The Child Read online

  At least now we know how much we’re loved, he sneered icily. What does he think he can do for them, come back to life? He had cut a slice of bread and chewed it, staring at them in turn in bewilderment and distress. Simone gripped the back of the high chair to calm her dizziness; her face was burning, and her eyes were smarting as though she had grit in them. She described the incident that morning—how Claude was starting to lose control of his left hand—as if trying to find an excuse for his driving. The idea that he could no longer see how close he was to his own death traumatized her. She felt as though she was going off with a madman.

  Cédric’s revolt had washed over her in an instant, like rising bile she was unable to vomit up, just a trickle of saliva. The bathroom looked straight out among the branches of the fruit trees. All that sparkling whiteness clouded with the tears she dabbed at hopelessly, ordering herself to get a grip. Life with Claude had been safe, stable, and frustrating. For a long time, pleasure had come from seeing him abandon himself for her sake to an intimacy that somehow offended him. He had never gone in for the effusions she had hoped for; his lovemaking had been earnest and hurried, always vaguely embarrassed, and she had resented him without admitting it to herself, never truly fulfilled but neither telling him nor forgiving him, and, above all, without understanding that so little did not satisfy him, either. We didn’t give each other enough happiness, she kept mumbling uncontrollably to herself while Yolande tapped anxiously at the door and Aude, left on her own downstairs, began to wail.

  On that day of extraordinary radiance and spring growth tumbling into the heavy caress of the Seine, the return home and the approach of the shopping center on the horizon, where the tower blocks loomed in fours over the old villages, struck Simone like an assault. She felt as though she was entering a fog of depression, forsaken and silent, from which Claude had always refused, during all these years, to break free and go and live somewhere else. He’s been so stubborn, and for what? she thought. Who’s it helped, staying put? Her tears began to fall again. She didn’t bother to hide them, and leaned her head against the car window, screwing up her handkerchief into a hard crumpled ball in her fist. Claude was just going to have to get used to seeing her cry, since there was not an ounce of courage to hope for from her. He was silent. For a few minutes, a scooter had been keeping pace with the car, letting a gap open up, then looping around them again with a casual swing of the rider’s slumped back. Each time, the helmeted head turned its blank face to them, revealing nothing but the reflections of the traffic passing across the opaque visor. Could Claude put a name to the body? He had known them all intimately under their flapping short pants and T-shirts, in effort and the hard, wild freedom of youth. Simone did not understand what this car chase was about. She was afraid of smoldering resentments kindled by the assault at the sports club. What does he want from you? she asked with a virulence that surprised her. There was a kind of flicker in Claude’s eyes when he turned to her. Her comment had distracted or annoyed him. They had reached the turn into their street and could see smoke rising from it and hear a crackling fire of branches. Claude turned the wheel slowly as he entered the street. His mouth was twisted in bitterness. The only thing bothering him the whole time had been the whims of his lazy hand, Simone realized.

  After the garage door had swung to behind the car and Claude had switched off the engine, he looked at her, grasped her shoulder and gave her a gentle shake, and said, I’m sorry, then begged her to pull herself together and got out. Simone watched him straighten up under the concrete ceiling oozing long trickles of saltpeter. The roof window cut a disk of sunlight among the dust and spiderwebs. Claude walked over to take a look, perhaps checking that the scooter had disappeared, and it was at that moment that something in his suffering finally buckled.

  She had never seen him weep. His sobs gave him an oddly frowning expression that embarrassed her. He put his numb hand up to his face, vainly stuck two fingers in his wet eyes, then wiped his mouth on his sleeve. It took Simone a few seconds to understand and to accept the regrets that washed over him. It was so incredibly cruel and so sudden that she could not even find the strength to evade his shivering embrace. She would never manage either to forgive him or to console him for having wanted to see Jovana again, she realized.

