By a Slow River (3 page)

IV

It was in 1897 or 1898—thereabouts. A long time ago. The factory paid for the renovation of the little house in the park, nibbled on by humidity like the hold of an old ship. Up till now whatever was unneeded had been stored there, a hodgepodge of this and that: dislodged armoires and rat traps, rusty scythes thin as crescent moons, stones, slates, a tilbury-style carriage, broken toys, skeins of twine, garden tools, tattered clothes. Also a bunch of stags’ antlers and wild boars’ heads, all quite dead and stuffed. The old man had been a fanatical hunter; the son, who also made heads roll, detested seeing them and so had had these trophies tossed there in a heap. Spiders had woven many a web over them, giving the whole collection an antique patina, redolent of sarcophagi and Egyptian mysteries. To spruce the place up after the exterior was redone, a decorator came specially from Brussels.

The first tenant arrived as soon as the renovation was complete. The second replaced him six months later, and then that one left in turn, whereupon a third showed up, and then a fourth, and so on. Everyone lost track. Many would pass through; none would stay more than a year, and each resembled the last. People stopped trying to distinguish them. They would say, “Look, there’s the tenant going by!” They were overgrown boys, still fairly young, who made no noise, never went out, never brought a woman back, and always stuck to business. They’d head for the factory at seven, return at eight after a supper eaten in the big building we’d dubbed the Casino—I wonder why, since no one ever played any sort of game there!—which served as a canteen for all those engineers. Sometimes a few of them dared to go for a brief stroll, of a Sunday, in the park. Destinat said nothing. He would watch them from behind his curtains and wait for them to go away before taking a walk himself and settling down on a bench.

The years passed. Destinat’s life seemed an unchanging ritual played out between the courthouse of V, the cemetery where each week he visited his wife’s grave, and the château in which he resided: shut in as though invisible, withdrawn from the world, which wove around him, bit by bit, a cloak of forbidding legend.

He advanced in years, but he remained the same—in appearance, at any rate. Always this severity, which inspired chills, and this silence, which seemed as long and complicated as a century. If you wanted to hear his voice—which by the way was very soft— all you had to do was attend a trial. They took place often. Murder is more common around here than elsewhere. Maybe that’s because the winters are long and people get bored, and the summers are so hot they make the blood boil in your veins.

The jurors didn’t always understand what the prosecutor meant: He’d read too much, and they hadn’t read enough. Among them you saw all kinds, though seldom bigwigs; mostly they were nobodies: rancid craftsmen cheek by jowl with ruddy-faced farmers, civil servants, priests in worn cassocks who’d come from their country parish having risen before the sun, haulers, exhausted workmen. All sat on the same bench, the good one. Many could just as well have found themselves on the opposite bench, between the two moustachioed bailiffs, stiff as pokers. And I’m sure each vaguely sensed this in his heart of hearts, realized it without wanting to admit it to himself, and that’s what often made them so full of peremptory hate toward the man they had to judge: their brother in bad luck—or derring-do.

When Destinat’s voice could be heard in the courtroom, all murmurs ceased. The whole room seemed to check itself, as when you stop before a mirror and pull on your shirttail to make the collar stand straight; the room was looking at itself and holding its breath. Into this silence, the prosecutor would fling his opening remarks. Never more than five little sheets, whatever the case, whoever the accused. The prosecutor’s trick was simplicity itself. No swagger. A cold and meticulous depiction of the murder and the victim, that’s all. But that in itself is a lot, especially when you don’t omit a single detail. Most often, the medical examiner’s report was his gospel. He insisted on it. It was enough for him to read it out, his voice dwelling on the most trenchant particulars. He wouldn’t gloss over a single wound, not a gash, not the least laceration, much less a sliced throat or gaping belly. All of a sudden the public and the jurors would see before them images from far away, from the darkest underside, the emerging face of evil and its metamorphoses.

It’s often said that we fear what we don’t know. But I say fear is born when one day we learn what we were unaware of only the night before. That was Destinat’s secret: Offhandedly, he would slip thoughts of things they didn’t want to live with under the noses of those complacent louts. The rest was child’s play. He could ask for the head, and the jury would serve it to him on a silver platter.

After that, he would go have lunch at the Rébillon. “Another one cut down to size, Mr. Prosecutor!” Bourrache would show him to his table and pull out his chair for him with flourishes fit for a lord. Destinat would unfold the silverware, clink the knife handle against his glass. Judge Mierck would greet him mutely, and Destinat would return his greeting in kind. The two of them sat less than ten meters apart, each at his own table. Yet they never exchanged a word. Mierck ate with the care of a horse, his napkin tied around his neck like a stable groom, his fingers greasy with sauce, and his eyes already clouded by wine-vapor nymphs. As for the prosecutor, he was, as I say, well-bred. He cut his fish as though caressing it. The rain was still falling. Judge Mierck would gobble down his desserts. Morning Glory would be dozing near the great hearth, lulled by fatigue and the jig of the flames. The prosecutor would linger in the folds of his own vapid dream.

