By a Slow River

by Philippe Claudel

  It had happened the day after my accident. He died as simply as could be, without fuss or theater—at home on a lovely autumn day, golden and red and just barely cool, the memory of summer still hanging in the air.

  He’d gone out as every day for a midafternoon stroll in the park of the château; and at the end of his walk he’d sat down as usual on the bench overlooking the Guérlante, his hands folded atop his cane. Normally he would have stayed there like that for a little under an hour and then gone back in.

  On that day, when she didn’t see him return, Barbe grew worried and went out into the park; when she caught sight of him in the distance, still sitting on the bench with his back to her, she felt reassured and tended to her kitchen again, where she was cooking a joint of veal. But once her roast was done, and the vegetables for the soup had all been peeled, chopped, and put into a pot, it occurred to her that she still hadn’t heard the prosecutor’s steps. She went out again and saw him still seated on his bench, seemingly indifferent to the fog rising from the river, to the night gradually enveloping all the trees, and to the swarm of squabbling crows in the branches. Barbe crossed the park, to tell her master supper would be ready soon, but when she called to him she got no reply. By the time she’d drawn close, only a few meters away, she had a sinking presentiment. Walking slowly, she circled around in front of the bench to find Destinat sitting upright, his eyes still open wide, his hands folded on the knob of his cane.

  It’s said that life is unfair, but death is even more so—the business of dying, in any case. There’s no sense to who suffers and who passes without a sigh. Justice is not of this world, but it’s not of the other one either. Destinat had passed away without pain or murmur—and without warning. He went all alone, just as he had lived.

  Father Lurant said the funeral was worthy of a minister, with every show of beauty and pomp our region could muster. The gentlemen were dressed in black tailcoats and the women in somber tones, their faces obscured by gray veils. The bishop had taken the trouble to come, as well as the prefect and an undersecretary of state. When the cortège reached the cemetery, a eulogy was delivered by Destinat’s successor in office. Then Ostrane did his part, lending his shovel and his eccentricity.

  As soon as I got out of the hospital, before returning home, I went to the cemetery, to see Clémence and to see him. I walked very slowly, with a stiffness in my left leg that has never left me; it gives me the gait of a veteran, though I never fought a war.

  I sat on the slab over Clémence’s grave, and I told her about my accident: my fear of causing her grief, my long pleasant sleep, my disappointment at waking up. I cleaned the marble and pulled up the clover growing along the stone; with the palm of my hand, I rubbed away the lichens that blistered the cross. Then I blew her a kiss through the air, with its wholesome scent of humus and damp meadow.

  Destinat’s grave was hidden under wreaths of flowers and beads. The flowers had almost rotted away, and their rusty petals were scattered on the surrounding gravel path. The beads glistened and, catching a ray of sun now and then, seemed for that moment like diamonds. There were also sagging bouquets, mud-died ribbons, ornate plaques, and visiting cards in envelopes that remained unopened. I said to myself that for him it was done; at last he was with his wife. He’d taken his time about it. A lifetime. I thought about his tall figure, his silence, his mystery, that aura of solemnity and distance that emanated from his tannic being—and I wondered if I was standing before the grave of a murderer.

  XXIII

  Several years later, after Barbe’s funeral, I told myself it was time for me to enter the château. The key she had given me made me lord of an abandoned domain. When I walked from the cemetery to the great mansion I made my way haltingly, as if toward something long awaiting me that I hadn’t dared to see.

  Turning that key in the tall door, I imagined myself unsealing an envelope that held thin paper—on which, in pale letters, the whole truth had always been inscribed from the first. And I’m not just speaking of the truth about the Case; I’m speaking of my own truth, of what made me this man I am, a man stealing through life.

  While the prosecutor was alive, I had never set foot in the château. It was no place for me. A dishcloth among silk handkerchiefs, that’s how I would have felt. I had been content to brush by, to glimpse it from afar at sunset in its continuous blaze, its vast fire of high slates and copper gables. And then there had been Lysia Verhareine’s death, Destinat waiting for me at the top of the steps before the door with a frightened air, and the two of us trudging toward the little house like convicts in a chain gang, climbing the stairs to her room.

