Fresh Water for Flowers

by Valérie Perrin

  The man made me sit down and, when his hands touched me, I felt a shock wave. He stood behind me and started to massage my shoulders, trapezius muscles, nape, and head. He touched me as if he were healing me, as if he were placing deep-heat plasters all along my back and on the top of my head. He murmured, “Your back is harder than a wall. One could abseil down it.”

  I had never been touched like this. His hands were really hot and radiated an extraordinary energy that penetrated me, as if he were trailing a slight burning sensation over my skin. I didn’t resist. I didn’t understand. I was in a cemetery house, the cemetery where my daughter’s ashes were buried. A house that reminded me of a voyage I’d never made. Later, I would learn that he was a healer. “A kind of bonesetter,” as he liked to describe it.

  I closed my eyes under the pressure of his hands and dozed off. A deep sleep, dark, with no painful images, no wet sheets, no nightmares, no rats devouring me, no Léonine whispering in my ear, “Mommy, wake up, I’m not dead.”

  I woke up the following morning, lying on the sofa under a thick, soft blanket. As I opened my eyes, I struggled to surface, to know where I was. I saw the tea caddies. And the chair I’d sat on was still in the middle of the room.

  The house was empty. A very hot teapot had been placed on a low table opposite the sofa. I helped myself and sipped the jasmine tea, which was delicious. Beside the teapot, on a porcelain plate, the master of the house had arranged dainty almond cakes, which I dipped into my cup of tea.

  In the daylight, I immediately saw that the cemetery house was as modest as my own. But the man who had received me the previous day had transformed it into a palace, thanks to his smile, his kindness, his almond milk, his candles, and his perfumes.

  He came in from outside. He hung his big coat on the peg and blew into his hands. He turned his head in my direction and smiled at me.

  “Good morning.”

  “I must go.”

  “Where to?”

  “Home.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “In the east of France, near Nancy.”

  “You are Léonine’s mother?”

  “ . . . ”

  “I saw you at her tomb yesterday afternoon. I know the mothers of Anaïs, Nadège, and Océane. You, it’s the first time . . . ”

  “My daughter isn’t in your cemetery. There are only ashes here.”

  “I’m not the owner of this cemetery, just the keeper.”

  “I don’t know how you’re able to do that . . . This job. Yours is a funny job, well, not funny. At all.”

  He smiled again. There was no judgment in his eyes. Later, I would also discover that he always put himself on the same level as the people he was addressing.

  “And you, what kind of job do you do?”

  “I’m a level-crossing keeper.”

  “So, you stop people from crossing to the other side—me, I help them a little in getting there.”

  I tried my best to return his smile. But I didn’t know how to smile anymore. He was all goodness, I was all in pieces. I was a wreck.

  “You’ll be back?”

  “Yes. I have to know why the children’s room burned down that night . . . Do you know them?”

  I took out and handed him the list of the staff of Notre-Dame-des-Prés, scribbled on the back of a bill by Philippe Toussaint.

  “Edith Croquevieille, director; Swan Letellier, cook; Geneviève Magnan, dinner lady; Eloïse Petit and Lucie Lindon, supervisors; Alain Fontanel, maintenance man.”

  He read the names carefully. Then looked at me.

  “You’ll be back to visit Léonine’s tomb?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Eight days after our meeting, I received a letter from him:

  “Madame Violette Toussaint,

  Please find enclosed the list of names you forgot on my table. Also, I have prepared a packet of blended tea—a green tea with almond and jasmine and rose petals. If I’m not there, take it, the door is always open. I’ve put it on the yellow shelf, to the right of the cast-iron teapots. Your name is on it: ‘Tea for Violette.’

  Yours truly,

  Sasha H.”

  To me, this man seemed like he was straight out of a novel, or an asylum. Which comes to same thing. What was he doing in a cemetery? I didn’t even know the job of cemetery keeper existed. For me, the death business was just about being an undertaker, waxen faced and clad in black, with a crow perched on one shoulder, if not a coffin.

