The east of France. A city erased from maps, eaten away by oblivion like posters peeled from a damp wall. The cobblestones resonate there more strongly than elsewhere, as if each step woke up the ghosts of those who once left their lives there. It was a hardware store, in the past.
A retail business as one no longer does, with its scents of metal and oil, its blackened wooden shelves, its iron boxes with yellowed labels. The walls were sweating the work. There were sold nails, screws, locks, and everything that gives men the illusion of keeping things in place. The boss was named Gabriel Menestrel. Three daughters, a dignified woman without being dry, and that look of the previous merchants: worried, but standing.
Then came the armistice, that muddy sigh of a war that had settled nothing. The Allied troops remained, like hosts who had become parasites, in garrison in the cities defeated by peace. And that night—November 1919 — an Englishman, a soldier of His Majesty’s, had drunk too much. He was laughing, a yellow laugh and chewed up by alcohol. The car, heavy and of another age, engaged on the bridge in the wrong direction. It was raining. The world was gray.
Gabriel was leaving a neighbor’s house. He carried under his arm a bag of bolts, as if the war had changed nothing in his daily life. He did not shout. He only raised one hand, derisory reflex, and then everything stopped.
The two surviving soldiers were sent elsewhere. The driver, exfiltered by his own, disappeared in the fog of a forgotten Dorset. He pretended to ignore what he had done, when the intoxication disappeared. No one questioned him. The theft of a lifetime justified running away in the English way…
He died in the sixties, old, half blind, with this taste of metal in his throat that we can’t explain. But her soul, she did not find the way out.
Since then, every evening at the exact time—19:23 — he returns. Not in his uniform, no. In plain clothes, as he could have been, with that English distinction that is attributed to dead men too quickly. He runs along the alleys, through the windows that no longer reflect anything. He speaks. He extends his hand. He says words without a clue, a mixture of faded English and approximate French. But no one hears him. Because no one is there. Or they are there, but too far in time.
The walls have changed. The hardware store became a bank branch, then an empty space. A ‘For Rent’ sign hangs wobbly above the door. Sometimes you think you can smell oil. Sometimes, at 7:23 PM, a dog stops dead in its tracks, tail low, as if it could hear the echo of ancient footsteps.
The ghost does not understand. He is looking. He repeats the gestures. He shouts names that he doesn’t know. He tries to catch up on a bag of invisible bolts. He wants to apologize. He wants to reverse. But the hour passes, and the world doesn’t flinch.
The Menestrel girls never talked about that night. The eldest married a postman, then disappeared in Paris. The cadet started to serve in a bourgeois house, then slowly gave up. She died of cold in 1932, on a bench, in Nancy. A rusty key was found on her. Without a lock. Without a past. The youngest, the one who dreamed of being a teacher, never really lived. She grew up with an aunt, tolerated by those around her, and took refuge in the poems, especially those of Musset, which she could recite by heart until the end of her life. She had an only son, whose pregnancy she hid and whom she abandoned on the porch of a church, to find him seven years later, driven by remorse and an informed cousin. His name was Jules-Marie, the name that the nuns who found his basket gave him.
And the bridge is still there, solid, reluctant, the stones stained with a memory they did not choose.
In the evening, when the light declines, it happens that some elders turn their heads as they pass by. They don’t know why. A discomfort. A malaise. Like a date we would have missed forever.
But Gabriel, he doesn’t have an appointment anymore.
And the English ghost, every day, returns. At the appointed time. To wait for what will no longer come.
The ghost doesn’t know if he’s dead or if he’s dreaming. He wanders. The word is right. He has no grasp, no grounding. It crosses the years as one crosses a river in fog, with no shore to reach.
His name was Edward Lancing. Corporal. Born in Kent. Son of a pastor and a stiff mother. He was twenty-three years old in 1919, the exact age when it is believed that everything is allowed, especially forgetting. He had been given a uniform, a rifle, a lot of whiskey, and was left to play the hero in a land he did not know. He didn’t speak a word of French. He had never driven on a stone bridge other than on the left side of the road.
The shock lasted only a second. Then the cries. Then nothing. He was pulled from the car, numbed, dirtied. He was hidden in a barracks. A British officer took him by the arm, a man who smelled of cigars and the end of an empire. The affair was hushed. A family of French people ruined, it was nothing. Not in the face of the fragile peace that had to be preserved.
And Edward, he thought he was getting away with it. He drank to forget, then stopped drinking to forget even more. He got married. A sweet, almost transparent woman. He had two children whom he never knew how to look straight. He was teaching military history in a boarding school. He spoke of the Somme, of Ypres, of Verdun, as if they were chess battles. He quickly passed over the occupation of the East. Barely a footnote.
The nights did not forgive.
He saw that look again. The gaze of the French father, frozen at the moment of shock. It wasn’t a cry. It wasn’t even fear. It was a form of peaceful stupor. A involuntary farewell.
He tried to talk about it. Once. To an old regimental comrade. The silence that followed convinced him to keep quiet forever.
So he started writing. Letters that he didn’t send. Confessions for a nonexistent tribunal. He burned them in the morning, in the stove of his office, like one burns evidence of a crime that one would have dreamed.
He died of a heart attack, one morning in January, alone, standing in front of a photo from 1919 that he had never shown to anyone. The bridge appeared there, distant, trembling, almost blurred.
And since then, every night, his ghost comes back.
