Time Is a Killer

by Michel Bussi

  That’s what these people are watching? Other people eating?

  At last a journalist starts talking but I can’t hear what he’s saying, I can only read the words that appear beneath him.

  ‘Live from Sopron.’

  Sopron?

  Obviously that isn’t going to make you jump, but I did. Sopron is the name of a little town in Hungary, with sixty thousand inhabitants, near the Austrian border. Don’t imagine that I’m a total geography swot, it’s just that Sopron, if you remember, is the town my family comes from, on my mother’s side.

  Crazy, right? I warned you.

  For what stupid reason have all the cameras on the planet gone to Sopron?

  I sprint, believe me, I sprint to C29, our bungalow.

  Everyone is at number 25, where the Germans are staying, Jakob and Anke Schreiber, Hermann’s parents.

  Everyone is at number 25 because they have a television. We don’t.

  ‘What’s happening, Ma …’

  Mama Palma raises a finger to hush me. No one turns around, they are all sitting on their plastic chairs, staring at the screen, and it’s still showing nothing but these families in tracksuits eating chicken legs and drinking beer. What is this madness? What is happening in Hungary?

  The resurrection of Sissi?

  The end of the world?

  A flying saucer landed on one of the picnic blankets with ant-sized mini-aliens inside?

  It takes me a few minutes to work out why the whole world is focused on these yokels having their lunch. The yokels are Germans on holiday in Hungary. East Germans, to be precise. And the hills are Austrian.

  Have you got it?

  Not completely? OK, let me give you the background.

  Today, on 19 August 1989, the Hungarian authorities decided to open the borders. The ones belonging to the Iron Curtain. For the Hungarians this had been possible for a few weeks, and generally speaking they’d go home after taking a little tour of the West. But this time they’d got rid of the border for everyone, with no regard for nationality. Operation open gate! Lasting exactly three hours, from three till six, long enough for people to organise an enormous picnic, a Pan-European Picnic, as they call it. The army sat back, folding their arms.

  Then the rumour went around, and the East Germans didn’t need to be asked twice.

  More than six hundred of them, who happened to be on holiday in this corner of Hungary, crossed the border before the gates closed again. And according to the journalists, they’re in no hurry to go back.

  The journalists are insisting that this is an historic moment, it’s the first breach in the wall between West and East, even if it’s just a test to see how the Russians will react.

  That’s a foregone conclusion.

  No reaction.

  Gorbachev doesn’t care.

  The only people it’s really bugging, judging from the TV, are the East German rulers. There are pictures of the big boss of the GDR, Erich Honecker, looking absolutely furious. In front of all the cameras, live from East Berlin, he goes on bawling, hand on heart, finger on the hem of his jacket, the visor of his cap between his thumb and his forefinger, a Stasi army nodding behind him:

  The Berlin Wall will stand for another hundred years!

  Die Mauer bleibt noch 100 Jahre!

  He repeats those words.

  Die Mauer bleibt noch 100 Jahre!

  As if it’s a historical truth.

  Something to remember, to recite, to carve in stone.

  Die Mauer bleibt noch 100 Jahre!

  In gold letters stamped in the great book of history’s mistakes.

  * * *

  He recited it again in his head, almost amused.

  Die Mauer bleibt noch 100 Jahre.

  26

  19 August 2016, 9 a.m.

  The heat in the bungalows was already almost stifling, from the moment the rays passed over the branches of the olive trees, warming the metal cube like a tin can abandoned in the blazing sun. Clotilde liked to cook like that, like cannelloni in a bain-marie. She liked lying in bed on her own, feeling the temperature rise until it became unbearable, until her body was dripping with sweat. All she needed was a shower or, even better, a swimming pool to throw herself into as soon as she got up.

  Franck had gone running. Valou was still asleep, and her attentive father had let her have the room that was in shade until midday. His little darling.

  Except that it was Clotilde who felt like an excited teenager. Her fingers slipped again over the key pad of her mobile phone. She reread the three lines of the message that had arrived during the night. At 4.05 a.m.

  Happy to have seen you again.

  You’ve become very beautiful, Clotilde, even if I preferred you as Lydia Deetz.

