The white pearls
Fallen on my sleeves with heart still full
We parted
I take them with me
As a memory of you
(Kokinshu)
I put some of Maman’s yellow foam earplugs in my ears and read haikus from Papa’s Anthology of Classical Japanese Poetry so that I couldn’t hear their degenerate conversation. Afterwards, Colombe and Tibère stayed by themselves and started making unspeakable sounds, knowing perfectly well that I could hear them. The worst of it was that Tibère was staying for dinner because Maman had invited his parents. Tibère’s father is a film producer, and his mother has an art gallery on the quai de Seine. Colombe absolutely adores Tibère’s parents, she’s going with them to Venice next weekend, good riddance, for three days I’ll have some peace.
So, at dinner, Tibère’s father said: “What, you don’t know go, that fantastic Japanese game? I’m in the middle of producing a film version of Shan Sa’s novel, The Girl Who Played Go, it’s a fa-bu-lous game, the Japanese equivalent of chess. Yet another invention we owe to the Japanese, it is fa-bu-lous, I assure you!” And he began to explain the rules of go. He had it all wrong. To start with, it’s the Chinese who invented go. I know because I read a cult manga on go. It’s called Hikaru No Go. Secondly, it is not an equivalent to chess. Other than the fact that it’s a board game and that two adversaries face off over black and white pieces, it’s as different from chess as cats are from dogs. In chess, you have to kill to win. In go, you have to build to live. And thirdly, some of the rules that Mister I’m-the-father-of-an-idiot described were wrong. The aim of the game is not to eat the other, but to build the biggest territory. The rule regarding taking stones says that you can “commit suicide” if it is to take your adversary’s stones and not that you’re strictly forbidden to go anywhere you might be automatically taken. And so on.
So when Mister I-have-engendered-a-pustule said, “The ranking system of players starts at one kyu and then it goes up to thirty kyu and after that you go to dan: first dan, then second, and so on,” I couldn’t restrain myself, I said, “No, it’s in the opposite order: you begin with thirty kyu and go up to one.”
But Mister Forgive-me-I-knew-not-what-I-was-doing was obstinate and said grumpily, “No, dear child, I do believe I am right.” I shook my head; Papa was frowning and looking at me. The worst of it is that it was Tibère who saved me. “Yes, Dad, she’s right, first kyu is strongest.” Tibère is a math student, he plays chess and go. I hate the idea. Beautiful things should belong to beautiful souls. But in any event it’s Tibère’s father who was wrong and Papa, after dinner, told me off: “If you’re going to open your mouth to make my guests look ridiculous, then don’t.” What should I have done? Open my mouth like Colombe to say, “To be perfectly honest, I don’t know what to think of this season’s line-up at the Théâtre des Amandiers,” when she’s utterly incapable of reciting a single line from Racine, never mind appreciating the beauty of it. Open my mouth like Maman to say, “Apparently the Biennale last year was very disappointing,” when she would kill for her house plants and let all of Vermeer go up in flames? Open my mouth like Papa to say, “The French cultural exception is a subtle paradox,” which is virtually word for word exactly what he has said at the last sixteen dinner parties? Open my mouth like Tibère’s mother to say, “These days you can scarcely find a single decent cheese maker in all of Paris.” At least she’s not in contradiction with her Auvergne shopkeeper roots.
When I think of go . . . Any game where the goal is to build territory has to be beautiful. There may be phases of combat, but they are only the means to an end, to allow your territory to survive. One of the most extraordinary aspects of the game of go is that it has been proven that in order to win, you must live, but you must also allow the other player to live. Players who are too greedy will lose: it is a subtle game of equilibrium, where you have to get ahead without crushing the other player. In the end, life and death are only the consequences of how well or how poorly you have made your construction. This is what one of Taniguchi’s characters says: you live, you die, these are consequences. It’s a proverb for playing go, and for life.
