Black Water Lilies

by Michel Bussi

  There is no happy love.

  She can’t help reliving those moments of madness on Nettles Island.

  Her dog, Neptune, slaughtered.

  Laurenç’s farewell note.

  There is no happy love.

  Jacques is sitting in the next room, on the bed. On the bedside table, the radio is wailing a heady hit, “Le Temps de l’Amour” by Françoise Hardy. Jacques is talking loudly so that Stéphanie can hear him in the shower:

  “No one can hurt you now, Stéphanie. No one. We’re going to stay here, both of us. No one will come between us.”

  There is no happy love…

  Except those loves that our memory cultivates.

  Stéphanie is crying, a few additional drops of water under the scorching jet.

  Jacques continues with his monologue from the edge of the bed.

  “You’ll see, Stéphanie. Everything is going to change. I’m going to find you a house, a different one, a real one, one that you will love.”

  Jacques knows her so well. Jacques always finds the right words.

  “Cry, my darling. Cry. You’re right. Tomorrow we’ll go to the farm at Autheuil and get a new dog. What happened to Neptune was an accident, a stupid accident. It happens, here in the countryside. But he didn’t suffer. We’ll go tomorrow, Stéphanie. Tomorrow things will look better.”

  The shower has stopped. Stéphanie is wrapped in a large lilac towel. She steps into the bedroom, barefoot, her hair dripping. Beautiful, so beautiful. So beautiful in Jacques’s eyes.

  Is it possible to love a woman so much?

  Jacques gets up, presses his wife to him, soaks himself in her.

  “I’m here for you, Stéphanie. You know that, I’ll always be here, with you, when things get tough.”

  Stéphanie’s body stiffens for a moment, just a moment, before abandoning itself completely. Jacques kisses his wife’s neck.

  “We can start all over again, my beautiful darling. Tomorrow we’ll get a new puppy. It’ll help you forget. I know you. Imagine, a new puppy to christen!”

  The wet towel slips to the ground. Jacques lays his wife down on the marital bed. Naked. Stéphanie lets him do it.

  She has understood. She has stopped struggling. Fate has decided for her. She knows that the years to come won’t count for anything, that she will grow old like that, caught in a trap, side by side with an attentive husband that she doesn’t love. The memory of her attempted escape will fade away, gradually, over time.

  Stéphanie simply closes her eyes, the only act of resistance she feels capable of now. On the radio the last guitar chords of “Le Temps de l’Amour” merge with Jacques’s raucous groans.

  Stéphanie wishes she could block her ears as well.

  After a brief jingle, the jovial voice of the presenter delivers the weather forecast for the following day. It will be fine, unusually warm for the time of year. Happy name day to anyone called Diane. The sun will rise at 5:49, another few extra minutes of daylight. Tomorrow it will be June 9, 1963.

  There is no happy love…

  Except those loves that our memory cultivates.

  For ever, for always

  Laurenç

  I shake myself. I’m going to end up being roasted by the sun if I stand motionless like this, beside the Chemin du Roy, lost in my mad, old-lady thoughts.

  I have to move. I have to loop the loop. All we need are the words “the end” in the frame of this story.

  It’s a pretty romance, don’t you think? I hope you appreciate the happy ending.

  They got married, at least, they stayed married, they had no children.

  He was happy.

  She thought she was. You get used to it.

  She had the time… Almost fifty years. From 1963 until 2010, to be precise. A lifetime, quite simply.

  I decide to walk on a little, along the Chemin du Roy as far as the mill. I cross the brook at the bridge and stop by the gate. Immediately I notice that my letterbox is overflowing with stupid brochures advertising the nearest supermarket. I curse under my breath. I throw the bundle of paper into the bin by the entrance to the courtyard, which I put there for that very purpose. Suddenly I swear.

  In the middle of the brochures is an envelope that almost suffered the same fate. A small, stiff envelope with my name written on it. I turn it over and read the address of the sender. Dr. Berger. 13 Rue Bourbon-Penthièvre. Vernon.

