Rivers

by Martin Michael Driessen

  Pierre was determined, more than ever, to defend his property rights. If anyone, no matter who, dared set foot on what was now and forever his land, he would shoot. This was no idle threat. He would shoot, even if it were Adèle’s daughter.

  After half an hour, he began to be troubled by the hornets swarming around him. He massaged his stump and refastened the prosthesis. He would give the tractor one last try but did not hold out much hope. That thing was stupider than an animal. Stupider than his dog Babouche, who was now chained up back at the farmhouse, because he could no longer take him along to the valley.

  They made better false limbs these days, folks said, but Pierre had decided to make do with this one. The stiff leather cup that fit perfectly around the stump of his lower leg, the steel pipe that had in fact become a bit too long now that he himself had gotten shorter, the hinged block that served as a foot; he had grown accustomed to it. The prosthesis was the price for concealing his transgression, and he paid his debts, down to the last centime and the last minute. I will pay my vows before those who fear Him. No one had ever found out that he had lost his leg in Berthou’s fox trap. And they never would. His lips were sealed. He would take this peg leg with him to the grave, even though he reckoned that prostheses did not count at the Resurrection come Judgment Day. Who cares, he thought. So I’ll stand before God on one leg. He’s seen stranger things.

  The shoe on the artificial foot had long been separated from its partner. It was cracked, torn, unoiled, and ancient, nearly fused to the metal staff of the prosthesis. On his good foot he wore something better. Under his bedstead were four or five pristine, never worn right shoes.

  He placed his hands on the warm stones to the left and the right, to hoist himself up, and then he saw her.

  She wore a dark-red summer dress with flecks or polka dots of a yet darker tint, and she walked along the riverbank.

  A strange girl, but that did not absolve her of the guilt of being the progeny of Berthou.

  She appeared to be picking flowers; at any rate, she held a few in her hand, but she shuffled along with a drooping head and a dragging gait. Pierre thought she looked terribly lonely, and not entirely normal, and he took a certain amount of pleasure in this. Life spared no one, including the wealthy, neither him nor Adèle Chrétien.

  He wiped his fingers on his handkerchief and picked up his shotgun. He would shoot. He would first warn her, but then shoot if she took even one step onto his land.

  The girl moved further along the creek, stooping and plucking now and then, as if picking up something she had dropped. She must have seen him by now, sitting atop the tumulus, his silhouette sharp against the blue sky.

  She stayed on her own side. Pierre felt in the pocket of his corduroy coat, hesitated, and took out the telescopic sight. This was as good a time as any to try it out. It was a German brand, and he had bought it secondhand. From his other pocket he took out his reading glasses, whose frame, which he had patched together with adhesive tape, was so wobbly that it hung lopsidedly on his nose when he tried to attach the sight to the rifle. It had gone easier at home, at the kitchen table. When the sight was finally fastened and he looked up, the girl was still there, crouching to pull a flower from the grass.

  He raised his gun and pressed his right eye against the eyepiece. He didn’t see anything. Distance needs adjusting, he thought. He twisted the black knob on the right side of the scope. At first everything became even blurrier, but then the world came into view. A tiny portion of the world. Her pale, skinny legs in low rubber boots, in which she waded into the water. Don’t do it, he thought. It was wondrous: He looked through a cross, the symbol of redemption, and what was beyond it he could kill by simply pulling the trigger.

  He tried aiming slightly higher while turning the knob: the red fabric of her dress flashed past, he saw all the dark spots on it, and then he saw her face. She was looking at him.

  What a homely girl. She’d obviously inherited the worst genes of the Berthous and the Chrétiens combined. Big nose, red hair. The sliver of creation contained in the circle of his telescopic sight was far from the prettiest.

  The crosshairs descended back down to her boots, which now stood on a pair of stones in the middle of the river.

  The Mirages returned, as if to smash the sound barrier from the other side, and the valley was flattened under the roar of the jet engines.

  “Halt!” he shouted. “One more step and I’ll shoot!”

  The cross flew upward, and he bent his index finger.

