By a Slow River (6 page)

X

The war went on and on. All those braggarts who were sure we’d be sending the Krauts back home with a quick kick in the ass, after three weeks—they shut their traps now. The first anniversary of the hostilities wasn’t observed anywhere but at Fermillin’s bistro. He was a tall, lanky guy with a head like a candle snuffer who had worked ten years for Northern Railways before discovering his vocation—“like a call from heaven,” he said—for selling spirits.

His place was called Au Bon Pied, the Right Foot. Many had pointed out that the name didn’t make much sense for a bar and would confuse the locals. He had replied, curtly enough, that he had reasons of his own for the name he gave his establishment; and as for the townsfolk, they could go to hell.

It didn’t take more than a round of drinks on the house for everyone to agree with his logic. Most found that when all was said and done, Au Bon Pied wasn’t half bad. It sounded rather distinguished in fact, not so run-of-the-mill as the ubiquitous Excelsior, Floria, Terminus, or Café des Amis. Anyway, the name proved no impediment to business.

On August 3, 1915, Fermillin unfurled over his sign a big banner made from an old sheet. On it he had written in large red, white, and blue letters: ONE YEAR AFTER: GLORY TO OUR HEROES!

The party began about five in the afternoon with the cult faithful: old man Voret, a paunchy retiree from the factory who’d been celebrating his widowhood for three years; Janesh Hiredek, a Bulgarian émigré who spoke French badly when sober but who quoted Voltaire and Lamartine as soon as he had two liters of wine in him; Léon Pantonin, called Green Face, the hue his skin had taken on as a result of a revolutionary treatment for pulmonary inflammation based on copper oxide; Jules Arbonfel, an apelike giant two meters tall but with a girl’s voice; and Victor Durel, whose wife would come looking for him at the Bon Pied, only to leave with him two or three hours later, when she had to be carried out herself.

It was going on three in the morning, and the bistro was still resounding with all the old saws: “Happy, We Depart,” “Madelon,” “The Young Recruits,” “Soldier Boy, My Brother!” The crowd would strike up the choruses and repeat them, practically choking on their own maudlin tears and flowery tremolos. Sometimes the singing was easier to make out when the door swung open and a combatant went out to take a leak under the stars before returning to the belly of the boozy beast. In the morning, you could still hear the groans coming from the joint. There was also the unmistakable odor of stale wine, puke, dirty shirts, and cheap tobacco. Most had spent the night there, sleeping it off. Fermillin, the first to rise, woke the rest as you might shake a plum tree, before selling them breakfast with white pinot.

Lysia Verhareine passed by the café that morning, favoring Fermillin with a smile, which he repaid with a courteous bow and a “Mademoiselle.” I saw her, but she didn’t see me; I was too far off. She wore a dress the ruddy color of vineyard peaches and a little straw hat adorned with a carmine ribbon. She carried a wide woven handbag, which swung against her hip with a sweet gaiety. She was headed toward the fields. It was the fourth of August. The sun was rising like a flaming arrow and already drying the dew. It would be hot enough to tan the soft skin of desires into leather. You couldn’t hear the big guns. Even pricking your ears, you couldn’t hear them. Lysia turned the corner at the Mureaux farm and entered the countryside, where the scent of fresh-cut hay and ripened wheat made the earth seem like a huge body, languid with odors and caresses. Fermillin had remained on the threshold of his bistro, his red eyes taking in the sky as he stroked his beard. Youngsters were setting out to roam the world, their pockets stuffed with the simplest of meals. On the clotheslines, women hung out sheets to billow dry in the wind. Lysia Verhareine had disappeared. I imagined her walking down the summer trails as on pathways of sand.

I never saw her again.

I mean, I never saw her alive again. That very evening, Marivelle’s son ran to my house and found me naked to the waist, my head drenched in water, dousing myself with a pitcher. When I wiped the water from my eyes, I could see his own were full of fat tears, which poured down his teenage face like dripping wax.

“Come quick, come quick!” he told me. “Barbe sent me! You’ve got to come to the château now!”

I knew the way, of course. I left the kid behind and took off like a wild rabbit, imagining I’d discover Destinat disemboweled, probably by an unhappy convict who’d returned, after twenty years’ hard labor under the hot sun, to pay his respects. I was even already telling myself on the path to the door that, when all was said and done, he deserved an end like that, the astonished victim of a really savage murder, since among all those heads he’d gotten over the years there were surely some perfectly innocent ones, people conveyed to the scaffold with their arms and feet firmly bound, screaming for someone to listen to reason.