He does not have the right to the Elysian fields of peaceful deaths. He does not have the right to the great sea where the liberated souls sail. No. His remorse, too useless, too late, has become his chain. He would like to be punished, judged. But the judges are dead, the witnesses too. Only he remains, facing the hour 19:23, this fixed point where his fault begins again.
It’s not a hell, not really. It’s an absurd repetition. A prayer without an altar.
He looks at the passers-by, he tries to speak, he would like us to hear him.
But he is alone with his remorse, useless as a key without a door.
And Father Menestrel, he does not return.
Him, he is sleeping. Deeply.
That evening, the city was even emptier than usual. The wind was moving up Rue de la Poste like a thin beast, whistling between closed doors. Jules-Marie had stopped at the corner of the bridge. He didn’t know why. He had come without thinking about it, almost without wanting to. Like a dog that returns to the place of abandonment.
The town hall clock struck: nineteen o’clock, twenty-three minutes.
So, he saw it.
Not an apparition. Not a vaporous spectrum like in children’s tales. No. A man. Well dressed, features drawn by anxiety, walking in the void, the eyes of an animal hunted. He did not touch the ground—he crossed it.
Jules-Marie opened his mouth unintentionally.
— Who are you?
The ghost looked up. He hesitated. It was the first time, in more than a century, that someone had spoken to him.
He replied. His voice was broken, full of echoes:
— I don’t know anymore.
A couple passed by at that moment, on the opposite sidewalk. They looked at Jules-Marie, then accelerated their pace. A lonely man who talks to the wind, it bothers.
But Jules-Marie couldn’t see them. He was staring at the ghost.
— You killed Gabriel Menestrel. He was my grandfather.
The silence that followed was not a normal silence. It was a collapse. A breach in the texture of time.
The ghost staggered.
— I… I didn’t want to. I didn’t know. I was taken away. I was told to be quiet.
— And you obeyed?
Jules-Marie’s tone was not accusatory. It was a question. Calm. Burning.
The ghost lowered its head. Its features, for a moment, lost their sharpness. It appeared young. Then old. Then nothing.
— Do you remember my grandmother? Gabriel’s wife. Three daughters. One of them… my mother. You could have been my father..
The ghost reached out with his hand, hesitant, as if he wanted to touch this voice that pierced it. He approached.
— I… I never had a son. Yes, I could have. Everything should have been different, everyone’s life, your grandfather of course, but also your grandmother, your mom… It’s dizzying.
Jules-Marie then felt something change in the air. A shiver. A tiny movement, imperceptible. The city had shifted. For a minute, maybe two, it was no longer quite of that time. A rift had just opened.
— You wandered for nothing, said Jules-Marie. No one was waiting for you. You asked forgiveness from a world that no longer heard you. But I am here. I am alive.
The ghost took a step back. He vacillated.
— So I’m no longer alone?
Jules-Marie nodded.
— No. But it’s not forgiveness. It’s recognition. It’s not you who suffer the most. It’s those who stayed.
The world, for a moment, seemed suspended. The cars had stopped further away. The noise had disappeared. A parenthesis. A breath.
Then, slowly, the ghost of Edward Lancing made a strange gesture. He took off his hat, which he did not have. He inclined his head. He did not smile, but a new peace floated around him.
And he disappeared.
Not by evaporating. Not by collapsing. But like an image that we close again. A page that we turn.
Jules-Marie remained alone, at the edge of the bridge.
A passerby looked at him frowning. Another, younger, crossed without a word. The city had taken its place. The lights flickered. The windows reflected the rain.
But Jules-Marie knew. The rift remained open. Not for the dead. For him.
He did not return that evening. He walked for a long time in the alleys of the old town, without knowing if he was still in his century.
Something had changed. The air. The texture of the ground. The very sound of his footsteps on the cobblestones. The shop windows no longer showed telephones, but locked clocks, old dresses, things from another age. The names on the signs were wobbling, as if the painting was rewriting itself before his eyes.
He stopped in front of a dusty display case. A tarnished copper plate still bore an erased name: Menestrel Hardware.
But he knew it wasn’t a reenactment.
It was before.
The rift, he understood, was not a portal — it was a fold. A hollowing-out of time, which men in a hurry no longer see.
But him, he was born in the shadows. So he was entitled to it.
He pushed the door of the hardware store. A bell sounded. It had not jingled for eighty years.
The smell struck him first: sawdust, iron, flax oil. He recognized without having known them the counters of his stolen childhood. Behind, a silhouette stood tall: a tall man, with a mustache, gray apron, hands blackened by work. Gabriel Menestrel.
Jules-Marie did not dare to speak. He knew that the man did not see him. Not yet.
Here, everything floated. It was a frozen world, repeating its last gestures before the drama. A day in a loop. November 11, 1919, maybe. Or the next day. There was no fixed date, just a day waiting.
He went out into the street.
The city was as if washed with its modernity. The shutters were made of wood. The women wore long coats. Children were running, their laughter clearer than today’s. And no one saw it.
But he saw them all.
And above all, he felt the fault. It was not stable. It moved, slowly, like an underground tide. She sometimes opened an alley, a door, a face, then immediately closed them again.
Jules-Marie was not trying to understand. He was moving forward. He knew that he was expected. Not by the living, nor even by the dead.
But by memory itself.
Read more in: In the Hardware Shadow
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