  The girl clamped her hands over her ears and stuck out her tongue. The two handfuls of wildflowers made it look as though she were crowning herself, a heathen creature that stood there, mocking him.

  The anticipated sonic boom did not happen. Instead, the roar died out, and the jet fighters banked northward, heading back to the base in Cambrai.

  Pierre stood up and lowered his shotgun.

  “Go away!” he shouted, gesticulating wildly. His voice sounded thin and irrelevant in the vast landscape, which, like him, still seemed deafened by the ferocity of the Mirages overhead. “Be off!”

  She stayed put on the stones in the middle of the river and shouted something he did not understand. Then she turned and went away. Once she reached the shore, she threw down the flowers she’d plucked, and ran off.

  The next day Pierre came back with two horses and pulled the tractor out of the muck. He noticed that something had changed, but couldn’t put his finger on it. Something about the contour of the meadow near the tumulus. Land didn’t change, he knew that, but still it looked different than the day before. His suspicions piqued, he wondered if Solomon had cheated him after all, or whether there was something else not quite right about the land that was now his. He brought the horses to a halt and went to investigate. He could have sworn that the shadow cast by the low-lying sun fell differently over the grassland than before. A bramble bush that had basked in sunlight at this time yesterday was now in the dark. That was impossible. Stopping halfway up the hillock, Pierre looked around warily. Horses, chain, tractor, hitch, and cart still stood like a long, stationary frieze down on the bank of the glistening river. Nor did the woods or the clouds look particularly unusual. Everything seemed the same, but something was different, although he didn’t yet know what.

  Suddenly he sank, both legs at once, into the ground. The land he mistrusted was swallowing him. He braced himself with both arms, and subsided no further. He waited for the pain, like when he had stepped into the fox trap, but it did not come. He was up to his hips in the ground; besides this, there was nothing amiss. He bent his arms and tried to pull himself out, his elbows cocked like the handles of a corkscrew, but underneath him the earth gave way, and he felt his foot and prosthesis dangle in thin air. Pierre remained still for a while, for sometimes that was the best thing. Thinking it through might help, he thought, but where to start? He was alone in the vale aside from the yoked horses, and from them he couldn’t expect any help.

  While his pocket watch in the grass counted the minutes, he noticed other things that were different. The river behind the cart looked narrower than some twenty meters further up, in front of the drooping heads of his horses. And now that he focused on the sounds of the world, he heard, in addition to the wind and the crows, another sound coming from the depths below him: running water. He could even smell it, a muddy, musty odor rising up around his torso.

  Pierre leaned forward, pressed his upper body into the turf and groped for sturdy clumps of grass. Slowly, ever so slowly, no need to hurry, he pulled himself out of the hole. Stalks, weeds, goat droppings, and a ladybug passed his wide-open eyes. Just as he carefully slid his hips onto the crumbling edge, the ground gave way underneath him, like a mattress on a sagging bed. He lay stock-still, two sturdily rooted thistles clamped in his fists, and waited for a while, until nothing more happened, before crawling further and grabbing hold of a boulder, where he could sit.

  The shoe that he had worn on his artific
ial foot was gone; he hobbled back to his horses, giving the treacherous ground a wide berth. The horses looked up lazily, as though they regretted he hadn’t stayed away for longer.

  The following edition of l’Ouest-Éclair carried, in addition to news of the war in Indochina and the resignation of Prime Minister Mendès France, a brief regional item:

  The long-running dispute between the Chrétien and Corbé families, frequently reported by this journal for the past hundred years, has apparently taken a new and unexpected twist. The uncommon exchange of their properties in the Issou valley (sous-préfecture de Pontivy) in 1953, intended to put an end to the dispute, now seems to have benefited one of the parties in an unforeseen manner. On the eastern bank of the river, since time immemorial in the possession of the Chrétien family but now the property of the unmarried M. Pierre Corbé, a Merovingian holy site is said to have been discovered, which according to archaeologists dates from the seventh century and was probably dedicated to Saint Godeberta. It likely contains relics and artifacts of inestimable value that would make the owner of the property a wealthy man. The valley is closed to visitors for the duration of the excavations. M. Berthou, the husband of the original owner, Adèle Chrétien, has indicated he shall contest M. Corbé’s ownership rights and the subsequent revenues in the highest courts of the land. Mme. Chrétien and M. Corbé were unavailable for comment, as was Maître Solomon, the former solicitor from Lorient and the initiator of the land exchange, who currently resides in faraway America and is said to enjoy a position of stature in the well-to-do Jewish community of Boca Raton in Florida. This writer shall continue to keep our readers, who undoubtedly follow this extraordinary affair with as much interest as himself, abreast of all new developments.

