The Child

by Pascale Kramer

  He now claims that he left the committee because of us. His tone was laconic, rebellious. He clearly wanted to see Simone finally come out on his side against Claude about the whole thing. She did not move, just raised her eyebrows in disbelief. It was all so long ago. She and Claude had been together for less than a year. He had been approached to run a kind of club for the local youth. It would have taken time out of the rare weekends spent with Cédric, and he had refused. He had probably not gotten over the regret and, after all these years, still blamed them and was making them pay for his choice. I don’t believe he said that, she retorted calmly, relieved to resist the doubt. Cédric considered her reaction with a half smile that was both a sneer and an apology. Ask him. You’ll see. That was his only comment as he came to kiss her. His hand lingered on her waist, like the smug apology of an insincere suitor. I shouldn’t have told you, he said. It’s legitimate to hate other people when you discover you’re dying at fifty. Simone nodded, but her whole being recoiled. Cédric said good-bye, again unflappable and methodical. She watched him remove a leaf that was caught in the windshield, take off his jacket and fold it carefully on the passenger seat, then position himself at the wheel. His calm annoyed her; she felt an overwhelming urge to be alone.

  Cédric backed off the pavement and stopped to take a last look at Claude, who was still at the bottom of the garden, his left hand dangling inert, as though dragged down by a lopsidedness he could not help. His arm doesn’t seem to hurt him any more, he observed, imitating the way they had seen him shake out the pain all the time. Simone pursed her lips. Now it was the other arm that was burning on the inside; the sum of his torments was unchanged. Cédric nodded absently. His attention had wandered to the study window, which he indicated to Simone with raised eyebrows.

  Gaël was perched on the windowsill and dropped heavily into a dark hole concealed by the bushes. He crouched down in a huddled ball for a few seconds as though on the alert, then sprang up and ran over to Claude, swinging his arms with childish, embarrassed enthusiasm. Maybe it was a spontaneous outburst, or perhaps it was suggested by Jovana, but when he reached Claude, he took his hand and leaned his head against his stomach.

  Cédric wiped his sunglasses in the draft from the air conditioning. Looking through his sparse, fine hair, Simone could see beads of sweat glistening on the slight bald patch. There was no point trying to get him to say something; his frustrations always found consolation unaided. Simone bent down to the window to ask him to kiss Yolande and the little girl for her. He nodded Okay, smiled, and put up the window. Since the cancer was diagnosed, Simone thought wonderingly, he has always managed to summon up the requisite sympathy, even if it means he never gives vent to his feelings. She wondered why she found it so hard at least to acknowledge his untiring attachment.

  Gaël had found things to do for the rest of the day. In the evening, after dinner, he wanted to play checkers with Claude. Simone was amazed to see him so focused. But it was mostly the pale skin of Claude’s forearm freckled with brown marks that was intriguing him. The treatment was destroying his veins, she explained to him later. But Gaël knew that already. He had insisted Simone come and say good night to him, and he lay listening to her on his back with the sheet pulled up under his chin, looking a bit clownish. His eyes would not stay still under his bare forehead, where there was a little scratch that formed a row of dark beads of blood. He was prickling all over with impatience and curiosity, endlessly savoring questions, not all of which he asked. On the bedside table, a T-shirt, an electronic game, and the lone earplug lay in a heap. His sneakers were thrown down in a corner and gave off that sweetish, slightly spicy, slightly moldy smell that had surprised Simone when she was straightening his room. She sat down on the edge of the bed, and she could feel his legs moving through the sheet. His boisterous affection in this little man’s inner sanctum intimidated her more than his silences and black moods. She wanted so badly to hug him to her that it hurt, and he must have sensed that perfectly well, because a provocative glint crept into his eyes. Can I tickle you? he asked with a big laugh, revealing gums sticky with chocolate. Are you eating on the sly? Her annoyance made him laugh. He sat up to seize her around the neck and draw her down to him. He wasn’t tired and never went to bed this early, he claimed, simpering to stop her from leaving right away, or at least turning the light off.

