By a Slow River (7 page)

XII

To continue, I must go back to the December morning of 1917 when I left the little body of Morning Glory at the edge of the freezing canal, along with Judge Mierck and his shivering entourage.

All this must seem a muddle, back and forth in time, but in fact it’s the very image of my life, made of nothing but jagged bits and pieces, impossible to stick back together. If you would try to understand a human being, you have to dig down to the roots. It’s not enough to nudge him along through time, into a flattering light: You have to probe the cracks and let all the poison seep out. You need, in other words, to get your hands dirty. But nothing disgusts me, it’s my job. Besides, it’s dark outside. What else could I do at night but get out the same old sheets and mend them a little more, and a little more?

Mierck with egg yolk still stuck to his moustache, and his haughty air of a gouty ambassador. His delight at the proximity of the château to this scene of death lingered in the corners of his mouth. The little door that led into the park was open, and the grass was trodden here and there. The judge started to whistle and swing his stool, like a gay blade. The sun had now pierced the fog and was making the frost drip. We were stiff, our cheeks as hard as wooden soles. Crusty had stopped taking notes—notes on what anyway? Everything had been said. “Well, well, well,” Mierck continued, rocking on his heels.

Then he turned quite suddenly to the city policeman. “Give him my compliments!”

The other man was taken aback. “Who do you mean, Judge?”

Mierck looked at him as though he had a bean where his brain should be. “Who? Why, the person who cooked the eggs, my friend. They were excellent. Where is your head? Get a grip on yourself!” The city policeman saluted. The judge’s way of calling people
my friend
—a perfect example of his knack for using words to say things they normally weren’t intended for.

We could have lingered there a good while longer: the judge, the policeman (exemplary fetcher of eggs), Crusty, Bréchut’s son, Grosspeil, Berfuche, and myself. The judge hadn’t said a word to me; it was always like that. The doctor, with his leather bag and his kid gloves, had taken off a while before. He had left Morning Glory—or rather the outward form of a little girl’s body—under the wet blanket. The canal continued reeling out its swift waters. I then remembered a Greek saying, without recalling it too well, one that spoke about time and running water, some simple words that said everything about life. Above all, they made you understand you could never go backward, no matter what you do.

Two ambulance orderlies finally arrived, biting their lips, freezing in their thin white smocks. They’d come from V and driven around a long time before finding the place. The judge beckoned to them, pointing at the blanket. “It’s all yours!” he called out, as if it were some old piece of furniture he had sold them. It was then I left, without a word to anyone.

Of course, I was obliged to come back to the waterside. I had to do my job, to say nothing of the duty of being human, which isn’t all that easy. I waited till early afternoon. The sharp bite of the morning had relaxed; the weather was almost mild. It seemed like another day entirely. Grosspeil and Berfuche had been relieved by two other policemen guarding the scene and fending off the gawkers. As they saluted me, some carp slipped between the algae. Now and then one of them rose to the surface to test the air before swimming off with a swish of the tail to take its place again in the little school. The grass shimmered with countless drops of water. Everything had already changed. You could no longer discern out the outline that Morning Glory’s body had impressed on the bank. Two ducks were fighting over a watercress cushion. One of them ended up snapping at the other’s neck; the loser went off, scattering plaintive cries in his wake.

I dawdled awhile, trying to look for clues but unable to think of much except Clémence and the baby in her womb. In fact I felt a bit ashamed, as I recall, to think of them and our happiness, as I was walking near the place where someone had killed a little girl. I knew I would be seeing them again in just a few hours: her and her belly, round as a prize pumpkin, through whose shell I could hear the heartbeat and feel the sleepy movements when I put my ear against it. Without a doubt, on this icy day I was the happiest man on earth, the same earth on which, not far from here, men were killing and dying as freely as we draw breath; on which, right beneath my feet, a murderer without a face could strangle little ewe lambs ten years old. Yes, the happiest of men, without a shred of guilt about it.

The strange thing about the inquiry was that it got assigned to everybody and nobody. Mierck made a mess of it. The mayor stuck his nose in. The policemen sniffed the pile of shit from a distance. But taking the lead was a colonel who showed up the day after the crime and used the state of war and our being in the front-line zone as an excuse to claim authority to give us orders. He was called Matziev, a vaguely Russian name. Elegant, he looked like a Neapolitan dancer, with an oily voice, a glossy head of hair he kept brushed back, a thin moustache, supple legs, and the torso of a Greek wrestler. In short, an Apollo with rank.

