By a Slow River (11 page)

I no longer recall the sequence of what came next or the time of my movements. Clémence was on the bed, her forehead colorless and her lips paler still. The color had left her with the blood that was everywhere. From the grip of her hands on her belly, it seemed as if she had been trying all on her own to bring into the world what she’d carried for months. Around her reigned the greatest disorder, evidence of her efforts, her falls. She hadn’t managed to open the window to call for help. She hadn’t even tried to go downstairs—for fear, no doubt, of pitching over and losing the child. And so she ended up stretched out on the bed, breathing with a dreadful slowness, the warmth almost gone from her cheeks. I pressed my lips to hers and said her name; I shouted it, I held her face in my hands, I slapped it, I breathed air into her mouth. The child that had filled my thoughts all these months was gone from my mind; I must admit that. I thought only of her. I tried the window. The handle came off in my hand, and when I broke the pane with my fist, I let my blood mingle with hers, until I found myself imagining us both bled dry, our life soaked up by the bedclothes. I howled at the street, howled with all the anger of a mistreated animal. Doors opened, windows. I fell to the floor, but even on my knees I still had the sensation of falling. For me there has been no more living except in that fall.

XVII

Hippolyte Lucy stands near Clémence, bending over her, with his anxious face and all his instruments. They’ve sat me down on a chair. I look on without comprehending. There are a lot of people in the room: neighbor women, old and young, speaking in low tones as if it’s already a wake. Where were all these bitches when Clémence was in agony, calling for help? Tell me. Where were these females who’ve shown up now, feeding on misfortune under my nose? I get up abruptly, like a murderer, a lunatic. I see them recoil. I kick them out. I close the door. Now there’s just the three of us: Clémence, the doctor, and me.

As I’ve said, Hippolyte Lucy was a good doctor. A good doctor and a decent man. I couldn’t see what he was doing, but I knew he was doing all he could. He said words to me:
hemorrhage, coma
. He told me to hurry. I lifted Clémence. She weighed nothing. It seemed that only her belly was still alive, that life had taken refuge in that swollen belly, ravenous, starving.

I held her close to me in the carriage while the doctor cracked his whip at the rump of his two nags. We arrived at the clinic. There they separated me from her. Two nurses wheeled her away on a gurney. Clémence glided off into odors of ether, crinkles of white sheets.

For hours I stayed there, waiting beside a soldier who’d lost his left arm. I remember his obscene contentment to have lost only an arm, especially the left one—a real piece of luck since he was right-handed. In six days he’d be home for good. Far from this war for dupes, as he said. One arm lost, many years won. Years of life. He never stopped reminding himself as he gestured with his stump. He’d even given a name to that absent limb—Gugusse— from time to time addressing it, calling it to bear witness:
Farewell,
Gugusse. Isn’t that right, Gugusse?
Happiness doesn’t depend on much. Sometimes it hangs by a thread, sometimes by an arm. War is the world turned on its head; it can make an amputee the happiest of men.

His name was Léon Castrie, that happy soldier. He was from the Morvan. He caused me to smoke a lot of cigarettes. He got me drunk on words, and I really needed that. He never asked me a question. He didn’t need me to make conversation. He made it all alone with his phantom limb. When they called his name, he stood up and said, “We have to go. Come along, Gugusse!” It was suppertime. Léon Castrie, thirty-one years old, corporal in the 127th, from the Morvan, bachelor, farmer. He loved life and cabbage soup. That’s what I remember.

A nurse came. It was evening by then. She said the child had been saved; I could go see him if I wanted to. I shook my head. I said it was Clémence I wanted to see. I asked for news. The nurse said I still had to wait, she would go ask the doctor. Off she went again.

