The Other Story Read online

  “According to the new governmental laws, French citizens with parents born in other countries now have to prove they are French.”

  Nicolas gaped.

  “I’ve never heard of this law! I was born in France, madame, right here, at the Saint-Vincent de Paul hospital. I am French, and have been French all my life.”

  “I’m afraid that being born in France is no longer a reason for being automatically French, monsieur.” The woman handed him a square of paper. “In the past couple of years, jurisdiction has been tightened on cases like yours. Those with parents born abroad. You are not the only one in this situation. You need to go to this address, the Pôle de la nationalité française, in the thirteenth arrondissement. They will study your dossier, and if they decide you can be French, they will deliver a certificate. This is called a ‘certificate of French nationality.’ It is the only way for you to obtain your passport. This may take several months.”

  Nicolas felt his jaw drop. “How on earth do I prove I am French?”

  “Call the Pôle and bring in the data they need.”

  “And if I’m not French, than what am I?”

  “Stateless, monsieur. Apatride.”

  Nicolas left the town hall in a daze, went home to Delphine’s apartment. He searched the Internet for governmental laws concerning French citizens with French parents born abroad. He discovered, to his consternation, that these laws had been recently toughened. Thousands of people all over the country were enduring the same trauma. How had he not heard of this? Fascinated, appalled, he read several interviews with famous writers, singers, and actors who were having to go through the Kafkaesque and humiliating procedure of proving they were indeed French. Many had denounced the entire process and had severely criticized the government.

  Nicolas finally summoned up enough courage to call the dreaded Pôle de la nationalité française, where he was put on hold, listening to “Spring” from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons over and over again, till he felt nauseous. At last, a female voice was heard, indifferent, unsympathetic. He was told to go to the Pôle in three weeks’ time, on Tuesday morning at eleven, with his parents’ birth certificates.

  “But both my parents are French, even if they were born abroad!” said Nicolas plaintively.

  The woman clicked her tongue. “There is a doubt concerning your nationality, monsieur. You must now prove that you’re French.” (Nicolas later told François and Lara, over a glass of wine, that this whole affair felt like a tasteless joke, as if France had reverted to her Vichy years. He told them about what he had learned online, relating the numerous articles, and the negative image this was giving France around the world. François had asked why his father had been born in Russia; Nicolas believed it was because his grandfather had taken his grandmother on a trip there when she was pregnant and she had unexpectedly given birth to his dad in Saint Petersburg.)

  How was he supposed to get a hold of his parents’ birth certificates, given they had not been born in France? Nicolas was informed by the charmless lady at the Pôle that French citizens in that precise situation obtained their birth certificates through the central service of the Registry Office in Nantes. Thankfully, this could be done online. Nicolas filled in the forms, specified he was the son of the late Théodore Duhamel and Emma Duhamel, née Van der Vleuten, explaining that he needed these papers to renew his passport.

  The certificates took four days to arrive by post at the rue Pernety. They got there on a rainy day. A day Nicolas would never forget.

  The first certificate read “Emma Van der Vleuten, born March 18, 1959, Edith Cavell Clinic, Uccle, Belgium. Father: Roland Van der Vleuten, born Charleroi, 1937. Mother: Béatrice Tweelinckx, born Liège, 1938.”

  Then he read “Fiodor Koltchine, born Улица Писарева, Leningrad, USSR, June 12, 1960. Mother: Zinaïda Koltchine, born Leningrad, USSR, 1945. Father: unknown. Died: August 7, 1993, Guéthary, France.” There was a fine handwritten sentence at the bottom of the certificate and an official stamp: “Adopted by Lionel Duhamel in 1961; from now on known as Théodore Duhamel.”

  A pit opened up somewhere in his stomach. Nicolas sat there, incredulous, frozen, staring down at the piece of paper. He did not pick up the telephone. Instead, he marched straight to his mother’s apartment on the rue Rollin. He got there out of breath, wet, and anxious.

  “You need to explain,” he said, shoving the birth certificate under her nose. Sitting in the large armchair by the fireplace, a startled Emma Duhamel had stared down at the paper, then back to her son with those fog-filled eyes.

