Mend the Living (15 page)

We’re going to begin an evaluation of all the organs, and transmit this information to the doctor at the Agency of Biomedicine who will recommend the recovery of one or several of them. Then we’ll schedule the procedure itself in the operating room. Your child’s body will be returned to you tomorrow morning. These words are Revol’s, and he joins a gesture of his hand to the ledge of each sentence, tracing the steps of the next sequence in the air. There’s a lot of information in these sentences, which nevertheless leave a stark gap in the middle, an opaque zone that catalyzes their fear: the procedure itself.

Sean speaks up suddenly: what are they going to do to him, exactly? He said “exactly” – didn’t emit that strangled stammering but stretched out his question, brave in this moment, a soldier advancing under heavy fire, breast offered to the machine gun, while Marianne clenches her teeth on the sleeve of her coat. What will happen tonight within the enclave of the operating room, the idea they have of it, this parcelling out of Simon’s body, this dispersion – it horrifies them but they still want to know. Remige takes a deep breath before replying: they make an incision, they harvest, and they close it up again. Simple verbs, action verbs, atonal information to counteract the drama linked to the sanctity of the body, to the transgression of opening it.

Are you the one who will operate? Sean lifts his forehead – always this impression that he’s going to charge, from below, like a boxer. In sync, Revol and Remige discern the part of the question that comes from a continent of archaic terror: to be pronounced dead, straight from the mouths of doctors, when one is in fact alive – we’ll remember that Revol keeps a copy of the thriller
Moonlight Becomes You
by Mary Higgins Clark in his office, a book that refers to a common funerary practice in England: they would put a ring on the finger of the person being buried, a ring tied to a cord that would cause a bell to sound on the surface if the person ever woke up underground; and the “custom-made” definition of the criteria of death, established in order to allow for organ retrieval, gets mixed in with this immemorial fear. The nurse turns to face Sean, inscribes a solemn sign in the air with his thumb and index finger: the doctors who pronounce a patient’s death never participate in the process of retrieval, never; plus – he firms each sound and his voice grows wider, deeper – there’s always a double procedure, two doctors follow the same protocol and two separate signatures are required on the written record that attests to a death – squelching the scenario of the criminal doctor who wittingly decrees the death of his patient in order to ransack him, crushing the rumours that link medical mafia to the international trafficking of organs, invisible dispensaries squeezed into the stringy suburbs of Priština, Dhaka, or Mumbai, and discreet clinics protected by video cameras and shaded beneath palm trees in the upscale neighbourhoods of Western metropolises. Remige concludes, gently: the surgeons who will harvest are from hospitals where there are patients waiting for transplants.

Stream of silence, then Marianne’s voice again, muffled, as though coming from inside a membranous pouch: but then who will be with Simon? – stress on “who,” naked as a stone. I will, Thomas replies, I’m there, I’m there for the whole process. Marianne slowly pours her gaze into his – transparency of crushed glass – so you’ll tell them about his eyes, that we don’t want, you’ll tell them. Thomas nods, I will tell them, yes. He gets up but Sean and Marianne wait, unmoving – a force weighs on their shoulders and grinds them into the ground, this lasts for a moment, and then Marianne continues: we don’t know who will get Simon’s heart, right, it’s anonymous, we’ll never know, right? And Thomas agrees with these affirmations that question, these questions that affirm, he understands the oscillation, but clarifies: you can be informed of the sex and the age of the recipient, yes, but not their identity; however, if you wish, you can be kept informed about the transplant. Then he unfurls a little further: the heart, if it ends up being transplanted, will be given to a patient according to medical and compatibility criteria that have nothing to do with gender, but, given Simon’s age, his organs are likely to go to children. Sean and Marianne listen and then confer quietly. Sean says: we’d like to go back to see Simon now.

Revol gets up, he’s needed elsewhere in the department, Thomas accompanies Marianne and Sean to the doorway of the room, they walk in silence, I’ll leave you now with Simon, I’ll meet you later.

