17. Alberte #2
You have to reach.
You have to choose one another again.
So I am choosing him.
Henri is choosing me.
I want to believe that is enough.
It feels like enough tonight.
* * *
17 April 1996
Henri brought a new researcher to supper tonight.
Nadia Moreau.
She is young and possesses the particular kind of intelligence Henri has always found irresistible, the kind that makes a person impatient with easy answers.
She is studying ethnobotany in Montpellier and has apparently been working on medicinal plant compounds, which Henri believes may complement some of the vascular research being done here.
He spoke of her before she arrived as though he had discovered her rather than hired her. That should have annoyed me, but I found myself amused. There was a time when Henri spoke about me that way.
Perhaps he still does when I am not in the room.
Nadia has a little boy. Camille. Barely one year old.
She showed us a photograph without being asked, which I liked about her immediately. The boy has enormous eyes and an expression of grave suspicion, as though already disappointed by the adults entrusted with running the world.
I told her he looked serious. She laughed and said he is only serious until someone gives him something sweet.
Henri asked whether motherhood would interfere with the work.
The question embarrassed her.
It embarrassed me more.
I told him not to be an ass.
He gave me that look afterward—the one that says I have contradicted him publicly and will pay for it privately—but he smiled when he did it, so perhaps I am forgiven.
Nadia will be useful here. Maybe she will even become a friend.
* * *
2 September 1998
Henri says I worry too much about rules written by men who have never handled the things they regulate.
There are specimens here now whose paperwork I have not seen. When I asked, Henri said the acquisition was complicated. When I asked again, he said it was private. When I asked a third time, he became angry.
Not frighteningly angry. Henri is rarely theatrical. That would be easier.
He becomes quiet.
He told me that our work would stagnate if every scientific advancement waited patiently for bureaucracy to approve it.
He said animals cross borders every day without permission. He said no creature understands customs law.
I laughed. I wish I had not.
I have loved this man for twenty years.
Surely I know the difference between moral compromise and evil.
Surely.
* * *
14 June 2000
A private collector visited today. Henri did not introduce him to most of the staff, but he introduced him to me.
I wish he had not.
The man had too much money and the unsettling confidence of someone accustomed to discovering that everything possesses a price if he waits long enough.
They spoke in Henri’s office for nearly two hours. When the man left, Henri was cheerful.
He kissed me.
There was a transfer recorded this evening without the usual destination information.
I signed it.
I should not have. I knew that while the pen was still in my hand. I signed anyway.
Twenty-two years together and I am still capable of mistaking his confidence for evidence.
* * *
3 February 2002
I bought this cottage sixteen years ago because I needed one place in the world where Henri could not enter merely because he wished to.
He hated it then. He pretends not to hate it now.
There are mornings when I wake here alone and remember who I was before him.
That sounds cruel. Henri did not erase me. I gave things away.
There is a difference, though perhaps not enough of one.
When we met, I thought his certainty was freedom. I followed him because I wanted to become the sort of man who never doubted himself. Now I wonder whether doubt was the thing that might have saved us.
Henri no longer doubts.
That is what frightens me.
Not madness.
I almost wish it were madness.
Madness would mean something happened to him.
A break. A disease.
He has simply become comfortable.
Comfortable with dishonesty.
Comfortable with other people paying the price for his ambition.
Comfortable deciding that if a law obstructs him, the law is foolish; if a colleague objects, the colleague is weak; if a person becomes inconvenient, then their inconvenience is a moral failure rather than his.
There was no descent, only repetition. Something terrible done once and survived. Then done twice. Then enough times that it became ordinary.
* * *
21 August 2002
Nadia came to me today. She closed the laboratory door before speaking. I have never seen her frightened before. Angry, yes. Frustrated frequently. Exhausted almost constantly.
But not frightened.
She asked if I knew about the accounts. I pretended not to understand, but then she stared at me for so long that I became ashamed, and said, “Alberte, please.”
I hate those two words now.
She had found discrepancies between materials leaving Le Mas and the projects supposedly receiving them. Payments routed strangely. Records altered after the fact.
