JEAN-LOUIS HAD COME TO MEET HER. He was standing in his boots, somewhat off to the side of the platform darkened by the afternoon rains, his neck straight and clean shaven beneath the collar of his parka. Ania found that he hadn’t aged much but was slow, almost reticent, in recognizing her. His face, serious like that of a teacher, still held the shock of the news. Ania had prepared herself for this, for finding him deeply affected. But seeing her under these circumstances probably hurt him more than it otherwise would have. Nevertheless, he allowed himself a modest embrace in which their bodies met.

He had come in Gabriel’s Audi. Ania was surprised to discover, on the folded rear bench, several bags of soil and fertilizer. “Your father gave it to us,” Jean-Louis explained, seeing her turn around on her seat; “he borrowed it from us those few times he had to go shopping.” The conversation stopped then, as if those few words were enough to dry up what remained of his saliva. From time to time, Ania saw him wipe the corner of his eyes with his creviced fingers, the tips of three of which were missing from his right hand. He and his wife, Jacqueline, had moved to Les Épinettes as caretakers shortly after Ania was born. They had stayed there ever since, unmovable and utilitarian, even though Gabriel was soon unable to pay their salary, turning on the heat in winter, killing the wasps and hornets, painting the shutters, scything the grass, raking the leaves. He worked for the maintenance department of the commune of V., and she cleaned house in several of the other large properties along the river. They’d been with him for more than thirty years, which was one of the rare things that Gabriel took seriously and was able to acknowledge. No intimacy had developed between them, only a bond of respectful filiation in which he was a kind of son who had surpassed them in age and understanding. They were the sort of people who went to church, avoided gossip, had a house built in the South for their retirement, and regularly visited the grave of a child who had died after only a few months and whose photograph Ania knew that Jacqueline always kept with her. The idea of suicide must have bothered them more even than the death itself. Indeed, Jean-Louis refused to believe it, as Ania understood from a remark he had made, which she chose to ignore. He preferred silence, which had never been a problem between them; they had always had difficulty understanding each other.

With evening, the sky had cleared. It darkened slowly, vast and pale above the outline of the woods into which the roads disappeared. A banner announcing a weekend flea market flapped between two balconies at the station’s exit. A truckload of metal barriers wound with red and white plastic lay on the tilled earth of the traffic circle. Ania told herself that the stall locations would have already been marked in chalk on the sidewalk; she was surprised that the memory of these things came back to her so easily.

A BLACK MINI, WHICH MUST HAVE BEEN CLARA’S, was parked in front of the open shed where Gabriel’s Zodiac was kept, its nose in the air. Ania let Jean-Louis take her bag. The field was yellow with leaves that had fallen during the afternoon rains; the damp grass wet the canvas of her shoes. It was still daylight, even though the lights along the roadway were visible behind the foliage. Jacqueline must have been keeping watch for their arrival for she approached, in boots and an apron, using a newspaper to protect herself from the drops of water falling from the trees.

She always wore her hair very short, tightly curled, and a scarf hid her thick neck, whose skin was sensitive to the sun and to emotion. Ania intuited that she was as disturbed as her husband and just as slow as he to forgive her for having been absent so long. For a second her eyes, bright with tears, questioned the expression on Ania’s face. “It’s unthinkable what happened, unthinkable,” she said with bitterness, suddenly taking her hands. Ania could feel her thin lips brush her cheek in a kiss that was as swift and sparing as it had always been. Jacqueline had taken care of her when she was small with irreproachable loyalty. She had never been tender but had shown great concern, a mother’s concern. But the couple’s love was primarily directed toward Gabriel. Their admiration for him was exclusive and, in a way, contradictory, at least during the first years of his widowhood, which had been cynical and disruptive. Her own suffering and her shame hadn’t been understood, her setbacks in school criticized as being a form of incomprehensible stubbornness. “You worry your father,” Jacqueline had scolded her while signing her reports.

Their loyalty had been rewarded. Gabriel had finally reconciled himself to their values, agreeing with them little by little, condemning the construction of factory outlets at the entrance to the town, the disappearance of the last local businesses, and later, the poor quality of television programming, the filth on the crowded trains arriving in Saint-Lazare, the invasion of hooligans from outside the area who arrived at night in loud cars that were certainly stolen, young men somewhat like Novak had once been. In one sense, Gabriel’s suicide confirmed the threatening debacle ushered in by a world in which they no longer felt safe or in their own element.

