A Citizen of the Country

by Sarah Smith

  “I’m taking bottles of water to Arras,” Ruthie said. “To every man who goes into the boves to search. I’ll ask them to leave bottles of water in the boves so that our men will find them. It’s water they need above everything.”

  “Yes,” Perdita said. It was absurd to take a cartful of water bottles all the way from Montfort to Arras, but now the men had been in the boves close to two days and would be desperately thirsty. She rolled up her sleeves and filled bottles with Montfort well water and corked them. They ran out of empty bottles and she pried out corks from unimportant bottles of wine and poured the wine down the sink. And only then when she was contemplating what a waste it was that the grapes should have grown and been pressed and barreled and fermented, and the wine bottled and left to grow ripe in Monsieur Cyron’s cellars for years upon years, and then poured away, did she think that Alexander might have been poured out and wasted too.

  A man can die of thirst in only three days.

  When she and Ruthie went to Arras she took all the money she had and went to the cheese shop. She bought all their stinky cheese, the Coeur d’Arras, and cut it in pieces and wrapped each piece in cheesecloth. “Put one with each bottle,” she told the men who were searching. And with the water and cheese she left candles, so that Alexander would have light.

  After the funeral, she sent Toby and Aline back to Paris. She and Ruthie moved out of Montfort and shared rooms in Arras. Every day they went to the film office on the Grand’Place and waited. The film office was being closed. They helped to pack up the photographs and the costumes. It gave them something to do. Ruthie was given the clothes Jules had left. No one picked up André’s, so Ruthie folded them up and took them too. “For when he comes back,” she said in a firm voice. Perdita was given Alexander’s clothing, his shirt and trousers. His penknife was in his trousers pocket. He had always kept it with him. She folded up his clothes; they smelled of him. His penknife she put in the pocket of her skirt. At night she put it on the nightstand and in the morning she put it in her pocket again.

  Three days. They passed that mark on Wednesday. “There must be water underground,” Perdita said.

  For a day she drank as little as possible, trying to convince herself that he could live without water too.

  Thursday. Friday. The searchers still persisted. Saturday. On Sunday, a week after the men had disappeared, Omer Heurtemance, the First Witch, brought some of his friends and made a special effort. The searchers were very kind to her and Ruthie. They were apologetic. But on Monday there were fewer searchers, and they were quiet, grim, not happy with going down into the boves. They had long ago searched the tunnels they knew.

  Uncle Gilbert and Mr. Daugherty both had wanted to come out from Paris. But Perdita put them off. She didn’t want them yet. She did not want to feel as if she must be taken care of.

  On Tuesday, Mademoiselle Huguette officially took over the shop that had been Mademoiselle Françoise’s and had the painters and the glaziers in. Ruthie and Perdita sat at a table in the Grand’Place, making their coffee last all morning.

  On Wednesday, for the first time, no one showed up to search.

  What day do you choose to stop hoping? What hour? Men had been lost in the boves for a week and survived. But they had had water with them. Ruthie and Perdita waited in a parenthesis of silence, but on the eleventh day it ended. Alexander’s secretary, Madame Herschner, wrote from Paris asking whether she should begin to refer business questions to Madame Reisden. Urgent questions needed resolving.

  “I’ll come back,” she told Ruthie. She wanted nothing more than to sit at the cafe within sight of the place where he had disappeared.

  She could not bear the last moment at the station. The train jerked and started and it felt as though she were leaving Alexander, as if her staying there could bring him. Hope is a terrible form of mourning. She closed her eyes and the train picked up speed and she went on, toward Paris, into a world without him.

  He had always done all the business of Jouvet. He had signed the checks; there was no one with the power to do it now. Madame Herschner explained to Perdita that there was very little left in the bank. In September Alexander would have signed General Pétiot’s very good new contract. But he hadn’t lived to do it.

