Don't Turn Out the Lights

by Bernard Minier

  And now there it is, soaring, the famous final aria they’ve all been waiting for: ‘Con onor muore.’ He dies with honour who cannot live with honour.

  Yes. Why not?

  ‘So the nausea, the punctured tyres, the hypermarket – that was you?’

  She is so weary …

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How did you do it?’

  So tired of all this.

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘All those nights I was sick, but couldn’t sleep. I threw out the food, I bought new medication at the chemist’s; I was eating the same thing as Thomas, and he wasn’t sick.’

  The phantom points the gun barrel towards the other side of the bath. Mila follows the movement with her gaze. At first she doesn’t understand. Then, suddenly, it dawns on her. The bath salts. She took a bath every evening. After she put Thomas to bed. But she didn’t bathe Thomas: he only took showers.

  Suddenly, the phantom picks up a remote control, presses a button and the music stops.

  ‘I’ve been watching you for weeks. It’s crazy all the stuff you can buy nowadays – a micro-camera in the kitchen, another one in your bedroom, a third in the bathroom … I probably know more about your habits and your obsessions than you do yourself, Mila. And the alarm system you had installed: it’s laughable.’

  From one of the many pockets in her trousers she takes out a black rectangular box.

  ‘A jammer,’ she explains. ‘One hundred euros on the Internet. There’s a bright future for burglars.’

  ‘Because of you, they want to take my son away,’ spits Mila in a final outburst.

  The phantom simply looks at her.

  ‘That is why you must let Léo raise his son. But that’s enough chit-chat.’

  She points to the razor, waving her gun, and Mila does not notice the increasingly obvious trembling of the barrel. Or the tears on Christine’s cheeks.

  ‘Tonight you are going to kill yourself. And I will make sure that Léo looks after Thomas. That he brings him up … that he recognises him. You have my word.’

  She wipes the tears and sweat from her face with the back of her gloved hand. Her eyes are glowing amid the dark mascara.

  ‘If you refuse, you’ll go to prison, and Thomas will be given to one foster family after another. And do you know what will become of him? Do you have any idea? Is that what you want for him? It’s your decision, Mila, and your decision alone. Now.’

  ‘Can you put the music back on, please? I’d like to hear the end.’

  Christine reaches for the remote. The music starts up where it had stopped: Final act. The voices mingling, coming one after another, responding.

  ‘Mila?’

  ‘So tired…’

  ‘You can free yourself from all this, Mila.’

  Maria Callas is singing:

  You? You? You?

  Little idol of my heart.

  My love, my love,

  Flower of the lily and the rose.

  Never know that, for you,

  For your innocent eyes …

  There is a long moment of silence while the two women listen to the music. Then, suddenly, Mila reaches for the razor. Christine watches her. Without saying a word.

  Look well, well

  On your mother’s face,

  That you may keep a faint memory of it,

  Look well!

  Little love, farewell!

  Farewell, my little love!

  ‘Rest now, Mila.’

  ‘He loved me.’

  ‘I know, he told me,’ Christine lies.

  Mila smiles. Her gaze lost in the distance, she slits the skin on her forearm, the muscle, the radial artery, from elbow to wrist, in one precise, slow gesture. Left arm. The razor in the other hand. Right arm. More clumsily. The blood pours out: two geysers … It splatters the porcelain and the bathwater, instantly red.

  With each throb of her beating heart, a new spurt of blood. Then suddenly the beating slows. She can feel the chill rising all at once, through her torso. It is as if she were freezing, at great speed, like a pond in winter. The music soars, peaks. Mila sheds a final tear, on hearing Pinkerton’s last cry:

  Butterfly! Butterfly! Butterfly!

  Christine spent the next five minutes covering up her traces and preparing to leave. She found Mila’s mobile in one of her pockets and placed it in her fingers, already cold, before dialling 17. When at last there was an answer, she murmured softly, ‘Please … come quickly … I’m dying … and my son is alone…’

  ‘What? What? Say that again, madame? Madame?’

