While the Gods Were Sleeping (18 page)

Above the back of the church there hangs a cloud of dust, ethereal dull red, yellow ochre, grey-white. “In the field there,” cry the girls. “She’s lying in the field.” Only when we walk past the church onto the lawn do we see the hole that has been knocked in the wall, and the lopsided crosses on the tombs, and the smoke rising from the nave of the church—one of the bombs must have fallen right next to the choir, on the narrow gravel path that divided the back of the chapel from the first row of graves. I heard later that Monsieur Bossuges, who had been buried about three weeks before, Monsieur Bossuges, a gentleman of private means, self-appointed dignitary, who had had a tomb built while he was alive in which the accumulation of cherubs and other feathered creatures supported the assumption that he expected a certain esteem in the hereafter also—Monsieur Bossuges, it was said, was hurled out of the hole that one of the bombs had made in his pathetic one-man
mausoleum and was found in his best suit, without footwear, hanging right across the tomb of Mademoiselle Bernier, former schoolmistress, as if he had tried to clamber over a stone fence to lie beside her, which in my uncle’s opinion wasn’t even that improbable. Monsieur Bossuges and Mademoiselle Bernier lived very close together and when they were alive, all kinds of things were whispered about them which, my mother felt, would have been a lot less interesting if people had simply said them out loud. “In any case, dear sister,” my uncle commented, by way of conclusion, “who on earth has himself buried with his glasses in his inside pocket?” What truth there was to all this I never knew, my uncle was not averse to exaggeration, and when we bury Amélie Bonnard a few days later, the
mairie
has had all the rubble cleared and the craters have been filled with it. The glazed tips of the wings of Monsieur Bossuges’s angels gleam like children’s teeth in the sand.

Because of the rouge it looks as if Amélie Bonnard is not dead at all. Because of the rouge and the earrings, and thick winter coat over her summer dress, she looks like a child very accurately playing dead. It takes a while to find her, flat on her back, an unsightly bundle of blue-grey serge amid the copper-coloured grass of the falling evening. She must have turned round at the last, wanting to retrace her steps, because she is lying with her feet in the direction of the gate in the hedge and the dusty country road, arms next to her trunk, a last convulsion still in her fingers under the thick sleeves of her coat. The eyes, vacant, stare at the clear sky without seeing the clogs and socks, the grazed knees, the skirts of the women, or the face of my mother, who kneels down by her and superfluously, since everyone knows that
Amélie is dead, puts the back of her hand against the child’s cheeks, the powdered cheeks, and then turns her hand over, and strokes Amélie’s forehead to close her eyes, and then with the chin in the hollow of her palm pushes it against Amélie’s upper jaw. “Someone should tell Marie,” she says without looking up, and when she gets up again I see she is close to tears—but it isn’t necessary to call Marie, more people are approaching down the country road. Above the voices and the footsteps Madame Bonnard calls, “Amélie, Amélie! Where are you?” as she walks towards us and wipes her hands on her apron, covered in smears of fat from her work at the butcher’s, and pushes her way through the people, the men who keep an embarrassed distance, the children whom she pulls brusquely aside until she is standing next to my mother and in turn sinks to her knees by her daughter, blushing from the rouge, the earrings glistening in the grass—“Silly child…” she hisses in a voice that is breaking.

She looks unharmed, Amélie Bonnard, an expensive powdered doll left behind by a spoilt rich person’s child, but when her mother lifts her head up she withdraws her hand in horror, red with blood, because the back of Amélie’s skull is left behind in the grass and her own fingers sink into the soft mass of the brain—and she does not so much utter a cry, Marie Bonnard, as a groan that seems to issue more from her tissue and bones than from her chest, as if all the tendons and joints were howling in their sockets. My mother puts a hand to her mouth and turns her head away. “Send them away,” she finally mumbles. “
Les enfants
. Send then away, Hélène. Take them with you to the market square.”

