Chapter 1

Who Are You?

I'm going to tell it all in order, and I won't lie. I don't promise to tell everything.

First there was a sound. A steady beep, very far away, like a drop of water falling into a metal bucket. Then a second one, keeping a different rhythm. Then a mechanical breath, the sigh of a bellows, somewhere to my left, which stopped dead, and whose silence frightened me more than the noise.

My throat was raw. That was the first thing my body told me, before it had even told me I had a body: someone had run sandpaper down my throat, top to bottom, and left it there. I wanted to swallow, and I couldn't.

Then there was a hand.

It was holding mine. It was warm, a little dry, with rough skin around the nails, and it squeezed without crushing, with the regularity of someone counting. I felt it before I opened my eyes. And with the hand came a smell, reaching me through the disinfectant, the plastic and the taste of iron in my mouth: orange blossom. Faint. The smell of Sunday pastries, of summers at my grandmother's, in Puglia.

“Stay with me, Inès,” said a woman's voice. “Stay with me.”

My heart bolted on the screen. I heard the beeps quicken, jostle, climb like a car alarm, and the hand holding mine stiffened for a second before it relaxed.

“It's normal,” the voice said, louder, to someone else. “She's waking up. It's always like this when they wake up.”

I opened my eyes.

The ceiling was white, with a stained tile above the door, a yellow ring shaped like a dog's head. To my left, a screen full of green curves and red numbers. To my right, a drip stand hung with clear bags emptying drop by drop into a tube, and the tube ended under a dressing, in the crook of my elbow.

And at the side of the bed, a nurse.

She was blonde, her hair pulled back in a low bun, with loose strands curling at the nape of her neck. Thirty-five, maybe a little older. A tired, gentle face, with violet shadows under the eyes, the kind of shadows one night's sleep no longer shifts. Pale blue scrubs. A badge pinned to her chest, laminated, with only a first name: Maud.

She was still holding my hand.

“Hello, Inès,” she said. “You're in hospital. In intensive care, at Godinne. You've had an accident. You won't be able to talk straight away, we've just taken the tube out, and your throat's going to hurt for a few days. Don't try to talk. Squeeze my hand if you can hear me.”

I squeezed her hand.

She smiled, a smile that didn't reach her eyes. I looked at her eyes. She lowered them to the screen, then to the drip bags, and she let go of my hand to adjust the dial on one of the tubes. My heart was still pounding. I heard every beat twice: once in my chest, once on the screen, with a slight delay, like simultaneous interpreting.

That's my job, simultaneous interpreting. I didn't say so. I couldn't say anything.

“I'll let the doctor know,” she said. “And your family. We've been waiting for you to wake up. It's been eight days, Inès.”

She went out. The orange blossom lingered for a while after her, above the bed, then the ventilation carried it off, and there was nothing left but disinfectant.

I closed my eyes. I counted. It took my heart several minutes to come back down.

The doctor's name was Wauters. He was tall, bald, with glasses pushed up on his forehead and a voice used to delivering bad news with the same courtesy as good. He asked me to follow his finger with my eyes. I followed it. He asked me to squeeze both his hands at once. I squeezed them. The whole left side of my body was a single bruise in the shape of a seat belt.

“Very good,” he said. “Really very good. You've been lucky, Mrs Delvaux.”

I tried to answer. My voice came out like gravel, and I stopped.

“Don't force it. One syllable at a time. Do you know where you are?”

“Hospital,” I said.

“Very good. Do you know what day it is?”

I shook my head. That was true. I had known what day it was when I closed my eyes, and I had just learned that I'd slept for eight days. I couldn't do the sum, not yet, not with that throat and that taste of iron.

“It's Monday,” said Wauters. “The 28th of September. It doesn't mean anything to you, that's normal. Waking up after sedation is a fog. Things will come back gradually.”

He noted something on a tablet. Behind him, the door opened.

A man came in.

He was tall, taller than the doctor, his shoulders slightly hunched as if he spent his life ducking under things that were too low. A grey crew-neck jumper with a hole at the elbow. Jeans with dried earth on the knees. Dark hair that was too long, uncombed, and several days of stubble. He had the hands of someone who works outdoors: broad, chapped, with broken nails and a recent cut on the thumb that hadn't healed well.

