The Life to Come

by Michelle De Kretser

  The film, an Iranian one, was playing at a cinema in the rue Gît-le-cœur. ‘Here lies the heart,’ translated Céleste. ‘People used to think that Louis XIV’s mistress was buried under the street. But it turned out to be his favourite cook.’

  Afterwards, sitting on a red leather banquette and drinking kir, Pippa said that she had found the film ‘really honest’. That was high praise—the highest. She had said the same thing about Alice Munro. ‘I used to try to write beautifully,’ confided Pippa. ‘But now honesty’s what I aim for in my work.’

  ‘But what do moral categories have to do with art? Doesn’t one aim for precision above all?’ Céleste believed this, but it was also intended to open a discussion—any one of her French friends would have understood that.

  Pippa ran her finger along the edge of the marble-topped table. ‘I’m useless at talking about this kind of stuff. I’m no intellectual. My education was rubbish. Country high school and crap university.’ Then she said, ‘No, the thing was, at uni I used to have this part-time job that started at four, so I always chose morning classes. But all the cool lecturers were night people who liked to sleep in. Like in the English Department, the theory seminars were always timetabled in the afternoon. I’m the only person my age with an Arts degree who hasn’t read those guys like Foucault.’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Everything changed in the Eighties,’ said Pippa. ‘The big division used to be between people who were born before the Second World War and people who were born after. Now it’s between people who know about post-structuralism and the rest of us. It’s a different way of seeing the world.’

  She produced a printout that she passed across the table. It advertised a week-long, live-in cooking course in the Jura in which she had enrolled that day. Céleste read: ‘For lovers of the authentic cuisine, full of rustic flavours and grandma secrets.’ ‘But it’s in the Jura,’ she said, as mystified as any Parisian by this desire to exchange the city for the provinces. ‘Why would anyone want to go there?’

  ‘Aren’t the mountains something else?’

  ‘Oh, the mountains!’ said Céleste, dismissing them.

  ‘All the real Parisians go away in August.’

  Céleste, stung, said, ‘That’s a myth, like saying the French are always on strike.’ Pippa looked as if she had been slapped. Céleste wanted to shout, What makes you Australians think you can blunder about, expecting people to be nice? The silence between them stretched. It swelled to encompass August, and Céleste, abandoned even by Pippa, sitting at her keyboard in her shuttered room with only the daily statistics about holidaymaker fatalities to console her. A pivoting electric fan blew papers from her desk. Summer, like Sunday, could last as long as a life. To fend off that vision, Céleste began talking about the latest knot in her translation. ‘The narrator’s describing his childhood in a village during the Second World War. One of his neighbours has gingham curtains. In French, “gingham” is “vichy”.’

  Pippa looked blank.

  ‘Well, so it’s a word that immediately evokes Vichy. You know—the regime. Collaboration with the Nazis.’

  Pippa seemed to be trying to remember something.

  ‘Which “gingham” doesn’t.’

  ‘I don’t see what anyone could do about that,’ said Pippa. ‘Some things you just have to let go.’

  Céleste looked out of the window. When she first met Pippa, she had mentioned ‘my girlfriend’—it was essential to make that clear. But Pippa knew nothing about Sabine and never would. It had been a possibility once, but not since the post about the soup. Nevertheless, Pippa was the sole receptacle of certain confessions decanted in the course of a long dinner in her studio when they had finished the Quincy and were making do with red: for instance, the overwhelming relief that Céleste had felt when her mother finally died. Pippa’s grandmother, too, had died after a lengthy illness. ‘I used to look at her lying there, out of it but not especially in pain or anything,’ said Pippa, ‘and over and over in my head, I’d say, Just die. Just die.’

  She began to laugh wildly. It set Céleste off as well. ‘How awful we were,’ cried Céleste, when she could speak, writhing in her chair. ‘I really mean that.’ In Pippa’s mouth, squared off in terror, her tongue showed, darkened by wine.

  In the cafe after the Iranian film, Pippa placed her elbows on the table like a judge. She said, ‘You told me you translate into English because that’s your native language. But if you were four when you left here, you must have spoken French first.’

