The Other Story (8 page)

Théodore Duhamel would never read
The Envelope.
But the book was dedicated to him.

To my father, Fiodor Koltchine (Saint Petersburg, June 12, 1960–Guéthary, August 7, 1993).

T
HE SUN IS SLOWLY
sinking behind a high, rocky hill. It is not going to set in the sea, in front of them. Nicolas is disappointed. He was expecting a glorious pink sunset. Most people have turned their chairs away from the horizon, worshiping the final golden rays being swallowed up by the looming hill. He is secretly proud of the fact that for the last hour or so he has resisted the temptation of glancing at his BlackBerry. Mr. Wong and Miss Ming are playing mah-jongg. The gay couple are listening to the same iPod and swinging their heads in the same movement. The Belgian family is having a last dip. The Swiss are dutifully reading the papers. Alessandra and her mother seem to be fast asleep. The hairy man is puffing away on a cigarette, phone clamped to his ear, oblivious to the fact that his buxom girlfriend is chatting up the French guy (whose wife is no doubt at the spa). A puce-faced, tipsy Nelson Novézan makes a quick appearance, a pitiful sight in faded swim shorts that sag around his equally sagging buttocks. He plunges a toe into the water, yelps, and scuttles back to the elevator.

Boats are coming in again from the yachts, bringing more exclusive clients to the Gallo Nero for drinks and dinner, and perhaps to spend the night. Once again, Nicolas thinks of the book he has been lying about to his entourage. One day soon, he will have to sit down, be responsible, and write that novel. No more procrastination. No more sloth. But how? If only energy for the book could come flowing in like those elegant guests smoothly riding in on the black Rivas. He remembered that when he started
The Envelope,
it was as if Margaux Dansor took him by the hand and led him onward. He could feel her hand, the texture of it, smooth, a little dry; he could feel the tug, the pull. He saw Margaux Dansor perfectly, as clearly as if she had been standing in front of him. It had been effortless creating her. She looked nothing like Emma Duhamel, his mother. Nor did she have Delphine’s auburn hair, white skin, green eyes. Margaux had a long Modigliani-like face, hazel eyes, thick silver hair. She was a piano teacher. She lived in the rue Daguerre with her husband, Arnaud Dansor (a doctor), and their two girls, Rose and Angèle. One day, she had to get her passport renewed. Margaux soon discovered this was an impossible feat, according to recent laws, even though she had been born in the chic suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine, near Paris. All this because her mother (Claire Nadelhoffer) had been born in Landquart, Switzerland, and her father (Luc Zech, who died in an avalanche when she was a child) in San Rocco di Camogli, Italy. At the Pôle de la nationalité française, Margaux was told to bring in every single document she could get ahold of concerning her father’s family—birth, death, and marriage certificates going back to her great-grandfather, military service carnets, tax forms, Social Security cards—in order to prove her French nationality. And it was by perusing all these papers, by delving into the past, that Margaux Dansor stumbled upon the unthinkable.

At the mention of the name Koltchine, Emma Duhamel had cleared her throat on that wet October day in 2006, nearly five years ago, when her son confronted her with her late husband’s birth certificate. It had taken her a while to decide how she was going to explain this to him as fluidly as possible, and Nicolas could see how complicated this appeared to be for her. She paced up and down the room, her hands going from her bead necklace to her hair, which she smoothed back in a calm gesture, but Nicolas could see those hands were trembling.

“I suppose you could say it all began with your grandmother,” Emma finally said, using the philosophy teacher’s voice, the one he disliked, higher-pitched and louder than her usual tone.

“Dad’s mother?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Nina?”

“Her real name was Zinaïda Koltchine.”

“Is that Russian?”

“Yes.”

“So she was Russian?”

“She was.”

“Not French?”

“She became French when she married Lionel Duhamel.”

Nicolas stared at his mother. “What are you trying to say?”

Emma Duhamel took a deep breath. “Your grandmother left the USSR in the early sixties. With her baby boy, Fiodor Koltchine.”

“So she was married to a guy called Koltchine?”

“No. Koltchine was her maiden name.”

Nicolas looked down at the birth certificate. Born in Leningrad on June 12, 1960.

“How old was Nina when she had Dad?”

“Very young, I think.”

“So Lionel Duhamel is not my grandfather?”

“No, he’s not, technically. But he adopted your father, gave him his name, and raised him as his son.”

“So who is my grandfather?”

“No one knows.”

Nicolas digested this in silence.

“Why did you wait all these years to tell me this?”

Emma took a while to speak. She seemed out of breath, distraught.

“When I married your father, we had to get paperwork ready for our wedding. That’s when I saw his birth certificate and his real name.”

She paused again.

“Did you ask him about it?”

“I did. But your father refused to answer me. I sensed that I could not talk to him about it. We never mentioned it again. The only person who brought up the Russian connection after your grandmother’s death was your aunt Elvire. And that was only once. I didn’t tell you because I was waiting for the moment when you would find out by yourself and be old enough to handle it. I believe that moment has come.”

