Desolation by Yasmina Reza Read Free Book Online

tortoise in her summer dress, short hair, eyes still pretty behind her glasses. Genevieve Abramowitz who was once the grand passion of Leo Fench. “I wouldn’t have expected to meet you here,” she says, “after all these years.”
    We look at each other for a moment, unable to find the right words. “I didn’t know you were interested in gardening.”
    “I’ve always had a thing for flowers. I have a house now.”
    I look at this little lady with her helmet of white hair pulling a little plant wagon full of gardenias and I think of Leo under the earth in Montparnasse cemetery. “And you?” I say.
    “I have a pretense at a balcony that I keep spruced up. It gives me something to do.”
    She says it gives me something to do and smiles apologetically. Immediately I think, me too, it gives me something to do, what else is going on here but me
giving myself something to do,
the two of us are giving ourselves something to do, citizens henceforth of a world in which desire no longer exists. A world in which compost and gardenias have replaced our possibilities of becoming something more. Compost, gardenias, guaranteed exchange rates, little deals here and there, playing the stock market, and getting sick become a substitute for living. A world without a Promised Land, without burns, without victories and defeats, a world where impatience has become terminally beside the point.
    O God, grant me the power to relive one day, one hour of the era of obsessions!
    Make me a lunatic, a fanatic, a criminal if you want. Give me back a horror of peace and quiet in any form. In the deadly light of the sun at Longchamp stands a man who disgusts me, a worm-eaten creature, a shadow, a man from the suburbs of manhood.
    “Every year,” she goes on, “I go and leave a stone on Leopold’s grave along with a little bunch of violets. His wife wrote me a letter after he died. She knew.”
    I nod. What is there to say to that? The body can do what it likes, the soul will tell itself any story it chooses. We are only kissing the masks that hide the face of abandonment. The ending of Leo Fench and Genevieve Abramowitz, whom we watched feverish and sleepless: three withered flower stalks and a pebble on a slab.
    She knew, she said. I nod with appropriate gravity. Two words which are supposed to re-conjure the illusion, two words to restore some apparent significance to the affair. What did she know, poor thing? What do any of us know, I thought, standing there among the flowers in these hopelessly unsuitable surroundings, since everything effaces itself with the passage of time.
    Genevieve Abramowitz gives me news of Arthur, whom, with his wife, she sees regularly. “And you,” she asks, “do you still see him?”
    “Less than I used to,” I say.
    “He’s just bought an apartment in Israel.”
    “Arthur? Where?”
    “Jerusalem.”
    “What on earth for?” I yell.
    “To spend part of the year there,” she answers, astonished.
    “I’m appalled.”
    I immediately think of your brother-in-law Michel, and his discovery of the Jewish Ramblers of Île-de-France, which gives him a system for declaring he’s a little bit Jewish. Between genocide and his Sunday exertions he’s found a way to weave together his roots and his observances. Michel Cukiermann, my son-in-law: heir of suffering, pillar of the community, contemporary stand-in for the sons of Abraham, disciple of Moses. Which he’s turned to account by becoming pro-Palestinian and talking incessantly about peace. Someone you should get on with really well. Listen, I told him, let’s settle this once and for all. You want peace in Israel. Okay. Why, one wonders. You want peace over there so as not to mess up relations between Montreuil and Roissy. Ireland, where things have been going on for centuries, doesn’t enter your mind, Yugoslavia bores you, you’ve had it with Kosovo up to here, Rwanda and Cambodia zilch, but you want peace in Israel the same way Arthur has just