By a Slow River

by Philippe Claudel

  More than one might have loved to take that simpleton’s place. In some sense, Maire was their stake in a common dream. The young woman soothed him like a child, and he awaited her as would a young fiancé. No one ever thought of making fun of them.

  VIII

  And Destinat? That’s another question; there things turn murky again. Perhaps Barbe was better informed than any of us. Years later, long after the Case, long after the war, she would come talk to me about him. Everybody was dead, Destinat in 1921, the others too, and there was little point in sifting the ashes anymore. But she told me, all the same: at the end of an afternoon, in front of the small house to which she’d retired, with other widows like herself. Solemn had been run over in ’23 by a cart he hadn’t heard coming. Barbe found her consolation in chatter and brandied cherries, which she’d hauled off from the château by the jarful.

  “We found him changed right away, as soon as the girl settled into the house. He began strolling in the park like a big sick bumblebee drawn to the only flower around. He’d walk in circles, in rain and snow and the fiercest wind. Mind you, he’d hardly ever stuck a toe outside before. When he came back from V he would shut himself in his office or in the library. I would bring him a glass of water on a tray—never anything else—and then he would dine at seven o’clock sharp. That was his day, without fail.

  “When the teacher moved in, things got a bit irregular. He would come back earlier from court for his walk in the park. He would sit on the bench for long stretches, reading or looking at the trees. And often I might find him at the window, staring out at nothing like a old woman. But his loss of appetite, that was the most alarming. He’d never been a big eater, but now he hardly touched a thing before waving his hand at me to come take it all away. You know, you can’t live just on water and air! One of these days, I said to myself, we’ll find him on the floor, in his bedroom or somewhere else!

  “Thank goodness it never happened. His face just got more and more drawn, especially his cheeks, and his lips, which were hardly there to begin with, got even thinner, like two loose threads. Everything changed. He’d always been early to bed. Now throughout the night I would hear footsteps, slow footsteps from the upper floors, then long silences, only for the slow steps to begin again. I have no idea what on earth he could’ve been doing— brooding, dreaming, who knows?

  “On Sundays he would always manage to cross the girl’s path as she was going out. It was always as if by chance, but I saw him not a few times, waiting like a patient cat to pounce. As for her, if she understood what was going on, she certainly didn’t let on. She would give him a big hello, clear and hearty, and then be on her way. He would answer, but almost under his breath, with his voice pathetically trailing after her. And of course when she was gone he’d stand there pondering endlessly, as if it were the scene of a crime and he was looking for—who knows what?—a clue maybe, before he’d give up and come inside.”

  Barbe seemed to relish chatting about the prosecutor and Lysia Verhareine. Anyway, she went on a good long while. The evening was falling around us, with its noises of animals being stabled and shutters banged shut. I imagined the prosecutor walking on the paths in the park, heading for the waters of the Guérlante, scanning the windows of the little house where the young teacher lived. That a man who was so near the end of his days should get his feet caught in the nets of love was nothing new. That story’s as old as the world. In such cases, all the proprieties go out the window. The absurdity is evident only to others, who just don’t understand. Even Destinat, with his face of marble and his hands of ice, had fallen prey to the unexpected appearance of beauty and the uncontrollable pounding of the heart. In the end, I suppose, that quite simply had made him human.

  Barbe said that one evening there had been a grand repast. Destinat had bidden her to get out all the silver, to press the linen napkins and embroidered tablecloths perfectly. Fifty guests? No. Just the young teacher and himself. The two of them alone, at either end of the enormous table. It wasn’t Barbe who did the cooking, it was Bourrache, summoned specially from the Rébillon; and Morning Glory served them at table, as Barbe sat brooding by the pantry. Solemn, recognizing his uselessness, had trundled off to bed long before. The meal went on till midnight. Barbe strained to discover what on earth they were talking about; she needn’t have. Morning Glory told her. “They’re just looking at each other; all they do is look.” Barbe had learned nothing. She began knocking back little glasses of brandy with Bourrache, who ended up waking her toward morning, her head on the kitchen table. At least Bourrache had done all the tidying up, put everything away. He left carrying his daughter in his arms, wrapped in a blanket, sleeping like a baby.

