by Alain Gillot
Once, just once, I’d felt something that might have resembled love. It was soon after I’d moved to Créteil to play in the national championships. Thanks to the club, I’d just moved into a two-room apartment in a development close to the municipal stadium. I moved in almost at the same time as an art history student from Croatia, who’d come to France to get her diploma. I helped her carry her boxes up the stairs. Her name was Mila Brekjovic and her face was partially disfigured. She told me later that it had happened during the war, but wouldn’t say any more than that. As far as I was concerned, she was really beautiful. She had the most amazing eyes. Our relationship gradually developed through a series of everyday events. First, we ran into each other in the laundromat, then, one day, her mail was put in my box by mistake and I rang her doorbell to hand it over to her. We started exchanging smiles when we met by chance, plus a few banal words to be polite. Although we never went beyond that, I felt strangely close to her. Was it because she was a foreigner? All those people who were settled, sure of their place, scared me. There was something reassuring about the way Mila just seemed to be passing through, her whole world contained in a suitcase. Plus, she’d been through a war, she knew what things could be hidden behind immaculate house fronts and neat gardens. One evening, an electricity blackout hit the whole block, and she must have felt emboldened. We shared a candle in my kitchen and, by way of a meal, a simple can of sardines. But then I let her go home. What stopped me from taking her in my arms? What was I waiting for? I finally persuaded myself that I had to at least try. I made up my mind to ask her out on a date when I got back from a tournament in the south where the club had a fixture. But when I did get back, there was a note under my door. She’d returned to her country. She thanked me for everything. I stood there, rooted to the spot, holding that note and reading it over and over. It really hurt. It was as if I’d lost the one person I trusted, the one person I could have had a connection with.
All at once, shouts jolted me back to the present, to Rue des Platanes, and I peered into the darkness to see where they were coming from. From a house opposite. The living room window was open and you could see a woman standing under the overhead light, her head bowed, and a man walking back and forth in front of her and waving his arms. They were obviously quarreling. Then the man realized their privacy was on display and closed the window. I smiled in spite of myself. That was exactly what my father always did before he exploded: check that the door and windows were closed, so that there was no chance our little personal hell would arouse our neighbors’ curiosity. I opened the gate and strode across the garden.
Once in the house, I switched on the light in the corridor and went straight to the bathroom. I turned the faucets in the bath full on, and had started taking off my jacket and my shoes when the front door bell rang. Who could it possibly be? I wasn’t expecting anyone, especially not at that hour. It had to be a mistake. My neighbor had taken the number off his gate, and people easily got it wrong.
I opened the door. A woman was standing there. It took me a moment or two to recognize her, because the garden was dark. Plus, her hair was a different color. It wasn’t a mistake, at least not a mistake with the number. It was my sister Madeleine.
4
I remembered her being the nervous kind, but never quite like this. Madeleine went straight to the living room, made as if to sit down, then changed her mind, as if the couch was burning hot. She dove into her bag and started talking, with her nose in her things.
“Do you have a cigarette?”
“I’d already quit smoking the last time we met, and that must have been at least two years ago.”
“As long as that?”
“Yes.”
“We’ve talked on the phone, though.”
“Argued, you mean. How did you get here?”
“Someone lent me a car.”
She was blonde now. But she’d kept her chestnut-brown eyebrows. It was obvious that something was wrong. “Are you still in Saint-Quentin with your mother?”
“No, I’m back in Paris. Why don’t you say ‘Ma’?”
“It doesn’t feel natural.”
She finally sat down. I remained standing. Nothing had ever been easy between us. Madeleine was my older sister, by five years, and it had always felt to me as if we hadn’t been brought up under the same roof. In those early years, there was too much of an age difference for us to really share anything, and by the time we moved to Saint-Quentin she was already a teenager, and my mother had urged her to go to a vocational college to learn secretarial work. She was a boarder there and I only saw her on weekends, if you could use the word “see”: She’d shut herself up in her room and only come out of it to go straight into the bathroom and “get ready,” as she put it. At mealtimes, she never ate anything, just sat looking out the window, as if Prince Charming was going to appear at any moment. My father would make comments about the length of her skirts, but she always managed to avoid confrontation. She was clever at that, much more than I was. She’d come and go and never let herself be trapped. And then once she got her diploma, she moved to Paris to do office work. All of which meant that she’d known nothing, or very little, about the nuclear war that had broken out in our house soon after we moved to Saint-Quentin. It’s quite simple: As far as she was concerned, our parents were frozen in time, like figurines on a mantelpiece. She hadn’t noticed that my father’s suits had started to look threadbare, that he hid bottles in the closets, or that my mother was living on pills.