  Dr. Berger. That old vulture would be quite capable of sending me a bill to extort some extra fees out of me. I assess the size of the envelope. Unless he’s giving me rather belated condolences. After all, he’s almost the last person to have seen my husband alive. That was exactly twelve days ago now.

  My clumsy fingers tear the envelope. In it I find a small, pale gray card with a black cross in the top left corner. Berger has scribbled a few barely legible words.

  Dear friend,

  I have learned with sadness of the death of your husband on May 15, 2010. As I told you some days before, on my last visit, this outcome was sadly inevitable. You were plainly a solid and united couple. You always had been. It’s a rare and precious thing.

  With my condolences,

  Hervé Berger

  Irritated, I twist the card around in my hands. In spite of myself, I find I am thinking back to that last consultation. Twelve days ago. An eternity. Another life. Once again, my past resurfaces.

  It was May 13, 2010, the day when everything changed, the day when an old man confessed on his deathbed. Just a few confessions, before he died.

  It took just less than an hour. An hour to listen, then thirteen days to remember.

  I resist the desire to tear up the card. Before losing themselves again in the labyrinth of my memory, my eyes settle once more on the envelope.

  I read the address. My address.

  Stéphanie Dupain

  Moulin des Chennevières

  Chemin du Roy

  27620 Giverny

  DAY ONE

  May 13, 2010

  (Moulin des Chennevières)

  Testament

  82

  I’m waiting in the drawing room of the Moulin des Chennevières. The doctor is in the next room, the bedroom, with Jacques. I called him out at about four o’clock in the morning. Jacques was twisting and turning with pain in the sheets, as if his heart had started to slow down, like an engine that is running out of gas, coughing before it finally stops. When I switched on the bedroom light, his arms were white, streaked with light blue veins. Dr. Berger arrived a few minutes after my call. He can do that; he set up his office in Vernon, on Rue Bourbon-Penthièvre, but he lives in one of the finest villas on the banks of the Seine, just outside Giverny.

  It was a good half hour later when Dr. Berger came out of the bedroom.

  I’m sitting on a chair. Not doing anything, just waiting. Dr. Berger isn’t someone to be handled with kid gloves. He’s an abrupt old bastard who built his veranda and dug his swimming pool on the back of all the old people in the area, but his frankness, at least, is a quality to be valued. That’s why he’s been a family doctor for many years.

  “It’s the end. Jacques understands. He knows he has only a few days left at the most. I called the hospital in Vernon and they have prepared a room for him; they’re sending an ambulance.”

  He picks up his little leather briefcase but then pauses.

  “He asked to see you. I wanted to give him something to make him sleep, but he insisted that he needed to talk to you.”

  I must have looked surprised. More surprised than upset.

  “And will you be all right?” Berger adds. “Can you cope? Do you want me to prescribe you something?”

  “I’m fine, thank you.”

  The only thing I want now is for him to leave. He glances again around the dark room, then puts one foot outside. But then he turns back again, a strange expression on his face. He almost looks sincere. Perhaps he’s not keen on the idea of losing a good client.

  “I�
��m sorry. Good luck, Stéphanie.”

  Slowly I walked toward Jacques’s room, without imagining for a second what awaited me: my husband’s confession. The truth, after all these years.

  The story was so simple, in fact.

  One killer, one motive, one place, a small handful of witnesses.

  The killer struck twice, in 1937 and 1963. His sole intention was to preserve his property, his treasure: the life of a woman, from birth until death.

  My life.

  One criminal. Jacques.

  Jacques explained everything. Nothing was left out. For these last few days, my memories have jumped from one era of my life to another, like a kaleidoscope. Yet none of these details was anything but a cog in a precise piece of machinery, a fate minutely guided by a monster.

  That was twelve days ago.

  That morning I pushed open Jacques’s bedroom door, without knowing that I would close it on the shadows of my past.

  “Come here, Stéphanie, come over to the bed.”

