A Sun for the Dying

by Jean-Claude Izzo

  This one had a particular smell, a smell of damp and dust. Saint John Perse: Collected Poems, it said on the cover. He leafed through it until he came across a page on which a few lines had been circled.

  A new race among the men of my race, a new race among the daughters of my race, and my cry as a living man on the road of men, step by step, from man to man,

  To the distant shores where death deserts!

  He closed the book, pensively. The words were beautiful, although he had no idea what they meant. He carefully put the book back on the suitcase, feeling suddenly embarrassed. He sat down on the floor, with his back against the wooden counter. He untied his shoes and stretched his legs toward the heater to warm the soles of his feet. He lit a cigarette and sat there, thinking of nothing.

  The sound of a toilet flushing roused him from his torpor. The girl came back into the room. She had removed her make-up and put on a black tracksuit.

  “The toilet’s through there. There’s a wash basin too.”

  “You want a beer?”

  “I’ll have a sip.”

  He handed her the can. She took a small gulp, then ­another, and gave it back to him.

  “I’m bushed,” she sighed, dropping onto the mattress.

  She opened the case, took out a metal box and a pack of tobacco, and started rolling a joint.

  “What’s your name?” she asked, looking up.

  “Rico. What’s yours?”

  “Mirjana.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Bosnia.”

  Rico tried to remember what he could of that war. Sarajevo under siege. A few terrible images. Words like massacres of civilians, internal migration, ethnic cleansing . . . Not very much. 1993 was the year Malika had dumped him. The year everything had fallen apart and he’d ended up on the street.

  He looked at Mirjana. She had her head down and her hair in front of her eyes, and was carefully mixing the grass with the tobacco. Rico tried to imagine the road she must have traveled to get here. From horror to poverty.

  From the worst to the least worst. But still the worst.

  Hell. The street.

  Mirjana twisted the end of the joint, lit it, and took a deep drag. She clearly enjoyed it. She held her breath for a few seconds, with her eyes closed, then released the smoke. Their eyes met. Hers seemed out of it.

  “Want some?” she asked.

  He shook his head. He had never smoked grass. Or ever taken any kind of drug. Apart from chewing a little kat when he was in Djibouti. To show off to his friends before a trip to the prostitutes’ quarter behind Place Rimbaud. But he’d never overcome his fear and smoked a joint for pleasure.

  “I’ll stick with beer,” he said with a laugh.

  “I only smoke,” she said. “I don’t do anything else. Don’t go thinking that.”

  She slowly blew out the smoke. The blue wreaths uncoiled above her head, and she watched them, then looked at Rico.

  “I need it, after I . . . It relaxes me.”

  “Been working hard?”

  He’d blurted it out. He felt embarrassed to ask a question like that. But it was a way of approaching her. The simplest, most direct way.

  As soon as their eyes had met, when she was on the street and he was sitting inside the bistro, he had felt close to her. A passionate closeness. Like brother and sister.

  Rico was never able to explain to me what he had felt at that moment. Whenever he talked about Mirjana, he’d say, “A passionate closeness. Like brother and sister. Can you understand that?” I think he meant something beyond the fraternity of blood that you get in a family. He was thinking of another kind of fraternity. The kind that unites, somewhere between rage and despair, those who have been rejected. Excluded. That, anyway, was the kind of closeness I experienced with him. Like father and son.

  Mirjana laughed. “Are you kidding? Two tricks the whole day. And a blowjob to a guy in a parking lot.” She looked at the lighted end of her joint. “I prefer it when I’m fucking all day. At least then, I don’t have to think, and I make some money.”

  Rico looked at her tenderly. The rings under her eyes were so dark, they were almost purple, and her eyes themselves, lost deep in their sockets, were without sheen. She seemed older than when he had looked at her in the bar. More fragile. Only her lips, when she talked, made her face look at all youthful. But it was as if it happened involuntarily. Her lips, her occasional smile, belonged to a world her eyes seemed to have left for good.

