The Empire Of The Wolves

27

Between his arms, she had been a river.

A fluid, supple, open energy. She had breezed through the nights and days like a ripple touches underwater greenery, without ever altering its languid pace. She had flowed between his hands, crossing shadowy forests, beds of moss, dark rocks. She had risen up in the clearings that burst into her eyes when pleasure came. Then she had abandoned herself once more, in a slow shift, translucent beneath his palms…

Over the years, there had been distinct seasons. Light, laughing rivulets of water. Manes of foam shaken by anger. Fords, too, truces during which their physical contact ceased. But such pauses were sweet. They had the lightness of reeds, the smoothness of bare pebbles.

When the current picked up again, pushing them again to the farthest shores, beyond sighs, their lips apart, it was to reach at last the ultimate pleasure, where everything was one and the other was all.

"You understand, Doctor?"

Mathilde Wilcrau jumped. She looked at the Knoll couch, just two yards away-the only piece of furniture in the room that did not date from the eighteenth century. A man was lying there. A patient. Lost in a daydream, she had completely forgotten about him and had not listened to a word he had said.

She concealed her embarrassment by saying, "No, I'm afraid I don't. You're not being very clear. Can you try and put it another way please?"

The man launched into another explanation, his nose facing the ceiling, hands crossed on his chest. Mathilde discreetly took a jar of moisturizing cream from a drawer. The freshness of the product on her hands brought her back to herself. Such moments of abstraction were becoming increasingly frequent and profound. She was now pushing the neutrality of the analyst to its extreme: she was quite literally no longer there. In the past, she used to listen to her patients' every word. She observed every slip of the tongue, hesitation and excess. They formed a thread that allowed her to find a path back through their neuroses and traumas… But now?

She put the cream away and continued to rub it into her hands. Nourish. Hydrate. Soothe. The man's voice was now just a murmur, rocking her profound melancholy.

Yes, between his arms she had been a river. But the fords had multiplied, the truces grown longer. At first, she had refused to worry, to see in these pauses a sign of a falling away. She had been blind with hope and faith in love. Then a taste of dust settled on her tongue, a sharp pain had gripped her limbs. Soon, even her veins seemed to have dried up, like lifeless mineral deposits. She felt empty. Even before their hearts had put a name to the situation, their bodies had spoken.

Then the breakup burst into their minds, and their words finished off the motion: their separation became official. The period of formalities began. They had to see a magistrate, calculate the alimony, organize the move. Mathilde had been irreproachable. Ever alert. Ever responsible. But her mind was already elsewhere. As soon as she could, she tried to remember, to travel within herself, in her own story, amazed to find so few traces in her memory, so few instants from the past. Her entire being was like a burned desert, an ancient site where only some meager ridges among the overly white stones still gave a sign of what had been.

She reassured herself by thinking of her children. They incarnated her destiny, were her last source of life. She devoted herself to them. She abandoned herself completely during the final years of their education. But they too, had ended up leaving her. Her son had vanished into a strange town, both tiny and huge, made up entirely of chips and microprocessors, while her daughter had found her path in traveling and ethnology or so she claimed. All that she was sure of was that her path lay far away from her parents.

So Mathilde now had to take an interest in the only person she had left: herself. She denied herself nothing-clothes, furniture, lovers. She went on cruises and trips to places that had always fascinated her.

In vain. Such extravagance seemed merely to hasten her downfall into old age.

Desertification was continuing its ravages. Lifeless sand spread ever farther inside her. Not only in her body but also in her heart. She became harder, harsher toward others. Her judgments were abrupt, her opinions strong and final. Her generosity, understanding and compassion deserted her. The slightest indulgent gesture cost her an effort. Her feelings became paralyzed, making her hostile to other people.

She ended up arguing with her closest friends and found herself alone, really alone. Having run out of enemies, she took up sports so as to confront herself. Her achievements included mountain climbing, rowing, hang gliding, shooting… Training became a permanent challenge for her, an obsession that drained way her anxieties.

Now she had gotten over such excesses, but her life was still dotted by frequent exertions. A hang gliding course in the Cevennes, the yearly climbing of the Dalles near Chamonix, the triathlon event in the Val d'Aosta. At the age of fifty-two, she was fit enough to make any teenager green with envy. And, every day with a hint of vanity she looked at the trophies that shone on her authentic Oppenordt School chest of drawers.

In reality, what delighted her was a different sort of victory: an intimate, secret triumph. During all those years of solitude, she had never once resorted to drugs. She had never taken a single tranquilizer or antidepressant.

Every morning, she looked at herself in the mirror and recalled this achievement. The jewel in her crown. A personal certificate of endurance that proved that she had not exhausted her reserves of courage and willpower.

Most people live in hope of the best.

All that Mathilde Wilcrau feared was the worst.

