The Eskimo Solution Read online

  ‘I’d say more soluble.’

  ‘OK, soluble, then. Have you finished with the carrots?’

  ‘I can’t do it. They’re all floppy.’

  Jesus, he’s a tough nut to crack! I can’t squeeze the slightest tear out of him. I turn the screw, tell him about the little girl on the news, clutching a beam and slowly becoming mired in a river of mud. Then I go on to the stories my mother told me to send me to sleep, the fire at the Bazar de la Charité, the raft of the Medusa and the absurd death, three years later, of one of the sole survivors, the shipwright Corréard, who drowned in a puddle, pissed, on his way home from a country dance. And the Titanic! Ah, the Titanic! … And that toothache I had last year! In agony for an entire Sunday, I was! Ooh, I can still feel it now … Awful!

  ‘So anyway, this soup of yours …’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘I can’t smell anything.’

  No wonder – I’ve forgotten to put the gas on underneath it.

  ‘Look, it’s not worth crying about. It doesn’t matter.’

  Oh but it does! I can’t even make a nice hot soup for my old friend the murderer who’s dying of cold. I break down, unable to speak, hanging off the edge of my chair as if teetering on the edge of the world, my feet swinging in the void.

  Out of the corner of my red eye, peering between the now empty bottles, I watch my Christophe suck in all the air in the room, stand up straight and become once again what he has always been, Saint Christopher carrying the little children who are afraid of getting their feet wet.

  ‘Right, come on, we’re going to Rouen to get some weed. A bit of fresh air will do us good. I’m not cold any more; everything’s fine.’

  I’ve worked my magic, but at a price.

  ‘All right, I’ll puke and then we can go.’

  We take Christophe’s car, an Opel as solid and reliable as him, although the seats are a little on the firm side. He takes the wheel – he’s always handled his drink better than me. What’s the point of drinking if not to get drunk? Plus I like being ferried around by other people. The windscreen wipers are slightly out of time with the music coming from the radio, a Dalida song: ‘He had just turned eighteen, he was beautiful like a child, strong like a man …’ It’s making my head throb. I don’t mind; I need a headache the way a blind man needs his dog. The world outside the car is like my soup, uncooked brown mush. A few times, as we pass a police station, Christophe slows down to peer in before speeding up again.

  ‘Do you want to hand yourself in?’

  ‘No, I’m just looking.’

  ‘What if we didn’t stop at Rouen?’

  ‘Then we wouldn’t smoke a spliff.’

  ‘And what if we said to hell with the spliff and all the rest of it? What if we just kept on driving?’

  ‘Since the Earth’s round, we’d end up back where we started.’

  ‘Jesus, you’re annoying sometimes! What I mean is, if we never stopped, never ever.’

  ‘Then we’d be dead.’

  ‘Do you think you can be dead without knowing it?’

  ‘And you say I’m annoying? How the hell should I know? I just want to smoke a spliff, that’s all.’

  We’re in Rouen because that’s what the sign says, plus there’s a cathedral and the Gros Horloge – if it wasn’t for them, we could be in any European city: same town centre with the same pedestrianised streets, same little cobblestones laid like fish scales, same tubs filled with anaemic privet, same branches of Chevignon, same jeans shops, same croissant stands, same guitar strummers, same accordion players, same red-nosed clowns following you and mimicking your movements. Nowheresville. We’ve been wandering around for an hour; I’m lost, as lost as lost can be. Funnily enough, the last (and only) time I came to this dealer was three years ago, on a day as fuzzy as this one.

  ‘It’s definitely next to a bakery. You’ll laugh, but this is exactly like last time. I came with a friend. We had a joint, then two, then three, and then, on the stroke of one in the morning, I had the urge to take a stroll around town. I went out, had a nose around, my head filled with the city stars, till my calves couldn’t take anymore. Only, I’d forgotten to take his address. Imagine, in November, at two in the morning, not a rat on the streets. And even if there had been someone, what could I have said? Do you know Horatio, the guy who sells weed and lives by a bakery? Hours I spent circling around this fucking town until eventually I found him by accident.’

  ‘I’d just like to point out that this is the third time we’ve passed this branch of André. We’re going round in circles.’