  But there was something much more disturbing. I recognized his handwriting on the envelope and the note. He’s was the one who’d sent me the “My darling, you were born on September 3rd, died on July 13th, but to me, you will always be my August 15th” plaque to place on my little Léo’s tomb.

  How did he know I existed? How did he know these dates, particularly the happy one? Was he already here when the children were buried? Why was he interested in them? In me? Why had he lured me to the cemetery? What did it have to do with him? I began to wonder whether he hadn’t knowingly locked me in the cemetery so I would come into his house.

  My life was a bombsite, to which an unknown soldier had sent me a funerary plaque and a letter.

  Yes, the war was drawing to a close. I sensed it. I would never recover from the death of my daughter, but the bombing had stopped. I would live through the postwar period. The longest, the hardest, the most pernicious . . . You pick yourself up, and then find yourself face to face with a girl of her age. When the enemy has gone, and there’s nothing left but those who are left. Desolation. Empty cupboards. Photos that freeze her in childhood. All the others growing, even the trees, even the flowers, without her.

  In January of 1996, I announced to Philippe Toussaint that, from then on, I would be going to the cemetery in Brancion-en-Chalon two Sundays a month. I’d set off in the morning and return in the evening.

  He sighed. He rolled his eyes, as if to say, “I’m going to have to work two days a month.” He added that he didn’t understand, that I hadn’t been to the funeral, and then now, all of a sudden, this fancy takes me. I didn’t respond. How could one respond to that? To the word “fancy”? According to him, going to visit my daughter’s tomb was a caprice, a whim.

  The writer Christian Bobin said, “Words left unspoken go off to scream deep inside us.”

  Those weren’t his exact words. But me, I was full of silences that screamed deep inside me. That woke me up at night. That made me put on weight, lose weight, age, cry, sleep all day, drink like a bottomless pit, bang my head against doors and walls. But I survived.

  The playwright Prosper Crébillon said, “The greater the misfortune, the greater one is for living.” In dying, Léonine had made everything around me disappear, except me.

  48.

  Like a flight of swallows as winter approaches,

  Your soul flew away with no hope of return.

  Julien Seul is standing at my doorstep. The one beside my vegetable garden, at the back of the house.

  “It’s the first time I’ve seen you in a T-shirt. You look like a young man.”

  “And you, it’s the first time I’ve seen you in colors.”

  “That’s because I’m at home, in my garden. No one comes across me behind this wall. Are you staying long?”

  “Until tomorrow morning. How are you?”

  “Like a cemetery keeper.”

  He smiles at me.

  “It’s lovely, your garden.”

  “That’s down to the fertilizers. Close to cemeteries, everything grows very fast.”

  “I’ve never known you to be so caustic.”

  “That’s because you don’t know me.”

  “Maybe I know you better than you think I do.”

  “Poking around in people’s lives doesn’t mean you know them, detective.”

  “
May I invite you to dinner?”

  “On condition that you tell me the end of the story.”

  “Which story?”

  “The one about Gabriel Prudent and your mother.”

  “I’ll come and pick you up at 8 P.M. And whatever you do, don’t change, stay in colors.”

  49.

  These few flowers, in memory of times gone by.

  I went inside Sasha’s house. I opened the packet of tea, closed my eyes, and inhaled its contents. Would I come back to life in this cemetery house? It was my second time inside it, and already I could smell that aroma that pulled me, almost by force, out of the blackness of my shadow of a life since Léo’s death.

  As Sasha had indicated in his letter, the packet of tea was on the yellow shelf beside the cast-iron teapots. He’d stuck on a label like those on school workbooks: Tea for Violette. But what he hadn’t mentioned in his letter was that, under the packet, there was also a brown envelope with my name on it. It wasn’t sealed. I discovered that he had slipped several pages inside it.

  Initially, I thought it was a list of people who had died recently, and the “Toussaint” written on the envelope might refer to tombs requiring flowers for All Saints’ Day. Then I understood.

