Yann Andrea Steiner

by Marguerite Duras

  But what the shark wants is to go on the sand to steal David. Nothing to be done about that. We’re here, don’t be afraid, the animals tell David.

  And David says to the shark, There you go, it’s starting all over again, nobody can ever tell what you want.

  And the shark weeps and cries out over and over that it’s not his fault.

  And here is David weeping with the shark over the horribly unjust fate handed to sharks.

  And then the light becomes illuminating, the air suddenly echoes with liquid thunder, and the Great Half-Breed of all the oceans slowly emerges from the Atlantic Reservoir to watch the setting sun.

  Still blind and so beautiful, the Source asks who was crying out in pain, that it’s indecent, that they can’t hear themselves think in the Atlantic Reservoir.

  And all the animals say in unison, It’s the shark who wants to eat David. Then David understands and he feels bad for the shark.

  They’re all nuts on this island, the Great Half-Breed says in French.

  The child asks if the Source still dances in the evening. The young counselor says yes, every evening until nightfall, and not always staying in cadence, nor always the Guatemalan polka. Sometimes a tango by Carlos d’Alessio. And sometimes the slow, funereal Passacaglia whose author no one here is sure of, probably an old organist from some Germanic country, according to some.

  The child asks how long David has been on the island. The girl says two years, but she isn’t sure either.

  Then she asks him if he wants to know how the story ends. He shakes his head no, he doesn’t want to. He stops talking. And he cries. He doesn’t want the Source to die, or the shark. Or David? asks the counselor. He says, Or David.

  And then the girl asks the child one more question. She asks what he would like David to do, kill the Source or keep her alive.

  The child stares at the ocean and the sand without seeing them. He pauses, then says, Kill the Source.

  And then the child asks, What about you? She says she doesn’t know. But maybe she’d kill her, too, like him.

  She says they don’t know why they want the Source to die.

  The child says it’s true, they don’t know.

  Outside the windows, it was suddenly night. It had arrived without anyone noticing it coming, and it was already very dark. And they thought about the wildness of the child and the sea, about all those differences that are so alike.

  The girl says people always wrote on the end of the world and the death of love. She sees that the child doesn’t understand. And both of them laugh about that, very hard, both of them. He says it’s not true, people write on paper. They laugh. Then she says that the child understands. They laugh. She also says that if there were no sea and no love, no one would write books.

  THE HOLIDAY campers have reached the other end of summer. The child with gray eyes was there. Next to him, always, was the young girl. Everyone sang except the two of them, the child and she, the employee of the holiday camp, that solitary girl.

  Then once again they went, as you know, to the other side of the breakwater. Toward the promontories of clay and the black pillars. And there, she sang for the child that by the clearwater fountain she had walked again and again; she sang that. She said that the non-Jewish deportees who passed through Rambouillet had also sung that song. He asked who that was, the deportees.

  She said, Frenchmen. And that afterward, the Jewish deportees had sung that song about the clearwater fountain before dying.

  Then she said no more for a long while.

  And then she said that they were Jews.

  The tide went out and the girl told the child about a book she had recently read, one that still haunted her and that she couldn’t get off her mind. It was about a love that awaited death without provoking it, infinitely more violent than if this love had been made from desire.

  The girl told the child that what he didn’t understand about what she was saying was just like what she didn’t understand in herself when she looked at him. She told him that she loved him. She said, “I love you more than anything.”

  The child began to cry.

  The girl didn’t ask him why he was crying.

  Then the child asked again about the Jews. The girl didn’t know.

  As on the first day the sea carries to shore the white froth of its fury; it brings it back as it would bring back an old love. Or the ashes of incinerated Jews from the German crematoriums who shall not be forgotten until the end of the centuries upon centuries that the Earth has to live.

  The child with gray eyes stood there. And the girl stood there too. Like strangers.

  They looked at the sea so as not to look at each other, as if trying never to see each other again. Never to speak.

  And while they looked at other things the child wept.

  And I took them in as I did you, as I did the sea and the wind. I shut them in this dark room that had wandered out above time. The one I call the Room of the Jews. My room. And that of Yann Andréa Steiner.

  The child wept for a long time. The girl let him cry. He had forgotten the girl.

  Then the girl asked, “What do you remember . . .”

  The child said, “Nothing.” And then he was silent. And then he said very clearly that his little sister, the German soldier fired into her head and her head exploded. The Child did not cry. He tried to remember and he remembered. He said that there was blood everywhere. That the dog too had been killed by the German soldier because it had jumped at him. The dog howled so much, he said he remembered that too.

  Her age, his little sister’s age, was two. The child didn’t remember anything more.

