Tania felt a knot in her stomach. Was this the result of one of the flashbacks Justine Tao had talked about? Was this a sign that he was regaining his memory?
Bilodo had taken out the pens and the exercise book Tania had used while learning the basics of calligraphy two years earlier. In all probability, he’d discovered the things in the back of the drawer where she’d put them and then forgotten them.
‘I didn’t know you liked calligraphy,’ said Bilodo.
‘I do, a lot,’ Tania felt obliged to affirm.
‘It’s interesting. I love it.’
Flashback or not, the damage was already done. Lines of Gothic letters, one after the other, marched down the page, the fruits of Bilodo’s meticulous work. Unable to come up with a pretext she could use to dissuade him from continuing, Tania took a seat at the table, chose a pen, and started to form beautiful letters too.
That was the way they ended the year, enjoying a delightful evening, embellishing sheets of paper with elegant handwriting.
14
A new year began. The platonic cohabitation dragged on. According to Justine Tao, the sensation of emptiness that Bilodo felt was normal in the circumstances. She predicted that he would recover his affective balance at the same time as his memory. Now this memory recall was precisely what Tania was trying hard to avoid, and so if the shrink was right, Tania was helping to reinforce Bilodo’s emotional block, and as long as his amnesia continued, he would remain incapable of falling in love – a paradoxical situation, if not a circle of the most vicious kind. It was one thing to reinvent the past; it was quite another to create love out of nothing. Where to start? How could she touch Bilodo’s temporarily disabled heart?
As soon as he was able to move around without crutches, Bilodo asked to see the scene of his accident. Dr Tao had advised him to visit systematically the places that had been familiar or significant to him in the past, and Bilodo wished to follow her recommendations. As Tania certainly had no intention of standing with him outside his former apartment, she instead led Bilodo instead to a previously selected street corner, where she pointed at some random patch of asphalt that naturally reminded him of nothing at all. Two days later, Bilodo conceived a desire to go to the restaurant where they had met, the place where their love began. Tania congratulated herself for never having mentioned the name of the Madelinot, because letting Bilodo set foot in there again was totally out of the question. She contacted Noémie, who without too much balking agreed to perform a rather unusual service for her.
‘Hello, young lovers!’ Noémie cried out joyously the next day, welcoming them like regular customers to Café Scaramouche, on rue Saint-Denis, where she worked as a waitress.
Skilfully playing her role, Noémie pretended to know Bilodo well; she evoked, with perfectly feigned nostalgia, the happy period when he frequented the café and courted her dear friend Tania. Bilodo was completely taken in, and Noémie, who having sighted this rare bird for the first time, called Tania that evening to share her impressions.
‘A good-looking man, a bit withdrawn, but sexy in his way. I’m reserving my final verdict, but I’m tempted to give him an A.’
Which, in Noémie Code, stood for ‘Acceptable’, a grade less disappointing than it might seem to anyone unfamiliar with Noémie’s stratospheric standards for rating persons of the male gender, and in fact the highest mark on a scale with only three levels: A for Acceptable, B for Bastard and C for Creep. There was no doubt that Bilodo’s extraterrestrial charm had worked on her.
‘Thanks for your help,’ Tania told her gratefully.
‘Don’t thank me,’ replied Noémie. ‘I know you’re crazy about that guy, but don’t ask me to approve of what you’re doing. You won’t be able to say I didn’t warn you.’
Tania, slightly ashamed, hung up. Questioning the morality of her acts one more time, she asked herself if she had the right to manipulate Bilodo the way she’d been doing for the past few months. Did love really excuse everything? Her scruples disappeared instantaneously the following day, when Bilodo revealed his intention to go to the Depot. He wanted to renew his acquaintance with his forgotten colleagues, a project that forced Tania to tap into her emergency supply of self-control and expend a goodly portion. She could have no doubt that Robert would happily annihilate the brand-new, beautiful past she had striven so hard to create for Bilodo. Hard-pressed, Tania reminded Bilodo that his doctor had forbidden him to enter a post office before his convalescence was complete. She managed to dissuade him with that argument, but she had no doubt the matter would come up again; and other, equally pernicious initiatives must be anticipated as well. A varied menu of catastrophic scenarios flashed through Tania’s fertile imagination; the most calamitous of them were related to the arrival of the first day of March, a date which had once appeared remote but suddenly seemed close at hand. What would happen when Bilodo’s sick leave was over? Wouldn’t everything go right down the drain the moment he stepped into a post-sorting facility again?