  The château wasn’t a dead man’s abode. It was an empty place—or, rather, emptied—emptied of its life long before. That the prosecutor had lived there, that Barbe had, and Solemn too, didn’t matter one whit: Vacancy could be felt before you crossed the threshold. The château was itself deceased, having stopped breathing ages ago, stopped echoing the sound of steps, of voices, of laughter, of murmurs, of arguments, of dreams, and of sighs.

  Inside, it wasn’t cold. There was no dust, no spiderwebs, none of the debris you expect to send tumbling when you force the locks of tombs. In the hall with its black-and-white checkerboard tiles, it seemed robbers had taken the checkers. There were vases, majestic pedestal tables, and gilded consoles on which dancing couples, frozen in Saxe porcelain, had suspended the movements of their minuet for centuries. In the huge mirror that offered the visitor his reflection, I discovered I was fatter, older, and uglier than I had imagined: I was facing a distorted image of my father, a grotesque resurrection.

  In a corner a big faïence dog stood guard, his jaws gaping, his fangs of glittering enamel, his tongue thick and red. From the ceiling, so high it almost vanished, hung a chandelier that surely weighed three tons, a realization that heightened the unease of anyone standing below it. On the wall opposite the door was a large portrait in shades of cream, silver, and blue, a very young woman in a long dress and a diadem of pearls. Her complexion was pale despite the darkening of the varnish over the years, her mouth the slightest mark of pink, her eyes dreadfully melancholy though she forced herself to smile. She held herself elegantly erect, but you could sense a poignant resignation. With one hand she was opening a fan of lace and mother-of-pearl, while the other rested on a stone lion’s head.

  I lingered many minutes gazing at this woman I’d never seen, this woman I’d never known: Clélis de Vincey . . . Clélis Destinat. She’d been mistress of the house, after all, and so quite entitled to look her oafish visitor up and down. In fact the thought almost had me turning around to get the hell out of there. What right did I have to come and stir up the still air, jostle its ghosts?

  But the figure in the portrait seemed perfectly benevolent, if a bit surprised. I think I spoke to her. I don’t know exactly what I said; that’s hardly important. She was a dead woman from another time. Her attire, her coiffure, her manner, her pose—it all made her seem a kind of sumptuous if brittle museum display. And I could have seen her that way, like the large faïence dog, had her face not reminded me of so many others, dancing in a circle, in motion and fleeting, their blurred features in constant flux, now aging, now growing younger; such was the swirl that I never managed to pin down one face or the other, to look at it long enough to see who it was.

  I was surprised that the prosecutor had never taken down this painting. I couldn’t have lived with so large a picture of Clémence set in front of me like that, every day and every hour. One day I tossed all the pictures of her I had into the fire, those lying photographs in which her bright smile shone. I knew if I had kept them I would have overloaded my sorrow, like an already heavy cart that, if laden with one more burden, would topple into the ditch.

  Might it be that, in the end, Destinat couldn’t see through this big canvas anymore—that it had become more a beautiful object than a portrait of the wife he’d loved and lost? Could it be that he’d earned that museum visitor’s pri
vilege which permits us to look unmoved upon figures under varnishes, hardly believing they ever lived like us, ever breathed, slept, suffered?

  The half-drawn blinds lent all the rooms a pleasant shadowing. Everything was in order, tidy and spotless, as if awaiting a master on vacation who would be back any day now to regain his dominion. The oddest part is that there wasn’t a whiff of any scent to be detected. A house without odors is a dead house indeed.

  I continued on this peculiar voyage for a long while, a cheeky prowler unwittingly following a well-marked path. The château was a seashell, and as I progressed slowly through its spiral, heading gradually toward its heart, I passed the commonplace rooms—kitchen, pantry, laundry, linen closet, sitting room, dining room, smoking room—till I reached the library, an enveloping cove of beautiful books.

