The first letter Théo Brunner ever opened at the Rue de Carouge post office was addressed, in blue fountain pen, to The Lake.
Not to the Lake Geneva Water Authority, nor to the Commission for the Protection of the Léman, nor to any person at all. Just: The Lake, Geneva, Switzerland. There was a stamp, correctly valued. There was a return address: Mme Odile Ferrand, 14 Rue des Voisins, 3rd floor, left, the door that sticks.
"What do I do with this?" Théo asked.
Madame Kälin, who had sorted mail at Rue de Carouge for thirty-one years and who could tell a forged signature from the weight of the ink, did not look up. "You put it in the tray."
"Which tray?"
"Hers." She pointed with her chin at a shoebox on the top shelf. Someone had written on its side, in the same blue ink, FERRAND — PENDING. It was full.
"There's a tray," Théo said, "for one woman."
"There is a tray for one woman," Madame Kälin agreed, "because one woman writes to everything."
He read them, of course. He was twenty-three and had been hired two weeks earlier on a temporary contract that nobody had explained to him, and the shoebox was the only interesting thing in the building.
Odile Ferrand had written to the Lake to complain that it had been "unreasonably grey" for eleven consecutive days and that she expected better from a body of water that featured on so many postcards. She had written to the Jet d'Eau to say its height was ostentatious. She had written to the Federal Office of Meteorology to report that its forecasts were "technically accurate and emotionally useless," and that a forecast of light rain, 40% told her nothing about whether she would need her good hat.
She had written to the number 12 tram.
Dear Number 12, the letter began. You were four minutes late on Tuesday, which I forgive, because the man driving you has a new baby and has not slept. I could see it in his shoulders. However, on Thursday you were early, which I do not forgive, because Monsieur Abadie from the second floor was running for you with his cane and you left without him. Being early is a form of rudeness the Swiss have not yet learned to recognise. Please pass this on to whoever drives you on Thursdays. — O. Ferrand.
Théo read that one twice.
"She knows the driver has a baby," he said.
"She knows everybody's everything," said Madame Kälin. "She sits at her window."
"And these just... stay here? In a shoebox?"
"Where would you like them to go? To the Lake?"
Théo looked at the box. Then he looked at the letter to the tram. Then he did something that he would later describe, to his mother on the phone, as the stupidest and best thing I have ever done at a job. He took the letter to the tram depot on his lunch break.
The depot manager, a heavy, unhurried man named Gaspard, read the letter standing up beside a vending machine. He read it again. Then he walked across the yard to a tram where a driver in a reflective vest was eating a sandwich in the cab, and he handed it to her.
She read it and laughed out loud, and then she stopped laughing.
"Abadie," she said. "Old man, grey coat, the cane with the duck handle?"
"I suppose," said Théo.
"I saw him in the mirror. I thought he was waving." She folded the letter carefully and put it in her vest pocket. "Tell her I'm sorry. Tell her it won't happen again."
"I'm not — I don't actually know her," said Théo. "I'm from the post office."
The driver looked at him the way people look at someone who has just said something obviously untrue.
"Then why are you here?" she said.
He went to see her on a Saturday. He told himself it was a professional visit. He brought the shoebox.
Number 14 Rue des Voisins was a narrow building the colour of weak tea. The third-floor door on the left did, in fact, stick. He knocked, and heard a long, deliberate silence, the kind made by someone deciding whether you deserve to be answered.
The woman who opened the door was small, upright, and dressed as if for a funeral she intended to criticise. She was perhaps eighty. Her hair was white and arranged with the precision of a legal argument. She wore a brooch shaped like a beetle and the expression of a magistrate who has heard every excuse twice.
She looked at Théo. She looked at the shoebox. She looked back at Théo.
"You've opened my mail," she said.
"Technically, Madame, you sent it to us."
"I sent it to the Lake."
"The Lake doesn't have a mailbox."
"That," said Odile Ferrand, "is the Lake's problem." She stepped aside. "You may come in. Wipe your feet. Not like that — properly. You are not a horse."
Her apartment was full of paper. Not mess: paper. Stacks of it, squared at the edges, on every flat surface — envelopes, writing pads, carbon copies of letters, a ledger with columns ruled in pencil. On the windowsill, angled to face the street, stood a pair of opera glasses and a cup of tea that had gone cold in a way that suggested she let it go cold on purpose.
"Sit," she said. "Not there, that's Monsieur Petit's chair."
Théo looked around for Monsieur Petit. There was no one.
"He died in 2009," Odile said. "It's still his chair. Sit there."
He sat there.
"So." She lowered herself into a high-backed armchair opposite him with the slow dignity of a ship being docked. "You have come to tell me to stop."
"No, Madame. I came to tell you that the tram driver says she's sorry. About Monsieur Abadie."
For the first time, something moved in Odile Ferrand's face. It was not a smile. It was the place where a smile would have been, if she had been the kind of woman who allowed them before lunch.
"You delivered it," she said.
"I took it to the depot."
"Nobody has ever delivered one." She said it flatly, as one states the boiling point of water. "In fourteen years."
"Fourteen years?"
