Lovers on All Saints' Day

The All Saints’ Day Lovers

THAT 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 air, love. We need to forget it all for a little while.”

“Forget it all,” Michelle repeated.

I told her I loved her. I told her we’d come back and keep talking. Look at the afternoon, I said. The sun’s not shining, but there’s lots of light, and I want you to come with us.

Michelle ended up accepting, and while we put on thick wool socks, sitting on the coach-house steps, she told me she was confident. For a moment, it seemed like she really believed it. She turned on the light in the little room and a moth flew outside. She got two pairs of boots out and looked for our jackets while I prepared the Browning and the ammunition. On the gravel courtyard, Pierre was playing with the dogs. He already had his rifle slung over his shoulder.

“It’s difficult,” said Michelle. “I suppose that’s normal. These things have to be difficult.”

“We’ll try,” I said.

“I know, I’m the one who wants to try. But I don’t know if it can work. Be honest: you don’t believe a word of what we talked about.”

It was true. I’d imagined the moment of separation so many times that I was now able to vary the details or the settings as if I were planning a film. Sometimes it would happen at night, after a fierce argument; other times, I’d leave before dawn, like a coward or a thief, aware I could no longer bear Michelle’s sadness or the burden of her tears. Now I was assailed by the certainty that it would all happen sooner than expected. At any moment we’d look each other in the eye and understand there was no longer any solution. That’s what I was expecting: a blow, painless and sharp. Then, as difficult as the moment might be, we’d each start over again on our own. And it would all, undoubtedly, be best for both of us.

—

THE PATH WAS COVERED in fresh mud. I felt the same pleasure as always, the pleasure of setting out from an open space where the stone buildings of Modave were visible, and advancing bit by bit, without changing paths, into the oilseed fields, through those crops of tall stems and yellow flowers where I used to get lost as a boy. Going hunting in the afternoons was different. Mornings meant large groups of old hunters, unavoidable rituals, solemnity. In the afternoons, it wasn’t like that. One went out hunting to breathe the mountain air and to feel the silence and the solitude and the coolness in the trees. Pierre walked in front of us. The dogs ran several meters ahead, stopped to wait for us, then bounded ahead again. Michelle looked beautiful. Her hair changed hue against the corduroy collar of her jacket. The sky was a single cloud the color of smoke, smooth and uniform. Behind Michelle, almost at shoulder height, the stalks of the crop formed an even wall beside the path. A string of black ducks flew overhead, but too high.

“What did you bring?” asked Pierre.

I showed him the barrel of my rifle. The ducks were beyond our range.

“Doesn’t matter. It’s going to be a good day,” said Pierre. “If it’s like this here, imagine what we can find in the woods.”

Pierre was superstitious. He wore the same socks every time he went hunting, and believed the first moments of a day determined what the rest would hold. The dogs loved him. They trotted along at his side, not mine. I said so to Michelle, and she smiled.

For about ten minutes we walked in silence. The landscape around us changed, and after we’d passed the Morés’ place, we crossed the field toward the woods. Pierre split off from us.

“Where’s he going?” said Michelle.

“He’s going around the woods. He’ll go in from the other side, to scare the animals.”

“Toward us?”

“Toward us,” I said.

“I want us to talk,” said Michelle.

“Well, let’s talk now,” I said jokingly. “When we go in the woods, we’ll have to keep quiet.”

“I feel strange. I’m cold.”

“In the woods it’s not so cold, you’ll see. There’s no wind.”

“Are we going to break up?”

I didn’t answer. The furrows of damp earth required concentration: a hunter could break an ankle if he wasn’t careful where he stepped.

“It’s true it’d be better,” said Michelle. “It’s true we’re hurting each other. But I’d like to know what you think. I don’t know what you’re thinking. I’d like to hear what you have to say.”

Fortunately, we arrived at the woods at that moment, so I held a finger to my mouth to hush Michelle. I leaned close to her face, so close that her red hair tickled my lips, and spoke very softly. From here on in, total silence. Don’t speak, step carefully, breathe in whispers. A boar can hear us from many meters away. If there are deer, the snap of a twig can scare them off.

The tracks of an abandoned railway line were covered in moss that sparkled with frost and raindrops from a recent shower. A false floor of fallen leaves covered the grass, and the leaves were wet and soft and opaque and golden, and Michelle liked stepping on them. I held her hand and we began to walk between the rails. The oaks and beech trees filtered out the wind. The air was dense and humid, the light filtered through the bare branches. There in the woods there was no noise. The world was green and gray and brown, there were no shadows, and nothing was moving. I think Michelle was happy.