We sized him up right away. He had a taste for blood but, being on the right side, he could make it flow and drink it without giving offense. The hotel having closed for lack of guests, he set up quarters at the home of Bassepin, who rented out a few rooms and sold charcoal, oil, grease, and canned beef to all the regiments that passed through.

The war years were the best of Bassepin’s life. Selling exorbitantly what he’d gone far away and bought for peanuts. Stuffing his pockets, working day and night, palming off the essential and the superfluous alike on the quartermasters who came through, at times taking back what he’d sold to regiments now departing so he could pass it on to the ones relieving them. A typical commerce-made man.

The postwar years weren’t so unpleasant for him either. Very quickly, he understood the municipal frenzy to honor those who had died in combat. Bassepin expanded his business and sold life-size cast-iron soldier boys and French cockerels by the ton. All the mayors of the eastern region snapped up his rigid warriors, with flags in the air and rifles aimed; he had them designed by a tubercular painter, an “award-winner in the exhibitions.” They came in any price range, suitable for all budgets: twenty-three models in the catalog, with options ranging from marble pedestals and gold lettering to obelisks. There were little tin children holding out laurels to the victors and allegories of France as nubile goddess, her breast bare and comforting. Bassepin was selling memory and memento. The cities settled their debts with the dead in a very visible way, one that would last. On every November 11, before those monuments surrounded by gravel walks and linden trees, a full-throttled brass band would blast out the lively airs of triumph and the bleary ones of pain, while at night stray dogs would lift their legs all around and pigeons would add their decorations to those bestowed by men.

Bassepin had a big pear-shaped belly and sported, regardless of season, a stick of licorice hanging from his mouth, blackening his teeth evermore. A fifty-year-old bachelor, he’d never had so much as an affair as far as we knew. The money he had, he kept; he didn’t gamble and was never to be seen in the brothels of V. He didn’t even take a drink. No indulgence, no appetite, just the mania of buying and selling, of stashing gold away for its own sake. A bit like those who stuff their barns with hay up to the gills when they don’t have any animals. But after all, that was his right: to die as rich as Croesus in 1931 of a septicemia. Incredible how a tiny wound can wreck your life and even end it. It started on his foot, just a graze, hardly a scratch. Five days later he was stiff, blue all over, mottled from head to toe, like an African savage covered with paint but without the kinky hair and the assegai. Not a single heir. Not a tear shed by anyone, in fact. It wasn’t that people loathed him—far from it. But his preoccupations were known, and they did not invite pity. He had had everything he wished for; not everyone can say the same. Maybe that was the reason for Bassepin’s life, to come into this world and collect its coins. In the end it’s no stupider than anything else. He made the most of it. On his death, all the money went to the government, a very fair and merry widow.

Bassepin gave Matziev the finest room he had and would raise his moleskin hat to the colonel whenever their paths crossed. It was a rare chance to see—among the three or four hairs dueling for supremacy on his bald pate—a large strawberry mark quite remarkably shaped like the North American continent.

Matziev’s first important order of business in town was to have his aide find him a phonograph. He could be seen for hours at the window of his room, shutters open despite the unremitting cold, smoking cigars as slender as shoelaces and pausing every five minutes to wind up his crackly companion. He always listened to the same song, a catchy hit tune from several years ago, when we all still believed the world was eternal and when to be happy required only our believing we would be:

Caroline, put on your li’l patent-leather shoes . . .
Caroline, I’m telling you . . .

Twenty times, a hundred times a day, Caroline put on her adorable shoes while the colonel smoked his little brown stinkers with an elegant air, a limp wrist, and rings on every finger, letting his black eyes dally on each surrounding roof. The song still runs through my head today, setting my teeth on edge. It was the theme of our bereavement, our thoughts of Morning Glory and of the face of the beast who had done that unspeakable thing. The colonel had cranked his phonograph like a drill, which slowly made its meticulous hole in our skull, to let the treacly tune seep in. A “little world” to be savored, to deliver one from the dreariness of the cadaver. No wonder those two, Mierck and Matziev, though different as they could be, got on like old friends.

