The Party Wall Read online

  Madeleine takes back the photo in which her face and Micha’s are slowly fading.

  “I have never found a way of telling all this to Édouard.”

  “Now you have the time.”

  The two women finish their beers without speaking, while the wind gets caught in the red-tinted hair and the cotton skirts. The sky has darkened but Madeleine thinks she can still distinguish the kite, pulling on its leash like a dog, hoping, like every sail in the world, to be allowed at last to fly away for good.

  Édouard’s steps are surer, his movements sturdier. It isn’t so much his gait as the fact he looks at the sky, the trees, and places his hands on tree stumps. As if he were coming out of himself after staying rolled up in a ball, a clenched fist, so that no energy whatsoever might escape. Madeleine is waiting for him beside a freshly dug hole. In an old shredded blanket lies Shabby the cat. He did not survive the heat wave or the commotion in the house or simply his eighteenth year in this world. Hugging the small, expired body one last time, Madeleine wept, but she could not help thinking that it had come at the right moment. Édouard gently lays the departed at the bottom of the hole and then, holding his shovel, straightens up.

  “The first time I travelled by train, I couldn’t sleep for the first three or four days. I couldn’t get used to the rocking, the noise of the cars, the wind. And going through remote areas that were completely uninhabited, I had the sensation of being the first man ever to have set foot there, and the thought obsessed me, kept me from closing my eyes. After a few days, of course, my body gave out. I fell asleep somewhere near Reno. When I woke up it was dawn. I looked around and I thought the train was sliding over water. We were on the track that splits the Great Salt Lake exactly in two. Because of the railroad ballast, the lake is divided in half, and the composition of the water isn’t the same in both halves. The northern side is full of wine-red algae, but on the southern side it’s green. The clouds were perfectly mirrored on the surface and took on the colours of the lake. The train rolled along slowly. The air was warm and soft. There was no sound; it was as if the universe had come to a standstill. Right then, I had the feeling that I would never again be hungry or cold or in pain or afraid.”

  Édouard deftly throws a handful of earth on the cat’s body.

  “That’s what I wish for him, for your Shabby. That’s what I wished for Dad. That’s what I wish for every one of us.”

  Copying her son, Madeleine pours a little earth on her pet, the earth he was so fond of. Édouard picks up the shovel and calmly fills the grave, with his braid keeping time on his lower back. Madeleine is impressed by the sureness of his movements. She thinks about the organ that continues to bond to him, generating day after day new connections with the body to which it now belongs; she thinks about this piece of another human being, which is keeping her son alive.

  “Now we both have another being inside us.”

  “Let’s hope there’ll be no more,” Édouard adds. “There’s no room left.”

  Madeleine takes a deep breath of salt air. The summer wind carries the messages of migrating whales.

  “Just one more month,” she says.

  Édouard sighs happily. In a month, the dangerous period will be over. The risk of rejection will become almost nil. And the boat that Yun has been slaving away at every day will be able to cast off. He squeezes Madeleine’s hand.

  “Are you certain?”

  He repeats the question as a matter of form. The discussion was concluded days ago. Together they finish burying Shabby, Madeleine’s interlocutor, guest, hot-water bottle, guardian, night-light for nearly a third of her life. She takes her son’s arm, looks out over the acre of land that belongs to her, and considers the extent to which she never belonged to it, the extent to which her desire drew her far from the demands of the soil and its shoots, far from the roots that probe the soul. Far from a house that was never open enough. The two of them stop in front of the slowly swaying willow. Two grey stones have been added at the foot of the tree. Madeleine casts Édouard a questioning look.

  “For the little girls,” he explains.

  Madeleine nods.

  “These grounds are getting crowded with the dead.”

  She feels as though she is standing in the palm of a large, restless hand. She must readjust herself with every step and test the floor she is treading; the angle is constantly shifting, as are the forces changing it from moment to moment. She endeavours to walk without holding the guardrail, to trust only the rhythm of the rolling as she tries to learn its syncopations.

