by Marie Ndiaye
Seeing him so disinclined to take an interest, Herman began to doubt that things would be any different the next morning.
“He doesn’t care if anything happens to Parisians,” he thought, “and if it does, it’s not his problem.”
“Once summer’s over, once the thirty-first of August has passed, then you want nothing more to do with us, do you? If we insist on staying till fall we do so at our own risk, we’re all on our own, and no authority is going to protect us. As far as you’re concerned we have no legal existence, that’s how it is, isn’t it?”
Offended, the gendarme shook his head. He assured Herman that at any time of year outsiders would find aid and protection from the local constabulary, and no gendarme had the right—not even the mayor had the right, or the town council, or the prefect—to decide otherwise.
“But do you ever have outsiders here in the fall? Or any season but high summer?” asked Herman, a little annoyed, less amiable than he would have liked.
“In truth, never.”
And the young man ingratiatingly added that Herman was the first Parisian he’d ever seen in the autumn rain and the stinging cold that inevitably settled in on the first of September, not to leave again until the middle of June. He didn’t say if he thought it was a good thing that a vacationer had crossed over the border of summer for the first time, if as a villager he found that development auspicious or galling. Herman was desperately curious to know. He folded his arms and put on a casual air.
“Is it in any way risky for me to stay here? Am I in any danger of arousing the antipathy of the locals?”
“No, no, of course not!”
The young man smiled more broadly, made placating gestures with both hands, assured Herman that everyone here would be glad for the opportunity to deploy their hospitality, which for many was nothing short of a mania.
“And in any case, as soon as you find your family you’ll go home, right?” he concluded, his tone slightly pleading, as if, thought Herman, the tightly clenched reins of perfect, codified politesse for a moment slipped slightly from his grasp.
“How will I ever find them without your help? You haven’t even written down their descriptions!” Herman cried.
“Come back tomorrow. As I told you, this isn’t the time. My shift officially ended an hour ago. I did turn off the light, and people generally don’t come walking into a dark building.”
Having said that, the gendarme gave a little bow, his eyes fixed on Herman’s shoes. Herman sighed, then turned toward the heater to warm his belly a little. He couldn’t bring himself to walk out into the rain, to go home—more than a kilometer away now—to end up adrift in the silent house, which he didn’t know in such weather, and fret all through the night. But his clothes were now thoroughly dry, and he had no excuse to linger in the gendarmerie. He nodded to the young man and went out.
“My God, what do I do?” he moaned when he was outside.
Had he ever known such helplessness? He felt terribly weak, desperately ill-equipped to face a situation of this sort. Not wanting to pass the shops again, he decided to take the lane, a narrow road that bypassed the village and climbed directly to the plateau where his summer house stood, his and many others, all of them now closed up for the year. The rain was still coming down; the cold was sharper now that night had fallen. Herman pushed on as best he could through the dark, whimpering, “My God, my God” over and over in a shivering voice, and for the first time he thought it would have been a fine thing, that evening, to have a house in the village, nestled among all the others, to walk home on a brightly lit street where he might meet some acquaintance he could pour out his troubles to. Very likely under the influence of the gendarme’s words, he found himself thinking that Rose and the child could never have disappeared if they had had such a house, if they’d simply emerged from one of these houses so huddled together that everyone must know everything that goes on in the houses next door, and if, rather than going off for eggs by the desolate country road that led to the farm—a road hemmed in by fields edged with tall mulberry hedges—they’d simply made for the nearby village grocery, which sold eggs from that very farm. No villager had ever disappeared, the gendarme claimed, and Herman wholeheartedly believed it. He was just as convinced that no such misadventure had ever befallen an outsider in the heart of the summer either, and since he and Rose were evidently the first to cross over into fall, they were the first to face the consequences of an untested experience.
“If there’s going to be trouble, best to face it head on,” Herman mumbled, trembling and terrified. “But will we be able to leave tomorrow? Oh, my God, my God…”
The start of the school year was five days away. He didn’t want to question whether they would be in Paris before then, but already he was fearing the disorder set off in his very tidy mind by this encounter with autumn in the village; in the region which, as he stumbled hunched and cold along the lane, he no longer considered it a privilege to be.
“Cursed fall,” he muttered, “cursed place! Another two weeks here and I’d be done for. But I won’t have it said that we backed away from trouble, not even the little one.”
He had some difficulty finding the house in the fog, unlit as it was by the garden lamps that shone from dusk to dawn all summer on the adjoining lots. The rooms were freezing cold and the house had no heater. For ten years they’d been coming to this place, and until the thirty-first of August Herman and Rose had known nothing but unending warmth. Only the sight of the pastures, dazzlingly green, almost artificial-looking, made them suspect that it wasn’t the same all year round, but they never thought to ask anyone to confirm that lazy assumption.