  She said it again and left the phone in Mila’s dead fingers on the edge of the bath. Suddenly she spun round to the door and started: Thomas was there, his eyes wide open. He was staring at her. She blinked and the vision disappeared. It was just a shadow in the corridor. She left the bathroom, went upstairs, her plastic overshoes around her wet trainers. She peered through the door: he was asleep, with his thumb in his mouth. She felt a sudden wave of nausea, hurried back down to the ground floor of the big silent house, and ran to the front door. She breathed in huge lungfuls of the damp fresh air. Then rushed to her car, leaving the front door wide open, and only removed her slippers and gloves once she was behind the wheel.

  She started up slowly, drove through the tunnel of trees and turned at the crossroads. It had stopped raining. The moon was visible through a tear in the clouds. She pulled over in the windy night. Switched off the engine, the headlamps, and jumped out. Just in time to let the bile rise up and leave all her dinner in the ditch by the front wheel.

  She took a long jagged breath, trying to slow the pounding of her heart. She sat behind the wheel and didn’t move, waiting. The storm was receding. The lightning was nothing more than a pale phosphorescence in the night, and the thunder a distant rumbling. Thirteen minutes went by before she heard the familiar sound of the siren and saw a van from the gendarmerie speed past her. The headlights whizzed along the tunnel of trees, blinking between each trunk. She picked up her binoculars and saw the van just as it was parking outside the house. She saw them get out of the vehicle and disappear inside. There were three of them. She put the binoculars away and looked at herself in the vanity mirror. In the glow from the ceiling light her gaze was empty: her dark pupils had engulfed her irises. She did not recognise herself.

  She closed the door quietly and drove off into the night.

  EPILOGUE

  The miracle of life, once again. She was at the end of the fifth month and her belly had a nice round shape. She knew that the baby’s brain and spinal cord were completely formed now, and that as long as he lived he would not acquire even one additional neuron. ‘I’m sorry, Léo Junior; you’ll just have to get used to the idea, my love. I hope you’ll at least know how to put them to good use. I’m counting on you.’ She had got into the habit of calling him Léo when she talked to him, even though they had not yet managed to agree on a name. His father was keen on Mathis, or Louis. He didn’t know it yet, but she had decided once and for all that it would be Léo.

  She turned her head to the open French windows.

  Day had dawned less than an hour ago but it was already hot. She was hungry. Voraciously hungry, to be honest: she had a constant desire to eat. A full breakfast: cereal, coffee, fruit juice, boiled eggs, soldiers, jam, butter. Her mouth was watering. She smiled. She felt terrific: all the nausea and fatigue of the early months had vanished. She was on fine form.

  He moved and opened his eyes.

  ‘You’re already awake?’

  He looked at her. Then, almost immediately, as he did every morning, he looked down at her belly.

  ‘Hi, Mathis,’ he said, putting his hand on their child.

  ‘Léo.’

  ‘Hi, Louis.’

  ‘Léo.’

  ‘He’s not moving.’

  ‘It’s normal, he sleeps a lot.’

  He looked at her. Differently.

  ‘Then in that case, he won’t notice if…’ an
d as she didn’t react: ‘You’re magnificent, you know, pregnancy really—’

  ‘Hush.’

  They kissed and caressed for a moment while the summer light grew brighter and the temperature rose.

  ‘Thomas won’t be awake yet, and Karla won’t bring the children until nine o’clock,’ he whispered. ‘We have plenty of time to—’

  ‘Hush!’