At the Pôle de la nationalité française, on another rainy day, Nicolas waited for over an hour in a crowded, narrow room. An old man next to him dabbed at his tearful, reddened eyes. He could not understand what he was doing here, he told Nicolas in a dignified, trembling voice. His passport and
carte d’identité
had been stolen, so he had gone to the town hall to get new ones. He was told that because his long-dead parents had been born abroad, he now had to prove he was French, at ninety-two, due to the new law. He was a retired doctor, a pediatrician, born in Paris; he had received the Légion d’honneur, he had fought for France during World War II, and now what was his country doing to him? Nicolas did not know how to comfort him. He could only shake his head and pat the old man’s hand.

Time crept by. The rain pattered against the windows. Children and babies whimpered. Bored teenagers played with their mobile phones. Others read. Some people slept. Nicolas looked down at the papers in the folder on his knees. The Russian connection. Zinaïda Koltchine had been born in Leningrad in 1945. Her son, Fiodor, in 1960. Nicolas stared down at the dates. She was fifteen years old when she became a mother. Nicolas was baffled. He had never realized how young his grandmother was when she was still alive. Lionel Duhamel, her husband, now in a geriatric hospital, was fifteen years older than she. Nicolas had never noticed that age difference, either. He now realized Nina Duhamel had been only forty-eight when her son died. How extraordinary that he had not realized this earlier. But then, there was an age, a very young age, he recalled, when everyone over thirty seemed to be a crumbing wreck. There was nothing exotic about Madame Duhamel. Nothing Russian, not even remotely Slavic. No accent. No high cheekbones. She was merely a distinguished, chain-smoking, sophisticated bourgeoise who ran her household with an iron fist and who enjoyed glamorous summers on the Riviera. He had not been close to his paternal grandmother, preferring the motherly warmth of his Belgian granny. Nina Duhamel liked to be called “Mamita” by her offspring. She died in 2000 of lung cancer, at fifty-five years old, seven years after her son’s disappearance. Nicolas’s eyes wandered back to the folder. Fiodor Koltchine, his father. Born of a stranger. Fiodor Koltchine. Even the name made him shiver, as ominous and as unfamiliar as Keyser Söze, the enigmatic gangster in his favorite movie,
The Usual Suspects.

A question mark had popped up in Nicolas Duhamel’s conventional family tree. He obtained his
certificat de nationalité française
easily enough, as his grandmother became French when she married Lionel Duhamel in 1961, and Nicolas had the necessary papers to prove that official act. But the question mark remained, hovering in his mind, looming larger and larger, buzzing about like an annoying mosquito, even as his new passport was issued. Who had fathered Zinaïda’s baby? And what had his own father, Théodore, known about his origins?

He had questioned his aunt Elvire Duhamel, Lionel and Nina’s forty-three-year-old daughter. She was a wiry woman, divorced, who lived in Montmartre with two cats. Her teenaged children, Alina and Carlos, Nicolas’s cousins, lived in Barcelona with her ex-husband, an alcoholic Spaniard. Their phone conversation was a fleeting, unsatisfactory one. “On her deathbed, Mother told me my brother had another name, a Russian one, and that he wasn’t Lionel’s son. What? Why did she tell me? She had just been diagnosed with lung cancer, Nicolas! She thought she was going to pop off any minute. Guess she wanted a clear conscience. She ended up living another six months, mind you. She never mentioned it again. And don’t you dare go talking about this to my father. He’s dotty enough as it is.” Lionel Duhamel, approaching seventy-six, suffered from Alzheimer’s and was in a geriatric hospital. Nicolas was confronted with the disagreeable reality of dementia and old age whenever he went to visit his grandfather (who, in fact, was not his grandfather, as he now liked to remind himself, with a touch of angst). With Emma’s help, Nicolas found the family tree he’d drawn in class with such care as a boy at the elementary school on the rue Rollin. The Belgian branch on one side, the French on the other: Duhamel and Van der Vleuten. There was nothing French about him, he realized during that long wait at the Pôle de la nationalité française. The irony of it nearly made him chuckle out loud, but the sobbing old man next to him girdled his mirth. He was no Duhamel. He was Russian and Belgian. He was a Koltchine–Van der Vleuten mix. And he would probably never find out who his paternal grandfather was. That mere thought opened up an abyss under his feet. Nicolas Duhamel’s placid, tranquil existence was no more. That gray day, as he waited over two hours at the Pôle, staring down at the papers on his lap, he felt a subtle shift in the world around him, as if unknown hands were tampering with his fate.

That was the day Nicolas Kolt was born, but he did not know that yet. And that was also the day Margaux Dansor first wove her way into his existence.

