by James Brydon
In love, as in almost all human affairs, the “entente cordiale” is the result of misunderstanding. This misunderstanding is pleasure. The man cries out: “Oh, my angel!” The woman coos: “Mamma! Mamma!” And the two imbeciles are persuaded that they are thinking in concert. The insuperable gulf, which bars communication, remains unbridged.
And then, farther down:
I believe that I already wrote in my notes that love bears a strong resemblance to torture or to a surgical operation. But this idea may be developed in the bitterest of fashions. Even if the two lovers are infatuated and full of reciprocal desire, one of them will always be calmer or less possessed than the other. This one is the operator, or the torturer; the other one is the subject, the victim. Do you hear these sighs, preludes to a tragedy of dishonor, these groans, these cries, these death rattles? Who has not offered them, and who has not irresistibly extorted them? And what do you find that is worse in interrogation carried out by meticulous torturers? These rolling sleepwalker’s eyes, these limbs whose muscles protrude and stiffen as if subjected to a galvanic battery, drunkenness, delirium, opium, in their wildest effects, do not yield such terrible results, such strange specimens. And the human face, which Ovid believed fashioned to reflect the stars, now speaks only through an expression of insane ferocity or relaxes in a sort of death. For, without doubt, I would think it a sacrilege to apply the word “ecstasy” to this kind of decomposition.
Terrifying game, in which one of the players must inevitably lose control of himself!
I flick through a very fine edition of Les Fleurs du mal: gilt-edged, bound in Moroccan leather. A gift? There is no inscription in the front. I go through Anne-Lise’s piles of notes line by line. In the margin of one page, she has scribbled: J’ai peur de l’araignée. Her school notes are neat, crystalline, thorough. They cover page after page. Then, suddenly, around Christmas, the handwriting trembles and meanders. It looks like the onset of a nerve disease. Her notes thin out. For a few weeks, Anne-Lise loses control. Then, after the new year, as the snows of 1958 drift into 1959, as suddenly as it appears, the confusion subsides. She seems herself again: alert, bright, her mind turning elegantly and precisely. Then, after the fifteenth of February, there is nothing more. Blank paper. White upon white. Like another fall of snow coming down and wiping out Anne-Lise’s voice forever.
At the back of one of her desk drawers a scrap of paper catches my eye. A torn corner of an exercise book, it has been carefully folded and preserved—hidden, even—beneath her other papers. It reads:
DEATH PAUSE PEACE LONG YOURS
5 14 4 21 9 23 18 17 2 20 4 1 12 13 1 13 21 8 19 ?
I stare at it for a while, but nothing clicks. Something about the words nags at me. I put the paper carefully into my pocket. Outside Anne-Lise’s window, the sun has started to glow weakly, vaporizing the mist. The quiet of her room is eerie. It’s not like a shrine, but like a denial. Sarah isn’t trying to embalm and preserve the past, she’s trying to forget the present. The edges of Anne-Lise’s photograph feel rough in my pocket. Her room feels tragic, drenched with loss. Everything seems desolate and foreboding: clothes hanging unworn in the wardrobe, books gathering dust on the shelves, the path across the lawn and out into the tree-lined road where she must have set off, one day in February, for the last time. She probably barely noticed these things, which were merely the backdrop to a life she couldn’t wait to cast off. She saw herself in Paris, reading philosophy, far from Sainte-Élisabeth.
A final thing draws my attention. Next to the title of the essay she will never finish, she has written a name: Anneliese Aurigny.
* * *
Downstairs, Sarah has bustled about, perhaps trying to restore order to the sitting room. Dirty clothes and discarded crockery have disappeared. Sarah sits by the window, her legs curled beneath her and a glass of cognac gleaming in her hand. Her eyes are bleary again, as if the rush of the alcohol has worn off and she can now start to feel its familiar corrosiveness scraping her insides. She looks up expectantly.
