The Shattered Sky
Enigma Books
Bernard Uzan
The Shattered Sky
A Novel
ENIGMA BOOKS
All rights reserved under the International
and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
Published in the United States by
Enigma Books
580 Eighth Avenue, New York, NY 10018
www.enigmabooks.com
Copyright © 2008 by Bernard Uzan
All rights reserved.
Translated from the French by Robert L. Miller
ISBN-10 1-929631-71-5
ISBN-13 978-1-929631-71-1
Cover design by: Robert Farrar-Wagner
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise
without the written permission of Enigma Books.
Library of Congress CIP available upon request.
The Shattered Sky
Paris in the early morning is one of the rare pleasures I truly enjoy. The alarm clock next to my bed rings at seven, and it’s high time to go. The bathroom mirror reflects a picture I know only too well. My face is filled with anger and despair in its complete rejection of the entire world as it exists. I look at myself and I feel like crying.
I’m living in the Montparnasse section of Paris, in an apartment that I share with Nicolas. I push open the door on to the rue Vavin…
I follow my usual itinerary, and walk along the Luxembourg Gardens, down the rue Bonaparte, to Mabillon, and the Odéon… It’s not easy to cross the street with all the traffic and the people who are hurrying early in the morning to reach their real jobs, with the very specific objective of getting to their office and doing as little work as possible…
Cars and pedestrians grind to a halt, and everything appears to be paralyzed…
A long black limousine goes by slowly, followed by many other cars with their parking lights blinking on their way to a funeral … this early in the morning, they must be in a hurry to bury the dead… a long line of cars for an important person no doubt. The big black car doesn’t look at all like the old hearse they used to take my father away.
They’ve made some progress since then to bury you. It happened six years ago, and I was twenty-one, the age of reason… The whole family is waiting at the entrance of the hospital, they’re all talking at the same time like a bunch of traders in an open air market. I keep quiet, I am silent, the blade of a knife sears my stomach, a hand is crushing my heart. Finally, after an unbearably long time, the hearse arrives…
The two funeral parlor attendants who load the casket into the hearse tell me to sit up front because of the heat. I’ll be more comfortable up front…
“We’ll be much more comfortable up front,” repeats my uncle.
“Oh yes! We’ll be more comfortable up front,” adds my aunt.
“We’ll be much better up front,” insists my mother.
They all hurry, push and shove, to grab the best seats faster, faster, as the door is about to slam shut; a few flowers tumble out in the scuffle. I hear my father moaning, but no one else can hear him; they prefer to sit by the windows, and we’re off.
The tall black van moves ahead, and I am sitting very comfortably on a soft black, feathery leather seat. The leather is as soft as a bed or soft like my father’s eyelids when I closed his eyes on his hospital bed. Thrown on the floor among the rows of seats, almost between my legs, is a wooden box covered with many flowers, red flowers, blue, yellow, green and inside that box, a dead man…
My father.
It’s three in the afternoon, my father died two days ago, my very own father, not my neighbor’s father or the father of the guy who runs the corner store; no, this time it’s my father, my very own father.
Two days! He must already look pretty bad!
I’m sitting alone with two seats to myself, at just about the location where my father’s belly should be. The others are sitting two by two, yakking away. They must have so many interesting things to discuss. They are off on a picnic; if this goes on much longer they’ll surely extract some food from their handbags, some dry sausage and red wine, no, it would probably be dry crackers.
The hearse is moving very slowly through the streets of Paris, clearly this is going to take a long time. They’re bored; they shift around on the black cushions, blow their noses, exhale loudly, perspire, sigh, stretch out, and finally yawn, at last: it’s so hot, so sticky. I begin to doze off; Paris always struck me as being a gluey, sticky city. A sticky city…
I only like Paris in the morning, very early, when only lost souls like myself are wandering around in search of what they are, what they used to be or what they will become….
The whores are finally ready to go to sleep, the garbage collectors are picking up the shame of humanity, college students have finally restructured the world after splitting pubic hairs all night long, and out of work actors, such as myself, think of themselves as Hamlet as they cross the Seine on the Alexander III Bridge…
I love Paris, especially on Sunday mornings when the neighborhood, where I spend most of my time, is totally deserted… the early morning, is both hot and cold, the silence is filled with noises. I hear the silence so clearly that it scares me…that silence… Within me silence descends regularly… I learned to keep so many things quiet for fear that they might make me explode. A fear that never lets go of me… The fear of being or of not having…
Paris is a sticky place for the underprivileged, the poor bastards, the out-of-towners, those who live in the suburbs, the out-of-work actors.
Tunis used to be sticky too, especially in the afternoons when during the summer months I am forced to take a three hour nap.… I love swimming in the green or blue sea so much, it’s the only time I feel just like everybody else; when I can show off my strength and compete with my cousins; when I can make believe that I am a complete human being, just like any other. I swim and swim, I’m not afraid of the waves, and my arms are strong. Nobody can see my grotesque looking, lifeless legs that make the neighbors and the school children laugh… And I want to swim all day, all my life, without stopping. I swim far, very far from the water’s edge and they call after me and wave their arms wildly and are worried. I’m happy and laugh out loud and ask everyone to look and admire me in the water. But no! I must take a nap everyday! I am thrown on my bed and forgotten like a pile of dirty laundry, full of unmentionable spots. I hate it. I hate taking a nap every day. They sleep or make believe they’re sleeping while I’m bored to death.
