The Birthday Party

by Laurent Mauvignier, Daniel Levin Becker

Genres: Literary Fiction; Small Town & Rural; Thrillers

Synopsis

A painter contends with the ghosts of the French countryside in a psychological literary thriller by a major French writer.

Buried deep in rural France, little remains of the isolated hamlet of the Three Lone Girls, save a few houses and a curiously assembled quartet: Patrice Bergogne, inheritor of his family’s farm; his wife, Marion; their daughter, Ida; and their neighbor, Christine, an artist. While Patrice plans a surprise for his wife’s fortieth birthday, inexplicable events start to disrupt the hamlet’s quiet existence: anonymous, menacing letters, an unfamiliar
car rolling up the driveway. And as night falls, strangers stalk the houses, unleashing
a nightmarish chain of events. 

Told in rhythmic, propulsive prose that weaves seamlessly from one consciousness to the next over the course of a day, Laurent Mauvignier’s The Birthday Party is a deft unraveling of the stories we hide from others and from ourselves, a gripping tale of the violent irruptions of the past into the present, written by a major contemporary French writer.

 

 

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Release date: January 24, 2023

Publisher: Transit Books

Print pages: 484

Sample

1

She watches him through the window and what she sees in the parking lot, despite the reflection of the sun that blinds her and prevents her from seeing him as she’d like to, leaning against that old Renault Kangoo he’s going to have to get around to trading in one of these days—as though by watching him she can guess what he’s thinking, when maybe he’s just waiting for her to come out of this police station where he’s brought her for the how many times now, two or three in two weeks, she can’t remember—what she sees, in any case, elevated slightly over the parking lot which seems to incline somewhat past the grove of trees, standing near the chairs in the waiting room between a scrawny plant and a concrete pillar painted yellow on which she could read appeals for witnesses if she bothered to take an interest, is, because she’s slightly above it, overlooking and thus observing a misshapen version of it, a bit more packed down than it really is, the silhouette, compact but large, solid, of this man whom, she now thinks, she’s no doubt been too long in the habit of seeing as though he’s still a child—not her child, she has none and has never felt the desire to have any—but one of those kids you look after from time to time, like a godchild or one of those nephews you can enjoy selfishly, for the pleasure they bring, taking advantage of their youthfulness without having to bother with all the trouble that it entails, that educating them generates like so much inevitable collateral damage.

In the parking lot, the man has his arms crossed—robust arms extending from stocky shoulders, a thick neck, a prominent chest and a tuft of very straight chestnut hair that always makes him look unkempt or neglected. He’s let his beard grow, not too thick a beard, no, but it doesn’t suit him at all, she thinks, it only accentuates his air of gruffness, that impression he never fails to make on people who don’t know him, also giving him a more peasant-like look—she couldn’t say what a peasant-like look actually is—the image of a man who doesn’t want to leave his farm and stays there, literally cooped up, scowling like an exile or a saint or, all told, like her inside her house. But for her it’s not so bad, she’s sixty-nine and her life is rolling quietly toward its end, while his, he’s only forty-seven, still has a long way to go. She also knows that behind his gruff exterior he is in fact sweet and thoughtful, patient—sometimes probably too much so—and has always been obliging with her and with the neighbors in general, at any moment he’ll lend a hand, of course, without a second thought, to anyone who asks, even if it’s her he readily does the most favors for, like he’s doing today by driving her to the police station and waiting to take her back to the hamlet so she doesn’t have to ride her bike for something like seven kilometers both ways.

Bergogne, yes.

Even when he was a kid, she called him Bergogne. It happened simply, almost naturally: one day she addressed him by his last name to tease him; this amused the child and it amused her too, all because he often imitated his father, with that serious and furrowed look children sometimes have when they act like responsible adults. He was flattered, even if he didn’t really pick up on the hard, ironic edge she took when she called his father by his last name, because often it wasn’t so much to compliment him as to unleash a scathing comment his way or treat him the way an old schoolmarm scolds a kid, addressing him as sharply as possible. She and Bergogne senior argued readily, as a matter of habit, as one does among friends or close classmates, but anyway that no longer matters—thirty years, maybe forty? diluted in the fog of time passing—and none of it ever really mattered anyway, because they’d always been close enough to speak their minds candidly to each other, almost like the old couple they’d never become but had nonetheless, in a sense, been—a platonic love story that never found the space to play out, even in their dreams, for either of them—in spite of what the acid-tongued and the jealous might have insinuated.

