Silk (6 page)

O
NLY
silence, along the road. The body of a boy, on the ground. A man kneeling. Until the last light of day.

I
T
took Hervé Joncour eleven days to reach Yokohama. He bribed a Japanese official and procured sixteen cartons of silkworm eggs that came from the south of the island. He wrapped them in silk cloths and sealed them in four round wooden boxes. He found a ship for the continent and in early March reached the Russian coast. He chose the northernmost route, looking for cold to arrest the life of the eggs and prolong the time before they hatched. By forced marches he covered the four thousand kilometres of Siberia, crossed the Urals, and reached St Petersburg. He bought, at an exorbitant cost, hundredweights of ice and loaded them, with the eggs, into the hold of a merchant ship bound for Hamburg. It took six days to get there. He unloaded the four round wooden boxes, and got a train heading south. After eleven hours of travel, just outside a city that was called Eberfeld, the train stopped to take on water. Hervé Joncour looked around. A summer sun was beating on the fields of grain, and on all the world. Sitting opposite him was a Russian merchant: he had taken off his shoes and was fanning the air with the last page of a newspaper written in German. Hervé Joncour stared at him. He saw the stains of sweat on his shirt and the drops that pearled his forehead and neck. The Russian said something, laughing. Hervé Joncour smiled at him, rose, took his bags, and got off the train. He walked beside it to the last car, a freight car that carried fish and meat, preserved in ice. It was dripping water like a bowl punctured by a thousand projectiles. He opened the door, climbed into the car, and, one after another, picked up his round wooden boxes, carried them outside, and set them on the ground, beside the tracks. Then he closed the door and waited. When the train was ready to leave they shouted to him to hurry and get on. He responded by shaking his head, and making a gesture of farewell. He saw the train grow distant, and then disappear. He waited until he no longer heard it. Then he bent over one of the wooden boxes, removed the seals, and opened it. He did the same with the three others. Slowly, with care.

Millions of larvae. Dead.

It was May 6, 1865.

H
ERVÈ
Joncour entered Lavilledieu nine days later. From a distance, his wife, Hélène, saw the carriage coming along the tree-lined drive of the villa. She said to herself that she mustn’t weep and that she mustn’t flee.

She went to the front door, opened it, and stopped on the threshold.

When Hervé Joncour came close to her, she smiled. He, embracing her, said softly

‘Stay with me, please.’

They were awake late into the night, sitting beside each other on the lawn in front of the house. Hélène told him about Lavilledieu, and all those months spent waiting, and of the past days, terrible.

‘You were dead.’

She said.

‘And there was nothing good left, in the world.’

A
ROUND
the farmhouses, in Lavilledieu, people looked at the mulberries, thick with leaves, and saw their own ruin. Baldabiou had found some shipments of eggs, but the larvae died as soon as they emerged. The rough silk that was obtained from the few that survived was barely enough to provide work for two of the seven silk mills in the town.

‘Do you have any ideas?’ asked Baldabiou.

‘One,’ answered Hervé Joncour.

The next day he let it be known that, in the summer months, he would build the park for his villa. He engaged men and women, in the town, by the dozens. They deforested the hill and rounded its contours, making the slope that led to the valley gentler. With trees and hedges they designed delicate, transparent labyrinths on the earth. With flowers of every kind they built gardens that appeared by surprise, like clearings, in the heart of small birch woods. They diverted water from the river, so that it would descend, from fountain to fountain, to the western edge of the park, where it pooled in a small lake, surrounded by meadows. To the south, amid lemon and olive trees, they built a large aviary, of wood and iron: it looked like a piece of embroidery suspended in the air.

They worked for four months. At the end of September the park was ready. No one, in Lavilledieu, had ever seen anything like it. They said that Hervé Joncour had spent all his capital. They said, too, that he had returned from Japan changed, perhaps ill. They said that he had sold the eggs to the Italians and now had a patrimony in gold that was waiting for him in the banks of Paris. They said that if it were not for the park they would have died of hunger, that year. They said that he was a swindler. They said that he was a saint. Someone said: something is troubling him, some kind of unhappiness.

A
LL
that Hervé Joncour said about his journey was that the eggs had hatched in a town near Cologne, and that the town was called Eberfeld.

Four months and thirteen days after his return, Baldabiou sat before him, on the shore of the lake, on the western edge of the park, and said

‘After all, sooner or later, you’ll have to tell someone the truth.’

He said it softly, because he didn’t believe, ever, that the truth was good for anything.

It was autumn and the light, around them, was unnatural.

‘The first time I saw Hara Kei he was wearing a dark tunic, and he was sitting motionless, with his legs crossed, in the corner of a room. Lying beside him, her head resting on his lap, was a woman. Her eyes didn’t have an Oriental shape, and her face was the face of a girl.’

Baldabiou listened in silence, until the end, until the train at Eberfeld.

He didn’t think anything.

He listened.

It hurt him to hear, finally, Hervé Joncour say softly

‘I never even heard her voice.’

And after a while:

‘It’s a strange grief.’

Softly.

‘To die of nostalgia for something you will never live.’

They went back across the park walking one beside the other. The only thing Baldabiou said was

‘Why the hell is it so damn cold?’

