by Todd Babiak
Pivot put on and removed his reading glasses with startling honesty. Much of what they discussed was beyond Kruse, who knew little and cared little about French, or any, politics, but the theme was clear. Most thinking people would say the Front National, since its birth in 1972, has been a race-obsessed party with a limited view on who is and is not sufficiently French. Yet many of those Jean-François had helped rescue from the wreckage on September 22, often at personal risk, were North Africans and gypsies. Pivot contrasted the baker-politician’s heroism with the reputation of the Front National as isolationist, anti-Europe, and anti-intellectual.
“Aunty?” said Lily.
Evelyn shushed her. “Anti is ‘against.’ We’ll explain later.”
On TV they spoke for twenty minutes about the soul of France and how it too might be rescued. Pivot, it turned out, was also a nostalgist. He remembered the thirty glorious years after the Second World War with as much affection, and melancholy, as Jean-François. They remembered growing up in this enchanted place, where French people were French people and where immigrants—there are good ones, after all—wanted nothing more than to be French. Bicycles, baguettes, berets. Yes, it was an international stereotype but there was great comfort in it, and unity. While he could not agree with the entirety of Jean-François’s analysis, Pivot declared the Front National an utterly transformed if not simply misunderstood party. He concluded the program by calling Jean-François de Musset the most articulate and most attractive conservative leader in France.
Before the night was out, national organizers and fundraisers were calling to set up meetings with Jean-François. Kruse, Evelyn, and Lily sneaked out, quietly waving at Pascale, who would be on the phone for hours. Evelyn, walking down the hill into their Roman quarter, was so pleased with what she had achieved she briefly wept. The party in the picturesque central square of Villedieu three weeks later, on Halloween, was designed as Jean-François’s national coming-out party.
There were quotations from Bouillon de culture in Le Monde, the first of the lieutenant’s articles that Kruse read in its entirety. The cause and effect of what had happened Halloween night was clear enough, tempered with words like présumé and accusé. Jean-François de Musset, politician and hero, drank too much on the evening of his fundraiser in Villedieu. He ran over and killed a three-year-old girl. He was charged with the crime and released. The girl’s mother, a foreigner, went to his home and murdered him and his wife in a fit of vengeful rage.
At the end of the story in Le Monde, after the turn, there were speculations from an anonymous source “close to the accused and the deceased.” The foreigner, a Canadian woman named Evelyn May Kruse, was deeply involved in the Front National party and was carrying on an affair with Jean-François de Musset.
The lieutenant leaned against the back wall of the conference room with his arms crossed. Kruse read the paragraph once more to be sure he had understood. He had understood. His right hand went cold, as it always did before a fight—nerve damage in his shoulder, from an ugly job in Montreal. Madame Boutet returned with a smelly plate of cheese and cured meat, dried fruit, and two baguettes. The articles in Le Figaro, La Provence, and Le Dauphiné Libéré carried the same information from the anonymous source: Evelyn was deeply involved in the party and carrying on an affair with the most articulate and most attractive conservative leader in France.
It was dark when they dismissed him from the interview room, three and a half hours later. The wind had calmed but only barely; it whistled and whined around the corners and through the empty corridors of Vaison-la-Romaine. Already the air was cleaner. No more grit in his eyes, no more humidity. He had eaten some of the meat and cheese, but it hadn’t oiled any of the ironworks in his stomach.
The trap he had set in the front door of the horse stable had been sprung: the book of matches sat half a metre inside. Kruse moved to the shoe cupboard near the door and slid his rattan fighting sticks out from their hiding place. No one was in here now. His teacher, mentor, and business partner, Tzvi Meisels, was a flawed religious Jew but an amateur spiritualist. Tzvi had convinced himself that if he followed his intuition without any doubtful mental chatter it led him correctly eighty percent of the time. In his work with the army and with Mossad, this confidence had saved his own life and the lives of his men. He had insisted Kruse hone his own sense of self-trust.
