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  BLACK FOREST

  A novel by Valérie Mréjen

  Translated from the French by Katie Shireen Assef

  Deep Vellum Publishing

  3000 Commerce St., Dallas, Texas 75226

  deepvellum.org · @deepvellum

  Deep Vellum Publishing is a 501c3 nonprofit literary arts organization founded in 2013 with the mission to bring the world into conversation through literature.

  Published in collaboration with Phoneme Media

  www.phonememedia.org

  Copyright © 2012 Valérie Mréjen

  Translation Copyright © 2019 Katie Shireen Assef

  Originally published in French by Editions P.O.L. as Forêt noire in 2012

  ISBN: 978-1-944700-90-4 ebook ISBN: 978-1-64605-021-5

  Library of Congress Control Number: Forthcoming

  This book is distributed by Consortium Book Sales & Distribution

  Printed in the United States of America

  Cover art by Lucas Rollin

  Typesetting and graphic design by Scott Arany

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quotes for review purposes, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  BLACK FOREST

  A novel by Valérie Mréjen

  Translated from the French by Katie Shireen Assef

  Deep Vellum Publishing

  Dallas, Texas

  A MAN IS AT HOME ONE AFTERNOON. He attempts to carry out a number of actions in a particular order, focusing on their progress. His gaze is drawn to the window overlooking the street and he takes in the people coming and going, their shoulders pulled down by various weights: bags of all sizes, overcoats, trenches. Legs carry these bodies composed and comprised of organs, some of which function better than others; legs continuously cross paths, legs march on; heads nod, ruminating over a thousand disparate things, and hair swings forward and back. Anonymous heads of hair shine in the pale, cold light of the winter sun, curling, lifting in cowlicks, fading, and becoming streaked with white strands—just a few at first, then many, if only they’re given the time and the chance.

  The man in the apartment decides he is old enough. He takes the disco ball down from its beam and in its place ties a rope, which he likely found in the hardware section of the bric-a-brac shop not far from his building. He loops it around his neck and, standing on the stepladder, now observes the room from high up.

  Something startles the downstairs neighbors—a noise like metal hitting a concrete floor—and they freeze.

  ON ONE DECEMBER 31ST, THIS man’s birthday, a family is getting ready for a New Year’s Eve party. The divorced father will be bringing his three children to the house of a friend of their stepmother’s. They won’t know anyone there and fear they’ll be terribly bored. In a lavish apartment resembling the set of a TV movie, a young, newly-hired maid will have tried to add a festive touch to the decor by placing tiny baskets of artificial flowers on tablecloths that will give the hosts a reason to recount their lengthy bargaining sessions at markets in poor countries. The absurdly low price that had been obtained through persistence will be brandished like a victory. Yet, considering the ugliness of the spoils, it will seem still too much to the eldest child, a nervous, aloof teenager who feels uneasy in this company.

  Before heading out to the party, the family must change into nicer clothes. The outfits chosen by the youngest two aren’t chic enough: they didn’t bring with them any perfectly ironed new shirts, nor flannel trousers or little English blazers. They do not, for that matter, own such clothing, since their father hates spending Saturdays at department stores and doesn’t know of any other, more fashionable places to shop. Every now and again, he takes them to an obscure boutique in the wholesale district, where a man who smells of eau de toilette and claims to have known them since they were babies makes them try on parkas too poorly cut to look like the ones in the window display, and knockoff shoes modeled after the latest styles. They don’t dare object, and the fitting is always an ordeal. They leave with pleated pants made of itchy fabric that zip so tightly they can hardly breathe, all rolled up into plastic bags whose rigid snap-seals never close completely and whose sharp-edged handles leave red and white marks on their palms.

