The Most Beautiful Book in the World (15 page)

“Are you thinking he doesn't love you? Or doesn't love you anymore? Maybe that's what he thinks, too . . . But I noticed something, I did: your photo, he has it on him all the time.”

Isabelle, touched by Odette's simplicity, lowered her head.

“He's been so unfaithful to me . . .”

“Oh, if you think that a man isn't supposed to flirt with other women and sniff around elsewhere, you shouldn't have a man, Madame, you should have a dog! And even then you'd have to keep it chained to its doghouse. My Antoine, who I loved so much, and still love, twenty years later, I knew perfectly well that he'd left his paw prints on other women, who were different—maybe they were prettier, or maybe they just had a different smell. Whatever: he died in my arms. In my arms. Looking at me. And that will be a gift to me, forever.”

She struggled for a moment with the emotion that came over her unexpectedly, and then forced herself to continue:

“Balthazar Balsan will come back to you. I've done the best I could to fix him up, to get him back in shape for you so that he'll smile and laugh, because, frankly, men like this one, so good and so gifted, so awkward, so generous, you can't let them drown. Two days from now I'll be headed back to Charleroi, back to the store. So I don't want my hard work to go to waste . . .”

Balthazar gazed painfully at Odette. She was tearing their love affair to bits, and in public. He was angry at her, he hated her for inflicting this upon him. He thought that there was something lost and confused about her expression, as if she had gone crazy, but he felt it was pointless to try and protest. If she had decreed that this was the way things were to be, then there would be no budging her.

Before setting off again, he went for a walk in the dunes with Isabelle. Neither of them was convinced that they'd be able to live together again but, for François's sake, they agreed to give it a try.

When they came back to the fisherman's cabin, an ambulance hurtled past them, siren shrieking: Odette had just had a heart attack.

 

As long as her life was still hanging by a thread, everyone stayed in Blieckenbleck. Once the intensive care unit confirmed that Odette was out of danger, the publisher and Isabelle and her son returned to Paris.

Balthazar, on the other hand, arranged to prolong rental of the cabin; he kept an eye on Rudy and Sue Helen, stipulating that they must hide from their mother the fact he had stayed on.

“Later . . . when she's feeling better.”

Every day, he took her children to the clinic and waited for them on a chair among the potted plants, grannies in bathrobes, and patients wandering around with their IVs hanging from poles.

Odette eventually regained her strength, her wits, and some color on her cheeks, and she was surprised to find that someone had put Antoine's photograph on her night table.

“Who put this here?”

The children confessed that the initiative had been Balthazar's and that he had stayed on in Blieckenbleck, taking care of them the way a father would.

Given their mother's emotion and the crazed reaction of the electrocardiogram, with its frenetic dance of green squiggles marking the rhythm of her palpitations, the children understood that Balthazar had been right to wait for her convalescence, and they wondered if her initial malaise was not due to her rejection of Balthazar: her heart had simply not been able to bear it.

The next morning Balthazar, as nervous as if he were fifteen years old, came into Odette's room. He offered her two bouquets.

“Why two?”

“One from me. One from Antoine.”

“Antoine?”

Balthazar sat down by her bed and gently indicated her husband's photograph.

“We've become very good friends, Antoine and I. He's accepted me. He thinks that I love you well enough to have earned his respect. When you had your attack, he confessed that he'd been glad of it rather too hastily; he thought you were about to join him. Then he was angry with himself for having had such a selfish idea: now, for you and your children, he feels reassured that you are much better.”

“What else did he say?”

“You're not going to like it . . .”

Balthazar leaned respectfully over toward Odette and murmured, “He has placed you in my trust . . .”

Deeply moved, Odette began to sob in silence. But then she tried to make a joke.

“He didn't ask for my opinion?”

“Antoine? No. He said you're the very stubborn sort.”

He leaned over further still and added, with irresistible tenderness, “I told him . . . that it was fine with me.”

And they kissed, at last.

