The Years Read online

  THE YEARS

  ANNIE ERNAUX

  Translated by

  Alison L. Strayer

  SEVEN STORIES PRESS

  New York • Oakland • London

  Copyright © 2008 by Éditions Gallimard

  English translation copyright © 2017 by Alison L. Strayer

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Seven Stories Press

  140 Watts Street

  New York, NY 10013

  http://www.sevenstories.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Ernaux, Annie, 1940- author. | Strayer, Alison L., translator.

  Title: The years / Annie Ernaux ; translated by Alison L. Strayer.

  Other titles: Années. English

  Description: First edition. | New York : Seven Stories Press, 2017. | First

  published in French as Les Années (Paris : Gallimard, c2008).

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017003723 (print) | LCCN 2017023091 (ebook) | ISBN

  9781609807887 (E-book) | ISBN 9781609807870 (paperback)

  Subjects: LCSH: Ernaux, Annie, 1940- | Authors, French--20th

  century--Biography. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs.

  | HISTORY / Europe / France. | HISTORY / Social History.

  Classification: LCC pq2665.r67 (ebook) | LCC pq2665.r67 z4613 2017 (print) |

  ddc 843/.914 [B] --dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017003723

  College professors and high school and middle school teachers may order free examination copies of Seven Stories Press titles. To order, fax on school letterhead to (212) 226-1411 or visit www.sevenstories.com.

  All we have is our history, and it

  does not belong to us.

  —José Ortega y Gasset

  Yes. They’ll forget us. Such is our fate, there is no help for it. What seems to us serious, significant, very important, will one day be forgotten or will seem unimportant. And it’s curious that we can’t possibly tell what exactly will be considered great and important, and what will seem petty and ridiculous [. . .]. And it may be that our present life, which we accept so readily, will in time seem strange, inconvenient, stupid, not clean enough,

  perhaps even sinful . . .

  —Anton Chekhov

  Translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett

  (New York: Macmillan, 1916)

  Preface

  All the images will disappear.

  —the woman who squatted to urinate in broad daylight, behind the shack that served coffee at the edge of the ruins in Yvetot, after the war, who stood, skirts lifted, to pull up her underwear and then returned to the café

  —the tearful face of Alida Valli as she danced with Georges Wilson in the film The Long Absence

  —the man passed on a Padua sidewalk in the summer of 1990, his hands tied at the shoulders, instantly summoning the memory of thalidomide, prescribed to pregnant women for nausea thirty years before, and of a joke people told later: an expectant mother knits the baby’s layette while gulping thalidomide pills at regular intervals—a row, a pill, a row, a pill. A friend says in horror, Stop, don’t you realize your baby may be born without arms, and the other answers, It’s okay, I don’t know how to knit sleeves anyway

  —Claude Piéplu who leads a regiment of légionnaires, waving a flag in one hand and leading a goat with the other, in a film with Les Charlots

  —the majesty of the elderly woman with Alzheimer’s, who wore a flowered smock like all the residents of the old folks’ home, but with a blue shawl over her shoulders, tirelessly pacing the corridors, haughty like the Duchess of Guermantes in the Bois de Boulogne, and who made you think of Céleste Albaret as she’d appeared one night on television with Bernard Pivot

  —on an outdoor stage, the woman shut into a box pierced all the way through by men with silver spears—and emerging alive because it was a magic trick, called The Martyrdom of a Woman

  —the mummies clothed in tattered lace, dangling from the walls of the Convento dei Cappuccini in Palermo

  —Simone Signoret’s face on the poster for Thérèse Raquin

  —the shoe rotating on a pedestal in an André store, rue du Gros-Horloge in Rouen, the same phrase continuously scrolling around it—With Babybotte, Baby trots and grows well

  —the stranger of Termini Station in Rome, who half lowered the blind of his first-class compartment and in profile, hidden from the waist up, dandled his sex for the young women in the train on the opposite track, who leaned against the railing, chins in hands

  —the guy in a cinema ad for Païc Vaisselle dishwashing liquid, cheerfully breaking dirty dishes instead of washing them while an offscreen voice sternly intoned “That is not the solution!” and the fellow, gazing at the audience in despair, asked “But what is the solution?”

  —the beach at Arenys de Mar, next to a railway line, the hotel guest who looked like Zappy Max

  —the newborn flailed in the air like a skinned rabbit in the delivery room of the Clinique Caudéran Pasteur, found again half an hour later, dressed and sleeping on his side in a little bed, one hand outside, and the sheet pulled up to his shoulders

  —the dashing figure of the actor Philippe Lemaire, married to Juliette Greco

  —in a TV commercial, the father who hides behind his newspaper, trying in vain to toss a Picorette in the air and catch it in his mouth, like his little girl

  —a house with an arbor of Virginia creeper, which was a hotel in the sixties, no. 90A, on the Zattere in Venice

  —the hundreds of petrified faces, photographed by the authorities before deportation to the camps, on the walls of a room in the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, in the mid-1980s

  —the lavatories built above the river, in the courtyard behind the house in Lillebonne, the feces mixed with paper gently borne away by the water that laps around them