  Corentin flung her onto the bed and laid into her with his fists.

  Adèle had never been able to fend off her husband’s violent attacks. If he had been drinking, he hit her; it had been like this since their wedding night. Brute force was the only thing in which Corentin Berthou was her superior. She pitied him, as the blood gushed from her nose. She was ashamed of him, now that he tore open his shirt, exposing his hairless, suety chest, and slowly pulled his belt from his trousers. He was nothing, he was a lost soul, and she had to live with it.

  “Think of the child,” was all she said.

  “Child?” he said, winding the belt around his fist. “Don’t pretend you care about her. That mutt should never have been born.”

  There had been that one night when she stood over him with a knife in her hand. She didn’t do it. Justice and dignity were still her domain. She, a mother, would rather be humiliated and beaten like a whore than give him a taste of his own medicine, no matter how much he debased himself.

  He pushed her face into the pillow and pulled up her nightdress.

  “Jew whore,” he said. “You threw away our land behind my back while I was in prison. Did you suck his circumcised cock, heh? I could have been rich! A millionaire! And now that bum Corbé will make off with the loot. Goddamned Catholic loot, on top of it.” He beat her mercilessly on her back and her thighs. “A Christian shrine!”

  “Corentin, stop! The child . . .”

  “The child—bullshit! Corentin—bullshit! I’ll teach you, bitch!” He beat her left and right, lost his balance, and caught himself on the bedpost.

  Adèle turned and tried to sit up. “You’re drunk, man! Stop it. Stop it!”

  He punched her squarely in the face. This was the first time he struck her with his closed fist; normally he hit her with his open hand. He sucked on his knuckles, surprised, and wiped them on his trousers, grinned, and hit her again with an uppercut worthy of Marcel Cerdan.

  “Not too drunk to show you who’s boss . . .”

  She fell back on the pillow and frantically reached for her nose. It felt broken.

  He picked up his beer bottle, saw that it was empty, started to cry, and whipped her with the belt. “Down! Couche-toi! Down!” he screamed, and Adèle plugged her ears, as if doing so might prevent her daughter from hearing.

  Marie-France lay stock-still under the duvet, her dolls and teddy bear clasped in her arms, a corner of the pillowcase in her mouth. Usually this was enough to fall asleep, even though she didn’t much like sleep because then she couldn’t keep her ear to the ground and couldn’t think, and felt somehow like she was abandoning herself. But tonight she closed her eyes as tight as she could and pretended she was asleep, so as not to have to hear what was happening in her parents’ bedroom.

  She knew why no one loved her. The true, actual, secret reason was that she had come into this world to do something marvelous and extraordinary, and until she had done that, no one would ever love her. Those were the special rules that applied only to her. That’s also why she wasn’t as cute as the other children. But she was a chosen one, so it would all work out in the end.

  “Bullshit,” Papa had shouted, and Mama had only whimpered. Maybe even Mama wasn’t convinced deep in her heart that she should have been born.

  The farmer across the valley, that Huguenot who had made off with their treasure, was a coward. She had provoked him earlier that day, just to test him. She didn’t feel sorry for him, even though he was crippled. And he had pointed a rifle at her, which at least showed he took her seriously. She had fussed around with some flowers, but that was just for show. He only yelled, just like Papa, go away and suchlike, but he didn’t shoot, not even above her head. But he did have a treasure that wasn’t his at all. He sat on that hill with his rifle, and that hill wasn’t even his. That land had always been theirs, treasure and all.