The electrocardiogram immediately began to jiggle, and an alarm went off, an urgent summons to the nursing staff: a heart was running away.

Balthazar removed his lips from hers and murmured, as he looked at her, “Calm down, Odette; calm down.”

 

 

 

 

 

A
shiver of hope went through them when they first saw Olga.To be sure, she did not seem particularly kind. Tall, dry, with a prominent jawbone, jutting elbows, and sallow skin, when she first came in she did not look at a single woman in the ward. She sat down on the wobbly bunk she'd been assigned, put away her belongings at the bottom of the wooden chest, listened to the guard shouting the rules at her as if the latter were braying Morse code, did not turn her head until she was informed of the location of the washroom, and then, once the guard had left, she stretched out on her back, cracked her knuckles, and gave herself over to the contemplation of the blackened planks on the ceiling.

“Have you seen her hair?” murmured Tatyana.

The prisoners did not understand what Tatyana meant by that.

The newcomer had a thick mane of hair—frizzy, robust, coarse, which doubled the volume of her head. Such health and vigor—the sort of thing you usually only saw on the head of an African woman. But Olga, despite her olive skin, did not look remotely African, and must have come from somewhere in the Soviet Union, since here she was now in Siberia, in this women's camp where the regime punished those who did not think in the orthodox fashion.

“What about her hair, then?”

“I think she's from the Caucasus.”

“You're right. Their women often have straw-like hair.”

“Yes, horrible hair, isn't it.”

“Not at all! It's magnificent! With my flat, fine hair, I could only dream of having hair like that.”

“I'd rather die. It looks like horsehair.”

“No—pubic hair!”

Giggling, quickly stifled, accompanied Lily's last remark.

Tatyana frowned and silenced the group by pointing out: “Her hair might offer us the solution.”

Eager to please Tatyana, whom they treated as their leader even though she was just an ordinary prisoner like the others, they tried to concentrate on what they had failed to grasp: how could a stranger's hair offer any solution to the lives they were leading—that of political deviants being forcibly re-educated?

That night a thick snowfall had buried the camp. Outside, everything was dark except for the lantern that the storm was doing its best to extinguish. The temperature, well below zero, did not help them to concentrate.

“Do you mean . . .”

“Yes. I mean you can hide quite a few things in a head of hair like that.”

They observed a moment of respectful silence. One of them finally guessed: “With her she has brought a . . .”

“Yes!”

Lily, a gentle blond woman who, despite the climate, the rigors of work, and the deplorable food, was still as round as any kept woman, now voiced a certain skepticism.

“Well, she'll have to have thought of it first.”

“Why would she not have?”

“Well I certainly wouldn't have thought of it before coming here.”

“And I'm referring to her, not to you.”

Well aware that Tatyana would always have the final word, Lily refrained from voicing her annoyance, and went back to sewing the hem of her woolen skirt.

They listened to the icy howling of the storm.

Leaving her companions behind, Tatyana went down the row, approached the foot of the newcomer's bed, and stood there for a while, waiting for a sign that would indicate she had been noticed.

A feeble flame was dying in the stove.

After a few minutes, during which she obtained no reaction, Tatyana resolved to break the silence: “What's your name?”

A deep voice answered, “Olga”; her lips had not moved.

“And why are you here?”

No reaction on Olga's face. A mask of wax.

“I expect, like all of us, you were Stalin's favorite fiancée and he got bored with you?”

She thought she was saying something funny, an almost ritual witticism that greeted all the opponents to the Stalinist regime; her words slid over the stranger like a pebble over ice.

“My name's Tatyana. Would you like me to introduce the others?”

“There'll be time enough for that, no?”

“There certainly will . . . we'll be in this hole for months, or years . . . we might even die here.”

“So we have time.”

To conclude, Olga closed her eyes and turned to face the wall, leaving only her angular shoulders to carry on the conversation.

Realizing she would get nothing more out of her, Tatyana went back to join the others.

