Theory of Remainders (44 page)

Morin’s cutting of his tongue was a testimony to the torment he’d experienced—the very same pain medical tests had been unable to explain. Suardet had claimed the symptoms were psychosomatic, which Philip found entirely plausible. That didn’t make them any less real.

Nevertheless, a glossectomy—partial or total excision of the tongue—was a radical solution. In the case of a localized cancer, removal of the tissue was the price one paid for saving the rest of the body. But if the malady were psychological, the goal might be different; resection of the tongue eliminated the very possibility of speech. It was possible that Édouard Morin had wanted to say something he shouldn’t, so he found a way to stop himself.

Melanie Patterson’s words came to mind: Some people are full of rests.

Philip felt implicated in this act of self-mutilation. Morin had needed him to witness it. The cutting of his tongue annulled the invitation to dialogue, rendering it moot. Or mute.

So many of Morin’s tics, his compulsive swallowing, his obsessions with language, his speech, even his humming pronunciation could be reduced to the single image of the tongue. All these tics were forms of expression.

Philip downed his coffee. Through the window he watched a thrush dip in and out of the hedge in the backyard. The grass needed mowing. The garden wall was missing some stones. Yes, there were chores aplenty in this old house.

Now he turned his attention to the wilderness of Morin’s words. Carrying the digital recorder with him as he wandered through the rooms of the empty house, he let his attention drift as he listened. He browsed through the books in the study, climbed the stairs to the bedrooms, even ventured up to the third floor. The changes of scenery helped him hear differently. He held on to what he could, whatever felt connected, and the rest he let drain away.

There were the broad preoccupations: the infatuation with language, the problem of indirectness, the anxiety about order. And the quirks: the insistence on
eyeshot
, the references to history, the buzzing accent. Place names ciphered Sophie’s initials, but they also alluded to Morin’s concern with maps, limits and borders.
Es gibt Grenzen, die man nicht überschreitet
. There are lines one doesn’t cross—such as the frontier between languages. Languages, Morin had said, were unfaithful—full of betrayals, like traitors of the fatherland.

Yes, translations were betrayals. But they were also accomplishments. Yvonne used to demonstrate as much. She’d throw up her hands in the middle of a project on Petrarch’s verse, complaining that such-and-such a phrase was
untranslatable
. Then she’d take a walk around the block or have a cup of coffee, and sit back down and translate it. Translations were always failures that still somehow worked, achieving something other than what they aspired to. They were mis-accomplishments.

It was Yvonne who understood all about language, about the crossing of borders, the balance between words. He only knew about it from the outside. When he’d started learning French, he’d aspired to the ease and naturalness of a native speaker. But that was never going to happen. Far from it. His French was always a misfire that barely clipped its target. He could manipulate the vocabulary and grammar, but French would always be an appendage, not an internal organ. And as an appendage, it could be separated from him. Like a tongue.

Beneath it all lay Morin’s pervasive preoccupation with evenness. Wasn’t that somehow the key? Reality is always such a poor match for one’s ideals, he had insisted. Nothing is perfectly even.

When he finished the recordings, Philip took the diary out to the back steps and sat in the sunlight by the overgrown lawn. His notes were more selective than the voice recordings, but they were also broader. Some items that Philip had originally marked with bold underlining now seemed unimportant. If he’d written in pencil rather than with Yvonne’s black pen, perhaps he would now have erased these passages, reducing their memory to curls of rubber he could sweep away with his hand. Instead, he simply drew a line through them. They survived as a kind of residue.

There were also passages where the opposite had occurred. For example, Morin’s first reference to his tongue, noted in passing on page five of the diary, had not initially drawn Philip’s attention. Its importance became evident only with the passage of time.

He also wondered about what the diary lacked—the apparently trivial details he had not recorded anywhere, dispatching them to oblivion. Those items might look quite different now. In the haystack of police reports and court records, might there not be a needle he’d failed to recognize, one whose point would prick only when pressed in a particular way? Such traces were now lost and forgotten.

The sun was high in the sky now. A dog barked in the distance.

It occurred to him that this volume also told another story—one about a person never mentioned on a single page, but present everywhere: Philip himself. Like any journal, it reflected the writer’s activities—the first meeting with Suardet, which days he met with Roger, where he was to pick up Yvonne. All these items were reported flatly, like a simple chronicle. Although the book in front of him was technically a diary, he’d not actually confided in these pages. Still, he could gauge his mood by the handwriting, which changed from page to page, now calm and upright, now turbulent and misshapen, now restrained but angry. Words were circled, underscored, and scratched out. On one page the letters S M A had three stiff bars of ink stroked beneath them. The corners of some pages were dog-eared, and margins overflowed with interpolated notes and exclamation points. Arrows and numbers linked passages together.

He’d not considered the diary in this light before. It had a main character—Édouard Morin—but it also had a narrator. Both voices spoke of the same subject.
You and I
, Morin had said,
we are not so very different
.

Philip dropped the diary in his lap and stared out over the yard. It was an outlandish notion. And yet, what had Philip done? For fifteen years he had occupied himself as best he could, living in a form of confinement that was no less solitary than Édouard Morin’s. He had alienated himself from those he loved, had thrown himself into a profession that exposed him to the intimacy of other people’s lives while forbidding him to share his own.

