By a Slow River

by Philippe Claudel

  Mierck was tilting far back in his armchair. Matziev was right beside him like a good soul mate, though a taller, thinner one. It seemed these two had fallen in love with each other: They were never seen apart. Matziev had extended his stay. He still lived at Bassepin’s house, driving us crazy with his phonograph. Not until the end of February would he be out of our lives for good.

  Charging ahead, Mierck started in on me.

  “By what right did you go to the factory?” he barked.

  I didn’t answer.

  “What are you after? The Case has been solved. The guilty have paid the ultimate price.”

  “That is officially true, Your Honor,” I said, inflaming him all the more.

  “You have some unofficial truth to add?”

  “Mine is only to make sure there isn’t one.”

  Matziev fiddled with a cigar that, amazingly, he hadn’t lit yet. Mierck mounted another attack. He looked like a suckling pig pulled from the sow tit by his tail. “Yours is to protect and not disturb decent people. If I am ever informed of your troubling anyone, anyone at all, about this case, any case we have closed, you can expect to be looking for another way to serve the public.” Having delivered his threat, he rose to stand beside me, almost purring into my ear in a far gentler tone. “I can understand that you haven’t quite been yourself. The loss of your wife—who among us could bear it?”

  To hear him speak of Clémence, evoking her memory, took me unawares. It was as if jasmine had just sprouted out of a pile of dung.

  “Shut your filthy mouth,” I said, without thinking.

  It was so unexpected, he might have found it amusing if he weren’t apoplectic with rage. Once the die was cast, I resolved not to lose my advantage.

  “To hell with you,” I added.

  Mierck seemed he would either strike me or collapse. Matziev stared incredulously; the officer’s gallantry he had shown, attacking innocents in support of his pal, had for the moment eluded him. He lit the cigar and continued to shake the match long after it was extinguished. I left them to sort it out between them.

  In the street the sun was shining. I felt almost giddy about my unplanned insolence. I really wanted to chat with someone there and then, someone I could trust and who felt as I did about things. I’m not talking about the Case, I’m talking about life and time and such things.

  I thought of Mazerulles, the secretary to the education inspector I’d gone to see after Lysia Verhareine was found dead. It would’ve been nice to see even his turnip head again, his gray complexion, his moist eyes like those of a dog waiting for the hand that was sure to pet it. I started heading toward the place des Carmes, where the inspector’s headquarters was. I took my time. No doubt Mierck was already busy demanding my head. But until I received word, I could at least enjoy the memory of unplanned insolence, and the look it had left on Mierck’s fat puss.

  When I asked the concierge if Mazerulles still worked there, he pushed his glasses up his nose. “Monsieur Mazerulles left us a year ago,” he told me.

  “Is he still in V?”

  The guy looked at me as though I’d just arrived from the moon. “I doubt he could have gone far, but you can always check. He’s in the graveyard.”

  Poor Mazerulles. He’d done nothing in life to deserve the sarcasm.

  XXI

  The weeks flew by, and spring returned. Twice a day without fail I would visit Clémence’s grave, in the morning and just before evening. I would recount for her the hours of my life that she had missed, as though she had simply stepped out to buy bread, in a kitchen-table tone—the kind in which words of love don’t need grand flourishes and fancy phrases to twinkle like louis d’or.

  I’d thought about abandoning everything—my job, the house—and moving on. But I remembered that the earth is round, and that soon enough I’d retrace my steps—pretty pointless, all in all. I’d sort of counted on Mierck to send me packing. I told myself he’d surely find a way to have me transferred or suspended. In fact, I was a coward. I foisted off on someone else responsibility for action I couldn’t take myself. But Mierck did nothing— nothing that worked, anyway.

