Babylon

by Yasmina Reza

  “Yes, absolutely,” Jean-Lino says, “I don’t give a damn in hell about the chicken, the turkey, the pigs, about all those animal-rights people, I don’t give a shit about the life the chicken leads, I’m glad to eat your organic chicken because it tastes better but apart from that I don’t give a damn, I don’t care if it had a miserable life, what do we know about it, I don’t care if it never saw daylight, never hopped around in the trees like a damn blackbird or if it rolled in the dirt, I don’t believe chickens have consciousness, chickens are made to be raised and killed and eaten. Now come to bed.”

  She tries to resist but he stands in front of her across the table. He’s neither sturdy nor large but he’s still stronger than she is. She finally drops the struggle. Pushing back her chair to head for the bedroom, she says, “That’s the real you.”

  “That’s the real me, yes! Yes, yes, that’s me! I’m glad you’re finally seeing it! And you think you were honoring me when you had the nerve to ask in that sweet-sour voice of yours where that lady got the chicken for her pâté, when you said you ‘don’t eat chicken unless you know where it came from’ as if we were in some cheap Chinese and it might be rat meat! You could have just not eaten it yourself, but no, you had to raise the subject, had to get on your high horse and teach people a moral lesson, so everyone should know about your virtuous behavior.”

  He follows her to the bedroom. She tries to keep him out. Not possible. She sits on the bed and starts to take the barrettes out of her hair. She does it with meticulous attention, setting them one by one into a pouch, the activity pointedly barring any other concern.

  “I’m sick of these constant rules,” Jean-Lino goes on, exasperated by this maniacal concentration, “sick of living in terror, if I feel like eating chicken every day I’ll eat it every day, there are people like you who won’t eat anything but grains and greens, there are more and more people like you, so eat your damn greens all of you and quit pissing us off.”

  “Leave my room.”

  “It’s my room too.”

  “You’re dead drunk.”

  “What I don’t understand is a person having the time to feel pity for all that stuff. OK, pity, but at least pity people. The world is horrible. Folks are dying on our doorstep and you guys are pitying chickens. There’s a limit to pitying. You can’t do it about everything or you’re like Abbé Pierre, incidentally he was a bastard, he’d be pitying street bums and spit on the Jews. Even him, he didn’t have a big enough heart.”

  “You know what separates us from animals?” Lydie shouts. “You know how much distance there is between us and animals? This much!” She snaps her fingers. “And it gets smaller every day! Ask your scientist friends!”

  “We know all about your theories.”

  “They’re not mine!”

  “Yeah, make that disgusted look, purse your lips, go ahead, do all your harpy faces, go ahead.”

  “Leave the room, Jean-Lino.”

  “I belong here.”

  “I want to be alone.”

  “Go in the other room.”

  “Tell that cat to get out of the room.”

  “No, he belongs here too.”

  “He doesn’t belong in my bedroom!”

  “Be nice to him a little, he’s sad all alone.”

  “We’ve already had this discussion.”

  “The poor thing. How come you don’t feel pity for him, since you care so much about animal welfare?”

  “Fuori Eduardo!”

  “You shouldn’t yell at him.”

  “Out, asshole!”

  The cat looks at Lydie haughtily and doesn’t budge. Lydie sticks out a leg and shoves him hard. The sharp heel of the Gigi Dool pump hits Eduardo in the side. He yelps in pain. By Jean-Lino’s own account, the howl shocks them both, but it’s too late. At the instant Lydie leans toward the cat, Jean-Lino grabs her by the hank of hair loosed from the barrettes and twists her neck back. She tries to turn to free herself but he no longer knows what he’s doing, he clutches the tufts of hair in both hands and wrenches them in opposite directions. She’s frightened. She looks ugly to him. From her distorted mouth comes no intelligible word, only shrill sounds that irritate him. Jean-Lino wants silence. He wants that throat to stop producing sounds. He squeezes the neck. Lydie struggles, rears up. He’s had too much to drink. He is insane. No knowing.