I pointed to the spot where we’d wait, the place where the hill started down toward an open field. From there, kneeling on the damp earth and feeling its coolness, we overlooked the place the prey would run across, frightened by Pierre from the other side of the woods. I loaded my rifle. It was something Michelle had never seen me do. I tugged a piece of bark off an oak tree and gave it to her to sniff. Michelle inhaled deeply and a bit of dirt stuck to her cheek. She didn’t feel it, because the cold air had numbed her skin, and I wiped it off with one finger in a movement that was very similar to a caress. I motioned to her to kneel down in front of me, so she could get a better view down the slope of the hill and the fallen tree trunks that had been caught up in the undergrowth. She liked the idea and crawled on her hands and knees without worrying about getting dirty. This, I didn’t know why, made me feel sad. Seeing her like that, moved by the shapes and colors that moved me, her eyes open wide like a little girl, made me regret what hadn’t yet happened. When had we failed at this? What words would which of us use to close off the possibilities? I thought back to the time when I’d fallen in love with Michelle. When I met her, she was a distracted and slightly brusque woman who was taking English courses at the University of Liège, but her only interest was in drawing letters to adorn the openings of books like Le Morte d’Arthur and Lancelot du Lac. This contradiction was emblematic of her way of going through life. On her T-shirts there was often a caricature whose outline, when it was cold, stood out from the pressure of her nipples. She used to ask me to pose for her, and she’d draw deformed figures in which my cheeks were like red peppers and my black hair, as in the Mandrake comic strips, appeared tinted with streaks of navy blue. At that time I loved her and everything was simple, clear, as evident as this uneasy reality, which would conclude with solitude, a necessary solitude but one requiring a sacrifice, a ghost sleeping between us like a small child. Realizing then that everything declines, that nothing lasts, made me think that living on my own would be less difficult. That’s how I was feeling, midway between sad and resigned, when we heard three shouts from Pierre. I looked at my watch. We’d been kneeling on the ground and the moss for half an hour.

Michelle turned and looked at me with her big eyes, asking me wordlessly what that meant.

“That he’s reached the end of the run,” I said out loud.

“The run?”

“He’s run out of woods, Michelle. And not a single animal came out.”

“So? We’re going now?”

“We’re going now.”

“What a shame. It’s so nice here, all so fresh.”

“We didn’t come to look at the landscape. We came to hunt,” I said. “And we haven’t even seen a rabbit.”

—

WE FOUND PIERRE sitting beside the path, playing with the dogs. Isis was biting the sleeve of his jacket and Pierre was letting her. Othello was lying in a puddle to cool off, and his fur looked like a vagabond’s blanket. Pierre stood up when he saw us coming. He told Michelle he was sorry, that not all days were like this, that it was a shame she’d been bored.

“But I wasn’t bored,” said Michelle. “Just the opposite.”

“Ah,” said Pierre. “Well, well. But next time will be better, I’m sure.”

“I was just fine,” said Michelle. “We had a nice time. I don’t know about you guys, but I was breathing and I felt alive.”

Michelle was walking with her shoulders raised, looking at the sky.

“I want a nice hot coffee,” she said. “Come back and have some tarte au riz, Pierre.”

She didn’t want us to talk anymore or, at least, she’d voluntarily forgotten. I was grateful. Michelle felt light. With a bit of luck, it might be contagious.

“A nice big piece, some good coffee, get the fire lit,” said Michelle. “What time is it? I can’t believe there’s still light.”

“It’s starting to get dark now,” I said.

“That doesn’t matter. There’ve been years when you can’t see a thing by this time.”

“I’m glad you came.”

“Me too, love. I feel different now.”

Suddenly, Pierre moved his arm in the air. He pointed at the planted field next to Michelle. I raised my rifle. Pierre snapped his fingers and the dogs understood.

Isis and Othello broke through the curtain of yellow flowers, barking. Then a pheasant took flight and I aimed and the sight traced its movements and the barrel followed its desperate flapping and when the shot rang out the pheasant’s left wing was broken in midair, paralyzed, and I knew I’d hit it, then the body turned sideways and fell slowly, like the silhouette of an airplane, into the yellow flowers. The dogs were barking, but I heard the thud of the body hitting the ground. It all happened in a couple of seconds.

“I’ll get it!” said Pierre, and ran toward where the body had fallen. “I’ll bring it!”

“Come on,” I said to Michelle.

I jumped over the shoulder of hardened earth between the path and the field and began to look for the pheasant. My boots got tangled in the stalks and sunk into the damp soil.

“Where are the dogs?”

“Isis!” shouted Pierre. “Isis! Cherche!”

“Do you see it? Pierre? Can you see it?”

I’d only wounded it. A pheasant is very fast on the ground. The flowers reached our waists, and it was impossible to find, unless we stumbled across it or it tired itself out, or its heart had stopped and it was already dead. I tried to look for traces of blood, but all I could see was the earth under my feet. It was like wading across a muddy river.

“He’s going to get away,” said Pierre. “Isis! Cherche-le, merde!”

The barrel of the gun was like a machete and I used it to move the stalks out of my way. The damp soil at my feet came suddenly into view and then disappeared again. But the pheasant was nowhere to be seen. We couldn’t hear it, the dogs hadn’t found it, and they leaped among the flowers and kept looking.

“Shit,” said Pierre. “Shit, we’ve lost him.”

“We haven’t lost him,” I said. “Othello! Find him!”

“Useless dogs. We’ve lost him.”