Evening has darkened the room and the silence, it seems, is even thicker than before. They approach the bed with its unmoving folds. They must have thought that Simon’s appearance would have altered after the announcement of his death, or that at least something in his aspect would have changed since the last time – the colour of his skin, the texture, glow, or temperature. But no, nothing. Simon is there, unchanged, the micro-movements of his body still lift the sheet lightly, so that what they’ve gone through doesn’t correspond to anything, doesn’t find any confirmation, and this is such a violent blow that their thinking comes unhinged, they flail and stammer, a rodeo, speak to Simon as though he could hear them, talk about him as though he couldn’t hear them anymore, seem to struggle to remain in language while sentences disarticulate, words knock together, become fragmented and short-circuit, while caresses collide, become breaths; sounds and signs soon whittled down to a continuous hum inside rib cages, an imperceptible vibration as though they were henceforth expelled from all language, and their actions find neither time nor place to fit into, and then, lost in the crevasses of reality, lost in its flaws, themselves flawed, broken, asunder, Sean and Marianne find the strength to heave themselves onto the bed to be closer to the body of their child, Marianne stretching out along the railing at the edge, hair falling into the void while Sean, one thigh on the mattress, leans over and rests his head on Simon’s chest, his mouth right over the tattoo, and his parents close their eyes together and are quiet, as though they, too, are sleeping; night has fallen and they’re in the dark.

Two floors down, Thomas Remige is glad for this moment alone when he can concentrate, review the process, and call the Agency of Biomedicine: we’re moving on to an in-depth assessment of the organs – the woman at the other end of the line is a pioneer of the organization, Thomas recognizes her deep, raspy voice, pictures her in the middle of a classroom with tables set in a U-shape, the big amber-coloured plastic links in her glasses chain concealing her face – then he sits down in front of the computer, and, following a labyrinthine path that requires him to enter several identification numbers and encrypted passwords, he opens a program and creates a new document where he carefully inputs all the data for Simon Limbeau’s body: it’s the Cristal file, archive and dialoguing tool that is currently being developed with the Agency of Biomedicine to ensure the traceability of the graft and the anonymity of the donor. He lifts his head: a bird hops on the windowsill outside, the same one as always, its eyes are fixed and round.

T
he day Thomas acquired the goldfinch, the heat erased Algiers beneath a cloud of steam, and inside his apartment with the indigo blinds, Hocine was fanning himself, legs bare under a striped djellaba, stretched out on a sofa.

The stairwell was painted blue, it smelled of cardamom and concrete. Ousmane and Thomas climbed three flights in the dimness, the frosted glass slabs on the roof filtering a quivering yellow light that struggled to reach the main floor. Reunion of cousins – a strong embrace and then rapid conversation in Arabic punctuated by the clicking of pistachios between teeth – Thomas is left out. He doesn’t recognize Ousmane’s face, which distorts differently when he speaks his language – jaw retracting, gums appearing, eyes rolling, and sounds arising from the back of his throat, issued from a complicated zone far behind the tonsils, new vowels held back and then clacked against the palate: he’s almost a different person, almost a stranger, and Thomas feels unsettled. The visit takes a completely different turn when Ousmane announces, in French, the reason for their visit: my friend would like to hear the goldfinches. Ah, Hocine turns to Thomas, and maybe adopt one? he asks, winking at him, laying it on thick. Maybe. Thomas smiles.

Having arrived the day before and crossed the Mediterranean for the first time, the young man is captivated by the Bay of Algiers, arced in a curve of perfection, and by the city behind that lays itself out in tiers, the whites and blues, youth in great numbers, the smell of mist-sprayed sidewalks, the dragon trees interlinking their branches in the botanical gardens, arches from a
fantastique
literary tale. An unvoluptuous, stripped down beauty. He’s intoxicated. New sensations grasp and discombobulate him, a mix of sensorial thrill and the hyperconsciousness of everything that surrounds him: life is here, no filter, and he is here too. The bills rolled inside the little handkerchief form a bump in his pocket – he pats it in a sign of euphoric excitement.