  The luggage and equipment have all found a place in the boat. The berths have been clothed with clean sheets and thick blankets. The provisions are hanging in a net over the little galley. The camera and about fifty rolls of film are tucked away on the deck in the small cabin that in another life was an old-fashioned car. Outside, on the passenger side, Joanna’s bicycle has been solidly secured. As for Édouard and Yun, they’ve settled down under the deck, amid the waves lapping against the hull.

  On the pier a few people are waiting in the spindrift. Paul, looking melancholy, is worrying at his rabbit’s foot, while the watchman waves a spotless handkerchief. A few of Édouard’s friends who have gathered are trying to play him a farewell song, but their instruments are stifled by the wind rushing into them. Even the doctor has come, dressed in a fisherman’s raincoat, clearly delighted at the chance to be by the seaside. Madeleine could swear that there, behind them, she has caught sight of Frank and Missy and all the other travellers who have passed through the village, leaving footprints and the indelible impressions of backsides in the sand. She gives them a joyous wave, while Joanna, like a star from the Fifties, smiles and blows them kisses. Édouard weighs anchor as Yun contemplates the shore with an earnest expression, trying to commit its shape to memory so she can include it in the map she is drawing in her mind. There is a bitter onshore wind blowing. Fall is approaching and the warmth of the South throbs on the horizon like a sack of gold at the foot of a rainbow.

  They button up their raincoats and lower their hats down on their heads, as if this detail was the last thing that needed to be attended to. When the boat finally casts off, Madeleine has the sudden sensation her lungs have filled with twice as much air, and she hangs on to Joanna’s arm for fear her feet will slip off the deck. The boat heads out clumsily toward the mainland, toward that immensity still unseen, though its mineral rumbling can already be detected. In a few days they will plunge into the maw of an immeasurable gulf that will slowly narrow and gulp them down into the interior, between cliffs bristling with life, reeking of history, shimmering with strength. They’ll avoid the shoals and greet the pods of cetaceans, as they brush by a string of salt-corroded cargo ships and let themselves be guided by a thousand beacons into the heart of America, where they will cut across the Prairies or slide along the Appalachian crests, and there they’ll catch the scent of the deltas and the lakes welling in prehistoric craters. And Madeleine, her fingers buried in her jacket sleeves, will no longer feel her as-yet-unsteady steps on the deck, will no longer hang on to stones and walls, and will stop counting, so that she may, finally, for the first time, be but one.

  A PENNY

  (MONETTE AND ANGIE)

  The grass is so high that it stands a good head taller than Monette. This doesn’t bother her, and using a branch she found where the trail begins, she knocks away the stalks that bar the path. She insisted on taking the lead; Angie is close at her heels, brushing the burrs off the little girl’s pink T-shirt and scanning the bushes for snakes and venomous spiders. The cicada’s song covers everything: the crunch of their steps, their thick breathing in the vegetable humidity, and the rustling of potential enemies on either side.

  With her free hand, Monette still keeps a firm grasp on the molasses cookie, which she nibbles at parsimoniously. As far as Angie can see, a significant portion of the treat is crumbling its w
ay out of the wrapper, but her sister is too absorbed by the walk to pay attention. Angie recalls the story of Hansel and Gretel and the bits of bread they strewed to be able to find their way again. She turns around several times to see if the birds are snapping up the cookie crumbs.

  From time to time the girls must stride over a tiny watercourse gushing across the path toward the river. Monette invariably bends down to try to see some fish and asks:

  “Brook or river?”

  “Runoff from the rain,” Angie explains.

  As it hasn’t rained for weeks, this answer does not sound entirely satisfactory, but Angie makes no attempt to elaborate. Such rivulets and the silty furrows they create are part of the terrain. Water is so abundant in these parts.

  The vegetation grows thicker and with it the insects’ song, the cries of the blue jays.

