BACKUP 2

On the Saturday morning she did what she should have done the first evening: she mapped it.

It is the first rule of the trade, and she had broken it because it was her father. You do not open a collection in the middle. You begin by recording what is there, how much of it there is, and how it is organised — even when it is not organised, above all when it is not organised, because a person's disorder is already information.

She plugged in the drive, opened a spreadsheet, and listed the root.

There were three folders.

PHOTOS, 11,204 files, 62 gigabytes.

BACKUP, 2,841 files, 9 gigabytes.

BACKUP 2, 162 files, 400 megabytes.

She opened the first and spent an hour recording its structure.

She opened the second: it was a partial copy of the first, plus some thirty administrative documents, scanned bank statements, an insurance certificate, two prescriptions.

She looked at the third in the left-hand column. BACKUP 2. She expanded it with one click: it contained a folder called docs, a folder called misc, and a configuration file for a backup program installed in 2004 and never uninstalled.

She noted in her spreadsheet, on line 3: BACKUP 2 — 162 files — backup duplicates, to be checked at the end of the sort.

And she moved on to something else, because she was looking for family photographs and that folder was not one.

It was a thing she explained to the trainees, twice a year, in the sorting room at the service: what loses you is not what somebody hides from you. It is what somebody has named badly. She said it, she believed it, and she did it anyway.

She went back to the photographs and picked up her search where she had left it.

Because it was no longer a matter of sorting.

She had spent the Friday night not sleeping, and at four in the morning she had admitted what was keeping her awake: it was not the woman. It was the idea that there might be a third one.

She set to it on the Saturday after lunch, with the drive plugged in and the shutters pulled because of the glare on the screen.

Eleven thousand photographs is thirty years of somebody's life. Two thirds of them could teach her nothing: interiors, still lifes, building-site shots, four hundred pictures of a garage wall taken for reasons nobody would ever know. She ran them past without seeing them, the way you turn over a pack of cards.

What she was looking for was not a face. In the background of a family photograph a face is not forty pixels high: it cannot be recognised, only guessed at. It is the first thing you learn working on old collections — you do not identify people at a distance, you identify their position.

So she looked for a position.

She found it again on the Saturday evening, on a school pick-up from September 1999, before she had enlarged anything at all. Not the face: the way of standing. The body turned a quarter to the left, in a street where everybody is looking at the camera or at their child. Somebody who is there, who is not passing through, and who is not looking at what the others are looking at.

It took her two minutes to find the 2001 wedding again, and to see that it was the same stance. Except that in 2001 the woman is at the edge of the frame, half cut off by the margin, and she is still looking in the same direction.

After that, she stopped sorting files.

She spent the rest of the weekend looking for that presence, and it is a different kind of work: you no longer look at the image, you look around the people you know.

By the Sunday evening she had four more.

September 1999, school pick-up, rue Pasteur. The woman is on the other side of the street, outside a baker's.

July 2001, a cousin's wedding, at Champtoceaux. She is in the group photograph, right at the edge, on the right, half cut off.

May 2004, the first communion.

April 2007, the Trélazé bric-à-brac fair. She is standing behind a stall of crockery, and she is looking towards the left of the frame, where Lucie, thirteen years old, is eating a waffle.

She printed the four on the printer in the living room, on A4, and laid them side by side on the table.

Grey coat. Dark hair. She was not smiling in any of them. She was talking to nobody in any of them. She was never in the foreground, never in the centre, and yet she was never hidden either: every time, you could see her face.

Lucie sat down in front of the four sheets and did what she always did in front of a collection: she looked for what they had in common.

A school fête, a school pick-up, a wedding, a first communion, a bric-à-brac fair.

They were not places. They were not dates. They were not even the same people: at the Champtoceaux wedding there had been a hundred and thirty guests, half of whom Lucie did not know.

One single thing linked those five images, and it took her twenty minutes to see it because it was too obvious.

In all five, there was her.

Lucie Aveline at two, at five, at seven, at ten, at thirteen.

She stayed in front of the table. Then she got up, went as far as the window, came back, and turned the four sheets face down on the wood, which was an idiotic gesture and which she made all the same.

She slept badly and woke with a sentence fully formed, of the kind you manufacture in your sleep: you are looking for an intruder, and an intruder does not put herself in the frame.

On the Monday, at the service, she waited for the ten o'clock break to go and see Karim Belaïd in the restoration workshop.

— I need an eye.

— An eye on what?

— On some family photographs.

Karim put down his scalpel and took off his gloves.

— Lucie, he said, you are the most comfortable person with a photograph I know. If you come and ask me for an eye, it is because you have already seen something and you want somebody else to see it too.

— Yes.

— Then show me.