The Moment Before Drowning

by James Brydon

  She returns looking pale, wrapped in a woolen cardigan, and lies down on the bed again. She gestures to me to sit beside her and closes her eyes.

  “You surprised me before. I’m ready now. What do you want to know?”

  “Why was Anne-Lise suffering so much, just after Christmas the year before she died?”

  Mathilde shakes her head. “I don’t know. She wouldn’t say.”

  “Would Sasha know?”

  She shakes her head again. “No. We talked about it sometimes. Before and . . . and after. He was sure that it was connected to her death.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “I don’t know. He comes and goes. When Anne-Lise was here he had a reason to stay. Not anymore.” She enunciates slowly, murmuring each word faintly, almost uncertainly. She seems to need to concentrate in order to move her tongue and mouth when she speaks. A wild child, Sarah said. She looks exhausted and bloodless, drained by the comedown from whatever artificial paradise she was in last night.

  “When you heard about what happened to Anne-Lise, what was your first reaction?”

  “Shock, probably. You don’t imagine something like that happening. She was the only one who made life in Sainte-Élisabeth bearable.”

  “How do you think it happened? Was it someone she knew or a stranger?”

  “When they first . . .” Her throat contracts again and she gulps for air. “When they first told me she had been killed, I thought it must have been a stranger. But when I heard what he did to her . . . it seemed personal, I think.” She shivers a little, pulling the cardigan more firmly around her shoulders.

  “Think back to the last two or three weeks you saw her. Was there anything during that period that you remember as being different from normal? Think carefully, because it might be something very small, something you’d barely notice. She might have mentioned the name of somebody new, or her normal mood was changed somehow, or you noticed that she was dressing differently or changing her plans in an unusual way.”

  “I don’t think so. After that Christmas she was so miserable. She couldn’t concentrate, she got bad marks, she didn’t want to do anything. She seemed to have no energy. Back then, something hurt her. But before she was killed, she seemed okay again. Not happy, I think, but more like her old self. Like she rediscovered who she was.”

  Could it be Anne-Lise’s happiness, not her suffering, which is significant? Was she killed as a punishment for something she got over or forgot? Once you begin to listen to witnesses, the strange, fragmented, and contradictory past that they conjure up begins to teem with suggestions of things that may never have existed. Whatever was significant may have remained outside of their field of vision, or stood entirely unnoticed within it.

  I ask Mathilde about “the spider” and the scrap of paper I found in Anne-Lise’s room, but she just shakes her head. She stares for a while at the words and numbers.

  “It sounds like a poem,” she says. “I don’t know what it means, though.”

  I ask her about Anne-Lise as she was, the living girl with a promising future: Mathilde’s friend, not the victim of a tragedy that seemed so quickly forgotten. I let Mathilde talk, seeing Anne-Lise flicker before me in the warmth of recollection. Like Erwann, Mathilde conjures up her intelligence, her almost uncanny ability to follow the most difficult topics in math or philosophy without any apparent effort, while her classmates scribbled furiously, hoping to master the theme by writing down every word uttered about it, as others simply gave up, gazing in bemusement at the teacher. Anne-Lise glows a little brighter when Mathilde describes her together with Sasha: two small-town outcasts, one touched by the plague of Nazism and the other by the poverty and pogroms of the East. Mathilde describes Kurmakin as more artist than revolutionary: pale-skinned, contemplative, his eyes staring intensely from under waves of flowing hair. He also learned effortlessly but, unlike Anne-Lise, with an almost complete lack of interest in the process of getting a conventional education. He read Marx and wanted to change the world. After Anne-Lise was killed, the blaze that was within him seemed to smolder and die. He disappeared. Mathilde has no idea where he went. When she saw him again the fire was back but intensified a thousandfold, transformed into a raging, incandescent fury that seemed to be consuming him minute by minute.

  I leave Mathilde lying on the bed, her legs curled under her. Her face is blanched, whether from drowning her nights in alcohol or her days in painful remembering. One more small-town outcast. I wonder if she too is infected, tainted by a stain that can’t be expunged.

