All My Friends

ALL MY FRIENDS

The next time I see Werner, once all this is over, a nervous snicker will be his only greeting. He’ll back a few steps away, cautious and, for once, unsure of himself.

* * *

I ask Séverine to tell me about her husband, which she does, at first sullenly and reluctantly, and then, seeing me so curious, curtly and parsimoniously.

Here I chide myself for letting my eagerness show. Take it one step at a time with your maid Séverine, I say to myself, she can read you like your own mother.

But Séverine is a full fifteen years my junior, so why all this interest in Séverine’s husband, obscure young man that he surely is, just as she is a commonplace charming young woman I pay to come to my house every day and do the tasks I find tedious?

Be patient, be careful with Séverine, I admonish myself, and slink through the tallest grass, and always stop short of your mark.

Because I’ve sensed from the start that this job does not mean so much to her that she’d hesitate to walk out on me should something displease her, for example my inquisitorial manner, and since I often feel uncomfortable and contrite to see Séverine doing some chore I could easily deal with, I accuse myself of attempting to abuse her to the fullest by thrusting these honeyed questions on her every time she looks up, for I’m quite aware that she can scarcely have the presence of mind to weigh her words, or hold her tongue, or change the subject when I confront her so unexpectedly that she jumps on her way out of the bathroom, still flushed and tousled from bending into my deep tub.

Little by little, inside me, a knowledge of Séverine’s husband is taking shape. I know the rudiments: he works in the post office, like Séverine he’s thirty years old, his hair and eyes are such-and-such a color, and so forth.

It takes me a good while to work up my courage and ask her if. .

I come serenely to Séverine, give her my caring, courtly smile, part my lips, but certain forthright words stay stuck in my throat. Séverine looks at me with her narrow golden eyes, surprised, then shrugs and goes on her way, tactfully sidestepping me.

I position myself in the hall, arms outstretched to block the way. Séverine comes out of my bedroom, empty-handed, as if she has nothing to do. In a loud, husky voice I blurt out:

“Do you love your husband, Séverine?”

For those are the words I couldn’t bring myself to speak before.

Séverine’s eyebrows come together, knit in anger. She stares into my eyes. But I hold her gaze, and after an awkward moment she finds herself forced to look away.

“Do you, Séverine, love your husband?”

My pleasure at saying this makes my voice slightly shrill. Séverine slowly comes toward me. Her arms swing back and forth, her chin is raised, lips clenched in indignation. I’ve never seen my maid Séverine so angry with me. Could it be that she doesn’t dare answer? She keeps coming till she’s standing against me, her very round breasts touching my chest, compressing it slightly with their heavy, unyielding weight. Séverine outstrips me, not by her height, which is close to my own, but by the density of her muscles, the solidity of her flesh. Again I cry out, enchanted by the words:

“Séverine, do you love your husband?”

Séverine’s gleaming eyes darken, and between two lashes a tiny teardrop appears, quivers, then falls onto my shoulder. But, although I believe I can feel a caustic substance eating into my skin at that spot, I see that Séverine is still enraged and surprised.

Séverine answers that, for one thing, she does love her husband (Oh, she loves him, I tell myself, downhearted), and for another, she’s leaving me here and now, as I had absolutely no right to ask such a question.

* * *

My maid Séverine was a student of mine in junior high, and I chose Séverine to come work in my house precisely because I recalled how she tormented me with her absurd, arrogant, selfabsorbed behavior as a beautiful teenager, lazy and bold, one among many, though none terrorized me like this Séverine, with her bird-of-prey stare — direct, yellow, unwavering.

Séverine clearly took great joy in fixing me with her cold, piercing gaze from the back of the classroom, eyeing me with relentless disdain as I stood exposed and frantic at the blackboard, until, exasperated, afraid, I let out an acerbic laugh and threatened her with sanctions if she didn’t look down at her workbook at once.

Séverine never obeyed. She’d raise one mocking eyebrow, still observing me. Sometimes, in a murmur, she answered: “But I’m not looking at you,” which set off such an explosion of hilarity inside me that I had to hurry out of the room, gasping, wretched, while she stayed just where she was, the imperturbable Séverine, perhaps even, who knows, taking my place at the board until, many long minutes later, my laughter and turmoil finally abated.

* * *

Now I have to beg Séverine’s forgiveness, and convince her to come back.

Before I do, I stop by the post office. I’ve had dealings with that round-cheeked boy before, perfectly pleasant and sharp, I remember his little wire-rimmed glasses and thick black hair, but I had no idea he was Séverine’s husband.

