The Child

by Pascale Kramer

  Gaël was starting to be distracted out of his frustration. The metal shopping cart shuddered along to his humming. He marched down the aisles ahead of Simone, swinging his body and his arms, constantly coming back to suggest buying things that he ended up putting back more or less graciously. His face was twisted by the contortions of his tongue feeling around the hole where the tooth had been. He was still abnormally pale and his breath a bit warm and sour. The spiky tufts of the morning had reappeared in his hair, which he had combed down after the rain. Simone did not altogether recognize him and she found the idea oddly unnerving. A voice over the loudspeakers announced for the second time that the store would be closing early today, at six o’clock, and it was only then that she realized she was scared. Go choose what you want for lunch and we’ll go home, she said, trying to catch sight of daylight.

  Gaël beat her to the checkout, where she found him with a pack of ground beef clamped between his knees, playing with the bags of jelly beans that were hanging at one of the displays. He looked around for her with a smile on his face, exuding malicious defiance and arrogance, as though itching for her to see him shove one of the bags in his pocket. Intrigued, the checkout clerk raised herself slightly from her seat. There was a pirouette of exchanged glances, which he withstood for a few seconds with disagreeable temerity.

  Simone caught up to him on the walkway in a whirl of drops as fat as beads. His cheeks were again mottled with bright red blotches, she noticed as she drew level with him. You didn’t steal it? she asked as sharply as she could. Gaël seemed about to play the innocent, but sensing that she was really angry, he said it hardly cost anything anyway. His reasoning unsettled Simone’s sternness momentarily. The memory of his brief angry outburst that morning lingered unpleasantly in her mind, creating a funny mix with the fears of the night and her present irritation. There was nothing left of her certainty about her affection and indulgence toward him. She was seized with sudden panic as she realized that she might no longer be able to put up with him and that she did not know what she had done with Jovana’s number.

  She plucked up courage to ask, Would your mother have let you steal them? It was a masochistic attempt to force him to betray his aggression again. But the question just baffled him. He thought it funny to make such a fuss about that. That, what do you mean by that? she asked, trying to get him to explain. The fat drops were buffeting them irritatingly. Gaël made a face and walked on. Simone’s earnestness was becoming a drag. He quickened his pace, then broke into a run till he reached the car, slamming into it flat on his belly with an affected groan, which she ignored.

  The lowering sky had turned yellow with a weird stir of patches of sunlight and circling seagulls. Simone hurriedly put the bags in the trunk, busying herself as a way of off-loading her agitation. Gaël squatted silently beside a wheel, pressing his fists determinedly into his cheeks. Simone called to him but did not wait to go and put back the shopping cart. When she came back, she found him standing by the car with an odd look about him.

  A dozen yards behind him, two young guys were loping toward them between the cars, taking oddly synchronized steps. Simone unlocked the doors and Gaël shuffled onto the backseat without taking his eyes off her, as though anxious that she hadn’t noticed anything. He slammed the door and froze into a huddled, awkward pose. A volley of hailstones clattered against the windshield as Simone struggled to put on her seat belt. She started the engine, failed to get the windshield wipers to move, and looked for Gaël in the rearview mirror. He ducked his head as he sensed the two shadows reach the windshield, cowering as their clothes brushed insistently along the side of car. Only after the figures had reappeared in the next row of cars did he suddenly seem bizarrely excited.

  Delicate strings of hailstones like white icing tumbled down the grooves in the hood. On all sides, the cars blazed in the sunshine, then instantly faded again. Simone turned the wheel numbly. Blood pounded deafeningly in her ears. The two guys looked around, as though amazed she was taking so long to move. Their eyes in their impassive faces were fearless, though they could not have been more than fifteen; their bodies were slim and wiry, already experienced. Simone felt they were looking at her as a woman, a woman judged old and despised. She hated them as much as she hated herself for being in such a panic. Her chest rose with an asthmatic wheeze. The car was only half out of the parking place, but all her actions were so out of control that she had to stop. In the mirror, Gaël’s expression clouded. What are you doing? Why don’t you go? he muttered in embarrassment, stretching out against the seat back. Simone snorted a kind of little laugh when she realized that he was ashamed to be with her.