VIOLET REFLECTIONS STREAKED ACROSS the windows of the double doors to the living room as Ania entered. Clara was sitting at Gabriel’s desk, her features hollowed, her hair a bit greasy, the concerned affection of the previous day visibly distracted by other concerns. “He’s in the bedroom, she said with a misplaced naturalness upon seeing Ania at the door. “I have to make a phone call,” she explained, her cell phone in her hand. “Can I leave you to yourself?”

Ania hadn’t expected to see Clara so at home in the house or to experience such discomfort. Two of the large sofas had been reupholstered with a light-colored woolen fabric, the old double curtains of heavy jute replaced with an ecru linen. Ania cast a final eye around her, then went to get her bag in the entrance hall, where Jean-Louis had placed it. There, everything had remained as it had been, as if for all eternity: the frog-mouth umbrella stand, the mildewed raincoats piled in the curve of the railing, the bags of stale bread for the horses under the stairs, the keys to the shed, to the Audi, and to the bicycle locks hanging next to the electric meter. The door to the toilet had been sealed and the wall entirely redone. Her father had changed his life after her departure, she realized, believing that, in a way, she no longer owed him anything.

It was Novak who had encouraged her in her desire to come, volunteering to stay with Théo until the following day. He felt that she shouldn’t let Clara decide everything, that she had to find the proof that the drawing was hers. Almost immediately, Ania had regretted talking to him. She needed to allow her worries to take their own course.

THE DOORS ALONG THE UPSTAIRS HALLWAY were open to the inhospitable shadows of the rooms. Ania realized at once that the body wasn’t upstairs. All the same, she pushed the door of her parents’ former bedroom, which then became her father’s alone. A paperback lay in the folds of the comforter neatly arranged on top of the bare mattress. Two crumpled summer hornets were lying on the edge of the window whose closed shutters were covered with white smudges. A cracked bar of soap sat in the shower in the bathroom, from which everything had been removed except for a pile of clean towels, a shell filled with small bars of hotel soap, a mosquito trap and a strip of blue refills wrapped in silver foil.

Ania took her bag to her old bedroom at the end of the hallway. Her name was still on the door, but all her belongings had disappeared, with the exception of a Kandinsky reproduction brought back by her godfather years ago. Even the bedspread had been replaced. Ania stood there, speechless, her face burning. It must have been Jean-Louis who had been given the job of removing her things. To take them where? To the dump? Ania was unable to even comprehend what that could have meant to her father to do something like that. It assumed a form of suffering or defiance on his part that she was unable to imagine. The inventory of what had disappeared slowly forced itself on her. Photographs of her as a girl and her mother at twenty, school notebooks probably, brush and ink drawings that she must have spent hours on after school, pictures taken with Chloé, and probably letters and documents whose disappearance left her feeling vulnerable. Ania placed her bag on the bed and opened the window. Jacqueline would be able to tell her what had happened; she was honest enough to tell her such things, even when unpleasant.

A station wagon was passing through the open gates, cautiously driving over the grass until it was behind the Audi. Ania didn’t recognize the young man who got out and went directly to the caretakers. She could hear Clara’s voice through the open door of the narrow interior balcony, which overlooked the living room at the end of the upstairs hall. When she was small, Ania had spent hours here, hypnotized by the depressing spectacle of her father’s silent and solitary work. She bent over the balustrade. Below, Clara had her back turned to her and was making a phone call while delicately dabbing her eyes before the chimney mirror.

Ania waited a few minutes before going downstairs. Clara took advantage of the time to say goodbye to her interlocutor. She wiped her lip with the back of her hand, saying, yes, she’d take care of herself. “I have to leave you now,” she added in a low voice, before hanging up. Ania watched her dig into the box of Kleenex on the low table and blow her nose furiously. “It’s so disgusting,” she said aloud, as her face broke into sobs. What was disgusting? Ania didn’t ask; she never felt sure enough and didn’t have the taste for fighting. Neither was she that curious about Clara’s convictions. Her pain, however, impressed her, it seemed so unlikely.

The man Ania had seen enter the caretakers’ home reappeared in the garden. He climbed the steps until he reached the double glass door of the living room, against which he placed his face. In the backlight, his silhouette was completely black. Clara crossed the room with long strides. “I have flowers to deliver,” he announced aggressively, reacting to the alacrity with which she had stepped before him. Clara excused herself: he had given her a scare. “Foolishly, I got scared,” she repeated, before opening the doors wide for him, first in the living room, then in the former library, which Ania discovered had been transformed into a bedroom.

