The Bestiary (18 page)

Nathalie’s bearded friend took the podium. His voice was high-pitched, his gestures broad. “I’m Tannen,” he hollered. No first name. After a rambling diatribe about the judge in the sedition trial, he introduced the other vets, who one by one ascended the courthouse steps and tossed their medals at the door, Tomansky slow and solemn on his crutches, Cork and Smoltz pumping their fists.

After a few more speeches, the crowd marched across the Memorial Bridge into Cambridge. I dropped back and walked beside a group called Doctors for Peace. At MIT, several hundred students broke away and surrounded the physics lab. They broke windows and hurled paint, chanting
MIT, CIA, how many kids did you kill today?
The cops moved in, but just when it seemed the students would disperse—a moment that yawned wide, then snapped shut—they stormed the building instead.

Some marchers hung back, roaring in solidarity, but most of us surged on toward Central Square. Behind us we heard police whistles and sirens. Then tear gas wafted up the avenue, burning our eyes.

At Harvard Square the cops were waiting for us. They were spooked by what had happened at MIT. Behind Plexiglas shields, they had encircled the Square. Reinforcements in rigid columns appeared on Brattle Street. An amplified voice ordered us to break up at once. Until then, the crowd had been restive, but unafraid; now panic set in. People at the center tried pushing their way to the periphery. Brandishing a permit, one of the march organizers approached a police captain. The captain threw the permit to the ground. The organizer started cursing him out.

What happened next was reported in the newspapers as a riot. From where I stood, it was the police who rioted. Batons whirling, they charged the crowd. People ran in all directions. They were clubbed and kicked, some were trampled. Most poured into Harvard Yard, or rushed screaming into the MTA station, but I ducked down Plympton Street. I saw a girl dragged by the hair. A man on crutches thrown against a wall. Another girl with a bloody face. Then I saw Nathalie. A big cop had her cornered by the steps to a basement apartment. He was swinging for her head and she was barely dodging the baton. She didn’t see me come up behind the cop until the last moment—and he didn’t see me at all. I shoved him and he plunged down the steps headfirst, hitting some trash cans, making a terrible racket. I grabbed Nathalie’s hand and we ran, never looking back, across Mount Auburn Street, down an alley, through a parking lot, to the river. Following the cinder path, we stopped to catch our breath near an old boathouse.

“Thanks,” Nathalie said, leaning against a tree. Her war paint was smeared, her bandanna was down around her neck.

“Are you okay?”

She nodded. “I couldn’t believe you were there. That was quick thinking.”

“I wasn’t thinking. We’re lucky another cop didn’t see it.”

“He was a pig. They’re all pigs.”

I thought maybe the cop had broken his arm or leg.

“Maybe he broke his neck,” Nathalie chimed into my thoughts. “It’d serve him right.”

I looked at her. “Then your Trotsky pals could add another medal to my collection.”

“You don’t seem upset about it.”

“I’m not.”

She refastened her bandanna. “I guess you learned to do that in the war.”

“Do what?” I asked, but I knew what she was saying.

“Go after people. Fight.”

“I went after him because he was going to hurt you. We should get out of Cambridge. Are you going home?”

She shook her head. “After the march, we planned to drive out to Walden Pond for a candlelight vigil.”

“You think people will show up?”

She stiffened slightly. “Everyone who can. Will you come with me?”

I was surprised. “I don’t think so.”

“Come on.”

“Because I helped you out?”

She took my hand. “Because I want you to.”

In bed that morning, we had turned away from one another, Nathalie curling against the wall while I stared out the window, down the narrow block of brownstones, parked cars, and spindly trees. I felt as if I had been away forever. The entire city seemed smaller, alien and self-contained: as if I were looking into a diorama. Nathalie’s studio was sparsely furnished. Cheap curtains, no rug. In the fridge, there was skim milk, cornflakes, and a tin of coffee. After dressing in silence, we ate some cornflakes.

