The Sage of Waterloo (10 page)

The farmer's truck trundled up through the woods and across the former Allied ridge. Heavy rain had turned the unpaved track into what it probably had looked like two hundred years ago. The truck dropped like a stone into brimming, artillery-sized craters.

The jostling shifted a few gray cells. I recalled that the moon had been close to full the previous night. And it hadn't escaped my notice that this was the month of June (although I couldn't tell you what date, exactly). Maybe Old Lavender had been preparing herself for this particular alignment of circumstance: Moon approaching full. Torrential rain. June.

We bumped past the Visitors' Center and Lion's Mound and turned left onto the Brussels road, and as the gray cells shifted again, I thought of the night I'd illicitly observed my grandmother: her heightened energies, and what surely could have been interpreted as intense longing.

And those shapes.

At the time, I could only explain them away as tricks of the air—visible exhales of the Hougoumont night.

As if she were answering a summons
.

Had Old Lavender finally gone to join those shapes?

She couldn't have left by the same route she had taken twenty years ago, clearly. The fencing had been reinforced, and bricks added.

How did she get out last night, then?

I began to tremble as another thought surfaced:
Had someone taken her away?

The truck entered the city limits and approached the market, and these questions gave way quite naturally to other, less specific ones, as if, my fate drawing near, the Hollow Way were meandering into a higher arena. The view was definitely better from here, that's for sure. And existential questions relaxed a bit: destiny's whereabouts didn't seem nearly as pressing as Old Lavender's at that moment, for instance. I couldn't help wondering, though: Is providence a relative thing? Is my providence—or yours, for that matter—less significant than the providence that had touched the Duke of Wellington?

Reassurance often comes from the most unlikely sources. As Emmanuel was grabbing for me in the pen, I distinctly remembered him saying: “
Allez, mon petit.
Everything will be all right.” He seemed unusually well informed, and it did make me wonder whether Moon hides wisdom in simpletons for a reason.

I
suppose that what happened to me at the
marché des abattoirs
could be called providential, even though the fate of Europe didn't hang in the balance. For how else can you explain being crammed into a banana crate with a heaving mass of your own kind one moment, and trucked to a Brussels market with a decidedly ominous name, and the next moment finding yourself in a quiet garden with two trees and a perfectly acceptable patch of grass? From hell to nirvana, you might say. And in just under two hours, including the transportation. I don't know. I'm over eighty in your mathematics, they say, and I still don't have an answer. The abattoir market does, as its name suggests, sell meat. But there are also vegetables, clothing, trinkets and pets on offer, and it was never clear if the items in this last category, when not sold in their living state, were then sent to the abattoir across the
place
to be sold as something else. How is it that I didn't have to make
that
momentous journey?

Doubtless something without physical substance—without four legs, two legs, or legs of any kind—was at work that day. Miracle, magic, randomness, providence . . . All I remember is that the shadow of a hand appeared over the crate and hovered, undecided. Someone said: “This white one, with the dots?” More hand-hovering. A skitter of paws as my relatives dove for cover. Then another voice, a deep baritone of the type that hums so pleasantly through the digestive system: “Well, all right. The dots it is, then.”

Through such banal moments is destiny decided. Really. Don't forget that it rained hard on the night before the Battle of Waterloo and French artillery got stuck in the mud, thereby changing the course of Europe. (Though it's true that Napoleon might still have rallied if the Prussians hadn't turned up.) “The nearest-run thing you ever saw in your life,” said Wellington.

Weather, Prussians . . . history is simply a set of precarious uncertainties. Your history and mine. I, for one, might have been a French rabbit instead of a Belgian one had the rain stopped.

But I digress.

Haggling came next. The genteel dispute over my fate joined the general din of deal-making in the market. So many fates decided in a single day! The deep, pleasing voice persisted, dulling my anguish at losing so kindly a buyer. At last a price was agreed upon, dispiritingly modest though it seemed to the merchandise itself. The Moroccan boy manning the stand grabbed at me—soullessly, as one would grab at a plucked chicken. Perhaps he felt he would have gotten a better price for me at the abattoir.

I was incarcerated in a small, white cage with nothing but cold metal underfoot, lifted high and then swung like a lantern through the crowds. Stares snapped my way. An occasional sigh drifted by, along with wafts of kebab and roast chicken. Perhaps I should have realized then that there was something different about me. I recalled what Grandmother had said, about me being like a bowl of water with a calm surface. Maybe these people were trying to peer into the depths.

A little arc of empty space opened around the cage and a queer silence fell all around. Merchants stopped yelling odes to their beautiful fruit; babies ceased crying; a man throwing empty wooden crates onto a pile with a sound like pistol-cracks turned to look. I would get to know his expression well over the years. Looking back now, I think that the sudden silence in the marketplace was just simple surprise—surprise that something as inconsequential as a rabbit might require deeper review. Is that wishful thinking on my part? Or vanity?

And what, exactly, guided that hand over the crate? I mean, why did the hand choose me, and not one of my brothers, or sisters, or cousins? All of them would have made just as good pets. But most, sadly, were probably served up with cranberry sauce and potatoes a few days later. Was it my looks—a white coat with that cryptic scattering of black spots? I hope not. One should never rely on looks. They may get you out of a scrape or two when you're young. But time will rush on, your coat will no longer be so pristine, and inevitably a scrape will materialize on which your looks will have no effect whatsoever.

Or perhaps it was Moon who had intervened. He's compassionate, no doubt about it. Rather like your god, I suspect. But there are flaws in his character. He's like an incorrigible, heavy-footed uncle for whom one feels love and exasperation in equal measure. He can make colossal errors, Moon. But on a good day, he's capable of great things.

