“Proof enough that the village has gone the way of the king’s forester.”
“No. Not proof enough,” he says. “Not in France. There are footpaths and bicycles and canal boats and horses and carts.”
On the seventeenth-century map, the footpaths are marked. On the map of the département, they are also marked. Some of the paths correspond. Some do not. In any case, the translation of lines from map to terrain is a highly intuitive skill, like water divining.
“We will find it,” he says confidently. He measures something with thumb and forefinger on the royal forester’s map and checks it against the modern map for scale. “The path should arrive somewhere here, when we can see the steeple of La Thierry.”
“Why does it matter? What do you think you’ll find?”
“It was where the king took his mistresses, the hunting lodge. Un grand chasseur, le roi soleil. Of women and of deer.”
“So that’s it. Hunting where the king hunted, and fucking where he fucked. That turns you on?”
“ Certainement.” He is gathering up the maps and setting them aside, his hands trembling. She is awed, she is bemused, she is sometimes frightened by his flash floods of desire, the way appetite seizes him as a hawk might seize a quail. She cannot tell who is hunter and who is prey. She cannot tell which one of them has power and which has none.
“All you really want,” she murmurs, “is a photograph of me in the lodge where Louise de la Vallière got laid.”
“Tais-toi, chérie. Tais-toi.”
The table creaks and groans with their weight. Time slithers, maps realign themselves, kings watch, the forest lures.
6. After the Hunt
“After the hunt,” he says, drowsy, “they say the king was inflamed. He liked to make love with the stag hung outside his window, dripping blood.”
“Charming. Eros and death again, that really turns the French on.”
“It turns everyone on. The French are honest about this, the puritan English are not.”
“I am not English.”
“Australian, English.” He shrugs to indicate the splitting of hairs. “Anglo-Saxon, protestant, puritan, inhibé, tendu … How do you say it?”
“Uptight.”
“Uptight, yes. But now .. ” He kisses her. “Now you are more décontractée.”
“In French, I am someone else.”
“Now you have the face of a biche. You should look always like this. Et voilà, I have you on film. I will keep you this way.”
7. Secrets du Bois
“Here is where we will search,” he says, trailing an index finger across the map of the département, “after we leave the rue d’Etam-pes.”
“Through the forest? But the old highway would not have gone through the forest.”
“Three hundred years,” he says. “Trees grow again.”
“The forest where the bodies …? and the hunters? Where you told me they still hunt wild boar?”
“We won’t be in danger. The hunting season hasn’t begun.”
8. Rue d’Etampes
Along the route to Etampes, each village is quiet as death. Stone house-fronts and high walls hug the road. Rambler roses suck at the mortar and the walls are thorn-barbed and honeysuckle-choked, but beyond all that noisy colour, hush crouches.
“No one lives in France,” Odette says. “Not outside Paris. That’s my theory. The villages are decoys left over from the Hundred Years War.”
“Listen.” Swann pulls her close and turns her to the wall that rises sudden as a rampart from the street. He presses his body against hers, and presses hers hard against the wall. “Listen,” he says against her ear and his hot breath is like waves breaking in her head. “What do you hear?”
“Surf. Ocean. The sea of you.”
“It’s the law of village and not-village. You can hear it behind every wall. Someone is whispering to someone else: C’est l’anglaise et le parisien. Again.”
“Then tell them I’m not l’anglaise. I wouldn’t be English if you paid me. Je suis l’australienne.”
“It’s all the same to them. It is slicing the hair. You speak English.”
“Anyway, there’s no one here. It’s a ghost village,” she insists. “If we ever find La Forêt le Roi, there’ll be no way to tell if it’s abandoned or alive.”
“You are wrong. Already everyone in St Sulpice knows. Listen.” He puts his ear to the wall and pretends to repeat what he hears. “They are taking the direction Etampes, they have passed through Venant, they are in Boissy-le-Sec, they are leaving the road. Even in La Forêt le Roi they know. They are waiting for us.”
“Then the baker tells them.”
