Magnus and Ada live really close to my hotel in Stockholm, at 27 Spergatten. I didn’t tell them I was coming. It’s nine in the morning. It’s still dark. The sun will rise at 11 A.M. and set at 3 P.M. I’m very cold.
Wrapped up in Jules’s padded jacket, I walk fast. By my calculations, Annette’s parents, Magnus and Ada, are around seventy years old. I also know that they don’t speak a word of French. So I’ve arranged to meet an interpreter outside 1 Spergattan before going to knock on the door of number 27. All I know about her is that she’s called Cristelle, is French, twenty-six years old, and has lived here a long time. I also know that she costs 400 Swedish kronor an hour, which is about 50 euros. Speaking two languages pays better than looking after old folk.
She’s waiting for me.
I see her blowing into her gloves. Her blond hair is hidden under a bottle-green woolly hat.
As I approach her, she says: “Hey, Justine!” She recognized me thanks to my Facebook profile photo, which shows me just as I am. Neither slimmer nor fatter, neither darker- nor lighter-haired, neither younger nor older. We shake gloves.
As we walk from number 1 to number 27, I explain to her again that I’ve come here to meet the grandparents of my cousin Jules, who is eighteen and whom I consider as my brother, that we both lost our parents in a car accident, which may not have been an accident, and that I’ve just discovered that my Uncle Alain, Jules’s father, may not have been his father. As I’m telling her this story, which sounds straight out of one of Gran’s novels, I see her warm breath gushing out of her mouth, while she emits only onomatopoeic grunts.
Number 27 is a red wooden door, hung with a Christmas wreath. Are they alone? Are they here?
Annette had a slightly younger brother. Jules has two cousins. What if it’s them who open the door?
I take off my right glove and give three quick knocks. Nothing. I knock again.
And what if, three days before Christmas, Magnus and Ada have gone off to a fjord, or something like that? But since I have no idea what a fjord is, I can’t picture Magnus and Ada at one. And what if they’re dead, and we knew nothing about it? But no, because I intercepted the Christmas card and check they sent Jules only last week. They couldn’t have died in a week. Although . . . It takes just a morning to die.
A man opens the door: Magnus in his pajamas. Jules in fifty years’ time. Same eyebrows, same eyes, same mouth, same emaciated face, same size. I notice his hands, his fingers longer than cigarettes russes wafers. Indeed, if he were smoking, I could faint right here on the sidewalk, he looks so much like my brother. Even his white hair resembles Jules’s: the same unruly mop.
“Hello, I’m Justine, Jules’s cousin.”
Cristelle repeats after me, in Swedish: “Hello, I’m Justine, Jules’s cousin.”