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BEFORE anything else, at the beginning of the story told here, there was a screening of India Song at an art cinema in the city where you lived. After the film there was a panel discussion in which you participated. Then after the panel we went to a bar with some young graduate students, one of whom was you. It was you who reminded me later, much later, about that bar, a fairly elegant, attractive place, and about the two whiskeys I had that evening. I had no recollection of those whiskeys, nor of you, nor of the other young grad students, nor of the bar. I recalled, or so I thought, that you had walked me to the parking lot where I’d left my car. I still had that Renault 16, which I loved and still drove fast back then, even after the health problems related to alcohol. You asked me if I had lovers. I said, Not anymore, which was true. You asked how fast I drove at night. I said ninety, like everyone else with an R16. That it was wonderful.
It was after that evening that you began writing me letters. Many letters. Sometimes one a day. They were very short letters, more like notes; they were, yes, like cries for help sent from an unbearable, deathly place, a kind of desert. The beauty of those cries was unmistakable.
I didn’t answer.
I kept all the letters.
At the tops of the pages were the names of the places where they’d been written and the time or the weather: Sunny or Rainy. Or Cold. Or: Alone.
And then once, a long time went by with no word at all. Perhaps a month, I don’t remember how long it lasted.
And so in my turn, in the void left by you, by that absence of letters, of cries for help, I wrote to find out why you had stopped writing. Why so suddenly. Why you had stopped writing as if violently prevented from it, as if by death.
I wrote you this letter:
Yann Andréa, this summer I met someone you know, Jean-Pierre Ceton. We spoke about you. I never would have guessed you knew each other. And then there was your note under my door in Paris after Navire Night. I tried to call you, but I couldn’t find your phone number. And then there was your letter from January – I was in the hospital again, sick again from who knows what; they said I’d been poisoned by some new medication, so-called antidepressants. Always the same old song. It was nothing, my heart was fine. I wasn’t even sad. I had reached the end of something, that’s all. I started drinking again, yes, over the winter, in the evening. For years I’d been telling my friends not to visit on weekends; I lived alone in that house in Neauphle that could easily have held ten people. Alone in fourteen rooms. You get used to the echoes. That’s all. And then one time I wrote you to say that I’d just finished the film called Her Name Venus in Deserted Calcutta. I don’t remember exactly what I told you, probably that I loved it the way I love all my films. You didn’t answer that letter. And then there were the poems you sent me, some of which struck me as very beautiful, others less so, and I didn’t know quite how to tell you that. That’s it. Yes, that’s it. That your letters were your poems. Your letters are beautiful, the most beautiful I’ve ever read, so beautiful they hurt. I wanted to talk to you today. I’m still recuperating but I’m writing. I’m working. I think the second Aurelia Steiner was written for you.
That letter, I felt, didn’t require an answer either. I sent news. I recall a sorrowful, discomposed letter. I was discouraged by some upset that had occurred in my life, some new, recent, unexpected solitude. For a long time I knew almost nothing of that letter. I wasn’t even sure I’d written it that summer, the one when you suddenly appeared in my life. Nor from which place in my life I’d written it. I didn’t believe it was from this place near the sea but neither could I imagine any other place. Only long afterward did I seem to remember the space of my room around that letter, the black marble fireplace and the mirror, the very one I was facing. I wondered if I should send you that letter. I wasn’t even sure I had sent it until you mentioned receiving a letter like that from me two years earlier.
I don’t know if I saw that letter again. You spoke of it often. You had been struck by it. You said it was remarkable, that it said everything about my life and work without ever mentioning them directly. And all this in a kind of indifference, a distraction you’d found horrifying. You also told me that I had mailed it from Taormina. But that it was dated from Paris, five days earlier.
Years later, that long letter of mine was misplaced. You said you’d put it in a drawer in the large chest in the Trouville apartment and that I was the one, afterward, who must have moved it. But that day you had no idea what was going on in the house or anywhere else. You were in the parks and the bars of the grand hotels in Mont Canisy, in search of handsome bartenders from Buenos Aires and Santiago hired for the summer. While I was lost in the erotic labyrinth of Blue Eyes, Black Hair. It was only long afterward, when I wrote the story of you and me in that book, that I found the letter in the large chest that it must never have left.
IT WAS two days after I wrote that rediscovered letter that you phoned me, here, at Roches Noires, to say you were coming to visit.
Your voice on the telephone was slightly altered, as if by fear, or intimidation. I didn’t recognize it. It was . . . I don’t know how to say it – yes, that’s it: it was the voice I had been inventing for your letters just when you called.
You said, I’m coming.
I asked you why.
You said, So we can get to know each other.
