Fresh Water for Flowers

by Valérie Perrin

  Come back here so I can organize for you to meet the mayor. Generally, one has to be wary of elected officials, but him, he’s a pretty decent sort. If he gives you his word, you won’t have to sign an offer of employment. So, you urgently need to think of some lie to get here as soon as possible. Have I already told you about the virtue of lying? If I forgot to, tie a knot in your hankie.

  With fondest love, precious Violette,

  Sasha

  “Philippe, I have to go to Marseilles!”

  “But it’s not August.”

  “I’m not going to the chalet. Célia needs me for a few days, at her house. Three or four at the very most . . . If there are no complications. Without counting the journey.”

  “Why?”

  “She’s going to the hospital and has no one to look after Emmy.”

  “When?

  “Straight away, it’s an emergency.”

  “Straight away?!”

  “Yes, it’s an emergency, I tell you!”

  “What’s wrong with her?”

  “Appendicitis.”

  “At her age?”

  “There’s no age for having appendicitis . . . Stéphanie will take me to Nancy and then I’ll get a train. Until I arrive, Emmy will stay with a neighbor . . . Célia begged me, she’s only got me, I have to go, and go fast. I’ve left you all the train timetables on a sheet of paper beside the phone. I’ve done the shopping, you’ll only have to heat up your blanquette or gratin in the microwave, there are two of those pizzas you like in the freezer, I’ve filled the fridge with yogurts and ready-made salads. At lunchtime, Stephanie will drop off a fresh baguette for you. I’ve put the packets of cookies in the drawer, under the cutlery, for you as usual. I’m off, see you in a few days’ time. I’ll call you when I get to Célia’s.”

  * * *

  During the car journey, which took around twenty-five minutes, and in what little I said to her, I lied to Stéphanie. I served up the same story to her as to Philippe Toussaint: Célia had appendicitis, I had to hurry to collect her granddaughter Emmy. Stéphanie didn’t know how to lie. If I’d told her the truth, she would have spilled the beans without meaning to. She would have blushed and stammered in front of Philippe Toussaint on meeting him.

  Stéphanie had got herself replaced at her register for an hour to take me to Nancy. We didn’t say much to each other in the car. I think she told me about a new brand of organic biscottes. For a few months, organic products had been appearing on the Casino shelves, and Stéphanie spoke to me about them as if they were the Holy Grail. I wasn’t listening to her. I was rereading Sasha’s letter in my mind. I was already in his garden, in his house, in his kitchen. I couldn’t wait. Looking at the white tiger dangling from the Panda’s rearview mirror, I was already searching for the right words, the right arguments to get Philippe Toussaint to accept moving, accept the cemetery keeper job.

  I took a train to Lyons, another to Mâcon, and then the coach that passed outside the château. I closed my eyes as we drew level with it.

  It was late afternoon when I pushed open the door of my future house. The daylight had almost gone, and it was bitterly cold. My lips were chapped. Inside, the air was sweet. Sasha had been burning candles and there was still that delicious smell, those handkerchiefs he soaked with “Rêve d’Ossian.” When he saw me, he just said, smiling:

  “I give thanks to the virtue of lying!”

  He was in the middle of peeling vegetables. His hands, which shook a little, held the peeler like some precious stone.

  We shared some truly delicious minestrone. We spoke of the garden, of mushrooms, of songs and books. I asked him where he would be going, if we moved in here. He told me that he already had everything planned. That he would travel and stop where he pleased. That his pension would be as meager as he was, but for the little he ate, it would suffice. That he would travel on foot, in second class, and by hitchhiking. Those were the only walks he felt like experiencing. He wanted to offer himself the unknown. With his friends as stop-offs. He only had a few, but they were true friends. Visiting them was part of his plan, too. Looking after their gardens. And if they didn’t have one, making them one.

