Year of the Drought

by Roland Buti

  Gradually, we transported them outside onto the platform in front of the entrance, where, huddled together, stunned by cold and fear, they stayed perfectly still. After one horribly close encounter with the aquatic element, they now found themselves under an immense and rain-swollen sky. They were not about to wander off into this threatening universe.

  We didn’t bother counting them. Of the ten thousand that Dad had hoped to sell, there must have been fewer than a hundred survivors, shivering under their wet feathers. I stood next to him under the eaves. The fine, white, stubborn rain seemed as if it would never stop, as if the clouds had won a final victory in their endless war of attrition against the drought. Dad looked at the pitiable remains of his brood. It was bankruptcy. How would he ever pay back the loan? How could he repair the ruined hen-house?

  I met his gaze. He looked at me for a long time, with infinite tenderness, and I understood that he hated these wretched birds, which had wounded his honour. They were not like our cows out in the meadow or in the barn, or our well-kept pastures, or our neat fields of barley and corn. They were not our allies. They were traitors; they had become enemies.

  We were standing there, soaking wet but sheltered from the rain, adrift in a kind of no man’s land, when a loud bang, followed immediately by a strange crackling sound, made us jump.

  “Where’s Rudy?” asked Dad.

  “I don’t… he must have stayed inside…”

  “Shit.”

  We rushed back into the building, noticing immediately that a further section of the metal roof had given way. A wide piece of corrugated iron floated among the dead birds. During its fall, it had ripped open the pipes carrying the feed, and torn out the electric wires, which gave off loud sprays of sparks as they came into contact with the water. Dad ran into the changing room to turn off the fuse box and cut the electricity. I was the one who discovered Rudy. He was floating on his stomach. I knelt down to turn him over and take his head out of the water.

  “Rudy! Rudy!”

  His eyes were open. They were full of dirty water, and covered with a dull, unreflecting veil.

  My father came up behind me. “Oh my God!”

  We would never know for sure whether Rudy, who must have stayed behind in the hope of saving a final hen, was killed instantaneously by the falling piece of roof, or was knocked out and then drowned, or was electrocuted, but we settled on the first version as the most bearable for all of us. We carried him into the car, as if there was still some point in sheltering him. At the time, I didn’t cry.

  Dad arranged him comfortably on the back seat. Gently, he replaced Rudy’s lock of hair on his forehead, in a gesture that reminded me of the caress parents give their children last thing at night. Abandoning the hens, we brought Rudy back home without saying a word. I told myself it was out of respect, because he was no longer there to hear us.

  * * *

  The storms of the summer of 1976 beat down upon the baked earth. They shredded the crops, already exhausted after their long fight against the drought. In some places, they uprooted every last dying plant. The fields, stripped bare by waves of mud, became as smooth as pebbles. The storms carried away a part of our countryside.

  The big elm in our garden, like all the elms in the country, began to die.

  * * *

  Léa gave a little wave when she saw us enter the concert hall. She was surrounded by young East Germans, with the festive look of convicts on leave. They gave the impression of being entirely at her service, stretching their shiny, too-tight city suits as they inclined smilingly in her direction. How could it have been any different? Léa was dazzling. All eyes were on her, and her alone. The other girls, already seated with their clarinets or violins, their faces sad or severe, seemed resigned to their fate as mere foils for her beauty.

  We took two empty seats in the last row. Dad’s neck looked somehow stiff, and he wore a strange expression, at times a little too focused, at times vague. The musicians began to tune their instruments, in no particular order; the sound was jarring and unpleasant.

  Mum and Cécile were sitting right at the front, and realised that Dad’s expression was vague when he was looking at the stage, intense when he was contemplating Mum. He couldn’t stop himself moving from one to the other, though he lingered longer on Mum than on the musicians. Neither of us was in the mood to sit and listen to a symphony, but Léa had promised Rudy he could come to the concert dressed in his Sunday clothes, and he had talked to me about it many times. It was clear that he had been imagining some kind of high-society occasion; perhaps he had even dreamt of meeting the chosen one who would at last take him out of his solitude. It was for Rudy that Léa would be playing.

