Life

by Perec, Georges

  “None of the cases I had to examine withstood these complementary checks. I was on the verge of giving up the whole affair when one of the students I had hired pointed out that the event we were hunting for could well have happened abroad! The prospect of having to go through the lost pets of the whole planet did not exactly fill us with joy, but we buckled down to it nonetheless. If your daughter had fled to the States I think I would have lost hope sooner, but this time luck was with us: in the Exeter Express and Echo of Monday the fourteenth of June 1953 we read this heartbreaking story: Ewa Ericsson, the wife of a Swedish diplomat posted to London, was spending her holiday with her five-year-old son in a villa she had rented for a month at Sticklehaven, in Devon. Her husband, Sven Ericsson, had had to stay behind in London for the Coronation celebrations and was due to join her on Sunday the thirteenth of June, after attending the great reception given on the evening of the twelfth by the royal couple for more than two thousand guests. Ewa’s health was not strong, and before leaving London she had taken on an au pair of French origin whose task was to look after the child, since a local charlady would take care of the cleaning and do the cooking. When Sven Ericsson arrived on the Sunday evening, he saw a horrible sight: his son, bloated like a kipper, was floating in the bath, and Ewa was lying on the bathroom tiles with her wrists slashed; they had died at least forty-eight hours earlier, that is to say on the Friday evening. The facts were accounted for in this way: told to bath the little boy whilst Ewa took a rest, the au pair girl, intentionally or unintentionally, allows him to drown. Realising the inexorable consequences of her act, she decides to run away immediately. A little later Ewa discovers her child’s corpse and, mad with grief, not knowing how to live on without her son, takes her own life. The absence of the charlady, who was only due to come again on the Monday morning, prevented these events being discovered before Sven Ericsson’s arrival and also gave the au pair girl forty-eight hours’ head start.

  “Sven Ericsson had only ever seen the girl for a few minutes. Ewa had put small ads in various places: the YWCA, the Danish Cultural Centre, the Lycée français de Londres, the Goethe-Institut, the Swiss Centre, the Dante Alighieri Foundation, American Express, etc., and had taken on the first girl to turn up, a young Frenchwoman of about twenty, a student with nursing qualifications, tall, blonde, with pale eyes. She was called Véronique Lambert; her passport had been stolen a month before, but she showed Madame Ericsson a copy of the declaration of loss made out at the French consulate. The charlady’s statement contained little further detail; she clearly didn’t like the way the French girl dressed and behaved, and had spoken as little as possible to her, but she was nonetheless able to state that she had a beauty spot beneath her right eyelid, that there was a picture of a Chinese junk on her perfume bottle, and that she had a slight stutter. This description was circulated throughout Britain and France to no avail.

  “I didn’t find it difficult,” Salini continued, “to establish with certainty that Véronique Lambert was indeed Elizabeth de Beaumont and that her murderer was Sven Ericsson, because when I went to Sticklehaven a fortnight ago to try to find the charlady so as to show her a photograph of your daughter, the first thing I learnt was that Sven Ericsson – who, ever since the tragedy, had carried on renting the villa year in, year out, without ever using it – had returned there and taken his own life, on the seventeenth of September preceding, only three days after the double murder at Chaumont-Porcien. But if this suicide on the very site of the first tragedy proved the identity of Elizabeth’s murderer beyond doubt, the main point still remained unclear: how had the Swedish diplomat succeeded in tracking down the girl who had caused the deaths of his son and his wife six years before? I was vaguely hoping that he’d left a letter explaining his act, but the police were adamant: there was no letter near the corpse, nor anywhere else.

  “But my hunch had been correct: when I finally got to question Mrs Weeds, the charlady, I asked her if she had ever heard of an Elizabeth de Beaumont who had been murdered at Chaumont-Porcien. She rose and fetched a letter which she handed to me.

