Doubtless something without physical substance—without four legs, two legs, or legs of any kind—was at work that day. Miracle, magic, randomness, providence . . . All I remember is that the shadow of a hand appeared over the crate and hovered, undecided. Someone said: “This white one, with the dots?” More hand-hovering. A skitter of paws as my relatives dove for cover. Then another voice, a deep baritone of the type that hums so pleasantly through the digestive system: “Well, all right. The dots it is, then.”
Through such banal moments is destiny decided. Really. Don’t forget that it rained hard on the night before the Battle of Waterloo and French artillery got stuck in the mud, thereby changing the course of Europe. (Though it’s true that Napoleon might still have rallied if the Prussians hadn’t turned up.) “The nearest-run thing you ever saw in your life,” said Wellington.
Weather, Prussians . . . history is simply a set of precarious uncertainties. Your history and mine. I, for one, might have been a French rabbit instead of a Belgian one had the rain stopped.
But I digress.
Haggling came next. The genteel dispute over my fate joined the general din of deal-making in the market. So many fates decided in a single day! The deep, pleasing voice persisted, dulling my anguish at losing so kindly a buyer. At last a price was agreed upon, dispiritingly modest though it seemed to the merchandise itself. The Moroccan boy manning the stand grabbed at me—soullessly, as one would grab at a plucked chicken. Perhaps he felt he would have gotten a better price for me at the abattoir.
I was incarcerated in a small, white cage with nothing but cold metal underfoot, lifted high and then swung like a lantern through the crowds. Stares snapped my way. An occasional sigh drifted by, along with wafts of kebab and roast chicken. Perhaps I should have realized then that there was something different about me. I recalled what Grandmother had said, about me being like a bowl of water with a calm surface. Maybe these people were trying to peer into the depths.
A little arc of empty space opened around the cage and a queer silence fell all around. Merchants stopped yelling odes to their beautiful fruit; babies ceased crying; a man throwing empty wooden crates onto a pile with a sound like pistol-cracks turned to look. I would get to know his expression well over the years. Looking back now, I think that the sudden silence in the marketplace was just simple surprise—surprise that something as inconsequential as a rabbit might require deeper review. Is that wishful thinking on my part? Or vanity?
And what, exactly, guided that hand over the crate? I mean, why did the hand choose me, and not one of my brothers, or sisters, or cousins? All of them would have made just as good pets. But most, sadly, were probably served up with cranberry sauce and potatoes a few days later. Was it my looks—a white coat with that cryptic scattering of black spots? I hope not. One should never rely on looks. They may get you out of a scrape or two when you’re young. But time will rush on, your coat will no longer be so pristine, and inevitably a scrape will materialize on which your looks will have no effect whatsoever.
Or perhaps it was Moon who had intervened. He’s compassionate, no doubt about it. Rather like your god, I suspect. But there are flaws in his character. He’s like an incorrigible, heavy-footed uncle for whom one feels love and exasperation in equal measure. He can make colossal errors, Moon. But on a good day, he’s capable of great things.
I just cannot bring myself to credit mere chance, somehow. Chance is Moon’s houseboy—a lackey, responsible for small delights like finding a blade of sweet grass poking under the chicken wire, or a dry patch of hay. Things like escaping the butcher or discovering love require higher powers.
I’ve heard humans say that fate comes knocking. Well, Moon never knocks. He either hails us pleasantly from afar, or he barges in. He’ll send his eagles swooping down with only the gliding shadow of wings to announce them, often for no other reason than to keep us on our toes. You can find yourself very suddenly without a corpus if you’re not light on those toes, believe me. But once in while, when the mood takes him, Moon sends something that delights. A fresh cabbage leaf, perhaps. Or a caressing hand.
6
It’s strange that in your language, the word “home” is used for a palace, a box under a bridge, and every sort of abode in between. Is home an idea? I wonder. Or a locale?
