Amour Provence (26 page)

Euphémie's chest constricted in a painful way and she clasped her hands to her breast. Before responding, she had to wait a few moments so her voice wouldn't betray her. Then she said to Gaston, “Florence says the disease I have will come on suddenly. She believes that she is doing the right thing. I can't possibly go against her wishes.”

“But you have a right to live freely,” Gaston told her.

“It would be a terrible battle,” said Euphémie with a sigh. “And it's my mistake. I signed papers relinquishing everything. It's finished.”

Gaston sat back and smoothed his beard. “I'd be willing to predict that with one or two telephone calls we could get you out of here in very short order.”

Euphémie sat very still. She could imagine those phone calls and what would be said. It was her own fault that she'd lost her property along with her rights. She'd just have to bear the consequences even if it meant being locked away for the rest of her life. She shook her head no.

“If you change your mind about this, a conclusion to which I believe you may come, you know where to find me,” Gaston told her. Then he stood and kissed her hand in the old-fashioned manner and Séverin kissed her once on each cheek, his face smooth as a child's even though he was a young man of nineteen.

That night the mistral blew so hard that the metal windows in Euphémie's room made a strange whooshing sound like an airplane taking off, and though she was fatigued from the emotion of Gaston's visit, she couldn't sleep. Her thoughts flitted from one thing to another, but they always returned to what Gaston had said about her right to be free.

The winter continued unabated, the sky a peculiar gray, and when Euphémie counted the months she'd been in that place on her fingers she realized that soon she wouldn't be able to keep it to just ten. Soon it would be a year, and then more than a year.

In March, it began to rain. Great pools formed in the turret where she took her daily walks because the plate-glass windows were badly sealed. Euphémie began to forgo her exercise and instead sat in the hallway with the other patients. There was nothing to do, nothing at all to read, so she watched the occasional visitor drift by and the inmates bobbing to and fro like flowers blown by the wind.

One evening at about eight thirty, two nurses glided out of the elevator wheeling a gurney that held someone stretched out beneath white blankets. Usually a new admission was accompanied by one or two family members chirping brightly about how nice everything was, secretly relieved to be ridding themselves of an inconvenient burden. But this patient was alone. The nurses maneuvered the gurney into an empty room and Euphémie watched as one of them slipped a name card into the slot on the doorway. When they left, she crept over to take a look. Neatly typed was the name Charles-Henri Le Lièvre. Her heart leaped.
Her old school friend Lapin!
Though he lived in her village, she rarely saw him, as he only left his isolated house to cash his monthly retirement benefit at the Poste. She turned the door handle and, finding it unlocked, entered the room and bent over the inert form. It was Lapin all right. His head was still round as a baby's, but his hair was thin and completely white. When they'd been in primary school together, she had loved running her fingers through his fine blond hair, often leaving her small fist affectionately clenched at the nape of his neck.

As she stood over him, Lapin opened his eyes and, when he smiled, revealed the same absurdly crossed front teeth.

“Ma chère amie,”
he said to her as if they were back in their old classroom.

“Lapin!” She touched the hand that lay unmoving on top of the white sheet.

“Yes, it's me.”

“What's happened? How did you come to be here?” Euphémie asked.

“I suppose I've simply grown old. But my heart is warm with the pleasure of seeing you.”

Could he be mistaking me for someone else? Euphémie wondered. For years everyone had talked about Lapin like he was a deranged eccentric, but she remembered the American pilot who had been shot down during the war and how Lapin had taken charge of everything. Very few people could have done what he did. Neither of them had ever talked about that day. When the war ended no one wanted to reminisce, and Euphémie certainly did not go looking for Lapin to find out any details. Like so many others, she'd just wanted to forget about everything to do with the war, the brutal death of the young flier, the killing of the German soldier who had assaulted her, and the terror concerning the possibility of her father being shot as a reprisal for a murder in which she had been involved.

Lapin coughed, a straitened, rasping sound. She pulled the pillow beneath his shoulders to prop him up, guessing he might have pneumonia, or worse.

“Sweet Euphémie,” said Lapin. “I heard you were here, but I didn't know how to help you.” He coughed again, but not as severely.

Glistening tears fell out of the corners of his eyes and Euphémie
gently wiped them away. Poor Lapin must be delirious. She saw that his fragile skin was embedded with a mass of wrinkles as if a fine net had been pressed onto his face.

The door opened and a nurse peered in. “What's going on in here?” She eyed Euphémie with a grimace.

“Monsieur Le Lièvre is an old friend of mine,” Euphémie replied, affecting her most dignified tone.

“Be that as it may, you cannot remain,” said the nurse opening the door farther.

“Why is my friend in this place?”

“He was found lying in a field. He's a mental deficient, so he was sent here.”

“But that's ridiculous,” said Euphémie. “If he's ill he should be in a hospital. You can't help him here.”

The nurse made a rapid motion with her hand. “It's time for you to leave this room!” Knowing the consequences of disobedience, Euphémie exited, but not before she had stroked Lapin's head once more and bid him good night.

The next morning she was up with the dawn. Without bothering to dress, she tiptoed toward her friend's room. She found Lapin awake, but his face was even whiter and his lips bloodless.

“Can I get anything for you?” she whispered, bending over him.

“Oh no,” he gasped, reaching up to touch the collar of her dressing gown. “Just stay with me. There are things I want to say.”

It was impossible that anything needed to be said, thought Euphémie, particularly if it dealt with the distant past.
All that was dead and gone like her poor mother in 1940, then her father a few years later, and finally, dear Agnes, who had helped to raise her.

“Don't tire yourself,” she said. “It's just nice to be together again, the way we were in school. Do you remember Father lending you books?”

