The Madonna of Notre Dame (19 page)

He let his soul drift. He now saw himself dressed in white, alone on the edge of an open grave where his older brother’s body had just been laid. He was seventeen and his dead brother had just turned twenty. The gravediggers were sealing the older brother’s tomb forever, handing him over to the rot of time, to worms, to dust, while the younger one remained on the edge of the abyss, his whole life before him and the experience of pain already rooted deep in his memory.

Three days later, he went back to the cemetery, to bid his brother a final farewell. He’d aged thirty years. He was drained. He walked along the graveled paths. He saw the flowers from the ceremony, from the burial, already wilted. He walked closer. The slab had been upended, and the grave was open, empty, deserted. He looked around. He called out. He could see his older brother walking away among the graves. He ran after him. The tombs scrolled by, anonymous, cold, smooth. He called out again. His older brother stopped, turned around, his face as it was during adolescence, intact, as it had been when they loved each other and had been close, before the drugs, before the dependency. His older brother spoke. He said goodbye. He held him in his arms.
He told him to get on with his life. He told him to seek the light. He told him that his little body was weak but that there was also much strength in it. He finally walked away. He returned to his grave. He vanished forever beneath the earth, after one last smile filled with a youth that would never have the chance to fade.

Was Kern dreaming? To what lands in his memory had his delirium and his fever taken him? He was now going through a gate. He heard the soil crunch under his feet. There was thick foliage all around him. He could finally lie on the ground. A blanket, a bed, or something akin to it. Rest his painful, motionless limbs. Spread his arms on the cool, damp grass. Sink into unconsciousness. Where was he? Above him, the black form of Notre Dame rose against the night, like a gigantic spider with a heavy body supported by its flying buttresses. He could see the apse drawing nearer. He reached out to try to touch it. He saw a figure come away from it, and walk around it. A white, pure, female figure with silky hair. He watched as she walked up the steps, nervous and suspicious, saw her knock on the door and wait, growing impatient. The door opened, allowed her to slip in, and another form took her place in the doorway: larger, darker, that of a man whose face remained concealed in the shadows, and who took the time to give a worried look outside before closing the door and also disappearing.

At last, he closed his eyes. He could feel that he was sinking once and for all, and yet he couldn’t quite fall asleep. Because of that light, distant still, shifting, immaculate, but which kept coming toward him and to which he felt irresistibly drawn.

They start walking again before dawn. They want to reach the village situated on the hill before the first rays of the sun. To seal off the area as quickly as possible, quietly, and in the dark. Later, they won’t find anything. Later, once it’s daylight, it’ll be too late. That’s what the sergeant said last night, and the sergeant is well-respected.

By the light of their lamps, before leaving the partly dried-up wadi, they fill their flasks at the murky trickles of water flowing here and there. It’s going to be a sweltering day. August here is unforgiving and you must never run out of water. It must be used sparingly. That’s what the sergeant reminds the second lieutenant in a few words, as the latter is already starting on his canteen when their ascent up the ridge has barely begun.

At the end of the day, once the operation is accomplished, they’ll go back to the base camp, probably by chopper, at worst by truck, and drink warm beer until their thirst is fully quenched, and think about the day to follow, about the next mission, and never mention the past. That’s how the Pursuit Commandos spend their resting hours.

Halfway up the slope, there’s the scheduled stop to radio in for confirmation. The orders are confirmed. To make a sweep of a village in the forbidden zone, where activity appears to have resumed. Check everyone’s documents. Do some clearing up. Stop the villagers from returning to live there. And—who knows?—perhaps recover the radio they’ve been chasing after for days, a PRC10 they lost during an engagement, and which some conscripts said they’d already glimpsed twice, through binoculars, on the back of a Fellagha on the run. The sergeant has turned this into a personal affair. The sergeant has great respect for equipment. He doesn’t like to see knowledge in the enemy’s hands. The young second lieutenant knows this, and he would quite like to recover the radio and give it to the sergeant as a trophy, as a first sign of complicity. Ever since he’s assumed the command of the paratroopers, the second lieutenant feels he’s being sized up, judged, and sometimes disapproved of by his junior. It’s the classic clash of styles between an old veteran who learned everything in Indochina, and a boy from a good family, from a long line of soldiers, fresh out of officer school. The sergeant has never taken the liberty to make a single criticism. Not once. However, his silence speaks volumes. His silence and some of his attitudes. Like the brief, practically imperceptible disgust he showed when, earlier on, the second lieutenant held out his flask to offer him a drink of water. The second lieutenant suspects it will take time to earn respect. Time, and passing the test of commanding open fire.

