Long Slow Affair of the Heart, A

by Ansley, Bruce

  ‘Mercredi,’ she said. Wednesday. It was Monday.

  ‘OK, Mercredi,’ I said. ‘Certainement?’

  ‘Peut-être Vendredi.’ Perhaps Friday.

  ‘Certainement ou peut-être?’

  She shrugged. Not Thursday anyway, she said.

  What was wrong with Thursday?

  ‘Nous ne travaillons pas.’ No work Thursday. One of the mysterious public holidays.

  Of course, this transcription leaves out the ums, ahs, and false starts.

  I studied French at school for three years and learned to read and write it. Before I left for the canals I took Alliance Française courses in speaking the language.

  Understanding the French on their home ground was a different matter, however. The French ran their words together. Picking out individual words in a spoken sentence was like being presented with a Brittany ragoût and asked to identify the ingredients.

  Speaking the language was as fraught. You might know the right words. Pronouncing them properly was another kettle of poisson. If you got the emphasis wrong, you got a blank look. You might as well be speaking English, which, however universal elsewhere, was not so in France.

  Sally had never taken any French courses, yet she understood the language better than I did. When someone was speaking to us in French they usually turned to her. I would be trying to understand the words; she’d be listening to what they were saying.

  Both of us, eventually, could work our way through a conversation in context such as buying groceries, or cashing travellers’ cheques, or talking to lock-keepers or a port captain, or even discussing the weather. Once you knew the subject the words followed.

  A wider conversation remained difficult. For me it was like a movie when the soundtrack didn’t match the pictures. They’d be on their third sentence while I’d just worked out the first and was framing up my reply.

  So in Revin the port captain was watching me attaching a hose to fill our water tanks. A simple task, usually. But she had something urgent to say. I didn’t understand. She made desperate shushing noises. I looked around for the approaching typhoon. She described great circles with her hands. I wondered if we should take cover.

  At last, it dawned. She was saying that I should let the water run around the hose for a while, to clear out any stagnant remains of the last fill. The relief in her face as I understood this simple instruction might have greeted the liberation of Paris.

  In Revin we were confronted by one scourge of the Ardennes. This was a very small town. A war memorial rose in its centre, very much like those in small towns all over New Zealand. The difference was that all four sides of this memorial were covered in names. Four boys were from the same family. No Private Ryan here.

  World War One had ripped the heart out of this village, stripped it of young men. World War Two had taken another generation. The pattern was the same throughout much of rural France.

  Some German boats took down their flags in this part of France, from tact perhaps, or respect, or even guilt.

  Herman never did. Herman parked his boat and sat in a deckchair with a look of beatific happiness. He was red-faced, and rotund, and laughing. He was everyone’s jolly German. He should have worn leather shorts and braces, although he preferred baggy shorts and T-shirts. He had a thin, nervous, nice wife and a fat red boat. Their dog was the friendliest Rottweiler we ever met. It could have smothered burglars with dribble. Herman wanted his dog to toughen up. I’d walk past his boat and say, ‘Here boy!’ and the dog would leap over the side and Herman would scream, ‘Halt!’ The dog would sit there with a grin full of goobs until Herman decided he’d made his point. ‘OK,’ he’d say, satisfied I’d got his message: his dog was not at just anyone’s beck and call. The dog came on at full speed, drooling like a steam locomotive, and I’d need a crack at the unisex showers.

  Herman’s brother usually tied up next to him. The brother had a little white boat and a big red-haired wife. She talked a lot but I never heard him say a word.

  They left Revin one wet morning with the River Queen close behind. The heavy rain made the wooded canyons in which we were sailing even greener and deeper.

  We travelled to Bogny-sur-Meuse, where the four giant stone warrior sons of Ayman and their equally huge stone horse glowered down on us from a cliff top. Who could be craven under that lowering gaze? I went into the local store and rejoined battle.

  Yes, they had the right kind of gas cylinder, with the right kind of gas.

