Maybe a month later, as Claire Marie was walking home after running some errands, a car pulled up alongside her. The driver lowered the window, and when she bent down, she was surprised to discover the man she’d seen once at her husband’s office; she recognized his slight accent, which he corrected with very careful articulation. He smiled and said, “We’ve met before, I think. Aren’t you the doctor’s wife? Can I drop you somewhere? You’ve got a heavy load.”
“What would you have done in my place?” my sister asked.
I thought about it; I said, “I wasn’t in your place, but it sure was a funny coincidence. In any case, if you really were weighed down, it was very nice of him to offer you a ride, and very understandable too. Besides, he was one of your husband’s patients.”
“Exactly my reasoning,” said my sister. “I accepted.”
I couldn’t make out her face very well. Around us in the garden, the trees and the hedge were gray, as though molded in the thick dough of the twilight. Only black holes marked the places where the windows on the upper floor were located (Mélanie had left hers open when she went out). From that moment on, my sister talked as if she’d forgotten my presence, without stopping, without looking at me, speaking in a monotone. The streetlamp opposite the house projected a steady illumination that elongated our shadows on the lawn; I could detect peaceful sounds I wasn’t used to, because the empty yards, isolated from one another by walls and manicured hedges, were abundantly sonorous: you could hear discreet, well-bred traces of people’s lives, their discernible imprint, the crunching of tires on the gravel of a driveway when a vehicle entered a gate, doors being shut here and there, calls, the sounds of television programs. Of course, a few little things were known about the neighbors: where they took their vacations, what schools their children attended. Claire Marie had told me that a fairly well-known painter lived in the neighborhood; she’d shown me his house, the glass windows of the big studio just above treetop level, but that was all. Every home held its mystery. In the evenings, figures would appear in kitchen windows; hands would pull net curtains closed or turn cranks to lower blinds, and reference points would vanish; windows, rectangles of light, would go dark, merging with the night.
I thought about secure fences, about intercoms with surveillance systems, about security cameras that allow the owner to monitor the street, to see who’s ringing the doorbell outside the gate, to inhibit the unexpected. But you can’t thwart everything, not every chance event, not every possibility.
On the evening she was telling me about in her serious, monotone voice, nobody had noticed anything, no one had observed the car that stopped at the curb for two or three minutes (the time it took the man to lower his window, the time it took my sister to decide) before melting into the moderate, smoothly flowing traffic on the avenue. There’s always a bit of play, a gap or two, in space and time. Blind spots.
THE CAR WAS NO RECENT MODEL; the radio was tuned to a music station. The man drove for a moment without saying anything; then he switched off the radio and turned to Claire Marie: “May I invite you to join me for a drink? Just before I drop you off.”
Inside the café, after a few banal remarks about the weather and Ville-d’Avray, he introduced himself: he was in import-export; his firm did business mostly with Latin America.
“What do you export?” Claire Marie asked politely.
“Specialized equipment for industry. I’m not going to bore you with that.”
The café was brightly lit. For the second time, she was face-to-face with him, and she saw him in the light; she understood what had struck her about him; he had a broad forehead, and there was more gray in his hair than she’d thought; he was well past his first youth, in spite of his assured appearance; she even found that he looked a bit tired; he smoothed back his hair, and she registered his high cheekbones, his dark eyes—was he German? Argentine? His name was German, but after the war, hadn’t some Germans emigrated and settled in South America? The hand he’d placed on the table, holding the stem of his wineglass, was blunt, powerful, almost thick. She tried to identify his accent.
He was observing her closely, never turning away his eyes.
He talked to her about the ports and train stations he had frequented in Latin America and elsewhere, in his “other life.” That was where he’d started; riding on trains that ran in the mountainous regions; it gave you the feeling that you wouldn’t ever arrive anywhere, he said, it was an adventure, and he’d “knocked around” a lot before he finally succeeded. “I’ve almost killed myself several times,” he said, “in my other life. Everybody has several lives, did you know that? But over there, business gets done quickly. You do business fast in dangerous countries, you have to take risks; I took a few back then; I wanted to succeed. There was no choice for me; I had to pull it off.”
Not understanding much, my sister asked, “And you did succeed?”
He didn’t answer. He took a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket, gave my sister a questioning look, suppressed his urge, and covered the pack with one thick hand. Then he smiled at her and said, in his careful articulation, “I succeeded in at least one thing, but before that: I got out of Hungary. I’m Hungarian, from Budapest.”
