By a Slow River (15 page)

XXIV

December 13, 1914

My darling,

At last I’m near you. This morning I arrived in P, a town only a
few kilometers from the front where you are. I was accorded a most
charming welcome. The mayor rushed to greet me as his savior. The
school is abandoned. I will replace the teacher there, who’s seriously
ill, so I’m told. His lodgings were in a deplorable state; I’ll have to
find a place to settle into. For now I’m going to stay at a hotel. The
mayor took me there. He’s a fat peasant who plays at being a young
blade. You’d find him funny, no doubt. I miss you so much. But knowing that you’re near me, knowing that we breathe the same air, see the
same clouds, the same sky—all of that comforts me. Look after your
self; be very careful. I love you and kiss you tenderly.

Your Lyse

My darling,

I’ve settled into a marvelous place, a doll’s house in a great park
that belongs to a beautiful mansion. People here call it the château.
They exaggerate a bit; it’s not a real château, but it is charming all the
same. The mayor was the one who came up with the idea. We went to
see the owner, who’s an old widower. He’s the prosecutor in V. When
we met, he couldn’t even bring himself to say hello. He just held my
hand a long while, as though surprised to be meeting anyone. Such a
deep sadness in his eyes. In the end he gave the mayor his consent, said
good-bye to me, and left us.

The little house hasn’t been lived in for quite some time. I’ll have to
do a lot of tidying up. I hope you can see it someday. I miss you so
much. For letters, the address is simply Château, rue des Champs-Fleury. Your last one was dated three weeks ago, and too much time
has passed without word that you are well. I hope you’re not su fering
too much on account of this cold weather. We hear gun blasts day and
night. My whole being shudders. I’m afraid. I love you and kiss you
tenderly.

Your Lyse

December 23, 1914

My darling,

I’m so worried: still no news from you, and the gun blasts never
stop. They said the war wouldn’t last long. If only you knew how I long
for your arms, to be held in them and see your smile, your eyes. I can’t
wait for this war to be over so I can marry you and have some beautiful
children to tug on your moustache! Oh, if only our parents hadn’t been
so foolish last year, we would already belong to each other. If ever you
write them, don’t tell them where I am. I left without warning. It
doesn’t matter: As far as I’m concerned, they’ve ceased to exist.

I’m trying to take my new job seriously. The children are obedient
at least. In fact, I’m fond of them, and I think they’re fond of me too.
Many of them bring me little gifts—an egg, some walnuts, a piece of
bacon. They give me a bit of peace and let me forget my loneliness a
little.

Sadness (that’s the nickname I’ve given to my landlord, the prosecutor) waits for me every day to come back home. He strolls in his
park, says hello. I return his greeting and give him a smile. He can’t
begin to cope with his loneliness, the housekeeper says. His wife died
when they were very young.

Christmas is coming. Remember our last Christmas, how happy we
were! Write me soon, my darling, write me . . .

I love you and kiss you tenderly.

Your Lyse

January 7, 1915

My darling,

Your letter, at last! It arrived today, though you wrote it December
26th. And to think you are so nearby. Sadness handed it to me in person. He must have suspected the nature of the correspondence when he
saw my excitement, but he was discreet. He knocked at my door, said
hello, gave me the envelope, and promptly left.

I wept with joy as I read your words. I hold your letter close; yes, I
hold it close, I press it to my skin, as though it’s you there with your
warmth and your scent, when I close my eyes.

I’m so afraid for you. Here we have a hospital where every day the
wounded arrive by the truckload. I dread so much that I might see you
among them. The poor things are in an inhuman state; some of them
don’t have faces anymore, others moan as though they’ve lost their
minds.

Keep safe, my darling, and think of me. I love you and long to be
your wife. I kiss you tenderly.

Your Lyse

January 23, 1915

My darling,

I miss you. I’ve spent so many months already without seeing you,
without talking to you, without touching you. Why on earth can’t you
get some leave? I’m so very sad. I try to stay cheerful around the children, but sometimes I can feel tears coming to my eyes, and then I turn
to the blackboard and write some words so they won’t notice anything.

I shouldn’t complain. Everybody is nice to me here, and I feel at
home in this little house. Sadness still keeps his respectful distance, but
he never fails to cross my path at least once a day so he can say hello. I
don’t know if it was only the cold weather, but yesterday I think he
blushed. His old servant Barbe lives there with her husband. She and I
get along very well. Sometimes I join her and Solemn—that’s her husband’s name!—for a meal.

I’ve gotten into the habit of climbing to the top of the hill every
Sunday. There’s a big meadow up there where you can take in the
whole horizon. You’re just beyond it, my darling; I see the fumes, the
horrible explosions. I stay as long as I can, till my hands and feet go
numb from the bitter cold; I want to share your suffering. My poor darling. How much longer will this drag on?

