Hunting Party

by Agnes Desarthe

  She’s still alive. Didn’t come to her daughter’s funeral. Didn’t see fit to take care of her grandson. After the Vigie scandal, at which she hadn’t been present, but which someone or other had related to her, Grandma blew a gasket.

  “Burn this for me, son,” Mama said, holding out a ball of paper to Tristan.

  “What is it?”

  “Your grandmother’s death sentence. A letter. I’ve read it, now you burn it, and we’ll never speak of it again. She’s gone from my life. She’s gone from yours.”

  “What did she write?”

  “Malicious things, false claims, curses.”

  “Won’t you miss her?”

  “No.”

  “What about when you were little?”

  “What?”

  “Was she nice when you were little?”

  “I don’t remember. I don’t remember anything about my childhood.”

  And, without knowing why, Tristan felt personally affected by this confession. As though it threatened his own childhood, as if his mother hadn’t saved anything for him. Out of selfishness, out of cruelty.

  Mrs. Klimt shows him his room upstairs. Thick blue carpeting on the uneven, creaking floor; a bench seat covered with turquoise chintz; paintings on the walls, gold-framed landscapes with waterfalls, horses and wistful knights; a chest of drawers as heavy as an ocean liner; a dark wood bed, up on risers, covered with a paisley duvet.

  Tristan has never seen anything more cozy.

  Mrs. Klimt leaves him after uttering an incomprehensible, enthusiastic phrase. She closes the door.

  Tristan is alone, his bladder hurts, hunger is crushing his stomach, but he can’t figure out how to resolve these three afflictions.

  What could she have said?

  Good night, see you tomorrow.

  Please don’t bother me.

  Come have dinner in five minutes.

  The bathroom is at the end of the hallway.

  How could he know?

  How can he avoid committing a faux pas?

  He sits on the bed, which bends under his light teenage frame and nearly closes up on him, like an anemone, a nest.

  Other people before me have gone through this. The uprooting, the solitude, the confusion, the fear of doing something wrong. Still, the worst would be getting the duvet or the carpet dirty. For a second, he considers pissing out the window, but he can’t see how to open the two horizontal panes. No handle, no latch. Nothing. Smooth wood and two thick ropes on the sides that seem to go into the framework and don’t slide. A prison.

  Tristan musters his courage, the pain in the hollow of his stomach assisting him. Without making any noise, he opens the door, looks right, left, bets on the end of the hallway, chooses the door on the right; his bladder relaxes, he feels the relief, the release in advance. But no, it’s a closet. Door at the end, locked; door to the left, another bedroom.

  He groans so that he doesn’t cry. As long as Mrs. Klimt doesn’t hear him. As long as no one ever knows what provoked that sob.

  A voice comes up from the ground floor, an inquisitive, singsongy, cheerful voice.

  Too bad. There, on the side table, a vase. But first, try the last door. Victory! Blessed black-and-white linoleum, the kind you want to kneel down on and kiss, in prostration before the promised land—the bathroom!

  A few minutes later, emboldened, revived, he heads for the kitchen. Mrs. Klimt is waiting for him. She designates a teapot, a loaf of gray bread the size of a piglet, a saucer on which glistens a very white, very soft kind of butter, along with a board where an enormous, apparently indestructible orange cube sits enthroned.

  “Fro-mage!” she enunciates with a great deal of care.

  It’s one of the only French words she knows. She presses her hand to her mouth, does a U-turn, rushes toward the fridge, and takes out a cluster of muscat grapes while royally announcing, “La rai-son!”

  Tristan thanks her in English, wondering if it’s appropriate to help himself.

  But she disappears, furtively, without another word, without leaving him the choice.

  This bread, this soft white butter, and this indestructible cheese are, beyond a doubt, the best things he’s ever eaten. Overcome with gratitude, incapable of expressing it, he puts everything away and cleans up once his meal is finished.

  Mrs. Klimt bolts into the kitchen right when he’s in the middle of scrubbing the teapot’s tannin-stained interior with the sponge. Poor old lady, she no longer has the strength to scour…

  Mrs. Klimt lets out a cry. Or rather, a scream. Tristan freezes. What did he do? What crime has he committed?

