by Yasmina Reza
“Not before he comes down here to us.”
He set the magnetic chessboard on my breasts and the press-clipping account of a game over my face. On the landing, Jean-Lino had behaved like a stranger—mechanical body, fleeting glance. It seemed as if all ties had come undone, including those with the walls of the building. I had not expected that coldness. In the worst years, during preadolescence, I was sent to summer camp in the Vercors mountains. I was always trailing around in those camps where you were left to your own devices and everyone seemed more emancipated and bolder than I was. Sometimes I managed to get myself included by making a few friends. Since we didn’t come from the same towns, we’d meet again only the following year. I would look forward to that happily. But I never found the girls the same as they’d been the last time. They were distant, stuck-up, as if we’d never been friends. It affected me all the more because I set so much store by these recovered bonds. I made a sudden movement and a few pawns flew off the chessboard. I went into my bedroom to put on my costume, my Kitty T-shirt and my nicely ironed checkered pajama pants and my fake-fur slippers. I heard Pierre grumbling next door.
Jean-Lino came back and rang our doorbell, with his retinue. Pierre opened the door to him in pale pink boxer shorts. I appeared in my getup. We went into the living room. Jean-Lino took over the Moroccan chair again. Seated higher than us like last time, almost as marmorial, but this time nicely coiffed and without the mouth tic. A good match for our spiffy living room. We opened the brandy. Drained the glasses. The table lamp was turned off, I turned on the ceiling light, turned off the ceiling light, lit the floor lamp. I tidied stuff that was already tidied. I brought out my beloved Rowenta hand vacuum. Pierre took it. He went and attacked Jean-Lino with it. Jean-Lino let it happen undisturbed. The more the judge labored to set the world in order the more things seemed to represent some utter madness. Our little procession moved into the service stairwell in muffled silence. Pierre at the head, with a slowness secretly designed to undercut my collaborationist zeal. The photo was taken at the turn of the stairs, from the Manoscrivi landing above. The seals had been lifted away. We entered the apartment where ten people awaited us in semidarkness. We moved toward the bedroom. Through the open doorway I saw Lydie’s feet with the red-strapped pumps. Moving into the room I had a real shock. Lydie below Nina Simone. She had not a hair on her—her face was shapeless and bald. It was a terrifying mannequin, dressed in the paneled flowing skirt and Gigi Dool shoes. Can you show us, the judge said, how you ascertained that Madame Gumbiner was actually dead? Pierre took the pulse. I felt along the legs as I had mentioned in my depositions. The contact was unpleasant, a cold dense foam. I tied a scarf on her, a different one found in the same drawer. As I knotted it the head contracted. Shot number fourteen: Madame Jauze ties the scarf while Monsieur Manoscrivi closes Madame Gumbiner’s mouth. Jean-Lino went through the motions without the least will to do them well. He seemed to dislike the doll. It was strange to see the chamber pot again, the pewter owl, the crystal pendant, even Nina Simone in her crocheted string dress. They were the PAST. I knew I was seeing them for the last time. Monsieur Jauze, can you show us exactly where you were standing when you urged Monsieur Manoscrivi to call the police? Pierre did a little spin in his miniskirt and his loafers and said, Here.
“What were your last words as you left the apartment?”
“I don’t remember now,” Pierre said.
“And you, Monsieur Manoscrivi, do you remember?”
“No . . .”
“Madame Jauze? . . . You’ve said that your husband advised Monsieur Manoscrivi not to wait too long before calling the police.”
“Yes. That’s right.”
“Can you show us how you left Monsieur Manoscrivi?”
Pierre and I went out of the bedroom. At the bathroom the judge stopped us. “You’re leaving the room so peacefully? You’ve said that your husband exerted some pressure to get you to leave the apartment.”
“Yes, that’s so.”
“Can you show us?”
We went back into the bedroom. Pierre gripped my wrist with his steel fingers and pulled me toward the hallway. I let myself be led, leaving Jean-Lino against a backdrop of flowered curtain, standing beside the yellow velvet armchair.
They all wanted to look through the peephole. The judge, the chief investigator, Jean-Lino’s lawyer and the public advocate. Each of them, imbued with the required gravity, was fully able to observe that the elevator button could be seen to blink. The lobby was ready for our arrival downstairs. The stenographer was pressed against the wall by the trashcans with the folding table and her PC. The second-floor neighbor was waiting near the windowed entry door, chewing gum. Jean-Lino stood at the elevator. They’d had him put on his hat, his Zara jacket, and his sheepskin gloves. The green coat hung to either side of his folded arm as he clumsily held Lydie’s bag by the handle. At the judge’s invitation he opened the elevator door and pulled out the suitcase. It looked to me less bulging than with Lydie inside it. The mannequin must have turned out to be more supple, luckily for Jean-Lino, who had had to fold her into the suitcase by himself.
