The Life to Come

by Michelle De Kretser

  The season progressed, and a new thought arrived in her sixth-floor studio: A swimming pool would be nice. Silently Céleste recited words that meant Australia: sport, veranda, up yourself, teenagers with braces, little battler, the peppercorn tree, provincial touchiness, provincial kindness, dirty wog. Each one was a scene dense with detail, lit in a distinctive way.

  Sabine ran her fingers over Céleste’s ribs. She said that they looked as if they had been put in by a maker of Japanese fans. Straight black hair and an ivory pallor gave Céleste a faintly oriental look. She had her mother’s long lips and diamond-shaped face, and nothing of her father, whose photographed head was a two-handled cup. He had died on the last day of 1961, when Céleste was two. In October, the police had picked him up on his way home from work. France was at war with Algeria, although war had never been declared. That year there had been terrorist attacks in Paris, so the police did whatever they pleased.

  Not far from the hotel where Céleste’s parents lived was a cafe where only Algerians went. The interior, badly lit, gave off a morose brownish glow. On a windy spring evening that year, Lucien paused near the cafe to light a cigarette. A man came out into the street, a pale-skinned Algerian with crinkly brown hair. Lucien recognised him from the plant and, on an impulse, greeted him. When the man turned, his eyes went straight to the cigarette. At the factory, the Algerian workers had no names—they were all known as Mohammed, when they were not bicots, ratons, crouillats. Lucien held out his packet of cigarettes.

  Over the next few months, the two men became—not friends, that was not possible. There was pressure from each side not to fraternise with the other. Céleste’s mother always emphasised this distance: ‘Ils n’étaient pas copains.’ But on fine evenings, if work hadn’t left him exhausted, Lucien liked to go out for a walk. At the factory, he no longer worked on the assembly line but in the paint shop—a punishment. The foreman was a Party man, and Lucien was given to dreaminess. When his bourgeois-imperialist thinking on Hungary had been revealed, it was easy to find fault with his work. He was the only Frenchman in the paint shop, and one of the few whites. His humiliation was to be compounded by working with North Africans and blacks. By the end of his second winter in the paint shop, Lucien had a permanent cough. His eyes smarted at the end of the day, and his head throbbed.

  An evening stroll helped his headache. If he ran into Karim, Lucien would take out his cigarettes. In the coldest weather, Algerians wore thin jackets with their collars turned up, and Lucien was conscious of his padded coat—he was glad to leave it at home as the year grew warm. One Sunday afternoon, although he had never told Karim where he lived, the Algerian was waiting when Lucien and Yvette returned from the park where they had taken Céleste. Karim was in his best clothes, a navy suit and maroon tie. Lucien shook his hand, and so did Yvette. People going past stared. Yvette went inside with the baby, and Karim asked Lucien for a loan: in his village in the Sahara, his mother was ill. It was a small amount of money but not easily spared. Céleste’s mother said, ‘Your father never warmed to Karim, to tell the truth, there was something self-important about the man. But he was Algerian. Your father couldn’t refuse.’

  Autumn came. Karim asked for a second loan—the first had never been mentioned again. This time, Lucien gave less than Karim wanted. Then one evening, when Yvette was preparing dinner, a man came to the door. He was a foreigner—a Hungarian, perhaps, or a Pole. He told her, in a peculiar, tangled French, that he worked with her husband. When they came off their shift that day, the police were checking identity cards at the metro. Lucien had been hustled into a police van along with several Algerians and driven away.

  At the gendarmerie, Yvette gave her husband’s name. The officer at the desk looked as if he hadn’t slept. He opened a file and ran his finger down a list. ‘That name doesn’t appear here,’ he said.

  ‘In that case, where was my husband taken?’

  ‘His name isn’t recorded here.’

  ‘He must have been taken somewhere.’

  ‘There’s no record of his name.’

