The Oath

On the Monday, at nine o'clock, there were nine of them and they did not know one another.

They had been put in a small room behind the courtroom, with a table, a coffee machine and a window looking onto an inner courtyard where somebody had parked a bicycle. An usher had told them not to wander off. Nobody spoke, except the man in the blazer, number 9, who had already explained to three people that he followed a great many criminal cases and that he had heard about this one.

— I'm telling you, it'll be over quickly.

The woman in the navy cardigan, number 2, said she certainly hoped so.

Étienne looked out of the window. He had a card with a number on it, a pen supplied by the court, a notebook supplied by the court, and a knot in his stomach he could not place.

At twenty past nine they were shown in.

The courtroom was full. That was what he had not expected. The day before there had been forty-two summoned and three lawyers; this morning there were a hundred and fifty people seated, standing along the walls, and a crowd noise that stopped dead when they appeared.

People were looking at the jurors. Étienne understood in three seconds what one looks for in a juror: which way he is going to lean, from his face, his jacket, the way he sits down. They were looking at him the way he looked at a boiler he did not know yet.

In the front row on the right, a woman of sixty-seven, grey cardigan, a handbag flat on her knees, both hands resting on it. She was not looking at the jurors. She was looking at the dock.

The dock was empty.

— The court, said the usher.

Everybody stood. Judge Trénel came in with two associate judges, a woman and a man, and they sat down in a rustle of cloth. Then the judge said: “Bring in the accused.”

Two gendarmes went out through a low door on the left and came back with a man.

Étienne had formed a picture. He had not noticed himself doing it, but he had formed one, out of four lines of newspaper and one word — murder. And the picture did not hold.

Karim Lenoir was a thin man, in a white shirt too big at the collar, with hair cut short by somebody who did not care. He had the colour of people who do not go outside. He climbed into the dock, sat down, put both hands on the rail in front of him and looked at the room, once, from left to right, slowly.

When his eyes passed over the jurors, he did not lower his head.

Étienne did not lower his either, and regretted it immediately, because he then had to hold it two seconds longer than he wanted to.

The man was his own age. That was the only thing he thought, and he could not think it any other way: this man is my age. Thirty-eight, maybe forty. There were four or five years between them, no more, and Étienne had the unpleasant sensation of a mirror set slightly wrong.

— The jury will take the oath, said the judge.

He stood. They all stood.

— Madame Kermarrec.

The small woman in the windcheater got to her feet in the front row of the jury bench and raised her right hand, and from behind Étienne saw her shoulders shaking.

The judge read, slowly, without looking at his papers:

— You swear and promise to examine with the most scrupulous attention the charges brought against Karim Lenoir; to betray neither the interests of the accused, nor those of the society that accuses him, nor those of the victim; to communicate with no one until after your verdict; to listen to neither hatred nor malice, neither fear nor affection; to remember that the accused is presumed innocent and that doubt must work in his favour; to decide according to the charges and the means of defence, following your conscience and your innermost conviction, with the impartiality and the firmness proper to a free and upright man; and to keep the deliberations secret, even after your duties have ended.

He paused.

— Madame Kermarrec, raise your right hand and say: I swear.

— I swear, said a voice that could barely be heard.

— Madame Aubrit.

The judge read it all again. All of it. From the beginning, with the name of the accused, the hatred and the malice, the fear and the affection, the doubt that works in his favour, the secrecy even after the duties have ended.

— I swear.

— Monsieur Delaroche.

He read it all again.

Étienne had assumed it would be a formality, a collective raised hand, three seconds. He understood at the third repetition that it was not, and that it was not a ceremony either: it was a way of putting the words inside nine people one at a time, so that none of them could hide behind the others.

By the fifth reading he had stopped hearing the sentences as sentences.

To communicate with no one. He thought of Karine, in the kitchen, the tea towel over her shoulder. Until after your verdict. Thirteen days. It was not an image, it was not the reticence of a private man: it was a prohibition, he had just understood that, and he was about to swear to it standing in front of a hundred and fifty people.

— Monsieur Mazière.

He raised his right hand.

The judge looked at him and read the whole thing again, for him alone, and Étienne heard every word that time, including the ones he had not heard the first six.

That doubt must work in his favour.

His hand was black in the creases of his fingers. He had scrubbed with workshop soap the evening before, twice, and there was still that dark line in the fold of the first joint, the one that never comes out, the one his wife called his signature. That was what he thought about, in mid-air, hand raised, in front of a full courtroom: his dirty fingers.

— Monsieur Mazière, raise your right hand and say: I swear.

— I swear.

He sat down. His legs were not steady.

Two places along, number 9 took the oath in a clear voice, articulating, the way one recites. Then it was over. The judge sat down and reminded them that jurors were forbidden to express an opinion, to consult the press, to speak about the case, or to take notes anywhere but in the courtroom.

Then he said:

— Monsieur Lenoir, stand up.

The man stood up in the dock.

— You are accused of having, on the night of 14 to 15 November, at Sarnay-les-Bois, wilfully caused the death of Sabrina Gaudin.