He took up the pen again and forced himself to continue:
…on the Bessières bridge, to hear me call you…
No, it was impossible. He was not going to write rubbish like that. He had to make it shorter. Not remind him of anything. Send a word, a cri du cœur, Bloch will be able to read between the lines. He will see that I am wretched. I wasn’t aiming at you, Jacques Bloch – I was after myself. I’ll write this afternoon. I’ll tear up the sheet of paper and put the envelope in plain sight on the desk. He even stuck a stamp on it, but he did not know that the letter would never be written and that the envelope would wind up under the seals of the magistrate, with its neat rubber stamp, between the Latin papers and the latest circulars to teachers of ancient languages at the Gymnase.
In the afternoon, which was traditionally free, he went down into town and went to Monsieur Liechti’s for a shave. He enjoyed stretching out in the barber’s chair, being soaped at length, feeling the blade run over his skin, crackling.
He did not write to Bloch. He roamed in the alleys of La Palud.
Going past La Louve, he debated over going up to Pernette’s place and abandoned the idea: she must have her Saturday clients, Italians, Spaniards; he felt unwelcome, he continued wandering, but, for several hours, he missed the shiny fat flesh and the lipstick that tasted of grenadine. At a stand on the Place Centrale, he bought a pocket book of the Satyricon and threw it down a sewer one hundred yards further on. He had just reminded himself that he did not have the right to defile Latin. He did not feel like struggling to convince himself of the contrary.
He went back home.
He was worn out from his wandering in the streets. He was trembling in the heat. He went to bed early.
That night he had no dreams, at least he thought not, and he rested completely.
The following day, which was Sunday 17 June, Jean Calmet masturbated on waking, and when he had had his meagre pleasure, he remembered the jokes of his comrades in the military: “It’s easier than screwing a woman. You don’t need a real hard-on. And, at any rate, there’s less machinery.” Laughter. But they had women. Disgust. His fingers sticky, Jean Calmet got to the bathroom and looked at himself furtively in the mirror. He went back to bed.
Fell asleep again.
When he awoke, church bells were ringing, and he imagined the groups of worshippers waiting on the square in front of the church, the robed pastor coming out of the vestry and slowly climbing the steps of the pulpit, the cold nave where the chants rose. He spent the day doing nothing. Should I write to Bloch? I’ll do it tomorrow. Nor did he write to Thérèse, as he had vaguely intended to do.
With her, all is lost. What good is it to explain to her what I couldn’t tell her by loving her? Then he began wishing that he could see her again by chance on the road to the Gymnase. Would he greet her? Yes, she would come towards him, there would be trees streaming with light, the wind, the blue of the sky over the rooftops and a pavement café to sit in and drink beer. They would be friends. The summer would be long. And this autumn, when classes resumed, he would look at the world with clear eyes.
The day of his death, which was Monday 18 June, Jean Calmet did not get up. Obviously, he could not know that his last day had come. Nevertheless, there were signs that morning which a shrewder or less uncertain man would not have failed to interpret more clearly.
For example, he did not telephone the Gymnase, and for someone as conscientious, that error of judgement, under ordinary circumstances, would have been the worst kind of foolishness.
Half-past six. He was lying flat in his bed, he felt weary, he was daydreaming. What was he going to do with the morning? Nothing, really, he would do nothing. Would he call in just the same? He did not have the strength. Impossible. The taste of dirty saliva. A phosphorescent fatigue as after a long night march.
Had he dreamt? He did not remember anything. No nightmare. No fever. A white slime.
He took his penis in his right hand, thinking about his comrades in the military. Easier than machinery.
But no shame this time.
Mentholated tissue.
Half sleep.
A little later, Jean Calmet did not dress himself. He stayed in pyjamas, grey ones with blue stripes, made of nylon, that his mother had given him for Christmas. He walked in pyjamas from one room to the other, barefoot, casting on his books and papers a gaze that conveyed nothing.
He had opened the blinds, and the gardens of Rovéréaz sent a green light into the apartment. It was half-past seven. People were hurrying towards the city. Jean Calmet did not stir. Another sign. For several long minutes, he stayed before a window watching leaves and birds move in a hedge of hazel bushes at the end of the gravel at the entrance. Then he sat down at his desk and shifted ballpoint pens on a blotter.
It was eight o’clock when he went into the bathroom. He opened his razor.
The blade shone on the metal head. He lifted it off, closed the razor again, put it back in its blue case.
He took the blade and lay down again on his bed.
For a moment, he looked at it in the light, his hand outstretched. Against the light, it made a rectangular silhouette whose sharp edges gleamed. He therefore acts quickly, with surprising decisiveness for someone who has been lying about for days.
