So that’s how Anthony wound up on a train platform with a check for nearly twenty thousand francs in his pocket and his possessions in a duffel bag. A gray day, kind of chilly. It was a German train station, and none of the destinations—Dortmund, Munich, Poland—appealed to him. Should he go straight home to Heillange? Either way, he had to go through Paris. He would see when he got there. Maybe he’d stay for a day or two and enjoy himself.
Arriving at the Gare de l’Est, his heart sank. Here he was in Paris, for the first time in his life. Right away, he disliked the size of the place. A city full of blacks, threats, shops, all those crowds and cars. He had the confused impression that every person there was determined to rip him off. He took refuge in the nearest bar, on rue d’Alsace, and started playing pinball and drinking beers. There, at least, he felt at home. It was a little punk bar whose owner sported an old Elvis-style pompadour, played ska, and served draft Belgian. Anthony bought a few rounds and made friends. At one in the morning the owner announced he was closing, and Anthony found himself out on the sidewalk, drunk. He asked the owner if he needed a hand. The guy wore rings on each finger and had a fur collar on his denim jacket, and he looked cool. He said, “No thanks, I’m good.”
“So what we do now?”
“I’m going home, buddy. My day’s over.”
“Do you know where I can sleep tonight?”
“At a hotel, of course.”
The guy had rolled down the metal shutter and padlocked it. Crisscrossed with quick shadows, boulevard Magenta descended toward the heart of the city with its colorful signs, its restrained ferment. Anthony didn’t much like it. He needed someone to guide him. He felt scared.
“Please, man, I was in the service. I don’ know nothin’ about Paris.”
The owner studied him for a moment, vaguely amused. Clearly, he didn’t quite see the connection.
“I can’t do anything for you, buddy. I’ve got a family. They’re expecting me.”
Anthony rummaged in his pockets. He found his check and showed it to him, as if his being solvent settled everything.
“Yeah, cool. So what?”
“Can’t you put me up, just for one night?”
“Cut it out with that stuff.”
“I’ll pay you.”
Anthony put his hand on the man’s shoulder, who jerked free.
“Look, buddy, I don’t know you. You keep on like that, and I’ll fix your face with a wrench.”
Anthony took a step backward. The guy had seemed cool, and Anthony had paid for drinks for him, for everybody.
“Okay, good night.”
The guy’s cowboy boots echoed on the pavement until he disappeared behind the train station.
Anthony had wound up alone in Paris. Even from a distance, this city of theirs seemed complicated, with its ten thousand streets, its misleading lights, the mix of all sorts of people, the buildings, a church, money streaming over poverty, the feeling of being awake, of always being on your guard, immigrants at every turn, incredibly numerous and diverse, kinky hair, blacks, Chinese, millions of them. He walked down toward République. On either side, there was nothing but barbershops for Africans and luggage stores, narrow snack bars with neon lights and young men out front talking loudly and drinking cheap beer. Nobody looked at him. It was a weekday night, and though the streets were never completely empty, they were still pretty quiet. Anthony wondered where all those people could be going. He found them different, without knowing why. The women were prettier than in other places, maybe. Some of the guys seemed a little swishy, but were out walking with their girlfriends. Overall, it was a place of mixing and menace. Gradually, Anthony’s drunkenness faded. He walked some more. From time to time he made sure his check was still in his pocket. He wanted Paris. He wanted those women, wanted to drink in those cafés, wanted to live in one of those apartments whose chandeliers and moldings he could glimpse from the sidewalk. It was tempting, promising. But unattainable. Which end were you supposed to start with? At one point he asked two young guys in leather jackets with highlights in their hair where the Eiffel Tower was.
“It’s straight ahead.”
“And if you keep going, you’ll see the ocean.”
Little twerps.