"Since my husband died. He used to deliver them. He would read them first and say, Odile, you can't write that to the Cantonal Office of Roads, and then he'd go out and tell the Cantonal Office of Roads anyway, in nicer words." She picked up the cold tea, examined it, and put it down. "He was very good at nicer words. I never learned."
Théo opened the shoebox and took out the top letter. It was addressed to The Bakery on the Corner (the new one, with the unhappy owner).
"What about this one?"
Odile held out her hand for it as if he were returning a library book late. She read it through her glasses. "Ah. Yes. Her croissants are perfectly adequate. Her bread is a crime against wheat. But she is unhappy because nobody comes in, and nobody comes in because she is unhappy, and someone ought to tell her that it is a circle and she can step out of it." She handed it back. "She won't listen. People don't. I write anyway."
"Why?"
Odile looked at him for a long time.
"Because if you only say things to people who listen," she said, "you end up saying them to no one."
Théo delivered the bakery letter on Monday.
The owner — a woman of perhaps forty with flour on her eyebrows and the brittle posture of someone who has borrowed money from her brother — read it behind the counter while a single customer waited. Théo watched her go pale, then red, then pale again.
Your bread is a crime against wheat, Odile had written. I say this with respect, because I have eaten bread in four countries and I know a crime when I chew one. But your almond croissant made me close my eyes on a Tuesday in March, which has not happened since 1987. Make only that. Make it beautifully. Put a chair by the window so old people can sit and pretend they're not watching the street. Then they will come, and they will bring their sons, and their sons will buy bread out of guilt, and you can practise the bread on them. — O. Ferrand, who will come on Thursday.
The baker looked up. "Who is she?"
"Third floor, number fourteen," said Théo. "The door that sticks."
"She's never been in here."
"She says she'll come Thursday."
The baker stared at the letter for a long moment. Then she went into the back room. When she came out, she was carrying a wooden chair, and she put it by the window.
It became a habit.
Every Saturday, Théo climbed to the third floor and collected the week's complaints. Odile would hand them over one at a time, with commentary.
"This is for the pharmacy. The young pharmacist explains things to old women as if we were dogs. Slowly, with treats. Tell him we can read."
"This is for the school on Rue Dancet. The children's crossing lady is wonderful and nobody has thanked her since the Berlin Wall. This is a complaint about that."
"This is for my nephew in Lausanne. He doesn't call. Don't read this one, it's rude."
He read it anyway, on the tram. It was the gentlest letter in the stack. It complained, in eleven precise paragraphs, that her nephew worked too hard, ate badly, had married a woman far too good for him and did not appreciate it sufficiently, and that he had not visited since Easter, which she had not noticed, and did not mind, and was only mentioning because it was a fact.
Théo posted that one properly, with a stamp. Some letters, he decided, should travel the normal way.
The others he delivered by hand, on lunch breaks and after shifts and, once, on a Sunday, when a letter to the Botanical Garden concerning the "smug" behaviour of a peacock seemed urgent. He began to know the neighbourhood the way Odile knew it — not as streets but as people, each one a small, ongoing argument she was having with the world on their behalf.
The pharmacist read his letter, turned the colour of a radish, and the following week Théo saw him explaining a prescription to Madame Abadie without once raising his voice or saying okay? at the end of a sentence.
The children's crossing lady read hers on the pavement, in her yellow coat, holding her little stop sign, and cried so hard that a group of eight-year-olds formed a protective circle around her and glared at Théo as if he had done it with a stick.
The peacock was unmoved. Some things are beyond correspondence.
"You are making me famous," Odile said one Saturday in November. She said it the way someone might say you are tracking mud on my carpet.
"Is that a complaint?"
"Everything is a complaint, if you write it down properly." She was at the window with the opera glasses. Down in the street, the baker's new chair was occupied by Monsieur Abadie, who was eating an almond croissant with his eyes closed. "Look at that. He's getting crumbs on his coat. His daughter will be furious."
"You're smiling, Madame."
"I am squinting. It's the light."
"It's raining."
"Then it's the rain." She lowered the glasses. "Théodore."
"It's just Théo."
"Théodore. Your contract at the post office. When does it end?"
He had not told her about the contract. He had not told anyone, because there was nothing to tell; it was the kind of job that ended the way weather ends, without anybody deciding.
"December," he said. "Probably."
Odile nodded slowly, as though he had confirmed a forecast she had already disputed in writing.
"I see," she said.
The following Saturday, there were no letters.
Théo stood on the third-floor landing with his hand raised to knock and realised he had not heard, through the door, the usual sound of her pen. It was a particular sound — a scratch, a pause, a scratch — like a small animal digging for the right word. He had grown so used to it that its absence was loud.
He knocked. The long, deliberate silence came, but it went on longer than usual. Then the door unstuck.
Odile was dressed, upright, brooch in place. But she was holding the doorframe in a way she would never have permitted herself to be seen doing.
"I have nothing for you today," she said.
"Are you all right, Madame?"
"I am eighty-one. Nobody is all right at eighty-one. We are merely still." She did not move from the doorway. "Go and enjoy your Saturday. Young people have Saturdays. I read about it."
"Madame Ferrand —"
"Go, Théodore."
