Yves shrugs. He waves the newspaper again.
“And what about ‘this very special couple,’ where do you get this stuff? Is that our parents you’re talking about?”
“Absolutely, it’s our parents I’m talking about,” Lise retorts.
Her voice is a whistle, her mouth spluttering behind her veil.
“Do you know what I think about this, Lise? Do you know what I think?”
“Oh yes. Very well. I know very, very well.”
She would like her brother to stop talking, but can tell he wants to work right through his anger, so she moves away from the coffin, which is being carried into the church by four men dressed in black, as if afraid her dead father can hear Yves. He turns and follows her.
“So what is it you’re telling us with this ‘very special couple’? Are you doing a Disneyland number, is that it? She didn’t love him, she thought he was a dick, she told him so, in front of us, she gave him a hard time his whole fucking life, and then when she died, he was left there crying over her …”
“She’s our mother, you have no right to—”
“I have every right. Horrible people have children too.”
“Say what you like. I don’t give a damn. God, if you knew how little I care what you say.”
“Yup, I’ll say what I like.”
“Stop talking so loud in front of … the kids …”
Lise says nothing more. Her gaze does not extend to the pretty brunette standing, silently, beside her brother.
Anna understands. She moves away, blends into the small crowd of people, none of whom she knows and none of whom want to know her. No distant cousin comes to say hello, nobody is curious about her. The family keeps its distance from the son’s partner, a bad son who ran away from home so young and never came back.
Anna was wrong. She wanted to use this painful occasion to claim her place by Yves’s side, she wanted to be beautiful, to honor Yves. The idea was not inappropriate, but here, in this hostile indifference, she feels too elegant, over-made-up, she wishes she could be invisible. Focusing on his argument, Yves has abandoned her. This anger in him reminds her that even though he no longer wants to be part of a family, he does still have one, and she does not feature in it.
It starts to rain. To the east, over Azelay’s slate roofs, a rainbow brightens the sky. If David were here, David, her brother who has “found religion,” he would look away from the prism up in the azure, and recite the Zocher haBrith blessing to remember the promise the Almighty made not to flood the world again. He would remind her that it was Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai himself, blessing be on him, who forbade contemplating the apparition of a keshet, a rainbow, the symbol of God’s renewed alliance with man, and that he put a handwritten note about it in the margin of the Zohar. But Anna no longer believes in God, she really could not care if the Torah has something to say at any point about waterskiing or whether the glue on postage stamps is kosher. A Jew who loses his or her faith is said to embrace questions because the world is then reduced to endless questioning. Anna looks at the rainbow, without actively defying heaven or its angels.
She steps inside the Gothic church, looks at the statues of emphatically Catholic saints, the brightly colored windows telling the story of Christ’s passion, the bust of the Virgin Mary carrying the baby Jesus with maternal bliss, and, looking down the nave, she sees the huge stucco figure of Christ nailed to the cross, Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum. The coffin is before the altar, draped in black velvet with bouquets of lilies and wreaths of roses laid on top of it, and white candelabras lit around it. Yves no longer believes in God either, but it really is not the same God. Anna inhales the bitter smell of incense and the sickly fragrance of flowers, her head spins, she sits on a pew at the back of the church, shivering, she suddenly feels cold, terribly cold.
She feels like a foreigner. She should not have come. She is not from here. No one will recite the kaddish, Yitgadal v’yit-kadash sh’meh rabba, b’alma di-v’ra chir’uteh, for the father; no one will tear their clothes before the grave is filled in; no one will lay a stone on the tomb; no one will light a candle in the father’s room. No, Anna is not from here, she does not want to be, would never know how to be. She cannot go back to Yves, cannot find refuge in his arms. Everything suddenly seems difficult, almost impossible. They are so different, he is a gentile, she a Jew.
Anna feels like crying. She would like to stand up and walk out of the church, but her legs will not obey her. A man’s warm hand takes hers, brings it to his lips. Anna huddles against Yves, the pain is too much for her, it overflows, she cries in his arms, shuddering as she sobs, she wants to stop, but she just can’t, she just can’t.
4. Pierre Desproges (1939–1988) was an outspoken and eloquent French humorist. Pierre Dac (1893–1975) was a cabaret singer.
THOMAS AND LOUISE
• •
THOMAS THOUGHT he would feel no pain. The analyst believed he was prepared for his father’s death, had so clearly inscribed the idea on his mind that he could already picture him under the earth. But he has a persistent ache, a blend of remorse and resentment. He never loved this absent father, this man he only ever called by his first name, Pierre, this father who showed so little interest in fatherhood that Thomas feels he can count the times they spent together on the fingers of one hand. As a teenager, Thomas wanted to change his name, he could have called himself Durenne, his mother’s maiden name. Then his anger lost its painful edge, was less of an issue. Eventually, he even thought he no longer bore him a grudge.
And yet when, almost twenty years ago now, “Pierre” said over the telephone, “I know you’re hurting, I know you resent me …,” Thomas sniggered to himself. He did it loudly enough for his father to hear, and the freshly qualified analyst in him knew that meant the business was far from over, and he said, “I’m sorry, Pierre. You’re probably right. I resented you and I still do.”
As he drives to La Roche-sur-Yon, Thomas knows he is going to confront him. If Stoics are right, if there really is nothing between men, no love, tenderness, or friendship, but the body is everything, if all feeling really does germinate and take root in the individual, then this journey, however belated it may be, will not be pointless. Thomas is driving toward his own appeasement.
Louise has canceled all her meetings, she wanted to come with him.
“Thanks for being here, Louise.”
Tenderly, without a word, she rests her head on his shoulder, he breathes in her perfume. She closes her eyes, puts her arms around him. She is wearing a sober black suit, looks at the map, acts as copilot.
“We need to take exit 30,” she says quietly. “And then the first turn to La Roche-sur-Yon and Noirmoutier.”
“In one kilometer, turn left,” says the satellite navigation system, which has maintained a discreet silence for nearly five minutes.
“That’s what I just said,” sighs Louise. “Can’t you at least switch it to Italian or Spanish, so we can practice a language?”
“You can actually. You can also have a man’s voice, if you like.”
“In five hundred meters, turn left onto the D347.”
“Someone should invent a GPS for life,” Louise smiles, and she adopts the machine’s slightly nasal, disembodied voice: “In one week, take a lover. In one day, take a lover. Take Thomas Le Gall now, on the left. In one month, leave your husband. In one week, leave your husband.”
“Leave your husband now,” smiles Thomas.