Later, during one of those strange, post-catastrophe conversations, they told us that they’d been amused to hear one of our children order spaghetti Bolognese. We’d just arrived at Tangalle, after six hours of driving to cover the 125 miles from Colombo; we were having lunch under the veranda of this dreamlike hotel, the Eva Lanka, perched on a hill above the sea. They were at the next table, a French couple in their thirties: he was tall and dark haired, she was blond and pretty, with a little girl as blond and pretty as her mother, and an older man whose hooked nose and salt-and-pepper curls made him look strikingly like the actor Pierre Richard. They were more like residents than tourists. In any case they looked as if they knew the lay of the land, and we thought it would be good to see them again: they seemed nice and were sure to have good tips to share with us.
We did see them again, on the afternoon of December 26. Of the disaster itself we neither heard nor saw a thing. We didn’t even know the word tsunami. Hesitating that morning between the pool and the beach below the hotel, we were lazy and chose the pool. Only when the hotel staff, ordinarily rather sluggish, started rushing around in panic did we understand that something had happened. Two hours later the hotel was full of half-naked, wounded, distraught Westerners. Among these survivors, some lucky ones had just lost all their belongings, their passports, money, and plane tickets, while others were searching for their wives, their husbands, their children. And some were no longer searching, because they knew.
Philippe, the man who looked like Pierre Richard, was in a bathing suit, feverishly talking and talking. The wave had surprised him in front of his bungalow, where, while his daughter Delphine—the pretty blond—and his son-in-law Jérôme went to the market in the village, he had stayed behind to babysit little Juliette and her best friend, Osandy, the daughter of their Sri Lankan friend M.H. The little girls were playing inside the bungalow; he’d tried to get them out, but the flood had swept him away, and he’d clung to a tree. Just when he was about to let go, he’d been saved by a board that pinned him against the trunk. When he found Delphine and Jérôme unharmed, he knew already, almost for certain, that Juliette and Osandy were dead. The three adults had gone to the hospital in Tangalle, where the bodies were starting to rush in. Juliette was there, in her red dress, and so was Osandy, and Osandy’s father, and other villagers—most of whom they’d gotten to know in the ten years they’d been coming there.
They didn’t cry. Philippe talked. Delphine was silent, Jérôme looked at her, then, little by little, he started to talk as well, and even to joke around. This black humor without a trace of hysteria left us speechless on the first evening. Then we understood: they couldn’t yet afford the luxury of going to pieces. They still had something to do: recover Juliette’s body and bring it home. In all the chaos they would have to soldier on until that was done.
The next day, we left Delphine with our children at the hotel—yes, with our children, whom she did her best to entertain by showing them hummingbirds, carnivorous plants, and a huge tortoise at the bottom of a well—and went with Jérôme and Philippe to Tangalle. At the hospital, right after the catastrophe, Jérôme had been given a slip of paper on which three words had been scribbled in Sinhalese, which must have meant something like “little white girl, four years old, blond, red dress.” He had nothing more official and feared above all that his daughter might be added to one of the groups of non-identified corpses that were now being cremated for fear of an epidemic.
“Finding the hospital is easy,” he joked when we arrived in the village, “just follow the flies.” Even from a distance the odor was suffocating. Coffins were coming in and out, for the dead who’d been recognized by their families. The others were loaded onto pickups, and inside, dozens were lying on the floor. A small group of Westerners had gathered in the vacant lot surrounding the main building, those who didn’t want to leave without having found the person they were looking for, dead or alive. Their clothes were in tatters, they were covered in wounds that had been hastily rubbed with a purplish disinfectant, their eyes were wide with horror.
Juliette was no longer at the hospital. The corpses of the Western victims had been transferred in the night, some to Colombo, others to Matara, that’s all they could tell us. Matara is roughly twenty-five miles from Tangalle, but no vehicles could take us there because there was no gas. In the best of cases we would have to wait until the next day. To while away the time and keep fear at bay, we wandered through the devastated village. On the beach strewn with boats we saw the ruins of the bungalow where Juliette and Osandy had died. There were still some bits of the wall on which Delphine had painted—with real talent—a fresco of palm trees and hummingbirds. Farther off we saw the old Sinhalese house that Philippe had bought two months earlier, which the family had been planning to move into in January when the work was done. With every step we took through the mud and debris, villagers stopped Philippe and gave him a big hug. Whereas just the day before he thought he’d never return to Sri Lanka, now he was already vowing he’d be back soon. He couldn’t leave them like that. They were his friends. They’d lost everything, he had to help them, the way a fisherman, seeing him wandering half-naked in the streets, had tried to help him the day before, insisting that he accept a thousand rupees—maybe a quarter of what he makes in a month. For the past twenty years Sri Lanka had been part of Philippe’s life, and in the thick of the catastrophe it was touching to hear him stress the inhabitants’ moral qualities and solidarity: “You saw the old guy in front of M.H.’s house? That’s his father-in-law, he’s from Colombo. Don’t ask me how he got here: the roads are cut off, you can’t get gas anywhere, and he was already here on the first night.”
At the Eva Lanka, the Garden of Eden was looking more and more like the Raft of the Medusa. All the foreigners who had been stranded along the coast had gathered there, both for safety in case the tsunami struck again and because there they were given food, shelter, and clothing. The Italian owners performed this task without departing from their lymphatic, icy courtesy; nevertheless such efficiency was worth far more than more exuberant demonstrations of sympathy. The staff were as respectful to the victims as they were to the paying guests. Like us unharmed by the disaster, these guests did what they could to help, with the notable exception of a group of German Swiss who were taking a course in Ayurvedic medicine, and who, dressed in loose-fitting robes and strange caps, continued to care for their bodies and souls as if nothing had happened. In the evening, when the generator was running and we could recharge our cell phones—in the rare moments when calls could get through, these were the only means of contacting careworn families, assistance services, and overworked embassies—everyone gathered around the television to take stock of the growing extent of the disaster.
