Woman in the Fifth

scenarios in my head, telling myself that, in a fit of anger, he’d decided to check them into a hotel for the night … and that he wasn’t letting me know their whereabouts to punish me for being such a bitch. But I knew that Zoltan would never do something so extreme. He mightn’t have had much in the way of ambition, but he still didn’t have a mean streak … something I always loved about him, even thought I was often so stupidly critical about so much to do with him. It’s terrible, isn’t it, how we lash out at the most important people in our lives — often against our better judgment, but just because we are frustrated in our own lives and …’

She broke off again. Another long drag on her cigarette.

‘The police arrived just before two. When I heard the voices on the stairs, I realized immediately that …’

Silence.

‘The police were very quiet, very solicitous. They told me there had been an accident, and would I please accompany them to the Hopital de la Pitie-Salpetriere. I became immediately hysterical and demanded to know what had happened. “Un accident, madame,” one of them said, also explaining that they weren’t able to discuss the circumstances of the incident or the condition of my husband and daughter. As the gendarme told me this, his colleague put his hand on my shoulder, as if to steady me. That’s when I knew they were dead.

‘I remember feeling as if I had walked into an empty elevator shaft — a long freefall. My legs buckled, but I somehow managed to make it into the bathroom and empty my stomach in the toilet. At that moment I wanted to stick my head into the vomit-filled water and not pull it out again. Death seemed like the only option. One of the policemen came into the bathroom and stood over me as I was sick. I sensed he knew I might do something selfdestructive — and once, when I dipped my head in the bowl, he gripped my shoulder and said, “You must somehow stay strong.”

‘I finished getting sick. The policeman helped me up. I remember flushing the toilet and going to the sink and filling it with cold water and plunging my head into it and the policeman getting a towel and wrapping it around my head, and shouting something to his colleague, and being helped into my coat and down the stairs, and into the back of their car.

‘At the hospital, they brought me into this small room. We waited almost a quarter of an hour for the “officials” to arrive — but I didn’t care. I knew that the longer “they” stayed away, the longer I wouldn’t have to face …’

She stopped in mid-sentence to light up another cigarette.

‘I must have gone through six cigarettes in that fifteen minutes. Then the door swung open and two men walked in. They were both middle-aged, chubby, grim-faced. One of them wore a white coat, the other a suit. A doctor and a police inspector. The doctor pulled up a chair beside me. The cop hovered by the door, watching me with dark, middle-of-the-night eyes. The doctor forced himself to make eye contact with me. When he started to say, “Madame, I regret to inform you …” I lost the fight I had been waging ever since the police had knocked on my apartment door. I must have cried for at least ten minutes — howling like some wounded animal. The doctor tried to take me by the hands to steady me, but I pushed him away. He offered something to calm me down. I screamed that nothing would deaden the pain. Eventually the doctor started explaining. “Hit-and-run … killed while crossing a street … they were on a zebra crossing when the driver struck them both … your husband killed instantly, your daughter died just fifteen minutes ago … we tried everything we could to save her, but her neck was broken, her other internal injuries too severe …”

‘The police inspector then began to speak, telling me that a passer-by had taken down the number of the car — a black Jaguar — and that they expected to trace the vehicle and apprehend the driver within the next twenty- four hours. “We are treating this as accidental manslaughter … but I must ask you: Did your husband have any enemies who might have wanted him … ?” I started screaming again, telling him that Zoltan had been a wonderful dreamy layabout with no ambition whatsoever, so why would anyone want him dead? “Tres bien, madame,” the inspector said. “I am sorry to have posed such a difficult question at this time.”

‘”I want to see them,” I started screaming. But they refused, informing me that their injuries were too severe. My screaming intensified. “I don’t care what they look like, I will see them.” But they still said no, the doctor telling me it would be too traumatic … that Zoltan’s skull had been crushed by the wheels of the car and Judit had been dragged for several meters by the car and her face …

‘That’s when I went crazy — kicking the desk, overturning the chairs, clawing at my face with my nails, and then trying to smash my head against the walls. I remember the policeman and the inspector attempting to hold me down, and me fighting against them, and the doctor running out of the room, and returning with a nurse, and me now shrieking that I wanted to die, and someone forcing my jacket off me and a needle penetrating my arm and the world going dark and …

‘When I came back into consciousness, I was strapped down to a bed in the hospital’s psycho wing. The nurse on duty said that I had been sedated for the past two days. She also told me the police wanted to speak with me. A few hours later, the inspector showed up. By this point, one of the doctors on call had decided I was calm enough to be freed from my restraints, so I was sitting up in bed, still being fed intravenously, as I refused all offers of food. The inspector was all business.

‘”Madame, we have apprehended the driver …” he said. The man’s name was Henri Dupre. He was an executive with a big pharmaceutical company and lived in Saint-Germain-en-Laye. They were certain that he was very drunk when he killed my husband and daughter — because when they arrested him the next morning at his house, the blood test showed he was still way over the limit … which meant that when he had struck them, he must have been completely bourre. Smashed beyond reason.

‘The inspector also said that one of our neighbors had identified the bodies, and that they had been released to a mortician who had reconstructed their faces, and if I wanted to view them now …

‘But I told the inspector that I didn’t want to see them dead. Because I couldn’t face …’

Silence.

‘We didn’t have many friends in Paris. But my businessman lover, Monsieur Corty, did come and see me. I was still being sedated, still under “suicide watch”, but I could nonetheless tell that he was shocked by my appearance. His kindness was extraordinary. He spoke in a very quiet voice and told me that he would be taking care of all funeral expenses, and that he had spoken with the mortician and that he could hold off for a week or so with the burial until I was well enough to leave hospital.

‘But I said that I didn’t want to be present at the funeral … that I couldn’t bear the sight of their bodies … that they should burn them straight away. I didn’t care what they did with the ashes, because they were just fucking ashes and had no meaning now that my daughter and husband were dead. Monsieur Corty tried to reason with me, but I would hear none of it. “Burn them now,” I hissed, and eventually Monsieur Corty nodded quietly and said that, with regret, he would carry out my wishes.

‘A few days later, I was discharged from hospital. Monsieur Corty sent a car for me. I went home to an empty apartment — yet one in which everything seemed completely frozen in that moment in time just before they died. The spaghetti sauce I had been making was coagulated in the pot on top of the stove. Judit’s drawing books and dolls were scattered in front of the fireplace. Zoltan’s reading glasses were still balanced on the arm of the easy chair where he always sat. So too was the book he was reading: a Hungarian translation of Moravia’s Contempt. Do you know the novel?’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘It was filmed by Godard.’

‘We saw it when our marriage was in a happier place. When things started to go wrong, Zoltan became obsessed with both the film and the novel. Because he identified with the central character. Like Moravia’s protagonist, he had lost the respect of his wife. Until he was dead — and every moment of every day was spent mourning him and my wonderful daughter.’

‘You felt guilt?’

‘Of course. Especially when, a few days after being released from the hospital, I was called into the commissariat de police of the Sixth arrondissement. The inspector needed to formally interview me for the dossier of the case. That’s when I found out that the same bystander who managed to get the vehicle’s registration number had also seen Zoltan and Judit right before the accident. Zoltan had seen a taxi on the far side of the road, and ran across with Judit to hail it. Halfway there …’