My Father's Hard Drive

There were fourteen thousand two hundred files on her father's drive, and not one folder bore a date.

Lucie Aveline noted this at ten past nine on a Thursday evening in March, in her flat in Angers, with the old computer casing sitting on the kitchen table and an adapter she had bought for twelve euros. She had promised her mother she would sort the photographs before handing the machine on to her cousin, who wanted it for his son.

She looked at the folder tree and felt that small professional discouragement she knew so well.

PHOTOS. Then inside: photos. Then inside that: new folder, new folder (2), camera, camera 2, to sort, misc, misc 2, Nathalie wedding, 2008?, holidays, holidays 2, CHRISTMAS.

She spent her working days doing exactly this for the Maine-et-Loire archives: receiving deposits with no inventory, opening boxes whose contents nobody remembered, and making legible what somebody had produced without a second's thought that it would ever be read after them. She was thirty-one, with nine years in the job. Her father had died on the sixth of February.

The phone rang at half past nine.

— Have you plugged it in?

— I've plugged it in, Maman.

— What's on it?

— Fourteen thousand photographs and no filing whatsoever.

Chantal Aveline gave a small laugh through her nose.

— That doesn't surprise me. He photographed everything and never looked at any of it.

— I'll make a selection. Five or six hundred, I'll put them on a stick for you, and I'll archive the rest properly.

— Are you looking at all of them?

— Sorry?

— Are you going to look at all the photographs?

— That's rather the point, said Lucie. You can't sort without looking.

There was a silence of a second and a half, the kind you do not hear at the time.

— Don't wear yourself out, said her mother.

Lucie made tea, switched on a lamp, and began.

She had a method. You do not look at fourteen thousand photographs sentimentally: you go through once in thumbnails, fast, without opening anything, to find the blocks. You note the landmarks — a wedding, a house, a car, a child growing — and you rebuild the chronology afterwards, because file dates always lie. A drive that has been copied three times carries the date of the last copy everywhere.

It is the first thing you learn and the only one the public never believes: a file date is not a date. It is the trace of the last technical act, and nothing else. A digital family collection, taken seriously, is dated the way a paper one is: by what is in the image. A calendar on a wall. A number plate. The length of a child's hair when you know the child. The brand on a cereal packet on a table.

The oldest images were scans of paper prints. Tired colours, crimped edges, faces she knew from the albums.

She worked forward into the nineties.

The Jean-Moulin school fêtes. A house move. The fortnight at the campsite at Saint-Jean-de-Monts in 1998, when she was four and had a red swimming costume. Her grandmother in front of a rose bush. Her father in a vest with a lawnmower.

Then came the June 1996 school fête.

It was an ordinary photograph: a hook-a-duck stall, a trestle table, four children from behind, and beyond them the school yard with paper streamers. Lucie Aveline, two years and two months old, was holding a bamboo rod far too big for her.

She was about to move to the next one when something stopped her.

She went back and enlarged it.

At the back, to the right of the stall, behind the table, there was a woman.

She was not blurred. She was not turned away. She was not doing anything, she was talking to nobody, she was holding nothing. She stood slightly back from the other adults, and she was looking towards the lens.

No: she was looking towards the child with the fishing rod.

Lucie enlarged it further. The grain went dirty. The woman was perhaps thirty-five, dark hair to the shoulders, a grey coat.

She looked for what had caught her, and it took her a while to put into words. In a photograph of a school fête, the adults in the background are doing something: holding a cup, keeping an eye out, talking to someone, looking elsewhere. They belong to the scene. That one did not belong to the scene. She was in it the way somebody stands at a bus stop.

She looked at the picture for a few seconds and thought: another mother from the school.

That is what anybody would have thought.

She carried on. She went through six hundred more, noted three blocks and two false dates, and switched off at half past midnight.

There followed four ordinary evenings. She worked, she came home, she plugged in the drive, she advanced seven or eight hundred photographs, she took notes. She found things that did her good: her father in 1997 in front of a white 205 she had completely forgotten existed, a Christmas where she wore a jumper that itched, her grandmother laughing with her mouth open, which was not like her at all.

She cried twice, properly, as one should when sorting a dead man's belongings, and thought it was as it should be.

The following evening she picked up at the year 2004.

A cousin's first communion, in May, on the church steps at Trélazé. Thirty people in a half-circle, the whole family, her grandmother in the middle with her handbag held in front of her.

In the third row, on the left, there was a woman in a grey coat.

Lucie put down her cup.

She opened the other photograph in a second window and set them side by side on the screen.

1996, school fête. 2004, first communion. Eight years apart, two different places, two unconnected occasions.

The same woman.