Hector and the Search for Happiness (9 page)

Everybody thought the question was very interesting. They came up with lots of answers.

‘Because they don’t yet fully realise their situation, they can’t make comparisons.’

This reminded Hector of lesson no. 1.

‘Because children who are sad die more quickly, so we don’t see them. Only happy children survive.’

‘Because they were pleased to see Hector.’

Everybody burst out laughing, and Marie-Louise told Hector that this proved it was true!

And then one of the cousins (she was rather too pretty, so Hector had been careful not to look at her too much) said, ‘Because they know that people will be kinder to a child who smiles.’

Everybody thought that this was the best explanation, and Marie-Louise’s cousin looked at Hector and smiled, and he wondered whether it wasn’t because she wanted him to be nice to her, but fortunately the whole family was there to stop them from getting up to any mischief.

This question of children smiling reminded Hector of the story of one of his fellow psychiatrists. When he was a child, people from another country had occupied Hector’s country and had decided to put to death all the people with surnames they didn’t like. In order to do this they put them on trains and took them very far away, to places where nobody could see them doing this terrible thing. Hector’s colleague was a child with the wrong sort of surname, and he’d been kept in a camp with other children waiting for the train that would take them to their deaths. But because he was a child who smiled and made everybody laugh, including the people guarding the camp, some of the grown-ups had kept him back, hidden him, and he hadn’t been taken away with the others.

This was something all children wanting to survive should know, then: people are kinder to a child who smiles, even if it doesn’t always work.

 

 

It was getting late, and because the food had been spicy and made Hector thirsty, he’d drunk quite a lot and was feeling rather drowsy. Everybody said goodbye, and Marie-Louise went with Hector to the car that had come to take him back to the hotel. It was a small four-by-four truck like Jean-Michel’s, with a chauffeur — not dressed like the chauffeurs in Hector’s country, though; he just wore a T-shirt, a pair of old bell-bottoms and some flip-flops. There was also a very young bodyguard carrying a very big revolver. When he walked past them to climb into the back, he could smell that they’d been drinking rum, but all things considered maybe it was a good way of not being scared when driving on the roads in that country. He waved goodbye to Marie-Louise and her family, who stood on the front step watching him leave, and the car drove off into the night.

Hector felt quite happy: he told himself that he would have plenty of interesting things to tell Clara, because he would be able to tell her about what happened to him in this country.

He would have liked to talk to the chauffeur and the bodyguard, to ask them if they were happy, but he was too drowsy. He fell asleep.

He dreamt about Ying Li, which proves that psychiatrists’ dreams are no more difficult to understand than anybody else’s.

H
E didn’t wake up completely but he did have the fleeting impression that the car had stopped, the doors had slammed and people had started shouting. However, because he was dreaming that he was sailing across the sea in a small boat with Ying Li to go back to his country, he resisted coming out of his dream.

Well, that was a big mistake.

Because when Hector did wake up completely, he had the impression that the driver and the bodyguard had changed. True, Hector had not paid much attention to what they looked like but he could see perfectly well that these were not the same men as before, and he tried to understand why. The other thing he tried to understand was why the car was still driving through the night. Because his hotel wasn’t all that far from Marie-Louise’s house, just about time enough for one dream, and yet they were still on the road.

If Hector had been more awake, or a bit smarter (Hector was intelligent but not necessarily smart), he would have guessed what was happening, but instead he asked, ‘Where are we going?’

The two Africans in front jumped out of their seats, nearly hitting their heads on the roof, and the car swerved sharply. They turned around, the whites of their eyes showing, and the one driving said, ‘Mercy!’ The other one took out a big revolver and pointed it shakily at Hector. At that moment, Hector saw that they were both wearing police uniforms. Then he understood what had happened.

It was as Marcel had explained. Stealing a car is difficult without the ignition key, and so it’s easier for criminals to make you stop and give them your keys. In this country, some criminals had discovered that a good way of doing this was to pretend to be policemen! Obviously, when a policeman flags you down on the road you stop, otherwise you risk getting fined or even being shot at. So, at night, sometimes there were fake police roadblocks or, rather, real roadblocks but manned by fake policemen who were actually criminals. And it wasn’t that difficult to get hold of uniforms because everybody had a brother or a cousin in the police force who could lend them his jacket or helmet on his days off (the jacket was enough because in this country even the real policemen could wear just any old trousers or shoes, even battered trainers).

Hector understood everything. The two fake policemen in front must have stopped the car, posing as real policemen, made the driver and the bodyguard get out, perhaps roughed them up a bit, and then left in a hurry without even realising that Hector was asleep in the back.

As he looked at the gun pointing at him, Hector began to feel scared, but not very scared. He knew that some men, especially criminals, could be very cruel or very scared and kill people, but since he’d never witnessed this at first hand (Hector had led quite a peaceful life, like most people his age in his country), he couldn’t really believe that anybody was going to hurt him, even though he knew it was possible.

Meanwhile, the man in the bodyguard’s seat had begun talking very fast into a mobile phone. Hector couldn’t understand everything because he was speaking in a language that was similar to Hector’s but not identical; it was a local version of it, which dated back to the time, long ago, when the people in Hector’s country thought that this country belonged to them. Judging by his tone of voice, Hector understood that he was talking to his boss, and that his boss wanted Hector brought to him. This didn’t seem like such a bad thing, because, as his mother would say (and perhaps yours too), it is always better to speak to the Good Lord directly than to one of his saints.

Although later, on seeing the boss, he wondered whether his mother was always right.

