And Their Children After Them

by Nicolas Mathieu

  “Good!”

  Simon had just landed very close nearby. He was standing there, one hand holding his skateboard upright, pants low, his muscular stomach shiny with sweat. Steph looked up at him. His cheeks were glowing, his hair damp.

  “Want to go?”

  He was talking to the Belgian girl. She said yes in her heavy accent and stood up, sluggish and very tall, taking time to brush the dust from her ass. Her breasts flopped freely under her T-shirt. You could tell she had big, rounded mammaries. Stéphanie was steaming.

  “So where are you off to like that?” asked Rodrigue teasingly.

  Anne turned her back on him. Simon, who was wiping his armpits with his T-shirt, didn’t answer either. He stepped off the ramp first, then helped the girl down.

  “Have fun,” said Rodrigue.

  Steph looked down, her nose prickling. The tears were coming; it was uncomfortable; it was the same thing every time. Besides, Clémence was watching her. But she held on, focusing on the bracelet she was twisting around her wrist. As soon as she was able, she stood up in turn.

  “Are you splitting, too?”

  “Wait, I’ll drive you home,” Clémence offered.

  “No thanks, I’m good,” said Steph.

  “C’mon, I’ll give you a lift.”

  “I told you, I’m good.”

  “You aren’t gonna walk all the way home like a dork.”

  “Just leave me alone, okay!”

  Clémence realized that they were at the edge. She didn’t insist.

  * * *

  —

  Steph set off across the undeveloped open space between the skate park and the old workers’ housing. It was a hilly, grass-covered stretch that wasn’t good for much except ditching broken refrigerators or riding ATVs. It would take Steph a good half hour to get downtown. The lake was at the ends of the earth, and her house wasn’t much closer. Steph didn’t care. Rocked by her steady pace, she followed a dusty little path that wandered through this useless territory. Her heart felt as heavy as an anvil. She was keeping it together, but the waves of pain and heartache were getting bigger and bigger. She tried to run but tripped and wound up falling full-length in the dust like a klutz. Standing up, she realized her hands were bleeding a little. At that, the dam broke all at once and she started crying for real, a true ugly heartbreak, with snot, hiccups, and makeup gone to hell. It left her breathless. Afterward, she felt relieved, though very tired. While in that state, she was surprised to hear the sound of an engine and turned around to see. It was the other dipshit.

  11

  After their visit to Malek Bouali, Anthony and his mother hurried to leave the ZUP and get back to their car. To do that, they had to cross a landscape of parking lots, flower beds, and grassy mounds, mothers with strollers, graffiti-covered park benches, and endlessly circling mopeds. Tenants watched them in silence from their windows. In the distance, you could see the viaduct that spanned part of the valley. The cars on it were driving to or from Paris at eighty miles an hour.

  “See, we did well to come,” said Hélène. She was pleased with the way things had worked out. Something had clicked between her and the old man.

  “Don’t you agree?”

  Anthony slouched along without saying a word, his head sunk into his shoulders. He looked cranky, as if ashamed. His mother thought he was swaggering like some sort of punk. It made her want to slap him.

  “Stop that thing you’re doing. What kind of way to walk is that?”

  Anthony glared at her.

  “We’ll never see that motorcycle again!” he said. “It’s gone. It’s somewhere overseas by now.”

  “You don’t know that. Those stories are stupid.”

  “Come down to earth, for chrissakes!”

  “We did what we had to.”

  He rolled his eyes. Once again, his mother found herself in the presence of a stranger. To think that ten years earlier he was making her macaroni necklaces for Mother’s Day. He’d always been a good kid. He didn’t exactly shine at school, of course, and he got into fights, but overall she knew what to expect. When he was very little she used to sing “La Rivière au bord de l’eau” to him. He loved blueberry jam and those cartoons with the little Indian, Zachari or something. She could still remember how his head smelled when he fell asleep in her lap on Saturday evening in front of the TV; it was like warm bread. And then one day he told her to knock before coming into his room, and from then on things went downhill in unexpected ways. Now she found herself with this semi-brute who wanted to get a tattoo, whose feet stank, and who swaggered around like a thug. Her little boy.

  Finally, Hélène blew up.

  “You little jerk! Do I have to remind you who took the motorcycle in the first place?”

  Anthony looked at her defiantly, almost with hate.

  “You can’t trust those people. That’s what you don’t get.”

  “Will you stop that? You sound like your father.”

  Curiously, he felt flattered by the remark.

  “At least I know what I need to do,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  They were walking down the hill toward downtown. Below them, three roads met at a roundabout. One led to the Grappe housing development where the Casatis lived; the others led into town and to the highway. Anthony picked up the pace to get away from his mother. Hélène grabbed him by the collar. She was ready to kill him.

