Fragments of Place Read online

  Everything looked normal for the others. No one seemed to have noticed the misfortune that had befallen the dwelling. She alone sought what was lost, her luminous big sister who, when she arrived, so they said, a red carpet had been unrolled from the door to the street in the middle of winter, and all flags were made to fly.

  Then, one day, the little girl understood that a baby was growing in her mother’s stomach.

  When that child entered the house, there were no celebrations to mark his arrival.

  The little boy did not have a room. There was no room in the house for the newborn.

  From the start, the girl was afraid for him.

  She slipped talismans into his diapers to save him from the evil forces she felt prowling all around him. If she could have, she wouldn’t have let anyone near him to keep something or someone from doing him harm, the way they had done to her sister.

  She feared that her little brother would also disappear in inexplicable fashion. Small children were so easily lost in this sinister place.

  But he didn’t disappear. His mother did.

  One morning, very early, she left as a siren screamed out its misfortune.

  The child saw her again, several days later. The body displayed on white satin was cold, stiff, and silent. The little girl called and called, but there was no more mother inside.

  The entire house sank along with the mother, then disappeared into a vast black hole.

  Just like that, the little girls, each in her own direction, were thrown into the dormitories of death.

  A few wane nightlights placed high on the walls made the place look like the catacombs. Bedside tables separated thirty or so narrow beds.

  Under the ecru blankets and the scratchy sheets were pale, unmoving children who, like them, seemed to be sleeping. But none of the little girls was asleep. They were dead.

  Yet in the morning, each bravely assumed her assembly line life, without anyone realizing they had disappeared.

  When evening came again, they died all over again, in silence. Again and again. Night after night.

  Suddenly the woman remembered where she was. She was standing in the middle of the present.

  The big sister and the little brother had died, for real, several years ago.

  Before they disappeared forever, the woman was able to find them again.

  Today, that’s the only thing that counts.

  As the woman looks on, the past slips into the confusion between the ill-fitting floorboards.

  THE JACKALS

  There was still an hour to go before curfew, but Lilia was huddling in her tent with the three other women with whom she shared her shelter. They had closed the canvas flap that served as a door. The heat was unbearable, but less threatening than the dangers from without.

  Tasmine, the oldest, was lying on a mat. She hadn’t stirred for several days. Soraya was attending to her. She was whispering prayers in her ear, moistening her lips with drops of water, keeping away the flies from her eyes and mouth, and bathing her forehead.

  Soraya and Tasmine came to the camp ten months ago. They were among the survivors of an exodus during which more than half of those who had tried to escape the attack were killed. Among the dead were Soraya’s children.

  Aïcha was sleeping in Lilia’s arms. Fever had blotted out the anxiety that twisted her stomach into a knot. She was eight years old. Her memory was already filled to the brim. They met during the thirty-eight-day march that led them, with the others, to this camp. They had become inseparable ever since the night when, under an indigo sky sewn with stars, as beautiful as a picture book, Aïcha was raped for the first time.

  Lilia looked at her pen. When fear came over her, as it was doing now, she kept it in her hand.

  Waterproof. An unnecessary guarantee. It hadn’t rained for more than two months. And the refugees didn’t receive the promised daily ration of water to drink, cook the rice in, and wash, a ration determined and written down somewhere, far away, in some official document, in a place where water ran freely. Here, people stood in line every four days, sometimes for hours under a burning sun, to get just enough of it, and just enough food not to starve to death. Some died anyway, every day, from lack of food and everything else.

  Fade proof. The ink from this pen was guaranteed highest quality. Lilia thought she would enjoy this guarantee for many years in the future. When you’re twenty-four, that’s normal.

  Lilia came from an urban background more educated and Westernized than the others. Some traditions were still respected, but many had fallen to the wayside because they were obsolete, unjust, and inhuman, even for the men.

  There was no more ink in the transparent cylinder of her pen. Before, she would have thrown it away and replaced it with a new one. But now she held onto it like a precious object. Here, you didn’t throw anything away. You always found new uses for the few objects you could keep.

  A thin metal point held in your hand a few centimetres from someone’s eye – that might make for a powerful dissuasive argument. But not all the time.

  Lilia hadn’t let go of the pen since those hundred or so new refugees showed up a few hours ago. They were still beneath the big canvas shelter by the guard post near the main entrance. But very soon, they would be escorted through the labyrinth of the camp toward the tents to which they were assigned, ones in which someone had just died, or would die soon.

  Tasmine was breathing her last.

  Lilia wasn’t afraid of the new arrivals, most of them women, completely exhausted, stunned by the horror they had witnessed, and had suffered, wanting only one thing, to collapse and sleep, and reach complete amnesia as quickly as possible.

  Lilia closed her hand over her pen.

  The Jackals were on the lookout, prowling in silence, in groups of two or three, near the tents where death had left its seal and made room for others.

  Lilia heard two of them walking close by, so close they brushed the canvas. They even urinated on it.

  In every tent, from the lips of every man and woman rose a single desperate prayer to a God who could not hear them since he had stopped existing.