  “Oh!” she gasped.

  “Well?” he grunted, still breathless.

  Silence.

  “Nicolas, its a long story,” she said at last, nervously fingering her bead necklace. “Please sit down.”

  ACCORDING TO THÉODORE DUHAMEL, the Atlantic Ocean was the king of all seas. Little did he know that it would one day claim his life. He had never enjoyed holidays on the Riviera, where his parents owned a villa overlooking Cannes. For him, the Mediterranean Sea was a cesspool full of impotent septuagenarians flaunting tans, face-lifts, and diamonds. He despised the smooth, glassy water and the lack of tides. In the late sixties, a classmate invited him to the Basque country one summer, where he was smitten by the rolling, frothy waves, the green mountains, the humid wind, the unpredictable weather forecast. He did not seem, at first glance, the rugged outdoor type, but he was more of an athlete than he appeared. He learned to surf as a boy in Biarritz with a bunch of young local surfers, of whom he was the youngest and probably the most enthusiastic. Nicolas remembers that as a young boy he would sit on the beach with his mother—pale and stoic, her nose buried in a book—while Théodore Duhamel rode the waves with his surfer friends. He stayed in the water for hours on end, wearing a black wet suit, which gave him the slinky appearance of a seal, and by the end of the summer, his chestnut locks had turned gold, bleached by the sun and the sea. “Surfer widow,” Emma’s friends dubbed her, mocking her for her endless waits on the sand with her son, and there was no way they could ever have suspected that their affectionate nickname would, one summer, ring horribly true.

  For the first ten summers of Nicolas’s life, his parents rented a poky apartment overlooking the Côte des Basques. It had a grandiose view over the ocean, facing south, and one could glimpse Spain creeping out along the coast like an outstretched arm. Every morning, Théodore Duhamel rose early and stared out to sea like the Ancient Mariner. Nicolas liked to watch him stride down the long and winding path to the beach, surfboard tucked under his arm. With binoculars, Nicolas could then observe his father on the sand, waxing his board with sure, precise movements (he can still remember the smell of that wax, and its name: Sex Wax, although it had nothing to do with sex, as he one day discovered.)

  Nicolas made Margaux Dansor’s father into a skier. But the two sports were linked in his mind. They were both action sports that involved gliding on a natural surface; they were both risky, the participants in search of the highest wave, the steepest slope. In the summer of 1990, when Nicolas was eight years old, Théodore Duhamel bought a catamaran, a black Hobie 16 that could ride the crest of the waves like a surfboard. Théodore Duhamel sailed his Hobie Cat audaciously, to such an extent that even his phlegmatic wife gasped with fright when the sleek boat was nearly overturned by a powerful shore break.

  Whenever Nicolas endeavored to describe his father to journalists, it was the memory of him sailing his Hobie Cat that he wished to convey, his wet suit, his cigar clamped between his teeth, his hair streaming behind him, waving to his son and wife as he drifted by. “There goes your man,” he heard his mother’s friends say. “Oh, look at him, Emma. What a prince!” And Nicolas would wave back, breathless with pride. The boat darted close to the shore, riding in on the wave like a surfer, then carelessly and effortlessly turned back at the very last moment, swooping high over the foam, black sail swinging over and swelling up again.

  The Hobie Cat washed up wi
th the tide near Hendaye two days after the disappearance, its mast smashed and its sail torn. But his father’s body was never found. It had been a muggy, humid August day in 1993. The waves were no bigger than usual. Théodore Duhamel told his wife he was sailing down to Guéthary to see his surfer friends. If the wind was strong, as it was that day, it usually took him under one hour from the Port des Pêcheurs, where he kept his boat. Nicolas did not see his father leave (that morning, he was at his tennis lesson), but when he got back at lunch, he did glimpse the small pointed sail as it appeared behind the Gothic peak of the Villa Belza. He knew his father could not possibly see him at such a distance, but he waved to him all the same. He had wanted to go to Guéthary with his father, but Emma refused, because of the tennis lesson. She became flustered when she had to pay for lessons that her son did not attend. If Nicolas had gone sailing with his father, would he have prevented his death? Would they both have died? Those questions still haunted Nicolas, eighteen years later.