  Now it was 1918. You could sense the war was about to end. It’s easy to write this today, knowing the war really did end in that year, but I don’t think I’m lying when I say you could sense it. The feeling made the last convoys of wounded and dead passing through our town seem even more horrible and futile. Our streets were still full of cripples and awful faces, crudely stitched back together. The hospital was always full, like those prestigious seaside resorts that society people recommend to one another. Except that here the high season lasted for four years without slackening. Sometimes I would catch sight of Madame de Flers from a distance, and then my heart would stop—as though she were going to notice me, come to me as she’d done before, and lead me to Clémence’s bedside.

  Almost every day I walked along the bank of the little canal, where I could continue to root around like a dumb stubborn dog, less to find a crucial detail than to keep things from being forgotten. Often I would make out Destinat’s tall figure beyond the wall encircling the park, and I could tell he took note of my pottering there. Since his retirement he hardly left the château anymore, except for the occasional trip to V, and received even less frequently—that is to say, he didn’t receive a soul. He spent his days in silence, said Barbe, not even reading, seated at his desk with folded hands, gazing out the window. Or else he would stroll in his park, like a lone animal. At bottom, we weren’t all that different, he and I.

  One day—it was June 13 that same year—as I was walking along the bank, I heard grass rustling behind me just past the Blood Sausage. I turned around to find Destinat. He was even taller than in my memory, his gray mane still lustrous but almost white, smoothed back from his forehead. He wore a black suit, and his shoes were impeccably polished as ever; a small ivory knob topped the cane in his right hand. He looked at me without stepping forward. I think he was waiting for me to pass before he would come out through the door at the edge of his park.

  We eyed each other without speaking, like two old rams.

  Destinat spoke first. “I see you here often, you know . . .”

  He dragged the sentence out without trying to finish it, or without being able to. For my part, I didn’t know what to say. It had been so long since I’d addressed him, I couldn’t remember how it was done.

  With the tip of his cane, he dug into the moss that bordered the bank. Coming a little closer, he scrutinized me—not maliciously but with an unwholesome precision. The strange thing was that his gaze didn’t embarrass me; rather, it gave me a feeling of bliss, soothing and calm, as when an old doctor we’ve known since childhood examines us to get to the bottom of our aches and pains.

  “You never came to ask me . . .”

  Here again he didn’t end his sentence. I saw his lips quiver slightly, and his eyes seemed troubled by the glare. I knew what he wanted to talk about. We understood each other quite well.

  “Would I have gotten an answer?” I asked, dragging out my words as he did.

  He breathed deeply. With his left hand he fished out his watch; it hung from the end of a chain, to the other end of which an odd little black key was also attached. Then he gazed into the distance, at the beautiful pale-blue sky, but quickly his eyes came to rest on me once more and now their penetration made me flinch.

  “We should be wary of answers—they’re never what we want them to be, don’t you think?”

  With the tip of his left boot he nudged into the water the bit of moss he’d dislodged with his cane. New moss of a tender green, it waltzed around in an eddy before heading midstream, where it sank.

  When I looked up, Destinat had gone.

  Life picked up again, as they say, with the end of the war. The hospital gradually emptied; so did our streets. The cafés did less business; so did Agathe Blachart, who had not yet left for Australia. Sons came home, husbands too: some still whole, others badly
damaged. Of course, many never reappeared; but despite all proof to the contrary, there were those who held out hopes of seeing them turn the corner, come into the house, and sit down at the table, expecting their pitcher of wine. As these families emerged from the terrible years, others, whose menfolk worked at the factory and who had gone through the war without much worry or privation, were paying the price of their good luck. Between these opposing camps the rift grew ever deeper. Some wouldn’t speak to those across the divide. Others had reached the point of unveiled hatred.

  Bassepin launched his monument business. In fact, one of the first he furnished was for our town: a soldier with the flag in one hand and a rifle in the other, his body lurching awkwardly forward on a slightly bent knee. Beside him was a French cockerel, huge and bursting with pride, portrayed at the moment when he belts out his song, tilted upward on his spurs.