  India was Sasha’s focal point. His best friend, Sany, was Indian, and Sasha had met him as a child. The son of an ambassador, Sany had lived in Kerala since the 70s. Sasha had visited him there countless times, once with Verena, his wife. Sany was the civil godfather of Emile and Ninon, their children. Sasha wanted to end his life over there. Sasha never said “end my life,” but rather “keep going until my death.”

  For dessert, he produced some rice pudding he had prepared the previous day, in assorted glass yogurt pots. I dug deep with my spoon to reach the caramel right at the bottom. As he watched me doing this, Sasha’s voice changed:

  “In losing my loved ones, I also lost an enormous weight. The worry of leaving them alone after my death, of abandoning them. The fear of imagining that they might be cold, in pain, hungry, and that I’d no longer be there to take them in my arms, protect them, support them. When I die, no one will mourn me. There’ll be no grief after me. And I’ll leave lightly, relieved of the weight of their lives. It’s only egoists who tremble over their own death. Everyone else trembles for those they leave behind.”

  “But I will mourn you, Sasha.”

  “You won’t mourn me the way my wife and two children would have mourned me. You’ll mourn me the way one does when losing a friend. You’ll never mourn anyone as you mourned Léonine. That you well know.”

  He boiled some water for the tea. He said he was happy I was there. That I would be among the real friends he would visit during his retirement. He specified, “During your husband’s absences.”

  He put some music on, Chopin sonatas. And he spoke to me of the living and the dead. Of the regulars. Of widows. The toughest thing would be children’s funerals. But no one was obliged to do anything. There was a real solidarity between the cemetery staff and the funeral directors. One could be replaced. A gravedigger could replace a pallbearer, who could replace a monumental mason, who could replace the funeral director, who could replace the cemetery keeper, when one of them felt unable to face a difficult funeral. The only person who couldn’t be replaced was the priest.

  I would see it all, hear it all. Violence and hatred, relief and misery, resentment and remorse, grief and joy, regrets. All of society, all origins, all religions on a few hectares of land.

  On a daily basis, there were two things to pay attention to: not locking visitors in—after a recent death, some mourners lost all notion of time—and watching out for theft—it wasn’t uncommon for occasional visitors to help themselves, from neighboring tombs, to fresh flowers and even funerary plaques. (“To my grandmother,” “To my uncle,” or “To my friend” could apply in most families.)

  I would see more elderly people than young. The young went far away for their studies, or work. The young didn’t visit tombs much anymore. And if they did come, it was a bad sign, it was to visit a friend.

  The next day would be November 1st, the biggest day of the year. As I would see, directions would have to be given to all those who weren’t used to visiting. Sasha showed me where all the different plans of the cemetery were kept, and the index cards of the names of people who had died in the previous six months, in a hut-turned-office outside the house, cemetery-side. He specified that the rest, those who had died before that, were filed away at the town hall.

  I reflected that Léonine was already filed away. So young and already filed away.

  Written on these index cards, for each tomb, was the name and date of death, and the location.

  On exhumation days, which remained rare, I would have to watch out that surrounding tombs didn’t get damaged. One of the three gravediggers was particularly clumsy.

  Certain visitors had special permission to drive into the cemetery.
I would soon recognize them, just from the sound of the engine, particularly since most of them were little old men who made the clutches of their Citroëns screech.

  Everything else I would pick up gradually. No day would be the same. I could turn it into a novel, or write the memoir of the living and the dead, one day, when I had finished reading, for the hundredth time, L’Oeuvre de Dieu, la part du Diable.

  Sasha wrote an initial list in a brand-new notebook, a school exercise book. He wrote down the names of the cats that lived in the cemetery, their characteristics, what they ate, their habits. He had cobbled together a kind of cat home, with sweaters and blankets, in the Spindles section, at the back, to the left. Where no one came to pay their respects anymore, ten square meters with no passersby, where, with the gravediggers’ help, he had put up a shelter. A dry, warm place for winter. He wrote down the details for the vets in Tournus, father and son, who made the journey there for vaccinations, sterilizations, and treatments, for only half the fee. Dogs could turn up there, to sleep on their owners’ tombs; I would have to look after them.

