Black Water Lilies

by Michel Bussi

  I turn toward the right bank of the Chemin du Roy, toward the water garden. Along the road, a few planks have been removed from the fence, probably by some indelicate tourist in too much of a hurry to take a picture of the water lilies, and alarmed by the queue at the entrance. The space thus revealed gives an incredible view of the pond. I observe Fanette, standing slightly apart from the other children in her class, among the willows and poplars. She has set up her easel on the Japanese bridge, propped up against the wisteria. She goes on painting, calm and concentrating, in spite of the hubbub all around her.

  I cross the Chemin du Roy and come closer to get a better view. I’m practically touching the fence.

  I shouldn’t have done that. One little brat has spotted me.

  “Miss, miss, can you take a picture of me with my friends?”

  He presses a brand-new camera into my hand. I don’t understand it all; he explains how to work it, but I’m not listening. As I take his photograph, I squint toward the lily pond and Fanette, painting.

  42

  “Come on, Fanette,” Vincent insists. “Come and play!”

  “No! Can’t you see that I’m painting?”

  Fanette tries to fix her attention on a water lily. A lonely one, floating apart from the flock; the flower is almost heart-shaped, with a little pink flower that has only just emerged. The brush glides across the canvas. Fanette struggles to concentrate.

  Someone’s sniveling behind me. The willow has found someone who weeps more than it does. Mary! If only she’d shut up, with her thin little voice.

  “You’re cheating. I’ve had enough. I’m going home.”

  There’s more than crying behind me, there’s also Vincent, still there, doing nothing, peering over my shoulder.

  “You could just go and play with Mary,” Fanette says.

  “She’s no fun, she cries all the time.”

  “And I suppose I’m no fun, painting all the time?”

  He won’t move. Vincent won’t move. He can stay there for hours. He’d have been a great painter, if he’d put his mind to it. Observing is his thing. But I don’t think he has any imagination.

  The children go on running around Fanette, shouting, laughing, crying. The little girl forces herself to stay in her bubble. Selfish, as James said.

  Camille rushes over and stops on the Japanese bridge. Out of breath.

  It never stops. He’s all I need!

  He covers his fat belly by tucking his shirt in again.

  “I’m beat. I’m taking a break.”

  He watches Fanette, busy painting.

  “Listen, Vincent, Fanette, this one’s good. I have a riddle about the water lilies. You know they double their surface area every day. So, if we say, for example, that the water lilies take a hundred days to cover a whole pond, how many days will the same water lilies take to cover half the pond?”

  “Well, fifty,” Vincent replies immediately. “That’s a stupid riddle…”

  “And what about you, Fanette, what do you think?”

  I don’t care, Camille, if you had any idea how much I don’t care.

  “I don’t know. Fifty. The same as Vincent.”

  Camille crows with triumph.

  If he ever becomes a teacher, I’m sure he’ll be the most boring teacher in the world.

  “I knew you’d fall into the trap! The answer isn’t fifty, it’s ninety-nine…”

  “Why?” asks Vincent.

  “Don’t even try,” Camille says contemptuously. “Fanette, do you get it?”

  Christ!

  “I’m painting…”

  Camille hops from one leg to the other on the Japanese bridge. Large sweat stains drench the underarms of his shirt.

  “OK, OK, I can see you’re painting. Just one last guessing game, one more and then I’ll leave you in peace. Do you know the Latin word for water lilies?”

  Boring! Boring! Boring!

  “No idea?”

  Neither Vincent nor Fanette replies. That doesn’t bother Camille at all—quite the contrary. He tears off a wisteria leaf and throws it into the pond.

  “Well, it’s nymphaea. But before that it came from the Greek, numphaia. The French name is nénuphar. And do you know the English name?”

  Will this never end?

  Camille doesn’t even wait for an answer. He tries to hang from the nearest wisteria branch, but a cracking noise dissuades him.

  “Water lily!” he announces.

