Blood Wedding

by Pierre Lemaitre

  The pregnancy, which proves to be an ordeal for the couple, and for Sarah in particular a time of immense suffering, is punctuated by a number of incidents only some of which can be treated with therapy. Unbeknownst to her husband, Sarah attempted on several occasions to provoke a miscarriage. It is useful to compare Sarah’s intense psychological need to abort the child to the self-harm she inflicts on herself at the time. The period is marked by two suicide attempts, symptoms of a refusal to accept the pregnancy on the part of a young woman who sees her unborn child – and she is convinced it is a boy – as an intruder, as “unrelated to her”, a being she increasingly considers to be wicked, even diabolical. Miraculously, the pregnancy reaches full term, and on August 13, 1974 a son is born, whom they name Frantz.

  As a symbolic substitute, the child will overshadow her grief for her parents and potentiate Sarah’s violent hatred, which frequently manifests itself. The first such manifestation takes the form of a mausoleum which Sarah constructs during the first months of her son’s life to the memory of her stillborn daughter. The occult, mystical nature of the “black masses” she purports to celebrate in secret during this period provides proof, if proof were needed, of the metaphorical aspect of her subconscious entreaty: by her own admission, she appeals to her “dead daughter who is in heaven” to cast her living son “into the flames of hell”. [. . .]

  *

  For the first time in weeks, Sophie goes out to do the shopping. Before she leaves, she looks at herself in the mirror and thinks she looks ugly, but she enjoys being out in the street. She feels free. She could go away. And she will do just that, she thinks, when everything is settled. She carries the grocery bags upstairs. There is food enough for several days. But she knows she will not need it all.

  *

  He is asleep. Sophie sits on a chair by the bed. She looks at him. She does not read, or talk, she does not move. Their roles are reversed. It is hard to believe. Can it really be so easy? Why now? Why has Frantz crumbled all of a sudden? He seems a broken man. He has nightmares. He tosses in his sleep. She observes him as she might an insect. He sobs. Her hatred of him is so all-consuming that there are times when she can feel nothing else. At such moments, Frantz becomes an idea. A concept. She will kill him. She is killing him already.

  Inexplicably, just as she is thinking this, Frantz opens his eyes. As though she had flicked a switch. He stares at Sophie. How can he be awake after the dose she has just given him? Perhaps she made a mistake. He reaches out, grasps her wrist firmly. She sits back in the chair. He continues to stare at her, to grip her hard, he has not said a word. Then he says, “Are you there?” She swallows hard. “Yes,” she whispers. Then, as though this were simply a brief parenthesis, Frantz shuts his eyes again. But he is not asleep. He is crying. His eyes are closed, but tears trickle down his neck. Sophie waits a while longer. Frantz angrily turns to the wall. His shoulders are racked with sobs. A few minutes later, his breathing slows. He begins to snore.

  She gets up, goes to sit at the table in the living room and reopens his notebook.

  The gruesome key to all the mysteries. Frantz’s diary describes his room in the building opposite the apartment where she lived with Vincent. Every page is a violation, every sentence a humiliation, every word a wound. Everything she has lost is here before her, everything that was stolen from her, her life, her love, her youth. She gets to her feet and goes to watch Frantz sleep. Standing over him, she smokes a cigarette. She has only ever killed once, a manager in a fast-food restaurant, something she remembers without pity or remorse. But that was nothing. When it comes to killing the man now sleeping in this bed . . .

  The overweight figure of Andrée appears in Frantz’s diary. A few pages later, Vincent’s mother falls down the stairs of her suburban house while Sophie is lying in a comatose sleep. She dies instantly. Andrée is thrown out of a window. Even before now, Sophie has feared for her life. But she had no idea of the extent of the horrors he has perpetrated. It leaves her gasping for air. She closes the notebook.

  *

  [. . .] It is undoubtedly thanks to the self-possession of Jonas, to his emotional and physical strength and his unquestionably positive influence over his wife that Sarah’s hatred for her son did not result in a fatal accident. It should, however, be noted that the child was subjected to subtle abuse, physical and psychological, by his mother: she confesses to pinching him, slapping him, twisting his limbs, burning him, etc. but is careful that his injuries are not going to attract attention. Sarah explains that it cost her every ounce of strength not to kill this child who now embodies all her bitterness.