  He falls silent. He looks at her. He has grown pale. He’s afraid to say something he’s concealing. He says he doesn’t remember.

  She says nothing. She looks at him again. She says, “It’s true. People don’t remember anything.”

  He says that except for his little sister Judith, it’s true, he doesn’t remember anything.

  He is silent. Then he says, “My mother shouted, she told me to save myself, to run down the road very fast, right now, not to tell anyone about Judith, not ever.”

  The child suddenly falls silent. As if he were losing his sanity. As if all at once fear had again become the law, as if suddenly he had become afraid of her, had grown afraid of that girl as well.

  She looked at him for a long time and then she said, “You have to talk about this. If you don’t, we’ll die, you and I.”

  The child doesn’t understand. She can see it. She says that if he doesn’t, it will all happen again.

  The child looked at her again and he smiled and said, “You were saying that as a joke ...”

  She smiled at the boy. He asked her, “Are you Jewish too?”

  She answered that she, too, was Jewish.

  The child had never seen such a fierce storm and he was surely afraid. Then the girl took him in her arms and together they walked into the foamy surf.

  The child was in a state of terror. He had forgotten about the girl.

  And it was in that act of forgetting that the girl saw the child’s gray eyes in their full light. Afterward she had shut her own eyes and held herself back from walking farther into the deep foam, as she wanted to do to kill them as well, the two Jews that they were.

  The child was still looking at the waves, their ebb and flux. The trembling in his body had stopped.

  The girl turned her face away from the sea, kissed the child’s hair; it smelled like the sea wind, and she cried and tonight the child knew why.

  She asked the child if he was cold and he said no. If he was still afraid, and he lied and said no. He corrected himself. He said, “Sometimes, at night.”

  The child asked if she could go farther out, to where the waves were crashing, and she told him that if she did the force of the waves would most likely rip them apart from each other and carry him away. The child laughed at this as if it were a joke.

  She asked him about
his parents. The child didn’t know where they were buried. He said they had taken pills, the way his mother had always said they would. She had put him out the door and then they must have been dead right after.

  Had he seen them die?

  No. Only his little sister and the dog.

  And the German soldiers, had he seen them?

  No. Later, on the road, after he’d run away, he saw some passing by in a car.

  The girl sobs quietly. He looks at her. He is surprised. He says nothing about this.

  “And after that, what happened? What do you remember?”

  “I went down the road. And in a field there were horses and a woman who had heard rifle shots. She called me over and gave me bread and milk. I stayed with her, but she was afraid of the Germans so she made me hide.

  “And then she got afraid again so she put me in the orphanage.”

  “Full-time?”

  “I think so. On Sundays we went to the forest. I remember that.”

  “And never the sea?”

  “No. This is the first time.”

  She says, “Are you happy at the orphanage?”

  He says yes, he’s happy. He cries. He says again, this time in a shout: “When the German soldier shot at my little sister, the dog jumped at him and the soldier killed him too.”

  They look at each other some more. He says, “I can really remember the dog when he barked.”

  Then the child doesn’t look at anything else. He stares into the void. He says his mother had told him that they were Jews. That the Germans were killing Jews, all the Jews. They, the Germans, didn’t want there to be a single one left, a single Jew, ever.

  The Child hesitates, then asks if that’s still going on, if the Germans are still murdering.

  The girl says no. He looks at her. She doesn’t know if he believes her.

  Afterward they headed north, toward the swampy plains of Bay of the Seine, past the docks of the port.

  They crossed over the naked sands and headed for the Black Pillars, toward the canal. At that spot the beach was pockmarked and gummy and again the girl carried the child.

  They crossed the great expanse of sand at the bay. The pillars grew taller as they approached.

  And then the girl put the child down and they walked onto the last sandbank before the Seine, the river she had said; it continued to flow into the sea before disappearing. She had told him to look at the color of the water, green or blue.

  The child looked.

  The girl lay down on the sandy beach and closed her eyes.

  Then the child went off to join the people collecting shells nearby. When the child had gone, she cried.

  Now and then, he came back toward her.

  The girl knew when he was there, looking at her.

  She also knew when he ran off again toward the fishermen and when he came back.

  He gave her what the fishermen had left behind, small gray crabs, shrimp, empty shells. And the girl threw them in the water-filled hollow at the foot of the tallest black pillar.

  And then the sea, slowly, pearled up with green.

  And then the long line of oil tankers from Antifer grew darker.

  And then the waters of the Seine were slowly invaded by the waters of the sea. And the difference between the waters of the Seine and the waters of the sea could be read with crystal clarity.

  The child returned to the young girl. He pressed himself against her and for a long time they looked at each other. Especially she. As if a stranger, suddenly.

