You Will Not Have My Hate

by Antoine Leiris

  Of course, having a culprit, someone to take the brunt of your anger, is an open door, a chance to temporarily escape your suffering. And the more odious the crime, the more ideal the culprit, the more legitimate your hatred. You think about him in order not to think about yourself. You hate him in order not to hate what’s left of your life. You rejoice at his death in order not to have to smile at those who remain.

  Perhaps these are aggravating circumstances—to say the least. But aggravating circumstances are for trials, as a way of quantifying loss. But people do not count their tears, and they certainly don’t dry them on the sleeves of their anger. Those with no one to blame are alone with their grief. I am one of them. Alone with my son, who will soon ask me what happened that night. What would I be telling him if I placed the responsibility for the circumstances of our life at someone else’s feet? If it was to those men that he had to turn in order to make sense of things? Death awaited his mother that night; they were merely ambassadors.

  With a burst of machine gun fire, they shattered our puzzle. And after we have put it back together, piece by piece, it will no longer be the same. There will be someone missing in the picture, there will be only the two of us, but we will take up the whole picture. She will be with us, invisible, but there. It is in our eyes that you will read her presence, in our joy that her flame will burn, in our veins that her tears will flow.

  We will never return to our life of before. But we will not build a life against them. We will move forward in our own life.

  “Another double espresso, please, and the check!”

  “Crazy, what happened, isn’t it?” one of the men says to me.

  “I haven’t had time to think about it, really. My wife wasn’t around this weekend, and I had my baby with me. But I’m going to see her now.”

  SEEING HER AGAIN

  November 16

  10:00 a.m.

  They should hand out fluorescent vests to everyone I want to avoid. The psychological support staff are wearing them this morning, which makes my task easier. I don’t want to talk to them. I have the impression they want to steal from me. To take my misery and apply a balm of formulaic phrases that will leave me insipid, watered down, without poetry, without beauty.

  So I map out the premises. Color-coded. Blue, police, so I can get through. Fluorescent yellow, psychological support staff, to avoid. Black, mortuary staff, so I can see her again. I head toward someone in blue, who leads me to someone in black, who suggests I go to see someone in fluorescent yellow. I pretend not to hear what he says. I am accompanied by Hélène’s mother and sister. It takes forever to get there. A few yards are like an eternity.

  Long needles of icy rain streak our faces. Every person I see follows the script to the letter. An actor in a play repeated over and over again, a mournful vaudeville, a worn-out comedy.

  Death is on the playbill today, and yet this walk is not a funeral procession. It isn’t time for that. This is a happy day, the return of a loved one.

  Inside the building, the tiles look old and shabby. So do the employees’ faces. It’s cold. Since arriving, I have been asked a dozen times if I would like to sit down; each time, I refuse, out of fear that I won’t be able to get up again. I wait, standing up.

  Protocols. Paperwork. Families come and go. About fifteen enter before us. All reemerge in pieces.

  “You’ve come to see Luna-Hélène Muyal?”

  It’s our turn.

  The room where we are led is more warmly decorated. Death’s waiting room is not as I imagined it. And yet, behind the polished boards that cover the room’s walls from floor to ceiling, I hear the blood of the dead flowing. From one moment to the next, I imagine it seeping through the wood paneling and slowly flooding the room. Climbing from our feet to our heads. Drowning us in a bloodbath. In truth, we are drowning already.

  A young woman speaks to us. She has done this a thousand times before, I can hear it in her voice. “Difficult moments . . . terrible circumstances . . . police work . . .” All these words sound worn out, a secondhand compassion. Her silences are calculated, her gestures prepared, her smile looks like it’s straight from the Illustrated Mortician’s Handbook. “Chapter Five: Talking to the Family.”

  I am just one among so many others.

  I only half-listen to her. Hélène is there, just next door. I can sense her. I would like to see her, alone.

  Hélène’s mother and sister understand. They know that, even here, it is the two of us, first of all. Together for this final moment, just her and me. Not someone’s daughter, or sister, or best friend, not the woman who was killed at the Bataclan. I want her to be mine, and mine alone. As she was before.

  We were like two little Lego bricks that fitted together perfectly. Made for each other. Our “once upon a time” began one June 21, with music, at a concert. As always happens at the start of the great stories, I thought she wouldn’t want someone like me. I thought she was too beautiful, too Parisian, too sophisticated, too everything, for a nobody like me. I took her hand. We were swallowed up by the crowd and the noise. Until the last moment, I thought she would escape me. Then we kissed.

  Afterward, it all happened very fast. I told her we would go to New York, that the time belonged to us, that my lucky star would guide us. She told me she loved me.

  A love story like any other. We were just sane enough to realize how lucky we were, and crazy enough to gamble everything on it. That love was our treasure.

  The door opens.

  “Let me know when you’re ready.”

  She is there. I move toward her, turn around, check that we are alone. This moment is ours. A pane of Plexiglas separates us. I press on it with all my weight. Our life together flashes before my eyes. I feel as though I never had another life. Hélène was the moon. A brunette with milk-white skin, eyes that made her look like a frightened owl, a smile you could fit the whole world inside. I remember her smile on our wedding day.

