Part one

My mother always left a finger’s width of air.

It’s the first thing I remember about her: her hand on the window crank of the old Fiesta, summer and winter, winding the glass down a centimetre before she started the engine. Even in January, on the road to Virton, with frost on the windscreen. “A finger of air, Mathilde. Always.” I never asked why. Even now, at thirty-four, I do it in my own car without thinking.

My mother’s name was Bernadette. She died in May, at sixty-three, of a cancer she had hidden from everyone until it was too late to hide it. That was her all over. She kept things.

Three weeks after the funeral, I went up to clear the attic of her house in Arlon, behind Saint-Martin’s church. Under a pile of First Communion tablecloths, there was a shoebox. Women’s ankle boots, size 38, a brand that doesn’t exist any more. Inside were envelopes. Birthday card envelopes, all addressed to me.

There were thirty-one of them. Not one had ever been opened.

I need to explain something about my father. I don’t know him.

His name is Yves. He left when I was three and a half, one summer, and he never came back. Not a phone call. Not a letter. Not a card. That’s what my mother told me, the only time she agreed to talk about it, when I was eight.

“He’s gone, Mathilde. He won’t be coming back. It’s not your fault.”

It’s the last sentence I remember most. I hadn’t asked her if it was my fault. She said it anyway.

At school, I said my father was dead. It was simpler. When I was twelve, after a row with my mother about I can’t remember what, I shouted in the kitchen: “I never want to hear about him again! Never! He walked out on us!” She put down the sponge. She looked at me for a long time. And she said: “All right.”

She kept her word. Twenty-two years. Yves’s name was never spoken in that house again.

I emptied the box onto the attic floor, under the skylight.

The envelopes were in order. One a year. All with a Belgian stamp, all with the Virton postmark, thirty kilometres away. All posted at the beginning of February, just before my birthday on the 9th. The oldest one had yellowed paper and a stamp in Belgian francs. The most recent had been posted on 3 February.

This year.

Three months before my mother died.

I counted again. Thirty-one. From my fourth birthday to my thirty-fourth. Not a single year was missing. On every envelope, the same slanting, slightly shaky handwriting: “Miss Mathilde Gérard”. And on the back, the same return address, in a little street behind the main square in Virton.

My father hadn’t gone to the other side of the world. He was thirty kilometres away. For thirty-one years.

And my mother had received those cards, one by one, and put them away in a shoebox, without ever opening them, without ever giving them to me.

I sat down on the floor. I wanted to scream, and the only person I could have screamed at had been in the cemetery for three weeks.

I opened the first one. The one for my fourth birthday.

A card with a teddy bear and a red balloon. Inside, a few lines in the same handwriting, less shaky back then:

“Happy birthday, my Mathilde. You’re four. I won’t be there. It isn’t because I don’t love you. It’s because I do. Daddy.”

I read it ten times. I didn’t understand. How do you leave because you love someone? It was a coward’s line. The kind of thing you write to make yourself look good.

I didn’t open the others. I don’t know why. I was afraid, I think, of finding the same excuse thirty times over.

I put the box on the passenger seat. I took the road to Virton. Half an hour through the woods of the Gaume, in a fine rain. At one point I realised I had wound the window down a centimetre. Like her.

I nearly turned back three times.

I thought of all the times I had needed a father. The day I fell off the playground wall in the third year of primary school and it was my friend Margaux’s dad who carried me to the sick bay. The day of my driving test, failed twice. The day I signed the lease on my first flat, alone, with my mother pretending not to cry in the corridor of the letting agency. Every time, I’d told myself: he doesn’t care. He doesn’t even know I exist.

And he was there. Thirty kilometres away. With my address. With my birthday, which he hadn’t forgotten once in thirty-one years.

The street was narrow and steep, with yellow stone houses huddled close together. At the number on the envelopes, there was a little house with green shutters and two geraniums in the window. On the letterbox, a handwritten name: “Y. Gérard”.

I sat in the car for ten minutes. I rehearsed what I would say. “I’m your daughter.” No. “You don’t know me.” No, not that either. “Why?” Maybe just that.

A neighbour came out with a dog and looked at me a little too long. I pretended to be looking for something in my bag.

I rang the bell.

I heard slow footsteps, a walking stick perhaps, on a tiled floor. The door opened. A man of about seventy, thin, in a grey cardigan buttoned all the way up, and with my eyes. Exactly my eyes.

He didn’t ask who I was. He just said, very quietly:

“Mathilde.”

And behind him, in the hallway, on the wall, I saw a framed photo.

It was me. At six. My class photo from the first year of primary school, at the village school in Arlon, wearing the yellow jumper my mother had knitted for me.

Next to it there was another one. Then another. Then another.