  That was the first time she thought it, that first day in Paris. She went upstairs to the apartment, where Aline was playing with Toby, and she thought: He did not live to do it. It did not feel like death yet, only an absence, a perpetual and unexplained absence like his silence earlier this summer. She hung up his trousers and shirt in his part of the armoire—she would not let Aline hang them up, nor have them laundered—and when the shirt was on the hanger she pulled the fabric to her and breathed the smell, already growing fainter, the smell of the twenty-third of July, in which he was still alive. What shall I do, she thought. She wondered if she should wear black. Not yet. She got from her own closet another of the dark skirts and plain white blouses she had worn since that day. But it felt now as though she were refusing to admit what everyone knew.

  She washed her face and straightened her hair and went down-stairs. She sat in the office that had been Alexander’s and one by one she called the people of Jouvet in to talk to her. Madame Herschner, Alexander’s secretary. Each of the doctors. The technicians, from the head man on down. We do not know for certain what has happened, she said to each of them. But we must fend for ourselves in the meantime. Tell me what you are doing, how your part of Jouvet works, what you think we must do.

  Then she sat in his office alone except for memories of him and the terrible ache of his absence. She had thought she wanted to leave him. How sure she’d been of that.

  It would have been easier (she faced this truth) if the searchers had found the bodies. Now, in law, Alexander had just disappeared. He had no insurance, there would have been no money from that, but he had owned the company; no one could act for it except him.

  Exactly like what happened with Richard Knight, love. She could hear him say it, exasperated. How could I have done that? How could I have been so stupid? She agreed with him. After Richard had disappeared, no one had known whether he was alive or dead. Uncle Gilbert had insisted he was alive. It had been chaotic for years.

  Uncertainty is another way to hope.

  She finally let herself understand how she must behave. She couldn’t do it alone.

  “Now, Uncle Gilbert, I must see you.”

  She dressed in black for their meeting; for the first time, all in black. Alexander had always dressed in black, and she had a wordless sense of being close to him. They met in Alexander’s office. She put Uncle Gilbert in one of the leather chairs and she sat in the other. Elphinstone lay on the floor.

  “I’ve talked with Alexander’s lawyer,” she said. “He left Jouvet to me. The will isn’t in force yet, and it will be a long time before we can officially apply to have him declared,” she hesitated and said the word, “dead.” It was the first time for saying that word. “But in the meantime there are decisions to be made. We will need a loan.”

  “Of course,” Uncle Gilbert said. “It is not even my money, it is his.”

  “But I need more.” I need you, she thought. She could not put that weight on Uncle Gilbert, as if she were still five years old and had fallen and skinned her knee and asked him to fix it. But she had to. “General Pétiot wrote me and suggested there should be a committee to run Jouvet. If the judge agrees, that’s what will happen. I can’t be on it. Not until I’m thirty.” She spared a moment’s halfhearted indignation for French law toward women. “I’ve asked for Madame Herschner to represent me, but how could she speak against General Pétiot? I want someone who would know what Alexander would have done. Uncle Gilbert, I want you.”

  She felt his astonishment, his hesitation.

  “I’m asking everything of you,” she said. “It would mean living much of the time in Paris. I don’t know how I can ask it. But I need you.—Uncle Gilbert, it’s not only that you can speak
for him. You’re American. I’m still Austrian. That’s another thing I can’t change because we can’t prove he’s dead. I’m going to be Austrian for another seven years. Jouvet will be owned by an Austrian, when the war comes.” She held up her hands, warding off his concern for her. “I don’t only want you to stay. I want you to stay if there’s a war. America’s neutral so far. Both sides want the Americans on their side. So they’re treating the Americans very well. Be our American. Be wild and horrible and wave dollar bills in the air and go to the embassy and say you’ve loaned money to Jouvet and you mean Jouvet to be treated right, like an American company.” There was not a word from him, not a sound. They loved each other dearly, but she was asking him to change his whole life. “It’s only,” she said, “I can’t do it on my own; no one can do this but you.”

  “Yes,” Uncle Gilbert said.

  Just yes.

