The Stone Boy

by Loubière, Sophie

  “He was ill this morning, his dad picked him up at two this afternoon. Did he not tell you?”

  Madame Préau smiled at her sweetly. It was time to reveal her identity.

  20

  Open, sesame!

  Being in the school where she had been the headmistress for many years brought it all back to Madame Préau. Other than a coat of paint and new floors, little had changed. The school had been entirely renovated, but the shape and size of the classrooms, the windows, the location of the toilets, the canteen and kitchens that they shared with the infant school, everything was there, exactly the same, even her small office to the left of the entrance to the playground.

  “This will be a flying visit—I haven’t much time.”

  The headmistress, Madame Mesnil, went ahead of her, trotting along in a belted black dress, showing her around her establishment with a degree of self-importance. A long pearl necklace rubbed against her mohair cardigan. There wasn’t a single crease in her black Lycra tights where they met her polished ankle boots. She was new to the area and had taken over the school just that year. Its syllabus for the children was full of outings and various artistic activities. Their “flavor of the day,” for example, was a daily morning snack designed to promote trying new foods. The brand-new headmistress made it a point of pride to adhere to national guidelines.

  “The school aims to make the students independent in their learning and responsible for it, but we strive for each child to succeed.”

  The headmistress swept her fringe back into place. Providing access to culture writ large was also a priority for all students, “whatever their standard of living.”

  Madame Préau liked the idea. But it was nothing new to her; it was the very foundation of her teaching for years before she was gently pushed toward the door.

  “In addition, we are fortunate here to have a great educational tool at our disposal in our Nature and Garden class, where students learn to plant and maintain plants to discover and respect nature.” Madame Préau asked her host if she knew who had the idea to create this Nature and Garden workshop in 1991. The headmistress raised her eyebrows, impressed.

  “No—you? That’s great! Did you know that Blaise Pascal became a pilot school because of it?”

  Understanding that she had now made it into her good books, Madame Préau asked if it were possible for her to see one or two classrooms. To her glee, the headmistress agreed.

  Bright, decorated with drawings, with its little kitchenette and ironing corner, paint pots, box of cuddly toys and pretty books to read, the reception classroom made you want to curl up in it.

  “Here is my class.”

  Above the desk, a photo showed the children gathered in front of the blackboard. Madame Préau immediately approached and put on her glasses. Sitting cross-legged to the left of the teacher, she recognized the little one who was his sister’s whipping boy. Chance had smiled.

  She pointed to the child in the photograph.

  “Oh! I know this little face.”

  “Kévin Desmoulins? His big sister is with Mr. Di Pesa, with the older children.”

  Madame Préau was delighted. She hadn’t managed to hear the name of the child screamed by his sister in the garden. The little girl, however, was frequently told off by her parents.

  “Little Laurie, no?” she said, with feigned affection.

  “Yes. Laurie is a good enough student. Kévin is more average. He finds it hard to concentrate. But they both seem to keep up.”

  “And the elder brother? Is he also at Blaise Pascal?”

  The headmistress raised her eyebrows, dubious. “The elder brother? There are only two Desmoulins children, to my knowledge.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I can check their registration file, but I think so.”

  Madame Préau felt her heart rate rise. She removed her glasses clumsily. A cowlick appeared in her fringe. The headmistress glanced at her watch.

  “Would you like to see Laurie’s class? I have five more minutes.”

  The old lady stammered a reply. “I wouldn’t want to be a bother; I know how exhausting a school day can be for a teacher and a headmistress…”

  “You’re not wrong there! But I can certainly give you a few minutes. It must be emotional for you, no?”

  “Pardon?”

  “To come back here, to your school.”

  “Yes, very moving.”

  “It’s this way; we have to take the stairs.”

  Mr. Di Pesa’s classroom was less fun but equally cheering and covered with photos. An alphabet of letters corresponding to animals ran around the walls. Boards on learning to count with fruits and vegetables were pinned above the blackboard. One entire wall was studded with drawings.

  “Earlier this year,” the headmistress explained, “this teacher asked his students to draw their families. Each child drew his house, his parents and siblings. It’s a good exercise. It allows us to place the child in relation to his perception of things and make a preliminary assessment of his capabilities. Some are still struggling to hold a pencil…”

  Madame Préau took off her glasses. She could see the amazing works of young artists: scrawny dads, chubby mums, giant dogs on leashes, houses in the form of suppositories—there was plenty of imagination on display. Some drawings were sloppy; others decorated down to the smallest details. One student had gone so far as to draw a frame along the edge of the page. A future gallery curator at work…

  And that was when she saw it.

  Taped above the light switch.

  Little Laurie’s drawing.

