Gérard Marchal Was not sick.
He might be losing his marbles a little bit, but—whatever the doctors or his son said—he was not sick.
Obviously, at seventy-three, he was no longer able to recite La Fontaine’s fables at the drop of a hat. Although he could probably still do a better job of it than most of today’s kids. Back in his time, they didn’t spend years at university but at least they knew how to read, write, and count correctly. Everything was in decline now, from spelling to morals. And his high school certificate was worth at least as much as the baccalaureates they were handing out these days.
No, Gérard wasn’t sick. He was just a bit tired.
That December morning in particular, as he drank his coffee in the kitchen, he felt desperately weary. He had worked so hard, all his life. A certain fatigue was natural. And his father’s memory hadn’t been great either. He was always losing stuff, could never remember his sons’ birthdays. Gérard smiled as he thought about this. That was another age. Men didn’t always bother back then. Those memories were still so clear. His father’s face, his mustache and pale eyes. And his mother. The word maman popped into his head and he was surprised by the emotion he felt. This was happening to him more and more. His day-to-day memory might be failing, but the old memories were more solid than ever. He saw again the playground at the school in Champbeauvert and his friends—Bino, Hubert Lebon, big Monce, and that poor, nervous wreck Robert Spinerni. Once, tidying up the benches in the church, Spinerni managed to get stuck inside, and no one had ever managed to figure out how.
The old man stood up to take his cup to the dishwasher, and the cat surreptitiously rubbed itself between his legs. He stroked the animal’s neck before glancing through the window. Outside, the grass was covered with a thin layer of frost. The unchanging trees lined the road just as they always used to. Again, he saw Christophe skating on the frozen pond, and this thought made him smile. His face was bathed in the pale morning sunlight, and the images inside him purred like a wood-burning stove.
He walked upstairs, his old slippers slapping against the steps, and went to the bathroom to shave. He was careful not to leave any hairs at the base of his nose or at the corners of his jaw, as he sometimes did. In the mirror, he no longer really recognized himself. The spreading baldness, the yellowish tinge to his skin, and that thinness, so strange for someone who had always been a little round, even kind of flabby as he approached fifty. Sylvie had put him on a diet then, which pissed him off. He’d been given nothing to eat but beans, not even a potato or a scrap of meat. Nowadays, Christophe worried about his appetite. You must be skipping meals, he said, otherwise this makes no sense. His son had even made him stand on the bathroom scales to check. What a pain in the ass it all was.
In his bedroom, the old man hesitated for a moment in front of his open closet. There were clothes in there that he hardly ever wore anymore, the nicest ones of course: that old habit of putting on your Sunday best for important occasions. But there weren’t many occasions anymore, apart from hunting, and when the kid came to visit.
And he didn’t come to visit anymore.
He got dressed as he did every day, in jeans, a T-shirt, and his big sweater, pulling the sleeves up to his elbows. Before heading back downstairs, he went into Gabriel’s room. It was all still so fresh. His mother had taken him away two days earlier. Gérard hadn’t said anything, but since then it had kept churning constantly inside his head. That day, the little boy had hugged him tightly, his head against Grandpa’s stomach. He had stroked the boy’s hair, so fine and soft, with his old man’s hands. He’d been tense as a bowstring ever since.
Back on the first floor, he put on his walking shoes, a jacket, and a red, white, and blue wool hat, which he pulled down to cover his ears. Then he went to the garage, where he spent a moment contemplating the two rifles chained to the gun rack. There was a Browning semiautomatic and his wonderfully balanced and robust Sauer 404, which he’d bought for peanuts at auction. At one point he’d had as many as seven guns in different calibers, for hunting ducks as well as big game. Over the years, though, he’d had to sell them all. His son had found buyers for him on the internet. But he was determined to keep at least one rifle at home.
Because one thing was sure: in this life, you had to stand up for yourself.
He remembered how, as a kid, other boys from the Bellevue neighborhood would constantly pick fights with him. One day, Hubert Lebon caught one of them and beat him with a plank. The boys stopped coming after that.
Back then, Gérard and his friends used to all carry a steel ball that sat in a square leather pouch sewn to the end of a long hemp strap. They would swing this sling over their heads at every opportunity, outside the apartment buildings where their many families lived after the war, pretending to threaten people for a laugh but ready to use those weapons if anyone really messed with them. He had often imagined the damage that sort of homemade weapon might cause. He was sure he could have killed someone with it.
He noticed then that the cat had followed him into the garage, so he picked it up by the scruff of its neck to take it back to the house. The cat wasn’t getting any younger either. It was better off staying in the warm. After that he left his rifles where they were and went out. The morning air stung his nose. It was going to be a beautiful winter day, he could tell, clean as a whistle. The temperature had dropped to twenty degrees overnight and the whole landscape was crisp and stiff with cold.
