The Avignon Quintet

by Lawrence Durrell

  He was full of complaints; his pots of honey sold well to his new clients but the roads were getting very difficult, movement was difficult, fodder for the horse was difficult. He had become quite a scavenger for scraps in what was once a land of plenty. With his large clasp-knife he cut off a hunk of cheese for her which tasted delicious, “situated” as it was by a glass of wine. He was full of quaint expression: “Il faut le situer avec un coup de vin.” The meaning presumably was to wash it down with the wine. Whatever it meant the act was appropriate and the wine delicious.

  “Well, what do you say now?” he asked with flamboyant gloominess. “What a pretty mess we are in – what did I tell you long ago, eh? The youth of France has gone work-shy and gun-shy – and here’s the result. The country ruined and the Hun in charge.” He glared malevolently at the young soldiers who were circling round his quaint coach, eyeing it with curiosity. “I shall soon be out of business. Life in the hills has become hard and dangerous.”

  “The Resistance?” she said, kindling, but he shook his head disdainfully and replied, “There’s no such thing. Simply slave-labour on the run, dodging the draft in order not to go to Germany. The hills are full of them. But they are hungry and dangerous. The Germans must be mad.”

  There was nothing vastly original in the complaints of Ludovic; but it was amazing to see that he was still in business, plying his anachronistic trade despite the upsets caused by the Occupation. He had grimmer tales to tell, of course, as who had not, for he came from the poor devastated villages which had suffered reprisals for sporadic impulsive action by the odd franc-tireur or peasant driven mad by Nazi exactions. The smoke of burning barns and houses was still fresh in his nostrils. “And I can tell you that before the last shot is fired, I will fire one, I will take one of the swine with me, that I promise.”

  They talked in this strain for a while and then he said that he must get going as he hoped to reach Remoulins before curfew time to avoid trouble. “When will we meet again?” he added sadly, “now there are no more fairs, and I have to sell in towns where I am tolerated, like Carpentras and St. Gilles. Let me at least take your address.” It so happened that he knew Tubain, and this cheered him up. He reharnessed his horse with a prodigious amount of purely theatrical roaring and shoving, while the little boy giggled himself witless. Then side by side they both waved to her as they clopped off down the road, while she rejoined her taciturn chauffeur and set off once more for Nîmes to despatch her business. She had been wondering what to say about the missing loaves of white bread, but when Ludovic had heard her story he at once offered to make good the loss with a dozen large pots of a choice honey, and nothing she could say would change his mind. He loaded them himself into the back of the car, expatiating on the virtues of honey for young people with big appetites and growing limbs. “Pure honey nourishes the intestinal flora,” he added inconsequentially but with an air of disinterested medical gravity. Where on earth could he have picked up such a phrase, she wondered?

  But after the warmth of this encounter – a voice emerging from prehistory it seemed – she found the journey turn cold and forbidding again. The grave heathlands through which they were starting to mount looked austere and forbidding, like cruel drypoints which soon the snow would mantle and hide. Her head ached partly from the belabouring she had received at the station and partly from the strain of conversation with Ludovic who conversed in a wild and whirling manner and in a high register complete with a whole repertoire of extravagant gestures. A conversation with him was like a whole season of opera. But how well she could recall the smell of the croissants they ate at breakfast daubed with his lavender honey. Blanford made the sacrifice of cycling down to Tubain for the bread and croissants almost before first light each morning. The honey of Provence – how romantic it had seemed to them then as they sat round the breakfast table smearing it on their bread while Blanford read them the head-lines in the newspaper and commented thereon with gravity and a touch of pomposity.

  So a new rhythm began and as the nights grew longer and the country a prey to the frost and the tearing mistral the journey home each night, or at the end of each professional visitation, grew more precious, more than ever desirable. Sometimes she kept the duty car for the night, sometimes she was dropped at Tu Duc at dusk. It was bliss to know that there would be a small fire in the grate, a lamp lit, an oven heating. It made her almost guilty to enjoy the mothering of the peasant girl and the warm solicitude of her husband, who had always brought off some coup in the matter of food for them, and sometimes even wine or a marc of smoky intensity.

  At other times, but the occasions were rare, she managed to bring with her Nancy Quiminal for a night. Nor were there any special alarms, though once or twice at the end of the year, at the full moon, she heard steps in the road at night. But nobody stopped; as for the patrols, they made so much noise with their service cars and motor-bike combinations that it was possible to plot their journey from afar; she got used to the particular swarming noise of the Volkswagen and Mercedes engines. These coveys of armed men passed regularly, at stipulated times, and they did not seem to be seeking for any trouble in this lonely corner of the countryside. After a few weeks she could tell the time by them almost, though she was careful to avoid them if she could where her own movements were concerned. She sought no contact with the patrol station up the hill.

