By a Slow River

by Philippe Claudel

  “And you,” he said, his voice suddenly stern, “where were you that night?”

  I sat there, dumbfounded. Clémence came very quickly to my side. I looked at her. She was as beautiful as ever, transparent but so beautiful. What could I say? Despiaux was waiting for my answer. He stood before me, his contempt growing as I sat there, looking back at him—and beyond him—into the emptiness where I alone could see Clémence. He pulled his hat down and turned his back on me without saying good-bye. He walked off. He went home to his regrets and left me to mine. No doubt he knew—as I do—that you can live in regrets as in a country.

  XIX

  It was Madame de Flers who led me to Clémence’s bedside. I recognized her instantly. She was from a very old family in V: high society, like Destinat. Her husband, the major, had fallen in battle in September 1914. I remember having had a cruel thought to the effect that widowhood would suit her like an evening dress, that she would use it to scale new heights at the prefect’s parties and the charity auctions. I can be extremely stupid sometimes, so harsh, no better than anybody else. For right away Madame de Flers, forgoing the luxury of sympathy, wanted to make herself useful. She left her grand house in V and came to our town, to the hospital.

  People said, “She won’t last three days; she’ll faint when she sees the blood and shit.” But she did last, in spite of the blood and shit, her boundless goodness and unpretentious mercies making everyone forget her title and her fortune. She slept in a maid’s room. Her waking hours, her days and nights, were spent at the bedside of those slipping toward death and those crawling back toward life. For all the slaughter and mutilation, all its gutting, befouling, crushing destruction, war can also put some things to rights.

  Madame de Flers took me by the hand. I let myself be guided by her as she apologized. “We have no more rooms, no space for anyone.”

  We entered an enormous ward, where the air was full of groans and pervaded by a tart smell of pus and fresh dressings. It was the odor of injury, of pain, and of wounds—not that of death, which is more distinct and horrible. There were thirty beds, maybe forty, on each an oblong form that you could see move a little sometimes, disrupting the uniformity of so many men wrapped like mummies. In the center of the room, four white sheets hung, describing a sort of alcove, light and undulating. That’s where Clémence was, surrounded by soldiers who couldn’t see her and of whom she was probably unaware.

  Madame de Flers pulled back one of the sheets. She lay there facing straight ahead, her eyes shut, her hands peacefully arranged on her chest. She might have seemed a corpse already except for the stately slow breaths that made her chest swell but left her features impassive. There was a chair near the bed. Gently, Madame de Flers seated me. As she laid her hand on Clémence’s forehead and stroked it, she said, without looking away, “The child is fine.” Then she added, “I’ll leave you now; stay as long as you like.” And pulling a sheet aside as they do at the theater sometimes, she vanished behind that translucent whiteness.

  I remained there all night long. I never stopped looking at her, but I didn’t dare speak for fear of being overheard by the wounded who flanked her and would take no comfort in the words of a loving husband. I laid my hand on her to take in her warmth and to give her mine as well; that’s how I persuaded myself that she felt my presence and would draw strength from it, the strength to return to me. She was beautiful still. Perhaps a little paler than when I had left her the night before, but sweeter as well, as though the deep sleep in which she wandered had dispelled all causes of unrest, all the worries and pains of day. Yes, she was beautiful.

  I will never have known her ugly, wrinkled, and hunched. For all these years I’ve lived with a woman who’s never grown old. My back is bent, I cough and splutter, I’m broken down and wrinkled up, but she remains unwithered. Death has left me that sense at least, which nothing can take away—even if time has robbed me of her face, so that I must struggle to see it again. Now and then, by way of reward or perhaps taunt, I’m granted a glimpse, in the gleams of the wine I drink or the glare of early morning.