Later, the doctor came—a military doctor, exhausted, worn out, overwhelmed. He might have been a butcher, a steer slaughterer, to judge by his bloody apron, his cap as well. For days he’d been operating without letup, creating Gugusses on an assembly line; some left happy, more of them dead, all of them black and blue. To him a young woman was an aberration in the midst of all that male carnage. He talked to me about the baby, so big he couldn’t come out all by himself. Everything was fine with him. Then he gave me a cigarette. A bad sign: I knew those cigarettes all too well, having given out quite a few myself, to guys who didn’t have many more days of life or of freedom. We smoked without speaking. And as he exhaled, evading my eyes, he murmured, “She lost a lot of blood . . .” His sentence hung in the air with the smoke. It didn’t dissipate. And with that I understood the blood covering him to be Clémence’s blood. This poor fellow with rings under his eyes and a three-day beard, who got tangled in his own sentences, this poor, tired, valiant man who had done everything humanly possible—I suddenly felt the urge to kill him. This shocked me. Even with violent means always available, I’d never had such a strong desire to kill somebody with my own two hands. To kill with rage, to kill with savagery.

“I have to go back,” he said, snuffing his cigarette on the floor. Then he innocently laid a hand on my murderous arm. “You can go see her,” he continued. And off he went, with a weary slowness.

The world doesn’t stop turning just because some of us are suffering. And bastards will be bastards, no matter what. Maybe there’s no such thing as chance. I’ve often told myself that. We’re all centered on our own tragedies. Morning Glory, Destinat, Joséphine in her jail cell, Mierck and Matziev—all forgotten.

At the very time when I should have been there, I wasn’t, and the two creeps made the most of my absence to do their dirty work unhindered, almost as if they’d ordered Clémence’s death to get me out of the way and give them room to maneuver. That’s what they did. With no shame.

As you can imagine, a crime such as the Case can really shake up a region. Such news ripples like a wave that makes everything tremble in its path. It fills people’s heads with horror and their mouths with talk, both at once. You might say it sets their minds fretting and their tongues wagging. In all, it’s no good for anyone to know that a murderer is roaming the countryside, that he could be right under your nose, that maybe your paths have crossed, or will, that maybe he’s your neighbor. It’s especially bad during a war, when all you have is what little peace and quiet can be found on the home front. If not, all is lost.

There aren’t umpteen ways to solve a murder. I only know of two: Either you arrest the culprit or you arrest somebody you say is the culprit. One or the other. Not much more to it than that. Either way, it’s the same so far as the population is concerned. The only loser on the deal is the guy who’s arrested; but when all is said and done, who cares what he thinks? Now, if there are more crimes, that’s a different story, true enough. But that wasn’t the case in our town. Little Morning Glory remained the only girl who was strangled. There were no others. Proof positive for those who needed any that we’d got our man. Case closed. Pass the salt!

What I’m going to tell about now I didn’t see with my own eyes, but that doesn’t change anything. I’ve spent years tying the threads together, retrieving the words, the trails, the questions and answers. It’s like the truth. I haven’t made anything up. Why would I?

XVIII

On that morning while I was crawling back home along the road from the bishop’s palace, the police arrested two young lads, half dead from hunger and exposure. Two deserters from the 59th Infantry. They weren’t the first the mounted police had caught in their net. For several months now, things had begun to unravel. Men fled the front line every day and vanished into the countryside, at times preferring to die all alone in the thickets and copses than be blown apart by the shells. Let’s just say that these two could not have come along at a better time. It suited everybody: the army, which needed to make an example of someone, and the judge, who needed a culprit.

The two kids were paraded through the streets, the two policemen showing off their collar. People came out to see them: two chumps and two officers. Two ragged bums, scraggly and unshaven, uniforms in tatters, eyes rolling every which way, stomachs empty, dragging their feet, towed by two big gendarmes, ruddy and well fed, polished boots, pressed trousers, the picture of conquerors.

The crowd swelled for no apparent reason, maybe because a crowd is stupid by nature. It closed in on the prisoners with more and more menace. Fists were raised; insults flew, rocks too. What’s a crowd? A gathering of people, every one of whom would prove to be a goose if you looked him in the eye and talked to him alone. But put together, almost stuck to one another, amid the odor of bodies, of sweat, of breath that makes even the least among them a glaring fiend, cocked for the smallest word of encouragement, a crowd becomes a hellish machine, a grenade without its pin.

