She was happy. She had just enrolled in her tenth Unit of Value [unité de valeur, a modular university course-credit]. She had filled out the form with care: Surname… BORNSTEIN (in capital letters). First name… Laurence. Born in… Etc… Etc… She looked at the other students around her. All of them seemed anxious, preoccupied with their choices. She — she was happy. It was true that they were, on the whole, younger than she was. In fact, she had thought: I am older than they are. But does one pay attention to the words that spin around in one’s head any which way, to those little inner cars that obey no highway code? She was happy. There was no longer a single free window in her schedule. All her hours were now taken up — well… There again, her thought had nearly used the word “caged,” because of that mania she had for cross-hatching the empty time slots on the cover page of her binder.
— Are there still places left?
A kid barely 20 was hailing her with that offhandedness that comes from the certainty of belonging to the same generation. And as always, the moment one noticed the thirty-odd years her face betrayed, one caught oneself.
— Oh! sorry, I…
— No, no, what are you apologizing for? I think there’s still room in the Body-Expression U.V.
She added, to let the other know she was “one of them”:
— That’s the one I’ve just signed up for.
— How many hours a week is it, this U.V.?
Laurence looked at her sheet:
— Three hours. Wait — that’s it, three hours, and now, it’s great, I’m taken full-time.
She caught herself blushing at this confidence made to a stranger, in a language that was not her own. The words “full-time” fluttered about in her head. Like butterflies, she said to herself. But she couldn’t decide whether they were moths or butterflies of the day. She turned the ignition key of the little Fiat. She was happy. Butterflies! butterflies! whatever am I dreaming up now? Come on, let’s say they’re butterflies of the day. The year would be a rich one, and perhaps once she had her degree… yes, why not? perhaps the child. A child. A wave of warmth rose from her belly to her face. As usual, it took her four or five tries before the engine roared into life. As usual, she thought: I’ll call the garage tomorrow. As usual, tomorrow was Saturday, Saturday was Judas, Judas was another rhythm, another aspect of the furniture, the rugs, the hours. The man she loved. The man who loved her. The one who would ask absentmindedly, sometimes without even looking at her: you weren’t too bored? As though he took her for one of those boulevard-comedy characters whose day is punched out by errands at the Galeries [Lafayette], the hairdresser on the rue Saint-Honoré, and the aerobics session. As usual, he would sleep late, wake smiling, gulp down a black and scalding coffee, ask after the week’s main phone calls, then ask all the same how things were going at the university. As usual, she would say things were going wonderfully, and she would add, full of pride but with an air of not attaching too much importance to it: you know, I’ve enrolled in Body Expression, a U.V. where there aren’t many people, because they think it’s about physical fitness, and I don’t have a minute to myself anymore, nearly as taken up as you are!
— I don’t wish that on you, it’s no fun every single day, you know!
The man she loved and who remained, to her, distant, foreign, closed, like those secret houses where one cannot tell whether the windows are rusted shut, the doors blocked by some code that is dreadfully unknown to you. Oh! Judas was always full of attentions toward her, he had the right voice, the right word, the right gesture, but how to put it? a nothing, a tiny nothing floated between them, an unspoken thing not dramatic in the least, simply a territory they did not share, a place where he could not, or would not, lead her. It took only a phone call from cousin Samuel, the nearness of a holiday, of a meal — above all, of a meal at his mother Golda’s — and she found herself absent, erased, as though emptied of her own culture, which she would begin to find bland and insubstantial. As every time she thought back on her life with Judas, the word “mixed marriage” slapped her viciously. And as every time that word assailed her, she felt humiliated. At the Place de la Nation, the traffic was reaching a fever pitch. The cars seemed wedged one inside another in a pointless flood of decibels and carbon dioxide. As though, on a Friday evening, all of Paris wanted to live in the suburbs. She sighed, and turned up the radio, which almost immediately irritated her. She switched off the program, looking in the rear-view mirror for a glimpse of her hair. She found it dull, badly brushed. Decidedly, her good mood of the afternoon was melting away before her eyes. Friday evening. She’d have plenty of time to shower, to do her hair; Judas’s train didn’t get in until 8:30. Of course, she would draw away a little when Judas made the inevitable phone call to his mother. There would be the unconscious gestures of his hands, the faces he pulled, the words murmured in a low voice — well, it was the little territory, the secret garden she had no access to. Judas’s voice, in those moments, took on something like a childhood timbre, a very particular gentleness — how to say it — a concern to understand, to spare; and words, suddenly, would slip into his careful French, words of that other language that literally terrified her, for what they connoted, in her subconscious, of a whole swath of Judas’s life in which she had no part. “Mamele,” he would say in that gentle, gentle voice, “Mamele, understand me!” The Yiddish excluded her, hurled her brutally back into that dreadful suburb of mixed marriage, far from a Judas who no longer had the same gaze, the same voice. She would then begin to look at him without a word, intensely, as though to summon this stranger standing beside her, in the only language that had become common to them: silence. And in those moments, people went so far as to think her a racist. But surely she was imagining things. She was unfairly blowing this whole business of language out of proportion. It was not the Yiddish that caused what she couldn’t quite manage to define, even alone in her car. No, things lay behind Judas’s eyes, behind that closed door to which he held the key, a key he kept carefully, with a violent gentleness, behind those irreversible years, those hours, those seasons of childhood during which Judas had built himself, during which he had become the man she had chosen and whom she loved. And the man she loved could not tell her, did not tell her: “Laurence, remember when…”, or else, “you know perfectly well my mother’s gefilte fish is more…”. He kept silent, with an immense tenderness, but he kept silent.
