Darkscapes

by Anne-Sylvie Salzman

  We cross the threshold. Boris goes down first, and I shut the door before joining him in the dark. ‘Turn on the light,’ comes his voice, suddenly mistrustful. The same bulb illuminates the same white walls, the same low door which Boris opens briskly, but there is nothing and no one in the further room, still whiter and more empty than the first.

  ‘There,’ I say. ‘Come.’

  Boris is seated on the edge of the bath, his hands on his knees. We are both stark naked, and Boris, holding with one hand his stiffening penis, caresses the skin of my arm and murmurs ‘Lamont, sweet Lamont, you are burning bright inside here.’

  ‘Your return is my happiness,’ he says, and tips up into the bath. Pressing down with all my weight on his shoulders, I strangle him, happy Boris, and I shall later make him pass, piece by piece, like the others, into that other country of which I am the frontier.

  IV

  WILDLIFE

  FERAL

  BY DAY the dull red front of the house is switched off; by night, in contrast, lit by a lamp on the pavement, it rears up high and devours the street, which in Kim’s time bore the name Avenue de la Neva. Two alleyways led off it at right angles to an empty plot along the track of the RER B. Travelling circuses of no great importance used to camp there. Once, perhaps, there had been a tiger that the clatter of passing trains drove into a frenzy. Otherwise, there were at best horses, and when they struck camp there lingered the smell of horse-dung and of wagons purveying pizza.

  Kim lived there until her twentieth year. She smoked her first cigarette in that derelict space one winter, when it snowed for more than a week. From the bridge over the motorway you could see the cars crawling slowly under a violet sky, white lights moving north and red moving south. Kim threw down over the railing without regret the stub of her second cigarette, which she hadn’t finished. The following evening, snow having brought the trains to a halt, she took back to the silence of the area two boys from her class, and as a new form of baptism drank a bottle of vodka with them, she swallowing the last of it at one gulp. With these boys and with others she used often, before she reached the age of eighteen, to slip under the barrier and go drinking on the slope that ran down to the motorway: in winter it was completely bare, in summer, like the country. Twice they were rewarded, so to speak, by the spectacle of an accident: once a car smashing into a lorry—that was terrifying—and later a pile-up in which some vehicles exploded.

  At about this time Kim acquired the habit of lying on her back and looking at the sky, not for its own sake but because there appeared before her retina the cells, floating in the vitreous humour, clear and gelatinous, of her eyeballs, and in following their movements she eventually saw the interior of her own eyes—or so, at least, she thought. In this way she passed insensate hours looking into herself, not only on the edge of the motorway, but also during her lessons and even in her room in the morning and at night, where the corpuscles became invisible.

  A little later, when she was a student, she followed an itinerary: over the motorway (the same one, though she no longer had time to go down there), then along beside the tracks of the RER, finally crossing the ring road by a footbridge that led over it into the park of the Cité Universitaire. From there she took the Metro—on some days she turned off in the vicinity of the footbridge or more rarely in the park. There were signs that encouraged her to abandon her journey, puddles of a particular shape on the paths that reflected, not the trees, but other forms it was better not to recognise, and menacing looks from statues. Kim, rather unenterprisingly, was studying biology at Jussieu, near the Jardin des Plantes.

  ‘Everything depends on monkeys,’ she said to herself, standing before Cambodia House, which was guarded by simian deities, their foreheads low, their legs spread out. ‘One day they will announce the end of time.’

  Time went on nevertheless, Kim pursuing her way towards Paris and returning in ill humour either by Gentilly—Rues Malon, Thélémine—or Champs Elysées.

  There came a night when, her parents being away, she left their house and sat down naked on the pavement, facing so as to see with a fresh eye the blood red façade. She went down towards the motorway using her old routes, and walked towards Paris without meeting a single car. Walking through the tunnel which passed beneath the park of the Cité Universitaire terrified her. The skin dissolved on her flesh. At the far side, she hastened to regain the streets, the open air. At the Avenue de la Neva a neighbour’s cockerel greeted her return. Her feet were bleeding and she slept for hours. After this expedition she never went again to the University. The sullen seriousness she had hitherto devoted to her studies was lost in the tunnel; or in the dance she executed on the footbridge when she was returning.

  To disguise her absenteeism, she adopted the well-tried device of continuing to leave home at her usual times. She soon discovered three different routes. At the bottom of the town a concrete cover sealed off the underground course of the Bièvre; you passed through a doorway, sometimes open, and walked alongside the river. Then, at Montsouris there was a fabulous ravine that crossed the park from east to west, the line of la Petite Ceinture, for many years disused. Finally, not far from the towers of Jussieu, there was the Alpine Garden of the Jardin des Plantes, to which again there was access by a tunnel.