  The mayor unveiled it on November 11, 1920. He made a speech—quavers, flights of fancy, rolling eyes—and then read out the names of the forty-three from our town who’d died for their country; after each name he paused for Aimé Lachepot, the local policeman, to give a solemn drumroll. Women in black wept; their children, those still small and heedless, took them by the hand and tried to drag them to Margot Gagneure’s store close by, especially for the licorice sticks and honey lollipops.

  Then there was the raising of the colors. The band played a dirge that brought everyone to their feet, standing up straight with an unswerving gaze, and after the last measure was finished, one and all rushed to the town hall, where a reception was held. People talked. They even started laughing again. The dead were forgotten over sparkling wine and pâté on toast. The living parted an hour later, ready to reenact year after year this sham of heavy hearts and remembrance.

  Destinat was at the ceremony, in the front row; I was two meters behind him. But he didn’t come to the town hall. Slowly, he made his way back to the château.

  Though he’d been retired for more than four years, there were, as I’ve said, the occasional trips to V. Solemn would have the horses harnessed by ten minutes to ten. At ten on the dot, Destinat would come down and settle into the carriage, and away they’d go. Once in town, he walked through the streets. It was always the same route: rue Marville, place de la Préfecture, allée Baptiste-Villemaux, rue Plassis, rue d’Autun, square Fidon, rue des Bourelles. Solemn followed in the carriage twenty meters behind, stroking both horses with his hand to calm them; they tended to pound the ground with their hooves while dropping their loads of dung. Destinat would be greeted by people of the city. He nodded slightly, never exchanging a word.

  At noon he would enter the Rébillon, where Bourrache welcomed him as always. He still had his table. Without fail, he ate the same dishes and drank the same wine as when he’d made heads roll. The difference was that now he lingered after his coffee. The dining room would empty, but Destinat remained. Then he would wave Bourrache over to join him. The innkeeper would pick up a bottle of brandy—one of his best—along with two little glasses and sit down across from the prosecutor. He would fill the glasses, gulping his down. As for Destinat, he whiffed the alcohol but never brought it to his lips.

  Then the two would talk.

  “About what?” I dared to ask Bourrache one day, though only after many years had gone by.

  His gaze lost its focus. You would have thought he was looking at a distant scene or through a stranger’s glasses. His eyes began to glisten.

  “About my little girl,” he said, and big tears rolled down the stubble on his cheeks. “It was mainly the prosecutor who talked at first, and I who listened. Such a pleasure to listen to a man of intelligence and learning. Nothing escaped his notice. Belle had hardly said a word to him when she brought his bread or a carafe of water, but he apprehended everything about her. He could bring her to life in a way I could not in my own memories. He would paint a picture for me, speak about her complexion, her hair, her birdlike voice, the shape of her mouth, and its color as well. He would mention the names of painters I didn’t know and say she could have been in their pictures. And then he would ask every question you can imagine—about her character, her little quirks, her childish sayings, her sicknesses, her earliest years. He let me talk, on and on and on, and he never wearied.

  “And every time he came back, it was the same: ‘What if we spoke about her now, my dear Bourrache,’ he would begin. As for me, my heart wasn’t in it. I was filled with grief, and the feeling would last all through the end of the day and into the evening too. But I could hardly be rude to the prosecutor, so I would talk too. An hour, two hours—I think he would’ve been happy to let me continue for days on end. It must have been his age, poor fellow. I suppose he was getting a bit senile and took an old man’s pleasure in hearing the same story over and over. And being all alone, never having had a child of his own, that must have been gnawing at his mind.

  “One day he even asked me for a photograph of my little girl. Can you imagine? Photographs are so expensive, we hardly ever made any. I had only three; one of them showed my three daughters. Belle’s godmother had insisted on paying for it. She’d taken them to Isidore Kopieck, the Russian in the rue des États. He posed them with the two older girls sitting on the floor, against a setting of grass and flowers, and Belle standing between them, her smile full of grace like the Blessed Virgin’s. I had three copies, one for each girl, so I gave Belle’s copy to the prosecutor. It’s not often common folk have a chance to be generous to grand people. His gratitude could not have been more profound. He almost tore my arm off, pumping my hand in thanks.