  As the night was sidling up to us, the old servant fell silent. She covered her hair with her scarf. The two of us lingered there in the dark for quite a while, saying nothing. Then, suddenly remembering, she dug into the pockets of her old blouse. Shooting stars cut through the sky, aimless and grotesque—fodder for omens, for those who need them—and then everything was quiet. What shone kept shining; what was dark grew even darker.

  “Here,” Barbe said. “Maybe you’ll know what to do with this.”

  She handed me a large key.

  “Nothing’s changed since I stopped going there. His only heir is a little cousin on his wife’s side—so little we’ve never seen him. The notary says he left for America. I’d be surprised if he ever came back, and it would take forever to track him down As for me, I won’t be around much longer . . . so you’d be the caretaker, in a way.”

  Barbe got up slowly, closed my hand around the key, and then went back into her house, without another word. I put the key to the château in my pocket and headed off.

  I never had another occasion to speak with Barbe. Even so, the urge came over me often, a bit like a case of scabies that hasn’t entirely healed, a strangely pleasant feeling even though it itches. But I told myself I still had time. That’s why people are so full of bull; we’re always telling ourselves there’s plenty of time—we’ll be able to do this or that tomorrow, three days from now, next year, in two hours—but then everything dies. We find ourselves following coffins.

  I looked at Barbe’s the day of her burial as though I could find some answers there, but it was nothing more than well-buffed wood, around which the priest was wafting Latin and puffs of incense. On the way to the cemetery with the meager, bleating flock, I even wondered whether she hadn’t been pulling my leg, that Barbe, with her tales of grand meals and Destinat playing the lover. But in the end it didn’t matter. The brandied cherries had sealed her fate. Maybe she was going to find whole cases of them up there, between two clouds.

  I still had the key in my pocket, ever since the evening six months earlier when she’d given it to me, though I’d never used it. The shovelfuls of earth put me back on track. The grave was soon filled, and Barbe was reunited with her Solemn, for a heap of eternity. The priest went off with his two choirboys, their little country clogs clacking in the mud. His flock dispersed like starlings in a field of green wheat. As for me, I visited Clémence’s grave, kicking myself a bit for not going more often.

  The sun, the rain, and the years have all but effaced the photograph I had mounted on her tombstone, in a porcelain medallion. All that remains is the shadow of her hair. I can also make out the outline of her smile, as if she were gazing at me through a veil of gauze. I rested my hand on the gilded letters of her name, and after a while I departed, having told her in my head all these tales of my life—the life I’ve led without her for all these years. She must know them by heart now; I’ve trotted them out often enough.

  It was on that day, after Barbe’s burial, that I made up my mind to go to the château, to delve a bit further, you might say, into the mystery of which I was now one of the few surviving witnesses. Yes, that was the day I pulled aside the rough beard of brambles that hung on the door and slipped the key into the massive lock. I imagined myself a sort of shabby prince, for
cing his way over the threshold into the palace of some Sleeping Beauty—except that, on the other side of this threshold, nothing really slept anymore.

  IX

  I still have something I want to say before telling about the château, and its shadows and dust. I want to speak of Lysia Verhareine, since I used to see her too, as everyone else did; our town is small enough that paths always end up crossing. Each time I would raise my hat; and she would return the greeting by lowering her head a bit, with a smile. All the same, one day I saw something else in her eyes, something sharp and cutting; something like a hail of bullets.

  It was a Sunday, in the beautiful hours of early evening, in the spring of 1915. The air smelled of apple blossoms and acacia tips. I knew that on Sundays the little teacher always took the same walk that led her to the top of the hill, whether the weather was fair or foul—even if it was raining buckets. At least, so I had heard.

