panting, her eyes closed, unzipped Jean Christophe de G.’s fly and took out his penis, quickly, determinedly, somewhat urgently, with a gesture that was firm yet delicate, precise, as if she knew exactly where she was going, but once she got there suddenly did not know what to do. She opened her eyes, surprised, sleepy-headed, drowsy with alcohol and fatigue, realizing that above all she was tired, that the only thing she really wanted to do now was to sleep, in JeanChristophe de G.’s arms, maybe, but not necessarily with his cock in her hand. She paused and, needing to do something with Jean-Christophe de G.’s cock, which she was still holding, she shook it, amiably, two or three times, out of curiosity, half-heartedly, she was holding it in her hand and waving it about, watching the result with curiosity and interest. What was she waiting for? For it to take flight? Marie had Jean-Christophe de G.’s cock in her hand and she didn’t know what to do with it. In the end, Marie fell asleep. She had dozed off for a few minutes, or else it was he who fell asleep first, they were hardly moving in the darkness, they continued to kiss, intermittently, in a shared half-sleep, dozing in each others’ arms, stroking each other with fleeting, drowsy caresses (we call that “making love all night long”). Marie had undone the top buttons of Jean-Christophe de G.’s shirt and was lazily caressing his chest, he didn’t stop her, he was hot, he was perspiring in his clothes under the sheets, he had a bit of a hard on, his penis neglected, abandoned out of his pants, still stirred by the occasional spasm, while Marie’s hand moved about under his unbuttoned shirt that was damp and shapeless, its sides sagging and slack around him. She kissed him softly, she was slightly sweaty as well, her temples warm, and without realizing what she was doing, she began rifling through his pockets, sliding a hand into his jacket pocket, curious to find out what the hard, angular object was that pressed against his hip when he would hold her. A weapon? Could it be he had a weapon in his pocket?

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Martin Winckler

The Women’s Chorus

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

Translation: Hester Velmans hestervelmans@gmail.com

Biography

Marc Zaffran was born in Algiers in 1955 and has lived in France since 1963. A graduate of the medical school of the University of Tours, he began publishing fiction in 1984 under the pseudonym Martin Winckler, a name he chose as a tribute to Georges Perec. His first novel, La Vacation [The Vacation], introduced the character Dr Bruno Sachs, who later became famous in La Maladie de Sachs [The Case of Doctor Sachs], which was made into a film of the same name by Michel Deville, with Albert Dupontel in the title role. Winckler gave up his country medical practice in 1993 in order to concentrate on translating and writing full-time, while continuing to work part-time in a provincial hospital. In 2009 he received an invitation from the Centre de Recherches en Éthique (Center of Ethical Research) of the University of Montreal, to work on a research project on medical training. Publications Recent novels published by p.o.l: Histoires en l’air, 2008; Les Trois Médecins, 2004 (reissued by Gallimard, collection “Folio”, 2006); Légendes, 2002 (reissued by Gallimard, collection “Folio”, 2003); La Maladie de Sachs, 1998 (Prix du Livre Inter 1998, reissued by Gallimard, collection “Folio”, 2005). And from Calmann-Lévy (coll. “Interstices”, 2008-2009) came the three-volume La Trilogie Twain.

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Jean Atwood, a hospital intern, top of his class for four years running, has his sights set on becoming a chief ob-gyn surgery resident. Instead he is to spend his last semester interning in a women’s health clinic. Atwood wants to perform surgeries, not waste his time listening to women talking about themselves all day long. Nor does he relish taking orders from Franz Karma, a department head with a rather controversial reputation. But reality never lives up to expectation, and the relationship between the two doctors winds up being very different from what Atwood has imagined.

A bildungsroman, The Women’s Chorus is also a choral novel, its structure inspired by musical theater: over the course of his sojourn in the microcosm that is Unit 77, Dr Atwood has to deal with women who tell him about their lives, their loves and their deaths, both as “soloists” and as members of a deafening chorus. It is also a story of enigmas: just like the patients in their care, both Atwood and Karma harbor a secret: one that drives them, that divides them and that ultimately unites them—the essential secret that defines who they are, as physicians and as human beings.

