1926
The good Lord didn’t answer her prayers. Hélène still doesn’t know how to read.
This evening, she has decided to die. She’s already heard about suicide. Last year, in the village, a man poisoned himself by swallowing tablets. For Hélène, it’s the big blackboard that’s poisonous.
After class, she hid in the storeroom, where the chalks, ink, paper, and dunce’s cap are kept. With heart pounding, she listened to the other children leaving and her teacher, Monsieur Tribout, coughing, putting away his things, fastening his big briefcase, stepping down from the dais, and closing the door behind him.
Once the corridors and yard are silent, Hélène stuffs the dunce’s cap in her pocket and returns to her empty classroom. It feels strange. And yet she’s very familiar with this empty classroom: at recess, she’s always in it, as punishment or to finish off her work. But usually she can hear the cries of the other children outdoors. This evening, she’s surrounded by silence.
She looks at the books neatly lined up near the teacher’s big desk. She has a burning desire to rip out every one of their pages, tear them to pieces, hurl them at the walls, for being so pretentiously lined up. But she’d never dare.
She’s facing the blackboard. With a remnant of hope, she attempts to read the first sentence of a paragraph Monsieur Tribout has written out in several colors of chalk, underlining certain words: SHE HAS BROKEN THE LITTLE MILK JUG.
SHASBROKELITHETLEMIKUG.
This is what Hélène reads.
Monsieur Tribout doesn’t try to change her perception of letters anymore. At first, he tried to help her by stressing each syllable. By making her write the same word ten times, but it’s as if Hélène can’t retain a thing. As if her words were forever being tossed around by the wind.
This year, he sat her at the back of the class. On her own. Who’d want to sit next to a pupil you can’t even copy from? Before, the teacher would take out the dunce’s cap. Now, it’s worse. She senses he pities her and has given up hope. As long as he was punishing her, it meant he had faith, had hope.
SHASBROKELITHETLEMIKUG.
No tears well in her eyes. Her grief ran dry ages ago. During her first year of school, she cried herself out.
She presses her mouth to the blackboard and starts licking, like some small creature. She begins on tiptoe. Then, realizing that the first sentence is far too high, she perches on the teacher’s chair. She licks each letter, whether red, blue, or green. She swallows them, wants to poison herself with their kind of poison. She spits on them so they slide better down her throat. She rubs her lips over the capital letters, the periods, the commas.
When the blackboard is clean and Hélène’s mouth every color of the rainbow, she goes to sit in her place. At the back of the class. On the opposite side to the wood-burning stove. And she waits for death. Sitting quietly there, she waits for the swallowed words to kill her forever. For them to finish the task begun on that first day she entered the school.
She is wearing a pretty red dress. Like Little Red Riding Hood’s dress, she’d said to her mother in front of the sewing machine. What she didn’t know was that the big bad wolf would appear to her in the guise of a big black board.
But death doesn’t come. SHASBROKELITHETLEMIKUG doesn’t have the magic powers of a lethal pill. And yet she’d thought it would finish her off as fast as the pig the neighbors kill once a year with a blow to the back of the head.
She won’t leave the classroom before she’s dead.
She decides to swallow the ink in all the pots on the class’s little desks, and finish off with the teacher’s. That way it’s certain she will die. And if that’s not enough, she’ll swallow the sewing needles she always keeps in her pocket to prick her thigh when the pain in her tummy becomes unbearable.
She gets up and opens the ink pot on the first little desk. It’s Francine Perrier’s, the best pupil. Top of the class. The girl who succeeds at everything and never crosses anything out. The girl whom Monsieur Tribout always addresses with a smile. The girl whose handwriting looks like a bird on the wing, and whose voice sounds like music when she reads aloud, never making a mistake or stumbling at the first comma.
Just as Hélène is taking a sip from Francine Perrier’s ink pot, and thinking that there are another twenty-seven to go, a noise makes her jump. Something has just struck one of the classroom windows. As if someone had thrown a stone in her direction. Someone’s watching her. Hélène’s heart races. She puts down Francine’s ink pot and hides under the teacher’s desk.
Ten minutes go by. Not another sound.
She finally comes out of her hiding place and goes up to the window. She can see nothing outside. The yard is empty. The big oak tree is losing its last leaves. Hélène’s eyes follow one in particular. Falling to the ground along with the night. The leaf flutters over a small white puddle. Hélène stares at it for a few seconds. It isn’t a puddle, it’s a bird that’s fallen to the ground. It’s still moving. Hélène rushes out to the yard. Through the corridor with its empty coat racks. She’d not worn her cape this morning so no one would notice she was still there after school.
Under the oak tree, she stops at first a few centimeters away from the bird. It’s a seagull. Her seagull! The one that’s followed her like a shadow since she was small. The one she watches in the sky to cleanse her eyes of the sentences she can’t read. The one she depicts with the shadows of her fingers on the atelier wall. It really does exist. She hasn’t just imagined it.
The seagull is wounded, but alive. It stares at Hélène, its beak half-opened, its breathing erratic, as if its heart were beating too hard. It seems to be suffering. Hélène suddenly understands that it threw itself against the window so she’d get out of that accursed school. Or perhaps it wanted to die at the same time as her.
The bird and the child observe each other. Kneeling beside the seagull, Hélène daren’t touch it. She fears hurting it even more. But she can’t abandon it. Hélène has no brother or sister. She can’t abandon her double.
Finally, gently, she cradles it with her hands, and slips it into the big inside pocket of her smock, against her heart.