Nikolski by Nicolas Dickner Read Free Book Online Page A

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    If Herménégilde Doucette had been around, he would have died of neurasthenia within forty-eight hours.
    Tête-à-la-Baleine had only an elementary school, so every September about fifteen teenagers went off to the high schools of Havre-St-Pierre, Sept-Îles or Blanc-Sablon. Their younger siblings, left behind, anxiously and impatiently contemplated the future.
    That morning, a boy had just aroused a wave of admiration when he declared he would fly a helicopter, like his uncle Jacques. Another upped the ante byannouncing that he would become the chief engineer on the icebreaker
Des Groseilliers.
A third would be a something-vaguely-mechanical-engineer of bridges and motors—like, you know … an engineer!
    Joyce rarely took part in the discussions. No questions were ever put to this odd little cousin, who, truth to tell, went for the most part unnoticed. That morning, however, moved by a sudden surge of enthusiasm, she was careless enough to open her mouth:
    “I’m going to be a pirate!”
    Her words were greeted with dumbfounded silence. They all turned toward Joyce, who met their gazes without flinching. She often provoked this sort of astonishment, due, on one hand, to the discrepancy between her slight appearance and her self-assurance, and on the other hand, to her propensity for uttering ideas so bizarre, so out of touch with reality, that one wondered where on earth she might come from. At any rate, surely not from Tête-à-la-Baleine.
    One of her cousins, still brooding over some whacks he’d received from a frying pan, did not miss the chance to call her a bearded lady. Another cousin objected that she was too scrawny to be a pirate.
    “To be a pirate, you mainly have to be a guy,” her eldest cousin ruled authoritatively. “That’s why your mother abandoned you. She wanted a boy.”
    “My mother is dead!” Joyce snarled, grabbing her cousin by the collar.
    “Your mother’s not dead. She ran away! She’s living in New York.”
    “No, Toronto!” another cousin chimed in.
    “Vancouver!”
    “Chicago!”
    Bombarded on all sides, Joyce wavered. At this point, they were told recess was over, and the group moved toward the door. After a moment of hesitation, she swerved away in the opposite direction. Feeling they might have said too much, the boys watched her head toward the cemetery.
    “Anyway,” one of them muttered, “pirates don’t exist anymore.”

    Joyce had never gone to see her mother’s grave.
    The choking on the head of a capelin seemed to her an indisputable fact. All the same, though, she preferred not to talk about it. That spectacular asphyxiation was part of the family mythology, made up of distinguished lives and exotic fatalities. What good was a flesh-and-blood mother, aside from dispensing household chores and admonishments? Joyce preferred an invisible, legendary mother, whose image melded with those of Herménégilde Doucette, Uncle Jonas’s postcards and Providence Island.
    She went around the cemetery reading every epitaph.
    She confirmed what her grandfather had told her: a number of Doucets had been buried there, most of them before 1970. But she found not a single tombstone bearing her mother’s given name. This absence was not a good omen.
    On leaving the graveyard, she veered off toward the strand.
    When she entered the shaky house, Lyzandre Doucet had just placed a steaming pot of tea on the table, as if he had been expecting his granddaughter. That day, however, she had no wish to discuss distant ancestors or seventeenth-century buccaneers; she demanded to know the truth about her mother.
    Lyzandre Doucet listened patiently to his granddaughter but declined to answer her many questions. He was familiar with her fiery personality and was afraid that, on learning the truth, she would feel responsible for events beyond her grasp. Some children are prone to bearing the weight of the world on their shoulders.
    “But Grampa,” she insisted, “how long am I going