Confidant (9781101603628)

by Gremillon, Helene; Anderson, Alison (TRN)

  Proof that their love affair was going stronger than ever. Would it never end?

  ‘Leaving you this pistol is my promise that I shall come back to you . . .’

  ‘To the most precious woman in my life, I bequeath the most precious object in my life . . .’

  I spent the night imagining all the vows Paul must have made on leaving ‘the little Deringer’ to Annie before he went away to war. Perhaps he handed it to her in silence before they made passionate love. No doubt.

  I awoke with a start to find the gun on my pillow, the barrel pointed towards me. I felt weak, more tired than before going to sleep. I was doing my hair when Sophie burst into the bathroom. ‘They’re here!’ People had seen them. I sent her to the cellar at once, to put together some reserves and set up the bedding we had already taken down as a precaution, including Camille’s cradle—in case they began to pillage, in case we had to hide. And I went back to brushing my hair mindlessly. I felt oppressed. The Germans were here. People had seen them. I felt the Deringer in the pocket of my bathrobe, banging against my hip with every stroke of my brush. I heard a sudden noise and swivelled around, panic-stricken. Alto had just come in and jumped on the edge of the bathtub, strolling along with his feline gait. I don’t know what came over me, I can’t explain it, I could not take my eyes off him. I put my brush down carefully, felt for the gun in my pocket, took aim, and pressed the trigger.

  ‘Fuck off and leave me alone, all of you!’

  When the gun went off I thought my arm was being wrenched out of its socket. I don’t know if I cried out. Alto’s body flipped into the bath and the water was saturated with blood in a matter of seconds. A sour taste came to my mouth. I did nothing. I watched him struggle without reacting. I saw myself in the bath again, the day I told Annie everything. Alto drowned the way a human being does, without making a sound. If I had not told her anything, none of this would have happened. When Alto stopped moving I no longer recognised his body covered with wet fur.

  I could still hear the gunshot echoing in my brain. Alto’s body, floating. I could not understand how it could have happened. Paul had never left any of his collection pieces loaded, including the Deringer. The ammunition had always lain dormant in a drawer in his desk, all mixed up together. Sophie used to say, ‘A mother cat couldn’t even find her kittens in there . . .’

  Nor would Paul have loaded the pistol before giving it to her, it wasn’t his way, for him these weapons were mere mementos. He cherished them because they had belonged to his father, but he no longer viewed them as weapons.

  But who else might have loaded that gun if he hadn’t?

  The answer came to me like a bolt of lightning. Annie, trying all the bullets, one after the other, with patience and determination, until she found the one that fitted perfectly in the barrel. And then she added the powder. Everything was ready.

  Because my desire for revenge obsessed me, I had never considered her own hatred towards me. Yet she had been thinking of killing me: you don’t load a gun just because you’re bored. What had held her back? Had I escaped the worst, or had she, like me, lacked the courage to kill?

  I felt a sort of rush. Everything had to stop. Now. Our strange companionship could not last much longer. Camille was a month old. She still went from one pair of arms to another without minding, but soon she would begin to smile for one of us in particular and call her ‘Maman’, and I wanted that person to be me.

  Giving birth is a mysterious thing, it removes a woman from society for a while and then suddenly returns her to it, just like that, abruptly. After weeks of stupor and bliss one becomes active again, one becomes the person one was before, in a denser, more concentrated fashion, not necessarily for the better, because now one is fighting not just for oneself but also for one’s child. With that single gunshot, life had just reasserted its rights over the privileged era of new motherhood.

  I went into Annie’s bedroom, took Camille from her arms and locked myself away with her in my room. Camille was crying, but it hardly mattered, I was not upset, even for her; I felt nothing but a heavy mass in my chest. The shock had been so violent that I was breathing hard through my nose. I could not understand what had happened. I never suspected the Deringer was loaded.

  It was Camille’s first bottle. To begin with she did not want it but eventually she came round. I could hear Annie knocking on the door, running everywhere, calling for help. I put Camille on the rug on the floor, left the room, locking it behind me, and went downstairs. Annie asked me what I had done with her baby. My manner was as cold as hers was agitated. I replied that I did not know what she was talking about, insofar as she had no baby, and then I said, viciously:

  ‘Paul has confessed to everything, I know all about the two of you, how you used to meet.’

  I described their lovemaking to her, using the most intimate words, the most explicit, too, unbearable even for someone who lacked modesty. She listened, shaking her head from left to right as if she were saying, no, no, in her head. Then she blocked her ears with shame and humiliation. I had imagined her collapsing in sobs but her eyes stayed dry. Tears make one lose one’s concentration, and she had to be on her guard and listen. Attentiveness prevailed over despair.

  ‘And that afternoon when he showed you what you had to do while you waited for him, when he told you to lie on the bed and pull up your skirt, and took the fingers of your left hand, and, after kissing them, placed them in that precise spot at the top of your sex between the two lips, while his other hand was on your breasts. He sat naked next to you. His sex was hard and he asked you to look at it. He did not touch you. He merely murmured to you what you had to do. You complied; you were filthy and obedient. You rubbed the spot where your fingers lay, gently at first and then faster and faster, harder and harder, your eyes glued to his sex. And then you gave a moan and arched your back before your body finally yielded, trembling, and Paul took you in his arms and rocked you like a little girl. “Will you dare to do it when I’m not here?’’’