  “You’re falling asleep,” she said, with a smile.

  Rico’s eyes were closing. The combined effect of his tiredness, the heat and the Dolipran.

  “Yeah . . . I ought to sleep a little.”

  “Let’s work something out.”

  She stubbed out what remained of her joint and pulled back the blankets.

  “I have my sleeping bag,” Rico said, getting it out of his rucksack, and unrolling it on the floor.

  “You’re not going to sleep like that! Put it here.”

  She slipped under the blankets and pressed up against the wall.

  “Switch off the light, please. The heater too.”

  Rico slid into his sleeping bag and lay down. He hoped sleep would come quickly. Even with the blankets and the sleeping bag between them, Rico felt ill at ease. It was many years since he had last slept next to a woman. He didn’t feel any desire for Mirjana, but she didn’t leave him completely cold either.

  “Are you O.K.?” she asked.

  “I’m fine.”

  Their voices echoed, as if coming from somewhere else. From another world. From the shadows. From the cold. A world where things just had to be fine. Lizard’s head, Rico thought before falling asleep. He remembered Félix. And Sophie Marceau’s breasts, watching over him, watching over his dreams. He wondered what Mirjana’s breasts were like, and the thought made him smile.

  As was often the case now, since Titi had died, Rico didn’t sleep for long. Just an hour. Time enough to drain away some of his tiredness. He was woken by a nightmare.

  He was playing pinball. But he couldn’t see his points on the scoreboard. Only countries, places he didn’t know. Cities that didn’t exist. And schedules that flashed by, like numbers on a lottery wheel. You had to hit the right targets to read a destination, a train number and its time of departure. Rico was feeling on edge. Marseilles just wasn’t coming up on the board.

  Behind him, he heard laughter. It was the ticket inspector. The pinball machine was on the high speed train.

  The ticket inspector was laughing. “You’ll never get there. Never . . .”

  “Fuck you!”

  Rico shook the pinball machine. Tilt.

  The ticket inspector started giggling. “Never. Never . . .”

  Rico grabbed him by the neck and started shaking him as hard as the pinball machine, then shoved him backwards. The ticket inspector fell down the steps of the train, which were suddenly as high as a skyscraper. He fell to the platform with the slowness and lightness of a dead leaf.

  “Shit,” Dédé said. “You broke his back.”

  Monique approached. She looked stunned. “Life,” she moaned. “For murder, you get life. Life.”

  All three of them looked at the ticket inspector’s body. His arms and legs were moving like those of a large beetle that had been rolled onto its back. People approached them. Some of them were people Rico had passed that morning at Part-Dieu station in Lyons. The vagrants from Avignon station were there too. Their dog started sniffing the ticket inspector’s crotch.

  “I’m going to find Félix,” Dédé said. “He can borrow the van. We need to get the body out of here.”

  “Don’t forget the pinball machine,” Rico said. “We have to take the pinball machine with us. I need it. It’s for the train, you see. It’s time to catch the train. The train. The train . . .”

  Rico sat up abruptly, as if propelled by a spring. He was sweating and out of breath. He groped for his cigarettes, which he had
put down next to him. He turned on his side and lit one. He puffed at it gently, in order not to cough. Behind him, Mirjana moved.

  “Can you give me a drag?” she asked.

  “I thought you were asleep,” he replied, handing her the cigarette.

  “No. Too many things going around and around in my head. I’m afraid of having nightmares.”

  “I have them all the time. A friend of mine named Titi used to say it proved that we wanted to carry on living. That we were still alive.”

  Mirjana gave a little laugh. “But I’m dead. I died a long time ago. When I saw them kill my parents. That’s what I see. All the time. Them being killed. Just that moment.” She turned. “But I’ll kill him.”

  “Who?” Rico asked.

  “The man who killed them. He was a friend of ours. He used to visit us. Him and his wife.”

  Rico didn’t understand much of what Mirjana was saying. He wanted to ask another question, but she went on, in a low voice and a different tone, “I dreamed about you. I dreamed you were wandering in the dark, and so was I. We found each other.”

