Fresh Water for Flowers

by Valérie Perrin

  It wasn’t the children that disturbed me as I entered the covered playground, but the smells, from the canteen, a building adjoining the school, and the bustling corridors. It was lunchtime. I used to collect Léonine at lunchtime. And she often said to me, “You see, Mommy, the canteen doesn’t smell very nice, I’m glad I go home.”

  On the pain scale, if such a shit scale exists, going into Léonine’s school was harder than going into the cemetery. In Brancion, my daughter was dead among the dead. Inside her school, she was dead among the living.

  The children who had been Léonine’s friends were no longer there. They had just started middle school. I would have found seeing them unbearable, recognizing them without really recognizing them. The same figures, with “life” as an added option. Gangly, less baby-faced, mouths full of metal, feet in giants’ trainers.

  With pockets empty, I made my way along the corridors. I thought how Léonine wouldn’t have wanted me to hold her hand anymore on the way to her classroom. A mom had told me that once they went to middle school, you lost a little bit more of them every year. Yes, and when they went to a holiday camp, you could lose them all in one go.

  Léonine called her primary-school teacher “Mademoiselle Claire.” When gentle Claire Berthier, bent over some exercise books, looked up and saw me coming into the classroom, she turned pale. We hadn’t seen each other since my daughter’s disappearance. My presence made her feel awkward, she clearly wished that the ground would swallow her up.

  The death of a child is a strain on grown-ups, adults, other people, neighbors, storekeepers. They avert their eyes, avoid you, change sidewalks. When a child dies, for many people, the parents die, too.

  We exchanged polite greetings. I didn’t give her a chance to say anything. I immediately took out the photo of Geneviève Magnan, the one of her in the ridiculous hat.

  “Do you know her?”

  Surprised by my question, the teacher frowned and stared at the photo, replying that it didn’t ring any bells. I persisted:

  “I think she worked here.”

  “Here? You mean at the school?”

  “Yes, in a neighboring class.”

  Claire Berthier turned her lovely green eyes back to the photo and studied Geneviève Magnan’s face for longer.

  “Ah . . . I think I remember, she was in Madame Piolet’s class, with the large nursery groups . . . She arrived in the middle of the year. Didn’t stay very long here.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Why are you showing me this photo? Are you looking for this lady?”

  “No, no, I know where she lives.”

  Claire smiled at me the way one smiles at a madwoman, a sick woman, a widow, an orphan, an alcoholic, an idiot, a mother-who’s-lost-her-child.

  “Goodbye, and thank you.”

  59.

  It’s when the tree is lying down that

  one gets the measure of its stature.

  I put Irène Fayolle’s journal into the drawer of my bedside table. I read the passages that refer to me randomly, never in chronological order. She came to my cemetery occasionally, between 2009 and 2015, to visit Gabriel’s tomb. Years during which she made notes on the weather, on Gabriel, the surrounding tombs, the potted flowers, and me.

  Julien had slipped colored paper between the pages where his mother talks about “the cemetery lady” in her journal. Like flowers lain over the lines in which she speaks of me. It instantly reminded me of Stefan Zweig’s Letter from an Unknown Woman.

  January 3rd, 2010

  Today I noticed that the cemetery lady had been crying . . .

  October 6th, 2009

  As I was leaving the cemetery, I came across the lady who looks after it, she was smiling, she was accompanied by a gravedigger, a dog, and two cats . . .

  July 6th, 2013

  The cemetery lady often cleans the tombs, she’s not obliged to . . .

  September 28th, 2015

  I came across the cemetery lady, she smiled at me but her thoughts seemed to be elsewhere . . .

  April 7th, 2011

  I just learned that the cemetery lady’s husband disappeared . . .

  September 3rd, 2012

  The cemetery lady’s house was locked and the shutters closed. I asked a gravedigger why, he told me that on Christmas Day and September 3rd, the keeper didn’t want to see anyone. They’re the only days of the year when she’s replaced, apart from the summer holidays . . .

  June 7th, 2014

  Apparently, the cemetery lady records the speeches made for the deceased in notebooks . . .

  August 10th, 2013

  When buying some flowers, I learned that the cemetery lady was on holiday in Marseilles. I could have walked past her . . .

  When I read beyond the lines concerning me, when I open the journal at places where there are no colored markers slipped in by Julien, I feel as if I’m entering Irène’s bedroom and poking around under her mattress. Like her son when he started looking for Philippe Toussaint. As for me, it’s Gabriel Prudent I’m looking for when I go out of bounds.

  There are some words I can’t make out. Irène wrote as illegibly as doctors do prescriptions. With her ballpoint pen, she produced a tiny, spidery scrawl.

  After their night of love in the Blue Room, Gabriel Prudent and Irène Fayolle didn’t leave the hotel together.

  They had to vacate the room by midday. Gabriel called reception to say that he would be staying another twenty-four hours. He stroked Irène with his fingertips, murmuring, between drags:

  “I need to sober up after all that alcohol, and, even more, I need to sober up after you before leaving here.”