  She laughed. It was only six o’clock in the morning. She leaned over to the night table for the box of condoms in the drawer. Tried to forget what they meant. Marcus hadn’t lied to her that night: he had left one last souvenir before departing this world. In her own blood: she was HIV-positive. The treatment hadn’t helped. They were doomed to have safe sex forever. When Léo had told her he wanted to have a child with her, she had hesitated for a long time. They had made enquiries, and she had found out that the risk of transmitting the virus from mother to child was extremely low, less than one per cent, if the mother underwent an antiretroviral treatment starting with the second trimester of pregnancy. And since Léo was not infected, they had resorted to the time-honoured method known as ‘self-in-semination’. Grimacing, she recalled the little ritual they had repeated until the god of fertility deigned to reward their efforts. Fortunately, they were lucky with the third attempt.

  They made love in front of the open French windows: anyone walking on the path that led by the house could have seen them, but they didn’t care. Christine let him do as he liked, her fingers in his hair. He put a pillow under her and it was very gentle, very slow, like the endlessly lingering summer. She wondered whether Léo Junior could feel what was happening, this fusion of desire and dread, their hopes and fears, his parents’ love. Yes, love, because they loved each other more than they ever had. All those months she’d had to keep out of sight, months when he had hidden her from everyone, including his own children, the risks they had taken together. The secret they shared and Thomas’s presence had strengthened their relationship beyond anything they could have imagined. And besides, she had changed. She had to acknowledge that she had become someone else in the course of all her ordeals. And she was aware, even though sometimes it weighed on her, that it was this new Christine that Léo was in love with.

  He propped himself on his elbow and looked at her.

  ‘Do you want to marry me?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘You heard me.’

  ‘You’ve only just got divorced and you already want to get married again?’

  He laughed.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking.’ He stopped smiling, and his serious expression was almost comical. ‘Ordinarily, men are faithful in the beginning, and unfaithful later on. I’m doing things backwards.’

  ‘Which means?’

  ‘That you can pretty much count on my being faithful.’

  ‘Pretty much?’

  ‘Let’s say the odds are ninety-eight per cent – does that suit you?’

  ‘And what if it’s the remaining two per cent that win?’

  ‘I promise I won’t ever lie to you, or ever hide anything from you.’

  ‘That’s a good start, but I’m not sure it’s enough. I hope you’re aware that it’s a rather unusual marriage proposal?’

  ‘If it’s usual you wanted, you should have found an accountant. You don’t have to say yes,’ he added. ‘Not right away.’

  ‘That’s what I think, too.’

  ‘So it’s no?’

  ‘It’s yes. But only because I’m not obliged to.’

  * * *

  He woke up that morning listening to music. Mahler, of course, just like every morning. Das Klagende Lied. The first lied was called Waldmärchen, ‘Forest Legend’, and Servaz smiled, thinking that he knew a good one, as far as legends went. It also talked about the forest. The music soared. This was his daughter’s gift, his daughter who now lived on the other side of the ocean, among the caribous, grey squirrels and Chantecler chickens.

  He heard a police siren, then the buzzing of a moped, and looking around him, for a moment he was completely disoriented until he recognised his room. Not the room under the eaves. His room. His flat. He sat up in his bed, stretched, and remembered he also had a job and an office waiting for him. He showered, got dressed, drank a black coffee and fifteen minutes later he was on his way to the police station.

  He stepped off the escalator in the Métro and crossed the esplanade outside the tall brick facade. Police employees were locking their bikes to the fence, going up the steps and disappearing through the revolving door. A bit further along the canal, the prostitutes had gone home to sleep, and council employees were clearing away the condoms scattered here and there in the bushes, not to mention the syringes. The dealers were counting their profits, and their scouts were waking up in their council estates. This was his city’s musical score, his everyday opera: the choir of cars and buses, the arioso of rush hour, the tempo of money too easily obtained, the leitmotiv of crime. He felt extraordinarily well. He knew this music by heart. It was his city, his music. He knew every note.

  The file was waiting on his desk.

  He read it quickly, then went down to borrow a company car. He left Toulouse to the northwest, drove for less than an hour along little back roads. The designer house was still there, in the dip of the valley, with its swimming pool, white fences and stables.

