“Your wife knew?”
“No.”
“And your daughter?”
“Certainly not.”
“Are you positive? You never know for sure what goes on in children’s minds. Maybe she’d already seen you with Adèle.”
“No! Laura didn’t know.”
“Okay. Go on.”
“We’d just got to the lake and Adèle threatened to tell my wife everything.”
“Just like that? All of a sudden? Were you planning to dump her or kick her out?”
“No.”
“Maybe you were going to denounce her?”
“Denounce her? I don’t understand.”
“She was an illegal immigrant, wasn’t she? You knew that and yet you employed her for years.”
“Yes, I knew that, but I didn’t intend to denounce her. I don’t know why she wanted to reveal everything. I’ve no idea.”
“And then?”
“I managed to get her away from my wife and daughter. I didn’t want them to hear what we were saying.”
“You mean, two weeks before Christmas that would have been a bit of a disaster.”
“Things got very heated. She started shouting and I wanted to shut her up.”
“You wanted to kill her?”
“No! No! Never! I just wanted her to keep quiet but she began struggling and fell into the water.”
“You pushed her.”
“No! I don’t know. I don’t know anymore. I was horrified. I didn’t want her to spoil everything, but she started struggling and then she fell. The jetty was very slippery.”
“Your wife and daughter: where were they at that moment?”
“They heard the argument and came over. My daughter ran up to me. She slipped. She … she … Laura. Laura.”
Adam thinks back to that moment with dazzling clarity, just before his body hit the water. Laura first. Laura above all. He had reached Anita first (to whom could he one day confess his rage and despair at reaching her, his wife, first, and not Laura?) and a few seconds later he had brought Laura up to the surface. At the hospital they estimated that Laura had been underwater for less than three minutes. Three minutes? How can life contain so many emotions, decisions, and changes of mind in less than three minutes? Adam begins shaking.
“Calm yourself, Adam.”
“I need to see my daughter. It’s hours now since anyone gave me news.”
“She’s still in a coma.”
Adam curls up on his chair, clutching his stomach, biting his lips so as to avoid weeping. He sways back and forth. This is a nightmare. What else could it be? This should have been a glorious day.
“Just one more thing and then you can sign your statement.”
“What?”
“Were the swans there?”
Yes, they had been there. While Anita was running back to the house to telephone the emergency services, Adam was hugging his daughter to him, his ear pressed to her mouth, listening hard to the feeble breathing he could hear, never letting go either of this body nor of this feeble breathing. Out of the corner of his eye he thought he had seen something moving on the lake. For one magical moment he thought Adèle was emerging from the water. But then he heard the great clatter of wings and said softly to Laura: Look, ma chérie, the swans are there.
Anita is lying on a mattress in her daughter’s room. Alexandre has just informed her that Adam will be kept in a cell and brought before the magistrate the next day. Anita had thought of offering an apology for the occasion when she virtually called him a racist but what would be the point now? Those things, those words, those evenings no longer matter. She feels ill. She had not stopped vomiting. In her house, after telephoning the emergency services (surrounded by the order and perfection of this house, the paintings, the books, the box of toys); in the ambulance; in the hospital corridors. Anita gets up, holds her daughter’s hand, a cold, limp little thing, and takes a deep breath. Amid the eerie hissing of all the apparatus she decides to get a grip on herself. This is what she will do: take a shower, eat something, remain alive, look after her daughter, remain resolute. She has no concept of the fact that this is exactly what she will be doing every day for the next four years, five months, and thirteen days.
Far away from all this David Schtourm has just dined in a discreet, old-fashioned restaurant in the upper part of the city. He likes cities beside the sea, he likes certain things to remain traditional (restaurants, hotel lobbies, service, the furniture in bistros), he likes the mist that softens the biting cold, he likes the hazy yellow halos around the streetlights on the promenade. He thinks about the painting back in his room, the hour he spent waiting for that artist-architect who never came. He could leave the painting at the hotel reception the next morning before catching his flight, he has the address of the architectural firm, but, as he is walking back to the hotel, he decides to keep the painting because, above all, he would like to know both the beginning and the end of this story.
Further away still, François Sol is thinking about Anita. He smiles as he recalls with affection that young woman who was playing at being somebody else. And yet she had something about her, that girl. I wonder what she has done with it, he muses, as he turns to his copy of Ulysses.
Today
ADAM LEAVES THE PRISON AT 12:15. As his left foot settles upon the little square of yellow grass in front of the gray prison gates, he recalls how much he used to love the month of June. He is astonished at such notions from the old days, these notions of a free man; prison has taught him to expect nothing, to hope for nothing other than what he had been given the day before. Back in his cell it made little difference whether it be February or June, the hours were there, solid, massive, and silent.
He moves away from the square of dry grass. The parking lot where Anita
