I haven’t been in to school for three days, and I must face the fact that the principal has never tried to get ahold of me, that no colleague has shown any concern. Nor has any parent written me, or passed on a little note or a sweet drawing from my students, as they did the few times I fell ill over the years.
I seem to have been erased from the life of the school, just as completely as Ange.
Not wanting to meet up with Noget, I never leave the study where I sleep except to race to the bathroom or look in on Ange. Nonetheless, even when Noget is away, I can feel his prying spirit around us, his watchful shadow. Just when I think he’s home for the night, I suddenly hear the creak of the hallway floorboards, the squeak of our bedroom door, and when, sitting up on the cot in the study, I cry, “Is that you, Monsieur Noget?” no one answers, and all at once everything in the apartment goes quiet.
What is he here for? I knead my hands, too frightened to move but rebuking myself for not protecting Ange in his vulnerable state. I don’t believe he’s hurting him, exactly. And Ange never complains about him—yes, that’s true, but would he dare? He’s simply exerting some sort of force on or around Ange, and the nature or intention of that force I don’t know. As if he wanted to make sure that Ange never recovers.
The morning of the fourth day, I drink the coffee Noget brings me before I’m even up (he must wait there behind the door, listening for the little sounds that tell him I’m awake), and that coffee truly is the smoothest and richest I’ve ever tasted. Then I get dressed, carefully choosing my clothes, and make up my eyes and mouth. My face in the mirror seems different, a little wider than usual, even fuller, my chin heavier.
It’s all that rich food he’s forcing on us, I tell myself, and I feel at the same time apprehensive and vaguely as if I’d been tricked.
“You use too much butter and oil in your dishes,” I tell him as I walk into the kitchen.
He’s busy buttering the generous slices of warm bread he brings every morning. There are croissants as well, I see, and buns studded with lumps of sugar.
“The butter is just pouring off that bread,” I say, irritated. “Why are you trying to fatten us up like a couple of pigs for the slaughter?”
He looks up at me, a gaze without warmth that he does his best to instill with a sort of polite amiability.
“Because I like you, nothing more,” he says. “You’ve always had a taste for good food, haven’t you? I’ve seen you two coming home from the market with fine Italian charcuterie that perfumed the whole staircase, or little vegetables you sometimes braised all afternoon long, so I realized that like me you have a fondness for…”
“And what about our neighbors,” I interrupt, my annoyance overflowing, “the Bertauxs, the delightful Foulques, those nice Dumezes, I suppose they’re all away on vacation?”
“Oh, those people,” he says scornfully.
He falls silent, pretending to be too polite to fully speak his mind.
“What do you have against them?” I ask, minding my tone.
“Who’s here at your side? It’s me, isn’t it? You haven’t seen hide nor hair of them, and you’re not going to. They wouldn’t even want to admit they’d ever met you.”
He purses his lips, breaks into a sullen pout, pretends to be concentrating on the bread and butter. There’s a decency in his offended reserve, his sort of long-suffering forbearance, that shakes my confidence.
“I’m sure you’re mistaken,” I say softly. “I’m sure our neighbors aren’t ashamed of us. As soon as they get a moment to give us a sign of their sympathy…”
“Oh, oh, oh,” he says, disgusted.
“You don’t know the first thing about it,” I say.
I feel oppressed and disheartened, just as I always do when I talk with Noget. He muddles my thoughts, trying to drag me into the mire where he feels so repellently at home, where every event is judged from the single, unchanging viewpoint of suspicion.
“There must be some reason you’ve decided to leave,” he says coolly.
Burning hot blood rushes to my face. My cheeks feel monstrously swollen. Don’t even think of mentioning that to him, I tell myself.
Suddenly I feel such pity for myself that my eyes fill with tears. I’ve devoted my life to my work, to the children, and now everyone’s shoving me aside like a piece of trash so vile you don’t even want the sight of it lingering in your memory.
“I’m just going to visit my son,” I say. “I haven’t even seen my granddaughter yet.” I can’t help adding, in a bitter yelp: “They named her Souhar!”
Noget doesn’t answer. An odd tension settles in between us, like when I rehooked my bra in front of him.
“Souhar. Weird idea, don’t you think?” I murmur.
With ostentatious care he arranges Ange’s breakfast things on a tray, and I dully observe that I’ve grown used to his tangled beard, his dubious clothes, his ambivalent form, slight and pudgy at the same time, and it no longer offends me.