I arrive at the gate with my hair still wet, my shirt in disarray, my trousers half buttoned, and my heart knocking against my ribs. I see him standing on the flight of steps, ramrod straight, a devilish commander, a true master of morose ceremonies, Swiss Guard of an unholy see: Mr. Prosecutor, very much alive, his guts apparently intact and no sign of mayhem on his person. As soon as I see him like that, erect as a flagpole, hands open on nothing, looking off in an awkward daze, I tell myself, If it isn’t him; I tell myself—and everything stops. I see Lysia Verhareine, again turning the corner of the Mureaux farm, I see the scene countless times in rapid succession, more real than life itself in all its precise details: the swaying of her dress and her little bag, the nape of her neck white under the rising sun, Bouzie pounding on the anvil in his forge a few steps away, Fermillin’s red eyes, old lady Sèchepart whisking a broom in front of her doorstep, the scent of fresh straw, the plaintive cries of the swifts that skim the roofs, the mooing of the cows that Dourin’s son is leading to the park. All that, ten times, a hundred times, as though I were taking refuge in this scene, as though I wanted to lock myself inside it forever.

I don’t know how many minutes the prosecutor and I faced each other wordless on the steps. I don’t much remember our gestures or expressions at that time, anything that could have distinguished one part of that moment from another. It isn’t my
present
memory that’s at fault, it’s the memory of that moment which, even as it was happening, cut itself to pieces, leaving gaping holes in the fabric of my recollections. Maybe I became an automaton, following him about mechanically; maybe he guided me, took me by the hand. Who knows! My first clear memory is the pounding of my heart I felt once again, the blood in my chest. My eyes were open. The prosecutor was at my left, leading me from behind. The walls of the little tenant house were covered in light-colored cloth in that room adorned with bouquets of flowers. I recall a few pieces of furniture: a chest of drawers, a wardrobe, a bed.

On her bed lay Lysia Verhareine, her eyes closed. Closed for all time, on the world and on the rest of us. Her hands were clasped upon her chest. She was wearing her dress of that morning, the shade of vineyard peaches, and little shoes of a singular brown— the brown that earth turns when crackled by the sun, when it becomes silky dust. Above her a moth whirred around like a madman, bumping against the half-open windowpane before heading back in precarious circles toward her face, then back again to the window, a dance that seemed like some hideous pavane.

The collar of her dress, slightly open, revealed on the skin of her throat a deep furrow, an almost blackened red. With a feint at the ceiling, the prosecutor indicated a suspended lamp made of blue porcelain, complicated and flanked by a counterweight in the form of a globe—the five continents, the seas and oceans in gleaming copper. Then he drew from his pocket a delicate belt of woven leather, embroidered with daisies and mimosas, out of which a hand, once supple and sweet, had fashioned a loop, the philosopher’s very image of perfection, the union of promise and fulfillment, beginning and end, birth and death.

Not a word was said. Our eyes would seek each other’s gaze, then return once again to the young teacher’s body. Death had not stolen her beauty—not yet, in any case. To that extent, she remained among us, so to speak, the face of a woman almost alive, her complexion very fair. Her hands were still warm when I placed my hand on them, somewhat embarrassed at first, because I expected her to open her eyes, to look at me and protest this intimacy I was presuming. I closed the collar of her dress to hide the finely traced bruise. Now the illusion would be perfect: a sleep that does not speak its true name.

The prosecutor let me be. He didn’t dare make a gesture or take a step, and when I turned away from Lysia’s face to look at his, I saw in his disoriented eyes a question to which I had no answer. Goddamn it, do I know why people die? Why they choose to die? Do I know any more today than I did then? After all, death was more his game than mine! He was the one who summoned it regularly, knew it on chummy terms, so to speak: an acquaintance he renewed several times a year when he went to the prison yard at V to see his will done before setting off without a qualm to have his lunch at Bourrache’s.

I offer him the thin belt, by way of asking if he’d been the one who had . . .

“Yes,” he replied, without my having to pronounce the word.

I cleared my throat. “You didn’t find anything . . .?”

He looked around him slowly, at the wardrobe, the chair, the chest of drawers, the dressing table, the bouquets of floral sentinels posted more or less everywhere in the room, the hot thick night forcing the window, the bed, the little curtain, the night table on which sat a delicate watch whose spreading hands continued to move time forward; then he met my eyes once more. “Not a thing,” he said, still dazed, no longer the prosecutor. I had no way of knowing exactly whether this was a statement or, in fact, another question—or just the words of a man under whom the ground kept giving way.

On the stairway there were the slow, difficult, painful steps of several people: Barbe and Solemn, followed by Hippolyte Lucy, the doctor. A good doctor, thin as a rail, humane and very poor; those two things went hand in hand. If the patient was needy, he hardly ever charged for a house call, and the needy included nearly everyone in our town. “You can pay me later,” he’d always say, with the most earnest of smiles. “I’m not hard up,” he’d add with a growl, yet it was poverty that killed him, in 1927. “Starved to death!” said Desharet, his fat jerk of a colleague, with his garlic breath and ruddy face, who’d come from V in an automobile wrapped in chrome, oily leather, and brass to examine the doctor’s brittle body. He’d finally been found on the floor in his kitchen— his kitchen unfurnished, without so much as a crust of bread or a pat of butter in sight, only a plate that had been clean for days and a glass of water from the well. “Starved to death,” the bastard repeated, as though put out by having to bend down to meet the body, over which his belly and jowls were hanging, all trussed up in flannel and English cloth.