I kiss you tenderly. I’m waiting for your letters.

With love,
Your Lyse

XXV

In the little notebook of red morocco there were many pages like that, covered with finespun slanted writing like a delicate frieze, pages on which were composed many letters from Lysia Verhareine to the man she loved and had followed. I could imagine her rewriting them on lovely vellum before she put out the light.

Bastien Francoeur was his name: twenty-four years of age, corporal in the 27th Infantry. She wrote him every day. She told him about the long hours, the children’s mischief, Destinat’s blushes, the presents from Martial Maire—the simpleton for whom she’d become the divinity of the park—the breath of spring that came to plant primroses and crocuses. She told him about all that in her small light hand, in phrases just as light, behind which anyone who’d known her even a bit could detect her smile. Above all she told about her love and her loneliness, that heart-break she concealed from us so well; though our paths crossed hers every day, we had never suspected a thing.

The notebook didn’t contain any letters from her lover. Besides, she hadn’t received very many: nine in eight months. She counted them, of course. She read them again and again. Where did she keep them? Maybe she held them close, close to herself, even pressed to her skin, just as she’d written.

So few letters—why? Not enough quiet time? Or not enough desire? We always know what others mean to us, but we never really know what we mean to them. Was Bastien’s love as strong as hers? I’d like to think so, but I couldn’t say.

The fact remains that the little teacher lived by this correspondence; her lifeblood flowed into her words. After she’d corrected her pupils’ exercise books, the light in the house must have shone late as she took up her pen to write out the letter she’d first composed in the red morocco notebook. Maybe writing them there first answered another need: to create a journal of absence, a book of lonesome days she spent far from the man for whose sake she’d exiled herself among us—a more eloquent form of Destinat’s bundles of dutifully preserved stubs.

She mentions Sadness quite often; I believe she was full of affection for the cold lonely man who’d given her a home. While perfectly aware of his pitiful efforts to find favor with her, she noted them with only a tender irony; there was no malice when she described his face turning crimson at times, his stammers, his pompous getups, his circuits around the little house, the way he would gaze up at her bedroom window imagining no one saw him. Sadness amused her, and I think I can swear without fear of contradiction that Lysia Verhareine was the only human being in his entire life the prosecutor ever managed to amuse.

As for that improbable meal that had flabbergasted Barbe, the girl described it in a long letter dated April 15, 1915:

My darling,

Yesterday evening I was invited for the first time to dine with Sadness. Such formality. Three days ago I had found a little card slid
under my door: “Prosecutor Pierre-Ange Destinat requests the pleasure of the company of Mademoiselle Lysia Verhareine for dinner,
Wednesday, April 14th, at eight o’clock.” I got myself ready for a dinner in society, but it was only a tête-à-tête with him—just the two of us
in an immense dining room that could have seated sixty! A real
romantic rendezvous! I’m teasing you! Sadness, as I’ve told you, is
almost an old man. But yesterday he looked like a minister or a chancellor, standing straight, in tails worthy of an evening at the opera!
The table was dazzling, the china, the tablecloth, the silver—I felt
like I was in . . . I don’t know, Versailles perhaps!

Instead of Barbe, a very young beautiful child served at table.
Eight years old, maybe nine. But she took her role very seriously and
seemed to know all the ropes. Sometimes she stuck out the tip of her
tongue, as children do when they try to apply themselves. Occasionally
our eyes met and she smiled at me. It was all rather strange—the dinner for two, the little girl. Barbe told me today that the child—who is
called Morning Glory—is the daughter of an innkeeper in V. Her
father had prepared the meal. Everything was superb, though one
could hardly enjoy it. I don’t know when I’ve seen such a feast—but
suddenly I feel ashamed, thinking of you, hunting for a potato and
maybe even going hungry! Forgive me, my darling, I’m stupid. . . .

I miss you so much. Your last letter was dated six weeks ago. And
still no leave. Even so, I know somehow you are safe—I can sense it.
Write me, my darling. Your words give me strength to continue here,
just as knowing that you are so close by sustains me, even if I can’t see
you or hold you in my arms.

Sadness hardly spoke at dinner. I would sometimes look up to catch
him looking at me, and he would look away, like a shy adolescent.
When I asked him whether his solitude didn’t weigh on him too much,
he paused for a moment and then he said, softly and solemnly: “To
be alone is the human condition, in any event.” I thought that very
beautiful, even knowing it to be untrue: You are not with me, yet I feel
your presence every moment. A little before midnight he escorted me to
the door, where he said good night and kissed my hand. Romantic, but
so passé, like an antique gentleman, which I suppose is what he is.

