By a Slow River (8 page)

Joséphine took him her booty every week. She’d long since been indifferent to the odors and—even before she took up her trade—to men as well. But Elphège Crochemort received her like a queen, or so she told me. He would offer her a glass of wine, speak graciously of the skins, of the fair weather or foul, and smile in a way that showed his fine features to advantage. Then he would pay her and help her unload her cart before escorting her back to the road as a beau might have done.

For twenty years Joséphine had lived at the far end of rue des Chablis, almost in the fields. Not a house, really, just a few planks blackened by the rain, held together thanks to some daily miracle. A shack so dark it scared the kids. We all imagined it was chockful of stinking hides, dead animals, dismembered birds, and mice with limbs outstretched tacked to little boards.

I did go there, twice. I wouldn’t have believed it but for having seen it with my own eyes. It was like passing through the doors of a shadow world and emerging into a realm of light. You would have thought you had entered a doll’s rooms, an immaculate place, all in rosy tones with little curls of ribbon tied everywhere.

“So you thought I would live as I work,” Joséphine said to me the first time, as I stood openmouthed, like a bream at the market, taking it all in. There was a bouquet of irises on a table spread with a lovely cloth; on the walls, painted frames surrounded pictures of cherubs and saints, the kind priests give to altar boys and to children at First Communion.

“You believe in all this?” I asked her, pointing with my chin at the graceful gallery. She shrugged her shoulders, less in mockery than to suggest the obvious: There was hardly any point in discussing the matter.

“If I had beautiful copper pans, I’d hang them up just like that, and they’d create the same effect—the feeling that the world isn’t so ugly, that there’s a bit of gilding here and there.”

I felt her hand on my shoulder. Then her other hand, and finally the heat trapped in her woolen layers.

“Why’ve you come back here, Dadais?”

It was the nickname Joséphine had used for me since we were seven years old, but I’d never asked why. I was about to answer, to launch into grandiose sentiments right by the water, standing in my shirtsleeves, my feet in the snow. But the cold made my lips tremble, and suddenly I felt the shock of imagining never being able to leave again.

“You’ve come back, haven’t you?”

“I’m only passing through; it’s not the same. There’s nothing for me here. I don’t have regrets. I did what had to be done. I did my part, and you know it.”

“But I always believed you!”

“You were the only one.”

Joséphine rubbed my shoulders, as if to shake some sense into me. The pain of the blood returning to my veins gave me a tonic jolt. Then she took me by the arm and we ambled along, an odd couple in the snow that winter morning. We walked without saying a word. Now and then I glanced sideward, looking in her ancient face for her former girlish features, a futile effort. I let myself be led around like a child. I would’ve gladly closed my eyes and somnambulated, placing one foot in front of the other, hoping deep in my heart never to open my eyes again, to go on and on like this in what might have been death or else a slow stroll, without aim or end.

At my house, Joséphine sat me down with authority in the big armchair and wrapped me snugly in three coats, one layered on the other; now I was an infant again. She went off to the kitchen. I put my feet up near the stove. In my body, bit by bit, everything was coming back—the stirs and the aches, the creaks and the cracks. She handed me a boiling-hot bowl of steaming plum brandy and lemon. I drank without saying anything. She drank too. When she finished her bowl, she clicked her tongue regretfully.

“Why didn’t you ever get married again?”

“What about you? You’ve stayed all alone.”

“I knew everything about men by the time I was fifteen. You have no idea what it’s like to be a servant! Never again, I said to myself, and I’ve kept that promise. But you; it’s not the same.”

“I still talk to her, you know, every day. There just wasn’t room for another woman.”

“Admit it: You’ve assumed the airs of the prosecutor!”

“Nothing to do with it.”

“Says you. You’ve been brooding so long, you’re even starting to look like him—that’s how old couples are.”

“Don’t be stupid, Fifine.”

We fell silent for a while, then she picked it up again. “I saw him that evening, I swear I did, with my own eyes. Even if that other bastard didn’t want to believe me—what was his name again, that pig in a suit?”

“Mierck.”

“He’s dead, I hope?”

“In ’thirty-one. His horse kicked his head in.”

“Better than he deserved. But what cause could he have had to doubt you? You were the policeman!”

“He was the judge.”

I couldn’t keep my mind from rushing through the years once again, ending up at the same point where I always do. Rather like reaching the outskirts of one’s region. From here, I know the road too well.

XIV

Joséphine had come to find me three days after the discovery of Morning Glory’s body. The inquiry was leading nowhere. The police were questioning people as if at random. Matziev was cranking his phonograph, listening to his song. Mierck had returned to V. As for me, I was trying to understand.

Clémence had gone to answer the door, her hands, as always, on her great belly, as one might lay hands on a globe of the earth. She knew Joséphine slightly and let her come in, despite her terrifying appearance and her reputation as a witch.

“Your wife was so gentle.” Joséphine handed me the bowl refilled. “I don’t remember her features well, but I do remember that she was gentle, everything about her, her eyes, her voice.”