“Who was Anne-Lise’s best friend? If I wanted to get more information about her—who she was, her contacts, friends, where she used to go—who would I go to?”
“Mathilde Blanchard. Have you heard of her?”
I shake my head.
“She’s got a bit of a reputation around here. She couldn’t have been more different from Anne-Lise. She’s been drunk in my bar more times than I can remember. Spent the night on a tarpaulin in the back or left on the arm of some stranger, I don’t know who and I doubt she did either, a good dozen times. The Blanchards adopted her, but they didn’t really know what to do with her. Who would?”
“Why did Anne-Lise like her so much?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they both felt like outsiders here.”
“Does the expression ‘the spider’ mean anything to you? I found it among Anne-Lise’s notes.”
Sarah stares vacantly. “I’ve never heard it. She didn’t really say all that much to me, though. Not about what really mattered to her. Just her age, I suppose. I’m sorry . . . I see I’m not being much help.”
“There’s another thing. It might be nothing, but I noticed that Anne-Lise had written her name in an essay as Anneliese. Was that also a nickname?”
“No.” Her face is suddenly white. “Anneliese was her real name.” She glances at the empty glass ballooning in her hand, lurches upright, and pours herself another drink. This time, she doesn’t even bother to offer me one. “Anneliese is the name that Otto and I—that her father and I—gave her when she was born. That was in 1941.”
“Otto. So he . . . ?”
“You can judge us if you want. Everyone else has. They judged me back then and they’re still doing it now. There was such . . . malice. Such hatred. Just because Otto was German. He wasn’t a Nazi. He wasn’t even a soldier. He was just an engineer. He didn’t fight or kill anyone. He defused bombs. He tried to stop people getting hurt.”
“Where is he now?”
“I don’t know. Back in Germany, I think. We haven’t spoken in more than fifteen years. I wanted him to stay here but he couldn’t live with the hatred. He was a gentle man. A pacifist. War scared and sickened him, but then the peace did too.”
“So everybody here knew that Anne-Lise was the daughter of a German?”
“Of course they knew. Everyone here knows everything.”
And Anne-Lise grew up surrounded by hatred. A foreign body left by the retreating occupier. A reminder of France’s torment and shame.
“Did Lafourgue know?”
“Of course he knew.” Breathing hard, she stares down at her hands. Her throat seems to be constricting.
At no point do Lafourgue’s case notes mention the fact that Anne-Lise was half-German, yet who knows what resentments might have festered behind the gray stone walls of Sainte-Élisabeth; humiliations choked back for years; loss decaying into obsession?
“Do you know the one thing that has given me pleasure in my life?” Sarah asks calmly. “Watching Anne-Lise grow up. I was terrified of how her life would be. How she’d have to skulk about with her head down, apologizing for what she was. That’s why I changed her name to Anne-Lise. To try to help her hide. When she was young, I always had the impression that everyone was just waiting, waiting and waiting, to see what kind of monstrosity would emerge from her as she got older. But she was a beautiful child. Clever and so assured. She wasn’t like me. She didn’t need to hide. She even started calling herself Anneliese and thought about changing her name back officially. She said that it was who she really was. She learned German in school at a time when no one else wanted to. She read all kinds of German literature. She couldn’t understand how I had never learned to speak it.”
Sarah stares blankly into the mist outside and her gaze wanders among the nothingness. “I think she pitied me.” It is almost a whisper. She peers at the whiteness outside. She fills her glass again wearily. She knows it’s no use. Her memories are more abidi
ng than the anesthesia. She can’t forget what has been branded in her mind. Even if her brain doesn’t recall, her body will. Hands shaking. Cheeks flushed red. Head swimming.
“Lafourgue seems to have considered a man named Christian de la Hallière as a suspect. He was a Nazi, and may even still be one, from what I’ve been told. Lafourgue certainly thought he was potentially dangerous. Did Anne-Lise have any contact with him, as far as you know?”