Now I know. Emboldened by this vital information, I hold my head high, and at that very moment some sort of mirror mysteriously hanging in the very atmosphere of that cramped post office reflects a new image of me: slender, well-dressed, distinguished profile, straight nose. Flustered but secretly pleased, I say to myself: still a fine figure of a man.

I gently rest my forehead on the pane of glass that separates me from Séverine’s husband.

* * *

How troubling it is to remember the loathing I felt for my student Séverine, and to think of the affection I feel for my maid Séverine. Are they even the same girl? I sometimes wonder.

The very young Séverine mistreated me horribly, despite all the pains I took with her, all the efforts I devoted to seeing her succeed, all the special warmth I might have seemed to feel for her, though that’s not how it was. It was my fear of Séverine that made me seek out her favor, her blessing. But there was no indulgence, no pity, not even coherence. How many times, in this very house that Séverine now half-heartedly cleans, saving her strength for activities unknown to me, how many times did I await her in vain, to give her, free of charge, the supplementary lessons she so sorely needed, and how many times did I drift off to sleep as I waited, beside the window where I’d been watching for her, and such a bitter, lost sleep it was? One morning I found the courage to scold her for failing to show, and in the soft, slightly breathless voice Séverine liked to use with me, she answered: “But I did come,” and I shuddered to think that, if she truly had crept into the house then she’d seen me in the anguish of my sad sleep, towering over me, perhaps tempted to. . to what? This Séverine, who knew nothing of anxiety, who was all reproval, pitiless judgment, disdain — this Séverine, I said to myself, oh, what Séverine? In my vulnerable state, in my solitude, what might this girl have done to me? I had no idea.

I still hoped to teach Séverine all I knew, but, intelligent though she was, Séverine shoved my lessons aside, with the discreet but unambiguous gesture that pushes away a dish of questionable food. My idea is that Séverine had chosen to sacrifice her education simply so as to receive nothing from me, and when a rational voice, rising from some spot in my empty house, assures me that this scarcely seems likely, I remain convinced all the same, however powerless t

Nothing I said was to stay inside her. I was a passionate man, and I was a passionate teacher, and that girl with the gaze of stone, that Séverine, disapproved of such passion. I had acquired a certain mastery in the art of beguiling my students. In the junior high school, in the high school, my enviable popularity had long been a matter of record. And that was precisely what Séverine condemned, never saying so outright, and so she coldly resisted it, preventing any intrusion of my knowledge into her clear, empty mind, sparing herself any commingling with me.

I tried to force her. I put my arm around her broad shoulders to help with an exercise she refused to let her mind even touch. In my turn, I stared into her yellow eyes, smiling deliberately, insistently, and I snapped my fingers before her closed face as if to invite her to dance, and I murmured:

“Séverine, I’m going to lend you some books, and you’ll read them, and then you’ll tell me about them.”

But not one of the many books lent to Séverine was ever returned, was ever the subject of any discussion, ever revealed that Séverine’s character had been affected by it, or her hatred for me reduced.

* * *

“Tell Séverine I’m sorry for being so curious,” I whisper to Séverine’s husband through the glass at the post-office counter.

Studying him at such close range, I’m disturbed and surprised to see Séverine’s husband for what he is, and unhappy with that girl for concealing what matters most about him.

He asks me what business I’d like to transact. “None,” I say, a little flustered.

And then, to that attentive young man: “Don’t you recognize me?”

I feel very alone. The glance I then give Séverine’s husband must be pleading or anxious, for in a low, kindly voice he replies that Séverine has already decided to keep working for me. I go on my way, listless, smelling the scornful workings of a conspiracy, a condescension, in the air of the street. And what my nose senses is confirmed by what I see on the opposite sidewalk, all aglow with a heart-wrenching gaiety: my wife and children, all three having long since made up their minds not to speak to me again, walking with long, lively strides toward the house that they live in without me.

Scurrying to keep up, I call out, first to my two sons and then to my wife.

“How are you doing?” I shout, forcing myself to sound cheerful, lighthearted.

They briefly turn their irritated gaze on me, three pairs of dark eyes, all identical and similarly hostile, then hurry off toward the avenue that I theoretically don’t even have the right to walk down.

