“A fallow doe.”
“Yes. Soft and most beautiful. I keep that photograph always in my wallet since that day.”
“This is impossible, as usual,” she says. “You don’t know what you make up and what is real.”
2. This Is Not a Sign
First photograph: the woman is framed by the sign. There is a stone wall, a saint’s niche, a Saint Someone–benefactor of pigeons– chalked with shit. Wild rose has choked the gate open. The woman sits on the ground between two posts, the gate behind her. Above her head, on the cross-piece, the name of the village is scored. The woman is pointing up at the black letters. She speaks to someone outside the frame, the tilt of her chin suggesting challenge. Can you read me? she seems to be asking. Or possibly: Can you translate this sign?
The sign says: LA FORET LE ROI.
Second photograph: a man leans on the same sign from the other side. He looks directly and intensely at the viewer. Below one of his eyes, a small birthstain, attractive, resembles the map of France. The man smiles, but sadness clings to his smile. Because his arms are hooked over the cross-board, and because his chin rests just above the T, he has the air of a man in the village stocks.
The words on the other side of the sign remain the same, but a red diagonal line runs from the lower left corner of the cross-piece to the upper right. Decoded, the slashed letters mean: You are leaving the village of La Forêt le Roi.
Other translations, however, are possible. For example: This sign is inaccurate. It is forbidden to use these words. This village has been discontinued. Translation unavailable. Not to be read.
The woman cannot find the photographs but she knows they exist. She can remember, yes, in some detail, the last time she held them in her hands. The day was cloudy. She was indoors, reading a book, and the photographs slithered out from between the pages and fell to the floor. She thought the book faintly ridiculous, though absorbing. It was in French, a nineteenth-century traveller’s meditations on the world. In Asia and the exotic lands of the South Pacific, the observer wrote, the appreciation of fine wine does not exist. This is due to a diet of fiery spices and boiled food, two barbarisms which have destroyed the palate in the contrary hemisphere. Such lands, one might say, constitute the realm of bad taste, for below the equator and east of Constantinople, one of the five senses is extinct. In Australia, there is a bird that laughs when people eat.
She had gathered the photographs up from the floor and studied them. Time passed; an hour, two hours, she does not know. Darkness surprised her. She turned on the lamp and closed the book. She has a clear image of pages 56 and 57 shutting themselves over the prints, and of her hand reshelving the book. The rest is hazy. She cannot remember the book’s title or the author, though the minute she sees them she will know. She remembers the shape of the volume and the colour. Cloth-bound. Red, with bleached patches where silverfish had dined. She has searched high and low, in all the likely and unlikely places. For the Nth time, she is working her way through her library, A to Z and Z to A.
3. Afternoon of a Faun
“It’s getting dark. We must have taken the wrong path again.”
“Shh.” He presses his fingers against her mouth. “Don’t move!” Behind his shoulder, the wheel of sun skims the vast beech-tree crowns. Her eyes water. “Bouge pas, chérie,” he whispers, and steps backwards through long grass, two paces, three. He is quiet and careful as a cat. Behind her: the abrupt wall of forest. Behind him: wheat fields, red scatter of poppies, black crows against blinding gold.
He whispers, “Look this way. Look at me.”
“I can’t. The sun.”
“Shh.” At the soft click of the shutter, she hears leaf swish, the shuffle of a branch, deer again. They are always watching but never stay. Before she turns they have gone, white behinds scudding away through the shadows like cirrus fluff.
“Two biches, very young.” He indicates a square with his index finger and thumb. “It will be perfect. Everyone in my same …” He emphasises the shape made by his hand.
“Frame,” she says.
“Frame, yes.” He strokes the camera. He draws spatial arrangements in air. “Three pairs of eyes, the white tails, your white shirt. It will be excellent. One can wait years for such a moment.”
“I think I spoiled it. I think I moved.”
“No, ma petite biche. High shutter speed, it doesn’t matter. I will call it Secrets du bois.”
