Amour Provence (12 page)

The birds fluttered in the trees and all was calm, but even though it was still early, the heat pounded unrelentingly and Rachida was aware of the dull ache in her lower abdomen and a new soreness in her breasts. She was pleased to see that Musa had considerately filled the stone basins with rich, dark topsoil that had come in heavy, hundred-liter bags.

It was a pleasure to plunge the trowel into the soft earth and sift it between her fingers. She dug the new plants into the stone basins, and when she had nearly finished planting everything, she turned on the hose and drank deeply. The summer heat was at its worst in July, and the air shimmered in the distance like water trembling in a glass. Rachida's shirt was plastered to her back and she wished she had worn a veil to shield herself from the sun. As she moved into a shady patch, she felt herself seized by dizziness and a bouncing, starry light flashed before her eyes. She made her way to the fountain, where the stone baby's head dribbled a constant stream of cool water into the basin. She sat down heavily on its edge. Cicadas kept up their primitive chant, harking back to a time when there had been nothing there, no château or
commanderie
, no garden, just the crest of a hill that dominated the valley where the Ouvèze River, the color of molten metal, flowed in the distance.

When Rachida stood again her head whirled and her body felt cold and slimy as a frog. Several drops of sweat ran into her eyes, burning them, and she felt a strong painful
twist in her belly. She breathed deep, wishing she had mentioned her problem to Amina, or to Mohammed, who might have insisted she see a doctor. With a shock Rachida thought she saw her mother standing next to one of the leggy fig trees now stripped of the strangling ivy. She closed her eyes and then looked again, but her mother had disappeared. The shovel leaned against the low stone wall and she imagined gravediggers in the dry, sandy cemetery at home, whose stones and walls were whitewashed, always gleaming so bright and clean under the scorching sun. A wave of nausea and weakness rolled over her and she fell to the ground in a slow painless tumble, like a child's ball that bounces softly and easily onto the grass. And she dreamed a deep dream that she was digging a great hole in the garden. She felt the rough wood of the handle and heard the scrape as the metal blade was driven into the earth. She kept at it until the shovel's edge clinked against something in the obscurity of the earth. At once, a clod sprang out and landed at her feet. As she picked it up, she felt herself surrounded with a cool essence, like air coming from a deep cavern. Something shone dully beneath the earthen thing that she held in her hands and she rubbed at it with her thumbs. A shiny metal began to appear as the soil crumbled away and she found herself holding a large ring made for a man's hand. The ring was old and slightly dented. Perhaps it had once belonged to one of the Templiers. As she turned it around in her fingers something moved against her palm and the head of a snake, triangular and golden, slid through the center of the ring. It opened its mouth and hissed, showing its forked tongue. She could see its sharp milk-white
teeth as it moved close to the thin veins in her wrist and she felt that she must rush home and find Mohammed. And yet, she feared that when he saw the serpent her beloved Hamidou would automatically know everything about her lies of omission and her unworthy desires, and that would cause him to abandon her forever. She called out, but no sound came, and she tried to raise her hand to grab away the serpent, but there was no movement.

When Musa found the pretty Moroccan girl lying crumpled in the grass, he grabbed the hose and splashed water onto her face, rubbing her cheeks and neck with his hands. When she didn't react, he took her by her shoulders and pulled her up into a sitting position. Her head lolled to the side, her eyelashes black crescents against pale, yellow flesh. He pressed his fingers beneath her jaw, searching for a pulse, and felt a thready vibration as from the body of a weak and frightened animal. The château was locked, so there was no access to a telephone. He sat for a moment with the girl in his arms, and then he laid her down very gently in the shade of a fig tree and ran down through the gates to a house he knew where he demanded to make a call, explaining it was an emergency.

The
sapeurs-pompiers
arrived in their enormous screaming van, red lights flashing. Men in blue uniforms gave the young woman oxygen. For a moment Musa thought of accompanying her in the ambulance, but then realized it was more important to find her husband, who he knew worked at a nearby vineyard. When the firemen lifted the stretcher
and slid it into the ambulance, Musa could just make out her pale face as the doors slammed shut. The vehicle crunched down the gravel drive and through the château gates, the
wa-wa
call of the siren loud and brash as the van descended through the village and onto the rural route, where the sound eventually faded until, once again, silence pervaded the empty garden, and all that was left was the pure light of high summer.

E
uphémie awoke feeling the pressure of hard fingers against her chest. A nurse peered down at her and she stared back from her pillow, all at once remembering her dream. She'd been a girl again, hiding by the stream while rifle fire banged in the distance and a strange chemical odor infused the air. The sounds and smells of wartime.

“Everything all right?” the nurse asked. She poked the tips of her fingers against Euphémie's breastbone again, neither a friendly nor reassuring gesture, and Euphémie smelled that familiar resinous odor of carbolic soap once more. The nurse must wash her hands with it! The scent brought back memories of the last days of the war, her father, her childhood friend Lapin, and the wounded pilot who had appeared by the flowing stream. They'd been with her during sleep for several nights now. She prayed the nurse wouldn't notice her galloping pulse. It didn't do to show any sort of
bouleversement
or upset in this place.

“I'm fine,” Euphémie replied. “Why do you ask?”

“There was a disturbance down the hall, one of the patients making a commotion. It didn't wake you?”

“You woke me.”

