“I—oh dear. We could do, I suppose,” said Frédéric. “Well, what is the time? My watch has stopped.”
“Eight thirty.”
“In fact, you know, I must go. I lecture at ten. I’m sorry, Sylvain, another time.”
“What are you sorry for, my friend. Everyone is always walking over your hospitality. I suppose I am no less guilty. I’ll follow you out.”
“Well, you know, thank you for telling me.”
That was a lie: Frédéric was not lecturing at ten that day. He walked calmly beside Sylvain down the driveway to the road, but once they separated and he rounded the corner he began to march so fast that by the time he reached the department his collar was damp with sweat. He leapt up the steps two at a time, pushed through the first double doors, charged through the second, reached the last door with the frosted window, and unlocked it as fast as his shaking hands could turn a key.
Everything was the same as last night. His desk drawer was still open, the pair of glasses from which he and Patrice had drunk stood together on the cabinet, bottomed with yellow cognac circles. He dropped his briefcase and began to assemble his papers. He opened drawers and pulled out pages, stacked them on the desk and flicked through. It was no use, he would have to take all of them. Even if they were in French—here, there, references to German philosophers, scattered all over the place. He snapped open two leather folders and slipped the papers inside as neatly as he could without bending the corners, collected his three most recent notebooks and an English translation of the Quran, and scanned the room one last time before running out again.
Jeannette, meanwhile, had left the house for the convent. As usual she had taken her copy of Les Mystères de Marseille, but en route she also stopped at a newspaper stand to purchase a selection of dailies. There was one convalescent on the second floor of the convent named Albert who came from Béziers and did not have any legs, and who always asked Jeannette why she never read any stories that were true. The wound on Albert’s face was slow to heal, and some days it split open and wept pus, and he was constantly complaining about the position of his bed beside the window, which was so bright in the mornings he couldn’t sleep in. The doctors said he was too delicate to move, and anyway, most people would be fighting for that bed. Look at the view you have sir, they said, of the garden wall. Albert’s tone on the subject of true stories unnerved Jeannette because she could never work out if he was joking or sincere, though it was similar to the tone he used to complain about the bed. By now he had said it so many times that she decided to take him at his word, if only so that he would stop repeating it.
Between the pages of the novel she also brought the two slips of paper she had shown to Midhat that morning. The doctor’s diagnosis of her mother, and her mother’s own handwritten description of her symptoms. There was no time to look at them again, but she did not want to part with them. She squeezed the book for fear they might fall out.
The low voices of doctors echoed on the stairway. Jeannette reached the second floor, shy as ever for her lack of a white nursing habit. The corner by the window where she usually sat was bright with daylight, and extra chairs had been brought from other parts of the ward. The men cheered as she approached. The bed nearest the window was bare, taut with a fresh sheet.
“Where is Albert?”
“He’s gone.”
“Third floor, they finally moved him.”
“He’s still alive, don’t worry! Look at her,” said the one named Jerome, pointing at her from his pillow, “she thought he was dead.”
A new convalescent sitting on one of the chairs in his pyjamas pinched his face and ducked his head with mirth.
“Fine,” said Jeannette drily, as she sat beside him. “Do we want Les Mystères today? I also have the newspaper.”
“I don’t know what you’re doing with that, Mademoiselle,” said Jerome. “No newspapers, thank you very much. Give us the story.”
“Fine, fine. Are you all ready? Bien. Chapter five, où Blanche fait six lieues à pied, et voit passer une procession … Blanche et Philippe quittèrent la maison du jardinier Ayasse au crépuscule, vers sept heures et demie.”
She did not pay much attention to the words as she read them but she was a good reader all the same, and she turned the corners of each phrase with expert modulations in her voice, cued by certain words and elements of punctuation, as though she were playing a piece of music. The men were rapt, and even the nurses who came to change the bandages spoke in whispers and wound the cotton very slowly. On occasion Jeannette would glance up from the page to see faces propped around her like children, their lips falling apart.
She left early in the afternoon. “Les braves” needed to eat—and also to sleep, the nurses said. The moon was already rising. She could not help it: before she even reached the house she opened Les Mystères and pulled out her mother’s note and, pausing at the corner before the drive, unfolded the paper in the dwindling light.
Sometimes I feel I am getting larger and larger, and then at other times that I am shrinking. I am going both fast and slow. The cavity in my mouth is enormous, and I feel a great pressure.
Sometimes I can smell death. Some people, I look at them, I don’t know if I smell it or see it or feel it. I feel it in my whole body. It is not totally bad. Some days have a particularly strong smell. I find myself wanting to keep them or I want to keep the feeling but I can’t and it washes over. It is like being turned upside down. When I feel it I think this is the real life, the not imitated and not performed. My marriage is a fact like a house I live in, these four walls. Frédéric is a house. That feeling is a reaction to something foreign. But then is that actually true? Because even a known thing can become unknown
“Jeannette.”
Midhat was running up the road. His eyes were wet and bright; his hair flopped loose from its oil. He whipped one large strand back from his face.
“Jeannette. I saw you walking, I ran. I have been at the library. I have not found anything new. But,” he caught his breath, “I have a theory.”
He was shining with excitement. She felt the urge to touch his hand, and although she did not, something of that impulse must have expressed itself because his face gave off an encouraged smile.
“Shall we …”
“Tell me at the house, not here.”
They turned the corner and walked up the drive, and Docteur Molineu opened the door on them. His expression was grave.
“I have some very sad news, mes petits.”
Midhat noticed a letter in the Docteur’s hand, and with a falling sensation guessed what it was.
“No,” he said.
“Our friend Laurent is dead.”
The letter was from Laurent’s mother. He had been killed in a bar at Ypres on his journey home. A drunken officer had mistaken him for someone else and stabbed him in the arm and the chest. Laurent had died quickly from severe loss of blood.
The door still open, the three stared at the floor in silence. Molineu touched his daughter’s neck. Then he reached to pull the door shut and suggested in a restrained voice that they rest before dinner.
Jeannette’s face was completely white. Midhat invited her into his bedroom, and she accepted without embarrassment, and sat in Midhat’s chair while he sat on the bed. Both faced the window, through which the last of the day erased itself from the garden. The cherub with its dry jug was stripped of detail as all the features of the landscape were unified in shadow, and the lamps of the interior turned the window into a mirror that reflected back their faces. There was his, the whites of his eyes gleaming, his body hunched on the edge of the bed. There was Jeannette’s. Her lids hung low.