*
He woke up in what seemed to be a hotel room. It took him a minute to realise that it was a hospital. Through the window, a sealed pane of glass, he saw a tree – a poor, slightly awkward, slightly sickly tree; and, beyond, the gleaming city, poisonous but beautiful. Irresistible.
I knew, said a voice beside his head or within it, an entire neighbourhood driven mad by the light. People kept complaining about it. Their hair was falling out. Their teeth were falling out. They changed the lighting and everything went back to normal. Paul didn’t dare to turn around – not right away. Somewhere else, it was the opposite, everything was going well until they changed the street lights and suddenly: car accidents. Suicides. Murders.
You’re making it up, said Paul.
Not at all, she said.
She came closer, he heard her. Sat on the bed, lay down beside him, what would rubbing together their shoulders and hips and dreams ignite? A new spark, in a world already eaten away by light, blazing everywhere?
You again, said Paul.
Me again, said Amelia.
He took her hand. He felt her veins, her tendons, her thin fingers. He knew her age as he knew his own, but the numbers seemed unreal to them, they were younger than that, both of them were: they were only as old as their love. As what their love had become and which was now something else. A memory, a ghost, a still-unknown force field. A way out, perhaps. And a strange thing happened: the city, outside, suddenly switched off. Not suddenly, but step by step, block by block, darkness spread. Night reasserted its dominion. And so tonight there was nothing left to behold but a shadowy, black rectangle.
The perfect image, said Amelia.
The perfect image, said Paul.
*
The day after the blackout, he felt better. And not just better – in fact, fully recovered. His doctors looked at him more oddly than when he was sick. Sylvia came to pick him up; she was beautiful and distraught and dressed in layers of thin fabrics already slipping off her shoulders and collarbones, not even covering the base of her throat; and this failure, in Paul’s eyes, was art. She was wearing pink, burgundy, a creased silk skirt that showed some streaks of gold, the whole thing reminiscent of Rome, the city she had returned from. I couldn’t get here yesterday, all the flights were cancelled, how did you recover so fast? Fully recovered! What happened? she asked a doctor, almost accusingly, and the doctor admitted that he’d be hard-pressed to answer that himself.
7
Paul was in bed with Sylvia the night he heard about Amelia Dehr’s jump, Amelia Dehr’s plunge. They had seen each other a few more times after she came back. They had gone to see Albers, that is, Albers’s ashes, which they scattered together over the city she had theorised about, and loved, this city which had ended up rejecting her. That’ll teach them, Amelia had said, they couldn’t stand her. Well, they can just breathe her in now. A bit of Albers in their lungs. Paul, shocked and thrilled to be, had laughed. He found that preferable, in fact: more of Albers in him. In the world.
They had talked about Louise and about the world and Amelia’s feeling had been that the former would fare better than the latter. She had talked about each as she might a concept, an abstract idea; but for Paul, his daughter’s smile, her smell, her voice were of the essence. One thing I don’t regret is that she looks like you, they had each said to the other. At the same time. Almost at the same time. That, too, had made Paul laugh. And all the while they were shyly keeping their distance from one another.
Maybe they could be friends, Paul had thought, but he knew perfectly well that was out of the question – that it had never been a matter of friendship between them. And no doubt Amelia felt that way, too, because shortly after that she jumped from her small apartment. The two witnesses talked about her smile and the strange, insane beauty of the scene, a tall woman barefoot, standing on a railing. Leaning nonchalantly against the wall – in the frame of that window like it was a door. Smiling, her hair still red, ablaze in the sun. Wearing a man’s shirt. She had been smiling as if she expected to be seen, one of the witnesses said, his hands trembling; she smiled as if she needed an audience in order to take her life. But that wasn’t it, the other witness said, she wasn’t smiling at us, she was smiling at someone straight ahead, a head taller than her, but of course there was nothing in front of her, just the sky, the setting sun and its slanting light.
Then Paul understood that this was Amelia’s only artwork, her form of artistry, her definitive and enduring way of making amends. It would be incomprehensible to everyone but him. A work meant for him alone. Paul knew it was him she had been smiling at.
Him, Paul, thirty years earlier, when he was asleep at his chair, at the front desk of the Elisse hotel, and he hadn’t seen her leave.
Him, Paul, twenty years earlier, when he had bought that immense, empty apartment for the sole pleasure of seeing her in a ray of sunlight, barefoot, his shirt on her shoulders.
Him, Paul, when she had woken up in the maternity ward and she had seen him, with Louise in his arms, and she had contemplated them.
So she remembered, she remembered everything.
And so he finally knew that he was, and had been, loved.
Author’s Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Mitzi Angel for bringing me to Faber and Emmie Francis for making it my home in the UK, and for her brilliant editing; my agent Laurence Laluyaux and the team at RCW; my French publisher Olivier Cohen and his collaborators at les éditions de L’Olivier, especially Violaine Faucon – and everyone who has, in their own way, helped me to write this novel, as well as the Centre National du Livre for the grant it awarded me, and the Villa Médicis, where this book was begun and abandoned, before being picked up again elsewhere, and finished at the Faber Residency in Catalonia. Many thanks to the French photographer Raphaël Dallaporta who shared his stories about drones, in connection with his Ruins series (2011). The lecture titled ‘The Astronaut in the Rosebush’, attributed to Amelia Dehr within these pages, is drawn from a text that was initially published in Le Ciel vu de la terre (Éditions Inculte, 2011), and includes a quotation from Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979). Documentary poetry owes a great deal to my own mother and her work, and its continuation by other means. For the earliest writings of Nadia Dehr I took some inspiration from an article by the American art historian Jennifer L. Roberts titled ‘Landscapes of Indifference: Robert Smithson and John Lloyd Stephens in Yucatán’ (The Art Bulletin, vol. 82, no. 3: Sept. 2000). Regarding the war in the former Yugoslavia, the works of Peter Andreas were an immense help during my writing of this novel. Most valuable of all were the direct and indirect accounts that were shared with me in Sarajevo during multiple trips.
Anton Albers is, of course, a fictional character; her life and her work comprise elements and notions adapted from intellectuals Giancarlo De Carlo, Jean Delumeau, Eric Hobsbawm, Saskia Sassen, and others. However, her spirit is a tribute to activist Mira L., without whom I might not have been born in Paris.
As for actual events that readers might be tempted to recognise in this story, it should be noted that they were frequently altered or amended intentionally. Consequently, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Except perhaps when it concerns myself.
The Elisse hotel chain does not exist.
Translator’s Acknowledgements
I owe a debt of gratitude to many friends and colleagues: to Clément Ribes, who first gave me the book, declaring that ‘je suis sûr qu’il te plaira’; to David Ferrière, for his unflagging friendship and insight; to Laurence Laluyaux, who always has an ace up her sleeve; to Emmie Francis, Elodie Olson-Coons, Anne Owen and the fine team at Faber & Faber for keeping us all on an even keel; and, last but not least, to Jakuta herself.
About the Author
Jakuta Alikavazovic is a French writer of Bosnian and Montenegrin origins. Her debut novel, Corps Volatils, won the Prix Goncourt in 2008 for Best Firs
t Novel. She has translated into French works by Ben Lerner, David Foster Wallace and Anna Burns. She lives in Paris and writes a regular column for the daily newspaper Libération.
Copyright
First published in 2021
by Faber & Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2021
All rights reserved
© Jakuta Alikavazovic, 2017, 2021
Translation © Jeffrey Zuckerman, 2021
First published in French as L’avancée de la nuit by Éditions de l’Olivier, 2017
Cover design by Faber
The right of Jakuta Alikavazovic to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–34228–0
Night as It Falls Page 22