  In their absence, Claude had pulled the blinds down and switched on the news. The sound was turned down and the images, taken with a mobile phone, were almost indecipherable. Flames exploded and gesticulated in a crazy whirling hurricane, scattering powerfully agile, tiny hooded figures. Then the scene began to shudder to the rhythm of a breathless chase through the darkness of a deserted street. It had happened an hour earlier downtown, Claude commented without taking his eyes off the set. A young man had been killed during the night and now two police officers had been hurt. The flames were succeeded by a woman’s face that seemed to have been pinned to the concrete wall of an apartment building by the midday sun.

  Simone did not immediately recognize the place or, for that matter, the woman, who was one of the patients at the dentists’ office. Her usually vindictive features were harried by a kind of nightmarish lassitude. She kept saying that it was a crime, not an accident, but oddly without anger, or else paralyzed by a presentiment of outbursts to come. Beside her, her eldest daughter pressed a handkerchief to eyes blackened by eyeliner. Her sobs gave her bright red lips an air of deep disgust. But it was she who foretold and condemned the current devastation, while the mother disappeared from the picture. Simone sat down gently on the edge of the sofa and thought, with a kind of dizzy feeling, that she had no way of sympathizing with these women whose son and brother had just been killed.

  They’re from around here, she said suddenly, as though asking for Claude’s help. He gave a shrug of irritation and took a while to reply that he knew who they were. His agony was much more tangible and realistic: he had already paid for so much distress and revolt, and the outcome finally, two years earlier, had been an even harder abdication. His arms lay side by side on his thighs, one a bit numb from edema, the other wasted by chemotherapy. He had the horrified air of someone who found himself tied up. Simone had never felt such lack of sympathy for his feelings of guilt. She studied his profile in the flickering images and asked if it was really because of them that he had left the committee. His hollow cheek tensed briefly, as though grinding on bone and muscle. All I said was, you weren’t interested in the problems of the neighborhood and my mistake was not to persevere. Simone thought he was going to add something, but he grabbed the remote control and turned up the volume. She hated the sickness for giving him the right to discredit in a sentence years of understanding that had been genuine and mutual.

  The flames had engulfed the screen again. The picture was clearer. Jets of foam capered across it, and gradually, the gutted carcass of an upturned car straddling the street appeared underneath. The red smoke in the background made everything look strangely thick, as though the night had caught fire. Claude leaned forward to put down the remote control, when suddenly his head jerked up above the sofa. Simone just had time to make out Gaël’s silhouette disappearing down the dark hallway. She glanced at Claude, as though he was now to be feared, then froze. His eyes were red; he was crying.

  Why aren’t you in bed? The question thundered out, but it did bring Gaël back to the doorway. He eyed Claude, half scared, half amused. He must see Claude’s roughness and emotion as a kind of joke. I was thirsty, he said, oddly intrepid. Claude tried to get up, but his weakened leg gave way and he stumbled. You don’t just help yourself without asking, he said in a voice that shook from the surprise of narrowly avoiding a fall. Gaël discreetly swallowed what he had had in his mouth. He had put on the green bathrobe over the T-shirt he had been wearing that day and the jogging pants he had on at dinner. Simone realized that he had been fully dressed under the sheets when she had gone up.

  Claude had settled b
ack in an awkward position, one knee folded under him and his arm flung over the back of the sofa. A tear he seemed not to know was there trickled down his chin; he caught it on the back of his hand with a startled look that must have shocked Gaël, who apologized and blushed but was nevertheless bold enough to approach the sofa, seeing that Claude’s anger had been undermined. Since he’d come into the room, his eyes had missed nothing of what was happening on the screen. He asked if it was the district around here. His fascination was intense and transparent, and Simone suddenly saw what Claude was just realizing: that it was too late to teach him to hate violence.

  THEY HAD STAYED UP late with the windows and shutters open, listening for the distant echo of sirens, standing silently side by side under a deep blue night sky, ruffled now and then by a flurry of pigeons. When Simone woke up, the street was intact and peaceful. A warm breeze was blowing heavy shadows of clouds across the foot of the bed. From the radio on the floor came the muffled announcement that the disturbances had died down shortly after midnight and that there was a risk of showers during the day. Claude had gone back to bed fully dressed and was lying on top of the sheets, his wasted, carefully soaped body furtively restless. Simone kept hearing him rustling in his pocket; it took her an age to find the strength to turn over to him.

