All My Friends

THE DEATH OF CLAUDE FRANÇOIS

She then said, too quickly, trying to conceal her unease, her excitement:

“I don’t see anything.”

“You don’t see anything?”

“Nothing at all,” she said, trembling a little.

“You ought to see something.”

And the woman who looked like Marlène Vador, and who was Marlène Vador, since she’d said so, added, teasing and vaguely put out: “Well, there’s something there, Doctor Zaka, so you ought to see it.”

“But I’m looking, and there’s nothing there, so there’s nothing there.”

She told herself she was glad there was nothing to look at more closely, as two minutes before she’d made precisely that claim without taking the time to be sure, so extraordinary, almost so frightening, did she find it to be examining Marlène Vador’s bare back, thirty years on.

Her cheeks burning and moist, she cautiously asked:

“What happened?”

“My son shoved me into. . I don’t know. . the corner of the sideboard, maybe. Not on purpose, of course.”

“Of course,” she said.

“You don’t know the first thing about it,” said Marlène Vador. “But I do, and I’m telling you. You remember the apartment? It’s so small. A big, strapping young man knocks into his mother every day and doesn’t even know it, just moving around the room, taking a breath, putting on his jacket.”

“Yes. A strapping young man.”

“It all goes so fast,” said Marlène Vador in a dreamy, pleased voice.

She bowed her head, lowered the hand pinning her lush, unchanged mass of dark hair to her temples. The locks slipped over Marlène Vador’s smooth, dusky back, hiding her satiny bra straps, but she still didn’t stand up.

Doctor Zaka patted her own chest with one hand.

Did Vador need to know how furiously her, Zaka’s, heart was pounding?

Back then, they’d always agreed that Marlène had a greater capacity for seeing and understanding a certain sort of mystery. Vador was a year older. Her parents were divorced. In the evening, her mother left her on her own and went out to have fun, brimming with naïve confidence and enthusiasm, and then came home very late, noisily, not always alone, to find a perfectly calm and idle Marlène waiting in the tiny kitchen, and that ten-year-old Marlène Vador smiled at her mother, relieved her of her high heels, her purse, skillfully wiped the makeup from her pretty face, put her to bed, and discreetly disappeared.

But today it was Marlène Vador revealing her flesh to Zaka and asking her opinion, although with some condescension. She was wearing a red bra embroidered with little black arrows.

Did she put that on for my sake? Zaka wondered.

Marlène sat still on the examination chair as Zaka looked down, pressing her thumbs into various spots around her waist, up her spine. Marlène Vador’s flesh was supple, solid, quite thin, her bones slight and rounded. With a hesitant hand, Zaka pushed aside the locks to palpate her upper back. A shiver ran down Marlène Vador’s vertebrae, and her glistening, electric hair flittered around Zaka’s hands. Those clammy, fumbling hands had taken on a mind of their own, Zaka realized in disgust.

Vador jumped up and briskly pulled on the tee-shirt she’d been holding in her lap.

“That’s enough for today,” said Vador, impatient.

And Doctor Zaka had time to observe that Marlène’s breasts were very pale beneath the red lace, and that one of those breasts bore a number of perfectly round little scars.

There was one thing Vador didn’t know, she told herself. They hadn’t set eyes on each other for some thirty years, neither had any idea of the life led by the other. But, Zaka told herself again, there was one thing Vador didn’t know, something miraculous like nothing else.

Zaka narrowed her eyes. She bit the inside of her cheeks to keep quiet. Then, her legs trembling and weak, she cautiously sat down on the chair Vador had just vacated.

“So you still live there?” Zaka asked.

“I promised never to leave. I’ve never left.”

Marlène Vador looked down severely at Zaka.

“You promised too, right? Remember?”

“Promised who?”

Zaka knew perfectly well. Her voice was nothing more than a whisper. Vador gave her a cold, acid little smile, and Zaka blushed violently as she thought to herself, abashed: she came all this way.

“You know perfectly well,” Marlène said, very softly.

