The Godmother

by Cayre, Hannelore; Smee, Stephanie;

  ‘They tell us that old people need to keep themselves hydrated, but I’m always finding the little Evian bottles I bring in because nobody gives him anything to drink, and they’re sitting there unopened… And the days I’m not there to feed him, they just put the meal-tray down in his room and close the door. Bon appétit, Monsieur Léger, they say, but nobody gives a damn whether he actually eats or not… And did you see how they’ve dressed Mother? It’s 35 degrees and she’s wearing a woollen jumper… And her escape… That car just knocked her down on the access ramp like a dog… Can you imagine if she had got any further? And how dare they ask us to pay for that anti-wandering bracelet she ripped off! I’d like to know where all our money goes.’

  Each new grievance would set off the daughter’s sobs again. The situation of that family was so ghastly she could have gone on for hours, and it was a story I knew off by heart.

  ‘It’s always like that over summer, with staff away on holidays. If you like, you can share the extra carer I’ve taken on for my mother…’

  ‘Oh yes, that would be fantastic…’ she said to me, eyes full of gratitude.

  Her brother intervened immediately, to explain that unfortunately they had no way of paying for it. Their two families would be staying in Paris that summer and they would take it in turns at their parents’ bedside.

  ‘We’re completely skint. My father’s pension barely covers half his expenses, and as for my mother, it’s all coming out of our pockets. We spend our time counting our money. We asked them about applying for guardianship, but everybody tells us it’s a white elephant… over-complicated and not worth the effort. First you have to wait a year to get it before a judge and once the decision is made, the accounts are blocked and you can’t withdraw another cent for months except with a judge’s authorisation which you never get either because the judge is over-worked or he’s away on holiday.’

  ‘So what are you meant to do? Fake your parents’ signature to withdraw their pension money from their accounts?’

  ‘Precisely.’

  ‘You know, we’re all in the same boat…’

  ‘We need at least ten thousand euros a month to cover all the costs. It’s huge. The notary advised us to sell their apartment for a life annuity and then bank the income in our accounts. We’ve been advertising for six months now, but nobody’s interested in such an expensive annuity transaction. It won’t be long before I have to sell my own apartment to pay for this damned aged care facility.’

  ‘Where’s your parents’ apartment?’

  ‘On Rue Monge. A three-room place with 72 squares.’

  ‘Actually, you know, I might be interested! I’ll be straight with you: as long as the initial capital payment is very small, I’m prepared to pay you what you need as a monthly annuity.’

  Hope was dawning in their eyes.

  ‘You could take on an extra full-time aide for the two of them and then take it in turns between you so one of you, at least, can have a holiday… But your parents will have to sign the contract in front of a notary, and all that…’

  ‘Our notary is willing to go into nursing homes and get old people to sign things – no matter what condition they’re in – provided there’s no chance of anyone suing. We’re the only two children and you only have to look at our parents to see they’re never coming out of here.’

  ‘As I said, I’m interested.’

  ‘You do realise you’d be saving our lives?’

  ‘There is just one small thing. I can pay you whatever annuity you want, but it has to be in cash. I’m not going to lie to you, I have a large amount at home that belongs to my mother. It’s not dirty money, just the savings of an old and slightly mad Jewish woman who always thought it was just a matter of time before the Germans came after her again.’

  ‘We can deposit the money into our account, that’s not a problem,’ said the Léger daughter.

  ‘No, no, we can’t do that!’ objected the son.

  ‘Well then, we’re never going to manage!’ she said, with a display of dramatic despair, as if the fact that you weren’t supposed to launder money was her brother’s fault. She began to sob again, and he resumed his sighing.

  ‘If it makes you feel any better, the manager of Les Eoliades is not at all particular. On the contrary, I’d say the cash would allow her to pay for thousands of hours overtime off the books. Perhaps you don’t realise, but this place is owned by an American pension fund that greatly appreciates any money it can save on its staff.’