She begins to sing, “Down there came a fallow doe, As great with young as she maun go,” but trails off.
“Is it an Australian chanson?”
She laughs. “No. It’s a ballad. Old English. Train of association with the deer.”
He frowns, deciphering this.
“Fallow doe,” she explains. “Une biche. It’s a song about secrets and death in the forest.”
“Always in forests there are secrets and death.” He reverts to French; she speaks English; it is simpler that way, though often they move erratically back and forth, new language to old, old to new.
“Maybe if we follow the deer scat,” she says. “Maybe that’s the right path. Maybe the deer will lead us to the village.” She walks out of sunlight, into the cavern of beech and oak. Instantly the light changes, fails, turns aqueous. The temperature drops. All around her are low unnerving sounds. She shivers. “It’s spooky in here.”
He is changing film, kneeling on the narrow grass levee between forest and wheat. He nods into the woods. “The deer trail might lead to a body. There was a murder last year.”
“What? Here?”
“A woman from our village and the curé from La Thierry.”
“From our village? From St Sulpice-des-Bois?”
“Yes,” he says in English. “It was a scandal. She was enceinte.”
“Pregnant.”
“Yes. She was …” He searches for the English word but gives up. “Absente,” he says, frustrated, and turns back to French. “She was missing for weeks, and then a hunter found the bodies in there.”
“Now you tell me.” She steps back into the light.
“En fait, the deer found the bodies and the hunter found the deer.”
She looks warily into the trees. “A priest and a pregnant woman. Were they lovers?”
“What do you think? They were found naked.”
“Ah.” She begins humming the ballad to herself and breaks off. “There’s a murder in the ballad too, and lovers, a knight and a maiden. I wonder why something like that gives us such a – frisson? There’s not an English word, isn’t that interesting? Un tel frisson. But it seems indecent to feel it, it seems obscene.”
He is checking his light meter, holding it close to the trees. “The forest is erotic,” he says. “And so is death. And so is mystery.”
“Down in yonder green field” she sings, “there lies a knight slain under his shield, with a down – Did they find out who did it?”
“No.”
“Nothing? No clues?”
“Yes, a clue. Another body in the forest near La Thierry. The chef de police in Etampes thinks the same killer, quelqu’un du coin.”
“Someone local.”
“Yes. Now you see why I do not let you walk alone.”
She bridles at this. “No one lets me or doesn’t let me. I do what I choose.”
“No, I forbid it. The killer could be anyone you meet.”
“He could be you.”
“He could be me.”
“Down in yonder green field,” she sings, the notes low and annoyed. “With a down, hey down. There lies a knight slain under his shield, With a down, derry derry derry down down …” She leaves the boundary line between forest and field and moves out between the wheat rows where the light is still golden as butter. “Haven’t you finished reloading yet? I’m starting back. I think we’re lost.”
“You cannot cross the field, that is trespassing. We are not lost.”
“Well then, the village is lost. Forgive us our trespasses
or we won’t be home before dark. And we’re not going to find La Forêt le Roi, that’s certain. Not today.”
“We are not lost” he repeats. “Simply, we have not yet found the right path.”
“Precisely my point. And we’re not going to find it in the dark. Let’s go.”
“No, we wait for the partridges. They will arrive now, momently.”
“At any moment,” she corrects. “We must be at least ten kilometres from St Sulpice. Once the sun goes –”
“Et voilà. Des perdreaux.” They always appear close to dusk, the fledgling partridges, and always in pairs, nervy, intense, small highspeed feathered propellers, flying low over the wheat fields and into the black trees where death waits: hawks, hunters’ guns, owls. She watches the pearled blur of wings and the birds seem to her unbearably vulnerable. “ Venez, venez, mes petits,” he murmurs, excited. He points the camera like a gun. A high thrumming rises from him, and she turns away, disturbed. The fledglings vanish between the trees. Panic, unaccountable, swoops down on her. She begins to run through the wheat toward St Sulpice.
