Suddenly, in the middle of my life, I was getting buried. They did it in Paris, where else?
On the sixteenth story of a block of service flats along the way to Orly. The two who had been chosen to be there first arrived in the morning. They drew the big curtains across the windows, erasing the view of the river and the sky. After that they combed the walls, arranged all the chairs, armchairs and sofas in a big square and posted some of the juniors in the corridor and the foyer, to keep an eye on things. Those were the rules: there had to be guards if there was a meeting of more than three people who were heads of departments or higher.

During the afternoon the others began arriving; one by one they slipped upstairs. Never two at the same time, never together. Under their arms they carried the farewell gifts. In their pockets were weapons and tiny walkie-talkies and envelopes with memos that the various departments sent to one another whenever there were meetings of this kind. They left it all in the outer hall and went in, to await my arrival.

I had been told to come at 3.20. A bit late for lunch, but anyway it wasn't supposed to be a proper meal; the flat cost two hundred-odd per day, and there was hardly any budget left for refreshments. I was already downstairs by 3.00 and watched some of them coming in. At 3.10 I began climbing the stairs, to make it slower. On the fourth floor I switched to the elevator. The security men were at me even before the doors were fully open. They examined my identity card and driver’s license and asked over the radio-transmitter with the utmost seriousness, "Can Charles Vincent come in?" In reply a burst of laughter came over the receiver and I wondered if I hadn't arrived too early. The people inside were still laughing at the alias.

Everybody was already there. I counted them quickly. Exactly twenty-two, and, of course, the Head, who was the first to come over to me. He gripped my shoulder as he told me how glad he was now that I would be at his side in the Tel Aviv office. After him all the others spoke, briefly and not to the point. Mainly they remembered their own lives through events which by chance had also included my presence. Then the Head raised his hand and spoke again, this time to everyone.

"Today we are parting from a first-rate man," he said, as usual, "one of the best we've ever had." I thought about how all the people whose funerals I had attended had been called "first-rate."

"But we are not losing him." That was the special privilege which had come my way - I did not quite know how, nor whether to be glad or sorry about it. "As of next month he'll be working in Tel Aviv. Many of the messages you receive will bear his signature." Who needed an explosives expert in the Tel Aviv office? At any rate, it was better than early retirement or a job as a security officer in some plant or other. "And so," the Head concluded, "we’re not saying goodbye, but see you next month."

Someone I barely knew, from the Brussels office, insisted on a eulogy. "Now," he said, "he'll have time to read all the books he loves so much." Two years ago, when someone who collected weapons for a hobby left, they had consoled him by saying that now he would be able to devote every day to cleaning them. He shot himself by accident two months later. "He’s still a young man and already has a second career." He looked around to see if he had made an impression. "We'll always remember you, Danny Simon."

The name landed among us on the gray carpet like the tail of a bomb. There is nothing which marks the end of a job more than the removal of the ban on using one's real name. From now on Charles Vincent would also be worthless, as would the cover provided by all his possessions: the flat he had rented in Boulevard Général Koenig, the Renault 11 he had bought in Place d'Italie and the postbox in the La Défense branch. Everything would be returned, transferred, lost at the end of the month.

The Head whispered something to the man sitting next to him, who jumped up and opened the door to two aging waitresses pushing a trolley laden with dishes and food. They were the first women to enter the room and everyone eyed their puffy thighs appraisingly. After they had left, carrying a few plates for the guards outside, it was time for the gifts. First the inevitable ones. A cake in the shape of a bomb with a long fuse of spun sugar which the wife of the security officer at the consulate had been asked to bake, without knowing for whom. A transistor radio in the form of three sticks of dynamite, its dial the activating mechanism. An alarm clock in the form of a booby trap. What would the presents have been if I hadn't been an explosives expert but rather had dealt with poisonous gases or surveillance or something?

Some of the others, closer friends, brought books. A sixty-year old Plutarch in a scratched leather binding. A wartime edition of Baudelaire with roughly cut pages. Something obscure by Conrad. A year's subscription to FMR which I'd once said I'd like to subscribe to if I had the money. For dessert I was served my replacement, wrapped in a new three-piece suit, about whom there was still something Israeli: a gaudy shirt, an old-fashioned knot in his tie and the clumsily-ironed look of a boy who had grown up in jeans.

He smiled and gripped my hand too firmly. I had read his file a month before, in the seclusion of the archives: an explosives officer, demobbed last year, married. I looked into his eyes, which were frank and open. He was the man they needed now that I was going. I could see his future life before me like a film: he would retain his true identity and operate from Brussels, advising Israeli institutions how to guard against terrorist bombs. He would have an office on the third floor of the consulate building. He would arrive there each morning, already exhausted from driving his children through the rush hour to the Jewish school, and would leave in the evening, looking forward to Wizo charity dinners with his wife.

"Have you found a flat yet?" I asked.

"In Zaventem. My wife is arranging it now."

"Zaventem?" I tried to remember. "That's outside Brussels..."

"Yes," he smiled politely. "New blocks of flats, near the airport. And where do you live?"

"Here, in Paris."

"Pity. You and your wife could have visited us..." Something in the look on my face flustered him. "In the time that's left, that is..."

"I'm on my own here," I said drily.

He mopped up the gravy on his plate with a piece of bread. On the way to his mouth a bit of the gravy fell onto the pile of presents. He leaned over and cleaned the cover of Plutarch with a napkin.

"You like books..."

"I read."

