Desolation by Yasmina Reza Read Free Book Online Page A

invested in real estate in Jerusalem. A flag planted for humanism and a little patch of ground for progressive souls in the new territories. That’s your way of rebuilding the temple of Solomon.
    Genevieve Abramowitz was a very fine woman. A woman with whom you could laugh, which is rare. “I’m appalled,” I said to her, “all these Jews without duties, without religious imperatives, buying their own redemption,” I go on, suddenly fired up.
    She laughs. “You haven’t changed.”
    “Nor you. I always liked your laugh and you still have it. To tell you the truth, I had a row with Arthur. Arthur recently told me to make a distinction between reality and my imagination. Arthur thinks the world can be considered from an objective point of view and that he’s the man to do it. The only cause of my unease, according to him, is my incurably partial view of things. He’s right. And I’m sure it was a totally objective decision, springing from his absolutely unarbitrary take on reality, when our friend Arthur Sadi, of whom no one could say that he’d breathed the air of synagogues to excess, bought himself a passport to his Jewish identity in the Holy Land.”
    “But his son just married an Israeli girl!”
    “So? If my son marries a girl from Tahiti, which is far from impossible in the circumstances, I’m going to go bury myself in Tahiti?”
    “You know that’s got nothing to do with it.”
    “It’s worse. He’s taking advantage of a marriage which is a surprise in itself, excuse me, Genevieve, to assuage some concocted nationalism that’s even more repellent than its genuine twin. Arthur will have a grandson called Ariel or Boaz, which is, I have to admit, certainly better than Jerome, and he’ll get into fights with everyone who fails to make the journey to be there for the circumcision. It all makes me sick. Tahiti doesn’t lead you that far astray. Tahiti is not an
act.
You have to tell me about this marriage, Genevieve. Because here’s a boy I saw being born, whose development I’ve followed with interest, with whom I always wished that my own son would have made friends, but he refused—you were horribly standoffish, my dear— a boy, all in all, who was infinitely superior to his father and whom, as you can see, I would never have suspected of needing to have his own Jewish girl, let alone an Israeli.”
    “What’s the point, my friend,” she replies smack in the middle of the flowerbeds in the park at Longchamp. “What’s the point of using all these definitions with me? I’m an old lady now, I’m no longer susceptible to the charms of contrarians like you. You think you’re being provocative and you’re just being predictable” (your sister used the word
dense,
remember?). “Unlike Arthur I don’t think there’s any reason to reproach you for the blinkered way you see the world, but why do you feel obliged to belittle it at every given moment? Your standpoint on this story is the standpoint of someone who’s fallen out of love. As a standpoint it’s devoid of affection, it doesn’t carry much authority, if you want to know what I think, and it certainly doesn’t merit being broadcast. People we no longer love no longer carry any credit with us and everything they do seems artificial. When we’re in love, obviously,” she went on after a hesitation, “we blindly cultivate every magic pull of enchantment . . . while you were drawn to Arthur, you would have accepted the apartment in Jerusalem and you would have been happy about the marriage because, please forgive me,” she adds by way of a final thrust, “you shouldn’t make yourself out to be less of a Jew than you are. You’re striking a bit of an attitude.”
    “My dear Genevieve, last night I was killing time in front of the TV by watching some variety show that was raising money for charity. At a certain moment a singer delivered himself of the pronouncement that ‘As long as people love one another, the world will be