  He presses the neck, pressing with his thumbs, he wants her to give in, to lie still, he squeezes until nothing moves.

  It takes him some time to understand what just happened. At first he thinks that, considering Lydie’s personality, she’s pretending to be dead. She’s faked a faint or a seizure in the past. He shakes her gently. He says her name. He tells her to quit playing games. He lets a moment go by in total silence so Lydie will think he’s left the room. Eduardo plays along, sitting completely motionless the way feral cats can do.

  Lydie persists in her stillness. It’s her eyes that alert him. They are open. He doesn’t think it’s possible for a person to sustain that stare of unvarying stupor. The idea of death crosses his mind. Lydie might be dead. He puts a finger beneath her nostrils. He feels nothing. Neither warmth nor breath. But really, he didn’t press hard. He leans close to her face. He hears nothing. He pinches a cheek, he lifts a hand. He carries out these gestures with terror and timidity. The tears come. He collapses.

  He told me: I collapsed onto her body and I cried. The mouth tic was back in force. A thrust forward of the whole jaw to shape a U with the lower lip. The night was still pitch dark, I could see through the window. From that apartment the kitchen window gives onto empty sky. I wondered if Lydie was floating there somewhere (and watching us through the glass). From time to time that old worry comes back to me—that the dead see us. After she died, my father’s sister came back and broke the ceiling light in our living room. We knew it was her because they’d promised each other whichever of them died first would break something in the other one’s house to prove survival in the afterlife. Aunt Micheline had raised her head and said, I’ll get me one of those tulips up there. The night she was buried, an opaline shade from the chandelier fell and smashed on the table for no reason. Goddamn that’s Aunt Micheline there! But where is she? Jeanne and I asked. They’re here, they see everything, my mother said. After which, all my illicit activities were ruined by Aunt Micheline’s all-seeing eye. Wherever I took cover, there she was. A middle-school friend and I used to go off into the bushes to show and touch each other’s pussy. My aunt would be watching in horror. Not a thicket in the world could shield me from Aunt Micheline. My father too—I thought he must be prowling around somewhere. But by then I was a grownup, that didn’t bother me anymore. He’d mellowed in his last years. There was something unfinished about him. He died just before I got my biology doctorate. I was glad to know he was seeing that. I even lifted the bound dissertation up real high so he could look it over.

  I said, “Jean-Lino, what did you want to do with Lydie’s body?”

  “Take it to her office.”

  “Is that far?”

  “Rue Jean-Rostand. A couple of minutes by car.”

  “Her therapy office?”

  “Yes. She lived there before we got this place.”

  Silence.

  “But when you got there, what would you do?”

  “There’s an elevator.”

  “You’d put her inside?”

  “Yes.”

  “By yourself ?”

  “The studio’s only one flight up. I’d have time to get up there ahead.”

  “She would have been strangled there in her office?”

  “Somebody could have followed her in from the street . . .” Silence. He strides the flat with a few wild swings of his arms.

  “She would have gone to her office in the middle of the night? After the party?”

  “We’d have had a fight, she’d have left the apartment. She’s done it before.”

  “To sleep there?”

  “Yes. Bu
t she came back.”

  The expression upset us. He’d said it that way without thinking. My mother on her bed had suddenly gone flat and she looked like a bird that had been shot. We don’t believe in any metamorphosis for a bird. For birds we don’t imagine some final migration. We accept the nothingness. I stood up, I went to look out at the Deuil-l’Alouette night outside the window. Not much to see—streetlamps, rooftops, building shadows, half-naked trees. An insignificant stage set, a scene that could easily be swept away in two seconds. I thought about Pierre, that he’d abandoned us. I turned around and I said, “Shall we do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “Take Lydie to her office?”

  “I don’t want to get you involved . . .”

  “We take her down, I help you put her into the car, and I disappear.”

  “No . . .”

  “There’s no time to discuss it. It’s now or never.”

  “You take the elevator down and that’s all.”

  “You won’t be able to put her into the car by yourself. You have the suitcase?”

