“Your wife knew?”
“No.”
“And your daughter?”
“Certainly not.”
“Are you positive? You never know for sure what goes on in children’s minds. Maybe she’d already seen you with Adèle.”
“No! Laura didn’t know.”
“Okay. Go on.”
“We’d just got to the lake and Adèle threatened to tell my wife everything.”
“Just like that? All of a sudden? Were you planning to dump her or kick her out?”
“No.”
“Maybe you were going to denounce her?”
“Denounce her? I don’t understand.”
“She was an illegal immigrant, wasn’t she? You knew that and yet you employed her for years.”
“Yes, I knew that, but I didn’t intend to denounce her. I don’t know why she wanted to reveal everything. I’ve no idea.”
“And then?”
“I managed to get her away from my wife and daughter. I didn’t want them to hear what we were saying.”
“You mean, two weeks before Christmas that would have been a bit of a disaster.”
“Things got very heated. She started shouting and I wanted to shut her up.”
“You wanted to kill her?”
“No! No! Never! I just wanted her to keep quiet but she began struggling and fell into the water.”
“You pushed her.”
“No! I don’t know. I don’t know anymore. I was horrified. I didn’t want her to spoil everything, but she started struggling and then she fell. The jetty was very slippery.”
“Your wife and daughter: where were they at that moment?”
“They heard the argument and came over. My daughter ran up to me. She slipped. She … she … Laura. Laura.”
Adam thinks back to that moment with dazzling clarity, just before his body hit the water. Laura first. Laura above all. He had reached Anita first (to whom could he one day confess his rage and despair at reaching her, his wife, first, and not Laura?) and a few seconds later he had brought Laura up to the surface. At the hospital they estimated that Laura had been underwater for less than three minutes. Three minutes? How can life contain so many emotions, decisions, and changes of mind in less than three minutes? Adam begins shaking.
“Calm yourself, Adam.”
“I need to see my daughter. It’s hours now since anyone gave me news.”
“She’s still in a coma.”
Adam curls up on his chair, clutching his stomach, biting his lips so as to avoid weeping. He sways back and forth. This is a nightmare. What else could it be? This should have been a glorious day.
“Just one more thing and then you can sign your statement.”
“What?”
“Were the swans there?”
Yes, they had been there. While Anita was running back to the house to telephone the emergency services, Adam was hugging his daughter to him, his ear pressed to her mouth, listening hard to the feeble breathing he could hear, never letting go either of this body nor of this feeble breathing. Out of the corner of his eye he thought he had seen something moving on the lake. For one magical moment he thought Adèle was emerging from the water. But then he heard the great clatter of wings and said softly to Laura: Look, ma chérie, the swans are there.
Anita is lying on a mattress in her daughter’s room. Alexandre has just informed her that Adam will be kept in a cell and brought before the magistrate the next day. Anita had thought of offering an apology for the occasion when she virtually called him a racist but what would be the point now? Those things, those words, those evenings no longer matter. She feels ill. She had not stopped vomiting. In her house, after telephoning the emergency services (surrounded by the order and perfection of this house, the paintings, the books, the box of toys); in the ambulance; in the hospital corridors. Anita gets up, holds her daughter’s hand, a cold, limp little thing, and takes a deep breath. Amid the eerie hissing of all the apparatus she decides to get a grip on herself. This is what she will do: take a shower, eat something, remain alive, look after her daughter, remain resolute. She has no concept of the fact that this is exactly what she will be doing every day for the next four years, five months, and thirteen days.
Far away from all this David Schtourm has just dined in a discreet, old-fashioned restaurant in the upper part of the city. He likes cities beside the sea, he likes certain things to remain traditional (restaurants, hotel lobbies, service, the furniture in bistros), he likes the mist that softens the biting cold, he likes the hazy yellow halos around the streetlights on the promenade. He thinks about the painting back in his room, the hour he spent waiting for that artist-architect who never came. He could leave the painting at the hotel reception the next morning before catching his flight, he has the address of the architectural firm, but, as he is walking back to the hotel, he decides to keep the painting because, above all, he would like to know both the beginning and the end of this story.
