“Your wife doesn’t even do the shopping,” continues Dumestre after a moment. “Madame is above that. Madame is an ‘artiste.’ And you, you don’t care. The cart means nothing to you. Except while you’re out grocery shopping, you know what I’m doing? You know what I’m doing with your wife who’s so far above all that?”
Tristan dozes off. He sees pictures. Dumestre with his cart. Dumestre facing the wall of cereal. He’s moved. His companion is a good storyteller. He feels the evening was a success: the little match girl, and now, the man with the shopping cart. Tristan is calm. His whole body relaxes. His lungs expand, breathe in the earth’s odor, like the nape of Emma’s neck beaded with sweat.
His wife. Yes. There’s something wrong with his wife. Dumestre is right in the middle of explaining.
I go shopping, he recaps for himself, and during that time… During that time, Dumestre does something with my wife. My wife who is above everything.
A more violent blow, harsher than all the others, hits his spinal nerve. A blade lashes his insides. The pain is unprecedented. Yet Dumestre didn’t move. Dumestre didn’t touch him.
Tristan grimaces, his teeth hurt, as if he’s holding back tears. He doesn’t want to hear what Dumestre is saying. He wants to plug his ears, lock up his imagination. He wants to fold over on himself, flee the scene. Erase, erase, erase. Water on his face, that’s what he needs. Not rain, not mud, but water from a stream, from its source, pure, untouched, to wash his hands, to splash his face.
That was Emma. Emma was the source.
Never again? he wonders. All while Dumestre explains the how, the when, the why.
He doesn’t listen, but snippets of it enter his ears occasionally: A harsh, brainy woman. Not easy. Never known one like her. Why do they betray us? Though I’m definitely the one who betrayed mine, I’ve got nothing to blame her for. She picked up the crumbs the first one left behind. She stuck me back together like a puzzle. I wasn’t appreciative. It’s awful. I felt guilty. I didn’t want to keep going, but with your wife, someone else’s wife, it was like we became different people, like we were new. She tossed me off anyway. Spitefully. She’s a spiteful woman.
“You don’t know anything about my wife,” Tristan murmurs reluctantly.
And then he thinks, No one knows about my wife, because she’s my wife. All that you and others see is the river, the polluted current, the raging waters, but only I know how to go back to the source, bathe in it, because she’s my wife.
And, with these words, finally, he falls asleep.
33
They count. They recount. It’s the only thing they know to do, except there’s no more to count. Tristan and Emma don’t have a penny to their names. The prefect’s money transfers stopped coming one month after his protégé left the university and his room at Mrs. Klimt’s.
Tristan didn’t go back to Hector’s. He lives at Emma’s, in her arms, in her vision for the future. He is more alone than ever. Yet he’s with her. The two of them are alone, and that’s worse.
“Tomorrow, we’re leaving,” she announces to him. “We’re going back to France.”
“How?”
“I have a plan. Someone will bring us over on a boat. After that, we’ll hitchhike. We can’t stay here anymore. There’s my stepmother’s house. She’s dead. I have the keys. We’ll go there. It’s in a field, in a village. Life won’t cost anything. We’ll plant vegetables.”
“I have to say good-bye to them,” says Tristan.
“To whom?”
“To Mrs. Klimt, to Hector. I have to say thank you.”
“We don’t have time. We have to pack. We have to leave.”
“Let me go see them.”
“No. They’re old. They’re used to it.”
“They’ve already lost a son,” argues Tristan, not sure of anything, ignorant of his host family’s true history, as crumbled as his own existence.
“That’s every parent’s destiny,” Emma responds. “All parents lose their children. You’re not going to change that.”
On the boat—a feminine vessel leaving the port of Dover, a masculine navire coming up alongside Calais—they wrap their arms around each other’s waists. “Happy” isn’t the right word. Ambitious, afraid, armed with orphans’ courage.
“I’m going to write books,” she promises him. “I’ll sell thousands of ’em. We’ll get through this.”
“What about me?” asks Tristan.
“You?” says Emma, laughing. “You’re young, you have time. You’ll find something.”
34
With his round black watermelon-seed eye, a turtledove contemplates his plumage. He shakes himself off, swells his vain chest. His wings are dry. Dawn, which perfectly matches the hues of his feathers, is breaking. A ray of sunlight splits the mauve band of clouds and lands on his tail. The bird shivers, takes a few meticulous steps on the sycamore branch, then lifts off, remaining motionless above the tree for an instant, carried by an upward current.
Suspended in the air, the turtledove observes the valley. The colors have changed, along with the substance. It looks like someone peeled away the earth, like the ground molted. It’s ugly. The turtledove perches on a branch again, sinks into the leaves, plants his fine talons into the supple bark mottled in brown, gray, and cream. He spots a big nest a little lower in the tree, hops down to reach it. A package, poorly tied, shoddy architecture, no twigs, no artistry. What bird could have made this?
He gets closer, pecks, prodding with his beak and feet. But suddenly, the package stirs. There’s something soft inside—what could this be? Is it a cocoon? What type of larva would dare stick itself to his tree like this? Something fidgets and bawls. A dreadful sound gushes out. The turtledove, seized with fear, wildly flaps his wings, gets tangled in the leaves, fails his takeoff, tries three more times, and bursts forth all at once from the green jumble into the thoroughly rinsed blue sky.
