On A Day Like This (11 page)

The realtor said they wouldn’t sign the final contract for another six weeks at the earliest. Andreas said he would be moving out in a couple of days, and going abroad. The realtor said he could give someone power of attorney to represent him in front of the notary. The money would be transferred to his account after the sale.

On Monday, the furniture dealer came and picked up the furniture. He was about to pick up the statue of the Huntress when Andreas said he’d prefer to keep it. The junk dealer said it was valueless. He offered Andreas a sum for the furniture that was far too low. Andreas argued with him for the sake of it, and managed to get a little more money out of him.

Everything he owned now fitted into a suitcase, the same red artificial leather suitcase he had arrived with in the city eighteen years ago: a few clothes, toiletries, a sleeping bag, Fabienne’s letters, the cassettes, and the two books he had decided to hold on to. He wasn’t even taking his address book. He felt light, free of all his ballast. It was as though he had been asleep all those years, grown numb like a limb that hadn’t moved for ages. Now he felt that same pleasant pain that you feel
when the blood shoots back into an arm or a leg. He was still alive, he could move.

That night was Andreas’s last in the apartment. He spread the sleeping bag out on the floor as on the first nights he had spent there, and, just as then, the apartment felt strange to him and a little frightening. He slept badly. When he woke up, it was just getting light. His footfall echoed in the empty rooms, and his cough sounded quite threatening. Andreas went up to the window and threw it open. It had rained a little overnight, and the cement slabs in the yard all glistened darkly. He lit a cigarette and smoked it without enjoyment. He watched a blackbird whistling and skipping from branch to branch. When he shut the window, he frightened it and it flew off. He had meant to stay a little longer to take his leave of the place that he would never see again, but suddenly it no longer interested him. It wasn’t possible to say good-bye to anything or anyone, he thought. The last look was just like the first, and memory was no more than one of many possibilities.

He wrapped the statuette in one of the curtains he had taken down from the windows. Then, without a last look back, he left the apartment. In the mailbox he found a couple of flyers and a letter, which he pocketed without looking for the sender’s name. He thought
he should have gotten in touch with the post office before leaving, but then he had no forwarding address, and didn’t know where he was going. Presumably his mail would be returned to sender, with a little stamp,
Addressee Unknown
.

He dropped the key in the mailbox, as he’d agreed with the realtor. When the front door shut behind him, he stopped for a moment, uncertain which way to go. In the end he went the way he had gone almost every day for the last few years. He walked down the street to the Boulevard de Clichy. At the bank, he withdrew all the money he had in his account. Then he walked on, straight on, to the Boulevard de Magenta, and from there to the Gare du Nord. When he reached the hospital, he walked a little faster, as though afraid someone might recognize him and stop him. Behind the station, he was approached by a woman of about his own age.

“Excuse me,” she said, as their eyes met.

Andreas raised his hand to ward her off. Though the woman didn’t look poor, he was certain she would ask him for money. He wanted to say something, but his voice failed him. Only his mouth moved. The woman mouthed something back to him, and they each went on their own way. Maybe she just wanted to ask me the
time, he thought, or directions to somewhere. He turned around. The woman was nowhere in sight.

He took the train to Deuil. He was later than usual, the rush hour was over, but the train was full just the same, and he had to stand in the corridor with his suitcase and his wrapped statue. In Deuil, he didn’t walk to school, but took the other direction.

The used car dealer would have preferred to sell Andreas a different car than the old 2CV. He said he had higher performance models on offer, for only a slightly higher price.

“It’s a collector’s item,” he said, “what you’re paying for is the name. Let me show you something a bit sportier.”

“I am a collector,” said Andreas. He said he would pay cash. He took a wad of banknotes from his pocket, and counted out the money in front of the astonished seller.

“Can I take it right away?”

The salesman said he had to get registration papers issued for it first. That would take at least five days. Andreas asked if there was a hotel anywhere nearby. The salesman didn’t know of any hotels here. There were the
spa hotels in Enghien, but they were expensive. If he didn’t want to go back into the city, there were plenty of cheap places to stay on the
Périphérique
.

