The Madonna of Notre Dame (12 page)

“I believe you, Mourad.”

“Because I’m telling you, Father: I did do my rounds. The aisle, the chapels, the ambulatory, the sacristy, the kitchens, the basements, the changing rooms ...”

“I believe you.”

“Then why doesn’t the rector believe me?”

“I don’t know, Mourad, I don’t know. I guess the police have given him another story. I guess in their eyes it’s the only possible explanation for the tragedy on Sunday night.”

“You see, Father, that’s the problem. Between a Frenchman and an Arab, it’ll always be the Frenchman they’ll believe. Automatically, without even thinking.”

“What you say applies to the whole country. What did the rector say to you?”

“That once this has all settled down, as he said, there’ll be a disciplinary meeting. What does that mean, Father?”

“It means that you’ll have to explain yourself, Mourad.”

“What’s there for me to explain? How can I prove whether or not I did my rounds?”

“Let me tell you something: when the time comes, if you’re called by the disciplinary committee, you’ll have the right to have someone with you. If you like, that someone can be me.”

Mourad looked at him askance. “That’s very nice of you, Father. Is that your ‘I defend Arabs and thieves, I defend the murderers in Poissy’ side? Is that your ‘good Christian, good boy’ side? Thank you very much, Father, but let me tell you something:
this isn’t Poissy and I’m neither a murderer nor a thief. With all due respect, you can keep your pity. And If I say I did my job properly, then it’s true. And I shouldn’t need to have a priest next to me to make people believe it.”

He drained his coffee in one gulp and walked away toward the inside of the cathedral, turning up the volume of the radio he wore at his belt, right next to his jangling key chain.

Father Kern got up with difficulty from the chest he was sitting on. He was already feeling pain in his lower limbs. Forgetting about the pay phone and the deputy magistrate for a moment, he went through the external door, down the stone steps and walked in the direction of the rector’s residence. He immediately saw him, leaning against the dark wall of his presbytery. Father de Bracy also noticed Father Kern, and started walking toward him. The two priests met at the door of Saint-Étienne.

“Have you come out for air, Monsignor?”

“It’s so hot up there in the presbytery. It’s unbearable. Remind me which tobacco you smoke, François.”

“Peterson, Monsignor. A Virginia-based blend. You don’t smoke, do you?”

“No, I don’t. I did when I was younger, but that was a long time ago. Were you coming to see me, François?”

“I’ve just heard that Mourad is going to appear before the disciplinary committee.”

“Not anymore. I’m going to leave poor Mourad alone, and the cathedral is finally going to be able to resume its liturgical life.”

“How come? What’s happening, Monsignor?”

“I’ve just received a call from the Minister himself. All this regrettable business is over.”

“The Minister?”

“The Minister of Justice. Surely you’re aware of his special interest in our cathedral. One could say that the suspect has just signed his entire confession.”

“‘One could say?’ What do you mean?”

“The young man committed suicide early this afternoon. A tragedy. Apparently, he jumped from the fourth floor right in the middle of an interrogation. By the time they took him to the Hôtel-Dieu hospital, he was already dead.”

Sitting on top of the stone wall, his legs swinging above the water, Gombrowicz watched the Seine flow by. Half an hour earlier, he’d come out of Number 36. He’d crossed the street, heedless of the traffic. Without thinking, driven by a peculiar need to see the waters flow, he’d gone down the paved alley that led to the river. He knew perfectly well that when he went back, he’d have to tell them what he’d seen, what had happened. An hour. They’d given him an hour to calm down and regroup. He searched for words while looking at the flowing Seine. He tried to alter the images in his head into a logical sequence of sentences, but couldn’t really manage it.

Words had never been Gombrowicz’s strong point. Ever since police academy, perhaps even since high school, he wasn’t quite sure, reports, paperwork, and minutes were for him a cross to bear. God only knew how many reports a cop had to write over the course of his career.

Once he was up there, they’d ask him to provide his version of the facts, after they’d heard Landard, after they’d questioned the young deputy. They’d ask him to transform feelings into words. What on earth was he going to tell the Police Inspection Committee people?

I was down in the courtyard of Number 36. I was sitting on the front wing of the Peugeot 308. I was finishing my panini. I was thinking of having a cigarette before going back up.

Just what was he going to tell them?

I had just opened my can of orange Fanta. I leaned my head back to drink and looked up.

What should he tell them? Should he mention the feeling he’d had since yesterday, which had prevented him from sleeping much of the night?

I could see very clearly that the boy was at the end of his tether. I’d already seen it in the car, last night, on the way back, after the search. Landard was driving at breakneck speed and the little lady, sitting next to him in the passenger seat, was staring at the road not saying anything, looking like she’d be on sick leave before the year is out.

Just what should he tell them?

I could see perfectly well that the kid would snap. Already in the car, last night, I felt he was shaking like a leaf. Then, when we took him down to the cells at the Palais for the night, I felt his arm give way. When Landard told him he’d be body searched, he started crying like a baby.

What could they possibly ask him?