I said, “I don’t have her face anymore either. I look for it often; I have the impression it’s coming to me, but then it fades away. At that moment I could beat myself senseless.”

“What for, stupid?”

“Not remembering the face of the woman I loved. What kind of bastard does that make me?”

Joséphine shrugged. “Bastards, saints—can’t say I’ve ever seen one or the other. Souls are never black or white; they’re all gray in the end, Dadais. You’re a gray soul for sure, just like the rest of us.”

“It’s just words, Fifine. They don’t change a thing.”

“What have you got against words?”

I had offered her a seat and she’d told me her story at one go, in very specific terms. Clémence had retired to our bedroom. I knew what she was making in there—with needles, lace, balls of blue and pink wool—for weeks already. I thought about her in the room nearby as Josephine spoke: thought of her fingers flying over the needles, of her belly and those feet kicking hard from inside.

And then, bit by bit, as Morning Glory’s sodden body entered the room, she came and sat down beside me, as though to listen to what Joséphine had to tell and say yes or no. So bit by bit, I could think of nothing. I was listening to Joséphine. I was seeing Morning Glory—the dead girl’s dripping face, her closed eyes, her lips chilled blue. I seemed to see her smile. She nodded her head now and then; her mouth appeared to say,
Yes, it’s true, that’s right, it’s
just like the Skin says. Everything happened like that.

So. On the day before the body was discovered, about six o’clock, she tells me—dusk, the hour of daggers and stolen kisses—Joséphine heads for home, pulling her cart, taking a swig of warmth from a brandy flask always in the pocket of her smock. Strangely, despite the cold, the walking wounded crowd the streets as on red-letter days; all of them out on the town—the amputees, the legless, the broken-faced, the eyeless, the trepanned, the half mad—wandering from bistro to bar, emptying glasses to fill their hearts.

At the outset, after the first battles, it had seemed very odd to us to see these guys who were our own age, coming back with their faces redrawn by shell bursts, their bodies shredded by sudden downpours of bullets, while we led our narrow little lives in warmth and peace.

We weren’t unaware of the war. We’d seen the mobilization posters. We followed it attentively in the papers. But in fact we were miming; we’d come to terms with it, as you do with bad dreams and bitter memories. It really didn’t belong to our world. It was something out of the movies.

And so, when the first convoy of wounded—I’m speaking of the truly wounded, those of whom there was nothing left but a reddish pulp and who lay in trucks on flea-infested stretchers, softly groaning and chanting their mother’s name or their wife’s—when that first convoy showed up in our town, it hit us right between the eyes. Suddenly there was a great silence, and we all came to see them, these shadows of men, when the litter bearers brought them out to carry them into the clinic. Double file, dense and thick—a hedge of honor, a hedge of horror—as the women bit their lips and wept continuously, while the rest of us, dumb-asses at heart, felt shamed. But also—it’s awful but it has to be said—we felt happy, an overwhelming and unwholesome joy, that it was them and not us lying there.

All that was in September 1914. This first wave of wounded were spoiled rotten. Endless visits, bottles, pies, madeleines, liqueurs, fine batiste shirts, corduroy trousers, pork treats, stoppered wine.

And then time went to work. Time and toll, because they started arriving every day by the truckload. We got used to it. We even got a bit sick of it. They resented us for sheltering from the action, and we resented them for their unchanged dressings, their lopped-off legs, badly relidded heads, twisted mouths, missing noses: everything we didn’t want to see and which they thrust in our faces. Soon there would be insults and sometimes fistfights.

In a way we were two towns then, two towns in the same place that turned their backs on each other, each with its promenades, its cafés, its hours. Two worlds. Only the widow Blachart reconciled them, opening her thighs to one and all, civilian and military, without rationing or discrimination, at every hour of the day or night. The line to her house sometimes reached ten meters; it was neutral territory, where men at odds could speak again, look at one another, fraternize while awaiting the great forgetfulness that holed up in the widow’s belly. As for her, she spent the whole day—or just about—stretched out on the big bed, under her deceased husband’s portrait. He was dressed for his wedding day, but black crêpe obscured his smile. It was only right, since every ten minutes an impatient guy took the place he’d deserted three years before, when a ton of coal fell on his head at the factory.

Old biddies used to curse the widow and spit at her back in the street. Agathe—that was her first name—didn’t give a damn. After the war, some of those who received medals had not served as well as the widow had. We have to be fair. How many are even capable of offering their body and their warmth for a few coins?

In 1923, Agathe Blachart closed her shutters and her door, picked up a fairly light suitcase, and, saying good-bye to no one, left for V on the mail coach. There she boarded the express for Chalons. At Chalons she changed trains, taking the one to Paris. Three days after that she was in Le Havre, where she set sail on the
Boréal
. Two months later she debarked in Australia.

The books say that in Australia there are deserts, kangaroos, wild dogs, flat and limitless expanses, human beings who still live like cavemen, and cities new as coins from the mint. I’m not too sure we should believe them. Sometimes books lie. All I know for a fact is that the widow Blachart has been in Australia since 1923. Maybe she remarried over there. Maybe she even has children, a shop. Maybe everybody greets her with a respectful hello and a big smile. Maybe the oceans she put between herself and us enabled her to forget us completely—to be without past or sorrow, without anything.