XIII

Considering what he did—and I’ll get to that soon enough—we might put Matziev squarely in that most numerous species of bastards on earth, the one that breeds like rabbits and thrives like roaches. But nothing is simple. Only saints and angels never make mistakes.

He is the same man who in 1894—twenty-three years before the Case—had scuppered his own career, owing to a much more famous affair, and had languished as a lieutenant for ages while the others earned their stripes in due course. Mind you, he was not a tinsel Dreyfusard or one who spoke up only at the family dinner table; there were thousands of those. No, in those days Matziev had the balls of a bull, and he supported the little captain quite publicly, declaring sincere faith in his innocence. This rearguard action, so to speak, attacking the good judgment of the staff officers, won him no friends in their ranks. With one gesture, he fell from grace in the eyes of all those who would most likely have been content to see a man of his ilk handsomely promoted and propelled toward the stars—the ones that are sewn on, made of solid gold.

All that is History with a capital H, as they say, but it often falls between the cracks and only gets fished out by accident, while we’re rummaging through attics or old heaps of trash.

I happened on it that way: It was in ’26, the year my father died. I had to return to the ramshackle house where I’d been born and raised. I didn’t want to hang around. My father was one more dead man, and I’d already had my fill of those for a lifetime. That house was the house of my dead; my mother—God keep her soul—had passed long ago, when I was still a little rascal, and now my father. It was no longer the home of my early years. The house now smelled of the grave.

The village too no longer resembled the one I had known. After four years of endless bombardments, everyone had left, abandoning the gutted buildings and the pitted streets. The only ones to stay were my father—because for him, leaving would have meant victory for the Krauts, despite their defeat—and Fantin Marcoire, an old kook who talked to trout and lived with a very old cow he called Madame.

Fantin and his cow slept side by side in the stable. They had ended up resembling each other, as to odor and the rest, except that the cow was undoubtedly more sensible than the man and less aggressive. Fantin detested my father, and the feeling was mutual. They had known each other since their schooldays, and neither could explain the persistent grudge. They had chased the same girls, played the same games—felt the same pains, no doubt—and time had worn them down just as it wears down the bodies and hearts of all men. But not the mutual loathing of those two. And so there they were: two madmen in a ghost town, hurling abuse and, occasionally, stones at each other among the ruins, like two urchins but with wrinkled foreheads and crooked legs. Every morning before dawn, Fantin Marcoire came to pull down his trousers and shit in front of my father’s door. And every evening, my father would wait till Fantin Marcoire bedded down against the flank of his cow to do likewise in front of his neighbor’s door.

That went on for years, like a ritual form of greeting: the manners of the lower abdomen.

“So he’s dead?”

“Dead as can be, Mr. Marcoire.”

“The son of a bitch, how could he do that!”

“He was on in years.”

“That means I am too, I suppose?”

“That’s what it means, Mr. Marcoire.”

“The bag of shit, how could he leave me here alone? What am I supposed to do now?”

“You’ve got to leave, go somewhere else, Mr. Marcoire.”

“You’ve got some bright ideas, don’t you, you little shit. You’re a dumb-ass like your bastard father, put on earth just to plague me! . . . You think he suffered much?”

“I don’t think so. Sorry.”

“Not even a little?”

“Maybe, I don’t know. Who can tell?”

“Me, I’m going to suffer—for sure. I feel like it’s already starting, the son of a bitch!”

Fantin left by what had been the main street of the village. He avoided the old bombshell craters only by theatrically serpentine detours. Every three meters he cursed the dead. Then he disappeared, after turning the corner at Camille’s store, Favors, Notions, and Novelties, its shutters gutted like the shattered keys of a gigantic derelict piano.

My father’s house was a pigsty. I tried hard to summon up lost tunes, memories, images of yesteryear, but nothing came to me anymore. Filth and dust had stiffened everything. It was like the large coffin of a fool who thought he could take everything with him but who had lost his nerve in the end. I recalled what the teacher had told us about Egypt, about its pharaohs’ tombs crammed with their earthly riches. My father’s house was a bit like that, though never having been a pharaoh, he had laid away, in the place of gold and jewels, towers of dirty dishes and empty wine bottles, stacked in all the rooms in large piles, wobbly and translucent.