  “Why are you being like this?” she snapped. “I can’t stand it! I can’t stand it, you understand?”

  “Let go of me, and leave me alone!”

  He yanked free, and Hélène was suddenly struck by how ugly her son was. In the months since puberty started to work its changes, she had privately accumulated a fair amount of disgust for him. It was like an ugly secret. He looked stupid; he was always in a bad mood. His drooping eye, which used to make his face appealing, now looked like an infirmity. And every so often, in his gestures and the way he spoke, she could recognize that other one, his father.

  “I can’t stand you anymore! You hear?”

  A car driving up toward the ZUP slowed as it reached them. There were kids inside. They honked cheerfully.

  “Do you need any help, ma’am?”

  Anthony took advantage of the distraction to ditch his mother and started running. The young guy in the car asked:

  “Want us to bring him back?”

  “Oh, leave me alone!” snapped Hélène, with a gesture as if chasing away a mosquito.

  Anthony sprinted down to the roundabout and took the road to the left. It wasn’t the one that led toward home.

  * * *

  —

  He continued running like that for a while, but he didn’t know where to go and had no intention of going home. He was angry at the whole world. Not that long ago, eating popcorn while watching a good movie was enough to make him happy. Life was its own justification, even when it was repetitious. He got up in the morning, went to school, fell into the rhythm of classes and friends; everything linked up with disconcerting ease. His biggest stress might be a pop quiz. But now he had the feeling of being stuck in mud, trapped in a prison of days.

  As near as Anthony could recall, the fever first hit him in biology class. The teacher was using extraterrestrial words like “monozygote” and “scissiparity,” when suddenly he didn’t think he could stand it anymore. Capucine Meckert in the front row. The color of the linoleum. His benchmate. The smell of caustic soda and soap in the labs upstairs. His chewed-up fingernails. The energy constantly burning under his skin. He just couldn’t stand it, that’s all. Anthony looked at the clock on the wall. There was a good half hour left in the class, and that half hour suddenly assumed oceanic dimensions. That’s when he sent everything flying: pencil case, books, notebooks, even his stool.

  The visit to the principal’s of
fice wasn’t as bad as all that. Monsieur Villeminot fully understood what made these kids tick, locked inside all year long, the victims of their hormones, pressured into earning useless certificates that would destine them for various kinds of schooling. These were more or less prestigious, but they all put the kids through the mill, from which they emerged either accomplished or broken, meaning available. Monsieur Villeminot no longer got upset over the fits of rage, the kissing in the corners, or the clandestine consumption of drugs and alcohol. He merely applied the rules mechanically, without anger or leniency. Anthony got a three-day suspension, since his outburst had followed quite a few others.

  From then on, life had taken on a strange aspect. Anthony found himself waking up in the morning even more tired than the night before. Yet he was sleeping later and later, especially on the weekends, which infuriated his mother. When his friends got on his nerves, he got angry, started punching. He constantly wanted to hit things, hurt himself, smash into walls. He would take off on his bicycle with his Walkman and listen to the same sad song twenty times in a row. While watching Beverly Hills, 90210 on television, a deep melancholy would suddenly overwhelm him. California existed, somewhere far away, and he was sure that people there were living worthwhile lives, whereas he had pimples, sneakers with holes in them, and his sad eye. Plus his parents, who ruled his life. He got around their orders and constantly defied their authority, of course, but even then, an acceptable future remained out of reach. Anthony sure didn’t want to wind up like his old man, drunk half the time and yelling at the TV news, or arguing with an indifferent wife. Where was life, for chrissakes?

  By dint of walking, Anthony had reached the edge of town. He’d gone far enough to see a depressing landscape of dense hillocks and yellow grass. For people with imagination, the abandoned shopping cart over there might seem romantic, but that wasn’t how he saw it. He was about to turn back when he spotted Stéphanie.

  Immediately, his heart leapt.

  She was alone on the little path to the new skate park. At this distance he was just guessing it was her, but from the ponytail and the ass, it had to be. A little two-wheeler with its characteristic pet-pet-pet was slowly bumping along behind her. It was Romain Rotier, the other asshole, riding his tiny Chappy. Steph stopped and waited for him. The distance between them quickly shrank. Anthony felt disgusted; he could already guess what would happen next.

  Instead, it was the exact opposite. Steph clearly had no desire to talk with that jerk, and their conversation degenerated almost immediately. She wanted to go on her way, but Romain wasn’t about to let her. He followed her, zigzagging on his two-wheeler and tweaking the accelerator to stay level with her. He would veer off and then come back to block her path. What he was doing looked creepy, and when he honked at her, Anthony could no longer stand it. He put his head down and charged.

