Apocalypse Baby

by Virginie Despentes

  Jean-Marc took me on his scooter to a house in Bougival, to which he had the keys. The journey lasted most of the night, many people were still trying to get out of Paris. I asked him to stop at a phone box, from which I called Zoska.

  ‘I’m in big trouble. Can’t tell you all about it on the phone. But you should know they may come looking for you as well. Is your mobile phone contract in your own name?’

  ‘No, of course not. Where are you? Are you alone? How can I reach you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Honey. Listen. Remember the name of the bar I told you I worked? Don’t say it. I’ll be there tonight. Call me in an hour, and get the number of a public phone box where I can reach you in the night. OK?’

  Her calm manner reassured me. The place where Jean-Marc left me showed every sign of being a safe house: a basement without windows, furnished impersonally, like a hotel. Next day, Rafik brought me a false driving licence, with the photo off my CV from when I’d first arrived at Reldanch – it makes me look like an axolotl. My name now is Blanche Laure, and I wonder how he managed it so fast, when Paris was in turmoil.

  I didn’t feel afraid then. It was only later that fear struck. I asked him if my parents would be harassed, and he thought to reassure me: they wouldn’t be kept long in custody, but it was essential that they shouldn’t know where I was, because if so, they’d be made to talk. And indeed I think my parents spent only a week in prison… Later, I got Zoska to send them two postcards, saying ‘see you soon, all well’, signed with the first names of my two grandmothers. Hoping they’d understand. I wonder whether they’re speaking again, telephoning each other if they ever got them.

  Rafik gave me three thousand euros in cash, telling me to look out, it’ll go quickly. Apparently Reldanch had a slush fund ‘for cases like this’. Cases like this don’t happen every day, though, and the fund policy isn’t there to protect agents. I know no more on this point than about anything else: did he give me money from his own account? Had he been given the money to help me to disappear more effectively?

  Jean-Marc came to say goodbye, and we drank instant coffee standing in the basement kitchenette. Rafik advised Argentina, he said it was a country used to receiving people who wanted to start again from scratch. Jean-Marc thought rather Poland. He didn’t advise Sweden, too bureaucratic, I might be spotted quickly. Well anyway, I wasn’t going to go to a country where it’s cold all the time and hardly ever light. Everything was so well organized. At the time, I felt like weeping with gratitude. In the months that followed, I was more likely to ask myself who they were trying to cover for, and why it was so important to get rid of me. They’d seen others, people they were closer to, fall foul of the state without any protection. Were they trying to protect the agency, or the Hyena, or were they working for some third party, did their orders come from high up, same level, lower down, or off the map? I have never known the answer. And in the end, that was the worst thing. Worse than losing my whole identity. It’s like a black hole, an area I mustn’t get too close to: what really happened?

  They left, asking me to leave the keys in the letter box which had no name on it, and not to stay longer than two days. I had to cling to the bed not to beg them to stay. And I didn’t hold back out of dignity, but because I realized it wouldn’t do any good.

  Zoska called me as she had said. I hadn’t told the others that I would venture out of the house, to the end of the street, just long enough to catch her call. I realized myself that it was dangerous, that there was nobody about in these residential streets. But I didn’t have any choice. It was when I heard her voice that I started to cry. She told me my name was already being mentioned in the papers, on the radio, and that they were only naming me as the private investigator searching for Valentine, not the Hyena. Then she asked me where I was, and I said I wasn’t supposed to say anything, so she said that would make it difficult for her to meet me. Again, I thought this was dangerous but I preferred to take the risk than to remain alone.

  She asked me if I was far from the station at Bougival, and I didn’t have the slightest idea. She didn’t give me time to change my mind, she said she’d be there next morning from ten o’clock, with her motorbike, she’d have a helmet for me that would completely cover my face. She seemed to have this all worked out in her head. It reassured me.

  Next day, Zoska trod out her cigarette as she saw me coming, gave me the helmet, and I climbed on behind her. I clung on to her back and off we went.

  Since I had left Barcelona, she had been playing cat and mouse with me with great accuracy: I call you and say sweet things, I don’t reply to your text messages, I promise I’ll come and see you soon, I warn you I haven’t time, I call you in the middle of the night and whisper torrid messages in your ear, I leave my mobile off all the next day. And it had worked very well with me, I became obsessed with my telephone. But this girl, whom I hardly knew, spent all night coming on her motorbike to pick me up, and took me to Brittany, to a house she had already rented. I was afraid this might be a bad idea. But in time I realized she had both the taste for and the experience of clandestinity. I could count on her to organize things properly.

  We arrived in the afternoon, the keys were hidden under some logs. The back garden was bounded by two factory buildings without windows. I could go out there without being seen and enjoy daylight without ever opening the shutters on the road side. I did protest that Douarnenez seemed a bit too close for comfort compared to Rio de Janeiro or Moscow. But Zoska likes Brittany. She thought we’d stay there a couple of weeks, then take the ferry across to England, and fly somewhere from London. Her idea was Brazil. But she soon realized I was in no state to go anywhere. As soon as we reached the house, I collapsed.

