I was about four hundred meters away from them when one of the boys spotted me. I was petrified. I could feel the clamminess of my hands, the fabric around my legs, the heat of my head. The boy was incapable of uttering a word. But his expression, his horrified stupor, made one of the girls turned toward me, cigarette in mouth, and she, well, she screamed. She screamed so loud that my mouth went dry, very dry. Her screaming made the other three jump. They who, until then, had been laughing their heads off, stopped laughing.
All five of them stared at me. It lasted one or two seconds, no longer. I stopped abruptly, two hundred meters from them. I pinched my lips and the light shone right at them. I stretched my arms into a cross and again went straight for them, but this time much faster, more threateningly.
In my memory, all that happened in slow motion, and I had time to analyze every second. If I didn’t pull it off, if I was unmasked, if they, in turn, pursued me, I was done for. But they didn’t think. Once they realized that a fluttering ghost was heading straight for them, at a good clip, arms in a cross, they bolted quicker than lightning. Never has anyone got up so fast. Three of them headed for the gates, screaming, two for the back of the cemetery.
I opted to pursue the trio. One of them fell, but got back up immediately.
I don’t know how they managed to scale the gates, despite them being three-and-a-half meters high. Proof that fear gives you wings.
I never saw them again. I know that they told anyone who would listen that the cemetery was haunted. I collected their cigarette butts and empty beer cans. I doused Madame Cedilleau’s tomb with hot water.
I found it hard to get to sleep, I couldn’t stop laughing. As soon as I closed my eyes, I saw them again, bolting like rabbits.
The following morning, I put the bike and my ghoulish disguise up in the attic. Before hiding it in a trunk, I thanked it. I put it away like you’d put away your wedding dress, taking it out from time to time to see if you can still get into it.
22.
Little flower of life. Your scent is eternal,
even if humanity picked you too soon.
Philippe Toussaint is dead. The only difference between him and the deceased in this cemetery is that I do occasionally pay my respects at their graves.”
“Philippe Toussaint is in the phone book. Well, the name of his garage is in the phone book.”
It has been more than nineteen years since anyone has spoken his first name and surname aloud in front of me. Even in the speech of others, Philippe Toussaint had disappeared.
“His garage?”
“I thought you would want to know, that you’d looked for him.”
I’m incapable of responding to the detective. I haven’t looked for Philippe Toussaint. I waited for him for a long time, which is different.
“I noticed that there’d been some movement on Mr. Toussaint’s bank account.”
“His bank account . . . ”
“His current account was emptied in 1998. I went to check on the spot where the money had been withdrawn, to find out whether it was fraud, identity theft, or Toussaint himself who had withdrawn that money.”
I feel chilled from head to toe. Every time he says his name, I want him to shut up. I want him never to have entered my house.
“Your husband hasn’t disappeared. He lives a hundred kilometers from here.”
“A hundred kilometers . . . ”
And yet, that day had started off well: Nono’s arrival, Father Cédric, Elvis singing at the window, good humor, the smell of coffee, the men’s laughter, my ghastly dolls, the dust to remove, the cloth, the warmth in the stairs . . .
“But why have you been investigating Philippe Toussaint?”
“When Madame Bréant told me he’d disappeared, I wanted to know, to help you.”
“Monsieur Seul, if there’s a key in the door of our cupboards, it’s so that no one opens them.”
23.
If life is but a passage, let us at least
scatter flowers on that passage.
W e arrived at the Malgrange-sur-Nancy level crossing at the end of spring 1986. In spring, everything seems possible, the light and the promises. You can sense that the trial of strength between winter and summer has already been won. That the dice are loaded. A game decided in advance, even if it rains.
“Girls in care are happy with very little.” That’s what a caseworker had said to my third foster family when I was seven years old, as if I couldn’t hear, as if I didn’t exist. Being abandoned at birth must make me invisible. And anyhow, what is this “very little”?
As for me, I felt I had everything: my youth, my desire to learn to read L’Oeuvre de Dieu, la part du Diable, a dictionary, a child in the belly, a house, work, a family that would be my first family. A rickety family, but a family all the same. Since my birth, I’d never had anything, apart from my smile, some clothes, my doll Caroline, my LPs of Daho, Indochine, and Trenet, and my Tintin books. At eighteen, I was going to have a legal job, a bank account, and my very own key. A key I’d load with jangly charms, to remind me that I had a key.
Our house was square, with a tile roof covered in moss, just like nursery-school children draw. Two forsythias were in bloom on either side of the house. They made the little white house with red windows seem to have blond curls. A hedge of red rosebushes, still in bud, separated the back of the house from the railway line. The main road, crossed by the
