Translated from the French by Sandra Smith
Irène Némirovsky (1903–1942). The daughter of Ukrainian Jewish parents, Némirovsky was born in Kiev under the Russian Empire. At the outbreak of the Russian Revolution, her family fled to Finland and finally settled in France, where she lived for the rest of her life. Even so, she was denied French citizenship. Arrested during the French occupation as a Jew – though she had converted to Catholicism – she was sent to Auschwitz where she died at the age of thirty-nine. Though she published many successful novels during her lifetime, it was the publication of Suite française in the late 1990s (her daughter had kept the manuscript for fifty years without reading it), that brought her to a world readership, being translated into thirty-eight languages and selling more than two million copies.
“Your husband …”
“No, Mama, please, don’t talk to me about him …”
“Suzanne! Fifteen years of marriage can’t be swept aside in an instant,” said the elderly Mme. Blanchard, taking her daughter’s hand.
Suzanne Lagrange let her hold her hand, but her mother’s shows of affection irritated her. Mme. Blanchard was old, stout and placid; white hair framed her fat, flushed face. She was forcing herself to look moved, to show compassion, but Suzanne thought: “She’s thinking that the children and I will spend the summer at her house, and that’s what she’s worried about. Her routine, the servants … She hardly cares about me at all … She does love me, poor Mama, but how could she understand? No one understands me,” she continued thinking, angry and sad, and suddenly feeling weary.
“Suzanne, I know he’d agree to live with you again,” said Mme. Blanchard, lowering her voice.
Suzanne sharply shook her head: “No!”
“But you loved each other, you have children, you managed to live together for fifteen years!”
“Fifteen years of fighting! Fifteen years of infidelity! Fifteen years of unhappiness. You know that very well, Mama! I waited because the children were young. But Jeannine is fourteen, and Hubert thirteen! It’s over now, over! Don’t talk to me about him. As soon as the inventory is complete and the furniture taken to the Drouot Auction House, I’m going to rent out the apartment and leave with the children. If you can put us up, all the better! If not, I’ll make other arrangements …”
“Really now, Suzanne …”
Suzanne frowned and fell silent. She was forty, a tall, thin woman, one of those “long poles” who understood from the time they were adolescents that their physique would not be suitable for cuddling, childish behavior or weeping; such women held back their tears, swallowing them, and looked as if their sorrows gnawed at them from the inside, giving them an irritated, bad-tempered appearance.
“Can I help you with the inventory, Suzanne?”
“No thank you, Mama.”
“Do you want to sell everything?”
“Absolutely everything! I hate that furniture!”
“You won’t get a quarter of what it’s worth.”
“I know, Mama, I know …”
“Very well,’ said Mme. Blanchard, standing up, “Goodbye, my poor dear; I’ll expect you home for dinner.”
Then she left, and Suzanne was alone.
The children hadn’t come home yet. Suzanne was happy to have a few minutes of solitude. She had put off doing the inventory day after day, but it was July: the summer vacation was starting. She had to leave. The children needed to be in the countryside.
She wandered around the armchairs that sat with no slipcovers on them, past the empty tables. She had spent the past three weeks at a friend’s place. The house looked abandoned, which made her heart break.
“Come on now, it’s time to start the inventory,” she said out loud.
Holding a sheet of paper and a pencil, she looked around the room. By selling this furniture, by making arrangements to banish these walls and windows from her sight forever, she felt as if she were taking revenge on her husband. She could not hurt him any other way in his present life: a man who was still young, handsome, and fickle does not fear solitude: he calls it freedom, and takes pleasure in it. But the past belonged to her; she was determined to destroy it with her blind anger.
“How many scenes we had here, how many tears were shed,” she thought. “How many nights did I spend on the sofa, alone, waiting for André! And the last time …”
She remembered, with extraordinary precision, the slightest word, the most insignificant circumstance of that last time: they had decided to get separated, and it was truly better that way. She shivered: she recognized the sound of her daughter ringing the doorbell.
“Didn’t you finish the inventory, Mama?” asked Jeannine when she came into the room.
She took the pencil from her mother’s hands.
“Let me help you, Mama! It will be fun.”
Jeannine and Hubert only knew that their parents had decided to sell the furniture and move; they would learn about the divorce later on.
“You think it will be fun!” Suzanne murmured. “You think it’s fun to see everything you’ve been looking at since you were born disappear?”
“It’s exactly because I’ve been looking at it for so long, too long,” said Jeannine, shaking her head.