I never loved my father, and I didn’t even know why. I never hated him either. We just hadn’t spoken much, that’s all. My mother’s death had come between us early on—a thick muffling curtain. Neither of us had dared to draw it open and hold out a hand to the other.

In what had been my room, he had taken up an entrenched position, a rubbish fort with parapets of old newspapers piled high. Of the window there remained only a thin slit through which he could spy Fantin Marcoire’s ramshackle stable. On the floor, there were two slingshots of hazelwood and inner tubing, such as boys make to shoot at crows and the butts of policemen. Next to them, a munitions dump of rusty staples and twisted screws, a bitten piece of sausage, a half-empty bottle of heady wine beside a dirty glass.

From this position my father had waged his war, bombarding the perennial enemy with small bits of scrap iron whenever the latter emerged from his beastly dwelling. I imagined him spending hours there, brooding and drinking, his eyes glued to the slit of light, his ears cocked for sounds from the street. And then suddenly he would load his slingshot, hold his breath, and take aim, not exhaling until he heard the yells, saw Fantin bitterly rubbing his side or his cheek or his ass, maybe wiping a bit of blood on a good day, before defiantly brandishing a fist and spewing his venomous curses. Thus my father earned the right to slap his thighs and dissolve into side-splitting guffaws, on and on, till the laughter petered out in grotesque hiccups, not a laugh anymore but a mutter. Catching his breath, he’d turn serious again, go back to his boredom, his emptiness. Pouring himself some more wine with a trembling hand, he’d drink it in one gulp, like hard spirits, and then reflect that there’s not much to us, no, not much, and even this can’t last much longer, even though a day is very long, and you’ve got to keep going, because there will be other days to take a gulp from the bottle and consider that we’re nothing.

On the way out my shoulder unsettled a stack of newspapers, which collapsed with the rustle of withered leaves. Lost days scattered at my feet, dead years, bygone dramas. From among the jumble of headlines that had lost all urgency, one jumped out at me, with Matziev’s name in big letters, above a short item from 1894.

It was late in the year, on a December day. Evening, to be precise. Lieutenant Isidore Matziev, it reported,

had proclaimed his belief in the innocence of Captain Dreyfus
in the back room of a café. Applauded by the assembly of unionists and revolutionaries, Matziev, in full uniform, also declared
his shame at serving in an army that would imprison the just
while letting real traitors go unpunished.

The approval of the crowd was interrupted by the arrival of the police. Several arrests were made, including the lieutenant, and a more than sufficient number of blows were dealt with billy clubs. Considered a troublemaker for breaking the code of silence and tarnishing the French army’s honor, Lieutenant Matziev had appeared two days later before a military tribunal that condemned him (two days prior to this report) to six months of close arrest.

The hack who’d written the piece concluded by huffing about the young officer’s insolent manner and his name, which “smacked of a Jew, or a Russian, unless it was both.” It was signed Amédée Prurion, a nice idiotic name for a real bastard. Whatever became of this Prurion? Did he keep on vomiting his petty bile for years and years? If he’s dead today, that makes one less bag of shit on earth. If he’s still alive, he can’t be a pretty sight. Hate is a cruel marinade; it gives meat a flavor of trash, no doubt about it: Though I knew him only as a son of a bitch, Matziev was worth ten Prurions. At least he could point to one time in his life when he hadn’t disgraced his humanity. How many can say as much?

I kept the article as proof—of what I don’t know. I never went back to the house; life can’t stand returns. I remembered the Matziev I had known: his thin waxed moustache, his twisted cigars, his phonograph scratching out the little song. He disappeared eventually, with all his kit, once the Case had been settled—settled for them, you understand. No doubt he’d gone on lugging his “Caroline” around with him, going through the motions. Whenever our eyes had met, he gave the impression of a man who had reached his destination. Wherever he happened to be, it no longer served any purpose for him to put himself out. All that was behind him. The only thing left for him was to wait for the final rendezvous.

