One Night in November

by Amélie Antoine

  As they waited in line on Boulevard des Capucines, they noticed just how many people were there on crutches or in wheelchairs, but they didn’t say a word. They suddenly felt so lucky, guilty that their own wounds were invisible, that the only damage they had sustained was on the inside. Just a few yards away, a horde of journalists, video cameras, and microphones was on the lookout for moving personal accounts, a few tears, or the slightest sign of fear. Léopold didn’t enjoy feeling like a circus act. He instinctively squeezed Romane’s hand a little tighter.

  He didn’t know what to expect that night. Would the music be enough to lift the weight that had been pressing down on his chest for the past three months? He decided it was better not to get his hopes up. Without thinking, he and Romane took their places in the same spot as the first concert, even though it wasn’t the same venue. As if they’d really come to finish the concert. Léopold didn’t recognize anyone around him, and a wave of sadness suddenly washed over him. As if he’d been expecting a family reunion, only to realize he’d made a mistake, that despite their shared ordeal, strangers were still strangers. He reveled in the hugs from his friends when they made their way to him and Romane, and they waited anxiously together for the band to come on stage.

  When Jesse Hughes finally appeared, with the carefree melody of “Il est cinq heures, Paris s’éveille” playing in the background, he was met with such thunderous applause and boisterous shouting, so full of life, that it left him speechless. He just stood there, as if looking at each of them one by one. Léopold could feel his stomach writhing, his throat tighten with all the emotions trying to escape. The hairs on his arms stood up, as if someone had pressed rewind and the past three months had disappeared for a split second. The singer blew kisses, raised his fists in the air, ran his fingers through his hair with a trembling hand, then brought his hands, palms touching, to his face, unable to express how overwhelmed with emotion he felt to see all the people who’d found the courage to come back.

  With a lump in her throat, Romane watched as Hughes’s bright-red suspenders rose and fell in time to his breathing, visibly ragged with emotion. At that exact moment, she would have sworn that the entire audience felt an intense and indescribable wave rush over them, a combination of joy, grief, thankfulness, and love. The feeling that they all belonged to something bigger, that they were united, sharing in the moment, as one. Then the singer’s tattooed arms pulled the strap of his white guitar over his head, and the much-awaited—and dreaded—concert finally began.

  The music didn’t erase all their pain, but for a few hours, amid all the other tortured souls in the room, their wounds didn’t seem so deep, so insurmountable, so unbearable. None of the concert-goers wanted November 13 to become their identity, to sum up who they were for the rest of their lives, and for a fleeting moment that night, they let themselves sing, yell, and dance, despite their sadness and grief, despite the knowledge that nothing would ever be like before again.

  Just after ten o’clock, Léopold glanced discreetly at his cell phone, and couldn’t help but feel incredibly relieved. Nothing had interrupted the music, and they were still alive. They would make it out of this concert hall unscathed—almost.

  Afterward, everyday life quickly took over, but neither of them has forgotten the intense feelings they shared with the crowd, with the group that night. The sudden fragile feeling that they would pick themselves up again and move forward, that one day they would no longer feel like they were riding the wake of that terrible, fateful night, but that they were truly living again.

  Léopold places his hands on Romane’s stomach and rests his head in the crook of her neck.

  “Do you think it’s a boy or a girl?” he asks.

  “If it’s a boy, we could call him Charles,” she says, caressing his stubbly cheek, her eyes glued to the frame she’s just hung on the wall.

  “Let’s hope it’s a girl, then,” murmurs Léopold before taking an elbow to the side and bursting into laughter.

  On the wall, in what will be a nursery a few months from now, a crowd of raised heads look toward a mustachioed singer going all out on the Bataclan stage, determined to give his fans the best concert of their lives. Some of them are resting their elbows on the crowd barricade in the front row, thrilled to be as close to the band as possible. Others, in the balcony, are standing, unable to stay seated while listening to such a vibrant beat, maybe even secretly jealous of the lucky ones dancing down in the pit.

