Chez Moi Read online

  ‘I haven’t listened to anything you’ve said.’

  I’d rather things were clear between us. I just hope he hasn’t told me his fiancée’s died, he’s about to be fired or, even more scary, he’s got some incurable illness. I shake at the thought of my prognoses. He’s smiling.

  ‘Couldn’t matter less,’ he says. ‘If you want a summary, I talked about the new gym I go to in the morning, and I also told you how I found this place. Do you like it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘This place.’

  As he says this, he gives a discreet sweep of his arm to point out the walls, furniture and even the people working and eating here, as if it were all his.

  ‘It humiliates me,’ I tell him, too quickly.

  My answer is both hurtful and unfathomable.

  But Charles is still smiling. He’s not upset. He thinks it’s interesting, wants to understand why I feel like that. He wants to know whether it’s connected to our mongrel origins, whether I’ve become more left wing than him, whether there was something wrong with my salad.

  I explain that I feel stupid because… oh, how come he’s even asking me that? Has he forgotten I’ve just opened a restaurant or what? I work myself to death from morning till night, my back hurts all over and so do my wrists from standing whipping up sauces, I think my cooking’s boring and haphazard, I’m not an experienced waitress, I spill the soup, I’m a complete shambles, I’m too slow, even when I’m being quick, I don’t know how to deal with customers, I’m no good at the art of conversation, and the lighting at Chez moi is two neon strips on the back wall and two huge orange lamps which I loved on the first day and have sincerely loathed ever since. I feel humiliated because I now see I don’t know anything about restaurants, that it’s a profession, a profession I haven’t learned, and - actually - I never learned anything, ever, in this bitch of a life, I’m incompetent, I’m going to throw in the towel and…

  I’ve managed not to raise my voice, but can’t hold back the tears. I start crying just as the waiter, a beautiful young man with dark hair and eyelashes that go on for ever, comes over to clear the first course.

  ‘Thank you,’ says Charles, ‘it was very good.’

  He comes across as so convinced, he manages to slip such a credible note of emotion into his voice that you would think that was why I was crying, because it was so good. In a few words he’s given my tearfulness a new meaning, transposed it, made it far more sophisticated by attributing an aesthetic explanation to it. He’s delivered it of its triviality, dissolving away my lack of discretion. The young man smiles at me, sharing with me - or at least so he believes - the silky soft but devastating pleasure afforded by the perfect combination of the special lettuce and its vinaigrette. Back in the kitchen he’ll be able to tell the boss that he’s made yet another customer cry. And the latter will sharpen his big knife, his full lips reflected in its flashing blade, and drive it into the tender flesh of the veal he’s intending for me.

  I can’t bear to think what I must look like to my brother. I want to be strong and sound of mind. I wish I could reason in the same good-natured way as my lost philosophy book. I want to inspire respect, not pity, not even compassion. My tears dry up. I straighten my shoulders, look at Charles, and we both burst out laughing.

  ‘I love the way you always do the most ridiculous things,’ he says.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘When you said you were going to open a restaurant I thought it was a joke.’

  ‘Didn’t you believe me?’

  ‘Not for a minute.’

  ‘That’s upsetting.’

  ‘Well, it shouldn’t be. Because you’ve done it. I was wrong and you were right. You’ve won.’

  ‘Why did you bring me here?’

  ‘To prove how little imagination I’ve got. If I opened a restaurant it would be like this. I bet yours is different. I bet your restaurant isn’t like anywhere else. I don’t understand how I can be such a conformist and you’re not.’

  ‘You’re jealous.’

  ‘No. I couldn’t live your life.’

  ‘Neither can I.’

  Charles shrugs his shoulders, and I think I wouldn’t like to live his life. A first wife met at university, not very pretty but a good sort, with whom he has two brilliant children brought up on the tried and tested recipe of after-school sports lessons, long meaningful conversations and weekends in the country. Leaving her because she feels unfulfilled and her psychotherapist leads her to understand that her marriage is an inhibiting factor. Meeting another girl - a prettier, younger one - and torturing her by refusing her a child. And all the while earning enough money to live and take your sister (and other people, I imagine) out for sumptuous meals in perfect settings. I couldn’t do it. I’ve tried. There’s something stopping me. A force. A tide. My brother’s a yacht and I’m a steamship, but my keel’s too shallow and my rudder too long. The slightest movement of the tiller drags me thousands of miles from my intended destination. I have the sluggish inertia of a great big ship. When the port’s in sight there’s no point aiming for the harbour, I’ll pile straight into the sea wall. Even though it’s slow and unremarkable, my existence has caused terrible damage. And yet I did see the lighthouse flashing its anxious message in the distance. I got its warnings and said, yes, yes, I know, I’m going to break everything; but it was too late.

  ‘What’s it like in your dive, then?’ Charles asks me.

  ‘Why do you call it a dive? You haven’t seen it.’

  ‘That’s what Dad calls it: your sister’s dive.’

  I feel as if I’ve opened a brothel.

  ‘And what else does he say?’

  ‘Nothing. As usual. Rubbish. He talks and all you get’s that droning fa-deva-fa-deva-ba-deva.’