  21

  She didn’t need to read the first name written on the bottom of the page. Madame Préau recognized the tree with fat tears falling from its branches: the birch. The little girl had made her house look much bigger than it actually was. The windows were ridiculously small, the door askew. A chimney spewed curls of black smoke. The garden was bristling with blades of grass as stiff as sticks. In the left-hand corner of the page, a big orange sun beamed its rays like a hairy belly. But most interesting was how she represented her family: the father and mother were the same size. He was smoking a stick (a cigarette, no doubt), she wore a skirt and a kind of egg-yolk yellow cloche on her head (her hair). Laurie had drawn them in the garden, near where the swing would be. She stood by their side, as big as her mother, holding a pink flower. As for Kévin, he was next to her, symbolized by a circle with two holes (head) and five sticks corresponding to the arms, legs, and trunk. Suffice to say that her little brother was of no interest. But what made Madame Préau shudder appeared in the other part of the garden. Something made up of five sticks and an empty circle.

  “You’re sure there isn’t a third child at the Desmoulins’ house? Have a look here…”

  The headmistress in turn looked closely at the drawing.

  “That’s strange, yes. I hadn’t noticed. It looks like she’s drawn something… a dog, perhaps?”

  “Do you think it looks like an animal?”

  The headmistress seemed disconcerted by the discovery, too. She would ask Mr. Di Pesa tomorrow. Maybe he would know what the little girl had drawn. The headmistress seemed worried as she went back down the stairs.

  “Why are you so interested in the Desmoulins family? Is there a problem?”

  Caught off guard, the old woman almost missed a step. She clung to the railing. The headmistress took her by the elbow.

  “The staircase is a bit steep, be careful.”

  “Thank you. I forgot. The Desmoulins family and I are neighbors. We don’t know each other very well yet, but the mother asked if I would give extra classes to their son. I thought she was talking about their older son… Seeing as Kévin is only in the youngest class… Maybe I misunderstood.”

  “I see. Why don’t you give me a ring tomorrow at break time at about three? I’ll be in my office. I might have the answer about the drawing.”

  Madame Préau thanked the headmistress warmly for the sp
ontaneous visit. On the way back, she walked as fast as she could, holding up the collar of her coat. The sun had disappeared and the cold—or perhaps the excitement—reddened her cheeks.

  Notes: Friday 25 September

  Called the headmistress at three as agreed.

  Got the answering machine three times.

  On the fourth attempt, got the expected response: no brother in the Desmoulins family.

  Confirmed by the academic records of the two children.

  According to her teacher, Laurie would have drawn her “imaginary friend.”

  The teacher asked me to say nothing of my visit to the school. She seems to be afraid of something, but what?

  Trust no one.

  Even teachers.

  On the way back from Intermarché at five, found a plastic bag full of plums hanging on the gate. A note written on the back of an advertising circular from the Post Office:

  “I buried Brutus. But I cannot wash my hair or it will fall out (because of the radiation caused by mobile phones). Thank you for your nice message. I will keep it in mind. Delphine Blanche.”

  6:30 p.m. Saw Mr. Desmoulins car back into the garage. No child in the backseat or the front seat.

  12:10 a.m. Noises in the attic. Take my 4 mg of Risperdal and also my Stilnox, which will allow me to sleep—the effect is very noticeable.

  Thinking about buying mousetraps.

  22

  The man stopped short in front of the piano. “Is this is a Gabriel Gaveau?”

  “In walnut veneer. Art nouveau,” specified Madame Préau.

  “The Sun model. Nineteen twenty-five?”

  “Nineteen twenty.”

  The piano tuner put his toolbag on the polished floor and approached the instrument slowly. He ran his fingers over the frame and crouched to feel lower down.

  “Keyboard on console columns with a carved leaf motif.”

  He stroked the double arms, light moving along the piano’s feminine curves, and slid his hands into the brass handles, strummed the keys covered in yellowed ivory, and then, abruptly, opened the belly of piano. Sitting in the background, her hands folded in her lap, Madame Préau stared at the piano tuner, a lingering hint of distrust in her heart. She had not appreciated the doorbell ringing an hour ahead of schedule. The tuner had a Breton-sounding name and an Asian face. Which certainly did not improve matters. Madame Préau only opened her home to people who had clearly identified themselves. The man had to introduce himself, pass his business card through the grille of the gate, explain how he had been adopted by his parents in an orphanage in Cambodia, and justify his being early by explaining that a previous appointment had been cancelled before Madame Préau finally agreed to let him into her home.

  “The mechanism is out of tune and dusty, but in good condition.”

  He turned to the owner of the premises. “I’ll need at least an hour.”

  “Very well.”

  “You’re going to stay here?”

  “Yes, why? Would it bother you?”

  “I’m not used to it, that’s all.”

  “Well, it doesn’t bother me. I want to see what you do to my Gaveau.”

  He laughed, removing his jacket.

  “Nothing too bad. I’m going to try to make it sing in tune, that’s all.”

  The tuner knew his stuff. That he was an Asian Breton in Seine-Saint-Denis lent a certain je ne sais quoi to the situation. Madame Préau watched her piano being dusted with a sense of peace. She felt somehow that years of neglect were being taken off of her, too. Hadn’t she abandoned the piano, like everything else, without a second thought? It was still the repository of all her secrets; as a child, she had told it everything that grown-ups refused to listen to and that scared the other kids. It was on this piano that she played her first piece for four hands with the future father of her child. Back then, Gérard still had the plump cheeks of a teenager, captivated by his cousin’s fantasies, once he got past his initial fear of her. Madame Préau ended up snoozing in her chair, listening to each hesitant tone find its rightful place, up or down until perfectly in tune. Then the tuner started in on a frenzied version of Handel’s Passacaglia. The time had come for her to leave her chair and take a few new notes out of her purse that she had withdrawn from the bank the day before.