The body was lying there, in a corduroy jacket and light-colored pants, on a large double bed recently made with a plaid bedspread. From a distance, Ania noticed that he wasn’t wearing a tie and had on shoes but no socks. The tears that rose in her eyes caught her by surprise, the result of some unknown chemistry. Clara had followed the deliveryman into the bedroom. Crossing before the bed while pointing out where the flowers should go, she placed her hand on Gabriel’s ankle, which she squeezed, hard, as if she were trying to comfort him with her presence. Ania couldn’t get over the fact that such a simple and forceful form of intimacy was possible with her father; it was as disturbing for her as seeing him lying in bed. The man returned with a third bouquet, which he placed to the left of the others before following Clara to the doorway, where she slipped a bill into his hand with gentle insistence.

Ania had moved to the threshold of the room, which rose up now from some dark and unrecognized corner of her memories of home. Someone had installed a window in the wall where there had always been a closet and bookshelves; it looked out over the peonies, which they must have had planted for the sake of privacy. A velvet-covered daybed faced the door. On it, a comforter lay folded in a heap; Clara had spent the night there, a few steps from the body.

HIS GLASSES HAD BEEN REMOVED, and the wrinkles from his lowered eyelids appeared to be made of plastic. It was the first time that Ania had seen a dead body. This presence so abstract, so denatured, and yet so alive left her more curious than disturbed. She extended her hand, winced at the completely foreign sensation of cold, damp skin. The body was chilled, the face artificially smooth, the mouth wired shut, the cheeks transparent. Ania stood there looking, waiting for him to get up, repeating to herself that he was dead, in the hope of getting some reaction out of her. The pale ankles, of female delicacy, hung loose in his shoes. Clara had gone along with this, his eccentricity of never wearing socks. Ania would not have known how to do such things and wondered what meaning they had. It must have been Clara, too, who had the idea of transforming the library into a bedroom. There was even a small bath, constructed from the old toilets on the ground floor whose orientation had been reversed. That’s where Gabriel’s shaving brush was found, his razor, a hairbrush with a tangle of white hair, his medications, mixed with Clara’s creams and lotions in intimate disarray. In the end, he had submitted to the conformity of marriage. Then he wasn’t so much above the trivial matters of daily life as all that, this man who had left her completely alone, or alone with Jacqueline, to face the very concrete problems of tampons and training bras.

Her home number appeared for the second time on her phone. Ania sat on the edge of the bathtub. Théo wanted to know if he could take out the biggest puzzle. The measured cadence of his voice reassured her, as well as Novak’s seriousness when he picked up the phone to listen to her answer. Ania was never completely calm when she left Théo with his father. Novak had neither the patience nor the intuition needed to address the uncertainties of a small deaf boy. He was careless about speaking to him face-to-face, had never been able to completely acknowledge what had happened to his son.

They had met at a park in town one July 14 evening. The night was hot, the crowd already a little drunk and restless. Several people had jumped fully clothed into the basin of a fountain. Novak watched them, laughing, with some friends who, like him, had arrived from Serbia, and a cousin who lived outside the city, with whom he had been staying for several months. His smile was distorted by a nagging scar, as if it had been made with a pair of scissors. Ania couldn’t take her eyes off his mouth. “What are you looking at?” he said to her from where he sat, getting up to go sit next to her. She was wearing her hair very short then. “You have a small head, a button mushroom,” he joked, wrapping a hand around her neck. She had had a couple of drinks, he had had several. His raspy tongue, with the bitter freshness of beer, had slipped in deep against her own. With a kind of obedient obscenity, everything inside her had said yes. She was twenty-five. Her lack of self-assurance had, until then, kept her far from love and men. That night, with him, and for a long time afterward, she had felt no more than a burning, anguished excitation, which was never satisfied.

Novak would disappear for months on end but always came back. This had gone on for two years, during which time, and in spite of everything, a lasting bond had formed between them. The fact of her pregnancy had made him proud, proud and crazy, to the point that Ania had wanted to believe he would stick around. Théo was three months old when the marriage took place. Ania was relieved that Gabriel wasn’t there. Until the final moment, she hadn’t even been sure that Novak would show up for the ceremony or that it was what she really wanted. The five years they lived together, in a kind of total unpredictability, had made her feel feverish and alive, just as they had been devastating for Théo.

