“Fair is foul, and foul is fair,” he panted, and suggested that it might be best to put the animal out of its misery. He removed the Opinel from his pocket and showed it to her.
When they let go of her legs, Tétine gargled and dragged her head sideways through the mud, as though trying to distance herself from the pain in her hindquarters.
“Shut up, you lush!” she shrieked, and slapped him in the face.
He dropped the knife, and before he knew it, he had grabbed her by the neck. This was unacceptable. She had hit him. She had no respect. She fell onto her back, half leaning up against the cow’s belly. He straddled her body and squeezed her throat. His knees sank deep into the lukewarm mire.
I might not know how to slaughter a cow, but this, this I know, flashed through his mind.
Her hands, at first vainly gripping his wrists, fell back into the sludge. After a couple of minutes, he struggled upright.
Goddammit, he thought. The cow was still bellowing, without any inkling of the gravity of the situation. He looked around him, he looked up at the stars, but did not see anything out of the ordinary. She suddenly moved and stared at him with wide-open eyes. It was very bad, what was happening here. It was wrong. All he wanted was for it to be over. He grabbed her by the ankles and pulled her off the cow. He dragged her half into the river, took her head, turned it, and pushed it underwater, without paying any heed to the rest of her body or to who she was. Suddenly, rain started coming down in buckets again. The heavy raindrops formed bubbles on the surface of the water, which drifted downstream like miniature domes. He got up and wiped the hair from his forehead. Her skirt, sopping wet, was hitched up to her hips. Her skinny legs were not pretty, round and white as flagpoles. Her boots lay flat in the mud, like the wilted stems of some plant or other. He tried to clamber up the slippery bank, but kept sliding back down. What a terrible spot he’d chosen to set up camp. He’d have to be more careful in the future. He did manage to get a bit further along.
He went over to the parked car, its engine still running and headlights lit, and removed the key from the ignition. He switched off the lamp on his forehead. The world was dark, the rain persisted, and there wasn’t a star to be seen.
“There’s husbandry in heaven,” Banquo says in the second act, “their candles are all out.” He had to leave at once and cover his tracks. He tripped on a guyline and thought, I haven’t had too much to drink, have I? No time to roll up his sleeping bag and mat. He yanked the tent out of the ground, pegs and all, and threw the shapeless bundle over the edge. The rest of his gear followed. He slid down the bank, covered from head to toe in mud like a golem, and began tossing everything into the canoe.
The farmer with the electronic voice, presumably the girl’s father, had seen him. His name and domicile were on the register of Le Cheval Rouge in Sainte-Menehould. He threw her car keys into the river. He wasn’t a thief, nor had he raped her.
“Your Honor,” he would address the court, “the prosecution is overlooking one crucial detail.” He suddenly panicked, unable to locate his paddle. He wouldn’t have put it somewhere too low, would he, so that it . . . but there it was, at the bottom of the canoe. “He maintains that killing a young girl, with her whole life before her, is a particularly heinous crime, and in that sense more reprehensible than murdering a man or an adult woman. But as Schopenhauer said: ‘With girls, Nature has in view what is called in a dramatic sense a “striking effect.” Girls are prized and idolized, loved and lauded, admired and desired, more than any other human being.’ And I therefore ask you . . .”
He could not get the cooler, which always fit squarely under the middle thwart, into place. “I therefore ask you, Is it not obviously a case of natural logic that this specific form of attention is more likely to fall upon young girls than other people, by which I mean to say, that they are murdered more often?”
He assumed he hadn’t forgotten anything. There was nothing else lying around. The rain pattered steadily. Water had collected in the bilge to above the floor slats, which would make the canoe unstable. But everything was loaded; it was too late to flip it over. The heifer no longer moved. Her head lay half submerged, an alligator with horns. The water around her hindquarters appeared dark. The girl’s upper body was also underwater, as if she were searching for her car keys.