The head of a wolfhound hovered on the tee-shirt just beside Zaka’s face, and she thought she heard Marlène Vador’s low voice coming from the muzzle of that beast, whose eyes were so black as to bear no expression, like Marlène’s own. Marlène was wearing close-cut red pants, high-heeled backless sandals, glasses with spangled frames. She gave Zaka a feeling of timeworn flash, of freshness long since faded, but in which Vador still believed with enough untroubled faith to counter the impression she made — so long admired and stunning, Vador’s self-assurance seemed to assert that her beauty and charm were henceforth beyond doubt. Was she beautiful? Oh yes, Zaka said to herself, a shiver running over her flesh, she had to be. Yes, she was, she thought, before Vador’s inexpressive gaze, her iris so wide that it left almost no room for the white of her eye.

She took a breath, then whispered:

“I have something amazing to. .”

But Vador broke in, her voice now timid and pious: “You were never much of a student, and now here you are a doctor. I’ll bet it took all you had.”

“That’s right,” said Zaka, uncomfortable for Marlène. She knew she was now supposed to ask “What about you?” But she had no wish to know what Vador had been up to, sensing that such talk would bring her nothing but boredom and dreariness.

Marlène Vador picked up her bag and her little red jacket. Then, Zaka told herself, she’d obviously gone on her way, slender and light, since she was no longer in the office when Zaka lowered the hand that she’d briefly laid over her eyes to shield them from the memory of something radiant and dazzling.

* * *

Doctor Zaka headed downstairs and out into the street’s wilting heat.

Sweat began to flow over her forehead, and her unquiet thoughts turned to another still, stifling summer, and a day when she’d seen her mother’s nape, and the napes of all the other mothers gathered on the lawn, suddenly bathed in the perspiration of horror and grief.

And now Doctor Zaka felt that same damp warmth down her neck as she hurried along the sidewalk toward the school.

How ridiculous, she told herself, all that sniveling, all that sweat, all that sorrow simply because a man had died, a perfect stranger to every one of those women on the lawn, although dearer to their wanting hearts than the many children they’d borne, than the husbands who had begotten them, whose eyes stayed dry on the death of that luminous, splendid stranger, so French, so blue-eyed, so blond-headed. A man had died, and Zaka’s mother was never the same again. She knew everything about that man, and that man had no idea she existed, but with that man’s essence Zaka’s mother had fueled her raging need to love with abundance and selflessness. Pitted against the glory, the magnetism of the French tongue so gracefully wielded, what hope was there for Zaka’s father, or any of the other fathers, with their d

Zaka’s mother never recovered. Had she glimpsed even the first stirring of a recovery, Zaka told herself, she would have violently crushed it out. None of the mothers wanted to be unburdened of their grief. What would be left, once they’d given up their sadness?

Doctor Zaka stopped before the iron bars of the school’s fence. In the fierce heat, the school wavered faintly before her eyes. She saw her daughter’s father slowly approaching, sweat streaming down his bloated face, his pants resting very low on his hips, held down by his pot belly. Their eyes met, and he blanched. A puff of contempt inflated Zaka’s lips. She shook her head no, her eyes cold, half-shut.

This wasn’t his week to pick up the child from school. He knew that, she could see it. So fierce was her hatred for this man that for a moment she thought it had blinded her, or that all this — the school, the fence, the ex-husband with the bulging bags under his eyes — had blown away on a whirlwind of rage. It was to see her, Zaka, that he’d come here today, because he couldn’t care less about the child, whom he never quite knew what to do with when he did have her.

Now she could see him again, pale and huge.

He was backing away, disappointed, eyeing Zaka with a gaze he tried to fill with deep and irrevocable meaning, but which was only plaintive, she thought, embarrassed to see him still there, reminding her of what she’d had to do to conceive her little girl.

She’d coupled with a white elephant, and that generous but slow-witted animal wouldn’t give up on the idea that it was her equal.

Doctor Zaka let out a strident laugh. People turned and stared. She took out a handkerchief, ran it over her short, thick, blond and gray hair, over her trickling nape.

Let them stare. They had no idea of the freakish intimacy that had taken place between the abject blimp now trudging away and herself, so poised and so lively, taut and unchanged, and no idea, what’s more, that to this day she remained an object of that stubborn elephant’s grimy affections.

Let them stare. Another sharp yelp escaped her. She felt cruel, unhinged, but stronger than all of them, snugly encased in a sheath of sarcasm and hardness from which Vador herself, that afternoon, could not have extracted her. She knew all about Vador’s virtue; she knew why, standing there before her, she’d so strongly felt her own betrayal, her failing.

It had to do with the death of Claude François. But it made absolutely no sense.

Doctor Zaka gently shook her head.

It made absolutely no sense.

