Authors: Pierre Lemaitre
Frantz comes into the living room having slept for twelve hours straight, although even now he does not seem awake. His movements are sluggish, his face is pale. He looks at the sofa where Sophie has left the blanket. He does not say anything. He simply looks at her.
“Would you like something to eat?” she says. “Do you want me to call a doctor?”
He shakes his head but she is not sure whether this refers to eating or to the doctor. Possibly both.
“If it’s the flu, it will sort itself out,” he says, his voice toneless.
He slumps rather than sits opposite her. He lays his hands on the table in front of him, like objects.
“You really should eat something,” Sophie says.
Frantz shrugs. To signal he does not care.
He says, “Whatever you want . . .”
She gets up, goes into the kitchen, puts a frozen meal into the microwave and lights another cigarette while she waits for the timer. Frantz does not smoke, usually he finds the smell irritating, but he is so weak he does not even seem to notice that she is stubbing out cigarettes in the breakfast bowls. Usually he is extremely fastidious.
Frantz
turns away from the kitchen. When the meal is ready, she spoons half of it onto a plate, checks that Frantz has not moved and then stirs the sleeping tablet into the tomato sauce.
Frantz tastes it, looks up at her. The silence makes her uncomfortable.
“It’s nice,” he says, eventually.
He eats the pasta, pauses for a second, then tastes the sauce.
“Is there any bread?” he says.
She gets up again and brings him a plastic bag containing a couple of slices. He starts to mop up the sauce. He eats the bread without savouring it, mechanically, conscientiously, until it is all gone.
“What exactly is wrong?” Sophie says. “Have you got a pain somewhere?”
He gestures vaguely towards his chest. His eyes are puffy.
“A hot drink will do you good.”
She goes to the kitchen and makes the tea. When she comes back she can see that he is tearful again. He sips the tea, but after a while he gives up, sets down the cup and struggles to his feet. He goes to the bathroom, then back to bed. Leaning against the doorframe, Sophie watches him. It is 3.00 p.m.
“I’m just going to do some shopping,” she says.
He has never allowed her to go out alone. But this time, Frantz opens his eyes, looks at her, his whole body seems overcome by fatigue. By the time Sophie has put her coat on, he is asleep.
*
[. . .] By February 1974, Sarah is pregnant again. Given the profound depression she suffered during this period, the pregnancy seems fraught
with symbolism since this second child is conceived exactly a year after the first. Sarah is plagued by baseless fears born of magical thinking (“This child has killed my daughter to take her place”), bouts of self-recrimination (she killed her daughter just as she killed her mother), and feelings of worthlessness (she considers herself an “unfit mother” and incapable of giving birth to a healthy child).
The pregnancy, which proves to be an ordeal for the couple, and for Sarah in particular a time of immense suffering, is punctuated by a number of incidents only some of which can be treated with therapy. Unbeknownst to her husband, Sarah attempted on several occasions to provoke a miscarriage. It is useful to compare Sarah’s intense psychological need to abort the child to the self-harm she inflicts on herself at the time. The period is marked by two suicide attempts, symptoms of a refusal to accept the pregnancy on the part of a young woman who sees her unborn child – and she is convinced it is a boy – as an intruder, as “unrelated to her”, a being she increasingly considers to be wicked, even diabolical. Miraculously, the pregnancy reaches full term, and on August 13, 1974 a son is born, whom they name Frantz.
As a symbolic substitute, the child will overshadow her grief for her parents and potentiate Sarah’s violent hatred, which frequently manifests itself. The first such manifestation takes the form of a mausoleum which Sarah constructs during the first months of her son’s life to the memory of her stillborn daughter. The occult, mystical nature of the “black masses” she purports to celebrate in secret during this period provides proof, if proof were needed, of the metaphorical aspect of her subconscious entreaty: by her own admission, she appeals to her “dead daughter who is in heaven” to cast her living son “into the flames of hell”. [. . .]
*
For
the first time in weeks, Sophie goes out to do the shopping. Before she leaves, she looks at herself in the mirror and thinks she looks ugly, but she enjoys being out in the street. She feels free. She could go away. And she will do just that, she thinks, when everything is settled. She carries the grocery bags upstairs. There is food enough for several days. But she knows she will not need it all.
