by Bernard Uzan
I stop one of them in the street.
“Sir, are you aware of being an asshole?”
“Excuse me?”
“No, no, nothing.”
I approach a second one.
“Sir, do you know that you are an asshole?”
“…”
“Sir, do you know that you are an asshole?”
“You must be drunk!”
“Me? Not at all.”
“Well, in that case you’re crazy!”
“Oh! Oh! Oh!”
I’m having lots of fun. Let’s try one more.
“Sir, are you aware of being an asshole?”
“Yes, definitely, and you?”
The bastard caught me at my own game!
I don’t feel like laughing anymore or saying whatever the hell I’m thinking. I feel like…I feel like looking at something beautiful! Or maybe doing something useful, even useful to other people—that’ll be a change for me.
Lillian, why are we seeing each other again, huh? Tell me! Why do you spend two hours with me from time to time? Because you want to get screwed? I’m not interested in becoming the one who screws. I have some dignity left in me, after all!
Your punishment will be no more me screwing you! Even though I feel like it. In any case I’m convinced that you’ll find someone else easily enough and quickly enough.
You always find someone to console yourself with. It’s part of human nature: we can’t be alone, we need someone to justify our insecurity, our cowardice and actually women are just as lonely as we are, even more so, as they watch themselves get older, melting away like an old candle, losing it all, losing everything that was still beautiful and trying desperately to fight it….
Even my aunt with the laughing thighs couldn’t stay by herself. A few years ago I met her in the street and she threw herself in my arms and whispered in my ear:
“It’s been so long. What are you up to?”
“I’m here, I’m working, I’m an actor now.”
“Oh, really? That sounds wonderful. We should meet and talk. To discuss what’s going on with you. I haven’t seen you since your father’s funeral. Will you come over for lunch at my place, say Thursday afternoon? I haven’t seen you in so long.”
“But this is the first invitation I get from you. No one in the family invites me, my dear aunt!”
“Don’t call me ‘my dear aunt.’”
“Well, you’d rather I call you ‘Tata’”?
“Oh no, it makes me feel as if I were seventy years old!”
“And how old are you?”
“I turned forty-three the day before yesterday!”
“Well you don’t look your age at all. You’ve been through so much, you look at least…fifty…no, I’m joking…you look very young.”
“And you are so mature.”
“Mature for what?”
“So are you OK for Thursday? For lunch!”
“Yes I’ll be there, we’ll get to know each other, we know each other so little, it’s a shame, don’t you think?”
“Yes it’s a shame.”
“We only met once when my Dad died, when he was buried, do you remember? You were sitting in front of me and it was so hot, and you were feeling so hot.”
“Oh yes, your poor father, he was such a marvelous brother to me. Thursday we’ll talk about all that. Good, so I’ll see you then?”
“I warn you that we shall only talk.”
“Of course, yes what else? Listen, I’ll see you Thursday, OK? You agree, you will come, won’t you?”
“Fine, but I warned you.”
Poor woman, what happened in the hearse wasn’t enough for her. She must have been waiting for me for a long time. She probably put some rouge on her cheeks, mascara around her eyes, green over her eyelids, white cream everywhere else, covered her body with perfume, even the most intimate parts.
She must have changed her dress ten times in front of a mirror as old as she is…
She is waiting for me, and slowly, the rouge fades away, the mascara starts dripping, the green shadow is running, the white cream turns grey, the dress that had been changed ten times is totally crumpled and even the mirror is cloudy.
She looks at her watch and goes into the kitchen for a glass of water.
She’s no longer expecting me, and she sits on a straight back chair and she becomes once more a Jewish mother without a child; she contemplates her own solitude, lamenting her fate as a woman who is now a widow and is inevitably getting older. Her husband died during the war in Algeria; she never remarried, to honor his memory, but mostly out of fear of the unknown, and now she doesn’t know how to handle her loneliness and boredom… Perhaps she really does have desires; maybe she really does have needs to fulfill. Who knows? She waits and hopes but is too fearful to act and to find someone.
She waits for me, and waits…
When someone is waiting for me, I feel I exist, it makes me feel alive, they wait for me because they want to see me and it really gives me a certain pleasure.
As for me I hate waiting and yet I’m always arriving at my appointments way in advance; everywhere I go or have to go, I’m always there one hour ahead of time, running around in circles, practically like a dog biting its tail. I think I know where that comes from: when I had my bad legs it always took me an incredible amount of time to go anywhere and keep my appointments. I had to leave two hours ahead of time it always took me so long to reach a given location. I’d drag myself there and made it no matter what because I needed to see other people. The habit stayed with me…to be everywhere ahead of time.
But damn!
What’s happening to me? Why am I all alone for days and weeks on end. Am I depressed? Am I, as they say, sinking into a deep depression?
