For A Long Time, Afraid Of The Night

by Yasmine Ghata

  Irresistibly drawn by the place, Suzanne walks toward the apartment. The widow opened the door very cautiously, the police officer posted between the two swinging doors shows only half his anxious face. Suzanne introduces herself and asks him to let her in. With a bewildered look, the old woman invites her in and offers her a seat in the living room. Sitting in a corner of the large room, the women converse in a low voice. The words are heavy, long silences diminishing their weight.

  Suzanne takes them back thirty years to a time when the dance of the little girl’s visits would punctuate the day. Hiding in her room, she never greeted visitors, as if no one had ever entered. The chatter of the real estate agents resonated in the hallway, disappearing in the common areas. Suzanne hated the string of words of their affected voices. Her mother received them with a smile, answered the wide range of questions. Nothing indicated her hurry to leave this place, although in her eyes it had become an open-air burial chamber.

  Suzanne remained quiet but everything inside her was shouting out her yearning to stay, to keep living within these walls even without his paternal arms.

  Living somewhere else meant losing her father a second time.

  The landlady remembers little Suzanne. In love with the place, she was in conversation with her mother, asking a lot of questions about the neighbors, the heating, the service chamber, and other details. At that moment, the little girl started pulling at her mother’s skirt, wouldn’t stop, wanting to interrupt their discussion. She kept breaking in, endlessly repeating her ‘mama, mama’ in a plaintive, whiny tone. The little girl was put in her place. She’d been observing the fruitful conversation between the two women with a hostile look. At that moment, she could have set it on fire, screamed without stopping, shattered the living room windows. She would have done anything to put an end to this polite exchange. But nothing happened, she went back to her room, lightly stroked a wall with her fingertips. She inscribed invisible letters on the matte paint, which she immediately wiped off with the back of her hand.

  Suzanne became mute that day, her anger and frustration were too fierce. No sound could come out of her mouth anymore. Words were a form of lightheartedness she seemed to have lost forever.

  Cardboard boxes are stacking up in the entryway. Suzanne’s room hasn’t been emptied yet, it’s the only space spared by the ravaging hand of her mother who is sorting, throwing out memories both good and bad. Her father’s affairs are the object of more deliberation, his old suits intended for the poor are piled up near the entrance. The scattered remainders seem to have no further usefulness. The mother drags herself from one room to the next, her frenzied need to throw out making space for despondency. The apartment is now no more than a hangar with boxes, a warehouse for the past. In her bedroom the girl resists, holding onto the last territory, preventing invasion, and opposing her mother’s plans.

  One whole day spent at school is enough to empty and bare the room. Suzanne would like to melt away into the décor, belong to it forever. At night she goes from room to room, puts her head against the front door, the very one that used to vibrate under her father’s keys when he’d take too long to come home. How will he find us if we leave? Suzanne forgets that he’s no longer there, that he no longer has any keys.

  Voices echo in the connected rooms, the apartment is nothing more than a receptacle ready to shelter new lives. The fatherly imprints will disappear under a new coat of paint, the smell of his pipe that used to bring fragrance to the living room will evaporate under the effects of the solvents used to strip the hardwood floor. The fixed mirror has no memory of its outlines. Suzanne knows that she can’t take the intangible with her. That’s why she leaves a scrap of paper in the fireplace. This pathetic act is a way of getting even with forgetfulness or rather with her fear of forgetfulness.

  In the morning her cries and sobs will not matter.

  She clutches onto the doors, puts her feet between the slats to slow down the departure, beseeches her mother not to leave this place. Her entreaties make no difference, her right arm tries to cling to the successive doors. The daughter challenges the mother’s plan. Leaving is to accept forgetting. The tears are pointless, she must yield when confronted with her mother’s decisive gesture as she gradually gains ground. The front door, now so near, and Suzanne’s strength waning, she gives up.

  Her blurred vision only captured a few sidelong images of the ceiling moldings, the baseboards, and the mantels. And then there is the chestnut tree that seems to bow down to greet her. There, in the middle of the living room stands a man, his back to her, Suzanne wants to see him, but a hand is pushing her, forcing her to move on. The silhouette has vanished, Suzanne leaves the premises with a scent of tobacco smoke in her nostrils. The sound of footsteps is heading toward the window, the two sections that are open to the street let the city noises in. The door slams shut.

