The Madonna of Notre Dame (17 page)

It was in the high school cafeteria, the year of her Baccalauréat, the year she turned seventeen. A boy in her class had sat next to her at the table, and was talking to her too loudly and too close. Too close, especially. And while he was yelling in her ear to make himself heard above the noise of eight hundred other students in the process of devouring their
steak-frites,
she started to scream. A very shrill scream that seemed neverending, a scream that rose in the air of the cafeteria above everybody else, a scream that had immediately silenced an entire school. A supervisor took her to see the principal, a little man with a mustache, who used to watch the world and his pupils while hiding behind thick glasses, and before whom she’d remained silent, unable to explain the cry of distress that had escaped her. The scream had been for nothing. Nobody had really heard her. She’d taken that as a given.

Almost twenty years later, in the huge waiting hall filled with all these voices that were overlapping, mingling, and climbing over one another, the same scream, the same overflow was about to rush out. She could feel it rising. Like a wave, a flood, an irrepressible tsunami. Like a galloping horse about to crash through a gate.

And all of a sudden, she saw her, the small, dark-haired woman sitting on one of the wooden benches, not far from the monument to the dead, dedicated to all the Palais staff who’d been killed in one or the other of the two wars. She saw her, holding her purse tight under one of her arms, while the other arm was immobilized by an electric-blue sling fastened with velcro. The tile installer’s wife. The one who’d been beaten with a hammer less than forty-eight hours earlier. The one whose husband had just been sentenced to a year, six months without parole, as a result of Claire Kauffmann’s summation.

She dropped her files. Papers scattered at her feet, sliding all around her on the smooth marble floor. A young lawyer in a black gown, hair smoothed down with a thick layer of gel, rushed over, kneeled down, and began picking up the papers one by one. She ignored the handsome kid, stepped on the documents, and walked to the wooden bench next to the monument to the dead. The tile installer’s wife looked up at her with eyes full of tears, and one of them had a dark bruise surrounding it. While a few yards away, the lawyer was putting the pages of her summation back in order, Claire Kauffmann had a long talk with the tile installer’s wife.

They ended up sitting in the middle of the constant to-ings and fro-ings, talking like two friends scarred by life, understanding each other without having to spell things out, each recognizing in the other woman an unconscious gesture, a protective attitude, an imperceptible tension in the body revealing fear at
first but lessening with the progress of the conversation. In the end, they smiled at each other, and the tile installer’s wife put her free hand on the young magistrate’s arm. Claire Kauffmann stood up and the lawyer in the black gown, who’d been hanging around for fifteen minutes, used the opportunity to bring her her file.

“This sure is heavy. You shouldn’t carry such heavy things, mademoiselle,” he said, handing her the files.

She looked him straight in the eye, bestowed a charming albeit slightly awkward smile. “You’re absolutely right, Maître. Would you mind very much dropping it off in the Clerk’s Office? I won’t be needing it anymore today.”

She left the waiting hall, leaving the lawyer flabbergasted and with an armful of papers, watching her walk away at a leisurely pace, with her light footsteps.

Over the phone, Nadia had given him an appointment at eleven p.m. At first, Kern had refused—he knew that the pain in his joints wouldn’t allow him to hold on till then and that he had to go back home at all costs—but she had insisted. It was eleven p.m. or nothing.

He’d found a place to wait a little farther away, at the back of a brasserie on the corner of Rue de Bruxelles and the boulevard. The waiter, this time an old veteran in a white apron and black waistcoat, had been watching him from the corner of his eye. Father Kern had been sitting there for nearly four hours, perfectly stiff and motionless in front of his empty cup of coffee, and there seemed to be no way of moving him an inch. In fact, he was overwhelmed by the pain, watching passersby on the sidewalk as though they were miles away, lost behind a kind of
damp, sticky fog that was made even thicker by nightfall. Moreover, the fever was muddling his thoughts, and it made a sickly mixture together with the heat and the stench of fried food and toilet freshener lingering at the back of the room.

Finally, he checked his watch and left the brasserie, while the suspicious waiter rushed to count the coins he’d left on the table. Once he was outside, he lit his pipe. The acrid smell of smoke filling his mouth did him good. Once again, he walked in the direction of Rue Blanche. The atmosphere in the area had changed. The nocturnal fauna was claiming back its rights, chasing away the daytime tourists, bathing in the illumination of headlights and tacky neon signs in the windows of peep shows. At the outside tables of bars, beer was flowing freely.

When he reached the door, he keyed in the code he already knew by heart, and which he’d pretended to write down four hours earlier over the phone. Before he stepped inside, he locked glances with the dark-circled eyes of the waiter with sideburns. He was balancing five glasses of beer on a tray. It was exactly eleven p.m.

In the bicycle-filled courtyard, he knocked on the door and the impact of his finger joints against the wood sent shocks of pain through his entire forearm. “I won’t be able to get through this,” he thought, “I’ll never manage it.”

The door opened and Nadia appeared. She crossed her arms and looked down to study the small, stocky, intimidated, feverish man standing in front of her.

“I knew it. The guy from the cemetery. I recognized your voice immediately when you called.”

“May I come in? I’d very much like to sit down.”

“Make yourself at home. It seems you already have your little habits.”

She stood aside after a hesitation that was a little too well rehearsed. Father Kern went into the studio, which was about a hundred square feet, basic, functional, with a white tile floor partly covered with a faded Oriental rug. On his way, he glanced at the bathroom, the door to which had been left ajar. It was the same shower curtain as in the picture on the Internet. It really was Nadia whose photo he’d seen, naked and on offer in her bathtub.