The snow fell for hours tonight. I kept hearing it as I sought sleep in my bed. Or perhaps it’s better to say I was hearing its silence and sensing its pervasive whiteness behind the improperly closed shutters, a whiteness that intensified hour by hour.

All that silence and whiteness, cutting me off still more from the world. Just what I need! Clémence loved this snow. “If it comes, there couldn’t be a more beautiful blanket for our baby.” She would never know the extent of that truth. The beautiful blanket would cover her too.

At seven o’clock I pushed the door open. The landscape was out of a pastry shop: cream and powdered sugar everywhere. I blinked as though before a miracle. The low sky was rolling its heavy humps on the crest of the hill, and the factory, which usually blew its stack with rage, was reduced to purring, almost a pleasant sound. A new world. The first morning of a new world. Like being the first man. Before the stains, the trail of footprints—and of misdeeds. I don’t really know how to put it better. Words were never easy for me. I hardly used them when I was still alive. If I write as if I’m a dead man, as a matter of fact, that’s true, true as true can be. For a long time I’ve felt like one, just keeping up a pretense of living for a while longer. I’m serving a suspended sentence, you might say.

My movements betray rheumatism, but they still have a mind of their own. They want to make me go round in circles, like a donkey tied to his millstone, grinding the last grain. To lead me back to feeling. It’s their fault I found myself on the bank of the little canal, which traced, in the whiteness, a green net trimmed with melting stars. As I sank into the snow, I thought of Napoleon’s bloody retreat across the Berezina River: an epic. Maybe that’s what I need to persuade myself there really is some meaning to life, that for all my feeling lost I’m headed in the right direction, straight into the history books, for centuries to come; that maybe Fate had a plan in causing me to postpone my departure so many times, the barrel of Gachentard’s rifle pulled away fast at the last moment, not slowly as I had slipped it down my throat, on mornings when I awoke to feeling like a dried-out well. The taste of a rifle—what an odd thing! The prickling in your tongue when it’s peeled off the freezing barrel. The flavors, like wine, pale rocks.

Some stone martens had fought a skirmish here. Their clawstudded paws had left calligraphies, arabesques, a madman’s testimony on the snow. Their bellies left molds and described shallow paths that diverged and then crossed, melting into each other, and then diverged again before stopping short, as though suddenly, at the end of their little battle, both animals had taken flight.

“So old and so fucking dumb . . .”

I thought the cold was playing tricks on me.

“You want to catch your death?” the voice continued, coming as though from afar, all raspy consonants, clinking medals. No need to turn around. It was Joséphine Maulpas. Born the same year I was, in the same village too. Moved here when she was thirteen years old and went to work as an all-purpose maid. She kept it up till she was twenty, passing from one well-to-do family to another as she cultivated a taste for the bottle, bit by bit—until there was not another family that would have her. Thrown out, chucked, rejected, done for. To survive, she took up the stinking trade of selling animal skins: rabbits, moles, weasels, ferrets, foxes, all sorts, dangling by her side still bloody, freshly stripped with a pocketknife. Thirty years and more of trundling her goitrous cart through the streets, bleating out monotonously, “Rabbit skins! Animal skins! Rabbit skins!” Most people simply stopped hearing her after a time, as she took on the butchery scent of her carcasses and, before long, their appearance too—their purple complexion, their leaden eyes—she who once had been a real beauty.

For a few coins, Joséphine—dubbed the Skin by the kids in town—sold her prizes to Elphège Crochemort, who tanned them in an abandoned mill on the banks of the Guérlante, six kilometers upstream from us. Half in ruins, the old mill took on water like a big open ship; but it remained standing all the same, season after season.

Crochemort rarely came to town, but when he did you could follow his trail. You could easily tell which street he’d gone down, his stench was so awful, regardless of season or time of day, as if he himself had soaked in those alkali vats. Notwithstanding, he was a tall, rather handsome man, with swept-back shiny black hair and lively eyes of a beautiful azure blue. A very handsome man indeed, and quite alone. I always saw him as one of the perpetually condemned, like the ones they say existed among the Greeks, forever rolling their boulders uphill or getting their livers eaten. Had Crochemort done something awful that haunted him? Maybe he was making himself pay for it by wreaking solitude, for if he’d only been rubbed with lavender and jasmine, he’d have had all the women at his feet.