  And so it is decided that they will stop by their mother’s. She’s out of town for the weekend with her lover—this is how the father refers to this man he’s never met, lover, though the divorce was finalized years ago and he, too, is involved with someone new. The father has a friend; the mother sees her lover. The family drives down deserted alleys lit by gas lamps, through a wealthy neighborhood where the broad avenues are lined with hundred-year-old chestnut trees, to a duller suburb full of one-way streets. The car pulls up in front of a duplex and the children are asked to hurry, or so they gather from their father’s exaggerated sigh. The brother begins to insert his key into the star-shaped keyhole and senses, from the absence of pressure, that the door isn’t locked. Someone has been here before them. There’s a light on in the kitchen; the warm halo of recently installed sconces has been illuminating the white wall for several hours. On the tiled floor, they see the pieces of a broken plate.

  They call out, wait for a response, and climb the first flight of stairs; they understand, of course, that none of this is normal. In the room at the end of the hallway, a presence awaits them: a woman who looks exactly like their mother, in a state resembling sleep, lies in a nightgown under the covers. They recognize the fake fur bedspread, the two antique nightstands perched on slender, graceful feet, the mysterious marquetry drawers inside which they’ve always hoped to find a surprise and instead only come upon little ivory or burlwood boxes containing their yellowed baby teeth split neatly in halves, or an old sewing kit—things already familiar to them. On the pillow, the waxy face appears calm, the half-closed eyes pointed toward a spot on the ceiling.

  THE FAMILY WILL TRY TO make sense of what has happened, unable to stop themselves from asking the same questions over and over as if, given enough time, a clear explanation might by some miracle occur to them and make it all seem a little more logical. Why did this thirty-eight-year-old woman and mother of three, enamored with her new boyfriend, come home early from her romantic weekend away? The boyfriend will say he doesn’t know, that he honestly has no idea. Nothing had happened between them that could have made her decide to return home that night. Maybe he’d unknowingly said something that hurt her. Maybe he’d said something to hurt her, partly on purpose. Maybe, in taking a valiant stab at complete sincerity, he’d been too harsh with her. Maybe he’d hoped to strengthen their bond by making a carefully worded observation, or tried to express his frustration with one or another of her neuroses, taking for granted her ability to handle criticism. Maybe he’d been cruel to her out of exhaustion, out of impatience. Maybe he had wanted to rile her a little.

  The fact remains that she took the pills. On the staircase, the dark blue, almost black uniforms and helmets of the police who have come to confirm the death make the event seem strangely official. Their colleagues at the station must be waiting for them, planning to open a bottle of champagne at midnight. At midnight, the officers on duty at the neighborhood precinct will clink their glasses, call their wives, children, parents, and will all wish each other a happy 1986. For the time being, they go about their work in the suburbs: at the end of a cul-de-sac overgrown with rosebushes and in the midst of a family no longer in a holiday mood, they watch as young children faint at the sight of a dead body.

  SOMEWHERE IN PARIS, IN A sparsely furnished studio apartment, two police officers come to the aid of a woman lying on a mattress on the floor. They turn her on her side, clumsily manipulating the soft, inert mass that has just e
jected a spurt of liquid from its mouth. The woman’s partner, who called them here, says that she takes barbiturates every day, sometimes five or six in the early evening when she’s feeling depressed. A doctor in a white coat arrives, throws a startled glance at the man filming the scene, and promptly kneels at the ailing woman’s bedside. A nurse is there, too, falling into step behind him. The partner stays on the landing with the officers, one of whom—young and mustached—says the word asphyxiation, trying to downplay the situation. He repeats once or twice that it was a close call. In the very next shot, slightly further down the staircase, the young doctor can be seen taking the man gently by the arm and pulling him aside.

