Other Lives But Mine

by Emmanuel Carrère

  We left the restaurant quite late, Hélène and I. Abandoning the last sounds of conversation, we followed the paved path beside the swimming pool and stepped into the shadows beneath the immense trees. The hotel grounds were extensive; it was a five-minute walk from the main building to our bungalow, five minutes that acted like an air lock. The only sound now was the constant peaceful chirring of insects, and when you looked up, the sky above the coconut palms was so full of stars you thought you could hear them trilling, too. Invisible waves broke rhythmically on the beach down below. We walked in silence, exhausted. We knew that soon we’d be lying side by side, and our tense bodies began preparing themselves for sleep. We held hands.

  When I think back on that time, I remember my childish fear that Hélène would turn away from me, but what she herself remembers is that we were together, truly together.

  5

  On the morning we left, the remaining seats in the minibus wound up being assigned to a few Swiss German Ayurvedics, who obviously knew what had happened to Delphine and Jérôme and, by never mentioning it, probably thought they were being genuinely considerate. They simply greeted us en masse with a quick nod, and when they saw Jérôme—who was sitting up front—light a cigarette, they informed us that even with the windows open the smoke bothered them. Our trip instantly became an endless series of cigarette stops, with everyone leaving the bus except the Ayurvedics, who couldn’t complain, being in the minority, but clearly figured we were purposely trying to piss them off. On the first leg, we drove to Galle along the coastal road, making fitful progress because of obstructions and rescue convoys. Processions of survivors trudged along the roadside, and we wondered where they were going with their bundles and handcarts. As we approached the city, traffic slowed even more, but the crowds disappeared once the minibus took the road into the mountains. Leaving the front lines behind, we drove through peaceful and luxuriant landscapes. Villagers tending casually to their affairs waved and smiled at us. The countryside looked just as it had to Jérôme and Philippe on their scouting trip of twelve years earlier, as if nothing had happened, as if here, far from the coast, no one even knew about the wave at all.

  During one of our smoking breaks by the side of the road, Philippe took me aside and asked, So, you’re a writer. Are you going to write a book about this?

  His question took me by surprise. I hadn’t thought about it. I replied that as far as I knew, no.

  You ought to, Philippe insisted. Me, if I could write, I’d do it.

  Then do it. You’re in a better position to write it than I am.

  Philippe looked at me skeptically, but within a year he did do it, and did it well.

  After the hospitals in Tangalla and Matara, the one in Ratnapura, about a hundred kilometers southeast of Colombo, was a comfort to visit. Here the staff was treating patients, not triaging the dead. Instead of corpses on the floor, there were injured people in beds or, for the latest arrivals, on straw pallets cluttering the halls, making it hard to move around. That Tom should have turned up fifty kilometers from the coast seemed inexplicable, almost super-natural, but it wasn’t the wave that had brought him here. The explanation was more prosaic: people for whom something could still be done had been evacuated inland to this hospital. Some were horribly wounded; we heard patients moaning and gasping for breath. There were shortages of drugs and bandages, medical personnel were clearly overwhelmed—it was like being in a field hospital in wartime. I don’t know how many doors we opened before Ruth froze on a threshold, signaling Hélène and me to wait. Having spotted Tom, she wanted to make the moment last, to look at him while he was still unaware of her presence. There were twenty or so beds; she pointed out his. He was staring straight ahead. A big fellow with close-cropped hair and bandages wrapped around his bare chest. He didn’t know that Ruth was there or even that she was alive, just as she’d been in the dark about him the day before. Finally, she approached him. She entered his field of vision. They remained motionless for a moment, silently facing each other, he propped up against pillows, she standing at the foot of the bed, and then she moved into his arms. Everyone in the room was watching; many began to cry. It did them good to cry because a man and a woman in love who’d believed each other dead had been reunited. It felt good to see these two look at each other and touch each other with such amazement. Tom’s chest had been staved in and one lung perforated, a serious injury, but he was being well cared for. On his bedside table were a tattered spy novel, a few cans of beer, and a bunch of grapes, all brought by a toothless old man whom Tom didn’t know but who was looking after him. Every day since Tom’s arrival, the little man had brought him similar small gifts, and he was right there, sitting modestly on the edge of the bed. Tom introduced him to Ruth, who embraced him gratefully. Then Ruth walked outside with Hélène and me to the parking lot where the others were waiting and said good-bye to everyone. As soon as Tom could travel, they would go home. Their story would have a happy ending.

