Once in Europa

by John Berger

No, it wasn’t hurting anymore. It stopped hurting before he showed me his burn.

  Why did he show it to you then?

  Because I asked him.

  What are we doing here, Christian, on this earth, in this sky?

  I’d been working in the Components Factory for ten years. On the wall beside my bench there were thirty postcards of the Mediterranean and palm trees and cows and cherry trees in flower and a village with a steeple—all of them sent to me over the years by friends on holiday. Gaston had understood the reality of our situation. When he stood behind me, pretending to oversee my work, I could sense his regret in my shoulder blades, because I could also sense my own. The racket of the machines month after month, year after year, wore away principles. The years were long. When I didn’t sleep the nights too were long.

  The factory shut for the month of August. We never went away for a holiday like some of the others. I gave Mother a hand in the garden. I made jam and bottled the last of the runner beans. When I passed the factory I no longer thought of Stepan. There is nothing in the factory which can have a memory. I thought of him when I ironed your shirts and cut your hair. I thought of him too when I did my face in the mirror. I was ageing. I looked as though I’d been married for twenty years.

  Do you know how to measure a smile? Stepan asked.

  Yes, I said.

  He bent down and picked me up so my mouth was level with his and he kissed me.

  You had a friend called Sébastien, whose father was the caretaker of the holiday camp in Bakon, on the other side of the Roc d’Enfer. Some Thursdays when there was no school, you spent the day with him up there. I was glad because the mountain air did you good. Cluses is like a dungeon. When the holiday camp was full of kids from the cities in the north, you wanted to go and find out if there were any flying enthusiasts. Here, you said, people don’t have a clue. Already I couldn’t follow you talking about “aerofoils” and “wing loadings.” I’m not sure Sébastien understood much either. His passion was fiddling with television sets. He could come into Michel’s shop and talk like a schoolmaster for an hour about new transistor circuits. Sébastien was twelve and you were eleven when in August ’66 you went to spend a whole fortnight with him up in Bakon.

  I didn’t have to go to work and I was by myself, alone as I hadn’t been for ten years. On the second day I did something I hadn’t done since Stepan’s death: I didn’t get dressed at all, I lay in bed, I listened to the radio, I took a shower when I was too hot, I remembered, I didn’t get up. Mother would have been deeply ashamed of me. Papa, examining the cruel crevices in his hands, would have looked up and said with a wink: Why not, if she can? My life already seemed inexplicably long. The next day I spent at the swimming pool sunbathing. From having to stand too much at work I was developing varicose veins. My hands weren’t like Papa’s but they were red and rough. I was never taught to swim. I made an appointment at the hairdresser’s. Mother had never once been to a hairdresser in her life.

  Coming out of the hairdresser’s with a scarf over my head, I saw Michel on the other side of the road. He was walking on crutches. I waved and he didn’t see me. His head was down and it looked as though the going was painful. I waited for the traffic and then I ran across the street. When at last he saw me, his face, red and glistening with sweat, broke into a smile.

  What a surprise! Always in his faraway voice.

  I’ve just had my hair done.

  Come and have a coffee.

  We went to the brasserie by the post office. A waiter offered him a chair. Obstinately he took another.

  Why don’t you take off your scarf?

  Order me a café au lait and I’ll be back. I went to the toilet.

  Ah! Odile! A beautiful head of hair you have there! All his words had to be hurled across the ravine of what had befallen him.

  It’s too fine. It breaks too easily.

  Too fine? I wouldn’t know what too fine was! He drank from his glass of white wine and lemonade. You remember the trip we made to Italy?

  I nodded.

  Thirteen years ago.

  The only time I’ve ever been on a motorbike. Afterwards you told me I was a good passenger.

  Your outfit has closed down for the whole month?

  Like every year.

  What about a trip to Paris?

  Paris! It’s hundreds of kilometres away.

  We take the car and we take four days, there and back. I have to go anyway to get a prosthesis adjusted. It’s not satisfactory … the left one here. If you came with me, it would be a holiday. What do you say?