  “‘Mr Ericsson,’ she said, ‘told me that if anyone came one day to speak to me about the French girl and her dying in the Ardennes, I should give him this letter.’

  “‘And if hadn’t come?’

  “‘I was to wait, and after six years, to send it to the address marked on it.’

  “Here is the letter,” Salini continued. “It was intended for you. Your name and address are on the envelope.”

  Motionless, stiff, and silent, Véra de Beaumont took the pages from Salini’s hand, unfolded them, and began to read:

  Exeter, the sixteenth of September 1959.

  Madam,

  One day, sooner or later, whether you find it by looking for it or having it looked for, or whether it reaches you by mail in six years’ time – that’s how long it has taken me to slake my vengeance – you will have this letter in your hands and you will finally know why and how I killed your daughter.

  A little over six years ago, your daughter, who used the name of Véronique Lambert, was engaged as an au pair by my wife, who was not very well and wanted someone to take care of our son Erik who had just turned five. On Friday 11 June 1953, for reasons I still do not understand, Véronique, either on purpose or by accident, allowed our son to drown. Incapable of assuming her own responsibility for this criminal act, she fled, probably within the following sixty minutes. A little later my wife discovered the corpse of our son, became insane, and slit her wrists with a pair of scissors. I was in London at that moment, and I did not see them until the Sunday evening. I swore then to devote my life, my fortune, and my mind to taking my revenge.

  I had only seen your daughter for a few seconds when she arrived at Paddington to catch the train with my wife and our son, and when I learnt that the name she was using was fake, I despaired of ever tracking her down.

  During the debilitating sleepless nights which began to afflict me then and have never since left me in peace, I recalled two anodine details that my wife had told me when mentioning the interview she had had with your daughter before giving her the job: my wife, learning that the girl was French, spoke of Arles and Avignon, where we had stayed several times, and your daughter said she had been brought up in that area; and when my wife complimented her on her English, she said she had already spent two years in Britain and was studying archaeology.

  Mrs Weeds, the charlady who worked in the house my wife had rented, and who will be the guardian of this last letter until it reaches your hands, was of even greater help to me: it was she who told me your daughter had a beauty spot beneath her right eyelid, that she used a perfume called “Sampang”, and that she stuttered. It was with her, too, that I searched the villa from top to bottom looking for any clues that the false Véronique Lambert might have left. To my discomfiture, she had not stolen any jewels or things, but only the kitchen purse my wife had got ready for Mrs Weeds to do the shopping, containing three pounds eleven shillings and sevenpence. On the other hand she hadn’t been able to take all her own things and she had left, in particular, the linen of hers that was in the wash that week: various cheap underclothes, two handkerchiefs, a rather loud print neckerchief, and, especially, a white blouse embroidered with the initials E. B. The blouse could have been borrowed or stolen but I hung on to those initials as a possible clue; I also found various objects of hers scattered around the house – in particular, in the lounge she had not dared go into before fleeing in case she woke my wife, who was sleeping in the room next to it, the first volume of Henri Troyat’s serial novel Les Semailles et les Moissons, which had been published a few months earlier in France. The label inside revealed that this copy came from Rolandi’s Bookshop, 20 Berners Street, a bookshop specialising in lending out foreign books.

  I took the book back to Rolandi’s. There I learnt that Véronique Lambert had a borrower’s ticket: she was a student at the Institute of Archaeology, a branch of the British Museum,
and lived in a Bed-and-Breakfast at 79 Keppel Street, just behind the Museum.

  Breaking into her room was a waste of time: she had left when my wife took her on as an au pair. Neither the landlady nor the lodgers could tell me anything. I had more luck at the Institute of Archaeology: not only was there a photograph in her registration file, but I was able to meet some of her classmates, and amongst them there was a boy with whom she’d gone out a couple of times; he provided me with a key piece of information: a few months earlier, he had invited her to see Dido and Aeneas at Covent Garden. “I hate opera,” she had told him, and added, “It’s not surprising, my mother was a singer!”

