By Sven Hansen-Löve
Translated by Simon Rogghe
April was having a strange dream. She saw herself wandering through a vast hotel. The occupants had all cleared out due to some catastrophe or other. She explored the rooms, rummaged through people’s belongings and opened their suitcases one by one, looking for something specific… what, she couldn’t say. She continued wandering through the palace. Afterward she told me that this dream had had a gripping reality to it. She was able to move around as she liked, fully conscious, as in a video game. After visiting the guest rooms, she walked through the big dining room, the reception lobby, the kitchens, and the gym: an uninterrupted string of deserted places. She finished at the swimming pool, built in Art Deco like the rest of the hotel. Inside of it horses were swimming — or thrashing about, rather. At this moment she woke up and told me her dream.
I turned my head toward her and grumbled something. It must have been six in the morning. I had only been sleeping for one or two hours. In those days I still made my living as a DJ, working nights and often coming home at dawn, which did not make life very easy, let alone life as a couple. I wasn’t thrilled about being woken up, but we had been together for two months and I had become used to these restless nights. I sighed and listened. She mulled over the dream for a long time.
April had a very active dream life. In general, she couldn’t remember her dreams. She talked in her sleep. Sometimes distinctly, which bothered me at the beginning of our relationship, because I would reply to her, thinking we were having a conversation in the middle of the night. It quickly became obvious that she did not hear me. Her utterances made no sense.
At times, she would wake up startled, in a sweat, not recalling anything. Other nights she would wake up crying, terrified, which made her dog Frisco growl, and made my hope for a good night’s sleep evaporate.
As time went by in our daily life, we crossed each other like two metro cars going in opposite directions. I came home late at night. She woke up early and went off to work. We did not share the same space-time continuum. April was British but had been living in France for a while. She wanted to become an architect and had found an internship at a reputed firm in Paris. She left home for the office every morning, charged with energy and motivated to succeed, even though she was secretly exhausted by her troubled nights. At best, we met each other in the afternoon on weekends. I’d make an effort to get up at the same time as her, and we would walk around the city or in the park. Those days were beautiful, at least in the beginning, because I loved her, or I thought I did, even if my actions didn’t always follow suit.
April… her spirit, her sense of humor, her upbeat personality, her somewhat eccentric views. But also her thoughtfulness, both charming and excessive — all of this I found exhilarating. I attributed — a bit too hastily — her eccentricity to her Anglo-Saxon roots. She was ravishing, sexy, often irresistible. She had modeled awhile in her late adolescence.
I didn’t know much about her. A shadow hung over some part of her. She had lived through a tragedy at the end of her adolescence; lost a parent, father or mother, under unclear circumstances. She was very evasive about the subject. After this sad event, she had come to settle in France.
We met through mutual friends, at a dinner party that had lasted until sunrise. That first night I had found her very attractive, mysterious (and a bit unsettling). I was fascinated by her eyes, great blue eyes, lively, penetrating, probing — eyes from which it seemed like nothing remained hidden.
We spent the whole evening exchanging glances until I finally approached her under some stupid pretext.
“Do you work here?” I asked.
“No, I replied to an ad. They asked for people to furnish.” The exchange veered toward the absurd. It helped us break the ice.
Never had I had such an easy connection with someone. It was all so smooth. She laughed at all my jokes, even the least funny ones. I was floating on a little cloud of joy.
We had instant chemistry. She moved in with me in no time, although we were a bit cramped in my twenty-five-square-meter studio at rue Pierre et Marie Curie. There were my books, my records, her cardboard boxes — some of which had never been unpacked — April, myself, and her dog, a mischievous fox terrier who was a fan of literature, judging by the number of books he chewed up, tore into pieces, and even ingested (with a predilection for the works of that poor William Carlos Williams, which I would have to do without for a while). All of this was not easy, but we adapted. We laughed a lot, and Frisco joined in, barking — much to the neighbors’ grief. They must have thought we were lunatics. I still have the dog.
Little by little, I became aware that there was something not quite right with April. More and more, small objects seemed to wind up in our apartment. Trifles she would snatch left and right: spoons, little bags of sugar, a light bulb, erasers, a silver lighter, restaurant menus, a stack of business cards, cigarettes (she didn’t smoke), paper napkins, and so on. She crammed them all into a box under our bed. A little urban squirrel. The thing that worried me was that, just as with her dreams, she wouldn’t remember anything. I tried to reason with her, especially when I noticed that she had brought pens, notebooks, even cell phones, from the office at her architecture firm.
“You know that you’re exposing yourself to trouble, right?” I insisted.
“I found them!” she responded, pretending she hadn’t heard me.
Luckily we saw a documentary about a kleptomaniac cat on TV, pillaging cottages in England, stowing his accumulated loot in a hiding place. It had been caught on infrared. I’m not sure what was going on in April’s mind as she watched this unusual report, but she stopped bringing home objects. When I had been living with her for a few months, I began to see — still only a hint of it — that her happy-go-lucky facade was hiding a deep and painful sadness.