I know that I hate being alone and yet I spend entire days without seeing anyone. What’s happening to me? I don’t feel like seeing anybody, I’m self-sufficient. Maybe if I jerked off less I would need to be with other people more. I don’t get it. I find that everybody is stupid, uninteresting, worthless, and limited… I’m either crazy or a genius or maybe just a pretentious little depressed asshole. So how long is it going to take for me to get some recognition? How marvelous I will be toward everyone; I’ll remain so simple, I’ll be such a normal person or almost normal. To some I shall be the great Jewish actor, since they say such a category does exist, by the way. Me? The great Jewish actor? If they hadn’t constantly reminded me that I was Jewish I would have certainly forgotten it…
“He’s a Jew!”
“I know he is.”
“How do you know?”
“I just do.”
“And as your mother I forbid you to date a Jew and spend anytime with him? With a Jew!!”
If she only knew that I can hear every word she’s saying from the parlor because the flunky blocked my way in and made sure I stayed at the door… me her Jewish university buddy …!
Who could even imagine that such attitudes could still exist in France at that time…or even these days… I am a Jew, a good Jew, a different Jew, an assimilated Jew but still a Jew in any case. Whatever the politics, or the problems may be, it’s always our fault, we are the ones who benefit, who disturb, who prevent things from running smoothly, the murderers of the Christian god, both the creators and the victims of communism. Soon every Muslim in the world will hate us and want to exterminate us.
All day the graffiti everywhere are attacking me and reminding me that I am a Jew!
Nice: reopen the Ovens! Death to the Kikes!
Sentier metro station: Jews to the gas chambers!
Strasbourg: Let’s burn the synagogue to the ground.
Israel = Nazi.
And taxi drivers lose their cool behind a delivery van marked LEVY and scream “Filthy Jew!“
“But mother I assure you he’s really wonderful.”
“I have no doubt that he’s intelligent. Those people are all very smart, or at least they are cunning.”
/> “But mother, besides being intelligent I can tell you he’s a very nice person.”
“What? What do you mean ‘Besides his intelligence?’ Did he Jew you up sexually as well? My poor child what will become of you?”
At that point I could no longer wait quietly at the door and I moved in and pushed the cleaning woman aside. I opened the door leading into the parlor of the magnificent apartment on the avenue de la Grande Armée and like a brave soldier of Napoleon I said:
“Excuse me, madam, the little intelligent Jew would like to say a few words. I never screwed your daughter because I would have had the feeling of screwing you, which is an unbearable thought. To tell you the truth I haven’t even put my hand in her crotch even though she wants me to do it passionately. You may rest in peace! You can be sure that your daughter hasn’t been defiled at the hand of a Jew. Good night, madam, good night, Sylvie, may God bless you and watch over you and all those French people from old and honorable families, may God watch over your ancestors who have made this country what it is, an ocean of pretense and prejudice…”
I was really wonderful that day! All the world’s Jews must have jumped for joy and to sing my praise. Only a few non-Jews and the self-hating Jews are still saying that there is no more anti-Semitism in France.
In any case I didn’t feel like going out with Sylvie that much. With my father sick in the hospital, how can I be thinking of going out with her? If at least I was screwing her, but no, not even, the well-bred young lady will fuck with a Jew. We hold hands, talk about literature, go to the movies, kiss a little, touch each other a bit above the waist or below the thighs but no fucking. In any case, when your father is sick and dying, we shouldn’t think about any of this petting, it’s just obscene; when your father is in the hospital you must suffer and can’t just go on living as before, don’t you think?
You can only live in slow motion, you must stop wanting to laugh, to drink, to tell jokes, to touch girls, to caress Sylvie, or do anything else, anything. You can only feel guilty because your father is dying.
Had I known the rest of it I wouldn’t have been so sarcastic; one week later I was writing Sylvie that my father had died that night… I was also telling her that I really didn’t want to see her or even hear from her. Another life was beginning for me. I wanted to go ahead in my desire to be in the theater and I couldn’t waste my time with her kind of society people… As a souvenir, Sylvie, I send you the description of my father’s final moments, someone your family must clearly despise because he is a Jew.
The 25th—my father died last night at one in the morning; on Monday afternoon at four I was at home listening to Hungarian dances by Brahms. My sister-inlaw came to pick me up. She cried out from downstairs in the street: “Julien, Julien, come quickly, hurry, your father is getting much worse, and he’s got very little time left.”
During the taxi ride on the way to the hospital at Asnières what was I thinking about? I can’t remember… I kept on looking out the window of the car at the trees in the Bois de Boulogne whipping by.
I have no memories, just a huge void moment, a big hole, a chasm. As we reached the hospital I see a bed where a man I can’t even recognize has been thrown, it’s my father: a plastic tube is dangling from his nose down into a glass container laying on the floor, a second plastic tube goes from his arm to a bottle red with blood that is dripping down slowly, drop by drop. His face is grey, I can only see the whites of his eyes that are covered with a yellowish substance; his body that had appeared to be so bloated lately now seems so tiny under the ivory white sheets.
He’s still conscious and sees me and says:
“I’m sorry, Julien!”
Sorry? Sorry about what?
Five people are around his bed: my mother, who looks as though she’s thinking about what she’s going to have for dinner this evening; my grandmother, who seems to be thinking about what her daughter will have for dinner that evening; my father’s brother, who must be pondering the problems he’ll have at work tomorrow and his professional responsibilities should my father die during the night; my sister-in-law, who is looking at me and remains silent; and then me.