  ‘It’s next to a bakery …’

  ‘There are bakeries everywhere! Come on, let’s get something warm to drink; it’s starting to rain.’

  Through the opaque windows of the café, the road is morphing into an aquarium, clouded by the violet ink of the falling night. My Viandox tastes like a wet rag. I leave it to cool down while I watch the passers-by skip between puddles of shadow and neon, hunched over, holding newspapers open over their heads. They look like sandflies. Christophe is reading the menu – written in white paint on the window – backwards, when I catch sight of Nat, in a fit of laughter, walking by on the arm of a comma-shaped man, probably David.

  ‘Doesn’t steak hachis have an “S” on the end?’

  ‘Why the hell should I care?’

  Nat, all wet, like a kitten that’s fallen into the bathtub, Nat laughing, Nat happy, without me. No matter how I try to tell myself that there’s nothing extraordinary about bumping into her like this, that the centre of Rouen isn’t that big and all the ghosts in the world have the right to walk there, I feel a horrible sense of unease coming over me, the sensation of turning up at a family party without having been invited.

  ‘What’s the matter? You’ve gone all pale.’

  ‘Huh? Nothing, nothing, I thought I saw someone but it wasn’t him. Doesn’t this Viandox stink? Or maybe it’s my hands; they do smell sometimes.’

  ‘It just smells a bit damp. You know, I don’t give a shit about the weed. If you want, we can just go home.’

  ‘No! We are not going home!’

  ‘It’s almost eight. Where do you think we can go? Something’s up with you all of a sudden.’

  ‘I don’t know, but we can’t go home, ever. I don’t want any more of this Viandox. I want a Picon bière instead.’

  ‘Fine, fine, we’ll get a Picon bière. Waiter?’

  After the Picon bière, which perked me up a bit, we got back on the road, but we didn’t go home. I would rather have dropped dead. We bought some beer from a corner shop that smelt of cat piss and rancid Gruyère. Christophe took a road heading towards the sea. I felt better. Everything was behind us again. I felt as if I had just avoided something terrible. J. J. Cale was on the radio. We joined in with the chorus together: ‘Cocaine!’ I wriggled about in my chair trying to find something to write with in my pocket. I was thinking of Louis; I had a brilliant idea. By the time I had found a scrap of paper, it had gone, evaporated. It was a shopping list: bread, sugar, washing powder, chocolate. The last word, oil, had been crossed out. Hélène had already bought some. On the other side, I wrote, ‘In six months, Louis had put on six kilos.’

  18

  In six months, Louis had put on six kilos and been on two aeroplanes. One to Munich, the other to Copenhagen. Marion had been dying to go to those two cities. Louis would have preferred to stay put, but how could he come up with a good reason for not wanting to go to either Munich or Copenhagen when he had nothing else to do and he and Marion were newly married? Anyway, now that all the cities in the world looked alike, travelling wasn’t too bad because it didn’t really feel like travelling. There were the same pedestrianised streets in the centre, the same fashions, the same exasperating music everywhere – the same everything everywhere. Except that Marion, like all tourists, did not want to be taken for a tourist, which meant interminable traipsing around rancid suburbs looking for a ‘typical’ little hotel
or a ‘charming’ caff whilst lugging enormous suitcases. Having said that, the exhausting excursions didn’t last more than a week and the rest of the time was spent developing photos of the mini-adventures and sticking them into an album before going back to the travel agent to fetch stacks of new brochures.

  ‘Listen to this: “Enjoy the ultimate Royal Scotland experience. The most luxurious train in the world takes you on an unforgettable journey with views of the beautiful lochs and mountains of the Highlands. Also included are private visits to gardens, stately homes and mysterious castles with commentary from an experienced guide.” What do you think of that?’

  ‘That sounds good. Is it expensive?’

  ‘About twenty thousand francs. Not bad.’

  ‘We’ll have to see.’

  Twenty thousand francs! That was about all he had left in his account. Marion thought that Louis was not rich exactly, but comfortably off. He had been spending at the same rate as Marion, that of a relatively well-off retiree. He didn’t have another mother or father he could kill off. It was a bit of a concern.

