By a Slow River (16 page)

XXVI

When I say there’s nothing more, I’m lying. I’m lying twice over, in fact.

In the first place there’s a letter, though not from Lysia. A little sheet, slipped into the notebook after her final words, signed by a certain Captain Brandieu, on July 27, 1915. It must have arrived at the château on August 4th. That much is clear.

Mademoiselle,

It is a with a great sadness that I bring you this news: Ten days
ago, during an assault on the enemy lines, Corporal Bastien Francoeur
was struck in the head by a sniper’s bullet. Aided by his comrades, he
was brought back to our trench, where a medic could do no more than
bind his wound. Corporal Francoeur died in the minutes that followed
without regaining consciousness.

I hope it will be of comfort to know that he died a soldier’s death for
his country. In the months he had been under my command, he conducted himself with an unwavering stout heart, always first to volunteer for the most dangerous missions. He was loved by his men and
esteemed by his superiors.

Please forgive my ignorance of the nature of your relationship with
Corporal Francoeur, Mademoiselle, but as several of your letters have
arrived since his death, I thought it well to inform you of his tragic
end, in case word had not yet reached you from his family, who are
some distance from you.

Rest assured, Mademoiselle, that I share in your grief and o fer
my sincerest condolences.

Captain Charles-Louis Brandieu

It’s strange, the varied instruments of death. You imagine a knife, a bullet, a shell, but those aren’t the only ones. A little letter can be as lethal; a mere letter, full of fine sentiments and compassion, can kill as surely as any weapon.

Lysia Verhareine received this letter. I don’t know whether she cried out, wept, screamed, or fell silent. I’ll never know. All I can say is that within a few hours’ time the prosecutor and I were in her room, standing over her body, looking at each other without understanding. At least I didn’t understand. He already knew, or soon would, upon finding the red morocco notebook.

Why had he taken it? To preserve the memory of their dinner, so he could continue to live with the miracle of her smiles and her words? Something like that, I suppose.

The soldier, the beloved, was dead. For him she had abandoned everything, for him she had climbed to the crest each Sunday, for him she had taken up her pen every day. It was for him that her heart beat. And this beloved soldier, had he seen any face before him when the bullet shattered his skull? Lyse? Another woman? No one? A mystery, and quite beside the point.

I’ve often imagined Destinat poring over the notebook, coming to the testaments of love that must have pained him, seeing himself called Sadness and mocked—though with a gentle, endearing mockery. He didn’t get his right between the eyes, as I did!

Yes, reading again and again, just as you might continually turn over an hourglass, to pass the time watching the sand flow, nothing more.

I said a while ago that I was lying twice over. Besides the letter slipped into the notebook, there were also three photographs. They were pasted side by side on the final page. And this little scene of frozen cinema had been composed by none other than Destinat.

In the first picture you could recognize the model who’d posed for the painter of the large portrait in the entrance hall: Clélis de Vincey might have been seventeen then. Here she was in a meadow dotted with umbellifers, the ones nicknamed meadowsweets. A girl laughing. She wore country clothes, and the simplicity only accentuated her elegance. A wide-brimmed hat cast a dark shadow across half her face but could not obscure her dazzled grace, her eyes in the light, her smile, the sun glow of her hand as she held down the brim lofted by the wind. She was the sweetness of the meadow.

The second photograph had been rough-cut from a larger, broader one, and in that oddly elongated slice a happy little girl looked straight out. In this way Destinat’s scissors had isolated Morning Glory from the photograph Bourrache had given him. “Just like the Blessed Virgin,” her father had told me, and he was right. The little girl’s face radiated something religious, a beauty without artifice, a goodness, a simple splendor.

In the third photograph, Lysia Verhareine was leaning against a tree, her hands flat against the bark, her chin raised a bit, her mouth half open. She seemed to be waiting for a kiss from the one holding the camera. She was just as I had known her. It was only her expression that had changed. She had never offered any of us that smile. It was the unmistakable smile of desire, of mad love, and it was very disturbing to see her this way, because with that her mask had dropped; you understood her true nature and what she was capable of doing for the man she loved—or to herself.

Still, the strangest effect of all this—and it wasn’t the result of my having drunk a fair amount at my kitchen table before heading out—was the impression of gazing at three portraits of the same face, the same face at various ages, in different moments of history, even.