In hopes of dispelling the awkwardness I’ve created by bringing up Souhar (but how painful I find the mere thought of that name!), I go on: “Surely there’ll be a school to take me in where my son lives.”
“Oh, you think so?” says Noget, courtly and cold.
I leave the apartment without stopping in to say hello to Ange, for fear he might ask where I’m going.
Rue Esprit-des-Lois is gray and damp this morning, yet again. Every day now for weeks, the fog rising up from the river has hung over the city until nightfall, filling the streets with the smell of silt.
I look up and can’t see the sky. The topmost floor of our building, home to the very decent, very sweet Foulque couple, has vanished into the mist.
I don’t have my coat to wear anymore. I shiver in my bulging old cardigan. This cardigan shouldn’t be so tight on me, I tell myself, angry at Noget, and angry at myself too, for blindly succumbing to the seductions of his cooking. It’s hard to believe. I don’t eat that much of it, because even though I’ve grown used to his appearance, I can’t shake my mistrust of any food chosen and cooked by his hand. And still I’ve ballooned, and I’m plump enough to begin with, and all this from just barely touching Noget’s dishes. Ange must be terribly sick, I suddenly tell myself in a flash of painful lucidity, to be getting thinner day after day even with Noget working so hard to stuff him—as if, I tell myself, shivering, that abundance of food were running out through Ange’s wound in the form of pus.
I walk through the clinging fog to the Saint-Michel neighborhood. I’m glad the few passersby can’t see me clearly. I might run into parents from school, who wouldn’t even treat me with the contempt they’ve shown over these past several months, them and everyone else, which I’m now used to, in a way—no, they’d pretend they hadn’t even recognized me, now that I’ve been expelled from the school.
I take several wrong turns before I finally reach La Rousselle police station.
I haven’t been here for years, not since my son left Bordeaux and so deprived me of any pretext for calling on Inspector Lanton, a young man I was very fond of, my son’s lover at the time, and even what one might call his partner, though they never actually lived together. I hope he still works at La Rousselle—and how distant and enviable seem those days, not so long ago (three years? four?), when I and sometimes Ange used to stop by the station after school for a cup of coffee with Lanton, whose face always lit up with a sort of filial gratitude when he saw me, who always found time to chat and joke, even when he was busy, and to tell us all the latest sordid goings-on in the city, knowing that Ange and I took a fervent interest in such things.
Ange is particularly fascinated by murders. He would blush with repressed exaltation as he listened to Lanton, his thigh jerking nervously. As soon as we were out of the station, he would work himself into a lather, brandishing his satchel and trying to demonstrate that it was the excessive liberty of contemporary society that led to these pointless, small-time murders Lanton had told us about. These speeches wearied me. And so I eventually found ways to visit Lanton without Ange’s knowing, and those tête-à-têtes sealed the bond that subtly united us. I was deeply unhappy when I learned that my son was breaking up with Lanton. Oh, I should have gone on visiting the station, I later reflected, rebuking myself for stupidly relinquishing my free will out of respect for the unspoken law that orders us to have nothing to do with our children’s former lovers, especially when the separation was painful—because Lanton, a finer young man than my son in many ways, suffered terribly at being left.
The waiting room is full even at this early hour. Troubled, I stare vacantly into space, and then, once I find the courage to look at the crowd straight on, I realize we’re alike, they and I.
How can I put it into words?
It shakes me to the core. I don’t know any of these people, all of them perfectly ordinary men and women. And yet I realize it could just as well be Ange and me waiting here, with our faces so like theirs, our expressions rigorously identical to theirs, even if they vary slightly from one to the next—that makes no difference, it’s a multiple echo originating in our similar souls, a oneness I’ve just seen for the first time.
Poor Ange, was it I who contaminated him?
I’m almost unsurprised to see my ex-husband, my son’s father, slumped in a corner chair. Of course, I tell myself, of course, him too.
He hasn’t spotted me yet. In fact, no one is paying me any mind, and it can only be because everyone here finds all the others’ faces so familiar. For my part, that resemblance disgusts me. How I despise them all of a sudden, every last one of them, with their anxious brows, their hunted look—all those frustrations, all those fears oozing from their glistening skin. Do I have that same shining skin, greasy with fright and fatigue?