Oh, he could fence with Roger, could even talk around the edge of things with Yvonne. But what most needed to be said wouldn’t pass through his lips. The problem wasn’t French. It wasn’t just language. It wasn’t even Édouard Morin. No, the problem was with him.

Words did not mesh with things in Philip’s life. Everything was a little off. Everything was always out of whack. It was simply a question of degree. When Morin had insisted at their very first meeting that Sophie’s body was not
out of place
, he was undoubtedly right. It all came down to how much leeway you allowed.

Sophie’s body. Even that was a dodge, a pretext. At first he’d told himself he owed it to Sophie to recover her. Then he’d wanted to protect Margaux. He’d convinced himself with all manner of noble thoughts. He hadn’t needed Roger’s slick salesmanship for this; he’d managed to con himself.

In fact, what had kept him in Yvetot was not his daughter. Sophie was gone. Bones or dust, it didn’t matter. No, it was not something
missing
that held him there. It was something
found
. It was Roger. Yvonne. Margaux. Bécot. Hell, even Hervé. It was the feeling of belonging, of being tied to something once again. Of walking down the street and sensing that, for better or worse, someone cared. Or at least noticed.

Sophie had been a convenient excuse. But he’d used her as a screen. He’d fudged the truth the same way Morin had fudged geography, pushing the German blockades a little to the left or the right.

If only he could have been more like Yvonne.

The buzz of his phone interrupted the stillness of the garden.

“Hello there,” Roger called out the other end. “Say, I just thought you’d want to know: Hervé is on the war path.”

Philip closed his eyes and tried to think. “This is no business of his.”

“Well, I’ll be the last person to side with him. But you did take his wife out for dinner. And someone says you actually embraced her outside the hotel. In the States, I believe such matters are settled with firearms.”

“As far as I know, it’s not against the law for me to be in Yvetot.”

“I suppose not,” he drawled. “Not at the moment, anyway.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Well,” Roger began, “there was the little matter of sneaking in to see Édouard Morin. And then . . . the falsification of documents.”

“What are you talking about?”

Roger cleared his throat. Hervé was well connected in Rouen, and he’d managed to lay his hands on the letter they had fabricated for the Bureau of Records in the courthouse.

“It was a simple request,” Philip protested. “They could have turned it down.”

“Well, it appears he has reported it to the authorities.”

Philip heaved out a breath. These tactics exhausted him. He would have been delighted to meet Hervé face to face and have it out once and for all. A duel sounded about right. But as the offended party, the choice of weapon went to Hervé, and he’d already chosen the one he was most skilled at: bureaucracy. Nothing in France was so clumsy and ponderous as the machinery of the administration, yet once put in motion, nothing could be so hard to stop. It wasn’t as swift as a blade or a bullet, but it was powerful, inexorable. The complaint would work its way through the chain of command, and someone would come knocking.

“What’s going to happen?” Philip asked.

“Well, nothing—right away. I spoke with Francis about it—Brigadier Boucher. He figures they’ll send orders to the police station, and he’ll be required to bring you in for questioning. He also said he expects to have a great deal of difficulty locating you.”

“I’m at your mother’s place.”

“As I said, Francis thinks it may be hard to track you down.” There was a voice in the background. “What?” Roger called out to someone at the other end. “Oh, right.” He addressed Philip again. “He says, especially if your car is kept off the road.”

He was up in the guest room stuffing clothes in his bag when the phone rang again. From the number he saw it was Yvonne, and he decided to let it ring. A moment later, though, it began anew, and he realized she wasn’t going to give up. Maybe she was worried. Maybe, like Roger, she wanted to warn him about Hervé.

“Yvonne—” he began.

“What’s going on? Why on earth are you back?” she said, her tone more plaintive than angry.

He sank onto the bed. In fits and starts he told her about his visit with Édouard Morin, about the self-mutilation, about the gagging noises coming from the man’s throat. Certainly these were the most proximate causes for his return, but they didn’t really address her question, and the very fact of this failure to answer underscored for him the real problem.

From the wall of the bedroom, photographs stared at Philip, a collection of Auberts at different ages in different times—Anne-Madeleine, Roger and Yvonne, Évelyne and Flora, aunts, uncles, cousins, spouses. Even when they weren’t blood relatives you could see the resemblance, all part of the same family, community, culture, language. One figure stood out from the others, present only in a few of the shots: a bearded man who was too tall for the group, dressed like a foreigner, carrying his body differently, as though he required more space. The odd one out.

“I understand Édouard Morin,” Philip said into the phone. “I know what it’s like for him.”

Yvonne bristled. “I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.”

And yet it was true. In a strange way, he felt close to the man. He tried to explain this to Yvonne, the problem of tongues that slipped, tongues that were tied, mother tongues—all those situations in language where he failed to find the right word.

“Don’t even think that,” she said in a rush. “You’re nothing like him.”

But he was. He kept putting one thing in front of another, masking how he really felt, expressing everything indirectly, looking for one thing when he should be looking for another.

“You have nothing in common with Édouard Morin,” she repeated firmly. “Do you hear me?
Nothing
.”