He was twenty, she eighteen. He approached her one evening at the Café du Relais Saint-Michel. He told her that he had just come from his sociology class. For her part, she waited several days to tell him that she was a salesgirl in a shoe store. They got into the habit of meeting up in the back room of the Relais—usually around six-ten, after she got off work at the store. She was happy to find him there every night: he was company for her; he was polite and sweet. She was happy to find someone with whom she could pass the pre-dinner hours before heading back to her room. She didn’t talk much—it was he who told her things. He told her about Islam and the Bible. This didn’t surprise her particularly, even though he returned to the subject again and again. It didn’t surprise her, nothing surprised her: that was just the way she was made; nothing really surprised her.
The first night he talked to her about Islam. The next day he slept with her and he talked to her about the Bible. He asked her whether she’d read it. She told him that she hadn’t. The following day, he brought a Bible with him and he read Ecclesiastes to her in the back room of the Relais. He read it loudly, his hands on his ears, in a passionate voice, following a liturgical rhythm. She was embarrassed by this and she wondered whether he wasn’t a little crazy. Afterward, he asked her what she’d thought of it. She hadn’t listened very carefully while he was reading because she was so embarrassed by it. She told him that it seemed reasonable to her, that it was fine. He smiled at her response; he explained that it was a fundamental text and that it was necessary to learn it.
He had seen the Nash papyrus at the British Museum; he told her about it. He had spent several hours in front of the glass case, and he’d gone back again the next day, and for several days after that. He would never forget those moments. All that was left on the Nash papyrus was a few lines from Exodus. He talked to her about Exodus. “And the children of Israel were fruitful and increased abundantly, and multiplied, and waxed exceeding mighty; and the land was filled with them… . And they were grieved because of the children of Israel… .” He told her about all the Bibles—the Vulgate and the Septuagint, as well as the Vatican, the Sinaiticus, the Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Latin Bibles.
He never wanted to talk about her, and he never asked whether she was happy working in the shoe store, or how she’d come to Paris, or what she liked. They made love together. She liked to make love. It was one of the things that she liked. While they were making love, they didn’t speak. Once he was finished, he started talking again about St. Jerome, who had spent his life translating the Bible.
He was thin, a little hunched. His hair was wavy and black, and he had very beautiful blue eyes, lined with thick black lashes. His skin was pale, his mouth very expressive, his pale lips barely grazing his teeth. He had a round nose, pronounced cheekbones. He wasn’t particularly clean—the collars of his shirts left something to be desired, and so did his nails, which were pink and rounded and too big for his slender hands, making the tips of his fingers look like spatulas. He had a concave chest. He had spent his youth reading the sacred texts of Islam and of Christianity. He had learned Hebrew, Arabic, English, German. He was still studying Arabic at the École des Langues Orientales—though, in fact, he knew it so well already that, while he was only in his second year when they met, he could read the Koran in the original.
Sometimes he took her out to dinner, but always to cheap restaurants. He confessed one night that he was buying, on layaway, a Hebrew Bible from the sixteenth century. His father was rich, but gave him very little money. Still, he hadn’t been able to resist buying this Bible; he had already paid for a third of it, and would pay it off entirely the following month. He dreamed of the moment when he’d have that Bible in his hands.
Even after they’d known each other for three weeks, they still hadn’t talked about anything other than the Bible and Islam. Always, he spoke to her of God, and of the eternal appeal that the idea of God held for men. She, herself, didn’t believe in God; she didn’t feel the least need to believe in God. She knew that there were people who believed in God, who felt that need. She didn’t believe that she’d spend the rest of her life at the shoe store; she believed that she’d get married and have children. She believed that she had been given her chance in the world—that was her only way of believing in God.
He didn’t believe in God, either, but that didn’t bring him any consolation. He was indifferent to his father’s fortune, which was significant; it had been acquired through the process of vulcanizing tires for cars. He spoke sometimes of his house in Neuilly, and of a property in Hossegor. She knew that they would never get married. He didn’t even ask himself the question.
She had never known a man like him. He talked about Muhammad the way one would talk about a brother—he told her about Muhammad’s life, his marriage to a merchant’s widow, his liaison with Maria the Copt. He knew the stories of each of Muhammad’s fourteen wives, Muhammad who had undertaken the task of monotheizing the Arabs. It had been a grand idea—Muhammad had defended it with a weapon in his hand and with celestial courage. It seemed to her a strange undertaking, but she said nothing to him. Nor did she tell him that sometimes she had had enough of helping people try on shoes all day. No, she kept those thoughts to herself; she didn’t, in any case, imagine that they would interest anyone—and that seemed normal to her. In the end, she got used to his ways, and whenever he wanted to recite entire suras of the Koran in Arabic, she let him do so; she thought that he was a nice guy. He bored her.
He bought her a pair of stockings; he was a kind man. But since they’d begun sleeping together, she had no joy in her life. One night, she understood why. I am not made for him, she told herself. All her strength, her youthful joie de vivre seemed to shrivel in his presence; she couldn’t help it. Still, she was flattered. In a sense, she was lucky; she told herself that she learned things when she was with him. But those things brought her no pleasure. It was as if she had already known them, so small was her need to learn them. But she did try to please him; in the evening she read the Gospels, as he had asked her to. What Christ said to his mother made her want to cry. That he had been crucified so young, before his mother’s eyes, was even more revolting. But—it wasn’t her fault—she couldn’t go beyond a certain level of emotion. She did not think that he was God, this man. She thought that he was a man who’d had very noble plans; his death gave him back his humanity, which meant that she was unable to read his story without thinking of that of her own father, who had died the year before, crushed by an industrial wagon, one year before his retirement. He’d been the victim of an injustice that had begun long ago. That injustice had never ceased to exist on earth—it continued through the generations of man. ♦
(Translated, from the French, by Deborah Treisman.)
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