‘…’

‘But at least something must always be happening with you.’

At last she was pulling the blanket of the conversation over to her side. An allusion to her dismal marriage. But she said this with a smile. Irony is often the gateway to despair. For her, the description of my break-up had been evidence of an exciting life. When you aren’t happy, other people’s lives always seem much more interesting; your judgement on such matters is impaired, to say the least. If I’d told her that I had cancer, she would probably have said: ‘Oh, that’s great! At least something’s happening in your body!’ More than ever, I had the feeling that I had entered this woman’s life at a critical moment.

1. 5. She didn’t know that I never give much in the way of physical descriptions of my characters.

18

Now that we’d discussed my love life to Valérie’s satisfaction, it was time to focus on her. But I had to be methodical. I couldn’t just let her give me some vague biographical background and a mishmash of recent emotions. She understood and obediently complied. First of all, I wanted to understand the context of her professional life. She had been working at the Collège Karl-Marx in Villejuif for twelve years now, taking the metro every morning. I had the sense that this relentless routine had gradually worn away her passion for the job, year after year. Her eyes shone when she talked about studying History at university and her early years as a teacher. She wasn’t sure when things had started to go wrong, but she did remember one September the immense weariness she’d felt at the idea of returning to work. That summer had seemed especially brief.

Perhaps her job was simply harder than it had been before? I’d been hearing more and more stories of parents complaining about their children’s schools, sometimes even becoming violent. Teachers were, increasingly, lightning rods for a society in crisis. But Valérie said it was nothing like that. She’d never had any serious problems at work and most of her pupils were attentive and eager to learn. She’d been offered a job in Paris, closer to where she lived, but she’d preferred to stay at the school in Villejuif where everything was familiar and she was happy to follow the progress of her favourite students. So why had she lost her love of teaching?

A few months before this, she’d confided in a colleague, a slightly older woman who taught Spanish at the school and with whom she’d become friends. ‘What you’re feeling is completely normal,’ the woman had told her. ‘All teachers go through this at some point. It’s a job with a fixed calendar: back to school in September, holidays on the same dates … It’s easy to feel like the years are blurring into one, that life has lost its flavour. But you’re the one who has to change that. You could take your students on a school outing, do something different, be innovative …’ Her colleague had been right: Valérie had let the routine suffocate her without even trying to fight it. Yet the truth was that she had quite a lot of freedom. In the end, she’d decided to take her pupils to Auschwitz. That had brought the class together. The children had been transformed by their shared journey into the memory of horror. And yet she vividly remembered feeling haunted by a sense of absolute emptiness as she sat in her hotel room in Krakow that evening. Something was missing in her life, but what it was she didn’t know.