  She put the dolls and the teddy bear in the drawer of her nightstand. It was time for them to go, just like the lambs that went to slaughter every year.

  When Marie-France lay back, her arms crossed over her chest underneath the duvet, she had a revelation, the best one she’d ever had.

  She would heroically steal back their rightful property, not even for herself, but for her parents, and everyone would be in awe of her. And when she came home with the treasure, she would pretend the Holy Mother of God had guided her there; and she would say: “The Holy Mother of God told me to do this, so that all fathers and mothers would know they have to love unto little girls, the way I love them,” or some such thing. And then her father would lift her up and exclaim: “This is truly my daughter!” And Pierre Corbé would have to swim, gnashing his teeth, in a pool of burning phosphorus, but even for him it would turn out well in the end because purgatory was only temporary. And her mother would sigh and say, “Oh my child, I have always loved you dearly, more than you will ever know.”

  In fact, she would be just like Joan of Arc, who eventually married the king of France.

  Now that the idea had taken root, she couldn’t sleep a wink.

  She heard slamming doors, and in between slams she could hear her mother weep.

  A car engine started, which always meant that Papa had left.

  Tomorrow, she thought, I’ll do it.

  Tomorrow everything will be fine.

  Berthou pressed the gas pedal to the floor and sped through the first curve, the headlights skimmed the deathly pale foliage of the plane trees, and a salvo of stones and gravel sprayed out from under the rear tires. He sat hunched over, his hands clamped to the steering wheel. He had saliva on his chin, and he swatted the rearview mirror angrily so as not to have to see himself. He downshifted to achieve maximum acceleration, before having to brake again at the end of the drive. He preferred not to have to brake at all, but it was a necessary evil if you wanted to keep control of the vehicle. But he did so as savagely as possible, using the foot and hand brakes simultaneously, a trick he could execute perfectly, and sent the car hurtling through the curve. He opened the throttle again on the straight stretch through the woods and hugged the snaking white line in the middle of the asphalt. Bitch . . . traitors . . . not the master of one’s own home . . . Jewish plutocrats . . . coerced into marrying under his station by hi
s father . . . a peasant woman who couldn’t give him a son, only a hideous mutt, a caricature of himself. He needed to piss, and slammed on the brakes when the wall of the British war cemetery loomed ahead.

  He left the engine running and the headlights on, the car parked diagonally on the shoulder; let everybody see, for all he cared. His trousers sagged as he pushed open the wrought-iron gate, for he’d left his belt in the bedroom. He took the second path to the right, his favorite place to urinate, where the gravestones did not display a cross but the Star of David and oriental symbols. He pissed against a stone belonging to one Balbur Singh, killed in action in 1918, and thought: Good thing no one sees me crying. No sir, I’ll not give them the pleasure. He returned to his car and tried to open the trunk, hoping there might be a bottle with a dreg of eau-de-vie left, but it was locked, and to open it he first had to turn off the ignition.

  Imbeciles, those Renault makers. American cars had a handle so you could open the trunk from the inside. He hated nothing, except his wife and himself, more than Renault. Once the trunk was open, he saw there was no bottle. He returned to the graveyard and drank from the garden hose. Midnight mist hung motionlessly between the woods on either side of the road. The illuminated hands of the dashboard clock showed that it was two o’clock.

  He was desperate for alcohol but did not want to go back home, not at any price. The Relais des Routiers at the bridge, then. It would be closed, of course, but the patron owed him a favor, so he could rouse him from bed if necessary. Maybe there were customers still drinking and playing cards behind the closed shutters, as was often the case.

  Berthou took the last dark curves with more luck than skill, parked inconspicuously behind the trucks at the side of the road, and got out. The inn was dark—even the neon sign had been turned off. It was quiet. The four tall lamps on the concrete bridge offered the only light between the dark hillsides. He wouldn’t think twice about pounding on the door, hollering and shaking up the entire joint, but first he leaned over the iron railing, which was orange but looked black in the light of the sodium lamps. The river flowed below him, black and narrow. What a godforsaken hellhole he had got himself into.