I approach the counter with a slightly hesitant step. The policeman on duty gives me an irritable glance.
“I’m here to see Inspector Lanton,” I say, in my firm schoolteacher voice.
“He expecting you?” the man asks, seeming to think it unlikely.
“He’s expecting me,” I say, deeply relieved to hear that Lanton still works here.
“OK, I’ll let him know.”
I turn around toward the room. My ex-husband is watching me with the dubious, aggrieved eyes our son inherited. I reluctantly walk toward him. I’m starting to sweat in the oddly tight cardigan, but I don’t want to take it off or unbutton it. I want everyone here to have only the vaguest idea of me, to have no notion what sort of top I’m wearing under my cardigan, and so on. In short, I don’t want to reveal anything that might confirm how entirely I belong to this family of people.
“Nadia?”
“Well yes,” I whisper, “it’s me.”
His lips slowly tighten into a sarcastic little smile that immediately takes me back to the life we once lived together. I frown, telling myself: Never once did my poor Ange take up the cruel weapon of sarcasm.
“You’re looking prosperous,” he says, inspecting me from head to toe.
He smiles again, joylessly. He’s become a little man with long hair and a restless face racked by nervous tics. So, I say to myself, shocked, this is my first love, and perhaps even, yes, the one true love of my life.
“You’re here to see Lanton too?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say, deeply surprised. “Why do you want to see him?”
“To get my ID card renewed,” he murmurs, scarcely opening his mouth.
He’s seems terribly tired and anxious. I give him a steely look, not telling him I’ve come for the same thing. I feel stronger than my ex-husband, and more confident.
“You hated him, you hated Lanton,” I say, very quietly. “You couldn’t stand it that he was our son’s lover.”
“That’s true,” he says, “and it still makes me sick just to think of it.”
I can see that he’s close to shouting in rage at the mere mention of their relationship.
“You’re so infuriating!” I explode, because his offended, irascible air takes me back to the time when our son abruptly broke up with Lanton and I suspected my ex-husband of driving him to it.
“And yet here you are coming to see Lanton,” I say, viciously.
“Not by choice, I assure you,” he says.
I look at him more closely. He seems to have fallen on very hard times. He’s wearing a gray corduroy suit I remember from long ago. A dull-white residue coats his lips.
“I don’t understand what’s happening to me,” he sighs. “You wouldn’t believe it if I told you. Every day, you hear me, every single day brings a fresh load of inexplicable torments. I’m sick of it.”
Pointless though it is, and pathetic though he now seems to me, I can’t help lashing out at him, whispering furiously, “You were so mean, so unfair to Lanton! Do you really think their relationship was any of your business?”
“Well, I at least happen to think that everything to do with my only son is my business,” he retorts, showing his yellowed teeth.
This veiled reference—which he’s still sharp enough to work into the conversation, I see—to my supposed lack of interest in our son (meaning that I preferred my students to my child) sets me off.
“Oh, yes, you, the perfect father,” I say, “meddling in his son’s love life so he can ruin it!”
“Aren’t you glad to have a granddaughter? That Lanton would never have made you a grandmother, I can tell you that,” says my ex-husband, cruelly triumphant.
I open my mouth to answer, then close it again, ashamed. I was just about to bemoan the choice of that name “Souhar,” which I can’t think about without feeling a pain like a kick in the stomach, which is to say a humiliated, undeserved pain, as well as a violent one. But it feels wrong to complain about that to him, so I say nothing, even as I seethe at his self-indulgent distress and arrogant insinuations.
“Why do we have to go on being enemies?” I say plaintively.
He shakes his head, denying the indisputable truth just as he did back when we loved each other, pinching his lips with the look I still know so well, the look of a man who has right firmly on his side.
“Well, I’m certainly not anyone’s enemy,” he says. “And I must tell you, I couldn’t be happier to be a grandfather, and besides, she’s a wonderful baby.”
“You’ve seen her?” I say, hurt.
He’s surprised.
“Souhar? Of course I’ve seen her.”
“Don’t say her name!” I bark.
“They came to visit me six or seven months ago,” he says with cruel relish, having obviously understood that I’d seen no sign of them.
“She’s such a smart baby. They let me feed her, and by the end of the stay she had a special smile just for me. I love babies,” my ex-husband intones.