*
He is asleep. Sophie sits on a chair by the bed. She looks at him. She does not read, or talk, she does not move. Their roles are reversed. It is hard to believe. Can it really be so easy? Why now? Why has Frantz crumbled all of a sudden? He seems a broken man. He has nightmares. He tosses in his sleep. She observes him as she might an insect. He sobs. Her hatred of him is so all-consuming that there are times when she can feel nothing else. At such moments, Frantz becomes an idea. A concept. She will kill him. She is killing him already.
Inexplicably, just as she is thinking this, Frantz opens his eyes. As though she had flicked a switch. He stares at Sophie. How can he be awake after the dose she has just given him? Perhaps she made a mistake. He reaches out, grasps her wrist firmly. She sits back in the chair. He continues to stare at her, to grip her hard, he has not said a word. Then he says, “Are you there?” She swallows hard. “Yes,” she whispers. Then, as though this were simply a brief parenthesis, Frantz shuts his eyes again. But he is not asleep. He is crying. His eyes are closed, but tears trickle down his neck. Sophie waits a while longer. Frantz angrily turns to the wall. His shoulders are racked with sobs. A few minutes later, his breathing slows. He begins to snore.
She gets up, goes to sit at the table in the living room and reopens his notebook.
The
gruesome key to all the mysteries. Frantz’s diary describes his room in the building opposite the apartment where she lived with Vincent. Every page is a violation, every sentence a humiliation, every word a wound. Everything she has lost is here before her, everything that was stolen from her, her life, her love, her youth. She gets to her feet and goes to watch Frantz sleep. Standing over him, she smokes a cigarette. She has only ever killed once, a manager in a fast-food restaurant, something she remembers without pity or remorse. But that was nothing. When it comes to killing the man now sleeping in this bed . . .
The overweight figure of Andrée appears in Frantz’s diary. A few pages later, Vincent’s mother falls down the stairs of her suburban house while Sophie is lying in a comatose sleep. She dies instantly. Andrée is thrown out of a window. Even before now, Sophie has feared for her life. But she had no idea of the extent of the horrors he has perpetrated. It leaves her gasping for air. She closes the notebook.
*
[. . .] It is undoubtedly thanks to the self-possession of Jonas, to his emotional and physical strength and his unquestionably positive influence over his wife that Sarah’s hatred for her son did not result in a fatal accident. It should, however, be noted that the child was subjected to subtle abuse, physical and psychological, by his mother: she confesses to pinching him, slapping him, twisting his limbs, burning him, etc. but is careful that his injuries are not going to attract attention. Sarah explains that it cost her every ounce of strength not to kill this child who now embodies all her bitterness.
The presence of his father, as I have said, doubtless offered the
fundamental protection which meant that the boy could survive a potentially infanticidal mother. It is precisely this vigilance on the part of the father which leads Sarah to manifest symptoms of dissociative identity disorder. In effect, at great psychological cost to herself, she manages to play a double role, that of a loving, attentive mother to a child whom she secretly wishes were dead. This secret desire manifests itself in many of her dreams in which, for example, he is doomed to take the place of her parents in Dachau. In other dreams, the little boy is emasculated, eviscerated, even crucified, or is accidentally drowned, burned or crushed to death, more often than not suffering terrible pain in which the mother finds comfort and even liberation.
To deceive those around her, and indeed the child himself, requires tireless vigilance on the part of Sarah Berg. It may well be that the very care she takes to disguise, to hide, to suppress the hatred that she feels for her son is what saps her psychological strength and finally hastens the major depressive disorder she suffers in the late 1980s.
Paradoxically, it is her own son, her (unwitting) victim, who becomes her (unwitting) killer, since it is his very existence that acts as the trigger to his mother’s death. [. . .]
