After the Crash

by Michel Bussi

  *

  The night before, the industrialist had lost his only son and his daughter-in-law. He had been the one, the shrewd CEO, who had pushed his son, two years earlier, into taking over the Turkish subsidiary of the de Carville business. It was an open secret that young Alexandre de Carville had been next in line to lead the multinational after his father’s retirement. Alexandre de Carville had coped brilliantly with his baptism of fire in Turkey, where not only his scientific training but also his diplomatic and political skills were needed. He had had to deal with both a military regime and a democratic government, as the country went through a volatile phase. And he had been playing for the highest stakes: his ultimate objective was to win the biggest contract in de Carville history, something that would make the company’s fortune for decades to come. Alexandre de Carville had moved to Turkey with his family to negotiate a deal for the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan oil pipeline, the second longest in the world at over a thousand miles, stretching from the Caspian Sea to the Mediterranean. More than half of the pipeline would go through Turkey, ending at the little port of Ceyhan, on the south-eastern Mediterranean coast, close to the Syrian border, where Alexandre de Carville and his family had set up a summer house. It was a long-term undertaking: for two years, negotiations had stalled. Alexandre de Carville had spent most of the year in Turkey, with his wife Véronique and their daughter Malvina, who was six years old at the time. Following the news of her pregnancy, Véronique had not returned to France: her fragile health had led the doctors to advise against all travel. The child’s birth had gone well, however: Lyse-Rose was born in the Bakirkoy, the largest private maternity hospital in Istanbul. Léonce de Carville and his wife Mathilde, who had remained in France, had received an elegant card announcing the birth, together with a rather blurry photograph of their new granddaughter. But there had been no rush. The family reunion was scheduled for Christmas 1980. At the start of the Christmas holidays, Malvina de Carville had flown to France, as she did every year, one week before her parents. The rest of the family – Alexandre, Véronique and little Lyse-Rose – were to arrive a few days later, on the night flight from Istanbul to Paris on 23 December. In the de Carvilles’ vast family mansion at Coupvray, on the banks of the Marne, everything was ready. In honour of her little sister, Malvina – an adorable, mischievous dark-haired girl who commanded an army of servants like a general – had ordered that the route from the entrance hall to Lyse-Rose’s bedroom, including the great cherry-wood staircase, should be decorated with pink and white pompoms.

  Malvina de Carville . . .

  Allow me to digress for a few lines, so that I can introduce you to Malvina. It’s an important point, as you shall soon discover.

  I don’t think Malvina de Carville ever liked me very much. In fact, that is something of an understatement. The feeling is mutual. Even if I tell myself that she is not to blame for her madness, that without this tragedy she would undoubtedly have grown up to be a clever and desirable woman – well born, then well married – it does not alter the fact that, with her ever increasing obsessions, she has always scared the shit out of me. Unlike her grandmother, she never trusted me; she must have sensed that I thought of her as some kind of monster. I promise you, I am not exaggerating. However adorable she may have been at six years old, a monster is what she became: ugly, embittered, uncontrollable. Anyway, that discussion is for another time. With a little bad luck, this notebook could end up in her hands, and God knows how that shrew might react!

  So, let’s talk instead about the thing that made her go mad: the so-called miracle, and what happened afterwards.

  In the Belfort-Montbéliard hospital, Léonce de Carville maintained his usual reserve. But, for once, those around him did not take it for coldness, but for modesty, humility, decency. He remained stoical, even when he was shown his granddaughter for the first time, sealed off from him by a wall of glass that rendered her screams silent.

  ‘That’s her,’ the nurse said. ‘The first crib, directly in front of us.’ ‘Thank you.’

  His tone was sober, calm, composed. The nurse gave him some space. She had heard the news: Lyse-Rose was the only thing left in this poor man’s life.

  In that moment, the industrialist’s faith must have been shaken

  – or dented at the very least. Of course, Léonce was not as fervent a Catholic as his wife Mathilde. He had converted only out of consideration for his new family, so that his rational, scientific views would not upset them or the other good (and highly influential) Catholic families in Coupvray. But in such moments, it would have been difficult, even for the most rational of men, not to think of supernatural forces. Not to be torn between anger at a cruel God who had taken your only son, and gratitude and forgiveness towards a mean God who, perhaps out of remorse, had agreed to save your granddaughter. But only her.