And yet, on the pretext of an invented injury, Marlène Vador had come all the way to the center of Paris from the ragged-lawned suburban town where they’d once lived, simply to shame her for not keeping her word — or was that not it at all? Whatever it was, Marlène still didn’t know that Zaka had more than redeemed herself for anything she might hold against her.

But what about the death of Claude François?

Zaka was quivering faintly. Her metal sheath quivered along with her.

Though only a child at the time, Vador too had sternly rebuffed all thoughts of consolation, firmly resolved that the death of Claude François would be the epicenter of all her life’s upheavals, a life then in existence for only twelve years. And, Zaka remembered, there were so many women in their little housing project who had scrupulously honored their vow of eternal mourning, despite the passing years, despite the emergence of new, still handsomer singers.

They’d stood there, sweating and petrified, outside the apartment building. News of the death had drifted from a neighbor’s open window. One of them let out a moan — Zaka’s mother? Vador’s mother?

Vador’s mother hadn’t kept her word.

Then they were all weeping, crying out: no, it can’t be. .

Did Marlène really faint, or was Zaka making that up, there before the school gate, in the heat rising from the softening asphalt?

There was no doubt about it: Marlène had fainted.

Zaka felt stinging tears in her eyes.

Then the mothers were sad, and the children fell into a blank, jealous stupor.

Vador’s fickle, adorable mother alone soon developed a passion for another singer. But not Zaka’s mother, nor Zaka nor Marlène, and Marlène, in a sense, less than anyone. They took to praying each day for the repose of Claude François’s soul.

Zaka discreetly prodded her eyelids with both fists.

The mothers seemed reluctant to leave the lawn and go back to their apartments. They lingered, vacant and drained, stamping the dry grass with a solitude, a defeat, and an incomprehension so overwhelming that the children, afraid and unsettled, stole away from that yellowing patch, sat down on the sidewalk beside it, dully watching the clogged or slippered feet trampling what tomb? what body? in a desperate jig of love, the slender, pale, lightly freckled ankles of their mothers, still young, now suddenly unrecognizable. Zaka remembered that Claude François’s death shrouded the housing project in a melancholy with no escape.

All at once the girl was standing before her. Zaka let out a little cry:

“Paula!”

Then, in a tone of tender reproach:

“Where did you come from? Hey, Paula! Oh, for. .”

The child said nothing. She was watching something behind Zaka’s back, something that bent her mouth into a half-smile. A light glaze of sweat glistened on her forehead. Zaka turned around slowly, cautiously, lest a careless movement jar the invisible, protective sheath. She saw Paula’s father, standing motionless not far behind her. Dizzy with rage, she shouted:

“Will you go away? Will you get out of here? What do you want?”

“Shh, mama. It’s OK, he’s going now, poor papa. You don’t have to talk so loud.”

“It’s just that stupid elephant, getting me all worked up. I don’t like that, I don’t like it one bit.”

She was still shouting, in spite of herself. She forced herself to keep quiet. She could hear her watch crystal clicking against the metal of her sheath, but she knew she was the only one who could hear it.

“You don’t have to call him an elephant in front of all these people.”

The air whistled between Paula’s teeth. Zaka lifted her chin with one outstretched finger, and the girl looked up at her with Marlène Vador’s marvelous face.

“How I love you,” cried Zaka, charmed, proud, unbelieving.

A jolt of pain pierced the back of her head. She fell to the sidewalk, not slumping but toppling, stiff and firm in her armor.

* * *

Doctor Zaka and her daughter Paula took a bus line unknown to them both. They got off at the last stop, as far into the suburbs of Paris as they’d ever been. Paula had refused to take a window seat. And when Zaka gaily pointed out all the changes the place had seen since her childhood, her daughter Paula answered only with a noncommittal flexing of her very red lips (red as Vador’s lipsticked lips, and not a trace of rouge, Zaka repeated to herself reflexively) and a polite nod, never looking at her or so much as glancing outside.

Off the bus, she kept that same impregnable halo of coldness around her.

Zaka wondered if the child was afraid. Or was she, like herself, her mother Zaka, walking down this street in a protective sheath that she feared might ring out if tapped by her fingernails or belt buckle?

