By a Slow River (9 page)

XV

It took four hours to reach V. The horse kept bogging down in the mire, and the ruts were actually pits. In places the snow was melting like barrels that had been overturned, flooding the way until running water flowed into the ditches ahead and vanished. There were also troop convoys heading to the front line—on foot, in carts, in trucks—obliging us to heave to the side to let them pass as best we could. We caught their melancholy gaze. Not a one of them reacted; not a one spoke, these denizens of the other world. Pale calves dressed in blue, meekly headed for the great abbatoir.

Crusty, Judge Mierck’s clerk, left us seated in an antechamber lined with red silk. I knew the room well. I had had frequent occasion to brood there about the universe—about boredom, the endlessness of an hour, a minute, a second. Without looking I could have drawn a perfect map of that room, showing the exact position of each piece of furniture, every decorative object, the number of petals on each dried anemone that sighed in the stoneware vase perpetually set on the mantelpiece. Joséphine drowsed with her hands on her lap, waking abruptly from time to time as though struck by an electric shock.

After an hour Crusty reappeared, picking at his cheek. He’d evidently been at it since seating us, since there were lapels of dead skin on his black suit, which was worn to a shine at the elbows and knees. He showed us into the judge’s office.

At first we almost couldn’t see anything, but we heard two laughs. One, as thick as spit, I already knew. The other was totally unfamiliar, but I would get to know it soon enough. A haze of stinking smoke floated in the room, obscuring both the fat judge seated at his desk and the fellow standing near him. As my eyes grew accustomed to the pea soup, the judge’s companion revealed himself. It was Matziev. They continued laughing, just as though we weren’t there three steps in front of them. The officer was puffing on his cigar. The judge had his hands folded contentedly on his stomach. They were slow to let the laughter die, picking at the scraps of their joke. And when they were sure there was absolutely nothing left to laugh about, Mierck peered at us with his big green fish eyes.

“Well? What now?” The judge harrumphed in irritation, as if we had killed the gag. He was sizing up Joséphine as though I had come in with a head of livestock.

Mierck had no use for me, and the feeling was mutual. Our jobs—or, rather, my job and his office—often forced us into contact, but we never exchanged an unnecessary word. Our conversations were brief and without warmth, and when we spoke we hardly looked at each other.

I made the introductions, but before I could even summarize what Joséphine had told me, Mierck cut me short to address her.

“Profession?” Joséphine opened her mouth wide and thought for two or three seconds, but that was already too long for the judge. “Is she an idiot or is she deaf? Profession?”

Joséphine cleared her throat, glanced at me, and at last spoke. “Salvage dealer.”

The judge looked at the officer; they traded smiles. Finally, something else to laugh about. Then Mierck continued. “And what is it she salvages?”

This was the judge’s way of reducing people to nothing. He spoke as if you weren’t there, as if you didn’t exist, were something to be commented upon rather than addressed. He deleted people this way with nothing but a pronoun. I’ve already said he knew how to use the language.

I saw Joséphine’s face turn deep red, and her eyes held a glint of menace. I’m sure if she’d had her skinning knife to hand, she would have gutted Mierck right there without a second thought. She’s not so strange that way. We kill a lot in the course of a day, in thought and in words, without fully realizing it. In light of all these abstract crimes, actual murders are pretty rare when you consider it. In fact, it’s only in wars that our actions keep up with our impulses.

Joséphine breathed deep and took the plunge. She stated her humble trade openly and clearly, without shame. Mierck resumed his petty abuse: “Imagine that! In other words, she lives off carcasses!” He tried to coax a false laugh, intrusive as a tumor; it would have died if Matziev—still sucking on his cigar, as if only that kept the world spinning—had not ratified it and joined in.

I laid my hand on Joséphine’s and started talking. Simply, without omitting any of the details, I recounted what she’d told me the night before. Mierck became serious again and listened without interrupting. When I had finished he looked up at the officer. They exchanged an inscrutable look. Then the judge picked up his letter opener with two fingers and set it dancing on its point on the blotter of his desk: a lively and nimble dance, between a polka and a quadrille, which ended as suddenly as it started. And that’s when Joséphine’s torture truly began.

The judge and the colonel launched a joint offensive, without even conferring in advance. Men cut from the same cloth don’t need to talk things over much in order to agree. Joséphine endured their broadsides painfully, sticking to her version; sometimes she looked over at me, with her eyes seeming to say, Why the hell did I listen to you? When are these bastards going to stop?