  Hélène, as I mentioned, never found the piece of paper with Ruth and Tom’s phone number. We never knew their last name, so it’s unlikely we’ll ever find out what has happened to them. As I write this, more than three years have passed. If they’ve stuck to their plan, they should be living in the house that Tom built, with their child. Perhaps they’ve had two already. Do they ever talk about the wave? About those terrible days when each thought the other dead and their own lives washed away? Are we part of their story, the way they are part of ours? What do they remember of us? Our first names? Our faces? As for their faces, I’ve forgotten them. Hélène tells me Tom’s eyes were very blue and Ruth was beautiful. She thinks of them sometimes, mostly to hope with all her heart that they’re happy and will grow old together. Of course, in hoping that, she’s thinking about us.

  The French embassy in Colombo sent us to the Alliance Française, which was operating as a welcome center offering support to tourists affected by the catastrophe. They’d set up mattresses in classrooms and posted lists of the missing in the lobby, lists that grew by the day. Psychiatrists offered their services. Delphine had calmly agreed to see one, who later confided his concern to Hélène: Delphine was bearing up too well, refusing to allow herself to break down, which would make her inevitable collapse upon returning home all the more massive. There was something unreal, even anesthetizing about the present atmosphere of disaster, but soon reality would catch up with her. Hélène nodded; she knew the psychiatrist was right. She thought about the little girl’s room back home in Saint-Émilion, about the moment when Delphine would enter that room. To postpone that moment, we would almost have preferred not to leave, not right away, not just yet, instead staying together a little longer in the eye of the cyclone, but our departure was already being organized, with talk of seats on a plane taking off the next morning. Jérôme had himself driven, alone this time, to the hospital where Juliette’s body had been taken. When he returned, he told Delphine that she was lovely, undamaged, and then confessed to Hélène with a sob that he had lied to Delphine: in spite of the cold room, she was decomposing. His little daughter was decomposing. Then there was a whole muddle about the cremation. Delphine and Jérôme wanted to take the body home, but not for burial. When everything is absolutely unbearable, something, some detail, always manages to be more unbearable than all the rest, and for them it was the image of a little coffin. They did not want to walk behind the little coffin of their daughter. They wanted to have her cremated in France, but the authorities explained to them that this was not possible. For sanitary reasons, the body would have to be repatriated in a lead casket, soldered shut, which could neither be opened again nor incinerated. If they took it home, they would have to bury it. The other solution, if they wanted to cremate the body, was to do it at the hospital, and after a long and stormy discussion Juliette’s parents resigned themselves to that. It was already dark when Jérôme and Philippe went to the hospital. They came back much later with an already half-empty bottle of whiskey that
we polished off, and then we drank some more at a restaurant they knew, where they always dined ritually on the first evening of every visit to Sri Lanka. When closing time came, the manager agreed to sell us one more bottle. It helped us stay awake until it was time to take the plane, which we boarded drunk. We fell asleep immediately.

  What I remember of that last night in Colombo is a feeling of panic, confusion, and despair. At one point, a Buddhist ceremony was under consideration, and then it wasn’t. The cremation was done on the fly, a dirty job you couldn’t invite anyone to attend, after which there was nothing left to do but get drunk and get out. We might have stayed one day longer, tried to do things properly, but that didn’t mean anything, doing things properly: nothing made sense anymore, nothing could be right anymore, we had to finish it, just get it done, and not even properly. By dawn, at the airport, Jérôme with his quiet strength had turned into a kind of sneering punk with bloodshot eyes, taunting the other passengers, and if anyone so much as made a sound, he screamed in their faces, My daughter’s dead, fuckhead, you got that?

