And then, after a few days of excitement, following letters and phone calls and sotto voce conversations in the staff room, there would be a modest funeral, a wreath from the school, a floral tribute from his colleagues. Walter would buy a big bouquet from the discount florist at the corner. He would have traveled up from Switzerland, found a cheap room somewhere in the neighborhood, and he would now be trying, with his bad French, to organize everything. He had got hold of Andreas’s appointment and address book. There was insufficient time to place an announcement in the newspaper, but he would call some of Andreas’s friends and invite them. He would be surprised by the number of women’s names in the address book, perhaps he felt a bit jealous of his brother’s bachelor existence. In the evenings he would call his wife and complain about the officiousness of the authorities, and ask how the children were doing. Then he would go out for a meal locally, and go for a walk in the rue des Abesses or the rue Pigalle. Andreas asked himself whether his brother might take in a peepshow or go with a prostitute. He couldn’t imagine it.
From the Gare du Nord, Andreas took the suburban train out to Deuil-la-Barre. He took the same train every day. He studied the faces of the other passengers, ordinary, unremarkable faces. An elderly man sitting across from him stared at him with expressionless eyes. Andreas looked out the window. He saw rails, factories and storage facilities, an occasional tree, electricity towers or lampposts, brick or concrete walls spattered with graffiti. He had a sense of seeing only colors, ocher, yellow, white, silver, a dull red, and the watery blue of the sky. It was a little after seven, but time seemed not to matter.
He asked himself whether Walter would leave the clearing out of the apartment to a moving company. The furniture hadn’t been exactly cheap, but what use would he have for it? That aside, Andreas didn’t have many possessions. Personal effects — he had always asked himself what that meant. A little statuette of Diana with bow and arrow, frozen in mid-step, that he had bought at a flea market shortly after his arrival in Paris, a couple of posters from art exhibits long ago, and framed vacation photos of deserted landscapes in the dazzling heat of Italy and the South of France. He owned hardly any books, a few CDs and DVDs, nothing special, nothing of value. His clothes and his shoes wouldn’t fit Walter, who was bigger and bulkier than he was. The apartment itself was the only thing that could be turned into cash. Andreas had bought it at a time when the neighborhood wasn’t as sought-after as it was now.
It was a strange thing that his brother, with whom he had so little in common and whom he didn’t even resemble, was the person who would have to deal with all this. Andreas didn’t like to think his death would put anyone to any trouble. But probably that was unavoidable.
He looked around at the other passengers, a pair of lovers kissing by the door, two children whispering, old women with tired faces, businessmen in cheap shiny suits, reading the business section of the paper with grave expressions on their faces. In a hundred years you’ll all be dead, he thought to himself. The sun would shine, the trains would move, children would go to school, but he and all the other people traveling with him today would be dead, and along with them, this moment, this journey, as though it had never been.
The passengers who got off the train with Andreas seemed to be different every day. He stopped on the platform for a moment and watched as they dispersed in all directions. Even though it was still cool, he took off his jacket. He felt a chill, but he loved the cool of the morning, which felt like a superficial caress.
He used to teach in a suburb that was even further out. He had always applied for jobs in the city, but every time he had lost out to colleagues who were older or who were married or had children. Ten years ago, when they built the secondary school at Deuil, Andreas gave up his dream of a job in the city. At least he didn’t have so far to go to work as before.
He was always there half an hour before the beginning of classes. The staff room smelled of cigarettes, even though smoking was not permitted anywhere in the school. Andreas got coffee from the machine and sat down by the window. After about fifteen minutes, Jean-Marc came in, one of the gym teachers. He was wearing a tracksuit.
“Have you been smoking?” he asked, as he washed his face in the sink. Andreas said nothing.
“I can’t believe you’re allowed to smoke in staff rooms in Switzerland.”
Andreas said he hadn’t been in a staff room anywhere in Switzerland for a very long time.
“Can I ask you a personal question?” said Jean-Marc.
“I’d rather you didn’t.”
Jean-Marc laughed. He had pulled off his tracksuit top, and was washing his armpits. He said it was too bad they hadn’t installed a shower for the teachers. He squirted on a deodorant, the smell of it spread through the room. Jean-Marc got dressed again. He got a glass of water, and sat down right next to Andreas.
“You must know Delphine?” he leaned back with a smug expression. “What do you think of her?”
“She’s nice,” said Andreas. “There’s something refreshing about her.”
“That’s exactly it.”
Andreas went over to the window, opened it, and lit a cigarette. Jean-Marc gave him a glare.
“We went for a drink together,” he said, “and somehow I ended up staying with her.”
“And what’s that to do with me?”
“Well, since then she’s pretended nothing happened. As though she didn’t know me.”
“You should be pleased. Do you want her calling you at home?”
Jean-Marc stood up and raised his hands. “God, no,” he said, “but it’s strange. You sleep with a woman, someone … not even beautiful. Did that ever happen to you?”
“I’m not married,” said Andreas. It seemed grotesque to him that he would certainly have described Jean-Marc as his best friend.
After Andreas turned off the light at night, he lay awake a little. He had drawn the curtains, and the only light in the darkened room was from the TV, the DVD player, and the stereo. The red luminous diodes had something calming about them, they reminded him of the light that doesn’t go out, of the presence of Christ, whom he didn’t believe in.
He spent Saturday as always, cleaning the apartment, and shopping for the week ahead. Some years ago, a film that had achieved cult status had been shot in the street, and since that time people came there from all over the world to check out the reality of the dream scenes. Andreas had bought a DVD of the film, and when he watched it from time to time, it seemed to him the pictures were more real than the street outside, as though the reality were just a pale imitation of the silvery film world, a cheap stage set. You had to close your eyes to hear the soundtrack and see the images. Then Paris was the way he had always imagined it.
Andreas liked being part of this stage set. He liked the sense he had of himself sitting in a café reading the newspaper, or strolling down the street with a baguette under his arm, and carrying bags full of vegetables that would spend the week rotting in his fridge before he threw them away. When tourists stopped him and asked for directions, he was only too glad to tell them. He answered them in French, even when he noticed they were German or Swiss and had trouble understanding him.
He was both an extra in the imaginary film and a member of the audience, a tourist who had walked these streets for twenty years now, without ever having a sense of arriving anywhere. He was quite happy with his part, he had never wanted to be anything else. Great undertakings and major changes had always alarmed him. He walked through the streets of St. Michel or St. Germain, went up the Eiffel Tower, or took a look around the church of Notre Dame or the Louvre. He strolled across the Pont Neuf and went shopping in the big stores, even though the prices were ridiculous. Sometimes he would follow people on the street for a while, see what they bought or watched them stop in a café for a drink, and then he let them go. When he talked to friends who had spent all their lives in Paris, he was amazed by how poorly they knew the city. They barely left their quartier, and hadn’t visited the museums since their school days. Instead of rejoicing in the city’s beauty, they complained about the striking Metro workers, the polluted air, and the lack of parks and playgrounds.