  Yvette filled out a missing persons form. The following day, she left the baby with a neighbour and went to the police headquarters on the Ile de la Cité. The morning turned into the afternoon. At last, she was seen by a functionary in a soiled shirt. He seemed wretched. Yvette thought, There’s trouble at home. The story was the same here: nothing was known of her husband and she was given a form to fill out. When she left the prefecture at the end of the bitter autumn day, Yvette was preceded by two North Africans crossing the courtyard. ‘I followed them, and we came to a long line of foreigners—Algerians, Portuguese, Spanish—standing along the north side of the building, where the wind was worst. They were there to apply for residency permits. Something about them looked familiar. I recognised a woman’s red shawl. Then I realised that most of these people had been standing there when I went in that morning.’

  Very early on sixteenth October, three days after he had vanished, Lucien was found unconscious in an alley near Austerlitz. One of his wrists was broken and two of his ribs. In hospital, it was discovered that he had a ruptured spleen. Lying in the open, he had caught a chill that turned into pneumonia. The fumes in the paint shop had ruined his lungs. The pneumonia went away but returned on Christmas Day. Before that, when Lucien could mumble, he told Yvette what the police had said: Karim was a member of the FLN, the Algerian resistance group responsible for the terrorist attacks in Paris. Every time Lucien said that he had known nothing of Karim’s politics, a gendarme hit him. Why had he given Karim money? It was common knowledge that Algerian immigrants funded the FLN. Lucien was informed that he was a traitor and would soon be shot. He heard a man screaming on the other side of the wall.

  What did Céleste remember of her early life in Paris? An impression of the hotel room remained, a picture half seen through dirty glass: it was vast and shadowy, with a niche for her parents’ high bed. She remembered a damp, checked cloth applied vigorously to her face. There was a smell that was not exactly boiled cauliflower but which made it impossible for Céleste to eat cauliflower now. A murky corridor also returned—it must have led to the shared lavatory. The Belleville street in which she was born had vanished, its dubious hotels and squalid houses cleared for Lego-like apartment blocks: forty years on, a modernist slum.

  Not far away, steps led up the side of a hill, a shortcut to the street above. Whenever Céleste climbed them, she could have sworn that the upward view—iron railings, an apartment block with curved walls—opened onto the past. She saw herself climbing patiently, her small hand reaching up to a large one that wore a ring. But it was quite possible that steps, ring and smooth Deco curve simply corresponded to the fragments of a dream. Her memory, a steel plate on which lists of vocabulary, rules governing the subjunctive, and a handful of French poems had been engraved forever, had areas eaten out by rust. Faces fell through it—lately, even her mother’s had disappeared. The Belleville hotel room that in retrospect loomed dim and lofty might well have been small and hot. In French, Perth was pronounced Perte: ‘loss’. When Céleste was asked where she was from, sometimes she said, ‘Australia,’ and sometimes she said, ‘France,’ and sometimes she said, ‘Loss.’

  Her father was a blank: not even a smell, an aura, a trace. But recently her mother, although remaining invisible, had taken to addressing Céleste. ‘How fat Dominic has become,’ Yvette said now. ‘I always thought we should have spelled his name the correct, French way.’

  ‘He and Mitch ate a whole baguette each every day when they were here,’ reported Céleste, the virtuous child, the sneak.

  Her mother’s tongue made a noise that signified wonder and dismay.

  Once a week, Djamila Kateb, the concierge’s fourteen-year-old daughter, came to Céleste for an hour of English conversation. Céleste refused payment for this service, saying, ‘C’est rien.’ That was both formulaic and true: the hour did nothing for Djamila, who had dreamed of being a hairdresser since
she was seven and wanted only to leave school. But a long time ago, her mother had set her mouth in a line. Mopping the entrance hall or vacuuming the stairs, Madame Kateb wore the shapeless, flowery overdress of an elderly provincial housewife to protect her sweatshirt and jeans. Stuck onto her childish torso, her head was a balloon. Her eyes, too, were disproportionate: pits of honey, milky at the rim. Céleste knew that the discoloration was the result of drops taken for a chronic eye disorder. Over time, she had subjected Djamila to a mild interrogation about her family that the girl’s English wasn’t nimble enough to dodge. It was a technique Céleste had perfected in her language-school classes. Students answering questions in a foreign language, proudly and effortfully deploying grammar and vocabulary, didn’t notice what they let slip. Céleste had learned that Madame Kateb was the daughter of Portuguese immigrants, and that Djamila’s father had a mobile phone shop là-bas—Djamila meant that he had returned to live in Algiers. Là-bas was a threat: it was where Djamila would be sent if she didn’t do as her mother wished. Djamila’s best friend was an Indian girl called Vasanti. Djamila had visited her at home, and seen that Vasanti’s mother served her father first, not starting her own meal until her husband had eaten—it was Djamila’s belief that comparably primitive arrangements prevailed là-bas.