Zaka had advised Paula on the clothes she should wear for this outing. She examined the little girl with pleasure and surprise. Paula was dressed as Marlène was no doubt in the habit of dressing: a clinging tee-shirt printed with fuchsia scorpions, so tiny and numerous that you had to squint to withstand the sight of them, and a pair of tight, very light-colored jeans, cinched with an alligator-print belt. On the child’s feet, high-heeled boots of cream-colored canvas, specially purchased by Zaka for their trip to the outer suburbs.

She was quite aware that Paula was not of an age to be dressed in this way.

Oh yes, she knew that.

She smiled at herself, a little stiffly, but who would dare claim that she dressed her daughter in such clothes for music lessons or school? Not even the unpleasant man who happened to be the child’s father could deny that Paula’s very busy little social life unfolded against a background of muted shades and full, classic cuts, that they were both, mother and daughter alike, true bourgeoises, refined and invisible. Zaka was not in the habit of showing off Paula’s beauty.

But was it her fault if Marlène Vador did not have the same tastes, the same ways?

Paula’s long black hair clapped gently against her slender back.

“Where are we going?” she asked quietly.

“To visit a friend.”

Zaka put on a cheery voice — what was Paula afraid of, here in the very neighborhood where her mother had grown up? Why was her daughter afraid, with Marlène Vador’s features on her face?

“You have a friend here?”

“My best friend, even if it’s been thirty years since I last saw her. And why, if you please, shouldn’t I have a friend here, and even a very good friend?”

She saw a little muscle twitching on Paula’s cheek. How pale the child was today, and how tense! Zaka began to fear she might not carry this off, or perhaps she’d been wrong from the start. Paula staggered on her platform soles. Zaka steadied her, eyeing her closely, that little-girl face so unlike her own, and nothing like her husband’s, but in every way, by the grace of a chemistry of prayers and calculations, like a stranger’s. She was annoyed by the child’s apprehensions. She herself once lived in this place — it wasn’t right to be afraid.

On her own face, Doctor Zaka plastered a resolutely carefree expression. She wasn’t beautiful, she was rough and angular, but was she not an accommodating person? She took Paula’s arm and, slowly caressing the hollow of her elbow, did her best to look around through her daughter’s eyes.

“You’re not too cold? My little one! Maybe you’re hungry? You want something to eat? Do you want a roll, a brioche?” She went on and on, not even hearing herself speak. Overwrought, she squeezed Paula’s arm a little too hard, and the child politely pulled free.

How could she deny it, how could she deny it? And shame fogged her glasses’ thick lenses. From Paula’s lost, dismayed air, she could see what had become of the street she’d so often walked with Vador at her side, from the housing project to the junior high, and that narrow street was once lined with tidy little homes, low apartment houses with flowers in windowboxes, not, oh no, these blighted gray concrete buildings, doors and windows closed off with plywood or cinderblocks, courtyards congested with trash. Two video clubs and a dusty-windowed sex shop, perhaps open, perhaps out of business, had replaced. . Zaka couldn’t recall what.

“I think there was a bakery around here somewhere. Do you want to find a bakery? If my little one wants something to eat, then we’ll find a bakery. .”

“I don’t want anything,” Paula whispered.

“In my day, there were two or three bakeries just in this neighborhood.”

Her tone was almost pleading. How to believe someone could walk down a street such as this every day and then, much later, give birth to a girl like Paula? If Paula refused to believe it, that was only common sense.

Zaka felt cruelly humiliated. How stupid of her to try to take pride in the life she’d led here, in this drab disaster! She touched the thick bandage swaddling the back of her head.

“Does it hurt?” asked Paula, anxious.

“Yes.”

“You shouldn’t have been so mean to him.”

Paula stopped to look at her, eyes dilated with fear.

“You’re right,” mumbled Zaka, forcing a deferential grimace.

“Wouldn’t you have thrown a rock at him if he’d talked to you like that?”

“You’re right, I would have thrown a rock at him.”

She almost added “that fat animal,” but she managed to choke back those words, which would have hurt Paula (and why could her daughter find no better cause for compassion than her idiot father, why?). Instead, with a mocking snort aimed at gaining the child’s complicity, she quickly added:

“I would have thrown a much bigger rock than he did, but would that have been enough to flatten him?”

“I’m sick of this!” Paula shouted.

“You’re right, honey,” said Zaka, putting her arms around her.

Tenderly pressing the small of her back, she started Paula walking again.

“You want something to eat? You want a little bun? A brioche?”

“I’m sick of this,” Paula murmured, distant and unhostile, as if to herself.