“Yes, she did. But he disgusted her. He was a Nazi to his very marrow. The whole thing excited him: the parades, the bullying and killing of the weak, all of it. So he spent a lot of time with the Germans during the occupation. Before he joined up, that is, and went to fight in Russia. Anne-Lise wanted to find out who her father was. Where she really came from. She wanted to know if Christian had known Otto during the war.”
“Had he?”
“Barely. He probably would have despised Otto anyway, if he even noticed him at all. Seen him as servant class. The Germans he admired were Prussian aristocrats who could trace their ancestors back for generations. Otto was a farm boy from the Hunsrück. He was an excellent engineer, though. But he had a Jew somewhere in his background, so they put him on bomb detail. It was an efficient solution, I suppose. He either saved German lives or got killed. Either way, they won.”
“Did Anne-Lise spend much time with de la Hallière?”
“I don’t think so.” Tiredness suddenly seems to flood through her. Her skin blanches. “Maybe I’m wrong, though. There’s a lot about her life that I probably don’t know, and that I perhaps don’t really want to know either . . . But you’ll need to find it out, won’t you, if you’re going to catch the person who . . .” Her voice trails off.
“What about her boyfriend, a Soviet, Sasha Kurmakin? Lafourgue mentioned him as a possible suspect too.”
Sarah’s eyes blaze. Life pulses through her again. “What nonsense. Sasha is the kindest boy you can imagine. He would never have hurt Anne-Lise or anyone else. He’s just a little bit different, that’s all. Just like Anne-Lise was. When Lafourgue investigates someone . . .” She pauses, and her mouth twitches.
“What?”
“It doesn’t always mean that they’re a suspect. Sometimes it’s just someone Lafourgue wants to have power over for a while. Interrogating people and imprisoning them are his ways of settling scores. Or of keeping himself entertained. An investigation like this gives him ways to hurt people he doesn’t like. I’m not really sure that he ever actually looked into Anne-Lise’s death at all. He never—not even once—found anything . . .”
I want to ask Sarah if she has any idea why Anne-Lise was mutilated, but I think better of it at the sight of her trying to drown in cognac, her hands twitching, her head tilted toward the mist and recalling something that no chemical will ever efface.
I thank her for her time and let myself out.
* * *
The Château de la Hallière lies on the coast road that winds west out of Sainte-Élisabeth, snaking between the heather and the shifting masses of the dunes. The sea gleams gray, dissolving into white froth where it batters the rocks. Spindrift glitters in the air, torn by the wind from the foaming tips of the waves. The car jolts along the corniche and shakes under the assaults of the gale. Windows rattle. The air is a maelstrom.
The château itself sits hunched on the side of a wooded slope, overlooking the bridge that crosses the estuary at the baie des Grèves Rocheuses. With the tide out, the glaucous, waterlogged sands stretch out into the distance. It looks desolate, like the wind-scarred soil of some alien planet. The slate roof and stone walls of the château sit in the shadows above the river mouth. Toward the eastern end, the roof has begun to collapse. Emptiness gapes between cracked slates. Timber joists poke out like the sudden eruption of bone through skin. Moss clings to the stones in green and brown clumps. Around the windows, rotten wood splinters in the air sodden with salt.
The bellpull is soaked through. Black mold crawls right up its length. The bell clangs dully, sending a cackling horde of gulls that were prowling in the estuary’s mud swarming up into the air. The woman who opens the door has deep liquid-brown eyes. Skin tan as oak, soaked with the sun of the Levant. The world goes fuzzy before my eyes.
Her eyes are still open. They stare vacantly as if she were in the grip of a nightmare haunting this, her final and infinite sleep. I reach out to close them and find that her skin is warm. It shocks me. A tiny electrical prickle. As if the sun of the Maghreb were still infused in her body. With her eyes shut, she seems to slip away. Her face becomes an immaculate mask. The strained, twisted lines that suddenly appeared at al-Mazra’a fade. As life ebbs out of her, so too do her griefs. Death erases the memory of these last few days and this basement that became her whole world. She looks like what she is: a child.
The first trickle of blood washes gently against my knees.
“How can I help you?” The woman’s voice is muted and distant. Her lips are dusky. Golden bracelets clack at her wrists. Only a whisper of some diaphanous fabric separates her body from the lacerations of the wind. She shivers and the points of her nipples stand out against the jet-black shimmering veil that barely covers her body.
“Would you ask Christian de la Hallière whether he would be prepared to see Capitaine le Garrec? I’m investigating the murder of Anne-Lise Aurigny. I believe that she and M. de la Hallière were acquainted.”
The woman nods and the dark squiggles of her hair bounce and gleam. She invites me to step inside and I watch her shimmering parabolas disappear down a murky corridor. A faint smell of putrefaction floats on the air. An electric light buzzes overhead. The paintwork has long since faded to gray and its mildew-bespattered, flaky surface creeps along the walls in abstract patterns.
The woman returns, and in her hand is a newspaper cutting. “Two things,” she says. “Firstly, M. de la Hallière asks whether you are here in an official capacity.”
“No. I have no official powers.”
“Good. M. de la Hallière said that these things are always more interesting when they are personal. Secondly, he asked me to show you this.” She holds up the torn article. “He would like to know whether it is about you.”
She hands me the crinkled paper. The headline says: “RESISTANCE HERO TURNED WAR CRIMINAL?” Next to it is a grainy image of a man with close-cropped hair and dead eyes. The picture was taken by the army just before I left for Algeria. I can’t recognize the person fixed in those yellow-brown smudges. The text tells a story to match the face:
A former Resistance fighter has been sent home from Algeria under the shadow of a heinous crime.
Yesterday morning, Capitaine Jacques le Garrec was returned to France on a military plane after two years of service. Le Garrec, 41, who grew up here in northern Brittany and attended school in Dinard, was ignominiously repatriated after details of a horrific crime, in which he is suspected of involvement, created a scandal in Algeria and sent shockwaves throughout France too.
Le Garrec went to Algeria with a distinguished Resistance record behind him, having joined the maquis in 1941 and played a valuable role in the group Patrie et Liberté right up until the Liberation. He participated in four missions to sabotage trains stocked with Nazi matériel and wrote many inspiring editorials for the clandestine newspaper La Lutte which urged his compatriots to fight openly against the oppressor in the name of humanity.
These impressive credentials won him a place in the brigade criminelle in Paris where, by all accounts, he served diligently and with moral purpose for well over a decade.
However, even before reports of the Algerian atrocity, there had been evidence that not all was well with le Garrec. A fellow student, who studied philosophy with him at the École Normale Supérieure, recalls him as a highly competent thinker, but one ineluctably drawn to the darkness. Nihilism fascinated him, it seems: he studied not only Nietzsche but also the Nazi Martin Heidegger. Then, after the war, he grew interested in so-called existentialism.
What is certain is that on the thirteenth of September, 1959, he was stationed with the French army in Algeria as part of the service de renseignements. At around ten o’clock on this morning, Capitaine le Garrec presented himself at a local police station and asked, in passable Arabic, to speak to an officer. In the back of his jeep, wrapped in tarpaulin, was the body of Amira Khadra, a 19-year-old Algerian girl. She had been brutalized and then shot in the head.
Le Garrec neither took nor refused responsibility for the crime. Curiously, he asked for the local police to investigate the matter, but then failed to provide any account whatsoever of his own actions or his relationship to the girl. He even went so far as to refuse to explain where the body had come from. However, there seems little doubt that the girl had been detained by the intelligence services and Capitaine le Garrec had been responsible for her at the time of her death.
Le Garrec has since been escorted back to France and must attend the preliminary hearing of an army tribunal this coming Friday. Thus far, no comments have been forthcoming, either from le Garrec or from the army, and so we must wait until the hearing before the first veils of mystery can be lifted from this grisly affair.
