Following the Summer (3 page)

He wanted to leave, but it was too late. Fatima had slipped away to the neighbouring tables and was exploring the three aisles with the same zeal she'd shown in the church. She had her own way of looking and at the same time ignoring. There was little life in the restaurant: two teenaged girls in identical black coats were sighing secrets to each other, a bespectacled man was huddled behind a newspaper, a few Sunday parents and children provided background noise around the remains of meals and cups of coffee growing cold. But he knew where she would stop, at the elbow of one of the three young men in bomber jackets who were leafing through magazines, absorbed in conversations that could only be about cars or music, in a syncopated German marked now and then by a Viennese languor. The first one to notice her was fair-haired, with the round folds of childhood bracketing his eyes; with a few laughing words he introduced her to the other two, who resembled each other with their muddy complexions, their open collars displaying the same chain, the same weak chins. She attached herself to them a few seconds later with such intensity that a brief silence settled over them, interrupted at once by the fair-haired one, who stroked her head.

Ervant thought her unsociable, but here she was allowing herself to be touched. It was too late to take her back, to understand, and he was unwilling to try. He grabbed her then and pushed her onto the street, ignoring the young people's sarcastic murmurs, anxious to get her back to the Theresianumgasse from which she would emerge again, or not, it was none of his business. The child was looking at him obliquely, she was beginning to yield. She was babbling now, something she'd never done before.

She kept him waiting at a stall on the edge of a laneway where an Arab immigrant sold newspapers and knickknacks from a box that he'd hide from the eyes of the police. Instinctively she had picked up the prettiest piece, a rhinestone necklace whose cheapness was cancelled by the purity of the setting, a circle in which the brilliance of the stones diminished regularly against some minuscule agates, black and regal. The two men barely debated the price, both of them eager for this day to end: it was six o'clock and the light was waning, leaving behind a cloak of dampness, the certainty, finally, of winter.

He crossed the Hofburg through the inner courtyard. A solitary guard stood watch at the entrance to the imperial quarters. He had thought vaguely of bringing her here, despite his loathing of the gilding of another era, and of wrinkles of every kind. He wouldn't do it.

They walked for a long time, as usual, through streets left empty by this first cold. The wind rose, whistling across the stones, and the chill rain of Vienna lashed down suddenly as they approached their neighbourhood. The public square for meetings, the Servitenkirsche. Outside the church they huddled in their new silence — bitter for him, terrifying for her — in their distance.

Still, she held out the necklace for him to hang around her neck, icy coals against the red sweater. There was a moment of tenderness as he lifted the hair of this thin young girl, made thinner by the rain. What would become of her? Already the tension in her neck, the defiant motion she had when she was hunting or lying in wait, had subsided into fear before this man who was leaving her now. He pulled her hair into a young woman's chignon and saw how heavy makeup, a broken oval, would make her ordinary by the time she was twenty, and he was sorry he had.

Gently he twisted her hair, the child's head on his hip. Night had fallen. Ervant was tall and warm in his wet clothes, and he felt Fatima's hand on his sex, firm, determined, the palm engaged at once in a back-and-forth motion that travelled to the root of his stomach. Night had come.

Four

A
T THAT POINT IN HIS STORY HE TALKED
about his sadness, then told how he had taken the child to the Maria Schneider café, right to the door that night, refusing to say goodnight in the hope that she'd understand her misbehaviour. A moral man, he felt indignant with Leonel, suspecting him of having taught his daughter that act, and others. Of having ordered her to beg, of having himself paid her in jewellery, the gold bracelet and the cheap ornaments, of having shown her how to offer herself. And of having left her for weeks with this solitary boy, for the money it brought her and with orders to seduce him should he become aloof. But Fatima was eight years old, ten perhaps, and Ervant's scenarios didn't always jibe with his recollections of that strange autumn, from which a little girl had emerged and then returned to the implacable silence of stone angels.

He had left Vienna a few weeks later, without going back to the café, without seeing Fatima again, though he watched her pass, up to her old tricks again, nothing changed.

