Cross Channel

by Julian Barnes

  Cheese is supposed to provoke bad dreams, but the combination of Brie, Saint-Nectaire and Pont-l’Evèque (I had declined the Bon Bel) had the opposite effect. I slept eventlessly, without even one of those tranquil episodes in which someone whom I knew to be me yet was not moved across landscapes both strange and familiar towards a reward both surprising yet predictable. I woke clear-headed to the sound of a late-season bumble-bee butting against the peeling slats of the shutters. Downstairs, I dipped my still-warm baguette into my bowl of hot chocolate and set off for the station before the others were up. Dewy spiders’ webs caught the early-morning sun like Christmas decorations. I heard a clattering behind me and was overtaken by one of those itinerant butcher’s vans made from silvery corrugated metal. At the station I picked up my car and drove through the village which seemed dormant, though I could see that the pavement in front of the shops had already been sluiced and broomed. It was 7.40 and the creaky church clock struck the three-quarter.

  When I started the car, my headlights and wipers came on, and I soon needed both as I headed down through damp morning mist to rejoin the N126. At Aurillac, another smart, four-carriage train was ready to take me to Clermont-Ferrand. There were few passengers, and my view was unimpeded; at times, I could even see the N126, which helped locate me. We stopped at Vic-sur-Cère and thereafter I paid particular attention. I was apprehensive about that misty cloud, but the soft October sun must have burnt it off. I watched, I switched my head regularly from side to side, I listened out for the train’s warning whistle, and all I can say is that we didn’t pass through the station of Marrant-sur-Cère.

  As the plane ended its first curving climb, and the levelling wing erased the Puy-de-Dôme, I remembered the name of the French writer who had written the autobiography of his cat. I also remembered my reaction as I sat next to him in the studio: you pretentious twat, I thought, or some such words. The French writers I am loyal to run from Montaigne to Voltaire to Flaubert to Mauriac to Camus. Does it need saying that I am unable to read Le Petit Prince and find most of Greuze nauseating? I am sentimental about clarity of thought, emotional about rationality.

  When I was an adolescent I used to come to France with my parents for motoring holidays. I had never seen a Bonnard. The only cheese I would eat was Gruyère. I despaired of the way they ruined tomatoes with vinaigrette. I could not understand why you had to eat all your meat before you got your vegetables. I wondered why they put grass-clippings in their omelettes. I loathed red wine. Nor was it just the alimentary apprehension: I was nervous about the language, the sleeping arrangements, the hotels. The absorbed tensions of a family holiday played on me. I was not happy, to put the matter simply. Like most adolescents, I needed the science of imaginary solutions. Is all nostalgia false, I wonder, and all sentimentality the representation of unfelt emotions?

  Jean-Luc Cazes, I discovered from my encyclopaedia, was a writer invented by the OULIPO group and used as a front for various promotional and provocational enterprises. Marrant is the French for funny, which of course I had known before I set off: where else would you expect a pataphysical encounter to take place? I have not seen any of my fellow participants since that day, which isn’t surprising. And I have still never been to a literary conference.

  DRAGONS

  PIERRE CHAIGNE, carpenter, widower, was making a lantern. Standing with his back to the door of his work-shed, he eased the four oblongs of glass into the runners he had cut and greased with mutton-fat. They moved smoothly and fitted well: the flame would be secure, and the lantern would cast its light in all directions, when this was required. But Pierre Chaigne, carpenter, widower, had also cut three pieces of beechwood the exact size of the panels of glass. When these were inserted, the flame would be cast in a single direction only, and the lantern would be invisible from three of the four compass points. Pierre Chaigne trimmed each piece of beechwood carefully, and when satisfied that they slid easily within the greased runners, he took them to a place of concealment among the discarded lumber at one end of the workshed.

