Free Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes Page A

the couch with one knee flexed; the exhausted pose reminds him of their father in death. The writer cannot help noticing the improvised cushion on which his dead brother’s head is resting: a Paris telephone directory. Jules sits down and weeps. His wife embraces him, and he senses in her the fear that it will be his turn next. His eye is caught by an advertisement printed in black along the edge of the telephone directory; from a distance, he tries to read it.
    Jules and his wife watch over the body that night. Every so often, Jules lifts the handkerchief covering his brother’s face and looks at the half-open mouth, expecting it to start breathing again. As the hours pass, the nose seems to become fleshier, while the ears turn as hard as seashells. Maurice becomes quite stiff and cold. “His life has now passed into the furniture, and each time it gives the slightest creak, we shiver.”
    Three days later, Maurice is buried at Chitry. The priest waits to be called but is denied. Jules walks behind the hearse, watches the wreaths jiggling, thinks the horse looks as if it has been given a special coat of dirty black paint that morning. When they lower the coffin into the deep family pit, he notices a fat worm seeming to rejoice on the grave’s edge. “If a worm could strut, this one would be strutting.”
    Jules concludes: “All I feel is a kind of anger at death and its imbecile tricks.”
    3) In August 1909, a small boy perched on a waggon in the middle of Chitry sees a woman sitting on the stonework of the village well, and then, suddenly, falling backwards. It is Renard’s mother, who over the last years has been losing her mind. Jules is summoned for a third time. He comes running, throws down his hat and cane, and peers into the well: he sees some floating skirts and “the soft eddy familiar to those who have drowned an animal.” He tries to get down using the bucket; when he steps in, he notices that his boots seem ridiculously long and are bending up at the ends like fish in a pail. Then someone arrives with a ladder; Jules gets out of the bucket, descends the rungs, succeeds only in getting his feet wet. Two efficient villagers go down and retrieve the body; there is not a scratch on it.
    Renard cannot determine whether it was an accident or another suicide; he calls his mother’s death “impenetrable.” He argues: “Perhaps the fact that God is incomprehensible is the strongest argument for His existence.” He concludes: “Death is not an artist.”

Chapter 15

    While living among the priests in Brittany, I discovered the work of the great Belgian singer-songwriter Jacques Brel. In his early years, he was known as “Abbé Brel” for his preachiness; and in 1958 recorded a track called “ Dites, si c’était vrai ” (“And what if it were true?”). It is less a song than a prayer-poem tremulously intoned against the background growl of an organ. Brel asks us to imagine what things would be like “if it were true.” If Christ really had been born in that stable in Bethlehem . . . If what the Evangelists wrote were true . . . If that coup de théâtre at the wedding in Cana had really happened . . . or that other coup, the stuff with Lazarus . . . If all of it were true, Brel concludes, then we would say Yes, because it is all so beautiful when one believes that it is true.
    I now find this one of the worst tracks Brel ever recorded; and the mature singer was to become as mockingly irreligious as his younger self was God-bothering. But this early song, wincingly sincere, makes the point. If it were true, it would be beautiful; and because it was beautiful, it would be the more true; and the more true, the more beautiful; and so on. YES BUT IT’S NOT TRUE YOU IDIOT, I hear my brother interject. Such rambling is even worse that those hypothetical desires you attribute to our dead mother.
    No doubt; but the Christian religion didn’t last so long merely because everyone else believed it, because