At the back of the apartment, a halogen lamp dimmed as low as possible spread a dreary glow over a bed covered in bright-colored cushions. The rest of the room—the table, closet, computer, kitchen corner, bottles of alcohol, glasses, pairs of shoes lined up in a corner—were bathed in a semidarkness that even candles placed on the floor struggled to light. Nadia came in and stood with her back against the wall. The fragile glow of the night lights made her eyes shine. Seeing her against the white surface like this, Kern thought of Luna, and her dead body on the floor of Notre Dame, her black hair shimmering by the light of the candles. Nadia lit a thin cigarette to hide her embarrassment. They observed each other like this for a while in total silence. She’d propped up her elbow on her hip. The cigarette burned slowly in the air, just below her face, drowning the top of her bust in smoke.

“You were Luna’s client, is that it?”

Words came to Father Kern with a kind of delay. The fever was keeping him distant. The pain in the joints of his hands was slowly bordering on burning, and he stuffed his hands in his pockets in a vain attempt to quench the fire. She took a drag from her cigarette. The incandescent tip lit her mouth with an orange mark at which Kern stared as though it were the distant glow of a lighthouse in the open sea.

“What do you expect me to do—take over from her? Luna
has only just been buried and you show up here to rent the other North African on duty. Is that the idea?”

He stared at her with curious intensity, as though he was struggling to grasp the meaning of her words. His eyes wandered to the windows between which she was standing. On the other side of the panes, he could see closed blinds. He would have given anything for her to throw open the windows fully and cool off the stifling room. His thoughts kept taking him back to the glass jar, in Notre Dame, where he heard the confessions of visitors. Perhaps it was because of the lack of air. Perhaps it was because of his silence, which he adopted automatically, the same way he would use silence to encourage those worshippers who had trouble confiding what was in their hearts.

“Shit, you’re not very talkative, are you?” She inhaled the smoke one more time, then came away from the wall. “It’s two hundred euros an hour, same as Luna. Safe sex, including oral, and no anal. Same as Luna. Don’t worry, you won’t be able to tell the difference in the dark. I taught her everything she knew.”

She drowned her cigarette in the sink and switched off the halogen lamp with the tip of her shoe. When she turned to Father Kern again, she had unfastened her dress, and her breasts looked pointy in the light of the three remaining candles. Kern was petrified.

She came closer. Her dress slid to the floor. Perched on her heels, she towered over the small priest by at least a head. She took his hands out of his pockets, gently opened them, and placed them on her breasts. Kern was shaking. He muttered a tense “No,” which she immediately smothered in a gentle interjection that stretched like a caress:

“Shhh ...” She said he looked like a beginner. Like a young teenager. She told him to relax. She told him his hands were burning hot. She asked him what he liked doing.

Father Kern had never touched a woman’s body. Never like this. It was the fault of his illness, not his faith. His teenage years, before he went to the seminary, were spent in pain and isolation. Now what he was discovering about these curves, rather late in life, was causing him the utmost surprise and pulling him out of his feverish torpor. As Nadia took his hands and brought them up to her breasts, he expected to grab an ember, to touch something incandescent, inebriating like strong alcohol. Yet her breasts seemed soft and fresh, like dipping his hands in milk. This young woman’s skin made him feel so peaceful that a simple caress seemed to have transformed the illness he’d been carrying around since childhood almost into a recollection that was, of course, most vivid in his memory, yet somehow outside his body.

Kern took his hands away from Nadia’s chest and placed them on her waist. He laid his head on her breasts, as though attracted by a magnet to the perfume in the hollow of her neck. He could feel the young woman’s heart beating in his ear, her tender flesh throbbing against his cheek, and, although he didn’t immediately notice it, something within him was released. He wept. Nadia put her arms around him. He realized he hadn’t cried since he was a child and, suddenly feeling as old as the world, for these few seconds that felt like an eternity, he gave himself permission to make up for lost time.

Then he straightened up, wiped his tears with the back of his hand, and whispered an almost inaudible “thank you,” which, however, came from the very depths of him. Nadia’s breasts were wet with Father Kern’s tears. She gathered the flowery dress that formed a flower around her feet, and got dressed without saying a word. The summer fabric absorbed the salty liquid. She sat on the bed, crossed her legs, lit a cigarette, and took the time to blow out smoke before she spoke. “All right. Let’s make it a hundred and fifty euros.”

“Excuse me?”

“I think we’ll call it a night. You look a bit tired. That’ll be a hundred and fifty euros.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Whether it’s tears or sperm, you have to pay, my dear little monsieur. I did you some good, you caressed me, now you pay for my time.”

“I simply came to talk to you.”

“You’ve no idea how many old guys come here to talk, ogle, grope, but not really to screw. Whatever it may be, you still have to pay for the service.”

“But I don’t have that kind of money on me.”

She tensed up and her tone suddenly changed. “What are you saying? What did you think you were coming to do here? Get a free coffee?”

“I’m truly sorry, I thought I was coming to talk about Luna.”

“Fuck! That woman’s always had a talent for picking up losers.” She grabbed the cell phone she’d left at the foot of the bed. Her fingers tapped on the touch screen with disconcerting speed. Someone picked up at the other end. “It’s Nadia. Gillou, I need you. I picked up one of Luna’s clients. He’s refusing to pay. Weird guy. Hundred and fifty.” She tossed the phone on the pillow and stared at Kern calmly, her legs still crossed, her hand going to and fro from her lips in time with puffs on her cigarette. Pain was once again taking over the priest’s body, this time at the speed of a tsunami. Less than twenty seconds later, he heard the courtyard door open and a man with an imposing build came into the studio. He had thick sideburns, like two triangles of carpeting. It was the waiter from the café next door.

“What’s the problem, Nadia?”

“Monsieur wants to touch but not pay.”

“Look, mademoiselle, I think there’s been a misunderstanding.”