  I bought it promptly. Then found my regulator wouldn’t fit.

  Le Boss called for help. The bouchier took off his cap and apron, left his meat counter and together we tackled the problem, brought it to the ground, kicked it around and finally called it quits.

  I left it for another day, although whether we’d get another day soon seemed entirely uncertain, for calamity awaited in the first lock of the morrow.

  The day was bright. White swans swam among yellow irises. Blue and yellow dragonflies flitted about the boat, landing on sleeves, sitting on knees.

  We were travelling with the couple who’d welcomed us alongside in Revin, she outgoing and garrulous, he mild and largely silent.

  They were Dutch, however, so they went through the automatic and remote-controlled lock with smooth efficiency. We followed them in. ‘Always,’ Mr Benny had said, ‘come second.’

  This time it was a very poor second. The lock filled, the other boat left, we were held up by a rope which refused to flick off a bollard. When it did, a bell began to ring, warning that the lock doors were about to close. I could see us trapped inside until the next boat came along, perhaps from the same direction, when we’d have to go back down, then up again.

  Never!

  I pushed the throttle hard forward. The idling engine belched a great cloud of smoke.

  Now the yellow lights on the lock door were flashing, and the doors began to close. Century-old slabs of wood and iron covered in slime and gashes made me think of that old film about a commando raid on France, when the survivors were paddling their kayak grimly ahead while the harbour gates closed on them. As a boy it had brought me to the edge of my seat. As a man I kicked the seat right out of the way and wished I’d never had the price of admission to the real thing.

  We were going to make it, weren’t we? A door hit the back of the boat with a bong unmatched by any bell tolling doom in my darkest hours. And stopped, immediately.

  We were through! Didn’t matter that in leaning over the side to see the damage only a scream from Sally saved us from ramming a bank full tilt instead of in hard reverse amid another great cloud of smoke. Behind us the lock doors stayed where they were, closed to the exact width of my boat’s backside.

  My first thought was, thank god for safety mechanisms.

  My second was, what will I do about the lock?

  My third was, let’s get out of here. What did they pay lock-keepers for, after all?

  So we tied up thankfully in Charleville-Mézières, and awoke next morning to the much more pleasant bells from the nearby church, soft as organ notes, while Charles le Gonzague, Duke of Nevers, who founded the town in the seventeenth century, leant cockily on his bronze sword below. I knew what he was saying: ‘I made this.’

  Charleville-Mézières was a big town: 60,000 people. The town had been turned over to the Germans so often — four times since 1814 — its citizens were giddy. In 2008 it became famous for the ‘Ogre of the Ardennes’, a serial killer who went hunting virgins with his wife. Press reports described poor Charleville-Mézières as a bleak north-eastern town whose only previous claim to fame was as the birthplace of the nineteenth-century poet Arthur Rimbaud.

  Yet the cafés were full, young people promenaded, tourists wandered. Its brochures featured a woman standing on a bridge looking at the town beside a dog with its paws on the top rail doing the same thing. She was showing it the town’s attractions, notably the Place Ducale whose excellent arcades echoed the Place des Vosges in Paris. The dog
wore an expression of polite interest.

  The Duke had been a smart businessman. One of his industries still flourished in the town. Perhaps his successors did not quite cut la moutarde.

  They’d built a new marina and camping ground, with sports track, kayaking centre and indoor swimming pool surrounded by parkland. The new marina was a fine amenity. It was also deserted, spaces for more than eighty boats empty while the pontoon on the riverbank outside was crowded.

  The reason was this: the functionaries of Charleville-Mézières (for this was a municipal project) built a footbridge over the entrance to their new marina, a splendid bridge, beautifully curved, a joy to walk over. It was also just three metres above the water at its highest point. A large sign said so.