  The widow has dozed off. Days when she’s lost her fondness for sleep. Suzanne is sitting across from her. In the apartment the silence is complete, the daylight has grown dusky, too crude a light would have kept her from traveling into the past. For Suzanne the apartment enfolds the secret of her childhood, an enigma that to her eyes has remained whole. She would like to have had an adult consciousness at that time, she could have decoded the face of her mother who was incapable of telling her ‘your father died’. The word ‘gone’ said it all, and its complete opposite, it stated the absence but not its irreversibility, in no way did it indicate whether this departure had been wanted or suffered, anticipated no return date whatever, as if the deceased had vanished into thin air.

  For a long time Suzanne waited for an unexpected return without ever looking hopeful. She’d become a master in showing no expression: her face was like a never-besieged fortress. It betrayed the minimum possible, her eyes didn’t blink, no longer reacted to outside events, and no smile ever creased her cheeks again.

  The widow woke up, Suzanne smiles at her. A procession of fat clouds brought shadows and light into the room. With her hostess Suzanne returns to the rooms of her childhood: her parents’ bedroom has two windows looking out onto the courtyard. Memories come back to her in a muddle, especially the one of her father dozing. Going around his bed on tiptoe, she’d once found him asleep with his eyes wide open. Suzanne imagined that even in death her father would never close his eyes.

  The boards of the hardwood floor still creak, resuscitating the details of a past life. At the time, her mother used to work on a typewriter, her nimble fingers skipping around on the keys. It had become a household sound, like the whistling of the kettle or the noise of the vacuum cleaner. But there was one sound that elated Suzanne more than any other, it was the sound of the front door lock that could be heard throughout the apartment. Her father’s cheerful though tired eyes would examine her like an animal starving for love.

  The only object left: his razor. The metal handle still shows some traces of shaving cream and of hard water. More precious are some short hairs that remain on the two blades. Suzanne clings to the object like a relic, a treasure of what was once alive. The slanting handle used to follow the outline of his face, being insistent with the spots that were hard to get to. Rinsing followed the gliding motions.

  Suzanne loved hearing the sounds of this daily ritual, she would watch him alternate the numerous frontal and profile views, tracing a remnant of shaving cream that he’d wipe off with a snap of his towel. What Suzanne was most fond of were the funny faces her father would make, reminding her of a chimpanzee. Tapping his cheeks with both hands was the sign that he was done.

  Whole months went by that the razor didn’t get a new blade, that it hadn’t been in contact with water anymore.

  Suzanne had snatched it together with some other things that were lying around the apartment. Her pickings were hidden in a box in an unsuspected place. Sometimes she lays out cufflinks, pipes, scissors, and the razor. She’d like to go more deeply into the close examination of these objects and through them make the absen
t one come back. Suzanne is firmly convinced that these objects can be enough to give him life again, to bring him back, open the passageway that separates her from him. At her age nothing is more plausible than a miracle, her imagination defies the improbable. She comes up with the idea of listing the items, listing them one by one on index cards as if it had to do with scientific data. With the help of a magnifying glass, she writes:

  Card no. 1: razor

  It is a safety razor Gillette GII-TracII-A3.

  It’s a chrome razor with a carved handle.

  It measures 13 cm.

  The object was made in an American factory.

  It dates from 1980.

  I chose this object because my father used it every morning.

  Card no. 2: pipe

  It is an old pipe.

  It is made of ebony and meerschaum.

  It measures 12 cm.

  This pipe was made in Asia Minor in the plains of Eskisehir between Istanbul and Ankara.

  It was made at the beginning of the twentieth century.

  It comes from Turkey, my father’s country of origin. He loved it very much and often showed it to his guests.

  Suzanne could just as well write down the ivory and brass pipe tamper, as well as the wooden cigar box that still contains three cigars she sniffs the way her father used to do when he was alive.