  The new arrivals, divided in groups according to different sectors, were escorted to their respective tents by armed guards. The latter would disappear once their job was done.

  Then the spoils could be divided up.

  The Jackals would burst into the tents, strip the new arrivals of the little they had saved, rape the women, and brutally beat the men to show them who the masters were here.

  Then they would go on their way, talking and laughing heartily, and return to their quarters where no one dared venture, not even the armed guards, despite the fact that they were refugees, too.

  The two Jackals stopped. They took up position by the opening to the tent, their legs spread, their arms crossed, their eyes as cutting as a blade. Any moment now, the guards were going to push someone inside.

  Lilia and Soraya had hidden little Aïcha underneath the mat where Tasmine lay. Their bodies would offer protection.

  EXILE

  Everything is black. India ink. More opaque than a starless night deep in the woods. Not the slightest ray of light under the door. No glow between the blinds, no night-light.

  Thick tar crept across the floor of the room and began to climb. Slowly, it covered everything: the walls, the furniture, everyone.

  Even his body disappeared. The man couldn’t see his feet or hands. Nothing. He couldn’t move to make sure he was still there. Yet he didn’t feel he was elsewhere.

  The silence was complete.

  He had stopped hearing Hildegard of Bingen singing through what seemed like cotton battien. And the muffled slipping of footsteps and the rustling of rich fabric. He’d stopped sensing the low voices of the people who, for hours, had attended to him, stroking his face and head.

  All sound had been consumed, down to the lowest murmur.

  OTHER PEOPLE’S BLOOD

  My legs suddenly stopped moving an
d my body, halted in its forward motion, wavered a moment, then recovered its balance so I would not have to put my foot on the linoleum of the Department of Hematology and Oncology.

  The floor of this imposing corridor was so shiny it looked like water.

  Yesterday, on the way out, I noticed that the cleaning staff had brought in heavy equipment used to wash, strip, and wax the linoleum. I didn’t pay much more attention. The work would be done through the evening and the night.

  I continued walking and headed for reception, where I checked in for a transfusion. Then I dropped the documents providing the necessary information into the pigeonhole by the door of Treatment Room B.

  As I waited for the invitation into that room, my eyes returned to the freshly waxed half of the long corridor.

  They had created a shallow pool, carefully designed to reflect the surroundings. A mirror of water. I leaned over. The mirror was so faithful I could see myself clearly.

  In it I also discovered the reflection of the many closed doors that lined either side, heavy with the drama that took place behind them, the images of wheelchairs in duplicate, the solid handrails that ran close to the floor, and the large posters on the walls that described, upside down and cast onto the floor, the intolerable illnesses that those who venture here are afflicted with.

  I felt trapped in this heavy universe, grown heavier still by its duplication.

  I decided to go into the section of the corridor with a duller finish where the transformation would take place tomorrow night.

  But it was no better. On this side, the linoleum was splattered with stains of every variety. Millions of germs must have been proliferating there and spreading out in all directions.

  I left the contamination zone and returned to the mirror in which sickness and death dwelled and evolved before my eyes.

  The reflecting pool of the Taj Mahal displays a tomb. Yet nothing is macabre there. On the surface of the water is reflected, in inverted form, the sublime mausoleum that transcends death, magnifies love, and glorifies life. In the mirror of water, many things are visible: the cypresses that border it, the birds, and the sky above that turns the immutable white marble tomb into a living soul, moving and alive, changing colour and mood.

  In the water of the hematology-oncology corridor, life was teeming there, too.

  It was a place of encounters. Discreet glances, soft smiles, and understanding nods. Sometimes a few words were exchanged. Though we didn’t know each other, we were comrades. I knew nothing of the exact circumstances that brought the other people to this place, and they knew nothing of mine, but we understood all the same. And that was enough to inspire a kind of tenderness that imposed no conditions, no confessions, and no expectations.

  Finally they called me. I entered the arena of extreme combat.

  The enemy was invisible yet ubiquitous, which made it terrifying. Its weapons were all the more terrible, since we hardly understood them at all. It manoeuvred in the secrecy of our cells, making them veer madly off course. They forgot everything about their position and their vital role. They started multiplying and invading us.

  Yet our bodies were not completely defenceless. Fearless warriors held constant vigil. Most of the time, we knew nothing of their struggles against chaos. Their victories happened on a daily basis, and they were numerous, though discreet and won in silence.

  In the room, we could hear the beep-beep of the transfusion pumps that shot atomic charges into our bloodstream to exterminate the part of us that was killing us. Many healthy cells were destroyed in the process, collateral damage, inevitable in wartime.

  In this place, unspeakable things happened behind banal appearances. You just had to settle into an armchair for a while, or on a stretcher, to see that.

  We were not passive spectators who entered the chemotherapy room to observe what occurred in this place of taboos.

  We were more involved than the ethnologist who went to live among some exotic, distant tribe. Even if that person tried to be one with the life of the tribe, and tried for years, he would always remain on the outside.

