North of Nowhere, South of Loss (15 page)

“Stop it. You're hurting me.”

“
Un chasseur aime chasser
,” he murmurs. A hunter loves to hunt. She can feel the camera against the curve of her spine. “You should not provoke,” he says. “But you like to provoke.”

“I don't like to be hunted as though I'm wild game, nor do I like to be lost. Look what you've done to my shirt.”

He runs his fingertips over her breasts. “You look better this way.”

“This is insane. It's nearly dark. You got partridges yesterday, and the day before.”

“Sometimes from six rolls of film, I do not find one single shot which pleases me.”

“You're obsessive. You're more interested in your wretched Nikon than in me.”

“To be jealous of a camera,
c'est ridicule, chérie
.”

It's not jealousy, she does not say, her heart thudding. It has nothing to do with jealousy. She does not know what it is. It is something shapeless and dark, like the black spaces deep inside the woods.

“Bouge pas.”
He focuses, clicks.

“Don't,” she says, angry, covering herself.

He pulls the shirt from her, rams it into his camera case. “I am an eye,
chérie
, this is what I am. Please. Like this. Or running, yes, if you want, that's good,
c'est magnifique!”

They are both gasping now, the wheat in tumult as they pass. She cannot tell if the tolling bell is a church or her heart or the blink of shutter or thudding feet. She trips and falls and rolls into darkness. His weight crushes her, the wheat stubble scratches her back. “Perfect,” he is laughing. “The light is perfect. I will call it
Nymph fleeing, with bare breasts.
Or
Diana the Huntress.”

She beats at him with her fists, she tears at his clothes, they bite, their embrace is violent and smells of soil and want and hay. Afterwards, spent, they look up through the smashed wheat at the darkening sky.

“Nymph and Satyr”
he murmurs. “But no one to put us in the same frame.”

She rolls onto her side and stares at him. “You arrange us in your head the whole damn time,” she says, furious. She bites his shoulder. “You weren't even here. You're an
onlooker,
you know that? a bloody voyeur. You're always some place else, inventing us.”

“I am not guilty as charged. I have been framed.”

“Oh, that's good. A pun in English, that's very good. Everything's just a game inside your head.”

“Just
a game? I am very serious about games,
mon petit joujou
.”

“I'm not your toy. We've been walking all afternoon and we never even found the right path, let alone your precious village.”

He laughs. “Is it Australian? You cannot enjoy the game without kicking the goal?”

“Is it French, forgetting which fucking game you're playing?”

“Mais c'est toi.
You are my fucking game. I never forget.”

“Lose the time clock, lose count of the score, change the rules as you go, declare yourself winner anyway.”

“Bien sûr.
I always win.”

“If that's a dare, you're playing a dangerous game.”

“You like dangerous games. We both like dangerous games.”

She shivers.

“What are you frightened of?” He strokes her neck with his fingertips. He bites her lip. “Are you frightened of me?”

4. Swann and Odette

She calls him Swann because he calls her Odette.

“Odette?” she says. “Why? Because you stalked me?”

“Because Odette played with men the way cats play with birds, and because Swann won her back against all odds.”

“A trophy. And then he walled her in
chez Swann
and she had to drop right out of the world. I don't like the sound of it.”

“It was you who came looking for me. It was you who came back.”

“Because you sent signals. You set out lures.”

“Yes,” he acknowledges. “And you were looking for them. You knew where they led. You flew right into my cage.”

“I can fly right out again.”

“Or you might not want to. Or I could stop you. That is the game.”

5. Swann's Way

“We will stay longer on the road,” he decides, his finger on the old map. “This time, we will follow the road to here,
direction
Etampes, but since Boissy-le-sec we will cross the fields.”

“I thought that was trespassing.”

“We will cross
between
the fields. On the right-of-way.”

The shutter clicks. She has him, profile against afternoon light, both maps unfolding their wings. She can see the bright plume of obsession. He believes it means something, that they found the map in the wine cave beneath their house. He believes it means something extraordinary. The map is cobwebbed and water-stained. When they unfold it, pieces fall away like ash. In the lower right corner is a royal seal and a stamp:

Propriété de Monsieur Bousquet, forestier du roi, 1681.
Pavillon de chasse du Roi.
La Forêt le Roi.

She moves closer and presses the shutter again.

“Since Boissy-le-sec,” he says, “we will search closely for the path. It should show itself here.”

“After
Boissy-le-sec.” She moves, focuses, clicks.

He raises his eyes, reproachful. “You are wasting my film.”

“You said ‘since'. You can only use ‘since' for time, not place.”

“ ‘After' is place?”

“Okay, so English isn't logical. ‘After'
can
be place. For example: before the wine cave, after the wine cave. As in: After the wine cave, Swann became obsessed with the king's hunting lodge.”

“Because the steps to the wine cave go down to the seventeenth century,” he says. He runs his index finger along the margin of the map.
“Forestier du roi,
1681. The question is, how has it arrived in our
cave du vin
, the map of the king's forester? Why has it travelled fifteen kilometres, maybe twenty, from La Forêt le Roi?”

“Maybe the forester was Protestant? Maybe he was appointed by Henri IV and Louis XIV inherited him? And then bang,1685, Revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis, and the Huguenots had to flee for their lives.”

“How do you know these things of French history?” he asks, amazed.

She thinks about it and shrugs. “Must be one of the oddities of an Australian education, a passion for dates. Mention a king or a war, and a year pops out like a cuckoo from a clock: 1066, 1215, 1337-1453, that's the Hundred Years War in case you don't know your own past.”

He says, offended: “Those scars on the bell tower of St Sulpice? English catapaults, 1405. Our grandmothers tell us the stories.”

“You're joking. Of the Hundred Years' War?”

