All of a sudden, he thinks of his friend’s wife and children, of the fact that he’s going to have to explain why he’s coming home alone. Why he survived, but Philippe did not. How he was cowardly and his friend brave. How he was selfish, while Philippe was generous, as always, even until the very end. Pascal wants to run far, far away to avoid that moment. He regrets not dying in Philippe’s place, or at least by his side. He glances at his phone and realizes people are worried about them, that they want to be reassured as soon as possible, so they keep calling, again and again.
He finally works up the courage to stand, though he isn’t too steady. He carefully places the shiny emergency blanket on the ground—it can still be of use to someone else, no reason to waste it. Ignoring the EMTs, he quickly crosses the courtyard. No one stops him, so he continues into the street. For a long time, he walks determinedly, like a robot, head down, heavy with guilt, until he reaches the sky-blue Renault Scénic they drove to the concert. He walks around to wait on the passenger side of the car before finally realizing that Philippe isn’t there to drive, and that he obviously doesn’t have his friend’s keys.
Pascal finally starts to cry, his back pressed against the cold metal of the locked car, alone in the dark Parisian night.
3
SOFIANE
A day later
Sofiane came home late that night, in a daze. Héloïse was ready to pounce, to throw wedding favors in his face, to bombard him with the tiny white and silver candies as punishment for leaving her to work on the little heart-shaped construction-paper envelopes alone for hours.
But when she finally heard the key in the lock and he opened the door, she saw the look on his face and realized something was wrong. She walked over to her fiancé, and he threw himself into her arms, almost ferociously. His hands were freezing, and he seemed chilled to the bone.
After a few minutes, she peppered him with questions. Had something bad happened, had he been mugged, had he gotten some terrible news? Sofiane opened his mouth, but not a single sound crossed his lips. So he turned on the TV, and Héloïse thought that he had a hell of a lot of nerve to start watching without saying even a single word to explain himself.
She kept staring at her fiancé while he stared at the screen, seemingly hypnotized by the whirlwind of dark images flashing by. Héloïse finally followed his gaze, instinctively.
That’s when she understood. She dropped down onto the couch next to him as the video montage, which had been broadcasting on a continuous loop for some time at that point, streamed across the screen. They watched together, both eager for more and devastated at the sight.
Wordlessly, she took his hand and squeezed hard. She wrapped her arms around him and pressed his head to her chest, awkwardly stroking his hair. Sofiane focused on the muffled sound of Héloïse’s heart pounding inside her rib cage.
As they watched the stretchers cross the screen again and again, Héloïse had an indescribable feeling that their lives could have taken an irreversible turn on that unseasonably warm fall night.
They went to bed, where she soothed her future husband like a newborn, whispering softly to him and rocking him almost imperceptibly against her body. Sofiane finally fell asleep, exhausted, but the rest of the night was regularly interrupted by nightmares, from which he woke screaming and drenched in sweat. The faintest sound of a siren outside made him tremble, and a car door slamming made him jump. He imagined he could hear footsteps coming from behind their bedroom door, so Héloïse opened it to show him no one was there. But he could still hear them—behind the walls, or at the front door, or in the stairwell. Footsteps coming and going without stopping, looking for him, hunting him.
Usually, when you settle into bed after a concert, it’s the music you keep hearing, like an echo. But Sofiane was possessed by the sound of those heavy, inescapable, fatal footsteps.
A terrible thought occurred to Héloïse: even though her fiancé had come home alive, he may not have made it out unscathed. Part of him might have been left behind at the Bataclan, at the bottom of the aptly named pit. The memories and flashbacks that were now a part of him might traumatize him and change him forever. This ordeal might slowly distance him from her—because he would never really be able to share his fear and anxiety with her.
As the morning light begins to shine shyly behind the opaque curtains in their room, the couple sit up in bed, relieved that the horrific night is finally over. Their features are drawn and their faces pale.
Héloïse hurries into the kitchen to make breakfast. Sofiane’s telephone vibrates on the nightstand, and he jumps up in a panic. The slightest noise terrifies him, though he tries to pretend he’s all right. His fiancée notices, and even though she doesn’t really understand his exaggerated reactions, even though she knows she’ll never really understand them, she does her best to keep quiet. She doesn’t use the Nespresso machine because of the loud buzzing sound it makes as the coffee flows. Instead she rifles through the back of the cabinet to find an old drip coffee maker that hasn’t been used in several years; it doesn’t make such a racket.
While the coffee is brewing, she sits down next to Sofiane, who’s lain back in bed, a pillow clutched between his arms. He’s looking out the window, lost in thought.
“What do you want to do today?”
“Forget,” he blurts immediately.
Héloïse can feel the lump in her throat growing. She wishes she could take away his fear and pain, or even wipe his memory clean. She suddenly feels utterly powerless.
“We could go for a walk in the woods? Or for a bike ride?”
Her words seem so frivolous when compared with what’s going on in Sofiane’s head.
“They said on the news that there’s a psychological support team. I could go with you, if you want to talk to someone. I’m sure it would do you good to talk it through . . .”
Sofiane shakes his head listlessly.
