Blood Wedding (27 page)

*

Clinical file

Sarah
Berg, née Weis, born July 22, 1944.

Parents deported to Dachau, date unknown.

Marries Jonas Berg, December 4, 1964.

Gives birth to a son, Frantz, August 13, 1974.

1982 – diagnosed with Manic Depressive Psychosis (Type III: Melancholic depression) – Hôpital L. Pasteur

1985 – hospitalised at the Clinique du Parc (Dr Jean-Paul Roudier)

1987–88 – hospitalised at the Clinique des Rosiers (Dr Catherine Auverney)

1989 – hospitalised at the Clinique Armand Brussières (Dr Catherine Auverney)

June 4, 1989 – after an interview with Dr Auverney, Sarah Berg put on her wedding dress and threw herself from a fifth-floor window. Death instantaneous.

*

Even if he is made of stone, waiting can weaken any man. It has now been three whole days since Sophie disappeared. Auverney came home at 4.30. He glanced at the lawnmower and, with a hint of resignation, picked up the envelope he had left there earlier.

At precisely that moment, Frantz’s mobile rang.

At first there is a long silence. He said “Marianne . . .?” He heard something that sounded like sobbing.

“Marianne, is that you?”

This time, there can be no doubt. Through the ragged sobs she said:

“Frantz, where are you?”

She said:

“Come quickly.”

Then, over and over, she repeated: “Where are you? Where are
you?” as though not expecting a response.

I’m here, Frantz tried to say.

Then:

“I’m home,” she said, her voice hoarse, exhausted. “I’m at home.”

“O.K., stay where you are. Don’t worry, I’m here, I’ll be home soon.”

“Frantz . . . Please, please come quickly.”

“I’ll be there in . . . about two hours. I’ll leave my phone on. I’m here, Marianne, you don’t have to be afraid anymore. If you start to feel scared, you call me, O.K.?”

Then, when she did not reply.

“O.K.?”

There was a long silence and then she said:

“Come quickly . . .”

And she started to cry again.

*

He snapped his mobile shut. He feels a huge wave of relief. She has not taken her medication for five days, but from her voice he can tell she is shattered, vulnerable. Fortunately, she does not seem to have regained her strength during her disappearance, the results of his work are intact. He needs to be vigilant, though. To find out where she has been. Frantz has already reached the fencing. He crawls under it, then breaks into a run. What if she leaves again before he gets there? He will call her every fifteen minutes on the way. He still feels vaguely worried, but mostly he feels an overwhelming relief.

*

Frantz races to the car, and then the floodgates burst. As he pulls away, he begins to weep like a child.

When
he opens the door, Sophie is sitting at the kitchen table. She looks as though she has been sitting there, motionless, for centuries. There is nothing on the table but for an overflowing ashtray; her hands are clasped and resting on the oilcloth. She is wearing clothes he has never seen before, crumpled, mismatched, they look as if they were bought in a charity shop. She turns to him very slowly, as though to do so requires a superhuman effort. He walks towards her. She tries to stand up, but cannot. She simply tilts her head to one side and says: “Frantz”.

He takes her in his arms. She smells of cigarette smoke. He says:

“At least tell me you’ve had something to eat?”

She presses herself against him, he can feel her shake her head. He had promised himself he would not ask any questions just yet, but he cannot help himself:

“Where
were
you?”

Sophie shakes her head vaguely as she draws away from him, her eyes vacant.

“I don’t know,” she says, “hitching lifts here and there . . .”

“Nothing
happened to you?”

She shakes her head.

Frantz pulls her to him and holds her for a long time. She has stopped crying, but she huddles in his arms like a frightened animal. Resting against him, she feels so slight. She is so thin.

He cannot help but wonder where she went, what she can have been doing all this time. She will tell him eventually, Sophie has no secrets from him. But his overriding feeling in these silent moments as they hold each other is how scared he was.

