Lea

by Pascal Mercier

  ‘It’s fine,’ he said. ‘Everything’s fine.’

  She looked at him like someone who has said something forced or unbelievable to provide reassurance.

  Sitting on a bench they had a brief conversation about where and how they were living now. He must have lied.

  She asked if there had been anything about it in the papers. He was glad, because it showed that she was back in the real world and in real time. He shook his head.

  ‘Stockholm,’ she said, and after a while. ‘After that, darkness, complete darkness.’

  He took her hand. She put up no resistance. Later he felt her head on his shoulder. That opened the floodgates. Wrapped in a clumsy embrace, they both gave their tears free rein.

  After that he waited for her call. It didn’t come. He tried to call her, again and again. He would have loved to know what Saint-Rémy had been like for her. And also so that the images of her behind the woodpile and on the wall, her arms wrapped around her knees, which had flowed together in his mind into icons of loneliness and despair, could liquefy and turn into episodes that blurred into the past and lost their horrors.

  The call from the hospital came in the small hours of the morning. Three days before, a trainee from the nurses’ home had shown Lea old newspaper reports about the trial. After that she had appeared for work as usual, laconic, but then she always was. Now she lay there, her white face as irrevocably still as Cécile’s had been.

  ‘Since then,’ Van Vliet said, ‘everything has been empty. Empty and bleached.’

  He waited, without knowing what for. At last he borrowed money from Agnetha to take this trip.

  32

  ON THE WAY TO BERN I kept thinking of the words he had added: ‘And now I’ve met you.’

  It might have been a grateful observation, nothing more than that. And it might have been more: an announcement that he wanted to cling to this anchor and go on living.

  As I had done throughout all those days, I was worried about our arrival. Would it resolve the contradiction between the two interpretations? Would I be strong and firm enough to be his anchor? I felt myself giving Paul the scalpel. Could one be an anchor for someone else – for someone who had ceased to trust his own hands?

  We stopped outside my apartment. Van Vliet studied the elegant façade in silence. We shook hands. ‘Let’s be in touch,’ I said. Dry words after all that had happened. But on the steps nothing better occurred to me.

  I lifted the shutters and opened the windows. And I saw him. He had driven a few houses further on and parked. Now he was sitting in the gloom with the lights off. La nuit tombe. He liked those words. They still connected him with Cécile. There were no lorries for him to fear. He didn’t want to go home. I thought about how the void had come towards him when he climbed the stairs after Lea left.

  I’d actually like to see where you live, I said when he wound down the window. ‘It isn’t an apartment like yours,’ he said, ‘but then you know that.’

  I was, in fact, startled by the shabbiness of his rooms. He hadn’t had the money to have it repainted. There were shadows on the walls where paintings had once been. In the kitchen there were pipes that protruded from the wall and then entered it again somewhere else, flaking paint, an antediluvian oven. Only the chairs and carpets recalled the apartment of a scientist on a decent salary. And the bookshelves. I looked for them and found them, the books about Louis Pasteur and Marie Curie. He saw my face and smiled wanly. Technical literature all the way up to the ceiling. A rack of records. A lot of Bach with Itzhak Perlman. ‘He set the standard for Lea,’ he said. ‘The record from Cremona with the different violin tones.’ Miles Davis. In one corner a violin case. ‘They didn’t think about that one. I could sell it to the violin-maker in St Gallen. But then I would be left with nothing of her.’

  He stood as if paralysed in his own apartment, unable even to sit down. When he had seen Lea standing motionless at the window of her room in Saint-Rémy and looking out across the landscape, he had thought that she felt completely alien on this planet. That occurred to me now that I saw him standing there.

  I put on Miles Davis. He turned out the light. When the last note had faded away I stood up in the darkness, touched his shoulder and left the room without a word. I have never felt closer to anyone.

  33

  TWO DAYS LATER he called. We walked along the Aare, a silent memory of the beach at Saintes Maries de la Mer and the shore of Lake Geneva. He asked questions about my job, about Leslie’s work in Avignon, and finally, hesitantly, he asked what my life would be like now.

  I would have been glad of his questions had they not been so distanced. Detached, as Liliane said. Likewise his handshake when he said goodbye, and his absent nod when I suggested taking another walk. Had he already finished? Or is that only the shadow that later knowledge casts on former events?

  On the bus home I imagined the rice fields of the Camargue and the drifting clouds. If only we’d stayed down there, I thought, and allowed ourselves to drift, two shadows against the light. I printed the photographs and leaned the picture of Martijn, the one in which he is drinking, against the lamp.

  The next day it snowed. I thought of his trips to the Oberland. I was worried and called again and again, in vain. The next morning I was flicking through a newspaper. A red Peugeot with Bern number plates had crossed into the opposite lane on a road in the Bernese Seeland and crashed head-on into a truck. The driver had been killed instantly. ‘It was very tight, he must have braked to let me past, and he went into a skid,’ the driver had said. ‘He looked curiously calm behind the wheel, he must have been paralysed with horror.’

  All day I saw his hands in front of me: quivering on the horse’s head, floating about the wheel, on the bedcovers.

  By the grave I was alone with Agnetha. ‘Martijn doesn’t make mistakes when he’s driving,’ she said.

  There was defiant pride in her voice, and it went far beyond driving. He loved snow, she said. Snow and the sea, ideally both at once.

  34

  FROM THE CEMETERY I went to the house where Marie Pasteur had lived. The brass plaque was no longer there, just the traces on the cast-iron door. I looked along the street that Lea had taken by mistake after her last visit, and which had, in her father’s mind, become an endless, fading straight line.

  The metal point on the newel post in Stockholm had flown at Van Vliet with the violence of a fast zoom. The image began to pursue me. I went to the cinema to get over it. The film images helped, but I didn’t want to see those film images, and left again shortly afterwards.

  After that I had to drive, feel the motion of the car, it made it easier. I took the bus back and forth through the city, from one end to the other and back, and then the same on the next stretch. I thought of Thelma and Louise and the two pairs of women’s hands, and how Van Vliet had loved their foolhardy grace. When the bus emptied I closed my eyes and imagined I was sitting at the wheel and driving to Hammerfest and Palermo in search of those images of one final freedom. With each bus I was less sure that I was only driving towards the images. I felt more and more as if I were driving the bus towards the edge of the canyon.

  As I waited in vain for sleep at home, I felt that I couldn’t simply go on with my life. There is unhappiness of a dimension so great that it is unbearable. And so, at dawn, I began to write what I had experienced since that bright, windy morning in Provence.