  He stood up, I followed him into the little room where Rémi probably slept and that in our flat had been Emmanuel’s. He turned on the ceiling light; it spread a bluish glow. The bed was covered with all sorts of toys. From a closet Jean-Lino pulled a hard-sided valise, an imitation Samsonite. I said, “You don’t have anything bigger?”

  “No.”

  “She’ll never fit in that.”

  “It holds a lot.”

  “Open it up.”

  He set the bag on the floor and opened it. I stepped into it, I tried sitting, but I couldn’t manage to double over even halfway. “You’re a lot bigger.”

  “This is the only one you have?”

  “I think Lydie could fit.”

  “No! She could not! . . .”

  I took the suitcase and we went into the bedroom. Lydie was still the same, stretched out with her scarf. We opened the valise again, in a glance it was clear she wouldn’t fit into it. I thought of our big red canvas bag down in the basement. “I have one that might work,” I said.

  Jean-Lino shook his head, looking distraught. He was annoying me a little. No initiative. “Shall I go get it?”

  “I can’t let you do that.”

  “The problem is, it’s in the basement, and the key is in my apartment.”

  “No, Elisabeth, let it go.”

  “I’ll try. If Pierre’s asleep, that’ll work.”

  I took the stairs down to my place. I opened the front door quietly. Without turning on the lights, I went to see whether Pierre was still sleeping. He was sleeping and snoring. I closed the bedroom door. In the vestibule, I opened the drawer where we keep the keys. I felt around. The basement keys were not there. Without panicking I thought for a moment. I remembered going down there that day to get the stool. I’d been wearing a cardigan with pockets. The cardigan was in the bedroom. I went back there, I snatched the cardigan that was hanging on a chair, being careful not to let the keys fall out. I dashed down the stairs. Our own storage unit is at the end of a corridor. The floor to it is partly unpaved. It bothered me to walk on it with my fur slippers, I walked the rest on tiptoe. I emptied the big suitcase of a smaller one and a few bags that were inside. As I made my way back along the corridor, the timed lights went out. I didn’t turn them back on. I climbed the steep stairs blind. I edged open the door to the lobby. Empty and unlit. The elevator was there and I took it back up to Jean-Lino’s floor. The apartment door was open. The whole thing done at the speed of a pro. I was rather proud of my cool.

  The red canvas suitcase lay open at the foot of Lydie’s bed. Jean-Lino had put theirs away. The red one was wider, suppler. The plan seemed feasible. On the night table burned a decorative candle he must have lit while I was downstairs. The two of us stood there without speaking. Again Jean-Lino’s arms were dangling loose and his neck was ducked forward. What were we waiting for?! After a moment he said, “Are you Catholic, Elisabeth?”

  “I’m not anything.”

  He opened his hand. He was holding a thin chain with a golden medal of the Virgin.

  “I’d like to put this on her.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “I can’t open the catch.”

  “Give it to me.”

  Some links of the chain had got tangled around the hook.

  “This will take hours,” I said.

  He snatched the necklace out of my hands and began laboring over it with unpracticed fingers.

  “We don’t have the time for that, Jean-Lino.”

  He was no longer listening. He fussed with the chain, his hands a half inch in front of his glasses, clawed like a crustacean’s, his mouth tight with hatred.

  “What the hell are you doing, Jean-Lino?”

  He seemed beside himself. I tried to pry his hands open, I wound up slapping him.

  “I’d like to do something!”

  “What is it you want to do?”

  “Some ritual . . .”

  “What kind of ritual? You already lit a candle, that’s very good.”

  “I said the beginning of the Shema.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The Jewish prayer.”

  “Fine.”

  “But Lydie is Catholic.”

  “First I’ve heard.”

  “She had other beliefs too, but she was firm about staying Catholic.”

  “So make the sign of the cross!”

  “I don’t know how.”

  “OK, OK, let’s put her in the suitcase, Jean-Lino!!”

  “Yes, I’m talking nonsense.”

