by Sarah Smith
Necrosar enters from right, wearing his coat and his gloves.
Cut back to full shot of family eating. Farmer enters from left, distraught, carrying a sick child. Countess shrinks away. She is afraid of the sickness. Count examines sick child on table, takes shabby medical bag from cupboard.
Count gestures to little André to come with him, while Necrosar takes out of the bag and holds up for the audience a syringe so large it is obviously meant for a horse or cow.
Countess, hysterically: Villain! How can you expose your child to such horrors?
Count: There is nothing to be frightened of. . . . André must not be afraid of death.
Necrosar, still clowning with the syringe: There’s nothing to be frightened of, is there? It’s death. It’s only a joke, André.
It’s a play, a film, a joke. Not a memory.
André takes particular care over the next shot, a complex track-and-pan in the village outside the walls of Montfort. The village street is deserted. The camera pans over the street, tracks forward to the brick wall and wide doors of a particular farm, and continues tracking into a courtyard. It pans around the walled farm to the stables where the cows are lowing, waiting to be milked. No smoke drifts from the farmhouse chimney. The farmhouse door stands open.
Inside the farmhouse, full shots of a farm family lying on their stained pallets in the main room. An old man lies sobbing for someone to help him, someone to change his soiled clothes, to give him a drink of water; then he vomits yellow bile onto his pillow. An old woman has been dragged into a corner. Her mouth has fallen open and a fly sits like a black-and-green teardrop at the corner of her half-open eye. The fly rubs its head with its front legs. And there is a boy lying on the bed, in close-up, his eyes sunken so that the insides of the eyelids are visible, his face like a wax mannequin’s left too long in the sun; all the color is bleached out of it. His tongue looks yellow and dusty and the end of his nose has drooped a little to one side.
Nothing moves in the frame. Does the boy look too much like a mannequin? A fly enters the frame left, alights at the edge of the boy’s mouth where there is something like a bit of brown soup. The fly crawls into the mouth.
Ah, says Necrosar, squatting down by little André, that will make them believe. Won’t it, André?
(Reisden, his audience, looks pale. Poor Hamlet. You can’t bear it. Was that why you tried to commit suicide, because you couldn’t bear it? You should have had the Necro.)
Full shot of little André among the dead people. Necrosar takes him around the back of the set, shows him how the gaslight is turned down and the filters are changed to make twilight, Necrosar adjusts the lights. It is twilight. The old man is dying. The others are already dead.
But it’s only a play.
Count, sitting by the dying old man, to André: Never leave a deathbed. Your people need you. Remember you are a Montfort. You aren’t frightened, are you?
Necrosar: No need to be frightened, André. It’s not real. And I’m here.
The film breaks for a moment, and André becomes conscious momentarily of himself, hungry, his wrists raw.
“What did André feel?” Hamlet asks.
André, feel? Hamlet doesn’t understand. André doesn’t feel. André only watches with his friend Necrosar.
If it were not for Necrosar, André would be afraid like Mama. It is only Necrosar who comforts him. Death sneaks in everywhere; in childbirth; in a mine explosion, where the bodies are black and red; with the cholera victims. If all this were real, the broken bones, the red intestines, the blood, the smell, above all the smell... but Necrosar shows him the lights and the stage sets behind.
Then something happens. One day, at a cholera victim’s house, Papa drinks water.
Papa is sick.
And the film breaks again. André is ravenous, tired; his arms are on fire from being tied behind him. “Let me go,” he says. “Untie me.”
“Tell me the rest,” Reisden says.
“I don’t remember.”
He does. Papa is drinking water from the pond in the village; his tongue is dry and cleaves to the roof of his mouth.
“‘I’m thirsty,’” André says. “‘There’s no beer, no cider. Give me water from the pond.’ That’s what Papa said.” Papa has forgotten that no one is supposed to drink from the pond.
André is thirsty himself.
Papa is sick.