*
Twenty hours later, Frantz wakes up. His eyes are puffy. He has cried a lot in his sleep. He appears in the doorway of the bedroom while Sophie is standing at the window smoking and staring at the sky. Given the drugs he has ingested, making it this far has been an act of sheer will. Sophie definitely has the upper hand. In the past twenty-four hours, she has won the molecular war they have been waging against each other. “You’re a complete hero,” Sophie says coldly while Frantz staggers down the corridor
to the toilet. He shivers as he walks, powerful shudders that run the length of his body. Stabbing him here, now, would be a formality. She walks to the bathroom and looks at him, sitting there. He is so weak that smashing his head in with the first blunt instrument that comes to hand would be child’s play. She takes a drag on her cigarette and stares at him evenly. He looks up.
“You’re crying,” she says, inhaling deeply.
He smiles an awkward smile by way of answer, then, steadying himself against the wall, he struggles to his feet, stumbles through the living room and back to the bedroom. They meet again in the doorway. He cocks his head hesitantly, clinging to the door frame. He looks at this woman with her icy stare and hesitates. Then he bows his head without a word, lies down on the bed, his arms flung wide. His eyes shut.
Sophie goes back to the kitchen and takes out his diary, which she keeps hidden in the bottom drawer. She picks up where she left off. She sees Vincent’s accident, his death. Now she discovers how Frantz managed to get into the clinic, how, after dinner, he went and found Vincent, pushed his wheelchair past the deserted nurses’ station, opened the emergency door leading to the stone staircase. For a fraction of a second, Sophie sees Vincent’s terrified face, imagines his helpless body as though it were her own. It is at this moment that she decides she is not interested in reading the rest of the diary. She closes the cover, throws open the window: she is alive.
And she is ready.
*
This
time Frantz sleeps for almost six hours. He has now gone for thirty hours without eating or drinking anything, drifting in and out of his comatose sleep. Sophie begins to think that he might die here, now. By accident. An overdose. He has already consumed a dose that would have killed a lesser man. He has had terrible nightmares, Sophie has heard him sobbing in his sleep. She slept on the sofa. She also opened a bottle of wine. She went out to buy cigarettes and to do some shopping. On her return, Frantz was sitting on the bed, his head, too heavy for him to support, lolling from side to side. Sophie looks at him and smiles.
“You’re ready,” she says.
He gives her a clumsy smile, but he cannot manage to open his eyes. She walks towards him, pushing him with the flat of her hand. It is as though she has knocked him with her shoulder. He grips the bed, manages to remain upright, though his whole body rocks, trying frantically to keep his balance.
“You’re ready at last,” she says.
She places her hand on his chest and effortlessly pushes him back. He lies down. Sophie leaves the apartment, carrying a large green rubbish bag.
*
This is the end. Her movements now are calm, precise, determined. One phase of her life is coming to its conclusion. For the last time she looks at the photographs, then one by one she rips them off the wall and stuffs them into the bag. It takes her almost an hour. Sometimes she stops for a moment to look at one in more detail, but it is no longer as painful as it was the first time. It is like a photograph album in which she might accidentally light upon a picture she has all but forgotten. Laure Dufresne laughing. Sophie remembers her hard, cold face as she laid out the poison pen letters
Frantz had made. She should want to proclaim the truth, to make amends, to purify herself, but this life seems so remote. Sophie is weary. Relieved and remote. Here is Valérie, her arm around Sophie’s shoulders, whispering something in her ear and smiling seductively. Sophie had forgotten what Andrée looked like. The girl barely registered in her life before today. In this photograph she finds her simple and sincere. She refuses to think of this body falling from the window. After this, Sophie scarcely pauses for breath. She drops all the other objects into a second rubbish bag. Seeing them again is even more upsetting than the photographs: her watch, her bag, her keys, the notebook where she wrote her reminders . . . And when everything has been packed up, she puts the laptop into the last bag. This is the first thing she throws into the skip, tossing the bags filled with other items on top. She goes back down to the cellar, locks the door and takes the bag full of papers up to the apartment.
*
Frantz is still sleeping, but lightly now. Out on the balcony, she sets down a large, cast-iron pot in which she begins to burn the documents, ripping out fistfuls of pages from the diary. Next come the photographs. Sometimes the flames rise so high that she has to step back and wait before she can add more fuel. Then she pensively smokes a cigarette and watches the images twitch and writhe in the flames.