We stopped running. Pierre and I looked like bronze busts on a yellow carpet. We started to walk back to the path. Pierre called the dogs again.

Michelle was waiting for us.

“You didn’t come,” I said. “Looking for it is the best part.”

“I didn’t want to,” said Michelle.

“We lost him. It was a magnificent pheasant and we lost him.”

“You’re not hearing me. I didn’t want to.”

“What’s the matter?”

“The shot hurt my ears.”

I tried to stroke her hair. She dodged my hand.

“It hurts. I can feel the shot inside.”

Michelle touched her head. Her hand was pale in the cold air. The gunshot had upset her.

“Here inside.”

—

PIERRE LIVED NEAR the Rue des Trois Maisons, in Modave, so he turned off before we did on the way home. Michelle did not reiterate her invitation to drink coffee by the fireside. We took a few minutes to get away because the dogs refused to follow us when we called.

“I can’t wait to get back,” said Michelle.

“I don’t know if there’s any wood.”

“What?”

“We’ve had the fire burning all week. If there’s no wood, I can go get some.”

“Ah,” Michelle said. “No, it’s not that. I feel dirty. I want to get out of these dirty clothes. I can’t stand wearing dirty clothes.”

It was getting dark when we reached the house. Michelle went in, turned on the courtyard light, and left her boots on the step. I picked them up and carried them into the coach house. In the coatroom, I brushed them off on the doormat, cleaned the caked mud off the soles with an old screwdriver, unloaded the rifle, and looked on the shelf for the.20-caliber box, because in hunting season I accumulated bullets of all kinds in the pockets of my jackets, and sometimes had to go from pocket to pocket and get my ammunition back in order. Then Michelle came in.

“The truth is I think we could have found it,” she said.

It took me a moment to understand what she meant.

“But we looked,” I said. “You saw us.”

“I don’t think you tried very hard. Have you no pity? The bird is suffering right now. You should have found him and killed him.”

“The dogs looked. They’re good dogs, Michelle. We did everything we could.”

“You left it to suffer.”

“What’s the matter?”

“You’re cruel. You must not be quite right in the head.”

She went quiet, waiting for me to say something. She was standing in the doorway, and the room’s yellow light hit her from the side and made her features stand out on her face. I felt worn-out. I had to look at the rifle that I’d already put back in the rack to make sure it wasn’t still hanging from my shoulder.

“And what do you want?” I said. “You want me to go look for it?”

“Don’t be sarcastic.”

“No, I’m going to go,” I said. “See you later.”

“But it won’t do any good now.”

“It doesn’t matter. I think I should, Michelle. Give us a chance to take some deep breaths, count to ten, all those magazine recommendations…. We just can’t stand each other anymore, can we? Who would have thought it would jump out at us like this.”

I saw her hand move to her mouth and press her lips together between two fingers. It was her gesture of control, her secret mechanism to not start crying.

“Fine,” she said. “Tell me one thing.”

“What?”

“Are you coming back?”

There was fear in her question.

“If you’re not coming back, tell me. On the whole, I like a bit of advance warning for things like this.”

“Of course I’m coming back,” I said without looking at her. “What a stupid question.”

I walked out into the courtyard and the cold air hit me in the face. It was night and it was autumn, and the temperature had dropped drastically. Isis barked when she heard me open the gate.

—

THE FIELDS ALONG THE ROAD were the color of the night sky. Streetlights, in this part of the Ardennes, were almost nonexistent, and only the hay bales wrapped in white plastic broke through the darkness, big and round like balloons of light. I drove through Hamoir and crossed the whole village without seeing any lights on. The Maison du Pêcheur was closed, but Luca’s old Ford slumbered on its gravel forecourt. Luca was a friend to all the local hunters; he would buy the day’s catch and paid well, and in the evenings the little lounge to the left of the bar would fill up with men dressed in gray and green, their boots still caked with mud, shouting and arguing about the day’s results. But tonight they’d already gone. I knocked a couple of times on the oak door; the place was dark, and the yellow lights of the level crossing reflected back at me from the steamed-up windows. I thought that any bright, warm place was as good as the next, I thought of the friterie on Rue Saint-Roch, and it felt good to get back in the pickup and close the door and be out of the wind again. Inside, it smelled of damp clothes, but also of Michelle’s perfume. The road shone under the yellow lights until I got to the edge of town. The radio forecast fog.

The friterie on Saint-Roch was a mobile home permanently parked on the corner of Rue Saint-Roch and Route de Marches. It was white and dirty, and inside they served sausages and hamburgers and frites and gaufres with hazelnut cream that I’d never tried despite having passed through there a thousand times. As I walked up the wooden steps, I ran into a group of German tourists, and thought they must have come to see the races at Spa. The premises smelled of bleach. I found a two-hundred-franc note among the bullets and shells still in my pocket. At the table in the corner, beneath a collection of old bottles, two men were drinking beer. Above the window frame were disposable cups and a thick glass key ring. The men’s checked shirts were identical except for the color; it was as if one of them had bought both shirts, or as if someone else had chosen them. Apart from those two and the woman in a ridiculous red uniform, who was making the cash-register buttons chime as if her life depended on the volume of that ringing, there was nobody else in the place. I ordered the same as those men, frites and a beer. I chose a table I could see my truck from. The men didn’t look at me.