* * *

A little later, she asked the child to wait in front of the building, where there was still a vast playground. The sand was much dirtier and more meager than she remembered. Doctor Zaka felt the inside of her mouth go dry.

“You can play, but don’t get dirty,” she said with some effort.

Then she remembered: Paula had stopped playing in the sand long ago.

Lips oddly downturned, Paula told her she didn’t want to stay in this place by herself.

“When I was your age,” said Zaka, “I spent all day outside, right here where we’re standing.”

She kissed her daughter and walked off toward the front door, its cracked pane of glass patched with brown packing tape, here reflecting scattered pieces of stormy gray sky, the sign of a heavy, hot rain soon to come, there reflecting — or was she mistaken? — Paula’s face, imprisoned in a broken triangular shard, so creased and distorted by panic as to seem shrunken, crumpled around a gaping mouth that might, at any moment, open into a bellow of fear.

“I’ll call you when it’s time, and you can come up and join me,” said Zaka.

She hadn’t turned around. She was talking to the door, the reflection. Paula couldn’t hear her.

She walked into the lobby, still just as she remembered it.

* * *

Vador was so beautiful.

She’d traded her glittering glasses for a pair of tinted contact lenses. At first Doctor Zaka was stunned to see her with blue eyes. How could I have foreseen contact lenses? Poor Paula. . Then, like a small explosion, a certainty resounded between the walls of her throbbing skull: the color of her eyes made no difference. Nor did it in any way matter that Vador had appeared in the doorway wearing a genteel, ladylike, longish, beige cotton skirt and a white, round-collared blouse with mother of pearl buttons. Her hair was tied back behind her neck, and straight bangs covered her forehead down to the two periwinkle blue marbles standing in (temporarily? Zaka hoped so) for her eyes, which were in reality of the same brown as Paula’s.

This was not the Marlène she’d so often seen, in her thoughts as in her dreams, welcoming her into her home, first surprised, then delighted, just as she was now. She’d imagined a Marlène whose tinge of vulgarity she’d have to try to overlook, her overeagerness to display her body — traits, Zaka reflected, that she might have shared had she stayed on and lived here.

Vador was so beautiful.

Today she’s middle-class and magnificent, Zaka told herself, intimidated.

“You kept your mother’s apartment.”

“Yes. Mama died here,” said Vador, as if that explained it.

“It wasn’t for Claude François’ sake?”

Zaka had leapt right in. To her immediate regret, a sort of titter escaped her. But Marlène’s thin face lit up, as if illuminated from within, from just beneath her fine, dusky skin.

She said to Zaka:

“I thought you’d forgotten him.”

“Why?” asked Zaka, slightly insulted.

“You went away. You live in Paris. We swore we’d stay here. But I’m the only one. The whole neighborhood’s forgotten Claude François.”

What could Zaka say, faced with those eyes? She went and looked out the living-room window. Far below, she saw Paula’s motionless little head, then thick drops of rain began to fall and the child’s head disappeared. A warm smell came up to meet Zaka, rising from the sand, from the dust in the steaming parking lot. She’s gone to find shelter, she told herself, vaguely concerned.

She was standing in Vador’s living room, and she recognized the furniture Vador’s mother had cluttered it with long before. Her first impression, that Marlène had kept everything just as it was, was oddly reinforced by the unexpected presence of a small round side table and a crushed velvet armchair that stirred up an aged layer of mud deep in Zaka’s heart. She ran one hesitant finger over the table’s varnished top.

“That comes from your place,” said Marlène.

She flashed a triumphant little smile.

“Your mother gave it to mine, along with the armchair and a bunch of other stuff I finally had to sell.”

Zaka smiled into space. What was Marlène trying to distract her from with this tedious talk of furniture? And how could she, Zaka, possibly have once lived with such furniture, and found it nice and even rather chic?

Rain was spattering against the windowpanes. Everything had gone very dark.

Zaka saw Marlène Vador’s artificial eyes shining. And all around there were dozens of similar pairs of eyes, some of them huge, on the living room wall, others more modest, in picture frames lined up on the sideboard, on the TV set, or, in close ranks, on two or three chairs sacrificed for their display. Zaka knew most of the photos. She’d helped Marlène cut them out, long ago, from magazines bought for precisely that purpose.

And today Marlène had given herself the same eyes as Claude François.

