by Fred Vargas
Well, rustic or refined, tall or thin, there they were at a table in this dingy café. So no matter.
‘You shaved off your beard,’ said Marc. Aren’t you doing pre-history any more?’
‘Yeah, I am,’ said Mathias.
‘Where?’
‘In my head.’
Marc nodded. The information had been accurate. Mathias was indeed down on his luck.
‘What’s up with your hands?’
Mathias looked down at his black nails.
‘I’ve been working in an engineering shop. They kicked me out. They said I didn’t have any feeling for machines. I managed to fuck up three in one week. Machines are complicated. Especially when they break down.’
‘And now?’
‘I’m selling tatty posters in the Châtelet Métro station.’
‘Any money in that?’
‘No. And you?’
‘Nothing to say. I used to be a ghostwriter for a publisher.’
‘Medieval stuff?’
‘Eighty-page love stories. You have this guy, untrustworthy but good in bed, and this girl, radiant but innocent. In the end they fall madly in love and it’s incredibly boring. The story doesn’t say when they split up.’
‘Of course not,’ said Mathias. ‘Did you walk out?’
‘No, got sacked. I used to change whole sentences in the page proofs. Because I’m bitter and twisted, and because I was so fed up. They noticed. Are you married? Partner? Children?’
‘No, nothing like that,’ said Mathias.
The two men drew breath and looked at each other.
‘How old are we now?’ asked Mathias.
‘Thirty-five-ish. We’re meant to be grown-up by now.’
‘Yeah, so I’ve heard. Are you still poking about in that medieval midden?’
Marc nodded.
‘What a pain,’ said Mathias. ‘You were always a bit unreasonable about that.’
‘Don’t start, Mathias, it’s not the moment. Where do you live?’
‘In a room I’ve got to get out of in ten days. The posters don’t pay enough to rent a bedsit. Let’s say I’m going downhill.’ Mathias squeezed his two powerful hands together.
‘I can show you this house,’ said Marc. ‘If you’ll come in with me on it, we might be able to forget the thirty thousand years between us.’
‘And the midden too?’
‘Who knows? What about it?’
Mathias, although he was uninterested in, indeed was hostile to anything that had occurred since 10,000 BC or so, had always-incomprehensibly-made an exception for his lanky medievalist friend, who always wore black with a silver belt. To tell the truth, he had always considered this weakness for his friend a lapse of taste on his part. But his affection for Marc, his appreciation of the other’s versatile and sharp mind, had made him close his eyes to the distressing choice his friend had made to study that particularly degenerate phase of human history. Despite this appalling weakness of Marc’s, Mathias tended to trust him, and had allowed himself to be dragged now and then into one of his quixotic enterprises. Even today, when it was clear that Don Quixote had been unhorsed and was reduced to trudging along like a pilgrim, in short, now that he was clearly down on his luck, just as Mathias was himself (and in fact that was rather pleasing), Marc had not lost his persuasive air of royal grace. There was a world-weary expression perhaps in the lines at the corner of the eyes, and some accretion of unhappiness, there had been shocks and traumas he would rather have done without, yes, there was all that. But he still retained his charm and the fragments of the dreams that Mathias had lost sight of in the underground corridors of the Châtelet Métro station.
True, Marc did not seem to have given up on the Middle Ages. But Mathias was ready to go along with him to this ‘disgrace’ that he was describing as they walked along. His hand, adorned with rings, waved arabesques as he explained the deal. What it seemed to be was a tumbledown house, with four floors if you counted the attic, and a bit of garden. Mathias wasn’t put off. They would have to try to find enough money for the rent. Make a fire in the hearth. Find room for Marc’s aged godfather. Why? He couldn’t be abandoned, because it was either that or a retirement home. OK. No problem. Mathias was not bothered. He could see Châtelet Métro station receding into the distance. He followed Marc’s lead, satisfied that his friend was in the same boat as himself, satisfied that he was in the pathetic situation of an unemployed medievalist, satisfied with the showy ornaments his friend dressed up in, and entirely satisfied with the wretch of a house, in which they were certain to freeze to death because it was still only March. So by the time they arrived at the rusty gate, through which you could see the house across a patch of long grass, in one of those secret streets that exist in Paris, he was incapable of viewing the dilapidation of the site with any objectivity. He found the whole thing perfect. Turning to Marc, he shook hands. It was a deal. But even with what he earned selling posters, it still wasn’t going to be enough. Marc, leaning on the gate, agreed. Both men became serious. A long silence followed. They were trying to think of names. Someone else as down and out as themselves. Then Mathias suggested a name: Lucien Devernois. Marc reacted strongly.