Now, as we walked back to the bridge, I put my arm around her. The encounter with the cop had brought us closer than making love. But only on the surface, and not for long.

We headed north on Route 1 in her old Saab. Dusk was falling. Between clusters of suburban houses, the woods were dense. As always, Nathalie drove hard, weaving through traffic, chain-smoking. We had lapsed into silence again. Nearing our destination, she turned to me suddenly.

“I don’t know why you wouldn’t throw your medals, but I’m sorry I sprang it on you.”

“Forget it.”

She hesitated. “Would you throw them now—after what just happened?”

“I’d do exactly what I did before.” I lit a cigarette with the dashboard lighter. “It has to do with me, not you. Not politics. I have to deal with it in my own way.”

We followed a winding road through the Lynn Woods to Walden Pond. Among the few cars in the parking area was Smoltz’s van. Neither he nor any of Nathalie’s other comrades had been arrested. A few dozen people were milling in a picnic area. There were lighted candles on a redwood table, but no vigil. Joints were being passed, and bottles of wine. Cork was sitting alone, sipping from a flask. The girl with the skull mask was arguing with her boyfriend, who had a black eye. Someone else’s blood was spattered on her trench coat. Tannen was holding court beside a statue of Thoreau. People were agitated and loud, but his high-pitched voice was the most audible.

He saw us, but didn’t return Nathalie’s wave.

She fell into conversation with a furtive woman named Deirdre who was speaking into a portable tape recorder. Deirdre had recorded a running commentary during the riot, of which this was the coda; later, she would transcribe and publish it in the
Boston Phoenix.

I wandered off by myself. Night had fallen. The wind was cold. Familiar scents washed over me—soil, foliage, timber—but, like the sights and sounds of Boston, they seemed a part of the distant past. I climbed a slope behind the picnic area and peered through the trees at the pond. It shone silver beneath the moon. The shadow of an owl slid across the surface. Pines were reflected, inverted, along the far shore. After a few minutes, someone came up behind me, the dry leaves crackling underfoot.

It was Tannen. “You’re not welcome here,” he said, stepping up close.

I just stared at him.

“Did you hear me?” He reached out suddenly and jiggled my medals. “How many people did you kill for these?”

I slapped his hand away.

“How many?” he demanded.

I felt a hot rush up my spine. “Fuck you.”

“Get out of here!” he shouted, pushing me in the chest.

I grabbed the front of his jacket and backed him into a tree.

“Let go of me,” he cried.

I pressed my forearm into his throat. “You want to know how many? Thousands—tens of thousands! If you touch me again, I’ll kill you.”

His face was red, his eyes bulging.

“Stop it,” Nathalie screamed, hurrying up the slope. Smoltz was right behind her, and then Deirdre, recording everything.

I released Tannen, and he stumbled, gasping.

“You’re an animal,” Nathalie said through her teeth. “They made you into an animal.”

Our eyes locked. “That’s right,” I said, walking past her, past all of them, across the slope into the woods. Within minutes, their voices were swallowed up by the darkness.

I walked on, into deeper forest. I skirted a ravine filled with brush. I crossed a shallow stream where many animals—raccoons, a fox, a bobcat—had left tracks when they came to drink.

I had no idea how much time had passed, or how far I had gone, when I stopped to rest beneath an enormous pine. The moon lit up the passing clouds. The wind had died down, and my own breathing filled my ears. I remembered as a child, in bed, listening to my breathing and feeling there was nothing more to me than that. As if my body had slipped from this world and left my spirit behind—perhaps to join those animal spirits that my grandmother said filled our apartment. I had wished I could remain that way, weightless, invisible, freed from shame and fear.