  Her lovely handwriting didn’t succeed in making him come back, he could have appeared for a few seconds, but the magic didn’t work. Determined, Suzanne writes another card, probably the last one.

  Jean Nour Ghata.

  Sex: male.

  Height: 1.73 m.

  Born in Beylerbey (Istanbul).

  Born 20 April 1927 and died 6 October 1981 in Paris.

  I chose him because he is my source, my sorrow.

  Suzanne has reclaimed the pages with her father’s handwriting like a thief. It’s a regular script, the stroke is clean, leaning slightly to the right. Suzanne spends hours erasing certain words and then rewriting them. She strains her right hand, presses the lead into the former imprint, into the former groove. Suzanne edits her rounded vertical lines, her winding, childish outlines, her father’s handwriting gets to the point and can’t be bothered with any flourishes. She wipes off the residues of the eraser with the back of her hand. While duplicating the words as they were before, she thinks she can keep him alive by passing through herself.

  Meanwhile, her mother is typing a long novel dedicated to the deceased to comfort herself in her bereavement while the little girl attempts to revive the departed via quasi-fetishist rituals. Suzanne confers a mystical virtue, a supernatural power, upon these intimate things. Her concentration mirrors her hope. Closing her eyes, she summons the dead man to appear after she has loudly counted out twenty seconds. An extra ten seconds don’t help. From wherever he is, her father is annoying and upsetting her. In her eyes, nothing can explain his negligence.

  Every day, when her mother wanders through the apartment or remains glued to her bed, collecting cups black with coffee dregs, Suzanne tries the same experiments, accompanying the beckoning of her father with learned formulas. When she least expected it, the miracle happened. Her eyes closed, counting out loud, something happened at the fifth second.

  ‘8, 7, 6, 5’… Numbers whispered softly in a white bedroom. A familiar smell had entered the room. Suzanne opened her eyes before she’d finished counting, all around her a delicate cloud encircled her as if to immobilize her. Spicy fragrances were penetrating her hair and her clothes. She recognized her father’s tobacco from Cyprus, half vanilla, half licorice scented, easily identifiable among all others. Closing her eyes again as if to smell it more clearly, Suzanne immersed herself in these vapors without breathing, almost paralyzed, she did not want to lose any of the fumes: everything in the atmosphere signaled her father.

  It lasted only a moment, barely a few seconds, Suzanne’s smile returned. Although he’d vanished, her father was still living in this apartment, anxious not to disturb those alive. The smell diffused, the room was cleared of his presence in an instant. Suzanne didn’t open the window: not a breath of outside air should enter the room.

  She no longer demanded any sign from him, she was aware that harassing her father incessantly was not the solution. She kept speaking to him without asking him for anything, using his objects in an attempt to be closer to him.

  When her mother went out, she’d sometimes copy the shaving ritual, very closely replicating the order of his gestures. She’d mime the motions, rinsed the blades to get rid of his imaginary hairs. It was followed by tapping her cheeks and screwing the top of the lotion bottle back on. Suzanne perfected the scenario with incredible precision.

  Her mother never saw any of this but would be surprised to smell the scent of shaving cream in the bathroom, or see old neckties lying around. Not until much later did she grasp the meaning of these performances. She finally understood what was going on within the walls of the grief-stricken apartment. One night when she should have been fast asleep, she ventured into her daughter’s bedroom, surprised to see light coming through her doorway. Suzanne jumped: a pipe in her hand, she’d tried hard to light the bowl, but the tobacco had been tamped too hard and wouldn’t burn. The tools were neatly aligned on her sheets: tobacco pouch and a large box of kitchen matches. Her mother didn’t say a word and closed the door again as if she hadn’t seen a thing.

  You cannot stay here any longer. There’s no human being around and perhaps there never will be. You feel disheartened this morning. For five days you’ve been roaming along a twisting trail through landscapes whose existence you had hardly imagined. You wouldn’t even be able to find your village again if you had to go back now. Every hill looks the same to you and crossing another one seems impossible. And you expected there’d be a village at the foot of each one of them. Where have they gone? The surface of the land seems to be populated only by animals and insects.