Already, somewhere, a blade was being sharpened, a scaffold being raised.

I’ve been told that Destinat’s talents and fortune could have taken him far. Instead, he planted himself for all his days in our town— in other words, nowhere—in a region where for years life reached us only as the murmur of a distant music, until one fine day it all crashed down on our heads and battered us horribly for a span of four years.

The portrait of Clélis still adorned the entry hall of the château. Her smile watched the world change and sink into the abyss. She wore the garments of a lighthearted time that was no more. Over the years her pallor had disappeared, and the discolored varnishes shaded her cheeks a lukewarm pink. Each day Destinat passed by beneath her, a little more worn, himself only more faded, his gestures slowed and his gait more deliberate. The two of them moved even farther away from each other. Brutally, death spirits beautiful things away and yet keeps them intact. That is its true grandeur. We can’t fight it.

Destinat so loved time that he could relish simply watching it go by, sometimes doing no more than sitting behind a window, on a chaise longue of rattan, or else on the bench atop a low manmade mound, covered with anemones and periwinkles, overlooking the lazy waters of the Guérlante and the more hurried stream of the small canal. At such times you might have taken him for a statue.

For many years I’ve tried to understand, though I don’t think of myself as any smarter than the next guy. I grope along, I get lost, I go round in circles. At the beginning, before the Case, Destinat was a name to me, an official position, a house, a fortune, a figure I came across at least two or three times a week and to whom I tipped my hat. But what lay behind all that I had no way of knowing. Since then, by living with his ghost, it’s a little as if he were an old acquaintance, a relative in misfortune, a part of myself, so to speak, and I do my best to make him talk and come alive again, so I might ask him a question. Only one. Now and then I tell myself that I’m wasting my time: The man is as impenetrable as morning fog, and a thousand evenings wouldn’t be time enough for me to see my way through. But now I have time to spare. It’s as if I’m outside the world. All the hurly-burly seems so far off. I live in the movements of a history no longer mine. Little by little, I steal away.

V

1914. There was, in our town, on the eve of the great slaughter, a sudden scarcity of engineers. The factory kept running as ever, but something compelled the Belgians to stay home in their little kingdom, under the spindly shadow of their operetta monarch. The prosecutor was informed, with many bows and courteous words: There would be no more tenants.

The summer had announced itself as a hot one, under the arbors and inside the skulls of the many patriots who in their fervor had been wound up tight as fine clockwork. Everywhere they raised their fists and bared their painful memories. Around here as all over, wounds have a hard time closing, especially where they never dry and are left to fester in evenings of brooding and rancor. Out of pride and stupidity, a whole country was ready to duke it out with another country. The fathers drove their sons. The sons drove their fathers. Hardly anyone but the women—mothers, wives, sisters—could see all this with even an inkling of coming misery, a foresight that projected them well beyond those afternoons of joyous shouts, of glasses tossed back, of rounds of songs that pounded against the canopy of the chestnut trees until your ears rang.

Actually, our little town could hear the war but didn’t wage it. You could even say without giving offense that we lived off it: Our men kept the factory going, and the factory kept them. An order was handed down from on high—a good one for once. By dispensation of I forget which far-off government bureaucrat, all workers were reserved for essential civilian service. And so at least eight hundred strapping local lads would escape the raging guns and the perils of the wild blue yonder. Eight hundred men who in the eyes of some were never men at all, who rose each morning from a warm bed and a drowsy embrace—not from a muddy trench—to go haul useful things rather than cadavers. The incessant blast of shells; the dread of meeting the fate of so many others; the buddies caught in barbed wire just twenty yards away, left to groan until they died, when the rats set upon their remains—all that stayed far away. Instead, there was life pure and simple: real life. It unfolded each morning, not as a dream somewhere beyond the fumes but as a warm certainty that smells of sleep and women.

Lucky bastards! Deadbeats! That’s what all the convalescent soldiers thought—one-eyed, legless, amputated, crushed, gassed, mangled, faces smashed—as they passed the workers on our streets, in the pink of health, about to open their lunch boxes. Some, with an arm in a sling or dragging a wooden leg, would turn around and spit on the ground when those men went by. You could understand it. A person can hate you for less than that.

Not everybody was a civilian worker. The few farmers who were not too young or too old traded their pitchforks for rifles. Leaving as proud conscripts, they couldn’t have known that soon enough they would have their names engraved on a monument still to be built.