  He had plumped up the pillow under his head and was staring at her wide-eyed, as though hoping she would exonerate him for the self-reproaches he had been muttering for days. Simone laid her hands on his face to muzzle her own fears. She had the taste of dirt in her mouth and, above all, so little heart for sympathy—couldn’t he see how badly she needed consolation herself?

  Did you manage to get some sleep? she asked him, laying her hand on his shoulder. Even that simple contact caused him a brief shudder, for which he apologized, withdrawing his arm like a lump of dead wood. I spent the whole night worrying that Gaël would go out into it, he said angrily. Simone rolled onto her back and made no reply. There was nothing to say that would not have led to conflict. The next chemotherapy session this morning would make him even more uncomfortable than the previous ones. He had rubbed Nivea over his scalp and put on a salmon pink shirt to go there. Simone watched him sit down on the edge of the bed and put his slippers on with his clumsy hand. She envied him for not doubting his duties or his mistakes.

  Claude was just about to leave when her brother called, clearly more curious than concerned about the previous day’s riots. Simone told him that they had not seen anything, just heard sirens in the evening. Claude’s preoccupied manner as he dawdled endlessly in the hallway prevented her from talking freely. He made her feel unfairly guilty for being unforgiving. Her brother’s firm, pragmatic tone justified her sense of revolt. He was untroubled by tolerance or complexes when he said that there was no excuse for making a whole district pay for a death that had probably been an accident. And that was what Simone felt she had a right to hear after the fears they had suffered.

  Why don’t you come over for a change of scene for a few days when the child has gone, he said in an undertone, as though Claude might have heard. Simone cradled the receiver closer to her cheek and replied that she couldn’t. The suggestion brought her not the slightest prospect of relief. With Claude, she had lost the habit and the need to confide in other people, including most of her friends, from whom she had grown apart since coming to live here. It was pointless while he was alive to think of taking a break from the torment that would have to be endured, day after day, out of loyalty to each other.

  As she hung up in the kitchen, she saw a moped leaning against the open gate in the tall grass on the other side of the street. The owners were away and had sent someone to check that there had not been any damage during the night. The blinds of the French door to the garden were raised halfway; a young guy in a polo shirt and cream Bermuda shorts was scouring the environs from the upstairs balcony. Simone guessed from his air of annoyance that there was nothing to see, nothing to deplore. Witnessing other people’s fears comforted her. It is so much more arrogant to think that you don’t have to defend yourself, she thought, feeling a sudden urge to cry as she watched Claude leave the house.

  Gaël must have been watching him go from his room, because almost immediately he appeared in the kitchen. He had not showered and was already dressed, and he wanted to know what she was looking at and who had called earlier on. His hair stood up in spikes and he flattened it down, first with one hand, then the other, trying to see the moped and the guy on the balcony. Simone could tell he was tempted to ask how long Claude would be gone. He was already playing subtle games with the liberties he could take in his father’s absence and was watching her with his head tilted and one eye half-closed, waiting for her to guess and bend the rules about not watching daytime TV. But she pretended not to understand and, contrary to all expectation, he did not insist.

  He wasn’t hungry, but he let her press him to have a yogurt shake, which he drank while leaning one hip against the desk and whining that he was bored. The sky was clouding over, and the light cast yellow halos over the downy translucency of his skin. Simone found his whining and loafing, in the context of this day, particularly trying. The day before, he had helped Claude pick up the plums that had been driven into the lawn like nails. Simone suggested he give it another try, explaining that, in any case, it would take her only an hour or two to do the dentists’ accounts. Gaël noisily emptied his puffed-out cheeks in disgust. His sour breath brought her upright with a jerk. He was clearly sick from eating too much chocolate in the night.