  All night long the soldier to Clémence’s left, hidden by the sheet, made himself present by babbling a story of which I could make neither head nor tail. Sometimes he hummed, sometimes he grew angry, but he was never still. It was not clear whom he was addressing: a pal, a relative, a sweetheart, or just himself. A feverish jumble of subjects—the war of course, but also tales about inheritance, meadows to mow, roofs to patch, a wedding feast, drowned cats, trees covered with caterpillars, an embroidered trousseau, a plow, altar boys, a flood, a mattress lent out and never returned, wood to chop. This chatterbox was constantly reshuffling the moments of his life and dealing them out again by the luck of the draw, just the way life dealt them to him, I suppose. From time to time he repeated a name, Albert Jivonal, with a force and clarity such as one might use to answer an officer. I suppose it was his name and that he needed to say it to remind himself whose story this was.

  His voice was like the solo instrument in a symphony of the dying—the heavy breather’s timpani, the groans of strings tuning up, the wheezing woodwinds of the gassed, the piccolo of a madman’s laughter—and, above it all, the song of Jivonal. His song became ours as I watched over Clémence, the two of us enclosed, it seemed, in the forecastle of a gauzy ship, drifting on the river of the dead.

  Toward morning Clémence moved a little, unless it was fatigue that produced this mirage. All the same, I believe her face turned toward me. What I’m sure of is that she breathed a deeper, longer breath than she had up till then. Yes, there was this great breath, like a beautiful sigh, as at the end of some long anticipation; breathing this way, you show you expected it and you’re very happy it’s occurred. I laid my hand on her throat. And with that I knew. It’s surprising sometimes how you can know things without ever having learned them. I knew this sigh was the last. It wouldn’t be followed by another. I rested my head against hers. Remaining that way, I felt the warmth leave her little by little. I prayed to God and the saints to let me wake from this dream.

  Albert Jivonal died shortly after Clémence. I didn’t know he was dead until he fell silent. And when his babbling could bother me no more, I hated him. I don’t know if it was rational, but I imagined that once he entered into death he would find himself right near her, waiting in some infinite line and seeing her a few meters ahead of him. So, yes, without knowing him, without even ever having seen his face—he’d suffered a chemical burn—I held his death against him. Jealous of a dead man. Wanting to take his place.

  The day nurse came by at seven o’clock. She closed Clémence’s eyes; oddly, they had opened at the moment of death. I stayed until midmorning. Nobody dared tell me to go. I left of my own accord, later, alone.

  Morning Glory’s burial took place at V the week after the murder. I wasn’t there. I had my own grief. I’ve been told the church was overflowing, that there were also more than a hundred people on the square outside, despite the rain. The prosecutor was there, the judge as well, and Matziev. The family, of course: Bourrache; his wife, who had to be held up on either side; and the little girl’s two sisters, Aline and Rose, who didn’t seem to understand fully or couldn’t bear to. There was also her aunt, Adélaïde Siffert, whose chin quavered like a ewe’s and who kept repeating all the way to the cemetery, “If I had known . . . if I had known . . .” Of course, you never do.

  As for us, there weren’t many at the church. I say us because it seemed to me we still had only each other, even if I was standing and Clémence was lying in the oak coffin flanked by large candles, so I couldn’t see or feel her anymore. Father Lurant celebrated the mass. He added words of his own that were simple and right. Under his vestments, I could still see the man in underpants with whom I’d shared a meal and a room as Clémence was dying.

  I’d been on bad terms with my father for a long time, and Clémence had no relatives anymore. It was just as well. I couldn’t have stood any of their embraces
or pity. I wanted to be alone immediately, having understood that from this time forward my life would be that way.

  We were six at the graveside: the priest, Ostrane the sexton, Clémentine Hussard, Léocadie Renaut, Marguerite Bonsergent— three old ladies who went to every burial—and me. Everybody listened with head bowed as Father Lurant read the final prayer. Ostrane rested his calloused hands on the handle of his shovel. I was looking at the landscape, the meadows that stretched toward the Guérlante, the hill with its bare trees and dirty-brown paths, the congested sky. The old ladies each threw a pathetic flower on the coffin. The priest made the sign of the cross. Ostrane started shoveling in the dirt. I was first to leave. I didn’t want to watch.