The older one had a harelip and his sparse mustache made it even more noticeable; the fingernails of the younger one were covered in a black film. I didn’t get as far as figuring out what kind of work they did but thought they would probably be taking a transport truck to Brussels or even to Paris, because they didn’t seem to be in a hurry to leave. The whole scene gave an impression of false calm, because the woman had stopped manipulating the cash-register keys and now her hands were busy organizing the things on the counter. There was something vaguely vulnerable about her, and it amused me to realize she was frightened. But then I thought it was perhaps legitimate that a small young woman — she wasn’t actually that small, but her fragility created that illusion — should be frightened, working alone and late in a fast-food place on the side of a dark road. I went up to the counter.

“What did you have?” said the woman.

I pointed to the remnants on the table. A cardboard plate with a bit of mustard on it and a can of Judas.

The woman wrote large numbers on a paper napkin. She pronounced a sum and I gave her some money. When she was handing me my change, a five-franc coin fell on the sheets of grease-stained wrapping on the counter.

“Don’t be scared. They’re truck drivers, they won’t hurt you.”

The woman looked at me, as if checking to make sure she didn’t know me. Then she looked toward the back, avoiding my gaze. In the irises of her eyes, I saw the brief reflection of the illuminated window. Suddenly I felt uncomfortable, intrusive, unwanted.

“Sorry,” I said. “I thought—”

“It irritates me that people can tell,” said the woman. “Everybody knows what I’m thinking, it’s terrible. It’s as if my face is a neon sign.”

“You wouldn’t be great at poker.”

“No,” she said. “You’re not the first to tell me that. Do you think they’ve noticed as well?”

The truck drivers were drinking unhurriedly. Nothing ever happens in the Ardennes; but all men are unpredictable, and anyone can be a rapist or a murderer. I felt that my presence was the only thing that gave the woman any peace of mind, and that power seemed immense and valuable. Or the woman’s peace of mind was valuable, and the possibility of her being afraid again hateful.

“I can stay for a while, if you want.”

“Oh, no,” she said with a sudden pride. “None of that. I can look after myself.”

“I can stay until they leave.”

“And how can I be sure?”

“Sure of what?”

I thought I saw her smile.

“That you’re not the one who’s going to attack me.”

The woman behind the counter smoothed a pleat in her red uniform, rubbed her index finger over her full, penciled eyebrows. Her skin was ash-colored, paler on her cheeks and broad forehead, darker under her eyes. On her right nostril sparkled a tiny diamond, worn with elegance like a family crest; when a wisp of hair fell over her face, she pushed it back under the red taffeta ribbon holding her hair flat.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess you have no way of knowing.”

She looked at me and smiled, but the fear had not evaporated from her face. Maybe it was a permanent feature, as Michelle’s red hair was for her, or the scar to the right of her belly button. When she was twelve, Michelle had had an appendectomy.

“Why don’t you ask for a morning shift?”

“There are no shifts here. I work all day.”

“Oh. You’re the boss.”

“The bosses live in Aywaille,” she said.

She turned around and took the aluminum mesh basket out of the hot oil.

“Thank goodness it’s time to close. I’m not in the mood to stay here tonight.”

“I can give you a lift, if you want,” I said. “As long as you don’t live too far away, of course.”

“Don’t worry. I live right here.”

“Here?”

“A couple of houses down the street. Very close by.”

“Just as well,” I said. “Is there a phone?”

The woman moved her hand in the air. I walked toward the back of the place. On an old pedestal table, in a little back room, was a black telephone with several automatic dialing keys. It wasn’t a public phone: the woman was doing me a favor.

Michelle’s voice sounded alert.

“I thought you’d be asleep.”

“Where are you?”

“In Saint-Roch. I wanted to let you know.”

“I want you to come back. I didn’t mean to say what I said. This isn’t going to end, is it?”

I’d heard that question a thousand times. In those moments I felt that Michelle, by forcing me to be optimistic, was also forcing me to lie. I reproached her in silence. I know you’re going to leave. That’s what was waiting for me: a woman who tells me she’s leaving. I was glad not to be able to see her now, and that she couldn’t see me. I felt hypocritical when I said:

“Of course not. We’re going to see this through.”

When I hung up, I stood by the little table for a few seconds. I’d wanted to hear Michelle’s voice, but now the conversation was ringing in my head like a rising bruise after being punched. The silence of the place bothered me. I went back out into the restaurant and again the air filled with the smoke of burned oil. The men in the checked shirts had left. Without bothering anybody, without putting anybody in danger.

The woman had taken off her red uniform. She was wearing a long black skirt and a windbreaker for the cold. “I changed my mind,” she said. Under the neon lights, the diamond in her nose looked like a drop of mercury.

“It’s so cold out,” she said. “Can you give me a lift?”

