The Fortress

by Danielle Trussoni

  “Okay,” I replied. “I’ll go to the gendarmerie as soon as I’m back home.”

  “You need to begin to present your case,” Hadrien said, running a finger over my arm.

  “Present my case,” I repeated.

  “You need to start recording everything. Keep a diary of what is happening. And don’t write anything in an e-mail that he can use against you. From now on, every interaction between you and your husband is a legal record and is going to be part of your divorce case.”

  I took this in, knowing that it was a turning point. Now, suddenly, the relationship that had been the most intimate and personal part of my life was a legal encounter. Our actions were considered “evidence,” and I was in charge of collecting it. But even as I determined to hold my position and engage in this fight, I felt an enormous sense of doubt about the meaning of the words “innocent” and “guilty.” It was unclear to me that these words could mean anything at all in such a context as our breakup. If our marriage were a murder mystery, there would be no way to determine the murderer and no way to identify the victim. We were both the killer and the killed, the criminal and the corpse. That was the very nature of divorce: the annihilation of the innocent by the innocent. Or the guilty by the guilty.

  —

  THE GENDARMERIE WAS just down the street from Alex and Nico’s school in Sommières, not far from the market square, and although I’d passed by often on my way to the Saturday farmers’ market, I’d somehow never noticed it before. It was one of those places, I realized, that you ignore until you need it. I stood at a gate and pressed the intercom button.

  “Oui, bonjour?” a voice crackled.

  “I want to make a complaint,” I said in French. Everything would be in French once I walked through the gate, and I would have the verbal capabilities, as Nico liked to joke, of a French two-year-old.

  “Entrez!” The automatic gate clanked and began to slide open.

  I walked into the offices and was directed to the back, where a uniformed man sat behind an extremely orderly desk. He had dark hair and dark eyes and a large framed photo of a woman and a child on his filing cabinet. There was a nameplate on the desk. It read HENRI CABIROT.

  Henri gestured for me to sit, and then, after asking me why I’d come and pulling up a form on his computer, he began to ask me questions. When I told him the basics—that my husband and I were getting a divorce, that he’d taken my daughter’s passport and driven off to Bulgaria—he said, “But why a divorce?”

  “Well,” I said, trying to figure out how to explain such a complicated story. I could have said that we’d moved to France to make a storybook life and that when this failed miserably, I fell I in love with a handsome Parisian twelve years my junior. Instead I said, “I met a man in Paris, and my husband is angry.”

  “I see,” Henri said. “He is jealous.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “And you have children?”

  “A boy and a girl.”

  Henri typed this into the computer. “Continue, madame.”

  “My husband told me not to go to Paris, but I went anyway.”

  “To see this man?”

  “To see this man.”

  “It was une question de liberté for you, madame? To go to Paris if you choose?”

  “Exactement,” I said, feeling that someone finally understood me. “Une question de liberté. I went to Paris, and when I returned, my husband was very angry and…” I wanted to say “aggressive” in French, but I hadn’t a clue how to say it, so I settled for “mean.” “…méchant.”

  “He beat you?”

  “No, but he was meanly angry.”

  “No insults or threats?”

  “Insults,” I said. “And threats.”

  “What threats?”

  “He said he would divorce me and take everything—the house and our children—and move to Bulgaria. My husband is Bulgarian.”

  “I’m sorry, but this is la France, madame, and in la France no man can do that to his wife. We are a civilized country. We have laws.”

  “So then he called his parents, and they came to Aubais from Bulgaria. They drove here.”

  “Oh là là,” he said. “Such a long drive.”

  “Then he told me he was going to go to Bulgaria and he wanted to take my daughter. He took her passport from my office by force.”

  “He beat you, madame?”

  “No, but he took it and held it like this.” I stood up and held my hand over my head, demonstrating how he had waved it high in the air, bully-in-the-playground style.

  “D’accord,” he said, looking more and more perturbed. “He took the child’s passport by force. And?”