  Bent over their instruments, the musicians began the first movement. At a stroke, they were transformed by suffering. They grimaced, their lips squashed against the chin-rests of their violins; they sweated copiously, with furrowed brows, as they blew into their trumpets; their pinched mouths twisted as they drew the bows of their cellos. If they stopped playing for a moment, they remained nervous and dazed, awaiting the arrival of fresh torments. Léa’s face, too, was marked with pain. I had never seen her so preoccupied, penetrated by something that wasn’t her, and that disfigured her.

  All I could see of Mum were her shoulders and her tiny head, leaning over to almost touch Cécile’s. I wondered if they were discreetly holding hands as they listened to the New World Symphony. Mum had been twenty-one when I was born. Now I was thirteen and she was abandoning us. Was she twenty-one again? Had her life with us been some kind of error, a glitch, a digression outside of time? Perhaps she really was a young woman again…

  The after-concert reception had been organised in honour of the musicians from the East. Dad seemed to have lost all ability to bend. He stood holding a glass of white wine, feet planted in the gravel in the shade of a plane tree. His back was straight, his suit tight around the armholes, his body seized by a stiffness that would stay with him for the rest of his life. The musicians mingled with the crowd, greeting admiring parents, moving from one group to another, excited and garrulous, as if they had all just been through a terrible ordeal and couldn’t quite get over being back in the normal world.

  I began to drink the wine laid out on long tables, amidst salty breadsticks and delicate canapés. My head was already spinning when Léa came over, still wearing her bewildered survivor’s look. Dad reassured her that she had been wonderful, that she had played magnificently, and I echoed him word for word. She explained to us how difficult it was, after the rumpus of the horns, to leap from the exuberance of the first movement to the meditativeness of the second, expansive and sad, and we agreed, as if we understood her perfectly how hard it must have been. After a minute or two, Léa went back to her friends.

  I had the strange feeling that we no longer existed, that there was a void around us, that the light was different where we were… Everyone was talking, moving from group to group with glass in hand, but nobody penetrated the magic circle that separated us from the crowd. We knew no one. We remained prudently motionless, as though we were standing in the centre of a minefield. Dad was staring at Mum and Cécile, who, side by side under the blue shade of a plane tree, were laughing with a group of young, female musicians. Mum glanced furtively in our direction and, despite the distance, the white wine, the dazzling sun, I knew she had caught Dad’s eye for a fraction of a second. He was tense, as if he were making a strenuous physical effort.

  “Bitch!” I muttered.

  Dad turned slowly towards me. The word floated dangerously in the air between us. I heard it reverberate there, as if it hadn’t come out of my mouth. Then everything shattered.

  When I came to, I was on the ground. I shook my head from side to side, my eyes still closed, trying to get things back into their proper places. There was a crowd around me. A woman leaned over and gave me a handkerchief. I took it mechanically. She rubbed her chin to show me that I should wipe my own. It was only then that I f
elt the blood dripping from my open lip.

  “What’s wrong with you? Hitting a child! Are you crazy?” I heard someone say.

  Dad was ignoring me. His attention had moved onto something else. And there was no Mum, leaning anxiously over me…

  * * *

  I didn’t know how the soothsayers of Antiquity regarded white doves, but it was clear to me that the arrival of the wounded bird in our household had been an ill omen that should have put us on our guard.

  That night, the acrid smell of the droppings which carpeted my room caught in my throat. I snatched from its perch the useless, unfeeling creature, so indifferent to my unhappiness, and hurled it like a grenade from the window. It spun through the air, stabilised itself long enough to unfold its wings, and fluttered pitifully over the roofs. But when it tried to turn and fly back, it suddenly lost altitude, landing violently on its back in the garden, less than a metre from the big red tomcat from the neighbouring farm. It had no time to get back on its feet. Collecting its prey in its jaws, the cat moved off calmly to find a quiet place to skin it, as if it were quite normal for his dinner to arrive in this way, by airmail.