  “Are we still in Georgia?” Monette inquires.

  “Uh-huh,” Angie softly answers.

  The little girl gives her big sister a doubtful look. She asks this same question whenever she finds herself in a place without houses or pavement, as if the state were defined solely according to its degree of civilization, its signs of human engineering. As if such an untamed environment could have neither name, nor border, nor government.

  A mockingbird passes overhead and draws Monette out of her questions. The smell of oil and tar filters in through the grass, and Angie guesses they are not very far. After about forty paces they reach a clearing streaked with train tracks, which lie behind a fence too rusted and broken to warrant that name. Pulling back a section of the chain-link mesh, Angie lets Monette through first and, once she herself has crossed, puts her hand on the diminutive crumb-littered chest to keep Monette still. There is a rumbling noise to the north.

  “Don’t move. The train’s coming.”

  She can almost feel Monette’s heart leap as she hops up and down. The spectacle of the train is an endless source of excitement for her.

  “Let’s put down a penny! Let’s put down a penny!” she shouts.

  Angie searches in her pocket for a one cent piece and nimbly rushes to the tracks to lay it down. When she comes back and takes hold of her sister’s hand, Monette, to be heard above the approaching roar, yells in a high-pitched voice:

  “Let’s count, okay?!”

  Angie agrees without taking her eyes off the railroad. Just before the train arrives, she thinks she has caught sight of something, a strange shape heaving on the other side of the tracks. Her pulse races and then the train saws the space in half. Monette launches into the arithmetic refrain that marks the rhythm of the passing cars.

  “One! Two! Three! Four! Five!”

  The freight cars speed past, covered with dust, graffiti, and rust stains, every one numbered, every one named. None will be forgotten.

  SHE IS NOT BURNED

  (ARIEL AND MARIE)

  There is something reassuring about the structure of the horizon here. Of course, a house or a man is completely exposed on the Prairies. But, on the other hand, anyone arriving can be seen a long way off. That is why each morning, even on cold days, Ariel goes out and walks around the house, scanning the vastness of the plains. He counts the foxes and the hares bearing their pale winter fur, and only when he has confirmed that the animals are their sole companions can he go back in to Marie and the aroma of coffee, which has remained unchanged from one existence to the next.

  They do not own much furniture. They took what came with the house, which seems to have been abandoned by people fleeing from a sudden apocalypse. Now, weeks after they moved in, a cake with only two or three slices missing still sits majestically in the middle of the table, as neither Marie nor Ariel can bring themselves to throw out the dessert that bespeaks those interrupted lives. Once they had given some clothes found in the cupboards to charity, replaced the curtains and acquired a few dishes from a second-hand dealer in Rockfield, they considered themselves properly moved in.

  Marie took the main bedroom, and Ariel, the adjacent room, where he shoved a twin bed with a sagging mattress against the wall. This slender barrier is all that separates them when they go to sleep. Each presses a hand against the wall to wish the other goodnight. Sometimes they wake up at dawn in a state of confusion, failing to recognize the unfamiliar shadows licking at the abstract furniture, their hearts still pounding in fear of what lies in wait outside, of what is lodged in their marrow. Then they remember. The moving, the prairies, the neighbourless house. Everything has already exploded; the world has already been annihilated. That is the advantage of surviving the apocalypse: there is nothing left to either protect or fear.

  A family of raccoons has taken up residence in the attic, and, out of respect, neither Ariel nor Marie goes visiting. In the spring, the constant squealing signals the birth of a litter. Marie spends a long time imagining the blind, toothless offspring whiffing the dusty air under the eaves in search of their mother’s milk, and then she places her hand on her breast, which will grow old but never heavy. Like the land where they have come to live, Ariel and she have become sterile, two celibates scraping by on nothing, a worn-out hide salvaged from their past that day after day they manage to stretch enough to make it resonate. A beat of the drum to confirm they are still alive.