She had reached the Bois de Vincennes, all magnified by the month of October. The leaves could not quite bring themselves to die altogether. The cold evening wind, like an invisible cat, pilfered the driest of them, and rolled them an instant along the road, before abandoning them like dead birds. The hour, perhaps, the oncoming night, those dead leaves — she felt suddenly a great pang in her heart, a wave of shadow. But no, she was happy, happy. She was going home, Judas would be there that night. Why had she lost herself in these stupid, useless ramblings? What mattered remained all that she shared with him, and this year of studies, too, that awaited her. What mattered was that she no longer had a minute to herself, that she would try to wrest at least nine U.V.s out of ten. The degree — that was certain, she’d have it next year. She mused a moment on the mysterious content of this “Body Expression,” which she had chosen rather at random, saw again the face of the student who had enrolled just before her. A sort of aged young man, and she had wondered whether his beard refused to grow or couldn’t bring itself to disappear entirely. He had had a kind of hesitation in filling out the form, the hand itself seeming to ponder and ask itself questions, the gait toward the exit faltering. In fact, something she had felt herself, a sense of what’s-the-use. She brushed the memory aside in annoyance.
The little car entered Nogent at a slow pace. To think she had detested this suburb at first! How can one live without the silhouette of the Panthéon, without the embankments in the rain, toward Notre-Dame? It had taken Judas’s absolute placidity, that way he had of de-dramatizing, of restoring to things their everyday dimension — small at times, but reassuring. Other habits had been fashioned, other glances had been woven with people, that complicity born of waiting at the same butcher’s, or at the same bus stop. Yes, a little homeland rather than a suburb.
Judas would not be there for another hour and a half, or two. She sighed, quickly arranging a lock of hair in the rear-view mirror. Three months that this commission in Bourges had kept him away for the week. A cultural center to decorate. Three months. And before that, there had been that horrid manor house out near Rennes, a real-estate bigwig. There, she had even ended up staying a fortnight at a stretch. Ah! she was not going to spoil the mood she’d had earlier. Judas would be there for dinner, that was what counted. On Sunday, they had that invitation to the Ponges’ at Fontainebleau. She quite liked Catherine, though very homely, almost a frump. And Henry too, a sort of partner of her husband’s; when he wasn’t talking shop with Judas, he was very pleasant, full of humor, at times. There it was, that was all she shared — a play now and then, a film, and this plan to go to the snow, not with the Ponges, of course, because they always chose the Easter break, and Judas at Easter, well… Pesach, he would say, it’s out of the question! Come now, come now, everything was fine, Judas was doing remarkably well these days. No more money problems. He spoke to her less — well, what one would call speaking — but he still made love beautifully. Saturday and Sunday. Everything was fine. She was going to sit her degree in psychology next year. Perhaps they would decide on the child, right afterward. Well, that was what he had already said five or six years ago, then again last year. A child. Judas had had a curious question when she first brought it up: “and what if it’s a boy?” His face, suddenly, had reflected an absolute anxiety.
She had been left dumbstruck by it, as though thunderstruck by a danger she couldn’t even manage to define. Ah! she could have slapped herself! why did she let herself be drawn into these speculations when she was happy? She no longer had a minute to herself during the week, she was going to have fascinating classes every day.
She parked the car a hundred meters or so from the house. A little detour to the bakery, the deli right next door. It was on her way back that she caught sight of the couple — he in a sweater and jacket, well into his thirties; she, in one of those faded “jeans” outfits that don’t cost a fortune, but still. He was holding a baguette under his arm rather comically, she a string shopping net. Their two free hands clasped without violence, as though laid one within the other, and she thought of those fruit baskets shaped like a boat, where the apples don’t seem to be prisoners. A couple.
They were standing in front of the big bookshop on the corner — well, the Maison de la Presse, with the newspapers in a jumble, the books, the records. Two strangers born of the chance of the hours. The young woman was pointing at a record album or a book, and one could see, in the reflection of the shop window, her lips move, like a water flower. He was smiling. Then, turning toward her, he kissed her lightly, with that naturalness that wool confers. They might have been a brother and sister, well, almost. They set off again at that calm, confident pace given by level ground and a great deal of time before one.
She watched the couple walk in front of her, hands still joined, with a stupefying ease. They stopped again, this time in front of the florist’s shop. The young woman bent down, took a little nothing of a bouquet, one of those curbside bouquets that soak all day in little green metal vases, went in to pay, then came back out, a smile offered up — there was no other word — a smile offered up on her face. He, again, brushed her lips, and they set off, hand in hand still. A simple scene, with no excess whatsoever, no ostentation. Standing against the door of her car, Laurence watched them walk away, and, without even realizing it, she began to cry. The tears came out of her without restraint, without reason. People turned to look at her, astonished by these smooth tears sliding down a face that, all in all, was not weeping.
She was still crying, at home, an hour later, these watery tears, organic, as though devoid of emotional content, onion-tears, when the doorbell rang, Judas’s two short rings. She quickly wiped her flooded face. After all, she had to announce it to Judas, joyfully — this enrollment in the Body-Expression Unit of Value.