The Last Life (20 page)

"But I want to book passage," he said loudly, to the vast chest of the man in front of him.

"Don't we all, sonny. Wait your turn," said a woman at his shoulder. "I've watched three boats go without me, and I'm not going to miss the fourth."

"My grandmother is dying."

"She won't need a place then, will she?"

My father turned away from the woman's shrill voice. He pushed against the swell of bodies, like everyone else.

A stout official emerged from the building, fingering a list. He stepped onto an overturned bucket; he cleared his throat. "This afternoon's departure is fully booked. Only those with tickets purchased through the central office, for this ship specifically, will be permitted to board. If, at 3 p.m., any berths have not been filled, then they will be open to those first in line. We will take nothing more than what you can carry when you board. We cannot accommodate furniture of any kind. Please remain orderly. There will be two departures tomorrow, but be advised that they, too, are fully booked."

The crowd broke into rowdy protest.

"My grandmother—a coffin—"

The official was close enough to look my father in the eye. "A coffin would be considered furniture. No coffins allowed."

(How amusing, in other circumstances, such a veto might seem: "No coffins allowed—can you imagine?" said my mother to me, with a guilty titter. "It's ridiculous." But my father was never able to make light of it.)

"And me?" he asked.

"Have you a ticket?"

"No."

"Then I suggest that either you stay here, like everybody else, and wait for standing room—which could take several days—or else go to the booking office in town and purchase a ticket."

"For when?"

"How would I know? You can see how many people there are." He looked at my father's crisp shirt, his neatly combed hair. "Don't you know somebody who could help you? That would be the best way."

Alexandre walked back through the city. His cousins, Jean excepted, were not in Algiers. His closest friends were gone, and had been for a month or more. His last girlfriend had left for a three-month English course in Kent and now, he knew, she would never return. He was reluctant to call his father and ask for help, but this he resolved—on seeing the queue, two blocks long, outside the ticket office in town—to do. He made a detour to pass in front of his neighbor's restaurant: its open windows and bustle, he decided, would reassure him.

It could not. An array of envelopes blanketed the mat inside the door. A notice on the glass, handwritten, hasty, announced that the establishment would be closed until further notice. The tables were set, the napkins folded in their flowery cones at every plate, already wilted and forlorn. His nose pressed to the glass, Alexandre could see, on the bar at the rear of the restaurant, bottles standing in disarray: liquor, wine, empties, jumbled up together. My father sat on the curb, stared at his shoes, and started to cry.

Monsieur Gambetta, the neighbor in front of whose business my father crouched despondent, appeared, a shiny, bulbous man in his late forties, jangling a great ring of keys. Theirs was, for my father, a serendipitous meeting: Gambetta was expecting a check and thought it just might have been delivered to his restaurant. He recognized young Alexandre, and when he learned of the boy's troubles, offered a solution. Well connected as they were, he and his wife had secured not merely tickets, but an entire cabin for the crossing, forty-eight hours thence. There was no reason, he said, if Alexandre didn't mind sleeping on the floor, why he couldn't share the space with them.

"It's very hard," he said, a sympathetic arm around the boy's shoulders, "to be suffering from the death of your grandmother at such a time. We're happy to do what we can, in the face of our tragedies."

"But Monsieur," said Alexandre, "my grandmother isn't dead yet. It's true, she's dying—they say it could be any moment—but she's still alive."

"You wouldn't leave her?"

"I can't imagine—No. I think, from what the doctor has said—"

"Let's wait and see."

"The priest came this morning."

Both men were awkward. Alexandre did not feel he could broach the subject of the coffin. He thought about it, though: it occurred to him that perhaps it could he in the cabin's floor space, and that he could sleep on top of his grandmother. But he didn't mention it.

"I'm so grateful," he said.

"Think nothing of it. We can arrange, on the morning of, when to meet. We could go to the port together, depending..."

"I'm so grateful. Perhaps, when we get there, my parents—"

"Think nothing of it."