  He’s so pleased with himself. He gets on my nerves, he really does, even if you have to admit that water lily is a much prettier word than nénuphar… I prefer nymphéa, the word that Monet used.

  Camille leans toward Fanette’s canvas. He smells of sweat.

  “What are you doing, Fanette? Are you copying Monet’s Water Lilies?”

  “No.”

  “You are! I can see you are.”

  Camille always brings science back into it; the problem is that he knows everything but doesn’t understand anything.

  “No, you idiot, no! Just because I’m painting the same thing as Monet doesn’t mean I’m doing the same thing.”

  Camille shrugs.

  “Monet painted loads of them. You’re bound to paint one that looks the same. Even if you do a tondo. You know what a tondo is?”

  He’s going to get my brush in his face. That’s the only way he’ll understand how boring he is. And he always does both the questions and the answers.

  “A tondo is a round canvas, like the one exhibited in—”

  “Are you coming, boys?” Mary calls out suddenly. She seems to have dried her tears.

  Camille sighs. Vincent laughs.

  “I think I’m going to push her in the pond. You could paint that, couldn’t you, Fanette? That would be original! Mary in the Water Lilies.”

  He laughs, gently pushing Camille down the bridge.

  “Right, we’ll let you get on with your work, Fanette,” says Vincent. “Come on, Camille.”

  Sometimes Vincent understands me. Sometimes he doesn’t and sometimes he does. Almost immediately.

  Fanette is on her own at last. She carefully studies the reflection of the willows in the pond, or the parts of the pond that aren’t filled with lily leaves. She remembers what James has been teaching her recently: vanishing points.

  If I remember correctly, the originality of Claude Monet’s Water Lilies lies in the fact that the composition of the paintings is based on two opposing vanishing lines. There’s the line of the leaves and the lily flowers, which broadly corresponds to the surface of the water. James called that the horizontal line. But there’s also the line that governs the reflections in the water: the wisteria flowers on the banks, the willow branches, the sunlight, the shadows of clouds. Broadly, according to James, the vertical lines are reversed, as if in a mirror. That, James explained to me, is the secret of the Water Lilies. Fine, all right, it’s hardly breathtaking as secrets go. And you don’t have to call yourself James or Claude Monet to find that out. You just have to look at the pond. It’s as plain as the nose on your face, those two vanishing lines. Well, I say vanishing. Where are they vanishing to? The pond with the leaves stuck on top of it is entirely motionless. There is no movement, as far as I’m concerned.

  It’s rubbish. Now that I’m alone, I almost want to join the others, to run around the pond with them. But no, I’ve got to be selfish, James said. Think about my talent, about the Robinson competition. I’ll join them in a minute.

  Fanette bends over her palette and carefully mixes her paints.

  Suddenly everything stops. Black! There’s nothing but black.

  Fanette is about to scream when she recognizes Paul by his smell of freshly cut grass.

  “Hey there!”

  “Paul! Where were you?”

  “We’ve had six games of tag in the garden, but we’re done now. I won!” He leans toward the picture. “Wow, Fanette, your painting is fantastic!”

  “I hope so. It’s for the Robinson Foun
dation competition. I think I’m going to be the only one to give something to our teacher.”

  “You’re amazing! You’re definitely going to win. It’s so strong, your way of painting.”

  “Yeah, if only. Well, I do have my idea. It was James who gave it to me.”

  “Your famous American painter?”

  “Yes, I’m going to see him after school. He’s probably still having a snooze in the wheat field. I’m going to show him my canvas. With his advice I might just have a chance. It’s true that he gets tired quickly, he sleeps more than he paints. But—”

  “It’s funny. Your painting doesn’t look at all like Monet’s Water Lilies.”

  Fanette kisses Paul on the cheek.

  I absolutely LOVE Paul!