Only when we rinsed her clean in our cellar, where it was cool, as we waited for Monsieur Véclin, carpenter and undertaker for the occasion to make her coffin, was the colour of death exposed in Amélie’s body, and my mother and I, who washed the child while her own mother vacantly stroked the bloody locks, we gulped and both bit our bottom lips. My mother had lent her shawl, so that Monsieur Véclin could bind Amélie’s head before he took the body away, and then it emerged that the mortuary had also been destroyed, and Monsieur Véclin admitted that because of what he called “the situation” he did not have sufficient planks at home, so that it might be quite some time before there was a coffin—“And you understand, Madame Demont, with this heat…”—then she had summoned me again: “Run home quickly, Hélène, ask uncle to send the dog cart, and bring a blanket with you.”

And so little Amélie Bonnard arrived at our house towards evening, under a blanket on the dog cart, followed by a procession of women and children. My mother supported Madame Bonnard, I walked ahead, next to the elderly servant who handled the dog. No one spoke. Behind me was the sound of suppressed sobs. The wheels of the cart crunched on the gravel, the dog panted. In our yard Madame Bonnard took her daughter off the cart and carried her into the house in her arms. We showed her the way, down the steps, into the cellar area, the vaulted passage under the house, with countless side rooms, one of them the cool room, with the flowing water and the big cold stone in the middle, on which Amélie Bonnard was set down.

My mother sent all the others away, instructed the maid to bring jugs of water, towels and washbasins and soap. We undid the straps of Amélie’s shoes. Madame Bonnard took the earrings off her child and put them in the pocket of the apron she still had on. She could not take her eyes off her daughter’s face, which in her hands blushed so unnaturally in death. “We’ve informed Abbé Foulard,” said my mother. Marie Bonnard nodded, but did not look up. “He’s on his way.” We unbuttoned Amélie’s coat, and the stiff material did not easily give. My mother said: “Take her socks off” and then turned to the maid, Madeleine, who was waiting by the door and looking on. “Fetch bandages, from the boudoir upstairs.”

We pulled her arms from the sleeves, I took Amélie’s shoes off her heels, rolled the socks over the ankles and insteps of her cold feet. Madame Bonnard kissed her daughter on the nose, helped move the body upright and let it rest against her hips when we took off Amélie’s dress and vest, taking the material off carefully, over the head that waggled, as if the child were still alive, in a deep sleep or seized by a high fever—but death was already painting her body with its contrary palette, from within it was draining the colour from her tissues. Blood was settling in the arteries, the little blood that had not leaked away into the grass, in the minutes after she had been hit. Amélie’s pale limbs, the clumsy arms, the round tummy, the touching crease of the child’s sex between her thighs, the fingernails already going blue, made the contrast with the powdered face even more absurd, not to say, I keep repeating the word, obscene. My mother first covered Amélie’s thighs with a towel and with a wet sponge rubbed the rouge from
the cheeks. “Lather her, Hélène,” she ordered me. “Take a basin and lather her.”

I washed Amélie’s ankles and calves, behind her knees. My movements were continued in the lame muscles of the lifeless body, which bobbed up and down at every stroke of the flannel over the skin. I lathered her wrists, the folds between her fingers, the elbows, the narrow chapels of her armpits, where the hairs would never grow that could drive a man wild with lust—and I thought, as stupid as it may seem, of the week before, when my mother had forced me to help her slaughter four chickens for the Sunday meal: how she had first pointed out the victims to me, among them unfortunately the creature I had out of boredom christened Madame de Staël because it was a chicken that radiated a certain nobility, although according to my mother she had simply stopped laying for good and was only noble enough for the bouillon: “You mustn’t give them names, child, that just makes it difficult. A chicken is a chicken.”

She had thrust the creature into my hands and snapped at me: “Don’t let go or there’ll be trouble.” Through the coat of feathers I had felt the warmth of that living being in my palms, the vibrating, restlessly beating flesh that, when my mother ordered me to lay the creature on the chopping block, did not even resist, but sank into a kind of hypnotic sleep, the pale
eyelids
closed over the reptilian chilliness of the pupils, and only when my mother—shockingly resolute in my eyes, a different figure suddenly emerged from inside her, a woman who showed the same routine hardness with which Emilie in her kitchen at home ruled over life and death—only when my mother with a resolute blow of the heavy cleaver separated the head from 
the body did the creature seem to come to life in its death throes: the legs that scraped along my forearm, the trembling, the dying jerks, the spasms that pushed life out of the arteries and cells with every gulp of warm blood, until the claws finally relaxed, the muscular spasms subsided and my mother, with sleeves rolled up, hands on hips and the bloodstained cleaver in her fist, announced with satisfaction: “
Bon
, that one’s gone.”