  I gave her the details in such a way that she could not fail to believe they came from my husband. She could not suspect the truth, that I lay in ambush only a few metres from them, stiff and hateful, in the folds of the heavy drapes. I wanted to defile their intimacy forever, deprive her of the pleasure she had taken with my husband, even in her memories. Never again would she be able to think of their embraces without imagining Paul confessing to me, telling me that those embraces meant nothing to him, that for those few months he had gone astray, but now he begged me to forgive him.

  I had envisaged that confrontation for so long. I had thought it through, preparing every little word, always choosing the most perfidious. To make Annie flee, to fill her with despair. To prevent her from pouring out her misfortunes to anyone who was prepared to listen, showing her body, still swollen from the birth, as proof. A doctor would not hesitate for one second to declare which of our two bodies had just given birth and which had never been anything but an empty shell. I had to humiliate her so thoroughly that I would drain her of the energy it would take to seek a doctor’s testimony; I had to render that testimony null and void, utterly inadmissible.

  I had lied to her. As I said this Annie sat up, questioning, hoping I would suddenly refute everything I had just said and give her a new, less horrendous version.

  ‘Yes, I lied to you. Paul never sent his regards, in any of his letters. I told you what you wanted to hear, for my child’s welfare. Oh, yes! Because I forgot to tell you, Paul was so happy to learn that I was pregnant. He could not stop saying how happy he was that we would be a family at last. We deserved it so much, after all we had been through . . . Mark my words, when a man loses his family in one of life’s tragedies—as Paul has done—all he thinks of is starting a new one. Even the least gregarious individual needs the support of a family. Mistresses—and mark this, too, for your next bout of whoring—are good f
or men who see a member of their family wherever they look; others need to build a family, that’s the way it goes . . . Sex is stronger than men, to be sure, but family is stronger than anything.’

  The door slammed behind her. At last. It was over.

  Murder is an alliance of circumstances and temperament, and while we both had the circumstances, neither of us had the temperament. I had thought of killing her, too, a thousand times, but in the end I resorted to nothing more than throwing her out. The most refined hatred, if it is not armed with a murderous temperament, will never kill a soul.

  No sooner had the door slammed behind her than I already regretted that my desire to have her out of my sight had been stronger than caution, which would have required keeping her at hand.

  In the weeks that followed, a paranoid fear took hold of me. Her absence turned out to be far more menacing than her presence. What was she going to do now? Had she believed my lies? Would she go on waiting for Paul? And Camille? Would she give her up all the same? There was nothing I could be sure of.

  I had asked Jacques to stay at L’Escalier, officially as a caretaker, but in reality to keep an eye on Annie, who, Jacques confirmed, had gone back to Nuisement. But knowing where she was did not reassure me altogether. When Jacques informed me that her mother had died, I was indecently pleased. From now on, I thought, Annie would stay put, to look after her father.

  Sophie lectured me: there were things one could do legitimately in life, and other things that were just not done—what would I say if one day someone behaved like that towards my daughter? Annie’s charm did not act exclusively upon men, I was in a good position to know, I too had succumbed to it at one time and I think that Sophie was very fond of her. But she was entirely devoted to me. I never understood how she could support me in this undertaking; it was everything she despised: lies, betrayal, theft.

  I had advised her to leave, it was getting too risky for her. I told her that there were many Jews also swelling the numbers of those who were fleeing. I was not one of those who despised them, but I had read the articles in the newspapers which seemed to promise the worst where they were concerned. Those who say that in those days we knew nothing about the camps are liars. But Sophie simply did not want to know. She would not leave me until Monsieur came home, she had promised him she would look after me, her word was her bond. And she was French above all else, and if the French needed her to make life difficult for the Germans, she would be there. I should just call her Marie, like all the other maids in Paris; and if you looked closely, didn’t her nose look like a pretty little Breton nose? The Germans would be none the wiser.

  I should never have let her make me laugh and win me over, I should have ordered her to leave right away. In the end she was the one who was none the wiser.

  They showed up one morning, very early, two plain-clothes German policemen. And their usual despicable scenario played out before my eyes. It wasn’t an arrest; they just wanted to ‘take a statement’ at the police station, and after that in all likelihood she would be able to come home, but they suggested she take a bag with some belongings anyway. They watched her as she got ready and, when she went to the toilet, one of the policemen wedged his foot in the door so she could not close it. I never understood how they had managed to find her. In spite of her pretty little Breton nose I had not been allowing her out of the house for several months; I did the shopping myself and she stayed at home to look after Camille and the housework. She hadn’t even been opening the door anymore if the bell rang. Someone, an acquaintance, perhaps, must have denounced her as a Jew.

  Oh, how she kissed Camille before she left. She whispered a few sweet words in her ear, and her eyes were shining with tears and rage, but she controlled her emotions. She held the child so tight against her breast that one of the policemen abruptly took me to one side:

  ‘This is your child, isn’t it, Madame?’