  I remember something else, though. We’d just arrived at the Alliance Française, where they’d asked if we wanted to take showers. Had the water been cut off or even rationed at the Hotel Eva Lanka after the wave? I don’t think so. We’d had a long day of traveling, that’s all, but it was as if we’d emerged from the desert after three months without washing. The children took their showers first, then Hélène and I, together. We stood facing each other for a long time under the thin trickle of water. We had a sense of how fragile our bodies were. I looked at Hélène’s, so lovely, so weighed down with horror and fatigue. I felt not desire but a searing pity, a need to care, to cherish, to protect forever. I thought, She might have died. She is precious to me. So precious. I’d like her to be old someday, I’d like her flesh to be old and flabby, and I’d like to still love her. Everything that had happened in those five days and was ending then, at that precise moment, washed over us. A dam opened, releasing a flood of sorrow, relief, love, all mixed together.

  I hugged Hélène and told her, I don’t want to break up anymore, not ever.

  She said, I don’t want to break up anymore either.

  6

  Two weeks after we got back to Paris I found the apartment we still live in. Several days later, the lease signed, we were inspecting the place with the Polish contractor who would be remodeling our kitchen when Hélène’s cell phone rang. She said hello, listened for a few moments, then went into the next room. When the contractor and I rejoined her, she was teary-eyed and her chin was trembling. Her father had just told her that Juliette had cancer again—again, because she’d already had cancer as an adolescent. This I knew. What else did I know about her then? That she used crutches, that she was a judge, and that she lived near the city of Vienne, in the département of Isère. Hélène rarely saw her sister; their lives were quite different, and there was always something more pressing to do than visit Vienne. But Hélène loved her. She spoke of her with tender affection and even admiration. Just before the Christmas holidays, Juliette had suffered a pulmonary embolism; Hélène had been worried, but the tsunami had swept that worry away along with the rest of our former life, and there’d been no further cause for concern since our return. Now, though, she had cancer again. Of the breast, this time, with metastases to the lungs.

  We went to see her one February weekend, at the beginning of her chemotherapy. Knowing her hair would soon fall out, she’d asked Hélène to get her a wig, so Hélène had made the rounds of the shops to find the most attractive one. She’d also bought dresses for Juliette’s three daughters. Anything to do with elegance, style, or flair—that’s Hélène’s department. It was clearly not Juliette’s or her husband’s: they were living in a modern single-family home in a charmless village, half country, half suburb. Walking in, I saw an exhausted woman who’d lost weight and no longer left her armchair; a handsome, slender, gentle husband, perhaps a bit of a dreamer; and three truly ravishing little girls, the eldest of whom—she was seven—drew sketchbooks full of princesses in royal robes and jeweled crowns, with a care and sureness of line I found astonishing for her age. She was just as serious about her dance lessons, though she laughed along when I improvised some clumsy entrechats with her to the strains of Swan Lake. But apart from these welcome shenanigans, a mixture of unease and laziness kept me on the sidelines of the conversation, which Juliette’s weakness somewhat hampered in any case. The winter afternoon dragged by; we soon turned on the lamps. As I always do when I arrive somewhere, I inspected the reading material on offer: a small bookcase held textbooks, children’s books, essays for the general public on bioethics and the law, plus a few novels of the kind one buys for a long trip. In this (to me) depressing array I spotted a more promising book, a novel by Béatrix Beck, whom I like a lot: Plus loin: mais où? (Farther Away: But Where?). Leafing through it, I came across a sentence that made me laugh, and I read it aloud to everyone: “A visit always brings pleasure—if not when it begins, then when it ends.”