  No more words passed between them throughout the return journey. Simone drove over a carpet of hailstones into a flaming burst of sunshine. Gaël hunkered down, tongue-tied, aware that disobedience had gone from his side to hers. As soon as they were home, he darted up to his room.

  Simone was putting the last of the food in the fridge when he came back down. He had put on a dry T-shirt. His mood seemed to vacillate between gloom and chicanery. He went and parked himself by the sink, craning his neck toward the window and asking when Claude was coming home and whether his mother had left a message. Simone replied in a tone of easygoing weariness that she had no idea. Drizzle was scattering the leaves, and a pleasant smell of warm steam filled the downstairs rooms. She longed for peace and silence.

  Gaël had taken off his sneakers, and his socks left damp little footprints on the tiles. Simone noticed a broad scar on his shinbone. She asked him if he had broken his leg, but she got nothing but a sulky shrug in reply. He leaned against the cupboard, its knob tucked between his shoulder blades. I know why Claude was crying yesterday, he said suddenly, looking down at his toes, which were waggling in his socks. Simone said, Oh yes, why was that? But she really wasn’t paying attention, distracted as she was by nagging fear and rage.

  Aren’t you going to tell me why? she insisted as it dawned on her what she had heard, puzzled that he had fallen quiet. She came over to him and crouched down, trying to smile up into his face, but he stubbornly refused to look at her. Her teasing brought a giggle from him and a childish arm movement that made him turn right around. Pressing his forehead against the cupboard, he fought her off with his elbow, then began to stammer in a rather silly voice that Claude was crying because it reminded him of when he had let the girl’s face get slashed.

  Simone felt a strange rushing noise sweep through her and numb her senses. So that was how things had been talked about in the neighborhood, she thought, almost glad that people were justifying her lack of sympathy. Even back then, that had been Claude’s mistake: to think you could reason with people holding deep-rooted and obtuse grudges. Training sessions at the club had been poisoned for weeks by rivalry between several teenagers on the handball team. Claude had ended up shutting two of the girls in the locker room and had given them an hour to get their hearts and brains in gear and settle the thing like adults.

  The girl was turned to the wall when he had opened the door; her face was buried in her T-shirt, which was dripping blood onto the floor. Simone had been called an hour later to the emergency room, where Claude was waiting, his neck and shoulders encased in plaster. I didn’t know blood stank, he managed to say despite his anesthetized jaw, grabbing hold of her arm like a rope. He couldn’t remember anything else, neither having seen that the girl’s cheek had been all but sliced off and that she was holding it in place with her T-shirt, nor having been shoved out of the doorway by the second girl as she fled. At the trial, he was still in the neck brace, so he had to stand rigidly (arrogantly was what they said) under the merciless stare of the two families. Simone was left with a humiliated sense of his testy insistence in denying all accusations of having acted out of turn. His view was that his responsibility—everyone’s responsibility—was not to protect violent behavior by showing the perpetrators leniency, but to force them to get a grip on themselves. He was sincere, indignant and
unsmiling, obstinately resistant to the lure of hatred that the tragedy exposed him to. Yet his face was wedged in a roll of yellow foam, his cheeks squeezed almost comically. Simone had blamed herself for having thought he was a coward and then having found it difficult to love him, and for feeling nothing but rejection for the animosity he aroused.

  Claude had never gotten over not having been vindicated. He said he had been betrayed, and he had grown bitter, had refused to discuss any of it again, and had lost interest in the community without agreeing to leave. Then he had wallowed in predictions about future guerillas but had refused to accept any responsibility or to excuse them. The pain in his back had appeared a few months later. He had put up with it for nearly a year before complaining. With hindsight, Simone had sided with Cédric in imagining that he had deliberately waited too long before seeing a doctor.