Overture What was it they had told me again? I’m having trouble remembering, because it seemed so unbelievable back then, and still seems ludicrous to this day … Ah, yes. That I was going to suffer. Because he always had to have the last word. That if I stood up to him, he’d crush me. That if on the other hand I pretended to be interested in what he was saying, he would bore me to death, so dearly did he love to hear himself talk. That he’d had plenty of women—nurses, medical students, interns—rotating through his bed at some time or other. That he’d lured many of his patients—the foxiest ones, naturally!—there as well … and that he had no objection to boys either! That with—or perhaps thanks to—my good looks, he would surely try to get me into bed. And if by some lucky chance I did not interest him that way, he would make my life miserable. In short: he was insufferable. And also: That he was always lecturing people. That he badmouthed his colleagues. That he spouted crazy ideas. That he performed dangerous and totally ill-considered procedures. That he took risks, with his patients as well. That he was very tight with Sachs, another nutcase of an internist who used to annoy the hell out of the ob-gyns at the teaching hospital, and who worked side by side with him in Unit 77 for many years before taking off to go freeze his balls in Quebec (good riddance!). That they had written a book together on the doctor-patient

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relationship, and that he had later done another tome on contraception, which had caused a bit of a stir in the women’s magazines—of course, journalists, if you know how to butter them up … In short: he thought he was a big shot, but he pissed everyone off. And finally: that he was secretive and a blabbermouth, straightforward and devious, aggressive and a toady. In a word: unpredictable. And temperamental as well. In the halls of University Hospital he was nicknamed Barbe-Bleue, Bluebeard. Because along with still playing the seducer at the age of fifty-plus, he sported a not always well-trimmed beard and was always ready to bark at his interlocutors. The whole thing just made me laugh, for to tell the truth, I couldn’t have cared less. It wasn’t my problem. My problem was that the Dean was making me spend the last six months of my fifth-year internship—my “swan song,” he had added with a big smile meant to console me—in this guy’s department, working under him, and that wasn’t fair. I didn’t give a flying fig, frankly, about Dr Franz Karma, his gal pals or his moods. Not a bit. But I’d already worked two six-month stints in the delivery room, which had been a real drag because Collineau, the chief of obstetrics, preferred delivery using touchy-feely haptonomy instead of Caesarean section, and would go all teary-eyed whenever he had to perform an episiotomy, apologizing to some woman who wouldn’t feel a thing anyway when he snipped her, who’d be quite happy to have the whole thing over and done with, for her kid to have nice pink cheeks instead of coming out blue with the cord around its neck because it had had to wait for Mr Head Obstetrician to search his heart and soul in order to decide if the kicks he felt when he laid his hands on the mother’s abdomen really meant, “I’m not in any hurry to get out of Mommy’s tummy, it’s cold out there,” instead of, “Get me out of here for crissakes, I’m either going to croak or go gaga if I have to rot in this hole a minute longer!” So I’d had it with the New Age doctors and their whiny patients. I was tired of having to apologize when I was getting them to spread their legs in order to retrieve oh so delicately their gooey howling brats while getting a faceful of placenta. I longed to do something different with my hands. In leaving the delivery room behind me, I had just one fervent wish: to get back to the OR. At least in there, the women don’t scream, they don’t ask questions, they just want the problem taken care of, they want to get rid of the tumor devouring their breast, or the fucked-up uterus with the bleeding fibroids— and that’s just the plain vanilla stuff, the most compelling is the icing on the cake: making the woman who’s flat as a pancake into a 36 C without leaving a scar, removing six eggs from a decrepit ovary incapable of popping them out by itself, fertilizing them in vitro, then incubating them in utero to make sure that they hatch. Or the ne plus ultra: I’d dreamt of nothing else, ever since the first time I saw Girard, the chief of plastic surgery, reconstruct a hymen, in that particular case, that of a penniless girl who’d been sleeping around since she

