She was right. The sun was already sinking behind the mountain. If he were to go down and get the urn and the shovel and then come back up, this whole side would be in the dark.
“Since you’ll be free this evening,” the woman said, “would you give me the pleasure of dining with me? I know, you’re in mourning but I can’t stand to eat alone any more. Neither can you for that matter, I noticed earlier when I came back from my walk.”
He wanted to spend this last evening alone with the ashes but how could he refuse when the Dutch woman had just relieved him of such a great concern? After all, dinner would last for an hour, two at most.
“You’re right, I don’t like eating alone in a restaurant.”
“Nine o’clock then? At the café where I saw you at noon. It’s the only one where they don’t play that never-ending music and you can still hear the lapping of the waves.”
28
SHE ARRIVED AT the café after a shower, hair done, scented, and wearing a dark silk dress with a generously plunging neckline that reminded Doctor Maras of the one that Alma had worn when they had their final meal together. As well, just like Alma over the past few years, before she sat down she would check the sources of light and choose a table where the lighting was softer, on the pretext that they would have a better view of the bay. On the other hand Alma, who usually applied perfume to all her pulse points, used none on Leros, the better to appreciate the scents all around her.
“One evening, during my first time on Leros,” the Dutch woman said when she’d finished settling in at the table, “I was sitting here and, when I saw the full moon appear on the horizon, I wished for a power failure. Suddenly, I swear, all the lights went out. For a good halfhour, the moon alone lit up the island, as it must have done at the beginning of the world. At the age I was then, I saw it as a message from fate: Every day would be for me a blank page that I could cover as I wanted, according to my dreams and my wishes.”
She heaved a sigh that raised her bosom and then, with the ease that people have when travelling, as if it were less painful to open up to a stranger one will never see again, she told him the story of her life.
Her name was Yannick Haakman. After studying Fine Arts in Amsterdam she had spent a year on Leros with her lover, he painting oils, she doing watercolours, until they knew every hue that earth, sky and sea can display between sunrise and sunset.
“Then we went back to Amsterdam where we did our best to tear one another to pieces.”
She made a nervous little laugh that heaved her bosom again and her perfume wafted to him.
“I apologize. You came to dispose of your wife’s ashes and I keep moaning and groaning. Were you married for a long time?”
“Twenty-four years.”
“Twenty-four years! Bravo! What was her name? Was she a doctor too? Do you have any children?”
She was as curious as Alma and her questions kept taking him back to the past so that now and then he forgot where he was, despite the water lapping at his feet.
“An actress! How did you meet? You worked in such different fields.”
Or:
“For some time now I’ve been seeing spots floating in my field of vision. What could that mean?”
Or else:
“Weren’t you afraid when you were your daughter’s age that you might make the wrong decision about your future? We’re catapulted onto the stage of life without knowing our part, forced to improvise everything. And we aren’t given a second chance to correct even one gesture, or to go over a word.”
She listened to his replies with her head bent to one side, now and then watching the movement of his lips or his hands, then her gaze shifted to small boats swaying gently at the end of the jetty, then towards the lights of Agia Marina, the little harbour of Platanos that streamed across the bay to them, and a shadow of nostalgia swept over her face.
“Is there really an age when we aren’t afraid of something? Even at my age and after all I’ve had by way of adventures, however much I wish, before I leave Leros for good, not for a power failure — those things only happen once in your life — I wish for an hour in the arms of a man, somewhere beside the water where there are no lights, but I don’t dare ask for fear I’d be laughed at.”
Doctor Maras looked down.
The woman’s fingers fiddled briefly around her glass. Then:
“Yep, life doesn’t have many parts for aging women only in the theatre and the movies.”
She drained her glass in a gulp.
To avoid looking at her, he busied himself pouring what was left of the wine into the two glasses.
“Is that to give me courage?” she asked with the audacity of despair.
This time he did look her in the eye, gently.
“I want to spend the night with Alma.”
The woman forced herself to smile.
“I’m happy for you. Your journey will end well and you’ll go home with the satisfaction of your mission accomplished.”
Raising her glass, she added:
“May your joie de vivre return very soon.”
29
HE STAYED UP all night with the ashes and left his room before dawn when all the islanders were still in bed.
Leaving the lights of the hotel behind him he plunged into the silence and darkness of a winding road that rose between houses buried in eucalyptus and pines, climbed two hundred metres beyond the last one, hearing nothing but the crunch of pebbles under his feet.
When he finally stopped, the sky was beginning to turn pale at the approach of day, and wasps were already buzzing around a caper bush.
The air was mild and a pale halo surrounded the stars still twinkling in the sky, while below the hill, small crests fringed with foam broke over the feet of the sleeping village.
He put down the urn and began to dig the dew-damp soil while a few metres away from him two sparrows were quarrelling over the carcass of a cicada.
He did not waver until it was time to place the urn in the ground.