Afraid of getting lost, afraid of running into bad people, Anthony retraced his steps and waited outside the train station. It was November. It was cold. Some homeless guys came over to bum a cigarette and started giving him a hard time because he didn’t have any. He was in good physical shape and was tempted to punch one out to set an example. The guys reeked, and they could barely stand upright. It would be easy. But he decided to split and walked around the area blowing on his hands, sitting down for a moment, then walking on. Hotels intimidated him. It was too late. Dawn wasn’t that far away anymore. What was the point of blowing a hundred francs? The first brasseries opened; he had a cup of coffee at the counter and watched the ballet of the dump trucks and the garbagemen. The black army of cleanliness. As soon as he could, he bought a ticket for Heillange, via Nancy. He showed up at his mother’s place in the early afternoon.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
Truth be told, she didn’t seem all that surprised. Anthony’s bed was made. There was some cauliflower au gratin and pasta left, and she cooked him a cutlet in cream. He devoured the food, then went upstairs and slept for twenty hours straight.
* * *
—
Anthony took a series of temporary jobs after that, without touching the check the army had written him. He didn’t dare. He had the feeling that once he cashed it, the money would disappear in seconds. Then it would be penury and misery, he would depend on his mother, be back to being poor, a child again. So he looked for work. Doing temp jobs was fine; all his friends did it. He cleaned the bathrooms at the Saint-Vincent clinic. Same thing for the abattoirs. Then he worked as a school janitor. Soon he wound up on the kitchen crew at the prefecture. Problem was, the job wasn’t right next door and nearly all his pay went for gas. He mentioned this to the woman at Manpower who was handling his case. She advised him not to quit, it would make a bad impression. So for eight weeks Anthony got up at dawn every day to drive sixty miles, work for four hours, and drive home, all to earn barely four thousand francs a month. It wore you out and it drove you nuts. But at least his mother didn’t give him any grief when he got home. She believed in killing yourself working. In her family, this was considered normal. An idea that Anthony was almost starting to subscribe to. At least he had right on his side. It was now his turn to complain about taxes, immigrants, and politicians. He didn’t owe anyone anything, he was useful, he complained, he was exploited, he was dimly aware of being part of a vast majority, the mass of people who could do everything and were sure there was nothing to be done.
After that, he specialized in nursing homes, doing laundry and cleaning. He went through five of them in three months. Then it was the Vivarte warehouse, Liqui Moly, the Merax print shop, and finally the Gordon factory, where he’d found a more or less permanent job in a workshop. The job consisted in stacking sheets of metal, rods, and pieces of grillwork in a precise pattern. This produced a cubic, stainless steel sarcophagus that was then raised by amazing forklifts and put in equally amazing ovens, where the temperature reached two thousand degrees and more. Which is apparently how you make an air conditioner. Gordon sold them all over Europe, though with more and more difficulty. Worried supervisors kept a watchful eye on the workers and an endless series of temps who were bounced at the slightest economic downturn. Above them were the bosses, the engineers, the executives. You saw them at the canteen. It was another world.
Anthony made a few good friends at work: Cyril, Krim, Dany, le Zouk, and Martinet. In the morning, he was glad to see them. They ate at the canteen together and secretly smoked blunts during breaks, sitting on pallets in the little courtyard behind workshop C. He saw th
em after work, too. They all shared the same kind of entertainment, the same salary level, an identical worry about their future, and especially a reticence that kept them from bringing up their real problems, a life being frittered away almost in spite of them, day after day, in this backwater town they’d all wanted to leave, leading a life just like their fathers’, a slow-motion malediction. They couldn’t admit to having the congenital illness of ever-replicated dailyness. Confessing it would add to the shame of their submission. Because these guys were proud, and especially proud of not being jerk-offs, profiteers, faggots, unemployed. And, in Martinet’s case, of being able to belch the alphabet.
After a while, Anthony was able to rent a little one-bedroom apartment. He furnished it from Confo and bought himself a car, a new Clio Williams that ate up his check. Since then, he ran up debts, but he still planned to buy himself a motorcycle for the summer. His mother criticized his thoughtless spending, but as long as he was working, she had nothing to say. On the other hand, when it came to girls, times were pretty lean.
