36. High times on Rue Esprit-des-Lois

Back in my son’s house, I gather my courage and pick up the dining-room phone. I punch in the number of our apartment in Bordeaux.

A stagnant air fills the whole of my son’s house, but here the atmosphere is heavy with death, constraint, and fear, and—I say to myself, dread washing over me—the hacking, slicing, and chopping of too many commingled meats. I think I hear Arno panting behind the consulting-room door.

The phone rings and rings. When someone finally answers, I say nothing, choked with emotion.

“Oh, it’s you, Nadia,” says Noget’s voice.

“How’s Ange?” I whisper. “Oh God, oh God… Can I talk to him?”

He doesn’t answer. Everything goes quiet, as if he’d put his hand over the mouthpiece. I shout, “Monsieur Noget?”

“Yes,” he says. “I’m afraid that won’t be possible, Nadia. No, I can’t put Ange on.”

I then make out the clink of bottlenecks against glasses, bursts of laughter.

“But how is Ange?” I say desperately.

“Not so well,” says Noget.

He seems distant, bored, as if I were being a terrible nuisance.

“So you’re having a party at my place, Monsieur Noget?”

“Your place, yes… Listen, Nadia, I believe I’d best hand you over to one of my guests, I have quiches and turnovers in the oven, and those tricky little cheese croissants…”

He loudly sets down the receiver (on my little marble table?), calls someone over.

“Hello?” says the voice of my ex-husband, my son’s father. “Who’s there?”

“It’s me, Nadia,” I say in a tiny little voice.

“Oh, it’s you? Hello, hello!” he says in English.

He’s clearly drunk, and his high spirits bring a chill to my heart.

He laughs. I can clearly make out Corinna Daoui’s harsh, rasping voice behind him. Meek and imploring, I ask, “Tell me how Ange is doing?”

“Who?”

“Ange! Ange! My husband!”

“Your husband? But that’s me, my love, I’m your husband!”

He laughs again, without cruelty, almost sweetly. Then the line goes dead—did he hang up? Or was it Noget?

Arno erupts into furious barking. I hurry out of the room, run to take shelter in the yard behind the house. It’s untended, planted almost solely with chestnut trees. It’s so dark that the trees, the dirt, the few overgrown bushes, everything seems black. The yard is steeply sloped, clinging to the mountainside. I take a few steps downhill, my feet splayed to keep from tumbling forward. With every step I stumble over what I first assume to be gravel, kicking it before me, seeing pale little shapes rolling along. I plop down on my backside.

For a moment I sit where I’ve fallen. My fingers dig into the dirt. I pick up one of those pieces of gravel—but it’s not gravel at all, it’s a bone. And then another, and another: they’re all bones, an abundance of skeletal detritus in all different sizes. A groan of horrified surprise springs from my lips. I quickly stand up, dust off my clothes. So, I tell myself, they’ve killed all these animals, so many animals…

I turn around and climb back toward the house. The bones shift and roll under my feet, under my groping hands—they spill down toward the valley, toward the blackened pines, toward the river’s dark, still waters.

On this second night in my son’s house, I again get out of bed, forbidden to sleep by excruciating contractions. Unable to stand it any longer, I go to my son and Wilma’s room. Just when I’m about to knock, I still my hand. I hear a sound, the sound of a deep, superhuman breath. Could that be Arno exhaling, powerfully enough to rattle the door? But, I tell myself, Arno’s not so big that he… There’s an animal serenity in that breath, a wild, patient self-assurance, and the tranquil but vigilant pride of one who has laid a heavy paw on a defeated breast.

I walk away as silently as I can, now more terrified of seeing that door open than of anything else. Back in my room, I latch the door behind me and open the window, hungry for fresh air. A white moon casts its cold light over the yard. I think of the little school in the clearing, wondering if the students stay there to sleep, if they spend their whole childhood there. Oh, I tell myself, I hope they don’t go home to the village! Violently, painfully, I wish I were there, in the milk-white clearing, in the friendly shadow of the pines. How well I would look after those children, wherever they come from!

Was I always fair and hospitable with the students—rare, in the neighborhood where I taught—who reminded me of Les Aubiers, was I always decent to the little girls who looked to one degree or another like the little girl I was? In all honesty, I wasn’t fair or hospitable or decent, I was unfeeling and remote, even derisive, silently wanting to see them eradicated, see them fly away, far away from my beloved school, and didn’t I sometimes picture them as pigeons, so multitudinous and filthy and unnecessary that they can be shot down without sanction?

But now, I say to myself, how well I would look after those children!