Darling, I'm Going to Charlie

by Maryse Wolinski

  Nathalie is also with her. She is playing psychiatrist, handing out coffee, glasses of water, cigarettes. She would like to hide in the theater manager’s office and rest for a few seconds, away from the sobbing, a break from having to calm everyone down, a few minutes when she doesn’t have to witness the scenes of distress she is finding harder and harder to deal with, but there is no time. Julien comes to help her; he is also obliged to play psychiatrist. He is listening to people who have a passionate need to speak, to tell their stories, to describe their shock, the shooting, the smell of gunpowder, and the black legs of the killers they saw from the places where they had hidden.

  Others are more silent. Sitting on the floor, they cry, their faces buried in their hands. The theater continues to fill up. Nathalie continues serving drinks. She hands a cup of tea to one of the people involved. “Be careful,” she says, “it’s hot.” The man dips his finger into the cup several times, burns himself, and without flinching gulps down the tea. She doesn’t know who they are now, the journalists and illustrators from Charlie Hebdo, because she doesn’t read it anymore. She used to, a while ago, when it was at its height with people like Choron, Cavanna, Wolinski, Cabu, Reiser. She would have recognized them. But she knows they’re on the other side of the street, two floors up. Because they’re not among the wounded, or the “involved” . . .

  But she dare not think about them being dead. Dead, murdered. Because the police van isn’t there anymore. She can still remember when the three men in balaclavas arrived, one was the driver and wasn’t armed. When interrogated a few days later at the central police station on the quai des Orfèvres, she would detail what she’d seen. According to Nathalie, she would be asked not to mention the third man. Why? The value of her testimony is questioned. Nathalie thinks he must have taken off his balaclava and run away without being seen. Thomas will also say he saw the third man in front of the door at number 10, while the other two were looking for Charlie Hebdo. When people panic, their testimony varies. But Nathalie and Thomas are not the only ones to suggest there was a third man. The policemen from the Anticrime Squad would also say they saw three men in balaclavas coming out of number 10.

  At three o’clock, when the doctors and psychiatrists arrive, Nathalie feels relieved. She can finally go out into the cold afternoon air and have a cigarette. She needs one, she’s hungry, having eaten only the Mars bars, potato chips, and madeleines she found in the theater and shared with the “involved” and their families. There was nothing left. She runs upstairs to look for some blankets for the “involved” who had come down from Charlie Hebdo without any of their things; they were starting to shiver in the poorly heated theater. But it is impossible to leave. A policeman stops her. Everyone is kept there until six thirty. A policeman asks Nathalie to go to the central police station. She refuses. She can’t take any more and wants to get back to her daughter, who has been on the phone with her constantly and who is worried, knowing she is still at the site of the massacre.

  6

  IMPOSSIBLE TO SIT down. I walk from my desk to my bed, from the sofa to the chair, I tell myself once more that nothing could happen to Georges, it isn’t possible. My thoughts clash, and very quickly my body takes over. I feel as if it is emptying, as if all my organs are breaking off and my brain is no longer functioning. I’m shaking from the cold and my face feels on fire, both at the same time. My legs no longer support me and my arms hang limply at my sides; I drop the telephone I’d been gripping tightly for several minutes. I must pull myself together, at all costs, otherwise I’ll miss the call that will give me the news. But I can’t. I stagger, my life is turned upside down. My life. Our life; it’s disappearing. My teeth are chattering, I’m shaking with cold, fear, anguish, even though I’m still wearing my coat; it never occurred to me to take it off. I put down just my bag, so my hands would be free. I have nothing but physical reactions. One question alone obsesses me: Why hasn’t Georges called me back? He was supposed to answer my message and confirm our appointment on the quayside. If he’s been wounded, I want to know, and quickly.

  Suddenly the phone rings. Where is the damned thing? I rush all around the room. I do not want to believe that I will no longer be able to hold Georges in my arms, that my face will no longer feel the touch of his hand, that he will no longer leave me loving Post-it notes. No, it isn’t possible. I finally find the phone on the bedside table. I answer.

  I hear a friend’s voice: “Where is Georges? Did he call you?” I can’t speak. My silence worries her. “Is he . . .” “No, no, I don’t know. I don’t know anything.” “Did anyone tell you what happened? I mean anyone official?” “No one.” “The police, the authorities? No? Really, no one? That’s unbelievable!” I want her to hang up quickly but she continues: “I heard some of them were just wounded. Let’s hope so.” “I have to go.” “Of course, I’ll call you back. Don’t worry, it will be all right.”

  I hold the phone with shaking hands; it rings again. My sister wants to know, I have to tell her the truth. And I say I know nothing. That the waiting is unbearable. I feel as if my brain is on fire. “It isn’t possible,” she says over the phone. “Impossible, Georges . . .” She hangs up.

  I decide not to answer the phone again unless it’s Arnauld. I sit down in front of my desk, where the pages of a manuscript are piled high, pages I’ll never finish. I look at them and read a few lines, which seem foreign to me. I don’t even know what I wrote yesterday. The past has disappeared while I wait, interminably. I force myself to try to remember what Georges and I said to each other yesterday, before I went to my meeting. We must have talked about the apartment we’d visited that we’d liked so much, and about moving and our new life. And just as I was about to leave, I noticed the sad look he always gave me when I was going out for dinner without him. I left the apartment with a heavy heart. Now I want him to call me, I want to hear his voice. My eyes are filled with tears.

