The telephone rang two or three days later, almost at the same hour—just as dusk was about to fall—as Madame Dufaux’s visit. This time, Claire Marie answered the phone. Of course it was Hermann.
He seemed to hesitate. “I hope,” he began, “you’re not angry at me for my insistence the other day.”
Then he gave it a try: he explained that he had a certain amount of leeway in his schedule, and that he could free up some time in the late afternoon or early evening on certain days. He could juggle his appointments. “I’d so much like to see you again,” he said. “Would you by chance be free this evening, for example? Could you meet me this evening?”
“Yes,” my sister said, without any very clear idea of what she was doing.
“In two hours? Perfect. It’s perfect that you’re available. Would Versailles be all right with you? That’s where my office is. Could you come to Versailles? It would just be a quick train ride for you. It would be simpler.” He gave her the name of a street. “Will you remember it? I’ll park my car on the right, near the train station, past the taxis. There are always open parking spots; it’s quite easy. I’ll leave my lights on. See you soon?”
“Yes,” said my sister.
“I’m stunned by your behavior,” I observed. “You recognize that you’re starting to get scared, and you go ahead anyway. I have to say, for a busy man, he had a good deal of free time. For the head of a company who traveled a lot. That didn’t surprise you? He had your telephone number. Which you never gave him. And then, he’d made sure to tell you about his wife…It doesn’t add up, none of it.”
“I know,” she said. “As you can imagine, I’ve had plenty of time to reflect on all that. I myself don’t understand what got into me. Let’s just say it was ‘beyond my control.’ ”
She stretched, leaning back on her chair, and sighed. “I’m not trying to justify myself.” She confessed that on the following days, in spite of everything, she’d agreed to several meetings with Hermann, always on Thursdays, the days when Mélanie stayed at a neighbor’s after school. It was the middle of the winter. Night came early, thus enhancing the discretion of her departures.
She’d walk down the dark shoulder of the street to the station at the hour when the offices empty out and the day, as they say, is behind you; the hour when suburbanites surge into the stations of the Transilien rail network; the hour when exhausted, inert passengers stand absentmindedly in the railroad cars, gliding along and watching the lights and station names slip past: Puteaux, Suresnes, Vaucresson, Marly-le-Roi, L’Étang-la-Ville.
The farther the train got from Paris, the blacker the darkness would become; the line went through entire neighborhoods whose dark streets, lower than the railroad tracks, were barely visible; nothing could be seen but the shapes of the windblown trees and bushes alongside the tracks, some small cafés, stores whose illuminated fronts succeeded one another in a blur of speed; these glimpses were interrupted only by the violent orange neon of the train stations’ lights. Some stations, where the train didn’t stop—it was a “direct”—passed by like movie sets.
At the Versailles station, the passengers would push through the ticket barriers en masse, leaving the platform as empty as a street after a storm. The concourse was drafty; once she caught a nasty chill and began to cough.
He’d be waiting for her near the station. She could identify his car because its lights were on; he’d be listening to music, often the same piece, or making a phone call; she’d tell herself he was attending to his business. He’d always end the call as soon as he saw her. One day, when he’d driven them to one of the park’s dark entrances and was just in the act of parking, a car appeared at the gate. The vehicle’s headlights illuminated the gate’s gilded scrolls. It opened. An interior barrier rose; someone must have inserted a card into the security system. The car passed inside; its headlights made a long colonnade of trees emerge out of the night. Then the two opened wings of the gate returned to their former position.
They never entered the park, Claire Marie and Hermann. It was too late.
THE CAFÉS where he’d arrange to meet her were never the ones that tourists went to. He’d choose places with discreet terraces, places whose decor hadn’t changed since the 1980s: cane-bottomed chairs, worn red-leather banquettes, and faux-marble tables that facilitated intimate conversations. When he was late, she’d sit all the way at the back to wait for him. One or two guys would be gloomily sipping their espressos, others would be buying cigarettes, while groups of disoriented Japanese or Americans studied maps of the Palace of Versailles and its grounds, whose gates had just closed. When Versailles closes, it’s as if the city’s heart stops beating. All the streets run toward the somber mass of the royal estate.
