The hospital car park was deserted. It had long gotten dark and cold. Gramps had fallen asleep in the car. I watched him through the windshield. And found him very beautiful. His features were relaxed. Was he dreaming? I knocked gently on the window; he opened his eyes and smiled at me in his own way, lightly puckering both brow and mouth. But his mask of grief returned. He started the car without a word.
I looked in my bag for a tissue to wipe my eyes and mouth. I wanted to keep some trace of that kiss. I often look in my bag for things I never have. I came across the letter that Rose had given me at the coffee machine. I read it out loud:
October 5, 1978
Edna,
I no longer remember the day you walked out of old Louis’s café leaving your bag on the table. I was far too small. And in any case, losing one’s memory runs in the family. In fact, it’s pretty useful. That day, I must have thought you were leaving us on vacation, my father, your bag, and me.
My earliest memories go back to the Sunday afternoons when Hélène would close the café. It was the only day she’d wear make-up and her Sunday-best dress. We’d go for a swim in a river. We’d bring bread and hard-boiled eggs in a basket, and both tuck into them while watching Daddy come back to life in the water. I think I’d only ever seen my father’s body stooped and clad in black. Little by little, I was discovering a very tall man with bronzed skin and the beginnings of a smile.
At the café, the customers were kind and gave me little gifts. Bubble blowers, marbles, crayons. They brought me sweets, too. Sometimes I would overhear murmured conversations about my father’s “absence,” and it was Hélène whom the customers called “the boss.” But I barely paid any attention. I was the stepdaughter of a seamstress and I wore dresses as beautiful as those of the heroines in fairy tales. I would walk through the village in my princess dresses and invent a thousand-and-one lives for myself. Were you in one of those lives?
Until I was ten, no one mentioned you to me. You were silent. But I remember the day when Daddy started converting the attic into a bedroom for me. I said, But are we staying in this house, Daddy? He smiled and replied, Where else d’you think we’d go? He asked me to choose the wallpaper. I picked some with boats on it, sailboats. There’s no sea in Milly. And yet I was sure I knew the sea, like an elder sister I’d lost touch with.
I have no photo of you. You’re like a phantom whose image has never been captured. I did sometimes wonder if you’d ever existed.
I suppose that, at first, I loved Hélène the way one does a relation by marriage. But the only time I saw Daddy kissing her on the mouth, I hated her. I ran away from the house.
From that day on, they never kissed in front of me again. I only ever saw them loving each other without them knowing it. Although I always called her Hélène and never Mommy, she raised me like her own child. Indeed, I believe she always considered me as her daughter, and not as yours, just as you did. The one she should have had with Daddy if he hadn’t been deported.
It’s young Claude who first spoke of you to me. Young Claude is the waiter at the café. He was born with a limp, but he’s the most upstanding boy I know. I’ve always considered him as a brother who would never lie to me. I understood that Daddy had had two lives, separated by the war. The second in which you hid him. Far away from the first.
I never waited for you. Or hoped for you. My parents did everything to make my childhood happy. A childhood full of light, leaving no dark corner for me to sit in and wait for you. I’ve become an illustrator, and in my drawings there’s often a woman in the background. That woman is no doubt you.
Young Claude found you again, last Friday. He’s been looking for you for years, without ever telling me. Apparently, you live in London, and you’re still a nurse. How many children have you cared for while thinking of me? How many hearts have you heard beating while thinking of Lucien’s heart? I’m writing this letter to you to tell you that it stopped beating last Friday. On the day young Claude found you again, Daddy moved into a third life that will be neither Hélène’s, nor yours.
I was there when he bowed out. I’d come to spend a few days with them. I was helping them—a busload of tourists had descended on the café. Daddy was just serving a mint cordial. He fell down and didn’t get up again. At first, I thought he’d tripped. Hélène immediately realized that, this time, the love of her life had gone, and you wouldn’t be bringing him back to her. For the second time, she kissed Daddy in front of me.
The day I lose my father, someone finds you. Life takes away and gives back at the same time. But I don’t know what it’s giving me back. Apparently, in life, things often go this way.
Know that you will never read this letter. I’m putting it into your bag that’s hanging on the door of my room. Daddy kept the bag and gave it to me when I turned eighteen. I’ve never dared open it; that would have been like rummaging in a stranger’s bag. Daddy and Hélène brought me up too well. But I left it in my childhood bedroom because the sailboats are still on the walls and one day, perhaps, I’ll set sail in one to visit you.
