When Jonathan Died

by Tony Duvert

  ‘So those are air-guns?’ Serge asked in the bus, talking about the weapon he’d used. ‘Well, then, cock-gun! Hey, cock-gun, just think, cock-guns, cock-guns!’

  This was the first word-play Jonathan had heard from the boy. But perhaps Serge had heard it from Stephane (who was almost ten years old, and whose language was developing rapidly) when he’d told the three brothers of his adventure at the fair. Serge’s insistence in repeating this play on words showed he hadn’t before imagined that one could so manipu­late this thing as light and as insubstantial as soap-bubbles, language.

  ‘In the garden,’ Jonathan suggested, ‘we could, uh… If the sun is shining, eh?’

  ‘Ooh, you filthy pig!’ Serge exclaimed, ‘Well, I’m not doing it.’

  ‘I never asked you to.’

  ‘Liar. ‘Cos it makes me go like this,’ said Serge with a harsh laugh; and his mouth gaped as if he were trying to swallow a tennis-ball.

  ‘You kiss it sometimes, just the same,’ murmured Jonathan, amused by these pretend refusals.

  ‘Yes, yes, but that was before. Or well then, just like this.’

  As he talked, Serge’s lips tickled against Jonathan’s ear, which suddenly felt a pointed little lick; Jonathan’s heart raced. The boy started laughing, and settled back into his seat.

  ‘I really love you!’ said Jonathan, in a low voice, and need­lessly.

  ‘Oh I know,’ said Serge, with the indifference of an idle king, “s no need to say so.’

  And just afterwards:

  ‘How does he do it, that boy when he eats the razor-blades, mm…? What d’you think then?’

  Jonathan thought Serge sounded a bit pompous. But he replied, improvising an explanation with great effort:

  ‘It’s… they’re not real blades. There’s one real one he cuts the paper with, and the other ones are fake. Then when he takes the blades out of his mouth, it’s different again, it must be a special blade, very thick, but you don’t see it, it’s too quick; it’s like an accordion, there’s lots of thin blades that aren’t sharp, tied tight together in a bundle, and they’re all tied together in advance, with, with fishing-line, and when he pulls they come unstuck, and he shows all that, and the other ones stay in his mouth. I think that’s it, well, I think so. I don’t know!’

  ‘So they’re fake?’ said Serge, in a challenging tone of voice. ‘They must be. He hides the real one, and then he eats the fakes.’

  ‘They’re not fake!’ said Serge, sitting up straight again. ‘They’re real! I’ll explain to you. You don’t know what he does? It’s not difficult. His face is fake!’

  ‘What?’ said Jonathan, ‘like a mask, you think?’

  ‘Yes, okay, but a fake face, definitely.’

  ‘Perhaps… But in any case, it’s very well done then.’

  ‘You’re telling me they’re real!’ said Serge, as if it was plain to see. ‘They’re really clever, see. So they put the fake face on first, and there’s a hole in it, in the mouth, and they put the blades in there. That’s what they do.’

  ‘I wouldn’t dare, myself,’ said Jonathan. ‘Imagine you got the wrong hole. Behind your fake face, there’s the other one, your own. If it’s the wrong hole you get cut about everywhere, no tongue, nothing. It’s dangerous.’

  ‘Mm… it is dangerous,’ Serge admitted, ‘but it’s pretty good.’

  All the waters are polluted, all the fields fenced off; the mead­ows are poisoned, the lanes narrow and filthy, and the only patches of grass or wooded corners still accessible are covered with mountains of plastic rubbish, abandoned domestic ap­pliances, rusting motor cars.

  Walks in the countryside, then, were no pleasure. One pro­gressed between two fences, or followed endless straight-line cuttings through the rye, wheat and maize. Away in the distance a river could be seen; but its banks, cut up and fenced off as private fishing-grounds, were forbidden to walkers. Perhaps, in a mile or so of flowerless grazing, one might see a puny grasshopper jump. No other insects but flies; no other birds than the enormous flights of crows and noisy rooks; no other animals than the rats. Such was the countryside in the region.