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was fourteen, and at the age of twenty-three wished to reinvent herself in order to marry a wealthy sucker, to make him think that it was a first for both on their wedding night—her first man, and his first virgin. Girard knew how to fix them just right. I still get shivers down my back when I think of his smile, his self-satisfied monologue as he tied the last knot: “There! Now she’ll be just tight enough so that he’ll flop on the first try; just sensitive enough that she’ll scream on penetration when he tries it again, as if it were really her very first time, the little slut; and just flimsy enough for it to tear and bleed at the first thrust—not too much, but just enough to leave a stain on the bridal sheet. And then, when the stain is discovered, the mother-in-law will want to hang it from the balcony … In other words, just enough to make sure that the guy’s wedding night isn’t ruined. A work of art.” I could think of nothing else for two whole weeks. So this Dr Franz Karma, the doctor in charge of Unit 77, “Women’s Health”, was really no skin off my nose. The fellow and his clinic held no interest for me. Only, I couldn’t get out of it: every intern planning to go into surgical gynecology had to spend at least twelve months on the obstetrics floor (where, I had to admit, I did learn to perform a pretty decent caesarian, as well as on three occasions—I really lucked out, since you don’t see those very often—having to perform an emergency hysterectomy on women hemorrhaging blood after popping their papooses) as well as—this was a lot less fun—six more months on a strictly medical ward. The official reason was that you had to “learn to establish relationships with the patients and become familiar with standard primary-care procedures.” Even though I tried to explain to Collineau that I wasn’t interested in establishing any relationships, hand holding really wasn’t my style, and that primary care wasn’t at all my cup of tea—I felt in my element only with a set of retractors in my hands, a scalpel or an electric lancet, scissors, a needle and thread; in other words, something solid to hold—he had replied that those were the rules and—with a haughty look—that if I did not want to go there, I might want to consider changing my specialty. So I was pretty steamed about having to waste my time with Karma. But what was being said about him didn’t bother me, and I promised myself in any case to take extra shifts and to sneak over to the OR as often as possible. It was important not to lose my touch. There was one thing, however, that did concern me. An intern I met in the hospital had told me that Bluebeard—he was also known as “the guru of Women’s Lib Health,” having been the one, apparently, who had decided on the name of the clinic—had fired him without any explanation the day after his arrival, after having heard him make some lame crack in front of a patient. “It’s crazy!” he told me, “I just made a silly comment, nothing bad, and the patient—what a bitch—took offense, I really have no idea why, she started bawling and before I knew it Karma appeared like Zorro on his big horse and

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kicked me out.” Since then the poor guy had been trying to find another post, but things being what they were, even back then, he was having a very hard time finding another department that would take him. And that, I must admit, did worry me quite a bit. I had come to realize that department heads are often little tyrants; aggressive, mean and vindictive to boot. Those who didn’t get to run a department would get frustrated and take it out on the interns. And to be fired by some little tyrant, even a very minor one, as Karma surely was (because his was the smallest department at University Hospital North), that’s equivalent to kissing your career at that hospital goodbye, or if not, having to go work for his worst enemy—hell, in other words, since his nemesis would be happy to declare that his colleague “made a mistake in letting such an excellent doctor go,” but would never miss a chance to tell anyone who would listen that your work stinks—to be expected, of course, considering the department you came from—and if even “over there” you weren’t able to do the work correctly, there really isn’t much hope … All this to explain how uncomfortable I felt that day—the first day, a drab, gray day in February—when, after having taken all the vacation days I had coming to me in order to postpone the start date as much as possible, and having tried every possible way to switch my assignment (to a rotation in women’s geriatrics, for example, where you would not have to waste your time asking your patients questions, since they aren’t capable of answering you anyway; or even, in a pinch, to rehab, where the gimps are so busy with their physical therapy there’s no need to spend more than five minutes holding their crutches), I finally screwed up my courage to present myself at … Women’s Health (what a joke!) telling myself that in the end, it was just like the first years of college, you just had to grin and bear it for a while, and if there was a way to jump ship at some point (I had enough points to be in the running for the first chief residency that became available when the incumbent, male or female, had had enough of working for peanuts and decided to go into private practice, which even in those days was happening more and more frequently), I would leap at the opportunity. For, if not, spending six months in the company of all those bimbos without being able to pick up a scalpel … No, that wasn’t for me. And so I found myself that day standing at the entrance to the Maternal division of “l’Hospice”, Tourmens University Hospital North, a dump built in the seventies and never renovated—there was even talk of tearing it down. I had already paid a visit to the maternity wing a few days earlier, to drop off my file, hoping to pump the secretary for some dirt, but nothing doing! She didn’t give me anything to go on, nothing, she simply brushed me off with, “Ah, you are going to work with Dr Karma! How lucky you are, he’s so nice, you’ll see, you’re going to learn so much with him,” in such a drippy way that I felt like smacking her.