He stopped in the doorway. He looked at me. Then he crossed the room in three strides and knelt at the side of the bed, so fast that Wauters had to step back, and he took my right hand in both of his. He said nothing. He rested his forehead on our three hands, and he wept.

He wept without a sound. Only his shoulders, jerking, and the damp warmth of his forehead against my fingers. He made no attempt to hide it. It was the hardest thing I watched that day.

I watched it to the end.

When he raised his head, his eyes were red and his face was wet, and he was smiling. He said my name under his breath, on two notes, like the name of someone you thought you'd lost in a crowd.

“Inès.”

I didn't answer.

Wauters cleared his throat. He leaned towards me, gently, with a caution I didn't like, because it was already a conclusion.

“Mrs Delvaux,” he said. “Do you know who this gentleman is?”

The gentleman — that was Wauters's word — stopped smiling. He didn't let go of my hand. I felt his fingers tighten, imperceptibly, the way you grip a banister when you feel the next step give way.

I looked at his face. I looked at his hands. I looked at the jumper with the hole at the elbow, and the earth on the knees.

“Who are you?” I said.

My voice was a rasp, but it carried. It carried to the far end of the room, to the nurse who had just come back and was standing by the door, a tray in her hands. She froze.

No one spoke for a moment. The screen went on beeping. The bellows in the next room sighed through the partition.

“I see,” said Wauters. “It's nothing serious. Don't worry. We'll take this gently. Can you tell me your name?”

“Inès.”

“Inès what?”

“Marchal.”

The gentleman closed his eyes.

“Very good,” said Wauters, in the same voice as before, the good-news voice. “Do you know what you do for a living?”

“Interpreter. At the courts. In Namur.”

“Very good. Do you know how old you are?”

I thought about it. I took the time to think about it, and the whole room waited with me.

“Twenty-nine.”

Wauters wrote. The nurse, by the door, set her tray down on the trolley, slowly, without a sound.

“And the last thing you have in your head,” said Wauters, “the last thing that's really clear, what would that be?”

“July,” I said. “The floods. The television, at my place. The houses in Pepinster under water.”

“July of which year?”

“2021.”

The gentleman opened his eyes again. He looked at me the way you look at a letter you can't read, written in a language you thought you knew.

“Inès,” said Wauters gently. “It's 2026.”

I looked at the ceiling. The yellow stain shaped like a dog's head. I waited for the beeps on the screen to calm down, and they did, because this time my heart was beating very slowly, very evenly, like the heart of someone asleep.

“I don't remember anything,” I said.

Afterwards everyone talked at once, but quietly, in that voice people use around a bed. Wauters said the words “confusion”, “sedation”, “very common”, “wait a few days”, “follow-up scan”. The nurse checked a drip she had already checked. She didn't look at me again. I looked at her, every time she crossed my field of vision, and she crossed it often.

The gentleman said nothing. He had stayed on his knees. Wauters touched his shoulder and told him he could stay, but not too long, that I needed to rest. He nodded without taking his eyes off my face.

Then they left us alone, with the screen and the bellows behind the partition.

He sat down on the plastic chair beside the bed. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and looked at his own hands for a long moment, as if searching them for instructions. Then he raised his left hand and held it out to me, palm down, open, fingers slightly spread, so that I could see.

On his ring finger there was a wedding ring. A plain band of yellow gold, a little scratched, a little too tight on a finger that had thickened from work.

“I'm your husband,” he said. “Antoine. We've been married for four years.”

He had said “votre”, the formal word for “your”. He heard himself say it, and he winced briefly, as if the word had cut his tongue.

I made no reply. I looked down at the sheet, at my two hands lying on it, the right one with the cannula dressing, the left one covered in yellow and purple bruises up to the wrist.

My left hand was bare.

There was no wedding ring. Under the bruises, at the base of the ring finger, there was only a band of paler skin, slightly hollowed, where a ring had been tight for years. A damaged hand on a white sheet.

No one in the room asked the question.