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  The Safe House

  The Safe House

  A Novel

  Christophe Boltanski

  Translated by Laura Marris

  THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

  Chicago and London

  The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

  The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

  © 2017 by The University of Chicago

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637.

  Published 2017

  Printed in the United States of America

  26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 1 2 3 4 5

  ISBN-13: 978-0-226-44919-7 (cloth)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-226-44922-7 (e-book)

  DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226449227.001.0001

  Originally published as La cache. © Éditions Stock, 2015

  Illustrations by Mickaël De Clippeleir

  The University of Chicago Press gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the France Chicago Center toward the translation and publication of this book.

  www.centrenationaldulivre.fr

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Boltanski, Christophe, author. | Marris, Laura, 1987– translator.

  Title: The safe house : a novel / Christophe Boltanski ; translated by Laura Marris.

  Other titles: Cache. English (Marris)

  Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2017. | Originally published in French: Paris : Stock, 2015 under title: La cache : roman. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017008988 | ISBN 9780226449197 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226449227 (e-book)

  Subjects: LCSH: Boltanski, Christophe—Family—Fiction. | LCGFT: Fiction. | Novels.

  Classification: LCC PQ2662.O5712 C3313 2017 | DDC 843/.914—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017008988

  This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

  FOR ANNE AND JEAN-ÉLIE

  Contents

  Car

  Kitchen

  Office

  Parlor

  Staircase

  Apartment

  Bathroom

  In-Between

  Bedroom

  Attic

  Acknowledgments

  Translator’s Note

  Translator’s Acknowledgments

  Car

  1

  I never saw them walk outside alone. Or even together. Never saw them so much as stroll the length of a block. They only ventured out on wheels. Sitting pressed against each other, shielded by the body of the car—behind some cover, no matter how slight. In Paris, they drove around in a Fiat 500 Lusso, a white one. It was a simple car, easy to handle, reassuring. It suited their scale, round and dwarf sized, with its speedometer that went up to seventy-five miles per hour, its two-cylinder rear engine making a death rattle, the sputter of an old, hacking tugboat. They parked it in the cobblestone courtyard facing the archway, along the main wing of the house, ready to leave at a moment’s notice, almost stuck to the wall like the escape pod of a rocket ship. The front passenger door always opposite the kitchen entrance. They only had to navigate a few stone stairs to reach their vehicle, and to make it easier, an extra step had been added to part of each stair at half height. Once they made it down, they could drop straight into the car. No one was abandoned—we always left together. She would take the wheel. He’d sit next to her. I piled into the backseat with Anne and Jean-Élie.

  She wore huge glasses with clear brown frames and slightly tinted oval lenses. Before turning the ignition, she would lean toward the mirror on the back of the visor, fluff her hair with her palms to lift it into a pouf, stick out her cheeks, and make a duck-faced pout to check her foundation and lipstick. Then she’d start the engine with a racket like a bunch of pots and pans reverberating off the facades. At the helm of her little motor, which was seized with violent trembling every time the pistons turned, she morphed into a cyborg. One with her machine. Since her lifeless legs couldn’t press the pedals, long levers had been added with the help of God-knows-what mechanic. Like the broom handles from vintage airplanes, these allowed her to brake and accelerate—and so to drive, which she did at considerable speed, at her fastest whenever she encountered a pedestrian crossing against the light. She pounced with joyful rage, preferably on limping old men, to punish them for what little freedom of movement they had and to scare her passengers. She never ran anyone over. I have no idea if she had a license, and if so, by what means she had gotten one. She loved driving. The car was her wheelchair, her legs regained, her triumph over forced immobility.

  2

  When had they stopped walking in the streets? In her case, I know. During the early thirties. Ever since she contracted polio in medical school, not long after Jean-Élie was born. Because of her stubborn refusal to use crutches, to be seen publicly as a feeble person, deprived of a part of herself. Once, when a waiter in a restaurant hurried to hold the door for her, she shouted that she didn’t need anyone’s help. She hated false pity, the smug kindness the seemingly healthy show to those who aren’t. But what about him? When did he decide to stop going to work on foot? To give up strolling along the quays, browsing through the booksellers’ stalls? To stop running errands? To live without a cent in his pocket? To boycott public transportation? Never to sit alone at a sidewalk café or even set foot outside without company? Was it his choice or his wife’s? Was he suffering from some acute form of agoraphobia? Did he, in snubbing a natural form of human locomotion, want to show his sympathy—or even his love—for a woman at war with the laws of mechanics?

  She was his chauffeur. She dropped him off in front of official buildings hewn from stone, watched him disappear through monumental doors topped with the tricolored flag. Then she staked out his return. She drove him everywhere, as if he were a wounded hero. To the hospital, when he still practiced, to committees where he discussed disability and impairment, to scholarly conferences on the handicapped. In the middle of the night, with their sleeping children in tow, she drove him to the bedsides of the dying, or more frequently, of hypochondriacs. Without his escort, he would surely have been lost. This conscientious doctor, adored by his patients, showered with diplomas, honors, decorations, was like a child, naked in front of the dressed. By turns happy, tormented, anguished, he moved through the world without a fallback, defenseless as a hermit crab pulled from its shell, left to the mercy of the first passing predator. Incapable of lying or concealing his emotions, he could burst into sobs at the slightest hint of feeling. A book, a piece of music, an offhand remark—these were enough to make him weep or blush to the tips of his ears.

