…The ceremonies involving Elena started at six-thirty; I was having a quick beer while she finished her preparations upstairs (having it out for the very last time with the bathroom mirror). I listened on.
‘Does the prescriptive exiguity make so bold as to encroach on the causal nexus?’
After an unhappy silence Jed said, ‘Excuse me? The causal…?’
Jed Slot was a young American writer of noir novels, but his latest book was a collection of noir short stories (called Court et noir: short and black). Already a minor icon in genre book clubs across France, Slot was suddenly the author of an uncontrollable bestseller that was engaging the critics’ deepest concern; and Slot’s sudden promotion moved his publishers to fly him over from Buffalo, NY…In his early thirties, in a slightly dank charcoal suit, with flat brown hair parted at the side, with weak nose and weak chin: Elena had twice got chatting with Jed, and pronounced him very polite but strangely charmless and uneasy-making. She also remarked that he knew no French at all, not even merci or bonjour.
‘Does the crystallisation process impel you in the direction of masque? Q-u-e?’
Jed consulted the thick sheath of his schedule. He said, ‘I’m sorry uh, Professor Boysghellin, but could you –
‘Boisgelin. But you can simply call me Jean-Ignace. Or plain Jean.’
Brightening, Jed said, ‘I’m sorry, John, but could you explain the meaning of that last word? The one with the q-u-e?’
‘No,’ said Jean-Ignace, ‘kabuki – the Shinto influence, but shorn of its fripperies, needless to add. In other words, Monsieur Slot – is the short story more abstract, more tropological if you prefer, more conceptualised than the novel?’
‘…The short story is more condensed than the novel. The novel is uh, more extended, more –’
‘Come on then,’ urged Elena from the passageway. ‘You’re making us late.’
In the fresh air he said, ‘Jed’s going through it. As usual. His interviewers speak better English than he does, or than I do. And Jed’s only got one thing to say.’
‘Poor Jed. He told me some of them last two or three hours. He’s here till May. Lyon is next. And it’s his first trip abroad apart from Toronto.’
‘Elena,’ he said, halting and standing back from her. ‘…It would be a waste of breath to say how lovely, how intelligent, and how young you look.’
‘Why a waste?’
‘You know what I mean. It’s obvious. Even a crowd of anti-American Jew-hounders could see it. In your own person you tell your own tale.’
Yes, and they linked arms…And it hit him in a rush – a sensation that was once very familiar, indeed almost routine. And this was the wrong time of day for it: the sensation of waking up happy.
As a result he felt slightly stoned. You know – strange to the earth.
High
‘Imagine…Close your eyes,’ said the salesman, ‘and you can see the sailsmen of two centuries since, fighting the invader. Imagine.’
And I did imagine. Standing there with the French rep, Gilles (the dreamy, the faraway French rep), I looked down through leaded glass from an embrasure high up in one of the twin towers of the eviscerated castle, which now served as a convention centre, as a banqueting hall, and, this week in March, as Festival HQ. Below, the fists and claws of the jetty reached out into the North Atlantic, the ironwork rusted with blood and brine…At five foot six, I was getting further and further below average height (the average Dutchman was six foot one). In the developed West, Canada included, everyone was getting taller. Everyone except Americans – and no one knew why.*1 But I would’ve towered over the warrior-mariners of the 1800s, who were the size of modern twelve-year-olds (and famished and scrawny, too, unlike the twelve-stone twelve-year-olds currently rolling around the First World). So the pomp of inches might have made me brave, might have made me rather more inclined to stop, or momentarily impede, a cannonball for twenty centimes a day. I was beginning to be embrittled by age, and the thought of combat jarred my whole skeleton, as if all my bones were funny bones. I was shrinking, too. ‘Mart, if you want to grow,’ said my much taller brother (this was in early adolescence), ‘sleep with your legs dead straight.’ I tried it for a couple of years, and I didn’t get much taller (and I didn’t get much sleep).
‘Will we go down?’
‘You go ahead. Nice talking to you, Gilles. I’ll be along directly.’
Elena was in a side room somewhere nearby, being interviewed by this medium and then by that medium and then by the other medium, so I’d be all alone, without my wife – ma femme, cicérone, et interprète…As I came down the stone staircase I thought of something I’d read in a laddish American glossy on the Eurostar: Who unties France from the tree and helps her find her panties every time the Germans are done with her? America, that’s who. This was from one of many articles in a whole special number endorsing Francophobia in all its forms. Another think piece, using charts and statistics, argued that the French were schlumps and slatterns, too, on top of everything else: for instance, barely half the men changed their underwear every day (the women were admitted to be rather cleaner – those panties that America was forever helping her find had a much better chance of being fresh out of the drawer). In the canyonlike reception room there were perhaps 300 of them, the French. And for a time I wandered around down there, trying to gauge these individuals with (for the occasion) a neurotically fastidious eye. And all right, there were unshaven chins and heads of unbrushed hair, and several wide smiles disclosed a seam along the gumline of last night’s dessert (usually crème brûlée). But who cared? I was about as slovenly as the French, I reckoned, and I admired their lack of interest in how they looked. It freed them up
