The Party Wall

by Catherine Leroux

  Fortunately, the pastor is a moderate and his attitude rubs off on his flock. He preaches tolerance, mutual support, modesty. The congregation is not afraid of him, so the nave is suffused with a certain degree of warmth. As a result, Marie and Ariel can manage a few seconds of contemplation, while sharp-angled forms rain down on them like wedges, the slanting shadows of stained glass windows where stylized Jesuses walk on the water and sink for the third time.

  The topic of the exercise: “what my name means.” After questioning their family on the subject, the pupils must present, in French, the origin of their given name and surname. With her little feet firmly planted in front of the class, Sophia says that her given name means “wisdom.” Marco talks about his Venetian ancestors and the explorer Marco Polo. Junior admits he was astounded to learn that his first name refers to his father’s, a fact of which he was unaware for the first seven years of his life because during that time he was just called junior. Lastly, Angel explains that she was baptized in honour of an aunt who had met with a serious accident.

  Stepping closer to congratulate her for her presentation, Marie notices some oddly shaped black-and-blue marks on Angel’s forearm. In addition, the little girl’s chin is scraped, a wound that Marie had ascribed to an ordinary childhood mishap. During the written exercises, she discreetly tries to get a glimpse of Angel’s knees under her yellow skirt. There, too, the skin appears to be rubbed raw, and Marie suddenly gets the impression Angel’s small chocolate-coloured body is covered with scars. Recalling Ariel’s remarks about Angel’s father, Marie spends two days looking for a way to broach the question with her. She finally decides on the direct approach.

  “Angel, sweetheart, you certainly have a lot of bruises!”

  Quite unexpectedly, the child breaks into a grin, rolls up her sleeves, and displays her marks as if they were trophies.

  “I got them during training! It’s not for wimps!”

  “I see! What sport do you play?”

  “It’s not a sport. They’re exercises my dad makes me do. To be stronger.”

  “Like… like a soldier?”

  “Yes. You know, Mrs. Leblanc, we’ve got to be ready for war.”

  Marie solemnly nods her head and lets the little girl scamper away. Waiting for Angel outside is Monette Vernon, who lifts her off the ground to kiss her. Under a grey sky, the school buses stir like exhausted dinosaurs; the kids’ small feet stamp on the indifferent ground. Watching the mother and daughter as they move away, Marie slowly brings a piece of chalk to her mouth and bites into it. “And what does my name mean?”

  The rain is coming down in small, grey, icy packets when the news hits Rockfield: the company that was expected to build the biomass processing plant has dropped the project. Despite months of effort, of transformations and investments on the local level, the managers have decided to defer the plan indefinitely.

  This is more than enough to demoralize the townspeople. After decades of disappointment, this new failure seems to partake of the natural order of existence. Now it’s back to vacant afternoons, empty bank accounts, boredom, and the bleak sound of trucks rolling by without stopping anymore. Ariel is the only one who refuses to be discouraged by the decision. And the only one convinced that he alone can change the course of events. Rather than daunting him, the bad news has spurred his ambitions even further.

  Within a week he succeeds in contacting a record number of townspeople and convincing them to carry on the campaign among their friends and relations. Yoked to his mobile phone, he creates a virtual movement that grows into a groundswell within a few days. At first Marie balks at getting involved, but she eventually gets swept up by the rising tide and endeavours to rally the other teachers and the students’ parents. Sunday night sees hundreds of people crowding into the school gym. Adolescents desert the abandoned quarry that is their secret meeting place; the elderly leave their too-cozy armchairs. Even the military personnel, ordinarily standoffish about civilian matters, have let themselves be carried along by their colleagues’ idealism. Marie spots Richard Vernon among them, with Monette on his arm looking twice as small beside her giant of a husband. Marie’s heart clenches as she imagines the father forcing his daughter to do a series of exercises meant for elite soldiers and pictures the little girl crawling through mud or striding over fences to make him happy.