  —all the twilight images of the early years, the pools of light from a summer Sunday, images from dreams in which the dead parents come back to life, and you walk down unidentifiable roads

  —the image of Scarlett O’Hara, who kills a Yankee soldier and drags him up the stairs, then runs through the streets of Atlanta in search of a doctor for Melanie, who is about to give birth

  —of Molly Bloom, who lies next to her husband, remembering the first time a boy kissed her and she said yes yes yes

  —of Elizabeth Drummond, murdered with her parents on a road in Lurs in 1952

  —the images, real or imaginary, that follow us all the way to sleep

  —the images of a moment, bathed in a light that is theirs alone

  They will vanish all at the same time, like the millions of images that lay behind the foreheads of the grandparents, dead for half a century, and of the parents, also dead. Images in which we appeared as a little girl in the midst of beings who died before we were born, just as in our own memories our small children are there next to our parents and schoolmates. And one day we’ll appear in our children’s memories, among their grandchildren and people not yet born. Like sexual desire, memory never stops. It pairs the dead with the living, real with imaginary beings, dreams with history.

  Thousands of words will suddenly be deleted, the ones that were used to name things, faces, acts and feelings, to put the world in order, make the heart beat and the sex grow moist.

  —slogans, graffiti in public toilets, on walls in the street, poems and dirty sto
ries, titles

  —anamnesis, epigone, noema, theoretical, the terms written in a notebook with their meanings so you didn’t need to look them up each time

  —turns of phrase that others used without a thought and which we doubted we’d ever be able to use, il est indéniable que, force est de constater

  —dreadful sentences one should have forgotten, more tenacious than others due to the effort expended to suppress them, you look like a decrepit whore

  —the words of men in bed at night, Do with me what you will, I am your thing

  —to exist is to drink oneself without thirst

  —what were you doing on September 11, 2001?

  —in illo tempore at Mass on Sunday

  —vieux kroumir, faire du chambard, ça valait mille! tu es un petit ballot,1 outdated expressions, heard again by chance, suddenly precious as objects lost and found again, and you wonder how they’ve been saved from oblivion

  —the words forever bound to certain people, like catchwords, or to a specific spot on the N14 because a passenger happened to say them just as we were driving by, and we cannot pass that place again without the words leaping up like the buried water jets at the Summer Palace of Peter the Great, which spray when you walk across them

  —the grammar book examples, quotes, insults, songs, sentences copied into notebooks when we were teens

  —l’abbé Trublet compilait, compilait, compilait

  —glory for a woman can only be the dazzling mourning of happiness

  —our memory is outside us, in a rainy breath of time

  —Perfection for a nun is to spend her life as a virgin and to die as a saint

  —Saucy spoonerisms: the acrobats displayed some cunning stunts, the explorer puts his mess in the cashbox

  —it was a lucky charm, a little pig with a heart / that she bought at the market for a hundred sous / a hundred sous is a pittance, between me and you

  —mon histoire c’est l’histoire d’un amour

  —can you tirlipote with a fork? Can you put a schmilblick in a baby bottle?

  (I’m capable of the best and the worst, but at being the worst I’m the best! so if you’re gay, why don’t you laugh? I’ll be brief, said King Pepin the Short and climbing out of the monster’s belly, Jonas declared, you don’t need to be a brain sturgeon to know that’s dolphinitely no minnow—the puns heard a thousand times, which had ceased to amuse or amaze us long ago; hackneyed, only irritating, they served no purpose but to consolidate the family esprit de corps, and disappeared when the couple blew apart though still sprang to mind sometimes, incongruous, inappropriate outside of the former tribe—basically, all that remained of it, after years of separation)

  —words that we are astonished ever existed—mastoc, hefty (Flaubert in a letter to Louise Colet), pioncer, to kip down (George Sand to Flaubert)!

  —Latin and English. Russian learned in six months for a Soviet—nothing left of it now—da svidania, ya tebia lioubliou kharacho

  —what is marriage? A con-promise

  —metaphors so tired, we were astonished when others dared to utter them, the icing on the cake

  —O Mother buried outside the first garden

  —pédaler à côté du vélo, to pedal next to the bicycle (wasted effort) became pédaler dans la choucroûte, to pedal in sauerkraut (go nowhere fast), then in semolina (go in circles, spin one’s wheels), then nothing—obsolete expressions

  —the men’s words we didn’t like, come, jerk off

  —the ones learned at school that gave you a feeling of mastery over the world. Once the exam was over, they flew out of your head more quickly than they had entered

  —the repeated phrases of grandparents that set one’s teeth on edge, and those of the parents which after their deaths remained more alive than their faces, curiosity killed the cat, little jugs have big ears

  —the old brands, short-lived, the memories of which delighted you more than those of better-known brands, Dulsol shampoo, Cardon chocolate, Nadi coffee—like an intimate memory, impossible to share

  —The Cranes Are Flying

  —Marianne of My Youth

  —Madame Soleil is still with us

  —The world is suffering from lack of faith in a transcendental truth

  Everything will be erased in a second. The dictionary of words amassed between cradle and deathbed, eliminated. All there will be is silence and no words to say it. Nothing will come out of the open mouth, neither I nor me. Language will continue to put the world into words. In conversation around a holiday table, we will be nothing but a first name, increasingly faceless, until we vanish into the vast anonymity of a distant generation.

  old geezer, make a hullabaloo, that was priceless! You little nincompoop!