  It’s a long way.

  Don’t put your scarf on again.

  Are we, Christian, a mother and child flying in the sky?

  At that moment I was twenty-nine; Michel was thirty-seven. If I’d been told as a child what the life of an adult is like, I wouldn’t have believed it. I’d never have believed it could be so unfinished. When young we lend so much authority and sureness to our elders. Michel and I had seen and lived a good deal, and yet, as we followed the Rhône along the gorge through the end of the Jura Mountains, we were like children. When I think of it now, I want to protect us.

  It was a white Renault 4. He had covered the seats with a fabric, striped like a zebra skin. He liked putting on a strong eau de cologne which, mixed with sweat and the August heat, smelt like mule. I’d bought a pair of white net gloves for the trip. In my whole life I never dreamt of wearing gloves in the summer but I’d seen this pair in a shop in Cluses, a shop where the bosses’ wives bought their haberdashery, and I said to myself: What the hell, Odile, if you’re going to Paris, Paris of all places on this earth, and you’ve got a smart pair of white shoes, you may as well wear white net gloves in August. In addition, they were at half-price.

  When I think of us on our way to Paris, I want us to come to no harm.

  The white cat died last week. She was hit by a car. Michel was at the shop and I went out into the garden and I heard a meow. She was in the grass by the edge of the road. Her back was broken, so I put her to lie on a blanket by the stove in the kitchen. She lay there, her white mouth a little open and her tongue scarcely less white than her teeth. She turned—or her body turned her—onto her side with her four legs stretched out and her hind legs straight behind her, as if she were leaping. Slowly, with her two forelegs she wiped her face, moving her paws down from her ears over her eyes towards her mouth. She did this once only, rubbing the vision of life out of her eyes. When her paws reached her mouth she was dead.

  Can there be any love without pity?

  The Jura are not like our mountains. They are more morose, more resigned to their fate. They would never cover a car seat with zebra skin nor wear white gloves in August. We passed a lake which looked as though no boat had ever sailed upon it. Michel talked about General de Gaulle and I didn’t know whether he hated or admired him. Next he talked about the factory. It belonged now to a multinational with factories in twenty-one different countries. TPI. The multinationals, Michel said, are the new robber barons of our time. TPI made eight thousand five hundred million francs profit in ’66.

  Michel keeps figures in his head like other people keep the words of songs.

  It’s raining kisses

  and hailing caresses

  till the flood of tenderness

  takes the nest.

  A man on one of their furnaces, he said, breathes air that contains four hundred thousand dust particles per litre—that’s lethal.

  May a mouthful of this on your night shift my darling keep you company between the hot and the cold …

  Lethal. No man can stand it indefinitely, Michel said. The forest is dying. The five chimneys spew out one thousand two hundred tons of fluorine waste every year.

  Papa had been right about the venom. He had been right too about my being married at seventeen. What he never knew, what he could never have imagined, was that I’d be a widow by eighteen.

  A TPI factory in the Pyrenees, Michel went o
n, has destroyed four thousand hectares of forest in three years and poisoned seven hundred and fifty cows and sheep.

  What I’ve lost is more than seven hundred and fifty cows and sheep! I said.

  You have a child. It helps.

  It helps, yes, but a son doesn’t make up for everything. One day he’ll go.

  At least you have somebody to live for.

  Sometimes, I shouted, you want to live for yourself!

  We each have to live for ourselves, he said.

  Sometimes I look at other women and I hate them because they’re, because they’re …

  Not living with a ghost?

  I’m getting out, let me get out.

  You have nothing to be angry about.

  Nobody has the right to call him a ghost. Do you hear me, Michel? Nobody. He’s here! I beat my hand on my breast.

  And I’m here, Michel said banging his hands down on the steering wheel, I’m here and I have no child so I know what I’m saying when I tell you you’re lucky.

  Lucky? Me lucky! I’m about as lucky as you, my dear Michel.