  On another page, he noted down the names of the gravediggers, their nicknames, their habits, their duties. And those of the Lucchini brothers, their addresses and their roles. And finally, the name of the person in charge of death certificates at the town hall. He concluded with these words, “For two hundred and fifty years, now, people have been buried here, and that’s not about to stop.”

  As for the rest of the exercise book, he took two days to fill it. With everything concerning the garden, the vegetables, the flowers, the fruit trees, the seasons, the planting.

  The following day, All Saints’ Day, a light layer of frost had appeared on the earth in the garden. Before the cemetery gates were opened, I helped Sasha pick the last summer vegetables in the dark. We were both on the frozen paths, flashlight in hand, wrapped in our coats, when Sasha brought up Geneviève Magnan. He asked me how I had felt on learning of her suicide.

  “I always thought that the children hadn’t set fire to the kitchen. That someone hadn’t stubbed out a cigarette properly, or something like that. I think Geneviève Magnan knew the truth and she couldn’t bear it.”

  “Would you want to know?”

  “After Léonine’s death, knowing is what kept me going. Today, what matters for her, for me, is making flowers grow.”

  We heard the first visitors parking outside the cemetery. Sasha went to open the gates to them. I accompanied him. Sasha said to me, “You’ll see, you’ll adapt to the opening and closing times. In fact, you’ll adapt to the grief of others. You won’t have the heart to make visitors who arrive early wait, and it will be the same in the evening. Sometimes, you won’t have the heart to ask them to leave.”

  I spent the day observing the visitors, arms laden with chrysanthemums, and wandering the avenues. I went to visit the cats, who rubbed up against me. I pet them. They did me good. The previous day, Sasha had explained to me that numerous visitors transferred their emotions onto the animals in the cemetery. They imagined that their deceased loved ones were channeled through them.

  At around 5 P.M., I went over to see Léonine, not her, but her name written on a tombstone. My blood froze when I caught sight of Father and Mother Toussaint, placing yellow chrysanthemums on her grave. I hadn’t seen them since the tragedy. When they came to collect their son twice a year, and parked outside the house, I didn’t look at them through the window. I just heard the sound of their car’s engine and Philippe shouting to me, “I’m off!” They had aged. He had become stooped. She still held herself rigidly upright, but she’d shrunk. Time had diminished them.

  They mustn’t see me, they would have immediately told Philippe Toussaint, who thought I was in Marseilles. I watched them, hidden like a thief. As if I had done something wrong.

  Sasha came up behind me, I jumped. He took me by the arm, without asking me any questions, and said to me, “Come, we’re going home.”

  In the evening, I told him about Father and Mother Toussaint at Léonine’s tomb. I told him about the mother’s nastiness. The disdain she directed at me as soon as she looked at me without seeing me. It was they who were the killers, they who had sent my daughter to that wretched château. They who had organized her death. I told Sasha that maybe coming to live in Brancion, working in this cemetery, wasn’t a good idea. Bumping into my in-laws twice a year, along the cemetery’s avenues, seeing them placing pots of flowers to assuage their guilt, was too much for me. Today, they had returned me to my grief. There wasn’t a minute, not a second of my life when I didn’t think of Léonine, but now it was different. I had transformed her absence: she was elsewhere, but closer and closer to me. And today, upon seeing the Toussaints, I had felt her moving away.

  Sasha replied that the day they knew that my husband and I lived here, they would avoid me and no longer come. That being here would be the best way never to see them again. To get rid of them forever.

  The following morning, I met with the mayor. I had barely set foot in his office before he told me that Philippe Toussaint and I would be employed starting in August of 1997 as cemetery keepers. That we would each receive the minimum wage, a house that went with the job, and that any water and electricity we used, as well as our household taxes, would be paid for by the council. Did I have any other questions?

  “No.”

  I saw Sasha smile.

