Read Online Yann Andrea Steiner by Marguerite Duras, Barbara Bray - Free Book Online

and for her to carry him in her arms some more; when he was there, in her arms, he looked at her face for a very long time with a kind of gravity that she had never seen in him before and he said to her almost in a whisper, very quickly, as if someone else could hear, he said that if she didn’t take him with her he would throw himself in the sea to die, that the other children had told him how to die in the sea, that he knew this now.
    It was at that very moment that the young girl promised to take him with her, swore to him that never ever would she leave him. That never ever would she forget him.

T HE END began.
    The groups from the south Paris suburbs have arrived. They wait around the buses, watched over by the drivers.
    The director of the South Suburb Camps squints toward the cliffs.
    She says, “We have to call the police. The child hasn’t come back. Neither has the counselor.”
    We have to call.
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    A siren wailed from somewhere around the Touques estuary. Just as at the end of the work shift in the small factories lining the roads.
    The girl lay behind a bush. The child came up against her as if trying to lose himself, to disappear in her. The child doesn’t know. The child is frightening. He cries, “I’m staying here with you.”

    Another siren calls, slower, softer. She says, “Go on. I’ll follow you.”
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    Then the child gets up and looks around. He looks at the distant, empty tennis courts, the shuttered villas, and at her, lying there without strength and without a voice and he looks in the distance at the buses and vans from the southern suburbs. Once he’d seen them, the child looked toward the cliffs. All was calm. All was clear. The child must already know what to do to keep from going back there.
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    A third siren wailed, longer and shriller this time, to be lost in the sea. The girl hissed under her breath.
    â€œGo – now! I’m begging you, do it.”
    The child looked once again at the vast summer desert and at her, this stranger.
    He said, “Come with me.”
    She said no, not that. She can’t join him right away but she’ll come. Tonight, she said, or tomorrow, or maybe the day after but not this afternoon; this afternoon, she says, she couldn’t bear it. She says they have to wait a little longer. He did as she asked. Slowly he moved away from the place and began to walk. And then he headed toward the cliffs.

    She doesn’t watch him leave. Again she sings that at the clearwater fountain she rested.
    She rests, stretched out full, with her eyes closed. She sings in a state of insolent happiness.
    Once she had sung, the child was no longer afraid.
    They had looked at each other and suddenly burst out laughing as if in a flash of joy. And the child had understood: that now she would never forget him, never again, and that the crime against the Jews had vanished from the earth with the knowledge of their story, hers and his.
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    In the dark room, time suddenly subsided. And it was evening.
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    She tells him that wherever she goes she will take him with her. That as of that very night she would find him again, that he has to start walking toward the forest and after the forest he must keep moving forward, on the paths marked in white for foreign tourists.
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    I remember.
    It was at the beginning of the story. And yet I began to remember.
    She had asked him, “What do you love the most?”

    He tried to understand the question and then he had asked what her answer was, what she loved the most, and she had said, “The sea. Just like you.”
    He had said it was the same for him: the sea.
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    I know nothing more of the differences between the child outside and the child inside, between what surrounds him and what keeps him alive, and what separates him from this life again and again, this havoc of life.
    Then I return to the frailty of his unformed body, to those temporary differences, the