Years later, I learned that among the Seminole Indians, when a woman died in childbirth, the infant was held over her face to receive, from her final exhalation, her parting spirit, to protect him from within. On the Hawaiian island of Niihau when a woman died in those circumstances, a bird named
makuahine ‘uhane,
“the mother’s spirit,” flew out of her mouth and alighted on a tree, to watch over the baby and give it courage. I hoped maybe that was the bird whose shadow appeared in my mother’s photograph, and that though I never saw it, it was watching over me.

The moon rose higher and stars filled the sky. I listened to the owls’ hooting. And the sharper cries of the ravens. I unpinned my medals and hung them from their ribbons on a pine branch. The Silver Star glinted and the Purple Heart spun in the breeze. Then I set off again, toward a clearing visible through the trees.

Those woods were filled with ravens. I knew that ravens adorn their nests with bright objects. And that on the fortieth day of the Great Flood the raven was the first bird Noah dispatched from the ark, to bring back some sign of land. Soon he did the same with the dove, who first returned with an olive leaf, and the second time it was released didn’t return at all, which meant the earth must be dry.

The raven is never mentioned again. Its fate is left ambiguous. But to me it’s clear: the raven kept flying as long as it could, and then drowned.

4

I
WALKED OUT
of the cypress grove in the Parc Montsouris onto the rue de la Santé. It was hot, and the trees on the sidewalk barely deflected the noonday sun. Following the rue Saint Jacques back to the Seine, I crossed the Pont d’Arcole into the Marais and circled around to my apartment off the rue Perrée. I stopped first to buy fruit and a bottle of wine, then went into a café for an espresso and called France Telecom from a pay phone to find out why my home line still hadn’t been activated.

I had flown to Paris a month after earning my college degree. After returning to Harvard, it took me a year, including summer school, to complete my credits and graduate with honors in classics. I wrote my thesis on Aelian. His
On the Nature of Animals
is as much mythography as natural history, a source of endless wonders: a hyena can render a man mute by stepping on his shadow; a horse which treads on a wolf’s paw print will be paralyzed; the Corocotta, a rare speckled hyena, can imitate the human voice in order to ambush a man; and rats on the Aegean island of Gyarus eat iron ore. He also describes an Ethiopian tribe that worshiped a dog as their king. They prostrated themselves before him at dawn and dusk, built him a lodge, prepared him special foods, and provided him with a harem of bitches. The tribe obeyed the dog’s wishes: when he whimpered, they knew he approved of their actions; when he barked, it was clear he objected. After his death, they deified him. Because my thesis won a prize, I was offered a graduate fellowship, but turned it down. If one day I felt differently, I could return to academia and pursue the subjects that interested me. But I wasn’t taking any more detours. I knew that better than ever now. I had waited, and prepared myself, a long time for the day when I could fully pursue the
Caravan Bestiary.
And as Bruno pointed out, if I did find it, a lot of doors would open, whether I wanted to walk through them or not. Meanwhile, I needed my B.A. to get a job and earn enough cash to subsidize my search. Using the university’s research facilities, I had been able to map out the itinerary I wanted to follow after graduation: the archives to be visited, the people to be interviewed. What little trail there was wound through Europe, not America, and it didn’t take me long to decide I wanted to live in Paris.

After returning from Vietnam, I would have gone abroad even if I weren’t searching for the bestiary. I didn’t intend to maintain even a nominal home in the States, as my father had. I didn’t renounce my citizenship; I just took another step away from Operation Phoenix, the government that concocted and concealed it, and the jingoism that permitted its execution—a renunciation of the sort Nathalie had urged when she wanted me to flee the country two years earlier. Except now, I told myself, I was leaving on my own terms, not running away. I had found this apartment after staying in a hotel for two weeks. On the fifth floor, it consisted of a small kitchen and two quiet, airy rooms with high windows that overlooked the Square du Temple. In the war I had learned that you only carry what you need, and I didn’t need much. At first I had a bed, a desk, a table piled with books, and some folding chairs. No radio, no TV. A map of the Mediterranean was tacked to the wall over my desk.