—

THE WOMAN LIVED up Rue Saint-Roch toward Rue sur-les-Houx, about five hundred meters from the friterie. I imagined her repeating the route every night, at this time or later, and in the image I conjured up, I don’t know why, it was snowing. I didn’t believe for a second that her name was Zoé, but I didn’t tell her that. We pulled into a small cluster of three identical houses, with smooth mown lawns as if nobody had ever stepped on them. When I stopped the pickup, I saw a silhouette spying on us from the house opposite.

“Don’t pay any attention,” said Zoé. “That’s Madame Videau. She’s very old and very nosy.”

In the redbrick walls, not a single light was visible.

“Nobody’s waiting for you?”

But Zoé had already gotten out. I watched her walk toward the door, red like the door of a doll’s house, with her hands clasped behind her back. She stopped as if gazing at the façade. She turned around and her mouth moved soundlessly. I rolled down the window on the passenger side.

“I asked if you’d like to have something to drink,” she said.

I caught a whiff of Michelle’s perfume from the back of the seat, where her red hair had rested. No more than twenty kilometers separated me from where she was sleeping, or not sleeping, alone and without me. I looked at the clock: it was still early. I’d never made love with a woman who had jewelry in her nose.

“Sure,” I said. “I’m still freezing to death.”

I followed her inside. The living room was an enormous exercise in mimesis: nothing in it proved that Zoé had any taste of her own, much less decorative fancies. There was barely room for the two floral-print sofas and glass table, on which sat a box of cigars and a paperback copy of The Little Prince in English. I looked for the room where things would happen that night. The hallway Zoé was walking back up, with a lacquered tray in her hands, led to two closed doors. Zoé put the tray down on the table. “I don’t have any alcohol,” she said in a slightly apologetic tone, as if she were embarrassed. I asked her if we could light a fire and she nodded. I pointed to the cigars, asked if I could have one, and Zoé stammered, she said of course, said I don’t know where the matches are, sorry, I’m a terrible hostess. It was suddenly obvious they didn’t belong to her. I left my cap on the back of the sofa and asked:

“Is the book his?”

Her eyes rested on the mantel of the fireplace.

“Is your husband away on a trip?”

“My husband died three years ago,” said Zoé. “He was a test pilot for new planes.”

She fell silent for a second. Then she added, as if this would rescue the balance of the conversation:

“But he didn’t read that book, either. He wanted us to read it together to help me learn English, but he died before we did.”

The revelation shocked me. Not so much what I’d heard, because cuckolding a dead Englishman didn’t trouble me, but rather the color of those words, the melancholy, the unexpected innocence. I put the cigar back in the box. A bit of leaf came loose and fell onto the glass of the table.

“His name was Graham. His plane crashed just before he reached Dover.”

“We don’t have to do this, if you don’t want to.”

“Right in the English Channel, imagine. No survivors.”

“I can leave right now and nothing will happen.”

“The sea is icy cold there. I’ve been told there are sharks, but I think it’s a lie.”

“Listen. Maybe it would be better if we saw each other some other day.”

“Stay there,” she said. “Please don’t leave.”

She straightened up the box of cigars, which I’d moved, to restore the symmetry of the table. The tray troubled her, and she ended up putting it on the floor. Zoé moved around her house as if it were a museum, and I realized she tried at all costs to keep it as it had been when Graham was alive. But she kept talking.

“Have you ever met anyone like this before?”

“Like what?”

“A woman like me. A young woman whose husband has died.”

I imagined the effort it was costing her to call herself a widow. I pronounced the word in my head. Widow. Its sound and the image of Zoé did not correspond to each other.

“No,” I said. “Never.”

“Ah. Well, now you see. We’re an interesting race. The first days, you worry a little when the person doesn’t arrive at the usual time. And then you remember, see? That’s the first days, and it hurts. Later, you start waking up at night, very late or very early. You think someone’s holding you, and then you start to cry and you don’t know whether out of love or out of fear. That always happens. To everyone.”

“It always happens like that?”

“I’ve read a lot. It’s the same for everyone. Sometimes the stupidest thing occurs to me: I think if only I’d been prepared, everything would be easier now. But I wasn’t prepared.”

“You weren’t prepared.”

“No. How were we going to imagine?”

“What?”

“That we wouldn’t have time. Why didn’t anyone tell us how everything worked?”

I wanted to touch her. I felt that would help. Then she said:

“Can I ask you to spend the night with me? Just to stay here, not to do anything, I’m not asking for anything and I don’t want anything more. Can I ask you that and for you to respect it?”

Her blouse was missing a button. I hadn’t noticed before. Behind the material, her collarbone was rising and falling like that of a cornered animal.

“I’d need a blanket,” I said. “It’s horrible to sleep with your jacket on.”

—

I LOOKED AT MYSELF in the bathroom mirror. It was true that the pajamas fit me, and curiously, I didn’t feel too out of place. I’d only asked for a blanket, but Zoé led me to the bedroom and opened a drawer with a geometric design etched into the wood.