  Dr. Berger has put two big pillows under Jacques’s body so that he’s sitting more than lying. The blood flowing to his cheeks contrasts with the pallor of his arms.

  “Come here, Stéphanie. I suppose Berger will have told you. We’re going to have to part. Soon. It’s… it’s… I have to tell you… I have to speak to you while I still have the strength. I asked Berger to give me something to keep my strength up before the ambulance arrives.”

  I sit down on the edge of the bed. He slips a wrinkled hand along the folds of the sheet. The hairs on his arm have been shaved for four inches around a beige bandage. I take his hand.

  “Stéphanie, in the garage, in the cellar, there are lots of objects that haven’t been touched for years. My hunting things, for example, some old jackets, a bag, some wet cartridges, my boots too. Moldy old things. You’re going to lift them up. You’re going to move everything. Then you’re going to push aside the gravel on the ground with your feet. Just underneath, you’ll see there’s a kind of trapdoor, like a small ventilation space. You won’t see it unless you move everything that’s on top of it. You’re going to lift the trapdoor. Inside, you will find a small aluminum chest about the size of a shoe box. You’re going to bring it to me, Stéphanie.”

  Jacques grips my hand tightly, then lets it go. I don’t understand, but I get up all the same. I find this whole thing strange—it isn’t Jacques’s style, mysteries and treasure hunts. Jacques is a simple man, plain, no surprises. I even wonder if Dr. Berger hasn’t overdone the medication.

  I come back a few minutes later. All of my husband’s instructions were rigorously precise. I found the little aluminum chest. The joints are rusty. The shining metal is stained all over with dark patches.

  I put the chest down on the bed.

  “It’s padlocked,” I say.

  “I know… I know. Thank you. Stéphanie, I need to ask you a question. An important question. I’m not very good at speeches, you know me, but you have to tell me, Stéphanie. For all these years, have you been happy by my side?”

  What kind of answer can you give to that? What answer are you going to give a man who has only a few days left to live? A man whose life you have shared for over fifty years, sixty, perhaps. What answer are you going to give other than “Yes… Yes, Jacques, of course I’ve been happy all these years…”

  It doesn’t seem to be enough for him.

  “Now, Stéphanie, we’ve reached the end of the road. We can tell each other everything. Do you have any regrets? Do you think, I don’t know, that your life could have been better if it had been spent differently… somewhere else… with…”

  He hesitates and gulps.

  “With someone else?”

  I have a strange sense that Jacques has gone over these questions thousands of times in his head; that he has just been waiting for the right moment, the right day, to ask them. Not that I haven’t asked myself these questions—my God, far from it. But I’m an old woman now. I wasn’t prepared for this when I got up this morning. The fog is dispersing slowly now, in my weary mind. I, too, have patiently locked away questions of that kind in a chest and forced myself never to open it again. I have lost the key. I need to look for it… It’s so far away.

  “I don’t know,” I reply. “I don’t know, Jacques. I don’t understand what you mean.”

  “Yes, you do, Stéphanie. Of course, you understand. Stéphanie, you have to answer me, it’s important—would you have preferred a different life?”

  Jacques smiles at me. The whole of his face, all the way to the tops of his arms, is now a healthy pink. Highly effective, Berger’s pills. And not just on the circulation. Never in fifty years has Jacques asked me questions like this. It’s unheard-of. It’s not like him. Is it his way of ending his life? At over eighty, asking the other one, the one who’s left behind, if her whole life deserves to be thrown in the bin? Who could answer “yes” to that, who could answer “yes” to her dying partner, even if they thought it, particularly if they thought it? I see the trap without knowing why it’s there.

  “What other life, Jacques? What other life are you talking about?”

  “You haven’t answered me, Stéphanie. Would you have preferred…”

  The poisonous effluvium of the trap becomes even more apparent, like a long-forgotten perfume coming back to me, an oppressively familiar scent that faded away a long time ago but has never been forgotten. I have no choice but to answer, with nurse-like tenderness:

  “I have had the life I chose, Jacques, if that’s what you want to hear. The one I deserved. Thanks to you, Jacques. Thanks to you.”