“Chérie, what are you doing?”
In minutes, he catches her and reaches for the back of her shirt. She tears loose, hears the ripping, then he has her again. He covers the back of her neck with savage kisses.
“Stop it. You’re hurting me.”
“ Un chasseur aime chasser,” he murmurs. A hunter loves to hunt. She can feel the camera against the curve of her spine. “You should not provoke,” he says. “But you like to provoke.”
“I don’t like to be hunted as though I’m wild game, nor do I like to be lost. Look what you’ve done to my shirt.”
He runs his fingertips over her breasts. “You look better this way.”
“This is insane. It’s nearly dark. You got partridges yesterday, and the day before.”
“Sometimes from six rolls of film, I do not find one single shot which pleases me.”
“You’re obsessive. You’re more interested in your wretched Nikon than in me.”
“To be jealous of a camera, c’est ridicule, chérie.”
It’s not jealousy, she does not say, her heart thudding. It has nothing to do with jealousy. She does not know what it is. It is something shapeless and dark, like the black spaces deep inside the woods.
“Bouge pas.” He focuses, clicks.
“Don’t,” she says, angry, covering herself.
He pulls the shirt from her, rams it into his camera case. “I am an eye, chérie, this is what I am. Please. Like this. Or running, yes, if you want, that’s good, c’est magnifique!”
They are both gasping now, the wheat in tumult as they pass. She cannot tell if the tolling bell is a church or her heart or the blink of shutter or thudding feet. She trips and falls and rolls into darkness. His weight crushes her, the wheat stubble scratches her back. “Perfect,” he is laughing. “The light is perfect. I will call it Nymph fleeing, with bare breasts. Or Diana the Huntress.”
She beats at him with her fists, she tears at his clothes, they bite, their embrace is violent and smells of soil and want and hay. Afterwards, spent, they look up through the smashed wheat at the darkening sky.
“Nymph and Satyr” he murmurs. “But no one to put us in the same frame.”
She rolls onto her side and stares at him. “You arrange us in your head the whole damn time,” she says, furious. She bites his shoulder. “You weren’t even here. You’re an onlooker, you know that? a bloody voyeur. You’re always some place else, inventing us.”
“I am not guilty as charged. I have been framed.”
“Oh, that’s good. A pun in English, that’s very good. Everything’s just a game inside your head.”
“Just a game? I am very serious about games, mon petit joujou.”
“I’m not your toy. We’ve been walking all afternoon and we never even found the right path, let alone your precious village.”
He laughs. “Is it Australian? You cannot enjoy the game without kicking the goal?”
“Is it French, forgetting which fucking game you’re playing?”
“Mais c’est toi. You are my fucking game. I never forget.”
“Lose the time clock, lose count of the score, change the rules as you go, declare yourself winner anyway.”
“Bien sûr. I always win.”
“If that’s a dare, you’re playing a dangerous game.”
“You like dangerous games. We both like dangerous games.”
She shivers.
“What are you frightened of?” He strokes her neck with his fingertips. He bites her lip. “Are you frightened of me?”
4. Swann and Odette
She calls him Swann because he calls her Odette.
“Odette?” she says. “Why? Because you stalked me?”
“Because Odette played with men the way cats play with birds, and because Swann won her back against all odds.”
“A trophy. And then he walled her in chez Swann and she had to drop right out of the world. I don’t like the sound of it.”
“It was you who came looking for me. It was you who came back.”
“Because you sent signals. You set out lures.”
“Yes,” he acknowledges. “And you were looking for them. You knew where they led. You flew right into my cage.”
“I can fly right out again.”
“Or you might not want to. Or I could stop you. That is the game.”
5. Swann’s Way
“We will stay longer on the road,” he decides, his finger on the old map. “This time, we will follow the road to here, direction Etampes, but since Boissy-le-sec we will cross the fields.”
“I thought that was trespassing.”