  Lyse-Rose cried silently inside her glass cage. ‘It’s a miracle,’ said Dr Morange, behind him. The doctor was wearing a white shirt and a priest’s smile.

  He looked exactly the same when I met him, years later, and he told me everything that had happened.

  ‘She’s doing miraculously well. She is not suffering any after-effects at all. We are keeping her in purely for observation, as a precaution, but she has already fully recovered. It is truly astounding.’

  Thank you God, Léonce de Carville must have thought, despite himself.

  It was at that moment that a nurse came to see Dr Morange. There was a telephone call for him. Urgent, yes, and very strange. Dr Morange left Léonce de Carville by the glass cage that contained his granddaughter.

  Now that he was alone, the poor man could finally let his tears flow, thought the doctor, who – like everyone else in the world – loved a tragedy with a happy ending. He took the receiver from the nurse. ‘Hello?’

  The voice on the line sounded as if it were coming from the end of the world.

  ‘Hello Doctor, I am the grandfather of the baby, the one from the plane. You know, the one that survived the crash, in the Jura. The switchboard put me through to you. How is she?’

  ‘She’s well, very well. I think she may even be out of here in a few days. Her paternal grandfather is already here. I could get him for you, if you like . . .’

  There was a silence. In that moment, the doctor sensed that something had slipped beyond his control.

  ‘Doctor . . . I’m terribly sorry, but you must be mistaken. I am the baby’s paternal grandfather. And my granddaughter has no maternal grandfather. My daughter-in-law was an orphan . . .’

  The doctor felt a strange tingling in his fingers. His brain seethed with possible explanations. A hoax? A journalist attempting to find out more information?

  ‘We are talking about the plane from Istanbul to Paris that crashed last night? The miracle child? Little Lyse-Rose?’

  ‘No, doctor . . .’ The doctor heard the relief in the other person’s voice. ‘No, doctor, I think there’s been a misunderstanding. The baby that survived is not called Lyse-Rose. She is called Emilie.’

  Sweat beaded on the doctor’s forehead. This had never happened to him before, not even in the operating room.

  ‘Sir, I am terribly sorry, but that’s impossible. The child’s grandfather is here, in the hospital. Mr de Carville is here right now. He has seen the baby and identified her as Lyse-Rose . . .’

  There was an embarrassed silence on both ends.

  ‘Do . . . do you live far from Montbéliard?’ the doctor asked.

  ‘Dieppe.’

  ‘Ah . . . Well, I think perhaps the best thing, Mr . . .?’

  ‘Mr Vitral. Pierre Vitral.’

  ‘Well, Mr Vitral, I think the best thing is for you to telephone the police station in Montbéliard. I believe they are currently trying to verify the passengers’ identities. I’m afraid I can’t tell you any more. But they will be able to provide you with the information you need . . .’

  Suddenly, the doctor felt bad: he was acting like a cold-hearted bureaucrat
, sending this poor, distressed man to the next office, just to get rid of him. He knew perfectly well that as soon as the man hung up, he would collapse, devastated, as if his granddaughter had been killed for a second time. But the doctor quickly told himself that this was not his fault. The story was ridiculous. The man must have made a mistake.

  They both hung up, and the doctor wondered if he should mention this strange telephone call to Léonce de Carville.

  Pierre Vitral slowly replaced the receiver. His wife, Nicole, was standing next to him, waiting anxiously.

  ‘So, is Emilie all right? What did they say?’

  Her husband looked at her with infinite tenderness. He spoke gently, as if he were to blame for the bad news he was about to give her: ‘They said the baby that survived is not called Emilie. She’s called Lyse-Rose . . .’