Of course, in the middle of that desert, there was her work. The consultations at Sainte-Anne Hospital and appointments in her private practice. The hard style and the soft style, as they say in the martial arts, which she had also practiced. Psychiatric care and psychoanalytic attention. But after a time, these two poles had ended up merging into the same routine.

Her timetable was now marked by several strict, compulsory rituals.

Once a week, when possible, she had lunch with her children, who spoke only of success for themselves, and the failure of her and their father. Every weekend, she visited antiques shops, between two training sessions. Then, on Tuesday evening, she attended the seminars at the Society of Psychoanalysis. where she would still see a few familiar faces. Particularly former lovers, whose names she had even forgotten and who had always seemed bland to her. But perhaps she was the one who had lost the taste for love. As when you burn your tongue and can no longer taste your food…

She glanced at the clock. Only five more minutes before the end of the session. The man was still talking. She wriggled on her chair. Her body was already prickling with the sensations in perspective-the dryness in her throat when she pronounced the concluding words after a long silence; the smoothness of her fountain pen on her diary when she jotted down the next appointment; the rustling of leather when she got up…

A little later, in the hallway, the patient turned around and asked her anxiously, "I didn't go too far, did I. Doctor?"

Mathilde shook her head with a smile and opened the door. So what had he revealed this time that was so important? It did not matter. He was sure to do even better next time. She went out onto the landing and switched on the light.

She screamed when she saw her.

The woman was hunched up against the wall, clutching her black kimono. Mathilde recognized her at once: Anna something. The one who needed a good pair of glasses. She was white and shaking from head to foot. What was this all about?

Mathilde pushed the man downstairs and turned angrily toward this little brunette. She did not tolerate it when her patients just showed up like that, without warning, without making an appointment. A good psychiatrist should always be a good bouncer.

She was about to give her a piece of her mind when the woman beat her to it, holding up to her nose a face scan.

"They've wiped away my memory and my face."

28

Paranoid psychosis.

The diagnosis was clear. Anna Heymes claimed that she had been manipulated by her husband and Eric Ackermann, as well as by some other men who were members of the French police force. Against her will, she was supposed to have been brainwashed and part of her memory removed. Her face had been altered using plastic surgery. She did not know why or how, but she had been the victim of a plot, or an experiment, that had damaged her personality.

She explained all this while hurriedly brandishing her cigarette like a conductor's baton. Mathilde listened to her patiently noting as she did how thin Anna was-anorexia could be another symptom of her paranoia.

Anna Heymes then came to the end of her unbelievable yarn. She had uncovered the plot that very morning, in the bathroom, when she discovered the scars on her face while her husband was about to take her to Ackermann's clinic.

She had escaped through the window and had been chased by policemen in civilian dress who were armed to the teeth and equipped with radio transmitters. She had hidden in an Orthodox church, then had had her face x-rayed at Saint-Antoine Hospital to obtain tangible proof of her operation. Then she had wandered around till nightfall, waiting to take refuge with the only person she now trusted Mathilde Wilcrau. There we are.

Paranoid psychosis.

Mathilde had treated hundreds of similar people at Sainte-Anne Hospital. The first thing to do was to calm the patient down. After a good deal of comforting words, she had managed to give her an intra-muscular injection of fifty milligrams of Tranxene.

Anna Heymes was now sleeping on her couch. Mathilde was sitting behind her desk, in her usual position.

All she had to do now was to phone up Laurent Heymes. She could even see to it that Anna was sectioned, or else contact Eric Ackermann, who was treating her. In a few minutes, everything would be sorted out. It was just routine.

So why hadn't she called? For the last hour, she had been sitting there, without picking up the phone. She stared around at the furniture, which glinted in places, reflecting the light from the window. For years, she had been surrounded by these rococo-style furnishings, most of which had been bought by her husband. She had fought hard to retain possession of them during their divorce. First to piss him off, then, she realized, to keep something of him. She had never made up her mind to sell them. She was now living in a sanctuary, a mausoleum of varnished antiques that reminded her of the only years that had really counted.

Paranoid psychosis. A textbook case.

Except that there were the scars. The traces she herself had observed on the young woman's forehead, ears and chin. She could even feel the screws and implants under her skin that were holding up her face's bone structure. That terrifying printout then gave her the details of the operations.

During her years of practice, Mathilde had encountered many paranoiacs, but very few of them went around with concrete proof of their delusions written into their faces. Anna Heymes was wearing a sort of mask that had been stitched onto her flesh. A rind of skin that had been fashioned and molded to dissimulate her smashed bones and atrophied muscles.

Was she quite simply telling the truth? Had these men-including even policemen-made her undergo such treatment? Had they shattered the bones of her face? Had they interfered with her memory?

There was another disturbing element in this business: the presence of Eric Ackermann. She remembered a tall redhead with a face pitted with acne. One of her countless suitors at university, but above all a man of extraordinary intelligence, which verged on the sublime.

