Midhat had experienced pressures he was sure Laurent had not. He felt an urge to prove that his enthusiasm was not a sign of unworldliness.
“Do you know what you will specialise in?” said Laurent. “I’m doing psychiatry.”
They halted by a ruin in the classical style, a roofless set of arches laced with red blossoms.
“Psychiatry?” said Midhat. “That’s not the body.”
“No. But I have developed an interest in it. And if you must know, it was because of a woman.”
Midhat could not reclaim the energy of a few moments before. He remained silent. Just as Laurent started walking off from the ruin, he threw out:
“I had a mistress in Constantinople.”
Laurent glanced back. Midhat continued, casually: “She spoke neither Arabic nor Turkish. I rented a chambre in the Etiler neighbourhood, for privacy.”
He felt a hand on his arm.
“I am impressed,” said Laurent. Again, he laughed. “I am also rather amazed!”
“Her name was Marie.”
“Where was she from?”
“Sweden.”
“Bra—vo.”
He had drawn them in a loop: ahead was the green gate, the letters in reverse. Midhat also felt amazed, and even a little alarmed. Apparently, it was quite as easy to invent something as to put on a new hat and coat.
4
The water in the garden pond was shallow and did not completely cover Jeannette’s knees, which rose above it like pink islands. The fountain had stopped working and the cherub’s jug was empty. A white scar around the stone perimeter marked the water level from the previous summer. She heard the wind in the trees before it reached her; a second later, goose pimples rose on her submerged legs.
A head bobbed in an upper window. It was Georgine, in Midhat’s bedroom. Jeannette had spent the morning in the room adjacent, her father’s study, organising a box of photographs into two leather albums. The box contained images of her mother as a young woman. Some Jeannette had never seen before. She had not thought intently about her mother in a long time, and the photographs were hard to look at. And yet she had looked, and for hours, searching ravenously for signs of herself in her mother. She came to when Georgine called for lunch. Then she decided to sit in the garden pond and meditate.
As a child, Jeannette had resembled her father and everyone thought she would take after him. Like Frédéric she was energetic: she spoke quickly, she liked drama. But over the years she had changed, and now she loathed the beating of her mind, and deliberately sought out boredom in order to avert it. Her father liked to call her “the Sphinx.”
When she thought about her childhood, she thought of her bedroom in Montparnasse. She thought of the pink and white wallpaper, embossed with gold curls that sprouted into tiny flowers, which she loved to pick in secret near the skirting board behind the chairs, digging her nail into the flowers and scratching out the cakey plaster underneath. A row of dolls dressed in coloured lace ran the length of the window seat, with heavy cold hands, white bisque faces, and real hair. Jeannette rarely touched them. Her favourite toy was a sticky tarot deck, which she spent whole afternoons arranging and rearranging on the floor, casting incantations. The girls from school were jealous of the miniature ivory elephants, the music boxes, the tin ship with the painted crew, and when they came round to play they wanted to wind them up and work their limbs, and at first Jeannette would sit patiently and allow them to do so. But sooner or later she demanded the other girl play with her instead, and together they would invent religions on the window seat, directing spells at the hats of passersby. Jeannette selected chants from a book of poetry, and her favourite was on page 92, from a poem called “Resignation”:
As a child, I dreamt of the Koh-i-Noor,
Persian and Papal richness, sumptuous,
Heliogabalus, Sardanapalus!
Héliogabale et Sardanapale! they called from the window, pointing their fingers at solitary men, watching how they reacted or did not react to the effect of the witchcraft, and the doom that lay ahead of them.
Papa was the patron of the toys. Jeannette had no brothers or sisters, and her mother Ariane was affectionate but withdrawn, and often kept to her bedroom. After lessons, or when she came home from school, Jeannette read the books her father gave her under the bed until her elbows were sore from the carpet bristles. When she thought about her childhood in later years, she thought of the view from the bedroom floor: the spaces beneath the chairs were shelters from equatorial typhoons, the woodwork below the window a carving from an ancient civilisation. On the bookcase she could remove the panel behind the encyclopaedia to access a round hole in the wall, which was a hiding place for scrolls and treasures. As she grew older she imagined different kinds of adventures and began reading novels, which she bought on her way home from class and concealed inside the dust jackets of history books.
One Friday afternoon, the year she turned sixteen, Jeannette returned from school to find their neighbour sitting with a policeman at the kitchen table. Her mother, they said, had shot herself with a pistol in the courtyard. Her father was not yet back from the university. The neighbour heard the shot and called the policeman, who had already called the undertaker. They looked at Jeannette with frightened eyes and offered biscuits and tea. She was surprised to find that she could not even open her mouth to form a yes or a no.
In the aftermath, all parental reserve evaporated and Frédéric told his daughter everything. Her mother had expressed the urge to end her life on at least two other occasions, but those episodes were so far apart that he had not considered them cause for serious alarm. “Forgive me,” he said, pulling a handful of his hair near the crown. Every now and then he would say, “Oh,” and cover his mouth, and she knew he was remembering something.
Jeannette seized at these details with appetite, at every memory that slipped out of her father’s mouth between his silences, while he sat in the living room staring at the floor, mouth contorted with regret. Death had loosened the truth from him and he was miraculously unguarded: gone was the man who cantered off midconversation; in his place stood a mass of uncatalogued private facts. Thus exposed he gave Jeannette everything. In the days leading up to the funeral he described his courtship, his impressions of the woman who became her mother at each stage of knowing her, how she changed and did not change over the years.
Without meaning to, with these stories he opened a whole hemisphere of his daughter’s imagination, so that once the coffin was finally laid in the earth and he began to close his wounds Jeannette was still picking at hers. A woman was taking shape in her mind. Not only was this woman her mother, she was also Mademoiselle Ariane Passant, and Madame Ariane Molineu, a figure made out of the darkness from before Jeannette was born. Before long, in the natural way, her father learned to live with sadness, and soon that sadness lost its sting, and what had been unsealed in shock began to clam up again, and he would not release any more of what he knew. He brushed Jeannette off when she asked him to, with an appalled look, as if forgetting how much he had already told her.
They moved to Montpellier after Jeannette finished school. Frédéric’s sister lived in town with her children Marian and Xavier, and also nearby was the vineyard of Sylvain Leclair, an old friend of Ariane’s. Frédéric took up a position as maître de conférences at the university, and Jeannette enrolled to study philosophy, becoming one of only nineteen women in her year.