Three Days and a Life

by Pierre Lemaitre

  Towards 4.00 p.m., calm was restored.

  People could hardly believe it. Doors and windows were opened warily, one after another.

  The inhabitants of Beauval stood speechless and surveyed the damage wreaked by this storm that German meteorologists had named “Lothar”.

  But soon they were forced to retreat indoors again.

  The rain that had ceased while the storm was at its height now returned, claiming its right to add to the devastation.

  12

  The rains lashed Beauval with such terrifying force that, within minutes, the sky turned black. Since the wind had completely died away, the ropes of water fell vertically. The streets quickly flooded to become streams and then roaring rivers, sweeping away everything tossed there by the winds some hours earlier – dustbins, letterboxes, crates, planks, even a small white dog that struggled to stay afloat and was found crushed against a wall the next day. Cars that, hours earlier, had been whipped away by the storm now floated in the other direction, eddying on the floodwaters.

  Antoine heard something falling in the cellar, he opened the door and flicked the switch, but the electricity was still out.

  “Don’t go down there, Antoine,” Madame Courtin said.

  But he had already grabbed the flashlight that hung on the wall and had descended the first few steps. The sight before him took his breath away: the water was more than a metre deep, everything that was not screwed down was floating: camping gear, boxes of clothes, suitcases . . .

  He stumbled back up and slammed the door behind him.

  “We need to go upstairs,” he said.

  They had to organise themselves because if the water reached the ground floor, as it threatened to do, there was no way of knowing when they would be able to come down again. While the wind hammered on the door as though trying to break in, Madame Courtin rapidly gathered together some provisions and set them on the stairs together with all those items she considered precious – her handbag, the photograph albums, a shoebox full of official documents, a pot plant (why that particular one was a mystery), a crocheted cushion given to her by her mother – it looked as though she was planning to take part in the Exodus. Antoine went from room to room turning off all the electrical appliances. The water was rising at a spectacular rate. It began to spill out from under the cellar door, stream across the floor and flood into every room. By the time they had carried everything upstairs, it had risen by two or three centimetres, it seemed as though nothing would stop it.

  Antoine sat on the stairs. The floodwater had just passed the first step and was still rising. Bobbing on its surface came the sofa cushions, the T.V. guide, a book of crossword puzzles, some empty boxes, the plastic broom from the kitchen . . .

  The situation was becoming nerve-wracking. They could hide out upstairs, but would that be enough? He remembered seeing television programmes about floods where the water reached the rooftops and people were forced to cling on to their chimneys. Would that happen to them?

  The storm returned, thunder boomed above their heads as though it were in the same room, blinding flashes lit up the windows. Still the rain fell, still the waters rose.

  Antoine went to join his mother. Now that the wind had begun to subside, Madame Courtin was going through the first-floor rooms, opening all the shutters.

  Through the windows, they discovered a new landscape. Patios, gardens, pavements were all submerged beneath a mass of water thirty centimetres deep, gushing along the main street at terrifying speed, a swirling muddy river that had burst its banks. The storm had wreaked havoc on the roofs, ripping away hundreds of tiles.

  What sort of state would their roof be in? Antoine looked up: the ceiling had changed colour, it was darker and here and there fat drops were beginning to bead. He began to wonder whether the whole house might not cave in onto their heads. But it was impossible to leave. Through the bedroom window he saw the supermarket delivery van float past, followed by another vehicle, as though a dam had just burst somewhere, the Peugeot belonging to the Mouchottes whirled by like a spinning top, colliding with a wall, then crashing into a road sign that buckled on impact. A few minutes later the mayor’s official car appeared, tossed on the roiling torrent and, in its wake, the railings from outside the mairie.

  Madame Courtin began to sob. Like him, she was probably afraid, but mostly she was weeping for the world she had always known which was disappearing before her eyes at an alarming speed. The townspeople doubtless saw this cataclysm as an ordeal sent to try them personally.