It had remained after the father died: Bergogne. His last name for speaking to his son, to this particular son and not to the two others. Since then, if it’s been without the slightest irony, just force of habit, it would still be with that same tone in her voice, at once harsh and with a hint of superiority or authority of which she wasn’t even aware, when she called him to ask him to pick up two or three things for her at the Super U if he was passing through town, or to take her if he was going—a town, imagine calling it that, that village with its population of three thousand—but also with the sweetness of childhood he sensed behind her words,

Bergogne, I need a ride,

as though she were murmuring in his ear my little one, my boy, my kitten, my treasure, in a fold hidden within the coarseness of his name or that of her voice, in her way of saying it.

She used to come spend holidays here in a very elegant old house on the riverbank, and everyone looked at her like a grande dame, vaguely aristocratic but above all vaguely mad—a Parisian artist, exuberant and batty—wondering just what kind of peace she expected to find here, in La Bassée, reappearing as she did more and more often, staying longer and longer each time until one day she showed up for good, this time without a husband in tow—what she’d done with her banker husband was anyone’s guess—come to settle down with some of his money, no doubt, even if nobody knew why she’d decided to bury herself in a dump like this when she could have settled some place in the sun, at the seaside, in regions that were more hospitable, milder, less ordinary, no, on this point nobody could say, they just kept wondering, because even if they’re fond of their region people aren’t stupid enough to not see how banal and ordinary it is here, how flat and rainy, with zero tourists to combat the boredom wafting from its trails, its streets, its waterlogged walls—and if not why would they all have dreamed at one point or another of getting the fuck out?

She’d said it was here and nowhere else that she wanted to live and age and die—let the others keep the Tuscan sun, the Mediterranean and Miami, thank you very much. She, crazy to her core, had chosen to settle in La Bassée and hadn’t even wanted to buy or visit any of the three handsome houses in the center of town, which looked like surprisingly decent faux manor houses, in the grand style, with turrets, exposed beams, timber frames and dovecotes, outbuildings. No, she had wanted to live in the middle of nowhere, saying repeatedly that for her nothing was better than this nowhere, can you imagine, in the middle of nowhere, in the sticks, a place no one ever talks about and where there’s nothing to see or to do but which she loved, she said, to the point that she finally left her old life behind, the Parisian life, the art world and all the frenzy, the hysteria, the money and the parties they imagined around her life, to come and do some real work, she claimed, to grapple at last with her art in a place where she’d be left the hell alone. She was a painter, and the fact that old Bergogne, the father, who sold her eggs and milk, who killed the fatted hog and bled it to its last drop in the yard, who spent his life in rubber boots covered in shit and animal blood, caked with soil in the summer and with mud the other eleven months of the year, that he, who owned the hamlet, should become her friend, this surprised people, and, bizarre as it seemed to those who wanted to suspect an affair, if only to make the whole thing imaginable and comprehensible, no, it had never happened, neither had ever shown the slightest attraction to the other, not the slightest amorous or erotic ambiguity, until one day he sold her one of the houses in the hamlet, making her his neighbor, further fueling the rumors and speculations.

All the same, it wasn’t out of friendship or the desire to have her by his side each day that he sold her the semi-detached house; he had simply, after years of refusal, of stubbornly denying the obvious, resigned himself at last to selling the two houses that his last renters had left to go leap into the maw of mass unemployment deep in the housing projects of some midsize city, leaving him faced with this undeniable fact, this idea or rather this observation that tied his stomach and brain in knots, that all the young people were leaving, one after another, abandoning the hamlets, the farms, the houses and the businesses, a veritable hemorrhage to which, from where he stood, everyone was indifferent; of course nobody would stay, there was fuck all to do in La Bassée anyway, true enough, but there was a nuance between having fuck all to do and not giving a fuck at all that no one seemed to see, because no one wanted to see it. Bergogne’s father had had to accept that his sons wouldn’t stay either, that they wouldn’t live with him in any of the houses in the hamlet and maintain the farm, as he would have liked, or else he’d believed until the end that they would, as he had done before them, and his own father before him.

