Once in Europa (7 page)

Next morning the police came to warn him that his sheep were a public danger, for they were encumbering the highway. Edmond the shepherd had disappeared and he was not seen again until after Boris's death.

The month of August was the month of Boris's triumph. Or is glory a better term? For he was too happy, too self-absorbed, to see himself as a victor who had triumphed over others. It had become clear to him that the instructions inscribed at the moment of his conception had involved more than the size of his bones, the thickness of his skull or the power of his will. He was destined, at the age of forty, to be recognized.

The hay had been brought in, his barn was full, his sheep were grazing high in the mountains—without a shepherd but God would preserve them—and every evening he sat on the terrace of the Republican Lyre overlooking the village square, with the blond in a summer dress, her shoulders bare, her feet in high-heeled silver sandals, and until nightfall the pair of them were the colour-television picture of the village.

Offer drinks to every table, he said, leaning back in his chair, and if they ask what's happened, tell them that Boris is buying horses!

Humpback, not every night, you can't afford it!

Every night! My balls are swollen.

He placed one of his immense hands on the bosom of her red-polka-dot dress.

It's true about the horses, he said, I'm going to breed horses—for you! Breed riding horses that we'll sell to the idiots who come for weekends.

What should I do with horses? she asked, I can't ride.

If you have a child of mine—

Yes, Humpback.

I'll teach the child to ride, he said. A child of ours will have your looks and my pride.

The last word he had never before uttered concerning himself.

If we have a child, she whispered, the house where we live now is too small. We'd need at least another room.

And how many months have we got to sort out the question of a house? asked Boris with his cattle dealer's canniness.

I don't know, Humpback, perhaps eight.

A bottle of champagne, Boris shouted, pour out glasses for everybody.

Are you still buying horses? asked Marc, who, with his pipe and blue overalls, is the sceptic of the Republican Lyre, the perennial instructor about the idiocy of the world.

That's none of your business, retorted Boris. I'm buying you a drink.

I'll be tipsy, said the blond.

I'll get you some nuts.

On the counter of the Republican Lyre is a machine where you put in a franc and a child's handful of peanuts comes out. Boris fed coin after coin into the machine and asked for a soup plate.

When the men standing at the bar raised their glasses of champagne and nodded towards Boris, they were each toasting the blond: and each was picturing himself in Boris's place, some with envy, and all with that odd nostalgia which everyone feels for what they know they will never live.

Beside Marc stood Jean, who had once been a long-distance lorry driver. Now he kept rabbits with his wife and was seventy. Jean was in the middle of a story:

Guy was pissed out of his mind, Jean was saying, Guy slumped down onto the floor and lay there flat out, as if he were dead. Jean paused and looked at the faces around the bar to emphasize the impasse. What should we do with him? It was then that Patrick had his idea. Bring him round to my place, said Patrick. They got Guy into the car and they drove him up to Patrick's. Bring him in here, lay him on the workbench, said Patrick. Now slip off his trousers.

The blond put some nuts into Boris's mouth.

You're not going to harm him? Slip off his trousers, I tell you. Now his socks. There he lay on the workbench, as naked as we'll all be when the Great Holiday starts. What now? He's broken his leg, announced Patrick. Don't be daft. We're going to make him believe he broke his leg, Patrick explained. Why should he believe it? Wait and see. Patrick mixed up a bathful of plaster and, as professionally as you'd expect from Patrick, he plastered Guy's leg from the ankle to halfway up the thigh. Jean paused to look round at his listeners. On the way home in the car Guy came round. Don't worry, mate, said Patrick, you broke your leg, but it's not bad, we took you to the hospital and they've set it in plaster and they said you could have it off in a week, it's not a bad fracture. Guy looked down at his leg and the tears ran down his cheeks. What a cunt I am! he kept repeating. What a cunt I am!

What happened afterwards? Marc asked.

