Fresh Water for Flowers

by Valérie Perrin

  They arrived at the gate that led to Martine Robin. He didn’t get out. He said:

  “We’re going to wait here, Irène. What matters is that Martine knows I’m here. I couldn’t care less about the others.”

  He asked if he could smoke in the car, she said of course, he lowered the window, he leaned back on the headrest, took Irène’s left hand into his own, and closed his eyes. They waited in silence. They watched the people coming and going along the avenues. At one moment, they thought they heard music.

  When everyone had left, when the empty hearse had driven past them, Gabriel got out of the car. He asked Irène to come with him, she hesitated, he said, “Please.” They walked side by side.

  “I told Martine that I was leaving her for another woman, I lied. To you, Irène, I can tell the truth, I left Martine because of Martine. The people you leave someone for, they’re excuses, alibis. We leave people because of people, nothing more complicated than that. Of course, I’ll never tell her that. And certainly not today.”

  When they reached the tomb, Gabriel kissed the photo. His hands gripped the cross that stood proud on the headstone. He whispered words that Irène didn’t hear and didn’t try to hear.

  Her white roses were at the center of the tomb. There were many flowers, loving words, and even a granite bird.

  * * *

  “But who told you all that?”

  “I read it in the diary my mother kept.”

  “She kept a diary?”

  “Yes. I found it in some boxes last week, while sorting her belongings.”

  Julien Seul gets up.

  “It’s two in the morning, I must go. I’m tired. Tomorrow, I’m hitting the road very early. Thank you for that dinner, it was delicious. Thank you. It’s been a long time since I’ve eaten so well. And had such a delightful time. I’m repeating myself, but when I feel good, I repeat myself.”

  “But . . . what did they do after the burial? You must tell me the ending of this story.”

  “Perhaps this story doesn’t have an ending.”

  He takes my hand and plants a kiss on it. I know of nothing more arousing than a gallant man.

  “You always smell nice.”

  “‘Eau du Ciel’ by Annick Goutal.”

  He smiles.

  “Well, don’t ever change it. Good night.”

  He puts his coat on and leaves the house, road-side. Before closing the door behind him, he says to me:

  “I’ll come back to tell you the ending. If I tell it to you now, you won’t want to see me anymore.”

  As I go to bed, I think how awful it would be to die in the middle of reading a good novel.

  34.

  In our hearts you remain forever.

  Three years after our marriage, in June 1992, the French railway came to a standstill. In Malgrange, the 6:29 train became the 10:20 one, which became the 12:05 one, until the 13:30 one stopped on the tracks at 16:00 and didn’t move again for forty-eight hours. Strikers put up a barricade about two hundred meters from our barrier. The train was packed. It had been particularly hot that day. The passengers soon had to open the windows and doors of the Nancy-Epinal train.

  The Casino supermarket had never seen so many customers. The stocks of bottled water had all been sold within a few hours. Toward the end of the afternoon, Stéphanie stopped checking the bottles through the register, instead distributing them personally on the steps of the train. No one made a distinction anymore between first and second class. Everyone was outside, in the shade of the train, around the tracks. The SNCF ticket inspectors and driver had disappeared at the same time.

  Once the passengers realized that the train wasn’t going anywhere, cars started to arrive, belonging to neighbors and friends. Some travelers phoned from our place to be collected. Others used the phone box. Within a few hours, the train and its surroundings had emptied.

  All traffic in Malgrange-sur-Nancy was cut off. People came as far as the closed barrier, picked up the passengers, and turned back. By 9 P.M., the Grand-Rue was silent, and the Casino was closing its doors. When Stéphanie lowered the shutters, she was bright red. In the distance, all you could hear now were the voices of the strikers. They were going to sleep right there, behind their barricade.