“They were Graham’s.” She handed me a shirt and pair of pants the color of smoke. “I’m sure they’ll fit, you’re the same size. If you don’t want to wear them, it doesn’t matter. I’m just giving them to you so you can be more comfortable.”

“I want to be more comfortable.”

“Oh, good. Then you can change in the bathroom.”

And again I saw her smile. But this time she bit the tip of her tongue, and I could almost recognize that texture and felt a breath of tea and fresh water. Absurdly, her smile became a sort of prize or offering.

Now, from outside I could hear minimal noises from Zoé, who moved around the house like a little mouse, collecting the drinks, rinsing the glasses in the sink. I heard her come into the bedroom, open and close a closet. She knocked three times on the bathroom door.

“Yes?”

“Don’t come out. I’m changing.”

“Okay. Let me know,” I said.

I kept myself busy by snooping around the bathroom, the details of someone else’s bathroom. Since I was little, a locked door has always given me a sensation of absolute impunity. There was a cheap tape recorder in Zoé’s bathroom, sitting on a small enameled glass shelf. Beside it, a disorderly pile of three cassettes without cases. All the labels said the same thing: RADIO MUSIC. I imagined this woman recording songs from a radio station without bothering to edit out the commercials, and listening to the recordings until she knew both sides of the tape by heart, and then repeating the whole operation. I had never looked at solitude so closely. It was as if at that instant someone revealed the rules of the game.

When I came out wearing the pajamas, smelling of wood and mothballs and dotted with flecks, Zoé was already waiting for me between the sheets. I was cold, the skin prickled on the back of my neck. I wasn’t obliged to make conversation: my script only called for my staying in the bed until dawn, filling a form whose emptiness was painful for Zoé. But I wanted to know what Graham was like, put a face to that name, and Zoé took out a spiral notebook with black pages, opened it to the first one, and showed me a dark photograph. I recognized the bed where I was now lying, the lamp on the bedside table to my left that in the photo appeared beside a crystal glass and a pair of sunglasses barely visible in the shadowy image, and I thought that Graham must have had a headache that night and the water was to take a pill with, if indeed it was water, and the headache might have been due to the strong summer sun during some maneuvers. However, in the photo only Zoé appeared, seated in the lotus position on her pillow. Her body was the only luminous point in the frame. The rest were vague suggestions of objects or profiles that were lost entirely in the uniform black of the edges.

“Where is he?” I asked.

“Almost everywhere. We were studying photography, going together to a studio here in Ferrières.”

I brought the paper close to my face. I examined it.

“He’s here?”

“Yes, he’s walking. If I look illuminated it’s because he’s standing beside me shining a light, first on one side of my face, then my body and knees. Then he walked around the bed and in front of the camera, and he lit me from the other side.”

“He’s walking past here. He’s in front of the camera?”

“But we’d turned off all the lights. The room was in complete darkness. He was explaining what the teacher had explained to him. He was saying: “Now I’ll open the diaphragm as wide as it goes, and take the photo over the course of fifteen minutes. You have to stay still the whole time, try not to blink.”

“Fifteen minutes,” I said.

“In those conditions, the camera only captures what is very still and illuminated from up close. Nothing is shining on him and he’s also moving. That’s why he can’t be seen.”

Zoé passed her hand over the image, as if she were performing a magic trick.

“But he’s there,” she said. “Even though we can’t see him.”

Zoé put the notebook back in the drawer. “Can you hold me?” she asked, and I stretched out my arm and she took refuge in my embrace. Her head smelled slightly of sweat. I thought that she would be taking in the familiar scent of Graham’s clothes. Before starting to feel sleepy, I heard her speak, almost to herself.

“When I feel very lonely, I turn off the lights. I pretend that this is the room in the photo and I am the one in the photo, and Graham is here running back and forth. There’s nothing odd about my not being able to see him. It’s just a question of optics.”

—

I WOKE UP SHORTLY before first light. Zoé was sleeping with her back to me, breathing through her mouth and with her arms relaxed. As I was getting dressed, I thought Saturday, November the first, and then I thought All Saints’ Day and then I thought of Michelle. I left the pajamas neatly folded beside the headboard of the bed. I left without saying good-bye, so as not to remind Zoé that she’d slept beside another man, to let her live for a few minutes more inside the spell she’d woven.

The house had been devoured by a bank of damp fog. The pickup’s fan was on, and what the night before had been heating was now a blast of ice-cold air. I didn’t turn on the radio. I wanted, without knowing why, to preserve the predawn silence, the gentle repose of the mountain, the pleasure of not seeing anyone in the sleeping streets: all that filled me with the sensation of testing out a new pair of eyes. In a short while, the men who had survived the night of the dead would begin to come out of their homes. All those who had worn disguises — as had I, who spent the night in a dead man’s clothes — to survive this night, would soon be emerging, and all those who had bribed the spirits with offerings. I counted myself among them. I was alive, in spite of having been chased by souls of sinners trapped in animal bodies. Because I knew that the night that had just passed was the last of the old calendar, the moment when debts are paid, revenge is taken, and the dead are buried so their bodies will rest during the winter. But on this night, the curtain that separated this world from the other was torn: souls were freed from their captivity and some walked the earth, divesting men of their brief pleasures, sowing discord, broken hearts, and terrifying solitude among them.