  Everything bad came from the north. Whatever else they believed, the whole town, both parts of it, knew that. It was the north wind, arching over the Montagne Noire, that made the ewes give birth to dead lambs; it was the north wind which put the devil into the widow Gibault and made her cry out, even at her age, for such things that she had to be stopped in the mouth with a cloth by her daughter, lest children or the priest hear what she wanted. It was to the north, in the forest on the other side of the Montagne Noire, that the Beast of Gruissan lived. Those who had seen it described a dog the size of a horse with the spots of a leopard, and many was the time, in the fields around Gruissan, that the Beast had taken livestock, even up to a small calf. Dogs sent by their masters to confront the Beast had had their heads bitten off. The town had petitioned the King, and the King sent his principal arquebusier. After much prayer and ceremony, this royal warrior had set off into the forest with a local woodsman, who shamefully had run away. The arquebusier emerged, several days later, empty-handed. He had returned to Paris, and the Beast had returned to its foraging. And now, they said, the dragons were coming, from the north, the north.

  It was from the north, twenty years before, when Pierre Chaigne, carpenter, widower, had been a boy of thirteen, that the commissioners had come. They had arrived, the two of them, lace at the wrist and severity upon the face, escorted by ten soldiers. They examined the temple and heard evidence, from those who came forward, concerning the enlargements that had taken place. The next day, from a mounting-block, the senior of the commissioners had explained the law. The King’s Edict, he said, had given protection to their religion, that was true; but such protection had been awarded only to the religion as it had been constituted at the time of the Edict. There had been no licence to enlarge their cult: the enemies of the King’s religion had been granted toleration but not encouragement. Therefore all churches built by the religion since the Edict were to be torn down, and even those churches which had merely been enlarged were to be torn down as warning and instruction to those who continued to defy the King’s religion. Further, to purge their crime, it was the builders of the temple themselves who were to demolish it. Pierre Chaigne remembered at this point an outcry from those assembled. The Commissioner had thereupon announced that, in order to speed the work, four children from among the enemies of the King’s religion had been placed under guard by the soldiers, and would be well and safely guarded, furnished with all that they required to eat, for as long as the dismantling of the temple might take. It was at this time that a great sadness came over the family of Pierre Chaigne, and shortly afterwards his mother had died of a winter fever.

  And now the dragons were coming from the north. The priests of the King’s religion had decreed that in the defence of the Holy Mother Church against the heretic anything was permissible, short of killing. The dragons themselves had another saying: What matter the road provided it led to Paradise? They had come, not so many years before, to Bougouin de Chavagne, where they had cast several of the menfolk into a great ditch at the base of the castle tower. The victims, broken by their fall, lost as in the darkness of the tomb, had comforted themselves by singing the 138th Psalm.

  Though I walk in the midst of trouble, thou wilt revive me; thou shalt stretch forth thine hand against the wrath of mine enemies, and thy right hand shall save me.

  But as each night had passed, the voices from the great ditch had grown fewer, until the 138th Psalm was chanted no more.

  The three soldiers placed into Pierre Chaigne’s household were old men, forty years at least. Two of them had scars visible on their faces despite their great beards. On the shoulder of their leather tunics they wore the winged beast of their regiment. An additional whorl of stitching indicated to those with military knowledge that these old men belonged to the dragons étrangers du roi. Pierre Chaigne had no such understanding, but he had ears, and they were enough. These men did not seem to follow anything Pierre Ch
aigne said to them, and spoke among themselves the rough tongue of the north, the north.

  They were accompanied by the Secretary of the Intendant, who read a short decree to Pierre Chaigne and his assembled family. It being given that the household of Pierre Chaigne, carpenter, widower, by its wilful failure to pay the tallage, was in odious breach of the King’s law, the dragons, one officer and two men, would be quartered upon the Chaigne family, who were to supply such needs as they might have until such time as the household chose to pay the tallage and raise the burden from themselves. When the Secretary of the Intendant withdrew, one of the two common soldiers beckoned Pierre Chaigne’s daughter Marthe towards him. As she advanced, he pulled from his pocket a small fighting animal which he held by the neck, and thrust it at her. Marthe, though merely thirteen years of age, had no fear of the beast; her calmness encouraged the family and surprised the soldier, who returned the creature to the long pocket stitched into the side of his trouser.

