31 THEY COULD DIE OF JEALOUSY
31
T HEY C OULD D IE OF J EALOUSY
Post festum, pestum. Margaux had heard the Latin phrase in school, and she hadn’t forgotten it over the years, with its elliptical verb resembling a curse repeated here and there throughout different moments of history and geographical locations. After the party comes the plague. This was the case, too, in Paris in 1944.
The months after the city’s liberation were not easy for anyone. Every person had lost someone—the count of men who wouldn’t return was in the thousands—and while everyone wanted to go back to the normality before the occupation, the weight of the absences was heavier. Paris couldn’t be fixed overnight. It was hard to recognize the face of liberty after years of imprisonment. Hunger continued to be something that needed resolving. Stores slowly raised their blinds, but food was still scarce, and pillaging in the street was widespread even without Germans to blame. Life was being rebuilt from a moral poverty. Everything involved reproaches and mistrust. Envy and revenge. Traitors were hunted down. It was a wild purge. With and without trial, all were executed: the traitorous militiaman, the Gestapo informer, the collaborator who’d ratted out his neighbor as a member of the resistance, or the poet who’d written in favor of the Vichy puppet government. Every day, there was a new case.
“Today, I watched how they made a line of women parade around naked.” Margaux arrived home in disbelief. “There’s maybe thirty of them in the middle of Rivoli. And people were spitting and insulting them. It was ...”
“Don’t look at those kinds of things,” her mother replied.
“I asked, ‘But what did these women do?’ And they told me they’d gone to bed with the Germans.”
“Yes, what do they call that, Ferdinand?”
“Horizontal collaboration,” he responded, without looking up from the newspaper.
“That. Horizontal collaboration. It’s a good name.”
“Mama, please.”
It wasn’t an easy autumn for the Dutronc family either. Days passed, and the hope that Damien would return vanished slowly. Margaux had been thrilled at the departure—or surrender or defeat or whatever you wanted to call it—of the Germans. Her parents tried bringing her down to earth, but she refused to sit around twiddling her thumbs. The first few weeks, she moved heaven and earth to find anyone who might know anything. The name Damien Devère didn’t appear on any of the Red Cross lists. The Gendarmerie—who didn’t encounter a lack of women looking for husbands, fathers, and brothers—didn’t know a thing. They were overwhelmed by the avalanche of fruitless searches and were in the worst of moods.
Margaux endured the suffering alone. Her parents had their own problems, and they had just enough to save their skin. A couple of days after the liberation, Michelle was fired from the Galeries Lafayette. The whole sequence of events took place in less than a week. First, they fired the floor manager. The angry mustached man had a lot of sympathy for the Nazis. Over the four years, he’d laughed along with them, and Marthe, Nathalie, and Marion decided to inform on him. A resistance cell waited for him at the door of the store and shoved him into a truck, and despite his shrieks that this was some kind of mistake, they didn’t care to know anything about misunderstandings. Revenge moved them more than truth did. The smallest denouncement was enough to make the charge.
After, Michelle’s coworkers went after her. They accused Michelle of being a collaborator. She and the whole Dutronc family. They were still angry that Ferdinand, unlike their husbands, hadn’t enlisted for the war. He must have had some contacts so he could stay at the theater. They also hadn’t forgotten what had happened with the girl, Margaux, modeling for a German propaganda magazine.
“You’re all a disgrace.”
“They should shave your head and make you walk through the city so everyone knows what you are.”
Astounded by the anger of her coworkers, Michelle defended herself as much as she could.
“I didn’t suck up to the Germans.”
“We can’t know that for sure.”
“Listen,” she begged. “How many years have we worked together? You know me well. I’m not capable of anything you’re saying. We survived at home ... Survived and nothing more. Is that our sin? I’m really very sorry for everything you and your husbands went through, but it’s not our fault. We didn’t—”
“She’s right, girls,” Marion jumped in in a spell of sympathy. “We can’t accuse her of things we haven’t seen.”
“But we don’t want to see your face here ever again,” said Marthe, feeling the need to emphasize the extent of their forgiveness.
They refrained from accusing her of anything they couldn’t prove. Their magnanimity was limited to sending an anonymous letter to the company headquarters in which they expressed doubts regarding Michelle’s behavior, and before the good name of the galleries could be stained, management had called her in and told her she needn’t return the next day.