“All the same,” I murmur, “Souhar…” And I add, my eyes stinging, “I so wish we could be friends, you, me, and Ange. Ange is terribly sick at the moment…”
But he’s stopped paying attention, suddenly reminded of his immediate difficulties by Lanton’s appearance in the waiting room. He stands up, waves, cries out, putting on an act of joyous surprise:
“Over here! I’m Ralph’s papa!”
Lanton’s fine, limpid gaze drifts over him so scornfully that even I feel indignant and hurt for my ex-husband. How I loved him back then! I find myself drifting into the strange distraction that’s been coming over me lately, just when I should be most focused and vigilant. I shake my head.
“I was looking for you, Nadia,” says Lanton, giving me the same tender smile he always did when I came calling.
All around us, the hopeful silence that greeted his entrance dissolves into crestfallen murmurs.
“I think all these people were here before me,” I say, a little flustered.
He casts a vague glance behind him.
“Well, they’ll just have to wait,” he says. “It’s not like they’ve got anything better to do, right?”
An ignoble relief courses through me. Lanton shows such disdain for those people that, if I was really as like them as I thought, he’d have to treat me more or less the same way, I tell myself, which means I’m not really like them after all.
He graciously takes my arm, and I follow him back behind the counter and into his office, the same as before.
“Nadia, I’m so happy to see you again,” says Lanton.
He clasps my two hands and lifts them to his lips. My face flushes deep red with emotion. It’s been such a long time since someone spoke kindly to me.
He takes a step back and examines me. His brow furrows.
“You’ve put on a great deal of weight,” he says reproachfully. “You’re not watching yourself at all, are you? That’s not good, Nadia. You were such a nice-looking woman, weren’t you?”
Ridiculously, I stammer out something like an apology. My head is spinning. I sit down on a chair facing his desk. He lets out an affectionate little laugh and hurries over to take me in his arms.
“Forgive me, forgive me. Forget all that, it doesn’t matter. I know it’s you, and I’m so happy you’re here.”
“Who else would it be?” I murmur.
“When you haven’t seen someone for years, you’re not always sure you’ll recognize them,” says Lanton.
He’s dressed in light-colored jeans, a thick white sweater, elegant boots. He’s tall, tanned, and muscular. There’s a distinctive gleam in the two green slits of his eyes, a gleam, I tell myself, of power and fulfillment. Still today, Lanton is a far more handsome man than my son.
“Well, I recognize you,” I say. “You look wonderful.”
“Why did you stop coming to see me?” Lanton asks.
Agitated, he begins to blink very quickly. Looking for something to do with his hands, which I suddenly see trembling, he hooks his thumbs over his belt and lifts one buttock onto a corner of his desk.
“Was it really that hard on you that I stopped coming?” I say, disconcerted.
“Yes,” says Lanton. “I thought we were friends, quite apart from anything I had with…”
“Forgive me,” I say, “oh, I swear, I didn’t know…”
I don’t dare say how terribly I missed him, how many times I almost went to see him, little caring, in the end, what my son thought of me, whether I was making him unhappy. But I never did, because that other young man is my son, not Lanton, and I believed it was my son I had to implicitly obey, and yes, now I regret it, I regret it so deeply that I feel an unjust anger at my son well up inside me.
We sit in silence. I’m not sure I trust Lanton now, because the brutality I saw him display in the waiting room seems new to me.
I look toward the window. There’s nothing to see but the fog, dense and still.
“Why does this fog never lift anymore?” I ask gloomily.
Then, in a sudden burst of vigor, I appeal to him:
“You noticed how I fat I’ve become, well it’s true, that happened after my son left you; I put on some of this weight over a couple of months, but it’s especially been in the past several days, because we have a stranger cooking for us and more or less forcing us to eat all the fatty, delicious things he makes; it’s true, they’re exquisite, but he’s secretly loading them with fat, I don’t know how he does it, because I can’t tell it’s there, it never bothers me while I’m eating… Anyway, that’s what’s going on, and… Oh God, Lanton, Ange is so sick, and I can’t do anything about it…”
“Don’t do anything at all, no matter what,” says Lanton. “Don’t call the doctor, don’t take him to the hospital.”
“Why do you say that?”
Lanton crosses his arms, buying time. An uncomfortable expression flits over his face.
