You Will Not Have My Hate

by Antoine Leiris

  PENGUIN PRESS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  penguin.com

  Copyright © 2016 by Librairie Arthème Fayard

  Translation copyright © 2016 by Sam Taylor

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Originally published in French as Vous N’Aurez Pas Ma Haine by Librairie Arthème Fayard, Paris.

  ISBN 9780735222113 (hardcover)

  ISBN 9780735222144 (e-book)

  Version_1

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  One Night in Hell

  Waiting

  The Ladybug

  It Could Have Been . . .

  Seeing Her Again

  The Music Can Begin

  “You Will Not Have My Hate”

  The Master of Time

  Homemade Meals

  N.

  Stay Strong . . .

  The Fingertip

  The Right to Doze

  Tidying Up Her Things

  Letter from Melvil

  The End of the Story

  Mama Is There

  “I’ve looked everywhere for her.”

  “ . . .”

  “Is there anyone left in there?”

  “Monsieur, you should prepare yourself for the worst.”

  ONE NIGHT IN HELL

  November 13

  10:37 p.m.

  Melvil fell asleep without a murmur, as he usually does when his Mama isn’t there. He knows that with Papa, the lullabies are not as soft and the hugs not as warm, so he doesn’t expect too much.

  To keep myself awake until she gets home, I read. The story of a novelist-turned-detective who discovers that a novelist-turned-murderer did not actually write the novel that made him want to become a novelist. After twist upon twist, I find out that the novelist-turned-murderer did not actually murder anyone. Much ado about nothing. My phone, lying on my bedside table, buzzes. I read the text:

  “HEY, EVERYTHING OK? ARE YOU AT HOME?”

  I don’t want to be disturbed. I hate those text messages that don’t really say anything. I don’t reply.

  “EVERYTHING OK?”

  “ . . .”

  “ARE YOU SAFE?”

  What’s that supposed to mean, “safe”? I put the book down and rush to the living room on tiptoes. Do not wake the baby. I grab the remote. The box of horrors takes forever to come on. Live: Terrorist attack at the Stade de France. The images tell me nothing. I think about Hélène. I should call her, tell her it would be a good idea to take a taxi home. But there is something else. In the corridors of the stadium, some people stand frozen in front of a screen. I do not see the images on that screen, only the expressions on the people’s faces. They look appalled. They are watching something that I can’t see. Not yet. Then, at the bottom of my screen, the news on the ticker that slides past too fast suddenly stops. The end of innocence.

  “Terrorist attack at the Bataclan.”

  The sound cuts out. All I can hear is the noise of my heart trying to burst out of my chest. Those five words seem to echo endlessly in my head. One second lasts a year. A year of silence, sitting there, on my couch. It must be a mistake. I check that that is where she went. Maybe I got it mixed up, or forgot. But the concert really is at the Bataclan. Hélène is at the Bataclan.

  The picture cuts out. I can’t see anything now, but I feel an electric shock go through my body. I want to run outside, to steal a car, to go out and look for her. The only thing in my head now is this burning sense of urgency. Only movement can put out those flames. But I am paralyzed because Melvil is with me. I am trapped here. Condemned to watch as the fire spreads. I want to scream, but it’s impossible. Do not wake the baby.

  I grab my phone. I have to call her, talk to her, hear her voice. Contacts. “Hélène,” just Hélène. I never changed her name in my contacts list, never added “my love” or a photo of the two of us. Neither did she. The call she never received that night was from “Antoine L.” It rings out. Goes to voice mail. I hang up, I call again. Once, twice, a hundred times. However many it takes.

  I feel suffocated by this couch that seems to be swallowing me up. The whole apartment is collapsing in on me. At each unanswered call, I sink a little deeper into the ruins. Everything looks unfamiliar. The world around me fades. There is nothing left but her and me. A phone call from my brother brings me back to reality.

  “Hélène is there.”

  In the moment when I pronounce these words, I realize there is no way out. My brother and sister come to our apartment. No one knows what to say. There is nothing to say. There is no name for this. In the living room, the TV is on. We wait, eyes riveted to the twenty-four-hour news channels, which have already begun competing to come up with the most lurid, grotesque headline, the one that will keep us watching, spectators to a world that is falling apart. “Massacre,” “carnage,” “bloodbath.” I turn off the TV before the word “slaughter” can be uttered. The window on the world is closed. Reality returns.

  N.’s wife calls me. He was at the Bataclan with Hélène. He’s safe. I call him, he doesn’t answer. Once. Twice. Three times. Finally, he picks up. He says he doesn’t know where she is. Hélène’s mother joins us.

  I have to act, do something. I need to go outside, quickly, so I can find her, so I can escape the army of unspoken words that have invaded my living room. My brother clears the way for me. Without a word, he picks up his car keys. We confer in whispers. Close the door quietly behind us. Do not wake the baby.

  The ghost hunt can begin.

