After school he hung around outside for ten minutes and then went back to his father’s to pick up his things. The curtains hadn’t been opened. He just put on the kitchen light to see his way to his bedroom. As he crossed the living room, he heard a strange sound, a sort of intermittent, muffled crackling, as though an insect were trapped somewhere. In the darkness he tried to work out where the noise was coming from and then he realized the radio had been left on since the morning and the volume turned down so that the words could no longer be made out.
Every Friday it’s the same drill: he gets everything together, his clothes, shoes, all his books, folders and notebooks, his ping-pong paddle, his ruler, tracing paper, felt pens, drawing pad. He must not forget anything. Every Friday, loaded up like a mule, he migrates from one place to another.
In the subway car, people look at him. They’re probably afraid that he’ll fall or faint, his small body staggering under the weight of all those bags. He bends, but he doesn’t weaken. He refuses to sit down.
In the elevator, before he lands on the opposite shore, he puts down his load, gives himself time to catch his breath.
This is what he has to do every Friday at more or less the same time: this shift from one world to the other, with no gangway or guide. Two complete worlds, without any common ground.
Eight metro stops away: another culture, other customs, another language. He only has a few minutes to acclimatize.
It’s half past six when he opens the door, and his mother is already home.
She’s sitting in the kitchen, chopping intriguingly shaped vegetables. He’d like to ask what they’re called but now’s not the right time.
She looks at him, scrutinizes him, scans him silently, her eye a radar. She can’t help it. She’s suspicious. She hasn’t seen him for a week, but there’s no hug. It’s the imprint of the other that she’s looking for, even though she fears it: the trace of the enemy.
She can’t bear it that he’s come from over there. Théo grasped that very quickly from the air of distrust she displays when he comes back from his father’s and the impulse to reject him, which she has trouble hiding.
And anyway, even before she says hello, she generally says “go and take a shower. ”
They won’t talk about the days he’s spent with his father. It’s a black hole in time and space whose very existence will be denied. She won’t ask him anything, he knows. She won’t ask if he had a good week or if he’s OK. She won’t ask if he’s eaten well, slept well, what he’s seen or done. She’ll pick up where they left off a week ago, exactly as though nothing has happened, as though nothing could have happened. A week of his life struck off the calendar. But for his diary—every day he carefully tears off the perforated corner of the page—he might doubt he’d experienced it.
He’ll put the clothes he’s wearing in the laundry basket, all of them without exception, separately, sealed in a plastic bag because she refuses to let them come into contact with his other ones. The hot water in the shower will wash away the smell she cannot abide.
In the hours after his return she’ll observe him with a hostility she’s not even conscious of but he’s all too familiar with, that air of interrogation. Because, in her son who is not yet thirteen, she’s in relentless pursuit of the gestures, inflections, posture of the man whose name she will no longer utter. Any real or imagined resemblance enrages her and becomes the subject of an immediate response, a sickness that has to be eradicated at once. “Look how you’re standing. Don’t do that with your hands. Sit back in your seat. Don’t slouch. Sit up. You’re just like him.
“Go to your room.”
When she mentions his father, when circumstances force her to refer to the man who was her husband and at whose home he has just spent an entire week, when there’s no way around it, she never uses his first name.
She says “him,” “that bastard,” “that loser. ”
When she’s talking to her friends on the phone he’s “that shit” or “that dirty bastard. ”
Théo absorbs this, his puny body spattered with words, but she doesn’t see it. The words are hurting him; they’re an unbearable ultrasound, a feedback loop that only he seems to hear, an inaudible frequency that shreds his brain.
During the night after his return, a high-pitched, faraway sound wakes him. A piercing note, a static whistle that comes from inside him. If he clamps his hands over his ears, the sound at first grows louder and then fades. It’s called tinnitus. He read about it on a health website. The noise swells up more and more often in the middle of the night. At first he thought it was coming from outside. He’d get up. He’d go into the kitchen, listen to the appliances, the pipes in the bathroom, he’d open the front door. And then he realized.
The noise is in his head. When the noise eventually stops, he can’t get back to sleep.
He has just one memory of his parents together.
His mother is sitting on a hard sofa upholstered in a foamy mustard fabric (in fact, he’s not sure if he really remembers this sofa. It’s possible he’s copied the detail of this image from a photo. Ms. Destrée taught them that at the beginning of the year; there are things we retain in the memory, others that we transform or manufacture, still others that we appropriate). His mother is sitting stiff and tense, not leaning on the backrest. His father is pacing up and down in front of her like a caged animal. Théo is sitting on the floor or maybe beside his mother, who is not touching him. He has to raise his head to see them. He’s a child of four and a bit, the watchful observer of a smoldering war that’s about to explode.
Then there are the words his mother says, words that strike him immediately, make him gasp, words that are saved on his hard drive, adult words charged with a meaning he can’t grasp but whose power he registers. His mother is looking down, but she’s talking to his father when she says, “You disgust me.”
They’ve forgotten he’s there or else they think he’s too young to understand, to remember, but it’s precisely because these words contain something he can’t grasp, something solid and maybe a little sticky, that he will remember them.
At this moment, neither he nor she can imagine that their son of four years and a few months will have just one memory of them together and this will be it.
Théo comes out of the bathroom wearing clean clothes. He thinks about Ms. Destrée wanting to know which of his parents he was spending the week with. She’d looked at him in a funny way. When he caught up with Mathis at the school gate, he said, “That woman’s crazy.” But now, thinking back, his forehead flushes with a feeling of shame that spreads to his throat. He’s sorry he said that.
His mother is still in the kitchen, half-listening to something on the radio as she finishes making dinner. He asks if he can go on YouTube.
“No.”
He should do his homework. He must have work to catch up on.
For the next few hours, maybe even until tomorrow, she’s going to make him pay for having set foot on enemy territory, for having been outside her law, her control, for having had fun.
Because she’s sure he will have taken full advantage, he’ll have done nothing all week but stare at screens, stuffing himself with chips and Coke and staying up till all hours.
That’s what she imagines.
It doesn’t matter what she imagines.
Anyway, he’s not going to contradict her.