Diary of Alina Masson—December 2004
For as long as I can remember, Myrtille has always been there.
I lived on Rue Puchot, a sixth-floor apartment with a view of the Seine, the Pont Guynemer and the towpath where we never went to play.
Myrtille lived on the Passage Tabouelle, in a little town house with a small garden. Right on the street.
I always called her Mimy.
I was Lina.
Mimy–Lina.
The inseparable duo.
We worked out that we had first encountered one another at the Feugrains Hospital in 1983. I had left the maternity ward on December seventeenth, and Mimy was born there on the fifteenth. But her mother, Louise, liked to tell us that we had really become friends at the age of thirteen months, at the playground in Puchot, coming down the slide together in single file. I have often looked at the old photographs of the two of us, with our muffs, scarves and hats, since Mimy is no longer with us.
We met up again in the same class at nursery school. I often went to play at Mimy’s house, with her and her mischievous little dog Buffo. I only found out much later that Charles had named it after a famous clown. We tormented the poor creature, we put him in the pram, we put bibs on him and gave him little pots of baby food to eat.
Mimy never came to mine. I was a little ashamed. And I didn’t have a dog.
We were like a pair of twins, that was what they said about us at Alphonse Daudet primary school. Even if we didn’t look like one another.
Louise and Charles worked very hard. Particularly on Wednesday, Saturday and during the holidays. Louise had her dance school, Charles did group tours of the museum. Sometimes we hung out in the street in Elbeuf, and most often we went to see Mimy’s grandmother, Jeanine.
She lived on Route des Roches in Orival, in a house dug into the cliff of the Seine with grottoes in the garden that we weren’t allowed to go to because of rockfalls. Jeanine made us laugh and wasn’t very strict with us. We gave her the nickname Grandma Ninja.
Sometimes we took Buffo to her house. We kept him on a lead along the Boulevard de la Plage. The boulevard has always been called that, I think. But there hasn’t been a beach on the banks of the Seine for as long as anyone can remember.
At the age of eight we went to our first summer camp together, in Bois-Plage-en-Ré, in the pines. Frédéric was already an activity leader, and Mimy thought he was incredibly handsome with his long hair, his guitar and muscular arms.
Louise and Charles ran the centre. The other kids gave Mimy hell because of it. She was the little princess, the bosses’ daughter, maybe the only one whose parents both had jobs.
Mimy and I stood shoulder to shoulder.
Mimy–Lina, for ever.
At the Bois camp, as we called it, Mimy cried a lot and didn’t want to tell her parents. We all slept together in a big dormitory. At night, Mimy sometimes wet the bed. She said as a joke that that was why the camp was called the Cloth of Gold, because of her pee-drenched sheets. I helped her. We arranged to be alone in the dormitory together and swapped mattresses. I lent her mine, and when one of our mattresses smelled too strongly of urine, we swapped it with the one belonging to the activity leader keeping watch in the corridor.
No one ever knew anything.
Our secret.
She would have killed me if I’d told anybody. I never said a word. She’s the one who died.
After middle school, we met up again at the workshops in the community centre. Fred was there too. Mimy did dance and theatre. I just did circus skills. I was quite good at the tightrope, the balance ball, the barrel, the rolla bolla, but Mimy was something else—perfect grace and harmony. Every now and then Louise would open the circus-theatre just for us and we’d walk about the round stage, dreaming. Once we found an old poster in the dressing room, a trapeze artist in a leotard, passing through a flaming hoop. His name was Rustam Trifon, and he was from a Moldavian circus. He was as beautiful as a god, fair-haired with eyes of steel. We put it up on our walls on alternate weeks. It drove us wild to have Rustam Trifon as an idol. He wasn’t a bit like Filip Nikolic in 2B. We sang “What’s Up” by 4 Non Blondes as we dreamed of travelling the byways of Transnistria . . . That was where Rustam lived.
Our first camp as activity leaders in Bois-Plage-en-Ré was in 2001. Fredéric was the director, and Mimy still found him as handsome as ever, even with his hair cut very short and playing a ukulele. It was still the same kids from Elbeuf, or their cousins, their little brothers, perhaps even their children. Mimy and I thought it was hilarious when we got them up at night to go to the toilet, checking that their mattresses or pyjamas were dry.
We spent our wages on a trip to the Vieilles Charrues Festival the following year, and we saw the Blues Brothers. So close we could almost have touched them. We chatted up the Breton volunteers. They were gorgeous! One evening, Mimy went out with the one she said was the nicest of the lot, the one who cleaned the toilets.
Mimy was like that.
When we came back, after a fortnight in Finistère, Buffo was dead. On St. Anne’s day. He had just fallen asleep among the rose bushes, one afternoon when it was very hot. Charles buried him there, he dug a hole underneath him without even moving his body. Since then, every time I’ve called in on Charles and Louise at Impasse Tabouelle, I’ve never been able to look at the flowers without thinking of Buffo.
I think he’d have liked to be reincarnated as a rose.