  AT THE MOMENT WHEN THE siblings flee the house in total panic to alert their father, who takes an eternity to extract himself from the car, wanting to know first what all the fuss is about and repeating “what? what is it,” demanding a good reason to unfold his body from the car seat and stop vaguely musing on the drabness of the street, where perhaps a bundled-up grannie is lingering—at this moment that seems unending to the children, the moment when they are faced with the obstinacy of their father who sits there sunken like an enormous stone in the leather seat—at that moment, their older sister leaves a flashy, overpriced hair salon near Pont d’Iéna with her stepmother, who’d insisted they both get a cut and blow-dry à l’américaine. The hour or more she had spent in that place—where she disliked every single thing, where the heady, musky air was like cloying perfume and rich women pouted like imperious children—only widens the unbearable gap between these two nearly simultaneous events: her siblings’ encounter with a stiff corpse in the house from which they will now have to move, and the teasing of her hair with round brushes and aerosol spray in a place where conversations are so empty that the whir of blow-dryers is almost a blessing.

  SHE MUST HAVE FOUND OUT shortly after everyone else, calling her mother’s house at the prompting of the stunned housekeeper, who had also just heard the news in this way. Her brother had answered the phone, but could only hand the receiver over to their father, who, for his part, knew no other way than to get right to the point, announcing it flatly and finally. The absurd sophistication of her hairstyle, like an old bourgeois lady’s, made her feel as if she’d been dropped into a bad soap opera—so often had she watched and re-watched those lion-maned actresses reacting to bad news over the telephone—and not long after, she went to another hairdresser more suited to her style and age, and had her head completely shaved.

  HOW DO WE TAKE UP this conversation where we’d left it? With what words should we begin? No doubt with the usual how are you, even if it rings hollow.

  IF THE YOUNG AND STYLISH woman had been in less of a hurry after work, then she might have taken the time to read the warning label on the device before installing it. She might have studied the instructions in the language of her choice, and placed an alarm at her side before undressing. And then she might not have fallen so soundly asleep—tired at the end of a long day and with no vacation in sight—after plugging in the neon lights, allowing the ultraviolet rays to scorch her skin as she slept. She won’t sun herself on any wide beaches this summer, since she’ll have been burned to death without knowing it, between the walls of a device that had arrived in a cardboard box, in an apartment that will likely be packed up into a few suitcases when they come to empty the premises.

  I REACHED, THEN SURPASSED, THE age she was when she died, and now find myself in the strange position of having become her elder. When I crossed this threshold I told myself that any person in my situation must experience more or less the same thing: the fear of being struck down at once, an unusually pronounced sense of guilt, and at the same time, a kind of relief.

  IN A SUNNY REGION OF the country, several married couples, a few of them with children, are summering together in a villa with a swimming pool. One night, two young children, a brother and sister, quietly leave their beds, walk down the stairs and out into the darkened garden and tread over the cool grass toward the pool, entranced by the luminescent turquoise of the water. At sunrise, when the children don’t answer a few calls from inside the house, the adults go out looking for them and find them drowned, floating on the surface of the pool. The women immediately take the bereaved mother into their care, staying with her in the house and attending to a few of the practical matters, while the men head to the station to meet the children’s father, who will arrive later in the day. As he waits to disembark the train, he spots his friends at the edge of the platform and wonders why so many of them have come, why this entire delegation, and understands, then, without a word, that something unusual must have happened.

  ONE NIGHT, I DREAM SHE is living in Nanterre. Why this city, I wonder. Like a detective in a film noir who frowns and mumbles the same enigmatic phrase several times in the hope of a revelation, I hear myself pronouncing n’enterre, the negation of enterre—bury—again and again. In the same dream, she is passing through Rome, which sounds like mort backwards. She wears a sun hat over very long hair. She grows organic vegetables. I find her utterly New Age.

  AND IF THIS OTHER WOMAN—AN acquaintance of distant acquaintances, the connections so garbled in the passage from mouth to mouth that nobody knows who really knew her anymore—if only this woman hadn’t laughed so heartily at the anecdote she’d heard from a fellow guest at a sauerkraut party. If she hadn’t leaned backward and caused her larynx to dilate, so that she risked aspirating a piece of food. If the guest had embellished his story a bit so as to draw out the jovial mood, or had been interrupted, or paused to serve himself another spoonful or two; if he’d been slowed by a coughing fit, or if his phone had vibrated and he’d pulled it out of his pocket, and glanced, with some annoyance, at the name of her potential savior, even if he’d decided not to answer it before delivering his punch line; a few seconds would have sufficed, and this poor soul would have been able to chew her piece of sausage.