THE BEDROOM SHUTTERS WERE NOW CLOSED from the outside. It was almost night when Ania ended her call with Novak, having made him promise not to go out again once Théo was asleep. An old mirror, one side of which was entirely tarnished, occupied the width of nearly the entire wall above the sink. Ania could see the body, now illuminated by a bedside lamp covered with light-colored fabric. Clara was putting socks on him; she suspended her gesture, surprised at seeing Ania at the entrance to the room. “I don’t think people would understand,” she said simply, with a voice drained by sorrow.

On the glass panes of the tall living room windows the evening was now nothing more than a red streak, a wound made on the reflections inside the room. Clara had put on a hooded raincoat whose horn belt buckle beat against the furniture. “I have to get my brother at the station and bring the music to the church; can I leave you alone with him?” Ania was troubled at no longer finding her as serene and stoic as she had been at Monceau. “The church?” She allowed herself to show surprise without knowing whether the idea really bothered her all that much. Clara looked at her, and her gaze was filled with fatigue. She sat on an armrest and undid the top buttons of her raincoat, as if preparing for a lengthy discussion.

“It wasn’t easy to convince the priest,” she said, massaging her forehead, “but we can certainly go back to the mayor to ask him to lend us a small room,” she said with a laugh that turned into a sob. She brought her bare hands to her face. Clara remained hidden that way for a few seconds, then drew a deep breath and apologized for having made the arrangements without consulting her. “You were so rarely here,” she added, justifying her actions without a hint of betrayal. “Gabriel was no longer the same, you know. He had returned to his more traditional feelings, whatever you might think.” Ania was not surprised. Her father had always loved being a bit out of step with his own character. “Do what you think is best,” she replied, feeling that she had no prerogatives about the burial. “Are you sure?” Clara asked, raising her eyebrows. Ania watched her as she readjusted her raincoat. The incident, though minor, had revealed a potential enemy beneath the beautiful and cautious face.

ANIA WATCHED THE MINI’S RED LIGHTS disappear through the gate. It was almost eight and the sky was melting bit by bit into the blackness of the trees. Gusts of wind shook the leaves of the birch trees against the wire grating on the front door. Ania rediscovered the silence and the unexpected but intimidating freedom that had been hers on those evenings when Gabriel left to sleep in Monceau. She went into the kitchen and, in the refrigerator, found a plate of chopped meat from Saturday that Jacqueline had prepared for her father. Only one of the three wall fixtures was working, and it did more to darken than to brighten the room. The house was uninhabitable at dusk. Even during those times when her memories were happiest, Ania had spent them in the poisoned air of her father’s sudden depressions.

Clara hadn’t said how long she’d be gone. Ania threw the chopped meat into the garbage pail and prepared a piece of bread with butter, which she ate in the living room, staring at her reflection in the window. The presence of death nearby had already become ordinary. What earlier life prepares us to confront such an extraordinary experience?

The lamp on the nightstand cast its light onto the cold skin. From the doorway, Ania looked into the room where Clara and he had stayed, leaving the upstairs to friends and hornets. The garden had vanished behind the inverted image of the living room, and she suddenly felt that she was being watched from outside. So she turned off the light. A relief of shadows and silence reappeared before the river on which a few red reflections still floated by. Through the reeds planted alongside the small building next door, two windows pierced the night with yellow light. No one was there. Ania rested her forehead against the glass. The whisper of fear slowly grew calm. In the bedroom, the body could barely be made out. Ania hesitated to relight the lamp but finally decided not to return to the room.

Clara had forgotten her phone, which vibrated for a few seconds in the disorder of the desk, left in disarray by Gabriel. Ania drew closer. The vibration had stopped but the screen was illuminated. It was resting on a letter of condolence, a handwritten letter on government stationery. The handful of other letters for Gabriel hadn’t been opened. Ania walked around the desk and sat on the chair from which hung one of his vests. With her foot, she hunted for the switch to the halogen lamp. The room seemed to open up before her, lugubrious and profoundly silent. Ania waited a moment, not knowing what she was hoping to find.

