The Woman With the Bouquet (22 page)

Devastated, Maurice collapsed on the edge of the bed. Sylvie rushed over to take him in her arms.

“Maurice, what is going on? Did you have a nightmare? Speak to me, Maurice, speak to me, tell me what’s worrying you.”

From that very moment, he had to keep quiet, otherwise, like Eva Simplon in the novel, they would think he had gone insane, and would pretend to listen to him without hearing him.

“I . . . I . . .”

“Yes, tell me, Maurice. Tell me.”

“I . . . I must’ve had a nightmare.”

“There, there, it’s over. Everything is fine. It was nothing serious. Come on, we’ll go down to the kitchen and I’ll make us some tea.”

She led him downstairs, constantly talking, confident, unruffled, imperturbable. Maurice, progressively won over by her serenity, thought he was right to keep his fears to himself. Sylvie’s tranquil attitude would give him the strength to conduct the investigation right to the end. After all, he was nothing but a simple history teacher, not an agent from the FBI, used to exceptional situations the way Eva Simplon was.

While Sylvie was babbling, he wondered if there wasn’t an analogy between this house and Darkwell. A secret room with a trap door might even be hidden behind these walls, a hideout where the intruder might have found refuge.

He shuddered.

That meant the intruder was still among them . . . wouldn’t it be better if they left right away?

A sudden revelation overwhelmed him. Of course! How obvious! How could the man have gotten in here since all the access from outside had been blocked off?

He hadn’t come in: he already was in. In fact, the man lived in this place, and had lived here longer than they had. He was living in a space they had not discovered because of the rather strange architecture.

“We disturbed him when we arrived.”

Who is he? And what is he looking for at night?

Unless . . .

No . . . .

Yes! Why couldn’t it be a ghost? After all, people have been talking about ghosts for so long. As Josépha Katz declared between two puffs on her cigar, there’s no smoke without fire. What if . . .

Maurice, taken aback, could not determine which was more terrifying, the colossus hiding somewhere inside the house without them knowing how or why, or a ghost haunting the house . . .

“Maurice, I’m worried about you. You don’t seem to be yourself.”

“Hmm? Maybe I’ve got a bit of sunstroke . . .”

“Maybe . . . Tomorrow, if you don’t feel better, I’ll call the doctor.”

Maurice thought, “Tomorrow, we’ll be dead,” but kept it to himself.

“Well, I’m going back to bed.”

“Do you want some more tea?”

“No, thank you, Sylvie. Go ahead of me, please.” While Sylvie was going up the first steps, Maurice used the pretext of switching off the lights in the kitchen to grab a long carving knife from a hook on the wall. He slipped it up into his loose pajama sleeve.

Upstairs, they wished each other sweet dreams.

Maurice was about to close his door again when Sylvie stopped him, turning her cheek to him.

“Here, I feel like a goodnight kiss. That way, you’ll be even calmer.”

She left a damp kiss on his temple. Just as she stepped back, her eyes filled with surprise: she saw something behind Maurice, yes, something in the room that was alarming her!

“What? What is it?” he exclaimed, panicking, convinced the intruder must be standing behind him.

Sylvie thought for a moment and then burst out laughing.

“No, I was just thinking about something else, no connection. Stop being so worried like this, Maurice, you’re getting yourself all in a tizzy. Everything is fine.”

She went away, laughing.

Maurice watched her disappear with a mixture of envy and pity. Ignorance is bliss! She doesn’t suspect a thing, and she even laughs at my anxiety. Maybe there is a ghost or a potential murderer just behind the wall where she leans her pillows, and she would rather tease me. Be a hero, Maurice, leave her to her illusions: don’t let it annoy you.

He lay down to think, but his meditation only managed to make him more worried than ever. Particularly as the unusual presence of the knife with its shiny blade lying next to his thigh on the sheet frightened him more than it stimulated him.

He opened up
The Chamber of Dark Secrets
once again, as if he were coming home after a particularly trying journey. Maybe he would find the solution in the book?

At one o’clock in the morning, when the story was more suspenseful than ever, and he only had fifty pages left to find the solution to the puzzle, he sensed something moving in the corridor.