Morning Glory, Clélis, and Lysia were like three incarnations of the same soul, a soul that had lent to the bodies it had worn an identical smile, a sweetness, and a fire without equal. The same beauty, returning again and again, born and destroyed, reappearing and gone. Seeing them side by side like this made your head swim. You went from one to the next, only to see the same. There was something pure and demonic in all that, inspiring a mixture of serenity and dread. Before so much constancy, you could almost believe that beauty persists, no matter what and in spite of time— that what was will return again.

I thought of Clémence, and at once it seemed to me I could have added a fourth photograph. And with that it seemed I was taking leave of my senses. I closed the notebook. I had too great an ache, too many thoughts, too many storms in my head. And all that on account of three little photographs, placed in a row by a lonely old man, well acquainted with boredom.

It occurred to me to burn everything.

I didn’t do it. Professional habit. You don’t destroy evidence. But evidence of what? Of our hopeless incapacity to see the living as they are? None of us had ever said, “How about that? Bourrache’s little girl is the spitting image of Lysia Verhareine. Two peas in a pod!” Barbe had never said, “That little teacher—it’s eerie how much she looks like the late Madame Destinat!”

But maybe only death could reveal that. Maybe it was only the prosecutor and I who could see it. Maybe the two of us were alike in madness as in other things.

When I think of those two long hands of Destinat, well manicured and delicate, covered with speckles of age and taut with tendons; when I see them early on a winter’s evening, squeezing the fragile, slender neck of Morning Glory, as the child’s smile ebbs from her face and a big question fills her eyes—when I imagine this scene that took place, or didn’t take place, I tell myself that Destinat wasn’t strangling a little girl but a memory, a suffering. That suddenly in his hands, under his fingers, it was the ghosts of Clélis and Lysia Verhareine whose necks he was trying to wring so he could be rid of them forever; so he would no longer hear or see them, feel their approach at night and extend his hand to reach them; so he would love them in vain no more.

But it’s not so easy to kill the dead. To make them go away. How many times have I tried it myself. Everything would be so much simpler if it were otherwise.

And so other faces would have passed into the face of the child, this little girl whose path he’d crossed by chance, at the end of a snowy, frosty day, as night began to gather and with it all those tormenting shades. Suddenly love and crime would have become confused, as though in that moment you could kill only what you loved, and that alone.

I lived for a long time with this idea of Destinat as murderer by mistake—out of illusion, hope, memory, dread. I found it beautiful. Not that it altered the fact of murder, but this way it seemed sublime, high above the sordid facts. Both criminal and victim made martyrs: That’s unusual.

And then one day a letter reached me. We know when letters are sent. There’s no telling why they never arrive, why they take so long. Could it be that the little corporal also wrote every day to Lysia Verhareine? Might his letters be in transit somewhere still, wandering through byways, labyrinths of human conveyance, even with the sender and the addressed long dead?

The letter I’m speaking of now had been mailed from Rennes on March 23, 1919. It had taken six years to get here. Six years just to cross France.

It had been addressed to me by a colleague. He didn’t know me, and I didn’t know him. He must have sent the same letter to all of us who had drowsed in towns near the front during the war.

Alfred Vignot—that was his name—wanted to track down a fellow he’d lost sight of since 1916. We at the station often received similar requests, from city halls, from families, from other policemen. The war had been a big broth stirring with hundreds of thousands of men. Some were dead, others had survived. Some had gone back home; others tried to start a new life, unseen and unknown. The great butchery had not only chopped up bodies and minds, it had also allowed a small number to let themselves be reported missing, so they might try their luck far from their native region, to have another spin of the wheel, so to speak. You had to be very clever to prove they were alive, especially since it had become so easy to change names and acquire documents. After all, there were about a million and a half who’d never need their names and documents again: plenty to choose from! And so, just like that, a lot of bastards blossomed all over again, smelling like roses, far from the places that had seen them down in the dung pile.

Vignot’s missing person had a death to answer for, a dead girl to be exact. He had tortured her meticulously—the details were given in the letter—before strangling and raping her. The crime had been committed in May of 1916, and it had taken Vignot three years to complete his inquiry, gather the evidence, be sure of his facts. The victim’s name was Blanche Fen’vech. She was ten years old. They had found her near a footpath, left in a ravine, less than a kilometer from the village of Plouzagen. That’s where she lived. She had set out as every evening to look for four wretched cows in a meadow. I didn’t have to read it through to guess who Vignot was after. Soon as I had opened the envelope, it was as if someone was reading over my shoulder, hovering inside my head.

