I reflected that Léonine was already filed away. So young and already filed away.
Written on these index cards, for each tomb, was the name and date of death, and the location.
On exhumation days, which remained rare, I would have to watch out that surrounding tombs didn’t get damaged. One of the three gravediggers was particularly clumsy.
Certain visitors had special permission to drive into the cemetery. I would soon recognize them, just from the sound of the engine, particularly since most of them were little old men who made the clutches of their Citroëns screech.
Everything else I would pick up gradually. No day would be the same. I could turn it into a novel, or write the memoir of the living and the dead, one day, when I had finished reading, for the hundredth time, L’Oeuvre de Dieu, la part du Diable.
Sasha wrote an initial list in a brand-new notebook, a school exercise book. He wrote down the names of the cats that lived in the cemetery, their characteristics, what they ate, their habits. He had cobbled together a kind of cat home, with sweaters and blankets, in the Spindles section, at the back, to the left. Where no one came to pay their respects anymore, ten square meters with no passersby, where, with the gravediggers’ help, he had put up a shelter. A dry, warm place for winter. He wrote down the details for the vets in Tournus, father and son, who made the journey there for vaccinations, sterilizations, and treatments, for only half the fee. Dogs could turn up there, to sleep on their owners’ tombs; I would have to look after them.
On another page, he noted down the names of the gravediggers, their nicknames, their habits, their duties. And those of the Lucchini brothers, their addresses and their roles. And finally, the name of the person in charge of death certificates at the town hall. He concluded with these words, “For two hundred and fifty years, now, people have been buried here, and that’s not about to stop.”
As for the rest of the exercise book, he took two days to fill it. With everything concerning the garden, the vegetables, the flowers, the fruit trees, the seasons, the planting.
The following day, All Saints’ Day, a light layer of frost had appeared on the earth in the garden. Before the cemetery gates were opened, I helped Sasha pick the last summer vegetables in the dark. We were both on the frozen paths, flashlight in hand, wrapped in our coats, when Sasha brought up Geneviève Magnan. He asked me how I had felt on learning of her suicide.
“I always thought that the children hadn’t set fire to the kitchen. That someone hadn’t stubbed out a cigarette properly, or something like that. I think Geneviève Magnan knew the truth and she couldn’t bear it.”
“Would you want to know?”
“After Léonine’s death, knowing is what kept me going. Today, what matters for her, for me, is making flowers grow.”
We heard the first visitors parking outside the cemetery. Sasha went to open the gates to them. I accompanied him. Sasha said to me, “You’ll see, you’ll adapt to the opening and closing times. In fact, you’ll adapt to the grief of others. You won’t have the heart to make visitors who arrive early wait, and it will be the same in the evening. Sometimes, you won’t have the heart to ask them to leave.”
I spent the day observing the visitors, arms laden with chrysanthemums, and wandering the avenues. I went to visit the cats, who rubbed up against me. I pet them. They did me good. The previous day, Sasha had explained to me that numerous visitors transferred their emotions onto the animals in the cemetery. They imagined that their deceased loved ones were channeled through them.
At around 5 P.M., I went over to see Léonine, not her, but her name written on a tombstone. My blood froze when I caught sight of Father and Mother Toussaint, placing yellow chrysanthemums on her grave. I hadn’t seen them since the tragedy. When they came to collect their son twice a year, and parked outside the house, I didn’t look at them through the window. I just heard the sound of their car’s engine and Philippe shouting to me, “I’m off!” They had aged. He had become stooped. She still held herself rigidly upright, but she’d shrunk. Time had diminished them.
They mustn’t see me, they would have immediately told Philippe Toussaint, who thought I was in Marseilles. I watched them, hidden like a thief. As if I had done something wrong.
Sasha came up behind me, I jumped. He took me by the arm, without asking me any questions, and said to me, “Come, we’re going home.”
In the evening, I told him about Father and Mother Toussaint at Léonine’s tomb. I told him about the mother’s nastiness. The disdain she directed at me as soon as she looked at me without seeing me. It was they who were the killers, they who had sent my daughter to that wretched château. They who had organized her death. I told Sasha that maybe coming to live in Brancion, working in this cemetery, wasn’t a good idea. Bumping into my in-laws twice a year, along the cemetery’s avenues, seeing them placing pots of flowers to assuage their guilt, was too much for me. Today, they had returned me to my grief. There wasn’t a minute, not a second of my life when I didn’t think of Léonine, but now it was different. I had transformed her absence: she was elsewhere,