  ‘OK, I’ll raise it with the notary. It’s true, when you’re in our situation, you can’t afford too delicate a conscience.’

  ‘What do you do for work, if you don’t mind my asking?’

  ‘I’m a detective.’

  ‘Small world! My partner is too – and I’m a court translator.’

  There we all were, part of that great, middle-class mass being strangled by its elderly. It was reassuring.

  The Léger children would have sold their parents’ apartment for around 750,000 euros, so we agreed on a capital sum of 50,000 and an annuity of 20,000 a month for the life of their hemiplegic and aphasic 86-year-old father and their mother with Alzheimer’s – a period of time estimated generously at three years, given the desperate look of them. So, nobody was being conned. As the papers for the apartment had already been drawn up in preparation for a possible sale, and obtaining a loan is a formality when you already own a mortgageable property, it took barely a week for my bank to lend me the money for the capital sum and the purchase of my life annuity.

  Meanwhile, I went to visit my future property with the Léger son.

  Whether because he felt awkward about entering the private realm of his parents, or else from some basic, animalistic psychological reaction in the face of death, he declined to cross the threshold, but encouraged me with a wave to make myself at home. Inside, it smelt musty. Dust particles danced in a ray of sunlight which filtered through the drawn curtains, revealing a dirty interior in very poor upkeep – but nothing, I estimated, that would defeat a Polish handyman. The cupboards, which I opened one by one, were filled with clothes and old bits and pieces covered in a patina of grime. It would all have to be thrown out, and I knew that once again I would be the one burdened with that task. It even entered my mind that the Légers were happy to offload their parents’ place just so they didn’t have to sort through their things.

  First my father, then my husband, my mother and now other people’s parents: you had to wonder if I wasn’t somehow destined to clear people’s lives of their worldly possessions, one rubbish bag at a time. Regardless, the apartment was in a great location, only a few metres from the remains of the Arènes de Lutèce. I was delighted – at last I had something decent to pass on to my girls.

  As we all sat around the notary’s large desk, I buried my hands into the side pockets of my summer dress and rolled my two fat wads of twenty thousand euros around between my fingers and the palm of my hand. Like two fat pebbles. When the time came and everything had been signed, I laid my pebbles on the table. Luc Léger grabbed them, the way you might pick up something a little dodgy, swiftly offloading them into the hands of his sister and scrawling me a receipt for two months’ rent. He may have found it all distasteful, but it was clear from the sparkle in her eyes that she was fond of a bit of dough.

  Summer flashed by at top speed, and then it was the start of autumn… Attacks, strikes, heatwaves…

  My daughters returned from their holidays and went back to work. Philippe took three weeks’ holiday with his son to show him some African giraffes; and I busied myself with my new apartment which I cleared out and had completely renovated for 60,000 euros by one Mikolaj and his team.

  I also took myself off for a few days to Switzerland, where, incidentally, they had just adopted a law against money laundering and had placed a ceiling on cash payments of… 90,000 euros per transaction. I went down to the Hotel Belvedere – the one in the photo of The Little Fireworks
Collector – where, in days gone by, I had known my way around; I was determined to enjoy myself and to start my endless summer at last.

  It was my grandmother, Rosa, who had started the trend for holidaying in this mythical hotel in 1946, with the money she had inherited from her new husband. Her sister Ilona, who had sought refuge in London at the time of the Anschluss, had established a philanthropic foundation over there, whose members were very, very old gentlemen, barely aware they were alive, but who were prepared to come to the aid of good, deported Jewish women. And so it was that my grandmother had married a certain 92-year-old Mr Williams in his home in November 1945, a man she had known for five minutes, all the time it took to strip every one of his heirs of their inheritance. He was dead within a few months of the ceremony and after having come into money – after all, one could hardly sue a good Jewish deportee – she paid for herself and her daughter, my mother, to do what together they had dreamed of in the camp: take a long and luxurious holiday in a neutral, German-speaking country, eating cakes while looking out at a lake. And that’s how the very chic English lady by the name of Mrs Rose Williams paved the way for future generations of her family at the Belvedere – in the process kicking off her own endless summer, which unfortunately only lasted fifteen years or so because her body, worn out by the deprivations suffered during the war, gave out at the age of about sixty.