  So my stupid dove ended its stupid existence in this sad fashion. Its death was the closing act of that summer of 1976, and nothing else abnormal – that is, apart from the normally abnormal – happened at our place.

  * * *

  Two days after the catastrophe in the hen-house, a hearse came to pick up Rudy’s body. We had put him in the living room, now transformed into a funerary chapel. In his work clothes amidst our household décor, his hands clasped over his chest, he looked ill-at-ease, as if he were making an effort to stay still, so as not to take up too much room in this unfamiliar, slightly intimidating place. Even though my parents had never forbidden him access to the different parts of the house, he knew only the hallway leading to the kitchen, and had never adventured upstairs. His real territory had been the farm buildings.

  Revived by the drop in temperature, Sheriff paced frantically to and fro for days in search of fresh tracks that might take him to his vanished companion. Our life seemed to have gone down a gear. We spoke in low voices even when we were far from the living room. We made as little noise as possible, as if we all felt ashamed of being alive in the house where this dead man lay. Perhaps we were also trying not to attract further unwanted attention from the powerful gods who watched over us, and who had made their displeasure at recent events all too clear.

  Dad spent a long time standing in the yard, doing nothing but gazing at the horizon. He gave no sign of noticing when my grandfather’s silhouette tottered into view. When Anni finally tapped him on the shoulder, Dad turned towards him slowly, after a few seconds of delay, as if a very complex series of manoeuvres were needed to effect this quarter-rotation. Anni rummaged through the bulging pocket of his jacket, in search of his pack of cigarettes. It took him a long time to fish them out, since just at that moment a powerful coughing fit took hold of him, shaking him from head to foot. Dad didn’t bat an eyelid as his father eructed, spat and heaved, seemingly about to break into pieces.

  Anni had been with Bagatelle when the storm broke. At first, he had taken shelter in his thicket, but round drops the size of grapes pierced the anaemic foliage of the maples, and he had made for the village, where Rose, the old cousin who looked after him, had been waiting anxiously. She had dried him from head to foot, but it was no good. His emaciated body had absorbed a fatal excess of wetness, which had penetrated his very bones, and could no longer be got rid of. Three months later, it would kill him with what the doctor, for lack of a better term, diagnosed as pneumonia.

  Anni finally got his dreadful shaking under sufficient control to bring the little flame of his match into contact with the tip of his fourteen centimetres of cigarette. The smoke entered and exited through his nostrils, filled his lungs with dry air, and calmed him down. He held the pack out to Dad, who took one, leaning towards him to light it. It was the first time I had seen him smoke. They stood side by side without saying anything, gazing into the void, enveloped by a grey cloud. Dad looked even stiffer and larger than usual.

  Anni wanted to go upstairs to see Rudy. As he passed in front of me, he gave me a few taps on the shoulder, similar to the ones he gave Bagatelle to tell her she wasn’t alone. We exchanged a look of complicity, and smiled at each other, perhaps to take our minds off our powerlessness in the face of the destruction of our lives. Anni smelled of rotting grass, roots and undergrowth, as if his days lying beneath the trees were a prelude to his final return to earth.

  He spent half an hour upstairs. When he came down, he looked satisfied, almost serene. Could he have understood something essential during his tête-à-tête with the corpse? Without a word, he returned to Dad’s side, and they began smoking again.

  That night, Dad and I were sitting at the big kitchen table, when Léa, who was warming some soup for us, asked, “How old was Rudy?”

  “I don’t know… thirty… or thirty-one, I think,” said Dad, a little nonplussed, as if he were wondering why he had never asked himself the question.

  “Are you sure?” asked Léa.

  “Yes… at least… wait!”