Dr. Lucy put his hand on the girl’s forehead and let it slide down her cheeks, toward the insult on her throat; as soon as he saw it he stopped. He joined our perplexed company, starting his own contemplation of all our questions that would never be uttered. Barbe gave us to understand we had nothing further to do there, in this girl’s room, which would remain just that. With a nod, she directed us to the door. We obeyed like children—Solemn, the doctor, the prosecutor, and I.

XI

And still the war went on. It had produced so many cadavers there was no point in counting anymore. But the news of the young teacher’s death—and the way it happened—came as a blow to our town all the same. The streets were deserted. The gossips, the fucking backbiters, the old blabbermouths usually ready with an insinuation, stayed mum in their houses. The guys in the cafés just drank in silence. All you heard was the sound of bottles and swallowing, of glasses being emptied, nothing more. A stuporous tribute of sorts. Even the summer seemed to flag. There were gray, stifling days, as if the sun didn’t dare show its face, spending its hours behind ample clouds the color of mourning. The youngsters weren’t hanging around, or going fishing, or throwing rocks through windows. Even the livestock seemed listless. The bells chopped time like a dead tree trunk. Sometimes the howl of wolves could be heard, but it was only Martial Maire, the simpleton who’d understood everything and who huddled against the door of the school, bellowing. Maybe all of us should have done likewise. Maybe there’s nothing else you can do in such circumstances.

I should have asked the prosecutor some questions. That’s the way it’s done in cases of violent death—of suicide, I mean, since we have to call a spade a spade. Yes, I should have. It was my duty, but I let it go. Could he have added anything to what I knew? Not much, I’ll wager. And facing him I would have felt like a prick, twisting my cap, looking at the floor, the ceiling, my hands, without daring to come to the point—whatever that was. He was the one who’d found her. He was taking a stroll when he’d noticed the open window and seen the body. He’d rushed over, forced the door of the room—locked from the inside—and then . . . nothing more. He took her in his arms and laid her on the bed. Then he sent for me. All that he told me, once Barbe had led us out and we walked around on the lawn without knowing where to go or what to do.

In the days that followed, Destinat remained secluded in his château. He spent his hours at a window, looking at the little house as though expecting the young teacher to appear. This much I would learn from the evening of Barbe’s brandied testimony.

We tried to find out whether Lysia Verhareine had a family— or, rather, I tried a bit and the mayor tried very hard. We came up empty-handed. Just an address on some envelopes, a crossed-out address of a former landlady; the mayor spoke with her on the telephone but only half understood her because of her northern accent. All the same, he grasped that she knew nothing of her former tenant. When letters arrived, the landlady would forward them to the new address—that of the château—which the girl had sent to her. “And were there a lot of letters?” the mayor asked, with me right there next to him. He never got an answer. The telephone cut off. In those days it was still unreliable. And it was wartime besides. Even the telephone had been mobilized, I guess.

Next we questioned Marcel Crouche, the mailman, who never managed to finish his rounds because of other rounds he never refused: rounds of wine, brandy, coffee with rum, Pernod, and vermouth. By late morning, he would end up sitting against the wall of the washhouse, slurring political humbug and then snoring like a saw, his mailbag clutched under his arm. With the château toward the end of his route, he was by then already walking as if on the bridge of a ship, tossed by a heavy storm.

“Letters—sure there were letters. I looked at the address, not the name. When it said château, it was for the château. Whether it was for the prosecutor or the young lady, I wouldn’t know fuckall. I just delivered them, and he sorted it out. I always give mail to the prosecutor himself, never to Barbe or to Solemn. That’s how he wants it, and after all it’s his house.”

Marcel Crouche poked his big nose, ravaged by smallpox, into his glass of brandy, sniffing the liquid like the very elixir of life, which I suppose for him it was. All three of us drank in silence, the mayor, the mailman, and me. Then there was another round. From the expressions on our faces, the mayor and I figured we were thinking the same thing. But we also both knew that neither one of us would dare put the question to the prosecutor. So we didn’t speak of it.