  He hadn’t realized they were so far away. He had to run for almost a full minute to reach them, and they had all the time in the world to see him coming. It was a curious spectacle, this short, stocky boy, heavy through the shoulders, pounding across the landscape at a dead run. Romain put the Chappy up on its stand and grabbed his helmet by the chinstrap, ready for anything. Steph could tell he was nervous. She wondered if Anthony was going to grab him by the throat; it seemed possible. When he finally reached them, dusty and out of breath, he was smiling.

  “What do you think you’re doing here?” snapped Romain, his lip curled.

  Anthony stood with his hands on his thighs, trying to catch his breath. He had the sun in his eyes and couldn’t see very well. Still, he immediately realized that Steph had been crying. Her face was disheveled and her eyes were puffy and red.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Is there a problem?”

  “Of course not. I’m fine.”

  She had snapped at him. Romain was amused.

  “What are you thinking, droop-eye? That she needed you?”

  “What did you just say?”

  A few more exchanges of that sort followed, along the lines of “What do you think?” and “Who do you think you are?” Romain had taken two steps toward Anthony and seemed to be planning to smash him in the face with his helmet. Which was exactly what Anthony expected. But Stéphanie cut them off:

  “I’m sick and tired of both of you. I’m going home.”

  Seeing that she really was heading home left them with their pride but without an audience. It seemed kind of a shame. Romain put his helmet back on.

  “You were lucky this time.”

  He walked back to his motorbike and gave Anthony the finger before heading back the way he’d come. The bike’s peeeeeet pet-pet-pet sound faded, and Romain disappeared in a small cloud of dust.

  In the other direction, calm lay on the open space and its motionless waves. The sun drifted overhead, creating a rich pattern of bronzes and golds. In the distance, Steph’s figure had already become much smaller. Anthony decided to follow her. He didn’t plan to catch up with her, just wanted to follow her a little. So he started walking, escorting her in silence, careful to leave a good hundred yards between them. Steph soon noticed that she wasn’t alone. She stopped, and Anthony couldn’t avoid catching up with her.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Why are you following me?”

  “No reason.”

  “Do you have something to tell me?”

  “No.”

  “Are you a pervert or something?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Well then?”

  “Nothing.”

  * * *

  —

  He continued following her all the same. Steph was feeling more and more weary and depressed. She didn’t want to be seen in town with this retard, and she also didn’t want to be all alone at home. Evening was falling, and she started to feel vaguely anxious. The two of them were now on the departmental highway to Étange. Steph was walking in the dry grass on the shoulder. Anthony was doing the same, thirty yards behind her. Once again, she let him catch up.

  “Just how long do you plan to follow me like this? Aren’t you tired of it? Don’t you have anything else to do?”

  Anthony shrugged. She was now talking without animosity, more to tease him than anything else.

  “What exactly are you hoping for?”

  “Nothing. I wanted to talk, that’s all.”

  “Do you often follow chicks this way?”

  “No, never.”

  “You realize you’re freaky, right?”

  He tried to give her a reassuring smile.

  “I didn’t want to scare you.”

  “Yeah…okay.”

  She seemed to be looking for something in the landscape. From all the times she’d crisscrossed the area on foot, by bicycle, scooter, bus, and car, she knew the valley by heart. All the kids were like that. Life here was a matter of trips. You went to school, to see your friends, to town, to the beach, to smoke a joint behind the pool, to meet somebody in the little park. It was all comings and goings. Same for the adults: to work, to run errands, to the babysitter’s, to Midas for a tune-up, to the movies. Each desire implied a distance; each pleasure required fuel. People wound up thinking of the place as a road map. Memories were necessarily geographical.

  Suddenly, Steph had an idea.

  “Feel like having a drink?”

  * * *

  —

  They retraced their steps and took the steep, winding road up to the overlook. It was lined with trees and pretty houses recently built by people who worked in Luxembourg. As they climbed toward the summit, the vegetation became denser, as did the shade. They walked along side by side, occasionally bumping elbows. Gradually their legs began to feel the fatigue of climbing. They walked in silence. Anthony was happy. He had so longed for som
ething like this to happen.

  Soon they spotted the statue of the Virgin Mary that stood at the top. The Wendel family had paid for the thirty-foot monster of piety that watched over the sleep of the workers below. Now, decades later, with her bent head and outstretched arms, she continued to bless Heillange. When you stood at the foot of the statue, it really was pretty impressive.

  “A shell hit it during the war,” said Anthony.

  “I knew that,” answered Steph.

  This was their shared history. Steph told him to wait for a moment and disappeared behind the statue’s base. Looking up, Anthony studied Mary’s benign expression, the heavy folds of her robe, the smoothness of metal that was beginning to rust. Steph returned holding a bottle of vodka.

  “What’s that?”

  “We came up here drinking the other day. We left a bottle behind.”