  ‘I’m going out to buy the TV guide. Is there anything else you need?’

  Once in the street, that street that he didn’t like and that didn’t like him, he repeated, ‘I’m going out to buy the TV guide. Is there anything else you need?’ several times in a row. How many sentences like that had he uttered in his life? Had he expressed anything else? And was there anything else to express? If you learnt those words in all the languages in the world, you would be able to manage in any situation.

  When he bought the TV guide, he also bought a French–German dictionary to learn his magic phrase. German, because he knew how to say it in English, and the French–German dictionary was on sale. In Munich, he had once wished he’d known some German. He and Marion were walking in the Englischer Garten, a sort of Bois de Boulogne in the heart of the city, full of bicycles, dogs, and Germans in shorts or dressed like punks. They took a little walk there every day before embarking on the inescapable trips to museums in the afternoon. By the lake, a little boy had passed close by them, walking a dog on a lead (although perhaps it was the dog leading the child – it was a huge dog, completely white). A flight of ducks? A sudden movement of Marion’s? Something frightened the dog and his lead became wrapped round Marion’s ankles, so that she, the animal and the child who held obstinately to the leather strap ended up in the black waters of the lake. The ducks were quacking, the dog was barking, his enormous mouth wide open, Marion was shouting, ‘Louis! Louis!’ and curiously the child was yelling ‘Taxi! Taxi!’ (It was only later that Louis learnt that was the dog’s name.) Louis didn’t fancy saving any of them. In fact, he would happily have sunk them with stones, so unbearable was their shouting. Of course, lots of people suddenly appeared from goodness knows where. Two young men had already thrown themselves into the water. The lake was not deep, but it was full of mud. They got Marion and the child out covered in sludge but the dog had made it difficult for the rescuers and it took a while to save him. While this was going on, the people on the bank, an elderly couple wearing matching jogging suits, a young woman with a twin buggy, and a handful of punks with red coxcombs, had bombarded him with questions to which he had replied by throwing his hands up: Nix sprachen deutsch. He would have liked to explain to them that, contrary to appearances, he had done what he could, that is, nothing. The life he was leading now that he wasn’t murdering anyone any more was boring beyond belief, and, no doubt to make up for the monotony of his days, had offered him this little spectacle that was more comic than tragic. That was the reason he hadn’t moved, just as you don’t climb on stage to stop Juliet from poisoning herself. But the only things he knew how to say in German were Nix sprachen deutsch, helles bier, dunkles bier, lam, schwein, rint, links, rechts and gut morgen.

  As she got out of the lake, dripping from head to foot, all Marion had said was, ‘Why?’ Why had she been knocked into a Munich lake by a dog called Taxi, or why had Louis watched her from the bank without doing anything? But, in fact, it was a more general why, encompassing an infinity of other much more profound and essential questions, a universal why, meaning ‘Why me?’

  Up until that point, Louis had always considered Marion to be as eternal and inevitable as spring following winter, or as the desire to drink a lovely cold beer follows a long visit to a museum. He thought that by her side he would benefit from the same status, but this tiny fault had just given rise to a doubt. Marion was submersible and could ask herself pathetic questions like ‘Why me?’

  Every week when he went out to buy the TV guide, Louis treated himself to a minced meat pie at the charcuterie next to the newsagent. They were so good, even cold. As he walked along, munching his pie, Louis opened the German–French dictionary at random. Apfel – apple, Hase – hare, Schwere – gravity, Schwerpunkt – centre of gravity. That’s how he could have answered Marion’s why beside the lake: Schwerpunkt instead of brushing in vain at her clothes caked in mud.

  Marion was preparing rabbit in a foil parcel when he returned. It smelt of mustard and tarragon.

  ‘You put the blue vase down so that it was balanced on the fridge door. So when I opened the fridge, it fell on the floor.’

  ‘Schwerpunkt.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  19

  Christophe is bent over his plate. Sitting opposite him, it’s my face that I can see above his shoulders in the mirror behind the banquette. I look like a Corsican bandit. On escapades like this, I begin to look scruffy at an alarming rate. Time hits me like a ten-ton truck. The restaurant is practically empty; we had a hard time persuading them to serve us. In the car, I’d had the strongest craving for fried fish with white wine. There wasn’t any. We had beef tournedos with a glass of red. Even though the place is called La Marine. There are sextants, compasses, telescopes, bits of rigging hanging all over the walls, but no fish on the menu. I’m disappointed. When men are unhappy, they think only of drinking and becoming sailors. I feel like going to sleep, like being cradled, but refuse to admit it.