  —

  There’s silence in the car. In the city around us, too. From time to time, the painful screams of a siren disturb the hush that has descended on Paris. The party is over. The fanfare has ended. We go to all the major hospitals, anywhere that might be taking in the wounded. Bichat, Saint-Louis, Salpêtrière, Georges-Pompidou . . . That night, death has spread to all four corners of France’s capital. One of its ticket-sellers awaits me at each stop. “I’m looking for my wife. She was at the Bataclan.” Her name is not on any of the lists. But each time, they give me what I’m looking for: a new reason to keep going. “Not all the wounded have been identified yet.” “They’re taking survivors at Bichat too.” “Some of them have even been taken to hospitals in the suburbs.” I leave my cell number, knowing that they will not call me back. Run to the car. I miss the silence of the road.

  The streetlights speed past by the side of the beltway. The night deepens. Each light brings me one step closer to hypnosis. My body is no longer mine. My mind is on the road. If I keep going around and around this too-tight belt that suffocates the city in its grip, something will eventually happen.

  —

  Even when there was nothing left to look for, we kept going. I needed to escape. To get away as far as possible, not to turn back. To keep going to the end of the road . . . to see if there is an end to it, an end to all of this.

  I saw it, the end of the road.

  It shone from the
screen of my cell phone when my alarm went off. Seven o’clock in the morning.

  —

  In half an hour, Melvil will drink from his bottle. He must still be sleeping. A baby’s sleep, uncluttered by the horrors of the world.

  Time to go home.

  “Take the Porte de Sèvres exit . . .”

  WAITING

  November 14

  8:00 p.m.

  Melvil waits. He waits to be big enough to reach the light switch in the living room. He waits to be well-behaved enough to go out without a stroller. He waits for me to make his dinner before I read him a story. He waits for bath time, for lunch time, for snack time. And tonight, he waits for his mother to come home before he goes to bed. Waiting is a feeling without a name. As I read him one last story, it brings all of them at the same time. It is distress, hope, sadness, relief, surprise, dread.

  I wait too. To be sentenced. A few angry men have delivered their verdict with automatic gunfire. For us, it will be a life sentence. But I still don’t know that. We sing a song before bedtime. I tell myself she will come through the bedroom door and join us for the last couplet. I tell myself she will finally call. I tell myself we are going to wake up soon.

  Melvil has fallen asleep. The telephone rings. It’s Hélène’s sister.

  “Antoine, I’m so sorry . . .”

  THE LADYBUG

  November 15

  5:00 p.m.

  After the walk, it’s time for Melvil to settle down. Later will come bath time, supper time, and then, finally, bedtime. Today, I can tell he is annoyed. His pain, still speechless, shows through in every little worry of his infant life. The cookie is too soft; he doesn’t want to eat it. The ball has rolled too far; he doesn’t want to play anymore. The straps on his stroller are too tight; he doesn’t want to stay in there. He struggles with everything jostling inside him, everything that he doesn’t understand. An unspeakable turmoil that robs him of the innocent curiosity of a little boy. What is this feeling that makes him want to cry when he’s not hungry, not in pain, not afraid? He misses his mother. She hasn’t come home for two days now. She’d never been away for more than a single evening before.

  To soothe him, I send him to find a book from his bedroom. His bookshelf is low enough for him to reach the books himself, populated with characters named after the feelings they embody: Mr. Happy, Mr. Silly, Mr. Grumpy . . . There is also an elephant who really wants to grow up. A little cloth mouse into which I fit my finger, and who, page after page, tries to escape the cat chasing it. Finally, the mouse hides in a flowerpot and asks for a good-night kiss, which Melvil never refuses it.

  Today, smiling his six-tooth smile, he returns from his mission with a book that he likes to read with his mother. It is the story of a pretty little ladybug in an enchanted garden. All the insects who gather nectar there admire the ladybug because she is so good-hearted. She is the prettiest and kindest of all the bugs. Her mama is so proud of her. But, one day, the little ladybug lands by chance on the hooked nose of an evil witch.

  Melvil has never known that the witch turns this sweet ladybug into a nasty ladybug. Concerned that he might be scared by them, Hélène always skipped those pages where the flying red-and-black beetle—with a spider and a toad for accomplices—terrorized the usually tranquil garden. The ladybug that Melvil heard about every night never landed on that witch’s nose.

  Snug in his bed, he only saw the good fairy who, with a wave of her magic wand, made the little insect beautiful and kind again. Today, I skip those pages too. But when I see the fairy appear, in her dream-blue, star-covered dress, smiling the serene smile of one who already knows how the story ends, I suddenly stop.

  Melvil will not be able to skip these pages of his life the way he skipped the pages of the story. I have no magic wand. Our little ladybug landed on the witch’s nose. The witch had a Kalashnikov and death at its fingertip.

  I have to tell him, now. But how?

  Mama, papa, milk. Melvil can only say three words, but he understands everything. Yet if I sit down with him and say, “Mama’s had a serious accident. She won’t ever be able to come home,” that would be using adult words to tell him a grown-up story. He wouldn’t be able to grasp what it means to him beyond those words. It would be like killing her a second time. Words are not enough.