  He turned to the trophies, his legs wrapped around one another and his belly protruding. His round hips raised two plump handfuls of flesh under his T-shirt. Simone took his hand to draw him toward her. You’re not diabetic, are you? she asked, trying to make a joke of it and find out whether his mother had thought about taking him to see a doctor. He made a funny face at the word (or the liberty). Then, slowly, his face began to smolder. My mother doesn’t care about you, he said, holding her gaze. His intention was unclear but so savage that almost immediately he had to run off.

  Simone dared not move or breathe. She guessed that he, too, was on the alert in the living room. The wind had come up making it impossible to listen to his silence. Outside, the rotary washing line had begun to spin around in a great eddy of leaves, and she suddenly thought she saw a figure from the street running away. She stood up in a mad panic that felt like an explosion and called out, then opened the net curtains. Gaël made no reply: he had gone out into the garden. She saw him skulking around with his hands in his pockets, dislodging a plum with the toe of his sneaker and kicking it toward the basket. His heightened color had settled into big red blotches down his neck, like the marks from a garroting. Simone put her head out of the window but was again startled by a shadow: A long skein of crows sailed overhead and seemed to shatter among the branches. She sat down at her desk, chilly and trembling. Gradually, her terror dissolved into physical numbness and only the panicky thoughts it had brought on were left. She could not get yesterday’s images out of her mind; they made her feel guilty, uneasy. She saw again the mother’s horror and the daughter’s disgust, and she went over and over their tragedy but could not get beyond a feeling of hostility. I’m not good, she thought, with a lucidity that was an almost comforting reaction to Claude’s disenchantment and his accusations. But who is? And who in the area ever cared what happened to us?

  When Simone next looked up from her computer, the first sparse drops of rain were casting long streaks against the windowpane.

  Gaël was pinned to the fence, talking to Malika or her mother—Simone did not know which, as the forsythia screened them off. His familiarity filled her with a vague sense of insecurity. Nora, the mother, had remarried in the spring that Aude was born. Within just a few weeks, the new husband had had a willow cut down, although the tree’s cascading branches had sheltered both their patios behind its swaying skirts. Suddenly exposed, they felt both spied on and nosy. No explanation had
been given, none had been demanded, and Simone had just settled for not putting the table outside anymore. Since then, the hedges had thickened up and they had stopped noticing one another, but they had lost the habit of eating lunch in the garden. Simone had continued to exchange a few words over the fence with Nora, and occasionally she still dropped the little girl off at school. Then one day, just before Claude got sick, she had found the husband’s son slumped in one of the deck chairs at the bottom of the garden, and there he had stayed till evening, an unmoving and worrying presence. Claude was out. Simone had gotten scared and called the father to come over and fetch him, creating a tension that still rankled.

  Gaël was still chatting through the fence, bouncing his shoulder against it, ricocheting farther and farther back each time. Simone was inexplicably perturbed by his disobedience and inquisitiveness. She had the feeling he was going to come back and tell her things she didn’t want to hear. But rain was starting to fall, straight down like a curtain, and Gaël was slowly coming through it with his arms outstretched, suddenly breaking into a run to get inside. Simone went back to her work, her body tingling with nerves exacerbated by lack of sleep and too much emotion. Several seconds crawled by before she heard the furtive scrape of a drawer in the kitchen, and he soon called out to know when they were going shopping. Simone turned around. He was watching her from the hall. His bangs clung to his forehead and were dripping water onto his smooth, untroubled face. He had lost a tooth, he blurted out, and came in to lay a rotten molar with a hole in it on the desk. His mouth was wide open and swimming in dark blood.

  The mall was less than a quarter of an hour’s walk away via the alleys of the old town, then along the side of the garden center. Gaël grumbled at the thought of having to walk, and Simone was easily persuaded to take the car, suddenly anxious at having promised to go out on a day like this. A thick ceiling of clouds scudded over the semideserted parking lot with its flutter of red bunting. Only a few shops along the walkway still had their grilles down. A man in a fluorescent jacket was piling up empty, rain-soaked crates beside some containers, and a guy in a tracksuit watched them park, stubbing out his cigarette on a tree trunk. Simone had not heard a squeak out of Gaël since they’d left. She could see his frowning face scanning the place intently. It was the burned-out cars that he had wanted to see, but she had refused, and anyway, she didn’t really know where they would be.