Three chicks had been born in a nest in the hollow at Écalgrain. A place where the rocks were almost red. I spent an infinite amount of time looking at them. The ferocious appetite they had, barely hatched.
I did not feel like drawing them.
I did not go past Théo’s place.
“The sea is making a strange sound today …”
Lambert had come up to me, silently. He always came up that way. Without me hearing him. The sleeve of his jacket against my arm. I touched it briefly.
He spoke very quietly. Sometimes that’s just the way it was, here, it was impossible to do things any differently.
I told him that Morgane had left. He knew. She had come to say goodbye. They had talked.
The tide was rising. It was darker to the west of the lighthouse. It is in that stretch of sea that the female sharks give birth, a dark stretch beyond the bar of foam, they keep their young with them and then one day they abandon them.
I showed him what I had in my pockets, an abalone shell that Max had given me.
“The abalone are dying, it’s the pollution, all the stuff that man has put in the soil to grow maize.”
I told him that the shellfish were dying, too, the seaweed.
He breathed in the smell inside the shell.
“It doesn’t smell.”
I shrugged. He looked at the sea. Did he talk to Morgane about her brother? The boats were coming in. It had been a good day, their pots were full.
We went to walk along the edge of the quay and watched them unloading the crates.
“They say here that God made the lobster and the Devil made the crab …” I said, pointing to a basket of shellfish that a fisherman was taking to deliver to the auberge.
“Is that why you have dinner with them in the evening?”
“At the lobsters’ table, with plastic flowers and a pyrex flower vase.”
He lit a cigarette, and cocked his head slightly to one side.
“The vase isn’t made of pyrex, it’s crystal,” he said, blowing smoke.
He handed me his cigarette.
We were having trouble speaking. We were sharing all the news, somewhat out of order. We left the quay and went to the hamlet of La Roche. Nan’s Refuge. As we went by, he stopped. He looked at the façade, the closed shutters.
What did he know?
He said nothing.
We went as far as the houses at La Valette and then we headed back in the other direction from La Valette to La Roche, along the walls. We did not meet anyone. Strange plants were growing in a garden. Lambert said that perhaps they were butterfly plants, because of the many butterflies fluttering about. He talked to me about Le Morvan. He said, “I’ll have to tell you about it.”
We walked back and forth along the path several times. Until the beam of the lighthouse came on. Every time we walked by the Refuge, he turned his head and looked. The last time, it was almost dark. He pushed open the gate.
“Shall we?”
That is what he said.
He walked across the courtyard.
I followed.
He tried all the windows and eventually found the one that opened.
He climbed over the sill.
“Why are you doing this?” I said.
He did not answer. He jumped inside. He waited for me on the other side. He had a torch in his pocket. It had a powerful beam, it lit up the first room. He walked round it the way I had, taking his time. I wondered what would happen if anyone found us there.
It was cold. We went through the building, along its entire length as far as the stairway, the beam from the torch lit up the steps, the corpses of flies. On the first floor, the long corridor, the beds. He was looking. He noticed things that I had not seen, an old painting, a pair of shoes. Had he any idea that his brother had spent years of his life walking up and down this corridor, at night, barefoot, because he could not sleep anywhere else … ?
We went into the dormitory. I went over to the window and looked down at the courtyard. I had seen Nan down there, on the bench, she was eating a croissant.
Today, it was dark, you could not see anything and Nan was dead.
I turned my head.
The little bear was on the bed, just where I had left it. I could tell from its darker shape. The beam of light passed over it, Lambert didn’t see it. He went into an adjacent room. I hesitated, I picked up the bear, and I joined him in the corridor. I did not need to say anything.
He just turned it over to read the label and he nodded.
He handed it to me so I would put it back on the bed. He seemed lost in thought.
“That doesn’t mean a thing … And in any case, it’s not enough to stand as proof,” he said.
We looked at each other.
What I had understood, he had understood.
“It’s not enough,” I said.
We went back out and sat down, outside, on the steps. He lit a cigarette and smoked half of it without saying a word.
He was looking at the ground between his feet, a stubborn frown on his forehead.
“I spoke with Nan the day before she died. I was on the beach, she came over to me. In everything she said, there were things … Since then, I can’t stop thinking about it …”
“What things?”
“A chain she was supposed to give back to me … A chain with a tag. She said it belonged to me. She talked to me as if she knew me.”
“She was like that with everybody.”
“No. Not like that … She asked me why I had left, and where I had been all this time. I told her about Paris, and Le Morvan, and she got annoyed because it didn’t match her story.”
He let out a long puff of smoke.
“Had you already been inside there?” he said, pointing to the window behind us that was still open.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
I did not answer.
He did not insist.
He went on smoking.
“I too had my suspicions, so I did what I used to do when I was working, I questioned her.”