“You absolutely have to help me out. I’m in deep shit.”
“Do you need money?”
“No, it’s not that. I’ve managed to get onto a course. Ten days of total immersion. I’ll have a real chance of finding work again. But it’s the school vacation, and I have my kid. A girlfriend of mine was supposed to take him in, but she let me down at the last moment.”
“Have someone watch him.”
“It’s obvious you don’t have a kid. You know how much a full-time babysitter costs? And you try finding one at short notice.”
“Is it that urgent?”
“I start my course the day after tomorrow.”
“Why don’t you take him to Saint-Quentin?”
“Ma’s back in the hospital.”
“Weren’t you with a guy? Weren’t you supposed to be going to South America together?”
“We broke up.”
Silence fell over the room. Madeleine had found her cigarettes. I saw that her hand was shaking a little, that she was breathing in the smoke and blowing it out too hard. She’d put on foundation to give herself some color, but had applied it unevenly. It stopped at the jawline, and the top of her neck was white. It was as if she was wearing a mask. I was summing things up in my mind. She was out of work. Her guy had dumped her. How old was her son? And what on earth was his name?
“Léonard. He’s thirteen.”
“What?”
“You’re trying to remember my son’s name and age. His name’s Léonard and he’s thirteen.”
“Hold on . . . Where is he now?”
“In the car.”
“You’re joking.”
She’d always had a nerve. As a child, I’d seen her stealing from my mother’s purse and then shamelessly asking her for pocket money not long afterwards.
“Go get him right now.”
“So you will take him?”
“I didn’t say that!”
“If you haven’t made up your mind, it’s best he doesn’t come in.”
“You left your kid in a car.”
“He loves it.”
“What?”
“He loves being alone in an enclosed space. It’s what he prefers. But he hates situations that aren’t clear. If he sees you hesitate, he’ll freak out.”
I felt anger rising inside me, but managed to control it. “I have to turn o
ff my bath.”
“I’m sorry, Vincent. If there was any other way—”
“I haven’t said yes.”
I went back to the bathroom and turned off the faucets. I sat down on the edge of the bath. Ten days wasn’t the end of the world, but it was her behavior that upset me, that way she had of coming back into my life without warning. When I went back out to the living room, Madeleine was still in the same position on the edge of the couch. She was like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
“I have a suggestion. You can sleep here. You aren’t going to drive tonight anyway, and that way we’ll have time to talk.”
“Talk about what?”
“Your son. Your situation.”
“You don’t trust—”
“No.”
Madeleine realized she had no choice. She nodded and stood up. She walked straight to the door. It wasn’t what she’d imagined. She’d thought she could just waltz in and take me by surprise, dump her son on me, and walk off again, before I’d taken it all in. Instead of which, she was going to have to stay a while. With a brother who wasn’t going to make things easy for her.
5
I went to the doorway to see what my nephew looked like. I realized why I hadn’t seen Madeleine when I got home. She’d parked on the other side of the street, a little farther down. The car she’d been lent was an ancient Renault 18. I had no idea they were still in circulation.
Madeleine opened the door on the passenger side and her son got out. She said something to him, clearly to inform him of the arrangement, then took a big bag from the trunk. They walked toward me. I felt as if I was in some kind of science-fiction movie. I’d be waking up any moment.
“Léonard, this is my brother Vincent.”
“Hello, Léonard.”
I couldn’t catch his eyes. I wondered if he was shy, or upset by the situation. Surely both.
“He’s always on the moon,” my sister said. “People often think he’s rude. But he isn’t, he’s just miles away.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
I let them go ahead of me into the house. Léonard had an oddly shaped head. It was as if he had an adult’s cranium stuck on a child’s neck. Now all three of us were in the living room.
“Would you like something to eat?”
“We ate all kinds of junk on the way. And besides, Léonard is used to going to bed very early. He generally sleeps a lot.”
It was now Léonard’s whole face I found intriguing. It was completely devoid of emotion.
“Then let me show him his room.”
I went ahead down the corridor that led to the bedrooms in back; there were three of them, including one that was quite big, the one Meunier had occupied. It was because of a misunderstanding that I had such a large house. The management of the club had mixed up my application with another candidate’s, a father of three, and the local council had offered me a four-bedroom house as a result. Of course, by the time I arrived in Sedan, the club had realized its mistake, but there wasn’t a lot of accommodation available, which meant that I’d kept the house, with the possibility that I’d move in the end. But I hadn’t heard any more about it, and so I’d stayed.
I turned to face my sister. She’d done her best to appear in top shape when she rang my bell, but now she looked completely exhausted.