Andreas took a taxi to the Porte de la Chapelle. Right on the motorway, he found a cheap Etap hotel, and took a room. He said he wasn’t sure how long he’d be staying, and paid for one night.

It wasn’t midday yet, and he had to wait until his room was ready. He sat in the lobby. Along a wall were machines for drinks and candy, and one that sold maps, dictionaries, toothbrushes, and condoms. Everything a man could wish for, thought Andreas. A couple of young blacks stood around in front of the machines, talking loudly. Not hotel guests, he thought.

Andreas watched a couple with their son, standing at the reception desk, talking to the clerk. The father was not much older than he was, but he looked tired and unhealthy. He was wearing jeans and an old-fashioned knitted sweater, over a little beer belly. The son, who was as old as Andreas’s pupils, was almost as tall as his father. He was thin and pale and had a spotty face. The mother had short, bleached hair. Andreas was sure they were German. The man looked lost and uncertain, and the woman ill-tempered. The porter was talking to them a little exasperatedly.

Andreas went up to the reception desk, and asked, in German, if he could help. The man looked at him in surprise, and then explained that he had thought the car park was included in the price for the room. Andreas translated. The porter said the price for the underground garage was separate. It wasn’t a very great amount, but the father seemed not to have been expecting the extra expense. The family didn’t look well-off, presumably they were on a budget, and maybe had spent more money than they had.

The woman said once or twice they didn’t have to stand for it. She looked disapprovingly at her husband, as though he was to blame for the mix-up. For a brief moment, Andreas thought of paying for it himself, but he knew it wouldn’t help in the end.

The room was small, and you could tell that all possible economies had been made on it. There was a toilet, but no bath. The door to the shower was glass, and opened directly into the room, the washbasin was mounted on the wall just next to it. Tucked behind the head of the double bed was a narrow foldaway cot for a third person. Andreas imagined the German family spending the night in a room like this, the parents in the bed, the boy
above them in the cot. He imagined them showering in the morning, the nakedness and the lack of space, the boy’s embarrassment as he treated his face with an acne preparation without being able to lock the bathroom door, the way he did at home. He imagined them traipsing through Paris, looking for the beauty of the city, and he asked himself whether they had found it. Their feet were hurting, they stopped for lunch in a restaurant with a German menu, where the waiter cheated them. Then there was an argument, because the parents wanted to go to a museum, and the boy didn’t. And then, when they asked him what he wanted to do, he couldn’t say anything.

Andreas was glad he had missed all that. He was glad he had never had a family. It was as near as he wanted to get, the times when his pupils went up to him at the end of class, and told him of their problems, and when he called the parents, and tried to mediate. Once or twice a pupil had even slept on his sofa, when home had become completely impossible.

He stood by the window and looked out at the many lanes of the highway. You couldn’t open the windows. They were soundproofed; only rarely you could hear the stifled sound of a car horn or an especially loud gear-change.

Andreas had been in his room since midday. He spent hours watching the traffic, sometimes the cars drove very close together, sometimes a little less, and then toward evening they solidified in columns, and now they were just starting to crawl forward again. The drivers had switched on their headlights. Night fell. They will drive like this forever, he thought, the traffic will never get any less. He thought about his death, or tried to think about it. But his life had been so uneventful that he couldn’t imagine his death. He could only see himself lying in some hospital somewhere. And then the road again, the numberless cars.
God Almighty has counted them up, to be sure that none is missing
. The stars, the grains of sand, the sheep in His herd. Even when he was a child, Andreas hadn’t believed in that.

Fear, fear wasn’t a thought. Fear seemed to come from outside. When Andreas thought of being sick he didn’t feel fear. He was desperate, confused, he struggled with himself, he reproached himself. Whereas fear came suddenly, without warning. It was like a darkening of his thoughts. Fear made it impossible to breathe, crushed his body until he felt ready to explode and break apart into a fine spray consisting of billions and billions of tiny droplets, spinning into the void.
In the morning, the whole hotel stank of disinfectant. For breakfast there was coffee in plastic cups, the bread was soggy, and the orange juice watered.