There were also some shocks at the Théatre du Chatelet. The conductor of the Pierné Orchestra had disappeared in mid-September, and no one knew anything. His lover’s wife, who’d already marked Delphin Moureau as a homosexual to the Germans, had now denounced him to the resistance as a collaborator. At every turn, the sycophant’s rancor had made her play her cards with the sole objective of saving her marriage.
Over the past year, Ferdinand had watched the disappearance of Imtold Lefebvre, Damien Devère, Delphin Moureau, and other musicians in the orchestra who he’d not had ties with, because no one can be friends with a hundred people at the same time. It was not the electrician’s problem whether a conductor, an oboist, or a violinist were missing. After all, there were a thousand and one virtuosos in the city looking for work, and they’d find another conductor to rehearse Debussy’s Symphony in B Minor. What worried him was that, in the theater and orchestra, there was someone pulling the strings, calling people out, or exempting them based on convenience. He had the feeling—and certainty—that it had happened when the Germans were in the city, and even now that none were left. The rat was inside the house, and he feared that, depending on how the wind blew, it would be his turn next.
But it was Christmas Day when a cold front settled in the Dutronc household. Margaux, who’d been a bundle of nerves over the past few weeks, thought a lot about whether or not she should say anything during dinner. At the end of the day, there was never a good time to disappoint your parents. They’d decorated the apartment like they hadn’t in recent years, and her mother prepared the chocolate log so they could lick their fingers. She didn’t want to ruin their appetites, but she knew the surprise and the fuss that followed would create a memorable “before” and “after” of the day in their house. In fact, she couldn’t wait any longer to share the news. As hard as she tried to cover herself with a towel when she walked from her bedroom to the bathroom, as much as she dressed in baggy clothing, her belly would eventually be noticeable.
Before picking up the dinner plates, Margaux decided it was time. She grabbed her mother’s and father’s hands and mustered the strength. She tried to be tactful and soft, but the words were what they were:
“I’m pregnant.”
The news left the family silent. Michelle and Ferdinand immediately understood, but it took them by such surprise, in its unexpectedness and strangeness, that they were still as stone. They’d never thought their daughter would confess something like that to them.
“Impossible,” said her father.
“Are you sure?” asked her mother.
Margaux nodded, chewing on her upper lip. The silence hung heavy throughout the apartment once more. Her father took a deep breath and let go of her hand.
“How embarrassing, how embarrassing ...”
Michelle’s world came crashing down. “I’m sorry.” Margaux tried to look into her mother’s disdainful eyes. “I’m so sorry.”
“Who’s the father?” Ferdinand slammed his fist down. “Is it a German?”
“No, no. I know it’s not.” It was the one question Margaux hadn’t expected from him.
“It can’t be the Holy Spirit’s.” Her father stood. He couldn’t stand the tension. “Are you sure it’s not a German?”
“Papa, please, it’s—” She tried to keep her voice from shaking. “It can only be an American soldier.”
“An American, how great.”
“The night of the party. We got carried away, and—”
“The fucking party!”
“Jesus Christ, Margi.” Her mother touched her hand. “How did this happen?”
Margaux shrugged her shoulders, looked down, and remained there for a moment in penance. She waited for her parents to have it out with her. But Ferdinand didn’t say anything else. He counted on his fingers, confirming there were four months in total between August 25 and December 25, and with a jolt, he grabbed his jacket and scarf and made to leave the apartment.
“My love, don’t leave,” Michelle reproached. “Not now. Let’s all talk about it, please.”
“I need some fresh air,” he responded, like he hadn’t heard her. He slammed the door. As he walked angrily yet lethargically around Montmartre, he decided he would never tell his daughter he loved her again. And by God, would he follow through with it.
Her mother, on the other hand, improvised a speech whose direction she wasn’t sure of. She spoke about this. She cursed that. She swore this. She damned that. And everything revolved around her disgrace, what people would think, the obstacle in front of them, how a fatherless child would survive, how she’d been so thoughtless, the bad luck of getting pregnant her first time—if she was to believe it—her ruined reputation, the black cloud that hung over the family, the fact they’d just emerged from war and now had to return to the bunkers to hide their shame, how she’d been able to be so shameless, what Damien would think, poor Damien ...
“Don’t go there, Mama.” Margaux stopped her. “Don’t you dare.”