  I scrubbed, he thinks. Nothing more. Like for Mama, for Grandma.

  Mrs. Klimt seizes the teapot, shakes it, caresses it, laments.

  And then she calms down, almost just as suddenly, looks at him, touches his cheek. Her eyes are shining.

  He remembers something the prefect said to him, about a son who died, or disappeared, or got angry about something. He doesn’t know anymore. He feels that he’s going to be very happy with Mrs. Klimt, that she’ll take care of him like no one ever has before.

  19

  “So, you speak English?” interrupts Dumestre.

  “Yes.”

  “That’s neat, speaking another language. My parents spoke patois. The local dialect that’s not too different from French. Except I can’t speak it. Shit, it’s raining.”

  “What should we do?”

  “What do you think we should do?”

  Heavy drops—mature, transparent fruit from the steel-colored sky—beat down on their foreheads, their cheeks, the backs of their hands.

  “We could…”

  “Continue the story. We’ll be soaked one way or another. We’ll tell the firemen to give us new clothes.”

  Dumestre sniggers, turns his head to one side, exposing the dry part of his face to the shower of nails, daggers, sabers.

  20

  The language school is a few steps from the Highbury and Islington subway station exit. Tristan congratulates himself each day on the simple itinerary he’s mastering to perfection. The first time, however, he’d had some difficulty finding it; he was expecting to see a building with a large sign on which he would recognize the English word “school.”

  Nothing of the sort.

  The address written in his vade mecum corresponds to a two-story house, made of brick and stucco, narrow, squeezed like the shy head of a child in a crowd of adults. Just in front of it, on either side of the columned porch, two tiny garden squares overrun with nettles and wild blackberry bushes clash, in a mix of arrogance and shame, with the neighbors’ gardens, which are filled with well-pruned rosebushes, blooming nasturtium, exuberant dahlias, and wild asters.

  Tristan is the sole pupil of Hector, a slender man, thin and round-shouldered, whose remarkably prominent Adam’s apple seems endowed with an autonomous existence. Hector serves Tristan black tea, bitter and heavy, and speaks for hours and hours, showing him photos of war ships, tanks, submarines. Sometimes he makes Tristan jot down a word in the notebook he provided for him: yellow pages with a small margin on the right and purple horizontal lines, not like the graph paper Tristan was used to using in France.

  Everything is different here, thinks Tristan, thrilled and disconcerted; his solitude deepens with each new exoticism: the color of cookies, the shape of cups, the size of spoons, the chocolate wrappers, the glass milk bottles. It’s as if he has to relearn everything.

  Initially, he doesn’t try to understand or translate the words Hector pronounces, which aren’t really words but garlands—indivisible, twisted, undulating, turbulent, without beginning or end. Tristan tries above all else to convince his body that the new shapes around him must become as familiar as the ones he left behind.

  After a few weeks, however, without his mind making any effort at deciphering them, he realizes that the stream of sounds has transformed into a torrent of words. He surprises himself by nodding his head and murmu
ring, without premeditation, a “Hmm, nice!” when shown a picture of a destroyer.

  Classes take place in the morning. Afternoons are free. No one told him how he was supposed to spend them. On the first day, he went back to Mrs. Klimt’s at lunchtime. The door was closed and she hadn’t left him a key. He guessed she had gone out. She’d probably told him, explaining in her feathered gibberish—fluttering, scattered with delicate consonants; hissing, lisping, as though rimmed with air—that he should come back in the late afternoon. He hadn’t understood. He hadn’t heard. He was forced to make it up.

  In front of the closed door, he tried to detect a sort of logic, thought about working hours, school schedules. She expects him, surely, for dinner.