Live, or die: mere consequences of what you have built. What matters is building well. So here we are, I’ve assigned myself a new obligation. I’m going to stop undoing, deconstructing, I’m going to start building. Even with Colombe I’ll try to do something positive. What matters is what you are doing when you die, and when June 16th comes around, I want to be building.
16. Constitution’s Spleen
The someone ringing at my door turns out to be the charming Olympe Saint-Nice, the daughter of the diplomat on the second floor. I like Olympe Saint-Nice. I think that one must have considerable strength of character to survive such a ridiculous first name, especially when one knows it must have destined the unfortunate girl to peals of laughter and “Hey, Olympe, can I climb on your mount?” all through what must have seemed an interminable adolescence. Moreover, Olympe Saint-Nice apparently does not wish to claim her birthright: she aspires neither to a rich marriage, nor to the corridors of power, nor to diplomacy, and least of all to any sort of celebrity. Olympe Saint-Nice wants to become a veterinarian.
“A country vet,” she confided to me one day when we were talking cats on my doormat. “In Paris all you get are house pets. I want cows and pigs, too.”
Olympe is not one for affected charades, the way some people in the building are, to prove that because she is a well-brought-up-child-of-leftists-without-prejudices she is conversing with the concierge. Olympe talks to me because I have a cat, and that brings us into a community of interests; I greatly admire her ability to circumvent all the barriers that society puts up along our laughable way through life.
“I have to tell you what happened to Constitution,” she says when I open the door.
“Please come in then, do you have five minutes?”
Not only does she have five minutes, she is so delighted to find someone with whom she can talk cats and little cat woes that she stays for an hour and drinks five cups of tea one after the other.
Yes, I really do like Olympe Saint-Nice.
Constitution is a lovely little female with caramel colored fur, a rosebud pink nose, white whiskers and lilac pads: she belongs to the Josses, and like all the pets in the building, she is taken to see Olympe the moment she even farts in the wrong direction. This useless but enchanting creature, three years of age, recently meowed all night long, depriving her owners of their sleep.
“Why, then?” I ask at the right moment, because we are absorbed by the complicity of acting out a tale and each of us wishes to play her role to perfection.
“A urinary tract infection!” says Olympe. “A urinary tract infection!”
Olympe is only nineteen and is waiting with frenzied impatience to start veterinary college. In the meantime she works relentlessly and both bewails and enjoys the afflictions that befall the fauna of our building, the only beasts upon which she can practice.
That is why she has announced Constitution’s urinary tract infection to me as if she had found a seam rich with diamonds.
“Urinary tract infection!” I chime enthusiastically.
“Yes,” she sighs, her eyes shining. “Poor sweetie, she was peeing all over the place and—” Olympe takes a breath before reaching the best part of the story—“she displayed mildly hemorrhagic urine!”
Dear God this is good. If she had said, There was blood in her pee, the story would have been over in no time. But Olympe, cloaking her cat doctor’s uniform with emotion, has also adopted the terminology. I have always found great delight in hearing people speak like this. “Mildly hemorrhagic urine” is, to me, a form of light entertainment: it has a nice ring to it and evokes a singular world, a brief refreshing change from literature. For the very same reason, I enjoy reading the leaflets that come with medication, the respite provided by the precision of each technical term, which convey the
illusion of meticulousness and a frisson of simplicity, and elicit a spatiotemporal dimension free of any striving for beauty, creative angst or the never-ending and hopeless aspiration to attain the sublime.
“There are two possible etiologies for urinary tract infections,” continues Olympe. “Either an infectious germ, or renal dysfunction. I felt her bladder to start with, to be sure she didn’t have distension.”
“Distension?!”
“In cases of renal dysfunction where the cat cannot urinate, the bladder fills up and gets terribly distended, to the point where you can feel it if you palpate the abdomen,” explains Olympe. “But this wasn’t the case. And she didn’t seem to be in pain when I was examining her. But she was still peeing everywhere.”
I spare a thought for Solange Josse’s living room, transformed into a giant litter box with trendy ketchup-colored accents. But for Olympe that is mere collateral damage.
