Waiting for Tomorrow

by Nathacha Appanah

  WAITING FOR

  TOMORROW

  Also available in English from Graywolf Press

  The Last Brother

  WAITING FOR TOMORROW

  A NOVEL

  Nathacha Appanah

  Translated from the French

  by Geoffrey Strachan

  GRAYWOLF PRESS

  Copyright © Editions Gallimard, Paris, 2015

  English translation copyright © 2018 by Geoffrey Strachan

  First published as En attendant demain by Editions Gallimard, Paris

  The author and Graywolf Press have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify Graywolf Press at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation. Significant support has also been provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, Target, the McKnight Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Amazon Literary Partnership, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

  Special funding for this title was provided by Edwin C. Cohen.

  Published by Graywolf Press

  250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600

  Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401

  All rights reserved.

  www.graywolfpress.org

  Published in the United States of America

  ISBN 978-1-55597-803-7

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-993-5

  2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

  First Graywolf Printing, 2018

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017938027

  Cover design and illustration: Kimberly Glyder Design

  For Bernard Gouley

  and Clotilde Monteiro

  CONTENTS

  Today

  PART ONE

  A New Year’s Eve party

  An oddly matched couple

  A stay-at-home mother

  A man who paints

  “The song of the fourth floor”

  Today

  PART TWO

  The day of the grass snake

  The concert

  The world as Laura sees it

  A dinner

  Today

  The Melody of Adèle

  PART THREE

  The first day of winter

  The swans on the lake

  A kind of truth

  Today

  Tomorrow

  WAITING FOR

  TOMORROW

  Today

  DAWN BREAKS OVER THE HORIZON. It moves across the sea, soaring over the empty beach where Anita and Adèle had sat one festive evening, climbing up silently through the city, slipping along without pausing in the street where, at number seven, a children’s shoe store has taken the place of Adam’s architectural office. It reaches the top of the hill and lingers there, gray and hazy for a moment, before suddenly plunging down the far side. It sweeps over houses, streets, trees, and flowers asleep on balconies. Down in the valleys it seems to dance, lightly, discreetly. It seeps into the forest and spills across the lake where no one ventures now since Adèle drowned there four years, five months, and thirteen days ago.

  The dawn finds Anita in her kitchen, seated at a great wooden table, with her back to the broad bay windows through which, for several minutes more, a few stars can be seen in the sky. Anita is wearing a long turquoise skirt, its hem now frayed by wear, and a gray pullover that belongs to her husband, Adam. She has had a sleepless night. She has been thinking about the old days, remembering forgotten dreams, things left undone, she has tried to look into her heart, she has been thinking about Adèle. Sitting there, barefoot, her eyes red, Anita is waiting for day finally to break, with a dry crack like the tough, wrinkled shell of a walnut.

  The morning light slips slowly across the living room and enters the bedroom where Laura, Anita and Adam’s daughter, is asleep. At this moment Laura is dreaming that she is swimming in the lake. It is a dream she often has, she runs along the jetty to give herself momentum, takes off, and performs a perfect swan dive. Her strokes are graceful, almost soundless, as if Laura were made of water. Those of her father, whose presence she senses close beside her, are noisy and powerful. Adèle is in this dream too, but she is swimming beneath her, completely underwater. It is a strange sensation but not unpleasant. Laura feels as though she is surrounded, supported. In her dream Laura has forgotten that for the past four years, five months, and thirteen days she has been unable either to run or to perform swan dives, or to swim.

  The dawn bathes the house and the forest in a dove gray color and makes its way across fields and mountain villages. When it reaches the front of the prison complex surrounded by barbed wire, Adam is on his feet, his face pressed against the little window, gripping the bars with both hands. Just now, when he climbed onto the table to reach the opening, he recalled the traditional French name for windows set high in the wall: they are known as jours de souffrance, “dark days.” Adam is waiting for the dawn, as he has been waiting for his release for four years, five months, and thirteen days. He has had a sleepless night, he has been thinking about the old days, all those promises not kept, the dozens of little acts of cowardice one scatters in one’s path. He has been thinking about Adèle. Now Adam stands there, barefoot, and at last he is looking the dawn in the eye.