His wife had died long ago, leaving him alone to deal with three sons; Bergogne pѐre had hoped the three of them together would have a better shot at making the farm grow and prosper, but he must have finally understood that only Patrice would stay, the two youngest having quickly chosen to leave him, as one of the two had put it, deep in his own dung. They had both gotten the hell out as soon as they were of leaving age and there was, alas, nothing surprising about this, La Bassée had long been destined to waste away, to disintegrate into shreds, a world—his world—uniquely fated to constrict, to contract, to fade away until it finally vanished from the landscape completely—and they can call it desertification if they want, he brooded, as if to say it’s a natural progression we can neither prevent nor reverse, but the truth is they just want us to croak without a word, with spittle on our lips but still standing at attention, good little soldiers to the end; La Bassée will disappear and that’s that, it won’t be the only nowhere of which there remains nothing but a name—a ghost on an IGN map—except La Bassée is such a banal name that four or five other places have it too, this particular Bassée not even being the one in the North, tucked between Arras and Béthune and Lille, a real city and not a village like this, anyway, all of it will be sucked up, swallowed down, digested and shat out by modern life and maybe it’s just as well. It was all going to disappear, Bergogne pѐre raged, not only the farms and all the hamlets with them but also the residential areas from the sixties that had sprouted before shrinking and withering without ever having had time to bloom, and the metalworks, which after many years of death throes had finally shut its doors like all the rest, just as the housing projects that had sprung out of the ground wound up ghost ships, like pustules on unhealthy skin, right when they all thought La Bassée was about to expand, with its brand new factories whose names sounded like Terminators and which were going to show the competition a thing or two, factories they didn’t yet know were riddled with asbestos and carried inside them this revolting pestilence that would eventually kill off everyone to whom they once promised the good life.

So Patrice’s two brothers followed the advice their mother had left them before she died, fucking off in unison, one going off to sell shoes near Besançon and the other, the one who was no doubt the cleverest of the three but also the most pretentious, going off to work in finance, as he said with enough contempt to let the others know he had no intention of living like a hick all his life, becoming a teller or an accountant at the Crédit Agricole of Bumblefuck—so long as it was far away from here he must have felt he was fulfilling a destiny—and no doubt living and working not in a city but in the interminable suburban periphery of one. The three brothers didn’t get along and had stopped fighting after Bergogne pѐre died, as though finally reaching the resentful conclusion of everything they’d shared since childhood: first games, then boredom and indifference, then irritation, and finally the desire that each strike out on his own, ideally as far from the others as possible. But he, whether he goes by Pat or Bergogne fils, by his first name, Patrice, or even just his last name, Bergogne, with his characteristic unhurried calm, his serene determination, coarse and unrefined, had said he didn’t want to sell, that he would keep the farm and that he’d stay there until the end, come what may, which is to say at the geographical center of the family’s history, eliciting their reprobation, their exasperation and their anger, but also their incomprehension—fine, they’d demanded, you find a way to pay us our share. Which he’d done, going into debt until the end of time and probably far beyond what was reasonable—but he had held tight and the farm remained in the hands of a Bergogne, as his father had wanted.

So, of the hamlet, the Bergognes still have the house where they live, some fields, about a dozen cows, and the milk, which Patrice supplies to the dairy that produces butter and cheese—not enough to live on, but enough to not die.

She, it turns out, had bought the house that abutted his, and has lived there for twenty-five years. Patrice has known her for at least forty, she’s a face from his childhood, which is surely why he stops by to see her every day, why he’s become attached to her, not as if to replace his own mother, who died too early from cancer, but simply because she’s there, is a part of his life, having been present through his adolescence and his adult life and becoming, over the years, not a confidante or a simple reassuring presence to lean on but in a way his best friend, because, without having to ask her for anything, just by showing up at whatever moment of the day, by accepting a coffee and the hooch she serves him in a glass no bigger than a thimble or pours directly into the coffee cup, he knows he can trust her and she won’t judge him, knows she’ll always be there for him.