  Sasha had put together the contact details of all the staff present at the château of Notre-Dame-des-Prés on the night of July 13th to 14th, 1993. The director, Edith Croquevieille; the cook, Swan Letellier; the dinner lady, Geneviève Magnan; the two supervisors, Eloïse Petit and Lucie Lindon; the maintenance man, Alain Fontanel.

  Apart from the director’s face, it was the first time I was seeing the faces of those who had seen my daughter for the last time.

  The tragedy had been covered on the 8 P.M. TV news bulletin. On every channel. They had shown a picture of the château of Notre-Dame-des-Prés, the lake, the ponies. And they had kept repeating the same key words: tragedy, accidental fire, four children perished, holiday camp. The children had been front-page news in the Journal de Saône-et-Loire for several days. I had skimmed through the articles that Philippe Toussaint brought back for me the day after the funeral. Pictures of the children, smiles full of gaps, teeth the fairy had taken away, lucky thing. We, the parents, had nothing anymore. I would have given my life to know where her fairyland was, to get Léo’s little teeth back, get a little of her smile back. But these articles had no photos of the staff from the establishment.

  The director, Edith Croquevieille, had gray hair gathered in a chignon, wore glasses, and smiled sagely at the camera. One sensed that the photographer had given her these directions, “Smile, but not too much, you need to look friendly, trustworthy and reassuring.” I knew that photo. It was at the back of the publicity brochure that Mother Toussaint had handed me, years earlier. That brochure full of blue skies. Like in the brochures of undertakers.

  “Only our reliability never takes a holiday.” How often did I berate myself for not reading between those lines?

  Beneath the portrait of Edith Croquevieille, her address had been written.

  The photo of Swan Letellier was from an automatic booth. How had Sasha got hold of it? Just as for the director, Sasha had written the cook’s address. But it didn’t seem to be his personal address. The name of a restaurant in Mâcon, “Le Terroir des Souches.” Swan must have been about thirty-five. He seemed thin, almond-shaped eyes, handsome and disturbing at the same time, a strange face, fine lips, a shifty look.

  The photo of Geneviève Magnan, the dinner lady, must have been taken at a wedding. She was wearing a ridiculous hat, like the mothers of the bride and groom sometimes wear. She had put too much makeup on, and badly. Geneviève Magnan must have been about fifty. It was probably this plump little woman, squeezed into her blue flowery suit, who had served Léo her last meal. I’m sure Léo thanked her, because she was well brought up. I had taught Léo that—it had been my priority—always to say hello, goodbye, thank you.

  The two supervisors, Eloïse Petit and Lucie Lindon, were posing together in front of their school. In the photograph, they must have been sixteen. Two cheeky and carefree young girls. Did they eat at the same table as the children? On the phone, Léo had told me that one of the supervisors “really” looked like me. And yet neither Eloïse nor Lucie, both blonde with blue eyes, looked like me.

  The face of the maintenance man, Alain Fontanel, had been cut out from a newspaper. He was wearing a football jersey. He must have been posing, squatting with other players, in front of a ball. There was something of the rocker Eddy Mitchell about him.

  Always an address, jotted down in blue ink, under each portrait. Those of Geneviève Magnan and Alain Fontanel were identical. And always the same writing as on the parcel containing the funerary plaque, the letter, and the labels on the tea caddies.

  But who was this cemetery keeper who’d lured me here? And why?

  I waited for him, he didn’t come home. I put the tea in my bag, along with the envelope containing the portraits and names of those present that evening. And I went around the cemetery to find Sasha. I came across unknown people watering plants, and walkers. I wondered who was buried here of theirs. I tried to guess by looking at their faces. A mother? A cousin? A brother? A husband?

  After an hour of pacing the avenues in search of Sasha, I found myself back at the children’s section. I went past the angels and up to Léo’s tomb. I saw, once more, my daughter’s name on the headstone—the name I had sewn inside the collar of her clothes before packing them in the suitcase. That was the rule, otherwise the camp’s management accepted no responsibility in case of theft or disappearance. A little moss had started to appear on the marble since last time, in one shady corner. I kneeled to rub it away with the back of my sleeve.