  PART ONE

  A New Year’s Eve party

  TWENTY YEARS EARLIER in a traditional solid brick house in Montreuil, on the eastern outskirts of Paris, Adam and Anita are perched on a vast, deep sofa covered in green velvet. A pile of clothes lies between them—coats, jackets, sweaters, scarves, hats, gloves—and as yet each is unaware of the other’s presence. It is the last half hour of the old year, it is still the twentieth century, they are both twenty-four. They are each haunted by a sense of failure, the feeling that, somehow or other, they have once more got it wrong, they should have been braver, less sensitive, less themselves. Later on, when people ask them how they met, they will reply (in unison), it was all thanks to a green sofa.

  But not so fast.

  Before he ended up on the sofa Adam had been in the dining room converted into a dance floor and bar where the only drink was a highly alcoholic punch. It was his first New Year’s Eve in Paris. Until now he had always gone home for the holidays, returning to his life as woodcutter / cabinetmaker / painter / surfer / marathon runner / only son. Every year he would be amazed by the ease, the pleasure, and the relief with which he reverted to being that Adam, a rugged, energetic young man, who smelled of timber and salt, and was given to deep breathing and outbursts of hearty laughter. He would also have the feeling he still cannot find words to express, a mixture of enthusiasm and relief welling up once the first pine trees have been spotted beside the route nationale, the tops of the trees silhouetted against the dusk sky, the russet color the ferns turn to in winter, the pounding of the waves that he hears before seeing the sea.

  Every year, it is true, he was bracing himself to experience the feelings that seemed to be common to all of his new friends, that boredom with home life, that distaste for the provinces, that contempt for the countryside, in short, the dreary prospect of being far away from the city and with their parents. But on the threshold of the wooden house his father had built with his own hands, his whole being would be overcome by a soft, warm sensation, in which he felt happy, at ease, safe. Adam liked being a
t home, he liked his father’s company, he went running in the forest with his friend Imran, a marathon runner like himself, he swam and surfed, he painted. Adam liked the simplicity of what it was to be a man down there. Sometimes he felt ashamed as well. Was he making the most of his youth? Wasn’t he just a big spoiled child? Shouldn’t he be yearning for something more (travel, action, noise, city lights, passion)?

  For this New Year holiday Adam had decided to stay in Paris. It was his fifth and last year at the school of architecture. Here is what he would do: a long stroll through the city, taking in the most brilliantly lit streets, the most imposing bridges, the grandest squares, the most impressive monuments. He would study all the plaques, go into churches, sit on public benches. Then he would walk up the Champs-Élysées and lay a flower on the tomb of the unknown soldier in memory of his great-grandfather, André, who had died at Soissons in 1917. As midnight began to strike somewhere, he would be beneath the Arc de Triomphe and it would be perfect.

  But at the last minute Adam had abandoned the whole plan because his friend Paul had laughed and said to him: What? You’re going to lay a flower on the tomb of the unknown soldier on New Year’s Eve? You must be joking!

  Behind this Adam had sensed more, things not said out loud but conveyed in a raised eyebrow, an ironic smile: You’re just a peasant, get back to your farm.

  In a world in which Adam had had sufficient self-confidence here is what he would have explained:

  André, a “poilu,” a French soldier killed in fighting at Soissons in 1917, the father of Maurice, a resistance fighter, killed in a bombing raid in Bordeaux in 1944, the father of André, pine tree tapper and woodcutter, born in 1940 in Hossegor in the Basque country, the father of Adam.

  In a world in which Adam did not feel inferior because he is a provincial, here is what he would have described:

  Evenings in the wooden house where the talk is of those heroes. André, who died in the mud, and Maurice, killed at Bordeaux on a patch of wasteland. The sticky gray mud, the rats on André’s body, the dark snow falling heavily on that endless night in 1917. Maurice’s blood caught up in the vegetation that morning in ’44, the dandelion clock blown apart by the draft from his body. Adam’s wax crayon drawings of the tufted herons taking flight gently, ever so gently, the wind that morning is just a light breeze.