  I’m under no illusions – had it instead been Rosa Zielberman, the pleb from the Prater district, who had attempted to make the reservation for that month of August in 1946, she would have received the pleasant reply that the hotel was fully booked, and none of us would ever have set foot in the place.

  My father came to join the two women in 1955 and I joined them in 1963, after my birth. It became a family custom to start our summer travels with a stay at the Belvedere so my mother could recover from her exhausting year of doing nothing. We used to book from one year to the next and would always arrive on the same dates so we could enjoy the fireworks on the 1st of August. My husband replaced my father at our side and my daughters were born. Then he died, leaving behind an all female table setting, until my mother was no longer able to pay for our holiday. After a long absence, here I was returning alone for the first time.

  Known around the world for its magnificent view over the lake, the Belvedere had been in the same family since its establishment in the 19th century. Three generations of Hürschs had greeted my relatives in their solid building with the scowling expressions of the professional Swiss hotelier. Their ultra-Calvinist austerity effectively kept away all the nouveaux riches and the wogs, who would find in the hotel none of the noisy distractions which they craved. No spa, no swimming pool, no hotel boutique, no conference room. No background music of the synthesised whale song variety, no video game room with screaming kids running around. Nothing but silence and an unobstructed view, in return for an astronomical bill. That was true luxury, the sort that created a sense of exclusivity. The last time I had set foot there, back when my mother still had a bit of money, I’d heard somebody ask at reception whether there was internet. Monsieur Hürsch had replied contemptuously that he did not offer that sort of service, as if they’d been asking for prostitutes.

  But when my taxi dropped me at the entrance, I didn’t recognise a thing. The hotel had disappeared, or rather it had been swallowed up by a glass mega-structure in the shape of a parallelepiped. Not a single familiar face remained amongst either the clientele or the staff, as if the Hürschs had never existed. No more little chocolate on my goose down duvet. In fact, no more feathered duvet at all in my aseptic, taupe-coloured room. Everything had become beige and taupe – curtains, bedspread, carpet… The non-colours par excellence, that you marry with white and black to create the ‘cocooning chic’ look of every luxury hotel in the world.

  The view over the lake was still there, of course, except that if you lowered your eyes, a hideous extension had replaced the pretty gardens where the little fireworks collector had taken her first steps. It was when I saw niqabs circling in the Swiss-blue sky under the petal-shaped wings of para-gliders that the penny finally dropped: the Belvedere had been swallowed up by a sovereign wealth fund from the Gulf.

  As my gaze followed those little black bells, I let out a sigh of philosophical weariness. Among all the veiled little girls sitting on the terrace of the Belvedere, their noses tilted skywards, was there perhaps one who might be allowed a strawberry melba ice cream drowning in sugar syrup and Chantilly cream? And if such a girl existed, was she too busy dreaming, as I had at her age, of living a life less ordinary?

  I deposited my things in my mole-coloured hole so I could go and wander the shopping streets without further ado and buy everything I had always coveted, and which I could finally afford. But I realised very quickly, walking past the jewellers’ and fashion boutiques, that I didn’t feel like any of it. I had barely paused in front of the platinum, gold or caviar-infused anti-aging cream at 600 euros for 300mls, when the sales girl, like a lab assistant in her white coat, appeared: It’s not just a simple anti-aging cream, Madame, it’s an experience. Smearing rare metals or animals on the road to extinction onto my face in order to achieve eternal youth bordered on the stuff of metaphysics… You might as well just eat the money – chop it up and make a luxury nutritional supplement, like royal jelly, I thought, making only myself laugh.