Can’t help you there anymore, he thought. “Is there perhaps some sort of atavistic jealousy behind the prosecutor’s call for the maximum sentence?” The willows across the river became white, like an overlit theater set: car headlights. He untied the canoe, climbed in, and pushed off. The current carried him along as though nothing had ever happened. Faster and faster he glided past the dark rows of trees. The river, now vastly wider, was unrecognizable compared to two days ago. This was a rain-swelled Amazon pushing its way through nocturnal northern France. But he felt equal to the task; he navigated with a sure hand through bends that he felt more than saw. As an experiment he switched on his headlamp, but then he saw only the gleaming aluminum bow and nothing of the river. Better to travel in the dark. The patter of the rain and the gurgling of the river were joined by another continually swelling sound: dull, like breaking surf, but without its somber rhythm. It was as if the polyphonic song of the water transporting him gradually modulated toward an irrevocable closing chord.
Before him, everything was black. A dam, a barrage, a weir, the edge of the world, the end of the world as he knew it. Maybe the end of the world was made of concrete. But something else loomed ahead: a high, black cliff and at its foot, white surf. The current gathered speed, and he knew there was nothing to be done. He held his paddle crosswise. The bow plunged into a mass of foam, there was a thud, the boat twisted as though steered by the hand of spirits, and capsized. The river was not cold, and underwater it was quiet.
This is my end, he thought, but I needn’t be ashamed because no one can see me. I am alone here. Forever alone, even more than on stage. He surfaced no further than his eyes, he made no effort to breathe. He was finished. He spread his arms and felt the current pin him against a fallen tree. The curve of the trunk pressed his head down against his chest. He screamed against his will, and the river surged, roaring into his mouth. And all of a sudden, everything went silent.
Remember this, he thought, because this is the last thing you will know, soon you will be dead.
He saw Minou approach him, her arms spread wide, like the first time, when they both passed their entrance exam for the theater school.
Life was good, he thought, only I’d like to have played Macbeth.
6
The next morning, at the bend in the river near Ivoy Farm, all they found was the farmer’s Toyota minus the ignition key. The flooded river had washed away the bank where the stranger had camped.
Several hours later the gendarmes made their discovery, a hundred meters upstream from the Autry barrage parking lot.
Sloshing against the trunk of a tree that had fallen across the river was a filthy carpet of debris made up of rotting reeds, foliage, plastic buckets, and all manner of refuse the river had dragged with it. And in that permanent wash of garbage, affixed to the tree trunk by the ferocity of the current that had reached its highest levels since 1972, they saw a capsized aluminum canoe, the shapeless remains of a wadded-up tent, the bloated cadaver of a heifer, a cooler, and the body of a young woman lying on the chest of a dead man, an empty bottle clutched in his hand.
Voyage to The Moon
Life Is a Dream
Durlacher’s house was the only one in the village with an upstairs. They had gotten up in the middle of the night and waited until a lamp was lit behind the windows.
It was the first time fourteen-year-old Konrad was allowed to join them to float the tree trunks. The coat he was wearing had belonged to his older brother, who had drowned last summer. His mother had hemmed up the sleeves. The half-moon was darkened by clouds pushing eastward.
The light went on.
“About time,” old
Schramm muttered.
“Now Mother’ll have to make coffee first,” Hinzpeter said peevishly and spat out a squirt of chewing tobacco.
A quarter of an hour later, Durlacher came out, followed by his son Julius.
He wore a long loden coat and a hat; Julius had on a loden pea jacket with little antlers embroidered on the collar, and a large round cap of soft gray felt.
“Looks like the lad’s put a tea cozy on his head,” Hinzpeter whispered.
“Morning, men,” Durlacher said.
“Morning, sir,” they replied.
It was a three-hour walk to the log stacks at the creek. They took the shortest route to the forest. The small, shabby houses at the foot of the hill were for the day laborers, widows, and men who were too old or too infirm to work as floaters or lumberjacks. At home, the shutters were still closed; Konrad’s mother was still asleep. A hundred meters up, the road became a wooded path.
