Rivers

by Martin Michael Driessen

  Looking over his shoulder, he noticed that the front truck was loaded with oil drums. It was parked on the shoulder, and the bank inclined sharply.

  Berthou retraced his steps and took a closer look. Came from Brest, destination Le Mans. Hundreds of twenty-four-gallon drums, stacked three high. Tens of thousands of liters of refined, highly flammable fuel oil. Truck’s cabin the height of the railing. Nothing but the steep embankment between the cargo bed and river. He could send a river of fire downstream, which would send that whole cursed treasure of Corbé’s up in flames. He would finish off that damn valley of Adèle’s once and for all. They had all underestimated him.

  A stinking layer of oil flowed through the valley, an opalescent ribbon winding between the dark hillsides. The Relais des Routiers stood at the foot of the bridge, just as dead and dumb as always. Think clearly now, Berthou said to himself. How long does oil burn? No time for mistakes. I won’t light it just yet. How fast does this blasted river flow? He lit his last cigarette, threw the empty pack into the water, and followed it with his eyes. Say about three kilometers per hour. How far from here to the tumulus? He’d need the Michelin map for that. He would drive along the riverbank on the paved road Corbé, the dolt, had put in himself, and there he would set the carpet of oil on fire.

  He started his engine as quietly as possible, obediently switched on his turn signal, and drove west.

  Pierre lay in bed. He could hardly believe his luck.

  He had become a wealthy man overnight. His finder’s fee, as the owner of the land, could be hundreds of thousands, perhaps even a million francs. Praise the Lord, now and forever. God gives to his beloved in their sleep. Our children and grandchildren shall tell of Your goodness. If there were relics in the crypt, then they might even make it into the Louvre.

  How could any man sleep if his fate took such an extraordinary turn? He felt for the braided electrical cord of his nightstand lamp and found the switch. Three a.m. Just a few more hours and then it would be light enough to go out and gaze upon the site of his miraculous discovery.

  He would be able to buy an electric milking machine, like the one he’d seen at the agricultural fair in Rennes. And the Lord gave Job fourteen thousand sheep and a thousand yoke of oxen, each and every brow bedecked with gilded garlands.

  Pierre could not stay in bed; he was overjoyed beyond measure.

  He got up and made coffee.

  The Lord’s ways are mysterious, but righteous. He would not have seven sons and three daughters, but a few large barns, anyway, and maybe a new house.

  It was dawn, with a little fantasy. He put on his coat and brought food out to the dog, who would stay in its kennel. Babouche eyed him with mistrust and reproach at being left behind.

  “Soon everything will be different, Babouche,” Pierre said. “You’ll see.”

  The Lord God is my strength, he will make my feet like the deer’s, and shall make me walk upon the heights. Pierre hobbled excitedly along the right bank of the river, anxious to revisit the corrugated iron roof and the festive rectangle of barbed wire that protected his treasure from the livestock. As a Protestant he scorned the veneration of saints, but even so, Godeberta, if she truly did repose on his land, deserved better than a field strewn with goat dung.

  Suddenly something off in the distance glimmered at him. Something that had not been there before. And the next moment a small moving figure appeared. Things were happening in a place where nothing at all should happen until the archaeologists returned. He was still too far away to see what it was, and picked up his limping pace.

  It was the Chrétien girl, and she was stealing part of his treasure. He did not call out, for he wanted to get a little closer first; but she saw him and stood up, a golden chest cradled in her arms, and started running toward the river.

  “Stay right there, you!” Pierre shouted, and also broke into a run, something he had not attempted since the amputation.

  She glanced over her shoulder and was clever enough not to wade into the river directly, but to give herself a head start; he saw the soles of her sandals and her dancing braids.

  Pierre followed, hobbling determinedly, but his prosthesis could not keep up with his good leg.

  Fortunately her judgment eventually abandoned her, and she leapt into the river, just at the spot where the water was at its deepest and split around a few large boulders. She disappeared underwater—all that was visible was a tiny pair of hands holding up the chest. It was no bigger than a shoebox. He waded into the river, lost his balance on the slippery rocks, fell to his knees, stood back up, dripping, and extended his arms.

  “Give it here, you little guttersnipe!”

  She surfaced as a hideous fish, with wide-open eyes, still clasping the chest, which had relief-ornamented edges and a small opaque window in the middle.

  “No!” she shrieked. “It belongs to my papa!”

  “I’ll teach you,” Pierre said, grabbing hold of her wrist. “Let go, or I’ll drown you like a cat!”

  She shrieked again, as loudly as she could, and hurled the casket into the river, whereupon it was carried off and then sank. Pierre held the body of the little girl underwater between his legs as he tried to locate it.