  In the end, I contented myself with being a so-called ‘Japanese ant’: that is, with laundering my money by buying four Fancy Vivid Pink 0.5 carat diamonds at 90,000 euros each (to be stored in a lip-stick), as well as a Hermès Kelly bag in red crocodile for the same price, all of which would be resold at auction on my return to Paris. Pink diamonds and brand-name handbags sell like hotcakes, something I knew from my ogling of Parisian auction house sales catalogues. The only personal item I permitted myself was a terribly expensive Italian leather collar for DNA and a matching leash.

  After this spot of shopping, I returned to my hotel, alone and silent, and spent my first evening on my balcony, admiring my elegant dog, lost in thought.

  My endless summer had not begun at all how I had imagined it.

  I was supposed to be overjoyed to be blowing some dough, some moolah, to borrow the language of the intellectuals currently populating my life… Yes… but buy what, do what? I was certain that not a single one of the young dealers whose conversations I had been translating for almost twenty-five years had had to cope with looking after a vomiting child, or one with braces, or with paying for school trips, or threading cords back through hoodies – or any of the small realities that threaten to drown women in the quicksand of motherhood. Life had run over me, like the iron I had used every evening so my children, despite the shortage of money, always wore impeccable clothes. I had become a bourgeois petite madame, my wings clipped by material preoccupations. And, contrary to what the ads would have us believe, it was not at all clear how you were supposed to alter your behaviour, once all those habits had become ingrained.

  I ordered my dinner from room service. It goes without saying that there was no Saint-Gallen sausage on the menu, but instead an oxymoron by the name of Luxury Halal Cuisine.

  I went to bed early. As soon as I fell asleep, the sewage system that served as my unconscious overflowed, flooding my mind with a continuous stream of incoherent scraps of dreams: me waiting for Scotch, my feet sinking into burning hot summer asphalt; Philippe fastening my Magnum around his nude torso like it was his service weapon; DNA swallowing mouthfuls of water, desperately trying to cool down his sausage-shaped body in the freezing water of the lake, tail wagging furiously… In the end, I got up at five in the morning with a head full of metal filings and a desperate need to talk to somebody. I called Philippe, and then, ashamed, changed my mind. He called me straight back but I didn’t answer. Out in the hotel garden, it was already all go, thanks to the Al Fajr – the favourite prayer of the Prophet, who must have been a morning person. I headed down towards the lake for an invigorating dip, but
that wasn’t to be either; a family of extremely threatening swans blocked my path.

  At six o’clock, I was at breakfast, pensively buttering my Weggli. These typically Swiss bread rolls bear a striking resemblance to a pair of buttocks, a fact that suddenly struck me as scandalously haram. What the hell were the Qatari management up to? For the second time since arriving at the Belvedere, I found myself laughing alone. The rest of my day stretched before me like the road to Calvary.

  By midday, I was on the train home.

  The first thing that leaped out at me when I opened the door to my apartment was my banana-coloured two hundred euro banknote stuck into the frame of The Little Fireworks Collector.

  All of a sudden, the meaning of the message written on it seemed both crystal clear and troublingly apt. You’ll be hungry again in an hour is what you say to children when they feed themselves rubbish – and it was precisely the conclusion I had reached during my lightning trip to Switzerland. What I needed wasn’t piles of cash to splash; nor was I interested in climbing the social ladder. No… I just wanted to rediscover a bit of the little fireworks collector’s innocence. I realised there wouldn’t be any endless summer as long as I was unable to rid myself of my anxiety about what tomorrow would bring, the anxiety I had lived with for so many years. Before I could spend a cent on myself, I had to accumulate sufficient money so that my girls would each at least have a roof over their head.

  Until that point had been reached, I would count my pennies like a shopkeeper. Then we’ll see if I’m hungry, I said to myself.