Down below, a fireman—busy clearing up the rubble, probing holes and piles of fallen rocks for survivors—hears the baby.
At first, he doesn’t understand where the crying is coming from. He looks up, doesn’t see anything. Thinks for a moment about storks, and the legend in which babies are dropped off at their homes by those trusty birds with long beaks. He rushes in the direction of the sound. He has been combing the ground since five this morning; he found three bodies, three corpses. It’s his first emergency. He signed up as a volunteer to impress the ladies. He’s been telling himself that by the time the Bastille Day ball comes around, he’ll be raking them in. He doesn’t have confidence in his face, because his nose is too long and always a little red because of his badly spaced teeth, but thanks to his training, he’s starting to take pride in his body. With the uniform’s prestige on top of that, the girls will drop like flies. His name is Jean, but everyone calls him Jean-Jean, which doesn’t help with the ladies either. Before today, he had never seen a dead person. Not in real life. He is nineteen years old.
Jean-Jean runs, reaches the sycamore, looks up, listens carefully. It’s coming from up there. The smooth trunk doesn’t offer any grip. The mud that coated it during the night and the water it soaked up have made the bark slippery. The child keeps crying. It’s an emergency, Jean-Jean repeats to himself, stamping from one foot to the other, powerless. What do you do in case of emergency? What has he already learned in training? The captain talked all day. You had to take notes, like at school. Jean-Jean never liked school. While the captain was speaking, he was admiring the deformed reflections in the nickel helmet, neither gold nor silver in color, a metal as smooth as water. Call your team, but how? He’s the only one in this area. There’s so much to do. They were ordered to not split up. They didn’t listen. They wanted to be heroes, every man for himself. The best thing would be to save a girl, a girl whose clothes had all been ripped off by the storm, and who he, Jean-Jean, would carry, naked, in his arms, without looking at her, with total respect, and the girl would let her head fall on his chest, f
eel his swollen biceps, say to him: You rescued me, and afterward, they wouldn’t necessarily get married, but hey, it would be a good start.
The baby cries louder and louder. What an irritating sound. How do parents do it? Jean-Jean wants it to stop. He has to find him. He must find him.
He touches the rope wound around his chest. If he doesn’t mess this up too much, if he can manage to throw the rope around the lowest branch, he’ll be able to hoist himself up. He imitates the movement cowboys make with their lassos, but that doesn’t do anything, the hemp snake falls down on his head, so he tries whatever he can think of, jumps, throws, jumps again. From afar, it looks like he’s dancing, like Pan in a fireman’s costume.
It works, the rope goes over. He makes a slipknot, grabs on, and lifts himself up, legs at right angles, abs on fire. He’d love for someone to see him now.
Once he’s up in the leaves, he regains his boyhood reflexes. He leaps and launches himself from one branch to another, and suddenly, he’s there in front of the package, tied up in a silk scarf with a green-and-pink pattern.
Very gently, he loosens the knot, constantly afraid of dropping the wiggling, screaming baby with his toothless mouth—a furious scarlet hole. The young fireman’s hands are shaking, but his thighs squeeze the branch firmly. He grabs the baby and presses him to his chest. Immediately, the crying stops, but like a spreading wave of contagion coming in contact with Jean-Jean’s chest, it causes him to sob in turn, without understanding why. This time, he’s happy no one can see him.
35
“A firefighter found him.”
“Where?”
“Hanging in the sycamore where the walking path starts.”
“How’d he climb up there?”
“Someone tied him up there.”
“Who, the firefighter?”
“No, the baby. Someone had tied him up in the tree, and the firefighter found him.”
“And the nanny?”
“She’s in the hospital. She says she doesn’t remember anything. She’s in shock.”
“Maybe she tied Nino up there.”
“Who’s Nino?”
“The teacher’s son of course, the miracle baby!”
“No, that’s impossible. The nanny wouldn’t have been able to climb that high. I hear it was fifty feet off the ground.”
“How’s he doing now?”
“The baby?”
“Yes, Nino, how’s he doing?”
“Fine. He was dehydrated and got quite a chill—”
“Hypothermia!”
“Yes, that’s it, hypothermia. But he’ll recover in no time. A good bottle, a warm bath, and he’ll be as good as new! Those little guys are really tough.”
“And his mom?”
“What do you think? His mom is happy, of course! Shh, be quiet, there she is.”
The teacher walks forward with Nino in her arms. The whole village has come to the memorial service for the dead and missing. Some are sad, others are relieved. The young priest put on cologne to muster his courage. He’s afraid that people won’t appreciate the service and say it’s his fault.
The teacher comes forward and everyone watches her. She is beautiful. She is full of love. She’s overflowing with it. The people in the church don’t know that what they’re seeing, what they’re admiring, is just that: overflowing love. They just think that the green-and-pink-patterned scarf around her neck brings out her eyes marvelously.
36
When Tristan wakes up, the cave is empty. He stretches.