• • •

She thinks about all this—or rather it crosses her mind, Bergogne’s story, as she watches him, observing the puddles in the parking lot still wet from the morning rain, despite the eye-burning light on the cracked, battered asphalt and the reflections of the white and blue-gray clouds in the puddles, the bursts of sunshine on the white body of the Kangoo, a white that turns blinding when the sun pierces through the steel-gray clouds; Bergogne takes a few steps as he waits for her, she keeps watching him and feels a bit guilty for making him waste his time, he has other things to do besides wait for her, she knows it, she’s a bit vexed by all this time wasted because of some idiots who don’t know what to do with their lives or how not to ruin other people’s. But she can’t pretend nothing’s happening, it’s a little different this time, she didn’t want it to get more serious, and anyway he was the one who offered to bring her—she doesn’t know why, since he was a child he’s often made the first move, responding to desires she hasn’t had time to articulate. He’s always been this way with her, not because he wouldn’t dare disappoint her, or because he’s so intimidated by her and her appearance, which has always expressed something quite different from all he knows, and maybe something unsettling too, something ferocious, maybe, because with her long hair that she’s always dyed orange, her makeup and her sometimes overly colorful dresses, her thick plastic eyeglasses with a row of shiny baubles covering the frames, she could well have frightened an impressionable child in a region where no one ever even dreams of being so visible. No, though she’s always been eccentric, he was never frightened or anxious, quite the contrary, he immediately felt a respect for her, a love, which she felt right back; and there, even in an unflattering backlight—he’s gained a lot of weight since he got married—she’s swept up in a wave of tenderness for him and for his patience; she only hopes she won’t have to wait for hours, or rather that she won’t make him wait for hours.

But no, no, she knows it won’t be long. On the phone they promised her it wouldn’t take too much time. And now what do you know, she hears steps, a movement behind her, a door opening and creaking, fingers tapping on a keyboard, a phone ringing, all at once the sound of the police station rises up in her, for her, as though she can finally perceive it, is finally here, as though by hearing the scrape of an office chair on the tile she’s returned to the lobby of the police station and can finally feel the slightly warmer air of the radiator near the green plant, the odor of dust wafting from it and suddenly the voice of the officer calling her—she turns around and it’s the same graying beanpole in front of her, the one from last time, who gave her his name and rank, which she forgot as soon as she left the police station, before she even got into Bergogne’s car. This time she tries to remember his name at least, so much for the rank, a name that sounds Polish or Russian, like Jukievik or Julievitch, but it doesn’t come to her right away, no matter, she’s just entered his office and the officer invites her to take a seat.

He’s extended his arm, hand open wide to indicate the black imitation leather chair that’s hardly new—she notes the rips, like very fine flakes of skin, or rather like newspaper ashes flying above a fire in a fireplace—the officer’s hand, thick and long, brown hairs mixed in with white, a silver wedding band, and, as she’s sitting down, before she even has time to rest her back against the backrest or her buttocks on the base of the chair, just in the time it takes to begin the motion of sitting on the chair’s edge, of placing her purse in her lap and starting to open it—fingers seeking the zipper—the officer will have had time to go around his desk and sit down in a firm, resolved motion, wedging his buttocks into the seat, and, without even realizing it anymore because unthinkingly he makes this same motion dozens of times a day, will, with a dry clack of his heels, move the chair closer to the desk by elongating both arms symmetrically, taking hold of the two edges of the desk to pull it toward him in a single gesture, there, hardly a thing, he won’t even be aware of himself doing it and what he will see, on the other hand, is this orange-haired woman who, he’ll have time to remember thinking the two previous times, must have been pretty, time to notice how obvious it is to him again, she must have been very pretty, which is to say that in spite of her age she still is, giving off a power, an elegance he already noted the two other times she came, yes, rare to see that, such an energy, something so lively and intelligent in the body and in the eyes. Now he looks at these hands that have taken an envelope from this dark red purse, practically black, just long enough to think blood red, and there it is, extending her arm toward him across the desk, she holds out the envelope and the anonymous letter she’s just received.

