Since that morning, Jeanne had seen three dwarves: the first on her way out of Versailles, on Avenue de Paris, the second while dropping her brother off outside the Louvre and the third, a woman, shopping at La Samaritaine. Some days are like that. Other days, you keep seeing film actors or bumping into people you haven’t seen for a long time, or take the same taxi twice, or nothing happens at all.
She was looking for a gift for Rodolphe but had no idea what to get. She would rather not give him anything, if she was honest. He had been even more odious than normal recently. But it was Christmas, and even naughty children were entitled to a present. She eventually opted for a set of bathroom scales, an unequivocally tasteless object covered in brown velour with a brass rim, Jules Verne style. It was a completely useless gift since Rodolphe didn’t care two hoots about his obesity and would not be able to see the reading anyway. But it was heavy and came in a big box, so it would make a nice present.
Having made her selection, she could not resist a look at the toy section, in spite of the swarms of harassed parents and overexcited children. All the dolls looked as if they had walked out of horror films, they were so alarmingly lifelike. Some had teeth and spoke inane words with metallic voices. It was terrifying. The dolls of her childhood did not speak, eat, wee or poo. They were either stiff or floppy. The first black doll went on sale when she was twelve. She was sorry not to have had one, but it was too late by then. That was the age she became old overnight. One morning she got up and her toys no longer spoke to her. They had become objects, things. She touched them, turned them over in her hands as though seeing them for the first time, and began to cry. Her childhood had run away during the night.
The pistols, rifles and submachine guns for boys looked more authentic than the real things. The kids were trying them out for size, making them rattle into action with expert ease. A mini Sarajevo. Had a terrorist slipped a real weapon among them, there would have been utter carnage. This was a truly false world. Anything could be forged, everything could be questioned; calves were being cloned and one could not even be sure of remaining the same person from one day to the next. Plagiarism had become the ultimate, fatal art form and illusion the universal religion.
Jeanne couldn’t care less. What was wrong with sending a cloned Jeanne to work and to pick up Rodolphe from the Louvre? What would she do with herself in the meantime? Nothing. She would be dead and thanks to her double, everyone would think she was still alive.
A child came along and threw himself at her legs. He already had the face of an old codger. With twenty years of teaching behind her, nothing surprised Jeanne any more. She had loved kids and then hated them, and now she was as indifferent to them as she was to adults. It was just a case of putting up with them and waving them away like flies from time to time.
As Jeanne left the department store carrying the scales under her arm, the cold air struck her full in the face, in stark contrast to the stifling heat inside La Samaritaine. For a few seconds it took her breath away. She didn’t actually mind this weather – the coldest since the winter of 1917 – any more than she had the heat wave the previous summer. She liked extremes. It was the same with dwarves: they were out of the ordinary.
She arrived in the room containing The Raft of the Medusa at exactly one o’clock. Rodolphe looked peeved.
‘It’s me.’
‘Yes, I know it’s you. You should change your perfume, then I could imagine I was meeting someone else.’
‘What difference would it make? You don’t like anybody.’
‘That’s not true. It’s them that don’t like me.’
‘Well, I like you. How about a nice choucroute?’
It was all yellow, the yellow of old teeth which would soon turn brown. But it was clean, perfectly maintained by Madeleine, his mother’s cleaning lady. She was the one who had found her a few days earlier, lying in bed with her hands clutching the edge of the sheets and her eyes eternally trained on a crack in the ceiling in the shape of Corsica.
Dead people don’t decorate the way we do. They put crocheted doilies with pineapple or spiral patterns all over the place – on top of the TV, underneath the phone, draped over cushions like spiders’ webs. Olivier was unsure where to put himself in the cramped, overheated flat he was setting foot in for the first time. Certain items of furniture and ornaments were familiar from his childhood, like the little writing desk he used to like to hide under. On its right foot, you could still see the mark where a pedal car had crashed into it. Or the brass lamp shade his father had proudly brought home one night, a gift from a client. These recollections aside, everything was foreign to him. On her husband’s death, Olivier’s mother had sold the house in Le Chesnay and moved into this small one bedroom flat. ‘Now that I’m all on my own’ (and she had really emphasised the ‘all on my own’) ‘it’s plenty big enough for me.’
She would no doubt have liked Olivier to be up in arms at the idea of selling the family home, but in fact he couldn’t care less. He had completely wiped Versailles from the map.
Getting off the train two hours earlier at the gloomy, silent, freezing Gare Rive Droite, he had been surprised to feel nothing at all. It could have been any other provincial town, curled up in its shell, hiding from the cold and dark. He was relieved, because he had been approaching his reunion with the place with a degree of apprehension. It was silly to have worried; after all, it was only stone, cobbles and bricks. And yet nothing had changed. Looking out of the window of the taxi taking him to his mother’s home, he recognised everything, even if a few shops had changed hands. The lead-coloured avenues and boulevards fanning out from Place d’Armes in front of the chateau were still the same. A quilt of snow softened the street corners and padded the pavements. Versailles was wearing a wig. He had been to pick up the keys from Madeleine, whom his mother had often talked about, but whom he had never met.
From the moment they laid eyes on one another, he could see she had hated him for a long time.
‘Oh, Monsieur Olivier, you look so much like her! My sincere condolences, Monsieur Olivier. It’s so sad! Excuse me.’
She plunged her nose (which looked like a rancid hunk of Gruyère) into a handful of tissues, while continuing to give him the evil eye. She was much as he had pictured her, voluntarily enslaved, even more of a Versaillaise than her mistress. A by-product. She had insisted on coming with him to the home of his ‘poor maman’, whom he sadly could not see until the next day because the undertakers had transferred the body to the morgue. The trouble was, with the weather like this and the Christmas holidays approaching, people were dying in large numbers. The funeral might not be held until the 26th or even 27th.
‘The 27th?’
‘That’s what they told me!’
For a good half-hour she carried on about his poor mother’s poor armchair, his poor mother’s poor mirror, his poor mother’s poor life. All the above swam in a poor whiff of poor leeks.
‘Thanks for everything, Madeleine. If you’ll excuse me, I’m rather tired …’
‘Of course, you poor thing, I understand. I’ll leave you to your memories. If you need anything at all …’
‘That’s very kind of you, Madeleine. Thanks again.’
Everything he touched had been touched by the hand of a dead person and he found the idea vaguely disgusting, even if that person was his mother. He wondered where he was going to sleep. Not in the bed, that was for sure. Tomorrow he would look for a hotel, but he didn’t have the strength to go out again in the bitter cold tonight, roaming this ghost town in search of a place to stay. The sofa, maybe? Curling up like a winkle, he should fit. He plumped up the cushions and removed the ubiquitous lace doilies from the arms. Before anything else, he must call Odile