When Anthony went out with his pals on a Saturday night, he would sometimes pick up a woman at a party or at the Papagayo, of course. But those one-night stands didn’t count. They were with cashiers, nurses’ aides, nannies, or women who already had two kids and were treating themselves to a weekend break while the grandparents minded the little ones. He had a different ideal.
He didn’t talk about it. But from time to time, when it was late and he’d drunk more than usual, he would grab a beer, go down the two flights of stairs from his apartment to the parking lot, and climb into his Clio. He would find something good on the radio, light a cigarette, and drive north. Toward Steph’s neighborhood.
For Anthony, the pleasure was driving drunk through Heillange at night, getting choked up listening to oldies on FM radio. He drove without pushing it, following the docks along the Henne, taking the too-familiar streets of his native town. The glow of streetlights punctuated this smooth trajectory. Gradually he started to experience those deep feelings that sad songs bring up and yielded to them. Johnny Hallyday was his preference. He sang of disappointed hopes, failed love affairs, the city, loneliness. Of time passing. With one hand on the steering wheel and his beer in the other, Anthony crisscrossed the landscape. The gigantic steel mill caught in the spotlights. The bus shelters where he’d spent half his childhood waiting for the school bus. His old school, the busy kebab stands, the train station he’d left from and to which he returned with his tail between his legs. The bridges where he used to spit into the river out of sheer boredom. The pari-mutuel betting shop, the McDonald’s, the emptiness of the tennis courts, the darkened swimming pool, the slow cruise toward residential neighborhoods, open country, nothingness. The lyrics of “J’oublierai ton nom.” Soon he would find himself very close to Steph’s house, almost without intending to. He would turn up the volume and take a sip of beer. From a distance, he would stare at the Chaussoys’ beautiful house, with its grille and electronic gate lock. He wondered if she was in. Probably not. He lit a cigarette and smoked it while letting his thoughts wander. Then he would go home, like a fool.
But none of this mattered, because France was in the semifinals. Around five, he took his box of rosé, got into his car, and drove to his cousin’s place.
2
Ever since Hacine and Coralie brought the baby home from the maternity ward, their life had become a never-ending series of chores. Getting up at night, fixing bottles nonstop, changing diapers, and taking walks, all while continuing to go to work. The days went by, all the same, all exhausting. He and Coralie couldn’t even talk without getting into an argument. Mainly they passed by each other like zombies, partners in a business whose purpose was to keep this frail life going. The girl. Her name was Océane, an Aquarius. She would be six months old in early August.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, Coralie was depressed about her weight gain. She still had twenty-five extra pounds she’d put on during her pregnancy and wasn’t able to shed them. She would burst into tears at the drop of a hat, and when Hacine tried to put things in perspective, it was worse.
And this wasn’t counting his in-laws, who had invented new rights over the couple’s life since becoming Grandma and Grandpa. They now felt they were entitled to drop by unannounced whenever they felt like it, to see the baby and lend a hand. “By the way, I made soup, I’ll bring you some.” There seemed to be no way to resist this invasion of kindness. Coralie’s mother left an apron and some cleaning products at their place. She was helping to do the housework, so she may as well have the right tools. She had even reorganized their kitchen drawers; the kids didn’t know how to do it right.
Sitting on the living room sofa watching the news with his father-in-law, Hacine sometimes wondered how he ever wound up there. He felt like a stowaway in his own life. Nothing appealed to him; nothing looked like him; he behaved himself, and waited. For her part, Coralie just took one nap after another. They had stopped fucking.