* * *

Later, once Werner has come back to town, I’ll confide in him on the subject of my wife and children, and though Werner is far younger than I am he will lighten my burden, saying, for example, in his cultivated voice, “Are you supposed to spend your whole life making amends? Your whole life being punished?” And his fervid serenity, and the unshakable certitude of his pragmatism, will bit by bit lead me to find it unfair, contrary to what I once thought, that I should think myself condemned to spend my entire life expiating the mistakes or the crimes I committed (yes, it’s true — unless that’s not exactly what they were?) against my own family. Ensconced in my best armchair, his handsome, disquieting face making me forget the disquiet that my house’s desolate, whispering depths inspire in me every night (for my house doesn’t like me), Werner will force me to regain some of the self-respect, poise, and excellence I’d been fleetingly shown by the broad mirror that hung in the air when I stopped by the post office.

My wife and children made an ally of my house, where they once lived, where they no longer live. My house misses my children’s games and my wife’s wrenching cries, my house jealously envies that other house they now live in, unknown and modern. And on that point, far from laughing at my terrors and precautions, Werner will murmur, with a kindheartedness that brings tears to my eyes: “Don’t forget, you’re the master of your house.” It sounds so innocent when Werner says it. I must neither fear my house nor beg it to forgive me for being alone.

I am the master of my house.

* * *

Séverine comes by while I’m still away at school. Surprised to see the lights on in my house, I stand for a moment in the rain, my face raised toward the living room window, and I see Séverine pacing slowly back and forth, moving her lips, sometimes smiling into the little phone she keeps clasped to her ear.

With some sheepishness I remember a tiny gold phone I once confiscated from Séverine, thinking I’d heard it ring during class. I want to bring that incident up with Séverine. But Séverine’s never shown any sign of remembering me as her ex-teacher. Never has Séverine seemed to recall that connection between us, fifteen years back, and whenever, irritated, I’ve found myself on the verge of spitting out: “What did you do with those books I lent you, Séverine?” I’ve always kept quiet, lips pressed together, for fear I might see Séverine narrow her wary eyes in incomprehension, and so realize she’s fulfilled her pledge to allow no germ of my being into her person, since she has deeply and utterly forgotten me.

I rush into the house, excited and relieved. I say to Séverine:

“I’m so happy to see you again, Séverine.”

And then my joy gets the better of me, and I add: “That telephone of yours, Séverine, is it the one I took away from you, then gave back at the very end of the year?”

Séverine doesn’t answer. She carefully rehooks the telephone to her belt, she gathers up her long chestnut hair and fixes it behind her neck. Séverine pirouettes on her sleek athletic shoes, colored a victorious silver. She walks away, muttering that she’s going up to do my room.

I find this extremely unpleasant. I feel ashamed and resentful. Toward Séverine’s back, toward her broad, unfriendly, puritanical back, I snap:

“Why didn’t you tell me your husband’s an Arab? Why didn’t you tell me I know him, Séverine? Why did you want to keep those two things from me, Séverine?”

Séverine freezes in the entryway, at the foot of the big black staircase that leads up to my room, as well as my children’s old rooms, still untouched, still crammed with their baby clothes and their toys, though my children are now in their teens, as if they’d fled with such haste that there was no time to take anything with them. Séverine looks back. In a self-possessed voice, she tells me I’m clearly mistaken, because there’s no way I could have met her husband before.

“No, you’re the one who’s mistaken, Séverine.”

I speak calmly. I have no wish to gloat, even if I’m right. My feelings are hurt. Like my house, Séverine doesn’t like me. Nevertheless, I speak calmly.

“Your husband was my student, Séverine. He was in your class, and he was the only Arab in that class, so I remember him well. Which means that you met him in high school, Séverine.”

Séverine snickers. Her discomfort and melancholy undulate heavily between us.

She starts up the black staircase, empty-handed, as if, rather than clean, she was planning to lie down for a nap in my room. Then, reaching the top, she leans over the banister, and I think I she’s falling, throwing herself over. But she merely repeats that there’s no way I could have met her husband before, and I’m obviously confusing him with someone else. And I think I see her detach something from her neck and drop it my way, and I think I can feel a youthful human skin falling over my feet, a skin heavy with rancor and bitterness.

* * *

I don’t remember Séverine’s husband’s name, because it’s a complicated name, which I found difficult to hold in my memory even then. But I do recall Werner’s name, including his real first name. And when, later, I enter Werner’s luxurious house, when I timidly take my place in one of his armchairs, upholstered in a pale green leather so fine-grained it will make me think of Séverine’s neck and arms, I’ll squint slightly to fend off the dazzling light from the bare picture windows and observe that the sun always shines with extraordinary brightness in Werner’s garden, and that this excess seems to have established itself as a banal, inevitable amenity of the house, like the many bathrooms and the three communicating salons, and then, gently basking in the warmth pouring through the panes, eyes half-closed, as happy as if it were one of my sons hosting me, I will ask Werner:

“Why did you change your first name, Werner?”

