A Citizen of the Country

by Sarah Smith

  He would feel they were safer if they were with him.

  “Have I time to make a telephone call?”

  The Montfort telephone was in the main building of the castle in a telephone cabinet off the Great Hall. He captured the telephone from little Guix, who was dictating to the Necro staff a long list of things that had been forgotten, and had the operator call the apartment at Jouvet. In the glass of the telephone cabinet he saw himself, yellow-faced, his shirt dyed a garish pink because white was too dazzling for the film stock. A clown.

  “Ici la famille Reisden—” Perdita.

  “Hello.”

  A long silence. “Hello.”

  Perdita, you were wrong, he thought, and said nothing. On the other end of the line she would be thinking he was wrong.

  “Come here,” he said. “Please.” He didn’t mention Gilbert, then thought better of that. “Only you and Toby. Aline, of course.”

  Another silence. “Is there a train?”

  He covered the transmitter and talked to Guix. There was one at 10:30 tonight; it got in at 3:46 in the morning. There was a sensible one at ten tomorrow, when a load of missing items would be coming for the film. He told her about both trains. It made sense for Toby to have at least one night’s sleep in his own house. Reisden said nothing for a moment, and they listened to each other breathe over the line.

  “We’ll come tonight,” Perdita said.

  He rang off and sat in the telephone booth a moment taking deep breaths. He felt, not securely Méduc, but lost between lives, vulnerable, angry, deserted, hurt, deserting, confused.

  Guix knocked on the door; the Arras witch had arrived; they were being called for the full run-through and filming.

  The hill slope had been transformed. According to the script, the scene with the witches was supposed to occur by the Holy Well, but Cyron had forbidden everyone to go down into the cellars. Instead, a backdrop painted with stalactites and moss had been set up and the ground had been covered with sandcloth and plaster rocks. A white canvas diffuser had been set up to the sun side of the set. “We still got that bump on the backdrop,” Krauss the photographer said in his flat American voice. “You got the Kliegs ready?” It was too far from the castle to use the generator and the electric supply; they were running the lights from the engine of Cyron’s Rolls. Krauss’ assistant cranked it and it started with a roar.

  Sabine was standing with Cyron. Cyron, in full eighteenth-century costume, was explaining something about the filming. He looked equally bizarre; his face was yellow, his wig pink. Sabine was looking up at him and giggling.

  On this day of transformations she had dyed her hair.

  Or, judging from the results, some Parisian professional had. Sabine had been a determined chestnut brown; now she was a blonde. And not just any blonde, but the sweet, wistful, Victorian blonde who plays the second lead and marries the hero’s best friend. Not as sensual, not as potentially threatening as a hot-blooded brunette. A sweet young girl. Cyron was an expert at making over other actors.

  But Lady M.? And how was she going to act the Second Witch looking like that?

  It was hot on the slope, but Sabine was wearing a modest dressing-gown covered with butterflies. Underneath the robe she was dressed in black, the Second Witch’s costume. The Third Witch would be André himself, who was off in a corner consulting with Cohen. André was dressed as an eighteenth-century version of Necrosar, skull makeup and all.

  Krauss’s assistant turned off the Rolls; the racket died, leaving isolated sounds. The wind snapped against the canvas diffuser. Cyron and Sabine talked together. Reisden took his coat and wig off and stood with his arms away from his sides to keep from sweating into the costume shirt. It wasn’t only from the heat that he was sweating.

  “Actors, places,” André called through his megaphone. The First Witch had arrived, the old man from Arras, Omer Heurtemance, mangy and magnificent. André’s eyes moved over the group without stopping at Sabine. They kept going, looking for someone.

  He didn’t recognize the girl with the blonde hair.

  She huddled off her kimono. Under it— Who had been clever? Cyron. Under it she wore a costume like a Montmartre grisette, all in black: a little provocative, a little old-fashioned. The dresser handed her a mask, a Carnival touch. It made her sensuality oddly innocent. “That’s not—” André said, and squinted, and then said nothing, then, “Who is that?”

  Cyron might get away with this after all.

  Sabine took her place by the witches’ pot.

  André stared at her for a minute. Then, deliberately, he turned away, opened the scenario to the first scene and began to read.

