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Ethel Portnoy Homo ludens
My friend Marie-Claude who lived in Paris had come into a fortune; I knew that from her letters. At last, after years of bickering with the lawyers of distant relatives, sales of foreign property, and settlements with the taxes, she had received the inheritance she had been waiting for during all the time I had known her. From being a woman who was quite well off, she had now become one who was positively rich.
When I was in Paris I arranged to meet her, one day after lunch, at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. She would be spending her morning replenishing her wardrobe. Her own lunch would be taken on a tray, between fittings. Her afternoon she would devote to culture and to me. In the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, a retrospective exhibition of Surrealist painting had just opened, so that these desiderata could be nicely combined.
A glance around the entrance-hall of the Musée made it clear that the few women I saw hanging about were not Marie-Claude. I sank onto a bench and picked up a newspaper that someone had left lying there. It was an early edition of France-Soir. A huge, very fuzzy photograph, obviously taken with a tele-lens, occupied most of the front page. It showed a terrorist standing on the balcony of a building, his head swathed in a black hood. A whole team of young men at the Olympic Games in Munich had been taken hostage. ‘Les jeux: la terreur’ said an immense headline just above this picture.
‘Some games!’ a heavy voice boomed from above my head.
I looked up, and of all people, it was Slatkin, an elderly painter, a man I used to see around in Montparnasse.
‘Eh bien! Dis donc! Slatkin! Comment ça va?’
I cried, more heartily than our slight acquaintance merited, so astonished was I at suddenly seeing this figure out of its usual context.
Interpreting these cries as an invitation, Slatkin sat down beside me, and my heart sank.
Slatkin's capacity to bore the pants off anyone he spoke to for more than thirty seconds was well known to all the habitués of Montparnasse. Every evening he could be seen making the rounds of its cheerful terrasses, a local fixture, to whom nobody paid any attention. A has-been, and old, he played the buffoon in order to make up for these two social defects. Well, and why should't he be here too, poor old thing? Perhaps in his youth he had even once met a surrealist painter.
‘And how are you doing these days?’ he said, peering closely into my face and half-closing his eyes, like a big wily pussycat. A clump of white hairs stuck out of one of his nostrils like a bush. I tried to put out of my mind the image of how it used to dip into his beer.
‘I live in Holland now.’
‘Left Paris, eh? Well, I can't blame you. It has become a madhouse. I too have left, in a manner of speaking. I spend most of my time in the country. I have bought an old mill. That's right, a mill. It's the biggest place for miles around. Can you imagine, me, Slatkin? Je suis le seigneur du village!’
So the inhabitants of some French bled considered this elderly Polish Jew as their feudal lord. I tried to suppress a smile, but he noticed it. ‘You are loffing’ he said jovially.
‘Not at all, not at all.’ What the hell was keeping Marie-Claude?
‘Oh it's a beautiful place. But a bit primitive, you know? So last year I decided to build a wing onto it, and start a bathroom. A bathroom! Rather call it a well into which I throw money. They have been working on it for over a year now. What with one thing and
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another, that bathroom has so far cost me three million francs. (Like all us old-timers, he talked in millions.) Why you could buy a whole new house down there for three million francs! It's a folly, the whole thing is a folly! I'm sorry I ever started it.’
I looked despairingly at the revolving-doors. ‘It was for my son that I did it, my son and that girl he lives with. I'm building the bathroom for them; I gave them their own private suite, and now with it they'll even have a private bathroom no less. Can you imagine, he is eighteen and she is twenty-six! I tell her, how can you, a girl of twenty-six, want to live with a boy of eighteen? Your best years are passing by, don't you see the risk you are taking? She says she sees it very well, but she stays ... Is that someone you were waiting for?’
‘I thought it was, but it isn't.’
‘I can't understand it about the boy.’ What boy, I thought, and then, oh yes, his son. ‘He was doing so well at school, he passed the first part of the bac, and now he has given it all up to go into the theatre!’
