Anouk.

 Divonne, France, 1952.    

 

Anouk.

 

     Old houses like this are deafening to the ears of a woman like Anouk Bessette. The decades of families, fights, death and children smear the walls and waft up from the floors. The lives of people past resonate like a hundred grandfather clocks in the old narrow hallway, striking 12.

 

    Anouk walked through the doorway of the old Bessette home and stopped, laying her hands on the doorframe where she stood. She tread lightly into the house, looking, smelling, touching. Laurent followed, arms folded over his chest. The arches of this old place stood grand and gentle overhead. Everything was dusty, the wooden surfaces covered in a soft film of grey. The floorboards beneath her creaked, permeating the eerie silence. Ben Bessette was everywhere.

     Anouk never really knew Ben Bessette. He had died six years ago, two years after the death of his two sons. Marie, Ben’s wife, had died in 1923 when their second son Donatien was born. She was here too. Not as prominently as Ben, but surely she was, as were their two boys. Anouk could feel Frederic here too, but then, she could always feel Frederic.

     She went through the hallway towards the bedrooms. The master bedroom where Ben had slept for thirty-five years. Past one smaller room with two beds in it. Approaching this doorway, Anouk’s ears rang like the echo of a steam-train. She stepped in and knelt by Frederic’s childhood bed. She lay her hands on the worn mattress and rusty frame, breathing his dust. She turned to Donatien’s bed and felt Frederic’s anger rise in her throat. His pain at losing his brother was immense. This pain of loss had become such a part of him in the last year of his life that, now that he was gone, she carried it with her. Laurent, their son, carried it with him too. It was probably a blessing in disguise that they had never conceived another child. Laurent was an angry boy. He didn’t have many friends and would not have been a good brother, at least not now in these volatile adolescent years. That, or he’d have been protective to the point of violent as Frederic had been over Donatien. Frederic, at twelve, had knocked three older boys out cold when he caught them teasing his younger brother after he’d fallen off his bike and ripped a hole in his pants. Ben scolded him in the presence of the other boys’ parents for such misconduct, but patted his back in private. Ben instilled a great sense of pride in his boys and was heartened to see it demonstrated with such vigour. 

     Anouk kissed the tips of her fingers and swept them through the dust of Frederic’s bed, stood and walked slowly out of the room. She walked back down the corridor to the kitchen. She wiped clean the window to the back garden where Laurent was kicking up dirt in boredom.

    “Laurent?”

    “Mmm?”

    “ Come in here. I want you to see your father’s room.”

Laurent made his way up the overgrown path, bobbing his head in obedience. He was rarely angry towards his mother. Letters and hazy memories of his father had always told him to be good to her. That he was to respect her and be kind to her. Apart from Frederic’s pride, he loved Anouk desperately and always showed it in the way that he was, not so much in the things he said. Laurent looked more and more like him every day.

     Even though he had lived most of his life in France, Anouk had made sure Laurent was well educated in English (much to the disapproval of his grandfather) convinced that it would serve him well to speak the language. He still had a prevalent French accent, however.

     “It’s dusty, Mama, it’s making me cough.”

     “You’ll be all right, amor, come, this is where your father slept.”

Back in the room, Anouk’s ears filled with the incessant ringing of her husband and seeing Laurent by his bed almost reduced her to tears.

    “He’s… Frederic… he’s there. He was, I mean. He was there.” Laurent nodded to the bed on the right and walked over to it. He sat on it and coughed as the dust rose up into his eyes and nostrils. “Mama, I feel sick.”

Anouk sat by him on the bed.

     “Where?”

     “Here.”

Laurent put his hand just below his ribcage and moved it up towards his heart.

     “Laurent, can you hear anything?

     “Hear what, Ma?”

     “Anything?”

     “No. Buzzing… a little… no. My chest, Ma, it hurts.”

     “Can you… see anything?”

     “Qua?”

Anouk shook her head dismissively and looked from her son to Donatien’s bed where Donatien and Frederic sat, watching them.