“So did Solange have urine tests done?”
Yes, but there was nothing wrong with Constitution. No kidney stones, no insidious germs lurking in her peanut-sized bladder, no infiltrations of enemy bacteriological agents. And yet, for all the anti-inflammatory, antispasmodic and antibiotic medication administered, Constitution remains obdurate.
“So what is wrong with her?” I ask.
“You won’t believe this,” says Olympe. “She has interstitial idiopathic cystitis.”
“Good Lord, what’s that?” I ask, eager for the next development.
“It’s like, well, Constitution is a nervous wreck,” replies Olympe with a peal of laughter. “Interstitial is whatever has to do with an inflammation of the walls of the bladder and idiopathic means no identified medical cause. In short, when she’s stressed, she gets inflammatory cystitis. Just like women.”
“But why on earth would she be stressed?” I am thinking out loud, for if Constitution, whose daily life as a fat, decorative lazybones is disturbed by nothing worse than kindly veterinary examinations consisting of having one’s bladder rubbed, has reason to be stressed out, the rest of the animal kingdom is bound to succumb to serious panic attacks.
“The veterinarian has spoken: only the cat knows why.”
And Olympe pouts with frustration.
“Not long ago Paul (Josse) told her she was fat. There’s no way to know. It could be anything.”
“And how do you treat it?”
“As you do with humans,” laughs Olympe. “You prescribe Prozac.”
“Are you serious?”
“Absolutely.”
What did I tell you. Animals we are, animals we shall remain. The fact that a rich person’s cat suffers from the same afflictions as a civilized woman is hardly a reason to call this cruel and inhuman treatment of felines or the contamination by mankind of an innocent domestic animal; rather, to the contrary, one should point to the deep-rooted solidarity underlying the fate of all animal species. We share the same appetites, we endure the same afflictions.
“In any event,” says Olympe, “this will give me pause when I treat animals I don’t know.”
She gets up and bids a friendly goodbye.
“Thank you, Madame Michel, you’re the only one I can talk to about things like this.”
“Oh you’re most welcome, Olympe, it was my pleasure.”
And I am about to close the door when she says,
“Oh, by the way, Anna Arthens is going to sell the apartment. I hope the new owners will have cats, too.”
17. A Partridge’s Ass
Anna Arthens is selling her place!
“Anna Arthens is selling her place!” I say to Leo.
“Well I never,” he replies—or at least that is my impression.
I have been living here for twenty-seven years and no apartment has ever been sold out of the family. Old Madame Meurisse left her place to young Madame Meurisse, and the same thing happened, more or less, for the Badoises, the Josses, and the Rosens. The Arthens arrived at the same time we did; in a way, we grew old together. As for the de Broglies, they’d already been here for a very long time, and still occupy the premises. I do not know how old the Councilor is, but as a young man he already seemed old, which means that now that he is truly very old, he still seems young.
Anna Arthens, consequently, is the very first, under my mandate as concierge, to sell property that will change hands and name. Oddly enough, the thought of it terrifies me. Am I therefore so used to the eternal repetition of the same old things that the prospect of a change that is as yet hypothetical plunging me once again into the river of time serves to remind me of that river’s currents? We live each day as if it were merely a rehearsal for the next, and the cozy existence at 7, rue de Grenelle, with its daily proof of continuity, suddenly seems like an island battered by storms.
Considerably upset, I take out my shopping cart and, leaving Leo behind to snore gently in his chair, I head with an unsteady step for the market. At the corner of the rue de Grenelle and the rue du Bac I encounter Gégène, the imperturbable inhabitant of his cardboard boxes, and as I approach he watches me like a trapdoor spider sizing up his prey.
“Hey there, Ma’am Michel, you gone and lost yer cat again?” he shouts, and laughs.
Here is one thing at least that never changes. Gégène is a tramp who spends his winters here and has done so for years: he sleeps in squalid cardboard boxes, and wears an old greatcoat which, like its owner, has somehow miraculously made it this far and, like him, is redolent of a turn-of-the-century Russian merchant.