A lump clogged Zaka’s throat. She rushed to Marlène and embraced her. How long had it been since she last clasped a full-sized adult body in her arms? Oh, years and years, she thought. A sort of euphoria came over her. Vador’s torso felt bony and cold, but all the same, how wonderful to embrace a substantial body, on the same scale as one’s own!

She felt an urge to nestle her head against Marlène’s neck, inhale its open-hearted scent of soap, but she didn’t dare, though she thought she could feel her friend’s muscles relaxing — and she was indeed her friend, she’d known that all through those thirty years she’d pretended to forget it.

“You’re the best friend I ever had. We’ll be seeing a lot of each other from now on. Right? Right?”

“No, not a lot. I’m going to die soon.”

Zaka loosened her grasp. She pulled back, arms outstretched, to look at Marlène.

In spite of her refashioned gaze, Vador was so beautiful.

“And why on earth should you be dying anytime soon?” cried Zaka, frowning and jovial.

She sometimes addressed the doleful old ladies who came to her office in exactly this way.

“I’ve made up my mind to,” Vador murmured.

She motioned quickly toward the innumerable faces of Claude François. Her delicate nostrils clenched.

“In a month, it will be twenty-five years since he died. I don’t want to live any longer than he did. We made a vow about that, too. You remember?”

Zaka went back to the window and opened it in spite of the rain, which immediately began to spray Vador’s little living room and her own flushed face, her big, black-framed glasses. In a distraught voice, she called out:

“Paula!”

What good was her miracle now? What good, now, were her fearless life and her offering to Vador?

She closed the window and turned around to see Marlène calmly wiping raindrops from the pictures with a chamois. “That’s why I came to your office,”said Marlène in a low, gentle voice. “To ask for your help, because I don’t know how to do it.”

“My daughter Paula’s downstairs. . She’ll be up soon. . You’ll meet her. .”

“Oh, at this point, I don’t. . ”

“You’ll recognize her. . You’re my friend. .”

“What great friends we were, you remember?”

And Marlène let out a sad little laugh, giving Zaka, whose face was trickling wet from the rain, a glance of such tender, unexpected companionship that Zaka couldn’t hold back a surge of pleasure. Vador put the last picture back in its place, now thoroughly dried. She caressed Claude François’s cheek with one wrist, lovingly, reflexively, as, Zaka thought, she must have been doing for decades, every day, several times a day.

“In the end,” said Vador, “he will have been my only love.”

Then, before Zaka could tell where it had come from, she found herself holding a photograph, and she heard Marlène explaining all sorts of things she had no wish to know of, and already, inside her, the obscure guardian of her serenity was fighting off all awareness of them.

But that these two embittered, confused-looking old people in the photo Vador had thrust into her hands — that these two forlorn, heartbreaking old people were her own parents, Zaka, caught off guard, could not help but see.

“Because they thought you really had died, poor things, and they would have been so happy if they’d known you were a doctor, but I looked after them to the end, along with my mother, and that, it turns out, was my youth, on one side those three old people, and on the other my passion, my passion. . ”

“And that son of yours. . ” Zaka choked out.

“No, I don’t have a son, I don’t have any children.”

“But you told me you had a son.”

“I never said that.”

Vador pursed her lovely plump lips in indignation. She let out a short laugh, authoritarian, disapproving.

“How can you say such a thing? That I said. . My poor Zaka.”

“You told me. I remember it clearly.”

Vador shrugged and took back the old couple’s picture, which Zaka, unaware, was about to drop onto the carpet. With a pious, loving attention that Zaka found all the more disturbing because it seemed to her wholly sincere, she leaned the photo against one of the framed pictures, the one that showed Claude François running through a glorious meadow with his two sons.

What envy, and even what jealousy, Zaka suddenly recalled, that picture had injected into their fervent, devoted little-girl emotions, the day they cut it out and glued it to a piece of cardboard! For they were exactly the right age to be Claude François’s children, the two daughters he might have had, one of them beautiful and one ugly. Then they began to imagine they really were Claude François’s daughters — had they not gone so far as to glue their own faces over those of the two boys who had unjustly supplanted them in that sublime role?

Hoping to patch things up, she was about to ask Marlène if she remembered being Claude François’s pretty older daughter, when something in the curve of Marlène’s back as she bent over her, Zaka’s, parents (long dead, shoved aside with hostility and derision) suddenly revealed to her how much kinder Marlène Vador was than she — how incomparably better, how incontestably more compassionate than she herself had ever been. All at once her eyes filled with tears.