  A strong wind blows in your ears, it seems to want to push you forward. Suitcase in hand, you feel the air propel you in the direction of yet another unknown territory. Your pace is faster than usual, you feel as if you’re running, the gusts of wind are so strong that you could almost be soaring. The suitcase is buffeted, balancing backward and forward. You wished you could stop to pee. The wind isn’t giving you a break. There’s no question of stopping, you must obey the command to keep moving over and over again. Since you are unable to stop, the urine burns and flows down your legs, between your thighs, down your calves, your ankles. No pain was ever this sharp.

  You’d like to let go of the suitcase, but it seems to be a part of your hand. You’d like to stop trampling the land, but it’s the gusting wind that forces you to move ahead against your will over ever more scorched ground, cracked, flat, without any protrusions. The wind has changed into a storm, a hurricane. You’re very cold, the strips of fabric of your wetted pants are freezing. You’ve been going for several hours at the will of a stubborn breeze when the wind stops and leaves you on the fringe of a cultivated area.

  You notice corrugated roofs, cultivated fields surrounded by hedges. Fog prevents you from seeing the exact details of the farm, which is surrounded by pastures. A smell of burnt wood and death makes you step back. As you move the fog lifts. Animals are lying on the ground, motionless right in the middle of the field. Barely hidden bones emerge from the soil. You’re afraid to proceed now but you can’t keep yourself from rushing down the embankments. Nothing moves, except for the swarms of insects invading the air like shapeless throngs. Your hand is sticky, you’re looking for water. The house doesn’t have a door anymore, you see prone bodies in the distance. The owners have been slaughtered, surprised during their everyday chores.

  As you advance you have to cover your nose to keep from sniffing the smell of death. A cloud of dust is carried along by the wind. You’re at a Tutsi farm.

  You go around the animals that litter the ground, your eyes avoid looking at the corpses proliferating
in the area around a house. Withered corpses, hacked to pieces. You find refuge inside a dwelling that has neither windows nor door. You take leftovers from some of the tables: manioc roots and sorghum stems. You have the impression you’re chewing on stone, that’s how hard it is. Circling in the sky birds of prey are hovering.

  The water supply allows you to wash yourself with soap, to purge yourself from five days of wandering. The bath almost erases your memory. The house, blackened by fire, is empty, but screams still seem to echo through the thickness of the silence. The stable is nothing more than a wall. With the help of a rag you wipe your suitcase, make the hide that had become dull and rough shine again. Sleep knocks you out, you fold yourself back up inside your suitcase and, as always, close the lid. The best way to escape from the world, to flee its cruelty.

  No longer moving you dozed off within a few seconds. Sleeping inside four walls was an extra safety measure, it made you feel doubly protected, doubly watched over. You slept for many hours like this in the silence of a house emptied of its inhabitants. The ceaseless sounds of nature no longer came to interrupt your slumber.

  When you woke up you thought for an instant that the whole thing had never happened, but the sight of the corpses on the ground quickly dissipated that illusion. The place suggested an open-air tomb. Sepulchers are silent homes.

  Two tangled silhouettes. Arsène struggles, holds his breath to gain strength. The shouts from the children in the schoolyard cover up the brawl. Arsène fights to take revenge for the acerbic taunts of his classmates. Feet apart, calves taut, their hands grapple with each other. The gym teacher, Mr. Benoit, intercedes to separate them. Arsène’s face is distorted with hate, revolt. Grabbing them by their shoulders, the teacher leads them to the principal’s office. As they walk, he roughs them up to force them to calm down. The other kids move aside as they pass by. Arsène hides his tears, which remind him of his earlier fears, reviving distant memories of a dry, pasty mouth. His assailant accuses Arsène of having started it by hurling insults. Catching their breath, eyes down, they listen to the principal’s serious, no-nonsense voice. Arsène doesn’t try to defend himself, he’s in another world anyway, bordering on the edge of humanity. The principal very quickly deals with the whole business, threatening the boys with eventual expulsion: ‘No violent action will be tolerated within the confines of this school,’ he warns them firmly.