At the time, what fascinated him was the human brain and "inner travel." He had followed the experiments on LSD conducted by Timothy Leary at Harvard and, via this approach, he claimed to be exploring uncharted regions of consciousness. He took all sorts of psychotropic drugs while analyzing his own altered states. He sometimes even spiked fellow students' coffee, by slipping LSD into it, "just to see." Mathilde smiled as she remembered his weirdness. It had been a crazy period, with psychedelic rock, protest movements, the hippies.

Ackermann had predicted that one day machines would allow us to travel inside the brain and observe its activity in real time. And time had proved him to be right. He had become one of the best-qualified neurologists in his field, thanks to new technologies such as the positron camera and the encephalogram.

Was it possible that he was conducting an experiment on this young woman?

She looked in her address book for the phone number of a student who had taken her courses at Sainte-Anne in 1995. On the fourth ring, the woman answered.

"Valerie Rannan?"

"Speaking."

"This is Mathilde Wilcrau."

"Professor Wilcrau?” It was past eleven, and her tone of voice was suddenly alert.

"What I am going to ask you will probably sound rather odd, especially at this time of the night…"

"What do you want?"

"I just want to ask you a few questions about your doctoral thesis. It was about mental manipulation and sensory isolation, if I remember correctly"

"It didn't seem to interest you very much at the time."

Mathilde noticed a slightly aggressive tone in the woman's answer. She had in fact refused to direct the student's work. She had not believed in this line of research. For her, brainwashing was more part of a collective fantasy or an urban legend.

She soothed out her voice with a smile. "Yes, I know. I was rather skeptical. But right now I need some information for an article I have to write on a short deadline."

"You can always ask."

Mathilde did not know where to start. She was not even sure what she wanted to find out. She started at random. "In the synopsis of your thesis, you wrote that it is possible to efface someone's memory. Is it… is it true?”

“The techniques were developed in the 1950s."

"By the Soviets, is that right?"

"The Russians, the Chinese, the Americans, just about everybody. It was a major element in the Cold War. Destroying the memory. Removing convictions. Modeling personalities."

"What methods were used?"

"Always the same ones: electroshock, drugs, sensory isolation." There was silence.

"Which drugs?" Mathilde asked.

"I worked mostly on the CIA 's program, MK-Ultra. The Americans used sedatives. Phenothiazine. Sodium amytal. Chlorpromazine."

Mathilde knew the names. They were the heavy artillery of psychiatry. In hospitals, these products were grouped together under the generic term chemical straitjacket. But in reality they were more like a grinder, a machine to mold the mind.

"What about sensory isolation?"

Valérie sneered. "The most advanced experiments were conducted in Canada, from 1954 onward, in a clinic in Montreal. First, the psychiatrists interviewed some of their female patients, who were depressives. They forced them to confess their faults, and any fantasies they were ashamed of them, they locked them in completely dark rooms, in which they could no longer see the floor, walls or ceiling. After that, they placed football helmets on their heads, in which extracts from their confessions were played on a loop. The women constantly heard the same words, the same sentences, which were the most painful parts of their confessions. The only respite was the sessions of electroshock therapy and sleep cures under sedation."

Mathilde glanced over at Anna, asleep on the couch. Her chest rose and fell slightly as she breathed.

The student went on:

"When the patients could no longer remember their names or their pasts, when they had no willpower left, the real treatment began. The therapists changed the tapes in the helmets, which now played out orders and commands, which were supposed to forge their new personalities."

Like all psychiatrists. Mathilde had heard of such aberrations, but she could not convince herself of either their reality or their effectiveness. "What were the results?" she asked in a neutral voice.

All the Americans managed to produce were zombies. The Russians and Chinese seem to have obtained better results, using more or less identical methods. After the Korean War, over seven thousand American prisoners of war returned to their country, absolutely convinced of values. Their personalities had been conditioned."

Mathilde scratched her shoulder. A tomblike chill was rising up her limbs. "And do you think that laboratories have continued to work in this field since then?"

"Of course."

"What sort of labs?"

Valérie laughed sarcastically. "You're really on another planet, aren't you? We're talking about military research centers. All armies work on manipulating brains."

"In France, too?"

"In France, in Germany, in Japan, in the USA. Everywhere that has the technological means. New products are constantly coming out. Right now, there's a lot of talk about a chemical compound called GHB, which wipes out what you have experienced during the previous twelve hours. It's called the rapist's drug because a drugged victim won't remember a thing. I'm sure the army is still working on that kind of product. The brain is the most dangerous weapon in the world."

"Thank you, Valérie."

She sounded surprised. "You don't want any precise sources? A bibliography?"

"That's all right. I'll call you back if necessary"

29

Mathilde went over to Anna, who was still asleep. She examined her arm for traces of injections. Nothing. She looked at her hair. Repeated absorption of sedatives provoked an electrostatic inflammation of the scalp. No particular sign.

She stood up in amazement at having almost believed the woman's story. No, really, she herself must be out of her mind as well… At that moment, she once again noticed the scars on the forehead-three tiny vertical lines barely an inch apart. She could not resist touching the temples and jaws. The prostheses shifted around beneath the skin.