SHE’D LOOK AT HER WATCH, on the alert for approaching headlights; pairs of them would pass in single file (because their brightness dazzled her, the face behind the steering wheel was never visible), she’d try to make him out—and later, she told me, years later, years and years, after they’d lost all contact, when she wasn’t even sure she’d recognize him if she were to run into him
(it’s almost fifteen years ago, she said, which is really crazy!),
it happened to her, it would still happen to her, at night, on side roads, every time a car would come upon her from the opposite direction, its headlights suddenly appearing, an invisible shape behind the wheel, the possibility suddenly appearing,
perhaps for a thousandth of a second, a quarter of a second,
time
always separating them, and indifference, no doubt, and incomprehension, she said,
this question would flash through her:
Is that you? Where are you?
HE’D ENTER THE CAFÉ with his slightly dragging, possibly exhausted step, thrusting his eternal pack of cigarettes into his pocket. He’d glance toward the leather banquettes, searching for her, squint to improve his chances of spotting her in her refuge, smile when he located her. Once or twice, seeing him from a distance like that, as he was pushing through the door of the café, at a moment when he didn’t know he was being observed, she thought he looked strange; he always wore the same long, dark overcoat, always left it open; he gave an impression of strength and attrition. But she didn’t know why, she could never explain it to herself, and yet when he took her hand and held it in his to warm it—saying, I’m so glad to see you, your hands are cold—or put it on his knee, she sensed that he felt for her, in spite of everything, an inexplicable tenderness.
She was almost sure that he was lying to her about a great many things, but she felt certain that he was alone and that his solitude was complete, so dense that she could perceive the space it occupied around him, and that solitude touched her heart.
He never talked about his present life, but always about his “life before,” in Hungary, about his apartment building in the suburbs, about his brother, who was stagnating somewhere, and from whom he seldom heard. He told her, “We listened to a lot of music in my house, but I never took any lessons. We couldn’t afford it. I’m not an intellectual. I was past thirty when I came over to the West, I didn’t speak the language. In France, I did odd jobs, first in restaurants, then as a laborer on building sites. I pulled myself up by my bootstraps. I even spent time in prison, you know.” He told her, “I trust you.”
He was the reason why she made Mélanie take piano lessons. Christian didn’t want to force her. Claire Marie insisted.
Once he said, “My wife doesn’t know anything about my business. She doesn’t know anything about anything at all.” On another day, he made an admission: “Things between us aren’t going very well. We’ve separated. We have too many differences, we’re too far apart.”
He’d drive her back in his car and stop a few blocks from her house, making sure she had enough time to pick up her daughter from the neighbor who was minding her; he’d look at his watch and say, “You have five minutes.” She’d get out, and he’d roll along slowly beside her; she’d clench her teeth and walk on, her expression giving no hint that she saw him. She’d say to herself, This is the last time, we’re done.
But he’d lower the window, stick his head out, smile at her, and say, “Thursday, same time?” Then he’d drive away.
In the car, he drove too fast. Once, as they were leaving Versailles, he ran a red light and they were pulled over by the police; she could see his anger, could sense that he had intended to mash the accelerator to the floor the moment the gendarme stepped out of his van, but he had controlled himself, probably because she was with him, and held out his driver’s license.
“This is an old license,” said the policeman. “It’s foreign, you haven’t kept it up to date, so it’s not valid anymore. And as far as I can see, you haven’t had the vehicle inspected either. Plus, you were driving too fast; at that speed, you could run over somebody, are you aware of that? You could kill someone on the spot.”
The gendarme paused for a moment, turning the document over and over in his hand with a skeptical look on his face. He wrote down the number on the license plate.
“Are you a foreigner?”
“Naturalized French,” Marc Hermann replied in a low voice.
The policeman nodded; he looked alternately at the car and at Hermann’s austere, expressionless face, and then he tried to distinguish my sister’s face through the driver’s window. She remained mute the whole time.
“Are you Madame Hermann?” the gendarme asked.
“No,” my sister said.
The gendarme asked no more questions. He walked around the car to place himself on the passenger’s side and stared at my sister as though he were trying to memorize (and later to recall) her face. Was he liable to identify her? Had he ever been to her husband’s office? If he wrote up a report, would he put “Monsieur Hermann and his passenger”? “Monsieur Hermann and an unidentified female”? “Monsieur Hermann and the doctor’s wife”?
“Where are you going?”
“Ville-d’Avray,” said Marc Hermann. “I’m in a hurry. I have an appointment.”