Finally, I wanted to tell you that you did well in bringing Daddy back to Hélène. He died happy.
Rose
I read Rose’s letter right to the end.
Gramps is still driving. There must be about fifty kilometers still to go. He says nothing. Makes no comment.
“D’you know what happens next, Gramps?”
“. . .”
“Gramps, d’you know what happens next?”
“Next?”
“After Lucien’s death, Hélène gave old Louis’s café to Claude and left to live in Paris.”
“And Rose?”
Never have I heard Gramps ask me a question about anyone. Not even whether I’d brushed my teeth when I was small.
“Rose and her son, Roman, found Edna again, in London. They stayed over there for a while.”
At first, I don’t see his tears. In the light from the dashboard, I see only his profile, and hear him sniffing, discreetly.
When I do finally realize that he’s crying, I don’t get a chance to say a word: he pulls over onto the shoulder and slumps onto the steering wheel. He is racked with sobs, and his wails break my heart.
Never in my life have I experienced such a tragic moment. I’m staggered. After a few minutes, or hours, I no longer know, I lay my shaking hand on his shoulder.
His cheap woolen coat prickles my fingers. Ever since Jules and I have lived with them, Gramps and Gran have only ever worn cheap clothes. In the old photos, they were far more stylish; I don’t know whether it was the death of their children or the life of their grandchildren that impoverished them. It strikes me right then what a hard time they’d had of it.
“Gramps, are you OK?”
My voice seems to hit him like an electric shock. He instantly sits up and mutters:
“You wouldn’t have a handkerrchief . . .?”
Once again, I search in my bag, just in case. But I’m not the kind of girl to carry handkerchiefs on her. I always search in earnest, but all I find is a cookie, some crumbs, a lip balm that’s down to the plastic, my empty coin purse, and a little Pikachu that Jules gave me when he was small. It’s a bag that serves no purpose. I search desperately in the glove compartment, and finally unearth a cloth that, apologetically, I hand to him. He blows his nose noisily, wipes his face.
We’re still sitting in semi-darkness in the car. The engine is humming away, totally indifferent to my grandfather’s feelings. It starts to rain. He puts on the windshield wipers, then his turn signal, and drives off.
And then not another word.
We’ve done around twenty kilometers when I dare to ask him a question that I’ve been dying to ask. I tell myself that now’s the time. That never again in my life will the chance arise. Him and me in the car, on Christmas Eve, after a storm, a cataclysm that struck him upon the reading of Rose’s letter.
“Gramps, what was Annette like?”
He tenses up, it’s almost imperceptible, except to me, his granddaughter.
He moistens his lips. As if his reply were burning them.
“She was luminous . . . I could have used herr as a sourrce of light . . . She liked people who used shorrt sentences.”
“She must have really loved you, then.”
Silence.
“She loved me.”
He said these words as if they were his last words. As if he’d been born to say them now, here in this car, and he’d done just that. If he’d died before my eyes, I wouldn’t have been surprised.
He overtakes a truck. Takes ten minutes to do so. He’s a real danger to the public. To dispel my fear, I say to him:
“Annette loved Uncle Alain. Jules is a love child. That’s for sure. You can tell. You can see it. Breathe it.”
He looks at me strangely. I’d even swear he’s smiling. Suddenly, I feel as if I’m sitting beside a man I don’t know. As if a magician had just switched my grandfather for another man. I watch him, and everything about him has changed. Since uttering his last three words, she loved me, he’s looking younger. If it continues, when we get home, we’ll be celebrating his twentieth birthday.
“Jules isn’t a love child, he is love itself. In life, therre’s gold-plated jewelrry, and therre’s solid-gold jewelrry. Jules is solid gold.”
At that, I’m the one who cracks and searches for tissues in my bag. Just in case. But I find my faded Pikachu. And cry all the more.
I have a vision. Gramps at the morgue, after the accident. Gramps all alone. Gramps identifying the four bodies, one after the other. Who did he start with? One of his sons? One of his daughters-in-law?
I see him coming out of the funeral parlor, getting back into his car, and driving off. How he must have loved us, to return home that evening. What did he say to Gran when he arrived at the house? It’s definitely them. The four of them are dead? And why didn’t Gran go with him to identify the bodies? I can see him again, the following day, in his garden, burning the wood of the two fruit trees. His eyes moist, and me a child. Yourr parrents had an accident.
“I love you, Gramps.”
“I should hope so.”