The following day, she took Mélanie to a birthday party. She’d had almost no sleep. The house was full of children, and she soon found the noise unendurable. She went out, heading for the Parc de Saint-Cloud, but when she saw the park gate, she turned her back on it and took some side streets, where she got lost; they had the same even slope as those in her neighborhood, the same buhrstone houses, the same well-maintained residences, all of them different, some dating from the 1930s, with their overly ornate little towers, while others were almost new and had painted doors, an English look, garden gates, large, practical garages, rain-soaked gardens. She walked on, past more and more houses. “It’s all completely built up, you can’t imagine the number of houses on those hills. You can’t imagine,” my sister said, “the number of lives. Do you ever think about that sometimes? The number of lives?”
She came to a train station on the Transilien suburban line. There were some people in the glass shelter, waiting for their train. She wanted to take it too. But finally she happened upon a telephone booth. She went in and dialed Marc Hermann’s number. After the phone rang three times, the answering machine was activated: it wasn’t Hermann’s voice, but one of those synthetic voices that recite their lines mechanically: “You have reached an automated answering system.” This discouraged her; she hesitated, decided not to leave a message (What good would it do?), let the tape run all the way to the end.
The trains made a lot of noise, yet she heard (or tried to hear), behind the fluctuating levels of the answering tape, the unknown life of the office where Marc Hermann currently was not, and where Marc Hermann had perhaps never been; similarly, the voice-mail recorded the vague sounds of the afternoon, the noises of the suburb, of the vehicles, of the train pulling into the station.
THE PHONE WENT DEAD. She stepped out of the booth and turned to the left.
It was cold. The farther she walked, however, the less oppressed she felt, and the better she breathed. The air was damp from the showers that were occasionally wrung out of the gray sky; there was an odor of recently soaked earth, of winter earth. The smell was so strong that my sister thought it had impregnated the silent message she’d left on the answering machine.
The streets she traversed that day reminded her of our childhood. Before, she’d never recognized the kinship between the streets of Ville-d’Avray and those of our old Brussels neighborhood, around the park in the municipality of Woluwe-Saint-Pierre. Modest beauty salons that had never been renovated, with their rows of sinks and their old-fashioned hairdressers, ladies all, reminded her of Chez Rosa, where we’d go to meet Mama. Women would be waiting in there, sitting under helmet-like hair dryers with their curlers wrapped in pink nets.
“Your mother’s under the dryer,” Rosa would tell us. “Come back in fifteen minutes.”
“Do you recall Rosa’s hair salon?” my sister asked me. “And I don’t know if you remember, because you were younger, but there were Japanese cherry trees on the streets. In Ville-d’Avray, there are magnolias and tulip trees, but never that kind of cherry tree, the ones that look like they’re covered with cotton when they’re in bloom; I’ve never seen any since. I guess it’s an unusual species here. Maybe this isn’t the right climate for them.”
She looked at the houses with great curiosity; they seemed at once unknown and familiar; she told herself that surely, during the days when there was sunshine, it must penetrate to the centers of the various rooms and make everything more cheerful; but that day there was no sun.
She saw some shaded lamps next to certain windows, as well as the backs of some armchairs, covered with cloths, as in her own house. In some cases, decals of stars or fir trees left over from the past Christmas were still on the windowpanes, and she told herself those were kids’ rooms—Mélanie too had asked permission to stick decals on her window.
Some bicycles were leaning against walls.
There must have been dishcloths hung up in the kitchens, cabinets filled with flour and sugar, machines on standby (refrigerators refrigerating, dishwashers ready for washing and drying duties).
She told herself that other women, perhaps, were moving around in the silence of those houses, behind their papered walls; she wondered if the women were bending over sideboards, putting dishes away. Or over sinks, cleaning them with a spray of some disinfecting product. Or if they were ironing and calmly placing the warm, folded articles to the right of the ironing board. Or if they were turning on televisions, just so there’d be some sound coming from somewhere. Maybe telephones were ringing, and those women were hoping that a man’s voice would be on the other end of the line.