Anonymous letters, yes, they can smirk all they like, or tell themselves with a knowing smile that it is perhaps, unfortunately, a French specialty, we’d have to see, all those stories from World War II, a rustic country specialty just like rillettes and foie gras in some regions, a loathsome tradition, quite pathetic and happily often without consequence, but one that all the same they can’t take lightly, the officer explains as he explained last time, with fatalism and a touch of weariness or dismay, because, he repeats, behind an anonymous letter there’s almost always someone embittered, someone jealous, an envier with nothing better to do than brood on their bile, thinking they can offload it by insulting a more or less fictitious enemy, by railing at them, by threatening them, by spewing warmed-over hatred at them through the intermediary of a sheet of paper; there’s nothing we can do, and anyway, reading the letter she’s handed him, or rather skimming it—he took out his reading glasses and hasn’t even bothered to place them on his nose, just holds them a few inches from his face—while with the other hand he holds the sheet, even though the folds of the letter, the quarters, keep falling in on themselves, as though the letter is reluctant to reveal its contents, these words written on a computer, 16-point, in the most banal font imaginable, Courier New bold or something like it, all of it centered and printed on ordinary 80-gram paper, he casts a quick glance, a long breath, a light shrug, murmuring,

Certainly it’s not very pleasant.

But already he’s put his glasses down and, with a sharp motion, as one does with a particularly insignificant object, he lets the letter fall back onto his desk—it rests on the fold for a moment before listing and then lying flat on one side—anyway, yes, we’ll have it analyzed, but since that didn’t tell us anything about the others I don’t see why this one would give us anything more to go on. People are insane, but when it comes to the details they can be quite skillful, I’m sure there’ll be no prints, nothing we can use.

He smiles as he says this, marking the end of his sentence with a frown, dubious or fatalistic, apologetic too, and he feels obliged to keep talking because the woman is waiting and because she’s leaning on her seat, waiting for him to say something, so yes, he continues,

In general, letting off steam in writing is enough for them, all the energy they put into mailing their letter is tiring enough and they leave it there.

Except this letter wasn’t mailed, she says, someone slid it under my door. Someone came all the way to my house for this.

The officer remains silent, he’s just stumbled over his certitudes, over the strategies he tried to deploy so this woman would think it’s not so serious, since after all they haven’t stopped at merely insulting her, calling her a crazy woman, this time they’re threatening her. She’s noted how the officer stopped talking, watched a shadow of doubt cloud his facial expression, the corner of his mouth, eyes, eyebrows, right, right, right, he finally summarizes, how many residences where you live?

Just the hamlet.

Yes, and how many of you in the hamlet?

Three houses. Bergogne with his wife and daughter. The other house is for sale, and then there’s me.

She is silent for a moment and, before he can respond, because she knows he has to respond, he owes her an answer, has to say something reassuring on behalf of the police, of the government and whatever else, he straightens in his chair and maybe makes it pivot, in the time it takes to blink he collects himself, but before he says anything, before he begins to sketch out what he means to tell her, she’s the one who speaks,

But I can defend myself just fine you know,

almost raising her voice, responding in advance to what he’ll surely say if she doesn’t chime in fast enough,

I have my dog you know. I have my dog.

2

This blue, this red, this orangey yellow and these drippings, these green spots of uniform color, of glaze, and these unruly, ebullient shapes, these bodies and faces rising out of a deep dark brown, out of a halo of mauve, almost luminescent, or else conversely brushed, rough, rocky, shadowy, these shapes wrenched from the darkness by colored splashes; landscapes and bodies, bodies that are landscapes, landscapes that are something other than landscapes, that are organic lives, mineral lives, proliferating, invading the space, spreading out across the very large canvases she paints on—most often square formats, two meters, sometimes less, sometimes rectangular, but in that case vertical and almost never horizontal. When she was young she greatly admired Kirkeby and Pincemin, their earthy and colorful paintings, but that was so long ago that she feels that young woman she remembers was never really her.