  In the warm glow of the blinding spotlights, all their faces are smiling, happy to be there, carefree.

  Radiant.

  On the right-hand side of the picture, near the front row, Léopold is there, raising his phone energetically into the air so his friend, who was disappointed not to be there, can listen in.

  And all the others are there too.

  AFTERWORD

  November 13, 2015

  I pored over the faces of the human beings who were massacred that night for no reason at all—dozens, maybe even hundreds of times. So many times that I started to feel like I knew them all, had loved them all. I was grieving for them all despite the fact that I had never even met a single one of them.

  Again and again, I watched the looped footage of the dozens of dark figures fleeing the Bataclan followed by echoing bursts of gunfire. Each and every time, I was left stunned. Paralyzed, like I had been on a certain September 11, when I had seen two planes the size of flies crash into two towering skyscrapers. It can’t be real. I was a teenager in 2001; I was an adult in 2015. The emotions were the same. Only this time, there was also the sadness of wondering what kind of world our children would grow up in and how we’d ever be able to explain some people’s senseless violence and others’ powerlessness to prevent it.

  I lost interest in everything else for weeks. With tears in the corners of my eyes and my stomach clenched in rage, I watched the news and browsed the Internet, unable to think about anything other than that night.

  I was embarrassed about the depth of my feelings. I felt like my grief and shock were somehow misplaced, almost indecent, in the face of all those who had been there, those who had lost a loved one, those who would be traumatized by what they had been through for who knew how long.

  Despite myself, time stopped for me on November 13. I couldn’t help but feel like the rest of the world hadn’t waited long enough to return to its usual hustle and bustle.

  In December, I went to pay my respects outside the Bataclan and the terraces of the Parisian cafés that had been attacked. I was filled with a fathomless emptiness when I saw all the wilted flowers, faded drawings, letters, and candles doing their best to withstand the wind.

  As I write these lines, I can almost smell the warm wax again—such an unusual scent in the city streets. The smell of all the birthdays we have been blessed to celebrate over the course of our lives. Our own, and those of our families and friends. The scent of warm wax has so often been synonymous with happiness.

  I didn’t want to write this book. Transposing every image and idea into words was grueling, and each word was painful to distill. I was compelled to write it, obliged to put everything else aside during the weeks it poured out of me. I naïvely believed that once the sentences had run their course through me, my inner turmoil would subside. But the opposite happened.

  When I woke up on the morning of November 14 and learned what had happened, and later as I watched and read witness statements scattered all over the Web, I had a sudden suffocating feeling that the victims had been just like me. They were my generation.

  A generation that has only known war through history books or from so far away that it seems unreal, intangible. A generation that goes to rock concerts and enjoys the simple pleasures of gathering together—in a kind of communion—with strangers, all swaying in rhythm to the same music. A generation that likes to have drinks at a sidewalk café to take advantage of the final days of crisp fall weather.

  A generation that has been taught that so ma
ny things are dangerous or risky. Taught to fear AIDS, economic crises, global warming, junk food, cigarettes, cancer, unemployment, Wi-Fi waves, and so much more.

  A generation whose parents let them run around outside, but who will never let their own children do the same. Too dangerous, too risky.

  A generation devoid of illusions, but so very full of dreams.

  A generation that can now add terrorism to the list of things to fear, to the list of things we must fight and stand tall against.

  Because that’s who we are, that’s who they were: a generation of fighters. A generation that should be afraid of everything, but refuses to be afraid of anything.

  For a host of other indescribable reasons, they were us.

  And because they were us, I had to imagine their story, their fate, had to turn them into characters. I didn’t re-create them; I invented them. I didn’t reconstruct them or re-create them through the painstaking process of collecting information from various sources, checked and rechecked for accuracy. I didn’t want to rummage through the private lives of real people—I would neither know how nor be able to do it. Besides, it’s not my job; I’m not a journalist. I invented them insofar as they came pouring out of me, of their own volition, because in a way they are me, and us too. Maybe you’ll recognize yourself in one of them, as you could have recognized yourself in any of the men and women who were at the Bataclan that night.