Holding the blade firmly between the thumb and index finger of his right hand, he pressed it against his left wrist, and, with the edge, he gently caressed the tendons and the main artery an inch from his hand. The blade was very keen. Jean Calmet felt the edge cut the skin; he shivered in spite of himself and looked at his forearm: a little red line was filling up with blood where the blade had gone. He did not put it down on the bedside table, as he had a terrible desire to do.
It was then that the die was cast.
All of a sudden, with an extraordinary force that he concentrated on that single point, he pressed on the blade, drove it into his left wrist and slowly sliced the radial artery and the flesh. Next, the right wrist…
He carefully placed the bloody blade on the little table next to the lamp and some books.
To his great surprise, the blood had not spurted. It oozed, tepid, thick; it was like a suction that tickled him over the slight smarting of the two wounds. He noticed that he was not thinking: for a minute, he had been making moves whose precision had absorbed him. He applied himself. The blood was not running fast enough, he had to help it. He let both his arms hang out over the side of his bed and he lay there, his arms outspread, motionless, while two scarlet streams trickled from his wrists into his palms and dripped from his fingers.
Jean Calmet waited, and now his thoughts were rushing with sharp clarity. He was not suffering. It was a crossing, a passage, where he shivered as in a dark trough. Faces, places appeared: the brown face of a girl glimpsed in a café, she was knitting, on her neck she had Arab jewellery made of plaited iron. Verret prostrated in the teachers’ room. A porcupine with shining nose in the moonlight. The orchard in Lutry, a slow-worm had been cut in two by a scythe, the two coppery sections wriggled in the sun…
His thoughts returned to his wrists. The blood was hardly running anymore. It was beginning to coagulate, no doubt because of the dry air on that summer morning, and Jean Calmet remembered that he had to dip his arms into hot water to promote the drainage.
When he arose, the two red streams were seeping again; he was pleased by this, but he noticed with disgust that the blood had already made two little gluey pools on the floor, and he wondered who would clean them up sooner or later. A malaise seized him. He wondered if he could walk. A black wing, painful, crossed his brain like a migraine; pincers bit into him above the elbow and at the thighs.
His wrists extended in front of him, he reached the bathroom and knelt before the bathtub. The blood had stained the sleeves of the pyjamas. Jean Calmet rolled them up and turned on the hot water. Drops of blood fell on the enamel and spread out in stars on the perfect white. The faucet made an infernal din: Jean Calm
et reduced the volume and stuck his wrists under the water. Now the blood was spurting. The entire bathtub was spattered with red. He had to make a mighty effort to remain on his knees, his trunk erect, his arms extended, while the faucet continued to drill through his skull, and all kinds of noises struck him like echoes of the horrible din: the lake assailing the breakwater at Lutry, the stormy nights, the bells of the old town, the fountain in the small square of the Grand Council, where the pigeons go to drink and bathe in the evening, and the scraping of chairs and the laughter lull to sleep the heart and the memory more surely than the weariness at the close of the day. But he was growing drowsy, too. He was aware of beginning to bend towards the whiteness of the enamel covered with crimson seals; try as he might to straighten up by fits and starts, he would fall forward again, and his arms, still extended, weighed him down now like intolerable burdens. For some time he had not felt the sizzling of the water at his wrists. Had not felt the blood escaping from him. He closed his eyes. He was going to sleep. Gently. To sleep.
He was on the verge of losing consciousness, and he caught himself on the rim of the basin. He looked: staring at the enamel, he saw his blood in scarlet scratches, in indecipherable red networks, in flowing scratches that turned round and round and crossed, intersected, became blurred like illegible constellations beneath him. The star! The yellow star! he thought, there’s still that! and he wondered if Bloch would ever forgive him for the nastiness of the Bessières bridge. Then his sisters called to him. He was playing at the back of the garden. He had to come inside for tea. He climbed back upon the terrace with infinite effort, crossing the orchard, leaning his back against the trees to rest, his eyes closed, and he felt the branches moving against his head. Apple trees. They were apple trees, and Simon’s titmice were singing in their shining leaves.
He collapsed, let his arms (which now hung against the rim) fall back down, and the blood came forth in thin spurts with surprising speed. Panic-stricken, Jean Calmet tried to straighten up, escape from the trap of that terribly echoing room, call for help, quickly! quickly! He tried to bring his arms back to himself in order to straighten up: impossible. He fell back down. Then tears rolled over his cheeks, his eyes were full of burning salt, he was crying, he was gasping like a desperate child. If he could at least turn off the water! But his arms no longer obeyed. His head fell, the tears mingled with the blood on the enamel, and great sobs now drove violent pains into the back of his throat. He remembered a gathering of good-looking young people, they smiled at him, it was at the Café de l’Évêché, then in a classroom with yellowed walls, he remembered Isabelle growing thin. Then, exhausted, he fell as he would into his grave.
