That’s exactly what she and her friend felt like. I find them a table.
The men who were muttering about the slow service are onto their third cup of coffee. They’ve loosened their ties, they’re smoking and chatting. When they ask for the bill, I say ‘I’ll be right with you!’.
It’s half past four when I close the door. I drop down onto the banquette and cry, without tears. A nervous, anxious sort of crying. I feel as if I’ve been trampled by a herd of elephants. I think it will take me two hours just to clear up and I’m pitifully short of ingredients for the next sitting. I decide to inaugurate themed evenings. This evening it will be various different soups followed by chocolate fondant cakes because I’ve got some vegetables left and a few eggs. My hand shakes as I write on the blackboard, adding an attractive price at the top (€7 for a set meal of soup and dessert), then I activate my secret arms to fill the bin bags, carry them out to the dustbins, wash the floor and peel another succession of vegetables.
At eight o’clock two women who could be friends of my mother’s turn up.
‘Do you have any candles?’ the taller of them asks. ‘It’s my sister’s birthday.’
I’m embarrassed to have nothing better to offer them than soup for a celebration dinner. But the two sisters think it’s perfect because they’re both trying to lose weight. Not that that stops them finishing off what little bread I have left, mind you. They order a bottle of Côtes de Beaune, we sing ‘Happy Birthday’ and I’m just about to offer them champagne on the house when a searing pain in my back reminds me I do deserve to earn a living.
They are my only customers all evening. As they leave the older of the two shakes my hand and says, ‘You’re very brave’. I’m not sure what she means by it, what she knows about me, what she’s discovered about my fate and on what authority she makes this diagnosis, but I feel galled and a sort of honeyed comfort in equal measures. ‘You’re very brave’ is what people say to a soldier who has lost both arms, to a teenager who has just been told she has some incurable disease and is trying to console her own parents, it’s what you say to someone who has lost everything, someone who is about to lose everything. How did she know? What did she see? As soon as she’s gone I wind down the shutter and run to the mirror. I want to know where it got out: my eyes? Or perhaps my grey hairs? I switch on a light to get a better look and am immediately reassured by my swollen lip. She must have thought I was a battered wife. I can breathe again. That’s brilliant. Yes, a woman who was slapped across the nose, punched in the mouth, kicked in the back and the stomach, cuffed over the head and kneed in the ribs. Phew! The honeyed feeling is washing over me now. The honey of admiration. ‘You’re very brave’, that means I’m coping well, that I’ve got that little extra something, I’m up to the job and should feel proud I’ve done so well. I overcome, endure, achieve. Her little sentence drives into me like a screw. With every turn there’s another source of pain, with every turn another reason to be pleased and proud, going deeper and deeper. Bent double by the pain in my stomach, I finish clearing up and decide to go to sleep without reading, without even thinking, so that I can set the alarm for six o’clock and get things under control again.
We expect sleep to restore us but sometimes it has other plans. I wanted a soft, heavy, velvety night to wrap itself around me; all I got was a few precarious moments on a fakir’s bed of nails. My body didn’t unwind, staying on the alert, with the ache in my stomach and the blade in my back both active, searing, working together. Only my consciousness broke away, the bolts of reason snapping off. No up or down, no true or false. I’m at home and a woman turns up. When I see her I think, ah, Mrs Cohen, even though I’ve never met her. Mrs Cohen has magnificent red hair and curved lips that are pushed out slightly by her perfect but imposing front teeth. She has high cheek-bones and her hazel eyes, set deep beneath a huge arching brow, are timid and cunning as a squirrel’s. Her tiny little hands, which flit about delicately and greedily, are the sort of hands you want to kiss and hold in yours. Her feet are beautiful too, with ankles the size of a wrist, angular and fragile. Her body bulges softly in clothes that are a little too tight, but its contours are firm and her skin quite lovely. She sweeps