Enjoying his recovered autonomy, Bilodo had been doing a lot of walking, lately even exploring the adjacent neighbourhoods. Tania feared that his peregrinations might soon take him all the way to Saint-Janvier, where there was a good chance he would instinctively retrace his former postal route and eventually end up in front of Grandpré’s old apartment or the Madelinot. In order to point Bilodo’s walks towards less perilous destinations, Tania planned to give him errand lists designed to take him in diametrically opposite directions, but he wouldn’t be able to help himself: in the end, his internal compass would guide him back to Saint-Janvier.
One morning Tania saw Bilodo engaged in an odd activity; he was repeatedly going up and down the outside staircase in the bitter cold, nearly fifteen degrees below zero. Fahrenheit. He explained that he was training so that he’d be in good shape when he returned to work. Two days later, hearing the kettle whistling in the kitchen, Tania found a glassy-eyed Bilodo steaming open his own post, an indubitable echo of his former vice as an inquisitive postman. This misty episode was but the first in a series of increasingly alarming incidents. The following Saturday, while they were out shopping on rue Sainte-Catherine, a beautiful black woman passed them, and Tania saw Bilodo turn around, his eyes following the woman, and on his face the somnambulistic expression Tania dreaded: this time, she thought, he was surely having one of those flashbacks that Justine Tao had predicted. Less than an hour later, Bilodo froze in front of a shop window displaying Far Eastern merchandise, including a red kimono that fascinated him. ‘I think I used to wear something like that,’ he said in a toneless voice. Keeping a cool head, Tania confirmed that he had in fact owned a red dressing gown, a rather uncomfortable garment he’d ended up giving to a charitable organization. Bilodo accepted this explanation and spoke of the kimono no more, but from that point on, Tania noticed, his attention was magnetized by any red article of clothing. Fortunately, Christmas had already been and gone; otherwise, Bilodo would probably have slipped into a trance every time he saw a Santa Claus, an apparition doubly dangerous because its beard could have reminded him of Gaston Grandpré’s.
One Sunday morning in mid January, Tania found Bilodo watching a television travelogue about Guadeloupe. ‘What a beautiful place. We should go on holiday there,’ he said, filled with wonder.
Quickly changing the channel, Tania settled on a documentary whose subject was Iceland and resorted to praising the tectonic splendours of that resolutely northern country. Similar pirouettes and mental contortions were often necessary, and her acrobatic management of the imponderable became more taxing with each passing day. And so, complicated by the constant vigilance to which Bilodo’s unpredictable reminiscences compelled her, the subtle task of re-programming his heart posed a greater and greater challenge for Tania. Flashbacks popped up everywhere, like demons on springs – apparently the forerunners of a major reflux of memory – and Tania was forced to acknowledge that the situation was spiralling out of her control. Assessing the sca
le of the levy that the events of the past several months had placed on her nerves, she felt drained of all strength and frightfully alone. ‘What a fine mess you’ve got yourself into, Tania Schumpf,’ her inner voice rebuked her. ‘You’re as tense as a piano string. You live in fear. If this continues, you’re going to snap.’ And in fact, collapse seemed imminent. Tania felt an urgent need for a pause, for a moment of respite, no matter how brief, so that she could recharge her batteries and renew her courage. But how could she allow herself to lower her guard for an instant in that city, rife with dangers, where the perfidious past was lurking everywhere?
She knew she couldn’t defy fate indefinitely, and her stress was skyrocketing, hoisting her to such levels of anxiety that she always came back down weeping. She was careful to hide those tears, not wanting Bilodo to witness them, but one evening when she thought he was already in bed, he came into the kitchen and found her silently sobbing. Distressed at seeing her like that, Bilodo assumed it was his fault and asked her to forgive him for still being an amnesiac. He swore he would make greater efforts to recover his memory, an oath that only added to Tania’s torment.