Further away still, François Sol is thinking about Anita. He smiles as he recalls with affection that young woman who was playing at being somebody else. And yet she had something about her, that girl. I wonder what she has done with it, he muses, as he turns to his copy of Ulysses.
Today
ADAM LEAVES THE PRISON AT 12:15. As his left foot settles upon the little square of yellow grass in front of the gray prison gates, he recalls how much he used to love the month of June. He is astonished at such notions from the old days, these notions of a free man; prison has taught him to expect nothing, to hope for nothing other than what he had been given the day before. Back in his cell it made little difference whether it be February or June, the hours were there, solid, massive, and silent.
He moves away from the square of dry grass. The parking lot where Anita is waiting for him is a little farther on, tucked away around to the right, but suddenly he stops. He would so like to be at his best today. He will not permit his fears, his anguish, and his sadness to rise to the fore. He tries to summon up positive thoughts, as the prison psychologist has advised him to do: today he is going to be reunited with Anita, take Laura in his arms, go back home, saw wood, swim.
Swim.
All at once the lake begins to intrude on his thoughts. The vision recurs of Anita, Laura, and Adèle on the jetty and he still remembers the colors of their coats. From where he stood, cowering among the trees, they made him think of brushstrokes—red, black, pink. Oh, for heaven’s sake, was he so self-obsessed, did everything always come down to painting, to his accursed painting? The images from that terrifying day crowd in on him like famished and thirsty beings of flesh and blood. He steps back and finds himself once more on the square of yellowed grass. Then he thinks of his gray-and-white cell, the clusters of light on the wall in the morning, the impeccable order of things inside the prison, the sofa bed, the table, the chair, the books all lined up, the right angles, the colored pencils in a jam jar, the drawing books stowed away in a portfolio. He has been learning to breathe slowly, through the nose and the abdomen. Sometimes this deep breathing has been putting him into such a profound state of meditation that he had the sensation of being back home in the forest. He should do this now, it will calm him.
Suddenly there is a noise like a great blow struck against the gate behind him. And Adam is running. It is the last lap of the marathon. Twenty-six miles or four and a half years, what’s the difference?
The asphalt turns into a carpet of mud, the cars disappear, it is a pine forest, the gray building is no longer there, it is a holiday, with smells of caramelized sugar, rain, sausages, and another two hundred yards to the finish. Anita is waiting there behind the yellow ribbon that will enwrap the winner. She is carrying Laura, barely two years old, on her shoulders. Anita is beautiful, it is there for all to see, that bewitching beauty, that voluptuous figure (in reality those eight pounds she has been unable to shed since Laura was born). As everyone waits for the marathon runners to arrive, amid this cheerful, im
patient crowd, all eyes are on her, her smile, her blue summer dress, her fine fingers clasping the ankles of the child she carries, straight back, head held aloft. It is Laura, perched up there, who sees her father emerging in front as they come around the bend and who yells PAPA!
Adam is coming, yes it is definitely him, those smooth strides can only be his, that towering body, made for basketball but fine for running (and for so many other things). He hears that PAPA and some people claimed that at that moment his stride took on a new life, as if he had found a little bit more energy to increase his speed. Adam flings his arms wide open to meet the yellow ribbon, Anita runs up to him, leans toward her husband, and in a movement of perfect grace, Laura tumbles into her father’s arms. The onlookers feel as if they have witnessed something flawless, timeless, and invincible.
Today in the prison parking lot there is only Anita waiting for him. Laura has remained at home, being looked after by a health care assistant. Adam buries his face in his wife’s hair, now dappled with gray. This gray touches him and suddenly there is the scent of vanilla, there, behind her ear and he is amazed at the butterflies coming to life in his stomach. He closes his eyes, remembers a goddess in a blue dress, and their daughter gently tumbling, light as a bird, into his arms and this thing that blazed up in his body, cauterizing his pain, sharpening his joy in victory, this thing that made him feel what it was to be a man loved, a man envied, a god.