  Serge and Jonathan had soon explored this barbed-wired, electric-fenced, hostile and monotonous desert. They had given up country amusements. The area around their house was still the liveliest, the most cheerful and the freest they could find. And so they busied themselves quietly at home, or perhaps Serge would pay a visit to the village. There he would meet a few children his own age, particularly at the grocer’s, where they had their headquarters. In the back of the shop and in the cellar, they fooled about noisily or in silence; Serge never mentioned what they did.

  Sometimes he went there early in the morning. He would come back towards lunch-time; he would willingly have brought back his friends, but their parents wouldn’t allow it. He would rejoin them in the village after the meal. Jonathan, who preferred to do his shopping in the afternoon, would often run into him and his gang. One rainy day, the grocer’s was invaded by potato-sacks, in which five or six small children were jumping up and down, laughing. Shelves were bumped into, tins rolled about. The grocer, their friendly sponsor, who’d given them the sacks, shouted a little, but let it go. In any case, it was his son who led the unruly procession.

  Later on in the summer, a coach stole away the children of the village. In fact, the local council offered low-priced holi­days at a children’s holiday camp, which gave the women a rest. Only the teenagers, who could help with the machine-work, stayed behind. There wasn t a cheerful voice in the streets, not a fresh face in the windows. Serge, deserted, fell back on Jonathan.

  Then the children came back. But Serge wasn’t interested in them any longer.

  The old woman next door was behaving strangely. Some days, she would chat at the garden fence, let Serge visit her, make him tea, with pancakes or brawn. Other days, she didn’t show herself, and her walking stick would stay hanging on the doorknob.

  In fact, she had two sticks: a garden stick, thick, blackened and worn, which she leaned on when she didn’t have a garden tool; and an inside stick, which she left at the door as she went out and picked up again as she returned. You could tell, de­pending on the stick at the door, whether she was in or out.

  Her idea of giving Serge tea cost her a lot, compared to what she had to spend: butter, eggs, sugar, chocolate, candied fruit, raisins, vanilla. Especially as she made big cakes, wanting Serge to have plenty left over to take home with him.

  The days she hid herself away, she wasn’t ill, but simply in a bad mood. You could see her going into the garden two or three times, her face sullen, her eye mistrustful.

  When Serge visited, she would lock up the dog and bring out the hens.

  The hens were a sorry sight, stupid, dirty, and cowardly. The old dog was very gentle and almost lame. But that was all. Serge liked him a lot, and gave him all his time. So she claimed the creature now had pains which made it bad tempered, it bit, and the boy shouldn’t play with it any longer.

  They still met, however, at the fence between the two gar­dens, for the old woman put the dog out again, ill or not, as soon as Serge had left. And if she caught them at their furtive dalliance, she would wave her stick, threaten the animal, shouting at Serge:

  ‘I’ve told you once, will you leave him alone! He’ll bite, I tell you!’

  ‘But no, he doesn’t bite,’ Serge would reply, giving the dog a scratch and feeding him pieces of cake, ‘he’s nice.’

  ‘That’s just what he looks like!’ the woman shouted, com­ing closer. ‘All of a sudden he’ll bite you! Don’t you trust him! He’ll bite you! Once a little idiot gets an idea into his head! You leave him alone now!’

  Once she had eliminated the rival, she was curious to know about the relationship between Jonathan and Serge. She nagged at the little boy, got her answer and was pleased with it, but couldn’t really do anything about it. She tried to poison her gifts a little, when the boy thanked her, testing the ground and exclai
ming:

  ‘But oh dear someone must, my poor little thing, with no one to look after you and your mother leaving you all alone.’

  But Serge’s plain speaking had soon robbed her of this little pleasure. For he calmly replied:

  ‘I don’t care about my mother. And anyway, I’m not alone.’

  She made up for it with her fits of domesticity, which she worked off on the boy when she had him in the kitchen. After having had a good long look at him, she would take some item of his clothing from him and wash or repair it on the spot, chattering and excited, her nose watering.

  It wasn’t for the young gentleman to look after that, and anyway, would he be able to?

  Serge, more or less undressed, uttered no protest. He sat there nicely, very upright on his chair, eating, quite proud, very pleased, full of questions, chattering away like a real gossip.

