Desolation by Yasmina Reza

take total responsibility for the state I’m in, Montparnasse is still part of the city, you go walking there without thinking twice, you take the children and hunt for entertaining figures among the dead, Leo would have hated being at Bagneux, last time I laid a pebble on his grave, almost a year ago, it was already dark, and I forbid you to laugh, we talked to each other: where were you all our lives? I murmured, when my life intersected with yours, where were you, now I’m too old to attract you, love passes me by and doesn’t even see me. —This is what I wanted, Genevieve. —What did you want? —That your face would be soft. That time would have left its marks, that I can stroke it the way you stroke a dog. —Why? He doesn’t answer. I ask why, but he doesn’t answer. There’s nothing more than the brown gravestone and the pebble in one corner, just as I too, during his life, stayed in a corner, and, absurdly, I tell them all the things I would never ever have said out loud while he was alive, I tell the marble and the incised letters things I left unsaid while my life and his intersected, and that will still remain unsaid tonight, even though I’m lightheaded, because I will never worry again about upsetting him or contradicting him or losing him, death has given him to me. Help, Samuel, right away, we have to get some fresh air.”
    Stand up, Genevieve, I said, in the living room in rue Ampère, where we found ourselves after walking the whole length of the Park Monceau and sitting for quite some while in the rotunda. Stand up, Genevieve, I commanded after we’d shared a third of a surviving bottle of vodka. Stand up, come on, we’ll move the armchairs, let’s push back the chairs and the table, I’ll close the curtains, Genevieve, and make rue Ampère and Paris and time all disappear, give me your hand and we’ll dance,
Jewish Songs for Cello and Piano,
present from my son-in-law Michel, never listened to them before, it’s just like opening a bottle of some ancient nectar with you but I think we’ve drunk enough, let’s dance instead, this evening we’ll dance to
Uncertainty
and the
Kaddish
and the
Kol Nidre,
I was born somewhere between Samara and Kazan on the Volga, somewhere between deserted roads and deserted villages, I’m going to die in the bed in that bedroom next door, a good bed to croak in, as I said to Nancy the other day, she was lying on the daybed for once in her life as was I, I said it’s perfect for keeping watch over someone who’s dying, you smile, Nancy, but that’s where you’ll be, in the armchair, I mean, my love, I’ll be in the bed. Frankly I don’t know which is the better spot. Let’s dance, Genevieve, the steppes are blanketed in white, there are no walls and no doors, the road we’re traveling doesn’t matter anymore. The little pre-Columbian goat has lost a leg, Rosa Dacimiento threw it out, a little leg made of clay, what does she think she’s doing? In the great tradition of Audoulia, I run the cloth over the bookcase slowly to begin with, then speed up as I get closer to the clay statue, laugh, Genevieve, laugh, I do so love your laugh, I’ll do the impossible, go anywhere, if it’ll make you laugh. Audoulia was our pre-Dacimiento, Spanish, my boy as a mere child made model fighter planes, and she broke them all dusting, she didn’t dust, she dueled with fighter squadrons, I miss her today, just as I miss everything to do with times past, whether it’s Audoulia, a leather bag, or the smell of fresh-sawn lumber, I’m immensely nostalgic, Genevieve, incurably nostalgic, it’s something that can wreck your reputation in a minute these days, if you’re nostalgic you’re one of our world’s bastards, I hate our world. Nancy is in Brest, at her parents’. My wife Nancy, Genevieve, is forging right ahead, and since she’s been forging right ahead she’s no longer pretending to jump out of the window, she no longer rolls around on the ground, she