As soon as she heard the screams, Diane knew it was no game. Around her, beyond the trees and the lawns, the city rustled with an ever-changing cacophony that the residents took for silence. And yet the cry for help cut through the night.
In spite of the darkness, in spite of her high-heeled thigh boots, which made it hard for her to run, in spite of the uneven ground—stumps, clods, roots—that the clearing set up as an obstacle, she rushed to the spot from where the screams had come.
Amid the chestnut trees, she made out three large shadowy figures crouching over a girl lying on the ground. The victim was struggling with all her might, but being hit seemed to excite the men even more as they indulged their pleasure. One was holding the head of their prey, trying to gag her with his arm, which she was wildly fending off. It was a battle. A smell of blood and sex hung in the air. Diane immediately saw the gravity of the situation. A fight has to have an outcome, and this one could well be a fight to the death.
Without hesitation, she charged at the rapists. Only the one holding the girl’s head saw her, but he barely had time to cry out before Diane brutally kicked the others on the backs of their necks. Caught by surprise, they rolled onto their sides in pain, and Diane now aimed for their genitals. They screamed and crawled away into the grass, moaning.
Then the one who was left was bitten by the girl, bellowed, and pulled his hand away, which gave Diane a chance to deliver a hook to his nose.
The three men lying on the ground, astounded that they were being attacked by a woman on her own, got ready to attack out of male pride.
But then the sound of a siren came from the boulevard below, and without thinking they stood up and scurried off.
They were absorbed by the night.
The siren stopped.
Diane’s heart wouldn’t slow down. All she wanted was to keep fighting.
Her fierce excitement was interrupted by the victim’s moans.
Diane bent over her and recognized Albane. Her legs bruised, her lips bleeding, her body shaking, the girl was crying, shielding her private parts with one hand and hiding her face with the other.
Diane had the good sense not to return her straight to her mother.
In spite of all the guests flooding Place d’Arezzo to attend the Bidermanns’ party, she managed to park her car on Rue Molière and sneak Albane up to her own apartment, concealed under a tartan rug. Jean-Noël wouldn’t disturb them: he was on a business trip to Stuttgart.
Once indoors, she helped the girl to pull herself together.
Albane stood in the hot shower, unable to move, at once distraught and convalescent, as if the water might cleanse her of what had happened, wipe the memory of her attackers from her skin, restore her lost purity. In that humid atmosphere, she was also able to cry.
On the other side of the door, Diane was worried. The girl had locked herself in—which was only natural—and Diane was afraid she might do something fatal. Although she had hastily removed anything sharp—razor, scissors—she knew that the resourcefulness of a desperate person should never be underestimated.
What reassured her was hearing Albane’s regular sobs: they proved she was still alive.
An hour later, the shower stopped.
“Are you all right?” Diane asked. “Do you want a hot drink?”
She heard a weak “yes.”
Albane appeared, wrapped in a robe, a towel tied around her head like a turban, which reassured Diane: if the girl was concerned with her hair, that meant she wasn’t planning to leave this world.
They sat in the kitchen, where Diane prepared a hot toddy with a liberal amount of rum.
Albane told her about her ordeal. It wasn’t easy for her. She had to break off her story several times out of anger and amazement. At other times, she was choked with hiccups.
Diane listened, then asked for details. She thought it vital that Albane put her attack into words, if not to overcome it, then at least to tame it, to remove it from that terrifying violence and put it into the order of language.
By her second glass of toddy, Albane had finished.
She felt a dumb kind of relief, verging on lethargy: she had put everything into words, but hadn’t rid herself of the horror. Images and sensations kept coming back to her, tearing at her flesh.
“Do you want a doctor?”
“I don’t know.”
“We’ll talk about it with your mother.”
At the mention of her mother, Albane lost heart and collapsed.
“What’s the matter?” Diane exclaimed.
“Mommy . . . She’ll be so upset when she finds out . . . Oh . . . ”
Diane propped the girl up and tried to reason with her. “Albane, be clear about this. She won’t be any more upset than you are.”
“Yes, she will.”
Diane realized the girl meant what she said. To her great surprise, this realization took her back decades, to when she herself was a little girl trying to shield her mother from life’s hardships. A loving child faces her own pain, but refuses to torment her parents. She put this recollection away into the drawer where she kept long-dead feelings and took Albane into her dressing room. Since the girl couldn’t wear her torn outfit again, she had to be clothed before she returned home.
Albane stopped being a martyr and spent a few moments marveling at what she saw. Since the capricious, versatile Diane liked playing different scenes, there was everything and its opposite in her wardrobe: leather and tweed, angora and latex, a business suit alongside a sexy nurse’s uniform, a hippie tunic next to a lamé shift. The wardrobe was like the costume department of a theater, the storeroom of a quick-change artist rather than the closet of a respectable Brussels resident.