  Taken aback by this evidence of Pippa’s mind working behind the scenes, Céleste said coolly, ‘Of course. But I started to think in English when we moved to Perth. My mother used to speak to me in French and I would answer her in English. I had to learn to speak French all over again, at high school and university.’

  ‘Something must have remained. A pattern.’

  When Pippa and Céleste went out into the street, the atmosphere of the film, which the brightness and bustle of the cafe had dispelled, returned. The light, now down to its grotty underwear, was cinematically sad. The two women walked slowly across a square, as if responding to direction. They might have been coming away from an event that had changed their lives, although they had yet to appreciate its weight. Céleste was wearing a glossy vinyl jacket over a lace dress that reached to her calves, and grubby lilac tennis shoes. A stranger would instinctively have addressed her in French, just as no one would have spoken anything but English to Pippa. The streetlights had come on, and the people crossing the Pont St-Michel had the look of messengers, coming towards Pippa and Céleste out of the dusk.

  A river of cars poured along the quai. Then there was the river itself, moving just as purposefully, and a tourist boat lit up and noisy like the memory of a party seen from afar. All the lights along the embankment shuddered in the water. The last of the day was slithering off fairytale towers that proclaimed the city of spectacle and romance.

  The sky over the river, curdy and vast, was a Dutch painting. Sometimes it was an Italian one, brilliant pink and gold. They crossed the first half of the bridge, and Pippa decided that she would walk home along the lower path beside the water. She paused to read a brass plaque near the head of the steps. She was still collecting details for the French section of her book. In the cafe, Céleste had watched her write ‘kir = 4 euros’, and ‘American girls with sluttish eye-shadow’ in her Moleskine notebook. Pippa had spent four months in France without progressing beyond ‘L’addition, s’il vous plaît’ and ‘Je ne comprends pas’, but the events memorialised on plaques tended to the world-historical. She proved it now, saying, ‘I know about Jews being deported during the war and Parisians liberating their city in 1944. But what happened on the seventeenth of October 1961?’

  Céleste said, ‘A curfew had been imposed on Algerians living in Paris. On the evening of the seventeenth, hundreds of them came out into the streets in a peaceful protest. It had been organised in secret, but someone tipped off the police. They beat some of the demonstrators senseless and threw them into the Seine. Others were taken to the police headquarters just over there and killed.’

  Pippa’s fingers, spread out across her mouth, belonged to a child. She said, ‘I had no idea.’

  ‘Don’t worry, plenty of French people know nothing about it either.’ Céleste didn’t add that she had been present when the mayor of Paris unveiled the plaque. Some people carried white cardboard cutouts of men with their hands on their heads. Céleste had read the official statement, issued forty years earlier. It mentioned ‘gunfire’ in the course of which two Algerians had died. Her mother had said that everyone talked privately of atrocities—it was rumoured that hundreds of bodies had been pulled from the river—but there was nothing in the media. All that week, Algerians were rounded up and disappeared. Hurrying past their cafe on her way to visit her husband in hospital, Yvette was startled to see it closed up. The following spring brought independence for Algeria and peace. What Par
isians wanted then was to seal up the events of 1961 in a lead container and drop it into the Seine. Their imagination had never been stirred by the Algerian conflict. Its corpses, its reprisals, its clandestine networks were only the warmed-up leftovers of the old war, the real one—towards the end, even de Gaulle had reappeared. Somehow, though, the second time around everything had been reversed in an evil mirror, and the French were no longer the brave heroes of the resistance but the agents of oppression. No wonder there was relief when it was all over. ‘Nineteen sixty-two was a fresh start,’ said Yvette. ‘Everyone wanted a fridge and a white nylon shirt.’

  ‘My first winter here,’ Céleste told Pippa, ‘someone wrote, Ici on noye les Algériens on this bridge. “They drown Algerians here.” The word “drown” was spelled wrong.’ She kissed Pippa on both cheeks, and marched on alone, into the arcade of plane trees that led across the island: she was stepping over waterlogged bodies all the way to the gilded gates of the Palais de Justice.