His man was named Le Floc, Yann Le Floc. He would have been nineteen at the time of the murder. He was my little Breton.

I never answered Vignot. To each his own shit! No doubt he was right about Le Floc, but that didn’t change a thing. The little girls were dead, the one in Brittany and the one here in our town. The kid was dead too, executed by firing squad, by the book. And deep down I couldn’t dismiss the idea that Vignot might have been mistaken or that maybe he had reasons of his own for framing the boy, just as those scumbags Mierck and Matziev had had theirs. Who knows?

Strangely enough, I was now well accustomed to living with mystery, with doubt, dimness, hesitation—long deprived of answers and certainties. Replying to Vignot would have swept all that away; with one fell swoop there would have been clarity, turning Destinat snow-white, plunging the little Breton into blackness. Too simple. One of the two had killed, certainly, but the other could have done it just as well, and there is no essential difference between the intention and the crime.

I took Vignot’s letter and lit the bowl of my pipe with it. Bah! Smoke! Cloud! Ashes! Nothingness! Keep on trying to find my man, so I won’t be the only one on this case! Maybe it was spite, in fact. A way of believing I wasn’t the only one digging in the dirt with his nails, trying to unearth the dead and make them talk. Even in the void, we need to know that there are other men like us.

XXVII

There you are: We’ve reached the end. The story’s end and mine. The graves, like the mouths, have been stopped up a long time now, and the dead are no more than names on stones, half worn away: Morning Glory, Lysia, Destinat, Solemn, Barbe, Adélaïde Siffert, the little Breton and the typographer, Mierck, Gachentard, Bourrache’s wife, Hippolyte Lucy, Mazerulles, Clémence. Often I imagine them—all of them, the men, the women, the little girl— in the cold earth and its packed darkness. I know that their eye sockets are long since empty, the flesh withered from their interlaced fingers.

If somebody wanted to know what I’ve been up to all these years, all the time that’s brought me to this point, I wouldn’t know for sure how to answer. I can’t say I saw the years pass, though all of them have seemed very long to me. I’ve kept a flame going and interrogated the darkness, without ever getting more than partial answers, tight-lipped and piecemeal.

But it’s been a living, this dialogue with the dead. Enough to keep me going, while waiting for the end. I’ve spoken to Clémence. I’ve recalled the others. Scarcely a day goes by when I don’t summon them before me to pore over their gestures and words yet again, wondering whether I understood them correctly the last time.

Just when I believe at last I’ve caught a glimmer of the truth, right away something else comes along and blows out the light, swirling the ashes around my eyes. And everything has to be revisited.

But maybe that’s the key to my having endured: this dialogue in a single voice, always the same, always mine, and the opaqueness of this crime that has no culprit, perhaps, except the opaqueness of our very lives. Life is extremely odd. Do we ever know why we’ve come into the world and why we’ve stayed here? No doubt delving into the Case as I’ve done was a way of evading the real question, the one we all refuse to pose with our lips and in our minds, in our souls—which indeed are neither white nor black but “nice and gray,” just as Joséphine had told me without a doubt in her mind.

I’ve told you everything, I believe. Everything about what I thought I was—or almost. There’s only one thing still to say, the most difficult perhaps, something I’ve never even murmured. And so for that let me take another drink, to screw up the courage, to say it to you, Clémence, since it’s for you alone that I speak and write, as from the beginning, now and always.

I couldn’t bear to give him a name or even look at him, really. I didn’t kiss him as a father should have done.