He was a week off work, watching TV, with his leg up on a chair!

The blond began to laugh and Boris put the back of his hand against her throat—for fear that the palm was too calloused—and there he could feel the laughter, which began between her hips, gushing up to her mouth. Systematically he moved the back of his immense hand up and down the blond's throat.

Jean, the lorry driver who now kept rabbits, watched this action, fascinated, as if it were more improbable than the story he had just told.

I couldn't believe it, he recounted to the habitués of the Republican Lyre later that night: there was Boris, over there, bone-headed Boris caressing the blond like she was a sitting squirrel, and feeding her nuts from a soup plate. And what do you think he does when the husband comes in? He stands up, holds out his hand to the husband and announces: What do you want to drink? A white wine with cassis? I'm taking her to the ball tonight, Boris says. We shan't be back till morning.

The ball was in the next village. All night it seemed to Boris that the earth was moving past the plough of its own volition.

Once they stopped dancing to drink. He beer, and she lemonade.

I will give you the Mother's house, he said.

Why do you call it that?

My mother inherited it from her father.

And if one day you want to sell it?

How can I sell it if I've given it to you?

Gérard will never believe it.

About our child?

No. About the house, he won't agree to move in, unless it's certain.

Leave Gérard! Come and live with me.

No, Humpback, I'm not made for preparing mash for chickens.

Once again, by way of reply, Boris thrust his massive head against her breast. His face fitted into her breast like a gun into its case lined with velvet. For how long was his face buried there? When he raised it he said: I'll give you the house formally, I'll see the notary, it'll be yours, yours not his, and then it'll go to our child. Do you want to dance again?

Yes, my love.

They danced until the white dress with red polka dots was stained with both their sweats, until there was no music left, until her blond hair smelled of his cows.

Years later, people asked: how was it possible that Boris, who never gave anything away in his life, Boris, who would cheat his own grandmother, Boris, who never kept his word, how was it that he gave the house to the blond? And the answer, which was an admission of the mystery, was always the same: a passion is a passion.

Women did not ask the same question. It was obvious to them that, given the right moment and circumstances, any man can be led. There was no mystery. And perhaps it was for this reason that the women felt a little more pity than the men for Boris.

As for Boris, he never asked himself: Why did I give her the house? He never regretted this decision, although—and here all the commentators are right—it was unlike any other he had ever taken. He regretted nothing. Regrets force one to relive the past, and, until the end, he was waiting.

The flowers which grew in the mountains had brighter, more intense colours than the same flowers growing on the plain; a similar principle applied to thunderstorms. Lightning in the mountains did not just fork, it danced in circles; the thunder did not just clap, it echoed. And sometimes the echoes were still echoing when the next clap came, so that the bellowing became continuous. All this was due to the metal deposits in the rocks. During a storm, the hardiest shepherd asked himself: What in God's name am I doing here? And next morning, when it was light, he might find signs of the visitations of which, fortunately, he had been largely ignorant the night before: holes in the earth, burned grass, smoking trees, dead cattle. At the end of the month of August there was such a thunderstorm.

Some of Boris's sheep were grazing just below the Rock of St. Antoine on the far slopes facing east. When sheep are frightened they climb, looking to heaven to save them; and so Boris's sheep moved up to the scree by the rock, and there they huddled together
under the rain. Sixty sheep, each one resting his drenched head on the oily drenched rump or shoulders of his neighbour. When the lightning lit up the mountain—and everything appeared so clear and so close that the moment seemed endless—the sixty animals looked like a single giant sheepskin coat. There were even two sleeves, each consisting of half a dozen sheep, who were hemmed in along two narrow corridors of grass between the rising rocks. From this giant coat, during each lightning flash, a hundred or more eyes, glistening like brown coal, peered out in fear. They were right to be frightened. The storm centre was approaching. The next forked lightning struck the heart of the coat and the entire flock was killed. Most of them had their jaws and forelegs broken by the shock of the electrical discharge, received in the head and earthed through their thin bony legs.