In the end, the policeman let them go with a simple warning: Don’t do it again. Obey the speed limits.
I interrupted Claire Marie: “Of course you realize he didn’t have any appointment. He was lying. Lying came easily to him.”
“I don’t know,” my sister said. “Accusing him is easy too. Anybody in his situation would have lied.” Then she conceded, “It’s possible. Maybe he lied about lots of things. What would that change?”
“Maybe he didn’t have a wife at all. Maybe he had no business at all. You didn’t know where he came from. From out of nowhere. Didn’t any of that bother you?”
“Yes, it did,” said my sister. “I had no idea where it was leading me. I told you that I found some of his behavior strange, but I was never really afraid. Or maybe just once, near the end.”
THAT THURSDAY, a heavy, cold, disheartening rain inundated the landscape.
The rain streamed down the big glass windows of the Versailles train station and made seeing difficult, so much so that Claire Marie had trouble finding the car. He was talking on the telephone, softly, in Hungarian, and cut the connection as soon as she opened the door; she could feel that he was irritated. He drove off right away. “I can’t go back home,” he told her. “I’m having some problems, some big problems.”
As always, he was driving too fast, and he sped through several red lights.
“What problems?” she asked.
But he simply replied, “Problems with suppliers. A ship with cargo in the harbor. I won’t pay. They’re threatening me. There are some guys in this business who’ll stop at nothing.”
They had left Versailles and entered a less populated area, an area my sister recognized, on the way to the Route Forestière du Cordon de Viroflay.
According to her, they drove along the same portion of the forest several times; it was terribly dark, awash in a deluge; Hermann kept driving without a word, randomly, consumed by a mute rage.
He braked in front of a store that was part of a gas station. “I have to stop,” he said. “I forgot to pick up a few things.”
Claire Marie watched him run through the downpour; she waited for him in the car, listening to the rain pounding on the roof and keeping an eye on her watch. Time passed, and he didn’t return. What could he be buying? she wondered. What’s going on? Did he get out to make a phone call? Is he being followed?
Cars with their headlights on filed past; she could barely see them through the fogged-up windows; the vehicles seemed to be fleeing, hurrying toward inhabited places; in the halos around the headlights, a thick curtain of raindrops was visible.
Finally he returned, his face expressionless; he opened the door roughly, threw some bags onto the back seat, and restarted the car.
She didn’t dare speak.
She had a feeling he was going back to the forest.
He’s been in prison, she thought. For what?
Suddenly, he flicked on his blinker and slowed down. On that part of the road, in the heart of the woods, there was a place, a hunting lodge or café, whose completely drenched terrace she could see; it was one of those former forester’s houses transformed into a chalet, where hikers would stop for a midday break. There were no lights on; but maybe, my sister hoped, maybe there was someone inside in the dark, standing behind the counter, waiting for the unlikely arrival of some customers, looking out at the rain, suffused with the sadness of the rain and the forest. That was what she hoped, with all her heart. She felt she was lost.
He braked, stopped the car in front of the building, and switched off the engine, but he didn’t open the door. And made no move to get out. The interior of the café looked deserted. Tables were stacked inside. In front of the door, a bucket caught the rain that was pouring down from a gutter without letup.
“Where are we?” my sister asked.
“I don’t know,” he said in a clipped voice. “As you can see, it’s a forest house. We’re stopping here.”
She protested: “I’d rather go home.”
“Five minutes. I’m thirsty, and it’s dangerous to drive in such a storm.”
“It’s closed,” said my sister. “This is pointless. There’s nobody inside.”
He pulled her to him and tried to kiss her, but she struggled and he let her go.
“I wish I understood,” he sighed.
They remained for a while without speaking. Claire Marie, increasingly anxious, counted the minutes on the dashboard clock. He lowered the window on his side and smoked a cigarette. Rainwater came in through the opening.
“I’ve had enough of these café meetings,” he said at last, throwing away his cigarette. “I want you to come to my place. It’s not the first time I’m asking you that. Why won’t you come to me?”
“To your house?”
“Don’t be stupid. To my office,” he said. “In Versailles. My company’s in Versailles. You have the address—I gave you my card. I’ll wait for you there tomorrow. Your choice. If you don’t come, I’ll understand.”
He started the car and didn’t speak again for the rest of the trip.