Anyway, on the evening in question not all the wounded were at her place. The streets were full of them—flooded, actually— and most of them were tanked, hassling passersby, yelling and vomiting, ganging up for trouble. To avoid them, Joséphine pulls her cart through the side streets. Instead of going down the rue du Pressoir, continuing on rue des Messiaux, skirting the church, coming back up behind city hall, and making a beeline to her shack toward the cemetery, she prefers to walk along the little canal, even though it’s pretty narrow there—and she knows that with a full cart she’ll have a hard time—even though this detour adds more than a kilometer.

It’s cold. The frost makes everything crackle. Joséphine’s nose is running and her flask is empty. The sky has become a roof of gray-blue tones that the first star pierces like a silver nail. The cart crushes the snow crust; the skins are stiff enough to stand like brooms. Joséphine raises a hand to wipe her nose, before an icicle can form. It’s then and there that she sees in the distance, without any possible doubt, about sixty meters away—she swears it—young Morning Glory standing on the bank of the little canal, talking to a tall man bending down slightly to meet her. And this unmistakable figure in black, stiff as a living thing could be, standing by the little canal as the worn-out winter day prepares to take its leave, is none other than the prosecutor, Pierre-Ange Destinat himself. A testimony beyond the shadow of a doubt. Him, with the little girl, at the fall of night. The two of them, him and her. Alone.

This twilight scene stopped Joséphine in her tracks. Why? No reason in particular. If we always had to explain everything we do, the gestures, the thoughts, the feelings, the movements, we’d never get to the end of it all. So Joséphine freezes in place like a pointer—what’s odd about that?—on this Sunday, December 2, as night falls, and that because she’s just seen, straight ahead in the cold, the prosecutor of V chatting with a young flower, laying his hand on her shoulder—yes, his hand on her shoulder; she swears to that as well. “Sixty meters away in the dark, a hand on a shoulder, when you’re blind drunk? Come, now!” they’ll tell her when they start harassing her later on—I’ll come back to that. Joséphine doesn’t give an inch. It was him. It was her. And no five sips of brandy could make her start seeing things!

So what? What’s wrong with a conversation between Destinat and the little flower? He knew her. She knew him. To have seen them in this place where the next day she would be found strangled: What does that prove? Have we taken leave of our senses?

There was no more sound coming from the bedroom. Maybe Clémence had gone in and fallen asleep. Joséphine had finished her story and was looking at me. I was still seeing the scene she’d just described, but Morning Glory had left the room, in silence, her drenched clothes clinging to her slim body of ice. She had smiled at me and disappeared.

“And then?” I ask Joséphine.

“Then what?”

“You went toward them?”

“Approach the prosecutor? I’m not crazy. I keep my distance from him.”

“And so?”

“So I turned back.”

“You left them like that?”

“What should I have done, set up a lantern for them and a foot warmer, perhaps?”

“And the little girl. You’re sure it was her?”

“That golden-yellow hood of hers, how many of those do you see around? Anyway, I’d seen her sometimes going into her aunt’s house. It was her for sure, you can take it from me.”

“What would she be doing at the edge of the canal?”

“Same as me, I’d guess: avoiding the drunks. A little ways farther on, she would have come out on the square and taken the six o’clock mail coach. You got anything to drink? All this talk is making me dry.”

I set out two glasses, a bottle, some cheese, a sausage, and an onion. We drank and ate in silence. I looked at Joséphine as though to see through her the picture she’d painted for me. She nibbled like a mouse and drank big gulps of wine, making a fluent, pretty music with her tongue. Outside it was snowing heavily, not straight down but on a bias, against the windowpanes, on which it seemed to be writing letters, letters that melted and streamed in rapid lines, like tears on an absent cheek. The weather was turning to muck. The frost was picking up its tattered finery and everything was dispersing. The next day would be all drips and mud.

It was late. In a corner of the kitchen, I laid out some blankets and a mattress. I’d succeeded in persuading Joséphine to go with me to V and tell everything to Mierck. We would leave at dawn. She nodded off almost immediately but slept fitfully, muttering things I couldn’t make out. The big gun fired from time to time but without conviction—only to remind us it was there, like a bell of evil.

I didn’t dare go back to the bedroom for fear of waking Clémence. I sat down in the armchair, the one I’ve still got, which holds me like a big gentle hand. I closed my eyes.

We left at dawn. Clémence had gotten up and made us a full pot of coffee, boiling hot, and some mulled wine swirled into a bottle. At the door she gave us a little wave; but at me and me alone, she smiled. I took several steps toward her. I wanted so much to kiss her but felt embarrassed in front of Joséphine. So I returned her wave. And that’s all.

Since then I haven’t had a day without regret over that kiss I withheld.

“Have a nice trip,” she told me. Her last words, and my little gems. I still have them in my ear, intact; I play them every evening.
Have a nice trip.
I don’t have her face anymore, but I swear I have her voice.