“I’m sorry, my love. I don’t even know what I’m saying.” She wiped a tear with a kitchen rag. “I don’t know what’s going on, I’m confused. I’m sorry ... I feel like I’m sleepwalking. Don’t listen to me.”
“Of course I’m listening to you, Mama.”
They hadn’t let go of each other’s hands the entire time. Even if they were hot or sweaty, Margaux needed contact with her mother now more than ever.
“It’s such a big surprise. So ... I guessed as much. Now I’m putting together that something wasn’t right ... but pregnant? I should have seen it, I’m so stupid. Oh lord, it’s so confusing, Margi.”
But she didn’t just need her mother. She would have also liked some understanding. She took a deep breath, and carefully, she dared to say: “I didn’t think you’d congratulate me, Mama. But I did think you would think more about me and less about what people might say.”
“What do you mean?” Her mother knew perfectly well what she had meant and more.
“I expected my father’s reaction. Swearing, two words, and then he flees. But you ... I wish that at some point you had looked down and asked me, ‘Margaux, how are you? Are you okay?’ One question. That’s it. Simply, ‘Are you okay, my daughter?’ Just that.”
She started to cry. Her mother remorsefully joined her. They got up without letting go of each other’s hands and hugged. Their legs failed them, as emotional as they were. They let it all go, noisily and in thick tears. They emptied themselves until the last sob. All at once, however, a weight had been lifted for Margaux. Perhaps the worst was over.
In her fifth month of pregnancy, she managed to go outside without feeling ashamed. If someone liked her belly, that was all well and good. If someone grumbled about it, they could go to hell. If someone speculated about it, they could die of jealousy. In the sixth month, her father began to speak to her again. He still wouldn’t tell her he loved her, but Michelle and Margaux were convinced his view would change. Once Ferdinand could see himself as a grandfather rocking a baby, maybe he’d be happy to show off his grandchild to everyone.
In the seventh month, Margaux was dying to see her baby’s face. If it was a boy, she’d name him Damien. If it was a girl, édith maybe. Deciding by herself had its advantages. She didn’t have to agree with anyone.
In the eighth month, each of her legs weighed a ton, and it was difficult to move around the house. She went up and down the five flights only when necessary. There were long spring days on which she heard more from the radio than anything else. Sometimes, she listened to music she couldn’t dance to, other times news that sounded a little better every day: French troops crossed the Rhine and entered Karlsruhe. Soviets advanced toward Bratislava. The United States Air Force conquered Hong Kong. Daily attacks were waged over Berlin and Hamburg. British troops isolated Holland from Germany. American troops liberated the concentration camp of Buchenwald, near Weimar. By mid-April, Hitler seemed to be cornered.
A week later, on a Tuesday when her mother had gone down to try to buy some fish and her father had gone to work, Margaux was napping in her room. She laid on her side, her belly resting on the mattress, which was how she was most comfortable. She also thought it was the posture in which her child moved the least. She was so comfortable that she’d fallen fast asleep. When she heard her name from afar, she didn’t know whether it was day or night. She didn’t know if she’d dreamed it or if she was really hearing it. A couple of minutes later, she thought she heard her name being called from the bottom of a well again. Sometimes, the man who was shouting called not only for Margaux.
“Ferdinand?” There was a pause. “Ferdinand? Michelle?”
The protagonist in her dreams knew the whole family ...
“Hello?”
That voice ...
“Margaux? Hello?”
The shouts were coming from the street.
“Hello, is someone there?”
She got out of bed and went to the dining room to figure out where the shouts were coming from. The window was half open, and she opened it up all the way. Carefully, she leaned out the window to look down on rue Tardieu.
A man looked up. He was completely shaved.
“Damien? Is that you?” She began to cry. “Damien!”
He blew her a kiss before he said anything.
“I’m here, Margaux. We won!” He raised his arms and repeated, “We won!”
“Damien ... my love. You’re alive ... You’re alive!”
Margaux put her hands to her head, and with her palms, she wiped the stream of tears that confirmed the law of gravity.
“Throw me the keys, and I’ll come up.”
“The keys?” Margaux was confused. “Is it locked?”
“Yes.”
“No, no ... I’ll come down and open the door.”