  The standard height of bridges and tunnels above the water on French waterways averaged about three-point-six metres, allowing most boats to pass underneath with no trouble. If the height were to be lowered, the canals would become impassable for some vessels and for others, such as the River Queen, canopies would have to be taken down, masts lowered, and windscreens folded flat. All of this could be done; but it was bothersome, and when there was an alternative outside the marina, well, let’s put laziness aside and just say most chose to moor on the river.

  ‘Where is your boat?,’ asked the woman in the capitainerie, which doubled as the camping ground office.

  ‘On the pontoon,’ I answered, and seeking to make a point, I added: ‘because we cannot get into your marina.’

  ‘D’accord,’ she said, as if there was nothing to be done, “C’est trop petit.’ I thought I detected a note of resignation, and nodded apologetically. The bridge, as she said, was too small.

  But the bridge proved not to be three metres high. A fellow-voyager measured it by the simple expedient of driving under it, and found it to be at least three and a half metres high, which was the height of his bimini, or sun-roof. A height of three and a half metres would allow most vessels to pass underneath, into the grand, new, deserted marina.

  A new sign would make the millions they spent on the marina a good investment. It would also be much cheaper than a new footbridge.

  Why did the sign remain unchanged? Well, why were shops closed apparently randomly, gas cylinders just a tiny bit different, internet cafés as rare as Toyotas, computer keyboards so different from the world’s standard they turned any sentence into code, bureaucrats as whimsical as Sarkozy’s politics? Because that was France and that, of course, was the very reason we all were there.

  We needed another telephone because the global roaming we’d organised on our New Zealand cellphone was stupidly expensive. We never could access the messages Vodafone assured us would be so easy to retrieve, so we left the phone turned on, when it would always ring in the small hours of the morning. That morning it had rung and a man invited us over to his new house for a drink. Where? I asked. In Titirangi, he said, and was this Ben?

  We decided to buy a French pre-pay card for our mobile in Charleville-Mézières. The business was complicated … still, first a pre-pay card, next the world. I was feeling cocky about my French. I got my come-uppance: I asked a young woman in a boulangerie whether they were open the next day, which I knew was one of France’s many holidays. She looked at me as if I were mad. I asked again. She looked scared. I cut out the chat and reduced it to two words: ‘Ouvert demain?’ Open tomorrow? She looked around for help in case this maniac was also dangereux. Defeated, I retreated. And yes, next day the boulangerie was open.

  We set off from Charleville-Mézières one bright morning in mid-May. We had to make a decision here. We could stay on the river heading south towards the Mediterranean. Or we could turn off, head for champagne country, perhaps stop in Reims for the famous cathedral, then tootle a mere couple of hundred kilometres on to Paris. But the first part of that journey promised forty-six locks in only 106 kilometres, almost a lock every couple of kilometres. We knew that if we stuck to our southward route we’d be facing much worse than that, lock-wise. That was later, however. This was now. We had been through comparatively few locks by then. They still worried us.

  Ahead of us the Meuse shone in sunlight. Water lilies sprouted flashes of yellow. Irises laid gold along the banks. Fiery poppies grew thick in the fields. Clouds of soft white fluff billowed gently down the river. Iridescent blue butterflies danced in the warm air with huge dragonflies, now black and yellow.

  We chose the river.

  Polite grey herons stood to attention as we passed, immaculate in pinstripes. Water-fowl roosted in floating nests, fish rose to the surface, greatly agitating the fishermen so evenly spaced along the riverbank, and here was Ratty, his coat a rich brown in the morning light, diving for his hole in the bank with a stroke of his strong tail. Perhaps he was thinking of lunch, although in a different way from the fictional Ratty: the French made water rats into pâté, pâté de ragondin.

  The old towpath vanished and reappeared; on the opposite side, trees dipped their boughs into the water.

  A lock-keeper took off his hat and bowed deeply when we thanked him for his efforts. He pointed at our little back flag with the silver fern.

  ‘All Blacks!’ he said, and gave us a thumbs-up. ‘Bonne chance!’ Then: ‘Where will you go today?’

  ‘Dun.’

  ‘And tomorrow?’