I
T TOOK NICOLAS UNDER
a year to write
The Envelope,
and it irks him to recall the smoothness of that routine, now that he is faced with the growing bulk of his procrastination. As he sips his fruit cocktail, he thinks of how he used to rise at dawn with ease and enthusiasm, before Delphine took her daughter, Gaïa, to school; he’d make tea and sit at the kitchen table. He wrote the novel by hand, in black notebooks like the empty one on his lap now, and then he typed the text into his MacBook, and it all flowed miraculously. Perhaps Delphine’s kitchen is the only place he can write? He misses Delphine. He misses his life with her. The simplicity of it, the rhythm of it. Before Hurricane Margaux, Delphine was the busy bee of the two of them. She worked in a real estate agency and spent her days showing apartments to clients. Delphine was the one who found the rue du Laos duplex for them—or rather, for him. She never ended up living there with Nicolas, as their breakup took place the week he moved. She and Gaïa stayed in the modern building on the rue Pernety, just above the post office, and Nicolas went to live in the huge duplex by himself.

Before he embarked on the adventure of the novel, Nicolas rose late, puttered around, gave his philosophy lessons, went to pick up Gaïa at school when she was too small to go home alone. He did the shopping along the rue Raymond Losserand—he was a favorite with the long-haired fishmonger, the Algerian fruit vendor, the beaming dry-cleaning lady from Haiti, Claudia—he did the washing, the cooking, the laundry. He did not mind being a kept man. It gave him a thrill to hear Delphine’s key in the lock, her face lighting up when she set eyes on him, her pleasure at the meal he had prepared, the wine he had chosen. Gaïa was put to bed and told a story, and then they had the evening to themselves.

When Delphine and Nicolas met for the first time in 2004, he was twenty-two. There had been nothing thrilling in his life since his trip to Italy with François in the summer of 2003, after the debacle of his studies. He still felt the brunt of his mother’s discontent, although Emma never voiced it. Their cohabitation in the rue Rollin apartment was a strained one. Emma wanted him to move out, yet she could not bear the idea of being alone. Nicolas longed for freedom, but his tutorials did not bring him enough money to pay rent on his own.

One fall evening, Lara (who had not passed the khâgne exam either, but who did not care, as she had just landed a job at a prestigious magazine) took him to L’Entrepôt, a trendy restaurant in the fourteenth arrondissement. After Lara left, a woman asked him how he was feeling. He was drunk, sprawled over the bar, wrapped in a dreamy, nauseous stupor, but lucid enough to notice she was attractive, with creamy white skin and auburn hair. Delphine took him back to her place, five minutes away, but it took over half an hour to get there, as he could barely stand up. He blacked out as soon as he collapsed on her sofa, and opened bewildered eyes the next morning, confused as to his whereabouts. She was reading, sipping a cup of coffee, wearing glasses and a man’s shirt, with nothing much underneath. He fell in love with her then and there.

After the breakup in 2009, it was in the splendor of the rue du Laos apartment that Nicolas realized he no longer had the energy to write. He put his lethargy down to Delphine’s departure. “I don’t like who you have become, Nicolas,” Delphine had said bitingly on the phone during that final and awful conversation. “I don’t like the full-of-himself, arrogant little bastard you like to pretend you are and that maybe you really have become.” He tried to interrupt her, feebly, although he knew it was useless. Delphine, once she was started, was like a freight train; nothing stopped her. And so out it all came. Nicolas stood on the top terrace of the duplex, looking out to the Champ de Mars and the Eiffel Tower, braced himself, and listened. “Of course, we all know that being exposed to such an overwhelming success is risky. I’m not saying you’ve been unfaithful to me. I know—I hope?—you haven’t, and I’m not even talking about that. I’m talking about how you used to care for people. You used to care, Nicolas. You used to listen. You were there. That’s gone. Now you’re a hot It Boy everyone hungers for. And the worst thing is, you’ve grown to like it.… No, don’t interrupt me. You never used to be vain. Now you look at yourself in shop windows, for Christ’s sake. Whenever you go anywhere, even into a supermarket, you check to see if someone has recognized you. You Google yourself all day long. You spend hours reading posts on your Facebook page. You seem to think that tracking down the Nicolas Kolt hashtag on Twitter is more important than talking to me, or my daughter, or your poor mother. Where is the Nicolas Duhamel who used to wash dishes and crack jokes when I got home? Now you’re either on a book tour or getting drunk at some cocktail party. This is not the kind of life I want with you. I’m thrilled, really, that the book has changed your life and that the world is at your feet.… No, don’t interrupt me. But that book opened our bedroom door to thousands of people. I can’t stand that anymore. I could, if you were being more mature about it. But you are not. You are like a spoiled little boy who got too many presents for his birthday. Listen to me, Nicolas. Gaïa and I are not coming to live with you. You are going to live on rue du Laos all by yourself. Maybe you’ll finally wake up and see what you’re doing to your life. Life isn’t one big book tour, Nicolas. Life isn’t about being recognized in the street by adoring readers. Life isn’t about how many people follow you on Twitter and how many friends you have on Facebook. Please tell Nicolas Kolt that I’m not impressed by him. Good-bye.” She hung up. Since then (this was two years ago), Nicolas has swallowed his pride and Delphine has stopped being so resentful. They have not gotten back together, but they remain friends.