At the base of the stairs Kruse knew who had been in the house. He climbed up. Evelyn had sprayed her perfume into a silk floral scarf and had hung it from the door handle to Lily’s room. The bottle itself and other toiletries were gone, with some of her clothes. So was Marie-France, the turtle doudou, and an envelope of family photographs. She had not left anything for him, not a note or a map or a denunciation of what he had read in the newspapers; only a spray of perfume in her least-favourite scarf.
The gendarmes had wanted to know how long she had been sleeping with Jean-François de Musset. It confused and muddied her motivation, which had seemed so clear: you kill my daughter and I kill you. Who was the anonymous source, close to the accused and the deceased? You can never really know her heart.
The great wind, her camouflage, shook car alarms to life. He turned on the lamp. There was still water in the glass on her side of the bed, next to the guidebook she studied every night. Evelyn had never been to Paris and she wanted her first time to be perfect, with the right hotel, the right restaurants, museums, and sites of execution. They had planned to spend Christmas in the city, three weeks. Eighteen percent of the time there was snow at the end of December, even if it wasn’t cold enough to stick.
Twenty-four hours earlier, at the hospital, a bearded man in a rumpled seersucker suit had asked them to give Lily’s organs to the state. Unfortunate children across the country could use her eyes, her liver, her heart. Not everything in her had been ruined. All they had to do was sign the form. Evelyn listened carefully. She looked at Kruse, squeaked, and answered the administrator. “Why would I give anything of her to France? You stole her from me.”
“Madame. You are refusing out of simple spite?”
La rancune, “spite.” She turned away and stared for a moment, evidently at public service posters tacked to a billboard. Wash your hands. Watch out for lice and AIDS. Then she jumped at the administrator with a right cross. Kruse caught up Evelyn and led her to the sliding doors. Until this moment he had not wanted to leave, to give her up. He had been hoping, not consciously but in some waiting room of his heart, that a doctor would emerge from a hallway and take off his glasses, wipe his forehead, and tell them Lily was going to be all right. The operation was a success. It was a miracle. He helped Evelyn down the old stairs to the Grand Rue, floodlit and deserted at midnight, and when she collapsed against the outer wall of a lavender shop and wailed and cursed God and begged God and cursed God again, windows opened along the street. The Vaisonnais, men and women they recognized, looked down silently.
For a long time, ten minutes or an hour, they stayed on the Grand Rue. She couldn’t move and didn’t want to move. Neither did he. Kruse fantasized about crossing the street, running for Lily, carrying her on his shoulders, holding her hand. Always hold Daddy’s hand on the road, la main de Papa. When she began to shiver Kruse bundled his long wife into his arms and carried her down to the converted horse stable on Rue Trogue-Pompée, his hard soles clacking on the stones. He carried her up the marble stairs and into bed, this bed. He drew her this glass of water.
Kruse had performed CPR on his dead daughter until Evelyn had taken her from him. His first and most powerful instinct, to rush into the crowd and find him and destroy him—all of them—did not weaken or fade. Some men in Front National T-shirts surrounded Jean-François, jostled each other, and delivered short sermons. The organizers from Paris remained at a distance, pale and sick. Kruse only saw Jean-François in flashes. Men and women held each other and led each other away. It was not a thing anyone should see. Music was still playing in the plaza, a German dance song called “Rhyth
m Is a Dancer.” After his initial plea for an ambulance, all Kruse could do now was shout into the crowd that it would be really goddamn nice if someone turned that shit off. He only realized afterwards, by the looks in their eyes, he had been speaking English.
The police cars arrived quickly. He mentioned this to Huard and Boutet during the interview: he was sure he had heard the sirens before the accident. How could that be? And even before the cars arrived, Huard was there in his grey sweater. The lieutenant had run up the hill from his house at the base of Villedieu and stopped. It was difficult to spit out his questions, through his panting and the phlegm.
“A car hit her, Monsieur?”
“Yes.”
“And she’s dead?”
Kruse could not say the word. Yes.
One of the men in a Front National T-shirt met the gendarme, his hands up. “It was me. I confess. I was driving the car.”
