Fresh Water for Flowers

by Valérie Perrin

  Since I’ve been here, I’ve seen several expired plots being dismantled and cleaned, and the bones of the deceased placed in the ossuary. And no one said a thing. Because those dead people were seen as lost property with no one left to reclaim it.

  It’s always like that with death. The further back it goes, the less hold it has on the living. Time does for life. Time does for death.

  Me and my three gravediggers, we do our utmost never to leave a grave neglected. We can’t bear to see that municipal label: “This grave is subject to retrieval proceedings. Please contact the town hall urgently.” When the name of the deceased person resting there is still visible.

  That’s doubtless why cemeteries are covered in epitaphs. To ward off the passage of time. Cling on to memories. The one I like best is: “Death begins when no one can dream of you any longer.” It’s on the grave of a young nurse, Marie Deschamps, who died in 1917. Apparently, it was a soldier who put up this plaque in 1919. Every time I go past it, I wonder whether he dreamt of her for a long time.

  Jean-Jacques Goldman’s “Whatever I do, wherever you are, nothing fades you, I think of you,” and Francis Cabrel’s “Among themselves, the stars speak only of you” are the lyrics most quoted on funerary plaques.

  My cemetery is very beautiful. The avenues are lined with centenarian linden trees. A good many of the tombs have flowers. In front of my little keeper’s house, I sell a few potted plants. And when they’re no longer worth selling, I give them to the abandoned graves.

  I planted some pine trees, too. For the scent they produce in the summer months. It’s my favorite smell.

  I planted them in 1997, the year we arrived. They’ve grown a lot and make my cemetery look splendid. Maintaining it is all about caring for the dead who lie within it. It’s about respecting them. And if they weren’t respected in life, at least they are in death.

  I’m sure plenty of bastards lie here. But death doesn’t differentiate between the good and the wicked. And anyhow, who hasn’t been a bastard at least once in their life?

  Unlike me, Philippe Toussaint instantly detested this cemetery, this little town, Burgundy, the countryside, the old stones, the white cows, the folk around here.

  I hadn’t even finished unpacking the removal boxes and he was off on his motorbike, morning till night. And as the months went by, he sometimes left for weeks at a time. Until the day he no longer returned. The policemen couldn’t understand why I hadn’t reported him missing sooner. I never told them that he had disappeared years before, even when he was still dining at my table. And yet, after a month, when I realized he wouldn’t return, I felt just as abandoned as the tombs I regularly clean. Just as gray, drab, and dilapidated. Ready to be dismantled and my remains thrown into an ossuary.

  5.

  The book of life is the ultimate book, which we can

  neither close nor reopen at will; when we want to return

  to the page on which we love, the page on which we die

  is already between our fingers.

  I met Philippe Toussaint at the Tibourin, a nightclub in Charleville-Mézières, in 1985.

  He was leaning on his elbows at the bar. And me, I was a bartender. I was doing several casual jobs by lying about my age. A friend at the hostel I lived in had doctored my papers to make me old enough.

  I looked ageless. I could have been fourteen as easily as twenty-five. I only ever wore jeans and T-shirts, had short hair, and piercings everywhere. Even in my nose. I was slight, and I put smoky shadow around my eyes to give myself a Nina Hagen look. I’d just left school. I was no good at reading or writing. But I could count. I’d already lived several lives and my one aim was to work to pay my own rent, to leave the hostel as soon as possible. After that, I would see.

  In 1985, the only thing that was straight about me was my teeth. Throughout my childhood, I’d had this obsession with having lovely white teeth like the girls in the magazines. When child-welfare workers visited my foster homes and asked me if I needed anything, I always requested an appointment with the dentist, as if my future, my whole life, would depend on the smile I had.