Herman lit the stove’s four burners, pulled a mattress into the kitchen. The cold and the primitive conditions made his despair complete. The best thing he could do, he thought, was try to get some sleep so he could get up early in the morning and launch a serious search. Remorsefully he told himself: “No one could possibly be more feeble than me. Out there on the lane my teeth were chattering in terror, and it was for myself that I was trembling, not for my loved ones. I’d never find the strength tonight to go scour the road and the hedgerows. No: first thing tomorrow, I’ll get the gendarmes to help me.”
2 – But the next morning, recalling the previous evening’s discussion with the very unhelpful gendarme, he decided it would be smarter to talk to the mayor. He knew the mayor had no direct power over the gendarmerie, but he vaguely reflected that the mayor was a sort of boss all the same, and in both age and education closer to him, Herman, than those young rural gendarmes, so surely he would quickly grasp the urgency of the matter, and would exert his moral influence to force an immediate inquest.
The clouds were low, the rain was still falling. Herman took his umbrella, but he had nothing to put on his feet except the flimsy pair of shoes that had drawn the gendarme’s gaze, and they were still thoroughly soaked. For that matter, the ambient wetness seemed to have already impregnated his clothes, the mattress, even the furniture, which looked oddly dark and damp. His hair felt faintly wet, the house funereal.
“Everything’s turned hostile all of a sudden,” he groaned. “Is it because I’ve seen the fall, is this the price you have to pay?”
He slammed the door as he walked out, not locking it. And with that he made a wish not to cross the threshold of that house again until the next summer, whatever happened, and he even thought he’d been very reckless to come back without first ascertaining the dangers of acting on his own—flouting the laws and customs that must govern post-summer life in this place.
The front yard was already dotted with puddles the size of small ponds. He hopped over them gracelessly. His bones, he thought, his entrails, everything in him was similarly saturated, stiff and cold. He followed the lane down into town, now indifferent to the mud that splashed under his feet and soiled his pant legs. He went straight to the town hall and found it open, though it was only a little past eight. It was an old half-timbe
r house, away from the center of town, across from the gendarmerie. From the street it was narrow and tall, but as soon as he stepped into the lobby, where he’d never been, Herman saw a long succession of rooms extending toward the back. A great many women in clacking high heels came and went from room to room, carrying files or thick binders, pens tucked behind their ears or thrust into their hair. He was taken aback by the extreme modernity of the furnishings and décor, remembering the city hall of his arrondissement back in the capital, its cramped little rooms, grimy wooden floors, yellowing walls, a scattering of cheap chairs. He was also surprised to see so many women at work here. They all wore the same outfit: a dark blue suit over that traditional blouse, whose colored ribbons hung from under the short jacket and bounced merrily on their hips. As for the rooms they were streaming out of, at the back of the building, Herman peered through the open doors but couldn’t see to the end, and he concluded the rooms must have been six or seven deep.
Suddenly intimidated, ashamed of his filthy shoes, he approached a receptionist sitting up very straight behind a long glass desk.
“I’d like to see the mayor, it’s serious.”
“Do you have an appointment?” she asked in a metallic voice.
“No, no, but it’s urgent, it’s very urgent.”
She raised her eyebrows, regretful, elegant, and undertook to explain that the affairs attended to by the mayor each day starting at seven in the morning were all, every one, of the greatest urgency, the rest were handed off to secretaries or functionaries, and she couldn’t possibly let Herman take the place of someone who, for similarly urgent reasons, had requested an appointment sometimes weeks in advance.
“But my case is particularly serious!” Herman cried, though in truth he was already beaten.
Had he ever rebelled against administrative rules when they were rationally, implacably laid out for him? The receptionist demurely asked to be allowed to point out that every urgent case possessed the same exceptional seriousness in the eyes of the petitioner.
“Yes,” said Herman, “but…”
“Would you like me to submit your case to a secretary?”
He jumped back in horror and sharply refused. Then, hoping to erase the memory of that reaction, he assumed a humble voice and asked what all these people were employed to do.
“It’s a big township,” the receptionist answered, a little surprised. “This is the seat of the canton, there are a great many problems and questions to see to.”
He was still intrigued and unsatisfied. But, vaguely fearing that if he displayed his ignorance of the workings of the village’s institutions he might be looked on less benevolently, he gravely nodded his head, doing his best to look as if he understood.
“Who’s the most important auxiliary or aid, I mean the one closest to the mayor, whom I could see immediately?”
“Well, there’s the president of the Chamber of Commerce,” said the receptionist, with an attentive, engaging smile.
“She wants to help me,” thought Herman.
He agreed at once, stammering out a few quick words of thanks. But his thoughts were darkened by deep discouragement, his will dissolving at the thought of wasting time with someone whose position gave Herman no reason to believe he might be of use in the search for Rose and the child. The receptionist stood up and asked him to follow her.
“These people are so considerate, so obliging,” Herman told himself. “They’re holding me captive, more securely than they ever could with orders and interdictions.”
He then chided himself for having refused to have his case placed in the hands of a secretary, who might immediately have grasped its importance, even all its potential tragedy, and passed it straight on to the mayor. Because now, convinced Herman would be all the happier and more confident for it, the receptionist was informing him that the president of the Chamber of Commerce was also the head of the festivities committee. Herman was almost offended.
