A Citizen of the Country

by Sarah Smith

  “Cut,” finally, the cameraman said. “I got it.”

  “Good.” He couldn’t have done it again.

  They took close-ups. A farmer stopped and stood by silently, out of shot, staring at the waste of hay.

  He drove the cameraman and the actor back but afterward simply parked his car by the New Buildings and, without taking off his makeup or removing his costume, went to see his boy. Toby was playing with Aline and looked up in delighted consternation at his father, yellow-faced and in strange clothes: How did you get that way, Papa? Reisden was filthy with sweat and chaff and field dust; he swung Toby up, hugging him. Toby picked hay off his face.

  I have a child, Reisden thought, I have a child and he has a father, and nothing is wrong. We can build something on that. I can give what I did not have.

  He held Toby until the sick hollowness in his chest eased. Toby was wriggling to get down. “All right, love.” He left Toby with booty, a goose feather that had got in his hair from the field. He hoped he hadn’t done the whole scene with it plastered to his face.

  “Alexander?” Perdita said.

  “We did ‘He has no children,’” he explained.

  She opened her arms to him and held him. He held on to her, suddenly breathless with grief. “I’m sorry,” he said. “For speaking to you that way about Gilbert. I had to send him away, but— I’m sorry.”

  “You shouldn’t send him away,” she said, but she held him.

  He took convulsive breaths. “Don’t leave me, love. I never want to feel like this.”

  There was a knock at the door. “Are you in there, Reisden? I need you. There’s trouble.”

  Katzmann.

  Cyron chooses Sabine

  “I THOUGHT HE WAS doing better,” Katzmann said. “He was talking about his parents. Then he talked to that Ruthie woman and he accused his wife of murder, poisoning, said he was going to kill her. And now Cyron wants to have him locked up.”

  “What exactly did he say?”

  “Cyron said ‘She’s afraid of you, you’re going to kill her,’ and he said ‘Why not?’”

  “Cyron was leading him.”

  “No one will believe that. André threatened her, Cyron says André’s crazy, she’s eighteen and he’s Necrosar, that they’ll believe. And if he’s dangerous and making threats and a family member’s asked for assessment, he’s got to be assessed. Reisden, it’s the law.”

  “Do you think André was serious?”

  Katzmann puffed on his cigar furiously. “No, he wasn’t serious, he’s all theater. But Cyron? He’s serious. He wants to put that poor man in an asylum for the criminally insane—”

  “No.”

  “The talking cure would help him!” Katzmann said; tears were standing in his eyes.

  ***

  André has been expecting Reisden and here he comes. He is still wearing his costume and makeup, sweat marks and all. He looks exhausted.

  “The scene?” André says, most important first. “Did you get ‘He has no children’?”

  Reisden nods.

  “Was it good?”

  “What did Ruthie say to you?” Reisden said.

  “Sabine poisoned Mademoiselle Auclart! With the rabbit. She poisoned Blantire too.” He explains. Ruthie, the Auclart farm, witches’ grimoires, flying ointment. “I knew what she was, I knew it from the beginning, I am not mad, Reisden. She poisoned them both.”

  “André—”

  André digs the button out of his trousers pocket. “Look, look, look.” He turns it and makes it glitter. “Rows of pink eyes. Rabbit eyes. On her dress,” André says patiently. “She went down in the cellars with Blantire; she poisoned him and locked him in. The Auclart woman found out.” André waves his left hand, filling in the blanks with whatever motive Reisden likes. Motives are Reisden’s business. “And so Sabine poisoned her, too.—You know. You saw.”

  “Sabine did not poison anyone.” The ruins of Reisden’s makeup make his face into a brown-yellow mask patched with dust, black around the eyes. A clay man, half-finished, a golem.

  “You saw the buttons,” André insists. “You were there. In the Grand’Place. She was wearing a dress with these buttons. She introduced us to the Auclart woman. ‘This is Mademoiselle Françoise.’” He imitates her breathy nasal voice. “‘I’ve just given her a poisoned rabbit.’”

