Catherine Leroux - The Party Wall

As for word from their families, it is as rare as sprouts in the ground here. Marc is the only remaining link between them and their former existence, allowing Marie and Ariel to send their close relations the occasional letter, the content of which is always so insubstantial that even the cleverest spies could not determine its point of origin. The information travelling in the opposite direction is hardly more specific. Ariel’s parents, having also yielded to the appeal of exile, have entered into old age on what is left of the Yucatan Peninsula and confine their messages to the weather and sometimes their health. Meanwhile, morality has gained the upper hand at the Leclercs’, who have refused to communicate with their daughter ever since it became clear she had no plans to leave Ariel. Marie has registered this loss without dramatizing it, like one more thing gone down in the ocean of all she has had to give up. Only Rachel, equanimous with regard to her sister’s choices, continues to correspond with her. As for the information passed on by Marc — the tribulations of the cops, the rebuilding of the Party — Ariel does his best to ignore it, just as he refrains from broaching with Marc the subject of his divorce from Emmanuelle. The less he knows about it, the better. An island with too many bridges is no longer an island.

In any case, it is not hard to turn a deaf ear on the plain, where silence is stronger than all else. Ariel and Marie give themselves up to this landscape, with its smooth horizons, its regular surfaces devoid of hills or fjords or the rectangular woods of the cities. Their self-sufficiency is more than ever necessary. They are friends, family, lovers; they share all the loves that go into a life, and all the solitude this entails.

When Marie returned to Montreal ready to describe to Ariel her journey in search of Eva Volant, she found him on the street, red-faced and stupidly rooted in a puddle of melted snow. The fire seemed to float weightlessly like a will-o’-the-wisp, a paper airplane ignited through spontaneous combustion. It took Marie a few seconds to grasp that it was their house.

No criminal investigation was needed for them to understand that the blaze was the work of an arsonist. During his stay in the capital, Ariel had been informed that a slew of letters had flooded his office in recent weeks. He had opened a few of them at random. One of them depicted its author as a sexual libertarian and offered Marie and Ariel a “haven of peace and tolerance where they could live their forbidden love and share it with a community of like-minded people.” Most of the others saw themselves as agents of divine wrath and condemnation to the fires of hell. It was hard to guess which of the fallen prime minister’s thousand foes might have burned down his house.

The day after the fire, Ariel and Marie treaded around the smoking ruins of their home trying to recognize its wrecked forms, to identify the living room, the staircase, the kitchen wall, the remains of what had been no more than a temporary structure, an ephemeral order they had believed in for so long. A few blackened objects peeked out here and there like little corpses rising to the surface of dark waters after being submerged in the depths: a toothbrush, a juicer, a Montblanc pen, a flashlight. The cat’s body could not be found. Unseen since the scandal had erupted, the animal had no doubt been dematerialized just like the rest of their world.

They had been circling around their former life for what seemed like hours when Marc arrived out of breath.

“Thank God you’re safe and sound!”

He paused beside them to contemplate the black pit where a fine snow was doing its best to settle.

“Witch,” he hissed between his teeth.

Ariel and Marie looked up at the former military man.

“Emmanuelle. It’s all her fault,” Marc explained.

Just as the house was going up in flames, Marc — by tugging on the many lines he had cast — learned that the person responsible for the leak was his own wife. Emmanuelle, rooting through her husband’s affairs, had found out. She was the one who had sent the journalists the anonymous message, which Marc’s men eventually traced back to her.

“She left even before I could confront her. I can’t believe she did this to us.”

The snowflakes covered their coats and their hair turned frizzy by a night without hope, but expired in contact with the seething rubble of the house. Nothing of this broken life could ever be washed clean again. Marie turned to Marc with a glazed look in her eyes.

“We want to disappear. Together. Can you help us?”

In Marie’s class a few children stand out, colourful faces in a room too often black-and-white. Little Marco with his second generation Italian accent, who curls the few French words he learned with an altogether Latin theatricality. His mother comes to fetch him every night and sometimes presents Marie with arancinis, murmuring, “For my boy’s favourite teacher.” Then there’s Sophia, with ponytails that defy gravity, law, and order, who keeps her hand permanently raised, even when she does not know the answer or has nothing to say. And, finally, Angel, whose classmates are all at least a head taller than her; her gaze is piercing and her French pronunciation perfect. Every Friday Angel tearfully presses Marie’s hand before running off to the weather-beaten yellow bus.

At the end of the fall term, Marie takes advantage of the parent-teacher meeting to apprise Angel’s mother of these incidents.

“My husband is in the army,” the mother explains. “We’ve changed cities four times since Angel was born. Even though we think we’ll be here for some time, she’s constantly afraid of moving again. Whenever she says goodbye to people she’s fond of, she has the feeling it’s the last time.”

“I see. Your husband works on a military base?”

“Yes, he gives combat training to recruits.”

“Mine teaches them politics.”

“Oh, Albert Morsehead! Richard often talks about him. They get along well, I think. You should come over for a meal!”

After accepting the invitation Marie asks about Angel’s remarkable aptitude for French. The mother smiles.

“I don’t know who she takes after. Certainly not me, and her father even less. In the neighbourhood where I was born in Savannah, French was as rare and exotic as Pakistani is here.”

“You’re from Georgia? How did you end up here?”

“When you grow up near a military base you fall in love with soldiers. When I met Richard he was in training near where I lived. I was smitten.”

When she returns home, Marie recounts her meeting to Ariel.

“Richard Vernon? Yes, I know him. He’s a bruiser. Gives the recruits a rough time.”

“His wife invited us for dinner.”

“Well, find a way to beg off. He’s the last person I’d want to socialize with.”

Looking out over the empty plain that surrounds them, Marie sighs. Their life seems so spare. There’s no room even for friendship. Ariel gently squeezes her shoulder.

“That’s not true,” he says. “It just takes longer when you start from scratch.”

As Ariel expected, he found Emmanuelle in a vast loft perched on the top floor of an abandoned factory, the kind of place that bolstered the image of the impoverished artist but which only the wealthy could afford. Despite the large windows, the room appeared dim. Pewter mobiles floated a few metres above the floor like swords. Curled up in a red leather armchair, Emmanuelle was dreamily contemplating her works of art. She started when Ariel walked in.

“They’ve burnt down our house.”

Stretching her legs, she turned toward him, the defiance already showing in her eyes.

“Fire is cathartic.”

“It was all we had left, Emmanuelle.”