  That is absolutely exactly the sound my father makes because he decided a long time ago that muttering was all the world deserved from him. I smile.

  ‘And Mum, did she say anything?’

  My life suddenly hangs on my parents’ opinions.

  ‘She said… hang on, I’m going to get it right, are you ready for this, I’m letting her come to me for a minute, just wait…’ He concentrates, closes his eyes, screws them up slightly and when he opens them again he is my mother. His cheeks are sucked inwards, his nostrils pinched, making his mouth protrude all the more, fleshy, clearly defined, and his eyebrows curve up towards the middle of his forehead, half-imploring, half-exasperated.

  ‘Your sister’s got so much talent!’ he pronounces in a voice ravaged by tobacco, when he doesn’t even smoke; ravaged, then, by my mother’s tobacco, she of the long cigarillos.

  He manages to reproduce every last nuance of her intonation: admiration, anger, a feeling of waste, despair. He’s so good at it that it comes as a slap in the face, but I take it without flinching: my mother’s slaps no longer get to me. They get lost somewhere between us, in a place where there’s no sound and no pain, a place I sometimes imagine - it’s white and we drift through it, facing each other and constantly threatening to bump into each other, but we never touch, just smile and avoid each other’s eyes.

  ‘Unbelievable talent!’ he adds, and the imitation is so accurate I can almost see smoke coming from his nostrils.

  I burst out laughing. My brother blinks and turns back into himself, freed from the maternal dybbuk. We’re ageless. When we meet up like this and our thoughts slot together like the two halves of a magic ring, time melts away and we relive every period of our existence condensed into the nectar of our shared presence. We talk about baby milk in the same breath as cigarettes, and Mickey Mouse plasters in the same sentence as nicotine patches. We can say Mummy and Daddy, words which are forbidden the rest of the time. We meet on the sibling’s playing-field, a stretch of wasteland that lies unnoticed behind a fence buckling slightly beneath the varnish of social expectations. We’ve got everything we need: stones to throw at each other, clumps of grass to collapse onto in exhaustion, and insects to frighten each
other and observe. Sometimes it feels really good to be there, when there are camp fires and we take refuge in their glow, outlining us with a golden igloo and protecting us from the outside world. The twigs we throw onto the fire to feed the flames are shared memories, and jokes that don’t make anyone laugh but us. We’re neither boss nor employee, divorced nor married, we have no children and no friends, the whole world has been swallowed up into our little pyre, reduced to whatever we want it to be. But there are times when it doesn’t feel good: the ground is too dry and the dust whips up off it and stings our eyes, the place is covered in thistles so there’s nowhere to sit down, the fire smells of cold cigarettes and the precious sibling is unrecognizable. We realize we have suddenly grown old, and the secret door in the fence slams shut behind us.

  Charles didn’t come to the field for several years. Or he only went there half-heartedly, as if performing an onerous duty, but his heart wasn’t in it because it was consumed with dreams for the future. He had become too ambitious for the two of us and I wasn’t what he needed. I would go and sit down alone beside the cold embers, and wait for him to come and save me from the curse of time which only ever goes one way. Eventually he came back, sat down without a word, struck a match, chucked in a couple of little disappointments which went up in flames immediately, and gave me back my childhood.

  This evening, in this chic restaurant, we have built a great bonfire of happiness.

  ‘So,’ he asks again, ‘how are you getting on?’

  ‘Really badly, I think.’

  Charles looks amazed.

  ‘There are some things I can do,’ I tell him, so as not to give the impression I’m complaining (we can’t stand whingers). ‘But there are too many things I just don’t know how to do.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘The paperwork. Filling in forms. I would never have thought there were so many forms, things to pay, expenses you can’t begin to understand and huge charges that you can never hope to pay half of a quarter of. And even the shopping. I’m sure I’m not doing the shopping properly. I’ve always heard people talking about Rungis, that’s where you’re supposed to go, but I haven’t got a car, so I go to the mini-market and the local market.’

  ‘How did you do it before, for the circus?’

  ‘It was different. We didn’t buy anything.’

  ‘Well, what did you eat then?’

  ‘Oh, everything, but I didn’t go to the shops. This bloke used to come. A farmer. But he was nothing like the sort of farmers you see in the countryside, or you picture in your mind, old peasants in blue overalls and berets. Our farmer was called Ali Slimane, he was very elegant, always in a white shirt and putty-coloured trousers. He came to us. I didn’t ring him, I didn’t have his number. I didn’t place an order. He’d turn up in his blue van, a very pretty blue, somewhere between dark and light, a blue from our childhood. And he had everything in that van - meat, vegetables, dairy products, but no labels, no abattoir stamps: he reared and slaughtered the animals himself. The vegetables were covered in a thin layer of mud. “It protects them. Take the mud off at the last minute. Don’t wash the vegetables, just peel or rub.” I did exactly what Ali told me. I always felt a slight constriction in my chest when he spoke to me and I don’t know whether it was because I felt sorry for him or because I rather liked him.’

  ‘Why should you feel sorry for him?’

  ‘I thought he was lonely.’