“You know perfectly well, my dear Nadia,” he slowly begins, “that people like you aren’t exactly in favor…”
“What on earth does that mean, people like us? Besides, Ange isn’t like me,” I say.
He puts his index finger to his lips.
“Not so loud, Nadia. The walls aren’t that thick here.”
Leaning toward him, I whisper, enraged, “I assure you, I have no idea what I am, and I can’t think of any sort of people I belong to.”
“That may not last,” says Lanton, hesitant, profoundly ill at ease. “You might change, Nadia. What’s the name of this stranger who’s forcing his food on you?”
“Richard Victor Noget,” I say glumly.
He whistles, admiring and surprised.
“If I had the great Noget looking after me, I wouldn’t turn up my nose. And even if he’s taken it into his head to fatten you up, just let him; a lot of people would give their eyeteeth to find themselves under Noget’s glorious wing!”
“Well, I’ve never heard of this Noget person,” I say.
“You see?” says Lanton.
I look at him, not understanding. But Lanton’s beautiful, tan face seems to have turned slightly hard and annoyed, as if from an irritation he’s struggling not to show, and so I hold back my question (what is it I’m supposed to “see”?), and I remember I came here this morning to ask for his help. I shiver at the thought that he could easily send me away empty-handed. And with that I think: If we hadn’t grown so close when he was my son’s lover, might he not treat me just like the others, might he not hate me and scorn me as casually and straightforwardly as he did them?
“I’m going away, my friend,” I say quietly.
“You’re doing the right thing,” says Lanton.
“But I’ll be leaving Ange here…until he gets better.”
My voice begins to shake. A rush of shame burns my cheeks.
“This Noget will be looking after him.”
“Really? Looking after him?” says Lanton, skeptical. “And where are you going, Nadia?”
“To my son’s.”
Lanton’s jaw clenches violently. He crosses his arms and tucks his hands into his armpits, as if to give himself a hug or to shield himself. He stares at me.
“It’s been so long since I last saw him,” I say. “He has a child now, a girl, and, can you imagine…”
I let out an overwrought little laugh.
“No, you’ll never guess what he named that baby.”
I break off, my throat tightening. Lanton’s eyes are half closed. Saliva shooting from my lips, I half shout, “Souhar! He named her…Souhar!”
Then I slump back in the chair, genuinely exhausted, drained.
“But maybe none of this means that much to you,” I say after a moment, “my son’s new life and these impossible ideas he has, like calling his daughter…”
“Enough, Nadia, enough!” says Lanton with an exasperated groan. “You’re right, what do I care? What do I care if he named his kid that? What do I care that this kid exists?”
“I just wanted you to understand how much he’s changed,” I say. “He’s clearly not the guy you knew anymore. Can you imagine him as the head of a family? All the same, it’s a real joy for me, a pure joy, even if I haven’t met the baby yet.”
Suddenly Lanton seems dispirited. He slides off the desk, slowly walks to the window, peers out at the fog. Keeping his back to me, he asks, “Why did you come here, Nadia?”
“I need to get my ID card renewed,” I say.
“And him…he’s expecting you?”
“Oh no. He has no idea yet.”
I don’t add that I’d rather not tell my son I’m coming before it’s too late to stop me, but Lanton must have guessed, because he murmurs, “You’re planning to tell him once you’re on the boat, right?”
“Yes,” I say with a sheepish little laugh. “But he can always toss me into the harbor if he doesn’t want me there. Incidentally, my son’s father is here, out in the next room, you saw him, he needs a new ID card too…”
Lanton pivots on his luxurious boots. He’s livid, but I notice his eyes are damp.
“I will never lift one finger for that guy,” he cries. “He can go die, for all I care.”
“He is his father, after all, Lanton,” I say.
“Not one more word.”
He would never have snapped at me like this in the old days. I say nothing more, afraid it might turn him against me. I feel desperately sad for my ex-husband; I feel like I’m failing in some very basic duty I owe him.
Suddenly Lanton sits down at his desk and begins to write a letter, as quick as he can. It still takes him a full ten minutes. Then he folds the sheet in four and slips it into an envelope, which he seals.
“I’ll take care of your ID card,” he says, slightly breathless from an emotion I can’t deduce, “and in return you’ll do me the favor of giving this letter to your son.”
“Of course.”