  Probably because since then, I’ve learned to live with ghosts.

  Natale.

  She read and reread those three lines, weighing each word of her response.

  Happy to have seen you again.

  You’re still as handsome as ever, Natale, even if I preferred you as a dolphin-chaser.

  Since then I’ve learned to live without ghosts.

  Clo

  She was lulled by a delicious feeling of euphoria. This Natale bore little relation to the man whose memory she had guarded so jealously, but strangely, the feeling of disappointment had faded, evaporated. As if one of her teenage idols, some singer with a perfect body displayed on a shiny poster, had come down from his billboard, and each of his imperfections made him even more charming. More human. More lovable.

  Clotilde remembered a Natale who drove her crazy. An inaccessible fantasy for her fifteen-year-old self. Today, she had discovered a fragile man. All of his dreams shattered. Misunderstood. Misloved. Mismarried.

  But still free, all in all.

  Still free! From the depths of her bed, Clotilde found the expression paradoxical. Natale was still free because a woman had stolen his freedom. She laughed gently to herself. Basically, all lovers steal freedom. They dream of finding Prince Charming, only to lock him up in a basement.

  She placed the phone on the bedside table and fell back into a doze, rolling herself up in the warm, damp blankets.

  How much time had passed when Franck’s voice made her jump?

  ‘Thanks for breakfast.’

  More than half an hour.

  Clotilde woke up with a start and accepted Franck’s kiss on her forehead. Sweat against sweat, Franck’s from his efforts to jog up to Notre-Dame de la Serra, and Clotilde’s from lounging in her oven.

  She struggled to imagine the reason for this rare kiss.

  Thanks for breakfast.

  She got to her feet in surprise.

  The table was laid.

  Fresh bread, croissants, coffee, tea, honey. Fruit juice and jams.

  Franck? Had Franck laid the table to impress her? Was his ‘Thanks for breakfast’ an ironic formula to make her get up? Her husband, the bold athlete, shaking the lazy slugabed?

  Clotilde’s eyes fell on the mobile phone beside the bed and she felt a tremor of guilt.

  Don’t spoil everything.

  She kissed Franck’s neck.

  ‘Thank you.’

  Franck looked surprised.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘This perfect breakfast. The only thing missing is a rose in a single-stem vase.’

  Franck was totally flummoxed.

  ‘It wasn’t you?’

  ‘No, I was asleep.’

  ‘And I’ve only just got here.’

  Their baffled eyes moved simultaneously to the door of their daughter’s room.

  Valou?

  That she should have performed this gesture for her parents seemed harder to imagine than a discrete intervention by house elves. Franck received confirmation of this in the form of a grunt from beyond the grave as soon as he pulled open the curtain in the girl’s bedroom.

  Not Valou, not Franck, not her …

  Who then?

  Clotilde put on a shir
t and studied the table, troubled by details that she hadn’t noticed at first. There weren’t three bowls, three sets of cutlery and napkins on the little camping table, there were four. But the number was unimportant compared to the other coincidences.

  Franck came out of Valentine’s room, and Clotilde pointed to a glass of pink juice and the white bowl placed beside it.

  ‘Nicolas always sat there, at the end of the table. He always had a grapefruit juice and a bowl of milk for breakfast.’

  Franck didn’t reply, so Clotilde went on, indicating a cup and a coffee-pot that were both still steaming hot.

  ‘Papa sat opposite him, there. He had a black coffee.’

  A teapot, two teabags.

  ‘Maman and I had tea. She had bought some jam at the market in the port at Stasero, fig and arbutus.’

  She gently turned the pot of jam beside the pointy baguette.

  Fig and arbutus.

  Clotilde put her hand on the table, feeling dizzy.

  ‘It’s all there, Franck. It’s all there. Just like …’

  Franck raised his eyes to the ceiling.

  ‘Like it was twenty-seven years ago, Clo? How can you remember the flavour of the jam you had for breakfast twenty-seven years ago? The brand of tea? The …’

  Clotilde stared at him almost spitefully.

  ‘What? Those were the last moments I spent with my family! The last meals we ate together. They have haunted my nights ever since then, thousands of nights, and thousands of days, the ghosts of Maman, Papa and Nico sitting beside me, at my breakfast table, every morning when I was alone, when you were away, when you were at work. So yes, Franck, I do remember. Every little detail.’

