An extract from The Birthday Party by Laurent Mauvignier, translated by Daniel Levin Becker

Bergogne, yes.  

Even when he was a kid, she called him Bergogne. It happened simply, almost naturally: one day she addressed him by his last name to tease him; this amused the child and it amused her too, all because he often imitated his father, with that serious and furrowed look children sometimes have when they act like responsible adults. He was flattered, even if he didn’t really pick up on the hard, ironic edge she took when she called his father by his last name, because often it wasn’t so much to compliment him as to unleash a scathing comment his way or treat him the way an old schoolmistress scolds a kid, addressing him as sharply as possible. She and Bergogne senior argued readily, as a matter of habit, as one does among friends or close classmates, but anyway that no longer matters – thirty years, maybe forty? diluted in the fog of time passing – and none of it ever really mattered anyway, because they’d always been close enough to speak their minds candidly to each other, almost like the old couple they’d never become but had nonetheless, in a sense, been – a platonic love story that never found the space to play out, even in their dreams, for either of them – in spite of what the acid-tongued and the jealous might have insinuated.  

It had remained after the father died: Bergogne. His last name for speaking to his son, to this particular son and not to the two others. Since then, if it’s been without the slightest irony, just force of habit, it would still be with that same tone in her voice, at once harsh and with a hint of superiority or authority of which she wasn’t even aware, when she called him to ask him to pick up two or three things for her at the Super U if he was passing through town, or to take her if he was going – a town, imagine calling it that, that village with its population of three thousand – but also with the sweetness of childhood he sensed behind her words,  

Bergogne, I need a ride, as though she were murmuring in his ear my little one, my boy, my kitten, my treasure, in a fold hidden within the coarseness of his name or that of her voice, in her way of saying it.  

She used to come spend holidays here in a very elegant old house on the riverbank, and everyone looked at her like a grande dame, vaguely aristocratic but above all vaguely mad – a Parisian artist, exuberant and batty – wondering just what kind of peace she expected to find here, in La Bassée, reappearing as she did more and more often, staying longer and longer each time until one day she showed up for good, this time without a husband in tow – what she’d done with her banker husband was anyone’s guess – come to settle down with some of his money, no doubt, even if nobody knew why she’d decided to bury herself in a dump like this when she could have settled some place in the sun, at the seaside, in regions that were more hospitable, milder, less ordinary, no, on this point nobody could say, they just kept wondering, because even if they’re fond of their region people aren’t stupid enough to not see how banal and ordinary it is here, how flat and rainy, with zero tourists to combat the boredom wafting from its trails, its streets, its waterlogged walls – and if not why would they all have dreamed at one point or another of getting the fuck out?  

So Patrice’s two brothers followed the advice their mother had left them before she died, fucking off in unison, one going off to sell shoes near Besançon and the other, the one who was no doubt the cleverest of the three but also the most pretentious, going off to work in finance, as he said with enough contempt to let the others know he had no intention of living like a hick all his life, becoming a teller or an accountant at the Crédit Agricole of Bumblefuck – so long as it was far away from here he must have felt he was fulfilling a destiny – and no doubt living and working not in a city but in the interminable suburban periphery of one. The three brothers didn’t get along and had stopped fighting after Bergogne père died, as though finally reaching the resentful conclusion of everything they’d shared since childhood: first games, then boredom and indifference, then irritation, and finally the desire that each strike out on his own, ideally as far from the others as possible. But he, whether he goes by Pat or Bergogne fils, by his first name, Patrice, or even just his last name, Bergogne, with his characteristic unhurried calm, his serene determination, coarse and unrefined, had said he didn’t want to sell, that he would keep the farm and that he’d stay there until the end, come what may, which is to say at the geographical centre of the family’s history, eliciting their reprobation, their exasperation and their anger, but also their incomprehension – fine, they’d demanded, you find a way to pay us our share. Which he’d done, going into debt until the end of time and probably far beyond what was reasonable – but he had held tight and the farm remained in the hands of a Bergogne, as his father had wanted.  

So, of the hamlet, the Bergognes still have the house where they live, some fields, about a dozen cows, and the milk, which Patrice supplies to the dairy that produces butter and cheese – not enough to live on, but enough to not die.  

She, it turns out, had bought the house that abutted his, and has lived there for twenty-five years. Patrice has known her for at least forty, she’s a face from his childhood, which is surely why he stops by to see her every day, why he’s become attached to her, not as if to replace his own mother, who died too early from cancer, but simply because she’s there, is a part of his life, having been present through his adolescence and his adult life and becoming, over the years, not a confidante or a simple reassuring presence to lean on but in a way his best friend, because, without having to ask her for anything, just by showing up at whatever moment of the day, by accepting a coffee and the hooch she serves him in a glass no bigger than a thimble or pours directly into the coffee cup, he knows he can trust her and she won’t judge him, knows she’ll always be there for him.