In La Bassée, the names of contemporary painters mean nothing to anyone. Maybe the kind of painting she loves, or loved, means nothing to anyone and she can’t talk about it with anyone, but so much the better, because she doesn’t want to talk about what she does, she doesn’t like to talk about painting or art, it’s always exhausting and false to talk about art, always the same considerations, hollow and repetitive, interchangeable, things a bad painter or a good one could say equally legitimately because both are identically sincere and intelligent, even if only one of them has talent, has power, has form, an intuitive sense of the material and the conceptual, a vision, because to her artists are there to have visions, which is why she once made a series of Cassandras that she painted as though they represented fragility and truth lost in a world ruled by brutality and lies, thinking that artists either tell the truth or say nothing, and say it so much that they don’t know they’re saying it, even though nobody believes them, because nobody believes them. Don’t speak, just paint, don’t waste your precious strength splitting hairs to arrive at the same banalities as everyone else, just paint those promises words can’t keep; have the vision of that which hasn’t yet come to be, paint the apple while looking at the apple tree in flower, the bird in place of the egg, turn toward the future and welcome it for its mystery, not to be the one who knows before everyone else does, better than everyone else does, anything but that, not the way she did it for too long, when she was young, philosophizing and palavering about everything she held dear, slathering what she did with more than enough words to suffocate ten generations of artists—so no, not a word more, that’ll do, for forty years she’s tempered her tongue to open up her vision, to open herself up to her vision, to force her gaze to go deeper, the way one tries to see at night, to get used to the darkness. She has the good fortune of having an art that can speak without having to run its mouth, so she doesn’t restrain herself, she found the right place for it when she bought this house that was in no way appropriate for a painting studio. She could have chosen a better house for it but she’d liked this one, having Bergogne’s father as a neighbor was reassuring to her, the distance from town too, and anyway she had enough money to tear down the partitions that separated the living room from the dining room, to transform the whole thing into one immense room by straightening out the walls, putting in rails and panels to multiply the surfaces on which to hang canvases, optimize the space, mount special lamps, a whole system to get the perfect light, white and natural, without aggressiveness or distortion of color tones so as to avoid the unhappy surprise of discovering, as soon as she took a canvas out of her studio, a yellow where she thought she’d laid down a white. She didn’t much care about destroying her dining room and her living room, clearing away what Bergogne’s father had done with the house for the previous tenants; she’d paid for the right to destroy these rooms designed to receive guests, to host dinners and parties or to have a family life, to nurture relationships, everything she no longer had, everything she no longer wanted or had never wanted, and she’d paid dearly for this: for a house that would be her studio, because the whole point was for the studio to be in the house and not next door.

This way she can spend her time in the studio and come back into the entryway and the kitchen by crossing a space the size of a table, barely more; upstairs she’s set up her bedroom and kept one of the two guest rooms, because old childhood friends still drop by sometimes, those who haven’t forgotten her, who come to see her paintings and ask how she is or tell her how they are, who leave with paintings and sell them for her, even if she doesn’t sell much anymore—they tell her she’s not accommodating or pliant enough with the market, that she should show her face at art fairs a bit more often, which is to say at least once every now and then because in fact she never goes, she never answers invitations from the gallerists who used to like her work, nor mail from her old buyers or patrons, they tell her it’s a shame she doesn’t make more of an effort and that she’s turning her back on everyone, a shame for her and for her painting but above all a shame for her audience, she has a duty to her audience, she who’d had one and eventually lost it through her negligence, really it’s a shame—yes, no doubt, she answers, no doubt, but oh well, she’s happy and she doesn’t give it any thought, she certainly is a bit rigid and takes her painting too seriously, no question. In reality, it’s just that when she paints she forgets that she’s also supposed to play the artist who’s successful at selling her work—which she could do, because she knows what she’s doing, what she’s painting, even if she lets herself get swept up and surprised by the images that come to life at her fingertips, she also knows inspiration never comes to anyone by chance and that you have to work, read, look, think, reflect on your work and, once the intellectual work is done, only then do you learn how to forget it, annihilate it, learn how to let go and allow this thoughtful conceptual world to be overrun by something that comes from beneath it, or beside it, that makes the painting surpass what you’d planned for it, when all of a sudden the painting is more intelligent, more alive, and crueler too, much of the time, than the person who painted it.