  “You’re brilliant. That’s exactly what I wanted. I’ll quickly tell you my idea. When you look at a Water Lilies by Monet you feel as if you’re plunging right into the picture, getting inside it, traveling through it somehow… I don’t know, like you’re sinking into a well or some sand. That’s what Monet wanted, sleeping water, the impression of seeing a lifetime pass. I want to do the opposite with my Water Lilies. I want people to have a sense of floating on the water, you see, of being able to jump on it, bounce off it, fly away. Living water. I want to paint my Water Lilies the way Monet would have painted them if he had been eleven years old. Water Lilies in all the colors of a rainbow!”

  Paul gazes at her with infinite tenderness.

  “I don’t understand everything you’re saying to me, Fanette.”

  “It doesn’t matter, Paul. It’s not serious, all that. Did you know that Monet painted some big Water Lilies that he didn’t like?”

  “No.”

  “He gave them to the children in the pink house! When they were our age. They used the canvases he had rejected to build some canoes. If any of those were found, in the mud at the bottom of the Epte or the Seine, there would be more Water Lilies! Can you believe that?”

  “I believe you, Fanette.”

  Paul pauses.

  “But it is serious, you know. I realize that you come from a different planet than the rest of us, and that one day you’re going to leave, go far away. You’ll become famous, and… well, everything! But the great thing is that for my whole life I’ll be able to tell people that I knew you, here, on the Japanese bridge. And even…”

  “And even?”

  “And even that I kissed you.”

  He’s hopeless, Paul. When he says things like that he makes me quiver all over.

  The water lilies drift slowly on the pond. Fanette shivers and closes her eyes. Paul gently places his lips on the girl’s.

  “And you’ll even be able to say,” Fanette murmurs, “that I promised you we’d live together, that we’d get married, and have a big house and children. And even that that’s exactly what happened…”

  The wisteria stirs.

  Vincent bursts from the twisted vines like a savage beast of prey in the jungle. He stares at Paul and Fanette with a strange, worryingly empty expression, as if he has been spying on them for some time.

  He scares me. Vincent is scaring me more and more.

  “What are you doing?” asks Vincent blankly.

  43

  Still surfing the Au Bon Coin website for a wooden five-step ladder to recondition and put her plants on, Officer Liliane Lelièvre glances at her watch, an elegant silver Longines: 6:45 p.m. Another quarter of an hour and she’ll be able to close the reception desk of the Vernon police station. There isn’t much going on this evening.

  She doesn’t immediately recognize the figure slowly climbing the steps to the station. But as soon as the old man comes in, turns his face toward hers, and greets her, a firework display of memories explodes in her face.

  “Hello, Liliane!”

  “Chief Inspector Laurentin!”

  My God! She hasn’t seen him in years. Chief Inspector Laurentin retired what, almost twenty years ago? In the early 1990s, just after the case of the Monets stolen from the Musée Marmottan was solved. Laurentin was viewed as one of the biggest specialists in the illegal art trade at the time. The Central Art and Cultural Property Unit automatically turned to him. Before that, he and Liliane had worked together for over fifteen years…

  Chief Inspector Laurentin. A monument. He alone embodied the whole history of the police in and around Vernon.

  “Heavens, Chief Inspector! What a pleasure it is to see you again.”

  Liliane is perfectly sincere. Laurentin was a brilliant, subtle, attentive investigator. The kind of character you don’t see anymore. They talk for a long time. But Liliane can’t resist the curiosity that is gnawing away at her:

  “So what brings you here, after all this time?”

  Chief Inspector Laurentin puts his finger to his mouth.

  “Shh… I’m on a special mission. Wait for me, Liliane. I just need a few minutes and I’ll be right back.”

  Laurentin walks down the corridors that he knows so well. Liliane doesn’t dare to press the issue. This is the man who ran the place for thirty-six years!

  The former policeman reflects that the paint on the walls of the corridor is still flaking. Nothing changes. Room 33. The former chief inspector takes a key out of his pocket. Will it still open? It has been twenty years since the key was last put in the lock of that office.

