One day, I asked my father what was the most distant city he’d ever visited. He simply said: ‘Amsterdam, in the Netherlands.’ And nothing more. Not looking up from his work, he carried on butchering dead animals. He had blood all over him, even his face.
When I wanted to know why he had made the trip, I thought I saw his jaw muscles tense. Was it the truculent hip joint of the veal haunch refusing to yield or my question that had set his teeth on edge? I didn’t understand. There was a dull snap, then a sigh, and finally he said: ‘To go fetch that dumb bastard Désiré.’
I had cut to the bone. It was the first time in my young life I’d ever heard him utter his older brother’s name. My uncle had died a few years after I was born. I’d found photos of him in the shoebox where my parents kept photographs and Super-8 movies. In them you could see dead people who were still alive, dogs, old people who were still young, holidays at the sea or in the mountains, more dogs, yet more dogs, and family reunions. People in their Sunday best gathered for weddings whose vows would be broken. My brother and I would spend hours leafing through these photos. We’d laugh at the clothes people wore, try to recognize family members. Sooner or later, our mother would tell us to put them away, as though these memories somehow made her uncomfortable.
I had thousands of other questions for my father. Easy ones, like: ‘To get to Amsterdam, do you turn left or right after the church?’ Others more difficult. I wanted to know why. Why had my father, who never left the village, trekked across Europe to fetch his brother? But no sooner did a breach open in the dam holding back his grief and anger than he swiftly plugged it up, for fear of being completely engulfed.
Everyone in the family did the same when it came to Désiré. My father and grandfather never mentioned him. My mother always cut short her explanations, and always with the same words: ‘It was all terribly sad, really.’ As for my grandmother, she dodged every question with mindless euphemisms, with stories of the dead people going to heaven and watching over the living here below. Each in their own way appropriated the truth. Today, almost nothing of the story remains. My father has left the village, my grandparents are dead. Even the village where it played out is crumbling. This is a last-ditch attempt to ensure that something survives. It is a mixture of memories, half-finished confessions and documented reconstructions. It is the fruit of their silence. I wanted to tell the story of what our family, like many others, lived through in total isolation. But how can I put their story into my words without robbing them of theirs? How can I speak on their behalf without my point of view, my preoccupations, replacing theirs? These questions long prevented me from starting to write this. Until I realized that only by writing could I make sure that my uncle’s story, my family’s story, did not disappear with them, with the village. To prove to them that Désiré’s life was inscribed into the chaos of the world, a maelstrom of facts, historical, geographical and social. And to help them to move beyond their grief, to step out from the solitude into which they had been plunged by sadness and shame. For once, they will be at the centre of the map, and all the material that usually gets attention will be relegated to the margins. Far from the city, from the cutting edge of science and medicine, far from the politically committed artists and activists, there will finally be a place where they exist.
*
When he had barely turned eighteen, my father was dispatched to bring his elder brother home from Amsterdam. The second eldest son had just passed his driving test and had bought his first car, a Golf, almost new. Most importantly, he was the one member of the family who always heeded his parents’ orders.
I don’t think I am aware of my father ever taking a plane or a train in his life. All he knew was his job behind the butcher’s counter and the constellation of villages through which he and his father drove the butcher’s van. He had never been travelling; he spoke no languages other than French and a smattering of the Italian dialect he used with his grandmother. These were the boundaries of his world. For him, the earth was still vast and largely unknown.
But this didn’t matter. The second son of the family, the boy who would never let his parents down, was making plans to drive across Europe and find his elder brother. My grandfather gave him an envelope stuffed with cash and a road map bought from the local newsagent. My grandmother suggested he take his cousin Albert along with him. Albert and Désiré were close. Surely, he would find the words to persuade Désiré to come back. They set off for Amsterdam one morning with a scrap of paper scrawled with the return address from the postcard Désiré had sent to reassure his mother.
My father told me almost nothing about this trip. Although, to date, it is the longest journey he has ever made. It is my computer that provides me with the details of their journey. I now know that they turned right after the village church. One thousand, two hundred and eighty-three kilometres exactly. A drive of more than thirteen hours, not including rest stops. I imagine they took it in turns to drive and sleep. Digne, Grenoble, Lyon, Dijon, Nancy, Metz, Luxembourg, Liège, Maastricht, Eindhoven, Utrecht and, finally, Amsterdam.