‘You’re not serious? Devernois? Have you forgotten what he does?’
‘Yes, I know,’ sighed Mathias. ‘He works on the history of the Great War.’
‘Come on, you can’t be serious. We may not have much money, and I know it’s not the moment to be too fussy, OK. But still, there is a bit of the past left to think about the future. And you’re proposing we get in a contemporary historian? Someone who works on the Great War? D’you realise what you’re saying?’
‘Well, yes,’ said Mathias. ‘But he isn’t a complete prat.’
‘Maybe not. But still. It’s not an option. There are limits.’
‘Yeah, I know. Although if you push me, Middle Ages and contemporary history, it’s all pretty much the same thing.’
‘Oh, steady, watch what you’re saying.’
‘OK. But I think I heard that Devernois was seriously down on his luck, although he may earn a bit on the side.’
Marc frowned.
‘Down on his luck?’
‘That’s what I said. He left off teaching teenagers in a lycée up north. He’s got a really dead-end job now, teaching part-time in a private school in Paris. Bored, disillusioned, writing, on his own.’
‘So he really is down on his luck, like us. Why didn’t you say so straightaway?’
Marc stood still for a few seconds. He thought fast.
‘That changes everything,’ he announced. ‘Get going, Mathias. Great War or no Great War, let’s turn a blind eye. Courage, men, France expects you to do your duty. You go find him and persuade him. I’ll meet you both back here at seven with the landlord. We’ve got to sign the lease tonight. Go on, find a way, convince him. If all three of us are in such a bad way, we ought to be able to contrive a total disaster.’
Saluting, they went their separate ways, Marc at a run, Mathias at walking pace.
IV
IT WAS THEIR FIRST EVENING IN THE DISGRACE IN RUE CHASLE. THE Great War historian had turned up, shaken hands at speed, taken a look at all four floors, and hadn’t been seen since.
After the first moments of relief, now that the lease was signed, Marc felt his worst fears reviving. The excitable modernist, who had turned up with his pale cheeks, his long lock of hair falling in his eyes, his tightly knotted tie, grey jacket, and a pair of shoes which had seen better days, true, but which had been handmade in England, inspired in him a degree of apprehension. Even setting aside his catastrophic choice of research subject, Lucien was unpredictable: a mixture of stiffness and laissez-aller, bonhomie and seriousness, good-natured irony and deliberate cynicism, and he seemed to lurch from one extreme to the other, with short bursts of fury and good humour. It was disconcerting. You couldn’t anticipate what was coming next. Sharing a house with someone who wore a tie was a new experience
. Marc looked over at Mathias, who was pacing around the empty room with a preoccupied expression.
‘Was it easy to persuade him?’
‘Piece of cake. He stood up, twitched his tie, put his hand on my shoulder and said, “The solidarity of the trenches. Theirs not to reason why. I’m your man.” A bit over the top. On the way, he asked me what we were up to these days. I told him a bit about pre-history, selling posters, the Middle Ages, ghostwriting romances, and machines. He pulled a face-maybe it was the Middle Ages he didn’t like. But he recovered, muttered something about the melting-pot of the trenches, and that was it.’
‘And now he’s vanished.’
‘He’s left his rucksack. That’s promising.’
Then the trenches expert had reappeared, carrying on his shoulder a packing case for firewood. Marc wouldn’t have thought he had the strength. He might be OK after all.