  “WITCHES discovered in cave. WITCHES stir pot, perform curse. MC, AR enter stage left and react. OH tells MC his fate, then tells AR his...”

  “What’s that mean?” Omer Heurtemance asked. André explained it to him. The witch scratched at his beard and made an objection to the form of the curse. Ruthie, holding a clipboard, came forward to negotiate with him. André took another look at the Second Witch, surreptitiously, out of the corner of his eye.

  Krauss’ assistant cranked the Rolls’ starter. The lights flickered, crackled, and came on. Immediately, under the lights, with the breeze cut off by the canvas diffuser, the already sultry afternoon turned stovelike, and the fug under the lights took on the sharp cheesy odor of unwashed old man.

  “All right, Mabet,” André said. “Méduc, behind him.” André walked into the camera-field and stood as far as possible from the Second Witch.

  “... Three, two, one ... On tourne!” Krauss began cranking. “Iris out!” The First Witch spread his arms and gestured widely over the pot. The Second Witch stirred it. André skulked around the edges of the scene, grinning like Fate, staying well away from the Second Witch. Mabet strode in from the left and reacted magnificently, drawing his sword. Méduc half-drew his. Heurtemance waggled his beard and pointed, giving Mabet his doom: he would reign like a king. But not his sons—he pointed at Méduc—Méduc’s children will rule here, but not yours. Mabet and Méduc looked at each other in confusion. André raised his arms; his skull-face tilted back in a fleshless laugh.

  “Stop and hold it.” Krauss stopped the camera. Mabet and Méduc held it, living statues. An assistant put the pot on a wheelbarrow and pushed it bumping out of the scene; Sabine, Heurtemance, and André followed. A second assistant brushed the wheel-marks out of the grass. Boomer O’Connelly, the armorer, carefully set a flash-match on the ground. O’Connelly struck a match on his thumbnail and lit the flash fuse; Krauss cranked his camera; the flash went off, and Mabet and Méduc jumped back, astonished. The witches were gone.

  “Cut.”

  Sabine wrapped her kimono protectively around her. Cyron smiled at her, patted her hand, told her she’d done very well. She gathered the kimono over her stomach; it was only her concealing it that showed there was anything to conceal.

  André paled and said nothing. Just “Again.”

  “In a minute,” Cyron said, gesturing at his most magnificent, “when your wife is feeling restored.” He couldn’t wait any longer to boast. “After all, André, we must think of Sabine’s child!”

  André went absolutely white and still for a moment, and then— It was as if something enormous and black and from another dimension had manifested itself on the set. André watched while the object appeared, and grew larger, filling his world, slicing through what André called reality. André’s shoulders squared, shuddering; he shook himself, like a rabbit that has seen an auto in the distance, a rabbit to be sacrificed; and then he was the theatre director again. But for a moment, the man who had been on the film set had not been André du Monde, the horror in charge, but someone Reisden had seldom seen; someone anguished.

  We’ve reached him, Reisden thought.

  “Makeup,” the makeup man decreed. In the heat the actors’ faces were blurring; they submitted to being touched up and powdered. “Places,” Cyron said. “On tourne,” Kraus
said. “Iris out!” The First Witch spread his arms over the pot; one could see sweat stains under his arms. Mabet strode in, drawing his sword. The Second Witch stirred the cauldron, but— “André? Cut! Where’s André?”

  André had disappeared.

  "Please let's dig my parents up."

  WHEN REISDEN HAD BEEN a bad young man, Count Leo had taught him the golden rule of moral cowardice: When you say something no one wants to hear, say it in a restaurant. Wait until just after the first course.—The middle of shooting the first scene of a film will do quite as well.

  Cyron had made sure that André had listened to him.

  The lights were turned off, the generator turned off, leaving the scene suddenly windy and silent. The technicians cleared their throats and congratulated Sabine on her good news.

  “I’m going after André,” Reisden said.

  “Take off your makeup and costume,” Cyron said. Doing anything else would signal André that they were concerned.