  He removed his thick wallet from the back pocket of his trousers. It had been stretched out of shape by all the things he was in the habit of “keeping safe” in it. Placing it on the table in front of him, he took almost everything out, before finally extracting an official document.

  “He was born in 1943. So. He was thirty-three.”

  “Thirty-three! Incredible!” murmured Léa.

  Dad showed us Rudy’s ID card, which he had kept on him since the day he had gone to get him in German Switzerland. It had been new, acquired specially for that journey, the only one in his life. Rudy’s name was Rudolf Biedermann. He was born in Aarberg in the canton of Berne. He was 1.66 metres tall, and had red hair. In the photo, he was smiling openly, with the innocence of someone who has his life before him and doesn’t know what lies ahead. He must have been less than twenty at the time, but his face was the one I had always known. His smile was the smile of someone who did not understand that his soul had somehow found its way into the wrong body, and that as a result he would have to live as a being apart, isolated from his fellow humans.

  The next morning, a long black car entered our yard. The two funeral employees, dressed in black, exchanged words with my father, before coming into the house with a large coffin made of light-coloured wood. Dad waited for them below. When they finally emerged with Rudy, they paused and looked around them, as if they could hear solemn music playing. They remained motionless for a long minute in the midst of our silent farm. It was a way to honour him before his final departure. Then Dad got in the back of the car. He wanted to accompany Rudy on his journey to the little cemetery in Aarberg, where a place had been set aside for him in the Biedermanns’ family plot.

  VIII

  Léa is dressed stylishly, in black stockings and a suit that strike me as unsuitable for the occasion. I stand back to let her enter. “How’re things, kiddo?” she says, looking me up and down. It has always seemed to annoy Léa to have such an inhibited and self-effacing brother, who makes no effort to escape his destiny, shows no desire to stand out.

  She has on that smile that is still a little foreign to me, even after years to get used to it. A permanent fixture, the smile seems less a sign of blissful enlightenment than a form of makeup, like the pencil-thin, black half-circles that have taken the place of eyebrows above her big green eyes. I often feel surprised that this is my sister, Léa, who used to complain at having knees that were too big, who deployed all sorts of strategies to avoid getting dirty, whom Dad had once called a “potato flower” because potato flowers are necessary and pretty though they never bear fruit. Léa, who has transformed herself into a woman who walks slowly in the street so that men can watch her better.

  Now, standing in the centre of my orange kilim, she takes in my bachelor flat, which suddenly
seems to have no independent existence outside her gaze. She is surprised that I’m not yet ready to leave.

  We get into her car, an immense, luxurious Ford Taurus she has no doubt chosen because it can accommodate the length of her legs. On the front passenger seat, I feel as if I’m far away from her, though barely fifty centimetres separate us. This is luxury – enlarging space, broadening the horizon, giving you the sense that you count for something… I ask her how her husband and children are. She replies that her children are with their friends in the house in Grignan for two weeks’ holiday, and that Grégoire is in Boston for an important conference. “Two weeks of freedom!” she adds with a wry expression. “I’m looking forward to frittering it away.” Léa has succeeded in living the life that most people want to live.

  She holds the steering wheel firmly with both hands, moving it with abrupt little gestures, her bracelets jingling with each small change of direction. She cranes her neck forward as she drives, as if a few extra centimetres might help her see further. She doesn’t know it, but she looks just like our mother when she used to take our Toyota into town in the old days.

  The car glides over the peaceful roads. On either side, graceful slopes rise and fall. In the distance, the grass in the meadows looks too green, artificial in its uniformity, as if nature has renounced its true self. We drive through several deserted villages, where the steam rising from piles of manure, sometimes stacked in front of the barns in traditional, rectangular blocks, is the only sign of life. You would have to linger awhile to discover the unseen activity beneath this tranquil surface, just as a wildlife spotter must remain long motionless and hidden, before all the little forest creatures gradually lose their timidity, and resume their normal lives.