Andreas left the hotel. The sky was gray, but it wasn’t cold. He strolled through the neighborhood. Not since he had first come to Paris, had he ever been out here. He had driven through St. Denis every day, but only ever seen the huge residential blocks from the train window, and in between them streets with dinky single-family homes in postage-stamp gardens, and further out, near the Stade de France, the new commercial district that had sprung up over the last few years.

Not far from the hotel was a cemetery, behind a high wall. Next to it was a funeral parlor, with a display of various sample gravestones in different shades of marble. In the window was a poster for their summer sale item, which was a stone in pale granite, and a stele with your own choice of top, all at a very low price. Andreas entered the cemetery. A man in a tracksuit came out of the toilet right beside the entrance, and walked past him. Andreas felt reminded of a joke he had once heard. It was something to do with death and tracksuits. He couldn’t remember how it went. A plane crash, maybe? He walked slowly between the rows of graves. There were some in which whole families were buried
together. The lists of names were like family sagas, the names of the oldest were barely decipherable, and the newest had a brassy gleam. He stopped in front of one particularly ugly grave with heavy iron chains and a roof copied from some Greek temple. He read the names and dates. Between the Fifties and the Eighties no one in the family seemed to have died, but then in the space of a few years, there had been five deaths. There was a withered bunch of flowers on the grave, so there had to be descendants, people who remembered the dead. There was room on the slab for another one or two names anyway.

Andreas left the cemetery, and walked on through the
quartier
. He was astonished how clean and tidy everything looked. He read the names by the doorbells, foreign-sounding names, he couldn’t tell where they came from. Some sounded Arabic, others Eastern European or Asian. There was almost no one on the streets. There were no shops, only a community center with public baths and showers. In the windows of a kindergarten hung some colored drawings, a dozen terrifying android beings all with extra-large heads, that looked exactly the same.

At noon Andreas was back in the hotel. He paid the room for another night. He had bought a few magazines,
and spent the afternoon lying on his bed, reading articles about the most scenic golf courses in the world, and about plastic surgery, and about film festivals. In a women’s magazine he found a list of a hundred tips for good sex. Try to look attractive at all times, comb your hair and freshen your lipstick. Small gifts spread happiness. Complimenting your partner’s physique will intensify your pleasure and his.

He fell asleep. When he awoke, it was nighttime. He felt restless, he knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep anymore. He left the hotel, and prowled through the neighborhood. After a while, he got to the new business centers that he had been able to see every day from the train. A few of them were only just completed, and not yet occupied. The glass facades had a blackish sheen in the light of the streetlamps. There were security cameras everywhere, but not a soul around.

On the way back, he passed the cemetery again, which was closed now. He wondered who would visit his grave, who would think of him when he was dead. Walter and Bettina, maybe. And apart from them? From time to time someone would read the inscription on his stone, and calculate the age at which he had died, and think he didn’t get to grow very old. And in twenty years’ time, Walter or one of his children would sign a
form, and Andreas’s grave would be cleared, and there would be no more trace of him.

Andreas stayed at the hotel for a week. Every morning after breakfast, he paid for another night, and then he headed straight back upstairs. When the chambermaid came to do his room, he would wait out in the hall until she was finished. He slept a lot, and tried to read, and spent whole afternoons motionless on his bed, lost in vague drifts of thought. Sometimes he felt so weak, he was barely able to get up and put his clothes on, and at others he paced through the neighborhood, as though he might be able to escape his illness that way. Once or twice he thought of calling the doctor’s office because he could no longer stand the uncertainty, but then he put off the call until office hours were safely over.

On the day he was able to collect his car, he felt better. He got up early, showered, and packed his things. Then he called Delphine and asked if he could see her. She asked him where he was. She sounded sleepy. He said he could be with her in an hour. On the bus to Deuil he wrote a text message to Sylvie. She had sent him a message the day before, and asked him in her
telegraphic style how he was feeling and what he was up to. He hadn’t replied. Now he wrote to say he was doing fine, and he wished her a nice summer. No sooner had he sent it off, than he got her reply. Sylvie wished him happy holidays and sent him a hug.