Once settled, I began scouring the city’s assorted libraries for any mention of Martin Lafourie, just as I had in Cambridge. He remained my best, and only, real clue. I also wanted to read everything I could find by my predecessors (I felt I had earned the right to call them that after my discovery of Lafourie), Brox, Cava, and Faville. Among the books I found right away were:
Nicholas of Cusa and Roman Cosmology
by Michael Brox;
The Illuminated Books of the Alpine Monasteries
and
Guillaume Heinault Henri Metz: The Techniques of Illumination
by Madame Faville; and a bizarre monograph by Niccolò Cava entitled
Empedocles’s Theory of Evolution.
Of course only Madame Faville’s books had any relation to the
Caravan Bestiary
(I learned about the monks’ writing instruments, vellum, and methods of transcription), though she never mentions it specifically. It was more difficult to track down some early essays by Cava and Faville that pertained directly to the bestiary, presenting their respective theories about sources that predated Physiologus. For Cava, it was obscure chroniclers like Tatian, a second-century heretic whose animal catalog has disappeared, and Ctesias the Cnydian, court doctor to King Artexeises II in the fifth century
B.C
., who set out to write a treatise on falconry and ended up cataloging the animals of Central Asia. Madame Faville was also intrigued by Horapollo, a fifth-century
A.D
. Egyptian who at various times was a grammarian, clairvoyant, spy, and high priest in the great Temple of Isis. In Book II of his famous study of hieroglyphics,
Hieroglyphica,
he wrote eighty-six chapters on animals that became the European template for allegorizing animals.

I wished I had more intimate knowledge of Madame Faville, Brox, and Cava so that I could understand the origins of their passion for the bestiary. How much of it was scholarly, and how much (as with me) was rooted in their personal histories? Such information about Brox and Cava seemed nonexistent; neither was famous enough to have a biographer. I couldn’t even find their likenesses—no daguerreo-types, not even a sketch. I had better luck with Madame Faville. A 1920 photograph on one of her book jackets showed an attractive, enigmatic young woman with long hair and wide-set eyes, her blouse with the high starched collar at odds with her arch smile.

I spent my evenings at the Bibliothèque Nationale and the medieval library at the Sorbonne. By day I took what jobs I could find. For three unhappy months I helped edit a classics journal. I cataloged material for an archaeological society (another three months). Then I joined a team of translators working under two editors on the sixteen volumes of Livy’s
History of Rome.
None of these jobs was lucrative, but they did allow me to hold on to my modest savings, which consisted of the final year of support checks sent by my father’s lawyer. Lena hadn’t needed the money for graduate school; she had already received a full fellowship to the Penn veterinary school. Because my own tuition was covered by my veterans’ benefits, I was able to squirrel away that other money. But after a year I had grown impatient. My job as a translator, boring from the start, had begun eating up more and more of my time and energy. I decided to live on my savings for as long as possible, and put everything into my research.

I had felt at home in Paris right away—with the language, the food, the welcoming solitude. As I settled in, I bought a Turkish rug at the Porte de Montreuil flea market and at the Marché Paul-Bert good secondhand furniture—a large blue sofa, a bureau, some proper chairs—and a set of beautiful Chinese prints of the six Celestial Dragons, which replaced the map over my desk.

Every morning at nine I had breakfast in a tea shop off the Place des Vosges and rode the Metro to one of the libraries. I began reading through biographies of King Philip VI and histories of his court. Lafourie appeared, first as a minor official, then as one of the king’s trusted diplomats. He was usually associated with foreign assignments that concluded in treaties or trade agreements. After being involved in the annexations of Montpellier and the province of Dauphiné, he served briefly as the ambassador to Genoa. But there was maddeningly little detail about the man himself. And no mention of a bestiary. Philip died in 1350. The end of his reign was calamitous: the Black Death wiped out three-fifths of the French population, and the Hundred Years War began when the English king claimed Philip’s throne. To finance his armies, Philip impoverished the country. By then, Martin Lafourie had disappeared entirely from the histories. I assumed he, too, had been a victim of the Black Death. Then I saw a new name cropping up in situations where Lafourie’s once had: a certain Duc D’Épernay, who served as a roving ambassador, first for Philip in his final two years, and then for his successor, John II.