aside her curls to talk, and every time her hair falls back down onto her shoulders an amber perfume spreads through the room. She is shy and very worried about disturbing me. It’s for a bar mitzvah, for her son Ezekiel, but everyone calls him Zeeky. He’s her eldest. It’s very important, do you understand? I understand. She’s looking for somewhere really original. Her son’s very original, do you understand? I understand. Everyone’s had enough of fuddy-duddy salons and hotels, all those frills and extras. What she wants is something simple - that doesn’t mean she isn’t prepared to pay, I should make no mistake about that! I make no mistake. Somewhere simple and fun. She wants to have a look around. I tell her she has, she’s seen it all. That there’s nothing else, the seating area and the kitchen, that’s all. How many square metres? About sixty. I’m lying. Chez moi is fifty-three square metres. And there’s really nothing else?, she asks. No cellar or annexe? No, I say, I’m so sorry. It’s a bit tight for 200 people, don’t you think? she asks. Very tight, I say. She wrings her hands for a moment and shakes her head, shifting her red curls and giving off their languid perfume. What about this door here? she says, pointing her tiny and admirably manicured finger towards the back of my kitchen. I turn round to discover a door, as if she had just drawn it with the tip of her nail: an imposing door from an elaborate front entrance, carved and painted in sky-blue lacquer. Oh, yes, I say, slightly embarrassed, I’d forgotten the store-room. Mrs Cohen would like me to show her the store-room. No, really. She has a lot of faith in our meeting like this, and thinks there’s a good feeling between us. We walk to the back of the restaurant and I turn the heavy brass handle. The door opens without creaking, weighty and well-oiled. We both screw up our eyes, blinded by the sun streaming in through a dome decorated with a mosaic of multicoloured glass. The store-room is about two hundred square metres, but it’s hard to gauge accurately because there are private alcoves hidden behind blue velvet curtains in the corners. There is an impressive staircase in dark-brown carved oak to either side of the door, leading to mezzanine galleries hung with ceiling lights in mauve-coloured crystal diffracting the flickering flames of a dozen candles.
How come we can see the candlelight so clearly when the sun’s shining? Mrs Cohen asks. I realize that this isn’t a question but an enigma. If I can formulate the right answer she won’t make any awkward remarks to the effect that it’s not very kind hiding such a beautiful back room from customers in need. I think for a moment. Stare at the candles, then study the dome with its coloured panes. I think about death. About the wake it carves through our lives, the terrifying way that wake closes over itself, snatched away by the march of time. And then we realize that the earth which opened up beneath our feet, gaping with sorrow, so deep we thought it would swallow us up, has filled in again. Leaving no trace. The living carry on being with the living. The dead have left us, they’re with the dead. But it’s not that simple. The dead are with us too in their own way. They speak to us, tease us, visit us in our dreams, they appear in the peculiarly similar features of a stranger on the bus, they make contact.
The candles glow in spite of the sunlight, I tell Mrs Cohen, we can see them, can make them out even in a much stronger light because we’ve decided, you and I have both decided, not to exclude the dead from our lives. We don’t exclude the missing either, she adds. I’m infinitely grateful to her for saying that. I feel soothed and tell her I’ll do whatever it takes for her party to be a success. I give her the use of my back room. I do need, she adds, still shyly, a guarantee that the food will be strictly kosher, do you understand? I understand. I’ll have alterations made, double the size of my kitchen, have two gleaming clean work-tops, one for dairy products and one for meat, I won’t cook the lamb in its mother’s milk, I’ll ensure everything obeys the rules of divergence a
nd separation. Two battalions of sponges, glass plates, different sets of cutlery. I ring my friend on the Avenue de la République and order an extra fridge, another oven, hob and dishwasher. I divide the space I have in two. For a moment, but only very briefly, I myself become two people: a dairy Myriam and a meat Myriam.