9. The Butcher, the Baker
Each day, when the baker leans on his horn, she opens the gate in their wall. It is ten exactly by the church-tower clock. The baker parks in the cobbled square where the guillotine stood, opens the back doors of his van, and leans against the shrine to Our Lady who wears white, a powdering of pigeon-shit centuries thick. The hot fresh smell of yeast pulls people like ribbons through the gates on all sides of the square.
“Ah, l’anglaise!” the baker says every day. “Bonjour, madame. Combien de baguettes aujourd’hui?”
“Deux, s’il vous plaît, monsieur. Je ne suis pas anglaise. Je suis australienne.”
Day after day, not a word, not an intonation changes.
“No one lives in France,” she says, “and nothing changes. Ever.”
“That is how we know we will find the village,” he explains. “And how we know they will be waiting for us.”
She says: “I dreamed there was blood on the baker’s hands.”
10. Souls of the Damned
“It’s so dark in here,” she says. “I used to love forests. Rainforests. But this one scares me.”
“Look! Look there. A hunter’s abri.”
“It’s the hunters more than the murders. I’m scared of guns.”
“Look.” He points to a small dam, a drinking trough. It is a lure. As they watch, a fawn pricks its way across moss on dainty unsteady legs. At the trough it pauses, sensing something, and stares at them with its huge and lustrous eyes, and then it is gone, a streak of taupe and white.
“The hunters stay downwind,” he explains. “They wait till the deer start to drink.”
“That’s so cruel. That’s so unfair.” She examines the water hole. “It’s quite steep. It’s very – merde!” She slips and falls into the mud.
Swann laughs, changing light reading and shutter speed. “I’ll call this one ‘Fallen Woman’. ”
“Oh for God’s sake,” she says, and hurls a handful of mud at the lens.
“My Nikon!” he cries.
She sees his face and begins to run, headlong, deep into the forest. Tangled ivy clutches at her ankles, pulls at her legs. She stumbles on, gasping. She can hear the thudding of his feet, of her heart, of the blood in her ears. She falls and staggers up and hugs the trunk of an oak for support and then she sees the white stag and cannot even scream.
Massive, the colour of soiled cream, he watches her, unblinking. His antlers seem ancient, deadly as the scaffolding that once stood in Place de la République. She cannot breathe. The stag’s basilisk eyes are impassive. Welcome to the royal hunt, the eyes say. There is no escape. Thou shalt not pass.
She seems to faint. A blackness floats before her eyes. She is buffeted by something, by history, by time, by the illicit, by something that is hurting her wrists. There seem to be cords.
“Magnificent, magnificent,” Swann breathes. “The royal stag. I got you both. I’ll call it ‘The Huntress Bound’.” He is taking her violently from behind, the tree bark strafes her face, her belly, her breasts. Her wrists are bound with a leather cord to the trunk. “He’s still watching us,” Swann says, his voice drunk with arousal. “He knows this scene.”
Swann’s skin is slick against her back. She can feel his nails on her thighs, drawing blood. Beyond her bound wrists, beyond the b
ark-strafed skin of her forearms, her eyes meet the eyes of the stag.
11. Woman Getting out of the Bath
When she steps out of the bath, the water is pink with blood.
“Like that,” he says, pulling away the towel. “With your hair wet, and one foot still in the water, and the steam rising.”
She feels drugged. The shutter flickflickflicks like an eyelash. She is wet as a seal and slippery, her movements tidal.
12. Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe
An old man leans on a pitchfork and stares at them stupidly. His face is seamed like a quarry. He has no teeth. Behind him, the floor of the stone barn is piled with hay. They can see a few sheep and a horse.
“We could ask him to take a photograph,” Odette says.
“We don’t need it. We’ve already got proof. The village sign.”
“Both of us together, I mean.” She smoothes the linen cloth on the grass near the edge of the pond. From her backpack, she takes out the glasses and the wine.
Swann says: “I’m going to pick apples.” A tree heavy with fruit hangs over the pond and Swann is climbing, the Nikon slung around his neck. “I knew it,” he says. “From up here I can see the iron spikes where the stags were hung. It’s the hunting lodge. The stone barn was the hunting lodge.”