  I didn’t have any friends who were girls—I looked too much like a boy. I’d been close with a few surrogate sisters, but the continual separations, the changes of foster home, had killed me. Never become attached. I told myself that having a shaved head would protect me, give me the heart and guts of a boy. So, girls avoided me. I’d already slept with boys, to be like everyone else, but it was no big deal, I was disappointed. It wasn’t really my thing. I did it to allay suspicion, or get clothes, a gram of dope, entrance to somewhere, a hand that would hold mine. I preferred the love in the children’s stories, the ones I’d never been told. “They got married and had many, many, many . . . ”

  Leaning on his elbows at the bar, Philippe Toussaint was watching his friends bopping on the dance floor while sipping a whiskey-and-Coke with no ice. He had the face of an angel. Like the singer Michel Berger, but in color. Long blond curls, blue eyes, fair skin, aquiline nose, mouth like a strawberry . . . ready to eat, a lovely ripe, July strawberry. He wore jeans, a white T-shirt, and a black-leather biker jacket. He was tall, well built, perfect. The moment I saw him, my heart went “boum,” as my imaginary uncle-by-marriage, Charles Trenet, sings. With me, Philippe Toussaint would get everything for free, even his glasses of whiskey-and-Coke.

  He didn’t need to do a thing to get to kiss the pretty blondes that hovered around him. Like flies circling a piece of meat. Philippe Toussaint appeared not to give a damn about anything. He went with the flow. He didn’t have to lift a finger to get what he wanted, apart from raising his glass to his lips from time to time, between two fluorescent kisses.

  He had his back to me. All I could see of him were the blond curls that turned from green to red to blue under the revolving lights. My eyes had been lingering on his hair for a good hour. Occasionally, he would lean towards the mouth of a girl as she whispered something in his ear, and I would study his perfect profile.

  And then he spun around to the bar and his eyes landed on me, never to let go. From that moment on, I became his favorite toy.

  At first, I thought his interest in me was down to the free shots of alcohol I poured into his glass. When serving him, I made sure he couldn’t see my bitten nails, just my white and perfectly straight teeth. I thought he looked like he came from a good family. To me, apart from the youths at the hostel, everyone looked like they came from a good family.

  There was a traffic jam of girls behind him. Like at a tollbooth on the Highway of the Sun at the start of the holidays. But he continued to ogle me, eyes full of desire. I leaned against the bar, facing him, to be sure that it really was me he was looking at. I popped a straw in his glass. I looked up. It really was me.

  I said to him: “Would you like something else to drink?” I didn’t hear his reply. I moved closer to him, shouting, “Sorry?” He said, “You,” to me, in my ear.

  I poured myself a glass of bourbon behind the boss’s back. After a mouthful, I stopped blushing, after two I felt good, after three I was bold as brass. I went back over to his ear and replied, “After my shift, we could have a drink together.”

  He smiled. His teeth were like mine, white and straight.

  I reckoned my life was going to change when Philippe Toussaint moved his arm across the bar, lightly to touch mine. I felt my skin tighten, like it had a premonition. He was ten years older than me. That age difference gave him stature. I felt like a butterfly gazing at a star.

  6.

  For the hour is coming, in which all that are in the graves shall hear his voice, and shall come forth.

  Someone’s gently knocking on my door. I’m not expecting anyone; indeed, I stopped expecting anyone long ago.

  There are two entrances to my house, one from the cemetery, the other from the road. Eliane starts yapping as she heads for the road-side door. Her
mistress, Marianne Ferry (1953­–2007) is buried in the Spindles section. Eliane turned up on the day of her burial and never left. For the first few weeks, I fed her on her mistress’s tomb, and gradually she followed me to the house. Nono named her Eliane after Isabelle Adjani’s role in the film One Deadly Summer, because she has beautiful blue eyes and her mistress died in August.

  In twenty years, I’ve had three dogs that arrived along with their owners and became mine by force of circumstance, but only she remains with me.

  Someone knocks again. I hesitate to open. It’s only 7 A.M. I’m just sipping my tea and spreading my biscottes with salted butter and strawberry jam, given to me by Suzanne Clerc, whose husband (1933–2007) is buried in the Cedars section. I’m listening to music. Outside cemetery opening hours, I always listen to music.