‘I can do better,’ he declared, looking resolute. ‘I’ll come to love you as much as before. If I keep on trying, it’s sure to work in the end.’
And that – that was the worst of all – what could be more depressing than Bilodo’s absolute sincerity, his unconditional commitment? Seeing him struggling so hard to love her without success, how could she not find herself pathetic, how could she not believe herself the most wretched of women? ‘It’s hopeless, Tania Schumpf,’ she thought, despairing of ever being able to arouse the least glimmer of authentic love in Bilodo.
The following night, as she passed Bilodo’s door on the way to the toilet, Tania heard him talking in his room. She pricked up her ears, thinking that he was talking on the telephone, but his tone wasn’t conversational. Plucking up her courage, she half-opened the door. Bilodo was talking in his sleep: ‘Cinnamon, saffron...malangas and carambolas,’ he muttered.
He was apparently dreaming about exotic spices and fruits, but the particular order in which he spoke the words sounded familiar to Tania’s ear. She recognized where they came from: one of Ségolène’s haiku. ‘He’s reciting her poems,’ she realized, horrified.
‘I dream about waking up...by your side...into a bright dawn...surely the most beautiful...of all mornings in the world,’ Bilodo sighed.
Tania felt her heart break into pieces.
‘I was talking in my sleep? What did I say?’ Bilodo asked in surprise. They were having lunch.
‘I couldn’t quite make it out,’ Tania lied.
‘I don’t remember a thing,’ Bilodo declared.
‘Thank goodness,’ Tania thought, all too aware that this was, at best, a reprieve. That sudden effusion of poetry surely marked the beginning of the end. Ségolène’s haiku were floating back up to the surface, already brushing against Bilodo’s consciousness; it wouldn’t be long before he actively remembered them, and then he’d have a thousand questions. ‘How can I answer him?’ she thought desolately, yielding to an attack of fatalism. Wasn’t it time to admit defeat and acknowledge Ségolène’s supremacy? What was the point of this obstinate struggle against the spellbinding charm of the Guadeloupian woman and the sovereign power of her haiku, which alone seemed capable, through their seventeen syllables’ unfathomable magic, of moving Bilodo’s heart?
Suddenly, Tania was caused to reflect; something that moved Bilodo’s heart – wasn’t that exactly what she was looking for?
The solution could only be poetic.
Tania would use haiku to give Bilodo a kind of emotional electroshock. The poems would act as romantic defibrillators, which with a little luck would restart his stalled heart. It was risky, but it might work. In any case, it was worth trying.
15
Drawn with a finger
on a frosty windowpane
a sun is smiling
It certainly wasn’t as dazzling as one of Ségolène’s poems, but at least it was something. Before leaving for work, Tania slipped the haiku under Bilodo’s door and then fled on tiptoe, aware that she had just gone for broke. At first, she’d thought about copying out a few of the Guadeloupian’s poems, but the idea of adding plagiarism to the list of her crimes repelled her. Were she ever to succeed in touching Bilodo’s heart, she wanted it to be by her own merits, and thanks to her own words, however humble they might be. Therefore, Tania proposed to offer Bilodo only poems of her own composition – which would, among other things, lessen the risk of evoking the spectre of Ségolène, for should Bilodo eventually recall the island woman’s haiku, he would naturally attribute them to Tania.
The day seemed interminable. Not knowing what to expect, Tania sometimes assumed the worst and sometimes the best. That evening, when she finally arrived home, Bilodo gave her an enthusiastic welcome. The pretty little poem he’d found under his door captivated him, intrigued him. There was no indication that he had remembered Ségolène. Tania pretended that before Bilodo’s accident it had been their charming habit, hers and his, to exchange poems in Japanese style, and she instructed Bilodo in the workings of a renku. He was prodigiously interested and proclaimed the whole idea ‘brilliant’.