  “My friends,” Ariel says to get the assembly underway, “whether we’ve been lied to or whether they simply changed their minds doesn’t really matter. What matters is that over the past number of months we’ve learned to pool our energies. What matters is what we decide to do with them now.”

  His tone of voice and the applause that greets these introductory remarks remind Marie so much of his electoral speeches that her head starts to spin. It’s as though she can once again see the cameras flashing, smell the sour odour of calculated stress, the sweat of the strategists and image-makers. Ariel remains oblivious to this apparent revisiting of the past. Standing before the crowd alive to his optimism, he is aglow.

  He asks the townspeople: What do you want to do? How do you think you can improve your situation? What are your dreams? Terms like “cooperative” and “public project” ring out; Ariel’s new collaborators take notes to keep track of the increasingly excited conversations. At midnight, an hour that most of Rockfield’s inhabitants haven’t seen in years, the enthusiastic assembly disperses, creating a human fireworks in the parking lot. Ariel is in the doorway, thanking every participant and wishing them all goodnight. Richard Vernon walks past and completely ignores him.

  “Your colleague—what’s eating him?” Marie asks.

  “Who knows? I’m amazed he showed up in the first place. It’s not his style.”

  Once the hall has emptied, Ariel’s associates join him to go over the most interesting suggestions. One is to build a large collective greenhouse that could provide the community with food security and give jobs back to idle farmers. Another involves self-financing a private wind farm and selling the energy to the state, an idea that has already proven very lucrative a little farther west. Ariel sees the dreams he had as prime minister slowly taking shape again, nourished by a spirit of solidarity and a sense of initiative that he had never witnessed in all his years in the Labour Party. So it’s true: revolutions are all about small-scale actions.

  Spring has returned with, in tow, all the vagaries of weather gone awry. They spend long hours on their porch watching the rolling clouds and the patterns that the wind etches on the tender grasses. The heat rises in whorls on the horizon. What Ariel sees there are white sails, or Marie. For her, the asphalt seems to be littered with gold nuggets, or there is Ariel soaring before her eyes. The world has become a collection of signs through which their love manifests itself, a distant respiration where they can safely love each other. Marie caresses all that is yellow; Ariel embraces the mist that forms on a glass filled with a cold liquid. She plunges her hands into a bag of almonds; he blows softly on the skeletons of dandelions. Their symbols are manifold and so intricate as to render any inventory difficult to compile. The secret code of twins who chose one another; the litany that reiterates the only possible bond.

  As May tips over into June the northern lights jockey for space and stretch out their bare legs in the premature heat. In the fields Marie and Ariel perceive the manes of yawning lions and the horns of emaciated zebus. It’s said that one truly belongs to the plains the day one catches sight of animals that have never lived there. After two summers in this northern savannah, a complex menagerie appears before them, circling in the vicinity of their house when the sun sets or when it reaches its arms out toward morning. Hand in hand, keeping watch day after day, Ariel and Marie discover that surviving has again become living; their hearts at ease, they are poised in a fine equilibrium, finally at home in this fenceless landscape.

  On the first morning of the summer holiday, Marie is up at dawn so she can
be the first to arrive at the farmers’ market in the neighbouring town. After a number of fruitless attempts she has learned that the early bird gets the well-ripened cherry and the unblemished tomato. Holding her shopping bag, she pokes her head into the bedroom for a wordless goodbye. Ariel is still asleep; in the half-light of the shuttered room, a small flame seems to be playing over his ribs. But it’s only a sunbeam that has slipped in between the wooden slats. Marie kisses her fingertips and blows the kiss toward Ariel. She turns away too quickly to glimpse the tremor in his sleep, his hand limply gesturing toward his lips.