This time, without hesitating for a second, he switched off the light, and took hold of the handle of his weapon beneath the sheet.

A few seconds later, the doorknob began to turn, a fraction of an inch at a time.

The intruder was trying to come into his room.

With a great deal of caution, and nerve-racking slowness, he opened the door. When he had crossed the threshold, the gray light from the lantern in the corridor shone on his bald head.

Maurice held his breath, and pretended to close his eyes; he kept them open a crack to follow the movements of the colossus.

He came up to Maurice’s bed and reached out his hand.

“He’s going to strangle me!”

Maurice sprang out of the sheets, with a knife in his hand and, screaming with terror, struck the stranger, splattering his blood.

There was an unusual amount of activity. In fact, such events were very rare in these sleepy provincial villages, ordinarily so quiet.

Alongside the police cars were those of the mayor, the local parliamentary deputy, and the nearest neighbors. While the house overlooked a rocky wilderness, dozens of rubberneckers had managed to hear about the incident and had come running.

They were obliged to limit access to the villa by means of a symbolic gate—plastic tape—and by stationing three gendarmes to ward off any unhealthy curiosity.

While a truck was removing the corpse, the policemen and the authorities looked unconvinced while the massive woman repeated her story for the tenth time, stumbling over her own words to hiccup, weep, and blow her nose.

“Please, at least let my friends in. Oh, here they are.”

Grace, Audrey, and Sophia rushed up to Sylvie to hug her and console her. Then they sat down on the next sofa.

Sylvie justified their presence to the policemen.

“It is through them that I rented this villa. We met this winter at the hospital where we were being treated, in Professor Millau’s service. Oh, my God, if I had even suspected . . .”

She began to tell her story again for her friends.

“I can’t understand what happened. He was so kind, Maurice, this year. More easy-going than the other times. Simpler. I think he had understood that I was recovering from a sickness, that I’d had chemotherapy for my cancer. Maybe someone told him? Or did he guess? All these last days, he kept reaching out to me, suggesting he loved me the way I was, that I needn’t try to hide anything from him. But it’s true that for me it’s hard. Hard to accept that I’ve lost my hair because of the treatments, and that I have to hide my skull under a wig. The first night, I was sure he had seen me downstairs, in my pajamas, without my wig, I was looking for a book I had bought at the supermarket and had mislaid somewhere. Yesterday evening when I wished him good night at his door, after we had some tea, I realized that the damn book was in his room, on his bed. So around midnight, as I was tossing and turning and couldn’t sleep—I’ve had trouble recuperating since my illness—I figured that I could go and get it from his room without disturbing him. Maurice was dozing. I was careful not to wake him up, I made my way without any noise, and just as I was about to put my hand on the book, he threw himself on me. I felt a terrible pain, and I saw a knife blade, and I cried out and fought him off, and sent him sprawling backwards, and he bounced against the wall and then fell on his side and then, shlack, the rabbit punch! His neck hit the night table! Stone dead!”

She had to stop for her sobs.

The police commissioner was rubbing his chin, unconvinced, then he conferred with his team. The hypothesis of an accident seemed improbable. Why would the man sleep with a knife unless he was afraid of his cousin attacking him?

Then, although the women protested in support of their friend, he informed Sylvie that she was under arrest. Not only was there no trace of a struggle but she was, according to her own confession, the victim’s sole heir. She was taken away, her wrists in handcuffs.

The police commissioner went back upstairs by himself, his hands protected by gloves, and into transparent plastic bags he slipped the two exhibits: a huge kitchen knife, and a book,
The Chamber of Dark Secrets,
by Chris Black, its pages also splattered with blood.

As he was closing the plastic around the book, he read beneath the brown smudges what you could still see of the description on the back, and he could not help but murmur with a sigh, “Some people really do read the trashiest stuff . . .”

A
t the train station in Zurich, on platform number three, there is a woman who has been waiting, every day for fifteen years, with a bouquet in her hand.