“That’s not what I need at all,” he said, a little too loudly.
And his eyes stung with helplessness. The receptionist pretended not to have heard him, out of tact, he supposed. She led him to a steep, narrow stairway that spiraled up from the lobby. As she walked in front of him, he noticed her blouse had no ribbons: it must have been secured by a clip on that side.
“So she’s not married,” he told himself, proud of his penetrating eye.
They climbed to the fourth floor, the receptionist quick and lithe, Herman trudging. The woman’s calves were oddly muscular and bulging, and that—combined with the lack of ribbons and the solicitousness that in this place sometimes came close to a languorous caress (the gendarme had taken that same honeyed tone with Herman)—vaguely stirred him. No one in Paris would have spoken to him so caringly, and no one would have gone to such lengths to make him feel they had no greater desire than to serve him, even if all manner of obstacles Herman couldn’t quite make out had so far prevented any actual help from being given.
“I have to be careful not to complain, and not to make any demands,” Herman told himself in a sudden surge of gratitude toward the receptionist. “Everyone here knows their job, and for that matter my case might already be known to more people than I imagine; maybe at this very moment the mayor is considering the steps to be taken even while someone is briefing him on one of those urgent matters they sometimes have to wait so long to have attended to…
Assuaged, trusting, he wordlessly accompanied the receptionist down a hallway that vanished into the back of the building, very straight, so long that Herman lost any clear sense of the village’s dimensions.
“How could this building be so deep?” he whispered.
“Why, we’re under the hill now!”
The receptionist stifled a little laugh, then gave him an almost tenderly reproachful glance over her shoulder.
“Don’t you know? All the houses on the main street are built into the hill. It’s very hard not to know that here.”
“Forgive me,” answered Herman, red-faced.
They walked past a tinted-glass door, through which Herman glimpsed a sizable conference room and many faces around a table, some of which he recognized: the village fishmonger was there; the grocer and her husband; a café owner; the charcutière, all poring over papers or, pen in hand, listening to someone Herman didn’t have time to see. Intrigued to find all these merchants gathered on the fourth floor of the town hall—people he’d never pictured away from their shops, now divested of their aprons, almost enigmatic—his curiosity got the better of him, and he asked the receptionist what they were doing there.
“From what I could see, they were all shopkeepers,” he added, lowering his voice, sensing he’d already shown a lack of discretion.
“Well, that’s the weekly assembly.”
This time she stopped and turned toward Herman, her pale, smooth face registering a surprise that worried him and immediately made him regret his inquisitiveness.
“Aren’t you from the village?”
“No,” he murmured. “Actually, I’m a Parisian.”
She let out a polite, distant little “Oh!” then whirled around and walked on without a word. But her back and hips were stiffer now, her gait quicker and more businesslike, thought Herman, and he felt more distressed than he would have imagined, saddened and afraid in a way he thought excessive.
“Anyway, what harm can this receptionist possibly do me? She doesn’t even know what I’m here for.”
He gave a little laugh, trying to put on a good front. Reaching the end of the hallway, the young woman knocked on a door, opened it, then stepped aside to let Herman through.
“Here we are. I’ll be on my way.”
She strode off before he could thank her as he was planning, to his deep mortification. The president of the Chamber of Commerce—a short, wide man with a big drooping mustache—came forward, hand outstretched and pointing at the receptionist, still in sight, very small now, down the endless hallway.
&
nbsp; “Did you notice? She doesn’t have any ribbons.”
“Meaning what?” Herman asked coldly.
“Meaning you can talk to her in a certain way, and she’ll answer the same way.”
“That’s barbaric!” cried Herman, furious and disgusted. “What archaic customs! I can talk however I please to whomever I please.”
“But it’s very exciting this way,” the president said in surprise.
“I’m not from around here,” Herman interrupted.
Trembling with anger, he stepped into the office and looked around at the posters hung on the wall, showing various views of the region. It was a windowless little room (“We’re under the hill,” he reminded himself), thick with the smell of damp and saltpeter. Indignant at the manner of the president whose appearance alone, pudgy and unctuous, seemed to lessen the chances of his case being solved, Herman crossed his arms and raised his chin, determined not to speak first. Were it not for the prospect of a long walk back, he would have left then and there.
“Where are you from, then?” asked the president, jovial, manifestly delighted at Herman’s visit. “From C.? From M.?”
He had named two nearby villages.
“I live in Paris. I should have been home yesterday.”
The man let out a cry of astonishment.
“You’re a Parisian? But summer’s over!”
“That’s what I’m saying,” answered Herman, impatiently. “I’m only here because something terrible has happened.”
And to himself, he said, “Although we did insist on waiting till the second to go home, God knows why, knowing perfectly well we were crossing the line into fall, even if we had no sense of what fall means here.”
“Well now, that’s extraordinary,” the president cried.