Nothing about Freddy Moliger was pleasant, but very soon Malinka couldn’t imagine doing without the feeling of her own nature being revealed, which only Freddy Moliger’s face and stories could bring her.
Not that he offered it, not that it was anything like a gift. But, though he didn’t know it, he was showing her the way into her own secrets. Oh, it wasn’t pretty, and sometimes she thought she’d never find peace again, but she wouldn’t have traded that pain for all the serenity of the life she lived before, when Richard Rivière was still with her.
Freddy Moliger was there, sitting on a chair in the kitchen with a cup of milky coffee she’d made him. She stood leaning against the sink and saw him enjoying that coffee, adding some sugar, a little more milk, exacting and sullen at the same time, feigning disdain, as if afraid that any sign it was good would summon someone to snatch away the cup, to punish him for enjoying himself when he didn’t deserve to.
Now, in bits and pieces, he was telling her that the police had come to arrest him and his brother. Though younger than he, Christopher put up an arrogant and defiant front while he himself trembled in terror, to such a degree that the police ended up letting them go, he said, so clearly finding all this coherent that she didn’t dare ask him to explain. So they left the police station, and Christopher wanted to go and play by the railway line. They were in no hurry to get back to their foster homes, especially Freddy, whose family beat him, whereas Christopher never let anyone lay a hand on him. And then, as he was crossing the tracks, Christopher was crushed by a train. Freddy ran away as fast as his legs could carry him, he ran through the farm fields and into the little woods where there wasn’t even a path, not going for help but because he was half out of his head, half out of his head, he said again in his piercing but still unemotional voice.
He took a sip of coffee and held the liquid in his mouth for a few seconds, lips thrust out. His eyes reddened. Malinka turned towards the sink, rinsed a glass.
A few years after that Freddy Moliger was in prison again, briefly, because he hadn’t actually done anything wrong, but he was too young, and prison messed him up, he said coldly, as if stating a general rule. Then he got married and his wife had a baby, a girl, but she met another man and disappeared one day out of the blue, taking the baby with her, meaning that Freddy Moliger never really knew the child, so to speak, which still pained him to this day. He once tried to see his daughter, when she was little, but she lived far away with her mother and the guy, and Freddy Moliger couldn’t afford the trip. And he had a feeling the mother was trying to turn the child against him, so he would leave them in peace, so they would be rid of Freddy Moliger.
That’s how it was. He had also forgotten the name of the village where Christopher was buried, and that too saddened him deeply, he would have liked to put flowers on the grave now and then. But as always the problem was money, because cars and trains were expensive. Not to mention, he concluded with a terse little laugh, that he would have to remember the name of that damn village. He’d recently asked his mother, but she couldn’t remember it either, assuming she ever knew. With all this he began to drink pretty heavily, and that’s where he stood now, but his life was no worse than before. He thought things were looking up for him. Once in a while he did some work for a local farmer, in the vineyards, or picking vegetables in the summertime. He shared a flat with two or three friends, and in the end everything was fine, except that on a sheet with his signature at the bottom he’d written that he wanted to be buried alongside his brother and didn’t know where the grave was, and that got to him.
He was thirty-four years old, he told her, and he knew he looked fifty but didn’t care. He had a slight limp, the result of a fierce thrashing by his father twenty-five years before, and that didn’t bother him either, it never got in his way or stopped him doing what he had to.
Here he snickered, as if he’d cracked a good joke. And all at once Malinka realised that he had to struggle constantly against howling rage, and that, if she herself had always refrained from judging others’ acts because she was guilty of a perpetual, on-going crime against the servant, what kept Freddy Moliger from accusing anyone was rooted less in personal, spontaneous stoicism than in the fear of seeing his anger’s terrible face come to life.
She took him to meet the servant just two days after they met. “Do you want to come with me to my mother’s?” she’d asked him,
holding her breath.
“Of course,” he said, surprised, happy.
She had not yet taken Freddy Moliger’s face in her hands, and
she was surprised to see a stranger’s face when she looked at him.
She was no less surprised by the importance that face had taken on
in her life, that stranger’s face she had to work to remember when
he was not around.
And yet she wanted him to see the servant, and she wanted her
to be introduced to someone by Malinka for the first time before she
touched and caressed his skin.
In her eagerness to give her mother the gift that was Freddy
Moliger, and to hear him call her Malinka in front of the servant as
if no Clarisse Rivière had ever existed, she ignored the Tuesday rule,
just this once, and took the train to Bordeaux on a Sunday, with
Freddy Moliger at her side.
Malinka’s mother opened the door suspiciously. Tufts of hair
stuck straight out of her tight chignon, the zip of her jeans was only
halfway up.
When she was expecting her daughter, she always came to the
door impeccably dressed, not a hair out of place, thought Malinka
in a sudden wave of sadness.
The servant gave Freddy Moliger a silent, unblinking stare. “This is Freddy,” said Malinka.
He embraced the servant as naturally as could be.
“Your daughter looks just like you, madame,” he said, in a voice
even more strident than usual.
The servant’s face didn’t trouble him at all, and Malinka was so
grateful that she impulsively caressed his cheek. Freddy Moliger gave
her a pleased smile.
He stepped into the room and exclaimed over the curios decorating
her shelves, a thousand porcelain trinkets, mostly animals, cherubs,
or shepherdesses, which Malinka’s mother spent hours arranging
and rearranging, their placement governed by secret affinities. The servant stepped towards him cautiously, as she would a
slightly dangerous dog. But her eyes shone with pleasure when she
began telling Freddy Moliger the source of each object, and why
she preferred this one to that, and he urged her on with lively
questions.
Freddy Moliger was dressed in a pale green short-sleeved shirt
and beige twill trousers. He’d plastered back his dead-grass hair, and