I don’t know what dumbfounded me most: the death that I had felt happen, or my mother’s transfiguration, from a lady who at home would have called herself
mondaine
without the least scruple if that had not testified to excessive vanity, to a being that just as coolly bit through umbilical cords and major arteries, and carefully prepared that child for her last journey. “Put out her clothes ready, Marie,” she said tactfully when we had almost finished drying Amélie. Madame Bonnard nodded and turned to the square box and the holdall on one of the tables in the cellar. She had fetched from home the Communion clothes that Amélie would have worn in church the following year, the clothes her mother herself had worn, for her own Communion. “She was so looking forward to it,” whispered Madame Bonnard as she took the top off the box, folded open the delicate tissue paper and did not turn round as she spoke, as if she knew that my mother was taking the opportunity carefully to undo the shawl around Amélie’s head, as if she were taking a fragile present from its packaging.

It was starting to get dark. “Give us some light, Madeleine,” said my mother to the maid, who was still standing against the door and, in the light of the candlestick she was holding in one hand, looked more than usually like a crudely carved wooden
statue, weathered as she was, with forearms that seemed disproportionately long; and now she was standing there with her arms crossed, those long forearms and rough hands, in one of them the candlestick with the hissing flame. She might have been a genie called forth from a magic lamp, who silently fulfils other people’s wishes.

Madeleine came closer and held the candlestick above Amélie’s body while my mother undid the shawl further, pulling it slowly free of the locks of hair and the congealed blood. Madame Bonnard spread her daughter’s clothes out on the table, the Communion dress, the white stockings, the white mules, the mother-of-pearl rosary and the shiny gloves, and more clearly than before used her back as a shield between her and my mother—I could see from her whole attitude that she was doing her best to think of something else. Of anything, but not of her child behind her back, of the bloody shawl that was lying openly on the slab, or the water in the basin that was going redder and redder whenever she dipped the cotton cloth with which she was washing the head in it and wrung it out. We were silent, the candle flame hissed, the water sloshed in the basin.

“Help me a moment, Hélène.” I went over to her. My mother gripped my hand, with her other hand lifted up Amélie’s head and slid my hand underneath. The head was cold, cold as the stone on which it had been resting. On my fingers I could feel the loose piece of Amélie’s skull give way under the pressure of my palm, and it was as if the lifelessness, the deadness, death itself, its chilly nothingness, its festival of freezing, its greedy congealing, transferred itself to my fingers from that head,
which was obviously no longer the head of Amélie Bonnard who two or three hours before had been hopping through the grass, but the head of a dead person, which lay in my hand like the curve of a cracked jug.

I shivered. My mother said later: “That was fear, my child. You’re as frightened of death as anyone else. Don’t fool yourself.” But at the moment itself she had said nothing. She had simply stopped her work. With the roll of bandage in her hands that she had wound around Amélie’s head from her neck, she had looked up at me. A few strands had come loose from her hair, which she wore up in a bun; they were hanging in front of her eyes, which fixed me for a couple of seconds—a look that could always do more than a thousand slaps or reproaches and needed no syllables to make itself understood: “Don’t dream of having a fainting fit or even being sick.” I looked away. She pulled the bandage further round Amélie’s head. “We’ve got to hurry,” she said quietly. She meant that the body was starting to go stiff. Amélie’s head seemed to be screwed to her neck, her lips pressed together more firmly than before, narrowed to a
red-blue
strip on that under-the-breath body. All the dead mumble.

There was a knock. Madeleine put down the candle and went to the door, which she opened a fraction. “Véclin,” she growled. She had a vocabulary of basalt, and language that resounded from her weathered wooden body like the rattle of stones in a tin. “Tell him to wait,” said my mother. “We’re not finished yet. Send him upstairs. My brother can give him something to drink.” Madeleine mumbled something and pushed the door shut again. My mother turned round, put her hands on Madame Bonnard’s shoulders. “We’ve finished, Marie. We can
dress her. Come on, turn round. You can stay here tonight, I’ll have them get a room ready.”