So that was why, after a scratch supper, eaten off their knees, the three seriously unemployed historians found themselves huddled before a large fire. The fireplace was imposing and coated in soot. ‘Fire,’ Lucien Devernois announced with a smile, ‘is our common starting-point. A modest example, but common to us all. Or if you prefer, it’s our base. Apart from being out of a job, this is our only known point of contact. Never neglect points of contact.’
Lucien accompanied this with an expansive gesture. Marc and Mathias looked at him, without trying to work out what this meant, warming their hands over the flames.
‘It’s simple,’ Lucien explained, getting launched. ‘For the sturdy pre-historian among us, Mathias Delamarre, fire is essential. He thinks of groups of hairy men huddling around their life-giving fire at the cave mouth, because it keeps away wild animals: the invention of fire.’
‘The invention of fire,’ Mathias began, ‘is a controversial …’
‘Enough!’ said Lucien. ‘Please keep your expert opinion to yourself. I have no interest in who is right and wrong about the caves, but let us honour the importance of fire in prehistoric times. Moving on, we come to Marc Vandoosler, who racks his brains trying to calculate the medieval population and what does he count? “Hearths.” Not so easy either, for the poor medievalists. Swiftly climbing the ladder of years, we get to me, and the firing line of the Great War: men under fire, the line of fire, reaching back to the dawn of mankind. Rather touching, isn’t it.’
Lucien laughed, sniffed loudly and rekindled the blaze in the grate by pushing a log with his foot. Marc and Mathias smiled weakly. They were going to have to reckon with this impossible guy who was nevertheless indispensable, since he would be paying a third of the rent.
‘Well,’ said Marc, twisting his rings, ‘when our disagreements get really serious and our chronological preferences too hard to face, all we have to do is make a fire, right?’
‘It might help,’ Lucien conceded.
‘Sensible idea,’ added Mathias.
So they stopped talking history, and warmed themselves by the fire. In fact they were more concerned about the weather that evening, and for the evenings to come. The wind had risen and heavy rain was leaking into the house. The three of them began to estimate the extent of the repairs needing to be done, and the work involved. For now, the rooms were all empty and they were sitting on packing cases. Tomorrow each would bring his own possessions. They would have to plaster the walls, rewire the electricity, fix the plumbing, prop up the ceilings. And Marc was going to collect his elderly godfather. He would explain that another time. Who was he? Just his old godfather, that’s all. He was actually his uncle as well. And what did this uncle-godfather do? Nothing, he was retired. Retired from what? From his job, of course. What kind of job? Oh, Lucien was a pain with all his questions. He was a civil servant, if you must know. He would fill in the details another time.
V
THE TREE HAD GROWN.
For more than a month, Sophia had been keeping watch from the second-floor window, observing the new neighbours. They interested her. Was there any harm in that? Three fairly young men, no women to be seen, and no children. Just three guys. She had immediately recognised the one who had been pressing his forehead against the rusty gates and had told her at once that her tree was a beech. She had been pleased to see him back in the street. He had brought with him two very different-looking fellows. A tall, fair-haired type, who wore sandals, and an excitable character in a grey suit. She was getting to know them rather well. Sophia wondered whether it was quite proper to be spying on them like this. Well, proper or not, it reassured and distracted her, and it was giving her an idea. So she went on doing it. They had been in perpetual motion for the whole month of April: transporting planks, buckets, sacks of stuff in wheelbarrows, or boxes on-what do you call those metal things with wheels? Trolleys, that was it. So, boxes on trolleys. Plenty of work going on, then. They had been crisscrossing the garden the whole time, and that was how Sophia had learnt their names, by leaving the window open. The thin one in black was Marc. The slow-moving, fair-haired one was Mathias, and the one always with a tie was Lucien. Even when he was making holes in the walls, he kept his tie on. Sophia touched her neckscarf. Well, each to his own mannerism.