  I also used to ramble up there fairly often with a light rifle Edmond Gachentard had passed on to me; he was an old colleague who’d retired from the force to plant cabbages in the Caux region and take care of a crumpled woman in a wheelchair. That rifle is pretty as a lady’s jewelry, with a single barrel gleaming like a twenty-sou coin and a butt of cherrywood. On it, Gachentard had had a phrase engraved in slanted script: You will not feel a thing. The phrase was addressed to wild game, but Gachentard feared he might take the gun to his wife’s head one evening, when the sadness of seeing her like that, with her lifeless legs and ashen face, got to be too much for him. “I’d rather give it to you,” he’d said, handing it to me wrapped in newspaper—the front page had a picture of the queen of Sweden, I recall. “Do with it what you like,” he said.

  I was amused by the invitation. How much can you do with a rifle, after all? Plant endives, darn your socks, take it to a dance? A rifle is for killing, period. I’ve never had much sympathy for bloodlust but I took the weapon anyway, telling myself that I might just be preventing a far-off little murder, fueled by hard cider, another blot on my conscience. Since then I’ve got into the habit of taking the rifle with me on my Sunday strolls, using it almost as a walking stick. Perhaps his suggestion was not so absurd after all. Over the years the barrel has lost its gleam and taken on a somber hue that suits it pretty well. The motto engraved by Gachentard has, for lack of proper care, more or less disappeared. Just a few words are still legible—“not . . . a thing”—and true enough, the rifle in my hands has never been used to kill.

  Edmond Gachentard had big feet, a Basque beret, and a distressing taste for complicated aperitifs flavored with plant essences that made them seem disagreeably close to medicinal preparations. He often shook his head while looking at the sky, and would become suddenly meditative whenever large round clouds intruded on a pure blue. “The bastards,” he would say, but I never really knew whether that applied to the clouds or to some other figures, faraway and shrouded, sailing forth, so to speak, for him alone. There you are; that’s all that comes to mind when I think of him. Memory is odd. It retains things not worth three sous. All the rest goes to the grave with us. Gachentard must be dead by now; he’d be a hundred and five years old. His middle name was Marie. Another detail. I’ll leave it there.

  When I say I’ll leave it there, that’s really what I ought to do. What good does writing this do, these lines serried like geese in winter, these words I string along with no apparent point? The days pass, and I return to my table. I can’t say I enjoy it, but then I can’t say I dislike it either.

  Yesterday Berthe, who comes to rearrange the dust three times a week, came across one of the notebooks—the first volume, I believe. “Fine thing, wasting paper like that!” I looked at her. She’s stupid, but no more than most. She didn’t wait for a response but went on with her housework, singing silly tunes that have been going through her head ever since she was twenty years old and couldn’t find a husband. I would have liked to explain a thing or two to her—but explain what? That I move along those lines as on the roads of some unknown and yet familiar country? What’s the use? I thought. And when she left, I went back to work. The worst of it is, I don’t care what becomes of the notebooks. I’m on number four. I can’t find two or three anymore. I must have lost them, or perhaps Berthe took them one day to light her stove. It doesn’t matter. I don’t want to reread. I write, nothing more. It’s a bit like talking to myself, a conversation from another time. I lay away portraits. I dig up graves without dirtying my hands.

  On that notable Sunday, I had walked for hours along the hill. A little farther down lay the town, heaped on itself, house against house—the piled-up mass of the factory buildings in the background, their brick chimneys gouging the sky. A landscape of smoke and work, a sort of shell inhabited by lots of snails without a care for the rest of the world. And yet the world wasn’t far off: To see it, all you had to do was climb the hill. That explains no doubt why families preferred to take their Sunday stroll along the banks of the canal, with its genteel melancholy, its calm waters stirred ever so slightly from time to time by the wriggling of a big carp or the prow of a barge. For us, the hill served as a stage curtain, but nobody felt like going to the show. People keep what cowardice they can afford. But for the hill, we would have had the war right in our faces, an honest-to-goodness fact. By the grace of the hill we managed to dodge it, despite the smells and noises it threw our way like so many farts from a sick body. The war mounted its stylish performances behind the hill, on the other side, in a world that wasn’t even ours—in other words, nowhere. We refused to be its audience. We made of the war the stuff of legend, and so we were able to live with it.