“He can have one of the two small bedrooms. Whichever he prefers. You can take the large one.”
“Don’t give him a choice. He doesn’t like that.”
My sister went into the nearest bedroom. She put the big bag down in the middle of the room and started rummaging through it. The boy sat down on the edge of the bed.
Léonard was like a cosmonaut. The image occurred to me because of the way he held himself. He was wearing only a slicker over a woolen sweater, but it was as if his clothes weighed tons and his movements were limited. What did his voice sound like? I still hadn’t heard it. His eyes had stopped roving and had come to rest on a specific point. His mother’s hand, busy sorting through his things and hers. He was waiting for something. He started moving his right leg up and down, faster and faster, then suddenly stopped when Madeleine handed him a small box covered in black imitation leather.
“I’ll get the sheets,” I said.
“He can sleep like that, you know.”
“I have a whole stock of them I never do anything with. Might as well use them.”
When I moved into the house, I’d observed that it was already furnished and that everything I’d need in daily life had been provided, from vacuum cleaner to forks, by way of bedding, and there was practically nothing to buy. Which was fine by me. I’d never bothered to make a place mine, surrounding myself with personal objects.
I opened the big closet in the laundry room. There was enough to make beds for a whole regiment. Everything was folded and spotlessly clean.
Léonard was already asleep by the time I went back into the bedroom. He was lying curled up, wrapped in the quilt, the black box next to him.
“When he’s sleepy, he just drops off.”
It was my sister’s voice from the bathroom, where she was putting out her son’s toiletries.
“You won’t have to tidy up after him. He’s very clean. He doesn’t like people touching his things anyway. He can throw a fit over a toothbrush that’s askew.”
“Don’t act as if I’ve agreed.”
“Sorry.”
She turned her back to me, and her gestures slowed down. I sensed she was taking in what I’d just said.
I glanced at the bed, at this boy who’d somehow forced his way into my house. He was breathing hard. Beneath his closed eyelids, the nerves throbbed.
“Did you choose this wallpaper?”
“No. It was already here.”
“Horrible, isn’t it?”
“This is the first time anybody’s slept in this room. I only come in here to air it.”
“So you still live alone?”
“As you can see.”
I looked at the room as if seeing it for the first time—which I was. An old woman must have lived in it. The furniture was from the fifties, and the china trinkets wouldn’t have withstood a child. The wallpaper really was hideous, disturbing even. I wondered if a kid waking up here would be scared by those monstrous flowers. But I dismissed the thought. It was only for one night.
6
I had a look in the fridge to see what was left. I hadn’t been shopping for several days, and it was starting to become obvious. All the same, I found some boiled potatoes, a little lettuce, a piece of cheese, and some eggs. I could make an omelet. Behind my back, I could feel my sister watching me.
“What is this training course exactly?”
“It’s about computer tools. If you don’t follow the latest changes in hardware, you have no chance. People are already fighting over the smallest jobs.”
“I thought you had a great job in that mail-order company. Weren’t you supposed to be getting a promotion?”
Hearing the chair squeak, I knew what she was doing. Whenever she started telling a story, she couldn’t stop fidgeting, as if she was looking for a position she couldn’t find.
“God, that place was hell! I even had to work weekends. I was going crazy. I was supposed to be made head of department. I didn’t make that up! But one Monday morning, when we opened, the cops showed up. I called the boss on all his phones. Vanished into thin air. He’d been cheating for years, fake invoices, check kiting, the whole thing . . . ”
Madeleine’s stories all had something in common. They started out with lucrative prospects, then things got confused, and it all ended up down the drain.
“And that was when you went back to Paris.”
“Yes. A girlfriend suggested I share her job part-time. Her guy had just walked out so she could put me up, too. She
wanted to go into something else, but without giving up her job. Except it didn’t work out and she went back to working full-time. I’m still living at her place. The Renault is her car.”
“So now you don’t have anything.”
“I have unemployment benefits, but not for much longer. I can’t mess up this course.”
I threw the eggs over the potatoes and the omelet came together. I put the bread, cheese, and lettuce on the table. I sat down opposite my sister and started eating.
“Are you sure you don’t want anything?”
“Now that I see you, I’m hungry.”
“Then grab a plate.”
I divided my omelet in half and slid part of it onto her plate.
“I wouldn’t like to deprive you of it.”
“You should have told me that before.”
“You see—”
“Eat.”
Madeleine threw herself on the food. There she was, in flesh and blood, in my kitchen. I had to stay wide awake and think ahead about the possible effects of this intrusion. Whenever my sister had come back into my life, there had been consequences. Usually disastrous ones.
“You make them like Ma. A little runny.”