  Instinctively, Antoine put an arm around his mother’s shoulders, but to no avail. Madame Courtin had dissociated, horrified and spellbound by the roaring torrent surging along the street, crushing, destroying, sparing nothing. Antoine was shocked to watch a surreal procession of items of furniture from the ground floor of the school floating past, as though they had dived into the water like synchronised swimmers. The flood loomed over his life, annexing it.

  And then he thought of Rémi.

  The water would rise and rise, it would reach the brow of the hill, flood the woods of Saint-Eustache, it would disentomb Rémi, his body would float free from its hiding-place. In a matter of minutes, the whole town would watch as Rémi’s corpse glided through the streets like a ghost, floating on his back, arms splayed, mouth open, only to be recovered several kilometres away . . .

  Antoine was too exhausted now for tears.

  They sat there for a long time. Every so often, Antoine would check to see how much the water had risen downstairs. By now it had reached the top of the dining-room table.

  Then, slowly but surely, the storm began to move on.

  At about 3.00 p.m., heavy rain was still falling over Beauval, but it was nothing compared to the cloudburst they had experienced all morning. Antoine and his mother could not go downstairs since the ground floor was submerged beneath more than a metre of water. The ceilings dripped, the mattresses were sodden, there was no escape from the wetness. It was beginning to get cold. Marooned with no electricity, no telephone, they were survivors waiting to be rescued.

  The sécurité civile helicopter made a single reconnaissance flight over Beauval and was not seen again. The town was abandoned to its fate, the inhabitants trapped in their houses.

  Night fell on a desolate landscape, although Antoine and his mother could see only the small patch framed by their bedroom windows.

  The streetlights did not come on, but by eight o’clock they could make out that the waters were beginning to subside. The turbulent torrent in the street had abated considerably. Downstairs, the floodwater was beginning to drain away. But a strange whiff of doom still hung in the air as the squalls that had given way to the rain now returned, determined to have the last word.

  As the waters seeped away, the wind blew harder. Once more they could feel the house judder on its foundations, the doors bulge and buckle as though pushed by some giant hand.

  The howling gale grew louder, an angry rumbling of chimneys, windows and doors. Antoine and his mother barely had time to rush around, closing the first-floor shutters once more. A second storm was about to follow on from the first.

  A few short hours after Lothar came the cyclone they named “Martin”.

  Of the two, this was the more violent, the more destructive.

  The roofs that had been ripped open were now utterly swept away; the cars mired by the raging waters began to careen dangerously, propelled by fierce flurries, some of which gusted at two hundred kilometres per hour.

  Madame Courtin huddled in a corner of her bedroom, drawing her head into her shoulders. She looked so painfully fragile that Antoine was distraught. Once again he realised that he could never do anything to hurt her.

  He came and huddled next to her, and they stayed that way all through the night.

  13

  At dawn, the town awoke in a state of shock. One by one doors opened, one by one the inhabitants poked out their heads, then emerged, distraught and petrified.
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  Though still exhausted, Madame Courtin went downstairs to survey the damage. The ground floor was entirely covered in a thick layer of mud, the furniture sodden, along the walls a horizontal line more than a metre above the floor indicated the high-water mark, the whole house reeked of sludge, but what could be done? There was still no electricity, no telephone . . . There was an eerie calm, as though time were suspended, and there was something in the air that signalled that the worst was over. Like the other townspeople, Madame Courtin felt it. Antoine saw her stand tall. She cleared her throat, moved with a more confident gait. She went outside, saw the fir tree that had fallen, took a few steps away from the house and looked up at the roof. Then she asked Antoine to go to the mairie to see whether they were entitled to aid.

  Antoine pulled on his coat, slipped on his shoes and waded through the waterlogged garden. Though it was not the first thought that occurred to him, when he looked at it more closely, it was plain to see that he and his mother were among the lucky ones, their roof had been miraculously spared, and while a number of tiles had been dislodged and some had fallen off and shattered, the damage was minimal.