  “What are you talking about?” Rico asked in surprise.

  “Nothing . . . It’s from a book. A book I read a long time ago. It’s weird, it just came back to me. Give me your hand.”

  Rico put out his cigarette, then held out his hand. Mirjana took it and placed it on her chest. On the side where the heart was. Despite the thickness of the tracksuit, Rico could feel her breast. He spread his fingers to feel the weight of it in his hand.

  “Yes,” she murmured. “I knew I’d meet you . . .”

  Rico’s fingers clung to Mirjana’s breast. He could feel her heart beating. Every beat echoed in his body, his head. And in his own heart. Mirjana put her hand over Rico’s.

  “We may be able to sleep now.”

  16.

  WE’VE FORGOTTEN HOW TO CRY WITH HAPPINESS

  I find it less painful to feel like a stranger here than in my own country,” Mirjana said.

  Rico nodded, thinking about what Mirjana had just said. She was good at finding the right words when she spoke. Not that it made any difference to the mess human beings had made of the world.

  According to Mirjana, there were about six thousand Bosnians scattered around the world. Most of them children of mixed marriages. They ended up in whichever country they could get to. Some were lucky, some found happiness, others didn’t.

  She had closed her eyes for a moment, and Rico had a sense of something somber behind her eyelids. The war, he thought. But the word was meaningless. It was only an abstract term, which didn’t convey the tragedy of the situation, the reality of separation and death. The deaths of loved ones. The deaths of friends. The deaths of neighbors.

  “There isn’t a Bosnian suffering, a Serb suffering, a Croat suffering,” she said. “It’s the same suffering, Rico, can you understand that? . . . The same suffering . . . Common to everyone. The same pain . . .”

  The sun was beating against the windows of the café. For a moment, its rays lingered on Mirjana’s hair and surrounded it with a halo of light.

  “But from what I’ve been able to gather, the predominant feeling in Bosnia now is one of hatred. Everyone feels obliged to hate the other communities in order to preserve their own . . . I don’t want to live like that. I don’t want to have to ask myself, when I’m walking down the street and meet someone, whether I should say hello to that person or spit in his face . . . I don’t give a damn about being a Bosnian or a Serb. Or a Croat. What I want . . .”

  She raised her eyes and looked straight at Rico.

  “What I wanted was to be happy.”

  Mirjana had taken Rico to a little bar on Rue des Carmes. It was only just ten o’clock. When they had left the shop, the street was relatively deserted, probably because the mistral was still as cold and strong as ever. The sky was a pure blue.

  “What a light!” Rico had exclaimed.

  And he had stood there, like a boy, in the middle of the road, dazzled by the light tumbling from the sky, which forced him to blink.

  The light of the South.

  A strong icy gust had blown him a few yards off course. He had started laughing, and with his arms open had greeted the next gust by twirling around.

  “Are you coming?” Mirjana had cried.

  She had caught him by the arm and dragged him to the end of the street.

  “You’re crazy!”

  “You have no idea! It’s been months since I saw a sky as blue as this. And the sun . . .”

  As they walked, Mirjana had taken Rico’s hand in hers. He had given her a sidelong glance, but she had carried on walking as if nothing had happened, her head down against the wind.

  The first thing Mirjana had done when she got up that morning was to gather her hair under a large red beret and put on a calf-length gray coat over her tracksuit.

  “Let’s go out for a coffee.”

  Standing there, with her hands in her pockets, she looked like a schoolgirl who has grown up too soon. Rico had felt a gentle warmth suffuse his body. All she needed was a pair of glasses, he had thought, with a smile.

  “What is it?” she had asked.

  “Nothing . . .”