  He parked on the grass next to the Porsche 911 and got out. She came out onto the terrace, a ball in her hand, wearing jeans, a hooded sweatshirt and tennis shoes. Servaz looked at her. She had cut her hair very short, an urchin cut, and was not wearing any make-up; this, along with her narrow hips and her height, gave her an androgynous, tomboyish look, despite her obvious pregnancy. She was radiant. As sure of herself, of her charms and of her power as any woman can be.

  ‘Coffee?’ asked Christine.

  He smiled and came forward, and they went into the house one after the other. Léo and Thomas were playing in the pool. Servaz saw them through the picture window. The boy’s clear laughter reached them along with the sound of his father splashing him.

  ‘I have what you asked for,’ he said.

  She had her back to him, facing the coffee maker. He saw her square her shoulders. She hesitated for a second then turned around.

  ‘You were right,’ he added, sliding the folder across the counter.

  He remembered that day in April when she had reappeared out of the blue. She was the one who called him. ‘I’m back,’ she said, simply. They met at the café in town. He asked where she had been all that time. She told him she had run away, that she needed to get away from everything, to be alone; that she had travelled a great deal. Of course, he was no fool. But it didn’t matter any more. Suicide. The file was closed.

  ‘I wonder … if we could compare the voice of the person who called that night with Mila Bolsanski’s, whether it would be the same,’ he said, nevertheless, staring at her thoughtfully.

  She did not seem the least bit ruffled.

  ‘Do you think it might be murder?’ she asked.

  He shook his head.

  ‘The pathologist was categorical: she did indeed cut her own wrists. But that does not exclude the possibility that someone who hasn’t come forward found her like that and called the police, pretending to be her. Because of the child, that is. Without that call, God knows what would have happened to him. It was a woman, obviously…’

  He looked at her for a moment. But she had learned to hide her emotions.

  He slid the folder a few inches closer.

  ‘There was an autopsy before your sister was cremated,’ he said. ‘You were right: she was pregnant. No one ever tried to find out who the father was: even if it had something to do with her suicide, it was not a criminal investigation. And besides, DNA tests back then were very rare. The foetus was cremated with the mother.’

  ‘Do we know who requested the cremation?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He took a sheet of paper from the folder.


  ‘This was in the file.’

  An authorisation for cremation. She read:

  Taking into consideration the request of the individual who is organising the funeral … In view of the decision of the prosecutor of the Republic to the county court of Toulouse … Hereby authorise to proceed with the cremation of the deceased.

  She reread the two names on the paper: her father’s, and that of the doctor she had attacked when she was twelve, the family doctor.

  ‘Thank you.’

  He slid another piece of paper over to her.

  ‘That’s not all. There’s something else,’ he said. ‘Regarding what happened at Mila Bolsanski’s. Here. Read it, then destroy it. It’s not a copy.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Read it.’

  She leaned closer and he saw her stiffen. Then she looked up at him, astonishment in her eyes.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I don’t know what this means, and in any case, the investigation is closed.’

  She stared at him.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said again.

  He shrugged and turned around to get ready to go; the paper she was holding was an excerpt from the police report: it stated that they had found two samples of DNA in the ditch that was dug behind Mila Bolsanksi’s house: the first belonged to Marcus, and the second to Christine Steinmeyer.

  He was about to go out, then he turned around.

  ‘And your dog,’ he said, ‘what did you do with it?’

  She smiled.

  ‘Léo and I buried him where you suggested. You were right: it’s a very beautiful place.’

  * * *

  He was driving along the bypass; traffic jams were reported ahead, even if it was still flowing where he was, when, all of a sudden, he pulled over onto the hard shoulder, unable to breathe. He did not hear the furious blaring of horns behind him. Or see the angry faces. He was staring at the road and a little wall through the windscreen, his mouth open, his heart pounding fit to burst.

  Two DNA samples …

  Could it be? He stared into space, and she was looking at him, smiling at him. He stared into space and he saw her.