The policemen saw how the wind was blowing. They picked up their pace. The deserters necessarily did likewise. All four took refuge in the town hall, where the mayor soon joined them. A calming wave was produced. A city hall is almost like a church— but a church with the blue, white, and red always hanging on the façade and the lovely motto nicely sculpted for first-rate fools: LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY. The stone façade of official order cooled the passions of the would-be rioters. Everybody stopped short, fell silent, and waited.

After a while the mayor came out, clearing his throat. He was uneasy as ever to be doing his job, being himself. Despite the cold, he was mopping his forehead; then he spoke. “Everything is under control. You can all go back home!” he said.

“We want them,” answered a voice.

“Who do you mean?” the mayor replied.

“The murderers!” called another voice, not the same as the first, backed up right away by a dozen more in succession, like an evil echo.

“What murderers?” asked the mayor.

“The murderers of the little girl!”

The mayor was aghast but pulled himself together. He told them they were nuts, this was all nonsense; these two fellows were deserters, the gendarmes would be turning them over to the army, and the army would know how to deal with them.

“It’s them—we want them!” some numbskull repeated.

“Well, you’re not getting them,” answered the mayor, stubborn and furious by now. “I’ve notified the judge, and he’s on his way!”

There are magic words.
Judge
is a magic word. Like
God, death,
child,
and a number of others. They’re words that command respect, whatever your other feelings.
Judge
can send a chill down your spine, even when you’ve done nothing wrong, particularly when it has a face and the face is like the one these people knew. These people knew very well that the judge was Mierck. Mierck, whose “little worlds” and pitiless snack of soft-boiled eggs beside the corpse of the little girl had carried him in their minds to another order of being, beyond his office. It didn’t matter that they hated him, he was still the judge: the man who, with an indifferent stroke of the pen, could send you off to think things over behind bars. The man who made small talk with the executioner. He loomed in their nightmares as the bogeyman loomed in their children’s.

People looked at one another. The crowd started dispersing, slowly at first, then very quickly, as though seized by a sudden bellyache. When only a dozen hotheads remained, standing on the cobblestones like so many iron pokers, the mayor turned his back on them and went back in.

His bright idea had undoubtedly prevented a lynching. But now the mayor really did have to notify the judge.

Mierck arrived in the early afternoon, accompanied by Matziev. It seems they were already getting on like long-lost friends, which didn’t surprise me, since I’d seen them at it before, and afterward too. I think I’ve already said they were cut from the same dirty cloth. They made their way to the town hall, where they established an armed camp with the support of a dozen policemen who’d come for that very purpose. The judge’s first order was to require that two good armchairs be placed before the fireplace in the mayor’s office and that wine be brought as well as something to go with it, cheese and white bread. The mayor sent Louisette to look for the best she could find.

Matziev got out one of his cigars. Mierck looked at his watch and whistled. The mayor remained standing, not too sure of what to do. The judge gave him a nod, which he took as an order to fetch the two deserters and their guards. And that he did.

The poor fellows entered the room, and the nice fire restored some of their color. The colonel told the gendarmes to “go outside and see if I’m there,” which made Mierck laugh. And so the two inquisitors set about sizing up those two kids. I say kids, because take away a few years and that’s what they were. One of them, Maurice Rifolon, age twenty-two, born in Melun, resident of Paris, 15 rue des Amandiers, in the 20th arrondissement, had been a typographer. The other, Yann Le Floc, age twenty, born in Plouzagen—a Breton village he’d never left before the war—was a farmhand.

“What struck me,” the mayor confessed later, much later, “was the difference between them. The little Breton kept his head down. You could clearly see he was consumed by fear. Whereas the other one, the city fellow, looked us straight in the eye, almost with a smile but not quite. It was like he didn’t give a damn about us or about anything.”