  “It was a week before his death, the last time he came in. The same ritual as always: the meal, the coffee, the brandy, the conversation. The same questions about my poor little girl, nearly always the same. Then, after a long silence, he told me almost in a murmur, in the tone of wise pronouncement, ‘She never knew evil; she left us without knowing it; but as for the rest of us, evil has marked us forever.’ Then he got up slowly and gave me a long fond handshake. I helped him on with his coat, and he picked up his hat. He looked intently around the empty room, the tables waiting for the next seating. I should have known when I opened the door and said, ‘See you next time, Mr. Prosecutor.’ He smiled without answering, as everyone else knew him to do.”

  Poor Bourrache. The pain of remembering. Writing brings it upon me. I know this, now that I’ve been at it for months. It’s a pain in your hand but also in your soul. Man wasn’t meant to do this—and what’s the point, anyway? What’s the point for me? If Clémence hadn’t left, I would never have scribbled all these pages—despite Morning Glory’s death and all its mystery, despite the little Breton’s death and the blot it left on my conscience. Yes, just her presence would have given me the strength to leave the past behind and not look back. But now I have nowhere to go and no means of travel. And so I write to trick myself, to pretend, to convince myself she’s still waiting for me, waiting to hear from me, wherever she may be. My words speak and she listens.

  Writing makes me live for two, when I cannot live for one.

  Living alone a long while, one must do something. Most people wind up talking to the walls. I’ve often wondered what the prosecutor chose to do. How did he spend his hours? Who was it he devoted his little thoughts to, his inner conversations? In the end, only a widower understands a widower, or so it seems to me. All in all, many things could have brought us closer.

  XXII

  On September 27, 1921, as I was crossing the rue du Pressoir, I was knocked down by an automobile I hadn’t seen coming. I remember the moment my forehead hit the curb. I thought of Clémence and, believing she was still alive, imagined them informing her that her husband had been in an accident. In that same fraction of a second I kicked myself for being so scatterbrained as not to have looked before crossing; it was my fault she would have to endure this trauma. Then I fainted, almost happily, as though I’d been led into a lovely quiet pasture. When I awoke at the hospital, they told me I�
��d drifted in this strange sleep for seven days. Seven days away from my life, so to speak, seven days of which I have no memory at all. In fact, the doctors thought I would never wake up. They were wrong. I had no luck.

  “We came very close to losing you!” one of them told me when I awoke: a cheerful young man with wide brown eyes, young enough not to have to have lost every illusion of youth over the past few years. I made no reply. In that great night I hadn’t found Clémence. I hadn’t heard or sensed her presence. So, contrary to professional opinion, I must in fact have been a long way from dying.

  They kept me for two more weeks. I was strangely weak. I knew none of the nurses who cared for me, but they seemed to know me. They brought me soups, herbal teas, boiled meat. I kept looking for Madame de Flers. I even asked one of them if she was still there. The nurse smiled without answering. She must have thought I was delirious.

  When they decided I was strong enough, I had a visit from the mayor. He shook my hand. Told me I’d had a close call; he’d fretted about it an awful lot. Then he dug into his baggy trousers and fished out a package of sticky candies. He laid them on the night table somewhat sheepishly. “I wanted to bring you a nice bottle of wine, but they have their rules here, so I said to myself . . . Anyway, the confectioner fills these with plum brandy.”

  He laughed. I laughed too, to put him at ease. I wanted to talk, to ask him questions; but he raised his finger to his lips, as if to say there would be time enough for that. The nurses had warned him not to overtax me. We continued the visit this way a few moments, looking at each other, looking at the candy, the ceiling, the window through which you could see nothing but a slice of sky, not a tree or a hill or a cloud.

  When the mayor got up to go, he shook my hand again, deliberately. He didn’t inform me that day of Destinat’s death. I would hear about it two days later from Father Lurant, when he came to visit me.