  ‘For you,’ said Djamila, placing a plastic container on the table. She touched her hair to check it—yes, it was magnificent. There would be grilled meat in the container or a salad of roasted aubergines or a white bean stew: her mother’s way of repaying a good turn. Céleste received these gifts with gratitude but rarely with enthusiasm, for Madame Kateb was an indifferent cook. The dishes she sent up were bland or oversalted, greasy or cooked to mush. They suggested approximations of a folk cuisine, something remembered but remote.

  Djamila placed her phone on the table. It was switched off at Céleste’s insistence, but had to be kept within sight. At night, Djamila slept with it under her pillow—Vasanti might text her at any time. ‘A texto is showing she love me.’

  Céleste said automatically, ‘“Text” not “texto”.’ Since meeting Sabine, Céleste, too, couldn’t stop checking her phone. The temptation was overwhelming: the opportunity for distraction, the hope of reward. Sabine often sent only one word: ‘toi’. She love me! Céleste’s heart would stutter like an egg boiling in a pan.

  Céleste and Pippa arranged to meet at the Musée de la vie romantique. It was a wayward sort of Sunday with a trembly blue sky. Pippa said that when she arrived in France, it had been so cold that the city was deserted after dark. ‘I went out looking for somewhere to eat on my first night, and the only thing I could see, up and down the street, was parked cars. I thought, Here I am in Paris. It’s a garage.’

  The museum, consciously charming, had green shutters, and a vine around the door. Inside, Chopin rang out without remorse. The same nocturne stood open on the piano; on the public side of the security cord, the carpet was worn smooth. On wall after wall, romantic life took the form of nerveless landscapes. Someone had polished the medals suspended from slivers of ribbon, but all the watches on display had stopped. Pippa and Céleste inspected Nadar’s portrait of George Sand, who along with Chopin had attended salons in the house. A plaster cast of the composer’s left hand, brilliantly white on the red lining of the cabinet, lay next to a cast of Sand’s right arm and hand.

  Afterwards, in the tea garden, where ivy trailed underfoot, Pippa remarked on the smallness of the plaster hands. She placed her own hand on her breast and said, ‘To my shame, I’d never heard of George Sand.’

  ‘She explored the countryside on a donkey with Chopin,’ said Céleste. ‘On the same donkey—poor beast! At the time, George Sand looked like a spaniel. Chopin didn’t think much of her when they first met.’

  For as long as Céleste could remember, tears had rushed readily to her eyes. To counter this affliction, with its suggestion of sentimentality and feminine weakness, she had worked on a way of speaking that showed she had no illusions; it came unbidden to her now. She was still unsettled by something that had happened in the museum, where a full-length mirror in an elaborate frame stood propped against a wall in the drawing room as if waiting to be moved. When Céleste glanced into it, all she saw was a flare of light. She recovered almost at once—any fool could see that a ray of sun reflected off the surface of the glass produced the phenomenon—and was able to say to Pippa, ‘If you stand just here and look into that mirror, you’ll realise that you’re a vampire.’ But that moment when she had disappeared into an angle of vision remained to disturb. To swat it away, Céleste told herself that the museum, drip-feeding ideas of heightened emotion and extraordinary lives, had long bored her. She came for the trees along the cobbled driveway, for tea on the green, perforated-metal chairs.

  Pippa remarked that a friend of hers, the novelist George Meshaw, had brought out a new book. ‘Do you know his work?’ When Céleste shook her head, Pippa said, ‘You know, it’s weird, I’ve met hardly anyone who’s heard of him here. He’s really well known in Australia.’ Céleste remained Australian enough to know what that meant: less a partial victory than a far-reaching defeat.

