Seventeen Minutes Past Two

The telephone rang at seventeen minutes past two.

Mathieu Kerbrat was not asleep. He had not slept for ninety-one days, not in the sense people mean by it: he slept in stretches of forty minutes, between eleven and five, and he now knew his bedroom ceiling better than the faces of his pupils.

He picked the phone up off the bedside table.

The screen said Number withheld and, beneath it, the time.

02:17

He stared at those four digits for a second, and his body knew before he did: his forearms went cold, and his heart began to knock as though he had just climbed four flights of stairs.

There was one two-seventeen in his life. One. On the fifteenth of November 2009, at seventeen minutes past two in the morning, Élise had called him after five weeks apart and said seven words.

They had separated at the beginning of October for a reason which, sixteen years later, seemed to him both serious and impossible to locate — something about a flat, a town, a job she would not leave. He had slept five weeks on a colleague's sofa. He was twenty-eight and convinced it was over.

The phone had rung in the middle of the night. He had seen her name. He had answered sitting up on a sofa bed, in the dark, in somebody else's home.

She had said: “I am staying. Don't ask me why.”

And she had hung up.

They had never parted again, and they had never spoken of that night, nor of the reason, nor of the seven words.

Nobody in the world knew that time. He had never told a soul, not his sister, not the psychologist he had seen three times in February.

He answered.

— Hello?

There was nothing.

Not a breath, not a crackle, not a sound of breathing. A clean silence, the silence of an open line.

— Hello? Who is this?

Nothing.

He sat up in bed, put on the lamp, and looked at the screen to check the call was still running. It was. The counter was moving. Eleven seconds. Twelve.

— Look, he said, if this is a wrong number—

There was a beep.

A short, high beep — the beep of an old answering machine, the kind you used to hear on cassette telephones, and which exists nowhere any more.

And then, in his ear, in his bedroom, at seventeen minutes past two in the morning, there was Élise's voice.

— Mathieu.

He did not move.

He did not shout, he did not drop the phone, he did none of the things he would have imagined doing. He sat in his bed, his hand clamped round the handset, and listened the way you listen when you are afraid of missing a word.

— Mathieu, it's me.

It was not an impersonation. He had known that voice for twenty years. He knew the way she attacked his name, barely pressing on the second syllable. He knew the small catch in her throat at the start of a sentence, the one she never heard herself and which he used to tease her about.

— I don't know when you're listening to this, said the voice. I hope it's as late as possible.

He closed his eyes.

— Listen carefully, because I'm not going to be long and because you're going to want to hang up.

A pause.

— Don't sell the house.

Mathieu opened his mouth and said nothing, because he had understood in a fraction of a second that there was no point in speaking.

— I know you're going to sell it. I know because I know you, and I know exactly what you do when you're not all right: you tidy. You'll have done the cupboards in a week, and after that there'll only be the house left to tidy.

The nineteenth of January. Ten days after. He had signed the agency papers on a Monday morning before lessons.

— Don't sell it, the voice said again. Not yet. Not before you've done what I'm going to ask you.

A silence of two seconds.

— In the bedroom. Behind the headboard. The wall.

Mathieu turned his head and looked at the wall behind him. A plastered wall, painted off-white, with a socket and a switch for the bedside lamp.

— Open the wall behind our bed.

He waited for the rest.

There was no rest.

The voice stopped, there were three seconds of nothing, then a click, and the line was cut.

Mathieu looked at the screen. Call ended — 58 seconds.

He sat in his bed, the lamp on, at eighteen minutes past two in the morning, with a warm telephone in his hand.

He ran through the fifty-eight seconds in his head, in order, twice, because he already knew he would spend the coming days trying to remember exactly, and that a memory you do not fix within five minutes will deform.

Silence: twelve seconds. Beep. “Mathieu.” Pause. “Mathieu, it's me.” Then the house, then the wall.

Twelve seconds of silence before the beep. It was the one detail that fitted nothing, and he noted it the way a pupil notes a figure he does not yet know what to do with.

Then he did what anybody would have done: he called back.

He went to the call log, selected the top line, and pressed.

The phone answered him, in small grey letters: Cannot return a withheld number.

He tried three times.

Then he stood in the middle of the bedroom, barefoot on the cold floor, looking at an off-white wall behind a headboard.

His wife had died on the ninth of January. It was the eleventh of April.