  He gets annoyed, stamps his feet, throws his books on the floor. He’s about to have a meltdown. I pick up my phone to play the songs that he listens to with her, with his thumb in his mouth, wrapping himself around her like an affectionate little boa constrictor.

  I hold him against my body, trap him between my legs, so he can feel me, understand me. He spent nine months inside his mother, listening to her live: her heartbeat was the rhythm of his days, her movements were his journey, her words the music of his nascent life. I want him to hear, his ear to my chest, my voice telling him my sorrow. I want him to feel my muscles tensed by the gravity of this moment. I want the beating of my heart to reassure him: life will go on.

  On the phone, I find the playlist that his mother put together for him, and hit play.

  She handpicked every single song, as if each one were a sort of musical bridge between his baby’s ears and the harmonies of the grown-up world. Henri Salvador and his “Chanson Douce” rub shoulders with Françoise Hardy’s “Temps de l’Amour.” An ode to the moon lights up “Berceuse à Frédéric” by Bourvil. As the first notes of this song play, I open the Photos folder. Her face appears, blurred, badly framed, but that is all it takes to jolt Melvil from the fragile calm produced by the opening words of the song. “It’s time to sleep now . . . my little Frédéric . . . I found this music . . . that I give you like a present . . . at the bottom of your cradle.”

  Immediately he points an anxious finger toward her, and then turns to me, his smile turned upside down and warm tears welling in his eyes. I break down, and I explain to him as best I can that his mama will not be able to come home, that she had a serious accident, that it’s not her fault, she would have loved to be with him, but she can’t anymore. He cries like I’ve never seen him cry before. He’s shed a few tears before, of course, out of pain, fear, disappointment, tantrums.

  But this, this is something else altogether. This is his first real sorrow. The first time he has ever felt true sadness.

  The photographs flash up one by one, and the music starts to sting. We are like two children, leaning over a music box that plays the tune of our life, crying our little hearts out. It’s normal that you feel sad; you’re allowed to be sad, Papa is sad too. Whenever you feel like this, come to see me and we’ll look at the photos. The song ends. “Don’t forget this music . . . that I gave you one day . . . with all my love . . .” The memories slowly take away some of the hurt. The parade of photographs becomes a game. That’s Melvil, that’s Mama. It doesn’t matter. We’ll have to talk about it again soon anyway.

  The tale of the little ladybug ends when, having once again become the prettiest ladybug in the garden, she finds her mama, who cries with joy at seeing her little girl again.

  Telling him is only the first step on the long path that awaits us. The witch has gone, but now I must explain to him, every time he needs to hear it, why his mama will not be waiting for him at the end of his story.

  I tear the page out of the book and pin it to the wall of his bedroom, next to a photograph of her. Melvil is holding on to her shoulders while he lies on her back. Her smile is like a flash of spring sunshine. A lock of hair falls over her eyes.

  She is looking at me, no pose, no lens. Her eyes speak directly to me. They tell me about the simple joys of those seventeen months we spent together, the three of us.

  IT COULD HAVE BEEN . . .

  November 16

  9:30 a.m.

  Melvil is at day care. It’s Monday morning, at a bar in the fifteenth arrondissement. People have gray faces and broken dreams. The television is tuned to BFM,
and all available eyes are glued to the screen, looking for something to talk about, now that the usual conversational topics—rising taxes, the flu—are worn out. It’s Monday, but no one can talk about anything but last Friday.

  “A double espresso!”

  I have to go to see Hélène this morning at the police mortuary. Next to me, two men, aged between forty-five and fifty, with the weary eyes of those who’ve seen too much, are discussing what I don’t want to hear. There is no way to avoid a conversation when you sit at the bar, it just happens to you. This would normally be a pleasure, to sit alone and, for the time it takes to drink a coffee, to overhear these bits and pieces of other people’s lives. But today, it is my life that is in bits and pieces.

  Even though I turn away, trying not to hear, a few words reach me through the hissing steam of the espresso machine.

  “. . . can’t let all those people die for nothing . . .”

  Does anyone ever really die for anything?

  It could have been a reckless driver who forgot to brake, a tumor that was slightly more malignant than the others, or a nuclear bomb. The only thing that matters is that she’s no longer here. Guns, bullets, violence—all of this is just background noise to the real tragedy now taking place: absence.

  Not many people understand how I can so quickly get over the circumstances in which Hélène was killed. People ask me if I’ve forgotten or forgiven. I forgive nothing, I forget nothing. I am not getting over anything, and certainly not so quickly. When everyone else has gone back to his or her life, we will still be living with this. This story is our story. To refuse it would be to betray it. Even if her disfigured body is corpse-cold, even if her kiss tastes like still-warm blood, and even if what she whispers into my ear has the chilling beauty of a funeral requiem, I have to hold her to me. I have to be a part of this story.