If, p.14
If, page 14
At the end of the corridor near the entrance is the playroom. It’s a huge space that boasts shelves of books and games, a playhouse, dolls, a tea set, a TV with video games, and a computer. It leads out onto two attractive terraces where the children can play in summer. It’s a cheerful, welcoming sort of place. Which is just as well. When they’re not feeling too terrible, the children spend hours in here. It’s here that they introduce their parents to all sorts of madcap activities: roasting a plastic chicken, looking after a baby doll with cancer, fishing for magnetic fish, piling up wooden rectangles, rolling marbles over a board with holes in it, hiding an aircraft carrier in a corner, riding a scooter over banana skins, and so on. And repeating everything, never-endingly. The parents join in willingly, happy to see their children enjoying themselves. So they get on with it, make mistakes, correct them, and improve. They have fun too sometimes. Most of the time, though, they seem a little absent. Sitting sideways on child-size chairs, with their knees up to their chins, they let their attention and their minds wander until their child calls them to order again. Once a week the activities coordinator suggests a cooking session. Mainly cake making. The children love it. And the parents do too: They don’t need to stay. They find themselves with an hour’s leave. Back in the playroom, everyone puts on an apron, washes his or her hands, takes a bowl and some flour, yogurt, and sugar. It’s a bit like at home, except that here they use liquidized egg that’s been pasteurized, just like the milk that comes in cartons. They need to watch out for germs in this apartment.
Entertainment isn’t limited to the playroom. It also spills into the corridor, where bikes and trikes are freely available. Being able to make the most of them obviously presupposes the patient doesn’t have a drip. This is one way of identifying those who’ve recently arrived and those preparing to leave: “Unplugged,” they celebrate their deliverance by pedaling at breakneck speed. There’s also a piano in the corridor that anyone can play. No one can enter or leave the department without brushing past it. It’s full of charm, a little worn, in varnished wood with yellowing keys, like an old thing in a saloon bar. There’s something strange about this instrument parked here, in among the sick, halfway down a corridor. And what’s stranger still is that, despite its dilapidated appearance and the heat in the department, it’s more or less in tune. There’s no doubting that this piano is tuned regularly. Someone must look after it. So it’s not here simply for decorative purposes. People can play it whenever they like and everyone seems to enjoy hearing it. In fact, no one has thought to wedge its soft pedal on. Perhaps that’s because not many people actually use it. Solal is in fact one of the few children to use it on a regular basis. To be frank, it’s the first thing he does every time he comes back to this apartment. He races over to the velvet-covered stool, puts his hands on the keyboard, and unfailingly tinkles out the first ten bars of the same Tchaikovsky piece. Like a sign of recognition—or of belonging. A nurse or a cleaner can often be heard calling from the far end of the corridor, “I think Solal’s back.” This makes his parents smile. Then a small group gathers, staff, patients, their families. The caregivers stay on their feet; the parents and children sit on the steps that lead out to the terrace; drips line up, blocking the corridor. They all listen in silence, smiling, moved. It’s a great escape.
Very close to the piano, between the bike park and the large picture windows, is one last game. The game. The one that brings together young and old, patients and visitors; the one that causes laughter and bedlam, that takes everyone back to their childhood and makes them forget cancer: table soccer. It’s an old design, the sort you still sometimes see in a café. In light-colored wood with red stripes on the sides and blue and red discs to keep the score. Luckily there’s an electric socket nearby. Once their pumps are plugged in, the brakes applied to the wheels on their drips, and the tubes secured over their shoulders, the children are completely free to grapple with the handles of those horizontal bars. Suddenly, they’re projected inside the stadium, toned as athletes, healthy and sporty, playing alongside their strikers, sweepers, center backs, and goalkeepers. Eleven times more energetic than any healthy person, and eleven times more robust. Untouchable eleven times over. Invincible. After a few months, Solal has become a table soccer grand master. Half-halts, dribbling, knocking back, tackling, spinning—no technique is beyond him. He systematically beats his mother, who, tired of the game or only too glad to make her son happy, adds to her natural incompetence. Solal celebrates every goal. His whoops can be heard on the far side of the department. Oh yes, he’s back. There can be a lot of happiness in this apartment.