From that moment on, my father spent the hours praying for his grandmother's demise. He sat in the hard chair in the gloom, the knitting sister impassive across the sheet, and listened eagerly for the death rattle. The old woman was unlikely to open her eyes again: all she needed to do was to let go. He whispered in her ear, when the nun left the room: "It's okay, Grand'-mère. God is waiting for you. Grand-père, too, and your sisters, and paradise. Let go, Grand'-mère."

But his grandmother, like her fellow colonials, braved adversity tough and recalcitrant. Her tense was the present continuous, and she clung to it with all the blind will of a mole. "I am dying," "she is dying," "our country is dying": the tense lingers in a defiance incomprehensible to those who are resigned, simply, to adopting the past.

Twenty-four hours passed, in which Alexandre did not sleep; nor did he eat, even when the nurse brought him soup. He was trapped, with the old woman, in the ongoing, in that chasm between past and future.

The nurse, who knew of the Gambettas' offer, reassured him: "She will die. She will die in time. God wills it. Have faith." But he could not believe her. He could not remember what faith might mean. Had he not had faith in de Gaulle's promise? Had he not had faith in Gambetta's restaurant?

On the evening of the next day, the nun, ever practical, sent an unwilling Alexandre to do the unthinkable: she dispatched him to the undertaker's to order his grandmother's coffin. She advised him to spare no expense: "If you pay, they'll have it ready by morning. Pay enough and they'll work through the night."

"She's dying, but she isn't—How can I, when she isn't?"

"Because you must. Because she will be."

When he returned, however, well after dark (minus his grandfather's gold watch, with which he had had to bribe the swarthy carpenter; and all the more firmly set in his plan to take the coffin to France, as the undertaker had informed him that burials were very backed up and bodies putrefying in the morgue), his grandmother was breathing still. She had barely stirred. The nun was unravelling a new skein of yarn: other than that, nothing had changed.

They sat with her, again, through the night, although several times my father, depleted, gave in to sleep, his head lolling to his chest. Each wakening start was accompanied by the hope—but no, she lived on.

At nine, on a morning fiercely hot and airless, Monsieur Gambetta came to the door. "We're going now," he said. "Because of the crowd at the port. Surely you've seen them?"

"Of course."

"Not yet?" Gambetta made an embarrassed nod towards the bedroom.

"Not yet."

"By two, my son. You have until two, at the very latest. After that we'll be boarding, and they won't let you on without us. Did you hear that the widow Turot's throat was cut last night? In her apartment. Not three streets from here. Hard to know who to blame. It's time, my boy. At the port, before two. We'll be as near to the gangway as we can get, in the ticket holders' section. Courage."

My father then pretended to pack. He paced the apartment, removing silver from drawers and pictures from walls. He took the sepia photograph of his grandparents on their wedding day from its frame and folded it in four, so that it would fit in his trouser pocket. He took his shirts from the dresser and laid them on his bed, only to put them back again. He placed three silver coffee spoons in each sock, where they were initially cool against his ankles. He removed a cushion cover needlepointed by his grandmother from its cushion, and stuffed it, along with a single pair of underwear, into a canvas sack. To these items he added a small framed watercolor of the Bay of Algiers which had hung, for as long as he could recall, on his grandmother's wall, a light-filled, buoyant picture painted early in the century, in happier times, a tableau in which the water winked in the foreground, the city's residents strolled the seafront and, up the hillside, the buildings gleamed, pristine, unmarred by dust or blood.

He took down his grandmother's photograph album, weighed it, and left it on the sofa; then returned to pluck from it an assortment of memories, trying to guess what his parents would most want, tearing the edges of some, until he had a handful to go into the bag. Every so often he slid into his grandmother's room: the nun would look up and shake her head, and Alexandre would begin again his restless perambulations of the flat.

At ten-thirty there came a hammering at the door. The coffin maker sweated on the landing, Alexandre's watch shiny on his wrist.

"It's downstairs, on the truck. Help me carry it up—I'm by myself. Can't do it alone."

It took the better part of half an hour to hoist the unwieldy box up three flights. Alexandre was drenched in sweat, and had to rest at every storey. He knew little about coffins, but could tell that this one was enormous, long enough for a man of six feet, and wide.

"It's huge," he panted, halfway up. "So heavy."

