by Mark Henshaw
Auguste. What are you doing here?
I wanted to talk to you. About Madeleine.
She looked away.
Is she all right? he asked.
I don’t know, Auguste. None of us knows. Since the baby was born, she has not been herself. She won’t tell us why. I told her I was going to talk to you. But she begged me not to. I forbid you to tell him, Mathilde. It’s got nothing to do with him. It’s me. Just me.
That’s why we come here. We take turns. To look after her. To make sure she gets some sleep, to see the baby’s fed, settled, that he’s all right.
She comes to school. The nurse is there. She teaches. But then, sometimes I’ll find her in her empty classroom. She tells me then. She says she can’t go home. She’s afraid. I ask her why. And she says that that’s where the fear is waiting for her.
What fear?
The fear that she is lost. The fear she can’t find herself. At night, she goes looking. But she’s no longer there.
Chapter 35
HE had not meant it to happen. Of course he’d had open briefs before. Infiltrate a cell. Do what you needed to do. For him it had been a commonplace. He had slept with targets before.
He was good at this. Better than good. He had that special intuition, that unique insight. Into the vulnerable. A woman with children. A woman with nowhere to live—now. A woman without money. Talk to the person next to her. Let someone else do the work for you. Let the subject hear of your kindness. Your generosity. The purity of your heart. Stay back. Volunteer. Ask for help, don’t offer. Not yet. Something trivial. The envelopes you can’t find. Directions to somewhere. If you wait, I’ll take you. Talk to her then. While you search. While you walk. Not about politics, ideology. About school, her ailing parents, the death of a brother, the difficulty of finding a doctor—all the intimate things. Things you will be able to use. Discreetly. Take your time. Go slowly. Tick off the list—one, two, three.
Haifa was none of these. Her family was well educated. She had a sister, Mathilde; a husband, Ahmed, who was ‘away’. And Jovert knew what that meant. Where that meant. He had a photograph of him—just in case. She didn’t have children. She didn’t need money. She had a place to live. He’d already been there. Been inside. Picked up her things. Her jewellery. Her earrings. Put them back again. She was strong. Independent. Intelligent. She’d studied jurisprudence in Marseille. By the time he’d made contact, he had followed her, watched her in the street. Observed her routine. Had seen her organising groups. Women, men. Seen how articulate she was, organised, revered. Loved.
Vulnerable.
Still, it would not be easy. She would be a challenge. Haifa was not your usual mark. He would have to clear the way. Be patient. Careful.
His recollection, sitting in the library, was more vivid now than ever before. The sun more intense. The shadows sharper on the crevassed white walls. The cut blue sky more vivid, more angular. He felt the cicadas’ serrated whirrings on his skin.
He was walking up the chipped stone stairs. Thinking of something else, someone else. Madeleine. Something was wrong. Something had changed. She had begun to push him away.
Then, suddenly, the air erupted around him. Some blinding thing, a woman, emerged from the wall in front of him, her dress so white, so dazzling in the blazing light that it was like a disturbance in the air itself. She was already past him, a barely apprehended incandescent shape. But her after-image lingered. A dark-skinned crescent floating against her white dress. She was gone before he could look back. To the empty street. The air beginning to reassemble. Then he was knocking on the same blue door in front of him.
A young woman opened it. Alminah, the youngest recruit, prettier than her photograph.
My name is Philippe Valedire, he says. Yves sent me. He looks at the piece of paper in his hand: Is Haifa here?
No, she isn’t. You’ve just missed her. She’s gone to meet her husband. We weren’t expecting you until tomorrow.
His look of surprise.
Please, won’t you come in?
The door quickly closed.
I’m sorry, she says. You can never be too careful. My name is Alminah.
She shakes his hand. The grip is firm. Haifa has trained her well.
Haifa’s just left. Brightness, warmth, admiration, in her voice. Just a minute ago. Yves’s not here. I’m afraid it’s just me.
I’m sorry, Almira.
Alminah.
Alminah. I will come back. I didn’t mean to take you by surprise.
No, it’s all right. Don’t worry. We know who you are.
Here it comes: Would you like a coffee? He smiles at her.
Would you like a coffee? Yves will be here any minute.
It had been easy. Talking to her, Alminah. The coffee cup’s length of conversation just enough.
He apologises again. Asks after Yves. How is he? His brother? No, no, we met in Paris. We were students together. Oh, and did they get the paper? The Roneo machine? Is it still working? Ah, yes, there it is. A half-turn of the drum. Lift the flap. Run one expert finger along its printing edge. Still dry. The coffee’s good. We had to fix it, you know. It was leaking. But these old machines—unstoppable! Yes, Yves told us. Yves, who is late. A glance at his watch. Who’s been delayed. Permanently. Yves is never coming back.