“A tough nut. Which is reassuring. There's a chance that . . .”

Nodding approvingly, even Lily, they decided to wait.

 

In the week that followed, the newcomer offered up no more than a sentence a day, and even that had to be forced out of her. Such behavior seemed to validate the hopes of the oldest prisoners.

“I'm sure she's thought about it,” said Lily eventually, more convinced with each passing hour. “She is definitely the type who would think about it.”

The day brought little light. The fog forced its grayness upon it, and when it lifted, an impenetrable screen of oppressive clouds weighed upon the camp, like an army of sentinels.

As no one had been able to inspire Olga's trust, the women counted on the shower to show them whether the newcomer was hiding a . . . But it was so cold that no one attempted, anymore, to get undressed; so impossible would it be to get dry and warm after such an undertaking that everyone resorted to a furtive, minimal scrub. One rainy morning they discovered, moreover, that Olga's mane was so thick that the drops slid over it without adhering; her hair was waterproof.

“Never mind,” ventured Tatyana, “we'll have to take the risk.”

“Of asking her?”

“No. Of showing her.”

“And what if she's a spy? What if she's been sent here to trap us?”

“She's not the type,” said Tatyana.

“No, she's not the type at all,” confirmed Lily, pulling on a thread in her sewing.

“Yes, she is the type! She's playing silent, tough, unfriendly, the sort who won't get close to anyone: isn't that the very best way to make us trust her?”

It was Irina who was vociferating in this manner, surprising the other women, surprising her own self, stupefied by the coherence of her reasoning. Astonished, she went on: “I can just imagine that if someone entrusted me with spying on a hut full of women, there would be no better way to go about it. Pass myself off as the quiet, solitary sort and, over time, gain the others' trust. That's cleverer than acting friendly, no? We may have been infiltrated by the biggest tattletale in the Soviet Union.”

Lily was suddenly so convinced of this that she rammed her needle into the thick of her finger. A drop of blood formed, and she looked at it, terrified.

“I want to be moved into another hut, quick!”

Tatyana intervened.

“I understand your reasoning, Irina, but that's all it is, reasoning. As for me, my intuition tells me the opposite. We can trust her, she's like us. Or even harder than we are.”

“Let's wait. Because if we are caught . . .”

“Yes, you're right. Let's wait. And above all, let's try to push her to the breaking point. Let's stop talking to her. If she's a spy who's been planted here to inform on us, she'll panic and try to get closer to us. With every step she takes she'll reveal her strategy.”

“Good point,” confirmed Irina. “Let's ignore her and see how she reacts.”

“It's dreadful . . .” sighed Lily, licking her finger to speed the scarring.

 

For ten days, not one prisoner in ward 13 said a word to Olga. At first she didn't seem to notice and then, once she was aware of it, her gaze grew harder, almost mineral; and yet she did not make the slightest gesture to break the wall of silence. She accepted her isolation.

After they had had their soup, the women gathered around Tatyana.

“There's our proof, no? She didn't crack.”

“Yes, it's terrifying.”

“Oh, Lily, everything terrifies you.”

“You have to admit it's a nightmare: to be rejected by the group, then realize, and not lift a finger to prevent such exclusion! It's hardly human . . . I wonder if that Olga has a heart.”

“Who's to say she isn't suffering?”

Lily put down her sewing, her needle stuck through the thick fold of cloth; she hadn't thought of this. Her eyes immediately filled with tears.

“Have we made her unhappy?”

“I think she was unhappy when she got here and she's even unhappier now.”

“Poor woman! And it's our fault . . .”

“I think, above all, that we can count on her.”

“Yes, you're right,” exclaimed Lily, drying her tears with her sleeve. “Let's confide in her now, quickly. It hurts me too much to think that she's just a prisoner like the rest of us and we're making her troubles worse by making life impossible for her.”

After a few minutes of consultation, the women decided they would risk unveiling their plan, and Tatyana would take the initiative.

