L’Usine

L’Usine is a bar opposite H4, the blast furnace that remained standing longer than the others, on a straight road leading toward the cemetery. It is both an ordinary neighborhood drinking place and a recurring meeting point in Heillange: a place where the town’s routines continue, where family and local histories collide, and where Anthony Casati and Hacine Bouali encounter one another at moments of conflict and reprieve. Its battered interior and the crowds that periodically spill beyond it make the bar a vivid measure of the community around it.

Place and Atmosphere

L’Usine is introduced on a sweltering afternoon when Anthony and his cousin arrive to look for Manu. The valley is oppressively hot, the asphalt seems to cling like glue, and the wind has died. Crossing the threshold brings a sharp change in light: inside, the temperature is around ninety-five degrees, three fans turn sluggishly, and five customers seem almost absorbed into the bar’s dark decor. Anthony recognizes the men by their first names. Beer-drinkers occupy the stools, while Rudi sits on the faux-leather banquette in shorts; the boys’ entrance draws heavy-lidded looks, a sniff, and a few polite waves. The scene makes the bar feel less like a busy public room than a sealed, slow-moving world.

That closed quality is not simply an effect of the heat. Manu has made L’Usine his home base: he lives nearby and passes his time there playing pool and darts, drinking, and spending time with friends. He once offered to help Cathy repair the place, but she refused. The bar has gone nearly a decade without fresh paint, air-conditioning, or much housekeeping. Its regulars call it L’Usine, while other people keep away. Drinking is quiet until five in the afternoon, then becomes more energetic; depending on the drinkers, the evening may turn sick, funny, or mean. Cathy maintains authority over the room, and the police do not bother to stop by because she knows how to manage the drunks. When she feels like it, she plays Joe Dassin, briefly exposing a glimpse of the young woman beneath her layers of makeup.

Anthony’s Visits and the Bar’s Social World

On the boys’ first visit, Anthony and his cousin ask Cathy whether Manu is there. She calls for him, but the customers barely react, taking another sip and returning to their sluggish thoughts. The cousin wants to take the conversation outside; Manu prefers to remain where he is. The visit grows awkward when the boys cannot establish whether the people they have come to ask about were involved in the matter they are investigating. As the pool balls resume their low ricochet, their approach loses force. Manu offers them a drink, but instead invites them to his nearby home. L’Usine thus serves as a point of contact without becoming a place where the boys can compel answers: its routines absorb their urgency and send the encounter elsewhere.

The bar also becomes a gathering place after a funeral. At the cemetery, the family asks mourners to respect its need for privacy, while inviting those who wish to continue together at L’Usine for brioche, coffee, and the first round of drinks. The announcement draws laughter and a cry for champagne. When the crowd arrives, the sidewalk is already packed; for once the doors stand open, and people move in and out among tables made from sawhorses, white paper cloths, a large thermos, trays of brioche, nonalcoholic drinks, and plastic cups. Cathy greets the arrivals with businesslike warmth, calculating the day’s takings as her smile widens. The arrangement turns a familiar bar into a public reception room, but its commercial life remains visible alongside the family’s mourning.

Gradually, pressure from the crowd, Cathy, and passing cars pushes people inside. Anthony ends up at a table in the back with his parents and Vanessa. In the hubbub, an older North African man approaches; Anthony recognizes him as Bouali, and memories of the motorcycle and the small apartment where tea had been shared return at once. His mother rises to greet the visitor, and his father gets to his feet as well. The recognition makes L’Usine a space where the past is not safely past: the funeral crowd brings former antagonists and family histories into the same room.

Mourning, Violence, and Its Aftermath

The gathering changes register as the day advances. When Hacine Bouali arrives to pick up his father, the tables outside are strewn with empty cans and plates, coffee-brown rings mark the white paper cloths, and plastic cups roll into the gutters. The café is now crowded and loud, with beer, tobacco, and overheated bodies filling the room. Children race between the tables as mothers try to restrain them; the coffee has given way to pitchers of beer, and waitresses circulate continually. Cathy stays at the taps and has already changed the keg. The nephew who had proposed several toasts in the deceased man’s memory is asleep in a corner with his head on his bare arms. The wake’s movement from formal hospitality to unruly drinking is registered through the room itself: its floor is sticky with beer, and its noise spreads beyond any single conversation.

L’Usine’s narrow men’s room then becomes the setting for a direct confrontation. After five beers, Anthony is at the urinal, whistling and feeling unusually hopeful because his parents have been getting along better and his father is keeping his pledge. Hacine enters, and the confined room abruptly turns that optimism into fear: the walls seem close, the ammonia smell becomes unbearable, and the barred window offers no way out. The encounter escalates into feints and middle kicks, though neither young man seems able or willing to make the fight decisive. Patrick Casati opens the door and finds his son disheveled. Having heard Hélène Casati’s account, he connects Hacine with the motorcycle theft and the breakdown of his marriage. Anthony leaves through the crowded bar without looking back.

Patrick emerges a few seconds later looking unexpectedly calm. He closes the restroom door carefully, takes a half-empty beer from the bar, and scans the room as life carries on around him: Cathy talks with a customer, the bartender serves drinks, and a child watches a wasp trapped in a glass of grenadine. Patrick drinks the beer in one swallow, orders another, and drinks again. The contrast between the violence behind the closed door and the bar’s unbroken bustle gives the aftermath its force. L’Usine does not pause to mark what has happened; Patrick’s return to drinking is absorbed into the same ordinary movement of glasses, customers, and noise.

The World Cup Reunion and the Bar’s Wider Meaning

Years later, during the 1998 World Cup semifinal between France and Croatia, Hacine returns to L’Usine for the first time since his accident. He has not intended to come: after work he rides around town rather than joining his colleagues at the stadium, searching for somewhere congenial amid the crowds. The town’s bars are packed, people spill onto the sidewalks, and the excitement leads him, from one bar to another, back to L’Usine. During halftime Anthony and his cousin also rush in, unable to find room elsewhere. They order a beer just as Croatia scores; the room falls silent. Hacine enters, recognizes Anthony at the bar, then turns toward the television as France equalizes. The crowd erupts, knocking over a table and spilling beer as spectators jump, shout, and embrace. Anthony shakes Hacine in shared excitement, and Hacine raises both fists to the sky.

The match does not erase the old antagonism. Anthony drinks heavily with his cousin and Rudi, while he and Hacine mostly avoid one another. When the cousin gestures toward Hacine, Anthony declines to start a fight that night. France wins and reaches the final; the celebrations spread through Heillange, and only around midnight or one in the morning do Anthony and Hacine find themselves outside L’Usine together. The bar has outlasted the day’s formal purpose, from football viewing to a late-night dispersal of drinkers. With the victory, the liquor, and the lingering mood of amnesty, Hacine finally approaches Anthony, and they exchange a brief acknowledgment of the occasion. Their hostility is not resolved, but for a moment the room and the town around it have supplied a different basis for contact.

Across these episodes, L’Usine holds together two scales of social life. It is Cathy’s neglected but carefully governed establishment, sustained by regulars and the habits of daily drinking; it is also a place where a funeral crowd briefly gathers, old grievances reappear, and football produces a noisy image of collective belonging. Its physical details resist any simple transformation into a comforting community center: the heat, stale upkeep, beer-sticky floor, and crowded rooms remain. Yet its repeated use makes it one of the few spaces where otherwise separated lives cross. The bar’s ordinary persistence is precisely what allows mourning, violence, and a temporary reconciliation to occupy the same ground.