  Jacques sighs as if St. Peter himself had come down to tell him that his name was on the list. As if now he is free to leave in peace. He worries me. His hand rises and reaches out toward the bedside table, in search of something. It bumps into a glass, which falls onto the ground and breaks. A small puddle of water flows onto the parquet.

  I’m getting up to clean it and pick up the shards of broken glass when his hand rises again.

  “Wait, Stéphanie. It’s just a broken glass, it doesn’t matter. Help me, look in my wallet, there, on the bedside table.”

  I step forward. The glass crunches under my slippers.

  “Open it,” Jacques says. “Beside my social security card, there’s your photograph, Stéphanie, can you see it? Run your finger under the photograph.”

  I haven’t opened Jacques’s wallet for an eternity. The photograph must have been taken at least forty years ago. Is that really me? Did those huge mauve eyes belong to me? That heart-shaped smile? That mother-of-pearl skin on a fine, sunny day in Giverny? Have I forgotten how beautiful I was? Do I have to wait to be a wrinkled octogenarian to be able to admit it at last?

  My index finger probes beneath the photograph. It finds a small flat key.

  “I’m reassured now, Stéphanie. I can die in peace. I can tell you now that I’ve had doubts, I’ve had such doubts. I’ve done what I could, Stéphanie. You can open the padlock of the chest with the key. That key that has never left me all these years. You’ll understand, I think. But I hope I can stay strong enough to be able to explain it to you myself.”

  My fingers are trembling now and a terrible feeling weighs down on me. I struggle to fit the key into the lock. It takes many long moments before finally it turns. Jacques puts his hand gently on my arm again, as if telling me to wait a little.

  “You deserved a guardian angel, Stéphanie. It turns out that was me, and I tried to do my job to the best of my ability. It hasn’t always been easy, believe me. I’ve sometimes been afraid that I wouldn’t be able to do it… But you see, in the end… You’ve reassured me. I didn’t come out of it too badly. You remember, my Stéph…”

  Jacques’s eyes close for a second.

  “My Fanette… After all these years, one last time, will you let me call you Fanette? I’ve never dared to, in over seventy years, since 1937. You see, I do remember everything. I’ve been a good guardian angel,
faithful and organized.”

  I don’t reply. I’m finding it hard to breathe. I have only one desire, which is to open the aluminum chest, check that it’s empty, that Jacques’s whole monologue is nothing but delirium caused by Berger’s drugs.

  “We were born in the same year,” Jacques continues, “in 1926. You, Fanette, on the fourth of June, six months before the death of Claude Monet. Me on the seventh, three days later. You on Rue du Château d’Eau, me on Rue du Colombier, a few houses away. I always knew that our fates were linked. That I was there, on the ground, to protect you. To part the branches around you, in your way…”

  Part the branches? Good God, these poetic images are so unlike Jacques. I’m the one who’s going to go mad. I can’t help it any longer, I open the chest. Immediately it falls from my hands as if the aluminum were white hot. The contents spill over the bed. My past detonates in my face.

  I look in horror at three painting knives, Winsor & Newton; I recognize the winged dragon on the handle, between two red stains, dried by time. My eyes move on and settle on a collection of poetry. En français dans la tête, by Louis Aragon. My copy has never left the shelves of my bedroom. How could I have imagined that Jacques had another? Another copy of the book that I have read so often to the children of Giverny School. On page 146, the poem “Nymphée.” I cling to the book as if it were a Bible. The pages dance. I stop, page 146. The corner of the page is turned down. My eyes go to the bottom of the page. Something’s been cut out. Delicately, someone has cut a piece of the page, just a half inch, only one line is missing, the first line of the twelfth verse, a line so often recited…

  The crime of dreaming, I agree to its creation.

  I don’t understand, I don’t understand anything. I don’t want to understand. I refuse to put all these elements in order.