  Those words I had so feared, now asked at such an inappropriate and painful moment, made me laugh nervously. Sophie turned to me, not understanding.

  ‘I’m laughing, Marie, because Monsieur is asking me to assure him that Camille is not your daughter.’

  A kindly smile lit up Sophie’s face, and that is the last image I have of her.

  The months went by, somewhat more calmly, until that day in December when someone rang at the door. From Jacques’ description, I immediately recognised the young boy who had been visiting Annie’s mother every day during our absence. He looked exactly how I had imagined him. Annie had left Nuisement the day before and he thought she must be here. At first I thought it was a ruse to try and take Camille back by force. The dismay I saw in his eyes when I told him Annie was not here reassured me. It was not a trap; he really was looking for her. I hadn’t ever thought to invent an explanation for Annie’s absence, but it was his manner, that lovesick air of his that inspired the unbearable story I told him: that Annie had fallen in love with a soldier. I even went so far as to say they were married. May he forgive me.

  He left, devastated. And I was relieved. Annie had not told him anything about her relationship with my husband. I thought the danger had passed until he adopted that voice people use to speak to babies.

  ‘Goodbye, Louise.’

  Annie was the only one who knew that name: he had just given himself away. He knew the truth, at least as far as Camille was concerned.

  When Annie had suggested we call the baby Louise, I had pretended to go along with it: at the time, I pretended to go along with everything. But deep down I always wanted the child to have my mother’s name, Camille. She had to have something of me, after all. I did not hesitate for one second when I went to see the registrar.

  ‘Camille Marguerite Werner.’

  Nor in response to the following question.

  ‘Date of birth?’

  ‘Five days ago: the twenty-eighth of June.’

  Camille was a little older than one month, but I said she was born ‘five days ago’, like almost all the other new mothers ahead of me in the queue. As a rule when they got to the window, the fathers would say ‘yesterday’, but now with the war it was the women who said ‘five days ago’, or ‘a week ago’, depending on how long it had taken them to recover from the birth.

  I wasn’t risking anything; soon enough, over time, no one would notice a month. Annie must have no official truth about Camille in her possession. So that my child would be a stranger to her, and remain so forever. Paul, too, always believed his daughter was a month younger than she actually was. I was alone, in my heart, wishing Camille happy birthday on the real day of celebration, just as, over the years, as aging went hand in hand with guilt, I had the misery of my past lies to celebrate alone.

  ‘Goodbye, Louise.’

  I watched as the young man left, feeling a strange compassion for him. He and I shared something in this story; we had both been betrayed, scorned, rejected.

  But he knew that Camille was Annie’s child, and in that respect he was a threat. I had to keep an eye on him, I had to be able to circumvent the danger. He also seemed like the best way of finding Annie. If she showed up again somewhere, it would be for his sake, of that I was sure. They shared something special. The kind of love that inspires a woman to choose that man’s name for her child, when he cannot be the father. To be sure of him, I kept a constant watch on his whereabouts.

  So Annie had left Nuisement, and could reappear at any moment. And what if she and Paul came hand in hand to take Camille from me? Did they really exist, those women who were so in love that they went to Germany to look for their imprisoned lovers?

  We were late for the puppet show. Camille had just turned one. I sat her down on the bench in front and left her there while I went to buy a ticket. The kiosk was just nearby. It was as I was returning to my seat that I saw Annie silhouetted against a tree. Her face lit up at Camille’s every move and s
he laughed along with her. Children laugh from their chest, like a cry, and adults from their throat, like a sigh; and when they happen to laugh the way children do, we look at them coldly, so that they will calm down. What a hateful mirror those two faces were for me. They smiled the same way. Fortunately, kinship cannot be established on the basis of a smile. I went back to sit down next to Camille as calmly as possible, and pretended to laugh at the misadventures of poor Punch. I don’t know if at that moment Camille could sense how terribly proprietary the grip of my hand on her little arm was.

  At the end of the performance I put Camille in her pram and counted to ten. I knew that when I looked up Annie would be walking away; she would not linger now that the object of her love was no longer in sight.

  I had guessed correctly, this was not the first time she had hidden somewhere to be able to see Camille; her behaviour had betrayed the calmness and detachment of someone used to this sort of spying.

  I had to follow her. Like the biter being bitten: I had to spy on the woman who was spying on me. I had to see where she went. With a bit of luck, find out where she lived, where she worked. Track her down, as if I were flushing out a dreaded illness, the source of which I had long been searching for—think of the relief it would bring.

  But the further we went along the streets, the more I began to lose my nerve. Without a doubt, Annie was headed for my house. I hadn’t been expecting it, I tried to think of a way to defend myself, I didn’t want an argument in front of Camille. Then suddenly, at the crossroads to the street that led to my house I could no longer see her. At first I thought she had caught me out and had run away. And then something caught my eye along the unbroken façades: my gaze, hesitant and fascinated, froze at the sight of the huge lantern hanging over the Étoile du Berger.