Oh, is that the time? I’m sorry, Alminah. I’ve got to go. I’ll come back. No, no, it’s no problem. No problem at all. At least we’ve met. One last quick sip. Thank you for the coffee, Alminah. You’ve been most helpful.
You’re welcome.
Could you tell Haifa I was here? That I’ll come back tomorrow. When I’m expected.
A small, shared laugh.
It’s fine…Philippe. Don’t worry. I’m pleased to have met you.
Tell her I’m looking forward to working with her.
I will.
Thank you, Alminah. Till tomorrow.
Steps one and two and three.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
It was always like this. He had once enjoyed the intricate preparation. The deft manoeuvrings. Now he found it slow. If only Alminah knew—trustworthy, dedicated, hard-working Alminah—just how many of her there were.
How focused had been his pursuit of her. Haifa. Yet how carelessly he had set the trap. Stood back.
Only to ensnare himself.
My name is Philippe Valedire. Yves sent me. Is Haifa here?
They found they liked each other. Philippe Valedire and Haifa.
How long have you known Yves?
Oh, a long time. We were students together. Years ago. My father knew his father.
Yves was so helpful. He did so much for us. Do you know where he is now?
Philippe was not Yves. Yves was always joking. He was loud. But a gifted propagandist. If not always reliable. He’d sometimes disappear for weeks. This Philippe was quieter. More thoughtful. Committed. Fantastically tall. He knew Algeria. Its people. Us.
She liked his unruly hair, which he
constantly brushed back. His round glasses. They made him look like a professor. Which he could have been. And yet he could fix her car. He knew how to build an irrigation ditch. Repair shelled walls. He read. One, two, three.
He found himself thinking about her. At night, the lamp lit, the windows blacked out. A book in his lap. The thump of artillery shells not too far distant. And in the next quadrant. Not his. No need to worry. About her eyes, how luminous they were. Her mouth, her skin, so different from the French. From Madeleine. Although he no longer knew.
And he had seen the subtle signs—the changing colours that she wore. The blue against her skin. And then, from time to time, she wore that dress.
He thought of her lean body, when the wind blew, or she reached out to pay. For a piece of fruit, a loaf of bread. Fresh coffee beans. His body ached. Bodies. It happened to both of him.
He began thinking less of Algiers. Of the loss that inhabited him there. And more of coming home. Here. To Ighouna, this nothing nowhere village. And to Sétif. Where Haifa was. Although they still were just colleagues.
Then the news had come. The news he would remember. That small something he had forgotten to do. He walked up the stone chipped steps again. He no longer needed to knock. He had a key. For when he worked back late.
They were all there when he walked in. Except Haifa. All looking up at him.
Ahmed is dead. And Mathilde, Haifa’s sister, Alminah said. They were killed in a bomb blast in Algiers last night. With three of Mathilde’s students.
Ahmed Soukhane, Haifa’s husband. Mathilde, Haifa’s sister…Madeleine’s friend. Whom she was watching.
She’s at her parents’.
Had they just not told him?
Later that evening, at the outpost: Ahmed Soukhane was finally neutralised last night. Some collateral damage, but all in all, a good result. Thank you, Jovert, for your good work.
That was the truth. Now. And the truth could not be undone. There was no going back.
Memory is a savage editor. It cuts time’s throat. It concertinas life’s slow unfolding into time-less event, sifting the significant from the insignificant in a heartless, hurried way. It unlinks the chain. But how did you know what counted unless you let time pass?
Haifa returned a month later. Not in mourning. She refused to be bowed. But the wound was there. Just like his own.
Now he sat looking across the library table into that moment when Haifa knocked on his door. A month, or two, later. Sent down at night from the checkpoint to see him, even though it was late. The sentry call. The long minutes waiting.
He had not slept with Madeleine for so long he could not remember how beautiful a woman could be. Theirs had not been a union consummated in lust. They had sought each other out in sorrow. This one time. There would, they knew, be no tomorrow.
I was supposed to be there. I was supposed to be there.
It drove her mad. The Madeleine that was lost to him.
They put her in the military hospital.
Where’s my son? I want my son.
Colonel Lemoine came to see him. In Algiers. In the empty house.
She needs to go home, Auguste. She’s not well. You understand. We’ll provide a nurse. Someone to go with her. To look after her, and your child. To make sure she’s safe.
He saw her to the ferry. But she did not see him. She stood there with the child in her arms, twisting in the wind. She seemed so thin. So alone. Then she was leaving, with no farewell. She had brushed his arm away.
He went back, to the emptier house. To where time stopped.
