* * *
During the car journey, which took around twenty-five minutes, and in what little I said to her, I lied to Stéphanie. I served up the same story to her as to Philippe Toussaint: Célia had appendicitis, I had to hurry to collect her granddaughter Emmy. Stéphanie didn’t know how to lie. If I’d told her the truth, she would have spilled the beans without meaning to. She would have blushed and stammered in front of Philippe Toussaint on meeting him.
Stéphanie had got herself replaced at her register for an hour to take me to Nancy. We didn’t say much to each other in the car. I think she told me about a new brand of organic biscottes. For a few months, organic products had been appearing on the Casino shelves, and Stéphanie spoke to me about them as if they were the Holy Grail. I wasn’t listening to her. I was rereading Sasha’s letter in my mind. I was already in his garden, in his house, in his kitchen. I couldn’t wait. Looking at the white tiger dangling from the Panda’s rearview mirror, I was already searching for the right words, the right arguments to get Philippe Toussaint to accept moving, accept the cemetery keeper job.
I took a train to Lyons, another to Mâcon, and then the coach that passed outside the château. I closed my eyes as we drew level with it.
It was late afternoon when I pushed open the door of my future house. The daylight had almost gone, and it was bitterly cold. My lips were chapped. Inside, the air was sweet. Sasha had been burning candles and there was still that delicious smell, those handkerchiefs he soaked with “Rêve d’Ossian.” When he saw me, he just said, smiling:
“I give thanks to the virtue of lying!”
He was in the middle of peeling vegetables. His hands, which shook a little, held the peeler like some precious stone.
We shared some truly delicious minestrone. We spoke of the garden, of mushrooms, of songs and books. I asked him where he would be going, if we moved in here. He told me that he already had everything planned. That he would travel and stop where he pleased. That his pension would be as meager as he was, but for the little he ate, it would suffice. That he would travel on foot, in second class, and by hitchhiking. Those were the only walks he felt like experiencing. He wanted to offer himself the unknown. With his friends as stop-offs. He only had a few, but they were true friends. Visiting them was part of his plan, too. Looking after their gardens. And if they didn’t have one, making them one.
India was Sasha’s focal point. His best friend, Sany, was Indian, and Sasha had met him as a child. The son of an ambassador, Sany had lived in Kerala since the 70s. Sasha had visited him there countless times, once with Verena, his wife. Sany was the civil godfather of Emile and Ninon, their children. Sasha wanted to end his life over there. Sasha never said “end my life,” but rather “keep going until my death.”
For dessert, he produced some rice pudding he had prepared the previous day, in assorted glass yogurt pots. I dug deep with my spoon to reach the caramel right at the bottom. As he watched me doing this, Sasha’s voice changed:
“In losing my loved ones, I also lost an enormous weight. The worry of leaving them alone after my death, of abandoning them. The fear of imagining that they might be cold, in pain, hungry, and that I’d no longer be there to take them in my arms, protect them, support them. When I die, no one will mourn me. There’ll be no grief after me. And I’ll leave lightly, relieved of the weight of their lives. It’s only egoists who tremble over their own death. Everyone else trembles for those they leave behind.”
“But I will mourn you, Sasha.”
“You won’t mourn me the way my wife and two children would have mourned me. You’ll mourn me the way one does when losing a friend. You’ll never mourn anyone as you mourned Léonine. That you well know.”
He boiled some water for the tea. He said he was happy I was there. That I would be among the real friends he would visit during his retirement. He specified, “During your husband’s absences.”
He put some music on, Chopin sonatas. And he spoke to me of the living and the dead. Of the regulars. Of widows. The toughest thing would be children’s funerals. But no one was obliged to do anything. There was a real solidarity between the cemetery staff and the funeral directors. One could be replaced. A gravedigger could replace a pallbearer, who could replace a monumental mason, who could replace the funeral director, who could replace the cemetery keeper, when one of them felt unable to face a difficult funeral. The only person who couldn’t be replaced was the priest.
I would see it all, hear it all. Violence and hatred, relief and misery, resentment and remorse, grief and joy, regrets. All of society, all origins, all religions on a few hectares of land.
On a daily basis, there were two things to pay attention to: not locking visitors in—after a recent death, some mourners lost all notion of time—and watching out for theft—it wasn’t uncommon for occasional visitors to help themselves, from neighboring tombs, to fresh flowers and even funerary plaques. (“To my grandmother,” “To my uncle,” or “To my friend” could apply in most families.)
I would see more elderly people than young. The young went far away for their studies, or work. The young didn’t visit tombs much anymore. And if they did come, it was a bad sign, it was to visit a friend.
The next day would be November 1st, the biggest day of the year.