  But Adam had not come out with any of this. He had laughed as well, and agreed to spend the evening in Montreuil. Beneath his heart, he felt a pain like that from the point of a dagger, just like what he used to feel when running a marathon, around the twelfth mile, and what he heard at that moment was: Foreigner! Who had said that? Had this word been lurking among Paul’s splutterings?

  At the start of the evening in that house in Montreuil, Adam thinks he’ll get used to it all, of course he will, he’s twenty-four years old, for God’s sake! There is music, pretty girls with glittering makeup, laughter everywhere. But the hours pass and Adam feels he is shrinking, wilting. He stays on his own in a corner, in his bubble, like a foreigner who does not speak the same language as the others, does not understand their rituals, their culture.

  Adam thinks about his father back home in their house. Has it snowed in the valley? What are the waves like tonight? He thinks about his surfboard. Oh, the thrill of tucking it under his arm, and running into the water, that unbelievable thrill! He tries to call to mind the smell of the room where he paints, imagines himself settling down on the stool, patient and alert in front of a white canvas. He knows a secret lies hidden there that he has never yet truly grasped.

  Now Adam pictures himself floating above all these people about whom he doesn’t give a damn, students of law, architecture, psychology, literature. He goes flying out through the window, out into the cold and the snow, toward the Arc de Triomphe, toward the flame, toward his great-grandfather. Ever since he has been in Paris he has wanted to do this, but he has been waiting for a special day, for he wanted to remember it always, to do it in such a way that later, on a winter’s evening, he could, in his turn, begin a story with words something like this: I spent the first minutes of the New Year beneath the Arc de Triomphe, beside the flame of the unknown soldier. Adam has always been fond of stories.

  Liar! Who said that?

  What is the matter with him? His whole body begins to shake. Adam staggers out of the noisy room, passes through the kitchen, walks along a corridor, finds himself in a dimly lit room. At the end of it a sofa piled high with coats. He dives onto it, head first, his body curled into a ball, with both the determination of someone plunging into a melee and the desperation of someone longing to return into his mother’s womb. Adam, half man, half child, that is how he settles onto the sofa, his neck at an angle, like a duck sheltering under its own wing, his chin on his knees, his hands clasping his ankles.

  It is here that the dagger pricks him most deeply, here that the two words, Foreigner and Liar, make themselves clearly heard, and with them a mass of details crowds in: his regional accent, which he tries hard to smooth over since he is so sick of people asking him where he comes from (Belgium? Switzerland? Canada?); the endless waiting for some surge of enthusiasm that never arrives (just look at that avenue! that light! that dome! that face! those legs! that energy!); his studies, at which he turns out to be merely average, after having always been top of his class; his vain efforts to be like everyone else, up to the minute, in fashion, a smoker, a drinker, a nonstop talker, a womanizer, isn’t that what being young is all about? Adam used to think that here in this city he would be transformed into a more sophisticated, more intelligent, and more ambitious version of himself. He believed he would be inspired by the centuries-old paved streets, the monuments, the gardens, the flights of steps leading to romantic squares, the cabaret theaters, the songs, the brasseries, the hundreds of thousands of people going down into the metro every morning, the woman from next door laying a hand lightly on his chest as she speaks to him, the milliner’s store at the end of the street, the perfect chocolate cream puff, the white and gold carousel, the folded metro ticket at the bottom of his pocket.

  In his brain (that creature with a thousand lights, portals, hiding places, and passageways) a notion arises and offers Adam the solace of truth.

  I don’t belong here.

  I don’t belong here.

  I don’t belong here.

  Adam becomes aware that he is repeating this sentence out loud only when the pile of coats replies to him:

  “Welcome to the club, my friend.”