  “We argued. I told him I did not want our daughter going to Bulgaria. But he left for Bulgaria anyway.”

  “With your daughter,” he said.

  “Yes, with our daughter,” I confirmed.

  “What was this date?”

  “He left on the sixth of April,” I said.

  “When is the last time you spoke to your daughter?”

  “I spoke to her April sixth for a few minutes. Now he won’t answer his phone. I spoke to his mother, but now she won’t answer either.”

  “You are afraid he will keep your daughter in Bulgaria?”

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s my fear.”

  “I will tell you something, madame,” Henri said, straightening in his chair, preparing to give me some important information. “What he did—taking his child out of France to visit his family—that is not a crime.”

  I had known that this was coming. It was exactly as Nikolai had said it would be. But for me it was a crime, a crime of the worst kind: the wounding of a parent through the child. I was furious, and wanted my daughter back. I felt absolutely zero empathy for him. I couldn’t understand that maybe, in his mind, he had no other option but to run away with Nico. Just as there had been no option for me but to go to Paris.

  “It is only a crime,” Henri continued, “if he does not bring your child back. What your husband has done is not illegal. It is simply very bad taste.”

  Bad taste—the worst condemnation one can receive in France.

  “But you have to understand,” I said, beginning to feel desperate. “I haven’t been able to speak to my daughter for a week. He could be anywhere by now. There’s no guarantee he’s coming back. That is a big problem.”

  “I agree with you, madame,” he said. “But in my opinion, when a man does this kind of act to his wife, it is not because he wants to keep the child. Children are too much trouble for most men. No. It is because the man wants revenge.” He looked at me, to see if I understood. I nodded. I understood perfectly.

  Henri returned to the keyboard. “When does he say he will bring her back?”

  “First he said one week. But it’s been a week already.”

  “When is she due back at school?”

  “The end of the Easter vacation,” I said. “April twenty-second.”

  “Okay,” he said, typing in this date. “If when the vacances de Pâques finishes and your child is not home in France and she is officially absent from her school, then the gendarmerie can do something for you.”

  “But that’s almost two weeks from now,” I objected. “I can’t just wait here without news for that long.”

  “I’m sorry, madame. There is nothing else I can do for you.”

  I must have looked particularly forlorn at that moment, because Henri took a piece of paper and wrote something on it. “This is my personal number. You call me if there is any trouble.” He pushed the paper toward me and smiled. “And I will wait to hear from you on the twenty-second of April, d’accord?”

  —

  IN THE DAYS that I waited for Nikolai to bring Nico back from Bulgaria, I wandered from room to room of the fortress as if looking for something I’d misplaced. I’d find myself in some part of the house, the dining room or the laundry closet, and suddenly wonder why I’d gone there to begin wit
h. Had I needed dinner plates? Was there laundry to fold? Soon I didn’t know one day from the next. I wasn’t hungry, and so I didn’t eat much. I wasn’t tired, and so I didn’t sleep more than a few hours a night. I couldn’t think clearly, and so I stopped working on my new book. I didn’t want to see anyone from the village, and so I avoided going outside La Commanderie, remaining home instead with Alex and Andy. The days were irregular, distended, indistinct. I didn’t pay attention to where I was going and walked into doors, dropped coffee cups on the floor, cut my finger while slicing an apple for Alex. I fell down the stairs because I wasn’t watching the steps, and I had bruises covering my legs and arms, dark flowers of broken vessels splotching my skin. They didn’t hurt, all these cuts and bruises. Nothing hurt. Nothing had edges sharp enough to pain me. My heart had been ripped out and transported thousands of miles away, leaving me numb, bloodless. Nothing could get through to me any longer.

  I blamed my suffering on Nikolai. He had gone crazy, I told myself. He had completely overreacted about my weekend in Paris. He was doing all this to get (as Henri had suggested) revenge. But if I’d been able to look at the situation with some distance—something I could not manage until quite a few years later—I would have understood that he wasn’t just out for revenge. He was in pain. He was losing me, and Alex, and he was afraid of losing Nico, too.

