Free The Last Life by Claire Messud Page B

old enough to hear. When I recounted it again, to my mother, she finished it quite differently, and less kindly, and I now turned both versions over in my mind, as if they might provide some explanation of the sunken, unshaven old man who presented himself, docile, at the police station the morning after the shooting.
    That noon my grandmother had filled our lunch, just hers and mine, with my grandfather's past, while he himself dined at the hotel restaurant with potbellied business associates, sucking garlic-stuffed olives and downing them with rosé. Not sentimental by habit, she was dreamy and softened by the vision of her darling in his youth. I'd like to say that at the time I was wholly under her spell, as I had been when I was smaller ("Tell me more, Grand'-mère, more!"), but I wriggled in my seat and twisted my napkin and kept my eyes on the chip of turquoise through the window, eager to rejoin my friends.
    I listened nonetheless, more closely than was by then usual, because my grandmother began by shocking me.
    "Your grandfather," she said, "was not the youngest of three children. I think you're old enough to know this now."
    I sniggered. It seemed such a preposterous statement. Her glare was grim, and her skin splotchy.
    "Your grandfather was the youngest of four. His brother, Yves, was the eldest, and Paillette, of whom you've heard—"
    "Yes, of course."
    "Was nearest him in age. But they had another sister, too. Estelle."
    "Estelle?"
    "She was a good bit older than your father—"
    "Grandfather."
    "Yes. And she disappeared when he was nine."
    The story was not about Estelle's disappearance, but about a reunion, the reunion between them many years later, when my grandfather was studying in Paris.
    "He was summoned," my grandmother explained. "He wouldn't—he couldn't—have found her otherwise. He never even looked. He was aware, of course, that she and Paulette wrote to one another, secret letters that their mother didn't know about; he had always been aware of that. But home—and Paulette, Yves, and their Maman—was so far from the life upon which he had recently embarked, and Estelle was further still, but a faint flicker in the memory."
    That afternoon, she told me, a wet afternoon in November, the air made more melancholy by the leaden drizzle in which Paris excels, he had declined to join his comrades in their Saturday round of the cafés and had set off in the opposite direction, towards the Jardins du Luxembourg.
    His mind was full of home, but not of Paulette or Yves or Maman, not of the crowded little house in Blida that he was delighted to have escaped. No, it was the glow of Algiers that illuminated his eye: the sparkling white buildings climbing the hillside behind the port, the azure glitter of the bay, the alleys of steps winding towards the sky, and the paths of the Jardin Marengo, scented by jasmine and passionflower, overhung with banana fronds—all these sites suffused with the blush of first love.
    "I was his first true love," my grandmother continued, her eyes on the sea's hazy horizon. "Or so he has always said. And I became his wife. He seemed young when we first met—he's three years younger than I am, you know. I was teaching kindergarten in a small school in the city. He was staying with cousins in the capital. I was charged with the care of, among others, their daughter, the daughter of these cousins, and he, studying for his special university exams, volunteered one afternoon to pick her up. You know this. I've told you this before."
    Thereafter, his walk to the school became a daily break from his studies, and the child's tiny hand in his a quotidian pleasure. A pleasure, too, to pass the time talking to the little girl's schoolmistress, trying, with his wit, to catch her averted eyes. My grandmother was smitten; how could she not be? He was so handsome, and dark, and fierce, and she could tell at once that his mind was like a great force, a wind. She