Thirteen Days

He told Bruno the next morning, at a quarter to seven, over coffee from the machine that had been making an end-of-the-world noise for four years.

Bruno read the letter all the way through, slowly, which was not like him.

— Thirteen days.

— Thirteen days.

— In September.

— Yes.

Bruno put the sheet back down on the bench, on a smear of grease, which made a ring at once. He drank his coffee. He looked at the planner, the real one, the one on the wall with the coloured magnets, because neither of them ever updated the one on the computer.

— Can't you get out of it?

— There are grounds. Over seventy, illness, already serving on another jury. There's no “I've got work”.

— Obviously there's no “I've got work”. There'd be nobody left.

That was exactly it, and they both understood it at the same moment, and it helped neither of them.

They did the sums at midday, on the corner of the table, with the calculator on the phone.

A day of Étienne's on a job was between four hundred and twenty and five hundred euros of turnover. The juror's session allowance he had looked up that morning: ninety-eight euros and forty cents per day of hearing, plus a meal and mileage. He had read it twice because he thought there was a decimal point missing.

— They pay you ninety-eight euros to send a man down, said Bruno.

— They don't pay me for that. It's an allowance. It isn't a wage.

— Explain the difference to me when the van has to be paid for.

There was no difference when the van had to be paid for. Étienne still insisted that the word be the right one, and he could not have said why.

They moved what could be moved. The bakery would come first, they would bring the strip-out forward to the 8th. The service visits Bruno would take on his own, which meant fourteen extra calls over three weeks, at two a day when everything goes well, and it never happens that everything goes well. Charlot's job, they were going to have to warn him. Charlot would not be pleased, Charlot was never pleased, and he had been a good customer for twelve years, which is a thing you do not replace in September.

— You want to know what I think, said Bruno, closing the folder. It's doable. It isn't pleasant, but it's doable. What bothers me isn't the thirteen days.

— What is it?

— It's that you'll come back strange.

Étienne laughed. Bruno did not.

— My brother-in-law did it, in Limoges. Something to do with a little girl. He still talks about it. He never talks about it, in fact, that's what I mean. Eight years, and he never talks about it, and we all know it's there.

He picked his gloves up off the bench.

— Anyway. You'll tell me about it.

— I don't think we're allowed.

— To talk about it?

— I don't think so, no.

Bruno shrugged, went out, and the workshop door made its workshop-door noise, that clang of sheet metal that cannot be adjusted.

That evening, Étienne told Karine he had been summoned as a juror.

He said it at the end of the meal, standing up, which was the wrong way and he knew it as he was doing it. Karine laid her hand flat on the table.

— How long have you had this letter?

— It came during the week.

— How long have you had it?

— Thursday.

It was Saturday.

She did not shout. Karine did not shout; she tidied. She cleared the entire table in four trips while he stood beside his chair, and when she had finished she turned round with the tea towel over her shoulder.

— You're going to judge someone.

— With eleven others.

— But you're going to judge someone.

— Yes.

She nodded, twice, the way you do when you take a measurement and commit it to memory.

— You could have told me on Thursday.

— I wanted to see Bruno first.

— No, she said.

And she left the kitchen without adding anything, because she was right and they both knew it.

He stayed downstairs on his own. The house was making its evening noises, the water heater, the fridge, Théo talking to somebody in his room. Étienne picked up his phone.

He was under no prohibition. He had sworn nothing, signed nothing, he had not even been drawn yet: he was a name on a list of forty-two. He still felt strange typing the words, the way you feel looking in at the window of a house that is not yours.

karim l canal sarnay

There were twelve pages of it.

The first article was four years old, almost to the day. A woman of thirty-five found one November morning beside the lateral canal, on the edge of Sarnay-les-Bois, some sixty metres from her car. Home help. A nine-year-old daughter. The next day there was a photograph of barriers and gendarmes in the rain, and the day after that nothing for three months.

Then a custody. Then charges. Then silence, for a long time, the particular silence of cases that turn into files.

And last year, in four lines in the county paper: sentenced to eighteen years' imprisonment.

Étienne read the line three times.

Eighteen years. It was done. It was judged. For one whole second he felt the plain relief of a man who learns that the work has already been carried out by somebody else.

Then he saw the last line of the article, the one in smaller type.

The convicted man, who has always denied the charge, has lodged an appeal.