The two drawers beneath the top of the desk were stuffed with a dense mass of business cards, receipts, paper clips, rubber bands, and a stack of photos of Gabriel at this same desk or walking into the wind beneath the trees in the garden. The wall of CDs was about the same as she remembered it. The small box of her mother’s jewelry was still there and, next to it, the shelves of orange notebooks. A photo hid the radio speaker, a marriage photo taken in the mayor’s reception room. In it, Gabriel, wearing a light-colored suit, was sitting on a velvet bench, his gaze focused somewhere beyond the lens. Clara stood behind him, one hand caressing his neck, the other resting familiarly on the mayor’s shoulder, her father, probably, or at least a close relative. She was wearing a fitted dress, sleeveless and seamless, with small gold earrings, and, as always, no makeup. Her relaxation in this setting and surrounded by such elegance reflected a very deliberate, almost willful shattering insolence. Ania was surprised at how deeply she felt wounded by the confidence given off by the picture. She put the photo back and opened her mother’s box. Nothing had been touched among the small collection of objects, figurines, and rings, to which had been added the enameled medallion she was wearing the day of the accident. Ania hesitated taking the medallion, but with a somewhat theatrical and insincere desire, which she soon abandoned.

THE CARETAKERS HAD MADE A FIRE, and clouds of smoke now reached the first-floor windows. Ania remained pensive in the center of the empty room, fascinated that she could feel so absent from her own past. She hadn’t turned on the lights when she came in, just opened the shutters. Some light reached her from the streetlights and the rapid sweep of headlights over the stone pillars of the entrance gate. Soon, a scooter pointed a white beam of light at the façade, then against the wall of the shed, where it stopped. The driver spoke briefly into a telephone before stepping to the ground and lifting the seat to remove something that must have been a camera, and walked toward the house.

He glanced through the glass panes of the entrance door, then stepped back as if looking for another way in. Ania was about to open her window when she saw Jean-Louis come out without closing the door and walk straight toward the man, his arms hanging by his sides. There was a brief exchange between them, after which the man backed toward the bike, his steps marked by a singular impertinence. Jean-Louis followed him a short distance, repelling him by his presence alone, and stood motionless on the road long after he had left. Ania watched him retrace his steps, tearing up fistfuls of tall weeds to free the wings of the gate, replace the bar, and return to the house, making a sign for her to open the window.

That he had known she was up there all that time made her feel uncomfortable. “Make sure the shutters on the garden side are shut and don’t answer the telephone,” he told her in a broken voice. “They’re shit, real shit.” He left to go back home. Ania closed the window. The unspeakable brutality of the scene continued to resonate within her. Only once before had she seen him in this stone-cold fury. It was a spring night, maybe a year after her mother’s death. Some drifters had gotten into the shed. Jean-Louis had seen their flashlights through the cracks in the boards; later he said that he was afraid they would set fire to the place with their cigarettes. Gabriel had found him kicking the bodies captive in their sleeping bags. Ania had been woken up by his voice, screaming at him to stop. She had gone downstairs in her pajamas, had been surprised by the coldness of the dew beneath her bare feet and stopped; a still unknown distress had left her paralyzed and in tears. Later, her father had come up to reassure her, still shaking with anger. “He might have killed them,” he remonstrated, kissing her hair. The coldness between the two men lasted several months. The lack of understanding was absolute; Jean-Louis had been mortified that his loyalty could be vilified in this way.

Ania wondered how Clara would open the gate from the outside when returning from the station. But she had neither the courage nor the desire to go out at night to remove the bar, any more than to close the shutters overlooking the garden. The electric heater futilely exuded an odor of burnt dust. It would have taken an entire day to heat the floor and ensure the rooms were at least a little comfortable. Her bed was made, but Ania feared the sensation of cold sheets, a feeling of lying down in ice, a memory her body had retained of the ski camps that Gabriel used to send her to every Christmas.

It wasn’t yet nine; she decided to call home. Théo answered. Ania heard him shout, “I’ll let you talk to Papa,” before returning to the TV screen. “They’ve been talking about your father on the news,” Novak told her, yawning. “What a strange guy,” he added, without being able to repeat what had been reported.

ANIA MANAGED TO FALL ASLEEP beneath one of her old parkas, which she had found in a closet and in which she discovered a dirty handkerchief and a ten-franc coin. The soft knock on her door drew her from her torpor. Clara had come up to ask if she wanted to eat something with them, that is, with her and her brother, whom Ania heard taking dishes from the cabinets. She told her she had already eaten, that she was tired. Their presence in the house and the incident with Jean-Louis had exhausted something deep inside her, and she was not far from tears. She lay in bed fully clothed without drawing the curtains. Wisps of smoke spiraled through the night before the window. Below, a kettle whistled in the kitchen. Then Ania heard the creaking of the tall shutters that opened onto the porch, near the garden, which her father had never bothered to close, even when he left for town for several days. Eventually, she fell asleep to the distant sound of the television.