Euphémie no longer tried to communicate in any real way with the nurses. When she'd first arrived at the place several months before, she'd told them that she was just fine, never better, and ready to go home, away from the locked ward where most of the patients were unable even to speak. At first, the staff repeated the same information her daughter, Florence, had given her regarding the incurable malady that would soon rage through her brain, leaving her a feeble, worthless remnant of her former self. They were all so polite about it, just the way the first wave of invading German soldiers had been polite in order to make people believe that theirs would be a benevolent occupation and to induce her countrymen to behave and obey orders. Yet one evening Euphémie had made the mistake of having an altercation with the nurse in charge regarding this so-called illness diagnosed by a doctor she'd never met before. When Euphémie defended her health and sanity, perhaps a little too vociferously, the nurses had suddenly surrounded her and she'd found herself carried bodily to her room and buckled to her bed with belts of canvas until morning. After that, she'd learned not to make a fuss. Maybe that's what had happened tonight, a chair overturned in protest, a door slammed in fear, attendants arriving to quell the outburst. Perhaps it was those noises that had evoked the distant rifle fire of her dream!

The nurse's synthetic uniform rustled like a plastic bag as she exited, the door closing behind her with an efficient click.

Florence had told the doctor that Euphémie didn't sleep in a proper bed, but on a pile of straw, and that she foraged for food in the town garbage bins. It was true that cooking and housekeeping had become a terrible chore. Euphémie preferred long walks up into the mountains, where she'd gather wild leeks and asparagus the way her father had taught her when she was a child. She'd make soups with what she collected or simply eat her harvest raw. And yes, at night she often left her cavernous bedroom that faced the road, not for a bed of straw, but to sleep on the horsehair sofa in the
grand salon
or the little
canapé
by the window, where she could hear the stream that gushed through the deep ravine behind. It was so much nicer to be within earshot of soughing branches, rushing water, the trill of birdsong. And Florence was wrong about the garbage. Euphémie had only gone through the town bins once or twice. It was amazing the things people threw away! Boxes of cookies and galettes, and perfectly good cheese in unopened packages. That foraging took place well before she had met her dear friend Hamidou, a Muslim man whom she'd first encountered near her favorite spot on the mountain, La Fontaine des Fées, where a spring used to flow in the days of her girlhood. When they'd gotten to know each other, Hamidou began to bring her lunch each day at that special meeting place. He always arrived with the food in a basket, a linen napkin folded neatly over the top. They ate together on a stone bench where a line of poplars stole up
the hill to a crumbled ruin that had once been a military garrison. Her friend always wore a suit with a freshly pressed white shirt and a red woolen hat, the Moroccan chechia, tilted back on his head. He had no family in Provence and no one to whom he could return in his native country. She gathered that he'd once had a young wife who had died due to complications of pregnancy. Now he made a modest living as an assistant to the imam at the local mosque, where he was considered something of a sage and was called
alhaji
because he'd been to Mecca twice. An unlikely acquaintance, this man who had spent most of his life as a foreman laboring in a local vineyard, but Euphémie had grown to appreciate his kindness and polite reserve. His name was Mohammed, but he asked her to call him by his childhood sobriquet, Hamidou.

She sat up in bed and slipped her legs over the side. Euphémie had been lithe as a youth. Now, as an elderly person, she remained slender with sinewy muscles developed from her long mountain treks. The regular meals in this so-called
maison de retraite
were making her stronger and she never felt hungry anymore. Her cheeks were round as plums and her blue eyes shone with health and vigor. Even though the food wasn't to her taste, she could always find something to eat, but she never touched the meat, gray and stringy with a putrid smell of old blood.

Yet the thought of not being able to continue life in her little village of Serret weighed upon her. Now that she had outlived most of her neighbors, she didn't have many friends, but occasionally she'd be invited to dine with one of the old families; Liliane Perra of Domaine Petitjean was
always particularly kind. But her favorites were the more patrician Prosts, who had been in residence in a grand old house for generations, though now they spent most of their time in Paris. Gaston, the head of the family, whom she'd known throughout his boyhood, was now a charming and cultivated middle-aged man with children of his own. How quickly life flew by! But it was true that for a long time Euphémie had been leading a solitary life, her long walks in the hills being her chief joy and comfort.

She slid from the bed and moved to the window, where she lifted the sash to better hear the river's loud rush. Her elbows pressed down on the sill and she propped her face in her hands and gazed out at a night enshrouded in darkness except for one solitary light gleaming in someone's window across the way. In the morning, a white heron always perched on a cantilevered rock at the center of the river, the huge stone pushed nearly upright by the force of the flow. The heron spent his days on the rock availing himself of darting fish and the turquoise frogs that skimmed to and fro beneath the reedy banks. Euphémie knew the heron's movements by heart, but he wouldn't appear until after sunrise.

In the darkness, the water gleamed the muted color of gunmetal with foamy whitecaps that appeared and disappeared as the river hurled itself downstream. It had been a wet spring and the Ouvèze was wilder than usual. She had always enjoyed walking close to the untamed current, watching the water birds and smelling the combination of fresh, newly growing things along with the odor of rotting reeds and undergrowth, so typical of those murky banks. It was her long sojourns spent in the mountains and down in
the valley, out of doors all day, that she longed for. The only other time that her freedom had been so drastically impinged upon was during the war, when it was too dangerous to traverse the balsam paths or walk by graveled streamlets. There was something about being in this locked place that caused her to recall those days with an unusual lucidity. During the long afternoons spent sitting with the other occupants in the common room, memories of her teenage years rose in her mind like spectral illuminations in a dark garden. Under Nazi occupation, she had been sensitive to the violence that pervaded everything, giving off its own special scent of decay and destruction. It was the same in this rest home, the putrid smells that occasionally wafted down the hallways coming from the vegetative patients who passed their time in wheelchairs banked up in windowless corridors, or the ambulant ones whose screams were quickly stifled with a needle. Looking at them, Euphémie sometimes felt that her own breath might be sucked right out of her unless she was careful. She had to be terribly careful.