In the space of one night Boris lost three million.

It was I, thirty-six hours later, who first noticed the crows circling in the sky. Something was dead there, but I didn't know what. Somebody told Boris, and the next day he went up to the Rock of St. Antoine. There he found the giant sheepskin coat, discarded, cold, covered with flies. The carcasses were too far from any road. The only thing he could do was burn them where they lay.

He fetched petrol and diesel oil and started to make a pyre, dragging the carcasses down the two sleeves and throwing them one on top of another. He started the fire with an old tyre. Thick smoke rose above the peak, and with it the smell of burned animal flesh. It takes very little to turn a mountain into a corner of hell. From time to time Boris consoled himself by thinking of the blond. Later he would laugh with her. Later, his face pressed against her, he would forget the shame of this scene. But more than these promises which he made to himself, it was the simple fact of her existence which encouraged him.

By now everybody in the village knew what had happened to Boris's sheep. No one blamed Boris outright—how could they? Yet there were those who hinted that a man couldn't lose so many animals at one go unless, in some way, he deserved it. Boris neglected his animals. Boris did not pay his debts. Boris was
having it off with a married woman. Providence was delivering him a warning.

They say Boris is burning his sheep, said the blond, you can see the smoke over the mountain.

Why don't we go and watch? suggested Gérard.

She made the excuse of a headache.

Come on, he said, it's a Saturday afternoon and the mountain air will clear your head. I've never seen a man burning sixty sheep.

I don't want to go.

What's the matter?

I'm worried.

You think he could change his mind about the house now? He'll certainly be short of money.

A flock of sheep's not going to make him change his mind about the house.

We shouldn't count our chickens—

Only one thing could make him go back on his word about the house.

If you stopped seeing him?

Not exactly.

What then?

Nothing.

Has he mentioned the house recently?

Do you know what he calls it? He calls it the Mother's house.

Why?

She shrugged her shoulders.

Come on, said Gérard.

Gérard and his wife drove up the mountain to where the road stopped. From there, having locked the car, they continued on foot. Suddenly she screamed as a grouse flew up from under her feet.

I thought it was a baby! she cried.

You must have drunk too much. How can a baby fly?

That's what I thought, I'm telling you.

Can you see the smoke? Gérard asked.

What is it that's hissing?

His sheep cooking! said Gérard.

Don't be funny.

Grasshoppers.

Can you smell anything?

No.

Imagine being up here in a storm! she said.

I've better things to do.

It's all very well for you to talk, you've never lifted a shovel in your life, she said.

That's because I'm not stupid.

No. Nobody could call you that. And he's stupid, Boris is stupid, stupid, stupid!

He was encouraging the fire with fuel, whose blue flames chased the slower yellow ones. He picked up a sheep by its legs, and swung it back and forth, before flinging it high into the air so that it landed on top of the pyre, where, for a few minutes longer, it was still recognizable as an animal. The tearstains on his cheek were from tears provoked by the heat and, when the wind turned, by the acrid smoke. Every few minutes he picked up another carcass, swung it to gain momentum, and hurled it into the air. The boy who had never been able to tap the ash-bark gently enough had become the man who could burn his own herd single-handed.

Gérard and the blond stopped within fifty yards of the blaze. The heat, the stench and something unknown prevented them approaching further. This unknown united the two of them: wordlessly they were agreed about it. They raised their hands to protect their eyes. Fires and gigantic waterfalls have one thing in common. There is spray torn off the cascade by the wind, there are the flames: there is the rockface dripping and visibly eroding, there is the breaking up of what is being burned: there is the roar of the water, there is the terrible chatter of the fire. Yet at the centre of both fire and waterfall there is a persistent calm. And it is this calm which is catastrophic.

Look at him, whispered Gérard.

Three million he's lost, poor sod! murmured the blond.