Who had done that? How could Anna have forgotten such an operation?

Right from her first visit, she had mentioned the institute where the tomographic tests had been carried out. It was in Orsay. A hospital full of soldiers. Mathilde had written the name down somewhere in her notes. She looked quickly through her pad and came across a page full of her usual doodling. In the top right-hand corner, she had written Henri-Becquerel.

Mathilde got a bottle of water from the closet next to her consulting room; then, after taking a long swig from it, she picked up the phone and dialed a number.

"Rene? It's Mathilde. Mathilde Wilcrau."

A slight hesitation. The time. The years gone by. The surprise… Then a deep voice finally said, "How are things?"

"I'm not disturbing you?"

"Of course not. It's always a pleasure to hear your voice."

René Le Garrec had been her teacher and professor when she was studying at Val-de-Grace Hospital. A military psychiatrist and specialist in the traumas of war, he had set up the first medicopsychiatric emergency units open to victims of terrorism, war or natural disasters. He was a pioneer who had proved to Mathilde that you can wear a uniform without necessarily being an idiot.

"I just wanted to ask you something. Do you know the Henri Becquerel Institute?"

She noticed a slight hesitation.

"Yes, I do. It's a military hospital."

"What do they work on there?"

"They used to work on nuclear medicine."

"And now?"

Another hesitation. Mathilde was now sure of one thing: she was venturing into forbidden territory.

“I don't know exactly" the doctor replied. "They treat certain forms of trauma."

"From war?"

"I think so. I'd have to ask."

Mathilde had worked for three years in Le Garrec's department. Never had any mention been made of this institute.

As though trying to cover the clumsiness of his lie, the soldier went on the attack. "Why arc you asking me this?"

She made no attempt to duck and dive. "I have a patient who's had tests done there."

"What sort of tests?"

"Tomographic ones."

"I didn't know they had a PET scanner."

"It was Ackermann who carried them out."

"The cartographer?"

Eric Ackermann had written a book about the techniques for exploring the brain, bringing together the work of various teams from around the world. It had since become the standard reference book. Since its publication, the neurologist had the reputation of being one of the greatest topographers of the human brain. A traveler who voyaged around this region of the anatomy as though it were the sixth continent.

Mathilde confirmed.

Le Garrec observed, "It's odd he's working with us."

The us amused her. The army was more than just a corporation. it was a family "You're right," she said. "I knew Ackermann at the university. He was a real rebel. A conscientious objector, drugged up to his eyeballs. I find it hard to picture him working with soldiers. I think he was even condemned for illegal production of narcotics."

Le Garrec could not help laughing. "But that could be the reason. Do you want me to contact them?"

"No thanks. I just wanted to know if you had heard about their work, that's all."

"What's your patient's name?"

Mathilde now realized that she had gone a step too far. Le Garrec was going to start asking questions himself or, even worse, refer the matter to his superiors. Suddenly, the world Valérie Rannan had described seemed more probable. A universe of secret, impenetrable experiments, conducted in the name of a higher reason.

She tried to deflate the tension. "Don't worry it was only a detail.”

“What's the patient's name?" the officer insisted.

Mathilde felt the chill rise higher in her body. "Thanks," she replied. "I'll call Ackermann myself"

"As you wish."

Le Garrec was retreating, too. They both adopted their usual roles, their usual casual tone. But they knew that during this brief conversation, they had crossed a minefield. She hung up after promising to call him back for lunch sometime.

So it was certain that the Henri-Becquerel Institute had its secrets. And Eric Ackermann's presence in this business deepened the mystery even more. Anna Heymes's "delusions" were now seeming less and less psychotic…

Mathilde went into the private part of her apartment. She had a particular gait: shoulders up, arms along her body fists raised and, above all, hips slightly swaying. When she was young, she had spent a long time perfecting this oblique step, which she thought suited her figure. It had now become second nature to her.

When she reached her bedroom, she opened a varnished writing desk, decked with palm leaves and bunches of reeds. A Meissonnier 1740. She used a miniature key, which she always kept on her, and then pulled open a drawer.

She opened a coffer of woven bamboo, encrusted with mother-of-pearl. At the bottom, there was a piece of chamois leather. With her thumb and forefinger, she pulled aside the rolls of cloth and revealed the glittering presence of a forbidden object: A Glock 9-mm automatic pistol.

It was an extremely light weapon, with a mechanical lock and a safe-action catch. Before, this pistol had been used as a piece of sports equipment, and its use had been authorized by an official license. But now this gun, loaded with sixteen armor-plated bullets, was no longer authorized. It had become an instrument of death, forgotten by the labyrinthine French bureaucracy..

Mathilde weighed the gun in her palm, thinking over her current situation. A divorced psychiatrist with a lousy sex life, hiding an automatic pistol in her writing desk. She smiled and murmured, "How symbolic can you get?"

