Nikolski by Nicolas Dickner Read Free Book Online Page B

to be able to stand up to my cousins without even a gravestone to point to?”
    After half an hour of this torment, Lyzandre Doucet finally confessed that the capelin-head story was a smokescreen for a scandal that no one had ever dared reveal to her: her mother had acted just like the rest of the Doucet family. She had gone away a few months after Joyce was born, with no warning orproper explanation. She had boarded a westbound ship, but no one was aware of her exact destination. Some said it was Montreal, or even the United States.
    Joyce drank her tea without saying a word. This disclosure muddled the situation a great deal. How could she be certain of what had really happened? There was no point in questioning those around her. The answer was no longer to be found in Tête-à-la-Baleine.
    Frowning, Joyce mulled over the annoying absence of roads on her father’s nautical charts.
    Five years later, Grandfather Lyzandre, the last Doucet of Tête-à-la-Baleine, passed away, carried off by a fit of coughing. It would be the second (and last) time Joyce paid a visit to the village cemetery.
    She did not seem to be greatly affected by Lyzandre’s death, and continued to go to the house by the shore. Each afternoon she settled herself by the table—at the exact spot where she had found her grandfather’s body calmly seated before his teapot— and looked at Uncle Jonas’s postcards tacked up on the kitchen walls. No one had had the nerve to disturb the contents of the house; it was as though all of its inhabitants had been cut down by the plague. While sifting through the jumble of family objects, Joyce salvaged her own inheritance: an antique sailor’s duffel bag that had no doubt belonged to her grandfather’s grandfather.
    Soon afterwards, Joyce’s uncles boarded up the doors and windows with old planks of wood.
    The house survived Lyzandre Doucet by only a few weeks. Its aging skeleton, afflicted by terminal osteoporosis, leaned farther and farther seaward. It seemed to just barely hang on to the shoreline. The great September tides gave the
coup de grâce
to its fragile footing, and it went adrift one Saturday morning. It floated for a while, and then the waves tore it apart and scattered the debris.
    Uncle Jonas’s postcards, misshapen and covered with purplish jellyfish, were all that came back with the tide.
    Joyce heard about the wreckage only three months later. The whole village was settling the bets that had been collecting for decades at the old house’s expense, but by then Lyzandre’s granddaughter was already in Sept-Îles, completely taken up with her arrival at high school.
    She had long looked forward to this chance to be rid of her uncles, aunts and cousins, and had not taken her father’s benevolence into account. One phone call had been enough for him to arrange her accommodations, so that, stepping out from a little-known corner of her kinfolk, an uncle and aunt were there, waiting for Joyce on the pier at Havre-St-Pierre.
    The intrusion of these distant relations was like a bolt from the blue. Was this family of hers inexhaustible? Joyce wondered, raising her arms up to the sky. Wouldshe have to escape to Vladivostok in order to elude the clutches of her family tree?
    Leaning over the handrail of the Nordik Express, she scanned the small crowd huddled in the pouring rain. She had never met these two new personae and did not have so much as a photograph to identify them. She finally spotted a stout individual wrapped in a green poncho, unfazed by the storm and displaying a wilted cardboard sign where one could make out the word
Joice.
Beside him, a small lady in a yellow raincoat was holding in one hand her umbrella and in the other a Tupperware container full of maple fudge.
    Joyce estimated that she could easily slip by them and disappear without being noticed. She looked at the sky. The remnants of Hurricane Paloma, which had travelled up from the Bahamas, had just reached the north coast of