Farther along the corridor two small terraces allow residents access to the outside. They’ve recently been reconceived by an architect, the father of a hospitalized child. Each of them is entirely clad in wood and comprises a uniform block constituting a bench with a backrest on either side of a low table. The children don’t come out here much—it’s not easy climbing up the few steps with a drip. The parents, on the other hand, use them occasionally. They’re not allowed to smoke here, for fear the smell will infiltrate the apartment, but these terraces do offer some comfort: escaping the oppressively torrid heat inside, avoiding eye contact with other people, and contemplating the world of the living. Because from up here they have the city at their feet. They can watch normal people living normal lives, rushing to work, missing the bus, carrying bags of shopping, taking children to school and scolding them when they’re naughty. Lise likes to choose a passerby at random and follow him or her as far as she can see. She imagines being these other people, takes their every footstep, invents lives for them into which she herself can be subsumed. It isn’t to do with making her own life better; in fact, she rarely chooses a mother with healthy-looking children. What she’s looking for is difference, not reparation. So she becomes by turns a lovestruck teenage girl, a hurrying businessman, an unsteady old lady, or a rowdy schoolboy. When she’s finished bringing to life these flesh-and-blood ghosts, she looks at the world around them. Her gaze cuts across the rue Gay-Lussac, along the rue des Ursulines, picks out the bell tower of Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas Church, takes the rue de l’Abbé-de-l’Épée, and passes the Institute for the Deaf before losing itself in the Luxembourg Gardens that she can only just make out in the distance. Then, cutting diagonally northward, she pictures the boulevard Saint-Michel dropping down to the Seine and the Île de la Cité. The twin towers of Notre-Dame encourage her to look up. She flits over the right bank, and Paris shrinks as if she were a bird on the wing. Soon, Lise can see the whole city: it isn’t a simple entity in white stone and zinc; there’s also concrete, metal, brick, tiling, and glass in this agglomeration. The weather is less important to Lise than the fact that time is passing. Perhaps she savors the golden glow of sunlight reflecting off buildings and roofs around her, but bad weather brings its share of light and shade too. It doesn’t make any difference: it’s just good to breathe the outside air. In this apartment, though, even the terraces fence you in. This is because tall glazed panels have been erected on what should be the open side. They must be well over six feet high, which means the only view is through them. There could have been a guardrail at chest height in wood or cement, hidden with shrubs and flowers. But no. The decision was made to have this insurmountable and coldly transparent wall. Lise can’t help thinking about why these glass panels are here; they form far too high a parapet not to be suspect…there’s a strong chance they’re not here simply to prevent accidents. She once found a red balloon abandoned on one of the terraces, and without thinking threw it over the glass wall. She watched it fly away, whisked upward for a moment, and then floating down as if in slow motion and coming to rest softly in the Institute’s courtyard, six floors below. There was something rather sad about it lying on the wet asphalt, caught between two green trash cans. Lise stayed there a long time, not moving, with her nose against the glass, reliving that long slow descent, waiting for a breath of wind to free the balloon and bring it to life again. But nothing happened. Tired of waiting, she eventually went back into the apartment, leaving two barely intersecting circles of condensation on the glass, like an ephemeral eternity sign.
The apartment’s inhabitants form a strange community. In some ways they are more than roommates, almost family. They didn’t choose each other but share an indissoluble sort of existential kinship. A blood tie. In the real sense of the words. Their common ancestor is an aggressive, unstable fellow and they are secret carriers of his unhealthy legacy. He’s the psychopathic uncle, the Nazi grandfather, the pedophile father. He spawns the unutterable. They meanwhile eat together, sleep together, celebrate Christmas and birthdays, exchange small talk, play, and occasionally laugh, but they avoid talking about this taboo. Tragedy grows in silence. And they all find themselves doubly constrained: they must keep from the others the one thing that should unite them. If they mention it they will open up an irreparable breach. No one knows where that might lead. The abyss threatens them all. But hiding this evil does nothing to weaken it; in fact, it emerges all the stronger. It wants to be voiced and tries to break down the barriers. And this means that communication between the inhabitants—being subject to the paradoxical injunctions of what can be voiced and what cannot—often revolves around sickness. With the passing days, then, they all harbor identical suffering within them but remain total strangers to each other. In this apartment there’s a unique blend of the strange and the familiar.
A CITY
The Institute is a city: it concentrates a dense population in a limited space and provides and facilitates a variety of activities for these citizens. Limited resources mean that everything here is on a miniature scale.
A room of about two hundred square feet therefore serves as a school. As in small rural schools, there’s only one class. Two teachers, substitute staff from the national education scheme, welcome students of all abilities and adapt exercises to suit each age group. Primary school children mingle with high-schoolers, and preschoolers with the primary school kids. The school is open every weekday, follows the official curriculum, and respects the calendar of vacations. As such, it is like any other educational establishment in Paris. But in this city, school isn’t compulsory, and there are generally few children here. Two or three at the most. Not that it’s unpleasant. Quite the opposite, in fact; it’s one of the places that connects the children most closely to their previous lives. Which means a lot of them would very much like to attend. Sadly, only too often they’re not well enough to do so. It turns out that education, like good health and eating, is one of those privileges we truly value only when deprived of it.