  WHAT NEWS IS THERE TO tell after twenty-five years? The Printemps department store is still here. The Grands Boulevards, too. The retailer across the street that used to sell such typically British products has closed for good, having failed to make enough profit in France. Too few people here cared to buy floral pajamas or ruffled blouses. It’s unfortunate, but I’ll admit I didn’t shop there much, either. That said, it’s now easy to get to London by train through a tunnel that runs beneath the English Channel. She must have gone to England for a language study trip sometime before she was married. I know she traveled to Germany, to the Black Forest and Baden-Baden, where as a child she accompanied her mother to thermal spa hotels; to Italy, a little seaside town in the Province of Rimini, several summers in a row; to Morocco for her honeymoon; and to Switzerland for winter sports.

  Metro and bus tickets have gone from yellow to blue-green to purple to monogrammed white. The currency has changed, and the tables in certain cafés now double as advertising spaces (a round poster, warped by humidity, is glued to the bottom of a hollow tabletop). There is an Opera Bastille, a Louvre pyramid, a new district near the Seine, a vast national library, bicycles to rent at self-service stations.

  The year 2000, which everyone had thought of as a kind of science-fictional future, is already far behind us, and despite all the talk of a fatal catastrophe, we entered this decade with relative smoothness. The calculations we made then to determine how old we would be proved correct in my case, and from that moment on, the logos and labels associated with the number 2000 felt oddly dated, as if the magnetic needle used to predict trends had suddenly switched over to point toward the past.

  SHE WOULD FEEL LIKE A foreigner. Against my better judgment, I sometimes catch myself dreaming of her sudden reappearance, and of what an adventure it would be to stroll with her through the streets of Paris. Everything would prove a source of astonishment: people walking while talking on cell phones, some with invisible earpieces, would look to her like fools chattering endlessly to themselves; at first her reactions would amuse me, but soon e
nough I’d grow impatient and raise my eyebrows with a touch of affectionate irony, as you do with a small-town cousin who is easily impressed by the big city, as if this whole dense and mechanized environment were our personal achievement, a phenomenal sequence of modern engines designed and assembled expressly to dazzle him. Everything would seem alien to her: the passersby rushing about; the plane trees with their camouflage-patterned bark; the fluttering of leaves in the wind; her ability to once again read facial expressions and the posters at bus stops—a thousand details would bring her to a halt and tell her something about the present day. I’d feel as if I were dragging along a child who’d just woken up from a two-decade-long nap. She would diligently name each object as if to assure herself that she remembered it, or perhaps to feel, in pronouncing each word, the euphoria of being reunited with the elements of this world. Since she no longer had any destination, she’d dawdle and inevitably annoy the more hurried pedestrians. As for those who would groan in frustration—striding purposefully past us while a few snatches of their insults cut through the street noises to fall on my ears—I would curse their rudeness and have to restrain myself from lecturing them for daring to betray a spasm of exasperation. I would be convinced I’d brushed shoulders with brutes, with monsters who’d go to any lengths to be on time, willing to push half the world aside. I’d denounce their crass behavior, though I never fail to do the same whenever a lone miserable ambler has the gall to slow me down with his snail’s pace, and what’s more, to stand right in the middle of the sidewalk. I’d hold her arm as though she were a timid fiancée and walk with her into the crowd, scanning the eyes of passersby for signs of surprise at the sight of us, as if the whole world must have known her; and I’d wonder, secretly, if they thought we were sisters. Just as when you go out for the first time with a new hairstyle, I’d feel vaguely disappointed at the absence, however ordinary, of any reactions around us.