These Things That Happen

  Illness, theft, accident: we always pray to stay away from these, especially when abroad, but there is no way denying that these things happen – especially when there are firemen outside one’s window shouting in French. No, my building was not on fire. Lan, my neighbor, was missing, and the firemen were there to search his apartment. Having gotten the code to the front door, three or four of them ran into the building while one climbed up a ladder to Lan’s window and pried it open. I would have been shocked had I not seen a similar procedure take place just that morning several blocks away from me in the Marais. Still, at first it was I that wanted answers. I’d met Lan only on one occasion – the day before I moved in. My landlady introduced me to him while she returned the ladder she used to reach the high closet spaces in the small front hall of the apartment. She asked if he was going on vacation in August. “Ah,” he said bitterly with a slight Chinese accent, “I’m going to Marseille for two weeks, but to work, always to work.” Several nights before the firemen came, I’d heard voices talking and laughing behind his door and thought he had guests, but that was all I’d seen or heard of Lan. Who filed the missing person’s report, I asked? A female relative who hadn’t heard from him in several days. Ah. It felt awkward looking on while these tall Frenchmen excavated Lan’s apartment; I closed my door. Only when I saw them taking a smoke break outside (bizarre, watching firemen smoke…) did I poke out my window again and ask, “So, is he all right?” “Excuse me?” One of the officers said. “Is he good – all right? You know, not in danger?” “He is dead, mademoiselle. Several days dead.”   Apparently, they were only taking a smoke break while waiting for the police and the detectives to arrive. A white armored police van soon replaced the bright red fire truck outside my window. Two questioning sessions by different detectives followed as did a trip to the local commissariat near Bastille to file a formal testimony at two in the morning. There was not much I could tell them, and not much they were willing to tell me. “Do your windows lock well at night?” an auburn-haired police detective asked me. “Yes. Why do you ask? You think someone could have gotten in through the window?” I asked, shocked. “Oh you know, old buildings. Just making sure…” was the mysterious reply. More questions along the lines of “Did you ever hear cries or calls for help?” did not do much to calm me. I just wanted to know that Lan had died a natural death. Although I’d never been in a comparable situation in the States, I couldn’t help but think of how it would have happened there. Would they open up Lan’s apartment back home this way, just because someone placed a call? The reddish-haired detective had only sketched down my name and number on a plain notepad next to a loosely drawn map of Lan’s apartment. Where were the professional photographs of the death scene? The forensic tape? The phone call at two in the morning telling my friend and me she was back in the office and ready to file a report somehow seemed very French, too. Who else would have assumed we were still awake? The officers were all mostly outside the commissariat talking and smoking. A female officer led us up to the second floor where two more officers were picking at croissants and joking around – this was clearly not their first death case. She kept us there while she typed out with frustrating deliberateness a lengthy summary of all I had told her in quotation marks. I was not about to start a stylistic argument, though. I signed my name and we were on our way. Before we were about to leave the station, though, the detective finally conceded some information. We already know, she said after I pleaded with her for my peace of mind a fifth time, it was liver failure. Lan had a liver condition, apparently, for which he had been hospitalized the previous week, but he had refused the necessary operation. It was the best explanation they had. Walking back to the rue St.Antoine, in the quiet chill of the night, I felt lighter for the first time that evening and tried hard not to think of Lan. Somehow I had resolved for myself that if it was a natural death it was just one of these things that happen.