  Juliette wasn’t eager for us to visit again too quickly—not until she’d recovered from the chemotherapy, she said. Two months passed, during which she and Hélène spoke only on the phone. Juliette being the type who reassures those close to her so as not to upset them, the news was all the more worrying. The doctors, she said, were optimistic. The combination of the chemo and a new therapy, Herceptin, seemed to be beating back the cancer. They were talking about a remission, however, not a cure, and even if Juliette hoped it would be a long one, her life was now reduced to this remission. When Hélène offered to come see her, Juliette replied, Let’s wait a bit, wait till the weather’s nice and we can be in the garden, that’ll be more pleasant, and anyway … just now I’m too tired. These conversations tore Hélène apart. She’d tell me, in a kind of stupor, My little sister’s going to die. Maybe in six months or a year, but it’s definite, she’s dying. I’d take Hélène in my arms, I’d cradle her face in my hands, saying, I’m here, and it’s true, I was there. I remembered how a year earlier the eldest of my own sisters had almost died, and the youngest as well, many years before: those memories helped me feel a little of what Hélène was going through, helped me to be a little more present, but except at those moments when she was talking about Juliette’s fate, or when she wasn’t but I saw that she’d been crying, the truth is that I hardly thought about it at all. Aside from that distant threat, our life was happy. To celebrate our new home, we threw a huge party, and for several weeks afterward all our friends kept telling us that parties as joyful as that one were rare indeed. I was proud of Hélène’s beauty, of her sharp wit, her generosity of character, and I loved, not feared, her streak of melancholy. The film I’d shot the previous summer was going to be shown at the Cannes Film Festival. I felt brilliant, important, and this quasi-sister-in-law with cancer off in her little house in the backwater of her dumpy province, well, I was sorry about her plight, of course, but from afar. That particular life on its way out had nothing to do with my life, in which everything seemed to be opening, unfolding. What bothered me the most was that worry was eating away at Hélène and thus keeping me (although hardly at all, actually) from freely displaying, in her presence, the slightly manic euphoria that cheered me all that spring.

  Between Cannes and the official opening of the film, there was one more stop on my path to glory: another festival, in Yokohama. I’d fly business class; the cream of the French film world would be there, and I already saw myself receiving kudos in Japanese. Hélène was working, so she couldn’t go with me, but she planned to hop down at last to Vienne while I was gone. Juliette was saying she felt somewhat better; there’d be mild weather, they could sit out in the garden. I was to leave on Monday, and on Friday I recorded the voice-over for a documentary I’d shot with a friend in Kenya. I was doing lots of things and felt I could go on forever. Recording my voice, mastering it better than I do in real life—this always brought me a narcissistic thrill
, and I’d managed to fit into the commentary the sentence that made me laugh, the one about how visits always bring pleasure, if not when they begin, then when they end, so I and my editor, Camille, left the studio quite content with ourselves and our afternoon. We went off to a café for a drink. I bummed a cigarette from a girl at the next table; she made a joke, so did I, and Camille—who’s always a great audience for me—laughed delightedly, and that’s when my cell phone rang. It was Hélène. She was calling from the TV station and leaving directly to catch a train: Juliette was dying.

  When we got off the train at the Gare de Perrache in Lyon, Hélène’s parents were waiting for us. They’d hurriedly left the house in Poitou where they were spending a few days on vacation and had just driven east all the way across France. I thought at the time that they’d waited to call Hélène until they’d covered at least half the distance, so that she wouldn’t arrive before they did, but I later discovered, back at our apartment, a series of increasingly urgent messages on our answering machine, which reminded me of the ones I’d found on mine twenty years earlier, when my youngest sister was in a serious car accident. I’d returned home too late and too drunk to listen to my messages and heard them only the next morning. The horror of the news was compounded (even if it didn’t change a thing) by the shame of having been unduly shielded from it all night long, of having slept the sleep of the drunk—if not the just—even though my mother, whom I’ve often accused of keeping silent about the truth to protect her family, had done everything she could to reach me. As Hélène and I settled into the backseat of her parents’ car, I had the feeling things were following a pattern long since abandoned: grown-ups in front, children in back. The ride to the Hôpital de Lyon-Sud was fairly long, with endless detours, signs we’d see too late, and exit ramps we couldn’t take in time, so we’d take the next one, then the service road back in the other direction. Dealing with these navigational difficulties gave us something neutral to talk about. For Hélène’s parents (and mine), good manners begin with keeping one’s feelings to oneself, but their eyes were red and Jacques, her father, gripped the wheel with shaking hands. Just before we arrived, Marie-Aude, her mother, said without turning around that this would probably be the last time we’d see Juliette. Maybe there’d be another chance tomorrow, but no one knew for certain.