  But the most beautiful moments of our lives are not those we stick in photograph albums. I remember all those moments when we just took the time to love each other. Seeing an old couple and wanting to be like them. A burst of laughter. An empty morning, lounging in the comfort of our sheets.

  It is the most insignificant moments, where there is nothing to show, nothing to tell, that are the most beautiful. Those are the ones that fill my memory.

  She is just as beautiful as she always was.

  When you close a dead person’s eyes, you give them back a little bit of life. She looks like the woman I watched wake up each morning. I want to lie next to her languorous body, warm her up, tell her she is the most beautiful woman I ever met. I want to close my eyes too and wait for Melvil to call out to us, wait for him to start tangling himself up in our crumpled sheets.

  Hélène often asked me if love could be shared. If, after the arrival of our child, I would still love her as much. After his birth, she never asked that question again.

  I cry, I talk to her. I would like to stay another hour, at least a day, perhaps a lifetime. But I must leave her. The moon must set. Today, November 16, the sun rises on our new “once upon a time.” The story of a father and a son who go on living alone, without the aid of the star to whom they swore allegiance.

  “Monsieur, it is time to leave her . . .”

  THE MUSIC CAN BEGIN

  November 16

  11:00 a.m.

  I have just come out of the mortuary. It did me good to see her. For two days, she was alone in the deep night that the terrorists had brought down on Paris. The City of Light was extinguished at the same moment that her eyes were closed. Such big eyes that saw the world in its entirety. Such big eyes that will never see her son get up again.

  Since coming out of the mortuary, I have only one thought in my head: going to see Melvil at the day care. Finding him and telling him that I saw his mother and I brou
ght her with me. I brought him back his mama, she’s not lost anymore, she is in the palm of my hand and she will come home with us.

  But I must have a coffee with Hélène’s family to talk about what happens next: the funeral, the police, the psychological support . . . All those bureaucratic irritations that pollute grief. You imagine your grief as something pure, free of all material contingencies, but the reality of a burial quickly takes over. You don’t even have time to take stock of what has happened to you before the parade of sorrys in black suits has already begun.

  “You have to go to the funeral home. If you want, I can help you.”

  Silence.

  Since Friday evening, I had practically lost the ability to speak. Sentences of more than three words tired me out. I was exhausted by the idea of putting words together, of putting thoughts into words. In any case, I was incapable of thinking.

  In my head, there was her, whom I hadn’t seen again, and him, whom I had to look after, and that buzzing noise that scrambled all the rest. I responded with silence, even to simple questions. At best, some people were answered with grunts of varying lengths and tones, sounds that they had to decipher to understand if I was hungry, if I wanted them to stay with me tonight, if I wanted a light for my cigarette. Since seeing her today, the buzzing has started to fade and my tongue to loosen.

  “You’ll have to be careful not to get ripped off, compare prices. We can come with you if you want!”

  “I’ll take care of it on my own.”

  “Some people take advantage of others dying to try to scam their relatives!”

  Time to go. I have to pick up the baby.

  —

  We are in the car, on the way back, when it begins. My brother-in-law, who is driving us, sees my foot frenetically tapping the floor of the car, and says reassuringly: “You’ll get to the day care on time, don’t worry.”

  It is not the stress of being late that dictates these movements, it is the words imposing their rhythm. One after another or all at the same time. They go in, some come out, some clash, those that remain call to others, and each one begins to play a few notes. Like the moments before an orchestra starts to play. You hear scattered sounds, dissonant, random, and then suddenly the notes blend together and climb up your spine, louder and louder until absolute silence. The music can begin.

  I am happy to see him again. My smile as I open the door of the day care collides with an army of embarrassed faces and dangling arms. He stands there, in the middle of what looks like a Napoleonic legion during a retreat from Russia.

  Melvil was the only one, that day, who could respond to my smile with a smile. The only one, that day, who saw that I had his mama with me. We go home on the path that he adores, the one where we see the most road signs—which are one of the things he’s passionate about, along with books, music, and the obsessive closing of doors. He lifts up his arms: “No parking!” He lifts them again less than fifty feet later . . . another “No parking!” And so on . . .

  House, lunch, diaper, pajamas, nap, computer. The words continue to arrive. They come on their own, considered, weighed, but without me having to summon them. They come to me. All I have to do is pluck them from the air.

  I chose each one, brought them together, separated them sometimes, and—after a few minutes as an intermediary—the letter is there: “You will not have my hate.”

  I hesitate for a while before posting it, then my brother forces me to do what I have not done for two days.

  “Lunch is ready. Come and eat!”

  No time to think about it. No desire to come back to it. Facebook, through which I’m communicating with some of Hélène’s friends whose phone numbers I don’t have, is open in the next tab. “What’s on your mind?” it asks. Copy, paste, post. My words no longer belong to me.