  For a long time, Nicole and Pierre Vitral did not speak. Life had been hard for both of them. Theirs was a marriage of two bad luck stories, which they told themselves could turn into a positive thing, like when two minus numbers are added together. Together they had faced up to a lack of money, to the cruel blows of fate, to illness, to the trials of daily life. They had never complained. It’s always the same: if you don’t shout, you never get anything. As the Vitrals had never protested against life, life had never bothered to correct the imbalance that afforded them so much misery. Pierre and Nicole Vitral had both ruined their health – Pierre his back, and Nicole her lungs – in twenty years spent selling chips and sausages from a specially remodelled orange-and-red Type H Citroën van. They sold their wares on the seafront at Dieppe, and all the other beaches of northern France, following the calendar of events and festivals, as far as the region’s generally inclement weather allowed. They had tempted fate by having two children, and fate had paid them back by taking one of them: Nicolas had died in a moped accident one rainy night in Criel-sur-Mer.

  Bad luck had dogged the family’s footsteps for many years, and then, for the first time – only two months before Christmas, 1980 – they had finally won something: a two-week holiday in Gumbet.

  Gumbet, as I imagine you are completely unaware, is in Turkey: a resort on a peninsula that extends into the Mediterranean, packed with four-star hotels. They would be staying in luxury, all expenses paid! They had won by pure chance: a lottery organised by their local supermarket. It was their son Pascal’s ticket that had been drawn. There had been only one condition: the holiday had to be taken before the end of 1980. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the best timing for Pascal and his wife Stéphanie, who had just become parents for the second time. There was no problem with Marc, their eldest, because he was already two years old and could stay with his grandparents while they were away. But Stéphanie was still breastfeeding little Emilie, and in any case she had no desire to be away from her newborn daughter for two weeks. The tickets could not be exchanged, so either they had to take the baby with them, or they would not be able to go at all.

  They went. They had never been on a plane before. Stéphanie was a young woman with laughing eyes who saw the world as a huge, crunchy apple, begging to be eaten. She and Pascal had thought it would be wrong to turn their back on good luck, now that it had finally smiled on them. They should not have been so trusting; you should never trust a smile. Pascal, Stéphanie and Emilie were supposed to land at Roissy on 23 December, then spend a day in Paris so they could admire the Christmas lights. Another whim of Stéphanie’s. She was an orphan, adored by the entire Vitral family. Her presence made them feel good. In truth, she did not need a trip to Turkey in order to be happy. Everything she wanted from life she could find in Marc and Emilie, her little darlings, their father and their doting grandparents.

  Pierre and Nicole Vitral were together when they heard the news. They were listening, as they always did, to the seven o’clock bulletin on France Inter.

  Facing one another, on either side of the cluttered kitchen table. The two stoneware bowls – Nicole’s filled with tea, Pierre’s with coffee – remained there for a long time afterwards, the whole scene frozen in the moment when life stopped in that little house on Rue Pocholle, Pollet, the old fishermen’s quarter that lay like an island in the middle of Dieppe.

  *

  ‘Why Lyse-Rose?’ Nicole Vitral suddenly yelled. They lived in a street of semi-detached houses. There were ten buildings in the cul-de-sac, each of them containing two dwellings. Everyone could hear everyone else. Nicole’s shout alerted the whole neighbourhood.

  ‘Why would they say the baby was called Lyse-Rose? Huh? Who told them that was her name? The baby? She said her name to the firemen, did she? A three-month-old baby on that aeroplane, a little girl with blue eyes . . . That’s our Emilie! She’s alive. How can anyone say she’s not? They’re plotting against us because she’s the only one who survived. They want to steal her from us . . .’

  There were tears in her eyes. The neighbours began to come out of their houses, in spite of the cold. She collapsed into her husband’s arms.

  ‘No, Pierre, no. Promise me . . . promise me they won’t take our granddaughter. She didn’t survive that crash just for someone else to steal her from us.’

  In the little bedroom that adjoined the living room, two-year-old Marc Vitral, woken by his grandmother’s cries, began to scream. He could not possibly understand what was happening, though, and he would not retain any memory of that terrible morning.

  2 October, 1998, 9.24 a.m. Marc stopped reading, and wiped the tears from his eyes. No, of course he did not remember that morning. Not until he

  read this account of it.