Did he eat his cup of instant soup in the cell last night? How should I know? Did they have enough of it to go around? Because they looked rather full last night. Who did he spend the night with? Who else was in his twenty-three-foot cell? I don’t really know. What I do know is that he didn’t look good in the morning. Obviously, the Palais cells aren’t exactly the Ritz. Coffee, yes. Of course he had the right to a coffee. I even bought him one. For once, the machine was working.

What should he tell them? Tell them exactly what he thought?

Let me tell you, there’s something in this business that doesn’t add up. From the very beginning, something about it has been bothering me.

Should he hush his gut feeling and stick to the facts? To the courtyard at Number 36? To the panini? To the front wing of the Peugeot 308?

I leaned my head back to drink my orange Fanta and I saw him at the window. I saw him go through the window at incredible speed. Like a contortionist coming out of a small box, if you like, with his arms and legs out in front, but in fast-forward.

Should he tell them about that odd feeling? The feeling that time had suddenly stopped during the fall?

Then he fell but slowly, like in slow motion. And in a deathly silence. Like a dead leaf, like a leaf that’s too light. Or like an angel. At least to start with. Because the closer he got to the ground, the heavier he seemed. Do you see what I mean? And the fall grew faster. Because when he touched the ground of the courtyard, there was a very dull thud, very strange, very heavy, like a piano crashing down, but without the notes. Do you see what I mean? Just the sound of bones. The sound of bones breaking, but without the notes.

However, what he didn’t need to tell them was that when he’d seen the kid dead at his feet, he’d screamed. That was something he remembered extremely clearly: he dropped his can of orange Fanta and started screaming like a man possessed. And the whole of Number 36 was looking out of their windows to see what was happening.

The itching seemed to be coming from deep inside his flesh. It was as though a foreign, living, demented body had penetrated
his body and chosen his joints to start eating away at his insides. Scratching was no use. Or else he would do it until he drew blood, until his skin gave and opened up, until his nails could dig through the flesh and claw at cartilage and bones.

The fever had kept him nailed to his bed from as early as eight in the evening. He’d tried to take the old Bayard alarm clock apart once again, but a shooting pain in his wrist made him drop the screwdriver. The attack was so violent, he’d had to give in to it. Without even going to the trouble of undressing, he’d lain down on his mattress, a small, dark silhouette on a white sheet, a marionette made of wretched, dried up wood, lost in the immensity of a bed. On the table, the alarm clock had been left half dismantled, its parts strewn in front of the black and white photo of his brother, while a couple of yards away, Father Kern was trying to forget that he possessed a body.

There was no possible relief. He’d known that since he was a child. Ever since that day when, at the age of five or six, he’d noticed the red splotches appear for the first time on his hands and neck and cried out, “Mommy!” The fever and the redness had returned the following evening, and the day after that. After four days of this pattern, in addition to which he’d then had sharp pains in his hands and wrists, they decided to put a pair of pajamas and his fluffy rabbit in a suitcase, and go to the hospital. He stayed there for three months.

They did everything to him—biopsies, lumbar punctures, blood tests—often fearing the worst, in particular cancer of the lymphatic system—then discarded all their theories one by one and in the end agreed on one final diagnosis. The illness was not deadly. That was the good news. The bad news was that nobody knew where it came from, or how to cure it.

And so the child returned home. The attacks subsided but then came back with a vengeance less than a year later, sending
him to the hospital once again. The doctors soon gave up on the huge doses of aspirin and administered equally huge doses of cortisone. The evening pains eventually subsided and they decided, from one attack to the next, as years went by, to make regular use of corticosteroids at every new alarm.

In between one stay in the hospital and another, the child aged rather than grew. The cost of relief and comfort from the arthritic pain was to give up normal growth, normal muscle mass, a normal skeleton, a normal childhood. The others, friends from elementary school, then junior high, then high school, grew, played football, threw parties, kissed the girls sitting next to them in class, and eventually distanced themselves from the pale schoolmate who did not want to grow, and who would disappear from the classroom for weeks on end in order to be treated for nobody knew what exactly at the Necker Hospital.

Through this lasting nightmare that had taken him from childhood to adulthood with more or less the same body, young Kern had had three true friends.

The first was his old Bayard alarm clock, which he’d taken apart and put back together about ten thousand times, every evening hoping to forget about the pain or the itching, trying to understand why fate had somehow decided to put a definitive stop to the passing of time sometime around the age of five or six.

The second was actually the person who’d given him the alarm clock, bought from a secondhand shop with his pocket money, broken, rusted, and in a bad state. His older brother was as blond as he himself was dark, as vigorous as he himself was puny. And yet in all those years, this very different older brother had never, so to speak, let go of his hand during the nights of attacks when young Kern could no longer contain the fire burning inside him.

The third he’d met later in life, at the end of his aborted adolescence,
at an age when boys are more interested in what goes on under girls’ skirts than in spiritual matters. And as though by another turn of fate, by a strange pendulum effect, it was when young Kern discovered God that his older brother swung into delinquency.

The diminutive priest reached out for the switch above his bed and put out the light. The only hope now, the only thing left to do was to get through the night like a long, dark, silent, frightening tunnel, and wait for morning. At the first rays of the sun, the itching and pain would subside. Daybreak would mark, at least for a few hours, the end of his torture. That, he knew. He believed in it wholeheartedly. It was not a question of faith but of experience of pain.