  At the market she finds the first heads of lettuce already shedding their youth like some girls who, barely out of adolescence, already walk with a stoop. She sifts through the pale strawberries and brushes away the insects hovering over a basket of figs come from afar. A wasp reacts to this provocation by stinging her. She cries out and lifts her hand to her mouth. She misses the bees.

  On the way home she bumps into several colleagues and greets them with a nod of the head. Back in downtown Rockfield, she spots Monette’s car. Sitting in the back, Angel casts a worried look at the main street and its boarded-up windows. When Marie waves hello Monette stops her car in the middle of the road and dashes over to Marie.

  “Anne, thank God! I’ve been trying to reach you for the last hour.”

  “I was at the market. Is everything okay?”

  “No! Your husband is in danger!”

  Unable to say any more, the woman breaks down in tears and her head seems to retreat into her plump torso. Marie opens the passenger door and motions for her to sit down. To their left, drivers honk and steer their way past the car parked at the intersection. Monette doesn’t appear to mind this, or the fact her daughter is stuck inside the vehicle.

  “It’s Richard. He found out your husband’s identity. He knows he’s the former prime minister. He rushed out of the house saying you were his sister and the two of you were in an incestuous relationship that’s an affront to God.”

  Marie feels all the blood draining out of her body through one of the thousand invisible doorways through which life comes and goes; without thinking, she squeezes Monette’s hand.

  “I’m so sorry. I was the one who recognized him the night of the meeting. I should never have said anything to Richard. Anne, he took his gun. He’s heading toward your house.”

  The straight road between the centre of town and their house is a fifteen-minute drive. Marie covers the distance in nine minutes that seem an eternity to her. The asphalt sticks to the wheels, the false flatness turns into a steep mountain. Her head is swimming, her skin itches as if a nestful of wasps were planting their stings in it at once. When she arrives there’s a van parked in front of the soundless dwelling. Darting from room to room, she shouts Ariel’s name. There is no sign of Vernon either.

  Only when she reaches the porch does she catch sight of him in the distance, to the west, where the plain lies. She runs toward him for a few seconds then slows down, unable to go any farther. Richard Vernon is walking toward her with a pistol in his hand and reeking of turpentine. His strides are slow but he is moving at superhuman speed. He soon reaches Marie, who can do nothing but lift her hand to her throat as if to protect herself from the fatal gunshot, from a lack of air. But he does not raise either his fist or his weapon. His look transfixes her, a look damning her for the rest of her days. Then he disappears from her field of vision. All that’s left is a small fire in the distance, its heat distorting the horizon and the threshold of reality. Marie treads toward the flames like a zombie.

  They say the smoke produced by a burning man is black if he was bad and white if he was good. Ariel emits no smoke at all. Only the golden birds escaping from his chest, his skin already almost completely consumed, his boiling organs, his bones devoured by the fire. Kneeling beside him, Marie tries to take hold of whatever is left of him, the incandescent limbs of which she has licked every square centimetre, the heart that seems to be still beating inside the flames, and the head she has loved with an epileptic rage. She thrusts her fingers into the fire and she is not burned.

  RAT’S TAIL

  (MONETTE AND ANGIE)

  A final gust sprays the two little girls’ faces with fine soot, and all at once the horizon becomes visible again.

  “Thirty-nine! Thirty-nine wagons!” Monette exclaims in a voice whose enthusiasm never waned as the train rolled by.

  Angie does not respond. She was not counting. She was preparing to confront whatever she thought she had seen through the fleeting gaps between the wagons. She diverts Monette’s attention to the flutter of butterflies the train has stirred up and discovers what the train was hiding from her. A few metres away, two half-naked people are rubbing against each other. The man is tall and tanned except for his buttocks, which move back and forth while he presses the girl against a tree. A long, thin braid whips his dirty T-shirt with every movement. A rat’s tail, Mam would say in disgust.