  She asked how Pippa was spending her time when she wasn’t writing. ‘Exploring the restaurant scene,’ said Pippa. In Sydney, where she worked part-time for a publisher of restaurant guides, she dined out once or twice a week with her husband. Matt would be joining her for the last week of her stay, and then they would travel to Italy. An apartment was already booked in Venice—Pippa called it Venezia.

  Céleste’s mind reached back to dripping, dark streets. ‘It rained every day I was there,’ she told Pippa. ‘Those pink palaces looked like blotting paper.’ There was also a memory of Sydney, visited long ago. ‘We stayed in Balmain with my stepfather’s sister. If you looked into her front window from the street, you saw straight through the house to the harbour.’

  ‘Well, I can’t afford to live anywhere near the harbour,’ said Pippa. ‘I’m a writer, remember.’ She had begun the first draft of her new novel, she confided. ‘It’s about a couple who are having problems in their relationship. It’s set mostly in Sydney, but the turning point is a holiday they have in France. It’s the first time I’m using the past tense and the third person together, so it’s a technical challenge.’ She bit into a financier with her big white teeth and said, ‘It’s important to grow as a writer.’

  She asked Céleste what she was working on, saying, ‘I’m very interested in translation.’ Céleste had heard that before: it signalled the rosy mist of low factual density that gathered around an activity both glamorous and obscure. She had already ascertained that the only foreigners Pippa read were North Americans. Now she decided that Pippa might as well be put to use. ‘Does “egged on by the enthusiasm of youth and our fervent vocations” sound OK to you?’ she asked. ‘I can’t see it straight any more, so I can’t tell if it’s clear that “enthusiasm” applies to the “fervent vocations” as well.’

  Pippa asked her to repeat the phrase. Her dark, straight brows, which seemed to have been painted on, gave her the look of a ventriloquist’s doll. After a minute, ‘What about “the enthusiasm of our youth and fervent vocations”?’ she suggested.

  Céleste’s face, while not unattractive in repose, hinted at severity just concealed. Sabine liked to narrow her eyes and suck in her cheeks, imitating what she called your white look. But no one had ever told Céleste about her smile. Through half a century she had remained oblivious to her effect, but now noticed that, while remaining motionless, Pippa seemed to slacken, as if previously she had been tied to her chair.

  The wind had stiffened. All around them, forget-me-nots shivered in their beds. Pippa produced a rust-coloured jumper from her pack. She pulled it on over her head; her bent elbows, uplifted, were rusty wings. Crew-necked and very possibly hand-knitted, the jumper belonged to a telemovie set in the Depression—an uncharacteristic, piercing nostalgia for the lumpish woollens of childhood found Céleste unprepar
ed.

  Pippa had brought Céleste a present of her latest novel. Signing her name on the title page, she said, ‘It’s not very good.’ One of Pippa’s endearing qualities was that she showed outright what others would have hidden: that she had never heard of George Sand, that her novel was a dud. She emailed Céleste that evening, adding a PS: ‘I actually do know good writing when I see it.’ This, too, had a corrosive effect on defences. The message ended with an invitation to dinner the following week.

  Barr, now back in Perth, sent Céleste a Friend request on Facebook. Céleste stared at her screen. She couldn’t remember her nephew saying a word to her during the Harrisons’ stay. At lunch in her studio, Barr had closed his eyes and placed his head on the table next to his untouched plate. Wendy went on talking. She was describing a fish shop she had passed. ‘There were tuna steaks in the window! I said to Dom, “When will people realise it’s like eating tiger?”’ In mid-sentence, two tears started to roll slowly down her cheeks.

  When Céleste was herding the Harrisons back to their hotel, Dominic fell behind with her so that they could talk. He told Céleste that Barr set himself tests: to wear nothing over his T-shirt in winter, to refuse food for twelve hours or twenty-four. At Christmas, he had asked for a book called Kill or Be Killed. It explained how to break someone’s fingers. ‘Barr’s not usually into reading so we didn’t like to say no,’ said Dominic. ‘Mitch was fine at that age, just the usual teenage stuff. Was I sort of obsessive at fifteen, do you remember? That period’s a bit of a blur for me. There’s no one to ask since Dad carked it.’ Dominic’s neck, like his fingers, looked full of blood.