  It was twelve minutes past four, displayed in red digits that swam in the pitch-black of the bedroom. Claude was no longer in bed; the imprint of chilled sweat left a totally dark presence, and Simone ran her hand over it, trying calmly to fend off her distress and disgust. The wind whistled and echoed along the gutters, startling the night with a strange tension. But it took Simone some time to get worried about what Claude was doing, force herself out of her leaden tiredness, and throw on a bathrobe.

  He had put the light on in the sitting room. The net curtains were half turned back and behind them the slats of the fragile gray screen were packed together. A glass of water and a yogurt container had been left out on the coffee table. The sound of the television was off, and a passing high-speed train majestically crossed the picture. Simone turned up the volume; then she switched the TV off and called out to Claude. He was nowhere to be found: he had gone out into the street.

  Simone saw him in the distance, standing in the middle of the street, legs astride like a guard. The loneliness of the neighborhood was heavy with darkness and perfumes stirred by the gales. Mist shimmered way off downtown, where the bar of buildings formed a black rectangle dotted with glinting staircases. A few dozen meters away, the traffic seemed to be coming at them off the freeway out of a void of thick silence; that was where Claude was looking. Simone could not bring herself to call him. The sight of him standing in the street in his pajamas derailed her with pity. It scared her far more to see him behaving suddenly irrationally than to know he was done for.

  He stood there motionless for a few minutes; then his back relaxed, he shook his painful arm, took a good look around, and then turned seeming not a bit surprised to see her. Simone shrank into a corner of the hallway, groping for something to steady her confusion. The garden gate swung closed with a metallic clunk; then she heard the shuffle of slippers along the passage, and suddenly Claude was there under the crude light in the hall. He was getting up early. It was ages since Simone had seen him in the slovenly state of waking. Strands of hair, which he had always worn in a stiff gray brush, were crushed down against the sides of his head; his cheeks were hollow under the stubble and his thin lips seemed to have been fused by a chalk line. His body still looked fit but somehow dulled by the invisible ash of cancer. He’s dying, she realized, for the first time fully aware of this.

  There was another attack against a bus, he announced, closing the door behind him. Simone said, Oh yes, and waited for him to go on. It was in C., you know, farther east, but I just had to go and see. See what? she asked softly, thinking, What on earth was he hoping to put right? See what could be done was his irritated rejoinder, brought out with an aggressive expression of pain. Simone tightened the belt of her robe without answering. His pain would always be impenetrable to her, but his sudden fears and his outrageous sensitivities, and now this kind of illogicality, were seeping into her like poison.

  For as long as she had known him, he had been a volunteer firefighter but had been called out no more than twice, the first time to put out a blazing shed, the second time to watch a detached house collapse with an old man and his dog trapped inside. If something happened, he would not be called—people in the area must already know that he was no longer in a fit state. His eyes scanned her harshly, as though defying her to think, like the others, that he was finished. Simone could feel the edge of the door frame digging into her spine; she felt like falling on the floor, wailing and begging him to get real.

  A car went by in an explosion of bass notes; then it was dark again, and quiet and windy. Claude was not sleepy; he put the kettle on and got out the biscuits. They both sat down at the kitchen table. Street lighting through the branches of the birc
h tree shifted cheerfully on the ceiling. Claude stretched out his arm to take the kettle and pour water over the tea bags in the cups. The twisted collar of his pajama top gaped over his ashen neck, where warts stood out on minuscule threads of skin. Simone could not remember when these growths had first appeared; they played on her mind unhappily. She gathered her robe about her, from which escaped a fishy waft of sleep. How pathetic two adult bodies are, alone in the night when all desire is gone. Gradually, shame gave way to sorrow. Jovana’s half-glimpsed youth merged with the memory of the little boy’s kiss in the same feeling of inevitable jealousy.