“Because it’s the same as yours,” Werner will answer, in the crisp, precise, slightly proud voice of the excellent student who was once mine, and which aroused in me, at the time, a certain antipathy.

Vaguely hurt, I’ll say nothing, wondering why this young man, whom I’d taught with no small devotion, who was fond of me, who might even, discreetly, have admired me, should, having attained a loftier standing than mine, find it appropriate to turn up his nose at what made him, what propelled him to the place he now occupies, to the lavish and ridiculous house I’ll be so pleased to visit and sit down in, for that house will treat me fairly and lovingly.

Unmoved by my lot, Werner will add, coolly:

“Because it’s the same as yours, and Séverine used to hate that.”

He will smile his disturbing little smile, disillusioned and sorrowful but devoid of compassion, thoughtfulness, or curiosity. All around me, Werner’s house will offer its protection. The spirit of the house will disengage from Werner to come closer to me, understanding that for Werner the house is only a tool, and not the object of an affection that I myself wholeheartedly feel for it, asking nothing in return.

And Werner will offer me a drink, and I’ll jump. I’ll even begin to tremble a little. Raising one arm as if he’s threatened to strike me, I’ll say:

“No, no. No alcohol, never again.”

And oh, his distant smile, his detachment as he pours himself a glass of something or other, wanting to know nothing more about me!

* * *

And why the other one, then, Séverine’s husband? Why a husband for Séverine? How did that ever happen?

Séverine’s husband, the only Arab in the class, enjoyed a special protection and benevolence on my part, mediocre student though he was, and is it not absurd, is it not a sign of my blindness that I treated him with more care than I did Werner, who did my teaching proud, who played a palpable role in the establishment of my renown, but whom I didn’t like, for whom I had no regard, whom I never favored, despite his superior grades and his personal charm? Was I not misguided? Oh yes, I was misguided, misguided, misguided. For Werner’s parents were notoriously bourgeois, and on those simple grounds I allowed myself, with a perfectly clear conscience, to feel a disdain tinged with aversion for the young man who was not then named Werner, never particularly troubling to hide it from Werner, very likely assuming that having two medical-specialist parents is reason enough for anyone to expect no consideration or friendship from others.

I will come to Werner’s house, I’ll relax gratefully in one of his armchairs, upholstered in something very like silken female skin, though light green. But even as I enfold Werner in a thankful, expectant gaze, I will find a remorse, a sense of my own duplicity and foolishness, a vague fear tarnishing my pleasure and quietude in spite of me. Because I used to curse Werner, for living in the town center’s finest neighborhood. And his elegant little leather jackets, his brand-name jeans, his smart haircut, his countless pairs of athletic shoes, I hated all that with a slightly painful relish, remembering some boy or other, very like Werner, who’d tormented me for my pathetic appearance when I was fifteen.

And yet I will now find myself in the thrall of Werner’s house, driven from my own by an indecipherable tyranny.

And yet I will now find myself in the thrall of Werner himself, not so much of that young man who was once my student, not so much of him as of all that comes with him: my earlier misjudgment, his friendly house, his single-minded longing for Séverine, his comfort, his wealth. Before everything I once resisted, fighting off the temptation to envy him or find him impressive, I will lay down my arms. And I’ll watch Werner gracefully come and go, I’ll hear him offer me comforting words, offhanded, with no real friendship, simply because he has in his house a frightened and lonely man and has learned that one has a duty to say comforting words to those in my situation. I’ll tell him of the treachery of my house, my wife, and my sons, who, on abandoning me, lost all consciousness of my existence. I will vehemently refuse any alcohol. Nevertheless, I will never tell him how I once hated him, and when that memory comes back, with Werner there before me, I will blush in humiliation, unable to stop it, a simple-minded smile on my lips. I will be so unhappy that it makes Werner uncomfortable, Werner who enjoys such a mastery over his emotions.

* * *

I ask Séverine if she remembers that boy who now calls himself Werner. Standing before the big mirror in the entryway, Séverine stretches, fists clenched and raised high above her head, eyes half shut. I glimpse the creamy skin around her very deep navel, revealed by the pink sweater pulled up almost to the base of her breasts by Séverine’s pose.

“This Werner was in your high-school class, Séverine, and his real name is the same as my own. He went off to study and work in Paris, and now he’s back with us, and, Séverine, you’re the reason he’s here.”

I speak in a murmur, as overcome with emotion as if I were asking for Séverine’s hand.