When he inherited his father’s money, Frantz was convinced that he would be able to dedicate himself to dealing with Doctor Catherine Auverney, so the news that she had died some months earlier felt like a betrayal. Life itself seemed treacherous. But today, something new stirs him: the same relief he felt when he first learned of Sophie’s existence and decided that she would take the place of Doctor Auverney. That she would die in her mother’s stead. This is the consolation he all but lost these past days. He hugs her to him and feels a surge of happiness. He dips his head to inhale the scent of her hair. She draws back slightly, looks up at him. Her eyelids are swollen, her face grubby. But she is beautiful. Undeniably beautiful. He bends down and suddenly the truth is laid bare to him in all its simplicity: he loves her. It is not this that he finds most striking, he has long known that he loves her. No, what he finds profoundly affecting is the fact that, by dint of caring for her for so long, working, directing, guiding, moulding, her face now looks exactly like Sarah’s. Towards the end of her life, Sarah had these sunken cheeks, the greyish lips, the vacant eyes, the bony shoulders, this evanescent thinness. Just as Sophie does today, Sarah would gaze at him lovingly as though he were the one and only answer to the troubles of this world, the single
promise that one day she might find a glimmer of peace. This resemblance between the two women moves him deeply. Sophie is perfect. Sophie is an exorcism, she will die a beautiful death. Frantz will weep copious tears. He will miss her terribly. Terribly. And he will be genuinely desolate to be cured without her.

Sophie could go on looking up at Frantz through this gauzy veil of tears, but she knows that tears have only a temporary effect. It is difficult to know what is going on inside his mind. So she stays there, motionless, allows things to take their course. She waits. He holds her by the shoulders, pressing her against him and in that precise moment, she feels something in him weaken, crumble, melt, though she does not know what. He hugs her and she begins to feel afraid because his eyes are frozen in a strange, fixed stare. She can almost see the thoughts teeming in his brain. She does not take her eyes off him, as though attempting to paralyse him. She swallows hard and says, “Frantz . . .” She purses her lips and he bends down to meet them. The kiss is tense, restrained, though there is something voracious about his mouth. Something urgent. And something hard in his groin. Sophie concentrates. She wishes she could calculate without factoring in her fear, but it is impossible. She feels caught, captive. He is physically powerful. She is afraid of dying. So she hugs him to her, grinds her pelvis against him, feels him grow harder and this reassures her. She lays her cheek against him and stares at the ground. She can breathe. She relaxes each of her muscles, one by one, and her body gradually melts in Frantz’s arms. He lifts her up. He carries her into the bedroom and lays her down. She could fall asleep now. She hears him move away, go into the kitchen, she briefly opens her eyes then closes them again. She hears the familiar sounds of
a teaspoon knocking against a glass. Senses him looming over her again. He says: “You should get some sleep now, get some rest.” He holds her head and slowly she swallows the liquid. He always adds a lot of sugar to mask the taste. He goes back into the kitchen. Immediately she rolls onto her side, pulls back the sheet and pushes two fingers down her throat. She retches, vomits up the liquid, feels her stomach lurch then draws the sheet over the stain and rolls back. He is there already. He runs his hand over her brow. “Sleep tight,” he says in a whisper. He presses his mouth against her lips. He admires her beautiful face. He loves it now. This face is his possession. He has already begun to dread the moment when she is no longer here.

*

“The
gendarmes
came round.”

Sophie did not think of this. The
gendarmes.
Her face immediately betrays her terror. Frantz knows how much the real Sophie has to fear from the police. Play his cards right.

“The clinic had to contact them, obviously,” he says, “so they came here.”

He revels for a moment in Sophie’s panic, then takes her in his arms.

“I took care of everything, don’t worry. I didn’t want them out looking for you. I knew you would come back.”

In all these months she has managed to have no contact with the police. Now, here, she is caught in the net. Sophie takes a deep breath, tries to gather her thoughts. Frantz will have to get her out of this. Their interests coincide. Play her cards right.

“You need to go in and sign some papers. Just to say that you’re back . . . I told them you were in Besançon. With family. We should probably get it over with as soon as possible.”

Sophie
shakes her head, murmurs “no”. Frantz hugs her a little harder.

*

The reception area of the police station is plastered with faded posters showing blown-up identity cards, offering safety advice, emergency numbers for every situation. The
gendarme
Jondrette looks at Sophie with good-natured detachment. He would like to have a wife like this. Sickly. It must make a husband feel useful. His gaze shifts from Sophie to Frantz. Then he taps the desk in front of him. His fat fingers draw their attention to a form.

“So you thought you’d run away from hospital.”

This is his way of being tactful. In front of him is a woman who tried to kill herself and he can think of nothing else to say. Instinctively, Sophie realises that she needs to pander to his idea of masculine power. She lowers her eyes. Frantz puts an arm around her shoulder. A handsome couple.

“And you were in . . .”