  The following night I had a dream. Clémence was in the ground, crying my name. Sand and roots filled her mouth, and her eyes had no pupils anymore. They were blank and lifeless.

  I woke up with a start, drenched, panting. Then I saw that I was alone in the bed. It had seemed such a small bed before. I thought of Clémence down there under the ground, on this her first night of exile, and for the first time since she died I cried like a child.

  After that there were days—how many, I couldn’t say. And nights. I didn’t go out anymore. I resolved and then wavered. I would take down Gachentard’s rifle, put a round in the magazine, and stick the barrel in my mouth. It’s a miracle I lived to play this game so many days, when I was drunk from dawn to dusk. The house looked like a boar’s wallow and smelled of the grave. I drew my only strength from wine and brandy. At times I shouted and banged on the walls. Some neighbors came to visit, but their sympathy dried up when I started throwing them out. And then one morning, when I’d scared myself with the sight of my castaway’s face in the mirror, a nun from the hospital appeared at the door. In her arms she carried a little bundle of wool that stirred feebly. But that I’ll recount a bit later, not right now. I’ll tell about it once I’ve finished with the others.

  XX

  Mierck had jailed the little Breton in the prison of V, though the army was adamant about intending to shoot him. In fact it was a bit of a contest as to who would do the honors. Naturally, this took some time to sort out, time enough for me to have developed a case of cabin fever to compound my desolation and to decide I had to return to work.

  When I went to the prison to see him, he’d been there for six weeks. I knew the place. It was a former monastery that dated from the Middle Ages. The prison inmates had simply replaced the monks. Other than that, it hadn’t changed much. The refectory was still the refectory; the cells were still the cells. All they’d done was add some bars, heavy doors with strong locks, metal stakes bristling with barbs atop the walls. Light had a hard time penetrating this big building. It was always dark inside, even on the sunniest days. You lost sense of day and night, which was perhaps helpful to the souls of monks, but for the layman this gloomy sameness caused an anxious yearning to leave as soon as you entered. That option was not available to the prisoners, of course.

  I told them it was the judge who’d sent me. Not true, but nobody questioned it. They all knew me.

  When the guard opened the little Breton’s cell door, I couldn’t see much of anything. I heard him, though. He was singing very softly in a childish voice—rather pretty, I might add. The guard left me there. As my eyes adjusted to the obscurity, I made him out: He hunkered in a corner, his knees pulled up under his chin, his head rocking constantly to the cadence of his song. He looked younger than his age, less the farm boy I expected than a youth from an ancient myth, with his beautiful blond hair and the blue eyes one could see only when he could bear to take them off the floor. I don’t know if he’d heard me come in. Anyway, when I spoke he didn’t seem surprised.

  “You killed the little girl?” I asked.

  He interrupted his song and sang to the same gay tune, without lifting his eyes, “It was me, it was really me, it was me, it was really me . . .”

  “I’m not here on behalf of the judge or the colonel,” I said. “You don’t need to be afraid.”

  He looked at me then with the absent smile of one who, having made his choice at a fork in the road, has continued too long to turn back. He was still moving his head like those cherubs in crèches, the ones who, when you insert a coin, bob their heads in perpetual thanks. Without adding anything more, he resumed his country ditty of ripe wheat, larks, and wedding bouquets.

  I stayed awhile longer to consider him, to look at his hands especially. Were these the hands of a strangler? When I left he didn’t turn his head but went on singing and rocking. A month and a half later, he would appear before a military tribunal to face the charges of desertion and murder. He was found guilty on both counts and shot forthwith.

  The Case was closed.