  50.

  For me, it’s been years now, forever, that your dazzling smile

  has sustained the same rose with its glorious summer.

  Irène Fayolle and Gabriel Prudent went into the first hotel they saw, a few kilometers from Aix station. The Hôtel du Passage. They chose the Blue Room. Like the title of the novel by Georges Simenon. There were others: the Joséphine Room, the Amadeus Room, the Renoir Room.

  At reception, Gabriel Prudent ordered pasta and red wine for four people, to be served in the room. He thought making love would make them hungry. Irène Fayolle asked him:

  “Why four people? There’s just two of us.”

  “You’re bound to think about your husband, I about my wife, so we might as well invite them for a bite from the get-go. It will avoid unspoken resentment, lamentment, and all that.”

  “What’s ‘lamentment’?”

  “It’s a word I invented to combine melancholy, guilt, regrets, steps forward, and steps backward. Everything that really bugs us in life, in other words. That holds us back.”

  They kissed. They undressed, she wanted to make love in the dark, he said that there was no point, that since the trial he had undressed her several times with his eyes, that he already knew her curves, her body.

  She insisted. She said:

  “You’re a smooth talker.”

  He replied:

  “Obviously.”

  He closed the blue curtains of the Blue Room.

  There was a knock on the door, room service. They ate, drank, made love, ate, drank, made love, ate, drank, made love. They enjoyed each other, the wine made them laugh, they enjoyed, laughed, cried.

  They decided, by mutual consent, never to leave this room ever again. They told themselves that dying together, there, then, that could be the solution. They envisaged running away, disappearing, a stolen car, a train, a plane. They went on quite a journey.

  They decided they would go and live in Argentina. Like war criminals did. She fell asleep. He stayed awake, smoked cigarettes, ordered a second bottle of white wine and five desserts.

  She opened her eyes, asked him who the third guest was, beside her hu
sband and his wife, he replied, “Our love.”

  They went to the bathroom. Returning to bed, they decided to dance. They switched on the alarm-clock radio, heard that Klaus Barbie was going to be extradited to France to be tried. Gabriel Prudent said these words, “At last, justice. Got to celebrate that.” He ordered champagne. She said, “I’ve known you for twenty-four hours and I haven’t been sober. It might be a good idea for us to meet again on an empty stomach.”

  They danced to Gilbert Bécaud’s “I’m coming back for you.”

  She fell asleep at around 4 A.M. and opened her eyes again at 6 A.M. He had just fallen asleep.

  The room smelled of stale smoke and alcohol. She heard the birds singing. She hated them for it.

  “Hold back the night.” Those are the words that came to her. Johnny Hallyday at six in the morning in the Blue Room. She tried to remember the words, “Hold back the night, today, until the end of the world, hold back the night . . . ” And she couldn’t remember what came next.

  He had his back to her, she caressed him, breathed him in. It woke him up, they made love. Fell back to sleep.

  They were rung at 10 A.M., to know if they were keeping the room or checking out. If the latter, the room had to be vacated by midday.

  51.

  Each day that passes weaves the invisible thread

  of your memory.

  On the ground floor of the left wing, one main corridor, three adjacent bedrooms, each with two bunk beds and toilets and basins, for boarders, and a bedroom reserved for staff. On the second floor, three adjacent rooms, each with two bunk beds and toilets and basins, for boarders, and five bedrooms reserved for staff.

  On the night of July 13th to 14th, 1993, all the rooms were occupied.

  The bedrooms of Edith Croquevieille (director and supervisor), Swan Letellier (domestic staff), Geneviève Magnan (domestic staff and supervisor), Alain Fontanel (domestic staff), and Eloïse Petit (supervisor) were on the second floor. The bedroom of Lucie Lindon (supervisor) was on the ground floor.