15
DURING THIS SUMMER, which I am spending alone in Paris, I often find myself rereading the Post-its that Georges left me. I walk down the long hallway where I have lined them up and look at them. I still think of Georges’s hand scribbling them, and I always will. I recall the tenderness contained in his words, in his gestures. The same tenderness that frightened him so much when he was about to turn fifty.
One evening in August, I turned on the radio while eating dinner and heard his voice on France Culture. At first, I was so surprised that I hardly recognized it. I listened, very moved. He was telling an anecdote from when François Mitterrand was campaigning in the 1981 election. We were invited to take the bus to Lille, where the future president of France was going to give one of his important speeches. When it was over, Georges went to join his friends who were heading for the buffet table. Mitterrand, who had come down from the rostrum and was looking for a glass of wine, noticed Georges, the cartoonist who was very irreverent toward anything to do with Mitterrand, in spite of Georges’s leftist leanings. From a distance, I saw them talking and laughing. So I decided to join them. Georges put his arm around me and introduced me. “I already know you,” Mitterrand said. “I see you every week in Wolinski’s drawings.” I smiled, not very comfortable at the remark, which made me Georges’s muse. And yet, I can’t deny it: I was his muse for forty-seven years. A muse who was loving and rebellious, both at the same time. I won’t ever deny it. They were the most wonderful years of my life.
In the silence of the apartment, I told myself that perhaps, soon, I might give myself permission to think about what my life was going to be like. The life I had to rebuild. Did I have the means to do it? Faced with pain, sometimes denial, often with the need to act, I felt that I had not taken the time to go through a period of mourning. And I always came back to the same question: What exactly does that mean, to go through a period of mourning? Perhaps it was what I had been doing for six months, moving from shock to isolation, to extreme agitation and a feeling of abandonment, from denial to anger . . .
Today I am moving into a space where changes are taking place; I’m facing the future, that theater of the unknown, which causes fragility and a feeling of instability. Months have passed, and I no longer resist time, which puts distance between that Wednesday when Georges left for Charlie Hebdo and the autumn that will lead me to my first year without him. A year without him, how is that possible? Without his gaze, his caresses, his admiration, his loving words, both spoken and written? After having held on to him for so long, having so desired to hold him in my arms, so wished for him to guide me through life, I let him go. I let him take flight. I no longer write “darling Georges” in my datebook when we are to meet. The last meeting won’t take place; we will never live on the quayside. But before making an important decision, I still can’t help thinking: What would Georges say? Would he approve?
To live or to die? Allow Georges to take his place in the picture frames that surround me, serious photos, funny photos? I remember saying to him, shortly after my mother died, “When you die, you’re nothing more than a photo in a picture frame.” He’d smiled.
In my office, on the mantelpiece of the fireplace, I put a photo of him in a ski outfit about to start a competition. He must have been sixteen years old. I love that photo, which I recently discovered. He’s there, he’s looking at me. When I have dinner alone, in the kitchen, I sit facing a shelf on which, until January 7, sat all sorts of jars and teapots, as well as a plate painted by him showing me naked, in front of a window, staring at the moon. I remember that summer in the Lubéron. With his potter friend, he decided to make something in the workshop. A cricket, who was quite ill, landed on one of the tables and died a few seconds later. Tony, the potter, chose to make a cast of it. Georges and I decided that Tony should create a dinner service for us that would have that cricket on each piece. When I set the table and hold one of those plates with the cricket and see that it is beginning to fade, I relive that moment and my eyes fill with tears.
Near the plate, on the shelf, I put a framed photo of him in which he is posing, smiling: the smile of a happy man. I have dinner looking at it and smile to myself. I think of the loving words he said to speak of the happiness I brought him. I am proud that I had, sometimes, pulled him out of his pathological melancholy.
Dahhling,
Tonight, I forgot everything, the drawing, Anne G’s party, the only thing I didn’t forget was you. I love you, G.
I can’t wait to join you in the Lubéron. I’ve loved you for 42 years now, G.
Sometimes, when the days are too difficult, I want to shout out to him that life without him is hell, a hell I will never escape, that my future is a desert, that he should stop smiling in that photo. Or that he should come out of that picture frame, as in the Woody Allen film we liked so much, The Purple Rose of Cairo. Like Cecilia, its heroine, I want Georges to come out of the picture frame as Tom Baxter did, so he can lead me to new loving adventures, holding a pencil, drawing the curves of my hips on the pages of the sketchbook that is always in his pocket.
I know. I have to stop dreaming, I mustn’t give in to the temptation of denial. Today I must be led by my own gaze. It has not been simple to accept that idea, and let Georges take flight.
But for him, from now on, I must go forward.
Acknowledgments
I would first like to thank my editors: Olivier Bétourné, the president of Éditions du Seuil, for having trusted me, and Frédéric Mora, for having supported my need to write what my life has been like since the attack.
I also thank Luc Hermann, codirector of the Premières Lignes agency, whose offices were on the same floor as Charlie Hebdo, and who was the first to guide me and allowed me to meet the journalists from his agency, who were all so kind that I can never forget them.
I thank my faithful friend Patrice Trapier, deputy director of the Journal du Dimanche, who gave me access to his contacts.
I thank everyone whom I didn’t have to call on but who spontaneously contacted me to help clarify certain questions, especially the police officers, whose anonymity I insist on respecting. Everyone gave me the strength to continue to write, to continue to live.
I thank Chantal Schmeltz, who, despite being so traumatized, told me what happened to her and the chaos that reigned in the building at 10, rue Nicolas-Appert that January 7.
I thank the Comédie Bastille, and in particular Thomas Joussier and Nathalie Rolandez, who had spent some time in the theater and directly experienced the events of January 7, opening the theater’s doors to the survivors and the families of the victims.
I thank the people from Charlie, among them the survivors, who told me what they lived through when the massacre took place, as well as Véronique Portheault and Patrick Pelloux, who accompanied me when I visited the newspaper’s offices, after the seals were removed.
Finally, I would like to thank my companions in pain: my daughter, Elsa; Chloé Verlhac, Tignous’s wife; and Hélène Honoré, Honoré’s daughter; as well as Arnauld Champremier-Trigano, my son-in-law. Everyone helped me move forward without tears during the most painful moments of 2015, the most terrible year of my life.
About the Author
Maryse Wolinski is a French journalist and writer and widow of the late Charlie Hebdo cartoonist Georges Wolinski. She is the author of several stories and novels, including Georges, If You Knew and The Passion of Edith S. She lives in Paris.
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Copyright © 2016 by Éditions du Seuil
Originally published in France in 2016 as Chérie, je vais chez Charlie by Éditions du Seuil
Published by arrangement with Éditions du Seuil, S.A.
English translation © 2017 by H. J. Stone
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Interior design by Kyoko Watanabe
Jacket design by Donna Cheng
Jacket photographs © Gautier Stephane / Alamy (Parade); © Vilma Pimenoff / millennium images, UK (Plant)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016373566
ISBN 978-1-5011-5489-8
ISBN 978-1-5011-5491-1 (ebook)
Darling, I'm Going to Charlie Page 8