As he approached his van, he noticed a new dent on the sliding door. He stroked it with his fingertips to make sure it was real. The metal was freezing, the damage irrefutable. He had been finding new dents and scratches on a regular basis for some time now, all of them inexplicable. He’d already had to change a bumper and a bent wheel rim. Obviously someone had it in for him—what other explanation was there? He was always careful when he went to Leclerc to park away from the other cars, even if it meant having to walk farther, because those big parking lots were full of idiots and bad drivers, people who didn’t care about anyone else. Normally, the discovery of a dent like that would throw him into a rage and he would spend hours fantasizing about retaliations and radical political measures. Because it was undeniable that most of his problems were caused by the general decline in standards: laziness and selfishness were turning the French into dangerous savages. Someone needed to bring some order back to this shithole. For too long, people had been allowed to get away with anything. Civil war seemed possible now. He had sensed it coming long before everyone else, alerted by the early warning signs of his impecunious tenants. But this time, the damaged bodywork inspired only a snotty sniffle and he got behind the wheel without giving it another thought. He had other, more serious things on his mind.
On the brief, narrow stretch of road that led to the center of Cornécourt, he didn’t see another living soul. High-voltage lines swung over the road at one point, but other than that it was the same impassive procession of bungalows and traffic circles, a barracks, and the fishing store that was not yet open. A Saturday morning so peaceful it could almost have been declared dead.
Yet when he thought about it, the events had occurred at a dizzying speed. Unless certain facts had been lost in the fog. Gérard would sometimes lose whole days, the way other men might lose their wallet or their keys. Christophe would mention a discussion they’d had, and of course he would nod along, but in reality he had no idea what his son was talking about. Sometimes he would find receipts in his pockets for exorbitant amounts and would have no recollection of spending that money. A hundred fifty euros at Bricorama for paint and light bulbs. What paint? What light bulbs? Or he would receive a pair of flannel pajamas through the mail that he had never ordered. He would open a cupboard upstairs to put away the new pack of toilet paper he’d bought, and the cupboard would already be full. His world was full of gaps, his weeks bristling with surprises and unanswered questions. He had to constantly improvise replies and invent explanations. Because he knew perfectly well that they were just waiting for him to make a mistake so they could send him to the hospital or, worse, to one of those retirement homes that smell of bleach where old people are sent to die. He had to be wary of people he knew and of strangers, had to be constantly on the alert, forever plugging holes in his leaky boat.
Except when it came to the kid.
Gabriel didn’t judge him. From time to time, he would say “Poor Grandpa” because someone had explained to him that his grandfather wasn’t well, but other than that he continued to regard him in the same way he always had. He did not doubt what the old man told him. When he gave his hand to his grandfather, the trust was palpable, and Gérard would rather have jumped in front of a train than let go of the boy’s hand. They went to the woods together for long walks. The grandfather went to fetch him from school and gave him pain au chocolat and sour candy. It wasn’t good for his teeth, but it made the kid happy and that was what mattered. They watched a lot of TV together too, those weird cartoons that kids liked these days, with stupid rabbits and superheroes in pajamas. Often, the old man would fall asleep beside the boy, and those were always his best naps.
It had been easy, being a grandfather. With his own kids, it had taken him longer to get used to it. He remembered being at the hospital when Julien was born, that round little red-skinned body, the frog-like face…It was obvious the fetus had spent months floating in liquid, and even though it was his kid, his own blood, Gérard had felt a detachment, a disturbance, a sense of duty mixed with something close to repulsion. Of course, the connections had been forged over time, at least until adolescence, when, once again, he had become a spectator, vaguely disgusted by the mutations taking place before his eyes. To put it mildly, he had not liked what his elder son became, the way he spoke and moved, like a little thug, like one of those Arabs from the Vierge neighborhood that he hung out with; he hadn’t liked his son’s unkempt appearance, his sweatpants and denim jacket, the blasé look in his red-rimmed eyes. Sylvie told him it was just a phase. But the phase had lasted a long time, and they had never fully reconciled. Then one day Julien had packed his bags and rented a studio apartment in town, when he was in technical college, without asking for money or anything. He’ll be back, tail between his legs, Gérard had thought. His son had never set foot in the house again.
With Christophe, it was different. That boy had never been as much trouble as his brother. And hockey had given him an outlet. If only he hadn’t fallen for that girl, who—twenty years later—would bring them such misery.
When Gabriel was born, Gérard, although healthy, was living an old man’s life in his big empty house, with nothing to distract him but hunting, his garden, a subscription to a news magazine, an ever-narrowing field of obsessions, and a sort of vague pain at still being there. Not to mention the feeling that other people were forever in his face, too noisy, always at odds with him, almost like another species. The birth of his grandson had been like a window opening. All he had to do was watch him crawl around or cover his face with mashed potato to realize that everything was worth it, that joy was still possible.