  Simone must have looked funny, because Gaël tried to slither out of view. She caught his arm, conscious that she was pressing into the tickly hollow under his arm. You can tell Malika or her mother—I don’t know whom you were talking to—that Claude just trusted that the two girls would be able to sort out their disagreement. Gaël nodded. His intimidated smile seemed to be trying to foil her sudden oddness. A wasp buzzing insistently around the window caught his attention. He gingerly wriggled free, ran over to the window, and nervously punched it closed, then stayed on tiptoe, intrigued by what was going on outside.

  The ambulance had pulled up in front of the house. Claude slowly unfolded himself into the rain that was now falling gray and steady, his face looking small and crumpled in his outsize head. Gaël sank back on his heels and asked if he could go up to his room. He disappeared, sliding over the floor in his socks, then stopped dead in the doorway. It was Mom who told me about the girl, but ages ago, and maybe I didn’t remember it right, he said with his back turned, before escaping up the stairs.

  It took Simone a moment to register the significance: Claude had already gotten back in touch with Jovana during that period. The information stood out, jarring with the memory of their imprisonment back then and his rigid face trapped in the vise-like neck brace. Simone had gotten through those horrible weeks without showing any sign of how shaken she felt by the disaster. They had, in fact, treated each other with considerable care, forcing themselves to make love, sometimes with painful moments of real pleasure. But it was the memory of Jovana that had been uppermost, so much so that Claude had agreed to betray and pretend. Simone felt sorry for their relationship, a relationship of old people, she thought, tasting the bitter dregs of her pain. How far had Claude managed, at least at first, to believe that they would be able to comfort each other? She felt that she had badly screwed up both her chances and their relationship.

  Claude gently closed the front door and gave the little cough that always announced his presence. When Simone did not see him appear, she went to the door to look into the hallway. His face took on a pained look as he caught sight of her. His salmon shirt clung to his bones; the dark circles of his nipples formed a kind of second expression of astonishment through the transparency of the wet fabric. He had gotten caught in the rain or had tried to relieve the nausea that still dazed his features. His clothes gave off a whiff of diarrhea, Simone realized, hearing the excruciating despair in his voice as he said that he would not be having any lunch. She stood smiling at him, incredulous and moved that it took so much humiliation to get the point of forgiveness. At least we’ll have had these shared moments of self-deprecation, she thought. She told him that he could go upstairs, that the child was in his room. Claude waved his hand as though to make sure she kept out of his wake. The town is swarming with armed police, he said, sighing, as though that was what he had to atone for with his sufferings.

  Simone had backed away to the sink, from where she could see the street through the fine threads of water dripping off the roof. The house opposite was shut up again and the rain had completely flattened the grass already bent from the gate passing over it. Claude had gone upstairs. Simone heard him slam the bathroom door, open the roof window, then turn on the shower, and soon after, she heard him start to cough up the bile he would be vomiting all night. This now-familiar collapse left her powerless and somehow vacant and slowed down. She went out into the hallway, where the warmth of recent days had gathered, and moved to the foot of the stairs, sliding her shoulder along the wall. Gaël was up there, with his arms dangling over the banister, his resting head a mass of tousled spikes. He straightened up when he saw her and gave her a sucked-in smile that seemed to beg her permission to come downstairs.

  His clammy palm stuck to the glossy finish on the handrail. He stopped from stair to stair to listen to the sobbing with which Claude exhausted his nausea. Mom told me that would happen, he said straight out, as though telling Simone she need not feel guilty. His capacity for compassion, both contrite and mature, was wonderful. Simone put her hand around his neck and gave him a gentle shake, trying not to give way to tears. Shall we see what’s on television, she asked, letting him go. The suggestion threw him into an extraordinarily turbulent indecision. Simone smiled, blew her nose, and said, Today, everyone can do as they like.

  Gaël had run to jump onto the sofa, where he squeezed himself sideways in among the cushions. Simone came and sat down next to him for a moment. His feet in their socks were a bit repugnant; he slid them under her thighs and wriggled them about. He took a kind of affectionate aggression in needling her, and for the first time, Simone realized the nostalgia they would have to put up with when he was gone. She stood up so as not to grow weepy and went to shut the door to the garden. It was cool and bleak; no ray of summer pierced the now-persistent rain. Simone closed the French window. The damp was keeping them indoors. Gaël gathered up a throw and buried himself in it, as though trying to stay out of the way.