  And then there was an unearthly, roaring whoosh. Pierre looked up and saw, in the distance, a wave of flames barreling toward them. The livestock on both riverbanks ran up the hillsides, birds flapped away, and an enormous column of black smoke sped down the valley, its upper layers as powerful as God’s clenched fury, the lower part a funnel that followed the meanders of the river. The Day of Judgment had come. Behold, the Lord comes with fire, and his chariots are like a whirlwind. The heat punched him in the face. It was all over. A raging wall of flames rushed at him. He turned and saw the small golden shrine sparkle from under the surface.

  She knew without looking in the mirror that her nose was broken. She would lie to the doctor that a cow’s horn had unwittingly hit her in the face, just as in the past she had explained away broken fingers and burn wounds as household mishaps.

  She washed her face with cold water, dried it off, and examined it in the mirror. More than the swollen, crooked nose, she was shocked by her thin, cheerless mouth and the stony eyes. Beauty, gone forever. She hung the wet towel on the hook next to the small bathroom window and looked outside.

  It was the rosy-fingered dawn, the only thing by Homer she remembered, but the slice of the eastern sky framed by the thick window sash was dominated by an immense column of black smoke.

  She could not imagine what kind of fire that might be in the remote valley.

  Adèle ran to the bedroom and quickly dressed; Berthou was gone, she would have to go look herself. She flung open the door to Marie-France’s bedroom.

  Pierre waded unsteadily downstream toward the chest, his arms spread wide to keep his balance.

  There it was, a meter deep, pushed up against the curve of a rock by the current, curiously wavering, as if debating which side of the obstacle to glide off. He bent over and thrust his arms into the water.

  The child screamed, the wall of fire had reached them, the black smoke towering above them like an enormous anvil. The vanguard of flames surrounded her. She threw her skinny arms in the air.

  Pierre had the casket in his hands. He did not do what he wanted to do, but rather as he had been trained on the front. He dared not throw the shrine onto the bank, as though he was holding an unfamiliar and hazardous explosive, but rather let go of it and wrestled his way upstream, straight at the fire.

  The girl floated toward him like a burning doll.

  “Hush now,” he heard himself absurdly call out.

  The flames now engulfed him, and he felt his beard, skin, and hair ripped away for good. Our God is a consuming fire. He caught her in his arms and ducked underwater with her.

  Underwater was better, much better, only there was no air. She floundered and thrashed, but he held her tight. She wouldn’t drown in just twenty seconds. He expected to
hear something, God’s raging fury, but he heard nothing unnatural, so he opened his eyes and looked. There was an intense light above him, and he thought, This is the last thing I’ll ever see. He had bungled everything, he had failed, he had no right to any happiness whatsoever. But the Lord wanted him, not this child. He held his breath, grabbed hold of heavy stones in order to stay submerged, and pushed her head down. It may be you shall be hid in the day of the Lord’s wrath.

  Then it was over, and he had to either breathe or die. He took the limp body in his arms and surfaced.

  Foul muck oozed around them. The first thing he saw float by was a large red drum with the word “TOTAL” on it. Smoke trailed behind the receding fire like black voile. The oil fumes made him gag. The Lord works in mysterious ways.

  He sought a foothold on the stony bottom. Oil vapors burned his eyes. The world looked round, as though viewed through a distorting lens.

  A woman in a brown shawl flapping around her shoulders came running along the opposite bank.

  She stopped unexpectedly, right in front of him, her arms outstretched and hands open, with a curiously disfigured face.

  Of course, the child must be with her mother, and then he could go home.

  He stood up, the child in his arms, and waded to the Chrétiens’ side, which had been his and his forefathers’ for so very long, to do what he had to do, what anyone else would do.

  He felt nothing except the knowledge that he had not abandoned God.

  There were traces of oil on his burned head. Wisps of smoke whirled around him while he rose up out of the water, right before Adèle’s eyes, cradling her child. The little arms and legs hung like immobile bell-clappers.

  He climbed onto the riverbank, tottering every other step, because his prosthesis no longer had a shoe.

  “Here,” he said, and laid the child against Adèle’s breast. “I have to go home now.”

  Adèle ran with her child along the western bank, while Pierre stumbled off in the opposite direction. The column of smoke, less imposing than it had been, disappeared into the distance.

  “Maman, Maman,” Marie-France whimpered. The half of her face that was visible among the folds of the brown shawl was contorted in fear. “There was nothing I could do. I already had the treasure, but then he came, and then the fire . . .”

  “My sweetheart, my brave child,” she whispered. “You have saved us all.”

  I can sleep in her bed tonight, Marie-France thought to herself, and then it will all have been worth the trouble.

  Eduard Solomon treated himself to a flight on the Concorde for his last trip to Brittany. He spoiled himself these days: he was eighty-six years old and had prostate cancer. During the descent into Paris, he tried to make out the coastline and smiled as he thought of Asterix and Obelix and their “small village in Gaul, which stubbornly holds out against the invaders.” But under the thick white cloud cover, he saw only the tip of Normandy, and then they landed at Charles de Gaulle.