  ‘Verdun.’

  ‘What time will you start?’

  ‘Eight o’clock.’

  A pause, a moue. ‘Non. Eight-thirty’.

  ‘D’accord,’ we said.

  We weren’t in France to muck around with the French way of life. We were there because of it. Early starts were a stupid New Zealand habit best left behind.

  Bells rang the hour from village churches along the way, sometimes the same hour; who cared if ten o’clock came a little later in some places than others? Certainly not the man who ran a stop on the way, grandly titled Meuse Nautic on the chart which declared it to offer all sorts of services to the cavalcade of voyageurs.

  We stopped there for fuel alongside a German couple taking their yacht through France to the Mediterranean; he plump and genial, she lean and muscular and looking as if she’d like nothing more than a romp in the mountains.

  Two tired-looking pumps reclined by the bank, as if they’d last passed fuel around 1996. Nothing else equipped the Meuse Nautic. No buildings, not so much as a hut. A sign invited us to press a button on a concrete wall. We did. A crackly recording told us that if we really wanted fuel, and the owners weren’t there, we should use our credit card. We checked. The owners weren’t there. No one was. The countryside seemed entirely uninhabited.

  The credit card slot was marked with a huge cross, and in case we were unsure of the message, it had been blocked off with a couple of kilometres of black tape.

  Time passed. We talked. Then chatted in a desultory manner. Then lapsed into long silences. We watched a coot bobbing in its nest on the river, fanned gently by a shading branch.

  A Weimaraner, sleek and brown and bred for hunting, bounded up with a stick the size of a log in its mouth. The dog galloped through our small group like Boadicea and her chariot, the stick gouging limbs on all sides, then turned to mop up the walking wounded. Its owner, a woman, appeared, we hoped with bandages. But she offered something far better: hope. She tried the button too. She appeared cross with the response. This was a slight upon her country. She dug in for the long haul. She borrowed a mobile and began telephoning. A dozen calls later and she was on track. The man who owned the pumps was working at a camping ground on a lake not far distant.

  She kept going. The Germans, whose phone it was, began looking uncomfortable. The fuel was getting very expensive. At last, she looked triumphant. She had reached him. He would come. In twenty minutes, thirty at most, and just in case, she waited with us, while her dog galloped back and forth with its wooden sword, sparing only its owner.

  Just as we were about to call for blood transfusions, the man who owned the pumps appeared in his
tiny white van. Perhaps the vehicle was small only by comparison, for he was huge. The French gene had passed him by. Everything a Frenchman was supposed to be — handsome, elegant, charming — he was not. He was short, fat, exceedingly ugly and as it turned out, greedy.

  First he pulled a large stick out of an underground tank, read it with much frowning and shaking of head, wiped it on the grass and replaced it complete with dirt and weeds. He filled first the German boat, then our own, then he grew fins and bit us all for $2.80 a litre.

  So the scene was set for the next stretch of river.

  The day, bright as hope itself, turned sullen as we entered the war zone.

  All through the Ardennes little villages, even the smallest, heralded the tragedy with memorials of stones packed tight with names: Mort pour France, 1914–1918. So many dead, a countryside robbed of youth.

  Consenvoye did badly in both wars and was much damaged in the last one although its eighteenth-century church, well-placed beside a bar, survived.

  A little down the road was a German cemetery. Beneath its black iron crosses lay 11,148 German soldiers killed in World War One. Some were unknown, and some were Jews, for in that war they were allowed to die for their country rather than because of it. But most were named on the crosses and in a list left in a little locker at the gates alongside a visitor’s book. There’d been a few visitors that year, not many; some from the United States who’d left messages in German.

  The cemetery and the books were pristine, which spoke volumes about tolerance in the nearby town which had suffered so much. The cemeteries of the French, and the Americans, carried white crosses in the traditional way of good versus the evil black, although it didn’t matter; the sadness was overwhelming no matter what the colour. All those laughing young men.