Before long, we would go out into his garden to work together. Whether it was freezing or fine, there was always something to do.
Planting, sorting seedlings, pricking out, positioning stakes, hoeing, weeding, taking cuttings, tidying the avenues, both of us leaning toward the earth, hands in the earth, all the time. On warm days, his favorite game was to target me with the hosepipe. Sasha had a child’s-eye view, and the games that went with it.
He had been the keeper of this cemetery for years, he never spoke about his private life. The only wedding ring he wore was the one found in his first vegetable garden, around the carrot.
Sometimes, he would pull Regain, the novel by Jean Giono, out of his pocket and read me passages from it. I would recite the bits of L’Oeuvre de Dieu, la part du Diable I knew by heart.
Sometimes, we were interrupted by some emergency, someone who’d hurt their back or sprained an ankle. Sasha would say to me, “Carry on, I’ll be back.” He would disappear for half an hour to look after his patient, and always returned with a cup of tea, a smile on his lips, and the same question, “So, how’s it going with our bit of earth?”
How I loved that first time. Hands in the earth, nose in the air, creating a link between the two. Learning that the one never went without the other. Returning two weeks after the first planting and seeing the transformation, approaching the seasons differently, the power of life.
Between those Sundays, the wait felt endless to me. The Sunday I didn’t go to Brancion was a desert where only the future counted, the following Sunday on the horizon.
I spent my time reading the notes I had taken, on what I had planted, how I had done this or that cutting, my seedlings. Sasha had entrusted me with some gardening magazines, which I devoured, just as I had devoured L’Oeuvre de Dieu, la part du Diable.
After ten days, I felt like a prisoner counting the final hours before being released. From Thursday evening on, I was stamping my feet with impatience. On Friday and Saturday, unable to bear it any longer, I’d take myself for a walk between each train. I needed to, so as to channel my energy without Philippe Toussaint noticing. I took shortcuts that he didn’t take on his motorbike. If, by chance, he was around, I told him that I was off to do some quick shopping. On Saturday, late afternoon, I went to pick up Stéphanie’s Panda, parked outside her house.
Never has anyone in the world loved a car like I loved Stéphanie’s Fiat Panda. No collector, no driver of a Ferrari or an Aston Martin has felt how I felt when placing my trembling hands on the steering wheel. When turning the key, going into first gear, pressing down on the accelerator.
I spoke to the white tiger. I imagined what I was going to find, the plants that had grown; the seedlings to be pricked out; the color of the leaves; the state of the soil, whether loose, dry, or soggy; the bark of the fruit trees; the progress of the buds, the vegetables, the flowers; the threat of frost. I imagined what Sasha had made me for lunch, the tea we would drink, the aroma of his house, his voice. Returning to my Wilbur Larch. My personal doctor.
Stéphanie thought I was impatient to return to my daughter, but I was impatient to return to life after my daughter. Lives other than mine. With the main one extinguished, the volcano was extinct. But I sensed branches, offshoots growing inside me. Whatever I sowed, I could feel it. I was sowing myself. And yet, the arid soil that was me was much poorer than that of the cemetery vegetable garden. A soil full of gravel. But a blade of grass can grow anywhere, and that anywhere was me. Yes, a root can take hold in tar. All that’s needed is the tiniest crack for life to penetrate the impossible. A little rain, some sun, and then shoots from who knows where, from the wind perhaps, appear.
The day I squatted to pick the first tomatoes I had planted, six months earlier, Léonine had long been filling the garden with her presence, as if she had brought the Mediterranean to the little vegetable garden of the cemetery in which she was buried. That day, I knew that she was within each little miracle the soil produced.
57.
Fate followed its path but
it never separated our hearts.
JUNE 1996, GENEVIÈVE MAGNAN.
I’m so sensitive that whenever I read or hear the word “sour,” my tongue hurts and my eyes sting. I burn all over. That’s what I tell myself when I see an ad for sour candies on the TV. “You’re too sensitive,” my mother would spit at me, between wallops.
Must be a balance thing: since my soul’s had it, worth only feeding to strays, my body makes up for it.
I change the channel. If only I could change life by flicking my remote. Since I’ve been unemployed, I’m slumped in my old armchair, not knowing what to do. Telling myself that nothing matters. That it’s over. That they can’t go back on it. That the matter’s closed. They’re dead. They’re buried.
I was asleep when Swan Letellier phoned me. He left me a message I couldn’t understand, his words were confused, he was in a right panic, everything gets jumbled up in his bird brain. I had to listen to it several times to make any sense of his words: Léonine Toussaint’s mother was waiting for him outside the restaurant where he works as a cook, she seems crazy, she doesn’t believe that the girls went into the kitchen to make themselves hot chocolate that night.
After the trial, I thought I’d never hear mention of Léonine ever again. Just like I’d never hear mention of