Oh, my darling, how much longer is this war going to last? I’m
laying my head down to sleep now. Sometimes when I dream of you, in
the morning I can’t bear to open my eyes right away and leave the
dream for the nightmare that awaits me by day.

Desperate for your embrace, I kiss you with all the force of my love.

Your Lyse

In time, the young teacher’s long-unanswered letters turned to bitterness, despondency, and occasionally venom. All we knew of her was the glowing smile and the pleasant, courteous word she had for everyone; underneath, pain and darkness were filling her heart. She began with greater regularity to express disgust at the men in our town, the ones who reported to work at the factory clean and rested. Even the wounded released from the hospital to loiter in our streets did not escape her contempt; she called them
the lucky ones.
Still, I can hardly describe my surprise to have been singled out for special loathing, a distinction I became aware of when I read the letter she’d written the evening of that indelible day when I’d seen her on the crest of the hill, staring at the distant plain as if she could divine from it some meaning.

June 4, 1915

My darling,

Your letters are like old newsprint, I’ve unfolded them, reread
them, and cried over them so often. How I suffer. Time seems like a
monster, born to divide lovers. They have no appreciation of how lucky
they are, these cows I see every day, separated from their husbands for
only a few hours, and these children whose fathers come home for supper each evening.

Today as every Sunday I climbed to the top of the hill to be closer
to you. Up there a great wind brought me the noise of the big guns.
They banged and banged and banged. I wept at the thought of you
sheltering under that downpour of iron and fire, of which I could see
only ominous smoke and flashes. My darling, where were you? Where
are you? I stayed there a long time, as usual; I couldn’t tear my eyes
away from that immense field of suffering where you’ve lived for
months.

Suddenly I sensed a presence behind my back. It was a man I know
by sight. He’s a policeman, and I’ve always wondered what on earth
he’s doing in this little town. He’s older than you are but still young
and fit. I suppose he’s on the right side, the side of the cowards. He was
looking at me dumbfounded, carrying a hunting rifle, a ridiculous
shiny gun for children or the stage. Can you imagine ambling around
with a weapon for idle killing while a few miles away men are slaughtering and being slaughtered with rifles? That moment I hated this
comical buffoon more than anything in the world. He mumbled incoherently, and in my disgust I turned my back on him.

I’d gladly send thousands of his like into the jaws of hell for a few
seconds in your arms. I’d sever their heads with my own hands just to
taste your kisses again, to touch your hands and look into your eyes. I
don’t care if I seem horrible. I don’t care about judgments, morality, or
other people. I would kill to keep you alive. I hate death because it
chooses without care.

Write me, my darling, write me. Each day without you is a bitter
eternity.

Your Lyse

I couldn’t hold it against her. She was right. I had acted like a prick on the hilltop, and what was I now, as I read her private thoughts? Would I not have killed to have kept Clémence alive? I found the living no less detestable than Lysia Verhareine did. I bet the prosecutor felt the same. Anyone could tell he felt that life had spat in his face.

Through the little notebook I traveled a road that passed from flowering countryside to savage expanses full of pus, acid, and blood, black bile, pools of fire. As the days flew by, not only the landscape but Lysia Verhareine was changing, though the rest of us never saw any signs. Inside this beautiful girl, so sweet and delicate, was growing a creature who screamed in silence and tore at her own heart. A being in free fall who never stopped falling.

Sometimes her fiancé himself came to bear the brunt of her anguish, as she reproached him for his silence and the infrequency of his letters, doubting his love. But the following day she would never fail to offer him profuse apologies and caresses as tender as the first. It seems neither tack, however, moved him to write more often.

I can never know which camp he was in, this Bastien Francoeur: whether he was with the bastards or on the side of the just. I’ll never know what sparkle may have been visible in his eye as he held one of Lysia’s letters, when he opened and read it, if indeed he did. I’ll never know if he kept those outpourings of hers with him in the trench, a suit of armor made of paper and of love, when the attack was about to start and his whole life whirled by him once more like a leering lurid carousel. For all I can know, he skimmed them wearily, perhaps with a dark suppressed laugh, before he crumpled them up and chucked them into a mud puddle.

The last letter, a short one filling the last page of the notebook, was dated August 3, 1915. In it she still professes her love, in simple words; she speaks of the summer too, of the vast and beautiful days that are filled with nothing when one is waiting and alone. I’m abridging a bit, but not much. I could copy it out verbatim, but I don’t want to. It’s already enough that Destinat and I laid our eyes on the notebook, as though gazing through a window at someone undressing. There’s no call for others to see this last letter. Let it remain sacred, her farewell to the world, her final words—even if the young teacher wrote them scarcely dreaming they would be her last.

Following this letter, there’s nothing more. Nothing but blankness, pages and pages unmarked. The blankness of death.

Death inscribed.