  The Desmedts had been less fortunate. Their chimney, blown over by a strong gust of wind, had crashed through the roof and the succeeding floors, taking bedrooms, bathroom and half of the kitchen with it and ending up in the cellar.

  Swaddled in a dressing gown under a parka that was much too big for her, Bernadette was standing outside, staring up at the damage. As it ripped through the house, the chimney had destroyed the bed in Rémi’s room. It was sickening to think that the little boy might have been asleep there, that the ceiling might have collapsed on him . . . He would have been killed instantly. Dazed by the scale of the tragedy that had overtaken her in the past two days, Bernadette now seemed utterly numb. Her thin frame resembled a piece of flotsam.

  Monsieur Desmedt appeared at the window of Rémi’s bedroom, he too looked stunned, as though he had come to wake his son and found him missing.

  Valentine came down the front steps and joined her mother in the garden. She was dressed in the clothes she had been wearing the last time Antoine had seen her, but the red jeans and white leatherette jacket looked grubby, as though she had spent the night in a fight with someone. She was pale and dishevelled, a tartan shawl that probably belonged to her mother was thrown over her shoulders, her mascara had run, leaving darks streaks on her face. Antoine did not know where the image came from, but in this apocalyptic setting, the sexy, super-confident teenager of the night before now looked like a kid sent out to work the streets.

  On the other side, the shutters had been ripped from the Mouchottes’ house, the conservatory had collapsed and the garden was littered with shattered roof tiles and shards of glass as big as dinner plates.

  Antoine saw Émilie’s face pressed against the window, he gave her a little wave but she did not respond. She was staring at a spot in the middle of the road. Framed by the window, frozen and impassive, she looked like a girl in a Renaissance painting.

  Her parents were already bustling about. Monsieur Mouchotte, his movements jerky as a robot, was filling rubbish sacks with the debris on the lawn. His wife, whom Antoine had always thought stunningly beautiful, was tugging at Émilie’s sleeve, as though there was something unseemly about staring out of the window.

  Walking through the centre, Antoine was met by a town that looked as though it had been bombed to rubble.

  Not a single car was in its place, they had all been swept away by the gale-force winds to the outskirts of Beauval and now lay, a heap of misshapen metal, by the pillars of the railway bridge spanning the road. Lighter vehicles – scooters, motorcycles and bicycles – were strewn everywhere, later they were found in cellars, under cars, in gardens, in the river. Shop windows had imploded and the storm had rushed in and littered the town with sodden packages from the chemist’s, broken tools and fancy goods from Monsieur Lemercier’s tobacconists. Homeowners who had lost only forty or fifty tiles considered themselves lucky, since other houses had no roofs at all.

  A crane in a building site had toppled onto the communal wash house, reducing the fifteenth-century façade to rubble. In their gardens or gravel driveways, people found a baby’s crib, a doll, a bridal veil, small objects that God seemed to have placed there to prove that He could be whimsical in his mysterious ways. The young priest (doubtless busy explaining to his flocks all over the département that what was happening to them was a “Good Thing” – no easy task in the circumstances) would realise when He came again that God might be profoundly sensitive, but He also had a sense of irony: the church had been spared save for the rose window, where all the panes of stained glass had been smashed but for one, which depicted Saint Christopher, the patron saint of gales and thunderstorms.

  The plane tree outside the mairie, uprooted by the storm, had fallen across the main street, crushing a van and separating the town into two equally ravaged zones. A caravan carried on the torrent from the municipal campsite had crashed into the mairie and the pavement was cluttered with plastic cutlery, mattresses, cupboard doors, bedside lamps, cushions and provisions.

  Outside the mairie Antoine encountered a dozen people who had also come in search of aid. Each, as they itemised the damage they had suffered, claimed to be the worst affected; some had young children, or elderly parents in need of shelter, others insisted their house was about to collapse. All of them were right.