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Feeling extremely grumpy, I stepped into the revoltingly smelly locker room (everyone got dressed and undressed in there together, nurses, orderlies and interns, as if in a cattle pen) thinking that I’d stow my belongings, but on catching sight of a pair of bright red pumps on top of a metal locker, I realized that it was even worse than I had imagined. Seeing her in her smock and plastic clogs, you’d never guess that in civvies, when she goes home, a nurse or orderly is only a poor vulgar slut. White is a great camouflage. The lockers did not have locks so I couldn’t leave my laptop case or my raincoat. I just grabbed a white coat in my size, pinned on a badge that said, “Dr Jean Atwood, Intern” and slipped a brand new little notebook into the pocket: I had been told that Karma liked it if you took notes during his tirades, that it pumped up his ego; since I write very fast and can read my own handwriting, why not, if it might help … * So I took a deep breath and pushed my way through the double doors into the long corridor that divides the maternity wing from the gynecology floor of Unit 77, Women’s Health—and Purgatory. Standing in the deserted corridor, my head bursting with all these thoughts, my case over my shoulder, the coat over my arm, I shake my head and sigh deeply in anger and frustration. What they do in this department is as far as you can get from my real interests and from what I have done up to now. And it wasn’t my choice to come here. Circumstances forced my hand … I dither. I glance at my watch. If I’m late, this isn’t the OR, no one will die. I could go and have a coffee with my mates, upstairs … But in the end I take a deep breath and I tell myself I’ve got to do this. I turn up my collar so that there will be no mistake about it, I am an intern, not some pimply medical student. I hold my head as high as I can and I start walking down the corridor, trying, in the forty-five seconds it takes me to reach the door, to remember all that I know about the physiology of the menstrual cycle, about ovulation, about periods, about all that foul female business I don’t give a flying fuck about but which I’m probably going to be hearing about until it’s coming out of my ears. Damn! At the far end of the corridor, the glass double doors don’t quite meet in the middle. A triangle of light dances across the vinyl floor covering. Through one of the translucent windows I see a shadowy silhouette, and I stop. For suddenly I’m afraid. Afraid of not knowing and not knowing how. Afraid of not knowing how to go about it. The way it should be done. Afraid of not being able to cope. Afraid of not being up to snuff.

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I’ve crammed in so much stuff over the past few years, and all of a sudden, I’m not sure what I’ve retained. Will I remember any of it? Is it going to be of any use to me? I stand there staring at the door, and when the shadowy silhouette starts to move, suddenly, like a bolt of lightning, it all comes back to me. I watch myself pushing open the door and going inside. Martin Winckler

The Women’s Chorus

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124

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

Adam Olivier

Decoin Didier

Unfavourable Winds

Is This the Way Women Die?

u Albanian [Buzuku, Kosovo] u German

u Castilian [Alianza] u Italian [Rizzoli]

Éd. de l’Olivier

[Klett-Cotta] u Italian [Bompiani] u Polish [Nasza Ksiegamia]

Grasset & Fasquelle

u Korean [Golden Bough Publishing]

Delecroix Vincent

Arditi Metin

The Shoe on the Roof

Actes Sud

u German [Ullstein] u Greek [Govostis]

The Louganis Girl u German [Hoffmann & Campe]

u Greek [Livanis] u Russian [Ripol]

Bello Antoine

The Pathfinders Gallimard

u Greek [Polis] u Italian [Fazi]

Benchetrit Samuel

A Heart Outside Grasset & Fasquelle u Dutch [Arena]

Berton Benjamin

Gallimard

u Italian [Excelsior 1881] u Korean

[Changbi] u Rumanian [RAO] u Russian [Fluid] u Spanish [Lengua de Trapo] Descott Régis

Caïn & Adèle Éd. JC Lattès u Spanish

Diome Fatou

Our Lives, Unfulfilled Flammarion

u German [Diogenes]

Alain Delon, Japanese Superstar

An Ordinary Execution

u Italian [Nottetempo] u Vietnamese

u Brazilian [Record] u Bulgarian [Fakel

Hachette

[Nha Nam]

Besson Philippe

The Accidental Man Julliard

u German [Deutscher Taschenbuch

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

My Traitor

Grasset & Fasquelle

u Castilian [Alianza] u Chinese (complex characters) [Ten Points] u Italian [Mondadori]

Dugain Marc

Gallimard

Express] u Catalan [Pages] u Dutch [De Geus] u Greek [Kedros] u Hebrew [Kinnevet] u Italian [Bompiani] u Japanese [Kawade Shobo] u Polish [Wydawnictwo] u Portuguese [Ambav] u Rumanian [RAO] Énard Mathias

Zone

Actes Sud

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

Dantzig Charles

[La Librairie Orientale] u Portuguese [Dom Quixote]

Grasset & Fasquelle

Faye Éric

Publishers]

Stock

My Name Is François u Arabic (world rights) [Arab Scientific

The Man With No Prints u Bulgarian [Pulsio] u Slovak [Ed. VSSS]

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Germain Sylvie

Nahapétian Naïri

Rollin Jean

The Unnoticed

Who Killed Ayatollah Kanuni?

