Marie shuts the door of her childhood room, which has become the realm of Frère Jacques, her parents’ malamute. She flops down beside the animal, which is sleeping on the rug, stroking its fur as thick as stalks of strong, nourishing grain, inhaling its rich scent. As far back as she can recall, her family has always had malamutes. A hardy, loyal, dignified breed, embodying all that the Leclercs value. Marie buries her nose in the salt-and-pepper pelt; the dog moans blissfully. She has an urge to whisper one or two secrets into the dog’s dense coat, or even to shout, but she contents herself with kissing it.
The little room with a sloping ceiling has remained untouched since she left some fifteen years ago. Whenever she visits it, Marie relives her childhood in reverse, starting with the morning she packed her bags, at once terrified and euphoric at the thought of leaving her home town for McGill University, where her life would finally take flight. Then her adolescence streams by, dreary and terrible; she sees herself bent over her schoolbooks, cloistered in the school environment, the one sphere in which she allowed herself a certain lack of moderation, the one place where she could excel without drawing attention to herself. She contemplates the spectral presence of the Lego cities she built with Rachel, and that of the dolls she would create on Sunday afternoons, little papier-mâché figurines to which she poured out her heart when it was brimming over. She stretches out on the bed, wrapped in the particular atmosphere of a room where one has lived long enough to experience boredom, that blend of living dust and dead time.
The walk from the car to her parents’ front door tired her out. There were reporters waiting for them, Ariel and her, in front of the house. It took her father’s stentorian voice to open a path through the throng clustered under the large maples in the front yard. Martial greeted his daughter with a hug. Ever since she was a child, it’s in moments like this that their relationship has acquired a little substance: Marie having a difficult time, Martial protecting her. Otherwise the fragile little girl and the larger-than-life man repel each other like inverted magnets, she, frightened by him, he, too clumsy to reassure her.
“Are they ever going to leave us alone, those people?” Hortense shouted from the kitchen. “We already had it up to here with our computer being repeatedly broken into! Sixteen hours it took for your father’s geeks to get the company’s network up and running again.”
From the back of the dining room Rachel stood up to speak, her silhouette rearing up as if a Greek column had suddenly been planted in the room.
“Mother, I’ll say it again: the hacking has nothing to do with Ariel’s new position. It happened before and will happen again.”
Rachel is in charge of operations in the family business and has kept an eye on all the hacking incidents; she had already confided to Marie that the frequency of these intrusions had doubled since the beginning of the election campaign. Thankful for this little lie, Marie abandoned herself to the smothering embraces of her sister and mother amid the boisterous barking of Frère Jacques.
As is always the case at the Leclerc residence, the meal was an expeditious affair carried out in a series of quasi-military stages. As soon as Martial had blown out the sixty-one candles on his colossal chocolate cake, Ariel excused himself. Although she was sad to see him head off to a rally at the far end of the country, Marie was relieved. Throughout the meal, her parents constantly badgered him with questions and innuendos. In such moments, which have multiplied in recent months, even Marie is unable to ascertain whether the Leclercs’ intention is to punish Ariel for his federalist convictions or rather to influence his decisions regarding Quebec. Either way, their efforts have been unavailing. Regardless of how he feels about their arguments, Ariel inwardly seethes at being lectured to by his in-laws.
Late in the evening, Marie muses on her childhood woes, which roll across the wooden floor of her room like faded marbles. To return to Saint-Roch is to once again drink a concentrated dose of the painful loneliness that for Marie is at the root of everything. She swallows a sleeping pill; Frère Jacques twitches his paws, chasing in a dream a prey that outruns him. The sound of resonant snoring reaches her upstairs room and prickles her skin like the kiss of an incipient beard.
With her head buried in a flattened pillow, she takes a deep breath and wedges her hand between the box spring and the small, sagging mattress. She finds her stuffed monkey stuck to the warped spring box. Endlessly petted, clutched, kissed, soaked with tears, and dressed in useless clothes meant to shield it against bad weather, its synthetic fur is as rough as an old woollen sock. Marie strokes the squashed toy, which has lain hidden under the mattress for nearly two decades, but she does not extract it from its hiding place. When, half-asleep, she finally lets go, she has the fleeting impression of hearing a cloth heart beating through her pillow.
Oddly enough, it was a long time before they realized they had both been adopted. Marie, haunted by her origins, preferred to wait before broaching the subject and kept the truth sealed inside her chest. As for Ariel, his sense of belonging to the Goldstein family was so powerful that he rarely gave any thought to the fact he had been born elsewhere, welcomed into the world by unknown hands, which had passed him on to someone else like a baton in a relay race that was to lead to as-yet-unseen heights.
It was when they first ran off together to the country, to the crude cabin that had belonged to the Leclercs for generations, that they became aware of how similar their paths were. The coincidence did not entirely surprise them. It explained the extraordinary understanding they shared from the very first moment. Marie, who had read extensively on the topic, knew that adopted children often befriend each other spontaneously, sometimes without having the slightest idea of their own origins. Their fractured beginnings lead them to one another, as though guided by a melancholy horse.
“How old were you when you found out?”
“I was eight, I believe. A boy in my class had asked me why my parents had red hair, while mine was brown. When I asked my father, he told me everything.”
“You’ve never wondered who your real parents were?”
“No. I have no memories that don’t involve the Goldsteins. I was only a few days old when they took me home. I may as well have been born there. What about you?”
“It’s a blur. The things I remember, I probably imagined them. I was four when my parents told me where I came from. The next day the planes crashed into the World Trade Center. For a long time I believed there was a connection between the two events.”
“Were you upset?”
“Not at first. They told me my mother was a teenager when she gave birth, and too poor to take care of an infant. The explanation seemed to make sense. But growing up I began to question it. And I envied Rachel for being a biological child.”
“Do you still envy her?”
“No. But I wish I looked like her. I’ve always felt I was the one blot on the illusion of the perfect family.”
“Well, I’m very glad you don’t look like a field marshal.”
Marie smiles at her lover’s teasing play on her father’s name. Something tells her her father would appreciate it.
“And you? Do you know who your birth mother was?”
“No. I only know she was Jewish, because it was important to my parents to maintain the heritage.”
“And here you are with a shiksa, threatening to break the lineage.”