June 1996—I’d been visiting Sasha every other Sunday for six months. I’d just left him, still had soil under my fingernails. I put their address on my dashboard. A place known as La Biche aux Chailles, just past Mâcon. I drove for about half an hour, got lost in the small roads, kept going forward, kept reversing, cried with rage. I finally found it. A small house covered in roughcast that was shabby and grubby, stuck between two others that were bigger and more imposing. It looked like a poor little girl between her two parents dressed in their finest.
Both of their names were on the letterbox that hung on the door: “G. Magnan. A. Fontanel.”
My heart started racing. I felt nauseous.
It was already late. I thought about how I’d have to drive at night to get back to Malgrange, and how I hated doing that. With my stomach churning, I knocked several times. I must have knocked hard. I hurt my fingers. I saw the soil under my fingernails. My skin was dry.
It was she who opened the door. I didn’t instantly make the link between the woman standing before me and the one posing in a ridiculous hat at a wedding, in the photo Sasha had slipped in the envelope. She had seriously aged and put on weight since that photo had been taken. In the picture, she was badly made-up, but she was made-up. In this late-afternoon light, her skin was marked by the years. She had purplish shadows under her eyes and red blotches down her cheeks.
“Hello, I’m Violette Toussaint. I’m the mother of Léonine. Léonine Toussaint.”
Saying the first name and surname of my daughter in front of this woman chilled my blood. I thought: She probably served Léo her last meal. I thought, for the thousandth time: How could I have let my seven-year-old daughter go to that place?
Geneviève Magnan didn’t respond. She remained stony-faced and let me go on without opening her mouth. Everything about her was double-locked. No smile, no expression, just her sticky, bloodshot eyes staring at me.
“I would like to know what you saw on that night, the night of the fire.”
“What for?”
Her question astounded me. And without thinking, I replied:
“I don’t believe that, at seven years old, my daughter went into a kitchen to heat herself some milk.”
“Should have said that at the trial, then.”
I felt my legs shaking.
“And you, Madame Magnan, what did you say at the trial?”
“I had nothing to say.”
She whispered goodbye to me and slammed the door in my face. I believe I remained like that for a long while, breath taken away, in front of her door, looking at the flaking paint and their names written on some plastic tape: “G. Magnan. A. Fontanel.”
I got back into Stéphanie’s Fiat Panda. My hands were still shaking. I had sensed, when speaking to Swan Letellier, that something wasn’t clear about the sequence of events on that night, and my “meeting” with Geneviève Magnan had merely confirmed it. Why did these people all seem so elusive? Was it me who was imagining things? Was I going crazy? Even more crazy?
During the return journey, I went from lightness to darkness. I thought of Sasha, and of the staff at the château of Notre-Dame-des-Prés. I decided that, next time, the Sunday after next, I would go to the château. I had never felt strong enough to go past it. And yet it was only five kilometers from the Brancion cemetery. And I would return to the home of Magnan and Fontanel, and I would kick their door until they finally spoke.
I arrived outside my house at 22:37. I just had enough time to park before lowering the barrier for the 22:40 train. When I opened the door, I saw Philippe Toussaint, who had dropped off on the sofa. I looked at him without waking him, thinking that I had loved him, a long time ago. That if I’d been eighteen with short hair, I would have thrown myself on him, saying: “Shall we make love?” But I was eleven years older and my hair had grown longer.
I went to lie down on my bed. I closed my eyes without finding sleep. Philippe Toussaint came and slid into the bed in the middle of the night. He grumbled, “So, you’re back.” I thought: Lucky I am, or who would have lowered the barrier for the 22:40? I pretended to sleep, not to hear him. I sensed that he was sniffing me, that he was seeking the smell of someone else in my hair. The only smell he must have found was the air freshener from the Fiat Panda. He was soon snoring.
I thought of a story about seeds that Sasha had told me. He had tried to plant melons in his vegetable garden, they had never grown. He had tried two years in a row, nothing doing, the melons refused to grow. The following year, he had thrown the rest of the melon seeds to the birds. Further away, at the back of the vegetable garden, where there were piles of pots, rakes, watering cans, and planters. One of those birds, carelessly or mischievously, must have carried one of the seeds in its beak and dropped it in the middle of a path in the garden. A few months later, a fine plant had grown, and Sasha hadn’t pulled it up, just walked around it. It had produced two beautiful melons. Nice and plump, nice and sweet. And every year, it had again produced one, two, three, four, five. Sasha had said to me, “You see, they’re melons from heaven, that’s what nature is all about, it’s she who decides.”
I fell asleep on those words.
I dreamt of a memory. I was taking Léonine to school. It was the first day of term at primary school. We were walking along the corridors. Her hand in mine. Then she had let mine go because she was “a big girl now.”
I woke up screaming:
“I know her! I’ve seen her before!”
Philippe Toussaint switched the bedside lamp on.
“What? What’s up?”
He rubbed his eyes, looked at me as if I were possessed.
“I know her! She worked at the school. Not in Léonine’s class, in the one next door.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“I saw her. After the cemetery, I stopped by at Geneviève Magnan’s.”
Philippe Toussaint looked horrified.
“What?”
I looked down.