At that time in my life, for someone to come see me like that, from far away, was a terrifying prospect. It’s true, I’ve never spoken about my solitude in that period of my life. The solitude that came after The Ravishment of Lol Stein, Blue Moon, Love, The Vice-Consul. That solitude was the deepest I’ve ever known but also the happiest. I didn’t experience it as solitude but as luck, a decisive freedom that I’d never had in my life until then. I ate at the Central – always the same thing: steamed prawns and a Mont Blanc. I didn’t go swimming. It was as crowded at the seashore as it was in town. I went in the evening, when my friends Henry Chatelain and Serge Derumier came to visit.
You told me that after that phone conversation you’d tried calling several days in a row but that I wasn’t home. Later I told you why. I reminded you that I went to Taormina, to the film festival, where I was to see my very dear friend Benoît Jacquot. But that I’d be back soon, back at the seashore, to write my weekly chronicle of summer 1980 for Libération, as you knew.
Again I asked, Why are you coming?
You said, To talk to you about Theodora Kats.
I said I’d abandoned the book about Theodora Kats, which for years I’d thought I could write. That I had hidden it for the eternity of my death in a Jewish place, a tomb I held sacred, the vast, fathomless tomb off-limits to traitors, those living dead of the fundamental betrayal.
I asked when you’d be here. You said, Tomorrow morning, the bus arrives at ten-thirty. I’ll be at your door by eleven.
From my bedroom balcony I waited for you. You crossed the courtyard of the Roches Noires hotel.
I had forgotten the man from India Song.
You looked like a Breton, tall and thin. To me you looked discreetly elegant; you didn’t know this about yourself, that’s still plain. You walked without looking at the tall residential building. Without glancing toward me. You were carrying a large wooden umbrella, a kind of Chinese parasol made of glazed canvas that very few young people still carried in the eighties. You also had a very small piece of luggage, a black canvas bag.
You crossed the courtyard, skirting the hedge. You cut over in the direction of the sea and disappeared into the vestibule of Roches Noires without once having raised your eyes to me.
It was
eleven in the morning, then, early in the month of July.
The year was 1980. The summer of wind and rain. The summer of Gdansk. Of the weeping child. Of the young camp counselor. The summer of our story. Of the story told here, that first summer of 1980. The story of the very young Yann Andréa Steiner and the woman who wrote books and who was old and alone like him that summer, a summer vast as all Europe.
I had told you how to find my apartment, which floor, which hallway, which door.
You never returned to the city of Caen. It was July ’80. Twelve years ago. You are still here in this apartment, here for the six months of vacation I’ve taken annually since that illness that dragged on for two years. That coma of horror. A few days before they were to “pull the plug,” as the doctors in my ward had unanimously decided, I opened my eyes. I looked around: people, the room. They were all there (so I’ve been told); I looked at those people standing there in their white smocks, who smiled at me in a kind of madness, a mad and silent happiness. I didn’t recognize their faces but I knew these were the shapes of human beings – not of walls or instruments, but of people with eyes to see. And then I closed my eyes again. Only to open them later on, to see the same people, with, I’ve been told, an amused look on my face.
There was a pause.
And then there were knocks at the door, and then your voice: It’s me, it’s Yann. I didn’t answer. The knocks were very very soft, as if everyone around you were sleeping in that residential hotel and that city, on the beach and on the sea and in every hotel room on a summer’s morning near the seashore.
Still I didn’t open immediately. I waited a bit longer. You said again, It’s me, Yann. Just as gently, calmly. I waited some more. I made no sound. For ten years I had been living in a very strict, almost monastic solitude, with Anne-Marie Stretter and the Vice-Consul of France in Lahore and she, the Queen of the Ganges, the beggar of the Tea Road, the queen of my childhood.
I opened up.
One never knows a story before it’s written. Before it has suffered the fading of the circumstances that led the author to write it. And especially before it has suffered, in the book, the mutilation of its past, its body, of your face, your voice, and it becomes irrevocable, fated. And I also mean that in the book it has become external, been carried away, separated from its author for all eternity, lost to him.
And then the door closed on you and me. On this new body, tall and thin.
And then there was the voice. The incredibly gentle voice. Distant. Regal. It was the voice of your letter, the voice of my life.
We spoke for hours.
Always about books we spoke. Always, for hours. You mentioned Roland Barthes. I reminded you how I felt about him. I said I would give all of Roland Barthes’s books for my tea roads in the Burmese forests, the red sun, and the dead children of the beggar women along the Ganges. You already knew this. I also said that I could never bring myself to read him, that for me Roland Barthes was false writing and that falseness was what had killed him. Later I told you that Roland Barthes, one day, in my home, had kindly advised me to “return” to the “so simple and so charming” style of my early novels, like The Sea Wall, The Little Horses of Tarquinia, and The Sailor from Gibraltar. I laughed. You said we would never speak of him again. And I divined that your curiosity about that brilliant author was sated.
We also spoke, as one always does, of that eminent fact, writing. Of books and more books.