  During that time of waiting, I went into my e-mail and looked up the Christmas 2003 messages Nikolai had sent me. I reread each letter, as if to convince myself that the man who had once written such beautiful love letters could not possibly hurt me now.

  —

  ONE AFTERNOON I followed Alex up to the attic playroom. He was glorying in his Easter vacation, so many weeks of unstructured freedom. He had played in a soccer tournament, and now he was in serious pursuit of leisure. He’d set up camp in the attic, creating a magnificent wreckage of books and games and water glasses and bags of microwave popcorn and DVDs and Fly’s toys. Fly slept among the rubble, snoring away as Alex played games on the computer. Some afternoons I would go upstairs with a book or a magazine and stay there with Alex and Fly. Being near my son was one of the few things that helped make me feel better while I waited, and so I tried to be close to him as much as possible, lying down on the couch when he was watching television or sitting in the courtyard when he played Ping-Pong with Andy. In my mind Alex and Nico were linked together, my AlexNico, and if one were here with me, the other would soon be.

  On this particular day, I climbed the attic stairs and collapsed on the futon, winded. There weren’t many stairs to climb, perhaps ten, but I was barely able to pull myself up. I was weak, and although it was my own fault—I’d virtually stopped eating and sleeping—I couldn’t find the will to take care of myself.

  The futon in the attic was hard, the cotton sheets cool. I pressed my cheek against the sheet and watched Alex. He was perched at the edge of his chair playing FIFA 12. I watched him for a long time, noting the way the blue light from the screen danced across his skin. In my malnourished, insomniac, magical state of mind, I could trance out for minutes, watching that light flicker over my son.

  In the far corner to the playroom, there was a basket filled with Nico’s stuffed animals. I got up, pulled the basket next to the futon, and began setting the animals up around the bed, piling stuffed bears and dolphins and frogs and cats at the outermost edge, a plush zoo. I drew a big stuffed frog close and inhaled. It didn’t particularly smell like her—it didn’t have the mixture of shampoo and condensed milk and salt of Nico—but it was her stuffed frog, one she’d slept with since the first year of her life. I pressed my face into its belly, trying to find some trace of my daughter.

  Finally Alex glanced up from his game, as if noticing me for the first time. A look of concern crossed his face, and I remembered the two-year-old Alex visiting me at Maichin Dom, that serious expression in his eyes when he said: You’ll get better now, okay, Mama? You’re better, okay? We had always had an understanding, unspoken, perhaps forged in the womb, that I would be there to care for him. When I couldn’t, he stepped in to care for me. What he might not have realized was how much I depended upon him to keep me steady. He was twelve, and his blond curls had darkened to brown, but he was still my compass, that strong magnetic force that guided me.

  “What’s up?” Alex said.

  I pulled myself up and propped my chin on my elbow. “Nothing’s up,” which of course was not true: Everything was up. Up in the air. Up in arms. Upside down.

  He wrinkled his forehead, studying me. He knew the details of what had happened with Nico. Every night he sat at the dinner table as Andy and I discussed the trip to Bulgaria. He understood that Nico’s absence hurt me and that I was anxious for her return. Still, I was not the type of person to lie around for an hour staring off into space.

  “Are you sick?”

  “I’m worried.”

  “About Nico?”

  “About Nico,” I said. “And about you. I’m worried that all this is making you sad.”

  “I’m okay,” he said, and the way he said it—the confident smile, the indifferent shrug, his practiced ability to hide his feelings—almost made me believe him.

  “Doesn’t any of this upset you?” I said, pushing him to reveal something to me, some flicker of thought, a reaction.

  He shrugged again. “Well, there’s one kind of weird thing that happened before Daddy left,” he said.

  “Really?” I sat upright, facing him. “What was that?”

  “Daddy and Grandma told me I should come and live in Bulgaria,” he said. “They told me I could go with them when they left.”

