The Breakers

by Claudie Gallay

  I watched her. Stork, such a strange name for a little girl, and no one could tell me why she was called that. Who had called her that so persistently that everyone had forgotten her real name? And from that day on, deep inside her, it had become impossible for her to call herself anything else.

  Lili said that she was like a rag-doll. She also said that smiling was what the waif did best. That, and tracing lines carefully across the pages of her notebook.

  We went back out. A sort of brutal passage, from darkness to light.

  Lambert was over by the road, leaning on the fence. He called to the Stork.

  “I’ll buy half a dozen!”

  She held out her hands and exchanged the eggs for a few coins.

  Lambert turned to me. He pointed to the eggs.

  “Shall we make an omelet?”

  I was not too keen on omelets.

  He took a few steps. I remembered a song by Mouloudji, I hummed it, softly, One day, you’ll see, we’ll meet somewhere, anywhere …

  I used to like to listen to Mouloudji, with you.

  Old Nan was going up the street, on the same pavement, ahead of us. This was not her usual time, but for some days now you could see her everywhere, her forehead low, talking to herself. Old Mother was watching for her from behind the window, her hunched shadow over her walking frame. When Nan reached the terrace, Old Mother came out. They looked at each other, two old women like two hatreds. They did not say anything. Old Mother let out a long hiss, and Nan spat.

  Lambert and I looked at each other and kept walking along the wall. We went over to his house. Snails as tiny as pinheads were stuck by the dozen on the stones around the door.

  The key was in the lock.

  The kitchen was low-ceilinged with dark beams and a farmhouse table down the middle. He put the eggs on the table.

  He rummaged in the cupboards.

  He eventually brought out a frying pan. A bottle of oil from the cardboard box on a low chest next to the sink. Some shopping he had done in Beaumont.

  He told me that the house had been rented for two months the previous summer and also for the holiday at All Saints.

  He broke an egg, a firm knock on the edge of the sink.

  “In 2000, I even managed to rent the house for the entire year, to a writer from Paris.”

  Hot embers were still shimmering in the hearth. There was firewood in a crate next to it. I added a few logs, some paper, and the flames took again. A heavy dark beam served as a mantelpiece. Remnants of red paint clung to the wood. There was a date carved, 1823, the year of the twenty-seven shipwrecks. Many of the village roof structures had been made with wood from the ships that had run aground that year.

  I went over to the window. Spiders with long thin legs had woven webs in the wooden frame. Bees with heavy bellies were trapped in the webs. They had been dead for a long time, and were dried out.

  I looked up. Old Nan was in the street. Her hands clinging to the fence, she was looking at the house. A moment later, she had vanished.

  I put two plates down on the table.

  “M. Anselme says that this dresser is from a shipwreck.”

  Lambert nodded.

  “I’ve heard him talk about it. It belonged to a Sir somebody or other …”

  “Sir John Kepper.”

  He turned off the fire under the frying pan.

  “We ought to have some bread, but we don’t. We don’t have any wine, either!”

  He glanced outdoors, at Lili’s terrace.

  “Could you go over and ask for two glasses?”

  “I could, yes …”

  “But you won’t?”

  I shook my head. “No, I won’t.”

  It made him laugh.

  He slid the eggs on to the plates. He rummaged in his cardboard box looking for something to replace the bread, and brought out a packet of biscuits. He looked at me, questioningly. They were fig rolls.

  We preferred to eat the eggs on their own, never mind about the bread.

  He pointed round the room.

  Two little red porcelain swans, set on the table. Their backs formed a hollow, full of salt.

  “There are things that have disappeared … plates from the dresser, and the things that disappeared were replaced by other things. But these two swans were already here in my parents’ day.”

  We ate the eggs, looking at the porcelain figurines.

  “Next time, I’ll make you some abalone, that will be better.”

  He told me that he used to live in Paris with his parents. They had a Renault 4L, and when they came here, his father attached the cases to the roof. They always stopped in Jumièges, winter and summer alike, and they would walk for an hour in the ruins and then set off again. In winter, the site was closed, but they walked around anyway.

  “I liked coming on holiday here. We’d arrive, open the shutters, and go down to see the sea.”

  He smiled at the memory of it.

  “They were endless holidays, especially the summer ones, we were here for two months, we never thought about the end … until the day we saw my mother bring the cases out and then it was as if something heavy was falling upon us. We had to put everything away, take the sheets off the beds, and my father would close the shutters. On the way home, we didn’t sing, and we didn’t go through Jumièges.”

  He pointed to a box on the floor against the wall.

  “Look what I found!”

  It was drawings.

  “My mother had us do them when it was raining. It rained a lot, so that made a lot of drawings.”

  He said nothing for a long while, and then, “I remember the way she would lean over the table and draw for us.”

  I went to pick up the box, and as I came back to the table I saw Nan’s face at the window. She was here again.

  I set the box on the table, and took out a few drawings. Lambert was right, there were a lot of them.

