TRANSLATED FROM SLOVAK BY MICHAELA FREEMAN
[FRANCE]
MARIE DARRIEUSSECQ
Juergen the Perfect Son-in-Law
My mother calls me on my cell phone all the time, she’s retired. The sound of a Bavarian fanfare alerts me to her call. I can’t always pick up, but usually I manage to call her back the same day. I’ll be in London, in Los Angeles, or in Paris, in a parade or in the middle of a shoot, and my mother will tell me the latest about her neighbor, her cat, or her geraniums. I do like it, really.
My mother is a widow, I’ve always known her as a widow, I have no memory of my father. I’m the only thing she’s got aside from her cat. She absolutely supported my decision to live in London and then, after that, places farther away. But she visits us a few times a year, and we have the flight times memorized. London-Munich-London. It’s so nice that she gets on well with my husband, Juergen. And, just like him, she goes along with my artistic projects. I think they talk about them and try to figure them out together, but they never complain in front of me.
I’m a photographer, I began in fashion, and then I started doing more and more portraits. I like pregnant women, fruits, animals, caves. Whatever I shoot has to be lighthearted, and at the same time, I’d like to capture the other side of these things, I don’t know, their fragility. I’m always conscious of the fact that all the people I photograph will die. That gives a sort of melancholic patina, pale and green, to my images. The people who like my pictures appreciate that, and they should, but these last few times I wondered if this patina wasn’t, rather, a sort of glaze, a sort of glass pane that I hadn’t yet broken. I’d like to get past that barrier, but something holds me back. And sometimes—maybe it’s a crazy idea—I tell myself that fate or something else has made a mistake, and that it’s Juergen and not I who should be a photographer.
I met Juergen in Bavaria, we were teenagers. I was already taking pictures, he was absolutely crazy about soccer. He let off some steam, played around, even if he didn’t really know how to do that except with a ball or a mug of beer.
It did us both good to leave Bavaria. From the beginning, in London, I earned enough money for the two of us, and Juergen kept busy with our children. Juergen in particular has an incredible talent for making friends, for talking about different things, so that everything’s more exciting when he’s around. He’s also got an incredible memory for things people have told him, and he can always tell when someone’s sad or not feeling well.
When that Bavarian fanfare trilled in my bag during the three days of vacation we’d finally managed to take, and my mother sobbed to me that her cat had disappeared, it was Juergen who insisted that we take the first flight to Munich. I was underestimating the importance of the cat to my mother, he told me. She lives alone, that cat is what she lives for. We had to stand by her during this ordeal, help her to find the cat again. Juergen was quite serious. We juggled planes and managed to get our children taken care of for a little longer, and here we are now at my mother’s place, a small chalet thirty kilometers from Munich. All this to ascertain, effectively, that the cat isn’t here. It’s been three days since he disappeared. A ginger male with white stripes, rather ugly if I remember correctly. “Cats wander away, Mom,” I tried to put it in perspective. “He’ll be back, all mussed up, and he’ll be starving.”
I can’t bring myself to care about this business of the cat. I took a few pictures around the house, of little winter flowers, yellow and nearly dried out, of everlastings, of the moss. All in all, I felt uncomfortable. My mother cried, and I had never seen her cry except a bit when my father had died. Those memories are rather blurred. I was three years old. I only remember that, my mother’s tears, as if she had poured herself out all at once so as never to cry again. My mother is a woman who keeps to herself. Had to be, to get through it. She always tried to raise me without burdening me with her grief. To see her crying for a cat really did bother me.
Best European Fiction 2012 Page 17