In the beginning, I didn’t want to believe it. I had already made several journeys to see Egon Ammann, my German language publisher, before I noticed her; then it took me a long time to formulate my surprise, because the elderly lady looked so normal, so dignified, so noble, that you paid her no attention whatsoever. She was dressed in a black woolen suit with a long skirt, and wore flat shoes and dark stockings; an umbrella with a knob sculpted in the shape of a duck’s beak emerged from her handbag of cuir-bouilli; a mother of pearl barrette held her hair in a chignon against her head, while a modest bouquet of wildflowers, with a dominant orange note, made a small splash of color in her gloved hands. There was nothing that suggested she might be a madwoman or an eccentric, so I had attributed my encounters with her to chance.

One spring, however, Ulla, one of Ammann’s colleagues, met me on the platform by my carriage, so I pointed out the strange woman.

“It’s very odd, I think I’ve seen this woman more than once. What a coincidence! She must be waiting for my double, someone who always takes the same train that I do and at the same time.”

“Not at all,” exclaimed Ulla, “she stands there every day and she waits.”

“Who for?”

“Someone who doesn’t come . . . because she goes away again every evening, alone, and comes back again the following day.”

“Really! How long has this been going on?”

“Well, I’ve been seeing her for five years but I spoke with a stationmaster who says he noticed her at least fifteen years ago!”

“Are you making fun of me, Ulla? This sounds like a novel!”

Ulla blushed—the slightest emotion turned her crimson—then she stammered, laughed in confusion, and shook her head.

“I swear, it’s true. Every day. For fifteen years. In fact, it must be more than fifteen years, because each of us has taken years to notice her presence . . . So the stationmaster must have as well . . . For example, you’ve been coming to Zurich for three years and you’ve only mentioned her today. Maybe she’s been waiting for twenty or thirty years . . . She’s never replied to anyone who asked what she was waiting for.”

“She’s right,” I concluded. “Besides, who could answer such a question?”

We could not elucidate the matter any further, because we had to turn our attention to a series of interviews with the press.

I didn’t think about it again until my next trip. The moment “Zurich” was announced over the train’s loudspeakers, I recalled the woman with the bouquet and wondered, will she, yet again . . .

She was there, vigilant, on platform number three.

I looked at her closely. Light eyes, almost the color of mercury, on the verge of fading away. Pale but healthy skin, marked by the expressive claw of time. A thin body, still in good shape, that must once have been nimble and vigorous. The stationmaster was exchanging a few words with her, and she was nodding, smiling amiably, and then she went on her way, imperturbably, staring at the railroad lines. I was able to note only one eccentricity: a folding canvas seat, that she carried with her. Or was that the sign, rather, of a practical nature?

As soon as I arrived at the Ammann Verlag, after changing trams several times, I decided to conduct an investigation.

“Ulla, if you please, I must find out more about the woman with the bouquet.”

Her cheeks went raspberry.

“As I was sure you would ask me again, I’ve come prepared. I went to the station and chatted with a few members of the staff, and now I’ve become very friendly with the man who runs the left luggage.”

Well aware myself of how easy it was to like Ulla, I had no doubt that she had managed to extract as much information as possible. Although she can be abrupt, and slightly authoritarian, with a piercing gaze as she looks at her interlocutors, she offsets her rather strict approach with an explosive sense of humor, and the sort of joviality one would not expect from someone with such dark features. If she befriends everybody easily, it is because she is basically well-disposed toward people—and irrepressibly curious as well.

“Even though she spends her days outside on the platform, the woman with the bouquet is anything but a tramp. She lives in a fine bourgeois house, in a leafy street. She lives alone, with the daily help of a Turkish woman in her fifties. Her name is Frau Steinmetz.”

“Frau Steinmetz? Will the Turkish woman tell us who she’s waiting for at the station?”

“The Turkish woman hurries away the minute you go up to her. This I found out from a friend who lives in a neighboring street: the maid speaks neither German, French, nor Italian.”

“Then how does she communicate with her mistress?”

“In Russian.”

“The Turkish woman speaks Russian?”

“As does Frau Steinmetz.”