André doesn’t want to see this. (Stop the film, Necrosar. But it won’t stop.) Close-up, Mama, with a wet towel in her hand, hesitating, wearing her plaid gloves, still afraid of touching a cholera victim. Close-up, Papa, his eyes sunken.
Mama says, Go outside.
Papa opens his eyes. Be a man, André. Don’t leave.
Go, Mama says.
André wants to leave, but he doesn’t know which of them to obey.
Mama takes a bottle from Papa’s medical bag. She stares at little André as she pours out a dose. Her hands shake; the medicine spirals and drips from the spoon in thick strings like witch’s hair.
Papa’s eyes are open; he watches André. She pours him one dose, slides it into his lax mouth; then she pours another.
Mama loves you, she says. Go outside. Please go.
Mama’s hands shake, her breath is hot and sour, he can smell her perspiration as she hugs him. Behind Mama’s elbow he can see Papa’s eyes, fixed, watching him.
He doesn’t see you, Mama says. Go outside.
Her eyes are wide, frightened. The bottle is half-empty; she picks it up again, and pours again, staining her gloves.
And he goes outside. He is not a man. He has run away. It is getting dark; at the foot of Montfort hill, shadows chase light across the fields. He sways back and forth; he makes little sounds in his throat. Papa wanted him to stay; Mama wanted him to go.
Finally there is nothing left of the light but deep blue at the top of the sky, and then that darkens too. There is no moon. An owl shrieks, and from inside the Vex-Fort Papa begins to cry out. André makes the sound himself. He has practiced this sound for years in secret, because he knows one day he will need to frighten someone terribly, and he makes it now, the raucous monotonous shriek of a man in agony.
Papa is not dead. Papa knows André has deserted him.
He stumbles away from the noise, toward the abbey towers, through the Lazarus Gate. In the churchyard he huddles against the side of one of the new mounds. The soil smells sharp and clayey. He thinks of the dead boy’s brown mouth and the boy’s lips fallen away from his teeth.
Where is Necrosar? Who will tell him that this is all a play? His mother is coming from the house, holding a candle. She is calling to him. It’s all right now, darling, come! Come inside! I don’t want to be in the dark alone.
She looks young and she is smiling. Her blonde hair is down, and a strand of it catches in the candle, flares and sizzles, but she doesn’t notice that it is burning.
Your father is asleep! Come inside, we’ll sleep, too, and we’ll be together, safe! Forever!
She looks around; she can see no farther than the circle of light around her candle.
Where are you, my darling? Come to Mama!
She waits for him. Then, all alone in the courtyard, she begins to cry. Because she knows she is deserted; because she is angry at him for not coming when she needs him so much; because she is alone in the dark, and afraid, and has no Necrosar.
She drops the candle onto the stones; she sobs, and sobs, and André cries with her, but silently, pressing his face into the clayey soil so that she won’t find him and take him back to the house with her. He digs his thumbs into his ears so he won’t hear her, so she will not take him back into the house where they will sleep forever.
My darling! Where are you? Don’t leave me alone!
A long time after she has gone, he unblocks his ears. He listens for her as if he believes she could still be there. Then, from the house, she begins to scream like Papa; and he shrieks too, sobbing, dashing his head from side
to side because his arms are tied behind him, he has no hands to wipe his eyes, no thumbs to put in his ears to press away the screams; he bangs his head against the bedpost.
Oh, Mama, Mama! Oh, Papa!
And he screams and cries forever. He screams all the time they think he is silent. When the man comes to buy Papa’s and Mama’s house, he cries; and when the man tells him stories, he cries while he listens; and when he goes to live with the man and calls him, punctiliously, Papa Cyron, not Papa, and when he goes to school and when he becomes a man, in the cavalry, on the parade ground. The only way to stop it is to tell stories, dreadful stories, and to be with Necrosar, to be Necrosar.
Then it’s safe. Then he can stop for a while.
But Necrosar is gone. “There is no Necrosar,” André cries out. He makes the dreadful sound again, he bangs his head against the bedpost; there is no Necrosar, there is no Mama, there is no Papa, they are all dead.
