I still felt a constriction in my chest. I would much rather have been thinking about something else. And yet Jean Borand had been kind to me. It wasn’t a bad memory, not like the memories of my mother. By now, I had reached Avenue Daumesnil, which reminded me of the street where the garage had been. I walked along, looking from side to side, searching for it. I would ask to speak to ‘Monsieur Jean Borand’. From my memory of him, I was certain he would be happy to see me, just like he used to be. Perhaps he wouldn’t recognise me? Although he would surely remember me. Was he really my uncle? In any case, he was the only one who would be able to answer my questions. Unfortunately, even though I looked hard at all the buildings on both sides of the street, I didn’t recognise anything. There was no garage, not a single landmark. One evening, in the same neighbourhood, near the Gare de Lyon, he had taken me to the cinema. It was my first time. The theatre seemed immense and was showing The Crossroad of the Archers, the film in which, a while before, I’d had a small role alongside my mother. I hadn’t recognised myself on the screen and, when I’d heard my voice, I’d even wondered if Little Jewel was some other girl, not me.
Yes, I know, it was wrong for me to be thinking about all that, even about Jean Borand. He didn’t have anything to do with it, but he, too, was part of that period of my life. That Sunday, I should never have climbed the stairs to the door of the woman who used to be called the Kraut and who is now called Death Cheater. For the moment, I was still walking aimlessly, hoping soon to find Place de la Bastille, where I would take the metro. I tried to cheer myself up: later, after I’d returned to my room, I would go out and telephone Moreau-Badmaev. He’d definitely be home on a Sunday night. I’d suggest that we have dinner together in a café in Place Blanche. I’d tell him everything: about my mother, about Jean Borand, about the apartment near the Bois de Boulogne, and about the girl they used to call Little Jewel. I was still the same person, as if Little Jewel had been preserved, intact, inside a glacier. The same terrifying panic came over me in the street and woke me with a start at five in the morning. And yet I had also experienced long periods of calm, when I ended up forgetting it all. But now that my mother was apparently alive, I no longer knew which path to take.
On a blue street sign I read: AVENUE LEDRU-ROLLIN. It intersected with another street, at the end of which, once again, I caught sight of the massive Gare de Lyon and the illuminated clock face. I’d gone round in circles and come back to where I’d started. The station was a magnet and I was drawn to it; it was a sign of my destiny. I had to get on a train straightaway; I had to make a break. The words had suddenly come into my head and I couldn’t get rid of them. They gave me a bit more courage. Yes, the time had come to make a break. But instead of heading for the station, I kept following Avenue Ledru-Rollin. Before making a break, I had to see this through to the end, without really knowing what to the end meant.
There was not another soul around, which was normal for a Sunday night, but the further I walked, the darker the avenue became, as if that evening I had put on sunglasses. Perhaps my eyesight was failing? Further down, on the left-hand side, was the neon sign of a chemist. I didn’t take my eyes off it, in case I lost it in the darkness. As long as the green light kept shining, I would be able to find my way. I hoped it would stay lit until I got there. A late-night chemist, that very Sunday, on Avenue Ledru-Rollin. It was so dark that I’d lost all notion of time and thought it was the middle of the night. Behind the shop window, a brunette was sitting at the counter. She wore a white coat and a severe bun, which seemed incompatible with her sweet face. She was sorting a pile of papers and, from time to time, she made notes using a Bic pen with a green lid. Eventually, she would have to notice me staring at her, but I couldn’t help myself. Her face was so different from Death Cheater’s, the face I had seen in the metro and imagined behind the door on the fourth floor. Anger would never deform the face before me, nor would that mouth ever be contorted or launch a volley of abuse…There was a calmness and grace about her in the soothing glow of the light, the same warm glow I’d experienced in the evenings at Frossombronne-la-Forêt…Had I really experienced that same glow? I pushed open the glass door. I heard the faint tinkling of a bell. She raised her head. I walked towards her, but I didn’t know what to say.
‘Do you feel ill?’
I couldn’t utter a word. And the heaviness in my chest was still suffocating me. She came over to me.
‘You’re very pale…’ She took my hand. I must have given her a fright. And yet her hand felt firm in mine. ‘Sit down over here.’
She took me behind the counter, to a room with an old leather armchair. She sat me in the armchair and placed her hand on my forehead.
‘You don’t have a fever…But your hands are like ice… What’s the matter?’
For years I had never said a word to anyone. I had kept it all to myself.
‘It would be too complicated to explain,’ I replied.
‘Why? Nothing is that complicated.’
I burst into tears, which I hadn’t done since the dog had died, at least twelve years or so earlier.
‘Have you had a shock recently?’ she asked, lowering her voice.
‘I’ve seen someone I thought was dead.’
‘Someone very close to you?’
‘It’s not at all important,’ I assured her, trying to smile. ‘I’m just tired.’
She stood up. I could hear her, back in the shop, opening and shutting a drawer. I was still sitting in the armchair and didn’t feel any urge to move.
She came back into the room. She had taken off her white coat to reveal a dark-grey skirt and jumper. She handed me a glass of water, at the bottom of which a red tablet was dissolving in bubbles. She sat next to me, on the arm of the chair.
‘Wait until it’s properly dissolved.’
I couldn’t take my eyes off the fizzing red water. It was phosphorescent.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘Something good for you.’
She’d taken my hand in hers again.
‘Are your hands still as cold?’
And the way she said ‘cold’, emphasising the word, suddenly reminded me of the title of a book that Frédérique used to read to me at night, in Frossombronne, when I was in my bed: The Children of the Cold.
I downed the drink in one gulp. It tasted bitter. But in my childhood I’d had to swallow pills that were far more bitter.
She went to get a stool from the shop and placed it in front of me so I could rest my legs.
‘Try to relax. You don’t seem very good at taking it easy.’
She helped me take off my raincoat. Then she unzipped my boots and gently removed them. She came and sat on the arm of the chair again and took my pulse. At the touch of her hand, clasped round my wrist, I immediately felt safe. I could have dropped off to sleep, and that prospect filled me with the same sense of well-being that I experienced when the nuns gave me ether to inhale, and I fell asleep. That was just before I went to live with my mother in the big apartment near the Bois de Boulogne. I was a boarder in a school somewhere and I have no idea why I was waiting in the street that day. No one had come to collect me, so I decided to cross the street, and I was knocked down by a truck. I wasn’t badly hurt, only my ankle. They made me lie down in the truck, under the tarpaulin, and drove me to a nearby house. I ended up on a bed, nuns all around, one of them leaning over me. She was wearing a white veil and she gave me inhale ether.