‘My, my’ I said, not knowing whether this was supposed to be bad or good.
‘So what could I do? I'm paying him a course in theatre-school; some academy he found in Marseille, he says it's very good. Can you imagine, he was such a good student, he could have gone on to the university, got a good job - and he throws it all up for this!’
Perhaps it was poetic justice that Slatkin should now be cast in the role of the anxious father - he, Slatkin, who must have given his own father white hairs when he ran away from Poland to Paris to become a painter. But before I could think of suitable condolences, the revolving-doors admitted Marie-Claude into the hallway. She stood there for an instant in an aura of light from the streeet, peering into the gloom, looking for me. Her hair was more blonde than it used to be, and she had it now in a long page-boy style. She was wearing a navy blue coat and high-heeled sandals. She was also ten pounds lighter, and looked ten years younger.
I waved and she came rushing over. ‘You look lovely’ I told her, as we hugged each other, ‘How did you do it?’
‘Well, I found this marvelous doctor, and he gave me these marvelous pills. They're absolutely marvelous, you must try them. I never even once think about food, or being hungry. And there are no nasty side-effects-except, of course, that sometimes I don't sleep very well.’ She looked thoughtful, remembering this one nasty side-effect. We must lose weight, I thought, before the skin loses its elasticity.
‘Have a good time at the exhibition’ a heavy voice boomed from behind us; it was Slatkin. Hastily I introduced him to Marie-Claude, and then rushed her up the steps to the turnstile. We marched around the galleries, paying our tribute to culture. Boredom seemed to be in my stars that afternoon; I had shaken off Slatkin, only to discover that the show too was a bore - cautious, pompous and pious, all that surrealism was not. Still, towards the end, I came upon three superb canvases that I had never seen anywhere before (in itself, a pleasure!) hanging together all by themselves on one wall. Whose could these be? I consulted the catalogue, and learned from it that Slatkin had a first name: Marcel.
‘Why the son of a gun!’ I whispered. ‘They're beautiful!’
‘What is it?’ asked Marie-Claude.
‘You met him in the hall’ I said lamely.
We looked for him, on the way out, but he didn't seem to be around any more.
‘Oh, what a pity’ said Marie. ‘Too bad. Now listen - you don't mind if I leave you for a few hours now, do you? I have something very important to attend to.’ Spending her newfound money kept her rather busy.
‘Not at all. I'll stop in at Galignani's. I'm looking for a certain book.’
‘Oh good. If I'm not there before you, the concierge will give you the keys. Just go right in and make yourself at home. I'll be along at about five-thirty. Au ‘voir!’ And she ran off
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with the step of a young girl in the direction of the Place Vendôme.
Galignani's, in the rue de Rivoli, turned out to be farther from their place than I had imagined. It had been a mistake to try to cover the whole distance on foot. By the time I stood before the door of the flat, it was already five minutes to six. At any rate, I had got there before Marie-Claude, and the keys were in my hands.
On the door there were two locks, a big one and a small one.
Inside the flat, I heard the phone start ringing. I fumbled at the locks. On the key-ring were five keys. Not one of them bore a label.
The phone inside rang unremittingly.
Frantically, I tried key after key. At last I solved the mystery of the bigger of the two locks. It opened with the smallest key, the one I had passed over the first time round, having assumed that it belonged to the wine-cellar. With a heavy click, the door sprang open, and I rushed across the thick carpet to the niche where I remembered the phone used to be. I picked up the receiver - just as it stopped ringing.
With a groan I dropped my book-laden handbag to the floor and sank into an armchair.
A few minutes later, keys turned in the locks and Marie-Claude walked in. But what had happened to her?
‘Can you see the difference? I've just had a facial at Guerlain. And they re-did my makeup for me too. Oh it was heavenly!’
