The
explain, over the phone, that they've been able to get him admitted to the
Bethesda Hospital, three hours by train from New York: its center for the
treatment of leukemia has the highest success rate in the country. American
Democrats--friends of the Algerian struggle--will be there watching over him.
Josie,
thirty-two years old, and mother of a young boy, hopes to be able to go with
him. She doesn't express her desire out loud to Frantz ('It'll be a month,
perhaps two at the most,' he tells her, undoubtedly to reassure her, to
reassure himself as well.)
She
was to admit to me, years later: 'Up to the end, I hoped: they, his friends,
those who liked Frantz and admired him, it seemed to me that they would
understand: that you couldn't send him such a long way to be treated alone,
that if I were looking after him.... Clearly they saw him as a man of iron,
indestructible! And he...'
She
stiffened, then added, hardly bitter: 'I understood his point of view; he
thought that all the expenses he was incurring were already quite enough for
the Algerian Revolution!'
She
remained silent, then: 'He died alone, in New York, two months later. Alone!'
she repeated harshly.
We
spent a summer's month together in a village by the sea, half an hour from
Algiers. She would get up early; she would pour out can after can of water to
wash the veranda floor. we would stay there, all morning long, contemplating
the sea. It was August 1988, we felt good: the rest of the day we would be
surrounded by our friends, our children.
Josie
would recall the past; then become silent. I would work each night, as I heard
the fisherman setting out to sea in their boats.
The
first days of October 1988, Algiers reached a fevered pitch; under Josie's
balcony in El-Biar, adolescents in revolt were the first to set fire to police
cars.
The
next day and the following days, this time in the heart of Algiers, the army
swarmed the capital, and, confronted with peaceful demonstrations, opened fire:
six hundred young people were shot down.
From
one end of the rioting town to the other, not being able to meet, we would
speak on the phone: I still hear today Josie's enraged voice commenting
endlessly on the scenes that she'd observed or that people had told her about.
Once
more, O Frantz, the 'wretched of the earth!'" (92)
"Josie
and her big gypsy eyes.... And above all her voice, that happy contralto. For
she would laugh--she loved to laugh!... How will I ever learn to grow old, now
that Josie Fanon, my elder, cannot show me the way with her laughter and her
brazen humor?
And
my daughter--during the years she was a student in Algiers, Josie was a second
mother to her--as soon as my daughter heard the news in Paris (it was the voice
of the author of Deserteur on the pone with me one morning) she took the plane.
Was there at the funeral.
Stayed
two or three days in Algiers; with Olivier, now an orphan, and a young
adolescent boy, Karim, the neighbor's son, whom Josie had taken care of since
he was a child.
My
daughter then returned to Paris. Was silent for a long time. And then finally
todl me, one evening, about Josie's last weeks and days.
In
June, she had made the trip to the Tunisian border to visit Frantz's grave. (I
am sure that it was then she made her decision: to join him.)
In
Tunis, she returned to every place they had lived. Back in El-Biar, she took
several days to put all her things in order: photographs, poems she was
writing, Frantz's letters which she had compiled and arranged much earlier,
letters of her son, her friends.
She
gave her young neighbor, Karim, various presents, 'to remember me by' she told
him gently when he'd protest or try to refuse, his heart fearful.
She
made sure the cleaning woman was even more meticulous. She would linger, I feel
it, every morning to listen to the sounds of neighboring families rising from
the courtyard: I see her low bedroom, filled with multi-colored rugs where we
would stay, the window open as if above a well, to catch the rising noises,
women's laughter, whining children.
I
hear Josie letting herself be wrapped in these sounds of Algerian life, by this
everyday profusion.
But
she has decided: since her visit to Frantz's grave; she is determined.
She
phones her son in Paris to reassure him: yes, she will start therapy again with
the family psychologist. Yes, he wants to hospitalize her for a week or two, no
more. Her son should put his mind at rest, she will do it. No, she does not
feel alone: he should not be worried; there's no need whatsoever for him to
come.
And
so she willingly went to the hospital. On the condition, she told the doctor,
that they let her go home to her apartment on the weekend: be with her flowers,
the sound of the neighbors, the concern of Karim and his mother.
She
rested in the hospital for six days. She brought books, music. She read; even
more she daydreamed, looking at the summer light from her bed. Hardly spoke.
'She
was smiling at us when she left,' a nurse recalled, unable to forget the
gentleness in Josie's large eyes, her voice so near.
Josie
went home to El-Biar on Thursday evening.
'I'll
be there Friday!' she declared.
The
nurse waited for her on Sunday. Very early on the previous day, by the light of
dawn, Josie opened the window of her living room that looked out onto the
street. pulled a chair over. Took off her shoes. In one or two seconds, glanced
around the rooms in which everything was in its place. At last glance at the
geraniums on the neighboring balcony.
With
her back finally turned on her home and her life, Josie Fanon threw herself out
of her fifth-story window.
The
13th of July, 1989; El-Biar, above Algiers. A Friday.
In
her fall, Josie hurt no one: only she exploded." (174-176)
