Graeme Burnet: The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau

Manfred recalled the sight of Adèle tottering on the pavement in front of him, adjusting the ankle-strap of her shoe. He masturbated with greater vigour than usual and fell asleep without mopping up his emission.

SAINT-LOUIS IS A TOWN of around twenty thousand people nestling at the very edge of the Alsace, separated from Germany and Switzerland by the width of the Rhine. It is a place of little note and aside from a handful of the picturesque oak-beamed houses characteristic of the region, there is little to detain visitors. Like most border towns, it is a place of transit. People pass through on their way elsewhere, and the town is so lacking in points of interest it is as if the townsfolk have resigned themselves to this. The brighter young people of Saint-Louis up and leave for college, most likely never to return.

The town centre, inasmuch as Saint-Louis can be said to have a centre, is a miscellany of unattractive post-war buildings peppered with a few more traditional dwellings that have survived the passage of time and town-planning. The signs above the shops are faded and the window displays are uninviting, as if the proprietors have abandoned the idea of attracting passing trade. The word that most often springs into the minds of those passing through, if they notice the town at all, is nondescript. Saint-Louis is nondescript.

Yet for three hundred years the town has sustained a population. It is a population somewhat less educated, less well-off and more inclined to the political right than the majority of their countrymen, but this mediocre tribe still requires, now and then, a new pair of shoes or an outfit of clothing, they need their hair cut, their teeth attended to and their ailments cured. They must withdraw and borrow money. They require places to eat, drink, gossip or simply postpone returning home. Their streets must be cleaned, refuse collected, law and order must be kept. Their houses require the attention of plumbers, electricians, joiners and decorators. Their children must be schooled, the aged nursed and the dead buried.

In short, the people of Saint-Louis are exactly like people elsewhere, in towns equally drab or markedly more glamorous. And like the inhabitants of other places, the townsfolk of Saint-Louis feel a certain chauvinistic pride in their municipality, even as they retain an awareness of its mediocrity. Some dream of an escape, or live with the regret that they did not get out when they had the chance. The majority, though, go about their business with little or no thought to their surroundings.

Manfred Baumann was born on the Swiss side of the border to a Swiss father and a French mother. Gottwald Baumann was a brewery worker from Basel. He was a short, exceptionally swarthy man with a glint in his eye. Manfred’s mother, Anaïs Paliard, was a high-spirited girl cursed with a sickly constitution, from a well-to-do Saint-Louis family of lawyers. Manfred spent the first six years of his life in Basel. He remembered little of these years, yet Swiss-German remained the language with which he felt most at home. He had hardly spoken it since his early childhood, but hearing it still transported him to those hazy early years. Manfred had only two memories of his father from this period of his life. The first was of the rancid smell that emanated from him when he returned from an evening at some bar, coupled with the bristle of his stubbled chin as he leaned over to kiss him goodnight.

The second was Manfred’s fondest memory of his father. For reasons he could not remember (perhaps it was his birthday), Gottwald took Manfred to visit the brewery where he worked. Manfred could recall the heady aroma of yeast and the thunder of empty barrels being rolled across cobbles. The other brewery workers were, at least in Manfred’s memory, short, swarthy, barrel-chested men, just like his father, who walked with their legs apart and their arms swinging outwards. As Gottwald led Manfred through the yard, the men spotted their workmate and shouted, ‘ Grüezi Gottli .’

‘You know what that means?’ Gottwald had asked. ‘Little God. Not bad, eh? Little God .’ Manfred gripped tight on his father’s hand and looked forward to the day when he too would work in the brewery.

When Manfred was six years old, the Restaurant de la Cloche came up for sale and Anaïs’s father purchased it for his daughter and her husband to run. The restaurant’s town centre location guaranteed a steady stream of trade from nearby shopkeepers and office workers, so, although evening meals were served, the bulk of its business was done during the day. M. Paliard must have thought that he was setting up his son-in-law in a failsafe venture, but he had reckoned without his son-in-law’s brewery worker manners and rudimentary grasp of the French language. Gottwald’s surly demeanour succeeded in alienating the establishment’s clientele. He lacked the graceful manner and authority of the successful patron . As the business slid into decline, Gottwald spent every night on the wrong side of the bar, noisily decrying the stuck-up French who had taken their trade elsewhere.

After his father’s death, the business was sold, but Manfred and his mother continued to live in the apartment above the restaurant until her delicate health obliged them to move back to the family home on the northern outskirts of the town. Manfred missed living above the bar; the smell of cooking and the sound of the day’s debate drifting through the open window as he and his mother ate their evening meal. The bar was the hub of the town. At the family home, Manfred was isolated. To his grandparents, he was less a source of pride than a reminder of their daughter’s lapse. Manfred inherited his father’s graceless demeanour and his mother’s sickly constitution, both of which mitigated against falling into friendship with the ease of other boys. When they had lived above the bar, older men greeted him cheerfully when he returned home from school as if he was one of them. At weekends he would run errands for the regulars, earning a few centimes for his trouble. In the evenings he would sit at the window above the bar listening to the ebb and flow of conversation, mentally contributing his own sage remarks. At the Paliard house there were no voices to listen to and Manfred would sit in his room listening to the slow ticking of the grandfather clock that stood on the landing halfway up the stairs.

Throughout his schooldays Manfred was known as ‘Swiss’ and the nickname had stuck. He loathed it. Lemerre still used it when inviting Manfred to join the Thursday card game. ‘You joining us, Swiss?’ he yelled across the bar. Manfred wished his mother had reverted to her maiden name, but despite her husband’s shortcomings, she remained devoted to his memory. After Manfred and his mother were obliged to leave the Restaurant de la Cloche, Anaïs would often call him to her bedside. Manfred disliked the smell of his mother’s room. It was like a hospital. The dressing table was arrayed with brown bottles of pills. Towards the end, the doctor visited on an almost daily basis, a privilege afforded to families of the Paliard’s standing. When Manfred entered the room, Anaïs would smile wearily and hold out her arm. Often she was too weak to raise her shoulders from the pillows that supported her. Manfred sat on the edge of the bed holding his mother’s hand.

Anaïs kept a photograph of Gottwald by her bedside. He was standing next to a motor car parked in a lay-by on a twisting road high in the Swiss mountains. The car was a Mercedes which Anaïs’s father had lent them for their honeymoon. Gottwald stood in his shirtsleeves, hands on his hips, chest puffed out, his thick dark hair slicked back in the style of the day, a study in virility.