The atmosphere between us is heavy with tension. How tenderly we once loved each other, words flitted back and forth between us with a butterfly’s delicate grace. He loved me more than his own mother, he trusted me, and I was as proud of him as if I’d raised him myself and made him so handsome and accomplished.
There then comes to me a thought that must tint my cheeks and forehead with a distinctive shade of pink. Lanton notices. He lets out a little laugh, his lips curling in a heartless sneer, and says, “Something I should tell you about my letter to your son, Nadia: I’ll know if you don’t give it to him, because then he won’t do a very specific thing I’m asking him to.”
“Suppose he doesn’t do it anyway,” I say, “just because he doesn’t want to?”
“Impossible,” says Lanton firmly.
I see a threat in his eyes. A tingle runs down my legs, right to my toes.
“I know where to find your husband,” says Lanton.
Aghast, I begin to shout, “Ange isn’t that sick, I can still take him with me!”
“Ange is very, very sick,” says Lanton coldly.
I stand up, quivering with anger.
“Of course I’ll give your letter to my son,” I say. “Why would you think I won’t?”
And my anger is sincere and intense, but at the same time faintly unreal, as if Lanton and I were masterfully playing characters very different from what we are in real life, even the exact opposite, and I realize there’s no way I can possibly stop loving him or hold anything against him.
Evidently Lanton’s feelings are in tune with my own. He comes to me and clasps my cheeks in his hands. How horribly awkward!
“I don’t want you to go away mad,” he says urgently. “In the name of all the good times we’ve had together, Nadia… Do you remember? I want you to have only happy memories of me, happy memories…”
I murmur, “Dear Lanton, do something for my son’s father.”
I gently push away his hands and give him a hug of my own. His hair still has the teddy-bear smell that used to make me smile, and it moves me deeply.
My ex-husband is still slouched in his chair when I cross back through the waiting room on my way out. They’re all there, in fact—all those people, our comrades in sorrow, who, like him, place their faith in Lanton’s unlikely goodwill. I wink at my ex-husband (how I loved that man! I tell myself again), because now I’m sure Lanton will see to his ID card, however deeply he hates him. And what about me, for that matter, don’t I hate him every bit as much?
In the course of just a few years, my son’s father has turned into one of those aging, disheveled, disgruntled wrecks who trudge along the sidewalk, cackling or cursing in time with the sour tide sloshing back and forth in their skulls. Just because that man cares nothing for what people might think of him, does that mean he speaks deeper truths than the rest of us, I ask myself, we who have learned to fear giving offense or seeming ridiculous above all other things? No, it most certainly does not, it might even be that this dark indifference strips him of any useful understanding of the world around him, I tell myself, profoundly sad for him.
He doesn’t react to my wink. He seems defeated, ground down by worry. But as I walk past him he leaps to his feet.
“Nadia, you’re huge,” he says.
“Yes, so what?” I say, nettled.
He bristles, he scowls, he breathes his hot, noisome breath into my face (how I once kissed that mouth, I tell myself again, how I sucked at that tongue!).
“You don’t understand, my dear, that your fat is offensive,” he whispers. “I certainly can’t afford to be overweight, I’ll tell you that.”
“Oh, I don’t eat that much,” I say.
Uncomfortable, not looking at him, I add, “I can help you, you know. Here.”
I dig into my bag, take out a fifty-euro bill, slip it into his raincoat pocket. He pats the pocket with a snide, almost furious little laugh.
“And I can help you again,” I say.
“Yes, and where will you be?”
Caught short, I hesitate. I murmur, “At our son’s.”
“That’s impossible,” he says, aghast. “He’ll never allow it. Oh, what do I know? He’s going to be shocked, deeply shocked to find you so fat.”
“I’m still his mother, aren’t I?”
“I don’t know if he’ll see it that way,” my son’s father answers, after a moment’s thought.
For the first time his gaze is sincere, troubled by something other than his own sad fate. He lays his hand on my arm, parts his lips, and in the end says nothing.
I slip away and hurry toward the front door. Words from such a man’s mouth aren’t necessarily any nearer the truth than any others. Why, then, am I afraid of what my ex-husband might want to tell me?