Soon Gérard Arrived in the center of Cornécourt and, at the traffic circle between the mayor’s office and the old vicarage, everything grew blurry again. No longer sure what he was doing there, he drove around it twice before heading toward the new residential zone that they’d built beside the factory, just past the tennis courts.
Some people called this place Turkishland, although it wasn’t clear if the nickname was linked to the origin of certain residents or to the nationality of the construction workers. Whatever, the subdivision had spread like an outbreak of hives, starting from nothing and soon covering acres of land. Most of the houses were modest and single-story, but some were enormous, with a tower and antique statues on the lawn, and they all lay in neat rows along streets with incongruous names. In spring, houses beribboned with wisteria and sagging under the weight of rhododendrons would compete in unlikely gardening contests that were always won by the same people. In summer, aboveground pools brought trouble and happiness. In the evenings, the smell of grilling meat would rise in tribute to the nostrils of indifferent gods, and in every garage you could find a lawn mower and a Ping-Pong table.
But the one thing that everyone there shared was a gnawing rage over border disputes.
For, here as elsewhere, freedom was marked out by boundaries. Hence the obligatory portcullises, thuja hedges, metal railings, rows of bamboo, and lovingly stained fences. Each property, in setting its own perimeter, created an outside and an inside, spaces between which the border was never completely sealed but that enabled the idea of dominion: a man’s home as his castle. There, at last, you could do what you wished, choosing rusticity or modernity in line with your personal taste, opting for minimalism or ostentation, and nobody could tell you it was wrong. Each house, in other words, was a principality, a domain with its own laws and embassies, because they were not above exchanging a few words with the neighbor, on tiptoes, leaning over the hedge, offering her some vegetables from their kitchen garden, or lending him a power tool that he must not forget to return. Often, they would complain about the noise, about their neighbors who did not know how to behave, about their children who never stopped yelling, about a dog who had somehow made its way into their yard to take a shit, but at least they had their own little territory to defend and the feeling that they could live free from servitude, free from fear of barbarian hordes. Essentially, what was happening in those replicated, individualistic neighborhoods, between the tomato plants and the overflowing pantries, was merely another attempt to find happiness.
That morning, in any case, the area was silent and deserted. Even the canal barely made a sound as its glittering browns and blacks slid under the pale belly of the low sky. On every windshield, the wipers had been glued in place by the night freeze, and the whitened lawns looked like they’d been put under a sleeping spell by some fairy-tale witch. Dreary, asphalt-framed flower beds were the only islands of promise in this desolation. Later, perhaps, a dog would be taken out for a walk, and people would go shopping, but for now nobody dared venture out onto the sidewalks, and the only clues to suggest the place was not completely dead were the lit-up windows and the strings of lights.
Passing a house decorated like a Christmas tree for the second time, Gérard noticed that he had been driving in circles. Not that it really mattered. Nobody was expecting him. He drove slowly, staring at the houses one by one, and sometimes stopping for a second before setting off again. At last he reached the right number, on the correct street. He opened his wallet and checked the Post-it that he’d put in there. Yep, that was it: number 22. He parked on the opposite side of the street, then waited.
His heart beat calmly and steadily.
There was no impatience in his anger.
The kid had gone. Gérard would never be in a rush again.
Just after ten, he got out of his car and crossed the road. He sniffed the air as he walked, breathing in the pleasant smell of woodsmoke and the duller, closer odor of asphalt. He opened the metal gate of 22 Rue Jean-Monnet and it gave a long creak. Instantly, a dog started barking furiously inside the nearby garage, and Gérard hurried up the flight of steps that led to the front door. He rang the doorbell and waited. The dog, meanwhile, was still in a rage, and every time it threw itself against the garage door there was a huge, echoing clatter, almost insulting in that silence, followed immediately by the frenzied scratching of its claws on sheet metal. That racket quickly got on his nerves, and the old man regretted not having brought the rifle with him when he left the house. He imagined firing a couple of large-caliber rounds in there and the thought was so satisfying that he couldn’t help chuckling to himself. Still nobody had come to answer the door. He rang the doorbell again. The spaced-out notes chimed cheerfully inside the house while the dog kept barking. Turning around to inspect his surroundings, Gérard thought he saw a curtain twitch on the other side of the street, but perhaps it was just his mind playing tricks. Soon, he heard a man’s voice from the garage, authoritative and threatening. There were a few muffled blows, and the dog whined. Then there was silence.
