Viviane (13 page)

You are leaning on your elbows at the balustrade of a terrace on the ninth floor. All the apartment windows have full western exposure onto the open water plied by ferries, oil tankers, container ships. To the south rise the cranes of the industrial port, looming over the deserted wharf like long-suffering pterodactyls. Then
come the domes of the refinery and the vertical labyrinth of a cemetery.

The apartment comprises three rather well-laid-out rooms, with the bedrooms on either side of the living room, plus the bathroom and toilet together at the end of the hall. The interior decoration is minimal but the packing boxes are gone. All your belongings have been put away in cupboards and closets and on newly installed shelves, an operation requiring numerous trips to major hardware stores. You didn't do anything. Catalogs were brought to you, you checked off the models, left the details to the professionals. You got out your checkbook.

So you left the Hôtel-Dieu, and your mother brought you home. In the weeks that followed you slept a great deal. Sometimes you watched afternoon television, where airy and insubstantial things happen in faraway settings. Surgeons two-time their wives with nurses pregnant by airline pilots, the husbands die through mishaps with ice picks, and the widows drive convertibles against a backdrop of azure blue. They all lulled you like the memory of an old joke.

In March, you were already feeling more energetic: it was time to look to the future. Well, Biron
Concrete was—how to put this—none too eager to see you again. Jean-Paul did not come right out and say no, Viviane, I'd prefer that you not return to your old job, or I would like Héloïse to replace you. He said you know, I have contacts—partners, entrepreneurs, district organizations—adding, do you know Normandy? Can you imagine, they're looking for an assistant regional director of communications, so I thought, hold on, why not you. Wouldn't you like a little change of air?

You took a train at the Gare Saint-Lazare, interviewed for the job for appearance's sake. Two weeks later, all taken care of: the salary level, notice given for the Rue Cail apartment, a new place on the waterfront (your only requirement). You started work in your new position on April 15. It's a job, no more, no less. You go every day to an office, where you do what is asked of you and leave at six o'clock.

The local child-care woman, in your opinion, can't hold a candle to the old one. She talks a lot, asks too many questions, never waits for the answers before asking new ones. The advantage is you can let her babble on surrounded by screaming children, whereas yours is so well behaved that at times she frightens you.

You did not bring along the rocking chair. That is
not where you read the press clippings collected during your stay at the Hôtel-Dieu, nor is it where you knit while you go over the thread of events. You do all that in bed, before setting aside your knitting to apply your hands to a different, more relaxing activity.

And so, after your little panic attack on November 15, you did indeed make an appointment with the doctor for the end of the afternoon, and you showed up right on time. But you were not alone. You were with your daughter, whom you were not going to leave on her own at the age of twelve weeks, after all. What a face the doctor made: he was even more huffy with you than usual, yawning as he listened to you and renewed your prescription.

After which everything becomes very strange, as if someone else's memories had been instilled in you. Yet you know they are true. You leave the office. Once more, you have not gotten what you wanted. You think, this is a waste of time, there's no point, it just keeps me on the hook, that's all. Dusk seeps into the stairwell; a potted plant watches over the silence. You sit down on the top step, curved like a parasol over the baby. You cry.

Someone else is already in the office. You heard the
bell ring when you were with the doctor and he let in the next patient using a switch on the low table near his armchair. The person entered the waiting room, closing the door to the landing. When that patient leaves the office, perhaps a quarter of an hour later, you are still sitting on the top step but your tears have dried. You look up when he passes you to dash outside. It's a momentary exchange of glances, a high-angle/low-angle shot in which you both seem equally distraught. He makes as if to do something, sees the baby asleep against you. Runs away. You have no memory of his face, but all the papers will tell you it was Pascal Planche.

You stayed another few minutes on the step before pulling yourself together. It isn't enough never again to set foot in that office. You must also look the doctor in the face to tell him: you're useless and you're fired. This time, all the doors were open. You went right in and saw the man on the floor, the red flood on the blue shirt, the eyes and mouth wide open in one last gasp of incomprehension.

You will not find out what drove Pascal Planche to do this. You will learn only that the doctor's letter opener was found in his apartment, and tests prove
without a doubt that it is the murder weapon. You will conclude that your own knives—lugged from the 12th to the 10th then on to the 5th arrondissements and so on—were never involved. Proof: they have been returned to your husband.

Three months after the incident, when you left the Hôtel-Dieu, you were handed a copy of your medical file. You studied it, frowning with concentration. You read and reread it without recognizing anyone in that pileup of technical terms like the ones in lab reports. You tried to understand. At your local library, you examined journals, specialized dictionaries, but all you saw were white pages streaked with tiny black insects, and those signs supposedly representing letters that would then clump into words and sentences and paragraphs did not trace any intelligible pattern. You observed the people around you, bent over voluminous works from which they were gleaning notes meticulously recorded on index cards. They seemed to understand; to them the words were meaningful. You would have liked to question them, these students, job hunters, lovers of psychological curiosities. Afraid of revealing terrible secrets, secrets accessible to everyone save yourself, you didn't dare say it's for a friend, I'm doing research so I can help
her. Folding and refolding the medical file, you transformed it into a paper boat and you went to the Bassin de la Villette, the largest artificial lake in Paris, where the water had frozen in large sheets drifting beneath the orange sun. You set the boat in the lake, then turned your back on it.

Out on the terrace, you watch the birds circling in the sky until the day vanishes completely beneath the horizon. Then you enter the bedroom where the baby is resting under the coursing lions and galloping giraffes, who settle down at your touch. The child tries out a few
vocalises
, exploring the variations of her instrument a little more methodically, and you reply with distracted enthusiasm. Her warbling grows more elaborate every day. She fuels the dialogue with smiles; she questions, suggests, protests, wriggles like a bug on its back, laughing in the hope of winning you to her side. In the end you take her in your arms to rock her dreamily from side to side, up and down, in more and more of a daze.

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