  Nicolas remembers the harrowed look on his mother’s face when she finally called the surfer friends in Guéthary as the sun was setting. Théodore had “been and gone,” chirped his laid-back pal from California, Murphy. “I’m worried,” she admitted. Nicolas was only eleven, but he felt a gnawing in his gut. Then she said softly, “I’m going to have to call the police.” He could not bear hearing what his mother had to say to the police, so he left the room and went to stand on the balcony, where his father had stood that very morning. He put his feet where his father had put his, and placed his hands on the railing, exactly where his father had placed his hands. He watched the darkness of the night sweep up into the sky and the slow, steady beam from the lighthouse shine through the black, and he was afraid, more afraid than he had ever been in his life, ten times more afraid than when the plane was hit by lightning. His mother came out and cradled him in her arms. He dared not look at her face. He stared out at the immensity of the sea and thought of his father somewhere out there, and he started to cry.

  The minutes slipped by, endless and dreadful. The night came, and people started to turn up. He was given something to drink, and someone made a meal. The apartment was soon packed with friends, and he was cuddled, kissed, cajoled, but it did not make him feel any better, and he watched his mother’s face become paler as the night inched along. He finally fell asleep, exhausted, on the corner of the sofa while people continued to talk, drink, and smoke, and when he awoke, bleary-eyed, at dawn, his mother was crying in the bathroom, and he knew his father had still not been found.

  “When there is no corpse,” he told the journalists, “no coffin, no undertaker, no grave, no Mass, no obituary, it is hard to accept that someone is dead. When the Hobie Cat was found, we all longed for the body to be, as well. But it never was. To this day,” Nicolas said over and over again in his interviews, “I still hope against hope that my father might walk through that door. He would be fifty-one today. I know it is impossible, because I know my father most probably fell off his boat and drowned, but there is still that inkling, that possibility, that he might still be alive, somewhere, somehow. Margaux Dansor, unlike me, does find out the truth about what happened to her father. But her story is not my story. Let’s say I invented her story in order to try to answer my unanswerable questions about my own father.” The journalists asked again and again, “And what about your name? Did you change your name when you wrote the book? How did Nicolas Duhamel become Nicolas Kolt?” Nicolas tried to answer them with the same patience each time. “Kolt is a abbreviation of Koltchine, my father’s real name. When I was told the book was going to be published, all of a sudden, Duhamel made no sense.”

  Théodore Duhamel would never read The Envelope. But the book was dedicated to him.

  To my father, Fiodor Koltchine (Saint Petersburg, June 12, 1960–Guéthary, August 7, 1993).

  THE SUN IS SLOWLY sinking behind a high, rocky hill. It is not going to set in the sea, in front of them. Nicolas is disappointed. He was expecting a glorious pink sunset. Most people have turned their chairs away from the horizon, worshiping the final golden rays being swallowed up by the looming hill. He is secretly proud of the fact that for the last hour or so he has resisted the temptation of glancing at his BlackBerry. Mr. Wong and Miss Ming are playing mah-jongg. The gay couple are listening to the same iPod and swinging their heads in the same movement. The Belgian family is having a last dip. The Swiss are dutifully reading the papers. Alessandra and her mother seem to be fast asleep. The hairy man is puffing away on a cigarette, phone clamped to his ear, oblivious to the fact that his buxom girlfriend is chatting up the French guy (whose wife is no doubt at the spa). A puce-faced, tipsy Nelson Novézan makes a quick appearance, a pitiful sight in faded swim shorts that sag around his equally sagging buttocks. He plunges a toe into the water, yelps, and scuttles back to the elevator.