  Franck quickly beat a retreat. A ruse, the better to change his angle of attack.

  ‘OK, Clo, OK. But it could just be a coincidence, admit it. Tea, coffee, fruit juice, local jam. Nine out of ten families would scoff that lot for breakfast.’

  ‘And the table? Who set the table?’

  ‘I have no idea. Perhaps Valou is playing a trick on us. Or on you. Or me? Or it’s just a bad joke. A thoughtful gesture from your friend Cervone, or his devoted servant Hagrid. After all, he seems to worship you.’

  Clotilde gave a start at the mention of Orsu’s nickname. She resisted the desire to deliver a kick to the four aluminium legs, to send everything flying in a spray of coffee and melted butter.

  Franck’s calm attitude made it even more unbearable.

  ‘It’s someone who’s trying to make you think about the past, Clo. Don’t play their game. Don’t even try to find out who …’

  Clotilde wasn’t even listening to her husband’s arguments. She had noticed a newspaper folded in two on one of the chairs.

  Le Monde. Today’s paper.

  She looked at it as if it were about to catch fire.

  ‘And … the paper?’

  ‘The same thing,’ Franck went on. ‘It’s all staged. I imagine your parents read that paper every morning, like everyone always does on holiday.’

  ‘No, never!’

  ‘Then, you see. Our mysterious waiter has made a mistake. Which proves that …’

  ‘Never,’ Clotilde cut in. ‘My parents never read the paper on holiday. Except once. Just once. Papa went out to get a copy of Le Monde from the newsagent in Calvi, and brought it back before Maman even woke up. He slipped it on to her chair. It was the first breakfast we’d had together. The last meal with the four of us at the table. The next day, Papa went off sailing for three days with some cousins to the Îles Sanguinaires, and he didn’t come back until the twenty-third, the day of the accident.’

  Franck studied the paper on the armchair.

  ‘On 19 August 1989, the Hungarians opened up the Iron Curtain for the first time. At Sopron, on the Austrian border, my mother’s birthplace. For the first time in my life, Maman read the newspaper at breakfast, the newspaper my father had bought for her. The paper dated the nineteenth of August, Franck, the nineteenth, the same day as today. It can’t be a coincidence! And yet …’

  ‘And yet what?’

  For a moment Clotilde had a sense that Franck was playing a trick on her, that he must know everything, that no one but him could have laid this table without waking her up. She chased the idea from her mind and went on.

  ‘And yet no one else could have known. No one but Nicolas, Maman, Papa and me. It was a family thing, a meaningless anecdote. Papa bought the paper without planning to, Maman read the article in five minutes, half a page, and then she put the paper on the barbecue and we burned it at lunchtime. No one could have known that detail. No one apart from the four of us. Do you understand, Franck? Whoever put that newspaper on my mother’s chair has to be one of us four. One of the four, and still alive.’

  ‘That isn’t your mother’s chair, Clo.’

  Yes it is, Clotilde was about to reply. Yes, she was going to scream.

  Valou got in before her.

  ‘Are you done yelling at each other?’

  She was standing there, wrapped in a Betty Boop dressing-gown, her hair tousled and her expression drawn. She sat down at the table, on the seat belonging to Nicolas’s ghost. She reached out one arm to pick up the paper, another to bring the coffee to her lips, then pulled a face.

  ‘Ugh, it’s cold!’

  Clotilde watched her, annoyed.

  ‘They’ll have to take fingerprints, Franck.’

  He sighed. He gazed lovingly at his daughter, and then looked at his wife as if she were mad. As if one had definitely taken the place of the other – her youth, her beauty, her joie de vivre, her reasoning.

  His daughter opened the pot of jam with an energetic twist of her hand, bit into the bread with gusto, living life to the full, preparing to devour the day with a hearty appetite, after a lie-in and a sunny breakfast. A gilded holiday. A dream life. And yet Clotilde couldn’t shake this idea: that Valou was desecrating every object she touched. Destroying, with each movement, a secret, sacred order.

  Franck was right; she was going mad.