With the passing hours, the increasingly frugal—although still ceremonious—meals, and the chain-smoked cigarettes, a friendship was born. We spoke of our lives, so very different: we were stressed-out Parisians, they were pleasure-loving Bordeaux residents from Saint-Émilion, fond of vintage wines, good food, and the outdoors. The children fell in love with Philippe, who never stopped joking with them. We also talked about Juliette, how she was born the day her parents got married, the four years of her life, and all of that without pathos, without lowering our voices as if we were in church. They continued to soldier on. They impressed us. We grew close to them.
At the hospital in Matara, the next day, it was worse than at the one in Tangalle. A medical examiner pulled the corpses’ entrails out by the handful, and the cold room had only six drawers, which Jérôme had opened one after the other. Juliette wasn’t there. Like everyone, Jérôme had come in with a mask over his nose and mouth, but he’d taken it off right away: “I’m a wine merchant, my nose is my tool. I’ve registered and classified that odor alongside wood violet and flint, it no longer has any effect on me.” Transformed into a machine for finding his daughter, this nonchalant joker had become a terminator. He still had one hope: a police photographer had taken shots of all the dead before they were evacuated, and the images were being shown over and over on a computer screen. Cutting through the crowd that was thronging around the monitor, Jérôme took the mouse from the policeman and clicked and clicked until the photo of two young white girls lying head to toe appeared; one of whom, like Juliette, had a Band-Aid on her leg. The next picture showed her face: blond, pretty, not yet ravaged. Jérôme insisted until a kind officer—and they were all kind, even if they weren’t all efficient—assured him that Juliette had been transferred to the police morgue in Colombo. We decided to leave for Colombo the next day; with or without a vehicle we’d find a way: nothing short of death would stop Jérôme.
That night, talking about Juliette’s repatriation with his medical assistance company, Jérôme discovered that she could only be brought back to France in a lead-lined coffin, that they wouldn’t be able to open it when it arrived because of the health risk, and that consequently they’d have to bury their daughter, instead of cremating her. This cremation meant a lot to them. “Have you ever seen a funeral with a child’s coffin?” Jérôme asked me. “I have, and I’m sure of one thing: I never want to see it again.” But it was either that or leave without Juliette. Jérôme took Delphine in his arms, something he didn’t often do. An overwhelming tenderness emanated from this couple, but they avoided tenderness the way they avoided everything that ran the risk of making them go to pieces. Softly he said that it was her decision.
No one spoke at the start of dinner. Delphine was in shock, her face blank and her chin trembling slightly. Then, after fifteen minutes, she lifted her head and said, “Juliette will stay here. She’ll be cremated here.” This decision bowled us over. The self-evidence, the lucidity, the complete lack of procrastination or regret. We were all on the verge of tears, and then in no time we all started to laugh and talk about the fantastic bottles we’d open when we came to Saint-Émilion, the rare Rolling Stones albums Philippe would play for the children, and the Ayurvedic clowns in their swimming caps who were chewing away impassively at their brown rice just a few yards away—it did us good to be a little catty, it was only human, and we had a terrible need to be human.
At the Alliance Française in Colombo we were found tickets on a plane leaving at dawn the next morning. Before that, Jérôme faced one last ordeal. He went to the morgue, alone, to see his daughter for the last time—he thought—and to order her cremation according to Buddhist rites. He came back with an impassive look on his face, told Delphine that Juliette was still beautiful, told us it wasn’t true, and knocked back a big glass of whiskey.
At this point Nigel, a chunky, jovial—and to judge by his car, wealthy—thirtysomething Sri Lankan, appeared on the scene. He asked us how we’d fared in the catastrophe. Jérôme answered naturally that they’d lost their daughter. Nigel merely said, “Sorry,” then asked just as naturally about the situation: Had we found her? Where was her body?… Jérôme explained, telling him about the cremation planned for the next morning. “It’s a good thing you’re telling me,” Nigel said. “I’ll go there myself and make sure things are done right.” We were starting to understand that when Nigel makes sure things are done right, they are. He took us to a splendid restaurant, where he announced straight off that the bill was on him, then left again, leaving us to drink, eat, smoke 850 cigarettes, and marvel at this encounter. It didn’t surprise Philippe, who remembered the thousand-rupee note he’d been given by a poor fisherman: all Sri Lankans, from the top to the bottom of the social ladder, are like that, he said. Delphine was overwhelmed but happy: what had just happened confirmed that she’d made the right decision. This ceremony, taken charge of by a complete stranger, was fate, and, in the midst of tragedy, a sort of perfect manifestation of human kindness.
Near the end of dinner Nigel came back with his wife, a beautiful neurosurgeon, whom he proudly presented to us. Then he took Jérôme and Philippe for a short walk, saying they wouldn’t be long. They went to a boutique, the most luxurious one Nigel could find, where he bought the most sumptuous girl’s dress they had. From there they went to the morgue, where they dressed Juliette and prepared her for the ceremony. Nigel assured them that by the time our plane had landed, everything would be done and the ashes transferred to Kandy, the former capital in the hills, where he would scatter them himself in the Botanical Gardens. Delphine loves gardens passionately, and in all of Sri Lanka the Botanical Gardens at Kandy are the place she loves the most. At this precise moment, when Jérôme told her that, she understood that the period of mourning had commenced, and that she could start to cry.
Published in Paris Match, January 2005
As things panned out, this Nigel, whom we had considered the very embodiment of kindness, did none of what he said he’d do. Nevertheless, Juliette was cremated, and a few weeks later her ashes were strewn by Philippe in the Botanical Gardens at Kandy.