His expression grew tense. His eyes squinting, almost closed, as if he were concentrating on one thing, an idea that he might lose at the slightest disturbance.
“In the end she told me about a kid they had brought to her, so sick he was almost dead, and I could see in her eyes when the two stories got mixed up. She didn’t know any more. She was waving her hands, disoriented, and then suddenly she stopped walking, and stared at a spot on the beach in the rocks. She said, ‘That is where you were.’ After that, she left.”
He lit another cigarette. In the night, the red glow made a point of light that must be visible from the path.
“It wasn’t me who was down there.”
For a moment he stared at the cigarette burning between his fingers. Long seconds ticking by in which he said nothing.
And then slowly.
“I believe that my brother is alive.”
He looked at me, disturbed that he had to say it, had to utter it aloud.
“I think he survived the shipwreck … I think Nan took him in.”
He got up.
“Don’t ask me why or how, but I think, too, that she gave him someone else’s identity.”
He threw a piece of gravel far ahead of him. The gravel struck a shutter.
“Fucking intuition!”
That’s what he shouted.
“I don’t know how it all happened, but I’m going to find out.”
He went back over to the window.
“We’re going back inside.”
He lit his torch again.
“We can’t not find something …”
At the end of the second room, between the common rooms and Nan’s house, there was a thick door, it was used to communicate between the two buildings. We tried to open it, but it was locked. Lambert looked all around him, until he found a piece of wire, and began to pick the lock. It made a strange scratching noise in the house of a dead w
oman.
“You can’t do that …” I said.
“Why shouldn’t I?”
He started over several times. Finally he had only to push the door open.
In the kitchen, everything was just as on the day when I had gone there, just after Nan’s death. The cups, the coffee in the coffee pot, the newspapers.
Lambert looked round quickly, just like that, not touching anything. In the other room there was the bed, and the pillow, still hollowed out. Another room, behind, smaller, that I had not seen the first time. He looked at it all and then he started searching through everything. I do not know what he was looking for. Nor did he. He said, “There must be a trace, something! There’s always something.”
He opened the cupboards. He was careful not to disturb anything. He disturbed all the same. His hunt was meticulous. I shone the torch on to his hands, inside the drawers. He came upon a ledger in which Nan had written down the names of the children as they arrived. Departures in another column. He sat down at the table. It was an old notebook. He turned the pages. 1967. There was a departure on September 13, another on November 6. One entry, October 12, a boy, two years old. A few other notes followed, all written on the same line, in separate boxes. An arrival date, nothing for the departure date. Right at the end of the line, a name, Michel Lepage.
The last box was empty.
“This child arrived at the Refuge and never left.”
“That makes sense,” I said. “She adopted him.”
He nodded.
“Normal, sure …”
He looked closer. Something had been written in the final column and then rubbed out. He held the notebook to the light, under the lamp, but even like that it was impossible to read anything.
“Paul disappeared in October ’67, on the 19th to be exact.”
He reread everything written in the column.
“This child arrived a few days before. He was the same age as my brother.”
He turned to me, his gaze angry, searching.
“I know, these are called coincidences! But when you’re a policeman, you learn to mistrust coincidences. There are facts, and the facts either match or they don’t. And in this case …”
“What are you thinking, exactly?”
He raised his hand to his neck.
“Paul had a pendant. The same as mine. Our four names etched on it, that’s what my mother wanted …”
He showed me the pendant he was wearing, the other side, the four names.
“Nan said something about a pendant that she had and that belonged to me. It must be here somewhere.”
“Unless Michel left with it.”
“Unless, indeed …”
He hunted some more.
I told him about the photograph I had found here, among the others, the photograph Nan had held so tightly against her chest.
The little boy with the wooden train. A print that was forty years old.
“It could be your brother, a few days after the shipwreck.”
I had left the photograph in my room.
“I’ll bring it to you tomorrow.”
I told him about the letters Théo was receiving, letters from the monastery. He listened attentively.
“So Paul might have become a monk …”
I thought about Théo. He must know the truth about the child Nan adopted. No matter which way I turned it in my mind, it was impossible for him not to know.
Lambert searched some more, everywhere, the same stubborn diligence, he wanted to find proof, his brother’s trace in this house.
I left him.
When I got to the door, I turned. I looked at him. I was glad for him.
I told him so, I’m glad for you. He had opened the door to the second room. He had already disappeared inside.
He did not hear me.
It was dark but it was not very late. There was still a light on at Théo’s place. I went back to La Griffue, took the stairs four at a time, and fetched the photograph taken at Nan’s house.
I went back up to the village, and took the medallion from the grave. The two photographs in the light of a street lamp. It was the same child, taken a few days apart. Only the background of the photograph differed. On the medallion, you could see the corner of a shutter, on the other photograph, a simple door. Everything else, the same face, the same polo shirt with little boats.