In spite of it, we still had some good times. I can’t remember having had more laughing attacks than I did during that time. Our complicity tied us together at difficult moments. She shared my view of the world — a world which she observed with a detached and ironic look.
Unfortunately, things got worse.
Her moods became more and more unpredictable. She could be very thoughtful, preparing a meal or organizing a surprise evening with our friends. She could also sink into complete muteness for many hours, if not days.
I dreaded going back to the apartment. The problems always happened at night. At night she was seized by violent episodes of feng shuism. These consisted of rearranging the apartment, the furniture, the decorations, according to the principles of feng shui: layout according to invisible currents — rivers, winds, channels of energy… a real science she adhered to at first, before she began to personalize it, not corresponding to any logic, unless it was to block all access to the apartment and make it impossible to move about.
The foreseeable happened. One night I found myself shut out. I had to yell to wake her up. Frisco started barking. I was afraid the neighbors would be up in arms. She ended up coming to the door after having had to clamber up a pile of boxes, a couch, and two chairs. It was a pity. For once, she had been able to enjoy a deep sleep.
I mentioned all of this to James and Rachel, the friends through whom we met. They knew her well. They listened to me without saying anything, but there was a certain awkwardness in the way they looked. Four months had gone by since our first encounter and now I was really beginning to worry. I was no longer dazed by the thrill of discovering someone new. I felt powerless. I was mad at myself. The love I felt for her was not enough. It did not help her, so I began to doubt myself: I wondered if I really loved her. On top of it all, I, too, began to have peculiar dreams, about talking cats and labyrinths populated by pickpocketing squirrels. April had most likely passed her virus on to me.
One weekday afternoon I got a call from April’s supervisor at her firm. I had to rush there instantly. All day at the office, she had shown signs of nervousness. Then she had begun to frenetically wrap everything in plastic wrap. She mumbled incoherently. In a panic, I called James who came to help me. In the meanwhile she had calmed down, but her eyes were evasive, even dead.
She did not put up any resistance when James and I took her to psychiatric urgent care. I wondered if she realized what was going on. I had the impression, for a moment, that she thought it was I who was being taken. It made my head spin.
The doctor at the reception seemed skeptical at first, but after a short interview with April, he was convinced. He explained to us the procedures to follow, the papers to fill out, and said they would keep her there for at least a while. I have never forgotten the way she looked at me when she saw us leaving her: her look was like a mirror in which I saw myself reflected. I was overcome with guilt, a very singular type of guilt which only those who have ever taken a loved one to the hospital could ever know. You begin to doubt. It doesn’t let go of you.
I wish I could say that our love story withstood all these events. I would like to think that those feelings of love sometimes turn out to be tougher than the dice of fate, like in those sappy novels or romantic comedies. But in reality, our relationship did not recover. I went to visit her many times a week, but it didn’t seem like she knew who I was anymore. She no longer spoke to me. I felt completely destitute, unable to help her heal. Her condition got worse, as did my despair. Progressively, the visits grew less.
I can’t say that I’m proud of it. Maybe our relationship had been too short for it to brave such an upheaval. What had initially attracted me to her now caused me fear, repelled me. I knew it all had something to do with my own inner struggles. I lived in a constant, suffocating quarrel with myself. In the morning I could hardly get myself out of bed. I no longer read. I didn’t eat.
James and Rachel did not judge me. They continued to keep me posted. Three or four months later I learned that April had been released from the hospital, that she had started to regain her spirit. Apparently her treatment had been successful. She did not want to see me again. I don’t really know why — something to do with being embarrassed, feeling deceived or bitter.
The one and only time we saw each other was when she came over with James and Rachel, to pick up her stuff. We all agreed that I would keep the dog, as I had become attached to it. She gave up her career in architecture. James told me she had begun to sculpt and that, against all expectations, it was working out for her: she had sold several of her sculptures. But this is all I know.
Last night I had this dream: I was at our place again, rue Pierre et Marie Curie. I heard her calling out to me. This dream triggered my memory of the whole story. There had been a time when I no longer thought about any of it, years perhaps. I have moved since then. I traveled, changed my job. In the dream, I woke up in that small studio that we had shared. I could hear her, but she wasn’t there next to me, not even in the room. I heard her voice, calling me, imploring me. It came from one of the cardboard boxes. I opened it, but still she called me, crying. Inside the box there was another box, then another. I opened every one of them, without end, like Russian dolls.
Sven Hansen-Löve decided to focus on writing after being a DJ for more than 15 years in Paris and all over the world. His work has appeared and is forthcoming in Paris Lit Up, Crack The Spine, Left Hand Of The Father, Lunch Ticket, and Kanyar, all translated from French by Simon Rogghe. He has also co-written with his sister, the well-know French film director Mia Hansen-Löve, a script for a feature film titled Eden. The shooting took place in New York, Paris, and Morocco. The film is in post-production now.
Simon Rogghe is a poet, fiction writer, and translator of French surrealism and contemporary fiction. His work has appeared and is forthcoming in 3:AM Magazine, Gone Lawn, Paris Lit Up and other publications. After traveling Europe and the US competing at horse shows as a professional rider, he is currently earning his PhD in French literature at UC Berkeley.