I am dying of shame and boredom.
I hear the silence of the street, I hear the silence of the unbearable sun that crushes the senses… Over one hundred degrees in the shade in Tunis…where everyone is asleep, and it’s two o’clock in the afternoon.
I grab a matchbox and amuse myself by setting fire to the ants that crawl along the walls of my bedroom, the bedroom of a crippled child. I like to burn them one by one. I can see their tiny, sticky bodies twisting desperately in the flames…The ants are screaming with pain and I burst out in laughter…. Hundreds of ants like the hundreds of Jews in Nazi Germany’s meat grinders… The flames of the tiny matches are like the crematorium; I have the power. I can burn bodies with total impunity. The silence of the street is marked by the moaning of the ants and the calls of the street vendors…
“Ropa ve-ecchia!!!”
“Sharpen your knives, sharpen your scissors, the sharpener is here!
“Ices, Bobby’s ices!”
“Jasmine flowers, jasmine flowers…”
I’m having a hard time burning them today. The ants are everywhere,
in every corner of my room and it takes me such a long time to get from one corner to the other…
They’re really oblivious about everything… They could have set my room up to suit my needs, my tasks… After all, I’m the only one who is in this condition… A bit of decency for the cripple, have some consideration for the polio stricken boy who can’t walk without help.
Maybe some of the ants are also crippled by now; some of them must have lost their legs, or rather their feet…
I place some bread crumbs to attract more ants and……
Okay, well enough about the ants… That’s all old stuff, ancient history, the time when I was nothing at all…on the way to becoming someone… Now I am… What am I? What? One of the living dead, a live one who is really dead and walking around Paris in search of time past… I think I’m Marcel Proust. But Proust should have called it In Search of Times Dead.
Dead, like my father.
They’re back with their yakking and I open my eyes. Everybody is talking inside the hearse, my mother, my uncles, my aunts, everybody is complaining about the heat, except my father who says nothing, as usual.
It’s true that it’s really hot; my grandmother is sweating like a pig, like a big bloated woman in a bikini, on the beach sweating uncontrollably like a leaking pipe, her hat looks like a flowery beach cap; she is absolutely grotesque.
Paris on a Thursday at three in the afternoon; cars, trucks, traffic jams, red and green lights, delivery boys, hookers, cops, pimps, ambulances, and the cemetery that is still so far away. It’s going to be a long ride. Thankfully we were all careful and sat by the windows.
“At least we’ll be able to breathe.” says my uncle
Opposite me, my aunt is crossing her legs, what magnificent tanned thighs; she’s not wearing stockings because it’s so hot…and me… I’m alone on my seat and I’m feeling even hotter; my father next to me must also feel very hot…the freshness of the wreaths and the flowers are no help when you’re in a box where you can’t breathe.
My aunt crosses and uncrosses her legs; she notices me looking at her and she hikes up to her thighs. She’s staring at me and licks her lips, then slowly with her nails, she softly caresses her knees, rearranges her necklace over her breasts, looks at me and smiles; my father, who knows her very well, must also be smiling inside his box.
My uncle, two rows behind, tells his son a story and laughs, softly at first, then louder and louder as he holds his stomach. He is laughing loudly and uncontrollably to the point of tears; suddenly he realizes it’s uncouth.
“It’s because I’m nervous,” he says, and then stops.
But his laughter catches on and I start laughing and laughing, my aunt’s thighs are laughing, my teeth scratch my lips, my aunt’s thighs are laughing out loud, my father is hurting in his box and has trouble breathing, his breath grows shorter, my aunt smiles showing her teeth, my uncle smiles, the people in the street and even those damn dogs are smiling. Tomorrow I’ll go pay a visit to my aunt whose thighs are laughing and the mere thought makes me so excited that I have to pull my jacket down over my pants so they won’t notice…everything is spinning, my head is pounding, I close my eyes…
“Come back, come back and set things straight, you have no right to go, nothing is right without you, nothing can be good, nothing can be straight, don’t leave! Come back.”
My mother’s elbow wakes me up….
“Come on now! You don’t doze off in a hearse especially when it’s your own father who is dead, watch your manners! Who brought you up? Yes, I know it’s hot but that’s no excuse. If you partied less you wouldn’t be falling asleep on the day of your father’s funeral.”
My mother plunges her face back into her handkerchief and dries her tears. I stop laughing, and I look out the window.
The street is still, the same as it was before and yet my father is dead. I don’t get it.
“Switch seats with me,” I hear my uncle saying to his son behind us. “I need some air, I can’t breathe, it’s so stifling in here!”
Surely it’s father who’s the one hogging all the good air for himself, and preventing everyone else from breathing; and yet just before he died he was so small, so thin, that he must have needed very little air.