It amused me to think of all that. It was Michelle who first told me about the superstitions of Halloween. She told me it was a shame that children here didn’t dress up and go out and ask for candy. She told me about Celtic legends, drew their symbols, wrote out for me the names of some of their goblins. Pinch. Grogan. Jack-in-Irons.

Michelle, the woman who was still my wife. Who had been far from me for so long, too long.

—

WHEN I GOT HOME, the fog had not yet cleared. I opened the gate and the iron stuck to my fingers like dry ice. Before I got to the stone steps, I saw Michelle standing in front of me in underwear and a T-shirt, a paper tissue clutched in her right hand. Her eyes were the color of her hair and the tip of her nose looked irritated.

“Go inside,” I said. “You’re going to catch cold.”

“You told me,” she responded.

“Calm down, nothing happened.”

“You told me you were coming back. I fell asleep, but I was waiting for you until half an hour ago. I was waiting for you, I fell asleep, you didn’t come back.”

I held her gently: her body was like a badly fired ceramic and was threatening to crack or fall to the floor and smash into pieces. She kept talking.

“But I don’t want this to happen again. I don’t want nights like this.”

“Nobody wants nights like this,” I said. “But we still have time.”

“You wanted to leave. I know it. You don’t have to lie to me.”

“Come on, let’s go upstairs.”

“I’ve been crying all night. I’m tired.”

“Yes, but you don’t know how much I want to be with you.”

We went upstairs. It was warm in the bedroom and it was good to be back. I took off my clothes and lay down on the bedspread. Michelle lay down beside me. “You’re exhausted,” she murmured. “I can tell.” A crow flew past the big window that overlooked the lake, and I asked Michelle to close the curtains. In that lake there were small trout. The day I asked Michelle to marry me, I remembered, I’d caught two. At that moment, two trout had seemed like a good sign.

“I wonder where the bird is,” said Michelle. “I hope he’s died, poor thing.”

“Hope so,” I said.

I thought later I’d go out to look for the pheasant, and that I’d like Michelle to come with me to look for it. I thought of proposing this to her, but she’d fallen asleep on my shoulder. I wanted to explain that we were going to be okay. I wanted to tell her that we’d made a lot of mistakes, and hurt each other a lot, but we didn’t do any of it out of cruelty, but rather trying, maybe in mistaken ways, to suffer as little as possible. I surprised myself feeling that the most difficult part had just begun.

“Nobody wants nights like these,” I said to Michelle, although she couldn’t hear me. “We’re not going to have to live alone.”

With the tip of my thumb I wiped away a dribble of saliva at the corner of her mouth. She snuggled her head against my chest and I closed my eyes to listen better to the silence of the early hours, the way the murmur of the heating mingled with the sounds of the Ardennes just as Michelle’s breathing began to mingle with mine.

—

WE LET THE MORNING go by without rushing it, and around midday I discovered there was no dry wood to light a fire with. I hadn’t been able to at Zoé’s house, either — Zoé, that already strange name, that distant night that belonged to her, not to me — and now the image and feeling of a crackling log fire turned into a sort of craving. But I didn’t go out to Modave to get a bundle, because I didn’t like the idea of being away from Michelle. Instead, I phoned Van Nijsten’s shop, in Aywaille, and a woman asked me to wait, and while I did an electronic version of a Jacques Brel song played in my ear. Then the same woman told me that Van Nijsten wasn’t there but someone would deliver my order in thirty minutes.

“Anything else?” asked the woman.

“She’s asking if we want anything else,” I said.

“Not for me,” said Michelle.

Michelle had taken a long shower, and after her shower we’d made love slowly, having taken the time to unplug the telephone and turn the digital alarm clock around, and then she had dried her hair and put on a soft pearly lipstick. But what I remembered, after all that, was how I had sat on the floor to read while she was showering, leaned against the wall beside the bathroom door, and a sliver of wood from the frame had snagged the right sleeve of my pullover. I took the sweater off and fixed the bunched thread by pulling on it with my teeth, while I heard the water pouring over Michelle and let myself be calmed by it, because the running water meant that Michelle was there, and hearing her shower, worrying about a sweater that she had given me, I felt comfortable and simple and satisfied, and I thought that must be happiness.

When the doorbell rang, Michelle was about to say something.

“Go ahead, get the delivery,” she said then.

I opened the door to a man with a bare head. His scalp was so cleanly shaved the glass of the door was reflected on it. The man put the wood down beside the poker and left the bill on the mantel, took the money, and left, all without saying a word. I knelt down in front of the fireplace.

“Okay, now we’re ready,” I said, rubbing my hands. “You were going to tell me something.”

“Have you got matches?”

I said yes, I had matches and several editions of La chasse aujourd’hui to burn. I made a bed of paper twists on the grate. When I was arranging the kindling and logs, I heard Michelle.