When Marie heard the story she scarcely believed it. Especially that ending, left hanging. She imagined Ervant instead having surrendered to the child's strength, stiff, perhaps moaning in the hollow of that little hand that would have taken the time to slip inside his clothing, to rub the skin beneath the cloth, he would have encouraged her rhythm, his back against the wall and legs apart, then closed over the slender fingers and wrist, gushing in a slow, feeble spasm, just as he comes when she, Marie, caresses him standing against doors where he abandons himself in the daylight shadows of the empty house. She preferred the Ervant of agitation and suffocating heat to his cursing and self-pity, to his going home in the rain, detaching himself from a girl who was there to be taken, who was troubled and fiery, slave-girl with a necklace, the ugly girl who wins out over night.

And so she asked him no questions. It is he who would be surprised at her, at what seemed to awaken in her when he evoked the memory, so remote from those of his childhood in Odensk, to which she listened abstractedly.

Ervant preferred Marie bright-eyed and a trifle cold, the woman who had made him realize at once that his flight could end with her.

For after Vienna the only possibility was America, a final farewell to old stones, to homesick immigrants, to misery always close at hand, and dusty shops that recreated an ancestral life. On the other continent there had been no place for him; he had joined a group of midwestern prospectors heading up to Canada, a frontier abolished for the progress of mining, then gone on with some who were on their way east, following a fault already exploited and developed, where the French-speaking Klondike was dying away. The houses weren't even thirty years old, the girls even younger, and everything was hard like the quartz that the rocks still yielded, pure, among the fallen rocks in lands ruthlessly stripped of their forests.

From the radio poured western songs like those of his first America, the cars were red or turquoise, with aggressive fins, the two movie houses served up war or horror, in English. He liked it all and cared little about the other face of this country, one he could never comprehend because Marie had withdrawn from it. Here, it was the other colonization, that of churches and the land, which had grown insipid almost before the church steeples were erected. She talked of it with quiet arrogance, a hint of contempt in her laughter.

At the town limits where the paved roads ended, the houses gave way as they did everywhere to burnt-out areas. They went there together sometimes in the late afternoon, because they'd found a seat carved from a long bare rock, smooth and round, which offered a view of most of the town as if it had been absorbed into the distant sound of the mine. Near them, the tennis court was deserted, behind a still-new convent. Marie said little about herself except to declare that her way of escaping was always through books, and that it was easy. She described other scenarios for him, the stories of girls who were trapped.

There was Berthe who lived not far away, near Lac Edouard, which was no lake but the open sewer of a still-remote part of the town. People there were poor, the frame houses never lost their grey and their dust. Alone, she never went there, but when the nuns took their classes to confession, it was the shortcut to the church. Lined up in twos, identical teachers at the front and back, deformed by mantle and cowl, they grew bolder. The cold pinched them under woollen coats that were always too light, and they learned how to laugh at the first forbidden touches, gloved hands joined in coat pockets. Once caught they were separated, the fiat closing over this additional sin.

Berthe walked alone, at the back. Already recruited. They had enlisted her for their organ first, then for their devotions: drunk on incense, or to assume her guilt, eldest daughter of a drunk. The following year she would join them, veils to claw at her skin, brown soap and sour refectories. They had convinced her that ugliness lay behind her grim glasses and bushy eyebrows.

One warm spring day, when the smell around Lac Edouard was already turning rancid, the girls had laughed at the poor children, at the children of the poor who stood on their galleries, eyes filled with pain, a wheezing in their voices that echoed their mothers' cries. It was the last time before summer holidays and Berthe had stayed behind, hadn't come to confession, hadn't reappeared the next day or the next year. Marie thought she had died.

There was Madeleine, who lived next to the convent but didn't want it known, who was the first to arrive, the last to leave after the evening study period. A family whose children — no one knew how many — ran around with the dogs and pigs, near the stream that cleaned the stable. So it was said. For the presbytery was closed to them, as were the Church's good works, closed to these people from France who had no religion, whose daughter had been granted special permission to study at the convent, in hopes of conversion. With her almond eyes, her curly hair, her sun-tinged skin, Madeleine sowed hatred, love, and legends. She claimed to be the illegitimate daughter of the writer Colette, pointing to her name in the Index and showing them her photo as a bayadère; she claimed to be descended from the Porteuse de pain, still honoured by France for who knows what revolution; claimed to be the protegee of Ava Gardner, who would come to fetch her one day.