  I hired several private detective agencies to trace, in France or elsewhere, a young woman aged between twenty and thirty, tall, blonde, with pale eyes, a slight mark beneath her right eyelid, and a mild stammer; the information card also mentioned that she perhaps used “Sampang” perfume, was perhaps using the name of Véronique Lambert, that her real initials could be E. B., that she grew up in the south of France, had stayed in England, spoke good English, had been a student, and was interested in archaeology, and, lastly, that her mother was, or had been, a singer.

  This last clue was the decisive one: reference to the biographies – in Who’s Who and other specialist listings – of all women singers whose name began with B produced nothing, but when we checked all those who had a daughter between 1912 and 1935 your name came up together with about seventy-five others: Véra Orlova, born at Rostov in 1900, married the French archaeologist Fernand de Beaumont in 1926; one daughter, Elizabeth Natasha Victorine Marie, born 1929. Enquiries quickly revealed that Elizabeth had been brought up by her grandmother at Lédignan, Department of Gard, and had run away from you on 3 March 1945 at the age of sixteen. I then grasped that it was in order to evade your pursuit that she had concealed her true identity, but that also meant, alas, that the trail I had found stopped short, since neither you nor your mother-in-law, despite all the appeals you had put out on the radio and in the papers, had had any news of her for seven years.

  We were already in 1954; it had taken nearly a year to find out whom I was going to kill: it took another three for me to find her.

  For those three years, and this is something I want you to know, I supported teams of detectives who worked shifts to watch you twenty-four hours a day and to shadow both of you, whenever you went out in Paris, and whenever Countess de Beaumont went out in Lédignan, in the ever less probable case that your daughter might try to see you again or to take refuge with her grandmother. Their surveillance was completely useless, but I didn’t want to leave any stone unturned. Everything that had even the slightest chance of putting me on a trail was tried out systematically: that was why I financed a huge market survey on “exotic” perfumes in general and “Sampang” perfume in particular; why I obtained the names of all persons having borrowed one or more volumes of Les Semailles et les Moissons from a public library; why all plastic surgeons in France received a personal letter enquiring whether they had had occasion since 1953 to conduct an operation to excise a naevus located under the right eyelid of a young woman aged about twenty-five; why I went round all the speech pathologists and elocution teachers looking for a tall blonde who’d been cured of a mild stammer; and why, lastly, I set up several entirely bogus archaeological expeditions devised uniquely to allow me to recruit through classified advertisements a “young woman with excellent English for N. American field study carrying out archaeological excavations nr Pyrenees”.

  I put a lot of hope into this last trap. It bagged nothing. There were crowds of candidates each time, but Elizabeth didn’t show up. By the end of 1956 I was still fumbling and had spent more than three-quarters of my fortune; I had sold all my securities, all my land, all my properties. All I had left was my collection of paintings and my wife’s jewels. I began to dispose of them one by one so as to keep on paying the army of investigators I had marching on the steps of your daughter.

  The death of your mother-in-law, the Countess de Beaumont, reawakened my hopes in early 1957, for I knew how attached your daughter was to her; but she no more came to the funeral at Lédignan than you did, and it was a complete waste of effort to have the cemetery watched for several weeks in case she was determined, as I imagined she might be, to put flowers on the grave.

  These successive failures became increasingly exasperating, but I would not give up. I could not admit that Elizabeth might be dead, as if I had become the only person competent to dispose of her life and death, and I wanted to go on believing she was in France: I had found out in the end how she had managed to get out of England without leaving any record of embarkation: on 12 June 1953, the day after the crime, she took a boat from Torquay to the Channel Islands: by erasing the first letter of her name on the declaration of loss of her passport, she had managed to register under the name of Véronique Ambert, and her embarkation card, filed under A, had eluded the search made by the harbour police. This belated discovery didn’t get me any further, but it gave me a basis for my belief that she was still hiding in France.