  The presence of his father, as I have said, doubtless offered the fundamental protection which meant that the boy could survive a potentially infanticidal mother. It is precisely this vigilance on the part of the father which leads Sarah to manifest symptoms of dissociative identity disorder. In effect, at great psychological cost to herself, she manages to play a double role, that of a loving, attentive mother to a child whom she secretly wishes were dead. This secret desire manifests itself in many of her dreams in which, for example, he is doomed to take the place of her parents in Dachau. In other dreams, the little boy is emasculated, eviscerated, even crucified, or is accidentally drowned, burned or crushed to death, more often than not suffering terrible pain in which the mother finds comfort and even liberation.

  To deceive those around her, and indeed the child himself, requires tireless vigilance on the part of Sarah Berg. It may well be that the very care she takes to disguise, to hide, to suppress the hatred that she feels for her son is what saps her psychological strength and finally hastens the major depressive disorder she suffers in the late 1980s.

  Paradoxically, it is her own son, her (unwitting) victim, who becomes her (unwitting) killer, since it is his very existence that acts as the trigger to his mother’s death. [. . .]

  *

  Twenty hours later, Frantz wakes up. His eyes are puffy. He has cried a lot in his sleep. He appears in the doorway of the bedroom while Sophie is standing at the window smoking and staring at the sky. Given the drugs he has ingested, making it this far has been an act of sheer will. Sophie definitely has the upper hand. In the past twenty-four hours, she has won the molecular war they have been waging against each other. “You’re a complete hero,” Sophie says coldly while Frantz staggers down the corridor to the toilet. He shivers as he walks, powerful shudders that run the length of his body. Stabbing him here, now, would be a formality. She walks to the bathroom and looks at him, sitting there. He is so weak that smashing his head in with the first blunt instrument that comes to hand would be child’s play. She takes a drag on her cigarette and stares at him evenly. He looks up.

  “You’re crying,” she says, inhaling deeply.

  He smiles an awkward smile by way of answer, then, steadying himself against the wall, he struggles to his feet, stumbles through the living room and back to the bedroom. They meet again in the doorway. He cocks his head hesitantly, clinging to the door frame. He looks at this woman with her icy stare and hesitates. Then he bows his head without a word, lies down on the bed, his arms flung wide. His eyes shut.

  Sophie goes back to the kitchen and takes out his diary, which she keeps hidden in the bottom drawer. She picks up where she left off. She sees Vincent’s accident, his death. Now she discovers how Frantz managed to get into the clinic, how, after dinner, he went and found Vincent, pushed his wheelchair past the deserted nurses’ station, opened the emergency door leading to the stone staircase. For a fraction of a second, Sophie sees Vincent’s terrified face, imagines his helpless body as though it were her own. It is at this moment that she decides she is not interested in reading the rest of the diary. She closes the cover, throws open the window: she is alive.

  And she is ready.

  *

  This time Frantz sleeps for almost six hours. He has now gone for thirty hours without eating or drinking anything, drifting in and out of his comatose sleep. Soph
ie begins to think that he might die here, now. By accident. An overdose. He has already consumed a dose that would have killed a lesser man. He has had terrible nightmares, Sophie has heard him sobbing in his sleep. She slept on the sofa. She also opened a bottle of wine. She went out to buy cigarettes and to do some shopping. On her return, Frantz was sitting on the bed, his head, too heavy for him to support, lolling from side to side. Sophie looks at him and smiles.

  “You’re ready,” she says.

  He gives her a clumsy smile, but he cannot manage to open his eyes. She walks towards him, pushing him with the flat of her hand. It is as though she has knocked him with her shoulder. He grips the bed, manages to remain upright, though his whole body rocks, trying frantically to keep his balance.

  “You’re ready at last,” she says.