Durlacher and his son, holding lanterns, walked in front. They each carried a peavey, the long pike with the wrought hook needed for this work. Konrad carried his brother’s.
At 7:20, the weirmaster would open the sluice, and then the creek would briefly convey enough water to drive the loose tree trunks down to the sawmills. Durlacher had contracts with the mills. If anything went wrong, he’d have to wait until the reservoir filled up again, which could take weeks. So only the best men in the village were eligible to drive the logs, and Konrad was proud that he was now one of them.
He had to take large strides to keep up with old Schramm, Hinzpeter, and the silent giant Ekkehart, who was the strongest man in the village but had two left feet, so he seldom went on a raft.
To be one of the rafters was Konrad’s dream. The spar rafts were made of the sturdiest, longest tree trunks, and every year they were floated, lashed into ever-larger strings, down the Rodach, the Main, and the Rhine, until they reached Holland.
This was the beginning: short trunks—three meters at most—were driven down the temporarily flooded creek to the mills in the valley, where they would be sawed into planks. That was the first step. If Durlacher approved, maybe next year he would be allowed to ride with them on a raft, into the wider world.
The first leg of the climb was steep, but living in the mountains, one got used to the slow pace of things. Every uphill road is a slow one. Drizzle changed to wet snow. Konrad trod in Ekkehart’s footsteps. He panted and did not look up or around, for he needed all his attention to keep from falling behind. The light from the oil lamps shone on bramble bushes, tree trunks, and glistening boulders, but the path they followed was almost entirely dark.
It became light. The crowns of tall pines jutted through the mist into the pale morning sky, like inquisitors who held his fate in their hands. Konrad thought the woods were ugly. The branches sagged under the drizzle and dew, and clouds hung in dales and crevices like dull-gray worms. It was dead quiet except for that dripping and the thud of a falling pine cone. Everything smelled of sap and damp decay. Birds and other animals made themselves scarce.
But he looked forward to driving the timber that had waited under the snow all winter and would now, finally, embark on a journey.
They arrived at the creek. From this point they would follow the bed. Durlacher blew out the lanterns. They proceeded in single file, shouldering their long peaveys like pikemen on their way to ambush an unwary enemy.
The gully was dry. A stripe separating the boulders in light and dark halves showed how high the water had stood last year. The stripe resembled the one on the hemmed sleeves of Konrad’s coat.
The dry creek bed was filled with logs, a moraine of wood. More trunks were stacked parallel to the creek. Durlacher unbuttoned his loden coat and checked his pocket watch.
“Seven-twenty, men,” he said. “Get ready.”
The men were ready. The controlled flood would last fifteen minutes, at most.
A few minutes later a primordial rumble sounded in the haze above them, and then a white plow of water came crashing down the hill, shifted the trunks, lifted them up, and carried them away. Konrad leapt forward and, using his pike as a lever, rolled the next trunk into the creek, following it with his eyes—how it dipped and rocked as it floated downstream, twisted sideways, rammed into the rocks, and then got brought back on course. This was the first trunk he’d ever driven. This was the beginning of his life as a man.
“Stay back, Julius!” Durlacher bellowed. “Keep away from there! What’ll I do if you break a leg? Just watch how it’s done, I told you.”
Konrad watched with amazement how weightless the trunks became once they entered the water.
Where brawn and leverage had to do the initial work, they now, as though in a fairy tale, glided effortlessly downstream with the glistening water. A swarm of spears. Never before had he seen anything so beautiful.
Julius attended the academic gymnasium in Kronach; Konrad worked as a journeyman. They only saw each other when Julius stood on the shore, watching the logs being driven. His father felt he should have practical experience; all well and good, that “Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres,” but after all, Julius was his heir and would eventually have to run the business. Julius was ever the model gymnasiast, always dressed to the nines, typically in gray loden, with a soft cap covering his ash-blond hair. Konrad couldn’t care less about Latin; he longed for life on the big rivers.