He said it at a certain point.

A
T
the start of the new year – 1866 – Japan legalised the export of silkworm eggs.

In the following decade France alone would import ten million francs’ worth of Japanese eggs.

Furthermore, starting in 1869, with the opening of the Suez Canal, the journey to Japan took no more than twenty days. And just under twenty days for the return.

Artificial silk was patented, in 1884, by a Frenchman named Chardonnet.

S
IX
months after his return to Lavilledieu, Hervé Joncour received in the post a mustard-coloured envelope. When he opened it, he found inside seven sheets of paper, covered by a thick geometric writing: black ink: Japanese ideograms. Apart from the name and the address on the envelope, there was not a single word written in Western characters. From the stamps, the letter seemed to have come from Ostend.

Hervé Joncour unfolded it and examined it for a long time. It seemed a catalogue of little bird tracks, compiled with meticulous folly. It was surprising to think that in fact they were signs; that is, the ashes of an incinerated voice.

F
OR
days and days Hervé Joncour kept the letter with him, folded in two, in his pocket. If he changed his clothes, he moved it into the new ones. He never opened it to look. Every so often he turned it over in his hands, while he was talking with a farmer, or sitting on the veranda waiting till it was time for dinner. One evening he began to examine it against the light of the lamp, in his study. In transparency, the tiny bird tracks spoke in a blurred voice. They said something absolutely insignificant or something that could unhinge a life: it wasn’t possible to know, and this Hervé Joncour liked. He heard Hélène coming. He placed the letter on the table. She came in and, as she did every night, before retiring to her room, kissed him. When she leaned over him, her nightgown fell open slightly, revealing her chest. Hervé Joncour saw that she had nothing on, underneath, and that her breasts were small and white like those of a girl.

For four days he went on with his life, with no change in his prudent daily rituals. On the morning of the fifth day he put on a fine grey suit and left for Nîmes. He said that he would return before evening.

A
T
12
Rue Moscat, everything was the same as three years before. The celebration was not yet over. The girls were all young and French. The pianist played, with the mute, themes that had a Russian flavour. Perhaps it was old age, perhaps some vile grief: at the end of each number he no longer ran his right hand through his hair and murmured, softly,

‘
Voilà
.’

He was silent, looking at his hands in dismay.

M
ADAME
Blanche received him without a word. Her hair black, lustrous, her face Oriental, perfect. Little blue flowers on her fingers, as if they were rings. A long, almost transparent white robe. Bare feet.

Hervé Joncour sat down opposite her. He took a letter out of his pocket.

‘Do you remember me?’

Madame Blanche nodded, with an infinitesimal movement of her head.

‘I need you again.’

He held out the letter. She had no reason to do it, but she took it and opened it. She examined the seven sheets, one by one, then looked up at Hervé Joncour.

‘I don’t love this language,
monsieur
. I wish to forget it, and I wish to forget that land, and my life there, and everything.’

Hervé Joncour sat immobile, his hands gripping the arms of his chair.

‘I will read this letter for you. I will do it. And I don’t want money. But I want a promise: don’t ever come back and ask this again.’

‘I promise,
madame
.’

She stared into his eyes. Then she lowered her gaze to the first page of the letter, rice paper, black ink.

‘
My beloved lord
’

she said

‘
don’t be afraid, don’t move, be silent, no one will see us
.’

Said Madame Blanche, Hervé Joncour listened,

she stopped, ‘Continue, please’, he said,

she said, she read softly, with the voice of a child- woman,

he listened without moving, from the pocket of his grey suit a bright white handkerchief stuck out,

she said, her head was bent over the pages, and one hand brushed her neck, slowly,

he listened, he kept his gaze fixed on an empty silver frame, hanging on the wall,

she said, she was leaning towards the lamp, the light struck the pages and went through her transparent robe,

he listened, at a certain point he turned to look at her, he saw her, he wanted to lower his eyes but couldn’t,

she said, in a whisper, then she stopped.

There were no other marks on the page that she had in her hand: the last. But when she turned it over to put it down she saw on the back some more orderly lines, black ink in the centre of the white page. She looked up at Hervé Joncour. His eyes were fixed on her, and she realised that they were beautiful eyes. She lowered her gaze to the page.

She said.

She remained looking at the page for a while, then placed it on the others, beside her, on a small pale-wood table. Hervé Joncour didn’t move. Only he turned his head and lowered his eyes. He was staring at the crease in his trousers, barely perceptible but perfect, on the right leg, from the groin to the knee, imperturbable.

Madame Blanche rose, bent over the lamp, and turned it off. A faint light came in through the window, from the parlour. She went over to Hervé Joncour, took from her fingers a ring of tiny blue flowers, and laid it beside him. Then she crossed the room, opened a small painted door hidden in the wall, and disappeared, half- closing it behind her.

Hervé Joncour sat for a long time in that strange light, turning over and over in his fingers a ring of tiny blue flowers. Weary notes from a piano reached him from the parlour: they were losing time, so that you almost couldn’t recognise them.

Finally he rose, went over to the small pale-wood table, and picked up the seven sheets of rice paper. He crossed the room, passed the half-closed door without turning, and went out.