That Time of Year

by Marie Ndiaye

  “All right, your taxi’s here,” the desk clerk came to say.

  In a murmur, she added: “It’s the worst taxi in L.”

  Herman tried to pick up his in-laws’ suitcase, but his frail arms wouldn’t let him, and the father, disturbed, remarked:

  “You’re in sad shape, my boy.”

  But he himself nearly collapsed when he unwarily strode through the hotel’s front door and the rain hit him square in the chest. They piled into the car as best they could.

  “It’ll cost extra today, understand?” asked the driver.

  He turned to them, his face fat and purple, and they saw that he had no nose. Rose’s mother let out a little cry. Then, embarrassed, she put her face to the window and pretended to study the street.

  “Whatever you like,” Herman said quietly.

  Resigned, he realized the man was drunk. The taxi reeked of wine. Slowly they drove out of L., the car already rocking and lurching in the wind.

  “How ugly, how horrible this city is,” the mother whispered; on the brink of tears, Herman thought.

  The driver had heard her, and he raised one index finger high. Now they were out on the dark highway, driving so slowly that Herman was sure his liquefaction would be complete long before they got to the village.

  The driver half turned around toward them, showing his perfectly flat profile, feverish, and told them:

  “Yes, but you didn’t know L. the way it was back in my day, long ago, it was beautiful, take my word for it, I was born there, I grew up there, before the war, it was a different place then, you should have seen it, old timber-framed houses, half-timbers, all leaning and crooked, then the war, the bombs, the fires, and then in the middle of all that off goes my nose, it was shrapnel, a chunk of my cheek blown away, and my whole nose along with it, ‘Have you seen your nose? Where did your nose go?’ I’ve been hearing that for the past fifty years, in every café in L., ‘So-and-so has your nose in his pocket, my house is built on your nose,’ that’s perfectly possible, the rubble, it was in there, buried somewhere, my nose is somewhere in the ground under L., in its walls, I think about that all the time, you understand, I talk to it, I call out to it, I see it, it’s poking out between two bricks, or when I’m walking downtown there it is stuck between two paving stones, that’s my nose, and that, right, how can you ever forgive that, how can you forgive…”

  As he spoke, he slapped his face just above his mouth over and over again.

  “Ha ha!” snickered Rose’s father.

  He looked at Herman and made a gesture like he was twisting his nose, to signify that the driver was drunk.

  “Ha ha,” murmured Herman.

  Then the car slowed to a stop; the driver cursed, pounded the wheel.

  “There we go, she’s died on us!” he cried.

  MARIE NDIAYE was born in 1976 in Pithiviers, France. She is the author of around twenty novels, plays, collections of stories, and nonfiction books, which have been translated into numerous languages. She’s received the Prix Femina and the Prix Goncourt, France’s highest literary honor, and her plays are in the repertoire of the Comédie-Française.

  JORDAN STUMP is one of the leading translators of innovative French literature. The recipient of numerous honors and prizes, he has translated books by Nobel laureate Claude Simon, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, and Éric Chevillard, as well as Jules Verne’s French-language novel The Mysterious Island. His translation of NDiaye’s All My Friends was shortlisted for the French-American Foundation Translation Prize.