Tomorrow
ON WEEKDAYS DURING THE SPRING, they can sometimes be seen on the beach where the wartime blockhouses are. They come halfway through the morning, settle down on beach towels, open a great blue sunshade. They never swim. Occasionally they take a walk near the concrete blocks. At such times the man carries the girl on his back. Sometimes they dip their child’s feet into the clear rivulets that wind around the concrete blocks and take her hand so that she can stroke the velvety moss on the walls of the pillboxes.
People around here know them and even if it was a long time ago there is always someone who can tell their story. But mostly when people see them like that with their daughter, they prefer to look away and think about other things.
The girl is very tall, she has long, smooth hair, she is too thin. Because she uses a wheelchair, and because she sometimes starts yelling, nobody apart from her parents notices the exceptional beauty of her face nor the way her eyes reach down into your soul.
They still live in that big house on the edge of the forest and, since returning from prison, the man spends his days repairing, consolidating, and making things. Some people remember that he had been an architect and a painter and the same people have the notion that while he was in prison his wife sold some of his paintings to pay for their daughter’s medical treatment. He has converted his former painter’s studio into a cabinetmaker’s workshop where he makes, repairs, and transforms furniture. He is a much-sought-after craftsman who receives visitors by appointment only. It is said that the floor in his workshop is covered in a thick layer of dried paint reminiscent of a multicolored carpet.
The woman still occasionally writes articles for the local newspaper under a pseudonym. She no longer goes to the fourth floor of that humdrum building the color of rough plaster, nowadays she telephones Christian Voubert on his direct line and he suggests topics to her. Sometimes she says yes, sometimes she cannot see the point of it. In her study these days there is not much literature. She devotes a good deal of time to reading books about drowning and coma, scientific studies on the psychological effects, accounts by survivors. She keeps herself informed about new developments in the cases of children suffering from neurological aftereffects. She is constantly on the lookout for new institutes, new medications, research in progress, clinical trials, hypnosis, herbal treatments, essential oils, miracles.
It is only in the evening, when Laura is asleep, that Adam and Anita can sit side by side together once more. They will talk softly about the day’s events. The gutter repaired, the furniture polished, the complete meal Laura has managed to eat, her progress with physical therapy. They never go beyond such tangible things. They hold fast onto these real things so as not to stray out of their depth. Of course the memory of Adèle often hovers between them, but the truth is that by that time in the evening they have not much energy left for her.
At this stage Anita and Adam simply want the day to end and for all thoughts, wishes, and regrets to close up for the night like water lilies. They go to their bedroom, lie down in silence. Before switching off the light they kiss and say to one another, till tomorrow, then.
AUTHOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A big thank-you to the American artist Ed Cohen who allowed me to draw inspiration from his magnificent paintings as well as his working technique for the character of Adam. His paintings can be seen at www.edcohenstudio.com.
Thanks to my parents, to Anuradha Roy, Christel Paris, Davin Appanah, Elsa Lafon, Jean-Philippe Rossignol, Monique Gouley, Myriam Greisalmmer, Xavier Houssein.
TRANSLATOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am indebted to a number of people, and especially the author, for their advice and assistance in the preparation of this translation. My thanks are due, in particular, to my editor at Graywolf Press, Katie Dublinski, and to Thompson Bradley, Daphne Clark, Robin Dewhurst, June Elks, Martyn Haxworth, Simon Strachan, Susan Strachan, and Cherry and Paul Thompson.
Nathacha Appanah was born in Mahébourg, Mauritius. She is the author of The Last Brother, which has been translated into sixteen languages. She works as a journalist and translator and lives in France.
Geoffrey Strachan, who also translated The Last Brother into English, is a prizewinning translator of works from both French and German, including novels by Andreï Makine, Yasmina Reza, and Jérôme Ferrari.
The text of Waiting for Tomorrow is set in Kepler Std. Book design by Ann Sudmeier. Composition by Bookmobile Design & Digital Publisher Services, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Manufactured by Versa Press on acid-free, 30 percent postconsumer wastepaper.
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