  Céleste had once asked what Djamila knew of the events of 1961. The girl looked away—she felt only boredom or horror for anything to do with là-bas. ‘That was the old-fashioned time,’ she said.

  ‘You should say “the past”. What happened in the past is part of your history.’

  ‘I am French.’

  ‘It’s part of French people’s history.’

  ‘No,’ said Djamila. ‘That is not true.’ She spoke slowly and distinctly, as to a fool.

  Yvette called from the kitchen: ‘Ma grande, it’s one thing not to fetishise housework and quite another to have cockroaches under the sink.’

  Every August, Bernard, Sabine and the girls spent three weeks at his uncle’s holiday house in Brittany. On the second Sunday they were away, Céleste received a text: ‘Skype?’ When they were online, Sabine told her that everyone else had gone out to lunch. ‘I said I had a crise de foie. So I could have lunch with you.’ Her voice was bland, as it always was when describing her actions, as if stating something she had merely happened to observe. Céleste spread biscottes with goat’s cheese, while Sabine microwaved a Weight Watchers meal of asparagus and fish. They toasted each other, cautiously touching their glasses to their screens. ‘Les yeux dans les yeux,’ instructed Sabine, bringing her face close. Céleste leaned forward and kissed her. Improbably, all the bells of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette started ringing out, peal after peal. ‘Someone is getting married,’ said Sabine. She ate neatly, cutting her salmon into squares, and talked about a cousin’s wedding that had taken place the previous weekend. This cousin had won the lottery, marrying the son of a richissime Jordanian. The wedding was held on his horse stud in Normandy, the five hundred guests seated in a crystal marquee designed to represent a Bedouin tent. There were three official photographers, and a drone that filmed everything from overhead. Madison, Sabine’s seven-year-old, had been a flower girl. At the last minute she refused to wear her dress, saying it pricked under her arms. She was bribed, eventually, with the promise of a mini iPad. ‘She is like me, that girl,’ said Sabine, complacently. ‘She knows what she wants and she gets it.’ She showed a container. ‘Low-fat strawberry mousse.’

  Céleste held up an apricot. She told Sabine about Barr’s latest Facebook post. ‘He wrote, “Mum’s birthday today. Maybe Dad’ll let her wear a strap-on.”’ Céleste said, ‘This kid’s barely sixteen!’

  ‘He’s gay,’ said Sabine, licking a teaspoon.

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘Sure. He wishes for his father what he dreams of for himself. It explains his behaviour, his unhappiness. Australian men are so macho, it must be awful to be gay there.’ Sabine’s picture of Australia, a violently dramatic comic strip, took its inspiration from a wildlife documentary about the culling of brumbies that she had watched as a child. For her, Australia would always be a country where stonehearted killers leaned from helicopters to shoot horses. Once she had asked Céleste, ‘In Perth, is it possible to go out into the street alone if you are a woman?’

  ‘No, they send a helicopter to kill you.’

  ‘I am serious!’ Then Sabine said, ‘It is such a long time you are away, you have forgotten what life is like for an Australian woman.’ It was her standard response. Contesting Sabine’s wilder claims—‘It is quite impossible to raise sheep there. They sicken on the inferior grass.’ ‘Even the little children drink beer.’—Céleste would find all discussion routed by a firmly smiling, ‘You have forgotten.’

  Sabine had found it utterly incredible that Céleste’s mother should have married an Australian. How could such a thing have happened?

  ‘They met in the metro. Roy was visiting Paris. He’d missed his stop and my mother helped him,’ said Céleste. ‘He was a nice man. Anyone could see that straight away.’

  Sabine looked dubious. ‘To go and live in Perth!’

  ‘My mother had no reason to love France.’

  ‘In her place, I would have made a complaint about what happened to my husband.’