And then there was a departure notable for its ceremony: that of the schoolteacher, whose name was Fracasse—Crash—a name you could hardly believe. He wasn’t from around here. A proper farewell was organized. The children had composed a little song, very moving and innocent, which brought tears to his eyes. The city council presented him with a tobacco pouch and a fancy pair of gloves. I really wonder what he could have done with those gloves of delicate salmon-colored hide; when he removed them from their sharkskin box and tissue paper, he looked at them incredulously. I don’t know what became of Fracasse: dead, wounded, or else safe and sound after the four years. In any case, he never came back, which I can understand. The war not only turned out dead men by the ton, it also cut the world and all our memories in two, as though everything that had taken place before was crammed into a paradise at the bottom of some old pocket you’d never dare reach into again.

They sent a substitute teacher, too old to be mobilized. I remember his madman’s eyes above all, two steel balls in oyster white. “I’m opposed!” he said from the first, when the mayor came to show him his classroom. We called him Opposed. It’s all well and good to be opposed, but opposed to what? We never found out. In any case, three months and it all came to a head, though the guy had undoubtedly started losing his grip a long time before that. Sometimes he would break off the lesson, stare at the children, and go
rat-a-tat-tat
like a tommy gun, or else he would ape a falling shell by dropping to the floor and remaining motionless for minutes on end. He was alone in this plight. Madness is a land that’s not open to day-trippers; it has to be booked in advance. As for him, he arrived there in style, having lifted anchor, cast off, and sunk with all the panache of a captain who goes down with his ship, upright at the prow.

Each evening he would go hopping and skipping along the canal. He talked to himself, usually words that nobody understood, stopping now and then to battle an invisible adversary with a hazelwood stick. Then he would set off hopping again, murmuring, “Tagada Tagada T’soin T’soin!”

He crossed the line on a day of huge bombardments. The windowpanes were trembling every five seconds, like the surface of water under a strong north wind. The stench reached even into our homes. We stuffed the cracks in the windows with damp rags. The children would later recount that Opposed—after almost an hour of sitting with his head between his hands, pressing so hard it nearly burst—had stood up on his desk and methodically removed his clothes while singing the “Marseillaise” at the top of his lungs. And then, naked as Adam, he’d run over to the flag and thrown it on the floor. After pissing on it, he tried to set it on fire. At that point young Jeanmaire, the biggest boy in class—he was going on fifteen—calmly got up and subdued him with a cast-iron poker to the forehead.

“The flag, it’s sacred!” the kid said later, very proudly, when everyone crowded around to hear him explain his feat. He had that streak in him already. He would die three years later at Chemin des Dames. Also on account of the flag.

When the mayor arrived the teacher was stretched out, still completely naked, on the sodden, slightly burnt tricolor, his hair a bit singed from the fire that hadn’t really caught. Two orderlies took him in a straitjacket that made him look like a fencer, the purple knot on his skull like some bizarre emblem of office. He didn’t speak, quiet as a scolded child. I think by then he was completely unhinged.

The fact remained that the school was now without a teacher, and though the kids were pleased, this didn’t sit well with the local authorities, who couldn’t afford to fall behind in brainwashing the young and miss turning out their quota of recruits. After all, once the first illusions had passed—“Those Krauts, in two weeks we’ll make them eat Berlin!”—no one knew how long the war would last, and a reserve force seemed only sensible.

The mayor was on the verge of tearing his hair out; he went on a crusade, but none of that changed a thing: He could find no solution, any more than he could find a replacement for Fracasse.

And then the solution appeared just like that—on December 13, 1914, to be exact—in the mail coach that came from V. It stopped as usual across from the Quentin-Thierry hardware store, where the window always displayed the same boxes of rivets in every size, alongside mole traps. We saw four livestock traders elbowing one another as they got out, red as cardinals from having drunk too much in toasting their latest transaction. Then two women, widows who made the trip to town to sell their cross-stitch needlework; and old man Berthiet, a notary retired from paperwork who repaired once a week to a back room of the Excelsior Grand Café for a game of bridge, with some other leftovers of his ilk. There were also three girls returned from having made the wedding purchases for the one among them who was a bride-to-be. And then finally, at the very last, when it seemed there was nobody left, we saw a young lady get off. At that moment the bang of the guns and the burst of the shells weren’t heard. Wafting on the air was something of the warmth of autumn and the sap of ferns.

She looked deliberately to the right and then to the left, as if to see what sort of place she was stepping into. Her two small brown-leather bags with copper clasps had preceded her. Her clothing was simple, without frill or ornament. She bent over slightly, grasped the two little bags, and, striking a slender outline that the evening swathed in a gauzy mist of blue and pink, disappeared from view.