Thus Jean Calmet died.
It had taken him twenty-five minutes.
At La Cité, at the same moment, the examinations for the bac were beginning. In haste, they had replaced Jean Calmet; one of the deans had distributed the exam questions in his place and invigilated room 17 from his desk covered with very old ink stains. In the next-to-last row, Marc was already cursing over the translation of Tacitus that Jean Calmet had selected without too much conviction.
One hundred yards from there, Thérèse was waking up in her little room. She was in no hurry. The light filtered through the blinds. The light of June. On the rug, the bedspread rolled into a ball resembled a heap of gold.
In Lutry, Madame Calmet had been up for a long time. She had nibbled a piece of bread, drunk tea, she had done her housework, then she had dressed herself and fixed her hair. Now she was sitting in her armchair, motionless, she looked into the light of the window.
A JEW MUST DIE
Jacques Chessex
A novel based on a true story
On 16 April, 1942, a few days before Hitler’s birthday, a handful of Swiss Nazis in Payerne lure Arthur Bloch, a Jewish cattle merchant, into a stable and kill him with an iron bar. Europe is in flames but this is Switzerland and Payerne, a rural market town of butchers and bankers, is more worried about unemployment and local bankruptcies than the fate of nations across the border. Fernand Ischi, leader of the local Nazi cell, blames everything on the Jews and Bloch’s murder is to be an example, a foretaste of what is to come once the Nazis take over Switzerland.
Jacques Chessex, winner of the prestigious Prix Goncourt, is from Payerne. He knew the murderers, went to school with their children. He has written a taut, implacable story that has awakened memories in a country that seems to endlessly rediscover dark areas of its past.
PRAISE FOR A JEW MUST DIE
“Told in spare and sober prose, Chessex’s final novel is a masterpiece. A thought-provoking picture of fear and prejudice that will stay with you long after you finish this small but intensely powerful book.” The Guardian
“In its imagined evocation of historical fact, A Jew Must Die is in itself a justification of the power of art. This brief, disturbing masterpiece goes to the heart of the creative process.”
The Independent
“It is a swift and stunning narrative based on a true incident. Read this novel for the history it captures and for the sheer beauty of its prose.” Booklist
£6.99/$12.95/C$14.50
Paperback Original
ISBN 978-1904738-510
eBook
ISBN 978-1904738-572
www.bitterlemonpress.com
THE VAMPIRE OF ROPRAZ
Jacques Chessex
1903, Ropraz, a small village in Switzerland. On a howling December day, a lone walker discovers a recently opened tomb, the body of a young woman violated, her left hand cut off, genitals mutilated and heart carved out. There is horror in the nearby villages: the return of atavistic superstitions and mutual suspicions. Then two more bodies are violated. A suspect must be found. Favez, a stable-boy with blood-shot eyes, is arrested, convicted, placed into psychiatric care. In 1915, he vanishes.
PRAISE FOR THE VAMPIRE OF ROPRAZ
“A truly horrifying tale of superstition, madness and retribution. Chessex brilliantly renders both the inhospitable winter landscape of the mountains and the harshness of a society that makes monsters of its victims.”
London Review of Books
“In measured prose that studiously sidesteps sensationalism, Chessex recounts the alternating repulsion and fascination of those who vampirically exploit Favez to satisfy their own needs.” Publishers Weekly
“This is a superb novella by a winner of the Prix Goncourt, written in a spare prose that renders it a thousand times more effective.” The Independent
‘All the more chilling for having its roots in a true story, this is an evocative tale of fear, prejudice and cruelty among country folk.” Daily Mail
£6.99/$12.95/C$12.95
Paperback Original
ISBN 978-1904738-336
eBook
ISBN 978-1904738-503
www.bitterlemonpress.com
BITTER LEMON PRESS
First published in the United Kingdom in 2012 by Bitter Lemon Press, 37 Arundel Gardens, London W11 2LW
www.bitterlemonpress.com
First published in French as L’Ogre by
Bernard Grasset, Paris in 1973
© Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle, 1973
English translation © Martin Sokolinsky, 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without written permission of the publisher
The moral rights of the author and the translator have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
eISBN : 978-1-904-73895-4
Typeset by Tetragon
Printed and bound by Cox & Wyman Ltd, Reading, Berkshire
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