  The first three months I alternated between inertia, black rage, anguish, sadness and terror. The rats under my skin could find no way out. Every calm moment was just an interval before a fresh attack. The questions I kept asking myself got mixed up, contradicted each other, and wouldn’t leave me alone until they’d tormented me for nights on end. What did the Hyena know? Who had Valentine met? What had happened? Was Rafik in the loop from the start? Did the grandmother suspect something? Could it have worked out differently if I’d paid a bit more attention to what was going on? What had the Hyena and Valentine said to each other during the journey back? Why was it those people who were present that particular day who had died? Who had commissioned this massacre? Who had provided Valentine with the bomb? What witness had we met that we hadn’t identified as particularly dangerous?

  For three long months, I remained obsessed with the day of the explosion. I was inside Valentine’s belly, I was inside François Galtan’s body, I was ripped apart by the impact, I was in the hands of the emergency services. I lost my identity. Everything I’d been before, and which I didn’t value greatly. I had become dispersed into space.

  All this time, Zoska was going to and fro, not always explaining what she was doing. She experimented on me with various kinds of ‘look’: I discovered she has a passion for hairdressing. I’ve been by turns ginger, platinum blonde, ash blonde, auburn. I’ve had my hair cut in a bob, then layered, crewcut, in spikes, and finally completely shaved when I couldn’t bear to look at myself in the mirror. I never left the house, but I never looked the same for three days on end.

  Zoska had decreed that to get me out of my depression, there’s nothing like a macrobiotic diet. She thinks I look good slimmer. I catch a cold every time there’s a draught and feel weaker. But I didn’t argue. In any case, I had a phobia about going out. Not a reasoned fear, but violent nausea and vertigo every time I approached the door. Zoska also decided to take my wardrobe in hand, so for a while I looked like a rich Frenchwoman from the 1970s. I’m afraid this must correspond to her idea of the most intoxicating femininity.

  One day, she declared that I was getting better and we should change our hideout. So we drove, in a car, to Seville. It was astonishing, I’d spent three months, clois
tered, terrorized at the idea of taking a step outside, but after five minutes out of the house I felt fine. The further south we drove, the more light there was and the more I felt I’d left the worst behind me.

  I’m still on the wanted list. My photo was broadcast everywhere for weeks. They somewhat exaggerated my importance in the affair. They speculated that I might have been kidnapped by a terrorist cell that’s afraid of the evidence I might give. But unlike Magali Thalbo, my face quickly disappeared from the media. I get the impression that it suits everyone if I remain untraceable. I don’t know why.

  I’m living in a village which is invaded in the tourist season, Cantillana, a few kilometres outside Seville. I’m no longer afraid of being recognized: when I look in the mirror, I don’t feel I look anything like myself. My expression is totally transformed.

  We’re still thinking about going to South America. A French woman who looks like me agreed to rent me her passport for the trip, but she’s disappeared. Never mind, Zoska isn’t in a hurry. She likes it here. Her business is going well. For a long time I was afraid she wouldn’t come home one day. Either because she was fed up with having to be a nurse, or because she’d been caught and sent down for a few months.

  Zoska is the best lover, friend, sister and accomplice anyone could wish for. She’s the only person I’ve spoken to for months. I’ve never been very sociable and quite quickly I appreciated being able to do without the rest of the world. Her company is enough for me.

  She brings me echoes from the outside world, what she hears, what she finds on the internet. According to various sources, the Hyena is in Chiapas, or in Gaza, she’s in prison in Ukraine, she’s died in Chicago, she’s working in Saint-Jean-de-Luz. Some say she’s even been sighted in a convent, in Mexico. I think she knew, when we brought Valentine back, what was going to happen. But I don’t think she was truly involved. She knew, and she didn’t like it. Because Valentine was special. When she finally joined us, I was surprised nobody had thought to tell us, about her, that she smelled good, that she had a lovely voice, that she had a sense of humour. When I was tailing her, I was seeing her from too far off. I didn’t know her smell. I didn’t know her smile. But Valentine had a special kind of strength. And I think the Hyena had glimpsed it. And she would have preferred things to turn out differently.

  Zoska has several theories. The people who commissioned the attack are the manufacturers of the uterine bomb. The whole story was at bottom nothing but a mega advertisement to promote their precious gadget, and find markets for it worldwide. The people who commissioned the attack are the manufacturers of the X-ray detectors that you now see installed at the entrance to every public building. The people who commissioned the attack are in the government: it wants to be re-elected and to have its hands free. The people who commissioned the attack are top-level church dignitaries who wanted to destabilize the state, because they see it as too soft on rival sects. When I try to argue with her, she just clicks her tongue and says, ‘You don’t know the half of it.’ Like me, she’s chosen to make up a story for herself to believe, because she’ll never know the truth.

  Valentine did what she had to do. She was too young to be interested in the daily changes in the trees, or to watch the light on the water, to wonder about the destination of the boats in the distance, and to fill a life with those things. I was furious with her, a heavy unbearable pain hammered at me for months. For her or against her, it wasn’t clear. I thought about the moment when we got back to Paris together, and her father put his arms round her. His awkwardness was touching. What did she think at that moment? Valentine did what she judged she had to do. Like everyone. I often think of all the things I should have said to her, and I listen to what she might have replied. I have told myself the story so often that in the end I’ve put together what I really know, inventing scenes that I didn’t see, to make the story stand up, the way I imagine it happened. It was when the narrative started to get going that I began to feel better. Gradually I’ve come back to life. One day, I realized that I’d been awake for several hours and hadn’t yet thought about Valentine. I felt like Noah at the moment the dove comes back with a little olive branch in its beak. The truth I’ll never know. What remains is the story I’m telling myself, in a way that suits me, a story I can be satisfied with.