  I get up and switch off the radio.

  “Who is it?”

  A masculine voice hesitates, then replies:

  “Forgive me, madam, I saw some light.”

  I can hear him wiping his feet on the doormat.

  “I have some questions about someone who’s buried in the cemetery.”

  I could tell him to come back at 8 A.M., opening time. “Two minutes, I’m just coming!”

  I go up to my bedroom and open the winter wardrobe to put on a dressing gown. I have two wardrobes. One I call “winter,” the other “summer.” It has nothing to do with the seasons, but rather the circumstances. The winter wardrobe contains only classic, somber clothes, for the eyes of others. The summer wardrobe contains only light, colorful clothes meant only for me. I wear summer under winter, and I take off winter when I’m alone.

  So, I slip a gray, quilted dressing gown over my pink-silk négligée. I go back down to open the door and find a man of around forty. At first, I see only his dark eyes, staring at me.

  “Good morning, forgive me for disturbing you so early.”

  It’s still dark and cold. Behind him, I can see that the night has left a covering of frost. Condensation is coming out of his mouth as if he were puffing on an early-morning cigarette. He smells of tobacco, cinnamon, and vanilla.

  I’m incapable of uttering a word. As though I’ve found someone long lost. I’m thinking that he’s burst in on me too late. That if he could have turned up on my doorstep twenty years ago, everything would have been different. Why do I say that to myself? Because it’s been years since anyone knocked on my road-side door, apart from sloshed kids? Because all my visitors arrive from the cemetery?

  I make him come in, he thanks me, seeming embarrassed. I serve him coffee.

  In Brancion-en-Chalon, I know everybody. Even the locals who don’t yet have any dead at my place. All of them have passed through my avenues at least once for the burial of a friend, a neighbor, a colleague’s mother.

  But him, I’ve never seen. He has a slight accent, something Mediterranean in his way of punctuating sentences. His hair is very dark, so dark that his few white hairs stand out in the mess of the rest. He has a large nose, thick lips, bags under his eyes. He looks a bit like the singer Serge Gainsbourg. You can tell he’s at odds with his razor, but not with grace. He has fine hands, long fingers. He drinks his coffee piping hot, in small sips, blows on it, and warms his hands on the china.

  I still don’t know why he’s here. I let him into my home because it isn’t really my home. This room, it belongs to everyone. It’s like a municipal waiting room that I’ve turned into a kitchen-cum-living room. It belongs to anyone passing through, and to the regulars.

  He seems to be studying the walls. This twenty-five-square-meter room has a similar look to my winter wardrobe. Nothing on the walls. No colorful tablecloth or blue sofa. Just lots of plywood, and chairs to sit on. Nothing showy. A pot of coffee always at the ready, white cups, and spirits for desperate cases. It’s here that I get tears, confidences, anger, sighs, despair, and the laughter of the gravediggers.

  My bedroom is upstairs. It’s my secret courtyard, my real home. My bedroom and bathroom are two pastel boudoirs. Powder pink, almond green, and sky blue, like I’d personally modified the colors of spring. At the first ray of sunshine, I open the windows wide, and, other than with a ladder, it’s impossible to see anything from outside.

  No one has ever set foot in my bedroom as it looks today. Just after Philippe Toussaint’s disappearance, I completely repainted it, added curtains, lace, white furniture, and a big bed with a Swiss mattress that molds itself to the contours of your body. My body, so I’d no longer have to sleep in the imprint left by Philippe Toussaint.

  The stranger is still blowing into his cup. He finally says to me: “I’ve come from Marseilles. Do you know Marseilles?”

  “I go to Sormiou every year.”

  “In the Calanque?”

  “Yes.”

  “Strange coincidence.”

  “I don’t believe in coincidences.”