  When night had already fallen and Philippe Toussaint had long since gone for a ride, I noticed that, inside the front carriage, there were still two passengers: a woman and a little girl, who must have been Léonine’s age. I asked the woman if there was someone who could come and pick her up, but she replied that she lived seven hundred and twenty kilometers from Malgrange, that it was very complicated, that she was coming from Germany where she had just collected her granddaughter, and was going to Paris. She couldn’t contact anyone before the following day, and even that wasn’t certain.

  I invited her to come and have supper at my house. She declined. I insisted. I took their suitcases without asking what she thought, and they followed me.

  Léo was already sound asleep.

  I opened all the windows, for once; it could get warm inside the house.

  I gave some supper to little Emmy, who was exhausted. During the meal, she played with one of Léo’s dolls, and then I lay her down beside Léo. Watching them sleeping side by side, I thought how I would like to have a second child. But Philippe Toussaint wouldn’t agree to it. I could already hear him telling me that our place was too small to have a second kid. I thought how it was our love that was too confined to welcome a new child, not the house.

  I told Emmy’s grandmother, who was called Célia, that she must sleep at my place, that I wouldn’t let her return to an empty train, that it was too dangerous. And I also told her that, for the first time in years, thanks to this strike, I was on holiday, that I had a guest, and that I hoped this railway line would be down for as long as possible, that at last I would be able to sleep more than eight hours in a row without being disturbed by the barrier alarm.

  Célia asked me if I lived alone with my daughter. That made me smile. Instead of replying, I opened a very good bottle of red wine that I was keeping for “a special occasion,” but until that day, there had never been one.

  We started drinking. After two glasses, Célia accepted my invitation to sleep over. I would put her in our bedroom and we, my husband and I, would sleep on the sofa bed. We slept on the sofa bed when Philippe Toussaint’s parents visited us—twice a year since our marriage. They would come to collect Léo to take her on holiday. One week between Christmas and the New Year, and ten days in the summer to go to the seaside.

  After the third glass, my guest said that she accepted my invitation on the condition that she slept on the sofa bed.

  Célia was around fifty. She had beautiful, very gentle blue eyes. She spoke softly, with a reassuring voice and a lovely Midi accent.

  I said, “O.K. for the sofa bed,” and I was right to. When Philippe Toussaint finally returned, he made a beeline for our room to collapse on the bed. He didn’t even look in our direction.

  I said to Célia, as Philippe Toussaint went past, “That’s my husband.” She smiled at me, without comment.

  Célia and I carried on talking in the sitting room until one in the morning. The windows were still open. It was the first time since our arrival that the rooms had been so warm. Célia lived in Marseilles. I told her she must’ve brought the sun right into the house. That usually, the heat didn’t get in, that there was an invisible barrier that prevented it from doing so.

  When we had finished the bottle of wine, I told her that she could sleep on my sofa bed on condition that I sleep with her, because I had never had a female friend or sister, and that apart from my daughter when she was a baby, I had never slept with a girlfriend like real girlfriends do. Célia replied, “OK, girlfriend, we’ll sleep together.”

  That night, I made a wish come true by making up a little fo
r what I’d missed of friendship. All those nights when I would have liked to sleep at a best friend’s, with her parents nearby, all those nights when I would have liked to jump over the wall with her to meet up with boys sitting on their mopeds at the end of the road, I made up for them a little.

  I think we spoke until six in the morning. It had been light for a short while when I finally dropped off. At 9 A.M., Léo came to wake me up to tell me that there was a little girl who couldn’t talk in her bed. Emmy was German, and spoke not a word of French. Then Léo asked a stream of questions:

  “And why are you sleeping in the sitting room? Why’s Daddy sleeping all dressed on the bed? Who is the lady? Why aren’t there any more trains? Who are they, Mommy, these people? Who is that little girl? Is she from our family? Are they going to stay here?”

  Sadly, no. Célia and Emmy left us two days later.

  When they got back on the train, I thought I would die of sadness. As if I’d always known them. All strikes come to an end. Holidays, too. But I had met someone, my first girlfriend. Through the half-open window of the train, carriage 7, Célia said to me:

  “Come and live with us in Marseilles. You’ll be happy there, I’ll find you some work . . . Usually, I don’t pass judgment, but since France is on strike, let’s say that I, too, am on strike and I’m going to tell you what I really think: Violette, it’s obvious that your husband isn’t right for you. Leave him.”