  She didn’t dare have the trousers off him, although one might sense in her hands an urge to wipe and poke about, to bring under control, with scrubbings and inspections, this half of the body which escaped her. Had the urchin been her grandchild, it would have been hers by rights.

  Just the same, she had the shorts. When she saw them hanging in the garden on Jonathan’s wash-day, she com­plained about the state they were in; Serge, phlegmatic, unpegged them and took them to her.

  In a strange voice, a little honeyed, a little peevish, squeaky and unguarded, she would ask him, after tea, whether he wanted a wee-wee or a poo-poo. She seemed to expect it as her due. The child would shake his head. Without discourage­ment, she would insist:

  ‘You’re sure?… Are you really sure?… not a wee-wee nor a poo-poo?… Not even a wee-wee?’

  Disdaining both the inquisition and the vocabulary, Serge shrugged his shoulders:

  ‘I’ve already had a shit.’

  Or he would go out and pee against a tree. It was only a half success for the old woman, who however exclaimed:

  ‘Ahh! There you are! You did want to, didn’t you! You must say when you want to! It’s not difficult, after all!’

  With the same air of teasing modesty and ingratiating cov­etousness, she enquired about his socks and his underpants, offered to change the elastic if they didn’t hold up properly. Unfortunately, Serge refused to give up his underclothes.

  Nor would he allow himself to be touched or kissed, and he would move away roughly if the old woman tried to rest a hand on his shoulder. She told Jonathan that the boy was difficult, pig-headed, as intractable as a cow, as stubborn as a mule.

  ‘But of course, the poor thing,’ she insinuated, with piteous voice and a false look in her eyes, ‘he can’t help being like that… You can’t bring them up properly without a mother. You just can’t ask the impossible…’

  Despite her vices of domesticity, she was dirty and didn’t look after herself. She patched herself up with safety-pins, tape and string. Her long yellow nails were dirty. But her house was clean, at least the tiles, the pans and the sink.

  Jonathan was unhappy at not paying her for the washing and mending. Her goings-on distracted him, without his being able to see anything wrong with them.

  Unable to think of anything else, he offered her cakes in his turn, when he made any. City stuff such as choux buns, mocha cake, puff-pastries: they weren’t the right thing at all. This skill made his neighbour cross, and she returned this rubbish to the little boy without even tasting it.

  ‘You can take that back with you. I’ve made you something else.’

  Jonathan looked for a better way. He bought sweets, can­died fruit. The woman received these with less disdain, but they all still ended up in the child’s pockets. Jonathan gave up.

  She’d had a married son, who used to live in the town. He had killed his wife and two kids in his cheap little car.

  ‘He used to come on Sunday. He brought his dirty washing, took away his clean clothes, his chicken, eggs, his wine, now he’s dead. Filthy brute!’

  She said no more about him.

  When the three brothers from town were also sent away on holiday, the area really became too uninhabited. Jonathan was worried that Serge would be bored; he suggested that they go away together somewhere, to the seaside, wherever. But the child wasn’t interested. He was very happy where he was and didn’t want to move.

  Despite his adventures in the village, he was a sedentary soul. He enjoyed his own place and his own little habits, as neither had been imposed on him, and he had arranged things as he wished. His whole ambition seemed to be no more than to start again on the same things every day, with the vari­ations, suppressions and restorations his fancy dictated. In this place and this way of life which Jonathan thought of no interest to anyone, Serge found a thousand resources. Appar­ently monotonous, his days were crowded with discoveries, crafty constructions, sensations, violence, flirtation, gossip, caresses, searches and investigations, by all of which he found himself endlessly fascinated. This excess, the fruit of his intelligence, offered him at all times an inexhaustible world — where Jonathan was one source among others. He kept to his place, perhaps a lowly one, in Serge’s mysterious collection; he had his use in operations, advances, trials and moods, in which he counted for nothing. Always available, he left the industrious child to grow, and to draw on him as well as on everything else.

  For quite a time during the summer, Jonathan was preoc­cupied by the thought of Barbara’s return. He still forced himself to see Serge as no more than a bird of passage, like a morning full of light, one of those things dreamt about in solitude, a lucky discovery in drawing. Later, he would not succeed in loving the child with so much precaution. He was afraid of autumn. He had secret ideas of kidnapping, of fleeing abroad with the child. Or he imagined himself moving back to Paris, engaging in a face-to-face struggle with Bar­bara.

