by Mark Henshaw
Fatima, their live-in housekeeper. Mathilde, Madeleine’s teaching colleague, both of whom she was watching over.
I’ll see you in the morning, she said.
If I’m back.
And he turned to leave her, to think again about the new baby that would soon be with her, with him. And the new lives that awaited them.
Chapter 30
HE went downstairs into the basement. Through the concealed corridor that led underground to the house below. It looked as lived-in as his own. He changed. Madeleine knew about the house, but not about this other him. Out into the small courtyard. Through its gated archway. And onto the street, where Thibaud was waiting for him in another car.
He tapped on the passenger-side window.
Thibaud stubbed out his cigarette, leaned across, unlocked the door.
It’s good, Thibaud said, looking at his unruly hair, his glasses, his elbow-patched jacket. You could be a prof. He bent forward to see his shoes. Yes, very good, he said again, nodding. Unrecognisable.
Thibaud checked the rear-view mirror, put the car into gear, pulled out. Down the narrow street. A few streetlamps coming on. The paling sky.
I’m sorry, Thibaud said, when the air began to thicken.
Jovert did not reply. Silence, he knew, was a useful tool. People didn’t like silences. They waited for them to fill. Or filled them for you. What had General Saressault said? In an empty set, everything is possible. One’s worst imaginings. The death of a loved one. A child. Your own. The as-yet-unuttered truth.
An empty set—an occupied cell.
Yes, there was something exquisite about silence. Which now began to fill the car, until it began to suffocate them. Or one of them. Thibaud wound his window down.
Then they were turning into the street, the one he was not meant to know about, that led down to the harbour. It was already busy. The shops reopening. People beginning to re-emerge. Thibaud slowed the car.
Again? Jovert said. Nice to see you, again.
I know, sir. I know. It was stupid.
Thibaud raised his hand from the steering wheel, pale palm up, as if the answer to his dilemma lay out there on the street.
But Jovert was watching the men walking ahead of them. Walking as though the car weren’t there. As though it were invisible. As though they were invisible.
Do you think she knows?
Madeleine’s not stupid, Thibaud. It was the first thing she asked.
And?
Slow down, he said.
He leaned forward, scanned the buildings to his right. A nondescript, dust-covered Citroën crawling down the broken street. The wake of men behind them seemingly what propelled the car forward. Shops, cafés, hole-in-the-wall shoe-repair places, tobacconists, car clutch-plates, glass wares, coffee beans, dust-filled kitchen utensils—most with their owners sitting on stools outside, studying the broken pavement at their feet.
Is this it? Up ahead?
Yes.
Thibaud slowed almost to a stop. The car rose and fell now on the potholed roadway like a tiny barque.
Okay. Pull over.
Thibaud pulled the car up onto the cracked pavement. Men spilled out around them. It was quiet now. Jovert had experienced this before, many times. An oasis of newly minted silence in an otherwise swirling street. No one talking. No one looking their way. The men streaming past them might come close to the car, but not one of them would touch it. Everybody knew.
Jovert could see the burnt-out shop front. The blown-out brickwork. The neatly circular black after-image stamped on the surrounding walls. The footpath. A few fragments of uncollected glass still glinting in the afternoon sun.
How many dead?
The owner. Hamid. Two customers. Two children playing outside. His. Seven injured. One still critical.
Hamid. Didn’t I recruit him? Two years ago. A bit more. Just before GS left. Didn’t we bring him in?
GS?
General Saressault.
Okay.
And Hamid?
Yes, we did. We brought him in. Once. In July ’57.
And?
Useful. Very useful.
Jovert sat in silence. You could read an explosion, its blast trajectory, its detonation pattern, distribution, the way its haloed scorch-mark radiated out: all perfect, a textbook example—this explosion ‘roseate’. Professional, perfectly judged, beautiful.
He did the calculations. No more than 120 grams of the new plastique. The ‘drop’, the ‘gift’, the ‘visitor’, whatever you wanted to call it, placed just inside the door. The blast crater shallow. The sphere of influence—out, up, and in. It was this that killed, the compression echo: being hit first from the front, then, a millisecond later, from behind. In an enclosed space the shock wave shredded whatever was in between. You didn’t need shrapnel, just physics, to kill.
He looked up through the windscreen, at the wall above them, then leaned across to scan the surface of the adjacent wall. The pit marks high up on the façades, the pits not deep—glass fragments, rubble, nothing significant. The lower wall clean. But you could see where the damage started. A kind of low-tide line about a metre up. Scatter marks above this. There must have been a car parked where they were. And one just outside the shop. Theirs? To concentrate the blast.
