Theory of Remainders (5 page)

Except for the flowerpots on the street corners and the presence of a few new storefronts, Philip would have sworn that nothing much had changed in the center. It was as if time had halted fifteen years ago, and now, finally, motion was resuming. A kicked ball suddenly unfroze and a young boy broke from his long pose to chase it. An old woman pulled back on her terrier’s leash, yanking him from his long-held stance at a lamppost. The church bell chimed for the first time in over a decade.

It seemed ridiculous to consider this a homecoming. Philip had never spent long periods in the town where Yvonne had grown up, but a few times a year they would make the pilgrimage from Paris, bringing Sophie to visit her grandmother. He hadn’t known the locals by name, but he would chat with the butcher and the grocer. There, just to his left, was the newspaper shop he used to frequent. To the other side was their favorite bakery. Over there stood the hardware store. Yes, he’d been something more than a tourist in Yvetot, and now its streets and buildings, even the curve of its road, surprised him with their familiarity.

He parked in front of the weary structure of the Hôtel la Cauchoise, one of the few buildings in the center that the Germans had neglected to destroy during the war. On the sidewalk he stretched his legs, checking his watch to confirm the magnitude of his lateness. Nearly four o’clock. He’d missed the funeral by over an hour, and he had to wonder: had it been worth coming at all? How would Yvonne react? He was half-tempted to climb back in the car and flee while there was still time.

The lobby of the hotel was dark with old-world wood smelling of furniture oil and mold. Overstuffed armchairs yawned in the shadows like Venus fly traps waiting for their prey. On the oak reception counter next to the service bell, two dead cockroaches lay back to back. Philip tapped the bell twice. Steps sounded down the hall, and an old barrel of a man arrived. He had a frog-like face, his chin lost in a wide neck, his eyes magnified behind wireframe glasses. He peered at Philip with suspicion, as though uncertain why a visitor with a suitcase might approach a hotel reception desk. Norman hospitality.

“
Oui?
” he inquired.

Philip uttered his name and the man examined him at length, unrushed, before finally waddling behind the desk and cracking open the reservation book, turning the heavy cover over the bodies of the roaches. “
Bien
,” he said, tracing his finger down the list of names. “
Adler, Adler . . . Voilà.
” He squinted at Philip again. “
Une seule personne?
”

“
Oui.
Pour une nuit
.” One night should do it.

Once again the old eyes studied him. “
Vous êtes . . . Américain, n’est-ce pas?
”

When Philip confirmed this suspicion, the man nodded, then tried out his thickly accented English. “From New York? Chicago?”

“Boston,” he replied, happy not to have to deal with French until he got more sleep.

“Of course. In
Mass . . . Massa-shou
. . .” He couldn’t get his mouth around the sounds.

“Massachusetts,” Philip pronounced.

“Yes. I’m afraid, my English is not so good.”

“Nonsense. You speak quite well.”

This compliment lifted some of the chill. The man introduced himself as Monsieur Bécot, and from behind his desk he produced a ragged assortment of brochures, slapping them down on the counter one after the other, reciting in a flat tone the litany of tourist sites in and around the town.

“I don’t think I’ll be needing these,” Philip interrupted.

Bécot stared. “I see. Perhaps you have been to Yvetot before, Monsieur Adler?”

He hesitated. “I have passed through.”

Bécot considered this answer. “
Bien
. Well, at least you should learn what to avoid. The Saint-Pierre church, for example.” He shook his head in disgust. “
Quelle horreur
.”

Philip nodded. “I couldn’t agree more.”

Monsieur Bécot approved of this reaction, turned and withdrew a key from the pigeonholes behind him. “
Une très bonne chambre
,” he announced. “
Au troisième étage
. And a message.” He presented an envelope with Philip’s name on it. The handwriting was Yvonne’s.

He headed for the stairs, then paused and turned back. “One more thing, Monsieur Bécot.”

His eyes thinned. “
Oui?
”

“I came across something rather odd as I entered town.” He described the scene he’d witnessed in the field. The blinking lights, the man in blue coveralls.

By the time he finished, Bécot was nodding. “Yes, yes. I heard that old Masseau found one. Hit it with the tractor! Not a stone, Monsieur Adler, no. It is a, how do you say, a oh-bus.”

“A what?”

“A oh-bus,” Bécot insisted.

Philip rummaged through the shreds of his French. What did the man mean? An opus? A bus? Then it clicked. Bécot was using the French word, pronouncing it in English. “You mean an
obus
. A shell.”

“That’s right, a shell.
Artillerie
, you know. From the war.”

“Here? So far from the coast?”

“
Everywhere
.” Bécot’s expression brightened. “The war left its souvenirs, Monsieur. At the Abouville church, you still find holes from bullets in the stone. On the road to Fécamp there is a bunker, almost all under the ground now. Every year, they find many tons of
obus
—shells—from the war.”

Philip shook his head. That couldn’t be right. “No, the man I saw, he wasn’t wearing any protection.”

“Hah. That is Tristan.” Bécot smiled with approval. “He is a
démineur
, and always he says, not to bother. If the shell goes, then he goes too. So it is better to be
confortable
.”

Philip tried to square Bécot’s explanation with what he’d seen. Certainly he’d heard of old armaments washing up on the beaches, but how had he missed the everyday nature of farmers plowing up high explosives? The old complexity of France returned to him now, a world shaded with deep folds.