Things I already suspected. Things I had carefully avoided arranging into one coherent picture.
She asked whether Henri was selling research materials privately. I said I did not know. That was technically true, though it was also cowardice.
She said she intended to keep copies, and that frightened me more than anything else.
I told her to be careful.
She asked, “Of Henri?”
I could not answer.
Before she left, she mentioned her son, Camille. He is seven now.
How has so much time passed?
Nadia said she cannot risk something happening to her because her son needs her. I nearly told her to leave Le Mas tonight. Instead, I told her we would speak again tomorrow.
I despise myself for that.
* * *
4 January 2003
Henri knows someone is copying records.
He asked me directly, and I lied. He knew I was lying. Still, he poured us wine, and we drank together beside the fire as though we were still the men we had been in 1978. At one point he said, “You would tell me if someone here intended to betray me.”
I asked what he would do if someone did betray him. He smiled almost sadly and said, “I would hope they remembered how much I had given them before they decided to take from me.”
I could not sleep beside him afterward, so I came here instead. He called twice, but I did not answer.
I have begun making my own copies.
God forgive me for waiting until fear for myself accomplished what concern for everyone else did not.
* * *
11 May 2003
Nadia says she has enough. Enough for what, I asked. She said enough to make people ask questions Henri cannot answer easily. I told her that is not the same as enough to survive accusing him.
She became furious. She said I was protecting him.
Perhaps I am.
That is the question I cannot answer anymore.
When does loving someone become protecting them from consequences? When does fear become complicity?
I told Nadia that Henri has friends beyond Le Mas.
She said she knows.
I asked how. She would not tell me.
Before leaving my office, she turned around and said something I cannot stop hearing.
“You talk about him like there are two Henris. The one you love and the one doing these things.”
I cried after she left.
Ridiculous.
Forty-six years old and hiding in an office because a woman thirteen years younger than me finally said aloud what I have spent years refusing to understand.
There is only one Henri.
That is why this hurts.
* * *
29 June 2003
One of the researchers, a young man called Josef, has not come to work for two days now. No one seems to know where he is. Henri says the man left after an argument, but no one heard or saw an argument.
Josef’s belongings remain in staff housing.
I asked Henri whether police had been called. He asked why the police would need to be involved when an adult is entitled to leave his employment. I said because the man left everything behind. Henri said he might have wanted a new life.
I said nothing more.
Later, I searched the office records. Several files were gone. Not misplaced. Gone.
Henri came into the room while I was searching. He stood in the doorway and watched me. Eventually he said, “You should come to bed.”
I went.
I do not know what is wrong with me.
* * *
8 July 2003
Another one.
God.
I cannot write the name yet.
I cannot.
* * *
10 July 2003
I wrote the name on another page and tore it out. The person remains missing whether I write it or not.
Henri says people are panicking because they want drama. Meanwhile, he has been calm. So calm. That terrifies me more than if he were pacing, shouting, breaking things.
Twenty-five years, and I know every version of his anger.
This is not anger. This is management.
He has begun managing catastrophe as if it were merely another difficult project. Who needs reassuring, which files should be moved, what language should be used, who should speak to investigators, and who should not.
I listened to him briefing the staff this morning and realized he sounded exactly as he does before presenting research.
I vomited afterward.
He found me in the bathroom, knelt beside me, and held my hair away from my face as he rubbed my back.
I looked at him and thought, “Did you do this?”
I could not say it.
He kissed my forehead, then helped me to bed. It is so hard to question him when he is showing he still cares for me.
* * *
18 July 2003
Nadia is frightened more than ever. She came to the cottage tonight rather than meeting me at Le Mas.
I did not tell Henri.
Nadia believes the disappearances are connected to what she uncovered. She has names of buyers, payment records, and documentation of animals arriving through channels that should not exist.
She also believes certain research materials left Le Mas for people who had no legitimate reason to possess them.
I asked whether she had proof, and she responded that she wants to go to the police.
I told her to wait.
She stared at me with such contempt that I felt physically small. I explained that I do not know whom Henri can influence. She said that is exactly why waiting is dangerous.
We argued. She cried.
I have never seen Nadia cry.