It was when you began talking about books that behind your attentive gaze and perfect, lucid reasoning, I was struck by a kind of urgency you couldn’t control, as if you had to hurry to get out everything you’d decided to tell me and everything you had decided not to tell. Everything you wanted to say before the sudden emergence of that evident, terrible, illuminating thing, the decision you had made: to become my friend before killing yourself.
Very quickly, that became all I knew about you.
Much later you spoke about this. You told me it was probably true, yes. All the while remaining vague, you added: Just like you, in a different way. You did not say the word. Later I understood that even within yourself, you had to keep silent about that word, the word in your smile: writing.
And then evening fell. I said that you could stay here, could sleep in my son’s room. That it looked out over the water, and that the bed was made.
That if you wanted to take a bath, that was all right.
That if you’d rather go out, that was all right, too.
And also that you could, for instance, buy some cold chicken, a can of chestnut cream, some whipped cream to put on it, some fruit and cheese and bread. That this was what I ate every day, to keep life simple. I also said that you could buy a bottle of wine, for you. That on certain days I was drinking less. We both laughed.
No sooner had you gone out than you came back. “Money,” you said. “After the bus I don’t have any left. I forgot.”
You devoured everything with a childlike appetite that I didn’t yet know was normal for you.
Much later you told me you’d still been hungry when you got up from the table. Even after the chestnut cream that you ate in its entirety, with whipped cream on top, without realizing it.
It might have been that evening, with you, that I started drinking again. We finished off the two half-bottles of Côtes du Rhône that you had bought on Rue des Bains. The wine was stale, undrinkable. We finished off the two half-bottles of that wine from Rue des Bains.
That first night you slept in the room overlooking the sea. No sound came from that room, just as when I was alone. You must have been exhausted for days on end, months, those leaden years, perhaps; those arid, tragic years before deciding your future, and also the torturous years of that same solitude of pubescent desire.
THE DAY after your arrival, you discovered the tub in the large bathroom. You said you’d never seen a bathtub so monumental, so “historical.” From then on, every morning, as soon as you got up you spent an hour in that tub. I said you could stay in there as long as you wanted, that I took showers because the bathtub frightened me, probably because there weren’t any in the functionaries’ cottages in the backwaters I came from.
There was your voice. An incredibly gentle, distant, intimidating voice, as if barely uttered, barely perceptible ; always seeming a bit distracted, unrelated to what it was saying, removed. Even now, twelve years later, I hear that voice you had. It has flowed into my body. It has no image. It speaks of unimportant things. It can fall silent as well.
We spoke, you spoke, of the beauty of the Roches Noires residential hotel.
Then you fell silent for a while, as if searching for how to say what it was you had to tell me. You didn’t hear the growing calm that came with nightfall, so deep that I went out to the balcony to see. From time to time cars passed in front of Roches Noires, bound for Honfleur or Le Havre. As every night, Le Havre was lit up like a holiday and the sky was above it, naked, and between the sky and the Sainte Adresse lighthouse was the black parade of oil tankers descending as usual toward the ports of France and those of southern Europe.
You stood up. You looked at me through the windows. You were still in a state of profound distraction.
I came back into the room.
You sat down again opposite me and said, “So you’ll never write the story of Theodora?”
I said that I was never sure of anything when it came to what I would or wouldn’t write.
You didn’t answer.
I said, “You’re in love with Theodora.”
You didn’t smile, but said in a single breath, “Theodora is what I don’t know about you, I was very young. All the rest I know. I’ve been waiting three years for you to write her story.”
I said, “I don’t really know why I can’t write Theodora’s story.”
I added, “Perhaps it’s too difficult, it’s impossible to know.”
You had tears in your eyes.
You said, “Don’t tell me any of what you know ab
out her.”
And then you said, “I know nothing about Theodora except the last pages of Outside.”
“So how she made love with her lover, that part you know.”
“Yes. I know this was how the wives of deportees took their husbands when they returned exhausted from the camps of Nazi Northern Germany.”
I said I would probably never finish Theodora, the book, that it was almost certain. That it was the only time in my life this had happened. That the most I’d been able to do was save that passage from the abandoned manuscript. That it was a book I couldn’t write without immediately being drawn toward other books that I had decided never to write.
Afterward you went out to the balcony, to the railing facing the sea. I heard no more from you.
We went to bed with the moon in the deep blue sky. It was the next day that we made love.
You came to me in my room. Not a word was spoken. We were nourished with the child’s body of Theodora Kats, with that disabled body, with her clear gaze, with her cries to her mother before the bullet in the back of the head from the German soldier charged with maintaining order in the camp. Afterward, you said I had an incredibly youthful body. I hesitated to publish that sentence. But I didn’t have the strength. I also write things that I don’t understand. I leave them in my books and I reread them and then they make sense. I said that people had always told me that, even the North China Lover; I was fourteen at the time. And we laughed. And again desire returned, without a word or a kiss. And then after lovemaking you spoke to me of Theodora Kats. Of those words: Theodora Kats. Even the name, you said, is stunning.
Yann Andrea Steiner Page 1