Do you know where the name Fausses-Reposes comes from?” my sister asked Christian while they were sitting at their table that evening, next to the Oasis’s big window.
“I think there’s been a change in the spelling,” Christian said. “I think it may have started out as Fosses1 Reposes. I’d have to check; it must refer to some episode in the past, I don’t know which. Something in the war. Maybe some Resistance fighters were executed. There were certainly Resistance groups operating in these parts. If they got caught, they were put in front of firing squads right away.”
But when he saw her worried look, he corrected himself: “The name’s probably very old. The war I’m talking about may have taken place long ago, like the Hundred Years’ War. Or maybe a legendary war. Many place-names are connected to old legends or superstitions. There’s nothing real in any of that. It was just a dark, scary forest. Dark forests have always scared people. And then there’s the Ponds, very nearby. And extremely deep, remember. Maybe they were the original fosses.”
He tried to reassure her, but the more he played down her worries, the more he talked about old, unfounded legends and about the calm suggested by the name Fausses-Reposes, the more she was convinced that something terrible, something excruciating, must have happened in that forest. She began to think about one of those news stories that the papers feature for a week and then forget, stories that remain shut up in the damp darkness, in the creaking of the tree trunks when they move, in the vague fear of those who remember the reports and who say, Didn’t something happen here? Wasn’t someone terribly…imprudent?
“Wasn’t it there,” she asked, “that they found some politician? Drowned in a few meters of water? It reminds me of something I read. A politician drowned in a pond.”
“I don’t know,” said Christian. “I don’t remember, and nobody cares. In any case, they concluded it was suicide. When politicians are involved, they always conclude it was suicide.”
Her cheeks were red, her look vacant; she thought that the way she’d spent her afternoon could be read in her eyes as in a book. She avoided looking directly at him and sat turned toward the Parc de Saint-Cloud, which lay drowned by the night.
1 Translator’s Note: As used here, fosses means “pits” or “graves.”