I set off without anything in my stomach. The sooner this business was settled, the better. It started raining before Amiens and I lost my way. I must have gone at least twelve miles too far. The town had changed a lot. I stopped in a service station and had a sandwich that had no taste. I finally spotted some signs pointing to the teaching hospital. It was a real treasure hunt, but just before two in the afternoon I drew up in the parking lot of the hospital.
At reception, I was pointed in the direction of the office, where I had to answer questions I had no answer for. My mother’s medical record was a mess; she owed lots of money to the hospital, and nothing had been done according to the rules. Then I was told how to get to the oncology department, because before I could collect my mother, I had to speak with Professor Charlier, who had operated on her several times. I sat down in a waiting room with people who’d been through chemo. Opposite me, a five-year-old boy with a shaved head was doing a jigsaw puzzle.
Professor Charlier saw me in his office. I was surprised by how cramped it was. He looked tired and overworked, but his eyes were piercing.
“Are you the son?”
He started by running through my mother’s medical history. He spoke concisely, without beating around the bush, and without taking refuge behind complex language. From the breast to the pancreas, the cancer had spread throughout her body over the years and become generalized. The professor had negotiated a few truces with the disease, but never gained a real victory. And now he was laying down his arms.
“Another operation would be pointless. These days, society has realized that it’s more humane for the terminally ill to be with their families rather than in hospital.”
I understood what he was saying, but wondered if there was anything humane about my return to Saint-Quentin. I struck me more as high-risk. I found myself in an elevator, holding the case history of Gabrielle Barteau, née Lemoine. I quickly looked through it and closed it again. I knew the ending.
The floor was reserved for terminal patients. I got a better idea of why the hospital was in such a hurry to retrieve any bed they could. It was like a military hospital struggling to cope with the ferocity of the fighting. Stretchers blocked the corridor, cables hung from the ceiling, the staff seemed in a constant hurry. Suddenly I saw my mother. They had already taken her out of her room so that a nurses’ aide could disinfect it. She was waiting in a wheelchair, a blanket over her shoulders. She was wearing a wig, and the skin stretched across her face seemed to pull her jaw back, forcing her to keep her mouth open all the time. I came level with her and she looked at me with her little black eyes. She didn’t show any surprise, let alone any emotion. She must have been warned, but that wasn’t the main reason for her attitude. She seemed to have come back from a long way away, from a country you can’t talk about to those who haven’t been there, a country that changes your perception of the present and considerably reduces its importance.
“I’m thirsty,” she said.
There was no breath in her voice, but in spite of everything, it was audible, as long as there wasn’t too much noise around. A nurse arrived.
“Where can I get some water?”
“At the end of the corridor, on the right. You can keep the wheelchair to take your mother down, but you’ll have to leave it at reception. You can hire another one, if you want to.”
I pushed my mother to the elevators. Being behind her suited me perfectly. It helped me get used to her. I could see the pins keeping the wig in place over her real, sparse hair. Her blemished hands. She drank from a paper cup at the water cooler, almost greedily.
We crossed the lobby. The sun was low in the sky. I took hold of her emaciated body and placed it in the back seat. I gave up the wheelchair and hired another, since I had no choice. I had to struggle to fold it and fit it in the trunk. I thought I’d never manage. I sat down at the wheel, feeling that I’d gotten through the first stage. The hardest part was still to come. Saint-Quentin. I’d sworn never to set foot there again. But there it was.
As soon as the car set off, my mother fell asleep. Before handing her over to me, the nurse had given her some tablets, two in one go, and had left me what remained in the box, advising me to use them sparingly. “She’ll sleep for a while now,” she said, adding, “Old people don’t like being moved.”