Lovers on All Saints' Day (4 page)

“The truth is I think we could have found it,” she said.

It took me a moment to understand what she meant.

“But we looked,” I said. “You saw us.”

“I don’t think you tried very hard. Have you no pity? The bird is suffering right now. You should have found him and killed him.”

“The dogs looked. They’re good dogs, Michelle. We did everything we could.”

“You left it to suffer.”

“What’s the matter?”

“You’re cruel. You must not be quite right in the head.”

She went quiet, waiting for me to say something. She was standing in the doorway, and the room’s yellow light hit her from the side and made her features stand out on her face. I felt worn-out. I had to look at the rifle that I’d already put back in the rack to make sure it wasn’t still hanging from my shoulder.

“And what do you want?” I said. “You want me to go look for it?”

“Don’t be sarcastic.”

“No, I’m going to go,” I said. “See you later.”

“But it won’t do any good now.”

“It doesn’t matter. I think I should, Michelle. Give us a chance to take some deep breaths, count to ten, all those magazine recommendations. . . . We just can’t stand each other anymore, can we? Who would have thought it would jump out at us like this.”

I saw her hand move to her mouth and press her lips together between two fingers. It was her gesture of control, her secret mechanism to not start crying.

“Fine,” she said. “Tell me one thing.”

“What?”

“Are you coming back?”

There was fear in her question.

“If you’re not coming back, tell me. On the whole, I like a bit of advance warning for things like this.”

“Of course I’m coming back,” I said without looking at her. “What a stupid question.”

I walked out into the courtyard and the cold air hit me in the face. It was night and it was autumn, and the temperature had dropped drastically. Isis barked when she heard me open the gate.

—

T
HE FIELDS ALONG THE ROAD
were the color of the night sky. Streetlights, in this part of the Ardennes, were almost nonexistent, and only the hay bales wrapped in white plastic broke through the darkness, big and round like balloons of light. I drove through Hamoir and crossed the whole village without seeing any lights on. The Maison du Pêcheur was closed, but Luca’s old Ford slumbered on its gravel forecourt. Luca was a friend to all the local hunters; he would buy the day’s catch and paid well, and in the evenings the little lounge to the left of the bar would fill up with men dressed in gray and green, their boots still caked with mud, shouting and arguing about the day’s results. But tonight they’d already gone. I knocked a couple of times on the oak door; the place was dark, and the yellow lights of the level crossing reflected back at me from the steamed-up windows. I thought that any bright, warm place was as good as the next, I thought of the
friterie
on Rue Saint-Roch, and it felt good to get back in the pickup and close the door and be out of the wind again. Inside, it smelled of damp clothes, but also of Michelle’s perfume. The road shone under the yellow lights until I got to the edge of town. The radio forecast fog.

The
friterie
on Saint-Roch was a mobile home permanently parked on the corner of Rue Saint-Roch and Route de Marches. It was white and dirty, and inside they served sausages and hamburgers and
frites
and
gaufres
with hazelnut cream that I’d never tried despite having passed through there a thousand times. As I walked up the wooden steps, I ran into a group of German tourists, and thought they must have come to see the races at Spa. The premises smelled of bleach. I found a two-hundred-franc note among the bullets and shells still in my pocket. At the table in the corner, beneath a collection of old bottles, two men were drinking beer. Above the window frame were disposable cups and a thick glass key ring. The men’s checked shirts were identical except for the color; it was as if one of them had bought both shirts, or as if someone else had chosen them. Apart from those two and the woman in a ridiculous red uniform, who was making the cash-register buttons chime as if her life depended on the volume of that ringing, there was nobody else in the place. I ordered the same as those men,
frites
and a beer. I chose a table I could see my truck from. The men didn’t look at me.

The older one had a harelip and his sparse mustache made it even more noticeable; the fingernails of the younger one were covered in a black film. I didn’t get as far as figuring out what kind of work they did but thought they would probably be taking a transport truck to Brussels or even to Paris, because they didn’t seem to be in a hurry to leave. The whole scene gave an impression of false calm, because the woman had stopped manipulating the cash-register keys and now her hands were busy organizing the things on the counter. There was something vaguely vulnerable about her, and it amused me to realize she was frightened. But then I thought it was perhaps legitimate that a small young woman—she wasn’t actually that small, but her fragility created that illusion—should be frightened, working alone and late in a fast-food place on the side of a dark road. I went up to the counter.