Hocine goes out onto the balcony, pushes open the shutters and leans into the street, claps his hands, tosses out orders, Ousmane protests in Arabic, seems to be saying, no, please, don’t trouble yourself, pleading, but here they are sending up soups and kebabs, plates of grain light as mousse, orange salad with mint, and honey cakes. After the meal, Hocine places the cages on the ceramic tiles that cover the ground, using their patterns as markers to align them perfectly. The birds are tiny – twelve to thirteen centimetres – and all throat, the abdomen disproportionate, the feathers unspectacular, matchstick claws, and all with the same fixed eyes. They’re perched on little wooden trapezes that swing lightly. Thomas and Ousmane crouch a few feet from the cages while Hocine curls up on an ottoman at the back of the room. He lets out a cry comparable to a yodel and the recital begins: the birds sing, one by one, and then together – a canon. The two boys don’t dare look at each other, don’t dare touch.

And yet, it was said everywhere that goldfinches were disappearing. The ones from the Baïnem forest, the ones from Kadous and from Dély Ibrahim, the ones from Souk Ahras. There were none left. Unchecked hunting threatened the extinction of populations that were once so dense. In the doorways of rooms in the casbah, hanging cages creaked, empty, while those of the merchants were gradually decorated with canaries and budgerigars, but not a single goldfinch, unless it was tucked away in the darkness at the back of the shop, guarded like a treasure, the bird’s value increasing with its scarcity – the law of capitalism. You might be able to buy them still on Friday evenings in El Harrach, to the east of the city, but everyone knew that the specimens on display there, like those of the Bab El Oued market, had never flown along the Algerian hillsides, never nested in the branches of pines and cork oaks that grew there, and had not been captured in a traditional way, with birdlime, where females that didn’t sing would be immediately released to ensure reproduction: they didn’t have the gift. No, these ones came from the Moroccan border, from the Maghnia region where they were hunted in the thousands, the ornithological net making a clean sweep, no distinction between males and females, and then were brought to the capital via channels manned by guys not even twenty yet who dickered in the trade, unemployed kids who’d abandoned their moribund jobs to dabble in this trafficking, sure their revenues would be juicier, guys who knew nothing about birds – and most of the specimens, throttled in nets, died of stress during the transport.

Hocine raised expensive birds behind the Square of Three Clocks, Algerian goldfinches, real ones. He always had at least a dozen in his possession and had never had any other job; his expert status was known throughout Bab El Oued and beyond. Recognized each species, characteristics and metabolism, could tell the provenance of each bird by ear, even the name of its native forest; people came from far and wide to call upon his services, to authenticate, estimate, uncover swindles – Moroccan specimens sold as Algerian, sometimes for ten times more, females sold as males. Hocine didn’t deal with the networks, he did his hunting himself, alone, with birdlime; he would leave on foot for several days, claiming to have “his” spots in the valleys of Béjaïa and Collo, and when he returned would spend the better part of his time cherishing his catches. Since the superiority of one goldfinch over another was measured by the beauty of its song, he worked at teaching them airs – the birds from Souk Ahras had a reputation for being able to memorize a great quantity – using an old tape player that broadcast its melody in the mornings, on repeat, never subscribing to the methods of younger breeders – covering the cages, making two slits, inserting MP3 earphones that played all night. But even more than musicality, what the goldfinch delivered was emotion, and this mostly around geography: its song made a territory materialize. Valley, city, mountain, wood, hill, stream. It made a landscape appear, made you feel a topography, touch a certain ground and climate. A piece of the planetary puzzle took shape in its beak, and, like the sisters in the fairy tale who spit out toads or diamonds, like the crow in the fable that shells out cheese, the goldfinch coughed up a solid entity, one that was aromatic, tactile, and full of colour. Hocine’s eleven birds, a variety, thus delivered the sonorous cartography of an entire, vast region.