  He said nothing more. We were driving between hills of grass which rose to outcrops of rock. The sky was thundery. The cows were clustered together, heads down, wherever there was a little shade. We were both sweating and hot.

  If you see a river, I said, why don’t you stop? Then I remembered it would be hard for him to clamber down a riverbank and I regretted saying it. Can you still have children? I asked him after five minutes’ silence.

  He nodded without a word.

  Around the next corner was a café and we stopped. We were waiting for the sandwich we had ordered when we heard a screeching of brakes followed by a crash. I rushed to the café door. A Peugeot 304, coming too fast round the bend, had crashed into the back of our Renault. The driver, unhurt, was waving his arms and cursing everything he could see. In God’s name, it’s not possible! No warning for the bend! How is it possible to build such a fool road? And to park a car there you need the mind of a cunt! It’s not possible, Jesus, I’m telling you it’s not possible!

  Michel walked over to his car and bent stiffly forward from the waist; he was like the conductor of a brass band after the end of a number, and he examined the damage. The other driver was pacing out the distance from the two cars to the corner and counting out loud in a shrill, mad voice. He had a way of looking at things, Michel—shafts, flanges, joints, cylinder heads, casings—which stopped them being intransigent, which made them obedient. As I watched him I thought of his gift of taking away the pain of burns. Was it a gift of attracting to himself and so dispersing a kind of shock? The shock suffered by burnt flesh or a chassis?

  If we order the parts tonight, he shouted to me, it’s only one day’s work, we’ll be on the road the day after tomorrow.

  Swaying like a ninepin, he moved across to the Peugeot. The owner screamed: It’s not possible! Less than twenty-eight metres from the corner, you can see my brake marks, can’t you? Jesus! I jammed them on as soon as I saw you. You’re a public danger. If you’re a gimp you should get yourself about in a wheelchair.

  I reckon, said Michel very calmly, the packet there won’t cost you more than a hundred and fifty thousand—the price of a good bicycle! You’re fortunate, considering the speed you were going.

  Crippled cunt! the man said.

  The storm hadn’t broken and we had to wait for the café owner to drive us to the nearest hotel, five kilometres away.

  Give us some cold beer, can you? Michel asked. The sweat lined the furrows of his brow and the pouches under his eyes. He sat on a table, his back to the wall, legs straight out, pointed polished shoes at an impossible angle, as if both ankles were broken.

  On a day like this, he said to me, when you’re working on the furnaces, you’re working in a temperature of seventy degrees centigrade. Half-way between blood-heat and boiling point. Halfway to hell … He poured some beer down his throat.

  I could never believe in hell, I told him. I couldn’t believe any father would invent hell as a punishment for his children.

  Fathers shoot their sons dead, he said.

  They shoot in anger. The way I learnt, hell has to do with justice, not anger.

  I offered him a handkerchief to wipe his face. He held it up before his eyes because it had flowers printed on it, and he didn’t use it.

  You really want to know about hell, he said smiling, it’s here.

  Sounds odd coming from you, Michel, the one who’s always talking about change and progress …

  I put the handkerchief carefully back in my bag.

  Who says hell has to stay the same? Hell begins with hope. If we didn’t have any hopes we wouldn’t suffer. We’d be like those rocks against the sky.

  I caught hold of the hand he was pointing with. He didn’t resist and I turned it over. On the back of his fingers he has black hairs; where the violet scar is, there is no hair. I sprayed some eau de cologne onto his wrist and he withdrew his hand to smell it.

  Hell begins with the idea that things can be made better, he said. It’s refreshing—your scent. What’s the opposite of hell? Paradise, no?

  Give me your other hand.

  I sprayed the back of that hand and he didn’t withdraw it, it lay in my lap.

  I could take you to your hotel now, announced the café owner.

  The hotel backed onto a river whose bed was almost dry. The window of my room looked out onto the pebbles. It was the first time in my life I’d stayed in a hotel—which didn’t prevent my realising this one was unusual. The proprietor, who was working in the kitchen when we arrived, came out wiping his hands on a sack tied round his waist.