  I replied that I had already been deprived of my parents, that I would never deprive Léonine of her father. Even if Philippe Toussaint was a father in quotation marks, he was still a father.

  A week after their departure, I received a long letter from Célia. In this letter, she had slipped three round-trip Malgrange-sur-Nancy–Marseilles train tickets.

  She had a chalet in the Calanque de Sormiou and was putting it at our disposal. The fridge would be full. It should be enjoyed, at last. She had written that, “Enjoy it, at last. You will be able to have a proper holiday, Violette, and see the sea with your daughter.” She also wrote that she would never forget that I had welcomed her into my home. That in exchange for those two days I had given her, it would be holidays every year in Marseilles.

  Philippe Toussaint said he wouldn’t go. That he had “better things to fucking do than going to a dyke’s place.” That’s what he called all women he wasn’t sleeping with, “dykes.”

  As for me, I told him that it was perfect that he wasn’t going, that way he could work the barrier while Léo and I went there. He can’t have liked the thought of us having a good time without him. He had a sudden fit of love: for the first time in six years, at his request, the SNCF found replacements for us within a matter of hours.

  A fortnight later, on August 1st, 1992, we discovered Marseilles. Célia was waiting for us at the end of the platform at Saint-Charles station. I threw myself into her arms. It was even sunny on the platform, I remember saying that to Célia, “It’s even sunny on the platform . . . ”

  When I saw the Mediterranean for the first time, I was in the back of Célia’s car. I lowered my window and sobbed like a child. I think I’d had the shock of my life. The shock of the majestic.

  35.

  Everything fades away, everything passes,

  except for memory.

  Love letters, a watch, a lipstick, a necklace, a novel, children’s stories, a mobile phone, a coat, family photos, a calendar for 1966, a doll, a bottle of rum, a pair of shoes, a pen, a bunch of dried flowers, a harmonica, a silver medal, a handbag, sunglasses, a coffee cup, a hunting gun, an amulet, an LP, a magazine with Johnny Hallyday on the cover. You find all sorts of things in a coffin.

  Today, Jeanne Ferney (1968–2017) was buried. Paul Lucchini told me that he’d slipped a portrait of her children inside her coffin, as she had requested. Last wishes are often respected. We don’t dare thwart the dead, we’re too scared that they will bring us bad luck from the beyond if we disobey them.

  I’ve just closed the gates of the cemetery. I pass in front of Jeanne’s tomb, decked with fresh floral tributes. I remove the cellophane from around the flowers so they can breathe.

  Rest in peace, dear Jeanne.

  Maybe you’ve already been born elsewhere, in another town, on the other side of the world. There’s your new family around you. Celebrating your birth. They are looking at you, kissing you, showering you with gifts, saying that you look like your mother, while here you are being mourned. And you, you are sleeping, you are preparing yourself for a new life with everything to be done again, while here you are dead. Here you are a memory, over there, the future is you.

  * * *

  When Célia’s car took the steep little road down to the Calanque de Sormiou, I looked beauty in the eye. Léo told me that she felt sick; I took her on my lap and said, “Look, can you see the sea down there? We’re nearly there.”

  We opened the chalet’s shutters, we let in the sun, the light, and the aromas.

  The cicadas were singing. I’d only ever heard them on the television. They drowned out our voices.

  We pulled on our bathing suits without bothering to unpack our suitcases. The sea awaited us! We walked a hundred meters and, already, we had our feet in the limpid, pale-green water. From afar, the Mediterranean was blue, close up crystal-clear. All I had ever known was the chlorinated water of municipal swimming pools.

  I inflated Léo’s swan-shaped rubber ring and we entered the cool water, squealing with joy.

  Philippe Toussaint made us laugh, he splashed us. He kissed me. He left salt on my lips. Léo said, “Daddy gave Mommy a kiss.”

