Babylon

by Yasmina Reza

  “Yes. I think something crazy happened. Maybe the fact of our party, where everyone did drink a little . . . I think that it’s a dreadful accident. A fit of madness. He had absolutely no intention of killing his wife.”

  “So it’s best that he should explain himself.”

  “Certainly.”

  “Do you envisage for a moment that he’d accuse you of wanting to help him to flee? Or to hide his wife’s body?”

  “No.”

  “Madam, from the moment you’re seen together, you holding the coat, the handbag, a person could think you’re going to help him. Now that’s the point that needs to be laid to rest . . . He could not accuse you of that?”

  “No.”

  “The young woman, the neighbor—could she accuse you?”

  “The neighbor can only say what she saw. I’ll confirm that. She saw the two of us in the lobby, he near the door and me behind him holding the coat and the bag.”

  “Did you speak?”

  “No. We heard her coming. We didn’t speak. Actually, we were petrified to see her, to be honest. I was petrified because there was a dead body in the suitcase.”

  “I bet!”

  “I was petrified for him and even for me, to tell the truth. I mean, after all, I was aware of being in a situation I should not have been in. Since the suitcase belongs to us.”

  “The suitcase belongs to you?”

  “Yes. I’d lent it to Lydie a few days ago. She wanted to move some things into her office.”

  “They don’t have a suitcase, your neighbors?”

  “She wanted to move some linens and cushions that take up a lot of room. And besides, a big suitcase would spare her making a second trip.”

  “And your neighbor—was he aware of the loan?”

  “I don’t know. He must have seen it in his house.”

  “I remind you that what you’re going to tell the police soon will be on formal record and will bind you for the future. Everything depends on your good faith and on your ability to convince. Your history holds together. It has the weight of truth. But I call your attention to the fact that the investigations will all be wide-ranging and thorough, your home will be searched, your husband interrogated . . . What is your work, madam?”

  “I’m a patent engineer at the Pasteur Institute.”

  “Did the people at your party witness anything? Any strain between the couple? They will certainly all be questioned.”

  “I don’t know . . . I myself did witness something but I don’t know if I should mention it . . . I don’t know what he will want to say . . .”

  “Careful here, madam, because if you give any impression of not cooperating and excluding some things in order to protect him, you move into an area . . .”

  “Well at one point, the conversation turned to a matter that she took very seriously—I tell you this, Counselor, even though it could seem silly—the conversation was about free-range chickens. He made fun of her because she’d asked a waiter in a restaurant if the chicken they serve was allowed to roost—that is, if it had lived a normal life, that kind of thing . . . He was trying to make the rest of us laugh with this story, and after that you felt a kind of chill between them.”

  “You’re supposing that the conflict began over that.”

  “It’s possible . . . She scolded him, when they got upstairs, for humiliating her in company. The argument got poisonous, and at a certain moment—I can’t explain, he’d do it better than I can—she gave the cat a kick . . . He grabbed her, he squeezed—”

  “You’re telling me that they quarreled when she stood up for animal welfare, and he killed her because she kicked the cat.”

  “I think the animals weren’t the point. I mean, they weren’t basically in opposition on . . . When a couple quarrels, opinions often serve as an excuse . . . I don’t believe she meant to harm the cat. He meant to hurt her, not kill her. Maybe she died of a heart attack. He’s not a criminal, he’s a very gentle man.”

  “It’s not in your interest to advocate for him.”

  “I’m only saying it to you.”

  “All right, but it’s not smart to take up his cause. You have a neighborly connection that turned into a friendly connection. You go to his aid to keep him from fleeing his responsibilities because you think that would be worse. Period. You must understand that what you’re suspected of is complicity and concealing a body.”

  “What do I risk?”

  “You’ve never been convicted. You have a profession. Everything depends on what he says. Your husband has been notified?”

  “Supposedly, yes.”

  “What is he going to say? . . .When you two went up there, why didn’t you demand that he call the police right away?”

  “We did demand it. Well, my husband did.”

  “And you went back down to your flat even though he hadn’t called?”

  “He said he wanted to be alone, that he needed a little time. My husband, suddenly, decided that we had no business there, that we’d done our duty and that it wasn’t up to us to call the police. And we went downstairs.”