The boss looked at Hector without saying anything, as you might look at a chair or an unwanted parcel you don’t know how to dispose of, while the other two explained what had happened in voices a little high-pitched for two such burly men. You’ll have realised that they were scared of their boss — and since they were criminals, this gives you some idea of what their boss must have been like; he can’t have been easy-going, any more than his two friends who were with him at the table when they arrived.

They were in a big house, which must have been splendid once but was in ruins now. Hector could see through into another room where some beautiful African women were sitting on a big sofa watching television. They all wore pretty, rather tight-fitting dresses and earrings, and looked as if they’d just come from the hairdresser’s. From time to time one of them would get up with a sigh and come to the door to take a peek at Hector or to listen to what the others were saying, but Hector avoided looking at her, because now really wasn’t the time for fun and games.

The boss was better dressed than his men, and he spoke Hector’s language without a trace of the local accent, and Hector guessed that he was the type of criminal Marcel had told him about who had come here because the police weren’t very efficient.

One of the boss’s friends at the table said, ‘We’re in the shit now because of these two idiots!’

And the other friend scowled at Hector and muttered, ‘What are you staring at?’

Hector began to explain; he told them he’d been to dinner with Marie-Louise’s family. The others looked at each other, and then the one who’d said ‘What are you staring at?’ said, ‘That’s all we need!’ Hector also explained that he was a doctor (he didn’t dare tell them that he was a psychiatrist; he wasn’t sure why but he thought it might annoy the boss of the gang) and that he was a friend of Jean-Michel, the doctor who treated the children at the health centres.

But he didn’t have time to say much more, because the boss ordered the others to take him away and he found himself locked in a kind of storeroom with a small light bulb on the ceiling and lots of beer crates. It also smelt very strongly of dead rat, and the smell gave Hector a bad feeling.

The door wasn’t very thick and he could hear what they were saying.

The criminals couldn’t agree, and it sounded as if they were squabbling. It was difficult to follow, but it went a bit like this:

One kept saying, ‘How much could we get for him?’

Another always replied, ‘Forget it, he’s white, we’ll never get away with it.’

And so the first insisted, ‘Exactly, he’s worth a lot because he’s white.’

But the third kept repeating, ‘In any case, he’s seen us now.’

Hector had the impression that it was the boss who kept saying that.

And then he felt quite unhappy because he began to think that he was going to die.

H
ECTOR had thought about death quite a lot during his life. He’d already seen quite a few people die in hospital when he was studying to be a doctor. He and his classmates were very young at the time, and most of the people who died in hospital were older, so they had the impression that death only happened to people of a different kind, even though they knew this wasn’t true. But, as previously mentioned, knowing and feeling are two different things, and feeling is what counts.

He’d seen people die very peacefully, almost willingly. They were of several different sorts: those who were already frail from their illness, who felt that life had become too much of an effort and were quite relieved that it would soon be over; those who believed in the Good Lord, for whom death was just a journey, and it didn’t make them sad at all; and then there were those who felt that they’d had a good life and couldn’t complain if it ended now.

Of course it was mostly old people who were able to say that.

But, occasionally, somebody as young as Hector and his classmates would be admitted to the hospital suffering from a very, very serious illness, and each day they would watch this person grow thinner, suffer, weep and finally die. And even if they tried to see this as an opportunity to learn more about medicine, it shook them all the same.

When Hector had chosen to study psychiatry, he’d told himself that one advantage of that worthy profession was that you rarely saw your patients die. Whereas in some fields it was really dreadful (we won’t mention any names so that if you ever have to go to one of those departments you won’t worry in advance). Hector even knew specialists in those fields who’d been to see him because they ended up finding it hard to bear seeing their patients die. Hector had to give them quite a lot of pills as well as psychotherapy.

And, of course, Hector had already lost people he loved, but there again they had been older, except for one very good friend, and he occasionally imagined what age she would be now, and the conversations they might have had.

All this might explain why, locked in his storeroom that smelt of dead rat, Hector wasn’t very scared of dying. Because when you think about something a lot, you become less and less scared of it.

He also said to himself that even if he died now, he’d already lived a good life: he’d had a nice mother and father, many very good friends, he’d fallen deeply in love more than once, had chosen a profession he loved, had been on some wonderful trips, had often felt he was helping people, and had never suffered any terrible misfortune. His life was a lot better than the lives of most people on the planet.

Of course, he hadn’t had time to make any little Hectors or Hectorines, but this was just as well because now they would be orphans.

Fear of death, then, was not the most difficult thing. No. What made Hector miserable was thinking about the people he loved, who loved him and whom he’d never see again, and how unhappy they’d be when they found out that he was dead.

He thought about Clara, and how very sad she would be when she heard the news, and memories came flooding back of her laughing, crying, talking to him, sleeping pressed up beside him.

He could feel how much he loved her and she loved him, and how much she would suffer.

He also thought of Ying Li, but not as intensely because he had fewer memories of her. Ying Li was like a future that would never exist, that had never had much chance of existing.

He thought of old friends like Édouard and Jean-Michel, especially Jean-Michel, who might feel guilty because Hector had come here to see him.

And then he thought of his parents, and that was terrible, too, because although it often happens, it isn’t normal for parents to outlive their child.

He remembered Marie-Louise’s mother, who had never really come back to life after her husband died, and he wondered whether this would happen to Clara or his parents.

And he took out his notebook in order to write them a note, which they might find on him. He began by writing to Clara, telling her how much he loved her, and that she shouldn’t be sad for too long because he thought he’d had a good life and in large part this was thanks to her.