  He appears not to have noticed Angie and Monette and grunts, “Lie down, I’m getting tired.” The girl obediently stretches out on the grass, which Angie guesses is strewn with rocks and traps. Her body, slender and very fair, is a weave of delicate ovals. Only when she turns her inscrutable face toward the two girls does Angie recognize her. It’s Eva Volant, a ninth grader who lives near them. Their eyes meet and Eva looks like she’s received an electric shock. She murmurs something in the man’s ear.

  This has the effect of a detonation. The man jumps to his feet and into his pants. Angie grabs Monette by the arm and yanks her onto the train tracks.

  “We didn’t pick up the penny!”

  “It doesn’t matter. Hurry up!”

  Behind them she hears Eva.

  “Don’t worry, I know them! They won’t say anything!”

  Monette hops from one tie to the next holding a daisy. The sun has planted itself directly overhead. The scent of lunch reaches them from the little houses backed on the railroad. Angie quickens the pace. Behind them Eva begs the man not to leave. Angie does not turn around.

  The wind picks up as they come to the bridge. The pong of seaweed and fish skeletons prickles their noses. Thirty metres below, the river has carved a ravine.

  “It’s dangerous!” Monette protests.

  “Nah, the train just went by. Come on, hurry.”

  Monette grasps her big sister’s hand as they set foot on the dizzying structure that straddles the precipice. Everything happening below is visible through the tracks: the flow of muddy water, the circling of bees gone astray, the snake skins scattered on the rocks. With her eyes glued to the void beneath her feet, the little girl walks on bravely. Angie can’t hear Eva or the man with the rat’s tail anymore.

  Halfway across the bridge she realizes her mistake. The wind had covered the rumbling, and the impulse to run away had kept her from thinking. She excluded the possibility of two trains coming through within fifteen minutes of each other as if this were mathematically impossible. A serious error of judgment. She turns around. The locomotive has not yet rounded the bend. But if the vibrations rising from the tracks to her legs are any indication, it’s a matter of mere seconds.

  “Monette, we have to run.”

  Looking squarely at her big sister, the little girl’s eyes fill with terror. She has never been given such an absurd order. Run? Now? When they are perched over an abyss? It’s impossible—Angie sees this in her sister’s face. Already, the train whistle is blaring out behind them. Monette is paralyzed. Without a moment’s hesitation, Angie lifts her off the ground and begins to stride awkwardly over the ties, powerless to pick up the pace as she would like. Calculating the risks at breakneck speed, she entertains the notion of jumping into the river with Monette but is immediately dissuaded by the rocks poking out of the water. Hanging onto the guardrail is too much to ask of the little girl, and it’s too late now to consider reaching the far end of th
e bridge in time. The train is so close she can feel its breath on her back. She keeps running as best she can amid the shriek of the whistle and the awful screech of the engine bearing down. Tears spring up in the corners of Angie’s eyes. They are going to die.

  Then the solution comes into view. Ahead of them is a niche set into the guardrail, a sort of balcony whose floor consists of a beam just large enough for a man to stand on. In a few nimble movements, the final grace of her child’s body, Angie leaps toward the niche and shoves Monette at arm’s length against the railing, tumbling forward on the beam in the process, still firmly grasping her little sister’s trunk to prevent her from tipping over. Monette screams as if one of her limbs has been slashed away. Only when she sees the blood spewing over the pastel clothes and chubby face does Angie grasp that tons of steel are rolling across her legs. A surge of heat bellows through her body.

  THE LAUGHTER OF ARCHIMEDES

  (SIMON AND CARMEN)

  The icy wind, the chapped skin, the crusts of blood freezing in her shoes, the frost stuck to every fibre, every strand of hair—all of it is lost in the chalky cadence of her steps in the snow. For the past forty-eight hours Carmen has been running in a world of shadows where night and day have become indistinguishable, and she still has some ten hours to go before the finish line. But she has stopped counting. She has stopped thinking. The all-powerful beat of her running, her regular strides striking the ground—this is the only order, the only law, the only statement in this sharp-edged land.