  His large head, his strong neck, his high forehead and flattish skull, his sparse, close-cropped hair—physically, he looked a little like Erich von Stroheim without the Prussian stiffness. In public, his persona had nothing in common with the actor’s noble yet sadistic soldiering, but his pose was equally contrived in its own way—the English gentleman, at once delicate, modest, and reserved. To this end, he sported a thin mustache, parted like David Niven’s, always wore a beige woolen vest under his jacket, smoked a briar pipe, the straight-stemmed, average model, typically made in Saint-Claude, and he affected a taste for scotch, though he almost never drank. With long, almond-shaped eyes exaggerated by well-defined lashes, he gazed around with an air of perpetual astonishment, as if the whole world remained a mystery. We protected him, banding together, threading around his form.
Whatever happened, we were his bodyguards. His air bags, ready to inflate at the slightest shock.

  3

  The second-generation Fiat Nuova 500 was an icon in Italian films of the fifties, but it reminded me of a goldfish bowl, a three-man submarine, a UFO—and I, its passenger, a Martian launched onto an unknown planet. In Italy, they called it the bambina. The French, less inclined to flatter, nicknamed it the “yogurt tub.” Its floor scraped the ground. Its sheeting was thin as tinfoil. In the back, the absence of rear doors or even moveable rear windows heightened the sense of entrapment. I sometimes spent hours with my rump against the motor, my senses jangled by each throb, my body doubled up, knees wedged against the front seat, face pressed against the porthole, watching the blackened buildings roll by in one low-angle shot, a monotonous landscape blurred by condensation. Deafened by the engine, I traversed wide arteries coated with soot—the rue Bonaparte, the boulevard Morland, the avenue de Ségur, the rue de Sèvres, the rue Vaneau, the avenue du Maine—in a weightless state, as if I were moving through a dim watery world (and don’t they say traffic is fluid?)—a world of ink blots, of deep-sea trenches filled with transparent fish. I huddled in a fetal position inside that ovoid vessel, that rolling womb piloted by my grandmother, visible to everyone and yet curiously unseen amid the commotion of the city.

  They lived in one of those mansions that were usually named after a marquis or a viscount, midway down the rue de Grenelle. As strangers to nobility and everything it represented, they had nothing to do with their Saint-Germain neighborhood, which since Balzac has stood less for a part of the city than for a social class, a set of manners, an air, a way of speaking. Until age thirteen, when I decided to live with them permanently, they looked after me on days off, which was nearly half the week. On Tuesday (or was it Wednesday?) afternoons, they came to get me after class in the 14th arrondissement, rue Hippolyte-Maindron, and returned me to my mother’s house on the impasse du Moulin-Vert the following night. Then they picked me up again on the weekend, from noon on Saturday until Sunday. They would all be there, waiting for me in the Fiat at the school entrance, and later, when I was in Lavoisier secondary school, from a respectful distance. With each new grade, they parked a little farther away to avoid embarrassing me in front of the other students. Rue Pierre-Nicole, then rue Feuillantines, close to Val-de-Grâce. Eventually, on a day that probably corresponded with becoming a teenager, I took the 83 bus from the Port-Royal stop—destination Bac-Saint-Germain.

  4

  In his childhood, when they had a Citroën Traction Avant, my uncle Christian spent 9:15 to 12:30 each morning sitting in the same spot while his father finished his duties at Laennec. The hospital terrified him, with its ballet of ambulances and police vans blaring their sirens. For good reason, he associated it with suffering and death. The Citroën wasn’t parked in front of the main entrance, on the rue de Sèvres, but on the Vaneau side. Were they sparing him the spectacle or merely following parking regulations? And what could he do in a glass box in the middle of Paris? He took in the view. The traffic cops slipping parking tickets under windshield wipers, the acrobatics of a driver who kept trying, vainly, to fit between two bumpers, the construction workers jackhammering a sidewalk, the pigeons perching on a gutter, a strip of sky veiled by exhaust. Christian stared at the passersby. After a while, he knew them all: the old biddy in gabardine, the postman in his mail cart, the old man swallowed by his raincoat, the woman pushing a baby carriage. With his forehead against the glass, he scanned the street for the arrival of a girl he’d fallen in love with, though he never said a word to her.

  He waited until adulthood before daring to go outside without this protective cocoon. He was eighteen the first time. He didn’t walk far. Five hundred yards at most, between the house and a tiny gallery called Les Tournesols, which specialized in Yiddish art. His mother had opened it on the rue de Verneuil to find something for him to do. He looked after the space and painted in the back room. After a few months, he took over the direction of the gallery and started showing painters he chose himself, like Jean le Gac. I don’t know if anyone came to fetch him after that first solo excursion. For several years, his parents continued to go with him in the car each time he went out. To the Académie Julian where he took drawing classes, to museums, exhibitions. My father, Luc, insists he gained his own independence earlier than Christian did. But once, at about the same age, when he expressed a desire to get some fresh air and go sailing, Luc found himself on a boat with his whole family. A single-hulled, thirty-two-foot-long sailboat moored at Graau, in Dutch Friseland. A skipper was included. How did his mother, with her unruly stems, manage to hoist herself aboard? “If he’d wanted to take a caravan across the desert,” said Christian, “we would have all been mounted on camels.”

