As soon as the guests have left, Ariel grabs Marie by the hips. He feels the words rising, ready to materialize in his mouth laced with the sugary flavour of Port. He wants them to have a child. Tonight. He does not want to wait for the right strategic moment, for his power to be consolidated, for the winning conditions. He wants to give his wife everything she desires, right now.
His impulse is curbed by the sound of the telephone. Marie seizes the chance to tiptoe away. In her bedroom she finds the two envelopes that she prepared. Her heart is pounding so hard it makes her reel. She hasn’t taken any medication since the beginning of the week. She wanted to be clear-headed for this moment, which she has been planning in absolute secrecy for months. She goes down the stairs gripping the handrail, as if on a ship in the middle of a storm. Through the buzzing that fills her head she hears Ariel scolding a political aide.
“Don’t you have a father, an aunt, a neighbour, Odile? A Madagascan roommate? So now you’re going to hang up, put on a clean sweater and leave the office to go wish him Merry Christmas, and if you can manage that, then have a glass of some alcoholic beverage. Anything will do. Mouthwash if need be. And don’t call me anymore because of what some asinine amateur blogger has to say. For the next twenty-four hours, I don’t exist.”
When he hangs up, Marie is standing in front of him; her complexion is opalescent, her gaze poignant.
“Happy birthday!”
Ariel smiles and moves closer, ready to dive under his wife’s skirt. She checks him with a trembling hand that proffers an envelope decorated with a gold ribbon. Her other hand holds a second envelope just as bulky as the first.
“You’ve brought me work? A case that needs to be dealt with during the holidays? You’re too kind!” he scoffs, snatching up his gift with a wink.
Marie does not laugh. She solemnly places her hand on her husband’s to stop him from opening the envelope too soon.
“Inside, there’s a surprise for both of us. I wanted for us to have a chance to get to know ourselves better, to understand ourselves better. These papers…”
She pauses, muzzled by an invisible filter. Ariel pulls her over to the loveseat, to the gentle warmth of the hearth.
“These documents contain the identities of our birth mothers.”
Ariel stops. Each of his movements — of his guiding arms, of his coiling spinal column, of his faithfully returning breath — hovers in mid-air.
“I know you would have preferred to wait, but… if we’re thinking of having kids, I feel it’s important to know where we come from. I don’t expect the contents of these envelopes to go beyond the walls of this house. We can throw them in the fire afterwards, if you like. Your parents won’t know. This is for us. For the nucleus. It belongs to us.”
Ariel plops down on a cushion and takes a gulp of Port as he contemplates the golden ribbon and the secrets wrapped within it.
“You have no idea what we’ll find in there?”
“No. I did whatever it took to wait until we could open them together.”
“Well, okay then, let’s do it.”
There are moments that nothing can prepare you for. Such as fainting on shaking hands with a stranger. Or reading your mother’s name for the first time. You don’t know what to do, how to behave. You forget how to breathe, blink your eyes, swallow the stones building up in your mouth. Ariel unties the ribbon, slips the set of papers out of the envelope, skims through them. Barely moving his lips he murmurs a woman’s name while Marie, sitting beside him, performs the same gestures, and in her turn utters a name. Like an echo. A poisoned refrain.
For many minutes, they remain frozen next to each other, unable to speak, unable to cry, paralyzed in a moment like the one experienced by suicides, the deafening minutes that elapse before they decide to pull the trigger. Finally, Marie holds out her hand. Ariel passes her his papers, and she gives him hers. There’s no mistake. There it is in black and white. Eva Volant. The same name twice. Two parallel lines that nevertheless meet at the source. A geometrical aberration. Thirty-three years earlier, Eva Volant, fifteen years old, gives birth to two premature babies. She gives up the girl for adoption, but wants to keep the boy. A month later, the boy is placed in the care of a private agency. Their three paths should never have crossed again.
After the vomiting, the screaming, the blows against the wall and the convulsions, it takes hours for them to start speaking again. “I love you,” they say in the same flat voice. Then Ariel pulls on his coat and goes out into the winter that crunches like a thousand bones.
They had wanted a small, private wedding, but, of course, the proprieties, etiquette, and the countless relations of their respective families forced them to revise their invitation list. All told, two hundred and ten people gathered together to watch them exchange their promises in the most beautiful garden of La Belle Province, at the foot of a weeping willow ringed around by wild roses. Everything went wrong, from the storm that broke a few minutes before the ceremony began, to the indigestion that Ariel miraculously contained when he made his vows, not to mention the door that had slammed shut on Marie’s hand that same morning. By the time he put the wedding band on her ring finger, the nail had turned completely black. And yet they took none of these unfortunate incidents to be a bad omen. They were so elated at getting married that on seeing the wedding pictures later on they would have to look closely to recall that it had rained, that they had been ill and injured, that the train of Marie’s gown had caught fire during the first dance, that a stray dog had burst in and stolen the spit-roasted lamb shank. The mishaps made them laugh. The more disastrous the wedding, the happier the marriage, they kept repeating.
In the small hours, they slipped away from the tent where some drunken dancers kept on swaying. The sky had cleared and was now suffused with an unreal moonlight. They followed a little winding path to the lake. They joked about the monster inhabiting its waters and commanded it to show itself. They lay down on the wharf, and the love they made was so exquisitely joyous they thought they heard music, an untuned guitar. The morning found them sleeping on the old, furry wood, both of them swathed in the myriad folds of her layer-cake wedding gown. It was, they believed, the start of an eternity.
“Who else knows?”
“No one.”
“The people you contacted? To find the paper trails?”
“Two different agencies. Yours, as you know, exclusively handled adoptions of Jewish — or supposedly Jewish — children. Mine was run by reformist Christians and covered the entire continent. No one will make the connection.”
“And the government? They have files, archives…”
“Of course. But someone would have to do some very specific research to be able to discover the link.”
“Which is certainly likely to happen over the four years of my mandate.”