A whole afternoon for a facial - and the effect so catastrophic! Light blue eyeshadow is so ageing, I thought, but refrained from saying. ‘Maurice will be along any minute’ she said, pulling off her gloves finger by finger, ‘and then we'll all drive out together. I think I'll do the driving - he's so tired these days, le pauvre.’
‘Didn't he go with you to Portugal?’
‘No. He stayed on at Plaisance, and re-did all the wiring. I couldn't get him to come along. Heaven knows he needed a rest! But he said it was just like a vacation, having all of us away. And then he worked so hard out there, all on his own. I'm sure he never ate properly.’
‘But Germaine.’
‘Germaine was having her vacation too, so there was no one to feed him.’
‘Well, I'm dying to see it all.’
‘And Maurice is dying to show it to you.
Especially the gardens. He's been talking about your visit for weeks. I don't know why he hasn't arrived yet. He walks, you know, from his office. So good for the heart. Let's see, if he left at six, he should be here in about ten minutes, I should think.’
Ten minutes went by. We drank lukewarm whisky and soda - they had turned off the fridge - and chatted about how hard Maurice was working. The great inheritance Marie-Claude had come into did not seem to have encouraged him to take life easier - quite the contrary - he was working harder and harder, fiercely, even, ‘And no need’ Marie-Claude said, shaking her head helplessly. ‘Things are going so well. But he insists on doing everything himself - everywhere. If only he would shift some of his burdens, take on an assistant... he gets so tired, so irritable... I almost can't handle him, sometimes...’
A long silence followed this confession.
‘Say Marie-Claude - when I got here the phone was ringing. You don't think it might have been Maurice, do you?’
‘Do you think so? Perhaps... I said I would be here around six. Perhaps he wanted to tell me he would go straight out by train, instead of coming back here! Maybe we had better go at once! Oh, I'm sorry - do finish your drink! What time is it? Why it's a quarter to seven already! Oh dear, I hope we'll still have some light left, when you arrive, to look at the gardens. He had set such store by it!’
The drive through Paris at a quarter to seven went fairly quickly, but at the entrance to the Autoroute du Sud thousands of cars were stuck in a bottleneck on the huge square leading to the tunnel, their drivers tense and sweating, the air literally vibrating with their impatience, their exasperation, their exhaustion. ‘Oh dear,
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oh dear’ Marie-Claude kept whispering, shifting gears and pushing pedals, stopping, starting, slowly inching forward in the dog-eat-dog atmosphere that is the hallmark of a Paris traffic-jam.
At last we were out and onto the open road, flashing past landscapes of incredibly manicured beauty. I glanced at my watch and observed with dismay that it was nearly a quarter to eight. Night falls quickly in the autumn, and with every passing minute, a substance like ink was seeping deeper and deeper into the twilit air around us. Maurice was on my mind; on her mind too.
‘He isn't well’ she said suddenly. ‘You'll see what I mean when we get there. He looks so pale; he's always in a bad mood.’
‘Perhaps he ought to see a doctor.’
‘Oh, he's perfectly all right physically. But something is eating him.’
‘Yet one would think, here is a man who has everything’ I said sententiously.
‘I know, but the money is all from me, that's the trouble.’
‘Surely for an intelligent person, that would hardly be a consideration?’
‘Oh he has his work and all - but it all has paled to nothing compared to that great sum that suddenly fell upon us. We spent most of it on buying Plaisance - but there is still plenty left, more than enough - he needn't have done the wiring himself, for instance; he needn't even work any more, for that matter!’
‘Just lie back and do nothing? You can't be serious.’
‘No, but I wish we could... Oh never mind... Sometimes I wish we had never got the cursed money. We were doing so well as it was, and then everything changed; I can't explain...’ She sighed.
I sighed. ‘I'm so curious to see this Plaisance’ I said at last, in order to say something.
‘Well, you'll see it soon enough because we are almost there.’