I hurt everywhere, he realizes. The fight was abandoned, the enemy brought down—or, at least, kept at bay. But what enemy?
His clothes, moist and smelly, are scattered around him.
He feels breathless, like after a nightmare.
But that wasn’t a dream, he thinks. I really did go through all that.
He slips on his clothing in the dark, diluted by the whiteness of the dawning day, and crawls out of the cave, along the tunnel to the burrow’s entrance.
Standing up on his mound, he gazes at the sky’s puerile outburst, the chubbiness of the hills. A naive, cleansed panorama.
He starts walking with his hand on the gamebag and feels the dead rabbit under his fingers, distractedly stroking the inert backbone through the fabric. He thinks of the night’s disaster, of the headache he has, of his odor. Returning from the hunt. What fresh glory now decorates his brow?
He tries to recover his anger, to hatch a mutiny against his fate, doesn’t manage, gives up from fatigue.
All the same, he continues on eagerly, happy to be alive, tasting the paradoxical mirth that comes in leaving a cemetery. At certain moments, going downhill, he starts to run, restless.
At the top of the final hill, he comes to a standstill. The village stretches out before his eyes. What’s left of it. The image in front of him doesn’t correspond with anything, not one emotion, not one word. It’s like trying to capture a dead person’s gaze. He spreads his arms open, lets them fall to his sides. His shoes are suddenly filled with lead. He can hardly lift his feet. There’s no noise. No light in the windows.
The colors have changed, Tristan says to himself. It’s because the contrast isn’t the same; the depth is uniform, confused by the destruction. The sounds are different too, muted by the mud, swallowed up by puddles. And my odor, thinks Tristan, my odor is nothing compared with the stench stinking up the air. The sewers have been upturned like a spilled drink.
He keeps walking, bites his lips, tears the skin from the cracks, bleeds, sucks on the blood. With each new bend, with each new road, he finds piles of fallen rocks, burial mounds made of shingles, embankments of mud mixed with rubble. A car door stands up in a hedge, resembling a bird’s wing. Bundles of straw wait at a broken traffic light. A clothesline adorned with corkscrewed laundry crawls laboriously along a side street, like a giant caterpillar caught in a trap. Shoes crown fallen utility poles.
When he nears the center of the village, Tristan is forced to retrace his steps—the water comes halfway up his thighs. He’ll have to go all the way past the sawmill to get around the marketplace. He hurts. The pain is all over his body, high, low, outside, inside; his skin, his organs, everything hurts. The pain is also in what he sees: the torn-off shutters, the twisted drain pipes. He admires the storm’s tenacity, its meticulous destruction of everything, turning everything upside down. The ironic precision with which the wind and the floodwaters have created a new landscape: here, a vacuum hanging from a bakery sign; there, an overturned table with three tires of different sizes on one of its legs, stacked on top of one another like an abacus.
Without thinking, he caresses the gamebag. He’d like to reassure the rabbit, tell him about the sun rising from behind the hill, the new day that’s dawning, the relief.
He wants to go home. He wants to see his house. But how could their poor little shack have possibly withstood the storm? You never know, he thinks to give himself the strength to go even faster. He stops to peek inside a few of the buildings that were spared more than others. Voices reach him. There are survivors. It’s dawn. That’s why it’s silent, because it’s dawn. People are still sleeping. They’re alive, but sleeping.
I’m lucky, he says to himself. Very lucky. I always have been. My life up to now has been easy and gentle. Joys have bombarded me, one after the other.
Tristan regains his energy. He lengthens his stride, starts running, catches sight of the sawmill, takes a shortcut, clears fences, gates; he jumps, falls, gets up, starts running again. The house is at the end of the path, in the middle of a cow pasture, protected by thistles.
The roof is gone. Decapitated, it stands, a pitiful hollow cube, over a century old. An incredulous sense of hilarity wrings his stomach. Terror seizes him. “Terror,” the word that came to his mind the day his mother died, midsentence, sitting on her bed. She had said, “You’re gonna laugh, but…” And nothing more. Her breathing had stopped.
Tristan calls out. He doesn
’t hear anyone calling back, but he keeps calling, running, breathless.
Then Emma comes out, wrapped in a winter coat, her bare legs stained with mud. She comes toward him, sinks into the earth up to her mid-calves, staggers, straightens up. He watches her come toward him, in their battered garden, in the sludge of an earth that drank too much. She halts a few yards away. Smiles at him. Her right eyebrow is scored with two red lines, her left cheek with a thin gash, beaded with drops of blood. She still has the head of an Indian chief, the eyes of pure water at its source, the look that he alone knows and recognizes.
Slowly, like a magician, he opens his gamebag to take out his surprise.
The rabbit.
He grabs the animal by the ears and brandishes him at arm’s length, sticks out his chest, and presents him to his wife. I’m back from the hunt, he thinks. And, for an instant, he feels a trapper’s pride.
But the ball of fur, as though animated by a spring, flails about and flies down to the ground, skates over the puddles. Only his white tail punctuates the zigzag of his flight every second or so.
Emma doesn’t understand. She didn’t have time to see. She stares, wide-eyed. Looks at Tristan. Looks at the white point moving away.
Hunting Party Page 11