“I don’t want to go out. Or talk. I just want to wait for it to go away. Would you mind if we stayed home today?”
“Of course not.”
Héloïse gets the coffee. As she’s leaving the kitchen with two steaming mugs, she realizes her fiancé has moved to the living room, where he’s sitting in front of the news, still broadcasting the same images from the night before on an endless loop.
She’s not sure it’s a good idea to let him dwell on the footage, or if she should try to get him to think about something else—or if she even could. She slowly extends one of the mugs to Sofiane, who grabs it without taking his eyes off the screen.
The phone keeps ringing, all day long—calls from close friends, mere acquaintances, family, and colleagues. Héloïse listens as Sofiane parrots the same couple of sentences over and over, in an affectedly cheerful voice: “Friday the thirteenth brought me good luck for once! I never win a dime from the lottery, never win any game, but this time, luck was on my side . . .” He laughs with whoever’s on the line, plays up the dark humor, saying he wonders if his ticket will be reimbursed, but as soon as he hangs up, his eyes go blank again—all the pretending seems to take a toll on him.
He’s glued to his cell phone, following the news on Twitter, contemplating the photos of every victim and every missing person. Héloïse suspects he’s running through the night in his head, trying to decide if he saw the young blonde woman or spoke to the bearded guy, if he knows anything that could help, anything that could be useful. He studies the portraits one after another, without saying a word, and she doesn’t dare ask what he’s thinking.
She’s fairly certain that he’s in shock, from waiting, terrified, in the makeshift attic, and from everything else he saw last night, but she doesn’t know what she’s supposed to do or say. Maybe just being there for him is enough; maybe she simply needs to let him get his bearings.
As the sun is setting, he finally looks at her and asks, distraught, “What in the world am I going to tell my students? How am I going to be able to explain all this to a class o
f seven-year-olds?”
At first, Héloïse doesn’t know what to say. She tries to put herself in a teacher’s shoes, in the shoes of the children, who are still so naïve and full of hope.
“I’m not sure you can really ‘explain’ anything . . . There’s no answer to the question why . . .”
“But they’re going to ask. They’ll want to understand. I know them, they’ll never let it go if they feel like it’s not totally clear . . .”
“Then deflect the questions you can’t answer into subjects you can talk about. All you can do is tell them not to be scared, that there’s no reason to be. Talk to them about the music . . .”
4
BASTIEN
Two days later
For the first time in years, René closed his butcher shop on a Sunday. Market day.
He left the metal security shutter down, without even bothering to put up a sign explaining his absence. Around nine o’clock, his usual customers started showing up outside the silent storefront, where they agreed that closing on a Sunday morning really wasn’t very businesslike.
The day before, he’d gone to work like he had every other day, because there was no way he could sit idly by, watching the news. As long as they didn’t know anything, the best thing to do was to go about business as usual. Fear does not keep danger at bay, as René’s father had always said.
So when he’d gotten the call, he’d been busy wrapping up a four-pound roast for a tight-lipped elderly woman. The phone had rung several times in a row, so he’d finally decided to answer it, despite the long line of customers in a hurry to get through their weekend errands, despite the choir of dissatisfied sounds they had made when he had headed to the cold room for some privacy.
He had nodded and mumbled hesitantly, “Yes, I understand. I’ll work something out . . .” Then he’d gently put his phone down on the counter and gone back to his customers. He’d kept working for hours, like a robot. Slicing, weighing, wrapping. He couldn’t bring himself to call his wife, because he knew firsthand that hope was better than utter emptiness and despair.
Then, today, earlier in the afternoon, after dragging his feet getting ready and handing tissue after tissue to his wife, he got in his car and headed for the capital. Without really thinking about it, he chose to take backroads rather than the main A13 highway, to avoid getting there too quickly. He was in no hurry, and anything that would postpone his arrival was welcome.
It hadn’t been too hard to persuade his wife to stay at home with her sister, who’d come from Le Havre when she’d heard the news. His wife couldn’t have come anyway—she could barely stand; she was as limp as a dead leaf. For almost a day now, she’d only been able to repeat one thing, over and over, saying it so many times that the words had lost all meaning: “I bought him the ticket. It’s my fault, it’s all my fault . . .” René knew he should have told her she was wrong, that he should have comforted her, told her she had nothing to do with it, that there was no reason to hold herself accountable. He knew all that, but God was it hard to console someone else when he felt like he was falling apart himself. His sister-in-law had taken over, spoken the soothing words in his stead. He had no idea that, to his wife, his silence was full of accusation and blame, a conviction with no chance of appeal.
Before he left for Paris, she’d given him a votive candle in a glass yogurt jar—“to protect the flame and keep it burning”—and made him promise to place it alongside all the other wavering lights and bouquets she’d seen placed in homage at Place de la République. A terribly feeble defense against bullets and grief.