She knows this, she seeks the moment where it’s the painting that sees her, that moment where the encounter occurs between herself and what she’s painting, between what she’s painting and herself, and of course this is something she doesn’t share. She prefers for Bergogne, as he does every day when he comes over for lunch, to tell her about what he’s doing in the fields, to tell her about the calves, about his ongoing work or about his wife Marion and about Ida—especially about Ida, whom she spends a great deal of time with, because every day, when she gets out of school, Ida comes over to have a snack and hang out here while she waits for her parents, who often come home late.

Today, Ida will come around five o’clock; she’ll talk about what she did at school, and she, in turn, won’t tell her that her father drove her this very morning to the police station, just as she’ll keep Officer Filipkowski’s words to herself—not that she’s suddenly remembered his name, Officer Filipkowski’s, just that she read it on the piece of cardstock he handed her at the end of their meeting, a card on which his name is printed, under which he’d added, in ballpoint pen, his mobile number, repeating two or three times,

You call me with the slightest concern,

insisting that she should call him if she received another anonymous letter, especially if this one was slid under her door, yes, like the Kraft paper envelope she found last night, late in the evening, which she told Bergogne about in the morning not so much out of fear as out of irritation and a more and more poorly contained anger,

These assholes are starting to piss me off.

Officer Filipkowski had been clear when he said that, even if they were vague, even if they were nutty and barely credible, they were still threats, the whole thing had gone up a notch, and not just because of the words but also because they had come, they had shown they were willing to venture all the way to her door. They were talking about burning orange-haired witches, after all, about cleansing the world of crazy women who’d be better off staying where they came from—were they blaming her for being Parisian, for not being from here? When she’s lived here for so long?

She had an inkling that she was really being punished for sleeping with a married man or two—had something been said, noticed, guessed? or even confessed by the husbands themselves?—husbands with whom she’d probably made love a few times without there ever being any question of making them full-time lovers, much less husbands—no thank you, she’d had her fill of that—but maybe a woman wanted to get even or one of the men resented her for refusing to become his “official” mistress? And the police officer had again wanted to make her admit that she maybe did have an idea of who could be behind these letters, these threats, the insults polluting her head, because the words in these most recent letters sometimes kept her from sleeping, but she’d answered that no, she didn’t know, and didn’t need to lower her eyes or look away when she lied to the officer, she’d looked him right in the eye, what do you want me to say? an old maid like me, I haven’t the slightest idea, I don’t have any enemies and I don’t know anyone. The officer had seemed perplexed, he had let a short skeptical silence linger, as though he understood that she hadn’t told him everything and didn’t intend to do so, that something in her was resistant to the idea of drawing up a list of potential perpetrators, of making herself an informer, knowing that in any case there was nothing they could prove against anyone.

All of this, of course, she wouldn’t tell Ida when she came into her house. The little girl would put her backpack down in the hallway, which is to say the kitchen, and go wash her hands in the sink. She, as she’d done with Bergogne when she left the police station, would look innocuous, put on a quiet smile, speak in a soft voice,

Everything alright, sweetheart?

in the same tone as the one in which she’d agreed to tell Bergogne two or three details, as thanks for the time he’d lost because of her. She owed him at least a summary of what they’d told her, you know, nothing special, cops are like doctors, they make these mournful faces to tell you something serious, and afterwards when you think about what you heard you realize they don’t know any more than you do. She’d told him they’d check the letters to make sure they were from the same person, and then she’d added, half exasperated and half amused by the assumption: as if I had enough enemies for it to be a different madman each time—I’m sure it’s actually a woman, a madwoman, I just know it, the last time I went to the dance I did spend a lot of time with you know who, right?

Bergogne had just smiled; he had his guess but wouldn’t ask her whether he was right. She’d kept talking while the Kangoo cruised toward the hamlet, then eventually they’d fallen silent, and she, just for the sake of changing the subject—because none of this is worth the time it takes to tell, right, don’t you think?—had said, Bergogne, my boy, your beard is ridiculous and it looks terrible on you. It makes you look ten years older, do me a favor and shave it off, okay? And if not for me, at least do it for your wife, may I remind you that tomorrow’s her birthday and even if that was your only gift to her she’d be grateful until the end of time.