  “YOU WILL NOT HAVE MY HATE”

  On Friday night, you stole the life of an exceptional being, the love of my life, the mother of my son, but you will not have my hate. I don’t know who you are and I don’t want to know. You are dead souls. If that God for whom you blindly kill made us in his image, each bullet in my wife’s body will have been a wound in his heart.

  So, no, I will not give you the satisfaction of hating you. That is what you want, but to respond to your hate with anger would be to yield to the same ignorance that made you what you are. You want me to be scared, to see my fellow citizens through suspicious eyes, to sacrifice my freedom for security. You have failed. I will not change.

  I saw her this morning. At last, after days and nights of waiting. She was as beautiful as she was when she went out on Friday evening, as beautiful as when I fell madly in love with her more than twelve years ago. Of course I am devastated by grief, I grant you that small victory, but it will be short-lived. I know she will be with us every day and that we will see each other in the paradise of free souls to which you will never have access.

  There are only two of us—my son and myself—but we are stronger than all the armies of the world. Anyway, I don’t have any more time to waste on you, as I must go to see Melvil, who is just waking up from his nap. He is only seventeen months old. He will eat his snack as he does every day, then we will play as we do every day, and all his life this little boy will defy you by being happy and free. Because you will not have his hate either.

  THE MASTER OF TIME

  November 17

  10:45 a.m.

  The doorbell rings.

  I am not expecting anyone. I look through the peephole. There’s a man at the door. His ears stick out. That is the only distinguishing feature of his face. His eyes, his mouth, his nose, all the rest, seem to have been deliberately designed to allow him to go about unnoticed. He is somehow everyone and no one at the same time. I open the door.

  “Hello, monsieur . . .”

  He is dressed in a worn gray uniform. A clipboard in his right hand, with a sheet of paper clipped to it. I look him up and down, indifferent. He stares at me, slightly embarrassed. Then finally he says:

  “I’ve come to read the electric meter.”

  I should have remembered the letter warning me of this visit. Hélène stuck it to our fridge, and I walk past the fridge several times a day. But recently I have been blind to the world.

  “Can I come in?”

  I thought that if the moon ever disappeared, the sea would retreat so no one would see it crying. I thought the winds would stop dancing. That the sun would not want to rise again.

  Nothing of the kind. The world continues to turn, and meters must be read.

  Silently, I move out of the way. Watch him walk ahead of me. He enters our apartment with his big, clumpy boots, his stride of the living. I do not tell him where the meter is. He knows what to do. He has already done it ten times today, maybe a thousand times this week. It’s all he has done his whole life. I watch him work, from a distance. I want to tell him that this is not a good time. He’s not welcome here. He has just screamed into my ears that, in the world outside, life goes on. And I don’t want to hear that.

  Since Friday, the only master of time has been Melvil. He is the conductor of the symphony of our days. Waking, eating, napping, snacking. No matter what time it is, he decides when the universe must rise, and I adapt in order to keep his world intact. Every day I play the same melody, keeping time with his metronome, taking care not to miss a single note. Get up. Hug. Breakfast. Play. Go for a walk. Music. Lunch. Stories. Hug. Nap. Get up again. Snack. Go for another walk. Shopping. Music. Bath. Dinner. Stories. Hug. Sleep.

  It is the only way I have found to tell him that life continues, regardless. Clinging to our habits is a way of shutting out the terrible and the wonderful. The horror of that night, and the compassion that followed at its heels. The wound, and the bandages that people wanted to heal it with. Neither has any place in our already full little life.

  Sometimes the barriers fall. Quietly.
Behind “Come on, it’s time for your snack,” Melvil detects the hint of a repressed sob. My heart is beating too fast. He knows that Papa is sad. He sees the gaping hole appear in our life. An invisible monster comes out to drag us down there. We cry. Slowly, the hole closes up. We are still here. The orchestra conductor and his soloist. Our little carousel goes around and around every day, endlessly.

  That man checking the meter in the kitchen is a false note. I watch him, waiting for the moment when he will realize he is out of tune. He just carefully notes down the numbers on his sheet of paper. I want to throw him out. But I don’t do anything of the kind. I stay in the doorway and bow down before the world as it continues to turn. Before life, which enters our apartment in spite of my wishes. Before those strangers, who remind me that I have no choice, that I am still alive.

  “That’s it, monsieur, all done.”

  The door closes behind him. The music is in tune once again. Time to pick up Melvil from day care.

  HOMEMADE MEALS

  November 18

  11:30 a.m.

  The day-care manager pulls me aside before Melvil and I can escape, pacifier in his mouth, cigarette in mine.

  “Salomé’s mama brought some homemade soup for you . . .”

  Since Hélène died, strangers from all over the world have offered to look after my son, we’ve been invited to go on vacations in every continent on the planet, we’ve been sent socks, a hat, gifts, and checks that I have never deposited.

  The other day-care mothers moved into action on Tuesday morning. Still whole in their maternity, they cannot bear to imagine us, two poor young guys alone in a big house without Mama. They have found a way to help us without Melvil or I having anything to say about it.