Claire turned on the living room light just long enough to get to the kitchen, and the kitchen light just long enough to fill a plastic IKEA glass with water. She was turning off light switches as she walked through her house as if she were alone there. But the porch light stayed on, waiting for Philippe. We went upstairs without speaking, and on the second floor, Claire took a telephone with a long cord out of the study and left it on the stairs, against the banisters.
“If you come downstairs, be careful not to trip.”
“You should put a phone in your bedroom,” I said. “Like we do back home.”
“Yes, I know. You’ve told me that before.”
I went up to the guest room, on the fourth floor, and found that I could move around without turning on the light, because there was a skylight in the ceiling and the brightness of the street illuminated the outlines of things: the tall headboard of the wooden bed, the wardrobe filled with clean towels. The noise of a nearby party could be felt through the walls, an electronic beat of intense bass notes that echoed in my stomach. I closed my eyes, tried not to listen. The house was dark, but not asleep: it was impossible to forget my wide-awake hostess waiting in that very particular way waiting for a telephone call becomes, such a modern kind of waiting, undoubtedly more anguished than the old waits in romantic novels, because there’s nothing more sudden than a phone ringing and there are no other situations where you can go, in less than a second, from well-being to loss. Waiting for someone implies their footsteps before they arrive at the door and waiting for a letter implies the time the envelope spends in our hands before being opened, but a phone call changes the world in an instant: it’s not there, and then it is. That’s how fast things happen.
I woke up when the phone rang. Somehow I’d fallen asleep, unaware.
I tried to hear, unsuccessfully. The creaky wooden floors prevented me from going down the stairs and listening to the conversation without being discovered. But the silence was not total: Claire’s murmuring, thin and soft as tends to happen when we speak to someone who loves us, reached me from afar, through the rude rhythms of the neighbors’ music. Claire spoke for three, maybe four minutes. I heard her hang up; I didn’t hear her close her bedroom door. I decided to go down: the bathroom, after all, was downstairs. I would have that pretext if I needed one.
I found her sitting on the third step, in front of the open door to her room, with the yellow light from the street barely illuminating the space her compressed body took up on the stairs. She was hugging her knees tight to her chest with her head between her arms, like a beggar in the subway. I put a hand on her shoulder: it was one of the first times I’d touched her (she was or is Belgian, and in spite of our friendship, physical contact was or is unusual and restrained), and Claire raised her head and I saw that she was crying softly, silently.
“The boy died,” she said. “Philippe isn’t coming home tonight, he’s staying with his sister.”
I thought of his sister’s husband, the man who, according to Monsieur Gibert, mistreated her.
“And her husband . . .”
“Of course, him too. Imagine that guy’s rage when he finds out his son is dead.”
“They don’t live together?”
“It’ll be her fault, of course, she sent the child off on the excursion. And the guy’s rage. Shit, I’d be scared to death, wouldn’t you? Of course, they’re all expecting Philippe to be there to protect them. And who’s going to protect him? Who’s going to comfort him?”
She picked up the receiver and dialed a long number.
“Good evening. I’d like a taxi, please.”
—
THE DRIVER, a Flemish man whose mustache completely covered his mouth, took us to our destination in twenty minutes. Schaerbeek was a neighborhood or suburb I’d been through on the train once or twice, on my way to the airport. Claire had never been to the house we were looking for, but she had an address taken from the invitation list for their wedding. The place just seemed dead: the sidewalks were dull cobblestones, and cars slept on both sides of the road. They were not the latest models: there were Fiats and Renaults from the early eighties, and they all had stickers on the bodywork or the bumpers, glow-in-the-dark cartoons making love in every possible position, or Flemish phrases—signs of admiration, underlined words—which I didn’t understand and had no interest in deciphering. The taxi pulled over and slowed to a walking pace. On the dark brick or gray stone walls, beside windows adorned with lace curtains, the house numbers came into view and disappeared again. When Claire found the one we were looking for, she said:
“It’s here. Stop, please.”
But we didn’t get out immediately.
“Are you sure?” I said.
“Of course not. If I were sure, everything would be easier.”
“Seven hundred and ninety,” said the taxi driver.
“Keep the change,” said Claire.
And there we were, the only two people on the empty street, the collars of our coats turned up (Claire was better protected with her black shawl), frowning at the cold. We looked up toward the second floor of the house, where the windows were boxes of silent light.
“It must be there. Philippe has told me about this, the house is divided into apartments. They don’t get along with the neighbors and the common areas are filthy with grime because nobody wants to clean them.”
It was number 8 Rue Goossens. The eight was wrought iron, sticking out from the concrete wall. Claire approached the list of doorbells, her index finger running down the four names. “Ah,” she said, and pressed a button. From the street we could hear an intercom buzzing. Someone I didn’t recognize looked out the window; presumably it was the same person whose voice came through the intercom.
“Who is it?”
“Claire Gibert. Claire Vial. Philippe’s wife. Good evening, madame.”