When she returned to her consulting room, she made another phone call, then went over to the couch. She had to shake Anna extremely hard before the woman showed any signs of waking up.

Finally, the young woman rolled over slowly. She stared at her hostess, showing no surprise, her head to one side.

In a low voice, Mathilde asked, "You didn't tell anyone that you'd come to see me?"

Anna shook her head.

"No one knows that we know each other?"

Same answer. It occurred to Mathilde that she might have been followed. It was now double or nothing.

Anna was rubbing her eyes with the palms of her hands, making herself look even more strange, with her lazy eyelids, that languidness about her temples, above her cheekbones. She still had the marks from the blanket on her cheek.

Mathilde thought of her own daughter, the one who had left home after tattooing on her shoulder the Chinese ideogram for "the truth.”

“Come on," she whispered. "We're going."

30

"What did they do to me?"

The two women were speeding along Boulevard Saint-Germain toward the Seine. The rain had stopped but left its presence everywhere in the glints, glitters and blue splashes of the night's vibrato.

To conceal her doubts, Mathilde adopted a professorial tone. "A treatment," she said.

"What sort of treatment?"

"Clearly something new which has allowed them to alter parts of your memory"

"Is that possible?"

"Normally speaking, no. But Ackermann must have come up with something… revolutionary technique connected with tomography and the brain's regions."

While driving, she constantly peered over at Anna, who was slumped on the seat, staring forward, her two hands clenched between her thighs.

"A shock can cause partial amnesia," she went on. "I treated a soccer player after a collision during a match. He could remember part of his existence, but not all of it. Maybe Ackermann has found a way to do the same thing using drugs, irradiation, or some other technique. A sort of screen that has been pulled across your memory"

"But why?"

"In my opinion, the answer lies in Laurent's work. You must have seen something that you shouldn't have, or else you have some information connected with his activities, or maybe you're just a guinea pig.. Anything is possible. We're in a world of madmen."

At the end of Boulevard Saint-Germain, the Institut du Monde Arabe appeared to their right. Clouds were drifting across its glassy sides.

Mathilde was amazed at how calm she felt. She was driving at over sixty miles an hour, an automatic pistol in her bag, with this death's-head by her side, and she did not feel at all afraid. Instead, she had a sensation of a certain distance, mingled with childlike excitement.

"And can my memory be restored?" Anna spoke awkwardly. Mathilde recognized this tone. She had heard it a thousand times during consultations at the hospital. It was the voice of obsession, of madness. Except that this time, the patient's delusions corresponded to reality.

Mathilde chose her words carefully: "I can't answer that until I know what technique was used. If it was a chemical substance, then maybe there's an antidote. If surgery was used, then… I'd more pessimistic."

The little Mercedes glided past the zoo in the Jardin des Plantes. The sleep of the animals and stillness of the park seemed to unite in the darkness to dig out an abyss of silence.

Mathilde saw that Anna was crying, in the small staccato sobs of a little girl. After a while, she recovered her voice, which was mixed with tears. "But why change my face?"

"That's a mystery. Maybe you were in the wrong place at the wrong time. But that wouldn't mean having to change your appearance. Unless the situation's even crazier, and they've altered your entire identity"

You mean I was someone else before?"

"That's what the plastic surgery could lead us to suppose.”

“I’m. I'm not Laurent Heymes's wife?"

Mathilde did not reply. Anna went further: "But what about my.. feelings? My… intimacy with him?"

Anger gripped Mathilde. In the midst of this horror, Anna was still thinking about love. There was nothing to be done about it. When a woman was shipwrecked, it was always desire and feelings first.

"All my memories of being with him… I can't have just invented them!"

Mathilde shrugged, as though to alleviate the seriousness of what she was about to say "Maybe your memories were implanted. You told me yourself that they're fading away, that they seem unreal… Normally speaking, such a thing is impossible. But someone like Ackermann is capable of anything. And the police must have given him unlimited means."

"The police?"

"Wake up, Anna. The Henri-Becquerel Institute. The soldiers. Laurent's job. Except for the Maison du Chocolat, your universe was entirely made up of policemen and uniforms. They were the ones who did this to you. And now they're looking for you."

They had reached the perimeter of Gare d'Austerlitz, which was being renovated. One of its façades revealed its own inner void, like a movie set. The windows gaping below the sky looked like the leftovers of a bombing. On the left, in the background, the Seine ran on. Dark silt drifting slowly.

After a long pause, Anna said, "There's someone in this story who isn't a policeman."

"Who?"

"The customer in the shop. The one I recognize. My colleague and I call him Mr. Corduroys. I don't know how to explain this, but I sense that he's not part of all this. That he belongs to the part of my life that they've wiped out."

"But why has he crossed your path?"

"Maybe it's a coincidence."

Mathilde shook her head. "Look, one thing I'm sure of is that there aren't any coincidences in this business. You can be certain that he's working with the others. If his face rings a bell, it's probably because you saw him with Laurent."