  It wasn’t very large: There was a desk with a writing set, a hand-warmer lamp, a very ordinary letter opener, and a blotter in black leather. Flanking the desk were two broad deep chairs, with armrests that curved up high. One chair was like new. The other preserved the imprint of a body; the leather was crackled, and shinier in patches as well. I sat down in the new one. It felt comfortable. Right across from me was the one in which Destinat had spent so many hours, reading or thinking of nothing.

  All those books, arranged along the walls in the perfect order of cadets in formation, muffled the sounds from outside. You could hear nothing but your own breath, neither the wind nor the hum of the factory, close as it was, nor the birds in the park. On Destinat’s chair a book lay open, splayed upside down on the armrest. It was a very old book, with brittle pages that fingers had turned again and again, no doubt, throughout an entire life. I took the book and have it beside me still: Pascal’s Pensées. I have it opened to the very page where he had left off. And on that page, cluttered with cloying pieties and addled comments, there are two sentences that shed their light like gold earrings left on a pile of dung, two sentences underlined in pencil by Destinat’s hand that I know by heart:

  The last act is bloody, however lovely the play may have been up till then. In the end they throw dirt over your head, and that’s it forever.

  Some words send a shiver down your spine and leave you speechless: those words, for example. I don’t know about Pascal’s life—and I don’t give a damn—but I’m sure he must have been none too pleased with the play he’s speaking of. Like me. Like Destinat, no doubt. He too must have drunk from a bitter cup and lost beloved faces all too soon. Otherwise he never could’ve written that; when you live among the flowers, you don’t think about the mud.

  With the book in hand, I went from bedroom to bedroom. There were lots of them, and each resembled the others: bare rooms. What I mean is that they’d always been bare, as if neglected, without memories, without a past, without an echo. They were full of the sadness of objects that have never been of any use. They’d needed a touch of roughhousing, some scuffing up, a fog of breath against their windowpanes, the weight of heavy tired bodies in their four-posters, children’s games scattered on their rugs, knocks on their doors, tears fallen on their parquet floors.

  At the very end of a hallway was Destinat’s room, at some remove from the others, a bit set off on its own, fittingly enough. The door was taller and more austere, a dark color something like garnet. It could have only been his room, there, at the end of this corridor that was more a gallery, a ceremonial walkway commanding you to take it with a measured gait, solemn and circumspect. On either side there were engravings on the walls: holdovers from rancid centuries, bewigged antique noggins with ruffled necks, thin moustaches, and garlands of Latin inscription. Just to pluck up my courage, I cursed them all as I approached the big door.

  Destinat’s room was nothing like the others. Muted and cold like him, like him it commanded a certain respect. The bed was small and narrow, made for one and monastic in its simplicity: iron bedposts, a thin mattress, no frills or flounces, no meringue overhanging it. The walls were covered in plain gray cloth, without picture or decoration of any sort. Near the bed, on a small table, lay a crucifix. At the foot of the bed, a grooming set, pitcher, and basin. Opposite where he slept, a desk on which everything had been put away: no book, no paper, no pen.

  From the sleep of its occupant the room had drawn the immeasurable reserve that made it scarcely a human place, damned for all eternity to remain impervious to laughter, to joy, to sighs of contentment, its very order a token of deadened hearts.

  Still with Pascal’s book in my hand, I went to the window: a beautiful view of the Guérlante, the little canal, the bench where death had come for Destinat, the small house in which Lysia Verhareine had lived.

  I was as close as possible to what had been Destinat’s life. Not his professional one but his inner life, the truth we mask with ingratiation, exertion, politeness, and small talk. His whole universe had been the void of these cold walls, these sparse furnishings. I wouldn’t have been surprised, in this room so far from the living, to see a dead man return, to see him suddenly appear and say he’d been waiting for me, wondering at my having taken so long. But the dead have their own business to tend to, which never coincides with ours.

  In the drawers of the writing desk, carefully stored, were block calendars from which all the days were torn away, leaving only stubs imprinted with the year. There were dozens of them, attesting to thousands of days gone by, wasted, tossed in the bin like the slips that had represented them. Destinat had kept the stubs. We keep such rosaries as we can.

