Yours truly,
Sasha H.”
To me, this man seemed like he was straight out of a novel, or an asylum. Which comes to same thing. What was he doing in a cemetery? I didn’t even know the job of cemetery keeper existed. For me, the death business was just about being an undertaker, waxen faced and clad in black, with a crow perched on one shoulder, if not a coffin.
But there was something much more disturbing. I recognized his handwriting on the envelope and the note. He’s was the one who’d sent me the “My darling, you were born on September 3rd, died on July 13th, but to me, you will always be my August 15th” plaque to place on my little Léo’s tomb.
How did he know I existed? How did he know these dates, particularly the happy one? Was he already here when the children were buried? Why was he interested in them? In me? Why had he lured me to the cemetery? What did it have to do with him? I began to wonder whether he hadn’t knowingly locked me in the cemetery so I would come into his house.
My life was a bombsite, to which an unknown soldier had sent me a funerary plaque and a letter.
Yes, the war was drawing to a close. I sensed it. I would never recover from the death of my daughter, but the bombing had stopped. I would live through the postwar period. The longest, the hardest, the most pernicious . . . You pick yourself up, and then find yourself face to face with a girl of her age. When the enemy has gone, and there’s nothing left but those who are left. Desolation. Empty cupboards. Photos that freeze her in childhood. All the others growing, even the trees, even the flowers, without her.
In January of 1996, I announced to Philippe Toussaint that, from then on, I would be going to the cemetery in Brancion-en-Chalon two Sundays a month. I’d set off in the morning and return in the evening.
He sighed. He rolled his eyes, as if to say, “I’m going to have to work two days a month.” He added that he didn’t understand, that I hadn’t been to the funeral, and then now, all of a sudden, this fancy takes me. I didn’t respond. How could one respond to that? To the word “fancy”? According to him, going to visit my daughter’s tomb was a caprice, a whim.
The writer Christian Bobin said, “Words left unspoken go off to scream deep inside us.”
Those weren’t his exact words. But me, I was full of silences that screamed deep inside me. That woke me up at night. That made me put on weight, lose weight, age, cry, sleep all day, drink like a bottomless pit, bang my head against doors and walls. But I survived.
The playwright Prosper Crébillon said, “The greater the misfortune, the greater one is for living.” In dying, Léonine had made everything around me disappear, except me.
48.
Like a flight of swallows as winter approaches,
Your soul flew away with no hope of return.
Julien Seul is standing at my doorstep. The one beside my vegetable garden, at the back of the house.
“It’s the first time I’ve seen you in a T-shirt. You look like a young man.”
“And you, it’s the first time I’ve seen you in colors.”
“That’s because I’m at home, in my garden. No one comes across me behind this wall. Are you staying long?”
“Until tomorrow morning. How are you?”
“Like a cemetery keeper.”
He smiles at me.
“It’s lovely, your garden.”
“That’s down to the fertilizers. Close to cemeteries, everything grows very fast.”
“I’ve never known you to be so caustic.”
“That’s because you don’t know me.”
“Maybe I know you better than you think I do.”
“Poking around in people’s lives doesn’t mean you know them, detective.”
“May I invite you to dinner?”
“On condition that you tell me the end of the story.”
“Which story?”
“The one about Gabriel Prudent and your mother.”
“I’ll come and pick you up at 8 P.M. And whatever you do, don’t change, stay in colors.”
49.
These few flowers, in memory of times gone by.
I went inside Sasha’s house. I opened the packet of tea, closed my eyes, and inhaled its contents. Would I come back to life in this cemetery house? It was my second time inside it, and already I could smell that aroma that pulled me, almost by force, out of the blackness of my shadow of a life since Léo’s death.
As Sasha had indicated in his letter, the packet of tea was on the yellow shelf beside the cast-iron teapots. He’d stuck on a label like those on school workbooks: Tea for Violette. But what he hadn’t mentioned in his letter was that, under the packet, there was also a brown envelope with my name on it. It wasn’t sealed. I discovered that he had slipped several pages inside it.
Initially, I thought it was a list of people who had died recently, and the “Toussaint” written on the envelope might refer to tombs requiring flowers for All Saints’ Day. Then I understood.
Sasha had put together the contact details of all the staff present at the château of Notre-Dame-des-Prés on the night of July 13th to 14th, 1993. The director, Edith Croquevieille; the cook, Swan Letellier; the dinner lady, Geneviève Magnan; the two supervisors, Eloïse Petit and Lucie Lindon; the maintenance man, Alain Fontanel.
Apart from the director’s face, it was the first time I was seeing the faces of those who had seen my daughter for the last time.
The tragedy had been covered on the 8 P.M. TV news bulletin. On every channel. They had shown a picture of the château of Notre-Dame-des-Prés, the lake, the ponies. And they had kept repeating the same key words: tragedy, accidental fire, four children perished, holiday camp. The children had been front-page news in the Journal de Saône-et-Loire