"Or because he likes Jikolas."

"Sorry?"

"Chocolates with a marzipan filling. It's one of the shop's specialties." She laughed breathlessly then wiped her tears. "In any case, it's logical enough if he doesn't recognize me, given that my face has completely changed." Then she added, in despair, "We must find it. We must uncover something about my past!"

Mathilde refrained from commenting. She was now driving up Boulevard de l'Hopital, under the iron arches of the overhead metro line.

"Where are we going?" Anna cried out.

Mathilde drove across the street diagonally, then parked in the wrong direction beside the campus of La Pitie-Salpetrière Hospital. She switched off the ignition, then turned toward the little Cleopatra.

"The only way we can understand your story is to find out who you were before. To judge by your scars, the surgery was carried out about six months ago. Somehow or other, we're going to have to go back beyond that point." She pressed her finger against her forehead. "You must remember what happened before that date."

Anna glanced up at the signpost of the teaching hospital. "You want… you want to question me under hypnosis?"

"We don't have time for that."

"So what are you going to do?"

Mathilde pushed a black lock of hair back behind Anna's ear. "If your memory can't tell us anything and your face has been obliterated, there's still one thing that remembers who you are."

"What?”

“Your body."

31

The biological research unit of La Pitié-Salpetrière was lodged in the faculty of medicine. A long six-story block, it was dotted with hundreds of windows, giving a dizzying idea of the number of laboratories it must contain. This typically 1960s architecture reminded Mathilde of the universities and hospitals she had studied in. She had a particular feeling for such places, and to her mind, their style was forever associated with knowledge, authority and learning.

They walked toward the gate, their feet clacking on the silvery pavement. Mathilde entered the security code. Inside, cold and darkness welcomed them. They crossed a huge hall to an iron elevator to the left, which looked like a safe.

Its interior smelled of grease. It felt to Mathilde that she was ascending a tower of knowledge, alongside the superstructures of science. Despite her age and experience, she felt crushed by this place, which evoked a temple for her. It was sacred territory.

The elevator continued to rise. Anna lit a cigarette. Mathilde's senses were so acute, it was as though she could hear the crackling of the burning paper.

She had dressed her protegée in some of her daughter's clothes, which had been left in her apartment after a New Year's party. The two women were the same size, and now dressed in the same shade: black. Anna was wearing a slim-fitting velvet coat, with long, narrow sleeves, silk bellbottoms and highly polished shoes. These party clothes made her look like a little girl in mourning.

At last, on the fifth floor, the doors opened. They went up a corridor covered with red tiles, punctuated by doors with frosted glass windows. A soft light was coming from the far end. They approached it.

Mathilde opened the door without knocking. Professor Alain Veynerdi was expecting them, standing beside a white bench.

This small, vigorous sixty-year-old had the dark skin of a Hindu and the dryness of papyrus. Beneath his impeccable white coat, he was clearly wearing even more impeccable evening dress. His hands had been manicured: his nails looked lighter than his skin, like little mother-of-pearl lozenges at the tips of his fingers. His gray hair was carefully combed back, held in place with Brylcreem. He looked like a painted figure straight out of a Tintin comic. His bow tie gleamed like the key of some secret mechanism, waiting to be wound up.

Mathilde took care of the introductions and went through, once more, the main points of the lie she had told the biologist over the phone. Anna had had a car accident, eight months before. Her vehicle had burned, her identity papers were inside and her memory had been obliterated. The injuries to her face had required extensive surgery. And the mystery of her identity remained entire.

The story was barely believable, but Veynerdi did not live in a rational world. All that mattered to him was the scientific challenge that Anna represented.

He pointed at the stainless-steel table. "Shall we start straightaway?”

“Hang on," Anna protested. "Maybe you'd better tell me what you're going to do first."

Mathilde turned to Veynerdi. "Can you explain. Professor?"

lie looked at the young woman. "I'm afraid we'll have to give you a little anatomy lesson…"

"Don't put on your airs and graces with me."

He smiled briefly, as bitterly as a lemon. "The elements that make up the human body regenerate according to specific cycles. The red corpuscles are reproduced every hundred and twenty days. The skin sloughs completely in five days. The lining of the intestines is renewed in just forty-eight hours. However, within this constant reconstruction, the immune system contains cells that conserve traces of contact they have had with foreign bodies for long periods of time. They are called memory cells."

He had a smoker's voice, deep and husky. Which did not fit with his immaculate looks.

"When confronted with a disease, the cells produce molecules for defense or recognition, which carry the mark of the attack. When they are reproduced, they transmit this defensive information. It's a sort of biological record, if you will. The entire principle of vaccination is based on this system. It is enough to put the human body in contact with a pathogen just once for cells to produce protective molecules for years. What applies to illness also applies to any other external element, We always keep traces of our past life, of our countless contacts with the world. It is possible to study these marks and give them a date and origin."

