Free The Last Bullet Is for You by Martine Delvaux Page B

threatening me, we had to separate, it was intolerable, you were suffocating. Then I would become the encouraging one, we had to keep going, it was like living in wartime, a shotgun wedding and then off to the front. When the war is over and conjugal life begins, two strangers find themselves sharing the same bed, two fearful creatures.
    You and I came into this world with the Prague Spring, the Vietnam War, the Baader-Meinhof Gang, Martin Luther King, Apollo 7, the first heart transplant, the attempted murder of Andy Warhol by Valerie Solanas, Hair , and the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. We were born at the same time as Céline Dion and Andrei Ivanovitch, Lisa Marie Presley and Timothy McVeigh. We were born with Rosemary’s Baby , Mia Farrow and her pixie cut in the role of the feminist Madonna impregnated by the devil. Sharon Tate was first cast for the role, then replaced. A year later, thirty-eight weeks pregnant, she was stabbed sixteen times by the Manson family. Polanski was supposed to have been at her side a few days later for the birth of their new baby. They had been married a year, the filmmaker cheated on her and everyone knew. Sharon Tate said, “Roman lies to me and I pretend to believe him.”
    How many love stories do I carry in my mind? How intently have I clung to romantic dreams? How many young men on their knees, trembling before the woman they hope to marry? How many glittering diamonds? How many close-ups on a perfect kiss with bodies frozen in an image of endless love? Those stories turned me into a hopeless romantic, like Kundera’s Teresa. And you became the Prince Charming of our love story in the glass case of these images.
    I had forgotten that Tybalt was hiding in Romeo’s skin, and that the dragon lived not below the castle but within it, and that Jennifer Cavilleri’s leukemia could have been the trace of Oliver Barrett IV in her blood.
    One morning, you looked me in the eye, you were livid with rage and you screamed, “You are such a typical Quebec woman!”
    I didn’t quite know how to take that, or what hurt me most about the insult, whether it was that superior way you said “woman,” or your arrogance when you said “Quebec,” or the combination of the two in your syntax stitched together with anger.
    You were at the head of an army marching on Montreal the way the Russians entered Berlin, and the way they occupied Prague. You were the machine invented by Kafka in the penal colony. You were Hitler on the outskirts of Moscow: “This place will be razed and covered over with an artificial lake!”
    For our first Christmas, I bought you a red phone I found at an antique dealer on the Main. On the case was a piece of tape with a date: 1968. The year of the Prague Spring.
    It was a dial phone like the ones we had when I was a child, it went tick-tick-tick when you dialed a number, like the teeth on the drum of a music box. The dealer promised me the machine would work, and it did. I made sure when I got home. The sound of the bell was hard, almost harsh, an alarm that had nothing to do with the gentle tones of today’s telephones. On December 24, I put it under the tree.
    The unwrapped gift sat on the counter, unused, as if we didn’t trust it or were afraid of it, maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to have a red phone in the house—what had Santa Claus been thinking? After you left, I kept the phone, figuring that one day, just maybe, it would ring and announce momentous news, like a truce between us because at long last you were ready to push down on the detonator inside you and let your resistance be blown to smithereens, and that among the pieces my love could finally find a home.
    I figured that, or dreamed it, but in any case it wasn’t true. Time passed, the dream faded, and the red phone has been stowed ever since, at the back of the closet, and the Iron Curtain has descended for good.
    Children who grew up