Diane chose a pair of jeans and a loose-fitting sweater, then, holding Albane’s hand, took her to her mother’s.
Half an hour later, leaving Patricia’s apartment, she felt a sadness akin to helplessness, which had been triggered by Albane’s question: “What were you doing there?” Naturally, Diane couldn’t tell the truth, so had improvised on the theme of “I was driving around, stopped to smoke a cigarette, and rolled down the window.” Mother and daughter had swallowed the lie, exclaiming, “Thank goodness!”
But Diane hadn’t gone out to smoke. She had been hanging around the park in Forest, an area with a dangerous reputation, because, her husband being away tonight, she was hoping for an encounter. The truth was, she had been there to experience the very act that had befallen Albane—but of her own free will! Could she ever admit that? Could she even hear herself say it? She could barely understand it herself . . .
She suddenly felt worn. Compared with Albane, she realized she had experienced everything, tried everything, exhausted everything. Her search for something new, extreme, and dangerous had led her to a critical point of humanity—or inhumanity—in which she practiced universal irony. In her cynicism, she found entertainment in what scared other people. Could she still feel anything? Hadn’t she dulled her emotions? Even violence no longer seemed like aggression, but more like a game, since she would immediately turn it into a staged scene. Every event became a ritual, and she an extra in the ritual.
I am my own surveillance camera. I become the night watchman who enjoys watching me on the screen in strange situations. In a way, I no longer live but watch myself live.
Who was she, this woman who spent more time outside than inside herself?
As she crossed Place d’Arezzo, Diane noticed a different kind of agitation. Whereas earlier she had sensed a cheerful impatience in the guests rushing to the party, there was now a tension: the music flooding out of the windows had stopped, and on the square everything had come to a standstill.
She saw the large door of the town house open and police officers emerge with Zachary Bidermann.
Diane thought she was hallucinating: the proud, haughty Zachary Bidermann, escorted by four police officers, looked like a suspect being taken into custody. He was rolling his eyes in outrage and keeping pace with those leading him. They finally pushed his head down and bundled him into a white car with blinding blue revolving lights. Anyone would have thought he was a criminal!
Rose appeared at the top of the steps, her face haggard, holding a handkerchief, supported by a few close people, among them Léo Adolf, Chairman of the European Commission.
Diane might have been stunned by the sight of Zachary, but that of Rose overcame her completely. Looking away, almost hiding, she ran off past the trees until she got home.
The following day, at dawn, she heard through the media about the scandal that had occurred on Place d’Arezzo.
At around noon, returning from Stuttgart, Jean-Noël found her glued to the TV screen. She pointed to a platter of cold meat she had prepared for him and carried on watching. He barely managed to exchange a few words with her, and they were only about the events unfolding.
“Poor woman,” Diane exclaimed.
“Let’s not exaggerate,” Jean-Noël grunted. “Sure, she was forced to give him a blow job, but she’ll get over it.”
“I meant Rose.”
“Rose?”
“Rose Bidermann, that bastard’s wife. She’s the one who’s suffering the most right now.”
“Oh?”
“Now that she knows he’s been cheating on her, what she’s refused to admit for years is going to come crashing down on her head. People have been talking since this morning, and all sorts of details are coming in about his sexual obsessions. The press are going to town on it and digging up lots of witnesses.”
“Honestly, Diane, are you shocked?”
“What?”
“A compulsive sex drive like that—”
“You wouldn’t understand,” she muttered, turning up the volume.
That morning, Diane woke, heard the whistling and chirping of the parakeets on the square, and decided it was time to act. Today, she would do what she had never attempted in the past few years.
She got ready, doing her hair and applying her makeup as if going to a prestigious evening, then dialed the number she had obtained years earlier.
A curt voice answered. “Zachary Bidermann’s office, Madame Singer speaking.”
“I’d like to make an appointment with Rose Bidermann.”
There was an irritable silence, then the voice said, “Who’s speaking and what is it concerning?”
“This is Diane Fanon.”
“Does Madame know you?”
“No.”
“What is this in connection with?”
“I have something to reveal to her.”
A weary groan preceded Singer’s reply. “Look, madame, we’re receiving revelations from women by the truckload. Mistresses, lovers, exes, the ones still to come, the ones who were forced, the ones who hesitate, and the ones who would quite like to—believe me, that’s all I’m getting on the phone. Can we have some common decency, please? Madame Bidermann isn’t remotely interested in your revelations, and I don’t understand how you can have the gall to try. Learn to respect other people’s grief, madame.”