  She took it badly. It was as if he’d said: “I need to rid myself of you before leaving here.”

  She got up, had a shower, got dressed. Since she’d been married, she’d never spent the night away from home. When she came out of the bathroom, Gabriel had fallen asleep. In the ashtray, acrid smoke was rising from a badly stubbed-out butt.

  She opened the minibar for a bottle of water. Gabriel opened his eyes and watched her drinking from the bottle. She already had her coat on.

  “Stay a little longer.”

  She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. He loved this gesture. Her skin, her eyes, her hair gathered in a black elastic band.

  “I’ve been away since yesterday morning. I was supposed to deliver flowers to Aix and return straight after . . . I’m sure my husband has already reported my disappearance.”

  “You’re not tempted to disappear?”

  “No.”

  “Come and live with me.”

  “I’m married and I have a son.”

  “Get divorced and bring your son with you. I get along pretty well with children.”

  “One can’t get divorced just like that, with the flick of a magic wand. You seem to think everything is easy.”

  “But everything is easy.”

  “I don’t want to go to my husband’s funeral. You abandoned your wife and she died of it.”

  “You’re becoming unpleasant.”

  She looked for her handbag. Checked her van keys were inside.

  “No, realistic. One doesn’t just abandon people like that. If you find it easy to pack in everything and start again elsewhere, without worrying about others, about their grief, well . . . that’s fine.”

  “Each to their own life.”

  “No. The lives of others matter, too.”

  “I know, I spend mine defending those lives in various courts.”

  “It’s the lives of strangers that you defend. The lives of people you don’t know. Not your own life. Not the lives of your loved ones. It’s almost . . . easy.”

  “We’re already at the reproaches stage. After a single night of love. We may be going a little too fast, here.”

  “It’s
only the truth that hurts.”

  He raised his voice:

  “I abhor the truth! It doesn’t exist, the truth! It’s like God . . . It’s been invented by men!”

  She shrugged her shoulders, as if to say what she did say:

  “That doesn’t surprise me.”

  He looked at her, sadly.

  “Already . . . I don’t surprise you anymore.”

  She agreed. Gave him a faint smile, and slammed the door without saying goodbye.

  She went down by the stairs, three floors, looked for her van. She couldn’t remember where she had parked the previous day. While searching for it in the streets around the hotel, along shopwindows announcing the final winter sales, she almost went back up to the room, to throw herself in his arms. When she was just about to turn back, she spotted her van, parked at the end of a cul-de-sac, half on a sidewalk, pretty much any old how.

  At the end of a cul-de-sac. Any old how. It was all any old thing. She must go home, get back to Paul and Julien.

  In the van, there was a smell of stale smoke. She opened the windows wide, despite it being winter. She drove directly to Marseilles. She didn’t stop off at the rose nursery. She went straight home.

  Paul was waiting for her. When she opened the door, he almost shouted, “Is that you?” He was worried sick, but hadn’t reported her disappearance. He knew that his wife could disappear from one day to the next. He’d always known it. Too beautiful, too taciturn, too secretive.

  She apologized to him. Told him that she’d had an unexpected encounter at the cemetery, a widower abandoned by his family, anyhow, in short, a strange story, she’d had to look after everything.

  “What do you mean, everything?”

  “Everything.”

  Paul never asked questions. For him, questions belonged to the past. Paul lived in the present.

  “Next time, call me.”

  “Have you eaten?”

  “No.”

  “Where’s Julien?”

  “At school.”

  “Are you hungry?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll make some pasta.”

  “O.K.”

  She smiled, went to the kitchen, took out a saucepan, filled it with water, put it on the stove, adding salt and herbs. She thought back to the pasta she’d eaten the previous day with Gabriel, to the love they had made.

  Paul came into the kitchen, pressed himself to her back, kissed her on the nape of her neck.

  She closed her eyes.

  60.

  A memory never dies, it merely falls asleep.

  JUNE 1996, GENEVIÈVE MAGNAN

  The Parisian girls arrived in a minibus—suitcases, pigtails, braids, flowery dresses, sick bags, squeals of joy. Lots of chattering, lots of whining: six- to nine-year-olds. Some I knew, already seen them the year before. Only girls. Four will be arriving by car, later. Two kids from Calais, two from Nancy.

  I’ve never liked girls; remind me of my sisters. Couldn’t stand ’em. Thankfully, I just had two boys, tough ones. They don’t whine, boys. They fight, but they don’t whine.

  I’ve never been good at math. Or any other subjects, come to that. But I do know what the scale of probability is—my crap life taught me that only too well, just let me knock that into your thick head. The bigger the number, the bigger the chance of the thing happening. But in this case, the number was minuscule. A godforsaken place of three hundred souls, where I was a replacement for two years.

  When I saw her getting out of the car, looking peaky, my first thought was of a resemblance, not of the scale of probability. I said to myself: Old girl, you’re nuts. You see evil everywhere.