The day Mrs Cohen and I are meant to sign the contract, I flatten the palm of my right hand on the window and the ‘Beth Din’ stamp certifying that everything at Chez moi is kosher is printed onto the glass in black letters. Mrs Cohen is punctual, she arrives at two o’clock. Everything’s ready I tell her, spreading my arms to show off my new equipment. I’ve spent €20,000 but I don’t regret it. I won’t put that in your budget. That’s just as well, says Mrs Cohen, terribly embarrassed, because, here’s the thing, I don’t know how to tell you this, but the whole thing’s off. I’ve had a row with my husband, do you understand? I understand. When my husband looks at me, she explains, I feel dead. I can’t take it any more. And Zeeky? I ask her. What’s your son going to do? Where’s he going to find somewhere original to become a man now? Mrs Cohen doesn’t answer. She disappears. I turn round and look at my kitchen: a kitchen designed by someone with a squint, drawn by someone who was blind drunk - it has two of everything. €20,000. I run over to the blue door, the door to the back room. Convincing myself that this won’t be bad for business. If it weren’t for Mrs Cohen I would never have discovered I’ve got a store-room which looks like a Venetian palace. I’ll be able to let it out, to expand, hold receptions. The door has got oddly smaller. I turn the handle, the hinges creak and, as it opens, the door gets even smaller. I lean in, almost having to bend double to get through the doorway. I manage to crawl inside. The walls have drawn in, the dome disappeared in the darkness, the chandeliers with drops of crystal dissolved. There is just the flickering flame of a single candle in the dark, so weak one little puff would blow it out. I hold my breath and watch the tiny flame burning in my store-room which is so much smaller and darker it’s almost non-existent, imploding and melting into the silent cosmos, the inter-stellar vastness that no light can ever assuage. Little flame. We don’t exclude the missing either, do you understand? I understand.
I wake at five o’clock with these words inside my head: ‘We don’t exclude the missing either’. I think of my son, Hugo.
I haven’t seen him for six years. I haven’t spoken to him for six years. I don’t know where he is or what he’s doing. I don’t know how much taller than me he is. Has he got a beard? What size are his feet? Did he get his baccalaureate? Has he enrolled at university? Does he have a girlfriend? No one tells me about him and I don’t talk to anyone about him. That’s the pact. I think he still sees his grandparents. At first I thought I wouldn’t be able to stand the torture; I felt it was unfair and disproportionate to punish me like this. I thought the family conspiracy was iniquitous. But I had neither the strength to stand up to it, nor the grounds to respond. I accepted being banished as someone who has sold their soul to the devil accepts being burned in hell. In fact, it’s not that they accept, it’s that they don’t have a choice. My personal hell - and this stroke of luck deserves recognition - was not unlike purgatory.
At first there was a period of drifting: small suitcase, neon-lit hotels, hanging about outside friends’ houses, waiting to hear their footsteps in the hall when they didn’t even know I was there; friends I could never have looked in the eye, and I would have fled if they had come out. I was petrified with shame for my very existence and for doing what I had done. I was unrecognizable, even to myself. There was nowhere I could put myself, nowhere to sleep. I felt like a hunted animal. I had to find work. My husband, who had also been my boss, didn’t want to see me ever again. I went into shops, hoping to find the courage to ask whether they needed sales staff, but my suitcase - which I took everywhere with me - created misunderstandings: people thought I was a tourist and spoke to me in loud, slow sentences. I didn’t dare contradict them. I stood gazing at the windows of temping agencies: bilingual secretary, I could do; plumber, I couldn’t do; financial manager, I couldn’t do; paediatric nurse, hmm… I didn’t go in. I was too frightened I might have to put together a CV. I couldn’t answer a single question. I didn’t want anyone to talk to me. I couldn’t look people in the eye. I now know there were people I could have turned to, who would have taken me in, without judging. But my disgrace reared up between me and anyone who might have wanted to help me. So I drifted. From morning till night, wearing out my shoes, light-headed with hunger and lack of sleep. The days rolled into one, indistinct. I don’t know how long it was before I gave up looking for work, settling for long, slow, aimless wandering. I avoided the area where I used to live. I would sit and watch teenagers, and their exuberance weighed heavy on my heart.