Hacine felt torn. On one hand he was grateful, of course. These people had adopted him. But he hated their little quirks and their way of living. Their absolutely rigid schedule of meals at noon and seven. Their habit of counting everything, rationing, breaking everything down, whether days or slices of pie. The dad’s unbuttoning his pants after meals. The simple, honest ideas they held about everything, being perennial losers. Their bland probity, which left them constantly aghast at the ways of the world. The three or four strong ideas they retained from primary school were useless in helping them understand current events, politics, the labor market, the rigged Eurovision votes, or the Crédit Lyonnais affair. And even then, the most they could manage was to be mildly scandalized, saying it’s not normal, it’s not possible, it’s not human. Those three dicta cut to the heart of all, or nearly all, questions for them. Even though life constantly contradicted their predictions, dashed their hopes, and routinely deceived them, the in-laws clung valiantly to the principles they’d always held. They continued to respect their leaders, believed what the TV told them, were enthusiastic when appropriate and indignant on demand. They paid their taxes, wore slippers indoors, liked the chateaus of the Loire and the Tour de France, and bought French cars. Hacine’s mother-in-law even read Point de vue. It made you want to shoot yourself.
What Hacine should have had was an ally, someone he could talk to about all this. He was now working on an open-ended contract at the Darty warehouse in Lameck. Whenever he dared tell his workmates that he couldn’t stand it anymore, someone always chimed in to say that having a kid was the most beautiful thing in the world. Conventional wisdom ruled at work as it did elsewhere, serving only to envelop and intoxicate you with happiness so the evidence of the facts wouldn’t kill you.
Where Coralie was concerned, even mentioning any of this was out of the question. It was strange because deep down, she had never really been who Hacine thought she was. Since Océane came into the world, he was discovering Coralie anew, and couldn’t believe it. He had always loved her cheerfulness, her strength of character, her ability to talk to anybody. Unlike Hacine, Coralie never said, “No thanks, that’s not for me.” Unlike him, she didn’t feel that people prejudged her. Everything was worth doing, worth trying. You just had to want to. She was a woman who loved to have fun, to eat, to spend time with her friends. At Christmas she was completely out of control. This was her big moment, obligatory joy, running errands for weeks, thinking of thousands of details, little touches, getting tiny presents for everybody, and wanting even more. And Hacine loved that, loved to see her blush, or dance, or have a third helping of roast beef. Her clumsiness, her somewhat leaden jokes, her unicorn-and-teddy-bear side, her multicolored nail polish. Coralie made the connection. Without her, he found life more than he could handle. He didn’t dare. He would have stayed in his corner.
But since they’d had the baby, Hacine realized something else: that Coralie had always suffered from an emptiness. A
place, deep inside, that had always been vacant. When Océane arrived, she was the first to take that place, and fill it completely. From then on, everything operated from that starting point. The baby was the measure of all things and justified everything.
Hacine wasn’t jealous of Océane. He didn’t feel neglected, especially. He didn’t resent her. He didn’t say that he had better things to do than devote himself to a baby. But he himself had never had that emptiness, that available space. Océane came along as a bonus, on top of everything else: his neuroses, his unhappiness, the rage that never left him. Life wasn’t enough for him, and the baby didn’t change anything. To the contrary. Well, it was more complicated than that. He couldn’t have said how.
So when one of the salesmen at the store where he worked placed an ad to sell his Suzuki DR, Hacine immediately went to see him. Without thinking, he wrote him a check. Coralie really yelled at him that evening. When it came to money, they were already in deep shit. They wouldn’t be going on vacation this year. Besides, where would they put it? They didn’t have a garage anymore. And, finally, motorcycles killed their riders and everybody knew it, goddammit.
“When are you going to grow up?” she wanted to know.
Baby Océane was crouched in her crib, busily tearing the men’s ready-to-wear pages in the La Redoute catalog. Arms folded, Coralie seemed on the verge of tears. The circles under her eyes were scary. She had just dyed her hair for the third time this month. With the upheaval in her hormones, her nails, hair, skin, libido, and everything had changed. She was trying to get a grip, but it wasn’t easy.
And Their Children After Them Page 39