“This is all very intriguing, Ulla. Were you able to find out this Frau Steinmetz’s marital status?”

“I tried. I wasn’t able to find anything.”

“A husband? Children? Parents?”

“Nothing. Let me be precise: I can’t swear she doesn’t or didn’t have a husband, or children, I only am saying that I don’t know.”

At teatime, over some
macarons
, the employees and the publisher Egon Ammann himself came to join us, and I brought up the subject once again.

“In your opinion, who is she waiting for, the woman with the bouquet?”

“Her son,” answered Claudia. “A mother is always hoping that her son will come.”

“Why her son?” asked Nelly, annoyed, “Why not her daughter!”

“Her husband,” said Doris.

“Her lover,” amended Rita.

“Her sister?” suggested Mathias.

In actual fact each of them, in their answer, was telling their own story. Claudia suffered from not seeing her son, who was a professor in Berlin; Nelly’s daughter was married to a New Zealander; Doris was pining for her husband, a sales representative constantly away on business; Rita changed her lover as often as her underwear; as for young Mathias, he was a pacifist and a conscientious objector, doing his civil service by working rather than serving in the army, and clearly he was nostalgic for his family cocoon.

Ulla looked at her colleagues as if they were all mentally retarded.

“None of that, she’s waiting for someone who died and she can’t accept the fact.”

“That doesn’t change a thing,” exclaimed Claudia. “It can still be her son.”

“Her daughter.”

“Her husband.”

“Her lover.”

“Her sister.”

“Or a twin brother who died at birth,” suggested the laconic, solitary Romy.

We looked at her: was this her own secret she was entrusting us with, if not that of the lady with the bouquet? She always seemed so sad.

To try another tack, I turned to Egon Ammann.

“And you, Egon, who do you think she is waiting for?”

Even though he kept company with us, Egon never said a great deal during these breaks, which he must have found childish. He is a passionate man, with intelligent eyebrows, a distinguished nose, he’s read everything, and deciphered everything for sixty years, getting up at five o’clock in the morning to light his first cigarette and attack his pile of manuscripts, plowing through novels, devouring essays. It is as if his very long white hair were carrying the traces of an adventurous life—the wind from the countries he has seen, the smoke from the tons of tobacco he has burned, the dreams contained in the books he’s published. So although he professes nothing, and does not moralize, he impresses me with his constant curiosity, his appetite for discovery, his gift for languages; next to him I feel like an amateur.

Egon shrugged, looking out the window at the great tits fluttering on the blossoming linden tree, and said, “Her first love?”

Then, embarrassed by his confession, furious at such a slip, he frowned and gave me a harsh stare.

“And what’s your theory, Eric?”

“A first love who will never return,” I murmured.

There was a silence in the room. We had all understood the trap. Through this unknown woman, we had divulged our most private wishes, confessing the very thing that we were waiting for, or could wait for, in our deepest soul. How I would have liked to be able to get inside their skulls, to know them better. And yet, how greatly I appreciated the fact that they did not get into mine. What a painful place it is, this brain of mine, this enclosure of unvoiced words, this dark sanctuary guarded by my temples! There are certain words I could not utter without collapsing. How much better to keep silent. Do we not all find our depth in our silence?

Back at home, I went on thinking about the woman with the bouquet. On subsequent trips to Zurich I traveled by car or plane, and I did not have the opportunity to go through the station.

A year or two went by.

What was odd about that woman with the bouquet was that I forgot her without forgetting her, or rather I thought about her at times when I felt somewhat lonely, at times when it was impossible to question anyone . . . Her image haunted only those moments of helplessness. Nevertheless, I did manage, one day when I was talking to Ulla on the telephone, to bring her up again.

“Yes, yes, I assure you: she’s still there. Every day. Platform number three. To be sure, she’s beginning to look tired; from time to time, she dozes off, sitting on her seat, but then she gets a hold of herself, and she picks up her bouquet and looks up and down the platform.”

“She fascinates me.”

“I can’t see why. Although she doesn’t look it, she is surely just out of her mind, an unfortunate madwoman. Besides, nowadays, with cell phones and the Internet, you don’t go and greet someone on a station platform, do you?”