For years after being so precipitously taken from my family, I considered home to be one place only: Hougoumont. I was convinced of this—certain that happiness had briefly been mine and would never return again. An ache installed itself, so persistent that at times I was hardly aware of it. But whenever I tried to coax myself to sleep with memories—with the odors of the meadow, or the rasp of dry leaves against chicken wire—there it was again, that ache, raw and throbbing and all that was left of my vanished family. Even the prospect of going to the Duchess of Richmond’s ball rarely comforted me. I would set the scene in my mind, and begin to drift off to sleep, only to find that the door to the salon on Rue de la Blanchisserie was locked, the building derelict. I realized only then that I’d never gone to the ball alone; I’d always gone with the others.
I’ve heard that humans are rarely content with their homes. So many lust after all things big, it seems—castles, even—though they would probably manage perfectly well in a cabin with just a door and a window. Has anyone ever made a study of dwellings and happiness? I suspect not. Anyway, since humans always presume that big and expensive means better, I suppose a cabin would bring only meager satisfaction (and a good deal of embarrassment on the slog up the social ladder). No. Few would pass up the chance to live in a palace. No matter that there might be sixteen paces between the sink and the dishwasher, or that half a kilometer yawns between the settee and your bed. It’s your possession—your kingdom. That’s what counts, apparently. Though the first thing a rabbit would notice would be the draft.
How irritating—how exhausting!—such a place would be for us. Rabbits hate drafts, for one thing. For another, we would have to map out the entire half kilometer between the settee and bed to identify all the good places to hide along the way. We’re prey creatures, don’t forget; we probably think about hiding places as often as people think about money, so that gives you a fairly good idea of our preoccupations.
I feel a bit ungrateful saying all this, considering that I had a palace built just for me. A rabbit palace, granted, but splendid accommodation all the same. The ground floor is full of fresh hay, and a separate toilet alcove is piled lavishly with wood chips. An old wine box cleverly serves as a bedroom, and upstairs, there are two roomy shelves ideal for the long hours of reflection for which I’d been trained so thoroughly in my youth. The front door even has a latch.
My palace, though, had no soul at first. Nothing could have felt farther from my patch of earth at Waterloo.
I realize now that a vital aspect of home is the traces of you that are left there: the smell of your last meal; a you-sized hollow in the earth; a kernel of corn with your tooth mark on it. Nothing is more comforting than the remnants of you—certainly not grandeur, or the number of bathrooms, or even a roomy wine cellar. Thus I had to rearrange the hay in my hutch after it had been so carefully plumped up, and tip over the food dish all the time, as my proprietors never seemed to catch on that it’s easier for us to eat from the floor. Pity that with all its superiority, the human brain is still unable to think like a lagomorph.
Even with all the distractions of this newfound luxury, I just couldn’t banish my homesickness. The family tried so valiantly to help, overfeeding me, scratching the sweet spot behind my jaw, taking me into the living room to run around a plush carpet without the slightest scent of grass. But memory had the last word: Hougoumont still filled every sense to breaking. My new home was only a few kilometers down the road from my birthplace, after all. Old Lavender would have been able to tell you whether or not you could have heard the cannons from here. If it’s true what she once said—that we live in relation to our memories every minute of the day—t
hen surely, I thought, I might channel the power of my ancestral home to build some kind of future.
Instead, memory imposed on me a kind of half-life. My ears turned constantly, hoping to pick up the bold, steady hiss of wind that blew so freely over the Hougoumont fields—the sort of wind that breaks up into toothless eddies in city gardens. My skin felt moribund in the recycled urban air. I longed for the freshness of rain on my coat, but was locked in my cage at the slightest hint of a storm lest I catch cold.
And those smells of home . . . oh, where had they gone? Sometimes, if I closed my eyes, I could summon the vapors of the hutch: the sweet-and-sour reassurance of kin. I listened for the trickle of Old Lavender’s digestion, and underfoot, on the cold patio tiles of my new place, I could feel the desiccated droppings of the enclosure. Was I experiencing that gift Old Lavender had talked about: the gift of reading things? Surely she hadn’t meant basic smells and dried droppings. If I’d really inherited her gift, then I was supposed to uncover deeper meanings, as she had; to consort with them until I understood them. Old Lavender would have been able to stand in a new garden and read meaning in it at once; she would have interpreted such a drastic change in life as forward motion, and gotten on with things.
