The scar on his left hand was as palpable as ever as Maurice Morel traced it absent-mindedly with the fingers of his right, his gaze fixed on the river without seeing it. It was an evening in late summer, and Bayonne lay below him in the last of the golden light — the red roofs running down the slope to the water, the bridge, the boats, and across on the hill the cathedral with its two towers like a pair of folded hands. Maurice had seen this view ten thousand times. That evening he did not see it. He saw something else, something sixty years gone, something the scar on his hand summoned up every time he touched it, whether he wished it or not.
“Papy?”
Mireille had stepped onto the veranda so quietly that he noticed her only when she was already beside him. She was his son’s daughter, twenty-seven years old, and she had a way of entering a room without stirring the air — a quality he liked, because it had grown rare in a world where most people burst in like an overturned bucket. That evening, though, something lay on her that he saw at once, the way he saw everything in a face — a tiredness around the eyes, a worry she was carrying about with her and had not yet spoken. He did not ask. He had learned that you must let things come to you, that a person sets a worry on the table only when he is ready, and not a second sooner.
“What’s that scar on your hand?” she asked, sitting down in the chair across from him, the little table with the cold cup of coffee between them. “I’ve never asked you about it. Not in all these years. Where did you actually get it?”
Maurice drew a deep breath. He looked at his granddaughter, that clever young face in which today, for the first time, there stood something of what life writes into us, and for a moment he wanted to do what he had always done when someone touched too near the old things: dodge, deflect, make a small joke. Oh, an accident, long ago, nothing worth mentioning. A trader who cannot dodge starves.
But he had grown old. And old men have, at some point, dodged enough. And perhaps, he thought as he looked at her, perhaps this girl who was carrying a worry needed, this evening, less a joke than a story.
He traced the scar one last time with his thumb — that smooth, pale patch that shone differently from the skin around it, almost like wax. Then he laid his hands in his lap.
“It all began,” he said, “with hunger.”
I was a hungry boy, Mireille. That is the first thing you must know, and really the only thing, for out of that one word everything else grew — the garage, the shops, this house you’re sitting in, the whole city down there that people claim belongs to me, which is nonsense, of course. But the hunger — the hunger truly belonged to me. That was mine, mine alone, from the very start.
I don’t know when I was born. That sounds strange to you, I know — you with your papers and your certificates, you have a date for everything. I have none. Sometime in winter, they told me, in a year no one could quite remember any more. There was no mother to have kept it in mind, and no father to have celebrated it. There was only the home. A grey house of grey stone, up at the edge of a town whose name I will not tell you, because it does not deserve to appear in this story. The nuns ran it, and above the nuns stood the Church, and above the Church stood — so it was drummed into us every morning and every evening — the good Lord.
“But you do believe in God,” said Mireille. “You still go across every Sunday.”
“I go to Him,” I said. “Not to those who shut the doors in His name. That is not the same thing, child, and it is the first thing I had to learn in my life — that the good Lord and the Church are two different things.” I waved it away. “But that comes later. Let us stay with the hunger.”
In a home like that, a child learns two things faster than anything else. The first is not to complain. Whoever complained got nothing — no pity, no extra bread, only a blow or, worse, the remark that he was ungrateful, when he had a roof over his head and ought to thank God for it. So none of us complained. We learned to carry hunger the way you carry a heavy bag — you don’t moan, you only change hands now and then.
The other thing a child learns there is reckoning. Not the reckoning you learned, with figures on paper. I mean the other kind. I reckoned in bread. When the soup came, thin as dishwater, with a piece of bread beside it, I saw in a single glance which was the biggest piece, and I worked out how to reach its table — who stood in my way, whom I would have to coax, whom to outwit, to whom I would owe a favour later. I could read a room before I could read a word. I read the faces of the other children — who was afraid and who was strong, who shared and who hoarded. And I read the faces of the nuns, who were the harder book, for with them it was not about bread but about escaping a blow, and that wanted reckoning more carefully still.
Don’t look at me like that. I’m not telling you this so that you’ll pity me. Pity is the one coin I never once accepted in my whole life, and I’m not going to start now, at eighty. What the fine people later called my business sense, and wrote about in their newspapers as though it were a gift from God — it was no gift. It was a hungry child working out how to get his fill without being caught.
“I don’t quite believe that,” said Mireille. “A thousand children go hungry in a home like that. Not every one of them becomes a man who owns half the city.” I had to smile. She was quick, my granddaughter. She let you get away with nothing.
“No,” I said. “There you’re right. Hunger alone makes no Morel. Hunger only makes you begin to reckon. What you become depends on what you reckon out — whether you find how to take the bread from your neighbour, or how the two of you both get fed. Most find the first. It’s easier.” I looked out over the river. “I needed a long time for the second. And I had help. There was an old man with a garden — but I’ll come to him.”
The scar, you ask. Patience. A scar needs a life behind it, or it’s only an ugly mark on an old man’s skin. And my life does not begin with the scar.
It begins with a door. A church door.
End of the sample.