  “By the way, what was the reason Monsieur Manoscrivi came down to your place after killing his wife?”

  “I think he couldn’t stay alone . . .”

  “Do your colleagues at work know of his existence?”

  “No.”

  “At your party your behavior wouldn’t have given the least—”

  “No.”

  “The young woman neighbor couldn’t say there was anything ambiguous about your behavior . . . Were you far apart from each other when she saw you?”

  “Yes. I mean, a normal distance.”

  “ . . . The police suspicion may consist in this: that it’s the neighbor’s arrival that forced you to notify the police, and that that was not your original intention. How do you counter that?”

  “What would I have been doing there in slippers and pajamas, with nothing . . . ?”

  “How much time elapsed between when you were downstairs and when you notified the police?”

  “A half hour . . . Not even. The time it took to convince him to go up to get the cat and put it in our apartment.”

  “Still, it’s the neighbor’s presence that led him to agree to turn himself in.”

  “I can’t say otherwise.”

  “Did you often go to his apartment?”

  “Almost never. Maybe once. Today yes—that is, yesterday, I went up with Lydie, to get some chairs. She was lending me chairs for the party.”

  “Good. You’ll undergo questioning. Which won’t necessarily be easy, it’s possible they’ll play on your nerves a little and that two people will question you at the same time, because there may be a suspicion of complicity not in the criminal act but in the aftermath. That you tried to conceal the body, and so on. So be careful during that segment. What you say will matter. I don’t see them holding you for more than twenty-four hours. If Monsieur Manoscrivi corroborates your version and if your husband gives no information that . . . he says nothing that might lead to any confusion, you’ll be out by this evening.”

  I did leave in the early evening. Pierre came to get me. He had been questioned during the afternoon. I handed over the long coat. I was free. In all likelihood, Jean-Lino confirmed that he acted alone. Now he had disappeared, dragged down some dark hole. In the car Pierre was sullen. Instead of comforting me. He looked tired and sad. He told me that he didn’t like this whole business. I said I don’t see how anyone could possibly like it. He asked me what I had actually done.

  “I did what I said I did. Nobody can understand how you managed to go to sleep,” I said.

  “I’d had too much to drink. I was done in.”

  “You didn’t mention the bathroom?”

  “You really think I’m some jackass.”

  “I was afraid you would, to keep me in the clear . . .”

  “You helped him?!”

  “No!”

  “Explain to me about t
he suitcase. Really explain it.”

  “I lent Lydie the suitcase to move some stuff to her office.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know . . . A couple of days ago.”

  “So he sees a suitcase in his house, he says to himself, Ah, good size, I’ll put my wife inside.”

  “I couldn’t foresee that.”

  “My Delsey suitcase!! Shit!”

  “I’m sorry . . .”

  “And nice job with the cat. I nearly had a heart attack. There would have been two corpses last night.”

  A little before the police phoned him, he had got up to look for me around the apartment. In the entryway he’d stepped on something soft. It was Eduardo’s tail, sticking out from beneath a chest. The beast had let loose a strident howl. Terrified, Pierre had pressed the light switch and discovered the cat, muzzle flat to the floor, the rest of his body pulled back under the chest, staring at him with terrified eyes. When we got home to the parking lot, I raised my head. I looked up at the building. At our floor, at the one above. I thought, There’s nobody at all up there. The mimosa branches waved gently. I said, “Who’s going to take care of the plants?”

  “What plants?”

  “Lydie’s plants.”

  “Nobody. The apartment is sealed.”

  I was stunned. The mimosa, the crocuses, the buds, all that new life I’d seen the day before in the array of unmatched pots. And I saw her again, leaning into her little patch of garden, taking the inexpressibly white crocus between her fingers to hand it to me. We got out of the car. I saw the Laguna still parked in the same spot. The lobby was empty. As impersonal as ever. We took the elevator. Our apartment was impeccable. Pierre had cleaned the kitchen. He’d cleared a space for the litter box and the table was set for two. I had not expected that kindness. It was all I needed to start me crying.