  ~

  ‘Isn’t your husband here?’

  ‘No, he went diving in the Gulf of Galéria.’

  Captain Cadenat had taken over three hours to get there. Franck had given up waiting after less than an hour. The policeman had said on the phone that he didn’t understand the business about the breakfast table, but that he would come anyway, not least so that he could sort out the story of the stolen wallet once and for all. He had made vague inquiries, but not found anything. No clues, not the smallest hint of a trail.

  He had been pacing around the bungalow for less than two minutes.

  ‘What about your daughter?’

  ‘She must have left, she’s supposed to be going canyoning.’

  Cervone Spinello was standing close by and he nodded. Half the kids from the campsite had gone off in a minibus to spend an afternoon in the gorges of Zoïcu.

  ‘I don’t see what else I can do, Madame Baron.’

  Take fingerprints, you idiot! Then compare them to the prints of all the tourists in this campsite, because one of them must have played this trick on me. Question witnesses, anyone who happened to be passing by my bungalow this morning. And above all, stop treating me as if I’ve got some kind of learning difficulty.

  The rugby three-quarter back exiled on the Isle of Beauty stared at her, his arms dangling by his sides. Cervone had briefed him about the whole story. The accident twenty-seven years ago, the memories returning, the survivor losing her marbles just a little.

  Cervone rested a hand on the policeman’s shoulder. A gesture from one man to another. The post-match complicity between the thirsty sportsman and the guy who’s paying for the next round. ‘Can I get you a glass of something before you head off?’

  The policeman didn’t say no.

  As she watched them leave, Clotilde understood that she would never be able to rely on the help of the police, or anyone else. That she would have to get by on her own. Alone, even if that
meant she had to plan a long series of emergency meetings, interview witnesses, question them and get them to talk.

  That bitch Maria-Chjara who had slammed the door in her face, as if she had seen a ghost.

  Her grandfather Cassanu, who had known about the sabotage of her parents’ car from the beginning.

  Natale. Natale who also had a ghost of his own to show her.

  The more the mysteries deepened, the more convinced Clotilde became that the solution lay somewhere in her memories, her memories of the summer of 1989, of which she retained only fragments, fleeting impressions, flashes filtered through her nightmares. How could she trust those? She needed more concrete memories, tangible facts, reliable witnesses. She would have given anything to have her diary, the one in which she had recorded every detail that summer. The one she had never got back.

  Why?

  She needed a starting point, the end of a thread so she could unravel the rest of the tangled knot, the start of a film that was real, so that the rest of the images would follow. She knew where to look.

  Clotilde stared at the breakfast table again. A little further down the path, Orsu, with his rake and spade, was watching her as if waiting to clear the table. As if he knew. As if he knew everything, but couldn’t say a word.

  That could wait. It wasn’t Orsu who was hiding the evidence. Nor Maria-Chjara. Nor Cassanu.

  They could wait too.

  Clotilde was furious not to have thought of it before now. Just a short walk away from her, three alleys and three mobile homes away, was the archive of memories for the Euproctes campsite. Every deed and every gesture. All the faces. All the looks.

  Fifty years of history.

  She would just have to persuade the keeper of the museum to open up his book of magic spells.

  27

  Saturday, 19 August 1989, thirteenth day of the holidays

  Fever-blue sky

  Gripping my pencil, O invisible confidant, I’m writing to you for the third time this day. The flurry of excitement over Sopron seems to have subsided, the rattling Iron Curtain has closed again – all the better for the people who stayed on the right side of it – Mama Palma went off to sun herself on the beach as soon as they stopped showing pictures of the Austro-Hungarian hills on the TV (replacing them with a panel of global political experts), and I’ve gone down to the Cave of the Sea-Calves to wait for the sun to set. I haven’t told you this yet, but sea-calves are really just a type of seal but they feel the cold and they like the water to be twenty-five degrees and to tan themselves on the rocks. They were all killed years ago, so I’m squatting in their home. You just have to climb over a few rocks to find this cave, which smells slightly of piss, ashes and salty seaweed, and where the sea comes and licks your feet. From here you can see everything without being seen, apart from the fishermen who come and catch crayfish, lobsters or sea urchins.