Then the camera goes around the back of the house and down to the bottom of the garden, you can just make out two figures, Daniel in a pale blue shirt and Suzanne in a flowery dress, in the shade of the apple tree, it’s before the row with Thierry, Daniel isn’t bandaged. The shot zooms in, bringing them closer but the image is shaky, you can’t see their features, they’re too far away to hear what they’re saying, Daniel puts his hand on Suzanne’s shoulder, she shakes her head, she touches his cheek, from the way her shoulders move it looks as if she’s crying, he moves closer to her, she opens her arms, and the film stops.
Hélène plays the scene again, tries to make out the faces, to work out whether Suzanne was already crying before Daniel joined her, but perhaps there’s something else that fascinates her, something she should never have seen. She watches it one more time, and then another, those wobbly images, those silent figures in the shade of the orchard, the movement of two bodies coming together, like an interrupted dance step, left in suspense.
SHE SWITCHES OFF THE VIDEO and sits back into her chair, the only armchair in the living room. Nothing has changed for twelve years, the tiger is losing his last hairs, the alligator is losing his sheen on the mantelpiece, the Jivaro with stitched lips is gently gathering dust, and everywhere in Daniel’s apartment, as there always were, there are piles of books, maps, and newspapers. The day he returns from his travels, if he ever returns, he’ll find his shambles just as he left it.
THE SUMMER SHE TURNED SEVENTY, Suzanne took a plane for the first time, to listen to the whale songs in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. She sent Hélène a postcard with the postscript The postmark is the REAL thing. She’s traveled a lot since then, she’s been to New York, Verona, Odessa, Jerusalem, she’s come home with beautiful photos, and she’s never forgotten, on every trip, to send a postcard. Hélène knows Suzanne isn’t telling her everything, she knows who it is she’s meeting in each destination, but she doesn’t resent her for keeping this last secret.
And in those twelve years she too has traveled to distant countries, worked on digs, exhumed mountains of skeletal remains, and more particularly reassembled tens of thousands of Byzantine mosaic tiles, her specialty. She’s kept the key to Daniel’s apartment, and she sometimes comes and spends a few hours here, when everyone thinks she’s gone off on some job. She goes down to the basement and sits in the very low armchair in the vaulted room with all the photos, sometimes she even sleeps.
But today, after watching the video, she stays in the living room. Motes of dust dance in the lamplight. They must still include minute particles of the burned manuscript. She was wrong to think it had gone. It’s still here, hanging in the air, it would take only one puff of breath to make it spiral and glitter in the light.
Hélène sits down at the desk. She sharpens a pencil in the sharpener with a crank handle, until it comes to a perfect point, like the tip of a harpoon. She opens a blank notebook, rests her elbow amid the piles of books, cards, and notebooks, and the pencil in her hands sails over the white ocean of paper, starting to tell the story of Daniel Ascher.
ALREADY PUBLISHED IN THE COLLECTION
“THE BLACK INSIGNIA”
The Ferrymen of the Amazon
The Road to Transylvania
The Warriors of Mururoa
Aunt Lucy’s Cabin
The Diamonds of Madagascar
Kidnapped in Bombay
The Heirs of the Negus
Terror on the Orinoco
America or Death
The Curse of Machu Picchu
The Three Tigers of the Taiga
Of Milk, Honey, and Powder
For a Handful of Pearls
The Bloodied Carpets of Lahore
The Black Cobra of Borneo
All the Honey in Casamance
The Soul Merchants of Bangkok
The Forsaken of Myanmar
The Scarab of Henuttaneb
The Call of Gibraltar
Meet Me in Soweto
The Clay Army of Xi’an
Theft in the Fugitives’ Garden
DÉBORAH LÉVY-BERTHERAT lives in Paris, where she teaches comparative literature at the École Normale Supérieure. She has translated Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time and Gogol’s Petersburg Tales into French. The Travels of Daniel Ascher is her first novel.
ADRIANA HUNTER studied French and Drama at the University of London. She has translated more than fifty books including Eléctrico W by Hervé Le Tellier, winner of the French-American Foundation’s 2013 Translation Prize in Fiction. She won the 2011 Scott Moncrieff Prize and has been short-listed twice for the Florence Gould Foundation Translation Prize. She lives in Norfolk, England.
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