You should go too, Auguste. Your work is done. It’s over now. Just pack your things. You know what I mean. Make sure you leave no trace.
He had read accounts of people who had nearly drowned. How many said that they had seen a strange white light, that they had not been afraid, that they had felt a state of transcendent serenity, of acceptance, before they lost consciousness.
Perhaps this was true. Perhaps they did.
But all he could think of, when the third knock came, when Colonel Lemoine stood unexpectedly in front of him again, and gave him the brutal news, was of his son being ripped from his mother’s arms by the impact of the water as they hit. During the night, unseen, the nurse asleep, Madeleine had fallen—or jumped, he would never know—from the ferry that had come to take her home.
He sees his son beneath the water, sees his startled eyes looking uncomprehendingly at his mother’s sorrowing face as she sinks unstruggling away. He sees the child’s first impulse is to swim after her, but she is already lost to him. And his thin-ribbed chest is already bursting, ballooning him up towards the surface, to the one slender hope he has of hanging on to everything that this life has to give. But the surface is no solace. It is all darkness. The boat is gone. No bright, twinkling lights. He is alone. He bobs in the sea for a moment before the primal urge to kick kicks in. Swim, it says. But swim to where? His child’s brain already knows it’s too late. There is no one there. Nothing to hold on to. Nothing to save him. Not his mother. Nor his father. Who was never there.
Part VII
MARTINE
Chapter 36
WHEN Jovert had finished telling Omura about his dead young son, Omura was sitting by the window, with the first hint of dawn just registering on the curtains behind him. He imagined Omura doing what he had sometimes done, closing his eyes as he listened, so that his voice was the only thing that came to him.
He could see Omura’s profile. How the outer edge of his glasses caught the dawn’s first glow.
Omura looked old now, insubstantial, as though he too were already just a memory. No longer there.
Omura turned away from him. He reached up for his glasses. Took them off. He rubbed his eyes. In the now pale light, against the window, Jovert saw what he was not meant to see—a single teardrop momentarily meniscussed on the downward curve of Omura’s glasses. He saw it holding on unsteadily in the early morning light, as though all of Omura’s grief were concentrated there. Then the drop let go. It fell slowly through the air, slowly, slowly, until it disappeared back into him. Still Omura did not speak.
This is her—Mathilde, he said.
How long had he waited before he handed Omura the crumpled photograph, after he had told him not everything—there was never any point in confessing everything—but enough to balance the ledger?
Omura pushed his glasses up onto his forehead, held the photograph up to the light. Squinted. His hand was shaking, as if the photograph, this almost insubstantial thing, was made of some newly discovered element of indescribable atomic weight, something so heavy it could barely be held aloft.
This is her? Omura said. This is your daughter?
He looked at Jovert.
Yes, he said. That’s her.
And you will find her?
I’m not sure, he began to answer.
Of what?
Well, of many things. But I’m not sure that I want to go digging up the—
But she is your daughter, Omura interrupted. How could you not? How could you leave this question unanswered?
Which question?
This one, he said.
Omura gestured around the room. Then he understood. Omura’s shaking hand meant all of this: in here, out there, out on the balcony, the streets. He meant every time Jovert opened his door. He meant rue St Antoine, the newsstand, the Metro, Le Bar l’Anise, the cold, mailbox-filled foyer, the lift. Everything that wasn’t him.
And he saw that Omura was right. This question had encircled him from the moment he had opened the envelope. Like her photograph, he’d carried it with him wherever he went. And it would be with him now, when he got up out of his chair. It would follow him to Omura’s door. It would come with him up the stairs. It would be there as he walked down the corridor to his apartment. And it would be waiting for him, just inside his door.
She is your daughter, Omura said. Your daughter.
Chapter 37
YEARS later, Omura told him, long after my father had died, I went to visit his village.
They were sitting at Le Cormoran in Place des Vosges, catching the last of autumn’s late-afternoon sun. Earlier they had gone to look at the plaque outside Victor Hugo’s door.
We had moved to Osaka when I was a boy, and I had only been back two or three times since.
My father’s village was famous for its forests, which spread up the sides of the mountains that encircled it. In October and November it was possible to do a daylong walk, a kind of pilgrimage, circling from west to east along the mountain rim, to see the maple leaves, how they changed colour at different times of the day. Halfway up the highest mountain was a shrine dedicated to the people from the village who were killed in Hiroshima on the day the bomb was dropped.
I went in December, he said. Not having been to the shrine since I was a child, I decided to visit it again. I went late in the afternoon, the best time to see the last leaves falling. To me, it was these falling leaves that were the most beautiful, more beautiful than those that remained on the trees.