  “I found them just like that, in the box, at the back of the cupboard.”

  He pointed to the cupboard behind him.

  Most of them were children’s drawings, but some had been done by an adult.

  “Lili’s mother said she saw lights here, some nights.”

  “It’s possible … The road mender was keeping an eye on the place, but he couldn’t do everything. A family of dormice nested in the room next door … Over where you live, you’re almost in the sea, right?”

  How to explain it? La Griffue is like an island, but more constricted, because it is tied to the land and cannot be what it really is.

  “Yes, almost …” I answered.

  I looked at other drawings. I showed him that, at the foot of some of them, you could read his first name.

  He nodded.

  “The flowered curtains upstairs, is that you?”

  “They were already there, before …”

  I put the drawings I had looked at on the table. I picked up others. The paper had yellowed with time, but the colors were still there.

  “Why are they buried here, your parents? You were living in Paris.”

  He shook his head.

  “It was one of my aunts who took care of all that. I suppose she thought they would have wanted to stay where Paul was.”

  I looked at him, with a drawing in my hand.

  Who had helped him to grow up? How many cries and tears had it taken before he could move on from the pain and make his life bearable at last? I looked at him again, and there was a split-second of intimacy where he stopped being a stranger. I was afraid of it. A potent fear. I thought, I must get away from this.

  “Last night the sky was so dark that the stars seemed to bang against my window. If I had held out my hand, I could have touched them.”

  I thought of you.

  Our eyes met.

  I did not look away.

  Most of the drawings were his, but on other sheets there were the messy scribblings of the kind only very young children make.

  Each drawing had a date.r />
  “You still don’t want to come with me to see old Théo?”

  “This is an obsession with you.”

  He smiled.

  “Théo’s not an easy person, you can’t walk into his place just like that.”

  “But you walked in, didn’t you?”

  “I’m doing the bird research.”

  “So?”

  “He did that too, before, so it gave us something to talk about.”

  He took my plate, and put it on top of his.

  “It’s not the same topic, but I also have something we could talk about.”

  “Go there on your own.”

  He took the plates over to the sink.

  “No doubt I will. I want him to tell me that he put out the light.”

  “What purpose would that serve?”

  He stood leaning against the sink. His arms folded. “Are you protecting him?”

  “That’s not the issue …”

  He smiled faintly.

  “I also have a problem with Max.” He said the words in the same tranquil tone of voice.

  “Nobody has a problem with Max …”

  He nodded. “But I do.”

  “Is it because of your buttercups? Max always takes flowers and he’ll go on taking them. Everyone knows it here, it’s not an issue.”

  “It’s not because of the buttercups …”

  “What is it because of, then?”

  He came back over to the table and lit a cigarette.

  “My brother’s medallion that was on the gravestone … it has disappeared.”

  He tossed the match into the flames. I could not let him believe that.

  “Max takes flowers, he doesn’t take anything else!”

  He hesitated for a moment, and he said, “I would just like to find the photograph again …”

  His face, just then. I would have liked to have seen it in the light.

  I said, “Your face …”

  He wiped his hand over his face to chase away the shadows. His hand on his slow-lipped mouth.

  Surely Lambert had seen Nan’s face up against the windowpane. I saw him go tense.

  “Excuse me.”

  He went out. He came back a moment later, holding Nan by the arm. He pulled out a chair and made her sit down.

  “I’m making coffee, would you like some?”

  That is what he said. Nan smiled. She placed her hands, one after the other, against her bosom, and she sat there, her eyes never leaving Lambert. His movements, that is what she was following. It was astonishing to see her do this.

  She seemed calm, too.

  “Drink it while it’s hot.” He put the cup down in front of her.

  She looked at the cup, the steaming coffee.

  He sat down opposite her.

  “I am not the man you are looking for …”

  He explained to her for a long time who he was, and why he was there.

  Nan was attentive, to his lips, to the sound of his voice, but she wasn’t listening to him. He must have realized, because he stopped talking.

  In the silence, Nan smiled.

  “Michel …” she said.

  He looked round, disoriented. He turned to me. “You tell her!”

  “What do you want me to tell her? That you are not the man she is looking for? You can see she doesn’t want to hear …”

  “But wait! Perhaps this Michel was on the boat?”

  “I really don’t know …”

  I looked at him.

  “Maybe he was there, or maybe he’s someone else …”

  Lambert shook his head.

  “But I am not the man she is looking for … We can’t let her go on thinking that.”

  He turned again to Nan and told her. Nan was rubbing her hands together. She suddenly seemed very agitated. She could not hear what he was saying, she did not want to, so, as he went on repeating that he was not Michel, she put her hands over her ears and pressed very hard.

  There was a tension in the room around her, now, a terrible confusion in her gaze, I thought she was going to cry out.

  He realized as well. He reached toward her arm with his hand, he did not touch her. She looked at his hand, his gesture.