  He wondered how the Chrétiens and the Corbés had fared since all the fuss about the discovery of that treasure. Like so many Americans, he was addicted to television series and was as curious about these two families’ narrative as when he had missed several episodes of Dallas while on a sailing trip.

  He had made an open-ended reservation for a suite at L’Ermitage in La Baule.

  With the first-class carriage to himself, he set his feet on a newspaper on the seat across from him. The latest Saul Bellow novel, still in its cellophane wrapping, sat on his lap. He didn’t feel much like reading, certainly not something American. He watched the landscape glide past and wondered if he would ever see it glide past in the opposite direction. Maybe not. Perhaps, like his literary hero, Nabokov in Montreux, he would spend his last days in a grand hotel.

  When the train pulled into Chartres a solitary female traveler entered his compartment, and Solomon politely removed his feet from the seat, despite her smiling assurance that it wasn’t necessary. He valued old-fashioned courtesy, especially now that he was back in Europe.

  The newspaper under his feet turned out to be l’Ouest-Éclair, the regional paper.

  He skipped the first section, having already perused the international journals during the flight. He wanted the local news and remembered where to find it. He even looked forward to reading the advertisements, if only to see whether the delicatessen in Lorient still advertised its celebrated saucisson.

  The article that caught his eye began with the headline: Chapel of Saint Godeberta Dedicated.

  A momentous day for Catholic Brittany: Today, Monseigneur Gouyon, archbishop of Rennes, dedicated the chapel of Saint Godeberta, located in the remote Issou valley. At the spot where the property’s owner, M. Corbé—himself, it should be noted, a practicing Protestant—discovered the crypt and the golden shrine containing the bones of this little-known seventh-century martyr, a striking octagonal edifice has been constructed, designed by the architecture firm Bervets & Sons in Nantes. The building was financed entirely from private means, in particular by Mme. Adèle Berthou (née Chrétien), the widow of the controversial Corentin Berthou, who, shortly after the sensational archaeological discovery, was tragically killed in an automobile accident.

  The remarkable edifice will in future certainly attract the attention of the rare hiker taking in the charming but inaccessible vale of the Issou, although many readers will share the opinion of your editor that our landscape has not been enhanced by a creation on par with, for instance, Le Corbusier’s Notre-Dame-du-Haut . . .

  I’ll never understand these people, Solomon thought to himself. The story was accompanied by a grainy black-and-white photograph. He took out his magnifying glass.

  The caption read: Proudly reunited: the donor, Mme. Adèle Berthou, her daughter Mlle. Marie-France, law graduate of the Sorbonne, and the tolerant landowner, M. Pierre Corbé.

  Adèle looked distinguished, in a buttoned-up overcoat and a hat sporting what appeared to be lapwing feathers. Pierre looked down and had a cropped gray beard. He was small—much smaller than Adèle, who gazed resolutely into the lens, and her daughter, who stood in between them. He wore a bowler hat and looked remarkably well kempt. He leaned, his ankles crossed, on a walking stick that he had planted diagonally in the grass. He looked a bit like General Lee in his final days. Marie-France smiled gaily, despite the solemnity of the occasion: an emancipated young woman in a plaid miniskirt. Her curly hair, even in the black-and-white photo, seemed to light up under her beret.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Photo © 2015 Bob Bronshoff

  Martin Michael Driessen is a Dutch opera and theater director, translator, and writer. He made his debut in 1999 with the novel Gars, followed by Vader van God (Father of God, 2012) and Een ware held (A True Hero, 2013), both of which were broadly reviewed and nominated for literary prizes. In 2015 his novel Lizzie, written with the highly acclaimed and prize-nominated poet Liesbeth Lagemaat, was published under the pseudonym Eva Wanjek. Rivieren (Rivers) was awarded the prestigious ECI Literature Prize (formerly the AKO) in 2016. His latest novel, De pelikaan (The Pelican), was published in 2017. His work has been translated into English, Italian, German, and Hungarian.

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  Photo © 2015 Michele Hutchison

  Jonathan Reeder, a native of upstate New York and longtime resident of Amsterdam, enjoys a dual career as a literary translator and performing musician. Along with his work as a professional bassoonist, he translates opera libretti and essays on classical music as well as contemporary Dutch fiction and poetry. His first two translated novels—The Cocaine Salesman by Conny Braam and Bonita Avenue by Peter Buwalda—were longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and Bram Dehouck’s comic thriller A Sleepless Summer (winner of the 2012 Golden Noose) was selected by the Sunday Times Crime Club as a “December pick.” Additional English translations include novels and short stories by Mano Bouzamour, Christine Otten, Hanna Bervoets, and A.F.Th. van der Hei
jden.