Mend the Living by Maylis de Kerangal Page A

now, I get it, and suddenly, without warning, she digs her heels in, lifts her head: you didn’t involve me in the patient’s intake, you saw his parents alone, we don’t work like that anymore. Revol looks at her, surprised: oh? And how do we work then? Cordelia takes a step forward and slaps down her reply: we work as a team. Silence stretches out, they look at each other, then the doctor stands up straight: you’re looking quite pale, have you been shown the kitchen? There are cookies in there, watch yourself, twelve hours in the ICU is a marathon, young lady, you have to be able to go the distance. Yes, okay, okay. Revol finally agrees to leave the room, and Cordelia plunges her hand into her pocket. She closes her eyes, thinks of her grandmother in Bristol who she speaks to every Sunday evening, it’s not her, it’s not the right time for her she says to convince herself, would have gladly hazarded a guess before lifting her lids and reading the numbers displayed on the little touch screen, would gladly bet, as in a roulette game, or on a door number that lights up on the board, would try to throw a paper ball in a trash can or simply play heads or tails with a coin – don’t be such a silly goose, what’s your problem?
    Cordelia Owl goes to stand in the middle of the room, phone in hand, lifts her head and throws shoulders back, slowly opens her fingers, revealing phalanx after phalanx the number that called her. Unknown. She smiles, relieved. In the end, not so entirely certain that she wants it to happen, not in such a hurry to hear from him. She’s suddenly cruel, when she thinks of him, she’s lucid and laughing. She’s twenty-eight years old. Anticipates with disgust the exhaustion of romantic tension, that mountain of exhaustion – exaltation, anxiety, craziness, crass impulsiveness – asks herself again why this intensity continues to be the most desirable part of her life, but then whirls around, turns away from this question the way you pull the tip of your toe back at the very last moment from the sludgy pond where it was about to land, to sink, she never gets any peace, what she needs is to prolong last night, let it steep like the afterglow of a party. Conserve the grace and the irony of girls. Once she reaches the small kitchen, she takes a pack of raspberry cookies from the cupboard, pulls open the paper that squeaks like silk under her little fingers, slowly and completely devours the pack.

R evol walks back down the corridor, ignoring those who call out and scamper along beside him, holding out forms, three minutes, dammit, he mutters between his teeth, I just want three minutes, thumb, index, and middle digit held up in the air while his voice stresses “three,” and the department staff know this gesture well, know that once he’s alone in his office the anaesthetist will gravitate toward the chair that sways and rolls, look at his watch, and start a countdown – three minutes, a soft-boiled egg, the ideal measure – and using this lapse of solitude as a kind of decompression chamber, will place his cheek on his forearm folded flat against the desk, exactly the way children in kindergarten nap in the classroom after snack time – and will dive into this crevice of rest to stem the tide of what’s just happened, might even fall asleep. Wiped out, he rests his head on his folded arms and dozes off. Everyone understands that he makes the most of these three minutes: after so many years of putting others to sleep (twenty-seven), you’d have to have refined a technique of high-efficiency micro-napping, even if the duration were slightly inferior to what was generally advised for recharging a human body. Everyone knows that Revol lost that other sleep long ago, the nocturnal, the horizontal, the deep sleep. In the apartment he occupies on rue de Paris there isn’t even really a bedroom anymore, just a large room with a double bed that serves as a coffee table, that’s where he