  The largest drawer was locked. I knew there was no point in looking for that little key, which must have been the black one so oddly shaped. I felt sure it had been taken to the grave, hooked to the end of a chain with the watch its other end, tucked into the watch pocket of a vest by now perhaps already in tatters.

  I forced the drawer with my knife. The wood gave way in a spray of splinters.

  There was only a single object inside, and I recognized it right away. I stopped breathing. Everything seemed enchanted. It was the little notebook, rectangular and delicate, bound in lovely red morocco, that I’d seen Lysia Verhareine holding in her hands. That had been years ago. It was the day I’d climbed to the crest of the hill and caught her gazing at the vast killing field. Suddenly it seemed to me that she entered the room, laughing only to freeze, surprised once more at my awkward presence.

  I snatched the notebook—afraid it would catch fire in my hand—and rushed out like a thief.

  I’m not too sure what Clémence would have thought of all that, whether she would have found it good or bad. I know I felt ashamed, the delicate notebook weighing like lead in my pocket.

  I ran and ran. And once I had shut myself away in my house, I set about emptying a bottle of brandy until my heart and breath had begun to slow.

  I waited till evening with the little notebook on my knees, not daring to open it, looking at it that way for hours, like some living creature I had discovered in the woods. When evening came my head was hot. I had for so long kept my legs squeezed together and still I couldn’t feel them anymore. Though I imagined I could feel the notebook: It called to mind a heart I was sure would start beating again when I touched its cover and laid it open. A heart I would break into, a different sort of burglary.

  XXIV

  December 13, 1914

  My darling,

  At last I’m near you. This morning I arrived in P, a town only a few kilometers from the front where you are. I was accorded a most charming welcome. The mayor rushed to greet me as his savior. The school is abandoned. I will replace the teacher there, who’s seriously ill, so I’m told. His lodgings were in a deplorable state; I’ll have to find a place to settle into. For now I’m going to stay at a hotel. The mayor took me there. He’s a fat peasant who plays at being a young blade. You’d find him funny, no doubt. I miss you so much. But knowing that you’re near me, knowing that we breathe the same air, see the same clouds, the same sky—all of that comforts me. Look after yourself; be very careful.
I love you and kiss you tenderly.

  Your Lyse

  My darling,

  I’ve settled into a marvelous place, a doll’s house in a great park that belongs to a beautiful mansion. People here call it the château. They exaggerate a bit; it’s not a real château, but it is charming all the same. The mayor was the one who came up with the idea. We went to see the owner, who’s an old widower. He’s the prosecutor in V. When we met, he couldn’t even bring himself to say hello. He just held my hand a long while, as though surprised to be meeting anyone. Such a deep sadness in his eyes. In the end he gave the mayor his consent, said good-bye to me, and left us.

  The little house hasn’t been lived in for quite some time. I’ll have to do a lot of tidying up. I hope you can see it someday. I miss you so much. For letters, the address is simply Château, rue des Champs-Fleury. Your last one was dated three weeks ago, and too much time has passed without word that you are well. I hope you’re not su fering too much on account of this cold weather. We hear gun blasts day and night. My whole being shudders. I’m afraid. I love you and kiss you tenderly.

  Your Lyse

  December 23, 1914

  My darling,

  I’m so worried: still no news from you, and the gun blasts never stop. They said the war wouldn’t last long. If only you knew how I long for your arms, to be held in them and see your smile, your eyes. I can’t wait for this war to be over so I can marry you and have some beautiful children to tug on your moustache! Oh, if only our parents hadn’t been so foolish last year, we would already belong to each other. If ever you write them, don’t tell them where I am. I left without warning. It doesn’t matter: As far as I’m concerned, they’ve ceased to exist.

  I’m trying to take my new job seriously. The children are obedient at least. In fact, I’m fond of them, and I think they’re fond of me too. Many of them bring me little gifts—an egg, some walnuts, a piece of bacon. They give me a bit of peace and let me forget my loneliness a little.