  The party’s cops were the first to arrive after the disaster. Impelled by an indignation that was amplified by their thirst for revenge, they forced the door of the little house after nightfall. As they no doubt expected denials from Ariel and Marie, they sat them down in separate rooms for questioning. They soon realized their interrogation was futile. He and she immediately admitted the truth, even offering to supply the adoption agency’s documents in support of their statements and as proof that they were unaware of being siblings when the elections took place. Thrown off balance by the confessions, the cops proceeded to the next stage of their plan and ordered Ariel to resign immediately. They drafted a speech for him, which in no way resembled what he would have liked to say, but he came to terms with endorsing it. He readily consented to shut himself away for the following weeks and to refrain from any contact with the media. The reporters, constantly stationed in front of the house, shivered like animals that would rather freeze to death than starve to death.

  The next day Marc succeeded in elbowing his way through to them. There were only a few hours left before the press conference, which had been put off long enough for an interim leader to be found whose curriculum vitae did not include incest, procuring, polygamy, or bestiality.

  “How?” is all Marc managed to articulate.

  “You’re the only one I shared this with,” Ariel replied.

  “And you, Marie?”

  “My sister found out, but she didn’t tell anyone else about it.”

  Marc looks at her in disbelief.

  “Everyone knows the Leclerc clan are all hard core independentists. Do you truly believe your sister could have kept something as explosive as this to herself?”

  “Yes I do. My sister sets great store on family.”

  “There’s no point in playing the blame game,” Ariel decides. “It’s too late.”

  It was indeed too late. The global media had latched onto the scandal. Forgetting their fight against modern science, the evangelists were marching in the streets now to demand not just that Ariel step down, but that the marriage be dissolved, that the twins be imprisoned, and that they be subjected to all manner of physical retribution involving fire and white-hot metal instruments. The Left’s reaction was hardly better, as it responded to the attacks by sparing no effort to downplay the situation, arguing that family ties are “a matter of biography and not biology,” and that, since Marie and Ariel had not grown up together, their kinship meant nothing. The party was floundering and the country’s instability had never been greater.

  Marie watched Ariel’s resignation alone, dry-eyed and glued to the screen of her laptop. S
he could never compare their situation to the sexual scandals that shook the world of politics with clockwork regularity. Still, hearing the contrition in her husband’s voice, seeing his wan complexion and his shoulders drooping in mortification, she had to admit he resembled the hundreds of men before him who had seen their careers disintegrate and slip through their fingers as they stood behind a plain lectern, sometimes flanked by a spouse, who clenched her teeth to hold down the bitter pill she was being made to swallow. Such people, no matter their misdeeds, were all to some extent the same; they had been forced, one way or another, to disclose facts that by their very nature should have remained secret. Sex, though socially acceptable, is not supposed to be described in public, detailed, analyzed, dissected. These defeated human beings mourned, not the end of their aspirations, but the fact that a space of intimacy had been forever altered, that a pleasure, wiped out by an avowal, was as dead as a wish uttered out loud. She came to pity all the infidels, closet homosexuals, Sunday nudists and other outsiders, even the most perverted, of which she now was one. Yet she envied them. Once the scandal had blown over, they could go back to a semblance of normality. For her and Ariel no such thing could ever exist again.

  At night the northern lights wave like flags and shake the sky with supernatural vibrancy. Still, it’s hard to forgive this firmament, where everything seems to be written, and those distant constellations, which, even before the invention of fire, were recounting their misfortune. Ariel and Marie spend a great deal of time watching the stars, questioning Castor and Pollux.

  They might have chosen Patagonia, the Kamtchatka Peninsula, or the Kerguelen Islands, but Ariel refused to leave the country. Unable to persuade him to go into exile, Marc resigned himself to helping them find an adequately remote community, and to weave a discreet security net around them. All that was left for them to do was to fashion new identities for themselves.