A Dead Dog After Him

u English [Dedalus Limited, Great

u Dutch [Querido] u Spanish [Alianza]

u German [Berlin Verlag] u Polish

Albin Michel Britain]

Liana Levi

Ollagnier Virgnie

Guyotat Pierre

The Uncertainty

Mercure de France

u Italian [Piemme]

Coma

u English [Semiotexte, United States] u Italian [Medusa] u Russian [Société

Liana Levi

Ovaldé Véronique

d’études céliniennes]

And My Transparent Heart

Hesse Thierry

u English [Portobello, Great Britain]

Demon

Éd. de l’Olivier

u Castilian [Duomo, Spain] u Hebrew

Lê Linda

In Memoriam

Christian Bourgois

u German [Amman]

Le Bris Michel

The World’s Beauty Grasset & Fasquelle

u Italian [Fazi Editore]

Lindon Mathieu

My Heart Alone Is Not Enough P.O.L

u Dutch [Ailantus]

Page Martin

Éd. de l’Olivier

u German [Thiele] u Greek [Patakis]

u Italian [Garzanti] u Korean [Yolimwom] u Portuguese [Rocco, Brazil] u Romanian

[Humanitas] u Russian [Astrel/Ast]

Malte Marcus

Zulma

u Italian [Piemme] u Polish [Albatros] u Spanish [Paidos] u Vietnamese

[Les Éditions littéraires du Vietnam] Monnier Alain

Albin Michel

u Italian [Baldini Castoldi Dalai Editore] u Korean [Munhakdongne Publishing]

Les Éditions de Minuit

du Hunan] u German [Frankfurter Verlaganstalt] Varenne Antonin

Fakirs

Ravey Yves

u German [Ullstein]

Bambi Bar

Les Éditions de Minuit

Viviane Hamy Viel Tanguy

u Greek [Agra] u Romanian [Bastion

Paris-Brest

Reinhardt Éric

u German [Wagenbach] u Italian [Neri Pozza] u Spanish [Acantilado]

Editura]

Stock

u Turk [Altin Bilek Yayincilik]

Révay Theresa

All the Dreams of the World Belfond

u German [Der Club Bertelsmann]

u Hungarian [Athenaeum] u Polish [Swiat Ksiazki] u Portuguese [Circulo de Leitores] u Russian [Family Leisure Club] u Spanish [Circulo de Lectores]

Rolin Olivier

A Lion Hunter

u German [Ullstein]

u Chinese (simplified characters)

Éd. du Seuil

[Shanghai 99] u German [Berlin Verlag]

u Italian [Barbès] u Portuguese [Sextante]

u Spanish [Matalamanga, Peru and Chile]

126

Toussaint Jean-Philippe

u Polish [Sonia Draga] u Russian [Astrel]

Our Second Life Flammarion

u Dutch [De Geus] u English [Europe Editions, United States and Bloomsbury, Great Britain] u German [Merlin] u Greek [Polis] u Hebrew [Kinnevet] u Italian [Einaudi] u Serbian [IPS] u Spanish [El Aleph]

u Chinese [Éd. d’Art et de littérature

The Slow Tortoise Waltz

u Italian [Il Saggiatore] u Korean [Agora]

Garden of Love

u Bosnian [B.T.C] u Catalan [Columna]

Pancol Katherine

Éd. du Seuil

[Knaus/Random] u Greek [Scripta] u Italian [Giunti]

The German’s Village

The Truth About Marie

Cinderella

u Catalan [La Campana] u German

Taiwan] u Greek [Papyros]

u Serbian [Nolit]

Majdalani Charif

Caravanserail

u Chinese (complex characters) [Ye-ren,

Gallimard

u English [Viking, United States]

[Wisdom House] u Russian [Riopl]

Grasset & Fasquelle

u Italian [Minimum Fax]

Joncour Serge

u Chinese [Phoenix Publishing] u Korean

Roux Frédéric

The Indian Winter

Sansal Boualem

Perhaps a Love Affair

Flammarion

[Czarne]

Éd. de l’Olivier

[Modan, Israel]

How Many Ways I Love You

P.O.L

Les Éditions de Minuit