Adam Haberberg by Yasmina Reza Page B

Jerusalem, in accordance with his unfulfilled wishes, what difference would it make? So whether he's cremated or his skull ends up amid the toys in a child's bedroom, does that change the color of his life? For years Goncharki had been writing
Meyer Lansky's Tomb.
A secret celebration, a secret ode to men who don't know how to be loved. Do you still have your parents? Marie-Thérèse asks suddenly.
    “Yes. I still have my parents.”
    “Are they well?”
    Does she know my parents? thinks Adam.
    “Yes, they're well,” he lies.
    “Do you see them?”
    “Not very often. They live in the provinces.”
    “Whereabouts?”
    “InLibourne.”
    “Where's that?”
    “Near Bordeaux,” thinking, what's it to her? And also thinking I ought to question her in return, but I don't give a good goddamn about her parents, just as I don't give a damn about her whole life.
    “And you, how about your parents?” he says.
    “My father's still alive. He still lives in Suresnes.”
    “And your mother?”
    “My mother died when I was ten.”
    “Excuse me.”
    “Do your children see them?” Marie-Thérèse resumes.
    “Who?”
    “Your parents.”
    “Not a great deal.”
    “That's a pity.”
    “No.”
    “Why?”
    “Because my parents aren't interested.”
    “It's mean to say that.”
    “No.”
    “It's a shame for children not to know their grandparents.”
    “They do know one another.”
    “Not to really know them.”
    “Excuse me, Marie-Thérèse, but what do you know about it? Why all these clichés? What if the grandparents are utter jerks?”
    Marie-Thérèse considers. Then she says, you're exaggerating.
    “Will we be there soon?”
    “Very soon. We'd have got there by now if it hadn't been for those trafficjams. What'd you like to eat? I've got a little piece of beef in the freezer. I could do a little roast of beef with carrots. Or a gratin dish. Or, this is simple but it's my specialty, I could make you a good potato omelette.”
    “An omelette, yes.”
    He says, an omelette, yes, and a little farther on the sign reading VIRY-CHATILLON-FLEURY-MéROGIS hangs there. I'm going to eat an omelette in Viry-Châtillon with Marie-Thérèse Lyoc, he thinks. He looks at his hands resting on the box of Veinamitol, hands aged more than the rest of his body, a little swollen, a little inert, but inoffensive hands, hands no one misses, he says to himself. He thinks about his children sprawled in front of the television and feels a faintness coming on, as if he were immensely far away, as if he'd lost times beyond retrieval. He thinks about the boys in their pajamas, beached on the carpet, among overturned toys, fragments of cake, candy wrappings, yogurt cartons, two animals tangled together, watching videos, commercials, and all kinds of hideous, yelling images, pell-mell, totally alone in their own way, he tells himself. And he tells himself the older boy hasn't learned his homework, he tells himself the older boy doesn't take school seriously, and the little one ought to be in bed, he tells himself Maria would do better to tuck him in and tell him a story instead of leaving him to rot in front of the television, which she's watching herself, chewing gum, her ear glued to her cell phone, he tells himself the older boy doesn't use the electric toothbrush he ordered, that the book
The Conquest of the New World
remains unopened, thatthe older boy couldn't give a damn about the conquest of the New World, and all these things of the most trivial importance that wreck his life as a man night after night, he thinks, these absurd concerns that in normal times he regards as evidence of his failure, now here, in the Wrangler Jeep, as it plunges down the ramp leading off the throughway, seem to him to constitute the heartrending substance of life itself. I must go back to Paris, he thinks, just as the Belgian brasserie, Leon de Bruxelles, appears out of the middle of nowhere, I must go back at once, Marie-Thérèse, please do a U-turn, go