I looked up the Duc D’Épernay in a peerage of the Valois dynasty, and the blood rushed to my head.

Duc D’Épernay—formerly Martin Lafourie, Knight. Born Auxerre, 1304; died Paris, 1371. Title conferred by King Philip VI on 6 March 1349 in appreciation of M. Lafourie’s long service to the crown, especially his role in the purchase of Dauphiné in 1349.

That was why the name Lafourie had disappeared. But would I have any better luck trying to research the Duc D’Épernay? At first I found no more personal information about Lafourie the duke than I had about Lafourie the knight. I looked in vain for a memoir or a biography, and started picking through collections of letters written by his contemporaries, but that seemed very hit-or-miss.

I had befriended a research librarian at the Sorbonne named Sylvie. She was a soft-spoken young woman, alert, funny, with long brown hair and a good figure. We went out to dinner one night on the Ile St-Louis, and after a bottle of wine talked about Vietnam. She had stronger feelings than most people. One of her uncles had been killed at Dienbienphu in 1954. “It was a bad war then,” she said, “and it’s worse now.” She propped her elbows on the table and leaned closer. She had long lashes, and one of her bangs kept sliding over her right eye. “I’ve met Americans who protested the war, and others who came here to avoid it, but never anyone who actually went. You were drafted, yes?”

After a stroll around the island, and some more brandy at a café, she told me she had a boyfriend, but that he was on a trip to Brussels. I walked her home, up near the Pantheon, and kissed her good night. When I asked her out again, she said with a shrug that the boyfriend was back. At the library she was of great help. I had told her about the
Caravan Bestiary,
and where I stood in my search for it; I told her too about Faville, Brox, and Cava, and how I had discovered Martin Lafourie’s later incarnation. This was manna for someone in her profession, and she listened avidly.

That afternoon we did a quick search for information about D’Épernay and came up empty.

But two days later, when I entered the library, she beckoned to me from the front desk. “I thought you would never show up. We’re going to the archives, three floors down,” she whispered, leading me to a small elevator behind the stacks. “It’s a restricted area—you need special approval—so be quick, and look casual.”

“Seems like contradictory advice,” I said, drinking in her perfume, which filled the elevator.

“This is no joke,” she said with a knowing smile.

The low, cavernous room we stepped into was suffused in a light more brown than yellow. The air was so thick with dust that I left faint footprints on the wooden floor.

The long narrow aisles were barely illuminated by low-watt bulbs suspended inside little cages. All the books were oversized and very old. I followed Sylvie to the end of one aisle and halfway down another. She climbed up a stepladder and took a leather-bound book off the top shelf, where it resided with dozens of others just like it.

“None of these books can leave this room,” she said, handing me the book. The spine read
Chronicles of the Court of Philip VI
in silver letters. “You’ll have to look at it down here. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before. This is Volume 16 of a forty-volume set that covers the reigns of all the kings of France from Charles IV to Louis XII. The books contain legal documents, treaties, proclamations, but also correspondence between high officials.”

“Including D’Épernay.”

“Of course. I put a marker at Chapter 3.”

“How can I thank you, Sylvie?”

She smiled. “Maybe that dinner…Charles is in London this weekend.”

She went back upstairs, and I sat down on the stepladder, beneath one of those lightbulbs, with the big book in my lap. On Chapter 3 there was a letter dated May 27, 1368, in Paris, from the Duc D’Épernay to the Compte de Briand, finance minister to the late King Philip. Before I finished reading the first page, I burst out laughing: it would be a champagne dinner with Sylvie.