  One day some small indisposition had made her ask for the afternoon off, and she spent the after-lunch period in turning out the upstairs rooms where, here and there, in corners and cupboards she found odd relics of their last summer stay; a bundle of newspapers, some old letters, a torn sweater belonging to Blanford. There was a little frail sunshine and she opened the window upon the garden to capture some of it. As she did so she heard, or thought she heard, the faint pure sound of a voice down by the weir – a voice pitched slightly above the steady drumming tone of the water. In fact it sounded exactly like the voice of Livia, her vanished sister, and, like her, it was intoning the Aum just as she used once to do at the beginning of her yoga sessions. Quite dazed with surprise Constance leaned out of the window, craning to see if there was anything which might substantiate this, for she told herself that it was a figment, a trick of memory – this low pure sound upon the cold air. Twice the voice intoned the word and then fell silent. Constance closed the window with a bang and made her way downstairs at breakneck speed. She slipped out of the verandah door and ran lightly down the avenue of planes into the dense patch of forest which bordered the weir. As she ran she parted the bushes with her hands, half afraid that at one such gesture she might reveal something so strange and frightening that she would be struck dumb with astonishment. She really did not know what to expect, so that it was a relief to discover nothing to correspond to the sound. By the old weir the frosty grass was trampled, yes, but by rabbits. There was no sign of anyone. Nonplussed, she turned and retraced her steps towards the house. And in the final alley she came nose to nose with Blaise. “You heard it?” he said, and she nodded.

  “Does it sound like your sister to you?” he went on. And when she nodded he said that he had heard the sound twice before but there had never been anyone when he went to investigate. “But once my wife said she saw far away a girl on a bicycle heading down the hill for Tubain. It was too far for her to see clearly.”

  “My sister Livia?”

  The thought echoed on in her mind, striking it with a deep amazement because of the improbability of such an eventuality. What would Livia be doing here? Strangely enough this question was soon to be answered, though for the moment she put it aside in order to apply herself completely to the work which had now become more exacting because of the season of frost and wind. For journeys now one had to count upon occasional sunny days when roads were not too frost-bound. The close friendship with Nancy Quiminal ripened day by day until they were as close as sisters – closer indeed than she had ever been with Livvie. They undertook alternate journeys, dividing up the responsibilit
y.

  Once Nancy came back from a visit to Aix and told her that she had seen all the Paris intellectuals playing at boules, rigged up in berets basques and complaining bitterly about the food shortage. “I felt such a disgust and shame that I almost wept – but then what else could the poor things have done?” Indeed. Constance was reminded of this one evening when she arrived to overhear the children of Blaise playing in the barn among the haystacks. They were exchanging caresses, making free with each other, and at the same time repeating memorable recipes of long-vanished dishes. It was one way to allaying their hunger in the prevailing dearth – she was both touched and amused. If only Sam had been there to share such things with – yet in a special sense he still was. And then from the conversations with Blaise suddenly some ancient French would rear up its head in the middle of a phrase; she was on the lookout for these cherished exceptions. As, for example: “Quand l’arbre est vertueux taillez le en bol.” Or else: “Madame, je vous signale que le zinc est une matière noble!”

  Then one evening something unusual happened; the duty car dropped her at the corner of the forest path – it would return on the morrow – and she made her way on foot for the last few hundred metres, glad to breathe in the forest for a moment before closing her door upon it. It was dusk, with a fading light. Outside the garden gate stood a duty car with a soldier at the wheel. She peered in at him and with a movement of perplexity invoked an explanation of his presence there at such a time. But the chauffeur did not wind down the window. He simply pointed to the house and then turned away his gaze with an air of brutish insolence. Seeing that there was nothing to be got from him she opened the gate and entered the little garden. And peering through the lattice of the old-fashioned windows into the kitchen, now warm and rosy with firelight, she saw a German officer seated before the blaze, but with his chin sunk upon his chest, apparently asleep. For a moment she thought it might be the General – an irrational enough surmise – and then, peering more closely, she made out the profile of Smirgel. He slept on under her gaze, he seemed hardly to be breathing, with his grey eyes doubly hooded, once by the heavy vulture’s eyelids which covered them, twice by the thick-lensed glass with which he covered them. He heard the snap of the latch as she entered the room and drew himself upright in the chair, sighing and rubbing his eyes apologetically, shamefacedly. His greeting sounded ingratiating in its warmth and she was too startled to return it. Instead she said curtly, “What brings you here?” He looked at her for a long moment during which she discerned that his attitude towards her had changed – it was stern now and earnest. “My duty,” he said sharply. “We have never really had a talk, have we? Not a really warm confidential talk, have we?”

  He stood now and watched her as she went about her conventional duties, taking off her coat to hang on the hook behind the door, smoothing her hair and unpacking her shopping bag, arranging her few spare articles of kitchenware on the tall dresser. Over her shoulder she said, “I trust you know my status, if this is intended to be an official interrogation?”

  “Of course I do,” he said and as if to punctuate the thought gave the shadow of a heel-click. “I came to put before you some of my own problems in the hope that you may supply some answers. Your sister has been very helpful – of course you know she is here?” Her consternation both puzzled and elated him. He said, “You did not know? She has not made contact, then? How strange, for she spoke of you all with great affection, great affection.” Constance sat down with some abruptness upon a chair before the fire. “So Livia is here after all?” she cried, almost in a fury, and the officer nodded. She is a nurse now in the Army,” he said. “She is working on shock cases at Montfavet – and Quatrefages is in her ward, in her care. Why have you never asked to see him?”