There is only André.
André sags against the bedpost. The inside of his arm chafes against an edge of an angel’s wing. Reisden is still watching him. Jou-Jou-Jouvet. Reisden, who thought he could be as helpful as Necrosar. Poor Hamlet.
“Let me go,” André says in a whisper, “untie me; I won’t do anything. I have to piss.”
Reisden unties him.
He moans while the blood comes back into his arms. Then he uses the chamber pot behind the screen, puts the lid on the pot, sits on the floor like a puppet without strings.
“André?” Reisden says.
“I’m hungry.”
Reisden takes him downstairs. Jules and Ruthie are there.
“Jules,” he says. “Ruthie.”
Saying their names reminds him that he is not truly alone, and this for some reason makes him cry again. He is good for nothing but crying. He is not a man. Ruthie brings him an egg and toast. He cries as he eats.
He is sitting where Papa and Mama and little André sat, at the table near the fireplace. He looks up into the shadows behind the banners.
“There,” he says, pointing with his swollen fingers. “The stairs were there, and that was their room. I came back, finally—I waited till the sun came. And they were dead. It was too late. I was supposed to stay, and I stayed then, but it was too late.”
He straightens up and brushes something like cobwebs away from his face. It is his own long hair. Necrosar’s hair. Not Necrosar’s. “I remember,” he says. “I remember before I was safe.” He remembers before Necrosar was here. He stands up, bracing himself for a moment by leaning on his knuckles on the table. There is a tray on the table, a silver-plated tray sent by some admirer of Papa Cyron’s. He turns it over and peers at himself in its rippling surface. But it is as if he has been drinking from a pool or a trough and then has tried to see a reflection. He can see Necrosar’s blond hair, Papa’s height, Mama’s pale blue eyes, but the ripples have to clear before he can see himself.
He remembers before Necrosar was. Now he feels as if he were newly born, or born long ago but only just conscious, some huge baby thing, grotesque, still with the egg-sac meat on him. He flaps his aching swollen wings and laughs and cries.
André unbricks a room
“HE REMEMBERED EVERYTHING,” KATZMANN’S voice said tinnily from Paris, “with all the feelings associated, just as it happened? Then I forgive you for waking me.”
It was dead night. André’s confession had taken far into the evening. Reisden saw himself reflected in the phone cabi-net glass, jaw rough with whiskers. He leaned against the wall phone. He was so tired the receiver felt too heavy to hold. “I never want to do that again.”
“Isn’t it wonderful when you see their minds changing?” Katzmann said. “You know, the betting at Jouvet is that you’ll be a psychiatrist someday.”
“Never. Come down and take him over. Please.”
“Coming by the first train this morning. Will there be fireworks at Montfort? And girls to dance with? I want a girl.”
What?
“It’s Bastille Day,” Katzmann said patiently. “Bastille Day. Fireworks. Dancing in the street. With girls.”
When Reisden hung up, he went into the lavabo to wash. The tap-handles spun uselessly: no pump, no water from the Holy Well. Oh fuck-- He went back out into the Great Hall, thinking of all the things he wanted and didn’t have: sleep, security for his family, a shave, a good relationship with Perdita, the secret of Montfort. Hot water. Any water. A bath. He slumped down into another of Sabine’s uncomfortable medieval thrones, propping his elbow on the arm and his chin on his hand.
Someone had taken the old banners down. They were spread on the table, old battle ensigns and flags, stained with cooking-smoke and mousy with dust. He was tired enough to think of sleeping on them. But, he knew, wherever he tried to sleep, even next to Perdita, he would simply end up staring at the ceiling. He looked at the wall where the flags had been. Behind their pale shadows he saw the shadow of the stairs and the sinister bricked-up door to André’s parents’ room.
André came through the door to the kitchen, followed by Jules, Ruthie, and two frowsty, sleepy techs dragging a long ladder. “Set it up there,” André said, pointing at the wall. He went out and came back with a pickax.
Ruthie looked at Reisden pleadingly.