  There was something surreal about discovering each detail of the

  tragedy that had consumed his childhood in this way.

  The noise and movement around him in the bar was making his

  head spin. The five guys from the student association got up and

  left, still laughing, and the glass door banged shut behind them.

  Marc breathed slowly, trying to calm himself down. After all, he

  already knew almost all of this story. His story.

  Almost all.

  The clock said it was 9.25 a.m. And he had only just begun.

  6

  2 October, 1998, 9.17 a.m. Malvina de Carville knocked on the glass with the barrel of her Mauser L110. The dragonflies barely stirred. Only the largest, with its sparkling red body and gigantic wings, attempted to raise itself an inch or two into the air before falling to the floor of the vivarium, where it lay piled up with dozens of other insect corpses. Not for a moment did Malvina de Carville think of switching on the oxygen in the tank or lifting the glass lid to allow the survivors to escape. She preferred to watch the creatures suffer. After all, she was not to blame for this massacre.

  She hit the glass with her revolver again, harder this time. She was fascinated by the insects’ despairing attempts to flap their heavy wings in that thin, deadly air. She stood watching them for several minutes. Let them all die, these dragonflies – what did she care? They weren’t why she was here. She was here for Lyse-Rose. Her dragonfly. The only one that mattered. Malvina moved off into the room. Surprised by the living-room mirror, she found herself staring at her own reflection. A shiver of disgust ran through her. She hated that white hair slide, the way her long, straight hair parted neatly in the middle; she hated her sky-blue wool jumper with its lace collar; she hated her flat chest, her skinny arms, her six-stonesomething body.

  People in the street thought she must be a fifteen-year-old girl, at least when they saw her from behind. She was used to seeing the shock in their eyes when they were confronted by her face. She was a twenty-four-year-old teenager, dressed as if she’d just been transported from the 1950s.

  Fuck it. She didn’t care.

  They could all go screw themselves, all those people who’d been telling her the same thing for the past eighteen years, all those shrinks, supposedly the best in the country, whom she had exhausted, defeated, one by one. All those child psychiatrists, tho
se nutritionists, those specialists on this and that. And her grandmother. She was sick of the tune they’d been singing to her all these years. Refusal to grow up. Refusal to age. Refusal to mourn. Refusal to forget Lyse-Rose.

  Lyse-Rose.

  She knew what they meant when they talked about mourning her, forgetting her. They might as well say kill her.

  She turned and walked towards the fireplace. She had to step over the corpse. Not for anything in the world would she have let go of the Mauser in her right hand. You never knew. Although it didn’t look as if that bastard Grand-Duc was going to get up any time soon. A bullet in the chest. And his head in the fireplace.

  She grabbed the poker in her left hand and clumsily dug around in the hearth.

  Nothing!

  That shithead Grand-Duc had left nothing behind!

  Increasingly annoyed, Malvina started to bang the iron rod around the fireplace, smacking Grand-Duc in the face and raising a cloud of black smoke. There had to be something: a scrap of paper that hadn’t been burned, a clue of some kind . . . But no, she had to face facts. There was nothing here but tiny flakes of black confetti.

  The archive file boxes lay scattered over the floor, the dates written in red felt tip on the side: 1980, 1981, 1982-83, 1984-85, 1986-89, 1990-95, 1996 . . .

  All of them empty.

  A blind, uncontrollable rage rose within Malvina. That piece of shit detective was really taking the piss. Was this what her grandparents had paid him for, for eighteen years? Not just his salary but all his expenses, his travel, his costs . . .

  For a pile of ashes!

  Malvina dropped the poker on the polished floorboards, leaving a black gash in the wood. It was their money that had paid for this bastard’s house, in the ultra-chic Butte-aux-Cailles neighbourhood. Their money. And for what, in the end? So that he could burn all the evidence before shutting his big fat mouth for ever.

  She tightened her grip on the Mauser.

  Malvina de Carville felt no more compassion for Grand-Duc than she did for the dragonflies in the vivarium.