I’d never heard her introduce herself with her married name. The intercom went silent again and then a new buzz sounded, this time the door. I opened it and we stepped into the dark hallway. The stairs were on the right, and Claire walked toward them as if she knew the way, suddenly in a hurry. I followed her, but I didn’t take my hand off the rough handrail for a second.
Philippe was waiting for us in front of the half-closed door to the apartment. He looked at me and it was as if he were blaming me for something. He was wearing a black, unironed shirt, half untucked like an untidy schoolboy. Behind him there was nothing but silence. I had expected murmurs, accusations, disapproval, gossip.
“What are you doing?” he said to Claire.
“I couldn’t not be with you,” she said. “I love you and I wanted to be with you.”
“This isn’t . . . she’d rather be alone right now, you know. She’d rather that we—”
Then two doors opened: the neighbors’ and the one Philippe was guarding like a soldier in some fairy tale. The neighbor had a patch over his left eye and was wearing a red dressing gown. The woman who came out behind Philippe had too steady a face to be his sister.
“Mais, qu’est-ce que vous faites?” said the neighbor. “Could you not carry on your little chat inside your house?”
“We are inside our house,” said Philippe.
“We’re in our house,” said the neighbor.
“And watch your manners, if you don’t want a punch in the face.”
“Let’s go in,” said the woman. “Philippe, it’s not worth it.”
“Salauds,” said the neighbor.
“Vieux con,” said Philippe.
“In,” said the woman.
She closed the door and some bells jingled (they were copper, tied with red and green thread). Philippe took them down off the door hook.
“That noise gets on my nerves. I don’t know how you can stand it.”
“Good evening,” said Claire.
“Ever
y time it opens, every time you close it.”
“Good evening,” said the woman. “I’m a friend of the family. Anne. A friend.”
We said hello, and I noticed that Claire didn’t know quite how to introduce me. This was not the moment to go into details about nationality and profession; I was not going to be of any use to her this time, to break the ice in gatherings of strangers. In the living room, two armchairs and a small sofa were covered with white sheets, and both windows had lace curtains. The woman sitting on top of the sheet, at one end of the sofa, seemed like she hadn’t moved in a long time. It was Philippe’s sister, the woman whose son had died. Her eyelids were swollen and she had a red mark on her neck. Her head was hanging slightly to one side, her gaze fixed on some point in the sisal rug. Philippe sat down next to her, and Anne, the friend, sat in the other chair. But it was as if Claire and I weren’t there, as if we hadn’t arrived yet. Claire went over to Philippe; he didn’t look at her. He’d put a hand on his sister’s knee like someone setting down a cup of coffee. And he did not look at Claire. Not once did he look at her.
No one spoke, the bodies barely moved, and the sound of clothes brushing against the sheets, when that happened, was as clear as a violin in the still air of the room. The only thing I wanted to know was where the dead boy was and if there was anything we could do to help: take care of some of the procedural paperwork, recover the car from the accident site, any of those routine tasks that are terrible because they take us away or distract us from the pain. I said:
“I’m sorry, madame.”
Nothing happened. No one looked at me. Philippe’s sister did not move her head. And that was when Claire, perhaps tired of standing like a statue at Philippe’s side, approached his sister, knelt down at the foot of the sofa, and embraced her. It was a simple gesture, and didn’t seem to have any consequences until Claire tried to go back to her place, and the woman’s arms surrounded her and kept her there and her voice released a wail, he’s dead, Claire, my baby’s dead, and I saw the clenched, pale fists against Claire’s black shawl. They were heavy hands and they pressed Claire’s back and clothes, and the fingers wore no rings and her skin was so fair that blue veins were visible in the faint light. Philippe, sitting beside the two embracing women, looked at the bells he’d put on the coffee table. He picked them up, hung them from one finger, and shook them so it sounded like someone had just come in.
—
LESS THAN A WEEK LATER, I had to pass through Brussels again, on my way back from Paris, but I was able to change trains at Midi station and continue my trip to the Ardennes without seeing Claire and Philippe. In the house in Aywaille, as soon as I arrived, I began to organize my notes and write the article. About the bookshop’s bedroom, I wrote: “It’s a child’s room, a child who has not visited in a long time. The doors of a wardrobe have been removed in order to fit a little bed inside it, but there are still checked blazers and winter jackets hanging from the rail. There’s nothing as lonely as the spectacle of abandoned clothing. It smells of mothballs and ammonia, because the bathroom is right next door. From the portraits, which absorb my attention, I discover that this room belonged, some time ago, to Sylvia Beach Whitman, George’s daughter. In the photographs, the little girl plays wearing nothing but a necklace made of flowers or she appears with Baskerville, her German shepherd. It is in fact an altar arranged by George for the adoration of his daughter. There is one thing lonelier than abandoned clothing, and it’s a child’s room abandoned by the child.” As I was writing, I was thinking of Philippe’s sister’s dead son.
One spring Sunday, three or four weeks after that night, Claire came to Aywaille to talk to Monsieur Gibert. I was pleased to see her, and to see her lightness as she stepped out of the car and the casual air with which we all chatted, standing in the narrow kitchen, warmed by the steam pouring out of the pans and hitting the tiles.