He bowed slightly "This as yet little-known field is my specialty"

Mathilde remembered when she had first met Veynerdi. during a seminar on memory in Majorca in 1997. Most of the guests were neurologists, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts. They had discussed synapses, networks, the subconscious, and had all mentioned the complexity of memory. Then, on the fourth day, a biologist in a bow tie had spoken, and their horizons had completely changed. Behind his reading desk, Main Veynerdi was talking about physical not mental memory.

The specialist presented a study he had conducted on perfumes. The constant impregnation of alcoholized substances in the skin ends up "engraving" certain cells, thus forming an identifiable marker, even after the subject has stopped using the fragrance. He cited the example of a woman who had used Chanel No. 5 for ten years, and whose skin still bore its chemical signature four years later.

That day, the audience left the lecture hall in rapture. Suddenly, memory had become something physical that could be analyzed chemically, under the microscope… Suddenly, that abstract entity which constantly evaded the instruments of modern technology, had turned out to be material, tangible. observable. A human science had become an exact one.

Anna's face was lit up by the low lamp. Despite her weariness, her eyes were sparkling brightly. She was beginning to understand. "In my case, what sort of things can you find out?"

"Trust me," the biologist replied. "In the secret of your cells, your body has kept marks of your past. We are going to reveal traces of the physical environment in which you lived before your accident. The air you breathed. The sort of food you ate. The signature of the perfume you wore. One way or another, I am sure you are the same woman as before."

32

Veynerdi switched on various machines. Their glittering lights and computer screens revealed the true dimensions of the laboratory: a large room, cluttered with analytical equipment, whose walls were divided between bay windows and cork lining. The bench and stainless-steel table reflected each light source, stretching them into green, yellow, pink and red filaments.

The biologist pointed to a door on the left. "Get undressed in the changing room, please."

Anna disappeared. Vetnerdi put on some latex gloves, laid sterile sachets on the tiles of the counter, then stood behind a long line of test tubes. He looked like a musician preparing to play a glass xylophone.

When Anna returned, she was wearing just a pair of black panties. Her body was thin and scrawny. Every time she moved, her bones seemed to be about to tear through her skin.

"Lie down, please."

Anna climbed up onto the table. Whenever she made an effort, she seemed more robust. Her dry muscles swelled her flesh, giving a strange impression of strength and power. This woman was concealing a mystery, a latent energy. Mathilde thought of the shell of an egg, transparently revealing the form of a tyrannosaurus.

Veynerdi removed a needle and a syringe from their sterile packs. "We'll start with a blood test."

He stuck the needle into Anna's left arm, without causing the slightest reaction. He frowned, and asked Mathilde, "Have you given her a sedative?"

"Yes, an intramuscular dose of Tranxene. She was highly agitated this evening, so…"

"How much?"

"Fifty milligrams."

The biologist grimaced. This injection was going to interfere with his tests. He removed the needle, placed a dressing in the crook of Anna's arm, then slipped behind the bench.

Mathilde followed his every move. He mixed the blood he had collected with a hypotonic solution, in order to destroy the red corpuscles and leave only the white ones. He placed the sample in the black cylinder of a centrifuge, which looked like a little oven. Turning at a thousand rotations per second, the machine separated the white corpuscles from the final residue. A few moments later, Veynerdi extracted a translucent deposit from it.

"Your immune cells," he commented for Anna's benefit. "These are the ones that contain the information we're interested in. We'll now take a closer look…"

He diluted the concentrate with some saline solution, then poured it into a flow cytometer -a gray block in which each corpuscle was isolated and subjected to a laser beam. Mathilde knew the procedure: the machine was going to locate the defensive molecules and identify them, thanks to a catalogue of markers that Veynerdi had compiled.

"Nothing very important." he said after a few minutes. "All I've found is contact with quite ordinary illnesses and pathogenic agents. Bacteria, viruses… though fewer than average. You led an extremely healthy existence. madam. Nor have I found traces of any exogenic agents. No perfume. No particular impregnations. A real blank slate."

Anna sat motionless on the table, her arms crossed over her knees. Her diaphanous skin reflected the colors of the security lights: like a piece of glass. it was so white it was nearly blue.

Veynerdi approached. holding a far longer needle. "We're now going to perform a biopsy"

Anna stiffened.

"Don't worry" he murmured. "It's painless. I'm simply going to remove a little lymph from a ganglion in the armpit. Lift your arm, please."

Anna raised her elbow above the table.

He introduced the needle while mumbling in his smoker's voice, "These ganglions are in contact with the pulmonary region. If you have breathed in any particular particles, a gas, pollen, or anything significant, these white globules will remember."

Still drowsy from the tranquilizer, Anna did not jump in the slightest. The biologist went back behind his counter and proceeded to carry out some more procedures.

Several minutes passed, then he said, "I've found nicotine and tar. You used to smoke in your past life."

Mathilde butted in. "She still does."