  She places her hand on his chest and effortlessly pushes him back. He lies down. Sophie leaves the apartment, carrying a large green rubbish bag.

  *

  This is the end. Her movements now are calm, precise, determined. One phase of her life is coming to its conclusion. For the last time she looks at the photographs, then one by one she rips them off the wall and stuffs them into the bag. It takes her almost an hour. Sometimes she stops for a moment to look at one in more detail, but it is no longer as painful as it was the first time. It is like a photograph album in which she might accidentally light upon a picture she has all but forgotten. Laure Dufresne laughing. Sophie remembers her hard, cold face as she laid out the poison pen letters Frantz had made. She should want to proclaim the truth, to make amends, to purify herself, but this life seems so remote. Sophie is weary. Relieved and remote. Here is Valérie, her arm around Sophie’s shoulders, whispering something in her ear and smiling seductively. Sophie had forgotten what Andrée looked like. The girl barely registered in her life before today. In this photograph she finds her simple and sincere. She refuses to think of this body falling from the window. After this, Sophie scarcely pauses for breath. She drops all the other objects into a second rubbish bag. Seeing them again is even more upsetting than the photographs: her watch, her bag, her keys, the notebook where she wrote her reminders . . . And when everything has been packed up, she puts the laptop into the last bag. This is the first thing she throws into the skip, tossing the bags filled with other items on top. She goes back down to the cellar, locks the door and takes the bag full of papers up to the apartment.

  *

  Frantz is still sleeping, but lightly now. Out on the balcony, she sets down a large, cast-iron pot in which she begins to burn the documents, ripping out fistfuls of pages from the diary. Next come the photographs. Sometimes the flames rise so high that she has to step back and wait before she can add more fuel. Then she pensively smokes a cigarette and watches the images twitch and writhe in the flames.

  When she is done, she cleans the pot. She takes a shower and packs her travel bag. She is not going to take much. The bare minimum. She needs to leave everything behind her.

  *

  [. . .] Prostration, fixity of gaze, expressions of grief, fear, sometimes terror, intricate fantasies, resignation in the face of death, overwhelming feelings of guilt, magical thinking, desire for punishment – these are just some of the symptoms that appear in the clinical assessment of Sarah in 1989, when once again she is hospitalised.

  Thankfully, the trust established between Sarah and I during her previous stay here make it possible to instil a positive atmosphere designed to allay – this being our primary objective – the feelings of aversion, disgust and hatred she secretly nurtures for her son, emotions that must be all the more exhausting to sustain since she has successfully managed to hide them, at least until the most recent suicide attempt which led to her being committed. By this point, hiding behind her pretence of being a loving mother, she has spent fifteen years repressing her feelings, her visceral, almost murderous feelings towards her son. [. . .]

  *

  Sophie sets down her bag next to the front door. As though she is checking out of a hotel, she makes a last tour of the apartment, tidying things away, plumping the cushion on the sofa, running a cloth over the hideous tablecloth in the kitchen, putting away the dishes. Then she opens the cupboard, takes out a cardboard box and sets it on the table in the living room. From her travel bag, she takes a bottle of pale-blue gel capsules. From the box, she takes Sarah’s wedding dress, goes into the bedroom where Frantz is still sound asleep and begins to undress him. It is a difficult task, his body is heavy, almost a dead weight. She has to roll him this way and that. Eventually he is naked. One by one she lifts his legs and slips them into the dress, rolls him onto his side while she pulls it over his hips. After this, it is more difficult; Frantz is too stocky for the dress to fit over his torso and shoulders.

  “Never mind,” Sophie says, smiling. “Don’t worry.”

  It takes twenty minutes before she is satisfied with the results. She has had to unpick the stitching on both sides.

  “You see,” she whispers, “I told you not to worry.”

  She steps back to gauge the effect. Frantz, draped rather than dressed in the faded wedding dress, is sitting up in bed, his back against the wall, his head lolling to one side, unconscious. His chest hair peeks out of the scooped neckline. The effect is arresting and utterly pathetic.

  Sophie lights one last cigarette and leans against the doorframe.