After lunch, Claire and I stayed downstairs. When quite a long time had passed in silence, Claire said:
“Let’s go outside. It’s hot in here, the windows are all steamed up. Let’s go for a little walk.”
It was cloudy and the sky looked like rain. We took the path toward the woods, walking on tiptoes between the puddles and fresh mud.
“What a change,” said Claire. “I’d never live here, but it’s really good to come out here once in a while.”
“Nice to breathe fresh air.”
“It’s so quiet,” said Claire. “No parties next door.”
“There aren’t any people, just animals.”
“Philippe’s seeing someone,” said Claire. “I don’t know if my father’s told you.”
He hadn’t told me. But in some obscure way, I’d deduced it after a series of random comments, and had rejected the idea, and soon the idea had come back to worry me. The strange thing was how Claire told me, as if she were talking not about a potential marital disaster but of help found, as if Philippe, rather than going out with another woman—her name was Natasha, she was English and worked for the European Economic Community—were seeing a psychologist.
“She called the house the other day,” said Claire. “She didn’t even know Philippe was married.”
At a fork in the path, where you have to decide whether to go up the hill until you can see Hamoir in the distance or turn right toward the road to Ferrières, we stopped. Claire had gotten distracted as she walked and her tights were soaked and dirty.
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“Well, I’m going to wait. This is a phase, you know.”
And then, as if resuming a conversation we’d interrupted earlier, as if the change of topic wasn’t sudden or abrupt:
“When she embraced me, I didn’t think about her. I didn’t think that hugging me might make her feel better. I thought this embrace was happening to Philippe and me, and we would be the beneficiaries.”
She rubbed her hand across her face, looked at it as if her features had become entangled in her palm.
“Maybe all this is a punishment, no? Someone’s punishing me for being so egotistical.”
We got to the little stone church, a construction the size of a doll’s house, where Claire, as a child, used to come and play. It had a rusted iron gate that would no longer budge. It had no Christ, no cross or altar. The interior was nothing but a damp rectangle, the walls devoured by lichen, the concrete floor covered in pine needles. “And what if we prayed?” said Claire; but before I had time to be surprised (Claire was an atheist, as were her parents), she burst out with a short dry laugh. She didn’t say anything more until we reached the place where smoke from the chimneys of Hamoir began to come into view. The grass beside the path was too wet for us to sit down, so we stood there, looking at the green carpet that rolled down toward the first buildings. I put my arm around Claire and said:
“When you want to come back, let me know.”
“Come back, ah,” she sighed. “If it were up to me, I’d stay right here till Judgment Day.”
—
CLAIRE DECIDED NOT TO STAY for dinner: at five in the afternoon the sky was already black, and the prospect of driving to Brussels on her own on the dark, slippery highway seemed exhausting. I walked her to the car and asked her to call us when she got home; I noticed something resembling gratitude in her voice; it was as if she wanted to tousle my hair, as one might do to a brother, but she didn’t. I watched her drive away until the red taillights had disappeared. In the living room, Monsieur Gibert had lit a fire; I sat in the upholstered armchair, beside the box of newspaper, and after a while Gibert appeared with an aperitif in hand. I remember that conversation very well, lasting as it did for the entire meal and full of old wartime anecdotes, in particular about the day Gibert rode his bicycle down to Spa and ran into a German soldier younger than he was, just a boy, maybe seventeen years old, and there was in that instant a tremendous understanding in which Gibert wouldn�
�t take his hands off the handlebars to grab his rifle if the soldier didn’t reach for his cartridge belt. “Who knows if I’d be alive right now,” Gibert said to me, “if one of the two of us hadn’t been afraid.”
The phone rang then and startled us: it was Claire, probably, Claire who was just getting home and maybe found Philippe not there, or found a note from Philippe lying about his whereabouts or whom he was with. I hoped it wouldn’t be, I caught myself hoping with all my might that Philippe was waiting for her when she got home. I stood up to answer when it became obvious that Gibert had no intention of speaking with anyone, not with his daughter, nor with his daughter’s husband, who now had a lover; but I must have taken too long, because when I picked up the receiver I didn’t hear any voice but just an even dial tone. And then I stood there, in front of the telephone, waiting for Claire to phone back, searching without success for something to say, a phrase that might serve as an umbrella or a hiding place for her after driving all the way back to Brussels alone. But when the phone rang—I don’t quite know how to say this—my hands didn’t move. I heard it, I heard the electronic bell and its echo from the house’s other phone, on the second floor, and the cord was brushing against the sleeves of my shirt; I even played with it, untangling it carefully, pushing it with my finger so it swayed like a pendulum. But I didn’t answer. I imagined it was a friend of the family calling; they wouldn’t be surprised that everyone in the house was asleep. I imagined someone dialing, getting the number wrong, from a pay phone, perhaps from a gas station. It might be a young man, well bundled up, just getting off work and phoning his girlfriend to ask her to come and meet him for a drink. I thought about this man; I invented a good life for him. And after a few seconds the phone stopped ringing, more or less the way a trout stops gasping on the shore.
Lovers on All Saints' Day Page 2