Journalists on the other side of the street shouted the man down. In his response to them and to the gendarme, he and his supporters said les étrangers several times. Jean-François de Musset was the next president of the republic. These, these, were foreigners. There didn’t seem to be any risk of Jean-François trying to escape; he was sitting on the gravel now, against a tree, lolling sweaty and drunk. The men in T-shirts tried to prevent the gendarme from speaking to him, his old rich friend. It was an accident, alors. She came from nowhere, the wild little thing.
Jean-François wasn’t arrested until the cars arrived. There was a harmless scuffle, between the men in the Front National T-shirts and the police. Television cameras hovered. One of the print journalists laughed out loud. Someone must have told the ambulance driver there was no great hurry. There was no great hurry. Evelyn would not let them take Lily at first. A paramedic asked for permission to sedate Madame. Kruse shook his head no.
They followed the ambulance to the hospital. It was the paramedic who told them Jean-François had been charged and released. A court date had been set. He was at home, in his faded yellow farmhouse behind the château.
Soft light from the street shone flatly into the horse stable on Trogue-Pompée. Normally, he would be tuned to Lily in the next room. When his daughter woke for a bathroom break or a glass of water, or when she startled herself out of a nightmare about cats, it was his job to tend to her. Evelyn dozed in the miserable silence. Like her daughter, she had blonde hair with a hint of natural curl and bright green eyes. They were closed now, crunched. Both of them had one dimple above and to the right of their lips, those crooked smiles. She was breathing too quickly. The French, who insisted on making these sorts of determinations, said both Evelyn and Lily looked Swedish. Maybe Norwegian.
Evelyn wasn’t more than one-sixteenth of anything, a mongrel. Still, she preferred a coherent and traditional culture—a feeling of us, something to protect from them, les étrangers.
Kruse leaned over the bed to touch her forehead, the way he would have touched Lily’s forehead if she were sweating and thrashing, to check for fever. She slapped his hand away and hopped out of bed, pushed him and stomped, in her T-shirt and panties, into Lily’s room.
“What are you doing?”
She didn’t answer and he didn’t want to watch or stop her. For the next half hour Evelyn broke Lily’s toys, ripped the pages from her picture books, threw her little clothes on the floor and stretched them and tore what she could tear. Kruse remained in their bedroom, the master bedroom overlooking the Roman ruins, where he had thought they were falling in love again.
FOUR
Avenue Frédéric Mistral, Orange
THE CONSULATE URGED HIM TO CREMATE HIS DAUGHTER. IN THE MIDDLE of these conversations, instead of listening to the young Québécois bureaucrats, he flipped through his choices. If only he had run for her. If only they had gone home at six thirty, as planned. If they had found another town, another house, another country. If they had learned to speak Spanish in school instead of French: Guanajuato or Seville. If they had saved their marriage in Toronto—another neighbourhood, maybe. The suburbs. Some fried chicken village in Quebec.
“Monsieur Kruse?”
“Yes.”
“You’re still with me?”
The nearest crematorium was in Orange, a small city thirty kilometres down the road from Vaison-la-Romaine. He toured the facility and, in the midst of a chat about receptacles for her ashes, he excused himself to run to the toilet and throw up. There was no one else in the unusually large room, designed for crowds. Every click and slide of his shoes echoed in the toilet. Kruse had checked the regional bus stops, thirty-nine of them, and had questioned hundreds of people: restaurant and café operators, hoteliers and owners of chambres d’hôtes. No one had seen his wife on the day of the dead or any of the four days thereafter. They had seen the newspapers. In their eyes he was a desperate cuckold whose wife had disappeared into the South of France. He knew Lily was gone, but in the crematorium, for the first time, he believed it. He was alone with his echoes. The funeral director knocked gently and opened the door. They could not wait much longer, as they had entered high season for death. The towns of the Vaucluse were full of retirees and many of them succumbed before winter, the anticipation of January air igniting and overpowering their imaginations. There were laws and rules and with respect, Monsieur, he did not have infinite space in his refrigerator.