  Claude took little slurps, pushing out his lips in a moist pout. Simone pointed out that they had not even talked about Gaël, but the look he cast her over his cup was absent. She added that she had adored him and wished she had never met him. Claude was still not listening. He had taken off his slippers and was staring at his bare feet, which lay flat on the tiled floor. My left foot feels as though it’s touching the floor through a sock, he noted after a moment. A half smile floated on his lips, a smile of bitter satisfaction. It was time I decided to get treatment, he went on, laying his hand on hers in a ghastly protective gesture. Simone stared at him, not daring to understand that he genuinely wanted to get better, cursing love, or desire, that had spawned such crazy, reckless hope. She said, Yes, sure, and smiled at him, her chest tight with screams she could not release. The sickness was getting worse, but it would now be she who was in pain. We weren’t carefree, but we were happy all the same, mostly because we respected each other, she mused, watching him put his slippers back on. From now on, we’re going to lie to each other.

  JOVANA CALLED a bit over a month after that night when the gales had broken off the tops of the birch and when Claude, for the first time in ten years, had not come back to bed. Simone answered the call, while he tried to keep down his nausea on the sofa. She took him the receiver and he grabbed it from her, adopting a suspicious, almost irritated look, which mostly made Simone feel offended. The room went suddenly dark with the rustling approach of a shower of fine rain falling vertically on the lawn. Claude stood up from the sofa to close the French doors. His whole body was angled toward Jovana’s voice, and he answered her repeatedly with a marked Right. Simone watched him sit back down on the edge of the sofa, his bad hand upturned on his thigh like a dead beetle. Having her listening to him was putting him off, and she eventually obeyed his almost pleading awkwardness and went back to her work. The study window looked out on a great shaft of sunshine through dazzling white streaks of rain. Simone sat down to face the prescriptions, checks, and patients’ notes piled neatly on either side of the computer. She finished the cold dregs of a coffee and kicked the door shut so as not to overhear anything. The pain of jealousy sucked her mind into a great hole of anxiety. She could think of nothing other than the dwindling hope of what love was left. It was the only sorrow she was capable of: an incurable bitterness that she was not even loved enough by Claude to be able to be of any use to him.

  Claude half-sat up on the sofa when he heard her come back into the room. The purple rings around his eyes gave him the wild stare of a convict. Jovana was hoping they could have Gaël stay with them for a week or two. She had to go to Belgrade and couldn’t take him with her. Her scruples were genuine, he insisted, massaging the back of his neck with both hands, and the request so legitimate, he couldn’t exactly protest that he was tired and throwing up. Simone waited for him to say straight out that he had agreed. She eyed him, his wasted body swamped in the folds of his tracksuit, the receiver lying between his legs like a kind of unseemly outsize penis. She was finding the submissive way that he was letting the treatment wear him down, irascibly and stubbornly hopeful, so difficult to cope with. Did he really think that he could put up with the absurd added torture, in front of the little boy, of knowing that Jovana was happy? Still, Simone tried to convince herself that at least these artificial duties would take his mind off the nausea his days reeled by in, and the paralysis that was gradually anesthetizing the pain but which was not yet more than loss of feeling. The previous day, an unsightly bald patch the size of a medallion had appeared on the back of his head where his hair had fallen out. The sight of this ivory crust caught her off guard every time with a wave of nausea and had the bizarre effect of tarnishing the memory of Gaël. Claude, of course, had not managed to describe to Jovana the hell of silent patience the stay would be for an eleven-year-old child. They ought to have called her back to warn her, but Simone did not know how or where to reach her. Gaël didn’t want to talk to me on the phone, Claude added suddenly, getting up to take the remote control. His delayed amazement was full of bitterness and foreboding, and it unhinged her. She felt cowardly for not daring to tell him that he couldn’t look after the child in this condition, and guilty for looking forward so crazily to being with and helped by a bit of youth.

  IT HAD BEEN AGREED that Jovana would bring Gaël on Saturday toward midday. In the morning, Simone flung open the door to the garden, hoping to let out the chemo-thickened air and cloying staleness of flaking skin. The sitting room was bright with a fine early-summer light. The heat was creeping over the lawn, rousing a buzzing of wasps among the heavy bunches of plums, which looked like hard kernels. Simone brought out the plastic seats but couldn’t find where the umbrella was kept. Expectation was throwing her into a kind of impotence. She had left Claude huddled, shivering, over the toilet, exhausting himself to tears as he strained vainly to expel the stones that were lacerating his anus. His troubles affected her but left her no possibility for reaction or sympathy.