  Simone went upstairs to ask after Claude, whose steps had creaked overhead several times already. She found him lowering the rolling blinds in their bedroom. He turned to her with hollow eyes, startled at the sight of her. He was completely incapable of all pretense. Simone hoped he would at least be loving enough to smile or apologize, but nothing. I’ll leave you, then, she said, closing the door. She felt so despondent that she toyed for a few seconds with the brief hope that she might manage to tell him that she couldn’t bear it anymore and was leaving.

  She had lunch alone with Gaël in front of the television, and she left him there when she went back to work in her study. The leaves nodded gently in the rain, numbing her thoughts whenever she lifted her head from the computer. She wanted some chocolate, wanted to make herself feel sick. Every now and then, Gaël’s revelations returned to the pit of her stomach with a shock that caught her breath unpleasantly, although the sensation didn’t last. From the living room came the monotonous echo of lisping voices and springy sounds. Claude had not made a sound for several hours by the time Cédric called.

  He had come home from the office early and wanted to know how Claude was coping with the new chemo. Simone told him about his repeated vomiting and the comatose silence that had followed, but she said nothing about the smell of diarrhea. Talking about it helped and reassured her about what she could still lucidly put up with. Cédric said he would try to stop over on the weekend. He made no comment about the riots, as though he thought they were both a bit to blame. Simone was glad she did not have to hear him flare up so unsympathetically, reminding her uncomfortably of her own feelings. Claude had always been a watchdog against prejudices she had held when she came to live here, and she had grown bitter burying and concealing them, she realized now, studying the reflection of the strained lines down her face.

  Her sandal had slipped off under the desk. As she pushed back her chair to feel for it with her foot, she saw that Gaël was standing there, listening to her, peeping around the half-open door. He looked tired, dazed by images. His face was damp and burning from the warmth of the throw. Mom still hasn’t called, he whined when Simone had hung up with Cédric
. He was idly fanning himself with the door; then he asked if he could maybe make a call. Simone had not managed to find the number, but he knew what it was. He pressed the buttons down with great concentration and took a deep breath as he listened to the rings (like an agitated lover, Simone thought to herself) and came up with Jovana’s voice mail. He left a short, courageous message. His dejection hung in the room. Claude still did not move upstairs. Outside, rain fell relentlessly on the distant summer-evening scene: a long, brilliant white line, with the trees silhouetted in the foreground. It’s going to be a nice day again tomorrow, Simone said, to console him as much as herself. I’ll get some work done and we’ll find something fun to do.

  It would soon be time for dinner and bed. Gaël whined ill-humoredly at the idea of having to take a bath. Simone could not face anything anymore, least of all getting him to obey. She told him she just wanted silence. Gaël nodded his head gravely and edged backward through the half-open door. The tinted glow from the computer screen in the darkening room flickered on his disappearing profile. Simone blew him a kiss and tried not to give way to too much emotion or scruples. He had almost shut the door completely, when, through the thin glimmer, Simone heard him ask whether he could go home soon.

  SIMONE HAD NOT shut the door to the garden. The first brittle light of day after the storm dragged her from sleep. The grass still needed mowing and was a bright, spongy green, with a splash of color from a plastic bag that had blown in from the street. Simone turned back the throw and piled up the cushions under her head. Having slept and awakened without concern over Claude’s suffering brought her a strange sense of anxious respite. They had never spent an impulsive night here with all the windows open to the garden. How far would Claude have let himself be happy in another life? Simone could not even picture him letting go. She felt almost more embarrassed than hurt at the thought of how troubled he must have been to discover pleasure with twenty-year-old Jovana. The bold, seductive generosity of that woman made her feel she had no excuse for regrets she could never make up for. I was so miserly with my love, she told herself, remembering that Gaël had asked to leave.