After that, the camp lapsed again into its drowsiness; outside, the frost was extreme; a few furtive squirrels scrabbled across the snow among the huts.

 

With her left hand Olga was crumbling an old crust of bread; with the other she was holding her empty dish.

Tatyana came over.

“Did you know that you're allowed a pack of cigarettes every two days?”

“Has it occurred to you that I have noticed and that I've been smoking?”

Olga's words had sprung from her mouth sharply, precipitously; the sudden cessation of a week of silence accelerated her elocution.

Tatyana noticed that despite her aggressive tone, Olga had spoken more than usual. She must be missing human contact . . . so Tatyana reckoned it was all right to continue.

“Since you notice everything, you will have seen no doubt that none of us smokes. Or that we only smoke now and again when the guards are around.”

“Uh . . . yes. No. What do you mean?”

“Haven't you wondered what we use our cigarettes for?”

“Oh, I see; you swap them. You use them for cash in the camp. You want to sell me some? I don't have anything to pay with . . .”

“You're mistaken.”

“So if you don't pay with money, what do you pay with?”

Olga looked at Tatyana with a suspicious scowl, as if she knew ahead of time that whatever she was about to discover would disgust her. So Tatyana took her time to reply:

“We don't sell our cigarettes, we don't swap them either. We use them for something other than smoking.”

Because she sensed she had piqued Olga's curiosity, Tatyana broke off the discussion, well aware that she would have a stronger case if the other woman had to come back to her to find out the rest.

That very evening, Olga went over to Tatyana and looked at her for a long time, as if to ask her to break the silence. In vain. Tatyana repaid her in kind for the first evening.

Olga eventually capitulated: “Right, what do you do with the cigarettes?”

Tatyana turned to her with a searching look.

“Did you leave people you love behind?”

Olga's only reply was a fleeting, pained expression.

“So did we,” continued Tatyana, “we miss our men, but why should we be more worried for their sake than for our own? They're in another camp. No, what really hurts, is the children . . .”

Tatyana's voice faltered: the image of her two daughters had just pricked her conscience. Out of compassion, Olga placed her hand on Tatyana's shoulder: a sturdy, powerful hand, not unlike a man's.

“I understand, Tatyana. I have also left a daughter behind. Fortunately, she's twenty-one.”

“My girls are eight and ten . . .”

It took all her remaining strength to keep from crying. Besides, what more was there to add?

Brusquely, Olga pulled Tatyana against her shoulder and Tatyana—tough Tatyana, the network leader, the eternal rebel—because she had found someone tougher than herself, she wept for a moment against a stranger's chest.

Safely unburdened of her surfeit of emotion, she picked up the thread of her thoughts.

“This is what we use the cigarettes for: we empty out the tobacco, and we keep the papers. Afterwards, by gluing the papers together, we can make a real sheet of paper. Here, come with me, I'll show you.”

Tatyana lifted up a floor board and from a hiding place full of potatoes she removed a crackling pile of cigarette papers, where each joint, each glued crease thickened the delicate tissues, as if they were some millennial papyrus discovered in Siberia through some aberration of archeology.

She placed the sheets carefully on Olga's knees.

“There. One of us is bound to get out of here someday . . . and she'll take our messages with her.”

“Fine.”

“But you may have noticed, there's a problem.”

“Yes, I can see that the pages are blank.”

“Yes, blank on both sides. Because we don't have a pen or ink. I tried to write with my own blood, I stole a pin from Lily, but it fades too quickly . . . And besides, I don't scar well. Something to do with my platelets. Malnutrition. I don't want to go to the infirmary, it might make them suspicious.”

“Why are you telling me this? What does it have to do with me?”

“Well, I suppose that you too would like to write to your daughter?”

Olga allowed a full minute of thickening silence to go by then says, gruffly, “Yes.”

“So here's what we'll do: we'll provide you with the paper, and you get us the pencil.”

“Now why would you think I have a pencil? That's the first thing they take off us when they arrest us. And we were all searched several times over before coming here.”