In 2003, the camp left the Île de Ré for Normandy, because of funding cuts. We were also recruiting more teenagers. One evening in September, Mimy found a little lost puppy behind McDonald’s in Caudebec-lès-Elbeuf. She called him Ronald, which was a bit of a stupid name, but it was the first clown’s name she could think of. She carried him in her arms to Charles and Louise. That was a way of telling her parents that she wouldn’t be there so much from now on. She had gone out with Fredéric during the camp. It was sort of obvious, even if he was nineteen years older than she was.
We all expected it, to tell you the truth. We even thought they’d been pretty lucky to find one another. The next spring Mimy asked me if I wanted to be maid of honour at her wedding. She wanted it all to happen very quickly. The wedding was scheduled for October 4th in Orival, in the church on the banks of the Seine that was dug out of the cliff, as solid as her love, she said. Mimy was more romantic than me, and more Catholic too, more white-dress, more poems, more Prince Charming.
I said yes. I also said I’d give her a hard time beforehand. That I was going to imagine the most mega-crazy events to celebrate the funeral of her time as a girl. In fact, I had planned for us both to go travelling after the camp in Isigny, for a month, to the other end of Europe, backpack and hitch-hiking, perhaps all the way to Transnistria . . .
Mimy left me on August 26th, 2004.
Without even saying goodbye.
It was her day off, and she’d never been further than the Chemin des Grandes Carrières, eight hundred metres from the camp in Isigny.
I was one of the first, with a police officer on either side, to discover her blue neck, her stripped body under its torn dress, her wide eyes staring at the sky.
I was the one who told Charles and Louise. And they told Fredéric.
I ran through every minute of my life before calling them, at breakneck speed, the playground in Puchot, Buffo, the circus, Rustam Trifon, Grandma Ninja’s grottoes . . .
I couldn’t imagine spending the rest of my life without Mimy.
Charles, Louise, Fredéric, and I wanted to know the truth.
But we didn’t fit in with Carmen Avril and her Fil Rouge “Never Forget” association. Still, it was an opportunity to spend time talking to Océane, Morgane’s sister. We were almost the same age, and we’d both lost the person dearest to us in the whole world.
Murdered by the same individual.
Twins of sorrow.
And yet we didn’t understand each other. Not really. Like her mother, Océane was fuelled by hatred. Océane dreamed of finding her sister’s murderer to kill her with her own bare hands. I think I might have been capable of going and visiting him every day in prison to tell him every detail of Mimy’s life, to show him who she was, to make him regret his actions, so that he would love her and beg for her forgiveness.
Charles and Louise realised that we would never discover the truth about the death of their only daughter after number one suspect Olivier Roy was identified.
And then cleared.
Commander Léo Bastinet informed them of the fact. Case closed . . . Barring any unexpected events. They left the Fil Rouge in 2005. It was their choice. They insisted that Fredéric and I should go on putting our energy into it.
Never forget.
At the time we didn’t understand why.
Louise waited until December 2007, until the inauguration of the Elbeuf circus-theatre after ten years of renovation. Charles and Louise invited a number of major international artists for the occasion.
Rustam Trifon was one of them. He was fifty-three. His poster was still pinned above Mimy’s bed. He agreed to come to Impasse Tabouelle, and went up to her room, climbing the stairs with the grace of an angel. Then I asked him to pick a rose from the garden, and he went and put it on Mimy’s grave, in the Saint-Étienne cemetery. He looked very moved.
It was a sad and beautiful moment.
In the evening we stayed in the arena, Charles, Louise, and I.
“Mimy would have loved it,” I said, looking at the huge velvet curtain beneath the rows of spotlights.
Charles and Louise didn’t reply. Perhaps they thought Mimy could see everything from there. Hear everything. pick up the same emotions. Perhaps not. Since Mimy’s death, they had rather lost sight of God.
We parted like that.
And I regretted, at the time, not mentioning my doubts.
The next day, Charles and Louise set off for the Île de Ré. The campsite where we used to go at Bois-Plage-en-Ré had been sold almost ten years before to make way for a new improved one. A luxury affair with a pool and tennis courts, where no child from Elbeuf would ever set foot. At about ten to seven in the evening, just before it closed, they went to the top of the lighthouse, the Phare des Baleines. Fifty-seven metres. Two hundred and fifty-seven steps. A cold wind was blowing from the Atlantic, they were on their own.
Hand in hand, they climbed the concrete balustrade and threw themselves into the void.
Afterwards, I often went to see Grandma Ninja on Route des Roches. She was the only survivor of my real family. We talked about it a lot. In the end I confessed what was weighing down my heart. She reassured me. I had been right not to say anything to Charles and Louise. It was better for them to have gone like that, convinced that Mimy had been murdered at random. With no one to accuse but fate. But she also gave me to understand that everything would gnaw away at me. That I had to get rid of it.
“How, Jeanine? How do I do that?”
“By telling the police everything. Even if it means re-opening the worst old scars.”
And then I thought of that poem Mimy had written.
The last lines.
I will build a fortress around us
And I will defend it
M2O
Mimy would never have been able to write that.
I missed Mimy so much.