  Downstairs, despite the clattering of dishes and pans, the Blanchards have made little impression on the piles of mess in the lounge and kitchen. They shuffle toward me.

  “Do you need to take her away?” Monsieur Blanchard asks.

  “No.”

  “Oh.” He sounds surprised, even disappointed. “I hope she didn’t give you any trouble.”

  Outside, rain clouds are clawing at the edge of the sky. Something Mathilde said stays with me, tickles at my nerves: Anne-Lise’s words sound like a poem. In the Resistance, sections of poems were used to encrypt messages. I look again at Anne-Lise’s note:

  DEATH PAUSE PEACE LONG YOURS

  5 14 4 21 9 23 18 17 2 20 4 1 12 13 1 13 21 8 19 ?

  As I reenter the Blanchards’ house, I realize I am almost running, stumbling back up the stairs and into Mathilde’s room. She doesn’t seem to have moved since I left her.

  “Did you forget something?”

  “Did Anne-Lise ever talk about the Resistance to you? About codes used in the Resistance?”

  Mathilde shakes her head. “No. Or no, wait. She mentioned an English film she saw. I think it was about a girl who was killed in the Resistance. She was a spy and she got killed.”

  The question mark at the end looks careless, like the encryption was unfinished. I try to decrypt the first block by simply taking the letters in order: HCTOS . . . It looks wrong. Yet what if Anne-Lise knew something about encrypted poems, but not much. The first step would be to number the letters in order as they appear in the text:

  D E A T H P A U S E P E A C E L O N G Y O U R S

  5 6 1 21 11 16 2 22 19 7 17 8 3 4 9 12 14 13 10 24 15 23 18 20

  I try the first block again, the 5 14 4 21 9, as a simple substitution with no padding or further encryption: DOCTE . . . The full message now falls out: DOCTEUR PASCAL NANTES.

  My voice rattles breathlessly.

  “Mathilde, did Anne-Lise ever mention a Docteur Pascal to you? Or say anything about going to a doctor in Nantes?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Sure.”

  “Can I use the telephone?”

  Mathilde nods. The Blanchards don’t even seem to notice me anymore. When I return to Mathilde’s room, she looks up at me with something expectant in her eyes.

  “Did you find out who Docteur Pascal is?”

  “I didn’t try. I think I already know.”

  “So who did you call?”

  “An old police contact from when I worked in Paris. I want him to find out about the poem for me.”

  “Not the doctor?”

  “I don’t think Anne-Lise encrypted the message to hide the doctor’s name. The encoding itself is nothing. It’s not even finished. And if she’d wanted to keep the name a secret, she could simply have written it somewhere where no one would ever find it. She wasn’t trying to conceal anything. She was putting things together in a way that made sense. It’s more like symbolism than encryption. I need to know why she used this particular poem, and these particular words from it, to represent the doctor’s name.”

  Mathilde hugs her knees and floats dreamily upon the bed while we wait. When the telephone rings, she follows me downstairs and inclines her head toward mine to listen into the receiver. I write down the text of the poem for her to see:

  The life that I have

  Is all that I have

  And the life that I have
/>
  Is yours.

  The love that I have

  Of the life that I have

  Is yours and yours and yours.

  A sleep I shall have

  A rest I shall have

  Yet death will be but a pause.

  For the peace of my years

  In the long green grass

  Will be yours and yours and yours.

  The words fall uncannily into place. I can almost hear them before they are dictated to me. Docteur Pascal. The life that I have.

  “Who was the poem for?”

  The voice crackles on the other end of the line. It hums faintly, far away, an echo, disembodied noise. “It was given to an agent of the Resistance named Violette Szabo.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “She was killed.”

  “By the Nazis?”

  “She died in the Ravensbrück concentration camp.”

  I put the receiver down.

  “What does it mean?” Mathilde asks.