  It is time to finish this. She goes in search of a bottle of mineral water, shakes the barbiturates into her hand and in twos and threes, pushes them into Frantz’s mouth, making him swallow.

  “‘Makes the medicine go down . . .’”

  Frantz coughs, he retches, but in the end he always swallows. Sophie plans to give him twelve times the lethal dose.

  “It may take a little time, but it will be worth the effort.”

  By the time she has finished the bed has been splashed with water, but Frantz has swallowed all the pills. Sophie stands back. She gazes at this tableau which truly looks like something out of a Fellini movie.

  “Just one little thing missing . . .”

  She goes to her travel bag and rummages until she finds a lipstick.

  “It’s not quite the right colour, but, well . . .”

  She outlines his lips, drawing over the edges at the top, the bottom, the sides. She takes a step back to assess the result: a clown in a wedding dress.

  “Perfect.”

  Frantz groans, struggles and manages to open his eyes. He tries to say something but gives up. He begins to gesture fretfully, then falls back.

  Without another glance, Sophie fetches her bag and leaves the apartment.

  *

  [. . .] It is about her son that Sarah talks almost exclusively during the therapy sessions: the boy’s physical appearance, his intelligence, his manner, his language, his tastes. Everything is used to bolster the loathing that she feels for him. It has become necessary to take time to plan the boy’s visits to the clinic, with the help of his father, who has been scarred by the events of recent years.

  Indeed, it is a visit from her son that eventually triggers her suicide on June 4, 1989. In the days leading up to the visit, she vigorously expresses her desire not “to be forced to be in the same room as Frantz”. She claims that she is physically incapable of playing her role for even a second more. Only through a permanent separation, she claims, can she hope to survive. The unintentional pressures of being in an institution, her own feelings of guilt, and her husband’s insistence persuade her to agree to the visit, but, in the moments after her son has left the room, channelling her rage and aggression against herself, Sarah puts on her wedding dress (a symbolic tribute to the husband, and to his unstinting support) and throws herself from the fifth-floor window.

  The police report issued on June 4, 1989 at 2.53 p.m. by Brigadier J. Bellerive of the Meudon gendarmerie is appended to Sarah Berg’s file, ref. JB-GM 1807.

  Dr Catherine Auverney

  *

  Sophie realises th
at she has not thought about the weather in a long time. It is a beautiful day. She pushes open the glass door of the building and pauses for a moment on the top step. Only five more steps before she begins a new life. This one will be her last. She sets her bag down at her feet, lights a cigarette, then changes her mind and immediately stubs it out. Before her are some thirty metres of tarmac and, beyond that, the car park. She looks at the sky, picks up her bag, walks down the steps and away from the building. Her heart is beating fast. She has trouble catching her breath, as though she has narrowly avoided an accident.

  She has walked about ten metres when she hears her name being called from far above.

  “Sophie!”

  She turns.

  Frantz calls to her from the balcony of the fifth-floor window; he is wearing the wedding dress. He has climbed over the parapet and, clutching the balustrade with his left hand, he is leaning into the void.

  He sways uncertainly. He looks at her, and in a soft voice he calls:

  “Sophie.”

  Then, with a fierce determination, he leaps like a high-diver. He flings his arms wide, he does not scream, he comes to earth right beside Sophie. The sound is horrifying, ghastly.

  *

  NEWS ROUNDUP

  A 31-year-old man leaped to his death from a fifth-floor balcony of the Résidence des Petits-Champs yesterday. Frantz Berg lived in the building. He died instantly.

  He was wearing a wedding dress that had belonged to his mother who, by curious chance, met her death in similar circumstances in 1989.

  The chronic depressive chose to end his life in full view of his wife, who was just setting off to spend the weekend with her father.

  An autopsy revealed he had taken sleeping pills and a considerable quantity of barbiturates. How he acquired the drugs is not known.

  His wife, thirty-year-old Marianne Berg, née Leblanc, is sole heir to the Berg family fortune, her late husband being the son of Jonas Berg, who founded the supermarket chain Pointe Fixe. The business was sold to an international consortium some years ago.