I wondered if it was simple coincidence that the garden had high walls, or just a bit of whimsy on the part of Moon. Hougoumont was walled, too. It’s funny how familiarity pops up in uncharted places. If you think about it, our passage along the Hollow Way is often sprinkled with landmarks of similar shape and hue, like stepping-stones over a stream. These familiar objects are not random, but present themselves with a sort of intentional symmetry, as if pointing the way. Our passage from one to the other really should not be taken for granted. Think about the turns your life has taken (I mean really think—stare out a window for at least an hour), and you’ll discover a startling, sometimes pleasing, invariably inexplicable logic in the way things have happened to you.
My days began early. Just after dawn, when my hutch door was opened, I took my first constitutional. This involved a thorough sniffing of the air from the edge of the patio—an initial “study of circumstance,” as Old Lavender called it. This rather arcane habit has gone out of favor these days, especially among the young, but the sad truth is that if Jonas or Caillou had been at all adept at the skill, they might have avoided their fates.
We rabbits have mediocre eyesight. We can see greens and blues best, along with shapes and shadows, which just about summed up this garden whatever your eyesight happened to be: a weed-infested lawn; ferns drooping in dim reaches; two trees, their trunks darkened by ivy; and foliage that waved mysteriously, even without any wind. A peony of sickly mien sulked near the patio. There were holes in the wall here and there where bricks were missing, and in one corner, a discarded toilet awaited removal. The pile of cracked plant pots next to it looked, to my eyes, like the jagged end of the Hougoumont chapel.
The garden was uninhabited except by me, but not unvisited. So much of my day was spent taking careful note of the rustling in the trees (inept rustling meant pigeons; arrogant rustling, magpies, and so forth) and keeping an eye trained on the tops of the walls. The dark red capping tiles formed a handy walkway for neighborhood cats, who lounged like petty sultans in the ivy massing over one corner of the wall. I’d seen an occasional cat at the farm. But these city animals seemed to be the most distant of cousins. They were phony predators, overfed and bored, on the lookout for any sort of cruel amusement. I knew they could get into the garden if they wanted to—I’d seen one pad across the lawn one evening and exit by the back tree. Inevitably, my fear of these domestic hybrids soon supplanted my fear of hawks, a clear indication that the real natural order did not extend this far into town.
Without a colony to impose order or a grandmother to rein in idiocy, caution ruled my days. My route through the garden was thus carefully planned and rarely varied. If it did vary, then the variation became the new, planned route. And so it went. Each route—or its variation—took in a thorough examination of the peony, the ferns, both tree trunks and anything at all that was unfamiliar or misplaced. Should one of the cracked plant pots have been moved, for instance, an olfactory once-over of the pot’s new location was required. If a dry leaf had blown in over the wall from a neighbor’s tree, this single leaf would need further investigation. (Autumn was a particularly tiring time, as you can imagine.) Every route, no matter how it traversed the garden, was accorded that essential component of the rabbit universe: an escape plan. This might be a damp hollow behind the tree, or a concealed alley behind the begonias.
Such exacting habits also occur in humans, I believe. Wellington himself fussed for hours over his terrain. Not that I’m comparing myself in any way, but I do think that my hero and I would have sized up the same parcel of land with similar precision. The Duke rarely left the field during battle. He studied the topography closely—combed it with his spyglass, and spent long hours reconnoitering on horseback to assess the circumstances. He knew all the ridges and hidden dips, and the tall crops of rye and corn in which men could be shot without ever seeing their enemy, but which also provided excellent cover and the advantage of surprise.
Sometimes one can be too meticulous, however. The battle very nearly took a fateful turn when Wellington rode down from the ridge to the Hougoumont orchard early on the morning of June 18 for a final check. He wanted to make double sure that all his orders had been carried out and everything was in place.