  She got up and walked over to the door. Before opening it, she turned round and looked at Lambert. It was as if she had just understood something, the meaning she might be able to give that gesture. She smiled, and her smile gave me a shiver.

  After that, she went out.

  Lambert and I looked at each other. We wanted to drink our coffee, but it had gone cold.

  “Shall we make another?”

  I nodded.

  He emptied the cups into the sink. Nan’s visit had disturbed him. He did not want to show it, but his gestures were more nervous, betrayed him.

  “I can’t hold it against her … When people disappear, for a long time those who loved them believe that they managed not to die. I don’t know if that helps in some way.”

  He came back with two full cups. He put them down on the table.

  “The sea ought to give back its corpses. So that people can touch them, see them! Does it disgust you, what I’m saying?”

  “No.”

  He sat back down across from me. I wanted to explain to him.

  “I think that with him it might be something else …”

  He looked at me.

  “What are you thinking?”

  “That he was someone she knew, someone who went away. And she’s waiting for him to come back.”

  I looked up.

  “Someone who’s alive … A boy that Max calls Tom Thumb.”

  He thought about it.

  A moment later, a car pulled up and stopped outside the house, and three people got out. It was the notary from Beaumont, bringing visitors.

  Lambert and I met again at the end of the day, by the rocks in front of the great cross for the Vendémiaire. He was walking about. I was there.

  Max was far away in the distance, on the breakwater. With my gaze I followed his tall, unsteady figure as he staggered toward the coastguard station.

  Lambert came up to me. I pointed to Morgane, stretched out in the sun, below us. Max must have looked at her, for a long time no doubt, too long, and when he could no longer bear to look at her, he did what he had to do.

  He fled.

  He would go and hide beyond the coastguard station, in the hollow spots in the earth that looked like caves.

  Lambert pressed my binoculars to his eyes. He looked at Max. He was staring at the sea, too, toward the islands.

  We talked about this place.

  “And have you sold your house?” I asked him, because of the visitors that morning.

  “I don’t know …”

  His tone was indifferent. “Just now, do you have anything you need to do?”

  I did.

  I was even running late. That was what I told him.

  There were birds that used to migrate that were no longer migrating. Others who used to follow their route, merely flying over La Hague, and who now were stopping here. We wanted to understand why there had been such changes. I had gone looking for their locations. It was not enough. I had to do more, and record everything properly. I was three days behind. After that, we would ring the birds.

  Lambert listened to me, staring through the binoculars at the lighthouse. Examining it with an infinite attention.

  “What I meant was, we could go and have dinner together … There’s a restaurant in Jobourg, Les Bruyères. Apparently you eat well there.”

  I looked at him.

  “It’s going to rain,” I said, pointing to the sky.

  He aimed the binoculars toward the coastguard station. Max was far away, almost invisible on the path. He smiled.

  “My mother used to say that too, it’s going to rain, when she didn’t want to go where my father was going. I don’t know if she really believed it was going to rain, or if it was just that she needed to be alone.”

 
He handed me the binoculars.

  We began walking.

  “Since I’ve been here, I’ve been remembering more things about her. When my little brother was born … She said he was more fragile than other children. I don’t know if it was true.”

  “Théo has a cat like that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “More fragile than others. He said that this one needs more love than the others.”

  He nodded.

  “I think my mother loved Paul that way … as if she sensed he wasn’t going to grow up. What a stupid thing I’ve just said …”

  “Do you think she loved him more than she loved you?”

  He thought.

  “I was already grown when he was born.”

  He took off his jacket. Just like that, all of a sudden, without warning. The air was bracing. He took a few breaths, long inhalations.

  “We lived in a quiet neighborhood in Paris. There was a toy shop not far from where we lived, Le Pain d’Épice, it was called. My mother worked there. It was a very old shop … in a covered arcade, passage Jouffroy … and a lot of our toys came from that shop. In the evening, with my father, we went there to wait for my mother. There was a place we used to go to eat cakes … A sort of tea room … I remember the women, their nice smell …”

  He stood gazing at the sea, his jacket on his shoulder.

  “When my brother was born, my mother stopped working, but we still had our walks there. I wonder if the shop still exists …”

  He spoke about his mother’s hands.

  I looked at his. It would have taken ten of his hands to make just one of yours. I had loved your hands, even before I knew them. It was enough just to see them. Right to the end, the very end, the last times, when you no longer had the strength to love me. Or the will. I would wait for you to fall asleep. I would circle round your bed. It was an animal need. The palm of your hand right against my face, and I would breathe, there. Your skin had become dry. Salty. It smelled of medication. I closed my eyes. I heard myself moan. I breathed some more. I would have liked to die, to suffocate and be buried with you.

  Lambert pulled me by the arm. He was giving me a strange look. What had I said? What had he understood?

  He was smiling peacefully.

  He pulled out his packet of cigarettes.

  We went as far as the stones by the breakwater.