  Before letting us go, the mayor served us vanilla-flavored tea, made with a teabag, and stale biscuits, which he dunked in his cup like a child. Sasha didn’t dare refuse, even though he loathes tea made with a teabag. “Porous plastic attached to vulgar string, the shame of our civilization, Violette, and they dare to call that ‘progress.’” Between biscuits, the mayor spoke to me while consulting his calendar:

  “Sasha must have warned you, you’re going to see all sorts. Around twenty years ago, we had rats in our cemetery, lots of rats. We called the pest controller, and he scattered powdered arsenic liberally between the tombs, but the rats continued to wreak havoc, and no one dared set foot in the cemetery. It was like something out of Camus’s La Peste. The pest controller increased the amount of poison, but still no success. The third time, he laid the same traps, but instead of leaving, he hid to try to understand, to see how the rats reacted. Well, you won’t believe me, but a little old lady turned up with a dustpan and brush, and she swept up all the powdered arsenic! She’d been selling it on the side for months! The following day, we made the newspaper headlines: ‘Arsenic trafficking at Brancion-en-Chalon cemetery’!”

  78.

  There are so many fine things you don’t know about, the faith that brings down mountains, the white spring in your soul, think of it as you fall asleep, love is stronger than death.

  Every tomb is a garbage can. It’s the leftovers that are buried here, the souls are elsewhere.”

  After murmuring these words, Countess de Darrieux downs her brandy in one go. Odette Marois (1941–2017) has just been buried, the wife of the countess’s great love. She is recovering from her emotions, sitting at my kitchen table.

  The countess attended the ceremony from a distance. Odette’s children know that she was their father’s mistress, their mother’s rival; they cold-shoulder her.

  From now on, the countess can place her sunflowers on her lover’s tomb, without me finding them later, petals torn off, at the bottom of a garbage can.

  “It’s as if I’ve lost an old friend . . . And yet we detested one another. But then, deep down, old friends always detest one another a little. And I’m jealous; she’s the one who’s joining my lover first. She really will have had first dibs all her life, the bitch.”

  “Are you still going to put flowers on their tomb?”

  “No. Not anymore, now that she’s under there with him. It would be too indelicate of me.”

  “How did you meet your great love?”

  “He worked for m
y husband. Looked after his stables. He was a handsome man . . . if you’d just seen his ass! His muscles, his body, his mouth, his eyes! They still send me aquiver today. We remained lovers for twenty-five years.”

  “Why didn’t you leave your respective husbands?”

  “Odette threatened him with suicide: ‘If you leave me, I’ll kill myself.’ And anyhow, Violette, between you and me, it suited me fine. What would I have done with a great love twenty-four hours a day? Because it’s hard work! I’ve never been able to do a thing with my hands, apart from read and play the piano, he would have soon got tired of me. Whereas that way, we frolicked when we felt like it, I was pampered, pomaded, perfumed, well put together. My fingers never stank of cooking or sour milk, and that, believe me, men really appreciate. You must admit, it was cushy. Trips around the world on my husband’s arm, palaces, swimming pools, and dips in the South Seas. I would return tanned, available, rested, I would meet up with my great love, and we would love each other even more passionately. I felt as if I were Lady Chatterley. Of course, I always led him to believe that the count, twenty years my senior, no longer touched me, that we slept in separate rooms. And he told me that Odette wasn’t remotely interested in sex. We lied to each other out of love, so as not to spoil us. Every time I listen to Brel’s ‘The Old Lovers’ Song,’ I shed a little tear . . . Speaking of teardrops, I wouldn’t mind a final little drop of your brandy, Violette. I sorely need it, today . . . Every time I came across Odette, she gave me a dirty look, I loved that . . . I smiled at her, on purpose. My husband and my lover died within a month of each other. Both from a heart attack. It was terrible. I lost everything, from one day to the next. Earth and water. Fire and ice. It’s as if God and Odette had combined forces to annihilate me. But anyway, I had some wonderful years, I never complain . . . Now, my final wish is to be cremated and have my ashes thrown into the sea.”