  The third call is the one I’d been waiting for. It’s Arnauld. He is at the theater with the families. I listen to him. His voice is firm, direct: “Georges was murdered. He’s dead.” “No, no . . . It isn’t possible.” “It’s true. He’s dead. Elsa is coming to you.” Then he hangs up.

  My throat tightens, as if someone is trying to strangle me. I can’t breathe. The feeling of being choked paralyzes me. Suddenly I realize what Arnauld has just told me. But how could he know? Who told him? Only the investigators are supposed to have that information. Just as they are supposed to inform the people involved. But the police never contacted me. I received no information at all. Was everyone at Charlie Hebdo dead? Since no one tried to contact me, that can’t be the case. The fact that I have had no official confirmation drives me mad. Until I hear it from an official source, I can’t believe it. Georges, our carefree life, can’t end like this. We still have so much life to live together.

  * * *

  When my daughter arrived, she too could not understand how this terrible news had not yet been told to us by the authorities. We’d waited all day, but no one had called. I remained seated on the sofa in the living room, shaking all over, body and soul. For twenty-four hours, no tranquilizer worked, not even the one prescribed by a doctor friend of mine whom I’d immediately called for help.

  Little by little, the living room of our apartment filled up with people: Georges’s daughters with their spouses and children, close friends, another friend of mine who is a doctor, dressed in black and who reminded me of my grandmother when she arrived in Paris, her face half-hidden under a black veil, after her husband had died in Algeria. Each of them sat down beside me and talked to me. I heard nothing, nothing but Georges’s voice: “Darling, I’m going to Charlie.” He had left me only a few hours earlier. Impossible to believe he’d been murdered. Why him? Around me, some people were crying. I had no tears left.

  And that was how our life together ended.

  7

  IN MY SLEEPLESS night, I can hear the rounds from the Kalashnikov and picture the
way Georges looked at me, etched in my mind forever, a look of love, of distress. Dressed in black and wearing a balaclava, the trained killer is calm; he aims and fires with no hesitation and no concessions. The first bullet pierces the aorta and heart of my beloved, then his body drops. The other three bullets were pointless. His body, facedown on the ground. Someone else slumps down at his side, a friend, a brother, and then another, and another. Ten would fall from the Kalashnikov’s thirty-four bullets. Four would be wounded. The night is very dark, silent, and I know I won’t go back to sleep. The sound of gunfire will return to haunt me, keeping me awake. And when I finally drift off, another scenario plays out its scenes of terror.

  I see them every night, at around four o’clock, and I start trembling, shaking that won’t stop until daybreak. The two terrorists burst in without difficulty, because there are no obstacles, they scream, aim their weapons at the Charlie Hebdo team, who are dumbstruck. I try to picture the look on Georges’s face, but I can’t. It’s as if his expression has disappeared. I ask myself questions. No, Georges didn’t have time to form any expression at all. His astonishment got the better of him. I prefer that he fell without thinking. Without suffering. I picture it: with his four or five stents, because of his arteriosclerosis, his heart must have failed. A heart attack took him before the terrorists’ bullets. From the first day, I tell myself the story of the heart attack. It calms me down. And still, I cannot get back to sleep. Images, shouting, the barrage of bullets, the violence, the bodies falling one on top of the other. And the color red bursts forth like sparks in my eyes. Carnage. Burning into my impossible nights. Why does evil exist? Where does it come from, if not from man himself, then from fanatics convinced they hold the truth? Doesn’t a good life consist of seeking the path to truth without ever claiming to possess it?

  Humor killed. A few strokes of an impertinent pencil and death at the end of that pencil, or felt-tip, or pen. There will be nothing but anxiety now, because there will never be an answer. Sleepless nights, or endless nightmares. The Kouachi brothers, whose photos I constantly see in the press—the very sight of them is a knife to my heart—scale the facade of my building, break the windows, and murder me the way they executed Georges and his friends. This other scenario began after I received a threatening letter. Nights filled with ever more questions. Nights when I write letters dictated by vengeance and despair. Letters that will never be sent. The slightest word in an article, the least mention on the radio or during a gathering of victims, and I explode, get carried away, give free rein to my anger. As soon as the sun sets on the horizon, wherever I am, I am filled with fear. Georges’s eyes have closed forever. I have lost my light, my confidence. Will day break again tomorrow? There is no longer a road ahead of me, only an expanse of happy days or less-happy days between today and the past. Night and day, I must continue to fight without him, without the man who was my support in life.

  A war scene in which Georges was killed. These last few years, there have been scenes of war everywhere in the world, on every continent. The fanatics at work. It’s bread and butter to television and to certain newspapers. But is it possible that such a scene could have taken place in the offices of a satirical newspaper, on the second floor of a peaceful street in Paris? Sleep has abandoned me, once and for all; waking up plunges me into the horror of the massacre. Massacre is the word the journalists use over and over again. I turn on the radio and hear: “Massacre at Charlie Hebdo.” Or “Massacre on January 7.”