I couldn’t do anything for her. I was just witnessing the sabotage. When Joséphine allowed in all innocence that she’d warmed herself several times with a sip from her brandy flask, Mierck and Matziev set about finishing her off. When they got through flaying her, she lowered her head, let out a long sigh, and looked at her hands, swollen from cold and work. In ten minutes she had aged twenty years.

Then they simply let up. You might have thought a game of cards had ended. Matziev lit another cigar and paced a few steps. Mierck leaned back in his chair and relaced his fingers across the vest that covered his ballooning belly. It seemed my chance to speak now, but when I made to start, the judged stirred in his chair. “Thank you. You’re no longer needed. Dismissed! As for her, she’ll remain until we can verify her statement.”

Joséphine turned to me, more frightened than ever. Mierck got up to show me to the door. I laid a powerless hand on Joséphine’s shoulder. In the antechamber, Crusty was dozing. Mierck signaled him to clear out, closed the doors again, and came up to me as he’d never done before, almost nose to nose, toe to toe. He spoke with a faint voice; I could see all the ruptured veins on his face and smell his breath: onions, fine wines soured, cured meats, and bitter coffee.

“You’ve been here a long time, so I’ll excuse your zealousness in bringing that madwoman to my office to spout her drunken hallucinations. You meant no harm, I’m sure, but I’ve already informed you that Colonel Matziev is in charge of the inquiry. You’ll take your orders from him. But if you breathe a word of this lunacy to the prosecutor, it won’t go so easily for you next time. Now you can go.”

“And Madame Maulpas?” I said defiantly.

“Three days drying out in a cell should clear her head.”

He turned on his heel and went back in his office, leaving me standing there like a damn fool.

“Three days?” Joséphine squawked. “He held me for a week, that pig, on stale bread and pea soup brought to me by a pickax in a nun’s habit. . . . You sure he’s dead?”

“Positive.”

“Better than he deserves! And the other one, the little shit with the cigar—is he dead?”

“I have no idea.”

We went on a lot longer, Joséphine and I, threading our way through the tangles of our lives. Talking of the distant past, we basked in the illusion that the game wasn’t over yet, that there might yet be a place for us in the great mosaic of chance. And then, imperceptibly, we gravitated toward our childhood, toward the fragrant meadows where we played blindman’s buff, the fears we shared, the songs, the water of the village springs. The steeple bell rang noon, but we couldn’t tell anymore whether it was the noon of our youth or that of the present, rasping and rusted over.

When Joséphine left, she kissed me on both cheeks. She’d never done that. I was grateful for that kiss. It sealed our kinship in a family of solitude, the cousinshood of a story that was old but still raw. She turned the corner of the street. And when I was alone, once again, my thoughts went back to Morning Glory.

Every Sunday the little girl had come to our town, ever since she was eight years old. Eight years then wasn’t like eight years now. At eight you could handle most anything, you had good sense and strong arms. You were almost an adult.

Bourrache had a flair for money. I’ve already said so. He’d chosen godparents for his daughters by following the scent of cash. That’s why at her christening the little girl had found herself carried by a vague relation, an inhabitant of our town who by the time of the Case was pushing eighty. Adélaïde Siffert was her name. A tall woman once, she was all gnarled up, her face carved with a knife, her hands like a butcher’s, her legs like a logger’s: an old maid and glad of it but very good-hearted.

For forty years she’d been the bookkeeper at the town hall, less on account of any numerical skill than because she could handle pen and ink gracefully, without mistakes or smudges. On a small pension she managed to live if not indulgently then well enough, eating meat often and having her glass of port each evening.

So every Sunday, Bourrache sent the little girl to visit her godmother. She would arrive on the noon mail coach and return on the six o’clock. Adélaïde Siffert would serve a pork roast, green beans—fresh in season, from jars the rest of the year—a salad, and an apple cake. An unchanging menu; she told me herself. The little girl always had three helpings of cake. She told me that too. Then they would spend the afternoon sewing. Sometimes Morning Glory also did a bit of housecleaning. At five o’clock she would have another helping of cake, drink a cup of café au lait, and kiss her godmother, who would give her a five-franc bill. The old woman would see her off. She had enjoyed her company, the little girl enjoyed her cake, and Bourrache would relish the five francs, which he would take from Morning Glory as soon as she returned. Everybody was content.