In her name, which we would later learn, that of a flower seemed to drowse: Lysia. It suited her well, as a long gown might have done. She had not yet turned twenty-two; she came from the north, just passing through; her family name was Verhareine.

Her little circuit out of our view led her to the notions store of Augustine Marchoprat. She asked for directions to the town hall and the mayor’s house; yes, that’s what the young lady had requested “with a honeyed voice,” as the dried-up prunes would later recall. And old Mrs. Marchoprat, that gossip, immediately closed her door, pulled the iron grate shut, and ran to report to her dear friend Mélanie Bonnipeau, a pious bonneted biddy who spent most of her time scanning the street from her low window, among green plants that uncoiled their aqueous curls against the windowpanes, her fat neutered cat with the head of a solemn monk settled on her lap. The two old ladies set about spinning their themes, unfurling plots borrowed from the penny novels they often devoured on winter evenings, rehashing all the episodes till they were even more asinine and preposterous. Louisette, the mayor’s maid, a girl as naïve as a goose, passed by half an hour later.

“So who is she?” old lady Marchoprat asks her.

“Who is who?”

“The girl with the two bags!”

“A girl from the north.”

“From the north? What north?” the shopkeeper continues.

“I don’t know, from the north. There’s only one.”

“And what does she want?”

“She wants the job.”

“What job?”

“Fracasse’s job.”

“She’s a schoolteacher?”

“That’s what she says.”

“And the mayor, what did he say?”

“Oh, he was all smiles.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“He told her, ‘You’ve saved me!’ ”

“You’ve saved me?”

“Yes, just like I said.”

“There’s another one with ideas in his head.”

“What ideas?”

“My dear girl, ideas in his trousers, if you prefer. You know your master, he’s a man!”

“But what kind of ideas are inside trousers—”

“My God, she’s a stump! And your bastard, how did you acquire him, from a draft of air?”

Clever enough to take offense at least, Louisette turned her back on them and left. The two old ladies were pleased. They had fodder for the evening: the north, men and their vices, and the young girl, too beautiful, altogether too beautiful, to be a teacher—beautiful enough to have no profession at all.

By the following day we knew everything, or almost.

Lysia Verhareine had been put up in the largest room of the only hotel in town, at the expense of the mayor’s office. And the mayor, dressed like a young bridegroom, had come in the morning to pick her up to introduce her all around and escort her to the school. You should have seen him, waltzing around till he almost split the seams of his Sunday-best jasper-black trousers, the pirouettes of his hundred kilos graceful as a circus elephant on its hind legs. Beside him the young lady was gazing all the while far beyond the landscape, even while she shook our hands one by one with a gentle squeeze from her slender fingers, as though she sought to wing her way into the distance, to lose herself there.

When she entered the school and then the empty classroom, there was no doubt of her being taken aback by the stink of country children. A few ashes from the burned flag still remained on the floor. Several overturned chairs gave the place an air of high jinks just ended. Observing the scene from outside with a nose pressed to the windowpanes, one could make out the first lines of a poem written on the blackboard:

No doubt their naked hearts have felt
The biting cold, and halfway death
Under the open stars

The words stopped abruptly. The handwriting, which must have belonged to Opposed, was still there to remind us of his mad eyes and gymnastics, though by now he must have been lying on a flea-infested mattress who knows where, or shivering under a regimen of cold showers and mauve electric shocks.

The mayor had made some remarks after opening the door and pointing out the flag; then he stuck his sausage fingers into the pockets of his silk vest and preened in silence, casting a dour glance our way from time to time—which meant, no doubt, Well, what are you doing there, you people? Why don’t you get the hell out of here and make yourselves useful? But none of us left. We were drinking in the scene like a glass of rare wine.

The young woman took tiny steps about the room, to the right, to the left, and up to the desks, where notebooks and pens still lay neatly in place. She leaned over one desk and read the page of writing; we saw her smile. At the same time, we saw her golden hair, cascading on her neck like seafoam, between the collar of her blouse and her bare skin. Next she stopped before the ashes of the flag, righted two fallen chairs, matter-of-factly arranged some dry flowers in a vase, and without remorse erased the unfinished verses from the blackboard. She smiled at the mayor, who was nailed to the ground where he stood, stunned by this twenty-one-year-old’s smile, while less than fifteen leagues away they were slicing one another’s throats with naked blades, scared shitless, falling by the thousands each day, far from any feminine smile, on ravaged earth where even the idea of woman had become a chimera, a drunkard’s dream, an insult altogether too beautiful.

The mayor patted his belly to give himself an air of distinction. Lysia Verhareine walked out of her classroom, her steps worthy of a dance.