He could see it now: cars parked either side of the street; the drop, two couriers, one a customer, asking for something, directions, the cost of a repair; the other, a friend, waiting just inside the door, one hand in his pocket, smoking. At the counter—thank you, thank you, you have been most helpful. The double handshake. Then the quick, stiff-bodied bow. Did they see the two children? Would it have mattered? The collateral benefit immeasurable. Pragmatic. The message unambiguous.
He was sure he knew who did this. He recognised the signature. Its unsentimental precision. Its telltale logic. He’d seen this perfection before. Not that he would ever find out. Their mantra: don’t ask what you don’t need to know.
But Hamid had been one of his. What had happened in the time he’d been away? Why wasn’t he told?
Do they know I’m here?
No, this is just between you and me.
Which is the way it will stay.
A car horn sounded behind them. Jovert turned to look back through the rear window. But it wasn’t for them. A waiting hand cart. A car behind it. Who had not seen them.
He turned back to watch the faces of the Arabs walking up towards them. How some were caught by surprise by the sudden blockage in front of them. He saw how they looked unthinkingly up. How they saw first the car, then the men in it. Then quickly looked away. This endless flow of men passing unimpeded around them, an invisible boulder in an uphill stream.
And this wasn’t one of ours?
No, sir. Not that I know. Paris is worried—about later. If any of this gets out.
You wouldn’t tell me if you knew, would you?
No, sir.
It looks like one of ours.
No response.
I guess what Paris doesn’t know, Paris doesn’t know…And the plastique, where is that coming from?
Tunisia. Morocco. The FLN.
You mean, if it’s them.
Who knows? You saw how easy it was to bring something in.
What about the widow?
She says she doesn’t know us.
Jovert took one last look out the window.
Okay, he said. I’ve seen enough.
Thibaud released the handbrake. The car rolled forward. The men in front of them, in their ancient robes, with their walking staffs, did not move aside. It was as though the car, with the two of them inside, were some recently captured exotic animal they were leading down to God knows what at the foot of this stinking hill.
He hated to think of what would happen if everything really got out of control. To date, it hadn’t been a war. Not really. That was why they were there, to make sure that that kind of chaos never took hold.
Does she know that you were here? Thibaud asked.
Madeleine?
Yes.
I don’t think so. I told her I knew your father, that you were one of my star pupils.
I didn’t know that, Thibaud said.
What?
That you knew my father.
Didn’t he tell you?
No.
Jovert was looking through the windscreen at the men again, at how their dark heads seemed to float on a strange, undulating wave in front of them.
Well, I did, Jovert said. I knew him well.
A small van blocked the roadway ahead. The space was tight. Thibaud manoeuvred the car up onto the footpath. Two old men playing cards gathered up their stools, went inside. Jovert felt the small resistance of the abandoned coffee glass against the tyre, heard the tiny splintering detonation.
Merde.
They could have got out. Seen what had happened. But what was the point? The tyre was either punctured, or it wasn’t. They’d soon know. And the two old men would have long since disappeared.
I’m sorry, sir, Thibaud says again after a while. It was stupid of me.
Don’t worry, Thibaud, he says. It’s not a problem. You and I have never had this conversation. And I have never been here.
The car bumps down the uneven pavement. There is no one walking towards them now. It is only backs you see. You had to admire these people, how efficient their communication systems were, how quickly bad news spread.
Chapter 31
THEY said the city was a labyrinth. But it wasn’t true. If it had been, it would have been easy. No, it was a maze, a confusing series of cross streets, folded-back laneways, cul-de-sacs, blind alleys, dead ends. There was a time he could have walked to his ‘office’ in the Villa les Tourelles from the house blindfolded without missing a step. But not now. It had changed. Or perhaps his memory had changed it for him. Whatever the case, now, in the library, once he stepped inadvertently off the beaten track he was lost. The unremembered was so much more vast than the remembered ever was.
They sat, in the beginning, in the evening, at the small wooden table on the balcony, each with their glass of wine, reading their papers, writing their reports, the music from the old city insinuating its way up through the night, curling lovingly around the pencilled minarets, through the snippets of half-heard conversation, up and over the high, white walls, to them, like the smoke rising from the mosquito coil in front of them. From time to time, they watched the intermittent progress of a freighter entering the harbour. Another. The fitful, distant reverberations of exploding shells oddly comforting. Sometimes, a helicopter would sweep up over them, impossibly low, impossibly fast, the urgent hollow thwop-thwop-thwop of its rotors slicing the music into ribboned pieces.
They’re busy tonight, Madeleine would say. Did you know?
Hmm? Noncommittal. Still reading.
I’m only joking. And she would nudge his leg gently under the table.