  Pierre Chaigne had been accounted an enemy of the King’s religion, and thereby an enemy of the King, but he did not admit to either condition. He was loyal to the King, and wished to live in peace with the King’s religion; but this was not permitted. The Intendant knew that Pierre Chaigne could not pay the tallage imposed, or that if he did pay it, the tallage would immediately be increased. The soldiers had been placed into the household in order to collect the tallage; but their very presence, and the cost of entertaining them, diminished still further any chance of payment. This was known and established.

  The Chaigne household consisted of five souls: Anne Rouget, widow, sister of Pierre Chaigne’s mother, who had come to them when her husband, a two-plough labourer, had died; after burying her husband according to the rites of the King’s religion, she had accepted the cult of her sister’s family. She had now passed fifty years of age, and was consequently growing feeble of mind, but still able to cook and make the house with her great-niece Marthe. Pierre Chaigne had also two sons, Henri, aged fifteen, and Daniel, aged nine. It was for Daniel that Pierre Chaigne felt the greatest alarm. The law governing the age of conversion had been twice changed. When Pierre himself had been an infant, it was established law that a child was not permitted to leave the church of his parents until he be fourteen years old, that age being considered sufficient to confirm mental capacity. Then the age had been reduced to twelve. But the new law had lowered it still further, to a mere seven years of age. The purpose of this change was clear. A child such as Daniel, not yet having the fixity of mind which comes with adult years, might be lured from the cult by the colours and scents, the finery and display, the fairground trickery of the King’s religion. It was known to have happened.

  The three dragons étrangers du roi indicated their needs with incomprehensible speech and lucid gesture. They were to occupy the bed, and the Chaigne family were to sleep where they liked. They were to eat at the table, the Chaigne family were to wait upon them and eat whatever they left. The key to the house was surrendered to the officer, as also were the knives which Pierre and his elder son naturally carried to cut their food.

  The first evening, as the three soldiers sat waiting for their soup, the officer roared at Marthe as she was placing the bowls before them. His voice was loud and strange. ‘My stomach will think that my throat is cut,’ he shouted. The other soldiers laughed. Marthe did not understand. The officer banged on his bowl with his spoon. Then Marthe understood, and brought his food swiftly.

  The Secretary of the Intendant had stated that the dragons had lawfully been placed into the Chaigne household to collect the tallage; and on the second day the three soldiers did make some attempt to discover any money or valuable property that might have been hidden. They turned out cupboards, looked beneath the bed, rooted in Pierre Chaigne’s woodstacks. They searched with a kind of dutiful anger, not expecting to find anything concealed, but wishing it to be known that they had done what was formally demanded of them. Previous campaigns had taught them that the households they were first invited to occupy were never those of the rich. When their services had initially been engaged, many years ago at the end of the War, it had seemed obvious to the authorities to quarter the dragons with those who were best able to pay the tallage. But this method proved slow; it strengthened the sense of fraternity among members of the cult, and produced some notable martyrs, the memory of whom often inspired the obstinate. Therefore it had been found more profitable to place the soldiers in the first instance into the families of the poor. This produced a useful division among the enemies of the King’s religion, when the poor observed that the rich were exempt from the sufferings inflicted upon them. Swift conversions were many times thus obtained.

  On the second evening, the soldier who kept the ferret in his long knee-pocket pulled Daniel on to his knee as the boy offered him some bread. He grasped Daniel so firmly by the waist that the infant immediately began to struggle. The soldier held in his free hand a knife with which he intended to cut his bread. He put the blade flat against the table, which was made from the hardest wood known to Pierre Chaigne, carpenter, widower, and with only a gentle push raised a crisp, transparent curl from the surface of the table.

  ‘’Twould shave a mouse asleep,’ he said. Pierre Chaigne and his family did not understand these words; nor did they need to.

  On the next day the soldiers used the ferret to slaughter a cockerel, which they ate for dinner, and finding the house cold at midday, though the sun was shining, they broke up two chairs and burnt them in the chimney, ignoring the pile of firewood beside it.