Odette watches the old man who watches Swann. That is surely his apple tree, she thinks. This is his barn. He could be a royal by-blow. He could be Monsieur Bousquet’s great-great-grandson, five times removed.
“Can I tempt you?” Swann swings down out of the tree. He offers an apple. When she bites into it, the eye of the Nikon blinks. “Eve in Eden,” he says, and the high bright sound is in his voice. “Tonight, when the old man goes, we’ll sleep on his hay.”
“I’m going to ask him to take a photograph.”
“He won’t have a clue what to do. Look at the way he looks at us. You might as well ask him for the moon.”
“He thinks we’re trespassing.”
“He doesn’t. No one owns a village pond or a village well.
He’s not thinking anything.”
“He’s scared of us then.”
“Inbred,” Swann decides. “It’s possible no one from outside has been here for three hundred years.”
“I’m going to ask him just the same.”
“I will take your photograph,” Swann promises. “I have six rolls of film. I will take you lying naked in the hay.”
“Where Louise de la Vallière got laid.”
“Yes. And in the pond by moonlight. The naked shepherdess sings to the moon.”
“I want one of us together. I want a keepsake. I want the picnic on the grass, just this one peaceful scene.”
“You don’t need a keepsake in Eden.”
“It’s no good, Swann. I’m leaving. You must have known. You must surely have realised that.”
His face goes still. She sees his knuckles turn white and the wine glass break in his hand.
“You’re bleeding,” she cries.
He lifts his bloodied palm to her face and strokes her cheek. “You won’t be leaving,” he says.
13. That Obscure Object of Desire
A man and a woman are drinking wine in a sidewalk café.
“Your hair is grayer than last time,” Odette says. “It suits you. Men look more distinguished with age.” She touches the birthstain under his eye with her fingertip. “Mon cher volcan.”
Swann takes her hands and kisses them. “There is still a wildness in you,” he says, “ma biche sauvage. You were like a doe in the forest, always poised to take flight.”
“You were so violent, Swann, when we were young. You used to scare me.”
“Violent?” He raises startled brows. “Mais non.”
“I found an old photograph. The picnic with wine and apples in La Forêt le Roi.”
He closes his eyes. “A thousand and one nights in the king’s hunting lodge,” he sighs fondly.
“I was going to bring it, but I couldn’t find it in time. It’s somewhere in the papers on my desk.”
Swann takes a deep slow breath. “I can smell the hay. I beguiled myself for years with that fantasy. It was a considerable work of art.”
“We asked that old man to take the picture.”
“I had some sort of idea for a show. A la recherche du village perdu, something like that. I arranged the hunting lodge and the pond and an apple tree. I could see them clear as a photograph in my head.”
“The essence of bucolic tranquillity” she muses. “You would never guess what was just outside the frame.”
“The map was real,” he says. “The possibility was always there. Camus wrote that the way matters little. What suffices is the will to arrive.”
“Do you remember that photograph of you leaning on the village sign?” she asks. “You look pensive. You’ve found the object of your obsession but it isn’t enough. I love that picture. It’s the essence of you.”
“In my wallet,” he says, “I carry the photograph of you in the king’s hunting lodge. You look the way you should always look.”
“I only look that way in French,” Odette says.
NATIVITY
When he passes under the boom, his fingertips turn slippery on the wheel. No vehicles over six feet. Jonathan ducks his head, just in case, and listens for a thump, miscalculation being something he has come to expect. He wipes his hands, one at a time, against the car seat, but the grey fabric is clammy too. He leans out to take the ticket. Even in the parking garage, he notes uneasily, as soon as the barrier descends and locks you in, that particular fog settles. Any hospital, any city, the same thing: he has difficulty breathing.