“This is what you saw when you reached the bottom of the stairs?” the judge asked me.
“Yes.”
“That’s not what you described. On document page D111, you said that Madame Gumbiner’s coat was lying on top of the suitcase . . .”
“Oh, yes. That’s possible.”
“So where was the coat?”
“On top of the suitcase.”
“Do you agree, Monsieur Manoscrivi?”
“Yes.”
“Can you show us how the coat was set on top of the suitcase?”
Jean-Lino laid the coat on the suitcase. I confirmed that it was correct thus. The judge entered the datum into the record and ordered the photo. “Monsieur Manoscrivi, can you recall what Madame Jauze said when she saw you?”
“She asked what was in the suitcase.”
“And you answered her what?”
“I didn’t answer. I went toward the door.”
“Can you recall for us how Madame Jauze intercepted you?”
“She grabbed the bag and the coat.”
“Madame Jauze, can you show us how you grabbed the bag and the coat?”
I seized the coat, and the bag he was still holding up high with his folded arm. We finally looked at each other. I saw again what I liked in his eyes. Above no matter what sorrow, the flame of mischief. Photo number thirty-two: Monsieur Manoscrivi watching Elisabeth Jauzetake hold of the coat and the bag.
When the van started up, Jean-Lino pressed his face to the window. They’d put his handcuffs back on. He leaned forward as if to signal me. I was standing outside the windowed front door in my slippers and I waved until the car rounded the building across the way. I stayed there a moment outside when everyone else had gone away. The parking lot was empty. It was a nice starry night in Deuil-l’Alouette. Before it disappeared, the vehicle had made a U-turn between the parked cars to leave in the opposite direction. Jean-Lino was still turned toward me, but what with the darkness and the distance I could no longer make out his face. I could see only the dark shape of his hat, the outmoded accessory that had set him apart and now seemed to toss him back into the anonymous mass of mankind. History was writing itself out above our heads.
We could not hold back what was happening, It was Jean-Lino Manoscrivi who’d just gone by and at the same time it was any man being carried off. I remembered the sense of belonging to some dim whole that Jean-Lino had felt in the Parmentier courtyard when his father used to read the psalm aloud. I looked at the sky and the people there.
Then I climbed back up the service staircase alone.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Playwright and novelist Yasmina Reza’s work has been translated into more than thirty-five languages. Her play Art was the first non-English language play to win a Tony Award, Conversations After a Burial, The Unexpected Man, and Life X 3 have all been a
ward-winning critical and commercial successes internationally, and God of Carnage, which also won a Tony Award, was adapted for film by Roman Polanski. A new play, Bella Figura, premiered in Germany in May 2015. Her fiction includes Hammerklavier, Desolation, and Adam Haberberg. Reza lives in Paris.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
A longtime fiction editor at The New Yorker magazine, Linda Asher (translator) has translated Victor Hugo, Balzac, Simenon, Kundera and many other writers. She has been awarded the Scott Moncrieff, the Deems Taylor, the French-American/Florence Gould Translation Prizes, and is a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters of the French Republic.
ABOUT SEVEN STORIES PRESS
Seven Stories Press is an independent book publisher based in New York City. We publish works of the imagination by such writers as Nelson Algren, Russell Banks, Octavia E. Butler, Ani DiFranco, Assia Djebar, Ariel Dorfman, Coco Fusco, Barry Gifford, Martha Long, Luis Negrón, Peter Plate, Hwang Sok-yong, Lee Stringer, and Kurt Vonnegut, to name a few, together with political titles by voices of conscience, including Subhankar Banerjee, the Boston Women’s Health Collective, Noam Chomsky, Angela Y. Davis, Human Rights Watch, Derrick Jensen, Ralph Nader, Loretta Napoleoni, Gary Null, Greg Palast, Project Censored, Barbara Seaman, Alice Walker, Gary Webb, and Howard Zinn, among many others. Seven Stories Press believes publishers have a special responsibility to defend free speech and human rights, and to celebrate the gifts of the human imagination, wherever we can. In 2012 we launched Triangle Square books for young readers with strong social justice and narrative components, telling personal stories of courage and commitment. For additional information, visit www.sevenstories.com.