  When he returned the second time, after taking the bus all the way to the last stop in one direction, then the other, he found a distraught Mrs. Klimt on the front steps, her hair disheveled, her cheeks redder than the day before. He discerned the word “police” in the breathless sentences she was uttering while trying in spite of everything to smile at him, relieved. He concluded from this that people in England eat dinner earlier than in France. Seven P.M. wasn’t the limit, the end of the day, the beginning of the evening. For Mrs. Klimt, seven was nighttime, danger, table cleared, dishes done, curfew.

  The next day, he gambled on four P.M., judging that the fear his hostess had felt—hadn’t she called the police?—signified he had been considerably late.

  At four, door locked. Tristan sat down on the front steps. Fearing he’d be taken for a vagabond, he quickly got back up and began a tour around the block: to the left, first left, and to the left again, he knew how to not get lost in a foreign town. However, the streets of Seven Sisters (but maybe this was also the case elsewhere in London) didn’t allow him to employ this tactic. Like the English language, English streets snaked and curved. The urban geometry in which he’d grown up was no help to him here. He got lost. Returning at 5:30, he found Mrs. Klimt angry but calm.

  Five. Five in the afternoon. “Tea time,” as she called it. For afternoon tea, you drank black tea with milk while savoring a meat pie and steamed vegetables in multiple colors that all had the same taste.

  “NEVER!”

  He recognized the word thanks to a song he used to listen to.

  “Never!” Mrs. Klimt said to him, once the meal had ended, pointing to the interior of the teapot with her left index finger, deformed by arthritis, while shaking the scrub brush with her right hand.

  “Never,” said Tristan, nodding, before placing his hand on his heart. He solemnly swore never to clean the interior of the teapot again. If that was the wager, the secret, the open sesame of their shared life, he was entirely ready to yield to it.

  “Never!” they cried together. It was the first time he’d burst out laughing in a long while.

  Upon leaving Hector’s, he eats an apple and a slice of extraordinarily soft and supple white bread for lunch. Then he roams the city by bus or on the subway, which the English call “the Tube.” That’s his routine. The repetition of the same. The stammer of days that all resemble one another gives him relief and rest from the persistent pain of exile. He watches people, trying to penetrate some mystery, but without clearly identifying which one. It’s somewhat as if he were investigating a murder case without knowing anything about the crime: the number of victims, the place, the date, the time. Focused and tense, he perceives a sort of danger, but, not knowing where to start, he collects the evidence haphazardly, without any hierarchal order: the girls’ tights are thick and full of holes; the men have very long eyebrows; the shoes seem comfortable (numerous black rubber soles); the pants are sometimes a little short; wearing suits is common, even for children; often, on public transportation, the passengers snack on chocolate bars or potato chips.

  One afternoon, a young woman attracts his gaze: she has huge white cheeks crowned with pink cheekbones, small dark brown eyes set deeply and close together in her wide face, and two braids of fine red hair falling down onto her shoulders. She entered at the Elephant and Castle station and sat down facing him, ankles crossed, her skirt riding up on her fat white thighs, which are spread out on the velour of the seat. Her fingers, plump but long and thin at the ends, rummage around in a bag and rise very slowly to her fleshy pale pink mouth to insert, with the greatest care, a potato chip. She hardly moves her jaw, as if refusing to make a crunching noise. Tristan thinks of holy wafers, of sacrilege. He watches her; she is always slow, always careful, her hands similar to those of the Virgin of Quattrocento—long and pudgy. She is patient and calm, as if the tiny bag between her thighs were inexhaustible, bottomless, endless. He gets an erection. He blushes.

  21

  This isn’t exactly how Tristan tells his story to Dumestre. He doesn’t tell him everything. He doesn’t use words like “stammer” or “arrogance.” He sticks to the facts, which he has to shout because of the wind carrying away his words, the thunder rumbling, the rain hammering down.

  The two men have decided to defy the storm. Fresh streams of water slip under their collars; their legs are already soaked. Their feet are protected by shoes, their chests by the double thickness of a sweater and a jacket, but not for long. Soon, they’ll be swimming in the deceptive warmth of a thin layer of water circulating between their skin and clothing. Deceptive, because it’s ephemeral. The warmth won’t last. The nice slime will quickly become ice cold from the wind and their immobility.