  Whereas we who were lying here, our hands pierced by needles, were undergoing mutation. Just a word, only one, and we were catapulted into the ranks of the Stricken. Never again would we be part of the Intact. Even if we displayed the appearance of a cure.

  There were seven of us here, plus eight more in an adjoining room linked by a narrow corridor that had been turned into a small command post.

  Today, no chemo for me. The most recent treatment had been an ordeal for my red blood cells.

  I chose an armchair instead of a stretcher. I felt less diseased that way. Sometimes all it takes is something small to make me feel less sick, or not sick at all. An article of clothing. A look. Desire that rises like sap.

  A nurse came up to me.

  The first time I entered this room, I thought the atmosphere would be saturated with sadness and discouragement, and that an almost mortuary gravity would be the order of the day. That’s because I didn’t know about these women coming and going from patient to patient, dispensing care with disconcerting ease. They talked and laughed, both concentrated and light-hearted. On that first day I understood that, thanks to them, this place had nothing morbid about it. On the contrary: here, life was celebrated.

  As months went by, or years in some cases, a bond grew between these women and us. A respectful familiarity that gave us a name, and them, too.

  The nurse, Christine, inserted a needle into my left hand. An IV drip would gently widen my vein and prepare me for the great Encounter.

  The most intimate kind of encounter: a disturbing connection between myself and someone I didn’t know would soon take place.

  That other person would slowly penetrate me and impregnate me with that unctuous red substance that flowed through every part of his body, driven by his heart.

  He would give me the ruby-red blood that ran through his veins.

  During this long, intense encounter, I would not see his face, nor touch him with my hands or lips. We would not sense the vibrations of our voices, nor hear our words, nor even the rhythm of our breathing.

  This would not be the vampire’s shadowy Gift. He would not empty me of my humanity and offer instead eternity built upon the blood of the innocent victims he killed.

  The man who would enter me through that little vein on my hand would offer the Gift of light that would return me to life, the simple, beautiful life of a mortal woman.

  One day, somewhere, not long ago, that man I did not know decided, without having to, to take his time and travel to some trivial place, most likely, to do the thing he had chosen to.

  Maybe it was at a shopping centre.

  There, they sat him down in an armchair or had him lie on a stretcher. After a few routine questions, a nurse stuck a needle into the soft part of his arm and hurt him.

  When I leave this place, I’ll go with that other person inside me.

  INDELIBLE VIRGINIA

  When she placed the tray on the low table, Nessa knocked over the opaline blue vase that was her mother Julia’s favourite. It broke when it fell to the floor.

  Her father roared. He fulminated. He groused. He claimed they wanted to take everything that remained of her away from him.

  In a defensive crouch in his armchair, he muttered to himself. An old ill-tempered bear licking his wounds, opening them up again to reawaken the pain, right there, where it always is. Under the skin, pus.

  The dignified patriarch before them, parading through the salon, drinking delicate sips of tea between two complacent comments, oh, how terrible, so utterly cruel for you, just imagine it. And urged on, he expanded, in life it’s not the same if you only knew no one could ever face.

  A nasty character with the women of the house. An ogre. The mother, devoured. The older sister, stifled. Now it was Nessa’s turn. Then probably Virginia’s. If there was anything left. If the false brother didn’t grab all of it, and destroy it all. One
small rape after another.

  In front of the father, the women were always together, standing very close to one another. Not taking each other’s arm or hand, but their dresses touched. Their silence formed a wall of bricks to protect them from what had despoiled them over these last four years.

  In her bed, Virginia was screaming and struggling. She scratched Leonard’s face and tried to strangle him.

  They moved Leonard away from her. And tied Virginia down.

  Leonard cried, What’s the matter with you, Virginia? I’ve never hurt you. I’ve always loved you. I’ve always taken care of you!

  Virginia screamed the crudest insults imaginable at him.

  He left the room, slamming the door.

  In the next room, he thrust his hands into a bowl of cool water and rinsed his injured face. He was crying.

  Virginia was serving tea in the strictest respect of Victorian customs. But her slip was showing and the lace was hanging free.

  Leonard bought a house far from London. Away from everything. So the beast in her would not reawaken.

  Virginia was serving tea the way she’d learned at fifteen in the dark house at Hyde Park Gate. Everything seemed in perfect order. But Nessa saw how her sister’s hands trembled.

  Lying by the currant bushes, Virginia stretched and laughed in the sunlight with Vita. She talked. Vita listened. She was talking about Vita being a hermaphrodite.

  Suddenly, Vita got up and spoke. You don’t even have a sex. All you know about is writing and talking!

  She stalked off angrily.

  It started with a thick fog that rose and moved slowly through her head. Like mist upon the sea. Virginia watched it come near. Little by little the horizon was cut off. Her train of thought became unravelled.

  Virginia lay down.

  The waves were forming. Crashing. Unfurling. Beating against the inside of her skull.

  She put earplugs in her ears. Covered her eyes with a black velvet band. She wished she could disappear.