The biologist nodded in reply but added, "As for the rest, there is no significant trace of any particular atmosphere or surroundings." He picked up a small flask and went over to Anna once more. "Your globules have not retained the sort of memories I was hoping for, madam. So we shall now try a different sort of analysis. Some parts of the body do not conserve the print of external agents, but their actual traces. We are now going to explore these microstocks."

He brandished a jar. "I'm going to ask you to urinate in this flask." Anna got slowly up and returned to the changing room. A real zombie.

Mathilde observed, "I don't see what you'll find in her urine. We're looking for traces going back over a year and-"

The expert cut her short with a smile. "Urine is produced by the kidneys, which act as filters. And crystals build up inside them. I can detect traces of these concretions. Some date from several years ago and can tell us much about the subject's diet, for example."

Anna returned to the room, holding the bottle. She seemed increasingly absent and alienated from the work being performed on her.

Veynerdi used the centrifuge once again to separate the elements, then turned to a new machine: a mass spectrometer. He deposited the golden liquid inside, then started the process of analysis.

Greenish waves came up on the computer screen. The scientist clicked his tongue in exasperation. "Nothing. This young lady is decidedly difficult to read…"

He changed tack, concentrating even harder, taking more samples, running more tests, plunging within Anna's body.

Mathilde followed each motion and listened to his commentaries. First, he removed some dentine, living tissue inside teeth in which certain products, such as antibiotics, can build up in the blood. Then he looked at the melatonin produced by the brain. According to him. the level of this hormone, which is mostly produced at night, could reveal Anna's old routine of sleeping and waking.

Then he carefully removed a few drops of fluid from her eyes, which could contain minuscule residues of certain foods. Finally, he cut off some hair, which retained the memory of exogenic substances and then secreted them in turn. The phenomenon was well known. The body of a person poisoned with arsenic will continue to exude the substance after death, through the hair roots.

After three hours of tests, the scientist had almost admitted defeat. He had found nothing. or nearly. The portrait he could offer of the previous Anna was insignificant. A woman who smoked, otherwise leading a very healthy life: who probably suffered from insomnia, to judge from the irregular levels of melatonin; who had eaten olive oil since her childhood-he had found greasy traces of it in her eyes. The final point was that she dyed her hair black. In reality she had lighter hair, which was almost red.

Alain Veynerdi took off his gloves and washed his hands in the sink cut into the bench. Tiny beads of sweat were glistening on his forehead. He looked exhausted and disappointed. One last time. he went over to Anna. who had gone back to sleep. He walked around her, apparently still searching, seeking for a sign, a hint that would allow him to decipher that diaphanous body.

Suddenly he bent down over her hands. He took hold of her fingers and looked at them attentively. He then woke her up. As soon as she opened her eyes, he asked her with barely contained excitement: "I can see a brown stain on your fingernail. Do you know where it came from?"

Anna stared at her surroundings in confusion. Then she looked at her hand and raised her eyebrows. "I don't know," she mumbled. "It's a nicotine stain, isn't it?"

Mathilde joined them. She, too, could now see a tiny ochre mark on the tip of the nail.

"How often do you cut your nails?" the biologist asked.

"I don't know… about every three weeks."

"Do you have the impression that they grow quickly?"

Anna yawned in answer.

Veynerdi went back to his bench, murmuring. "How could I have missed that?" He picked up a tiny pair of scissors and a transparent box, then returned to cut off the piece of Anna's fingernail that seemed to interest him so.

"If they grow normally" he said softly, "these extremities date back to the period before your accident. This stain is part of your past life."

He switched the machines back on. While their motors purred again, he diluted the sample in a tube containing a solvent. "That was a close call," he said, and smiled. "In another few days, you would have cut your nails and we would have lost this precious remnant."

He placed the sterile tube in the centrifuge and turned it on.

“If it's nicotine," Mathilde commented, "I don't see what you can…"

Veynerdi placed the liquid in a spectrometer. "I may be able to work out which brand of cigarettes she smoked before her accident."

Mathilde did not understand why he was so enthusiastic. Such information would not reveal anything important. On the screen of the machine. Veynerdi observed the luminous diagrams. Minutes passed by. "Professor." Mathilde was losing patience. "I don't understand. This is nothing to get worked up about. I "

"It's extraordinary."

The light of the monitor was illuminating a fixed look of wonder on the scientist's face.

"It isn't nicotine."

Mathilde went over to the spectrometer. Anna sat up on the metal table.

Veynerdi turned on his seat toward the two women. "It's henna." A wave of silence smothered them.

The researcher tore off the square-ruled paper that the machine had just printed out, then he typed the data on his computer keyboard. It at once flashed up a list of chemical components.

"According to my catalogue of substances, this stain comes from a specific vegetal composition. A very rare sort of henna, cultivated on the plains of Anatolia." Alain Veynerdi stared triumphantly at Anna. He seemed to have waited all his life for this moment.

"Madam, in your previous existence, you were Turkish."