He went. He went as far as the bakery, where he sat in the window chair, which was empty, and ate an almond croissant he did not taste, and looked up at the third-floor window on the left. The opera glasses were not on the sill.
He went back the next day. No letters. And the day after.
On the fourth day, he did something else stupid. He went to the shoebox at the post office, where a handful of last week's letters were still waiting to be delivered, and he found the one he had not read — the one to her nephew in Lausanne, the rude one, which he had posted. There was a carbon copy. Odile kept carbons of everything.
He called directory enquiries. Then he called Lausanne.
The nephew's name was Bernard. He was fifty-four, worked in insurance, and had the slightly hunted voice of a man who has been receiving eleven-paragraph letters for most of his adult life.
"She's not answering her phone," Théo said.
"She never answers her phone. She says it's an instrument for people who can't spell."
"She's stopped writing."
There was a silence on the line, quite unlike Odile's silences. It was the silence of someone setting down a coffee cup very carefully.
"Stopped," Bernard said.
"Four days."
"I'll be there in an hour," said Bernard.
It was her heart — nothing dramatic, the doctor said, the ordinary slow mutiny of an organ that has been working for eighty-one years without a holiday. She had fallen in the kitchen on the Saturday morning, before Théo came, and she had got herself up, and she had dressed, and put on her brooch, and answered the door, and told him to go. Then she had sat in her armchair for three days, because she did not want to make a fuss, and because making a fuss would have required telling someone, and the only way Odile Ferrand knew how to tell someone anything was to complain about it in writing, and she had been too tired to hold the pen.
They kept her at the Hôpital Cantonal for a week. Théo visited every day after his shift.
On the third day, she was sitting up. On the fourth day, she asked for paper. On the fifth day, she handed him a stack of envelopes so thick he had to hold it with both hands.
"To the hospital," she said, tapping the top one. "The food. Then the nurse on nights — she has a beautiful laugh and nobody has told her. Then the man in the next bed, who snores like a cement mixer and, I suspect, is very frightened. Then the doctor, who is too young and keeps calling me Odile, as though we went to school together."
"And this one?" The last envelope was addressed in a shakier version of the blue ink. It said simply: The Post Office, Rue de Carouge. Re: Théodore Brunner.
"That," said Odile, "is the most serious complaint I have ever written. Deliver it to the person in charge. Not Kälin. Above Kälin."
"What does it say?"
"It says," said Odile, settling back against the pillow and closing her eyes, "that you are the worst postman in the history of the Swiss Confederation. That you open private mail. That you deliver letters to trams and peacocks and bakers. That you have, in four months, caused a pharmacist to develop manners, a crossing lady to weep, an entire bakery to stay open, and an old woman's nephew to drive from Lausanne in fifty-one minutes, which is illegal, and which he will be hearing about."
"Madame —"
"It says that if they let you go in December, I will write to them every day until I die, and I intend to live a very long time out of spite."
Théo looked down at the envelope in his hands.
"Is that a complaint," he said, "or a reference?"
Odile opened one eye.
"Théodore," she said, "I have been trying to explain this to you since September. There is no difference."
Bernard drove her home on a Sunday in December. Théo carried her bags up three flights to the door that stuck, and then he carried up a second set of bags, because Bernard's wife — who was, as advertised, far too good for him — had sent a lasagne the size of a paving stone and a note that read Bernard will visit every second Sunday. I will make sure of it. — C.
Odile read the note and placed it, squared at the edges, on top of the nearest stack.
"She has good handwriting," she said grudgingly. "I may have misjudged her."
"Is that a complaint?"
"It is an amendment."
At the window, the opera glasses were back on the sill. Down in the street, the baker had put out a second chair. Monsieur Abadie was in one of them. In the other, to Théo's astonishment, sat the tram driver in her reflective vest, on her break, eating an almond croissant and reading something folded small in her hand.
"Is that one of yours?"
"I wrote to her last week, from the hospital," said Odile. "To complain that she has not visited Monsieur Abadie, who misses the tram now that he has nowhere to rush to. People need somewhere to rush to, Théodore. It's very bad for them otherwise."
Théo looked at the two figures in the window of the bakery: an old man with crumbs on his coat and a young woman with a letter in her hand, both laughing at something he couldn't hear.
"Madame Ferrand," he said. "Can I tell you something?"
"You may make a submission."
"The post office kept me on. Permanent contract. Monsieur Rochat — above Kälin — read your letter and said that in thirty years, no customer has ever complained about anyone that thoroughly."
Odile Ferrand did not smile. She was not that kind of woman, and it was not yet lunch.
But she picked up her pen, and uncapped it, and pulled a fresh sheet of paper towards her, and Théo heard it again, the sound he had missed — a scratch, a pause, a scratch — the small animal of her attention, digging once more for the right word.
"Who's that one for?" he asked.
"For you," said Odile. "You've taken your coat off without being asked to stay. It is extremely presumptuous." She did not look up. "Sit down. Not there. That's Monsieur Petit's chair."
He sat in Monsieur Petit's chair.
"I'll put the kettle on," said Odile Ferrand, "in a minute. When I've finished my complaint."
The End