The garage door opened then, revealing the master of the house, in shorts and flip-flops, and a thick yellow sweatshirt. He couldn’t be more than five foot three, and he wore rimless glasses. He had sparse ash-blond hair, like the cyclist Laurent Fignon, but there was something less present, almost diaphanous, about his appearance, curiously redolent of unpleasant things like a spider’s web or the skin on a cup of milk. After struggling to subdue the fairly large briard sheepdog, this skinny little man took a step forward before rudely demanding:
“What’s this about?”
“I want to see the kid,” replied Gérard.
“What?”
“Your kid,” the old man added. “That little shit.”
The man frowned. “Who are you? What do you want?”
Gérard pointed threateningly at him, his mouth deformed by rancor.
“Don’t fuck around with me.”
The man stood there stunned for a moment, tied to his dog as if to a buoy.
“Are you crazy?” he said. “What the hell are you talking about?”
Gérard shook his head. This was pissing him off now. The guy knew perfectly well why he was there.
“Go on, get out of here,” said the man. “Or I’ll call the cops.”
“It’ll be too late,” replied Gérard.
“I’ll set the dog on you, I’m warning you.”
“I don’t give a shit about your dog. You have no business being here anyway.”
This whole thing was making less and less sense the more it went on, and more than the presence of an intruder, it was this impression of weirdness, of spiraling insanity, that disturbed the blond man. An icy gust of wind blew through the street, and the dog tried to free itself from its master’s grip, earning itself a smack on the nose. It whined, ears lowered, then sat down and waited for a better opportunity to disobey. Just then, a boy appeared in the garage. He was barefoot and wearing pajamas. It was Kylian.
“Go back inside,” his father said, waving his hand at him.
Pale and wide-eyed, the boy stood still, looking at his friend’s grandfather, who stared back at him without a word.
“I said go inside!”
The blond man could feel the situation getting out of hand. He grabbed hold of his son, and the dog immediately flung itself in the other direction and began barking.
“So it’s you, you little bastard,” said Gérard.
He pronounced these words in a cool, even voice, but beneath it there were hints of sorrow and anger, maybe even of despair. The little boy was half smiling as he tried to get away from his father. He was small with pale blond hair and gentle, slightly lost-looking eyes. One of his pajama legs had gotten hitched up over his knee. Even from a distance, his flesh looked extremely delicate.
“It’s your fault,” said Gérard.
“For God’s sake! What are you talking about?” the man asked.
Gérard did not need to justify himself. He looked for the quickest route to the garage and, his hands stiff and wide open, began to descend the flight of steps. That little shit had hurt Gabriel. And now Gabriel was gone. He clung to this simple logic, which had the merit of pinpointing a cause and naming a culprit for the misfortune that had ruined his life. In his head, this loop had been running endlessly for days. He couldn’t stop thinking about it. It explained everything. It blazed brightly at night when he closed his eyes and tried to fall asleep. It drew all his other thoughts into its orbit.
This little boy was all he had left.
A strange noise tore him from these thoughts and he stopped dead, as if waking from a dream. Barefoot on the concrete floor, Kylian was shivering with cold. His teeth were chattering. Gérard heard a deep growl behind him and turned to see a Range Rover stopping in the middle of the street. The mayor of Cornécourt got out.
“What are you up to now, eh? What’s gotten into you?”
It took the old man a few seconds to recognize his old friend, but as soon as he did his whole attitude changed and he gave Monsieur Müller a friendly wave. Then, glancing back over his shoulder, he noticed that Kylian, his father, and the dog had all disappeared. All that remained was the empty garage, the metal shelves filled with jars, a pressure washer, a sled, and—lying on the floor—a large, half-eaten buffalo-skin bone.
“Well?” Monsieur Müller asked.
“Well what?”
“One of the neighbors called me. Apparently you’re troublemaking again.”
“Again?”
Gérard wondered what the mayor meant by that. But he didn’t linger on the question. Increasingly these days, the things that were said to him felt like a snare and he preferred to turn a deaf ear. He would rather not hear yet again about how he was losing his marbles.
It had been a long time since he’d seen old Monsieur Müller. Years, maybe. But he remembered it all: the barbecues with the other hockey parents, the tournaments, the raffles, the electoral campaigns, when he worked as an assessor and the same name appeared on almost every envelope: Paul Müller. He had felt flattered by this man’s friendship. He had bought the mayor’s old BMW, and they had gone out drinking together. And now here he was again, the mayor of Cornécourt, in the middle of one last winter. Once again, Gérard had that vague sensation of blurriness. Suddenly, he no longer had the faintest idea what he was doing there. At the far end of the street, a police car appeared. The light on top was not flashing and it came over to them at a crawl.
“I’ll sort this out,” said Monsieur Müller with a crafty look.
And he put his hands up in a pacifying gesture toward the police car. Gérard, for his part, wasn’t worried in the slightest. He was just enjoying this chance meeting, the comforting impression inspired by that familiar face, that thick mountain accent, and that smile, which brought back so many good memories.