  The Years

  It is a sepia photo, oval-shaped, glued inside a little cardboard folder with a gold border and protected by a sheet of embossed, semitransparent paper. Below are the words: Photo-Moderne, Ridel, Lillebonne (S.Inf.re). Tel. 80. A fat baby with a full, pouty lower lip and brown hair pulled up into a big curl sits half-naked on a cushion in the middle of a carved table. The misty background, the sculpted garland of the table, the embroidered chemise that rides up over the belly (the baby’s hand hides its sex), the strap slipping from the shoulder onto the chubby arm suggest a cupid or a cherub from a painting. All the relatives must have received a print and immediately tried to discern whose side the child took after. In this piece of family archives, which must date from 1941, it is impossible not to read a ritual petit bourgeois staging for the entrance into the world.

  Another photo, stamped by the same photographer—the folder is of lesser quality, the gold border has disappeared—and probably destined for the same distribution within the family, shows a little girl of about four, serious, almost sad despite her nice plump face under short hair, parted down the middle and pulled back with barrettes to which little bow-ties are attached, like butterflies. Her left hand rests on the same carved Louis XVI–style table, which is fully visible. She bulges out of her bodice, her skirt with shoulder straps hiked up a little over a protuberant belly, possibly a sign of rickets (circa 1944).

  Two other small photos with serrated edges, very likely taken the same year, show the same child, slimmer, in a flounced dress with puff sleeves. In the first one, she nestles playfully against a stout woman, whose body is a solid mass in a wide-striped dress, her hair swept up in two big buns. In the other photo, the child’s left hand is raised, fist closed, the right one held back by the hand of a man. He is tall with a light-colored jacket and pleated trousers, his bearing nonchalant. Both photos were taken on the same day in a cobbled courtyard, in front of a low wall with a floral border along the top. A clothesline hangs above their heads, a clothespin still hooked over it.

  On holiday afternoons after the war, amidst the interminable slowness of meals, it appeared out of nowhere and took shape, the time already begun, the one which the parents seemed to be staring at, eyes unfocused, when they forgot to answer us, the time where we were not and never would be, the time before. The voices of the guests flowed together to compose the great narrative of collective events, which we came to believe we too had witnessed.

  They never grew tired of talking about the winter of ’42, the bone-chilling cold, the hunger and the rutabagas, the food provisions and tobacco vouchers, the bombardments

  —the aurora borealis that heralded the coming of the war

  —the bicycles and carts on the roads during the Rout, the looted shops

  —the victims searching the debris for their photos and their money

  —the arrival of the Germans—every person at the table could say exactly where, in what city, they’d landed—and the English, always courteous, the Americans, inconsiderate, the neighbor in the Resistance, the collabos, the girl X whose head was shaved after Liberation
/>   —Le Havre razed to the ground and where nothing at all remained, the black market

  —Propaganda

  —the Boches fleeing across the Seine at Caudébec on broken-down horses

  —the countrywoman who loudly broke wind in a train compartment full of Germans and proclaimed to all and sundry, “If we can’t tell it, we’ll make them smell it!”

  From a common ground of hunger and fear, everything was told in the “we” voice and with impersonal pronouns.

  Shrugging their shoulders, they spoke of Pétain, too old and already gaga when he was brought back into action, faute de mieux. They imitated the flight and rumble of V-2s circling above, mimed past terrors, feigning their own careful deliberations at critical moments, What do I do now, to keep us in suspense.

  It was a story replete with violence, destruction, and death, narrated with glee, belied at intervals, it seemed, by a stirring and solemn “It must never happen again,” followed by a silence like a warning for the benefit of some obscure authority, remorse in the wake of pleasure.

  But they only spoke of what they had seen and could re-live while eating and drinking. They lacked the talent and conviction to speak of things they’d been aware of but had not seen. Therefore, no Jewish children boarding trains for Auschwitz, nor bodies of starvation victims collected every morning from the Warsaw Ghetto, nor Hiroshima’s 10,000 degrees. Whence our impression, which later history courses, documentaries, and films failed to dispel, that neither the crematoria nor the atomic bomb belonged to the same timeline as black market butter, air-raid warnings, and descents to the cellar.

  They started to make comparisons with the other war, 1914, the Great War, won in blood and glory, a man’s war, and around the table the women listened to the men with respect. They spoke of Chemin des Dames and Verdun, the gassed soldiers, the bells of November 11, 1918. They named villages whose children left for the Front, never to return, not one. They compared the soldiers in the mud-filled trenches with the prisoners of 1940, warm and sheltered for five years without a bomb ever landing on them. They quarreled over who had been more heroic and who more unlucky.