  “I think Anne-Lise had an abortion. That’s why she needed the address of a particular doctor who lived far away. She read the poem like a dedication: the life that I have is yours. But she knew it had to end. I don’t know if it was a reproach or just regret.”

  Mathilde nods. “It could be.”

  “She never mentioned anything about it?”

  “No. But it would explain why she kind of fell apart that winter, the one before she died.”

  “Was she away for any days around that time?”

  Mathilde shakes her head, not to say no, but because she can’t remember. She wants to dredge up the past. She wasn’t looking in the right direction and now it’s gone, melted into forgetfulness just like Anne-Lise.

  I decide to drive over to the lycée Jacques Cartier to catch Erwann before the end of the school day. Gusts of wind rattling off the sea beat against the car and the air is damp with the promise of unfallen rain. There is hardly another soul on the roads. The country seems to be in hibernation, hiding away from the brutality of the elements, the hedgerows and the fields and the relentless sea silhouetted grayly against the deeper gray sky.

  * * *

  Saint-Malo seems eternal. The great taupe rows of stones, the ordered lines of buildings, and the immensity of the walls, just rebuilt after pulverization by the Allies, project a sense of changelessness through the spasms of passing time. It is as if the years since my childhood have not elapsed and worn away so much with them. The light over the sea is electric, brooding; rocks jut out in jagged streaks from the beaches, breaking the surf in explosions of foam. The grand edifice of the town ramparts traces a perfectly crenellated line across the sky and forms a tranquil but implacable barrier to the waters tossing in the bays beneath.

  It is late afternoon when I arrive at the lycée. The lights are burning inside. I walk around to find Erwann’s classroom and see him lecturing animatedly to the pupils seated on wooden benches. He stares out at them intently, gesturing as if whatever he is saying is the key to understanding a mystery of the utmost importance. I can’t hear his words, though I see his mouth moving silently through the windowpane. He is unshaven, and where the stubble prickles on his chin it is the same blanched gray as the hair around his temples. In spite of the erratic curls of hair, which from time to time he sweeps off his forehead, and his worn, patched jacket that suggests an indifference to day-to-day life, there is a furious concentration about him. He never saw philosophy as material for academic debate. He experienced it as a profound modulation of his perception of the world and, as such, of his own self. Time has drained some of the color from him, faded him, but his fervor for elucidating the mysteries of being appears undimmed.

  When I appear at the door, he beckons me to come in and indicates a seat at the back of the room. In front of me, the students’ heads incline curiously, trying to follow the permutations of the thought Erwann is elaborating. He seems to forget my presence almost immediately and continues his lesson.

  “I was saying that because of the essentially rational character of Sartrean existentialism, emotion for Sartre is not a profound, almost sacred phenomenon from which truth or art can be mined. Remember, Sartre insists that my consciousness is totally transparent to itself at all times. He rejects Freud’s notion of an unconscious, or a part of the mind that lies beyond rational understanding. I am, he says, always fully aware both of myself and of the world around me. I am always, therefore, responsible for what I do and for what I feel, and I choose the latter just as much as I choose the former. My emotions are not absolute and incontrovertible phenomena; they are chosen reactions to particular situations. My sadness, joy, or rage are all free choices which emanate from the perception of myself and my surroundings that I undertake to adopt.”

  He pauses for a moment, surveying the class in front of him, some of whom are scribbling urgently while others look up seeking further explanation.

  “The danger comes when we convince ourselves that our emotions are not choices, when, rather than seeing emotions as magical transformations of reality, we take that magic as the very stuff of reality itself. The desolation of unhappiness, the fires of rage, or the tender hues of love all exist only as illusions of our irrational perceptions. For Sartre, this is inauthentic being. In reality, rational understanding always remains, and it is this and not the sorcery of our feelings which must govern our actions . . .”