The classroom sometimes also serves as a gymnasium. A sports instructor comes once a week to supervise the children. The chairs are pushed aside, the computers protected, and the only Formica table moved to the middle of the room. It’s Ping-Pong time. Traditional bats and balls are used while a piece of string stretched between two yogurt pots acts as a net. The table must be only about five feet long by three feet wide, but that doesn’t matter. Its modest dimensions match the physical limitations of the players. In any event, the children wouldn’t be able to expend enough energy for normal forms of exercise. Other times there’s badminton. Here again, the appropriate type of racket is used but, given the lack of space, the shuttlecock is replaced by a balloon. The children enjoy it, a little. Truth be told, there’s something sad, and tragically laughable, about these ersatz sports. The parents probably welcome the organizers’ dedication and inventiveness, but they can’t help noticing the cramped space, the balls going missing among schoolbooks, rackets getting stuck in pipework, and—as ever—the throwing up that interrupts play. It all seems diminished. Even the children’s enjoyment. Parents succumb to a feeling of atrophy and a fear of seeing even this truncated.
Arts and entertainment seem better adapted to the constraints of illness and its treatments. The city has a library that is open to all, consisting of shelves of comics, and there’s a media library that boils down to a laptop and a few DVDs. Every now and then a movie theater is set up in the kitchen in the outpatient department on the far side of the main corridor. Charlie Chaplin films, Disney films, and a whole selection of cartoons are screened. Once a week this same kitchen is transformed into a painting studio. The children give free rein to their dreams of escape, making this one of the rare occasions when they succeed in forgetting. Lastly, every Tuesday afternoon, a traveling circus comes to town. It amounts to two clowns, a man and a woman, with fanciful, brightly colored clothes, makeup, and red noses. They arrive in a blaze of noise with booming voices, a barrel organ, tambourines, and party horns. They go from room to room with a plethora of songs, jokes, pranks, and magic tricks. They pretend to squabble, gently castigate the parents, and take the nurses to task while encouraging the children to side with them. The kids can’t get enough. The adults, meanwhile, are sometimes uncomfortable. They’ve probably lost that childhood facility for suddenly changing register. This buffoonery needles and unsettles their inner trauma. Something about the excesses of farce offends them. Like the rictus grin of a skull. Whatever the circumstances, the clowns never stray from their roles. From the moment they step into the city, they are pure comedy and it’s impossible to imagine they have other lives. When they change back into their everyday clothes, they slip away discreetly through a hidden door. They never stay around after their performance. Lise comes across them one evening on their way out. It takes a while for her to recognize them, stripped of their artifice. She’s not sure who is the more embarrassed, herself or the two of them.
For obvious reasons of hygiene, furred and feathered animals as well as plants are banned by municipal law. The city does, however, have a semblance of a zoo and of an indoor jungle. An aquarium with a few aquatic plants and tropical fish has pride of place where the corridors intersect, a point by the entrance to the city that constitutes a sort of traffic circle. But neither the fauna nor the flora appear to flourish here. Confined between ill-lit glass walls and drowning in inadequately oxygenated water, the residents of the zoo are gradually thinning out. After a few months, only mineral and plastic decorations—gravel, rocks, artificial sea wrack, and fake treasure chests—seem to have survived.
The community has no commercial outlets within its walls. Water is dispensed for free in public drinking fountains, but anyone wanting other forms of refreshment or to brighten the day with some extra food must leave the city center and venture into outlying neighborhoods. And this means descending to lower floors, because, thanks to a distinctive feature of local town planning, the city is arranged vertically. It is not until four floors below, then, that you would find a café, which in this instance is called a cafeteria. This single-room establishment is as lacking in charm as it is in visitors, but at least there’s the opportunity for several people to meet here to enjoy a cup of tea, a hot chocolate, or a soda, and nibble on an amalgam of saturated fats and rapid-release sugars served up by a machine. It is possible, although rare, to meet people from other neighborhoods here, inhabitants of what the city’s residents view as sort of suburbs. And they are a very different population. Older, often less appealing and less cheerful. To tell the truth, the city folk—being fairly protectionist and afraid of being contaminated by foreign sadness—aren’t keen to mix with these outsiders. Still, whichever the floor, everyone works in the same sector: medical, paramedical, and peri-medical, and there are only a few paying positions. The city and its suburbs have this feature in common: they both have an unusual number of volunteers.