For now, they walk a few more minutes in almost total darkness. Their eyes have gotten accustomed to it. At times, they check with the soles of their combat boots that the stones are solid. A fall wouldn’t be dangerous but it would make noise. In this setting, the smallest rolling pebble can be heard within a five-hundred-yard radius. Behind them, they sense daylight breaking. They must pick up the pace, and reach the ridge from which they’ll be able to control part of the djebel. They’ll leave the AA52 machine gun all set up on the top of the hill, then come back down to the right, toward the first mechtas of the village and there, in those loam houses, they’ll achieve the final objective of their mission.

FRIDAY

N
EVER BEFORE HAD HE SEEN THE DAWN AS A REBIRTH. PERHAPS
it was because he’d slept out in the open and there was something new and unblemished about this sunrise over Île de la Cité. Perhaps it was because of the violent events of the night before. Perhaps because he’d been afraid—for his life and his body.

He let the shadows and the timid light of daybreak caress him. He was smiling like a fool and breathing through his mouth to escape the inexpressible stench he was steeped in, and which originated from the sleeping bag he was lying in. He hadn’t tried to move his limbs yet. For the time being, he chose to keep them numb and anesthetized by the night. He knew that as soon as he got up to return to that massive stone building he could see on the other side of the green fence, his body would make him pay for the excess, the imprudence, the received blows, and maybe even for his sins the night before. He had caressed a woman’s breasts. And brushed their soft tips with his lips.

The garden was deserted. Soon, its gates would reopen and tourists would swamp it with casual slowness. He would then have to extract himself from the sleeping bag and resume his double life as a priest and an investigator. Meanwhile, he took
advantage of this strangely late waking hour. He was absent from the world, absent from himself, and that helped him regain his strength and partly come around.

He heard footsteps on the gravel. The leaves of the bush behind which he was hidden rustled and Krzysztof’s hairy face peered out between two branches.

“You OK?”

“I’m OK, Krzysztof. Thank you for what you did last night.”

“Last night?”

“You picked me up from the ground, didn’t you? It was you, wasn’t it?”

“Bouvard Clichy, yes, yes.”

“What were you doing so far from your usual neighborhood?”

“Neighborhood?”

“What were you doing there?”

“
Polska Misja Katolicka.
”

“The Polish Catholic Mission, of course. And you were going home to sleep?”

“Notre Dame home, yes.”

“Notre Dame home. You brought me all the way here? You carried me on your back like Saint Christopher with the baby Jesus.”

“Here, yes. OK, OK.”

“I think you saved my life last night, Krzysztof.”

“OK, OK. No problem.”

The Pole held out a stale croissant to Father Kern. “
Musi ksiadz jesc.
”

“Is this for me?”

“
Musi odzyskac sile.
”

“Thank you, Krzysztof. What about you? Do you have food for yourself?”

His only reply was to pull out a can of cheap beer from
his pocket, knock it back in a few sips, burp loudly, and throw it against the fence that separated Square Jean-XXIII from the Notre Dame garden. Kern bit into the croissant. Krzysztof had probably obtained it from the café on the corner of Rue du Cloître. Sometimes, the woman who owned it would give him the previous day’s croissants in exchange for a few hours during which the Pole promised not to beg from the patrons who sat at the outdoor tables. Kern was hungry. He even picked the crumbs off his bloodstained shirt, which made Krzysztof laugh. It was perhaps the most delicious croissant the priest had ever eaten.

“You find killer?”