“Let him do it.” There was no question of letting him do it; André swarmed up the ladder and attacked the bricks as though he were axing enemy skulls. Chalk bricks and parts of bricks smashed down on the floor around them, hitting the table and Sabine’s new chairs. The techs ducked; Ruthie pulled chairs out of the way. All of them moved the table.
Cyron arrived in a red bathrobe and Moorish slippers, his thin hair sticking in all directions. “What’s happening now?”
André turned around and saw him. “I didn’t poison anybody,” he said. “You don’t need to tie me up. I’m harmless. I don’t kill people. I didn’t kill them. I’m just a coward.” Another great smash.
Cyron looked up at him, scowling at coward.
“Just go away,” Reisden said to him. “Go.”
For a wonder, Cyron actually went.
The mortar gave way suddenly. An irregular chunk of chalk cracked out of the wall and crashed in pieces on the floor, starring everything with grit. The tech holding the ladder swore and patted at his clothes. André carefully began knocking the rest of the mortar-work back into the room. The hole was big enough; he scraped through it and disappeared.
The two techs looked at Reisden. “Get me a light,” he said. One of them brought an electric torch. He climbed the ladder too.
André was sitting on the floor, back against the wall, knees drawn up. Reisden slid through and sat down near him.
The torchlight showed cobwebs on a beamed ceiling, stone walls, a bricked-up window, an ancient pitted floor. The air smelled like stone.
“They’re not here," André said. Reisden shone the torch beam toward him, half-covering it with his fingers to dim the light. There were fresh tear tracks on André’s face, but he had stopped crying; he wiped his nose with his knuckles, a gesture part childish, part brutal. “I wanted to be frightened. It isn’t frightening,” André said, “just— Sad. I feel sad.”
His voice made echoes in the empty room.
André tried to do Necrosar: “I’m harmlessss,” he cackled, making a face. He bared his teeth. Above them, his eyes were the eyes of a caged ape, speechless and questioning. “Turn off your light.”
Reisden turned the light out. They sat together in the dark. André sniffled a bit. What Reisden heard, in the dark, was a child who had been frightened, had been crying, but was coming out of it. Sometimes, when Toby woke in the night, Reisden sat with him like this.
“I’ll go to bed,” André said finally.
André struggled back through the hole in the wall. Reisden got up to follow him but sat back down. Let Jules and Ruthie take care of André. He clicked on the light but found it distracting; he turned it back off and stared into the dark.
I am sad. André had never said those things simply; he had always been an actor in his own mental theatre, Necrosar, the horror in charge.
Do I frighten you, Reisden?
I’m frightened. I remember before I was safe.
He leaned against the wall, worn out, a little sick at heart from all that emotion. The old stone surrounded him, and the dark. He clicked on the light again, shining it around the empty room: fragments of a wall, broken out of the darkness by the light; nothing else. André was right; there was nothing frightening here. All the fright had been in André himself, and he had kept it with him for thirty-five years.
And now he had let it go.
Reisden turned the light off and closed his eyes, but now the uneasiness that lurked in the dark was here for him.
I must go to sleep, he thought. With my wife and my son. I must talk to Perdita. We must work out our quarrel over Gilbert. If André can face his parents, I can face down Gilbert.
I must let it go.
I must let Richard go.
I’m frightened.
But thinking that, with his face toward the light from the door, he fell completely asleep and woke up what seemed like hours later, sprawled on the stone. Someone had put a blanket over him; someone had left a lantern burning low so that he would not be in the dark.
Ruthie?
Perdita?
But whoever it was had gone. He was alone.
Pétiot makes an apology
IT WAS JUST BEFORE dawn. He descended the ladder stiffly, blundered into the washroom, swore at the pump again, and went into the kitchen. There was coffee. He got a cup and sat down at the kitchen table, a massive thing almost as old as the table in the Great Hall. Its surface was scarred into hillocks with knife cuts and butchering. He moved his index finger back and forth along a deep cut, tracing it.
“Reisden? I’ve been looking for you.”