After several blustery days, the cold, dry wind out of the southwest had just died down. It had swept the sky clean of its last clouds and a still-bright autumn sun was drying the puddles on the asphalt and the tears on people’s faces.
It was a fine morning to bury a child.
The crowd in mourning clothes gathered around the little church of Passa. About a hundred people hadn’t been able to squeeze inside it, and were following the ceremony as they stood on the village square. Gilles Sebag, one of the first to arrive, had insisted on staying outside. Inside the church the despair was too great, the pain too personal.
Leaning against the wall of a house, he hugged his daughter to him. He felt her young body shaking with sobs. He would have liked to be able to help her more, to assume some of her suffering and thus preserve her innocence. But Sévérine was thirteen years old, and she had just suddenly understood that death was definitive. Life wasn’t like a video game. When the game was over, you couldn’t play it again: Mathieu could never start his game over.
Claire’s hand was softly caressing Sévérine’s hair. Gilles turned to his wife and smiled at her. It was good to feel her here at his side, he’d been so afraid of losing her the preceding summer. But he quickly shooed away these bad memories; this was not really the time to think about all that again. Claire responded to his smile. Her shining green eyes were filled with sorrow.
From the densely packed crowd, here and there painful, heartbreaking wails shot up. Tears, cries, and moans fused in a threnody the teenagers sang in canon. Some of these kids had no doubt already encountered death: that of a grandparent, probably. They had suffered, they had sincerely wept, but that death hadn’t touched the very depths of their being. On the other hand, the death of their classmate was their own. Their pain was mixed with a mute fear. To avoid being drowned in the children’s suffering, Sebag forced himself to examine the buildings around him. Unfortunately, Passa’s church had no special charm. Its façade, which was covered with concrete-colored stucco, was decorated only by a marble porch leading to a semicircular flight of stairs. The church was imprisoned in a row of small, unattractive houses. However, on the left his eye was drawn to a post office. Its assemblage of bricks and pebbles was typical of Roussillon but not really interesting. On this Saturday morning, the post office’s shutters were closed because of the funeral.
Mathieu had died three days earlier in a scooter accident. On a street in Perpignan, a small van had suddenly swerved toward him and Mathieu, coming in the opposite direction, had not been able to avoid colliding with it. The crash had been violent, but at first the boy got up and seemed unhurt. He’d been able to talk with the driver of the van and together they had decided to call an ambulance anyway. Just in case. However, before the ambulance arrived, Mathieu suddenly collapsed. Internal bleeding. Everything had gone so fast. The doctors couldn’t do anything to save him.
Mathieu . . . one of Sévérine’s friends. A ninth-grade student at the Saint-Estève Secondary School. An athlete, a rugby player. A kid who believed that he had everything going for him.
Goddamn scooter!
The black hearse was slowly making its way, in reverse, through the crowd. The mass was coming to an end. The employees opened the doors of the hearse and began to arrange the funeral sprays in the back. A long line formed on the square to offer condolences to Mathieu’s parents in the church. Sévérine left her parents to join a group of her girlfriends. Sebag started to follow her but Claire stopped him. At the same moment, Sévérine turned around and gave him a look that made it clear that she wanted to go alone. That is . . . with her friends. Without him, in short.
Sebag felt a twinge in his heart and immediately reproached himself for it. He was suffering at seeing his daughter grow up too fast, but this was neither time nor the place to complain about that. Sévérine was alive. Nothing else mattered. Mathieu’s parents would never have the good fortune to see their son become an adult.
A bell started to toll. A sad ring followed by a long, plaintive echo. People looked up. The church in Passa had a square tower with two bells in it. The smaller of the two swung slowly. Its peal floated out over the village and carried its lamentations far out toward the hills covered with vineyards.
The church slowly emptied. A shiver ran through the crowd when the parents came out. The father, ramrod-erect, followed his son’s casket, involuntarily nodding his head, as unaware of what was around him as a groggy boxer. The mother stumbled along at his side, supported by a young son. Sebag recognized the boy’s big sister. He’d seen her two or three times over the past few years when he’d taken his daughter to Mathieu’s birthday parties. Sévérine emerged in turn with a bunch of adolescents, boys and girls holding each other up. Her mascara had run and marked a path for the tears on her chubby cheeks.
The casket was put into the hearse and the cortege moved off toward the cemetery. The chorus of sobbing teenagers was like a dirge. Claire took her husband’s hand and they walked three rows behind their daughter. Gilles was biting his lip, struggling to control his feelings. He had to keep a grip on himself and look strong. For Sévérine, for her friends, and for the others as well.
It was true that in his work, he’d seen lots of terrible things. How often had he had to inform someone of the death of a relative, a wife, a husband . . . a child? He’d long reproached himself for not knowing what words to use to soften the blow. Until he’d realized that he’d never know. Because there simply were no such words.
The hearse stopped at the gate to the cemetery. The funeral home’s employees slid out of the casket and then, followed by the mourners, carried it along a row of family vaults. Gilles leaned against the cemetery wall and lit a cigarette. He smoked only rarely. He’d picked up a pack on the way that same morning. Claire grabbed his cigarette, took a puff, and then gave it back to him.
“You okay?” he asked her.
She shrugged.
“You?”
“The same.”
He passed her the cigarette again. Across from the cemetery, workers on a construction site were smoking, too. They’d stopped working when the cortege passed and were waiting for the ceremony to end before starting up their bulldozers and backhoes again. The streets they’d already marked out indicated that they were getting ready to build a new residential subdivision. Another one. Every year, five thousand more people moved to the department of Pyrénées-Orientales; they had to live somewhere.
Sebag saw Sévérine coming back toward them, accompanied by two of her friends. The girls had their arms around each other’s waists and swayed back and forth as they walked. Their black mourning clothes made them look more mature. Real little women, Sebag said to himself. But no! Now that he thought about it, it wasn’t the clothes. It was the sorrow itself that had matured them.
When they stood in front of him, his heart ached at the sight of their swollen eyes. They looked as if they had just smoked a whole lid of marijuana. That’s a stupid idea, he reflected angrily: you had to be a cop to have such thoughts at a time like this.
“Papa, I have something important to ask you,” Sévérine said.
Her whole face seemed to be a plea.
“Mathieu’s sister says that there’s something wrong about her brother’s accident, that the driver of the van is not the only one responsible . . . Apparently the police think the case is closed and don’t want to investigate it any further.”
Sebag waited to see what she would say next, but he’d already guessed it.
“I told her that you could try . . . ”
His first response was to blink his eyes. It was Saturday, and he was going back to work two days later after a week on vacation. His partner Molina had told him that everything was quiet at police headquarters. He would probably have time to have a look at the case.
“I’ll see what I can do,” he promised.
Sévérine smiled through her sadness and added in her sweet, fluting voice:
“I told her that if there was anything to find, you’d find it.”
Despite his sorrow, Sebag felt a deep happiness. Ultimately, mourning had not completely transformed his daughter: she was still a girl of thirteen, a child who still saw her father as a miracle-worker.
“I also told her that you were the best policeman in Perpignan—that’s right, isn’t it?”
He nodded, trying to look confident, and then gave his daughter a kiss on her cheek that was still cool and damp.