Lhermitte did not know judo. Neither did her rival. Those women began something without realising what they had begun. They were not prepared. And so they could not see it through. According to plan Lhermitte should have killed herself too. And her rival should have killed all her five children. But after the third child she faltered, like an engine that sputters because the fuel tank springs a leak. Caused by whom, by what? Don’t ask questions, Odette. There’s a leak, OK?
Sometimes things go your way, sometimes they go against you.
Man proposes, fate disposes.
A panic attack, writes one.
An epileptic fit, maintains the other.
I say: an epileptic fit caused by panic.
If I have learned one thing from M, it is not to give in to panic. He did not know what panic was. He didn’t know what love was and he didn’t know what panic was either. That sometimes makes life easy, you know, not knowing what feelings are. Feelings get in the way. Not always, but often. And of course M had feelings. He felt pain, rage and indignation. They are feelings too.
Perhaps panic is more of a reaction than a feeling, but that is no excuse. You must learn to control reactions too. When they arrested me in front of my children, when they led me away in handcuffs, when they took me away in a wailing police car… I didn’t feel a moment’s panic. I knew that panic wouldn’t help me. On the contrary.
Cool head, cool head, cool head. Make the best of a bad job.
Now too. Definitely now.
Anyone who lets themselves be carried away by panic is giving up, said M. And humiliating themselves. He had seen that often enough in the girls he dragged into his van. They wet themselves. He found that embarrassing for them. Extremely embarrassing.
M never gave up. Not even when he had lost.
If you ask me he still hasn’t given up.
If she had not had that panic-epileptic attack, she could have beaten Lhermitte: murdering five children and herself too.
Lhermitte wouldn’t have liked that. No more gold medal for Geneviève Lhermitte!
Now her rival didn’t have a chance. She collapsed like the twin towers in New York. She lay there like a sack of potatoes. The two children she had not yet murdered rushed to her aid. ‘Mummy, Mummy what’s wrong?’ They wanted to help their Mummy, their dear Mummy. They rang for an ambulance. And they fetched the woman from next door. She came as soon as she could and also brought her little son with her. What chance did that woman have with all those people in her house?
M. would say that the plan was no good, but even he could not always foresee everything. If he had foreseen everything I wouldn’t be in here now. And he wouldn’t be in there. The two most hated inmates, each in their own prison. Mirror, mirror in the wall, who’s the most hated one of all, him or me?
They’ve thrown Lhermitte in jail, but where has her rival been dumped: prison, hospital or madhouse?
In love, engaged, married. In love, engaged, prison. In love, engaged, madhouse. In love, engaged, hospital. They’ve probably put her in a madhouse. A madhouse specialising in epilepsy.
Whenever the moon is full and round in the sky, it crackles in their heads. They fall to the ground like lumps. White foaming saliva leaks from their mouths. They jerk like a bad actor faking orgasm. ‘They can choke,’ said my mother. ‘Sometimes they swallow their own tongue and they choke.’ She had once seen one, on the tram. She was on her way to the parents of my father, to whom she had just got engaged. ‘Leave the tram!’ ordered the conductor sternly, but no one wanted to miss the spectacle, and neither did my mother, a young bride-to-be. Imagine: a German officer in uniform whose trembling body is filling the aisle. The arms were flailing, the legs were stamping. Urine was streaming from him.
My mother had wanted to throw herself on the epileptic. She had kicked off her shoes and had slid to the edge of the seat. She placed her hands to the left and right of her thighs, ready to push off for the leap. Her body would calm his, like a blanket thrown on the flames. The realisation that she would become part of the spectacle stopped her at the last moment.
Nothing would have stopped me.
When the conductor had finally thrown the passengers off his tram, my mother realised that urine had leaked from her too. Not as much as from the German officer, but enough to feel it. Was there a stain on her dress? On her coat? Oh, the shame, the shame! And now there was also a ladder in her new stockings. What on earth was happening? She had bought the stockings especially for the visit to her future parents-in-law, although it was wartime. Stockings cost a fortune, but her mama had said: ‘If you’re serious about that man, you must wear stockings.’
The other stranded passengers had carried her along with them to a bar. She had tried in vain to drink the Dutch gin a fellow passenger had offered her. Her teeth were chattering against the rim of the glass. Someone said that she must eat, but she couldn’t swallow a thing. The ambulance siren drove them all back out into the street. They saw the epileptic being taken away on a stretcher and disappearing into the belly of the ambulance. The tram continued on its way, but my mother could not bring herself to get on. She felt exhausted and soiled as if she had had sex with the pissing, foaming man in the aisle in full view of all the passengers. She would have liked nothing better than to break off the engagement.
At home she took off her clothes and threw them away, not into the laundry basket, but into the rubbish bin. War or no war, she did not want to wear them anymore, she could not wear them any more.
First she soaked in the bath, and then she scrubbed herself clean at the washbasin. But the gagging man still clung to her. He never disappeared from her head or from her body.
‘That day evil was planted in my womb,’ she often said.
Because she and my father were respectable people. Des gens convenables. And so were their parents. I couldn’t have got it from them.
If I was fathered by that sick SS officer on that Sunday afternoon, it was a pregnancy of over sixteen years. Long enough for a Devil’s child.
But I was not fathered in that tram.
Sometimes they turn into wolves.
That isn’t true.
M could turn into a wolf, a wolf that stands on its hind legs so that everyone can see its penis. His wolf’s penis. It was a test. He wanted to see whether I would get into a panic. I forced myself to stay calm. I folded my hands and prayed. In my mind I folded my hands. If I had really done it, he would have torn me to pieces with his wolf’s teeth, his wolf’s claws.
Wolves are less dangerous than people think. They attack when they have no other choice. Actually they are frightened of people.
Don’t force me, M often said.
I didn’t force him. I tried not to force him.
Sometimes I forced him without realising, or I realised too late. With that story of my mother’s about the epileptic, for example. I thought it would amuse him, and it did seem to amuse him. I could have sworn that he giggled when I told him how my mother, with wet knickers, was ready to jump on the poor man in the midst of a full tram. It made me reckless. I made up details to extend my moment of triumph, and laid it on thick. Pathetic, I know, and unforgivable. I heard myself rattling on, though I knew perfectly well that people rattling on drove M nuts. He let me tell the story. He didn’t interrupt me. And then suddenly there was his hand over my mouth and four grim words: my brother has epilepsy.
Which brother? I didn’t dare ask. He had so many.
‘Forgive me,’ I said. ‘Please tell me you forgive me.’
‘There’s no point,’ he said. ‘I can forgive you and you’ll do it again tomorrow.’
He didn’t hit me that time. I wasn’t even worth the effort.
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