  In a single night, Mierck and Matziev had succeeded in turning a simple little peasant into a half-mad confessed killer. Of course, I heard about the events of that night only later, when I finally found Despiaux and induced him to vomit them up. At the time I knew only that neither the judge nor the colonel had gone to question the prosecutor. What Joséphine had said was completely forgotten. In a way it puzzles me to this day. After all, Mierck loathed Destinat, no bones about it! Here was a heaven-sent opportunity to draw blood: at the very least, to drag his name through the gutter and knock him off the pedestal on which he posed like a Roman emperor.

  But I suppose the world turns by reason of things stronger than hate. It has its rules, and in the end these matter more than any man’s feelings. Destinat and Mierck belonged to the same order of being: good birth, hand-kissing, and motorcars. Above individual particulars and moods, higher even than the laws that men make, there is this code of genteel connivance, this polite tit for tat: “Don’t bother me, and I won’t bother you.” To believe that one of your own could be a murderer would be to believe you could be one yourself. And before you know it, all those you’ve wrinkled your nose at and looked down on like chickenshit, this rabble you’ve spent your life eyeing with contempt, see that you have a rotten soul just like other men. It’s unbearable to contemplate.

  And anyway, why should Destinat have killed Morning Glory?

  According to the official report, when they arrested the little Breton they’d found in his pocket a five-franc note, with a cross in lead pencil in the upper left corner. Adélaïde Siffert formally identified it as the bill she’d given to her goddaughter that lamentable Sunday. It was a quirk of hers to put crosses on bills, her way of marking them as her own, and—who knows—perhaps to reconcile God and Mammon.

  The deserter swore he’d found it along the bank of the little canal. So in fact, he’d gone by there! Yes, but so what? What does that prove? That was also where, under the Blood Sausage, the well-known paint-daubed bridge, he and the typographer had slept, sheltering from the cold and the snow, huddled together: The police had seen the flattened grass and the shape of two bodies. That too he readily confessed.

  On the other side of the little canal, almost opposite the small door that leads to the park of the château, stands the factory laboratory. Very long and low, the building looks like a large glass arcade and was lit up night and day, night and day, because the factory never stopped: The laboratory was constantly manned by two engineers, who checked the tolerances and quality of everything that issued from the big monster’s gut.

  When I asked to speak with the ones who’d been on duty the night of the crime, Arsène Meyer, head of personnel, looked at the pencil in his hand, turning it every which way.

  “Well?” I said, pulling no punches. We’d known each other long enough; besides, he sort of owed me one: I’d turned a blind eye in 1915 when his ne’er-do-well eldest son had gotten it into his head to help himself to various army supplies—blankets, mess kits, and rations—stored in the warehouses near place de la Liberté. After I put a good fright into him, the prick put everything back and I didn’t file a report. Nobody had noticed anyway.

  “They’re no longer with us,” Meyer
tells me.

  “No longer with us—since when?”

  I could barely hear his reply.

  “They went off to England about two months ago.”

  England, especially in wartime, might as well have been the ends of the earth. And two months ago: That would have been shortly after the murder.

  “Why’d they leave?”

  “They were told to.”

  “Who told them to?”

  “The director.”

  “Was this expected?”

  Meyer was now sweating as if he’d committed a crime himself.

  “You’d better be on your way,” he said. “I’ve got orders. You may be the police, but you’re a small fish alongside the ones I answer to.”

  He’d said what he would, and there was no point in making him squirm further. I left him to his embarrassment, with the intention of putting the question to the director himself the following day.

  But my time ran out. My mistake: I should have known the clock was ticking. The next morning at dawn a message arrived: the judge, summoning me to come at once.

  As usual, Crusty welcomed me to the antechamber, where I was left to twiddle my thumbs for the obligatory hour. Beyond the leather-tufted door I heard voices—cheerful, or so it seemed to me. When Crusty returned to tell me His Honor the Judge would receive me now, I was busy peeling off a patch of red silk that had come unstuck from the wall. I’d pulled off forty centimeters or more, which I’d then proceeded to tear into a fringe. I thought he might complain, but the clerk just stared at me in sadness, as though at a very sick child, and said nothing.