“Besançon,” Sophie says in a hushed whisper.

“That’s right, Besançon. That’s what your husband told me. With family.”

Sophie changes tactics. She looks up and stares at Jondrette. He may be a little rustic, but he can sense things. And what he senses is that this Mme Berg is a character.

“A good thing, family,” he says. “I mean, at times like this, it can be a good thing.”

“I believe my wife is supposed to sign something?” Frantz’s voice interrupts this rather oblique conversation and brings them back to earth. Jondrette snorts.

“Yes. Right here.”

He turns the form around for Sophie. She looks for a pen.
Jondrette hands her a biro bearing the logo of a petrol station. Sophie signs.
Berg.

“Everything will be alright now,” Jondrette says.

Difficult to know whether this is a question or a statement.

“It’ll be fine,” Frantz says.

The good husband. Jondrette watches the couple, arm in arm, as they leave the station. Must be good, to have a wife like that. Then again it must come with a shitload of bother.

*

This is something she painstakingly learned, the even breathing of the sleeper. It demands great concentration, ceaseless attention, but she is now a skilled deceiver. So much so that twenty minutes later, when he comes to check on her, he is convinced. He caresses her through her clothing, lies on top of her and buries his face in the pillow. Her body utterly limp, she opens her eyes and stares at his shoulder, she feels him fumble with her clothes then penetrate her. She almost smiles.

*

Sophie has slipped into a phase of sleep that means he can allow himself a brief respite from his vigilance. This time, in the excitement of the moment, the joy of being reunited, he was a little heavy-handed with the sleeping pills: she is sleeping deeply in the bedroom. He watches over her for a long time, listens to her breathing, noting the fleeting expressions that flutter across her face, then he gets to his feet, leaves the apartment, locking the door behind him, and goes down to the cellar.

*

He considers the state of his plans and, realising that they will be of no use, he decides to erase the digital photographs of Sophie’s father’s house. He scans through them on his camera, deleting
them as he goes. The house, close-ups of the windows, the car, Auverney coming out of the front door, leaving the envelope on the mower, Auverney working at the garden table, stripping paint from the gate, unloading the bags of compost. It is 2.00 a.m. He takes a U.S.B. cable and connects the camera to his computer so he can download some of the images and study one or two properly before deleting them. He chooses four. In the first, Auverney is walking in his garden. Frantz kept this one because Auverney’s face is clearly visible. For a man of sixty, he is in fine fettle. Square-jawed, spirited, keen-eyed. Frantz adjusts the resolution to 80%. Intelligent. To 100%. Cunning. The sort of man who could be a threat. It must be a genetic trait, since it is her cunning that has kept Sophie alive. The second photograph shows Auverney working at the garden table. He is in three-quarter profile. Frantz zooms in on a small section, the corner of the computer screen. The result is blurred. He launches his photo-editing software and applies a filter to sharpen the image. He can make out the tool bar of what seems to be a word-processing programme, but the text itself is a blur. He drags the image into the trash. The third photograph was taken on his last day. Auverney is wearing a suit, walking towards the tractor mower to leave the envelope probably intended for the repair man. It is impossible to decipher what is written on the envelope, but it is not important. The last picture was taken at the very end of his stake-out. Auverney had left the front door wide open. Frantz scans the interior which he has previously seen only through his binoculars: a large, round table with a low-hanging ceiling lamp, at the far end of the room a hi-fi is set into a shelving unit that holds an impressive number of C.D.s. Frantz drags the picture to the trash. As he is about to shut down the photo-editing software, one final thing occurs to
him. He takes the photograph of the shed from the trash, reopens it and zooms in on an area in shadow: boxes, sacks of compost, gardening implements, tool boxes, suitcases. The door casts a shadow across the stack of boxes; those at the top are in darkness, while those at the bottom are still visible. Zoom 120%. 140%. Frantz tries to decipher what is scrawled on the side of a box in black marker pen. He applies a sharpening filter, adjusts the contrast, zooms in a little more. On the first line, an A, a V, and at the end an S. On the next line a word that begins with D, then a C, a O, then something that begins AUV, so obviously “Auverney”. The last line clearly reads “H–L”. The box is at the bottom of the stack. The one at the top is bisected by shadow. The lower part is legible, the upper part obscured. But what little he can see roots him to the spot. Frantz sits, dumbfounded, as he tries to process the significance of what is on the screen. He is looking at the case files of Doctor Auverney.