Georges explained the photo I found between the pages of his book. This is how it happened.
At five o’clock on Blvd Arago Georges meets Ines and Peter. They all embrace, faire la bise, Ines hugging like a spider around George’s waist, she’s skinner than last winter, their sweaty secret nights in Grenoble. Has she told Peter about that? No, he still acts collegial with Georges, old pals. They sit at a table outside a restaurant near the walls of Le Santé. People have abandoned the other tables, left cigarette butts in coffee cups. Georges sweeps black cake crumbs and ants off the table with his rolled-up Libé and asks the sloe-eyed waitress for three bottles of beer. The girl looks half-Arab, lazy and sexy, she slightly resembles Shada, the girl Georges screws Mondays in Belleville. He doesn’t say that aloud to the Germans, of course.
Peter says there will be rain before dark. Georges wants to eat a hamburger but will settle for a cigarette. He pours his beer into a glass. Ines doesn’t bother with a glass, there are more important things to do. She empties her handbag on the table: passport, cheap notebooks, hotel receipts, crushed Kleenex, leaky pens, clip-on sunglasses, box of matches, diaphragm case, a paperback novel (König Salomons Ängste by Emile Ajar), Olympus microcassette recorder and six caseless microcassettes.
Peter laughs, swigs his beer, says Ines’ mood is foul after seven hours in the air without food. She doesn’t smile or laugh or do anything to contradict Peter, she wants to talk with Georges about Deles, they’ve just fled that dreadful place, she has notes to type up tonight and dispatch to Die Zeit in Hamburg by fax. She wants to interview Jean Bouchard who lived in Deles for years and directed Naïveté starring Nafissa N’Diaye. Bouchard is dead, says Georges, he killed himself last November, same day as Jean Eustache. Repose en paix. Romain Gary is a suicide, too. Everybody is dying.
Peter takes out his Leica R4, there are two or three frames unexposed, the prior twenty-two were shot on bloody streets in West Africa, it’ll be tomorrow’s front page, so let me finish off the roll and get it to the lab. He lines up a shot of Georges and Ines. Georges smiles for the camera. Oh, fucking hell, says Ines, forget memorialising this moment, there’s too much to discuss. The shutter button is jammed, says Peter, wait a second. And Georges laughs and puts a cigarette between his lips, lights a match from the box on the table, ignites the tobacco and starts to inhale. Ines is saying Omar Kolo is dead, the son is now in power, and we don’t know what this means for the people of Dhaba. Georges shakes the match but it’s reluctant to be extinguished. Ines turns to Peter and says stop that at once as Peter clicks.
