Everything about him was elongated. His legs, arms, hands, neck, eyes, mouth. His limbs and features had been drawn with a two-meter ruler. Like they have in primary schools to measure the world on maps.
I started drinking through the straw, I found it delicious—it reminded me of the childhood I’d never had, and of Léonine’s, it reminded me of something infinitely gentle. I dissolved into tears. It was the first time I was enjoying swallowing something. Since July 14th, 1993, I had lost my sense of taste. Léonine had done that, too, made my sense of taste disappear.
I said to him, “Forgive me, the gates were locked.” He replied, “No harm done. Take a seat.” He took a chair and brought it to me.
I couldn’t stay. I couldn’t leave. I couldn’t speak. I was incapable of doing so. Léo’s death had also taken words away from me. I read, but I was no longer able to say. I stored things up, but nothing came out. The life of my words boiled down to, “Thank you . . . hello . . . goodbye . . . it’s ready . . . sorry, I’m going to bed.” Even to do the tests for my driving license, I hadn’t needed to speak, I’d just had to tick the right boxes and parallel park.
I was still standing. My tears were rolling down into my glass of milk. He dabbed a cotton handkerchief with a perfume called “Rêve d’Ossian” and made me breathe it in. I carried on crying as if the floodgates had given way, but the tears I shed did me good. They cleansed me of nasty things, like bad sweat, like poisonous toxins oozing out of me. I thought I had cried all my tears, but there were more left. The dirty tears, the muddy ones. Like stagnant water, the sort that just festers at the bottom of a hole, long after the rain has stopped.
The man made me sit down and, when his hands touched me, I felt a shock wave. He stood behind me and started to massage my shoulders, trapezius muscles, nape, and head. He touched me as if he were healing me, as if he were placing deep-heat plasters all along my back and on the top of my head. He murmured, “Your back is harder than a wall. One could abseil down it.”
I had never been touched like this. His hands were really hot and radiated an extraordinary energy that penetrated me, as if he were trailing a slight burning sensation over my skin. I didn’t resist. I didn’t understand. I was in a cemetery house, the cemetery where my daughter’s ashes were buried. A house that reminded me of a voyage I’d never made. Later, I would learn that he was a healer. “A kind of bonesetter,” as he liked to describe it.
I closed my eyes under the pressure of his hands and dozed off. A deep sleep, dark, with no painful images, no wet sheets, no nightmares, no rats devouring me, no Léonine whispering in my ear, “Mommy, wake up, I’m not dead.”
I woke up the following morning, lying on the sofa under a thick, soft blanket. As I opened my eyes, I struggled to surface, to know where I was. I saw the tea caddies. And the chair I’d sat on was still in the middle of the room.
The house was empty. A very hot teapot had been placed on a low table opposite the sofa. I helped myself and sipped the jasmine tea, which was delicious. Beside the teapot, on a porcelain plate, the master of the house had arranged dainty almond cakes, which I dipped into my cup of tea.
In the daylight, I immediately saw that the cemetery house was as modest as my own. But the man who had received me the previous day had transformed it into a palace, thanks to his smile, his kindness, his almond milk, his candles, and his perfumes.
He came in from outside. He hung his big coat on the peg and blew into his hands. He turned his head in my direction and smiled at me.
“Good morning.”
“I must go.”
“Where to?”
“Home.”
“Where’s that?”
“In the east of France, near Nancy.”
“You are Léonine’s mother?”
“ . . . ”
“I saw you at her tomb yesterday afternoon. I know the mothers of Anaïs, Nadège, and Océane. You, it’s the first time . . . ”
“My daughter isn’t in your cemetery. There are only ashes here.”
“I’m not the owner of this cemetery, just the keeper.”
“I don’t know how you’re able to do that . . . This job. Yours is a funny job, well, not funny. At all.”
He smiled again. There was no judgment in his eyes. Later, I would also discover that he always put himself on the same level as the people he was addressing.
“And you, what kind of job do you do?”
“I’m a level-crossing keeper.”
“So, you stop people from crossing to the other side—me, I help them a little in getting there.”
I tried my best to return his smile. But I didn’t know how to smile anymore. He was all goodness, I was all in pieces. I was a wreck.
“You’ll be back?”
“Yes. I have to know why the children’s room burned down that night . . . Do you know them?”
I took out and handed him the list of the staff of Notre-Dame-des-Prés, scribbled on the back of a bill by Philippe Toussaint.
“Edith Croquevieille, director; Swan Letellier, cook; Geneviève Magnan, dinner lady; Eloïse Petit and Lucie Lindon, supervisors; Alain Fontanel, maintenance man.”
He read the names carefully. Then looked at me.
“You’ll be back to visit Léonine’s tomb?”
“I don’t know.”
Eight days after our meeting, I received a letter from him:
“Madame Violette Toussaint,
Please find enclosed the list of names you forgot on my table. Also, I have prepared a packet of blended tea—a green tea with almond and jasmine and rose petals. If I’m not there, take