“I need to understand. To meet the people who were at the château of Notre-Dame-des-Prés that night.”
He got up, walked around the bed, grabbed me by the collar, and, choking me, yanked me right up and started screaming:
“You’re beginning to seriously piss me off! Carry on, and I’ll get you locked up. Do you hear me? And I warn you, you’re not going back there! Do you hear me? NEVER set foot over there, ever again!”
Over the years, he had let me sink into a bottomless solitude, a black pit. I could just as well have been someone else, got myself replaced, employed a temp to lower and raise the barrier, do the shopping, make lunch and supper, wash his clothes, and sleep on the left side of the bed, he wouldn’t have cared, wouldn’t have noticed.
Never had he knocked me about or threatened me. By doing that, he brought me to my senses. I became myself again.
* * *
The following morning, I went to Stephanie’s to return the keys to the Panda. On Mondays, the Casino was closed. She lived alone on Grand-Rue, on the first floor of a house. She made me come in and poured me some coffee in a ceramic goblet. She was wearing a long T-shirt with Claudia Schiffer on it, and said, “Monday, at home, it’s cleaning day.” It seemed odd to me, seeing her head above that supermodel’s, but it’s her head that moved me to tears, her friendly round face, her lovely rosy cheeks, her tow-colored hair.
“I filled her up for you.”
“Oh, well, thanks a lot.”
“Looks like it’s going to be nice today.”
“Oh, well, yes.”
“It’s good, your coffee . . . My husband doesn’t want me to go to Brancion cemetery anymore.”
“Oh, right, well, hold on, hey. It’s for going to see your kid, after all, isn’t it.”
“Yes, I know. In any case, thanks for everything.”
“Oh, well, it’s nothing, hey.”
“Yes, Stéphanie, it’s everything.”
I clasped her in my arms. She didn’t dare move. As if no one had ever shown her the slightest sign of affection. Her eyes and mouth became even rounder than normal. Three flying saucers. Stéphanie would remain forever an enigma, the Martian of the Casino. I abandoned her there, arms dangling, in the middle of her sitting room.
Next, I went back along Grand-Rue, heading for the primary school. Like in Dave’s song, “Swann’s Way,” I took the same route backwards. The one I took every morning with Léo. In her satchel, the Tupperware box took up more space than her textbooks and exercise books. I was obsessive about making her lavish packed snacks, so she never went without. Because I still had that emptiness the foster families had left me with. When we’d go on a school trip, and the others would have chips, bars of chocolate, sandwiches made with farmhouse bread, sweets, and fizzy drinks in their knapsacks. Me, it’s not that I went without, but there were no treats in my plastic bag. “Girls in care are happy with very little.” It wasn’t the fact of having less that upset me, it was not being able to share my frugal lunch. Having just enough. I wanted to give Léonine the chance to share with the others.
It wasn’t the children that disturbed me as I entered the covered playground, but the smells, from the canteen, a building adjoining the school, and the bustling corridors. It was lunchtime. I used to collect Léonine at lunchtime. And she often said to me, “You see, Mommy, the canteen doesn’t smell very nice, I’m glad I go home.”
On the pain scale, if such a shit scale exists, going into Léonine’s school was harder than going into the cemetery. In Brancion, my daughter was dead among the dead. Inside her school, she was dead among the living.
The children who had been Léonine’s friends were no longer there. They had just started middle school. I would have found seeing them unbearable, recognizing them without really recognizing them. The same figures, with “life” as an added option. Gangly, less baby-faced, mouths full of metal, feet in giants’ trainers.
With pockets empty, I made my way along the corridors. I thought how Léonine wouldn’t have wanted me to hold her hand anymore on the way to her classroom. A mom had told me that once they went to middle school, you lost a little bit more of them every year. Yes, and when they went to a holiday camp, you could lose them all in one go.
Léonine called her primary-school teacher “Mademoiselle Claire.” When gentle Claire Berthier, bent over some exercise books, looked up and saw me coming into the classroom, she turned pale. We hadn’t seen each other since my daughter’s disappearance. My presence made her feel awkward, she clearly wished that the ground would swallow her up.
The death of a child is a strain on grown-ups, adults, other people, neighbors, storekeepers. They avert their eyes, avoid you, change sidewalks. When a child dies, for many people, the parents die, too.
We exchanged polite greetings. I didn’t give her a chance to say anything. I immediately took out the photo of Geneviève Magnan, the one of her in the ridiculous hat.
“Do you know her?”
Surprised by my question, the teacher frowned and stared at the photo, replying that it didn’t ring any bells. I persisted:
“I think she worked here.”
“Here? You mean at the school?”
“Yes, in a neighboring class.”
Claire Berthier turned her lovely green eyes back to the photo and studied Geneviève Magnan’s face for longer.
“Ah . . . I think I remember, she was in Madame Piolet’s class, with the large nursery groups . . . She arrived in the middle of the year. Didn’t stay very long here.”
“Thank you.”
“Why are you showing me this photo? Are you looking for this lady?”
“No, no, I know where she lives.”
Claire smiled at me the way one smiles at a madwoman, a sick woman, a widow, an orphan, an alcoholic, an idiot, a mother-who’s-lost-her-child.
“Goodbye, and thank you.”