“The stories are passed down and down, and in the
mairie
records are kept from the twelfth century. Children find pieces of armour.”

“They do? Still?”

“Si, si. Chain mail, coins, it is very bad luck to put an English coin in your pocket. They find Roman coins too, but that is lucky.”

In St Sulpice-des-Bois, she is subject to a kind of vertigo. History floats. Time flutters like partridge wings. Monsieur Bousquet hovers over the king's hunting map while William Dampier, buccaneer, maps the north-west coast of Terra Incognita, inventing the shape of Australia as he goes.

The house itself, the house of Swann and Odette, once a stable, is three centuries older than the royal forester's map. Sometimes Odette presses her ear to the thick stone wall (it is cold; it is never warm, not on the hottest day; it is never light inside the house; they live in dusk), sometimes she holds the former stable like a shell to her ear and hears Crusaders thundering by, hears kings on hunting trips, hears the guillotine in the village square.

“On the old map,” Swann says. “There is still the
s
. Do you see?” He points to the curled baroque script:
La Forest le Roi.

“When did that change? The circumflex accent instead of the
s
?”

“I don't know. A long time ago. And on the map of the
département,
latest edition, here it is, the same village. La Foret le Roi.”

“Either way, it doesn't really make sense. The Forest the King. Why no partitive?”

“For the Sun King? Redundant, I suppose.”

“Anyway, we've driven along every back road and every country track in that area. There's nothing there.”

“It is on the map. The
mairie
is very exact.”

“That doesn't prove the village still exists. Probably ten generations of
fonctionnaires
transferred the old to the new, year by year, without checking.”

“In the
mairie
, they always check. The road is not transferred,” he points out. “In the old map, you see? the village is on the main highway from Etampes to Versailles. Now, on the map of the
département
, you see how the autoroute is very far from the villages. La Forêt le Roi is here, but there is no road that leads to it.”

“Proof enough that the village has gone the way of the king's forester.”

“No. Not proof enough,” he says. “Not in France. There are footpaths and bicycles and canal boats and horses and carts.”

On the seventeenth-century map, the footpaths are marked. On the map of the
département,
they are also marked. Some of the paths correspond. Some do not. In any case, the translation of lines from map to terrain is a highly intuitive skill, like water divining.

“We will find it,” he says confidently. He measures something with thumb and forefinger on the royal forester's map and checks it against the modern map for scale. “The path should arrive somewhere here, when we can see the steeple of La Thierry.”

“Why does it matter? What do you think you'll find?”

“It was where the king took his mistresses, the hunting lodge.
Un grand chasseur, le roi soleil.
Of women and of deer.”

“So that's it. Hunting where the king hunted, and fucking where he fucked. That turns you on?”

“
Certainement
.” He is gathering up the maps and setting them aside, his hands trembling. She is awed, she is bemused, she is sometimes frightened by his flash floods of desire, the way appetite seizes him as a hawk might seize a quail. She cannot tell who is hunter and who is prey. She cannot tell which one of them has power and which has none.

“All you really want,” she murmurs, “is a photograph of me in the lodge where Louise de la Vallière got laid.”

“Tais-toi, chérie. Tais-toi
.”

The table creaks and groans with their weight. Time slithers, maps realign themselves, kings watch, the forest lures.

6. After the Hunt

“After the hunt,” he says, drowsy, “they say the king was inflamed. He liked to make love with the stag hung outside his window, dripping blood.”

“Charming. Eros and death again, that really turns the French on.”

“It turns everyone on. The French are honest about this, the puritan English are not.”

“I am not English.”

“Australian, English.” He shrugs to indicate the splitting of hairs. “Anglo-Saxon, protestant, puritan,
inhibé, tendu …
How do you say it?”

“Uptight.”

“Uptight, yes. But now .. ” He kisses her. “Now you are more
décontractée.”

“In French, I am someone else.”

“Now you have the face of a
biche.
You should look always like this.
Et voilà,
I have you on film. I will keep you this way.”

7. Secrets du Bois

“Here is where we will search,” he says, trailing an index finger across the map of the
département,
“after we leave the rue d'Etam-pes.”

“Through the forest? But the old highway would not have gone through the forest.”

“Three hundred years,” he says. “Trees grow again.”

“The forest where the bodies …? and the hunters? Where you told me they still hunt wild boar?”

“We won't be in danger. The hunting season hasn't begun.”

8. Rue d'Etampes

Along the route to Etampes, each village is quiet as death. Stone house-fronts and high walls hug the road. Rambler roses suck at the mortar and the walls are thorn-barbed and honeysuckle-choked, but beyond all that noisy colour, hush crouches.

“No one lives in France,” Odette says. “Not outside Paris. That's my theory. The villages are decoys left over from the Hundred Years War.”

“Listen.” Swann pulls her close and turns her to the wall that rises sudden as a rampart from the street. He presses his body against hers, and presses hers hard against the wall. “Listen,” he says against her ear and his hot breath is like waves breaking in her head. “What do you hear?”

“Surf. Ocean. The sea of you.”

“It's the law of village and not-village. You can hear it behind every wall. Someone is whispering to someone else:
C'est l'anglaise et le parisien
. Again.”

“Then tell them I'm not
l'anglaise.
I wouldn't be English if you paid me.
Je suis l'australienne.”

“It's all the same to them. It is slicing the hair. You speak English.”

“Anyway, there's no one here. It's a ghost village,” she insists. “If we ever find La Forêt le Roi, there'll be no way to tell if it's abandoned or alive.”

“You are wrong. Already everyone in St Sulpice knows. Listen.” He puts his ear to the wall and pretends to repeat what he hears.
“They are taking the direction Etampes, they have passed through Venant, they are in Boissy-le-Sec, they are leaving the road.
Even in La Forêt le Roi they know. They are waiting for us.”