“Yes, I remember your wonderful father,” Lapin panted. “But I never liked your husband.” She was silent. What could Lapin know about Dominique? “You never knew that my father was with the Resistance,” Lapin continued. “After the war, there were reprisals, secret killings of those who had betrayed our country . . .” Euphémie touched her hand to his lips. She could guess what was coming. She remembered how Dominique had been, whether they were walking in the woods or lying in bed at night, his rifle always within reach. He feared something and now it all became clear. He'd no doubt been clandestinely at work for the Nazis when they had occupied France, and Euphémie was well aware of what happened to certain collaborators after the war was over.

“Don't speak,” she said to Lapin. “I understand. But it doesn't matter anymore.”

“But it does because I caused you pain. You never knew what had happened. I hid him too well, just the way I had hidden the German soldier.”

Euphémie turned away to raise the window shade that blocked the violet-blue of the morning light. The truth seemed too much to take in. But somehow it was a relief. Now she knew what had really happened to Dominique. When she returned to his side, Lapin's head was turned
away and he appeared to be in a deep sleep. She tiptoed out of his room. When she returned an hour later, she found that he was no longer there. He had died shortly after her visit that morning and his body had been swiftly removed from the ward.

Though Euphémie remained profoundly shocked for several weeks, it was as if Lapin's death had tolled the end of winter. Spring came almost immediately, but the delicate pink and white flowers of the fruit trees blooming outside the cathedral might as well have been made of plastic because Euphémie remained interred where no soft breezes or perfumed air could penetrate. On the hillsides, wild thyme and rosemary would be bursting with purple buds issuing their pungent, savory scent. Her fingertips conjured up the feel of their rough stems as she rested in the afternoon sun that streamed through the plate-glass windows of the corridor. She was stronger than ever, but the ennui of the place was sapping her energy. Euphémie was waiting for something to happen and wondered if perhaps it was her own death that she was actually waiting for.

Before lunch one day, she recognized an elderly visitor who often came to see his wife, one of those white-gowned figures who spent her days in an armchair in the lounge, her face vacuous. As the man made his way to the elevator after his visit, a nurse repeated some numbers and laughed. “Fourteen-seven. How ironic! That's the date of the storming of the Bastille!” The gentleman chuckled at her little joke. Euphémie watched as he pressed the numbers and the elevator doors opened and then closed behind him.

She waited until the nurses were occupied with getting
the patients into the refectory at lunchtime. When there was no one around, Euphémie carefully pushed the three digits on the numbered panel by the elevator. The doors seemed to whisper
Open sesame!
as they slid apart—as if in a fairy tale! In the lobby, the desk was unmanned at lunchtime and she walked out into the warmth of the tarred parking lot. She knew the way to go. Past the cemetery at the edge of town, a narrow path took her up into the hills. It would only take an hour or so by foot and she knew all the shortcuts.

Euphémie had been used to walking on the flat tiles of the terrace and her heart ached with pleasure as her feet turned this way and that on the stony road. The redolence of wild herbs and spring flowers surrounded her as she scaled the first long hill and found that her legs were just as strong as ever. At the fork marked by wooden arrows, she followed the road to the left instead of the one that led to her village. No one saw her and no one passed. She skirted the fire road and kept to the narrow path where cars couldn't go, breathing the cool air in the dappled shade of the dense forest. She felt in her core that she was not some separate creature passing through glade or woodland by rocky cliffs, or the little springs that emerged between banks of flowering mosses and blooming bulbs, but that she was an integral part of all that surrounded her. What she breathed was absorbed like nourishment into her lungs, her rib cage, her thin, capable legs, still so sturdy and dependable.

Finally, she turned off and descended a long slope. At the bottom she half slid through a thatch of tender mountain holly. Across the road was a small house. Hamidou was sitting outside it on a metal chair pouring tea into a gold-rimmed
glass. When he looked up and saw her, his fox-colored eyes widened with a start, but then a smile crossed his face and became a grin that revealed his large yellow teeth.

“Madame!”
he said, standing up. “They let you out!”

“Yes, Hamidou, I'm free.” Euphémie laughed. She clasped his hands in hers.

“But, madame, where will you go? Your house has been sold!”

Euphémie stood very still and thought about that for a few moments, not particularly surprised. Gaston Prost had indicated that something other than an impending illness was behind her incarceration. Hamidou pulled another chair up to the small table. Euphémie sat down and thirstily drank the sweet mint tea that he served her.

Of course, it was the property that Florence had wanted so badly. The place in Saint-Tropez had probably been sold as well. The money would raise Florence and Victor's status in Lyon, though it was common knowledge that he was rather a failure. Euphémie found that she wasn't angry or particularly upset. Only the thought of Florence's cold heart gave her any pain.

When they had finished the pot of tea, she looked at Hamidou and said, “The sale of my home is not a tragedy. It was too much for me anyway. Much too big!” Hamidou drew his large brown hand over his weathered face and stared at her without speaking. “Still, I'll have to find a place to live,” she said. “Just one or two rooms would be sufficient.”

Her friend continued to gaze at her. After a moment, he stood up and excused himself. He went into his small house and came back almost immediately. Then he sat down next to Euphémie and said,
“My neighbor Madame Bonnefoie moved away to live with her daughter in Toulouse. The family wants to rent the place.” Euphémie turned and looked with pleasure into her friend's fiery amber eyes. “Madame Euphémie, they have been looking for someone just like you!”

Hamidou reached into his pocket and withdrew something that Euphémie at first took to be a squirming yellow snake, but as he placed it in her hand she saw that it was a golden necklace. “This belonged to my wife, Rachida,” he said. “It will help you pay the rent. She would have wanted me to do that for you.”