“No, Krzysztof, I haven’t found the killer yet.”

The vagrant grew somber and withdrew into silence. Then, as though after a lengthy internal debate, he ended up partially unzipping his padded jacket and slipping his hand into the opening. He pulled out a faded color photo, protected with transparent adhesive that had turned yellow in parts. It was of a little girl of ten or twelve, wearing a white First Communion dress, with a wooden cross hanging around her small, slender neck. Next to her, with his arm around her shoulders, there was a man in a brown suit and a flower-patterned necktie, with a careful side part in his blond hair, and a blissful smile. It took Father Kern awhile to recognize the Polish vagrant in this slightly stiff, awkward-looking dad who was posing before the camera lens in his Sunday clothes, and whose smile gave his face an adolescent and—it had to be said—fundamentally happy expression. What had happened since the day when this picture had been taken? What event could have made Krzysztof stumble down this endless slippery slope until he ended up behind a bush in Square Jean-XXIII, in the 4th arrondissement in Paris? Kern knew only too well. He’d seen it so many times during the course of his priesthood. Misery needed a trigger, a separation, an illness,
a family tragedy. A human being would fight for a long time before toppling over. Fate would have to attack relentlessly then, finally, deal you the deathblow.

Krzysztof stroked the photo with his tobacco-stained fingertips. “Mine little girl. Helena.”

“Where is she?”

The Pole looked at the priest, apparently not understanding, as though alien to time and space, and alien to himself. Kern repeated the question, pointing at the photo. “Where is Helena now?”

Krzysztof vaguely gestured around.

“Is she in Paris? Krzysztof, your daughter is in Paris? How old is she now? When was this picture taken?”

“I look for Helena. She leave Poland. She leave Kraków.”

“When was that? How old was she when she left? You came all the way here to look for her? When did she leave Poland?”

In response to this last question, Krzysztof traced a date in the mix of sand and gravel that, every night, constituted his bed, a date which, alone, summed up the extent and duration of the man’s fall: 1996.

Kern found it hard to ask the next question. Looking at the vagrant in his torn padded jacket, he thought he already knew the answer. “Did you find your daughter?”

The Pole grabbed the diminutive priest by the collar of his dry bloodstained shirt, and his breathing suddenly became noisy. He glared straight at Kern and his pale eyes grew misty. Then he muttered a few words into his beard two or three times before putting the photo back into his inside pocket. “You find killer. You find killer.” He opened a second can of beer and stared at it, disgusted, before emptying it in one go.

A few yards away, a municipal employee had just unbolted the garden gate and was starting a vague tour of inspection.
Krzysztof hid farther behind the foliage. The priest laid his skinny hand on the Pole’s thick forearm. “I will find him, Krzysztof. I promise. I promise, on my faith in the Blessed Virgin.”

It was time to go. Kern waited for the employee responsible for public gardens to leave. When he finally made up his mind to get up, his limbs testified to his memories. It was going to be a day filled with pain. He had to muster all his willpower to start walking. His body, he could feel it, was at the end of its tether. He turned once more toward the bush where Krzysztof was crouching, sluggish, huddled in his wine-colored padded jacket that was shedding feathers, and felt a pang in his heart.

He rinsed his face at the fountain on the corner of the square and Rue d’Arcole. His head was still caked with dried blood from the night before and he plunged his neck under the water. He shook himself like a puppy and the coolness did him good. Father Kern turned to the façade of Notre Dame.
The
two towers rose above his dripping head and, for the first time in his life, he thought they looked menacing. It wasn’t eight yet, and the Portal of Saint Anne was still shut. He’d have to go through the gate reserved for the staff, on the side of the Seine, walk along the cathedral south wall, past the presbytery, before he’d reach the sacristy door. At this time, with a bit of luck, he wouldn’t meet anybody before he’d had the chance to change his clothes. He needed to get rid of his dirty clothes and of Krzysztof’s smell of alcohol that permeated him. And above all, he had to cleanse himself of that moment of distraction when, as he lay his hands on a woman’s skin, he forgot nearly everything.