  By now it was the end of the light anyway; the shadows were lengthening over Montfort. Most of the cast and crew were queueing up by the main entrance of the castle; meals would be served in the Great Hall, and the professionals knew not to be late. André wasn’t with them, of course; at Montfort, André didn’t eat. Reisden had had years of experience chatting up kitchen staff; he got bread and cheese and an unopened bottle of wine, for bait, and went looking.

  André wasn’t in the kitchen garden, beyond the Lion Gate, or in the walled garden with the roses and the old lavender. He wasn’t in the ruins of his father’s scientific greenhouse or in the drying room of the laundry. Over the fields, veils of rain drifted, pink in the evening light. The shadow of the abbey towers stretched across the hill, across the chalk road, into the fields. Reisden looked up and saw a candle flickering in the more ruined of the two towers.

  The top of the tower was half-overgrown with weeds and flowers. André was sitting on the cracked stone floor, barefoot, ankles crossed, staring at the candle. The breeze that always rose at night tugged at the candle flame.

  “She looks like Mama,” Andr£ said, turning frightened eyes toward him. “Mama was blonde.”

  Reisden said nothing.

  André said nothing.

  Reisden sat down, near André, in the shelter of the tower wall. The wind whispered around them, damp and chill. He pushed the bread and cheese over to André. André unpeeled the butcher-paper and examined the food with the air of someone who was not going to eat it. He was frighteningly thin; the candlelight picked out the joint at the corner of his jaw and a fold of skin by his mouth.

  “When I think about my own son,” Reisden said, “I think: not a life like mine. I want better for him.”

  André nodded. “I’m not having children.”

  Reisden said nothing, providing no resistance.

  “Elle faisait toujours le petit bec, tu sais,” André said suddenly. “Mama was picky, Papa said, picky about everything. It bothered her that her dresses were out of fashion. She didn’t like to hoe the garden or pick weeds. She would always wear gloves. I remember she had boxes of gloves, hundreds of pairs, every color, a pair of plaid gloves, red and green. She had gloves with frills and embroidery. She didn’t want to wear them. They were for when we went back to live in Paris.” André closed his eyes and leaned against the wall. “Papa had been a cavalry officer, that’s what we do. She had met him in Paris during the war. She thought he was rich because he had a title and a castle, and romantic because he had been wounded. One time, I remember, it must have been the worst of the winters after the war, we ran out of wood. Papa broke up a big old oak chair. She piled the pieces in the fireplace and burned them all at once, and she said that in Paris there were houses that were always warm and always light. And Papa shouted at her because she had burned all the chair at once and left none of it for later.”

  He opened his eyes and stared into the candle. The sun was gone; the wind had come up strongly. The candle flame ripped away from itself and the candle went out. In the darkness André’s voice was almost a child’s.

  “They were always fighting,” André said.

  He’s going to talk about it, Reisden thought wonderingly.

  “It was summer then,” André said. “The sickness came. Papa was a doctor, you know.” Suddenly he was Necrosar. “He wasn’t a doctor,” he said in Necrosar’s overprecise voice. “There simply needed to be a doctor; the Count pays for the village doctor; and he had no money so he was the doctor himself. He gave his patients tea, grass, whatever he had. The horses usually lived but the people died.” Necrosar paused, perhaps waiting for a laugh from the audience of the Necro, but Reisden held his breath, said nothing: and when he spoke again, miraculously André was back. “Papa meant very well,” he said with the insistence of a small child. “Papa did his best for everybody. There wasn’t anybody else. But Mama was afraid that he would bring the sickness back to us.”

  André stood up, blond hair and pale face visible in the crescent moon. “And he did. There were people in the village then,” he said, looking beyond the wall where blocks of darkness slumped: the ruins of tenant farmers’ houses. “But the sickness came. One day everyone was dead, or gone. Papa buried them in the graveyard, there.” He leaned against the crumbling wall of the tower, pointing downward. On the graveyard side of the tower, the walls had fallen away, leaving nothing but a crumbling edge of floor. Bits of mortar gritted under their feet. Reisden came up beside him, ready to grab André if he started to fall, or jump; looked over the edge, seeing stones and crosses in the iron-railed yard below the tower, the graveyard of the commune of Montfort.