When the weather was bad, the little girl would stay the night at her godmother’s house. There was never cause for concern: The next morning she would take the mail coach, specifically the eight o’clock.

The evening of the crime—for according to Victor Desharet, who stuck his dirty paws into the child’s body, opening her belly as you would unbutton a shirt, it was that very evening the crime was committed—Adélaïde had tried to keep the little girl with her. It was already cold enough to split a rock; you felt, drawing breath, like you were cracking apart from the inside. But the kid wouldn’t be made to listen. “I’m not cold, Godmother. Your hood keeps me warm as toast!” That had flattered the old lady, since she herself had made the hood, from velvet plush of a striking golden yellow, lined with rabbit fur. She’d given it to her for her seventh birthday. Morning Glory had drawn the strings and pulled on her mittens, and then, like a gust of wind, she’d hopped into the cold air and vanished.

Sorrow kills. In no time. The feeling of guilt does just as well, at least among those who have a shred of decency. Adélaïde Siffert followed her goddaughter to the cemetery. Twenty-two days between the two burials, not an hour more. And for those three weeks the tears flowed without end down Adélaïde’s face, stopping neither by day, which I could witness, nor by night, as I’d be ready to swear. Good people go quickly. Everybody appreciates them—death, no less. Bastards, on the other hand, die old as a rule, and sometimes even in their beds, peaceful as can be.

Having left Joséphine in Judge Mierck’s office, I didn’t feel very proud of myself. I hung around V awhile, hands in my pockets, my trousers getting filthier by the minute from all the mud splattering on the sidewalks.

The city was giddy, a city of drunks. Recruits stamped here and there, glutting the streets with their asinine jokes and horsing around. A new batch, sizable this time, were gearing up to have a go at the Krauts, and for now they could all still laugh about it. The streets as well as the cafés were given over to uniforms: a river of brand-new leggings, shiny buttons, smartly sewn epaulettes. Here they were singing, there they were yelling—or whistling at the few girls who hurried past into the stores. It was like the onset of a rutting season—massive, wild, communal, and bloody— a thrust of raw life you could feel welling up, on the verge of gushing out.

I wondered what I could come up with to do among all these suckers who hadn’t figured out the score. Soon enough, most of them would be making the trip back packed in four lousy planks of larch, if they were lucky enough for someone to find their scraps at the bottom of a shell crater or dangling from barbed wire.

Drifting along, walking like a blind man, I ended up at the door of the Rébillon. I was taken aback. Then I thought that this was the only place I could have gone: I had to come here and push the door open to see Bourrache, with his dark eyes and hulking frame, had to shake his hand and mumble the stupid words you say on such occasions.

Never before had I seen the big dining room empty. Not a sound. Not a single table set. Not a voice. No tinkle of glass or silver. No pipe smoke. No smell of food. Just a meager fire in the enormous hearth, and Bourrache before it, seated on a footstool, his feet stretched toward the few live embers, his head hunched over: a lifeless giant.

He hadn’t heard me come in. I stood near him and said the practiced words. He didn’t move, made no reply. I watched the fire fall back; the last beautiful flames shrank and twisted, still struggling to stay erect, until they finally suffocated and disappeared. Then I saw the gaze of Clémence, her eyes and her smile. I saw her belly. I saw my shameless happiness and I saw the face of Morning Glory, not dead and drenched but as I’d glimpsed her for the last time in this very dining room, alive and rosy and lush as young wheat, slipping between the tables to bring the patrons their pitchers of Toul and Vic.

The flames had given way to acrid gray fumaroles that escaped from the hearth, jigged around the room, and crashed into the darkened ceiling. At that point Bourrache, slow as an exhausted ox, turned his face toward me—a face that showed no feeling or expression. Then he got up, reached for my neck with his massive hands, and started to squeeze and squeeze, harder and harder—but strangely, I wasn’t afraid. I let him do it: I knew I wasn’t dealing with a murderer, nor even with a madman, but simply a father who’d just lost his child and for whom the world was now like a huge sun spotted with black. I felt myself choking. Everything was buzzing inside me. I saw before me white dots, flashes, and the scarlet features of Bourrache, who trembled, trembled—and suddenly tore his hands from my neck as though from a red-hot iron, fell to the floor, and cried.