  This, thinks the rabbit, is a very serious problem. It’s your species’ main weakness. I don’t understand how you could have rid yourselves of your body hair. Was it out of vanity at first? Were you so anxious to distinguish yourselves from us that you agreed to give up your fleece? But maybe you didn’t choose. Maybe you’re undergoing a natural degeneration. You didn’t decide anything. Under your efficient exteriors, your domineering exteriors, you don’t decide anything. Someone is playing with you, someone is fooling you, but who? Who could be so cruel, so mischievous, so fiendish, as to deprive you of the best thermoregulation system there is?

  Take the word for “fur” in French. Pelage. The word itself is soft. And for what reason do you think you can hear in it, like an echo, like its root, the French word peau, for skin? Precisely because hair is born in skin, planting itself there so tightly that water can’t get through, but not so much that air can’t get through. This way, our skin breathes without fear of getting wet.

  It’s already starting to smell like carrion in your clothes—they’re not permeable enough to let your pores exhale, yet too permeable to prevent water from enveloping you. Your stench is astounding. Never smelled anything like it. If I were you, I’d dig a hole—yes, I know, whatever the situation, I’ll always propose a hole as the solution, but listen for a moment: you dig a hole and undress yourselves, then you shove your clothes into the hole so they stay dry. You run and you jump to warm yourselves up. Your skin breathes, you’re clean, and when the rain stops, you just have to dry yourselves in the sun, or the wind, or simply the air, and put your clothes back on. That way you’ll be warm. That way you’ll be covered up. Because, yes, I know it’s very important for you to be covered up. Just what is your problem with nudity, anyway?

  Nudity, thinks Tristan. Nudity… But it’s not easy to think while speaking, while enduring the assaults of a storm. So words burst out one at a time, like on the surface of a volcanic mud pool: “nudity,” “shame,” “fear,” “sexuality.”

  Oh yes, goes the rabbit. Sex. Sex is a very important thing for you humans.

  It’s important for everyone, Tristan counterattacks. It’s important for animals, and especially for you rabbits. He almost starts laughing. A rabbit asking about sex, would you look at that.

  We don’t call that sex, replies the rabbit, we talk about reproduction, and, personally, I regard those two notions as having nothing to do with each other.

  You damn papist, says Tristan, outraged.

  It takes one to know one, retorts the rabbit. Then just as
quickly, he moves on: I heard this story, I can’t remember where, can’t remember when: “They knew that they were naked.” Everything started from there, after all, from your lack of fur. Take us, for example, we’re never naked. Let me start again. You exhibited your naked skin, and that, it seems, caused your kind lots of problems, problems with desire. You became obscene; you became indecent. You knew shame and lustfulness. That’s sex. Where I come from, there aren’t so many problems. We kept our fur; we have our hearts set on reproducing, by instinct, because you hunt us, because you—not just you humans, of course, but also foxes and other creatures, let’s be fair—you decimate us. We don’t have the choice, we don’t ask ourselves questions, we fuck to survive, that’s called perpetuating the species. But you, you live to fuck, that’s called sex. They’re two completely distinct activities, I assure you. I understand. It’s so complicated for you humans, whereas for animals, it’s functional. Certain fish are born female, then become male, because it’s practical, and for no other reason. And…

  Tristan gently presses his thumb on the rabbit’s muzzle. He’s had enough. He wants to continue his story. He has to distract Dumestre. He tells the story because he’s endowed with speech, true speech, and intelligence as well, real intelligence. He speaks, rather than dancing naked in the rain, because he hasn’t spent millions of years evolving with persistence and tenacity in order to behave like an animal.

  “And you didn’t find that strange, you and this teacher, all alone in his pad? Where’d this guy come from? I wouldn’t have trusted him. I mean, shit, school isn’t just for show, it’s more than just some perv showing warships to a defenseless kid.”

  Dumestre didn’t appreciate the chapter about Hector. He thinks it’s shady.

  “And that still doesn’t explain how your mother died either. Oh, shit, I feel the cold coming up my stomach.”