  Then he understood that it wasn’t just a question of Bar­bara. It was the order of things, which would take hold of Serge and turn him into one of those numberless men from whom Jonathan had fled. Everything, all the world’s fascina­tion, all its powers, would force Serge to betray himself, and without regret. In the end, the enemy would be embodied not in the monsters, the caricatures, the idiots, not in the parents or assize-courts; it would be implanted in the child’s own heart. Neither Serge nor Jonathan had any means to prevent it.

  Jonathan took this idea to heart. He stopped struggling, stopped hoping. He thought of this coming dissolution, the death of the child; he thought upon his own. The simplest, the easiest would be to cut his wrists. A suicide of protest, rather than from mere suffering: but one doesn’t splash oneself with petrol in front of a hundred journalists in witness of a lost cause. Jonathan would keep his death to himself.

  Despite these torments and these plans, Jonathan lived cheerfully. He made sure to do nothing that would displease Serge; he became less neutral, entered more profoundly into the odd things the child wanted to do, dared to follow him without reserve.

  Jonathan was in perfect health. His difficulty in being did not affect his body, as its origin was not anything internal, or unknown to him. He ate well, drank well, digested well, shitted copiously, pissed forcefully, slept wonderfully, looked well, with good muscles, a good skin and a fine cock. Even his friendship with Serge inspired in him neither guilt, nor self-exploration, nor theory. He would have been incapable of explaining himself, trying to legitimate himself before those who, incapable of living as they are of dying, are thus appointed to judge and to reorder what exists. Nothing was more right, for Jonathan, than to know so much, and to be able to say so little.

  Neither of the two boys worried about the calendar any more. No threat was presented by the signs of wear and maturity to be seen in the countryside now that the summer was ending. An order without boredom or suffering, a disor­der without suffering or injury: such was the impossible universe they had built. An anti-world, which would die in autumn. But it didn’t matter.

  They ate, hugged, breathed, they got bored the way people do when they get
on together, they played at sex, then aban­doned it, they made their house clean and bright as a mini­ature landscape, then they dirtied it, soiled it, disordered it. And as houses, unlike living things, do not reconstitute them­selves as one lives off them, they reconstructed it energeti­cally, brushing, sponging, polishing, getting the scene ready for the next bout of filthiness.

  Serge and Jonathan were not in love, being insufficiently narcissistic. They had better things to do together. Their asso­ciation was more biological. Certain plants absorb the sub­stances they require and purify the soil, making it usable by other plants which would otherwise die. Each absorbs and gives out different nutriments; each one eliminates the poi­sons that would prevent the other from living. Such was the friendship between Jonathan and Serge, and it was impos­sible to tell which one, in fact, was purifying the world for the other.

  If the old woman had made pancakes, Serge farted eggs. There was a special smell, an egg fart smell. The sound, swift, easy, sustained and singing, had a melody of its own. When Jonathan was present for a fart of this kind, he thought of hard-boiled eggs, then of mayonnaise; and he would make some in the evening. Serge, too, liked mayonnaise very much. He farted like a young dog, surprised.

  One day when they were bringing in the clean washing, Serge wanted to put on Jonathan’s clothes, and offered him his own.

  Naked, they set about it. The underclothes were a problem. Jonathan was thin, but the boy was small; the disproportion was striking.

  Disguising themselves as each other was easier with shirt and shorts. Serge looked like a clown. Jonathan put his arms into one of the boy’s pairs of jeans, so that he had two sleeves. Tearing a little at a very large pullover the child liked to wear, he managed to get his legs in and made it into a pair of underpants. What popped through the collar wasn’t a little boy’s head.

  Despite the discomfort of these accoutrements, they de­cided they felt good in them, and abandoned them only with regret. Serge was entirely accustomed to Jonathan’s docility and to everything that made him different from an adult. Now, he rather thought of the young man as some kind of very small boy, smaller than Serge was himself — and he was very kind and gentle with little children. The boy’s habitual violence and provocations were often put aside; he was even sometimes shy when he cornered Jonathan to make love. Perhaps he felt that he was really the assailant.