(Where are you, they’d say, in a meeting? Keeping an outside appointment?)
But often it was an advertising message. And if there was a maid working in the house, she wouldn’t disturb herself; the phone wasn’t for her, she knew that; it was never for her; many domestic employees were foreigners, they barely spoke French, they’d listen to the message left on the machine by a human voice, a human voice that broke and entered the silence of the empty room, leaving a message to which no other voice responded—and which was followed by the subdued, terse hum of the answering mechanism resetting itself.
When he came back, Hermann would surely listen to his messages; he’d hear nothing but silence, the buzz of the tape, the heavy sound of the train entering the station just at the moment when she made the call. No message, he’d think. He’d roll the tape again. He’d strain to hear the vague murmur of a suburban afternoon. Practically nothing. It was all that would remain to him of my sister.
The streetlamps came on all at once.
Claire Marie turned up her collar and pulled it close around her neck as she walked, and the streets succeeded one another; there were always intersections, cafés, little canteens, here and there a house higher than the others with a freshly repainted balcony, plucked, muddy gardens whose lawns were now nothing more than grass, barely finished new buildings (wet sand from the worksite and the cement mixers still remained on the lots). The building never stopped.
The streets grew darker, the lots wider and more wooded; there were more trees. Suddenly, she saw a great hole in the landscape. She said to herself, The Ponds!
She wasn’t sure exactly how, but she’d headed toward the Fausses-Reposes Forest, and although it wasn’t the best time (it’s not advisable for a woman to walk alone in the vicinity of the Ponds in the evening), she kept on going.
Eventually, she found a bench and sat down facing the water; night was falling; it would probably stay cloudy, without too much wind; the thick cloud cover would stall over Paris and Ville-d’Avray. Descending airplanes were making their final approach; she could see their blinking lights. Paris’s beating heart was very close, and the planes were trying to land on it.
The lights went on in the common areas of some buildings that formed an apartment complex, the last one before the forest began: a few low, numbered structures, separated by trees and streetlamps, with a letter on each entrance door and the look of public buildings.
All of a sudden, a man came out of the undergrowth opposite her; she sensed rather than saw his silhouette on the other side of the pond. He must have noticed her as well; he’d been able to “spot” her because of her light raincoat, which was brighter in the shadows, brighter than the shadows.
The man didn’t move. She knew he could follow each of her movements because of the light patch she made on the dark bench. She tried to see if he had a dog; a dog would have reassured her, would have meant that the man was simply out for a walk.
As far as she could make out, he was standing with his back to the woods, facing her. Maybe he was remaining immobile like that because he was smoking.
She shook herself, got up, and retraced her steps, heading for the lights of the apartment complex. It was inhabited, there would be people in it, around it; she walked fast, her hands in her pockets; she walked about a hundred meters, following the marked-out path, and then glanced behind her; he’d already come halfway around the pond. Maybe, when she reached the willow grove up ahead and skirted it, following its curve, she’d disappear from his view. But he was walking faster than she was.
“In the end,” my sister said, “I started running; I made myself breathless. I was crying too, the way you cry only in dreams when great difficulties arise. I told myself that if I tried to call out, I wouldn’t be able to make a sound. He shouted something behind me.”
By a miracle, she found herself at the top of her street; there was light in the living-room picture window. She’d completely forgotten Mélanie. Christian had gone to pick her up from the birthday party. And now he was giving her something to eat. He looked glum, full of reproach. The little girl was eating an egg.
“Why are you coming home so late?” Christian asked. “Where were you? Two hours I’ve been waiting for you!”
Mélanie thrust her spoon the wrong way into her egg and said nothing. Her face was all smeared, and the yellow egg yolk was running down onto her napkin.
My life, my sister said to herself. Here’s what I’m making of my life: this angry man, and this dirty-faced little girl.