“What did you have?” said the woman.

I pointed to the remnants on the table. A cardboard plate with a bit of mustard on it and a can of Judas.

The woman wrote large numbers on a paper napkin. She pronounced a sum and I gave her some money. When she was handing me my change, a five-franc coin fell on the sheets of grease-stained wrapping on the counter.

“Don’t be scared. They’re truck drivers, they won’t hurt you.”

The woman looked at me, as if checking to make sure she didn’t know me. Then she looked toward the back, avoiding my gaze. In the irises of her eyes, I saw the brief reflection of the illuminated window. Suddenly I felt uncomfortable, intrusive, unwanted.

“Sorry,” I said. “I thought—”

“It irritates me that people can tell,” said the woman. “Everybody knows what I’m thinking, it’s terrible. It’s as if my face is a neon sign.”

“You wouldn’t be great at poker.”

“No,” she said. “You’re not the first to tell me that. Do you think they’ve noticed as well?”

The truck drivers were drinking unhurriedly. Nothing ever happens in the Ardennes; but all men are unpredictable, and anyone can be a rapist or a murderer. I felt that my presence was the only thing that gave the woman any peace of mind, and that power seemed immense and valuable. Or the woman’s peace of mind was valuable, and the possibility of her being afraid again hateful.

“I can stay for a while, if you want.”

“Oh, no,” she said with a sudden pride. “None of that. I can look after myself.”

“I can stay until they leave.”

“And how can I be sure?”

“Sure of what?”

I thought I saw her smile.

“That you’re not the one who’s going to attack me.”

The woman behind the counter smoothed a pleat in her red uniform, rubbed her index finger over her full, penciled eyebrows. Her skin was ash-colored, paler on her cheeks and broad forehead, darker under her eyes. On her right nostril sparkled a tiny diamond, worn with elegance like a family crest; when a wisp of hair fell over her face, she pushed it back under the red taffeta ribbon holding her hair flat.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess you have no way of knowing.”

She looked at me and smiled, but the fear had not evaporated from her face. Maybe it was a permanent feature, as Michelle’s red hair was for her, or the scar to the right of her belly button. When she was twelve, Michelle had had an appendectomy.

“Why don’t you ask for a morning shift?”

“There are no shifts here. I work all day.”

“Oh. You’re the boss.”

“The bosses live in Aywaille,” she said.

She turned around and took the aluminum mesh basket out of the hot oil.

“Thank goodness it’s time to close. I’m not in the mood to stay here tonight.”

“I can give you a lift, if you want,” I said. “As long as you don’t live too far away, of course.”

“Don’t worry. I live right here.”

“Here?”

“A couple of houses down the street. Very close by.”

“Just as well,” I said. “Is there a phone?”

The woman moved her hand in the air. I walked toward the back of the place. On an old pedestal table, in a little back room, was a black telephone with several automatic dialing keys. It wasn’t a public phone: the woman was doing me a favor.

Michelle’s voice sounded alert.

“I thought you’d be asleep.”

“Where are you?”

“In Saint-Roch. I wanted to let you know.”

“I want you to come back. I didn’t mean to say what I said. This isn’t going to end, is it?”

I’d heard that question a thousand times. In those moments I felt that Michelle, by forcing me to be optimistic, was also forcing me to lie. I reproached her in silence. I know you’re going to leave. That’s what was waiting for me: a woman who tells me she’s leaving. I was glad not to be able to see her now, and that she couldn’t see me. I felt hypocritical when I said:

“Of course not. We’re going to see this through.”

When I hung up, I stood by the little table for a few seconds. I’d wanted to hear Michelle’s voice, but now the conversation was ringing in my head like a rising bruise after being punched. The silence of the place bothered me. I went back out into the restaurant and again the air filled with the smoke of burned oil. The men in the checked shirts had left. Without bothering anybody, without putting anybody in danger.