And I am looking for someone who should be there: where is he? Why isn’t he here? He should be present on such an occasion. His place is here.
Where is Fabien?
My brother, where is my brother? He should be here to help me, next to me but he’s not here; he died a stupid death… Smack! Whiplash… Smack!
The doctor comes by and tells us that it will happen during the night. I feel nothing when he says it, not even pity. My father falls asleep after they give him a shot of morphine. We decide to spend the night at his bedside, my sister-in-law, my mother, and myself. After about one hour my mother and sister-in-law fall asleep. I stay awake at my father’s bedside as he falls into a long delirium; it’s now early dawn. During the night the nurse came to check his blood pressure, which is excellent at 130; his heart is holding up very well.
Tuesday 8 a.m.
I go downstairs to get a cup of coffee; my mother and Claudia went home to get some sleep and I went back inside his room at 8:30 a.m. My father is basically out of his coma and is looking at me with his huge and intelligent eyes. He wants me to recite the prayer “Shema Israel.” Me? How could I recite the “Shema Israel” prayer since I don’t even know it and have never learned it. I haven’t heard it in an eternity… Well in any case I’ll pretend, I’ll just mumble something; I’m sure that at that specific instant he won’t even figure out what I’m saying, so it’s not that important…
And then he cries as he asks me to forgive him… Forgive? Forgive what? For what? And then I start looking at him deeply. I see him as the companion of my childhood, the one who played hide and seek with me, the one who wrestled with me, the one who hugged me, who was saying that I was the strongest of them all, and who was such a bad liar.
“Hey Dad, I’m the strongest.”
“It’s true. You’re really tough!”
“Dad help me, tell me that someday I’ll be able to run, to dance, to dance through the sky just like Peter Pan, tell me that, Dad, say it to me!”
I understand…that I never stopped loving him even though I wanted to lose him for five years and I tell him.
Large manly tears run down his sunken cheeks that are disappearing and he regrets that he is leaving me nothing when he’s actually leaving me his love. He falls asleep and I fall asleep with him.
Noon
I’m awakened by his dry and rough cough; he’s throwing up blood, pints of blood, and I’m holding the bowl where his life is winding itself down; large black clots of blood are running and running uninterruptedly and are mixed with my tears; then, exhausted, he stops and falls back into a semi-coma.
The doctor comes by at that time and tells me it’s best that I don’t leave the room, that it may only be a matter of hours or maybe even minutes. I panic when I hear it’s imminent and call the family, who come by two hours later; they’re all surprised to see that I’m still there. I, the disowned one, the one who left home, the bad son who loved freedom, who wants to be an actor, they’re surprised to see me so calm and so quiet. I, calm and quiet? If only they knew what was going on inside me... If they only knew. They will never know; we don’t belong to the same world; it would be useless to try and explain; they wouldn’t understand.
My father lifts his arm and lets it fall in a sign of powerlessness over and over for about one hour. Everyone else around me is crying. I am not crying. Between my father and myself there is a pact, a pact of love. I feel him with me and I feel his heart inside mine. The others look at each other and elbow each other to point out my dry eyes as a sign that I have no feelings. The doctor comes in and says there is internal hemorrhaging due to a perforation of the stomach: more and more blood transfusions, the blood keeps on dripping from the bottle into his arm. At 6 p.m. my father suddenly is again conscious and awake and repeats to me everything he said regarding his f
inal wishes. The others all suddenly jump at the opportunity and decide, given the circumstances, that I’m the only one who can spend another night at his bedside. They leave the room as quickly as possible to go back to their homes.
And now I am alone with him.
The nurses make their continuous rounds and repeat that his blood pressure is very good and that they have never seen such a strong heart. As I sit next to him I remember all those nights when he would sit next to my bed and tell me stories where I appeared as the indestructible hero. He never reminds me of my condition even though he, too, hears what people are saying. Those words that still haunt me.
“He’ll never make it.”
“Yes, he will, you’ll see.”
“He won’t make it.”
“You’ll see, he will.”
“Won’t make it.”
“Yes, you’ll see.”
“Won’t make it.”
“You’ll see…”
“Won’t…”
“We’ll see…”
It’s an awful night. I have to hold his hand because he’s trying to pull the tubes out of his nose because it bothers him terribly; he’s suffering and there’s nothing I can do, just pathetically mop his forehead that’s streaming with tears and sweat. He’s suffering and I can only be sleepy; he’s in agony and I can only feel back pain.
“Help me Dad, help me! I still need you, even now you must help me endure your suffering, and you were always so good at doing things for others and for me. Even when you’re dying you must help me… I’m scared Dad… I’m scared…”
I’m scared… I recapture the fear of my childhood that I had forgotten…the fear that would freeze me up when they left me alone.
They all went out and I stayed behind.
They left me with my crutches near my bed. “You’ll be able to get up if you need to go to the bathroom.”
Thank you for the delicate thought.
They all went away and left me there, leaving me like a dog tied to a leash.