  I close my eyes and focus on Erwann’s voice, allowing it to transport me back to my own school days, before Algeria, before Amira’s blood soaked my clothes and Tarik’s inhuman voice wormed into my brain and fed upon me like a parasite. I search in memory for those endless afternoons listening to the drone of the teacher’s voice, when deliverance meant nothing more than the bell to release us from class as we jostled and rushed for the exit, desperate to breathe the air outside and stretch our legs and hurry along in the remains of daylight.

  These memories seem dim, as if they are not memories at all but images my mind has conjured to compensate for the loss of the past. They flicker gently, tiny fragments pieced together by desire, invented templates of an existence swallowed in the onrush of time.

  A student raises her hand. Her skin is creamy. Her auburn hair bounces and catches the light. Her voice is melodic. “Is love an illusion then? Is it also inauthentic?”

  Erwann seems to barely notice her. His entire attention is occupied by answering the question. “It is an illusion par excellence. It is a myth that we use to legitimize and to fantasize our existence. Love gives us a purpose and a destiny in life. It makes us feel that we need to be just the way we are. We deny our reality as contingent beings and try to fix ourselves forever in the luminous, undying gaze of adoration. What greater illusion could there be?”

  After the bell goes, the class files out pensively and Erwann comes over to sit on the bench beside me. The smooth, sanded-down seats and scratched desks seem imbued with the infinite hours and labors of the past.

  “Do you miss it?” Erwann asks. “Philosophy, I mean.”

  “It seems less and less important.”

  “I see. I suppose you’re here about more pressing things. Like Anne-Lise. Tell me, have you found anything that might shed some light on what happened to her?”

  “I don’t know yet. I found many things, but I don’t have a sense of where they lead.” It’s like trying to dive down to the bottom of a lake, paddling and choking among the murky, oppressive depths, and each time feeling yourself forced back upward into the light. “I know, for example, that there’s something you didn’t tell me about your relationship with Anne-Lise. You gave her things. Presents. Books.”

  He nods. “I knew you’d find out. Unlike that buffoon Lafourgue. He couldn’t see the things that were right under his nose. How did you know?”

  “Anne-Lise’s room. There was a particularly fine edition of Les Fleurs du mal. I can’t see a teenager spending her little money on that, so who might have given it to her? Her alcoholic mothe
r, not educated past school level? Her revolutionary boyfriend? Or the same person who assigned her an essay on Baudelaire that she was never to finish: her teacher?”

  “You’re quite right. I did give her the book.”

  “No. You didn’t just give her a book—you crossed a line. Your relations with her stopped being professional: those of a teacher and student. You gave her a book of poems and asked her to think about love. You spoke just now about adoration. What else did that gesture mean?”

  He nods very slowly and his brow furrows.

  “Not only that. You knew you were crossing a line. That’s why there’s no dedication in the book, nothing that could link it back to you. You could have given her Descartes or Hegel if you’d just wanted to educate her, but you chose Baudelaire. You knew that there was something ambiguous in that choice. Erwann, look at me. Look up. Was it you who got Anne-Lise pregnant?”

  I don’t take my eyes off him for a second. I watch his eyes, his fingers, his throat, and his lips, his feet, his legs, analyzing every infinitesimal movement of his body to read his answers. Al-Mazra’a is back with me.

  “No. It wasn’t me.”

  Is he lying? He swallows faintly though his eyes don’t waver. There’s sadness in them. He’s telling the truth.

  “But you knew about the abortion?”

  “Yes. Anyone could see that Anne-Lise was distraught that winter. She couldn’t work. Her grades were falling disastrously. I couldn’t just ignore it. She told me that she’d been pregnant. You’re right, of course: I did care about her. But I certainly didn’t get her pregnant. It was horrible to see her in that state. I was only glad that she felt able to confide in me.”

  “Do you know who the father was?”

  “Kurmakin.”

  “Did she actually say that or did you just assume?”

  “No, she told me, and I don’t see why she’d lie. Unless . . .”

  “Unless she was having an affair with someone she couldn’t possibly name in front of her teacher. Did you know that she never spoke to Mathilde Blanchard about the abortion? Does that surprise you?”