The following morning, Tania found a carefully calligraphed haiku under her door:
Bill’s in his bubble
waiting for manna
dreaming of infinite ponds
Thus we go along
not knowing that our pathways
are already traced
It’s snakes and ladders
everything’s hanging
on the next roll of the dice
Sitting on my hat
a little bird, bright and fat
sings his songs for you
Weary of desert confines
I lie down at last
in your oasis
Endlessly echoed
between two mirrors
our faces: the absolute
The situation was strangely inspiring. Every evening, Tania slipped a new poem under Bilodo’s door, and the next morning she’d find a response lying across her threshold. It was a daily challenge, thrown down again and again, that filled the hours and usurped all thought, but it was also a source of happiness, of the slightly paradoxical joy of creation, with its retinue of apprehensions and doubts, followed by euphoria when at last, under deadline pressure, the daily tercet came to fruition. Bilodo hadn’t had a flashback since poetry had once again become his soul’s natural way of getting some fresh air. His delight in expressing himself broke through his habitual reserve. Bilodo would smile, and for Tania it was – every time – like a waft of oxygen, a grace that allowed her to forget for a few moments the approaching, fateful date of the first of March, the sword of Damocles hanging over her. Hoping to gain time, she suggested to Bilodo that he apply for an extension of his sick leave, but he swept this idea aside: ‘I can barely wait to start working. I miss walking my route,’ he replied.
Unshakable, he explained that it was a question not only of pride, but also of pleasure. By all appearances, not even a nuclear attack would make him postpone his return to the postal service any longer, and Tania had to resign herself; her postman’s postal zeal was too great, she couldn’t immobilize him any longer...unless she broke his other leg?
‘Suppose we move to Germany?’ she blurted out impulsively, one evening when they were doing calligraphy.
Wasn’t that, in fact, the ideal solution? To put some distance between Bilodo and Montreal...to flee that overly familiar city, teeming with baleful memories...to take him somewhere far away...to scrape off the scales of the past and start a new life there...
Carried away by that exciting prospect, Tania announced her desire to see her native Bavaria again. She made the case that Munich was lovely at that time of year, with its snow-covered cathedrals. They would explore the cultural riches of the ancient city and follow Kandinsk
y’s traces in the borough of Schwabing; they would eat in some of the many beer halls, typical establishments where the customers contended in epic tarot games and quaffed hearty brews served out by waitresses in traditional costume. Then, as a digestive aid, they’d go skiing in the Alps!
Anticipating Bilodo’s objections, Tania committed herself to teaching him German and assured him he wouldn’t have any trouble finding gainful employment over there: her father, a vice-president at Siemens, would use his connections to get Bilodo a job as a postman.
‘All you have to do is apply for a sabbatical leave,’ she pointed out. ‘If you don’t like Bavaria, we’ll come back to Montreal.’
Bilodo admitted that this spontaneous proposal was not without appeal. Encouraged, Tania told him they could live in her Uncle Reinhardt’s country house on the shore of Lake Starnberg, a romantic spot she’d often visited as a child during the sacred summer-holiday season. She added that Lufthansa offered a daily flight to Munich, so they could fly there anytime, and soon. But this was to assume a spontaneity foreign to Bilodo’s nature, and he suddenly became reluctant. He acknowledged that it was a fine project, but he suggested they take the time to consider it more fully – wouldn’t it be more reasonable to make plans for an exploratory trip to Bavaria during the holiday period next July? Unwilling to upset Bilodo, Tania chose not to insist; she would polish her arguments and return to the charge at the appropriate moment. Because she nevertheless wanted to keep the idea alive in him, she put a tourist guide to Bavaria on the coffee table and selected a new wallpaper for the computer screen: a view of Lake Starnberg and the Alps. After doing that, she took down the calendar and hid it at the back of a drawer, forbidding herself to think about the first of March.
That night, Tania dreamt she was strolling about in Munich with Bilodo. They visited the old city, they promenaded in the Odeonsplatz, and then, while the glockenspiel in the Marienplatz was chiming, they exchanged a long kiss.
The Postman's Fiancée Page 8