You’re afraid of everything, I tell myself once I’m out on the sidewalk. I must look worried and lost. My breath is heavy. And then there’s another thing I must face: long accustomed to educating children, my students as well as my son, I don’t like being taught lessons. Often—and yes, I regret it, I feel terrible about it—I’ve cut short conversations in which I foresaw a lesson coming, or sensed some such intention. And I would laugh or throw out a joke or walk out of the room, and I could feel my skin prickling and shuddering at the threat constituted in my mind by the possibility that some wisdom was about to be imparted. Ange is the same.
What sort of lesson is being forced on me by that intolerable name “Souhar”? What is my own granddaughter meant to be telling me, a girl just a few months old? Yes, Ange is the same. The moment someone sets out to enlighten him on any subject at all, he cries out: Oh, I can’t stand pontificators!
I slowly walk away from the police station, my throat tight, short of breath—it must be the fog, permeating the city with a metallic smell. All at once a man comes striding energetically past me, jostling me, and by his baseball cap with its long transparent visor I recognize him from Lanton’s waiting room. “Betrayer!” he whispers in my ear.
At least that’s what I think he says.
“What’s the problem?” I say, my voice turning slightly shrill, then breaking.
He stalks off. The fog whisks him out of sight before I can even get an idea of his age or his build, any sense of a connection he might have with Ange or me. I must have misunderstood, I tell myself. That was just some generic obscenity he tossed out at me, as timid men sometimes do in this city, then scuttle off with their hands in their pockets, their heads hunched between their shoulders.
It’s still early. Cours Alsace-Lorraine is deserted. Just when I’m about to cross the street, I see the tram emerge from the milky dimness. As if it were far, far away, slowed by the fog, I hear the little bell’s pointless tinkle, which now seems to be desperately chasing after the tram rather than running along before it. I wonder whether I should step back or run across the tracks. I bound forward. The tram speeds by just behind me with a furious hiss.
The tram is looking for me, trying to catch me; it deliberately comes racing along to run me down.
Gasping, I turn around. My son’s father is sitting in the last car, his face olive in the fluorescent light, and when he sees me he smiles, with that same kindly, gentle smile he had when we were first married.
He couldn’t be driving it, could he? He couldn’t have anything to do with the way the tram is behaving, him, my son’s father?
I recognize the guilt I can never shake when I think of my ex-husband, a guilt now made sharper by that innocent, friendly smile. Yes, my son’s father is a bit self-absorbed, but he’s also innocent, and he doesn’t hold a grudge. Unlike him, I rarely forget my own long-term interests. Oh, what a loser, I sometimes think, moved and ashamed. But also: After all, what did I do that was wrong? There’s no law I defied, no obligation I didn’t scrupulously respect. What did I do? I negotiated my divorce with that man so that every possible wrong was imputed to him, and he never suspected things could have been otherwise. He owes me money to this day. More precisely, this is what troubles my conscience: I can now confess that I began my love affair with Ange long before I asked for a divorce, and, knowing my husband had no idea of my liaison with Ange, I demanded, very unjustly in moral terms, that my husband take full responsibility for the failure of our marriage, oh yes, most unjustly, because he was a stubborn man but naïve, gruff but easily manipulated, and I had only to complain of this or that (perfectly unobjectionable, in truth) aspect of his behavior to make him lose all his self-assurance, his judgment, almost his memory, and agree that he’d never been much of a husband.
“Isn’t it his fault if your son prefers men to women? Clearly it is,” Ange had told me in his wise, placid voice, when I was wondering how to go about getting a divorce.
And so I repeated to my husband, “After all, it’s your fault that our son prefers men to women, although that doesn’t bother me in the least.”
I repeated those words to my husband, knowing this side of our son’s life bothered and even tormented him. I repeated them to my husband, knowing he’d find it hard to come up with a good counterargument. But why dredge up these old stories again? Yes, my ex-husband still owes me money, but the fact that I’ve stopped asking him for it absolves me of any symbolic debt I might owe him—that’s how it seems to me.
He was an electrician when we were married, and he made a good living. I believe he gradually stopped working after the divorce—is that my fault? Was it my job to keep him on track? Really, what can you do for a man driven to self-sabotage by sadness and spite, by baseless remorse and low self-esteem? Ange and I wanted the three of us to come together in a sort of polite friendship, but he refused all our dinner invitations. Nor did he come to our little party on the birth of that baby, the ridiculously named Souhar (please God, I sometimes say to myself, appalled, may that name bring her no misery, may it not be the death of her, even!).