When Madeleine started to show, more beautiful than ever with a new, defiant way of holding her head, she too disappeared. Usually they laughed about these accidents of love, about the identity of the father, the sex of the child who would be born somewhere else. This time the whispers were as grave as terror, and virtually forbidden. In a cubicle reserved for the pianists, a fat girl close to the nuns had declared, under seal of a secret meant to be spread, that Madeleine had made the child with her own father, as her sisters had done before her, and that this explained the prolific inbreeding of the family who lived by the pigsty. Marie still wondered if it could be true, and why Madeleine was so cheerful.

“I had no friends,” she said, hands joined around knees pulled up to her chin. She conjured up uglier girls who dreamed only of marriage, and more beautiful ones who dreamed only of marrying in English. She portrayed herself as an outsider who was heading down a literary path. She lied. She, too, had fed herself on romantic novels, on religiosity, on Madeleine's extravagant stories, on her own diary. She had made every concession. She had danced on her last day at the convent, in her white dress, this first elegance tarnished by the mechanic's son who had given her a wet kiss at midnight. There had been others, at the movies, at the Moulin Rouge. It was their ritual. She erased it now that it no longer had a meaning, now that she was convinced she had wiped out the pettiness of those days, escaped the triviality of that company of the feeble.

Because of Ervant, who was so unlike them. She got to her feet, looked down on the dark nape, thick like a labourer's, like labourers one doesn't marry. But he had a naked strength she never tired of. It was like rediscovering, at last, the first feelings of excitement, those she had forgotten, too: undressing at thirteen in the harsh hot grass, summoning the sun to the place between her legs, and waiting. Dampness, the corrosion of August.

Five

T
HE PEOPLE OF THIS LAND DON'T PUT
down roots. They live where they can, along roads going north, between truck stops. They do not make gardens; they cover their houses with tarpaper, held in place by temporary laths. They wait, then they move on again, amidst the penury that clings to those who open the roads. That is why we know nothing about them. In the few photos kept by the priests are only the house fronts and streets turned grey by badly mixed acids. No adventurers' faces. The men standing outside their log cabins have expressions that apologize for their humility. Thus the grandfathers, washed up here by the Depression, came to this place by chance, chosen by the first masters. Later on they'll have wives, bashful women.

Legends have no faces here, no descendants, are like burned forests in which only aspens grow. Memories are short for children born so far away. In the attic, in trunks whose clasps are never locked, photos tell them of the marriages and deaths in families that will always be strangers, and they don't believe them. In cardboard cartons smelling of mothballs there are no lace handkerchiefs or jewels: only last year's rags and tatters, featherless felt hats, sweaters that will be unravelled one day, stacks of movie magazines, and a scrapbook of clippings about the English royal family. The children of this country are of their time, abridged.

Their knowledge of what is old comes from the abandoned houses they're allowed to explore on Sundays, when people go north in search of coolness, travelling along the colonists' old roads. Knees scraped on windowsills or cut by broken glass, or on torn-up carpeting. They found a family's castoffs, the wind whistled under a battered roof, a boy hoisted himself to the second floor despite the broken staircases. They found rusty hooks, a reader, a plastic crucifix, the head of an iron bedstead. In an old tool chest lay Isis, a brown wool doll dressed in a yellow leotard, a black crown pulled down to the eyes. At once she was a goddess, the Negro Queen of childhood, brought here from the back lanes of the town. They swore oaths to her.

And at the end of the summer they burned her. She had lost her powers, she was dead; to this country's children magic is short-lived. Marie, like the others, had agreed: it was time to temper their dreams, learn how to recognize them as soon as one had slipped inside. She had destroyed the diary in which she had hated her mother, where she had run away, where she had copied out sickly sweet poems. She had come to loathe this wasted time. Isis had decomposed.