Sometimes, when he knew in which direction to look, what time, when he remembered, he would wait for the first far-off night-sky glow. He always counted. Could not help himself. The time it took for the faint reverberation to reach them. One, sometimes two. Three hundred and forty metres a second. Three seconds a kilometre. Forty-five seconds—fifteen kilometres. A minute—twenty. Each soft boom a piece of history already written. By soldiers he knew. Sometimes commanded. It was like looking into the clear night sky, at the thousands and thousands of other tiny beating worlds that surrounded them. Except that what was written out there was written millions of years ago.
He’d glance up at Madeleine, at her lamp-lit frowning face. Her chin hunched on one bent-back hand, a pen in the other. Her eyes reading.
They’re busy tonight, he would hear her say.
Now, then, a long time ago.
See, he was good at this. He had been there. On the balcony. With Madeleine again. In the Bibliothèque Nationale. Except that the chair opposite him was empty.
Chapter 32
LATER, much later, he realised he had married her because she had somebody else’s laugh.
She’d called him Jo-Jo when he was eight. His uncle’s mistress. His father’s brother. The younger son, who had done so well.
My little Jo-Jo. How’s my little Jo-Jo today? Mon petit beau. My beautiful, beautiful boy.
He’d met her in Paris. Once or twice. She talked to him. She took the time.
Or at his uncle’s summer house.
I saw you this morning, Jo-Jo. Kicking the ball. Fixing the firewood stack. Lying on the timber table. Staring up at the sky. What were you thinking, Jo-Jo? Come on, you can tell me.
Crouching down, her two hands on his two knees. She would look into his eyes as though something was swimming there. He remembered her mouth. Her lovely, slow-breathing summer dress. Her skin. How he ached for her.
Sometimes she called him Gusto. Augusto. Our Gusto? Mi Gusto. And she’d cuff him on the chin.
When she got bored, she’d say, Come on, Jo-Jo. Let’s go. Get out of here. Won’t you, please?
As if there was any doubt.
I’m off, she’d say. Con mucho Gusto. Or, Con mi muchacho, Gusto. With my gorgeous gallant beau. We’re going for a walk.
And she’d get up. She would leave with him, hand in hand, his family’s tabled faces turned towards the door. Her laugh as sharp as darting swallows, as if it was she who had set them free.
Once. A sun-filled, insect afternoon: Tell me what you think, Jo-Jo.
He thought of his uncle. His father’s brother. Who had done so well. Of his ant-heap balding patch descending the stairs. Who was older. A lot older than she. Whose first wife had nailed him to a cross, when she found out. Although he’d seen his hands.
His uncle—who never spoke to him.
Do you think I should? He loved her voice, when she talked to him. When she was this close.
Marry him, she meant.
Not everybody was happy. About the wedding. His grandmother: She’s not even French. She’s from Madrid!
Her grandmother was a seamstress! Thank God she’s not here. At least she did the right thing. Last year.
He so, so liked her. And her name. Lina. Carolina—semiquavered, like her laughter. He lay on his back on the outside bench. Ca-ro-li-na. Carolina. The faster he said it, the faster it slipped off his pebbled tongue.
He fought them off. In her absence. Standing at the top of the table. When she wasn’t there to defend herself. When cruel things crawled out of his grandmother’s mouth. Slid down her chin.
No, don’t say that! That’s not true! Why are you so mean? She’s nice. She’s beautiful. She talks to me. She sees me. I love her.
He went out to see the tables in the sun. Thirteen of them. Under the olive trees. The cicadas already thrumming. Thick white linen tablecloths hanging to the ground. The complex coded silverware all laid out. Face all the little tadpole spoons towards the edge. There, that’s better. Flowers on the biggest table. The magic space underneath a long-tunnelled tent. He lay on the ground in his new white world. The white cloth sides undulating like gills. Like sails. They could be moving. A little kick or two just to keep up.
In the corner of his newfound ceiling, a blue-pen love heart, an arrow: Céline loves Jules. Up on his elbows. A closer look. No, not Jules. Julie. Céline loves Julie. He wondered what it meant. Now voices from the house. Coming. What’s happened here? These spoons. Two polished black-leather shoes under each white hem. Moving in step. The glasses clinking. This one’s chipped. Here, let me see. The flat black cockroaches stopping. Then on their sideways march again. Towards him. Lie quickly on his side. Here they come. Here-they-come! Their beetle-belly laces done up tight. A sprinkle of grass on each black toe. Past him now.
Okay, that’s it. One to go.
The screen door slams.
Jo-Jo. Jo—Jo? Have either of you seen Jo-Jo?