  On the seventh of each month, I shudder at the thought of hearing those words. January 7, 2015, will, of course, be a day marked with the seal of terror in the history of France. To me, it will remain the date when Georges died because of the most extreme violence. The cruelty of separation. The destruction of life. The unimaginable and the horrific fill me. There is also the fear of Georges’s fear. Fear of his suffering. Like François Cavanna, Georges hated death.I He feared it, rejected it. I pointed out to him that he lacked humility. “Stop crève” (“Stop death”), Cavanna wrote. He wanted to believe in immortality and remained convinced that someday scientists would discover how to make us immortal. Georges smiled at his words. He did not wish to be eternal, but he also couldn’t live with the idea of death.

  * * *

  The central police station on the quai des Orfèvres, the third day after the attack. I climb the large staircase that leads to the office of the police captain in charge of the Charlie Hebdo case. Many police officers, both men and women, go up and down the stairs, pass by each other, in the chaos caused by the crisis. Words are called out: “This time, we’ve got them!” Got who? I can’t understand, because I have no idea what has happened since January 7 at 1:15. My mind is fixed on Georges’s body, his body I cannot find, despite the numerous calls made to the crisis unit on Wednesday and Thursday . . . Not one official could answer my question. Two days without knowing where Georges was laid to rest. Day and night, I thought only of his body, his face, his eyes, his lips that would never again kiss mine, his body abandoned somewhere, shot through with bullets, an autopsy performed, without my knowing a thing. The cruelty of silence.

  I have difficulty climbing the stairs, for fear of the details I will be told and which I’d rather not know. Sitting in the police captain’s office, I learn that two bullets went through Georges’s thorax. The officer undoubtedly did not have the entire autopsy report, or he was confusing it with another case. Because there were four bullets, as I would later learn from my lawyer. The first one hit the aorta. He died immediately.

  At this moment, I imagined two holes in his chest. Two red holes, as in the poem “Le Dormeur du val” (“The Sleeper in the Valley”), which has stuck in my memory since my youth. The lines by Rimbaud surged up as I listened, dumbstruck, to the police captain. A young lieutenant was typing my replies to the questions being asked on an old computer. Had Georges talked to me about threats that he might have received in the mail? Was he afraid to go to work?

  What could I say? That he had recently seemed worried, sometimes in distress? Could he sense the danger? Had he hidden the fact that he’d received threats, to protect me? He never talked to me about the fatwa against Charb, and the information had escaped me, strangely enough, even though I read the newspapers avidly. And we rarely discussed what was happening at Charlie Hebdo. I was aware only of the paper’s financial problems. Was that what was worrying him, or did he have a premonition that something terrible was going to happen and found it difficult to hide that from me? “What’s wrong?” I’d asked him several times in the weeks before the attack. “I worry about you . . .” he’d replied. “When I’m no longer here . . .” “But why think about the end of your life? You’re in good health, you have projects you’re passionate about. And life will go on as long as we love each other.” He’d nodded. “I’ve been too careless in truth, and I love you, but I haven’t protected you as I might have wished. I think about that often.”

  The police captain was still questioning me when Arnauld, my daughter’s husband, came in, accompanied by one of my best friends, who was also a police captain. She held me tightly in her arms, which caused a flood of tears I could not hold back. After saying hello to them, the captain stood up and left the office. He came back a few minutes later holding Georges’s briefcase, which I immediately recognized. I had given it to him the previous Christmas. The captain gave it back to me, coldly, for that is his job, then Georges’s watch, which had recently been repaired, the gold chain I’d given him for his birthday, and his datebook. It had been found and examined, undoubtedly by the Anticrime Squad. I opened it to January 7. The day before, Georges had drawn an X through Tuesday the sixth, something he’d been doing regularly for a few years. “Why do you do that,” I’d asked him, “as if you were counting the days?” A strange way of counting things that I’d never understood. Missing was the pen that matched the datebook, which I had given him for our silver wedding anniversary, some twenty years earlier. “We didn’t find a pen wit
h the datebook,” the police captain told me. Finally, he gave me Georges’s wallet, but his identity card was missing. I pointed that out. “We keep the identity cards,” the captain explained. All that was left was his press card and some money. Arnauld had taken the briefcase from me.

  My friend was talking to the captain about the repercussions of the attack. I held Georges’s things tightly in my hands, as if they were treasures that had been lost, then found. The captain opened a drawer and took something out; I couldn’t see what it was right away. Then he went around to the other side of the table piled high with files, came over to me, and handed me Georges’s wedding ring. The tears I had managed to control for a few minutes started flowing again. He had worn that wedding ring since July 3, 1971; he’d never once taken it off since the day we got married in Canapville, a village in Normandy where we had commandeered two witnesses. The mayor was over an hour late. His Citroën had broken down. Georges liked reminding me that he had never taken off his ring, and that he was proud of that, because I had already lost two wedding rings, since I can’t stand wearing any jewelry when I’m working. “A wedding ring is not jewelry.” I can hear him saying those words, a loving reproach.