Jean-François and Pascale de Musset’s joint funeral came first. On the fifth of November, a cool and dreary Thursday, the cathedral filled quickly. Officials from the town rushed to set up folding black chairs behind the pews. Media from Marseille and Paris set up in the back. Several hundred people stood on the brown grass outside Notre Dame de Nazareth, in a murky spray that threatened to transform into rain. Kruse had come early, to look for Evelyn, though the smell of incense and the whispering around and about him was too much; he surrendered his seat to a retired woman in a veil he recognized from the Tuesday morning market. She did not thank him. The cloister where they had inspected the little flowers and the fat bees was inaccessible, so Kruse sat on the moist curb on Rue Saint-Exupéry, where he was close enough to hear through the outdoor speakers but far away enough that no one would be obliged to look at him. They did anyway.
Afterwards, the procession of black limousines and pedestrians crossed the Roman bridge. All the newer bridges had been destroyed in the flood. The de Mussets had a family crypt in the Saint Laurent cemetery; it had been there long enough that rain and sun had stained it black. There was a substantial cross above, like two dull swords. Mourners filed into the sloped corridors between the dead. Small children and babies were propped up on the crypts of Vaison-la-Romaine’s other prominent families. Graves were decorated with small stone and ceramic souvenirs, real and fake flowers, plaques and murky tablets declaring “Tu seras toujours parmi nous” and other truths. Older and richer families had tombs up in the shade, on the hill, many with statues and reliefs depicting both the lost loved ones and their saviour. The de Musset crypt was just below them. Dogs chased each other through the feet of the mourners as the sound system squealed and crackled. The spray turned to rain and, at once, hundreds of black umbrellas arose and popped.
He recognized Front National officials from the fundraiser in Villedieu and from outings with Evelyn: a meeting in Arles, a rally in Malaucène. The de Mussets had brothers and sisters but none who lived here. He stayed at the gates with two young cashiers he knew from the Super-U grocery, women in their twenties with long black-painted fingernails and dyed black hair, small-town goths, women who would always smoke. All that emerged from the speakers was an apology. Rain had made it too dangerous for outdoor electricity. Words were then spoken but none that Kruse could hear. The cashiers stared at him and spoke to each other until everyone in the small crowd around him was aware of his presence and properly distracted. A few men, with beer in their breath and strong accents, shoved him. He excused himself, for standing in their way.
Kruse walked around them all and climbed as high
as he could climb. It was difficult to see, in the fog and the rain, with so many black umbrellas.
She had not come.
He booked an hour the following afternoon, the smallest room available in Hall 1E of the crematorium in Orange. It was outside the city core, set in the first wave of what would become the French approximation of a power centre. There were supermarkets, chain stores selling furniture, electronics, and shoes, and next door, a discount wine store. Marigolds came with the cremation package, and under the fluorescent bulbs they shone like creamed corn. There were no guests. Lily’s teacher might have come, or the parents of some of her little friends, the family from Nyons, the bartender in Villedieu, the banker, the woman from the cheese shop, but he didn’t invite them. No higher authority was present, so Kruse said a few words about Lily, to Lily, in English; everything he had said aloud, since her death, to police and the coroner and the consulate in Nice, the insurance company and the municipal officials and the funeral director, had been in his studious French. It was not a speech worthy of his daughter’s spirit. Speaking his own language, Lily’s language, undid him.
After Evelyn had destroyed her toys and ripped her books, she had come back to bed, sweaty and shivering. This is what Kruse did not tell the gendarmes. The anonymous source, close to the accused and the deceased, did not tell the newspapers what she had demanded. Kruse had said, “Can I do anything?” and for two hours she did not speak. She mumbled and sighed, wept, said her daughter’s name in a prayer to no one. Then, at 3:16 in the morning, Evelyn answered his question.
“Yes.”
“Yes what?”
“You can do something.” Light from the pedestrian street splashed teeth on the ceiling. “I think you know.”