  She said to him, “You are the child with gray eyes. That is you.” The child saw that she had wept during his absence. The child said he didn’t like it when she cried. He knew it was because of his little sister but he couldn’t help it sometimes, if he talked about Maria. She had asked him the color of Maria’s eyes. He didn’t know. Green, he thought; his mother said so.

  Time passed. It was getting onto autumn. But the end of summer had not yet arrived.

  It suddenly turned cold.

  The girl carried the child. She held him very close against her, kissed his body. Then the child said that sometimes at night he dreamed he was still crying over his little sister, and the dog.

  The child looked toward the canal; maybe he was afraid because they were now the only ones on that entire stretch of sand. The girl told the child that he must no longer be afraid. She put him down and the child was no longer afraid and they walked along the same path they’d taken to get there, the one between the fallow fields that were covered by the sea when the tide was high.

  Then the girl spoke to the child. She told him she’d rather it remain this way between them.

  That she’d rather their story not move from this place, even if the child didn’t understand her; that it remain in this desire, even if that meant she put herself to death. Not a real death, mind you, but a dead death, where you don’t hurt, where you’re never sad, you’re never punished, nothing.

  She said, “It should be completely impossible.”

  She said, “It should be desperate.”

  She said that if he had been older their story would have left them behind; that she could not even imagine such a thing, and that it was good that things between them were like this. She added that if he didn’t understand everything she was saying, it wasn’t important. The child cried. He also cried for no reason, as if the massacre of his little sister had never ended and was still invading the earth, the whole world, little by little.

  She also said she knew he couldn’t yet understand what she was telling him, but that she didn’t know this well enough to keep silent.

  The child listened to all of it. He listened to all of it, that child.

  Sometimes, while walking, he looked at her, for a long time, as if he were seeing her for the first time.

  At first he said nothing to the girl. Not a thing.

  And then he said he was tired and for her to carry him in her arms some more; when he was there, in her arms, he looked at her face for a very long time with a kind of gravity that she had never seen in him before and he said to her almost in a whisper, very quickly, as if someone else could hear, he said that if she didn’t take him with her he would throw himself in the sea to die, that the other children had told him how to die in the sea, that he knew this now.

  It was at that very moment that the young girl promised to take him with her, swore to him that never ever would she leave him. That never ever would she forget him.

  THE END began.

  The groups from the south Paris suburbs have arrived. They wait around the buses, watched over by the drivers.

  The director of the South Suburb Camps squints toward the cliffs.

  She says, “We have to call the police. The child hasn’t come back. Neither has the counselor.”

  We have to call.

  A siren wailed from somewhere around the Touques estuary. Just as at the end of the work shift in the small factories lining the roads.

  The girl lay behind a bush. The child came up against her as if trying to lose himself, to disappear in her. The child doesn’t know. The child is frightening. He cries, “I’m staying here with you.”

  Another siren calls, slower, softer. She says, “Go on. I’ll follow you.”

  Then the child gets up and looks around. He looks at the distant, empty tennis courts, the shuttered villas, and at her, lying there without strength and without a voice and he looks in the distance at the buses and vans from the southern suburbs. Once he’d seen them, the child looked toward the cliffs. All was calm. All was clear. The child must already know what to do to keep from going back there.

  A third siren wailed, longer and shriller this time, to be lost in the sea. The girl hissed under her breath.

  “Go – now! I’m begging you, do it.”

  The child looked once again at the vast summer desert and at her, this stranger.

  He said, “Come with me.”

  She said no, not that. She can’t join him right a
way but she’ll come. Tonight, she said, or tomorrow, or maybe the day after but not this afternoon; this afternoon, she says, she couldn’t bear it. She says they have to wait a little longer. He did as she asked. Slowly he moved away from the place and began to walk. And then he headed toward the cliffs.

  She doesn’t watch him leave. Again she sings that at the clearwater fountain she rested.

  She rests, stretched out full, with her eyes closed. She sings in a state of insolent happiness.

  Once she had sung, the child was no longer afraid.

  They had looked at each other and suddenly burst out laughing as if in a flash of joy. And the child had understood: that now she would never forget him, never again, and that the crime against the Jews had vanished from the earth with the knowledge of their story, hers and his.

  In the dark room, time suddenly subsided. And it was evening.

  She tells him that wherever she goes she will take him with her. That as of that very night she would find him again, that he has to start walking toward the forest and after the forest he must keep moving forward, on the paths marked in white for foreign tourists.

  I remember.

  It was at the beginning of the story. And yet I began to remember.

  She had asked him, “What do you love the most?”

  He tried to understand the question and then he had asked what her answer was, what she loved the most, and she had said, “The sea. Just like you.”