  Léo’s laughter on her father’s shoulders, the cicadas, the coolness of the water, and the sun—it all made me giddy. It was like a merry-go-round going round too fast. I plunged my head under the water and opened my eyes. The salt stung me. I was ecstatic.

  We stayed for ten days. I barely slept. Something within me refused to let my eyes close, a surplus of happiness, my emotions were off the scale. I had never seen my daughter so full of joy.

  Whatever the time, it was daylight. Whatever the time, we swam. Or we ate. Or we listened. Or we contemplated. Or we breathed. Now, only three sentences left our lips, “That smells good,” “The water’s good,” “That’s good.” Bliss makes idiots of us. It’s as if we had changed worlds, as if we’d just been born elsewhere, into a blinding light.

  During these ten days, Philippe Toussaint didn’t go off for a ride. He stayed with us. He made love to me and I returned the favor. We exchanged our sun-drenched skin for a semblance of happiness. We were back to how we’d started, but without the love. It was simply for the pleasure, to revel in it all. Everything was far away. The Eastern sky, and the others.

  Léo resisted when I covered her in sun lotion. She also resisted when I wanted to keep her in the shade. She had decided to live naked, in the water. She had decided to turn herself into a little mermaid. Like in the cartoons.

  Over the ten days, I don’t think we put shoes on. That’s it, I’ve understood what holidays are about: not putting shoes on anymore.

  Holidays are like a reward, a first prize, a gold medal. One has to merit them. And Célia had decided that I had several lives’ worth of merit. One life for each foster family, and the one with Philippe Toussaint.

  From time to time, Célia came down to see us. She came to inspect our happiness. And like a satisfied foreman, she would leave with a smile on her face, after having a coffee with me.

  I showered her with thanks like others shower their wives with jewelry. I created entire parures of thanks for her. And I was far from done. It wasn’t me who closed the chalet’s shutters on the day we left. I asked Philippe Toussaint to do it. If I’d closed the shutters myself, I would have felt as if I were burying myself alive, closing up my own tomb. As Jacques Brel sings, “I’ll make up crazy words for you that you’ll understand.” That’s what I did so that
Léo didn’t cry when it was time to go, so that she didn’t cling to the doors of the chalet screaming. I made up crazy words for her. The childhood ones, the simplest ones.

  “Sweetheart, we have to leave because in a hundred-and-twenty days, it’s Christmas, and a hundred-and-twenty days go very quickly. So we’ll have to start that list for Father Christmas immediately. Here, there’s no pen, no crayon, no paper. There’s only the sea. And so we must go back home. Then, we’ll need to decorate the Christmas tree, hang ornaments of every color at the ends of the branches, and this year, we’re going to hang paper garlands that we’re going to make ourselves, yes, all by ourselves! That’s why we need to get back home very quickly, there’s no more time to lose. And if you’re really good, we’ll repaint the walls of your bedroom. In pink? If you like. And then before Christmas, what’s coming up before Christmas? Your BIRTHDAY! And that’s in almost no time at all. We’re going to blow up balloons, oh, quick, quick, quick, we must get back home! We’ve got so many fun things to do there. Put your shoes back on, sweetheart. Quick, quick, quick, let’s pack the suitcases! We’re going to see the trains again—and maybe they might even stop running them! And Célia will be in one of them. Quick, quick, quick, we’re going home! And in any case, we’ll come back to Marseilles next year. With all your presents.”

  36.

  All those who knew you miss you and mourn you.

  Irène Fayolle and Gabriel Prudent left the tomb of Martine Robin, married name Prudent. Before leaving, Gabriel Prudent stroked her name engraved on the stone. He said to Irène: “It does feel strange to see your own name written on a tomb.”

  They walked along the avenues of the Saint-Pierre cemetery, stopping from time to time in front of other tombs, in front of strangers. To look at photographs or dates. Irène said:

  “Personally, I’d want to be cremated.”