The only thing I heard from my father is an anecdote he sometimes told to entertain friends who came to dinner. As they were driving into Amsterdam, they were stopped and asked for their papers. Seeing the green car and the green uniforms, they didn’t immediately realize that they were dealing with police officers. Albert gave a dazzling smile and responded to their questions with insults in French. ‘Every time one of the cops asked something in Dutch, that idiot Albert came out with some bullshit. And he found the situation so hilarious that he couldn’t stop!’ Realizing they were being insulted, the police hauled them in and they spent the night in separate cells, with bars in the ceiling through which snowflakes slowly fluttered. The following morning, they were released, frozen to the marrow.
I was fascinated by this story. My father had almost wound up in prison halfway across Europe and all for a stupid prank. This man I’d only ever seen behind the window of the butcher’s shop. His life suddenly took on a surreal dimension. I wanted to know more, I tugged at his sleeve in front of the guests. But he carried on his grown-up conversation and promised to tell me another time. This story of his only foray into the wide world beyond the village was a point of pride whose memory he nurtured like a flame.
Although neither Albert nor my father spoke a word of Dutch, they managed to find Annekatrien and Nell’s apartment in Amsterdam. Désiré was astonished to see them; all in all, he was pleased. He was sleeping on the sofa with a young girl he’d met a few days earlier. Maya insisted on going back to France with them. She had dropped out of school and was estranged from her parents. She wanted Désiré to show her France. It was she who persuaded him to go home. Not that my father gave his brother any choice. He couldn’t imagine going back to the village and telling his parents that he had failed. Besides, my uncle was keenly aware of everything his mother had done to bring him home. He couldn’t inflict such bitter disappointment on Louise.
They set out at dawn, all four of them. Albert and my father in the front, Désiré and Maya, an underage Dutch girl with no passport, in the back. The lovers had their pockets stuffed with weed, but everything went smoothly. They got to the village late that night.
The following day, Désiré introduced Maya to the whole family. His father and mother were overjoyed to see him home and gave the girl a warm welcome, even if they were concerned about her age and her situation. Not only had their son trekked across the continent like a tramp, now he had also brought back a young girl who had run away from home. With Maya acting as interpreter, they contacted her parents, who did not oppose their daughter’s decision and offered to regularize her position by filling out an application for her to be an au pair. A few days later, Émile and Louise drove Maya to Nice, where she applied for a passport and began the necessary formalities to be granted residency. This way, everything was legal and above board, and it would be easier to introduce her to the rest of the village. My grandmother’s formidable facility for denial shifted into top gear. No, Désiré hadn’t run off to Amsterdam without telling anyone. He’d been on holiday, staying with friends, and had brought back a young girl who was keen to learn French.
Maya and my uncle moved into his apartment above the cafe. She quickly became a part of the family and the bustle of the shop. Her first French words were butcher’s terms. My grandfather taught her how to dress the shop window, how to salt and cure the cold meats. As there was little to do in the village, she would sometimes go with him up into the mountains. On Mondays, she would go to the slaughterhouse with him. To impress her, Pierre, the abattoir ‘employee’, would drink the steaming blood of the animals that had just been bled, before tossing the entrails to the dogs.
*
My brother and I caught glimpses of this little hippie girl in photos from the period. In a random Polaroid, she and my uncle are snuggling on the velvet sofa in my grandparents’ living room. Whenever we asked our mother who this strange girl was, she would smile and say: ‘Oh, that’s Maya, she was nice. She lived with us for a couple of months. She drank milk with her dinner. I’d never seen the like. She was a girl Désiré brought back from Amsterdam. Your father had to go and fetch him. There was a terrible fuss at the time.’
In another photo, Maya is sitting on the sofa next to Désiré, Albert and my father in a room with an orange carpet. This is the only surviving image of Amsterdam. Albert is pretending to drink wine from the bottle my father is holding. Maya and Désiré are laughing. My father looks really happy to be there. As though the trip had not been some difficult chore, but an opportunity to join his elder brother on the lam. A brief jaunt beyond the butcher’s shop, with not a trace of the seething anger that would later erupt whenever I asked him about his brother.
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FromSleeping Children by Anthony Passeron; Translated from the French by Frank Wynne. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, April 29, 2025. Copyright © 2022 by éditions Globe. Translation copyright © 2025 by Frank Wynne. All rights reserved.