  ‘He could have had a wife, at the farm. And children. Three mistresses in the village and fifty-three brothers and sisters.’

  ‘No. And even if he’d had all that there was something solitary in his eyes, the remains of a bright flame darkened by the expression - or rather the lack of expression - in the rest of his face. He also brought me preserved foods, jars of artichokes, marinaded lemons, all sorts of peas and beans, bottles of spices, eggs with rough shells… he kept flour in brown paper bags. At the far end of our plot he’d cleared a little square patch of land and planted herbs: thyme, rosemary, parsley, coriander, chives, sage and mint. I asked him if he was worried they’d be polluted by the city air. “You’re all polluted yourselves,” he said, but without animosity, not judgemental. “You breathe the air, what difference does it make if you eat it? It’s already inside you.” At night I used to visit our vegetable patch with a torch. I would crouch down with my feet on the bare earth and watch the velvety sage leaves catching the moisture, covering themselves in it, soaking it up. The rosemary held up its tiny daggers in the darkness as if trying to burst bubbles of water hovering just above the ground. And the tall tubes of chives, the spiky, green, seriously weird hair-style of a subterranean onion reaching upwards. Thyme crawled over the soil, like a detachment of the Resistance, grouped together, efficient, close-knit. I used to stay there thinking, resting. I liked being with plants, they’re neutral, they don’t talk, don’t hear anything, have no longings or needs. I’d have liked to model myself on them, to imitate them…’

  My voice drifts off, I feel as if I’m leaving the playing-field.

  ‘Why don’t you try and get in touch with him?’ my brother asks.

  ‘With who?’

  ‘Your farmer.’

  ‘I never had his address or his phone number. I don’t know where he was from. I don’t even know the name of his farm.’

  ‘I’m sure we could find him. We’ve got a name, his name. He can’t be very far from Paris. Why don’t you ask the people at the circus?’

  ‘I don’t know where they are. When we got the eviction notice things happened very quickly. The next day everything was packed up and they left. When the manager said goodbye to me I asked him what I should do. “We can’t take you with us.” That was all he said. I said I understood but I was worried: how were they going to cope with the children and animals? The city seemed such a hostile place but the country was even worse - people stare at you and don’t want you there. I was frightened the ground would just gobble them up. The manager looked confident. “Why are you crying?” he asked, “we’re lucky, we never paid for anything here. It’s a good site, we made the most of it. We’ll find something else. Why are you crying, my little Jew?” (It was strange but that’s what he called me.) “You shouldn’t be crying for us, you know.” I nodded and went and picked the herbs. I harvested the whole lot, cutting them right down to the ground. I wrapped them up in paper and took my little parcels to the manager’s wife. She looked at them, hugged me and chucked them out of the window of her truck as she left. She laughed and watched those herbs fall onto what was just a piece of wasteland again. I picked them up and put them in my suitcase. When I got to the hotel I asked for a vase to stow my little forest in. It was a cheap hotel and the woman said, “we haven’t got anything like that”. I put them all in the basin and had to brush my teeth without using it. The next morning I threw them in the bin and cried. I cried about everything that gets cut down and uprooted. I thought I’d never stop.’

  ‘And you stopped.’

  ‘I stopped.’

  ‘It always stops. Have you noticed that?’

  We think for a moment about how sadness inevitably comes to an end.

  ‘You should have called me,’ Charles says after a while.

  ‘When?’

  ‘When you were chucked out of the circus. When you were on your own and you didn’t have anywhere to live. You could have come to us.’

  ‘I didn’t want to. I think I reverted to a sort of wild state.’

  All of a sudden the veal is in front of me and the smell of it is intoxicating. I could pick it up in my hands and bite right to the bone, like the wild animal I have become. But no. I look at it, study it. I analyse how it’s been cooked, prod it with the tip of my knife, then make an incision: pink blood - some water, a bit of juice, nothing really - oozes out and blends with the brown sauce where Chinese artichokes drift past green beans so fine they look like chive stems, only firmer. I decide to put off till later my painful deliberations about belonging to
a concept, and simply enjoy my meal.

  I like winding up the metal shutter to get into Chez moi. There’s something archaic about it and it affords me a genuine feeling of power. Once inside, I let the shutter back down and feel protected. This steel eyelid cutting me off from the world - in the same way that the blink of an eye is sometimes enough to repress a thought, or a tear - blots me out more surely than a door. Who would think there was someone in there sleeping; that every evening the banquette is covered with a sleeping bag, itself taken from a box cleverly slipped beneath this unsuspected bed? Who would think someone brushes their teeth here, washes their hair, gets up in the night to pee, checks what they look like in the mirror in case the nightmare they have just had has completely transformed them? Who would think that a pot full of pencils graces one of the tables and that someone sits in that orange glow writing and drawing and starting something new while everyone else is asleep? That someone is me. Because tonight I’m not asleep: I’m making a list of my brilliant ideas. I’m also making a list of the things I need to do to help my brilliant ideas see the light of day. So I’m drawing up two lists, and they each have a name: list number one is called ‘Brilliant Ideas’, and list number two is called ‘What Needs Doing’. List number two is much longer than list number one. I don’t know whether that’s good or bad.