  ‘She did. Before I was born, she’d worked in a factory that made cardboard packaging. The owner, Monsieur Kahn, was married to a woman whose father had been at the bar. Madame Kahn wrote one of those lawyer-type letters filled with unspecified threats to the Ministry of the Interior, and her husband took a copy to the prefecture himself. He went back twice, and each time he had a new letter.’ Céleste said, ‘Monsieur Kahn also went with my mother to the car plant where my father had worked. They wanted to talk to the man who had seen him being picked up by the police. But he didn’t work there any more. No one could tell them what had become of him.’

  ‘And your mother and this Jew—they stop there?’

  After a moment, Céleste said, ‘The Kahns were old and unimportant. What did the ministry have to fear? And then my mother met my stepfather. I’m guessing she was tired of her life, tired of struggling. It was time for a fridge and a white nylon shirt.’

  ‘In Australia. My God—such courage!’

  This Jew. Céleste knew that Madame Kahn couldn’t have children because her ovaries had been removed without anaesthetic in a camp. The cornelian necklace had belonged to her, a farewell gift when Yvette left France. The beads were ancient, valuable, Chinese. When Céleste touched them, they were warmly alive. She told herself that it was important not to exaggerate what was only a dismissive manner of speaking. What Sabine had said was level with, He can’t read a map. At the same time, Céleste knew that there were people who wouldn’t even think this Jew—Pippa, for one, or Wendy.

  In Brittany, Sabine rotated her head as if her neck were stiff and said in her offhand way, ‘Imagine what Bernard has decided. He’s going to enter the lottery for a Green Card. He says Europe is finished, except for Germany, and he doesn’t like Germans. He spent two weeks in Hanover on a school exchange. His host family ate smoked fish at breakfast. The mother’s feet were bigger than the father’s.’

  The hollow opening under Céleste’s ribs informed her that everything vital there had been scooped out. ‘And you?’ she managed to say. ‘Do you want to live in the States?’

  Sabine’s eyes were fixed on her screen, her creamy lids at half-mast. ‘Jennifer and I like Los Angeles or New Orleans, but Madison and Bernard prefer New York.’

  ‘Even the little children have guns.’

  Wendy was in the habit of sending Céleste small, fragrant presents that Céleste characterised as suitable for a maiden aunt: geranium-scented hand cream, a carved sandalwood box. When Wendy came to Paris, she had brought Céleste an air-freshener made from mandarin peel and cinnamon. Céleste sprayed her room after her Skype lunch with Sabine. It was wasteful—the windows were wide open. Across the road, Mavis Staples was on repeat: Peace abounds like a river, they say. From Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, the Virgin peered at Céleste over rooftops, through the smog. A storm was on its way. It came every August, on or around the Feast of the Assumption. After that, whatever the weather, summer was done.

  At five, the downpour came. Soon after, the doorbell rang.
It was Djamila: like Céleste, the Katebs stayed at home and sweltered out the month. Where could they go? A hotel was out of the question, and neither side of the family wanted them. Slouching in, Djamila began at once to complain that she was misunderstood by her mother. ‘Of course you are,’ said Céleste. ‘It’s the fate of all teenage girls. Mothers are so limited. Take yours: she doesn’t want you to repeat her life. As if you would—can’t she see your generation is already so much more advanced?’

  ‘Exactly.’ Blessed with a total absence of irony, Djamila was armoured against self-doubt. Her expertly made-up eyes inspected Céleste: she was assessing her hair. Every few weeks, she would sit Céleste at the table with a towel over her shoulders and scissors to hand. The handle of a comb prodded now and then at the creeping grey. ‘Chestnut?’ pleaded Djamila. ‘Or a nice mahogany? Blended highlights, not streaks.’

  ‘Only if you say everything in perfect English.’

  Usually, however, the conversation hour began with a personality quiz (What could be more fascinating than you?) that Céleste had found on the net. Djamila loved these tests: they were clues to secret selves. She had learned which Kardashian she was, which fashion decade, what she looked for in a date, and her hotness rating out of ten. Her archetype was The Warrior (dynamic, ambitious, organised, thrives on challenge) and her soul-animal was a bat (fun-loving, loyal, methodical).