Lovers on All Saints' Day Read Online Free Page A

to Brussels on her own on the dark, slippery highway seemed exhausting. I walked her to the car and asked her to call us when she got home; I noticed something resembling gratitude in her voice; it was as if she wanted to tousle my hair, as one might do to a brother, but she didn’t. I watched her drive away until the red taillights had disappeared. In the living room, Monsieur Gibert had lit a fire; I sat in the upholstered armchair, beside the box of newspaper, and after a while Gibert appeared with an aperitif in hand. I remember that conversation very well, lasting as it did for the entire meal and full of old wartime anecdotes, in particular about the day Gibert rode his bicycle down to Spa and ran into a German soldier younger than he was, just a boy, maybe seventeen years old, and there was in that instant a tremendous understanding in which Gibert wouldn’t take his hands off the handlebars to grab his rifle if the soldier didn’t reach for his cartridge belt. “Who knows if I’d be alive right now,” Gibert said to me, “if one of the two of us hadn’t been afraid.”
    The phone rang then and startled us: it was Claire, probably, Claire who was just getting home and maybe found Philippe not there, or found a note from Philippe lying about his whereabouts or whom he was with. I hoped it wouldn’t be, I caught myself hoping with all my might that Philippe was waiting for her when she got home. I stood up to answer when it became obvious that Gibert had no intention of speaking with anyone, not with his daughter, nor with his daughter’s husband, who now had a lover; but I must have taken too long, because when I picked up the receiver I didn’t hear any voice but just an even dial tone. And then I stood there, in front of the telephone, waiting for Claire to phone back, searching without success for something to say, a phrase that might serve as an umbrella or a hiding place for her after driving all the way back to Brussels alone. But when the phone rang—I don’t quite know how to say this—my hands didn’t move. I heard it, I heard the electronic bell and its echo from the house’s other phone, on the second floor, and the cord was brushing against the sleeves of my shirt; I even played with it, untangling it carefully, pushing it with my finger so it swayed like a pendulum. But I didn’t answer. I imagined it was a friend of the family calling; they wouldn’t be surprised that everyone in the house was asleep. I imagined someone dialing, getting the number wrong, from a pay phone, perhaps from a gas station. It might be a young man, well bundled up, just getting off work and phoning his girlfriend to ask her to come and meet him for a drink. I thought about this man; I invented a good life for him. And after a few seconds the phone stopped ringing, more or less the way a trout stops gasping on the shore.

The All Saints’ Day Lovers
    T HAT AFTERNOON Michelle came hunting with me. Pierre, the tracker, arrived after lunch. He was wearing his old hat with the feather and a green jacket. His left hand held an invisible rifle. He was impatient, and the yellow laces swung on both sides of his waterproof boots. In the dining room, Michelle swept up the bread crumbs with a plastic-bristled brush, and her blouse slipped off one shoulder, revealing her bra strap.
    “Michelle’s coming with us,” I told Pierre.
    “But she’s never liked it.”
    “Exactly,” she said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
    Her tone was lighthearted, but Pierre could tell something was wrong. Out of courtesy, he insisted. Michelle began to refuse again, but I went over to her, with my back to Pierre, took her hands, and asked her to come with us. She bowed her head and her red hair tumbled over her shoulders. When she spoke, her breath palpitated in her unadorned throat.
    “I want us to stay here. You have things to say to me.”
    “I can say them later.”
    “I have things to say to you.”
    “We need to get some fresh