After school, Annie took my brother and me to the house across the street. She rang at the small door that opened onto Rue du Docteur-Dordaine. A brown-haired woman, rather corpulent and dressed in black, opened for us. She was the housekeeper, as the owners of the place never lived there.
“The room’s all ready,” said the housekeeper.
We went up a flight of stairs lit by electric lights. All the shutters in the house were closed. We followed a hallway. The housekeeper opened a door. The room was larger than ours, and there were two beds with brass bars, two grown-up beds. The walls were covered in light blue patterned wallpaper. A window looked out onto Rue du Docteur-Dordaine: those shutters were open.
“You’ll like it here, kids,” said Annie.
The housekeeper smiled at us. She said:
“I’ll make you breakfast in the morning.”
We went back down the stairs, and the housekeeper showed us the ground floor of the house. In the large living room, with its closed shutters, two crystal chandeliers shone bright enough to blind us. The furniture was cased in transparent slipcovers. Except for the piano.
After dinner, we went out with Annie. We were wearing our pajamas and our bathrobes. A spring evening. It was fun to wear our bathrobes outside, and we walked down the avenue with Annie, all the way to the Robin des Bois inn. We wished we would run into someone so they’d see us walking around in our bathrobes.
We rang at the door of the house across the street and, once again, the housekeeper opened up and took us to our room. We got into the beds with the brass bars. The housekeeper told us her bedroom was downstairs, next to the living room, and we could call her if there was anything we needed.
“And anyway, Patoche, I’m right nearby,” said Annie.
She gave us each a kiss on the forehead. We had already brushed our teeth after dinner, in our real room. The housekeeper closed the shutters and turned off the light, and the two of them went out.
That first night, we talked for a long time, my brother and I. We would have loved to go downstairs to the living room on the ground floor to look at the chandeliers, the chairs in their slipcases, and the piano, but we were afraid the wood of the staircase would creak and the housekeeper would scold us.
The next morning was Thursday. I had no school. The housekeeper brought us breakfast in our room, on a tray. We said thank you.
Frede’s nephew didn’t come that Thursday. We stayed in the large garden, near the façade of the house with its French doors and closed shutters. There was a weeping willow and, way in back, a bamboo wall through which we could make out the terrace of the Robin des Bois inn and the tables that the waiters were setting for dinner. We ate sandwiches at noon. The housekeeper made them for us. We were sitting in the garden chairs with our sandwiches, as if for a picnic. That evening the weather was warm, and we had dinner in the garden. The housekeeper had again made us ham and cheese sandwiches. Two apple tarts for dessert. And Coca-Cola.
Annie came round after dinner. We’d put on our pajamas and bathrobes. We went out with her. This time, we crossed the main road at the bottom of the hill. We met some people near the public garden, and they looked surprised to see us in our bathrobes. Annie was wearing her old leather jacket and her blue jeans. We walked past the train station. It occurred to me that we could take the train, in our bathrobes, all the way to Paris.
When we returned, Annie kissed us in the garden of the white house and gave each of us a harmonica.
I woke up in the middle of the night. I heard the rumble of a car engine. I got up and went to the window. The housekeeper hadn’t closed the shutters, just drawn the red curtains.
Across the street, a light was on in the bow window of the living room. Roger Vincent’s car was parked in front of the house, its black convertible top folded down. Annie’s 4CV was there too. But the sound of the motor came from a canvas-covered truck idling on the other side of the street, near the wall of the Protestant temple. The motor shut off. Two men came out of the truck. I recognized Jean D. and Buck Danny, and the two of them went into the house. Now and then I saw a silhouette pass in front of the bow window of the living room. I was sleepy. The next morning, the housekeeper woke us carrying the tray with our breakfast. She and my brother took me to school. On Rue du Docteur-Dordaine, there was no sign of the truck or Roger Vincent’s car. But Annie’s 4CV was still there, in front of the house.
When I got out of school, my brother was waiting for me all alone.
“There’s nobody home at our house.”
He told me the housekeeper had brought him back to the house a little while ago. Annie’s 4CV was there, but no one was home. The housekeeper had to go do the shopping in Versailles until late that afternoon and she had left my brother at the house, telling him that Annie would be back soon since her car was there. My brother had sat in the empty house, waiting.
He looked happy to see me. He even laughed, like someone who had been afraid but was now relieved.
“They just went to Paris,” I reassured him. “Don’t you worry.”
We walked up Rue du Docteur-Dordaine. Annie’s 4CV was there.
Nobody in the dining room or the kitchen. Or the living room. Upstairs, Annie’s room was empty. Little Hélène’s as well. So was Mathilde’s, in the back of the courtyard. We went into Snow White’s room: maybe she had come back after all. But no. It was as if no one had ever lived in those rooms. Through the window of our bedroom, I stared down at Annie’s 4CV.
The silence in the house was frightening. I turned on the radio and we ate the two apples and two bananas that remained in the fruit basket, on the sideboard. I opened the back door. The green bumper car was still there, in the middle of the courtyard.
“We’ll wait for them,” I said to my brother.
Time passed. The hands on the kitchen clock said twenty minutes to two. It was time to go back to school. But I couldn’t leave my brother all alone. We sat down, facing each other, at the dining room table. We listened to the radio.
We went outside. Annie’s 4CV was still there. I opened one of the doors and sat in the front seat, in my usual spot. I rifled through the glove compartment and carefully inspected the back seat. Nothing. Except an empty cigarette pack.
“Let’s walk up to the chateau,” I said to my brother.
The wind was blowing. We walked along Rue du Docteur-Dordaine. My friends were already back in school, and the teacher would have noticed my absence. The more we walked, the deeper the silence grew around us. Beneath the sun, that street and all its houses seemed deserted.
The wind gently ruffled the tall grass in the meadow. The two of us had never ventured here alone. The boarded-up windows of the chateau provoked the same anxiety in me as in the evenings, coming back from our walks in the woods with Snow White. The chateau façade was dark and threatening in those moments. As it was now, in midafternoon.
We sat down on the bench, where Snow White and Little Hélène used to sit back when we climbed the branches of the pine trees. The silence still hovered around us, and I tried to play a tune on the harmonica Annie had given me.
On Rue du Docteur-Dordaine, we saw, from afar, a black car parked in front of the house. A man was at the wheel, his leg sticking out from the open driver’s-side door, and he was reading the newspaper. At the door to the house, a gendarme in uniform stood very stiff, with a bare head. He was young, with short-cropped blond hair, and his big blue eyes stared into the void.
He started and looked at my brother and me, his eyes wide.
“What are you doing here?”
“This is my house,” I said. “Has something happened?”
“Something very serious.”