But for now this was denied him. Durlacher did not hire him for the real job, that annual event where the women and girls assembled on the bridge and along the quay to admire the steersmanship of the full-fledged raftsmen, who stood tall, legs apart, and steered the wooden capital downstream, deftly pushing off against bank and riverbed in their oiled hip waders, their pride and joy.
Konrad yearned to be one of those men. He wanted to join them on those immense floating islands that sailed down the Rhine, bigger than any ship, for they were strung together in such a way that they could follow the meanders of the river like huge, prehistoric wooden snakes. He wanted to see the wealthy Dutch cities, which in fact were built upon their very own woods, because those proud stepped and curved gables and brick towers rested upon a subterranean forest of Franconian trees.
But Durlacher would not let him.
Only when Julius had reached his final year of gymnasium, as Oberprimaner, did he and Konrad first strike up a conversation.
The men had once again assembled outside Durlacher’s house in the middle of the night and waited for a light to go on. Schramm was there, Hinzpeter and the Halder brothers too. It had thawed, and there was a good chance that this year they would have no problem driving all the logs, as the reservoirs were filled to the rim, and meltwater already flowed in part of the bed.
Konrad and Julius walked side by side behind Durlacher and his men. The pines dripped, water droplets beaded on their loden coats and pea jackets. Julius shifted his peavey over his head to his left shoulder so they could walk closer together.
After proceeding like this for some time in silence, he whispered, “Say, when I take over the firm I’ll see to it that you get to be a rafter.”
Durlacher stopped, as he did every year, at the large boulders.
“Father—may I join Konrad this time?” Julius asked.
“I’d rather you stay here with me,” Durlacher replied.
“You want me to learn the trade, don’t you? Then I’ll have to have done everything once myself. I’ve already seen how they roll the logs often enough. Let me have a go, with Konrad.”
The other men had already begun the steep climb up the bed, striding ahead without so much as a sideways glance.
Durlacher thought it over. “As you like. But watch yourself.”
They each took one side of the bank and leaned on their pikes. The bed was not very wide; they stood at most five meters apart. The mist lifted, the sky went white, a pair of crows whizzed above their heads in a screeching dispute that apparently needed to be resolved further up.
“When the
logs come down,” Konrad warned, “stand back and watch me first, d’you understand? Only try it yourself once you’ve seen how it’s done.”
“Righty-ho!” Julius called back.
The first trunks came at them almost with the very first rush of water, side-by-side, like rival boats in a regatta, and Konrad did nothing except to give them the occasional nudge with his peavey to lead them past the boulders; in fact, even this was hardly necessary, as they showed no sign of wanting to twist sideways as they dipped down the gorge.
“You see?” he called. “Just guide them—let the water do the work.”
Julius aimed the point of his peavey at a crooked, furiously rolling trunk. He missed and nearly tumbled headfirst into the water.
“Be careful, man!” Konrad shouted.
He guided the logs with the routine of a farmer driving his livestock through a gate; he did no more than necessary, aside from a push here and a tug there just to keep a feel for the current.
Julius, on the other hand, regarded every trunk that came by as a personal challenge, whether it needed his help negotiating the gully or not. He tried too hard and wore himself out without actually doing anything useful.
Half the logs had already passed. Konrad was engrossed in the gurgling of the creek and the stately procession of the felled trees on their way to the sawmills.
Suddenly, far longer trunks, too long to pass through the gully, appeared. They couldn’t be Durlacher’s, because he always cut his to a specified length.
“Back off!” Konrad shouted. “Watch out!”
The first oversized trunk forced its way head-on into the gap in the rocks, but the current dragged it askew, and it became jammed across the creek. The trunks that followed rammed the newly formed barrier, creating a stationary raft unable to move in any direction. The bed became clogged with logs, and water gushed over and around them. The long trunks kept on coming, like pirate ships cornering an unsuspecting fleet of merchant ships, until they had formed a crosswise wall of logs, blocking the gorge.
Rivers Page 3