“What interests me, it’s not
why
she’s waiting on the platform, but
who
she’s waiting for. Who can you be waiting for like that, for years, or even your entire life?”

“Beckett, waiting for Godot.”

“A sham! For him, the point was to show that the world is absurd, that there’s no God, and that we are wrong to promise ourselves anything in this life. Beckett’s a street cleaner, he’ll sweep earth and sky and send all your hope—stinking refuse—to the dump. What I find interesting about the woman with the bouquet is that there are two questions she inspires. The first one: who are we waiting for? The second: is it right or wrong to wait?”

“Here, I’m going to hand the receiver to the boss, he’s been listening to our conversation. He’s got something to read to you.”

“Eric? Just one sentence for you. ‘What is interesting in an enigma is not the truth that it hides, but the mystery that it contains.’”

“Thank you for the quotation, Egon.”

I hung up, fully suspecting that on the other end of the line they must be laughing at me.

Last spring, I went once again by train to Zurich to give a lecture. Obviously, the moment I climbed into the carriage, I could think of no one but her. I was looking forward to seeing her again, peaceful, smiling, faithful, indifferent to everyone, attentive to something we knew nothing about. She was a woman we had only glimpsed for a few seconds, and yet we spoke about her for hours, as if she were a sphinx hiding a secret, an inexhaustible ferment for our imagination.

As we came into Zurich, I mused that there was one certain thing we knew: she was not waiting for any of us. Could it be that our silence, our disinclination to probe further, our intermittent forgetfulness were all rooted there, in that humiliation, the fact that she looked right through us as if we were all invisible?

“Zurich!”

As I stepped down on the platform I noticed her absence at once. A few bystanders had just left platform number three behind them—a spotless, empty space.

What had happened to her?

As I went through Zurich on the tram, I refused to indulge in hypotheses. Ulla must know, Ulla knew, Ulla would tell me. So I concentrated on looking out at this unusual city, both rich and modest, a grandmother’s dream, where buildings seem to have been constructed for the sake of the geraniums beaming down from windowsills, a peaceful town as sleepy as the lake resting against its side; while behind its thick walls, deals are being made with powerful economic consequences. Zurich has always seemed mysterious to me because of its absence of mystery: while we Latins think that anything that is dirty, meandering and profuse is adventurous, Zurich is well behaved, clean, and neatly ordered, yet it becomes strange for its very—extreme—lack of strangeness. It has the charm of an elegant lover, wearing a bow tie and tux, the exemplary son, the ideal son-in-law, yet it is capable of committing the worst debauchery the moment the door is closed.

At the Ammann Verlag, I got my chores out of the way—discussions, program—then I made the most of a break to go and speak to Ulla between two doors.

“What happened to the woman with the bouquet?”

She rolled her eyes, aghast.

“As soon as we get a minute, I’ll tell you.”

In the evening, after the lecture, book signing, and dinner, we went back to the hotel, exhausted. Without saying a word, we sat down at the bar and pointed to the cocktails we wanted, then I switched off my cell phone while Ulla lit a cigarette.

“Well?” I asked.

I had no need to be more specific. She knew what I was waiting for.

“The woman with the bouquet was waiting for something, and whatever that something was, it came. That’s why she isn’t there anymore.”

“What happened?”

“My friend at the left luggage told me everything. Three weeks ago, the woman with the bouquet suddenly got up, radiant, her eyes full of wonder. She waved in the direction of a man getting out of the carriage, and he saw her right away. She threw her arms around him. They embraced for a long time. Even the baggage handlers were moved, she radiated so much happiness. The man was tall, wearing a long, dark coat, and no one recognized him because a felt hat partially hid his features; from what they were able to tell me about him, he didn’t seem at all surprised to see her there. They left the station arm in arm. At the last minute, she did something rather whimsical: she left her canvas seat on the ground, as if it didn’t belong to her. Oh, I nearly forgot the strangest detail: the man was traveling without a suitcase, and the only thing he had to carry was the orange bouquet she had given him.”