When the tall nun in a wimple, dry as autumn fruit left in the oven too long, brought him to me a week after your death, she said, “This is your child. He has only you now.” She did no more to install him here than to put the white bundle in my arms before being on her way. The child was asleep. He felt very warm and smelled sweetly of milk. His face peeked out of cloth that swaddled him like a baby Jesus in a crèche, and his cheeks were so chubby that his mouth was lost in their fullness. I looked for your face in his, imagining a keepsake you might have sent me from the afterlife. But he didn’t look like anything—nothing like you, anyway. He looked like all other newborns, those who’ve just seen the light of day after a long cozy night, spent in a place we all forget. Yes, he was one of them: an innocent, as they say. The future of the world. A human baby. The perpetuation of the race. But for my part, I could see in him only the one who’d taken your life, a little murderer without conscience or remorse; and I could see I would have to live with him though you weren’t here anymore, though he’d killed you to make his way to me, though he’d used his elbows and all the rest to get here and face me alone. And while I’d never see your face again or kiss your skin, he would grow every day, soon cutting teeth to go on devouring, hands to grab things and eyes to see them; and then, later, he’d have words, words to tell his great lie to whoever cared to listen: that he had never known you, that you had died giving birth, when in fact he killed you in order to live.

I didn’t think it over very long. It just happened. I picked up a big pillow and made his face disappear. I waited there, a long time. He didn’t move. To use the terms of those who judge us here on earth, there was no premeditation; it was all I could do, and so I did it. I took the pillow away and I cried, thinking not of him but of you.

I went to look for Hippolyte Lucy, to tell the doctor the baby wasn’t breathing. He came with me in haste. He entered the room. The baby was on the bed, still with that face of an innocent sleeper, peaceful and monstrous.

The doctor undressed him. He bent down to hold his cheek near the closed mouth. He listened to the heart; it was no longer beating. He said nothing. He shut his bag and he turned to me. We faced each other, a long time. He knew. I knew he did, but he said nothing. He left me alone with the little body.

I had him buried next to you. Ostrane said that newborns vanish into the ground like a perfume in the wind, before you’ve even had the chance to notice it. He meant no harm. The thought seemed to fill him with wonder.

I didn’t inscribe his name on the gravestone.

The worst I must confess is that even today I feel no remorse. I’d do it again with no more qualms than when I did it then, which is to say none. I’m not proud of it. I’m not ashamed of it either. It wasn’t pain that drove me to it. It was emptiness. Not the fear of it but the desire for it. The emptiness where I’ve remained, and where I wanted to remain alone. He would’ve had no luck, an unhappy little boy growing up with a father for whom life was no more than a void filled with a single question—a great bottomless hole, along whose rim I’d be forever picking my way, round and round, talking to you, and clinging to my words like the walls of a deep well.

Yesterday I went and loafed around the Pont des Voleurs. Do you remember? How old could we have been, not yet twenty? You were wearing a red dress. My stomach clenched up. We were on the bridge, looking down at the river. This current, you told me—look how far it goes, how beautiful it is, there among the water lilies, the algae with the long hair, the banks of clay. I didn’t dare put my arm around your waist. The knot in my gut was so unbearable I could hardly breathe. Your eyes gazed off into the distance. Mine were looking at the nape of your neck. I smelled your perfume of heliotrope and the fragrance of the river, the freshness of trodden grass. Then, without my expecting it, you turned to me with a smile and gave me a kiss. It was the first time. And the water flowed under the bridge. The world shone as on some beautiful Sunday, and time meant nothing.

Yesterday I lingered on the Pont des Voleurs a long while. The river is the same. Those big water lilies, those algae with long hair, those clay banks are still there. The scent of the grass. A child came up to me, a boy with light-colored eyes. “Looking at the fish?” he asked. “There’s a lot, but you never see them,” he added, a little disappointed. I made no reply. There are so many things you never see. He leaned on his elbows beside me, and we stayed that way quite a while, amid the music of the frogs and the eddies, he and I. When I left, the boy followed me for a bit; then he disappeared.

Today it’s all done. I’ve spent my time, and the emptiness no longer scares me. Maybe you think I’m a bastard like the rest, no better than the others. You’d be right, of course. Forgive me for everything I’ve done and, even more, for everything I haven’t done.

I hope you’ll be able to judge for yourself, face-to-face. I need so much to believe that God exists and, with him, all the nonsense they crammed into our heads when we were little. If it’s so, you’ll have a hard time recognizing me. You left behind a young man, and I return to you an old one, almost old, grizzled and scarred anyway. You haven’t changed, I know. The dead never do.

A while ago, I took down Gachentard’s rifle. I took it apart, oiled it, cleaned and polished it. I put it back together, loaded it, and set it here beside me at the window. Hard to imagine the girl didn’t notice its beauty. Outside, the weather is mild and bright. Today’s a Monday. It’s morning. A fine time for a story to end.