And there it was, a high stone wall, a heavy wooden porte-cochère. Marie-Claude pulled the car to a stop, and I stepped out into the open air, the perfumed air of the French countryside, that mingled odor of grass, fruit, and wild roses, an odor so voluptuous that it makes you want to fall moaning to the ground. A dog began to bark, the heavy doors swung open, and there was Maurice, his face ashen in the light of the gateway lantern. ‘So there you are!’ he shouted, straight at Marie-Claude, without even bothering to acknowledge my presence. ‘I told you I would ring you at five-thirty!’
‘But mon chéri, we had decided that if I hadn't spoken to you by six, I would wait for you at the flat, and that was what I did!’
‘I told you I would ring between five-thirty and six, and if I got no answer I would come straight out here. That was the agreement. That was what we had agreed.’
‘Yes darling, and when I got there it was five to six, so we waited for you!’
‘Why didn't you come straight out here at once? I rang you every five minutes between five-thirty and six and you weren't even there. Where were you, anyway?’
‘Please Maurice,’ I kept shouting, ‘I did hear the phone ringing at five to six but I couldn't get the door open!’ No one listened to me, for their dog Dumpling barked steadily, mingling his high-pitched yelps with my expostulations. Anyway, it was as if I didn't even exist; they were alone, in a brightly-lit ring, locked in battle high above a darkened stadium. Behind them the two little boys cowered with white tense faces, watching their parents quarrel. And behind the boys, like a theatrical backdrop, stood the magnificent eighteenth-century building they had so wanted me to admire.
‘You said - and I wish I had it on a tape - that you'd phone me between five-thirty and six, and I was there at six sharp’ Marie-Claude shrieked piteously, her face convulsed with anguish.
‘No I didn't, I said that if I hadn't spoken to you by six it meant I was coming straight out here.’
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‘Oh what does it matter, Maurice, we're here and the house is really beautiful’ I pleaded, but to no avail.
There seemed to be nothing else we could think of saying. In silence we walked along the path to the fine columned doorway, behind which Germaine was standing with a welcoming smile, waiting to shake my hand. Surely she must have heard the scene at the gate, but with perfect control she behaved as if it had not taken place at all. We passed at once to the table, where Maurice was silent, breaking off small bits of bread as he waited for the hors d'oeuvre and eating them ragingly, while the rest of us - me, Marie-Claude, Jean-Pierre, and little Guy, stared down at our plates with deeply guilty faces.
A terrible meal! Everyone ate but nobody tasted anything. Because no one felt like talking, Maurice got up and switched on the radio that stood in a corner of the room. We were just in time for the tail-end of the eight o'clock news. In some guttural foreign language a man was speaking; from the rhythm of his phrases he seemed to be pleading. ‘That was the father of one of the hostages’ a voice said in French when he had finished. What's that, I thought, and then I remembered, oh yes, the Games, the hostages.
‘These brochettes are cold’ said Maurice bitterly, looking with distaste at the squares of meat on the skewers. ‘Germaine had them lying for hours in the marinade to get them just right, and now you have spoiled it all.’
‘They're warm enough from the oven’ MarieClaude said defensively.
‘Yes but all the juices have dried out, don't you see?’
The little boys excused themselves hastily after the meal. Crammed with distressful bread, we moved on to the salon for coffee. It was a huge room, the kind of room in which they could hang tapestries as other people hang paintings. Along one wall, a row of french-windows gave on to the garden - pitch-dark by now, of course.
‘Watch this’ said Maurice, and touched a switch. A great and glorious old tree sprang into view just outside the windows, lit from underneath by spotlights.
‘Fantastic’ I breathed.
‘Did it along with the rest of the wiring, in August.’
‘Decorating this room will be a life's work’ I said, glancing round at the high, bare walls.
‘How do you intend to go about it?’
‘Well’ said Marie-Claude, ‘I was thinking of having orange trees, in boxes; between each window, you know.’
‘My, how art-déco that will look, art-déco dix-huitième.’