She went down the five flights as fast as she could, propping herself up on the railing. With each step, she experienced a mess of feelings, just as rash as they were contradictory: Damien wasn’t dead, how happy she was to know this. But as soon as she opened the door, Damien would see ... But Damien had gotten out—how happy and unexpected ... But when Damien hugged her, he’d feel her belly ... And Damien, so skinny, where had he been? How would Damien take the news that she was pregnant? But Damien had been revived, thank God. Whatever happened, there was no other option. He would have to handle it the way he handled it, there was no hiding it.
She opened the door and threw herself around his neck.
The hug. Everything was concentrated in that hug. Peace, fear, nerves, desire, anxiety, thankfulness, suffering, hope. Condensed love in a wordless reunion. She didn’t say, “You’re a skeleton, Damien. You don’t have any curls left.” He didn’t make any indication of Margaux’s state, like it wasn’t real and nothing was happening.
They went up to the apartment, she walking slowly in front of him.
“I’ll tell you everything, Dami. But first I need to know everything about you. Where were you? How’d you get back?”
“I’ve dreamed of coming back to this apartment so many times. The first oboe lessons ...”
“The house is the same, you’ll see.”
“And your parents?”
“They’re fine, they’re fine, thanks. They’re not here.”
“That’s why no one heard me.”
“I was sleeping because ... because this weighs me down, you know?”
He continued to act like he hadn’t seen her swollen belly. Once upstairs, they hugged again without kissing. Damien didn’t dare, and Margaux didn’t feel it was appropriate. It felt wrong without updating him on how she’d gotten into this situation.
“But tell me, tell me about you ... I need to know it all, from the moment they took you.”
Eyes feverish and sunken to their sockets, Damien sat down to recount a story that had ended in Buchenwald only ten days prior. The beginning, however, felt like so long ago, and he wanted to tiptoe around it.
When they’d arrested him, after the concert at the theater, they’d taken him to the prison, where they hadn’t even interrogated him. There’d been so many people in the same cell, and they treated them like animals. Then, they took them to a camp in France, out in the open, with a barbed-wire fence. A week later—or maybe it was two—they loaded the prisoners in a wooden wagon, and he went on a horrible trip to Germany by train. What happened next was worse. Someone explained that they were three hundred kilometers away from Berlin. When they arrived, they told them the name of the place no one on the train had heard of before: Buchenwald. After a year, or maybe more, everyone who was left would never be able to forget it. Damien tried to tell it all with the same naturalness as always, but his face had lost its shine. Sometimes he coughed and had to stop recounting his story, which expressly omitted all the terrifying details. He didn’t want to even think about them. Why did he have to explain how pigs in the SS stables were fed better than they were? What would he have gotten out of telling her how they’d executed his friends? He spent more time, indeed, talking about the last few hours he was in Buchenwald. The prisoners’ revolt, the Germans’ anxiety, and the escape before the Sixth Armored Division of the United States Army had freed them. On the truck back to France, almost all of them still wore their striped uniforms. Near Fontainebleau, having had to walk the last few kilometers, Damien and two other men were seen by a woman near the highway. She made them come into her house so they could shower, and she gave them clothes to change into. She also gave them a suitcase and packed pants and shirts into it for them, because she didn’t have any men left at her house. They’d all died during the war.
For months, Margaux had pictured Damien in one place and in a specific way. Now she knew the reality clashed entirely with her fantasy.
“If I’d had a way, I would have written to you from there,” said Damien. “But I didn’t have a pencil or paper or any way to—”
“You don’t have to excuse yourself. I know your letter by memory. The one you gave my father when you saw things were heading south.”
“You can rip it up now.”
“I won’t ever do that.”
“Maybe”—he tried not to look at her belly—“maybe words of love don’t have much meaning anymore.”
“Oh, no ... Damien ... Let me explain. Please.”
“You have nothing to explain. I told you to go your own way. And you listened.”
“Let’s stop with the sarcasm, Damien. Let me—”
Margaux didn’t know where to begin her story. She had to tell him it wasn’t a betrayal, not to jump to conclusions, that it had all been an accident. But he got ahead of her.
“I thought about you every day. Always.”
“Even if you don’t believe me, Damien, I also—”
“You gave me strength, you know? When I thought I couldn’t bear it anymore, when I saw friends from my barracks die, I thought about the day you read my life line. Remember what you said?”
“That it’d be long.”
“That it’d be long, yes. And that gave me the strength to continue. I thought about you. Your face came to my mind, and I was convinced you couldn’t be wrong.” He coughed. “My friends dropped like flies, from typhus, from hunger, from things you don’t want to even know about ... Every day, there was someone who didn’t come back. But you said I’d live a long time, so I had to resist whatever it may be.”