  Anita is sitting, or rather crouching, hugging her upraised legs, head lowered, forehead resting on her knees, inhaling her own warm vanilla scent. There has been substantial traffic since she took refuge here. People walk in, dump their stuff on the pile that is already quite high or on top of her, and go out, laughing. Everyone is laughing this evening, animated by an unrelenting collective gaiety. This is how the new year must discover us when it arrives; sparkling eyes, open mouths, glass in hand, arm around a friend, body gyrating. Better that than huddled up on a green sofa, all alone and buried under a pile of coats.

  And yet it had all started well. She had arrived with Christophe and they had been kissing. But when he had tried to slip his hand under her skirt she had slapped his face. Oh yes, it had been a real good slap, swift, hard, impossible to dodge. It had been a reflex action—and yet for such an action to occur doesn’t there have to be thought, a connection made, the alerting of the nervous system, the transmission of data? There was just that sudden impulse in her right hand, arising more or less at the level of her wrist (“an impulse arose,” that’s something she ought to write down in her notebook, where she writes things down, words, phrases, ideas for use later, in, shh, the novel). At the very moment when her hand was striking that boy’s cheek, she was once again astonished at the girl she had become. In the old days she would never have slapped him. She would have resisted, wriggling this way and that (in her mind’s eye she sees her place being taken by a fine silvery gray fish
in Christophe’s grasp, he leans forward, his mouth half open, concentrating on his catch), she would have uttered frightened little squeals and her eyes would have filled with tears.

  But here, in this city, Anita has become high-strung, impulsive, often filled with bitter anger. Once she used to write neatly turned, well-rhymed things, charming verses (the way you might knit a charming sweater, arrange a charming bouquet). She wrote what she saw: a bird on a branch, an innocent blue sky … and she won prizes for her poetry. She dressed in pastel shades and plaited her black hair into delicate braids.

  Now jagged words well up inside her, arranging themselves almost involuntarily into poems that are published in a well-regarded literary magazine that sells few copies and is edited by François Sol. Thrilling poems, François Sol had said to her, some months previously, laying a hand on her arm. Anita is afraid of François Sol, his office piled high with editions of classic writers published in the Pléiade series, anthologies, complete works, rare editions, his formal manner of speaking that seems like a putdown, the way he tosses a volume of Nietzsche or Kierkegaard or a copy of Ulysses nonchalantly onto the top of a pile, his questions and the advice that follows without his waiting for an answer to the question. (Have you read Joyce? You must read Joyce. Do you keep a diary? You must keep a diary.) The truth is that she dreads him examining her properly, with his gecko-green eyes, dreads him unmasking her beneath her heavy makeup, her military boots, and her hair bound tight, like a sailor’s knot, dreads him seeing beyond her vitriolic poems, beyond her gear, and dismissing her with vexing bluntness, a finger pointed at the door, the way one dismisses an imposter.

  Five years ago she was still that young girl (a bird on a branch, an innocent blue sky) when she arrived in this city and a distant cousin met her at the airport and took her to her home, on the twenty-fourth floor of a tower block in the suburb of Rosny. Anita stayed for a week, the time it took for the promised room on the university campus to become free. There were sharp corners everywhere in her cousin’s apartment (little square rooms opening onto other rectangular spaces), and it was decorated with plastic flowers and pictures in relief representing scenes (ranging from the Eiffel Tower to the Arc de Triomphe). Everywhere a heavy scent of incense and spices. In this apartment, during the first few moments, as her mind and body took in this new setting that was as dismal as it was unexpected, Anita had wanted to become a child again, so that she could scream and weep and roll on the ground. An unbelievably powerful feeling overcame her when she thought about her parents, their house close to the sea, the spacious rooms flooded with light, the red waxed floor, the garden, their dog who was called Dog, the wide veranda where, as a child, she used to measure the progress of the dawning sun with her school ruler. It was a mixture of nostalgia, sadness, desire, lack, a profound longing to be elsewhere—for the first time Anita was experiencing homesickness.