  All the characters in this book are fictional. They’re not real, but they are, I hope, true. This book explores the intermingled fates of ten imagined people and their loved ones. Ten characters who are perhaps even truer than life, ten people I so wish I had been able to save.

  I wasn’t at the Bataclan with them on November 13, 2015. Their story is neither a personal account nor an essay. It’s not exactly a novel, though, either; it is too heavily based on reality for that.

  It is quite simply an attempt—most likely clumsy and perhaps illegitimate, but deeply sincere and absolutely inevitable—to make something bright flow from the darkness. I believe that is writing’s role: to reinvent reality, exorcise it and transcend it, to make it less terrifyingly dark, more approachable. I hope that those who read this book will understand, that my words will bring something to the world. I wrote this text when feelings were running high, before our memories and feelings could fade, while they were still violent and omnipresent.

  One Night in November is my tribute to the victims and their loved ones. More than anything else, however, it’s a call to remember, because we will forget soon, too soon; we’ll move on to other things, like we always do. It’s the candle I humbly light, with the hope that it will withstand the wind and the passage of time.

  I hope that my words will do some good. That my characters are a worthy tribute to all the victims of November 13, 2015.

  To those who didn’t survive, and to those who continue to fight to live their lives.

  May we never forget.

  Contact information: amelie.antoine.auteur@gmail.com

  Facebook: www.facebook.com/AmelieAtn

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’d like to thank Mathieu for supporting me as I wrote this arduous text. Thank you for standing by me, even when you feared that the words would pull me under rather than soothe me.

  My thanks also go out to my father for his reaction upon reading One Night in November, which made me realize the emotions others might have in response to this difficult novel.

  I’d also like to thank my first readers, before publication: Solène, Mélanie, Cyril, Florence, Isabelle, and Patrick. Thank you for going down the rabbit hole with me; thank you for believing in this book, which is so important to me.

  Thank you to the team at Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing France, for getting behind my second novel, even though it wasn’t published under my name at first. Thank you, Éric and Bérénice, as always, for your patience and dedication to helping independent authors.

  I’d also like to thank Amazon Publishing for reading Au nom de quoi and offering to publish an English translation. Thank you to Maren Baudet-Lackner for translating this text—I wouldn’t have been comfortable giving it to anyone else!

  And, since I’m an incorrigible optimist, thanks in advance to the French publisher who may one day have the courage and audacity to bring this novel to bookstores.

  Finally, thank you, readers, for picking up One Night in November and sharing your time with Abigaëlle, Philippe, Sofiane, Bastien, Léopold, Margot, Daphné, Théo, Lucas, and Romane.

  If this text has touched you, please talk about it with your friends, face-to-face or via social media, and review it online. And please don’t hesitate to contact me—you can’t imagine how much your messages help fuel my desire to write.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Photo © 2015 Flora Chevalier

  Amélie Antoine’s bestselling debut novel, Interference, was an immediate success when it was released in France, winning the first Prix Amazon de l’auto-édition (Amazon France Self-Publishing Prize) for best self-published e-book. In 2011, she published her memoir, Combien de temps. One Night in November, written as “a call to remember,” is her second novel. Antoine lives in northern France with her husband and two children.

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  Photo © 2015 Flora Chevalier

  Maren Baudet-Lackner grew up in New Mexico. After earning a bachelor’s degree from Tulane University in New Orleans, a master’s in French literature from the Sorbonne, and a master of philosophy degree in the same subject from Yale, she moved to Paris, where she lives with her husband and children. She has translated several works from the French, including Amélie Antoine’s first novel, Interference, the novel It’s Never Too Late by Chris Costantini, and the nineteenth-century memoir The Chronicles of the Forest of Sauvagnac by the Count of Saint-Aulaire.