  How to tell her what he was feeling? How to express the emotion he felt, deep inside? Rico had forgotten about these things, which belonged to a world of feelings. The words “I love you” and all the other sappy, infantile phrases people invent had gradually become threadbare. They evoked only memories. Fragments. Over the years, the flesh had decayed off those words, leaving only the bones. What did loving mean without the kisses, the caresses, without the pleasure two bodies can give each other until both are exhausted, until both reach that secret innermost point at which the word is annihilated in a cry and tears flow? “We’ve forgotten how to cry with happiness,” Julie had murmured, the last night they had spent together.

  Rico had wanted to say that to Mirjana. Just that one thing. But standing there in front of her, with his hands deep in the pockets of his parka, he couldn’t utter a word, couldn’t even tell her, quite simply, that he thought she was beautiful.

  “Nothing,” he had said again.

  Rico had woken late. Mirjana lay with her face turned toward him. The room was dimly lit. He lay there for a few moments, looking at her face. Even in sleep, it betrayed all the tension inside her. She was asleep but not at rest. He had wanted to put his hand on her forehead, to calm her. But he had done nothing. For fear of waking her. There was no hurry. For her, as for him, the days were probably quite long enough already.

  He had settled with his back against the wall, not far from the open door of the toilet, through which a little light filtered. He’d had a beer, smoked a few cigarettes, and leafed through Mirjana’s book, stopping whenever he found a passage underlined in pencil.

  The night opens a woman to you: her body, her safe harbors, her shore; and her previous night where all memory lies . . .

  Once again, Saint-John Perse’s poetry had dazzled him. Even if he couldn’t grasp his meaning, even if it was beyond him, its music had unsettled him. He had repeated the phrases one by one. He had whispered them to himself, as if he wanted to learn them by heart. And as he recited them, he had been sure that Mirjana had savored each phrase in her mouth. And that, on her lips, the poet’s words had become hers. At some point in her life, they must have found their meaning. In her.

  Then Rico had thought again about what Mirjana had told him the previous evening. She hadn’t said much about herself, about her life. But there had been so much anger in her words. So much despair. When you get to a certain point, Rico had thought, you can’t turn back. Because you’ve seen things no one has seen, lived through things no one has lived through. You’re condemned.

  Condemned. Maybe that was the only response. The response to everything. Not wanting to return to that society wasn’t a sign of powerlessness. Only of being weary of life after so much misery. Titi’s death. Dédé’s tempers.
Félix’s silences. What was the point of coming back to the surface of things?

  When Mirjana had opened her eyes, Rico was holding the book on his knees, looking at her pensively. He’d been like that for a while, watching her sleeping, drinking another beer and slowly smoking.

  “Oh, you’re here,” she had said, as if relieved to see him.

  “Yes,” he had replied. “I’m here.”

  And now he was listening to her.

  The reason she had that book of poetry was because she had been a student of French literature. She had written a paper on Saint-John Perse. That book was her most precious possession. A lifeline she had clung to since the day she had been forced to flee Sarajevo.

  “Those poems are the only reason I still have the strength to live. I know some of them by heart.”

  Mirjana took her purse out of her coat pocket. From it, she extracted a dog-eared color photo. The right-hand side of it had been cut off. She handed it to Rico.

  “That was the last time we were together as a family. The next day, the Serbs started shelling the city.”

  She leaned across the table and pointed at the people in the photo.

  “These are my parents. Manja and Miron. That’s my aunt Leopoldina. This is my brother, Mico. And this is Selim. We were engaged. He’d just asked me to recite a poem, that’s why I’m standing. It was Mico’s wife Haidi who took the picture . . .”

  Rico stared at the photo, as if hypnotized by the happiness that emanated from it. The image reminded him of other images, other family meals. His fingers started shaking.

  “That’s all I have left of the old days. This photo, and the book.”

  That was yesterday, Rico thought. And today nothing exists. Nothing will ever exist again. Not for her, not for me. The world dissolves, but not the evil that rules it.

  Mirjana leaned even closer toward Rico, until she was almost lying on the table. She raised her dark eyes to him and gave him a look full of pain. Her lips almost against his, she started reciting, almost in a whisper: