by James Brydon
And then, as my eyes adjusted to the twilight, I made out a figure waiting in it. I could glimpse the face glowing ghostly in the dark, which swallowed up the hair, the body, merged with them into one great expanse of blackness.
An immigrant’s face with Slavic almond eyes.
Kurmakin. He waited for her in the cold evening and her eyes crept toward him. To me, she could only mumble half-remembered fragments of dead texts. He pulled her into his orbit.
I told her to go. She said sorry. I didn’t see the expression on her face because I couldn’t look at her. Her voice was strained. I heard the door close behind her and then I saw her silhouette outside next to his, both blurred by the dusk, two frail shadows about to disappear into the night.
23/01/59
Four o’clock in the morning. Sleep will not come and so I sit here at my desk hunched over the paper. My cold fingers clutch the pen that jumps despite my attempts to control it. I can hear my breath and my pulse beating in my ears.
She has not been in school for three days now. Each morning I feel my heart squeezed with terror, waiting to see whether the chattering tide of pupils will carry her in. I look for her pale skin amid the flippant smiles and the weary eyes. The disappointment when she does not appear is an almost physical pain, a kind of malignant growth that swells in my chest and sets my nerves on fire. I try to concentrate on what I have to teach, but it is a useless effort. I can feel my thoughts breaking apart, my mouth straining to form words, my speech slurring into nonsense. My eyes turn toward the window and scan the distance. I look to pick her out amid the mists and the rain, even though I know she will not be there.
I turn my head and look out upon rows of baffled faces. I try to force the pieces of my mind back together. I want to carry on but the memory of her is like radiation scarring and devastating everything within me.
In the quietness of the night, shivering at my desk, I wonder what the difference is between loneliness and isolation. I always saw the latter as a precondition of serious thought: a necessary distance from the chatter of the world.
In the sleepless hours of the morning I can no more think than stop my bloodless hands from shaking with cold. The silence around me feels not like a cocoon but like the emptiness that waits for us all in death.
26/01/59
Anne-Lise has returned! A little quieter than before. A little paler. Her skin has been drained of some of its brightness. Its golden tone has faded gray. Her deep brown eyes seem wider, as if the flesh of her face has somehow melted away. I did not know how to speak to her but she seemed anxious not to waste any time. She came up to my desk at the end of the lesson, almost shyly, crossing and uncrossing her arms. She swayed slightly on her hips and chewed at her bottom lip.
“Dr. Ollivier, I’m sorry for my absence this last week. I wasn’t well . . . and . . . I couldn’t read.”
I perhaps nodded. I still couldn’t look at her. What illness could have eaten away her flesh like that?
“But I want to continue now. If that’s okay with you. I hope that you want to continue too.”
The nerves in my skin are dancing. She hopes that I too want to continue. That I want to . . .
Now it is February. The last days and hours Anne-Lise will ever know.
13/02/59
What am I to make of the strange contradictions that inhabit this child? For days she had attacked books with a kind of fervor. She was desperate to compensate for the time she had lost, weakened by whatever it was that hollowed out her cheeks and made her eyes shine even more wildly than before. It seemed as if she had forgotten her illness. More than ever, she wished to exist solely in the élan of pure thought. She seemed alive once more with that intensity of intelligence and feeling that makes the rest of the world fade into insignificance and draws me irresistibly toward her.
And then today her face suddenly decomposed. There was water running down her cheeks and some primitive sounds, like choking or vomiting, came out of her. She said, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I can’t do this now,” and she grabbed her books and turned away from me.
As she reached the door she stopped. “Dr. Ollivier, can I talk to you?” She said it almost inaudibly. “Not now, not today. But . . . I need to talk to you. Is that okay?”
I said nothing. I nodded but I kept my eyes trained on the books in front of me on the desk. Whatever had eaten Anne-Lise’s flesh had smashed into her like a train and broken her into pieces. The girl who had tormented my dreams for so long was gone, she didn’t exist anymore, and I couldn’t bear to look at the wreckage.
This is the final entry. Three days before Anne-Lise’s mutilated body was laid to rest on the heathland above the wild glitter of the waves. I lay the journal back down on the table. I can feel the cold that Erwann spoke of.
After some time, I don’t know if it is minutes or hours, I hear the creak of the door. Footsteps sound in the hall. Erwann enters and starts to say something. Then he sees the diary open in front of me. His brows contract. Something quivers in his face and his eyes sweep the room.
“You killed Anne-Lise,” I say.
Once again, he looks as if he might say something. A flicker crosses his face like a smile. His eyes flit from side to side, desperate, cornered.
He walks over to the bookshelves and picks up a large stone paperweight in his left hand. Then, turning, still holding the rock in his bunched fist, he walks toward me.
* * *
Through the wire-latticed glass of the interrogation room door, we watch Erwann sitting on a gray metal chair. He rests his head on his hands, which clutch at the graying strands of hair dotting his temples. He has not spoken for hours now. Instead, he rubs his eyes, or simply stares at the dull walls, his mouth clamped shut.
“Are you sure it’s him?” Lafourgue asks.
“It’s him.”
Lafourgue shrugs. Only yesterday I told him it was de la Hallière. Why believe me now?
“What have you got, apart from the diary?”
“Nothing.”
“And it doesn’t prove anything at all, except that he fantasized about teenage girls. That’s not a crime. We might be able to shame him with it, but not convict him of anything.”
Lafourgue is right. And yet I saw that darting flicker in Erwann’s eyes: part prey, part predator. He started to come at me with the paperweight and then, suddenly, his fingers loosened and he simply placed it on the table in front of me. He seemed totally calm. Eerily cold. “And? What are you going to do about that idea?” he asked.
“I want you to come to the police station with me to talk about Anne-Lise.”
“Do I have to?” A faint smile emerged from the corners of his mouth.
“No . . . You know that I don’t have any police powers.”
“I see.” He sauntered back over to the bookcase and peered at the volumes arrayed there. “But if I don’t come, I imagine that you will simply go to Lafourgue and then I shall have to suffer the indignity of being questioned by someone of vastly inferior intelligence.”
“Yes.”
“In that case, I would prefer to come with you.”
He didn’t utter a single word as I drove, but it seemed as if that icy calm were beginning to ebb away from him. His breaths grew heavier in his chest. He twisted his fingers and gazed hard into the distant whiteness where the indefinition of fog blurred into the spectral shapes of snow-bound trees, hedges, and fields.
Now, in the interrogation chambers, he simply sits still, silhouetted by the gray walls, waiting.
“We have absolutely nothing on him,” says Lafourgue.
“Right. And he knows that. For a moment, when he saw me reading the journal, he was afraid. There was a moment of panic. Then his intelligence reasserted itself. That same glacial intelligence that knew how to erase all traces of the crime from the body. He knew there was no proof. He knows it now.”
“So why’s he here?”
“Because he wants to hear what I know. And what I c
an guess.”
Lafourgue seems unconvinced. “What do you want to do?”
“Can I talk to him?”
“Only if he wants to. I can’t detain him. Let me ask.”
I watch Lafourgue’s lips moving through the glass and Erwann nods slightly. Lafourgue comes out and holds the door open for me. I sit down across from Erwann.
“Lafourgue says we can talk.”
He doesn’t respond.
“Let’s start with what we know. You loved Anne-Lise. There’s no point in denying that. It’s imprinted in every word you wrote in your journal. The whole world came alive when she was near you. When she wasn’t there, you felt confined. Trapped. Closed within the desolate boundaries of yourself. That oscillation terrified you—between a kind of delirious, unstable joy and a barren, desperate isolation, a loneliness so extreme that it made your whole life seem meaningless. You felt you could only live again in the glow of Anne-Lise’s presence.
“That was love, as you experienced it. Anne-Lise terrorized you. Oh, she illuminated your days. But when you woke up with shivers and night sweats and faced the interminable parade of identical minutes until the dawn, then you understood the power she had over you. She was your torturer. In your seemingly eternal separation from her, you must have hated her every bit as much as you loved her. She reduced you to such misery, abased you, annihilated your self, made you believe that everything you were and had ever done was worthless because you couldn’t inspire her to love you.
“You tried to talk to her about it. Not directly. That was why you gave her philosophy and literature about love. It was the closest you could come to acknowledging the pain and the rage inside you. You needed to hear the word love on her lips, even if she couldn’t say it about you. It eased the pressure a little. Afforded you a tingle of pleasure. Made you able to exist for one more day, hoping and hopeless.
“So it went for weeks. Months. Then Anne-Lise disappeared for a few days and came back looking as if something had eaten away the flesh of her face. You didn’t know what it was, this thing that had corroded her. Cheapened her.
“She wanted to come and talk to you about it. She told you that three days before somebody beat her until she was unrecognizable, then strangled her, mutilated her body, and left it framed by the majesty of the sea like some work of art.”
Suddenly, Erwann pushes his chair back from the table and doubles over, clutching his stomach. He retches. The spasm shakes his whole body. A stream of bile spews in an arc from between his lips. His chest heaves painfully. For about a minute he can’t move, can’t control his own body, which twitches furiously and spills its waste onto the tiled floor of the interrogation room.
Before I can move there are policemen in the room with us. One of them helps Erwann to his feet and steadies him. “We’ll have to take you to another room,” he says.
Erwann, his face ashen, simply nods.
“Do you want some water?”
Again, Erwann can only nod. He shuffles into the corridor, and once we are settled in another identical-looking room, he sips intermittently at a plastic cup.
“I’m sorry,” he says to me, “about before. That was . . . abject.”
“Can we continue?”
He is silent.
“I know what Anne-Lise told you. She came to you looking for understanding. She couldn’t talk to her mother. Her friends were too young. She respected you. She thought that you wouldn’t judge her with small-town morality. And so she sought you out to tell you that she had been pregnant with Sasha Kurmakin’s baby and that she’d had an abortion. The guilt was chewing at her insides. Eating her flesh, you said. That cellular pulse inside her had been a life and she had destroyed it. It would have stopped her going to Paris to study. She knew that Sasha would never have wanted to be tied down. Every logical instinct screamed at her that she couldn’t have a baby. So she put an end to the existence of that tiny, unformed life in her womb.
“She came to talk to you about guilt but you couldn’t hear what she was saying. You saw only Kurmakin’s pale hands clutching the hidden reaches of her flesh.”
For a second Erwann’s eyes meet mine, then he looks away. Something in the depths of his gaze troubles me. I don’t know what happened after this. The diary ends. The evidence has all disappeared. Only Erwann now knows and he has twisted everything in his own mind. He has invented some things and forgotten others. He has deformed whatever fragments of the past remain with him until they’ve become something that he can live with day by day.
“From this point on, I’ll have to guess. I don’t know exactly what happened. I think Anne-Lise said that she needed to talk to you. She asked if she could come and see you. You didn’t know why she was suffering. Perhaps you hoped that it was for you. Some desperate, illogical longing rumbled in the pit of your stomach. You thought it was her desire for you that had martyrized her flesh. Hope blinded you. You set a date: the sixteenth of February. You told her to come to your house.
“What did you do before she arrived? Were you nervous, checking your clothes, your skin, your smell? Did you think about how long it had been since you’d kissed a woman, and suddenly you were aware of the awkwardness of your hands, your words, your tongue? Perhaps you drank a little, choked back a few mouthfuls of something chemical, anesthetic, something that made your hands lie still but your head swim. The minutes must have trickled by painfully. An agony of waiting, and still she didn’t come.
“I see you by the window, staring out, willing her to appear, wondering if she could have changed her mind. Has she slipped away from you, vanished and left you alone?
“Then you hear the tap of her fingers on the door. You feel like you might cry, either out of joy or despair, you can’t even tell the difference anymore. You wonder where she’ll sit. How close to you. But before you can speak, she has sat down at the other end of the lounge, far away from you. She looks drained. Apologetic. Something isn’t right.
“You offer her a drink. Alcohol isn’t subtle but it is magical. It seems to pull her toward you. You take another drink. The blood drums against your temples. It feels like having your head pushed down beneath the waves. The half-lit room shudders like a drowned city.
“Anne-Lise opens her mouth and starts to speak. She looks up at you. She trusts you. She thinks that you will speak to her with dispassionate wisdom. You won’t say that she’s a whore who killed her own baby. She tells you that she was pregnant. She says that the baby was Sasha’s and she glances down as she says it. You can’t see her eyes. She says she didn’t know what to do. She would have disappointed him either way. She would have ruined her own life. There was no good way out.
“She had a scan and she saw a fuzzy, shapeless blob on the screen no more than a few millimeters in size, pulsing with life.
“She put an end to it. And now those gray clouds of growing cells haunt her sleep. That pulse ticks in her ears.
“You saw Kurmakin’s body pressed against Anne-Lise. Her fingers reaching out to hold him. Her legs spread wide. Her head thrown back as she floated on his scent. Her hair a corona. Her skin damp with sweat. Her breath in ragged gasps from the pit of her belly. The pale kinks of her ribs crushed against him. A rhapsody by starlight.
“The police photos of the injuries to Anne-Lise’s face are stuck in my mind. The way her eyes were destroyed. Her gaze must have been unbearable to you. What did you see in the depths of her stare? Her indifference to you? Your own powerlessness? You felt everything in the room lurch away from you and rush toward her.
“You walked to the bookshelves and picked up something heavy, perhaps a stone paperweight, and beat her face to a pulp. That skin that made yours tingle, that breathed poison at you, came apart beneath your hands. You made her unrecognizable.
“You waited. Did you realize what you had done? Then you choked her. You wanted one final act of intimacy with her so you used your hands. Anne-Lise breathed her last in your embrace. She died on your living room floor. She
must have screamed. Your blows blinded her. She faced her last moments in the dark, terrified, writhing, her broken skin pressed against your hands.
“I don’t think you can remember it now. Your mind turned blank. When you came to, you found her lying on the floor beside you. Your fingers must have been aching and bruised.
“Did you know she was dead? Did you touch her? Caress her body for the first and only time? Did you panic?
“I don’t think you did, not even for a minute. Everything you did then was calm and methodical. Perhaps you had learned from what happened to Julie Bergeret. You remembered your hasty attempts to hide her body. This time, you would not need to skulk. You washed the body inch by inch. Destroyed or disposed of the clothes. Then you saw the corpse that you had made of Anne-Lise. The battered face. The bruised neck. Another commonplace, trivial crime. Love that turned to jealousy and then to rage. A soap opera of trite rejection. A footnote in the local newspapers. The momentary blind rage of an aging man.
“You didn’t see it like that. You thought of Baudelaire and of love. You cut the flesh out of Anne-Lise’s side as if you were living a great moment of ecstatic nihilism. Perhaps you were also thinking of the abortion: the living flesh taken out of her belly; the obscenity of her impregnation and the termination of that tiny life.
“I wonder if it hurt you, or even disgusted you, to hack at the flesh you had so adored. You saw the wound hanging open in her flank. There wasn’t any blood. The heart had already died.
“You didn’t mutilate Anne-Lise’s body out of hatred but out of love. You wanted to give a sense to the crime. It was an act of interpretation. You wanted to say why Anne-Lise died, that she wasn’t just the victim of helpless rage.
“In the cold and the silence of a winter’s night, you carried Anne-Lise’s body to the heather and laid it there, naked, exposed, one hand grasping at the brown shoots and the other resting chastely upon her breast. You left her in that posture that seemed to summarize and eternalize the contradictions of her life. In death, you made her tormented existence into art.”
