This most appropriate headgear had often proved to be sensationally well chosen at memorial evenings for the victims of the twentieth of July 1944, and thus it was most likely suitable here too. And under its, as it were, narrow-lipped horizontality, Christa’s eternally young sapphire gaze struck me all the harder, saw me:

me, sneaking on tiptoe along the wall, without a hat, of course (much less a black one), and in an old raincoat (it hadn’t been cold in Paris, whereas here, an early November fog cut icily into your bones), my hair disheveled to boot (due to my “irresponsible speeding” with the windows down):

just barely making it on time to a bizarre, anything but private, yet very intimate ceremony, in which they had, for better or worse, been forced to ask me to participate (since I belonged to the unavoidable flotsam of a life that along with many ups had inevitably gone through many downs, inevitably coming into contact with all manner of undesirables)—just barely making it on time to a ceremony that no sure instinct for proper and suitable behavior would have advised me to stay away from.

Was I mistaken? Did Christa nevertheless give me an encouraging nod anyway? Conciliatory? Encouraging? Had her small, arrogant mouth softened into a smile?

—the mouth that, after each of her spare utterances, retreated and closed as definitively as the purse of a miser who has yielded a penny’s worth of alms; the mouth that—softer, purer, and poetic because of a precocious grief—was repeated in the face of our boy, who carried it into the painful ordeal of innate taciturnity:

in the vise of two fine creases as in the grip of tweezers, inserted in the innocence of the round cheeks: a coyly bent Cupid’s bow, destined for tenderness, but despicably scrawled by a never-begun love story in the Latin majuscule M, whose right-hand vertical stroke drops in a priori resignation (Gaia: “Sa bouche traîne la patte, pauvre petite”)—

yet without the pinched intransigence of the mother who had exasperated me, arousing one of those unjustifiably cruel impulses with which we take revenge for an eternal—because primordial—misunderstanding; letting myself go, I had told her that her mouth expressed the most recent German tragedy: in the pathological drop of its arrogant curve, it resembled, I said, the signature of Adolf Hitler—

(which, the evil words backfiring, naturally led to my never again being able to bring myself to kiss her. Which was why she could not believe that I still—despite this and despite many other things besides—loved her, even though our love had long since become the most efficient instrument in our conjugal torture chamber, because of that primordial lack of understanding, which perpetuated and increased the lack of understanding forever)—

•

Could it be possible that this mouth had softened into a smile: ready to speak the words: “Come, I’ve forgiven you!”

No. She did not smile, nor did she nod. It was an illusion—like the illusion that her head was looming wondrously above all other heads and out from among them—