‘I tell you I don't want orange trees between the windows’ Maurice interrupted angrily. ‘The windows must have velvet curtains, and then there will be no room for your orange trees.’ ‘Do you think curtains would be nicer?’ asked Marie-Claude, wistfully looking at me.
‘Well, I rather like the idea of the orange trees’ I said, ‘But it's true, if you have those, there won't be room for curtains too.’ I glanced uneasily at Maurice. What was eating him, why was he so white and jumpy? He had everything - what more could anyone want, what more could there even be to want?
Perhaps that was the trouble. He had that ‘is that all’ feeling, that well-known feeling that people suddenly get in middle life. Is that all. My glance in his direction must have touched off some spring, for he at once jumped up and started the record-player. The acoustics of the huge room were indeed breath-taking. To show off his new four-track stereo, he turned up the sound as loud as the human ear could bear.
‘Do the boys have other children to play with, around here?’ I yelled; perhaps if a conversation started he would turn the thing down a bit.
‘Yes indeed’ cried Marie-Claude, ‘a family with two boys, just a bit older. And they live only five minutes from here.’
‘No, three minutes’ cried Maurice.
‘Oh, Maurice, five’ said Marie-Claude, who
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never knew when to stop.
‘I tell you, they live only three minutes away!’ ‘Maurice, it takes the boys a full five minutes to walk there.’
‘Three, I tell you, three! You can go out and measure; it's exactly one hundred and fifty metres from that doorway. How many metres can a normal human being walk in a minute? Answer me!’
At the other end of the room, the phone started to ring. Maurice got up and walked - twenty-five metres - to answer it. Marie-Claude and I were left alone, sitting there, facing each other, speechless. She sat a moment, shaking her head, no, no, and then began to cry, her small face crumpling like a crushed rag, her shoulders hunched over her breasts, like a little old woman in her misery. I wrung my hands; if Maurice were to come back now and see this, he would really let her have it. As if to forestall any such eventuality, she got up and rushed out of the room through the nearest door. A few moments later - he was still on the phone - she was back, with a newly washed face, and gone was Guerlain - scrubbed and blunt and middle-aged was the face she sat with now.
Back from his phone-call, Maurice did not seem to notice any difference.
‘Shall we take a look at the gardens?’ he said.
‘I'll get a flashlight.’
As we stepped through the french-windows, the perfumed night fell upon us like a mantle of grace, and once Maurice's mood changed; it was as if his anger and annoyance evaporated, dissolved into the vastness of the dark. The black air was breathless, and, this being the country, we could even see the stars. Above the wall that bounded their gardens, I made out the dark shape of a forest. In the valley below twinkled the lights of the village. Maurice began racing along the garden paths, holding his flashlight down; it was like going along the aisles of a cinema. I trotted dutifully right behind him, and behind me came Marie-Claude, in her high-heeled sandals.
Maurice stopped before a great dark mound, its shape completely masked by a storm of ivy. ‘The folly’ he said proudly. ‘Designed by Mansard. The Division of Monuments have promised us some money to restore it. That means we shall have to show it to visitors. But only on selected days.’
‘When the weather is nice we can take tea in it’ chirped Marie-Claude.
I thought of the strange combination of circumstances that had helped her to exchange, for these fragrant gardens, the shaky old warehouse of her uncle in Macao, that had been crammed to bursting with black lacquer bowls, celluloid letter-openers, bamboo flutes, and matchstick parasols for the decoration of ice-creams - the whole lot stored up for years and engulfed in a musty smell that would cling to those objects long after they had made their way to the Western world. What was becoming of that warehouse now? Perhaps the export of little wooden boxes decorated with a hand-painted scene of a pagoda standing next to a bridge was essential to the economy of an Eastern nation, and girls would still be sitting in some steamy slum, hour after hour, painting them. In the meantime, all that had been magically transmuted into this elegant façade, those graceful balustrades, those high protective walls. I uttered a deep sigh.