  Boats are coming in again from the yachts, bringing more exclusive clients to the Gallo Nero for drinks and dinner, and perhaps to spend the night. Once again, Nicolas thinks of the book he has been lying about to his entourage. One day soon, he will have to sit down, be responsible, and write that novel. No more procrastination. No more sloth. But how? If only energy for the book could come flowing in like those elegant guests smoothly riding in on the black Rivas. He remembered that when he started The Envelope, it was as if Margaux Dansor took him by the hand and led him onward. He could feel her hand, the texture of it, smooth, a little dry; he could feel the tug, the pull. He saw Margaux Dansor perfectly, as clearly as if she had been standing in front of him. It had been effortless creating her. She looked nothing like Emma Duhamel, his mother. Nor did she have Delphine’s auburn hair, white skin, green eyes. Margaux had a long Modigliani-like face, hazel eyes, thick silver hair. She was a piano teacher. She lived in the rue Daguerre with her husband, Arnaud Dansor (a doctor), and their two girls, Rose and Angèle. One day, she had to get her passport renewed. Margaux soon discovered this was an impossible feat, according to recent laws, even though she had been born in the chic suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine, near Paris. All this because her mother (Claire Nadelhoffer) had been born in Landquart, Switzerland, and her father (Luc Zech, who died in an avalanche when she was a child) in San Rocco di Camogli, Italy. At the Pôle de la nationalité française, Margaux was told to bring in every single document she could get ahold of concerning her father’s family—birth, death, and marriage certificates going back to her great-grandfather, military service carnets, tax forms, Social Security cards—in order to prove her French nationality. And it was by perusing all these papers, by delving into the past, that Margaux Dansor stumbled upon the unthinkable.

  At the mention of the name Koltchine, Emma Duhamel had cleared her throat on that wet October day in 2006, nearly five years ago, when her son confronted her with her late husband’s birth certificate. It had taken her a while to decide how she was going to explain this to him as fluidly as possible, and Nicolas could see how complicated this appeared to be for her. She paced up and down the room, her hands going from her bead necklace to her hair, which she smoothed back in a calm gesture, but Nicolas could see those hands were trembling.

  “I suppose you could say it all began with your grandmother,” Emma finally said, using the philosophy teacher’s voice, the one he disliked, higher-pitched and louder than her usual tone.

  “Dad’s mother?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Nina?”

  “Her real name was Zinaïda Koltchine.”

  “Is that Russian?”

  “Yes.”

  “So she was Russian?”

  “She was.”

  “Not French?”

  “She became French when she married Lionel Duhamel.”

  Nicolas stared at his mother. “What are you trying to say?”

  Emma Duhamel took a deep breath. “Your grandmother left the USSR in the early sixties. With her baby boy, Fiodor Koltchine.”

  “So she was married to a guy called Koltchine?”
/>   “No. Koltchine was her maiden name.”

  Nicolas looked down at the birth certificate. Born in Leningrad on June 12, 1960.

  “How old was Nina when she had Dad?”

  “Very young, I think.”

  “So Lionel Duhamel is not my grandfather?”

  “No, he’s not, technically. But he adopted your father, gave him his name, and raised him as his son.”

  “So who is my grandfather?”

  “No one knows.”

  Nicolas digested this in silence.

  “Why did you wait all these years to tell me this?”

  Emma took a while to speak. She seemed out of breath, distraught.

  “When I married your father, we had to get paperwork ready for our wedding. That’s when I saw his birth certificate and his real name.”

  She paused again.

  “Did you ask him about it?”

  “I did. But your father refused to answer me. I sensed that I could not talk to him about it. We never mentioned it again. The only person who brought up the Russian connection after your grandmother’s death was your aunt Elvire. And that was only once. I didn’t tell you because I was waiting for the moment when you would find out by yourself and be old enough to handle it. I believe that moment has come.”

  At the Pôle de la nationalité française, on another rainy day, Nicolas waited for over an hour in a crowded, narrow room. An old man next to him dabbed at his tearful, reddened eyes. He could not understand what he was doing here, he told Nicolas in a dignified, trembling voice. His passport and carte d’identité had been stolen, so he had gone to the town hall to get new ones. He was told that because his long-dead parents had been born abroad, he now had to prove he was French, at ninety-two, due to the new law. He was a retired doctor, a pediatrician, born in Paris; he had received the Légion d’honneur, he had fought for France during World War II, and now what was his country doing to him? Nicolas did not know how to comfort him. He could only shake his head and pat the old man’s hand.