  Reisden remembers the button. André sees.

  “Françoise Auclart was Blantire’s lover,” Reisden says. “He wrote a note to her in one of his books. They apparently used flying ointment as an aphrodisiac. I do remember Sabine had a dress with those buttons, but it smelled new when we saw her, and Blantire was dead long before that. Where did you get the button?”

  “Ruthie found it by the Holy Well. It’s Sabine’s. You remember it.” Reisden says nothing. “You are going to help me, Reisden?” André says. “Aren’t you? You remember this? It came from the Holy Well, Reisden! Right by Blantire’s body! From where he died!”

  “You’re sure.”

  “This button,” André says, but he has to add the rest. “A button exactly like it. The first one went down the plumbing.”

  “André,” Reisden says, and oh, André knows the tone.

  “You know it is the same,” André says. “You saw. You were there with me. She was wearing the dress with these buttons. You saw. You tell Papa Cyron. She has to be arrested.”

  He takes Reisden’s hand and drops the button into it. Reisden looks at it and up at him. It might be the makeup. But there is something hard about his face, something closed-in, self-protective.

  “André. Cyron wants to put you in an asylum.”

  “This time I’m not making it up,” André says. “This is real. I know I’ve said things about my parents, I was wrong, but I’m all right now, I know what I’m saying now. My wife is a witch and she has been poisoning people.”

  “André.”

  André, André thinks.

  “Ruthie hallucinated everything,” Reisden says. “She said so. There’s nothing to this. You’re acting mad.”

  “So reasonable, Reisden.” For a moment André can summon Necrosar. It is a relief; Necrosar can help him deal with the creeping terror that is invading him. It can’t be that Reisden won’t stand by him. Reisden has always stood by him.

  There is a crashing from outside. “I’ve been looking for you,” Papa Cyron roars, slamming the big oak door open. “What’ve you been saying about Binny?”

  A great hopelessness comes over André as if he will be made to go back into the cavalry. “Listen to me,” he says, but now Reisden and Cyron are talking to each other.

  “You’ve heard what he’s saying?”

  “I’ve heard.”

  “I’ve had enough!”

  “She’s a murderess,” André says.

  “Be quiet, André,” Reisden says.

  Papa Cyron points his finger at Reisden. “Don’t make excuses for him anymore. Don’t say you’ve cured him. He threatened her. He said he would kill her, don’t you understand?”

  “I never said my mother was a witch,” André says.

  “I want him locked up,” Papa Cyron says. “Bring me the papers. I’ll sign them. I want him locked up now.”

  There is a terrible silence, and instead of Reisden saying what he should, he says, “Cyron. Think what you’re doing.”

  “He is a danger to others. She’s ready to run away, she’s so frightened. He should be locked up.”

  André looks at them, not quite believing what he’s hearing. “Papa Cyron,” he says. “Reisden.”

  Papa Cyron turns on him.

  “What do you want? I’ve done my best for you. I found you a wife who’d have you, and it wasn’t easy. You’ve spoiled that, boy. You’ve spoiled everything. I—” Suddenly Papa Cyron is helpless, a magician who has tried to transform a stone into a dove, but the stone won’t fly. “I don’t have anything left for you, André. It’s gone. You made me choose between you and her.” Papa Cyron
looks at him, from far away. André reaches out his hand. Papa Cyron pulls back. “I choose her,” he says. “Her and the child. Reisden, I want him evaluated for insanity. He needs to be where he won’t harm anyone.” He turns his back and walks away.

  For all André’s life they have been a family. He cannot imagine this betrayal. He looks over at his friend, Reisden, who is suddenly in charge of his future. Reisden is pale under his yellow makeup. He is still holding the button in one clenched hand. Suddenly it’s very quiet.

  “Hamlet, are you going to say I’m insane?”

  “André,” Reisden says, pleading with him. Always with him. Be well. Be perfect. Be happy. André.

  “Are you going to put me in an asylum?”

  “I have to have someone look at you,” Reisden says tiredly. “He asked. It’s the law.”

  “Look in your hand.”