“I taught you all, and that boy was the most brilliant student I’ve ever had, Séverine,” I add, with the vanity of a father.

Séverine eyes me coldly in the mirror. Slowly she lowers her arms, virtuous and assured, and I know that, perfectly confident in her own austerity, she would be no less unembarrassed or brusque had I actually seen her breasts.

Séverine did no work that morning. She drifted through the house, opening and closing the doors, tapping the furniture with a bent index finger, a discreetly critical expression on her dispassionate face. She seemed to be playing at inspecting my house like a potential buyer, but, roleplay being foreign to Séverine’s nature, I thought in a sort of outraged dismay that Séverine might actually covet my house. I could see that she felt no fear of the place. The empty upper-floor rooms greeted her pleasantly. I took note of all that with some gloom.

Séverine then answers my question: yes, she remembers Werner. To my great surprise, she adds that she once dated Werner, then left him for another boy, now her husband, and today they’re all thirty years old, meaning that these adventures date back to a distant, apocryphal, and even unlikely past.

“Ah yes, your husband, Séverine,” I say peevishly. “Do you believe your husband will ever do better than a job at the post office counter, Séverine? He was not a good student, not a good student at all. I believe, Séverine, that the past deserves our trust and respect, and I believe you have no right to consider the Werner question closed.”

But I stop there, shocked at myself, and fall into torrents of apologies, already cringing at what I see gleaming in Séverine’s bronze-colored eye: a pure, sovereign anger whose legitimacy enrages me.

I remember the pitiful grades that once disgraced Séverine’s work, like that of the boy who became her husband, I remember the peculiarity they shared, a total absence of the ugliness and indignity that reveals itself now and then on the brows of all backward students. Indeed, as I often vaguely reflected, did not the blot of their incompetence, displayed before the whole class, sometimes land on me, me, unjustly and incomprehensibly? As if the dishonor of a grotesquely bad grade lay with me, I who had written that grade with my own hand, and not with them, they who merely accepted it, without really accepting it, arrogant as ever. They think they’re too fine for all this, I often seethed, they want to play artist, and they feel only disdain for the teacher who sweats for them, stammering in his excitement and his yearning to please.

Séverine unhooks her telephone from her belt. She tosses her head to shake back the bounteous curls that cover her ear, which is tiny and pierced with three holes, always left unadorned. I notice the fine lines delicately incised at the corners of her eyes. A gentle stupor keeps my gaze glued to Séverine’s cheek, her straight mouth, her small nose, and I ask myself: is this the same person? knowing perfectly well, but could my ex-student Séverine really have gone from sixteen to thirty without those many passing years in any way altering my own existence, without my having done anything other than languish and age? No, I tell myself slowly, it’s out of the question, out of the question.

Lulled by Séverine’s murmurs into the phone, I realize with a start that she’s talking to my wife. She calls her “Madame,” then the name that belonged to my wife when I met her. Séverine turns off the phone. She looks into my helpless eyes, her gaze hard, intractable, authoritarian, icy with morality and truth. Sharply, Séverine tells me she knows of the harm I did to my family, my wife having told her on learning that Séverine was in my employ. Séverine knows all there is to know about that, she assures me. Séverine glowers at me, almost fanatically sure of herself and her unassailability.

“Can I not be pardoned someday, Séverine?” I say, wretched, blindsided. “Can I never be absolved, Séverine? Someday?”

Séverine then tells me that what I did can’t be forgiven, and, in the incorruptibility of her rigor, it’s as if she herself were the victim of my misdeeds.

“Why did you marry that boy, Séverine?” I ask. “Werner’s the one you. .”

But Séverine cuts me off with a sharp bark. Séverine tells me I must never speak of her husband again, and that, should I dare do so, she will lay out all my misdeeds, all the awful things I’ve said, exhaustively catalogued for her by my wife.

Confounded, I mumble:

“What you don’t know, Séverine, is that I couldn’t always control what I said or did, that there were, Séverine, circumstances which. .”

None of that interests her, Séverine tells me. And as the fire in her yellow eyes dims I see that she means it, that the reasons for my behavior bore her in advance, that it wearies her even to consider the possibility that there might have been reasons and moments.

“Do you remember that my wife was your teacher, Séverine?” I ask her.

Séverine tells me she does.

“Then why won’t you remember that I was your teacher as well?” I explode.

Patiently, Séverine explains that my wife was an excellent teacher, and that to this day she remembers her, my wife as a teacher, with great fondness.

“Well, that hardly seems fair, Séverine.”

