Viviane

Начало книги

The child is twelve weeks old, and her breathing lulls you with the calm, even rhythm of a metronome. The two of you are sitting in a rocking chair in the middle of an essentially empty room. The boxes stacked up by the movers line the wall on the right. Three of them, at the top of the pile, have been opened to obtain the most urgently needed items: kitchen utensils, toiletries, some clothing, and the baby’s things, which outnumber yours. The window has no curtain. It seems tacked onto the wall like a sketch, a pure study in perspective, in which the railway tracks and overhead wires streaking away from the Gare de l’Est would provide the vanishing lines.

You are not entirely sure, but it seems to you that four or five hours ago, you did something that you shouldn’t have. You try to recall what you did, to reconstruct the sequence of your actions, but whenever you remember something, instead of automatically calling the next action to mind, it stumbles into the hole your memory has become.

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