David Golder, The Ball, Snow in Autumn & The Courilof Affair (2008) by Irène Némirovsky

And starting over again … Oh yes, if he’d ever considered
that,
well, honestly, he would have been dead long ago. He sat up straight, absent-mindedly shook the water off his hand and leaned against the window, holding his freezing hands towards the warmth of the sun. He shook his head and said out loud, “Yes, honestly, in Moscow for example, or even in Chicago…” and his mind, unaccustomed to dreaming, conjured up the past in dry, brief little snapshots. Moscow … when he was nothing more than a thin little Jew with red hair, pale, piercing eyes, worn-out boots, and empty pockets… He used to sleep rough on benches, in the town squares, on dark autumn nights like these, so cold… Fifty years later, he could still feel in his bones the dampness of the thick white early morning fog, a fog that clung to his body, leaving a sort of stiff frost on his clothes … Snowstorms, and in March, the wind …
    And Chicago … the small bar, the gramophone with its grating, tinny old-fashioned European Waltz, that feeling ofall-consuming hunger as the warm smells from the kitchen wafted towards him. He closed his eyes and pictured in extraordinary detail the shiny, dark face of a black man, drunk or ill, slumped on a bench in the corner, who was hooting plaintively, like an owl. And then … His hands were burning now. He carefully held them flat against the glass, then took them away again, wiggled his fingers, and gently rubbed his hands together.
    “Fool,” he whispered, as if the dead man could hear him, “you fool… Why did you go and do it?”

    GOLDER FUMBLED ABOUT at Marcus’s door for some time before ringing the bell: his thick, cold hands couldn’t find the buzzer and hit the wall instead. When he got inside, he looked around him in a kind of terror, as if he expected to see the dead man laid out, ready to be taken away. But there were only some rolls of black fabric on the floor of the entrance hall and bouquets of flowers on the armchairs; they were tied with purple silk inscribed with gold lettering, and the ribbons were so long and wide they trailed on to the carpet.
    While Golder was standing in the hall, someone rang the bell and delivered an enormous, thick wreath of red chrysanthemums through the half-open door; the servant slipped it over his arm as if it were the handle of a basket.
    “I must send some flowers,” Golder thought.
    Flowers for Marcus… He pictured the heavy face with its grimacing lips, and a bridal bouquet beside it…
    “If you would care to wait for a moment in the drawing room, Sir,” the servant whispered, “Madame is with…” He made a vague, embarrassed gesture. “…with Monsieur, with the body…”
    He held out a chair for Golder and left. In the adjoining room, two voices were talking in a vague, mysterious whisper, as if at prayer; the voices grew gradually louder until Golder could hear them.
    “The hearse decorated with Greek statues and a silver rail, in the Imperial style, with five plumes, with an ebony-panelled, silk-lined casket with eight carved, silver-gilt handles are included in the Superior Class. Then we have the Class A; that comes with a polished mahogany casket.”
    “How much?” a woman’s voice whispered.
    “Twenty thousand two hundred francs with the mahoganycasket. Twenty-nine thousand three hundred for the Superior Class.”
    “I don’t think so. I only want to spend five or six thousand. If I had known how much you charged I would have gone elsewhere. The coffin can be made of ordinary oak if it’s covered in large enough draperies…”
    Golder got up abruptly; the voice was immediately lowered, softening once again to a solemn whisper.
    Angrily, Golder grasped his handkerchief between his hands and absent-mindedly twisted and knotted it. “It’s stupid, all this… ” he muttered, “it’s so stupid…”
    He couldn’t think of any other way to describe it. There wasn’t any other way. It was stupid, just stupid… Yesterday