Read Online Adam Haberberg by Yasmina Reza - Free Book Online Page A

and sail there.
    There are ducks, swans.”
    “Do you water-ski?”
    “No. I tried one year at Banyuls, I could never get started. That's where I live.”
    Marie-Thérèse points to a low, terraced apartment block that resembles certain vacation homes. There's not much around it, apart from a crane in front of a building under construction and another block set farther back. No more rain and fog. No more floating lights. No more warmth.
    “Marie-Thérèse, take me back to Paris.”
    “Why, for goodness' sake?”
    “Please.”
    “You're going to eat first, then we'll see. Come along.”
    Marie-Thérèse gets out of the car. Adam as well. Marie-Thérèse locks the doors. She says, “That's Grigny over there.”
    “I see.”
    “That's the public housing at Grande Borne.”
    “I see.”
    They stare at an illuminated hillside in the distance. Adam takes a few steps toward the lake. Marie-Thérèse follows him. Then they stop. After a moment Marie-Thérèse says, the area on the Grigny side is not so well looked after, they don't prune the trees, there are McDonald's wrappers. Adam nods. In silence they contemplate the low trees, the little hedges, the motionless water, the birds slipping along in the half-light. They contemplate the lampposts, the low-rise housing zone, the restaurant on the far shore. Marie-Thérèse is contemplating what she sees every day and every night. She's lost her energy, thinks Adam. He sees her in the bleak light, at last he can see her face, a somewhat sunken mouth, dark veins, nothing serious, just the passing of youth. Right, shall we go in? says Marie-Thérèse.
    “So what's it like, that restaurant?”
    “It's a restaurant.”
    “Do you go there sometimes?”
    “No.”
    “Why?”
    Marie-Thérèse shrugs her shoulders. Adam looks at the restaurant on the far shore. A white building with a green sign, the same green as the ankle boot, he thinks, and a balcony. Suppose we go there, he says.
    “Oh no,” she laughs.
    “Why?”
    “We haven't come here to go to a restaurant!”
    “Why not?”
    “I'm not going to a restaurant just down the road from me. If I go to a restaurant I go in Paris or somewhere else.”
    “But I'd very much like to go to that one.”
    “You'd be disappointed.”
    “Really?”
    “It's dreary. And not very good.”
    “I see.”
    “And there's no one there in the evening.”
    “Oh,” he says, staring at the tranquil building beside the water and thinking about the sad and childish and inexplicable desire to
go out to a restaurant.
One day when they were driving down south, at the start of Irene, he remembers, very long ago, they'd crossed deep valleys and reached a village on a hillside. The village was called Glandieu. At one end of a promenade of compacted earth there was a turn that vanishedbeneath a rock and at this spot there was a little restaurant. They'd sat down at a table outside and he'd said to himself, he remembers, I'm going to eat a good country terrine here and drink rough wine. I'll eat gherkins beneath a summer sun, while holding Irene's hand under the tablecloth. Can you hear the seagulls, can you see them? says Marie-Thérèse.
    “I can see them.”
    At Saint-Vaast-la-Hougue he'd refused to rent bicycles. He recalls this stubbornness. Why had he refused to rent bicycles? The other families were cycling merrily along with the seagulls all around them. Fathers in shorts, mothers with knapsacks, cycling along amid the salt breezes and the cries of the gulls. What does this resistance signify? What ails a man who's afraid to rent bicycles? Yes, I can see the seagulls, Marie-Thérèse, and, though I don't understand what on earth they're doing in Viry-Châtillon, I can see them flying over this path for Sunday strollers and swooping down to the dull waters, I can see the lake, too, he thinks. I can see the lights of the life all around, Marie-Thérèse's summer house and Marie-Thérèse too, her coat, her scarf, her face of thirty years