Bécot was still talking, and a word snagged Philip’s attention. “I’m sorry. What did you say?”

“Bodies, Monsieur.”

“What?”

“Skelets.”

“Skeletons?”

“That’s right.” The old man hesitated, studying his guest. “Or parts of them,” Bécot continued. “Now and then, they come up to the surface. If we can tell—German or American or French—off they go to the military cemetery. But sometimes they do not know, and then Rouen sticks in its nose. Rouen,” he added with distaste, “wishes to be in charge of everything.”

But Philip was no longer listening, troubled by the image.

The two men stood in silence. Bécot bobbed his head as though he’d just made a decision. “I can perhaps offer you an aperitif, Monsieur Adler?”

“No, thank you.”

“
C’est gratuit
. No cost. A little
Calvados
, perhaps? Liqueur made of apples?”

“I’m afraid I don’t drink.”

The old man gave him a surprised, faintly pained look.

“Thank you all the same, Monsieur Bécot.” Philip turned and started up the steps.

Before he was halfway up the flight, Bécot spoke to his back. “It must be very hard, I think, to come back to Yvetot after all these years. Monsieur Adler.”

He turned to find Bécot eyeing him. Philip had missed something. Back in the States he prided himself on his powers of observation, noticing people’s tics, reading them like the tells of poker players. But here it wasn’t just the language that was different. So were the looks and gestures.

“I remember the story well,” Bécot continued. “When I saw your reservation, I suspected. But Adler is not an unusual name. I was not certain it was you, even when you arrived. You are different. Older. But I do not forget faces or names, even from the newspaper. Even when a person hides behind a beard. It is you. I can tell.”

Philip nodded slowly. “Yes,” he said. “I’m afraid it’s still me.”

“You have come for Anne-Madeleine Aubert? For the . . .
enterrement?
”

“The funeral. That’s right.”

“You are too late.”

“I know.”

A new silence hovered between them.

“You should not have returned, Monsieur Adler.”

Philip bristled. “And why is that?”

Bécot raised his palms in defense, but offered no reply.

So this was to be his welcome. Philip turned and mounted the stairs, ducking at low passages in the hallway.

The room was squashed under the mansard roof of the hotel, and it had the sloped ceiling to prove it. The bed occupied most of the space, a beige cotton coverlet hugging the corners of the mattress tightly enough to conceal the sagging basin of the middle. When he slid his carryon into the great wardrobe by the armchair, the door gaped back open, again and again, like the chin of a mouth-breathing boy. Near the bathroom, the odor of mildew grew stronger. Flanking the minibar stood a lame desk, one leg shorter than the others, pushed with its chair into a shallow alcove below a yellow-curtained window overlooking the main square. So this was Monsieur Bécot’s penthouse suite.

He opened the envelope the old man had given him. Just a few lines in Yvonne’s hand. The ceremony had gone as well as possible, she reported,
despite his absence
. He could call her that evening if he felt up to it, but in any case would he please meet her the next day at the office of Maître Caumartin? She gave the address.

Maître
, Philip realized, was a title given to a lawyer or notary. Whatever could she want of him there?

Dusk had settled by the time the Renault pulled up outside the Saint-Louis cemetery on the south end of town. Near the entrance leaned a centenarian oak tree, its stocky trunk dividing into branches that strained against their own weight, some sporting great wooden knobs where arboreal amputations had been performed long ago. Philip climbed out of the car and smoothed down his necktie. He buttoned his sport coat. From the back seat of the car he retrieved his camera and took up an armful of flowers, the cellophane from the florist crinkling in his hands. He made his way past the oak toward the iron gate.

The cemetery was vast, filled with rows of stone slabs, separated by thin bands of gravel. It was a far cry from the sprawling, green-lawned cemeteries of New England.

Amidst the individual graves and family vaults were occasional tipped crosses and flourishes of sculpture. Many tombs had been colonized by lichens or bore a blanket of moss. A life-sized maiden bearing a flag in one hand and an olive branch in the other stood as a lissome memorial for the war dead, her eyes cast downward in sorrow, her crown adorned with a five-pointed star, a sensual horror. What did she represent? The nation? Gratitude? The Angel of Death? All Philip knew for sure was that she’d gone to rust, with flakes of metal lifting off the rise of her breasts and the pleats of her robe.

Names reeled by with each step, the stones providing a directory of the families of Yvetot—Cottard, Bourdin, Massue, Rioult, Joret, Desplanches, Hesse. In this single stretch were dates spanning more than a hundred years. Old and new were interspersed, abandoned graves having been reclaimed to make room for new occupants, resulting in glistening new stones tucked between ruins. There were so many dead to accommodate.

A path led toward the back. After the maintenance shed Philip took a right. Halfway down the gravel alley, on the left, lay a brownish slab adorned with fresh wreathes and bouquets. The name Aubert ran along the arched top of the headstone, and engraved below was the inventory of remains, beginning in 1891. Below the name of Yvonne’s father, who had died nearly two decades ago, came the last completed entry:
Anne-Madeleine Aubert, 24 janvier 1926–7 juin 2008
. Four other names appeared beneath Anne-Madeleine’s, those of the now adult children, Yvonne included. Only the birth dates had been chiseled in.