The woman had taken off her red uniform. She was wearing a long black skirt and a windbreaker for the cold. “I changed my mind,” she said. Under the neon lights, the diamond in her nose looked like a drop of mercury.

“It’s so cold out,” she said. “Can you give me a lift?”

—

T
HE WOMAN LIVED
up Rue Saint-Roch toward Rue sur-les-Houx, about five hundred meters from the
friterie
. I imagined her repeating the route every night, at this time or later, and in the image I conjured up, I don’t know why, it was snowing. I didn’t believe for a second that her name was Zoé, but I didn’t tell her that. We pulled into a small cluster of three identical houses, with smooth mown lawns as if nobody had ever stepped on them. When I stopped the pickup, I saw a silhouette spying on us from the house opposite.

“Don’t pay any attention,” said Zoé. “That’s Madame Videau. She’s very old and very nosy.”

In the redbrick walls, not a single light was visible.

“Nobody’s waiting for you?”

But Zoé had already gotten out. I watched her walk toward the door, red like the door of a doll’s house, with her hands clasped behind her back. She stopped as if gazing at the façade. She turned around and her mouth moved soundlessly. I rolled down the window on the passenger side.

“I asked if you’d like to have something to drink,” she said.

I caught a whiff of Michelle’s perfume from the back of the seat, where her red hair had rested. No more than twenty kilometers separated me from where she was sleeping, or not sleeping, alone and without me. I looked at the clock: it was still early. I’d never made love with a woman who had jewelry in her nose.

“Sure,” I said. “I’m still freezing to death.”

I followed her inside. The living room was an enormous exercise in mimesis: nothing in it proved that Zoé had any taste of her own, much less decorative fancies. There was barely room for the two floral-print sofas and glass table, on which sat a box of cigars and a paperback copy of
The
Little Prince
in English. I looked for the room where things would happen that night. The hallway Zoé was walking back up, with a lacquered tray in her hands, led to two closed doors. Zoé put the tray down on the table. “I don’t have any alcohol,” she said in a slightly apologetic tone, as if she were embarrassed. I asked her if we could light a fire and she nodded. I pointed to the cigars, asked if I could have one, and Zoé stammered, she said of course, said I don’t know where the matches are, sorry, I’m a terrible hostess. It was suddenly obvious they didn’t belong to her. I left my cap on the back of the sofa and asked:

“Is the book his?”

Her eyes rested on the mantel of the fireplace.

“Is your husband away on a trip?”

“My husband died three years ago,” said Zoé. “He was a test pilot for new planes.”

She fell silent for a second. Then she added, as if this would rescue the balance of the conversation:

“But he didn’t read that book, either. He wanted us to read it together to help me learn English, but he died before we did.”

The revelation shocked me. Not so much what I’d heard, because cuckolding a dead Englishman didn’t trouble me, but rather the color of those words, the melancholy, the unexpected innocence. I put the cigar back in the box. A bit of leaf came loose and fell onto the glass of the table.

“His name was Graham. His plane crashed just before he reached Dover.”

“We don’t have to do this, if you don’t want to.”

“Right in the English Channel, imagine. No survivors.”

“I can leave right now and nothing will happen.”

“The sea is icy cold there. I’ve been told there are sharks, but I think it’s a lie.”

“Listen. Maybe it would be better if we saw each other some other day.”

“Stay there,” she said. “Please don’t leave.”

She straightened up the box of cigars, which I’d moved, to restore the symmetry of the table. The tray troubled her, and she ended up putting it on the floor. Zoé moved around her house as if it were a museum, and I realized she tried at all costs to keep it as it had been when Graham was alive. But she kept talking.

“Have you ever met anyone like this before?”

“Like what?”

“A woman like me. A young woman whose husband has died.”

I imagined the effort it was costing her to call herself a widow. I pronounced the word in my head.
Widow
. Its sound and the image of Zoé did not correspond to each other.

“No,” I said. “Never.”

“Ah. Well, now you see. We’re an interesting race. The first days, you worry a little when the person doesn’t arrive at the usual time. And then you remember, see? That’s the first days, and it hurts. Later, you start waking up at night, very late or very early. You think someone’s holding you, and then you start to cry and you don’t know whether out of love or out of fear. That always happens. To everyone.”