Now she’s seated in the middle of her studio and, amid the jumble of all her canvases—those hanging on the walls, those just leaning against something, those piled on the stairs leading up to the bedrooms, those not yet framed and still lying around rolled up like calico—she looks at the one in front of her, right in the middle of the room, resting there, stapled to the wall she prefers to work on, not yet framed: the portrait of the red woman.

She knows it’s finished, that it’s done—it still needs a bit of blue near the eyes. She hesitates to go any further, tells herself that whatever she does nothing more can fundamentally alter the painting, nothing more can deepen it, that to deepen it would be to risk destroying it; the red woman is naked, her body entirely red—a red that’s almost orange, but the shadows are a very pure, vibrant red, vermillion, a shadow that’s a colored light and not a dark shade of color, which changes everything, an effect she had great difficulty producing. The red woman pierces, with her stillness, anyone who raises their eyes to her; her portrait looks, perhaps, like the one of that little girl who was the source of her entire desire to paint, because when she began painting, long ago now, it was initially to exorcise a photo by David Seymour that had long obsessed her, a portrait of a little Polish girl drawing her childhood house on a blackboard, in an asylum. The child is tracing, in chalk, a circle of fire, the destruction ravaging the drawing; above all you see the terror in the eyes of the little girl in black—that’s what the photographer captures. She had seen this image and the only way she could forget it, or manage to live with it, had been to paint it; this was her first black-and-white painting, a large painting, the little girl lost in the shining white of the canvas, her gaze wild and steady. Now, more than forty years later, the red woman she’s just finished, she thinks, has almost the same hallucinatory expression—she carries the fire of a house destroyed, annihilated, her breath as if mimicked by the blasts of the bombs exploding on the city. She thinks about this in front of the red woman, in the middle of her studio, and she doesn’t hear her German shepherd, who was asleep next to her not two minutes ago. She waits for something to match what she’s watching for, a sign of life, because life must come from the painting.

Now her dog gets up because he’s heard someone coming, or not coming yet but he knows it’s time, between four forty-five and four fifty-five depending on traffic. At the end of the pebbly path leading from the hamlet to the poorly tarred road where they leave the trash bins, a road that joins the county road they take to go into the town of La Bassée, the school bus will stop, its door will open, and Ida, with two children from the neighboring hamlets, will get off. The door will have barely closed behind them with the creak of its hydraulic suspension when the three children part ways or keep giggling for another few minutes, exchange a few more words, then set off, one toward the west, the other toward the east, the third to the north; Ida will walk and keep her hands on the straps of her backpack, paying no attention to the road in front of her—she knows all too well the moment when the poorly tarred road, worn out and hollowed by successive winters and summers, cold and rain, heat and tractor wheels, turns left and leaves the strip of tar behind to become a white gravel path, blinding in the summer but muddy most of the time, and then almost red, or rather ocher, yellow, as it is now, full of the rain that fell all night and into this morning, cluttered with deep wide brownish puddles that she has to walk around and sometimes likes to jump over, with, at the end, the hamlet and the rooftops of the three houses, the barns and the stable, her house, the rooftops green in places because of the moss and the vegetation that have invaded the walls and spread all the way up to the rooftops; there’s the hamlet, like a closed fist in the middle of the cornfields and the pastures where the cows spend their days grazing; there are also the trees lining the river that separates the land into two administrative departments; on the other side, a white tuffeau stone church, and here, on our side, poplars all in a row, like an army standing guard, lining and shading the river. But all of that is still far off, it takes a while to get there on foot, and also to get across that tiny little wild wood, like a square of trees parked in the fields, trees whose leaves and branches you can hear rustling as soon as the wind blows in from the right direction, bringing birdsong too, and where the foxes live who hang around a little too close sometimes—they saw one in the yard, very early one morning, before leaving for school.

But this evening Ida is interested only in the tips of her toes: how, with her yellow sneakers, she can roll the sole on the pebbles and sometimes pass over them, and sometimes on the other hand strike them, launch them, send them rolling into the distance. She knows, Ida does, as she steps over the puddles, ...