“You should go to the shelter,” I tell him, as I always do, “it’s going to get cold tonight.”
“Ah, ah,” he yaps, “that shelter, I’d like to see you there. I’m better off here.”
I go on my way, then feeling guilty, turn back.
“I thought I’d let you know . . . Mr. Arthens died last night.”
“The food critic?” asks Gégène, with a glint in his eye, and his nose raised like a hunting dog sniffing out a partridge’s ass.
“Yes, the food critic. His heart suddenly gave out.”
“My, my!” Gégène is clearly moved.
“Did you know him?” I ask, to have something to say.
“My, my!” says the tramp again, “why do the good ones have to go first?”
“He had a good life,” I say hesitantly, surprised at the turn the conversation is taking.
“Ma’am Michel,” says Gégène, “folks like him, they don’t make ’em anymore. My, my, I’m going to miss the old fellow.”
“Did he give you something, I don’t know, some money for Christmas?”
Gégène looks at me, then spits at his feet.
“Nothing, in ten years not a single coin, whaddya expect? No two ways about it, he was quite a character. Don’t make ’em like that anymore, no they don’t.”
This little exchange is disturbing, and while I thread my way up and down the aisles of the market, I let my thoughts wander back to Gégène. I have never given poor people credit for having noble souls, on the pretext that they are poor and only too well acquainted with life’s injustices. But I have always assumed that they would be united in their hatred of the propertied classes. Gégène has set the record straight on that score and taught me this: if there is one thing that poor people despise, it is other poor people.
Basically, that does make sense.
I wander up and down, distractedly, and find myself in the cheese section, where I buy a chunk of parmesan and a fine piece of soumaintrain.
18. Ryabinin
When something is bothering me, I seek refuge. No need to travel far; a trip to the realm of literary memory will suffice. For where can one find more noble distraction, more entertaining company, more delightful enchantment than in literature?
Quite suddenly I find myself by the olives, thinking about Ryabinin. Why Ryabinin? Because Gégène wears that old greatcoat, embellished in the back with buttons at the waist, and it reminds me of Ryabinin’s greatcoat. In Anna Karenina, Ryabinin
, a greatcoat-wearing timber merchant, comes to see Levin, a country aristocrat, about a sale with Stepan Oblonsky, a Moscow aristocrat. The merchant swears on all the icons and all the saints that Oblonsky will profit from the sale, but Levin accuses him of cheating his friend out of a small forest that is worth triple what Ryabinin has offered. This scene is preceded by a dialogue where Levin asks Oblonsky if he has counted how many trees there are in his forest.
“What on earth, count the trees?” exclaims the gentleman, “you may as well count the sand in the sea!”
“You may be certain that Ryabinin has counted them,” retorts Levin.
I am particularly fond of this scene, first of all because it takes place in Pokrovskoye, in the Russian countryside. Ah, the Russian countryside . . . there is a very special charm about such a place—it is wild and yet still bound to mankind through the land, mother to us all . . . The most beautiful scene in Anna Karenina is set at Pokrovskoye. Levin, dark and melancholy, is trying to forget Kitty. It is springtime, he goes off with the peasants to mow the fields. In the beginning the task seems too arduous for him. He is about to give up when the old peasant leading the row calls for a rest. Then they begin again with their scythes. Once again Levin is about to collapse from exhaustion, once again the old man raises his scythe. Rest. And then the row moves forward again, forty hands scything swaths and moving steadily toward the river as the sun rises. It is getting hotter and hotter, Levin’s arms and shoulders are soaked in sweat, but with each successive pause and start, his awkward, painful gestures become more fluid. A welcome breeze suddenly caresses his back. A summer rain. Gradually, his movements are freed from the shackles of his will, and he goes into a light trance which gives his gestures the perfection of conscious, automatic motion, without thought or calculation, and the scythe seems to move of its own accord. Levin delights in the forgetfulness that movement brings, where the pleasure of doing is marvelously foreign to the striving of the will.