In any case, anything is possible in the best of all possible worlds.
A stick of chewing gum suddenly appears in front of my eyes—my uncle is giving it to me with a knowing look in his eyes:
“It prevents your ears from popping.”
“But we’re not in a plane!”
He looks surprised and adds:
“It’s the same thing, it’s the same thing, listen to me, you have to be brave, don’t worry, you’re a man now, think about your mother, think about your future, it’ll be hard at first, but things will work out… And of course we’re here after all, you can count on me, and your lovely mother can also…”
“What a bastard!” my father whispers to me.
We’re almost there. We must have been riding for quite a while; no one is talking, they’re either tired or have nothing to say to each other anymore.
We reach the cemetery at last, everybody gets out. Handkerchiefs reappear. There is an unbelievable crowd of unbelievable people. I didn’t know my father had so many friends…he spent most of his time alone, and lost in his thoughts, as if he were trying to find a truth that escaped him.
They made us stand in line, one behind the other, with our handkerchiefs in hand, while the casket passes in front of us, in the midst of flowers. People shake hands, kiss each other; a few women look like they might pass out because of the pain; they speak in loud voices and argue; they wonder how they will get back into town since the hearse drives to Père Lachaise cemetery but doesn’t drive back downtown.
It’s done, the casket is on the ground, a man all in black and all in beard, the undertaker, chants in Hebrew and calls the rabbi who is on duty and who was waiting discreetly and almost fearfully to be called upon.
The rabbi is a lost soul who wanders around the cemetery from one plot to the next, desperately searching for a fee. He goes from burial to burial, from one tomb to the other just like an unemployed actor who is ready for anything while he haunts the television studios…
He’s wearing a long black coat and an old hat, a hat in this heat! He looks like a Polish Jew who just escaped from a concentration camp…
All he needs is a suitcase to be on his way to Bergen–Belsen… He says his prayers mechanically and very quickly, I can’t make out a word he’s saying, nobody else can understand what he’s saying either… Every ten phrases there’s this little gesture he makes with his hand and one of the crying people in attendance steps up, and delicately places a ten franc note on the casket.
After a while there are so many bills on top of the coffin that the rabbi signals that the prayer is over and stuffs them quickly in his pockets; they start hugging again and they cry their joy as they meet cousins they hadn’t seen in ten years and finally they leave as they keep on chattering with one another. My mother returns home with my uncle, they have all found a ride…
The party’s over. The ceremony is finished, the obligation has been fulfilled, my father is buried and I stay there, disheveled, empty eyed, dumbfounded. …
The rabbi comes over and shakes my hand… He looks like the rabbi in Tunis who officiated at my Bar-Mitzvah. I was ashamed, so ashamed. Here I am, supposedly becoming a man and I’m small, so small, like an ugly stunted child, and I am in a wheel chair, and I get up to go to the Torah and I grab my crutches, and I trip and fall like a wooden puppet.
My cousin sneers aloud and my older brother, my older brother who is so good to me, comes over and helps me up. I hate him for being so tall and I’m ashamed.
Why are we all here anyway? Nobody really believes in this synagogue where we’re all disguised in our Sabbath best. My father isn’t even wearing a yarmulke and has a handkerchief on his head instead and my grandfather is wearing a hat. I learn
ed my prayers phonetically, pretending that I know Hebrew but I have no idea what I’m saying or what I’m supposed to be saying, or what I’m expected to feel. We become Jewish once a year, at home for Yom Kippur; we fast, go to the synagogue late in the afternoon, and come back home happy to be forgiven…but forgiven for what, I wonder?
But we feel that we are Jewish…
The extended family is more Jewish than we are; we’re heathens who believe in nothing… Maybe they have reasons to be religious, while on our side of the family...
So why be here, in this synagogue, today? So that I can look ridiculous? So that I can be ashamed? To enjoy the circus of my becoming a man?
The rabbi smiles at me with a big smile that tries to be so kind and compassionate. He’s wearing an old black coat and hat; he looks like a Polish Jew on his way to Bergen-Belsen.
Everything is mixed up, Tunis, Paris, the cemetery and the synagogue, the dead, and the living.
I am also alive, and what gives me the right to be alive?
The last car goes by and I can cross the street, and seven years after his death I’m still walking the streets of Paris thinking about my dead father. I’ve been walking without any help… for only twelve years and I’m twenty-seven. Do you know what it means after all these years to be able to look at someone straight in the eyes without having to lift one’s head? I know…I’ve managed to defeat my illness, to overcome my fate. I am walking.
A month ago I started growing a mustache and they tell me that I look good with it, that it makes me look even wilder. Actually, I now look like what I hate the most, a wog. They say I have beautiful lips, so every morning I trim my mustache to show off my upper lip and use my mouth as a means of seduction… When people don’t like me, when I can’t make them like me, I feel like dying.
Actually I have a small but full mouth, the small full mouth of a licorice eater. Add a tiny round and willful chin and then I appear totally ridiculous! I look like a comic book character. But my nose saves me! It’s long, hooked, and bent, and has a life of its own, a nose with character.