  Then she could cry. She put her elbows on her knees and her face in her hands and she cried, horrible retching tears that she tried to keep silent because outside the room people from Jouvet were probably listening. The tears ran down her face and out of her nose, ran through her fingers. Uncle Gilbert gave her his handkerchief, and it was like Alexander who had always had a clean handkerchief ready for anyone. He knelt beside her and put his arm around her and she cried on his shoulder. She cried until her nose hurt and her throat hurt and her stomach.

  “When Richard disappeared,” Uncle Gilbert said, “I missed him every day. Alexander—Richard— When the children went to the first day of their schools, I missed taking him, buying him notebooks and pencils. I missed reading to him every night. And when—Harry came—I read to him because I knew Richard would have liked it, and it was always, and Harry knew, that I was trying to find again something that had never been, trying to read to Richard.”

  “I enjoyed your reading to me,” she said. “He would have liked it. He read to me.”

  “Ah, my dear, you were different! You were yourself! I was cruel to Harry.”

  “At least he has Efnie.”

  “Oh, yes,” he said, and sighed. He was thinking of Harry, and might be thinking, too, of sitting on committees and confronting General Pétiot, who was cheery and kind but, Perdita had seen already, very, very interested in having his way with Jouvet.

  “I will not this time— I know what Richard wanted. Alexander. He would not want me to say he was alive. Not this time.”

  “I want to say something Alexander never did,” Perdita said. “He didn’t mistrust you more than anyone else. It was him quarreling with himself; he didn’t put much trust in anyone. Nothing was safe enough for Toby, no one could take enough care. He always wanted me older, and more capable, and not blind— Well. We’re what he’s got. What Toby has, and Jouvet, and we are going to be up to it.”

  “Of course, my dear,” Uncle Gilbert said softly. “Of course. I do not mean of course I shall be up to it, but—I shall be.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  She gave Uncle Gilbert dinner. They fed Toby in the dining room upstairs, with all the windows open because of the heat. She let Uncle Gilbert spoon Toby’s dinner into him. In the middle of dinner she put her fork down. “Toby,” she said. “Your father wanted to tell you something and he never did. He killed someone once. All his life he was sorry he did it and angry at himself, but he loved you so much, and he was such a good man. He wanted you to know he was that bad. I want you to know he was that good. You can be proud of your father.”

  Not that Toby would understand any of that.

  You are orphaned, dear Toby, she thought. We’ll do our best, Uncle Gilbert and you and I, baby, and we’ll be brave. But we won’t be what we were.

  She sent Uncle Gilbert home to his apartment and played with Toby, gently, because she was afraid of giving way again. She got him ready for bed and read to him; she was learning the French version of Braille by reading children’s books. When he fell asleep, she went to her own room, only her room now, and took off her clothes, got into her nightgown, and sat by the window on the window seat Alexander had had made. She went into the music room, touched the piano; went into his upstairs office, next to the music room, and felt the surface of his desk, still scattered with the notes he had been making, the books he had been reading; went back to the piano. She sat down at the piano and began to play, the long sobbing shivers of the Brahms she was learning, trying to make her grief teach her fingers gentleness. He was gone, he was gone. You didn’t die giving up on André; you tried to save him. Alexander was good to all his friends, she thought, to everyone at Jouvet, to Toby and me, and I did nothing but tell him that he’d failed in one thing, that he still had to deal with Uncle Gilbert, which he knew. And when I’d said that, I just kept on going, thinking where he might fail; I had no faith in him.

  She wanted him so much that it frightened her, so much that he must be there. She wanted to be able to tell him she had thought he was so good she had wanted him perfect, and what a burden that had been on Alexander, who wanted himself perfect. Oh, my dear, my dear, you were far from perfect and so was I, and neither of us had any faith in you. Let us talk now. Let me just tell you I love you; then let us go from there. Let us have the rest of our lives to talk, and listen, and love each other.

  She thought she was going mad, she wanted him so. Alexander, she whispered, Alexander, and she held out her hands to the empty air as if she could draw him to her. She knew all the time she was deceiving herself. But she wanted him so.