The colonel opens fire first. “You know why you’re here?” he asks them.

Rifolon stares at him, doesn’t answer. The little Breton lifts his head a bit and mumbles, “Because we left, Colonel, sir. Because we ran away.”

Mierck joins the fray. “Because you killed.”

The little Breton’s eyes widen. On the other hand, cool as can be, Rifolon remarks, “Of course we killed; that’s why they came to get us, so we could kill more men across from us who look like our brothers, to kill them so they’ll kill us. It’s people like you who put us up to it—”

The little Breton panics. “I’m not so sure I killed anybody. Maybe not, maybe I missed them; it’s pretty hard to see, and I don’t know how to shoot, even my corporal makes fun of me. ‘Le Floc,’ he says, ‘you couldn’t hit a cow in a hallway!’ ”

The colonel goes up to them. He takes a big drag on his cigar and exhales the smoke into their faces. The little one coughs. The other doesn’t bat an eyelid. “It’s a little girl you killed, a ten-year-old girl.”

The little Breton jumps. “What? What? What?” It seems he repeated the word at least twenty times, hopping in place, wriggling like a man on fire.

As for the typographer, he retained his calm and his slight mocking smile. He was the one the judge addressed now. “You don’t seem surprised?”

He took his time about answering; he examined Mierck from head to foot and Matziev too. The mayor told me, “He looked like he was weighing them with his eyes, and he seemed amused by all this!”

Finally he answers. “Nothing surprises me anymore. If you had seen what I’ve seen these past months, you’d know that anything is possible.” A pretty turn of phrase, no? And a smack in the face for the judge, who starts to turn crimson.

“You deny it?” he shouts.

“On the contrary, I confess,” the other quietly replies.

“What?” yells the small one, grabbing his pal’s collar. “Are you crazy? What are you talking about? Don’t listen to this guy! I don’t know him; we’ve only been together since last night! Me, I don’t know what he did. Bastard, why are you doing this? Tell them, go on, tell them!”

Mierck shuts him up by sequestering him in a corner of the office, as though to say, We’ll see about you later. Then he comes back to the other one. “You were saying?”

“Whatever you want,” he says, peaceful as ever.

“The little girl?”

“I killed her. I’m the one. I saw her. I followed her. I stabbed her in the back three times with a knife.”

“No, you strangled her.”

“Yes, that’s right, I strangled her, with these very hands. You’re right, I didn’t have a knife.”

“On the bank of the little canal.”

“Exactly.”

“And you put her in the water.”

“Yes.”

“Why did you do that?”

“Felt like it.”

“You wanted to rape her?”

“Yes.”

“But she wasn’t raped.”

“Didn’t have time. There was some noise. I ran off.”

The lines flow without hesitation, as at the theater—that’s how the mayor put it. The typographer stands very straight, speaks very clearly. The judge doesn’t miss a beat. You’d think they’d been rehearsing for hours. The little Breton cries, his face full of snot, heaving his shoulders and shaking his head continuously in futile dissent. Matziev envelops himself in the smoke of his cigar.

The judge addresses the mayor. “You’re a witness to these confessions?”

This takes the mayor aback. He knows full well he’s witnessed no such thing. He knows Mierck realizes this too. And to top it off, he knows the judge doesn’t give a damn what he thinks. Mierck has what he wants, and the likes of the mayor won’t be snatching it away from him.

“Can we really say confessions—” ventures the mayor.

Matziev gets into the act. “You have ears, Mayor, and a brain. So you’ve heard them and understood them.”

“Perhaps you would like to lead the inquiry?” the judge says, backing up the colonel. And with that the mayor falls silent.

The little Breton is still crying. The other one stands straight as a flagpole, now smiling broadly, elsewhere already. Anyway, he’d figured it out. Deserter: shot. Murderer: executed. Either way, so long! All he wanted was to go quickly. That’s all. So why not stick it to them in the process?