"You didn't tell me how tall she was. Couldn't take any chances. And the wood I had handy was thick. There's no help for it. Better too big than too small, you know. She's got to rest in it a long time. She might as well be comfortable."

When at last they reached the apartment, they laid the coffin, its door swung wide, on the living room floor, alongside the sofa.

"Where's the dead then?" asked the undertaker's man, wiping his slick, hairless brow with his slick and hairy arm.

"She isn't—just a minute."

My father went to the door of his grandmother's room. Her knitting to one side, the nun leaned over the old woman, cradling her head with one hand and beating at the pillow behind her with the other. As Alexandre came into the room, the nun let his grandmother's skull slip gently back into the newly blooming down. The nun, so long unruffled, seemed flushed, her smooth face pink and beaded.

"I wanted her to lie nicely. She's gone, poor dear. While you were on the stairs. She's ready to come with you now."

"But when?"

"As I say, a minute or two ago, when you were in the stairwell. She didn't suffer. The Lord is merciful."

There wasn't time for my father to cry, or to wonder at his elder's impeccable timing. For the promise of a standard lamp, a soup tureen and a silver candelabra, the man from the undertaker's was persuaded to shuttle Alexandre and his grandmother to the port. From the sheet beneath her they made a sling, and lifted her, still warm and in her nightgown, into the living room and into the box. She lay marooned there, tiny in the space. The nun shadowed them, praying quietly.

"She'll shift around. She's not stiff enough," said the man. "Got anything to hold her still?"

It was Alexandre's idea to use the sofa cushions, their faded green velvet of no other use to him by then. The men stuffed them in around the body, one squashed at her feet and two flattened along her sides. Beneath her head they laid the pillow from her bed, which gave off the sickly scents of illness and her perfume.

"That'll do."

The man let Alexandre bend to kiss the old lady one final time, allowed him to rearrange her hands (those ridged fingernails!) across her chest, and then he swung the hinged lid and fastened the shiny bolts in place.

Full, the coffin was even heavier, but to Alexandre, precious. He was careful on the descent. He didn't quite believe that his grandmother would not flinch at the bumps, and so took great pains not to scrape the box in the turns, or to let it fall. Once she was safe in the truck, the two men returned one last time to the apartment. The nun had packed her things, was ready to make her way back to the hospital. Alexandre took his canvas sack and threw into it, at the last, a cardigan of his grandmother's, and the little cedar crucifix from above her bed. The man shouldered his lamp, crooked the tureen under his arm, and asked the nun to wield the candlestick. The three of them left together, without bothering to lock the door.

The nun declined a ride, preferring to stroll the stifling streets for the first time in days. She embraced my father, and blessed him. "You've done well," she said. "Your parents will be proud."

It was almost one by the time they reached the port. The truck could not advance even to the gates, so thickly massed was the ramp down to the pier. A few vendors with more interest in money than in politics had installed themselves along the seafront to cater to the departing, and they hawked fruit and ice creams and french fries in waxed cones at inflated prices.

Unloading my great-grandmother was one thing; proceeding to the far edge of the pier reserved for ticket holders proved another. People crushed up against them; some banged on the box; children scurried underneath it. The older men and women stepped back to let them pass, and one or two crossed themselves furtively. The undertaker's man smoked while he hauled, puffing out of the corner of his mouth, allowing the cigarette to droop and rise with his breathing. When he was done, he spat the glowing butt into the fray with an upward flick of his chin.

The sailor at the barrier was mercifully young, and evidently had not been apprised of the decree against coffins: he lifted the gate for them without question when Alexandre caught sight of Monsieur Gambetta and the latter, waving, called out, "He's with us. Let him through."

The ticket holders were calm, their end of the pier comparatively uncluttered. They waited in the heat-shimmered shadow of the sleek ship, the
El Djezair,
a vessel whose canvas-covered lifeboats dangled like baubles above its deck. The air was saltier at this end, less choked with the fumes of decay. Alexandre, the coffin maker and their load advanced without obstruction to the Gambettas' pile of suitcases. No sooner were they unburdened than the man gave a small salute. "Best of luck. See you over there, maybe," he said, and was gone.