feels better.
Everyone, at some point or another, had reproached him for giving too much importance to his work. His fiancées, his family, his colleagues, his collaborators, his clients, the cleaning ladies who officiated at night, and even a doctor, once. Well-intentioned people said he was conscientious; others said that he was needy or even worse, academic, and he’d never really known what to say in his own defence.
Why had he been working so hard for so many years?
What was the point of all these sleepless nights? Life on a scale of 1:100? This relationship that was so shabbily constructed? This nagging little stiffness in his neck? This urge he had to climb the walls?
Or was it simply a trial of strength, lost from the start?
What . . . No, he’d never known how to justify himself to obtain absolution. He’d never felt the need, to be honest. But now, yes. Now he did.
That morning, as he got up and took out his passport, surprised yet again at how light his luggage was, to the sound of
Passengers on Air France flight 1644 departing at seven ten for Moscow Sheremetyevo are kindly requested to proceed to gate 16
, he had his answer: it was so that he could breathe.
Just breathe.
The hours, the little we’ve seen of him thus far, the abyss, might all seem to suggest, how to put it . . . that we should have some doubts as to just how clear-sighted Charles’s explanation really is, but anyway . . . Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt for once.
Let’s let him breathe as far as gate 16.
8
THE FLIGHT REACHED its cruising speed of nine hundred kilometres an hour. He’d scarcely had time to switch on his laptop when the captain came on to inform them that the temperature was two degrees Celsius at their destination, wishing everyone a pleasant flight, and the usual blah blah from SkyTeam.
He located Viktor, his chauffeur with the gentle smile (a hole, a tooth, a hole, two more teeth); Charles would discover, after dozens of hours of traffic jams (in no other country in the world had Charles spent so much time on the rear seat of a car. Puzzled at first, then worried, then annoyed, then enraged, then . . . resigned. Oh! So this was the legendary Russian fatalism? Watching, through a steamy car window, as one’s goodwill dissolves into the endless ambient confusion?), that Viktor, in another life, was a sound engineer.
He was talkative, and told countless amazing stories that his passenger did not understand, all the while smoking dreadful-smelling cigarettes that he pulled out of charming little packets.
And when Charles’s mobile rang, when his client began putting on the pressure again, he would hasten to turn on the music at full volume. Out of discretion. No balalaikas or Shosta, no, just the local rock group, his own. The needle well into the red.
Bloody hell.
One evening, he had taken his shirt off to show Charles his life. Every era quivering on his skin: firmly tattooed. In front of a petrol pump, he had spread his arms and whirled like a ballerina while Charles gazed at him, wide-eyed.
It was . . . remarkable.
He met up with his little French comrades, his little German comrades, and his little Russian comrades. Managed to bullshit his way through several meetings, and equal quantities of sighs, taking the piss, and doing bugger all, a luncheon that lasted far too long, and then on with the hard hat and the boots once again. Everyone talked at him, voluminously, everyone confused him, slapped him on the back, and eventually he had a good laugh with the blokes from Hamburg. (The ones who came to install the air con.) (But where?)
Yes, in the end he had a laugh. One fist on his hips, one hand to his brow, and his feet deep in shit.
Then he headed over to the bosses’ prefabs where two fellows were waiting for him, two blokes straight from a Karl Marx Brothers comedy. Larger than life with their big cigars and their air of second-rate cowboys. Nervous, pale, already flushed with
Everyone, at some point or another, had reproached him for giving too much importance to his work. His fiancées, his family, his colleagues, his collaborators, his clients, the cleaning ladies who officiated at night, and even a doctor, once. Well-intentioned people said he was conscientious; others said that he was needy or even worse, academic, and he’d never really known what to say in his own defence.
Why had he been working so hard for so many years?
What was the point of all these sleepless nights? Life on a scale of 1:100? This relationship that was so shabbily constructed? This nagging little stiffness in his neck? This urge he had to climb the walls?
Or was it simply a trial of strength, lost from the start?
What . . . No, he’d never known how to justify himself to obtain absolution. He’d never felt the need, to be honest. But now, yes. Now he did.
That morning, as he got up and took out his passport, surprised yet again at how light his luggage was, to the sound of
Passengers on Air France flight 1644 departing at seven ten for Moscow Sheremetyevo are kindly requested to proceed to gate 16
, he had his answer: it was so that he could breathe.
Just breathe.
The hours, the little we’ve seen of him thus far, the abyss, might all seem to suggest, how to put it . . . that we should have some doubts as to just how clear-sighted Charles’s explanation really is, but anyway . . . Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt for once.
Let’s let him breathe as far as gate 16.
8
THE FLIGHT REACHED its cruising speed of nine hundred kilometres an hour. He’d scarcely had time to switch on his laptop when the captain came on to inform them that the temperature was two degrees Celsius at their destination, wishing everyone a pleasant flight, and the usual blah blah from SkyTeam.
He located Viktor, his chauffeur with the gentle smile (a hole, a tooth, a hole, two more teeth); Charles would discover, after dozens of hours of traffic jams (in no other country in the world had Charles spent so much time on the rear seat of a car. Puzzled at first, then worried, then annoyed, then enraged, then . . . resigned. Oh! So this was the legendary Russian fatalism? Watching, through a steamy car window, as one’s goodwill dissolves into the endless ambient confusion?), that Viktor, in another life, was a sound engineer.
He was talkative, and told countless amazing stories that his passenger did not understand, all the while smoking dreadful-smelling cigarettes that he pulled out of charming little packets.
And when Charles’s mobile rang, when his client began putting on the pressure again, he would hasten to turn on the music at full volume. Out of discretion. No balalaikas or Shosta, no, just the local rock group, his own. The needle well into the red.
Bloody hell.
One evening, he had taken his shirt off to show Charles his life. Every era quivering on his skin: firmly tattooed. In front of a petrol pump, he had spread his arms and whirled like a ballerina while Charles gazed at him, wide-eyed.
It was . . . remarkable.
He met up with his little French comrades, his little German comrades, and his little Russian comrades. Managed to bullshit his way through several meetings, and equal quantities of sighs, taking the piss, and doing bugger all, a luncheon that lasted far too long, and then on with the hard hat and the boots once again. Everyone talked at him, voluminously, everyone confused him, slapped him on the back, and eventually he had a good laugh with the blokes from Hamburg. (The ones who came to install the air con.) (But where?)
Yes, in the end he had a laugh. One fist on his hips, one hand to his brow, and his feet deep in shit.
Then he headed over to the bosses’ prefabs where two fellows were waiting for him, two blokes straight from a Karl Marx Brothers comedy. Larger than life with their big cigars and their air of second-rate cowboys. Nervous, pale, already flushed with
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