“We will cross between the fields. On the right-of-way.”
The shutter clicks. She has him, profile against afternoon light, both maps unfolding their wings. She can see the bright plume of obsession. He believes it means something, that they found the map in the wine cave beneath their house. He believes it means something extraordinary. The map is cobwebbed and water-stained. When they unfold it, pieces fall away like ash. In the lower right corner is a royal seal and a stamp:
Propriété de Monsieur Bousquet, forestier du roi, 1681.
Pavillon de chasse du Roi.
La Forêt le Roi.
She moves closer and presses the shutter again.
“Since Boissy-le-sec,” he says, “we will search closely for the path. It should show itself here.”
“After Boissy-le-sec.” She moves, focuses, clicks.
He raises his eyes, reproachful. “You are wasting my film.”
“You said ‘since’. You can only use ‘since’ for time, not place.”
“ ‘After’ is place?”
“Okay, so English isn’t logical. ‘After’ can be place. For example: before the wine cave, after the wine cave. As in: After the wine cave, Swann became obsessed with the king’s hunting lodge.”
“Because the steps to the wine cave go down to the seventeenth century,” he says. He runs his index finger along the margin of the map. “Forestier du roi, 1681. The question is, how has it arrived in our cave du vin, the map of the king’s forester? Why has it travelled fifteen kilometres, maybe twenty, from La Forêt le Roi?”
“Maybe the forester was Protestant? Maybe he was appointed by Henri IV and Louis XIV inherited him? And then bang,1685, Revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis, and the Huguenots had to flee for their lives.”
“How do you know these things of French history?” he asks, amazed.
She thinks about it and shrugs. “Must be one of the oddities of an Australian education, a passion for dates. Mention a king or a war, and a year pops out like a cuckoo from a clock: 1066, 1215, 1337-1453, that’s the Hundred Years War in case you don’t know your own past.”
He says, offended: “Those scars on the bell tower of St Sulpice? English catapaults, 1405. Our grandmothers tell us the stories.”
“You’re joking.
Of the Hundred Years’ War?”
“The stories are passed down and down, and in the mairie records are kept from the twelfth century. Children find pieces of armour.”
“They do? Still?”
“Si, si. Chain mail, coins, it is very bad luck to put an English coin in your pocket. They find Roman coins too, but that is lucky.”
In St Sulpice-des-Bois, she is subject to a kind of vertigo. History floats. Time flutters like partridge wings. Monsieur Bousquet hovers over the king’s hunting map while William Dampier, buccaneer, maps the north-west coast of Terra Incognita, inventing the shape of Australia as he goes.
The house itself, the house of Swann and Odette, once a stable, is three centuries older than the royal forester’s map. Sometimes Odette presses her ear to the thick stone wall (it is cold; it is never warm, not on the hottest day; it is never light inside the house; they live in dusk), sometimes she holds the former stable like a shell to her ear and hears Crusaders thundering by, hears kings on hunting trips, hears the guillotine in the village square.
“On the old map,” Swann says. “There is still the s. Do you see?” He points to the curled baroque script: La Forest le Roi.
“When did that change? The circumflex accent instead of the s?”
“I don’t know. A long time ago. And on the map of the département, latest edition, here it is, the same village. La Foret le Roi.”
“Either way, it doesn’t really make sense. The Forest the King. Why no partitive?”
“For the Sun King? Redundant, I suppose.”
“Anyway, we’ve driven along every back road and every country track in that area. There’s nothing there.”
“It is on the map. The mairie is very exact.”
“That doesn’t prove the village still exists. Probably ten generations of fonctionnaires transferred the old to the new, year by year, without checking.”
“In the mairie, they always check. The road is not transferred,” he points out. “In the old map, you see? the village is on the main highway from Etampes to Versailles. Now, on the map of the département, you see how the autoroute is very far from the villages. La Forêt le Roi is here, but there is no road that leads to it.”
North of Nowhere, South of Loss Page 14