  Open Sesame…

  So they haven’t changed the lock of the office since… 1989. In the end, Laurentin reasons, it seems logical. Why change the lock of an office door inside a police station? As he opens the door, he thinks to himself that his most recent successor must be a boy wonder from CID, armed with computers and specialized technology, all those technological advances so beloved of police procedurals on television, and which he stopped understanding long ago.

  He stops beside the desk and looks around the room. The walls are covered with Impressionist paintings. Pissarro. Gauguin. Renoir. Sisley. Toulouse-Lautrec. He smiles to himself. In fact, if he met his successor, he might be surprised. The man has good taste.

  The desk is closer to what he expected: on it are a computer, a printer, a scanner. The chief inspector walks around the room. He hesitates, disappointed by his visit. He realizes that in 2010 the desk of a policeman who does his job well is an empty desk. Everything will be on the hard drive of the computer. He isn’t going to break into the personal workstation of his successor, which is probably protected by a series of passwords. And besides, he knows absolutely nothing about computers. It would be ridiculous to deny it. He has never had the opportunity to follow the latest advances in the work of the art division. It’s become a specialist area, for scientists. He was told that the OCBC, the art police, now makes use of a gigantic international database, TREIMA, or the “Electronic Search and Fine-Art Images Thesaurus.” The TREIMA database includes more than 60,000 missing works, and is shared with the American FBI’s Art Crime Team and the Art and Antiques Unit of the Metropolitan Police in London.

  Laurentin sighs.

  Different times, different methods.

  He leaves the office and goes back to see Liliane at reception.

  “Liliane, are the archives still downstairs? Red door?”

  “Exactly as they were twenty years ago, Chief Inspector. Nothing’s changed about the archives, at least!”

  Once again, his old key lets him in. It’s as if anyone could get in here. But then, he’s not just anyone. A policeman, just a policeman. That’s probably why Patricia Morval turned to him. She wasn’t as crazy as all that, the widow.

  Liliane was right, nothing has changed, and the files are still arranged in alphabetical order. One generation may succeed another, but there will always be certain officers with a mania for making sure the right files are on the right shelves, even in an age of hard disks and memory sticks.

  M… for Morval.

  The large red file is there. It isn’t very thick.

  Laurentin hesitates again. He knows he has no right to viol
ate the secrecy of an investigation like that, without a mandate, without authorization, without any reason other than his personal curiosity. Why should he open that file? Prickles of an excitement that he hasn’t felt for years make the hairs on his arms stand up. Why did he come here if not to open this file? He is careful to close the door behind him, leaving the key in the lock, then sets the archive box down on the table. He opens it and inspects the pages slowly, being very careful to put them back in their exact place.

  His eyes rest on a sequence of photographs of a corpse: Jérôme Morval, in a stream. The incriminating evidence passes through his fingers: other photographs of the crime scene, one of the print of the sole of a boot, a plaster cast; scientific analyses of fingerprints, of blood, of mud. He speeds up a little, stops on some other pictures: five photographs of couples, from the most platonic to the most obscene. The only point they have in common is the dead man, Jérôme Morval.

  Chief Inspector Laurentin looks up, alert, listening for the faintest of footsteps through the red door. No, everything is calm. Next he studies some bundles of paper: a list of the children at Giverny School; the more or less well-thumbed biographies of individuals related to the case: Jérôme and Patricia Morval, Jacques and Stéphanie Dupain, Amadou Kandy, other shopkeepers from Giverny, neighbors, art critics, collectors; lots of handwritten notes, practically all of them signed by Inspector Sylvio Bénavides.

  Almost all the documents are lying facedown on the table now. The prickling sensation on Laurentin’s skin becomes even more intense. He has only one more document to examine—a yellowed report from the gendarmerie in Pacy-sur-Eure, concerning an accident: a child who drowned in 1937, one Albert Rosalba. Chief Inspector Laurentin’s hands are trembling. He sits for a long time in the dark room, trying to understand, trying not to forget a single detail, attempting to forge an opinion, with no preconceptions. It would be easier just to take everything away with him or make photocopies.