“I can’t do what you’re asking,” said Zaka.

“I’ll manage,” said Marlène.

“I would so much have liked for us to see each other again.”

Vador smiled, regretful, resolute, infinitely sad. She stood there in her polished, dowdy little living room, her face as if pierced in two places by the gleam of her immortal eyes, her arms limp at her sides, and Zaka knew that this woman was no longer her friend. And for all her exemplary kindliness, this woman who was no longer her friend would never be moved by anything that might happen to Zaka. It was all over, it had all come to an end, long before Zaka could have imagined.

Zaka stepped forward and quickly hugged Marlène Vador, who was, in a way, no longer Marlène Vador.

Who was it that had cried out, with a furious, desperate, bewildered sob: “It’s all over, we’ll never meet him!”?

Maybe Zaka’s mother, maybe Vador’s. Not Marlène, certainly not, her eyes half closed onto the comforting, mysterious certainty that she would indeed meet him one day, that nothing was ever over as long as you weren’t dead yourself.

* * *

Doctor Zaka bustled back and forth in front of the apartment building, calling:

“Paula! Paula!”

She ran through the puddles, ungainly. She was fat and graceless, and no imaginary sheath or metal casing could protect her now. She was ashamed to have played at thinking herself light and hard when she was so ponderous, so broad. And now her daughter Paula was nowhere to be seen, and it was her fault. And the back of her head was throbbing. And how could she not remember the shocked shout that had burst from Vador’s lips as Zaka bolted out of the room, alarmed that Paula hadn’t come up:

“You can’t leave a child alone around here anymore!”

Oh, Marlène Vador would never see the little girl who had Marlène Vador’s face — for that too, it was too late. And what was Marlène Vador’s face now, since that woman was no longer a friend, since nothing mattered to her anymore but not exceeding Claude François’ lifespan?

Now Zaka’s cheeks were bathed in tears. She trundled along, unsure which way to turn. The flesh jiggled on her hips and her arms.

“Paula! Paula!”

Her glasses slipped off her nose. At the same instant, Zaka made an awkward leap from the street to the sidewalk. She heard the lenses shatter underfoot, and she would have liked to make a similar noise, the stinging expression of her despair and her terror.

Trembling, she picked up the glasses.

“Oh God, oh God.”

She stuffed the mangled frames into her pocket and tried to look around, squinting. Suddenly, among the tall, rundown towers — so like the one that Marlène still lived in, that Zaka herself had once lived in, when those buildings took the luminous, white, well-tended form of their childhood — she thought she spotted Paula’s small fuchsia figure. She believed she could make out another vague shape beside her, and she warily started forward again, panting loudly, unsure if she should call out. Another wave of pain drilled into her head, and as she winced, pulling back her upper lip, the figure at Paula’s side turned away. Zaka thought she recognized the child’s father. And although a bitter substance immediately filled her mouth, she was ashamed to have pretended to see Paula’s father as a huge, flabby man, cowardly and deceitful. She realized she could keep that ruse up no longer. She wanted to spit at his back — but how not to see, despite her nearsightedness, that he had the proudly erect back of a fine and upstanding man? That man had stopped loving her long before: long, long before. Would he love her again if, one hand very visibly pressed to her bandage, she shrieked:

“What are you doing here? I’ll see you in court!”

And she, Zaka, would she stop loving him, in spite of it all? What did she have to do, she wondered, her head spinning, to turn regret and nostalgia into indifference?

She stopped and stood, exhausted. She felt her entire body shivering with desire and resentment, aimed at that man who was no longer hers, who had lost all regard for her.

Just then the man walked away with a long, relaxed stride. Now Zaka was not at all sure that he was Paula’s father.

And now Paula herself, or the silhouette that might have been hers, took off as well, in the other direction. The cold shadow of a building swallowed her up.

* * *

Doctor Zaka happened onto her daughter at the bus stop.

“Mama! I was waiting for you,” said Paula, joyously.

And then, seeing her daughter’s eyes shining with an enthusiasm and a gaiety she’d never seen before, Zaka was embarrassed by her own naked face, glistening with despair.

She forced herself to smile, held back the words of reproach and relief.

She did her best to prepare herself: any revelation would have to be greeted with benevolence. ingy words?