I snicker, but I’m devastated.

My wife and I never talked about Séverine when she was our student, my wife because in her class Séverine was a passive and unexceptional pupil, me because Séverine persecuted me in silence, disrupting my lessons with her poisonous enmity. And now that my wife has left me, abandoned me to myself and my house’s little machinations, now she’s won Séverine to her side, now she’s staked out a marvelous, unparalleled place in Séverine’s memory, when the fact is I know that my wife is a cynical and irascible teacher.

To what end should she seek to make Séverine her ally, fifteen years after the fact? And forever distance Séverine from me, Séverine and her innocent, fierce inflexibility?

My wife’s prying spirit scuttles through my house, hungry for vengeance. At school, my reputation is secure and longstanding, whereas my wife’s teaching and personality enjoy no special renown, despite all her efforts, when she left me, to gain our little clan of envious colleagues’ sympathy and approval. To be sure, now my wife’s gaze never meets mine in the hallways. To be sure, I sometimes come nose to nose with one of my sons on the playground, and how painful it is to see his eyes, having lighted on me by accident, suddenly fill with a sort of still water before he turns on his heel and flees, his gait slightly stiff, horrified.

“Is your father a swine?” I sometimes cry after him.

And to be sure, I can no longer pretend not to see that the shop teacher whose mailbox adjoins mine in our break room now lives with my wife and my children in their new house, a rival to my own. But. .

“Does your father stink so horribly, that you have to run?” I sometimes cry after my son.

My voice breaks. I no longer know my children, brought up to feel only contempt for their father. The shop teacher looks after my children alongside my wife, he raises and loves them as if they were his own, and, when I see my children’s radiant faces and, from snatches of conversation made out here and there, learn of their excellent grades, I must admit that he’s raising them in the best possible way, and when we bump elbows he unfailingly treats me with the same polite sympathy, cool and impeccable. To be sure, what better can I expect? To whom can I complain? I myself put on a cheerful, good-hearted air with everyone around me. To whom can I complain, why complain? I simply find it unjust, when my wife never seemed to trouble herself over Séverine’s future as I did, that she should now use the fact that she’s of the same sex as Séverine, and lives a happier life than my own, to prevent Séverine from looking on me with solicitude, compassion, and neutrality. Deep inside me, in a place I never go, where I would find it slightly ignoble to want to go, an urge for revolt is swelling, and it shortens my breath and sharpens my voice.

* * *

Werner clearly recalls the year when my wife was his teacher, and recalls, too, that at the time Séverine confessed to her great pleasure on heading into my wife’s classroom.

“I find that very surprising,” I say, annoyed.

Settled into one of Werner’s armchairs, legs crossed, I note with a sort of panic that boredom and impatience dull Werner’s fine, glowing face with this mention of my wife’s teaching. I know that Werner came to me only because Séverine works in my house. But I’d like to think that my incongruous presence in his own house, the house of a flourishing adult, reminds him with some nostalgia of a time when I nourished his keen mind, when it was I who paced back and forth before his raised, attentive eyes, my size, my voice, and my power all working for me at once. Werner has moved into the suburbs of our little city, amid other vast silent houses inhabited by people I loathe without having to meet them.

“What are you doing among our enemies, Werner?” I said the first day.

“Our enemies?” said Werner, not understanding.

“For you, Werner, everything’s always been easy,” I told him, severely.

His bright eye is veiled by the distant, circumspect, genteel fog with which he repels any remark he might find embarrassing for me, and then I recall that, even when I was his teacher, one slightly dimmed glance could immediately make me feel all the mediocrity of my origins, all my innate lack of finesse.

“Séverine will never come to this neighborhood,” I say crossly. “And besides, what can you possibly want with Séverine now?”

“I love her, and I want to live with her,” Werner says serenely.

But I see his upper lip trembling. This troubles me. I hadn’t expected to hear such words from his lips. I’m troubled, upset.

“Séverine should have waited for me, and, as you see,” says Werner, “she didn’t.”

“Séverine is lugubrious,” I say. “What a grim woman! Séverine, Werner, is not sexy in any way.”

“No, Séverine isn’t sexy,” says Werner.

Again, in his eyes, that sort of mist that at least partially shields him from my foolishness and vulgarity. It hurts me, it leaves me broken. For there is nothing in Werner to find fault with. Looking away, I grumble:

“Séverine is lazy. She’s kept eight of my books for fifteen years. She spends all her time on the phone. Séverine is not nice, Werner. She has nothing in her head. Séverine picks the wrong enemies and chooses her friends badly. She’s aging too quickly. Oh, she’s not an attractive young girl anymore, Werner. She’s turning fat and doughy. I don’t think Séverine deserves any better than the life she has now. What is this Séverine, deep down? A small person, savage and blind.”