  “What?” I said, feeling my stomach lurch. It was still hard for me to believe that they had taken Nico, let alone that they’d wanted to take Alex, too. “What did they say to you?”

  “Daddy and Grandma came to my room and told me I could go with them if I wanted. They said that Nico was going to choose them and that I should, too. But I didn’t want to go. I think they got mad about that.”

  “I don’t know why they said that,” I said. “It wasn’t right. You can’t choose something like that.”

  I was trying not to get emotional in front of Alex, but I was furious that they would put him in the middle. Even if Alex had wanted to go to Bulgaria, even if he had packed his bags and jumped into the Citroën of his own volition, they would have had no right to take him without my consent. Just as they’d had no right to take Nico without my permission.

  “I told them I choose you,” he said, meeting my eye. “I choose you.”

  “Come here,” I said, gesturing for him to sit next to me on the futon. He came and leaned against me. I wrapped my arms around him and hugged him. He was still thin as a twig then, a short boy with a lot of growing ahead of him, but I could see the person he would be one day. It was folded into him, his height, his future, waiting to unfurl. In just a few months, after school let out for the year, I would send him to stay with Sam for the summer break, hoping to spare Alex the worst of the divorce. In August, Alex would call to tell me he wanted to stay with his dad for the 2012–13 school year, and although it hurt to be without him, I would agree, understanding that my son needed a father, needed his own father, in order to heal. Sam loved Alex, taught him, cared for him. Alex wanted to stay longer. One year extended to two, then two years extended to three. Alex filled out and grew to be a head taller than me. In our most recent picture together, he’s looking down at me, a big smile on his face. With his father’s help, he was becoming a man, growing into the person I knew he could be.

  —

  THROUGH THESE WEEKS of waiting, Andy kept me company. We spent long mornings in the courtyard, drinking coffee as the sun warmed the flagstones, talking through everything that was happening, going over the events of the past weeks, trying to find solutions. As we talked, he would uncoil the garden hose and water the orange and lemon trees in their clay pots, then spray the rosemary and jasmine. I was not easy to be around on
those mornings. I was by turns angry and sullen, teary and spiteful. And yet Andy was patient with me, generous with his affection, ready to cook lunch, willing to listen as I repeated myself. I could only think of what was happening in terms of story, and I was desperate to figure out the next chapter: What was Nikolai plotting? What would he do next? Andy heard all my speculations: that Nikolai would file for divorce in Bulgaria and never return (a tragedy) or, on the other side of the spectrum, change his mind, drive home, and want to reconcile (a comedy). But while Andy listened and offered advice, neither of us had any idea what to do. My stepfather couldn’t help me sort through the tangle of my emotions. The confusion and the anger, the sickening sense of helplessness—these feelings were mine alone. I had to experience them and metabolize them myself. I was in it alone.

  And so Andy had been, too, so many years before. I understood, as we puzzled over what to do, that Andy had been in the same state of confused despair during his divorce. There’s no easy way through it, he said. You just keep on moving. Time helps you see things more clearly. He had been in a loveless marriage and, when he met my mother, his life pivoted. He had gone through the fallout of a nasty divorce—the shame of leaving his family, the pain of hurting his children, and the financial beating of alimony and child support—only to be hit with the rage and contempt of his twelve-year-old stepdaughter. Me.

  “You know,” Andy said one morning as we sat in the courtyard, “you were pretty hard on me and your mom when we went through this.” He was right. I remembered how venomous I’d been. As a child, I had blamed him for my pain. I had snubbed him when he moved into our house, rejecting his affection, ridiculing his way of doing things, and reminding him that he wasn’t my real father. My dad was wild and exciting and crazy; Andy was a normal, steady guy. I told him he didn’t belong with us, that he should go back to his wife and kids. I rejected him—and his marriage to my mother—every chance I got. I’d tried to salve my wounds by destroying his happiness. I had needed to fight him; it was the only way I knew at the time.