“I’ll miss you, my love. Your laugh, your sparkling eyes, the energy you put into everything, that revived me when I came home in the evening, drained … I was so happy with you that I thought I would never know the agony of loneliness. But don’t worry: I’ll let nothing show and I’ll do my best to help Mélissa to find her way and to rediscover the beauty of the world. And one day I’ll come back here with her children. I’ll take them to see the place where I buried their grandmother’s ashes and just as you’d have done I’ll teach them to say jasmine, oregano, and thyme, not simply the words but how to recognize their scent …”
In the distance, a rooster crowed. And as if it were Alma expressing her gratitude with that song, it was with a lighter heart that he took the shovel to cover the hole that now contained the ashes of his beloved, while the orange ball of the new day was emerging on the horizon, accompanied by the ringing of his cell phone.
He was so far away in his thoughts that for a moment, he was stunned.
“Hello?” he said finally.
“It’s Franck. Sorry to wake you up but it’s important.”
“Did something happen?”
“Yes. Are you still on Leros?”
“Yes, why?”
“You mustn’t leave the ashes there.”
“Don’t tell me you’re going to bug me about that again?!”
“If you insist on respecting your wife’s last wishes, listen to what I have to say.”
“I’m listening.”
“The letter Groslin had you read wasn’t written by Alma. I’ve just found out. I’m shooting nights and the actress is a friend of Ninon Conti. We were chatting and she told me that this afternoon, Ninon talked to her about Alma’s last wishes. I was right, eh? Groslin couldn’t help boasting about it to his wife.”
“Will you get to the point,” Doctor Maras murmured. “What did Groslin tell his wife?”
“You won’t breathe a word to Hélène? If she found out that you heard it from me she�
��d kill me. Promise?”
“I won’t say a word. What did Groslin tell his wife?”
“Mélissa had contacted him to say you were coming to Paris and to tell him she’d send him a letter that she was going to write, imitating her mother’s signature. That was why he made you wait another day. He wasn’t in Marseille; he was waiting for the letter from your daughter.”
There are people like that, embittered people who won’t admit that others are not like them, and who try to contaminate them with their bitterness at all cost. And now that he had spat out his venom, Franck concluded dejectedly though in fact he was delighted:
“I knew this news would come as a crushing blow but I can’t keep mum about a deceit like that, knowing how much you care about doing your very best at the task that Alma imposed on you.”
30
LONG AFTER FRANCK had hung up he was still staring at his cell phone, lost, while the sun was giving back their colours to the sea and earth, and from the distance came the sound and its echo made by a woman beating a rug on her balcony.
When finally he emerged from his thoughts, he looked at his watch, realized that Mélissa hadn’t gone to bed yet — in Montreal it was still the night before — and called her.
“When does your plane get in?” she asked blithely.
He wasn’t the type to use cunning, especially not with his daughter with whom relations had always been candid. He asked her then straightforwardly if she had written the letter Groslin had given him.
“What? Who told you that? It can’t be Groslin, you wouldn’t have got to Leros.”
So as not to involve Franck and screw things up in his marriage he told his daughter that he’d re-read the letter and decided that it wasn’t Alma’s writing. Too nervous and forced, as if someone were trying to imitate her.
“Too nervous?” Mélissa exclaimed. “She’d just found out that she was dying!”
“If she was so agitated, why hadn’t she phoned Groslin instead of writing? Now that I think of it, why didn’t Groslin bring me the envelope too?”
“Ask him.”
“Mélissa, I can’t take any more of this nightmare.”
“What about me? I’ve just lost my mother, I don’t know what’s going on in my life, my father disappears just when I need him most, and all you can think of to tell me … Shit! When will we see the end of those goddamn ashes?”
She could not go on; choked by a sob, she hung up.
When Doctor Maras came back to the hotel with the urn and the shovel, he was in such a state that when the Dutch woman, who was having breakfast in the garden, noticed him, she rushed over, saying:
“What happened? They wouldn’t let you bury the ashes there either?”
He was so shaken he told her everything. But when he said that he was considering calling Serge Groslin, she burst out laughing, making her bosom heave.
“It seems as if you absolutely want to find out that she was happiest with another man!”
“Not at all. I just want to be sure …”
“But it’s obvious that your daughter wrote the letter. And it’s very much to her credit. You ought to be wondering instead why she wrote it. It certainly wasn’t to deceive you because her mother loved that French man, but to make you stop searching. And so that you would take care of her a little.”
“She just had to ask me …”
“And overwhelm you with her academic worries when you were mourning your wife?”
She wrapped an arm around him tenderly.
“Take the ashes home and try before it’s too late to save what can still be saved. You don’t know how lucky you are to have a daughter like her.”
31
DOCTOR MARAS WAS back in Montreal twenty-six hours after departing Leros and one week after taking off for Paris. Mélissa hadn’t come to the airport to meet him. He had called from Athens to let her know when he would arrive but her cell was still dead so he went home by taxi.