Werner mutters to himself in irritation, standing a safe distance from my armchair. Then I reflect that the shop teacher raising my children must know Werner’s parents, as I’ve sometimes seen him entering their house, on Sunday, at the aperitif hour. Which means that my children, in a sense. .

“You don’t know Séverine,” Werner says sharply.

Over the years he came back several times, solely to see Séverine. She didn’t want to go to Paris. She’s never gone to Paris. And now, after years of study, he’s given up and left Paris for good, only to find her married to the Arab. He can’t understand it. He won’t resign himself to it. For Séverine was once his, Werner’s, more or less officially. What does this mean? That the Arab cast a spell on her? He can’t resign himself. He refuses to believe that Séverine could truly have chosen to marry the Arab. For what reason? What sense does that make?

“Séverine told me she loves him,” I declare.

“Séverine told me she loved me,” Werner growls, with a sinister, determined air that makes me uneasy.

He shakes his head slowly. In Paris, he then adds, he met all sorts of girls. But none had Séverine’s obscure, almost unbearable appeal, which has to do with the fact that she seems to imbue herself with existence only via the purifying element of a stern, grave demeanor, austerely and instinctively demanding, of which she herself has no idea.

“Séverine doesn’t run in your circles,” I say, full of spite.

“No matter,since Séverine is a religious woman,”Werner says calmly.

“Pff!”

Overcome with disgust, indignation, I can scarcely stop myself spitting on Werner’s white wooden floor. And all at once the lush, well-tended greenery I see in the garden seems corrupted in my eyes.

* * *

Now they’re all three in my house, obediently drawn here by an innocent invitation tendered and signed by the house itself — so I suppose, seeing them there, unable to imagine them showing up at my simple request. If my house schemes, can it not sometimes and by chance scheme in harmony with my desires?

They’re all here, my three former students: Séverine, the Arab, Werner, still so young in my eyes that I find it difficult to believe they’re as old as I was when I taught them. What sort of gratitude can I expect from these three? None, none, I tell myself, though unable to accept it entirely. And because the day before I spotted my two sons in equestrian garb in the street, because that attire and all that it signifies so scandalized me that I nearly, having no right to do so, went and rang the bell at my wife and the shop teacher’s house to tell them just what I think of a good upbringing cynically pushed to such an extreme, I spontaneously place myself closer to Séverine and the Arab than to Werner.

Séverine’s face furrowed with surprise on seeing Werner enter my living room. She defensively moved her hand toward her telephone, then gave up on that idea. Who was she thinking of calling for help? I wonder. My wife? Sentiments hostile to Séverine agglomerate in my mouth, forming a little ball of bitter paste, difficult to choke back. Then, as if planned out in advance, Séverine and the Arab square their shoulders. Their two faces look much alike. They stand straight and self-sufficient, unaware of their arrogance.

Werner tries to come closer to Séverine, but he stops, terror-struck, two meters away. The other two look at him, puzzled, ever so slightly repulsed, haughty and daunting. Their faces are similar, remote, radiating a haughty morality.

“I fear Séverine and her husband don’t live in the same century as we do,” I say to Werner with an urbane little laugh.

“Séverine, I’ve come back for you,” says Werner.

“This fine young man. .” I say, eager to tout Werner in spite of it all.

But no one hears my wispy voice, and no one pays any mind. I’m nowhere at all anymore. My house belongs to them, and all my belongings. Similarly, whenever I happen to bellow the shop teacher’s name in the break room, he turns to me with a curious, affable air — and have I not then, instead, murmured entreatingly: “Oh, if you would. . ” Or else, perhaps: “I wonder if you could tell me. . ”

Werner is red-faced and tense, hackles raised. He’s dressed in an elegant, pale blue shirt, a little tight at the neck. Séverine and the Arab are wearing well-pressed sports clothes. Werner’s right foot beats a distraught tattoo on my floor.

Then Séverine tells Werner his return means nothing to her. She tells Werner she’s married to this other man, and everything is just as it should be. Séverine says all this to Werner in a coolly confident voice, with no cruelty intended. But how to endure such a thing? Séverine and the Arab stand shoulder to shoulder, with their matching faces, their unfounded superiority, consecrating the occupation of my house.