  Unlike the King’s religion, the cult could be celebrated anywhere that the faithful gathered, without attendance at the temple. The dragons made efforts to prevent the family of Pierre Chaigne from fulfilling their observances: the house was locked at night, and the three soldiers disposed themselves during the day so that they could spy upon the movements of the family. But they were outnumbered by five to three, and it happened sometimes that escape was possible, and thereby a visit to a house where the cult was being celebrated. Pierre Chaigne and his family openly talked of such matters in front of the dragons; and it seemed a kind of sweet revenge to do so. But the dragons in the town, who numbered around forty, had sources of intelligence, and although the members of the cult frequently changed the house in which they met, they were as frequently discovered by the soldiers. So the enemies of the King’s religion chose to gather in the open air, in the forest to the north of the town. At first they met by day, and later only by night. Many feared that the Beast of Gruissan would descend upon them in the darkness, and the first prayer offered up was always a plea to be defended from the Beast. One night they were surprised by the dragons, who ran at them screaming, then beat and cut them with their swords, chasing them from the forest. The next morning, when the widow Gibault was not to be found, they returned to the forest and discovered her there, dead of the shock.

  Pierre Chaigne was able to remember a time when the two populations of the town moved freely among one another, when a funeral or a marriage was celebrated by the whole community, without regard for the creed of the participants. It was true that neither the adherents of the King’s religion nor the members of the cult would enter one another’s place of ritual; but one group would wait patiently outside for the ceremony to be completed, and then the whole town would follow, whether to the graveyard or to the wedding-feast. But shared rejoicing and shared grief had fallen equally into desuetude. Similarly, it was now rare in the town for a family to contain members of both faiths.

  Though it was summer, the dragons were in need of fire. They burnt all the furniture except that which they needed for their own use. Then they began to burn the finest wood of Pierre Chaigne, carpenter, widower. Lengths of weathered oak from trees cut by his father twenty years ago, prime sections of elm and ash, all were consumed by fire. To increase Pierre Chaigne’s indignity and misery, he was himself made to saw the timber into combustible lengths. When the dragons observed that t
his fine wood burnt more slowly than they had hoped, they ordered Pierre Chaigne and his sons to build a great bonfire beside the workshed, and instructed them to keep the fire alight until all Pierre Chaigne’s wood was consumed.

  As Pierre Chaigne stood looking at the mound of ashes which was all that remained of his future as a carpenter, the officer said to him, ‘God’s help is nearer than the door.’ Pierre Chaigne did not understand these words.

  Next the soldiers took all Pierre Chaigne’s tools, and those of his son Henri, and sold them to members of the King’s religion. At first Pierre Chaigne felt his misery lift, for having deprived him of his timber the soldiers did him no further harm depriving him of his tools; and besides, the sale of all his fine implements might even bring in money enough to pay the tallage and so make the soldiers depart. However, the dragons sold Pierre Chaigne’s tools not for their value, but for a price so low that no one could resist buying them, and then kept the money for themselves. François Danjon, miller, widower, member of the King’s religion, who had bought several of the instruments, returned them to Pierre Chaigne under cover of darkness. Pierre Chaigne wrapped them in oiled cloths and buried them in the woods against a better day.

  It was at this time that a pedlar, aged nineteen, passing through the town on foot from the direction of the Cherveux, was seized by several dragons and interrogated. He had the suspicious accent of the south. After being beaten, he admitted to membership of the cult; after being beaten further, he admitted that he desired to abjure. He was taken before the priest, who gave him absolution and copied his name into the register of abjuration. The pedlar made a mark beside his name, and two of the dragons, proud of their zeal and trusting that it would be recompensed, signed as witnesses. The pedlar was sent on his way without his goods. Henri Chaigne, aged fifteen, watched the beating, which was done in the public square; and as the victim was taken off to the church, a dragon whom he had not before seen said to him in the coarse language of the north, ‘What matter the road provided it lead to Paradise?’ Henri Chaigne did not understand what was being said, but recognised the word Paradise.