It was dark by the time I reached Bonn. I was about to meet, thirty years later, Selma, who had been my best friend when I was young. Our friendship had unravelled as friendships often do, for no particular reason, because our paths had diverged. I had started to write, Selma had fallen in love with a German musician, and although our tastes and interests had been, if not shared, at least very similar between the ages of seventeen and twenty-two, she had turned more and more towards her own interests, which were music, mysticism and philosophy, while I had turned more and more towards mine, which was literature. The parting, however, had been a bit brusque, and it was Selma who had initiated it. We met in a cafe in Paris where she told me she had decided to end our friendship and go her own way. I then forgot about her, I think, as no doubt she forgot about me, though I discovered later, when I met up with her again, that she had felt bad about ending our friendship in this rather brutal manner and feared I might have been badly hurt.
I remembered Selma as a girl who, when she turned up for vacation at my grandparents’ one day, had stepped down from the train with an enormous bunch of wildflowers. I also remembered the pleasure she took in tormenting a shy young man who was in love with her, playing at kissing him whenever possible only to give him nothing in the end. On another occasion, when she was the one in love, she had declared her passion for a man she yearned for but didn’t know how to approach by stuffing his mailbox with rose petals. I remembered that she read Nietzsche avidly, that her father was a minister, and that she had an absolutism that made my own demands seemed lukewarm. Last but not least, I remembered an abundant correspondence the moment we were apart, and endless conversations the moment we were together. Something slightly odd united us at times: a form of cruelty.
One day, scrolling through Google for traces of this or that friend from the past, I typed her name on the keyboard and discovered that she lived in Bonn, where she sold icons. There was an email address, I wrote to it, cautiously, asking if she was indeed the Selma I had known, though as her surname was very unusual, I was almost certain it was her. She replied at once, and a frantic exchange of long emails ensued, giving news of our lives, clearing up misunderstandings, sharing bereavements (in my case), births (in hers), affairs of the heart, jobs. And we decided to meet. It was I who would take the first step and go to Bonn, since it was I who had wanted to find her.
When I stepped down from the train, Selma was waiting for me on the platform with an enormous bouquet, not of wildflowers this time, but of roses. What struck me at once was that she hadn’t changed at all. Thirty years of life, of new experiences, joys and sorrows, friendships and loves, travels and work, and, in Selma’s case, motherhood, had left her so identical to the young woman I had known that I felt almost uncomfortable. She wanted to whisk me off to a beach on the shores of the Rhine where she liked to sit and watch the river. I thought it very sweet of her to want to involve me like this, right away, in something she enjoyed doing, but I was worn-out from the journey and from the emotions aroused by the idea of a reunion, it was dark out, I would have preferred her to take me to her apartment where I would have rested for a while before dinner. I told myself that I had clearly aged, with this need to pace myself and rest, whereas Selma, like the woman she had been, the women we had both been thirty years earlier, cared nothing for rest or quiet. She had remained every bit as ardent, lively, inventive and freewheeling as before. I admired her for this, realizing (though I had known it for years) that I no longer felt any pleasure in improvising, sitting on a beach at night when it’s a bit chilly, drinking beer straight from the bottle, chatting with a friend under the stars.
Not only had Selma not changed physically, with her scarlet lipstick, her leather trench coat and her blonde hair, but her attitude to life hadn’t changed either, her words, her conversation, her laughter. And yet she had a twenty-five-year-old daughter whom she had raised alone, and she’d had a rather hard life which she told me a bit about, as well as certain satisfactions I found difficult to place. When she showed me into her home I was at once amazed, intrigued and bewildered. The apartment, where she lived by herself, was gigantic, occupying two floors with a huge terrace, was full of interesting furniture and objects, some of which came from her family (I recognized a sleigh bed I had seen at her parents’ home) while others she had probably bought for herself (I recognized her unfailing good taste), was packed with bookcases and books, vases filled with fresh or wilting roses . . . and was an unspeakable mess. On a table, on a beautiful tablecloth spattered with stains, unwashed plates and overturned wineglasses conjured up the aftermath of a drunken party, except that the glasses, plates and tablecloth seemed to have been there not for twelve or twenty-four hours, but for weeks. In her kitchen, a mound of dishes, saucepans, glasses, plates and cutlery spilled out over the sink and neigbouring surfaces, like in a fairy tale where time has come to a halt and turned everything to stone, leaving everything ‘exactly as it is’ in a magical sleep. Selma seemed oblivious to the mess and offered not a word of explanation. I realized that this was her world, that she had been inhabiting this world for a long time now and couldn’t see how odd it appeared to a visitor, and that she probably welcomed very few visitors into her home.
Other than this, there was nothing to suggest a woman who had lost her way. She dealt with some business on the phone, switching fluently between German and English, showed me pictures of her daughter, who was studying abroad, pulled down books we had read together when young and took me out to dinner at a restaurant she liked. What struck me when we were back in the apartment was the hoard of possessions she seemed to live among, a side of her I had never seen before: ten coats hung on her coat rack, on one of the large tables in the living room were bundles of folders and documents, her terrace was overflowing with plants, and her bathroom, which I visited briefly before turning in for the night in a bedroom of my choice (there were four available), must have contained a good fifty flasks, jars, shampoos, creams, oils, soaps. Selma lives as if there were eight or ten of her, I said to myself. And though the hoard of possessions and the chaos to be found nearly everywhere seemed extraordinary to me, I still wanted to see in them a fearless display of freedom, of disregard for practical affairs, of youthfulness, mentally comparing her life to my own, which had become so strictly regulated, so orderly and so full of little habits, that it made my friends laugh.
There was also the question of a man. A wealthy, powerful man whom Selma was toying with, exactly as she had toyed with the timid young man until he was madly in love with her and then instantly cast him aside. The persistence of this over the years struck me as odd. Had Selma never felt the need for love and affection, like me, like the rest of the world? Was she trapped in this sadistic wheel, or did she remain there because it was the only position that gave her pleasure? What had grown in her, it seemed to me, was not what I had most liked about her in the past. She also had this way of disavowing, of erasing the thirty years that had elapsed by dredging up conversations that no longer held any real meaning for me, discussions and questions which, for my part, I had found an answer to one way or another over the years, and I didn’t like the confusion this sewed in my mind. Little by little, I could feel myself growing apart from her again. I was there for three days, but by the second day I was itching to leave. I still admired the independence of mind that had always distinguished her, her way of thinking solely for herself which I had loved more than anything and which had made us such close friends, the peals of laughter with which she would greet any form of stupidity, vulgarity, falsehood. Yet the gap which had started to appear, as if between the two legs of a pair of compasses, when we were twenty-two had grown significantly in my eyes, and now stood so wide open that, apart from our momentous meeting at seventeen, we had virtually nothing in common.
After my return to Paris, she wanted to continue our discussions, but I didn’t, and I told her so, explaining why. As gently as I could, I closed the door. She never tried to open it again. Later, I wondered whether her decision to end our friendship when we were twenty-two hadn’t affected me more than I realized, and whether the reason I went back to see her, thirty years later, was so I could end it in my turn.
Translator’s note: The story was first published in French in Au coeur d’un été tout en or (All in the Golden Afternoon), a collection of short fictions each of which begins with the opening line (or lines) of a book in the author’s library. Here the opening sentence is from Heinrich Boll’s The Clown.
Image © Annie Spratt