In between the two there had been a shipwreck.
Théo could not lie to me. He could not deny it. I took the path to his house.
When I got there, he was watching television, curled up in his dressing gown, his cats all round him.
I went in.
He looked up. He hesitated for a moment then switched off the television.
“You’re rather late today.”
I went up to him. I looked at him. He seemed so alone, so tired. I pulled up a chair and sat down.
I took the photograph from my pocket, the one I had found at Nan’s place. I slid it quietly over to him. He looked at me again and adjusted his glasses.
He picked up the print, and held it up to his eyes. I could hear his dry fingers rubbing against the paper. The slightly wheezing sound of his breath.
There was a bottle of ether on the table, and some cotton wool. The nurse had been. Théo never put anything away any more.
“This picture doesn’t belong to you …”
He said nothing else, that was all, and he put the print gently down on the table.
“Théo, you have to tell me …”
“What do you want me to tell you?”
“Who is that child?”
He gave a resigned smile.
“It’s Michel.”
“I know that.”
“Well, if you know, why are you asking me?”
He said it very gruffly. It was a most odd moment, when I thought he might go out of the room and leave me there. I think that was what he wanted to do.
I think too that if he did not do it, it was because he remembered that Nan was dead, and that it no longer mattered so very much. A shadow passed over his face, immensely painful. Long seconds passed before he picked up the photograph again.
Long seconds still before he spoke. And his voice was unrecognizable.
“That little wooden train he’s got at the end of the string, I’m the one who made it for him.” He said, “I had forgotten that Florelle had this photograph.”
He spoke about the child, his words slow.
“At times it seemed to me, when I would look at them together, that Michel really was her child, her child and mine.”
“Your child more than Lili was?”
He thought about it, and said, “My child, yes, more than Lili.”
He bent down and took the little white cat on his lap. He was not caressing her. Just touching her lightly.
“He was a marvelous child … He looked at the world around him with his eyes full of wonder, and yet sometimes they could be so sad.”
His hands remained motionless, curled around the soft slope of the little cat’s back.
I took out the medallion. I put it next to the other photograph.
The same two faces.
“You knew, didn’t you?”
He looked at me. His eyes, suddenly extraordinarily clear. He could have said that it had nothing to do with me, that I had no business there. He could have shown me the door and I would have left.
He said nothing.
He got up. He went over to the window and looked outside. Since Nan’s death, he seemed to have renounced any form of struggle.
“That night, the wind was blowing from the west.”
He turned round. He glanced at the two photographs.
“Westerly winds often bring in the bodies.”
He picked up the photographs.
“Florelle left her house when she heard the sirens. She spent the night on the beach, walking back and forth. She was waiting for her dead.”
He came and sat down again at the ta
ble. Only a tiny bit of light filtered from his eyes.
“So when she found the child, in the morning … He was attached to a small dinghy, hardly even wet. She hid the dinghy among the rocks. I was the one who went to get it a few days later.”
He folded one hand over the other.
“He was little, barely two. She hid him, she didn’t know if he would survive … Afterward, when she understood that he was going to live, she hid him still so that no one would see him.”
“She didn’t tell anyone?”
He shook his head.
“He had been brought back by the sea, for her, you understand … She had been waiting for years. A child brought back alive in exchange for all those the sea had taken from her.”
“But you, did you know who he was? Did you know that he had a brother?”
“Yes, I knew … So did she, she knew, deep inside, but she preferred to forget.”
Knotty veins ran over the back of his hands. In the light of the lamp, the blood they contained looked black.
“She found Michel in the waves.”
“His name is Paul.”
“Paul, yes … All she could think of was saving him. Afterward, there were other things …”
“Other things … ?”
“She grew to love him.”
I picked up the photographs. Lambert’s face, superimposed upon the two faces.
“You kept them from knowing each other! You kept them apart, and they had already lost the most important—”
“I often thought about that, yes.”
Suddenly Théo disgusted me. That he was capable of such a thing.
“And when he came back, and he saw you in the yard … That child with you, it was his brother, and you said nothing to him!”
I got up. I suddenly felt I needed air, I had to get out.
He held out his hand.
“Don’t go …”
I looked at him. In disgust or pity. I found myself outside. Sitting on the steps, trembling, indifferent to the cold and the growling cats.
Max said that the female porbeagle abandons her cubs after a year, and that they forget they ever had a mother. Had Paul forgotten his parents? Had he grown attached to someone else? I felt sick to my stomach. I held on to the railing. Leaning forward, my hands on my belly.
Théo was still under the lamp. In the yellow light of the bare bulb. He had not moved. He was waiting for me, as if he knew that I would come back. No doubt he would have waited for me for hours still, just like that, without making the least movement. Bent over in his woolen dressing gown. The little cat was sleeping, curled in a ball on his lap.
The Breakers Page 34