  I don’t know how many times I was interrogated after that. The detectives from the police headquarters, the ones from the crime squad, some kind of personality investigator (he used some other title but I’ve forgotten it; I didn’t understand if he was investigating my personality or Jean-Lino’s), the examining magistrate. As to the sequence of events, always more or less the same questions. With a few variants: Why did we offer the suspect a cognac instead of going to help his wife? Had we touched the body? (Fortunately I had put the scarf on her, I also said I’d touched her legs while Pierre took her pulse.) The magistrate, whom I liked, asked me—in these terms—how it happened that my husband saw fit to go off to bed, when he had just discovered his neighbor’s dead body? And of course the question the lawyer had asked kept coming back in various forms: What would you have done if the third party had not arrived on the scene? But the terrain that lawyer Gilles Terneu had not explored, and which everyone tried ad nauseam to get me to take on, was the terrain of my life. What was she all about, this Elisabeth Jauze, née Rainguez in Puteaux? That’s called The Full Identity, it seems, in police language. Everything you ever carefully buried must be brought back to life. Everything you’ve crossed out you must write again, in tidy lettering. Childhood, parents, youth, school, good choices and bad. They examined my life with ridiculous zeal. That was my impression—a ridiculous determination to manufacture a false picture. A little sociology packet they’ll put into the dossier and that will say nothing. The justice system will have done its job. For me, it brought back images I was unaware had stayed around somewhere—the bar in Dieppe, the big dormant limo decorated for the carnival and set going again in the fog—I didn’t know I was still carrying them with me. You can’t understand who people are outside the landscape. The landscape is crucial. It’s the landscape that is the true filiation. The room and the stone as much as the segment of sky. That’s what Denner taught me to see in the pictures they call “street photography”: how the landscape illuminates the man. And how, in return, it is part of him. And I can say that this is what I’ve always liked about Jean-Lino—the way he carried the landscape inside him, without guarding against anything.

  The next day, I went to the Pasteur as if everything were normal. I had lunch in the canteen with Danielle. On the telephone all we’d said was that we had things to tell. We found a table near a window, set down our trays, I said, “Who goes first?”

  “Go ahead, you go.”

  “You won’t be disappointed.”

  She was all ears. “You remember that couple who were there Saturday night, a woman with an orange-dyed mane and her husband?”

  “Yes, your neighbors.”

  “Our neighbors. He strangled her that night.”

  “She’s dead?”

  “Well, yes.”

  Anyone else would have put on a horrified look. Not my Danielle—she lit up. “No?!”

  She had no idea of my relation with Jean-Lino. I gave her an account of the night (the official one, need I specify). A very lively report. Urged on by her beneficent frivolity, I took care with all the effects: the doorbell, the cat, the suitcase, the lobby, the cops, the jail cell . . . From time to time, Danielle would say “It’s insane!!” or some such remark. She was enchanted.

  “And what will you do with the cat?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t an atom of feeling for him.”

  “We could give him to my mother.”

  “Your mother? . . .”

  “She lives in a ground-floor in Sucy. There’s a little square of lawn in front, he’d be very happy.”

  “But what about her?”

  “That will pull her out of her funk over Jean-Pierre. She adores cats, she’s had them before.”

  “Ask her about it.”

  “I’ll call her tonight.”

  “And what about you? . . . While this was going on . . . Mathieu Crosse?”

  I had no sooner finished saying Mathieu Crosse than a yoke of depression fell onto my shoulders. Here we were trading story for story as we started on the lemon tart, the insane neighbor stacked against the potential lover: Jean-Lino, do excuse me. But Danielle is subtle. Rather than describe her Saturday night, with that faculty we women have for thickening the slimmest amorous anecdote, conferring weight on no matter what word or insignificant detail, she set about understating the significance of her encounter. Something that might have given us joy and the thread of an unending tale became a small tale verging on sad. She had driven Mathieu Crosse home in her car. Double-parked in front of his house. He had the delicacy (in view, she assumed, of her newly bereaved situation) not to suggest that she come upstairs. Touched by this thoughtfulness, and after a few awkward clinches in the front seat, she parked properly.

  He’d had to confess that he was boarding his sixteen-year-old son for the weekend. The boy was out but could be back at any moment. Ultimately, they did slip into the apartment like a couple of thieves afraid of getting caught. Toward four o’clock in the morning, ejected upon the son’s arrival, she went home in something of a whirl. “You like him?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Liar.”

