Beast
Elsa Court
1.
School was out. You were preoccupied because you had fooled around with a boy who had a very beautiful—very popular— girlfriend. But what was done, you know, was done, and that was what gave you trouble. We trailed after this feeling all day, you and I, waiting for the world to end. Summer was already dragging. Shadows loomed behind us as we glided beneath the elms. After a point, we both started noticing something was off in the atmosphere, like a conspicuous twist in the larger fabric of things.
My intuition (yours confirmed this) was that we had transitioned back to a moment before our time, possibly the 1970s. The early afternoon light had turned sepia and people we crossed paths with were all dressed in a coordinated fashion that seemed out-of-sync with the world. People young and old looked the same. I began to feel anxious.
We started paying attention to the untouched postwar shop signs above their window fronts, there, in the industrial northern streets we thought we knew well—the hairdresser’s, the stationery shop, the content of their window displays no longer dusty or sad or ridiculous. The covers of old magazines, once whitened by the sun, their pages baked into a slow curl, seemed resuscitated to enable us to consider them afresh.
Right on cue, the very same guy you had fucked, along with his beautiful (she was so tall) girlfriend, emerged from an old Peugeot van by the side of the road wearing a combination of
ample white clothes and washed-out denim. The van was bright orange. Another boy and girl came out to stand alongside them, dressed in billowy shirts, oversized linen. You held my hand: the moment had reached its strange apex.
You thought she—the girlfriend—had looked at you with a knowing smirk on her face. She wore a wreath of flowers around her head. We veered off the avenue, down the slope of a back alley. Whether or not time had gone back was beside the point. You thought your life was over.
2.
Stranger events have occurred when we were out together talking and walking. One evening, weeks later, having escaped to the city for a day, we decided to miss the last train home. We had taken a long walk across the south of Paris—which seemed equally as strange as our provincial town: filled with rude pockets of space and strewn with the untouched shop fronts of the aprèsguerre—and had ended up there, Avenue des Gobelins, sitting on the edge of the backrest of a very public bench, under the swaying branches of a plane tree. Amidst the rush of cars driving into the city, you said you’d heard a creature flapping its wings overhead. It sounded, you said, velvety. I looked up. I still can’t say for sure what it was.
We still talk about it. Avenue des Gobelins, between the Monoprix and the glowing emerald cross of a pharmacie de quartier. Right on the edge of what people called La Petite Ceinture—the little ring of an abandoned train track that once passed through the commercial entrails of the capital. You know the part I mean? With all its markets.
Such is the world of our friendship, which we both know is strange: large symmetries open up and close again when you and I
sit or walk together, as if we sometimes stirred something up from the entrails of the world, from the very bottom of things.
3.
Most of the time it was up to us. We could have chosen to stay out of trouble. A girl may adopt, in towns as in cities, a way of roaming the country without poking at its darkness. So went the advice inscribed on school leaflets when we were young, after several anonymous girls had met the same improbable fate: Go about the world, a French idiom would say, and keep your tongue in your pocket. But that was never our way, Beast.
Ours was a language of incantations, of pantomime gestures. As youngsters, we gave each other names—still do! I called you ‘animal’, ‘creature’, you called me ‘beast’, beastie. The unbridgeable distance between us made us irreducible items to one another. The night sky could only be measured in the distance between your house and mine.
True, we survived unspeakable things together. You were possessed once, I think, is how some people would frame it. Some of your instincts had to be curtailed after that, and your outfits became longer, to cover both your arms and ankles. Parents still tolerated our unlikely friendship but we were urged to become wary of the kindness of strangers, whose animosity only grew more pointed with your overt scorn of the French principle of laïcité, whereby all mysticism must remain taboo.
For a while, then, we kept to ourselves.
We made an exception of Babette, who, like us, seemed to always be in trouble. She had a habit of walking endlessly around town, and naturally we pestered her a lot, because she was extremely middle-aged, always feigning to be making a call from
one of our public phone booths, asking for the wrong kind of attention. She would drag her angry frame from square to square, holding several carrier bags in each hand, large and sturdy, filled with unopened dry goods (books). We would stop by and casually ask her for the time. She didn’t like this at all.
What was she, to us, who were so young and powerful? It was the fact that she was old and, therefore, free to howl at passersby without any consequences. We relished in her freedom, which made your father concerned. You were asked to take a summer job at the municipal library, when he decided one of us at least needed to keep busy in July. We had entered this revolting period of transition between youth and adulthood. We no longer belonged to ourselves.
I came by the library to say hello and you were bored out of your wits, reading Proust from the beginning, rain crashing against the windows of the building. You became expert at retelling the most shockingly flat anecdote this or that librarian had told you. The head librarian was persistently giving you hell for the tightness of your headscarf, the way it made your cheekbones pop.
One day you said something interesting: Babette’s membership had been discontinued because the staff had noticed traces of blood on the pages of the books she had returned. But it was only the odd drop! you said.
We hoped to find out what had happened to her, to the books. Ritual or mischief! We chased her down an old paved street, to a dilapidated stone and brick building. I threw a small rock at her window, for attention. The window smashed, and through the broken shards she called us shameless little hussies in the wildest dialect we had ever heard.
“How powerful are you?” we asked. A pause, then. “Are you just demented?”
“I know your kind,” she said. “I know where you come from.” Almost everything, in this town, had been damaged beyond
recognition during the first of the two world wars. As though none of it made any difference now, the lost buildings, or the reliance on migrants from Algeria to rebuild and repopulate, Babette kept making suppositions about the loss of your virtue, which was public knowledge. She threatened to tell your father, or the head librarian, or anyone whose opinion mattered.
My own culture had lost the use of the word “magic.” Yours had not. We told her this. We offered to exchange her silence for a new library card in her name (forged).
4.
“You might want to be careful,” she said, to me, a few days later, yelling from the enclosure of a disused phone booth on the town square, “careful with the company you keep.” Her face was overly made-up in the light of the day.
Company? What company. Did she mean—you?
She said you would be going back to your own country any day now, and could not remain my friend for much longer.
I reassured her that there was nothing for her to worry about. That a French boy destined to the School of Mines and Bridges in the city was courting you. That you would move with him to Paris, would never renounce your veil. That the apartment you would live in faced the back-entrance gates of the Observatoire National, in the south of the capital, which looked like a spaceship. We had seen it on our expeditions: its digital clock glowing red in the dark, night after night, like a time bomb.
I told her that all wild creatures lived there: in the space where time is counted, where every second drops strangely and automatically, wild and eternal. Like the pulsing of new blood through old, parasitic countries. Ongoing. Salutary. Unstoppable. Ordered by God.