Do you remember Stepan? I asked him.
I remember him. He was very tall, with blond hair. Didn’t he have blue eyes? We worked a couple of nights in the same gang, two or three nights I think — before I collected this packet. He slapped his hip.
I don’t even have a picture of him, I said.
You don’t need a photo, he said, fingering your woolen bonnet, you have his progeny.
Strange word, progeny!
You can’t have closer, he said. Good night.
The long years began, the long years of your boyhood. Do you remember the flat we lived in? You did your homework on the kitchen table. You were always wanting me to make potato pancakes for supper. You kept a soccer ball in a net hung from the ceiling over your bed. Your room smelt of glue because of the models you made. The same smell as my nail varnish. You could change washers on a tap before you were ten. In my room there was the oak bed with the carved roses, when you were ill you slept in it with me and sometimes on Sundays too. Remember when we painted the living room and you fell off the ladder? You were all I had in the world and I thought you were dead.
Why do I have the same name as you, Maman, why am I called Christian Blanc?
Because your father died before you were born.
What was he like?
Strong.
What did he look like?
Big.
Was he like me?
Yes.
Was he interested in aircraft?
Not particularly, I think.
You don’t know much about him, do you?
As much as anyone ever knows.
Guess what I really want to do, Maman. I want to build a glider. One that will fly. I saw a picture in a book at school. It’ll have to be big, as big as a car.
Big enough to fly us round the world?
Yes … I’ll need lots of glue.
The long years began. Where could we go to be at home? Régis got married to Marie-Jeanne. Her condition for marrying him was that he give up drinking, and for a while he did. Mother sold the last cow, keeping only the goats and chickens. The trees of the forest, up by the path to Le Mont, began to die. The hillside above the river became the grey rusty colour of dead wood. Emile got a job loading drums in a paint factory near the frontier and Mother lavished all her attention upon him. Every evening he came home to a hero’s welcome. His weaknesses inspired her determination to live to be a hundred. As she aged, Emile became the love of her life. She changed the hay of his mattress every week.
I bought an atlas to study how to go to Stockholm. I found the Ukraine and the river Pripiat. Yet what could we have done there? We’d have been further from home than ever.
Why are we going up so fast now?
The boss at the Components Factory pursued us for a while. You remember he bought you a Sputnik with a dog inside, and you lost the dog? I went to his house for supper several times. He took us to the lake and we ate a fish like a trout but stronger tasting. You said fish find their way in the ocean through their sense of smell. His wife had left him years before. He was nearly forty, you were nine.
Do you want to marry Gaston, Maman?
We are still climbing into the sky.
No, I don’t want to marry him.
I think he wants to marry you.
I don’t know.
He told me he’s going to buy a Citroën DS.
That’s what interests you, isn’t it?
If you didn’t have to work for him, Maman, I think I’d like him more.
Gaston is very kind. He and I don’t know the same things, that’s all. What he knows doesn’t interest me a lot and what I know would frighten him.
You couldn’t frighten me, Maman.
When we turn, Christian, it’s strange, for there I am looking not up but down at the blue sky.
Michel’s shop in Pouilly was unlike any other in the district. The newspapers were arranged in a special way, the left-wing ones always in front. When a customer asked for Le Figaro, Michel bent down and brought one up from under the counter with a look of disgust, as if the paper the man had demanded were wrapped round a rotten fish. He sold bottles of gnôle with a pear the size of my fist inside the bottle.
How did the pear get inside? you asked.
It grew from a pip! Michel said and you didn’t know whether to believe him or not.
He also sold toboggans and radios. He was mad about radios and could repair anything. On the back wall of the shop he pinned a large map of the world and on each country he stuck little labels like the ones they sell for jam pots, indicating the city, the wavelength, the hours of broadcasting. There were those who said that Michel with his politics and his radios could only be a spy for the Russians! His reputation as a fire-cutter spread. People from other valleys came to him to have the pain of their burns taken away. He categorically refused any payment. It’s a gift! he repeated.
Do you remember when I took you to him? You’d burnt the palm of your hand with a firecracker. It wasn’t serious but you were howling your head off. Michel came out from behind the counter with his stiff, swaying movement — like a skittle. Let’s go into the back room, he said. I made as if to accompany you but he shook his head and the two of you disappeared. He closed the door and within seconds you stopped howling. Not gradually but suddenly in mid-cry. There wasn’t a sound in the shop. Total silence. After what seemed an eternity I couldn’t bear it anymore and shouted your name. You came bounding through the door laughing. Michel lumbered after you. There were already grey hairs in his black head.
You don’t have to burn yourself in order to come and see me, he said when I thanked him and kissed him good-bye.
Later I asked you: What happened?
Nothing.
What did Michel do?
He showed me one of his burns.
Where?
Here — you pointed at your tummy.
And your hand stopped hurting?
No, it wasn’t hurting anymore. It stopped hurting before he showed me his burn.
Why did he show it to you then?
Because I asked him.
What are we doing here, Christian, on this earth, in this sky?
I’d been working in the Components Factory for ten years. On the wall beside my bench there were thirty postcards of the Mediterranean and palm trees and cows and cherry trees in flower and a village with a steeple — all of them sent to me over the years by friends on holiday. Gaston had understood the reality of our situation. When he stood behind me, pretending to oversee my work, I could sense his regret in my shoulder blades, because I could also sense my own. The racket of the machines month after month, year after year, wore away principles. The years were long. When I didn’t sleep the nights too were long.
The factory shut for the month of August. We never went away for a holiday like some of the others. I gave Mother a hand in the garden. I made jam and bottled the last of the runner beans. When I passed the factory I no longer thought of Stepan. There is nothing in the factory which can have a memory. I thought of him when I ironed your shirts and cut your hair. I thought of him too when I did my face in the mirror. I was ageing. I looked as though I’d been married for twenty years.
Do you know how to measure a smile? Stepan asked.
Yes, I said.
He bent down and picked me up so my mouth was level with his and he kissed me.
You had a friend called Sébastien, whose father was the caretaker of the holiday camp in Bakon, on the other side of the Roc d’Enfer. Some Thursdays when there was no school, you spent the day with him up there. I was glad because the mountain air did you good. Cluses is like a dungeon. When the holiday camp was full of kids from the cities in the north, you wanted to go and find out if there were any flying enthusiasts. Here, you said, people don’t have a clue. Already I couldn’t follow you talking about “aerofoils” and “wing loadings.” I’m not sure Sébastien understood much either. His passion was fiddling with television sets. He could come into Michel’s shop and talk like a schoolmaster for an hour about new transistor circuits. Sébastien was twelve and you were eleven when in August ’66 you went to spend a whole fortnight with him up in Bakon.