  Monsieur Weiser came down from the mayoral office clutching a sheaf of papers and looking harried. Théo trailed after him. Out in the square he addressed the little group, attempting to explain things they did not want to hear: the emergency services were overwhelmed, and besides, it was impossible to call them since the telephone lines were down. The préfecture and the E.D.F. would certainly have put emergency procedures in place to restore the electricity, but there was no way of knowing whether this would take hours or days . . . The group began to protest loudly.

  “We need to get organised,” the mayor shouted, brandishing the sheaf of paper. “First, we need to draw up an inventory of basic needs. The town council will collate all submissions and prioritise them.” Under these circumstances, he fell back on administrative jargon intended to express proficiency with a strong emphasis on voluntarism.

  “The gym has suffered only minor damage. Our first priority should be to set up a shelter for those who are homeless, a soup kitchen to feed everyone, we need to find blankets and bedding . . .”

  Monsieur Weiser spoke in a firm, determined voice. Given the all-encompassing chaos, the platitudes he trotted out took on the reassuring and familiar contours of familiar tasks.

  “In order to restore the flow of traffic in Beauval, the plane tree will need to be chopped up and removed,” he went on. “And for all of this we need manpower. Lots of manpower. Those with problems that can wait need to help out those in dire need.”

  Madame Kernevel appeared, looking very troubled.

  “Maître Vallenères is lying in his garden,” she announced. “He’s dead. A falling tree!”

  “Are . . . are you sure?”

  As if the material damage were not enough, now there were fatalities.

  “Oh, absolutely sure. I tried shaking him but he didn’t move, and he’s not breathing . . .”

  An image flashed into Antoine’s mind of Rémi lying dead. He remembered his own attempts to resuscitate the child.

  “We need to go to him right now,” the mayor said. “We need to carry him into his house.”

  He paused. No doubt to think about the measures he should take if the emergency services were indefinitely delayed. How would they deal with a dead body? Or with several bodies? Where could they be stowed?

  “Who’s going to look after his daughter?” someone asked.

  Monsieur Weiser rubbed his bald pate.

  Meanwhile, more people had arrived, including two of the town councillors who took up position behind the mayor. Several voices suggested set
ting up a shelter, they knew where to get hold of blankets, someone volunteered to open the gym. A tentative solidarity began to evolve. Monsieur Weiser announced a meeting to be held in the council chamber in one hour, all were welcome to attend, and decisions would be made . . .

  From the back of the crowd came a loud voice. All heads turned.

  “What about my son?” Monsieur Desmedt bellowed. “Who’s going to help me find my son?”

  He hung back from the group, arms dangling helplessly, fists clenched. What was striking was that there was none of the fury one might have expected of him. Instead it was a wail of sheer anguish.

  “Weren’t we supposed to be doing another search this morning?”

  His voice faltered in its intensity, in its tone. His question was like that of a man who has lost his way and is asking for directions.

  None of those who had taken part in the search organised by the gendarmerie the previous evening felt any less sympathetic to Monsieur Desmedt’s plight, but there was such a yawning disparity between what he was suggesting and the devastating reality that extended as far as the eye could see that no-one had the heart to try to explain.

  Monsieur Weiser, to whom the responsibility fell, coughed to clear his throat only to be interrupted by a firm, clear voice.

  “Do you have any idea of the seriousness of the situation, Roger?”

  Everyone turned.

  Monsieur Mouchotte stood with his arms folded, assuming the pose of the pedant that he was. Émilie’s father was a man who kept a high horse permanently saddled. Before being laid off he had been a tiresome foreman, pernickety, never given to generosity or indulgence. Standing a few metres away, he stared down Monsieur Desmedt, his bosom enemy. Everyone was remembering the resounding slap Rémi’s father had given him back when they worked together, they remembered Monsieur Mouchotte reeling back and slumping in a box of wood shavings, gales of laughter only serving to add to his humiliation. Monsieur Weiser had suspended the guilty party for two days, but refused to fire him. Like everyone else, he probably thought the incident comic rather than actually violent, a comeuppance that was long overdue.