He smiled again. "I won't have time for reading." He had a tremendous need to be friendly, something alien to a sapper: "I ask myself how it was for
you, with all the things you were involved in..." He was trying to show off what he knew. "The PLO commander in Cyprus blown up in bed... the Volkswagen that wiped out Hassan Salameh in Beirut..."

Some of the guests were already on their way to the door, stopping to shake hands. "Write," they said, or, "We'll keep in touch," but they displayed the weariness of people who had eaten too much and a concern which derived from an awareness of the time left until their own funerals. My replacement left with the next wave and I was left with the two who had organized the party. They tried to finish quickly and moved around me nimbly, opening the windows, airing the room of cigarettes and food smells, and
recorking the half-full wine bottles so that they could take them with them. Below, in the car park, all secrecy rules were broken and a row of cars with French, Belgian, Austrian, Italian, Danish and German license plates drove off into the gloomy fog of dusk.

"All you have to do is slam the door behind you," the organizers said before they left.

"Thanks," I replied. "It was nice, really." They smiled affably and departed, swiping the ashtrays along the way.

The gifts remained. Most of them were useless, like the knowledge I had acquired over the years, the instincts I had developed, the memories. I flushed the cake down the toilet. I left the clock and the radio on the sofa, booty for the waitresses. I packed the books in a pillow-case I took off a pillow in the bedroom and went out.

The security men had already left. Downstairs the outside doors were wide open. It was drizzling. I went down to the Metro. From a bench nearby two old men watched me. I waited with closed eyes until the train burst into the station, fast and whispering like an approaching disaster. Fifteen minutes later I was unlocking the door to my flat.

"Monsieur Vincent!" The concierge opened her door a crack. "Will you permit me to bring the new tenants to see the flat this evening?"

God, I thought as I read Plutarch in bed, so many people came from all over Europe just to see me out. Shouldn't I be happy? If Hannah were here she'd say I was spoiling a good thing again.

I let the book fall onto my chest and thought about her. I would have to get used to it: from the end of the month my whole life would be overshadowed by her.

***

Hannah and I lost one another a year after our marriage. It happened in an open yellow jeep on a long straight road leading to the airport of an African town where a plane to Tel Aviv was waiting for her.

It was my second year of service there, and she had come to visit me. As we climbed into the jeep I was thoughtful, almost detached. I held the wheel steady and drove slowly. Somewhere on the way I began to talk. I described the charm of the place, the peacefulness of the vast expanses at dawn and the sense of oppression they cast on me at sunset, a combination of the joy of being alone and the longing for tranquility. I had spoken of that sense of oppression only twice before. On both occasions Hannah had stroked my arm and listened in silence.

This time she said that I depressed her, that I spoiled every moment which could otherwise be happy.

"I don't think that you'll ever be happy," she added through the whistling of the wind, "I don't think you're capable of it."

I maneuvered carefully around the carcass of an animal which had been run over in the night. Hannah contracted her narrow nostrils in disgust.

"...And the profession you've chosen doesn't add to your mental health either." She was in her first year of university studies. "If you'd agreed to transfer to the Foreign Service you would at least have had diplomatic status, and with Daddy's connections you could have served in a civilized place..."

"Sure - imprisoned in an office, at cocktail parties, smoke-filled meetings."

A low-flying plane frightened a flock of birds which flew off from the heart of a lake. I put my hand on her arm: "We could be happy here, together..."

One by one the birds landed again on the water.

"We could be happy anywhere if I knew that I could rely on you to advance, to be somebody." She stroked the back of my neck with a movement which had once filled me with great pride. "I wouldn't like to find myself stuck with a nobody..."

She might possibly have escaped the fate she feared so much if the previous evening, in a room with netted windows looking out on a town of wide, empty boulevards, Jonathan had not been conceived. When Hannah boarded the plane, which seemed like a bird from another world against the background of the beautiful savannah and the cordiality of the black people, she already bore within her the fate of the next seventeen years, a fate that held dozens of silences on the phone and hundreds of forced smiles, to which I returned each time from a new place, with different tags on my suitcase, another strange language I had learned and foreign money in my pocket. In the same devious way I had accepted my life, I loved those home holidays: the shock of being home dispelled my impatience, and the date on my return ticket was an insurance policy.

***

This time things were different. The days dragged on endlessly, silent and lifeless like a fuse burning towards nothing, and the desolation of home was supplemented by the thought of the barrenness of my life at the office.

As I had expected, I was given a room, a desk and an air-conditioner on the seventh floor of a building with barred windows. In order to get there I would wake up every morning gripped by a mood somewhere between depression and indifference, hastily go through the motions of washing, eating, talking and helping with minor household tasks. Jonathan was always the first to leave, his satchel on his shoulder, throwing a skinny leg over the crossbar of his bike and freewheeling along the path to the street. Hannah sent him off with a loud, "Bye!" and turned to remove the breakfast things from the table. Her round schoolteacher's face radiated sympathy.

Other books

Gaze by Viola Grace

The Eldritch Conspiracy by Cat Adams

Not Too Tall to Love by Berengaria Brown

El bosque de los susurros by Clayton Emery

Bite Me by Lana Amore

Up The Tower by J.P. Lantern

An Economy is Not a Society by Glover, Dennis;

The Honor Due a King by N. Gemini Sasson

The Beginning of Connie and Isaac: Blue Butterfly Series (The Blue Butterfly Book 3) by D H Sidebottom

State of the Union by Brad Thor