  ‘Why are you smiling?’

  ‘No reason. I feel relieved.’

  ‘Have you made a decision?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re going to hand yourself in, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I knew it! But shit, we could leave, cross the border; we can get false papers, you could send for your kids, start a brand-new life! I’m here for you, damn it! I can help you! … Why hand yourself in? Who for?’

  ‘It’s time to face facts, mate. Can you see me playing Jean Valjean with a false beard? It’s a lot simpler than that.’

  ‘Right, then. Coffee and the bill! Bish, bash, bosh, it’s over!’

  ‘This is real life! I’m not the hero of one of your fucking books! I’m not a hero of anything.’

  ‘How do you know? You’ve never tried. Anyway, what do I care? Go on, you go and spend ten years behind bars making espadrilles. I’m gonna keep this going.’

  ‘Don’t be so ridiculous. I’m the one on the run, not you!’

  ‘How would you know? You think you’re the only one running away from something?’

  The broom, passed expertly between our legs, brings an end to the debate.

  Outside, the night unravels in trails of cloud, a few paltry stars flickering between them. I piss against the car in one long hard stream. My hands are old, my dick is old, the Opel is old and Christophe, who’s waiting for me at the wheel, the oldest of them all. I collapse into the seat beside him.

  ‘OK, here’s what I think we should do. We go and watch the sun come up at Étretat – you know, where we used to take the kids, where the cliff looks like a slice of cake. And then … and then day will have dawned.’

  I just shrug my shoulders. The truth is, I couldn’t care less. My bladder must be directly connected to my brain. When I emptied it, I completely emptied my head, heart and the marrow of my bones. I am a kind of tube,
open at both ends, incapable of taking the slightest initiative.

  The car smells of plastic, mints and a full ashtray. It’s like being at the prow of a boat, the trees either side of the road fringed with grey foam in the beam of the headlights. It’s so nice to follow someone who knows where he’s going. I should have shadowed him since nursery school; I needn’t have been me or worn myself out becoming me. The road, the night, the music, how could it all come to an end? I have the firm conviction that I was destined to live for ever.

  I must have fallen asleep for quite a while. The car slows down and turns down a track. There are no more trees, just an expanse of grass flattened by the weight of the sky, heavy with static clouds. There’s nothing at the end of it, and I find this nothingness more and more oppressive as the car moves towards it, slowly, even more slowly, and then stops. A fixed image. Total silence. Christophe stretches his limbs, still holding the steering wheel.

  ‘The end of the road, the end of the night.’

  His serene smile, his calm assurance, the extreme banality of what he has just said annoy me immensely.

  ‘The end of nothing at all, that’s right. Now where are we? I don’t like this place; let’s get out of here.’

  ‘We’ve been here dozens of times. Don’t be an idiot, come on. The sun’s going to come up. It’s amazing from the top of the cliff.’

  He opens his door and the void rushes into the car with the noise of a turbine. I see him walk a few metres beyond the bonnet, bent double, the two flaps of his raincoat plastered against his legs. Here we are then; the sun will rise, our hero will receive the absolution of the raging elements and then bish, bash, bosh, off he’ll go to hand himself in at the police station and it’s over: violins, the end, credits roll. Or even fucking stupider: he says goodbye to me, smiling, and throws himself into the abyss like an angel, disappearing between two clouds. I bash my fist against the dashboard. The glove box opens, spewing out an old rag and a pair of glasses missing a lens. What a lousy ending, what a terrible script! I force myself out of my shell, ready to scream, ‘Come on then, Christophe. Do you really have nothing more original for me?’ … but the wind pushes the words back down my throat the minute I open my mouth. If I didn’t keep both hands on the door handle, it would be me getting blown away. I throw myself down on all fours, fingernails digging into the ground. From the cliff edge, Christophe turns and motions to me to join him.