  “I kinda do.”

  I told her that she would be interrogated as a witness, as would Mathieu and all my guests, by the crime squad. She was far from unhappy at the prospect.

  Only Georges Verbot showed no surprise when we told people. The woman was asking to get hit with a pickax, he said. Claudette El Ouardi emerged from her reserve to say that she had noticed something wasn’t quite right with that Manoscrivi fellow.

  She had noticed it when they met at the front door and he’d introduced himself by way of some incomprehensible sally. Later on she’d felt embarrassed at the sight of his euphoria over Gil Teyo-Diaz needling Mimi. His imitation of the chicken beating its wings had upset her, as much for the vulgarity of the act as for his views. While never imagining such an abominable development, she had sensed madness around his antics. All her comments, proffered over the phone in her even tones, showed me how much closer I was to a Jean-Lino than to a Claudette, whose stiffness I’d hitherto attributed to a form of
scientist’s introversion but now suddenly saw as revealing a shameful conformism. Before she grew into a great stringbean and lost her vocation, my sister Jeanne used to dance. Our parents and I went to see her perform in a year-end gala. She did a little solo at stage-front that everyone applauded. There were drinks afterward in the cafeteria of the Maison des Jeunes. Our parents were mingling with the others, who complimented them on Jeanne. My father wasn’t accustomed to that sort of thing. He thought he’d get through it by joking. People smiled politely. It was clear to me that the jokes were going a little off the mark but he got excited without realizing anything. At a certain point he chuckled, his nostrils reddened and dilated, and said, “Yeah she’s great, pretty soon we could send her out into the street to dance and pass the hat.” People turned away and the four of us were left alone. Another time, my high-school music teacher organized a trip to the Olympia music hall to see Michel Polnareff. My father drove us in from Puteaux with two classmates and their mother. In the Sani-Chauffe company van, which was actually our usual car, he said, “Somebody’s gotta explain to me why the national school system would send you kids to see that faggot!” When my classmates reached adolescence and he’d run into one of them at the house, he would pat her behind or grip a breast and exclaim, “Oh it’s coming along nice now, you’re turning into a big girl, Caroline honey!” The girl would laugh convulsively and I’d say “Papa please!!” He’d laugh, “What, I’m just checking out the goods, no harm in that!” These days he’d go straight to jail. My father made me ashamed, often, but I was never able to cross to the other side. No character on a plain background ever interested me. Except to Danielle, then Emmanuel and Bernard, we gave no details on the business here. I told nobody about my involvement, nor about my session at the police station. Not even Jeanne, who anyhow was all tied up in her erotic passion. Catherine Mussin was the only one who said the poor thing about Lydie. The others considered the event abstractly horrible and were curious about the details and the why. I must confess to feeling a certain delectation in announcing the thing. It’s not unpleasant to be the bearer of sensational news. But I should have stopped there. Managed to hang up right away, and not be drawn into any chatter. There’s no purity in the human relationship. The poor thing. I ask myself whether the term applies. We can’t judge only living persons by the criteria of our situation. It’s absurd to pity a dead person. But you can complain of destiny. The mixture of suffering and a probable inanity. Yes. In that sense the poor thing does apply. I can say the poor things about my father, about my mother, Joseph Denner, the Savannah couple, the Jehovah’s Witness in front of the enormous wall, some dead people from my black-and-white photography books, those folks in the tomb portraits in San Michele, dressed up like kings among their fake flowers but whose lives we sense were not always rosy, the numberless obscurities from before, all the people whose deaths the newspapers bundle together into utter meaninglessness. I think of that line of Jankélévitch’s about his father: “What was the point of that little stroll [he had to take] through the firmament of destiny? . . .” Ought we to say “poor thing” about Lydie Gumbiner? In her highly colored world, Lydie Gumbiner had wafted above any vicissitudes. I can only think of her in movement, I see her crossing the parking lot, her skirts fluttering, like a lively little woman in a George Grosz drawing, or patting the cleavage of her bosom beneath a tumble of hair. On her leaflet she had written, “The voice and the rhythm matter more than the words and the meaning.” Lydie Gumbiner had sung, militated, spun her crystal pendant: in her way she had dodged Nothingness.