  It was not quite twelve o’clock when the dark form of the SUV glided slowly up behind the hedge to the gate. Simone had gone back to watching the street from the kitchen window. She felt her heart bump and thought how crazy she was to be so nervous and fearful.

  There was a little involuntary hoot; then the car radio stopped, all the windows rose together, and half-glimpsed faces were eclipsed by the reflection of the roofs against the deep blue summer sky. In the long, motionless minute that followed, Simone’s joy began to falter, sapped by the trivial fact of Claude’s silence, for he was still locked in the lavatory. Jovana had just squeezed through the half-open garden gate and was squinting into the sun. Simone had not expected her to be tall. Jovana’s punctuality inexplicably disarmed her jealousy.

  Jovana was wearing a bright blue flared miniskirt over black leggings stretched so tight that they were almost transparent on her sturdy thighs, and chunky white sneakers. Her hair was pulled back in a high ponytail the same as before, her face was full and glowing, and her whole build gave her a virile but girlish mien, with brisk, healthy gestures that were instantly beguiling. Gaël had gotten out of the car, too, but was still engrossed in an electronic game, his body limply blocking the open gate. Simone could see the tousled movement of his hair on the back of his neck, rubbed up the whole journey against the seat back. Jovana had taken a big backpack out of the trunk and was peering shortsightedly at the house. She asked Gaël several times with a kind of numb patience to get a move on and clear up the mess and to stop that thing. Simone shouted up to Claude that they had arrived, but she got no reply. So she made up her mind to go and open the door, not sorry to have to see and feel right away, fully and unrelieved, the regret one might have for not being with a woman like that.

  Jovana did a double take of surprise when she saw her at the front door. Her full lips were sucked in with the same mannerism Simone had loved in Gaël. Jovana said hello and held out her hand, then changed her mind and offered her cheek for a kiss. Simone found she smelled of fries and Nivea. She felt mean-spirited, hurt. Gaël came forward in his turn for a kiss, but he was scratching his elbow angrily and refused to meet her gaze. Everything about him suggested sullen resentment of his mother. Jovana looked him up and down without taking offense at his sulking or showing any real sympathy. I really can’t take him, she explained again with a smile, gesturing vaguely toward the reason sh
e had given on the phone. She had picked up a snail shell and threw it into the flowers, jolting the backpack off her shoulder. I’ve put in some gym clothes, she said by way of asking about Claude’s condition. Simone replied, flabbergasted, that there was absolutely no question of his doing any sports. Jovana’s oversight had aroused Simone’s anxieties about what they were going to do with the child for two weeks. She nearly said that it would no longer be possible, but Claude was standing at the foot of the stairs with his hand on the rail, as though stopped in his tracks as he was about to go back upstairs.

  He had given up the tracksuit for a shirt and corduroy trousers, rubbed the stale odor of his lusterless skin with toilet water, and shaved off what remained of his brush of hair, which had fallen out, leaving great patches as pale as wax. Simone was seeing for the first time, and together with Jovana, his somehow enormous, hairless scalp, cast from the same dented bone as his face. What had he thought as he checked his appearance in the mirror? Had he been hoping for something? Had he seen that he had turned into somebody else, someone with a crazed, oddly younger, almost disquieting look?

  Jovana shot him a warm, slightly commiserating hello. Nothing was left of the love she had felt twelve years earlier except an obvious intimate sadness at not recognizing him like this, a sadness that would pass or come out as nostalgia, and Claude, lucid and stiff, registered this, looking around for Simone with a kind of silent, unbearably pathetic supplication. Gaël stood in anxious and awkward surprise at the sight of the drab face and yellow scalp. Yielding to a sympathetic intuition, he seized the backpack and took Claude’s hand to follow him upstairs to his bedroom.