strong smell. I find myself wanting to keep them or I want to keep the feeling but I can’t and it washes over. It is like being turned upside down. When I feel it I think this is the real life, the not imitated and not performed. My marriage is a fact like a house I live in, these four walls. Frédéric is a house. That feeling is a reaction to something foreign. But then is that actually true? Because even a known thing can become unknown
“Jeannette.”
Midhat was running up the road. His eyes were wet and bright; his hair flopped loose from its oil. He whipped one large strand back from his face.
“Jeannette. I saw you walking, I ran. I have been at the library. I have not found anything new. But,” he caught his breath, “I have a theory.”
He was shining with excitement. She felt the urge to touch his hand, and although she did not, something of that impulse must have expressed itself because his face gave off an encouraged smile.
“Shall we …”
“Tell me at the house, not here.”
They turned the corner and walked up the drive, and Docteur Molineu opened the door on them. His expression was grave.
“I have some very sad news, mes petits.”
Midhat noticed a letter in the Docteur’s hand, and with a falling sensation guessed what it was.
“No,” he said.
“Our friend Laurent is dead.”
The letter was from Laurent’s mother. He had been killed in a bar at Ypres on his journey home. A drunken officer had mistaken him for someone else and stabbed him in the arm and the chest. Laurent had died quickly from severe loss of blood.
The door still open, the three stared at the floor in silence. Molineu touched his daughter’s neck. Then he reached to pull the door shut and suggested in a restrained voice that they rest before dinner.
Jeannette’s face was completely white. Midhat invited her into his bedroom, and she accepted without embarrassment, and sat in Midhat’s chair while he sat on the bed. Both faced the window, through which the last of the day erased itself from the garden. The cherub with its dry jug was stripped of detail as all the features of the landscape were unified in shadow, and the lamps of the interior turned the window into a mirror that reflected back their faces. There was his, the whites of his eyes gleaming, his body hunched on the edge of the bed. There was Jeannette’s. Her lids hung low.
“We were children,” she started to mumble. Tears fell out of her eyes. “When we were children we used to pretend that we were orphans.”
He could not reply. Very soon, he would feel unbearable pain. It was only a question of waiting.
“We all wanted to be Cosette. Or La Petite Princesse.”
The fact was, Laurent remained Midhat’s superior in every way. Laurent, whom he had started to resent, and even—yes, even to hate. And he had even—for a moment, only—wished Laurent would die. He squeezed his fists together and shut his eyes. But perhaps it was not the real Laurent he hated. Perhaps it was only the idea of him. The idea of a person who so exceeded him in virtue, as well as in intellect, and in manner and culture, and even in appearance. Laurent Toupin, his stoop, his blond mop and easy gestures. At the edge of these thoughts was the unmanageable fact that the man no longer existed. He could not face that just yet. He must think about Laurent alive.
Jeannette was still talking, something more about orphans. What did she mean by it? Did she mean that Laurent had been like a parent? He could not face that yet either. He dared himself to picture a bloody corpse, a ruptured arm and chest. It was a horrible image, but it did not move him. Possibly it was difficult to believe in something he had constructed himself. Nothing yet could overpower the picture still beating in his mind: Laurent ahead on the garden path, trouser twisting around the knee, eyes half shut against the sunlight as he murmured some absurdity about human nature.
Jeannette had stopped talking. Midhat spoke aloud, without control.
“He was my friend!”
Even the bitter sound of those words; he hated it.
The gold watch occurred to him in the middle of the night. He woke to the sound of the windowpane rattling in its frame, and as he brought his cold arms under the warm covers his brain flicked awake. The watch.