  She was looking forward to tomorrow.

  To play for the child who had asked her to.

  So long as it didn’t rain.

  23

  Over his sweatshirt, he had donned a dark blue anorak that was too short. His skinny wrists stuck out of his sleeves. It didn’t seem to bother him. He recovered a burst ball and tried to fill it with soil to restore its round shape, scratching his head lazily. The other two children bickered for the swing. Judging this to be right moment, Madame Préau put the binoculars down on the table and went to the living room. She opened the curtains and the window, sat down at the piano, and began a series of Charles-Louis Hanon exercises, which she knew by heart. She continued with a Czerny study and, having the feeling that she wouldn’t go on much longer, she launched into an improvisation, a series of chords with the left hand, against which the right hand picked out a melody. When a moped passed in the street, blocking out the piano with its shrill buzzing, Madame Préau stopped playing. Her joints were hurting and she was suffering from a bad back. She massaged her fingers and then her neck before getting up. Then she listened. On the other side of the street, Kévin’s shouts answered his sister’s taunts. Could he have heard the piano from the garden across the way? The old woman went to the window and peered through the cedar foliage behind the latticed concrete wall. Nothing moved in the weeping birch. She stayed like that for several minutes before returning to her room to get the binoculars. Crouching, the boy continued to fill the flat ball with soil and scratch his head. What was she hoping for? That the child would hold up a banner that read “Thank you for the music”? That he’d applaud at the end of the concert? Madame Préau had no idea. But that there was no change in the child’s behavior affected her so badly that she forgot to eat dinner and went to bed at seven without having washed. In the middle of the night, she was awakened by the passing 2:45 freight train and then by rustling from the attic. As she couldn’t get back to sleep, she went to the kitchen to nibble some biscuits and drink a glass of warm milk. She went back to the bathroom to freshen up and to soak the joints in her aching hands, and listened to the pathetic mewing of a cat coming from the garden shed—was some idiot molly there to mourn the one-eyed tom?—then she lay down again.

  It was only in the morning when she opened her bedroom shutters, that she saw it.

  The burst ball that the child had filled had landed in her flower bed.

  24

  Thursday night dinner had turned into lunch on Mondays at Yakitori Express, a Japanese restaurant. Martin could have taken her to a kebab shop; it would have made no difference. Madame Préau was in a hurry to finish. The place was noisy, the menu sticky, and the food certainly tasteless. But Martin was in the habit of going there. The waitress brought them two overly sweet kirs and prawn crackers, which the medic munched absentmindedly.

  “It’s convenient for me here because I’m close to the surgery. That gives us an hour to chat. It’s not bad, is it?”

  “If you say so.”

  Madame Préau unfolded a paper napkin so thin that it almost flew away.

  “So… what does one eat here?”

  “Raw fish or meat skewers.”

  “Raw fish. You’re sure?”

  “I come here almost every day. I haven’t ended up in the hospital yet.”

  “Yes. Well, I think I’ll pass. Have you heard from your father?”

  Martin stared into his mother’s face. Her features were drawn, her skin dull and slack.

  “What’s wrong, Mum?”

  “What do you mean, what’s wrong?”

  “Usually, you ask me that question at dessert.”

  “Oh? Well, today I wanted a change.”


  “Are you sleeping well?”

  “Yes. Actually, I have a mouse problem.”

  “Mice? Where?”

  “In the attic. But don’t worry, the problem is about to be sorted.”

  Martin swallowed his aperitif in one gulp. He clinked the champagne flute against his mother’s.

  “You’re not drinking your kir?”

  “No thank you. You know, I’ve gone back to the piano—”

  The waitress came to take their orders, interrupting Madame Préau.

  “Excuse me, are you ready to order?”

  The latter stared at her.

  “I feel as if we’ve met… Your father isn’t a piano tuner, by any chance?”

  The young woman looked a bit embarrassed. She was having trouble with the term “tuner.” Martin half choked on his prawn crackers.

  “My mother is making a joke.”

  “I think you look very much like him,” continued Madame Préau.

  The waitress nodded and gave a slender laugh, believing it to be a compliment. Satisfied, the old lady put on her glasses and leaned into the menu.

  “What do you recommend for the speediest food poisoning, set menu M1 or B13?”

  Madame Préau chose her kebabs according to her son’s advice. She told him what she had learned recently about Charcot and Daudet in two biographies borrowed from the library, and expressed her regret that Michel Onfray could publish drivel like The Aesthetics of the North Pole or The Art of Enjoyment, among other relevant philosophical works; she raged against the hedge cutters who never stopped ringing the bell to offer their services at all hours; and passed quickly on her visit to the Blaise Pascal School.

  “You went back there?” gaped Martin. “They let you in?”