There was no skiing lesson. They drove back to the chalet and tried to get through the rest of the day. Probably a time would come when they could return to normal life, think about something else, but each of them sensed that that moment was still far in the future and would not arrive during ski school. There was nothing they could do, however, except wait for it. As playing was out of the question, the teacher decided to assemble the class for a dictation exercise, followed by arithmetic problems. Since some time still remained before lunch and they were all expected to write at least one letter to their parents during their stay, she suggested that they set to it. But after passing out a few sheets of blank paper, she changed her mind. ‘No,’ she murmured, shaking her head. ‘It’s not the right time.’ Standing in the middle of the room clutching the packet of paper so fiercely that her knuckles turned white, she looked exhausted.
Hodkann chuckled nastily and called out, ‘Let’s write a composition, then. About our happiest memory of ski school …’
‘Enough, Hodkann!’ exclaimed the teacher, and then she almost shouted it, ‘Enough!’
Hodkann was the only one of the children bold enough to speak, reflected Nicolas. It was as if the fact that he had lost his father had given him that right. Later, during lunch, when even the clatter of cutlery seemed muffled in cotton, Nicolas asked Patrick if they’d found René near the chalet. Patrick hesitated, then said no, he’d been found over a hundred miles away.
‘That means one thing, at least,’ he added, ‘which is’ – he hesitated again – ‘that the murderer isn’t in this area anymore.’
‘It also means,’ continued the teacher, ‘that there’s no reason to be afraid. It’s terrible, it’s awful, but it’s over. You’re not in any danger here.’
Her voice broke on the last word; the tendons of her neck stuck out like taut strings. She looked around at the children sitting at their lunch, as though defying them to challenge this reassurance.
‘But he must have been killed here,’ insisted Hodkann. ‘He didn’t travel a hundred miles on his own.’
‘Listen, Hodkann,’ said the teacher, in a pleading tone edged with a kind of hatred, ‘I’d like us to stop talking about this. It happened, there’s nothing we can do about it, we can’t change a thing. I’m truly sorry that at your age you all should have had to cope with something like this, but we must stop talking about it. Simply stop. All right?’
Hodkann merely nodded, and the meal continued in silence. Afterward, some of the boys began to read or draw, while others gathered for a game of Authors. Those who wished to play hide-and-seek were told to stay indoors and under no circumstances to go outside.
‘I thought we weren’t in danger anymore,’ remarked Hodkann flippantly.
‘That’s enough, Hodkann!’ yelled the teacher. ‘I asked you to be quiet, so if you can’t manage that, go upstairs to your room, by yourself, and I don’t want to see you again before supper!’
Hodkann went upstairs without arguing. Nicolas would have liked to go with him, so they could talk, but the teacher would never have allowed that, and besides, Nicolas wanted to avoid drawing attention to a compromising complicity between the two of them. At the moment, each was better off looking out for himself. Nicolas stayed in a corner, pretending to read a magazine. Whenever he turned a page, he thought he heard the flier crinkle in the pocket of his jacket, which he was still wearing on the pretext of feeling cold. Bundled up like that, he seemed to be waiting to be called away, never to return again. The little boy’s body, lying broken on the snow, floated before his eyes. But perhaps there hadn’t been any snow where he’d been found. Had the murderer killed him there or here? Even if the killer had won his trust with presents or promises, which was how they operated, these bad men Nicolas’s parents had always warned him about, it was hardly likely that René would have let himself be driven so far away without protest. Living or dead, he must have made the journey in the trunk, and it was even worse to think that he’d still been alive. Shut up in the dark, not knowing where he was being taken.
Nicolas’s father had once told him one of those hospital stories he brought back from his trips. A small boy was to have had a minor operation, but the anesthetist had made a mistake, and the child had been left permanently blind, deaf, mute, and paralyzed. He must have come to in utter blackness. Hearing nothing, seeing nothing, feeling nothing with his fingertips. Buried in a slab of endless night. With no idea that people were hovering desperately around him. In a world that was close by but cut off forever from his own, the doctors and his parents peered in distress at his pasty face, not knowing if there was anyone behind those half-closed eyes who could feel and understand things. At first he must have thought that he’d been blindfolded, perhaps put in a body cast, that he was in a dark, quiet room, but that eventually someone would come to turn on the light, set him free. He must have trusted his parents to get him out of there. Time passed, though, impossible to measure, minutes or hours or days in silence and darkness. The child shrieked and couldn’t even hear his own cry. At the core of this slow, unspeakable panic, his brain struggled to find the explanation. Buried alive? But he didn’t even have an arm anymore to stretch out toward the coffin lid above him. Did he ever suspect the truth? And René, tied up in the trunk, did he guess what was happening? He felt the bumps in the road, he pitched around, bruising himself on the corner of a suitcase, touching an old blanket with his fingers. In his mind’s eye, did he see the silhouette of the driver behind the wheel? Did he imagine that moment when, having parked in some isolated spot in the woods, the driver would get out, slam the car door, walk around to the trunk, open it? First a thin streak of light, which grows wider; a man’s face bends over him, and then René knows with absolute certainty that the worst is about to begin and that nothing can save him. He remembers his happy childhood, the parents who loved him, his pals, the present the tooth fairy brought him when his front tooth fell out, and he understands that this life ends right there, with this atrocious reality that is more real than all that has come before. Everything that has already happened is only a dream, and here is the awakening, that cramped space in which he lies bound, the click of the key in the lock of the trunk, the glimmer of light revealing the face of the man who will kill him. That instant is his life, the sole reality of his life, and there is nothing left but screaming, screaming with all his might, a scream that no one will ever hear.