  Reisden throws the button on the floor angrily.

  “You want to fix me,” André says. “Make me well. But I’m not sick. She kills people.”

  “Stop it.”

  André sees it all, all the betrayal. “I get in your way. The way of your precious Jouvet, your family, your baby. You can’t fix me and you need to fix all the crazies. Oh, Hamlet, you don’t like to worry, you don’t like to be frightened, and you don’t want Papa Cyron against you; how will you help me?”

  “André, listen to me.”

  “When you put me in the asylum, what will you do to resign yourself? Give me a puppet theatre to play with? Stage blood and detachable heads? Will you come to see the plays? Don’t do this.”

  “Then stop all this,” Reisden says. “This is a story. It’s Necro.”

  “What about Ruthie?” André says. “Ruthie won’t betray me.”

  “Stop it! Stop it!”

  The show must go on

  REISDEN WENT TO SEE Ruthie just as he was, dirty and in his makeup, and found her in the Great Hall, being shouted at by Cyron. Ruthie was in tears. She thought she had seen— she thought she had read—

  “I want him in an asylum,” Cyron said.

  “I must have him formally evaluated,” Reisden said to Ruthie.

  “He described the books,” Ruthie said, “the ointment, just the way I remembered them.”

  “You were drugged,” Reisden said. “From touching the plants.”

  “I know he wouldn’t hurt her—”

  “He threatened her in front of a hundred people!” Cyron said. “‘She’s going to die.’ He said Sabine poisoned you. Lock him up in a good place,” Cyron said to Reisden. “But if it has to be a bad place, it has to be. I don’t want her dead.”

  “He doesn’t mean anything by it!” Ruthie said to Cyron. “He doesn’t! Dr. Reisden, you know. Tell him that Count André never means harm.”

  Reisden would remember that moment the rest of his life, and never decide whether he had been bought or he simply didn’t know. He remembered André as Necrosar hissing “I’m harmlesss” and André at the café in the Grand’Place, plotting out the guillotine scene and talking about killing his wife.

  “Not even André knows what he’ll do,” he said.

  “You see?” Cyron said.

  Ruthie held her handkerchief over her face and wept openly.

  “How soon can you do it?” Cyron said.

  “That depends on whether André goes willingly. I think he won’t. He doesn’t think he’s insane.”

  “I’m not insane!” And here came André, out of the office, waving something between his fingers: the button. “Only a little. Not that way. She’s—”

  “I’ll have you arrested for threatening her,” Cyron said.

  “You don’t want him in a prison for the criminally insane, Cyron,” Reisden said.

  “I don’t want her dead!” Cyron exploded.

  “She’s a murderer!”

  “Shut up!” Reisden yelled at him.

  André held up his button. “She is! And I’m not going to go to Dr. Wardrell’s Asylum like a good quiet sacrificial piggy. Hamlet won’t help, so I’ll help myself. I’ll prove she’s a murderer and I’ll delay, I’ll act as sane as you are.” He drew himself up into a parody of the sane, sad man he had been on Bastille Day. “’I am the Count of Montfort,’” he said, utterly calm. “’Why do you think my mind is disordered?’” He switched into full Necrosar. “And I’ll prove she’s a murderer. The play’s the thing, Hamlet, I’ll show her for what she is, I’ll put it on screen! Papa Cyron,” he whispered sweetly, “you do want me to finish the film, don’t you?”

  No one said anything.

  Cyron licked his lips. “Will he finish the film?” Cyron asked Reisden.

  “Good G-d in Heaven! You’re putting him in an asylum,” Reisden said, “but you want him to finish the film first?”

  “Of course I have to finish the film,” André said.

  “Don’t talk to me, boy. This is harder on me than it is on you.”

  André leaned forward. “It won’t be as good without me, will it? Ask him,” he nodded at Reisden. “Ask him what I did with ‘He has no children.’ I won’t give you my notes.”

  Everyone looked at Reisden.

  “The battle scene,” André said. “I want to do it. Your fight with Hamlet. Your speech.”