  I went off to the kitchen to make pancakes for the lot of them. I found them again in the refectory, sitting around jugs of water and bottles of grenadine syrup, and served them a pile of pancakes sprinkled with sugar, which they gobbled up.

  When the boss called the register, and the little girl replied, “Present,” on hearing her surname, I nearly fainted. A name that goes with the dead.

  One of the supervisors gave me a glass of cold water. She said, “Is it the heat making you feel queasy, Geneviève?” I replied, “That must be it.”

  At that moment, I realized that the Devil existed. God I’d always known was an invention for suckers, but not the Devil. That day, I’d have almost taken my hat off to him, a hat I’ve never had. In my family, we almost never wore hats.

  “Hats, they’re just for the bourgeoisie,” my mother would say, between wallops.

  The kid looked like her father, two peas in a pod. I watched her eating her pancake, and thought back to that last time, that taste of blood in my mouth. It was three years since I’d seen him, and I thought about it all the time. Sometimes, at night, I’d wake up in a sweat, I’d dreamt of missing him, and that yearning to get my revenge, too, have his hide like he’d had mine.

  After tea, the brats went out to stretch their legs. I cleared the tables, it was a lovely day, I opened the windows, I saw her playing, running with the others with squeals of joy. I thought to myself that I wouldn’t last the week. Seven days of seeing him through her, at morning, midday, and evening meals. I’d have to call in sick. But this work, I needed it. The upkeep of the château gave me a living all year. And I couldn’t clear off in full season. The boss had warned us: in July and August, no absences allowed unless you’re dying. A right bitch, that one, all holier-than-thou.

  I thought of tripping the kid up so she broke a leg on the stairs and got sent back to her father pronto. No one the wiser, return to sender. With a note pinned to her dress, “With my worst memories.”

  I prepared the grub. Tomato salad, breaded fish, rice pilaf, and creamy desserts. I laid the tables, twenty-nine settings, Fontanel gave me a hand.

  “You don’t look quite yourself, old girl.”

  I asked him to shut it. That made him laugh.

  He leaned out of the window to ogle the two supervisors, while the brats were playing one, two, three, red light, green light.

  One, two, three, red light, green light . . .

  61.

  We know that you would be with us today if heaven weren’t so far away.

  When we moved to the cemetery in August of 1997, Sasha had already left the house. As usual, the door was open. He had left a note and the keys for us on the table. He welcomed us, explained where to find the hot-water tank, electricity meter, water mains, lightbulbs, and spare fuses.

  The tea caddies were gone. The house was clean. Without him, it was sad, it had lost its soul. Like a girl forsaken by her first love. I went upstairs for the first time, saw the empty bedroom.

  The vegetable garden had been watered the previous day.

  The head of the municipal technical department came to see us in the evening to check we’d settled in alright.

  At first, people came to the house to get treatment for their tendinitis and their chronic pains, not knowing that Sasha had left. He had said goodbye to no one.

  * * *

  The church bells are ringing. Never a funeral on Sunday, just Mass, to call the living to order.

  Usually, at midday on Sunday, it’s Elvis who comes to have lunch with me. He brings me vanilla cream puffs, and I make him penne with mushrooms. I add a little fresh parsley on top. Delicious. According to the season, I pick what there is in the vegetable garden, and we have tomatoes, radishes, or a green-bean salad.

  Elvis says very little. It doesn’t bother me, with him there’s no need to make conversation. Elvis is like me, he has no parents. He stayed at a Mâcon hostel until he was twelve, and then was sent to be a farmhand in Brancion-en-Chalon. The farm, just outside the village, is now in ruins.

  All the members of that family have been dead and buried in my cemetery for a long time. Elvis never goes near their vault. He’s scared of th
e father, Emilien Fourrier (1909–1983), a brute who hit everything that moved. Around their vault, the paths aren’t raked. He has always told me that he doesn’t want to be buried with them. He made me promise to see to it. For that I would have to die after him. So, I made him take out a funeral contract with the Lucchini brothers. That way, he would have his own tomb, just for him, with a photo of Elvis Presley soldered on top, and the words Always on my mind in golden lettering. Although Elvis looks like a child, as boys who’ve never known a mother’s caresses often do, he’ll soon be retiring.

  It’s Nono and I who do his accounts and fill in his admin papers. His real name is Eric Delpierre, but I’ve never heard anyone call him that. I think all the Brancion locals are unaware of his true identity. He’s always gone by his stage name. He fell in love with Elvis Presley when he was eight. Some people enter religious orders, he entered Elvis, or maybe Elvis entered him. Elvis’s songs touched him and stayed with him, like prayers. Father Cédric recites the “Our Father,” and Elvis, “Love me Tender.” I’ve never known him to have a girlfriend, and neither has Nono.

  While looking for dried bay leaves in my condiments cupboard, I come across a letter from Sasha, slipped between the olive oil and the balsamic vinegar. I scatter Sasha’s letters around the house in order to forget them and then finally come across them by chance. This one dates back to March 1997.