  “Why should I? I have only seen him once or twice; I know nothing about his activities except that he worked for Lord Galen. Livia on the contrary knew him much better. But what intrigues you about all this business? Lord Galen and the Prince were partners, hunting for the Templar treasure – mythical as it is I suppose. They thought they were on its traces. Or so I understood.”

  Smirgel said almost sadly, “So am I, so are we, and so far with little result. I will be frank with you. We have been able to do little with Quatrefages because of his health which has broken down under the strain of our rather harsh questioning. This is all over, now; we have placed him out of reach of the Gestapo – you know that my department belongs to the Foreign Ministry, I report direct to Ribbentrop while Fischer and his colleagues depend upon Himmler. You can imagine there is some rivalry, as in any organisation. So that much that I know is not known to Them.” A very fine contempt had now entered his tone of voice upon the word “Them”. But she also felt the implication that whatever she told him would be held in confidence. It was puzzling. Later, in discussing this very perturbing visit with her friend Nancy Quiminal, the latter said, “Of course you were puzzled – you were for the first time hearing the voice of the born double agent – he was taking a sounding.” Constance’s kettle was making a slurring noise. Without more ado she poured out two cups of sage tea and sat down opposite Smirgel, examining his face with attention as she said, “You will please now tell me what is on your mind, or ask me what you have to ask. I cannot stay up all night. I am tired after a long day.”

  “Of course. Of course.” For a moment he was sunk in thought, coiling (so it seemed) and uncoiling his long spatulate fingers. He placed his hands about the cup as if to warm them, and spoke now in the most friendly, kindly manner, as if the act of participating in this little refreshment had brought them much closer together. “I’ll tell you everything,” he said, clearing his throat. “I will admit that I am under a little pressure, simply because my master is, because the Führer is himself deeply interested in this matter; not, you realise, because of the fortune involved (suppose there were) but just because other astrological predictions which have been made in the past would be confirmed by such a find. You see?”

  “What a farce,” she said, and he nodded as he said, “From one point of view, certainly it so seems. And yet who can say? The world is such a strange place, and we are busy refashioning it anew … we must have all the facts if we can. Now, let me carry on the story. When you were all here on holiday you were very friendly all together, Galen, Prince Hassad, your brother, the consul, and Quatrefages. At that time the last-named had made advances to Livia and been refused by her, so that he nourished a violent hatred against her. So she says. There is no reason why not. You were all young and on holiday. But during this period Quatrefages gave her to understand quite clearly that he had managed to pinpoint an orchard with a family vault or crypt in it which showed every sign of being the site they were all looking for. To us he denied this. Anything he might have said, he adds, would have been to seduce her. All they did discover were Greco-Roman remains dug up by the gypsies. We have accounted for most of these pieces, some were sold to the Louvre, some to New York. Can you add anything to this?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “Livia is the only one who might have had such information. But had it been true either Galen or the Prince would have blurted it out, I’m sure. There was no secrecy about this purely financial adventure, nothing esoteric.”

  “Au contraire,” he said sharply, with a warning finger raised. “Quatrefages is deeply steeped in the lore of the gnostics and the Templars. All this apparent rubbish had great symbolic importance for him – he felt himself to be or the track of the Grail, the Arthurian Grail, nothing less. The treasure might have been a simple wooden cup or a priceless chalice or a loving cup buried by the knights; it could have been the cup out of which Jesus drank at the Last Supper. It was not money or specie he thought himself hunting!” His look of triumph matched her own look of surprise. She did not know what to say, the whole matter was so surprisingly novel. He now leaned forward – he had a long neck like a lizard with a pronounced Adam’s apple – and said, “This is what interests our Führer, a lost
tradition of chivalry which he wishes to re-endow and make a base for a new European model of knighthood. But of a black order, not white.”

  “Chivalry!” she said contemptuously, standing up before the fire, her cheeks rosy with warmth and a vivid anger. “I suppose you have not seen the trains pulling out of the station day after day?”

  He looked at her in amazement. “You surprise me,” he said, “for I thought you would have grasped by now the scope of the New Order, the terrifying new order which now through German arms is trying to establish itself in the western world. You do not see beyond the fate of a few Jews and gypsies, and such riff-raff which will soon be swept away together with the whole Judeo-Christian corpus of ideas based upon gold – for in alchemical terms the Jew is the slave of gold. Spiritually we are on the gold standard of Jewish values. At last this has been recognised, at last someone has dared to break away, to break through into the historic future. You cannot belittle the enormity of the evil we have unleashed in order to outface it; we Germans are a metaphysical race par excellence – beyond good and evil stands the new type of man the Führer has beckoned up. But so that he perfects himself we must first go back and start from the wolf, so to speak. We must become specialists in evil until the very distinctions are effaced. Then he will come, the new man whom Nietzsche and Wagner divined. You underestimate the vast scope of the new vision. Our world will be based no more on gold, but on blood – the document of the race-might.”