‘You are tired’ said Marie-Claude. ‘Come on, Maurice. We'll save the rest for the morning.’ Maurice looked quite peaceful. Our walk, my unfeigned admiration of what I could see, even in pitch darkness, of his new and great estate, had put him in a better mood. In wordless agreement as to the best strategy to follow, Marie-Claude and I said good-night, and, although ostensibly trailing after him, she quickly led him away.
I had been hoping to talk with her alone for a few moments. Back there in the salon, her sudden tears had made me think that we could drop the pretense of everything being fine, just fine. Instead, engulfed in trivialities, the moment had passed.
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***
I kept waking up, off and on, during the night, because of the crying of an owl. I suppose that was the reason, for whenever I opened my eyes, I could hear its plaintive call echoing over the long garden paths. I was sleeping badly because it was a strange bed and in my fitful dreams the crying of the owl turned into the voice of the father I had heard on the radio while we were at dinner. With red-rimmed eyes, he kept plucking at my clothing the way some people will, trying to convince me that his son was such a good student, that I should persuade the man in the black hood to let him go. ‘I can't help you’ I kept telling him, ‘ask the people from the television.’
Towards dawn I fell into a deep slumber, and finally slept far into the morning. When I came downstairs I could find no one in any of the rooms. I walked the length of the salon, into the dining-room, and past a number of pantries, into the kitchen. Madame a bien dormi?’ asked Germaine; she was standing there, ironing, oozing contentment like a warm teapot. Plump and sleek, like a cat, - well-fed, well-housed by her masters. No attachments, no troubles. Her own woman.
As I was finishing my bowl of coffee, Marie-Claude came bustling in. She looked fresh and gay - a night's rest had smoothed her face.
Dumpling ran into the room behind her, wagging his tail. He began to paw my thigh for a lump of sugar.
‘Now you can see the gardens as they should be seen’ said Marie-Claude.
‘Good! Let's call Maurice.’
‘Oh he isn't here. He's gone down to the village.’
‘What about the hostages’ I asked. ‘Did you hear the news this morning?’
‘No. But Maurice will be bringing back the newspapers. He's been up for hours already.’ I followed her into the bright morning. The air was crisp, with a touch of early frost. A roaring noise came from the forest above.
‘What's that?’
‘A bulldozer. They're building low-cost housing up there.’
‘Paris is coming out to engulf you.’
‘We tried everything to stop them, but I think the Finance Minister's brother-in-law has something to do with the company, so it was no use. And it's miles from here to the station. They'll all have to have smelly cars to get to work in the morning.’
And what will be their thoughts, I reflected, as they look down on this place, where for a few weeks a year four people, their maid and their dog occupy twenty rooms and five acres of land.
We had been moving along a maze of paths to the kitchen-gardens. Dumpling had been following us, and now some fury possessed him to dig in the soft earth of the vegetable-beds for a long-forgotten treasure. ‘Dumpling, look what you're doing!’ shrieked Marie, ‘you're covered in filth! You'll bring it all into the house!’ In the course of our walk, Dumpling's belly-hairs, which nearly touched the ground, had received a plentiful bath of dew. Now mats of earth were clinging to them. ‘You are not a dog, you are a pig!’
While Marie-Claude went off to clean Dumpling, I returned to my room to pack my pyjamas. Germaine had already made the bed, and I found them neatly folded under the pillow. Putting them into my bag, I saw the catalogue of the Surrealist exhibition and took it out: we had been there only yesterday, yet it seemed like a month ago. I riffled through the pages looking at the paintings - black and white reproductions, with none of the impact of the originals. But in the back, there were photographs of the artists. Aragon, jeune. Breton, jeune. Dali, jeune, Slatkin, jeune. Slatkin, jeune! Decidedly, there was no getting away from him these days. I sat down on the bed and studied the photo. It certainly looked nothing like the Slatkin I knew. Only the eyes were something like those that looked out of the craggy fortress of the old man's face - and then,
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only their expression - there was hardly anything left of their original shape. No amount of facials at Guerlain can smooth this out, I thought. Age is a form of acromegaly. It's in the bones... And yet, of all of us here, he, le seigneur du village, was the truly happy one. Still following the gleam.