  He seems to be looking for something in the pocket of his jeans. My men don’t wear jeans. Nono, Elvis, and Gaston are always in overalls, the Lucchini brothers and Father Cédric in Terylene trousers. He takes off his scarf, stretches his neck, places his empty cup on the table.

  “I’m like you, I’m quite rational . . . And I’m a detective.”

  “Like Columbo?”

  He replies with a smile for the first time:

  “No, he was a lieutenant. I’m a captain.”

  He presses his index finger on a few sugar grains scattered on the table.

  “My mother wishes to be buried in this cemetery, and I don’t know why.”

  “She lives around here?”

  “No, in Marseilles. She died two months ago. Being buried here is one of her final wishes.”

  “I’m so sorry. Would you like a drop of something stronger in your coffee?”

  “Do you often get people drunk so early in the morning?”

  “Sometimes. What is your mother’s name?”

  “Irène Fayolle. She wished to be cremated . . . and her ashes to be placed at the tomb of a certain Gabriel Prudent.”

  “Gabriel Prudent? Gabriel Prudent, 1931–2009. He’s buried on avenue 19, in the Cedars section.”

  “You know all the dead by heart?”

  “Almost.”

  “The date of their death, their location, and everything?”

  “Almost.”

  “Who was Gabriel Prudent?”

  “A woman comes by from time to time . . . His daughter, I believe. He was a lawyer. There’s no epitaph on his black-marble tomb, or photo. I can no longer remember the date of the burial. But I can look in my registers, if you’d like me to.”

  “Your registers?”

  “I record all burials and exhumations.”

  “I didn’t know that was part of your job.”

  “It isn’t. But if we had to do only what was part of our job, life would be sad.”

  “It’s funny to hear that from the mouth of a . . . what’s the name of your job? ‘Cemetery keeper’?”

  “Why? You think I weep from dawn to dusk? That I’m all tears and grief?”

  I serve him more coffee while he asks me, twice: “You live alone?”

  I eventually answer yes.

  I open my register drawers and consult the 2009 volume. I look through the surnames and immediately find that of Prudent, Gabriel. I start reading:

  February 18th, 2009, burial of Gabriel Prudent, torrential rain.

  There were a hundred and twenty-eight people for the interment. His ex-wife was present, as were his two daughters, Marthe Dubreuil and Cloé Prudent.

  At the deceased’s request, no flowers or wreaths.

  The family had a plaque engraved that reads: “In homage to Gabriel Prudent, a courageous lawyer. ‘Courage, for a lawyer, is essential; without it, the rest doesn’t count: talent, culture, knowledge of the law, e
verything is useful to the lawyer. But without courage, at the decisive moment, there are but words, sentences that follow each other, that dazzle and then die.’ (Robert Badinter).”

  No priest. No cross. The cortege only stayed for half an hour. When the two undertakers had finished taking the coffin down into the vault, everyone left. Still raining heavily.

  *

  I close the register. The detective looks dazed, lost in thought. He runs a hand through his hair.

  “I wonder why my mother wants to be laid to rest beside this man.”

  For a time, he returns to studying my white walls, on which there’s absolutely nothing to study. Then he returns to me, as if he didn’t believe me. He indicates the 2009 register with his eyes.

  “Can I read it?”

  Normally, I only entrust my notes to the families concerned. I hesitate for a few seconds, and end up handing it to him. He starts leafing through it. Between each page, he stares at me as if the words of 2009 were written on my forehead. As if the volume he held in his hands were an excuse to look at me.

  “And you do that for every funeral?”

  “Not every, but almost. That way, when those who were unable to attend come to see me, I can tell them about it from my notes . . . Have you ever killed anyone? I mean, in connection with your job . . . ”

  “No.”

  “Do you have a gun?”

  “Sometimes I do. But now, this morning, no.”

  “Did you come with your mother’s ashes?”

  “No. For now, they’re at the crematorium . . . I’m not going to place her ashes on the tomb of a stranger.”