Through the side window of a boxroom on the second floor, Sophia could also see what was going on inside the house next door. The newly repaired windows had no curtains and she did not think they would ever acquire any. Each resident seemed to have chosen a floor. The problem was that the tall, fair-haired one worked in his apartment half-naked, virtually naked, and sometimes completely naked, according to his fancy. As far as she could see, this bothered him not at all. It was embarrassing. He was good to look at, that wasn’t the problem. But as a result, Sophia did not really feel at her ease perching in the boxroom. Apart from work on the house, which sometimes seemed to overwhelm them, but which they were pursuing with determination-they did a lot of reading and writing as well. Bookshelves had been filled with books. Sophia who had been born on the rocky shores of Delphi, and who had made her way in the world entirely by her voice, admired anyone who could spend time reading a book at a table with a reading lamp.
Then last week, there had been a new arrival. Another man, but much older. At first Sophia thought he was a visitor. But no, the elderly man had come to stay. For some time? Well, anyway there he was, in one of the attic rooms. It was pretty odd, all the same. He had a good face, she thought. He was far and away the most handsome of her neighbours. But the oldest too: sixty, seventy, maybe. To look at him you would suppose he would have a commanding voice, but on the contrary, he spoke so softly and mildly that to date Sophia had been unable to hear a single word of what he said. He held himself very erect and tall, very much the ex-commander of the fleet. Nor did he lend a hand with the repair work. He watched, and chatted. It was impossible to catch his name. For the moment, Sophia called him ‘Alexander the Great’ or ‘the old bugger’, depending on her mood.
The one you heard most often was the one with a tie, Lucien. His voice carried a long way and he seemed to take pleasure in giving a loud running commentary on what he was doing, giving all kinds of advice, only rarely followed by his companions. She had tried talking to Pierre about the neighbours, but he was no more interested in them than in the tree. As long as they didn’t make too much noise in the disgrace next door, he was not going to concern himself with them. Yes, of course, Pierre was preoccupied with his social work. Yes, of course, every day he had to deal with files on terrible cases, single mothers sleeping rough, young people chucked out by their families, homeless twelve-year-olds, old people wheezing away in slums, and he compiled reports on all that for the minister. And Pierre was the kind of person who was conscientious about his work. Even if Sophia hated the way he sometimes talked about ‘his’ cases, which he divided into categories and sub-categories, the way he did her fans. Which category would Pierre have put her in, when at twelve years old she was trying to sell embroidered handkerchiefs to tourists in Delphi? A ‘social problem’ for sure. So yes, one could
understand how, with all that to think about, he couldn’t give a damn about a tree or the four next-door neighbours. But still. Why would he never talk about them? Even for a minute?
VI
MARC DID NOT EVEN LOOK UP WHEN HE HEARD LUCIEN FROM HIS third-floor eyrie shout an order of high alert, or some such warning. Marc was more or less learning to put up with the Great War historian, who had, for one thing, put in a huge amount of work on the house, and was, for another, given to impressively long periods of silent study. Indeed they were so intense that he was dead to the world for as long as he was grappling with the mudbath of the Great War. Lucien had made himself responsible for all the rewiring and replumbing, of which mysteries Marc knew absolutely nothing, and for which he would be eternally grateful to him. He had transformed the attic into a large double room, neither cold nor dilapidated, where the godfather was now happily settled. He paid a third of the rent and contributed a generous flow of donations, bringing some new refinement to the house every week. But he was also generous with speeches and occasionally with outbursts. He could deliver sarcastic military tirades, excesses of all kinds, and snap judgements. He was capable of ranting away for a whole hour at full stretch, over some tiny detail. Marc was learning to let Lucien’s tirades go in and out of his consciousness like inoffensive monsters. Lucien wasn’t even a militarist. He was trying, with determination and rigour, to penetrate the heart of the Great War, but not succeeding in locating it. Perhaps that was why he shouted so much. No, there must be some other reason. At any rate, this time Lucien came downstairs and burst into Marc’s room without knocking.
‘General alert!’ he cried. ‘Take cover! The neighbour’s on her way.’
‘Which neighbour?’
‘The one on the Western Front. The one on the right, if you prefer. The rich woman who wears scarves. Not a word. When she rings the bell, nobody moves. Empty house. I’ll tell Mathias.’