Fist out, I leap at Séverine. She backs away, staggering, but she doesn’t fall, and she doesn’t speak a word. Séverine is strong and hard. The Arab pins my arms behind me and throws me to the floor. He kicks me several times, cautious and restrained, while, as if from another time, another age, I hear Werner’s anxious cries, and while, thinking what a grievous mistake it is, and how senseless, to seem to be taking his side against them, I tell myself with infinite regret that it will take far more than a rebuke such as this to get rid of me. It would take a great deal more than that.

I think I hear myself crying out:

“Take my house! Take my children! Take it all!”

My intestines are gurgling. Is that disagreeable sound drowning out my voice? Séverine hisses that I’ve probably broken her nose. Icily, she tells Werner not to touch her.

* * *

“We’ve got to get rid of the Arab,” says Werner.

“We’ve got to get rid of me,” I murmur.

“We’ve got to liquidate him,” Werner proclaims, gripped by a sort of frenzy.

He throws himself down in one corner of my big, desolate living room and begins to groan, head between his knees. He shows no concern for my condition. Who ever cares about his old teacher? Even when they’re thirty years old, I tell myself, the students think themselves caught up in the whirlwind of life, whereas nothing vigorous or enviable seems to have grazed the existence of their teacher, still mired in the same school after so many years.

I hoist myself onto the couch. My bones hurt. Werner hiccups that he’s been betrayed even more grievously than he thought, and not only Séverine but the Arab too has betrayed him, by taking a place he knew to be Werner’s. No, Séverine didn’t betray him. The Arab took her, bound her, such that Séverine has now lost. . her freedom of choice, her will, everything she. .

“Her husband works at the post office,” I say.

I’m buffeted by Werner’s long growl of contempt. But, in the end, is all this real? And in what way does it concern me, me to whom everyone involved owes such a great debt of patience, of understanding, of self-abnegation?

“Not to mention the books that were lent out and never returned,” I say.

“We’ve got to get rid of him,” Werner barks.

Is he going to say it? Place the burden of that mission in the hands of his former teacher?

I keep Werner with me as long as I can, dreading the moment when the darkness in my house turns sneering and vicious. I have nothing left. What I’ve come to realize, in a violent, blinding blaze of insight, what was conveyed to me by the unbridgeable gap separating Werner from the two others, that gap so coolly marked out by Séverine’s alien, neutral voice, what all that told me, taught me, proclaimed to me, is that I will never prevent my children from riding horseback in their ridiculous getups, never bring about the return of anyone at all to my house, never again see those days when I could hope that disgrace and despair would not irrupt into my life — and that my wife and my children now have ambitions and joys entirely independent of my existence, desires that would in fact be no different if I’d died long before. Oh, it’s all in the past, I tell myself, and everything’s happened outside of me. For did I not furtively hope that on coming home from school one evening I might find not a disapproving, sibylline Séverine but the wife and two sons who are the true masters of this house, all three of them there in the brightly-lit living room? Bringing Séverine into my house left me no less alone. Séverine’s presence was meant to remind me that I will never be young again, and at the same time that nothing, ever, will be forgiven me.

* * *

I secretly make my way into the post office, and a forgotten detail surfaces in my memory. The moment I see his pitying gaze turned toward me, I realize Séverine’s husband’s first name is Jamel. That gaze, I tell him within myself, seals your doom.

* * *

It’s a tidy little apartment building not far from the school, on the edge of the city, and no sooner have I rung the bell than a pretty little girl with watchful eyes cracks open the door. She asks me to take off my shoes, and when I leave them on the landing she nimbly snatches them up and sets them inside, explaining that nice shoes are always liable to be stolen. I question her:

“Are you Jamel’s little sister? Where’s your mother? Your father? Do you work hard in school? Is your teacher happy with you?”

I glide in my stocking feet into the dining room, tiny and well-polished, filled with flowers and framed photographs, among which, again and again, I see Séverine’s husband. A woman watching television stands up and turns off the set. She smiles tentatively when I introduce myself as Jamel’s former teacher, turns to the little girl translating my words, then turns back to me with a congenial, almost joyful air. She gestures an invitation to take a seat at the table and sits down across from me, waiting serenely. My throat is tied in knots. Poor, poor woman, I tell myself. I sigh and yawn, forcing myself to smile at the mother all the same. Her black hair gleams at her cheeks. She waits, tranquil, untouched by doubt. Finally the little girl leaves the room. I lean toward the mother, fix my tear-filled eyes on her face, and tell her what’s going to happen to her son, while, smiling and calm, trusting in the teacher, she gently nods her head, not understanding. o prove it.