Mélissa had taken good care of her mother’s garden. The lawn was mowed, the plants properly watered and growing green and vigorous. Even the bird-feeder was well-stocked with seeds. Mélissa wasn’t there however to welcome her father. Doctor Maras took some time to unpack, shower, and make coffee to recharge his batteries: They would have lots to tell each other when his daughter came home.
He would say nothing more about the letter, he’d be careful not to preach to Mélissa about her education. Like him, she had opted for medicine when very young. While he had never regretted his choice, his daughter’s enthusiasm had waned and she felt a need to make her way towards other horizons, devote her dreams to a profession not so “tedious.” As if he’d become a surgeon just to make piles of money. But he won’t stand up for himself, won’t even try to convince her that talent, passion, and a vocation are not the prerogative of artists only. His daughter was living the first real heartbreak of her life. It was his duty to listen to her, to say the words that would most likely bring her strength and comfort in her suffering, to let her sail on her own. Even if she was toying with the idea of studying theatre like her mother, he wouldn’t object, though he was well aware of the problems that she’d encounter along the way. It was he in fact who should change his attitude, look at his child through different eyes, with no illusions, and let her surprise him. Mélissa had both feet on the ground, she had curiosity and drive. She would just have to rediscover passion to start making progress again.
But there was no sign of Mélissa and two cups of coffee later he called Simon, her boyfriend, also a medical student.
“Is Mélissa at your place?”
“No.”
“Do you know where she is?”
“I haven’t spoken to her for a week.”
“But I asked you to look after her while I was away. What happened?”
Simon hesitated to reply, as he had hesitated the previous Saturday.
“Was it because of school?”
“Did she talk to you about it?”
“I know she’s not interested in medicine any more. Is that why you aren’t speaking?”
“It’s Mélissa who doesn’t want to talk to me. She says she feels like she’s at the bottom of a well and she intends to get out on her own.”
Just like her father, who didn’t talk about his problems until he had solved them, Alma would have said — Alma, the drama queen who at times seemed to get herself into difficult situations so she could talk afterwards and in detail about her woes and anxiety attacks.
“Thanks, Simon.”
He hung up, thinking that his daughter was giving him the cold shoulder and had decided not to talk about her problems with her father either. And while he would rather have mortified his own flesh than see his child suffer, he would do as she wished and not call her friends to find her. Instead he should start to learn how to deal with the void that Alma had left. His lonely evenings had only begun.
32
HE WENT BACK to work on Monday, convinced that in a few days’ time when Mélissa was not so angry with him, she would be back home. He couldn’t imagine her doing anything else. But when a week went by without a word from her, he called her girlfriends. None of them knew where Mélissa was hiding. He called his sister-in-law too — perhaps Mélissa was hiding out in La Malbaie — but Carmen hadn’t seen her niece since Alma’s funeral. That is when he really started to worry, to imagine everything that a parent with no word from his child could imagine, and he leaped on the telephone every time it rang. His anxiety only faded when he was with a patient, then it came back with a vengeance when he found himself alone in the house. At dinner, it was as though he was eating soap. And when there was a reference on the news to the discovery of a young woman’s body, he would shudder and the colour would drain from his face.
Carmen called every day to ask if he’d had any word about Mélissa. Though he was annoyed at his sister-inlaw, as he was at all the people who had interfered with him in his search, he contained his anger and replied polit
ely. Until his sister-in-law told him that she was coming to Montreal to help him in his investigations. He told her:
“You’ve done enough. I’ll sort things out on my own.”
He began by searching his daughter’s room, but found nothing that could give him clues as to where she might have gone. Next, he called one of his patients, Detective Sergeant Dominic Ferro of the Montreal Police Force, to ask if Ferro could help him out.
“Has your daughter got a cell?” the policeman asked.
“Yes, but I’ve called and called and she never answers.”
“Give me her number. At least I’ll be able to locate her cell.”
Two hours later, Detective Sergeant Ferro called to say that he had located the cell phone: in Saint-Hilaire. More precisely, in a property that now belongs to the Alliance universelle pour la Vie.
“And my brother-in-law didn’t say a word,” Doctor Maras said. “Probably to spite me, because I didn’t leave the ashes to his sect.”
“It’s not a sect, Doctor. I looked it up. The Alliance universelle pour la Vie is a movement founded on justice and peace.”
“Where all creatures are loved and respected for what they are.”
“Those are honourable intentions, aren’t they?”
“They’re all vegetarians.”
“Good for them.”
“Sergeant, they’re vegetarian because like his biblical namesake, their leader, Frère Isaïe, wants to make the lion eat straw with the ox.”
“What are you getting at?”
“If he respects all creatures for what they are, why would he force the lion to eat straw?”
“Hmm. I hadn’t thought of that.”
Doctor Maras phoned Saint-Hilaire and asked for his daughter.
Zak picked up the phone. And told him:
“Mélissa’s not ready to talk to you.”
“When will she be ready?”
“Don’t worry, she’s fine. That’s all I can say for the moment.”
Portrait of a Husband with the Ashes of His Wife Page 7