“But I do respect it! I love Rose.”
“What do you mean? You just said she didn’t know you.”
“Look, I don’t want to tell her anything about Zachary Bidermann, it’s something else I want to talk to her about.”
“What?”
Diane hesitated. Would she utter the words she had been avoiding for years? She resorted to a subterfuge. “Tell her I want to talk to her about . . . Zouzou.”
“Zouzou?”
“Zouzou. Tell her—”
“I don’t understand.”
“She’ll understand.”
Diane dictated her phone number and hung up.
Her heart was pounding fit to burst. She felt as if she had just committed the riskiest, most indecent act of her existence. Unwilling to leave, she lingered by the phone, waiting for the return call.
Luckily for her nerves, it came soon. A few minutes later, Madame Singer suggested an appointment at five that afternoon.
Diane presented herself solemnly at the front door, ignoring the reporters and photographers camped out on the sidewalk. She kept her head down, ignoring their questions, focusing on her objective.
She gave her name and the butler invited her to slip inside, careful to prevent an indiscreet snapshot, and led her up to the main floor. Here Rose Bidermann was waiting for her, standing in the middle of a room blooming with peonies. Her hair neatly done, prettily made up, dressed in light colors, with a resonant voice and a smile on her lips, she behaved magnificently, her grace and ease contradicting the tragedy that had befallen her.
Diane accepted her invitation to sit down, the cup of tea, and the macarons, and they exchanged a few platitudes about the splendid weather. Then she pulled herself together and said, clearly, “Does the name Zouzou mean anything to you?”
Rose tensed, then smiled. “Yes. It was my father’s name. I mean his nickname. To those who knew him well. Basically just my mother and me.”
“It was my father’s nickname too. Also to those who knew him well. In other words, my mother and me.”
There was silence. Rose wanted to make sure that she understood—or rather, that it wasn’t a misunderstanding. “In my father’s case,” she said, “Zouzou was a rather odd diminutive of Samuel. Unusual, isn’t it?”
“Yes, unusual. The same for mine.”
There was silence again. Rose looked confused. “Who was your father?”
“Samuel van Eckart, just like yours.”
Rose lost her composure.
Diane took a photograph from her bag and held it out to her. “This is the only picture I have of him with Mom. He broke up with her soon afterwards. As for me, I saw him only two or three times because he didn’t acknowledge me. He’d occasionally send money or gifts, and sometimes did us the favor of a quick visit to ease his conscience. I wasn’t allowed to call him ‘Daddy’ under any circumstance.”
Rose grabbed the snapshot. “That’s definitely my father.”
“With my mother.”
“How can you prove—?”
“I can’t. My honesty is all I have. And my mother’s. In other words, some very fragile elements that your father held in contempt.”
Rose felt the emotion rising in Diane. She no longer knew what to think or how to react.
Diane continued, “Oh, and there’s also this . . . ”
She bared her right shoulder and indicated a mole at the top of her arm. “He had this. I do too. What about you?”
Rose turned pale. In reply, she slowly pulled down her blouse and showed the same mole in the same place.
Diane’s eyes filled with tears and she started breathing heavily. “So Mom wasn’t lying . . . Poor Mom . . . ” She curled up in her armchair and within a few seconds became again the little girl who had wept as she wondered about her identity.
Rose went over to her, hand outstretched, hesitant about comforting this stranger. She stood in front of her, overwhelmed with sadness at discovering another new lie, not by her husband this time but by the other important man in her life: her father.
Although sunk deep in her own pain, Diane raised her head and saw Rose standing there biting her lip and looking totally helpless.
“Why?” Rose asked. “Why now? Why not before?”
“Because I didn’t need you. But with all that you’re going through now, I thought perhaps you might need me.”
“You?”
“A sister.”
Rose stammered in amazement. Usually, she was the one in charge, the one who took care of others and fixed things. And now a stranger who claimed to be her younger sister wanted to help her . . .
Diane opened her arms and Rose, lost and weary, threw herself into them, letting the grief pour out of her, the grief of a woman who had been cheated, betrayed, humiliated, mocked—the woman she was and refused to be.
When she returned home that evening, Jean-Noël waved a black and gold card at her by way of greeting, his eyes glowing with desire. “My darling, I have an invitation to Tea for Ten, where they’re holding a swingers’ party. You know, the one that has a Turkish bath with steps where you can do anything you like.”
Diane looked at Jean-Noël and put a hand on his shoulder. “Listen, Jean-Noël, that’s very sweet of you, but I’m fed up with sucking endless cock. How about going to bed, just the two of us?”