When I walked back into the salon, Maurice was just entering it from the other door. He had a newspaper in his hand. He looked decidedly better this morning, pink and rosy. ‘The Games?’ I asked.
He tapped the paper demonstratively. ‘Dead, all dead!’ he announced.
‘All?’
‘All.’
‘So the German police opened fire.’
‘Mais oui, the imbeciles. They must have been crazy.’
‘Crazy like a fox’ I muttered. ‘Now they're rid of the whole problem.’ He handed me the paper and I studied it. When the police had opened fire, the terrorists had done as they had threatened; they had blown up their helicopter, with themselves and all the hostages together. I gave the paper back to Maurice. His spirits had risen, that was clear.
‘I got some brochures this morning, about pools. It's not as expensive as I thought, a pool. And it would be so great for the boys!’ So that was it. Toujours en avant. Thank heaven he had found something to look forward to. A pool.
After lunch they drove me to the station. The sky was clouding over, and with it, Maurice's mood seemed to be changing again. He had sunk back into himself. Marie-Claude sat beside him in the front seat, with Dumpling on her lap, stealing apprehensive glances at his profile.
***
In the train, the photos of the tragedy were on the front pages of all three newspapers within my line of vision. On the one just opposite me, I could study the burnt-out helicopter in detail. All dead. The good students. The terrorists. All the boys. And their fathers? Sorrow in widening ripples was spreading through the world. Crime and banditry. Distress and perplexity. Will continue until the bishops open Joanna Southcott's box. How does it feel to be blown up? A quick death. Like a bursting feeling. Like a punch on the chin, or a smash on the skull with a hammer. At the same time, a loud blasting sound in the ears. Or does one ever hear the sound at all?
Across the aisle from me, occupying a seat all by himself, was a red-haired man, a farmworker, to guess from his clothes and shoes. What I could see of his face was deeply-grooved and reddish; he had the kind of complexion that red-haired men will get when exposed to too much sunlight. I thought at first, he is looking out of the window, but then I thought, no, he is crying. That was why there was no one sitting next to him. Then I thought, illogically, he must be crying about the helicopter - but of course it wasn't that; he had no newspaper; he was crying about some private thing of his own.
Twenty minutes later, at the Gare St. Lazare, I located my bus-stop and climbed into my bus. With distracted eye, I watched the opulent shop-windows of the Seizième go flashing past. Hats, shoes, dresses. Cars, tools, toys. The world is too much with us. In one shop-window, fifteen television sets were all showing the same, ice-cream colored picture: a group of long-legged athletes, chugging along, head-on towards the camera. It was the Games, of course. The show must go on. From now on, reality with its hard edges and garish colors, its woe, misery and confusion, would perhaps seem easier to bear, in terms of these softened outlines, these pastel tints.
The bus stopped. A crowd of people got off, and another crowd of people got on. Idly, I watched two women who were sitting in the front seat of a parked car on the other side of the street. The one at the wheel was explaining
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something to the one beside her. The one at the wheel looked upset. One of her hands went up to her forehead. Then the same hand, slightly cupped, came down to cover one side of her face, like a screen - and then her shoulders started to shake, and then, by god, there she was, crying too! This was the second person I had seen crying within the past hour, and if one counted last night, it was the third! What had got into everybody these days? If I had a computer and fed into it all the things I had seen over the past two days, and then asked, is this life bearable, what would be its answer? As the bus pulled away I too started to cry. I can't help you, I thought, even I cannot cope, there's too much, and I can't handle it all either; I can't, I can't, I can't, I can't.
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