‘Stay where you are, Jonas, don’t come near me or I swear I’ll kill you.’
‘You’re making a mistake. There’s nothing between me and Émilie, I swear.’
‘Go to hell, and take her with you! You’re a bastard, a fucking bastard!’
Furious, he rushed at me and slammed me against the wall, spraying spittle in my face as he screamed insults at me. He punched me hard in the stomach. I fell to my knees.
‘Why do you have to ruin my happiness?’ He was close to tears, his eyes bloodshot, his lips flecked with spittle. ‘Why, for God’s sake, why did you have to ruin everything?’
He kicked me in the side.
‘Curse you, and curse the day I ever met you,’ he shouted, running off. ‘I never want to see you again, I never want to hear your name, you miserable two-faced bastard!’
I lay on the ground, unsure which was worse, the pain from the beating, or my heartache.
Jean-Christophe did not go home. André had spotted him running across the fields after our argument, but no one had seen him since. Days passed. Jean-Christophe’s parents were sick with worry; their son had never disappeared without letting them know where he was. He had gone away after his break-up with Isabelle, but he had phoned his mother every night so that she would not worry. Simon came to see me to ask what had happened. He was clearly worried – Jean-Christophe had just recovered from a serious depression; he might not survive a relapse. I feared the worst too. I could not sleep for thinking about what might have happened. Sometimes I would get up, fetch a jug of water, and drink it as I paced up and down the balcony. I didn’t want to talk about what had gone on in the bookshop. I felt ashamed; I tried to pretend it had never happened.
‘I’m sure that bitch did something to upset him,’ Simon growled. ‘I’d swear to it. That little pricktease has something to do with this.’
I couldn’t bring myself to look him in the eye.
After a week of phoning Jean-Christophe’s friends in Oran and making discreet enquiries in Río Salado, his father finally called the police.
When he heard about Jean-Christophe’s disappearance, Fabrice rushed back to Río Salado.
‘What the hell happened?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ Simon told him.
The three of us set off for Oran and combed the brothels and the bars, the sordid fondouks in La Scalera where for a few francs you could hole up with the ageing whores, drinking cheap wine and smoking opium. There was no sign of Jean-Christophe. We showed his photograph to the brothel madams, the barmen and the bouncers at the cabarets, to the moutchos in the hammams, but no one had seen him. Nor was there any news of him at the hospitals and the police stations.
Émilie came to see me at the pharmacy. My first thought was to throw her out. Madame Cazenave had been right: nothing good could come of my relationship with her daughter; when I looked into her eyes, a horde of demons was set loose. And yet when she stepped into the shop, all my anger drained away. I had felt she was to blame for Jean-Christophe’s disappearance and for anything that might befall him; but in her face all I could see was an immense sadness, and I could not help but pity her. She stood at the counter, her fingers nervously twisting her handkerchief, pale, heartbroken, helpless.
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘How do you think I feel?’
‘And I’m sorry I got you mixed up in all this.’
‘What’s done is done.’
‘Every night I pray no harm has come to Jean-Christophe.’
‘I just wish I knew where he was.’
‘There’s still no news?’
‘Nothing.’
She stared at her hands. ‘What do you think I should do, Jonas? I was completely honest with him from the beginning. I told him I was in love with someone else. But he didn’t believe me, or maybe he thought he had a chance. Is it my fault that he never had a chance?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, mademoiselle. Besides, this is neither the time nor the place—’
She cut me off. ‘You’re wrong. This is the time and the place to tell the truth. It’s because I didn’t have the courage to tell the truth, to say what I really felt, that all this has happened. I’m not cruel, I never meant to hurt anyone.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘You have to believe me, Jonas.’
‘I can’t. You showed no respect for Fabrice. You put your hand on my thigh while you sat in that restaurant smiling at him. But that wasn’t enough. You had to break Jean-Christophe’s heart. And now you’ve dragged me into your little game.’
‘It’s not a game.’
‘What do you want from me?’
‘I want you to know . . . that I love you.’
I felt the room crumble around me.
Émilie did not flinch. She stared at me with her big black eyes, her fingers still clutching her handkerchief.
‘Please, mademoiselle, go home.’
‘Don’t you see? The only reason I flirted with other boys was so you would notice me; the only reason I laughed was so you would hear me. I didn’t know what to do, how to say I love you.’
‘Then don’t say it.’
‘Can a heart be silent?’
‘I don’t know, but I don’t want to hear it.’
‘Why not?’
‘Please, don’t say any more . . .’
‘No, Jonas! I love you and I need you to know that. You don’t know how hard this is for me, how humiliated I feel, baring my soul to you, telling you I love you when you don’t seem to feel anything for me. But it would be much worse to go on saying nothing when everything inside me, every breath I take, is screaming “I love you”. I loved you the first time I saw you . . . That was ten years ago, in this very pharmacy. I don’t know if you remember, but I’ve never forgotten it. It was raining that morning, my gloves were soaking wet. I’d come for my injection; I used to come every Wednesday. You had just come home from school. I remember the colour of your school bag with the studded straps, the jacket you were wearing, the fact that the laces of your brown shoes were untied. You told me you were thirteen. We talked about the Caribbean. While your mother was giving me my injection in the back room, you pressed a rose between the pages of my geography book.’
I felt a spark, and suddenly memories whirled dizzyingly in my mind and it all came back to me: Émilie . . . a little girl with a hulking man who seemed to be carved from a standing stone. Suddenly I remembered her face at the picnic when I told her I worked in a pharmacy. She was right. We had met before, a long time ago.
‘Do you remember?’
‘Yes.’
‘You asked me what Guadeloupe meant, and I told you it was a French island in the Caribbean . . . When I found the rose in my geography book, I was so touched and I hugged the book. There was a rose bush in a pot over there on the sideboard. And there used to be a statue of the Virgin Mary behind the counter, on that shelf . . .’
As she talked, the scene flooded back with extraordinary clarity and her soft voice held me spellbound; I felt as though I was being carried away by a great wave. Madame Cazenave’s voice was ringing in my head, trying to drown out her daughter, pleading with me, imploring me, and yet I could still hear Émilie’s voice over her mother’s shrieking, clear and sharp as a needle.
‘Younes . . .’ she said. ‘That’s your name, isn’t it? I remember everything.’
‘I . . .’
‘Please, don’t say anything.’ She pressed her finger to my lips. ‘I’m afraid of what you might say. I need time to catch my breath.’
She took my hand and held it to her breast.
‘Can you feel my heart beating, Jonas . . . Younes?’
‘This is wrong,’ I stammered, but I did not take my hand away.
‘Why is it wrong?’
‘Jean-Christophe loves you. He is madly in love with you,’ I said, trying to drown out the voices of mother and daughter, locked in mortal combat in my head. ‘He told us you were getting married.’
‘Why are you talking about him? I was talking about us.’
‘I’m sorry, but Jean-Christophe’s friendship means more to me than some childhood memory.’
My words clearly shocked her, but she was graceful.