  5

  In winter, during her long hours of waiting, she left the engine running to keep warm. She put a hot-water bottle between her knees, covered it with a plaid blanket, and blackened pages with a pen, leaning on a leather lap desk. Under the pseudonym Annie Lauran, she wrote novels about her sad, solitary childhood, about her adoption (when she was “bought”) by her godmother, an eccentric society woman and patroness, about her father, a penniless, morphine-addicted lawyer from Rennes who was worn down by political defeat, about her brother, an adventurer, overcome by delusions of grandeur and exiled to French Polynesia like some Napoleon in Saint Helena. Very beautiful books set in a long-ago country of cathedrals and baptisteries in the humid and superstitious province of Mayenne, or in an overseas France, restrictive and colonial. She was also the author of quasi-sociological essays—astonishingly prescient studies of second-generation immigrants, the “children from nowhere,” as she called them, or of the marginalized “third age,” an expression that was popular in the seventies before the invention of senior citizens and elder rights. She advocated a “tape-recorder literature,” which depended on strictly cataloging real life. Following Jean Rouch’s cinéma vérité, it was a neutral style, free from any kind of psychology. She wrote about twenty books in total, published by Plon or Pierre-Jean Oswald, and later with the Éditeurs Français Réunis, the publishing house of the Communist Party, often with photographs or collages by Christian on the cover. A life’s work that has unjustly fallen into oblivion.

  6

  After my birth, when she was forced to adjust to her new genealogical status by adopting a term, if not of endearment, then at least of familiarity, she chose the title mère-grand after the story of “Little Red Riding Hood,” or more specifically, the Big Bad Wolf—that two-headed hydra who combines sweetness and a growling voice, innocence and predation, nightgown and gray pelt, cotton bonnet and snapping fangs. She liked to provoke people, to disrupt social codes, to seduce as she intimidated. “Granny,” the nickname chosen by my maternal grandmother, wouldn’t have suited her. She had nothing in common with those sweet old ladies cooking up cakes and jams for their descendants. No chance she’d get lumped in with the stereotypical grandmas or share their penchant for benevolent smiles, indulgence, and attention lavished on naughty children under the affectionate gaze of passersby. She had a savage appetite for life. She bubbled over with the force of a pressure cooker, unable to transfer her overflowing energy into four motorized wheels. Like the animal in the fairy tale, she was confined to her bed and hollowed by raging hunger. She would have devoured us all just the same as the little girl dressed in crimson. We had become her arms, her legs, extensions of her body.

  In public spaces—the airport lobby, the terrace of a café, a movie theater, or the annual book festival for the Communist newspaper L’Humanité, I was forbidden from calling her mère-grand or pronouncing any such formula that might reveal her age, a subject she guarded with the utmost secrecy. As I write these words, I still don’t know exactly when she was born, and I cringe from doing the necessary research with the authorities for fear of violating her deepest privacy. She refused, in her words, “everything that leaves a mark.” Starting with
the weight of years, the slow decline, the physical decay, the narrowed life that reminded her of her illness, another setback she never stopped battling. She took infinite care with her appearance. She dyed her hair a reddish black, abused self-tanning lotion, and in spite of her difficulties with mobility, wore high heels to gain a few inches. In front of strangers I had to call her “aunt,” a more respectful title, and a much less temporal one, not tied to old age like the title she’d given herself, which was certainly burlesque, but not very flattering. To prevent confusion, I avoided addressing her in public.

  7

  Of course, we sometimes left our spaceship to go see a movie (preferably American) or to eat at a restaurant. The venues were picked for their ease of access and their anonymity. Cinemas like the Maine, the Escurial, and the MacMahon, with their theaters on the ground floor. Or big brasseries, loud and impersonal, like the Coupoule or the Select, located on either side of the boulevard Montparnasse, and also Les Ministères, an establishment on the rue du Bac. Never French bistros, with their checkered table cloths, so-called traditional cuisine, candle stubs, and solicitous proprietors. We wanted to melt into the mass of guests or spectators. Despite our efforts to stay unnoticed, I felt the weight of stares as soon as we disembarked somewhere. We made a curious team, our small figures hitched together (all skinny, with the exception of my more voluminous grandfather), our dark coloring, and our tortoise pace, our serious look, almost on guard. Hand in hand, huddled together, we formed one single being, a sort of overgrown millipede. I was obviously a little embarrassed by these creatures, so frail, so vulnerable. The wife held up from both sides, the husband leaning on a cane. We surrounded them. When I didn’t offer my arm, I acted like I didn’t know them—I went ahead, nose in the air. As much as I loved the warmth, the close chaos of the Fiat, I dreaded these outings in the open, those few feet to cross in front of everyone.