  Oh, that first night, crouched beneath a tree at the furthest end of the small gorge that constitutes the Alpine garden! It must have been her third or fourth visit there. The weather was bad, and she was alone. She crept under the chain that shut off the end of the ravine. The whistle-blasts signifying the closure of the garden sounded out. She was not pursued, although at every stridulation her heart leaped with a sharp thump that sounded to her like a clicking tongue. Night came on; she dared to hold up her head and sniff the air. It smelt of large carnivores, or perhaps of kangaroos, whose enclosure was next to the Garden. Further off there was the chatter of night birds. She pissed in the bushes and ate a pain au chocolat that some urchin had thrown over the barrier. A half-moon rose, and she followed its movement avidly. On later nights she let herself be shut in other gardens.

  ‘I’m sleeping at a girlfriend’s house,’ she would tell her parents.

  She no longer had friends, however, something to which she did not give so much as a thought.

  ***

  ‘I’ll take the plunge in the spring,’ she said to herself one rainy evening which she spent in the streets, walking continually because the cold made her afraid to go to sleep.

  She went round the dustbins, she tried eating the remains of a sandwich, and was surprised that she experienced no disgust in partaking of the germs and saliva of a complete stranger. At about four in the morning she crossed the Seine by the big bridge, smooth and white, that links the Gare de Lyon and the Gare d’Austerlitz. The rain had turned to snow. She walked down the middle of the road, ruler of all she surveyed. It remained only to choose the place. She put the rest of the winter to good use in constructing a map. The principal entrance, she was sure, would be at Montsouris. Several times, eluding the watchmen, she went down into the gorge through which ran the tracks of the disused railway. She spent two nights there. On the second she went into the tunnel, although she didn’t have a torch. The darkness had tendrils. They clutched at her legs, her arms, her neck, they sucked her courage, they released her at the far end laughing, weakened, but apparently intact.

  She ran away in the last days of April. Her parents had just left for Argentina on a two weeks’ holiday to celebrate their silver wedding anniversary. They left the house in her care. Kim went with them to the RER station; all three were in excellent spirits. She was, in fact, like someone drunk and out of her mind, but managed to conceal this from them. That afternoon she in turn packed her bag, taking a knife, a sleeping bag and a few provisions. She also stowed a little money, which she never used, and stout shoes. She went off on foot to the park, crossing the bridge over the motorway (with a prayer for the dead) and then the footbridge by Cambodia House (with a pr
ayer to the simian kings that ruled their temples). Some weeds had been burnt there a few days before. She paused for a moment to watch the traffic on the ring road, —red, white, red, white—and to look at the four angels of the Portuguese church, and she took care to pay her respects to the monkeys. Similarly at Montsouris, before slipping furtively past the barrier, she genuflected before a group of lion-cubs in bronze at the bottom of the park—strangled, she recalled, by a hydra.

  The descent was steep. She had to cling to tufts of grass and branches in order not to fall. She lay down beside the railway tracks. The sky stayed blue for a full hour; then it yellowed before passing into the usual grey cotton wool of towns. The blood in Kim’s veins turned black.

  ‘Ah,’ she thought, ‘this way I shall not die.’

  The thought thrilled her. The city above could perish in ruin; she, Kim, would survive in its rotting guts. One day she would re-emerge, the last of womankind.

  ***

  She established herself for the night in a shelter in the tunnel which had harboured other drop-outs before her. There were bottles, empty tins of food and a strange smell which was not, as she had dimly feared it would be, that of urine. She herself pissed and shat that evening on the tracks, her knees shaking. She wiped herself with a paper handkerchief and buried it beneath pieces of hoggin. Back in the shelter she slowly explored with her index finger the valley between her legs, from the puckered mouth of her anus to the lips of her vulva, which she stroked absently. Next day she applied herself to hunting.

  She had slept late, understanding that from now on she would have to live at night. There were water-points along the line, used by others besides herself. Her provisions being exhausted in a few days, she killed pigeons and rats by throwing stones, drank their blood and ate their tiny hearts, their livers and their lights, and as much of their flesh as she could detach from the bones. In late evening she would go out up into the park and rummage through the dustbins. But she did not allow her new kingdom to go to her head, especially as she was sharing it with others as elusive as herself. The railway line was home to all sorts of outcasts. Their fires burnt in the tunnels, villages of cardboard arose out of nothing. Kim picked a careful way between the encampments. Eventually she found a new hiding-place. To reach it you had to scale a wall of dressed stone five or six metres high: it was a real eagle’s nest from which she could contemplate the tracks at her ease.

  From rat’s blood she tried to make herself gloves, rubbing it into her fingers and palms in the hope that the pigment would eventually impregnate her skin. When she went to wash in the lake of the Montsouris park it all came off. The blood attracted swans. One night she trapped one and wrung its neck before it could peck her. She carried it back to the shelter, plucked it—no easy task—and devoured all that she could find between the bird’s ribs. The feathers she put on one side, and the beak and feet she later buried near the railway line. At that time she was still afraid to cook her prizes; the fire would have made her visible.