She was young, with a pink and white complexion; her skin was taut and smooth, her eyes a light grey.
“Let’s see. I’m putting down two red armchairs, velvet. One of the legs has been broken and glued back on, Mama.”
“Yes, your father …”
Suzanne quickly fell silent.
“Five or six years ago, he got angry,” she thought, “and so did I. He kicked that poor armchair, even though it had nothing to do with what made him angry … Then he was ashamed of how he had behaved … We laughed … Back then, that’s how our arguments ended. What was that argument about? How did it start, anyway? I don’t remember. And yet, at the time, it had seemed so serious …”
But she immediately remembered other fights, more recent ones, and a wave of disgust and sadness ran through her body.
“One small table made of mahogany …”
“You don’t know anything, Jeannine; it’s not mahogany, it’s made of cherry wood. It’s a very pretty table, a real 17th century antique …”
She suddenly thought: “When the children were little and didn’t eat at the dining table yet, André and I sometimes had dinner served to us in the living room, near the fireplace. He would turn off the light and we would talk quietly, in the semi-darkness. That was ten years ago … He had the flu all winter long, couldn’t shake it off … I was so worried. Oh! I would have given anything to be reassured then.”
“Two bookcases with glass doors. Books …”
“No, leave the books.”
She and André had bought some of the books before they got married; they would go around the booksellers’ stalls and antique shops, furnishing their future apartment in their minds, in advance, lovingly. That was in 1922. It was impossible to find an apartment. My God! How happy they had been when they found this one, a little dark, a little cold, but enormous and convenient.
“Should I go on, Mama?”
Suzanne tilted her head and stroked the backs of the books. Who would buy these bookcases? Who would use the old settee? Who would switch on the lamp? It was made of Venetian glass; they had bought it in Italy … All those trips … Arriving at night in an unfamiliar city, the very old hotels, that delightful feeling of disorientation, of freedom, the flower market beneath the windows, the blue arcades in that Spanish town, everything merged together, surging up in her memory, so vivid still …
“We once were happy,” she suddenly thought. “We had moments of real happiness …”
Could such tender moments have happened in fifteen years of fighting, of infidelity, fifteen years of unhappy married life? It seemed inconceivable. Yet here she was rediscovering them all once more; memories rushed around her like children, seeming to quietly call out to her: “It’s me … Don’t you recognize me?... That smile, that kiss, that look … The way you burst out laughing when you were young … And even those moments of sadness and peace when, after some misunderstanding, he would come back to you, in spite of everything, and you knew that he would always come back to you, if you wanted him to …”
“But I don’t want him to anymore,” she murmured.
Yet she could feel the tears gathering in her eyes. She made a movement to push Jeannine away.
“Leave all this. Go get dressed. As soon as your brother gets home we’re going out. We’re having dinner at your grandmother’s.”
“Oh, Mama!” said Jeannine bursting out laughing. “Mama, I’d forgotten about this horrible clock! How lucky that I won’t have to look at it anymore! It annoyed me so much!”
“It isn’t horrible,” replied Suzanne with such vehemence that even she was surprised. “You’re a little idiot! You understand nothing! It may be old fashioned, but when your father and I bought it …”
She was finding it difficult to speak. Her lips were trembling. André had never liked it: it was she who noticed it one day in a small shop and bought it, she didn’t know why. You sometimes feel drawn to something that disappoints you later on. Her sister, her mother and her friends had made fun of her. Only André had said: “No, the clock isn’t as ugly as all that …”
Jeannine, frightened, looked at the tears running down her mother’s face:
“Oh, Mama! What have I done? Please forgive me … I didn’t mean to upset you …”
“You didn’t upset me,” murmured Suzanne.
She felt so alone! Her children seemed so distant! André was gone, vanished forever from her life. Who else in the world would know the past? Who could she ask: “Do you remember? It was in 1935, in Brittany …” or “Do you remember that beautiful summer when we got engaged?”
She was called to the phone. She heard her mother’s voice.
“Suzanne, forgive me, I know you’re going to be angry with me again, but André is here … Wait, don’t hang up. He wants to talk to you and …”
“What’s the point? Really, what is the point?” murmured Suzanne, “You know very well that it’s impossible …”
“Impossible, impossible!” she said over and over again, but through her tears, the faintest hint of a smile appeared on her lips, the acquiescent smile that only André had ever seen on her face, and she already knew that, once again, she would forgive him.