He’d left his country when he was young because of the oppression, because of communism. Because of the closed horizons. Because of the barbed wire on the borders. Because of the watchtowers. He explained, “I got out in 1980. It was risky. Some people got shot at when they were spotted. Some didn’t make it. Others succeeded. I succeeded. I took the risk. One day,” he said, “I’ll tell you about it. I didn’t have much to lose. My father was a member of the opposition, and he was liquidated in the crackdown in 1956, when I was eight. My mother and my brother stayed on the communist side. I was the only one who left. I chose foreign lands. Exile.”
My sister nodded vaguely, because those words (the 1956 crackdown, communism) referred to things that were vague to her; they were words connected with our childhood, images like archival records that didn’t seem to apply to the actual world, but rather to a black-and-white past—as seen in films—and which, because of that, appeared as distant as the war. Like certain other words: the “Cold War”; the “Soviet bloc.” She remembered: Hungary was part of the Soviet bloc. One got the impression that it was a sort of solid block, as massive as a building, whereas in fact it covered a vast territory shaded on maps—the “Eastern European countries,” the ones behind the “Iron Curtain.” She remembered having seen documentaries about revolutions with bizarre names (“the Velvet Revolution”); “the Prague Spring” crossed her mind; she recalled images of protest demonstrations, of dense crowds marching in the streets and confronting tanks, of men carrying banners. Did they all have, as Marc Hermann did, an energetic face, a dimpled chin, a barely perceptible, slightly mocking smile?
“I’m boring you,” he said, “telling you all that.”
“Not at all,” my sister said.
“I got married in France,” he disclosed. “My wife’s French.”
My sister, embarrassed, bowed her head.
He watched her, still smiling, and tossed back his stiff hair.
“How did you manage to get across?” she asked. “Over the border, I mean. When you left.”
“I did what everybody who got out did. At the time I’m talking about, things had already loosened up. You could travel a bit, but you had to leave your passport. I elected to cross over illegally. At night, when the guards were tired, just before dawn. After the winter. Not a very original plan. The worst part were the dogs in the villages; they’d get a whiff of you, and once they started barking, they never stopped. Do you want something else? I could use another glass of wine.”
She refused and thanked him. “I have to go home.”
“Then may I drop you off?”
They went back to his car, chatting as they walked, and after a detour found themselves pleasantly strolling the streets in the vicinity of the Chaville train station.
“Let’s just say goodbye here,” my sister said, all of a sudden. “It’s much simpler. You needn’t trouble yourself. It’s late, and mine is the very next stop. I’ll take the train.”
But Marc Hermann didn’t look like a man in a hurry. He protested: “But why? Don’t go yet.”
She stayed. She wondered how she’d be able to get away from him. Would she have to thrust out her hand?
Night had fallen. He’d lit a cigarette, and he was walking very close to her in the darkness, on her left side, closer than necessary. She moved away, but he drew nearer; she noticed his shuffling gait, as if he were dragging his shoes along the ground. He said, “Your husband advised me to stop smoking, but I’m not following that piece of advice. And not the other one he might want to give me either. I’m happy to have had this chance to see you again, you know.”
She didn’t answer.
He agreed to leave her at the station but then accompanied her downstairs to the platform. He considered her for a moment in the darkness. “I’ll leave you now, I don’t want to pester ‘the doctor’s wife.’ Go on, you’re going to miss your train.”
He handed her his card: “If by chance you want to get hold of me someday. Get hold of me personally. Maybe you’ll feel like doing that, you never know. That’s my office number, my private line at my company. Call me. Don’t hesitate.”
She took the card and got on the train. While the train was moving away, she saw him moving away too, dragging his feet, and she smiled silently at herself, reflected in the window.
BACK HOME, my sister reread the card several times: MARC HERMANN—IMPORT-EXPORT. There was also a telephone number, and an address in Versailles. She hesitated to write the information in her address book and ended up leaving the card in the pocket of her raincoat, which she hung in the closet.
“I wonder,” she said to Christian, “if you remember a patient who came to see you the day I filled in for your secretary, a few weeks ago? A man named Hermann.”
“Maybe,” said Christian. “Why?”
“I don’t know. For no reason. The name came back to me. It’s a foreign name.”
“I see so many patients. Why should I remember that one?”
She wanted to ask, “What did he have?” But it would have been a waste of time.
In the course of the following days, she thought a little about Marc Hermann.
Then she thought about him less.