  She also killed one of the ducks in the park and an owl that one morning had been so imprudent as to perch at the entry to her nest. She killed both by throwing stones; she had become expert. Sleeping during the day, she often dreamed of a vast city built on a hill of yellow grass and crossed by a valley. It was the yellow, speckled with brown and red, which you see in peat-bogs. She would walk there for hours, or perhaps for the minutes or seconds of her dream, constantly chewing the raw heart of some bird, or any other organ she pulled out of her prey without properly noticing it; and she would gnaw the bones and sometimes, even, she could not stop herself from swallowing them.

  ‘What have you got in your stomach?’

  ‘A rat’s head.’

  In her waking life she kept these things in a pile, and the feathers likewise; skulls and beaks that she washed in the water of the lake and anything else that wouldn’t rot.

  She was taken by surprise, during the first two months, by the onset of her period; the blood ran down her thighs for two or three days. She was by then going almost naked; it was a hot summer. In the autumn the bleeding ceased.

  ***

  At night she hunted in the park, then along the track which she learnt to skirt with caution, the human population there being dense. Better organised than she, they slept at night after their suppers beside their wood fires, which lit up their faces, espied by her from a distance. She never stole from them, having acquired a taste for raw meat and for spoilt fruit from the park dustbins. Two or three tunnels further on, however, there were rabbit warrens and kitchen gardens, and sheds for drying tomatoes and curing sausages. To the north west there was a chicken-coop with eggs and chickens. She turned herself into a fox. She strung out the skulls of her captures on the rails.

  A little later she wanted to work on skins: her own to start with, and then those of the animals she hunted. She slid under her skin the smallest bones of birds and rabbits, first on one arm and then the other. That took her to the beginning of winter, a period she dated from when she had to go into winter quarters. The pain warmed her; several times she thought she was dying of cold or of various infections, something she viewed with indifference, despite the promise she had made to herself to die long after the rest of the world. As for the animal skins, she scraped them with her knife, then tenderised them on stones; but in spite of her efforts they hardened and became unusable. In the park dustbins she found plastic sacks in which she was obliged to clothe herself on top of the clothes she had preserved from the summer. The cold chapped her hands and lips. One evening she caught a fair-sized dog which she managed to kill cleanly. She ate its heart and liver the first day, having bled it after killing it; other unidentified organs she ate on the second day, and the meat of its thighs and rump on the third. She buried what was left in the park under a tree. The head, however, she preserved, after taking out the brain and the eyes, which she felt no desire to swallow. Insects picked the skull clean in a few days. The following week she had another dog, smaller, with short legs. After that, anything was fair game: cats, weasels. She wouldn’t have been surprised to come up against a bear or a wild boar; in other towns, it was said, they were common. For the dogs she made a cross in the hollow of her thumb. That did not last, and she had to cut again and enlarge the incision with a little earth. She had a vague hope that horns and fur would grow on her: that too happens in other places. The third dog was young, its coat short and black. Since she did not know how to tan the hides, she kept it alive to warm her feet. It stayed with her. Dogs will eat dogs and many other things. This one, like her, slept by day, and never barked.

  ***

  It snowed. The dog brought in dead rats and a living cat she had to finish off. The first night of snow they went into the park and helped themselves to a couple of geese. The dog ate the head of the larger one then and there. Through the grill of the park gates she saw cars, their wheels spinning silently. When they went down again, the birds in her bag, the dog at her heels, she smelt the whiff of the fires that had been lit by the other inhabitants of these depths. A good thing, this snow; you could drink it, it added brightness to the night, and it kept fresh the meat of the animals you killed. She licked the horrible sores on her hands, she ate the scabs and clots of blood, which it was better not to offer to the dog. Yes, let the snow swallow up everything, let it engulf the city and those who dwell in it.

  But that still did not come to pass. On particularly cruel nights she crept closer to the fires, despite everything, in order not to die. One of the shelters caught alight. The men who lived there had time to get out, shouting and throwing handfuls of snow on the brazier. She, pressed against the wall, was warm for once. Another evening she managed to steal two blankets from a garden: they had been put out to dry. It was at a place, far from her nest, where she could hear the roar of the motorway, as in former days. She stole some home-made preserves that she found in the garden shed, which made her sick: she had lost the habit of eating cooked food. In a garden on
the way home she found a hen and two eggs, which she shared with the dog that kept her feet warm and cleaned her face and hands. The rest of her body was caked in filth.

  The weather became milder for a few days, then returned to extreme cold. The dog one morning scented a dead body in the snow, a woman older than Kim, clad in overalls, a sweater and an anorak; these were removed with care and stored in the shelter. The dog chewed at her ribs; Kim covered up the body with snow. The woman was also wearing a camisole and pants. A woman of the tunnel, perhaps? Had she died in her sleep? of cold?

  Kim had confused dreams. She was in an aeroplane, flying over a desert of ice. The aeroplane came down on the sea. She was the sole survivor, floating on top of the cockpit in the middle of the Pacific, or at least in some warm sea, ploughed by many ships which all altered their courses to come to her aid. A woman then folded her in her arms calling her ‘my daughter’. She, however, was certain it was not her mother.