Nicolas slept well, and the next day was a perfectly happy one. In the morning, Patrick came into the office and, with the complicitous grin of a fellow king of the road, told him that he’d been monopolizing the teacher long enough: with all the snow that had fallen, there was no question of her missing any more skiing, and since they weren’t going to leave him alone in the chalet, he’d be coming along too. Nicolas was afraid he would have to go skiing and tried to protest that he didn’t feel well, but Patrick had already begun getting him dressed by adding several layers of warm clothing on top of his pajamas, an outfit that made him look, exclaimed Patrick gleefully, like the Michelin tire man. Announcing, ‘Last layer!’ he plopped the pudgy figure down on the bed and swaddled it in the blanket. When he finally picked up the bundle, only Nicolas’s eyes could be seen. Thus burdened, Patrick went downstairs and made a grand entrance into the main room, where breakfast had been cleared away and the children were getting ready to leave. ‘Here’s a bag of dirty laundry!’ joked Patrick, and Marie-Ange burst out laughing. The others crowded around them. In Patrick’s arms, Nicolas felt as though he had climbed a tree to escape a pack of wolves. They could growl, slaver, claw the trunk all they liked – he was safe on the highest branch. He noticed that Hodkann was not among the encircling wolves but off on one side, reading, without seeming at all interested in what was happening. They had not spoken to each other for two days.
In the bus, Patrick arranged a kind of bed for him from two seats and a big pillow. Marie-Ange said that he was a real pasha and that Patrick was going to spoil him rotten if this kept up. Behind Nicolas, the others snickered a bit, but he pretended not to hear.
‘And now, off to the bistro!’ said Patrick when they’d arrived in the village. He picked Nicolas up again, still wrapped in his blanket, and carried him to the village café, which was at the foot of the ski slopes. Chatting with the café owner, a big man with a mustache, Patrick installed Nicolas comfortably on a banquette near the window, which overlooked – through a balcony with wooden balusters carved in the shape of fir trees – the modest hill where beginners had their lessons. The children were already putting on their skis and waving their poles around, and Marie-Ange and the teacher seemed overwhelmed. Nicolas was glad to have escaped all that. Patrick gave him a bunch of old comic books (not very interesting, but something to do) and asked what the gentleman would like to drink.
‘Give him a mug of mulled wine,’ chuckled the owner. ‘That’ll get him back on his feet in a hurry!’
Patrick ordered Nicolas a hot chocolate, ruffled his hair, and went outside, passing in front of the window to rejoin the group. They all turned toward him confidently, as though he alone could solve every problem – defective bindings, lost gloves, incorrectly buckled boots – and always with a joke and a smile.
Nicolas stayed in the café for the three hours the skiing lesson lasted. He was the only one there, aside from the owner, who readied the tables for lunch without paying him the slightest attention. Nicolas felt fine propped against his pillow, swathed in his blanket like a mummy. He had never felt so fine in his life. He hoped that his fever would last long enough so that everything would stay the same the next day, and the day after that, and all the other days of ski school. How many more were there? He’d already spent three days in the chalet, so there must be ten left. Ten days of being sick, excused from everything, carried around in blankets by Patrick – it would be marvelous. He wondered how he could prolong his fever, which he could feel letting up already. His ears weren’t buzzing anymore, and he had to make a real effort to shiver. Now and then he groaned weakly, as though he’d half fainted and were once again beyond the control of his conscious mind. Perhaps, now that he was supposed to be a sleepwalker, he might be able to go outside at night again, to stretch out his illness and keep everyone worried about him.
The business about sleepwalking had been a lucky thing for him. He’d been afraid of reproaches, but thanks to this explanation, no one had blamed him for anything or even expected anything of him. He was more to be pitied, actually. He was suffering from a mysterious illness: they didn’t know when it might strike again or how to prevent it. Yes, it was really a lucky thing. The teacher would convince his parents in spite of their misgivings. Nicolas walks in his sleep, they’d whisper at home. Of course, they wouldn’t say it in front of him; when a child is seriously ill, no one talks about it in front of him. How serious was it, being a sleepwalker? The benefits were clear, but were there any real drawbacks? He’d heard people say that it was extremely dangerous to awaken someone who was sleepwalking. But how was it dangerous? For whom? What could happen? Was there a risk the sleepwalker might die or else go crazy, try to strangle whoever had awakened him? If he did something bad – really awful – during a fit, would it be his fault? Certainly not. Another advantage of sleepwalking was how hard it was to expose a faker. To claim you have the flu, you have to have a fever, which can be checked, whereas if Nicolas were to start walking around every night with a vacant stare and his hands held out in front of him, people might suspect that he was pretending in order to make himself interesting or to have an excuse for doing forbidden things, but they could not accuse him of faking if there was the slightest doubt about it. Unless, of course, there were some special ways of finding out. Somewhat uneasily, Nicolas imagined his father opening the trunk of his car to produce a device with dials and needles, a helmet he would strap onto Nicolas’s head, something that would prove irrefutably, if Nicolas got out of bed at night, that he was completely conscious, that he was responsible for his actions and was trying to fool everyone around him.
Ever since Nicolas had fallen ill, there had been no more mention of his father. The first day, they had expected him to return or at least to telephone. That seemed to go without saying, for they assumed he would open his trunk and find the bag there. But as he’d given no sign of life, they’d simply stopped counting on him and wondering when he would arrive. If this silence had meant he’d had an accident, as Nicolas had thought, they would have discovered him by the roadside during the last three days. His mother would have been informed, and therefore he’d have found out too. Even if it had been decided to put off telling him, he would definitely have sensed from the way people were acting that something serious had happened. But no. It was curious, this mystery – plus the fact that everyone had so quickly lost interest in it, no longer seemed to notice it. Even Nicolas, at a loss for explanations, had stopped puzzling over it. He hoped only that his father would not return, that ski school would continue the way it was, with every day like this one, and that his fever would last and last. He looked outside, through the fogged-up window and the carved fir trees. On the beginners’ slope, Patrick had lined up poles for the children to zigzag around. Some could ski already, and they teased those who couldn’t. Maxime Ribotton came down the hill on his backside. Nicolas was warm. He closed his eyes. He felt comfy.