  Two rooms, yes, he said, you’ll be eating here tonight? Tonight I’m cooking a dish I’ve never tried before!

  The corridor leading to the bedrooms was stacked with wardrobes, there was scarcely space to get by. In my room, besides a bed and a washbasin there were two electric radiators and a deep freeze. I looked inside the freezer and it was full of meat. At last the rain began to fall, large drops the size of pearls. I washed and lay on the bed in my slip, with my feet bare.

  I had the impression that we had lost our way: we were not going to arrive in Paris, Michel’s prosthesis was not going to be adjusted, we were in a land apart, which we had come across by accident, without meaning to, and without realising it, until now we had found ourselves in a hotel run by a madman. With this idea, and yet peacefully and to the sound of the rain, I fell asleep.

  When I woke up the storm had passed. I put on another dress and a pair of white shoes—the pair which had prompted me to buy the summer gloves. I also put on a necklace of coloured beads that Christian had made for me at school. It was getting dark—the short days of August for all their heat—and I could just make out the white shapes of geese down by the river. I slipped past the wardrobes and found my way downstairs.

  To my surprise there were three or four other guests in the dining room. Michel was sitting at a table by the window, where there was a large vase of orange gladioli. I can still see the flowers. He had changed his shirt and washed.

  So too had the proprietor, who had discarded the sack and was now wearing a tie. He led me to the table. Michel insisted upon getting to his feet. We said good evening to each other like people do in films.

  Would we like an aperitif? asked the proprietor. Two Suzes, said Michel. My sense of us having lost our way reminded me of the uncertainty children feel when they find themselves having to do something for the first time. Yet I’d never felt older.

  Can we propose to you, sir, poularde en soutien-gorge?

  What is it? asked Michel.

  A skinned chicken roasted in pastry, sir. Unforgettable. And as an entrée perhaps truite au bleu?

  It’s the chicken you’ve cooked this way for the first time? I asked.

  Precisely, Madame, the first soutien-gorge I’ve ever fitted! he winked at Michel.

  Four point to the sky, four walk in the dew, and
four have food in them; all twelve make one—what is it? I asked the man.

  He didn’t know and I wouldn’t tell him. We ate well, like at a baptism.

  If you wanted, I could help you, Michel said.

  What do I need help for?

  To live.

  I’ve managed not too badly up to now. It’s good, this white wine, isn’t it? Santé.

  Do you know what people say about you?

  I’ve never worried. It’s the one thing, Michel, I’ve never worried about.

  There’s no talking with her, they say. When Odile’s made up her mind to do something, she does it. When she’s made up her mind not to, nothing can make her. There’s no approaching her. They respect your courage, they respect the way you’ve brought up the boy—but from a distance. You’re alone.

  I don’t feel it.

  In a few years it’ll be too late.

  Too late for what?

  Too late to change.

  You want to change everything, Michel, the world, hell, people, politics, now me.

  You think things can stay as they are?

  I don’t know.

  Happiness doesn’t say anything to you?

  There’s more pain than happiness, I said.

  Pain, yes.

  Have I told you the story of the two bears? I asked.

  Who’s been eating from my plate? The story of the three bears?

  No, two. Two bears in the snow …

  Fairy tales, Odile! We’re too old now for fairy tales. We need to face reality.

  Like we both do all the time.

  Then he said something that impressed me, for he said it so slowly and emphatically: Things can’t … go on … as they are. These words were more grunted than spoken and the gladioli I was gazing at in their vase blurred before my eyes.

  They do go on, I replied, every day, every hour. People work, people go home to eat, feed the cat, watch TV, go to bed, make jam, mend radios, take baths, it all goes on all the while—till one day each of us dies.

  And that’s what you’re waiting for! he said.

  I’m not waiting for anything.

  You know you talk like an old woman?

  I’m a widow. I was a widow at eighteen.