When he arrives at the orange-brick building that houses the coroner’s office, his legs suddenly stop, and René fears that despite his brain’s urging, they may refuse to go any farther. He can’t remember exactly what they’d told him on the phone yesterday. He was shaken, and now everything seems so jumbled in his head. He had wanted to call back to ask if he had to come, but didn’t dare. The hoarse voice on the other end of the line had told him they were sure. They’d found Bastien’s wallet on him, with his ID inside. The T-shaped scar right under his left eyebrow meant there wasn’t a shadow of a doubt: it was him. René still remembered his son running around the grocery store that morning, not listening, how he’d rammed headfirst into a cart steered by a young woman in a hurry to finish her shopping. There had been blood everywhere, and she had screamed, but hadn’t dared touch the little boy, who’d been too dazed to cry. René had picked Bastien up matter-of-factly and energetically dabbed at the wound with his checkered handkerchief. In the end, they’d gone to the emergency room for two stitches. He never took Bastien grocery shopping again.
The chain-smoking woman’s voice had also mentioned the four hoops in his son’s left ear, and that’s when René’s heart skipped a beat. Who else would have had the crazy idea to decorate their ear like a goddamn Christmas tree?
No, there was no room for doubt, no place for hope to hide. René didn’t know if identifying the body was mandatory, or if they had simply offered him the chance to see his son one last time. So he could come to terms with reality, see it with his own eyes.
And here, now, in front of the empty stairs leading up to the building, seemingly waiting for him alone, he has no desire, no need to see his child’s body riddled with bullets, even though he’s been reassured—as if it were any consolation—that his face was spared.
Without thinking, he reaches out and places his right hand on one of the stone columns that flank the entrance to the morgue, to catch his breath and work up the courage. A graying man who looks about fifty comes over and asks quietly—the situation seems to call for silence—if he is all right. René nods and gestures for the stranger to continue on his way. The man doesn’t press him further.
As he enters the building and walks slowly through the main hall, the childless father hopes the body he’s about to see won’t irreversibly replace all the other memories he has of his little boy, all the vibrant images that pop spontaneously into his head when he thinks of Bastien. The way he squished his eyes shut with all his strength when blowing out his birthday candles as a kid, only opening them once his lungs were totally empty, eager to see if he’d managed to put them all out at once. That means my wish will come true, Daddy! he would say, delighted with his accomplishment, and René would nod. Yes, I’m sure it will, Bastien. His obsession with picking all sorts of insignificant objects up off the ground: rocks, half-rusted paperclips, pieces of string. I’m going to keep it. It’s my treasure! he would announce, indifferent to his father’s admonitions, I don’t want trash all over the house! The day when he called to tell his parents that he’d finished among the top ten students in his graduating glass. René can still hear his casual tone, the way he wasn’t surprised at all. Bastien’s success had always been a given. When he hung up, he saw his wife’s tears of joy and shook his head before heading out to mow the lawn, which had been in need of attention for a while. Once hidden from view and enveloped in the buzzing of the mower’s motor, he wiped a tear from his cheek, his heart suddenly swollen with pride at the thought of the amazing future that awaited his son.
When he finally climbs back down the steps and finds himself overlooking the Seine, it’s dusk. René, who’s only been to Paris a handful of times, gets out his map of the city and looks for Place de la République. The glass yogurt container in his coat pocket jingles against his belt buckle whenever he moves.
After a few minutes, he concludes that it shouldn’t take more than a half hour to walk there, and decides to leave his car where it is. He flips his coat collar up and pushes forward into the capital’s deserted streets, taking deep breaths of cold air until his lungs ache.
The statue of Marianne, a symbol of the French Revolution and an allegory of liberty and democracy, is surrounded, overrun with flowers still in their plastic wrapping, and little orange flames. René had naïvely thought he’d be alone to grieve and pay tribute, but there are hundreds, maybe even thousands of other p
eople there. He sees the police armed to the teeth and thinks sadly that they’re a bit late. He hears voices shouting, “We’re not afraid!” and wants to say there’s no reason to be afraid now—the worst has already happened.
He studies the scene before him, which is quickly becoming a memorial: white roses; drawings in plastic sleeves to protect them from the rain that’s bound to come soon; the blue, white, and red striped flags; brightly colored wreaths; the candleholders, which are starting to pile up; and the kneeling people carefully relighting the candles that have gone out. René patiently waits his turn. He doesn’t want to elbow his way to the front—he’s in no hurry.
Suddenly he’s jostled by the crowd. All around him, people are screaming, running. Fleeing. René takes advantage of the situation to get closer to the statue, where he stands unmoving, watching men and women stampeding like animals, trampling each other and groaning in terror. “We’re not afraid!” Yeah right, thinks Bastien’s father. Without knowing what’s caused the tumult, he observes as people take refuge in cafés that are already bursting at the seams, while others fan out to neighboring streets. He watches them scurry away like rabbits, unable to feel anything himself, caught in a stupor. He doesn’t even wonder why they’re running away; he doesn’t really care. The only question in his mind is whether his son also tried to escape. Did he run like that too?
Maybe those were gunshots that just rang out. Could be. But René isn’t paying attention to the noises around him. A building could collapse a few yards away without his heart jumping into his throat. He doesn’t have the energy or the drive to run anyway. What’s the point now? He wasn’t able to admit to his son that he loved him unconditionally before it was too late. Now all he’ll have left is regrets, filtering into his heart like a slow poison.
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