One afternoon when the storm-laden sky was particularly threatening - thick purple-grey clouds, yellow light and a smell of twilight - I walked down a narrow, sinuous dead-end street with cobblestones snaking between tall buildings so close together they seemed to be in conversation. At the far end, as if leading to a clearing in the woods, it opened out onto an area of wasteland where the big top of a small circus stood proudly, decorated with a string of multicoloured bulbs. I was cold and hungry and curious. I don’t remember paying for a ticket. There were only very young children on the rickety tiers, and a few grandmothers. The show had started. All eyes were on the ring, where a poodle was walking on its hind legs while a cat scrambled all over a clown without ever putting a foot to the ground; it trotted over his head and along his arms, clung to his trouser legs, defying gravity, wandering - like me - over a painfully restricted space while giving the impression of never taking the same route twice. The dog made the children laugh because he was wearing clothes and he scuttled about quickly then came to an abrupt stop in front of one of them with a furious look in his eye, only to set off again in the opposite direction. The next act was performed by two elastic young women who walked on their hands, turned themselves inside out like gloves and abolished all sense of body shape so that, after a while, it was hard to tell whether their arms were actually their legs and whether their heads hadn’t come unscrewed and taken root somewhere around their abdomens. They smiled all the way through their contortions, sliding over each other, lifting themselves with just one hand, flattening themselves so that they almost disappeared into the ground, and then suddenly springing back up. I started clapping and it was the first time for a long while that I seemed to feel anything. It’s hard to say what. Amazement, perhaps. Next came the man I would call boss, standing upright on a horse, smoking a pipe and reading a paper while the animal cantered round. He wasn’t holding reins or a whip but he lay down, sat up and got back to his feet without ever losing his balance, and at the end of his act he gave such a convincing portrayal of sleep that I found myself really believing he’d fallen asleep on his horse. As he woke up he looked me in the eye. I don’t know how he had time to see me, nor exactly what he saw of me because his head was upside-down and he was going round so quickly he must have been dizzy. Every time he came past he looked for me. When he was taking his bows he stared at me and I felt he was trying to say something.
When the show was over I didn’t have the strength to get up. I wanted to stay there, they would have to drive me out. I had seen the elastic girls, the horse man, the clown with the cats, the tightrope walkers with the snakes, the feathered trapeze artists, the football-playing jugglers, the spider man. I, the adulterous woman, the perverse woman, the manipulative woman, the child-eater, had admired them all and was part of their troupe.
The big top emptied. Soon the performers were up between the seats where the audience had been, clearing up. It was more an inspection: picking up the odd orphaned glove or abandoned scarf. I waited my turn. People smiled at me. I couldn’t manage to smile back at them. I saw one of the contortionists having a quick word in the boss’s ear. He came over and sat down beside me. He sat very upright with the palms of his hands over his
knees and his chest puffed out. He smelled of horse manure and oranges. I didn’t dare turn to look at him.
‘What’s your thing?’ he asked me.
I had no idea what he meant and didn’t know how to reply.
He rubbed his stubble and rephrased his question.
‘What can you do?’
I can disgrace myself very quickly, was the first thought that came to me.
‘Nothing,’ I said, so quietly he didn’t hear it.
‘What?’ he said.
‘Nothing, I can’t do anything.’
I gathered later that this was how a good many of the troupe were recruited. They washed up with no warning like me, sitting on those seats without paying for a ticket, stayed on after the applause had died away and explained their own act. The magician, the juggler, the cat-trainer, the sword-swallower, the girl with the hula hoops. They had all been swept here by a wave and, like seaweed borne on the tide, apparently devoid of free will, they had landed - silent and opaque, keeping their talents hidden - on the tiered seats of Santo Salto. Without realizing it, I had performed the code, said the password and was now expected to demonstrate some sort of miracle. Who knows what I might be hiding under my raincoat? Flame-throwing dwarf rabbits, crystal hoops that I swung round my body without breaking a single one, ropes and rings I used to lift myself up into the air as easily as climbing a staircase? My lined face and tired expression did nothing to belie this hypothesis, quite the opposite. I had plenty of time, subsequently, to watch the performers. There was not one of them whose astonishing prowess could be guessed at first glance (an uninitiated first glance). The boys were mostly short and stocky, sometimes even pot-bellied; the girls, who were almost all very slim, had black teeth. Some of the acrobats seemed damaged, with deeply furrowed brows; the tightrope walker had fat buttocks and constantly worried about them getting bigger. These people weren’t particularly ugly, some of them were even devastatingly attractive, but their bodies were rendered ordinary by the combination of little flaws naturally accumulated over a lifetime. I was like them. I had made no special effort to stop the march of time, with my rounded little tummy, calluses on my feet and bags under my eyes. So there was absolutely no reason why a remarkable talent, a gift like those each of them possessed, shouldn’t be camouflaged beneath my semblance of normality.
Chez Moi Page 7