“Oh, Damien.”
“Even if it was just to see you one last time.”
Margaux grabbed his hand and kissed his palm. His skin was gray and dry, his fingers like bones. She gave him another peaceful and sweet kiss on his hand, searching for that familiar smell.
“Do you think I can play the oboe with these hands?”
She didn’t hear the question. She couldn’t continue to act like nothing had changed. It was time to confront it.
“You haven’t asked me who the father is.”
He was silent.
“Why haven’t you asked me yet?”
“Do I have a right to?”
“Of course you do, Damien.” She sighed deeply. “The father doesn’t exist. There is no father, believe me. I don’t know his name. I didn’t want to know. It was the night of the liberation of Paris ... Do you know anything about that day?”
“No clue.”
“The city was madness. The party lasted two days and nights. It was at the end of August. Everyone was hugging everyone. It’s not an excuse, I know. I met an American soldier. One night. Just that night, and goodbye.”
He stared at her. “Put that way, it’s—” He stopped.
“Say it. Don’t feel bad.”
“A child of happiness.”
“Dami ... I’m so sorry ... I thought, I’m sorry, that maybe you—”
Damien shut her up with a finger to her lips.
“These last few years have been so horrible that a new life must be welcomed.”
“Damien ...”
“And even more so if you’re the mother.”
“I love you so, so much. I’m so sorry.”
“Can I kiss a pregnant woman?”
“It’s what I want most in this world ...”
Slowly, they moved closer together. Damien’s lips were dry, but he hadn’t forgotten his passion for Margaux.
“I’ve missed your eyes, always so beautiful,” he said.
And she pretended and responded that his were the same too. And they found each other’s lips, and they didn’t know how to process that this was truly happening to them. They sat on the sofa. Margaux stretched out her legs to reduce the swelling. Damien, exhausted, fell asleep with his head on a pillow. Margaux observed him. Gaunt and sickly, with bony cheekbones. In just a year, he’d aged eight or ten. From the grimace he made at times in his sleep, it looked like he was having a nightmare. When he woke, he didn’t know where he was. A warm cup of coffee waited for him on the table. Margaux held the oboe case on her lap.
“I didn’t open it. I haven’t touched it in all this time.”
Damien grabbed the case and left it on the table as if he didn’t care about it at the moment. He was thinking about something else.
“Margaux, is it true that you’re alone?”
“Of course, it’s true.”
“You haven’t fallen in love with someone else, and you’re scared to tell me?”
“No, no, no. I promise that everything happened like I said it did. I don’t know who the father is. I know who it is, but I don’t know what his name is. I won’t look for him, and he—”
“Margaux.” He didn’t need to hear anything else. “Listen to me for a second.”
“Go ahead, Mr. Devère.”
Damien put both his hands on her belly. “I want this to be my child.”
“Are you telling me this honestly?”
“I’m serious. Our son. If you want that, of course.”
“Or daughter. I have a hunch it’ll be a girl.”
The child had to say its own piece.
“Did you feel that?”
“It kicked, didn’t it?” said Damien, admiringly, because he’d never felt life knocking at the door.
“That means yes, that nothing would make her happier. And I want it, of course. Everything about today feels like a miracle, Damien. You’re alive. You’re here. You’re with me. I can’t believe it. Maybe it’s moving too fast. It caught you by surprise, and ... What happens if a couple of days from now, you regret this?”
“Margaux. That won’t happen.”
“You’re not doing it out of pity? Are you sure?”
“I’m doing it because I love you and because I want to.”
“Damien ... How can you be so generous with me?”
“Because I want us to do this together, if you’re willing, like the family we’re meant to be.”
“You don’t know how much I’ve suffered, how much I’ve missed you, how I thought you had ...”
“And look. I’ve been resurrected,” he said, bursting into a laugh. “I was supposed to surprise you, but you’re the one who surprised me.”
Margaux grabbed his hand and put it back on her belly so he could see how a life yet to come was moving.
“When she’s born, my hair will have grown some, maybe not the curls from before.”
“If she’s a girl, her name will be édith.”
“I like it,” said Damien decisively.
“édith Devère. It sounds nice.” She proudly caressed her belly. “My daughter, let me introduce you to your father.”