  Cyron cleared his throat. “The guillotining scene?”

  André waved his hand. “Use an extra, put a wig on her. I won’t kill her,” he said solemnly, spoiling it by grinning like Necrosar. “I promise. No blood, just her guilt, spilling all over the screen.”

  “Cancel the film,” Reisden said.

  Cyron and André both turned on him. ”No.”

  Andre stages a war

  THEY COMPROMISED. ANDRÉ WOULD be allowed to continue the film. He would be watched constantly. After Sunday, after the guillotine scene, André would go to a private asylum while he underwent a thorough evaluation.

  The soldiers gathered early the next morning for the start of the battle scene. The air was full of banners. The soldiers from the Citadel put on their new costumes, laughing, their buttons glittering, their colors bright. The soldiers ran up the hill, shouting and charging and falling. Smoke obscured the battlefield. The hot sun beat down on them. Men fell at the sound of the trumpet. Eli Krauss filmed them from above the Jerusalem Gate, from the slope by the stonehenges, in the fields where the soldiers swept forward and beat down the hay. He filmed them from Reisden’s car, moving along the Arras road with them as they charged. The soldiers bivouacked in the fields that night, enthusiastic for more war the next morning.

  By the next morning André had changed everything.

  The soldiers found new makeup numbers with their uniforms. When they lined up at the makeup stations, they were given wounds. Bloody stumps for hands. Bloated faces. Blood-soaked uniforms. André marched them down to the fields past Montfort commune. When they joked, he told them to be quiet, because they were dead.

  André filmed the dead for two days.

  They lay in piles in the hot sun, among the ruined fields. They lay where they had fallen, tangled in hedges or facedown among the wheat and beets. The sugary blood drew the birds, which pecked at their hands and faces. “Stay still,” André said. He filmed the wounds, the blood, the birds. He filmed the sky through the ruins of the commune roofs. He set a track through the field and moved the camera along it; he set the camera on Reisden’s car and had it driven along the road filming nothing. Motionlessness, silence, bodies, broken hay: not just the one field Reisden had cut, but hayfields ruined all up and down the Arras road.

  A very few soldiers he kept alive. He had them drag bodies from the field, one by one, until the living soldiers dropped in exhaustion.

  The script called for Mabet and Méduc to have a sword fight as the culmination of the battle. But there was no battle and there was no sword fight. André filmed them in a few minutes of unchoreographed fighting, clumsy and unshowy, until Cyron tripped and Reisden pointed his sword at Cyron’s sprawled body.

&nbs
p; “What are you doing?” Pétiot said to André. “My boys came here to fight.”

  “You’re not using that piece of film?” Cyron said. “I stumbled. He didn’t win. I stumbled. Don’t even develop that piece.”

  “It’s not about fighting and winning,” André said. “We’ve all come here to die.”

  Katzmann followed André through the hot days of filming dead men in the fields. On Thursday afternoon he spoke for a long time to Cyron. On Thursday evening Reisden drove him back to Arras, and they sat on a bench in the park in front of the station, at the edge of the electric lights, waiting for the train.

  “André’s crazy but he’s not homicidal,” Katzmann said. “I think. Under ordinary circumstances— But he threatened her, and she has money, and Cyron doesn’t want to let the money go.”

  Reisden thought of Cyron and Sabine dancing. Cyron didn’t want to let Sabine go. “We’re letting ourselves be used.”

  Katzmann pulled the papers out of his jacket pocket and scribbled in the portion of the form marked Reason for committal, then signed them. Reisden tilted the paper toward the light and read it. Believes his wife is a poisoner and has threatened her life.

  “He’ll be in a good place,” Katzmann said. “We won’t stop fighting for him.”

  Reisden went back to Montfort. Cyron was in his office, not working or reading scripts; playing solitaire with the dogged late-night persistence of a man who would rather put the black eight on the red nine than think about what he is doing. All the cards were up but Cyron couldn’t find one to move. Reisden dropped the order of committal on his desk. Cyron stuck his chin out and inscribed his signature on the line for Next of Kin.