  “Here he is, then,” said André. “He comes home. Papa.” Suddenly he was acting it out. He put his hand to his forehead, then his stom-ch. “‘My head aches. My belly aches.’” He turned his head to the other side; now he was looking back at himself, pressing his hands together, big-eyed like a terrified Necro ingenue. “Mama says, ‘I’m so afraid. It’s the fever. We’ll die, Henri. You’ve brought the sickness to us!’” He dropped his hands and pointed at the air, shouting in a deep, rough, pained voice. “‘Foolish woman! Bring me my medicine bag!’ And the mother doesn’t do it,” André said, “so the little boy has to. Papa is sick, very sick; he’s throwing up. ‘Aren’t you ashamed, Henri, to send your child where you think there’s danger!’”

  Reisden said nothing; he was André’s audience.

  “She sends the boy outside,” André said. “The boy goes into the graveyard. He sits down.” André sat down. “There are new graves in a row, six, seven, ten. Some are big ones but some are little.” André put out a hand to pat them. “There are no names and he wonders whose they are.—Can you imagine?” It was Necrosar again. “She sends him outside, where he’s safe. Except from his imagination,” Necrosar whispered. “The dark comes. The dark ought to protect him, but he can hear his father crying out from inside the castle. The father shouts—he shrieks—and the little boy sits in the dark, between two mounds of dirt, and wonders, who is dead? Is Papa dead?

  “He falls asleep, crying, and when he wakes up he doesn’t hear his father . It’s dark. Quiet. So quiet. And his mother comes out of the castle with a candle in her hand.” André smoothed his long blond hair back, tilted his head to one side, knelt, and picked up the unlit candle. He was calm suddenly, composed, half-smiling, the movements of his hands as delicate as though he were wearing frilled gloves. “‘Your father is asleep. Come with me. We’re going to sleep too, and then we’ll be safe forever.’”

  He led the way down the stairs, barefoot, holding the unlit candle high. Reisden followed, speechless. The steps were soft with dirt; grass grew in the cracks of the stones. They came out the door and crossed the moonlit grass toward the graveyard gate, and there André stopped. The chalk path into the churchyard intersected the path toward the main part of the castle. At the crossing, the paths had been widened and straightened, and an area had been cut out and filled with gravel or c
oncrete.

  In the faint moon the cross shone chalk white.

  “See?” said whatever spirit or role inhabited André’s body. “Here I am. They found me in my husband’s arms. I loved him, after all. But what a fate for a girl from Paris! Buried in the country! Right there, see, in the moonlight, X marks the spot. People walk over me. Consecrated ground would spit me out-- Walk on her to keep her down,” André said. “That’s what the people say.”

  Three hours by train from Paris, André’s mother had been buried at a crossroads to keep her unquiet spirit down.

  Some spell was broken; André moved away jerkily, holding up his moonlight candle, past the wooden crosses and rusted iron of the churchyard, through the ruined abbey door. Reisden followed, stumbling in the rubble. One of the side chapels, in better condition than the rest, had been re-roofed. Inside, rows of rush-seated church chairs faced the altar. The rear of the chapel was a stone wall, blank except for an iron door and inscriptions. André put his hand on a name.

  “It doesn’t happen in real life,” André said earnestly. “Only in the theatre.—I’m a very imaginative boy,” he added as if it were someone else’s words. André leaned his cheek and the flat of his hand against the stone with his father’s name.

  “Nothing happens like I think,” André said, “because I’m odd, like my mother. Odd. Like the flowers. Sweet peas; do you remember you told me about them? Red and pink. Red parents make pink children. But we don’t like to talk about it, because we can’t talk about how pink I am.”

  Reisden said nothing for a moment, because he couldn’t. Think of the ways parents desert their children. Fighting with each other, playing at doctor and farmer and mistreated wife; dying; leaving André to think that, whatever she had been, he was too, but we don’t talk about that; no; we encourage André to become a cavalry officer like his father and to marry and have children.

  “I never want to have children,” André said.

  He reached up above the door and, with Necrosar’s teeth-baring grin, offered a key to Reisden. “We keep the key above the door for visitors!” He laughed; above them, in the ruins of the abbey roof, bats shrieked and flew. And then he said earnestly, even politely, “Please let’s dig my parents up.”