At the Public Education Bureau, they didn’t know much more, only that Lysia Verhareine had volunteered for a post in the region. The inspector, whom I’d made a special trip to V to see, made me wait three quarters of an hour in his hallway, just to make sure I knew what an important man I was calling on. He seemed less concerned about the teacher than about his right moustache, which he couldn’t smooth down despite ample pomade. He butchered her name several times, made like he was hunting through the files, consulted his lovely gold watch, patted his hair down, studied his spotless nails. He had the eyes of a calf, the sort of fucking dumb animals that don’t even moan when you lead them off to their death, because they never even suspect that such a mystery exists. He called me
my dear fellow,
but in his mouth it sounded like something that had formed in the back of his throat that he was trying to clear out.

After a while he rang for a minion, but nobody answered. Then he shouted. Still no answer. He started howling, and a sickly head resembling a dried-out turnip appeared. The head coughed every thirty seconds, a cough that came from very far away to announce that all good things must end, the body no exception. The turnip head was called Mazerulles. The inspector spat out his name like a whiplash, asking him to rack his brain. He did remember the girl, the day she’d arrived.

People don’t always look the part. You would have thought this scarecrow was just a dumbbell bureaucrat, somebody’s soulless doormat, good for nothing else. But when I started talking about the girl, and I told him what had happened, it was as if I’d nailed him between the eyes with a plank. He braced himself on the door-frame, stammering disjointed sentiments about youth, beauty, waste, war, the end. It was just the two of us now, Mazerulles and me, with a little ghost that came to commune with us, phrase by phrase.

The inspector sensed this, the clod; he began to stamp his feet, breathing hard and repeating “Good. Very good. Very good,” as though his patience for this matter had run out. I left the office in the company of Mazerulles, without saying good-bye to the stuffed shirt, who stank of starch and department-store cologne. The door slammed shut behind us. We went into the secretary’s office: tiny, sad, and rickety, not unlike its occupant. It smelled of wet cloth and firewood, also of menthol and coarse tobacco. He offered me a chair near the stove and sat down behind his little table with three plump inkwells.

Shaking off his astonishment, he recounted Lysia Verhareine’s visit. His story was straightforward and it wasn’t any help, but I enjoyed hearing her talked about by someone else, someone not from our town. It was proof I wasn’t dreaming, that she’d really existed, this guy I didn’t know from Adam summoning her in front of me. On my way out I shook Mazerulles’s hand and wished him good luck; I don’t know why, it just slipped out. He didn’t seem surprised. He said to me simply, “My luck, you know—” I
didn’t
know, but looking at him I could imagine.

Now what should I say? I could describe Lysia Verhareine’s burial. It was on Monday. The weather was as beautiful as the day she’d chosen to take her leave of us, maybe even warmer. Yes, I could tell about all that: the sun, the children who’d woven garlands of grapevines and wheat, every last inhabitant crowded into the church, which seemed it might burst, Bourrache and his little girls, the prosecutor in the first pew like a widower, and the fat priest, Father Lurant, newly arrived, whom we’d distrusted until then but who found some very apt words to express what many of us had in our hearts—a priest who could truly make the funeral seem something only natural. I could tell about all that, but I haven’t the heart.

Actually, it was the prosecutor who was most changed. He kept on asking for a head now and then, but it seemed his heart was no longer in it. Worse, he sometimes muddled up his closing arguments. Well, that’s not completely accurate. It would be better to say that sometimes, in the course of reiterating the facts and drawing his conclusions, he would slow down, stare into space, and just stop talking. As though he weren’t there anymore, in his speaker’s chair at the courthouse. As though he were absent. It would never last very long, never to the point where someone might have thought of tugging at his sleeve to get him started again; but there was a certain embarrassment, and when he resumed his closing argument, everybody seemed relieved, even the guy on trial.

The prosecutor had the little house in the park bolted up. There was never another tenant there, just as there wouldn’t be another teacher at the school until the end of the war. Destinat stopped strolling in the park as well. He went out less and less. We learned somewhat later that it was he who had paid for the coffin and the monument. We all considered this a handsome gesture on his part.

A few months after the teacher’s death, I learned from Léon Schirer, a guy who served as a kind of handyman at the courthouse in V, that Destinat had requested retirement. Schirer wasn’t one for idle talk, but I could hardly believe him. For one thing the prosecutor, though not a kid, still had some good years ahead of him. More than that, I couldn’t imagine what he could possibly do with himself, alone in a house big enough for a hundred, with two servants he barely said three words to on any given day.

But I was wrong. Destinat delivered his last closing argument on June 15, 1916. He delivered it without believing it. And in fact he didn’t get the defendant’s head. Once the courtroom emptied out, the president made a speech, sober and short, and then a sort of aperitif was served, with the whole bench—headed up by Mierck—lawyers, court clerks, and some others. I was there too. Most everyone went to the Rébillon for a farewell meal. I say
most
. As for me, I wasn’t there. For some sparkling wine, they could suffer my presence; but for the truly good things—things meant to be savored by those born to them—I would go back where I came from.

After that, Destinat entered into silence.