Mierck called back one of the policemen, who conducted the typographer upstairs to a narrow room, a broom closet. He was locked inside and the gendarme stood guard at the door.

The judge and the colonel decided to reward their own efficiency with a break, so they gave the mayor to understand they’d call him when they needed him. The tearful little Breton was led down to the cellar by another policeman, and since the cellar couldn’t be locked, he was handcuffed and made to sit on the floor. The rest of the squad returned to the scene of the crime, on Mierck’s orders, to go over it with a fine-tooth comb.

It was already fairly late in the afternoon. Louisette came back with a lot of provisions she’d collected here and there. The mayor told her to serve those gentlemen—and, not a mean man, he told her to take a little something to the prisoners as well.

“At the time my brother was at the front,” Louisette would tell me. “I knew it was tough; he’d had the same idea as them. ‘You’ll hide me!’ he’d told me one day when he’d come on leave, and I told him, No, if he did that I’d tell the mayor and the police.” She wouldn’t have done it, but she knew what happened to deserters and wanted to frighten him. In the end he died anyway, a week before the armistice. “All that to tell you I felt sorry for those poor guys, so before I served those two healthy men, I took food to the prisoners. The one in the cellar was huddling in terror. He wouldn’t take the bread and bacon; I left everything beside him on a barrel. As to the other one in the closet upstairs, I knocked on the door. There wasn’t any answer. I knocked again: still nothing. I had my arms full of the bread and bacon, so the policeman opened the door. The poor guy was smiling—I swear, he was smiling, staring us right in the face, his eyes open wide. I screamed and dropped everything. The policeman said ‘Shit!’ and pounced on him. But it was too late. He’d used his trousers to hang himself; he’d made strips of them and tied them to the handle of the transom window. I wouldn’t have thought an old window handle was that strong.”

Mierck and Matziev took the news in stride. They were men able to find their justification in any development. “Further proof, as if any were needed!” Mierck said to the mayor.

Night was beginning to fall. The colonel added logs to the fire, and the judge summoned Louisette. She arrived with her head lowered, trembling all over. She thought he was going to question her about the suicide. Mierck asked what she’d found for them to eat. She reported. “Three sausages, some potted meat, some ham, some pigs’ feet, a chicken, some calves’ liver, a cow’s-milk cheese, and a goat cheese.” He was obviously content and gave his orders without a moment’s thought: the pork products as an appetizer, braised calves’ liver after that, then a stew of chicken, cabbage, carrots, onions, sausage, followed by pigs’ feet
à l’estou fade,
the cheeses, and an apple crêpe. And wine, of course, the best available. White with the first course, red after that. And with the back of his hand, he sent her off to her kitchen.

Throughout the evening, Louisette shuttled between the town hall and the mayor’s house: bringing bottles and tureens, removing the empties, serving the next course, carrying off the dishes of the preceding one. The mayor had taken to his bed with a sudden fever. They had unhooked the typographer and taken him to the hospital morgue. A single gendarme had stayed behind at city hall, to keep watch on the little Breton. Louis Despiaux was the gendarme’s name, a fine fellow; I’ll come back to him.

The mayor’s office, where the judge and the colonel had bivouacked, looked out onto a small courtyard, where a skinny chestnut tree had grown very tall. From one of the office windows you could see it perfectly: a scrawny thing that never had room to flourish and become a real tree. It’s been gone a long time now. Shortly after the Case, the mayor had it cut down, finding that when he looked at it he saw something besides a sick tree, something he couldn’t stomach. From the office you reached the courtyard by a low door that closed a corner. On the door, spines of books were outlined in trompe l’oeil; this beautiful design augmented one’s impression of the library, which was otherwise pretty threadbare and held precious few real books—never opened—alongside tomes of the civil and the municipal codes. At the end of the courtyard there were toilets and a canopy wide as a man’s outstretched arms, under which logs were stacked.