  That year I began, I think, to lose my reason. I began to explain things to myself like this: I am looking for Elizabeth de Beaumont, that is to say a tall, blonde, pale-eyed young woman with good English, brought up in the Gard, etc. Now Elizabeth de Beaumont knows I am looking for her, thus she is hiding, and in this case hiding means removing as many as she can of the distinguishing features by which she knows I know her; therefore I should be looking not for a tall, blonde, etc. Elizabeth, but for an anti-Elizabeth, and I started getting suspicious about short, swarthy women jabbering Spanish.

  On another occasion I awoke covered in sweat. I had just dreamt the obvious solution to my nightmare. Standing beside a huge blackboard covered in equations, a mathematician was concluding his demonstration, in front of a turbulent audience, that the celebrated “Monte Carlo theorem” was generalisable; that meant not just that a roulette player placing his stake on a random number had just as much chance of winning as a martingale player systematically doubling his stake on the same number on each loss in order to recoup eventually, but that I had as much if not more chance of finding Elizabeth by going to Rumpelmeyer’s for tea next day at sixteen hours eighteen minutes precisely than by having four hundred and thirteen detectives looking for her.

  I was weak enough to give way to the dream. At 16 hours 18 minutes I went into the teashop. A tall redhead left as I entered. I had her followed, uselessly of course. Later on I told my dream to one of the investigators who was working for me: he said quite seriously that I had only made a mistake of interpretation: the number of detectives should have made me suspicious: 413 was obviously the inverse of 314, that is to say of the number π: something would have happened at 18 hours 16 minutes.

  So then I began to appeal to the exhausting resources of the irrational. If your mysterious and beautiful American neighbour had still been there, you can be sure I would have had recourse to her disturbing services; instead, I went in for turning tables, I wore rings encrusted with particular stones, I had magnets and hanged men’s fingernails and tiny bottles of herbs, seeds, and coloured stones sewn into the hems of my clothes; I consulted wizards and water diviners, fortune tellers and crystal-ball gazers and soothsayers of all sorts; they threw dice, or burnt a photograph of your daughter in a white porcelain plate and examined the ash, they rubbed their left arms with fresh verbena leaves, put hyenas’ gallstones under their tongues, spread flour on the floor, made unending anagrams of your daughter’s names and pseudonyms, or replaced the letters of her name with figures in an attempt to reach 253, examined candle flames through vases filled with water, threw salt into fire and listened to the crackling, or jasmine seed or laurel branches to watch the smoke, poured the white of an egg laid by a black hen into a cup of water, or dropped in lead, or molten wax, and watched the shapes that were made; they had sheep’s shoulder blades grilled on hot coals, hung sieves on wire and rotated them, examined carp roes,
asses’ brains, and circles of grain pecked by a rooster.

  On the eleventh of July 1957 there was a coup de théâtre: one of the men stationed at Lédignan to continue the watch despite the death of Countess de Beaumont rang me to say that Elizabeth had written to the town hall to request a copy of her birth certificate. She had given a hotel address in Orange.

  Logic – if in these circumstances one may still talk of logic – demanded I should grasp this opportunity to end this inextricable affair. All I needed to do was to take from its green leather sheath the weapon which, some three years earlier, I had decided would be the instrument of my revenge: a bone-handled field surgeon’s scalpel, similar in appearance to a razor but infinitely sharper, which I had learned to handle with unrivalled dexterity, and to burst in at Orange. But instead I heard myself ordering my men simply to tail your daughter and not to relax their surveillance. They missed her at Orange in any case – the hotel didn’t exist; she had gone to the post office saying she had made a mistake and the postman dealing with mail returned to sender had fished out the letter from Lédignan town hall and handed it to her – but they caught up with her, a few weeks later, at Valence. That is where she got married, with two of François Breidel’s workmates acting as witnesses.