  That Sunday I had climbed higher than usual—oh, not much higher, twenty or thirty meters, somewhat inadvertently—and all on account of a thrush I was following step by step, as it fluttered and chirped, dragging a broken wing beaded with several drops of blood. Since it was the only thing in the world I was focused on, I ended up by reaching the crest, which is a crest in name only, since a great meadow there gives you the impression that an immense hand, its palm held skyward and covered with grasses and low copses, crowns the hill. I felt by the wind in my collar—a warm wind—that I had passed the line, the invisible one that we below have all traced on the earth and in our minds. I raised my eyes, and I saw her.

  She was seated casually on the thick grass dotted with daisies, and the pale fabric of her dress scattered around her waist reminded me of the déjeuners of certain painters. The pasture and the flowers adorning it seemed to have been arranged for her alone. From time to time the breeze lifted the wispy curls that lent the nape of her neck a soft shadow. She was looking straight ahead, at what the rest of us never wanted to see; she gazed with a beautiful smile, a smile to make the ones she offered us each day— and God knows they were beautiful—seem wan and remote. She looked at the broad plain, dark and infinite, trembling under the far-off vapors of the furious explosions that came to us deadened and decanted—in a word, unreal.

  There where the front line merged with the horizon—so that at times you might have supposed several suns were rising at once, only to fall back again with the thump of a dud shell—the war unfurled its manly little carnival over many kilometers; from where we were you might have thought it was a scale miniature of battle. Everything was so small. Death couldn’t abide this smallness; it was fleeing and taking its replica of suffering with it—its kit of dismembered bodies, of lost cries of hunger and belliesful of fear, of tragedy.

  Lysia Verhareine took it all in with her eyes wide open. She was holding on her knees what at first I took to be a book—but when she began writing a few seconds on, I saw it was the little notebook covered in red moroccan. She jotted down some words with a tiny pencil that disappeared in her hand, and as she put those words to paper, her lips were pronouncing others, unless they were the same. I felt like a thief, gazing at her this way at her back.

  I was remarking as much to myself when, slowly, she turned her head toward me, leaving he
r beautiful smile on the distance of the battleground. Like a prick, I stood there nailed to the ground, not knowing what to say or do. If I had been totally naked, I couldn’t have been more embarrassed. I ventured a little nod. She kept on looking at me, and for the first time I saw her face smooth as a lake in winter: the face of a dead woman. I mean the face of a woman dead within herself, as though nothing inside her was coursing or pulsing anymore, as though her blood had gone somewhere else.

  That moment seemed endless, as a session of methodical torture. Then her eyes traveled from my face to my left hand, where Gachentard’s rifle dangled. I saw what she was seeing. I turned red as a woodpecker’s ass. I babbled several words, regretting them immediately. “It isn’t loaded, it’s just for—” And I stopped. I couldn’t have sounded any dumber and in retrospect should have simply held my tongue. She let her eyes linger upon me: a fusillade of darts, acid-tipped, piercing every inch of my skin. Then she shrugged and returned to her landscape, letting me fall back into the universe from which I’d come: a realm much too ugly for her—too narrow, or perhaps too stuffy, of which gods and princesses know nothing, though they sometimes pass through it on tiptoe—the universe of men.

  After that Sunday, I put my all into avoiding her whenever I caught sight of her from afar. I sidled through alleys, angled into doorways, or hid under my hat when no other cover was at hand. I could no longer bear to see those eyes, haunted as I was by a great shame, not quite knowing why. What had I seen, after all? A young lady, alone, writing something in a red notebook as she looked out over a landscape of war. I too had a perfect right to be strolling in the orchards if I felt like it!