  I took up a position by the feet. Jean-Lino slipped his arms beneath Lydie’s shoulders. He said, “Got to double her over first and then slide her in.” I was glad to see him get back to technical style right away. I’d never manipulated a dead body. Touched one, kissed one, yes. Manipulated, no. She wasn’t wearing tights, the contact with her skin startled me with its tepid temperature. We easily turned her onto her side. She half-rolled onto her belly, stretched out long as if she were mocking us. Before shifting her into the valise we’d have to fold her up. I sensed that Jean-Lino wanted to handle the job by him-self. He circled the suitcase, he lifted the thighs through the skirt and drew them to the front so the knees bent. Next he grasped the waist so that would fold too. He finished by curling the upper body. All done with swiftness and delicacy. Lydie politely let it happen, with her kerchief and her tranquil countrywoman face. In the end she looked like a little girl asleep on the bed in the fetal position. I felt that Jean-Lino was uneasy about tipping her in. I offered a hand, thinking to hold her back and avoid a rough drop into the suitcase. She got there rumpled and askew. We had to rearrange her and tuck in whatever stuck out. The look of childlike serenity was gone. Lydie was compressed, contorted. Her curly hair bulged out of the scarf in a strange clump against the red lining.

  We’d had to take off her shoes and jam them into the interstices. I could see that Jean-Lino was suffering. I took it on myself to work the zipper closed. But buckling the straps required pressing down and sitting on top of the suitcase. I did sit on it. I felt the soft bulk of the body give way beneath my buttocks. I said “Help me.” He took up the other buckle strap and pulled.

  “This is awful.”

  “She’s dead, Jean-Lino, she doesn’t feel anything.”

  It didn’t close. There was still a gap on one side. Jean-Lino sat too. I stood up to drop on my rear as heavily as possible. Jean-Lino did the same, we stood and we dropped, gaining a quarter inch or two of zipper each time. Finally I lay full length on the thing, Jean-Lino lay in the opposite direction, both of us squirming on the bulges like rolling pins on a crust. When the tab had swallowed up the last few teeth, we were exhausted. Jean-Lino got up before I did. He slapped down and smoothed his hair ten times in a row. Now the purse and the coat, he said, fitting his glasses back on. I followed him into the living room. Lydie’s bag sat on the floor, wide open, next to the
desk. I took a quick look at the notepad beside the computer. I made out the words ulcers, cannibalism, then the figure 25,000, then an arrow and the words, underlined, Life and death of a bird. Procedures like Frankenstein’s. Suffering imprinted into their (very) genes. The pen lay across the page. The lamp, with its saffron shade, was lit. I’d never seen her handwriting. Those words, slightly slanted, a memo, gave me a sharper sense of Lydie’s existence than any moment of her physical presence ever had. The act of noting, the words themselves, and the unknown person they were meant for. And more mysteriously, the word bird. The word bird applied to poultry. Jean-Lino, in a crouch, was checking the contents of the purse. He took the cellphone from the table and put it into the bag. Eduardo came over and looked inside too. A terrible anguish gripped me. I no longer understood what we were doing. I saw myself a few hours earlier in that same spot, a chair in one hand, signing the petition against grinding up baby chicks. Lydie Gumbiner opening drawers to find things to lend me. The brevity of the passage from life to death felt dizzying. A bagatelle. Jean-Lino opened a closet, he took out the green coat I knew well—a long Russian redingote style, tight through the waist and flared below. I used to see her from my window trotting through the parking lot in that coat and short boots. Every winter, I’d see the redingote reappear, it marked the flow of time for me in Deuil-l’Alouette. I’d worn an ankle-length coat myself back in that maxi period. I’d never got completely into the style. One day, on an escalator in the Galeries Lafayette, the hem had caught between two steps. The machinery jammed and made the thing stop short. I waited there in my coat for someone to come and free me; it never occurred to me to slip out of it. Jean-Lino went back into the bedroom. I heard a collision, then the sound of wheels in the small hallway. I saw my red valise in the doorway. Swollen, monstrous, the telescoping handle raised to its highest position.