I just cannot bring myself to credit mere chance, somehow. Chance is Moon's houseboy—a lackey, responsible for small delights like finding a blade of sweet grass poking under the chicken wire, or a dry patch of hay. Things like escaping the butcher or discovering love require higher powers.

I've heard humans say that fate comes knocking. Well, Moon never knocks. He either hails us pleasantly from afar, or he barges in. He'll send his eagles swooping down with only the gliding shadow of wings to announce them, often for no other reason than to keep us on our toes. You can find yourself very suddenly without a corpus if you're not light on those toes, believe me. But once in while, when the mood takes him, Moon sends something that delights. A fresh cabbage leaf, perhaps. Or a caressing hand.

6

I
t's strange that in your language, the word “home” is used for a palace, a box under a bridge, and every sort of abode in between. Is home an idea? I wonder. Or a locale?

For years after being so precipitously taken from my family, I considered home to be one place only: Hougoumont. I was convinced of this—certain that happiness had briefly been mine and would never return again. An ache installed itself, so persistent that at times I was hardly aware of it. But whenever I tried to coax myself to sleep with memories—with the odors of the meadow, or the rasp of dry leaves against chicken wire—there it was again, that ache, raw and throbbing and all that was left of my vanished family. Even the prospect of going to the Duchess of Richmond's ball rarely comforted me. I would set the scene in my mind, and begin to drift off to sleep, only to find that the door to the salon on Rue de la Blanchisserie was locked, the building derelict. I realized only then that I'd never gone to the ball alone; I'd always gone with the others.

I've heard that humans are rarely content with their homes. So many lust after all things big, it seems—­castles, even—though they would probably manage perfectly well in a cabin with just a door and a window. Has anyone ever made a study of dwellings and happiness? I suspect not. Anyway, since humans always presume that big and expensive means better, I suppose a cabin would bring only meager satisfaction (and a good deal of embarrassment on the slog up the social ladder). No. Few would pass up the chance to live in a palace. No matter that there might be sixteen paces between the sink and the dishwasher, or that half a kilometer yawns between the settee and your bed. It's your possession—­
your
kingdom. That's what counts, apparently. Though the first thing a rabbit would notice would be the draft.

How irritating—how exhausting!—such a place would be for us. Rabbits hate drafts, for one thing. For another, we would have to map out the entire half kilometer between the settee and bed to identify all the good places to hide along the way. We're prey creatures, don't forget; we probably think about hiding places as often as people think about money, so that gives you a fairly good idea of our preoccupations.

I feel a bit ungrateful saying all this, considering that I had a palace built just for me. A rabbit palace, granted, but splendid accommodation all the same. The ground floor is full of fresh hay, and a separate toilet alcove is piled lavishly with wood chips. An old wine box cleverly serves as a bedroom, and upstairs, there are two roomy shelves ideal for the long hours of reflection for which I'd been trained so thoroughly in my youth. The front door even has a latch.

My palace, though, had no soul at first. Nothing could have felt farther from my patch of earth at Waterloo.

I realize now that a vital aspect of home is the traces of
you
that are left there: the smell of your last meal; a you-sized hollow in the earth; a kernel of corn with your tooth mark on it. Nothing is more comforting than the remnants of
you
—certainly not grandeur, or the number of bathrooms, or even a roomy wine cellar. Thus I had to rearrange the hay in my hutch after it had been so carefully plumped up, and tip over the food dish all the time, as my proprietors never seemed to catch on that it's easier for us to eat from the floor. Pity that with all its superiority, the human brain is still unable to think like a lagomorph.

Even with all the distractions of this newfound luxury, I just couldn't banish my homesickness. The family tried so valiantly to help, overfeeding me, scratching the sweet spot behind my jaw, taking me into the living room to run around a plush carpet without the slightest scent of grass. But memory had the last word: Hougoumont still filled every sense to breaking. My new home was only a few kilometers down the road from my birthplace, after all. Old Lavender would have been able to tell you whether or not you could have heard the cannons from here. If it's true what she once said—that we live in relation to our memories every minute of the day—then surely, I thought, I might channel the power of my ancestral home to build some kind of future.

Instead, memory imposed on me a kind of half-life. My ears turned constantly, hoping to pick up the bold, steady hiss of wind that blew so freely over the Hougoumont fields—the sort of wind that breaks up into toothless eddies in city gardens. My skin felt moribund in the recycled urban air. I longed for the freshness of rain on my coat, but was locked in my cage at the slightest hint of a storm lest I catch cold.

And those smells of home . . . oh, where had they gone? Sometimes, if I closed my eyes, I could summon the vapors of the hutch: the sweet-and-sour reassurance of kin. I listened for the trickle of Old Lavender's digestion, and underfoot, on the cold patio tiles of my new place, I could feel the desiccated droppings of the enclosure. Was I experiencing that gift Old Lavender had talked about: the gift of reading things? Surely she hadn't meant basic smells and dried droppings. If I'd really inherited her gift, then I was supposed to uncover deeper meanings, as she had; to consort with them until I understood them. Old Lavender would have been able to stand in a new garden and read meaning in it at once; she would have interpreted such a drastic change in life as forward motion, and gotten on with things.

I wondered if it was simple coincidence that the garden had high walls, or just a bit of whimsy on the part of Moon. Hougoumont was walled, too. It's funny how familiarity pops up in uncharted places. If you think about it, our passage along the Hollow Way is often sprinkled with landmarks of similar shape and hue, like stepping-stones over a stream. These familiar objects are not random, but present themselves with a sort of intentional symmetry, as if pointing the way. Our passage from one to the other really should not be taken for granted. Think about the turns your life has taken (I mean
really
think—stare out a window for at least an hour), and you'll discover a startling, sometimes pleasing, invariably inexplicable logic in the way things have happened to you.