“On Thursday I was at my parents’ house. I’m going to spend some time with them.”

I stayed still, as if paralyzed. Maybe I believed that, if I pretended not to have been listening, the words would fall into oblivion.

Michelle went on talking. She said she no longer had any hopes for this, and that love seemed to her a distant emotion, something that no longer had anything to do with us. It hurt her to speak of love that way, like a dog that had run away in the middle of the night, while she was alone. But that was the truth. She had glimpsed it last week — on Tuesday, after eating alone in front of three bulletins from Euronews — and she’d talked to her mother and her mother had told her to think it over carefully. She did as she was told: she didn’t want to give in to her first impulse; she preferred to give us a few more days, give life a chance to straighten out its course.

“Now I’ve thought about it, while I was in the shower. And that hasn’t happened, nothing has straightened out. I want to be alone. I don’t want us to go on hurting each other.”

“Is that why you took so long?”

“What?”

“Showering. That’s why you were so long in the shower?”

“I don’t know, love. I don’t think that changes anything.”

“You had it all worked out,” I accused her. “You’ve known for a long time, and you made us carry on with this farce.”

I imagined her naked, letting the hot water hit her face, or leaning on the wall of the shower with her eyes closed and the cascade of her hair stuck to her shoulders. How had she decided? Had she thought of me, of a history of my mistakes? Had she recalled any happy moments, perhaps ones that I didn’t even remember, to then confirm how much everything had changed? I could think back, too, but the only thing that came into my head would be the coolness of the air this morning, when I got home and Michelle was waiting for me. It was cold air, but it didn’t have the harshness of winter; it was air that was pleasant to breathe, and I had breathed it avidly and had felt that every lungful was cleansing my body. At that moment, the world was as simple as bread fresh out of the oven. The spirits of the night of the dead had gone back into hiding, and Michelle was waiting for me.

“Are you sure? Is there nothing we can do?”

Michelle covered her face with her hands.

“Almost all my clothes are at my parents’ house. I took them when I went to visit, just in case.”

“And if someone helps us? If we were to see someone?”

“I’m ready,” said Michelle. “I can leave this afternoon, if you want. So we don’t drag this out.”

I felt sorry for both of us. Out of fear of feeling faint, I kept my eyes fixed on the bare match between my fingers. I realized I’d stopped understanding, that I’d lost control of something: the immediate course of my own life, Michelle’s emotions, or, simply, the idea of a splendid renovation I usually glimpsed like a prophecy when I thought of us splitting up. And the most uncomfortable aspect was to feel that some semblance of truth was about to be conceded to me and I hadn’t managed to know what it was about. I closed my eyes to listen to the voice that perhaps wanted to speak to me, to show me something about this moment. But nobody spoke in my head. Maybe this moment didn’t have any meaning, after all. Maybe pain and loss had meaning only in religion or in fables. Maybe it was futile to look for meaning in the shapeless vertigo that now, for the first time, filled me from within.

“And now what are we going to do?” I said.

“I don’t know,” said Michelle. “We’re going to be fine, I imagine.”

—

THAT AFTERNOON, after I dropped Michelle off at the station in Aywaille, after waiting with her for the orange train that would take her to Liège and seeing her get into the car and put the yellow knapsack I once brought her from Paris in the luggage rack, after asking her to call me when she arrived and hearing her say I promise, I’ll call as soon as I get in, after saying good-bye and walking out of the station along with the rest of the relatives and friends who’d been saying good-bye to their relatives and friends, after all that, I decided to pass through Saint-Roch before going home. But the trailer was closed, and I peered in the window and the kitchen was not working and the oil was not boiling. It seemed strange to me that a place like that would close on Saturdays. I looked at it from the outside: things are bigger in daylight. I waited awhile, then went to look for Zoé at her house. I didn’t find her there, either, but I found something better: there was a note hanging on the gray mailbox, stuck with insulation tape, that Zoé had left for someone. I read: I won’t be long, attendez-moi. And trying to imagine who would be waiting for Zoé, trying to investigate the plural request and the circumstances of the day, I thought that Zoé wasn’t so alone after all, if she had people willing to wait for her on a Saturday at five o’clock in the afternoon. I realized then that the note was written on an English postcard, and I thought Graham would have brought it back from some trip, and from the caption under the image I found out it was a bronze plaque in Liverpool, perhaps near the port, and that those English words, courage and compassion joined, were an homage to the musicians who’d died in the shipwreck of the Titanic. I put the postcard back in its place and made sure it was well stuck, pressed the insulation tape firmly, because it would be terrible if the wind blew it away and Zoé’s friends left without waiting for her due to the breezes that usually blow in the Ardennes. I drove out of the neighborhood before Zoé returned, and on my way I imagined her going out to get the wine she hadn’t been able to offer me the night before, or buying some pastry at L’Épi d’Or for her guests. Of course, it was also possible the note was not directed at any friend, but at strangers who were coming to fix her hot-water heater or dishwasher or maybe leave her a bundle of firewood in anticipation of winter. That was also possible and I knew it. But I preferred to hold on to the other idea.