He halted on the track . . . a mere ten yards or so from a French sniper.
The man, hidden in the undergrowth, didn’t fire. Had he even recognized his target? one wonders. Wellington had been wearing a plain blue coat and cloak, after all. Perhaps, addled by circumstance, and suffering from a momentarily frozen trigger finger, the sniper had had a change of heart.
No amount of vigilance can wrest control from providence—or however you wish to call the powerful force that can, without notice, render even history just a featherweight on the wind. From the mighty Wellington to a humble rabbit, outcomes maddeningly, inescapably depend on myopic snipers or absent hawks; on the thickness of the mud or a hollow under the fence; on whether or not the corn—or begonias—hold up as escape routes.
I was a lucky exile, I suppose. Many never know such havens as mine; many continue to wander in their hearts, even when the physical body has more or less come to a halt.
I have in mind a particular exile.
He’s been lurking at the corners of these pages, and it’s about time to bring him up, I think. He may not have troubled your reading so far, but he certainly haunts this story. He’s never found his own, fragrant piece of earth anywhere. Oh, he tried to find it, all right. In every country he invaded. But you can’t spend your youth at Hougoumont, as I did, and not grasp that bloodshed is no way to find a happy chez soi.
Napoleon.
The name will never have a neutral feel, will it? Somewhere in France at this very moment, someone is calling him a monster, while across the street they’re toasting his deeds and singing “La Marseillaise.” Both extremes have a firm hold on the historical record, though paradoxically, both only give insipid impressions of the famous commander, and are about as cliché as the brooding countenance and hand tucked into the coat. Did you know, for instance, that Napoleon had a very keen sense of humor? Difficult to imagine in someone who felt that the world belonged to him, and then went doggedly out to prove it.
There’s no shortage of speculation regarding Napoleon’s legacy. I hasten to say that I’m no expert. But nothing is more satisfying than discussing a famous person who is maddeningly hard to pin down. Bonaparte’s character, his marriages and affairs, his strategies, moods, illnesses and death all provoke the liveliest of debates, even now, though the subject was beyond the capacities of most of the lagomorph population at Hougoumont. Spode tackled it gamely. But his administrative bent narrowed his interests to dates, locations and names, which we all promptly forgot. History is in th
e details . . . Just not in Spode’s, it seems. I’ll try to recall Old Lavender’s, therefore, as her lessons had that curious sticking power.
We’d all grown up in Napoleon’s shadow as much as we’d grown up in Wellington’s. The earth of our farm had received vast numbers of both armies into her bosom, after all. It seems simplistic to call one group of men good and the other bad, when they both ended up in the same spot, and in the same sorry state. The corpses of the French and British may have been burned in separate pits, but their ashes must have found each other on the wind eventually, and come to rest together. Now that I think of it, the tranquillity of our woods and meadows had an ambiguous feel: part victory, part defeat, the joy of one and bitterness of the other joined in common regret.
Grandmother liked to point out that the French and the British never fought each other again after Waterloo, and that the price for this might have been a reasonable one to pay. I’m quite certain she didn’t believe it herself, though, but was just encouraging discussion, which was commendable. Because of all the occupants of our colony, she was the one who understood how high the price of Waterloo—and Hougoumont—had been.
Old Lavender loved military strategy, as I’ve mentioned. I even suspected that she deeply admired Napoleon’s genius in that sphere, though she’d never admit it. But grand military design always paled before her little historical pearls.
“Napoleon was a wreck when he arrived in Belgium,” she said. “Oh, there were flashes of his old Austerlitz brilliance, certainly: he managed to humbug Wellington with that surprise attack on the Prussians near Charleroi. But the poor man was a digestive nightmare. He was ill, in pain. Imagine having to ride a horse with those terrible hemorrhoids—even a sweet-tempered mare like Desirée! He would explode at underlings, then sink into lethargy. That kind of thing.”
“Spode says he was a psychopath,” I ventured, pleased not only that I’d retained this bit of information, but that I’d found the opportune moment to disgorge it.
The Sage of Waterloo Page 7