He clicks on his headlights and follows the arrows up, second level, third, still no free spaces, fourth level, he can feel his pulse picking up speed, all these sick and dying people, this fog, he is practically hyperventilating now, he is allergic to visitation hours, to visitations, Visitation of the Plague, Visitation of the Archangel Gabriel to Mary, to this fever of unwanted associations, to fifteenth-century woodcuts plastering themselves across his windshield. He turns his wipers on. He has reached fifth level. Sixth. He may not be able to get out of his car. Does that ever happen? he wonders; blackouts, heart attacks, in hospital parking lots? Obviously. He can see attendants in Day-Glo vests checking, all part of the day’s work. The attendants hold slim flashlight probes. They move from car to car. They are looking for bodies slumped low against the wheel. Potius mori quam foedari, Jonathan thinks. He wonders what the statistics are.
When he turns off the engine, the fog leaks in through the vents. The smell is always the same, a moist blend of anxiety, disinfectant, roses wilting at bedsides, sweat (the kind one smells on animals in veterinarians’ waiting rooms), vital fluids, IV fluids, bed pans, over-perfumed visitors, death.
Maternity wards should be different.
Wards, he thinks. Wardens. Detention. There is no getting away from threat. The concrete pillars undulate slightly, like the pulse in a baby’s head, sucking back and then distending themselves. His sense of balance has gone. There is less and less space for the car and he can see that it will not be easy to back out. He will have to work at it. (Labour’s begun, the first phase, and she’s been admitted. She especially wants you to be there. Can you drop everything and come down?) He decides that Atlanta is worse than other cities. (Apparently there are complications. Something called preeclampsia. Do you think you can make it in time?) He is labouring now, tugging at oxygen, raking it across his ribs. Atlanta is worse because of the congestion, the smog, the violence, the rampant harm.
He does not seem able to move. He leans against the steering wheel and watches a Toyota draw a bead on him, nosing in, docking. He absorbs the soft vinyl jolt of front bumpers bumping. The eagle has landed. His mind is like that, a grab bag of not entirely illogical associations. The eagle has landed. The stork circles.
A man gets out of the Toyota. He has roses in one hand, a balloon string in the
other. IT’S A BOY! the balloon says, sleekly silver, bobbing above the man’s head. The man feels Jonathan watching. He grins and salutes. He is laughing a winning-the-lottery laugh. Rah rah rah, he burbles, or seems to. I’ve won a son, a son I’ve won.
Dr Seuss, I presume.
Dr Seuss tugs on his balloon and gives an exaggerated whoop of jubilation. Jonathan is not fooled. The man is terrified.
“Whoa, hey,” the man says, rapping on Jonathan’s window.
Jonathan considers. This could be as good a summons as any. He opens his door part way, and extends his left leg. He gets both feet on the ground.
“Hey” Dr Seuss says. “Do you know where we get the free tokens?”
“Sorry?”
“Parking tokens. You know. We’re supposed to get free ones.”
“Are we?”
“Uh-huh. All the new dads. I couldn’t find the right desk last night. Mind you, in a bit of a whirl, I’m the first to admit. Know where we have to go?”
“Sorry,” Jonathan says. “No idea.”
“Shoot.” Dr Seuss is frowning a little, assessing him. “You know what? I can tell, just by looking at you, that your stork hasn’t made delivery yet. Am I right?”
Jonathan thinks of possible responses, some of them violent. This startles him and piques his interest. He cannot recall ever before having the urge to hit anyone. He is a gentle, scholarly person. At least, that is how he thinks of himself. Other people – his students, for instance, or his son Ben and his daughter Stacey – probably think of him as out of it. He has certainly never had fantasies of violence. Never. But was that honest? Could a classicist truly claim a lack of interest in war, murder, bloody revenge, infanticide, patricide, noble self-immolation, the tearing of bodies limb from limb? Potius mori quam foedari, death before dishonor, and yes, at this moment, he would prefer a heart attack, or death by lions, or by man-to-man combat in the parking garage, or by, say, an out-of-control car ramming him against a concrete pillar. At this moment, he definitely feels such sudden escape would be preferable to blacking out in the delivery room in full public view. He slumps back into his car.
North of Nowhere, South of Loss Page 15