The drawer of the bedside table is half-open. There’s no water left in the carafe. I fill it. Hélène drinks a lot. I don’t know if it’s the heat of her beach that makes her thirsty, or having been a bistro owner. Usually, we have to force the residents to drink so they don’t become dehydrated. No risk of that with Hélène.
With his girlish hands, Roman removes the hair elastic holding together some torn and stained scraps of paper. They are old pages pulled from newspapers or books. Roman touches them lightly, with his fingertips, and says to me:
“It’s extraordinary.”
I reply to my feet that, throughout his internment at the Dora factory, Lucien hid a sharp little stone inside his mouth, and every time he wanted to write something to Hélène, he would spit it out.
Roman hands me a piece of yellowing newspaper, now almost transparent from being kept so long in a pocket.
“So, what’s written on this one?”
“‘Hélène Hel not-married on November 19, 1934. Milly.’”
“You can read Braille?”
“No, Hélène read them out to me.”
“And on this one?”
“‘We should pray only for the present. To give thanks when it has your face.’”
“That’s beautiful. My grandfather wrote well. But I think people always write well when they’re in love.”
This time, I can’t stop myself from looking at him. As he says it, he pushes his blue eyes into mine, like a child filling two holes with modeling clay.
Without him asking, I unfurl page 7 of a Polish newspaper. On it, there’s the black-and-white photo of a silver-birch forest. Against the light, I show Roman how the page is riddled with tiny holes.
“It’s a kind of letter. A disjointed letter. The last words he ‘wrote’ in Braille. I don’t know what happened next. The train he arrived in, at Gare de l’Est, came from Germany.”
“Could you read it to me?”
I start to recite the words that I know off by heart:
“Why do they shoot at the dead? Why? So no one ever tells? So we all keep silent, even beyond this world? When it was my turn to get a bullet in the head, when I felt the cold of the barrel on my temple, there were some cries from outside. No more barrel on my temple. The men aimed upwards, into the sky. They forgot me, they forgot my life that was there for the taking. She comes from you. The child before our child.”
“What’s he talking about?”
“About Buchenwald, the execution, the seagull.”
“What seagull?”
“Hélène always thought that a seagull was protecting her, since her childhood. And that it protected Lucien while he was deported.”
“Carry on reading, please.”
I continue:
“What’s left of the man who wore flannel suits? Will you recognize me?
“I’m scared.
“First move one finger. Very gently. Then the hand, like on a piano.
“It’s to make noise inside my head.
“I write to remember a memory. The one of us hanging that ‘Closed for vacation’ sign on the café door. But we never left. Our pretend vacation in the room above, with the shutters closed. You’d seen to the provisions, I’d seen to the blue suitcase. I placed it on the floor of our room. The Mediterranean on the floorboards. A blue lagoon full of novels that I read to you. I particularly recall those by Irène Némirovsky. Sometimes, you would lean out of the window, as if out of the porthole of a boat, to tell me about the village and the people who were bored without us. And I told you about your belly, salty like a sea urchin’s.”
I look up. For the first time, I hold his blue gaze for a few seconds. The more I recite Lucien’s words, the less fearful I am of Roman’s eyes:
“You never said ‘I love you’ to me, but I love you for us.
“My love, the first time I kissed you, I felt a fluttering of wings against my mouth. At first I thought a bird was struggling behind your lips, that your kiss didn’t want mine. But when your tongue came in search of mine, the bird started to play with our breaths, as if we were volleying it back and forth between us.”
I’m no longer able to utter a word. I roll the papers up again, into the hair elastic. He asks me if that’s the end; I say yes, it is. I put the papers back into the drawer of the bedside table.
“Is it a fable, this seagull story?”
“Hélène’s fable. She says that each human being is connected to a bird during his or her time on earth. That the bird protects us.”
He leans over to his grandmother and kisses her.
“Why aren’t you wearing your smock today?” he asks me in one breath, without looking at me.
“I’m on vacation.”
“Yet you still come here?”
“I came to say goodbye to Hélène before I head off.”
“Where are you going?”
“Sweden.”
“It’s almost never daylight at this time of year . . . Well, what I mean is, it’s almost always dark.”
He smiles because he’s getting his words mixed up.
I look at him now. I can’t tell him that only Sweden will be able to enlighten me, even in the middle of December.
* * *
“Hello.”
“Could you take me to the airport?”
“Of course. What day?”
“Now.”
“Where are you going?”
“To Stockholm.”
“You’re visiting Jules’s grandparents?”
“Yes. How d’you know?”
“How do I know what?”
“How d’you know that Jules’s grandparents are Swedish?”
“You told me so.”
“You remember everything I tell you?”
“Yes. Well, I think so.”
“And do I tell you lots of things?”
“On the days I don’t annoy you, yes.”
Outside terminal 2 of Saint-Exupéry airport, What’s-his-name kisses my hair before leaving.
You never kiss the hair of someone you’re just fucking. He touches me and looks at me as if we’re “together.” In fact, I no longer really know what we are to each other.
I don’t have a suitcase, just a small bag with what I need for two days. In the departure lounge, my flight for Stockholm is listed, boarding gate 2. Terminal 2, gate 2. Jules was born on the 22nd. To me, that’s a positive sign.
Between Milly and the airport, What’s-his-name didn’t ask me any questions.
He switched on the radio, searching at random for songs, telling me this was his favorite kind of lottery. He was wearing a mustard sweater that didn’t go at all with his trousers. In any case, the color mustard should be prohibited by law.
What’s-his-name’s clothes are never well matched, but he gets two lovely dimples deep in his cheeks whenever he smiles, as if to make up for his poor taste.