  In the boves

  THEY DISTRUSTED TUNNELS THAT felt too easy; those were the ones that slanted down. They turned their faces in the darkness, trying to feel a breath of moving air. André led them toward the northeast. “I know these tunnels,” he said. “I used to come down here and explore.” They found a wide tunnel, but it petered out; then smaller tunnels, mine workings, curving and branching off in all directions. At first, whenever the tunnel forked, they carefully explored each alternative, but there were too many, and after a while they conserved energy and simply chose the one that went northeast, or the one that felt a little more difficult and would not lead them further into the earth.

  The most promising ended in a crumbling downward slope into black water. From the ceiling, water dripped onto the tunnel floor. “We must be underneath the Scarpe”—the river at the north of town. They drank some water—they were already thirsty—but they had brought nothing to take the water away with them, and the place was too dangerous to stay.

  They retraced their steps to what André said was the last branch they had taken. None of the other branches led in the right direction.

  So they retraced farther, back down the tunnel André said they had come from. But now that path seemed suspiciously easy, as if it were going downward. André muttered to himself unintelligibly. Beyond the lantern light, the darkness was absolute, like a missing sense.

  The circle of light dimmed and grew yellow. The wick began to spark. Reisden lit the first of the candles from the last of the flame. They left the lantern because it was heavy, using it to mark a tunnel.

  They had ten candle-ends, then eight, then six. Reisden held the bits of candle. They lit mostly his palm and fingers. “Hold it up,” said André, “I can’t see.” The hot wax burned his skin and he dropped one inch-long stub that they never found again. He drilled a hole in the side of one of the candles with a match and held the candle by the match-end. When the candle was almost burned out, it softened and fell off the match-end, and that was another one gone.

  They had four candles and eighteen matches.

  To save the light, they did something that turned out to be wrong. The tunnels were narrow; in this area of the boves, wherever they were, the passages went on for some distance without branching or turning. It made sense that they should conserve the rest of the candles and go on in the dark. They found their way by touching the walls. They groped; they stumbled over rubble. They found new tunnels by the difference in the smell of the air, or by a sud
den disorientation when they reached out and could find no wall. Then they would strike a match and look at the compass to see which way they should go.

  They had three candles and ten matches.

  In a damp place, thirst is insidious. When they lit matches, water made a sheen on the walls; André ran his hand across the chalk and sucked at his dirty fingers. Reisden thought about drinking a glass of water: the cold mineral taste of it, filling his mouth with it, swallowing. He wondered if, by breathing deeply, he could get enough moisture from the air.

  Above them, it would be a hot July night. Here the air had the chill of an icehouse. They were all shivering and Jules’ clothes were wet with Sabine’s blood. Jules, dehydrated, staggered along, supporting himself with a hand against the wall. Reisden tried to help him but the tunnel was too narrow.

  They found a branch tunnel and lit a match. One branch turned north, the other east. North, Reisden indicated, pointing down the tunnel.

  The northern tunnel was blocked by old flinty rubble fifty meters on.

  The eastern tunnel led to air.

  They smelled it from far away, a fresh breeze. Faintly, on the breeze, they could hear crickets. And they could smell hay, freshly cut.

  Which meant hayers. People. Rescue.

  They lit a candle to show them the direction. The flame tugged eastward. It jumped up suddenly, and Reisden held it high and saw in the ceiling a square black hole, a shaft for hauling up cut blocks of stone. It was as beautiful as the sun. A huge hand-forged pulley lay on the floor by the shaft wall. There might be ropes or a ladder in the shaft itself.

  Reisden took out his pocket watch and held it near the candle. Midnight. Two and a half hours since they had gone into the boves. Only that long? They had used up half their lights.

  “In the morning we can see.”

  They lay against each other to try to get warm. André took first watch. Reisden fell into a half-doze. He was sitting in the kitchen in Paris explaining to Perdita how they had climbed out of the mine shaft. She had made him tea with milk and sugar, comfort food. She was wearing Gilbert’s necklace. Toby pulled himself up by his father’s trouser leg. Reisden was exactly where he wanted to be, among his family.